A puzzling dedication of a horned altar

6.10

ANTIPATER <OF THESSALONICA>

Trito-born Pallas, goddess who defends,

Daughter of Zeus who flees the marriage-bond,

Unwedded and unchildbirthed queen — to you

Seleucus raised this altar made of horns,

When the mouth issued a Phoebean cry.

There once was a very famous altar made of horn, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World in some lists; it was dedicated to Artemis in her great sanctuary at Delos, so this is not it. ’Seleucus’ could be the historically famous founder of the Seleucid dynasty, or one-or-other of his numerous and eponymous descendants, or any of various other well-known Seleucuses besides (Wikipedia disambiguates them); or some other, less attested person of that name. Antipater addresses a sympotic epigram to a personal friend called Seleucus (11.23) and there's every chance it's him.

Trito-born (Tritogeneia) is a common epithet of Athena, variously explained. The form given here is rarer (Tritogenēs), and the poem is a treasury of words found nowhere else: Denys Page in Further Greek Epigrams (1982) points out the unique epithets phugiodemnios (‘who flees the marriage-bond’) and apeirotokos, the rare-bird qualities of which I have tried to echo with ‘unchildbirthed’.

One of the things I like about this poem is that nobody knows what to do with the last line, which in the Greek is line 4. Why would an altar to Athena be built at the urging of Apollo, and whose mouth is it? One convenient old suggestion (Stadtmüller) is that all would have been made clear by two lines that have dropped out of the text between lines 3 and 4. Denys Page favours this explanation, while suggesting as an alternative that the original last line of the poem has been lost and that line 4 has wandered in from another poem entirely. As an alternative to Stadtmüller's two-line gap, W. R. Paton in his Loeb posited the loss from the end of the poem of a third couplet that would have filled in the rest of the mouth's story.

I wonder if the ‘mouth’ (stoma) might not be the mouth of a cave or chasm; the Greek word is used for these. I tentatively suggest that, whoever the Seleucus was who built this horned altar, he did so in response to an oracle issued at Delphi. Vapours from a chasm there inspired the utterances of Apollo’s priestess, the Pythia. If so, the poem is alluding with epigram's typically enigmatic concision to a fuller story that is otherwise lost to us — lost, that is, as far as I know.

Remembering Cleodemus, son of Diphilus

Translators are traducers: we lovingly betray our authors, and sometimes they haunt us in revenge. Here is a translation that has haunted me on and off ever since I produced it. It comes to me sometimes when I am walking alone.

The original, AP 7.514, comes down under the name of Simonides, the famous specialist in inscribed verse epitaphs. It might very well not be by him; Denys Page for instance files it under pseudo-S., calling it 'oddly phrased at the beginning...ponderous, the product of an unpractised hand'. It's fair to say the Greek is a bit clunky. So too is my cover version, but that slightly halting way with language is one of the things that keeps it floating back up to the surface of my mind from the murk beneath:

Beside Theaerus’ bank, respect for self

Led Cleodemus to lamented death

When he engaged a force of Thracians;

There too the spearman son of Diphilus

Established glory for his father’s name.

The self-respect that compelled Cleodemus to die on his riverbank is aidōs, a reverence for righteous action and a fear of incurring shame by acting wrongly. It is the very first word of the poem.

Was this is a real inscription? Probably; maybe. Odd not to see his city named, if so, but the context might have made it obvious. Approximate date? Anywhere between the early fourth and the second century BC, by Page's reckoning. I treasure his little note on the otherwise unattested river Theaerus:

it seems idle to speculate whether this is an alternative form of Tearos, the Thracian river about which Herodotus has so much to say in 4.89-91. If they are the same, we still have no idea when Cleodemus was there or what he was doing.

Was Diphilus heartbroken, did he think it a dreadful waste, or was he secretly relieved that his son had held the line and not run? Was he perhaps there on the day, somewhere in the mass of the phalanx with his boy? In what war, between what city-states, was this otherwise forgotten skirmish? Who even was Cleodemus? We have no idea. But for the last minute or so he has lived again, in the reading of his epitaph; you have briefly perpetuated his memory, and maybe you will even think of him again from time to time. 'Beside Theaerus’ bank, respect for self led Cleodemus to lamented death when he engaged a force of Thracians...'

Two sundials

There are very few poems on sundials in the Greek Anthology. A scattering of inscriptional ones are known; you can find out lots about them in the chapter by Francesca Angiò in a collection edited by Evina Sistakou and Antonios Rengakos, Dialect, Diction, and Style in Greek Literary and Inscribed Epigram (2016). The first and shorter of the two poems presented below, 9.780, is in the book; the other is freshly done for this blog.

Ancient timekeeping suited sundials. The day was divided into twelve hours, running from dawn to dusk; the night likewise. from sundown to first light. Summer daylight hours were thus longer than winter ones, summer night-time hours correspondingly shorter, and so on.

