Aldington's Myiscus

A GIRL SPEAKS

He is lovely; sweet and dear to me is the name of Myiscus; what reason have I for not loving him? | For he is beautiful, by Aphrodite, all beautiful; and if he is cruel -- Love mingles bitter with the sweet.

So runs Aldington's version (p.34) of Meleager AP 12.154. He stays close to the Greek. Compare Paton's Loeb:

Sweet is the boy, and even the name of Myiscus is sweet to me and full of charm. What excuse have I for not loving ? For he is beautiful, by Cypris, entirely beautiful ; and if he gives me pain, why, it is the way of Love to mix bitterness with honey. 

 The big difference lies in the heading he has assigned: 'A GIRL SPEAKS'. What motivates it? Headings of this kind frame the reader's experience of the translated poem, and at many points in the history of epigram's modern exegesis they have helped steer readers away from disallowed truths around gender and sexuality in the Greek original. Their frequent allies are categorisation, creative ambiguity, and avoidance or outright alteration of pronouns -- any number of translators have thereby turned pretty boys into pretty girls.

De-gaying epigram is easiest when the Greek name of a male beloved rings ambiguously in modern ears, as 'Myiscus' does not. Any reader is going to know that he is masculine. Fallbacks in such a case can include rearrangement and recategorisation of poems, a game Aldington does not play; or occasionally refocalisation, in which paratext plays a vital role. That would be the easy thing to think about Aldington's 12.154 if we met it in some other context --  but literary epigrams are invariably encountered in some kind of sequence, and Aldington has already given us several Myiscus poems that are openly homoerotic. Here are a couple:

By Eros, Tyre brings forth beautiful lads, but Myiscus outshines the others as the bright sun outshines the stars. (AP 12.59, p.25)

One beauty is all I know, my keen eye sees Myiscus only; I am blind to all the rest. | He seems to me everything. Do the eyes see thus to flatter the heart? (AP 12.106, p.30)

So why does he title his final Myiscus poem 'A GIRL SPEAKS'? Is it that in this poem Myiscus gains a little agency, the power to say no? Once again, I am left wondering.

Meleager resexed

This week we begin digging into the versions of Meleager made by Richard Aldington a little over a century ago (1920). The following epigram by Meleager is placed among the erotic poems of Book 5. Its position there is not an infallible guide to its content: when Cephalas divided heterosexual from homosexual amours, he occasionally made mistakes. But I don't doubt that it belongs where he placed it. The motif of the lamp is characteristic of epigrams about faithless partners in opposite-sex liaisons.

I give Aldington's version first, then mine:

WRITTEN IN WATER

You, holy Night, and you, Lamp, were the only witnesses of the oaths we took; she swore that she would love me and I that I would never leave her; you witnessed our common testimony.

Now she says that the oaths were written in water and you, Lamp, see her in the arms of others!

 

You holy Night, you lamp: no celebrants
But you we chose, to witness to our vows.
His was to love me always, mine to leave
Him never; and the two of you were there.
But now he says those oaths are borne away
On water, void: and, lamp, you see him now
Enfolded by another — and by more.

The faithless lover of Meleager's original is unambiguously a 'he', and Aldington must have known that. Even if he weren't classically educated, which he was, he will have had recourse to the Loeb: quite apart from its facing-text translation, Paton's was the most up-to-date version of the Greek text. The gender of the first-person speaker is no more explicit in the Greek than is the gender of the 'others' with whom the betrayer now consorts, but the scenario is clear enough.

Why then 'she'? At this point we are off into storytelling. Did Aldington not feel comfortable writing/translating from a female character's point of view? He liked women well enough. Did he think it might make the poem read as homosexual? Maybe it's better not to dig too deeply.

Meleager in the small press

I've started getting interested again in early twentieth century translations of Meleager of Gadara, after finding out earlier in the year that T. E. 'of Arabia' Laurence nearly took a run at him. Our university library and archive have a couple of rarities tucked away and I'm looking at one right now, Richard Aldington's The Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1920).

Aldington published with the Egoist Press, born from the wreckage of the Egoist magazine (1914-19) and best known for a constellation of literary Modernists: the end papers of his two-and-sixpence Meleager advertise Joyce, Wyndham Lewis (founder of Vorticism), Eliot, and Pound, and end by trailing a forthcoming something-or-other titled Ulysses. Aldington himself was a poet of no mean reputation (Images, 3s6d net). But the Egoist also had an established list of translations and Aldington was especially active on that front, with versions of Anyte (bundled with Edward Storer's Sappho), Latin Renaissance poets, and finally, Meleager. These little volumes sat alongside versions of Euripidean choruses by H.D., and of Posidippus and Asclepiades by Storer.

We know that the Imagists especially prized Greek epigram for its lapidary concision, spare phrasing, and striking...well, images. I must look up Storer's versions; he was an interesting fellow. Aldington's in the meantime strike me as worth blogging. He admits to some self-censorship at the outset and declares his regret at the necessity in a not-yet-modernised England:

... V.208, XI.223 and XII.86 are obscene. Two lines have been omitted from XII.33 and XII.41. This translation is, therefore as complete as can possibly be expected, since nine of the fourteen omitted are probably not by Meleager at all, and the others could only be printed in an enlightened country. I have reason to believe that this is by far the most complete translation issued in English. Those who know French and wish to see how a Greek peot ought to be translated, should read M. Pierre Louÿs' translation of a hundred poems of Meleager.

Hmmm, Louÿs... another rabbit-hole. Looking to the Loeb, Paton did fudge the closing line of 12.33, but not the far worse 12.41 ('goat-mounting herds'). And it would not have occurred to me that 12.86 was obscene at all; Paton translates it fully. Plenty to think about in coming weeks.

