Tragic Vergil: Rewriting Vergil as a Tragedy in the Cento "Medea"

Author(s): Scott McGill and Scott C. McGill

Source: The Classical World, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 143-161
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Classical Association of the
Atlantic States
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TRAGIC VERGIL: REWRITING VERGIL
AS A TRAGEDY IN THE CENTO MEDEA
The Vergilian cento appears on the fringes of the canon and
curricula, where it resides amid other literary curiosities.' The cento
consists of unconnected verse units of varying length taken from
the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid,2 which authors piece together
to create narratives differing from Vergil's own. The fourth-century
poet Ausonius, who composed a Cento Nuptialis ca. 374 on the occasion
of Gratian's wedding, provides the sole ancient poetics of the form
in a prefatory letter to his cento.3 In the epistle, whose addressee is
the rhetor Axius Paulus, Ausonius notes that a cento contains discrete
Vergilian verses which are reconnected to form a new coherent poem:
variis de locis sensibusque diversis quaedam carminis structura
solidatur, ("out of different passages and different meanings a certain
structure of a poem is built," praef. Cent. Nupt. 24-25). Ausonius
also states that a centonist can divide a Vergilian line at any of
the caesurae of a dactylic hexameter (diffinduntur autem per caesuras
omnes, quas recipit versus heroicus, "moreover, they are divided at
all the caesurae, which dactylic verse allows," 28-29) and proceeds
to delineate the different metrical segments that can result (29-32).
Performing such strange surgery on Vergil produces a text that Ausonius
describes succinctly to Paulus: accipe igitur opusculum de inconexis
continuum, de diversis unum . . . de alieno nostrum ("accept, therefore,
a little work continuous from unconnected verses, one from many verses
. . . mine from another," 20-21 ).4
Sixteen centos survive from antiquity: four possess Christian subject
matter,5 two are wedding songs containing obscene accounts of the
I
The word cento derives from the Greek KEiTpOJZE5 (see
Etym. Magn.
s.V. Ke1TpWVEs). The word in Greek originally meant a humble cloak placed
on the back of a donkey and made out of fragments of cloth (see schol. ad
Arist. Cl. 449).
2 No cento cites a verse membrum from the poems understood by some
in antiquity as Vergil's minor works.
I
i use the text of R. P. H. Green, ed., The Works of Ausonius (Cambridge
1991)132-39.
4 Ausonius adds that the cento is a work de seriis ludicrum, "ridiculous
from serious verses." Such a description, however, does not apply to every
ancient cento (including Hosidius Geta's Medea), whose narratives can be quite
serious.
I
The most renowned is the Cento Probae, composed by the poetess Faltonia
Betitia Proba in the mid-fourth century. The others are the De Ecciesia ascribed
to Mavortius, the Versus ad Gratiam Domini ascribed to Pomponius, and the
anonymous De Verbi Incarnatione. The dates of these three poems are uncertain:
the De Ecclesia has a terminus ante quem of ca. 534 (it appears in the Codex
Salmasianus, a North African anthology gathered at that time), while the Versus
ad Gratiam Domini and the De Verbi Incarnatione may have been written
closer in time to the Cento Probae, as K. Schenkl (CSEL 16 [Vindonbanae
18881
561) suggests. Schenkl conveniently publishes the Christian centos together.
143
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144 SCOTT MCGILL
deflowering of the bride,6 two are on homely topics,7 and eight relate
mythological narratives.8 The first of these Vergilian centos is the
Medea of Hosidius Geta, written as a tragedy ca. 200. Tertullian provides
a terminus ante quem for the poem, alluding to it in his De
Praescriptione Haereticorum of 203:9 vides hodie ex Vergilio fabulam
in totum aliam componi . . . Hosidius Geta Medeam tragoediam ex
Vergilio plenissime exsuxit ("you see today a story composed out
of Vergil that is entirely different from him . . . Hosidius Geta extracted
most fully a tragedy, Medea, out of Vergil," 39.3-4). Critics have
agreed that the work which Tertullian mentions is the tragedy included
among the centos in the Codex Salmasianus (now Parisinus 10318),
the leading manuscript of a North African anthology dating to ca.
534.'1 They base this claim on the closeness in title, form, and subject
matter between the Salmasianus poem and the cento described by
Tertullian. This similarity overrides the confusion surrounding the
centonist's name: the manuscripts of Tertullian give a number of
possibilities which I will discuss later in this paper, while the superscript
of the Salmasianus records no author of the Medea. In this study, I
should note, I follow scholarly convention and use the name Hosidius
Geta.
Metrical errors" and some obscurity'2 mar the Medea, which has
caused several critics to give it less than charitable notices. (Hostile
6
These are Ausonius' Cento Nuptialis, mentioned above, and Luxorius'
Epithalamium Fridi, written by the North African poet early in the sixth century,
which appears in the Codex Salmasianus (Anth. Lat. 18 R).
I
These are the anonymous De Panificio and De Alea, both of which
survive in the Codex Salmasianus (Anth. Lat. 7-8 R). I should note that the
subject matter of the De Alea is obscure: it may refer to a dice game, or to
combat between gladiators. The author composes the cento so badly that a
reader cannot easily discern what it says. Having passed much time trying to
penetrate the caligo densa of the poem, I think it best to agree with G.
Polara ("I centoni," in G. Cavallo, P. Fedeli, and A. Giardina, eds., Lo spazio
letterario di Roma antica III [Rome 1990] 258) and to consider the cento's
subject a dice game described parodically as though it were mortal combat.
I
These are the ludicium Paridis of Mavortius (perhaps the same figure
who composed the De Ecclesia) and the anonymous Alcesta, Progne et Philomela,
Narcissus, Hercules et Antaeus, Hippodamia, and Europa. Rounding out the
list is Geta's Medea. These centos may also be found in the Codex Salmasianus
(Anth. Lat. 9-15, 17 R).
9
I follow the chronology offered by T. Barnes, Tertullian (Oxford 1971).
10
On this topic, see R. Lamacchia, ed., Hosidius Geta: Medea (Leipzig
1981) v; and F. Desbordes, Argonautica: Trois etudes sur l 'imitation dans la
litterature antique (Brussels 1979) 83-84. 1 use Lamacchia's text of the Medea
rather than Riese's Anthologia Latina 17 R (Leipzig 1894).
"
Lamacchia (above, n.10) 24 provides a list of versus qui longiores
iusto videntur, "verses that seem longer than the meter allows," of which there
are fifteen and versus qui manci videntur, "verses which seem to be defective,"
of which there are twelve. Lamacchia ("Metro e ritmo nella Medea di Osidio
Geta," Studi italiani di filologia classica 30 [1958] 175-206) discusses the
meter of Geta's cento in detail.
12
Schenkl (above, n.5) 550 notes the obscurity and metrical errors of
the cento in his bilious assessment of it: rude enim est omnique arte destitutum
neque ulla in eo conspicitur venustas et elegentia. immo multi insunt versus
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 145
scholarship on the Vergilian cento as such has also condemned the
Medea by association.)'3 Yet an unfavorable appraisal of the poem
presents only half the picture. I wish to approach the Medea from
a new perspective, analyzing the text not for its shortcomings, but
in terms of its genre. Geta's choice to compose his cento as a tragedy
is the principal innovation and most noteworthy feature of his poem.'4
In this paper, I will examine some of the ways in which Geta
accomplishes the task of accommodating Vergil to tragedy, a task
that Geta alone undertakes among the ancient Vergilian centonists.5
After a brief survey of the formal characteristics and performance
context of the cento Medea, I will turn my attention to an important
strategy employed by Geta to situate his work and the Vergilian
language comprising it in the tragic genre. I refer to the centonist's
redeployment of Vergil's verse units to imitate two non-Vergilian authors,
Ovid and Seneca. This engagement with the literary past allows Geta
to assimilate his poem to tragedy by alluding to particular predecessors
in that genre. Because the allusions to Ovid and Seneca are made
by way of Vergil a gesture that increases the degree of difficulty
of Geta's references-the Vergilian verses undergo a strange yet precise
form of generic transference, as they come to echo dramas on Medea
and so to belong to the tragic tradition. A study of such acrobatic
intertextuality will illustrate that the much maligned Medea has a
peculiar complexity and richness, and will touch upon broader issues
related to genre.
