Introducing F. A. Wright

'Noteworthy as perhaps the feeblest verse translation of any ancient poet'

-- so wrote Peter Whigham (1975) as he surveyed the predecessors to his own Meleager. Whigham himself, though, was reliably dreadful, so let us not prejudge. Who then was 'F. A. Wright', and what can we make of his Complete Poems of Meleager of Gadara (1924)?

Frederick Adam Wright (1869-1946), F.A., LL.D., was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He taught classics at Birkbeck for an astounding thirty-seven years (1898-1935) and seems to have thrown himself into the role of affable don. In the 1910s he had published a small handful of classical notes, giving his address as 'Katoombah', Thorpe Bay, Essex. Then came a flurry. He wrote a History of Later Greek Literature and translated later Greek authors: Alciphron's Mimes, Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story, and what he called the Complete Love Poems of the Palatine Anthology, all in the same year, 1923. His Meleager of 1924 will have been spun off from that last one. The same year he had a full Martial out, though at least for that there was a co-author.

Frankly I don't understand his publication history at all. Look on his (online) works, ye research-active, and despair:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Wright%2C%20F%2E%20A%2E%20%28Frederick%20Adam%29%2C%201869%2D1946

How did he possibly cram in so much between 1923 and 1925? A trickle before his mid-fifties, and then all this. Had he been stockpiling it all in a trunk under his bed? Actually that is my least hopeless guess. Roger Pearse has done better digging than I, on his excellent blog.

When Wright comes to the Anthology -- and we may presume he comes in a hurry -- he accepts the erroneous tradition that Meleager had arranged his Garland alphabetically, finds no trace of that arrangement in the Greek Anthology today, and concludes that all traces of it must have been obliterated by its 'later editors' (one would not go to him for the details). Accordingly he is free to devise an arrangement that respects the evident trajectory of Meleager's career, and in this too he follows a known though misleading path. We will look into that next time.

Headlam's sphragis, and self-censorship

Headlam signs off his selection with -- what else? -- an epigram of his own devising, as follows. 'Transformed' in line 1 scans as three syllables, olde-worlde-style:

Transformed fifty blossoms are of Meleager's soul,
   all with the Muses and the Graces grown:
Let these suffice thee; for by far the half exceeds the whole,
   say we to whom is Hesiod's wisdom known.

The second couplet invokes line 40 of Hesiod's famously pious Works and Days, where the poet propounds exactly this axiom: πλέον ἥμισυ παντός. It has the ring of something already proverbial, or on its way to becoming so.

Fifty is rather less than half of the Anthology's 134 Meleagrian epigrams -- but then, so many are ruled out already by being addressed to beautiful boys. Headlam has preceded his own sphragis with two of the self-epitaphs with which Meleager wound up his collection (and indeed 'Muses and Graces' riffs on the first of them). He excludes the third such epitaph, in which the poet dedicated his Garland to a current or former lover, Diocles. Here is the second:

Tread softly, stranger: here at rest among pure souls below
An old man, Meleager, sleeps the sleep that all men owe:
The son of Eucrates; that did together of his wit
Muses and Love the sweet in tears with merry Graces knit:
Whom Tyre divine to manhood reared, and Gadara's holy land;
Cos of the Merops nursed his age upon her lovely strand.
If thou art Syrian, then Salaam! Naidios! if Phenician:
Prithee to me return the same, or Chaere!, if a Grecian.

The selection came out in 1890. A very few years later (I do not know exactly how many) Headlam pulled the book from the market: I wonder how that conversation with his publisher went. The memoir says he was embarrassed at his juvenilia, and that may well have been true. I wonder also if growing public awareness of Oscar Wilde's sexually dissident Hellenism may have fed into his thinking, though I guess it would now be next to impossible to find out. Headlam's selection was decorous, but his introduction and notes had repeatedly exalted the fine remarks on Meleager in Studies of the Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds, whose idealising view of Greek love so strongly influenced Wilde. The posthumous and bestselling third edition of Studies came out in 1893, praising Meleager as a paragon of healthy bisexuality in terms it was hard to ignore.

Wilde on trial (1895) subsequently invoked Symonds's Uranian vision of a love that dared not presently speak its name but that had always been there, inspiring humanity's most sublime artistic achievements. He won over the crowd but not the court, and blew the cover on the nineteenth-century gay elite's favourite hanky code as he did so.