Two dead warriors

Not very seasonal, I know. Two epitaphs for men killed in battle, the first from Attica in the sixth century, the second from Eretria in the fourth.

IV

Pause here and grieve beside a dead man’s tomb,
Croesus’, whom long ago the war-god slew
As he was in the forefront of the fight.

VIII

The world will never lack a monument
To tell your quality, Lysandrides:
You call a witness we must all believe,
Ares, who made you king of all the field;
Conquered by Fate, in death you gifted fame
To Andros, island garlanded by sea.

 

Three epigrams for Christmas

Happy Christmas, everybody! The following epigrams are from Book 1 of the Greek Anthology, the editor of which, Constantine Cephalas, gave pride of place to poems on Christian themes. None are assigned an author; instead we get explanatory headings. All three are in the book (ideal stocking filler).

37. On the birth of Christ

Trumpets and lightning, and the earth resounds;
But to your Virgin Mother you came down
And trod all silently upon your way.

38. On the same

This manger was as Heaven, and was more;
For Heaven is this newborn’s handiwork.

39. On the shepherds and the angels

One dance, one song for men and angels too,
For man and God have now become as one.

Three performers buried at Athens

These inscribed poems too are from Hunter's lovely new Green-and-Yellow. All are epitaphs from fourth-century Athens.

 

The entry for Euthias in Brill's New Pauly by Nesselrath (so hardly 'new') reads:

 

'(Εὐθίας; Euthías). Attic comic poet, who came second in a contest around the mid 4th cent. BC [1. test.]. Of his plays, neither titles nor fragments are extant.'

 

In other words, if it weren't for this epitaph (the middle one below), we would never have heard of him. He was a playwright; did he also act? And as for Potamo of Thebes, who died at Athens: was he just visiting, perhaps to perform at a festival, or had he made the city his home? The poems let you spin your own story, though clearly theirs were well enough known in their day.

VII

Hellas awarded for the piper’s arts
First prize in every match to Potamo,
A Theban, and he lies within this tomb.
Olympicus his father grew in fame
By virtue of his powers of memory,
Such was the boy he raised, a prodigy
And touchstone to the clever and the wise.

 

IX

All Greece admires him and it marks his loss
In every sacred contest: Euthias,
And rightly so. His gift was not innate
But won by training, and he rose in grade
In sweetly-laughing Comedy, the art
That earns the grape-wreath, to the second place;
So said the vote; but rank him first in grace.

X

Had Fortune brought you safe along the way
To prime of life, for sure, Macarius,
You would have risen high in hope and name,
And held the reins of Tragedy in Greece.
That future did not happen; all the same,
Though young in death, your sober character
And quality assure sufficient fame.

Agathias on what endures, with a dubious pencil and some peculiar creeping

Though Cephalas presents it as a preface (pröoimion, 'proem'), I think Agathias must instead have written the closing poem of Book 4 of the Anthology as his sphragis -- the poetic signet-seal that came at the end of his completed book to warrant its quality and assert his authorship. It's much shorter than his actual proem, thank heavens, and I present the whole of it here in my own translation. The two emboldened bits identify translation choices that I'd like to talk about afterwards.

The slabs of stone, the tools to carve the line,
The tablets with inscriptions — all are cause
Of hearty cheer to those who call them ‘mine’;
But only while they live. The empty vaunts
Of men in life yield little benefit
To souls in that which follows. Nonetheless
Excellent character and wisdom’s grace
Can percolate to there and still remain
In this our world, here to perpetuate
Remembrance. So did Plato never brag
In pigments and in graven monuments,
Nor Homer, but in wisdom all alone.
Happy are they whose memory endures
In libraries of volumes subtly wrought,
And not in emblems destitute of thought.

Line 1's 'tools to carve the line' is my best stab at the Greek graphis. It is close kin to the Greek verb graphō, meaning to write or mark, and the noun gramma, a thing written or marked. Very many words in English derive from these -- telegraph and telegram, autograph, seismograph, graphic, graphite (and thereby graphene), and so on, down to Instagram. Here is the entry for graphis in the great Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, revised by Jones, LSJ for short.

A. [select] = γραφεῖον 1, AP6.63 (Damoch.), 65 (Paul. Sil.), 67 (Jul.): esp. stilus for writing on waxen tablets, Pl.Prt.326d; paint-brush, APl.4.178 (Antip.); graving tool, LXX Ex.32.4; “σύμβολα . . γραφίδεσσι κατέξυσα” Hymn.Is.11, cf. AP4.3b.72 (Agath.); needle for embroidering, APl.4.324.

II. [select] embroidery, AP5.275 (Agath.): but in pl., = paintings, Nonn.D.25.433.

The citation I've highlighted is annoying if you're working from the old Loeb, as I generally am, since it's (a) in the public domain and (b) lovely. The reference is to Agathias' proem, 4.3, parts of which we've considered in previous blog posts. At some point an editor decided to divide this block of verse into a pair of poems: 4.3a (lines 1-46), and 4.3b (everything that follows). There is obvious sense in this. Not only does the topic change, but the metre as well, from iambics to epic hexameter, apt for extolling the heroic conquests of Agathias' emperor. But it means you have to do sums if you are using an older edition and want to make sense of the citation, which in this case refers to the dative plural graphidessi in what used to be line 118.