The most conspicuous marker of the tragic genre of Geta's Medea
is its mimetic mode. In creating his work, the centonist largely takes
verse units that originally appeared in mixed narratives (i.e., texts
that combine diegesis and mimesis, as the Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues
4, 6, 10, and the openings of 2 and 8 do), 16 and adapts them to
male decerpti aut contexti, multi loci obscuri atque inepti vel cum grammaticae
legibus parum convenientes, "for it is crude and destitute of all skill, nor
does any charm or elegance appear in it. Indeed, there are many verses cut
or put together badly, [and] many obscure and inept passages, or passages
that obey the laws of grammar too little."
13 D. R. Shackleton Bailey, ed. (Anthologia Latina [Leipzig 1982]) refuses
even to include the centos in his edition of the Codex Salmasianus, and heaps
Housmanian vitriol upon them (iii). D. Comparetti (Vergil in the Middle Ages,
tr. J. Ziolkowski [Princeton 1997] 53-55) is no less scathing.
14 G. Salanitro ("Osidio Geta e la poesia centonaria," in W. Hasse and
H. Temporini, eds., Aufstieg und Niedergang li 34.3 [Berlin and New York
1997] 2345) makes this point: "La 'Medea' . . . si presenta sotto forma di
tragedia, un genere cioe alieno dalla produzione poetica di Vergilio, ed in
questo risiede la sua principale novitc ed il suo maggiore motivo d'interesse
rispetto agli altri 'Vergiliocentones
"'
("The Medea is presented in the form
of a tragedy, a genre quite alien to the poetic output of Vergil, and in this
resides its principal innovation and its greater interest in comparison with the
other Vergilian centos").
'5 Geta need not have written his cento in the tragic genre; the fabula
of Medea does not belong exclusively to drama in antiquity, but takes a variety
of forms, including epigram, elegy, epic, and epyllion.
16 Only thirty Vergilian verse units out of the 695 in Geta's cento come
from the mainly mimetic or amoeboean Eclogues.
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146 SCOTT MCGILL
mimesis exclusively.'7 Admittedly, the majority of the lines in the
Medea come from passages of direct speech within Vergil's mixed
narratives.'8 Yet the absence of a diegetic frame gives these verse
units the formal appearance of a drama, a genus activum vel imitativum.
Along with its narrative mode, the meters of the Medea reveal
immediately that the cento is a tragedy. Geta shapes his Vergilian
language into the form of a conventional tragedy by manipulating
that source material to create both dialogue and choral parts.'9 Geta
divides the sections of his poem metrically, presenting the spoken
lines in dactylic hexameters-a necessary deviation from the iambic
trimeter of classical Roman tragedy, given the meter of Vergil's poetry20-
and the songs of the chorus (comprised of Colchian maidens rather
than the traditional Corinthians) in paroemiacs. Taking a cue from
Aristotle (Poet. 1449b), an audience can understand that the different
metrical patterns, like pure mimesis, define the cento as a drama
and distinguish it from epic and all other texts that contain a single
meter. The presence in the Medea of dialogue and choral passages,
even ones that lack a rich variety of lyric rhythms, overshadows the
ways that the cento fails to resemble a traditional tragedy. These
include its lack of a five-act structure (the cento contains eight, along
with three choruses) and of stichomythia, as well as its chorus' failure
to perform many classical functions, such as announcing the arrival
of characters and engaging individual characters in dialogue, polymetric
or otherwise.2' Even so, Geta's ability to recreate the formal frame
of a tragedy enables an audience to recognize at once how the
centonist has situated Vergil's language in a new generic setting.
In referring to an audience, I do not wish to imply that Geta
staged his poem in the theater. Aspects of the Medea in fact suggest
quite the opposite. The thematic use of props, the inclusion of stage
'7 The terms mimesis and diegesis have their origin in Plato Rep. 392-394.
18
have counted 232 verse units in the Medea that come from diegetic
passages in Vergil and 386 that come from mimetic passages. This does not
include verses that occupy a middle ground, coming from inset narratives
within Vergil (i.e., Proteus' story in Georgics 4 and Aeneas' narration of books
2 and 3 of the Aeneid). I locate sixty-seven membra in the Medea taken
from those passages. (Lines taken from direct speech within those narratives
I count as wholly mimetic.) A large number of lines taken from mimetic
passages contain first- or second-person pronouns and verbs. This is unsurprising,
since they are a necessity to soliloquies and dialogue respectively.
'9 As Lamacchia (above, n.l0) x suggests: ne generis scaenici leges prorsus
neglegere videretur, actus chorosque quodammodo metris dissimilibus distinguendo
tragoediae speciem operi suo, ut ita dicam, extrinsecus impressit ("in order
that he not seem to neglect entirely the laws of the stage, he impressed from
without, so to speak, the appearance of a tragedy onto his own work by
distinguishing dialogue and choruses in some way with different meters").
20 On the importance of iambic trimeter to drama, see Horace, AP 251-
262. The change from the senarius to the trimeter occurs in the Augustan
age and may have originated then, as R. Tarrant ("Senecan Drama and Its
Antecedents," HSCP 82 [1978] 258) notes.
21
Tarrant (above, n.20) 221-28 discusses these aspects of the chorus as
they relate to Senecan tragedy.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 147
directions (particularly entrance and exit cues), and the dramatic
incorporation of stage-setting are missing from the cento.22 Without
such indications of performance, the Medea loses any tangible
connection to the living theater and becomes an example of declamatory
drama.23 The cento also has a feature that bolsters this negative evidence
and decisively precludes its staging: its versus imperfecti. Like Vergil
himself, Geta leaves certain lines in his poem unfinished (103, 204,
254, 335, 348, 398, 402, and 456).24 While an interpolating actor
would doubtless have welcomed the incomplete verses, it is very
unlikely that the poet would have left them if he had written his
tragedy for production. The versus imperfecti suggest that the centonist
intended his play instead for recitation among a learned coterie-a
setting in which an author could present work containing half-lines25-
or, lacking the wherewithal to apply the summa manus, left an incomplete
work intended solely for reading. Either existence befits the cento
Medea, which is a textual performance, not a theatrical one. Rather
than approaching the cento as a transparent text, the listeners at a
recitatio or solitary readers appreciate its compositio, concentrating
upon Geta's display of technical skill in creating his narrative out
of Vergil instead of upon the emotional effect of that narrative.26
While Pliny (Ep. 7.17.3) is right to point out that drama belongs
to a context other than the lecture room, Geta's creation of the Medea
for settings other than the stage hardly expels the cento from the
ranks of tragedy. The centonist creates his work as a peculiar type
of Rezitationsdrama,27 perhaps to be enjoyed originally by an educated
22
A. J. Boyle ("Senecan Tragedy: Twelve Propositions," in Boyle, ed.,
The Imperial Muse [Victoria 1988] 88-89) enlists these elements as signs that
Senecan tragedy is performable.
