ABSTRACT
The Renaissance Gallus enjoyed a longer posterity than the ancient Gallus—or at least a better attested posterity. Through the eighteenth century some scholars remained adamant in their attribution to Cornelius Gallus of the elegiacs of Maximianus, together with the forgeries of Didacus Pyrrhus: one such was Matthieu Chiniac de La Bastide, who explained away the faults perceived by other readers in Maximianus as merely features of the ‘late style’ of an elderly Gallus, the conventional chronology having been rejected. 1 Editions of the ‘poems of Gallus’ collecting the works ascribed to him in the Renaissance were still being produced in the nineteenth century, albeit with a slightly more cautious approach to attribution. For example, Jean Genouille’s 1836 translation and commentary edition of the Poésies de Cornelius Gallus collected items 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 12 (see Appendix), giving a reasonably thorough scholarly introduction based mainly on Wernsdorf: from this selection, Genouille explicitly vouched only for the line transmitted by Vibius Sequester, but found the authenticity of the Didacus Pyrrhus forgeries ‘très-probable’. 2 And readers were still responding to these poems in imaginative ways. If W. A. Becker’s famous historical novel Gallus, oder, römische Scenen aus der Zeit Augusts (1838; translated into English as Gallus; or, Roman scenes of the time of Augustus) took a rigorous approach to the sources, there were still those who found the Renaissance Gallus a more alluring prospect. Paul Lacroix, writing under the pseudonym Pierre Dufour, included in the second volume of his Histoire de la prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde (1851) a chapter on the sex lives of Tibullus, Gallus and Ovid. 3 He invented a titillating narrative of the life and loves of Cornelius Gallus (pp. 337–41), a fantasy fuelled by extravagant readings of the forgeries of Didacus Pyrrhus and of the Carmen ad Lydiam, with the odd concession to more reliable sources. In this account, Gallus returned from the Parthian campaign only to find that Lycoris had abandoned him, so he turned his affections to other courtesans: first the sisters Gentia and Chloe, and then 60Lydia. By 1851, the elegies of Maximianus could no longer be part of this narrative, but Lacroix did his best to include them nonetheless, since Maximianus ‘mérita d’être confondu avec Cornelius Gallus’: Lacroix’s account of Lycoris’s rejection of Gallus when he returned from the Parthian wars (‘elle avait pris des amants’) is accordingly influenced by the second elegy of Maximianus.
