## TWO CONJECTURES IN THE 'FABELLA SULPICIAE' ( EP. BOB. 37.65-66)

By Maxwell Hardy

Summary: Two conjectures are offered on the text of the Fabella (or Conquestio ) Sulpiciae ( Ep. Bob . 37). It is argued that at v. 65 aequos 'equal, fair, reasonable' is an anagrammatic corruption of quaeso 'please', and that at v. 66 nostro 'our' is a corruption of nullo 'no'.

Interest  in  the  text  of  the  so-called Fabella  Sulpiciae ,  a  long  diatribe against Domitian's expulsion of philosophers from Rome, has recently been reignited. 1 In this brief article two conjectural emendations are offered at the poem's close. The text cited below is James Butrica's reconstruction of the lost archetype (Giovanni Galbiati's 1493 transcript of an eighth-century MS copied at Bobbio), punctuated in line with modern conventions. 2

The Muse makes her reply to Sulpicia's speech:

- haec ego. tum paucis dea me dignarier infit:
- 65 'pone metus aequos, cultrix mea: summa tyranno haec instant odia et nostro periturus honore est. nam laureta Numae fontisque habitamus eosdem et comite Egeria ridemus inania coepta.

uiue, uale. manet hunc pulchrum tua fama dolorem:

- 70 Musarum spondet chorus et Romanus Apollo.'
* I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.
- 1 See Hockings 2021. The date and authorship of this poem are much disputed: it could be an original poem by the Sulpicia known to us from Martial's epigrams (10.35, 38), or a fourth-century forgery written in her name at a time when her poems were exciting new interest (cf. e.g. Auson. Cent. nupt. p. 153 Green).
- 2 Butrica 2006: 88-99. B = Vat. lat. 2836 ( non ante 1493); V = the editio princeps of Ep. Bob. 37 (1498); P = Ugoletus' Ausonius (1499); A = Avantius' fourth edition of Ausonius (1507).

Maxwell Hardy: 'Two conjectures in the 'Fabella Sulpiciae' ( Ep. Bob. 37.65-66)' C&M 72 (2023) 305-310.

64 haec VP: nec B | dignarier] dignatur et Pithoeus || 65 aequos] caecos Hertz :  saeuos Baehrens :  aegros Peiper,  Eskuche  suo  Marte :  sequor  en Withof |  pone  metum,  cultrix  mea:  saeuo  summa  tyranno Boot ||  66 haec] ecce Heinsius : hinc Hertz | odia] gladii Butrica : dira Hockings | honore] honori Burman || 69 tua] sua Pithoeus | dolorem] laborem Hockings

So  I  spoke.  The  goddess  then  began  to  honour  me  with  a  brief  response: 'Lay aside your reasonable (?) fears, my devotee. The most decided enmity closes in upon the tyrant, and he will perish with our honour. For we inhabit the laurel-groves and fonts of Numa, and with Egeria by our side we mock his vain enterprises. Live long, keep well: your fame awaits this honourable grief. The choir of the Muses and the Roman Apollo promise it.'

The generality of critics agree that pone metus aequos 'lay aside your reasonable fears' cannot be what the author of this poem wrote: encouraging someone to lay aside their fears, only to qualify those fears as 'just' or 'reasonable', 3 is  not a very effective way to go about setting a nervous person  at  ease. 4 Baehrens,  Hertz,  Peiper  and  Eskuche  accordingly  exchange aequos for a more negative epithet saeuos , caecos , and aegros respectively - and at least two modern editors print one of these suggestions. 5 However, as Withof and Boot long ago remarked, the expression pone metus (or metum ) is not usually construed with an epithet qualifying

