Copa Today

Extract

TheCopa in the Virgilian Appendix is a fascinating but baffling piece. It has verbal connexions with the Eclogues, notably the second, and with Propertius' last book of elegies, notably iv. 2 (Vertumnus). Wilamowitz took it to be an expansion of an epigram, composed by some follower of Propertius. He thought the speaker to be the poet throughout. Büchner interprets the poem quite differently. He considers lines 18–19 and 21–22 to be interpolations. To begin with, they mix autumn fruits with summer (though by the same token the lines in Lycidas ordering various flowers for the ‘laureate hearse’ would be an interpolation: botanical purists have protested that they do not bloom simultaneously). They also contain the connexions with Propertius. Remove them and the poem is certainly a little more consistent; and Büchner is then able to argue that the poem was composed between Catullus and the Eclogues and known to Virgil. But who would want to interpolate in such a poem? At any rate, more evidence would be needed if the lines are to be discredited.