Cristiano Castelletti died in 2017 at the age of 46: this commentary is the English translation of his 2015 Italian Habilitationsschrift, prepared for publication by three friends and colleagues. While not “the first dedicated commentary on the eighth and final book of Valerius Flaccus’ […] Argonautica” (thus the blurb), it is a welcome addition to the works by Pellucchi (2012) and Lazzarini (2012) on the same book, as well as to the ever-growing body of commentaries on the poem in general.[1] The volume consists of a slim introduction, an original Latin text with critical apparatus and facing English translation, and a detailed line-by-line commentary, supplemented with a bibliography and indexes. This is a work of outstanding erudition and insight, but it does bear signs of a lack of its author’s ultima manus.
After a half-page paragraph on earlier scholarship, the introduction plunges into a tightly-knit analysis of a sphragis passage at 2.357–377, which serves to illustrate both Valerius’ dexterity in composing technopaignia and, more crucially, the programmatic importance of cosmological and astronomical thought and imagery, especially of the Aratean tradition, for the poem as a whole (pp. 1–6). There follows a section that explores the place of Book 8 within the poem and, more broadly, the global mythological and historical narratives: the book’s intratextual connection with Book 1 (especially with Jupiter’s Weltenplan at 1.531–567), Jason’s failed ‘imitation’ of Hercules’ final labour (the stealing of the Hesperides’ golden apples), and the abduction of Medea as a precursor of all subsequent conflicts between East and West are key leitmotifs that will reappear throughout the commentary (pp. 6–9). The introduction concludes with a brief statement on the Latin text and a list of sigla. While one could expect a more comprehensive treatment (Valerius’ language and style are particularly notable omissions), the two central sections are an accurate reflection of Castelletti’s main interests — and main contributions — in the commentary itself; the selectiveness of the introduction need not be deemed a weakness (there are more than competent alternatives available in the commentaries by e.g. Zissos or Manuwald), but it does mean that the book is less than ideally suited for first-time readers of Valerius’ poetry.
The commentary proper has a traditional format, offering introductory notes on chunks of some 30–50 verses, before proceeding to lemmatised comments on individual lines and phrases. Castelletti systematically considers the book’s intratextuality—how, being in all likelihood the final book of Valerius’ poem, it echoes and picks up events and motifs from the preceding text, especially Book 1. Another central concern is of course Valerius’ interaction with his main narrative model, Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, as well as with alternative treatments of (other parts of) Jason and Medea’s story, especially the tragic events in Corinth, in Euripides, Ovid and Seneca. Unsurprisingly, Virgil features prominently too, but no less welcome is the recurrent citation of unobvious mythological parallels and recondite mythography. Aratus is allotted a special place in the commentary, and in general one of the areas where Castelletti truly shines is in adducing astronomical imagery to shed light on Valerius’ poem. For instance, on the simile comparing the dragon guarding the golden fleece to the Po and the Nile (90–91), Castelletti illuminatingly notes: “the Dragon constellation is usually described as a river flowing between the two Bears; the River constellation is most commonly identified with the Eridanus and the Nile” (p. 104). On 122–123 (uillisque comantem | sidereis [sc. pellem, the fleece]), he perceptively observes: “Given the astronomical context […], comantem makes one think of the phrase stellamque comantem […] at Ov. Met. 15.749” (p. 123). The comment on 341–343, exploring the links of Styrus, Jason, Hercules and Gilgamesh with the constellation of Orion (pp. 211–212), is a veritable tour de force, while Castelletti is to be commended for offering his suggestions in a non-dogmatic way. Another praiseworthy aspect of the commentary is its systematic use of iconography, with LIMC being cited again and again. Finally, Castelletti has a keen ear for subtleties of Valerius’ wording and potential instances of wordplay: note e.g. the proposal ‘to see in geras [at 15] a joke [pun?] on the word γῆρας’ (p. 57), the evocation of an etymological connection between δράκων and δέρκομαι (p. 85), or the playful suggestion that line 153 (promisSa TYRannO) might be concealing Styrus’ name (p. 138).
