The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q"

The Pervigilium Veneris—of unknown authorship, but clearly belonging to the late literature of the Roman Empire—has survived in two MSS., both preserved at Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Of these two MSS. the better written may be assigned (at earliest) to the close of the seventh century; the other (again at earliest) to the close of the ninth. Both are corrupt; the work of two illiterate copyists who—strange to say—were both smatterers enough to betray their little knowledge by converting Pervigilium into Per Virgilium (scilicet, “by Virgil”): thus helping us to follow the process of thought by which the Middle Ages turned Virgil into a wizard. Here and there the texts become quite silly, separately or in consent; and just where they agree in the most surprising way—i.e. in the arrangement of the lines—the conjectural emendator is invited to do his worst by a note at the head of the older Codex, “Sunt vero versus xxii”—“There are rightly twenty-two lines.”