Agathias invokes his patron

 

 

 

A very large chunk of Agathias' proem to his Cycle is taken up with praise of his all-conquering Emperor. It used to be taken for granted that he meant Justinian (ruled 527-565), who did indeed get a lot done, but Alan and Averil Cameron challenged this consensus in a 1966 JHS article and suggested we instead consider his son, Justin II.

 

That's not a debate into which I propose right now to wade. Anyway, encomium delivered, Agathias returns to consideration of his own literary conquests. The Camerons also challenge the identification of Agathias' patron with the Theodorus who was magister officiorum under Justinian and Justin. Again, I'm feeling too tired to consider going there, so I'll just give you my translation of the bit that immedaitely follows all the world-conquering stuff.

Maybe one day I'll translate the whole thing, but there's at least one book I really ought to finish first.

 

And so, since all the lands of men are filled
With lovely peace, and since all anxious fears
Of foreign and domestic martial strife
Are blown to pieces by our Emperor,
Then let us call a contest of the wise,
My blessed Theodore, and set in train
The entertainments of the bardic dance.
You see, it was for you I toiled to shape
This prize, and wrought this wordy artefact,
Gathering tight within my monograph
All the promiscuous commerce of the bee,
And gathering a universal bloom
From reams of elegy; I hung for you
A wreath of Calliope eloquent,
As one might offer beech to Kronos’ son,
Hulls to the Earthshaker, a warrior’s belt
To Ares, or a quiver full of darts
To lord Apollo; Hermes, tortoises;
Dionysus, the cultivated vine.
I know that Theodorus’ eponym
Will drizzle endless critical acclaim
Upon my marathon of diligence.

 I'm trivially pleased with how 'marathon of diligence' reshuffles the Greek, though I doubt many readers will want to know about that. Perhaps to be followed up in some future blog post.

In the immediate sequel to this section, and as the conclusion to his proem, Agathias lays out the kinds of poem he will offer us -- and that's something I definitely want to translate.

 

Agathias in the toilet

Agathias 'Scholasticus' ('the Advocate') was the sixth-century anthologist of a Cycle of contemporary epigrammatists, including much work of his own. Some of these are inscriptional in form and I would like to think the following two were inscribed for real, in a public toilet in Byzantium. According to the second poem, Agathias himself had paid to have it renovated. The first poem is newly translated; the second is in the book.

9.644

How justly blessed are you that work the soil,
Stout-hearted labourer, who all your life
Must brace against the agonies of toil
And poverty: the meals you eat are small,
And in the thickets you lay down your head,
Awash with water as your beverage.
Fit as a fiddle, here you sit a while
Unburdening your belly in a flash;
You do not knuckle at your lower spine,
Or thump your thighs in anguish as you shed
Your wholesome cargo. Pitiful are they,
Those who possess or flock about great wealth,
Who set more store by feasting than by health.

 

9.662 

I was a place detestable to see,
A mud-brick warren. Here the strangers came,
And native folk and boorish countrymen,
To noisily excrete their bowel waste,
Until our city’s father intervened.
Agathias transformed me: now I shine,
Who was so ignominious before.

 

Agathias gets his Cycle rolling

I'm becoming very fond of the proem (authorial preamble) to the Cycle of Agathias 'Scholasticus'. This sixth-century historian, our main source for the reign of Justinian, was also a keen and fine poet. His Cycle anthologised a circle of contemporary epigrammatists, including plenty of erotic and satirical ('skoptic') verse. He wove the works of his fellow authors in with his own, just as had Meleager when he compiled the first Garland seven centuries before.

Sixth-century Byzantium had a busy literary scene and was clearly a hotbed of epigram-writing. Four centuries later, Constantine Cephalas drew heavily on Agathias when compiling the prototype of our Greek Anthology.

In this blog post I offer a translation of the opening part of the proem (or rather, of the first and much the longer of the two proems). After this, Agathias moves to a long encomium celebrating the military victories of his emperor, before returning at the end of the proem to a list of the kinds of poems he has chosen to include.

I think his proem is very charming and I hope you will enjoy the version I have made. The short prose preamble I take to be by Constanine Cephalas, the 10th-century compiler of the prototype of our Greek Anthology; he loves adding little explanatory notes of this kind.

....

