Two fragmentary dedications

These poems too are from Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca. I enjoy their fragmentary quality. The first evidently celebrated a victory at the Isthmian Games; the second is a mystery to me and I quite like it that way.

810 (Corinth, fourth century)
 
Of Corinth (lord?) . . .
Set up this chariot as offering . . .
And placed it . . .
In lasting memory . . .

875 (Lesbos, fourth century?)
 
This is Poseidon’s . . .
And decorates Apollo’s . . .
And temple; but the city . . .
In payment for your artistry . . .

A filthy oil-lamp

Ancient homes were lit after dark with oil-lamps made from clay. Wikipedia has a picture of some Hellenistic and Roman examples. They had spouts for wicks and were filled through holes in the middle of their top faces. The oil would typically be less expensive than that used for cooking and might not smell very nice.

Lamps could be decorative as well as functional. The moulds in which they were typically batch-produced could imprint a design or motto, perhaps a humorous or sexy one. A lamp might have more than one wick, or be unusually shaped. I don't have the reference to hand, but I'm pretty sure one of Martial's epigrams character-assassinates a rival but downmarket satirical poet as (among other degrading things) a peddler of novelty oil-lamps.

Hansen's CEG contains one very rude inscriptional epigram from such a lamp, fired in Sicily in the fourth century BCE. It consists of a single metrical line, running around the edge of the lamp's top surface, and thus circling the hole through which the lamp was refilled with oil. The motto was not part of the mould; instead someone took it from the mould and incised it with a sharp point before it was fired in the oven. This is thus a very personal insult, one surely aimed at a known contemporary:

I AM PAUSANIAS' MOST BUGGERED HOLE.

Three offerings from the Athenian Acropolis

 Three sixth-century dedications to Athena, again from Hansen's wonderful Carmina Epigraphica Graeca, and nicely illustrating the formulaic character of votive language. Athena received a lot of one-tenth shares.

194
To Pallas spur of battle and as tithe
Promised to her by Dionysius,
Coloeus’ son, a statue here I stand.
 
197
Lady of Athens, Aristaechmus’ son
Timocrates made you this offering,
And you the child of aegis-bearing Zeus.
 
202
Aeschines to Athena dedicates
This statue that he promised as his tithe,
Gift to the child of aegis-bearing Zeus.

Two more sailor's graves, adorably flawed

These two are taken from p.12 of Woodward's Tales of Sea-Sorrow. The first hinges on an 'eye rhyme'; the second eccentrically Anglicises the Greek personal name Pheidōn (which might ordinarily come to us Latinised as Phido) and makes the poem's sense more dogged than I think Woodward can have intended.

I love them already for their control of tone, but more so for their imperfections.

JULIAN, PRAEFECT <OF EGYPT>: VII.582

Ship-wreckt sea-man, fare thee well!
E'en within the gates of hell
Dub not thou the sea unkind:
Rather blame the stormy wind,
For it proved the death of thee.
But the billow of the sea
On her breast thy body bore
To thy fathers' tombs ashore.
 
LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM: IX.107

Avoid the storms of life, and run
To Hades' port as Fido, son
Of Kritès, I myself have done.

Two from Woodward's 'Tales of Sea-Sorrow'

 Dipping back into Woodward, I learned a new word that I do not expect to be allowed in Scrabble. These two quite lovely versions from the Anthology's epitaphic seventh book appear on p.41 of Tales of Sea-Sorrow (1931) and are what you might expect from the title.

As in previous posts, I have replaced the long 's's that moft modern readers would otherwife find abfurd and diftreffing, but otherwise do not meddle with the translator's archaising charm. The more I dip into Woodward, the more I find to enjoy and admire.

ANTIPATER OF SIDON: VII.639

Every where the sea's the sea.
Why to Hellè straits give we,
Or to Cycladés, ill name?
Why the Needles idly blame?
They deserve no evil fame.
Safely past these spots I came,
Doom'd to meet, in sorry sort,
Death at Skarphè, when in port.
Proy who will, 'Fair passage home,'
After all, the foam's the foam,
As declareth, nigh the wave,
Aristagoras his grave.

