Hill, Jesse

English

Edinburgh Research Explorer

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      [Review of] Robert Maltby, Niall W. Slater, FragmentaryRepublican Latin, volume VI: Livius Andronicus. Naevius.Caecilius. Loeb classical library, 314. Cambridge, MA; London:Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 736. ISBN 9780674997486Citation for published version:Hill, J 2023, '[Review of] Robert Maltby, Niall W. Slater, Fragmentary Republican Latin, volume VI: LiviusAndronicus. Naevius. Caecilius. Loeb classical library, 314. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard UniversityPress, 2022. Pp. 736. ISBN 9780674997486', Bryn Mawr Classical Review.<https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2023/2023.08.28/>Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:Bryn Mawr Classical ReviewGeneral rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 11. May. 2024BMCR 2023.08.28 Fragmentary Republican Latin, volume VI: Livius Andronicus. Naevius. Caecilius Robert Maltby, Niall W. Slater, Fragmentary Republican Latin, volume VI: Livius Andronicus. Naevius. Caecilius. Loeb classical library, 314. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 736. ISBN 9780674997486. Review by Jesse Hill, University of Edinburgh. jesse.hill@ed.ac.uk  This book is the latest installment in the Loeb series, Fragmentary Republican Latin (FRL), which has gradually been replacing (and considerably expanding and improving) the four volumes in Warmington’s now dated Remains of Old Latin (ROL). We have so far received editions of Ennius (FRL I–II) and the fragmentary republican orators (FRL III–V);[1] here Robert Maltby and Niall Slater offer us the wreckage of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Caecilius Statius (FRL VI). The standards established by the editors of the first five FRL volumes are extremely high (anecdotally, but truthfully, it was encountering FRL I and II as a PhD student that persuaded me to start caring about early Latin poetry). And there is also a particular need for Andronicus, Naevius, and Caecilius to be treated in this series: none of those poets has received a commentary or a translation that is at once full, reliable, and in contemporary English – despite the fact that they have all been garnering more and more interest in the world of anglophone literary criticism.[2] So, there was a lot for Maltby and Slater to live up to, and it was important that they got it right. Did they? In part, yes; in part, no. I’ll begin with what I take to be the positives. Many of the basic editorial virtues that mark the earlier volumes of FRL, and make the series superior to ROL, are present in this latest volume. Maltby and Slater[3] include extensive and accurate Testimonia for each poet. They present a generally excellent Latin text of every fragment[4] alongside a generous portion of the prose context in which it has been transmitted (the most extreme example: more than a page of Aulus Gellius accompanies Odyssia F 1). And they often arrange the fragments of a particular play or epic, not in a speculative order in which those fragments could have first appeared, but in the chronological order of the quoting authors[5] (perhaps the most salutary example: the verse that Warmington and many others confidently treat as the incipit of Naevius’ Bellum Punicum, despite it having been transmitted without book-number, here becomes F 41, landing among that poem’s “unplaced fragments”). These are all simple decisions, in line with the practice of earlier FRL volumes, but they nonetheless help to guarantee the book’s value. Valuable, too, is the portion of FRL VI devoted to Caecilius Statius. Here the editors provide full, useful, and modern bibliographies for most of the plays and have a number of insightful points to make (for example, the suggestion of paratragedy in Plocium F 1, at p. 491, n. 3). But it is the translations that strike me as particularly excellent: “festooned with headbands” (plenum taeniarum, Asotus F 1), “bonemeal-style” (ossiculatim, Fallacia F 6), and “I’m shredded by gossip” (differor sermone, Plocium F 1.18) are all choice bits of English diction that accurately and engagingly convey the colour of Caecilius’ Latin. Ethically, too, these renderings seem to me a big improvement on what we had in ROL: where Warmington, upon confronting a fragment that didn’t specify a character’s gender, tended to assume that Caecilius was writing about a man, the editors of this new Loeb are rightly less certain (Warmington’s “he” becomes “s/he” at Carine F 1, Hypobolimaeus [Subditivos] F 7, and Nauclerus F 3); similarly, where Warmington had sanitized at least one moment of obvious sexual violence in Caecilius’ Davus, Maltby and Slater translate with appropriate frankness (compressa, which had been “forced” in ROL, is now “raped” at F 1). There are minor missteps here and there (I am surprised that, at pp. 379–80, the