On a seashell, and asking questions of monuments

An unusual epigram by Theodoridas, a lyric poet and epigrammatist of the 3rd century BC. Theodoridas was from Syracuse on the eastern coast of Sicily, and the following epigram suggests a fairly local setting: Pelorias (modern Capo Peloro) is the promontory at the island's northeastern point.

The shell is a marine 'labyrinth' in the original because of its spiral shape. The Greek of the poem is unusually convoluted and comes back round on itself in near-repetition, like the shell it describes:

Εἰνάλιε λαβύρινθε, τύ μοι λέγε: τίς  ς᾽ ἀνέθηκεν 
ἀγρέμιον πολιᾶς ἐξ ἁλὸς εὑρόμενος; — 

παίγνιον ἀντριάσιν Διονύσιος ἄνθετο Νύμφαις 
（δῶρον δ᾽ ἐξ ἱερᾶς εἰμι Πελωριάδος,） 
υἱὸς Πρωτάρχου: σκολιὸς δ᾽ ἐξέπτυσε πορθμός, 
ὄφρ᾽ εἴην λιπαρῶν παίγνιον Ἀντριάδων.

Whether or not they were really used in that way (and it can sometimes be hard to tell), dedicatory poems are written as if for inscription on objects and structures in plain view: tombs by the roadside, offerings in sanctuaries, statues of victors in sport and war. Often they explicitly anticipate a passer-by or visitor who will read them aloud, and sometimes that reading-aloud becomes a dialogue between the visitor and the monument. Any such dialogue is also a monologue twice over, albeit a collaborative one. The visitor supplies both of the voices; the monument supplies all of the lines.

It is a cliché for these dialogues to open with the visitor posing questions to the monument -- what are you, why are you here, who placed you here? -- and requesting answers. The difference with a seashell is that it is an object that might speak back without needing to resort to inscription. If you hold it to your ear and listen, you will hear the sea...and maybe, just maybe, something more.

6.224 (on YouTube)

THEODORIDAS

You spiral seashell, whisper in my ear — 

Who set you here, who was the beachcomber

That took you trophy from the surging sea?

‘I am a toy for Nymphs within the cave,

And it was Dionysius set me here,

A gift from holy Cape Pelorias.

He is Prōtarchus’ son. The winding strait

Spat me upon the shore, that I might be

A toy for glistening spirits of the cave.’

Courtesans' gifts to Aphrodite, by the two Antipaters

These epigrams are by the two Antipaters, of Sidon (late 2nd century BC) and Thessalonica (late 1st century BC, an Augustan court poet). They fall within a substantial run (6.206-211) of poems notionally written to accompany thank-offerings to Aphrodite by women retiring from careers as courtesans. 

The women are moving from the care of Aphrodite 'Pandemos' (vulgar) to that of Aphrodite 'Urania' (heavenly) because they are leaving the profession to enter a new chapter in their lives as respectable married women.

6.206 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF SIDON>

These sandals that were comfy on her feet,

Labour of love of skilful shoemakers,

Bitinna gives; Philaenis brings the net

That tamed her straying hair, dyed in the blooms

Of surging sea; and as for Anticleia,

She gives her fan; the veil that hid her face,

Worked delicately as a spider-web,

Is pretty Heracleia’s; and the snake,

Her shapely ankles’ golden ornament,

Well-coiled, from she who shares her father’s name,

Our Aristoteleia. These best friends,

Alike in age, now dedicate their gifts

To Cythereia the Uranian.

Philaenis' hair-net is dyed scarlet with orchil, made from seaweed.

Poems on retiring courtesans go all the way back to literary epigram's early years, with Philetas (4th-3rd century, 6.210) and Leonidas of Tarentum (3rd century, 6.211). How often they found good husbands in real life I would not care to guess, but in the epigrams of Book 6 the trope is so firmly established that the second of my poems can play around with it. 6.208 puts the scene in an ecphrastic frame. We do not see the women in the act of dedication; instead we take it in at second-hand, through art. If the other poems in the sequence are notionally dedicatory inscriptions, 6.208 is notionally the caption to a painting.

6.208 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER <OF THESSALONICA>

The one with sandals is Menecratis;

It is Phēmonoe who brings the cloak,

And Praxo has the cup. That is the shrine

Of Aphrodite, and her statue too.

