{"id":1156,"date":"2021-03-05T18:12:13","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T18:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2021-03-05T18:12:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-05T18:12:14","slug":"guest-blog-greek-epigram-in-the-roman-west-by-gideon-nisbet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/2021\/03\/05\/guest-blog-greek-epigram-in-the-roman-west-by-gideon-nisbet\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest blog: Greek epigram in the Roman west, by Gideon Nisbet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"My<\/figure>
\n

We are delighted to share the script of the brilliant presentation that Gideon Nisbet (University of Birmingham) gave on occasion of our first MAPPOLA workshop<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Gideon has now published his talk<\/a> on his fantastic Lector Studiosus blog<\/a>: we are very grateful to have his permission to re-blog it here. Make sure to visit Gideon’s blog regularly \u2013 there is so much to discover! And his handout for the talk is available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

INTRO<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Greetings and thanks
It\u2019s my pleasure to have this opportunity to introduce my new translation from the Greek Anthology for the World\u2019s Classics,
By way of a small sample of Greek epigrams in the Roman West,
Including some that enjoy complicating that situation.
The book is available now, and I am blogging additional translations (Google me and \u2018epigram\u2019 and you\u2019ll find them easily enough).
In all, my World\u2019s Classics translation includes more than 600 poems,
Which is the biggest new version into English in a very long time,
And sounds like a lot, but is less than a sixth of what the Anthology contains.
What I\u2019ve given you on the handout is a small sample for, I hope, your reading pleasure.
Its arrangement follows that of the source text,
But the story I\u2019m spinning around them this afternoon is broadly chronological, so we\u2019ll be hopping back and forth,
and I won\u2019t discuss every poem in detail.
I\u2019ll begin by briefly introducing my source:
The Greek Anthology that we read today, runs to sixteen books and contains about four thousand epigrams.
It is more or less the text of the Palatine Anthology, a tenth-century manuscript that in turn was more or less the Anthology that Constantine Cephalas had compiled not long before. Cephalas had gathered whatever he could from his classical and late antique predecessors, notably Meleager, Philip, and Agathias.
As a collection of epigrams, the Greek Anthology hits its stride with the erotic poems of bk.5.
It is front-loaded with oddities, inc. a collection of Christian epigrams; the Prefaces of Cephalas\u2019s predecessors, from Meleager onwards;
and the strange little inscriptional collection that is the Cyzicene Epigrams \u2014 a pagan Stations of the Cross from a lost temple to an Attalid queen, and made up of scenes from Greek myth that illustrate the love of sons for their mothers. Though it\u2019s notionally an artefact of the second century BC, it climaxes with the story of Romulus and Remus. This is the first item on your handout, but Book 3 is so weird and mysterious I\u2019ll say no more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EPIGRAMS OF MAGNA GRAECIA<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Instead I\u2019ll begin my tour on safer ground, by touching on Magna Graecia, which in Hellenistic times was as rich in epigrammatists as it had formerly been in lyric poets. Theocritus and Nossis, for instance, are significant presences in the Anthology. But they are poets, not of the Roman, but of the Greek West, with Rome still over the horizon.
Leonidas\u2019s situation is probably different and I\u2019ve given you one of his poems, from the dedicatory sixth book of the Anthology.
His home town of Tarentum, in Italy\u2019s instep, was a rich Spartan foundation, and this poem celebrates a southern Italian victory for which the Tarentines erected a trophy at Pylos, in Sparta\u2019s back yard. The metropolis helped out against the Oscan-speaking locals more than once in the mid- to late fourth century BC, so this feels plausible as a real inscription.
But modern scholarship places Leonidas\u2019 floruit around 270, by which point the Romans had won the Pyrrhic War and pulled Tarentum\u2019s walls down, so I suspect we are seeing an exercise in nostalgic avoidance of present realities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PHILODEMUS, CRINAGORAS, ANTIPATER OF THESSALONICA<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Later Hellenistic poets engage directly with Rome because it was a rich source of patronage. Their poems often accompany thoughtful little gifts that tastefully advertise the authors\u2019 own modest means, as well as their warm friendships with wealthy and powerful individuals: a toothpick, for instance, or a nice warm hat. In a poem from Book 5, included on your handout, we see Philodemus of Gadara getting it on with a hot Italian girl. Cicero\u2019s speech In Pisonem scolded Philodemus\u2019s patron for picking up louche habits from his famous Epicurean houseguest, but Cicero himself was the proud sponsor of another Anthology poet, Archias.
In the next generation, Antipater and Crinagoras were kept busy celebrating Augustan family occasions. Antipater is represented on your handout by an epitaph for a Greek freedwoman, from the funerary Book 7; Crinagoras, by two poems from Book 9, including a very unlikely story about a parrot. The ninth book is \u2018epideictic\u2019, meaning displays of rhetorical skill. Since authors love showing off, it\u2019s one of the Anthology\u2019s biggest books. We have a secure context for Crinagoras\u2019 other poem here, 9.516. He had passed through the Alps with Augustus on the way to Spain in 26\/5 BC, and Gow and Page had fun wondering which animal\u2019s fat it was that did the trick.
