Vergil the Elegist

17 Et in Arcadia Ego: Vergil the Elegist nandini b. pandey Please note these are uncorrected proofs from a volume on Vergil and Elegy, ed. Alison Keith and Micah Myers (Toronto 2023). Thank you for consulting the whole finished volume and citing accordingly. “A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,” said Moritz Heimann once, “is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” Nothing is more dubious than this sentence – but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man – so says the truth that was meant here – who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life. Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller Vergil, we all know, was an epic poet. But he is an elegiac one. Latin’s foremost epic author has cut an elegiac profile since antiquity: in the circumstances of his death, the stories and pseudepigraphia that construct his remembered self, and the material contexts in which readers encounter his work. These include the prefatory epigrams that stand epitaphically over his book rolls, much like the grave inscription standing over his cenotaph in Naples. These posthumous accretions reify the elegiac sensibility that Vergil evinced in life when he imagined his voice receding into the perennial, yet perennially past-tense, world of his texts – beginning with the imperfect canebam and self-quotation from the Bucolics that close the Georgics (4.559–66). This paper inspects the paratextual palimpsest that encircles Vergil’s poems like a winding-sheet, constructing his epic corpus as a kind of elegiac corpse that arrives to us today only through the interventions of countless undertakers.1 1. Generic Mixing in and around Vergil As Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, we know genre when we see it – through the ineffable interaction of formal patterns, aesthetic traditions, audience expectations, and performance situation. While any 302 Nandini B. Pandey definition necessarily oversimplifies, one signature of a genre is the mutual positioning it implies among author, reader, text, and time. Epic sings eternal truths, sometimes mingled with falsehoods, in a public voice that exists in the “now” and claims to transcend the material world. Elegy, in contrast, trains a private gaze upon bodies (from the poet’s dearly beloved to his literary corpus to his future grave) affected by the passage of time, often assuming what I call a “future perfect” stance in vocalizing what they will someday become. Elegy often therefore looks over its shoulder at epigram, a “distinctive type of elegy” that includes epitaphs, dedicatory epigrams, and other forms that struggle against time to speak to the living about the dead or other mute objects.2 Elegy and elogia thematize loss both formally, with the “missing” foot of each alternate line, and etymologically, with their putative shared origin in the Greek elegos, derived onomatopoetically from cries of lamentation (e e legein or eleleu). More generally, they share an obsession with death, disenfranchisement, and the role of writing in preserving memory. Generic distinctions like this, however, begin to disintegrate when it comes to Vergil, despite his epic insistence that he sings of arms and the man (A. 1.1).3 Vergil did give occasional recitations and even, according to the biographical tradition, completed certain half-lines orally (VSD 33–4). But in Georgics 3.16–39, Vergil imagines his epic in monumental terms that prefigure its ultimate detachment from the author’s voice.4 So too did the Georgics’ public debut over several days’ recitation to Octavian; as Vergil’s voice grew exhausted, Maecenas filled in to read from a script that divided and disembodied Vergil’s vox propria at the poem’s inception (VSD 27). The Aeneid itself partakes in the epitaphic tradition of speaking for and as those who lack a voice. Book 6.860–86 offers a eulogy for Marcellus through the persona of Anchises’ ghost – words that, voiced by Vergil during an imperial reading, reportedly made Octavia faint.5 The elegiacally tinged narrative of Nisus and Euryalus concludes at 9.446–9 with the poet’s personal, epitaphic vow to immortalize the dead lovers as long as the Capitoline rock endures.6 These interchanges between living voice and mute bodies replicate Aeneas’ katabasis on a narratological level to confuse the boundaries among epic, elegy, epitaph, and eulogy. Vergil’s poems drift into elegiac, even epitaphic, territory through their consciousness of their material survival of the poet. 2. Recapitulation and Decapitation in Epitaph and Elegy Despite its “epic” claims to be public, oral, and eternalizing, then, the Aeneid already speaks in sepulchral tones. These are amplified by the Aeneid’s origin mythos: the early and persistent rumour that the dying Vergil asked for Et in Arcadia Ego 303 his epic to be burned, only to be overridden on Augustus’ authority (auctore Augusto, VSD 41).7 I have argued elsewhere that this story ties the birth of the epic to the (literal) death of its author.8 It also functions as a paratextual reminder of the perishability of Vergil’s written poem, whose public survival nonetheless countervails its creator’s private wishes. The Aeneid thereby