On Coming After: Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception 311020441X, 9783110204414

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Richard Hunter On Coming After Part 1

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Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabe´ · Margarethe Billerbeck · Claude Calame Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 3/1

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

On Coming After Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception by

Richard Hunter Part 1 Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN 978-3-11-020441-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover Design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Contents Part 1 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 On Coming After . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception 1. Apollo and the Argonauts: Two notes on Ap. Rhod. 2, 669 – 719 29 2. Medea’s flight: the fourth Book of the Argonautica . . . . . . . . 42 3. ‘Short on heroics’: Jason in the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4. Winged Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5. Bulls and Boxers in Apollonius and Vergil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6. Greek and Non-Greek in the Argonautica of Apollonius . . . . 95 7. Callimachus and Heraclitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 8. Writing the God: Form and Meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 9. Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in the Phainomena of Aratus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 10. The Presentation of Herodas’ Mimiamboi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 11. Callimachean Echoes in Catullus 65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 12. Plautus and Herodas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 13. Bion and Theocritus: a note on Lament for Adonis v. 55 . . . . 229

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14. Mime and mimesis: Theocritus, Idyll 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 15. The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . 257 16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 17. Before and after epic: Theocritus (?), Idyll 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 18. (B)ionic man: Callimachus’ iambic programme . . . . . . . . . . . 311 19. The Poet Unleaved. Simonides and Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . 326 20. The Poetics of Narrative in the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 21. Virgil and Theocritus: A Note on the Reception of the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 22. The Sense of an Author: Theocritus and [Theocritus] . . . . . 384 23. Imaginary Gods? Poetic theology in the Hymns of Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 24. Theocritus and the Style of Cultural Change . . . . . . . . . . . . 434 25. Notes on the Lithika of Poseidippos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . 470 27. The prologue of the Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’) 503 28. Sweet nothings – Callimachus fr. 1.9 – 12 revisited . . . . . . . . 523 29. The Reputation of Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537 30. Hesiod, Callimachus, and the invention of morality . . . . . . . 559

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Part 2 Comedy and Performance 31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 32. Philemon, Plautus and the Trinummus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 33. The Aulularia of Plautus and its Greek original . . . . . . . . . . . 612 34. Middle Comedy and the Amphitruo of Plautus . . . . . . . . . . . 627 35. ‘Acting down’: the ideology of Hellenistic performance . . . . 643 36. Showing and telling: notes from the boundary . . . . . . . . . . . 663

Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire 37. Generic consciousness in the Orphic Argonautica? . . . . . . . . . . 681 38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius . 700 39. The Periegesis of Dionysius and the traditions of Hellenistic poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 718

The Ancient Novel 40. History and Historicity in the Romance of Chariton . . . . . . 737 41. Longus and Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 775 42. Growing up in the ancient novels: a response . . . . . . . . . . . . 790 43. The Aithiopika of Heliodorus: beyond interpretation? . . . . . . 804 44. ‘Philip the Philosopher’ on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus . . . 829 45. Plato’s Symposium and the traditions of ancient fiction . . . . . 845 46. Isis and the Language of Aesop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 867

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47. The curious incident …: polypragmosyne and the ancient novel 884 General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Passages Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 902

Preface A collection such as this probably requires an apology more than a Preface, but I hope that the bringing together of these pieces from the last thirty years will at least be found useful by students of ancient literature. The remarkable recent growth of collected volumes, ‘companions’, and conference papers perhaps gives volumes such as this more justification than some may have had in the past. I have resisted the temptation to revise (contenting myself with a few addenda and the up-dating of some references), even where the follies of past years seemed to demand correction, in part because, once started on the process of revision, ‘where do you stop?’ becomes an ever more insistent question. In particular, it should be noted that the bibliographical and editorial conventions of the original publications (including the spelling of ancient names) have been very largely preserved. This book would never have appeared without the remarkable and selfless labours of Antonios Rengakos, one of the Editors of Trends in Classics, and Evangelos Karakasis, both of who advised, scanned, edited and corrected with apparently indefatigable, and extraordinarily cheerful, carefulness; I am very much in the debt of these two friends, whose work on this project I have found very moving. I am also very grateful to Sabine Vogt of Walter de Gruyter Verlag for her support and encouragement at every stage, and to the editors and publishers of the original articles for the permission to reprint them here.

Introduction The papers collected in this volume fall broadly into four, certainly not wholly discrete, areas: Greek and Roman comedy and performance traditions after the fifth century, Hellenistic poetry and its reception at Rome, the Greek poetry of the Roman empire, and the ancient novel. These four areas of ancient literature have enjoyed different levels of interest in the last decades. The study of Greek comedy after Aristophanes has in many respects made significant recent advances.1 After the excitement of the publication of Menander’s Dyskolos in 1958 new papyri of Menander and (?) Menander have continued to accumulate, so that some long familiar plays, such as the Epitrepontes, are better known to us now than they were even just a decade ago, and our overall picture of Menander’s art grows ever more rounded; Geoffrey Arnott’s three-volume Loeb of 1979 – 2000 allowed new generations of students usable access to ‘the new Menander’, specialists are increasingly well served by commentaries (mostly, however, in languages other than English), and Colin Austin’s new OCT is eagerly awaited. Moreover, the monumental Poetae Comici Graeci of Rudolf Kassel and Colin Austin has made the fragments of all Greek comedy ‘readable’ in a way they simply were not before, and individual studies, such as Geoffrey Arnott’s commentary on the fragments of Alexis, have at least given ‘Middle Comedy’ a recognisable shape, however deep our ignorance remains. There is now a secure enough base in place to move from textual recovery to interpretation. My impression, however, is that operations have stalled. Certain landmarks stand out, such as David Wiles’ The Masks of Menander (Cambridge 1991), and articles devoted to Menander still of course appear regularly, but I have no real sense of an academic community pushing hard at these plays and fragments to see what light they can shed, not just on theatrical and textual practice, but on Athenian society, its ideo1

For a concise recent bibliographical guide to ancient comedy as a whole (with something of a bias towards Anglophone scholarship) cf. N.J. Lowe, Comedy (Cambridge 2008).

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logical assumptions and its modes of thinking; Susan Lape’s Reproducing Athens (Princeton 2004) is a reasonably isolated attempt to find a more layered socio-political context for these plays. A large conference I recently attended in Greece on ‘Space and Time in the Ancient Theatre’ (admittedly, not a scientifically conducted experiment) yielded not a single paper on Menander out of more than fifty presentations. Perhaps there is a feeling that we already know all there is to be known about Menander and that new texts merely confirm this – ‘surprises’ are no longer really surprising. Unlike the Attic tragedy of the fifth century, furthermore, these are not plays which issue a hermeneutic challenge, which both dramatise the process of interpretation and demand an equally questioning response. Moreover, the relation between the substance of the plays and the society which gave them their context seems less angular and open to contestation than in the case of Aristophanes; these plays can go down without touching the sides. Perhaps, in fact, we are living through a period of neo-Plutarchanism (cf. the Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander), which is, paradoxically, doing Menander no favours.2 The current relative neglect of the literary study of Plautus is, in many respects, even more of a puzzle, if only because of the abundance of textual material with which to work. Some years ago I mused on why modern scholarship, particularly Anglophone scholarship, seemed more or less to have given up on Plautus;3 this battlefield – by some way the largest body of Republican poetry which we possess – has long since been largely left to Germans and Italians to dispute, though some significant American interventions in recent years have begun to reclaim bits of territory. I exaggerate of course, but it is one of the most remarkable facts of recent Classics publishing that we had to wait until 2007 for an English translation of Fraenkel’s Plautinisches im Plautus/Elementi Plautini, and it finally came from the polyglot heart of Australia.4 In particular, the question at the heart of Fraenkel’s book, to which two of the essays in this present volume are devoted, of the relation between Plautine 2 3

4

On Plutarch’s essay cf. Chapter 3 of Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming). Review of E. Lefèvre, E. Stärk, G. Vogt-Spira (eds.), Plautus barbarus. Sechs Kapitel zur Originalitt des Plautus (Tübingen 1991) in N.W. Slater and B. Zimmermann (eds.), Intertexualitt in der griechisch-rçmischen Komçdie (Stuttgart) = Drama 2: 235 – 7. Plautine Elements in Plautus, trans. T. Drevikovsky and F. Muecke, Oxford 2007.

