Rewriting the Virgilian Career: The Scaligers and the Appendix Vergiliana

Renaissance scholars agreed that Virgil’s canon included poems beyond the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, but the number of other authentic poems and their value were matters of debate. This article charts competing readings of the Appendix by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Joseph Justus Scaliger. Pseudo-Virgilian poems play a key role in J.C. Scaliger’s Poetices Libri Septem (1561), as they provide a model of self-quotation and self-emulation for young poets to imitate. In a groundbreaking edition, J.J. Scaliger then discovers a neoteric, Catullan side to Virgil. Their influential readings of the Appendix offer radically revised conceptions of the Virgilian poetic career.