I INTRODUCTION
Even among professional Latinists, Terentianus Maurus is hardly a household name.Footnote 1 Author of poems De litteris, De syllabis and De metris, he is known as a grammarian today, and only read — or rather raided — by those in search of recondite philological information. Who would do otherwise with a text buried deep inside Heinrich Keil's monumental Grammatici Latini? But a glance at Terentianus’ text might cause you to wonder whether he really belongs in this company. In the thousands of pages of Keil's eight learned and laborious volumes, Terentianus Maurus is the sole author of a text in verse.Footnote 2 And if you actually read that text, you will realise that Terentianus is not just the author of a text in verse — he is a consummate literary artist who crafted polished and elegant poetry. We have thus made an error of generic classification and condemned Terentianus to an unjust neglect by literary scholars. Wrongly relegated to the Sahara Desert of the Grammatici Latini, Terentianus deserves to be recalled into the company of learned didactic poets writing in the Alexandrian tradition.
Since fate has rendered Terentianus obscure today — as he himself wrote, ‘habent sua fata libelli’ (1286)Footnote 3 — I will begin by introducing the man and what we can surmise about his literary context. The known facts about his life are few. He mentions in passing that he is North African (‘Maurus’, 1971), and Augustine, perhaps with a touch of patriotic pride, confirms this origin (Aug., util. cred. 7.17). His date is uncertain, but the mid- to late third century at least suits the available evidence.Footnote 4 The latest author he quotes — with apparent affection and a tantalising nuper — is Septimius Serenus (‘dulcia Septimius qui scripsit opuscula nuper’, ‘Septimius, who recently wrote his delightful Opuscula’, 1891).Footnote 5 Unfortunately, we do not know exactly who Septimius Serenus was or when he flourished.Footnote 6 We can, however, say that he is later than the poet Alfius Avitus (‘ut pridem Alfius Auitus’, ‘as Alfius Avitus [wrote] some time ago’, 2448). And it is very tempting to identify this Alfius Avitus with P. Alfius Avitus Numerius (CIL II 4110 = ILS 2931), and further to make this man the boy who performed in a choir for Septimius Severus in 204 (AE 1932 no. 70) and the eventual governor of Lower Pannonia at some point between 244 and 247 (CIL III 10436).Footnote 7 If this admittedly fragile chain of reasoning is correct, then Serenus will have flourished in the mid-third century, placing Terentianus soon thereafter. We can in any event be sure that Terentianus’ works were in circulation by the middle of the fourth century, since he is used by Apthonius (aka Asmonius), who dedicated a grammatical treatise to Constantius.Footnote 8
Terentianus bequeathed to posterity a preface and three polymetric poems: De litteris, De syllabis and De metris (this last incomplete). The poems’ titles reflect their content. De litteris treats the pronunciation of individual Latin letters, De syllabis the pronunciation of syllables, with special focus on points of difficulty, and De metris the rules and origins of a bewildering array of Latin poetic metres. Terentianus is also a metrical magician: his preface is in glyconics (Ter. Maur. 1–84), De litteris in sotadeans (85–278), De syllabis in trochaic tetrameters (279–998) and dactylic hexameters (999–1299), and De metris (1300–2981) in literally scores of different metres — because in De metris he describes the individual metres he discusses in those very metres.Footnote 9 Such a verse virtuoso already looks much more like a poet than like your typical author of a metrical treatise.
There is some controversy over whether all three of Terentianus’ poems were published together, and further controversy over whether the preface was meant to introduce all three works or only some.Footnote 10 But Chiara Cignolo has well argued that the three poems, whatever their original order of composition, form a unity arranged in the traditional order of phonetics, prosody and metrics, to which the preface was attached as an introduction to the collected whole.Footnote 11 This will be my working assumption in this paper, although most of my arguments work equally well even without a Grand Unified Authorial Design, as the poems were certainly all written by a single author with a consistent set of poetic principles.
What did Terentianus Maurus do besides write these poems? All we know is what he tells us in his preface. He claims that he has turned to this narrow genre in his old age, no longer able ‘dicere grandia’ (‘to speak on grand themes’, 53). Some have thought that this phrase could indicate a past career as an orator, but given the poetic sophistication of his extant work, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that Terentianus’ grandia were in fact poems in ‘higher’ genres.Footnote 12 And we do have a single fragment, preserved in Servius (ad Aen. 8.96), of a poem in iambic dimeters attributed to one Terrentianus.Footnote 13 Whatever he had been before, however, he was certainly no professional grammarian or schoolteacher. In the first instance, he addresses this work to his son Bassinus and his son-in-law Novatus, a sure sign of the gentleman amateur.Footnote 14 Furthermore, in his treatment of technical points, he often varies from the ordinary explanations of the grammatical tradition; he speaks instead from his own experience.Footnote 15 Finally, throughout his poetry he takes pains to distance himself from the grammatici and magistri (e.g. 1354–5, ‘latius tractant magistri … | nos uiam metri studemus parte ab aliqua pandere’, ‘the schoolteachers treat [this] at greater length … we are [just] trying to open up the path to meter to some degree’).Footnote 16
Terentianus Maurus was thus a practising poet, and he was writing a didactic poem about poetry, directed at least notionally to other poets and aspiring poets. He is following not so much in the footsteps of the grammatici as those of Horace in the Ars poetica, one of his most important models.Footnote 17 Terentianus’ aspiring poets would not have been schoolchildren; this material and its presentation are again too sophisticated for such an audience. His two named addressees, Bassinus and Novatus, are adults.Footnote 18 Moreover, he demands a careful and conscientious reader who will take time and work hard in order to appreciate his subtle art (see Section IV, Conclusion). Terentianus’ poetry is thus constantly working on multiple levels: on one he is providing instruction to potential poets on how to write, say, a well-formed pentameter, while on another he is himself exemplifying his poetic precepts in his own poem, complete with careful language and allusions and even, in De metris, by writing in the very metres on which he is giving instruction. There is throughout a delicate interplay of these levels, of form and content, and this interplay is a large part of how Terentianus constructs his poetic authority and a large part of his literary artistry.
You might ask why Terentianus would write such a poem. He gives us one answer in his preface, which we will turn to in Section II, but a look at the broader context of his life and times is also suggestive. An African living in the third century would have been surrounded by Latin speakers uncertain about pronunciation and, especially, vowel quantities. While such confusion may have been widespread in the contemporary Roman Empire, in our sources it is particularly associated with North Africa — the grammarian Consentius calls it the ‘African vice’ (GL V 392.3) — and evidence from inscriptions and poetry bears this out.Footnote 19 And there was a lot of African poetry: Africa boasts more published Latin verse inscriptions than any other province.Footnote 20 For a literary example, consider only Commodianus, an African Christian probably dating to the third century, whose poems are much more famous for their quantities than their quality.Footnote 21 Terentianus’ own ‘sure-footed’ quantities, by contrast, are a point of particular pride (79–80), and his poetic canon — at least insofar as we can judge from the authors whom he quotes — is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, Vergil and Horace above all.Footnote 22 And so with the linguistic ground shifting under his feet, Terentianus may have written his poems in part as a revanchist project, trying to regain lost territory of Latin pronunciation and classical versification.
