CUP (2016) h/b 366pp £74.99 (ISBN 9781107116276)
This Festschrift had its origin in a conference in Cambridge in early 2013 to mark the 70th birthday of Michael Reeve. Thus the papers (fourteen of which appear here) share a greater than usual homogeneity by reflecting the honorand’s interests; and, it may be added, their quality is uniformly of a very high standard—though this, as will appear, poses a particular problem in one area for the reviewer.
Those of less direct relevance to textual studies include Alessandro Barchiesi on ‘Jupiter the antiquarian: the name of Iulus’, who makes the valid point that when Jupiter, at Aeneid 1.267-8, announces that Ascanius will have Iulus (‘little Jupiter’) added to his name as cognomen, this is a performative utterance with implications, not a mere statement: discussion of the etymology of the name disposes of some implausible derivations.
L.B.T. Houghton’s ‘Maritime Maro: Virgil’s fourth Eclogue in Renaissance Venice’ demonstrates that poem’s continuing influence, in, for example, Navagero’s poem written, c. AD. 1500, to honour the birth of a son to the Venetian condottiere d’Alviano, though the extract given shows little of the quality of the Mantuan, while the same has to be said of Amalteo’s eclogue Silis, addressed to the Venetian commander Savorgnan: I say only that Virgil’s use of enjambment seems largely to have escaped the notice of the later composers.
Contributions from Monica Gale and Emma Gee concentrate on specialised aspects of Catullus and Lucretius: Catullus ‘seeks to ensure a favourable reception for his work by modelling his ideal audience as a community of like-minded readers and writers’, while Gee points out lexical similarities between Lucretius and Cicero, and disputing—or at least not accepting—Merrill’s dismissal (1921) of the similarities between Cicero’s Aratea and the DNR as mere coincidences. The argument in both these contributions is convincing and detailed, and repays more study than it is possible to indicate here. The same is true of Matthew Leigh’s careful demonstration of the unity of Catullus 68: ‘any attempt to divide it into two entirely separate poems must fail’, since it is ‘conspicuously built out of recurrent terms, motifs, themes and preoccupations’.
Where the reviewer finds himself in a quandary is in noticing those contributions in which matters textual come to the fore. Many of the solutions proposed are both detailed and arrestingly convincing, but to consider them properly would call for almost as much space as the proposals themselves; but an attempt must be made. What follows is the briefest possible selection, in each case, from the cornucopia provided.
We await (not before time) a new Oxford Classical Text of Horace from Richard Tarrant—and may find its contents appearing in chronological rather than the traditional order. Tarrant plans to direct a course between the Scylla of Klingner (too cautious) and the Charybdis of Shackleton Bailey (too adventurous). Thus at Odes 3.17.5, he prefers ducit (D. Heinsius, accepted by Klingner) to Shackleton Bailey’s ducet or the ducis of the MSS, and at 3.1.42 he rightly finds Nisbet’s Sidone for sidere of the tradition a compelling improvement. Bentley makes a welcome comeback more than once, notably at Epistles 1.6.59 (Campum for populum); and that highly dubious (eius atque!) quatrain at Odes 3.11.17 is likely to suffer athetesis (David Butterfield justly characterised it as ‘if genuine, an odds-on favourite for the worst Sapphic stanza of Horace’s poetic career’). As for the ancient (1901 and 1912) OCT of Wickham, Tarrant quotes Housman on an editor of Manilius: ‘he has a relish for the uncouth and is not dismayed by the hideous’.
In Butterfield’s own paper (‘Some problems in the text and transmission of Lucretius’), he argues convincingly that in the near ‘doublet’ at DRN 1.949=4.24, we should again read perspicis rather than the tradition’s percipis (MSS) in the latter instance; and at DRN 1.306, where we are faced with the odd word dispansae, if indeed word it be, he shows, with the help of photographs of the MSS, that this is a case of ‘medial-line interference’ from suspensae which appears immediately above, and that the correct reading, candenti, can be found in the ‘indirect tradition’ of Nonius (of course this is a shamingly abbreviated account of Butterfield’s superbly argued case). At DRN 2.356 he boldly offers instat as the logical reading (for a ‘heifer [doing something] the tracks of a lost calf’), rather than the ‘smorgasbord’ of suggestions—approaching 20—to find an appropriate trochee to replace the nonsense of the tradition (actually, quaerit, Capelli/Bailey, can also be defended).