I think LSJ is actually wrong about this instance. As I understand that line, Agathias is contrasting the use of a graphis to compose inscriptional or quasi-inscriptional epigrams, with the physical carving of such poems onto actual monuments. As my translation had it,

... Part the Second, though,
Collects the antique votive offering:
All that we graved with pens or had inscribed
Out in the world, on well-wrought statue’s base
Or on the many far-flung monuments
That witness to the breadth of human art.

'Percolate' in my line 8 is my playful best guess at what to do with the compound verb sunerpei in line 5 of the Greek. Herpō by itself means to move by slow gradations, as might the very young or very old. If I had to settle for a single English rendering, it would have to be 'creep'. Its close cousin in Latin is serpo, from which we get 'serpent', and our 'herpetology' is the study of creeping things (reptiles). But what is sun-erpō? It has no dictionary entry of its own, and a TLG search turns up just one other instance in the whole of Greek literature, in the philosopher Epictetus. There, it just means to 'herp' in another's company.

On the one hand, that's not terribly helpful; on the other, it frees me up to go for something quirky, as surely was Agathias' original word choice in the poet's own eyes.

Agathias concludes his proem.

This is the final part of the long poem with which Agathias introduces his Cycle, freshly translated for this blog. It follows the praise of his patron, Theodore, of which I gave you a version last time. He closes by telling his readers what to expect by way of structure and content.

Agathias divided his anthology into seven sections, each containing a particular kind of epigram; this was a familiar type of organisation, carried over from the epigram-books of individual classical authors such as Posidippus (as confirmed by the Milan papyrus). Agathias could deploy it on a larger scale within a single volume because parchment codices were much more capacious than the papyrus book-rolls of old.

I would begin by setting out for you,
In rivalry with men of olden time,
All that progenitors of modern song
Have written in the way of offerings
As though for former gods; for it seemed wise
Yet to conserve an expert mimicry
Of ancient letters. Part the Second, though,
Collects the antique votive offering:
All that we graved with pens or had inscribed
Out in the world, on well-wrought statue’s base
Or on the many far-flung monuments
That witness to the breadth of human art.
As for the third part of this book new-made,
It takes as motive, insofar is right,
Whatever mottoes God permitted us
To write for tombs, in verse, while still intent
On truth unswerving. As for what we wrote
Of all the varied paths of human life
And of the teetering scales of fickle fate,
Look for it by the fourth foundation-stone
Of this my book. In quick succession too
The charms of our Part Five may win you round,
In which we wax satirical and write
In the invective mode. The Queen of Love
Steals the sixth chapter, and may well divert
Our path to discourse out of elegy,
And sweet Desires. Within our seventh hive
Of poets’ honey you will ascertain
Pleasures of Bacchus, dancing choruses
That like their drink unwatered, bowls of wine,
And dinner-parties that bring happiness.

The joyful banquets of the proem's conclusion recall its opening lines, in which Agathias introduced his Cycle as a literary smorgasbord of choice morsels from contemporary poets.

In the Anthology, the proem (4.3) is followed by a shorter poem (4.4), also by Agathias, which I think must have concluded his Cycle. In technical terms it is his sphragis, his seal and sign-off, and it's lovely -- but that will be for another day.

Agathias invokes his patron

 

 

 

A very large chunk of Agathias' proem to his Cycle is taken up with praise of his all-conquering Emperor. It used to be taken for granted that he meant Justinian (ruled 527-565), who did indeed get a lot done, but Alan and Averil Cameron challenged this consensus in a 1966 JHS article and suggested we instead consider his son, Justin II.

 

That's not a debate into which I propose right now to wade. Anyway, encomium delivered, Agathias returns to consideration of his own literary conquests. The Camerons also challenge the identification of Agathias' patron with the Theodorus who was magister officiorum under Justinian and Justin. Again, I'm feeling too tired to consider going there, so I'll just give you my translation of the bit that immedaitely follows all the world-conquering stuff.

Maybe one day I'll translate the whole thing, but there's at least one book I really ought to finish first.

 

And so, since all the lands of men are filled
With lovely peace, and since all anxious fears
Of foreign and domestic martial strife
Are blown to pieces by our Emperor,
Then let us call a contest of the wise,
My blessed Theodore, and set in train
The entertainments of the bardic dance.
You see, it was for you I toiled to shape
This prize, and wrought this wordy artefact,
Gathering tight within my monograph
All the promiscuous commerce of the bee,
And gathering a universal bloom
From reams of elegy; I hung for you
A wreath of Calliope eloquent,
As one might offer beech to Kronos’ son,
Hulls to the Earthshaker, a warrior’s belt
To Ares, or a quiver full of darts
To lord Apollo; Hermes, tortoises;
Dionysus, the cultivated vine.
I know that Theodorus’ eponym
Will drizzle endless critical acclaim
Upon my marathon of diligence.

