659.0 Eol5 A = At m 1 ^^^ X 1 = =- •■..] 4 = 2 m 4 m -1^^ 7 = 3 1 ^- 1 i o ^ -=i The T'liegi^e in ^'qeGen-^.tem By Robinson Ellis - f f^-*-'*- THE ELEGIAE IN MAECENATEM A LECTURE DELIFERET> IN THE HALL OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD, ON mONDAT, JUNE lo, 1907 BY ROBINSON ELLIS, M.A., Hon. LL.D. CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN LITERATURE LONDON HENRY FROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, AMEN CORNER OXFORD; 116 HIGH STREET 1907 Price One Shilling net THE ELEGIAE IN MAECENATEM A LECTURE DELIFERET> IN THE HALL OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD, ON mONDAT, JUNE 10, 1907 BY ROBINSON ELLIS, M.A., Hon. LL.D. CORPUS PROFESSOR OF LATIN LITERATURE LONDON HENRY EROWDE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, AMEN CORNER OXFORD: 116 HIGH STREET OXFORD : HORACE HART PRINTUR TO THE UNIVERSITY • * « • , - . • •••• *.•• • • : . : •• » . ■ • •• '..: •• ••• • • • '« '• ' ' • •'... ■;.':• ,.••■« a • t K « « « c v*^ -1 THE ELEGIAE IN MAECENATEM Among the smaller poems which the carelessness or ignorance of antiquiiy ascribed to Vergil is extant an eleo-iac composition of 178 lines which in the one early MS. containing the whole poem, the BruxeUensis of the twelfth centurj'-, is written, without any indication of discontinuity, as a single poem, Joseph Scaliger was the first to show that in reality a break occurs after 144 Ifon umqiiam sitiens fiorlda temper eris, and that the verses which follow beginning Sic est Maecenas fato ueniente locutus, form a new elegy, describing Maecenas' dying moments as 1-144 deal with his character as a living man.^ This ^ view of two distinct elegies has been generally accepted ^ since ; but there is, perhaps, room for a slightly different hypothesis ; the original poem may have been much longer than what remains in the Brussels MS. ; it may have extended to 400 or, like the Consolatio ad Liuiam, to nearly 500 verses. Then the lacuna between 144, 145 might be occupied with the more intimate and private relations of Maecenas with Augustus (including his loss of favour) in the later years of both, and this would naturally introduce the death scene, which begins with 1 45. In any case there can be as little doubt that Scaliger was right in dissevering the two portions of this Elegia in Maecenatem, as that Jacobs was right in dissevering the two portions of the pseudo-Vergilian Bivae, which are similarly continuous and without break in the MSS., into (i) 1-103 the curse itself [Dirue), (2) 164 — fin. a fragment ' Schauz. '.V^7i\\y< of a connected but distinct poem on a woman who was beloved by the author, and who gave her name Lyd'ta to liis verses. The first verses of tlie Maecenas'^ offer a not incon- siderable difficulty. Defleram iuuenis tristi modo carmine fata, Sunt etiam mei-ito carmina danda seni. Vt iuuenis deflendus enim tam candidus et tarn Longius annoso uiuere dignus auo. Who was the youth whose death the poet had recently deplored? The old man is, of course, Maecenas, who, as Meibom ^ computes (p. 183), might have been over 60 when he died. We should reply unhesitatingly, the youth can be no other than Drusus, the brother of Tiberius, whose death preceded Maecenas' death by a year, an agreement with the words of the poem, as Vahlen has observed, of rather special exactness (Skutsch ap. Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. Con- solatio), were it not for two objections : (i) that where Drusus is believed to be actually mentioned in the Maecenas, 147-H, Men, inquit, iuuenis primaeui, luppiter, ante Angustum [al. -tam) Drusi non cecidisse diem, the Bruocellensis and all the remaining codices known to me (of which I shall speak further on) agree to give Bruti for Drusi, fidem for diem. As sane a critic as Meibom retained Bruti . . .fidem, explaining the words to mean, 'Is it possible that I, Maecenas, should die at an age later than Brutus, whom Julius Caesar brought up as his own son and trained to be loyal to the imperial house ? ', a sense which, however, can scarcely be got into the words, even if with Meibom we read augustam. (2) the second objection to ^ Tlie best edition of the poem is Riese's, Anthol. Latin, ed. 2, No. 760 a. It is also in Bahrens' Poe'ae Latini Minores I, pp. 122 sqq. 2 ' lohannis Henrici Meibomii MAECENAS sine de C. Cilnii Maecenatis uita moribus et rebus gestis liber singularis. Lugduni Batauonun, 1653.' identifying the iuuenis, whose death the poet had before deplored, with Drusus the son of Liuia, is the almost in- evitable conclusion that the autlior of Maecenas was the author of the Consolatio. As Schanz has observed, it is not necessary to read more than a very slight portion of the two poems to repudiate such a conclusion. The style of the one is wholly and essentially different from the style of the other. The Consolatio is greatly influenced by Ovid, and is throughout written in what may be called the classical form of elegy at the time. The Maecenas is comj^ara- tively nondescript in form : far removed from the manner- isms and artifices of the Ovidian school, it maintains a level plainness of style and diction which Meibom has not inaptly characterized as humilis (low or without elevation). The Consolatio is an artificial work^ with little of nature : the Maecenas does not aspire to be anything great, but yet is pleasing from its mere simplicity. It has far more of natural feeling, far less of what is technical or rhetorical.