The poem Dirae is one of the poems that make up the Appendix Vergiliana. It is a pastoral poem, told from the perspective of a Sicilian herdsman forced to give up his land to Lycurgus, who is receiving this land as a reward for his participation in the Roman civil wars.^[1] The herdsman spends the entire poem cursing the land so Lycurgus cannot benefit from it.

The scholarly history of the Appendix Vergiliana and therefore of Dirae has been one of authenticating the poems as works of Vergil.^[2] Modern consensus is that they are not by Vergil,^[3] and the focus has shifted to situating the poem in time and literary context.^[4]

Dirae is a series of curses. It is told from the perspective of a Sicilian herdsman, who is evicted from his lands by Lycurgus, a veteran of Rome’s civil wars. The herdsman exhorts his friend, Battarus, to join him in his cursing of the land that they leave behind, swearing that the natural order of the world would be overturned—that prey should chase after predator—sooner than he stops his baleful song.

The series of curses follow a narrative. The unnamed singer asks the land to become infertile, even the hills bereft of water, so that Lycurgus is not able to experience the beauty of Sicily. Then, the breezes that used to blow sweetly on the land, he asks to turn to unmanageable heat. He mourns the felling of the woods he loves so much, and he asks Jupiter to strike the land with lightning so that first the woods, and then all the farmland, might burn up. Once the land has burned, he turns to the sea, calling on the waves to flood the land and on Neptune to drive sea monsters over the land with the waves. If Neptune does not heed his call, the herdsman asks that at least the streams would flood and, when the streams retreat, that they might leave behind marshes.

In the end, the singer takes a final look from a hill upon his land and vows that, again, the natural order of the world would sooner be overturned—that white would appear to be black and left appear to be right—before he ceases to mourn the loss of his land, disappearing afterwards into the woods.

The characters of the poem are the singer, his friend Battarus to whom this song is addressed, and Lycurgus who has been given the singer’s land. The singer’s girlfriend, Lydia, is mentioned twice. In addition to the humans mentioned in the poem, the speaker refers to several well-known entities from Roman mythology and culture.

Dirae is one of the poems that make up the Appendix Vergiliana.The term “Appendix,” refers to works that are considered solely within the background of authentic texts (i.e. works that are authentically attributed to Vergil), and are of interest because of the question of their authenticity.^[2] This is contrasted against the term “opuscula” (meaning “little works”), for which the main question is of significance.^[2] Thus, the vast majority of scholarly work around the Appendix is concerned with the authenticity of the poems.

None of these poems are mentioned by Vergil’s literary editors, L. Varius or Plotius Tucca,^[38] nor are they mentioned in Valerius Probus’s Vita of Vergil written in the first century CE.^[38] The first attribution of Dirae to Vergil occurred in Aelius Donatus’s biography of Vergil in the 4th century CE, in which Donatus claimed that Vergil wrote the poems Catalepton, Priapea, Epigrammata, Dirae, Ciris, and Culex when he was 26.^[39][38] Servius’s biography, also of the fourth century, adds Copa to Donatus’s list.^[40]

There is a catalogue from the ninth century CE, found in Murbach, listing several poems from the Appendix—and among them, Dirae—but the manuscript itself is lost.^[41] In general, manuscripts that include poems from the Appendix only have a few.^[41]

Doubts regarding the authenticity of at least some of the poems occur as early as the sixteenth century CE.^[41] Jodocus Badius Ascensius, in 1501 CE, asserts that Priapea must be Ovidian on account of obscenity and that In Maecenatem is also not by Vergil,^[41] and mentions that there are doubts as to the authenticity of Aetna as well.^[42]

The first recorded doubt regarding the authenticity of Dirae specifically is in Josephus Justus Scaliger’s work, Appendix Vergiliana.^[42] Scaliger was the first to name this collection of poems in such a manner, and the first to have formally decided the poems that constitute the Appendix.^[42] In it, he attributes Dirae to Valerius Cato.^[42] He only considers three of the poems to be genuinely Vergilian: Catalepton, Ciris, Culex.^[42] By the seventeenth century, all poems were attributed away from Vergil, though in the early twentieth, scholars began to reconsider the possibility.^[42]

Scaliger’s assumption that Dirae was written by Cato is based on an event recorded by Suetonius. Under the reforms of Sulla, Cato lost his land.^[43] In indignation, Cato wrote a little book, a libellus, in which he complained about his eviction.^[43] Scaliger connected the authorship of Cato’s book and Dirae based on the spirit of complaint and lament found in both works.^[43]