- 3 Giordano Rampioni 1982: 59 and Lana 1949: 69 offer 'i tuoi giusti timori'.
- 4 Withof 1799: 136: 'wie kann man von der Furcht das Beiwort aequos gebrauchen, und doch sagen, dass man sie ablegen solle?' Baehrens 1873: 36: 'metus aequos ,  id  est, ueros nemo potest iuberi deponere, potest timores quamlibet magnos, dummodo uanos.' The parallels for metus aequos adduced by Munari 1995: 95, viz. Carm. Priap. 55.4 iustos … metus , Sen. Contr . 1.1.11 iustus metus and Ulp. Dig . 4.2.7.1 iustus … metus , neither confirm the Latinity of aequos (as opposed to iustos ) nor describe Sulpicia's fears as 'justified' while also advising her to ignore them.
- 5 Baehrens 1873: 36; 40 (cf. Baehrens 1883: 96); Hertz 1874: 574; Peiper 1886: 416; Eskuche 1890: 388-89. Butrica 2006: 101 prints caecos , Fuchs 1968: 46 aegros . The transmitted  lection  is  retained  by  Lana  1949:  68,  Munari  1955:  95,  Speyer  1963:  47,  and Giordano Rampioni 1982: 58.

metus (or metum ). 6 In fact, if a search of the Musisque Deoque website can be relied upon, 7 it  is  not  ever  so  construed,  save  once  in  a  passage  of Ovid's Metamorphoses , where the epithet refers to qualities not congenital to fear itself: pulchros, regina, piosque | pone metus , 'lay aside, queen, your becoming and pious fears' (11.389-90). There Ovid's pulchros and pios contribute something additional to the sense of metus . In Sulpicia, by contrast, it is very far from obvious what meaning is added by aegros 'sick', saeuos 'cruel', or caecos 'blind', that is not already present in metus to some degree. As the sense 'lay aside your fears, my worshipper' is complete in itself and wants no expansion, I suspect that the corrupted word was a parenthetical one, and this I conjecture to be quaeso 'please'. 8 The gods of the classical pantheon do not normally condescend to such courtesies as 'please' or 'thank you'; but, says Butrica, in this poem 'Sulpicia is 'renewing [her] intimate counsel' with one who knows and recognizes her' (cf. 3-4 nam tibi secessi, tecum penetrale retractans | consilium ); and the words of the muse are expressive of this relation in other ways. 9 In v. 69, for instance,  Calliope  signs  off  with  the  friendly  valediction uiue,  uale ,  'live long, keep well' (also at Hor. Epist . 1.6.67). And if, in the same line, Hocking's laborem be accepted for dolorem and Pithoeus' sua for tua , then the sentence manet hunc pulchrum sua fama laborem can be understood as a friendly  compliment  on  the  fame-winning  excellence  of  Sulpicia's verse. 10 If quaeso be  right,  I  imagine it will have come to aequos by  the same anagrammatic process that at Ov. Her. 9.20  converted turpis into stupri and at Trist. 1.1.83 changed argolica into agricola . 11

- 6 Withof 1799: 136; Boot 1868: 17 (whose rearrangement pone metum, cultrix mea: saeuo summa tyranno ,  does not appeal for metrical elegance). For pone metus without an epithet, cf. Ov. Am . 3.6.61-62, Met. 1.736, 15.658, Pont . 3.3.83, Stat. Theb . 3.713, 9.895, Silv. 2.1.183,  and  Hil.  Pict. Macc .  86.  For pone  metum without  an  epithet,  cf.  [Tib.] 3.10.15, Ov. Her. 16.68, 20.1, Ars am . 1.556, Rem . 544, Met. 3.634, 5.226, Fast. 2.759, Tr. 5.2.3, Stat. Theb. 11.727, and Maxim. Eleg . 3.60.
- 7 Mastandrea et al. 2007.
- 8 For pone combined with a word equivalent to 'please', cf. Ov. Met . 14.762 pone, precor, fastus ; Stat. Silv . 2.6.103 pone, precor, questus ; and Sil. Pun . 9.350 pone, precor, lacrimas .
- 9 Butrica 2006: 115.
- 10  Hockings 2021: 885.
- 11  For the latter corruption see Owen 1889: 6 n. 83; and for a very long list of similar anagrammatic errors, see Housman 1903: lviii-lix; Willis 1972: 81-87.

