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[German version] The title of this poetry book which was created c. AD 400 and structured by a later editor refers to a codex of the monastery Bobbio (north of Genoa). The codex is no longer extant but a copy of it has been kept in the Vatican Library since the humanist period (Cod. Vat. lat. 2836 f. 268r-278v; fig.: [3] appendix; [4. 140f., 152f.]). The collection contains 71 poems of varying lengths and metre (mostly distichs, less often iambic trimeter and stichic hexameter) and is divided into two parts of almost equal length by the 70 verses of t…

[German version] The Sulpiciae conquestio de statu rei publicae et temporibus Domitiani ('Sulpicia's complaint on the state of the nation and the age of Domitian') is preserved within the Corpus Ausonianum (Ausonius) and the Epigrammata Bobiensia (no. 37). It consists of 70 hexameters which, according to title and content, are supposed to have been written by the Sulpicia [4] known from Martial (10,35,38). Its language and line of thought suggest it to be the work of a Roman citizen from the beginning of the 5t…

[German version] I. Definition In contrast to invective and iambics [1], attested from the beginning of antiquity both orally and in writing and aiming at personal insult and abuse, polemics - from πολεμική/ polemikḗ (sc. τέχνη/ téchnē), 'art of war', i.e. hurtful dispute through words - is directed towards topics and is thus objective in its orientation. From time to time, the polemicist also makes use of invective when he is carried away by anger at the person whose opinion or theory he is challenging. Since the establishment of…

[German version] I. General Many early cultures assumed the superiority of divine to human authorship (notion of a god as first cause) [1]. This establishes pseudepigraphy as the earliest form of literary work: a god or a divine human of a mythical primeval time is considered author. This form was common in the Orient, but there are also traces in Greece (as, e.g., in laws, oracles, Orphism). With the adoption of artists' signatures and indications of the creator's own name (orthonymity) beginning with Hesiod, various kinds of pseudepigraphy are attested: besid…

[German version] [1] From Syracuse, poet, member of Symmachus' circle of friends, 4th cent. AD A poet with a knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, author and Roman senator from Syracuse, who (from about 310 AD until after 400), with Ausonius, was a member of the rhetor  Q. Aurelius Symmachus' circle of friends. Like them, N. believed that for the continuation of traditional culture it was sufficient to continue the tradition of the classical heritage. He avoided any confrontation with  Christianity. In his …

[German version] A. Jewish The apocryphal literature of early Judaism may be subdivided into two groups: apocryphal literature in the narrow sense and pseudepigraphic literature. According to the terminology of the Reformation churches, those are texts or parts of the Septuagint and  Vulgate that are not part of the Hebrew canon: 3 Ezra, Judith, Tob 1, 2 and 3, Macc, Wisdom, Sir, Bar (including ‘the Epistle of Jeremiah’) and the Prayer of Manasse; also the additions to Est and Dan. Apart from 2 and …