Ille Ego qui quondam: on authorial (an)onymity

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Ille ego qui quondam: on authorial(an)onymity

Irene Peirano

As an institution, the author is dead: his civil status, his bio-graphical person have disappeared; dispossessed, they no longerexercise over his work the formidable paternity whose accountliterary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsi-bility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way,I desire the author: I need his figure (which is neither hisrepresentation nor his projection), as he needs mine (except to‘prattle’) . . .

Roland Barthes (1975: 27)

THE PARATEXTUALITY OF THE AUTHOR

The wave of post-structuralist criticism of the subject’s ability tocontrol language has fundamentally discouraged the possibility ofaccessing and reconstructing that ‘somewhat decrepit deity of theold criticism’1—the author and his intentions. According to thiscritical model, the rich polysemic plurality of language cannot bepinned down to any definite meaning, transmitted from author toreader, but is irreducible and subject to constant multiplicationthrough readers’ readings and rereadings. To borrow another ofRoland Barthes’ famous formulations, if in discourse ‘it is language

1 Barthes (1974: 211).

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that speaks, not the author’, it is only inevitable that the focus ofcriticism should shift away from the subject behind the text to thetext itself.2 At the centre of this model of authorship, then, there isno longer the objectivity of the intention-bearing author, whois for all intents and purposes unknowable, but the subjectivity ofthe reader.3

But, as Michel Foucault has powerfully argued, the author is ahistorical phenomenon that simply cannot be ignored.4 As SeánBurke points out, albeit in different forms at different times, manysocieties and cultures display a ‘passionate, sincere, and sometimessavage interest in retracing a discourse to its author or producer’.5

This ‘structure of resummons’ is an enduring form of discourse whichmust be examined in its historical specificity:6 the question, arguedFoucault, is no longer ‘who really spoke?’ but ‘what are the modes ofexistence of this [authorship] discourse? Where has it been used, howcan it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?’7

The author, however, is not simply a cultural phenomenon in needof an explanation; it is more specifically a textual category.8 For,though ultimately he is only what readers make him to be, the authoris nevertheless a powerful and important hermeneutical tool in liter-ary discourse.9 If the author is not a deus ex machina that existstranscendentally outside of the text, if it is not his intentions that arethe real meaning of the text, the author is nevertheless an essentialfunction of readers’ understanding of it. Thus the reader is constantlychallenged and teased by the text to infer the identity and beliefs ofits creator.10 Reading, as Eco has argued, is eminently a process of

2 Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Burke (1995: 126).3 Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Burke (1995: 129): ‘a text’s unity lies not in

its origin but in its destination’.4 Foucault (1979).5 Burke (1995: 285).6 Burke (1995: 289).7 Foucault (1979: 160).8 Booth (1983) was groundbreaking in establishing not only the implied author

(the image of the author constructed by the reader) as distinct from the real author,but also in outlining the literary mechanism—the rhetoric—through which suchan image of the author is constructed.

9 ‘[T]he author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’sfeatures; he is a character, a hypothesis which, if accepted provisionally, guidesinterpretation, and is in turn modified in its light’ (Nehamas 1981: 145).

10 ‘[O]ne of the most persistent ways in which both Roman and modern readersconstruct the meaning of a poetic text is by attempting to construct from (and for) itan intention-bearing authorial voice, a construction which they generally hope or

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conjecture, one in which meaning is created by constructing from thetext an authoritative voice to whose intention such meaning isassigned.11 The author thus constructed is a figure of reading orunderstanding that is activated to some extent in all texts.12 Onemight say with Barthes in the quotation with which I opened, thatdesire for the author (‘in the text . . . I desire the author’) is an essentialcomponent of the wider structures of desire which animate thereading process.13

The author’s name appears to be an especially suitable topic fromwhich to examine the hermeneutic function of the figure of the authorin reading and interpreting texts. For the signature is perhaps themost visible and yet least examined mark of authorial presence. Thedeceptive simplicity and ordinariness of the author’s referencingof his own name, which Gérard Genette calls ‘onymity’, belies acomplex and far from obvious nexus of functions associated withthe author and revolving around issues of authentication, fiction,genre, and reception.14 ‘The author’s name,’ writes Foucault in hisclassic ‘What is an author?’, ‘is not . . . just a proper name like therest’.15 Far from being straightforward conveyers of factual infor-mation, indications of authorship can be an essential element inunderstanding the genre and meaning of a text: for example indeciding whether a text is a work of fiction or an autobiography,the reader looks to see if the ‘I’ who speaks is the same as the ‘I’ on thecover of the book.16 Put differently, references to the author on themargin of a text signify a pledge of responsibility for the contentwhich varies according to genre, and is most significant whenever, asin the case of historical or autobiographical texts, the author himselfis part of the narrative. In these cases, the name of the author activates

believe (in a belief which must always be partly misguided) to be a reconstruction’(Hinds 1998: 49); see also his discussion of intentionality in the discourse of classicalphilology in that chapter; and Edmunds (2001: 19–21, 164–6).

11 Eco (1990: 44–63).12 De Man (1979).13 Brooks (1984).14 Genette (1997: 39–40).15 Foucault (1979: 146). Amid the vast bibliography on the question of the author,

I single out recent surveys by Bennett (2005), Irwin (2002), Burke (1995), and Pease(1990).

16 Lejeune (1989).

Ille ego qui quondam 253



an autobiographical pact, attesting to the credibility of the narrativeby virtue of its being the account of direct testimony or ÆP��ł�Æ.17

Yet even when the author is not part of the narrative proper, thesedeceptively straightforward references to his name do more thansupply factual information. Though he is as much part of a text andof our understanding of it as the story itself, as Genette noted, thename of the author is more precisely ‘paratextual’, straddling the textand the world outside it.18 To further paraphrase Genette, the authoris both literally and metaphorically at the threshold of the text:physically, he is often on the fringes of the text, his name appearingas a signature at the beginning or end of the book in so-calledsphragides (�çæÆªE��, ‘seals’), or, in modern times, on the bookcover.19 Hermeneutically, however, the physically liminal figure ofthe author very much controls our understanding of the work. Thus areader’s understanding of a text will always be tied to some extent toits author’s name and identity: our perception of Shakespeare wouldchange dramatically ‘if we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon’sOrganon by showing that the same author wrote both the works ofShakespeare and those of Bacon’.20 One’s view of Cicero would haveto be considerably altered if it were discovered that he wrote underthe pseudonym of Catullus, as would our picture of Catullus.In this paper, I pursue further the question of the role of the author

in the reading process by investigating the hermeneutic functionperformed by references to the author’s identity and their receptionas they pertain to two classical authors, namely Homer and Virgil. Towhat end and in which manner do authors name themselves? Howdoes the author’s name influence the reading of the text or, to put itdifferently, what is the relation between the signature and the maintext? What, if anything, can we learn about the figure of the author inclassical antiquity from ancient discussions of, and responses to, theauthorial self-identifications, or lack thereof, of Homer and Virgil?

17 On the relation between authorial self-naming and authentication in ancienthistoriography see Marincola (1997: 270–5). On autopsia as an authenticating deviceof narrative in general, see Nünlist (2009: 185–93).

18 Genette (1997: 2).19 The practice of classical philologists of defining such authorial statements with

the Greek term �çæÆª�� is explained by the occurrence of this term in a controversialpassage of self-identification by the archaic Greek poet Theognis which I explore on p.pp. 262–3. For a comprehensive survey of such passages see Kranz (1961).

20 Foucault (1979: 146).

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Though for the sake of comparison, I will make reference to otherauthors such as Theognis, Hesiod, and Ovid, I choose to focus onHomer and Virgil for two reasons. In the first instance, we possessrich evidence of the ancient reception history of their texts whichallows us to trace important trends in ancient understanding ofclaims to authorship. Second, as we will see, Virgil’s strategies ofself-identification can be seen to be influenced by, and therefore bepart of, the history of reception of the figure of the Homeric author,forming a fascinating dialogue not only with the Homeric poems, butalso with their exegetical tradition and mediated through the readingof Hellenistic poets.In what follows, I therefore focus on this ‘structure of resummons’

to the authorial subject outside of the text and investigate what itaccomplishes both for the reader and for the author through selectcase studies of ancient authorial signatures and their reception. First,the signature, I suggest, has an obvious authenticating force: it lendscredibility, authority, and thus value to the narrative, particularly ifthe author is already a known figure.21 Paradoxically, however, suchreferences to the authorial persona, which normally function asauthenticating devices, can also have the opposite effect of exposingthe text as ‘too real’, and thus as fake, as I show with reference toancient debates on Homeric and other authorial self-identification.Homeric anonymity, however, is not necessarily to be equated with‘non-onymity’: in response to Homer, Virgil, for example, signs theAeneid by way of self-citation in the song of Iopas on the heels of atradition of allegorical reading of the figure of Demodocus. Ultim-ately, the fate of the authorial signature, now presented and receivedas an indicator of truth and now exposed as an emblem of deception,highlights the textuality of the author and its authenticating role asone grounded in literary convention and implicated in the problemsshared by all acts of literary reference.Second, I stress how the authorial signature acts as a temporal and

hermeneutic bridge between writer and audience, creation and fru-ition, world and text, intention and reception. If the author is her-meneutically on the threshold of text and world, instances of hiswritten name can be said to be temporally paratextual: while beingin the past from the point of view of readers, the signature retains the

21 Baudrillard (1981: 102–11) on signatures as conferring value to artistic objects.




appearance of authorial presence or in Derridean terms of a transcen-dental form of ‘nowness’ (maintenance).22 Such authorial mainten-ance is always proleptic, created and intended for the consumption ofreaders in the future from the point of view of composition. Signa-tures are thus primary foci for scenes of reception, allowing authors tostage projected encounters with their audiences. Thus I explore howin imagining their own reception, Homer and Virgil borrow fromgenres such as epic and epigram which are vehicles of meditation ontopics such as memory, excellence, and immortalization.

