Loving Lists in The Greek Anthology

 

This is not scholarly, but purely appreciative.  My modest goal is to direct a few readers to unfamiliar territory.  W. R. Paton’s 1916 edition with translations in the Loeb Library series is perhaps the only complete version of the Anthology in English.  All poems quoted are from Book VI, included in the first Loeb volume.  Though Paton’s renderings are not only prose but also fusty in style, I believe they adequately serve the purpose of this essay. 

 

     The pre-eminent genre of Hellenistic poetry was the epigram, though epics were still written and pastoral was shaped during the era.  The huge collection of collections that is called The Greek Anthology preserves a good deal of this poetic production, but most modern readers including many scholars focus very narrowly on a few poems.  Certain post-Classical Greek attitudes are resonant in our own post-Decadent time.  Modern poets are fond of the wistful, elegiac epitaphs and the passionate, sometimes scurrilous erotic verses, but, often for adequate reasons, they neglect the bulk of the collection.  Even a brilliant rendering into English would attract few readers to the volume of verses describing the bronze statues in a Theban gymnasium [1].  Later books include such materials as metrical oddities (Book XIII) and puzzles (Book XIV) that could only interest specialists, but wandering in these little-visited volumes can have its rewards for the general reader.  Book IX, for instance, made up of declamatory epigrams, basically a catalogue of variations on rhetorical figures, many of which circle about metaphor’s core, playing with proverbial wisdom, almost at times riddling, contains a good many verses worth reading.

     Book VI, the dedicatory epigrams, is among those rarely translated today.  In it are preserved literary examples of votive inscriptions, versions of a genre well-known in the lived experience of antiquity, polished into lapidary works of art.  Countless such dedications, similar though anonymous, are known from inscriptions associated with actual cult offerings with an implied end little different from that of people who buy classified advertisements containing prayers “never known to fail,” published in fulfillment of a vow to the Virgin Mary. 

     In the Anthology some dedications seem to be simple formulaic statements of this sort. 

             6.  Philip of Thessalonica

Amphitryon dedicated me, having won me from the Teleboi. 

Such a votive dedication may be of interest to philologists or historians, but it offers little to readers of poetry.

     In other poems, the focus seems to be on the virtuoso display of minute variations in phrasing and rhythm.  Sometimes a long series of poems which are almost identical are ranged next to each other for the comparison of connoisseurs.  For instance, poems 11-16 as well as 179-187 all describe the same three brothers, one a fisherman, one a fowler, and one a hunter dedicating their implements to Pan. [2]

             11. Satyrius

The three brothers, skilled in three crafts, dedicate to Pan, Damis the huntsman this long net, Pigres his light-meshed fowling net, and Clitor, the night-rower, his tunic for red mullet. Look kindly on the pious brethren, O Pan, and grant them gain from fowl, fish and venison. 

The poems on this theme, often with the smallest of variations, are by different authors, indicating that the original readership appreciated subtleties of rhythm and phrasing of which most modern readers would be wholly unaware, even in their own language.  In an inversion of the Romantic and modern assumption that associates literary value with originality and self-expression, these poets prize technical mastery and imitation of worthy models. 

     In the sixth century C. E., about a century before the Rashidun Caliphate conquered Egypt, a Roman official there felt sufficiently connected to Classical Greece to write a variation on an old poem attributed to Plato the Philosopher. 

   20.  Julianus, Prefect of Egypt

Lais took captive by her beauty Greece, which had laid in the dust the proud shield of Persia.  Only old age conquered her, and the proof of her fall, the friend of her youth, she dedicates to thee, Cypris.  She hates to see even the shadowy image of those grey hairs, whose actual sight she cannot bear. 

Here the woman’s hair is more a pretext than a plausible offering, especially when presented with bitterness.  Rather than thanks to the divine, it is a complaint, the more eloquent for understatement.  Erotic appeal illustrates its power as the conquerer of the country that conquered proud Persia.  The final line heightens the intensity of regret, the characteristically Greek attitude in which the joyful and exuberant sensuality celebrating sex and drinking is linked with a concomitant melancholy, born of the consciousness of inevitable old age and death.  The hair, at one time a “friend” as an emblem of Lais’ glorious physicality, now suggests only ugliness, feebleness, and the grave. 