becomes an epitaph of sorts. Instead of speaking as its author, it speaks in his place and against his will. As we read it, then, we view an object whose meaning (and very existence) are constructed by an audience, upon its supposed author, in memoriam. In doing so, we occupy the same position as the viewers of grave inscriptions. The following elegiacs found at Rome (CIL I2 1222), for instance, call out to passers-by to mark the absence of the dedicator’s daughter and make interpretive claims about her form and value.9 Sei quis hauet nostro conferre dolore[m]/adsit nec parueis flere quead lachrymis/ quam coluit dulci gauisus amore puella[m]/[hic locat] infelix unica quei fuerat/ [donec compleuit] fatorum tempora numphe/[nunc sublat]a domu cara sueis tegitur/[et candor uult]us et eo laudata figura/[umbra leuis nun]c est paruos et ossa cinis If anyone cares to add his own grief to ours, here let him be; and with no scanty tears let him deign to weep. Here an unhappy parent has laid to rest his one and only daughter Nymphe whom he cherished in the joy of sweet love while the shortened hours of the Fates allowed it. Now she is torn away from home – earth covers her, dear to her own; now her fair face, her form too, praised as fair, – all is airy shadow and her bones are a little pinch of ashes. Other epitaphs, like this first-century BCE inscription in senarii found near Cremona (CIL I2 2138), speak not just for but as the deceased, make possessive claims on his behalf, and highlight the separation between living and dead, even as they hint that the same fate awaits us all. M[arcus] Statius/M[arci] l[ibertus] Chilo/hic/heus tu uiator las/se qu[i] me praete/reis/cum diu ambula/reis tamen hoc/ueniundum est tibi/in f[ronte] p[edes] X in ag[ro]/p[edes] X Marcus Statius Chilo, freedman of Marcus, lies here. Ah! Weary wayfarer, you there who are passing by me, though you may walk as long as you like, yet here’s the place you must come to. Frontage 10’, depth 10’. These speaking stones on the margins of the city underline their material permanence vis-à-vis human life but also their reliance on readers to 304 Nandini B. Pandey remember and give voice to the dead. Their extreme distillation of lives parallels the body’s transformation into a handful of ash and all representations’ miniaturization of reality. Or at least, such is the theme of the epitaph purportedly written by Ennius for Scipio:10 quam tantam statuam statuet populus Romanus / quamue columnam, quae teque et tua gesta loquatur (“How great a statue will the Roman people raise to you, or how high a column, that may praise you and your deeds?”). These verses throw up their hands in despair at the inadequacy of any metonym, from image to text, to encapsulate the fullness of a great career. By condensing a human life into a few synoptic words, epitaphs engage in a physical and temporal telescoping that is one generic hallmark of elegy. Elegists at least since Callimachus have fantasized about writing their gravestones in advance (Epigrams 35): Βαττιάδεω παρὰ σῆμα φέρεις πόδας εὖ μὲν ἀοιδήν / εἰδότος, εὖ δ᾽ οἴνωι καίρια συγγελάσαι (“By the tomb of Battus’ son you bear your feet, a man well-skilled in song and at laughing in season over the wine”). In Bucolics 10, Gallus imagines how gently his bones will rest if the Arcadian shepherds sing his loves (33–4). As a highly wrought hexameter composition purporting to be sung by and about the first Roman elegist, this early poem of Vergil’s already illustrates the generic mixing that would come to surround his corpus.11 As Teresa Ramsby observes, Tibullus 1.3 preserves the first (and explicitly fictitious) epitaph in Roman literary elegy, as the poet imagines himself dying far from Delia in Messalla’s service.12 But it is Propertius who most insistently envisions his own death, developing a characteristically elegiac stance that would bleed over into his epic contemporary’s reception. By my reckoning, twenty of Propertius’ Carmina13 anticipate, even prememorialize, the deaths of the poet or his beloved. At 2.13, for instance, Propertius envisions Cynthia and his books accompanying his funeral procession like heirs who will preserve his name after death (25–30). As the funeral flames miniaturize his body into ashes in a little urn (paruula testa, 32) for a tiny tomb (exiguo … busto, 33), the poet crystallizes his life into a single epitaph: QVI NVNC IACET HORRIDA PVLVIS, / VNIVS HIC QVONDAM SERVVS AMORIS ERAT (“HE WHO NOW LIES HERE, COARSE DUST, / ONCE WAS THE SLAVE OF A SINGLE LOVE,” 35–6). In asking Cynthia to mind his “remembering stones” (lapides … memores, 40), unable to speak for themselves (57–8), Propertius collapses this epitaph with all his elegies to remind us that they continue to speak only through texts voiced by readers. This exemplifies elegy’s future perfect vision of the poet’s death as already past, often in terms of lapidary inscriptions that preserve his posthumous memory even as they eviscerate his inner life. Et in Arcadia Ego 305 The cruellest twist is the deceased person’s loss of control over the words that will resurrect her for posterity, sometimes in direct defiance of her own self-conception. At 4.7.83–6, Cynthia’s ghost bids Propertius