Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid's Fasti by Angela Fritsen

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 254 Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti. By ANGELA FRITSEN. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 240; 10 illustrations. Hardcover, $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-81421284 -4. Angela Fritsen has written a wide-ranging, nicely illustrated study of the reception of Ovid’s Fasti from the 12th to the 15th century. The book concentrates on the 15th -century commentaries of Paolo Marsi (based in Rome and Venice) and Antonio Costanzi (of Fano). It does not attempt to give an impression of what each is like to use or read, nor to assess the contribution that they made to the study of the poem, but rather connects particular passages with intellectual and political movements. This is most engaging in the pages that explore how the early and recent history of Fano and its neighbors has affected Costanzi’s writing (176–86) or the suggestion in the Afterword that Mantegna’s painting The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome may owe something to the impact of Marsi’s work among the Venetian elite. When scholarly debates are examined there is rarely any attention paid to who is correct, and in no case any suggestion that their interpretation might inform or be superior to the modern vulgate: on 90–2, for example, it is not clear whether Fritsen thinks there might be a case for taking spica Cilissa at Fasti 1.76 as nard (Marsi) rather than saffron (Costanzi, followed by modern commentators). Chapter 1 considers recent scholarship, commentaries written in Orleans in the aetas Ovidiana, and the intriguing problem of the missing books 7–12: Fritsen has mined some rich material on the 12th - and 13th -century reading of the Fasti from Rieker, Engelbrecht and others. Chapter 2 brings out the importance of facts uncovered in commenting on details, whether of ritual or history (48– 50), before discussing the issue of dedicatee (Tiberius or Germanicus?): this neatly illustrates the difficulties such research posed for humanists working before the discovery of Tacitus, Annals 1–6. Chapter 3 explores the function of the Fasti as a site for professional rivalry: the breadth of historical, mythological and religious reference requires serious learning of its commentators. Lecturing brought income and experience, but it also left ideas, and even full sets of notes, open to publication by others. Publication enhanced prestige, but it also committed scholars to claims that others might show to be false. Chapter 4 includes some vivid, if not novel, material on the topographical researches of the humanists, from Petrarch BOOK REVIEWS 255 through Poggio, Ciriaco d’Ancona, Flavio Biondo to Pomponio Leto and the Academy. There is illuminating discussion of Pomponio Leto’s invention of the temple of Apollo and Clatra (138–9), of Marsi’s seeing “what he wanted to see” (141–7), and of the humanists’ desire “to find a Rome that is whole, whether it be through her visual or literary monuments” (134: this is oddly symbolized by William of Malmesbury’s 12th -century report of the supposed discovery of Pallas’ body, with a lamp still burning in the coffin beside his head). In Chapter 5 we find that even the date of Rome’s foundation, the Parilia, was uncertain (158–66): Fritsen apparently misses Lazzarrelli’s mention of the change from 20th to 21st April in the couplets quoted on 166 (hac celebrata die cessere Palilia; nunc te,/ Victor, habet dederat quae sua liba Pali). Despite the book’s attractions, there is, however, a persistent lack of precision and accuracy, especially in the translations. For example, on page 1 AD 8 (the year of exile) is described as the year Ovid began his poem; on page 16 a phrase of William of Orleans (si vero sol ingrederetur ante diem XI Kalendas Aprilis) is translated “if the sun were indeed to enter the zodiac before March 22” instead of “enter on March 22nd ”; the transmitted Palaestinas at 4.236 is taken (page 83) as Marsi’s emendation of the later conjecture palam Stygias; on page 93 Costanzi’s epigram is printed (and translated) in an unmetrical form (f. 9r in the 1502 Epigrammatum Libellus duly reads...