Nobody’s home: surrogacy, substitution, and the failed search for «Calpurnius Siculus»

The author known as “Calpurnius Siculus”, probably first century ce but plausibly third century ce, has always been tough to locate. With no external testimony to pin down his historical being, scholars have leapt to overinvest in text-internal cues to help build his much-needed but sorely lacking author image: the figure of Corydon - the star of Calpurnius’s Eclogues 1, 4 and 7 - has long been the go-to surrogate with whom the missing author is identified. This article argues that the poems actually discourage that identification even as they recommend it - and make the process of searching for the author one of frustrated readerly desire for an authority which remains as absent as the name of the particular Caesar overseeing the collection. Through close reading of moments in Ecl. 1, 3, 4 and 7, I attempt to show that Calpurnius messes with the desperately allegorising and historicising impulses of pastoral readers ancient and modern; he baits us with an asymptotic, ahistorical Corydon who gets us closer to author and authority, but never quite close enough.