The last English-language commentary on the enigmatic Pervigilium Veneris (hereafter PV) was published nearly 40 years ago (L. Catlow, Pervigilium Veneris [1980]). B.’s comprehensive commentary, therefore, is an overdue and valuable addition to the scholarship on the poem. B.’s work is well-researched, detailed and sure to become a necessary point of reference for any scholars interested in the PV. Occasional errors, omissions or inconsistencies in formatting, editing or analysis, detailed below, do not detract from the overall impressiveness and erudition of this commentary, which will serve scholars from the graduate level onwards well.
B.’s introduction comprises sections on the poem's manuscript tradition, date and authorship, metre, final stanza and reception from 1578 ce to c. 1800. Two aspects are noteworthy. First, B. supports and adds evidence for linguistic and thematic connections between the PV and Solinus’ Pontica (pp. 21–8), a theory first proposed by Claude de Saumaise in the seventeenth century, but last analysed and supported by G.H. Pagés in 1986. The connections between the two rely on a ‘common intellectual milieu, built on the same base of religious-philosophical stereotypes’ (p. 28), a milieu shared with a certain Tiberianus of the fourth century ce, who has often been suggested as the author of the PV and whose poems Amnis Ibat and Omnipotens appear (in Latin without translations) in an appendix at the end of B.’s commentary. B.’s contributions to Pagés's and de Saumaise's arguments help date the PV more convincingly (although, necessarily, not conclusively) within the fourth century. Second, the novel section on the reception of the PV between the publication of its editio princeps by P. Pithou in 1578 and c. 1800 elucidates an understudied period of the PV’s Nachleben, compared to ubiquitous studies of its reception in more well-known works like W. Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) or T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). The authors and works whom B. considers include J. Bonnefons’ Pervigilium Veneris (1587), R. Sidney's Song 3 (c. 1580), M. Wroth's Song 1 (1610), J. Balde's Philomela (1645) and Sir W. Jones's Carmen Turcicum (1774). Any of these works seems apt for further investigation beyond B.’s quick but insightful analyses.
The introduction contains some minor errors. At p. 30, facta of line 23 (facta Cypridis …) is scanned as a spondee (fāctā) rather than a trochee (fāctă, as facta must be nominative singular and the following c does not make position). Second, though B. asserts that ‘the swallow has been celebrated as the herald of spring in literature since at least Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics’ (p. 36), the association reaches as far back in Greek literature as Hesiod, Works and Days 568–9.
The Latin text is accompanied by a comprehensive apparatus criticus and a translation on the facing page. Odd, unexplained instances of white space occasionally break up the visual cohesion of a stanza in the Latin text (lines 61–2, 87–8). The translation flows idiomatically and proves in most places faithful to the Latin, with minor diction choices occasionally questionable (e.g. eliding the differences between rus and ager by using ‘fields’ to denote both at lines 76–8). Some formatting choices are inconsistent: Diva at 84, but diva at 28 and 50, with no discernible difference in the context of either; aether at 59, but personified and capitalised ‘Aether’ in the English translation; lower-case laurentem at 70 while all other proper adjectives are capitalised (e.g. Troianos and Latinos in the preceding line).
The commentary is usefully sectioned by full reproductions of each line, further subdivided as needed by portions of the line under discussion. The format obviates the need to flip between the main text and the commentary. One lemma (p. 127, ‘genetrix’ under line 76) appears misplaced or misleadingly chosen given its lack of appearance in the line under discussion. Typographical or formatting errors occur very infrequently (‘multipe’ for ‘multiple’, p. 81; missing comma between ‘Mackail (1912)’ and ‘Rand (1934)’, p. 98; missing year of publication for Formicola while all other citations include a date, pp. 103 and 108), as do a few factual errors or unverifiable assertions. For example, at p. 81, B. refers to fifteen instances of the pronoun ipsa denoting Venus without any listing of the line numbers, while I count only fourteen (13, 14, 15, 22, 28, 40, 41, 50, 63, 69, 70, 72, 78, 79). Also, B.’s assertion that ‘in Ovid's account [of the brutalisation of Philomela] it is Procne who is the wife of Tereus and who becomes the swallow and Philomela the violated sister who becomes the nightingale’ (p. 132, emphases mine) is incorrect, as Ovid's description of the transformation of the sisters (Ov. Met. 6.667–74) deliberately avoids ascribing a specific bird to either sister.
B.’s observations augment and, in places, attempt to correct the work of previous commentators like Catlow and C. Clementi (Pervigilium Veneris [1936]). Two aspects of B.’s commentary deserve special note. First, his ubiquitous and thorough palaeographical breakdowns of manuscript variants provide plausible explanations and solutions for textual cruxes that have been hotly contested in scholarship for over a century, most noticeably with the notorious crux at the beginning of line 74, transmitted by the manuscripts as Romoli (ST) / Romuli (V) and matrem (STV). B. follows a suggestion by P.S. Davies (‘The Text of Pervigilium Veneris 74’, CQ 42.2 [1992], 575–7) to emend the manuscript reading to Iulium mater, but improves upon Davies's convoluted description of the palaeographical error with a lucid and straightforward suggestion of the copyist's combination of the Rom- of line 72 and the termination of Iulium, the assumption of -i- into the -m- of Rom-, omission of the final -m by haplography with mater, and correction to the final Rom(o/u)li by dropping the extraneous final -u. Second, B. identifies several textual allusions to Classical authors and Roman social practice that are surprisingly not found in previous commentaries. See, for example, B.’s connection of the rose's blossoming (line 26) to the untying of the nodus Herculaneus of the Roman wedding ritual (p. 100).
The bibliography is current, multilingual and mostly thorough. However, two glaring omissions would undoubtedly have enriched B.’s discussion of the poem, especially in the commentary. First, the most recent (Italian-language) commentary on the PV, that of C. Mandolfo (Pervigilium Veneris. La veglia di Venere [2008]), offers different intertexts for comparison or more fulsome interpretations of difficult phrases in the poem. Compare, for example, B.’s quick citation of two lines of Tibullus to explain PV 77 (p. 127; see also p. 103) with Mandolfo's paragraph on the line's debt to Tibullus, the PV poet's clever use of Tibullus’ Alexandrian footnote dicitur, and further context for the rural provenance of Cupid in a later section of the Tibullan poem. Second, T. Privitera's monograph Terei puella: metamorfosi latine (2007) traces the origins of the Tereus, Procne and Philomela myth from its earliest Greek literary sources to the PV and includes the most comprehensive discussion of the sources for and interpretations of the mysterious final lines of the poem (pp. 77–93), at a length precluded by the exigencies of B.’s commentary.
The extent to which this review may seem to nit-pick on editorial errors attests to the overall soundness, utility and impressiveness of B.’s work. His novel observations about the poem's diction and mythological and literary precedents and his discussions of previous scholarship improve our understanding of this enigmatic poem and contribute valuable insights into its structure and allusions.
