When I began my first academic job almost 40 years ago, there was widespread agreement on how poetry would be treated within the scholarly community. Bibliographers would produce a text, which would then be interpreted through a succession of theories ranging from structuralism to deconstruction. In the 1980s and 1990s the so-called ‘new historicism’ shifted the emphasis from theory to history, with a focus on texts and their power to shape events as well as to reflect them. Around the same time the niche discipline of bibliography evolved into a much broader field called book history, which insisted that the material form that carries a text also plays a key part in its interpretation.
As readers of this journal know, Classics struggled during this period to find its place within these broader developments. Some theories like narratology and feminism were embraced by some Classicists, but for most of us the default position remained similar to what it had been for centuries, with philology providing a method both for generating texts and for interpreting them within the culture in which they had been produced. The perception that interpretation changes over time received somewhat greater acceptance as what had been called the classical tradition evolved into reception studies, but the material turn that became more pronounced in postclassical studies did not seem to offer much promise for a period in which most texts survive only in books and manuscripts from later centuries. Ancient Latin Poetry Books shows that far more can be done here than has generally been imagined.
What turns out to be an important book begins in a rather unsatisfactory way. It is not unreasonable for the author of a book like this to begin by clarifying what the object of study is, so that most of the substantive introduction is devoted to clarifying what poetry was understood to be in antiquity. The discussion goes well beyond key figures like Plato and Aristotle and the basic terms like mimesis and poesis / poema / poietes, but after 20 pages we get exactly the conclusion we would expect: ‘it is undeniable that meter was throughout antiquity the main distinctive factor of poetry … common readers would undoubtedly call poetry any versified composition’ (p. 21).
N.M. uses this commonplace conclusion, however, to provide a clear structure for the rest of the book. If metre is the determining factor for what constituted poetry in antiquity, then it makes perfect sense to devote a chapter each to hexameter, elegiac and dramatic poetry. Since the object of study is the ancient manuscripts that carry the poetry, each of the first three chapters is divided into three subsections: authors and texts, codicology and palaeography. The first subsection offers an overview of which of the 35 known manuscripts that carry secular Latin poetry and date from the first century bce to the sixth century ce contain poetry written in a given metre. The codicology subsection provides detailed information about how the books are constituted, and a similarly broad definition is applied to palaeography, which here includes signs and annotations as well as the description and dating of the scripts. A final chapter collects the basic conclusions and draws out the broader cultural significance of the study.
In addition to these analyses, the volume contains a 65-page descriptive catalogue that provides the relevant data on all 35 ancient Latin poetry books in table form. Some of the information is available elsewhere, but N.M. has checked and corrected everything to which he was able to get access and gathered it together in one place. There are also two appendices, the first devoted to the reconstruction of fragmentary manuscripts and the second to the metrical layout of Vat. lat. 3226, an important Terence manuscript. This material, which adds 100 pages of detailed data to the book, offers much valuable information for future research, and N.M. is to be commended for doing all this work, and the publisher deserves praise for agreeing to publish it.
A review like this is not the place to list findings about individual manuscripts, but three conclusions with broader ramifications emerge. First, an initial distinction is made between Latin fragments that were found in Egypt and the Middle East, and late antique manuscripts that were anchored in the Latin West and have been preserved for the most part in libraries there. The former group has traditionally been the province of papyrologists whose focus is inclined towards the Greek East, while the latter group has been studied by codicologists and palaeographers whose attention has been directed to the cultural history of the Latin West. Often the two groups do not communicate with one another, but this study makes it clear that they should.
As N.M. notes, his research can and should be extended into several areas: many new developments and ramifications are possible, not least the material and contextual analysis of early medieval manuscripts of Latin poetry, including Christian verse works. As mentioned in the introduction to the book, the study of the layout of Christian poems, which had a metrical structure greatly different from classical forms, would undoubtedly yield interesting results. A similar inquiry could be applied to ancient Latin prose books, which are more numerous and represent a greater number of literary genres than their poetic counterparts. The materiality of the Greek poetry book has garnered much deserved attention in the past few years, but it can still bear new fruits. The study of the layout of lyric poetry in papyri, for instance, would add to our understanding of Alexandrian ecdotics, as would an exhaustive analysis of the colometry of comedy papyri (p. 199).
Finally, this volume provides evidence on yet another level of the pervasive, dominant place of Virgil in the ancient world. The importance of the codices Vergiliani antiquiores, which include the oldest, best and most complete of the ancient poetry books, is well known, but when they are placed into the corpus of material that is studied here, it becomes clear that there are more ancient manuscripts of Virgil (eighteen) than there are of all the other Latin poets put together (seventeen). What is also striking is the presence of multiple Virgil manuscripts in the Greek East, where they were carried by Roman officials who were stationed there or used by Greek speakers who wanted a better control of the language and culture of power in the eastern Mediterranean. Adding the material element to the study of the arrangement of poetry books as seen, for example, in the essays in volume thirteen of Arethusa, which is dedicated to the ‘Augustan Book of Poetry’, confirms that ‘Virgil is by himself a symbol of romanitas and his works were almost invariably present wheresoever the Latin language was present’ (p. 197).
I am left with both a feeling of regret and one of gratitude for this book. When I began working on my Protean Virgil (2015), I began with medieval manuscripts because I did not see how to use the limited amount of surviving evidence from antiquity to show how the physical form of the book helped guide its interpretation during this period. But regret over what I was not able to do there is coupled with gratitude to N.M., who has provided the guidance on how that missing chapter can now be written.