 I'm trivially pleased with how 'marathon of diligence' reshuffles the Greek, though I doubt many readers will want to know about that. Perhaps to be followed up in some future blog post.

In the immediate sequel to this section, and as the conclusion to his proem, Agathias lays out the kinds of poem he will offer us -- and that's something I definitely want to translate.

 

Agathias in the toilet

Agathias 'Scholasticus' ('the Advocate') was the sixth-century anthologist of a Cycle of contemporary epigrammatists, including much work of his own. Some of these are inscriptional in form and I would like to think the following two were inscribed for real, in a public toilet in Byzantium. According to the second poem, Agathias himself had paid to have it renovated. The first poem is newly translated; the second is in the book.

9.644

How justly blessed are you that work the soil,
Stout-hearted labourer, who all your life
Must brace against the agonies of toil
And poverty: the meals you eat are small,
And in the thickets you lay down your head,
Awash with water as your beverage.
Fit as a fiddle, here you sit a while
Unburdening your belly in a flash;
You do not knuckle at your lower spine,
Or thump your thighs in anguish as you shed
Your wholesome cargo. Pitiful are they,
Those who possess or flock about great wealth,
Who set more store by feasting than by health.

 

9.662 

I was a place detestable to see,
A mud-brick warren. Here the strangers came,
And native folk and boorish countrymen,
To noisily excrete their bowel waste,
Until our city’s father intervened.
Agathias transformed me: now I shine,
Who was so ignominious before.

 

Agathias gets his Cycle rolling

I'm becoming very fond of the proem (authorial preamble) to the Cycle of Agathias 'Scholasticus'. This sixth-century historian, our main source for the reign of Justinian, was also a keen and fine poet. His Cycle anthologised a circle of contemporary epigrammatists, including plenty of erotic and satirical ('skoptic') verse. He wove the works of his fellow authors in with his own, just as had Meleager when he compiled the first Garland seven centuries before.

Sixth-century Byzantium had a busy literary scene and was clearly a hotbed of epigram-writing. Four centuries later, Constantine Cephalas drew heavily on Agathias when compiling the prototype of our Greek Anthology.

In this blog post I offer a translation of the opening part of the proem (or rather, of the first and much the longer of the two proems). After this, Agathias moves to a long encomium celebrating the military victories of his emperor, before returning at the end of the proem to a list of the kinds of poems he has chosen to include.

I think his proem is very charming and I hope you will enjoy the version I have made. The short prose preamble I take to be by Constanine Cephalas, the 10th-century compiler of the prototype of our Greek Anthology; he loves adding little explanatory notes of this kind.

....

A collation of epigrams published in Constantinople and dedicated to Theodore the Decurion, son of Cosmas. The proems were delivered after the frequent recitations held at the time.

You gentlemen, I think, have had your fill
From this great smorgasbord of poetry,
So much that all your appetite is fled
And all the dainties sticking in your craw.
You sit there bloated: many before me
Have set before you gourmandising feasts
That sample many genres and persuade
Contempt for common fare. What now to do?
This buffet I have laid: just let it lie,
Until it rots? Or set it on a stall
At wholesale market, hawk at discount there
To barrow-men? Then who could stand a share
Of this my produce, who would buy my words
For thruppence, if not deaf? Yet hope remains —
That you may taste a sample of my wares
And like it, and be raised from apathy:
I know your custom is to judge a meal
Solely by the devotion and good will
Of those who have invited you to dine.

Agathias next spells out why his generous listeners will find their time well spent:

Further than this, the banquet I propose
Comes to you seasoned, and its condiments
Are all brand-new. It was not in my power
To single-handed lay a bill of fare
That did you fellows justice, so instead
I have persuaded many fellow-chefs
To share my toil, donate ingredients,
And amplify your menu. And indeed
These wealthy men provided generously
Of delicacies that they most enjoy;
And I, who borrowed them, take honest pride
In these exquisite dishes of their own.
And any one of them will aptly say,
Pointing to me, and speaking to his peer,
‘This new-made Muses’ dough just recently
I kneaded out myself; the batch he serves
Is one of mine.’ Just so, but such a man
Is not among the wisest of the cooks
Thanks to whose labours I alone am seen
As orchestrator of so great a feast.
For I have nerved myself to sprinkle in
A little share from my own larder store,
So I may not entirely seem to be
A stranger to the company I call.
Instead I offer tidbits from each bard,
Enough to get the taste: if you want more,
To get a bigger plate and eat your fill,
Know you must find them in the market-place.

Agathias' contemporary 'fellow-chefs' included Macedonius the Consul and Paul the Silentiary, whose many epigrams come into the Anthology through their friend's Cycle. He then continues:

To add some dignity to these my toils,
I shall begin my prologue with our king:
For then, I think, the rest will turn out well;
And since I sing of deeds that are so great,
I hope to find such words as fit the theme.

This proem-within-a-proem leads us into praise of Justinian, his all-conquering Emperor (ruled 527-565).