Epigram takes a bath: conference paper

• [Thanks to chair, organisers, hosts, conference helpers]
• My paper this afternoon pairs nicely with Bernadette’s.
• Together, we show that a single genre can mediate ancient experience in very different ways. Epigram contains multitudes.
• The epigrams I introduce today are from the Greek Anthology, and are among our most vivid literary sources for ancient bathing,
• As briefly noted by Kathleen Dunbabin.
• These Anthology poems were closely tied to — and sometimes participated in — the late antique inscriptional practice on which Dunbabin then concentrates her scholarship.
• Many are by known literary authors, and are written to demonstrate rhetorical skill —
• But named authorship and literary sophistication can go hand in hand with genuine inscription.
• This paper will:
• Situate the balneary epigrams within their anthologised context,
• And, within the likely source from which they came to the Anthology: the sixth-century Cycle of Agathias.
• It will examine them as a collection, artfully curated both by Agathias and by the later collector who expanded on his arrangement.
• We will close by considering these epigrams as witnesses to the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing in the Byzantine world,
• In the light of the characteristic concerns of their named authors.
• A word about the handout:
• The section headed ‘A balneary anthology’ is a partial translation of the sequence. My talk will refer to some of these poems, but by no means all.
• I’m giving you the work-in-progress, such as it is, so you have something extra to take away.
• All translations are my own.
• The balneary epigrams in their anthologised context
• The Greek Anthology in its present form runs to sixteen books, of which the sixteenth, the so-called Planudean Appendix, is a modern compilation.
• Not all the other fifteen are exclusively devoted to epigram, and some of them probably are not original to the archetype assembled by Constantine Cephalas in the early C10 AD.
• However, he definitely put together the book with which we are concerned today.
• It is given over to what he calls epideictic epigrams, written to display excellence in rhetorical display.
• Since poets like showing off, it is by far the longest of the books he edited, at 827 poems — a whole Loeb to itself.
• The epigrams about bathing are placed late in the book.
• They are preceded by a run of twenty-one poems (9.584-605) that mostly concern works of art: some are portraits, while others show famous scenes from myth;
• And this theme of art criticism, intertwined with myth, sets up nicely for the bathing poems, since ancient thermae were often beautifully decorated. [PowerPoint]
• Indeed, Dunbabin suggests that the very first poem of the sequence, 9.606, was inscribed as a caption to a painting or mosaic or statue of Aphrodite in just this kind of material context; and perhaps she is right.
• I think it’s no accident that the two art-critical poems that come immediately before the bathing sequence (AP 9.604-5) are by a famous woman poet, Nossis. [PowerPoint slide].
• She praises portraits of beautiful women who possess kharis and inspire pothos, two recurring topics in the bath epigrams.
• Immediately after the poems about bathing (9.606-640), a quartet of poems by Agathias continues the watery theme:
• The first, on Justinian’s military bridge over the River Sangarius [PowerPoint].
• Descending from the sublime to the ridiculous, the remaining three are on a public toilet that Agathias refurbished at his own expense (642-4); the theme is revisited at 9.662, of which I supply a version here for your amusement. [PowerPoint]
• Then comes further material on the built environment: 9.643-7 is great cities, 648-51 on inns, and 651-60 on mansions and palaces; then gardens and parks (663-9), on which I recommend the recent chapter by Steven Smith; and so on.
• Epigram’s bathhouses are home to Eros and the Graces, and the example I offer here, 9.669, finds those same charming powers in a locus amoenus in the suburbs of Amasia in northern Turkey. [PowerPoint]
• The balneary sequence is, then, thoughtfully placed and appropriately framed within the Anthology.
• The balneary epigrams as part of Agathias’ Cycle
• I draw your attention now to the first and longest of the texts on my handout.
• This is part of the verse preface composed by Agathias to introduce his Cycle, an anthology compiled in the late C6 AD, and one of the several prototypes out of which Cephalas built the Greek Anthology, several hundred years later.
• Earlier in the preface, Agathias elaborately describes how he has interwoven his own poems with those of his peers.
• Explicitly he has done so with their consent. His anthology is meant to stimulate the reader’s appetite for the books of epigrams published individually by each of the featured poets, whom he presents as his literary collaborators or ‘fellow-chefs’ in an elaborate culinary analogy. To quote:
• … 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.
• Every epigram in Agathias’s Cycle must have come with a heading identifying its author’s name, so that readers would know which books to buy.
• Agathias calls his fellow-authors ‘wealthy’ as well as ‘generous’, and many of them hold titles that confirm it. They are lawyers, or court officials. The rank of ‘Consul’ worn by Macedonius was largely honorary, but Silentarii or Ushers did more than just hush.
• [PowerPoint of epigram 1.35] Agathias and his friends had always known they were destined for great things.
• As described in the section of his preface that I have italicised on the handout, the second part of his Cycle is the obvious source for many of the bathing poems of Book 9, and indeed for many of the twenty-nine epigrams on infrastructure that follow it, though not for the poems on art that come before.
• The named authors of the infrastructure poems are Agathias and his colleagues – Macedonius, Paulus Silentiarius, and so on —
• Most of whom are also represented in the bath-house sequence,
• As well as elsewhere in the Anthology –
• Including in the skoptic and sympotic Book 11, the epitaphs of Book 7,
• And notably of course in the erotic epigrams of its fifth book, substantial parts of which are taken from the sixth part of the Cycle.
• ‘Expert mimicry | of ancient letters’ is the declared justification of the Cycle’s first part, comprising dedicatory poems to pagan gods in whom Agathias’s world had long since ceased to believe;
•  But a commitment to creative anachronism clearly also factors into other parts of the Cycle, including parts six and seven, where Christian court officials play at being pagans drunk on love and wine.
• This generic playfulness extends to the Cycle’s second part, which included the poems by named authors about thermae.
• If we can believe Agathias — and I do — then some of these poems were composed for genuine inscription, while others are literary simulacra, perhaps sometimes approached through an antiquarian and paganising point of view.
• But he gives us no clue which are which, and if we try to tell the two kinds apart, we do not get very far.
• Both inscriptional and literary epigram had very long histories by his time, as of course did bathing,
• And surviving inscriptional epigrams confirm that the two kinds continued to operate in close mutual dialogue, just as they always had, since the time of the Persian Wars if not before.
• [PowerPoint of kharis inscriptions]
• Their repertoire of motifs was held in common, and an antiquarian and paganising point of view might be expressed either on the page or on a bath-house wall.
• However, one feature that distinguishes the bath-house sequence from what we know of the Cycle is the incorporation of epigrams by unknown authors.
• These poems, too, are likely to have blended genuine inscriptions with literary imitations,
• And again, the only way to tell the two apart would usually be to dig up inscriptions that matched.
• The Christian epigrams of Book 1 tell us clearly that Cephalas liked collecting inscriptional poems when they came readily to hand. Constantinople will have been full of them.
• Of course, some of the anonymous poems are highly unlikely to have been commissioned as inscriptions — no bath owner would have wanted 9.617 on the wall, telling customers they were likely to freeze to death.
• Similarly, 9.609a functions within the sequence as a satirical response to 9.609, and it is hard to imagine a bathhouse owner paying to have it inscribed. But this has no necessary bearing on whether 9.609 was, or was not, put up on a real bath-house wall.
• Perhaps a literary author composed them as a pair;
• Or they are part of a literary conversation between two or more authors, perhaps over a long period of time;
• Or conceivably 609 was a real inscription, and a dissatisfied customer appended 609a as a graffito. Let’s not waste time worrying further.
• Let us instead ask: what are the anonymous epigrams doing here? Agathias named all his poets, so they must have been slotted in by a later hand,
• Rather as I think must have happened with the Boyish Muse of Strato of Sardis, as it swelled to become the Anthology’s pederastic Book 12, but on a smaller scale.
• Insertion at a later stage does not tell us anything about when the anonymous epigrams were composed. They could be earlier, could be later.
• In terms of their themes and the implied milieu they are pretty much indistinguishable from those of the named authors. Let’s just say ‘Byzantine’ and leave it at that.
• The epigrams as an ordered or semi-ordered sequence
• Now, the anonymous poems appear to have been inserted with some care, into an Agathian sequence that was itself sensibly designed.
