‘IN PONDERE NON MAGNO SATIS PONDEROSAE...’ 3
Remitto cum largis gratiis Gronovii Papinium. Valde me delectarunt
Notae tam accuratae, & in pondere non magno satis ponderosae Viri ad
restituendum genuinum Auctoribus sensum peculiari qvopiam Genio
nati, a Charitibusque educati. (Daum to Reinesius, Zwickau, 21. Febr.
1654 [= Bosius 1670, 151, n° 58])
I am returning to you, with very many thanks, Gronovius’ Statius. I
took very great pleasure in the notes, which are so precise and which,
though they appear in something that weighs so little, are themselves
quite weighty, coming as they do from a man born with some Genius
all of his own for restoring to the authors their original meaning, and
who was educated by the Charites.The identity of the author of these lines is by no means without inter-
es t. Daum,^8 rector of the Ratsschule in Zwickau, was in fact one of the
closest friends of Caspar von Barth (1587–1658), and he was to be-
come the posthumous editor of many of his works—in particular of
his monumental commentary on Statius, published in 1664–5 in
Zwickau. Though written ten years before its publication, Daum’s
words strikingly applied to what Barth’s commentary would not be
(or, at any rate, would not be considered to be). In Gronovius’ notes,
Daum found qualities of relevance and brevity (satis ponderosae,
pondere non magno) the absence of which many readers would de-
plore in Barth’s Statius, totalling more than three thousand pages of
erudite discussions often felt as digressive; such characteristics had
already been criticized in Barth’s earlier works, notably in his second
Claudian, published the same year as N. Heinsius’ commentary
(1650), to which it was explicitly compared.^9 Did Daum implicitly
8 Inventory of the correspondence addressed to him in Mahnke 2003.
9 Negative reactions to Barth’s Claudian include the (necessarily tendentious,
given the identity of the addressee) letters to N. Heinsius by Gevartius, Antwerp,
Idibus Junii 1650 [= Burmann 1727, II 763, n° 469] (“[...] non est cur ob editionem
istam vadimonium deseras. Commentarius enim ille multae lectionis est, sed exigui
judicii, ut & vastum ejus Adversariorum opus.”), by Jacques Dupuy, Paris, 3 juin
1651 [= Bots 1971, 81–2, n° 30] (“Nos libraires ont enfin receu le Claudian de
Barthius qui nous a épouventé de sa grosseur qui est prodigieuse; s’il se fust contenté
d’y inserer les choses qui pouvoient servir à l’illustration de l’histoire du temps ie n’y
trouverois rien a redire, mais c’est ce qui y est plus iejunement traitté, et il se iette sur
des lieux d’autheurs barbares qui n’ont rien de commun avec Claudian; pour vous le
faire court quoi que nostre bibliotheque soit fort nombreuse nous ne l’avons pas voulu
accroistre de ce volume, vostre edition quoi que reduitte au petit pied comprenant
beaucoup plus d’essentiel pour l’intelligence de cet auteur.”), and later by Jean
Chapelain, Paris, 6 avril 1662 [= Bray 2005, 345, n° 118] (“Votre révision de
Claudian vous apportera de la gloire et j’en attends avec impatience la nouvelle Edi-