Edit: everyone always used to assume it was Justinian, so I did too, but (who else) Alan Cameron disputed this and now the question is open. Nowhere in the proem is he named. Sixth-century Byzantium knew many emperors, and many Theodores.

Birds and Beasts, by a Beast

 One of my favourite books about the Greek Anthology is Norman Douglas' Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology (1928), which does what it says on the tin in a not terribly systematic way. I like it not least for the self-deprecating charm of the author's introduction, from which I quoted in my last big book, Greek Epigram in Reception:

Three years, I finally concluded, might suffice for the venture. Three years, under some vine-wreathed arbour, with the necessary books at one's elbow, and one's soul at ease... Such a thing, it is obvious, should be a holiday performance; written con amore and not otherwise; in reverential, playfully-erudite fashion. Three years or even more; for I soon realized that the enterprise might well blossom -- why not? -- into a general treatise on ancient Natural History... Three years, I kept on saying to myself -- where shall they be found?

I shall not find them.

Remembered as a novelist and travel writer, Douglas was an aficionado of vine-wreathed arbours; he spent a great deal of time in Posillipo, Capri, Florence, and the French Riviera, moving on whenever scandal blossomed and the law threatened to catch up. Unfortunately it turns out he was a dreadful sex criminal in modern terms. He never got those three straight years because he kept being run out of town.You should never Google your heroes.

But to continue, just the once. This is Douglas on what he managed to come up with, his chaotic lifestyle  notwithstanding. His 'my Anthology' was surely Paton's Loeb:

The pencillings then scrawled in my Anthology are fast fading; I amplified them later with references to such authorities as were accessible, but a good many others would have to be consulted... which I have not been able to procure.

An undertaking, for the rest, of the gentlemanly kind; quite useless. No doubt an interesting little paper might be written, were we to investigate nothing but the Natural History of a single period or of a single poet, such as Meleager... or if we devoted ourselves to one particular beast, say, the lion or the bee... A monograph of this kind would be brief indeed but not without a certain value from a scientific point of view. 

To compile, on the other hand, a long list of creatures mentioned only at hazard (some of the most conspicuous animals are not so much as named in this collection); a list of creatures mentioned by poets good and bad, poets of divers nationalities, poets scattered over a large geographical area and over a period of fifteen hundred years of time -- to compile such a list: what more exquisitely unprofitable?

 'What more exquisitely unprofitable?': it's as if he had foreseen REF.

Simonides' saviour ghost, with Cicero and Woodward

AP 7.77

SIMONIDES

οὗτος ὁ τοῦ Κείοιο Σιμωνίδεω ἐστὶ σαωτήρ,
ὃς καὶ τεθνηὼς ζῶντ᾽ ἀπέδωκε χάριν. 

My favourite carolling anthologist translates it like this in Tales of Sea-Sorrow (1931):

The sailor this, whose ghost did save
His benefactor from the grave.

Simonides is the most famous of classical epitaphists. Woodward's version loses the original's embedded sign-off or sphragis ('Simonides of Ceos'), but handles the returned-favour aspect of the second line really nicely ('his benefactor'). He appends the following charming note:

The story, to which this distich alludes, is told by Cicero (De Divinatione, j, 27): -- After Simonides had seen the corpse of some unknown shipwrecked mariner, and had buried it, he intended to sail on board a certain vessel, but was warned by the ghost of the aforesaid person not to do so; else he should be shipwrecked. Whereupon Simonides remained safe ashore, while the rest, who sailed, were lost.

I love little explainers of this kind. Very few can ever have seen it; like all his little books of epigram, Sea-Sorrow was hand-made in a small print-run of 136 copies, of which the one open on my lap is hand-numbered as No.132. In combination, the translation-and-note clarify an underlying story that the Greek original had left opaque. And Woodward keeps his version to a distich, which I hardly ever can, try as I might.

My own least bad attempt, on a dozy, post-COVID July afternoon, and choosing not to feed in that Ciceronian tidbit:

Here lies the man that saved Simonides,
And he himself already dead and gone;
Repaid the living for a kindness shown.

 

Gaetulicus on Archilochus' tomb, two ways

 Literary epigram lent itself very well to imaginary epitaphs; and epitaphs for the great authors of the classical canon were a great way for later authors to show off their credentials through potted biography. One such was the Roman-named Gaetulicus, nine of whose poems survive in the Anthology. His epitaphic writeup for Archilochus runs to six lines in the Greek:

σῆμα τόδ᾽ Ἀρχιλόχου παραπόντιον, ὅς ποτε πικρὴν
μοῦσαν ἐχιδναίῳ πρῶτος ἔβαψε χόλῳ,
αἱμάξας Ἑλικῶνα τὸν ἥμερον. οἶδε Λυκάμβης,
μυρόμενος τρισσῶν ἅμματα θυγατέρων.
ἠρέμα δὴ παράμειψον, ὁδοιπόρε, μή ποτε τοῦδε
κινήσῃς τύμβῳ σφῆκας ἐφεζομένους.

