1

Fashioning the Poet: Biography, pseudepigraphy and textual criticism1

Andrew Laird

In an essay on the person in Greek biography, Arnaldo Momigliano pinpointed a problem

with the way ancient historians were prone to portray character on the basis of evidence,

when it came to their lives of poets:

The Greek biographers faced the question of how the characters of a poet could be deduced from

his poems in the same spirit in which they faced the problem of how the character of a general

could be deduced from his victories on the battlefield.… In both cases what is at stake is the

validity of inferences from events to character.2

The trouble, as Momigliano pointed out, is that one cannot infer anything about the

character of Euripides from his tragedy Hippolytus in the same sort of way as the

Athenians were able to make inferences about the character of Miltiades from his

performance as a general at Marathon. That observation was in accord with the spirit of

Mary Lefkowitz’s Lives of the Greek Poets, cited in Momigliano’s discussion – and it

still reflects much current thinking about all ancient poetic biography.3

Some more recent scholarship, exemplified by a couple of contributions to this

volume, is reviving consideration of the value of the lives of poets as veridical testimony.

The Lives of Virgil, like Virgil’s own poetry, make mention of historical people, places

and events and can thus to some degree be read as discourses of evidence which are

1 I am grateful to Niklas Holzberg, Gianni Guastella, Philip Hardie and Anton Powell for many helpful

comments and suggestions, even if they could not all be adequately addressed in what follows. 2 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Marcel Mauss and the Quest for the Person in Greek Biography and

Autobiography’, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History ed. M. Carrithers, S.

Collins and S. Lukes (Cambridge, 1985), 83-92. 3 Mary R. Lefkowitz, Lives of the Greek Poets second edn. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2012). For

bibliography on the Virgilian vitae, see Nicholas Horsfall, A Companion to the Study of Virgil, Mnemosyne

Supplement 151 (Leiden, 1995), 1–25; Niklas Holzberg Vergil. 4 Vitae Vergilianae: Eine Bibliographie

(Munich, 2005): http://www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/Bibliographien.html.

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subject to refutation or verification.4 Such an approach though, should be regarded as a

line of historical rather than literary enquiry: the importance of Nicholas Horsfall’s

reminder that ‘know[ing] next to nothing of Virgil's “life and times”… matters little if at

all to our understanding of the poetry’ rests not so much on scepticism about the

reliability of the ancient sources (though that may be open to question), but on

recognition that the study of poetry and literature has always been distinct from the study

of history and historical concerns.5 Moreoever, setting a text in the historical or

biographical ‘context’ of its author by making use of supposed data from that text itself is

perilously circular.6

The aim of the present chapter is to attempt a re-evaluation of the Latin tradition

of the Virgilian Lives, not as historiography, but as a form of exegesis of Virgil’s,

conceived as something akin to literary criticism.7 Inferences made about the poet Virgil

from his poetry will be explored in relation to pseudepigraphy – as a theme and as a

4 Compare Powell in this volume: ‘Does [Horsfall]… mean that…Virgil’s naming of Maecenas, Augustus,

Antonius and Actium is not part of the poetry?’ The significance of historical names in poetic or fictional

texts, though, is not primarily historical: compare Aristotle’s remark (Poetics 1451b10) that ‘poetry is like

philosophy though it attaches proper names’, and D.C. Feeney ‘Epilogue’ to C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman eds.

Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, (Exeter, 1993), 234. See further G. Frege’s classic study ‘Sense and

Reference’, in Conceptual Notation and Related Articles ed. T.W. Bynum (Oxford, 1972) and Saul Kripke,

Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980). 5 Nicholas Horsfall, Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden, 1995), 1. Hans Smolenaars’ ascription (in

this volume) of the ‘objective’ approach to New Criticism, characterising it as a methodological fashion,

akin to reader-response theory, structuralism or deconstruction, discounts the consensus, across

Aristotelian/classical, medieval, Renaissance and neo-classical (as well as modernist) theory and criticism,

that the category of the literary or poetic is independent of the historical or biographical. See further M.H.

Abrams, ‘Poetry, Theories of’ in New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1993), 942-

54; Andrew Laird ‘Reinventing Virgil’s Wheel’ in Classical Literary Careers and their Reception ed.

Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge, 2010), 144 n. 26, 157-9. 6 There are legions of examples of Virgil’s poems being contextualised ‘historically’ in the light of the

poems themselves but the practice has its problems: Don Fowler, Roman Constructions (Oxford, 2000), 1-

4, 5-33. Such a reflexive approach to contextualisation is applied to the VSD by Smolenaars in this volume:

having argued that the meeting in Atella between Octavian, Agrippa and Maecenas (VSD 27) was the same

conversation between the three men as that reported in Dio Cassius Book 52, Smolenaars then relies on the

VSD itself to argue that Virgil, who had just finished his Georgics, was there too. 7 Compare the discussions in Richard Fletcher and Johanna Hanink eds. Creative Lives in Classical

Antiquity: Poets, Artists and Biography (Cambridge, 2016); see also note 31 below.

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practice in ancient Virgilian biography, and also as a parallel to such biography.8 The

opening discussion will the consider the role of pseudepigraphy in the foundational Vita

Suetonii vulgo Donatiana (hereafter ‘VSD’ or, where appropriate, ‘Suetonius’) and some

revealing points of contact this text has with the Culex (I). Further connections between

Virgilian pseudepigraphy and biography will emerge from a synoptic examination of the

verse passages cited in the VSD and in Phocas’ verse life of Virgil (II). The final part of

the chapter (III) will highlight the broader role of pseudepigraphy in constructions and

interpretations of poetry made by scholars today as well as in antiquity – suggesting its

affinity to the modern practice of textual criticism.

