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.