My version runs to seven, which is pretty close, for me:

This seaside tomb is of ARCHILOCHUS,
Who first dipped bitter Muse in viper’s bile,
And spattered gentle Helicon in blood.
Lycambes knows: he weeps for his three girls,
Who hanged themselves. Go quietly, traveller,
As you pass by: take care you do not stir
The swarm of wasps that sleep upon this tomb.

 Ordinarily I like Woodward's versions very much. He has faults, but who among us shall throw the first stone? He chases rhyme with adorable ingenuity, and on good days his archaisms achieve a grand mood. But AP 7.71 was not so good a day. Six lines become a heavily padded twelve, or as he would put it, XII.

Archilochus’ bier by the sea-shore is here;
   And he was the very first piper
To sorely mis-use and be-dip the poor Muse
   In the venomous gall of the viper.

Blood-staining at will gentle Helicon’s hill,
   This wotteth Lykambes a-rending
His heart over III hempen cords, [wo was he]
   That sent his III girls to their ending.

So on tip-toe pass on: ye way-men, be gone!
   Lest haply, or ever ye know it,
Ye wake from their sleep the wopses that keep
   Watch & ward o’er the grave of this poet.

I don't wot what he was thinking, but I feel the wo, as if stung by wopses.

 

Two epitaphs for men

 Two more from Hunter's fine new Green-and-Yellow.

Going by his excellent notes, the first is from 7th- or 6th-century Corcyra and was carved boustrophedon; the Greek includes the digamma, an ancient letter (a sort of 'fw') that was on its way out.

As in my last post that drew on this source, the numbering is Hunter's.

I

This tomb is of Arniadas, who fell
To ravening Ares close beside the ships,
Soldiering on the banks of Aratthus.
The war-god took him as he led the field
Beneath the echoes of the battle-cry.

II

Whether a citizen or from afar,
Let he who passes weep for Tettichus.
He was a good man and he died in war,
Lost in the bloom of youth. Be on your way;
Shed tears, and may they bring a lucky day.

Guest post: Armand d'Angour answers riddles

The crazily talented Professor Armand d'Angour has kindly supplied the following solutions to some of the Greek Anthology's thornier riddles. Over to the expert. -GN

If one looks at the answers to the riddles, one regularly finds names of animals (including fish), objects, and places, and also commonly the use puns or of parts of words with alternative meanings. For instance, from Paton's Loeb:

νῆσος ὅλη, μύκημα βοός, φωνή τε δανειστοῦ.

My whole is an island; my first the lowing of a cow, and my second what a creditor says.

Answer: Rhodes (dos = give)

One riddle that Paton did not answer, no. 30, clearly refers to the lyre, the body of which is made from at (dead) tortoise and the strings from the gut of a (dead) sheep or ram:

κριὸν ἔχω γενετῆρα, τέκεν δέ με τῷδε χελώνη:
τικτομένη δ᾽ ἄμφω πέφνον ἐμοὺς γονέας.

I have a ram as my father, and a tortoise bore me with him.
When I came into being I killed both my parents.

[My own complementary explanation: Hermes made the first lyre from a tortoiseshell and two ram's horns. -GN]

On a similar basis I suggest the answers to the following are:

4.28

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. (tr. Nisbet)

 Answer: τράγος

1. τράγος is a type of fish

2-3. τράγος means ‘goat’, the nominal prize for tragedy at the Dionysia

4-6. A goat, sacrificed at the Games (stadion - running race), was anointed in oil and sprinkled with barley (=Plutus, son of Demeter)

7-9. τράγος also means ‘merchant-ship’, which was rowed with 100 ‘giant’ oars extending from its sides and “hauled away by many hands”.

14.39
The one who calls me island will not lie:
How aptly he placed my name with reference to many cries.

Answer: Euboia 

This is a pun on εὖ βόω “shout well”. So the peninsula would be aptly named an island for, or with reference to, “many cries”.

[My own translation of 14.39, which I didn't solve:

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

Three inscribed epitaphs for women

These are versions of real epitaphs, the originals of which collected in Richard Hunter's brand-new Greek Epitaphic Poetry: A Selection. For anyone who knows Greek this is a great treat of a book with lots of helpful notes. These three range from the sixth to the early fifth century and are from Thera, rural Attica, and Thasos respectively. The numbering is that of Hunter's edition.

XLVIII

This tomb commemorates Parthenice,
Child of Thrasysthenes, and too soon gone.
Damocleia commissioned it to mourn
Her sister from the self-same mother born.

XLIX

This tomb is Phrasicleia’s. For all time
I shall be called a maiden, since instead
I drew this name in place of marriage-bed.

L

A handsome tomb: my father set it here,
Since I am dead, Learetē by name;
And nevermore shall I be seen again.

Two takes on a bad musician

 I've cracked the covers of the Reverend Woodward's Tart and Homely Gibes of Greek Epigrammatists (1928) and his very first version is of a poem by Lucillius of which I included a version in the book. Here is my version. The original is AP 11.133:

Eutychides the lyricist is dead!
You denizens of underworld, now flee:
Eutychides is coming, with his songs.
He ordered twelve guitars upon his pyre,
And five-and-twenty cases of his tunes.
Now Charon has you in his grip indeed:
Where in the future might a person go,
When even in the kingdom of the dead
Eutychides is inescapable?