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plays and their Greek originals, a question taken in thought-provoking, though utterly different, directions in the last decades by Otto Zwierlein and Eckard Lefèvre and his colleagues,5 no longer really registers on the map of scholarly interests, though Plautine stagecraft and theatricality continue to attract significant contributions.6 ‘Certainty’ concerning the relationship between Menandrean and Plautine scripts can of course only be reached in very exceptional cases, such as that of Menander’s Dis Exapaton and Plautus’ Bacchides, but this general field deals in probabilities no more than many areas of literary study and it has the great virtue of forcing us to pay very close attention to the particularities of both Greek and Roman texts and thus to learn a great deal about the respective modes of thought and the representation of those modes in language; as such, the disrepair into which it has fallen may both surprise and disappoint. There are, nevertheless, some obvious reasons for the current relatively undernourished state of Plautine studies, particularly in the Anglophone academy: the Latin is hard, the metre (ut dicitur) is even harder, the text is in a difficult state and one does not have to adopt a position towards that of Zwierlein to recognise that it poses all kinds of problems of interpolation; moreover, for most of the plays, we lack the detailed historical context which we enjoy for later periods, though Matthew Leigh’s Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford 2004) represents an innovative attempt to move the argument on. It is true that for some problems – such as the still naggingly fascinating question of the origin and affiliations of the cantica – we lack the evidence necessary to move towards a solution (or, at least, one which will command assent), but I suspect that we cannot fall back on such excuses. We live in a post-Ovidian age: is there now something faintly embarrassing in, particularly British and American, academic circles about devoting one’s time to a literary form which apparently glories in its transparency, farcical qualities and broad, popular appeal? The modern turn to ars has left Plautus behind, as surely as did the ancient. ‘Neo-Plutarchanism’ thus damages Plautus, here cast as the vulgar ‘Aristophanes’, no less than it does Menander. 5 6

Some guidance in my ’Bibliographical Appendix’ to the reprinting of G. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton 1952, London 1994), and cf. also Lowe (n.1 above) 112 – 14. Cf., e. g., T.J. Moore, The Theater of Plautus (Austin 1998), C.W. Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (Cambridge 2006).

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This pessimism about the study of comedy is, I hope, unnecessarily extreme (and I am aware that the picture of Classics in the UK weighs disproportionately on my mind), but – from the outside, at least – it may seem that the modern turn to ars has been as beneficial for the study of Hellenistic poetry as it has encouraged the neglect of Plautus. The principal moments in the revolution in the study of Hellenistic poetry are familiar: Gow’s Theocritus, Pfeiffer’s Callimachus, the editions of epigrams by Gow and Page, Vian’s Budé Apollonius, the regular Hellenistic workshops at Groningen inspired by Annette Harder, the Supplementum Hellenisticum of Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Peter Parsons. The flood of work shows no sign of drying up, and Luigi Lehnus’ Teubner of Callimachus and Annette Harder’s commentary on the Aitia are among the major publications currently anticipated; surprises which could not have been anticipated, such as the ‘Milan Posidippus’, have opened the bibliographical sluice gates even wider. What has emerged is not just the richness and variety of this poetry, and the study of Hellenistic poetry written after the golden Ptolemaic age is now beginning to benefit from such attention also, but also how different this poetry is in many respects from that of its Latin imitators. I do not think it is completely unfair to say that ‘once upon a time’ a dominant scholarly discourse regarded Hellenistic poetry, in as much as it did regard it, as Latin poetry written in Greek; such a view no longer, of course, requires rebuttal, but it is salutary, as well as pleasing, to remind ourselves every so often how far we have come. That said, the study of Hellenistic poetry now stands at something of a crossroads. Most of Hellenistic poetry now enjoys serviceable, in some cases outstanding, commentaries, though the gaps and the need for revision is always with us; thus, new full-scale commentaries on (particularly) the first four Hymns of Callimachus and, in my judgement, on the fourth book of the Argonautica are important desiderata. Authors outside the ‘premier league’, such as Euphorion and Nicander, are receiving serious philological attention (Philitas has two recent commentaries to his credit), and each of the major epigrammatists is slowly being picked off for the ‘commentary treatment’. Sensitive and scholarly monographs, both on individual authors and on themes which cut across authors and genres, have been produced. Where to go from here? There will, of course, always be individual problems requiring attention, and some large questions – such, for example, as the nature of Callimachus’ Hymns and their relationship to Hellenistic religious practice, or, in a quite different domain, the differences between Hellenistic poetry and

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its predecessors in the use of linguistic images and tropes – remain (perhaps surprisingly) under-investigated.7 Nevertheless, the fact that the world of Hellenistic poetry looks quite different now than it did twenty-five years ago, as also (very pleasingly) the age-profile of those engaged with it has dropped considerably, has perhaps not really penetrated beyond this engaged circle; both ‘sides’ may reasonably be thought to be at fault here. What is needed is a raising of the eyes, so that Hellenistic studies do not continue as a reasonably discrete, though now much enriched, field, but are brought into the mainstream of Greek literary study and thus make a full contribution to our understanding, both synchronic and diachronic, of the ancient world. Both those principally engaged with archaic and classical literature and the ‘Hellenistic circle’ have a responsibility to assist this process of cross-fertilisation. This does not, of course, simply mean something so banal as the hope that more people will work on Greek literature across the board (though that of course would help), but it does mean that in areas such as (e. g.) myth, narrative and the representation of moral value, questions, methodologies and paradigms from one area may illuminate another. It would, presumably, be absurd, for example, for someone interested in Greek tragedy not also to take a serious professional interest in Homer, but it seems at least ‘not abnormal’ for students of tragedy not to follow with equal attention what is happening in, say, Hellenistic poetry and the novel; the reverse is also, of course, true. Particularities and change over time must be respected, but it is hard to see how those particularities and that change can be properly understood except through serious comparative study. There are, of course, the inevitable institutional pressures towards specialisation, but – at least as far as Hellenistic poetry is concerned – too widespread a yielding to those pressures will lead to the gradual withering of the current impetus in Hellenistic studies, so that ‘the usual suspects’ will start talking only to themselves and the range of questions will become inevitably narrower, or at least more and more predictable, and the answers less and less important to everyone except those propounding them. This is precisely the fate that ‘once upon a time’ threatened to engulf the study of the ancient novel: an explosion of interest, itself of course an interesting case-study in how the academy works, led to a feast of 7

For the latter cf. ‘Language and Interpretation in Greek Epigram’ in M. Baumbach, A. Petrovic and I. Petrovic (eds.) Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram. Contextualisation and Literarization (Cambridge 2008).

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publications and conferences and a genuine sense of intellectual excitement and adventure, followed, however, by the inevitable hangover and a sense of dulling repetitiveness and surfeit. Here too the dangers of narrow over-specialisation were manifestly on view. If, however, there is room for optimism, as I believe there is, this is in part the result of the sheer number of people interested in the ancient novel (the fourth ‘International Conference on the Ancient Novel’ in Lisbon in July 2008 offered some 280 papers), many of whom are able to set the particular issues of this field within the wider context of ancient literature and society as a whole. Optimism arises principally, however, from the fact that the need to study the novel within the context of the high and later Roman empire and later antiquity more generally seems to have taken a firm hold; in particular, there is fruitful work being done at the interface of pagan and Christian narrative, so that ‘novel studies’ are now making a real contribution to the wider study of antiquity. No student of ancient culture can afford to ignore the light that these studies have shed upon a whole range of central social and narratological issues, which have resonance far beyond the literature of the Roman empire; this is, of course, not to say that all those outside the ‘novel circle’ are indeed taking sufficient notice of how far this subject has progressed. The situation of the Greek poetry of the Roman empire and late antiquity might seem to be utterly different,8 but here too things can be seen to be moving. The Budé Nonnus, under the general direction of Francis Vian, towers monumentally over the landscape, but other new editions and a trickle of conferences (in Bordeaux on Dionysius Periegetes,9 in Zurich on Quintus of Smyrna,10 in Cambridge on the field in general11) suggest both a growing interest and a growing confidence that there is something there which it is worth being interested in. The number of labourers in the vineyard, many of them French or Italian, remains relatively small, but work of the highest quality is being produced. If it is unlikely that most of these poets, with the pos8 There is a helpful survey of the whole field (Greek and Latin) by Alan Cameron, ‘Poetry and literary culture in late antiquity’ in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity (Oxford 2004) 327 – 54. 9 Cf. Revue des tudes Anciennes 106 (2004). 10 M. Baumbach & S. Bär (eds), Quintus Smyrnaeus: Transforming Homer in Second Sophistic Epic (Berlin & New York, 2007). 11 Cf. K. Carvounis and R. Hunter (eds.), Signs of Life? Studies in Later Greek Hexameter Poetry (forthcoming).

