The Renaissance ‘discovery’ of the lost works of Cornelius Gallus is one of the more curious chapters in the history of classical scholarship. Edited by Pomponius Gauricus (Pomponio Gaurico) and published in 1502 as Cornelii Galli fragmenta (Venice: Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus), the six elegies constituting the collection, alongside the anonymous hendecasyllabic Carmen ad Lydiam (likely medieval), actually belonged to Maximianus, antiquity's last elegist, and had been printed, with correct attribution, as early as 1474 (Utrecht: Nicolaus Ketelaer et Gerardus de Leempt). To make matters worse, Aldus Manutius the Younger in 1588 printed four elegiac poems (AL 914–17 Riese), unearthed by Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus, with attribution to Gallus. The pseudepigraphical editio princeps and its follow-up editions (bibliographical details on pp. 61–4) show that editors, printers and readers were in on the conspiracy to pass off Maximianus’ poems as Gallus’ and played along for reasons of commerce and status. Consequently, even though the ‘forgeries’ were revealed as such early on, false ascriptions continued to circulate, causing chaos until this day. In a brief introduction, six succinct chapters and a snappy conclusion, W. guides us through the earliest production and reception of the ‘original’ New Gallus.

W.’s libellus weaves an intriguing tale, showing how Maximianus’ particular flavour of elegy, as a poet of old age looking back on his youthful exploits while struggling to cope with his decrepit present, combined with the more traditional amatory persona of the 1588 elegiacs actively encouraged and constructed the poems’ interpretation as being by Gallus, which in turn played into a Renaissance aesthetic that legitimised that reading. W. puts this circularity to good use in disentangling ‘Maximianus-Gallus’ (the first round of pseudepigrapha) from the image of Gallus’ poetry projected by classical sources on the one hand and a good deal of wishful thinking on the part of later publishers and scholars on the other. Dubious manuscript evidence merged the identity of Gallus with, on the one hand, Maximianus (pp. 4–6; cf. L. Spinazzè in A. Franzoi [ed.], Le elegie di Massimiano: testo, traduzione e commento [2014], pp. 53–4, and W. Schetter, Studien zur Überlieferung und Kritik des Elegikers Maximian [1971], pp. 70–4) and, on the other, the Carmen ad Lydiam (Schetter, op. cit., p. 72). This aided Gauricus’ cause and created the circumstances in which the Aldine elegiacs could be accepted as genuine before the entire fiction eventually was exposed.

First W. (Chapter 1) discusses the ‘Maximianus-Gallus’ hybrid, signalling the cues that sold the earliest readers on Gauricus’ fabrications (e.g. the aged persona's references to poems of his youth in Elegy 1, begging for identification with Gallus’ youthful Amores; the cameo-appearance of Gallus’ puella Lycoris in Elegy 2; a promise of a return to elegy in Elegy 3, with perhaps a hint, I suggest, at the generic promiscuity of Ovid, reverse-engineering this Gallus as his predecessor). Framed by Gauricus’ tendentious paratexts – a Cornelii Galli vita and an elegy on the ravages of time – and some partisan editing (cf. Elegy 4.25–6, mentioning Maximianus as the lover, but in Gauricus’ edition tacitly expunged), these cues projected the idea of a collection of youthful Amores later revisited by the poet (another parallel with Ovid), despite the real Gallus’ death, sua manu, aged 43. The senex amator of Maximianus’ poetics of decrepitude furnished a model for Renaissance readers (Chapter 2), who in their own tendentious self-presentation likewise looked back on a glorious past and felt unable to rival antiquity's achievements. Such metapoetic readings explain the persistence of ‘Maximianus-Gallus’, despite the evidence, and demonstrate how Gauricus’ concoction influenced the Renaissance image of Gallus.

The Carmen ad Lydiam (Chapter 3) further consolidated the credibility of Gauricus’ edition: although its metre and style do not suit Latin love poetry, the verbal and thematic parallels with Maximianus’ Elegy 1.89–100, briskly discussed by W., who also detects their reception in Renaissance poetry, made the suggestion more palatable. It, moreover, catered to a taste for a younger and more sensual Gallus, who now was rehabilitated as a love-poet proper rather than a poet on love lost. These two strands, senectus and amor, defined the Renaissance view of Gallus as simultaneously obscene and gentle, disillusioned and infatuated, pessimistic and optimistic, and shaped a particular elegiac aesthetic that permeated contemporary poetry (Chapter 4).

This sets the stage for W.’s final argument (Chapters 5–6) about the Aldine elegiacs (the second round of pseudepigrapha), which occasionally have been regarded as genuine (most recently by B. Kayachev & M. Shumilin, ‘Four Poems Ascribed to Gallus (AL 914–917): the History of the Text’, MD 78 [2017], 195–225; M. Salanitrò, ‘Il “topos” “la donna è mobile” con ἀπροσδόκητον’, Maia 60 [2008], 163–92, ‘L'elegia 914 R. e il carme 427 R2’, Maia 60 [2008], 408–10, ‘Prove di autenticità dell'elegia 914 R. attribuita a Gallo’, Maia 63 [2011], 63–83). In Chapter 5 W. discusses the longest elegy, Non fuit Arsacidum, and traces several echoes of Maximianus. The conclusion seems inescapable: its author knew Maximianus’ cantankerous elegiac persona and thus cannot be Cornelius Gallus; rather, this is the Renaissance ‘Maximianus-Gallus’ hybrid. To neutralise the objection that the poem's author could have had (in)direct access to Cornelius’ work and to preclude a hunt for ‘Gallan complexes’ in Non fuit Arsacidum (the term is F. Cairns’, Sextus Propertius: the Augustan Elegist [2006]), W. shifts the date of composition to the Renaissance, post Petrus Lotichius Secundus’ elegiac poetry, which predates the Aldine elegy by two decades.Footnote ¹

W. further alleges (Chapter 6) that the real poet, not ‘discoverer’ (contra Kayachev & Shumilin, op. cit.), must be Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus, who saw soft targets in Achilles Statius (his compatriot and recipient of the poems in 1578) and Aldus (received 1580, printed 1588), both of whom previously had been duped by a fake Orpheus. This is evident from two teasing pseudonymous letters to Statius, known to be by Didacus, Didacus’ own elegiac persona as senex à la Maximianus, allusions to material in the Aldine elegies prior to their discovery and a 1594 reprint of the Aldine elegies, despite ample debunking, side-by-side with an elegy by Didacus himself. W. regards this as a virtuoso test (parallels for which exist) of Didacus’ contemporaries by a scholar-poet who wanted to get caught in order to be noticed. W.’s book is long overdue.