1. NOT WITHOUT SONG?
Like his great didactic predecessors Hesiod and Aratus,Footnote 1 Grattius began with the gods:Footnote 2
I sing the gifts of the gods, skills welcome to hunters under your auspice, Diana. Before, all hope was in weapons, without instruction men disturbed the woods with bare courage, and there was error in all their life. Afterwards, starting out better by a different, more appropriate, path, they took you, Reason, as their ally in their campaigns. From here came every help to their life, the right way shone out and from skills they learned to produce associated skills; from here mindless violence fell behind. But it was a god who gave the first auspice to their skills, and deep supports all round; then each man followed his own role and carried it through, and hard work reached its goal. It was you, Diana, when life was trembling at war with the beasts and first sought help, who thought it right to protect it by finding reinforcements, and to free the world from this harm.
The train of thought is clear enough. Yes, early humanity used its own resources by applying reason to its war against wild animals, and the poet duly exploits Lucretius’ account of the natural development of civilisation in De rerum natura Book 5.Footnote 3 But it was a god—Diana, marked out by the conspicuous ring-composition (1–2/13–15)—who heard the cry for help and provided the necessary leadership.
The key word is auspicium (2, 10). A Roman general's victories were won ductu imperio auspicio suo,Footnote 4 because as dux he led the army, as imperator he gave the orders, and as auspex (or augur) he consulted the will of the gods.Footnote 5 Since that is the world Grattius’ language evokes,Footnote 6 it seems we are meant to think of Diana as humanity's victorious commander against dangerous beasts.
So far, so intelligible; but what comes next is much harder to understand. In the next eight lines the meaning of the text is ambiguous in two separate places:Footnote 7
Either Under your name a hundred goddesses, all the (Dryads) of the groves and all the Naiads wet from the springs, brought in companions, Or Under your name the goddesses brought in a hundred companions, all the (Dryads) from the groves, all the Naiads wet from the springs,Footnote 8
and the satyrs of Latium and Faunus came in support, and the Maenalian boy (Pan) and the Idaean Mother, tamer of lions, and Silvanus, rejoicing in his wild tree-branch.Footnote 9
Either With these as my guardians, and bidden, not without song, to defend our human lot against a thousand wild beasts, Or Bidden to defend our human lot against a thousand wild beasts with these as my guardians and not without song,
with song I shall both supply the weapons and pursue the skills of hunting.Footnote 10
Does centum (17) go with diuae or with comites? Does non sine carmine (22) go with defendere or with iussus?
On the first of these dilemmas, neither of the possible meanings of lines 16–18 is really satisfactory. If we understand centum diuae, it is not clear who the companions were, and if we understand centum comites, it is not clear who the goddesses were. A very small emendation, diuas for diuae at line 17, would provide better sense. In that case the subject of adsciuere would be the same as that of all the previous third-person plural verbs (mouebant 3, sumpsere 6, didicere 8, exegere 12), namely humans still seeking help: they now had their divine leader, Diana, but the commander-in-chief cannot be everywhere at once, and they needed the expertise of local divinities too. ‘Under your name (by your authority) they brought in your goddess-companions,Footnote 11 a hundred of them, all the (Dryads) from the groves, all the Naiads wet from the springs.’
Whatever the exact sense, and whether or not his text needs emendation, Grattius chose to emphasize the sheer number of divinities now involved. It was not just the hundred wood- and water-nymphs, followed by their colleagues as local ‘countryside divinities’,Footnote 12 Faunus, Silvanus and the satyrs; there was also Pan from Arcadian Maenalus and the Magna Mater from Phrygian Ida, unexpectedly present among the deities of Latium (18). These ‘guardians’ (praesides) had evidently instructed the poet to teach humankind about the equipment and techniques of hunting.
It is a measure of the neglect Grattius has suffered that line 22 does not appear in Peter White's list of evidence for the use of iubere in literary contexts.Footnote 13 As that list shows, authors in the first century b.c. might be ‘bidden’ to write by their equals (brother Quintus or Atticus for Cicero),Footnote 14 by their patrons (Pollio for Virgil, Maecenas for Virgil and Propertius),Footnote 15 or by divinities (Apollo for Virgil, Amor for Ovid).Footnote 16 Grattius’ motivation must belong in the third category, but he seems to imply a whole collective of divinities delivering the commission.