^ I do not agree on this point with Schanz, who pronounces the Consolatio to be the work of a tolerable poet, the Maecenas of a bungler. The two above-mentioned objections to believing Drusus to be the iuuenis of u. i have their weight, but are not con- clusive. The two parts into which the Maecenas falls have an intimate correspondence, not only in language and metre, but reference. Hence, if in the first of these we are told at the outset by the poet that he had not long before written an epicedium on the premature death of a young man, when the second part similarly begins with a passionate complaint against the cruelty of the gods which had cut off a young man in his prime, it is a natural, though not • There are points in which it approaches the stylo of the Elegy ad Messallam included in the Calalepta ; but metrical considerations, especially the uniform adoption of a disyllabic ending to the pentameter as opposed to the trisyllables and quadrisyllaljlus of the Ekyia ad Messallam, preclude anything moro than a superficial likeness. necessary, inference that the youth thus early extinguislied should be in both parts of the poem the same. And this identification would be supported by the coincidence of rela- tion in either section of the poem to Maecenas and the imperial house of the Caesars. Any allusion to a man who, like Brutus, had taken part in the murder of Julius Caesar, would be out of place, and wholly alien to the feeling which the poet uniformly conveys. And if the iuuenis is not, and hardly can be, Brutus, so far as I can see, Drusus and Drusus alone ^ suits the palaeographical requirements of 148. Ex- perts will support me in stating that the interchange of d and b in MSS. is familiar and acknowledged ; fidem might be retained, and (reading augustaon with MS. Arundel 133 and the codex once in possession of Petrus Servius, and now in the Bodleian) be explained of the princely loyalty of Drusus to the house of the Caesars : yet, as the Bruxellensis, our oldest voucher, gives angustum . . .fidem, not angustmn, it is more than possible that fidem is a corruption of diem, an error of transcription too easily defensible by numerous similar parallels to need enlarging upon. As to the other objection — the dissimilarity of style in the Gonsolatio and the Maecenas — we cannot feel sure that our surviving Gonsolatio ad Liuiam de morte Drusl is the only poem that commemorated the death of Drusus : there may well have been other Epicedia by less ambitious versifiers ; amongst them by the author of Maecenas, who perhaps tried then his limited powers for the first time on a subject of national and world-wide interest. That his epicedion on Drusus should have perished, whilst his elegy on Maecenas has survived, would be one of those freaks of * Marcellus is out of the question, as he died in 23 b. c, which does not agree with Dejleram iuuenis tristi mo do carmine fata ; and the view mentioned by Meibom, p. 171, that a son of Maecenas, who died in early youth, is alluded to, seems to have as little solid foundation as the gloss in the MS. of Petrus Servius which explains iuuenis by the words nepoiis Maecenaiis, a grandson of the senex of v. a. chance or accidents of literature which can surprise no one. ' But/ it will be said, ' the Maecenas is unworthy of the Augustan age and cannot have been written in it ' : to which we may answer, with Meiboni, that the humbleness of the verses does not prove anything as to the time when they were written. The Augustan era had its great stars and its smaller lio^hts. Of the long list of versifiers men- tioned by Ovid in the last of his elegies from Pontus how very few have survived ! Not that I would defend the Augustaneitj' of our poem from its ascription to Vergil ; compositions as palpably non-Augustan as Robae, Est et Non, Vir Bonus have been admitted to the same privilege, and no one can say why. Joseph Scaliger thought tlie Maecenas was written by Albinovanus ^ Pedo, and the weight of his authority has given credibility to this view till comparatively recent times. But the highly-coloured passage quoted by the elder Seneca from Pedo's poem on the expedition of Germanicus (or possibly Drusus) to the German Ocean is inconsistent with such a view : we have in it a true specimen of the later Augustan poetry, such as the writer of Maecenas could never have aspired to. More modern critics have contented themselves with attempts to fix the date. Haupt thought he could trace the chief source of the Maecenas in the younger Seneca's 114th letter, in which the philosopher, prefacing with the words quomodo Maecenas uixerit notius est quain ut narrari nunc deheat, proceeds to a detailed description of his walk, his effeminacy, his parade of a loose style of dressing and speaking: then quotes, as an illustration of his outlandish and extravagant dictions, a number of instances, the reading and meaning of which have ever since been the despair of interpreters, as the attempts signalized by Meibom are enougli to show. Quid turplus? * So Iliibner ap. Schanz, § 315. 