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sible exception of Nonnus, will ever become ‘popular’ (in any meaningful sense), there is at least the hope that they too, with all they have to teach us about ways of engaging with the past, will be seen to be a proper part of ancient literary culture, and not just one more small, specialist interest. ‘Post-classical’ studies of all kinds have perhaps been the principal beneficiary of the widening of ‘Classics’ as a discipline, but – as I have been constantly reminded while confronting my past in the preparation of this volume – there remains a very great deal to do, if we are to understand the literature of the ancients and what it has to teach us.

On Coming After* Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen: There was a time, so it is said, when Inaugural Lectures were necessary so that people could see what the new man – for they were always men – looked like; most present would never get another chance, certainly not a second lecture. As with many such stories, facts ought not get in the way: in the first years of the Chair which I now occupy, the holder was in fact expected to lecture for a full hour five, subsequently reduced to four, times a week during terms and, except in times of plague, the Long Vacation – no regulations are laid down for the audience. If that were not enough, the first holder of this Chair under the new dispensation of 1546, Nicholas Carr, first of Pembroke and then of Trinity, was, so his biographer tells us, ‘obliged to resort to the practice of medicine in order to maintain his wife and family, the stipend of the Greek professor being insufficient for that purpose’. Well, the infirm of Cambridge need not worry just yet – the shortage of doctors in the NHS is acute, but not perhaps that acute … If Carr’s sad financial plight speaks to us of continuity between past and present, the myth about Inaugural Lectures shows us how times have changed, perhaps for the better; academic life is now such that it might be thought (though I would disagree) that we all see far too much of each other, in Tripos reform committees, Faculty Boards and the other meta-discursive situations of this life. Be that as it may, the bright optimism of the term ‘Inaugural’ conceals the painful truth that such occasions, for both lecturer and audience, are really about dealing with the weight of a hallowed past and hoping that the present is not as grim as it might appear; there is an almost inevitable element of navel-gazing to such gatherings – how on earth did we reach this situation? Most Inaugurals, alas, also imply a previous retirement and thus carry a sense of closure, bringing with it the fear (or is it hope?) of radical change, and a temptation, which in the past has not always been unjustified, to see the whole fortune of a subject as embodied in the holder of the relevant Chair. Even if I did be*

Inaugural Lecture delivered in Cambridge on October 17, 2001

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lieve in such a discontinuous model, it is far too early (and would be absurdly presumptuous) to attempt a summary of what geologists will come to call the ‘Easterling era’, but the earth can move in more than one way, and my concern today will be with the variety of ancient, specifically Hellenistic and specifically literary, constructions of and ways of dealing with, talking about, and characterising the past, all of which are in fact the taking of positions about the present. If my selection of texts must inevitably be minute, it is, nevertheless, not presumptuous (I hope) to hope that such a concern can help us to understand what we do now, and why we do it. If we do prefer a more developmental view of recent history, then it is of course Aristotle who shows us the way. In the Poetics Aristotle briefly traces the dramatic genres from their alleged origins in popular performances to the telos ‘the end’ of their proper nature, their phusis, most fully exemplified, as far as tragedy is concerned, by Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. From Homer, qua poet, descended both tragedy and comedy. Aristotle bequeathed to the western tradition a teleological and narrative form of literary history from which escape has proved remarkably difficult, partly of course because there is something deeply satisfying about closed narratives. It is temptingly easy to construct a similar narrative of the recent history of the Regius Chair of Greek. In the beginning was Denys Page who knew everything and from whom all forms of life descend, then Geoffrey Kirk who opened the world of Homer and epic to generations of students, then Eric Handley who restored Menander and New Comedy to us, and then my predecessor, Pat Easterling, whose name is almost synonymous with the study of tragedy, particularly Sophocles; in the Aristotelian model, it may be said, with Pat the Regius Chair reached its phusis and then ‘stopped’ (1pa¼sato). What follows in most ancient narratives is, as is well known, terminal decline or, at best, stagnation. If it might be thought that I have reason to view such narratives with suspicion, let me say that the briefest consideration of Pat’s monumental services to the study of Greek both within and without Cambridge will suggest that, as happens too often for comfort, there might just be something in Aristotle’s rather peculiar views. On a personal level, from my very first days in Cambridge Pat has been more than generous with her time, her advice and her wisdom, and I here record my heartfelt thanks to her; Sophocles famously gave hospitality to a divine snake, divine certainly, but a snake none the less – I hope that the parallelism is not exact.

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There are of course other narratives, both post and, in some cases, propter Aristotle, which one could tell. The poetry of the third century BC is full of representations of the relation between past and present, and this can be no accident of survival. In the fourth book of Apollonius’ Argonautica, the Argonauts, who carry all hopes and fears for the survival of Greek culture with them, are plunged into an impenetrable primeval darkness and lose their way, drifting in aimlessness and ignorance, not a 5 star in sight,1 not knowing how to rescue their civilising mission, until they are saved by the epiphany of a young (well, youngish) blonde god from the south east who brings enlightenment and restores a sense of direction and purpose. Fortunately, the ancients recognised that such epic narratives were a special form of fiction … The majority of my scholarly life has been devoted to literature which is conventionally categorised as ‘post-classical’, and if I begin with this stress upon my own sense of epigonal status, I hope I will be forgiven. I used to joke in lectures that the period after the death of Alexander the Great is usually called ‘the Wars of the Successors’ because no one knows or cares about their names; I don’t think I will be making that joke again. It is, however, with representations of succession that I am partly concerned in this lecture. We will, however, for once let Droysen rest in peace, and I will not trace again the origins of the idea of ‘the Hellenistic’ in modern scholarship. As far as modern literary history is concerned, the idea is of course more time-honoured than the name. Without going back to the laments of Schlegel and others about the decadence of Alexandrian literature, we find that in his Geschichte der griechischen Literatur of 1831 Friedrich August Wolf, the founder of modern Homeric studies, divided Greek literature from the beginnings to the end of Byzantium into 6 periods, of which the fourth indeed stretched from the death of Alexander until the battle of Actium, i. e. exactly the extent of what is now conventionally thought of as ‘the Hellenistic period’. Twenty years later Karl Otfried Müller simplified things by dividing all of Greek literature down to the high Empire into 3 periods which he labelled, the First, the Second, and the Third (this last indeed beginning with Alexandria). Müller did not – if you will allow me a self-indulgent footnote – live to write about his third period, 1

This refers to the scoring system in operation for the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, by which the research of all Faculties and Departments in England was assessed; the outcome had very significant financial implications. ‘5 star’ was the best result possible.

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but his History was elegantly completed by his translator, John Donaldson (not the John Donaldson, I hasten to add).2 Donaldson was an Australian classicist (his brother made a fortune in sperm oil), a Fellow of Trinity, and his appointment to a headship in Bury St Edmunds is described by the National Dictionary of Biography as ‘unfortunate for the institution and for himself’ (absit omen), though it speaks approvingly of ‘the wholesome intellectual influence he exerted on the town, where he greatly improved the Athenaeum and raised the level of intellectual culture in general’ as Australians customarily do – I added that last bit. Donaldson died, incidentally, of overwork. Periodisation and the stereotypes which accompany it are, of course, always with us, even when relatively brief flourishings are under examination. In his marvellous Inaugural Lecture of fifty years ago Denys Page said of a now famous papyrus fragment of drama on the subject of Gyges and the wife of Candaules: ‘look again at the language and style … we shall find the dignity, simplicity and reserve of the early [i.e. late archaic-early classical] period; where in it shall we find any of those features which we associate with Alexandrian literature of any type’ (or of those who study it, you may be tempted to add). Such a way of arguing finds countless parallels in the rhetorical and art criticism of antiquity. Dio Chrysostom’s laudatory account of the Philoctetes plays of the three ‘classical’ tragedians is a familiar example:3 Aeschylus is characterised by the ‘archaic spirit of great-mindedness’ (lecakovqos¼mg ja· t¹ !qwa?om) which is well suited to tragedy and the old-style characters (pakai± Ehg) of the heroes’ (ch. 4) – even the craftiness of his Odysseus is an archaic form of guile, unlike modern pseudo-straightforwardness, with which, I dare say, many of us are very familiar (ch. 5). Euripides, on the other hand, is the complete opposite ( !mt¸stqovor) of Aeschylus (ch. 11), whereas Sophocles, ‘seems to come in the middle …’ (ch. 15), rather as Hellenistic rhetorical theory devised three kinds of prose style, the high, the plain, and one in the middle which draws from both the other two; three was ever a magic number. Book 10 of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria is of course another fertile source for such critical attitudes.

2 3

Another John Donaldson was (and still is) the Assistant Curator of the Museum of Classical Archaeology in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge. This speech (52) of Dio will be considered at greater length in Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming).

