Dirae

An exploration of Dirae, a pastoral poem from the Appendix Vergiliana, that includes the Latin text, an English translation, and line-by-line commentary.

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The Dirae is a curse uttered, in bucolic hexameters, by an Italian farmer against his former estate which was confiscated to enable the settlement of Caesarean veterans in the aftermath of the battle of Philippi: this commentary is the first work, in 80 years, to offer a systematic exploration of the poem within the literary and historical context of the Late Republic.

At the heart of the volume is a freshly edited Latin text, based on a thorough reappraisal of manuscript evidence and earlier textual scholarship, which in particular aims to restore the poem’s stanzaic organisation, gravely distorted in the course of transmission. Besides providing an account of the manuscripts and an overview of the poem’s structure and contents, the introduction discusses at length the Dirae's engagement with other poetic texts and traditions, first of all with its 'sibling' the Lydia, but also, crucially, with Greek bucolic, before considering its reception in Virgil's Eclogues and later Augustan poetry; it sheds new light too on the Dirae's links with Hellenistic curse poetry and with the ritual tradition of inscribed curses.

Endorsing a composition period shortly after the poem’s dramatic date (spring–summer of 41 BC) and tentatively reviving the old attribution to Valerius Cato, the introduction also explores the Dirae's engagement with the political events and narratives of one of the most dramatic moments of Roman history. The line-by-line commentary provides exegesis of the poem’s textual, linguistic, literary and historical aspects, with the English translation offering a further point of orientation.