Lydia, a Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary

This volume offers the first comprehensive literary and philological commentary on the Lydia, in any language. At its core is a freshly edited Latin text of the poem, which systematically reconsiders the paradosis as well as earlier textual scholarship and endorses numerous improvements against current editions. Besides scrutinizing all the textual problems and adopted solutions, the commentary provides a thorough linguistic exegesis of the text as well as a wide-ranging discussion of the poem's rich intertextuality, both Latin and Greek. The Lydia's literary side is also the main focus in the introduction, which challenges the established communis opinio that views the Lydia as a dateless anonymous imitation of Virgilian bucolic, by situating it in the literary context of the Late Republic: it highlights, for the first time, the centrality of Greek bucolic, in particular of Bion's Lament for Adonis and the anonymous Lament for Bion, in the Lydia's literary genealogy and tentatively revives the old attribution to Valerius Cato, as well as exploring the poem's relationship with its better-known sibling, the Dirae. The work is complete with an English translation, aimed to serve as a guide to the Latin text for readers without a solid background in the ancient language.

1 - The Lydia and the Dirae: unity, chronology, authorship
2 - Poetic frameworks
3 - A note on the language and metre
4 - Manuscript tradition and the text

After study in Moscow, Berlin and Leeds, Boris Kayachev went on to held research fellowships in Trondheim, Dublin, Moscow, Oxford and Basel. Boris has published on a wide array of Greek and Latin poetry, but the main focus of his research has been on the Appendix Vergiliana. The present commentary on the Lydia follows on his earlier work on the Ciris (Allusion and Allegory: Studies in the Ciris, 2016; Ciris, a Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana, 2020), and will in turn be followed by a commentary on the Dirae.