Pseudepigrapha Latina – serie

This volume offers the first comprehensive literary and philological commentary on the Lydia, in any language. At its core is a freshly edited Latin text of the poem, which systematically reconsiders the paradosis as well as earlier textual scholarship and endorses numerous improvements against current editions. Besides scrutinizing all the textual problems and adopted solutions, the commentary provides a thorough linguistic exegesis of the text as well as a wide-ranging discussion of the poem's rich intertextuality, both Latin and Greek. The Lydia's literary side is also the main focus in the introduction, which challenges the established communis opinio that views the Lydia as a dateless anonymous imitation of Virgilian bucolic, by situating it in the literary context of the Late Republic: it highlights, for the first time, the centrality of Greek bucolic, in particular of Bion's Lament for Adonis and the anonymous Lament for Bion, in the Lydia's literary genealogy and tentatively revives the old attribution to Valerius Cato, as well as exploring the poem's relationship with its better-known sibling, the Dirae. The work is complete with an English translation, aimed to serve as a guide to the Latin text for readers without a solid background in the ancient language.

This volume focuses on the nineteen elegiac poems of the Appendix Tibulliana, a series of little-known Latin elegies transmitted as Book 3 of the Corpus Tibullianum. Although it is accepted that they are not the work of Tibullus himself their actual authorship remains unclear and has been hotly disputed: they are notable especially for containing work attributed to Sulpicia, who may be the only female Latin poet we know of from pre-Christian antiquity. Though admittedly somewhat obscure, this volume argues that the elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana have been unjustly overlooked in traditional scholarship: rather than concentrating on what we don't know both the Introduction and the Commentary focus instead on broader contexts of discussion. The Introduction examines not only stylistic and textual matters, but also the genre of elegy, its main practitioners, poetic communities, and gender roles, while the Commentary examines whether and how the poems fit into their cycles, into the Corpus Tibullianum, and into the genre as a whole. Close reading of the individual elegies reveals that they have a lot to teach us, especially in light of the question of women as authors in antiquity and the notion of mutability of identity. Not only do they call into question the social and legal status of the participants in a 'standard' elegiac relationship and play with the gender norms of the actors and the genre, they also destabilize the commonly-held notion that elegy is personal poetry, rooted in autobiographical events experienced by one individual author. These valuable insights, more broadly applied, may have important consequences for traditional understanding of what elegy is and does.

The Augustan period in Rome was a golden age for poetry, and also the age in which the cult of the author began in the west. By examining some early poetic understandings of what it might have meant to be Vergil, Ovid, and Tibullus, Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana explores what those authors meant to near-contemporaries, and what the construction of authorship they were a part of meant to the later western tradition. Constructing Authors and Readers in the Appendices Vergiliana, Tibulliana, and Ouidiana takes its starting point from the Appendices attached to three major Augustan poets, exploring how their different conditions of production, and the differences between their authorising authors, result in different notions of what an appendical text 'ought' to contain. So, for instance, Vergil's biography leaves ample room for 'juvenilia', while Ovid's does not; the Tibullan appendix explicitly engages with a wider poetic community. Moving beyond questions of forgery and deception, some chapters ask how we would be able to know the difference between texts of genuine and of disputed authorship, given that most of the stylistic features that distinguish authors are replicable. Other chapters make the case for re-evaluation of poems that have been neglected or disparaged, and still others make sense of individual works in their likely context of composition. The volume is the first to treat in conjunction the majority of the appendical works ascribed to Vergil, Ovid, and Tibullus, and to draw connections across corpora.