The second problem that I wish to discuss arises from v. 66. The statement et nostro periturus honore est is of dubious meaning. Baehrens took it in the sense 'honore, quem semper nobis Romani habuerunt habentque, eueniet ut in iram indignationemque accensi tyrannum tollant'. 12 That is, he took nostro … honore as causative: 'by the honour which the Romans have for us [sc. Calliope], he [sc. Domitian] will be made to perish.' This is a rather odd notion, for why should the Romans' respect for Calliope impel them to depose an emperor? Surely they had more pressing reasons to remove him? 13 Other critics have sought to extract from nostro … honore the meaning 'to' or 'in our honour', a sense that might have been more  easily  conveyed  by honori ,  which  Burman  accordingly  conjectured. 14 But this reading, though accepted by Butrica, is open to a similar objection as the last: how could the assassination of an emperor ever bring 'honour' to a Muse ? It is doubtful too whether vv. 67-68 follow from this statement with the clear logic implied by nam . This particle has explanatory force, but in no way is the prophecy 'and he shall perish in honour of us' explained by the statement 'for we inhabit the groves and fonts of Numa, and with Egeria we mock his vain enterprises '.

The passing of an emperor was usually attended with public displays of respect: a state funeral, dirges, eulogistic orations and so forth. 15 It is notorious that Domitian on his decease received no honours of this kind: cadauer eius ,  Suetonius says, populari sandapila per uispillones exportatum Phyllis nutrix in suburbano suo Latina uia funerauit 'his body was carried out on a pauper's bier by those who bury the common folk, his nurse Phyllis cremating it at her suburban estate on the Via Latina' ( Dom . 17.3). 16 That is to say, Domitian did not die 'with' or 'in' or 'to' or 'by' the Muses' honour; he died emphatically 'without' it. If Sulpicia's honore was intended to signify the respect that ought to be accorded to a recently expired emperor, then sound sense in adequate style can be restored if only the text be made to say something like 'and he shall die without honour'. 17 A simple way of doing this would be to read nullo 'no' in lieu of nostro 'our'. 18 Nam then accomplishes the point it was written to make: not only is Domitian deprived of the Muse's honour in failing to receive, say, an epicedion or eulogy, but she even 'mocks' him and his inania coepta with the satire which she has inspired Sulpicia to write.

12  Baehrens 1883: 36.

13  Collins 2009: 79: 'In Suetonius' account, Domitian's saevitia , his confiscations of property, his cupiditas , and his extreme arrogance made him hated and feared, until 'at length he was killed in a conspiracy of his friends, intimate freedman, and his wife'.' See Suet. Dom . 14.1.

14  Burman 1731: 439.

15  See e.g. Suet. Aug. 100.1-4, Tib . 75.3, Claud. 45.1, Tit. 11.1.

16  See also Suet. Dom. 23.1.

Occasions when nullus is collocated with honor are too numerous to cite here, but note, in connection with funerals, Lucil. 691 Marx nullo honore … nullo funere and Suet. Dom . 2.3 defunctumque nullo praeter consecrationis honore dignatus . For the corruption nullo → nostro (common in later MSS, owing to the shared abbreviation n o ), see Prop. 1.16.21, where the opposite mistake, nullo for nostro , is made by the scribe of cod. Leidensis Voss. Lat. 81 (s. XV ) (probably, however, in perseveration of nulla at the beginning of the line). 19 The likeness of o to u in the cursive pre-Carolingian minuscule script of Galbiati's exemplar might have abetted the error. 20

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baehrens, E. 1873. De Sulpiciae quae uocatur satira commentatio philologica . Jena.

Baehrens, E. 1883. Poetae Latini minores . Vol. 5. Leipzig.

Boot, J.C.G. 1868. Commentatio de Sulpiciae quae fertur satira . Amsterdam.

Burman, P. 1731. Poetae Latini minores […] cum integris doctorum virorum notis, et quorundam excerptis . Vol. 2. Leiden.

Butrica, J.L. 2006. 'The Fabella of Sulpicia ( Epigrammata Bobiensia 37)' Phoenix 60, 70-121.

- 17  For honor in the sense of 'funeral rites', see Mehmel, TLL 6.3.2925.23-61.
- 18  Else, conceivably, cariturus for periturus : 'and he shall want our honour.' The anonymous reviewer, however, finds nullo to be more emphatic, and indeed we have had caritura (Peiper's excellent emendation of captiua ) already in v. 52. To read cariturus would also deprive the end of this poem to a reference to Domitian's death, the violence of which is well conveyed by periturus .
- 19  See the apparatus of Richmond 1928: 124.
- 20  See Butrica 2006: 89 (citing Ferrari 1973: 21 n. 2; 13).

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