Loriano Zurli (rec.)

Anonymi versus serpentini

Denuo recognovit Loriano Zurli. Translation by Nino Scivoletto. Commentary by Paola Paolucci.

2008.

XVI/206 pp.

Series: Anthologiarum Latinarum parerga Volume 1

Publisher: Weidmann

ISBN: 978-3-615-00357-4

 

This edition constitutes a critical revision of the collection Anonymi versus serpentini in the light of the textual, literary and interpretative studies on these texts published since D’Orville’s editio princeps, including findings from the edition of the same name published by Herder in Rome (2002).

The poems in the collection are identical in form and linked by a common theme (events are governed by chance), yet they are as multi-faceted as the myths which they retell, and display a wealth of variety in their internal structures and a refinement in their ambiguous literary games. They are characteristic of the style of this anonymous collection of epanaleptic distichs which is both original and rooted in the contemporary literary experiments in the Roman Africa.

The text, already translated into Italian, has now been given a comprehensive philological and historical commentary which picks up on the textual problems cited in the apparatus and develops them in the context of the complete work; it also places this collection, passed down in the Anthologia Salmasiana, in the context of works by the learned poets working in Roman Africa towards the end of the Vandals’ rule.