In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the Appendix V ergiliana, the Appendix Tibulliana and what one might call the Appendix Ovidiana. This new book by F. is the first English commentary on the elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana (AT) in a century. It is also the first in the new OUP series Pseudepigrapha Latina co-edited by A. Augoustakis, R. Kaster, C. Kraus and F. herself, promising to offer ‘modern commentaries on frequently neglected, falsely attributed, and anonymous Latin texts’. F.’s book fulfils this promise. The book is not intended for the absolute beginner in elegy but requires some prior knowledge and experience of the genre. It includes an introduction, text and commentary, followed by a bibliography and two useful indexes, an index locorum and an index nominum et rerum.
In the introduction F. lays out with clarity the most common topoi, motifs and standard features of Latin love elegy, as the poems of the AT are located in this generic context. (F. does not discuss poem 3.7, the hexameter Panegyric to Messalla, because it is not elegiac and it is incongruous within the AT. She also leaves out the two Priapea, the prose vita of Tibullus and the funerary epigram for Tibullus and Virgil that appear at the end of most manuscripts of [Tib.] 3.) She rightly notes that whereas [Tib.] 3 displays a significant number of readily recognisable elegiac features, there are also variations and deviations from the elegiac norms. F. discusses the hard-to-determine status of women in elegy and in [Tib.] 3, issues of intertextuality and referentiality that are prominent in [Tib.] 3 as well as metapoetic discourse and nuances. An important section of F.’s introduction is the discussion of poetry in the context of Augustan Rome, since, regardless of the actual time of their composition, the poems in [Tib.] 3 situate themselves in the late Augustan period. F. treats significant issues such as patronage, literary circles (Maecenas’ and Messalla's), poetic community, recitation, censorship and freedom of speech. She also presents three of the most frequent and influential theoretical approaches to amatory elegy (the ‘historicist’; the ‘formalist’/‘symbolic’; the ‘feminist’/‘gendered’). Particularly useful is the section on the names/pseudonyms of the major characters of the AT. F. also examines the question of women as authors in antiquity and the notion of mutability of identity, with emphasis of course on Sulpicia. F. prefers to treat Sulpicia's poetry as ‘an authentically recovered female voice from antiquity’ (p. 53); however, she sensibly admits that it is impossible to ascertain whether Sulpicia was in fact a woman. F. seeks to incorporate her into the mainstream and does not consider her as a separate category from male poets.
F. intends to read the poems as a single book of poetry, in which details of a relationship are told in various ways and from different viewpoints. She uses the standard, single-book numbering system and adopts the traditional authorial/cyclical division of the AT: poems 1–6 by Lygdamus, stand-alone poem 7, poems 8–12 (the ‘garland of Sulpicia’ written by an anonymous amicus of Sulpicia, although 9 and 11, or even all of them, may be Sulpician), poems 13–18 by Sulpicia, poems 19–20 of anonymous authorship. F. hesitantly takes the cycles of poems 8–12 and 13–18 to be separate, but clearly sees the connection between them, as the ‘garland poetry’ (8–12) is written in response to Sulpicia's poems (13–18). She states that it is hard, and surely arbitrary, to distinguish between the ‘anonymous’ poems and poems written by Lygdamus, Sulpicia or her amicus, since we practically know nothing about these poets and/or about the person(s) that collected and ordered the poems. In fact, we do not even know how these poems came to be together.
F. inevitably addresses the rather contentious and hotly disputed questions of priority, dating and authorship of the AT. Her approach is balanced and cautious. She introduces the various and often contradictory views on these issues, and she refers the readers to fuller treatments. She repeatedly declares that the problem of authorship in and of the corpus ‘is likely to be insoluble’ (p. 26). She is equally cautious about the dating of the poems: she considers it possible that they were written in the Augustan period ‘by a coterie of contemporary poets working closely together either with or without Tibullus himself’ (p. 58), but she does not rule out the possibility that this collection is ‘an accretion of later texts carefully assimilated into the work of Tibullus along the model of the Appendix V ergiliana’ (p. 58).
F. prints the text of F.W. Lenz and G.K. Galinsky (Albii Tibulli aliorumque carminum libri tres [3rd ed. 1971]) without apparatus and with only a few differences, which she discusses in the commentary ad loc. The translation of the poems would have been a most welcome addition to the book.
The comments on each poem are preceded by informative short introductions in which F. examines the generic identity of the poems, and whether and how they fit into their cycles and into the AT (my favourite introductions are those of the poems beginning the cycles: 3.1, 3.8 and 3.13; 3.4 has a rich introduction too).
Every couplet is conveniently printed in the commentary section, so readers do not need to page back and forth from the text of the poems to the appropriate commentary. Lemmata begin with general matters and move towards particular issues. Numerous cross-references throughout the book guide the reader. F. successfully elucidates and explains the difficulties of the poems. She focuses on literary analysis, however, the reader may also find useful grammatical and syntactical information, as well as discussions of stylistic, metrical and textual matters. F. draws comparisons with other elegiac works but also cites usages from other genres; she generally does not look beyond the first century ce for parallels. Her analysis reflects a deep understanding and mastery of the poems. I found rich material in the comments on: the Kalendae Martis and the Matronalia (3.1.1–2), poetry as a gift (3.1.9–10), family members in elegy (3.2.13–14), ancient attitude towards the visual contrast between white and scarlet/purple (3.4.29–30), castus poeta (3.4.43), the ‘hard-hearted’ topos (3.4.85–6), lions and lionesses (3.6.15–16), the implicit recusatio with arma cadant (3.8.3–4), credula turba (3.10.17–18), mea grandia narret (3.13.5), to name but a few. The highlights of F.’s commentary are too many to include in the limited space of this review. Typos and misprints are notably few for a book of such content and size.Footnote 1 The book is beautifully produced, with a lovely detail from Edward John Poynter's ‘Reading’ on the jacket.
This is a well-rounded, user-friendly literary commentary. F. is to be commended for offering a most valuable contribution to the study of the AT. With its wealth of information and the excellent, clear and lucid insights it provides, this book will be an essential point of reference for any future scholarship on [Tib.] 3 and will certainly spur further interest in these unjustly overlooked poems.
