'Love-Epigrams', part two: widened horizons

Woodward will surely have met Greek epigram at Harrow, through one of the standard selections compiled for use in classrooms. These books were both teaching tools and paradigms for emulation -- boys not only read but wrote Greek epigrams, and Harrow gave an annual prize for the best such composition. Unsurprisingly, the school selections were carefully winnowed to avoid what we would now term adult content. Published translations into English from the Anthology in the nineteenth century often centred on these poems as familiar mementos of shared upper-class schooldays.

Love-Epigrams knows no such limits, and convinces me that Woodward was choosing his poems from Paton's Loeb, which was still fairly new (1916-18) and was the first and so far the only complete translation of the Anthology into (mostly) English, face-to-face with an affordable and up-to-date edition of its original Greek. Paton's five volumes were a stupendous labour and have been a fundamental resource ever since; an update is under way but has so far only got as far as volume 1.

With Paton to browse in, Woodward ranges widely. The home of heterosexual erotic epigrams is Book 5 of the Anthology, but his selection of 133 poems draws also on Books 6 (votives, x4); 7 (funerary, x2); 9 (epideictic, x7), 10 (protreptic, x1); so-called Book 15 (the Planuedean Appendix, x1); and allegedly also Book 4, though this must be a typo, since Book 4 contains only the prefaces of the anthologists who preceded Cephalas.

By far the largest share of epigrams from outside Book 5, though, comes from Book 12 -- the Anthology's treasure-trove of paederastic epigrams, built around the Mousa Paidikē or 'Boyish Muse' of the notorious Strato of Sardis. One might not expect this from a retired vicar. Woodward's way with the Boyish Muse deserves its own blog post, or posts. Indeed, the very first poem of his selection is one of Strato's.

Woodward's first foray into epigram, part the first

GREEK ANTHOLOGY

133

Love-Epigrams

in

English Verse

Woodward published his first translation from the Greek Anthology in 1934. John Barnes' biography (1996: 114-5) tells me he had by now been printing little books at West Hill for two years, beginning with carol lyrics that he illustrated with woodcuts. In one of those little carol-books were published for the first time the lyrics to 'Past Three A Clock' and 'Ding Dong! Merrily on High'.

Here as in later volumes, Woodward, a lover of old things, uses the archai 'long' form of the letter 's'. Peering closely one can distinguish it from an 'f' but for many readers the extra workload will really fuck. Furely hif friendf muft have fuggefted otherwife? I won't be reproducing thefe -- sorry, these -- in anything I quote in these blog poftf.

Love-Epigrams is to the usual dimensions (discussed in a previous post) but much fatter than anything that followed; the cover is glued onto the stitched spine. The title-page proudly announces its author as 'Formerly Scholar of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge', where he had read classics.

Barnes' focus is primarily on his subject's religious life but he passes on some curious information on this point: Woodward was admitted as a Sayer Scholar and graduated in 1872, after a three-year ride, with only a third-class degree. A casual search suggests the Sayer Scholarships were reserved for Harrow boys, but competition was surely fierce and Woodward's late-in-life translations show him to have remained a highly capable and widely read classical linguist. I suppose we are unlikely ever to know what went wrong, if 'wrong' should turn out even to be a relevant term to apply.

To be continued.

A little about Woodward

Born in Birkenhead, George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848-1934) attended Elstree and Harrow Schools and won a Scholarship to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He read classics, not perhaps very attentively, coming away with a third-class degree and a vocation to the Anglican Church. His long career was spent at various churches in London, Norfolk, and Suffolk. In his country livings he was a keen bellringer and beekeeper. He retired a widower in 1906 and moved to 48 West Hill, Highgate, a distinguished old rental property, in 1916.

In the last years of his life he became a prolific self-publisher of, among other things, tiny books of translations of Greek epigrams into rhyming verse. He made them all at home in Highgate, where he installed a printing press. The books seem to me unusually sized: each page measures five by three-and-three-quarter inches, half the size of a duodecimo. The sheets are hand-cut, and typically joined by a simple double stitch. Covers are of brown card, of thinner stock than the pages they contain. The print-runs (120 or 136 copies) were almost as tiny as the books themselves, each copy being hand-numbered. There seems no indication that he offered them for sale.