EPIC (AN)ONYMITY

For many centuries, the history of interpretation of the texts of thefirst authorial figure of western culture—Homer—has been a deeplycontested debate over questions of authorship and authority. What-ever view one might take on the question of composition and writtentransposition of the Homeric poems, it seems reasonably clear thatthe Homeric author is better thought of not as a historical, real fleshand blood composer and maker of a reconstructable Urtext, but as anauthoritative figure invoked to embody a specific tradition.23 Thusone influential account asserts that ‘Homer’ never existed but wasrather a retrojected founding figure whom the first professionalPanhellenic performers invoked as the source of their songs and towhom they claimed to be related to enhance their prestige. The‘invention of Homer’ was instrumental in the process of transmissionof the Homeric texts throughout antiquity and into the present. Onesuch clan of performers was that of the Homeridai who claimeddescent from Homer himself and are described in ancient sources

22 ‘[B]y definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresenceof the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having-been present in apast now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now general, in thetranscendental form of nowness (maintenance)’ (Derrida 1982: 328). His essay ‘Sig-nature, event, context’ is essential reading on the question of signatures and self-naming.

23 See Nagy (1996: passim and 21), where he states his view that Homer is‘retrojected as the original genius of epic’. Porter (2002) and Graziosi (2002),following an earlier contribution by West (1999), are essential reading on the devel-opment of the authorial persona of ‘Homer’. See also Beecroft (2010), and onreferences to the biographical persona in early Greek poetry see Griffith (1983).

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as coming from Chios, one of the poet’s putative fatherlands.24 Therhapsodes developed a rudimentary discussion of Homeric biog-raphy, presumably to boost the fame and appeal of their ancestorwhose works they claimed to be reperforming.25 Starting with thefigure of Homer, the evocation of the biographical persona of theauthor is thus inextricably linked to a claim to authority of the text.One of the earliest instances of recourse to the figure of Homer—

the sphragis in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo—already prefigures theenduring relationship between the persona of the author, the valueand authority of the text, and its survival. In its present form, theHymn to Apollo consists of two parts, which focus respectively onDelos and Delphi. The first section on Apollo of Delos refers toa poetic Iª on the island dear to the god in which local maidens(v. 157 Œ�FæÆØ ˜ÅºØ��) sing hymns ‘remembering men and womenof old’ (160–1).26 The poet concludes the first half of theHymn with areference to himself, asking his internal audience of Delian girls toremember him as the ‘blind man who lives in rocky Chios’ (v. 172)and as the singer whose songs ‘will be the best forever’ (165–76):

Iºº’ ¼ª�Ł’ ƒº�Œ�Ø b ��ººø �æ�� Ø�Ø ��,åÆ�æ�� ’ � �E� �A�ÆØ· K �E� �b ŒÆd ��Ø�Ł�

��Æ�Ł’, ›�� Œ� �Ø� K�ØåŁ��ø IŁæ�ø

KŁ��’ I��æÅ�ÆØ ��E�� ÆºÆ��æØ�� KºŁ·‘t Œ�FæÆØ, �� ’ h Ø Icæ l�Ø�� I�Ø�H

KŁ�� øº�E�ÆØ, ŒÆd ��øfi ��æ��Ł� �ºØ��Æ’;� �E� �’ �s �ºÆ �A�ÆØ ��Œæ�Æ�Ł’ �Pç� ø�·‘�ıçºe� I�æ, �NŒ�E �b ��øfi �Ø �ÆØ�Æº��fi Å,��F �A�ÆØ ��Ø�Ł� IæØ��ı�Ø I�Ø�Æ� ’.� �E� �’ � ��æ� Œº�� Y�� ‹�� K�’ ÆrÆIŁæ�ø ��æ�ç� ��ŁÆ ��º�Ø� �s ÆØ��Æ�Æ�·�ƒ �’ K�d �c ��ÆØ, K��d ŒÆd K��ı � K��Ø.

But now come, let Apollo be propitious together with Artemis; and hailall you girls and remember me also in the future, whenever one of the

24 Acusilaus FGrH 2 F 2; Hellanicus FGrH 4 F 20, Strabo 14.1.35. On the Home-ridai see West (1999: 366–72) and Graziosi (2002: 201–34).

25 See Plato Rep. 599e; Ion 530d; Isoc. Helen 65.26 On the passage see Graziosi (2002: 62–6), Burkert (1979), and West (1975).

Whether the second section, which focuses on Apollo of Delphi, was originallyconceived as a separate poem and if so, how it was joined to the first one, remains asubject of intense speculation (West 1975; Janko 1982: 99–132).




human beings who populate the earth comes here as a guest, after muchsuffering, and asks: ‘Maidens, of those who come here, who in yourjudgment is the sweetest singer, in whom do you rejoice most?’ Thenanswer all together propitiously: ‘A blind man, he lives in rocky Chios,and all his poems remain the best for times to come’. We will bring yourglory wherever on earth we will wander among the well-inhabited citiesof men. Surely they will believe me, since this is indeed the truth.

The two attributes—blindness and Chian origin—chosen to identifythe author suggest that the poet is here representing himself asHomer whose blindness was probably known to Stesichorus (fr. 192PMGF), and who is referred to as the ‘Chian man’ by Simonides(fr. 19.1 West), but also as �O Åæ[�� in fr. 20.14 West from the samepoem, and later by Theocritus (7.47; 22.218).27 Certainly, this was aninterpretation shared in antiquity by several sources which identifiedthe blind man from Chios as Homer: this passage from the Hymn toApollo is the source of the anecdote, retold in the Contest of Homerand Hesiod (315–21 Allen), according to which Homer recited theHymn at the very festival mentioned by the author and found somuch favor with his audience that the Delians kept a written copy inthe temple of Artemis. In the third book of the Histories, Thucydidesquotes two passages from the poem as evidence for the antiquity of aPanionian festival held on the island of Delos, a tradition recentlyrevived by the Athenians in 426/5 BC (3.104), and identifies its authoras Homer. The identification of the author with Homer is in keepingwith the general tendency in antiquity to treat theHymns as Homeric.28

This archaic sphragis and its reception history adumbrate many ofthe issues associated with the function of the author’s name andidentity. First, the authorial self-identification is introduced as partof the projected future reception of the poem and yet the drama ofreception staged in the passage is connected in interesting ways to thenarrative present of the poet’s performance. Most notably, the poetdepicts the stranger who is to enquire about the best poet in ways thatare very reminiscent of himself: the who comes in after much suffering(v. 168 ��E�� ÆºÆ��æØ��) resembles the poet who ‘wander[s] among

27 On similar instances of antonomasia with poets’ names—the practice of refer-ring to poets not directly through their names but through a periphrasis—see Farrell(1991: 33–60, esp. 37–40 on this passage).

28 Allen, Halliday, and Sikes (1963: lxiv–lxxxii), and on the reception of theHomeric Hymns in Hellenistic and Roman culture, see Barchiesi (1999).

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the well-inhabited cities of men’ (v. 175).29 Both are obviously remin-iscent of theHomericOdysseuswho is read as an autobiographical self-projection of the Homeric author already in the Contest of Homer andHesiod, where the wanderings of ‘Homer’ are clearlymodelled on thoseof the Homeric hero.30 Moreover, the poet, who had earlier praisedthe maidens for their superior skill at imitating the voices of men (vv.162–4), here himself imitates and assumes the voice of both strangerand Delian maidens.31 The poet’s injunction to the Delian girls toremember him beyond the present moment (v. 166–7 K �E� �b ŒÆd

��Ø�Ł� | ��Æ�Ł’) is also mirrored in the suggested responsewhich he puts in the mouth of his audience: the Delian girls are invitedto attest to the excellence of the poet ‘in times to come’ (v. 173 ��Ø�Ł�). This collapsing of present performance and future recep-tion can be read as protreptic: by staging this drama of reception, thepoet invites his audience to recognize his excellence in the presentmoment of the Iª, the Delian festival which is given as the setting ofthe poem in vv. 146–78.In second place, the introduction of the poet’s person is a form of

self-advertisement which constructs ‘Homer’ as the recipient of theepic glory (Œº��) normally reserved for his heroes. The identity ofthe poet thus enters the text as part of the author’s effort to configurehis work as authoritative discourse. The very narrative structure ofthe passage, which is couched as a response to the enquiry of astranger, provides a vivid example of the way in which the allusionto the authorial identity of the speaker is tied to self-advertisementand survival. The poet proposes a poetic contract of sorts:32 in returnfor the advertisement proffered by the Delian maidens, the poet will

29 ��E�� ÆºÆ��æØ�� is a Homeric phrase (Od. 7.24 of Odysseus himself; 17.84;19.379). Indeed, the manuscripts of Thucydides 3.104.5 read �ÆºÆ��æØ�� ¼ºº��(‘another much suffering human being’), which would render the comparison be-tween ‘Homer’ and the fictional questioning character even more explicit. See also vv.190–1 where the sufferings of men (IŁæ�ø | �ºÅ ��Æ�) is the preferred subjectmatter of song for the Muses and the gods.

