This is the script of the paper I presented at the excellent recent conference Crafting a Lie, at La Sapienza in Rome. I'll put up the content of the handout as a separate post.
........
A pseudepitaphic habit: GN script
Intro
·
[Greetings
and thanks]
·
My
topic today is two epigrams by Lucillius, a poet active in the first century AD,
under Nero.
·
He
composed at least two books of satirical or ‘skoptic’ Greek epigrams,
·
And
is best known as the model for his younger contemporary, the Latin
epigrammatist, Martial, about whom we will hear more tomorrow.
·
Like
Martial, though to a much lesser extent, he is sometimes a character in his own
satirical poems (AP 9.572, 11.196).
·
Lucillius
is a Greek, with a Roman name; we do not know how he got it. It is nearly
identical to that of a famous early Latin satirist, Gaius Lucilius, and he exploits
this resemblance to appear before you today under forged credentials.
·
His
surviving epigrams are preserved in Anthologia Palatina, the Greek
Anthology, ‘AP’ for short,
·
Where
he is the principal author of Book 11, the sympotic and skoptic epigrams.
·
The
two poems I consider today are at the start of your handout, with my own
translations.
The
bad poet as a Lucillian comic type
·
I
should begin by telling you that each of Lucillius’s books was divided into a
number of thematic categories, each of them introduced by a descriptive title.
·
This
was the traditional approach for Greek epigrammatists publishing their own works,
as witnessed by the Milan Posidippus papyrus and by othe early papyri
o
Subsequently
it became popular among anthologists, all the way from the early collections
witnessed by papyri [xref to Sherry’s paper/chapter] through Meleager
and Agathias to the tenth-century compiler of the Greek Anthology itself.
·
It
did not preclude artistic skill in the arrangement of poems, but it was nothing
like the uariatio that typifies the books of Martial.
·
I
mention this because the first of my poems, AP 11.135, appears within the
Anthology in a sequence that preserves at least some of its author’s original
arrangement.
·
It
is part of a thematic category, and the theme is bad poets.
·
Other
epigrams were added later, but the basis of the sequence is Lucillian.
o
There
are seven epigrams by him there, all in a row (11.131-7), and all on the same
topic.
o
I
am sure they all sat together in one of his original books.
·
Now,
Lucillius’s bad poets are very bad indeed. They are almost as dangerous to your
health as Lucillius’s bad doctors, and that is saying something.
·
I offer
two further examples from this sequence on the first page of the handout, in
translation, for your amusement.
·
The
‘Eutychides’ and ‘Heliodorus’ of those poems are not real people. There is no
point trying to identify them with historical individuals. They are comic stereotypes,
with metrically convenient names that are sometimes part of the poem’s humour.
11.135
·
So et
us now consider 11.135.
·
With
one exception, its language is straightforward:
·
Koptō
in the middle voice is
to beat or strike oneself in grief, and so, to mourn for a person who has died;
·
Katadeiknumi in the final line is to invent a new
art or tekhnē, and to share it with the world by teaching others.
·
The
character Marcus believes his work will endure, and be respected as
literature: we find para used with the dative to refer to published authors
as authorities, with the particular sense ‘in the work of so-and-so’.
·
But
Lucillius disagrees: he calls Marcus a dēmios, a public executioner,
because his poetry is so painful to read.
·
Five
features of this epigram strike me as more or less odd:
1.
First,
it may surprise us that Lucillius does not propose a legendary figure, such as
Cadmus, as the inventor of books;i
o
Instead
he presumes that the technology emerged through collective practice, which
makes perfect sense to us, but isn’t the usual kind of ancient story.
2.
Second,
it is a little unusual for the targets of Lucillius’s satire to have Roman names.
Normally they’re Greek.
o
But
he uses Aulus a few times, and has, I think, three other Marcuses (e.g. an
athlete at 11.85, a lazy person at 11.276). Lucillius’s imitator
Nicarchus also uses this common and metrically convenient name (11.113).
o
And Lucillius’s own name is Roman too, of
course.
