In Alan Cameron's long-awaited and epoch-making study The Last Pagans of Rome, a typically erudite and stimulating chapter is devoted to the anonymous poem generally known today as Carmen contra paganos (CCP), written in the late fourth or (some have argued) early fifth century.Footnote ¹ This poem (of 122 lines)—of which the text is still in many places uncertain, in spite of a wealth of critical attention from the time when it was brought fully to light by Delisle in 1867Footnote ² to the present dayFootnote ³ —is a blistering invective against worshippers of the traditional gods and their practices, and against one person in particular, whose identity has been much debated.Footnote ⁴ Cameron has brought forward a battery of strong arguments, many of them new, against the claims of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus,Footnote ⁵ for a long time the front runner, whose name used to be given confidently in the poem's title, and, like Ellis and Cracco Ruggini, has strongly championed the claims of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, the grandee who was consul designate for the year 385 but did not live to take up the office.Footnote ⁶

It is not proposed here to discuss the target's identity, but to examine Cameron's contention that the writer of CCP may be confidently identified: it was Pope Damasus.Footnote ⁷ As has long been clear,Footnote ⁸ this attribution was known in the Middle Ages, in an eleventh- and twelfth-century library catalogue of the abbey of Lobbes, which includes an item Damasi episcopi versus de Praetextato praefecto urbis, now part of number 238.Footnote ⁹ This ascription, though accepted by Courtney,Footnote ¹⁰ has been received by scholars with less than full agreement.Footnote ¹¹ Some cite a strong difference in style between CCP—sometimes denounced by modern writers as ‘doggerel’—and the extant verses of Damasus, praised as elegant by Jerome.Footnote ¹² Cameron takes the identification seriously, however, seeing more in the catalogue entry than ‘medieval guesswork’ or an example of the common tendency to attribute anonymous poems to major authors, such as Cyprian, Paulinus of Nola and Tertullian.Footnote ¹³ To confirm the attribution to Damasus he undertakes a detailed philological study of the poem, in which he points to many shared characteristics of metrical practice, style and intertextuality.Footnote ¹⁴ Included in this is the phenomenon of ‘formulae’,Footnote ¹⁵ that is, more or less fixed expressions used by both Damasus and CCP for recurring themes of importance; various features of metre and prosody, both regular and irregular (regular ones may be used to detect a link if their frequency in the two authors is proportionately identical or similar);Footnote ¹⁶ some verbal parallels which arguably achieve more than the usual type of conclusion that one author knew or imitated another, or that both have the same source; and other surprises such as evidence in both poems that the pope read Petronius.Footnote ¹⁷ The present article, which uses philological argumentation to approach ‘the philological issue’ (Cameron [n. 1], 311), will concentrate on what is for Cameron the ‘final detail that clinches the matter’ ([n. 1], 314). This is founded on what he calls the ‘truly remarkable idiosyncrasy of Damasus: complete avoidance of copulative et (et = and)’.Footnote ¹⁸ He goes on to argue that the same idiosyncrasy is present in CCP.

This claim about Damasus' very marked preference was first made by Maximilian Ihm, editor of the Teubner Damasus and writer of two relevant articles.Footnote ¹⁹ In 23.1 Ihm (25.1 in the later text of Ferrua),Footnote ²⁰ aspice et hic tumulus retinet caelestia membra,Footnote ²¹ the meaning of et must, as Ihm's index confirms, be etiam. The first two words of the line are De Rossi's emendation of the text in manuscript T, a medieval sylloge which uniquely preserves the opening line.Footnote ²² This has been accepted without reservation, for it is difficult to conceive an alternative; the fact that Damasus avoids hiatus seems to rule out simple aspice.Footnote ²³ To explain et Ferrua speculated that it might have referred to the spelunca magna, the cave in which the various tombs inscribed with his verses were discovered. But another possible example of et—this is clearly copulative—is revealed by consultation of Ferrua's index; at 59.1 (= Ihm 61.1), both editors print the line as corpore mente animo pariterque et nomine Felix, implicitly preferring the text of two particular manuscripts (C and Th) to those of various other testimonies which give metrically acceptable wording without et.Footnote ²⁴