• You will have seen that the run of anonymous poems that open it, 506-9, alternates between Aphrodite and the Graces, establishing them as a ‘double act’ in a way we could call programmatic for the expanded bath-house sequence as a whole.
• 609a then transitions the reader into a section on small baths, that continues till 614, — in the light of discussion this morning I think we must take these to be specifically the hot rooms;
• And later we have a concentration of poems on how baths make their customers irresistible to the opposite sex (619-22).
• The first poem of that new sequence introduces the theme of the Judgement of Paris, revisited sporadically in a couple of later epigrams (633 and 637).
• Of the poems by named authors to which the anonymous material has been added, 619 and 620 are thematically well matched.
• 624-5 are united by the Graces, 625-6 by Aphrodite, and 626-7 by Eros, giving us a sequence of overlapping thematic pairs.
• 630 and 631, by named authors, comment on how warm the water is. So too does the anonymous poem that follows, 632, again showing thoughtful action on the part of the post-Agathian interpolator. As with the pederastic Book 12, my money would be on Constantine Cephalas himself.
• So: this artful Agathian sequence has been artfully expanded.
• The balneary epigrams as a source for the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing
• I want to close by inviting you to consider the epigrams as a source for the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing in the Eastern Rome of late antiquity.
• The epigrams suggest it was mediated by classical tropes for anyone with a classical education —
• Which is to say, any man or boy educated beyond a basic level, and some women and girls too.
• We might have guessed this already from the presence of the Graces in a few excavated inscriptions, and from a decorative preference for classical themes,
• But the Anthology makes our picture much more vivid.
• The epigrams expect their readers to know Greek mythology and to know some admittedly famous lines from Homer and Pindar.
• They are distillations of paideia, as it bears on the civilised tradition of bathing.
• In effect, they constitute a balneary sophistic.
• Suggestions that they engage with visual traditions in art, or perhaps rather with the rhetorical traditions of art criticism and ekphrasis, are therefore very plausible.
• But these poems are also the work of erotic poets, who were accustomed to mediating desire through the filter of Aphrodite, Eros, occasionally the Graces —
• [PowerPoint AP 5.231]
•  — and through a tradition of erotic epigram that stretched all the way back through Meleager to fourth-century Alexandria.
•  Just from browsing the handout, you will have seen that bathing with the poets of Book 9 is often sexually tantalising.
• [PowerPoint of Numidian inscription] This was not unknown in real bath-house inscriptions, but the surviving evidence suggests it was rare — though Agathias and his friends may have helped make it less so.
• Compare for instance 9.625, on your handout, with one of the same author’s epigrams from the erotic section of Agathias’ Cycle, now in book 5 of the Anthology:
• [PowerPoint of 5.219]
• The bath attendant of 625 moves into the role of the watchful porter who, in erotic elegy, bars the door of a domestic dwelling to prevent the lovers’ illicit rendezvous.
• We see then that the bath-house poems come out of, and help expand, a shared fantasy rooted in classical elegiac tropes. Respectable Christians can dip into the fantasy of an ancient empire of pleasures. They bathe regularly just as their pagan ancestors did, in edifices within which those ancestors would feel immediately at home,
• And amid scenes from ancient myth that activate collective memory through shared acculturation.
• As tagged by art and epigram, the bath-house offers a physical and emotional connection to the classical past;
• When customers pay the entrance fee, they rent temporary access to an imagined classical subjectivity, with all its possibilities. They can be Homeric heroes, or elegiac lovers.
• Probably nothing physically exciting happened from day to day in the thermae of Byzantium, and the physical spaces were sometimes disappointing,
• But educated bathers were set free into a shared space of cultural nostalgia for an age of gods and goddesses without pantaloons or bodices (to paraphrase Byron), and of men and women who followed their lead.
• The classical past had never really been like that, but the fantasy was what mattered. The past is always gone. In the now, a fantasy of the past is always more real.
• I leave the last word to Paul the Usher, AP 9.620, on a bath with men’s and women’s spaces separated by a door:
• The hope of love is imminent, but still
• One cannot catch the women unaware.
• A door so small cannot accommodate
• The mighty Paphian. And yet in this
• I find some balm: for men of broken heart,
• Hope is more honeyed than reality.
• Thank you all for your time.
• ENDEpigram takes a bath
• [Thanks to chair, organisers, hosts, conference helpers]
• My paper this afternoon pairs nicely with Bernadette’s.
• Together, we show that a single genre can mediate ancient experience in very different ways. Epigram contains multitudes.
• The epigrams I introduce today are from the Greek Anthology, and are among our most vivid literary sources for ancient bathing,
• As briefly noted by Kathleen Dunbabin.
• These Anthology poems were closely tied to — and sometimes participated in — the late antique inscriptional practice on which Dunbabin then concentrates her scholarship.
• Many are by known literary authors, and are written to demonstrate rhetorical skill —
• But named authorship and literary sophistication can go hand in hand with genuine inscription.
• This paper will:
• Situate the balneary epigrams within their anthologised context,
• And, within the likely source from which they came to the Anthology: the sixth-century Cycle of Agathias.
• It will examine them as a collection, artfully curated both by Agathias and by the later collector who expanded on his arrangement.
• We will close by considering these epigrams as witnesses to the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing in the Byzantine world,
• In the light of the characteristic concerns of their named authors.
• A word about the handout:
• The section headed ‘A balneary anthology’ is a partial translation of the sequence. My talk will refer to some of these poems, but by no means all.
• I’m giving you the work-in-progress, such as it is, so you have something extra to take away.
• All translations are my own.
• The balneary epigrams in their anthologised context
• The Greek Anthology in its present form runs to sixteen books, of which the sixteenth, the so-called Planudean Appendix, is a modern compilation.
• Not all the other fifteen are exclusively devoted to epigram, and some of them probably are not original to the archetype assembled by Constantine Cephalas in the early C10 AD.
• However, he definitely put together the book with which we are concerned today.
• It is given over to what he calls epideictic epigrams, written to display excellence in rhetorical display.
• Since poets like showing off, it is by far the longest of the books he edited, at 827 poems — a whole Loeb to itself.
• The epigrams about bathing are placed late in the book.
• They are preceded by a run of twenty-one poems (9.584-605) that mostly concern works of art: some are portraits, while others show famous scenes from myth;
• And this theme of art criticism, intertwined with myth, sets up nicely for the bathing poems, since ancient thermae were often beautifully decorated. [PowerPoint]
• Indeed, Dunbabin suggests that the very first poem of the sequence, 9.606, was inscribed as a caption to a painting or mosaic or statue of Aphrodite in just this kind of material context; and perhaps she is right.
• I think it’s no accident that the two art-critical poems that come immediately before the bathing sequence (AP 9.604-5) are by a famous woman poet, Nossis. [PowerPoint slide].
• She praises portraits of beautiful women who possess kharis and inspire pothos, two recurring topics in the bath epigrams.
• Immediately after the poems about bathing (9.606-640), a quartet of poems by Agathias continues the watery theme:
• The first, on Justinian’s military bridge over the River Sangarius [PowerPoint].
• Descending from the sublime to the ridiculous, the remaining three are on a public toilet that Agathias refurbished at his own expense (642-4); the theme is revisited at 9.662, of which I supply a version here for your amusement. [PowerPoint]
• Then comes further material on the built environment: 9.643-7 is great cities, 648-51 on inns, and 651-60 on mansions and palaces; then gardens and parks (663-9), on which I recommend the recent chapter by Steven Smith; and so on.
• Epigram’s bathhouses are home to Eros and the Graces, and the example I offer here, 9.669, finds those same charming powers in a locus amoenus in the suburbs of Amasia in northern Turkey. [PowerPoint]
• The balneary sequence is, then, thoughtfully placed and appropriately framed within the Anthology.
• The balneary epigrams as part of Agathias’ Cycle
• I draw your attention now to the first and longest of the texts on my handout.
• This is part of the verse preface composed by Agathias to introduce his Cycle, an anthology compiled in the late C6 AD, and one of the several prototypes out of which Cephalas built the Greek Anthology, several hundred years later.
• Earlier in the preface, Agathias elaborately describes how he has interwoven his own poems with those of his peers.
• Explicitly he has done so with their consent. His anthology is meant to stimulate the reader’s appetite for the books of epigrams published individually by each of the featured poets, whom he presents as his literary collaborators or ‘fellow-chefs’ in an elaborate culinary analogy. To quote:
• … 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.
• Every epigram in Agathias’s Cycle must have come with a heading identifying its author’s name, so that readers would know which books to buy.
• Agathias calls his fellow-authors ‘wealthy’ as well as ‘generous’, and many of them hold titles that confirm it. They are lawyers, or court officials. The rank of ‘Consul’ worn by Macedonius was largely honorary, but Silentarii or Ushers did more than just hush.
• [PowerPoint of epigram 1.35] Agathias and his friends had always known they were destined for great things.
• As described in the section of his preface that I have italicised on the handout, the second part of his Cycle is the obvious source for many of the bathing poems of Book 9, and indeed for many of the twenty-nine epigrams on infrastructure that follow it, though not for the poems on art that come before.
• The named authors of the infrastructure poems are Agathias and his colleagues – Macedonius, Paulus Silentiarius, and so on —
• Most of whom are also represented in the bath-house sequence,
• As well as elsewhere in the Anthology –
• Including in the skoptic and sympotic Book 11, the epitaphs of Book 7,
• And notably of course in the erotic epigrams of its fifth book, substantial parts of which are taken from the sixth part of the Cycle.
• ‘Expert mimicry | of ancient letters’ is the declared justification of the Cycle’s first part, comprising dedicatory poems to pagan gods in whom Agathias’s world had long since ceased to believe;
•  But a commitment to creative anachronism clearly also factors into other parts of the Cycle, including parts six and seven, where Christian court officials play at being pagans drunk on love and wine.
• This generic playfulness extends to the Cycle’s second part, which included the poems by named authors about thermae.
• If we can believe Agathias — and I do — then some of these poems were composed for genuine inscription, while others are literary simulacra, perhaps sometimes approached through an antiquarian and paganising point of view.
• But he gives us no clue which are which, and if we try to tell the two kinds apart, we do not get very far.
• Both inscriptional and literary epigram had very long histories by his time, as of course did bathing,
• And surviving inscriptional epigrams confirm that the two kinds continued to operate in close mutual dialogue, just as they always had, since the time of the Persian Wars if not before.
• [PowerPoint of kharis inscriptions]
• Their repertoire of motifs was held in common, and an antiquarian and paganising point of view might be expressed either on the page or on a bath-house wall.
• However, one feature that distinguishes the bath-house sequence from what we know of the Cycle is the incorporation of epigrams by unknown authors.
• These poems, too, are likely to have blended genuine inscriptions with literary imitations,
• And again, the only way to tell the two apart would usually be to dig up inscriptions that matched.
• The Christian epigrams of Book 1 tell us clearly that Cephalas liked collecting inscriptional poems when they came readily to hand. Constantinople will have been full of them.
• Of course, some of the anonymous poems are highly unlikely to have been commissioned as inscriptions — no bath owner would have wanted 9.617 on the wall, telling customers they were likely to freeze to death.
• Similarly, 9.609a functions within the sequence as a satirical response to 9.609, and it is hard to imagine a bathhouse owner paying to have it inscribed. But this has no necessary bearing on whether 9.609 was, or was not, put up on a real bath-house wall.
• Perhaps a literary author composed them as a pair;
• Or they are part of a literary conversation between two or more authors, perhaps over a long period of time;
• Or conceivably 609 was a real inscription, and a dissatisfied customer appended 609a as a graffito. Let’s not waste time worrying further.
• Let us instead ask: what are the anonymous epigrams doing here? Agathias named all his poets, so they must have been slotted in by a later hand,
• Rather as I think must have happened with the Boyish Muse of Strato of Sardis, as it swelled to become the Anthology’s pederastic Book 12, but on a smaller scale.
• Insertion at a later stage does not tell us anything about when the anonymous epigrams were composed. They could be earlier, could be later.
• In terms of their themes and the implied milieu they are pretty much indistinguishable from those of the named authors. Let’s just say ‘Byzantine’ and leave it at that.
• The epigrams as an ordered or semi-ordered sequence
• Now, the anonymous poems appear to have been inserted with some care, into an Agathian sequence that was itself sensibly designed.
• You will have seen that the run of anonymous poems that open it, 506-9, alternates between Aphrodite and the Graces, establishing them as a ‘double act’ in a way we could call programmatic for the expanded bath-house sequence as a whole.
• 609a then transitions the reader into a section on small baths, that continues till 614, — in the light of discussion this morning I think we must take these to be specifically the hot rooms;
• And later we have a concentration of poems on how baths make their customers irresistible to the opposite sex (619-22).
• The first poem of that new sequence introduces the theme of the Judgement of Paris, revisited sporadically in a couple of later epigrams (633 and 637).
• Of the poems by named authors to which the anonymous material has been added, 619 and 620 are thematically well matched.
• 624-5 are united by the Graces, 625-6 by Aphrodite, and 626-7 by Eros, giving us a sequence of overlapping thematic pairs.
• 630 and 631, by named authors, comment on how warm the water is. So too does the anonymous poem that follows, 632, again showing thoughtful action on the part of the post-Agathian interpolator. As with the pederastic Book 12, my money would be on Constantine Cephalas himself.
• So: this artful Agathian sequence has been artfully expanded.
• The balneary epigrams as a source for the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing
• I want to close by inviting you to consider the epigrams as a source for the sensory and intellectual experience of bathing in the Eastern Rome of late antiquity.
• The epigrams suggest it was mediated by classical tropes for anyone with a classical education —
• Which is to say, any man or boy educated beyond a basic level, and some women and girls too.
• We might have guessed this already from the presence of the Graces in a few excavated inscriptions, and from a decorative preference for classical themes,
• But the Anthology makes our picture much more vivid.
• The epigrams expect their readers to know Greek mythology and to know some admittedly famous lines from Homer and Pindar.
• They are distillations of paideia, as it bears on the civilised tradition of bathing.
• In effect, they constitute a balneary sophistic.
• Suggestions that they engage with visual traditions in art, or perhaps rather with the rhetorical traditions of art criticism and ekphrasis, are therefore very plausible.
• But these poems are also the work of erotic poets, who were accustomed to mediating desire through the filter of Aphrodite, Eros, occasionally the Graces —
• [PowerPoint AP 5.231]
•  — and through a tradition of erotic epigram that stretched all the way back through Meleager to fourth-century Alexandria.
•  Just from browsing the handout, you will have seen that bathing with the poets of Book 9 is often sexually tantalising.
• [PowerPoint of Numidian inscription] This was not unknown in real bath-house inscriptions, but the surviving evidence suggests it was rare — though Agathias and his friends may have helped make it less so.
• Compare for instance 9.625, on your handout, with one of the same author’s epigrams from the erotic section of Agathias’ Cycle, now in book 5 of the Anthology:
• [PowerPoint of 5.219]
• The bath attendant of 625 moves into the role of the watchful porter who, in erotic elegy, bars the door of a domestic dwelling to prevent the lovers’ illicit rendezvous.
• We see then that the bath-house poems come out of, and help expand, a shared fantasy rooted in classical elegiac tropes. Respectable Christians can dip into the fantasy of an ancient empire of pleasures. They bathe regularly just as their pagan ancestors did, in edifices within which those ancestors would feel immediately at home,
• And amid scenes from ancient myth that activate collective memory through shared acculturation.
• As tagged by art and epigram, the bath-house offers a physical and emotional connection to the classical past;
• When customers pay the entrance fee, they rent temporary access to an imagined classical subjectivity, with all its possibilities. They can be Homeric heroes, or elegiac lovers.
• Probably nothing physically exciting happened from day to day in the thermae of Byzantium, and the physical spaces were sometimes disappointing,
• But educated bathers were set free into a shared space of cultural nostalgia for an age of gods and goddesses without pantaloons or bodices (to paraphrase Byron), and of men and women who followed their lead.
• The classical past had never really been like that, but the fantasy was what mattered. The past is always gone. In the now, a fantasy of the past is always more real.
• I leave the last word to Paul the Usher, AP 9.620, on a bath with men’s and women’s spaces separated by a door:
• The hope of love is imminent, but still
  One cannot catch the women unaware.
  A door so small cannot accommodate
  The mighty Paphian. And yet in this
  I find some balm: for men of broken heart,
  Hope is more honeyed than reality.
• Thank you all for your time.
• END