ISIDORE: VII.532

Eteókles is my title:
Sea-born hopes from off my pightle
Drew me for to try my hand
Trafficking in foreign land.
So I trod on ridge and back
Of the Tyrrhene salt-way track,
Until ship and man were drown'd,
Overwhelm'd by wave profound,
Feeling full brunt of the blast.
No man may the twain contrast:
Airs, that winnnow chaff from wheat;
Airs, that blow on canvas-sheet.

Three inscribed epigrams from Attica

I'm not done with Woodward, the carolling epigrammatist, but here for a breather are some versions of epitaphs from Attica. They are numbered after the Greek originals in Peter Allen Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (1983/1989, 2 vols), a wonderful resource.

Where known, Hansen tells us where the stones bearing the inscriptions were found. Poem 40's grave-marker was recovered from the wall of a church where it had been reused as masonry; poem 52's, from the wall built by Themistocles to protect the transport corridor between Athens and its harbour at Piraeus.

Poem 66 is followed by a credit to the stonemason who carved the image of the deceased on the funeral stela that bears the inscription. 

40 (Attica, sixth century)

 

This tomb is famed abroad. Pisianax

Erected it for Damasistratus,

His son, for so is honour due the dead.

 

52 (Attica, sixth century)

 

Among the Samians a noble man

Is here entombed, son of Hēragoras,

Leōnax, far away from those he loved.

 

66 (Attica, sixth/fifth century)

 

Phi[ltiades of Sam]os here interred

Chaste Lampitō, far from her fatherland.

-Endoius was the artist

'Love-Epigrams', part five: the girl in the library

                       XXIX

HIMS ANCIENT AND HERS MODERN

        ΗΣΙΟΔΟΥ ΠΟΤΕ ΒΙΒΛΩΝ

    [MARCUS ARGENTARIUS: ix, 161]

My Hesiod book one day while I was thumbing,
I saw young Pyrrha suddenly a-coming:
Cried I, my folio flung upon the floor,
'Old Hesiod, of thy Works & Days why more?'

This is a perfectly fine translation, line for line, of an epigram by Marcus Argentarius (he wrote satirical epigrams before Lucillius and I really should find out more about him). Woodward updates the terminology of book-reading: the poem's speaker is scolling (ἑλίσσων) through a papyrus book-roll, not thumbing the pages of a 'folio' (in the Greek simply βίβλον both times). But this is fair play.

There are two small amplifications. Pyrrha is not explicitly 'young' in the original, but youthful beauty is the built-in presumption (epigram treats old women as hags). Specifying his Works & Days helpfully reminds a modern readership of the stuffy moral precepts for which Hesiod was best known. Otherwise Woodward is unusually close to the Greek: 'Old Hesiod' is indeed ὦ γέρον Ἡσίοδε.

Why pick out this poem? Because it chimes with some of Woodward's own, original verse. I know this thanks to John Barnes's biography, a helpful source that I've mentioned before. Barnes quotes the following from Wooodward's Miscellaneous Verse Sacred and Secular of 1928, some years before Love-Epigrams:

If e’er ye be found
In the Reading-room Round,
   Remember the bachelor Preedy,
Whose forefoot was lamed,
And his heart-string unframed,
   By the fall of an Encyclopedy.

’Twas Edna the fair,
With flaxen-fine hair,
   Was studying under the dome,
When, out of command,
Dropt out of her hand
   A weighty historical tome.

‘So sorry’, said she:
‘No matter’, said he:
   But mark, a few days after those,
On her finger a ring,
All along of the thing
   Let fall, as befel’t, on his toes.

There was nothing irregular about a woman using the British Library in Woodward's day but the idea of women around books seems to have bemused him. Though probably he liked women well enough, in contexts unscholarly; at any rate, he had been married to one.