Is YOUR child texting about Greek epigram?

Is YOUR child texting about Greek epigram? Learn the signs: WTF = Wayfarer, Think Fondly TBH = Tomb Befits Herdsman BIAB = Buried In A Battlefield SMDH = Strato Makes Dudes Horny BTW = Bisexual Theocritus Wiki PMSL = Planudes Maximus, Sore Loser BRB = Barbarians Ravage Byzantium

Two epitaphs for a boy poet

A little out of town on the Via Ostiense is the Centrale Montemartini, one of the most evocative of Rome's archaeological museums. None of the artworks here is especially famous, but as an ensemble, they suggestively contrast their setting -- a disused power station, its massive boiler and engines still in situ. No museum is more photogenic.

Among the sculptural curiosities relegated to the Centrale Montemartini is the inscribed marble frontage that once announced the tomb of one Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, a boy of eleven buried beside the Via Salaria. Evidently he was a prodigy: in AD 94 he performed a hexameter poem of his own composition in a literary festival held by Domitian (you can read about these 'Capitoline Games' on Wikipedia).

The Museum website has a good picture of the monument in ts present home. An old article about it by J. R. Morgan (1903) can be read online for free as plain text, though it's also on JStor if you have access to that.

Quintus had composed his little epic in Greek, and at the foot of the monument are two separate epitaphs for the boy, also in Greek. Here is the first:

And here are the two poems in Morgan's translations, which he calls literal but which have some literary flavour. The first closely echoes Callimachus' famous 'They told me, Heraclitus' (AP 7.80) at its close:

Though but a lad of twelve short years was I,  

I left this contest for the land of shades.  

Disease and weariness reft me away,  

For of the Muses dreamed I, morning, noon, and night.  

I pray you for the sake of this poor lad,  

Pause here and see his off-hand verses' dainty grace.  

And speak through falling tears, with gracious lips  

This single prayer, 'Fare thou to Elysian land.' 

For thou hast left here living nightingales,  

Which greedy-handed Pluto ne'er shall seize. 

How slight this token of our love; and yet thy fame to heaven shall come. 

Oh, Maximus, by thee the Pierian Muses have been far outdone.  

Nor nameless didst thou bow to ruthless fate,  

Which gave thy song no lethal lot.  

No one with tearless eyes thy tomb shall pass,  

Beholding here thy verses, row on row.  

Thy glory is secure, for not unknown  

Shalt thou repose, gazed on by humbler shades. 

The Centrale Montemartini is worth a visit. Go!

Two by Demodocus

Demodocus of Leros (sixth century BC) shares his name with a famous bard in Homer's Odyssey. Richard Porson had his paradoxes in mind when he wrote his epigram of 1836:

The Germans in Greek 

Are badly to seek; 

Not five in five-score, 

But ninety-five more, — 

All, save only Hermann, 

And Hermann’s a German.

Sententiae Antiquae has blogged about the Demodocus-Porson connection, with characteristic erudition and clarity.

Here are Demodocus' two poems, from the sympotic and satirical eleventh book of the Anthology.

11.235 

Demodocus has this as well to say: 

Chians are dreadful. They are all that way: 

No ‘He is bad; this other one will do’; 

Except for Procles — and he’s Chian, too. 

11.236 

Cilicians are crooked to a man. 

The only honest one is Cinyras, 

And Cinyras is a Cilician.

The epigrams of Bones

Many of you will know Bones, the comfortingly formulaic TV drama in which forensic osteologist Dr Temperance Brennan (a calque of Kathy Reichs) teams up with FBI agent Seeley Booth to solve grisly murders. My SO and I have been merrily ploughing through its oh-so-big back catalogue on Amazon Prime all year.

Recently we came upon an instance of classical reception that's explicitly epigrammatic. It's Season 8, Episode 15, 'The Shot in the Dark' (2013), and the team are questioning colleagues at Brennan's research institute (the crime of the week is an inside job). One researcher gives the following alibi for her whereabouts during the latest bizarre murder:

I had to catalogue some papyrus Hellenistic epigrams; we're having an exhibit on the Posidippus scroll.

This is of course the Milan Posidippus papyrus, first published to great excitement in 2001. Harvard has lots of information about it along with a link to the most up-to-date translation, all for free. I'm not the first classical-reception enthusiast to note the arrival of the papyrus at Bones's 'Jeffersonian'. Kristina Killgrove on her blog Powered by Osteons sharply disses the scene, and she's not wrong:

-some random woman who can't pronounce Posidippus or talk about epigraphy properly.

However, this may not be the end of the episode's engagement with epigram. The titular 'Shot in the Dark' is the mystery the team must solve -- two people have been shot, one fatally, but their wounds contain no trace of a bullet. The answer turns out to be that the assailant used a bullet made of blood that had been frozen with liquid nitrogen, and fired from a tube using compressed air. Once in the body, it simply melted away.

Whether or not the writers knew it, the 'ice bullet' gambit is out of Martial. I've blogged about this poem before -- it's 4.18:

Where the gate drips with rain next to Agrippa's portico and the stone is slippery-wet from the constant runoff, a water-flow heavy with winter ice fell upon the neck of a boy who was passing under the dripping roofs; and when it had performed its brutal execution on the poor child, the fragile dagger melted away in the still-warm wound. Does Fortune place no limit on her own cruelty? What place is safe from Death, when waters turn cutthroat?

Practical experimentation is necessary to establish whether a falling icicle can really impale a child, but it is now known that a bullet made of frozen water is not a viable murder weapon: an early episode of the TV show Mythbusters (2003) debunked it through practical experimentation. Accordingly, the writers of Bones replace ice with blood and have their fictional science squad run experiments to establish its feasibility.

Mythbusters only bothered to blow up the 'ice bullet' because the myth had such traction in popular culture, as a staple of locked-room mysteries. My SO and her childhood friends loved to rack their brains over death-themed riddles along just these lines. In film it goes back at least as far as Double Exposure (1933, originally titled Corruption), written by Charles Edward Roberts. I wonder if he had read Martial; and I wonder how many 'ice bullets' are out there, in stories of this kind? I'd love to hear from readers who recognise the trope and can suggest examples.