23 J. Mooney (Hosidius Geta's Tragedy Medea [Birmingham 1919] 8) claims
that Geta did not intend his cento for performance, though without any textual
support.
24 All of Geta's unfinished lines are also unfinished in Vergil except 398,
which the centonist takes from Aen. 2.118. (Could it be that Aen. 2.118 was
unfinished in the manuscript that Geta used?) On Vergil's incomplete lines
and their relation to the Vergilian centos, see H. Born, "The Centones Virgiliani
and the Half-Lines of the Aeneid," CP 26 (1931) 199-202.
25
VSD 33 reports that Vergil himself recited passages with incomplete
lines (which he completed extemporaneously as he performed; for a skeptical
appraisal of this story, see N. Horsfall, "Virgil: His Life and Times," in Horsfall,
ed., A Companion to the Study of Virgil (Leiden 1995) 19. That poets recited
drafts of works is clear from Pliny (Ep. 3.7.5), who relates that Silius non
numquam iudicia hominum recitationibus experiebatur ("sometimes he tested
the judgements of men by reciting") and from Horace (AP 438-452).
26
I paraphase F. Dupont ("Recitatio and the Reorganization of the Space
of Public Discourse," in T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro, eds., The Roman Cultural
Revolution [Cambridge 1997] 50-51) on the reception of a recitatio and the
presentation of tragedies at such an event.
27 Much criticism has focused on recitation drama: notable examples are
F. Leo, L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae. Vol. 1. Observationes Criticae (Berlin
1878) 163-69; C. J. Herington, "Senecan Tragedy," Arion 5 (1966) 422-71;
and 0. Zwierlein, Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas (Meisenheim an Glan 1966).
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148 SCOTT MCGILL
circle in its otium and certainly to be marvelled at (whether
appreciatively or scornfully) by readers up to the present day.
So far I have approached the question of how Geta creates his
tragic Medea from formal and pragmatic perspectives. I now turn to
a more complex category used to define genres: the thematic, or
the subject matter of a text.28 There are several ways in which Geta
turns Vergilian language into tragic content. The first is obvious:
having decided to compose a drama on Medea, Geta recombines Vergil's
verse units in order to alter their narrative functions and sense and
to recreate the subject matter and conventions of the tragedy. Such
a gesture is inevitable, since one of the aims governing Geta's cento
would have been to reproduce closely the traditional tragedy of Medea.
Geta succeeds wonderfully at this aspect of cento composition, despite
his slight changes to the personae of the drama,29 and despite his
mild shifts in the presentation of conventional material.30 His drama
contains the familiar mulier marito viduata and the exiled saeva
malorum facinorum machinatrix, an unfaithful Jason, a loyal nurse,
and a blustering king in Creon. Geta's Medea also has traditional
plot elements, including Creon's allowing Medea a stay of banishment
(52-103), Jason and Medea's agon (194-283), a description of Medea's
black arts (321-373), a messenger speech reporting Creusa's death
(411-433), and Medea's murder of her children (382-407). That Geta
redeploys Vergil in order to reproduce the conventional code of a
Medea tragedy identifies the cento and its constituent units as belonging
in a general way to the tragic genre on the level of content. The
recognizable sequence of events that makes up a drama on Medea
constitutes a field of reference within which Geta situates, and his
audience identifies, the genre of his text.3' In addition, the new
28
G. B. Conte and G. Most (OCD s.v. "genre") use the rubrics formal,
pragmatic, and thematic to organize the criteria that determine genre.
29
As I noted above, Geta's chorus consists of Colchians rather than
Corinthians. The centonist also gives a speaking part to the umbra Absyrtis
(a figure to whom Medea only alludes in Seneca [Med. 963-9641; giving
the umbra a speaking part strikes me as -an aemulatio-charged innovation that
Ovid and Seneca would have liked), provides Jason with a satelles, and includes
Allecto as a nether divinity that comes to aid Medea.
30 In comparing Geta's Medea with Seneca's, there are differences that
appear. Missing from the cento are the soliloquies of Medea on her suffering
and anger (397-425, 893-977 in Seneca) and Jason's entrance monologue
(431-446 in Seneca). Geta also eliminates the Colchian's incantation (740-
842 in Seneca), replacing it with a messenger's eyewitness account of her
sorcery (321-373 in Geta). The omissions lead to the abbreviated length of
Geta's play (461 lines to 1027 in Seneca), which seems necessitated by the
cento form; it would indeed be difficult to sustain the technique for a thousand
lines (Geta's is the longest of the non-Christian centos, however). Geta also
shifts the order of some events in his plot. The dialogue between Medea and
her nurse that precedes Creon's entrance in Seneca's Medea (150-179) comes
after the king departs from the cento in line 103. Finally, Geta has two messenger
speeches (3 13-373, 411-433), while Seneca (670-739), like Euripides (1136-
1230), has one.
31
I paraphrase G. B. Conte, Genres and Readers, tr. G. Most (Baltimore
1994) 4.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 149
representational functions of the Vergilian membra give to those verses
a tone appropriate to tragedy.32
Within this broad accommodation of Vergil to a dramatic plot,
there is a mechanism through which Geta adapts specific verse units
to the tragic genre. I refer to the redeployment of several Vergilian
lines to allude to the non-Vergilian authors Ovid and Seneca, both
of whom composed tragedies on Medea.33 By having verse membra
echo the works of those tragic poets, Geta performs the more
circumscribed act of assimilating particular Vergilian lines to the Latin
dramatic tradition, which Ovid and Seneca represent. With the lines
depending upon and respond to those dramatic models, they come
to belong to a narrower branch of the tragic genre.34
Before examining how Geta utilizes Vergilian language to imitate
Ovid's and Seneca's works, I must first state that certain difficulties
attend this inquiry. The first is the very conventionality of tragedies
on Medea, which at times limits how accurate I can be about Geta's
sources. When the centonist reproduces an image or refers to a theme
common to the tragic tradition, it is hard to know whether he imitates
any one poet specifically or reworks publica materies, the conventional
stock of dramatic elements. To conclude the scene between Medea
and Creon (Med. 102-103), for instance, the centonist has the king
state darkly: si te his adtigerit terris Aurora morantem (from Aen.
4.568), / unum pro multis dabitur caput (from Aen. 5.815) ("if Aurora
finds you staying in these lands, one head will pay the price for
many"). This warning, comprised of verses that in Vergil had been
a part of Mercury's appearance to Aeneas in Carthage and Jupiter's
warning to Venus, respectively-two distinctly epic lines made tragic
in sense and tone echoes Seneca (capite supplicium lues, / clarum
priusquam Phoebus attollat diem / nisi cedis Isthmo, "you will pay
32
A good example is line 159 of the cento: credo, mea vulnera restant
(from Aen. 10.29) (I believe my wounds are yet to come"). Here Geta takes
a verse unit that had referred to Venus' wound suffered at the hand of Diomedes
and makes it refer to the metaphorical wounds of love that Medea endures.
Jarring, less successful moments of semantic and tonal shift also arise. In
line 437, Jason, having discovered Medea's heinous deeds, cries dux femina
facti ("the woman is the leader of the deed"). The verse describes Medea in
the same terms as Jason does at the same point in Seneca: concurre, ut ipsam
sceleris auctorem horridi / capiamus ("come quickly, in order that we may
take the source herself of the horrid crime," Med. 979-980). Thus in meaning
and tone, dux femina facti seems appropriate to Geta's play. Even so, the
original Vergilian meaning and context intrude on the cento, causing curious
intertextual effects.
