Lobo of Argos? Not a name familiar to most modern classicists, and probably not to most ancient scholars either. Lobo is known from only two references in the first book of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, where he is cited as a source of biographical or literary information on two of the Seven Sages, Thales and Epimenides (1.34-35, 112). The second citation gives the title of his work as
The story of how two brief references in Diogenes Laertius led to the inclusion of seventeen couplets and six sets of scolia by “Lobo Argivus” in Lloyd-Jones and Parsons’s Supplementum Hellenisticum (1983; retained in Lloyd-Jones’ 2005 update) is a fascinating chapter in the excesses of Quellenforschung and its continuing effect upon our perception of what we know about antiquity. Garulli carefully leads us through this story, from Casaubon’s suggestion that Lobo had composed the scolia attributed to the sages to Schneidewin’s 1844 addition of the epigrams (as well as forged letters in Diogenes), to Hiller’s 1878 influential condemnation of Lobo as a Schwindler for making up biographical and literary information and faking compositions. This process culminated in Crönert’s 1911 edition of the testimonia and poetic texts, which was accepted as authoritative and formed the basis for Lloyd-Jones and Parsons’s edition, which assigned the poetry to the third century B.C. In the context of recent suggestions that the assumptions on which Crönert’s edition was based were too rigid or even wrong-headed,1 Garulli has reexamined the textual material in great detail, made careful judgments about what should be attributed to Lobo, and produced a new critical edition, based on her own examination of the manuscripts, that excludes all the scolia and admits fewer epigrams. She prints Crönert’s edition at the beginning of the monograph and then at the end her own edition of the testimonia and poetic texts, divided into those considered securely Lobonian and those only possibly so.
Garulli works with the nineteenth-century idea of sigilla Lobonis, a set of textual similarities between passages in Diogenes’ Lives (and even other texts) that, when taken as a group, were thought to signal Lobo as the source and the true author of the poetry quoted therein. These sigilla are: (1) bibliographic information that includes stichometric references in round numbers, (2) scolia, and (3) epigrammatic couplets said to have been inscribed on tombs or statues. These three indicators are present sequentially in Diogenes’ life of Thales, where he attributes to Lobo of Argos the information that Thales’ writings extend to about two hundred lines, the quotation of a couplet from a statue of Thales at Miletus, and the quotation of a set of Thales’ “songs,” or scolia. Although Garulli accepts rounded stichometric references as a legitimate sigillum, she is doubtful about the related view that Lobo was a complete fabricator of bibliography. She points out that some of the prose works mentioned in other supposedly Lobonian passages are cited elsewhere and that round stichometric references are not unique. She also accepts the scolia quoted by Diogenes for six of his sages as the second sign of descent from Lobo, based on a linguistic similarity in the introductory phrases. Even so, she excludes them from the material she considers composed by Lobo, following metrical evidence2 that the scolia came into the
The seven epigrams that Garulli considers indisputably by Lobo are those found in Diogenes’ lives of Sages where all three sigilla are present (though not necessarily sequentially, without intervening material). From the common characteristics of this group, she establishes a set of criteria involving stylistic-compositional features and metrical-prosodic usage. In analyzing the relationship of the three consistent elements of
Based on these internal criteria, Garulli divides the testimonia and couplets edited by Crönert into four groups: (1) those passages containing information certainly by Lobo (including epigrams on statues for Thales, Solon, and Chilon, and epitaphs for Pittacus, Bias, Cleobulus, and Periander); (2) epigrams not by Lobo (an epitaph for Thales, a couplet on Arion [from Aelian], an epitaph for Sophocles [from the Sophoclean Vita);3 (3) epitaphs composed Lobonis more (on Linus [from Homeric scholia], Timotheus of Miletus [from Stephanus of Byzantium], and the tragedian Theodectes [also from Stephanus]); (4) epigrams in Diogenes’ first book doubtfully by Lobo (on Musaeus and Linus). She discusses separately the problem of the Orpheus epitaph that occurs in Diogenes’ life of that poet, just after Musaeus and Linus. The example of the Orpheus epitaph is complicated because it shares two words from its hexameter and its entire pentameter with the first couplet of a quatrain that descends from a fourth-century text by Alcidamas and shares its opening two words with a couplet known from the Aristotelian Peplos. Garulli considers plausible Benndorf’s suggestion that Lobo composed the couplet by contaminating elements from the earlier epitaphs, but she ultimately decides to suspend judgment on authorship.
The most generally useful part of the book is Garulli’s final discussion of the literary and cultural setting for Lobo’s
Despite the careful work that underlies this book, issue can be taken with some of its methodology and conclusions.