Gian Biagio Conte discusses his new Teubner of the Aeneid, in which he has benefited from new collations of eight Carolingian MSS, and adduces several places where he differs from the OCT of Mynors. At 1.380 he argues that the last five words are an unnecessary duplication from 6.123, and the subsequent half-line (tibicen, as it is known) ad loc. should be allowed to remain; while by similar reasoning 4.126 should vanish, as a doublet of 1.73. Bentley’s simple ambiguumve (for –que of the MSS) is accepted at 5.326, as is his incautus for incautum at 10.386 ; and at 9.463 Conte sensibly prefers cogit (MSS, Servius) to Mynors’ cogunt (Cunningham, Wagner).
S. J. Heyworth (‘Authenticity and other Textual Problems in Heroides 16’) examines the question of Ovidian authorship, partly led by Michael Reeve’s illuminating question ‘Why should Ovid not have composed Epp. 16-21 in exile?’ (Among much else, this would explain those polysyllabic pentameter endings.) Heyworth’s long and important paper defies comprehensible summary (in it he also has to consider the implications of an incunable in Goettingen [possibly dated circa 1475] in relation to the Parma edition of 1477, with their inclusion of two long passages in Epp. 16 and 21 not found elsewhere), and the reviewer must simply repeat his conclusion that ‘the normal processes of textual corruption [the phrase is taken from Courtney, who is against Ovidian authorship] include things that repeatedly turn Ovidian Latin into non-Ovidian Latin.’
D.H. Berry gives good reasons for dismissing as later and unnecessary additions passages in three speeches of Cicero; the case against the interpolation in Verres II.5.83 is so compelling—it was first made by Ernesti—that the Loeb editor’s defence (that the words are found in all the MSS) strikes one as desperation: identifying glosses in prose is often difficult (so Reynolds and Wilson [2013]), but the application of res et ratio will make it less so.
Marcus Deufert argues, and displays in a table, a list of eight rubricated lines in Lucretius which he believes (contra Butterfield 2013) to be corrupt or spurious, notably DRN 2.706a and 3.672a; at 3.805 we see a case (so Gerhard Mueller) of a long interpolation from 5.351-363 being introduced by rubrication in the archetype. However, at 3.759 it was unclear to the reviewer whether Deufert is accepting or rejecting Carlo Giussani’s opinion: ‘I tre versi (757-9) sono forse una aggiunta posteriore del poeta, un corollario introdotto per incidenza’. Only 3.905 remains ‘certainly sound and authentic’.
It remains to consider S.J.V. Malloch (‘Acidalius on Tacitus’), Llewellyn Morgan on Tristia 1.10, and S.P. Oakley on the editio princeps of Priscian’s Periegesis. Valens Acidalius (Valtin Havekenthal), a brilliant young scholar who idolised Lipsius, died at the age of 28 in 1595, and did much work on Latin authors including Plautus (praised by Ritschl), was an important critic of Tacitus, especially the Annals: he concentrated on elucidating and emending the text. Malloch gives 25 corrections made by Acidalius—who was working from Lipsius’ text of 1589—some of which were arrived at independently of Muretus, whose prior claims he acknowledges; that the corrections are often small and tersely expressed—e.g. habeat for habebat at 15.62.1—does not lessen their utility. It remains a great pity that Acidalius did not live long enough fully to justify the high hopes that Lipsius had expressed for him.
Llewellyn Morgan argues that the primary significance of Tristia 1 is to prove that Ovid is still Ovid in the most critical respect of all, his poetic creativity—‘a powerful assertion of Ovid’s personal integrity in the face of all attempts to make him a non-person’; after all, he could have been exiled to a place less remote and barbaric than Tomi. In the end, Ovid ‘was saved and preserved by his ingenium’ (Ronald Syme, 1978: 227): after all, quicquid temptaba(t) dicere, versus erat. For nimium amator ingenii sui he may have been, as Quintilian observed, but ingenium there most assuredly was—and error too there must certainly have been.
S. P. Oakley takes up Michael Reeve’s argument that ‘some MSS were copied from printed books’ (Reeve, 2011); ten of Priscian’s MSS derive from printed editions. The intensely detailed nature of Oakley’s demonstration that one MS (Ko) derives from a printed edition, and is itself the parent of Kk (thus both deriving from an edition and having progeny of its own), does not lend itself to summary, but may be thought of as an appropriate way to honour the subject of this Festschrift, the long list of whose published writings forms a welcome coda to the book (which has been printed by CUP in exemplary fashion).
The reviewer can only apologise for the inadequacy of his comments, while adding that the pleasure and benefit that he has drawn from this most distinguished work is of a very high order indeed. Both the editors and the contributors have earned our gratitude.
Colin Leach