And what exactly were their instructions? Here the second dilemma comes into play (21–3): either they told him with song to defend our human lot, or they told him to defend our human lot with song. In the latter case, carmine is merely the familiar metaphor for poetry: the poet was told to do it in verse. That seems unsatisfactory (why should the order be ‘do not use prose’?), and the emphatic repetition of the word in the following line seems to be more than just a convention of the didactic genre.Footnote 17 But if carmine goes with iussus, were the assembled divinities speaking verse, or literally singing? It is not at all clear what was going on.
2. PERFORMING TO AN AUDIENCE
In the excellent volume that has given back to Grattius the attention he deserves, Steven J. Green notes that ‘the identity of the implied student audience … can oscillate between a singular and plural entity’.Footnote 18 It was the norm for didactic poets to address a single pupil, sometimes named (Hesiod's Perses, Lucretius’ Memmius) but more often not, allowing the reader to assume the role. Take, for instance, the first book of the Georgics: in 514 lines there are a total of forty unspecified second-person singular verbs and pronouns. In Grattius’ surviving text, of similar length (541 lines), the total is sixty-three, plus six uses of tuus. In each case, however, there are a few lines where the second-person verbs are plural.Footnote 19
Why should that be? Green offers an ingenious explanation based on the specialist skills of those involved in the hunt:
In an attempt to preserve the dramatic illusion, one might, perhaps, envisage Grattius as speaking in the presence of the entire hunting team, offering instructions into the air to be caught by the relevant member of the audience.
Similarly, the Georgics ‘deal with an activity (agriculture) that also requires a diverse “workforce”’.Footnote 20 However, that escape is not available for another contemporary didactic work, Ovid's Fasti, where the same phenomenon has been pointed out: there are sixty-one unspecified second-person singular verbs and pronouns, but also five second-person plural verbs.Footnote 21 The fact is that all three poems were addressed to a notional single pupil, but all three poets sometimes found it natural to address a collective audience.
A likely reason for that may be inferred from Ovid's Amores, where the poet frequently seems to be addressing a collective audience.Footnote 22 The same is true of the Ars amatoria and the Remedia amoris, where second-person plural verbs are ubiquitous, and uulgus and mea turba are used as vocatives;Footnote 23 but the evidence of the Amores is critical, because the poet himself tells us that they were read to the Roman people.Footnote 24 The current belief that Roman poetry was written solely for an educated elite readership can be sustained only by disqualifying part of the primary evidence—those poems that present themselves as addressing the general populace.Footnote 25 Since that is exactly what Ovid says he did, it offers a simple explanation of the second-person plural verbs.Footnote 26 The poet was addressing those listening to him on the day.
How and where would it happen? With poems ‘read to the people’, it is not a case of recitationes in private houses,Footnote 27 nor even of poets finding an ad hoc audience in the street or the forum or a public portico.Footnote 28 To have the Roman people gathered together as an audience, the poet needed to be performing at big public festivals. The most important such events were the annual ludi scaenici and ludi circenses,Footnote 29 and there seems to have been fierce competition among poets to be selected for the programme.Footnote 30
The best evidence comes from the young Horace, who didn't need to compete:Footnote 31
While the turgid poet of the Alps murders Memnon and moulds the muddy head of the Rhine, I play about with things that are not meant to resound in the temple, in a competition with Tarpa judging, and come back again and again as theatre shows.
