Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

MINOR FIGURES
a forgery — though it need not be by Virgil — referring as it does to the archaizing
fad of the forties, and in particular, to the taste for Thucydides which
emerged at that time. We have no special reason to link Virgil with Annius
Cimber, the poem's offending and criminal rhetorician: but at least we have
a genuine, if obscure, product of the forties.
Catullus is the main influence on the sixth and twelfth epigrams, as on the
tenth, a parody of the phase/us poem, number 4 in our collection. In the first
two, fairly straightforward abusive'exercises, a certain Noctuinus is assailed:
once more obscurity of occasion perhaps rules out a forger — although it does
not guarantee Virgilian authorship. And if Sabinus, the muleteer recipient of
the parody Catalepton 10, is Ventidius Bassus, that poem too belongs to the
forties: Bassus, friend of Caesar and consul suffectus in 43, was lampooned as
an upstart by Cicero, Plancus, and the populace at large (Cic. Fam. 15.20 and
Gell. 15.4). We are left with the insignificant 13, an epitaph on a literary man,
of uncertain date, and three Priapic poems. Although Donatus and Servius may
have thought Virgil wrote the whole of the Priapea, an entirely separate
collection, probably compiled by one author in the late first century A.D., 1 the
three poems in question were chosen in antiquity for inclusion with the
Catalepton. Their main distinguishing characteristic is their bucolic colour,
taken from the Eclogues: 2 probably Augustan, they are unlikely to be the work
of Virgil himself.
Tradition further ascribes a pair of elegies on the death of Maecenas, neither
of them the work of any great talent: Scaliger is responsible for first noticing
that the continuous elegy of the manuscripts should be divided into two. Whoever
composed the first poem had also written an epicedion for some young
m a n : . „ . . . . , • c
defleram muenis tnsti modo carmine fata:
sunt etiam merito carmina danda seni. {Eleg. Maec. 1.12)
My saddened muse of late had mourned a young man's death: now to one ripe in years
also let songs be duly offered. (Tr. J. Wight Duff)
An obvious, but not inevitable, candidate for the iuuenis is Drusus, whose
death in 9 B.C. antedated that of Maecenas by a year. Virgil, who died in 19 B.C.,
has never been a serious contender for the poem — at least not since the Middle
Ages. But what of Ovid? That question is, unfortunately, posed by the couplet
just quoted, since under Ovid's name has been transmitted a Consolatio ad
Liviam, a lament on the death of Drusus. Though tedious, the Consolatio is
better than either of the Elegiae, and is most unlikely to be the epicedion of the
first elegy's first couplet. It could be the work of an Ovid composing in more
official vein — but we need posit no more than influence: in terms of its conceits,
its rhetorical deployment of ideas, the poem prefigures Lucan.
1 See Buchheit (1961) and Kenney's review (1963). * See Galletier (1910) i^i.
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