8 asks Seneca, than the following from Maecenas' treatise de cultu ? Amne siluisque ripa comantihus ukJe ut cdueum lyntrihiis arent uersoque uado remittant hortos, again irremedlahilis factio and rlmantur eindis lagonaque temptant domos et spe mortem exigunt. Much more to the same effect might be found in Seneca's voluminous philosophical writings. But that the poem was based on Ep. 114, or on Seneca at all, is a rather arbitrary hypothesis which does not commend itself to a judicial criticism, and has been rejected by the latest modern writers as decidedly as Haupt's other view, that the Gon- solatio ad Liuiam was a forgery of the fifteenth century. Even the correspondence of Maec. 25, 26 : Liuide, quid tandem tunicae nocuere solutae ? Aut tibi uentosi quid nocuere sinus ? with Sen. Ep. 114 Quid ago? non oratio eius aeque soluta est quam ip>se discinctus? or Non statim, haec cum legeris, tlhi occurret hunc esse qui solutis tunicis in Vrhe semper incesserit? merely turns on a point of dress which, as Skutsch has observed, was the well- known almost proverbial symbol of effeminacy. Long before his death Maecenas had passed into a type of soft living; it did not require the tirades of a Seneca to suggest what the poet might have witnessed with his own eyes. At any rate, there seems no valid reason for thrusting the poem down, as Haupt seems to imply,^ to a late period of the Empire, when such an apology for softness would fall flat and perhaps hardly be under- stood, and when the history of the man himself, as detailed in the two Elegies, would be out of place and out of time. Far nearer, I believe, to the fact, is the opinion of the ' Opusc. i. 347 ' neque antiquorum uakle neque ut uidetur recentissi- morum.' By ' most recent ' Haupt means written in the fifteenth century, as he believed the Consolatio ad Liuiam to be, against all modern criticism. 9 accomplished metrist, Lueian Miiller, who placed the composition of the work in the first decennia after Maecenas' death. This would suit the chronological datum supplied by the name Lollius (u. lo), whom both Hlibner * and Skutsch more than probably identify with the Lollius of Horace's fourth book of Odes (iv. 9) consul 20 B.C., died I B.C. But it is time to give an outline of the actual contents of the poem. (1-13) I, who recently bemoaned in verse the death of a youth cut off in his prime, must now chant an encomium to the memory of an old man;. for Charon's bark ferries old and young alike. To this task I am impelled, not by personal acquaintance with Maecenas, but by the request of Lollius. (13-20) The stock of Maecenas was Etruscan and regal : he was the right hand of Caesar (i.e. Augustus) and chief of the uigiles of Rome. Yet, though so high in Caesar's favour, he never abused his power. In him were combined the arts of ^linerva and Apollo ; if he showed a preference for things fine and rare, who is there that does not prefer the rich gems C? shells) of the Syrian coast to those of commoner shores ■? ^ (21-3S) The one fault alleged against Maecenas, his effeminacy of mind and body, may be excused as frankness and simplicity. Jealousy must confess that his flowing tunics did not interfere with his energy in guarding the streets of Rome ag'ainst bullies and cut-throats. His un- aspiring nature shrank from the glitter of triumphs, though in his grasp, had he wished them : he preferred to large estates and splendour the shade of a garden, the fall of waters, the songs of birds, the cult of the Muses ; for song * Jlenms, xiii. 239. And so Dessau in the Prosopographia hnperii Romani. ^ Or perhaps, ' lie was as unique as the ricli gem of the Syrian coast.' 10 and song alone has immortality. Homer's verses are a lasting monument, marble memorials perish. (39-92) And what was he to do? He had played his part as a soldier, had fought against Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, against Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, against Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. Victory and peace brought their natural relaxation. Did not Apollo, the same god who, at Actium, prevented the subjection of Rome to Antony and his Eastern paramour, and pursued with his arrows the barbaric host to the furthest corner of the Orient, drop his bow and strike his lyre, when victory had set in ? Thou too, Bacchus, when Rome had conquered India's coloured populations, didst return to the wine-cup, didst assume a double tunic, each of purple, didst carry a jewelled thyrsus and, in the jollity of thy heart, address it with words of free-spoken sincerity.