Sappho, by a freedman of Cicero

 7.17
TULLIUS LAUREA

You friend that passes this Aeolian tomb,
Do not report I lie among the dead,
The bard of Mytilene: for this stone
Was raised by mortal labour. Such works go
Into oblivion so speedily;
But if you gauge me for the Muses’ sake,
From each of which great ladies I did take
A bloom to place within my ennead,
Then you will see that I escaped the dark
Of Hades’ realm, and there will come no day
When lyric SAPPHO’s name has passed away.

Tullius Laurea was once a slave owned by Cicero; he may have been freed in his master's will. If 'Laurea' was his slave name, which is my guess, it points towards him being already recognised as a literary talent -- the laurel was sacred to Apollo. He was a fluently bilingual poet: in his book of Natural History on water sources, Pliny the Elder cites and commends an epigram he wrote in Latin about a hot spring at a villa estate owned by Cicero.

The 'ennead' of Sappho to which Laurea refers was not her own arrangement of her work, but the standard edition compiled by scholars at Alexandria in the Hellenistic age. They divided her works into nine books, one for each of the Muses.

Literary epitaphs for Homer and Erinna

7.2
ANTIPATER OF SIDON

He was Persuasion in a mortal guise,
A mighty voice, a genius who sang
Works that the Muses might have called their own.
This craggy isle of Ios boasts its claim,
For on no other island, only me,
He breathed his sacred last, o wayfarer:
The breath with which he told of Kronos’ son
Of will invincible, Olympus too,
And Ajax mighty at the naumachy,
And Hector dragged upon the Trojan plain
By colts of Pharsalus, Achilles’ team.
If I am small to hold so great a one,
Consider poor bare Ikos, wherein lies
The husband who claimed Thetis as his prize.

7.13
LEONIDAS, OR SOME SAY MELEAGER

Young and unwed, a bee among the bards
Who gathered nectar from the Muses’ blooms —
ERINNA, she whom Hades snatched away
To take in marriage. All too apt and true
Those words she sang, that girl, alive and well:
‘You are a jealous one, you lord of Hell.’

 

 

Two rooted epitaphs

 Like most of my other recent translations, these two epitaphs are from Richard Hunter's recently published and very fine Greek Epitaphic Poetry (poems XI and XIII). The first is from a gravestone (stēlē); the second, from the base of an equestrian statue raised in honour of the deceased.

Both poems hinge upon  ancestry, expressed through the term rizē, literally  'root'; my versions have 'line', but 'stock' would have been closer.

Both poems also manage a change of voice partway through. The dead man is praised in the third person, then speaks for himself to those who pass by his monument.

 From Laurion in fourth-century Attica, famous for its silver-mines:

Great-hearted Paphlagonian, he came
From the Black Sea; Atōtus was his name.
Far from that land he bade his body rest
From mortal toils. No other could contest
In crafting silver. I am of the line
Of bold Pylaemenes, who met his fate
Slain by the great Achilles in his hate.

 From Pherae in Thessaly, third century BC, and surely commemorating a member of a mystery-cult :

They said that Lycophron, Philiscus’ son,
Was of great Zeus’s line — but truth to tell,
His origin was everlasting flame.
I live now in the starry firmament,
Raised up there by my father, while below
My mortal body rests beneath the earth
To which my own dear mother owed her birth.

From the statue of a Hellenistic cavalry captain

(Content warning: suicide)

'An early Hellenistic poem from Akraiphis on the northeastern shore of Lake Copais in Boeotia' (Richard Hunter, Greek Epitaphic Poetry, highly recommended). Hunter discusses a couple of possible invading kings, both of which would put Eugnotus' death in the early 290s BC. His commentary is very helpful in pointing out the Homeric echoes that put Eugnotus on a par with the heroes of ancient epic.