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A recent attempt to come to terms with Latin literary history reminds us that ‘a critique of periodization must begin by historicizing the notion of periodization itself’.4 Easier said than done, one might retort. Much of our evidence for ancient discussion of cultural periods comes in fact from the writers of Roman classicism, from the Atticists of the Augustan age through to Quintilian, together with those who parody them, such as Petronius. Here, for example, is the famous opening of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ essay On the ancient orators: ‘In the epoch preceding our own, the old philosophic Rhetoric was so grossly abused and maltreated that it fell into a decline. From the death of Alexander of Macedon it began to lose its spirit and gradually wither away, and in our generation had reached a state of almost total extinction. Another Rhetoric stole in, intolerably shameless and histrionic, illbred and without a vestige either of philosophy or of any other aspect of liberal education. Deceiving the mob and exploiting its ignorance, it not only came to enjoy greater wealth, luxury and splendour than the other, but actually made itself the key to civic honours and high office, a power which ought to have been reserved for the philosophic art. It was altogether vulgar and disgusting, and finally made the Greek world resemble the houses of the profligate and the abandoned: just as in such households there sits the lawful wife, freeborn and chaste, but with no authority over her domain, while a reckless harlot, bent on destroying her livelihood, claims control of the whole estate, treating the other like dirt and keeping her in a state of terror; so in every city, and in the highly civilised ones as much as any (which was the final indignity), the ancient and indigenous Attic Muse, deprived of her possessions, had lost her civic rank, while her antagonist, an upstart that had arrived only yesterday or the day before from some Asiatic sewer, a Mysian or Phrygian or Carian creature, claimed the right to rule over Greek cities, expelling her rival from public life. Thus was wisdom driven out by ignorance, and sanity by madness.’ (trans. S. Usher, adapted) I will not be concerned in this lecture with the substance and course of the debate between ‘Atticism’ and ‘Asianism’, though it is worth bearing in mind that just as in antiquity ‘Asianism’ seems always to have been a purely negative construct, created the better to parade the virtues of its ‘opposite’, so ‘Hellenistic’ has in the more recent past been another such negative construct (and it is of course no accident that the ancient period of ‘Asianism’ roughly overlaps with the modern construct of ‘the 4

J. Farrell, Latin Language and Latin Culture (Cambridge 2001) 85.

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Hellenistic’; as Dionysius’ essay makes clear, both categories have politics at their heart). What we should, on the other hand, notice for the moment is the very continuity of critical language. What Dionysius has to say about ‘Asianic rhetoric’ mirrors almost exactly the treatment by Attic Comedy of ‘the new music’ of Timotheus and Philoxenus nearly four centuries before. What came before was solid and genuine, ‘men’ were really ‘men’ then, but the new, I am almost tempted to say ‘the inaugural’, is characterised by the empty fashionableness of the performance, which is made possible by the ignorance of the audience; ‘playing to the crowd’ (or the lecture questionnaire score) is now the name of the game (cf. Quintilian 10.1.43). For the writers and scholars of the Augustan age oR !qwa?oi – and their virtues – were what we would classify as ‘the ancients’ down to (roughly) the end of the fourth century BC, though of course divisions could be made within such a long period, and the critical language of periodisation was never meant to map smoothly on to a chronological table, in part because (of course) much more than mere chronology is at stake. It is less easy to establish where the poets and scholars of the third century themselves drew boundary lines, or rather what any such boundaries might have meant for them, in the way that we can see that !qwa?om and pakaiºm are already highly charged words for Thucydides and for certain self-consciously fashionable characters in Aristophanes. It will mean something that Eratosthenes did not carry his chronographical work on the Olympian victors beyond the death of Alexander, though we should be wary of leaping to the most obvious conclusions that one might draw from this apparent watershed. So too, Quintilian’s famous report that, in the late third and second century BC, Aristarchus and Aristophanes (of Byzantium) did not receive anyone ‘of their own time’ (suum tempus) into the lists of approved authors (10.1.54) begs as many questions as it answers; these were, you will recall, the same people who, rather like the Quality Assurance Agency, thought that Homer deserved only 23 of the 24 available books of the Odyssey.5 The practice of the grammarians perhaps tells us more about the history of generic classification as a scholarly activity than it does about any sense of what divides the present from the past. More5

This refers to the scoring system in operation for the Quality Assurance exercise, by which the teaching of all Faculties and Departments in England was assessed; scores from 1 – 4 were awarded for each of 6 categories, making 24 the best possible result.

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over, there is evidence on the other side. There is, for example, no sign that the several quotations of Callimachus and the at least one each of Euphorion and Simias of Rhodes in the great first-century catalogue of dreadful things said by poets in Philodemus’ treatise On Piety were ‘ghettoised’ off from the quotations of archaic and classical poetry, and some at least of these quotations of what we call Hellenistic poetry presumably go back as far as Apollodorus in the mid-second century. Be that as it may, periodisation and the rise of scholarship can indeed hardly be separated, but where is that rise to be located? This too may, of course, be one more charge to be laid at the door of the sophists of the late fifth century, and it is at least worthy of note that it is again in the Frogs (which has so often been thought by moderns to mark some kind of watershed) that we find perhaps the first dramatisation of the kind of literary scholarship which we so closely associate with the Hellenistic period. Here Euripides accuses Aeschylus of using ‘sheer massive mountains of words that it was very hard to work out the meaning of’ (929 – 30, trans. Sommerstein) and Dionysus, that avid reader of books, breaks in: ‘Yes, by the gods; I for one have certainly before now lain awake through the long watches of the night trying to fathom what sort of bird a tawny horsecock was’ – this was in fact an emblem painted on a warship. Dionysus’ language of sleepless searching – the pursuit in fact of what would come to be known as a zetema — strikingly foreshadows that of later scholarship. Moreover, if it is true that his words pick up those of Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, ‘before now, during the long watches of the night, I have pondered the ways in which human lives are destroyed’, then the comic move from a great moral problem to the meaning of a rather silly gloss might be thought precisely to skewer what is wrong with ‘scholarship’ as narrowly conceived and practised. Be that as it may, it is texts of the third century which are replete with allusions to and anecdotes about ‘scholarship’, with – if you like – second-order reflection which knowingly reifies the activity into a discrete form of life and at the same time monumentalises the past. I offer just one famous example. One of Callimachus’ epigrams deals explicitly with the folly of the élitist self-delusion of the scholar who knows the technical names for things: I hate recycled poetry (poiema kuklikon), and get no pleasure from a road crowded with travellers this way and that. I can’t stand a boy who sleeps around, don’t drink at public fountains, and loathe everything vulgar (demosion).

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Now you, Lysanies, sure are handsome … But before I’ve repeated ‘handsome’, Echo’s ‘and some … one else’s’ cuts me off. Epigram 28 Pf., trans. Nisetich

The poet proclaims his disdain for all things common or banal which must be widely shared: ‘cyclic’ poetry, the broad highway, a promiscuous lover, a fountain available to all. The variety of the verbs in the first four verses marks the poet’s fastidiousness and care, whereas the very prosaic expression for the things which are rejected enacts at the verbal level the banality which is being imputed to them. What is rejected also involves or implies movement: the poem ‘which circles around’, the path with its bustling crowd, the boy who roams from one admirer to the next, the fountain to which one must travel; against this chaos is set the stillness of the scholar-poet, fixed in his opinions, and the privacy of his superiority. The final couplet modifies this picture. The play with echo suggests the emergence of a truth which previously was (consciously or unconsciously) suppressed;6 the poet’s brave words turn out to be a protective barrier which conceal as much as they reveal, and only the operation of echo, which is beyond human control, can unmask the truth. The ‘vulgar’, embodied in a popular, ‘non-élitist’ pronunciation which makes the echo possible, triumphs. The poem thus explores the fissure inherent in the whole business of seeking to write ‘élitist’ epigrams about desire, an emotion to which we are all vulnerable (it is always demosion) and one which is no respecter of aesthetic principles; it is not merely that the store of epigrammatic literary topoi is finite, but so is that of experience – hierarchies of literature are, in the end, as vain as hierarchies of kinds of lover. The word !qwa?or ‘ancient’ does not appear in Homer, though pakaiºr ‘of old’ does, and in contexts which suggest that this notion of ‘oldness’ was already in early epic associated with the idea of song: men and women who were ‘old’ were the subject of epic song.7 The vocabulary of periodisation turns out (unsurprisingly) to have as much to do with description as with chronology. And so it has remained. In one of the most suggestive modern discussions of ‘the Hellenistic’, almost now a ‘classic’ text, Sir Kenneth Dover addressed the question of naivety or pseudo-naivety as a poetic mode, and observed that one 6 7

Cf. G. B. Walsh, ‘Surprised by self: audible thought in Hellenistic poetry’ Classical Philology 85 (1990) 1 – 21, pp. 11 – 12. Cf. Od. 2.118, Il. 9.524 ff, hAp. 160 etc.