^ I recall it all, even the silvered anklets thou wilt acknowledge to have worn, and the new-fashioned words which suited so well, young Bacchus, with thy frank and boyish mood. Hercules himself, hero of so many athla, could forget his conflict with the lion of Nemea, the boar of Eryman- thus, to dally with Lydian Omphale. The lion's skin and knotted club put aside, he submitted to twirl the distaff, bite the uneven surface of the bobbin, be cuffed by Omphale for working into knots or rudely breaking the thread. And this w^as he who, as an infant, had stifled the huge serpents, shorn away the Hydra's renascent heads, quelled the fury of Diomede's horse, slain Geryon with his three bodies and six hands. Nay, Jupiter himself, ' I agree with Meibom in considering the words Et tibi consulto uerhafuere noua to be an allusion to the insignifa uerba which characterized tl;e speech of Maecenas and of which some specimens are quoted in Seneca's 114th letter. Cf. 117 ' Haec uerba tarn improbe structa . . . tam contra consuetudinem omnium posita ostendunt mores non minus nouos- .. fuisse.' To Maecenas was ascribed the suggestion of a new kind of affectation in style {noua cacozelia) traceable in the works of Vergil (see Nettleship, p. 20 of his Ancient Lives of Vtrgil). 11 waited to conquer his giant foes, the Aloidae, before dis- patching his eagle to look for the Ganymede who should grace his hours of festivity. (93-106) Even so : it is for the victor to love and to enjoy and sleep on a bed of roses, for the vanquished to plough, reap, and be the slave of alarms. Seasonable- ness determines everything; the steer ploughs by day, reposes by night ; the swallow hides itself in winter, flits twittering over the lake in spring. Maecenas' life of indolent seclusion coincided with his friend Caesar's elevation. Sheltered by the approbation of Avigustus, who never judged with precipitance, he might fairly claim the repose he delighted in. (107-128) Would that he had possessed Medea's drug of rejuvenescence ! Flowers fade and revive ; stags shed their horns and receive new ones ; crows live and live on year after year ; why is man alone condemned to rapid ex- tinction ■? Aurora could make Tithonus immortal ; would that Maecenas had found a consort as potent as she ! Certainly, like Tithonus, he deserved to harness her steeds at dawn, place the reins in her hands, stroke their manes caressingly at the close of day. (129-144) For Maecenas was mourned as fondly as Hesperus, the youth so suddenly extinguished, was mourned by his sorrowing companions. One admirer brings saffron, another casia, another balsam, to honour his tomb. Nestor, the old man of three generations, could not live long enough to content his friends : and Maecenas might have rivalled him had the threads of his destiny been in my (the poet's) disposal. As it is, what remains for me to do ? I can only implore the earth to lie softly upon him and not press him with its full weight. We, for our part, will bring to thee, O earth, unfailing gifts of flowers and per- fumes ; drought thou shalt never feel, never be without a coronal of flowers. 12 Second Section ( 1 45-^7'^) These were the %A'ords of Maecenas as he lay dying. ' Alas, that I have outlived him who should have survived me (Drusus). A boy in years, he was a man in ripeness of understanding, a creature worthy of its creator, Caesar. And would that I had died before the breach (with Augustus) ' — shame prevented his saying more : but it was clear his thoughts were of his wife (Terentia) and that he missed her touch, voice, kiss, and embrace in his dying moments. 'Yet it may console me to remember that, living and dying, I was the friend of Caesar. Perhaps he will drop a tear when he is told "Maecenas is no more". One only boon I ask, to be buried happily : yet I could also hope that you, Caesar, will still remember, still talk of me. It is not your custom to forget a friend because he is dead. I, in my turn, shall remember you from the dust of my grave. It was you that gave me wealth and made the name of Maecenas unique and memorable. I was the guide of your counsels, your inner and informing spirit. May you live to a prolonged old age, and not pass to the Immortals till late. This is the world's necessity ; it should be your own wish. May the two young Caesars grow up to transmit undiminished the glories of their race ; above all let Li via be the object of your supremest care, and Tiberius compensate for him you have lost. But earth must not retain a god ; scion as thou art of ancestors that were divine, let Venus herself place thee (Augustus) in the bosom of thy father ' (Julius Caesar). It will be seen from this outline that the subject of the poem is what may be called an Ajxdogia pro ulta Maecenatis, a defence of the great minister against the attacks on his life and character. This apology (which we perhaps possess only in a fragmentary condition) mainly turns upon a single point, Maecenas' undeniable effeminacy of conduct and 13 morals, and his afiectations in diction and dress. They were parts, says the poet, of a frank open character which despised conceahnent and prided itself on its candour. The very word has almost come to connote the man. The Elegy itself supplies three examples: 4 cancUdus, 62 can- dldiora, 135 candoris] and every one will recall Horace's candide Maecenas. In times of peace Maecenas could show himself in the streets of Rome in double tunics fallino: to the feet, and an unedifying looseness of demeanour which ill-suited the ^j?'ae/ef^^ts iivh'i ; but when war came, he could brace himself to its duties and fight vigorously, as he proved in the naval campaign against Sextus Pompeius, at Philippi and