I

John Carew Rolfe’s popular text and translation of Suetonius’ life of Virgil in the Loeb

Classical Library could not include the last part of the VSD (47-66), which was inserted

as a kind of coda to the biographical narrative.9 That may well be why the account in the

VSD of how to introduce a study of an author’s poetry is so rarely discussed. There the

subject of ‘what is usually treated before the work’ [quod tractari solet ante opus] is

treated as follows:

Ante opus titulus causa intentio. Titulus, in quo quaeritur cuius sit, quid sit; causa, unde ortum sit

et quare hoc potissimum ad scribendum poeta praesumpserit; intentio, in qua cognoscitur, quid

efficere conetur poeta… [48] Quamvis igitur multa ψευδεπιγραφα , id est, falsa inscriptione sub alieno nomine, sint

prolata, ut Thyestes tragoedia huius poetae, quam Varius suo nomine edidit, et alia huiusmodi,

tamen Bucolica liquido Vergilii esse minime dubitandum est, praesertim cum ipse poeta,

tamquam hoc metuens, principium huius operis et in alio carmine suum esse testatus sit dicendo: carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa, Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi [G. 4.565-6]

8 Niklas Holzberg ed. Die Appendix Vergiliana: Pseudepigraphen im literarischen Kontext (Tübingen,

2005) and Irene Peirano, The Rhetoric of the Roman Fake: Latin Pseudepigrapha in Context (Cambridge,

2012) have drawn attention to the importance of pseudiepigraphy in Latin literature. 9 Suetonius Volume 2 ed. J.C Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 1914). There have been 48 editions.

4

Before the work is the title, the cause and the intention. Through the title it may be discerned

whose the work is and what it is; from the cause, its provenance and most importantly why the

poet undertook to write it; and from the intention what the poet is striving to achieve… [48] So although there are many pseudepigraphic writings: that is to say works put out under

another’s name by being falsely signed (like this poet’s Thyestes which Varius published under

his own name or other examples of this sort), there is no doubt that the Bucolics are clearly by

Virgil, especially since the poet himself, as though fearing it was in question, attested in another

poem that the beginning of the work was his, saying: I played at shepherd’s songs and bold with youth Tityrus, I sang of you under the cover of a spreading beech

Here the inferral or construction of the author is at stake: it is made clear that treatment of

the title, the cause, and the intention of the work should be conducted before one gets

onto the work itself. Yet as the elucidation of the Bucolics later provided in the VSD will

show, its account of Virgil’s title, or authorial identity, and of the cause and the intention

of his poetry comes from a reading of the poems themselves.

The idea of pseudepigraphy is introduced too: pseudepigrapha are defined as

‘works put out under another’s name by being falsely signed’. The example of the

Thyestes is confusing though – it seems at first to convey that the play was really by

Virgil and passed off by Varius as his own, when, historically it was really by Varius.10

The point must be that some people falsely attributed the Thyestes to Virgil, since the

Bucolics are contrastingly affirmed as being unequivocally by the poet. The evidence for

that comes from the testimony at the end of the Georgics (4.565) in which Virgil referred

back to his Bucolics as ‘shepherd’s songs’, carmina pastorum.

Earlier in the VSD, the Catalepton, Priapea, Epigrammata, Dirae, Ciris, Culex

and Aetna had been canonised as works of Virgil, whilst it was acknowledged that there

was debate about the Aetna.11 Was the authentication of these texts consistent with the

criteria set out later, here in 47? In this context it is worth noting that the first verse of the

Culex:

10 See Fernandelli in this volume. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 10.1.98 claimed that Varius’ Thyestes could

compete with Greek plays; the play was attributed to Varius when praised by Tacitus in Dialogus 12. On

these and other references to Varius see A.E. Housman, ‘The Thyestes of Varius’ CQ 11 (1917), 42-8,

reprinted in Classical Papers of A.E. Housman ed. F.R.D. Goodyear vol. 3, 941-9; H.D. Jocelyn, ‘The fate

of Varius’ Thyestes’, CQ 30 (1980), 387-400. 11 VSD 19: scripsit etiam, de qua ambigitur, Aetnam [he also wrote the Aetna: about that there is debate].

5

Lusimus, Octaui,

We have played, Octavius,

somewhat resembles the very verse of the Georgics (4.565) which was used to

authenticate the Eclogues themselves. Perhaps the Culex is to be deemed authentic on this

basis. There might be a similar thought underlying Suetonius’ comment (VSD 69) that

the Bucolics began, not with Eclogue 1.1 (as we have it), but with the opening of Eclogue

6:

sed sunt qui dicant, initium Bucolici carminis non ‘Tityre’ esse, sed:

Prima Syracusio dignata est ludere uersu

Yet there are those say that the beginning of the Bucolic poem is not

‘Tityrus’ but:

She first thought to play in Syracusan verse

This observation might have been an attempt to account for the intensive

evocation of the proem of Eclogue 6 in the opening of the Culex:

Lusimus, Octaui, gracili modulante Thalia Prima Syracosio dignata est ludere uersu

atque ut araneoli tenuem formauimus orsum; nostra, neque erubuit siluas habitare, Thalia

lusimus: haec propter Culicis sint carmina dicta cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem

omnis et historiae per ludum consonet ordo uellit, et admonuit: ‘Pastorem, Tityre, pinguis

notitiaeque ducum uoces, licet inuidus adsit. 5 pascere oportet ouis, deductum dicere carmen

quisquis erit culpare iocos Musamque paratus, nunc ego (namque super tibi erunt qui dicere laudes

pondere uel Culicis leuior famaque feretur. Vare, tuas cupiant, et tristia condere bella)

posterius grauiore sono tibi Musa loquetur agrestem tenui meditabor harundine Musam

nostra, dabunt cum securos mihi tempora fructus. non iniussa cano. Si quis tamen haec quoque, si quis

ut tibi digna tuo poliantur carmina sensu. 10 captus amore leget, te nostrae, Vare, myricae

Latonae magnique Iouis decus, aurea proles, te nemus omne canet; nec Phoebo gratior ulla est

Phoebus erit nostri princeps et carminis auctor... quam sibi quae Vari praescripsit pagina nomen

Eclogue 6.1-12

…Et tu, cui meritis oritur fiducia chartis,

Octaui uenerande, meis adlabere coeptis, 25

sancte puer, tibi namque canit non pagina bellum Iouis

6

Culex 1-12, 24-7

Thus it could be that the density of allusion led to the idea that the Bucolics once began

with the sixth Eclogue.