3.
A
third oddity lies in the poem’s use of direct, second-person address. This really
is rare in Lucillius, and I think it marks out Marcus as something else that is
rare in Lucillius’s surviving work –
o
that
is to say, a recurring character, and in this case, a rival poet.
o
We
are used to meeting such characters in Martial, but they are not part of his
predecessor’s regular style. I know of just two examples: a thief named Eutychides
(AP
11.175 and 177); and a second recurring Marcus, a leptos of AP 11.90
and 93-4,
o
whom
we could, at a stretch, identify with Marcus the poet, since unhealthy slenderness
was associated with intellectual pursuits.
4.
Our
fourth oddity is length. We are told that Marcus is a painfully bad poet, but apparently
the pain is over very quickly.
·
Other
Lucillian poets go on for ages, like Eutychides in 11.133,
·
Or
Heliodorus in 137, of which you will find an antique translation on your
handout’s second page,
·
But
Marcus’s epitaph for the unnamed boy imposes a stikhinos thanatos.
·
That
word stikhinos draws attention as being unfamiliar.
·
It
is in fact a hapax, so the exact meaning is open to question, though obviously
it has to do with stikhos, a line of verse.
·
I
believe Lucillius may mean to say ‘a single line long’, partly because
our second poem addresses the same addressee under strikingly similar
circumstances,
·
And
there we are definitely dealing with a monostich.
·
Before
moving on, we should note a fifth and final oddity:
5.
Skoptic
epigram often proposes a connection to the symposium, and Lucillius represents his
other bad poets as declaiming their verses aloud to unwilling audiences in (for
the most part) sympotic contexts.
o
Initially
I read 11.135 in the same way, but I was wrong:
o
for
Marcus, it is all about the written word.
o
This
must relate to his choice of sub-genre within epigram: the literary epitaph,
o
A
form that is among the oldest of Hellenistic innovations in epigram,
o
Alongside
literary imitations of the verse inscriptions written to accompany offerings to
gods.
AP 11.312
·
Let
us now turn to our second poem, 11.312.
·
This
does not come to us as part of a thematic sequence, though it must
originally have been placed in one;
·
That
principle of organisation, which was likely based on the remains of a Lucillian
book, breaks down halfway through Book 11, at epigram 224. After that, porca
macedonia.
o
Maybe
it came from the same Lucillian book as 135; more likely, I think, in a sequel.
·
The
poem’s neighbours in Book 11 are also by Lucillius, but are on a mix of topics,
showing that they came to the Anthology through an intermediary,
o
presumed
to be the second-century Anthologion of Diogenianus.
·
With
the very first line of this second poem, we are in the world of inscribed
epitaphs on tombs that speak directly to travellers on the road – ō parodīta
–
·
Except
of course that we are not, not exactly, because the tomb is empty.
·
Again
it is worth remembering that literary imitation of the epitaph form goes back
to Callimachus and his circle,
·
Who
developed a fascination with how epitaphs on cenotaphs could be used to reflect
on, and pull apart, the inherited repertoire of inscriptional tropes,
·
But
here the cenotaph motif becomes the basis for a satirical attack against its
own putative poet.
·
Sometimes,
of course, a tomb was built while its intended occupant was still alive. This
is parodied in Petronius’s figure of Trimalchio, who commissions his own tomb
and even holds rehearsals for his funeral there.
·
But
in Lucillius’s scenario, there is no intended occupant.
·
The
tomb is real, within the world of the poem – Marcus has paid for every stone of
it –
·
But
it is also fake.
·
There
never was any ‘Maximus, twelve years, from Ephesus’.
·
The
dead boy exists only within the world of Marcus’s one-line epitaph,
which in turn is nested within the world of Lucillius’s six-line epigram.
·
Now,
there is nothing wrong with Marcus writing a pseudo-inscriptional epitaph for
an imaginary tomb, unless, I suppose, the epitaph is a very bad one.
