Lucillio, Epigrammi: Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e commento ed. by Lucia Floridi (review)

Lucillius, the most cutting Greek epigrammatic poet, amply deserves a modern edition of his poems—and, thanks to Floridi’s excellent book, one of the more significant sources of Martial’s well-known wittiness and sharpness can now be studied and appreciated in a fully satisfactory way.

The Greek text and the Italian translation of Lucillius’ 142 epigrams (including five dubia and ten spuria) are preceded by a rich introduction, almost one hundred pages long, where Floridi deals with the poet’s life and his relation to the emperor Nero; his prominent position within the genre of the scoptic epigram; the language and the style of his poems; the structure of his books of epigrams; and his fortune in late Latin, Greek, and Byzantine satiric poetry.

Floridi dedicates a long section of her introduction to the manuscript tradition, where she enriches the already copious information given in the introductory pages of her edition of another celebrated epigrammatic poet (Stratone di Sardi: Epigrammi [Alessandria 2007]) by taking into account some other manuscripts (such as the Riccardianus 25) and by discussing some new bibliography, especially F. Maltomini, Tradizione antologica dell’epigramma greco. Le sillogi minori di età bizantina e umanistica (Rome 2008). A specific chapter is dedicated to the versification technique of Lucillius’ epigrams.

But the most valuable contribution that Floridi makes to our knowledge of Lucillius’ work is the commentary on his epigrams, because, however strange it may seem, no extended scholarly work has yet been dedicated to him apart from a dissertation composed almost half a century ago (B. J. Rozema, Lucillius the Epigrammatist: Text and Commentary [Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971]). The more or less recent editions of the fifteen books of Martial’s epigrams published in England (Howell 1980 and 1995, Kay 1985, Leary 1996 and 2001, Williams 2004, Coleman 2006); in Italy (Citroni 1975, Carratello 1980, Canobbio 2011 Buongiovanni 2012); in Germany (Grewing 1997, Schöffel 2002, Damschen and Heil 2004, Fusi 2006); in Holland (Galán Vioque 2002, Moreno Soldevila 2006); and in Sweden (Henriksén 1998–1999) have created an urgent need for a modern edition of a poet whose production was deeply exploited by the most famous Latin scoptic poet. After the publication of Gideon Nisbet’s Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial’s Forgotten Rivals (Oxford 2003), dedicated to some imperial epigrammatic poets, a work Floridi quite often refers to (sometimes with disagreement), a new edition of the epigrams of one of the more prolific, and also more biting, of these “forgotten rivals” was badly needed—and has become even more necessary since the subsequent publication of the editions of other imperial epigrammatic poets such as Ammianus (Schulte 2004) and Nicarchus (Schatzmann 2012).

Floridi has accomplished a difficult task in a very thorough way, showing her growth as a scholar who has built effectively on her (nevertheless still remarkable) edition of Straton’s musa puerilis (the Latin translation of the locution used by Constantine Cephalas, the collector of the poems of the Palatine Anthology, to indicate the homosexual content of the epigrams of Straton). The Greek text of each epigram is followed by the critical apparatus and by a neat Italian translation; after a detailed introduction in which the content of the poem is discussed in relation not only to the whole production of Lucillius, but also to the peculiar poetics of the scoptic genre, we find the commentary proper, with particular attention to grammatical, linguistic, and philological questions.

The usefulness of this book, which is essential for anyone interested not only in Greek epigrams but also in the main features of classical scoptic poetry, is enhanced by the three indexes (Greek words, Greek and Latin quoted passages, most significant names and items) that complete the volume.