The Life and Times of Calpurnius Siculus

Abstract

Until the early nineteenth century it was agreed that the Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus were products of the reign of Carinus, for the name of the poet Nemesianus appeared in the manuscripts and Nemesian was known as the author of the (partly surviving)Cynegetica, which explicitly praises the sons of the emperor Carus. However, in 1819 G. Sarpe first raised some of the arguments for setting the poems in the early years of the reign of Nero, and in 1854, in what Wilamowitz subsequently lauded as a model of scholarship, M. Haupt firmly distinguished the seven poems of Calpurnius from the four of Nemesian. With the link to Nemesian went the only support for a date in the later third century, and Haupt settled the identification of Calpurnius Siculus as a Neronian poet which has remained entrenched to this day. Attempts there have been to upset it, by seeing in the young Caesar praised a Domitian, a Commodus, a Severus Alexander, a Gordian III, even a Probus, but such attempts were clearly heterodox and obviously flawed. Those that were not refuted were ignored, and only isolated doubt remains today.