·
As
noted, the literary epitaph is a conventional Hellenistic form, at home to
pathos and paradox. Book 7 of the Anthology is full of excellent poems of this
kind.
·
Where
Marcus goes wrong is in succumbing to a category error.
·
He
is a literary epigrammatist, a poiētēs; or at least, he thinks he is.
·
His
epitaph for Maximus began with pen and paper – grapsas – and it should
have stayed there.
·
Instead
he misguidedly inscribed it – ekharaxe –
·
Missing
the point of what literary epitaphs are meant to do, and where they are meant
to go.
·
But
now of course it is back in a book again – if, indeed, it ever left –
·
And
at this point the question of ‘Who speaks?’ – Chi dice ‘io’? – becomes
quite interesting.
Who
speaks?
·
The
poem begins in epitaphic mode, and we might expect the ‘I’ of the epigram to be
the inscribed tomb itself, speaking by ventriloquio every time a paroditēs
reads its message aloud. That is quite normal, both in inscribed epigrams
and in literary imitations.
·
The
demonstrative enthade emphasises the materiality of the scene,
·
And
tois pariousi in the final line creates a ring-composition that appears
to place the whole poem within an epitaphic scenario.
·
But
in the meantime (line 4) it has suddenly become apparent that Marcus’ real or
intended epitaph for Maximus is much shorter – and by ‘real or intended’, I
mean simply, within the scenario of the poem.
·
This
is not a new trick – Callimachus does something similar in his epitaph for
Thēris of Crete, which is on the second page of your handout –
o
Note,
by the way, Callimachus’s use of stikhos to mean an epitaph of just one
line –
·
But
Lucillius brings an additional level of complication, by making this about another
poet’s words rather than his own.
·
We
may note in passing that the age of Lucillius was when epigram started naming
and critiquing itself as epigram, as, for instance, in Lucillius 11.137;
o
We
might say the genre realised its reflexive consciousness as an explicit
commentary on itself,
·
And
again this is something we find most fully expressed in the Latin epigrams of
Martial, in that same century.
·
The
poem invites us to ask: who or what speaks the first-person verbs of the final
couplet, eidon and legō? The challenge is emphasised by the
inclusion of egō: ‘I saw no “Maximus”’.
1.
Let
us take it that egō is the tomb, speaking through its six lines of
vocalised inscription as have real and imagined tombs for centuries.
2.
If
this is so, does that make it Marcus who speaks, since he is, supposedly, the
author of the epitaph?
3.
It
seems instead that the tomb is independently critiquing and modifying Marcus’s
intended epitaph, while quoting his monostich as part of its own text to prove
the point of what a bad poet he is –
4.
Leaving
the reader to wonder, how does a tomb know what is or is not inscribed
on itself? Stones are not normally considered to be experts on the relative
aesthetic values of different parts of their own inscriptions.
o
And
what party or parties are we to imagine carved it there?
o
Did
Marcus put up his monostich, and a satirical interloper then add the remaining
by way of critical paratext?
·
Again,
we can find Callimachean precedents for these games; we may compare, for
instance, epigram 6.149, which is also on your handout. I love that one for its
deconstruction of the tropes of dedication –
·
But
we may also consider that a literary epitaph that is not intended as
satire, may nonetheless question the validity of the imagined monument that
bears it,
o
As
at Leonidas 7.273, also on your handout in translation.
·
To
test and play with inscriptional tropes, and with the very idea of
inscriptionality, is a familiar game among Hellenistic writers of literary
epigram.
Lucillius
as author
·
Alternatively,
we may choose to be dull and reductive, dismiss the inscriptional gesture of
the first line – ‘ō parodīta’ – as simply a red herring, una falsa
pista –
·
And
declare that Lucillius has been speaking the whole thing.
·
And
of course, there is a very real and obvious sense in which this is true,
because:
·
He
is the poem’s author.