The second half of the first verse of the Culex, gracili modulante Thalia [‘with

slender Thalia marking the measure’], though not a direct echo of any Virgilian verse,

could not be more evocative of the poet. The verb modulari occurs twice in the

Eclogues (5.14, 10.51) and the collocation gracili modulatus is found at the end of the

opening verse of the spurious pre-proemium or ‘Incipit’ to the Aeneid:

ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena

I am he who once played pastoral songs on a slender reed.

Like that Incipit, the Culex incorporates all of Virgil’s genuine works, perhaps at the

same time signalling their legitimacy. Glen Most and many earlier critics have pointed

out how it emulated the Eclogues, Georgics and the Aeneid in chronological succession

– the latter principally through the poem’s preoccupation with katabasis.12 The tomb

inscription Virgil supposedly wrote for himself and the Incipit which could be read as

having a sepulchral feel, might also have had a part to play in determining the peculiar

emphasis, if not on death in general in the Culex, then on the epitaphic utterance which

brings the poem to and end:

Parue Culex, pecudum custos tibi tale merenti

funeris officium uitae pro munere reddit

12 Glen Most, ‘The ‘Virgilian’ Culex’ in Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, Mary Whitby ed. Homo Viator:

Classical Essays for John Bramble (Bristol, 1987), 199-209; M. Bonjour, ‘Culex’ in Enciclopedia

Virgiliana i (Rome, 1985), 948-9; D. O. Ross ‘Culex and Moretum as Post Augustan Literary Parodies’

HSCP 79 (1976), 235-63; D. Güntzschel, Beiträge zur Datierung des Culex, Orbis Antiquus 27 (Münster,

1972) has also been influential in arguing that the Culex was written by a Virgilian impersonator in the 30s

AD. F. Leo, Culex: Carmen Virgilio Ascriptum (Berlin, 1891), and A. Klotz, ‘Zum Culex: Verfasser und

Zeit’ Hermes 61 (1926), 28-48, along with C. Plésent’s text and commentary, Le Culex: Poème pseudo-

virgilien (Paris, 1910) and Le Culex: Étude sur l’alexandrianisme latin (Paris, 1910). Finally W. Ax, ‘Die

pseudovergilische ‘Mücke’ - ein Beispiel römischer Literaturparodie?’, Philologus 128 (1984), 230-49

regards the poem as a ‘forgery’ attacking Virgil and Augustus, but discerns a Virgilian narrative structure

(237-8).

7

Culex 413-14

Little Gnat, a shepherd renders to you, as you merit it,

the rite of burial in return for the gift of life.

The couplet, quoted through the whole tradition of the Lives up to the fifteenth century,

usually followed a summary of the poem it had concluded:

deinde …Culicem, cum esset annorum XXVI. cuius materia talis est: pastor fatigatus aestu, cum

sub arbore obdormiuisset, et serpens ad illum proreperet, e palude culex praeuolauit atque inter

duo tempora aculeum fixit pastori. at ille continuo culicem contriuit et serpentem interemit, ac

sepulchrum culici statuit et distichon fecit:

Parue Culex, pecudum custos tibi tale merenti funeris officium uitae pro munere reddit

Next came the Catalepton, Priapea, Epigrammata, and the Dirae, and then the Ciris, and the

Culex, when he was twenty-six years old. [18] This is its subject: when a shepherd worn out by

the hot weather had fallen asleep under a tree and a snake crept up to him from a marsh, a gnat

flew out and stung the shepherd between the temples. He straightaway squashed the gnat and

killed the snake, and then set up a tomb for the gnat and composed this couplet:

Little Gnat, a shepherd renders to you, as you merit it,

the rite of burial in return for the gift of life

VSD 17-18

It is interesting to consider why the gnat’s epitaph might have found its way into the

VSD in the first place, given that there are so many verses from Virgil’s authentic

corpus which could have been included instead. It may because the epitaph had

provided an epitome to the Culex as a kind of mise en abyme within the poem and the

lead-in to the inscription also called attention to writing and to the contradiction of

enunciation through the written word:

tum fronte locatur

elogium, tacita firmat quod littera uoce

Culex 411-12

Then upon the face of the tomb is placed a eulogy,

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which the written word fashions with silent speech

The paradox of the epitaph, of any epitaph, is of course that it speaks for one who is

dead and who cannot speak. The conceit also picked up Culex verse 26 – canit non

pagina bellum [‘my page does not sing of war’]. Thus fronte could be important from a

metaliterary perpsective: as well as ‘face’ or ‘façade’ the word was of course used for

the outer end of a book roll or frontispiece close to which an Incipit could be found –

sometimes with a portrait of the author.13 While Virgil’s own katabasis narratives in

Georgics 4 and Aeneid 6 might accounts for his authority as a necragogue in later

antiquity and in medieval vision literature, well before Dante, the Culex may have had a

formative part to play in that tradition – which drew attention not just to Virgil as an

authority on the underworld, but repeatedly to his status as a speaker who is dead

himself.14

II

The gloom of the tomb also pervades the VSD. Below are assembled all the complete

lines of verse that are quoted in the text so that they can be viewed together:

(i) monte sub hoc lapidum tegitur Ballista sepultus.

nocte die tutum carpe, uiator, iter [17] Epitaph: Anth. Lat 261

(ii) parue culex, pecudum custos, tibi tale merenti

funeris officium uitae pro munere reddit [18] Epitaph: Culex 413-4

(iii) Cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite Grai:

nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade [29] Prop. 2.34.65-6

(iv) Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc

Parthenope. cecini pascua rura duces. [36] Epitaph of Virgil

13 See further notes 27, 28 and 30 below. 14 Andrew Laird, ‘The Poetics and Afterlife of Virgil’s Descent to the Underworld: Servius, Dante,

Fulgentius and the Culex’, Proceedings of the Virgil Society (24) 2001, 49-80; ‘Recognizing Virgil’ in

Creative Lives ed. Johanna Hanink and Richard Fletcher (Cambridge, 2016), 75-99.