to inscribe a column with an epitaph that is “worthy” (dignum, 83), but brief enough that a traveller might read it as he hastens from the city (84):14 hic Tiburtina iacet aurea Cynthia terra: / accessit ripae laus, Aniene, tuae (“Here in Tiburtine earth lies golden Cynthia: this glory, Anio, accrues to your banks”). The shining reputation that Cynthia here claims mismatches her now charred corpse (7–12) and Propertius’ representations elsewhere. Indeed, her insistence that she has been faithful and he has failed to honour her in death (23–34) turns the tables on his earlier epitaphic profession of loyalty to a single mistress (2.13.35–6), as does the subsequent poem (4.8): a flashback to the night where she left town on another affair, only to discover Propertius entertaining other women in her absence. This latter poem’s anti-chronological resurrection of the supposedly faithful mistress of 4.7 illustrates how memory continues to evolve after death, but also reminds us that the living (in this case, the poet) continue to control the mimetic purse strings.15 In effect, then, these elegies stage a contest between writers and subjects over who controls posthumous summations and thereby perceptions of their lives. Though Cynthia returns from the dead to prick Propertius’ conscience, and poke holes in his selfrepresentation through her own attempted recapitulation of her life, she forever relies on him and his readers in order to speak. The point gains wider resonance when we regard Propertius’ textually constructed puella as an emblem for his own poems. Vergil’s corpus, too, would continue to speak as a corpse through the loving if refiguring embrace of his admirers. We find a real-world example with John Keats’ own lyre-topped grave in the Protestant Cemetery in the Roman rione of Testaccio (Figure 17.1). Keats, “half in love with easeful Death,” carried the torch of elegy (and its future perfect stance) into English letters: he once wrote to his inamorata, Fanny Brawne, “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute!”16 As he lay dying far from home, he wished his tomb to say: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” This inscription transforms Catullus’ lament at lovers’ mutability (sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, / in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua, 70) into a meditation on the ephemerality of poetic success. But what his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Brown actually had inscribed was: This Grave / contains all that was Mortal, / of a / YOUNG ENGLISH POET, / Who, / on his Death Bed, / in the Bitterness of his Heart, / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, / 306 Nandini B. Pandey 17.1. John Keats’ grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Desired / these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone / “Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water.[”] / Feb 24th 1821 Even in claiming to record the poet’s intentions, this inscription defies them by editorializing and speaking in the poet’s stead. It ventriloquizes Severn and Brown’s own bitterness about Keats’ early death onto the poet himself – as they themselves would come to regret. But in omitting the poet’s name, and relying on faithful readers to supply it, the epitaph nonetheless proves Keats’ fame and corrects his despair, even in English letters on the margins of Catholic Rome. Might this incident parallel Varius’ and Tucca’s evident defiance of their friend Vergil’s behest that they publish “nothing that he Et in Arcadia Ego 307 himself had not revised” (VSD 40), under pressure from Augustus but also their own admiration? 3. Vergil, Following Ennius, as an Epic Elegist The genius of Cynthia, Keats, and Vergil was thus paradoxically preserved by loving survivors’ commemorative violence, in keeping with elogia’s secondary meaning as a codicil of disinheritance. Posterity also reshaped poets’ remembered identities, embalming certain epic poets in the posture of elegists on their deathbeds. The funerary epigram (or two?) that Cicero attributes to Ennius (Tusc. Disp. 1.15.34 = Vahlen Epigrammata 1) constitutes a sphragis to the poet’s works within the cultural memory of first-century BCE Rome: aspicite, o ciues, senis Enni imaginis formam. hic uestrum panxit maxima facta patrum. nemo me lacrumis decoret nec funera fletu faxit. cur? uolito uiuus per ora uirum. Behold, citizens, the aspect of the image of old Ennius. He unfolded the great deeds of your forefathers. Let nobody honour me with tears or render funereal service with weeping. Why? I flit living through the lips of men. These lines might have accompanied a book roll, frontispiece portrait, or statue of the poet, in a private library or the Scipios’ tomb. Enhancing the ambiguity, formam (1) may either point deictically to an accompanying image or adumbrate the words that follow. Either way, Ennius’ achievement has been transformed into an aesthetic object, viewable in one glance, that contains the “great deeds” of Rome’s forefathers with little hint of the Scipionic epitaph’s metonymic anxiety. The initial division between the dead author’s past-tense image and its present audience (o ciues) finds resolution