If I have it right, the thickest of these pamphlets (Greek Anthology: 133 Love Epigrams in English Verse) is also the earliest (1924). Woodward had been in Highgate for eight years and was well into his seventies. The greatest concentration of his epigram volumes appeared hot on each others' heels in 1931, when he would have been 83 or thereabouts. I wonder if he was working the press by himself, or had help: I expect he had domestic staff. [update: he had two presses there, and in his last years his housekeeper operated them. He left one of the presses to her in his will] His papers are held at UCLA but it does not immediately sound as if they will shed much light. In the meantime I've ordered the biography by John Barnes. [update: it's a lovely book]

I've begun a list of Woodward's possible or (emboldened) definite epigram books, which I'll add to if I find more. I don't know the order in which volumes appeared in years when he issued more than one; I don't yet even have a sense of whether it can be known.

1924    Greek Anthology: 133 Love-Epigrams in English Verse

1925    Domestica: Being Greek Epigrams Turned into English Verse

1926    Greek Anthology: Beauty-Epigrams (I wonder if this is code for AP12?)

1928    Tart and Homely Gibes of Greek Epigrammatists

1928    Gleanings from Ancient Olive-Yards, Greek and Roman (mixed poets, non-Anthology)

1928    ? Spring-Time Songs Translated from the Greek (unclear if includes epigrams; not yet seen)

1929    Greek Epigrams on and by Famous Poets and Musicians

1929    Greek Anthology: Epigrammata Heroica

1929    ? A Bunch of Grapes from Ancient Greek Vineyards Crushed into English Measures (unclear if includes epigrams; not yet seen)

1929 ?  Greek Witticisms told in the English Verse (unlikely to include epigrams, but not yet seen)

1931    Epigrams on Sappho and Other Famous Greek Lyric Poetesses

1931    Greek Epigrams: Religious and Dedicatory, Part I

1931    Greek Epigrams: Religious and Dedicatory, Part II

1931    Greek Epigrams on Timon, Diogenes & Others

1931    Five and Forty Examples of the Epigram Sepulchral

1931    Tales of Sea-Sorrow from the Greek Anthology

1931    ? A Garland of Spiritual Flowers (unlikely to include epigrams, but not yet seen)

Next post

The Highgate Caroller

 In my next few blog posts I want to revisit one of the Anthology's more obscure translators -- the Revd Charles Ratcliffe Woodward (1848-1934), of St Augustine's in Highgate, London, where the porch bears an inscription in his honour (a bit garbled in transcription).

His enduring reputation is as a great collector and composer of carols and seasonal hymns: 'This Joyful Eastertide', 'Ding Dong Merrily on High', 'Past Three o'Clock'. But between 1924 and 1931 he also published a dozen or so books of translations from the Greek Anthology, doubtless making his selections from the newly published complete Loeb. You can see some in the stock of this rare book dealer.

I talk about Woodward a bit in my academic book, Greek Epigram in Reception (2013) but I'd like to unpack his story a little more, if I can find material to go on; and especially to revisit his tiny, card-bound pamphlets and the often charming translations they contain.

If anyone knows anything about Woodward, please get in touch? next post

On small mistakes

No matter how expert, every translator messes up somewhere. So it's with humility and respect, and in the conviction that I will have done worse, that I present here two instances where I was able in a small way to improve on the old Loeb by W. R. Paton.

Paton took on a daunting task. Never before had the whole Greek Anthology been translated into English, and he not only did it (with the minor exception of the poems he reckoned too obscene -- he put those into Latin instead) but did it well. In industry and breadth of learning he towers above me, and none of us could find our way around the Anthology without him.

Still, even Homer nods. Here are two occasions where I was able, or was helped, to fix a glitch.

9.333 (Mnasalcas)

Let us stand by the flatland of the strait,
To view the shrine of Cypris of the Sea;
And see the fount beneath the poplar’s shade
Where sip the beaks of darting kingfishers.

