FROM Referee

RE "An Early Stage in Vergil's Career"

Most efficiently to meet your request for corrections, suggestions or criticisms that may be of use to the author, I share with you some of my notes from reading (numbered as follows: Page, paragraph, line--'key words' as needed). Through it all, I have tried to keep in mind what I imagine to be the mission of ————— in view of the varied public it serves in the branches of our profession, which needs more than ever to find ways of communication among its members in every calling as well as reaching out to a wider public. Articles, then, ought to be examplary in the way they handle ancient evidence and digest it for diverse readers.

1,1--'scholars do not usually recognize the full significance...ancient sources...Bucolica...performed publicly in a theater...insufficient scholarly attention':
typical premises to justify an essay, yet in this case false, showing lack of familiarity with scholarly discussion in recent decades, how theatrical presentation of the Bucolica established Vergil's public profile and role in shaping the ideology of the new regime.

2,1--'lets us know only that something by Vergil was performed':

but the whole context in Tacitus' Dialogus*Maternus' praise of poetry*reveals a great deal about the early reception of Virgil*his quasi-mythic persona in his own time*, but NOT what text it was that occasioned the applause NOR INDEED (as Henry Rowell once admonished), that said text was being performed (more likely a verse interpolated, as actors and orators often did ad hominem: many examples in Cicero, Laberius, etc): all of which would have to be sifted carefully (and has been in recent discussion). Author elides Tacitean context, ideological perspective, distance in time, and rides rough-shod where critical discrimination and historical imagination required.

3,1: Author accepts uncritically Servian anecdote of Cytheris performing eclogue 6, w/o pondering difficulties, among them Cicero's hearing it before 43 BCE and praising Vergil in words drawn from the Aeneid (12,168). Author should weigh significance of fact that Servius resembles Tacitus in joining the names of Vergil and Cicero: a cultural-historical paradigm.

3,2--'One might argue that this is simply a reference to a recitatio':

how such an argument could be made on the basis of the Servian anecdote escapes me. By 'this' A. apparently refers to the story of Cytheris performing ('cantasset'), forgetting that Servius places this after ('postea') a prior and hugely successful recitation by Virgil: hence Servius' story is not simple but two-fold, first the poet's success, then the actor's performance, which is the pattern of the report also in the ancient biography of the poet.

3,n10: 'performing in a work in which she will be subsequently mentioned': what assumptions crowd in here? By 'work' does Author mean Bucolica? But that is not what Servius says she performed.

4,1: arguing that performances mentioned by Tacitus, Servius & the biography were not recitations belabors a point already evident in the texts, if obfuscated by the misreading of Servius on page 3.

4,1--'sparsity of information': sparseness? scarcity? plenty of information exists about political interpolations, gestures, and resonances in public performances of diverse kinds. Author seems strangely oblvious to so much that has been written in these decades about the media of communication in republican and augustan Rome.

4,2: from the uninformed and confused opening, the Author moves to a desultory speculation about dramaticity in scattered eclogues. More cogent Norman DeWitt (Toronto 1923) who saw that right off 'deus...|...ille...' (ecl 1,5-6) would have played with a dramatic gesture to the front row, stirring the crowd in a style worthy of Laberius against the (adoptive) father, but here flattering the (adoptive) son. Public impact begins there.

5,2--'the odd-numbered eclogues': elides problem that ecl. 7 is of mixed (narrative {dramatic}) form (as Aristotle defined it & ancient critics remarked it: see also ecll. 2,6,8,10). Failure to take into account this (ancient) formal distinction vitiates discussion.

6: interminable and rambling.

__--'conversely definitely concerned with rural themes': curiously blind to way Vergil wove urban themes into bucolic matter (again signal failure to grapple with topical implications of ecl. 1 ['patriam', 'deus', 'urbem...Romam', 'miles', 'cives'] to say nothing of topicalities in 3 [Pollio], 4, 5, 6 [Varus, Gallus], 7 [Mincius], 8 ['a te principium', 'ab urbe'], 9 ['in urbem', 10 [Gallus, 'legat ipsa Lycoris']). It all makes me feel a little like Socrates before Meletus (MH MEMELHKE: belies his name, never really cared about these matters, teasing, just to see if we readers have actually read and remember the texts).

