Title: L'Héracléade ou Herculanum enseveli sous la lave du Vésuve Poëme de L. A. Florus traduit en vers français avec des notes par J.-F.-S. Maizony de Lauréal Membre de l’Académie napolitaine de Pontanus
Description: <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">8vo. pp. xxi, [3], 458, f. [1]. Contemporary (?) smooth marbled boards. Verse in ten chants occupying pp. 1-256, ‘notes justificatives’ pp. 259-458.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">First and apparently only edition of one of the more obscure classical forgeries of the Romantic era: an entirely unrecorded ten-canto poem on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79, attributed by its ‘discoverer’ to Lucius Annaeus Florus, the second-century historian and poet under Trajan and Hadrian, friend and protégé of the latter.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">The ‘translator’ Joseph-François-Stanislas Maizony Maizony de Laureal (1780-1848) was – according to a French source that takes the attribution to Florus seriously, and provides no citations – the natural son of Count Andre Joseph Abial (1750-1828), a French peer and in 1799-1802 Minister of Justice. A minor but persistent literary figure in his time, poet, opera librettist, and commentator on the Latin classics, Maizony had a particular affinity with Italian affairs, serving at one time under Napoleon as avocat-general in the Imperial Court of Florence, and subsequently as a civil administrator at Rome in 1812-13, where he became, proudly enough, a member of the Académie Napolitain de Pontanus (founded in the 15th century by the great Venetian humanist himself, and reinstituted as an international scholarly sodality in 1808).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">While at Rome, as he tells us in a lively ten-page preface, Maizony devoted himself to exploring uninvestigated manuscripts in the Vatican Library, and was rewarded by the discovery of the hitherto unknown Héracléade, an anonymous but highly finished and evocative poem dedicated to the shade of the great naturalist Pliny the Elder. Maizony allegedly did not at once transcribe his discovery, but translated it into French prose as he read, and finally settled on Florus as the author, blaming the anonymity (pp. xiii-xiv) on an ill-advised satirical passage on the Emperor Vespasian, at the end of the eighth canto – which had also led to the silence on, or ignorance of the poem itself, by near-contemporary Latin authors (Manilius, Phaedrus, Quintus Smyrnaeus). Maizony then tells us that he was obliged to quit Rome during the new Spanish-Neapolitan invasion, completing only his prose translation, and when peace was restored – and, according to Maizony [another canard?] when in 1826 new discoveries of fragments of Florus in a Verona convent had been announced in print by ‘le savant bibliophile Michel Panggini’ – he attempted to procure a full transcript of the original poem from a local ‘personne assidée’, only to find, to his ‘chagrin’, that the precious manuscript was now missing from the Papal library, having evidently been abstracted during the invasion by ‘un brigand lettré, Napolitain’, who had no doubt transported it into his own distant realm. This left Maizony temporarily baffled, but he made the best of the loss by converting his prose translation of 1812-1813 into formal French verse, with an extended commentary, as homage to Florus himself and the antiquarian revivals then underway.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Obviously, all these circumstantial details are nonsense, but surprisingly few critics have ever bothered to say so. In 1847, ten years after the sole appearance of the text, J.-M. Quérard (Superchéries littéraires. Paris, pp. xvi, xxxiii) had noticed it, with its clearly damning ‘incrédulités’, but likely the only modern treatments are by Eric M. Moormann, most recently in his ‘Literary Evocations of Herculaneum in the Nineteenth Century’ (in C. C. Lalusch, ed., Rediscovering the Bay of Naples, 1710-1800 [New Haven and London, 2013], pp. 187-204), where Moormann was ‘unable to find much information about the author’ and merely paraphrased the title and preface. He describes the Héracléade as ‘an example of a genre that was extremely popular after the discovery of the papyri in Herculaneum’, but without naming any other example. As a proposed source or inspiration for the imposture, he suggests – with a short epitome of its contents – the anonymous poem Aetna, ascribed to Virgil since the second century, but occasionally thereafter to Claudius Claudianus and to Lucillius, the dedicatee of Seneca’s Letters. But Maizony could easily have accomplished his ‘Florus’ fabrication with no dependence upon any genuine classical precedent. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Moormann’s failure to find out more about the ingenious perpetrator need not have been quite so abject: the poet-cum-civil servant was no literary neophyte, and his other publications may well bear examination for similar traces of a forger’s sometimes irresistible inclinations. Extended poems, with dense historical commentary (La petite Henriade, ou l’enfance d’Henri IV (1824 (see Bib# 8755821 in this collection), 1837, 1845) and La forêt de Belême (1826)) and the ‘operacomique en trois actes’ Louis II, ou la route de Reims (1825) deserve more attention. This is certainly the case for an edition of Virgil’s Bucolics (1821, 1846) translated into French verse, with ‘tous les passages des auteurs grecs et latins imités par Virgile et des auteurs des diverses nations qui ont imité Virgile’ (1821, 1846), claims that sound susceptible, at least, to imaginary citations, and cry out for investigation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">The Héracléade (1837, no reprint recorded) seems to be of signal rarity, WorldCat noting copies only at the Bibliothèque Nationale (two copies listed in the BN catalogue) and the Mediathèque Valois in Sion, Switzerland. Copies were listed in Austria (3) and Italy (1), but none in the UK or USA, in the defunct database KVC, but do not appear in WorldCat now.</span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_8755820" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>