Empire of Letters: Writing in Roman Literature and Thought From Lucretius to Ovid by Stephanie Ann Frampton

Author:Stephanie Ann Frampton [Frampton, Stephanie Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Ancient, General
ISBN: 9780190915421
Google: hJSBDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-03T00:30:22.644552+00:00

5

The Roman Poetry Book

fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia, quom tu

maxima Romanae pars eris historiae

postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum

fixa legam spolieis deivitiora tueis.

—“Gallus Papyrus,” lines 2–51

In 1979, a singularly momentous discovery for the history of the Roman book was published in the Journal of Roman Studies: a fragmentary papyrus sheet—all of 19 cm wide and 16 cm high, about the size of a leaf of this book though slightly more square—containing six fragmentary lines of elegiac poetry in Latin and four complete ones (Figure 8). That winter, it had been pulled from waste material long ago thrown into an alleyway at Qasr Ibrîm, an ancient town once known as Primis, which sat for millennia on an outcropping overlooking the Upper Nile River and, since the construction of the Aswan Dam, has occupied a small island in Lake Nasser, one of only a few sites along this part of the ancient Nile still open to researchers.2 Between about 24 and 22 bce, Romans troops held control of the garrison at Primis, and the site has been the source of hundreds of documents in the languages of its various occupations—Coptic, Greek, Latin, Meroitic, Old Nubian, and Arabic—among them, this remarkable bit of Latin poetry that was quickly attributed to Cornelius Gallus, the Roman prefect of Egypt between 30 and 26 bce and the first Latin author to become famous for his elegies.3 At the time of the manuscript’s discovery, Gallus’s most prominent written remains, aside from a single pentameter recorded by the geographer Vibius Sequester, were the traces of his name once inscribed on the obelisk that now stands in the piazza of St. Peter’s at Rome.4 His was a remarkable career, followed by an exceptional fall from grace, when he was recalled by Augustus and forced to commit suicide.5 As Ellen Oliensis remarks, with reference to the epigrams, “If Gallus had been content to carve his name on papyrus, he might have survived to sing the praises of Caesar.”6

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