Epigram takes a bath: handout as plain-text

Epigram takes a bath

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.
…
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 [tini khōrōi], 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.

Bibliography

Busch, S. (1999), Versus Balnearum. Die antike Dichtung über Bader und Baden im römischen Reich (Stuttgart and Leipzig).
Cameron, A. (1993), The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford).
Coleman, K. (2001), ‘Roman baths and bathing’, Classics Ireland 8:121-32.
Dunbabin, K. M. D. (1989), ‘Baiarum grata voluptas: pleasures and dangers of the baths’, Papers of the British School at Rome 51: 6-46.
Fagan G. G. (1999), Bathing in Public in the Roman World (Ann Arbor).
Ginouvès, R (1962), Balaneutikè. Recherches sur le bain dans l’antiquité grecque (Paris).
Robert, L. (1948), Hellenica, Recueil d'épigraphie, de numismatique et d’antiquités grecques. Vol. IV. Epigrammes du Bas-Empire (Paris).
Smith, S. D. (2019), ‘Art, nature, power: garden epigrams from Nero to Heraclius’, 339-53 in M. Kanellou, I. Petrovic, and C. Carey (eds.), Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era (Oxford).
Zellinger, J. (1928), Bad und Bäder in der altchristlichen Kirche (Munich).A balneary anthology, AP 9.606-40 (in progress)

AP 9.606
On a bath

Whom Ares loved before, behold her here:
The Cytherean, who bathes in sparkling springs.
Look as she swims, and do not be afraid:
No maiden, no Athena meets your eye;
You will not be the next Tiresias.

AP 9.607

This was the Graces’ bath; and for their fee
They granted it the glamour of their limbs.

AP 9.608

This water is of quality so fine
It birthed our Aphrodite Cythera;
Or else that Cytheraean entered here,
And bathed, and lent the bath her purity.

AP 9.609

This pool is where the Graces come to play:
Graces alone may enter and disport.

AP 9.609a

This one is where the Graces really bathed:
It has no room for any more than three.

AP 9.610

This is a very small facility
But its appearance is delectable:
It is a rose amid the shrubberies,
A violet in the basketsful of flowers
That destine for the garland-weaver’s stall.

AP 9.611

Within a little bath, great beauty lies,
And sweet Desire belongs to those who bathe
Within a stream that is the slenderest.

AP 9.612

There is a tree: its leaves are very small,
And yet its scent is lovely. Even so
This bath is loved though it is small and low.

AP 9.613
On the Bath of Maria <wife of the Emperor Honorius>

The god of Envy saw Maria’s Bath
And wept at seeing it: ‘I cannot stay;
As with its patron, I must go my way.’

AP 9.614
LEONTIUS SCHOLASTICUS
On a small bath next door to the Zeuxippus

Baths of Zeuxippus, do not seek to blame
That this bath is your neighbour. Just the same
The star called ‘Little Darling’ shines out fair
Beside the mighty body of the Bear.

AP 9.615
On a bath at Smyrna

You premises once murky, tell, what man
Rendered you wealthy in the light of day
That shines upon your bathers? Who was he
That found you caked in sooty smut and grime
And scoured it to expose your radiance?
The mind of Theodorus, wise in this
As in all things: how truly did it show,
Even in this, his heartfelt purity;
Though city father, steward of its means,
He never stained his hands with private gain
From public property. Almighty God,
Immortal Christ, protect this patriot
And ward him safe from all calamity.