Actium. And no one can say that he was unenergetic in the defence of the city against footpads or nocturnal assassins: Rome was safe when Augustus was away. And did not Augustus himself overlook or ignore his minister's failings ? He, at least, did not form his judgements inconsiderately. At this point (107 S(|(|.) the poet turns off very abruptly to a mythological digression, which, beginning with the story of Medea's caldron and the magical renovation of Pelias, goes on to speak, first of Tithonus, whom Aurora preserved unharmed by the old age which she could not prevent, then of Nestor, the vener- able sage of Pylos, who had seen three generations come and go ; introducing by the way a remote and very obscure legend of Hes^Derus. This somewhat empty display of mythological learning, intended, it would seem, to show off the poet's acquaintance with the technical and rhetorical rules on which cpicedia and poems of consolation were framed (Skutsch, Lillge), serves to introduce a wish that the life of Maecenas might have been artificially prolonged ; a wish, in lieu of which, as vain, the poet offers a prayer to Earth, to lie less heavily on the beloved shade, and promises an offering, ever to be renewed, of flowers and perfumes, which he, with all Maecenas' friends, are to bring. 14 With this (144) the first elegy, or perhaps the first part of the poem, ends. The second rushes at once in medlas res : Sic est Maecenas fato ueniente locutus, Frigidus et iamiam cum moriturus erat, unless we suppose, as its comparative shortness, 34 verses against 144 of the first elegy, justifies our supposing that a considerable number of verses are lost. These would seem to have preceded 145, since the fragment is otherwise con- tinuous and complete, except that the last two verses (33, 34) Cur deus in terris ? diuis insignis auitis, Te Venus in patrio collocet ipsa sinu are a little abrupt, and perhaps point to a lacuna after 32. I shall quote the whole of this section to give an idea of our poet's style and versification. 3 ' Men,' inquit, ' iuuenis primaeui, luppiter, ante Angustum Drusi non cecidisse diem ! 5 Pectore maturo fuerat puer, integer aeuo, Et magnum magni Caesaris illud opus. Discidio uellemque prius' — non omnia dixit: Inciditque pudor, <|uae prope dixit amor. Sed manifestus erat : moriens quaerebat amatae 10 Coniugis amplexus, oscula, uerba, manus. Si tamen hoc satis est, uixi, te, Caesar, amico, Et morior, dixit, dum moriorque, sat est ! Mollibus ex oculis aliquis tibi procidet umor, Cum dicar subita uoce fuisse tibi. 15 Hoc mihi contingat, iaceam tellure sub aequa. Nee tamen hoc ultra nil potuisse uelim, Sed meminisse uelim. uiuam sermonibus illic, Semper ero, semper si meminisse uoles. Et decet et certe uiuam tibi semper amore, ao Nee tibi qui moritur desinit esse tuus. Ipse ego, quidquid ero, cineres interque fauillas, Tum quoque non potero non memor esse tui. Exemplum uixi te propter f molle beatef 15 Vniis Maecenas teque ego propter eram. 25 Arbiter ipse fui : uolui quod contigit esse, Pectus eram uere pectoris ipse tui. Viue diu, mi care senex, pete sidera sere : Est opus hoc terris, te quoque uelle decet. Et tibi succrescant iuuenes bis Caesare diofni, 30 Et tradant porro Caesaris usque genus, Sed tibi sit curae quam primum Liuia coniunx. Expleat amissi munera rupta gener. Cur deus in terris ? diuis insignis auitis, Te Venus in patrio collocet ipsa sinu. This short fragment describes the death-bed of Maecenas; his last thoughts, partly of his wife Terentia, partly of Augustus, whose intimacy with Terentia could not but disturb the last moments of her husband. Yet Maecenas takes a justifiable pride in the knowledge of being not only the friend of Caesar, but the guiding spirit of his policy (26 Pectus eram uere pedoris ipse tui), expresses his last good wishes for the continued life of Augustus, and the prosperity of the imperial family : and ends with a parting prayer that one who was already a god on earth should attain to more complete consummation of godhead in heaven. It is difficult to believe that a piece justificative of this kind should be the work of a time far removed from the era of Augustus. Not that such theories are unknown in other and much more conspicuous instances. The Astrono- mical poem which goes under the name of Manilius, a work of the early part of the first century A. D., was once believed to date from the age of Theodosius ; the Satirae of Petronius Arbiter were thought by Niebuhr to belong to the age of Alexander Severus or Gordian : there are critics who deny the Ibis, usually included in the list of Ovid's works, to be by him, and pronounce it a forgery, perhaps by a Christian ami not earlier than the third 16 century A. D, Why sliould not our Maecenas be a similar composition of late date, perhaps not earlier than the third or fourth century 1 There are, indeed, not wanting special reasons for such a view. Meibom, with that enlarged erudition which marks his monograph, has shown that several extant compositions purporting to be written by contemporaries of Maecenas, mostly works dedicated to him , are apocryphal. He mentions the supposed letter addressed to Maecenas by Horace, from which Suetonius