Horsing Around: A Suppressed Celticism in a Fragment of Helvius Cinna’s Poetry

This article argues that the text of a hendecasyllabic fragment of Cinna, transmitted by Aulus Gellius, is defective, and that a neglected conjecture made by the sixteenth-century scholar Gyraldus gives a better reading . mannis , a loanword from Cisalpine Gaulish, may be the first usage of this word in Roman literature. Furthermore, reading mannis allows for the recognition of echoes of Cinna’s poem in the elegies of Ovid and Propertius. While Gellius definitely read nanis (since he builds an entire chapter around the reading), a palaeographical corruption in Gellius’ text of Cinna is simple to explain, although conjecture cannot be dismissed. The article shows the danger of linguistic biases in texts which transmit fragments: in this case, a bias towards reading Greek loanwords in place of those from Celtic languages.