Il centone virgiliano Hippodamia dell'Anthologia Latina: Introduzione, edizione critica, traduzione e commento (review)

Roughly the last twenty-five years constitute a golden age in Italy for scholarship on the Vergilian centos, i.e., texts in which authors take discrete lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to create new narratives. Italian classicists have produced valuable new editions of individual centos and exciting literary criticism on elements of cento composition, the corpus of sixteen patchwork poems to survive from antiquity, and single texts. Those studies have gone a long way toward countering the prejudiced notion that the radically secondary texts are manifestations of late-antique cultural devolution, and toward establishing them as legitimate objects of scholarly attention. Continuing the fine scholarship by Italian critics on the centos is Paola Paolucci's introduction, text, translation, and commentary on the anonymous Hippodamia. Paolucci's book is by far the most detailed study of the cento yet produced and impresses with its rigor and philological acumen. I have no doubt that it will become the standard work on the poem.

The start of Paolucci's book, however, brings a disappointment: it lacks a comprehensive overview of the Vergilian cento, which might have included a discussion of the form's history and its relationship to other aspects of and activities in Vergil's reception. Providing such a big picture would have contextualized the Hippodamia, and in the process would have made her study more useful to a general scholarly audience. As things stand, Paolucci devotes her introduction to an informative and keen analysis of thematic and formal aspects of the Hippodamia. Particularly good in my view is the examination entitled tecnica compositiva (lxi–xcix). A fascinating feature of cento composition is the manner in which the author works in verbal units larger than the individual word. For the centonist, what functions as a verbum is some segment of a Vergilian line, a complete hexameter, or, rarely, some still larger metrical unit; and "writing" amounts to reconstructing the Vergilian membra that he has rendered disiecta into a new unity. (I use the masculine pronoun out of convenience, despite the existence in antiquity of a female Vergilian centonist, the fourth-century Faltonia Betitia Proba, although some identify her as Anicia Faltonia Proba.) Paolucci is thorough and intelligent in her treatment of the compositional techniques that the centonist uses to perform his singular artistic task—or perhaps better, to play his literary game of skill successfully—and of the formal features that arise from the reembodiment of Vergil. Of particular note is the excellent discussion of voces communes and voces propinquae (lxxii–lxxviii), the "keywords" that link up the lines of Vergil that a centonist cites either consecutively or in close proximity to one another.

Two other strong features of the introduction are the studies of the cento's prosodia e metrica (xcix–cxii) and of its textual tradition (cxiii–cxxx). The text itself (3–10), meanwhile, which is accompanied by a useful apparatus criticus that gives weight to the readings of a wide range of editors, including the recent De Nonno and Zurli, is very solid and should supersede previous editions of the cento. (Paolucci's good editorial sense shows itself especially in lines 9–10, 49–50, 73–74, 84, and 155–156.)

After a sound translation of the Hippodamia (13–18), Paolucci provides a full and detailed commentary (21–139), which contains many useful and enlightening remarks on textual matters, the author's centonic methods, the poem's formal characteristics, and narrative issues. In addition, Paolucci often discusses sensibly parallels between the cento and other texts, including but not limited to other patchwork poems. She does not, however, offer extensive interpretive notes on the peculiar intertextual relationship between the Hippodamia and its source poetry. This seemed to me a curious omission, given that a defining aspect of any cento is, of course, its recasting of Vergil's...