The thirteen essays in this carefully curated volume began life as papers presented at a convegno at the Università Federico II in Naples in 2022. The goal of the conference—and thus of this volume—was to explore the reuse of the classical poets in various late Latin literary genera, especially the repurposing of those Augustan age poets who enjoyed prominence in the late antique educational curriculum as well as in the commentary and grammatical handbook tradition represented, for example, by Servius and Donatus. Accordingly, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid receive the bulk of the attention, although one early imperial poet “notoriamente non de scuola” (ix), that is, Martial, does find himself front and center in several papers, a surprising outcome as noted, for example, both by the editor, Concetta Longobardi of the University of Naples (ix) and Luca Mondin, whose chapter title begins with, “Un classico inaspettato?”At the reception and repurposing end of the spectrum, texts and authors privileged with their own essays are the Anthologia Latina, Ausonius, Endelechius, Claudian, Martianus Capella, and Isidore of Seville; finally 4 chapters foreground the importance of the age’s educational and scholarly apparatus for formation and transmission of the poetics of spoliation, a phenomenon also stressed by Frances Foster in her essay on inculcation of the jeweled style in the recent thirtieth anniversary celebration of the publication of Michael Roberts’s highly influential The Jeweled Style. Indeed, Poetica Spolia can be read with considerable profit alongside that 2022 commemorative volume.[1] In an age when poets so often indulged in intertextual gesturing and the cento enjoyed popularity, it may seem natural that the jeweled style and flagged or subtle borrowings often worked together to create an art form, the late Latin carmen, that encouraged readers to participate in unraveling its meaning and appreciating its delights.
Bardo Maria Gauly spotlights the presence of Ovid in the Anthologia Latina, primarily as the Augustan Poet’s mythological and erotic works figure respectively in the poems assigned to Pentadius and Reposianus. Gauly’s is the only essay to foreground Ovid, whose afterlife in the poetry of late antiquity has attracted considerable attention among late Latin poetry’s cognoscenti in recent years, although the Anthologia has largely been peripheral to that conversation, which gives an edge to Gauly’s chapter. Unsurprisingly, three papers explore the legacy of Vergil across several genres. Vergil of the Eclogues, as well as late antique pastoral more broadly, is the subject of Fabio Stok’s essay on the charming De mortibus bovum composed by the poet Endelechius, a correspondent of Paulius of Nola. Vanni Veronesi unpacks a citation of the Georgics by Martianus Capella in the latter’s discussion of the spherical shape of the earth. Veronesi reveals how the North African poet’s incorporation of this Romuleus vates, a hapax, (84) testifies to Vergil’s status as a scientific authority who can withstand comparison to the Greek physici. In the volume’s third chapter Maria Luisa Delvigo leads readers into the thickets of the commentary tradition by demonstrating the degree to which the Vatican Mythographers’s accounts of the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra are indebted to Servian commentary on Aeneid 7.61-82.
As noted above, surprise does arrive with the three essays devoted to Martial’s afterlife. Luca Mondin’s 111-page (!) tour de force excavates the vast sweep of late Latin literature to unearth the early imperial poet’s relics. Mondin’s fascinating dossier of 353 (parts II-XII) allusions to or echoes of Martial by Christian poets from Ausonius to Eugenius of Toledo will long be a touchstone for future treasure hunters. In the shadow of Mondin’s epic effort, the essays of Claudio Buongiovanni and Fabrizio Bordone still manage to sparkle. The former charts Martial’s subtly rising tide among late antiquity’s grammarians and commentators, even though, as Buongiovanni highlights, Martial himself (X.21) stressed that access to his epigrams, unlike the overblown verses of his Hellenizing contemporaries, was not dependent on the ingenuity of grammarians or school commentaries to make it intelligible. Moreover, Buongiovanni observes that Martial’s infiltration of the scholarly tradition is a late arrival, discontinuous with a past that had largely eschewed him, and is, therefore, a peculiarly late antique phenomenon. The epigrams allegedly inscribed as tituli in the library of Isidore in Seville are the focus of Fabrizio Bordone’s chapter. Bordone’s essay is an insightful exposition not only of Isidore’s familiarity with Martial but also of the bishop’s ulterior motives in composing these remarkable epigrams: to provide others with a “canone di una ideale biblioteca cristiana” (250).
