Forged Grouse

Nemesianus or not

Very much not a name to conjure with, Nemesianus is what they call ‘a minor Latin poet’. He was a late 3^rd-century AD figure from North Africa, Roman Carthage, popular at the imperial court during the short reign of Emperor Carus (282-83). Carus died in his early sixties, apparently struck by lightning whilst out on a military campaign, which is a hell of a way for a Roman emperor to go. What Nemesianus did then is anyone’s guess: we know next to nothing about his life. It seems he wrote a number of pastoral poems, which were later attributed to a different poet, Calpurnius Siculus, and included in that geezer’s collection of eleven eclogues; though contemporary scholarship insists that the last four of the eleven were actually by Nemesianus. It used to be thought that a short fragment—all that remains from a much longer work on birds and bird-catching, De aucupio (aucupium is the Latin for wildfowling, that is, snaring wild birds)—was by him, but now it seems it may have been a forgery by one Gisbertus Longolius (that is, Gijsbert van Langerack, 1507-44), a Dutch physician and humanist who printed the lines as by Nemesianus in his Dialogus de avibus (1544), claiming they had been copied-out of a now-lost manuscript by a friend, Hieronymus Boragineus. Scholars doubt this: the Latin is more late medieval than Roman, although whether Longoliuis confected them, or whether he was taken-in by a friend’s forgery, isn’t clear. One indication that things might not be completely on the Nemesianian level is Longolius’s claim the manuscript was discovered in bibliotecha porcorum Salvatoris Bononiensis, ‘Salvator Bononi’s Pigs’ Library’. I can’t say I’m wholly au fait with what a bibliotecha porcorum is, but it surely doesn’t sound kosher. Here is the poem Hieronymus supposedly discovered in the Piggy Archive [text from John Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff’s Loeb Minor Latin Poets (1968), 512-13]:

… et  tetracem,  Romae  quem  nunc  vocitare  taracem 
coeperunt. Avium  est  multo  stultissima. Namque 
cum  pedicas  necti  sibi  contemplaverit  adstans, 
immemor  ipse  sui  tamen  in  dispendia  currit. 
Tu  vero  adductos  laquei  cum  senseris  orbes, 
appropera  et  praedam  pennis  crepitantibus  aufer. 
Nam  celer  oppressi  fallacia  vincula  colli 
excutit  et  rauca  subsannat  voce  magistri 
consilium  et  laeta  fruitur  iam  pace  solutus. 
Hic  prope  Peltvinum  radicibus  Apennini 
nidificat,  patulis qua  se  sol  obicit  agris, 
persimilis  cineri  collum,  maculosaque  terga 
inficiunt  pullae cacabantis  imagine  guttae. 
Tarpeiae  est  custos  arcis  non  corpore  maior 
nec qui  te  volucres  docuit.  Palamede,  figuras. 
Saepe  ego  nutantem  sub  iniquo  pondere  vidi 
mazonomi  puerum, portat  cum  prandia, circo 
quae  consul  practorve  novus  construxit  ovanti. 

… and the tetrax, which in Rome now they call the tarax
or are starting to. It's the most stupid of birds: really, for
as traps are being set it waits nearby, watching closely,
and then, oblivious to itself, flutters straight to capture.
But when you see the snare’s noose drawing tight
step-in at once and seize your prey, its wings clattering.
For soon it quivers the trap's cord from its neck,
escapes, and with hoarse voice mocks its captor’s 
scheme, flying now to peace in happy freedom. 
Here, near Pelvinus, it nests at the foot of the Apennines,
in the broad fields where the sun throws itself down:
its neck is coloured like ashes and its spotted back 
is tinged like a chick’s with teardrop-shaped marks.
The guardian of the Tarpeian citadel is no bigger,
or the bird who taught you the shapes of letters, Palamedes.
I have often seen a slave staggering under the weight,
of the platters of food he is carrying to the circus
which the new consul or praetor has instituted in celebration.

The tetrax or tarax is, it seems, the black grouse, Lyrurus tetrix. You can see from the image at the head of this post that its neck is indeed blackly ashen, and that it has a pattern on its back of droplets. Pseudo-Nemesianus doesn’t mention its striking scarlet eyebrow, or its lyre-shaped tail, which seem to me more interesting features. The stupidity of the grouse, and its ease of capture, is well-known: in portions of Scotland the grouse is called ‘the fool hen’ for this reason.

In this poem line 14, ‘the guardian of the Tarpeian citadel is no bigger’ means that the bird is about the same size as a goose: for it was the honking of the sacred geese of Juno, in the Roman Capitol, on the Tarpeian hill, that alerted Marcus Manlius to the nighttime attack by hostile Gauls in 390, enabling him to rally his men and repel the assault: a famous story. The ‘Roman Goose’ is smaller than the greylag or swan geese familiar in the UK. The reference to Palamedes in line 15 is to the claim in Hyginus’ Fabulae [277] that this Greek hero created the letters of the Greek alphabet: ‘the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropo, created seven Greek letters: Α Β Η Τ Ι Υ. Others say that Mercury did it from the flight of cranes which make the shape of letters when they fly. However, Palamedes the son of Nauplius invented 11 letters’. Nemesianus here seems to conflate Mercury and Palamedes, and to be saying, periphrastically, that the tetrax is about the same size as a crane. The segue to the slave-boy carrying a heavy platter, heaped up with, we assume, roasted tarax, suggests that they are good to eat.

But I like this poem very much, forged or not: the captured grouse with its ‘crepitating’ wings in line 6 (crepito means ‘to rattle, clatter, crackle’); the markings on the back of the bird being described as teardrops, guttae, in line 13. The throughline mournfulness of the ease with which fool-hens—like you, like me—can be trapped; the temporary freedom of the grouse who slips its snare, but the ashes and teardrops of their livery, leading to a platter of them cooked and ready to be devoured by the consuls and praetors.

In other news: Forged Grouse is the name of my new band.