Joshua D. SOSIN Ausonius' Juvenal and the Winstedt Fragment

A century ago the Oxford undergraduate E.O. Winstedt discovered, in a Bodleian manuscript, more than 30 previously unknown lines in Juvenal's sixth satire. Much effort has been spent assessing the genuineness of the lines and explaining their lapse from the tradition. Arguments from style or reconstructions of scribal error have ignored the basic problem: we know nothing about the transmission of the lines before they were copiedca. AD 1100. This paper focuses on a crucial but overlooked witness to the fragment from 4^th-c. Gaul. The testimonium is found in a poem by Ausonius. Throughout a short poem dedicated to his deceased sister Julia Dryadia (Green X 12), Ausonius alludes to satire 6 with numerous verbal and thematic echoes. Nearly every detail of Dryadia's upstanding behavior echoes in word and opposes in sense the vices attacked in satire 6. Satire 6 in general and the Winstedt fragment in particular treat the demise of feminine morality as a process in which women learn from the base example of cinaedi and other undesirables. Ausonius' praise of Dryadia centers on her great capacity to learn and teach virtue. He extols this virtue by setting it in literal and literary contrast to Juvenal's archetypal portrayal of feminine debauchery.

Among these allusions Ausonius inserts three structural and lexicalechoes, quoting almost verbatim in the same metrical position (X 12.9:seria vitam) the last two feet of the18^th Winstedt line (seria vitae). Green (CQ 27 [1977]) saw this echo, but no one has seen its relevance toAusonius' poem or its import for the history of the Winstedt fragment. Moreover Ausonius echoes the first line of the Winstedt fragment (in quacumque domo vivit ...) in the last line of his own poem (inque domo ac tecto, quo pater, oppetiit) and its last line (prospicit hoc prudens et ab illis incipit uxor.) in his first (Si qua fuit virtus, cuperet quam femina prudens). Dryadia observes severity in her life while the woman of the Winstedt lines omits severity from hers. Dryadia lives and dies in the house; Juvenal's woman frequents the house where the cinaedus conducts lessons. Dryadia and the wife of satire 6 are prudens, the one intent on virtus; the other on crimen (6 O 33-34).

Ausonius frames his poem, like the Winstedt fragment, with the two powerful concepts of prudentia and the domus. He crafts the allusion so that the thematic echoes are in the middle of both texts and the lexical allusions fall chiastically at the ends and middles. The chiasmus reflects the thematic tension in Ausonius' allusive program; Dryadia was all that Juvenal's woman was not. In combining the thematic, lexical and structural echoes Ausonius weaves a web of intertextuality, which serves both to interpret the poem to which he alludes and to invite interpretation of his own poem.

Ausonius' echoes of the Winstedt lines prove his acquaintance with them. His allusions to the greater context of satire 6, furthermore, prove that he probably knew the lines as belonging to Juvenal 6. As to the genuineness of the lines, Ausonius' testimony is more compelling than speculation of moderns and it provides the crucial first link between the day Juvenal might have composed the lines and the day a South Italian scribe copied them nearly a thousand years later.