Three charioteers

These three poems are from the Planudean Appendix of the Greek Anthology. It is often called 'Book Sixteen', but is a modern scholarly compilation. The Byzantine Greeks of Constantinople were as mad on charioteers as the Romans had been before them, and they leave us many epigrams about them.

EPIGRAMS ON THE STELAE OF ATHLETES IN THE HIPPODROME AT CONSTANTINOPLE

335

On Porphyrius

The Emperor and populace erect 

The son of Calchas, our Porphyrius, 

Laden with garlands for his noble toil, 

The youngest of the drivers and the best 

By measure of his many victories. 

He should have had a statue made of gold, 

And not this brass, like all the rest here placed.

383

On Faustinus, of the Green faction

Behold Faustinus, charioteer of old, 

Who, once he found the faction of the Greens, 

Knew nothing of defeat upon the track. 

You see him as he was, an older man, 

But in his strength he was a stripling still, 

And never once was beaten in a race.

386

On Julianus, charioteer of the Reds

The hand has skill to birth the ancient dead 

A second time: for here is Julian 

In all the strength he showed in former age, 

And hauling to and fro the reins of Red. 

He stands now imaged high upon his car; 

His hand awaits the signal to begin: 

He only needs to see the turning-post.

Dating Strato of Sardis

Strato of Sardis is the main poet of what is now Book 12 of the Greek Anthology. He was the author of a book of pederastic epigrams, the Boyish Muse (Mousa Paidikē), which in time became Book 12's armature. In a poem clearly written to close the Boyish Muse, he declares that the poems are not autobiographical but were written to please others, presumably patrons:

One day, perhaps, a reader will look back 

At these my playthings, reckoning these toils 

Of love were all my own. It is not so: 

Incessantly I jot assorted lines 

For every sort of man in love with boys, 

Since some god gave me this capacity. (AP12.258)

Look in most dictionaries of classical literature and civilisation and, if you find him at all, you will find Strato of Sardis dated to the reign of Hadrian (120s-130s AD). The reason given is that public knowledge of the Emperor's taste for beautiful young men encouraged Strato to court his patronage. An address to a doctor called Capito in a Stratonian poem found elsewhere in the Anthology (11.117) was also thought to pin the poem to Hadrian's reign, but Alan Cameron in The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes shot this down.

Sometimes a Neronian date is suggested instead, on the same basis (poets write about liking boys when the Emperor likes boys), which I've always thought is (a) slender and (b) potentially just a bit homophobic (I don't think this is a question on which I get to make a call).

Kathleen Coleman calls out these attempts in the introduction (xxxiii-iv) to her excellent commentary on De Spectaculis. She is inclined to place Strato before Martial, drawing attention to two parallels that she thinks indicate Martial had read the Boyish Muse: AP 12.175 is very like Martial 9.25, and AP 12.191 is similar to Martial 4.7.

But of course the influence could run either way -- or perhaps even both ways. One poem in particular encourages me to believe that Strato and Martial were contemporaries, both writing under Domitian, another emperor who liked young men. Indeed, he collected them.

Here is Martial, praising the Emperor's taste. The scene is set on Olympus. Ganymede implores that he may cut his long hair and assume the station of an adult man, as Domitian's 'Ausonian cupbearer' (Earinus) has just now done on earth below. Jupiter replies:

"My sweetest boy, it's not me but the facts that turn you down. Our Caesar has a thousand cupbearers who look like you. His whole vast palace teems with gorgeous hunks. But if your haircut makes you look grown-up, who else will mix my nectar?"

Compare now Strato:

Are they emerging from some holy shrine? 

What is their source, this army of Desires 

That shed bright beams on everything around?

Their brightness clouds my vision, gentlemen: 

Which one is slave, which free? I cannot say. 

A mortal man, their lord? It cannot be; 

Or if a mortal, greater man by far 

Than Zeus, who owned a single Ganymede, 

Though mighty god. How many such has he? (AP 12.258)

Strato declares the unnamed mortal owner 'greater by far than Zeus'; in similar vein, Martial often also flatters his Emperor as a living god. I am confident that Strato too is courting Domitian’s patronage.

'Time now to sail': two versions

The ancient sailing season ran from April to November. Antipater's poem (2nd century BC) is a variation on that by Leonidas of Tarentum (3rd century BC). Appropriately, this pair of epigrams opens the tenth, 'protreptic' (advisory) book of the Anthology.

10.1

LEONIDAS

Time now to sail. The swallow has arrived 
To gossip to us in the pleasant breeze 
Of Zephyr, and the meadows are in bloom; 
The sea, just now whipped high in jagged squall,
Has fallen silent. Weigh the anchors then, 
Cast off, you mariner, and make all sail:
Priapus of the Anchorage so bids 
The merchantman to venture on his way.

10.2

ANTIPATER OF SIDON

This is the moment for the ship to race, 

And dash to foam a sea no longer scored 

By shivering billow as it surges by. 

The swallow curls her nest beneath the eaves; 

Fresh meadow-growth is smiling: so now coil 

Your dripping lines, you mariners, and weigh 

The anchors from their burrows in the hithes. 

Bowse up fresh canvas on the forestay line. 

Priapus of the Port, I so decree, 
The son of Bromius the boisterous.

Bromius (‘Roaring’) was an epithet of Dionysus.

An ancient military manual, rediscovered

AP 9.210 

ANONYMOUS

On Orbicius’ Book of Tactics 

Behold the book that births heroic deeds:
Hadrian had me with him in his wars,
In olden days. I fell into disuse;
The aeons passed; I neared oblivion.
But under our lord Anastasius,
The strong in battle, I came back to light,
That I might aid him in his marshalling.
For I can teach the arts of bloody war:
I know the way to help you beat the men
Who ring the western sea, and Persians too,
And Saracens whose doom is now secure,
And charging cavalry of frenzied Huns;
Isaurians too, who lurk on lofty crags.
And I will bring them all beneath the rule
Of Anastasius, whom the ages fetched
To outshine even Trajan’s sceptred sway.

Urbicius (sic) dedicated a short military treatise to Anastasius I around the end of the fifth century; it still survives. He opens with a précis of part of Arrian’s Ars Tactica (AD 136/7). The elderly Hadrian could indeed have read Arrian, though too late to put his suggestions into practice; he died the following year. The Isaurians were Turkish mountain bandits who backed a rival claimant to the imperial throne; Anastasius wore them down in the 490s and fought Sassanid Persia to a standoff in the 510s, so maybe the manual worked.

Links roundup

Some links I've posted from time to time, rounded up for convenience:

My video interviews with OUP (YouTube playlist)

My blog posts for OUP:

• Who is Martial?
• A Roman author in a Greek genre
• Roman dress, and life in a crammed metropolis
• 'Tomorrow I'll start living': Martial on priorities
• Mourning a lost love

My Reddit AMA on Martial's epigrams

My Conversing the Classics interview for Classical Youth Society of Ireland

Sam Hayes's Martial blog

You could also visit my academic web page at Birmingham