The second of the poems makes a pair with its immediate neighbour, 9.807, also on the sundial of Sergius. I expect the seven divisions on its stone dial mark hours of the working day, during which fixed appointments might need to be kept. Martial (4.8) tells us a day's work in Rome wound down in hour five; the eighth hour was when a person might stop in at the gym, on his way from an after-work siesta to 'the dining-couches packed with cushions'; but not everybody could live as easily as Martial did, or aspired to.

9.780

ANONYMOUS

On a sundial

A clever stone to compass heavens’ vault:

My little gnomon parses all the sun.

9.806

ANONYMOUS

On a sundial

This bounded precinct was an orchard once,

That in its season peeked upon the sun

Through leafy shade that made the day seem night;

But now you see it glitter all serene.

The author of the work was Sergius,

Who witnessed and disclosed the Trinity.

This very stone, erected here, proclaims

Seven instalments of the wheeling sky

That spins forever and inexorably.

Three retired plough-oxen

Like the poems on the scolopendra, these thank-offerings are from the Anthology's book of dedicatory epigrams. Their authors take on the point-of-view of grateful ploughmen, but were themselves highly educated; Macedonius was a hupatos or 'Consul', a court official under Justinian in the sixth century AD.

Addaeus is among the first of the Hellenistic literary epigrammatists, active in the fourth century BC. Between his time and Justinian's nearly a millennium had passed, but the oxen's work never changed.

6.40

MACEDONIUS

My pair of oxen, that brought forth the corn:

Accept them in good spirit, Demeter,

Though these are dough; grant the real beasts may live.

My acres, fill with sheaves; give rich return,

Because your honest ploughman has endured

Eight decades, four years back. He never reaped

Harvests like those at Corinth, nor did taste

The bitter poverty that knows no corn.

6.228

ADDAEUS OF MACEDON

His working ox, broken by age and toil,

Alcon did not lead to the slaughterman,

In honour of its labours. Now that ox

In some rich pasture bellows and is glad:

It celebrates its freedom from the plough.

A lost sea-monster

Book 6 is the Anthology's collection of dedicatory epigrams: real or imaginary inscriptions to accompany offerings hung up in temples and sanctuaries. All sorts of things can be offered to gods -- a retiring craft worker can hang up the tools of their trade, for instance -- making Book 6 a whole ancient world in miniature.

These two poems are immediate neighbours and concern the same subject, a colossal, millipede-like sea-monster called the scolopendra. The modern genus scolopendra includes various large tropical centipedes, but none nearly so large as their ancient namesake. 6.223 is in the book, but 6.222 is newly done for this blog post.

A note on weather: the constellation Orion rises in July and sets in November, and was anciently associated with storms in both seasons. Virgil in Aeneid 1 has Orion stir up a sudden storm that drives the refugee Trojans' ships onto reefs, just as the storm of Theodoridas' epigram casts the scolopendra onto the reefs of southern Italy:

Hic cursus fuit,

cum subito adsurgens fluctu nimbosus Orion 

in uada caeca tulit penitusque procacibus Austris 

perque undas superante sala perque inuia saxa 

dispulit; huc pauci uestris adnauimus oris. (1.534-8)

Theodoridas (3rd century BC) was a poet of Syracuse, so Apulia ('Iapygia' in the Greek) was fairly local. Antipater was writing about a century later.

I reproduce Aelian's account of the scolopendra below the translations. He was a rhetorician writing in the third century AD, so the many-legged sea-monster had a good run, but it is not found in the modern Mediterranean; at some point it went away, to where all the good stories eventually go.

6.222

THEODORIDAS

The scolopendra with a thousand feet,

That depths of sea stirred by Orion’s storm

Cast on the reefs of the Apulians:

The masters of the deep-hulled merchantmen,

Ten oars a side, hung up this giant rib

Of cartilage from off that bristling beast,

Nailed in a temple to divinities.

6.223

ANTIPATER <OF SIDON?>

This ragged remnant of an ocean beast,

The scolopendra, twice four fathoms long,

Tossed in the surf upon a sandy shore,

All mangled by the reef, Hermōnax found

When he with netsman’s art was drawing in

His haul of sea-fish. What he found, he hung

As offering to Ino and her son,

Palaemon — a sea-monster, for sea-gods.

‘Now in the course of examining and investigating these subjects and what bears upon them, to the utmost limit, with all the zeal that I could command, I have ascertained that the Scolopendra is a sea-monster, and of sea-monsters it is the biggest, and if cast up on the shore no one would have the courage to look at it. And those who are expert in marine matters say that they have seen them floating and that they extend the whole of their head above the sea, exposing hairs of immense length protruding from their nostrils, and that the tail is flat and resembles that of a crayfish. And at times the rest of their body is to be seen floating on the surface, and its bulk is comparable to a full-sized trireme. And they swim with numerous feet in line on either side as though they were rowing themselves (though the expression is somewhat harsh) with thole-pins hung alongside. So those who have experience in these matters say that the surge responds with a gentle murmur, and their statement convinces me.’

--Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 13.23, tr. A. F. Scholfield for the Loeb Classical Library (1958)