30 Graziosi (2002: 138–63). The criterion of sweetness (v. 169 X�Ø��) and pleas-ure (v. 170 ��æ��Ł�) as a measure of the excellence of song is also in the Odyssey:13.80, 8.368.

31 Thus capitalizing on the centrality of mimesis in this passage, Nagy (1990:375–6) reads the Delian maidens as images of the Muses.

32 See v. 166 � �E��K �E�, v. 174 � �E�� æ�. See also Od. 8.497–8, whereOdysseus promises Demodocus that in exchange for him singing of the sufferings ofthe Achaeans at Troy he will ‘declare to all mankind that the god has willingly granted[him] the gift of divine song’ (ÆP��ŒÆ ŒÆd �A�Ø ıŁ�� ÆØ IŁæ��Ø�Ø, | ‰� ¼æÆ ��Ø




spread their Œº�� throughout the earth (v. 174 � ��æ� Œº��

�Y�� ). This reciprocal exchange implicitly compares the Deliangirls’ allusion to the identity of the poet to the Œº�� which ‘Homer’will confer on them.It is therefore no surprise that the narrative configuration of the

passage in which the poet’s self-presentation is expressed not in hisown voice but rather focalized through secondary narrators—respect-ively the stranger and the Delian maidens—has a strong affiliationwith epic, where different heroes embed imaginary speeches of ananonymous figure (i.e. �Ø� Kæ��Ø / �Ø� �Y�fi Å�Ø) in their own discourse.33

The embedded perspective of the anonymous voice is often used toarticulate the primary speaker’s fears and hopes as they pertain to howhis community will view his actions and character. It is thus no coinci-dence that it is Hector, the hero who is most sensitive to his people’sevaluation of his actions, who gets the highest share of such speeches—five in total— in the Iliad.34 One, in particular, occurs in book 7 and is arelevant parallel for theHomeric Hymn. Hector is challenging the bestof the Achaeans to come forward and resolve the stalemate in the war,fighting a duel with him on condition that the body of the loser bereturned to his people and buried (84–91, trans. Fagles):

I will hand back his body to the decked ships. So the long-hairedAchaeans can give him full rites and heap his barrow high by thebroad Hellespont. And someday one will say, one of the men to come(�� Ø� �Y�fi Å�Ø ŒÆd OłØª�ø IŁæ�ø), steering his oar-swept shipacross the wine-dark sea, ‘There’s the mound of a man who died in theold days (I�æe� b �� B Æ ��ºÆØ ŒÆ�Æ��ŁÅH��), one of the bravewhom glorious Hector killed (‹ ��’ IæØ��Æ ŒÆ��Œ�Æ� çÆ��Ø ��

� ‚Œ�øæ).’ So they will say, someday, and my fame will never die. (u�

�� Ø� Kæ��Ø· �e �’ K e Œº�� h ��’ Oº�E�ÆØ)

Hector here imagines an anonymous traveller (v. 87 �Ø� . . . OłØª�ø

IŁæ�ø; cf. Hymn to Apollo 167 �Ø� K�ØåŁ��ø IŁæ�ø) ap-proaching the Hellespont where the Greek hero defeated by Hector inthe proposed duel will be buried. The Trojan hero then delivers anepigrammatic couplet focalized through the voice of the anonymous

�æ�çæø Ł�e� þ�Æ�� Ł��Ø I�Ø��). See further Miller (1986: 61–5) for discussion ofthis poetic exchange in the Hymn to Apollo, and Griffith (1983: 45).

33 de Jong (1987) is a full-length study of �Ø�-speeches in the Iliad.34 Il. 6.460–1; 6.480–1; 7.89–90; 7.301–2; 22.107: de Jong (1987: 76–9).

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and celebrating the excellence (v. 90 IæØ��Æ; cf. v. 173IæØ��ı�Ø in the Delian maidens’ reply) of the defeated warriorand thus implicitly of his opponent. In both passages, the embeddedanonymous voice is used to dramatize the reception of the primaryspeaker’s character and to emphasize the hope of future recognitionand the kind of memoralization (v. 91 Œº��; Hymn to Apollo, 174Œº��) desired by epic heroes. In turn, the embedded speech isreminiscent of epigrammatic epitaphs, a parallel already noticed bythe ancients (schol. bT ad Il. 6.460).35 Thus, though the genre ofcelebration is epic, which is traditionally oral, being named is im-agined and configured as a written experience: for already the em-bedded quotation of the Iliad is composed in the style of funeralinscriptions in a bold allusion by an oral medium to a written genre.Thus, if the desire by the poet of the Hymn to Apollo to be

identified and remembered is in some ways framed as a heroicgesture, it is appropriate that in his wish to be named, ‘Homer’ shouldbe echoing the words and behaviour of his hero, Odysseus, whofamously chose to name himself to Polyphemus as he departedfrom the Cyclops’ land (Od. 9.502–5, trans. Fagles):

˚�Œºøł, ÆY Œ� �� ŒÆ�ÆŁÅ�H IŁæ�ø

OçŁÆº �F �YæÅ�ÆØ I�ØŒ�º�Å IºÆø��,ç��ŁÆØ �O�ı��BÆ ��ºØ��æŁØ� K�ÆºÆH�ÆØ,ıƒe ¸Æ�æ��ø, ��Ł�Œfi Å �Ø �NŒ� ’ �å��Æ.

Cyclop, if any mortal men shall ask you about the shameful blinding ofyour eye, say that Odysseus, the sacker of cities, made it blind, the son ofLaertes, who has his home in Ithaca.

Just like Odysseus, ‘Homer’ imagines an anonymous person (v. 502�� ŒÆ�ÆŁÅ�H IŁæ�ø � Hymn to Apollo, 167 �Ø� K�ØåŁ��ø

IŁæ�ø) posing a question (v. 503 �YæÅ�ÆØ � Hymn to Apollo, 168I��æÅ�ÆØ) in the answer to which is embedded the identification ofthe main speaker. The act of identifying oneself is not an innocentgesture of self-expression; rather it manifests itself as a desire to beremembered and proleptically enacted in the mode of discourse of thegenre with which remembrance of excellence is most closely associ-ated, namely epic.36

35 Scodel (1992).36 See Lissarrague (1994) for a comparable analysis of the framing of a painter’s

signature.




In a highly controversial passage, the sixth-century poet Theogniscites a ‘seal’ (�çæÅª��) which will ensure the integrity of his poetry(��Å).37 Once this mysterious device is placed on the poems, no one,he says, will be able to steal from the text or change it, and everyonewill recognize Theognis himself as its author (19–23):

˚�æ�, ��çØÇ� �øØ b K �d �çæÅªd� K�ØŒ��Łø

��E��’ ��Ø, º��Ø �’ �h�� Œº�� Æ,�P�� Ø� Iºº��Ø Œ�ŒØ� ��P�Łº�F �Ææ��·z�� b �A� �Ø� Kæ�E· ‘¨��ªØ�� K��Ø ��Å

��F ��ªÆæ�ø�· ��Æ� �b ŒÆ�’ IŁæ��ı� O� Æ��.’

Kyrnos, let a seal be placed on the present lines by me as I practise my art,and they will never be stolen without detection, nor will anyone substitutesomething inferior for the good thing that is there. And so will everyonesay: ‘these are the lines of Theognis of Megara, named among all men.’

On the basis of this passage, it has long been conventional to refer toclosing authorial statements in Greek and Roman poetic texts in whichpoets name themselves either directly as Hesiod does in the proem tothe Theogony (v. 22–4) and Timotheus in the Persians (PMG 791.229),or indirectly by way of periphrasis as Bacchylides (Ep. 3.96–8) does, assphragides, a practice which I have followed in this paper.38 Thoughthe term is a convenient label, Theognis never specifies what the sealentrusted to protect the integrity of the text actually is, leaving gener-ations of readers to puzzle over themeaning of these lines. It is hard notto think that the poet is here, if nothing else, teasing the audience totake his name as the elusive seal by the very narrative structure inwhichthe mention of the name is couched. For having just announced that aseal must be laid upon (v. 19 K�ØŒ��Łø) his words, he proceeds toincorporate or place upon his verses a quotation in the mouth of afuture anonymous member of his audience; the embedding of theauthor’s name in the main text via the incorporation of this externalvoice mimics the laying of the external seal onto the text.39

37 On this much disputed text see Edmunds (1997), Ford (1985), and Woodbury(1952).

38 This extended usage of the word is practical but possibly historically inaccurate:it is in fact uncertain whether the sphragis, which is mentioned by the second-centurygrammarian Pollux (4.66) as the sixth part of the citharodic nomos, is actually asignature at all (Edmunds 1997: 30–2).

