Review

Author(s): W. R. Johnson
Review by: W. R. Johnson
Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), pp. 176-177
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/268932
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176 BOOK REVIEWS

Ciris: A Poem Attributedto Vergil. By R. 0. A. M. LYNE.Cambridge Texts and

Commentaries, vol. 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Pp.
xii + 332.
Since its latest wild blazing in the first decade of this century, the Cirisfragehas
from time to time guttered and rekindled and guttered again, but, with the
appearance of this book, it may be extinguished indefinitely: in the squandered
and defeated ingenuities of this massive commentary, we come to see how hopeless
the questions of the poem's authorship and date are (and also, alas, how boring
they are). Having wandered patiently and impatiently through this maze for
several hundred pages, just as the feeling that there is no exit begins to stir in the
mind, one is relieved to discover that we can indeed get out-by the way we got
in. The exit is the entrance, the answer is the question. Who wrote the Ciris and
when? We do not know, no one knows. That knowledge is sufficient and somehow
gratifying. But Lyne is not easy with questions that are their own answers, and so,
while we depart from the labyrinth, he remains there to invent new questions and
new answers.
Is the anonymous author a neo-neoteric of the second century A.D.?No: he is a
neo-neoteric writing sometime "at least after Statius" (p. 54; see also pp. 11, 25,
28, and, in particular, 48). Was he forging a Virgilian poem? No, he was not.
What was he doing? We do not know. What was his method of composition?
Here, we begin to have some luck. This writer of "later epyllion" cut and pasted
his poem together from his random and insatiable pilferings, from any early
epyllion he could lay his hands on (Catullus 64, chiefly; from Cinna's Zmyrna,
Valerius Cato's Diana, Calvus' Jo) and from Cicero's Aratea, from Lucretius,
Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Statius. The sedulous ape created an industrious collage,
and the poem is something of a "cento" (p. 36).
This formulation affords some chance of solutions when we come upon a phrase
in the Ciris that "seems slightly ill at ease in its linguistic surroundings" (p. 40);
we do not rest until we have found it "a contextually plausible home" (p. 41) in
a parallel passage from a poem that happens to have survived (but the Ovidian
and Silver parallels that Lyne offers are never as convincing as his Catullan and
Virgilian parallels) or, failing that, from a vanished poem. Thus, if we feel that
the peplos of 21-41 is "quite inappropriate" (p. 109), we search our memories,
lexicons, and imaginations, until we come upon Calvus' lo, which "could well have
included, in an account of a religiousprocession" in Juno's honor, "a description of
a robe, of a peplos in fact, to be offered to her." Or does the nurse, Carme, seem
to be not "basically very comfortably at home in our poem" (p. 185)? If she does
not, she has her real home, doubtless, in Cinna's Zmyrna, from which the Ciris
poet, who could invent almost nothing for himself-not plot, not language-has
shanghaied her. To argue from genuine fragments is bad enough; to invent frag-
ments and argue from those is beyond desperation.
L. is deeply worried by "wilder contributions to the Cirisfrage, based on sub-
jectively chosen 'significant' parallels" at the opening of his introduction (3), and
near its close (56) he speaks of having "accumulated . . . a lot of objective evi-
dence." But in describing his method for discovering the perished sources for the
Ciris' uneasy borrowings (pp. 40-47), such words and phrases as plausible, prob-

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 BOOKREVIEWS 177

ability, convincing, likely, very possible, clear, obvious, possible or probable,seem

demonstrably,probablydesign a kind of incantation of certainty, a rhetoric of proof,
and the urgency of this strategy of synonymia guarantees one's doubt. Superb
tools have been wasted on the construction of an empty box.
Or rather, they might have been wasted had L. not sometimes escaped from
the clutches of the Cirisfrage. So far as I can judge, this text of the Ciris is the
best we now have, and the part of this commentary that explains L.'s choices
and changes is a model of tact, of Latinity, of imagination, and of sheer good sense.
So, when L. is not hunting phantoms, his comments on the language of Latin
poetry are always helpful and sometimes brilliant. He has written, as he modestly
claims (p. 4), a commentary that "could be of some use as a reference book to
students of Latin poetry generally"-much more than that, for this is an invaluable
reference book for the study of Latin poetry. Finally, whenever L. chances to
look at the Ciris itself, when he yields himself to this irritating, charming, occasion-
ally beautiful poem and ignores the "serious gossip" about its problems, he
invariably writes with great precision and sensitivity. His remarks on the narrative
technique of epyllion, on neoteric lost ladies and neoteric style, on the nature and
function of Carme, on passages or verses in the poem that please him, are at once
instructive and delightful. One would very much like to see his thorough readings
of Catullus 64 and of Virgil's Orpheus. In the meantime, we have this rich, baffling,
remarkable book.
W. R. Johnson
Cornell University

Studi apuleiani: problemidi testo e loci vexati delle "Metamorfosi."By GIUSEPPE

AUGELLO. Letteratura Classica, no. 5. Palermo: Palumbo, 1977. Pp. 261.
L. 6,500 (paper).
Studi apuleiani contains discussions of textual problems in 407 separate passages
of the Metamorphoses,arranged in order of occurrence. The reading adopted by
Augello is listed first. The reading of the extant archtype (codex F) is indicated,
and, where appropriate, the readings of the later tradition (o, a, s). The choices
printed by Helm (third and fourth editions), Giarratano, Terzaghi, Robertson,
Frassinetti, and (for the sections which they edited) Van der Paardt, Paratore,
Grimal are regularly recorded. In most instances, the reading which A. espouses
has already been chosen by one or more of the editors whom he regularly cites,
often by most or all of them. But there are seventeen readings advocated which
none of his "edd." have printed: one reading of F sub rasura (4. 4. 11-12 percussus
for perfossus), seven readings of F defended against conjectural change, and nine
conjectures.
One of the conjectures is his own: 5. 17. 2 nocteturbatisvigiliis (perdita), perditae
matutino scopulum pervolant.Here A.'s (perdita) perditae is inferior to Gruterus'
simple perdita,which permits matutinoto mark the beginning of the main utterance
in contrast to nocte. The other eight conjectures are the following. In 2. 7. 4, A.
adopts Salmasius' viscus (for F's viscum) without manifesting awareness of CIL,

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