Horace could afford to be contemptuous of poets popular enough to be selected year after year, but it must have looked different to those who did not have access to an exclusive private audience at the house of Maecenas.Footnote 32 This passage, not well understood by commentators,Footnote 33 explains not only Ovid's reading of the Amores ‘to the people’—and thus the problematic second-person plural verbs in the Georgics, the Fasti and Grattius—but also the scattered and neglected evidence for poets performing in theatres.Footnote 34
The six months of Ovid's half-completed Fasti included the first three public ludi of the Roman year: the Megalenses, beginning on 4 April, the Ceriales, beginning on 12 April, and the Florales, beginning on 28 April and continuing into May.Footnote 35 For each of them Ovid composed a lengthy set-piece narrative or dialogue, and in each case the phraseology suggests that he meant it to be delivered to the audience at the time.Footnote 36 At the games of Magna Mater: ‘The stage resounds, the games are calling. Take your places, citizens!’Footnote 37 At the games of Ceres: ‘The place itself demands that I tell of the virgin's abduction.’Footnote 38 At the games of Flora: ‘Let this song too go with the Circus’ show.’Footnote 39 It is not surprising that one of the few unspecified second-person plural verbs in the Fasti comes in the ludi Florales passage, and in the context of stage performance: ‘She is not, believe me she is not, to be counted among the goddesses in tragic boots.’Footnote 40
If these parallels are persuasive, then the first step in explaining Grattius’ introductory passage is to recognize that the poem was probably composed with public performance in mind, and that the ‘theatre games’ (ludi scaenici) are a likely context for the audience implied by those otherwise anomalous second-person plural verbs.
3. DANCERS AND SINGERS
There is no need to imagine a poet reading from the huge stage of the Theatre of Pompey or the Theatre of Marcellus.Footnote 41 Those enormous buildings were not the only places for a festival crowd to assemble: the tradition of constructing ad hoc wooden theatres still continued in the Augustan Age,Footnote 42 and in any case the steps of the relevant temple could always provide seating for a sizeable audience.Footnote 43
The performers who did need wide spaces were the dancers, singers and musicians who made up the most conspicuous part of the ludi scaenici programme. Again, the evidence is scattered and neglected, but it tells a consistent story.Footnote 44 Our earliest evidence for the Roman games is Fabius Pictor's description, for the benefit of his Greek readers, of the procession at the ludi Romani in September: it included ‘groups of satyristai presenting the Greek dance called sikinnis, [who] mocked and mimicked the serious movements, turning them into something laughable’.Footnote 45 Two hundred years later, in the early years of Augustus, the satyric sikinnis was one of the dance styles developed by Bathyllus and Pylades into the elaborate spectacle of ‘all-mime’ (pantomimus).Footnote 46 Bathyllus’ Satyr was a famous piece, and his style of dance was described by Plutarch as ‘Echo or some Pan or satyr revelling with Eros’.Footnote 47
Echo was a nymph, one of ‘those born in the waters and the hills’ like Diana's hundred companions in Grattius; and she had a voice.Footnote 48 Nymphs always danced (their characteristic collective noun was chorus),Footnote 49 and they often sang.Footnote 50 Satyrs too were dancers,Footnote 51 Pan's pipes made music, and the Bacchic thiasos to which they belonged was also often called a chorus.Footnote 52 The world of divine mythology, as Varro complained, was the world of the stage.Footnote 53
One mythological story that was danced from the very start of the history of drama (Phrynichus in the sixth century b.c.) was that of the hunter Actaeon, who came across Diana and her nymphs bathing, and was torn to pieces by his own hounds.Footnote 54 Five centuries later it was still being performed on the Roman stage, as we happen to know from a joke in Varro's Menippean Satires about the expense of keeping hounds: ‘If Actaeon had got in first and eaten his dogs before they ate him, he would not be rubbish for dancers in the theatre.’Footnote 55 Two centuries later again, it was part of the repertoire of ‘all-mime’ (pantomimus).Footnote 56
With all that in mind, understanding that a poet might share his occasion and his audience with performers of a different kind, we can go back to Diana and the hundred nymphs in Grattius’ introductory passage, conjecturally emended:
Under your name they brought in your goddess-companions, a hundred of them, all the [Dryads] from the groves, all the Naiads wet from the springs; and the satyrs of Latium and Faunus came in support, and the Maenalian boy and the Idaean Mother, tamer of lions, and Silvanus, rejoicing in his wild tree-branch. With these as my guardians, and bidden, not without song, to defend our human lot against a thousand wild beasts, in song I shall both supply the weapons and pursue the skills of hunting.
