This volume brings together studies approaching Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius and his poetry from different disciplines such as ancient history, philosophy, history of art (ancient and modern) and Classical literature. It also contains a new typographic presentation of Optatian's gridded poems (carmina cancellata), figure poems and other poems with acrostichs, mesostichs and telestichs, the text of which is based on Polara's 1973 edition.
S.’s introduction, ‘Optatian and his Lettered Art’, introduces both Optatian and the volume. S. situates Optatian's poems in their historical context and literary tradition and summarises their reception, which was particularly rich in the Middle Ages, and Optatian scholarship.
W.’s ‘Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius: the Man and his Book’ fully lives up to its title: it re-examines the testimonia of Optatian's life, arguing that after a curious standstill in Optatian's senatorial career and exile, his governorship in Achaea and brief terms as urban prefect document Constantine's goodwill towards the poet. W. also confirms the authenticity of the two letters between Optatian and Constantine and summarises his conclusions in a very useful biographical table. My only reservation concerns W.’s literal reading of how Optatian (Carm. 1.7–8) describes the codex which he is sending to Constantine (p. 134): as W. is well aware (p. 125), Optatian repeatedly alludes to Ovid's Tristia in the opening poems, and since hardly any scholar would nowadays take Ovid at his word when he describes the roll and paper of Tristia 1 (cf. e.g. G.D. Williams, ‘Representations of the Book-Roll in Latin Poetry: Tr. 1.1.3–14 and Related Texts’, Mnemosyne 45 [1992], 178–89), a more literary reading of Optatian's description seems worth considering.
In ‘Optatian and the Court Riddlers’ J. Kwapisz places two of Optatian's figure poems (Carm. 26 [altar] and Carm. 27 [panpipes]) in the Hellenistic and imperial Greek tradition of pattern poems, in particular Vestinus’ Altar and its political potential as court poetry, here drawing also on parallels with Leonides of Alexandria's isopsephic epigrams.
Playing games as a way of writing and reading poetry is at the heart of A.-L. Körfer's ‘Lector ludens: Spiel und Rätsel in Optatians Panegyrik’. After a brief survey of the use of games and riddles in late-antique poetry, she reads Carm. 6 as a board game in which the reader (and Constantine as the ideal reader) will re-perform Constantine's success in the recent war against the Sarmatians. In this way, the praised emperor takes an active role in the construction of panegyric.
M. Rühl, ‘Vielschichtige Palimpseste: Optatians Gedichte und die Möglichkeit individueller Lektüren’, focuses on the reader's role in constructing meaning in Optatian's multi-layered poetry by reading the poems in combination with those next to them in the collection (e.g. Carm. 6 and 7, and Carm. 8 and 9) and by considering the epic models of Carm. 16, 11 and 14.
Optatian's use of space and his combination of various poetic (e.g. the arrangement of the words on the page, the Muses’ vertical space of inspiration) and political (e.g. exile, the empire) spaces are the subject matter of M.-O. Bruhat's ‘The Treatment of Space in Optatian's Poetry’. For the discussion of exilic space in Carm. 1–3, she focuses in particular on the allusions to Ovid's exile poetry. Her broad understanding of ‘space’ branches out in real and metaphorical spaces while providing coherence to her discussion.
The following two chapters (P. Schierl and C. Scheidegger Lämmle, ‘Herrscherbilder: Optatian und die Strukturen des Panegyrischen’, and I. Männlein-Robert, ‘Morphogrammata – Klangbilder? Überlegungen zu Poetik und Medialität bei Optatian’) focus on Optatian's Carm. 3, the former comparing the poem to common panegyric practices as well as representations of emperors in art and arguing that it exposes and overcomes the limits of the conventional panegyric discourse by its intermediality, and the latter exploring the multi-mediality of the poem (the weaving, painting and singing of the Muse), the potential significance of the shape created by its intext (eagle, butterfly or phoenix) and the often neglected vocal and oral aspects of Optatian's poetry.
In ‘Elementorum varius textus: Atomistisches und Anagrammatisches in Optatians Textbegriff’, M. Bažil situates Optatian's imagery of textus (‘fabric’ and ‘structure’) and its elements in a diachronic series of allusions to atomic understandings of language (in particular in Lucretius and Manilius) and their multiple ways of constructing meaning (e.g. by anagrams) and synchronically in Christian approaches to texts, for example Proba's cento, which draw attention to their construction and inherent meaning.
A study of the 20 individual words that make up Optatian's Carm. 25 is at the centre of A. Pelttari's ‘A Lexicographical Approach to the Poetry of Optatian’. He argues that such studies are useful for the rest of Optatian's work and late Latin (and Greek) poetry more generally. Indeed, his chapter provides a welcome counterpoint to most others in that it explores the meaning and uses of Optatian's words in depth. Despite my high estimation of his approach, I failed to understand where his lexicographical approach would be superior to a thorough literary commentary (still to be written), and I wondered why he discussed the OLD (alongside the TLL) as a resource for lexicographical research on late Latin poetry (not without highlighting its limited relevance) and does not even mention Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary (or Blaise's Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens).
