Ancient Latin Poetry Books: Materiality & Context by Gabriel Nocchi Macedo

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 351 sustained emphasis on continuities with nuanced and appreciative readings of late antique Latin poetry is a welcome challenge to a field that may just now be leaving behind its rebellious adolescent years. University of Waterloo Andrew Faulkner Ancient Latin Poetry Books: Materiality & Context. By Gabriel Nocchi Macedo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (New Texts from Ancient Cultures). 2021. Pp. xii, 365, 5 plates. Attention to the material contexts of Roman book production and use has increased in recent years with a cluster of recent books and projects focusing on Roman bibliography in a variety of contexts, from the literary1 to the papyrological.2 The book under review is an important addition to the field. Nocchi Macedo examines thirty-five extant ancient and late antique manuscripts of classical Latin poets, providing a detailed analysis of manuscripts of hexametric, elegiac, and dramatic poems in turn; these are bookended by an introductory chapter on poetry and its writing in Greece and Rome and a concluding chapter on “Book Typology and Contexts of Reception.” The narrative portion of the book is followed by a descriptive catalogue of the thirty-five manuscripts covered by the author, as well as two appendices, one providing hypothetical reconstructions of the original manuscripts and one outlining the metrical layout of Vat. Lat. 3226 (a fifth- to sixth-century manuscript of Terence). Nocchi Macedo shines in his detailed analysis of the manuscripts in Chapters One to Three, displaying his considerable expertise and careful study of the manuscripts on almost every page. He is particularly good on the Barcelona Alcestis manuscript, on which he has published extensively elsewhere,3 and makes important observations on the ruling of late antique manuscripts (esp. on page 58) which add greatly to our understanding of the development of techniques of page preparation over the course of the first millennium . I have my quibbles, however, about the book’s organisation, which has Nocchi Macedo looking in turn at all the hexametric, then elegiac, then dramatic manuscripts. In arranging the material by metre the author implies that he seeks to find common elements in the mise-en-page of manuscripts in the same metrical mode. This is most successful in Chapter Three, where there are important things to be said about the ways in which dramatic metres are laid out on the page. But is it really helpful to juxtapose palaeographical considerations in the same way? After all, the Gallus fragment (first century b.c.e.) is surely more palaeographically similar to the Carmen de Bello Actiaco fragment of the same date, rather than the fifth-century snippet of Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto with which it is paired. It would also have been a service to the reader to provide a brief conclusion to each chapter summing up the important common features of each group of manuscripts, as well as the ways in which those differ from manuscripts of other genres. 1 For example, S. A. Frampton, Empire of Letters (Oxford 2019), reviewed by E. Barbiero in Phoenix 73 (2019) 213–215. 2 Above all S. Ammirati, Sul libro latino antico (Pisa 2015). 3 For example, G. Nocchi Macedo, L’Alceste de Barcelone (P.Monts. Roca inv. 158–161): Édition, traduction et analyse contextuelle d’un poème latin conservé sur papyrus (Liège 2014). 352 PHOENIX Only someone who has spent time cataloguing or doing detailed codicological analysis of manuscripts will appreciate the sheer amount of work this kind of project requires. Nocchi Macedo has done us all an important service in re-examining as many of these manuscripts as possible (either in person or via high-resolution digital images; for the four that were entirely inaccessible to him he relies on previous descriptions and older photographs). A major drawback of toiling away on manuscripts is that the academy does not always consider this work to count as scholarship by itself: context and the all-important “research question” are needed too. The necessity to make a case for the significance of his work is perhaps what has led Nocchi Macedo to frame his detailed analysis of the manuscripts with two contextual chapters, both of which add little and...