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Cursus Fastorum: a Study and Edition of Pomponius Laetus’S Glosses to Ovid’S Fasti

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Cursus Fastorum: a Study and Edition of Pomponius Laetus’S Glosses to Ovid’S Fasti Cursus Fastorum: a study and edition of Pomponius Laetus’s glosses to Ovid’s Fasti Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Michael Jean, B. A. Graduate Program in Greek and Latin The Ohio State University 2015 Dissertation Committee: Frank Coulson, Advisor Richard Fletcher Anna Grotans 1 Copyright by Michael Jean 2015 2 Abstract The teacher and antiquarian Pomponius Laetus was and is among the most celebrated and studied of the 15th-century Italian humanists, and a wealth of extant material witnesses (particularly exegetical commentaries on classical texts, neo-Latin poetry, and correspondences to and from other notable humanists) testifies to his life and his activities in the various intellectual circles of Quattrocento Rome. One such piece of evidence is an extant commentary composed by Pomponius on Ovid’s Fasti. Supplementary evidence suggests that Ovid’s Fasti was a lifelong object of study for Pomponius and that his work in explicating the calendar poem’s obscure mythological, historical, and topographical references greatly influenced future generations of humanists. Despite the centrality of this particular classical text to Pomponius’s pedagogical and personal programs, his commentary on the poem has gone understudied and today lacks an edition. This dissertation remedies this lack by locating, studying, and contextualizing previously unknown extant witnesses to Pomponius’s work on Ovid’s Fasti and by providing an edition of the commentary itself. Pomponius’s commentary and the traditions in which it was read and copied are valuable witnesses to a period of intense intellectual activity and cultural engagement with classical antiquity, and this dissertation makes this evidence accessible for the first time to the modern reader. ii For my family. iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude, first and foremost, to Professor Frank Coulson. His constant support, enthusiasm, and guidance made both this project and my entire graduate career both successful and meaningful. I am grateful also to Professors Anna Grotans and Richard Fletcher for their support, and to the whole faculty of the Department of Classics for making the last six years at once enriching and enthralling. It is with their support, and in particular the support and encouragement of the department chair, Professor Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, that I have been able to undertake the travel and research necessary to bring this project to completion. I would like to thank in particular Mary Babcock and the Charles L. Babcock Rome Scholarship Fund, without which this kind of work would not be possible. I am indebted to the assistance and patience of the staff and faculty of the institutions whose collections allowed me to undertake this project: the Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, the Cambridge University Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Biblioteca Estense. I am also indebted to the assistance of Ms. Wendy Watkins and Ms. Erica Kallis, without whom we would all fall apart. I am grateful also to all of my friends and family who kept me going in times of fatigue and stress: to Adam, Lauren, Aaron, and Deanna for their friendship; to Hank and Marion for their camaraderie; to my family for their unfailing support and love; and finally to Rebecca, because of whom all things are possible. iv Vita Born, West Palm Beach, FL ...................................................................... January 18, 1987 Graduated, Santaluces Community High School...........................................................2005 Graduated, B. A. in Classics, University of Florida ......................................................2009 Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Classics, The Ohio State University ............................................ 2009-2015 Fields of Study Major: Greek and Latin v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Vita .......................................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................1 1.1 Introductory remarks ..................................................................................................1 1.1.1 Ovid’s Fasti .........................................................................................................2 1.1.2 Ovid’s Fasti in the medieval period ....................................................................5 1.1.3 Ovid’s Fasti in the Italian Renaissance ...............................................................9 1.1.4 Pomponius Laetus .............................................................................................14 1.1.5 Pomponius Laetus and Ovid’s Fasti: summary remarks ...................................20 1.2 The witnesses to the glosses of Pomponius Laetus on Ovid’s Fasti ........................22 1.2.1 Witness V ..........................................................................................................23 1.2.2 The pre-V witnesses (A and F) ..........................................................................29 1.2.3 The V-tradition witnesses (N, M, and C) ..........................................................37 1.2.4 The dictata witnesses (O and B) .......................................................................44 1.2.5 The witnesses: summary remarks ......................................................................60 1.3 The glosses of Pomponius Laetus on Ovid’s Fasti ..................................................61 1.3.1 Pomponius’s language in V ...............................................................................62 1.3.2 Pomponius’s vita Ovidii ....................................................................................65 1.3.3 Sources ..............................................................................................................70 1.3.4 The glosses ........................................................................................................77 1.4 Editorial approaches .................................................................................................95 Chapter 2: Edition ............................................................................................................109 2.1 Vita Ovidii ..............................................................................................................109 2.2 Liber Primus ...........................................................................................................110 2.3 Liber Secundus .......................................................................................................196 2.4 Liber Sextus ............................................................................................................291 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................365 vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introductory remarks Ovid’s six-book calendar poem, the Fasti, has undergone a recent revival of interest and a critical reevaluation. Within its elegiac couplets are Ovid’s accounts of the conflicting and often ludicrous myths, quasi-historical events, and star-movements around which the Roman calendar is constructed. In the medieval and Renaissance periods of Europe, the poem was a storehouse of information about the cultural practices of ancient Rome, and though it never received the kind of sustained attention as did Ovid’s Metamorphoses, gloss and commentary traditions from as early as the 11th century testify to the calendar’s poem important place in the canon of classical authors. The second half of the 15th century in Italy in particular witnessed a major revival of interest in the poem, and the humanist teacher and antiquarian Pomponius Laetus is chiefly responsible. Pomponius’s work in explicating the calendar poem’s obscure mythological and historical references and in mining it for information about the ancient past occupied him for at least three decades of his life, and during that time he promoted the study of the text both within his own circle of friends, scholars, and students, in Rome, as well as among other humanists throughout Italy. The evidence for this work survives in the thousands of glosses that he composed for the poem—glosses that contain 1 Pomponius’s exegesis on all matters of classical antiquity, but especially on mythology, history, topography, epigraphy, and the Roman calendar. A large number of extant textual witnesses contain Pomponius’s Fasti glosses. To date, modern editions have been created for the commentaries of several of the text’s other major commentators, but despite the centrality and importance of Pomponius’s work to the history of the reception of Ovid’s Fasti, especially in the second half of the 15th century in Rome, no such edition exists for his own
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