T. Habinek, ‘Optatian and his Œuvre: Explorations in Ontology’, positions Optatian's poetry in the intellectual, philosophical, hermeneutical and artistic context of his time and reads the ‘diversity-in-unity’ of Optatian's poems as expressing ontological concerns. Habinek's chapter provides a broad account of philosophical thinking and aesthetic trends at the time and shows how Optatian reflects them, in particular Stoic categories, allegoresis and conceptions of colour and light.
The materiality of Optatian's book of poetry and his use of Christian names (e.g. ‘Jesus’ in Carm. 8) and symbols (e.g. XP in Carm. 8, 14, 19 and 24, cross in Carm. 24, ship in Carm. 19) are at the centre of S. Lunn-Rockliffe's chapter, ‘The Power of the Jewelled Style: Christian Signs and Names in Optatian's versus intexti and on Gems’. She compares these to inscribed gemstones and other material evidence and situates them in the syncretic context of Christian magic. As seal-rings and military standards would be able to identify, save and protect their wearers due to the power inherent in the Christian symbols, so would Optatian's poems.
In his learned ‘Conceptual Poetry: Rethinking Optatian from Contemporary Art’ J. Hernández Lobato highlights the self-referentiality, tautology and meta-discursivity of Optatian's poetry as well as their nature as ‘open texts’ and compares them to examples from twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and art such as Borges’ writing, Kosuth's ‘One and Three Chairs’ and Darboven's ‘00-99 / 100 à 19 × 42N° / 2 K-61’. He finds in Optatian's conceptual poetry evidence for philosophical, theological and hermeneutical notions of his time, for instance the problematisation of language, representation, meaning, semiotics or notions of time and infinity.
J. Elsner and J. Henderson round off the volume with a diptychic envoi: Elsner discusses Optatian's importance as a witness of the Roman Empire on the verge of Christianisation and highlights the parallels between this religious turning point and that in our own time. Henderson's essay left me puzzled, but will undoubtedly enthuse his fans. He seems to comment on the teleology of the present volume and Optatian's poetry.
As this summary has shown, the volume sheds light on Optatian and his poetry from various angles. Several chapters look at a variety of contexts of Optatian's poetry: historical (S., W., Körfer, Schierl & Scheidegger Lämmle, Männlein-Robert), intellectual (Habinek, Hernández Lobato), cultural/religious (Lunn-Rockliffe, Elsner), aesthetic (Männlein-Robert) and geographical (Bruhat). These Constantinian contexts are a particularly strong focus of the volume. Other chapters examine the poems as literature, for instance by looking at reading practices (Rühl, Körfer, Pelttari), the meaning of words (Pelttari), metapoetics (Bruhat, Männlein-Robert, Bažil, Hernández Lobato) and the literary tradition (Bruhat, Kwapisz, Rühl, Schierl & Scheidegger Lämmle, Bažil, Pelttari), and a third group of articles sheds light on Optatian's visuality (S., Kwapisz, Schierl & Scheidegger Lämmle, Männlein-Robert) and intermediality (Schierl & Scheidegger Lämmle, Männlein-Robert). The repetition of names across categories speaks to the multidisciplinary nature of this volume as do the frequent cross-references between contributions. As a whole the book leaves little to be desired though a new commentary on Optatian, which would take Polara's 1973 still very useful Latin commentary and the loci similes in his edition as a starting point, but would also incorporate the exciting findings of this volume and other recent studies on Optatian (e.g. M. Squire, ‘POP Art: the optical poetics of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius’, in J. Elsner and J. Hernández Lobato [edd.], The Poetics of Late Latin Literature [2017], pp. 25–99; G. Pipitone, ‘Il “panegyrico a Constantino” di Optaziano Porfirio’, Cuadernos medievales 19 [2015], 18–35), would ideally complement both the volume under review and the critical edition and German translation currently in preparation by J. Wienand and J.N. Dillon.
The book closes with English abstracts of all chapters and notes on the contributors, but, alas, without an index (or indexes). In line with the visual appeal of Optatian's poetry, much effort has gone into the presentation of this volume: the layout stands out, the contributions contain 44 black-and-white figures, and 16 colour plates complete the book. I noted very few typos only such as adnuat (instead of abnuat, p. 295) and an oversized footnote reference (p. 429). The glue binding, however, neither matches the care invested in the production and evident elsewhere nor the quality of the contributions. All in all, the volume offers a diverse, multidisciplinary and up-to-date examination and celebration of Optatian's life and work.
