Rewriting the Virgilian Career: The Scaligers and the Appendix Vergiliana

Abstract

Renaissance scholars agreed that Virgil's canon included poems beyond the “Eclogues,” “Georgics,” and “Aeneid,” but the number of other authentic poems and their value were matters of debate. This article charts competing readings of the “Appendix Vergiliana” by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Joseph Justus Scaliger. Pseudo-Virgilian poems played a key role in J. C. Scaliger's “Poetices Libri Septem” (1561), providing a model of self-quotation and self-emulation for young poets to imitate. In a groundbreaking edition, J. J. Scaliger then discovers a neoteric, Catullan side to Virgil. Their influential readings of the “Appendix” offer radically revised conceptions of the Virgilian poetic career.