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of the problems (for him) with Hellenistic poetry was that the poets ‘treated poetry as if its province had been defined at some date in the past and it had been forbidden to advance in certain directions or to penetrate below a certain phenomenological level … If we can put ourselves into the place of educated Athenians at the end of the fifth century B.C., a period in which philosophical, political, religious, scientific and historical thinking were developing at an almost explosive pace, we may, I think, be able to recapture the surprise we should have felt if someone had asserted that a century and a half later one distinguished poet would be writing, “And if you do this for me, Pan, may the boys of Arkadia not flog your sides and shoulders with squills when meat is short” (Theocr. 7.106 ff) … One can imagine, too, the despair of Thucydides if he had foreseen the drivel which Timaios (FGrHist 566) was to write about the mutilation of the herms (fr. 102, criticised by Plu. Nic. 1), a good example of the backwash of poetic convention into historiography’ (Theocritus p. lxix). These are serious charges, not really mitigated in the one case (Theocritus 7) by the presumably deliberate ignoring of context, speaker identity etc (to which I will return) and, in the other, by the wholesale swallowing (in which Dover is not alone) of Thucydides’ own (very idiosyncratic) claims for what constitutes historiography. What can these two cases in fact tell us about the Hellenistic literary response to coming after? Timaios of Sicilian Tauromenion, whose long life extended from the middle of the fourth to the middle of the third century BC, was the great historian of the Greek west – and the first Greek writer to concern himself seriously with the history of Rome; his history of Sicily and the west in 38 books was probably written during half a century of political exile in Athens, and may be seen, from one point of view, within the context of a remarkable flourishing of western Doric cultural and intellectual life in this period. As for the history itself, in the words of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ‘Timaios took an extremely broad view of history, including myth, geography, ethnography, political and military events, culture, religion, marvels, and paradoxa’; in many ways, then, not just ‘extremely broad’, but also a very traditional kind of history. Whether or not it is right, with Frank Walbank, to label this ‘a more frivolous attitude to the past’ (Polybius p. 1) than Thucydides’ paraded sobriety may, however, be debated. Thucydides has, it must be admitted, nothing to rival Timaios’ discussion of the hedonistic life of the Sybarites (fr. 50), which reveals to us (inter alia) that they were the ‘first inventors’ of the practice whereby, for ease of relief, each man

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brought his own chamber-pot to a drinking-party; remarkably enough (perhaps) word-searches with the latest electronic tools reveal that the word for a chamber-pot appears nowhere in Thucydides, and his only mention of Sybaris is a programmatically incidental reference to the river of this name during a military narrative (7.35). Fortunately for all of us, however, it falls to others in this room to establish the parameters of historical enquiry. Labels stick, and in both antiquity and modern times, the label which has been stuck on Timaios is that of ‘pedant’, itself a notion hardly conceivable without the same mindset which gave us ‘Hellenistic’. Even Momigliano, one of Timaios’ more sympathetic modern students, calls him ‘a pedant with imagination’ (Terzo contributo I 48) – almost a real scholar, then, almost ‘one of us’. Indeed, a climactic section of Felix Jacoby’s introductory essay on Timaios is concerned with the – to all of us highly culturally charged and to many of us personally important – question of whether the title ‘ein gelehrter’ is appropriately bestowed upon Timaios. Part of Jacoby’s self-confessedly ‘psychological’ answer is that Timaios’ blindness to his own faults and his constant polemic against, not just other historians, but figures such as Aristotle, his constant nit-picking (if you like), which brought the name ‘Epitimaios’ (the ‘blamer’), may ( Jacoby does not commit himself to the analysis) have been the result of a deep consciousness that he himself was nothing more than a dilettante without ‘wissenschaftliche Ausbildung’ who was not really up to the job of serious historiography (FGrHist IIIB pp. 537 – 8). ‘Dilettante’ is, of course, another wounding word: no graver charge can be brought against any ‘scholar’, and Timaios was both ‘pedant’ and ‘dilettante’. Polybius famously criticises him for doing all his research in libraries, without any practical experience of military affairs, topography, or the interviewing of witnesses: ‘Inquiries from books’, sneers Polybius, ‘may be made without any danger or hardship, provided only that one take care to have access to a town (polis) containing a wealth of written accounts (rpolm¶lata) or to have a library near at hand’ (12.27.4). (How different from the life of scholarship as we know it!) The sub-text seems to be that Athens, the polis where Timaios worked, like Alexandria, the site of the ancient world’s most famous library, is now merely ‘a university’, i. e. not part of the real world, a place of theory, not practical knowledge; power, and the writing of that power, has moved elsewhere. Polybius’ polemic, with its implicit exaltation of a Thucydidean ideal – Thucydides, after all, was exiled from the very polis in which Timaios worked and, at

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the very least, his account of this exile (5.26.5) implies extensive travel in pursuit of his enquiries, unlike the smug Timaios – is thus an early witness to the periodisation, and the stereotyping which accompanies it, which was to take such hold in critical circles in Rome a century and more later. In the light, incidentally, of modern directions in classical scholarship, we must also ask – if only to put off the answer for another day – what is lost and what is gained in the modern flight from the charge of ‘pedantry’, which – as Homer would say – the gods call ‘antiquarianism’. When is the flight from Realien the flight from reality? Polemic is, of course, always with us, however easy this is to forget amidst the soothingly understated modernism of Little Hall. What remains of Polybius’ all-out attack upon Timaios in his twelfth book bears eloquent, and in many ways extraordinary, witness to this. It also reminds us (again) how persistent over time are certain kinds of abuse: thus Dover’s accusation of ‘drivel’ against Timaios echoes Polybius’ charge of vkuaq¸a (12.12b.1), just as many of Polybius’ terms of abuse pick up those which Timaios himself had used. Polybius’ polemical luxuriance at Timaios’ expense is itself, however, a version, in rhetorical terms an aungsir or amplificatio, of what was for him and his readers a very famous text, the early programmatic chapters of Thucydides’ first book. After concluding his sketch of early Greek history (t± pakai², 1.20.1), Thucydides turns to the uncritical attitude that most men take to traditions about the past; he cites three specific examples: a popular belief about the end of the Athenian tyranny, and two facts about the Spartan constitution. No Hellenistic ‘pedantry’ here of course … Errors 2 and 3 we know to have occurred in Herodotus, but Thucydides names no one – the object of the attack is, at least on the surface, oR pokko¸. In Polybius some of the language of criticism remains the same, and is to be seen within a standard framework of intertextual allusion, but what is important is that Polybius’ polemical, scholarly practice takes as its starting point an authoritative ‘classical’ text and massively documents the kinds of failing at which Thucydides had merely gestured. Between Thucydides’ silent stiletto and Polybius’ strident shotgun lies, of course, a whole revolution in the use of books, the nature of education, and the nature of criticism, but here Polybius and the despised Timaios stand clearly on the same side of the divide; both illustrate the new world which we still inhabit. One of the most persistent and virulent strains in Polybius’ attack upon Timaios’ history, and particularly the speeches within it, is the charge that it is infected by the frigid practices of the rhetorical schools.

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The terminology of this critical abuse – ‘scholastic’, ‘sophistic’, ‘childish’ (paidaqi¾dgr, leiqaji¾dgr) – passed into the canon of standard judgements, for we find it (and some of the very same examples used to illustrate it) repeated in Plutarch (Nicias 1.1 – 4) and ‘Longinus’ (4.1 – 3). It is ‘Longinus’ who preserves for us Timaios’ observation that Alexander conquered the whole of Asia ‘in fewer years than it took Isocrates to write the Panegyrikos about war in Asia’; for ‘Longinus’ such pursuit of novel witticisms (1pivym¶lata, sententiae) is forced and frigid – it is patently the product of the epideictic declamations of young men practising their own puerile humour upon each other (not unlike the Union Society or the House of Commons on a good day). ‘Longinus’ also cites the example which so upset Plutarch and Kenneth Dover: Timaios linked the Athenian disaster in his homeland of Sicily, in which the Syracusan leader Hermocrates, son of Hermon, played a central rôle, with the mutilation of the Athenian Herms shortly before the expedition’s departure. So too, it was not a good omen that the Athenian general Nikias, whose name means ‘victory’, had in fact at first declined to take part. We may of course argue about the level of ‘drivel’ involved here – we live in a world where strange things happen, particularly in times of real or alleged war, and rationalism is at least not obviously triumphant today – and it is, moreover, not entirely certain that these reflections were in the voice of the historian himself rather than one of his characters. Nevertheless, Thucydides had already noted that the Athenians had taken the mutilation to be a bad omen for the expedition (6.27.3), and it is hard to believe that the oracle-mongers and seers, against whom, as Thucydides reports (8.1), the Athenians turned when disaster struck had not already seen what lay in Nicias’ name, though apparently they drew a different conclusion from it. Thucydides’ Nicias had after all already sensed divine jealousy (phthonos) at work in the Athenian disaster (7.77.3), and events had proved that Nicias and those who took the mutilation of the Herms seriously were right all along. In writing from Athens the ‘Sicilian version’ of Athenian disaster, Timaios takes the Thucydidean account as his starting-point and expands upon it (another ‘amplification’), particularly in the gaps which Thucydides’ apparently rigidly austere selectivity sought to occlude, but in fact openly advertised. Specifically, we may speculate that Timaios took up and sharpened the tragic shaping of the Syracusan narrative in Thucydides, a shaping much discussed in modern scholarship: the rôle of the faceless divine, the daimonion, the ominous significance of names (cf. ‘Helen’, ‘Aias’ etc), the fact that Timaios has the Athenian

