The Epic Successors of Virgil

'This is a short book on some very long poems written in the first 130 years of the Roman empire: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Statius' Thebaid, Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, and Silius Italicus' Punica. My aim above all is to throw light on the dynamics of a tradition. Tradition is often felt negatively as a dead weight; I shall have succeeded if I encourage in my reader a sense that these monstrous poems are possessed of a restless and fertile energy and that close to the surface of their hides there is stretched an intricately sensitive nerve-system.

'In literary terms the source of this dynamism is Virgil's Aeneid. One of the greatnesses of this apparently definitive Roman epic is its ability to spawn a vigorous progeny. The successors to Virgil, at once respectful and rebellious, constructed a space for themselves through a 'creative imitation' that exploited the energies and tensions called up but not finally expended or resolved in the Aeneid.'

--Philip Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge University Press 1993), p. 1

Michael Choniates, a reader of Nicander

Michael Choniates was Metropolitan of Athens in the early 13th century, a learned man who loved the ancient world and wrote with sadness about the barbarous conditions to which Athens had fallen in his time. I found him through a letter he'd written which in part praised the work another man had done in making Nicander accessible to others. In the following poem (number 6) the opening is unmistakably--though metaphorically--Nicandrean:

Δράκοντι δηχθεὶς καὶ νοητοῖς σκορπίοις,
θνήσκων τε μικροῦ καὶ τὰ λοίσθια πνέων
ἀναθεωρῶ τὸν κρεμασθέντα ξύλῳ,
ὡς καὶ θανών πως ἀναβιῴην πάλιν.

'Having been bitten by a dragon and by mental scorpions, close to death and breathing my last, I reconsider the one hanging on the wood, how even having died I might somehow return to life.'

The poem continues (with two more Nicandrean images), but I'll leave it for now since I really should be getting ready for the German exam. There are a few things I have questions about (ζωὴ μόνος?), but for the most part it's clear: a prayer for everlasting life.

Ἀνάστασις γάρ ἐστι καὶ ζωὴ μόνος, (5)
ὡς ἀμνὸς αἴρων κοσμικὴν ἁμαρτίαν.
Εἰ χάλκεος γὰρ καὶ τυπικός τις ὄφις
ἑρπυστικῶν δήγμασι θανατουμένους
ἐζωοποίει προςδεδορκότας μόνον,
πῶς οὐκ ἂν αὐτὸς ἐξαναστήσεις, ἄναξ, (10)
κέντρῳ πεπληγότα με τῆς ἁμαρτίας
καὶ κείμενον δείλαιον ὡς τεθνηκότα
καὶ βλέμμ’ ἀνατείνοντα πρὸς σὲ καὶ μόνον;
Ἀλλ’, ὦ πρὸς ὕψος ἀναβὰς θεοῦ λόγε,
ὡς πάντας ἄρδην πρὸς σεαυτὸν ἑλκύσαις, (15)
ὡς αἰχμαλωτεύσειας αἰχμαλωσίαν,
ὡς αὐτὸς εἶπας καὶ Δαυὶδ ψάλλων ᾄδει,
ἕλκυσον, ἀπάλλαξον αἰχμαλωσίας
καὶ προςλαβοῦ με τὸν κακοῖς ἀπωσμένον
χερσὶ ταθείσαις σταυρικῇ διατάσει, (20)
καὶ ζωοποιῷ σῷ τριταίῳ θανάτῳ
ἔμπνευσον ἐμπνεύσαντι παλινζωίαν
ὡς πνεύματι ζῶ σήν τε νέκρωσιν φέρω
καὶ συμμετάσχω, σῶτερ, ἀειζωίας.

Naked Philosophers

I just came across the following in a section of Prudentius' Hamartigenia in which he is expounding on the wickedness of fallen man. I'm fairly certain I've never seen the italicized word before or, if I have, I don't recall it.

Inde canina foro latrat facundia toto;
hinc gerit Herculeam vilis sapientia clavam
ostentatque suos vicatim gymnosofistas,
incerat lapides fumosos idololatrix
religio et surdis pallens advolvuitur aris. (401-5)

Guess I may have to go to Pliny 7.2.2 to check it out.

Horace Manuscript Tradition

A little while ago, I put up a couple of posts on the transmission of classical texts and the Carolingian Renaissance. Recently I needed to look at Horace's second Epode and had recourse to David Mankin's commentary in the 'Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics' series. In section 7 of the introduction, he has the following to say about Horatian manuscripts:

It appears that after their publication in the late first century BC Horace's works went in and out of fashion but never ceased to be read in parts, if not the whole, of the Roman world. Nevertheless, the earlies manuscripts (MSS) containing them date only to the ninth century AD, when there may have been a kind of 'Horatian revival' at the court of Charlemagne. These MSS seem to be the ancestors of the countless others from later centuries, and are the only ones that modern scholars draw on for composition of the text.