The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly Page A

leader’s literary bent was less steadfast than might have been expected.
    Claudius was the first emperor since Augustus to be deified. Nero, who succeeded Claudius, ordered his tutor Seneca to mock the apotheosis in verse, as
The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius.
The Stoic philosopher struggled in vain to inculcate a sense of self-control and mental discipline into his wayward ward, and eventually committed suicide as Nero’s murderous regime sought out new traitors. His nephew, the poet Lucan, similarly killed himself, leaving his poem about Julius,
The Pharsalia,
incomplete.
    Nero fancied himself as an artist, and acted in various plays and farces, sometimes scandalizing the court by playing the female roles. His attack on Claudius Pollio,
The One-Eyed Man,
has perished alongside the rest of his oeuvre. “What an artist dies with me!” he had lamented as the troops hunted him down. History disagreed.

Gallus
    {
c.
70–26 B.C.E.}
    IN THE FIFTEENTH poem of his first book of
Amores,
Ovid makes a bold claim for the immortality of poetry: “
carmina morte carent,
” “songs from death are free.” To prove his point he catalogues the imperishable names of Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, concluding with the lines
    Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois et sua cum Gallo nota Lycoris erit.
    Gallus, from the West and even to the East, Gallus will be famed and with Gallus will be famed his Lycoris.
    Gallus’ literary perpetuity was more precarious than that of the illustrious company in which Ovid places him; and Ovid may have had a suspicion that this was the case. Inscribing his name three times in two lines is almost laying it on a little thick, especially when Homer is only referred to as “the son of Maeonia.” Ovid’s insistence on Gallus’ greatness extended across his career: he is mentioned again in book III of
The
Amores,
in
The Art of Love
(where young men are advised to memorize poems by Gallus), and thrice in his
Tristia.
    Nor was Ovid the only poet to commemorate the achievements of Gallus. Propertius links his name with the earliest Latin love elegists, and two of Virgil’s
Eclogues
feature Gallus. In Eclogue VI, he appears with no less than Orpheus and the god Phoebus in a cantata of poetic themes. Eclogue X is both dedicated to Gallus and descriptive of him. “Who would refuse poetry to Gallus?” asks Virgil. The answer was the emperor.
    Servius, the commentator on Virgil, tells us that Gallus composed four books of amatory elegies for Lycoris, whose real name was Cytheris, an actress rumored to be the mistress of Mark Antony. He was one of the
neoteroi,
or “new poets” (“modernists” might be an acceptable comparison), who drew their inspiration from the allusive, finely polished poetry of Callimachus and the Alexandrians. As well as being an eminent poet, Gallus was a soldier. He fought alongside Octavian (who became Augustus Caesar) against Mark Antony, and was rewarded for his loyalty and bravery during the capture of Alexandria by being made prefect of Egypt in 30 B.C.E. Some unspecified indiscretion or rumor of ambitions or unacceptable conduct led to his fall from imperial favor: he committed suicide in exile in 26 B.C.E.
    Though Augustus could be forgiving—Horace, his panegyricist and ode writer, had fought alongside Mark Antony—he could also be implacable. Servius claims that the emperor demanded that Virgil remove a section praising Gallus from the fourth
Georgic,
but it seems as if the commentator had confused the final, fourth poem of the
Georgics
with the final, tenth poem of the
Eclogues.
Absence of evidence often being mistaken for evidence of absence, several scholars were later on embroiled in trying to hypothesize about the missing accolade, while ignoring the evidence that Virgil did not remove a reference.
    We do not know if Gallus’ work was actively suppressed: nonetheless, no manuscripts