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Poetae Novelli Emanuele Castorina: I ‘Poetae Novell’. Contributo alla storia della cultura latina nel II secolo d. C. Pp. xv+228. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1949. Paper, L. 550.

Robert Browning

The Classical Review / Volume 1 / Issue 01 / March 1951, pp 34 ­ 35DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X00174153, Published online: 13 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009840X00174153

How to cite this article:Robert Browning (1951). Review of Emanuele Castorina 'I ‘Poetae Novell' The Classical Review, 1, pp 34­35 doi:10.1017/S0009840X00174153

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34 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

open to doubt what constitutes a cretic phrase. If quo modo ?, why, however,haec celox . . . (M.G. 936), etc. ? Also, 'deliberate sound effects' are a precariousground for admitting clash as 'unobjectionable'. Nevertheless H. can becredited with establishing a marked tendency of Plautine verse.

It is curious that the great majority of instances of clash in iambic wordsoccur at the so-called 'loci Iacobsohniani'.

Queen Mary College, University of London W. A. LAIDLAW

POETAE NOVELLIEMANUELE CASTORINA: / 'Poetae Novell?. Contributo alia storia dellacultura latina nel I I secolo d. C. Pp. xv+228 . Florence: La NuovaItalia, 1949. Paper, L. 550.

IN all the history of Roman poetry there is hardly a period from which lesssurvives than the century after the death of Juvenal. A few names in AulusGellius and some forty short fragments in Terentianus Maurus and latergrammarians and metricians are all that the jealous hand of time has spared.Among this debris of a literature we can discern the work of a group of poetswho by their innovations in matter, style, and metre represent a reactionagainst the classical formalism of the preceding century. It is with these poetaenovelli—Annianus, Septimius Serenus, Alfius Avitus, Marianus, and others—that Signor Castorina's study is concerned.

He sees in them not merely a group of poets moving with the intellectualcurrent of the time in an age of antiquarianism and triviality, but a true schoolor coterie, sharing the same artistic principles and working in personal contactwith one another. As we have so few fragments of their poetry, and as onlyAnnianus can be even approximately dated, C.'s demonstration of this notimprobable thesis is mainly based on a priori considerations.

In the term novellas, which—with the variants novare, novitas, etc.—is oftenapplied by Terentianus Maurus to these writers, C. sees the name which theygave to themselves and by which they were known to their contemporaries.The fact that Terentianus uses the same epithet of Petronius is no obstacle toC , who in an article1 which was inaccessible to me has argued that Petroniuswas not only a contemporary of Annianus and Serenus but an adherent oftheir school. Be that as it may, C. is certainly right in distinguishing sharplybetween these poets and the neoterici of Diomedes, who are much later in dateand who are quoted only for such trifling tours de force as the versus reciprocus(Keil's Gramm. Lat. i. 516-17).2

1 'Petronio e i "poetae novelli"', in The anonymous neoterici quoted by DiomedesGiomale italiano de filologia, i (1948), 213 ff.; and Marius Victorinus belong to the samerejected by Maiuri in Parola del Passato, viii period, though there can be no question(1948), 106; reply by Castorina in Giomale here of a true school or coterie. Thoseitaliano di filologia, ii (1949), 175-6. desiring to compose versus reciproci, versus

2 C. has discussed these neoterici in great recurrentes, versus rhopalici, versus echoici, versusdetail in Giomale italiano di filologia, ii (1949), jerpentini, carmina figurata de minio, etc., will117—46, 206—28. Publilius Optatianus Porfy- find all the rules worked out by C. withrius is the central figure among these poets—• admirable diligence. Where C. seems to goif such they can be called—while Pentadius wrong is in supposing that such amusementsand Ausonius dabble in similar techniques a as these were not practised by poets in theirgeneration earlier and later respectively. less inspired moods from the beginnings of

THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 35

Annianus is a contemporary of Aulus Gellius—probably an older contem-porary, born in the opening years of the second century. Septimius Serenus,whose dating depends upon that of Terentianus Maurus, is placed in thesucceeding generation. Terentianus himself, in whom C. sees the last of theschool, wrote the third book of the De Metris in his old age in the openingdecades of the third century. Thus, says C , the poetae novelli belong to thesecond half of the second century. They are a part of that movement away fromthe stifling classicism of the preceding age, towards the archaic and the popular,a movement in which Fronto and Aulus Gellius were among the most strikingfigures. Annianus, the founder of the school, belonged to Gellius' circle, andthe title novellus is to be compared with Fronto's elocutio novella.

Their themes are above all Italian: idyllic—and doubtless somewhatidealized—pictures of life in the Italian countryside, descriptions of Italianreligious festivals, vignettes of the heroes of ancient Rome. In style they inclineto the popular and the familiar, enfranchising the sermo cotidianus and eschew-ing the ampullate and the sesquipedalian. In their choice of metre, above all,they make a sharp break with tradition. In place of the hexameter, the elegiaccouplet, and the iambic trimeter we find a rich variety of lyric metres, many ofthem new. Here, too, C. sees a return to an old Italian tradition which hadbeen running underground, as it were, for three centuries. Certainly thestrange metrum faliscum is said by the grammarians to be that of the songs ofCalabrian shepherds; and the iambic dimeter acatalectic was, as C. pointsout, a popular metre adopted by the early Christian hymnographers. C. isinclined to argue that because a certain metre has no Greek analogue, it there-fore belongs to native Italian folk-literature. Yet these poets appear to haveadhered to Caesius Bassus' doctrine of procreatio metrorum—the free creation offresh metrical forms by recombining elements of already existing metres. C.recognizes this in general, but sometimes fails to give it due weight in hiseagerness to give his poetae novelli firm roots in Italian popular tradition.

C. analyses in detail all the fragments of the poetae novelli—Annianus' frag-ment 3 M. he attributes to Serenus, thus returning to Lachmann's view—anddiscusses fully the many metrical problems they present. His treatment issympathetic and careful, and in his general view of the place of these writersin Roman literature he is undoubtedly right. What is new in his treatmentbelongs mostly to those spheres of taste where one man's opinion is as good asanother's; what is old is presented with full acknowledgement. The book'schief fault is its length. Had the author been forced to compress it to half itssize, he would probably have expunged most of the ill-informed digressions(for instance that on Indo-European metre on p. 107), the repetitive exposi-tion, and the woolly argumentation which mar it at present. Then his ownerudition, taste, and judgement would have been seen to better advantage.

University College, London ROBERT BROWNING

Latin literature, just as they went on being of others were mercifully lost, was first, hispractised until the age of Charlemagne and own unbelievable ingenuity and deadlybeyond. Quintilian ix. 4. 90 knows of an seriousness, and second, the patronage ofignobUis poeta who wrote versus reciproci. What Constantine.preserved the nugae of Porfyrius, while those