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(MIS)READING THE GNAT: TRUTH AND DECEPTION IN THE PSEUDO-VIRGILIAN CVLEX

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2019

Talitha Kearey
Talitha Kearey*
Affiliation:
Magdalen College, Oxfordtalitha.kearey@magd.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

The Culex—the earliest and best attested of the purported minor works of Virgil, and the most outright in gesturing towards Virgilian authorship—poses a problem for modern classical scholarship. Since at least the seventeenth century scholars have been preoccupied with the poem's authenticity. Is it a piece of early Virgilian iuuenilia, as the ancient testimonies and mediaeval transmission of the text seem to assert, or a later production? If a later production, should we see it as a deliberate forgery, or as a poem severed in the course of transmission from its original author and helplessly swept up in Virgil's train? The authenticity problem has proven persistent: as recently as the 1970s, scholars tried to claim the Culex for Virgil. Even among those who think it non-Virgilian, the apparent consensus of anonymous late-Tiberian authorship has been contested by Otto Zwierlein's suggestion of M. Julius Montanus and Jean-Yves Maleuvre's, even more unlikely, of Augustus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 174 - 196
Copyright
Copyright ©Ramus 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Emily Gowers, Bob Kaster and Irene Peirano Garrison for their comments, suggestions and encouragement. Glenn Most and Irene Peirano Garrison kindly shared prepublication material with me. This article originated as an essay submitted for a Cambridge MPhil degree in April 2014, under the wise supervision of Philip Hardie, and was substantially reworked during a stay at the Fondation Hardt (Vandœuvres, Switzerland); I am grateful to the Roman Society and Cambridge's Faculty of Classics for enabling that visit. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503897/1).

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