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(v) iusserat haec rapidis aboleri carmina flammis

Vergilius, Phrygium quae cecinere ducem.

Tucca uetat Variusque simul; tu, maxime Caesar,

non sinis et Latiae consulis historiae.

infelix gemino cecidit prope Pergamon igni,

et paene est alio Troia cremata rogo [38] Anth. Lat. 653

(vi) ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena

carmina et egressus siluis uicina coegi,

ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono,

gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis Incipit of Aen.

arma uirumque cano [42]

(vii) Tityre, si toga calda tibi est, quo tegmine fagi? [43] Parody of Ecl. 1.1

(viii) dic mihi, Damoeta: cuium pecus, anne Latinum? Parody of Ecl. 3.1-2

non. uerum Aegonis nostri sic rure loquuntur [43]

(ix) carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta,

Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi [48] Geo. 4.565-6

(x) Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus [64] Ecl. 4.1

(xi) Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi [69] Ecl. 1.1

(xii) extremum hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede laborem [69] Ecl. 10.1

(xiii) Prima Syracusio dignata est ludere uersu [69] Ecl 6.1

(xiv) Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi [72] Ecl. 1.1

Such a synoptic perspective on the verse quotations in the VSD reveals some things

which have not been remarked upon before:

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(a) The first eight of the passages of the fourteen verse passages quoted in the Life are

not by Virgil at all;

(b) The first five are not in Virgilian hexameters, but in elegiac couplets, with (i), (ii)

and (iv) being self-contained epigrams.

(c) The first real Virgilian verses from the Georgics, only come after the biographical

narrative, as the narrator goes on to address the authenticity of Virgil’s works; the

quotations of first lines from Eclogues 4, 1, 10 and 6, and again, Eclogue 1, do not serve

as biographical data: they are simply used to reinforce observations about the cause,

order and metre of the bucolic poems.

(d) Three of the eight verse passages in the narrative of Virgil’s life are epitaphs: the

first for Ballista, the second for the gnat of the Culex, and and the third for the poet

himself.

(e) Those epitaphs are in italics, along with the other passages which have an epitaphic

quality or funereal innuendo. That obviously applies to the verses attributed to Sulpicius

of Carthage about the death of Virgil and his request to burn the Aeneid; both the Incipit

and the sphragis to the Georgics have a lapidary quality – the Incipit and the tomb

inscription for Virgil were probably inspired by this sphragis: the recurrence of

Parthenope, a word not found elsewhere in Virgil, excavates a sepulchral significance

that might be discerned in these closing lines of Georgic 4.

All the quotations attributed to Virgil in the VSD show an interest in his persona or

personal voice and all of the passages quoted are in the first person. On those bases it

could be held that the selection is appropriate and sensible: after all, some scholars have

been under the false impression that the Incipit, the Mantua me genuit epitaph, and even

the Culex, were no less authentically Virgilian than the last verses of the Georgics.

Furthermore, in contrast to some Greek biographies of poets, it can at least be

said for the VSD that none of the narrative of Virgil’s life is derived from quotations of

characters, or from utterances which are not imputed to the voice of the author himself:

for Virgil’s Latin biographers, poetic imitators and pseudepigraphers alike, the same

passages provide touchstones to enable them to get to the essence of their subject.

11

That community between biography and poetic imitation is highlighted by the

fascinating verse life of Virgil by Phocas. Scott McGill has shown how this was built on

Donatus’ life, with the elements of the prose narrative being infused with imitation of

Virgil himself, so that the account of the poet’s childhood is adorned with description of

the child in Eclogue 4.15 Verses 70-90 of Phocas’ life exhibit an eerie correspondence to

a few compact sentences in the VSD chapters 17-20. In three quite different ways

Phocas’ composition appears self-consciously to lend weight to the contention that

biography of Virgil, poetic imitation of Virgil, and Virgilian pseudepigraphy have more

in common than has often been recognised.

Phocas handles in his own fashion the report in the VSD that Virgil ‘made a

beginning in the art of poetry and composed a distich on Ballista’ [Poeticam puer adhuc

auspicatus in Ballistam… distichon fecit]. Phocas’ telling here is more elaborate and

detailed:

Incidit titulum iuvenis, quo pignera vatis edidit Phocas, Vita 69-70

The young man cut an inscription through which he published his tokens as a poet.

The word titulus had, however, been introduced as a technical term in the VSD 47:

‘Through the title’ we were told, ‘it may be discerned whose the work is and what it is’

[titulus… in quo quaeritur cuius sit, quid sit]. The point Phocas is making about this

Ballista poem is that it reveals the identity of the author, and that through this couplet

Virgil’s hallmark as a vates was made public, becoming known to readers. The other

sense of titulus in Latin as a title in the honorific sense as simply ‘fame’ may also be in

play: ‘The young man made his reputation…’ Phocas seems to have used that sense of

the word in the prefatory stanzas to Clio:

Tu senescentes titulos avorum

flore durantis reparas iuventae

Phocas, Vita 13-14

15 Scott McGill, ‘Another man’s miracles: recasting Aelius Donatus in Phocas’ Life of Virgil’ in: From the

Tetrarchs to the Theodosians. Later Roman History and Culture, 284–450 CE (Cambridge, 2010), 153-70.

12

You restore with the flower of lasting youth the ageing honours [titulos] of our ancestors.

So Incidit titulum iuvenis could also be translated ‘The young man cut a name for

himself’. In any case, that is adding a lot more to the simple, almost incidental

biographical datum we were given in VSD 17.

The way Phocas next plays on the hallmark [pignera] of Virgil’s real identity is

relevant too:

nos tamen hoc breuius, si fas simulare Maronem

Phocas, Vita 73

We too can do this for a bit, if it is allowed to simulate Maro.

The verse biographer then shows how he can produce at least one couplet of his own in

a similar vein, ringing the changes on the titulus, the very evidence for the authenticity

of Virgil’s work.16 A further irony is that an elegiac couplet can never be a simulation of

a poet who wrote in hexameters. Phocas appears unaware of this as he follows the VSD

in quoting the elegiac couplet which closed the Culex as his next example of Virgil’s

verse.

