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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
‘Bad poetry is written daily, and married women seduced; but it is seldom that a seduction becomes as famous as Helen's, or that a poem as bad as Colluthus’ survives for fourteen centuries to be re-edited with all the apparatus of scholarship and equipped with commentary at the rate of a page for every two lines of verse. γᾷ δ' ἐπισκήπτων πιϕαύσκω: Colluthus is one of the very worst ancient poets to have come down to us. His only notion of the art is to arrange in hexameters phrases borrowed from his predecessors, with little sense of their appropriateness or of narrative coherence. It is as if a parrot had learnt to fit his pseudo-speech to the metre of Shakespeare. Colluthus can give delight, but only to a connoisseur of the ludicrous.’ The opening paragraph of Martin West's review of Enrico Livrea's annotated edition of Colluthus may be the most devastating appreciation of The Abduction of Helen ever written. At the other end stands Giuseppe Giangrande's review of the same edition: ‘Colluthus was a poète savant, who delighted in skillfully borrowing, often with felicitous “humour” and “malice”, from his epic models, and who dexterously applied oppositio in imitando within the framework of arte allusiva.’
1. West (1970) 657f.
2. As summarised in the opening paragraph of his review of Orsini’s edition: Giangrande (1974) 129.
3. Livrea (1968a) xiv–xxiii; Orsini (1972) xxvii. Cf. Williams (1973) 240: ‘It is symptomatic that O. denies any intrinsic merit in the poem he has laboured (p. xxvii); this negative attitude seems to have become obligatory in recent years for editors of Colluthus, and helps to explain why their results have been so disappointing.’
4. Zoellner (1892) 55–115 compared Colluthus’ version of The Abduction of Helen with Ovid’s Heroides 16 and Lucian’s Judgement of the Goddesses and concluded that they all go back to a lost Alexandrian original which he thought he could reconstruct. For a discussion of the differences among these texts see De Lorenzi (1929). De Lorenzi believed that the proem is an interpolation and that the body of The Abduction belongs to lost work of Colluthus’. The conclusions of Zoellner and De Lorenzi are summarised by Livrea (1968a) xiv-xx.
5. Rocca (1995) 46 : ‘Certamente se Colluto avesse conosciuto tutta l’epistola XVI di Ovidio se ne sarebbe servito anche altrove (e come si potrebbe negarlo nel poeta tardo greco che raffazzona senza discernimento tutto quanto la tradizione gli offre?), cosa che non e avvenuta.’
6. In the De raptu Helenae Helen and Paris meet in Cyprus, not in Sparta. Helen goes there in her husband’s absence in order to celebrate a festival of Venus and Paris is driven to the island by adverse weather.
7. Paschalis (2005a).
8. In the introduction to his edition of L’Enlèvement d’Hélène Pierre Orsini (1972) compares Colluthus to the Christian sophist and rhetorician Procopius of Gaza (465–528), applying to the author of The Abduction of Helen what was said about Procopius: his work has little artistic or simply literary value (‘a peu de valeur, soit artistique, soit simplement litteraire’); it presents interest as the document of a cultural and intellectual milieu, which is that of the γραμματωκoί of the 6th century CE, late heirs to the Homeric poetry and the Epic cycle.
9. The text and line-numbering adopted here are Orsini’s (1972).
10. Livrea (1968a) xx.
11. Giangrande (1969) 150; Livrea (1968a) xx.
12. Vian (1969a) 590 (review article of Livrea 1968a).
13. The Abduction has been criticised for this ‘omission’. Orsini (1972) xx writes that the poet neglects to signal the absence of Menelaus at the appropriate time and attributes this assumed neglect to the summary treatment of the scene of the seduction of Helen (‘un désir manifeste de faire bref’). Keydell (1975) begins his review by calling Colluthus ‘the worst poet of Greek Late Antiquity, with the exception of Dioscorus from Aphrodito’ and proceeds to identify two flaws (‘Mängel’, ‘Fehler’) in the structure of the poem; one is the absence of Menelaus and the other that Hermione mentions in her lament having searched for her mother in the woods (356–58), something of which the reader has no prior knowledge.
14. All translations are my own.
15. Cypria summary (p. 39 Bernabé); pseudo-Apollodorus, Epit. 3.3; Ovid, Her. 16. An amusing detail are the instructions of departing Menelaus to Helen to entertain their guest; see Kenney (1995) 192f.
16. Cf. Allan (2003) 20f. on the portrayal of Menelaus in Euripidean tragedy.
17. There is a textual problem here, for which see the discussion of the passage below.
18. Ovid puts the Helen-Hermione relationship, like everything else, at the service of Paris’ courtship of Helen: ‘If you gave your daughter, Hermione, kisses, I delighted/right away in taking them from her tender lips’ (255f.); cf. however Her. 8.77–80 with Livrea (1968a) 326.
19. Cf. Orsini (1972) xxiii.
20. Paris’ sight-seeing is criticised by Combellack (1971) 48: ‘It is hard to imagine anything less plausible than that Paris, on his arrival, should, rather like Hermes before Calypso’s cave, stand for a while gazing on the architectural splendors of Sparta, the time being lengthened for the reader by a seven-line excursus on Hyacinth.’
