In these lines from the fourth poem of his first collection of satires, Horace defines his poetic identity against the figures of his satiric predecessor Lucilius and his contemporary Stoic rival Crispinus. Horace emerges as the poet of Callimachean restraint and well-crafted writing in contrast to the chatty, unpolished prolixity of both Lucilius and Crispinus. A proponent of the highly wrought miniature over the sprawling scale of Lucilius, Horace knows when enough is enough. And, owing to a playful link between (...) what is satis and satura, this makes Horace not only a skilful poet but also the consummate satirist. I suggest that this programmatic message is both emphasized and illustrated by a piece of wordplay beginning in line 14. In a previously unnoticed telestich, the last letters of lines 14–18 spell out the word satis. Moreover, this hidden word—made possible only by the particular arrangement of words in all five of its lines—anticipates and deepens the poem's later interest in the matter of compositio, or artful word-arrangement. While this may be unique as an example of a Horatian telestich, Horace does engage in various forms of wordplay elsewhere, and could look not only to Hellenistic poets but also to Lucretius as a predecessor in this regard. In the Satires, a collection in which problems of libertas make forms of implication and veiled speech especially significant, a wide range of hidden words and wordplay has been detected and suggested. The instance observed here reaffirms Horace's interest in wordplay, while its uniqueness as a telestich is, as I hope to show, particularly suited to its context in this poem. (shrink)

Aratus’ Phaenomena calls upon its reader to scrutinize the letters of the text as carefully as the stars and constellations that form its subject matter. The poem abounds with clever letter-play and wordplay, and its reception too is characterized by verbal cleverness, as later authors vie with Aratus and one another to create ingenious textual effects. Among the best-known examples is the word ἄρρητον at Phaen. 2, a witty hidden sphragis for Aratus, who nowhere in his work directly names himself. (...) Later poets picked up on this pun: Callimachus speaks of the λεπταὶ ῥήσιες Ἀρήτου, repeating the verbal root of ἄρρητον in ῥήσιες and its sound in Ἀρήτου. Leonidas of Tarentum meanwhile rates Aratus ‘second after Zeus’, acknowledging the hidden sphragis, which follows directly after the invocation of Zeus in line 1 of the Phaenomena. (shrink)

Recently in the pages of The Classical Quarterly Mathias Hanses convincingly demonstrated the existence of a fourth occurrence of the programmatic adjective λεπτός in Aratus, Phaen. 783–7. This new example occurs in the form of a diagonal acrostic alongside the known ‘gamma-acrostic’ and the occurrence of the same form of the adjective in line 784. Jerzy Danielewicz has now proposed yet a fifth instance of λεπτή in the form of an acronym spread over two lines and meant to be read (...) anticlockwise. (shrink)

This article proposes a new acrostic (SAPI) and telestic (SOIS) at Laus Pisonis 227–30. Their position opposite one another is an indication that they are to be read as a single sentence and an admonition to both dedicatee and reader that poet and patron need each other to gain eternal fame. The telestic allows us to reconstruct the poet's usus scribendi of the reflexive possessive pronoun suus.

Καλλίμαχος τὸ κάθαρμα, τὸ παίγνιον, ὁ ξύλινος νοῦς,αἴτιος ὁ γράψας Αἴτια Καλλίμαχος.Callimachus [means] trash, trifle, wooden mind:the cause is the Callimachus who wroteCauses.This abusive epigram, probably composed in the first centuryc.e.by a certain Apollonius ‘Grammaticus’, has become famous on account of its false attribution to Apollonius of Rhodes and of its consequent identification as ‘evidence’ for the literary feud between Apollonius and Callimachus. Its literary features have attracted less interest. Cameron, for one, dismissed it, finding ‘no coherent literary thrust to (...) the polemic’. I argue here that this epigram in fact shows close engagement with the poetics of Callimachus and his language of literary self-definition. As we find in other anti-Callimachean epigrams, the author ofAnth. Pal.11.275 crafts his insults by appropriating and transforming several Callimachean terms of literary-aesthetic value, which he then directs back against their creator. (shrink)

This note identifies a new acrostic in Christodorus’ sixth century c.e.Ekphrasis of the Baths of Zeuxippus (Anth. Pal. 2) and explains its significance.

This article proposes that Horace's Epodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses open with significant acrostics that comprise the first two letters, in some cases forming syllables, of successive lines: IB-AM/IAMB (Epod. 1.1–2) and IN-CO-(H)AS (Met. 1.1–3). Each acrostic, it will be argued, tees up programmatic concerns vital to the work it opens: generic identity and the interrelation of form and content (Epodes), etymology and monumentality (Metamorphoses). Moreover, as befits their placement at the head of collections, both acrostics negotiate the challenge of literary (...) commencement. The introduction reviews recent developments in acrostic studies and discusses important predecessors and parallels for Horace's and Ovid's ‘two-letter’ and syllabic acrostics. Two subsequent sections examine the acrostics singly, and a conclusion compares the dialogues that these acrostics open between author and reader, underscoring the welcome challenge which Ovid's acrostic offers to the prevailing scholarly view that this form of wordplay is a strictly visual affair. (shrink)

καλὸν δ᾽ ἐπὶ σήματι σῆμασκέπτεσθαι, μᾶλλον δὲ δυοῖν εἰς ταὐτὸν ἰόντωνἐλπωρὴ τελέθοι, τριτάτῳ δέ κε θαρσήσειας. It is a good idea to observe one sign after another, and if two agree, it is more hopeful, while with a third you can be confident. Appropriately for a poet who is ‘subtly speaking’, the epithet applied to him by Ptolemy III Euergetes, Aratus does not cease offering unexpected material to explore. This statement holds true also for the famous passage containing the acrostic (...) ΛΕΠΤΗ. (shrink)