A fawnskin for Dionysus, a dog for Pan

6.172 (on YouTube)

ANONYMOUS

Woman of Cnidus, Porphyris, now leaves

Her double thyrsus that is like a spear,

Garlands and anklet, wearing which she raved

And footloose wandered Dionysus’ way,

An ivied fawnskin pinned across her breast.

For your own self, before your temple porch,

She sets aloft these her insigia,

Emblems of beauty and insanity.

I am particularly pleased with my version of 6.176 because I am soppy about dogs, and badly missing one dog in particular. Macedonius was a 'Consul' (Greek hupatos) at Byzantium under Justinian in the early sixth century AD; he is one of the poets whose epigrams came into the Anthology through the Cycle of his younger contemporary, Agathias. 

6.176 (on YouTube)

MACEDONIUS CONSUL

This dog, and leather wallet, and this spear

With crooked barbs I hereby dedicate

To Pan and to the spirits of the trees.

But I will bring my dog back to the fold,

Alive, unharmed, that I may have my friend

To share my scraps and keep me company.

'This spear' is sigunos, a word not found in LSJ. Aristotle notes it as a Cypriot word, and I reckon Macedonius found in in Aristotle. He must have chosen it to suggest a setting on Cyprus:

‘So that the same word may obviously be at once strange and ordinary, though not in reference to the same people; sigunos, for instance, is an ordinary word in Cyprus, and a strange word with us.’ - Poetics 3.21, tr. Ingram Bywater

Darius' bridge across the Bosporus

When Darius the Great set out to crush the nomadic Scythians he took his great army across the Hellespont on a pontoon bridge built by one Mandrocles, an engineer from the island of Samos. This was before Darius determined on subjugating the Greek city-states. The Great King was good business for lots of Greeks early in his reign.

Darius immediately rewarded Mandrocles with immense wealth, some of which the engineer spent commemorating the success of his project. He commissioned a painting of the army crossing the bridge, with Darius looking on, and dedicated it to Hera in her great sanctuary on Samos (legendarily the goddess's birthplace). An unknown poet supplied an inscription in verse:

He bridged the fishy span of Bosporus:

Now Mandrocles sets up this souvenir

Of his pontoon-work in our Hera’s shrine.

He took a coronet for his reward,

And crowned his Samians with martial fame,

When he fulfilled the will of Darius.

The epigram comes to the Anthology (6.341) through Herodotus, who gives a great account of the bridge episode at 4.87-8.

I'll next move onto some of the erotic epigrams of the Anthology, from Book 5.