In late antiquity Terentianus seems to have had a good reputation. Augustine praises one of his verses in passing (‘elegantissimo uersiculo’, ‘a most elegant little verse’, De ciu. D. 6.2), and Sidonius Apollinaris coins the marvellous phrase centimeter Terentianus, while placing him in the company of a number of famous Latin poets (Carm. 9.264). Prudentius may have known his work.Footnote 23 But already he seems to have been passing into the grammatical tradition, where he is used as a source and widely quoted.Footnote 24 Such recycling and abridgement of his poetry into more practical form may have contributed to his eventual near extinction. He disappears from view in the Middle Ages, surviving to the Renaissance in a single manuscript, which was rediscovered in 1493 and then vanished after the text was set in type in 1497.Footnote 25
Since the age of print, Terentianus has scarcely been read, despite the apparent admiration of some of his early editors.Footnote 26 And even his few admirers seem deaf to his poetry: Jan-Wilhelm Beck, perhaps the most resolute champion Terentianus has ever found, can say that ‘despite writing in verse, Terentianus has no poetic pretensions and in none of his three works does he pursue poetic goals’.Footnote 27 When Terentianus has been read, he has been merely a quarry for information.Footnote 28 Now he is a good quarry, to be sure, but his work offers much more than material for the collector of grammatical curiosities.
Augustine once said, ‘If you haven't studied the art of poetry, you wouldn't dare to read Terentianus Maurus without a teacher’ (‘nulla imbutus poetica disciplina Terentianum Maurum sine magistro attingere non auderes’, util. cred. 7.17). Whether I am sufficiently instructed in the art of poetry or not, in the rest of this paper I will dare to read Terentianus Maurus, and dare to read him as a literary artist, with attention to his allusions and language and metre and the constant interplay in his text between form and content. I will first examine the preface to his poems (1–84), which is studded with intertextual gems and shines with every kind of literary polish. It thematises a poetics of both small-scale elegance and labor, and constitutes a self-conscious declaration of allegiance to the Hellenistic tradition of learned didactic verse. Then I will look at passages from the rest of Terentianus’ poetry to show how he puts the programmatic ideals of his preface to work in poetic practice. Terentianus Maurus is not a grammarian, or, if writing about grammar ipso facto makes a grammarian, he is not ‘just’ a grammarian: he is a poet. And his poetry is not just a versified compendium of technical lore: it is a work of literary artistry in the tradition of Alexandrian didactic.
II TERENTIANUS MAURUS’ PREFACE (1–84)
In the preface to his poems, Terentianus Maurus inserts himself into a long intertextual tradition of didactic poetry, and does so with flair and panache.Footnote 29 It is ostensibly a recusatio, as Terentianus claims that he is too old to write poetry on lofty themes (‘grandia’, 52) and so has chosen a humbler subject instead (‘exile negotium’, 63). But he is very keen to emphasise that this does not mean that his task is easy: throughout his preface he juxtaposes the small size and scope of his poems with the immense labor required to create them. The centrepiece of the preface is an elaborate simile, a comparison of himself and his poetry with a retired Olympic athlete and the small-scale exercise that he is said to have devised for himself. The whole thing constitutes a brilliant blend of self-deprecation and boasting, shot through with metapoetic commentary.
Terentianus begins with the tale of the Olympic athlete, including in his first lines a programmatic double allusion (1–14):
I heard an old man often tell this story: a certain athlete, who under the aegis of Zeus had three times won at the Olympic games, saw spiteful old age encroaching on his strength. While he still enjoyed the reputation of triumphing over everyone, he hastened to put an end to his competitive regime of diet and exercise. But so that this sudden relaxation wouldn't bring about the ruin of his body, he claimed he'd come up with the following sort of exercise to practise by himself at home.
Terentianus here alludes to two famous Latin predecessors.Footnote 30 First, Ennius (Ann. 522–3 Sk. [= Cic., Sen. 14]):
Just as a powerful horse who has often won in the last lap at the Olympic games now, done in by old age, enjoys a quiet retirement
We do not know how Ennius’ fragment continues, but Cicero, the quoting author, tells us explicitly that Ennius is comparing himself to the retired Olympic horse; Ennius is making his own recusatio.Footnote 31 So too Horace, in the first epistle of his first book of Epistles, tells Maecenas that he is too old to be drawn back into writing lyric poetry (Epist. 1.18–19):
Give the ageing horse his freedom in good time, if you've got any sense, so that he doesn't wheeze and stumble at the end, an object of ridicule.
In his own recusatio, Terentianus has picked up on both the general image of a retired Olympic victor and the specific language of Ennius (‘qui … Olympia uicisset’ ~ ‘qui … uicit Olympia’, ‘senium’ ~ ‘senio’) and Horace (‘maturasse’ ~ ‘mature’, ‘resoluere’ ~ ‘solue’).Footnote 32 His small variations from Ennius within his allusion — ‘ter’ ~ ‘saepe’, ‘Ioue praeside’ ~ ‘spatio … supremo’ — even manage to maintain the same grammatical structure (temporal adverb and ablative of attendant circumstances).
Furthermore, Terentianus has perhaps underscored his repetition of Horace with resoluere.Footnote 33 And this might not be the only metapoetic gesture: the very first word of the poem, audiui, looks like an ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device, as James Townshend has neatly put it, ‘designed to draw attention precisely to the allusive content of an utterance — to the fact that the material belongs to an earlier tradition, or even a plurality of competing traditions’.Footnote 34 If this is the case, then even the poem's second word, ueterem, may point to the venerable antiquity of the tradition, which in fact stretches beyond Horace and Ennius back to a fragment of Ibycus (fr. 6.4–7 P.).Footnote 35 Terentianus also improves on his poetic predecessors: he has replaced the horse of Ennius and Horace with an ageing athlete, allowing for a perfect parallel between his poetic retirement activities and those of the quondam Olympic victor.Footnote 36 Indeed, Terentianus’ retired athlete is the very embodiment of the common claim of a Latin poet in a recusatio that their strength (uires) is insufficient for a grand undertaking.Footnote 37 In sum, in the first few lines of his poem, Terentianus Maurus fully enters into the allusive tradition of poetic recusationes, signalling to the reader that he is a poet with literary chops bent on imitatio and aemulatio.
Terentianus continues by describing the retired athlete's home exercise programme (15–35):
He joined together soft pieces of string into a smooth mass, and just as a Parthian or Scythian connects a smooth string to the ends of their bow, so he kept binding together his pieces until he had a length of slender rope that would be sufficient for his well. And so then he would drag jugs full of water from the depths of the darkness by means of a string so fine that it couldn't be grasped by the palm of his hand. He concentrated the efforts of his entire body in his fingertips, and, holding fast to his narrow rope until his slippery burden emerged from the depths of the hole into the light above, he strived by tugging with each thumb in turn to conquer the weight so prone to fall back down.
There is a repeated and overwhelming emphasis on slenderness: this of course points up the apparent smallness or insignificance of the athlete's new exercise regime, in marked contrast to the immense effort and strain that it demands. Tension and suspense — in every sense of those words — build as the long description plays out and we wait to see whether the athlete will succeed or fail. We can almost feel our own fingers and thumbs joining in the struggle, and the stakes manage to feel both so high and so low all at once.
