Hymnes naturels.

Jacques Chomarat's annotated French translation of Hymni naturales in four books by Marullus (ca. 1453-1500) takes as its point of departure the critical edition by Alessandro Perosa (Michaelis Marulli Carmina, Zurich: Thesaurus mundi, 1951). Most of Marullus's poems were known in France through the members of the Pleiade, and some of his works (for instance, several epigrams and hymns) were imitated by Ronsard. Chomarat shows that, after a period of some poetic glory, Marullus's works have lapsed into oblivion, perhaps due to "the difficulties of Marullus's Latin and to a word order even freer than that of Horace's Odes" (7).

Composing pagan hymns in the fifteenth century, Chomarat says in his introduction, could well be a literary exercise or an erudite game; but for Marullus it was a form of expressing a perpetual nostalgia for a Greece that he had never known. Born in Ragusa of parents who had left Constantinople shortly before the tragedy of 1453, Marullus lived his mature years in Italy, moving in the literary circles of Naples and Florence (8). Yet Greece is present in his hymns not only through her gods (to whom the poems are dedicated) but also through her cities, rivers, mountains, and temples.

Chomarat's introduction discusses the two major themes of the hymn cycle: one is the transcendent world of the supreme Deity, whose multiple aspects are embodied in as many gods; this world is spiritual and eternal. The other theme centers around the immanent world of the spheres and elements; this world is material and perishable (11). The celestial bodies are enumerated in the "Egyptian" order adopted by Plato in Timaeus: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Sun, and Moon. Chomarat insists that, in spite of Marullus's admiration for Lucretius, the former's vision of the world is not the representation found in De natura rerum (10).

Chomarat identifies disparate myths or "migrating" variants of one myth that Marullus juxtaposed in conceiving his hymns. Of special note is the persistent inclusion of music among the vocabula of Marullus's poems: whether practical (as in instrumentally accompanied vocal performance) or speculative (as in the music of the spheres [II, I: Pan]), music is a quasi-ubiquitous theme (11).

As for the religious significance of the Hymni, Chomarat suggests that the poems offer "a concordance between polytheism and the specifically Christian dogma of one God in three persons representing Power, Wisdom, and Love" (12) and are a manifestation of Marullus's desire to "make respectable the religion of his ancestors by showing how it concords, in its essential points, with Christianism" (13).

The original Latin and the French translation appear on facing pages, with interpretations, metric analysis, and critical apparatus arranged as notes at the bottom of the translation. Chomarat's translation is not metric: rather, each Latin line is rendered through a single French line.

Of the four appendices, the first includes dedications (original and French translation) found in two of the manuscripts containing the Hymni (to Lorenzo de' Medici and Giovanni de' Medici, respectively); the third - two letters by Beathus Rhenanus published in the 1529 Parisian edition of the Hymni; the fourth is a list of several grammatical peculiarities found in the Hymni.

The indices are an index rerum and an index nominum, respectively, with the latter based on Perosa's index.

LUMINITA ALUAS Eastern Illinois University