21. Livrea (1968a) 189. Livrea cites also Ov. Her. 16.31–34 and reminds the reader that in Lucian’s Judgement of the Goddesses 20.15 Aphrodite instructs Paris to depart from Troy 
(‘as if to go sight-seeing in Greece’). The parallels were already cited by Zoellner (1892)82.
22. Giangrande (1975a).
23. Cf. Magnelli on ‘Evil omens going unnoticed’ (pp. 159–62 below).
24. James (1969). The contrast is most clear with Triphiodorus who treats a topic from the same epic cycle as Colluthus and has about twelve extended similes (though one should take into consideration that Triphiodorus’ epyllion is almost double the length of Colluthus’).
25. The walls of Troy were believed to have been built by both gods or by either of them; lines 279 and 307 adopt the former version but 287f. appears to follow the latter (288 is most probably corrupt): see Livrea (1968a) 208f.
26. The poet calls her consent a συvθεσίη (315), which is a formal agreement.
27. The meaning depends on whether we read voμόv (‘pasture’) or vόμov (‘a kind of melody’).
28. Cf. Prauscello p.179 below.
29. ἔρριψε is Portus’ emendation for the manuscript reading ἔρρηξε (‘tore’). Both Livrea (1968a) and Orsini (1972) print ἔρρηε, but I think that v.326 
(of Hermione), Horn. Il. 22.406 
, and Nonn. Dion. 45.50 
favour the emendation. See further my discussion of the Homeric passage below.
30. Il. 5.62f.; see Livrea (1968a) 64.
31. This kind of repetition in Colluthus is generally treated as a purely stylistic feature; see MinnitiColonna (1979)87.
32. Zoellner (1892) 1 10f.
33. Neblung (1997) 227f. is an exception.
34. Note also that Zeus arrives at the banquet from Olympus and Apollo from Helicon (22f.).
35. The canonical version placed the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on Mt Pelion, but Colluthus had the option of locating Peleus’ wedding elsewhere, as did Catullus who located it in the palace of Peleus at Pharsalus; see Courtney (1989).
36. This is a difficult passage: see Livrea (1968a) 107–09; Matthews (1996b).
37. To the significance of this point I will return below.
38. Nύμφη and derivatives (
) occur a total of 11 times. For the various meanings of vύμφη see Chantraine (1946–7) 228–30.
39. Prauscello in this volume discusses the implications of the bucolic associations and the mournful resonances of the invocation. Cf. also Magnelli’s conclusion in this volume (p.162 below): ‘Though Colluthus’ poem does indeed begin with a marked bucolic colour, the reader who assumes that it is going to follow in the steps of Theocritus will gradually see his expectations unfulfilled. The story fails to respect some of the basic conventions of the Greek bucolic tradition.’
40. Mair (1928) ‘Argive nymph’; Livrea (1968a) ‘ninfa argiva’; Orsini (1972) ‘jeune épousée’; Schönberger (1983) ‘junge Argiverin’.
41. It occurs again only with reference to Hera as Zeus’ wife and only in the context of the judgement (64, 138).
42. Cf. Harries (2006) 545f., and Prauscello p. 177 below.
43. Giangrande (1969) 153.
44. Vian (1969a) 597.
45. Cf. Ov. Her. 16.96f. Ovid uses nympha for both Oenone and Helen (Her. 16.96, 128). In The Abduction Paris’ marriage to Oenone receives a vague, passing reference: ‘Lacedaemon, after Troy, shall see you a bridegroom’ (165).
46. Cf. Hunter (1999) 250, on Theocr. Id. 6.6f.: 
(‘Galatea is pelting your flock with apples, Polyphemus…’).
47. See Eur. Andr. 274–92; Hec. 629–56; Iph. Aul. 573–85, 1284–1314; Hel. 29, 359); and Lucian’s Judgement of the Goddesses. The Euripidean passages are discussed by Stinton (1965). In Ov. Her. 16.53–88 Paris does not tend animals of any kind; the emphasis is laid on his capacity as arbiter and iudex; cf. Cucchiarelli (1995).
48. Livrea (1968a) 61.
49. The plural 
is used to indicate a girl’s breasts in Aristophanes (Lys. 155, Ec. 903) and in pseudo-Theocr. 27.49f.
50. Orsini (1972) xxiii-xxvi; see now Spanoudakis (2007) 89f.
51. Harries (2006) 545.
52. Alan Cameron (2004); Hollis (2006) 151–56.
53. For a recent reading of the poem see Morales (1999). Morales notes an ‘infelicitous irony’ as regards the Renaissance popularity of Hero and Leander vis-à-vis the topic of her article (issues of identity in Musaeus), in the sense that popularity came as a result of ‘the complete misidentification of its author’ (41; Musaeus was identified with the legendary poet).
54. Spanoudakis (2007) shares Keydell’s (1975) harsh criticism of the poem and adds: ‘read the Abduction of Helen seriously and it is a disaster’ (89).
55. I would like to thank Richard Hunter and Marco Fantuzzi for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
