epistolary genre, according to the Alexandrian canon, a genre connected
to satire but more mild. The poet’s glorious career—attested by the
abundance of first person personal and possessive pronouns—is opposed
to the degradation of the book in the bookstore (maiores pinnas nido
extendisse).
Thanks to his qualities (uirtutibus) and not to an aristocratic family
(generi), in fact, the son of a freedman (libertino patre), he has become the
friend, that is, the client, of the leading men of the city, Maecenas and
Augustus (primis placuisse; 20–23):
...melibertino natum patre et in tenui re
maiores pinnas nido extendisse loqueris,
ut quantum generi demas, uirtutibus addas;
me primis urbis belli placuisse domique,(... you will say that I, born to a freedman father and in straitened circum
stances,
have spread my wings too wide for my nest,
so that whatever you take from my lineage you add to my merits;
that I have pleased the leading men of the city in both peace and war.)He himself has a poor physique, a plebeian accustomed to work in the
fields (solibus aptum), no longer young, with the temperament necessary
for a mild satirist: quick to get angry (irasci celerem) but easily calmed
(placabilis; 24–25):
corporis exigui, praecanum, solibus aptum,
irasci celerem, tamen ut placabilis essem.(thin bodied, prematurely gray, fond of the sun,
quick to get angry but I’m quick to forgive.)This portrait of the poet ends on a very Roman note—his age indicated by
reference to the civic calendar: during the consulates of Lollius and
Lepidus (21B.C.), he was forty-four years old (26–28).
Admittedly, this signature of a book by a final poem is nothing remark-
able;^18 what is remarkable is that the poet signs not a work but a book, a
scroll, materially indicated in its concrete reality. It is the object itself and
its destiny that consecrates, or not, the existence of the poet.
One finds, although differently formulated, the same alternative in an
epigram of Catullus (95). It opposes theZmyrna, a short epyllion by his
friend Cinna, the fruit of long and painful work, with the botched and
numerous verses—500,000—of Hortensius.Zmyrnawill be sent through-
out the whole world and people will take care of thevolumen, for even
- Cf.Odes3.30.
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet 155