39 The parallel is so compelling that it led some scholars to think that Theognis isadvertising a physical seal to be placed on his poems (Cerri 1991).

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This embedded self-identification is a trope that will by now befamiliar: the poet’s identity is proffered not by the poet himselfdirectly but by an anonymous collective figure (�A� �Ø�) in the styleof Homer’s displaced celebration of his heroes in the embeddedepitaphs uttered by his characters. Being named (O� Æ��) onceagain takes the form of being celebrated in epic discourse—��Æ� �b

ŒÆ�’ IŁæ��ı� in itself being a Homeric formula.40 This interpret-ation is further reinforced by the play between the two basic meaningsof O� Æ�� (and Z� Æ) as ‘named’ (and ‘name’) and ‘renowned’(and ‘renown’).41 It is literally the name which is the glory. Self-naming is not a value-free activity; on the contrary, it evokes andarrogates the cultural capital of the genre through which memory andcelebration are enacted.When Ovid wanted to allude to his potential for more elevated

poetry in the last poem of the Amores, it is to the model of embeddedepic sphragis that he turned as he imagined the anonymous reactionof a visitor to the Paelignian region, his homeland (3.15.7–14):

Mantua Vergilio, gaudet Verona Catullo;Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego,

quam sua libertas ad honesta coegerat arma,cum timuit socias anxia Roma manus.

atque aliquis spectans hospes Sulmonis aquosimoenia, quae campi iugera pauca tenent,

‘Quae tantum’ dicat ‘potuistis ferre poetam,quantulacumque estis, vos ego magna voco.’

Mantua rejoices in Virgil, Verona in Catullus; let me be called the gloryof the Paeligni who were compelled by their love of freedom to takehonourable arms, when anxious Rome feared her allied troops. And letsome guest, looking at the walls of Sulmo, rich in water, which occupybut a small area of land, say, ‘You who could beget such a great poet,small though you are, I call you great.’

40 Il. 10.212–13 �ªÆ Œ� �ƒ ��ıæ�Ø� Œº�� YÅ | ��Æ� K�’ IŁæ��ı�; Od.1.299, 19.334, 24.94 (see n. 41).

41 See Od. 24.93-4: S� �f b �P�b ŁÆg Z� ’ þº��Æ�, Iºº� ��Ø ÆN�d | ��Æ� K�’IŁæ��ı� Œº�� ÆØ K�Łº�, �åØºº�F. The same ambiguity exists in Latin and isexploited by the poets: see Feeney (1986) on Lucan 1.135; Virgil, Aen. 6.776 haec tumnomina [great names] erunt, nunc sunt sine nomine [name] terrae. Cf. 2.558 sinenomine corpus; Ovid, Rem. 389 magnum iam nomen habemus.




The anonymous guest sets up a contrast between the poet and hisnative city: small though the city might be, it is nevertheless to becelebrated as great for having begotten such an outstanding poet.Lurking behind the comparison of the poet to a building is thewidespread metaphor of the poetic text as an opus—a word whichencompasses the products of both physical and poetic workman-ship.42 If the physical opus of the walls is in some sense a symbol ofthe poetic opus of the Amores, the small size of the native region (v. 12campi iugera pauca) can be read as a reference to the refined smallscale of elegy, and in fact the switch from elegy to tragedy is an-nounced as a move to a physically larger space (3.15.18 pulsanda estmagnis area maior equis). The reference to the poet’s native land as amarker of identity is traditional, but the presentation of the Pae-lignian people in martial terms echoes the Propertian sphragis tobook 1, which similarly closes the book by giving the poet’s birthplacein response to the enquiry of the book’s dedicatee.43 Another Proper-tian passage, the first poem to book 4, similarly evokes the compari-son of the text to the monument exploited by Ovid and does sothrough an external focalizer (65–6):

scandentis quisquis cernit de uallibus arces,ingenio muros aestimet ille meo!

Whoever sees the citadels climbing up from the valleys, let him judgethe walls by my genius!

Propertius and Ovid both relate their fame as poets through theobservation (v. 65 cernit; Am. 3.15.11 spectans) of an anonymousvisitor stumbling on the sight of the city’s walls, a physical monumentwhich triggers reflection on the monumentality of their poetic out-puts. While the visitor in Propertius remains unknown (quisquis), hispoem is itself addressed to a hospes (4.1.1 hoc, quodcumque uides,hospes, qua maxima Roma est) visiting the city of Rome. The addressto the stranger is an epigrammatic move but one mediated throughthe epic tradition, since Propertius’ tour of Rome is meant to evokeEvander’s encounter with Aeneas in Aeneid 8, where the epic hero

42 opus, referring to the collection, is the last word of the book: Am. 3.15.20 postmea mansurum fata superstes opus (the poetic monument outlives the poet); cf. Am.Ep. 2 hoc illi praetulit auctor opus.

43 1.22, esp. v.5 cum Romana suos egit discordia ciues � Am.3.15.10 cum timuitsocias anxia Roma manus.

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is also addressed as a hospes (Aen. 8.188) visiting the future siteof Rome.44

The embedded focalizer is an epic gesture used by Ovid in othercritically placed poems to stage instances of reception of his work (Am.2.1.7–10; 3.1.19–20; 2.10.37–8), but the poet gives it a further spin inthis passage by turning the anonymous into a guest reminiscent of thefocalizer of Homeric Œº�� in the Hymn of Apollo.45 The contrastbetween the smallness of the land and the greatness of the poet isalso one familiar from the epigrams on Homer’s homeland, a series ofwhich is found at the beginning of book 7 of the Greek Anthology andwhich feature a similar opposition in infinite variations.46 Whether ornot Ovid’s aliquis hospes in Am. 3.15.11 gestures to the ��E�� in thesphragis in theHomericHymn toApollo, it is safe to say that he, just likePropertius, has used theHomeric model of embedded sphragis tomarkthe shift to a higher register:47 in the case of Propertius, it is aetiologicalelegy on national themes (4.1.60 hoc patriae serviet omne meae). ForOvid, the area maior is taken to be Tragoedia, which was announced asthe competitor to Elegia in the first poem of book 3, and which is hereimplied through Ovid’s allusion to Dionysius and his thyrsus.48 YetTragoedia herself is inmanyways reminiscent of epic in her vocabularyand aspirations, and Ovid’s choice of Virgil and Catullus (v. 7MantuaVergilio gaudet Verona Catullo) seems to isolate two opposite poeticmodes of Virgilian epos and Catullan deliciae (v. 3 nec me deliciaededecuere meae� Cat. 2.1 passer, deliciae meae puellae). Ovid’s higherinclinations are confirmed not only by his use of the epic -tis/aliquisembedded focalizer, but also by the epic register of his self-presentationin v. 8: Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego. The monumental expression,which occupies a line, is an epic calque on the Greek expression ŒF��

�åÆØH, suggesting that Ovid is here arrogating for himself the im-mortality afforded by epic to its heroes.

44 Hutchinson (2006: 62) ad 4.1.1.45 Cf. AA 3.7 dixerit e multis aliquis with Gibson (2003: 90) ad loc in the context of

epic allusion; McKeown (1998: 8) Ad Am. 2.1.7–10 aliquis iuuenum . . . dicat calls thisa formula ‘with a strong Homeric pedigree’.

46 E.g. AP 7.1.7–8 ‹��Ø Œ�Œ�ıŁ� | �ÆØc, ��ı��ø I��æÆ ŒÆd �Ææ��ø � 7.4.3–4 �N�� Oº�ªÅ ª�ªÆıEÆ �� å�� I�æÆ B��, | c �� ŁÆ ��ÅØ�.

47 Hutchinson (2006: 194–6).48 Cf. 3.1.23–4 tempus erat thyrso pulsum grauiore moueri; | cessatum satis est:

incipe maius opus� 3.15.17–18 corniger increpuit thyrso grauiore Lyaeus; pulsanda estmagnis area maior equis.




THE NAME OF HOMER

Surviving ancient testimonia of the reception of the sphragis in theHymn to Apollo offer a unique opportunity for tracing some of thepotentials and limitations of this authorial self-identification. AsI mentioned above, Thucydides cites two passages from the Hymn:first he quotes vv. 146–50, stating that ‘Homer ‘makes very clear(�Åº�E �b �ºØ��Æ �O Åæ��) that this [ie. the ancient origin of thefestival] was the case in the following lines [146–50] from the Hymn(�æ�� Ø�) to Apollo’ (3.104.4). Having established that the Panio-nian festival is at least as old as the Homeric Hymn, Thucydidesimplies that Homer himself participated in the poetic competitionat the festival and gives as proof the lines containing the authorialself-identification (3.104.4–6):

That there were also competitions of music and that the men resorted tocompeting there, he also makes manifest (Æs �Åº�E) in these verses ofthe same hymn: for having celebrated the chorus of Delian women, heconcluded his praise with these lines [165–72], in which he also men-tioned himself (K �x� ŒÆd Æı��F K�� ŁÅ). With such statementsHomer has given proof (��ÆF�Æ b �O Åæ�� K��Œ Åæ�ø��) that therewas a great meeting and festival even in ancient times.