And here is Woodward's rhyming version:

Eutychides is dead and gone,
The melodist. Escape anon,
Ye undergrounders: for with odes
Eutychides descends your roads.
Along with him upon the pyre
He bade set XII guitars afire,
Plus V and XX chests, enclosing
Much music of his own composing.
Now Charon’s keel is known to ye:
From henceforth whither may you flee?
For, near Eutychides, we know
’Twas hell on earth, as now below.

I love the inventiveness of 'undergrounders'. The closing lines are a little loose, but isn't it fabulous? The sometime Vicar of Walsingham deserves a wide audience, though he chose to cultivate a narrow one.

The Athenians at Chalcis: three versions

 'Book 16' of the Greek Anthology is a modern scholarly concoction. It contains all the epigrams that are found in Maximus' Planudes bowdlerised redaction of the Cephalan Anthology, but that are absent from the Palattine Manuscript that is otherwise the best witness to that lost original.

Many of these poems are about works of art, which everyone reasonably takes to show that Cephalas' megamix originally included a whole book on this subject and that, for whatever reason, the copyist of the Palatine MS missed it out. But there are poems of various types.

One such (16.26) is an epitaph ascribed to Simonides. If it is his, which I don't doubt, the original will have been inscribed on a lost monument. Here is my version:

Beneath the glen of Dirphys we were slain;
Near Euripus they raised our barrow high,
By order of the people. Justly so:
We sacrificed the loveliness of youth
To face the savage cloud of battling.

Here is Woodward's, from his Epigrammata Heroica of 1929:

Where we fell, neath Dirphys' combe,
Grateful Athens rear'd this tomb
O'er us nigh Euripos bank,
Nor amiss; for, facing dank
War-cloud, we in fight and fray
Barter'd precious youth away.

And here, an unattributed version published in a lengthy piece in the Westminster Review of 1838, occasioned by the publication of and notionally reviewing a German edition of Simonides:

At Dirphys' foot we fell; and o'er us here
Beside Euripus' shore this mound was piled,
Not undeserved, for youth to us was dear,
And that we lost in battle's tempest wild.

 That last couplet is rather like, and perhaps fed into, Housman's well known 'Here Dead We Lie':

 ...Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
 But young men think it is, and we were young.

Dirphys, the modern Dirfi, is a mountain in Euboea; its really good Wikipedia page includes photos of walking trails in wooded valleys below, just the kind of terrain in which the Athenians clashed with the Chalcidians and defeated them. This was Athens' second victory in one day, and Herodotus can tell you all about that; he preserves an epigram from the Acropolis, of which inscriptional fragments also survive, in two versions (one from before and one after the Persian sack). From Herodotus it entered the Anthology as AP 6.343:

The sons of the Athenians laid low
By deeds in battle the Boeotian tribes,
And those of Chalcis, putting out their pride
And bringing them to grief in iron bonds.
They set their horses here, as Pallas’ tithe.

The bronze chariot and horses were still there when Pausanias visited the Acropolis in the second century AD (1.28.2).

Two fragmentary dedications

These poems too are from Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca. I enjoy their fragmentary quality. The first evidently celebrated a victory at the Isthmian Games; the second is a mystery to me and I quite like it that way.

810 (Corinth, fourth century)
 
Of Corinth (lord?) . . .
Set up this chariot as offering . . .
And placed it . . .
In lasting memory . . .

875 (Lesbos, fourth century?)
 
This is Poseidon’s . . .
And decorates Apollo’s . . .
And temple; but the city . . .
In payment for your artistry . . .

A filthy oil-lamp

Ancient homes were lit after dark with oil-lamps made from clay. Wikipedia has a picture of some Hellenistic and Roman examples. They had spouts for wicks and were filled through holes in the middle of their top faces. The oil would typically be less expensive than that used for cooking and might not smell very nice.

Lamps could be decorative as well as functional. The moulds in which they were typically batch-produced could imprint a design or motto, perhaps a humorous or sexy one. A lamp might have more than one wick, or be unusually shaped. I don't have the reference to hand, but I'm pretty sure one of Martial's epigrams character-assassinates a rival but downmarket satirical poet as (among other degrading things) a peddler of novelty oil-lamps.

Hansen's CEG contains one very rude inscriptional epigram from such a lamp, fired in Sicily in the fourth century BCE. It consists of a single metrical line, running around the edge of the lamp's top surface, and thus circling the hole through which the lamp was refilled with oil. The motto was not part of the mould; instead someone took it from the mould and incised it with a sharp point before it was fired in the oven. This is thus a very personal insult, one surely aimed at a known contemporary:

I AM PAUSANIAS' MOST BUGGERED HOLE.

Three offerings from the Athenian Acropolis

 Three sixth-century dedications to Athena, again from Hansen's wonderful Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, and nicely illustrating the formulaic character of votive language. Athena received a lot of one-tenth shares.