The VSD put the two verses in their literary context by making clear that the

shepherd in the poem had composed them. But Phocas introduces the couplet closing

the Culex in a biographical context – as an early landmark in Virgil’s poetic career:

Hinc culicis tenui praelusit funera versu:

Parve Culex, pecudum custos tibi tale merenti funeris officium uitae pro munere reddit

Phocas, Vita 84-6 (quoting Culex 413-14)

Then in delicate verse he made his first play with the gnat’s death:

Little Gnat, a shepherd renders to you, as you merit it,

The rite of burial in return for the gift of life.

16 The subsequent couplets on Ballista in the sole manuscript of Phocas’ life are probably interpolated:

verses 75-83 have been deleted by Refferscheid and other editors.

13

Verse 84 is hard to translate but it suggests that the Culex was a prelude or prolusion –

implicitly to a more serious composition. The opposition between tenuis and gravis

frames the Culex and the cognates of the verb ludere recur especially in the proem of

the Culex. 17 Thus in this briefest of comments on the poem, Phocas is deftly imitating it

himself. That shows he read the Culex, while it is not clear that Suetonius had actually

done so: what is said about the poem in the VSD could have been gleaned from hearsay.

Best of all, though, Phocas playfully conjoins the technique of the literary

scholar with emulation of the poet, as he turns to Virgil’s renowned works:

Musa refer quae causa fuit componere libros.

Phocas, Vita 91

Muse, relate what was the cause of the books he composed.

This is obviously a playful echo of the epic question in the proem to the first book of the

Aeneid:

Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso…

Aeneid 1.8

Muse, recall to me the causes, what divine power was so wounded…

which launched the account of the reasons Juno’s grudge against the Trojans. But

Phocas’ verse also recalls the VSD which held that a poetic opus also has a cause. The

causa is to be treated after the titulus, before discussion of the work itself. This kind of

causa is of necessity outside the text: ‘whence the work arouse and most importantly

why the poet undertook to write it’ [causa, unde ortum sit et quare hoc potissimum ad

scribendum poeta praesumpserit VSD 47], but it is in part inferred from the text. This is

duly explored by Phocas in his account (verses 95-120) of the motive for composing the

Eclogues, which embellishes and expands the account of the author’s will in the VSD.

The life of Phocas is a unique and unusual document but it shows how poetic

emulation of Virgil and writing Virgilian biography can overlap more generally: the

excavation of the Virgil’s past is a context for poetic activity, involves inventio for a

17 Culex 2: atque ut araneoli tenuem formauimus orsum; Culex 6-8: quisquis erit culpare iocos Musamque

paratus,/pondere uel culicis leuior famaque feretur./ posterius grauiore sono tibi Musa loquetur; Culex 35:

mollia sed tenui pede currere carmina. Forms of ludere are found in Culex 1, 3, 4, 19, 36.

14

poet as well as a biographer. A work like Phocas’ Vita is an exercise in poetic imitation

and pastiche of Virgil – not pseudepigraphy. The same could be said of the Culex and

Catalepton which do in fact give signals they are not by Virgil.18 But it remains to

consider pseudepigraphy per se, because it involves issues common to both biography

and poetic pastiching of Virgil, and because pseudepigraphy is indispensable to both

kinds of writing.

III

In the VSD 48 pseudepigrapha were defined as ‘works put out under another’s name by

being falsely signed’ [falsa inscriptione sub alieno nomine, … prolata]. Signatures are

now usually conceived as subscriptions at the end of texts – but in antiquity a

pseudepigraphon, a ‘pseudo-epigraph’ – a false inscription – was really more proper to

the title or heading of a document. Pseudepigraphy therefore does not have to be the

result of lengthy labour: a few strokes of the pen at the top of a manuscript can change

the whole way its contents are interpreted: a simple inscription can assign Varius’

Thyestes to Virgil (or vice versa).

An author can also be his or her own best pseudepigrapher: anyone who

renovates an old conference paper by changing its title is engaging in this practice.

Ovid’s account of his attempt to recycle his own poetry in Tristia 1.7 is an important

example which has an obvious bearing on the VSD and the Virgilian Lives. In that

poem in the Tristia, Ovid explains that he burnt his Metamorphoses once he knew he

was forced to leave Rome:19

18 Niklas Holzberg, ‘Impersonating Young Virgil: The author of the Catalepton and his libellus’ MD 52

(2004) 29-40. Similarly the poet of the Culex does not fully assume the role of Virgil, until verses 8 (often

read as a pledge that the Aeneid would follow). Not only does the Culex echo all the works of Virgil (with

fewer phrasal resemblances linking his authentic works to each other than those link all those works to the

414 lines of the Culex), there are also pointed echoes of Ovid on which full understanding of the poem’s

construction depends. 19 Stephen Hinds, ‘Booking the return trip: Ovid and Tristia 1’ PCPS 211 ns. 31 (1985), 13-32 contains an

important discussion of this poem; see also Niklas Holzberg, ‘Playing with his Life: Ovid’s

“Autobiographical” References’, in Peter Knox (ed.): Oxford Readings in Ovid (Oxford, 2006), 51-68.

15

haec ego discedens, sicut bene multa meorum,

ipse mea posui maestus in igne manu.

utque cremasse suum fertur sub stipite natum

Thestias et melior matre fuisse soror,

sic ego non meritos mecum peritura libellos

imposui rapidis uiscera nostra rogis: 20

uel quod eram Musas, ut crimina nostra, perosus,

uel quod adhuc crescens et rude carmen erat.

These verses, upon my departure, along with so many other things of mine, 15

I sadly threw on the fire with my own hand.

Just as, they say, in burning the brand and burning her son,

the daughter of Thestius proved a better sister than a mother,

so I placed to perish with me these undeserving books,

my very own flesh and blood, on a fierce funeral pyre: 20

either because I detested the Muses, my accusers,

or because the poem was crude in form and still growing.