AP 9.616

There was a time the Graces bathed herein,
And baby Eros stole their lovely clothes
And ran away and left them naked here,
Ashamed to leave and be a spectacle.

AP 9.617
On a chilly bath

You bath-attendant, who put walls around
This icy river? What deceitful man
Renamed as bathing-house this mountain spring?
‘The lord of winds, Hippotes’ son, and friend
To the immortal gods’ has gathered in
The gales of every quarter, here to dwell.
Why are these wooden boards beneath our feet?
Their purpose is not warmth; instead they bear
A chilling stream of freshly melted snow:
Phrixus and Narce find themselves at home.
Put up a sign, then: ‘Bathe in Mesorus,
For Boreas is gusting here within.’

AP 9.618
On another bath in Byzantium

The Lotus-eaters’ ancient tale is true:
This bath is witness. If a man once wash
Amid its pure, clear waters, he forgets
All pain at loss of country or of kin.

AP 9.619
AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS
On another bath in Byzantium

I know now, Cytherea, how you won
When you were in that contest long ago
And rigged the vote of Paris, Priam’s son.
For when you dipped your body here within
You found a way to beat the wife of Zeus
Whose bathroom was the streams of Inachus.
It was the bath that won it; doubtless then
Pallas Athena cried ‘I am undone
By better waters, not the Paphian.’

AP 9.620
PAUL THE SILENTIARY
On a twinned bathhouse, in which both women and men bathe

The hope of love is imminent, but still
One cannot catch the women unaware.
A door so small cannot accommodate
The mighty Paphian. And yet in this
I find some balm: for men of broken heart,
Hope is more honeyed than reality.

AP 9.621

Come all ye members of the fairer sex
Who thirst for sex — which is to say, come all,
And you shall be so fortunate to gain
Beauty more gleaming. She who has a man
Will titillate him; she as yet unwed
Will stir a horde of suitors bearing gifts
To ask her hand; and she who makes her way
By selling favours, find her lovers swarm
Upon her threshold if she bathe herein.

AP 9.622
On another bath

If gripped by sweet desire for wedded wife,
Bathe here, and she will find you handsomer.
But if your itch inclines to easy girls
Who work for money, they will take no fee;
They will pay you, who took your bath herein.


AP 9.623
CYRUS

Cypris and all the Graces bathed herein,
Here too her boy of golden archery.
They left a Grace in payment of their fee.

AP 9.624
LEONTIUS SCHOLASTICUS
On another bath next door to the public baths in Byzantium

Beside the doorway of the public bath
A private citizen erected me
Not for the sake of jealous rivalry
But just to be the best that I could be.
Next door can wash the multitude, while we
Furnish a handful who are dear to me
With cooling streams, and myrrh, and sympathy.

AP 9.625
MACEDONIUS THE CONSUL
On another bath in the Lycian Quarter(?)

Let he who guides my door and notes the time
Of new admissions be of mortal men
Most true and scrupulous, lest any see
One of the Nymphs who plunges in my streams
All naked, or the Cyprian herself
Amid her Graces with their lovely hair,
Even by accident. Who would gainsay
The words of Homer, ‘Dangerous are they,
The gods, to witness in the light of day’?

AP 9.626
MARIANUS SCHOLASTICUS
On another bath, named Eros

Within this basin once upon a time
Did Eros bathe his mother Cyprian,
Warming its pretty its waters from below
With his own torch. The sweat that trickled then
From her ambrosial form to merge within
The seething waters — oh, what springtime air
was in its scent, and thenceforth evermore
These bubbling streams are redolent of rose,
As though still bathed the golden Paphian.

AP 9.627
BY THE SAME
On the same

Right here exhausted underneath the planes
Eros once rested in a tender sleep,
His love-torch set aside for Nymphs to mind,
And they said to each other, ‘Why delay?
If only we extinguish this one flame,
That in the hearts of men will die the same.’
But the plunged torch set the whole stream afire,
And ever since those Nymphs are Eros’ prey
And pour forth heated water to this day.

AP 9.628
JOHN THE GRAMMARIAN
On the public bath named The Horse at Alexandria

The smoothly flowing Horse was jaded down
By years of goading, till our wealthy lord
Roused it to action with a bit of gold.

AP 9.629
BY THE SAME
On another <bath>

Pindar, if only I had been around
To bathe you in my streams, your line would run:
‘Water is best — but really just this one.’

AP 9.630
LEONTIUS SCHOLASTICUS
On the Royal Thermae

They call these baths the Royal, rightly so,
For men of old awarded them that name
In wonder, nor by any mortal hand
Are warmed its shining waters, but its spring
Runs hot all by itself, nor would you need
A cold supply to mix your bath just so:
Exactly as you wish it, does it flow.

AP 9.631
AGATHIAS SCHOLASTICUS
On the Spa of Agamemnon at Smyrna

I am a place Danaans used to love:
When they had come to me, they clean forgot
The healing arts of Podalirius.
With battle done, they tended to their wounds
Amid my streams, and drove the venom out
That foreign spears had planted. For this cause
I was enlarged, was fitted with a roof,
And in exchange for heroes’ high esteem
Took ‘Agamemnon’ as my epithet.

From Byron, Don Juan:
His classic studies made a little puzzle,
  Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses,
Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle,
   But never put on pantaloons or bodices;
His reverend tutors had at times a tussle,
   And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys,
Were forced to make an odd sort of apology,
   For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.

Epigram takes a bath - PowerPoint slides as plain text

 

•Epigram takes a bath
•Gideon Nisbet, University of Birmingham
•Academia Belgica, 18/10/23

 

•AP 16.107 (Julian)

On an Icarus in bronze, set up in a bathhouses

Wax killed you, Icarus; but now with wax

The bronze-smith has restored you to your form.

But do not beat your wings upon the air,

Lest you should once more plummet from the sky

And make these baths as well ‘Icarian’.

 

•AP 9.605 (Nossis), preceding the sequence

The portrait is of Callo, like to life

In every detail: she commissioned it,

And hung it here in Aphrodite’s hall.

How nice she looks, and lovely for her age!

Good luck to her throughout her blameless life.

ἁ χάρις ἁλίκον ἀνθεῖ; cf. 9.604.4, δέσποιναν ... ποθορῆν

 

•AP 9.641 (Agathias), following the sequence

First came proud Italy, and tribes of Medes;

The whole barbarian horde. Now you as well,

Sangarius, are made our emperor’s slave,

His mighty arches shackling your streams.

Impassable before; yet now you lie

Pinioned and tamed in manacles of stone.

 

•AP 9.662 (Agathias)

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.

