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FROM PRIAPUS TO CYTHEREA: A SEQUENTIAL READING OF THE CATALEPTON
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2018
Extract
In an article published thirteen years ago, I tried to break new ground by showing that the texts transmitted under the title Catalepton as the work of Virgil can be seen to form an elaborately arranged and highly allusive book of verse written by a single author. This latter, I argued, was identical with the anonymous poet who, in an epilogue, represents the preceding poems as the juvenilia of the author later known for his Bucolics, Georgics and Aeneid and, consequently, is himself speaking in the alleged early works as Virgil impersonator. This anonymous poet, however, cannot rightly be labelled a literary forger, since he repeatedly and quite unmistakably recalls each of Virgil's three opera as well as other texts written after the year 19 b.c. Evidently, then, he is inviting his readers to take part in a literary lusus, one in which they are expected to be familiar not only with the texts of Bucolics, Georgics and Aeneid but also with the life of the man who wrote them. The fiction of a young Virgil is created, one who wrote his first poems—the verses referred to in the epilogue as elementa and rudis Calliope (Catal. 18[15])—primarily under the influence of Catullus, the said poems being, with the exception of Catal. 12(9) and 16(13), epigrams. My interpretation has borne fruit, with Irene Peirano and Markus Stachon each devoting, in 2012 and 2014 respectively, a monograph to this approach and offering what are often very thorough analytical readings of the poems as the creations of a Virgil impersonator. However, neither of these two Latinists has considered one particular interpretative aspect, which I myself had only been able to introduce very briefly into my paper: the recognition that, as many more recent studies have now further corroborated, Roman poetry books were designed for linear, sequential reading, that they have, as it were, a story to tell. Peirano, moreover, disregards in her study the three Priapea positioned in editions before the other fifteen epigrams and shown there with their own separate numbering. In the manuscripts, however, the title Catalepton refers without exception to a unit comprising the three Priapea and the fifteen epigrams. The title Priapea, found in the catalogue of the Murbach manuscripts and in some codices (for example the Graz fragment), is always attached solely to the poem Quid hoc noui est? In the Vita Suetoniana-Donatiana (VSD), the terms Catalepton, Priapea and Epigrammata were evidently used as three different titles; the author (or his source) may not have seen that Catalepton is the title of all the poems. Furthermore, I should like to point out that, counted together, ‘Virgil's’ Priapea and epigrams come to a total of seventeen poems and so match precisely both the total of seventeen books in the real Virgil's three works and the total number of Horace's epodes, of the poems, that is, which the not-so-real Virgil quite conspicuously evokes in his own penultimate poem (Catal. 16[13]). More significantly, however, a sequential reading of the Priapea et Epigrammata can in fact build a watertight case for taking the texts to be, as it were, a composite whole, and that is what I intend to argue in the rest of the article.
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References
1 Holzberg, N., ‘Impersonating young Virgil: the author of the Catalepton and his libellus’, MD 52 (2004), 29–40Google Scholar.
2 My numbering unites the Priapea and the epigrams as 1–18; the numbers shown in brackets are those conventionally used for the epigrams alone.
3 Peirano, I., The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context (Cambridge and New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stachon, M., Tractavi monumentum aere perennius. Untersuchungen zu vergilischen und ovidischen Pseudepigraphen (Bochumer Altertumswissenschaftliches Colloquium 97) (Trier, 2014)Google Scholar.
4 See Höschele, R., Die blütenlesende Muse. Poetik und Textualität antiker Epigrammsammlungen (Classica Monacensia 37) (Tübingen, 2010)Google Scholar and the literature cited there.
5 Peirano (n. 3), 80 n. 23.
6 Zogg, F., ‘Carmina Virgilii mitte minora, precor: Die Überlieferung der Appendix Vergiliana im Mittelalter’, MLatJb 53 (2018), 27–45, at 32Google Scholar.
7 First correctly noted by Gaar, E., ‘Text und kritische Bewertung des Grazer “Vergil”–Fragments’, AAWW 90 (1953), 188–231Google Scholar, then by Zogg (n. 6) and recently (10 June 2017) by Michael Reeve during an Oxford symposium on the Appendix Vergiliana. The plural could indicate that this particular poem originally or once preceded the three Priapea of the Catalepton, but was later moved. Since it stands out from the other poem as decidedly obscene, someone may have thought it better suited to the Copa, before which it stands in the Murbach catalogue (cf. Zogg [n. 6]).
