Suetonius, De poetis. A commentary on the preserved fragments and well-grounded conjectures about the lost parts

• Applicant: Dr. Markus Georg Stachon
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 253310372

Suetonius's 'De poetis', a collection of poets' biographies from the 2nd cent. AD which is only preserved in several fragments of various length, has been neglected by scholarly attention so far, so that there is no satisfactory reconstruction of the work. In a first step I will look at the five preserved biographies with regard to Suetonius's use of his sources as well as later writers' usage of Suetonius as a source for information considering poets' lives. In a second step, the results will be applied to the lost biographies, so that I can give conjectures about them that are grounded on knowledge of Suetonius's predecessors and successors dealing with the same topic. For every piece of information Suetonius offers I plan to search for a passage in the works of the poets themselves and the ancient commentary tradition, which might have become Suetonius's source by biographistic misinterpretation. As Suetonius had an enormous impact on the following centuries, we can draw conclusions about his 'De poetis' from remarks on poets' lives by later authors. Having in mind that Suetonius is not necessariliy the only source of later writers one has to investigate whether a piece of information might have been popular in the 2nd cent. AD or it rose later. By knowing that an 'urban legend' surrounding a poet has been popular in Suetonius's time and finding it in the text of an author influenced by Suetonius we can state that it has been part of 'De poetis'. Thus such a collection of 'urban legends' can help us to get an idea of the content of the lost biographies. The results will be published in a book. In the first part I will deal with basic questions considering the composition of the work and the manuscript tradition of each biography; the second part will contain a commentary on the preserved lives; in the third part I will finally bring forward my well-grounded conjectures on the biographies that are only preserved in fragments. The radically new aspect of my approach lies in the fact that I don't consider a poet's biography as a starting point for interpretation of his works but as a document of his reception. Having solved single biographies from the whole and attached them to the works scholars (from the ancient time until today) have given more and more impact to the information Suetonius offers because the lives were thought to be historically precious sources. So I want to appreciate Suetonius's 'De poetis' not just as a useful text but as a work of its own value. As the biographical information about the poets has also played a part in the reception history of the poets my work will be of interest not just for classicists but also for literary scholars dealing with the medieval and modern reception of the classics. They will be helped to distinguish between historical facts about the classical authors and stories surrounding them that have become historical 'knowledge' in the collective memory of the ancient, medieval and modern world.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants