FROM PRIAPUS TO CYTHEREA: A SEQUENTIAL READING OF THECATALEPTON

Abstract

In an article published thirteen years ago, I tried to break new ground by showing that the texts transmitted under the titleCataleptonas 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 hisBucolics,GeorgicsandAeneidand, consequently, is himself speaking in the alleged early works asVirgil impersonator. This anonymous poet, however, cannot rightly be labelled a literary forger, since he repeatedly and quite unmistakably recalls each of Virgil's threeoperaas well as other texts written after the year 19b.c. Evidently, then, he is inviting his readers to take part in a literarylusus, one in which they are expected to be familiar not only with the texts ofBucolics,GeorgicsandAeneidbut 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 aselementaandrudis Calliope(Catal.18[15])—primarily under the influence of Catullus, the said poems being, with the exception ofCatal.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 aVirgil 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 threePriapeapositioned in editions before the other fifteen epigrams and shown there with their own separate numbering. In the manuscripts, however, the titleCataleptonrefers without exception to a unit comprising the threePriapeaand the fifteen epigrams. The titlePriapea, found in the catalogue of the Murbach manuscripts and in some codices (for example the Graz fragment), is always attached solely to the poemQuid hoc noui est?In theVita Suetoniana-Donatiana(VSD), the termsCatalepton,PriapeaandEpigrammatawere evidently used as three different titles; the author (or his source) may not have seen thatCataleptonis the title of all the poems. Furthermore, I should like to point out that, counted together, ‘Virgil's’Priapeaand 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 thePriapea et Epigrammatacan 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.