Moreover, the metapoetic imagery in these lines is everywhere to be seen. The athlete has woven a fine rope of narrow threads. In the first place, weaving has served as a metaphor for poetic composition since Indo-European time immemorial.Footnote 38 More importantly, the emphasis on slenderness introduces the poetic ideal of λεπτότης, subtlety and critical refinement in the Callimachean tradition.Footnote 39 And there is much more Hellenistic ideology to come. Indeed, Terentianus’ very choice of metre puts into practice his avowed Callimachean ethos. Glyconics are by their nature a ‘slender’ metre, and so here our poet has matched form with content.Footnote 40 In some sense you might even say that he has assiduously woven together a series of small threads into a long and slender 84-line preface. This is the first of the many instances of lively interplay between form and content that we will see in Terentianus’ poetry; such play is one of the hallmarks of his artistry, and precisely what you would expect from an author who describes metres in the very metres being described.Footnote 41
Metapoetry may not stop there. The athlete's exercise is to use his slender thread to draw water from a well. From Hesiod's Muses bathing in the Hippocrene (Theog. 4–7; cf. Theog. 22–3) to Callimachus perhaps drinking from that font (Aet. fr. 2 H./Pf.) through the Augustan poets (e.g. Prop. 3.3.1–6, 51–2) and beyond, poets have been drawing water from pure springs:Footnote 42 Terentianus has appropriated that image with a twist, as his athlete draws water instead from the depths of darkness. The bottom of his well, to be certain, but also perhaps the rebarbative obscurity of Terentianus’ slippery subject matter, out of which, using all his careful and subtle poetic technique, he crafts pure poetry. If he succeeds, he draws forth this poetry into the light — and if he fails, it will fall flat.
Finally, let us indulge in a bit of speculation. The first letters of lines 15–18 spell out N I C A: could they constitute a bilingual acrostic, representing νίκα, ‘victory’ or ‘Victory’ (with Doric alpha) or an imperative verb?Footnote 43 The context is right: we are talking about a victorious athlete, and this preface is full of Hellenistic motifs. Terentianus is moreover a poet who has Greek everywhere in his poem, in both Greek and Roman letters; he is even a poet who tells us explicitly that his poem was rubricated, and such an acrostic could have been highlighted for readers by its mise-en-page.Footnote 44 Could the word inuicem in the acrostic's opening line, combined with extimis in its closing, be gesturing to its bilingual nature and its location at the beginnings of the lines? Indeed, even the hypothetical Doric alpha could signal an awareness of the lyric poet Ibycus’ use of the retired victor image.Footnote 45 Speculative and unprovable, I fully acknowledge, but the more you see of this poet's skill, the more you might be willing to countenance the possibility of such clever games.
Terentianus then emphasises the unexpected challenge of the athlete's exercise (36–50):
You'd think that what he was doing was no big deal and that the effort was confined to his fingers alone — but the hidden struggle is aquiver everywhere inside his body. You could see the whole thing, but it wouldn't be obvious where the whole thing is being carried out: the inmost pockets of his lungs are filled by invisible breaths, and his hamstrings and knees tremble, and his feet can't stay planted on the ground. Nothing is left unaffected, and yet there is but a small way out for his strength. The customary manner of a competition is preserved, while the usual sweat drips from his body, but without the struggle of a wrestling match.
‘Small’ might look easy, Terentianus says, but nothing could be further from the truth: in the case of this athlete's exercise, it requires extraordinary labor. It is a mighty struggle to draw a bucket full of water from the depths of a well using only a thin string and your fingertips, even if you cannot see the hard parts. So too, Terentianus will soon explain, is his own small-scale and fine-spun poetry the product of immense labor.
Toward the end of this passage Terentianus mentions a parua … uia, a ‘small way’ out for the athlete's strength. This narrow road imagery, of course, is not just chance, as our poet makes clear in the lines that follow (51–8):
So our old age too — because our fully ripened talent refuses to speak of lofty themes and our innermost parts no longer breathe such a spiritFootnote 46 — wears out a narrow track of study and a subtle path, just so that our mouth doesn't make the mistake of getting used to idleness and silence.
Here Terentianus finally moves to the payoff of his comparison, introducing himself for the first time. He programmatically refuses to speak of ‘lofty themes’ (‘grandia’), instead opting for a ‘narrow track of study’ (‘angustam studii uiam’) and a ‘subtle path’ (‘callem tenuem’). In the space of ten lines, then, we have three references to narrow roads — and how many narrow roads does a poet need to walk down before you start thinking of the prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia?Footnote 47 Three is actually a pretty good number, since that is how many Callimachus mentions (Aet. 1.21–8 H./Pf.):
…….]…ἀοιδέ, τὸ μὲν θύος ὅττι πάχιστον
θρέψαι, τὴ]ν̣ Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην·
πρὸς δέ σε] καὶ τόδ’ ἄνωγα, τὰ μὴ πατέουσιν ἅμαξαι
τὰ στείβε⌟ιν, ἑτέρων ἴχνια μὴ καθ’ ὁμά
δίφρον ἐλ]ᾶ̣ν μηδ’ οἷμον ἀνὰ πλατύν, ἀλλὰ κελεύθους
ἀτρίπτο]υ̣ς, εἰ καὶ στε⌞ι⌟ν̣οτέρην ἐλάσεις.
… Poet, feed the sacrificial animal so that it becomes as fat as possible, but, my dear fellow, keep the Muse slender; besides, I also urge you to go where the big waggons never go, to drive your chariot not in the same tracks as others and not along a wide road, but along untrodden paths, even if you will drive it along a more narrow one. (Trans. A. Harder)
Terentianus, with his ‘angustam studii uiam’, seems to be looking directly to Callimachus’ στεινοτέρην, just as his ‘parua … uia’ paraphrases Callimachus’ μηδ’ οἷμον ἀνὰ πλατύν (‘not along a wide road’). Indeed, even his choice of callem is pointed: callis means ‘a rough track, path’ (OLD s.v. 1), and is first found metaphorically here (TLL III 174.36–73);Footnote 48 Terentianus’ path is ‘rough’ because it has not been paved by his poetic predecessors, but also because his very subject matter is rough and difficult. The epithet tenuem is likewise pointed: it alludes in Callimachean terms to the smallness of the path, but also perhaps to the sense that Terentianus’ subject matter, grammatice, was sometimes derided as trivial and slight. Quintilian, for example, had to fight off such criticism of the ars grammatica (Inst. 1.4.5, ‘quo minus sunt ferendi qui hanc artem ut tenuem atque ieiunam cauillantur’, ‘so much the less should we tolerate those who complain that this art is trivial and jejune’). Terentianus’ project is tenuis in every sense.
Terentianus then describes the actual content of his works (59–72):Footnote 49
What is a letter, what are two, what are syllables when they're joined together — this is what we'll pursue among the thickets and rough terrain and rocky shallows. At first glance you might think this is a humble activity and fit only for children, but those who've undertaken it know that it's hard work and that the burden is hardly manageable. But the mind stretches itself even more keenly so that it's not content with the obvious, so that the fine points do not escape notice as one searches out what is hidden in every crevice, so that there's no false distinction in matters of such refined subtlety.
