Pentadius Ovidian Poet. Music, Myth and Love

This work, devoted to the poet Pentadius (the fifth of the series Anthologiarum Latinarum Parerga), is part of the more than twenty-year project of study and critical editions of the poems gathered in the so-called Salmasian Anthology, coordinated by professors Loriano Zurli and Paola Paolucci at the University of Perugia. This Anthology, transmitted for its greater part in the codex Parisinus Latinus 10 318, known as codex Salmasianus from the name of its seventeenth-century owner Claude de Saumaise, is a poetic sylloge, put together in North Africa at the end of the Vandal Kingdom (around the years 533-534 A.C.). Pentadius is one of the various poets, often otherwise unknown, of the Salmasius’ sylloge. Six poems (two elegies and four epigrams) are attributed to him. They are, in order, an elegy about the variability of destiny, illustrated through various mythical instances, with the title De Fortuna (AL 234 R2 = 226 ShB); another elegy about the arrival of the spring season, entitled De adventu veris (AL 235 R2 = 227 ShB), depicting a naturalistic frame; two epigrams on the same theme of Narcissus (AL 265-266 R2 = 259-260 ShB); an epigram about a women named Chrysocome (AL 267 R2 = 261 ShB) and a final epigram, concerning misogynous advice (AL 268 R2 = 262 ShB). The first three poems have a particular metric system, called epanaleptic couplet, where the first hemiepes of the hexameter is repeated in an identical manner in the second hemiepes of the following pentameter. These six poems require an all-round study and a reliable edition. With this essay Paola Paolucci aims to pursue the first purpose and to lay the groundwork of the second one.