Ciris: A Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana

Kayachev, Boris. Ciris: A Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana. Introduction, Text, Apparatus Criticus, Translation and Commentary. Swansea, UK: Classical Press of Waales, 2020. ISBN 978-1-910589-81-6.

Reviewed by Thomas R. Keith, Independent Scholar, trkeith@hotmail.com.

In the hortus deliciarum (garden of delights) of Latin literature, the Ciris is a thornbush. Its authorship and date are much disputed, as is its literary merit (or lack thereof), and its text has a degree of instability out of proportion to its length. We are fortunate, therefore, that Boris Kayachev has grasped the nettle. The monograph reviewed here is part of a much larger scholarly project, beginning with Kayachev’s dissertation, in which he grappled with the most difficult philological and intertextual problems the Ciris poses, and the fruits of his labors will be absolutely indispensable to anyone who wishes to study the poem seriously. This is true due to the relative paucity of prior work on the Ciris: even as there has been a comparative boom in studies of intertextuality in Latin literature, inspired by Stephen Hinds’ Allusion and Intertext, no one before Kayachev – not even the formidable philologists, from Scaliger on, who have turned their attention to the Ciris’ textual difficulties – has yet seriously tried to apply this scholarly approach to this most troublesome poem.

The result of his labors is a slim volume, but an impressive one. In the span of under 200 pages, Kayachev takes us through the tortuous manuscript history of the poem, collating stemmata, weighing the merits of conjectures, and arriving at plausible conclusions in the best philological tradition. He offers a number of conjectures of his own, some of which are daring, but almost all of which are supported by intertextual references–whether to Vergil, Catullus, Ovid, Flavian epic, or even Hellenistic authors like Apollonius. Whether one agrees with all these conjectures or not, the comprehensive apparatus criticus Kayachev provides makes it easy to follow his thinking and engage with his arguments.

The heart of the book, though, is the commentary—94 pages, for a poem of only 541 lines—and it is here that Kayachev really demonstrates his virtuosity. His notes are a complex polyphonic dialogue with all the commentators before him, not least R.O.A.M. Lyne, whose 1978 Cambridge monograph is the last serious attempt in English to engage with the Ciris. While Kayachev acknowledges the greatness of Lyne’s achievement, he does not shy away from pointing out what he sees as occasional misjudgments or critical errors on Lyne’s part. The bulk of Kayachev’s notes focus on textual problems—understandable, given the many corruptions and cruces in the Ciris—but there is still ample room for the sort of charming digressions one hopes for in a good commentary: a case in point is Kayachev’s note on line 344, where he refutes Lyne’s understanding of how a Roman lamp might plausibly be extinguished, drawing upon witnesses as diverse as Nicander and Paul the Silentiary to bolster his case. Another moment of elegance, not to say brilliance, is his defense (at 473-4) of the received text of Scylla’s journey through the Cyclades, where he suggests that Delos is out of position not due to corruption or geographical error on the poet’s part, but because the event takes place before Apollo’s birth and the “fixing” of Delos in place.

For a detailed example of Kayachev’s textual criticism, we might look at his note on line 186. Against the manuscript reading, furtim atque detonsum mitteret hosti, Kayachev first supports the 1970 conjecture of Knecht to read furata for furtim, then uses this as support to read desponsum for detonsum (following the 1909 conjecture of Némethy), and finally adduces these two conjectures as support for reading arguto for atque. The resulting line, while it may appear to rest on uncertain foundations, is a bravura and generally convincing attempt to heal an obvious textual corruption.

I cannot deny that I am in awe of Kayachev’s philological mastery, and I am quite convinced by two of his principal contentions in the monograph: first, that the Ciris is best dated to the 40s BCE, not to the post-Vergilian period; and second, that its rich web of intertextual connections with Latin and (to a lesser degree) Greek poetry makes it worthy of serious study. Where I part company, somewhat reluctantly, with Kayachev is his championing of the poem’s literary merit in its own right. Even after Kayachev’s valiant attempts to rectify the text and to elicit the significance of particular passages, I remain doubtful that the Ciris is a great poem, or even a particularly good one. Its author’s clever conceits are, to my mind at least, outweighed by his poor sense of structure and tendency toward melodrama. If, as Kayachev contends, Vergil was in contact with (perhaps even a younger acquaintance of) the author of the Ciris and engaged with it when composing his corpus, the student far surpassed the master.

My other chief criticism may well be unfair, in that I am criticizing the book for not achieving a goal that it was never meant to achieve; this is, after all, a work of philology and textual criticism, not of literary criticism. But what is generally missing is any real sense of the Ciris as literature, as opposed to a collection of textual problems or intertextual references. To return to my initial horticultural metaphor, the forest sometimes feels lost for the trees. One would like to know more, either here or in a separate article or two, as to what Kayachev thinks of the poem as a cohesive whole. How does it rank among extant neoteric works? How well does it achieve its goal of evoking pathos for the unhappy Scylla? These are questions worth exploring.