194
To Pallas spur of battle and as tithe
Promised to her by Dionysius,
Coloeus’ son, a statue here I stand.
 
197
Lady of Athens, Aristaechmus’ son
Timocrates made you this offering,
And you the child of aegis-bearing Zeus.
 
202
Aeschines to Athena dedicates
This statue that he promised as his tithe,
Gift to the child of aegis-bearing Zeus.

Two more sailor's graves, adorably flawed

These two are taken from p.12 of Woodward's Tales of Sea-Sorrow. The first hinges on an 'eye rhyme'; the second eccentrically Anglicises the Greek personal name Pheidōn (which might ordinarily come to us Latinised as Phido) and makes the poem's sense more dogged than I think Woodward can have intended.

I love them already for their control of tone, but more so for their imperfections.

JULIAN, PRAEFECT <OF EGYPT>: VII.582

Ship-wreckt sea-man, fare thee well!
E'en within the gates of hell
Dub not thou the sea unkind:
Rather blame the stormy wind,
For it proved the death of thee.
But the billow of the sea
On her breast thy body bore
To thy fathers' tombs ashore.
 
LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM: IX.107

Avoid the storms of life, and run
To Hades' port as Fido, son
Of Kritès, I myself have done.

Two from Woodward's 'Tales of Sea-Sorrow'

 Dipping back into Woodward, I learned a new word that I do not expect to be allowed in Scrabble. These two quite lovely versions from the Anthology's epitaphic seventh book appear on p.41 of Tales of Sea-Sorrow (1931) and are what you might expect from the title.

As in previous posts, I have replaced the long 's's that moft modern readers would otherwife find abfurd and diftreffing, but otherwise do not meddle with the translator's archaising charm. The more I dip into Woodward, the more I find to enjoy and admire.

ANTIPATER OF SIDON: VII.639

Every where the sea's the sea.
Why to Hellè straits give we,
Or to Cycladés, ill name?
Why the Needles idly blame?
They deserve no evil fame.
Safely past these spots I came,
Doom'd to meet, in sorry sort,
Death at Skarphè, when in port.
Proy who will, 'Fair passage home,'
After all, the foam's the foam,
As declareth, nigh the wave,
Aristagoras his grave.

ISIDORE: VII.532

Eteókles is my title:
Sea-born hopes from off my pightle
Drew me for to try my hand
Trafficking in foreign land.
So I trod on ridge and back
Of the Tyrrhene salt-way track,
Until ship and man were drown'd,
Overwhelm'd by wave profound,
Feeling full brunt of the blast.
No man may the twain contrast:
Airs, that winnnow chaff from wheat;
Airs, that blow on canvas-sheet.

Three inscribed epigrams from Attica

I'm not done with Woodward, the carolling epigrammatist, but here for a breather are some versions of epitaphs from Attica. They are numbered after the Greek originals in Peter Allen Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (1983/1989, 2 vols), a wonderful resource.

Where known, Hansen tells us where the stones bearing the inscriptions were found. Poem 40's grave-marker was recovered from the wall of a church where it had been reused as masonry; poem 52's, from the wall built by Themistocles to protect the transport corridor between Athens and its harbour at Piraeus.

Poem 66 is followed by a credit to the stonemason who carved the image of the deceased on the funeral stela that bears the inscription. 

40 (Attica, sixth century)

 

This tomb is famed abroad. Pisianax

Erected it for Damasistratus,

His son, for so is honour due the dead.

 

52 (Attica, sixth century)

 

Among the Samians a noble man

Is here entombed, son of Hēragoras,

Leōnax, far away from those he loved.

 

66 (Attica, sixth/fifth century)

 

Phi[ltiades of Sam]os here interred

Chaste Lampitō, far from her fatherland.

-Endoius was the artist

'Love-Epigrams', part five: the girl in the library

                       XXIX

HIMS ANCIENT AND HERS MODERN

        ΗΣΙΟΔΟΥ ΠΟΤΕ ΒΙΒΛΩΝ

    [MARCUS ARGENTARIUS: ix, 161]

My Hesiod book one day while I was thumbing,
I saw young Pyrrha suddenly a-coming:
Cried I, my folio flung upon the floor,
'Old Hesiod, of thy Works & Days why more?'

This is a perfectly fine translation, line for line, of an epigram by Marcus Argentarius (he wrote satirical epigrams before Lucillius and I really should find out more about him). Woodward updates the terminology of book-reading: the poem's speaker is scolling (ἑλίσσων) through a papyrus book-roll, not thumbing the pages of a 'folio' (in the Greek simply βίβλον both times). But this is fair play.

There are two small amplifications. Pyrrha is not explicitly 'young' in the original, but youthful beauty is the built-in presumption (epigram treats old women as hags). Specifying his Works & Days helpfully reminds a modern readership of the stuffy moral precepts for which Hesiod was best known. Otherwise Woodward is unusually close to the Greek: 'Old Hesiod' is indeed ὦ γέρον Ἡσίοδε.

