In these lines, as critics have long recognized, resides evidence for identifying Valerius Flaccus as a quindecimuir sacris faciundis. Emphasis is placed on the tripod emblematic of this sacred office which is here intimately associated with expertise in the oracular communications of the Cumaean Sibyl.Footnote ¹ The libri Sibyllini, the supervision and interpretation of which were amongst the earliest and most conspicuous of the XVuiri's responsibilities, could be traced to the Sibyl at Cumae (Lactant. Div. inst. 1.6.10-11, citing Varro, even if this connection was less than the entire story from a strictly historical perspective). Wreathes, too, formed part of the XVuir's equipment, and of course during the Imperial period the Sibylline books were deposited in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. In little more than two lines, then, one finds an abundance of references that cannot fail to fashion this addressee of Apollo as a quindecimvir.Footnote ²

Although almost nothing is known about the flesh-and-bone Valerius, it hardly lies beyond the bounds of probability that he was a member of the college of XVuiri.Footnote ³ None the less, modern inclinations, averse to biographical reconstruction, are keener to ascertain just why it is that the voice of this epic poem elaborates itself as the voice of a quindecimvir. The importance of this literary moment, ‘l'unica autorappresentazione del poeta in tutto il poema’,Footnote ⁴ has not gone unobserved, nor the startling and even provocative effect that is achieved here when Valerius’ autobiographical move ‘ruptures the usual anonymity of the epic narrative voice’.Footnote ⁵

Sound and sensitive explanations have been advanced. Alessandro Barchiesi, for instance, has proposed that, in his divergence in these lines from the opening of Apollonius’ Argonautica, Valerius exhibits his awareness of previous literary investigations into the correct interpretation of the Greek epic's ἀρχόμενος σέο (Ap. Rhod. Argon. 1.1) (specimens of which are preserved in our scholia) and consequently constructs himself as a poet who, in the beginning of his epic, explicitly evokes Apollo and represents himself as ‘una sorta di “agente” di Apollo a Roma’.Footnote ⁶ In the similar but less specific view of Andrew Zissos, the quindecimviral persona is adopted ‘for reasons of literary authority’,Footnote ⁷ installing Valerius in the role of ‘poet-as-priest and making Apollo a twofold patron deity’,Footnote ⁸ a proposition that Tim Stover advances further in making his case that Valerius endeavours in his Argonautica to rehabilitate and reinvigorate the figure of the uates in epic poetry—largely in reaction to Lucan's derogatory treatment of the same figure.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, for Stover, Valerius’ priestly posture here underscores ‘the religiosity that his status as uates bestows on him’, and by way of claiming a relationship with Apollo that is at once ‘personal and pious’ Valerius is able to distinguish his poetic voice from the fractured and conflicted voice of the narrator of the Bellum Ciuile.Footnote ¹⁰ Taking a somewhat different perspective, Gesine Manuwald observes how, because the XVuiri supervised the Sibylline books, this passage helps to signal the epic's pervasive engagement with the issue of communication between mortals and the gods.Footnote ¹¹

Notwithstanding the obvious merit of these approaches, in none of them is the literary significance of Valerius’ specifically quindecimviral posture addressed. Valerius need not have been a XVuir in order to configure a relationship with Apollo, or to redeem the vatic posture from Lucan, however relevant his pose may be to each of these literary purposes. And yet Valerius’ syntax (mone, si …) concentrates our attention specifically on the poet's condition as a XVuir: it is because the poet is a XVuir that what follows lines 5–7 can follow—by way of Apollo's inspiration. Perhaps, then, there is more to be gained from these lines by concentrating closely on the quindecimvirate itself, the very conceit Valerius employs in defining the poetic voice of his epic.

Unlike pontifices or augures, the XVuiri had variegated responsibilities that ranged widely. Their supervision of the libri Sybillini has already been remarked: these were sacred texts, of foreign origin and composed in Greek, which, although appropriated by Rome's civic religion, always sustained something of their alien quality. It is this kind of religious management that is perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the XVuiri's role in Roman society: they acted, to advance another instance of their role, as intermediaries between the Senate and the Etrusca disciplina by consulting Etruscan haruspices and conveying the results of their consultation to the Senate; they supervised Greek practitioners of civic cult, in the city's Greek-style worship of Ceres, to adduce only a single example; and they supervised foreign practices annexed by Roman civic religion from farther afield, of which the worship of the Magna Mater was perhaps the most strikingly a stranger to its Roman setting.Footnote ¹² An essential operation of the XVuiri, then, consisted in putting to permanent and profitable Roman uses texts, cults and rites that not only had foreign origins but also remained unalterably foreign even in their new Roman contexts—and yet, owing to their new contexts and the uses to which they were put, were, none the less, Roman as well as imported.

Denis Feeney has done much to unpack the intrinsically Roman habit of preserving, as a defining element of Roman culture, institutions and practices that were explicitly marked as foreign in some important respect, a phenomenon far from infrequent (as we have already seen) in Roman civic religion. An obvious example, to which he refers, is the (unquestionably) Roman practice of performing sacrifice Graeco ritu.Footnote ¹³ This cultural habit, as Feeney demonstrates, shaped the Romans’ approach to writing their own literature, not least in the Romans’ treatment of myth.Footnote ¹⁴ From this perspective, it begins to become clear how useful an idea it was to fashion the Roman narrator of the Argonautica as a prominent expert in the best practices—indeed, in the establishment's official practice—in managing Rome's selection, exploitation and acculturation of originally alien religious texts and rites. The narrator as XVuir, then, is a figure that naturally suggests an authority on the correct appropriation and redeployment of literary properties the origins of which lay in Greece.