But these criticisms are secondary. Overall, Kayachev’s monograph is a triumph of philological art. He has given us a book worthy not only to take its place beside Lyne’s, but to be consulted and read with care by anyone with any degree of interest in this perplexing little poem. The thorns have borne their roses.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1–41
Ciris: Text and Critical Apparatus 43–71
Translation 73–83
Commentary 85–178

Discussion

1. What drew you in the first instance to the study of the Ciris?

Toward the end of my first degree, I grew interested in Latin poetry (I had trained primarily as a Hellenist), especially its intertextuality. I read voraciously on the topic, and one of the books that struck me the most was Dorothee Gall’s Zur Technik von Anspielung und Zitat in der römischen Dichtung: Vergil, Gallus und die Ciris (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999). I was surprised, a young and inexperienced student that I was, how easily Franz Skutsch’s bold thesis that the Ciris predates Virgil’s work (and belongs to no less a figure than Cornelius Gallus) could be dismissed in scholarship (until Gall, that is), despite—or perhaps because of—its momentous implications for one of the key points in the history of Roman poetry. I decided to see for myself, and formed a hypothesis: if the Ciris does indeed predate Virgil, then it should engage extensively with pre-Virgilian texts, a hypothesis which I explored in my doctoral thesis, Allusion and Allegory: Studies in the Ciris (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). While my interest in the Ciris began as a scholarly problem, I was soon fascinated by it as a piece of poetry in its own right: with this edition, I hope to have made the poem more accessible.

2. How has intertextuality informed your approach to this puzzling poem?

Intertextuality was the lens through which I approached the Ciris in the first place, gradually discovering that it engages not only with Catullus, but also with Lucretius, Euphorion, Bion, Moschus, Nicander, Apollonius, Callimachus, Theocritus, Euripides, and Homer, among others. Much of the pioneering scholarship on Latin (and Hellenistic) poetry had focused on individual allusions, which it analysed as sophisticated tours de force of ivory tower dwellers; the density and complexity of the Ciris’s intertextuality made me realise that we are dealing with a more fundamental phenomenon. Plato criticised poetry because, unlike philosophy, it imitates the messy and deceptive reality of the phenomenal world rather than the ultimate beauty and perfection of eternal forms; Aristotle objected that, unlike history, poetry does not merely describe particular events and dispositions, but is able to extract universal patterns underlying individual phenomena. The great Hellenistic poets reinterpreted this debate in terms of intertextuality: true poetry does not merely imitate individual earlier texts (“Plato”), but is able to channel the very essence of poetic tradition which is pervasively intertextual (“Aristotle”). According to my reading, the Ciris poet was one of the first Romans who rediscovered this Hellenistic poetics and attempted to put it into practice.

3. How might it change our reading of the poem if we accept your hypothesis that its author influenced Vergil?

Readers who assume that the Ciris postdates Virgil have to resolve a paradox: Why does a poet so closely engaging with Virgil write in a markedly pre-Virgilian style? The usual answer is that this is some sort of sophisticated literary game, though the specifics as to its point may vary. If, by contrast, we accept that the Ciris was written just before the Eclogues, possibly by a friend of Virgil’s, the poem finds an organic and not unimportant place in the development of Roman poetry as we understand it. One aspect I have already mentioned: the Ciris bears witness to the deciphering of the “metaphysical” imagery found in Hellenistic poetry. At the same time, the Ciris explores the inherent contradiction between this “metaphysical” poetics and the Epicureanism that dominated the literary scene of Late Republic Rome in the wake of Philodemus and Lucretius: again, the poem turns out to be a far more topical text if it is read as an early response to Lucretius. More generally, the energising tension between Lucretius and Hellenistic influence is what in many ways shaped Augustan poetry, and if I am right, the Ciris may have played a vital role in initiating this interaction.

4. What are your plans for future work on the poem?

I have now largely moved on to other poems from the Appendix Vergiliana, having produced commentaries on the Lydia (Lydia: A Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023]) and the Dirae (Dirae: A Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana [Swansea, UK: Classical Press of Wales, 2024), as well as beyond, my current project focusing on patterns of word order in Latin poetry more generally. But it can be rewarding to look at the Ciris from this linguistic perspective, too: I have recently published a paper on non-discontinuous noun phrases in the poem (“Non-Discontinuous Adjective-Noun Phrases in Latin Poetry,” Journal of Latin Linguistics 21 [202]: 1–22), and there are other aspects of word order that are worth exploring. A further promising area of research is lexical analysis: as I have come to realise, we as readers of Latin poetry are all too often not sensitive enough to the nuances of the meaning and usage of individual words and expressions. Having tackled the Ciris’s intertextuality in my thesis and textual issues in this edition, perhaps one day I will have time to return to the poem and write a comprehensive, but primarily linguistic, commentary.