Das vorklassische Lehrgedict der Römer (review)

In a little-known poem that might well be described as didactic, A. E. Housman asks the question, "What was the date of Volcacius Sedigitus? / What might the date of that good man be?" only to answer himself, "We will not allow such a detail to fidget us: / Put him B.C. if he wasn't A.D." (The Poems of A. E. Housman, ed. A. Burnett [Oxford 1997] 267). As it turns out, B.C. is an excellent guess, though we know next to nothing about Volcacius, who reportedly earned his cognomen by having six fingers on each hand and who appears to have written a poem, perhaps entitled De poetis, on Latin literary history. If such details do fidget you, you can now turn to this engaging booklet on preclassical Latin didactic poetry by Kruschwitz and Schumacher, who present fourteen authors of the third to first centuries, providing text (typically based on J. Blänsdorf's FPL) and translation of any extant fragments, as well as commentary and background discussion. In the space of a few pages, you will encounter, for example, the gnomic utterances of Marcius Vates (an actual prophet consulted by the senate in 213); Ennius' advice on buying fish; Valerius Soranus, who wrote a work on tutelary deities (and ended up being executed for divulging the secret name of the divine guardian of Rome); and the Empedoclea of Sallustius, a work of natural philosophy reviled by Cicero.

Kruschwitz and Schumacher's declared goal is to rehabilitate this neglected and underrated chapter of Latin literary history. What exactly counts as didactic poetry, however? The authors adopt a deliberately wide definition that includes any kind of (largely) poetic text that conveys some sort of knowledge (11). This approach makes sense in light of the disparate and fragmentary evidence: if you don't cast your net widely, you are not going to come up with anything at all. Even so, it is not clear that all authors included are really didactic poets according to Kruschwitz and Schumacher's own definition. In the cases of Appius Claudius Caecus and Marcius Vates, we cannot tell whether their fragments are in verse (E. Courtney [The Fragmentary Latin Poets (Oxford 1993)] has raised the same concern for Accius' Didascalica); the identities of Valgius and Manilius are not assured; and no fragments survive for Sallustius and Titus Albucius. The justification for including the latter is particularly flimsy: Albucius was a politician, Epicurean, and noted Hellenophile of the late second century. The only indication that he might have composed poetry comes from a passage in Fronto, who in a list of poets declares, Albucius aridus. Clearly this means—so Kruschwitz and Schumacher conclude—that our man must have written a didactic poem on Epicureanism!

Despite the scarcity of fragments and information on the one hand and the lack of generic definition on the other, the authors are able to point out certain tendencies within their corpus, notably metrical experimentation and the preponderance of philological, philosophical, and scientific (esp. astronomical) topics. Kruschwitz and Schumacher largely avoid engaging with the issue of the poets' Greek models, preferring to highlight instead the Roman authors' independence (e.g., 116, 139–41). A fair number of the works discussed, however, are (or may well be) adaptations/translations of Greek originals, a fact that is interesting in itself and calls for more detailed treatment. It is symptomatic of the authors' Romano-centric approach that they compare at some length two passages by Varro Atacinus and Cicero (133–36) and discuss their relative poetic merits—but without quoting the lines of Aratus that they are both translating.

If the book thus raises more questions than it can answer, it fulfills its purpose of putting a number of neglected but intriguing authors back on the map. Given the current renaissance of archaic Latin studies, Volcacius Sedigitus may soon be a household name.