Two other apparent exceptions to Ihm's thesis should be mentioned. The reader will also find et, clearly copulative, three times in one inscription (Ferrua 50.7 and 8/9; Ihm 11.7 and 8/9), but the situation is not straightforward. Ferrua seems to agree with Ihm that lines 8 and 9 are an addition to Damasus' original poem by another writer; as for line 7, where Ihm insisted that the et apparent in the damaged line 7 (the left side of the manuscript is torn) must be part of a verb, Ferrua shows some sympathy with Ihm's ornauet [sic],Footnote ²⁵ by at least referring the reader to 42.3 (Ihm 42.3 also), where the phrase ornauit tumulum is paralleled. Other suggested supplements are recorded by Ihm, including composuit, but Ihm had no time or space for De Rossi's suggested supplement <te colit> before et, dismissing it as ‘improbable’.Footnote ²⁶ (Although a verb in the present or future tense, ending in -et, cannot be ruled out, none seems to have been suggested.) There is another appearance of et, twice, in Ferrua's 33,¹ at lines 2 and 6; but although he includes this among the genuine poems, Ferrua admits to finding no ground for ascribing it to Damasus.Footnote ²⁷ Ihm had followed the edition of Merenda,Footnote ²⁸ where the criteria of authenticity are not linguistic, and placed the poem among the falso tributi, at 102.

Ferrua, then, seems to have been content to follow Ihm, or at least not challenge him, in the matter of copulative et. Yet, when carefully setting out his criteria for distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic epitaphs of Damasus, he dismissed the contention of Ihm that Damasus avoided copulative et as ‘inane’ (that is, fruitless for this purpose), and averred that he could see no reason for Ihm's conclusion.Footnote ²⁹ This implies that he would not reject a poem, as Ihm was resolved to do, on this criterion alone.

The absence, or perhaps one should rather say rarity, of copulative et in over 300 lines of Damasus is indeed striking, and evidently a distinctive preference. He chooses to write, at the end of a hexameter line, faleras telaque cruenta (Ferrua 8.7, Ihm also) and sinus regnaque piorum (Ferrua 20.5, Ihm 26.5), and domos regnaque piorum (Ferrua 25.5, Ihm 23.5) rather than use an et which would give sound metre, as well as domum regnaque piorum (Ferrua 43.5, Ihm 43.5; also Ferrua 39.8 [Ihm 47.3]), where the syllable before et regna, had et been used, would have to be elided. It is not likely (and quite unprovable) that the phrase regnaque piorum in the last-mentioned case acquired the respect of a formulaic description of ‘heaven’, and that this influenced other usages. Damasus was in general a careful metrician, and knew his Virgil.Footnote ³⁰ This aversion to copulative et is in no way due to the nature of epigraphic writing in general (as can be seen from the rich range of extant epitaphs from countless hands), nor to any feature of Damasus' subject-matter, or his approach to it, or the way in which he constructs his edifying short narratives of martyrs and others. Sometimes he employs asyndeton, but uses it no more than some other writers of Late Antiquity do (and much less than many); and although he makes frequent use of -que, it is not prominent.Footnote ³¹

What about the author of CCP? Of the two examples of et that Cameron finds, neither, he claims, is copulative. They are in lines 15 and 59, and require careful investigation. The text of Shackleton Bailey will be used (14–16):Footnote ³²

