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.

Agathias on what endures, with a dubious pencil and some peculiar creeping

Though Cephalas presents it as a preface (pröoimion, 'proem'), I think Agathias must instead have written the closing poem of Book 4 of the Anthology as his sphragis -- the poetic signet-seal that came at the end of his completed book to warrant its quality and assert his authorship. It's much shorter than his actual proem, thank heavens, and I present the whole of it here in my own translation. The two emboldened bits identify translation choices that I'd like to talk about afterwards.

The slabs of stone, the tools to carve the line,
The tablets with inscriptions — all are cause
Of hearty cheer to those who call them ‘mine’;
But only while they live. The empty vaunts
Of men in life yield little benefit
To souls in that which follows. Nonetheless
Excellent character and wisdom’s grace
Can percolate to there and still remain
In this our world, here to perpetuate
Remembrance. So did Plato never brag
In pigments and in graven monuments,
Nor Homer, but in wisdom all alone.
Happy are they whose memory endures
In libraries of volumes subtly wrought,
And not in emblems destitute of thought.

Line 1's 'tools to carve the line' is my best stab at the Greek graphis. It is close kin to the Greek verb graphō, meaning to write or mark, and the noun gramma, a thing written or marked. Very many words in English derive from these -- telegraph and telegram, autograph, seismograph, graphic, graphite (and thereby graphene), and so on, down to Instagram. Here is the entry for graphis in the great Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, revised by Jones, LSJ for short.

A. [select] = γραφεῖον 1, AP6.63 (Damoch.), 65 (Paul. Sil.), 67 (Jul.): esp. stilus for writing on waxen tablets, Pl.Prt.326d; paint-brush, APl.4.178 (Antip.); graving tool, LXX Ex.32.4; “σύμβολα . . γραφίδεσσι κατέξυσα” Hymn.Is.11, cf. AP4.3b.72 (Agath.); needle for embroidering, APl.4.324.

II. [select] embroidery, AP5.275 (Agath.): but in pl., = paintings, Nonn.D.25.433.

The citation I've highlighted is annoying if you're working from the old Loeb, as I generally am, since it's (a) in the public domain and (b) lovely. The reference is to Agathias' proem, 4.3, parts of which we've considered in previous blog posts. At some point an editor decided to divide this block of verse into a pair of poems: 4.3a (lines 1-46), and 4.3b (everything that follows). There is obvious sense in this. Not only does the topic change, but the metre as well, from iambics to epic hexameter, apt for extolling the heroic conquests of Agathias' emperor. But it means you have to do sums if you are using an older edition and want to make sense of the citation, which in this case refers to the dative plural graphidessi in what used to be line 118.

I think LSJ is actually wrong about this instance. As I understand that line, Agathias is contrasting the use of a graphis to compose inscriptional or quasi-inscriptional epigrams, with the physical carving of such poems onto actual monuments. As my translation had it,

... Part the Second, though,
Collects the antique votive offering:
All that we graved with pens or had inscribed
Out in the world, on well-wrought statue’s base
Or on the many far-flung monuments
That witness to the breadth of human art.

'Percolate' in my line 8 is my playful best guess at what to do with the compound verb sunerpei in line 5 of the Greek. Herpō by itself means to move by slow gradations, as might the very young or very old. If I had to settle for a single English rendering, it would have to be 'creep'. Its close cousin in Latin is serpo, from which we get 'serpent', and our 'herpetology' is the study of creeping things (reptiles). But what is sun-erpō? It has no dictionary entry of its own, and a TLG search turns up just one other instance in the whole of Greek literature, in the philosopher Epictetus. There, it just means to 'herp' in another's company.

On the one hand, that's not terribly helpful; on the other, it frees me up to go for something quirky, as surely was Agathias' original word choice in the poet's own eyes.

Agathias concludes his proem.

This is the final part of the long poem with which Agathias introduces his Cycle, freshly translated for this blog. It follows the praise of his patron, Theodore, of which I gave you a version last time. He closes by telling his readers what to expect by way of structure and content.

Agathias divided his anthology into seven sections, each containing a particular kind of epigram; this was a familiar type of organisation, carried over from the epigram-books of individual classical authors such as Posidippus (as confirmed by the Milan papyrus). Agathias could deploy it on a larger scale within a single volume because parchment codices were much more capacious than the papyrus book-rolls of old.

I would begin by setting out for you,
In rivalry with men of olden time,
All that progenitors of modern song
Have written in the way of offerings
As though for former gods; for it seemed wise
Yet to conserve an expert mimicry
Of ancient letters. Part the Second, though,
Collects the antique votive offering:
All that we graved with pens or had inscribed
Out in the world, on well-wrought statue’s base
Or on the many far-flung monuments
That witness to the breadth of human art.
As for the third part of this book new-made,
It takes as motive, insofar is right,
Whatever mottoes God permitted us
To write for tombs, in verse, while still intent
On truth unswerving. As for what we wrote
Of all the varied paths of human life
And of the teetering scales of fickle fate,
Look for it by the fourth foundation-stone
Of this my book. In quick succession too
The charms of our Part Five may win you round,
In which we wax satirical and write
In the invective mode. The Queen of Love
Steals the sixth chapter, and may well divert
Our path to discourse out of elegy,
And sweet Desires. Within our seventh hive
Of poets’ honey you will ascertain
Pleasures of Bacchus, dancing choruses
That like their drink unwatered, bowls of wine,
And dinner-parties that bring happiness.

The joyful banquets of the proem's conclusion recall its opening lines, in which Agathias introduced his Cycle as a literary smorgasbord of choice morsels from contemporary poets.

In the Anthology, the proem (4.3) is followed by a shorter poem (4.4), also by Agathias, which I think must have concluded his Cycle. In technical terms it is his sphragis, his seal and sign-off, and it's lovely -- but that will be for another day.