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generals commit suicide, rather than (as in Thucydides and others) being put to death, and has their bodies (in time-honoured fashion) exposed to public viewing (theama, fr. 102) all gesture towards familiar features of Athenian tragedy. This is not a matter of the familiar importance of dramatised pathos in Hellenistic historiography, but of a specifically appropriate literary shape to a real ‘Athenian tragedy’. The obvious parallel for the ‘Sicilian version’ of the Athenian catastrophe would be an Athenian version of the Persian catastrophe of the early fifth century, and Timaios may, as perhaps also Thucydides before him, have specifically had in mind just such a text, the Persians of Aeschylus, another dramatisation of a disaster of which the gods had given forewarning (vv. 739 – 41) and of which the lesson was that no one should ‘scorn their present lot and by desiring the property of others waste great prosperity’ (vv. 824 – 6, cf. Thucyd. 6.13.1, 6.24.3). The turning of such a text against the Athenians would have carried a brilliant textual power. It is at least tantalising that a not implausible ancient tradition has it that the Persians had in the fifth century been performed in Syracuse at the request of the tyrant Hieron I; was there a Sicilian tradition of this play? Alas, we do not know, just as only more of Timaeus’ text than we actually possess would show us whether Thucydides’ rationality, constructed as the easy rationality of hindsight, was also subverted, so that the Athenian historian collapsed along with the power of his city. Let me now turn to Dover’s other exhibit.8 The meeting and songexchange of Lycidas, the unmistakable goatherd (or is he?), met by chance (or is it?) on a Coan country road, and Simichidas in Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll, the Thalysia, has a fair claim to be among, not only the most discussed, but also the most powerful and strangely compelling scenes of all Greek poetry; in part its hold over us lies not merely in the familiar attractiveness of the mysterious and riddling, but also in our pervasive sense of witnessing a confrontation across time, a dramatisation of historical development. Whereas Timaios demands that we acknowledge his textual suppletion, his ransacking of the past, the Thalysia teasingly veils its secrets in proclaiming only its pristine novelty. If, like the élitist Pindaric voice, Lycidas speaks ‘to those who understand’, it would seem that the young Simichidas, the ‘professional’ poet from the city with a repertoire of songs ready to hand (vv. 92 – 5), but now faced with his inaugural performance in front of the only audience 8

For a revised and properly annotated version of the following section cf. this volume 445 – 52.

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which matters, is not to be included in this privileged group, for when it is his turn to sing he adopts a fiction of ‘poetic inspiration’, as though he has not understood what Lycidas has said to him: t¹m d³ l´t’ awhir jAc½m to?’ 1v²lam7 “Kuj¸da v¸ke, pokk± l³m %kka M¼lvai jAl³ d¸danam !m’ ¥qea boujok´omta 1shk², t² pou ja· Fgm¹r 1p· hqºmom %cace v²la7 !kk± tºc’ 1j p²mtym l´c’ rpe¸qowom, è tu ceqa¸qeim !qneOl’7 !kk’ rp²jousom, 1pe· v¸kor 5pkeo Lo¸sair.

(Id. 7.90 – 5)

‘After him I spoke in my turn as follows: “Lycidas my friend, the Nymphs taught me too many other songs as I tended my herd on the mountain, excellent poems, which public report has perhaps carried even to the throne of Zeus. But this with which I shall do you honour is much the finest of them all: listen then, since you are dear to the Muses.’

Simichidas here sets himself as a latter-day Hesiod, whose poetic ‘initiation’ by the Muses as he herded his lambs on Mt Helicon is recorded in the opening of the Theogony. The very fiction which he employs marks him as a modern poet of a quite different kind from the model which he claims; divine inspiration, whether from the Muses or the more appropriately bucolic nymphs, is now merely a ‘technical’ gesture, a code shared between a poet and his audience. It is a code which Simichidas, like all modern professionals, can adopt or abandon at will, in accordance with the generic demands of any particular song. When, however, Lycidas offers the first performance of a song which he has ‘recently crafted on the mountain’, we have at least no prima facie reason to disbelieve him. Here is the opening part of Simichidas’ poem in A.S.F. Gow’s translation: ‘For Simichidas the Loves sneezed, for he, poor soul, loves Myrto as dearly as goats love the spring. But Aratus, dearest friend in all to me, guards deep at heart desire of a boy. Aristis knows, a man of worth, the best of men, whom Phoebus himself would not grudge to stand and sing, lyre in hand, by his own tripods – knows how to the very marrow Aratus is aflame with love of a boy. Ah, Pan, to whom has fallen the lovely plain of Homole, lay him unsummoned in my friend’s dear arms, whether it be the pampered Philinus or another. And if you do this, dear Pan, then never may Arcadian lads flog you with squills about the flanks and shoulders when they find scanty meat. But if you consent otherwise, then may you be bitten and with your

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nails scratch yourself from top to toe; may you sleep in nettles, and in midwinter find yourself on the mountains of the Edonians, turned towards the river Hebrus, hard by the pole. And in summer may you herd your flock among the furthest Ethiopians beneath the rock of the Blemyes from where the Nile is no more seen. But do you leave the sweet stream of Hyetis and Byblis, and Oecus, that steep seat of golden-haired Dione, you Loves as rosy as apples, and wound for me with your bows the lovely Philinus, would him, for the wretch has no pity on my friend.’ The (to us at least) obscure proper names, the sense that the poem is full of in-jokes, the joking prayer to Pan, and the persistent detached irony are all suggestive again of an entirely modern, iambic mode. The very lowness of such poetry, its claim to a ‘popular voice’, made it a paradoxically perfect vehicle for the exploitation of the new possibilities of written poetry and new types of audience. Thus, for example, whereas Lycidas speaks in a prophetic, incantatory, semi-mystical manner which hints at a magical control of the world (the halcyons etc.) and recalls the originary link between poet and seer, Simichidas includes the description (which so offended Dover) of a distant, but allegedly contemporary, rustic magical rite, with which he himself has nothing to do and about which he has learned, so we are to understand, from a book. If the world of Simichidas’ in-jokes remains (perhaps deliberately) closed to us, he makes very sure that we understand his geographical and cultic allusions. The cause of the Arcadian rite is explained (108), the location of the (otherwise unknown) ‘rock of the Blemyes’ specified (114), the relevance of Oikous spelled out (116). Simichidas offers no ‘mythic narrative’ as such, just a world marked out by cult sites and practices, now fossilised in the grasp of scholarship. Lycidas’ telling – or rather the telling which he puts in Tityrus’ mouth – of the stories of Daphnis and Komatas, as he imagines the party he will hold to celebrate the safe arrival in Mytilene of his beloved Ageanax, is very different: ‘Close by Tityrus shall sing how once Daphnis the oxherd loved Xenea, and how the hill grieved for him and the oaks which grow upon the river Himeras’ banks sang his dirge, when he was wasting like any snow under high Haemus or Athos or Rhodope or remotest Caucasus. And he shall sing how once a wide coffin received the goat alive by the impious presumption of a king; and how the bluntfaced bees came from the meadows to the fragrant chest of cedar and fed him on tender flowers because the Muse had poured sweet nectar on his