cites a passage in his Life ^ of that poet ; a Latin translation of a supposed letter by Hippocrates similarly addressed ad Maecenatem which is found at the beginning of the Laon MS. of Marcellus Empiricus' treatise de Medicament is y and seems to be identical with the libellus generally known as de tuenda ualetudine ad Maecenate7)i, ascribed to Antonius Musa, the famous physician who cured Augustus (p. 105 in the edition of Caldani, Bassano, 1800); and the so-called Isagoge of Soranus of Ephesus, which Meibom believed to belong to the age of Hadrian 2. Why should not our poem be ranked with these and be added to the list of Maecenatian forgeries ? If it was written long after, this might account for its seldom or never occurring in the same MSS. with the Gonsolatlo ad Liuiam. It had never been associated with that work, because it belonged to a perfectly different period of literature; the tradition of dissociation remained as a fact in the few and rare MSS. which preserved it. Its nondescript style might be thought to point in the same direction. It most nearly resembles some of the elegiac poems scattered * Vit. Eoratii, p. 45, Eeiff. Venprunt in manus meas et elegi sub titulo eius et opistola prosa oratione quasi commendautis se Maecenati, seel utraque falsa puto ; nam elegi uulgares, epistola etiam obscura, quo uitio minime tenebatur. ^ See Cagnati Variar. Observed, iv. 2, published at Kome in 1587, p. 263. This supposed treatise of 'Soranus the Ephesian ' is in Latin. Maecenas is addressed e. 5. 17 through the Latin Anthology, and might, hke them, be of almost any date. I do not doubt that these arguments might be multiplied, and perhaps be thought strong enough to make a powerful case against the Augustan epoch of the poem. My own impression — I will not say conviction — is on the other side. Elaborate apologies of this kind become less and less effective in proportion as they are removed from the age of the person they defend. No one can believe the hexameter Panegyric of Piso to have been composed long after Piso's death. Particular allusions that dwell in the memory, such as Piso's skill in playing a game resembling draughts or chess, would be natural from a contemporary, ridiculous, if not impossible, when the player had long been dead, and the game itself probably forgotten. Now the Maecenas has several such particular references. I. Nothing is better attested than Maecenas' passion for gems (Macrob. S. ii. 4. 12, Isid. Orig. xix. 32); two such allusions are believed to occur, Maec. 19 Vincit uulgaris, uincit Berytus harenas, where most editors change Bcrytus into heryllus, and 129-133 Quaesiuere chori iuuenum sic llesperon ilium Quern nexuni medio soluit in igne Venus, Quern, nunc infuscis iilacida sub node nitentem Luciferu^m contra currere cernis equis, in which Rubenius (son of the painter Rubens), approved later by Wernsdorf (p. 123), and to some extent in agreement with the contemporary French antiquary, Peiresc, traced a reference to a Tiberian gem representing the chief members of the Augustan family, conspicuously Drusus, a laurelled youth of beauteous features, who mounted on a winged steed seems to be soaring to the sky, possibly as idcntilied with Hesperus the ephebe beloved by Venus, quein Venus ante alios astrorum dlllgit ignes, Acn. viii. 590.^ * Tliis is of cour^o very douoUul. IJulniiiu.s' ( .ulicr view, tliat tlio winged steed carries BdUruphuii ideutilicd with Urusus, lias at least tho 18 2. The purple tunics, jewelled thyrsus, silvered anklets, which the poem ascribes to Bacchus, seemingly imagined in the person of Maecenas ^ in uu. 59-65, correspond closely to the description given by Velleius ^ of Antony on his returning from his Parthian expedition to Alexandria. This episode in the history of the defeated hero of Actium, an episode which the writer of Maecenas has transferred by a not unnatural adaptation to the subject of his own poem, was no doubt well known in Rome at the time : it would be out of date, if not forgotten, some years later, and would, especially in the inartistic form in which the poem presents it, be impossible two or three centuries after the event. 3. The presence of Maecenas at Actium, which is dis- tinctly asserted in uu. 45-48 Cum freta NiUacae texerunt lata carlnae, Fortis erat circa, fortis et ante clucem, and seems to be implied by the opening words of Horace's fii'st epode (Dessau, Prosopographia s. u. Maecenas), is against tlie express statement of Dion Cassius li. 3, and not mentioned by most of the authors who speak of the battle. Would our poet have gone out of his way to emphasize a fact wdiich was, when he wrote, generally discredited, and which was likely, as against history, to rouse suspicion or cavil ? But if the poem appeared at a time when the fight was still recent, it would merely rank with the other merit of a valid reason for the identification. Both Bellerophon and Drusus were lamed, the former by falling from his horse (Find. Isthm. vii. 44, Schol. Find. Olymp. xiii. 130), the latter by his horse falling on him and breaking his leg (Liv. Epit. 140 ex fractura equo super crus eius collapso, tricesimo die quam id acciderat tnortuus est). * See, however, Julius Ziehen, Rhein. Mus. lii. 450 sqq. ^ Veil. ii. 82 'Bellum pati-iae inferre constituit, cum ante nouum se Liberum Patrem appellari iussisset, cum redimitus hederis coronaque uelatus aurea et thyrsum tenens cothurnisque succinctus curru uelut Liber Pater uectus asset Alexandriae.' Plutarch {Ant. 50) npoaqmeiov Se tavTov AuTwvws . . , Aiovvaqj /caTO, rov tov fiiov ^rjkoy Atupvaos vtos irpoaayopivo- fitvos (Le Clerc). 