3 Critics have noted that Geta redeploys Vergil to imitate tragic texts,
without adducing specific evidence and without pursuing the implications of
such imitative diffusion. Among the scholars who have noted the wide intertextuality
of Geta's cento are Salanitro (above, n.14) 2345; Lamacchia (above, n.10)
x; and Mooney (above, n.23) 8.
34 The logistics of Geta's intertextual feat are uncertain. It seems to me
most plausible that he had texts of Seneca and Ovid before him and scanned
Vergil in his poetic memory (all centonists are likely to have committed Vergil
to memory) to find lines that parallel those in their tragedies.
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150 SCOTT MCGILL
a capital price, unless you leave from Corinth before Apollo can
lift up the bright day," Med. 297-299); Euripides (e' o' i '7rioua
Xaalk7raS o`ETat LOEou, / Kai 7raeaaS E'VTO5'
TjO-8E TEpJ4OldVWV
xeovo',
/ Lav-,
"if the rising light of the god sees you and your children within
the boundaries of this land, you will die," Med. 352-354); and Ennius,
who translates Euripides (si te secundo lumine hic offendero, moriere,
"if I find you here tomorrow, you will die," V. 264). The diffuse
appearances of Creon's threat make it impossible to know if Geta
had only Seneca in mind when he composed lines 102-103 of his
poem or the broader tragic topos. Because such material is so common,
I will not use it as evidence of Geta's imitation of specific Latin
predecessors. Only exemplary parallels in image, language, or theme
that Geta has with Ovid and Seneca alone will concern me.35
A second difficulty facing this study results from an unfortunate
accident of textual transmission: the loss of Ovid's Medea. Because
the tragedy no longer exists, it is impossible to know definitively
the extent to which Geta imitated it. Just as obscure is the question
of Seneca's dependence upon Ovid. Without any comparative evidence,
I could classify a line in Geta's poem as a Senecan imitation, while
in fact the cento unit also echoes a passage in Ovid's Medea, to which
Seneca himself alluded. The centonist thus may imitate Ovid exclusively
even as he appears to rework Seneca, or he may follow both Ovid
and Seneca, despite the fact that the surviving literature reveals only
a relation to the latter. To arrive at a necessarily incomplete but workable
solution to this impasse, I will turn my attention to Metamorphoses
7.1-424 and Heroides 12, where Ovid tells the story of Medea. If a
line, image, or theme appears in either text and not in Euripides, the
fragments of Ennius, other anterior works, and Seneca, I will classify
it as Ovidian and will assume that Ovid may have reused the material
in his tragic Medea. I will then identify specific elements that the
Ovidian and Senecan poems share and that Geta reproduces. Rather
than conjecture which author the centonist relies upon in locating
that material, I will assume that Geta has at least one of his Latin
predecessors in mind. By the same token, if a line, image, or theme
occurs in Seneca's drama and not in the Metamorphoses and Heroides,
and then reappears in the cento Medea, I will suppose that Geta takes
Seneca as his single model. While I recognize the limits and hazards
of this approach, and while I acknowledge that Geta also may have
taken other Medea tragedies that do not survive as models,36 it is
the most efficient way to pursue the subject at hand.
35 G. B. Conte (The Rhetoric of Imitation, ed. C. Segal [Ithaca 1986]
31) defines exemplary allusions as the reproduction of single loci in a source
text-that is, the imitation of individual phrases and lines rather than broader
themes, topoi, or plot elements (imitation of this latter material being allusions
to a code).
36 Lucan (though his tragedy was unfinished [see Vit. Luc.]) and Curiatus
Maternus (see Tac. Dial. 3.4), for instance, both wrote tragedies on Medea:
whether these focused on her travails in Colchis (like Accius' play [see e.g.,
Cic. De Nat. Deor. 2.35.89, Nonius 307, 18; Priscian apud GL 3.424.9) or
in Corinth is unknown.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 151
An example of Geta's imitation of his Roman models occurs in
lines 10-11 of the cento: quid Syrtes aut Scylla mihi, quid vasta
Charybdis / profuerit (from Aen. 7.302-303), mediosque fugam tenuisse
per hostis? (from Aen. 3.283) ("what did the Syrtes or Scylla, what
did huge Charybdis avail me, and to have maintained my flight through
the middle of my enemies?").3" The reference to Scylla and Charybdis
has a partial parallel in Heroides 12, where Medea wishes that Scylla
had consumed Jason and herself (Her. 12.123-124). This sea monster
consistently interests Ovid's Medea: in Metamorphoses 7, she expresses
her fear of Scylla, as well as of Charybdis, before setting sail with
Jason (Met. 7.63-65). Likewise, Seneca has Medea refer to Scylla,
though now as a creature whose ferocity cannot match the Colchian's
own (Med. 407-410). While Geta's reference to Scylla and Charybdis
may depend upon either Ovid or Seneca,38 the gesture itself reveals
that the centonist alludes to earlier tragedies in Latin on Medea,
and that he reuses Vergilian language productively, taking Ovid and
Seneca as models and emphasizing the independent, non-Vergilocentric
existence of the cento. In other words, the separation of Vergil's language
from Vergil, and the activation of an allusion to poets other than
the Mantuan, allows the Medea to be read as a text in its own right,
in an intertextual and generic tradition of its own.39 Even though
Vergil antedates Ovid and Seneca, the direction of the intertextual
exchange occurring in the cento, in which Ovidian and Senecan plays
are the sources that Vergil's verba echo, compels an audience to consider
certain of the Vergilian lines in Geta to be secondary to the "Silver
Age" poets. Along with its narrative function, Geta alters the generic
identity of this "later" Vergilian material in a precise, exemplary manner
by assimilating it to Ovid and Seneca, whose tragedies the centonist
then incorporates into his own work through allusion.
Another moment common to Geta and his Roman predecessors
has its origin in the start of the second choral song in lines 105-
106: ferte facis propere (from Aen.
12.573),
thalamo deducere adorti
(from Aen. 6.397); / ore favete omnes et cingite tempora ramis (from
Aen. 5.71 ) ("bring torches speedily, having begun to lead the bride
down from her bedchamber; all be quiet and gird your temples with
branches [i.e., fillets]"). These words seem to presage the marriage
ceremony of Jason and Creusa and an epithalamium to them, which
37 The idea seems to be, "what did it avail me to have escaped from
[the monsters]?".
* Euripides may also refer to Scylla when his Medea cries to Jason,
rpO6 TraTra Kai AegLaLva, el
$o0A7W,
K6eLAC / Kai
U6AXav
"
TlupoTv0
'"We1' 7rcrTpaV
("in addition to these things call, if you want, the beastly Scylla who dwells
on the Tyrrhenian rock," Med. 1358-1359). In his 1984 Oxford edition of
the text, however, Diggle brackets the line, which allows me to see Geta's
use of the image as an act of imitation limited to his Roman predecessors.
3 Desbordes (above, n.10) 92 describes pointedly the strange discreteness
of the Medea: "Qui lit Hosidius, lit une Medee, mediocre c'est entendu, mais
une Medee que Vergile ne connaissait pas. C'est un lexte autre. nouveau,
original" ("one who reads Geta reads an admittedly mediocre Medea, but a
Medea that Vergil did not know. It is a foreign text, new, original").
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152 SCOTT MCGILL
the chorus of Colchian maidens will sing. Such a chorus would have
echoed Heroides 12, in which Medea hears the nuptial song of Jason
and Creusa (Her. 12.137-143), and Seneca's Medea, whose choral
parodos consists of hymenaioi to the same couple (Med. 93-115).
