Authorial Pagination in the "Eclogues" and "Georgics"

A meaningful and authorial disposition of these works onto the columns of script (paginae) of a papyrus roll can be recovered from their text: 36 lines per column for the Eclogues, 40 for the Georgics. The pagination is an artistic feature of the works: the text mimetically responds to and comments on its column-breaks, investing the column and margins with various figurative valences. Lines at column-breaks are anomalous in several ways. These phenomena are too frequent and rich to be coincidental; at least some early copies of the text will have borne this arrangement.