It is now possible to understand how ‘not without song’ can go with iussus. The suggestion is that those nymphs, satyrs and other deities were dancers and singers, and that at the end of their performance (‘The Death of Actaeon’, perhaps?) they provided the lead-in for Grattius as the next item on the festival programme. One hopes that some at least of the audience stayed to listen.
4. WHERE?
If the poem presupposed a specific performance context, where might that have taken place? As it happens, the best evidence for the use of a temporary theatre at ludi scaenici is Josephus’ description of the scene on the Palatine immediately before the assassination of Caligula in January a.d. 41.Footnote 57 The seating was arranged immediately in front of the imperial residence,Footnote 58 with the performance presumably taking place in the piazza (area Palatina);Footnote 59 there was certainly enough space there for competitions of pantomimus dance-drama, as we know from the record of one of the winners.Footnote 60 There are, I think, good reasons to suppose that that was where the Grattian corps de ballet was performing.
Pan was the god of Arcadia; his favourite haunts were Maenalus and Lycaeus, mountains respectively in the north-east and south-west of that country.Footnote 61 However, he also had a cult site in Rome, first attested in the third century b.c. but probably much older than that,Footnote 62 at the Lupercal, a cave in the western slope of the Palatine.Footnote 63 He was worshipped there as ‘Pan Lycaeus’,Footnote 64 but the other Arcadian mountain could identify him just as well.Footnote 65 So Grattius’ ‘Maenalian boy’ turns out to be not a foreign intruder after all.
The same is true of the ‘Idaean Mother’, who was brought to Rome in 204 b.c. and installed in a new temple on the Palatine, at the top of the hill immediately above the Lupercal.Footnote 66 Since her cult was famous for frenetic music and dancing,Footnote 67 it is not surprising that Propertius pictured the goat-footed Pans playing their reed-pipes as the Great Goddess nearby beat raucous cymbals for her Idaean dances.Footnote 68 Ovid presented a similar scenario in Fasti Book 6: ‘Cybele, her brow encircled by a turreted crown, invites the eternal gods to her festival, including the satyrs and nymphs, deities of the countryside.’Footnote 69 Notionally set on Mount Ida, the story was for a Roman festival, the Vestalia (9 June), and Vesta too was now a Palatine resident.Footnote 70
Finally, Diana herself, the presiding deity of Grattius’ poem,Footnote 71 was quite at home on the Palatine. The magnificent temple dedicated there on 9 October 28 b.c. was for her as much as for Apollo, as contemporary evidence shows.Footnote 72 Its lavish endowments included a silua or lucus, very appropriate for the divine mistress of woods and forests.Footnote 73 And hunting was not all Diana did:Footnote 74
When she is satisfied and has cheered her heart, this huntress who delights in arrows slackens her supple bow and goes to the great house of her dear brother Phoebus Apollo, to the rich land of Delphi, there to order the lovely dance of the Muses and Graces.
On the Palatine, Diana did not have to visit: she already shared the ‘great house’, where her brother was conspicuous as the citharoedus.Footnote 75 Apollo had always played for the Muses’ choir,Footnote 76 and on 3 June 17 b.c., in front of the Palatine temple itself, Horace sang in praise of ‘Phoebus the augur, glorious with his shining bow and dear to the nine Camenae’.Footnote 77
If the Muses were associated with the Palatine cult of Apollo and Diana,Footnote 78 Grattius’ address to the goddess makes better sense: ‘Come speak, Diana—for it is lawful—to a servant of the Muses.’Footnote 79 By making a point of fas est, the poet claimed fellow-membership with her in the Muses’ world of dance and song; that, no doubt, was how he had received his instruction ‘not without song’ to read the Cynegetica to the assembled audience. (Circulation of the text on papyrus copies was a separate, and later, stage of ‘publication’.)
5. THE LVDI QVINQVENNALES
The Palatine temple would be a very appropriate scene for Grattius’ observations on hound-puppies’ diet, where reason must control self-indulgence:Footnote 80
This [luxury] was the very wrongdoing that broke the Egyptian kings, while they were drinking vintage Mareotic wine from hollowed-out gemstones, harvesting the nard-bearing Ganges and acting as servants to their vices. In the same way also did you fall, o Lydia, to Persian Cyrus: and yet you were rich with gold in the veins of your river. [Greece too gave in to luxury.] But of what sort and how simple was the table of our own Camilli! What was your lifestyle, o Serranus, after so many triumphs! Consequently, it was these men, in accordance with the bearing and custom of ancient virtue, who set over the world Rome as its head and, led by these men, virtue reached towards the heavens and the highest honours.