But Ovid then let on that several copies were made of his work after all:

quae quoniam non sunt penitus sublata, sed extant

(pluribus exemplis scripta fuisse reor),

The verses were not totally destroyed: they survive

(several copies of the writings, I think, were made)

Now I pray they live, and that my studious pursuits may give the reader 25

delight, and serve as a reminder of me.

The poet is afraid nonetheless that the Metamorphoses will make a bad impression if it

lacks further finishing touches. So he proposes some new verses to be placed at the head

of the first book of the epic:

nec tamen illa legi poterunt patienter ab ullo,

nesciet his summam siquis abesse manum.

ablatum mediis opus est incudibus illud,

16

defuit et coeptis ultima lima meis.

et ueniam pro laude peto, laudatus abunde,

non fastiditus si tibi, lector, ero.

hos quoque sex uersus, in prima fronte libelli

si praeponendos esse putabis, habe:

orba parente suo quicumque uolumina tangis, 35

his saltem uestra detur in urbe locus.

quoque magis faueas, non haec sunt edita ab ipso,

sed quasi de domini funere rapta sui.

quicquid in his igitur uitii rude carmen habebit,

emendaturus, si licuisset, eram.

Yet they can’t be read patiently by anyone

who’s unaware they lack the final hand.

That work was taken from me while on the anvil

and the writings lack the last touch of the file.

I ask forgiveness not praise, I’ll be praised in full,

if you don’t despise me, reader.

These six verses too, if on the brow of the first book

you consider them worth placing, take them:

Whoever you are who touch these book rolls bereft of their parent,

to them at least let there be granted a place in your city.

And that you may be more indulgent, they were not published by him,

but snatched away, as it were, from the funeral pyre of their master.

Whatever defect in them this crude poem has,

I would have been about to correct – if it had been allowed.

Ovid’s references to the burning of his poetry in his Tristia are instances of a common

motif: a declamatory exercise by the Elder Seneca has several speakers consider an

imaginary deliberation: Deliberat Cicero, an scripta sua comburat promittente Antonio

incolumitatem, si fecisset [‘Cicero deliberates whether he should burn his writings:

Antony promises his safety if he does so’].20 That example is of special interest because

20 Seneca, Suasoria 7; R. Kaster ‘Becoming CICERO’ in P. Knox and C. Foss, Style and Tradition: Studies

in Honour of Wendell Clausen (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998), 248-63.

17

it sets up a clear competition between the needs of the mortal author on the one hand

and the claims of his readers on the other.

In spite of the general prevalence of this topos in Greek and Roman literature,

there is still a widely held assumption that Ovid’s conceit of burning the

Metamorphoses was specifically based on his knowledge that Virgil had wanted to

commit the Aeneid to the flames. 21 Yet we have no testimony for Virgil’s wish to this

effect before Suetonius – and it is notable that Ovid never makes any reference to Virgil

when he considers the destruction of his own work. The assumption that Ovid was

thinking of Virgil may well be based on Ovid’s poetic emulation of Virgil – and it

provides a nice example of how – in our own time as well as in antiquity – a poet’s

literary practice can prompt conjecture about his life and career.22

There are grounds for giving serious consideration to the possibility that Ovid’s

conceit of burning the Metamorphoses was what ultimately prompted the earliest

testimony we have that Virgil wanted to ‘cremate’ the Aeneid.23 Ovid’s remarks at

Tristia 1.7.28 that his works lacked the final hand’ [his summam abesse manum] are

echoed in language used in the VSD to describe Virgil’s intended finalisation of the

Aeneid:

anno aetatis quinquagesimo secundo impositurus Aeneidi summam manum statuit in Greciam

et in Asiam secedere VSD 35

When he was about to put the final touch to the Aeneid in his fifty-second year, he decided to

retire to Greece and to Asia

The first report of Virgil’s request to have the Aeneid burned comes in the VSD. It is

embedded in an elegiac poem – attributed to the apocryphal Sulpicius of Carthage –

which is quoted in the text. That poem itself uses expressions that were employed by

Ovid in Tristia 1.8:

21 See J. Farrell, ‘Ovid’s Virgilian Career’ MD 52 (2004): 41-55; Jan Ziolkowski and Michael C.J.

Putnam, The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven, 2008), 420-2. 22 W.R. Barnes ‘Virgil: The Literary Impact’ in provides an important account of Virgil’s influence on

Ovid and the Metamorphoses in Horsfall, Companion, 257-67. 23 Niklas Holzberg, Vergil. Der Dichter und sein Werk (München 2006), 16; Heinrich Naumann, ‘Die

Vergil-Legende’, Mnemosyne 35 (1982): 148-53 at 150: ‘Das “Zweite Testament” mit dem

Verbrennungsgebot duerfte seine Entstehung Ovid (Trist. I, 7, 15) verdanken’.

18

De qua re Sulpicii Carthaginiensis exstant huismodi uersus:

Iusserat haec rapidis aboleri carmina flammis

Vergilius, Phrygium quae cecinere ducem.

Tucca uetat, Variusque, simul tu, maxime Caesar,

Non sinis et Latiae consulis historiae.

Infelix gemino cecidit prope Pergamon igni,

Et paene est alio Troia cremata rogo. VSD 38

On that matter the following verses of Sulpicius of Carthage survive:

The destruction of these verses by hungry flames was bidden by

Virgil: verses which sang of the Trojan leader.

Tucca prohibits it, and Varius; so too do you, greatest Caesar

You do not allow it and so protect the history of Latium

Unhappy Troy almost fell by a second fire

And Troy was almost burnt on a further pyre.