Geta's chorus proceeds to meander into an account of the ill omens
that attended Creon's sacrifice before the wedding (Med. 112-121),
followed by a list of exempla (Marsyas, Icarus, and Pentheus) of those
punished for excessive boldness (3 1-146). Even so, Geta seems to
refer to Ovid and Seneca immediately after his chorus. The centonist's
predecessors both have Medea state that the wedding song of Jason
and Creusa comes to or strikes her ears in Ovid (ut subito nostras
Hymen cantatus ad aures / venit, Her. 12.137-138) and in Seneca
(occidimus, aures pepulit hymenaeus meas, Med. 116). Despite the
fact that his choral passage does not contain an epithalamium, Geta
echoes his predecessors in having Medea hear the sounds of a wedding
and, presumably, an epithalamium: en quid ago? (from Aen. 4.534)
vulgi quae vox pervenit ad aures? (from Aen. 2.119) ("ah, what am
I to do? What voice of the crowd comes to my ears?" Med. 148).
The verbal echo in aures suggests strongly that the centonist imitates
one or both of his Roman models.
Certain passages in the cento Medea are identifiable as references
to Ovid alone. I must stress again that difficulties attend this assertion,
owing to the loss of Ovid's Medea. Yet there exists some evidence,
albeit of a very circumstantial sort, for assuming a connection between
Geta and Ovid even before looking at the cento. This support comes
from the De Praescriptione Haereticorum (39.3-4) of Tertullian. As
I noted above, while it may be presumed that the tragedy that Tertullian
mentions is the Medea preserved in the Codex Salmasianus, obscurity
surrounds the name of the centonist himself. The manuscripts of the
De Praescriptione provide several nomina for him, including Vosidius
Geta, Osidius Geta, Offidius citra, Ovidius citra, and Ovidius ita.40
While modern editors have settled upon the name Hosidius Geta,
it obviously remains uncertain.4' Of the other possibilities, the most
intriguing are Ovidius ita and Ovidius citra. These names may indicate
an ancient awareness of the links between Ovid's Medea and the
cento. A copyist familiar with the former tragedy may have recognized
the parallels between it and the patchwork text, and accordingly may
have dubbed the centonist Ovidius.42 A second conjecture is that
the centonist took the name as a pseudonym, in order to indicate
40
For a discussion of the centonist's name, see Lamacchia (above, n.10)
v; Desbordes (above, n.1O) 83-84; and N. Dane, "The Medea of Hosidius
Geta," CJ 46 (1950) 75-78.
41 A Gn. Hosidius Geta is known in antiquity: he was consul in 43 C.E.
While dating precludes the possibility that the consul was the author of the
cento, his name provides a precedent for the Medea poet's.
42 Beatus Rhenanus, who published the 1521 edition of the De Praescriptione,
does precisely this, dubbing the centonist Ovidius Geta. lohannes Pamelius,
editor of the 1579 text, gives the poet the same name.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 153
his dependence upon Ovid. It even has been suggested that the centonist
aligned himself with his predecessor by adopting the name Ovidius
Geta, with the cognomen resulting from the Getae who resided in
Tomis, a place named for Medea's mutilation of Absyrtus (Tomis from
Trekvw, to cut), as Ovid relates in Tristia 3.9.43 While ingenious, this
argument seems a bit elaborate, since the name Geta is common in
the Roman world.
The existence of Ovidius ita and Ovidius citra in the manuscripts
of Tertullian and the conclusion that may be drawn from the names-
that Geta imitated at least in part the argumentum and language of
Ovid's tragedy-find some support at two points in the cento Medea.
In line 23, the Colchian bitterly imagines herself seeing Creusa reclining
in her bedroom on proud purple: [videbo] reginam thalamo cunctantem
(from Aen. 4.133) ostroque superbo (from Aen. 1.639) ("[1 will see]
the queen loitering in her bedchamber and on proud purple"). The
word ostrum occurs similarly at Her. 12.179: rideat et Tyrio iaceat
sublimis in ostro ("let her laugh and let her lie high on Tyrian purple").
This close verbal parallel suggests that Geta reuses Aen. 1.639 so
that his cento might echo Ovid, who himself may have employed
the image of the proud Creusa in his tragedy on Medea. A second
allusion to Ovid appears in the next line (24) of the cento: si quid
mea carmina possunt (from Aen. 9.446) ("if my songs are able to
do anything"). In the Metamorphoses, Jason asks Medea to use her
incantations to restore Aeetes in like terms: si tamen hoc possunt
(quid enim non carmina possunt?), / deme meis annis et demptos
adde parenti! ("if nevertheless they are able to do this [for what
are songs not able to do?], take years from me and add them to my
parent," Met. 7.167-168). It is likely that Geta imitates quid enim
carmina possunt, which Ovid again may have used in his tragedy,
perhaps in a context closer to the cento's.44
If Ovid's Medea had survived, I believe that more parallels with
the cento would emerge. As things stand, Geta appears to turn more
often to Seneca as a tragic model, with whose Medea the cento has
pervasive similarities. Striking parallels between the poems are evident
in Geta's choruses. The centonist includes Orpheus in his third choral
song (307-3 12), just as Seneca had done (625-630). Moreover, Geta's
citation of a second exemplum, Phaethon, clearly owes something
to Seneca, despite the fact that the mythological figure does not
appear in the same choral sedes (Geta presents him in his second
chorus [139-142] and Seneca in his third [599-602]). The centonist
describes Phaethon in line 141 with the words ausus se credere caelo
(from Aen. 6.15) ("having dared to entrust himself to the sky"), a
Dane (above, n.40) 76 offers this interpretation. He follows in the
tradition of Scriverius, Pirckheimer, Fabricius, and Delrius, whom P. Burman,
ed. (Anthologia veterum latinorum epigrammatum el poematum [Amsterdam
1759] 149), takes to task for considering the author to whom Tertullian refers
to be Ovid.
44 Desbordes (above, n.10) 84 notes this parallel between Geta and Ovid.
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154 SCOTT MCGILL
phrase that resembles Seneca's ausus aeternos agitare currus, ("having
dared to drive onward the eternal chariots," 599).
Another example of Geta's imitation of Seneca appears in line
194, where Medea opens her speech in the agon with Jason: ad te
confugio (from Aen. 1.666) ("to you I flee"). The the word confugio
recalls the beginning of Medea's speech to Jason in Seneca (fugimus,
Jason, fugimus, 447), as well as her insistent use of the verb to flee
in the next two lines (causa fugiendi nova est: / pro te solebam
fugere, "the reason for fleeing is new; I was accustomed to flee for
you," 448-449). While the point that Geta's Medea makes is different
from Seneca's, the echo in the word confugio suggests that the centonist
deliberately follows Seneca at that point in his drama. Further evidence
that Geta has Seneca in mind when he composes Medea's speech
appears in lines 205 and 210, in which the Colchian repeats the
question menefugis? (from Aen. 4.314) ("are you fleeing me?"). This
repetition recalls a similar gesture in Seneca, whose Medea cries in
line 451 (ad quos remittis?, "to whom do you send [me] back?")
and in line 459 (quo me remittis?, "to where do you send me back?").
Seneca seems to act as the catalyst for Geta's use of mene fugis, as
both poets employ repetition as a framing pattern in Medea's speech.
