Poems without Poets: Approaches to Anonymous Ancient Poetry ed. by Boris Kayachev

Reviewed by: Poems without Poets: Approaches to Anonymous Ancient Poetry ed. by Boris Kayachev Markus Hafner Poems without Poets: Approaches to Anonymous Ancient Poetry. Edited by Boris Kayachev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Classical Journal Suppl. 43). 2021. Pp. viii, 230. While the philological collections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marginalized anonymous texts as works or fragments by unknown authors, "masterless" texts were classified differently in antiquity. They could, for example, indicate a verse that was generally known. Thus, sayings or quotations could circulate even without authorial specification as socially shared knowledge, provided with anecdotal evidence and plausibility. Statements of anonymous authors could be assigned a fundamental role. [End Page 149] While Aristotle refers to the anonymous "composer of the Kypria" (Poet. 1459b), Plato has Socrates cite an anonymous elegiac verse as important testimony (Prot. 344d6–7 = adesp. eleg. fr. 2 W. [IEG II]). The validity of even an authorless judgement could provide persuasive evidence. Verses could circulate without an author; anonymous texts were transmitted alongside those mentioning their authors' names. Ancient authors often also relied on their audiences' familiarity with a quotation. Latin literature offers a similar picture: Suetonius, for example, lists et sine auctore notissimi uersus (Aug. 70.1) or refers to the incertus auctor of the Pseudo-Caesariana without committing to an author (Iul. 56.1). Thus, onymity in ancient times remained often a special case, anonymity a frequent one, and anonymi still served as reference points. Long before the introduction of copyright, "ownerless" texts appeared as the universal property of all those who drew on them. The present volume promises its readers "an assortment of approaches to anonymous poetry" (2; Kayachev's italics), envisioning the condition of anonymity in the context of textual transmission and reception. It attempts, first, to highlight the creative autonomy of anonymous, or later anonymized, collections, fragments, and texts. Secondly, it proves the philological approach to them to be extremely productive and meaningful, especially when dealing with the textual problems and editorial challenges posed by authorless works. By contributing to the recent interest in authorless texts, the book undertakes to overcome negative preconceptions of anonymously transmitted works and to engage with them on their own terms. The volume follows a tripartite structure. Part 1 deals with prominent collections of anonymous poetry and foregrounds the co-creative role of compilers in the process of textual transmission. Often, anonymous texts only survived in the context of a larger collection or through later attachment to a famous author, thus being declared worthy containers of knowledge. Alexander Hall (Chapter One) examines the developmental phases of the Homeric Hymns, recognizing various stages of accretion. In the course of the corpus' transmission, compilers played a co-authorial role; as Hall argues, the attribution of Homeric authorship appeared as a connecting principle for both Homeric and un-Homeric material. Jane Lightfoot (Chapter Two), in turn, explores astrological poetry traditionally attributed to Manetho. At the center of the six books, she argues, lies an original kernel from the second century a.d., joined by poetry from later authors. As in the case of Homer, the attribution to the Egyptian astrologer served as a marker of authority. Lightfoot sees in the multi-authorial collection of the Manethoniana a fluid, yet generically interlocked, textual tradition at work. Chapters Three and Four address Latin poetry collections. Robert Maltby argues for a coherent authorial intent that connects the various elegiac voices throughout the twenty poems in the third book of the Corpus Tibullianum, which scholars mostly conceive of as a loosely anonymous compilation. He points to intertextual as well as poetological similarities to demonstrate how the various poems subtly refer to the Sulpicia Cycle (poems 8–12), suggesting an overarching design for the collection. In contrast to the model of multiple authorship, this unitarian perspective rather opts for a single anonymous author with different masks. In a comparable way, Tristan Franklinos argues for a unified design of the Catalepton collection, with the two hexadic cycles of symmetrically arranged poems 1–6 and 7–12 constituting the original libellus. According to Franklinos, the poems create a chronological fiction in retrospect, especially through prosopographical references to authors...

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