Why pick out this poem? Because it chimes with some of Woodward's own, original verse. I know this thanks to John Barnes's biography, a helpful source that I've mentioned before. Barnes quotes the following from Wooodward's Miscellaneous Verse Sacred and Secular of 1928, some years before Love-Epigrams:

If e’er ye be found
In the Reading-room Round,
   Remember the bachelor Preedy,
Whose forefoot was lamed,
And his heart-string unframed,
   By the fall of an Encyclopedy.

’Twas Edna the fair,
With flaxen-fine hair,
   Was studying under the dome,
When, out of command,
Dropt out of her hand
   A weighty historical tome.

‘So sorry’, said she:
‘No matter’, said he:
   But mark, a few days after those,
On her finger a ring,
All along of the thing
   Let fall, as befel’t, on his toes.

There was nothing irregular about a woman using the British Library in Woodward's day but the idea of women around books seems to have bemused him. Though probably he liked women well enough, in contexts unscholarly; at any rate, he had been married to one.

'Love-Epigrams', part four: shuffling gender

An old move in scholarly apologetics around the Boyish Muse is to point out that not all its poems are gay anyway: some girls with potentially boyish-sounding names have ended up there by mistake. One such is the 'Phanion' of Meleager AP 12.53, included in Woodward's selection (his poem 102) and sentimentally semi-modernised:

...If haply on the shore ye see
My Fanny crafting wilful glance
This way o'er ocean's broad expanse,
Tell her, ye gallant keels, from me...

Not all names ending '-ion' were girls' names, which of course is why some such girls end up in AP12 by mistake, but translators could be tempted to expand the list, re-sexing homoerotic epigram's objects of affection by suggestion or outright fibbing. Woodward does not specify the sex of the 'Timarion' of Meleager AP 12.113 (his poem 78) but lets the poem's new heterosexual neighbours do the talking. I've elsewhere seen the same poem glossed with an explanatory note stating that Timarion is female, though the name is characteristic of pederastic epigram (Edmonds, Some Greek Poems of Love and Beauty (1937), p.30).

In his poem 19 Woodward leans on the potentially feminine sound of a boy's name to tweak his pronouns. His Christianising version runs to three stanzas:

When ’twas time to take my leave,
Moiris kist me yester-eve.
Whether soothly it were so,
Or a dream, I hardly know.

Though the rest is well defined,
And I bear it all in mind,
Everything whereof she spake,
Or did fond enquiry make,

But and if she kist me too,
Beats me; for, if this be true,
Once caught up to heavenly bliss,
That should be my world, not this.

A common English reader asked to guess Moeris' sex might well say female, by analogy with Phyllis or Doris. In fact the name is masculine. Here is my World's Classics version. The original is Strato AP 12.177.

Moeris at evening, as we said goodnight —
He took me in his arms? I cannot say
If it was real, or only in a dream.
Already I recall what went before,
In every detail: all the things he said,
All of the questions that he asked of me;
But did he kiss me, too? I can but guess.
If it is true, how can it be the case
That I am walking, feet upon the ground?
For last night surely I became a god.

There is no 'he' in the Greek, no adjectives or pronouns to give the game away, and I can see why Woodward might have wanted to slip this one in -- it's a fantastic poem. The choice may seem a little risky, since even readers with litle or no classical learning might recognise Moeris as a boy from Virgil, where he is set in pastoral dialogue with Lycidas (Eclogue 9). Then again, Woodward's audience was select, his print-runs tiny. One may picture him operating his home press at Highgate and anticipating his chosen readers' pleasure at how deftly he has re-touched a problematic source. Next post

'Love-Epigrams', part three: starting with Strato

Woodward opens with a piquant choice: AP 12.2, the second of the programmatic poems with which Strato introduces his Boyish Muse. Stripped of typographic archaism, the caroller's version runs as follows, in three stanzas:

Seek not in these leaves of mine
Priam at the altar-shrine:
Look not for Medea's woes,
Nor for Niobe's ill throes:
 
Nor for chamber'd Itys' grief,
Nor for night-cocks on the leaf:
For of all such manner stuff
Former bardies wrote enough.
 
But the blitheful Graces iii, [i.e., three]
And sweet Eros ye shall see,
Blent with Bacchus; and, I wot,
Serious looks become them not.

My World's Classics version, for comparison:

No Priam at the altars on my page,
Woes of Medea or of Niobe;
No dozing Itys and no nightingales
Among my leaves, so do not seek them here.
Poets of old penned them exhaustively;
Instead find sweet Desire with pleasant Grace,
And Bacchus. They do not deserve a frown.

It's a matter of taste which one you prefer; Woodward's is hardly inaccurate. Instead he changes the poem's meaning it by uncoupling it from its immediate company. Here is 12.1, the poem that precedes it and opens the book:

‘Let us begin from Zeus’, Aratus said;
Muses, I shall not bother you today.
If I love boys and keep their company,
What is it to the maids of Helicon?

The poem immediately following it, AP 12.3, is explicitly homosexual and assigns pet names to the stages of erection of a young man's penis (I've blogged this poem). Woodward's isolation of 'Seek not in these leaves...' from its original context reframes his Strato as a poet of presumptively heterosexual amours.