Less successful is Castelletti’s engagement with Valerius’ numerous textual issues. To begin with, the introduction offers no account of the manuscripts, besides what little can be inferred from the list of sigla, merely citing some of the recent scholarship (p. 9); it gives no indication of how uncertain Valerius’ paradosis generally is. Commendably, Castelletti often follows Liberman, rather than slavishly reverting to Ehlers’s conservative text, yet although his departures from the former are not always for the worse, original contributions are rare and less than palmary (e.g. at 158 he adds et (quid ego <et>) to fix the metre, but does not explain what the line is supposed to mean, with or without the addition (p. 139; spoiler: it requires a rather more radical remedy); at 320 he considers reading admotis Colchis for quoniam Colchis, ignoring the harsh homoeoteleuton thus produced [p. 204]; at 349 he proposes changing corpus to caput [p. 215]). The apparatus largely replicates Liberman’s, unnecessarily repeating orthographic trivia (such as e.g. ‘adsunt γ c*: assunt Δ’ at 49, or ‘danuvii V: -bii L’ at 293) and inevitably introducing errors (such as reporting carpit, instead of carpsit, for D at 8, or printing the apparatus for 52 under 51). Similar to his discussions of textual issues, Castelletti’s analysis of linguistic complexities usually offers detailed doxography, but is less consistently decisive (note e.g. the suggestion to take illa in 208 [illa Thoanteae transit defleta Dianae] as picking up litora from 207 [p. 159], as in ‘those [sc. shores] of the Tauric Diana’, when in fact illa is a nominative singular and Dianae a dative of agent with defleta). There can be no doubt that many of these shortcomings would have been eliminated had the author overseen the publication of his commentary.
This brings us to the volume’s most serious flaw, which has nothing to do with its author: the quality of its English translation (I have been unable, though, to make direct comparison with Castelletti’s original thesis). For the most part it reads well enough, at least superficially, but time and again one stumbles over details suggesting that the translator may not have had a firm grasp of the contents. Sometimes these are minor and do not seriously impede comprehension: e.g. the list of sigla defines Δ as ‘fragment of a manuscript of Carrion’ (p. 10, translating Castelletti’s translation of Liberman’s ‘fragment du manuscrit de Carrion’), where of course the definite article is required (cf. similarly on p. 99: ‘in a [sic] fragment of the Codex Carrionis’). A few lines below, however, I struggle to understand the statement: ‘The section of text covered by C includes the readings Carrion attributed to his manuscript, which, considered sound and not diverging from γ, are not mentioned in my apparatus criticus’; I assume Castelletti meant that readings of Carrion’s lost manuscript (as reported in his editions) are not cited separately in the apparatus when they agree with γ in truth, but I doubt this is the only construal that can be extracted from the English text without the prior knowledge that it is the only one that can make sense. I am not sure what to make of this: ‘The Dragon is still today a circumpolar constellation, whose form in antiquity encircled the North Pole, the equatorial pole, and the elliptical, in which the zodiac signs were arranged’ (p. 81); or this: ‘VF does not choose the adjective sanguineo at random, even if it is applied to the word Hebro’ (p. 167); or this: ‘Courtney follows Barth’s example in reporting in his apparatus that qui is an adverbial ablative equivalent to quid’ (p. 173; Courtney’s apparatus lists quid as Barth’s conjecture). Other confusions may be easier to disentangle (as e.g. ‘the island, which the river divides’ [p. 223], where the implication is something like ‘which the river splits off the mainland with its two channels’), but one can never be quite certain that what one reads is what Castelletti meant. There is not much to say about the English translation of the Latin text: at its best it is wordy and/or vague, at its worst it is also wrong; it should not have been printed. Typos are not infrequent, especially in Latin quotations, throughout the commentary.
In sum, Castelletti’s commentary on Book 8 of Valerius’ Argonautica is an indispensable contribution to Valerian studies, whose particular strengths lie in its engagement with the literary aspects of the poem. The decision to publish the work in English, thus making it accessible to a wider academic audience, is laudable, even if the lack of authorial supervision over its publication might make it a demanding read for students approaching Valerius Flaccus for the first time. But some of these obstacles can easily be eliminated, and one hopes that OUP will find resources to produce a revised edition.
Notes
[1] T. Pellucchi, Commento al libro VIII delle Argonautiche di Valerio Flacco (Hildesheim 2012); C. Lazzarini, L’addio di Medea: Valerio Flacco, Argonautiche 8,1–287 (Pisa 2012). On other books, note e.g. A. Zissos, Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica Book 1 (Oxford 2008); G. Manuwald, Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica Book III (Cambridge 2015); P. J. Davis, Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica Book 7 (Oxford 2020).