A collation of epigrams published in Constantinople and dedicated to Theodore the Decurion, son of Cosmas. The proems were delivered after the frequent recitations held at the time.

You gentlemen, I think, have had your fill
From this great smorgasbord of poetry,
So much that all your appetite is fled
And all the dainties sticking in your craw.
You sit there bloated: many before me
Have set before you gourmandising feasts
That sample many genres and persuade
Contempt for common fare. What now to do?
This buffet I have laid: just let it lie,
Until it rots? Or set it on a stall
At wholesale market, hawk at discount there
To barrow-men? Then who could stand a share
Of this my produce, who would buy my words
For thruppence, if not deaf? Yet hope remains —
That you may taste a sample of my wares
And like it, and be raised from apathy:
I know your custom is to judge a meal
Solely by the devotion and good will
Of those who have invited you to dine.

Agathias next spells out why his generous listeners will find their time well spent:

Further than this, the banquet I propose
Comes to you seasoned, and its condiments
Are all brand-new. It was not in my power
To single-handed lay a bill of fare
That did you fellows justice, so instead
I have persuaded many fellow-chefs
To share my toil, donate ingredients,
And amplify your menu. And indeed
These wealthy men provided generously
Of delicacies that they most enjoy;
And I, who borrowed them, take honest pride
In these exquisite dishes of their own.
And any one of them will aptly say,
Pointing to me, and speaking to his peer,
‘This new-made Muses’ dough just recently
I kneaded out myself; the batch he serves
Is one of mine.’ Just so, but such a man
Is not among the wisest of the cooks
Thanks to whose labours I alone am seen
As orchestrator of so great a feast.
For I have nerved myself to sprinkle in
A little share from my own larder store,
So I may not entirely seem to be
A stranger to the company I call.
Instead I offer tidbits from each bard,
Enough to get the taste: if you want more,
To get a bigger plate and eat your fill,
Know you must find them in the market-place.

Agathias' contemporary 'fellow-chefs' included Macedonius the Consul and Paul the Silentiary, whose many epigrams come into the Anthology through their friend's Cycle. He then continues:

To add some dignity to these my toils,
I shall begin my prologue with our king:
For then, I think, the rest will turn out well;
And since I sing of deeds that are so great,
I hope to find such words as fit the theme.

This proem-within-a-proem leads us into praise of Justinian, his all-conquering Emperor (ruled 527-565).

Edit: everyone always used to assume it was Justinian, so I did too, but (who else) Alan Cameron disputed this and now the question is open. Nowhere in the proem is he named. Sixth-century Byzantium knew many emperors, and many Theodores.

Birds and Beasts, by a Beast

 One of my favourite books about the Greek Anthology is Norman Douglas' Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology (1928), which does what it says on the tin in a not terribly systematic way. I like it not least for the self-deprecating charm of the author's introduction, from which I quoted in my last big book, Greek Epigram in Reception:

Three years, I finally concluded, might suffice for the venture. Three years, under some vine-wreathed arbour, with the necessary books at one's elbow, and one's soul at ease... Such a thing, it is obvious, should be a holiday performance; written con amore and not otherwise; in reverential, playfully-erudite fashion. Three years or even more; for I soon realized that the enterprise might well blossom -- why not? -- into a general treatise on ancient Natural History... Three years, I kept on saying to myself -- where shall they be found?

I shall not find them.

Remembered as a novelist and travel writer, Douglas was an aficionado of vine-wreathed arbours; he spent a great deal of time in Posillipo, Capri, Florence, and the French Riviera, moving on whenever scandal blossomed and the law threatened to catch up. Unfortunately it turns out he was a dreadful sex criminal in modern terms. He never got those three straight years because he kept being run out of town.You should never Google your heroes.

But to continue, just the once. This is Douglas on what he managed to come up with, his chaotic lifestyle  notwithstanding. His 'my Anthology' was surely Paton's Loeb:

The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted... which I have not been able to procure.

An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager... or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee... A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. 

To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time -- to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable?

 'What more exquisitely unprofitable?': it's as if he had foreseen REF.

Simonides' saviour ghost, with Cicero and Woodward

AP 7.77

SIMONIDES

οὗτος ὁ τοῦ Κείοιο Σιμωνίδεω ἐστὶ σαωτήρ,
ὃς καὶ τεθνηὼς ζῶντ᾽ ἀπέδωκε χάριν. 