in the second couplet, whose first-person insistence that Ennius lives on through his readers imagines him in the elegiac position of envisioning and defying his mortality. Ironically, though, this last testament was likely written (certainly chiselled) by another’s hand, and reappropriated by others to assert their own immortality – most memorably, Vergil in his “proem in the middle” at Georgics 3.9 and Ovid in his envoi at Metamorphoses 15.875–9. Of all Ennius’ epic successors, Vergil takes on the most distinctly elegiac aspect. Not only is he too remembered in the elegiac stance of pre-memorializing his own death, but his poetic body has been transmitted through the millennia with prefatory material that stands over it like a headstone. The various epigraphs, dedications, biographies, and accessus that have 308 Nandini B. Pandey accompanied Vergilian books since antiquity reflect successive generations’ interpretive practices, continue to condition our receptions and transmissions, and encourage readers to approach Vergil’s words with an elegiac appreciation for their mute monumentality. According to various uitae, of which the Vita Suetonii uulgo Donatiana (VSD) and Vita Focae have received particular attention of late,17 Vergil’s first and last compositions were epitaphs. He is said to have cut his poetic teeth on a funerary distich for a brigand gladiator:18 monte sub hoc lapidum tegitur Ballista sepultus; / nocte die tutum carpe, uiator, iter (“Under this mountain of rocks the buried Ballista is covered; safely by night and day, traveller, make your way”). As Ballista is smothered under stones, this couplet accreted countless imitations, of which the Vita Focae preserves no fewer than five (74–83). Other works attributed to Vergil’s youth, Andrew Laird has noted, share a funereal tone. The Culex, for instance, concludes with the shepherd’s elogium for the gnat who saved his life only to be killed with a smack (411–14): his tumulus super inseritur. tum fronte locatur elogium, tacita firmat quod littera uoce: PARVE CVLEX PECVDVM CVSTOS TIBI TALE MERENTI FVNERIS OFFICIVM VITAE PRO MVNERE REDDIT. The tumulus is strewn with these [flowers] above. Then on its face is placed an elogium, which letters spell out with silent voice: O LITTLE GNAT, A GUARDIAN OF FLOCKS REPAYS YOU, DESERVEDLY, THE OFFICE OF BURIAL IN RETURN FOR THE GIFT OF LIFE. Flirting with elegiac pentameter through third-foot caesuras in alternate lines, these silently speaking letters share elegy’s habit of finding magnitude in trivial events through a subjective lens, as well as the genre’s characteristic irony, respect for the unidirectionality of time, and neglect of responsibility (nowhere does the epigrapher admit his guilt). This epitaph shares elements with the biographical incipit (ille ego quondam …) that Vergil supposedly intended for the frons of his epic, itself ironically probably authored by a third party to canonize Vergil’s authentic corpus.19 The most famous of Vergil’s elegiac epitaphs, however, is surely the one that still marks his cenotaph on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc / Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces (“Mantua gave birth to me; the Calabrians snatched me away; Parthenope now holds me; I sang of pastures, ploughlands, and leaders”). The uitae insist that Vergil personally authored these lines as he lay dying in Et in Arcadia Ego 309 Brundisium.20 The lines are, of course, almost certainly apocryphal. What matters, though, is that they put Vergil in the elegiac position of anticipating and memorializing his own burial far from home – and us in the equally elegiac position of reading alien words that speak for (and as) the dead. A proliferation of imitations, including ones commemorating Lucan and a dog named Margarita,21 show that this distich circulated early and widely, and not just among superfans (though the latter certainly existed: Silius Italicus supposedly bought and restored Vergil’s tomb, treated it like a temple, venerated the poet’s bust, and honoured his birthday above his own).22 This epigram’s lack of deictic markers and use of biographical formulae, Ahuvia Kahane has argued, suggest that it functioned not so much as an epitaph as a reproducible “epitaphic sign and … biographical emblem of Vergil’s life.”23 It also sculpts the poet’s figure into elegiac shape for posterity. Much like the Aeneid incipit, this eulogy epitomizes Vergil’s life and serves as a table of contents to his corpus, imposing an insistently tripartite chronological structure on both even as it recalls the tituli, elogia, and epitaphs mentioned above.24 Like elegy, it reels time forwards and backwards, purporting to represent both the author’s final premonition and his retrospective synopsis of his life. It also miniaturizes his hexameter magna opera into single words in the pentameter.25 The violence of Calabri rapuere enhances our sense that Vergil’s life and work were cut short, like elegy’s catalectic distich: the epitaph thus functions as a paratextual seal to the epic, framing its half-lines as internal evidence of its “incompletion” upon the author’s death.26 Parthenope, an archaic name for Neapolis that refers to the “maidenvoiced” siren who died there when her songs failed to seduce Odysseus,27 sets off a nostalgia trip back through Vergil’s corpus to the Georgics, whose sphragis identifies Parthenope as the nourisher of Vergil’s youthful otium (dulcis alebat / Parthenope, 4.563–4, discussed below). The poet’s burial thus represents a homecoming, into the arms that nursed him in happier days, on a hill whose very name whispers freedom from care (Pausilypon, “respite from worry,” now Posillipo).28 Through this epitaph, Vergil, like Ennius, oscillates between death and immortality. Mantua, Calabria, and Campania comprise a miniature verbal map, governing verbs that pin Vergil’s singular body (me, 1) firmly to Italian earth like the stones that smother Ballista. Campania inscribes the dead poet, like his own creations Palinurus, Misenus, and Caieta,29 into the same lugubrious landscape that Aeneid 6 conjoins with the underworld. In the distich’s second half, though, the poet takes on new life as the first-person subject of one verb, cecini, with three different objects (cecini pascua, rura, duces). Shepherds, fields, and leaders serve as tituli to the books that generate the fame by which the poet continues to fly living through the lips of 310 Nandini B. Pandey men. The plural form duces encompasses Aeneas along with his descendant Augustus, but reverses the latter’s overwriting of the poet’s dying wishes according to VSD 41; here, the princeps is merely one anonymous object of the poet’s song. Might a coin of this same year featuring a crab grasping a butterfly (Figure 17.2), previously interpreted as a symbol of Cumae 17.2. Aureus of Augustus, c. 19 BCE. Oak-wreathed head of Augustus, left, with legend CAESAR AVGVSTVS (obverse); crab holding butterfly with legend M DVRMIVS IIIVIR (reverse). RIC2 Augustus 316. Photograph courtesy of the American Numismatic Society. Et in Arcadia Ego 311 holding the poet’s body,30 similarly hint at the transformative flight that liberated the poet from his body, books, and Augustus’ grasp? Cecini at once acknowledges and historicizes the poet’s voice, above all his epic’s clarion cano (A. 1.1). It also recalls closural motifs from earlier poems, engaging readers (and, before them, the inscribed author) in an elegiac backward glance from the future upon prior scripta. The perfect infinitive cecinisse had heralded the end of the Bucolics (10.70–4): haec sat erit, diuae, uestrum cecinisse poetam, dum sedet et gracili fiscellam texit hibisco, Pierides: uos haec facietis maxima Gallo, Gallo, cuius amor tantum mihi crescit in horas, quantum uere nouo uiridis se subicit alnus. It will be enough for your poet to have sung these words, divine Pierides, while he sits and weaves a basket of supple hibiscus: you will make these songs great above all to Gallus, Gallus, for whom my love grows as much each hour as the green alder shoots up in the new spring. The transition from pastoral songs (70) to woven basket (71) and growing tree (74) emblematizes the publication process itself; words the poet once rolled through his tongue are finally transcribed onto papyrus and circulated as books to replicate in others’ hands. This image intertwines with Horace Odes 1.12, where the recently deceased Marcellus’ fame grows like a young tree (45–6), to recall the Stoic conceptions of immortality that underwrote the sidus Iulium (46–8) and Augustus’ own eventual deification.31 Undercutting cano’s pretence of immanent performance, the perfect cecini and cecinisse remind us that the uates owes his fame over time to the perishable intermediary of his book – which was just as subject to neglect, encroachment, and destruction as the tomb inscriptions cited above. We glimpse Vergil’s consciousness of this fact in his attempted burning of the Aeneid – an episode that itself became an object of elegiac lamentation, as poets like Sulpicius of Carthage mourned Troy’s destruction for a second time had the poem not been snatched from the flames (Calabri rapuere?). As, before, and after “he” wrote his epitaph, Vergil was already felt to be a projection of his text, their fates and fames intertwined like Meleager’s with the branch. The Georgics’ closural consciousness of its own materiality also crosses the katabatic boundary between song and text, poet, and persona (4.559–66): haec super aruorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altum 312 Nandini B. Pandey fulminat Euphraten bello uictorque uolentes per populos dat iura uiamque adfectat Olympo. illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti, carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi. These things above on the care of fields and herds I was singing, and trees besides, while great Caesar thunders in war at the deep Euphrates and gives laws as a victor to willing peoples and pursues a path toward heaven. At that time sweet Parthenope nursed me, Vergil, flourishing in the pursuits of inglorious leisure, I who played with shepherds’ songs and, bold in youth, sang you, Tityrus, under the shelter of the spreading beech. The perfect cecini (566) “seals” the poem’s authorship with an intertextual recollection of Bucolics 1.1.32 But already at the start of the sphragis, super (559) marks the physical space “above” on the papyrus roll, breaking the illusion of continuous song. Likewise, the imperfect canebam abruptly transforms the lines above into a past-tense artefact, anchored in time to Caesar’s campaign by the Euphrates. The name of this river, as Ruth Scodel and Richard Thomas have noted,33 occurs six lines from the end of a book in Georgics 1.509, 4.561, and Aeneid 8.726. It thereby calls attention to the textual materiality and interallusivity of all these poems. The allusion also packs metapoetic heft: six lines from the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, the Euphrates stands in for the broad and muddy genre of epic, which the poet has rejected for the clearer streams of smaller forms (105–13). The Callimachean reference validates Vergil’s choice to play with non-epic (if hexameter) forms while Caesar works at war. But it also unravels the poem’s representational weft. Octavian was nowhere near the Euphrates at the time of composition and never conquered the river at all, despite its appearance on Aeneas’ shield and perhaps his own triple triumph.34 Vergil’s recitation of the Georgics to Octavian at Atella (VSD 27), on his way home from the east, further argues that the poet knew fiction from fact.35 Why, then, does Vergil use this false report to anchor his poem to history? It puts the author in the elegiac pose of appearing to have read about Caesar’s campaign – in keeping with contemporary poets’ self-positioning as belated audiences of war’s representations rather than direct participants.36 The genre’s originator, Gallus, envisions himself someday “surveying,” or “reading about,” the “temples of many gods, richer for being fixed with” Caesar’s spoils (multorum templa deorum / fixa legam spolieis deiuitiora tueis, Qasr Ibrîm fr. 4–5).37 Propertius fantasizes about “reading” triumphal tituli from the sidelines at 3.4.16; in Ars 1.219–28, Ovid urges Et in Arcadia Ego 313 his readers to invent referents for triumphal floats, naming one river the Tigris, another Euphrates at will.38 Not only are generals’ representations of their victories tendentious and self-serving from the first; such distinctions, Ovid suggests, are also arbitrary and factually irrelevant to audiences in the city. Georgics 4’s reference to a nonexistent Euphratic campaign footnotes the tendency of all mimeses, from the triumph to this very poem, to warp the facts they claim to distil. This points in turn to all representations’ inability, though their necessary metonymy, to encompass the full truth: of a leader’s labours, a person’s life, an epic’s plot. This problem of omission comes to the fore with Servius’ report that the second half of Georgics 4 originally sang the laudes Galli – until the elegist incurred Augustus’ anger through epigraphic self-monumentalization in Egypt.39 Vergil is said to have substituted his narrative of Orpheus’ descent to the underworld, rendering Gallus’ very absence from the Georgics a tacit elogium in absentia and a textual mirror for his erasure from the monumental landscape. Vergil’s closural haec … canebam thus misrepresents not just the circumstances but the content (haec) of poetic composition. Here at the borders of the book roll, Vergil’s first-person song fades before readers’ eyes into the mut(at)ed, past-tense embodiment of plural interactions and constraints. 4. Epitaphic Epigraphs If this sphragis marks the Georgics’ ultimate transformation into text, the dedications, argumenta, and other materials that have prefaced Vergil’s books since antiquity accomplish this before he could even sing. They become epitaphs in advance, full of tombstones’ metonymic anxiety even as they eulogize, package, and pre-digest the poems as objects for readers’ consumption. The prevalence of elegiac dedications means that many ancient readers encountered Vergil’s works in material contexts that were already generically chimerical, likely enhancing their appreciation for the hybridity of the poems. Such distichs also condition readers to approach Vergil’s epics with an elegiac outlook. They detain us on the margins of the text, looking in from the outside; highlight the poem’s material and temporal alienity; and (like Gallus viewing Caesar’s spoils) beckon us to admire the past greatness of what Vergil has already written, rather than hear him sing in the present. An epigram by Martial to accompany a Vergilian codex recalls Ennius’ concern that any column could contain Scipio’s deeds, even the “little pinch of ashes” or 10’ x 10’ plot to which Nymphe and Chilo have been reduced (14.186): quam breuis immensum cepit membrana Maronem / ipsius uultus 314 Nandini B. Pandey prima tabella gerit (“How thin, the skin that holds the great Maro; the first page wears his face”). These lines personify the physical book as a metonym for Vergil, a face (uultus) enclosed in skin (membrana), but like a tombstone transform the poet into a mute, third-person object and speak in his stead. Such non-authorial front matter, including portraiture, grafts an alien caput upon Vergil’s corpus, sitting atop it but apart from it like a death mask. Other prefatory elegiacs admire but anatomize Vergil’s poems, like a butterfly dissected on a board. The magnificently produced