The verse quotation is followed by an account in prose, which elucidates what is

conveyed by the poem:

[39] egerat cum Vario, priusquam Italia decederet, ut si quid sibi accidisset, Aeneida

combureret; at is ita facturum se pernegarat. igitur in extrema ualetudine assidue scrinia

desiderauit, crematurus ipse; uerum nemine offerente, nihil quidem nominatim de ea cauit. [40]

ceterum eidem Vario ac simul Tuccae scripta sua sub ea conditione legauit, ne quid ederent,

quod non a se editum esset. [41] edidit autem auctore Augusto Varius, sed summatim emendata,

ut qui uersus etiam imperfectos, si qui erant, reliquerit…

[39] He had arranged with Varius before he left Italy that if anything should happen to him, that

he should burn the Aeneid; but Varius had insisted he would not do it; so at the end of his life he

continually asked for his writing tablets, intending to burn them; but when no one brought him

anything, he left no specific provision about the poem. [40] But he entrusted his writings to the

same Varius and to Tucca on the condition that they would not publish anything which he

would not publish himself. [41] Varius did publish it, on Augustus’ authority, but only

glancingly corrected it so that he left even the unfinished verses as they were…

19

This offers slightly more than a glosss on the poem. But one detail given here which

was not hinted at in Sulpicius’ verses – that Virgil had made his wishes clear to Varius

before he left Italy – could be constructed by reconciling the events conveyed by those

verses with the information already relayed by Suetonius about Virgil’s itinerary in 35.

Another new detail in VSD 41 – that Varius only made some light corrections to the text

– could simply be inferred from the verses of the Aeneid which are de facto unfinished.

The segue into 42 may also be significant: Suetonius then goes on transmit the

pseudepigraphic preproemium or Incipit to the Aeneid – after a discussion of the

incomplete verses in the poem: that contiguity and associative connection as well as the

echoes of diction from Tristia 1.8.17-20 in in the passage above suggest a connection

between Ovid’s own auto-pseudo-epigraphic verses and the Incipit attributed to Virgil:

Nisus grammaticus audisse se a senioribus aiebat, Varium duorum librorum ordinem

commutasse, et qui nunc secundus sit in tertium locum transtulisse, etiam primi libri correxisse

principium, his uersibus demptis:

ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena

carmina et egressus siluis uicina coegi,

ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono,

gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis

arma uirumque cano.

[43] obtrectatores Vergilio numquam defuerunt, nec mirum, nam nec Homero quidem.

The grammarian Nisus used to say he had heard from older people that Varius had switched the

order of two books, moving what had once been the second into third place, and also that he had

corrected the beginning of the first book by removing these verses:

I am he who once composed poetry in a pastoral strain,

and then coming from the woods I compelled the neighbouring fields

to obey their owner, however demanding.

That work was pleasant for farmers, but now of Mars’s

bristling arms and of the man I sing.

[43] Virgil never lacked detractors, and no wonder: Homer certainly was not short of them

either.

20

Richard Tarrant has rightly noted in his OCT preface that the Metamorphoses has no

unfinished verses as the Aeneid does.24 But the fact that such texts were copied by hand

in antiquity meant that they were in one respect more like websites than printed books:

the opportunity to change, update, and improve them would have been tempting.25

Ovid makes clear he wants the Metamorphoses to live on after his own death –

and this is hinted at in verse 38 where he says that the books of his poem were snatched

away from what might be called his funeral. Thus the Metamorphoses are an extension,

and an image of himself. By providing his new preface to the work, he seeks to inject

his own personality or presence into that entire poem, and to control and change the way

we look at its contents. Overall Ovid connects himself, as he is now, to the

Metamorphoses in three ways: by echoing it; by infusing it with a new and more

personal voice and by conceiving his epic as a posthumous work.

The Virgilian Incipit, for all that it focuses on the poet rather than the poem,

takes after Ovid’s epigraph in some important ways. It too echoes the composition it

introduces; it too infuses the Aeneid with a new and more personal voice; and it too

could have the effect of projecting Virgil’s epic as a posthumous work which is already

outliving its author. That Incipit should not be seen as a malevolent hoax. It is tempting

to use the modern idea of literary forgery to label poems in the Appendix Virgiliana –

which represent a deliberate and overt attempt by ancient readers to reproduce the

manner and style of a reputable model. But in the imperial period, Roman training in

declamation required students to engage in prosopopoiea, the business of impersonating

orators and literary authors. This sort of school exercise, outlined by Quintilian,

explains why we find so many extensions and elaborations of verses by Virgil in the

Latin Anthology – and it also explains some of the interpolations which have crept into

manuscripts of ancient authors. These modest compositions are sometimes valuable as a

form of critical illumination or commentary.

The Incipit to the Aeneid though is no run of the mill interpolation. It represents

a response not just to the opening lines of the epic, but to all of Virgil’s work: it has

been suggested that one of its likely purposes was to canonise the poems of his that

were genuine. Whoever wrote the Incipit probably sought to help readers understand

24 Tarrant, Praefatio, P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses (Oxford, 2004). 25 These questions are explored in Shane Butler, The Matter of the Page: Essays in search of ancient and

medieval authors (Madison, 2011); Richard Tarrant, ‘The Reader as Author: Collaborative Interpolation in

Latin Poetry’, J.N. Grant ed. Editing Greek and Latin Texts (New York, 1989), 121-62.

21

what followed, rather than mislead them. Whoever wrote the Incipit is only doing what

Virgil did in the famous lines which end the Georgics: where Virgil usefully named

himself as author of the Eclogues, as Suetonius pointed out in the VSD. So whoever

wrote the Incipit did the best thing possible to secure the ultimate authority for his

words: by impersonating the author, Virgil himself. This is not so very different from

the activity of the textual critic who, in making conjectures to reconstruct the correct

reading of a lost word or passage, is effectively impersonating the author he or she is

editing. It is worth noticing how textual critics, in describing their practices, appeal to

intentionalism which often amounts to a kind of biographical fiction: ‘Virgil had in

mind’, ‘What Ovid means’, ‘Cicero was obviously thinking’ and so on.26

The particular importance of the pseudepigraphic verses of the Incipit, – and for

that matter the Mantua me genuit epitaph – for the biographical tradition is that they

invigorate the work of the poet with his personal voice. They facilitate and make more

plausible the process of inference from the author’s works to the author himself, or

from opus to intentio. That is why Virgilian verses in a personal voice were quoted to

support the biographical narrative in the VSD, and not what we would think of as

Virgil’s real poetry. This point can be briefly illustrated: Ovid asked for the new verse

epigraph he had composed to be placed on the frons of the Metamorphoses. That word

for ‘face’ or ‘forehead’ can designate one of the flat ends at the beginning or end of a

papyrus roll – frons was used for the inscribed facade of the gnat’s tomb in the Culex.