A close verbal echo signals another point of contact between
Seneca and the cento Medea in lines 313-314 of Geta's work, where
the messenger begins his account of the Colchian's hideous rites:
<rumpit> pavor, ossaque et artus (from Aen. 7.458) / perfudit toto
proruptus corpore sudor (from Aen. 7.459) ("fear breaks out, and a
sweat broken out over my whole body pours over my bones and
limbs"). Geta proceeds to describe the messenger as possessing the
conventional outward signs of fear, with failing knees, hair standing
on end, and speechlessness (315-316). The centonist's portrayal of
the nuntius follows Seneca's of the nurse, who delivers the same
speech in that earlier Medea. The nutrix opens her description with
the words pavet animus, horret ("my soul fears, it shivers," 670).
This line, and particularly the word pavet, to which Geta's pavor
seems to refer, is likely to have provided the centonist with the cue
for the opening of his first messenger speech.
A few more representative examples will illustrate further how
Geta signals the generic tradition in which he works, and adapts
Vergil in precise ways to it, by imitating a predecessor in that tradition.
The first appears in line 156, where Medea confesses her guilt to
her nurse: fateor me (from Aen. 2.134), arma impia sumpsi (from
Aen. 12.31) ("I confess, I took up impious arms"). Of all the program-
matic terms in Latin poetry, arma is one of the more notable: "consider
a word like arma. Within a certain constellation, this is an epic theme,
indeed, a sign of epicness, a connotator of a genre."45 The word arma
acquires a different generic identity in Geta's play, where it is part
of a passage echoing a confession found three times in Seneca's Medea
1s Conte (above, n.31) 108-9.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 155
(237, 246, 461-462). The same shift marks line 446 of the cento:
arma, viri, ferte arma (from Aen. 2.668) ("arms, men, bring arms").
Having discovered Medea's grisly crimes, Jason exhorts his comrades
to assail Medea in words uttered originally by Aeneas during the
fall of Troy. Again, Geta removes the associations that the word arma
has with epic and with a decidedly epic scene in the Aeneid and
uses the verse unit to echo Seneca's Medea. Line 446 reproduces
Jason's call for weapons that appears near the conclusion of Seneca's
play, after the hero learns what Medea has done: huc, huc, fortis
armiferi cohors, / conferte tela ("here, here, brave, warlike band,
hurl your missiles," 980-981).46
The final exchange between Jason and Medea in the cento offers
two further instances of allusion. These examples are noteworthy for
their closeness to Se-neca. The first appears in lines 435-437, after
Geta, like Seneca, had violated Horace's rule (AP 185) and showed
Medea's murder of her children onstage (or in the case of declamatory
drama, "4onstage") (969-977 in Seneca, and 403-407 in Geta). After
seeing his dead children, Jason begs to be killed: me, me, adsum
qui feci, in me omnia tela / conicite (from Aen. 9.493-494), hanc
animam quocumque absumite leto (from Aen. 3.654) ("I am here who
did the deed, hurl all weapons at me, me, me, and also carry away
this soul to death"). Geta here presents Jason as initially guilty before
growing vengeful in 444-446. In doing so, the centonist inverts the
order set by Seneca, whose Jason felt initial wrath (978-981, 994-
996), followed by responsibility (1004-1005). Despite the inversion,
Geta imitates Seneca in portraying a remorseful Jason. The verse units
adsum qui feci and hanc animam quocumque absumite leto imitate
Seneca's si quod crimen, meum est: / me dedo morti; noxium macta
caput ("if there is any crime, it is mine; I give myself to death;
strike a hateful head," 1004-1005) as well as Jason's cry to Medea:
infesta,
memet perime ("enemy, kill me," 1018). Geta's desire to recall
Seneca at the end of his play accounts for Jason's admission of guilt.
The centonist also alludes to Seneca in line 447, where Medea says
to Jason in her final speech, thalamos ne desere pactos! (from Aen.
10.649) ("do not desert sworn marriage pacts"). The word thalamos
links the cento to Seneca, whose Medea taunts Jason with a similar
statement toward the end of the tragedy: i nunc, superbe, virginum
thalamos pete ("go now, haughty one, seek the marriage rites of
maidens," 1007).
There are two more examples of Geta's imitation of Seneca that
I wish to note. These instances differ somewhat from the allusions
that I have examined so far, as the Vergilian lines that Geta cites
not only follow Seneca, but also echo material in Vergil. In other
words, while Geta sets the Vergilian lines in a new order and narrative
setting, the verse membra constitute passages in the Medea that resemble
46
I have not located a similar reuse of a programmatic term linked to
Vergil's Eclogues or Georgics.
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156 SCOTT MCGILL
those in Vergil himself. In addition, some of the Vergilian verses
comprising the cento at such points come from the very Vergilian
passages that are being mirrored and so do not undergo radical changes
in their meanings. This is unlike what happens to most of the verse
units in the cento, which experience sharp alterations and become
part of a story entirely different from Vergil's. Indeed, only Ecl. 8.47-
48, where Medea is the subject,47 are altered less than the Vergilian
lines that now concern me. These lines are drawn from Aeneid 4,
the story of Dido.
It is hardly surprising that Aeneid 4 provides Geta with such
amenable material for his cento. As critics have long noted, the fourth
book of Vergil's epic is an inset tragedy, with a plot that moves in
Aristotelian ways and with a main character whose soliloquizing belongs
to the stage.48 Literary responses to Aeneid 4 indirectly confirm its
tragic nature. Not only did Renaissance theory hold that epics might
contain an inset tragedy-a notion that likely has its source in Vergil-
but Renaissance authors also composed tragedies on Dido, thereby
demonstrating their sense that her story was a drama.49 Even more
important for Geta is the fact that Vergil's tragic Dido is in many
ways akin to the tragic Medea.50 Not only do both women rage after
being abandoned by their beloveds, but there are also verbal and
thematic echoes that Aeneid 4 has with Medea tragedies. When Dido
claims in lines 543-546 that she has nowhere to go, her words echo
Medea's question to Jason in the agon (502-505) and her earlier
lament (386-389) in Euripides; when Dido asserts that she could
have cut Ascanius into bits (600-601), she grows chillingly Medean;
and when she participates in a black ritual (504-521), her resemblance
to Medea is clear. The close relation of Dido to Medea is evident
47 Not surprisingly, segments taken from Ecl. 8.47-48 appear three times
in the cento (263, 400-401, 442).
48 R. Heinze (Virgil's Epic Technique, trs. H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson
[Berkeley 1993] 93-120) analyzes Aeneid 4 as a tragedy in Aristotelian terms
and adds that Dido's frequent soliloquies and Anna's role as confidante also
belong to drama. R. G. Austin, ed. (Aeneidos Liber Quartus [Oxford 1955]
ix-x) is so taken with the tragedy of Aeneid 4 that he states, "If Virgil had
written nothing else . . . it would have established his right to stand beside
the greatest of the Greek tragedians." On the relationship of the Aeneid as a
whole to tragedy, see P. Hardie, "Vergil and Tragedy," in C. Martindale, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Vergil (Cambridge 1997) 312-26.
4 Alessandro Pazzi de'Medici, Lodovico Dolce, Giambattista Giraldi, Etienne
Jodelle, and Christopher Marlowe all wrote tragedies on Dido. For a discussion
of their plays, see B. Bono, Literary Transvaluation from Vergilian Epic to
Shakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley 1984) 88-139. Two other examples are
worth noting, those of Petrus Ligneus Gravelinganus written in 1559 and the
anonymous tragedy Dido published in the same period. These dramas appear
in the cento form; obviously, the stricture against composing centos on Vergilian
themes had at that point dissolved.
