The poet, the grammarian and the Origines: Servius, Vergil and the record of Cato’s history in ancient scholarship

The poet, the grammarian and the Origines: Servius, Vergil and the record of Cato’s history in ancient scholarship

This paper analyses what can be gleaned from Servius about the ancient reception of Cato’s Origines, in the context of the findings of a project examining the Origines’ transmission history entire. Servius is our single largest source for the work, supplying around 20% of the surviving number of citations. Surprisingly, however, far from offering us insights into how Vergil incorporated the Origines into the fabric of his poetry, the Servian record for all its size fails to make clear whether Vergil even worked with the Origines at all.

Surviving ancient scholarship suggests a brief scholarly efflorescence of interest in the Origines, traceable to the early Augustan era. This interest is visible, however, in only one of two then active branches of scholarship: the older form of scholarship at Rome, which represented various forms of historical inquiry (interest in cult and customs, etymology, morphology, etc.). Nascent in the early imperial era was an altogether different vein of scholarly interest, one that sought to explain recent and obtrusively modern works (e.g. Vergil’s, Cinna’s, Cicero’s, Ovid’s), not as vehicles of ancient lore but as objects worthy of explanation in their own right (Zetzel 2018: 59–77). It is clearly to this latter branch of scholarship that the many verbatim quotations of Ennius’ Annales in Servius and related “Vergiliocentric” sources are owed: they explain why Vergil used the particular language he did, and the relationship implied between the two texts is effectively a causal one. It is by contrast clear that the Origines never became a medium for the newer-fashioned interest: ancient scholarship never comes close to implying a causal relationship between the Origines and any other work, not even Sallust’s. As far as we can see, the Origines were mined in a post-Ciceronian moment of interest—exclusively, however, for antiquarian content. Scholars later occasionally juxtaposed this content with other ideas of the past found elsewhere. Nowhere is this fact more clearly on display than in Servius, where the functions of citation of the Origines offer a striking contrast to the functions of citation of Ennius’ Annales.

There are three main reasons why the Origines are cited in the Servian commentaries: (1) most frequently, to point out that Vergil’s account of the Roman past fails to cohere with Cato’s (e.g. DS/Serv. Aen. 1.570 = FRHist 5. Cato F 6c); (2) in an attempt to reduce Vergil’s elusive meaning (e.g. DS/Serv. Aen. 1.5 = F 4a); (3) rarely, to show Vergil in agreement with Cato (e.g. DS/Serv. Aen. 1.6 = F 63). These last cases (under 3) never require that any perceived coincidence between the two works have been intentional on Vergil’s part and do not constitute evidence that Vergil followed the Origines or that his readers felt that he did. This paper’s findings thus cohere with the larger study’s other results to date in showing the odd isolation of the Origines in the literary historical landscape.