From Anthologia Latina 285:
From what I’ve read, this is not Gothic (goticum is just a general term), but the language of the Vandals, who are portrayed as enjoying eating and drinking (matzia ia drincan) at a convivium, but not poetry.
P.S. I like the metrical joke in the last line–the switch from hexameter to pentameter to complement the sense.
Very strange indeed. What have you been reading about this? What is the situation, exactly? A quick google search yields the idea that the speaker is drinking with the Goths and “observing them acerbically,” that the Goths are “in an adjoining room” and the poet can’t get any work done and is protesting at their barbaric accents, that the poet is summing up the favorite pastimes of barbarian soldiers (namely “produce/create” [an erotic allusion?], “eat,” and “drink,”), and that “in those days of startling ethnologic upheaval” he is full of scorn for “the alien.”
Who is ‘quisquam’? Are there others present who would like to recite good poetry but can’t? Or is it just the speaker? The barbari drink too much. But evidently the speaker does too–he does not dare (trepidat) to recite because he himself is too drunk to pull it off. Or are the Vandals imagined as themselves knowing better but too drunk?
Ah! Maybe he is a (would-be) court poet, complaining about the lack of interest in his talents among the Vandal aristocracy. He’s drinking with them, but can’t get them interested in the finer things.
Hi Chris,
Yes, the last paragraph seems closest to what is perhaps going on, at least as far as I can tell.
One of the places I recently saw this briefly discussed is G. Traina, ‘428 A.D.’, p. 82–you seem to have come across it, too, in your googling (it’s where the ‘favorite pastimes’ bit comes from). I have a vague recollection of having seen it discussed somewhere else as well, but I can’t remember it at the moment.
Traina provides a footnote also: ‘Other scholars have interpreted the epigram as an allusion to the Vandals’ heretical rites’ and notes that there is bibliography in N. Francovich Onesti, I Vandali. Lingua e storia (Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp. 139-44.
I should note, too, that the last two verses have sometimes been separated from the first two as a different poem (see the apparatus in Poetae Latini minores, entry 439 (p. 363)):
http://books.google.com/books?id=CoZKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA363&dq=matzia+ia+drincan&lr=&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=&as_brr=3&cd=20#v=onepage&q=matzia%20ia%20drincan&f=false
You get the same clue in the apparatus of the AL text linked in the post. This obviously would eliminate the possibility of the joke on which I speculated.
Shackleton-Bailey’s Teubner edition of the Anthologia (1977) accepts the separation (#279-280), and it seems to solve some of the puzzlements that were puzzling me. Shack’s note in the apparatus is also interesting:
Massamannus in Hauptii annal. germann. I, p. 379 sqq. ‘eils’ salutem, ‘skapja’ procuratorem peni [= foreskin??] vel ‘skap’ “procura, praebe”, ‘jah matjan jah drigkan’ “et cibum et potum” interpretatur.
But I’m still kind of confused.