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