It must be conceded that there is no evidence that the XVuiri exercised their competence as individuals, unlike augurs or pontiffs who very often did. It is true that, during the Republic, individual XVuiri can occasionally be viewed expressing themselves on matters pertinent to the duties of their college, often with noticeable effect, but it is far from obvious that in doing so they acted in any official capacity or with incontestable authority.Footnote ¹⁵ Still, it appears that, whenever the official view of the college was expressed in the Senate, it was (unsurprisingly) a single XVuir who spoke on the college's behalf.Footnote ¹⁶ This practice may have persisted, but in any case, by the Imperial period, there was little possibility of any individual—pontiff, augur or XVuir—acting independently.Footnote ¹⁷ Still, it is probably unnecessary to push these realities too far. Here Valerius evokes the crucial function of the quindecimvirate and not the full particulars of the job description as he applies the concept of its essential religious operation to the composition of epic in Rome.

Now if it can be agreed that the quindecimvirate expresses a Roman sensibility that simultaneously preserves and assimilates, respects and annexes, cultural resources originating outside Rome, then reference to his official status as a XVuir constitutes an assertion on Valerius’ part that, in this epic, one finds the correct (and therefore the best) Roman version of its ultimately Greek material—a version whose superiority is meant to trump any Roman predecessors, whose poetic voices, whatever their merits, lacked Valerius’ authority. By the time Valerius began his work, after all, the myth of the Argonauts had received abundant literary treatment in Greek and in Latin literature in more than one genre and by more than one distinguished author. And, for the author of a Latin Argonautica, there was an unavoidable precedent: the splendid adaptation by Varro Atacinus, influential and effusively praised by Ovid and (less effusively) by Valerius’ contemporary Quintilian, represented a formidable rival achievement the reputation of which Valerius could hardly ignore.Footnote ¹⁸

Critics have commented on Valerius’ confidence in confronting his own belatedness in taking up the Argonautica myth: instead of being crushed by any anxiety of influence, he instead exerts himself in finding imaginative metapoetic means of scripting his success in retelling his much-told tale.Footnote ¹⁹ He was, to be sure, hardly the first Latin poet to insist on his own literary authority, and it can hardly be necessary here to rehearse the various tropes employed by Roman writers to inscribe their originality or literary stature, even as they wrote themselves into an existing tradition.Footnote ²⁰ Claiming to be first—primus ego—was a popular move on the part of Latin poets asserting their originality in introducing some element of Greek literature to Rome.Footnote ²¹ Sometimes, by way of an image tracing itself back to Callimachus, this declaration of priority was formulated in terms of trail-blazing, itself a Greek conceit that could be naturalized through its association with patently Roman institutions, like the triumph.Footnote ²² At Epist. 1.19.21-34, as is well known, Horace insists that he was the first to tread the poetic turf of Latin lyric and iambic, an assertion he embellishes by resorting to the technical terminology of Roman law and references to Roman practices in canvassing for political office.Footnote ²³ And so it goes, poets combining established (Greek) tropes with familiar themes from Roman public life.

It was out of the question, as we have seen, for Valerius to advance any serious claim to literary priority when asserting his literary authority.Footnote ²⁴ Still, by describing his literary inspiration by Apollo as dependent on his stature as a XVuir, Valerius reworks a long-standing tradition, whereby a Latin poet assumes a priestly guise that harks back to the (Greek) priest of the Muses.Footnote ²⁵ In doing so, however, Valerius can distinguish his poetic achievement from that of his predecessors by means of a literary stance that combines a familiar gesture (his address to Apollo)Footnote ²⁶ with a pose that is at once novel and (not unlike Horace's elaborations cited above) quintessentially Roman. In doing so, Valerius can affirm the Greek literary tradition he perpetuates at the same time as he vaunts his superiority over his Roman rivals in appropriating it: he is not simply some vague uates figure, but rather an official who is expert in managing, for the public good, the right kind of Romanisation.

The artistry of Valerius’ self-fashioning may not impress every reader, but, as the example of Horace illustrates, there is nothing exceptionable in his introducing to his proem a suggestive and yet specific Roman institution. His very Roman declaration of literary superiority in the correct appropriation and rendering of the epic tradition he intended to extend or even (following Stover) to restore must matter to any attempt to unpack his appeal to Apollo. And it will be obvious, I hope, that this interpretation of lines 5–7 is compatible with Barchiesi's distinctly Roman Valerius insisting on his learned clarifications to the epic tradition, with Zissos’ programmatic authority-figure, or with Stover's Valerius reinvigorating the vatic figure.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, each claim gains something when the real-world qualities of the quindecimvirate are recalled in reading Valerius’ proem. In his quindecimviral pose, Valerius finds a conceit that is imaginative and which in purely Roman terms expresses his claim to superior literary authority as he negotiates the best Roman expression of an expansive and ancient literary tradition. How could Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Palatine, fail to heed him?Footnote ²⁸