Evangelos Karakasis - T. Calpurnius Siculus: A Pastoral Poet in Neronian Rome

Evangelos Karakasis

T. Calpurnius Siculus

Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes

Edited by

Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos

Scientific Committee

Alberto Bernab Margarethe Billerbeck

Claude Calame Philip R. Hardie Stephen J. Harrison

Stephen Hinds Richard Hunter Christina Kraus

Giuseppe Mastromarco Gregory Nagy

Theodore D. Papanghelis Giusto Picone

Kurt Raaflaub Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 35

ISBN 978-3-11-046804-5

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-047325-4

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-047269-1

ISSN 1868-4785

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;

detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen

www.degruyter.com

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in postVergilian Roman pastoral, especially in Calpurnius Siculus, with several important commentaries and individual papers focusing on various aspects of his bucolic poems. In terms of this revival of interest, the main aim of this book is to offer a systematic reading of Calpurnian poetics from the viewpoint of generic evolution and within the historical context of the Neronian period. Some of the material included in this book has already been published as separate papers on individual poems; however, it has been revised in the light of new research and bibliographic data, and has been enriched and incorporated into a book exploring Calpurnian poetics as a whole.

I would like here to express my deepest thanks to friends and colleagues who have helped me during the preparation of this book: first, I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for their valuable remarks overall and in points of detail. Many thanks are also due to Prof. R. L. Hunter (University of Cambridge) who has kindly discussed with me several thorny pastoral issues and given me his insightful feedback. A special debt of gratitude goes to Prof. T. D. Papanghelis (University of Thessaloniki and Academy of Athens), who proved once again a bucolic Mentor, helping me decisively in forming my ideas on the generic evolution of Calpurnian pastoral and its historical contextualisation; his continuous help, thoughtprovoking remarks and invaluable criticism made me reassess several problems and bring this book to its completion. Last but not least, I would like to warmly thank Prof. A. Rengakos (University of Thessaloniki and Academy of Athens); his constant interest in the progress of my work, his strong willingness for help and assistance, his unfailing eagerness to include this book in the Trends in Classics Series make him yet again worthy of many special and cordial thanks.

The dating of Calpurnius life and works still remains a hotly debated issue. Suggestions include the late first century, after Statius, the reign of Domitian, the period of Severus Alexander, in the third century AD, or the end of the third, sometimes even the fourth century. It has also been proposed that the poet, although of a later date, chose to set his bucolics in the Neronian years , a poetic panegyric most probably in praise of C. Calpurnius Piso.

Modern scholarship attributes seven bucolic poems to Calpurnius, although until the 19 th c. (Haupt 1875) Nemesianus four pastoral poems were mistakenly transmitted under Calpurnius name. The text of Calpurnius bucolic poems is based on two manuscript families.

As observed above (cf. pp. 1 2), Calpurnius must have flourished in the first hopeful and promising years of the Neronian regime, the socalled quinquennium Neronis , during which the interest in the revival of the Augustan ideals (political, social and literary) was vigorous eat: it is not suggested here that pastoral is a timefree generic zone; one could easily understand that Calpurnius, as a late comer, zooming out the previous literary traditions and their occasional fine nuances does not always play by Vergils generic rules either in forming the generic profile of his bucolic poetry or in depicting various generic interplays. Nonetheless the surrounding literary milieu of Calpurnius floruit ,with its penchant for revival or even inversion of Augustan literary trends, may justify some of the research aims set out above (cf. above, p. 5). From this perspective, the present book aims to examine the ways in which the Calpurnian text converses with the previous pastoral tradition, and to focus on the means (themes, motifs, intertexts, language and style) that Calpurnius employs in order to suggest his generic ambivalence, his generic branching out towards forms of nontraditional pastoral discourse. The manner in which Calpurnius generic modification is applied to wellknown metalinguistic signs related to Neoteric pastoral poetics, which permeates Vergilian pastoral, will also form an important concern of the readings to follow. A further objective of the present study is to set the poems in their social and historical contexts and, thus, to read the various formalistic changes discerned on the basis of a historicising analysis of the pastoral data.