7,2: 'fairly straight forward pastoral poem': of ecl. 6 could only be said by one who has missed the controversy from Servius down over this poem's egregious departure from measure.

__--'satyri': much discussed by others than Coleman and Clausen (who are notorious for ignoring recent scholarship), but the hint of parallelism with a dramatic genre needs to be amplified and refined, extended into study of other links to genres, notably tragedy and epic, but also obviously elegy. Then, too, there is the Hellenistic fashion of excerpting monologues for solo performance, showpiecing.

8,2--'the simple explanation...Silenus, portraying the part of the bull, comforts Aegle, playing the maiden': "simple" did you say (again)? Staggered, again like Socrates, I would like to ask, 'Please say that again. Just what do you mean?' As an old-fashioned reader, I always thought that Vergil enjoyed picturing Silenus as ransoming himself*song for Chromis and his sidekick but a hint of sex for Aegle*and then imagined his rendition of the Pasiphaë episode in the song vividly, as musical therapy for the Cretan queen (a bold enough leap of Vergil's imagination, but no less than accosting Arethusa in Arcadia in the tenth poem: that's the joy of poetry. Think of Aristaeus under the sea, or Keats' Endymion, for that matter!).

8,3--'produced beween 42 and 39': again ignores extensive debate and specific problem of Cicero's autopsy, accepted above.

9,2: intriguing (if unmediated by adequate argument on the tissue of intergeneric reference throughout the eclogue book) the association with saturae (which of course has its own recursive frame of reference within the book of eclogues, as well as recalling the aesthetic ideology of neoterism and the Alexandrians).

_,_: superficial and reductive paraphrase of the dramatic figures cut by eclogues*a run-through done with more acuity by others (to name, again, only DeWitt 1923). Really astounding the lack of attentive reading and digestion of how the eclogues build through progressive variation.

10,2--'according to Conte': do we need a history of Latin literature to know that Bucolica refers to the whole and ecloga to the parts? The host of remarks like these betray the Author's strangeness to scholarship in the field.

_,_--'contain numerous self-references': by this the Author apparently means echoes of one poem by another (which is not quite the same as self-reflection, which rather suggests the poet making a theme of his own poetic process, e.g. 'herding' or 'weaving' to symbolize composition, etc. Vergil thus thematizes his constant reuse and varying of motifs from poem to poem when, at the end, he describes himself as having been sitting weaving a wicker container, fiscella). None of which, alas, proves that the poems "were meant to be performed...as a group."

10,3--'10, a poem that more closely resembles traditional epic': !?!

11,1: in showing surprise that Vergil wrote in hexameter, Author neglects rich performance tradition of hexameter poetry from Homer down.

11,2--'copying...imitation':

begs whole question why Theocritus used Homer's and Hesiod's tradition the way he did, and why this experiment attracted Vergil (again needed, that systematic examination of Vergil's links to the genres of public performance, and to the public themes of his time, with their active political implication: c.f. e.g. Cicero, Seneca the Elder, Macrobius, et al. antiq., but also DeWitt, Bona, Raaflaub and Tober, Wallace-Hadrill, et al. plur. nostri).

12,2: given the problems in what comes before, no basis for speculation about book and chronology.

In fine, the Author is to be applauded for taking an interest in the dramatic function of the Bucolica, which is a significant topic in recent scholarship, but one that requires more critical discrimination (with respect to the texts), logical rigor (in argument), and scholarly information (both historical and literary) than the Author thus far has demonstrated.
I can imagine no definition of the editorial mission of ————— that would include publishing material in such an inchoate state. I would encourage the Author to go back to work, rereading the Bucolica and the Dialogus in the light of suggestions given above, then following a few of the bibliographical leads available not only here but abundantly in recent issues of Vergilius.