Didactic texts make particular demands on modern scholars. Scholars tend to suppose that women are best equipped to interpret texts about women's bodies; can a text about hounds and hunting be understood by scholars who have never held up a covert and think that a ‘form’ exists only in a grammar book and a ‘slot’ as a space for their lectures?
The contributors to this volume on Grattius, the Augustan hunting poet (the likely emendation of Ov., Pont. 4.16.34), show that it cannot. They omit discussion of the ‘technical’ material about hunting. Indeed, Grattius’ poem is incomplete, covering hunting equipment but not drawing, casting or the kill (perhaps it is the first book of more?). Even so, they write about ‘hunting with dogs’ and a ‘dog-master’. Hutchinson, discussing verbs of movement (ch. 5), stops to assure us that hunting is nowadays found ‘tedious or abhorrent … I would go for “abhorrent” myself’ (138). Contrast Mynors’ excellent notes on Virgil, Georgics 1.139, 1.307, 2.471, and especially 3.43, 3.371–2 and 3.404–13 (his commentary is not even in the bibliography). Like Hor., Epist. 1.18.49–50, he understands the Romans’ moral and practical esteem for hunting. Up front, in line 1, Grattius calls the arts of hunting laetae.
Six of the ten contributors run riot and need to be whipped back onto the scent. Gale (ch. 2) thinks that Cyn. 223–45 are ‘notably open to metapoetic interpretation: the hound “reads the signs” as we read the words in the poem’ and behaves like a ‘good Callimachean’ (90–1). Kayachev (ch. 3) airs the possibility that Grattius may have written before Virgil composed the Aeneid (a long process indeed). He can then suggest (103–8) that at Aen. 4.305–6 and 12.753–5 Aeneas is related intertextually to a type of hound which Grattius has presented as decidedly less than perfect. Tsaknaki (ch. 4) compares Ovid's Ars Amatoria and its hunting references and persuades herself that Ovid and Grattius share a deep preoccupation with their status as artists and their ars scribendi. She reads Grattius’ nets as ‘complicated, interwoven and constructed from the fine-spun thread of Callimachean poetics’ (124). Green (ch. 6) argues that Grattius’ ‘sustained anthropomorphism is at times suggestive of the figure of Augustus’ and, wondrously, ‘invites’ readers to think ‘how much more topical the poem would be if one reads into the instructions on tree-pruning tacit endorsement of Augustus's drastic handling of family affairs in the early years AD’ (174). Whitlatch (ch. 7) offers a forced comparison with the Eclogues, especially Ecl. 5, and over-interprets dotes at line 252 (183: ‘the dowry image underlines the role of the hunter in a sustainable environment’). O'Rourke (ch. 8) endorses ‘the potential of Dercylos and Hagnon’, Grattius’ two rare inventors of hunting skills, ‘to be read in the tradition of the embedded authorial surrogate’ (204). Through them he is a ‘supremely cerebral educator who buys into the system that produced him’ (211).
So do these contributors. Nobody discusses the poem's structure and the conventions of listing, digression and resumption which it exploits. Oppian could have helped more, giving a hint of lost Hellenistic models. Moul (ch. 9) breaks new ground with a study of hunting in neo-Latin. Waters (ch. 10) presents Christopher Wase, the first English translator of Grattius in 1654, and suggests that he did so because he loved hunting, wished to please his hunting patron the Earl of Pembroke and to regain his lost Fellowship at King's, Cambridge. Times change.
Nobody discusses what Grattius’ hounds are assumed to be chasing. Not hares, the leve opus (199–200). The spears and the wounds imply wild boar, as does the ‘scare’ at 75–93 (hares would run under it), but stags are likely too in the rocky Italian landscape at 509–10. Xenophon's main focus is thus different. Nowadays, vidi is not allowed to mean what it says, but at 435–6 it and saepe show that Grattius lived, for a while, in east Sicily. Lines 430–60 are not about ‘petroleum’ on Etna. Lava flows are said to chase individual wicked visitors, most interestingly (451–5). This moralising of the landscape is very different from the Aetna poem, its near contemporary. At 307–28 Grattius presents rejection of luxury as a key to the Romans’ far-flung imperium. He advises a similar avoidance of luxury and a similar exercise of imperium when bringing up puppies.
J. Henderson/Hounderson, PCPhS 47 (2001), 1–22, combined glittering puns, exaggeration and insight and laid several false trails here down which the contributors gleefully run heel. A kennel huntsman is often a iuvenis (332) without thereby being Augustus. A bitch on heat is indeed promiscuous (adultera, 285) without evoking Augustus’ moral legislation. Grattius exploits Lucretius and Virgil's Georgics, without their pessimism. His survey of horses, not discussed here, includes an under-remarked laus Italiae (539–41).
Grattius is erudite: Hagnon, Dercylos, Glympis (103, 214). The metagon (209) is actually a tracker dog, with an appropriately Greek name referring to its function. The pauper custos (46) of the well-watered garden at Alabanda is not Priapus (as in 21 n. 14). Hemp at Alabanda flourished in the damp plain, thanks to the river Marsyas and its tributaries. Is pauper ignorant or a touch of Hellenistic social pathos or a playful reversal of the Alabandans’ reputation for luxury and decadence (Strabo 14.2.26; Juv., Sat. 3.69–78)?
The text as printed is only indicative. Problems abound, also in the translation. Line 212 does not even scan: read Sparta suos et Creta suos at 212 and translate promittit as ‘sends forth’, not, impossibly, ‘declare’. At 532, Pellaei Cerauni are not a place name in Macedon, none such existing: Cerauni is a name for the horses, fast-moving ‘Thunderbolts’. In the horse-list, non-Italian horses are extolled, but not recommended for hard hunting. In 530, therefore, instead of vix transposed from 531, read bis, meaning ‘earned twice over’, in two types of race, charioteering and plain galloping. For other corrections see D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Phoenix 32 (1978), 311–15. His emendations have all been overlooked.
Grattius’ huntsman, in his cap of badger-fur (340: grey, not ‘white’), would wince at most of this book.