     The following is another “imitation,” following very closely an earlier poem by Leonidas, again illustrating the writer’s preference for tradition and technical skill over the pose of literary “sincerity.”  The details up to the five grapes and the recovery from illness are identical. 

190. Gaetulicus

Take, honoured Cythereia, these poor gifts from poor Leonidas the poet, a bunch of five fine grapes, an early fig, sweet as honey, from the leafy branches, this leafless olive that swam in brine, a little handful of frugal barley-cake, and the libation that ever accompanies sacrifice, a small drop of wine, lurking in the bottom of the tiny cup. But if, as you have driven away the disease that weighed sore on me, so you do drive away my poverty, I will give you a fat goat. 

The catalogue of products – grapes, a fig, an olive, a barley-cake, and a few drops of wine – present in miniature the basics of the Greek diet.  Even the poet’s cup is small (like traditional Chinese wine cups), perhaps to allow the ceremonious drinking of many servings.  The shameless bargaining with divinity promises a rich blood sacrifice in return for prosperity, but the prosperity presumably must perforce come first.

     Coming of age is also the occasion for dedications. 

309. Leonidas

To Hermes Philocles here hangs up these toys of his boyhood: his noiseless ball, this lively boxwood rattle, his knuckle-bones he had such a mania for, and his spinning-top. 

Though achieving maturity is the occasion for celebration, the verse has still about it the slow and melancholy music of the passing of time, the end of innocence, the arrival of adult responsibilities. 

     The poems often record significant “objective” depictions of material culture, but never without the addition of considerable subjective value.  

174. Antipater

The three girls all of an age, as clever as the spider at weaving delicate webs, dedicated here to Pallas, Demo her well-plaited basket, Arsinoe her spindle that produces the fine thread, and Bacchylis her well-wrought comb, the weaver's nightingale, with the skilled stroke of which she deftly parted the threads. For each of them, stranger, willed to live without reproach, gaining her living by her hands. 

Here the characteristically female work with textiles, producing work as lovely as its makers, is dedicated to Athena who, like the three “girls,” is a virgin.  The products of each is a testament to their femininity, skill, and proper modesty with the final line assuring the reader that they each earned an honest living.  The poem is a lovely little tribute to a trio of respectable young women, but the opening simile likening them to spiders implies several ironies.  Apart from the wiliness suggested by “weaving a web” which for the spider is deadly trap, there is the mythological association with Arachne who was ruined by the very same goddess due to her extraordinary skill at weaving.

     War, the occupation most identified with masculinity, is also represented.  

81. Paulus Silentarius

Lysimachus, who has now exchanged his armour for an old man’s staff, presents to Ares his oxhide shield, the protector of his body, his spear that often tasted, his coat of mail that warded off missiles from his breast, and his helmet with thick horse-hair plume. 

Here the only pathos is the mention of “an old man’s staff,” yet the image of a laconic aging warrior is compelling.  The details of his gear make the action of ancient warfare dramatic whether the author had ever fought or not.  The reader is brought into the (imaginative) thick of the battle with the ferocity of the spear “that tasted the entrails of his foes,” the rain of stones and darts on his body, and the defiant towering helmet.

     Other professions are also defined by their characteristic tools.  

38. Philippus of Thessalonica

To you Poseidon, Lord of the sea, did Amyntichus give these his last gifts, when he ceased from his toil on the deep - his nets edged with lead that plunge into the sea, his oar still drunk with the brine, his spear for killing sea-monsters, strong lance of the waters, his weel ever betrayed by floats, his anchor, firm hand of his boat, and the flint, dear to sailors, that has the art of guarding the seed of fire. 