Martial mentions the first leaf of a codex which depicted Virgil’s face – a custom which

endured endured into late antiquity and the middle ages – and the opening pages of

Roman book rolls may have displayed a portrait of the author on the opening page.27

The fifth century Rome Manuscript of Virgil also includes portraits of the poet to

precede specifically those Eclogues which were written in the poet’s own voice; and the

26 R.G.M. Nisbet ‘How textual conjectures are made.’ MD 26 (1990) 65-91 is a good account of the

procedures. Don Fowler’s review, in Greece & Rome 40 (1992) 226-36, of A.J. Woodman and J.GF.

Powell eds. Author and Audience in Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1992) memorably called attention to the

hazards of intentionalism for general interpretation. 27 Craig Kallendorf, ‘The Virgilian Title Page as Interpretive Frame’, Princeton University Library

Chronicle (2002) 64: 15-50.

22

codex of the earlier Vatican Virgil probably had a medallion painting of the poet on the

first page.28

This all suggests that the identity, and the presence of an author was very

prominent to an ancient reader, who might have been prone to regard even narrative

epics like the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses as the expression of a particular

individual.29 One only need think of the difference made to the whole tone and meaning

of a cookery book which has the beaming face of a celebrity chef on the front cover.

The way that a visual likeness of the author amplifies his voice might also explain why

pseudepigrapha like the Incipit to the Aeneid came about in the first place. It has often

enough been noted that the wording of Ille ego qui ‘I am that man’ would make a very

satisfactory subscript to a picture of Virgil on the frons of an early copy of his epic.30

Conclusions

It may be a category mistake to regard texts like the Latin Lives of Virgil as primarily

historical: Suetonius’ biographies of poets and rhetoricians, which seem to follow those

of his predecessors in adhering to the Greek encomiastic tradition, nowadays might be

regarded as being a good deal nearer to hagiography than to documentary report.31 The

present discussion has sought to rehabilitate the Virgilian Lives by showing that they

are more comparable to verse elaborations of Virgil’s poetry like the Culex, or even to

modern textual conjectures. The thing all these activities share is a preoccupation with

the causa, cause, the intention or presence that lies behind the poet’s output. The

positing or construction of a speaker or writer’s identity or presence – what analytical

philosophers of mind coyly call ‘attitudes’ – is an inevitable element of interpreting and

28 D. Wright, The Vatican Vergil: A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford,

1993); The Roman Vergil: The Roman Vergil and the Origins of Medieval Book Design (London, 2001). 29 This is developed in Laird, ‘Recognizing Virgil’ (n. 12 above). 30 E. Brandt, ‘Zum Aeneis-Prooemium,’, Philologus 82 (1928): 331-35 first suggested this; compare G.P.

Goold, ‘Servius and the Helen Episode’, HSCP 74 (1970): 101-68, cited with brief discussion in Boris

Kayachev, ‘Ille ego qui quondam: Genre, Date, and Authorship’, Vergilius 57 (2011) 75–82 at 76 n. 4. 31 Jerome (Suetonius, Reliquiae 3 ed. Refferscheid) identified Suetonius’ predecessors as Varro, Santra,

Nepos and Hyginus. Little is known of Santra and Varro’s endeavours in this genre, but Nepos’ lives are

indebted to Greek encomiastic biography and Aulus Gellius (1.14.1) reports that Hyginus wrote a work on

‘illustrious men’ (de vita rebusque inlustrium virorum) in several books.

23

making sense of all kinds of discourse. Without such construction, reading and

conversations could not take place, as the philosopher of mind Donald Davidson

pointed out:

We could not begin to decode a man’s sayings if we could not make out his attitudes towards

his sentences, such as holding, wishing or wanting them to be true. Beginning from these

attitudes, we must work out a theory of what he means, thus simultaneously giving content to

his attitudes and to his words. In our need to make him make sense, we will try for a theory that

makes him consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good (all by our own lights, it goes

without saying).32

Yet there is still a tendency to forget that the author is always constructed from the text.

The reader gets to the cause, from the effect, by a process of inference. So it is still the

pattern in editions, commentaries, and translations of classical poets, that discussions of

authorship, dating, and the life of the author come first: in the introduction. This is

always the case – even though all such material for the introduction, more often than

not, is derived from the text of the poetry that is to follow. The VSD made clear the

title, cause, intention of a work and the poet himself are to be treated before the work.

The same goes for texts in the Appendix Virgiliana, which were composed in the

light of Virgil’s actual works and derived from them: they are passed off as the poet’s

juvenilia – so that they too could, in theory at least, be bound and presented as

prologomena to edition of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. Shorter examples of

pseudepigraphy (such as Virgil’s epitaph, the Incipit to the Aeneid and Ovid’s elegiac

preface for the Metamorphoses) are prefatory, in accordance with the ancient definition

and etymology of pseudepigrapha. The textual critic’s practice of conjecture is a bit

different because it mostly bears on the form and presentation of a poet’s actual diction,

but it remains the case a poet can only be effectively impersonated by an editor who has

become thoroughly familiar with all his oeuvre: it would not be inappropriate in

principle for emendations of the Eclogues to be influenced by a verse in the Aeneid.

There are thus some similarities between the way modern editors reconstruct texts and

facts according to their philological methodologies on the basis of what they find in

ancient testimonies (manuscripts, quotations etc.) and the way in which ancient

pseudepigraphers and biographers constructed their texts on the basis of the sources and

32 Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980), 222.

24

models that were available. For both ancients and moderns, prejudices and partiality can

be as influential as the surviving evidence: some scholars today, like the

pseudepigraphers of antiquity, can go beyond reflecting on those authors who have

excited their interest, on occasions venturing to emulate and speak for them.