Garulli’s main contribution to the so-called quaestio Loboniana (only classicists could worry over such a topic!) is her new set of criteria for establishing Lobo’s authorship of couplets. The discussion of stylistic and compositional elements found in her seven securely Lobonian poems convincingly suggests a common origin for these poems. My own quick survey of such couplets in the Palatine Anthology and in the Peplos uncovered no others with exactly the same approach to the basic SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT core. It seems hazardous, however, to take this compositional style as an author’s rigorous signature, to the exclusion of all others. A composer of couplets on similar subjects might well want to vary his style, and the 48 epitaphs that survive as a group from the Peplos show a number of different structural patterns. Of course, Garulli adds to this criterion her metrical and prosodic analysis, but this evidence is even more dubious. The central problem is the smallness of the sample. Since only seven couplets fall into Garulli’s category of certainly Lobonian, her analysis of metrical patterns and the presence or absence of correptio epica and correptio Attica is based on only fourteen lines, seven hexameters and seven pentameters. This is hardly enough to give any reliable statistical pattern.
More serious to my mind is Garulli’s inability to distinguish between the plausibility that certain passages in Diogenes were derived from Lobo and the complete lack of proof that Lobo composed any poems. In his first citation, Diogenes does not say that Lobo composed the Thales epigram, only that he transmitted it as a genuine inscription, and in the second citation Diogenes does not mention any poetry at all, either transmitted or composed by Lobo. In fact, the Epimenides passage attributes to the Argive only the information that the sage established in Athens a shrine of the Semnai, or Eumenides. In other words, there is no statement, in Diogenes or in any other ancient source, that Lobo composed couplets (or scolia). The idea of Lobo as a fake author of inscriptions was surely influenced at its inception by Diogenes’ inclusion of his own epigrams on philosophers, which he freely admits to have composed himself. Garulli accepts the arguments of other scholars that the scolia attributed to the Seven Sages were taken over by Lobo from an earlier source. Why could the couplets not also have been extracted from an earlier author? Garulli’s stylistic similarities may support single authorship, but they do not prove the author was Lobo. In fact, her metrical-prosodic analysis, which shows usages typical of pre-Callimachean poetic practice, fits with composition in the classical age, and Garulli cites any number of phrases from classical inscriptions incorporated into “Lobo’s” poetry, which she explains as attempts at imitating an earlier style. Why not assume that Lobo culled his couplets from some earlier prose author who had included epigrams in a discussion of
In addition, a parallel for the problem of the Lobonian couplets is found in the epitaphs surviving from the Peplos. Based on the studies of nineteenth-century scholars (including the same Schneidewin who studied Lobo), these poems have been assumed to be Hellenistic forgeries inserted into a Peripatetic prose text.4 In a forthcoming article, I show that an epitaph for Oedipus which is inscribed on a Lucanian vase securely dated to the first quarter of the fourth century B.C. replicates a Peplos epigram and that known classical inscriptions were apparently modeled on other of the epitaphs for heroes.5 We may therefore conclude that the Peplos epitaphs were, at least in basic form, pre-Hellenistic and even pre-Aristotelian. Both the Orpheus epitaph from the Peplos and the Orpheus epitaph in Diogenes Laertius (from Lobo?) resemble an epitaph in Alcidamas, as mentioned above, and epitaphs for Hesiod and Homer were, it seems, included in the fourth-century portion of the Certamen by Alcidamas. About the end of the fifth century, Damastes of Sigeum, who wrote an On Poets and Wise Men, also wrote a genealogical work on heroes. He may be the source for many of these anonymous couplets.
In conclusion, Garulli offers a careful survey of earlier scholarship on the minor figure of the Argive Lobo and a competent analysis of the evidence for his On Poets, resulting in a new edition of passages likely deriving from that work. The corpus of material thought to be from Lobo has been reduced, and the main point of interest that this figure held in the past — his rather scandalous reputation as a forger of facts and verses — has, hopefully, been put to rest. Though we still know little of the scope of Lobo’s study of early poets (and the statement about Epimenides as the founder of an Athenian shrine, with its hint of an interest in cult practice, has been neglected as a guide to Lobo’s biographical approach), Garulli has managed to place him in a largely Peripatetic tradition of constructing plausible, if not provable, biography. She has, however, been unable to escape the weight of nineteenth-century scholarship entirely, since she fails to question Lobonian authorship of the epigrams on the Sages in Diogenes. The concept of Hellenistic fakery still seduces. In truth, the complicated relationship between traditions inherited from the classical world and Hellenistic ways of shaping that inheritance does not lend itself to such an easy solution.
Notes
1. Especially, C. F. Farinelli, “Lobone di Argo ovvero la psicosi moderna del falso antico,” AION(filol) 22 (2000) 367-79.
2. She relies especially on A. K. Kolár, “De quibusdam carminibus in Diogenis Laertii Vitis,” Eunomia 3 (1959) 59-67.
3. Some scholars have created a third reference to Lobo, independent of Diogenes, by emending
4. A conclusion accepted by Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993) 388-93.
5. K. Gutzwiller, “Heroic Epitaphs of the Classical Age: The Aristotelian Peplos and Beyond,” Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram, ed. Andrej Petrovic, Ivana Petrovic, Manuel Baumbach (Cambridge, forthcoming).