fifth-century Vergilius Romanus (MS Vat. Lat. 3867) contains the following pseudo-Ovidian preface to the Aeneid, with ten-line hexameter argumenta epitomizing each book.40 Virgilius magno quantum concessit Homero, tantum ego Virgilio Naso poeta meo. nec me praelatum cupio tibi ferre poeta; ingenio tantum si loquor, hoc satis est. argumenta quidem librorum prima notaui, errorem ignarus ne quis habere queat. bis quinos legerent, feci, quos carmine uersus, Aeneidos totum corpus ut esse putent. adfirmo grauitate mea, me crimine nullo liuoris titulum praeposuisse tibi. 5 10 Vergil defers as much to the great Homer, as I, the poet Naso, defer to my Vergil. And I do not desire to hold myself preferable to you as a poet – if I speak with such talent, that is enough. Indeed I noted down the first arguments of the books, so that no-one unawares shall be able to make an error. I made twice five verses for each, for people to read with song, the whole corpus of the Aeneid so they would consider how it is. I declare that I, with my seriousness, and with no fault of envy, have laid out before you the summary.41 This preface, inserted between the closing canebam of G. 4 and the opening cano of A. 1, interpolates a disjunctive elegiac voice into the generic and genetic fabric of Vergil’s corpus. Through his Ovidian persona (ego … Naso, 2), the elegist imports memories of the epic/elegy competitions at Amores 1.1 and Metamorphoses 1.452–65 to ironize the first couplet: does Vergil defer to Homer, and Ovid to Vergil, in all readers’ judgment? In keeping with Ovid’s didactic persona in the Ars, Fasti, and Tristia 2, the epitomizer reserves for himself the ability to “speak” (loquor, 4) while the Aeneid is a textual object to be dissected, taught, even corrected: he claims to provide summaries “so that no-one unawares shall be able to make an error” (6). But as every teacher knows, no summary can encompass an epic’s Euphratic breadth; ignorance and error are no less part of the reading experience than they are central to Aeneas’ journey. Et in Arcadia Ego 315 In digesting “the whole corpus of the Aeneid” so readers might “consider how it is,” this anonymous writer is performing an elegiac critique that prejudices readers’ encounter with the text. In accordance with the Aristotelian dictum that a beautiful object must be visible at once (Poetics 7), the accompanying synopses not only radically condense each book but also strike an inverted elegiac relationship with it, like a pentameter that precedes the hexameter. The preface’s final couplet recalls the legalism of Chilo’s tombstone in defending the writer from charges of encroachment. But the mention of “Envy” recalls the latter’s provocation of a contest between epigram and epic in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (105–13, quoted above), confirming the generic rivalries that re-emerge here via Ovid. This final couplet, for that matter, permits a sly ambiguity. On one reading, the poet has put himself forth at the head of the epic (me … titulum praeposuisse, 9–10), displacing the Vergilian incipit that served as its titulus, and forming an alliance with the reader (tibi) in “post-morteming” Vergil’s epic text. Over the long history of the Vergilian book, many other scribal interventions would eulogize and etherize Maro’s corpus, thus elegizing readers’ approach to the text. One manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale, for instance, squeezes Vergil’s hexameters into the left-hand column of the page, and divides each one at its caesurae into two uneven halves, in a mise-en-page that imitates the structure of the Psalms but also unconsciously replicates the unequal lines of elegy. These elegiac prefaces, like the epitaphs with which this paper began, synopsize long stories into lapidary form, depend on readers to construct memory and meaning, and simultaneously lament and replicate the abbreviating force of death. Vergil’s uitae imagine the epic poet participating in this elegiac process as he foresees his death, tries to define his legacy, and finally cedes control as others speak over and above his dead poetic body. His biographical and bibliographic paratexts also impose an elegiac temporality on readers: we already see the future as past, be it the span of the poet’s life or his narratives. The emphatically written quality of Vergil’s poems owes something to the elegiac epigraphs, which, for all their loving pietas, convey not the poet’s living voice but rather his marmoreal imago. NOTES 1 Genette’s (1987) concept of paratexts has been gaining prominence in Roman studies; e.g., with Jansen 2014 and Laird 2016. Ancient biography’s function as a form of literary criticism, and our inability to “get back to any originary meaning wholly free from subsequent accretions” (in the words of Martindale 1993: 7), are well recognized by Goldschmidt and other contributors to Powell and Hardie 2017. 316 Nandini B. Pandey 2 Hutchinson 2008: 103; see also Keith 2011a on intermodalities between elegy and epigram, and Dinter 2013 on inscriptional intermediality in Latin literature. 3 See Lewis 1942, the classic discussion of primary vs. secondary epic, and Lowrie 2009 on orality and textuality. 