editors are so credulous of Jerome’s claim that Caecilius was close friends with Ennius: Jerome is a valuable source, to be sure, but not always especially trustworthy on matters of biography); all in all, however, the last third of this book is a genuine success. Less successful, to my mind, are the book’s first two-thirds, where Livius Andronicus and Naevius are the focus. The translations are generally okay, accurate if not as elegant as those of Caecilius;[6] but there are some significant blemishes. Take F 78 of Naevius’ Tunicularia, one of the longest and most interesting fragments of Naevian comedy:   Theodotum cum Apella comparas qui Compitalibus sedens in cella circumtectus tegetibus Lares ludentes peni pinxit bubulo? “Theodotus, do you compare him with Apelles, Theodotus, who on the feast of the Crossroads, seated in a cellar screened round with matting, painted the household gods at play with a bull’s tail?”   This English strikes me as graceless (the repetition of Theodotus), a bit lazy (is “cellar” really the best rendering of cella here?), and syntactically clumsy (I needed to look at the Latin to understand that “Theodotus” wasn’t in the vocative). To boot, a key aspect of the last verse is wrongly rendered: we are dealing with the festival of the Compitalia, and Lares does not mean “household gods” in this fragment; it means “neighborhood gods” or perhaps “gods of the crossroads.”[7] Thankfully, as I say, the translations of Andronicus and Naevius are typically more accurate and less confusing than this; but they also rarely surpass Warmington when it comes to capturing Livian and Naevian style (one representative example: “contradict” for rumpere at F 65.2 of Naevius’ Tarentilla in FRL VI looks pretty drab next to ROL’s “shatter”). Likewise disappointing is the scholarly apparatus that accompanies the text and translation of Andronicus and Naevius (and it is in their scholarly apparatuses – especially in their state-of-the-art introductory essays to individual works and books – that the earlier FRL volumes particularly excel, so here the disappointment is acute).[8] Core items of modern scholarship, which have set the terms for recent discussion of republican poetry, are absent from FRL VI,[9] and there are some issues with the framing of the Odyssia (perhaps the text in this Loeb that most readers will be most interested in). One of the basic insights of contemporary scholarship on that important poem – the first epic in Latin – is that Ennius’ implicit and influential characterisation of it as rustic is unfair: that the poem, in fact, is genuinely sophisticated.[10] The editors of FRL VI seem reluctant to accept this. They do grant that certain aspects of Andronicus’ adaptation of Homer “could have been motivated by artistic considerations” (p. 16, my italics), but they are certain that the epic contains “concessions” to its Roman audience (p. 14)[11] and they claim, offering little in the way of support for this position, that the Odyssia was probably closer to (and consequently more derivative of) Homer’s text than many modern scholars would allow.[12] Long story short: the Odyssia presented here strikes me as at once less credible and less appealing than the epic I have come to love in, e.g., Goldberg 1995, Hinds 1998, and Biggs 2020. It bears mentioning, too, that the editors’ conception of Andronicus’ craft affects how they actually edit this poem. Confident that he is a fidus interpres of Homer, they twice supplement his Latin to make it closer to the Greek (see F 7: <primum> in Pylum devenies… ~ Od. 1.284: πρῶτα μὲν ἐς Πύλον ἐλθὲ…; and F 17.2: … domum venisse <parentis> ~ Od. 6.296: …ἱκώμεθα δώματα πατρός), and throughout create a new reordering and renumbering of the fragments of his epic, based on the assumption, presumably, that they can match up his saturnians more closely to Homer’s hexameters than Blänsdorf and Viredaz had. They can’t: FRL VI’s reordering is just as subjective as Blänsdorf’s[13] and not as good as Viredaz’s.[14] Nor, among all this reordering, do I notice any new arguments or new suggestions for which Homeric hexameter might lie behind any given saturnian. But let me back off: this is a 700-page book, and only around 40 of those pages discuss, present, and translate the Odyssia. Many of the complaints of my last two paragraphs, then, are limited in scope: FRL VI, especially in its excellent final third on Caecilius, is generally better than those paragraphs might imply. Mention of the book’s length, however, brings me to one final point, which does have a connection to the criticisms I have just been making. FRL VI is well over 100 pages longer than any of the other volumes in FRL, and it lacks, unlike those other volumes, any sort of general introduction: this mega biblion doesn’t justify itself – it doesn’t tell us why Andronicus and Naevius, playwrights and epicists from the third century BCE, belong between the same covers as Caecilius, a comedian from the second century BCE (ROL had presented those three authors in two different volumes). I wouldn’t come down too hard on this lack, except that it seems to me emblematic of an underlying issue with FRL VI: where the earlier volumes in the series are consistently self-aware, transparent, and rigorous, this volume, for all the obvious labour and learning that went into it, just seems a bit haphazard, a bit underdeveloped. So, I count myself a disappointed fan, hopeful that FRL will return to its former glory.   