The temple was there because Apollo had given Rome victory over the last of those luxurious Egyptian monarchs.Footnote 81 No one could possibly miss the message, as Grattius piled up one Augustan moral topos after another,Footnote 82 ending with virtue reaching ad caelum just like the conqueror of Egypt himself.Footnote 83
Although recent work on Grattius has had the laudable aim of ‘exploring the potential of Grattius’ text to engage meaningfully with Augustan society and contemporary Augustan authors’,Footnote 84 surprisingly little notice has been taken of this digression on Egyptian luxury defeated by Roman virtue, with its clear reference to the moral policy Augustus was famous for.Footnote 85 Equally surprising is the assertion that ‘Grattius undoubtedly writes for the elite of his time, the same elite to which he probably belongs’.Footnote 86 Since the only thing known about him is his presence in Ovid's list of poets who enjoyed a popular following (‘the crowd has their songs’),Footnote 87 it makes better sense to pay attention to the evidence for Augustan poets performing to a public audience.
Evidence for the Palatine temple of Apollo as a performance venue could hardly be more conspicuous: not only Horace's hymn at the ludi saeculares of 17 b.c. but also Tibullus 2.5, celebrating Messalla Messallinus’ induction as quindecimuir sacris faciundis, and Propertius 4.6, in praise of Apollo as Augustus’ ally at Actium.Footnote 88 The forecourt of Augustus’ own house, decorated with Apollo's laurel, was so close to the temple that the god and the princeps could be said to live together.Footnote 89 As Diana's temple too (a fact frequently forgotten), it is an attractive possibility as the setting for Grattius’ poem. What might the occasion have been?
When the news of Actium reached Rome, the Senate and people voted that a public festival be held every four years in commemoration of the victory. The games were held for the first time in 28 b.c., along with the dedication of the Palatine temple.Footnote 90 Their superiority to the regular annual ludi was expressed in various ways: the four-year cycle, expressed inclusively as ‘quinquennial’, gave them the dignity of a Hellenic πεντετηρίς;Footnote 91 the funding was provided by each of the four main priestly colleges, presumably in rotation;Footnote 92 the consuls often presided, outranking the praetors who looked after the annual games;Footnote 93 above all, they were in honour of Augustus, a regular public vow for his safety.Footnote 94 However, they are not well attested: not being part of the annual calendar, they do not appear in either the epigraphic or the Ovidian fasti. That may be the reason why recent scholarship largely ignores them.Footnote 95
It is not known when or where these games took place. A good guess for the date would be 2–3 September, the two days immediately before the start of the annual ludi Romani (4–19 September), each marked in the calendars as a holiday (feriae) in celebration respectively of the victories at Actium and Naulochus.Footnote 96 Since numismatic evidence shows that Diana was given retrospective credit for Naulochus, to match that of her brother for Actium,Footnote 97 the site of the games must surely have been the Palatine, in front of the temple of Apollo and Diana and the house of Augustus himself.
Festivities so closely associated with the princeps were no doubt a mixture of entertainment and serious content.Footnote 98 What sort of thing would be deemed appropriate? One possibility is the hexameter poem on the war against Cleopatra of which fragments survive from the library of the ‘Villa of the Papyri’ at Herculaneum.Footnote 99 The villa was very probably owned by L. Piso Caesoninus, consul in 58 b.c.;Footnote 100 Caesoninus’ son L. Piso ‘the pontifex’, consul in 15 b.c., was a prominent figure who may well have been involved in organizing the quinquennial games for Augustus on one of the occasions when the college of pontifices had the responsibility.Footnote 101 The library contained the works of Caesoninus’ poet-philosopher friend Philodemus of Gadara;Footnote 102 the author of the poem on Actium may have had similar patronage from Piso the pontifex.Footnote 103
Grattius’ subject did not have the immediate relevance of the Actium war, and the poem shows no sign of being commissioned by a patron. One feature, however, suggests that the text as transmitted may have been adapted to fit new circumstances. After the introductory lines 1–23, discussed in section 1 above, there is a passage of thirty-seven lines on the making of nets (24–60). That in turn is followed by fourteen lines on the dignity of the whole subject of hunting, complete with mythological precedents (61–74), a passage that some editors, in order to achieve a more natural sequence, have transposed to after line 23 as part of the introduction.Footnote 104 However, it is not enough merely to posit an unexplained dislocation in the order of lines. We need a more specific hypothesis.