8 In my 2004 article (see n. 1 above), I followed those who read Catalepton (et Priapea et Epigrammata), in other words, those who take et Priapea et Epigrammata to be in apposition to Catalepton, but Reeve quite rightly observed during the Oxford symposium (see n. 7 above) that there are no brackets in medieval manuscripts.
9 See Holzberg, N., Die römische Liebeselegie. Eine Einführung (Darmstadt, 2015 6)Google Scholar.
10 The end of Catal. 12(9), however, can be read as anticipating the Bucolics (noted by Fabian Zogg).
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12 Or of Cremona (cf. Ecl. 9.28). According to VSD §6, the historical Virgil spent his initia aetatis there, and Catal. 11(8).6 assumes that the father had once owned land near Cremona.
13 See e.g. the transition from Tib. 1.4.81–4 to 1.5.1–9 and Holzberg (n. 9), 83–4.
14 See Boerma, R.E.H. Westendorp, P. Vergili Maronis libellus qui inscribitur Catalepton conspectu librorum, prolegomenis, notis criticis, commentario exegetico instruxit, 2 vols. (Assen, 1949–1963), 1.30Google Scholar and OCD 4 s.v. ‘Prostitution’.
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17 See Westendorp Boerma (n. 14), 1.56–7.
18 ‘Virgil’ in fact says—well-nigh metapoetically—in Catal. 16(13).34: et [‘even’] nomen adscribo tuum: cinaede Lucci.
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21 As long since noted by scholars who do not ascribe the Catalepton to the real Virgil, there are various allusions to Ovid scattered throughout the liber; see esp. Radford, R.S., ‘The language of the ps.-Vergilian Catalepton with especial reference to its Ovidian characteristics’, TAPA 54 (1923), 168–86Google Scholar.
22 Given that ‘Virgil’ is at his least pudens in these two poems, Catal. 8(5).14 provides an additional argument for including the three Priapea in the liber.
23 See Westendorp Boerma (n. 14), 1.135.
24 We know from the Herculaneum papyri that the real Varius and the real Virgil belonged to the circle of friends centred around the Epicurean Philodemus; see Gigante, M., ‘Vergil in the shadow of Vesuvius’, in Armstrong, D., Fish, J., Johnston, P.A., Skinner, M. (edd.), Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (Austin, TX, 2004), 85–99Google Scholar.
25 ‘Catalepton 7’, LCM 7 (1982), 50–1Google Scholar.
26 See Westendorp Boerma (n. 14), 1.143–4.
27 See Westendorp Boerma (n. 14), 1.156–7 and the literature cited there.
28 On this poem, see now Kayachev, B., ‘Catalepton 9 and Hellenistic poetry’, CQ 66 (2016), 180–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Hor. Carm. 3.1 Odi profanum uulgus et arceo and Carm. 2.16.39–40 malignum spernere uulgus ~ Catal. 12(9).64 pingui nil mihi cum populo.
30 ‘Gedanken über den jungen Vergil’, in Mühlher, R. and Fischl, J. (edd.), Gestalt und Wirklichkeit. Festgabe für Ferdinand Weinhandl (Berlin, 1967), 337–47, at 346–7Google Scholar.
31 ‘Of hernias and wine-jugs: Catalepton 12’, Mnemosyne 61 (2008), 245–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Thalassio … in 16(13).16 and Thalassio in 15(12).9 form the concatenatio here; see also 15(12).8 hirneam and 16(13).39 hirneosi. The name Caesar links 17(14).9 to 16(13).11.
33 Birt (n. 16), 141.
34 Birt (n. 16), 157–8.
35 Westendorp Boerma (n. 14), 2.88, 2.90 and 2.77.
36 Maurach, G., ‘Catal. 8 and Hellenistic poetry’, AClass 12 (1969), 29–46Google Scholar.
37 A useful interim alternative: Iodice, M.G. (ed.), Appendix Vergiliana (Prefazione di Luca Canali. Classici Greci e Latini) (Milan, 2002)Google Scholar.
38 I am indebted to Fabian Zogg for sharing a number of valuable observations with me.