It is noteworthy that the second quotation is ostensibly introduced toprove that the festival involved musical competition. The presence ofmusic and poetry, however, was already corroborated by the firstpassage which cites the Ionians delighting among other things insong (I�Ø��). Yet the second citation containing the sphragis can beseen to fulfil a further, more subtle, though no less important aim,enhancing the credibility of the Hymn as a source by presenting it asthe work of Homer. Just as the Hymn functions as proof(K��Œ Åæ�ø��) of the version of events endorsed by Thucydides, so‘Homer’’s mention of himself (K �x� ŒÆd Æı��F K�� ŁÅ) functionsas proof of authorship of the Hymn.49 The Hymn, and with it thehistorian’s narrative, gains further credibility as a source through thereference to the lived experience of its putative author. It is important

49 On the language of proof in Thucydides, see Hornblower (1987: 100–7).��Œ �æØ� / ��Œ Æ�æ� ÆØ is repeatedly used by Thucydides of his own deductionsbased on solid evidence (1.1.1), including the evidence of Homer’s text (1.3.3), asopposed to fabulous imagination (1.21.1).

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to consider briefly the context in which the reference to the author’sname is scrutinized and exploited. Homer is not any poet but thepoet: because of his high standing, he can be appealed to as a witnessto lend authority to espoused truths. The appeal to the authenticatingforce of his name is directly related to a particular approach to his textas a store-house of information. As E. M. Forster argued in animportant essay on literary anonymity, words that are thought toconvey information are the ones that more typically necessitate asignature: ‘information is supposed to be true. That is its only reasonfor existing, and the man who gives it ought to sign his name, so thathe may be called to account if he has told a lie.’50 The name of Homerthus enhances the value of the text beyond its internal fictionaluniverse to reach out to the world of the audience.In a curious twist, however, this authorial self-reference, which in

the reading offered by the historian authenticates the poem, had adiametrically opposite effect for other readers. In explaining thepoet’s reference to the rhapsodes as ‘singers of stitched verses’(Nem. 2.1–2), a scholium to Pindar Nemean 2 (Scholia in Pind.Nem. 2.1c Drachmann = FGrH 568 F 5) attributes to the Hellenistichistorian Hippostratus the claim that Cynaethus, a prominentmember of the clan of rhapsodes which called themselves Homeridai,and his fellow clan members composed many verses and insertedthem into Homer’s work (��ººa �H K�H ��Ø��Æ�Æ� K �Æº�E �N�

�c � ˇ �æ�ı ��Å�Ø).51 The scholium continues: ‘this Cynaethuscame from a Chian family and of the poems that bear Homer’sname, it was he who wrote the Hymn to Apollo and laid it to hiscredit’ (�˙ �b › ˚�ÆØŁ�� E��, n� ŒÆd �H K�ØªæÆç� �ø � ˇ �æ�ı

��ØÅ ��ø �e �N� ��ººøÆ ª�ªæÆçg� o � IÆ��Ł�ØŒ� ÆP�fiH).Whether the poem and the signature passage were indeed the workof Cynaethus, the presence of these lines in the Hymn can be ex-plained as arising from a desire to ‘authorize’ the text with a referenceto Homer and thus to enhance its perceived value and chance ofsurvival.52 The sphragis passage in the Hymn to Apollo, which in

50 Forster (1951: 81).51 On the scholium see West (1999: 367–72) and Burkert (1979).52 The Homeridai are accused of forging Homer’s text already by Plato: see

Phaedrus 252 b–c, where the philosopher denounces the ‘stored away verses’(I��Ł��ø K�H) attributed by the Homeridai to Homer as forgeries.




Thucydides supports the poem’s attribution to Homer, caused Hip-postratus and subsequent readers to suspect forgery.Biographical self-referencing acts in effect as a double-edged

sword: the ‘signature’ is needed for audiences to validate the author-ship of the text and enhance its value. Yet in the case of Homer,anonymity may well have appeared as more authentic and ‘onymity’—the practice of signing oneself in the text—suspiciously anachronistic.Thus ‘onymity’ was singled out as a distinctive feature of the Hesiodicas opposed to the Homeric persona by Velleius Paterculus, accordingto whom Hesiod gave testimony of his fatherland and parents lest heshould end up in the same predicament as Homer (1.7.1: qui vitavit,ne in id quod Homerus incideret, patriamque et parentes testatus est),whose place of birth and parentage were the objects of furious debate.Dio Chrysostomus similarly contrasts Homer’s choice not to namehimself (�e Å�Æ �F ª�ªæÆç�ÆØ �e Æ��F Z� Æ) with the practice ofHecataeus, Herodotus, and Thucydides (Or. 53.9–10 von Armin; cf.ps-Plutarch Vita Homeri 1). The second-century CE historian Ce-phalion similarly omitted mention of his family and place of origin,claiming to be following Homer’s model of anonymity.53 Arrian’srefusal to name himself in the Anabasis (1.12.5) has been interpretedas resulting from a desire to make his narrative more Homeric.54 Theperception of anonymity as characteristic of the Homeric authorialpose might in fact explain why the poet of the Hymn to Apollo fellshort of naming himself, choosing instead to refer to himself as the‘blind man from Chios’.55

The Hesiodic corpus offers a comparable example of the issuesof credibility raised by authorial self-references in early Greek poetry.In antiquity the proems to the Works and days and Theogony werewidely believed to be spurious, and that of theWorks and days (1–10)

53 FHGMüller, vol. 3 fr. 1.13–14 (from Photius Bibl.):ˇy�� e b ª�� Æ��F ŒÆd�Æ�æ��Æ, ‰� ÆP�e� KŒ�E�� çÅ�Ø, u��æ �O Åæ�� I��Øø�fi A.

54 On anonymity as a Homeric pose in these two historians, see Marincola (1997:274).

55 Some scholars have in fact suggested that the injunction to anonymity isexplicitly commented on in v. 171, where the vulgate reads a nonsensical Iç’ � Hwhich has been variously emended: Burkert (1979: 61) reads Iç� ø�, a variantattested in the manuscripts of the Thucydidean passage where the hymn is quotedand which he takes to mean ‘anonymously’; contra Richardson (2010: 110) ad loc, whotakes it to mean ‘in unison’. Most recently, Graziosi (2002: 65) has proposed thereading �Pç� ø� which she argues can mean both ‘propitiously’ and ‘in a respectfullysilent manner’, from �PçÅ �E, ‘to be propitious’ or ‘keep silent’.

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was absent in some copies. Thus we are told that Crates of Mallosathetized both proems on the grounds of their lack of specific rele-vance (Vita Dionys. Perieget. 72.58-60 Kassel = Fr. 78 Broggiato=-Most, Hesiod T50):

Detaching the prooimion easily from the action, he athetizes the begin-ning of the poem. That of the Hesiod’s WD and T. is a prelude for hispoetry as a whole (��Å� ��Ø �æ��ÆØ ��Ø��ø�); hence Crates tooathetized them with reason.

Aristarchus concurred.56 The proems were thus suspected of beingspurious—but why? The reported opinion of Crates takes us someway towards an explanation: hymns, including the Homeric ones,which were known in antiquity as �æ�� ØÆ (prooimia), were intro-ductory pieces performed before the Homeric poems and mighttherefore be thought to be easily substitutable one for another. Yetwe might also speculate whether the ancient suspicion about theHesiodic proems betrays a distrust of the intrusive Hesiodic bio-graphical persona. As Lamberton shrewdly observes, without theprooimia, ‘the Hesiodic landscape is left impoverished and nearlyanonymous, and the poet himself without a name. To put it differ-ently, without a prooimion, Hesiod approaches the condition ofHomer.’57 One might wonder whether the editorial omission of theproems speaks to a desire to make Hesiod more anonymous andtherefore in a sense more Homeric.

VIRGILIAN ‘ONYMITIES ’

I have argued that the name of Homer poses particular challenges forancient audiences: on the one hand, there is the attraction of invokinghis authority to validate the text. On the other, his absence as anauthor from the Homeric poems speaks against accepting the trust-worthiness of his self-identification elsewhere. The name of Homer

56 Schol. Hes. Op. Prolegomena A.c p. 2.7–12 Pertusi = Most, Hesiod T49: ‘somehave crossed out the proem, as for example, Aristarchus among others, who obelizesthe verses, and Theophrastus’ student Praxiphanes . . .This latter says that he encoun-tered a copy without the proem, which lacked the invocation of the Muses and beganwith . . . [v.11].’ See also Pausanias 9.31.4–5.