Metapoetic terminology again all but leaps off the page, as Terentianus describes the difficulty of his subject matter and his own diligence in pursuit of refinement and subtlety. This is a boast common to didactic poets, but Terentianus may look specifically to Lucretius (1.922–7):
I realise how obscure all this is, but high hope for praise has struck my heart with a sharp goad and at the same time has instilled in my breast a sweet love of the Muses, and I'm now driven on by that love, and with a lively mind I roam the trackless paths of the Pierides that have never before been trodden by anyone's foot.
Terentianus’ recondita parallels Lucretius’ obscura; both have acer; both have mens; both invoke the Callimachean untrodden paths. But Terentianus spurns Lucretius’ high hopes for glory (cf. 84, ‘pompae gloria uilis est’, ‘the glory of the grandiose is a trifling thing’); he is instead ostentatiously modest in his ambitions. Moreover, where Lucretius proudly claims to teach matters of great importance (‘magnis doceo de rebus’, 1.931), Terentianus insists that he is content to exercise his craftsmanship on a smaller scale. Mutatis mutandis, what Tore Janson has written of Pomponius Mela's preface surely applies here: ‘His apology for the dryness of his subject may well have been intended seriously, but it also serves discreetly to draw attention to the way in which the writer masters these difficulties. The more ungrateful the subject, the greater the merit of the writer who succeeds in presenting it artistically. What we have here is a … brand of mock modesty’.Footnote 50
So Terentianus continues in apparently humble strain (73–84):
Skill and circumspection are ever vigilant, avoiding ambiguous language, avoiding what's excessively archaic or colloquial, avoiding hiatus or a disjointed structure or anything that's insufficiently clear. While we advance with a steady foot, our verses’ feet themselves must never tremble. This test is no less fervent than if you were discoursing on the most elevated topics, and the time required to pronounce judgement is the same. The glory of the grandiose is a trifling thing.
This closing passage is again deeply intertextual, garlanded with flowers plucked from Horace, especially from the Ars poetica. It is no surprise, of course, that a Latin poet writing didactic poems about the art of poetry would allude to his most famous predecessor in the genre, and we will see a number of such allusions later in his poems as well. But to stick to Terentianus’ preface for the moment, with the opening line of our passage compare Hor., Ars P. 46–8:
In carefully and subtly weaving words together you'll speak very well if a clever conjunction makes a familiar word seem new.
Terentianus’ ‘callida cautio’ is an allusive instantiation of Horace's ‘callida … iunctura’, blended with his foregoing cautus — quite fitting for a poet who is so avowedly concerned with the tenuis.Footnote 51 So too do Terentianus’ ‘ne sermo ambiguum sonet’ and ‘neu … sit quod male luceat’ evoke Horace's ‘parum claris lucem dare coget, | arguet ambigue dictum’ (‘[the good critic] will force you to illuminate what's insufficiently clear, he'll critique ambiguities of phrase’, Ars P. 448–9): Terentianus promises that he will follow Horace's poetic precepts. And even Terentianus’ foot pun, ‘dum certo gradimur pede, ipsi ne trepident pedes’, looks to Horace's ‘pede certo’ (‘with sure foot’, Ars P. 158). Now foot puns have a long history in Greek and Latin literature; they are found at least as early as Aristophanes (Ra. 1323), and poets like Ovid seem to make an entire career out of them (Am. 1.1.4, etc.).Footnote 52 But when Terentianus Maurus, metrical magician, re-activates this traditional pun, he does so with full force: he is a poet who will write in some fifty metres. This is a programmatic and justified boast.Footnote 53
Terentianus’ closing sententia is also programmatic: ‘pompae gloria uilis est’, ‘the glory of the grandiose is a trifling thing’. He concludes with a final rejection of grand poetry on grand themes. This caps the inversion of generic expectations that he has been working toward throughout the preface. For 83 lines he has defiantly revelled in the ‘labor arduus’ (65) of crafting small-scale poetry, arguing that such work is in every way equal to sublimia (82). Now, in his last line, he even dismisses the supposed glory of ‘higher’ genres. Terentianus, in short, follows the poetic pattern observed by William Fitzgerald, apparently claiming inferiority while in fact demonstrating superiority, turning ‘weakness into strength’ and forcing readers to adjust their own value judgments and hierarchies of genre.Footnote 54
By now it should be clear that Terentianus is a very skilful poet. We have seen allusions, careful language, puns, and a persistently clever blend of self-deprecation and boasting as he exploits the productive tension between his small-scale poem and the hard work required to create it (‘aw, shucks, this old thing? — and oh, by the way, you can't even imagine how hard it is to do what I'm doing here’). And he is not just parroting buzzwords from the poetic past: he has refashioned this intertextual tradition into his own poetry for his own ends. In his preface Terentianus Maurus gives every promise of being a worthy heir to the Alexandrian tradition of didactic poetry.
III THE REST OF THE POEM (85–2981)
Poets are on their best behaviour in programmatic prefaces, but Terentianus Maurus puts his poetic ideals into practice in the rest of his poetry, too. His De litteris (Ter. Maur. 85–278) treats the pronunciation of individual letters; De syllabis (279–1299) the pronunciation of syllables, with special attention to particular difficulties; and De metris (1300–2981, incomplete) the rules and origins of a variety of metres. We will take a close look at selected passages from all three of these poems, and I will show that Terentianus’ refined literary features are not confined to programmatic purple patches — he is simply a refined literary poet.
1. De litteris
De litteris first. We will examine a connected series of passages from the end of the poem. After describing the pronunciation of all the other letters, Terentianus is left with the semivowels, which pose particular difficulties (222–39):
The seven remaining letters, the semivowels, can scarcely be named even in prose. Since I can't put them into suitable verse, I'll mark them out for you in shining red ink like a title: we'll talk about each in the order given below:
F L M N R S X
…
But the third [m] ‘moos’, as it were, from within a closed mouth. The sound of the fourth [n] is produced just beneath the palate, where the breath of the nose and the mouth comes together. The letter which follows these [r] causes a harsh sound to vibrate with quivering blows.
Terentianus says that he was able to put the rest of the letters into verse: a (‘ā’), b (‘bē’), c (‘cē’), d (‘dē’), e (‘ē’) — but he apparently did not say ‘ef’ or ‘el’ or ‘em’. For him, these sounds were evidently just ‘f’ or ‘l’ or ‘m’; they were continuants that did not require a helping vowel and so could scarcely even be pronounced properly in Latin prose, let alone be made to fit verse.Footnote 55 What to do with the unscannable is a long-standing poetic problem — think of the Ennian induperator for imperator (Ann. 78 Sk. etc.) or Horace's little town ‘quod uersu dicere non est’ (‘which can't be named in verse’, Sat. 1.5.87) — and it is one Terentianus will confront over and over again in these poems, solving it in different ways.Footnote 56 But his solution here is particularly creative: he has inserted the seven problematic letters as a rubricated title. Indeed, while notionally perhaps speaking only of his own autograph copy, Terentianus’ description of the rubrication would seem to serve as instructions to his copyists as well. Terentianus is not the only ancient author to refer to rubrication, but he is very nearly the only extant author to give such explicit instructions for its use in his own work.Footnote 57
His descriptions of the letters themselves are no less artistic. The ‘third’, i.e. m, ‘moos’ (mūgit) from within a closed mouth. Try it: close your mouth and moo like a cow. It is an excellent description, and even in saying the onomatopoetic mugit you make the right sound. So too is his description of n quite accurate (again, try it). And he outdoes himself in his description of r: ‘uibrat tremulis ictibus aridum sonorem | . . . littera’, ‘the letter causes a harsh sound to vibrate with quivering blows’. He is describing a trilled r, and again the form of his verse matches its content, as in the first two words of the line you are forced to trill the r in successive syllables.Footnote 58 It is not easy to describe the pronunciation of letters clearly and accurately; it is not easy to do so with literary verve; it is not easy to do so in sotadean verse.Footnote 59 Terentianus takes this small-scale poetic exercise and executes it to perfection — in fact, he handles his discussion of Latin letters in verse better than the vast majority of ancient grammarians manage it in prose.Footnote 60 He is a poet in sovereign command of his material and his medium.