·
He
may not be the egō of line 5, but the word ‘egō’ is there
because he put it there, along with everything else.
·
If the
tomb speaks these lines through the paroditēs, it does so within a world
that Lucillius has created, a world six lines long.
·
Likewise,
if Marcus writes these lines, he is doing so as a character who exists
for us only in these two epigrams by Lucillius.
o
Again
we should remember that Lucillian epigram is populated mostly by comic types,
not by real people, and we are under no obligation to suppose that Marcus ever
existed.
·
Lucillius
is accusing Marcus of having invented Maximus, but probably Lucillius is guilty
of inventing them both.
·
So,
the situation is strange; and the thematic categorisation makes it stranger.
Lucillius placed these epigrams within
sequences of poems about bad poets, but what is really so bad about the
line, ‘κλαύσατε δωδεκέτη Μάξιμον ἐξ Ἐφέσου’?
o
It
conveys the necessary information. It scans.
·
I
have seen it suggested that κλαύσατε
is a bad word choice because inscriptional epitaphs only tell family members to
cry, not random passers-by;
·
But
Maximus was a child, and everyone is supposed to be sad when a child dies.
·
There
are good inscriptional epitaphs that invite paroditai to weep for dead
children whom they did not personally know.
o
There
are two on my handout, but we’ll come to them later.
·
Again,
I suggest that the point of the poem is not necessarily that Marcus is
incompetent at making verses, but that he has failed to recognise the
appropriate limits of being a literary poet, of being Marcus ho poiētēs.
·
He has
constructed the fake tomb to promote his book of epigrams to travellers coming
in and out of Rome – effectively, it is a marble billboard –
·
But
this is a lot of effort and expense for one average stikhos.
·
A
real poet does not need stunts like this, and Marcus is asking real,
living paroditai to weep for a boy who never existed.
·
This
is in poor taste. Marcus wishes to be considered a poiētēs, but he has
failed at the role because he does not know where its boundaries lie.
·
If
he had kept the epitaph on paper, it would have been an honest fake, of
a traditional and respected kind – and that would have made it authentic
as literature.
·
But
the monument is a forgery, making the epitaph inauthentic simply by being
inscribed on it...
·
Again,
within a scenario that Lucillius has almost certainly invented for the fun of
it.
Marcus
as Martial?
·
Before
we conclude, there is one possibility I want to consider briefly, though it is
surely another falsa pista.
·
What
if ‘Marcus’ is Marcus Valerius Martialis, the poet Martial?
·
It
is true that we think of Lucillius as a Neronian poet, and Martial as Flavian,
but between Nero and the Flavians there are not so many years –
·
Many
emperors, yes, but from Nero’s death to Domitian’s inauguration is not much
more than a decade, (Nero dies in 68 and Domitian reigns from 81)
o
And
Martial was already in Rome as a young man during the later years of Nero’s reign,
o
And
in Book 1 of his epigrams, published in AD 84, he refers to much older books of
his that are products of his inexperienced youth.
·
So
it is possible to imagine that Lucillius is ridiculing some of Martial’s
juvenilia, epigrams written not in Latin but in Greek.
·
Actually
I don’t believe this,
·
And
I certainly don’t believe that the young Marcus Valerius Martialis was erecting
marble cenotaphs on the roads outside Rome,
·
But
I am telling you about it because of a defect in my character,
·
And
I suppose we could imagine a young Marziale reading these poems as being
about him, piu o meno, whether Lucillius meant them that way or not.
The
tomb of Quintus Sulpicius Maximus
·
Let
us now conclude in the Rome of Martial, under Domitian. It is the year 94.
·
Perhaps
Lucillius is still alive, and still living in Rome; if so, he will be getting
old.
o
Let
us imagine that Martial brings him soup.
·
I
do not think he is writing epigrams any more.
·
And
then this happens:
·
There
is a boy in Rome. His father is a wealthy freedman of Greek origin, a man of
profound paideia: let us say from Smyrna or Ephesus.