19 numerous accounts of the battle in prose or verse, would be read by few, be gainsaid by still fewer, the general level of the work being too humble, not to say insignificant, to attract any wide attention. 4. The candor which plays so large a part in the character of Maecenas, and which as we have seen is emphasized by the triple repetition of the word in the poems, is not a point which would have been accentuated so strongly by a writer removed at any distance of time from the personal existence of Maecenas. I lean then to an early date for the composition of the Elegies, perhaps within a j^ear of Maecenas' death, perhaps some years later, hardly as late as the time of Seneca. Little or nothing, 1 believe, can be argued from the language, very little fi'om the metre. The diction is classical and in no way belongs to a period of decline : its few peculiarities such as torosus applied to a knotted club, omniperita used of Medea, sacerdos of Ganymede ; the position of -que very late in the sentence, the fond- ness for assonances, 50 Marte sedente decent, 65 talari a talos, 95 metat, metus, 99 lux est . . . nox est; 33 maior res magnis, 150 magnum magni are such as belong to the author, not to the time. If we might restore an Oriental word sicera to the corrupt passage 89, 90, where MSS. give Atque aquilam misisse suam, quae quaereret, ecqui Posset amaturo sitrna rcferre loui and write Posset amaturo sicera ferre loui, i. 8. bear strong drink to Jove, the cup-bearer Ganymede being thus designated, the writer might be a Syrian (cf. 19 Berytus) or at least a native of some region of the East. The disyllabic ending of the pentameter is observed through- out; and the peculiarly Ovidian combination Jiuias ct haius {Ih. 410) is once found 17, 18: 20 Palladc cum docta Phoebus donauerat artis, Tu decus et laudes Imius et huius eras. The resemblances to the Cousolatlo ad Lluiam, mentioned ))y Lillge, pp. 6, 7, such as Maec. 106 Augusto iudice dignus erat. Cons. 63 Res hominum ex tuto cernere dignus erat. M. 13 Omnia cum posses tanto tarn cams amico. C. 42 tanto tarn 2^lacuisse u'lro. M. 158 Cum dicar subita noce fwisse tibi. C. 148 lamne/ui Drusi mater et ipse/iti'n are mucli more numerous, and some of them very marked : nothing, however, can be inferred from them as to which of the two was written first ; and still less is it possible to believe that they were written by the same one man, in spite of the support which such a view may seem to receive from Maec. 1,3: Defleram iuuenis tristi modo carmine fata, Sunt etiam merito carmina danda seni. It remains to speak of the MSS. in which the Maecenas is preserved. They fall into two classes, (i) Of the first class the best representative is the Bruxellensis, of which a collation was published by Grosse in Fleck ei- sen's Jahrhilcher for 1869, p. 278. It contains the whole poem. Somewhat earlier in date are two eleventh- century codices, Parisinus 16236 containing uu. 1-43, and the Melllcensis (Molk, near Vienna) which has preserved the first 25. Paris 16236 was first collated by Chatelain ; the Molk Codex by Schenkl, who thought it would have been, if preserved entire, the best of our extant sources. Of these three I have myself re-collated the two first at Brussels and Paris: a collation of the Mcllicensis made by Schenkl was most generously sent to me by his son. Prof. H. Schenkl, of Graz. Much later in date (cent, xv) arc Arundel 133 in the British Museum, Phillipps 7283, Bodl. Auct. F. 4. 28, once in possession of Petrus Servius, a Roman physician of the early seventeenth centuiy, now in the Bodleian. Heinsius and Burmann cite most of its more prominent variants : sucli otliers as liave any vahie will be found in my forthcoming A2:>pendix Ver- gil iana. These three MSS. are all of the fifteenth century, but belong to the same class as the three earlier. (2) The second class comprises two MSS., one in the Vatican, 3269, the other at Leyden, Voss. Lat. 0. 96. Both agree in appending to the end of the Maecenas the words Finit elegia inuenta ah enoc in dacia, from which we may believe that Enoc of Ascoli discovered a copy of it either in Denmark or, as I mj^self think more likely, in Hungary. At any rate there is extant in the Rylands Library at Manchester a copy of Henry the Eighth's 'Defence of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther,' which has preserved in the king's own handwriting the words Eegi Daciae, i. e. presented to the King of Hungary, Louis IL The first seven of the above-mentioned MSS. are all I have been able to examine ; there are others which deserve careful inspection, notably two at Munich, each of cent. xi. The occasional excerpts from them given by Bahrens are inadequate : I shall, therefore, say no more of them here. Nor have I been able to see the Leyden Codex with the ' Suhscrix)tio' inuenta ah enoc in dacia ; but its compeer Vat. 3269 has many readings differing not inconsiderably from the first class : this is also true of the Codex ' Petri Seruii medici ' in the Bodleian. Though in many cases accident has determined the con- junction of particular authors in the same MS., it may not be without profit to mention that in five of the seven MSS. collated in my Apjmid. Vergil, the Maecenas is combined with one or more of the better-known pscudo-Vergilian 99 opuscules. Thus in tlie BruxeUenais it is attached to the Clrls and Catalepton, in Paris 16236 to the Moretuvi, in Vat. 3269 to the Dirae, in Arund. 