Terentianus follows his description of the Latin semivowels with a digression (247–74). He claims that the Pythagoreans have a system in which letters correspond to numbers — not the one everybody knows, where α = 1, β = 2, γ = 3 and so forth, but one based on place of articulation. Thus γ, κ, ξ and χ have the same value (Ter. Maur. 260), as do δ, θ and τ (Ter. Maur. 264). Vowels are not counted. The passage is obscure, as this bit of Pythagorean numerology does not seem to be attested elsewhere, at least not in this form.Footnote 61 But it looks a lot like the ‘Major System’, a modern memory technique that maps numbers onto letters in almost exactly the same way (so d, t and th correspond to the number 1; k, hard g, hard c and hard ch correspond to 7; etc.).Footnote 62 The Pythagoreans must have had a similar system, whether used as a mnemotechnic or a mystical device or for some other purpose.
But just as Terentianus seems to be on the verge of telling us more, he demurs and offers instead an elegant envoi (274–8):
Since this material is beyond our strength, if I manage to expound such subtle things to you in verse in a way that avoids the obscurities which usually befall even prose speech when it tries to explain these recherché things, I'll be content with what my trifles have accomplished thus far.
Here we return to the themes of the preface. Terentianus says that the intricacies of Pythagorean numerology are ‘beyond our strength’, recalling the uires-topos of recusationes generally and perhaps Horace again specifically (Ars P. 38–40):
Take up material appropriate to your strength and think long and hard about what your shoulders can bear and what they can't.
Terentianus would be following Horace's advice here, not trying to do what is beyond his powers. He also picks up on his own prefatory simile of the struggling athlete. With ‘tenues res’ and ‘paruis … rebus’ we hear the twin echo of the ‘triviality’ of Terentianus’ subject and the critical refinement with which he has treated it. So, too, does he emphasise here how he has strived to avoid obscurity in his exposition (cf. 73–8). And if he has succeeded in a clear presentation of his material, he says, he is well content with his literary nugae. Again we have a ‘humble brag’, blending apparent modesty with implied boasting.Footnote 63 And of course the very word nugae has an illustrious history in this context, being the word Catullus uses to describe his own supposedly small-scale and trifling but actually well-wrought poetry (Catull. 1.4) — whatever exactly Catullus himself meant by nugae, later authors will have thought of his refined example.Footnote 64 Thus in closing De litteris, Terentianus recalls the poetic principles of his preface with a series of programmatic intra- and intertextual references.
2. De syllabis
So ends De litteris. If we turn the page in a modern edition, we meet with the beginning of De syllabis, where the same artistry is everywhere on display (279–85):
The syllables which properly fit into the heroic metre I've laid out here in verse, as far as my abilities allowed — in verse so that the sonorous smoothness of the lines might lighten the tedium of a rather dry style. Bassinus, my son, and Novatus, my son-in-law, first polish these verses as much as you can with frequent application of a refined file — not treating me like a father or a father-in-law, but as if I were a stranger.
Terentianus declares his subject in the first word and the first line: he focuses on syllables, and in particular on syllables in hexameter verse. He then explains why he is writing in metre at all: so that the ‘smoothness’ (lēuitas) of the lines might lighten (lĕuaret) the reader's potential boredom. Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way: the reader will think of Lucretius’ famous ‘honey on the cup’ passage, where Lucretius offers the same reasoning for presenting Epicurean philosophy in hexameters (Lucr. 1.934–50). But Terentianus has also included a pun with a variation in quantity, which I suspect is not just there for our aesthetic pleasure, but to rework Lucretius’ own pun in that passage (Lucr. 1.939–42):
So that the unwitting age of children may be beguiled as far as the lips, and meanwhile may drink the bitter draught of wormwood, and though charmed may not be harmed, but rather by such means be restored and come to health. (Trans. C. Bailey.)
Terentianus’ allusion refigures Lucretius’ etymological wordplay into a metrical pun: entirely appropriate for a metrical magician concerned with vowel quantities.Footnote 65
Moreover, Terentianus declares his adherence to the ideals of Horace's Ars poetica. He entrusts his poems to his son and his son-in-law to polish ‘with repeated application of the file’.Footnote 66 polio and its compounds are commonly used to describe putting the finishing touches on literary works (cf. again Catull. 1.2), and such ‘refinement’ is one of the key ideas of Horace's Ars poetica. Horace is in fact the first extant author to use lima figuratively to refer to the revising and polishing of literary work, famously speaking of the labor limae (Ars P. 291). Terentianus’ choice of the diminutive form limula is perhaps self-deprecating in the spirit of nugae and a recollection of Catullus’ love of diminutives in his polished libellus — or perhaps, because Terentianus’ subject matter is so small and fine, he requires a correspondingly small and fine instrument to polish it.Footnote 67 And Terentianus is without any doubt thinking of Horace in this passage. Little allusions abound in what follows,Footnote 68 but we can consider in some detail a passage just a few lines later (314–16, 324–6):
This work will remain under lock and key at home, nor will I allow it to be known until your judgment has set my mind at ease on this question, whether our efforts have been in vain or have some usefulness.
…
Of course if anything seems to you to need correction, I won't fight against it like a fool or cling to my bad ideas; I'll straightaway cross out the offending passages and replace them with what's right.
This is an elegant intertextual blend of two Horatian passages of advice on critical revision: Hor., Ars P. 386–90:
Nevertheless if at some point you write something, let it be subjected to the critique of the ears of a Maecius and your father's and my own, and put your parchment safely aside at home for nine years: you can expunge what you haven't published, but a word that's been sent forth doesn't know how to return.
And Hor., Ars P. 438–52:
If you recited something to Quintilius, he would say, ‘Correct this, please, and this’; you could deny that you could do any better — you'd tried twice and three times before in vain — he would order you to expunge and return to the anvil poorly wrought verses. If you preferred to justify your mistake rather than delete it, he would waste no further word or expend pointless effort to prevent you from loving yourself and your own work alone and without a rival. A good and prudent man will criticise flaccid verses, he'll reproach harsh ones, he will place a black mark next to inelegant ones with a turned pen, he'll prune back excessive ornamentation, he'll force you to illuminate what's insufficiently clear, he'll critique ambiguities of phrase, he'll mark down what needs to be changed.