As Hunter notes, one puzzling feature is the assertion that Eugnotus' suicide was according to the ethos of noble captains. His note on it is great: 'The "custom" of suicide after defeat is not in fact at all commonly attested, but the claim both justifies Eugnotus' action and acts as a protreptic for those reading his epitaph' in the final lines.

Onchestus is on the southern shore of Lake Copais; it 'was a traditional centre for pan-Boeotian meetings and may have been targeted by "the king" for that reason. The commentary is really good. :-)

Eugnōtus’ character was known when he
Rallied the brave Boeotian cavalry
And charged the tyrant’s countless minions;
Although, alas, away from Onchēstus
He could not drive the brazen thundercloud —
For he was unsupported, with the spears
Around him all in shatters when he came.
O father Zeus, with courage adamant
He launched his riders in a close array
Eight times and even ten. He lost the day,
And did not think it seemly to live on;
Instead he loosed his breastplate, and drove home
His sword with manly courage in his breast,
As noble captains do. The enemy
Did not despoil, but sent his body back,
Wet with the blood of his own liberty,
To his ancestral vaults. And now the rock
Of the Acraephians possesses him
In brazen portrait, faithful to his face,
A gift of wife and daughter. You young men,
Be soldiers like him, seek your own renown;
Be brave like him; defend your fathers’ town.

Two dead warriors

Not very seasonal, I know. Two epitaphs for men killed in battle, the first from Attica in the sixth century, the second from Eretria in the fourth.

IV

Pause here and grieve beside a dead man’s tomb,
Croesus’, whom long ago the war-god slew
As he was in the forefront of the fight.

VIII

The world will never lack a monument
To tell your quality, Lysandrides:
You call a witness we must all believe,
Ares, who made you king of all the field;
Conquered by Fate, in death you gifted fame
To Andros, island garlanded by sea.

 

Three epigrams for Christmas

Happy Christmas, everybody! The following epigrams are from Book 1 of the Greek Anthology, the editor of which, Constantine Cephalas, gave pride of place to poems on Christian themes. None are assigned an author; instead we get explanatory headings. All three are in the book (ideal stocking filler).

37. On the birth of Christ

Trumpets and lightning, and the earth resounds;
But to your Virgin Mother you came down
And trod all silently upon your way.

38. On the same

This manger was as Heaven, and was more;
For Heaven is this newborn’s handiwork.

39. On the shepherds and the angels

One dance, one song for men and angels too,
For man and God have now become as one.

Three performers buried at Athens

These inscribed poems too are from Hunter's lovely new Green-and-Yellow. All are epitaphs from fourth-century Athens.

 

The entry for Euthias in Brill's New Pauly by Nesselrath (so hardly 'new') reads:

 

'(Εὐθίας; Euthías). Attic comic poet, who came second in a contest around the mid 4th cent. BC [1. test.]. Of his plays, neither titles nor fragments are extant.'

 

In other words, if it weren't for this epitaph (the middle one below), we would never have heard of him. He was a playwright; did he also act? And as for Potamo of Thebes, who died at Athens: was he just visiting, perhaps to perform at a festival, or had he made the city his home? The poems let you spin your own story, though clearly theirs were well enough known in their day.

VII

Hellas awarded for the piper’s arts
First prize in every match to Potamo,
A Theban, and he lies within this tomb.
Olympicus his father grew in fame
By virtue of his powers of memory,
Such was the boy he raised, a prodigy
And touchstone to the clever and the wise.

 

IX

All Greece admires him and it marks his loss
In every sacred contest: Euthias,
And rightly so. His gift was not innate
But won by training, and he rose in grade
In sweetly-laughing Comedy, the art
That earns the grape-wreath, to the second place;
So said the vote; but rank him first in grace.

X

Had Fortune brought you safe along the way
To prime of life, for sure, Macarius,
You would have risen high in hope and name,
And held the reins of Tragedy in Greece.
That future did not happen; all the same,
Though young in death, your sober character
And quality assure sufficient fame.