6. ADAPTED FOR THE OCCASION
Suppose Grattius’ poem had originally begun, like the Georgics, with the naming of a patron. The size of the task would then be stated (61 magnum opus), and the dignity and importance of the subject asserted, just as we find in lines 61–74. If the poem were subsequently chosen for a particular performance occasion, the opening few lines could be sacrificed and a new introduction composed, consisting of the first sixty lines of the text as we have it.
Evidence for poets writing passages appropriate to a particular venue goes back at least to the fifth century b.c. ‘Hail to you, my friends, who dwell by the citadel in the great city looking down on yellow Akragas!’Footnote 105 ‘Celebrate in your hymns, O Muse, Nephelokokkygia the fortunate!’Footnote 106 Seven centuries later, poets and orators were still being instructed how to praise a city.Footnote 107 A poet in Rome did not have to travel from one city to another to find his festival venues; but though the capital offered many different performance opportunities, each of them required its own particular thematic treatment. Ovid's Fasti gives an idea of how it might be done, at least for the regular annual ludi.Footnote 108
It was argued above (sections 2–4) that lines 1–23 of Grattius’ poem were composed for delivery to an audience, at ludi scaenici that involved singers and dancers, on the Palatine in front of the new temple of Apollo and Diana. It was also argued (section 5) that lines 312–25, a digression on the treatment of puppies’ diet, were composed in particular for the ludi quinquennales in honour of Augustus’ victory over Cleopatra; and a further suggestion may now be made, that those lines had not been in the poet's original composition, but were spliced in at a more or less relevant point to help adapt the poem to that occasion.
That idea, if accepted, may also be applied to the problematic lines 24–60, on the making of nets. Since that was slave's work, dealt with only briefly at the end of the later Cynegetica by Nemesianus,Footnote 109 the prominent position of this passage at the start of Grattius’ poem requires a particular explanation.
The threads for the nets were made from linen, and the poet lists the most suitable flax-growing areas in Africa and Italy (34–9). By contrast, he goes on, the very fine Egyptian linen was useless for the purpose of hunting:Footnote 110
The foot-stamping crowd of summer-time Canopus are scarcely veiled by their own linen when sacrificing at the rites of Bubastis; the whiteness itself, a liability in the unhelpful material, reveals the trap from far away and frightens off the ‘enemy’.
Hardly germane to the poet's didactic argument, the place-names are eloquent in a quite different way. Canopus was notorious for degenerate luxury,Footnote 111 and the rites of the goddess of Bubastis involved much drunken revelry.Footnote 112 In Grattius’ time those ideas would call up a very specific image, ‘the harlot queen of foul Canopus’, drunken and debauched, who hoped to stretch her own fine nets over the Roman Capitol.Footnote 113 As at lines 312–14 on the puppies’ diet, here too the gratuitous reference to decadent Egyptian luxury served to prompt thoughts of the defeat of Cleopatra. The description of hunted animals as ‘the enemy’, continuing the military imagery from the previous invocation to Diana,Footnote 114 would help to achieve that aim.
Finally, it is worth noticing that Grattius’ list of Italian flax-growing areas begins with ‘the Aeolian valley of the Sibyl’.Footnote 115 The quinquennial games celebrating the victory over Cleopatra were put on in turn by the four major priestly colleges, and the main duty of one of those colleges, the quindecimuiri sacris faciundis, was the care and consultation of the Sibyl's books, newly edited and now installed in the temple of Apollo and Diana on the Palatine.Footnote 116 Perhaps Grattius’ line was a polite tribute from an invited performer to the people in charge.
