A NEW ACROSTIC AND TELESTIC AT LAVS PISONIS 227–30?

Abstract This article proposes a new acrostic (SAPI) and telestic (SOIS) at Laus Pisonis 227–30. Their position opposite one another is an indication that they are to be read as a single sentence and an admonition to both dedicatee and reader that poet and patron need each other to gain eternal fame. The telestic allows us to reconstruct the poet's usus scribendi of the reflexive possessive pronoun suus.

I would happily, dear sir, join you and throughout my life my songs would rival your qualities: I will go more loftily if you open up to me the road to fame, if you remove the shadow [of obscurity].What use is a hidden vein of precious metal if it does not have someone to mine it?What use is a boat if it, hidden in a quiet port, lacks a captain, even though it is fitted out with all the tackle and could let down its flowing sails from the smooth mast, if someone just slackened the rope.Even the poet who makes his poem on Aeneas resound among the peoples of Italy, who with his mighty reputation traverses Mt Olympus and challenges the old Maeonian with a Latin-speaking mouth, might have played his reed in vain, unknown to those peoples, and his poem might have remained hidden in the shadow of the grove, if he had lacked a Maecenas.
Despite some textual turmoil in lines 228-9, 3 we find opposite one another the words SAPI SOIS, forming the sentence 'to be savoured by' or 'known among one's own'. 4I submit that, even though we need not accept the telestic since SAPI alone makes perfect sense in context and vis-à-vis the LP's coda, there is added point in reading it alongside SOIS (as an alternative to suis).Before turning to the telestic's orthography and the poem's programme of alphabetic play, I consider what the poet wishes to convey.
To return to the orthography of the (archaicizing or dialectical?)sois for suis: it is curious but not unheard of.We should be wary of retrojecting the modernized conventions of Late(r) Antiquity into earlier texts, as it is likely that our texts displayed greater orthographical and dialectic variation than the manuscripts would lead us to believe. 5Our form sois is attested in epigraphical evidence, 6 has a solid basis in 3 See the apparatus criticus in Seel (n. 2) and Di Brazzano (n. 2) for the word order in the second half of line 228: all manuscripts, however, have malo at line-end so that the o in SOIS is guaranteed.In line 229 Di Brazzano prints t 3 's rudente rather than F's rudenti, traditionally preferred by editors: the former is found in the earliest sixteenth-century editions and in a marginal note in t by a sixteenthcentury hand, doubtlessly copied from a contemporary edition (cf.Di Brazzano [n.2], 119-20).The latter is surely lectio difficilior, as Seel (n. 2), ad loc.realizes, but not quite as rare as Di Brazzano makes out ([n. 2], 374-5; to his n.437 add German.Arat.154, a close parallel, printed by E. Baehrens (ed.), Poetae Latini Minores 1 [Leipzig, 1879]), and the consensus of all florilegia, including t (12th-13th cent.).It may be another archaic(izing) feature: cf.LHS § §355-7 (1.433-41) and below.
4 OLD s.v.sapio 1 and 6b. 5 So R. Tarrant, Text, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism (Cambridge, 2016), 5.If we accept the telestic, this provides insight into the poet's spelling habits. 6The uncontracted Old Latin soueis is found in CIL XI.1 3078, CIL IX 4463 = I.2 1861 (3rd-2nd cent.B.C.), souom in CIL VI.1 373 = VI.4.2 30926 = I.2 727.These could represent a middle stage in a historical linguistics (cf.*sew-> souos > suus vs the parallel development of *su̯ os > *sos, the latter not to be confused with the demonstrative), 7 and eventually the stem so-returned in several (Gallo-)Romance languages. 8Perhaps our form was retained or (re)created by analogy in the poet's local dialect.If the telestic represents the poet's usus scribendi, future editors might wish to print forms of the reflexive possessive pronoun with the stem so-rather than su-.
It is tempting to think that the letters of the acrostic and the telestic in the poem's mise-en-page were highlighted through rubrication, but there is no hard evidence for such practices in the Neronian period, to which the LP conventionally is dated.Nevertheless, in the passage discussed above and in that on the ludus latrunculorum (played with black and white pieces) yielding the other known instances of alphabetic play in the poem, the poet contrasts light and dark, as he does throughout. 9Some believe that acrostics contain metapoetical clues of rubrication. 10Do the new acrostic and telestic hint at this practice?Given the LP's imitation of material culture elsewhere we might not dismiss the idea out of hand. 11If so, the acrostic and the telestic in our passage, like the mesostic and the telestic in that on the ludus latrunculorum, enact the relationship between poet and patron (it takes two to play, just as poet and patron need each other to win fama) as well as reader and medium (without readers, no fama for poet or patron but also no successful decoding of the text, which can now be read horizontally and vertically).
If Piso was willing to look past the superficial appearance of both poet and poem, so should we: perhaps we will find more messages encoding eternal glory hiding in the shadows of the text, and so give the poet and Piso the fama they are due.GARY P. VOS University of Edinburgh gvos@exseed.ed.ac.uk doi:10.1017/S0009838823000964PRISCE, IVBES (PLINY, EP. 6.15)

ABSTRACT
In the famous exchange between Passennus Paulus and Javolenus Priscus at Plin.Ep. 6.15, it has not been previously recognized that Priscus' reply is metrical and carries on the hexameter begun by Paulus.This opens up some interesting new possibilities for the interpretation of the letter.Keywords: Pliny; Roman poetry; dialogue; stichomythia; letters In a letter of uncertain date to Voconius Romanus, Pliny relates a story about Passennus Paulus, a Roman knight and scholar who fancied himself a writer of elegiac verse.One day Paulus was giving a public reading of his poetry, attended by a number of his friends and acquaintances.Among them was a certain Javolenus Priscus.At this event the following famous exchange occurred between Paulus and Priscus: [Paulus] cum recitaret, ita coepit dicere: 'Prisce, iubes …'.ad hoc Iauolenus Priscus (aderat enim ut Paulo amicissimus): 'ego uero non iubeo.' cogita qui risus hominum, qui ioci.est omnino Priscus dubiae sanitatis, interest tamen officiis, adhibetur consiliis atque etiam ius ciuile publice respondet: quo magis quod tunc fecit et ridiculum et notabile fuit.interim Paulo aliena deliratio aliquantum frigoris attulit.tam sollicite recitaturis prouidendum est, non solum ut sint ipsi sani uerum etiam ut sanos adhibeant. 1ulus was giving a public reading and began by saying 'You bid me, Priscus-', at which Javolenus Priscus, who was present as a great friend of Paulus, exclaimed 'Indeed I don't!'You can imagine the laughter and witticisms which greeted this remark.It is true that Priscus is somewhat eccentric, but he takes part in public functions, is called on for advice, and is also one of the official experts on civil law, which makes his behaviour on this occasion 11 Inscribed texts regularly made letters stand out by using brightly coloured stones or inks: see (with a spatiotemporal spread) several essays in A. Petrovic, I. Petrovic and E. Thomas (edd.),The Materiality of Text: Placement, Perception, and Presence of Inscribed Texts in Classical Antiquity (Leiden and Boston, 2019), 260, 308, 388, 390-4.