Columella invites his readers to plant different flowers, including violets—which will be the main focus of the following discussion (10.94–102):
96 pangite Heinsius: pingite SAR || 99 nitentia Gesner || 101 frondes SA: frondens R | purpurat auro ϛ: purpura tabo SAR: purpura et auro Ursinus: purpurat albo Heinsius
This is the text of Rodgers's recent OCT, but with a somewhat modified apparatus criticus.Footnote 1 For the purposes of my argument, it will be useful also to quote from the outset a related catalogue of melliferous flowers from another book of Columella's treatise (9.4.4):Footnote 2
mille praeterea semina uel crudo caespite uirentia uel subacto sulco flores amicissimos apibus creant, ut sunt in uirgineo solo […] gladiolus narcissi. at in hortensi lira consita nitent candida lilia nec his sordidiora leucoia, tum Punicae rosae luteolaeque et Sarranae uiolae, nec minus caelestis luminis hyacinthus.
There are a number of more general similarities, but the relevant point is that the two catalogues list many of the same flowers and describe them in similar ways, which means that one catalogue can serve as an interpretative guide to the other. The first two items in the prose list of garden flowers (nitent candida lilia nec his sordidiora leucoia) correspond to candida leucoia and calathisque uirentia lilia canis, similarly listed in the first half of the verse catalogue; nitent (lilia) can thus support Gesner's emendation nitentia for uirentia (lilia), unduly neglected by recent editors.Footnote 3 The metaphoric periphrasis gladiolus narcissi can be compared with narcissique comas. Both texts describe the hyacinth as sky-blue, which seems to be otherwise unparalleled (nec minus caelestis luminis hyacinthus and necnon […] caeruleos hyacinthos: note also that in both cases the reference is introduced by a litotes). Finally, just like the prose list (tum Punicae rosae luteolaeque et Sarranae uiolae), Columella's poem groups roses with two varieties of violet (note also that both passages are introduced with tum):Footnote 4
The prose version makes it all but certain that the poem should likewise refer to a yellow and a purple varieties of violet.Footnote 5 While Columella's verse description of the former variety is fairly unambiguous (if not very informative), that of the latter raises questions.
The main problem concerns the expression purpurat auro. It is sometimes assumed that purpureus and purpurare can denote brightness rather than a specific colour; the phrase would accordingly mean something like ‘the violet glows with gold’.Footnote 6 Yet, it is in general quite doubtful that the root purpur- can be devoid of any denotation of colour;Footnote 7 and even if it could, it would be inappropriate to use purpurare in this way in a context speaking of the violet, as it cannot but evoke the most prominent, purple variety.Footnote 8 More often scholars take the phrase to imply a combination of gold and purple, as in Viola tricolor, but I fail to see how it can be construed in that way.Footnote 9 If we wished to obtain this sense, we would have to write something like mixto purpurat auro. But even apart from these linguistic considerations, the catalogue of flowers in Book 9 shows that what we need here is a reference to the purple variety of violet.
This problem was recognized by earlier scholars, even though they failed to produce a satisfactory solution. For instance, Orsini conjectured: tum quae pallet humi, quae frondent purpura et auro, | ponantur uiolae (the text thus refers not to two but to three varieties, the same varieties as mentioned by Pliny [HN 21.27, quoted in n. 5]: white, purple and yellow).Footnote 10 This is too drastic an intervention to be convincing; moreover, frondere cannot mean ‘to bloom’, so we would also have to write something like florent or splendent. Heinsius proposed quae frondes purpurat albo, which is likewise implausible, but makes the important point that auro—a humanist conjecture—finds little support in the paradosis (purpura tabo).Footnote 11
If purpurat auro is an impossible expression, how can the text be restored? It seems likely that humi in the first half of the line requires a counterpart in the second.Footnote 12 A possible option might be to write alte in place of (t)abo, so that (purpurat) alte would contrastingly parallel (pallet) humi.Footnote 13 However, this solution encounters two obstacles. First, such an exact syntactic parallelism appears inelegant; some variation would be preferable.Footnote 14 Second, (t)abo may not be the only corruption here; and if there are other textual problems, they should be taken into account before alte can be accepted.
Although editors seem to find no fault with it, fronde(n)s is arguably corrupt as well. Rodgers, who prints frondes, apparently takes it to mean ‘petals’ (surely the text cannot refer to the violet's leaves?), but, unlike folium, frons cannot have this sense.Footnote 15 Even if it could, or even if we substitute flores for frondes, the explicit reference to the violet's petals would be superfluous (‘the violet that is purple in its petals’). Most editors print frondens, which may be an understandable decision, but still does not produce a satisfactory sense.Footnote 16 It may be a matter of fact that, like most flowers, violets have leaves, but this is not a detail that warrants attention.Footnote 17 While in certain contexts the adjective may indeed have the pregnant sense ‘lush in foliage’, I doubt that bare frondens is sufficient to draw contrast between one variety of violet that has lush leaves and another that does not.Footnote 18 These objections could be removed by writing florens, but that would merely be a stopgap.
If fronde(n)s is corrupt, and flore(n)s not a plausible correction, what has it replaced? As pointed out above, the second half of the line appears to be missing a counterpart to humi in the first half; while alte may be an option, it is quite possible that this counterpart has been ousted by fronde(n)s rather than by (t)abo. Palaeographically, scandens would be an easy correction (ſ → f, c → r, a → o), but scandere is only used of climbing plants.Footnote 19 The proper word to describe a (relatively) tall plant would be surgens:Footnote 20 this is, I think, the solution we should adopt, despite its being less than totally straightforward in terms of palaeography.
If, then, we have surgens in place of fronde(n)s to answer humi, alte proves redundant. I suggest that (t)abo has replaced a term for a purple substance, and ostro seems to be the only option that fits the metre. Although the expression has no exact parallels in classical Latin, we may compare Prop. 4.3.51 Poenis nunc purpura fulgeat ostris, Aetna 333 purpureoque rubens surgat iubar aureus ostro, Ciris 387 coma Sidonio florens deciditur ostro. Later on in the poem Columella uses this term to describe the rose: 287 iam rosa mitescit Sarrano clarior ostro; and he does in fact associate the idea of purple dye with the violet in the prose part of the treatise at 9.4.4, where, as we have seen, he uses the same adjective Sarranus (‘Tyrian’) as an epithet of the violet.
How can the corruption be explained? I suggest that tabo is not a mechanical error for ostro but an interpolated gloss.Footnote 21 A reader of the archetype's ancestor, mistaking ostro for oestro,Footnote 22 will have added above an explanation: tabo, which is a late and/or colloquial form of tabanus, ‘gadfly’.Footnote 23 He may have remembered Servius’ comment on Verg. G. 3.148: οἶστρος autem Graecum est: Latine asilus, uulgo tabanus uocatur. It may also be relevant that Columella himself cites the Greek word, even if in a different sense, as a term for the bee queen (9.14.4): uerum quidam Graecorum auctores οἴστρους appellant [sc. reges].Footnote 24 It is true that the form tabo is only attested in the manuscripts of the Carolingian poet Moduin (Eclogues 1.21 in se forte furit [sc. aries] multo cogente tabone),Footnote 25 but it also survives in the French taon (compare Lat. pauo → Fr. paon), which suggests that this form would have been familiar at least to some medieval readers from everyday use.
To sum up: tum quae pallet humi, quae surgens purpurat ostro, | ponatur uiola, ‘then let the violet be planted: the yellowish one that blooms close to the ground, and the one that rises high, crimson with purple’.