The work is Aristomachus’, of Thrace.

All three are citizens, and courtesans;

But they have chanced to meet the Cyprian

In mellow mood, and now each one of them

Becomes the property of just one man.

 

Two trumpets for Athena Ilias

These two dedicatory epigrams are by poets of the Hellenistic age, when Greek superpowers warred on each other almost without pause.

The cult of Athena Ilias was by then already ancient, and from the fourth century BC a 'Confederation of Athena Ilias' celebrated a Panathenaic festival at Ilium (Troy), attested by coin finds (an article by Aneurin Ellis-Evans sums up what is known). Miccus is from Macedonia, and leaves his trumpet a long way from its native Italy.

6.195, by Archias, is a variant on Tymnes' poem.

6.151 (on YouTube)

TYMNES

Miccus of Pella hung this booming horn,

The war-god’s, in Athena Ilias’ shrine:

Etruscan instrument, through which that man

Many a bygone time did bellow out

The siren calls of parley and of war.

6.159 (on YouTube)

ANTIPATER OF SIDON

I am a trumpet, that in former time

Gushed forth the bloody war-song in the fight

And issued too the sweet refrain of peace.

And here I hang, your gift, Pherenicus,

To the Tritonian maid: for I have ceased

From roaring out the bellowing clarion.

Two fictive dedicatory inscriptions, by Callimachus

Placed sequentially in Book 6 of the Anthology, these two poems are by the famous Alexandrian scholar-poet Callimachus, one of literary epigram's early masters. Like many of the poems I’ve been posting lately these are fresh versions and won’t be in the book.

In this first poem, 6.149, the inscription ‘speaks’ when the passer-by reads it aloud, but speaks in the persona of the dedicated object, and what does a bronze cockerel know about anything? Including that it is a bronze cockerel? A statue cannot bend to see the inscription on its own base, and it's not as though cockerels are great readers to begin with.

'The Tyndarids' are Castor and Pollux, twin sons of Leda, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta, and brothers to Helen of Troy. Pollux was a famous boxer, so the victory being celebrated by Euaenetus son of Phaedrus is surely meant to be in a boxing-match. Strictly speaking only Castor is a Tyndarid; Pollux’s father was Zeus, making the boys only half-brothers despite being twins. Improbable in normal circumstances, but when gods get involved, all bets are off.

6.149 (on YouTube)

CALLIMACHUS

The man who set me here, Euaenetus,

Assures us (for I cannot tell myself)

That I am hung here for a victory,

His own, and I a cockerel made of brass,

And dedicated to the Tyndarids.

I trust the son of Phaedrus, he in turn

Being the offspring of Philoxenus.

The second poem, 6.150, is written as if to be inscribed on the base of a votive statue of a young woman in a sanctuary of Io/Isis. Callimachus asserts identity between the goddesses through a patronym that he probably invented for this poem, ‘Inachian’ (Inakhios). Inachus was the mythical founder and first king of Argos; his many children included Io, the city's first priestess of Hera. Io was said to have spent time in Egypt and introduced the cult of Isis, and was occasionally identified with her. Both goddesses were depicted as horned, Io because Zeus had turned her into a cow when Hera got jealous of him sleeping with her. Greek mythology's list of reasons not to sleep with Zeus is never-ending.

6.150 (on YouTube)

THE SAME

Inachus’ Isis — in her shrine she stands.

Daughter of Thales, Aeschylis fulfils 

The promise of her mother, Eirene.

In myth, both Io and Isis were well-travelled, and Callimachus does not specify a notional location for the sanctuary in which Aeschylis' statue has been placed. The poem invites us to take a guess, if we want. A cult of Io at Argos is not firmly attested, but that is not to say there was none; there is better evidence for her worship at Antioch. But it is Isis who is named, not Io. Callimachus’ own Alexandria had a temple of Isis on the royal island (now sunken) of Antirhodos, and of course there were plenty of others across Egypt.

Isis was worshipped as the loving and determined mother who revived Horus, and surviving spells show that people often appealed to her to protect their own children from disease, or to ensure safe childbirth. The scenario conjured by Callimachus’ fictive inscription, and by the imaginary statue it accompanied, is that Eirene had promised the statue to Isis as payment if she kept Aeschylis safe through one or other of these dangers. Now she gratefully fulfils her vow.

