Virgil's Georgics and the Art of Reference

N 1942 Pasquali published a brief but important article on the way in which poets allude to their predecessors, a process which he named arte allusiva. Although this was the first work to confront the issue as an artistic phenomenon, it needs to be said that certain studies had already investigated individual instances of allusion;2 and since Pasquali, the investigation has been carried on, although not perhaps as extensively as the subject deserves.3 The focus of all these studies is Hellenistic poetry, which has been shown to demonstrate a certain type of allusion, namely, the use of a dictional oddity whose sense is to be recovered only by having recourse to the imitated passage, from which it will normally diverge in any number of ways-a practice generally referred to as oppositio in imitando, but which I shall call "correction."4 Most of the work done in this area treats the interplay between the Alexandrians, chiefly Callimachus and Apollonius, and the Homeric text, although Giangrande in particular has examined lateral activity within Alexandria; so, on a fairly simple level, where Callimachus has 'E4~iprvSq8 (H. 4.42) and Algovrle0v (Aet. 1.7), Apollonius will give us 'E4noprOEv (Arg. 4.1212) and AiloovrlvsE