 

•AP 9.669 (Marianus), on a park named Eros

Break from your journey for a little while,

And sprawl at ease beneath the bosky glade

To rest your limbs from weary voyaging,

Where water bubbles from the fountain-spouts

And runs spontaneous amid the planes.

Upon the gleaming furrow here in spring,

Soft violet twines with rosebuds. Come and see:

The sprawling ivy weaves the dewy lawn

An arbour of its ample foliage.

Here too the river’s banks are overgrown,

Skirting the meadow of a magic dell. 

This is Desire for sure: what other name

Befits a spot to which from every side

The lovely Graces have been gathered in?

 

•AP 1.35 (Agathias)

On <an icon> in the Sosthenium

Aemilianus, come from Caria,

And John, who came with him along the way;

Rufinus too, of Alexandria;

Agathias, of Asia. They attained

The fourth year in their study of the Law,

And in your honour, blessed Archangel,

Offered this painted image, praying too

For a bright future. Make your presence felt

And guide their hopes for life that is to come.

 

•Kharis in some inscribed balneary epigrams

Rome, C4 AD (Busch p.133):

‘...From all around flashes inextinguishable kharis, whatever your eye may light upon: the waters of the Nymphs, the bathing-pools, the halls, the Kharites…’

— excerpted from an epigram signed ‘Eudemus of Laodicea, sophist of the Romans’

Cilicia, C5 AD (Busch p.146), in mosaic:

‘Great is the kharis of possessions; the general Museus is master of them all, he whom nature has adorned with illustrious deserving traits. Let Phthonos keep away from the excellence of this mosaic.’

 

•AP 5.231 (Macedonius)

Your lips with charm, your cheeks with flowers bloom;

Your eyes with Aphrodite; and your hands

Bloom with the lyre. Your glances captivate,

Your song enslaves the ear: at every turn,

Huntress, you set a trap for poor young men.

τὸ στόμα ταῖς Χαρίτεσσι, προσώπατα δ᾽ ἄνθεσι θάλλει,
ὄμματα τῇ Παφίῃ, τὼ χέρε τῇ κιθάρῃ.
συλεύεις βλεφάρων φάος ὄμμασιν, οὖας ἀοιδῇ:
πάντοθεν ἀγρεύεις τλήμονας ἠιθέους. 

 

•Numidia, C2 AD (Busch p.284):

[o]ptaui Dacos tenere caesos: tenui.

[opt]aui în sella pacis sedere: sedi.

[o]ptaui claros sequi triumphos: factum.

optaui primi comoda plena pili: hab[ui.]

optaui nudas uidere Nymphas: uidi.

•Cf. AP 9.625 (Macedonius)

 

•AP 5.219 (Paul the Silentiary)

Rhodope, let’s steal kisses — steal the joys

Of Aphrodite’s bouts. Sweet to evade

The eagle eye of sentries; sweeter still

The honey of a secret love-affair.

Ancient thermae: grim realities

The balneary epigrams present a gilded dream of ancient bath-houses as the haunts of goddesses, gilded palaces of leisure and pleasure. A few anonymous poems, though, point towards realities that coiuld not be relied on to measure up. Promises of exclusivity and intimacy might mask cramped and overcrowded premises. The hypocausts that heated the warm and hot rooms were not always up to scratch, or owners skimped on fuel bills. They also leaked sooty smoke that called for regular cleaning, which didn't always happen. The deep-clean sponsored by Theodore in the second of these epigrams is presented as a truly heroic labour.

AP 9.609a

This one is where the Graces really bathed:
It has no room for any more than three.

AP 9.615
On a bath at Smyrna

You premises once murky, tell, what man
Rendered you wealthy in the light of day
That shines upon your bathers? Who was he
That found you caked in sooty smut and grime
And scoured it to expose your radiance?
The mind of Theodorus, wise in this
As in all things: how truly did it show,
Even in this, his heartfelt purity;
Though city father, steward of its means,
He never stained his hands with private gain
From public property. Almighty God,
Immortal Christ, protect this patriot
And ward him safe from all calamity.

AP 9.617
On a chilly bath

You bath-attendant, who put walls around
This icy river? What deceitful man
Renamed as bathing-house this mountain spring?
‘The lord of winds, Hippotes’ son, and friend
To the immortal gods’ has gathered in
The gales of every quarter, here to dwell.
Why are these wooden boards beneath our feet?
Their purpose is not warmth; instead they bear
A chilling stream of freshly melted snow:
Phrixus and Narce find themselves at home.
Put up a sign, then: ‘Bathe in Mesorus,
For Boreas is gusting here within.’
 

Bathing Graces

The Graces (Kharites), embodiments of attraction and delight, appear in a number of the balneary epigrams collected in Book 9 of the Anthology. They are often in the company of Aphrodite (the Cyprian or 'Cypris'), her naughty son Eros, or both. Here are two examples:

 
9.616


ANONYMOUS



There was a time the Graces bathed herein,

And baby Eros stole their lovely clothes

And ran away and left them naked here,

Ashamed to leave and be a spectacle.


 

9.623


CYRUS



Cypris and all the Graces bathed herein,


Here too her boy of golden archery.


They left a Grace in payment of their fee.

Kharis and the Kharites also appear in epigrams found inscribed in bathhouses. Busch's Versus Balnearum (p.131-3) gives a couple of good examples in Greek from late antique Rome. Here is an extract in prosaic translation:

...From all around flashes inextinguishable kharis, whatever your eye may light upon: the waters of the Nymphs, the bathing-pools, the halls, the Kharites...

  There is a lot of Nymph action in the balneary epigrams too, as you might expect.

Theodorus titivates a bath

This epigram by an unknown poet of late antiquity praises an unidentifiable Theodore for renovating a public bath in Smyrna, today called Izmir. Then as now it was a great city though earthquake-prone. The context is certainly Christian: the name Theodore means 'Given by God'. It seems likely the poem came to the Anthology from genuinely inscriptional use.

9.615
On a bath at Smyrna

You premises once murky, tell, what man
Rendered you wealthy in the light of day
That shines upon your bathers? Who was he
That found you caked in sooty smut and grime
And scoured it to expose your radiance?
The mind of Theodorus, wise in this
As in all things: how truly did it show,
Even in this, his heartfelt purity;
Though city father, steward of its means,
He never stained his hands with private gain
From public property. Almighty God,
Immortal Christ, protect this patriot
And ward him safe from all calamity.

For Theodore to have merited this puff-piece implies that this was no mere spring-cleaning: the bath must have been in a truly shocking state, thickly encrusted with debris accumulated from a leaky heating system. One wonders at the air quality and what it had been doing to the bathers.

The poet's determination to frame amenity maintenance as a heroic display of civic-mindedness reminds me of this one by Agathias from a little later in Book 9, on his gentrification of a public toilet. It's in my World's Classics translation and is one of my favourites (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.

