Corpus Tibullianum

This book presents the first commentary on the whole of [Tibullus] 3 in English. It consists of a text, translation, introduction and commentary. The text rests on the author’s autopsy of the most important manuscripts of [Tibullus]. The prose translation is as literal as possible, in order to bring out clearly the meaning of the Latin. The detailed line-by-line commentary serves to clarify the language and literary associations of the poems and to back up the theory that the whole work was composed by a single unitary author. It argues that what were previously thought of as separate sections of the book, composed by different authors at different times, were in fact the product of a single anonymous poet impersonating, or adopting the mask of, different characters in each section: Lygdamus (poems 1-6), a young Tibullus (7), a commentator on Sulpicia’s affair with Cerinthus (8-12), Sulpicia (13-18) and Tibullus (19-20). The close connections and associations between these different sections and their use of the same Augustan intertexts are shown to favour a unitary interpretation of the work. The main literary inspiration for the work, this volume argues, comes from the elegists of the Augustan period, but its date of composition could have been late in the first century AD, linking it with the other pseudepigraphical writings of this century such as the Virgilian and Ovidian Appendices.

This is the first study of the poems of the enigmatic Latin author Lygdamus as an independent collection. An analysis of his identity and dating is accompanied by a full critical edition and word-by-word commentary on his work.

Michael von Albrecht's A History of Roman Literature, originally published in German, can rightly be seen as the long awaited counterpart to Albin Lesky's Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur. In what will probably be the last survey made by a single scholar the whole of Latin literature from Livius Andronicus up to Boethius comes to the fore. 'Literature' is taken here in its broad, antique sense, and therefore also includes e.g. rhetoric, philosophy and history. Special attention has been given to the influence of Latin literature on subsequent centuries down to our own days. Extensive indices give access to this monument of learning. The introductions in Von Albrecht's texts, together with the large bibliographies make further study both more fruitful and easy.

The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the center, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossible to access anonymous poems in their pristine shape and context. The essays collected in this volume attempt, each in its own way, to disentangle the bundles of historically accreted uncertainties and misconceptions that affect individual anonymous texts, including pseudepigrapha ascribed to Homer, Manetho, Virgil, and Tibullus, literary and inscribed epigrams, and unattributed fragments. Poems without Poets will be of interest to students and scholars working on any anonymous ancient texts, but also to readers seeking an introduction to classical poetry beyond the limits of the established canon.