Here again is an elegiac poem upon retirement, this time from a fisherman.  The list of the tools of his trade would make a fine material culture exhibit (a “weel” is a trap), and the unexpected mention of a flint brings to mind the value of fire on a long wet and windy voyage. 

     Another epigram provides a list of a scribe’s tools, to be dedicated to Hermes. 

62. Philippus of Thessalonica

Callimenes, on giving up his work, now old age has veiled his eyes, dedicates to the Muses his circular lead which marks off the margin of the pages, and the knife that sharpens his pointed pens, his longest ruler, and the pumice from the beach, the dry porous stone of the sea. 

     A number of the dedications commemorate the speaker’s miraculous escape from wild beasts in one case slightly lengthened to a bit of a short story with an exotic protagonist.  

220. Dioscorides

Chaste Atys, the gelded servant of Cybele, in frenzy giving his wild hair to the wind, wished to reach Sardis from Phrygian Pessinus ; but when the dark of evening fell upon him in his course, the fierce fervour of his bitter ecstasy was cooled and he took shelter in a descending cavern, turning aside a little from the road. But a lion came swiftly on his track, a terror to brave men and to him an inexpressible woe. He stood speechless from fear and by some divine inspiration put his hand to his sounding tambour. At its deep roar the most courageous of beasts ran off quicker than a deer, unable to bear the deep note in its ears, and he cried out, "Great Mother, by the banks of the Sangarius I dedicate to you, in thanks for my life, my holy cell [the thalame or receptacle into which the organs of these castrated priests were deposited] and this noisy instrument that caused the lion to fly." 

The Phrygian cult of Cybele with its self-castrated priesthood had been familiar in Greece since pre-Classical times, sometimes as a simple protective Mother Goddess figure, sometimes as the center of a mystery cult.  During her rites described in the poem as “wild” and “ecstatic,” the most prominent instrument was the τυμπανον, a small hand drum, such as here saves the speaker.  In dramatic fashion the poem expresses what everyone, perhaps, has felt on occasion: the redemption by grace, unexpected, sudden, unaccountable.    

     In this intimate little poem on love through calling the oil lamp his “play-fellow” and love-making a “night festival” the poet constructs what might be called a wholly celebrative attitude toward sexuality while maintaining some sense of social taboo by saying that these must be “secret.”  Of course, this also suggests that Aphrodite may be a sort of mystery cult.  Since these tended to be salvationist, the implication can only be that participation in sex provides a sort of immortality, if only because time vanishes during love-making.  

162. Meleagar

Meleager dedicates to you, dear Cypris, the lamp his play-fellow, that is initiated into the secrets of your night festival. 

One could scarcely better the economy and the poignance of this epigram on a peasant. 

226. Leonidas

This is Cleiton's little cottage, this his little strip of land to sow, and the scanty vineyard hard by, this is his patch of brushwood, but here Cleiton passed eighty years. 

     Book VI of The Greek Anthology has a great variety of other poems, but the special charm of the dedicatory epigram (and a good number of the poems in the book are not in fact dedicatory) is best displayed in poems in which a list of objects that might remind a twenty-first century reader of the prose poems of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge is lent a human significance.  In these highly conventionalized works, the minimalist eloquence of simple naming can sound almost incantatory.  The gesture of a sacrifice to a god uplifts the poet’s world and all sorts of objects are thereby invested with potent meaning and emotion.  If few today can appreciate the metrical music of the epigrammatists’ language, the images speak to all.  Sappho and Pindar are in little danger of losing their pre-eminence in ancient Greek poetry, but the myriad epigrammatists of the Anthology add masterful polished little works on the great themes of love and god and death.

 

  

1.      1. Such poems with their tiresomely repetitive amazement at the statues’ realism constitute Book II of the Anthology.  Similar ekphrastic poems fill Book III. 

2.      2. The familiarity of listeners or readers with such poems is then the basis for an obscene play on the theme in poem 17, attributed to Lucian. 

3.      3. One thinks of Villon’s several poems which expatiate at greater length on the theme.