57 Lamberton (1988: 47).




then becomes subject to conflicting readings, with the author beingboth exploited as a purveyor of authority and pointed at as a forcethat disrupts the persuasiveness of the text.Moving on to Virgil, it becomes clear, however, that such a conflict

is in no way typical only of Homer’s name. On the contrary, indica-tions of authorship exhibit a troubling paradox that cannot be re-duced to or explained by the specifics of one author’s or his readers’construction of his persona but are rather indicative of much widerissues concerning the role of the author in the reading process. Forhere we begin to notice even more how the reference to the author’sname and identity can be a destabilizing as well as an authenticatingforce. Thus, precisely because self-naming was held to have an au-thenticating force, sphragides were commonly inserted into both fakeand perfectly genuine texts in order to offer further proof of theirauthorial origin with the consequence that the one and the samedevice could be conjured up with radically different results.The Virgilian corpus offers a striking example of such paradoxical

overlap between the validation of a truthful narrative and the attemptto give credibility to a forged one: in the case of Virgil, we possess atleast two sphragides, one authentic and one spurious. The first comesat the end of the Georgics (4.559–66):

Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebamet super arboribus, Caesar dum magnus ad altumfulminat Euphraten bello victorque volentesper populos dat iura viamque adfectat Olympo.illo Vergilium me tempore dulcis alebatParthenope studiis florentem ignobilis oti,carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuventa,Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi.

These things over the care of the fields and cattle, and of trees, I havebeen singing while great Caesar thundered in war near the deep Eu-phrates and while he as a conqueror gives laws to willing people andmakes his way to Olympus. At that time sweet Parthenope was nursingme, Virgil, flourishing in the pursuit of undistinguished leisure; I whoplayed the songs of shepherds and in the boldness of my youth sang ofyou, Tityrus, under the cover of a spreading beech tree.

The sphragis is in itself divided into two sections, with four linesbeing devoted to the military achievements of Caesar, to which theotium of the poet is contrasted in another four lines. The lines about

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the poet contain a reference to his name (v. 563 Vergilium me), atemporal (v. 563 illo . . . tempore) and geographical (v. 564 Parthe-nope) indication of where he operated, and a reference to hisprevious work. The text is thus signed in two different but comple-mentary ways. First, the poet names himself directly, on the modelof his didactic predecessor, Hesiod, who in the proem to the The-ogony says that ‘the Muses once taught Hesiod [ � ˙��, also in theaccusative] fine song as he pastured his lambs below holy Helicon’(Th. 22–3). This Hesiodic signature contrasts with an earlier, muchmore veiled, reference to the poet’s name in book 1, where Virgilhides an acrostic of the first two letters of his name (Publius Vergi-lius Maro) in imitation of Aratus, whose Phaenomena he closelyfollows in this passage and who had also introduced a similaracrostic (Phaen. 778–818).58 The practice of embedding specificallythe poet’s name in an acrostic is found in another didactic prede-cessor of Virgil, the Alexandrian Nicander (Th. 345–53; Alex. 266–74), who also, like Virgil, names himself directly at the end of hispoems (Th. 958; Alex. 629–30).59 Secondly, in the sphragis to book 4,Virgil refers to himself as the author of the Eclogues by reworkingthe first line of that book.60 This too, however, can be read as a formof self-naming: though Tityrus is here portrayed as the subject of thepoet’s song (v. 566 Tityre te . . . cecini), in Ecl. 6.4–5, the authorrecounts that Apollo addressed him as Tityrus as he persuadeshim to keep his poetry slender.61 Virgil, in other words, had alreadysuggested the possibility of reading the character of Tityrus asallegory of himself, quite possibly on the analogy of the TheocriteanSimichidas who was read as a projection of the author.62

The poet’s reference to himself in this passage from Georgics 4is treated as possessing an authenticating force by his biographerDonatus in the fourth-century Life of Virgil (48):

58 Georg. 4.429–431, 433: maximus agricolis pelagoque parabitur imber; | at sivirgineum suffuderit ore ruborem, | ventus erit . . . | pura. On this passage see Farrell(1991: 79–83) and Feeney and Nelis (2005).

59 For the practice of signing via an acrostic, see Caroli (2007: 63–4 n. 217). ForNicander in Virgil, see Georg. 3.414–39, 3.513 with Thomas (1988) ad loc.

60 On self-quotation as a form of signature and its literary pedigree see pp. 278–80.61 Ecl. 6.4–5 cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem | uellit, et admonuit

‘Pastorem, Tityre . . . ’ For this identification see also Servius Ad Buc. 1.1 and Calpur-nius Siculus 4.44.

62 Schol. Theocr. ad Id. 7.21.




So then, although there are many pseudepigrapha (that is, works that areput out with a false title, under another’s name), such as our poet’stragedy Thyestes—which Varius published under his own name—andother works of this sort, yet it is scarcely to be doubted that the Bucolicsare clearly Virgil’s, especially since the poet himself (fearing this verything) gave testimony at the beginning of the work, and also by sayingin another poem,

‘ . . . I who played shepherds’ songs, and emboldened by youth sang ofyou, O Tityrus, under the cover of a spreading beech.’

Donatus points to the presence within the sphragis of book 4 of theGeorgics of a second embedded one, consisting, as we have seen, ofthe near citation of the first line of the Eclogues. Donatus explains thissphragis-within-a-sphragis precisely as being motivated by fear (hocmetuens) that the Eclogues might not be recognized as his work. Thesphragis can be used as evidence for the Virgilian authorship of theEclogues by Donatus, who attributes to it the trustworthiness andtruth-value of a document in a way that is reminiscent of Thucydides’approach to the Hymn to Apollo.63

The dynamics of book production and circulation might offer apartial explanation for the use of editorial or supertextual indicationsof authorship and their reception: to judge from our records, titlesthemselves, consisting most often of the name of the author in thegenitive followed by the title of the book, came into use in the thirdcentury but were far from stable in antiquity.64 Titles written on theexternal margin and title tags (��ººı��Ø) on papyri rolls, useful tolocate a text on a shelf, were subject to being lost. It is perhaps for thisreason that the practice developed to insert an end-title in the inner-most and therefore safest section of the roll, though initial titles arealso found.65 Thus it is no surprise that authors chose to incorporatereferences to themselves and their place of origin in their own worksin the incipit or at the end. Since external ascription was an unstablematter, self-naming within the text was held by authors and readersto have greater authority than we might otherwise expect. Not sur-prisingly, because authorial signatures are perceived to authenticate

63 Hence Virgil is said to have given testimony (testatus sit).64 Caroli (2007); Schironi (2010) notes how indications of authorship were by no

means standard in some genres such as grammatical and oratorical texts. By theRoman period, books generally had titles (Horsfall 1981).

65 Schironi (2010: 83–4). Thus it is fruitful to investigate the ways in which theliterary device of sphragis plays and interacts with the book habit of end-titles.

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texts, the absence of self-naming or authorial inscription is cited as afactor that facilitates plagiarism. In the second century, Galen feltcompelled to write a treatise uniquely on the subject of his ownliterary production (��æ� �H N��ø �Ø�º�ø) precisely in order toclarify the content, chronology, and titles of his writings. The reasonhe gives for doing so is that his work has been mutilated by strangerswho deleted and added things, or even read out his work as their own(Galen, ��æ� �H N��ø �Ø�º�ø, Kühn 19.9.15–20). As he explains,they have been able to do this because many of his works circulatedwithout proper authorial ascription (Galen, ��æ� �H N��ø �Ø�º�ø,Kühn 19.10.4 åøæd� K�ØªæÆçB�).66

Yet the fate of the Virgilian sphragides highlights much broaderchallenges of such super- or epitextual indications of authorship.Moving on to our second Virgilian case study, according to bothDonatus and Servius, what is in our text the opening of the Aeneidwas preceded by lines which were edited out of the text by Varius(Donatus, Vita Verg. 42) or Varius and Tucca (Servius Praef. Aen.2.13), Virgil’s friends and posthumous editors. The four lines thatwere supposedly cut out of the text form a link between the threeVirgilian poems (Donatus, Vita Verg. 42):

Ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus avenacarmen, et egressus silvis vicina coegi,ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono,gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martisarma virumque cano.

I am that man who once sang on a slender reed and coming out of thewoods forced the neighbouring fields to obey their owner, howevergreedy for gain, a work pleasing to farmers, but now of Mars’ bristlingarms I sing and the man.

As in the case of other textual variants mentioned by Donatus andServius, the lines are not in the earliest manuscripts and for a varietyof reasons have been long thought to be spurious.67 Nevertheless, it isinteresting to investigate what kind of sphragis they retrospectively

66 For another anecdote linking private circulation with lack of authorial ascriptionand therefore plagiarism, see the fifteenth-century life of Virgil known as the VitaDonati aucti 68–70, expanding on a sixth-century epigram written in the personaof Virgil and found in the Codex Salmasianus (Anth. Lat. 250 SB).