50
Several other mythological heroines contribute to Vergil's portrayal of
Dido, including Nausicaa, Hypsipyle, Circe, and Catullus' Ariadne. Apollonius
of Rhodes' Medea (in Scythia, not in exile) was also a source for Dido, although
she was not as important as Servius (ad Aen. 4.1) and Macrobius (Sat. 5.17.4)
would have it.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 157
even in the opening lines of Aeneid 4: at regina gravi iamdudum
saucia cura / vulnus alit ("but the queen already for a long time
struck with worry nourishes her wound," 1-2). Vergil's wound metaphor
follows the description of Medea in Euripides (Ipw'rI 6UZ,V
6K7raTe-)
'
'IUTovo;,
"struck in her spirit by her love of Jason," 8) and in Ennius
(Medea animo aegro amore saevo saucia, "Medea struck with savage
love in her distressed soul," V. 253)5'
Geta is aware of the links between Dido and Medea and indeed
exploits them. Of the 592 units that Geta takes from the Aeneid
(compared to 64 from the Georgics and 39 from the Eclogues) 107
come from book 4. This does not result in a tidy intertextual exchange
so that Dido's words are always given to Medea, Aeneas' to Jason,
and Anna's to the Nurse. Yet there are a number of instances when
Geta's heroine delivers lines originally spoken by Vergil's. The parallels
between the cento and the Aeneid in such cases are exact both verbally
and thematically. An especially clear instance of this phenomenon
occurs in line 19 of the cento, where Medea cries out nusquam tuta
fides (from Aen. 4.373), "nowhere is a pledge safe." With the semantic
and thematic qualities of the verse unit preserved and seamlessly
transferred, the Colchian's lament echoes Dido's, whose words were
themselves allusions to Euripides' Medea 492:
OpKLV a6 ?bpo05a ri'oTl
("trust in pledges is gone")."2
Among the Vergilian material relating to Dido that Geta employs
to portray Medea, there are two passages whose intertextuality is
especially vertiginous. The first appears in lines 210-213, where Medea
addresses Jason in their agon: per ego has lacrimas (from Aen. 4.314),
per siquis amatae / tangit honos animum (from Aen. 12.56-57), per
inceptos hymenaeos (from Aen. 4.316), / per conubia nostra (from
Aen. 4.316) et mensas quas advena adisti / te precor (from Aen.
10.460-461): miserere animi non digna ferentis (from Aen. 2.144)
("By these tears, by any reverence of a beloved that touches your
soul, by our begun wedlock, by our marriage and the tables which
you approached as a foreigner, I pray, pity a soul bearing unworthy
things"). Medea's plea by things personal and pathetic has a parallel
in Seneca. In the agon of his play, Medea begs Jason by the hopes
of their children, their house, their shared perils, the monsters conquered
in Colchis, her own criminal hands, and heaven and sea, witnesses
of her marriage, miserere, redde supplici felix vicem, ("pity me, [and]
fortunate one, give recompense to a suppliant," Med. 477-482).53 The
51
Geta may employ this imagery in line 159, where Medea cries credo,
mea vulnera restant (from Aen. 10.29) ("I believe my wounds are yet to
come"). See above, n.33.
"
Such exact parallels between Dido and Medea appear especially in the
prologue to the cento Medea, where the Colchian laments the wrong done to
her. Of the 36 Vergilian verse units comprising the scene, 14 come from
Aeneid 4. Of these, 5 lines are originally delivered by Dido, and nearly all
the others refer to her in Vergilian diegetic or third-person passages.
53 A prayer for pity also occurs in Heroides 12, but in inverted form.
Ovid's Jason asks Medea by his misfortunes, his lineage, the mysteries of
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158 SCOTT MCGILL
appearance of the prayer at the same point in Seneca's and Geta's
tragedies indicates that the centonist was imitating his dramatic
predecessor. Yet there is another echo in the lines. Dido issues a
similar plea for pity in Aeneid 4.314-318, from which Geta takes
some of the material constituting Med. 210-213. For readers attuned
to the intertextual strata of the cento, such a moment can invert
the temporal order of literary history. Because it sets Senecan tragedy
up as a primary model and uses Vergil's reused language (including
Aen. 4.314 and 316) to allude to it, Geta's Med. 210-213 suggests
that a passage appearing in both Aeneid 4 and Seneca's Medea
originates in Seneca, not Vergil. This effect is the same as the one
that occurs elsewhere in the cento. What is new in Med. 210-213
is that the Vergilian and Senecan material is parallel; Geta has not
imitated a Senecan passage unlike anything in Vergil, but has
reconnected Vergilian membra to reproduce a prayer found in both
Aeneid 4 and Seneca. This causes Aen. 4.314-318 to appear to be
in itself Senecan, even before Geta resets lines drawn from it in a
new, Senecan scene. The cento suggests, in other words, that the
story of Dido contains elements that are already part of Seneca's
Medea even before Geta's stitchery. The fact that Aeneid 4 is organized
as an inset tragedy and contains echoes of Euripidean and Ennian
dramas on Medea only adds piquancy to the curious allusive effect
of Med. 210-213.
The final passage that will concern me is the opening prayer
of Geta's cento. In a prologue that resembles Seneca's, Medea begins
by invoking her ancestor the Sun, the Earth, the Avenging Furies,
Saturnian Juno, and Venus (1-6). The lines recall Seneca, whose Medea
calls upon the gods of wedlock a role taken by Juno alone in the
cento (3-4) Lucina, Minerva, Poseidon, Hecate, Pluto, Proserpina,
and the Furies to open the drama (1-18). While the placement of
the prayers at the incipit of the dramas reveals that Geta imitates
Seneca, the prayer itself is conventional to tragedies on Medea; Euripides
(764) and Ennius (V. 284) include it in their plays. The prayer also
appears in Aeneid 4.607-612, where Vergil echoes dramas on Medea
and has Dido call upon the Sun, Juno, Hecate, and the Avenging
Furies to help her punish Aeneas for what she sees as his betrayal
of her. Geta seems to have been aware of the parallel, and cites Aen.
4.610 in composing his opening lines: et Dirae ultrices ("and avenging
Furies," 2). Once more, however, Geta's use of Vergil to allude to
Seneca may be understood to subsume the former poet to the latter.
The centonist simultaneously invokes Vergilian and Senecan passages,
but establishes his tragic predecessor as his direct model. This gesture
assimilates the Vergilian prayer to Seneca's and, disrupting chronology,
indicates that the very words of Dido are not only Medean and tragic,
but also Senecan.
