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Olybrius and the Einsiedeln Eclogues*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2015
Abstract
Two ancient pastoral poems were published by Hermann Hagen in 1869 from a manuscript at Einsiedeln and were soon dated to the reign of Nero. In this study, I show that these poems are related to the Bucolicon Olybrii listed in a library catalogue of Murbach from around 850, and demonstrate on internal and external grounds that the poems were likely composed around the end of the fourth century by Anicius Hermogenianus Olybrius, the consul of 395. This attribution enhances our understanding of the literary culture of the age of Claudian and contributes to the on-going debate on the extent and import of Neronian literature.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2015. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Footnotes
I would like to thank, first and foremost, David Armstrong for advice and encouragement throughout this whole process, and for reading several drafts; George Woudhuysen for many pleasant hours of conversation on matters of patricii and prosopography; and Michael Reeve, Gavin Kelly, Kathy Coleman, Jarrett Welsh, and Christopher Parrot for reading drafts of this study and offering much useful criticism. Evina Steinova generously shared some of her expertise on notae and Michael Allen his on the hand of Heiric of Auxerre. I am grateful to them all, as well as to the anonymous readers and editor of this journal.
Einsielden 266 is available online at e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/sbe/0266). I have also used Brepols databases: Library of Latin Texts, Series A and B, and the Cross Database Search Tool.
The abbreviations used are:
CLA – E. Loew 1934–1971: Codices latini antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century (12 vols), Oxford
PLRE – A. Jones et al. (eds) 1971–1992: Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (3 vols), Cambridge
TLL – Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
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