67 Austin (1968); Gamberale (1991).




create for Virgil’s epic poem. A reference to the Eclogues (v. 1 gracili. . . avena; cf. Ecl. 1.2 tenui . . . avena, 10.71 gracili . . . hibisco) isfollowed by a summary of the Georgics (v. 4 gratum opus agricolis)and a bridge to the proem of the Aeneid (v. 4 at nunc . . . ). Further-more, the pre-proemium associates the poet of the Aeneid with thehero of the poem in ways that remind one of the collapsing of‘Homer’ and Odysseus in the Hymn to Apollo as well as in thebiographical tradition. For, as Andrew Laird has noted, there are anumber of noticeable linguistic correspondences between the pre-proemium and the first four lines of the Aeneid: the hero and poet areidentified in strikingly similar ways (Aen. 1.1 qui primus � quiquondam) and share a change of location (Aen. 1.2 ab oris . . . 1.2–3Laviniaque litora � egressus siluis . . . arua) and an association withgods, respectively Juno (Aen. 1.4 Iunonis ob iram) and Mars (v. 4horrentia Martis).68

The spurious ille ego pre-proemium to the Aeneid, linking twoauthentic texts, fills an apparent gap. The Eclogues and Georgics, asDonatus testifies, were ‘authorized’ by the sphragis at the end of theGeorgics, but no such authorship claim existed linking the Aeneidback to his earlier works where one might in fact be expected on theanalogy of the poet’s practice in the Georgics. From a typologicalpoint of view, the pre-proemium belongs to a distinct subcategoryof editorial fakes, namely passages interpolated to provide a measureof authorial or narrative continuity between two distinct poems.69

One such case is represented by a variant reading of the end of theIliad in a scholium that reported the arrival of an Amazon.70 Thisalternative version of the ending of the Iliad retrospectively preparesthe ground for the Aethiopis, one of the poems of the epic cycle whichdealt, among other things, with the exploits of the Amazon Penthesi-lea. The lines support the attribution of the cyclic poem to Homer,and thus confer authority on the version of the death of Achilles thatthe Aethiopis favours as against other competing accounts (e.g. theLittle Iliad’s where Achilles is killed by Telephus’ son).

68 Laird, ‘Virgil, performance and the myth of biography’, in progress.69 La Penna (1985) calls this type of spurious links ‘raccordi editoriali’.70 Schol. T Il. 24.804a remarks that ‘some write: ‘so they busied themselves with

Hector’s funeral [Il. 24.804]. And an Amazon came, a daughter of Ares the great-hearted, the slayer of men’ (�Øb� ªæ�ç�ı�Ø „S� �¥ ª’ I ç�� ç� � ‚Œ��æ��· qºŁ��’ � ÆÇ, | @æÅ�� Łıª��Åæ �ªÆº��æ�� I�æ�ç��Ø�).

274 Irene Peirano



BETWEEN BELIEF AND DISBELIEF: THEAUTHENTICATING FORCE OF THE AUTHOR

We are thus confronted with a noticeable paradox: the sphragispassage at the end of Georg. 4 is taken by Donatus to authenticatethe Eclogues and simultaneously is itself the model for the fake pre-proemium which according to the anecdote preserved in the Vitae,accompanied the Aeneid. Signature devices of different sorts—self-naming, self-citation, and editorial self-reference—which are used byauthors to authenticate their texts can just as easily be hijacked tocreate the impression of authenticity. As in the case of Homer andHesiod, claims to authorship via self-reference are often part of thecomplex apparatus of ‘authenticating devices’, which include indica-tions of textual provenance, source citations, and indications ofhistorical occasion, that are inserted to convey the impression ofreliability, but actually have the effect of parading the mendacityof the text.71 Put differently, as Simon Goldhill notes in relation tothe poet’s voice in the Homeric poems, ‘the fictive is always part of thevoice of truth’.72

The duplicitous nature of the signature and of such similar devices,however, is a symptom of their profound involvement in the verystructures of language. For the name of the author is manifestly just asign, no better and no worse than any other. Though its authenticat-ing power has been traditionally grounded in its ability to referencesomething outside of itself—the lived experience of the author—thisact of reference is entangled in the ambiguity which is characteristicof all mimetic activities, that whereby any sign can, but (crucially)need not, correspond to a reality.73 As a linguistic gesture, therefore,the signature can never fully disentangle itself from the paradoxes ofrepresentation to create the presence to which it aspires. In this way,signatures expose the tell-tale signs of the ‘real’ as a matter of easilyreproducible conventions, denouncing authenticity as ultimately amatter of persuasion rather than proof.74 In the words of the Homericpoet of the Hymn to Apollo, the future audiences will have to bepersuaded (��ÆØ) of the truth (K��ı �) of the poet’s claim

71 Feeney (1993: 238–40). 72 Goldhill (1991: 68).73 Eco (1976: 6–7) on the relation between lies, truth, and signification; and see

Harris (2000: 161–82) with specific reference to the semiotics of the signature.74 Schwartz (1996).




regarding the Delian maidens (v. 176 �ƒ �’ K�d �c ��ÆØ, K��d ŒÆdK��ı � K��Ø), just as future audiences of the Hymn will need to bepersuaded of the truth of Homer’s claim to authorship.

VIRGILIAN ANONYMITY OR PUTTING THEAUTHOR BACK INTO THE TEXT

So far I have considered the challenges and rewards of ‘onymity’—thereferencing by the text to the lived name and figure of the author—but equally interesting and worth exploring are those instances wherethe author does not name himself.75 For it is in these cases where it ismost evident how the author is ultimately only a figure postulated bythe reader, a conjecture which is formulated in the reading process tosome extent irrespective of genre and narrative style. Tracing Virgil’sreception of Homeric anonymity, one can illuminate the processwhereby, as part of the reading process, audiences retrospectivelyinscribe authors back into otherwise anonymous or unauthorizedtexts. Because of the reader’s desire for the figure of the author,anonymity can thus never be reduced to a complete lack of onymity.As we have seen, the process of constructing an author for a text

from or despite its anonymous nature already began with Homer.Thus, in the biographical tradition, to which the sphragis in theHymnto Apollo alludes in its presentation of Homer as the blind man fromChios, the Odyssean bard Demodocus is read as an allegory of thepoem’s author.76 It was this reading which informed Virgil’s choice tosign the Aeneid, not with a reference to his name as he had done inthe Georgics, but more appropriately for a Homerus Romanus, in thesong of the Carthaginian bard Iopas, who entertains Aeneas and hisfellow Trojans at the court of Dido, just as Demodocus performed forOdysseus and the Phaeacian royals (1.740–7):

. . . cithara crinitus Iopaspersonat aurata, docuit quem maximus Atlas.hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores;

75 On anonymity, see Forster (1951) and Mullan (2007).76 Sch. EV Ad Od. 8.63, see Beecroft (2011), Graziosi (2002: 138–42), and

Marincola (2007).

276 Irene Peirano



unde hominum genus et pecudes; unde imber et ignes;Arcturum pluviasque Hyadas geminosque Triones;quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soleshiberni, vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet.ingeminant plausu Tyrii, Troesque sequuntur.

Long-haired Iopas whom mighty Atlas taught plays on his golden lyre.He sings of the wandering moon and the sun’s toils, of where the raceof men and animals are from, of the origin of rain and fire, of Arcturusand the Hyades, bringers of rains, and the twin Bears; of why the winterdays hasten to dip into the Ocean, and what delays the nights so thatthey are slow to end. The Tyrians applauded repeatedly, and the Trojansfollowed suit.

In striking contrast to Demodocus’ choice of erotic (love affair of Aresand Aphrodite) and martial themes (fall of Troy), however, Virgilrepresents Iopas as a singer of nature.77 And yet, while seeminglydistancing himself from Homer, he in fact translates and echoes atseveral points the cosmological passage from the Shield of Achilles inIliad 18.78 Joe Farrell has discussed the implications of Virgil’s de-parture from his Homeric model in his choice to represent himself asa poet of natural philosophy, arguing that Iopas’ overt cosmogony isinfluenced by an exegetical reading of Demodocus’ song on the loveaffair of Ares and Aphrodite as an allegory of natural philosophy.79 Inturn, the theme of the song of Iopas can be read as an allegory of theAeneid itself, highlighting Virgil’s desire to present the foundation ofRome as a cosmogony.80

Yet another exegetical tradition, however, is lurking behind thefigure of Iopas: for if on the evidence of the Homeric Hymn toApollo one reads the figure of Demodocus as a representation ofHomer, then Iopas himself can be read as a representation of theauthor of the Aeneid prior to the composition of the poem, that is,as a writer of rerum natura in the Georgics. Virgil supports thisself-identification with an intricate web of self-references, pointingboth backwards to his earlier poems and forward to other passagesin his epic.81 Most notably, Iopas cites two lines from a problematic

77 The song of Ares and Aphrodite is oddly displaced in the mouth of a femaledivine singer, the nymph Clymene in Georg. 4.345–7.

78 v. 742 solis labores� Il. 18.484 M�ºØ� �’ IŒ� Æ�Æ with Servius Ad Aen. 1.742; v.744 � Il. 18.486; v. 745 � Il. 18.489.

