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.