This is the second of three derisive vignettes of the traditional gods in the core of the opening paragraph, each of which contains a scathing comment or sarcastic question attached. Here the point is that in view of Saturn's yielding to compulsion and his son's violent usurpation no suppliant respects the temples of Jupiter, which are deservedly defunct.Footnote ³³ Et, with quisquam, is best taken as part of a phrase which certainly derives from Verg. Aen. 1.48, et quisquam numen Iunonis adorat?Footnote ³⁴ Shackleton Bailey helpfully makes an exact reference to the lines in Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in which the Virgilian passage is classified.Footnote ³⁵ This is not the category of et = etiam, but the larger one for et as coniunctio copulativa; and within this, it falls into the category in which [et] ‘ducit enuntiatum interrogativum: a. cum affectu (plerumque indignatione) elatum’.Footnote ³⁶ If it is not obviously copulative in a simple sense of joining A and B, it is certainly not equivalent to the stronger word etiam (TLL uses the adverb ‘additive’ of this usage), as the practice of translators confirms: in their translation of CCP Croke and Harries have simple ‘and’, Cameron has no word, and neither does Bartalucci.Footnote ³⁷ Translators of the Virgil passage agree: of ten translations I have consulted all but one offer no word equivalent to et. As for translators of Ovid, who uses the phrase twice, clearly influenced by the Virgil passage both times (Am. 3.3.33; 3.8.1, where it is the first word of a poem, making et = etiam even less likely), there is no attempt to render et in particular. Before Virgil the copulative force of et when joined to quisquam may have been felt more strongly—translators of Cicero (at Clu. 30 and Leg. Man. 42) divide.

The second example in CCP of supposedly non-copulative et is in the following context, where the writer asks why the initiate should change his garments and demean himself (57–9):

Here Cameron appeals to the note in Bartalucci's commentary, where, although he has translated the words mendicus … et pannis as ‘accattone e ricoperto di stacci’, Bartalucci surprisingly declares, ‘Quanto ad et, si può considerarsi equivalente di etiam’ and accordingly refers broadly to the second main category (pars altera) of TLL (5.2.906,74 ff. [sic]). Alternatively, Bartalucci suggests that this is a ‘pleonastic’ use of et; but the comment of Einar Löfstedt to which he refers relates to its use in certain correlative expressions, and has nothing to do with the case.Footnote ³⁸ Surely, though, the usage in the present passage is purely copulative, simply connecting mendicus (whether this is seen as noun or adjective makes no difference) and, with postponement of et as often, the phrase obsitus … pannis. There would be little point in saying ‘a beggar and, moreover, one covered in rags’. Of course, in English, where the adjective ‘beggarly’ may be thought largely metaphorical, one might well wish to translate as ‘a beggar covered in rags’ as Croke/Harries and Cameron himself do, but that does not affect the grammatical analysis and interpretation.

There is, then, no reason to see et (= etiam) anywhere in the text of CCP; it is a red herring. As for copulative et, we may count two in the passages just analysed. If it is objected that et in et quisquam is not obviously copulative in the usual sense, it is clearly not equivalent to etiam, and there is no reason to believe that the writer of CCP would have thought it was. As for Damasus, supposing that he did not spurn et completely (a faint possibility canvassed above), he used et once as equivalent to etiam, and perhaps once or twice in ways that are not equivalent to etiam, but rather copulative. There is no shared predilection or practice here. And whatever the exact numbers, one must also dismiss, in the interests of mathematical accuracy, the claim of Cameron, who presents the total numbers of these and other words in Damasus and CCP, that the proportions are ‘startlingly similar’.Footnote ³⁹ Arguments from proportionality in stylistic matters—but it is nowhere proved that proportions are consistent in different works of an author—might have some force if exact, but have none in this case.