79 Farrell (1991: 258–61).80 Hardie (1986: 52–66). 81 Theodorakopoulos (1997).




recusatio in the second book of the Georgics (2.481–2) in which Virgil,speaking in the first person, delivers a makarismos directed at the manwho understands rerum causae, a puzzling statement in which the poetseems to be expressing a preference for what he is in effect practising.The choice of this passage from the Georgics is far from random. It issignificant that Servius already notes Virgil’s striking use of the first-person (Servius ad 2.475me . . .Musae). Here it seems that, by alludingto this earlier passage in the same way as in the sphragis of theGeorgicshe had made a reference to Ecl. 1.1, Virgil has inaugurated the autobio-graphical reading of this first-person statement which will eventuallyculminate in the biographical anecdotes connecting him with variousEpicurean figures.82

Moreover, all of the five lines of the song of Iopas are self-citations.In v. 742, the combination canit errantem reminds one of Ecl. 6.64,where the expression is found with reference to Gallus’ wanderings inthe song of Silenus (tum canit, errantem Permessi ad flumina Gal-lum). In v. 743, the expression hominum genus et pecudes is repeatedin slightly altered form in Anchises’ speech at Aen. 6.728 (indehominum pecudumque genus), in itself a Lucretian didactic passageon the fate of the soul.83 Finally, besides 745–6 mentioned above,v. 744 is repeated exactly at Aen. 3.516, where it refers to the object ofPalinurus’ observation. Crucially, in his painstaking observationsof the stars (3.515 sidera cuncta notat tacito labentia caelo) and inhis role as interpreter and giver of signs (3.519 dat clarum e puppisignum), Palinurus echoes the poet keeper and interpreter of signs inGeorg. 1 (1.204–5 Praeterea tam sunt Arcturi sidera nobis | Haedor-umque dies seruandi et lucidus Anguis) and his model Aratus, and hasthus the potential to be taken as another figure of the author. Thereaction of Iopas’ audience—their re-echoing of their own doublingof applause (v. 747 ingeminant plausu)—should be taken as a learnedmarker of allusion, footnoting Virgil’s reduplication of his ownmaterial in the preceding passage.84

82 Catalepton 5; Vita Donati aucti 79; Servius Ad Ecl. 6.13; Servius Ad Aen. 6.264.83 Behind both passages in Aen. 1 and 6 there may be the important model of

Ennius: see v. 743 imber et ignes � Ennius, Ann. 221 Skutsch (a passage translatingEmpedoclean physics); v. 740 crinitus Iopas � Ennius, Sc. 28 Jocelyn crinitus Apollo.

84 See Georg. 1.410–11 tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces | aut quateringeminant, where the repetition of the ravens’ cry marks the engagement withAratus, Phaen. 1003–8; Ovid, Met. 3.369 ingeminant voces (Hinds 1998: 6).

278 Irene Peirano



Thus Virgil’s signature in the Aeneid blends two forms of poeticself-identification. On the one hand, there is the epic tradition,familiar from the biographical readings of the Homeric poems, ofthe poet embedding himself in the text in the figure of a bard. On theother, there is the practice of using self-citation as a form of signaturewhich Virgil already employed in the close of the Georgics, where, asDonatus noted, the poet identified himself as the author of theEclogues. The signature in the song of Iopas is a Homeric gesturemediated through a long exegetical tradition of allegorical (philo-sophical and biographical) readings of Homer, but, not unlike thesphragis of the Georgics, it is much indebted in its use of self-citationto the Hellenistic practice of poets casting themselves as both authorsand editors of their own work.85

It has long been recognized that the weaving together of differentstages of the poet’s career by way of self-citation at the close of Georg.4 may owe much to Callimachus’ editorial practice at the close ofAetia 4, where the Alexandrian poet blended together two closuraldevices.86 On the one hand, we have a form of internal ring-compos-ition achieved through self-citation: although again the context is farfrom clear, in vv. 5–6 Callimachus alludes to Hesiod by reusing twolines from the Dream in the first book of the Aetia.87 On the other,there is a supertextual closure linking the poem forward to the Iambi:though the interpretation of this passage is disputed, it seems likelythat the ‘pedestrian pasture’ (��Çe . . . � �) to which the poet willmove is to be understood as the Musa pedestris (Horace, Sat. 2.6.17)of the Iambi, the work which in the comprehensive edition of Cal-limachus’ works followed after the Aetia.88

85 In some epigrams, the author speaks qua writer to introduce or close a collection(Posidippus SH 705), or someone posing as the editor presents a book (AP 9. 205Artemidorus’ edition of a bucolic collection; AP 4.1 Meleager; Catalepton 15). SeeGabathuler (1937) and Lloyd-Jones (1963).

86 See Cucchiarelli (2008) and Fowler (1998).87 Aitia fr. 112.5–6 �fiH ��F�ÆØ ��ººa � ��Ø �� | �f

_ �Ł�ı� K��º�� Ææ’

Yå[Ø]� O�� ¥��ı (‘to him who as he was pasturing many grazing beasts, the Musesgave stories by the track of the swift horse’) � fr. 2.1-2 ��Ø �Ø BºÆ �

_��Ø �Ææ’

YåØ� O�� ¥��ı | � ˙�Ø��øfi .88 Aitia fr. 112.9 ÆP�aæ Kªg ��ı��ø ��Çe

_[�]��Ø Ø � � (‘and I move on to the

pedestrian pasture of the Muses’). This reference to the pedestrian pasture may initself be a form of ring composition if, as John Van Sickle has argued, the pedestrianpasture is to be contrasted with the high pasture of Hesiod on Mount Helicon (VanSickle 1980: 14).




But yet another Callimachean closural composition blends thetwo devices in the manner of the Virgilian sphragis, using super-textual self-citation both to establish the identity of the poet and tomark the end of the book. It is likely that Callimachus’ Epigramsended with a pair of epitaphs (30, 29 G–P), respectively on the tombof Callimachus and of that of his father.89 If it is indeed the case thatthe poems concluded the collection of epigrams, the ending of thefirst poem would have contained at least one direct reference tothe Aetia preface, since, in the voice of his father, the poet describeshimself as one who ‘sang things greater than envy’ (29.4 › �’ X�Ø��Œæ��Æ �Æ�ŒÆ�Å�), a phrase later reused by Horace in the con-cluding poem of Odes 2 (20.4 inuidiaque maior) and an obviousreference to the poet’s description of the Telchines as ‘the destructiverace of Envy’ in Aetia fr. 1.17 (BÆ�ŒÆ�Å� Oº�e ª��). This sphragisis clearly indebted to the tradition of using fictional sepulchralepigrams on the poets’ tomb as conclusions to the book (e.g. Proper-tius 1.22) and in the poet’s vitae, in which fictitious epigrams ofdifferent sorts are ‘cited’ to give evidence (cf. Gellius 1.24.2 quodtestimonium iustum esse potuisset) of various events in the author’slife.90

Callimachus and Virgil sign the text both literally by namingthemselves (Georg. 4.563 Vergilium) or their ancestors (Ep. 29.1–2G–P ˚ÆººØ �å�ı � Y�ŁØ ˚ıæÅÆ��ı �ÆE�� ŒÆd ª��Å; 30.1BÆ��Ø��ø) and/or by identifying themselves as the authors of theirother poems through self-citation, as in the case of the song of Iopasand the incorporation of the first line of the Eclogues (Tityre turecubans sub tegmine fagi) into the sphragis of the Georgics. Thetwo strategies, however, have much in common: if the name refersthe reader to the physical body of the author, self-citation directsattention to his poetic corpus. Self-quotation, self-correction, and self-allusion are thus primary vehicles for conveying the controllingpresence of the author in the text.91

89 Gutzwiller (1998: 211–13).90 Woodman (1974) on Odes 3.30 has important remarks on Horace’s play with

the tradition of epitaphs for poets at the conclusion of the Odes.91 Most (1993) on Hesiod’s self-correction at WD 11–12 (correcting Th.

225ff.).

280 Irene Peirano



CONCLUSION

As I have argued, different levels of authorial self-identification aredue to factors such as genre, context, and audience, and should not inany way be taken as indicative of the level of self-awareness of thepoet as in the case of the Homeric anonymity of Virgil in the Aeneidin contrast to the ‘onymity’ of the Georgics.92 More to the point, genreis a useful concept with which to approach authorial self-identifica-tion, not just because it is a variable in whether and to what extent apoet chooses or not to name himself, but also because, in namingthemselves, poets cast the encounter of audiences with their work in alanguage that is generically marked. Self-naming, that is, is not aneutral activity, but one mediated, imagined, and filtered throughthe genres in which memory is enacted. Moreover, I have suggestedthat indications of authorship possess a symbolic rather than a prac-tical function for the audience.93 The signature, heralded as anemblem of truth, has in effect no practical value in establishing orprotecting authorship. Caught on the threshold of text and world, theauthor and his name are inescapably intransitive: they refer the readerback to something outside of the text—a ‘real’ person, a subjectresponsible for the content of the writing—and thereby potentiallyenhance the credibility of the text. However, in the final analysis theynever leave the domain of the textual, not only because, as we haveseen, this outside subject and his intentions regarding the text areforever elusive, but also because indications of authorship are notimmune from the paradoxes shared by all representations, which,while claiming to reproduce reality, create only an illusion of the real.The author’s name does, however, possess abundant symbolic

meaning for the audience: if they are willing to believe it, it tellsthem that they are listening to an authoritative version of the trad-ition and involves them in the process of disseminating this versionassociated with the poet’s name. The signature works as an injunctionnot by protecting the text but by summoning the audience’s beliefthat they are listening to an authoritative version. If they are willing tosubscribe to this fiction of presence and immediacy, the author’sname delivers the illusion of authorial maintenance in what is ultim-ately, however, nothing but a triumph of signification.

92 See Osborne (2010) against the idea that artists’ signatures signal a presumedrise of the individual artist.

93 See Platt (2006) with reference to the social function of seal stones.




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Ille Ego qui quondam: on authorial (an)onymity

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