Richard Lovelace's Latin Anthology

Abstract

The second and posthumously published edition of Richard Lovelace's Lucasta (1659) includes, by way of appendix, a sequence of translations with the original texts en face.1 All are epigrams and, as printed, they number forty. The sequence opens with Sannazzaro's famous hexastich on Venice, which, apart from one unidentified French epigram and another probably misidentified, is the only modern piece. With the exception of a couplet from the Greek Anthology (11 .432), the rest are taken from the range of classical Latin poetry. Catullus, not unexpectedly, is most fully represented with thirteen poems, followed by Ausonius with six, and Martial with five. Various oddities attend the representation of the texts of these poets. Two are notable. Catullus' 'Odi et amo' (no 86 in the numbering of early editions, no 85 in modern editions) is made to serve as the final couplet of 'Dicebas quondam' (no 73 in early editions, 72 in modern). And the final couplets of Martial's epigrams 6.15 and 4.33 (4.32 in modern editions) are switched, conceivably, as the editor of the still standard edition of Lovelace indicates, by a failure of memory one concerns a bee in amber, the other an ant. Of the remaining twelve epigrams, roughly a third of the total, six are unattributed and seven attributed (or misattributed) to lesser poets: two to Pentadius, one each to Quintus Catulus (second-first century B.C.), Floridus (for Florus, first century A.D.), Avienus (fourth century A.D.), Porcius Licinus (second century B.C.), and Seneca (first century A.D., and only in this context lesser). The attributions to Florus and to Seneca are mistaken.2 Though the four on Cato are sometimes attributed to Seneca, the five unattributed epigrams remain of uncertain attribution.3 The immediate origin of this group of poems has gone unnoticed. But it must be the anthology prepared by Pierre Pithou (Pithoeus) the Younger under the title Epigranttnata et Poematia Vetera, first published in Paris in 1590 (though the colophon gives 1589), reprinted or reissued the same year in Paris, republished in Geneva and in Lyons in 1596, again in Lyons in 1599, and again in Geneva in 1619 and in 1629.4 That Lovelace's printers used some version of this volume is not evident from the details