A Hidden Anagram in Valerius Flaccus?

Abstract

In Virgil's third eclogue, the goatherd Menalcas responds to his challenger Damoetas by offering as his wager in their contest of song a pair of embossed cups, caelatum diuini opus Alcimedontis (Ecl. 3.37), decorated with a pattern of vine and ivy. In the middle of this design, he says, are two figures. One is the astronomer Conon, and the other—at this point Menalcas, afflicted with a sudden loss of memory, professes to have forgotten the name of the second figure, and breaks off into a question (Ecl. 3.40-2): quis fuit alter, | descripsit radio totum qui gentibus orbem, | tempora quae messor, quae curuus arator haberet? Various candidates for the identity of this second astronomer have been suggested, one of the most favoured being Eudoxus of Cnidus, whose Phaenomena had been versified by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. In 1930 it was proposed by Léon Herrmann that Menalcas in fact answers his own question in his reference to curuUS ARATor at Ecl. 3.42: the solution to Virgil's riddle is already written into the question, in the form of the anagram of Aratus concealed within these two words. Strictly speaking, Hermann notes only that ‘Arator au v. 42 évoque le nom d’Aratos’; he and later exponents of the theory tend to ignore the preceding ‘-us’—but there seems no reason to exclude it if an allusion to the Greek poet is to be seen in the two following syllables.