Siculus

Abstract: Until the early nineteenth century it was agreed that the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus were products of the reign of Carinus, for the name of the poet Nemesianus appeared in the manuscripts and Nemesian was known as the author of the (partly surviving) Cynegetica, which explicitly praises the sons of the emperor Carus. However, in i8i9 G. Sarpe first raised some of the arguments for setting the poems in the early years of the reign of Nero, and in I854, in what Wilamowitz subsequently lauded as a model of scholarship, M. Haupt firmly distinguished the seven poems of Calpurnius from the four of Nemesian. With the link to Nemesian went the only support for a date in the later third century, and Haupt settled the identification of Calpurnius Siculus as a Neronian poet which has remained entrenched to this day.' Attempts there have been to upset it, by seeing in the young Caesar praised a Domitian, a Commodus, a Severus Alexander, a Gordian III, even a Probus, but such attempts were clearly heterodox and obviously flawed.2 Those that were not refuted were ignored, and only isolated doubt remains today.3 A work of literature can be the most deceptive of historical documents, and the mechanical act of dating it is one to be approached with exceptional diffidence, for it will be built upon by the historian and the critic alike. Yet too often hypothesis is accepted as fact, and fresh examination of the work can produce startling revisions in chronology.4 The aim of this paper is simply to replace one hypothesis as to the date of Calpurnius Siculus with another which is equally valid and perhaps (in the author's opinion) more so. For the sake of clarity, its arguments may be set forth briefly at once. First, with but one exception, all of the traditional indications of a Neronian date are based on circumstantial details which are equally appropriate to other periods in imperial history; and various objections can be advanced to discount tho Neronian date and to favour one in the late second or third century. Second, the one explicit reference to Nero is not as exclusive as it appears, and while Nero cannot be rejected Severus Alexander is equally appropriate. Third, granted that the indications of a Severan date are at least no weaker than those for a Neronian date, the eclogues can be comfortably aligned with events of the reigns of Elagabalus and Alexander. In short, it is a matter of fact that a Neronian date cannot be proved and a Severan date disproved; it is a matter of opinion which is the more likely. Given the tentative nature of the arguments to be advanced, it would be out of order to draw any large conclusions; but if they are acceptable the slight diminution in our knowledge of the relatively familiar age of Nero will be more than offset by a dramatic addition to the history and literature of that enigmatic twilight, the reign of Severus Alexander.

Abstract: ‘ uilia sunt nobis quaecumque prioribus annis uidimus, et sordet quidquid spectauimus olim .’ ‘all the things which we saw in former years are worthless to us, and squalid - everything that in times past we gazed upon (esteemed/respected).’ Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogue 7.45–6 When Calpurnius’ old Roman tells Corydon, the country-boy fresh in town, that nothing that one has seen before can prepare one adequately for Nero's Roman spectacle (probably the games of 57 CE), it is almost impossible not to recall the magnificent loathing that Suetonius ( Nero 12.1-2) and Tacitus ( Annals 13.31) express for the new emperor's extravaganzas. Eleanor Leach comments that: ‘The builder of the amphitheatre [Nero] has combed the world for his marvels, creating a new cosmos within his gilded wooden oval.’ This spectacular new cosmos maps out a world in which pastoral can no longer exist because Nero has distorted the notion of rus in urbe to such an extent that Calpurnius’ only recourse is obituary. Here, Calpurnius’ eclogue functions not just as an elegy for pastoral, but as a poem which opens up a dialogue with Lucan's civil war landscape; in this world, metaphorical and real species of ruin take on an ever greater cultural urgency as means of interpreting the dramatic artifice of Rome's present.

Abstract: Time has done almost its worst with the cultural and social history of Western Greece in the period from Hieron's succession in 478 to the death of Aeschylus in 456. It has left us no complete work by any Western Greek author; and for a chronicler of the period it has been able to do nothing better than a Diodorus Siculus. As a result, most of those details in the picture that are not missing are obscure. Close observation is fruitless, except only at one or two points where there still falls the brilliant but fugitive light of a Pindaric ode. Even so, if we step far enough back, a general composition emerges about which, I believe, there will not be much disagreement.This was a precocious culture, largely called into being by artificial means, and hence short-lived. But while it lived it anticipated in many ways the culture and the problems of Old Greece a generation and more later. Here already was at least one city-state swollen to outsize proportions, with a fluid population for which the moral and social patterns of the close-knit archaic community must inevitably have been losing their meaning. Here already was that violent confrontation of old and new, tradition and free inquiry, which is more familiar to us from the Athens of the late fifth century, from the time of Euripides, Socrates and Aristophanes. There is a religious background of essentially rather primitive mortuary beliefs—that whole region, of course, is the demesne of the Two Goddesses—though these beliefs themselves are taking on new and far from primitive shapes in the minds of the Pythagoreans and their associates. In abrupt contrast to them stand the utterly modern and sophisticated minds of the native Epicharmus and the immigrant Xenophanes; and half-way between there is a Sicilian who embodies in one man the contradictions of the epoch: Empedocles, poet and scientist, author (to the consternation of the learned in modern times) both of the Πeρὶ Φύσeως and of the Καθαρμοί. The same time, in Syracuse, sees the beginnings of a school of rhetoric—rhetoric, carrying in itself all those fearsome questions as to the relation between the word and the thing, between beauty and truth, which were to perplex Plato well into the fourth century.