133 to the Aetna, Ciris, Catalepton, in the Mellicensis to the Culex, Dirae, CojM, Moretum. The Phillipps codex forms an excep- tion, as also the codex Petri Seruii. In this latter the Maecenas follows the Fasti of Ovid, a circumstance unique in my experience, but full of hope for future explorers. Nor must I omit to mention that in an ancient Catalogue of the Murbach library of cent, ix-x all the pseudo-Vergiliana (except Est et Non, Vir Bonus, Rosae) are entered as copied in the following order: Dirae, Ciris, Culex, Catalepton, Aetna, Priapea, Copa, Moretum, Maecenas (Manitius in Bhein. Mus. xlvii). The ascription to Vergil thus rests on good manuscript authority, and may remount to the time of Charlemagne ; it may equally probably be much earlier. APPENDIX. p. lO, 1, 12. Sum memor, et corte memini sic dicere thyrso Baeche puer, pura candidiora niue as I suggested in American Journal of Philology for 1888, 270. On the whole of this passage I would refer to the above paper, whore I have drawn out the meaning of the poet, as I understand him, at greater length. Since then Dr. Julius Ziehen {Rhein. Mas. Hi. 450) has put forward the view that it is Augustus himself whom the poet intro- duces in the character of Bacchus, as he (Bacchus) might be imagined when returning from his (mythical) conquest of India. Some advantage gained by Augustus over the Indi, possibly the embassies which they kept sending to Eome as recorded in the Moniimentum, Ancyranum, Ilpoy hixi i^ 'IvZias Bacnkfwv irpia^uai noWaKts dnfaTaArjcxav, ovdinort -npo tovtov \_rov'] xp'Jfov wi'Giiaai -napa "Pu^ialwv -qytfilivi may have induced Augustus to institute a Eoman pageant in honour of Bacchus in which he himself played the part of the God, assxuning the purple robe, golden thyrsus, and richly ornamented shoes, which in a similar Dionysian procession Ptolemy Philadelphus had worn when representing the God. (Athen. 193 sqq., cited by Lillge, p. 10.) Such impersonations of divine beings by men were very familiar to the Greeks, and are specially mentioned as countenanced by Augustus, who himself took the part of Apollo in a cena SwSfKaOtos (Suet. Aug. 70). The poet of Maecenas, perhaps by imperial invitation, was not only present at this Bacchus-pageant, but took an active and personal part in it, addressing the God's representative (i. e. Augustus) in confidential and familiar words. This view, wliich Lillge accepts, labours under several objections, (i) No such signal conquest of India {denicimus Indos) is known to have occurred. (2) Augustus would hardly have condescended to imitate his rival Antony in supporting a part for which he had himself no inclination or aptitude. (3) Whereas such a part would be quite in keeping with all we are told of Maecenas, on whose ehrius sermo Seneca dilates Epist. 19. 9, cf. eloquendam ebrii hominis, Epist. 114. 4, and of whose mollities and uerha nova we possess attestations in various forms and in a great number of writers. (4) I do not know of any such Dyonisiac pageant in con- nexion with Augustus, and if lie took a part in any such anthropotheo- nixrphic pageant, it would have been as Apollo, not as Bacchus, that ho would naturally appear. Ziehen, however, objects to the identification of Bacchus with Maecenas on the ground that Bacchus is introduced to excuse Maecenas' iiiactiim after the victory of the Caesarians, and this is inconsistent with any immediate reintroduction of Maecenas at ail, uhkIi niorc win n In.ui a .'J27(i9 24 person excused ho is supposed suddenly to change into the very God who excuses him. It is true that such a transition is not poetically felicitous ; but tlie Maecenas does not appear to be mucli more than a tribute to the memory of a departed friend, and is in no sense written in the grand style. Not very unlike nor very much more extravagant is the personification of Apollo as taking an active share in the conquest of Actium, which both Vergil and Proj^ertius admit (Aen. viii. 704, Prop. iv. 6), and which the poet of Maecenas has borrowed from them. p. 17, 1. II, I quote this famous passage of Macrobius to give currency to the eminent lapidarian critic C. W. King's emendation Arahice, which Eyssenhardt has neglected to mention. Vale mel gentium, meculle, ebur ex Etruria, lasar Arretinum, adamas supernas, Tiberinum margaritum, Cilniorum smaragde, iaspi figulorum, (Iguuinorum lahii), berulle Porsennae, carbunculum fhabcas {carhuncide Arabice C. W. King), IVa avvTfixoj navra, fjidXay^ia moecharum. 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