Symmachus, Ausonius, and the Right of Authorship

Scott C. McGill (Rice University)

A letter by the fourth-century CE Symmachus (Ep. 1.31) shows signs of a misunderstanding with the poet Ausonius. Symmachus devotes a good portion of the letter to answering Ausonius’ complaint, now lost, that he shared with others a poem of Ausonius’ that the author did not want to circulate (Ep. 1.31.1). Among Symmachus’ responses is the contention that Ausonius forfeited all rights to his poem upon sending it out. Once made public, Symmachus continues, a text is a free thing (Ep. 1.31.2). Critics (e.g., T. Kleberg, Buchhandel und Verlagswesen in der Antike [Darmstadt, 1969] 56, and E. J. Kenney, “Books and Readers in the Ancient World,” in E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen, eds., The Cambridge History of Classical Literature [Cambridge, 1982] 19) have noted that Symmachus’ remarks offer a glimpse into a literary culture where audience members reproduced and shared works without any legal constraints, and consequently where authors lacked any dominion over how their texts were copied and circulated upon releasing them. But as this paper argues, Symmachus’ letter carries another message about an author’s relationship to his intellectual property, which to my knowledge has escaped critical attention. At the close of the epistle, Symmachus jokingly proposes a way out of the impasse to which he and Ausonius had come over his treatment of Ausonius’ poetry. This suggestion indirectly asserts the symbolic right of authorship, by which I mean an author’s right to have his identity as the originator of his compositions acknowledged and preserved as those compositions moved about in the world (cf. M. Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power [Toronto, 2001] esp. 80-1, 84-5, and 93-4).

In the relevant passage (Ep. 1.31.3), Symmachus facetiously states that, if Ausonius is in fact humble and shrinks from acclaim, he should still send his poems, but then remain silent so that Symmachus can pretend that he wrote the texts and, it is implied, garner the renown due Ausonius. If things were to unfold as Symmachus proposes, he would be committing a kind of plagiarism, a literary transgression to which authors throughout Latin antiquity, including Ausonius (Ep. 13.10-15, 103-4, Green), display familiarity. In the ancient Roman world as today, a defining feature of plagiarism was that its practitioner received undeserved credit from an unsuspecting audience, which he had tricked into considering him the author of literary material that he had in truth taken from another. Symmachus’ proposal has him getting just such fraudulent notice: in the scenario he lays out, he presents a false authorial self to others, so that he wins bogus notice.

The manner in which Symmachus’ fakery dovetails with a recognized transgression in his historical era and throughout Latin antiquity indicates that he saw his imagined behavior as an example of that offense. Symmachus’ proposal to engage in such illicit conduct is of course a facetious one, which he expects Ausonius to dismiss as laughable. But jokes can reveal much about cultural assumptions in how they play off of them. In this case, Symmachus’ tongue-in-cheek apologetic proposal to deviate from customary activity and to lapse into illicit practice discloses ipso facto the standard from which he imagined himself straying. What makes Symmachus’ offer absurd, and thus what animates his irony, is the fact that Ausonius normatively maintained the conventional right to have his paternity of his texts, i.e., the right of authorship, recognized and kept intact after sending out his poetry, rather than taken by someone else. By working from the starting point that an author’s credit for his work was a possession (however intangible) that audiences should respect, Symmachus consequently presents a different perspective on textual ownership from the one he offers earlier in the epistle, when he asserts that writers lose all rights to a carmen profectum, and that an oratio publicata is a “free thing.” While audiences could circulate a work as they wished, they were also to uphold an author’s proprietary claim to having written it; and this made a text libera on one level, but possessa on another.