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lips. Ah, blessed Comatas, yours is this sweet lot: you too were closed within the coffin; you too, on honeycomb fed, did endure with labour the springtime of the year. Would that you had been numbered with the living in my day, that I might have herded your fair goats upon the hills and listened to your voice, while you, divine Comatas, did lie and make sweet music under the oaks or pines.’ Lycidas, unlike Simichidas, finds personal, exemplary comfort in the bucolic and aipolic heroes of his own world – Daphnis and Komatas – and what is important, as it had traditionally been in the poetic representation of myth, is how their stories, their p\hg, act as paradigms for his own experience. Moreover, this highly allusive text seems to assume an audience, whether that be just Lycidas himself or some wider group, to which those stories are known and significant. This allusive narrative mode, seen most famously in the song of Daphnis in Idyll 1, suggests ‘tradition’, as it also constructs for itself an interpretive community; here, literary allusiveness, intertextuality if you like, and mythic allusiveness function in similar ways. The different gods who question the fast-fading Daphnis in Idyll 1 embody different levels of knowledge and curiosity, thus dramatising the text’s construction of its audience, but this device also foregrounds that allusiveness which implies familiarity, while conjuring up the generic world of myth and constructing a community to whom that myth is significant, who need constantly to (re-) interpret it. It would be tempting to set this contrast between Lycidas’ high allusiveness and Simichidas’ plain specificity within that broad movement which we have come to know, and seek to deconstruct, as the shift from myth to mythology, but let me return first to what Simichidas actually says. The pursuit of novelty leaves, as I noted earlier, a world marked out by (often arcane) cult and ritual names, rather than by narratives of personal or collective significance. Many modern readers of Callimachus’ Hymns might feel at home within Simichidas’ ‘written’ religious world, in which the scholarly gloss is the standard discursive mode, but this ‘precision’ of names, which there is no reason not to connect with the prevalence of systematic written history, has a place in the wider evolution of mythic narrative. The modern study of fiction has taught us that detailed names and places are the ‘effects of the real’ which create the fictional illusion; this is an irony which Thucydides would presumably not have appreciated. Such detail goes hand-inhand with the telling of stories as coherent, self-contained wholes in which temporal and spatial sequence are of primary importance: we may think of, for example, Simaitha’s first-person narration of her affair

24

On Coming After

with Delphis in Idyll 2. With hindsight we can see that the vast sea of Greek myth was fertile ground for the development of fictionalising instincts and the instinct for fiction: Walter Burkert once noted9 that what is distinctive and ‘utterly confusing for non-specialists and often for specialists’ about Greek myth is its extraordinarily profuse detail of names, genealogies and inter-relationships, with, in other words, (though Burkert certainly did not say this) ‘effects of the real’ waiting to happen. If we are forced to name a crucial moment in this process, the classicist may think of Aristophanes’ Euripides, whose prologising gods told ‘the whole story’ (Frogs 946 – 7), i.e organised disparate strands (and disparate names) into a coherent, connected narrative. As for Lycidas’ stories of Daphnis and Komatas, it is tempting to suggest that the allusive mode of telling, related forms of which are of course familiar enough from the choral lyric of the archaic and classical periods, is a direct response to developments in ‘systematic mythography’ and to what I have called the ‘fictionalising’ impulses which go with that systematisation. In the Bucolics, Theocritus thus imaginatively recreates or invents an oral style of ‘traditional tale’ beyond systematisation (and certainly beyond Simichidas) and only preserved in the folk memories of shepherds and goatherds. No more powerful dramatisation of what ‘coming after’ actually means survives from the extraordinary intellectual currents of the third century. There are, of course, periods of Greek teaching as well as of Greek literature. In his Inaugural of only 72 years ago, D. S. Robertson observed, ‘The Greek Professor is happily no longer expected to teach students their alphabet or declensions’; try telling that to the Classical Languages Committee. The deep commitment by the Faculty of Classics to the teaching of the Greek and Latin languages, and to innovation in that teaching, is in fact a major reason why I am very proud to be associated with this remarkable institution. This is, of course, not the easiest period for Greek and for Classics as a whole, despite the enormous contemporary interest in the ancient world and its imagining in successive ages, which was already justly celebrated by Professor Easterling in her London Inaugural of 1988 and which has just been so vividly demonstrated in the sell-out audiences for Jane Montgomery’s challenging production of Sophocles’ Electra.10 Adjustment to the times in which we live, to – 9 ‘Mythisches Denken. Versuch einer Definition an Hand des griechischen Befundes’ in H. Poser (ed.), Philosophie und Mythos (Berlin 1979) 16 – 39, p. 30. 10 The Cambridge Greek Play of 2001.

On Coming After

25

for example – the disappearance of Greek from mainstream secondary education, has, however, been painful and occasionally divisive, particularly for those at the heart of whose universe stand the classical languages. I hope, however, that grand recipes for the future are not an inevitable part of Inaugurals. An obvious cliché would be to recall Rodney Wainwright, the lecturer from the University of North Queensland in David Lodge’s Small World, who does not know how to complete the crucial sentence of his lecture (an inaugural performance on the world stage) at a Future of Criticism conference: ‘The question is, therefore, how can criticism …’. He is, as you recall, saved by an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease; well, life is imitating art too often these days to allow such jests. I am, in any case, tempted to say that it is in fact not the future of criticism which concerns me – no doubt I will get plenty of that. One of my predecessors as a University Professor of Greek, to whom I should feel particularly close, Nicholas Ridley (successively student, Fellow, and Master of Pembroke), was burnt at the stake, though not perhaps for a poor seminar performance. More seriously, however, the whole future of ‘criticism’, of krisis ‘judgement’, about Greek literary culture depends crucially upon the training in the Greek language of future generations of students; the crisis for krisis is no longer just a feeble pun (has not been so for many years), and our concern must be, not just the future of so-called technical disciplines such as papyrology and palaeography, which (I think) there is good reason to hope will continue to attract highly talented specialists, but rather for the wide diffusion of an appreciation of the Greek literary heritage, as well as for the progress of higher-level understanding of these difficult and rewarding texts. I hope that it is another cliché to say that the furtherance of knowledge of the Greek language must be the principal, though not the only, duty of the Regius Professor, and I pledge myself to work tirelessly to that end. What makes this position so special, however, is the privilege of working in an institution which thinks not only about how we can do this, but also why we should wish to; what, to put it another way, ‘coming after’ really means and what opportunities it provides. If, therefore, I do not plead for moderate, or even radical, change of direction – as, for example, did Ted Kenney and Anthony Snodgrass in their Inaugurals of 1975 and 1977 – it is not just because a glance at those lectures will reveal just how far we have moved in a very short time, and certainly not because very hard thinking and (perhaps radical) change will not be needed, but because the collective will is such that there

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On Coming After

seems no chance whatsoever of a return to the unexamined life of an earlier age. As long, then, as the University holds to the educational purposes which it publicly proclaims, unlike the young Heracles Classics at Cambridge does not face an inaugural choice between virtue and vice, between (in random order) the hard, indeed often physically demanding task of properly learning an inflected language and the pursuit of more easily attained and possibly more short-lived intellectual satisfactions. This is not because we do or should conceal the difficulties and often frustrations involved in learning Greek at what is roughly the same age as Heracles made his choice, but because the dichotomy and the labels attached to it are utterly false to the complex and variegated material which forms the substance of our subject and the philosophy which informs the way we teach and study it. There are, in fact, many paths from which someone at Cambridge interested in the ancient world has to choose, and in some Greek plays a more prominent rôle than in others; this is not a cause for regret, but rather a symptom of careful attention to the ends which we all have in view. The plural here is strictly necessary, of course. Introducing local primary-school children to Greek once a week in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, as has happened in the Faculty this year, must have a different purpose and criterion of success than teaching first-year undergraduates, but too often in the past we have saddled ourselves with a single – and I use the word advisedly – paradigm of what learning Greek looks and feels like. Post-modern diversity is here to be embraced and encouraged. One thing, however, I hope remains constant and unifying. When I was twelve I was fortunate enough to be offered the chance to learn Greek by a school (very many miles from here) 11 which had not otherwise taught the language for fifty years, but where it still now hangs on (by threads of varying degrees of precariousness). Since then learning, reading, and eventually teaching Greek have been and continue to be for me the sources of what (most of the time) seems like a pleasure far surpassing the simple absence of pain, and this is an end we must not overlook and which we as teachers must do our best to allow others to enjoy. It may be that my colleagues in the Faculty do not think that I was placed among them to pursue pleasure, but let me end by thanking them once again for their support and by saying how much I look forward to the common pursuit in the years ahead. 11 Cranbrook School, Sydney.