Palladas\u2019s poem from the same book, 9.502, feels like it ought to belong to this early period \u2014 indeed I wonder if it can really be by him. This kind of cheeky banter with a patron would be more in Philodemus\u2019 line, and by the fourth century AD even the most stubborn Hellene ought to have known what conditum was. (Plus, the poem is fun and Palladas is professionally miserable.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NERONIAN POETS<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Imperial patronage continued under the later Julio-Claudians. The Anthology\u2019s other Leonidas, from Alexandria, specialised in isopsephic poems in which the letter-values of the first couplet \u2014 alpha as one, beta as two, and so on \u2014 added up to the exact same total as those of the second; and in the case of 6.329, of the third couplet as well. Or so he claims; his perverse party-trick has been a nightmare for modern scholars trying to emend the text so that the sums work.
Lucillius joined Leonidas in courting Nero\u2019s patronage; he is famous for his scoptic or satirical epigrams, contained in the Anthology\u2019s eleventh book, of which I give you two examples. I\u2019m tempted to have \u2018Marcus\u2019 be Marcus Valerius Martialis, the poet Martial, who we know was heavily influenced by Lucillius. It\u2019s a stretch \u2014 Martial began his major epigrammatic project of twelve numbered books in the 80s. But he was in Rome from 64, so he could well have met Lucillius and begun tinkering with epigram around that time. Certainly Martial\u2019s own Book One is at pains to put distance between the new material and his various unspecified juvenilia.
Could some of Martial\u2019s early poems have been in Greek? Epigram was fundamentally a Greek genre, and plenty of Romans were writing Greek epigrams before and after Martial\u2019s time. Poem 9.332, included on your handout, is an inscriptional example by a good, second-century amateur poet with a demanding day job.
Regardless of Marcus\u2019s real identity, or of whether Marcus had a real identity, the scenario presented by Lucillius\u2019s two poems is already satisfyingly messy. They give us a Greek poet, with a Roman name, living in Rome, where he makes fun of another Roman-named and presumptively Latin-speaking poet, who composes epitaphs in Greek \u2014 including one for a boy with a Roman name, who comes from the Greek East.
And that\u2019s assuming we don\u2019t take \u2018\u039a\u03bb\u03b1\u03cd\u03c3\u03b1\u03c4\u03b5 \u03b4\u03c9\u03b4\u03b5\u03ba\u03ad\u03c4\u03b7 \u039c\u03ac\u03be\u03b9\u03bc\u03bf\u03bd \u1f10\u03be \u1f18\u03c6\u03ad\u03c3\u03bf\u03c5\u2019 and the rest as a presumptive translation by Lucillius into Greek of an epitaph that Marcus has composed in Latin \u2026but that is probably a complication too far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STRATO OF SARDIS<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll end with a prolific and witty poet whose assigned period wanders in between the Hellenistic era and late antiquity, though as often as not, he is placed under Hadrian for no really good reason. Strato of Sardis specialised in pederastic verse, and the twelfth book of the Anthology comes down to us under what was probably the title he gave his own poetry-book, the Mousa Paidik\u0113 or Boyish Muse. I\u2019ve given you two of his poems.
In the first, he complains to a friend that all the best boys are off-limits, by virtue of their Roman citizenship, which by his time I take to have been pretty widespread. Strato is nostalgic for the ancient ideal of a respectable love-affair in which the lover and his youthful beloved are of equally high social and moral standing, but sardonically admits a less idealistic and often mercenary contemporary sexual reality, closely aligned to Martial\u2019s own pederastic verse.
Of course, 12.185 doesn\u2019t at all imply this Lydian Greek poet was in Rome, or that he ever came west at all. There will have been plenty of purple-togaed boys in Sardis, I am sure.
But 12.254 suggests to me not only that he came to Rome, but that he was there in Martial\u2019s day. Kathleen Coleman has observed that Martial seems to allude to Strato\u2019s Boyish Muse, and I badly want them to have known each other \u2014 so much so that I\u2019m half-tempted to write novels in which they team up to fight crime or hunt werewolves.
You will see that Strato 12.254 has a lot in common with Martial 9.36. Both poems elaborately flatter a wealthy and powerful figure who possesses a great and shining host of divinely beautiful young men: Er\u014dtes, Strato calls them. This makes their master at least the equal of\u00a0 Zeus or Jupiter, who for all his power can claim only one such Ganymede. For Martial, the lord of heaven is merely \u2018the other Jupiter\u2019, whose power can surely be no greater and is less immediately felt than that of his earthly counterpart.
The identity of Martial\u2019s \u2018Ausonian page\u2019 has never been in doubt; his epigram comes as the climax of a concentrated cycle of poems celebrating the beauty of Earinus, the handsome young favourite of the Emperor Domitian. For my part I am pretty confident that Strato is angling for patronage right alongside him.
In any case, the pairing of Strato and Martial feels like a good way to end in the context of MAPPOLA \u2014 Greek and Latin poets working in the same spaces, chasing the same kinds of outcome, and becoming hard to tell apart. I hope you\u2019ve enjoyed our little tour of the Anthology, and I thank you for your time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are delighted to share the script of the brilliant presentation that Gideon Nisbet (University of Birmingham) gave on occasion of our first MAPPOLA workshop. Gideon has now published his… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[38],"tags":[72,29,73],"class_list":["post-1156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","tag-anthologia-palatina","tag-e-workshop","tag-greek-anthology"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbaMDT-iE","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Anthologia_Palatina_p101.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappola.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}