The economy with et is indeed striking and unusual. Many Latin authors, both of the classical and of the late antique periods, often have twenty or more cases of the word et in 122 lines, and none, in my extensive sampling, has so few as two. And in passages where et is relatively rare, the effect is evidently sought after without any particular purpose. The writer may perhaps have been quite unaware. This is overwhelmingly likely, for example, in Juvencus, the Christian poet who wrote some fifty years before Damasus, who has at least one passage of equal length to CCP in which et appears only three times (2.713–829), and several where it makes just five appearances.Footnote ⁴⁰

Although Cameron's argument depends on the absence, and not the rarity, of copulative et, in the interests of completeness one should examine a number of other passages in CCP which might have been taken into account in the search for et, but where it may have been corrupted or edited out. Thanks to the ‘apparato critico completo’ helpfully provided by Bartalucci (68–83) in addition to the apparatus beneath his text of CCP, and the shrewd and helpful apparatus of Shackleton Bailey, it is possible to adduce a number of other passages in CCP where the presence of et is not unlikely, or at least deserves consideration. It will certainly not be argued that all the emendations to be mentioned should be accepted, but there is a possibility that the number of its uses of et may not be quite so low as two. The passages are presented in the text of Shackleton Bailey, with enough lines quoted to give necessary context. In some cases the punctuation is changed, or must remain uncertain because of deeper textual uncertainty. The words principally concerned are in bold.

(a) 9–12:

Our single manuscript, P, has flueret and mugiret, with t superscript in the latter case; but as is clear from the list of such superscripts given by Bartalucci ([n. 37], 30), this does not signify anything more than a lapsus calami, quickly revised. What Bartalucci calls ‘l'aporia dei due coniunctivi’ (in lines 11 and 12) has attracted various unconvincing solutions. Cameron translates the two lines as if they were simply past indicatives.Footnote ⁴³ Bartalucci, in his commentary, suggests (though his text in fact adopts the solution first made by Mähly, see below) that they might exemplify the imperfect subjunctives that express indignation or are, in the words of LHS 2.338, ‘unwilligen (‘polemischen’) Fragen’ (‘was he to …’, which would be an abrupt change in expression). Shackleton Bailey suspected that a line was missing after line 10, as Cameron notes, and Baehrens one after line 13,Footnote ⁴⁴ but it is not obvious how a few extra words in these positions might help. Not surprisingly perhaps, nobody seems to have suggested that the imperfect subjunctives might indicate final clauses, following on from fingeret ut; this would make the lines 11 and 12 impossibly compressed. (It may, of course, be the case that it was the proximity of fingeret that misled a scribe).

The problem is removed by emending the subjunctives to infinitives (fluere, mugire) each followed by an et, a suggestion put forward by MählyFootnote ⁴⁵ and resurrected by Shackleton Bailey. This helps to provide a close connection with the first of the three descriptions of Jupiter's fabled loves (lines 9 and 10), where, overcome by love for Leda, in order to imitate a swan, he was willing to sprout white feathers. Here there is a clear statement of motive, strategy and implication(s) of the strategy; the proposed infinitives, based on uoluit, provide this very neatly in lines 11 and 12. This remedy was applied also by Baehrens,Footnote ⁴⁶ but he was content to read fluere subito (for the prosody, compare fluere Berecyntia in 73 and facere parua in 82) and mugireque, a reading less close to what is transmitted.Footnote ⁴⁷ If objection is raised to the postponement of et in line 12 to so late a position, there is a parallel in ps.-Tert. Carmen adversus Marcionitas 5.229, humanis sese uestiuit et artubus ille. Perhaps the original read per freta Parthenopes mugire et taurus adulter, a neater line, so that taurus and mugire et should be transposed.

I therefore suggest:

(b) 116–18:

P's molat cannot stand. Though the form molare, as opposed to molere, is occasionally found (Itala Matth. 24.41 molantes, changed in Vulgate to the regular molentes), and by verbal nouns (molatio, molator) in glosses, the verb is otherwise exclusively third conjugation. In any case, a ritual sense for the verb is unattested. Early emendations were mola (alone) by Morel;Footnote ⁵⁰ mola ac by Ellis;Footnote ⁵¹ and mola et by Dobbelstein,Footnote ⁵² who is followed by Shackleton Bailey and Bartalucci among others. Cameron, who discusses this passage briefly ([n. 1], 315 n. 203), finds Dobbelstein's emendation ‘tempting’ but not certain given the divided ancient testimony to Verg. Aen. 4.517 mola manibusque piis altaria iuxta (molam is also attested), which obviously underlies the passage but surely supports et as much, or as little, as it does ac. But ‘in the light of the poet's avoidance of et’ he accepts ac, with some obvious circularity. A further problem, but one not relevant to the present question, is created by the remarkable hyperbaton of mola and donis, made harsher by the intervening manibus: Croke/Harries and Cameron have ‘with grain and gifts’, Bartalucci ‘[mentre con le mani] copre supplice di farro salato e di doni gli altare’.

The presence of et is less likely in the following passage, but it should be included in the interest of completeness; and it shows, as does passage (d), that a prolific textual critic saw nothing wrong in conjecturing et.

(c) 23–4:

At line 24 Baehrens suggested sacrati, et; as he explains in his edition,Footnote ⁵³ this would make a clear reference to proceres (reflected in Croke and Harries, ‘sacred leaders’). Though the enjambement and the elision are certainly not impossible, the emendation robs the lines of a certain balance, even elegance; and the fact that sacratis does not refer to the same beings as ducibus (these are the quarrelsome gods of lines 19–22) but to the ‘consecrated ones’ (the adjective is always used ironically, according to Cameron [(n. 1), 305]) is clear enough without emendation.

(d) 46–50:

The text and punctuation are problematic. diceretque does not scan, for a double trochee is inadmissible in hexameters, even for the poet of CCP (whose metrical failings are largely ones of prosody, and are not errors of metre as such). Ellis suggested diceret with no copulative,Footnote ⁵⁶ which leaves it uncertain how line 49 should be taken and indeed what its subject is. Shackleton Bailey suggested dixit et or dixitque; this would link line 49 closely with 47, with dixit then a second verb in the perfect tense in the relative clause introduced by qui. This would be easier if lines 48 and 49 were transposed. It is possible that line 50 belongs with the sentence that follows, in which case the question mark should be moved. There is now, in the reconstructed sentence, a marked contrast between the words urbi and rure: the sophisticated man of the city has descended to boorish simplicity.Footnote ⁵⁷ Between the suggestions dixit et and dixitque it is impossible to adjudicate with confidence, though the fact that lines beginning with a double dactyl are more than twice as frequent in the poem as lines beginning with spondee and dactyl supports the former.

With these emendations, the translation of lines 46–9 would run: ‘How did your consecrated man benefit the city, I ask, (he) who taught Hierius (how?) to seek the sun beneath the earth, and who said that it was a companion of the gods and master of Bacchus, when a country digger had by chance hewed for himself a pear-tree?’

The above examples may furnish some additions to the number of instances of copulative et in CCP, but of course do not affect the fact that it is not avoided by CCP and thus cannot be a distinctive feature shared with Damasus, the point on which Cameron's hypothesis rests. It has not been the purpose of this article to examine all the arguments that he puts forward and ‘the sheer number and variety of similarities between Damasus and CCP (verbal, metrical, prosodical, stylistic)’;Footnote ⁵⁸ though making occasional comment on the criterion of proportionality and the notion of ‘formulae’, it has concentrated its focus on the issue highlighted by him as crucial, and as providing ‘all the confirmation that could be required’, namely the treatment of the word et. But, for their intrinsic interest, I end with a few comments on Cameron's categories of close verbal parallels between the two texts, and similarities in the texts they know, where, naturally enough, some are more noteworthy and potentially significant than others.Footnote ⁵⁹ My brief comments will concern first some observations on their uses of Virgil, and then his arguments from texts of which both seem to be aware.