 

This epigram is in the book. 'Darting' in the final line is the Greek xouthos. Paton has yellow kingfishers, and at first so did I, but my wife asked "Are there yellow kingfishers?" and of course I couldn't find any. Xouthos does have a secondary meaning as a yellow or tawny colour, but its basic sense is of rapid movement, and secondarily of the sounds made by rapid movement, especially of wings: nimble, darting, rustling, whirring, buzzing.

 

13.23 (Asclepiades)

Though you be pressed for time, o passer-by,
Listen however briefly to the tale
Of Botrys and his overwhelming woe:
Eighty years old, he buried here his boy,
An infant, but his babble made some sense,
Already showed capacity. I cry
Not just for Botrys but for his dear son,
Robbed of life’s pleasures when he was undone.

This is one of the 'polymetric' epigrams preserved in the Anthology only because they are metrically unusual. Where I put 'an infant', Paton has 'a boy of nine'. The second couplet of the Greek runs:

ὃς πρέσβυς ὀγδώκοντ᾽ ἐτῶν τὸν ἐννέων ἔθαψεν

ἤδη τι τέχνᾳ καὶ σοφὸν λέγοντα.

Paton takes ἐννέων to be a genitive plural of the Greek numeral ἐννέα, 'nine', and pairs it with the genitive plural ἐτῶν: 'of nine years'. But ἐννέα does not decline -- no matter the gender or case, it's always just ἐννέα. Instead I am sure the plural ἐτῶν goes with ὀγδώκοντ᾽, 'eighty', which likewise does not decline: Botrys is an old man of eighty years. Instead I reckon ἐννέων must be a metrically convenient one-off formed from from ἐν(ν)εός, meaning dumb or speechless; or as Latin would have it, infans.

I did not spot this because I am better at Greek than Paton was -- in plain fact it is the other way around. But hard-pressed Paton was several thousand epigrams in, with hundreds left to go. Unlike him, I could make a litttle time to pause and wonder: what would be so special about a boy of nine already making some sense when he tried to speak? The solution followed from there.

My old Martial posts for the OUP World's Classics reading group

 Would you believe these are still up on the OUP site, after all this time? Well, they are --

https://blog.oup.com/authors/gideon-nisbet/

-- and I've been really tickled to re-read them. I was on good form those few weeks, I think. Enjoy, if you haven't already, and despite the copyeditor's weird swapping-out of colons for commas all over the place.

Two unsolved riddles

 The Anthology's fourteenth book is composed of riddles and puzzles. Many of the puzzles are mathematical and I would be at sea without the helpful notes supplied by W. R. Paton in his old Loeb edition. Paton also presents solutions for many of the riddles, but some remain unsolved. Here are two such. Good luck, and please let me know if you get anywhere with them.

14.28

From sea I draw a fishy parentage;
A single contest guarantees I come
To celebrate the Dionysia;
And when I ventured to the stadium,
And made my body slick with olive oil,
With my own hands I slew Demeter’s son.
A second point of note: that I emit
A multitude of Giants from each side,
And they are hauled away by many hands.

14.39

The one who calls me island will not lie:
Aptly he fixed my name into the midst
Of many rushing waters speaking clear.

 UPDATE: the excellent Armand d'Angour has worked these out! See guest post

Martial's Narnia

Martial has a cherished country neighbour who is hardly ever around -- he is in Narnia instead.

Narnia exists; it is an old Roman settlement, today called Narni. It sits on high ground above the river Nera (the ancient Nar) in southern Umbria, and was a strategic waypoint on the ancient Via Flaminia the linked Rome to the Adriatic. C. S. Lewis chose the name from a map because he liked the sound of it, allegedly, though if you go to Narni (please do, it's lovely) you will see lots of old carvings of lions.

 

Here is Martial 7.93. politely asking Narnia if he can have his friend back. For the first time this is me doing Martial in verse:

Hemmed by your silvered stream of sulphur-spring,
And perched upon so steep a mountain cleft
That one may scarcely climb it: NARNIA,
Why must your fancy all too often be
To steal my Quintus, leaving me bereft
As you extend his slow captivity?
My little country place, Nomentum way —
Why must you ruin it, whose worth to me
Was having him next door? O Narnia,
Please do not take advantage; let him be,
Restore my Quintus, and in turn I say
Enjoy your bridge for all posterity.