My favourite carolling anthologist translates it like this in Tales of Sea-Sorrow (1931):

The sailor this, whose ghost did save
His benefactor from the grave.

Simonides is the most famous of classical epitaphists. Woodward's version loses the original's embedded sign-off or sphragis ('Simonides of Ceos'), but handles the returned-favour aspect of the second line really nicely ('his benefactor'). He appends the following charming note:

The story, to which this distich alludes, is told by Cicero (De Divinatione, j, 27): -- After Simonides had seen the corpse of some unknown shipwrecked mariner, and had buried it, he intended to sail on board a certain vessel, but was warned by the ghost of the aforesaid person not to do so; else he should be shipwrecked. Whereupon Simonides remained safe ashore, while the rest, who sailed, were lost.

I love little explainers of this kind. Very few can ever have seen it; like all his little books of epigram, Sea-Sorrow was hand-made in a small print-run of 136 copies, of which the one open on my lap is hand-numbered as No.132. In combination, the translation-and-note clarify an underlying story that the Greek original had left opaque. And Woodward keeps his version to a distich, which I hardly ever can, try as I might.

My own least bad attempt, on a dozy, post-COVID July afternoon, and choosing not to feed in that Ciceronian tidbit:

Here lies the man that saved Simonides,
And he himself already dead and gone;
Repaid the living for a kindness shown.

 

Gaetulicus on Archilochus' tomb, two ways

 Literary epigram lent itself very well to imaginary epitaphs; and epitaphs for the great authors of the classical canon were a great way for later authors to show off their credentials through potted biography. One such was the Roman-named Gaetulicus, nine of whose poems survive in the Anthology. His epitaphic writeup for Archilochus runs to six lines in the Greek:

σῆμα τόδ᾽ Ἀρχιλόχου παραπόντιον, ὅς ποτε πικρὴν
μοῦσαν ἐχιδναίῳ πρῶτος ἔβαψε χόλῳ,
αἱμάξας Ἑλικῶνα τὸν ἥμερον. οἶδε Λυκάμβης,
μυρόμενος τρισσῶν ἅμματα θυγατέρων.
ἠρέμα δὴ παράμειψον, ὁδοιπόρε, μή ποτε τοῦδε
κινήσῃς τύμβῳ σφῆκας ἐφεζομένους.

My version runs to seven, which is pretty close, for me:

This seaside tomb is of ARCHILOCHUS,
Who first dipped bitter Muse in viper’s bile,
And spattered gentle Helicon in blood.
Lycambes knows: he weeps for his three girls,
Who hanged themselves. Go quietly, traveller,
As you pass by: take care you do not stir
The swarm of wasps that sleep upon this tomb.

 Ordinarily I like Woodward's versions very much. He has faults, but who among us shall throw the first stone? He chases rhyme with adorable ingenuity, and on good days his archaisms achieve a grand mood. But AP 7.71 was not so good a day. Six lines become a heavily padded twelve, or as he would put it, XII.

Archilochus’ bier by the sea-shore is here;
   And he was the very first piper
To sorely mis-use and be-dip the poor Muse
   In the venomous gall of the viper.

Blood-staining at will gentle Helicon’s hill,
   This wotteth Lykambes a-rending
His heart over III hempen cords, [wo was he]
   That sent his III girls to their ending.

So on tip-toe pass on: ye way-men, be gone!
   Lest haply, or ever ye know it,
Ye wake from their sleep the wopses that keep
   Watch & ward o’er the grave of this poet.

I don't wot what he was thinking, but I feel the wo, as if stung by wopses.

 

Two epitaphs for men

 Two more from Hunter's fine new Green-and-Yellow.

Going by his excellent notes, the first is from 7th- or 6th-century Corcyra and was carved boustrophedon; the Greek includes the digamma, an ancient letter (a sort of 'fw') that was on its way out.

As in my last post that drew on this source, the numbering is Hunter's.

I

This tomb is of Arniadas, who fell
To ravening Ares close beside the ships,
Soldiering on the banks of Aratthus.
The war-god took him as he led the field
Beneath the echoes of the battle-cry.

II

Whether a citizen or from afar,
Let he who passes weep for Tettichus.
He was a good man and he died in war,
Lost in the bloom of youth. Be on your way;
Shed tears, and may they bring a lucky day.