Notes [1] S. Goldberg and G. Manuwald, Fragmentary Republican Latin I–II: Ennius (Cambridge, MA, 2018); G. Manuwald, Fragmentary Republican Latin III–V: Oratory (Cambridge, MA, 2019). [2] The epics of Andronicus and Naevius have been getting the most attention: T. Biggs, Poetics of the First Punic War (Ann Arbor, 2020) is a signal contribution. [3] The editors never tell us who was responsible for which part of the book, so I treat every aspect of it as collaboratively created. [4] The app. crit., as is customary in Loebs, is spare, but full when it needs to be: e.g., there are enough details given below F 72 of Naevius’ Tarentilla for a reader to figure out that that fragment has only a tenuous claim to being Naevian. [5] There are two exceptions, noted but not justified by the editors: they follow the numbering of T. Guardì, Cecilio Stazio (Palermo, 1974) for Caecilius and develop a new numbering for the Odyssia, on which more below. [6] Other aspects of FRL VI also change from one section to the next (e.g., gender ambiguity is rarely marked in Andronicus or Naevius). [7] See D. Padilla Peralta, Divine Institutions (Princeton, 2020), pp. 158–65, especially n. 110. Cf. H. Flower, The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden (Princeton, 2017), pp. 26–27. [8] Reviewers of the earlier volumes have documented this strength: see, for instance, Whitton’s praise for FRL I–II at G&R 66.1 (2019), p. 120. The introductory essay to Ennius’ Annales at FRL I, pp. 97–107 is especially good – useful in its discussion of recent bibliography on that poem; convincing in the explicit and fully articulated argument it provides for its own interpretation; and extremely valuable in its description of Ennian topics that deserve further exploration. [9] Notably absent: A. Mercado, Italic Verse (Innsbruck, 2012); J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge, 2013); and B. Krostenko, “The Poetics of Naevius’ ‘Epitaph’ and the History of Latin Poetry,” JRS 103 (2013), pp. 46–64. The items cited in note 7 above are also not mentioned in FRL VI. [10] The point is made at S. Goldberg, Epic in Republican Rome (Oxford, 1995), pp. 63–73 and S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 57–63. [11] The pages from Feeney that they cite in their support (Beyond Greek [Cambridge, MA, 2016], pp. 58–59) discuss how Andronicus modernizes and adapts Homer to Rome; “modernization” and “adaptation” are meaningfully different from “concession.” [12] Their defense of this position mainly hinges on one sentence, which claims that “the range of the quotations remaining from the Odyssia and their closeness in wording to Homer’s original” are both evidence in favour of Andronicus’ general fidelity (p. 12; pp. 82–83 refer back to this). But “the range of the quotations remaining” – i.e., the question of which fragments of the Odyssia correspond to which verses from the Odyssey – is in fact extremely uncertain (as the notes on pp. 86–117 of FRL VI allow a reader to see, even the idea that the fragments derive from “twelve books” [p. 12, n. 13] is at most a possibility); and, in plenty of instances, Andronicus is not particularly close to Homer in his wording (as indeed pp. 14–17 of FRL VI show). [13] Note, for instance, Maltby’s and Slater’s belief (shared by Blänsdorf, Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum [Berlin, 2011], p. 23) that F 4, argenteo polybro, aureo eclutro, “probably” (p. 89, n. 2) corresponds to Od. 1.136–37 rather than to Od. 4.52–53, 7.172–73, 10.368–69, or 17.91–92. They do not justify this belief; it seems arbitrary. [14] A. Viredaz, Fragmenta Saturnia heroica (Basel, 2020), pp. 153–82 responsibly grants that there are some fragments of the Odyssia that simply cannot be accurately placed: in this respect, his ordering seems to me superior to FRL VI’s.  

[Review of] Robert Maltby, Niall W. Slater, Fragmentary Republican Latin, volume VI: Livius Andronicus. Naevius. Caecilius. Loeb classical library, 314. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 736. ISBN 9780674997486

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[Review of] Robert Maltby, Niall W. Slater, Fragmentary Republican Latin, volume VI: Livius Andronicus. Naevius. Caecilius. Loeb classical library, 314. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 736. ISBN 9780674997486

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