Pliny the Elder paraphrased a poem attributed to Ovid; this is almost certainly the extant Halieutica. This chapter looks at the poem as transmitted. It argues that the text can be bettered by closer attention to Pliny, whose accurate paraphrase has been insufficiently employed; as often an ‘inferior’ text has not been edited with the rigour applied to canonical texts. The poem, however, is well written enough to assume reasonable coherence, style, and grammar. The transmitted text is acephalous, thus presenting an inviting gap for imitators; two attempts to fabricate the opening are considered. The first is a passage which must date from the high empire; the second is a humanistic forgery. This chapter stresses two aspects of the reception of ‘appendix’ texts: their comparative neglect by modern editors who expect too little, and the temptations that gaps in such texts provide for later writers and forgers to provide new material to supplement what is transmitted.