Two arches of that bridge, built by Augustus and restored by later emperors, are still there along with massive chunks of the rest. The Nera runs through one of the surviving arches; a high-speed train line through the other. We recently visited Narnia and its bridge in the company of our excellent chum Agnes Crawford, of Understanding Rome. The bridge is easy enough to find and is imposingly atmospheric.

 

Horrors of the Deep (slides)

This is the outline view of the slides for my July 2021 Academus talk, for which the script is here.

Horrors of the Deep

Gideon Nisbet

University of Birmingham

g.nisbet@bham.ac.uk

 

My talk this afternoon – main points

1.Introducing epigram

2.The missing-body problem

3.Mysterious nature

4.A lost sea-monster

Content warning: references to violence; briefly, slavery

 

1. Introducing epigram

 

‘The Anthology may from some points of view be regarded as the most valuable relic of antique literature which we possess. Composed of several thousand short poems, written for the most part in the elegiac metre, at different times and by a multitude of authors, it is coextensive with the whole current of Greek history, from the splendid period of the Persian war to the decadence of Christianized Byzantium...

‘Even the Graffiti of Pompeii have scarcely more power to reconstruct the past and summon as in dreams the voices and the forms of long-since-buried men.’

  - J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1873)

 

Kinds of epigram

Inscriptional, and then (also) literary (epi-gramma)

Main literary source: the Greek Anthology (‘AP’)

New discoveries on papyrus (e.g. Milan Posidippus)

Main kinds of literary epigram:

1.Erotic

2.Dedicatory (‘Anathematic’)

3.Funerary (‘Epitaphic’)

Also Rhetorical (‘Epideictic’), Sympotic, Satirical...

 

Three by Simonides: 7.248-9, 254a

From Pelops’ Isle four thousand battled here

Against three million in a bygone year.

Go tell the Spartans, friend, that here we lie:

We heard what they were telling, and comply.

I, Brotachus of Gortyn, man of Crete,

Came not to lie here; I just came to trade.

 

Wayfarer, pause: Heraclitus 7.465

The earth is freshly dug, and on the tomb

Rustle the leaves of half-green coronets;

Read its inscription, wayfarer, and see

Whose polished bones it claims to keep within.

Friend, I am Aretēmias. My land

Was Cnidus...

 

Sending it up: Paul the Usher 7.307

My name is — Should I care? And my home land —

Can I be bothered? And my family

Was famous — Would it matter, if they weren’t?

I lived respectably, and — What’s your point?

And now I lie here — Who were you again?

Do you imagine someone’s listening?

 

2. The missing-body problem

 

Washed ashore: ‘Plato’ 7.269

Sailors, keep safe at sea and on the shore;

This tomb you pass is of a shipwrecked man.

Cf. Antipater of Sidon AP 7.6, on Homer:

...Stranger, the sea-beat strand inters him here.

 

Denied closure: Damagetus 7.497

Thymōdes too, one time, piled up this tomb;

Wept as he did so for the ruined hope

Of his son, Lycus. No-one lies within:

Not even far away is he interred;

But some Bithynian shore or Pontic isle

Has claimed him. There unwept he bares his bones,

And naked lies upon a friendless shore.

 

No body: Leonidas of Tarentum 7.273

The hard and hasty squall from out the East;

The dark of night; the swell Orion sent

As he descended darkly out of view:

These did for me, Callaeschrus. Off I slipped,

Dead as I cleaved across the Libyan main.

Spun in the sea as food for fish I roam;

‘Here lies’ is lies. Nobody is at home.

 

Cf., from Eliot’s The Waste Land

    A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

    Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Find ‘their’ translation on https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus/

 

Half a body: Leonidas 7.506

... But as I came back up from the abyss

And was already reaching out my hands

Toward my shipmates, I was gobbled up.

A monster of the deep attacked — so big! —

And gulped me from my bellybutton down. 

My shipmates pulled one-half of me aboard,

A chilly catch; the shark bit off the rest.

The sad remains of Tharsys they interred,

Good stranger, on this shore: I went not home.