(e)

• Verg. Aen. 11.50 cumulatque altaria donis

• Damasus 32.3 (Ihm: 33.3 Ferrua) haec Damasus cumulat supplex altaria donis

• CCP 116/7 coniunx altaria supplex | dum cumulat donis

Cameron rightly observes that the word supplex is not present in the underlying Virgilian passage, but was added to this particular mix by both Damasus and CCP, and evidently shared by them alone.Footnote ⁶⁰ Damasus uses the word of himself no fewer than five times;Footnote ⁶¹ as Ferrua points out, it indicates the pope's role in the commemoration of martyrs and others, and is a kind of dignified and respectful self-fashioning. He is a humble suppliant praying for the deceased. But in CCP the word is used very differently, being used twice of the writer's pagan adversaries. In line 15 (quoted above) it denotes a typical pagan disappointed with traditional cult, and in line 116 (quoted above, as [d]) it describes the grandee's wife who, while her husband in the temples worships all the monsters of pagan devotion, attends the altars and seeks to move hell with magic charms, and in so doing sends the wretched man down to Tartarus. Is it likely that Pope Damasus could have recycled his saintly self-description in this way to denote the supplex of a religion he certainly thought superstitious?

(f)

• Verg. Aen. 7.337–8 tibi nomina mille, | mille nocendi artes

• Damasus 27.2 (Ihm: 21.2 Ferrua) carnificumque uias pariter tunc mille nocendi

• CCP 51–3:

Cameron notes that the original Virgilian artes is found in all the passages that allude to the Virgil passage save these two (with a trivial exception).Footnote ⁶⁴ This observation is not quite accurate, for in CCP artes follows the quotation proper after a few words. The way in which it is introduced seems to lack point: the intervening words totidem cum quaereret seem to be padding,Footnote ⁶⁵ and translators see artes as a synonym of uias. An intertextual explanation may help to lessen the charge. I suggest that the writer of CCP recalled the gruesomely effective phrase of Damasus ‘the torturers’ thousand-fold ways of doing harm’, but also wished to recall Virgil's picture of Allecto, wreathed in snakes and infected by their poison, which is particularly relevant since in the next line he calls the grandee (or the Devil) luridus anguis.Footnote ⁶⁶ The allusion is a double one: it reinforces the Damasian line, and to some degree ‘corrects’ it by emphasizing the relevance of the original. If the term ‘window allusion’ is considered meaningful,Footnote ⁶⁷ it is as if on opening the Damasian window one sees (and recalls) Virgil. Virgilian associations, as many a line shows, were important to the CCP. According to Shanzer, Damasus ‘caps’ CCP.Footnote ⁶⁸ This procedure, however described, makes it likely that the writer of CCP is not actually Damasus but a poet aware of and influenced by him.

No less striking to Cameron are similarities in the texts they know,Footnote ⁶⁹ and he finds such evidence in their use of Proba and Petronius. Knowledge of the former is evident in three passages of Damasus, and in two passages of CCP; his point is not that they both quote the same phrase (only one is used by both, pia foedera from the first line of Proba's cento), or that they both know such a recent work,Footnote ⁷⁰ but that both recall phrases from a short passage (lines 1–28). But how striking is this fact? That is the only part of Proba of which they could show knowledge, for all the remaining lines of the preface (the prefatory material continues to line 55) and the cento are composed of Virgilian material; quotations of Proba would be quotations of Virgil, or indistinguishable from them. Nor are these lines of the preface without importance; they virulently and vividly denounce the traditional symbols of classical inspiration and pour scorn on pagan deities (lines 13–22), a fact which may be lost from sight owing to equally vigorous emulation by later poets who are better known today.

