Much of Latin literature has been lost forever to posterity. Classicists have long wondered how much more we would know about the Roman Republic if we had the lost decades of Livy's Ab urbe condita. Perhaps no loss to our understanding of Latin poetry has been greater than that of the verse of the pioneering Latin elegist Gaius Cornelius Gallus, commemorated by Virgil in his Eclogues. Until 1978, when nine lines of Gallus's poetry on a papyrus fragment were discovered, only one line of his was known. Paul White's study introduces the reader to an intriguing aspect of the world of Renaissance humanists, some of whom appear to have been interested in more than simply documenting and lamenting literary losses and themselves tried to compensate for the ravages of time. Anticipating today's popular fan fiction, the literary “misattributions, fakes and forgeries” (1) of the Renaissance represent an important and often overlooked aspect of the creative way in which the ancient world was received by the early modern.

The edition of Cornelii Galli Fragmenta by a young scholar named Pomponio Guarico, published in Venice in 1502, is a case in point. The six elegiac poems in this volume attributed to Gallus were actually the work of the sixth-century poet Maximianus. What makes the attribution especially bizarre is that these love elegies are written “from the distorting perspective of a querulous and decrepit old man” (7), who is lamenting his loss not only of sexual but “poetic potency” (14). The real Gallus, of course, was a highly regarded elegist who was dead by the age of forty-three. Despite the obvious discrepancies, Gaurico's Gallus was certainly convincing to some. Peter Ramus went so far as to adjust the age of Gallus upward at his death. Some Neo-Latin poets admired the style of Gallus (Maximianus) and even compared it favorably to that of Tibullus and Propertius. Montaigne quoted extensively from the first of the elegies on the disagreeable aspects of growing old and praised the poet's simplicity: “Gallus parle simplement, par ce qu'il conçoit simplement” (“Gallus speaks simply, because he sees simply,” 21). Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, cites Gallus (Maximianus) on the problems of impotence. Another poem included by Guarico in his edition Lydia Bella Puella Candida, written in accentual hendecasyllables, was “widely imitated” by Neo-Latin poets and frequently translated (chapter 3).

Not all were convinced, however, and over the years scholars began to uncover (and condemn) Guarico's “fraud” (“fucus”), while denigrating the quality of the poetry accordingly (19). White takes a different point of view, suggesting that it is possible to read Guarico's edition as a “ludic reprise,” a form of learned amusement. The point of the edition may not have been to offer readers the fruits of philological scholarship but to provide them with “a sustained ironic commentary on the genre of Roman love elegy” (14).

The Gallus fraud continued. Over eighty years later (1588), the grandson of the famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published four fragmentary elegiac poems also attributed to Gallus (chapter 5). In the best known of these (“Non Fuit Arsacadicum”), the poetic persona is an old man with white hair who fears that his beloved Lycoris will discard him in favor of a younger suitor. Gallus himself probably did not live long enough even to grow gray, and as early as Joseph Scaliger the authenticity of the poem was being questioned. But the lacunae in the text lend it an air of genuine antiquity, and White argues that the poem is a sophisticated fabrication designed to appeal to the humanist fetishization of the fragment. The clever forger was likely Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus (1517–99), who took “the humanist project of imitatio to its limits, reveling in its logic of anachronism” (56).

This slim volume is just the right vehicle for a study such as this. Taking advantage of the space that exists somewhere between a long article and a short monograph, too infrequently occupied by scholars today, White's elegant opusculum will be of interest to anyone interested in exploring the playful and creative side of early modern philology.