Small but perfectly formed

Three tiny but exquisite bath-houses, again from the epideictic ninth book of the Anthology. Epideictic means declamatory, that is, rhetorical skill shown off for its own sake. In my first version I take liberties in unpacking the suggestive connotations of the violet among the flowers. The Callimachean echoes of the second lay it open to metapoetic interpretation as well. Paton declares the tree of the third to be myrtle, and I do not doubt him.

9.610

This is a very small facility
But its appearance is delectable:
It is a rose amid the shrubberies,
A violet in the basketsful of flowers
That destine for the garland-weaver’s stall.

9.611

Within a little bath, great beauty lies,
And sweet Desire belongs to those who bathe
Within a stream that is the slenderest.

9.612

There is a tree: its leaves are very small,
And yet its scent is lovely. Even so
This bath is loved though it is small and low.

Two classically allusive bath-houses, with alchemical postscript

 

A sizeable chunk of the Greek Anthology's ninth and largest book is given over to epigrams from bath-houses. They are all anonymous, which makes it hard to pin them down to particular times and places or to decide which ones are inscriptional and which literary games. Many such epigrams were definitely inscribed for real: Stephan Busch's Versus Balnearum (1999) amasses whole and fragmentary examples.

 I've not yet dived deep into Busch's material but on first glance I note various epigrams written in Greek to praise the Roman sponsors of public baths in the wealthy, Greek-speaking Eastern provinces. These then are classic thermae in the grand Roman style. Or sometimes not so grand; my next post will be about thermae that were allegedly all the more lovely for their small compass.

The bath-house poems of Book 9 give little local detail, but the world they conjure is Christian late antiquity, often in the Greek East but not necessarily exclusively so. The Maria of the second of the poems below was the wife of the Emperor Honorius (thank you, Paton) and daughter of his star general Stilicho, who thereby became his emperor's father-in-law. Honorius was son of Theodosius I and ruled 393-423. It was he who relocated the western imperial capital from Milan to Ravenna. That city would seem a likely enough setting for Maria to exercise her patronage in funding public amenity (her baths seem otherwise unattested, so let us pick whatever story we like).

As Katherine Dunbabin notes, excessive beauty risks incurring phthonos (jealousy) and the evil eye, making the poem for the Bath of Maria apotropaic. The "god of Envy" is Mōmus, a figure closely aligned with Phthonos. He is of course a pagan figure, as is the Aphrodite of 9.607. The late antique and Byzantine elite were classically educated and enjoyed striking pagan poses even as they devoutly worshipped Christ.

9.607

This water is of quality so fine
It birthed our Aphrodite Cythera;
Or else that Cytheraean entered here,
And bathed, and lent the bath her purity.

9.613

On the Bath of Maria

The god of Envy saw Maria’s Bath
And wept at seeing it: ‘I cannot stay;
As with its patron, I must go my way.’

I learned something wonderfully random while writing this post. In the middle ages, long after Honorius' Maria was dead and gone, 'Bath of Maria' became a technical term that had little to do with ancient thermae. Named for a legendary Egyptian lady alchemist, the balneum Mariae was a water-filled vessel in which magical potions might be gently warmed. We know it now in French and from watching Masterchef: it is the modern bain-marie.

The Playboy Anthology

Did you know that at the end of the 1960s Playboy Magazine published two instalments of epigrams from the Greek Anthology? An illustrated feature titled 'Ribald Classics' appeared in many issues of the magazine in that era, introducing modern readers to saucy old-timers such as Boccaccio, and had already supplied the materials for a couple of standalone paperbacks. Apparently some such versions were tinkered up by moonlighting academics under pseudonyms, but to add a touch of prestige to the 1969 and 1970 Christmas issues the editors roped in the long-established and classically educated poet, Harry Brown.

 I might write an article about it one of these days. Here in the meantime is one of Brown's adaptations, based on Philodemus AP 5.46. The original is here if you want to see it (in Paton's translation). It's a conversation between a hetaera and her potential mark; Brown's version relocates it to a modern meat-market.

Hi, chick. Hello. What's your name? What's yours? Phil O'Demus. And you are...?

Mary Jane. Nice name, doll. You here with some stud? No.

Will I do? ... all right. Done! Say, you want to blow the joint now?

I beg your pardon! I mean, find a more Active Spot.

Well ... I dunno. Where, for instance? My pad. I've stereo, soft lights,

Jack Daniel's. Well ... all right. You'll come then, M. J. ? Any time.

How's about coming right now? Heavens, you're eager. Correct, chick.

Well, I'd prefer your pad, but ... all right, that corner booth's dark.

 I'm not sure it's scholarly of me to say it, but I think Brown's a bit of a creep.

Two grieving mothers

Two mothers lament their sons who died young. These two epitaphs are from Hunter's green-and-yellow. Both are Hellenistic in date. The first was found at Alexandria; the other is from Corcyra.

 

'The Strophades, "Turning Islands", were in legend where the sons of Boreas turned around and abandoned their pursuit of the Harpies... Strabo 8.4.2 identifies them as two islands in the open sea west of the Peloponese, roughly south of Zakynthos...

'Corcyra had been identified with the Homeric Scherie, land of Alcinous and Arete, at least since the fifth century' (Hunter).

XV

Philoxenus, your mother used to throw

Her arms around your neck for love of you

When finally you came, but never more;

Never again with age-mates will you go

Up to our hallowed city, and enjoy

The shaded floor of the gymnasium.

Instead your father brought your sun-bleached bones

And laid them in this tomb, since all your flesh

Was burned at Caunus in a raging pyre.

XVI

Calliope was puddled on this tomb;

Ten thousand tears in mourning for her son,

For Alexander who was swift to die

And left no issue when she laid him here

Beneath this earth, leaving the breath of life

At twenty-seven years, a cultured man,

Famed with the bow, whom murderous pirates slew

Hard by the ocean-girded Strophades.

But go now, traveller, and bid farewell

To a good man, good Satyrus’s son,

Born from the island that Alcinoüs won.

Woodward tackles Simonides

Two more versions from one of my favourite translators, G. R. Woodward, a retired vicar and small-press aficionado with a great reputation in writing and collecting carols. These are from his Epigrammata Heroica of 1929, produced in a typicaly tiny print-run of 120 hand-numbered copies. The first poem is for the Athenian dead in the great joint Greek land victory at Plataea; the second is the most famous epigram ever written, for Leonidas and his 300 Spartans at Thermopylae the year before.

For Woodward's version of 16.26, the Dirphys epitaph, see this older blog post.
 

7.253

In noble death if Virtue's acme lies,
To us, of all men, Fortune gave the prize:
For, keen to robe thee, Greece, in Freedom's vest
Endow'd with ageless glory, here we rest.

7.249

Stranger, to the Spartans! saying,
Here we lie, their words obeying.