Horace tells the aspiring poet to keep his work at home (‘membranis intus positis’) until it has passed critical judgment (including that of family members) and is fully ready; Terentianus declares that he will keep his poem under lock and key (‘domi clausum manebit’) until Bassinus (his son) and Novatus (his son-in-law) have given it their imprimatur.Footnote 69 Horace criticises poets who defend their poems’ imperfections rather than fix them (‘si defendere delictum quam uertere malles’); Terentianus says that he will not fight against (i.e. ‘defend himself from’) adverse criticism nor will he be foolishly in love with his own stuff (‘non ero stulte repugnans, aut amans praue mea’): if there are things to be corrected (‘corrigenda’), he will straightaway excise the reprehensible parts (‘culpanda delens’) and make space for what is right (‘praebeam rectis locum’). The Quintilius of Horace would say ‘correct this’ (‘corrige … hoc’) and order that to be deleted (‘delere iubebat’); that is precisely what Terentianus will do. Horace's critic will reproach (‘culpabit’) certain verses and mark out what needs to be changed (‘mutanda’); Terentianus will obliterate the culpanda. Indeed, there is even Horatian imitatio in apparently innocent phrases. Terentianus awaits the judgment of Novatus and Bassinus about whether his labor has been in vain (‘opera … inanis’) or has some usefulness; the only other place in extant Latin literature where opera is paired with inanis is in our intertextual passage of Horace, ‘operam … inanem’ (Ars P. 443).
As I have already observed, it is no surprise that a didactic writer on poetry would show knowledge of the most famous didactic poem on poetry in the Latin tradition. But more than simply signalling that he is aware of the poetic tradition and that he is entering into it himself, Terentianus is deliberately showing just how closely he has followed Horace's advice. He thus proves that he is doing what a good poet is supposed to do; with the dense Horatian intertextuality in these passages, Terentianus is legitimating his project against the most important critical standard and demonstrating his competence and authority to write a didactic poem on poetry himself.
3. De metris
Much more can be said about the preceding passages and about De syllabis more generally, but let us now breathe some of the even more rarefied air of De metris. Although incomplete, De metris is the longest of Terentianus’ extant works, and in many ways his most impressive.Footnote 70 Over the course of nearly two thousand lines, he describes the details of a minutely marshalled host of Latin metres — and he describes these details in the very metres that he is discussing. He constantly plays with form and content, and he continues his allusive poetics, all while communicating a lot of practical information about patterns of longs and shorts.
Terentianus begins De metris in trochaic tetrameters (1300–1456) and sotadeans (1457–1579), but at line 1580 he shifts into an epodic system of dactylic hexameters alternating with iambic trimeters. This shift is a classic instance of Terentianan metrical form reflecting his poem's content: Terentianus is a ‘derivationist’, tracing all metres back to expansions and contractions and resolutions and substitutions and combinations of dactylic hexameters and iambic trimeters.Footnote 71 Indeed, he traces both the dactylic hexameter and the iambic trimeter back to a single primitive six-foot Urform. The aetion for this original metre is Apollo's fight against the giant snake Python, during which, Terentianus says, the Delphic people gave a double cheer (1584–95):
There is moreover this story which explains the double metre in a not unharmonious fashion — and maybe it's true; let your trust look to the credibility of the story's source. When Apollo as a youth was overwhelming Python with a storm of hostile arrows, the inhabitants of Delphi are said to have shouted encouragement to strengthen his spirit as he did battle, as their fear or their reverence for his presence dictated. They let out a fearful exclamation of two/two-fold words, īē paīān, īē paīān, īē paīān: you see here the origin of the hexameter verse in six spondees. But they also let out a happy shout of excited words, ĭē paĭān, ĭē paĭān, ĭē paĭān: and from this arose the iambic verse of as many feet.
Terentianus introduces this tradition with some well-chosen wordplay: there is a ‘non absona fabula’, a ‘not unharmonious story’, to explain the origin of the double metre. On the one hand this simply means that the story fits. On the other, however, it means more particularly that the story is metrically apt for the phenomenon that it explains. Terentianus alludes to the antiquity and multiplicity of the tradition with his Alexandrian ‘feruntur’ (1587); this footnote may serve to distance himself from that tradition, whose truth he has already left to the reader's judgement (1585), declaring that the reader must look to the authority of the tale's source — which, in true allusive fashion, he never names.Footnote 72
In line 1590 Terentianus breaks from his epodic system, writing three consecutive hexameters to describe the origins of the dactylic hexameter, and he again introduces the key phrase with a pointed pun: the people let out an exclamation consisting of ‘geminas … uoces’, ‘two words’ (i.e. ἰὴ παιάν) or ‘words with two forms’ (i.e. ἰὴ παιάν = two spondees or two iambs;Footnote 73 cf. ‘gemino … metro’ just above). Terentianus’ wordplay, of course, is not either/or: it is both/and. So in the first instance he scans ἰὴ παιάν, ἰὴ παιάν, ἰὴ παιάν as six consecutive spondees, which he then glosses in 1592 with a holospondaic line, the only such verse in his poem. Form perfectly mirrors content as Terentianus describes the origin of the dactylic hexameter.
At 1593, Terentianus switches from dactylic hexameters to iambic trimeters. Line 1594 repeats line 1592 with different scansion, this time six consecutive iambs. And so in the following line (1595) Terentianus writes a purely iambic Latin verse to point to and point up the origin of the iambic trimeter. And with that he has done it, deriving both dactylic hexameters and iambic trimeters from one original exclamation — given to support the god of poetry, no less! — matching his metrical form to his aetiological content at every sure-footed step, and adding in plenty of wordplay and allusive poetic reference along the way. In his masterful presentation of the material, he communicates both information and his poetic authority. He will organise the rest of De metris along derivationist lines from these original forms, first treating metres that derive from the dactylic hexameter (1608–2180), then metres springing from the iambic trimeter (2181–2538), and finally metres that arise from blending the two (2539–2981).Footnote 74
Much of Terentianus’ artistry in this poem is to be found in the details. So, for example, at one point he discusses dactylic hexameters that end in an iamb (1920–40). Now you might say to yourself, ‘Latin hexameters that end in an iamb? I've never seen such a thing’. Terentianus has anticipated this objection (1927–30):
If someone is thinking that this sort of thing isn't found, look, I'll give a Homeric example ‘re-sounded’ into Latin verse of the sort that the Greeks used to call a ‘mouse-tailed’ (i.e. ‘tapering’) verse: attoniti Troes uiso serpente pauĭtant.
Of course Terentianus is explaining the phenomenon in question while also writing lines that exemplify it (ending dabĭtur, mŏdo, solĭta est), but he outdoes himself in pointing to a Homeric example. He could simply cite the Homeric verse in Greek (cf. ἰὴ παιάν above), but here he refashions it into Latin verse (with a deliberately reperformative re- prefix). What is the verse? Il. 12.208 Τρῶες δ’ ἐρρίγησαν ὅπως ἴδον αἰόλον ὄφιν. Terentianus has kept the sense, kept the hexameter, and kept the iambic finish: a small-scale tour de force of form matching content in literary translation. Moreover, he alludes to the scholarly discussion that attended this Homeric verse and those like it, so-called στίχοι μείουροι (‘mouse-tailed lines’), Latinising the Greek technical term as the hybrid form mĭuron (Latin prosody with Greek declension).Footnote 75 This Homeric verse is the locus classicus for ancient scholarly discussions of the form, and Terentianus simply expects you to know about the Homeric passage and the learned controversy that surrounds it — otherwise you will miss almost all of what is going on here.Footnote 76 This is Hellenistic poetry in Latin form.