Petronius, a very different author from Proba, is on the available evidence little known in the fourth and fifth centuries; there is also evidence from the sixth and seventh.Footnote ⁷¹ There are two passages in question, the first quoted by Damasus, the second by CCP. In Damasus Cameron notes the similarity of Petronius 128.1, nocte soporifera ueluti cum somnia ludunt and Damasus 21.9, nocte soporifera turbant insomnia mentem. soporifer is found with nox in other authors (Stat. Theb. 10.326, in the dative case, and Sil. Pun. 7.287, in the genitive case), and it might be argued that the phrase nocte soporifera, so conveniently metrical, was an obvious iunctura for any poet who needed a phrase for night-time. Damasus could have devised this particular combination without the help of Petronius, and been blissfully unaware of him, or he could have found it elsewhere, in a minor poet now unknown. In the other words of the lines set out above there is minimal similarity; it might be unsafe to build much on the similarity of the common words somnia and insomnia. So this pope (I cannot comment on others) need not have read Petronius at all, and, given the weakness of this link, the similarity between him and CCP falls. It is intriguing that at line 71 CCP has the words nympharum Bacchique comes, verbally identical to words at the beginning of Petronius 133.3.1, but wherever he found them and however he interpreted them—this is an intriguing question which cannot be pursued here—it is not, on the above argument, incontrovertible evidence of a predilection shared with Damasus.

The question of Damasus' authorship has also been taken up by Franca Ela Consolino in her contribution to the collection of essays entitled The Strange Death of Pagan Rome that discuss and analyse the various chapters of Cameron's book.Footnote ⁷² Quickly reviewing Cameron's manifold arguments, Consolino is unconvinced by many things, declaring, with good reason, that here ‘statistics are almost no use at all’, and that ‘analogies in proportions’ in metrical matters ‘cannot make the point, because they can also be found in poets who have nothing in common’ (105). But she is impressed by his argument about the complete avoidance of the copulative et. This, she avers, ‘is the step nearer to the certainty that can be attained’, words that relate to one of Cameron's more restrained remarks.Footnote ⁷³ Cameron's ‘clinching’ argument is, according to Consolino, ‘beyond any doubt’ the strongest argument in favour of Damasus’ authorship,Footnote ⁷⁴ but evidence of remarkable value, she continues, ‘is also offered by the heavy elision before’ [sic; but the word ‘after’ is used, more correctly, on page 106] ‘the relative pronoun and the knowledge of Petronius’. She does not go so far as Cameron does when he says that the number of cases of such elisions in Damasus (12) and CCP (4) are ‘almost exactly in the same proportion’ (313), but she does not note that they are found in many poets of Late Antiquity, and indeed in some from the classical period.Footnote ⁷⁵ The argument based on knowledge of Petronius is, as we have just seen, not strong enough to sustain the point.

Cameron argued that ‘the shared avoidance of et provides all the confirmation that could be required’ for upholding the medieval ascription and concluding that ‘CCP and the epigrams of Damasus were written by one and the same author, namely Damasus' ([n. 1], 316). This particular claim has a lot of weight to carry, and is not equal to it. To recapitulate the argument of this paper, the et which is undeniably present in line 59 of CCP is surely, pace Bartalucci and Cameron, copulative et. There could be debate about the classification of the other clear et in the phrase et quisquam (CCP 15), which in some ways falls outside the simple distinction of ‘et = and’ and ‘et = etiam’ borrowed from TLL (or, perhaps, overlaps with both). Of course, one might well wonder why a writer should draw a distinction between uses of et, and avoid one category but not the other. There may also, as I have suggested, be passages in CCP where examples of copulative et have been corrupted, or removed by editors; but for present purposes a single one is enough to refute the hypothesis. As for Damasus, it may well be that Ihm's claim that he totally avoided the word et was too sweeping; we have seen that there may well be one or two examples in epitaphs that were genuinely written by him. The later editor Ferrua was obviously not impressed by this criterion. Why Damasus should do this—he was certainly not constrained in any way by metre, by any epigraphic convention or by limitations imposed by his chosen style—need not be considered here. The gulf that many have perceived between the sensitive and elegant epitaphs of Damasus and the gravely flawed rhetorical ambitions of the anonymous author's spectacular satire in CCP has certainly not been bridged.Footnote ⁷⁶