Diana, and the gods of Medea's family: o virgo, miserere mei, miserere meorum
("o maiden, pity me and mine," Her. 12.77-81). It is possible that Ovid included
in his tragedy a plea for pity close to Seneca's that Geta might have imitated.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 159
Having examined how Geta creates his tragedy out of Vergil, I
wish to end by exploring what the cento suggests about broader issues
related to genre. On the one hand, the Vergilian verse membra in
the Medea reinforce an axiom of Latin, and indeed all, poetry. They
suggest that genres are interpenetrable, or that poetic language, when
redistributed, is capable of crossing the permeable boundaries between
generic forms. To express this point differently, the reuse of Vergilian
units to convey a drama reveals that much poetic language, including
terms with a marked programmatic significance in one context, is
in itself generically neutral and capable of taking on the content
and register of another genre.54 The general practice of conflating
generic elements, or of taking them as sets of dynamic and adaptable
features rather than as the ingredients of a recipe,55 finds extreme
expression in the cento Medea, in which Geta places the very verses
of Vergil in a new generic setting, rather than a theme or individual
word. The centonist's act suggests that Vergil's language has the latent
ability to beget a tragedy and even to echo tragic poets, and thus
is adaptable to a range of genres.56 Such cross-fertilization is especially
evident in those cento passages that reproduce scenes from both Vergil
and Seneca, as they show how Vergilian poetry in its original state
possessed tragic and, to reverse time as the cento compels one to
do, even Senecan elements. In so adapting Vergil, Geta causes the
Medea to signal a peculiar Kreuzung der Gattungen, or intersection
of genres.57 When Vergil's poetry becomes tragic, literary forms open
to each other, and language, rather than belonging exclusively to a
single literary form, is exchanged between them.58
There is another side to the generic interaction that occurs in
the Medea, however. To achieve its full effect, the cento requires
that an audience be aware that Vergil, though called by Martial Maro
cothurnatus ("Vergil who wears the tragic boot," Ep. 5.5.8, 7.63.5)
presumably because of his subjective style and incorporation of tragic
material, never composed a drama, much less a Medea. Indeed, Vergil
distinguishes his own literary output from his patron's (whether it
54 Not all poetic language could be comfortably turned into another genre,
of course. It would be impossible to turn the "low" diction of Plautine comedy
into a tragedy on Medea, for instance. Even so, as S. M. Braund has reminded
me, it is impossible to determine the genre (tragic or comic) of several fragments
of Republican drama. This fact supports my claim that verse units cannot be
generically defined apart from their narrative settings, and in isolation can
belong to different genres.
5 I take this metaphor from Conte (above, n.31) 107.
56 R. Tarrant ("Aspects of Virgil's Reception in Antiquity," in C. Martindale,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virgil [Cambridge 19971 59) makes a similar
point about the cento, whose "diversity of subjects also fostered the notion
that the original source material had a universal character; Vergil's work thus
becomes a sort of 'master poem' containing the seeds of an infinite number
of other poems."
7 The term Kreuzung der Gatuungen originates with W. Kroll, Studien
zum Verstandnis der romischen Literatur (Stuttgart 1924) 139-84.
"
I paraphrase S. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone (Cambridge
1987) 1 16.
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160 SCOTT MCGILL
be Pollio or Octavian),"9 Sophocleo carmina digna colurno ("songs
worthy of a Sophoclean boot," Ecl. 8.10). With this understanding
of literary history in place, readers can see that Geta imposes a new
genre upon Vergilian language along with a new narrative. Just as
a full appreciation of the formal compositio of the tragic cento relies
upon an acknowledgement of its differences from Vergil, the audience
of the Medea is meant to experience the thrill that comes with
recognizing the cento as a corps etranger, or a work generically unlike
Vergil IS60
Because Geta's creation of a tragedy becomes fully resonant when
an audience discerns its distance from the genres of Vergil, the cento
Medea reinforces a second aspect of generic relations: that theoretically,
there exists a well-articulated sense of distinctions between literary
forms. This is certainly the case in antiquity, where evidence for
such an understanding of genres abounds. Along with the catalogues
of literary types produced by Alexandrian scholars,6' several texts
in antiquity assert the existence of such generic categories, including
Cicero's De Optimo Genere Oratorum,62 Horace's Ars Poetica,63 Accius'
Didascalia," and the work of Diomedes.65 Moreover, the programmatic
statements of poets, including recusationes and references to meter
or to the relation (often strained) between form and content,66 indicate
that the ancients had a developed notion of normative generic
differences. The ideas expressed in these varied work support the
On the identity of the tragic poet/patron whom Vergil mentions, see
W. Clausen, ed., Eclogues (Oxford 1994) 233-39.
60 For the term corps etranger and a discussion of how the cento is a
"foreign body," see Desbordes (above, n.10) 92.
61 For example, the librarian Apollonius the eidographos (see Etym. Magnum
295.51). For this reference and a discussion of the cataloguing spirit among
Alexandrian scholars, see T. Rosenmeyer, "Ancient Literary Genres: A Mirage?"
YCGL 34 (1985) 74-84.
62
poematis enim tragici, comici, epici, melici, etiam ac dithvrambi . . .
suum cuiusque est, diversum a reliquis. Itaque et in tragoedia comicum vitiosum
est et in comoedia turpe tragicum; et in ceteris suus est cuique certus sonus
et quaedam intellegentibus nota vox ("indeed of poems there are tragedies,
comedies, epics, lyrics, even dithyrambs . . . each of its own, different from
the rest. Thus in tragedy the presence of the comic is wrong, while in comedy
the tragic is bad; and in other poems there is to each a particular tone and
certain voice known to the educated," De Opt. 1).
63 versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult; / indignatur item privatis
ac prope socco / dignis carminibus narrari cena Thyestae ("comic material
does not want to be expressed in tragic verses; and by the same token the
meal of Thyestes resists being narrated in verses ordinary and nearly worthy
of the comic sock," AP 89-90). See also Horace's differentiation of epic,
elegy, iambic, and tragedy (AP 73-82).
64 See Accius fr. 8 (Funaioli). Cited in Hinds (above, n.58) 162, n.5.
65
See Diomedes, "De Poematis," in book 3 of Ars Grammatica (Keil).
Rosenmeyer (above, n.61) 83, n.16 provides this reference.
66
Recusationes are so common that I need not cite them. For representative
examples of programmatic references to the disassociation of meter and content,
see Ovid Fast. 2.123-126 and 3.1-4.
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TRAGIC VERGIL: THE CENTO MEDEA 161
claim that "the undoubted tendency of writers . . . to mix and exchange
topics between the generic categories must not be taken to imply a
lack of interest in or an awareness of what constitutes the norm in
each genre."67 Indeed, the conflation of generic elements often depends
for its effect upon an awareness of the established distinctions that
a poet dissolves.
This principle applies to the cento Medea. As he utilizes Vergil
to imitate tragic poems, Geta accentuates the generic differences
separating his text from its sources, even as he transgresses those
very distinctions. While Geta affirms in practice the adaptability of
one genre to another, the impact of the cento relies largely upon
an awareness that the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid are not tragedies,
even if they contain some tragic elements. The possibility of such
recognition confirms the disparities between generic norms that existed
in ancient literary theory, while at the same time showing how Geta
violates those very norms, as poets often did in practice.68 These
dual aspects of the cento Medea affirm Vergil's fixed place in the
canon as a poet of pascua, rura, and duces while treating his work
as open and adaptable to new genres.
In its reproduction of a conventional tragedy and its imitation
of Ovid and Seneca, then, the Medea of Hosidius Geta makes a
paradoxical point about genre and generic interaction: that units of
poetry are in themselves generically neutral and capable of participating
in different genres; and that generic borders exist, which give the
free exchange between genres its affective bite. With these implications
of the Medea noted, it is clear that the cento is more than an
insignificant and flawed literary trifle. Those who dismiss or condemn
the poem overlook its greatest merits, the varied allusive relations
that Geta establishes with the Latin dramatic tradition, and the complex
generic exchanges that occur in the work. The rich intertextuality
of the Medea not only reveals much about Geta's cento technique,
but also demonstrates how an ancient writer understood and exploited
generic relations. Such insights make the Medea an important text
in the study of Vergilian reception and for our understanding of the
interplay between genres in antiquity.
Rice University SCOTT MCGILL
CW 95.2 (2002) smcgill(rice.edu
67
Hinds (above, n.58) 116.
68 I paraphrase T. Verweyen and G. Witting, "The Cento. A Form of
Intertextuality from Montage to Parody," in H. Plett, ed., Inlertexlualiiy (Berlin
and New York, 1991) 173, who see the simultaneous constitution/violation of
literary norms as fundamental to the cento.
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