Tour de Florus: the Schoolmaster is Abroad (Vergilius orator an poeta 2–3)

Like its companion piece in Dictynna 20, this article reads Florus’ fragmentary Vergilius orator an poeta as a novel form of intertextual autofiction: a self-portrait of the artist as a young narrator recounting his exilic lifestory through and as a web of literary texts of both poetry and prose. The piece examines how, in these last extant sections of the dialogue, ‘Florus’ treats his inquiring and obliging Baetican interlocutor to an autobiographical tale of Virgilian (etc.) wandering, and a studied, setpiece panegyric of his seemingly final resting place in seaside Tarraco. The article then demonstrates how the unparalleled praise heaped upon the vocation of teacher by our speaker is itself built out of a tissue of texts this poet-grammaticus could well have known, and taught. As the analysis shows, it all makes for a strikingly artful portrait of literate self-sufficiency — and so, perhaps, one directed straight at the imperial center, and even angling for support from a new, more beneficent princeps.