 

3. Mysterious nature

 

The provident hedgehog: anon 6.45

Bristly with spines that gather up the grapes,

This hedgehog, terror of the drying-floor,

Cōmaulus hung alive as offering

To Bacchus, when he caught it rolling through.

Hedgehogs also lay up food for the winter; rolling themselves on apples as they lie on the ground, they pierce one with their quills, and then take up another in the mouth, and so carry them into the hollows of trees... If it were not for the quills which it produces, the soft fleece of the sheep would have been given in vain to mankind; for it is by means of its skin, that our woollen cloth is dressed.

- Pliny, NH 8.56

 

Death on the Nile: anon 9.252

The wayfarer leapt swiftly from the bank

Into the depths of Nile: he saw the wolves,

A greedy pack. But they pursued him on,

Across the water. Each bit onto each,

Latching upon the tail of the next.

A bridge of wolves stretched far across the stream:

The self-taught tactic of the swimming beasts

Bloodily overtook the traveller.

 

God-haunted shores: Theodoridas 6.224

You spiral seashell, whisper in my ear — 

Who set you here, who was the beachcomber

That took you trophy from the surging sea?

‘I am a toy for Nymphs within the cave,

And it was Dionysius set me here,

A gift from holy Cape Pelorias.

He is Prōtarchus’ son. The winding strait

Spat me upon the shore, that I might be

A toy for glistening spirits of the cave.’

 

Swamped by cranes: anon 7.543

Well might one pray to shun all voyaging,

Since you, Theogenes, did make your grave

At sea off Libya, when a deadly cloud

Of cranes innumerable took their rest,

Alighting on your laden merchantman.

The quail is a small bird and when it has come to us remains on the ground more than it soars aloft; but they too get here by flying in the same way as the cranes, not without danger to seafarers when they have come near to land: for they often perch on the sails, and they always do this at night, and sink the vessels.

– Pliny, NH 10.33

 

Back to our shark

A monster of the deep attacked — so big! —

And gulped me from my bellybutton down. 

My shipmates pulled one-half of me aboard,

A chilly catch; the shark bit off the rest.

Cf. Antipater of Thessalonica 9.269, a sailor eaten by a kuōn halos

 

‘A monster of the deep’  kētos (root of our ‘cetacean’)

‘The shark’    pristis, literally a sawfish

Modern Greek word for shark is karkharias; rare in ancient sources

Kuōn karkharias steaks a Macedonian speciality, Archestratus 23)

Karkharos (saw-like, jagged) used of, e.g., the teeth of wolves

 

[image] Pristis antiquorum, the small-toothed sawfish

 

4. A lost sea-monster

 

Antipater of Sidon 6.223

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.

 

Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 13.23

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 (kētos), 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...

 

Nature’s battleship

...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.

Triremes were about 37m (120’) long

Leonidas’ fragment of a scolopendra is c.15m (8 fathoms = 48’)

Standard swimming pool = 25m, Routemaster bus – 8.38m

The common scolopendra: Pliny NH 9.67 (trick), 20.53 (sting)

 

Pieces and parts: Theodoridas 6.222

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.

‘if cast up on the shore no one would have the courage to look at it’

Orion (July/November) the harbinger of storms: V. Aen. 1.534-8

 

Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found...

But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus... [An English scientist] rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it... one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.

 

Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590)

Eftsoones they saw an hideous hoast arrayd

Of huge Sea monsters, such as liuing sence dismayd.

Most vgly shapes, and horrible aspects,

Such as Dame Nature selfe mote feare to see...

All dreadfull pourtraicts of deformitee:

Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales,

Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee.

Bright Scolopendraes, arm’d with siluer scales...

 

Image of Aldrovandi's scolopendra from De Cetis, 1613

 

Contrast the ephemeral blue whale

Fossil evidence now extends dating to 1.5-1.25m years

Assigned balaenoptera musculus by Linnaeus, 1735

‘Sulphur bottom’ in Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Norway accepts blåhval as common name, 1874

It’s been a species for less than three centuries,

And been called the ‘blue whale’ for less than two.

So let’s not write off the scolopendra just yet...

 

Thank you for your time

 

Gideon Nisbet, University of Birmingham

g.nisbet@bham.ac.uk