Shields of the defeated, from southern Italy

The shields of my last blog post were hung in temples as dedications by the men who owned them, on the occasion of their retirement from successful careers as mercenaries. The shields in the poems below might have hung alongside them, but are there for a very different reason -- they were taken as spoils by the victors in battle. The first of these epigrams is in the book, as is a companion poem (6.129) by the same author; the second is freshly translated for this blog post. Both of them celebrate the victories of Greek city-states over non-Greek peoples in southern Italy in the third century BC.

Shields are cumbersome objects and very heavy. Anyone trying to run from a battlefield would need to throw theirs away; hence the famous injunction of Spartan women to their menfolk to come back either with their shields (victorious), or on them (dead).

Leonidas was from Tarentum, the modern Taranto in Apulia, just at the instep of the heel of Italy's boot. Nossis was from Epizephyrian Locris, right down in the toe. These were major and long-established cities in what the Romans called Magna Graecia, the Greek presence in coastal southern Italy.

The Lucanians were a native Italic people, and the Bruttii were close relatives who lived just to the south of them in what is now Calabria.

6.131

LEONIDAS <OF TARENTUM>

These long shields taken from Lucanians,

This row of bridles, and the polished spears

Hung on each side, bereft of horse and man: 

To Pallas. Man and horse, black death devours.

Nossis is a woman poet but seems every bit as keen on war as Leonidas, at least when their own cities are winning at it. The adjective that I translate as 'keen fighters', ōkumakhos, is found only in this poem and may be her own coinage.

6.132

NOSSIS (on YouTube)

Bruttian soldiers cast these arms away

From shoulders fated to a sorry end,

Falling beneath the blows of Locrians — 

Keen fighters, of whose courage they now sing,

Hanging within the temples of the gods,

And do not miss the forearms of those men,

The cowards they forsook and left behind.

The Greek Anthology on YouTube

I’ve recorded my recent translations from Book 6 and made a YouTube playlist of them — it’s my first time trying something like this, and I hope someone out there will enjoy them. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY2GBapteg3mLFcUn-WhfYRKWNRzVW-mg

The shields of three retired mercenaries

Soldiers of fortune were a staple of ancient Greek warfare, and never more so than in the early Hellenistic age. They left their mark on the up-and-coming genres of new comedy (Plautus' Miles Gloriosus is a mercenary recruiter) and epigram. Book 6 of the Anthology preserves many poems in which veterans hang up their well-used gear as they retire on the profit of war. You will find some in my book, but these three are done fresh for the blog. 

6.124 (on YouTube)

HEGESIPPUS

Timanōr’s bloody shoulders bore me once,

And now, a shield, I hang beneath the eaves

Of Pallas’ shrine, Defender in the Fight.

I often knew the dust of iron war,

And ever warded death from him who bore.

 

Doubtless plenty of real-life mercenaries did make offerings on retirement to whatever deity they credited for their survival, and though I don't presently have access to a library to check, it's a fair bet that many of them commissioned inscriptions, a minority of which were surely in verse. These literary versions, though, are consciously participating in an extended conversation (which may nonetheless have intersected with and enriched actual inscriptional practice) between authors writing for publication and performance. The following poem by Nicias implicitly acknowledges that plenty of poets have tried their hand at the 'shield' trope already ('just like the others') -- and Nicias, a friend of Theocritus, comes very early in epigram's development as a literary genre.

6.127 (on YouTube)

NICIAS

Just like the others, I was always bound

To leave behind the hateful strife of War

And listen to the chorus of the girls

Beside the shrine of Artemis, the place

Where Epixenus dedicated me,

When pale old age began to sap his limbs.

Mnasalcas was a contemporary of Nicias.

6.264 (on YouTube)

MNASALCAS

The shield of Alexander, Phylleus’ son,

I hang here as a holy offering

To lord Apollo of the golden hair.

Worn is my rim and tired by constant war,

Worn too my boss, but courage makes me shine,

Courage I earned in arming that brave man

Who set me here. From when I first was made,

I never have been worsted or outdone.