Two other late ancient poets earn their own essays. Étienne Wolff considers the frequency with which Ausonius’s well documented “réutilisation des classiques” (95) works against the grain to alter or subvert the meaning or point of the original usage. Not unexpectedly, Ausonius’s Vergilian cento nuptialis and ludus as well as his epigrams provide much of the evidence. That is, Ausonius’s intertextual dexterity is Wolff’s primary target. Raffaele Perrelli takes aim at Claudian’s “pictures of life (Lebensbilder)” especially as that poet’s praefatio to his panegyric composed for the sixth consulate of Honorius draws on Lucretius (a poet otherwise little evident in this volume) and Horace.
Finally, the teaching of late Roman subject matter in the modern Italian university is the subject of an invited round table report consisting of three papers by Lucio de Giovanni, Fabio Gasti, and Umberto Roberto. De Giovanni’s short essay laments the general absence of the direct teaching of late Roman law in the university. His call for a concerted effort to plug this hole will resonate with some readers. Gasti’s essay on the historical and cultural context of the teaching of “la letturatura latina tardoantica” offers in depth commentary that validates the study of this literature by drawing comparisons between late antiquity and our current age of uncertainty, as we, too, struggle to resolve fundamental tensions between continuity and change. His suggestion, to make the case for relevancy, is that there are lessons to be learned from this past—for example, from the popularity of carmina figurata and the tenor of Augustine’s Confessions (307)—about the aesthetic and ideological readjustments that drive and define our own cultural moment. In the volume’s concluding essay Umberto Roberto turns to the study of history to observe how in Italy certain “importanti libri,” such as the “riflessione scientifica di grandi maestri come Santo Mazzarino e Lellia Cracco Ruggini” have driven the resurgence of interest in “I secoli della Tarda Antichità (dal III al VII)” (213). Anglophone readers will be hard pressed not to think of the impact of Peter Brown (relegated to a footnote here) to appreciate the power of books to remake broad sweeps of history—and in this case to transform a once liminal age into one capable of standing up on its own legs.
Poetica Spolia may not break new ground in its general claim that spoliation in the form of reuse of the classical poets was characteristic of late Latin poetry, but taken together its individual essays further substantiate and illustrate that claim while also demonstrating that the aesthetic of reuse was widespread and even embedded in the grammatical and commentary traditions that informed and shaped the scholarly establishment and its curricula. In doing all this Poetica Spolia effectively complements several other recent edited volumes that together continue to expand and refine our understanding of the stylistic choices of late Latin poets.[2] Recourse to this very rich collection of essays will be frequent in the years ahead.
Authors and Titles
Bardo Maria Gauly, Modalità di recezione di Ovidio nell’Anthologia Latina: i casi di Pentadio e Reposiano
Paolo De Paolis, La selezione delle citazioni poetiche nelle grammatiche tardoantiche
Maria Luisa Delvigo, Percorsi di mitografia virgiliana
Fabio Stok, Endelechio: il codice bucolico da Mantova alla Gallia
Vanni Veronesi, Romulei vatis assertio: Virgilio e la sfericità della Terra in Mart. Cap. VI 9,4 [592]
Étienne Wolff, Ausone et la réutilisation des auteurs classiques
Luca Mondin, Un classico inaspetattato? Marziale nella poesia cristiana
Claudio Buongiovanni, Presenza e reuso di Marziale nei grammatici e nei commentatori tardoantichi
Fabrizio Bordone, In biblioteca con Marziale: intertestualità e implicazioni metaletterarie nei Verus Isidori
Raffaele Perrelli, Claudiano e i Lebensbilder
Lucio de Giovanni, Il tardoantico giuridico nella didattica universitaria
Fabio Gasti, La letteratura latina tardoantica: contesti storico-culturali e orrizonti didattici
Umberto Roberto, Tendenze e prospettive dell’insegnamento universitario della tarda antichità: il campo dello storico
Notes
[1] Frances Foster, “Learning the Jeweled Style“, in Joshua Hartman and Helen Kaufmann, eds. A Late Antique Poetics? The Jeweled Style Revisited. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.
[2] In addition to the previous note, see, e.g., Stefania Filosini, ed. Poetic Rewritings in late Latin Antiquity and Beyond. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024.