·
The
boy is already highly educated, and shows great promise. He even competes
against adults in a poetry competition; he does not win, but he is specially
commended by the judges.
·
And
then the boy dies. His name is Maximus. He is twelve years old.
·
His
story is of course well known, from the unusual marble tomb that his parents
built for him on the Via Salaria just outside the city walls.
o
A
replica stands there now in Piazza Fiume, and the original is my favourite
thing in Centrale Montemartini.
·
The
tomb preserves the poem he composed for the competition, and also two epigrams
that honour his memory. I expect his father wrote them. They are on your
handout, with Barbara Graziosi’s translation.
o
Cry
for him!, they tell the
passer-by.
·
I
do not suggest that Lucillius’s epigrams are about this tomb. That would be stupid.
He wrote them years before, as a joke. But then they more or less came true anyway.
Coda:
From Hell
·
For
a coda, I leave you with a panel from the graphic novel From Hell,
by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell (on the handout).
·
Two
pensionati are walking on an English beach.
·
Many
years before, the figure in the background was a police inspector. He led the investigation
into the Victorian serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
·
His
friend, who speaks in this panel, was once a celebrity clairvoyant. They both
know the identity of the killer, but have been sworn to silence.
·
Here,
the psychic confesses that he invented all his visions, including the one that
first pointed the inspector towards the real killer. He did it to get attention
and patronage, nothing more.
·
But
when you invent stories for a living, sometimes life plays nasty tricks.
·
‘I
made it all up, and then it all came true anyway. That’s the funny part.’
·
Thank
you for your time.
END
Greek texts for reference
Lucillius
AP 11.133, 134, and 137
τέθνηκ᾽
Εὐτυχίδης ὁ μελογράφος. οἱ κατὰ γαῖαν
φεύγετ᾽ ἔχων ᾠδὰς ἔρχεται Εὐτυχίδης:
καὶ κιθάρας αὑτῷ διετάξατο συγκατακαῦσαι
δώδεκα, καὶ κίστας εἰκοσιπέντε νόμων.
νῦν ὑμῖν ὁ Χάρων ἐπελήλυθε: ποῦ τις ἀπέλθῃ
λοιπόν, ἐπεὶ χᾁδην Εὐτυχίδης κατέχει;
Ἀρχόμεθ᾽, Ἡλιόδωρε; ποιήματα παίζομεν
οὕτω
ταῦτα πρὸς ἀλλήλους; Ἡλιόδωρε, θέλεις;
ἆσσον ἴθ᾽, ὥς κεν θᾶσσον ὀλέθρου ...
καὶ γὰρ ἔμ᾽ ὄψει
μακροφλυαρητὴν Ἡλιοδωρότερον.
Ὠμοβοείου μοι παραθεὶς τόμον, Ἡλιόδωρε,
καὶ τρία μοι κεράσας ὠμοβοειότερα,
εὐθὺ κατακλύζεις ἐπιγράμμασιν. εἰ δ᾽ ἀσεβήσας
βεβρώκειν τινὰ βοῦν τῶν ἀπὸ Τρινακρίας,
βούλομ᾽ ἅπαξ πρὸς κῦμα χανεῖν ... εἰ δ᾽
ἐστὶ τὸ κῦμα
ἔνθε μακράν, ἄρας εἰς τὸ φρέαρ με
βάλε.
Leonidas AP 7.273
Εὔρου με τρηχεῖα καὶ αἰπήεσσα
καταιγίς,
καὶ νύξ, καὶ δνοφερῆς κύματα πανδυσίης
ἔβλαψ᾽ Ὠρίωνος: ἀπώλισθον δὲ βίοιο
Κάλλαισχρος, Λιβυκοῦ μέσσα θέων πελάγευς.
κἀγὼ μὲν πόντῳ δινεύμενος, ἰχθύσι
κύρμα,
οἴχημαι: ψεύστης δ᾽ οὗτος ἔπεστι λίθος.
