CATALEPTON 9 AND HELLENISTIC POETRY

Abstract

The dating of Catalepton 9 has been the central issue of scholarship on that poem. The more particular questions of the poem's authorship, the identity of the addressee, and its chronological relation to other texts, both depend on and contribute to ascertaining the date of composition. The clearest exposition of the problem remains that by Richmond. Evidence provided by Catalepton 9 falls into two categories: literary and historical. Literary evidence encompasses two kinds of data: various formal features of the text and intertextual links with other poetry. While the poem's metre, language and style suggest a relatively early date of composition (before the Eclogues), the close textual parallels with the Eclogues, interpreted as borrowings from rather than sources of Virgil's poetry, point in the opposite direction. Historical indications are likewise ambivalent. On the one hand, it seems likely that the addressee is M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus (cos. 31 b.c.) and, further, that the occasion of composition is his (only) triumph in 27 b.c. (Catalepton 9.3 uictor adest, magni magnum decus ecce triumphi). On the other hand, the allusions to his military achievements (4–5, 41–54) are both too vague and exaggerated, and, if taken literally, do not fit well our Messalla at any particular point of his career (nor any other known member of the family). Richmond, following Birt and followed by Schoonhoven, believed that at least some of the historical references are ‘intended to be prophetic’. More recently, Peirano has attempted to explain this lack of precision by arguing that Catalepton 9 is not a real-life panegyric but a later biographical fiction, the real focus of which ‘is to be found […] in the relationship that the poem constructs between Virgil and his patron’.

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