4 In the sense that the temple representing the epic will have a separate existence from the poet (13), will honour and belong to Caesar (in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit, 16), and will be subject to the same interpretive interventions as any speaking object (cf. Pandey 2018: 1–34). 5 VSD 32; this story is also attested in Servius (ad A. 6.861). Smolenaars 2017 and Ziogas 2018 have recently pushed against long-standing critical scepticism of the VSD, notably by Horsfall 2001. Norden (1957: 34–45) notes that A. 6.860–86 may echo Augustus’ eulogy for his nephew. 6 Cf. Pandey 2017: 24–5, on Vergil’s epigraphical appropriation by the September 11 Memorial in New York. On Nisus and Euryalus, see also Gladhill and Ortiz in this volume. 7 Tristia 1.7.13–16 is taken as the earliest evidence, though Laird (2017: 41) points out that Ovid could have back-formed the rumour. See also Krevans 2010. 8 Pandey 2017; see also the complementary argument in Laird 2016, unavailable at the time. 9 These two translations are by Warmington 1940, using his text; other translations are mine. 10 Vahlen 1854: 156, Saturarum Reliquiae III.7. 11 Servius claims that these lines rework Gallus into hexameter (ad B. 10.46); see Kennedy 1987 and Hollis 2007. On B. 10, see also Fabre-Serris in this volume. 12 Ramsby 2007: 73–87. 13 Carmina 1.7, 1.17, 1.19, 1.21, 1.22, 2.1, 2.8, 2.9, 2.11, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.20, 2.24, 2.26c, 2.27, 2.28, 2.34, 3.16, and 4.7. 14 Hutchinson (2008) views this as graffiti on a pillar rather than a tomb inscription and notes the echo of Gallus’ carmina … digna (Qasr Ibrîm fr. 6–7). 15 At 2.20, Propertius hopes his parents’ ghosts will come back to haunt him if he is unfaithful; Cynthia’s revenant ghost at 4.7 seems to fulfil this self-imposed curse (cf. his identification of her with his home and parents at 1.12.23–4). 16 In a letter to her dated 25 July 1819, also quoted by Goold (1990: 183); the earlier quote is from “Ode to a Nightingale,” line 52. 17 On the fourth-century VSD, based on an earlier Suetonian biography, see Horsfall 1995; Brugnoli and Stok 1997; Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008: 179–99, with text and translation; Stok 2010; Garrison 2017; and Laird 2016 and 2017. 18 This distich occurs in VSD 17, Vita Seruii, Vita Focae, Vita Philargyrii I, Vita Gudiana I, and many other interdependent biographies usefully catalogued by Et in Arcadia Ego 317 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Ziolkowski and Putnam (2008: 183, 203, 208, 213, 253, 285, 294, 308, 324, 347, 399–400), sometimes with the spelling Balista. Brandt (1927) first suggested the incipit was on the frons of an early copy; see also Kayachev 2011 and Peirano 2013, with Kallendorf 2002 and Laird 2017: 44, on Vergilian title pages, and Wright 2001 on book design. Pease (1940: 180) analyses these uitae’s variations on the phrase quem ipse moriens dictauerat. The present inscription is an expanded post-classical version. See Frings 1998. See Pease 1940 and Kahane 2017. Lucan’s is Corduba me genuit, rapuit Nero, proelia dixi (Anth. Lat. 668.1). Martial 11.48 and 11.49; Pliny Ep. 3.7.8–9. Kahane 2017: 53. Theodorakopoulos 1997 discusses the perceived unity of Vergil’s corpus and career. Much as Domitius Marsus does in his epigram on Vergil and Tibullus, as Myers (2020: 112–13) observes. On which see O’Hara 2010. On Parthenope and Naples within the classical imagination, see Hughes and Buongiovanni 2015; an alternate Roman story holds that she was loved by the centaur Vesuvius. DeWitt 1922 explores Vergil’s time at Pausilypon and its Epicurean resonances. On homecoming, see also Myers in this volume. Thomas 1985 and Kyriakidis 1998. Only twenty-five kilometres up the coast was the tomb of Scipio Africanus at Liternum, an object of pilgrimage for Augustus himself and supposedly inscribed with the self-composed epitaph ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis (“ungrateful homeland, you will not have even my bones”). Seneca meditates on how small a space held the “terror of Carthage” (Ep. 86.4). In the reading of Desnier 1995. Deonna 1954 interprets the type as an emblem of Augustus’ dictum festina lente. See Pandey 2018: 50–64. Mynors (1990: 323–4) notes the possible Ennian touch in fulminat but takes the Euphrates as merely “representative of the Near East.” Scodel and Thomas 1984. As Östenberg (2009: 230–2) suggests. If anything, Antony was associated with wars in this area; Augustus’ best bid for eastern victory was the diplomatic return of the Parthian standards in 20 BCE. Smolenaars 2017 argues that the episode, often dismissed, accords well with the events of summer 29 BCE. As explored by Pandey 2018: 185–239; see also Beard 2007: 143–86 on the triumph as representation. 318 Nandini B. Pandey 37 See Hollis 2007: 241–52 for commentary. 38 Among the copious bibliography, compiled by Pandey 2018: 185–239, see especially Putnam 1980 and Beard 2007: 184. 39 Serv. Dan. ad B. 10 init. and G. 4.1, with discussion, e.g., by Griffin 1979; Hollis 2007; and Pandey 2018: 205–6. See also Boyd in this volume. 40 For further description, see Wright 2001 and Lafferty 2018. 41 Edited and translated by Schodde 2014.