Terentianus’ translations from Greek have a quiet confidence about them, as the reader is expected to recognise the original and so recognise Terentianus’ skill.Footnote 77 So consider his translation of the opening lines of Theocritus’ first Idyll, from a passage where he is discussing the importance of the bucolic diaeresis to the pastoral genre (2123–30):
If someone wants to compose a pastoral poem, he should end his fourth foot with a word break and fill out the verse with two feet that begin from a complete word, since this is the sort of verse that they've decided to call ‘bucolic’. In this genre (pastoral)/metrical form (bucolic diaeresis), the son of the Sicilian land is far and away the best — to avoid introducing a Greek verse here, I'll rewrite it in Latin:
dulce tibi pinus summurmurat, || en tibi, pastor,
proxima fonticulis; et tu quoque || dulcia pangis.
(Cf. Theoc. Id. 1.1–3 ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς, αἰπόλε, τήνα, | ἁ ποτὶ ταῖς παγαῖσι, μελίσδεται, ἁδὺ δὲ καὶ τύ | συρίσδες.)
We are, of course, meant to understand that ‘the son of the Sicilian land’ is Theocritus, and that Terentianus has translated the opening lines of Theocritus’ Idylls into Latin, again keeping the sense and the hexameter and the metrical detail in question (the bucolic diaeresis). We are perhaps also meant to recognise that ‘Siculae telluris’ is a Vergilian tag (Aen. 1.34),Footnote 78 which may help introduce the following lines (2131–4):
Theocritus observes this rule continuously in almost the whole of his poem; our Vergil seldom follows it to that extent, but nevertheless he does say:
Terentianus’ observation is accurate: Theocritus does use the bucolic diaeresis extensively, and Vergil is more sparing.Footnote 79 Terentianus loves Vergil (‘noster … Maro’), who is his most common source of examples throughout his poetry,Footnote 80 but here I suspect that he is allowing that Vergil is only second-best as pastoral poet. Terentianus had begun his discussion of the bucolic diaeresis by instructing the budding pastoralist to write such lines; he then says that Theocritus is far and away the best at ‘this’. Whether by hoc he means the pastoral genre or the bucolic diaeresis, it is pretty clear that Theocritus does it better than Vergil. Indeed, Terentianus goes on to say in as many words that Vergil does not use the bucolic diaeresis anywhere near so often as Theocritus — i.e., Vergil does not follow Terentianus’ prescription.
Furthermore, the Vergilian example that Terentianus has cited is both homage and challenge. Terentianus has quoted the opening two lines of the third Eclogue; these lines themselves are a translation of Theocritus (Id. 4.1–2). This need not cast shade on Vergil — i.e., it need not imply that Vergil is somehow secondary — but it does show that Terentianus can play Vergil's game too, and just as well: Vergil has translated the first two lines of Theocritus’ fourth Idyll, keeping the bucolic diaeresis; Terentianus has done the same for the much more famous first Idyll. These examples are not chosen just to exemplify the metre; they have metapoetic intent, and in them and in Terentianus’ remarks about them we can see both literary criticism and poetic rivalry.
Another Vergilian example with an element of imitatio and aemulatio occurs just a few lines later. Terentianus is now talking about adonics, i.e. the typical dactyl-spondee close of a hexameter. He says that Sappho had written a poem composed only of adonics, and then he says that he can do so too (2161–78):
And what is Terentianus’ poem? Beck refers to it in passing as a ‘little Aeneid’.Footnote 81 Terentianus’ passage, however, is not exactly a little Aeneid in the Ovidian mould; it is not a retelling of the whole Aeneid, but rather a reworking and expansion of the Aeneid's proem, as shown by the first and last lines (the endings of Aen. 1.1 and 1.7 respectively), as well as by the fact that it has precisely twice as many lines as that passage. Terentianus displays his wide knowledge of Vergil's poem, as the Vergilian cento is sewn together with only a few bits of Terentianan thread.Footnote 82 And rewriting Vergilian epic in short compass is a project characteristic of our poet: the man who spent much of his preface thematising a poetics of small-scale composition has here almost literally cut (and pasted) a grand epic narrative down to his preferred size. He is, moreover, exquisitely self-conscious about what he has done. Switching to hexameters, he explains: ‘pluribus idcirco, paruis ut notius esset | uersiculis carmen condi potuisse, peractum’. He has written this poemlet, he says, to show that a full poem can be composed in ‘small verselets’ — to exemplify his own avowed aesthetic tastes. And while the word condi could be chosen for any number of reasons — it is a common enough way to describe poetic composition (OLD s.v. condo 14) — in context one thinks of the importance of the term in the Aeneid and notes that Terentianus has perhaps deliberately drawn attention to it by not quoting Aen. 1.5 (‘dum conderet urbem’) in his cento. For Vergil, condere is used of both construction (Aen. 1.5) and destruction (esp. Aen. 12.950, ‘ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit’).Footnote 83 Terentianus, in an act of creative destruction or destructive creation, has done both, chopping up Vergil and ‘burying’ him by re-arranging the disiecta membra into a new poem. Terentianus could have picked almost anything he wanted to exemplify the adonic verse, but he has chosen to pay homage to Vergil while daring to rival him in redoing ‘his way’ the most famous lines in all of Latin literature.
One last passage. Much of De metris, of course, is taken up with descriptions of the rules and regulations governing various Latin metres. And much of the aesthetic pleasure to be had from these descriptions comes from Terentianus’ delicate interplay of form and content, as he writes the rules in the very metres that he is discussing, always with the ‘sure step’ of his preface. To adapt a couplet of Tennyson's, ‘hard, hard, hard is it, only not to tumble, | so fantastical are the dainty metres’!Footnote 84 And in these explanations, too, Terentianus Maurus’ careful craftsmanship is ever present. Let us consider his discussion of galliambics, which comes from near the end of De metris as we have it (2885–2900):Footnote 85
If we repeat this [the form of the foregoing verse] but take away the last syllable from its second half, when the two cola are joined together you've got a galliambic:
sĕgĕtēs mĕūm lăbōrūm, sĕgĕtēs mĕūm lăbō.
The grove of Cybele continually resounds with this metre, and they say that the name ‘galliambs’ was given to the metre because they thought its trembling nature was well suited to the Galli, to such an extent that they often try to make the penultimate foot a tribrach so that the verse warbles all the more. The line usally starts with an anapaest or a spondee, then two iambs follow, or a tribrach is added, and the first colon ends with a catalectic short. A pyrrhic and two trochees or a tribrach finish off the second half of the verse, and a half foot is left over. Catullus’ liber shows that he kept this metre rigorously:
sŭpĕr āltă uēctŭs Āttīs cĕlĕrī rătĕ mărĭă.