Modern consensus is that the poems of the Appendix are not written by Vergil,^[3] but the focus has switched from the possible authenticity of the poems to engagement with the poems themselves.^[4] Scholars are attempting to receive the poems the way they would have been in their original context. Given that comparatively few Latin poems from the first century BCE survive, it is impossible to say whether these poems were deliberately faked or simply representative of their genre and time.^[2] Scholastic tendency is towards assigning extant poems to known poets: it is tempting to flesh out the character and life of historical figures. Likewise, scholars have tended towards proving or disproving the authorship assigned by previous scholars, so the majority of scholastic analysis has been used to support arguments towards dating or authorship. For example, one of the poems of the Appendix, Catalepton, was brushed off as unlikely to be by Vergil because, “the assumption that Virgil could have ever written laudatory verses on such an occasion will need more proof than is here produced before it can be accepted,”^[44] a statement that seems to imply a personal knowledge of Vergil’s character. However, significantly less time has been used in analysing the poems for their artistic merit—an aspect of the poetry in which the Ancient Romans were far more interested.^[45]

It is unlikely that the Romans considered the issue of imitation in the same manner that scholars have approached the Appendix—the manner of sorting the authentic from the inauthentic.^[46] Imitation was a big part of Roman culture,^[47] extending down even to the school curriculum.^[48] Vergil is considered to be among the most important poets of the Roman Republic, so it was fashionable to imitate him,^[49] and it is probably due to his name labelling the Appendix that these poems have been preserved until the first recorded scholarly analysis.^[50]

The education of Roman boys included paraphrasis, an exercise that asked the students to convert poetry into prose and vice versa,^[48] teaching them how to express the same thoughts in several ways.^[51] Imitation was also an important part of the education system,^[47] schoolboys first analysing and even memorising sections of literary texts before using their knowledge to create new pieces in old styles.^[52]

Roleplay, a more comprehensive form of imitation, was the next step. After composing in the style of a particular poet, the students had to also perform in that style.^[53] So the poems, written in a style similar to that of Vergil, were not considered by the Romans to be deliberate forgeries, but as imitations to be judged as to how accurate the imitation was.^[54]

Additionally, the term used to denote works labelled with an author’s name but not truly authored by that person—pseudepigrapha—referred both to works deliberately faked and works that were merely written in the style of said author.^[55] Roman book-publishing was not very precise: titles changed over time and authors did not always claim their own work.^[56] Books would be assigned authors and titles by the publishers according to their own standards, misattribution thus becoming very easy.^[56] The concept of intellectual property was not based on individual contributors, but on the school to which the work belonged—it is in this way that works on medicine were often assigned to Hippocrates and works on mathematics to Pythagoras.^[57] The construction of public figures was less concerned with “what actually happened,” but in the creation of anecdotes to fill in the blank spots between the publicly-known events of their life and to form a story suited to their persona.^[58] It was not about what was true, but about what was possible. So the attribution of the Appendix to Vergil was not necessarily due to deliberate forgery, but perhaps to denote a specific style or to help form a picture of Vergil as a young man.^[59]

Given the context, scholars believe that it is unlikely these poems were deliberately faked.^[60]

Another area of scholarly research around the Appendix is how expansive the Appendix should be. Some scholars argue that the couplet on Vergil’s tomb should be included in the Appendix, especially because the couplet is too short to be considered in any way but against the context of Vergil’s other works.^[42]

There are no known commentaries on the Appendix Vergiliana from antiquity.^[39] Post-antiquity opinions about the Appendix surface around the Renaissance.^[39] Jodocus Badius Ascensius wrote the first known commentary in 1500 CE.^[39] Badius believed that these works were written by a young Vergil, based on the Vita written by Donatus, but it is unlikely that he read the poems himself.^[39] He used these poems as a way to teach morality to children, and for that reason, published Silvae Morales, which is a series of five moral poems taken from the works of Vergil.^[61] In the Renaissance, the general conception of Vergil as a moral poet was used to judge whether certain poems could be written by him or not. For example, Priapea  and Catalepton were disqualified due to their obscenity.^[62] This, however, may be due to the fact that poetry in the sixteenth century was classified under moral philosophy.^[62]

By the middle of the sixteenth century, commentary shifted away from moral application and towards style, craft, and literary development.^[63] Julius Caesar Scaliger considered Vergil’s poetry—and by extension, the Appendix—to be the standard from which budding poets take their inspiration.^[64] He valued the authority, clarity, and logic of Vergil’s work,^[64] and taught that Vergil’s method of working (or what he perceived to be Vergil’s method, based on Donatus’s biography), which entailed writing in the morning and severely editing in the afternoon, to be an example of iudicium (judgement), in which anything that could be considered less than beautiful is removed.^[65]

Julius Caesar Scaliger did attribute Dirae to Vergil, but as he also believed the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana were written by a young Vergil, he does not take them as perfect models.^[66] Pastoral poetry in particular required time to develop, as it was among the first genres that Vergil wrote.^[66] He considers Dirae to be the first draft of Damon in Eclogue 8.^[67]

His son, Josephus Justus Scaliger, was the first scholar to call the collection of poems an Appendix (previously, these poems were known as Opuscula or as Iuvenalia).^[68] In this collection, he deems only Culex, Catalepton, and Ciris genuine Vergilian poems and considers them to in fact be mature works.^[69]

A. E. Housman is known to have called the authors of the poems of the Appendix “mediocre poets and worse; and the gods and men and booksellers whom they affronted by existing allotted them for transcription to worse than mediocre scribes.”^[70]