Terentianus had been discussing hendecasyllables, a discussion that he has concluded by focusing on the line's closing eight syllables (an anacreontic), as represented by sĕgĕtēs mĕūm lăbōrūm. In keeping with his organising methodology, in our passage he proceeds to derive the galliambic verse from a repetition of that colon with catalexis, i.e., sĕgĕtēs mĕūm lăbōrūm, sĕgĕtēs mĕūm lăbō: and voilà, we have the metre and its derivationist origin. At this point Terentianus shifts into galliambics himself, and he gives some details about the metre's ‘real world’ background. The metre was named after the Galli, the self-castrated priests of Cybele, who do seem to have used it in hymns to the goddess.Footnote 86 Terentianus says that it is well-suited to them because it has a tremulous quality, just like their voices. He then says that the basic form of the verse is frequently modified to bring out this warbling quality all the more: ‘they often try to make the penultimate foot a tribrach’. A fair description of metrical reality, but look at its form:
A galliambic line in which form mirrors content perfectly. Terentianus has made the penultimate foot (-rĕ trĭbră-) a tribrach, i.e, three consecutive shorts — and he has also literally made it ‘tribrach’, i.e. the word itself (tribrachyn). But he is not done: in the next line he points out that ‘the line usually starts with an anapaest’. And what has Terentianus started with? ănăpaēstus — again an ‘anapaest’ in every sense of the word. And still more: ‘two iambs follow’, duo post ĕrūnt ĭāmbi: he has done it yet again!
This is the sort of small-scale artistry that Terentianus’ poem abounds in, and working to understand such craftsmanship is essential if you want to appreciate his poetic project and enjoy his poetry. It is hard enough to give the rules for a bunch of Latin metres concisely and accurately, making sure to include the relevant Realien (Galli and Cybele) and requisite bits of literary history (Catull. 63). It is even harder to organise all this information in a coherent framework, deriving each metre from the one before it in a family tree going all the way back to an originary ἰὴ παιάν. And it is harder still to put metrical terminology like ‘catalectics’ and ‘cola’ and ‘half-feet’ into verse at all, let alone to describe hendecasyllables in hendecasyllables and galliambics in galliambics and so on through the entirety of the Latin metrical canon. All these are hard, but Terentianus goes further: so complete is his command of his material and his metres that he can accomplish all these feats of technical bravado while writing clever and allusive literary verse. This is the Alexandrian ideal of didactic poetry put fully into practice.
IV CONCLUSION
Terentianus Maurus is not a grammarian, except insofar as his raw materials are harvested from the traditional preserves of grammar. He is instead a didactic poet who has fashioned those raw materials into elegantly wrought poetry. Throughout his works he speaks in the voice of a practicing poet giving practical instruction to other poets. But already in late antiquity he had become a source for the grammarians, and so he gradually began to be absorbed into the grammatical tradition himself. Terentianus Maurus is a good source for grammarians, both ancient and modern, and there is nothing wrong with reading him for the unique and valuable philological information that he preserves. But to read Terentianus only as a source is to ignore the work of literary art that he has so carefully crafted, and to banish him to a life among the grammatici is to ensure that most of those who would enjoy and appreciate that art will probably never even sight it from afar. And Terentianus is a poet whose art cannot be appreciated from afar.
Early on in De syllabis, Terentianus tells us how he wants his poetry to be read (317–23):
But you need to work really hard while you're reading this poem: it won't offer up its subtle refinements to just anyone on a quick or cursory reading. The reader needs to give the same protracted (mŏrosa) attention to our text as we gave in writing it, we who — by confronting hard work and overcoming weariness — have scraped out from their hiding place things perhaps neglected by many. We've sought the glory of the difficult, not praise for the obvious.
This is yet another passage full of metapoetic meaning. These lines programmatically propagate an ideology of poetic reward through difficulty and hard work, labor. The poem's reader must work, just as the poem's author had to. Throughout we hear echoes of the language of Terentianus’ preface, with its emphasis on the mighty struggle required to grapple with such minute and subtle and frankly intractable material (cf. e.g. 39 ‘occultus trepidat labor’; 65 ‘labor arduus’; 66 ‘nec tractabile pondus’). Just as Terentianus had claimed in his preface that he was ‘not content with the obvious’ (68, ‘ne contenta … obuiis’), but deliberately pursued the difficult struggle (‘labor arduus’), here he insists that he is seeking ‘the glory of the difficult, not praise for the obvious’ (‘ardui laudem …, non fauorem ex obuiis’). Such work is a challenge, but as the alliteratively rhyming and chiastic wordplay of line 321 underscores (‘laborem prouocando, perdomando taedium’), it is a challenge that the poet has met willingly and overcome. And therein lies the glory of his achievement. Terentianus is not, however, just boasting about what he has accomplished; he is promising to readers that if they struggle and persevere, their hard work, too, will be rewarded.
Each of these verses is bursting with meaning. Consider the associations conjured by the vivid line ‘forsitan neglecta multis e latebris scalpsimus’ (‘we've scraped out from their hiding place things perhaps neglected by many’).Footnote 87 We recall first the image from the preface of the athlete struggling to draw jugs of water ‘imis ab tenebris’ (‘from the depths of the darkness’, 24). Moreover, the phrase ‘neglecta multis’ evokes Terentianus’ prefatory boast of venturing on untrodden poetic paths; Terentianus is not doing what has been done by ‘the many’. Finally, the last word, scalpsimus, is a striking and unexpected verb that may be working on two levels. On one, we have the image of the poet scratching at the dirt to dig out what is hidden in the darkness (OLD s.v. scalpo 1c, ‘remove from the ground by scratching, dig out with the nails’), a variant on the prefatory simile: difficult, literally ‘hardscrabble’ work.Footnote 88 But on another, scalpo means ‘sculpt’ (OLD s.v. 2), in this case to carve enduring works of art out of material that others have neglected. Terentianus is grubbing in the dirt and creating high art all at once.
We should also pause one last time to appreciate a piece of significant Terentianan metrical wordplay: mŏrosa intentio. The adjective mŏrosus is first attested here; the word would have stood out for readers. It derives from mora, and so mŏrosa intentio means on the one hand ‘protracted attention’ (cf. 83 ‘iudicii mora’). And yet there is doubtless a quantitative pun here, as the reader will think of the much more common mōrosa (‘pedantic’) as well: you need more than a bit of pedantry to appreciate what Terentianus has done in this poem. And could there even be a third sense? If mora can also have the sense of ‘metrical unit’, then Terentianus is further saying that you have to pay attention to his quantities to get his poetry.Footnote 89 And of course the very word he uses to make the point also exemplifies it: form matching content yet again. Terentianus both demonstrates and instructs the reader in how he should be read.
In this passage, Terentianus is notionally talking to Novatus and Bassinus (= uobis), whom he elsewhere describes as ideal readers, endowed with wisdom and charity and an indefatigable capacity for hard work (cf. 1288–9 ‘quibus est amor et prudentia iuxta, | et labor in studiis semper celebratus inhaeret’, ‘who possess love and wisdom in equal measure, and who are famous for constant and tireless work in literary studies’). But of course he is also addressing us, all his readers. And he is right. A cursory or superficial reading of Terentianus Maurus will not do: ‘deses et impatiens nimis haec obscura putabit’ (‘the lazy and impatient [reader] will think that these things are too obscure’, 1285). Terentianus’ poems yield up their rewards only on close and careful study; they require laborious philology in every sense of those words. But Terentianus’ poetry is worth such a reading, because he composed it with such care and artistry. In among the grammatical nuggets, there is a much richer literary treasure to be found.
ABBREVIATION
- GL =
H. Keil, Grammatici Latini (8 vols), Leipzig, 1857–1880.