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

1. Apollo and the Argonauts: Two notes on Ap. Rhod. 2, 669 – 719* I. The first stop for the Argonauts after they have passed through the Symplegades is the island called Humi\r. Putting in there just before dawn, they see Apollo as he travels from Lycia to the land of his beloved Hyperboreans1; on the advice of Orpheus, they build an altar on the island to Apollo :~ior and perform sacrifices upon it. The episode2 concludes with the swearing of an oath of mutual help, and the poet tells us that a temple of jl|moia which the Argonauts built on the island was still standing in his day. We recognise here a very common pattern in Apollonius’ epic: a brief stop on the journey is marked by ritual and aetiology. Apollo’s appearance in the second book is related in particular to 4, 1701 – 1730 where, in response to Jason’s prayers, Apollo saves the Argonauts by revealing to them (again in his role as a god of light) the island which they subsequently called )m\vg and on which they founded a cult of Apollo AQck^tgr3. The impenetrable darkness from which Apollo saves the heroes in the fourth book is the last peril of the whole voyage, but when they see him in Book 2, Colchis and the return journey lie in front of them. Nevertheless, the epiphany and the foundation of the temple to jl|moia emphasise that the worst peril of the outward journey, the Symplegades, has been successfully negotiated * 1 2 3

Museum Helveticum 43 (1986) 50 – 60 Cf., e. g., 4, 614, Pind. Pyth. 10, 35, Call. fr. 492, Diod. Sic. 2, 47. Apollo’s route shows that Apollonius placed the Hyperboreans to the north of the Scythians (as indeed was the usual view). The events on the island are marked off as a separate unit by Glor d’ … v\or (669) ~ Glor d] … v\or (720). For the links between Apollo’s two appearances cf. Pfister, RE Suppl. 4 (1924) 284 – 286; P. Handel, Beobachtungen zur epischen Technik des Apollonios Rhodios (Munich 1954) 39 n. 1, and Vian’s Budé edition of Bk. 3 (Paris 1980) 12. The )m\vg episode has usually been thought to borrow from Callimachus’ account in the first book of the Aetia, cf. Pfeiffer on fr. 18, 6 – 15; E. Eichgrün, Kallimachos und Apollonios Rhodios (Diss. Berlin 1961) 128 – 133. For the possible use of Callimachus in the present episode cf. below pp. 38 – 41.

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and prepare the Argonauts for the tasks ahead4. This division of the poem is marked by vv. 762 – 771 in which Jason gives Lycus, the king of the Mariandynoi, a brief account of ‘the story so far’, beginning with the Catalogue of Heroes (762 – 763) 5 ; the ‘enchantment’ which Jason’s words work (cf. h]kcet’ !jou0 hul|m, 772) suggest that he is like a Phemius (cf. Od. 1, 337) or, rather, Odysseus himself (cf. Od. 17, 514, 521). We may indeed compare Apollonius’ technique here with the echo of the opening lines of the Odyssey at Od. 13, 88 – 92, an echo which points to a division of the poem into ‘Odysseus absent’ and ‘Odysseus present’6. The stop among the Mariandynoi is also marked by the deaths of the prophet Idmon and the steersman Tiphys, and so it would clearly be a mistake to interpret Apollo’s epiphany as a sign to the Argonauts that their luck has turned. We may perhaps see a foreshadowing of these grim events in the fact that the account of the Argonauts on Humi\r draws freely upon Homer’s description of the island across the water from the Cyclopes where Odysseus and his crew camp (Od. 9, 116 – 176) 7. Both islands not only provide an opportunity for rest and recovery, but also act as a prelude to disaster. The language8 and structure of Apollo’s epiphany are traditional: a divine appearance causes mortal h\lbor and is followed by prayers and worship (cf., e. g., Od. 3, 371 – 394). The god’s flowing hair9, the bow in his left hand10, and the quiver hanging down his back, however, well exemplify a Hellenistic interest in detailed pictorial representation. 4 For the central importance of the Symplegades cf. 1, 2 – 3, Eur. Med. 1 – 2. 5 Contrast 1, 980 – 981 where an opportunity for such a summary is not taken up; Medea gives Circe a rather sketchy account of the story at 4, 730 – 737. 6 With 2, 762 – 771 H. Fränkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich 1968) 230, compares Od. 23, 310—343, but the structural role of those verses is quite different. There is a good discussion of the Lycus episode in K. W. Blumberg, Untersuchungen zur epischen Technik des Apollonios von Rhodes (Diss. Leipzig 1931) 44. 7 Cf. Vian’s edition, pp. 275 – 276. 8 Cf. M. Campbell, Echoes and Imitations of Early Epic in Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden 1981) 33, and F. Williams on Call. Ap. 2. 9 In Pythian 4 Jason’s flowing locks remind the onlookers of Apollo (82 – 87). H. L. Lorimer, ‘Gold and ivory in Greek mythology’, in: Greek Poetry and Life: Essays presented to Gilbert Murray on his seventieth birthday (Oxford 1936) 23, suggests that the description of Apollo would remind Apollonius’ readers of Ptolemy. 10 As it was in the great cult statue at Delos, cf. Pfeiffer on Call. fr. 114, 8 ff; id., The image of the Delian Apollo and Apolline ethics, JWCI 15 (1952) 20 – 32, pp. 21 – 22.

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Striking also is the suddenness of the god’s appearance. The scene is presented as though Apollo is unaware of the Argonauts’ presence on the island; they see him but he does not see them. Such an experience was highly dangerous for mortal men, as Callimachus states baldly in the fifth hymn (Lav. Pall. 100 – 102): Jq|mioi d’ ¨de k]comti m|loi· fr je tim’ !ham\tym, fja lµ he¹r aqt¹r 6kgtai, !hq^s,, lish_ toOtom Qde?m lec\ky.

Nevertheless, we do not have to assume that Apollo, who after all has a central role in the whole epic, was unaware either of the Argonauts’ presence11 or of the effect which his epiphany will have upon them. The lack of preparation for his entry emphasises the gap between mortal and divine action, even when the mortals are, like the Argonauts, all related to gods (cf. 3, 365 – 366). There is very little direct contact in the Argonautica between the heroes and the major Olympian deities12, and confrontations with minor divinities are marked by the same apparent suddenness as is Apollo’s epiphany. After Heracles has been left behind, for example, Glaucus appears out of the sea to foretell the future, but although his opening words appeal to the lec\koio Di¹r bouk^ his intervention remains abrupt and mysterious (1, 310 – 1328) 13. So too in the fourth book, Triton appears very suddenly to aid the Argonauts after Orpheus has had the bright idea of using one of Apollo’s tripods to win over the local divinities (4, 1547 – 1591). These scenes are not merely examples of Apollonius’ many experiments with epic narrative, but are also part of a problem which the whole poem raises in a very acute form, namely the link between motive and action. 11 We may recall Od. 10, 573 – 574, t_r #m he¹m oqj 1h]komta / avhaklo?sim Udoit’ C 5mh’ C 5mha ji|mta ;. The dangers of unwittingly seeing gods are fully documented in M. Teufel, Brauch und Ritus bei Apollonios Rhodios (Diss. Tübingen 1939) 167 – 188 and cf. A. W. Bulloch (Cambridge 1985) on Call. Lav. Pall 101 – 102. 12 On the gods in Apollonius see H. de la Ville de Mirmont, Apollonios de Rhodes et Virgile (Paris 1894) passim; L. Klein, Die Gçttertechnik in den Argonautika des Apollonios Rhodios, Philologus 86 (1931) 18 – 51 and 215 – 257; H. Faerber, Zur dichterischen Kunst in Apollonios Rhodios’ Argonautica (Die Gleichnisse) (Diss. Berlin 1932) 79 – 90; H. Herter, Bursian’s Jahresbericht 285 (1944/45) 275 – 284; Fränkel, Noten (n. 6 above) 630 – 633. 13 Contrast Leucothoe’s appearance at Od. 5, 333 – 350.

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Apollo’s epiphany is at one level a poetic version of sunrise. Opinions will differ as to whether Apollonius invites us to understand that the physically exhausted14 and emotionally drained men interpret a natural phenomenon as a divine apparition. It is possible that Herodorus, a major source for this part of the epic15, had mentioned (in order to reject) this aetiology for the cult of Apollo :~ior, but unfortunately the relevant scholium is ambiguous16. Be that as it may, Apollonius has made the equation of Apollo and the sun17 absolutely clear by stressing the god’s golden hair and his brilliant eyes into which none of the heroes could look directly; later in the poem we are told that such eyes are a feature shared by all the race of Helios (4, 727 – 729; cf. 4, 683 – 684). pqosj}mgsir to the rising sun was a widespread ancient practice18, and in the present episode we see an elaborate version of this. The solar identity of Apollo also illuminates the role of Orpheus here. The poet par excellence takes a leading role in ritual throughout the epic and the links between Orpheus and Apollo require no special illustration. Nevertheless, Apollonius may have a particular legend in mind here. According to this story19, Orpheus rejected the worship of Dionysus and instead used to climb Mt. Pangaion every morning to worship the sun which he called Apollo. This story formed some part of Aeschylus’ Bassarai (cf. fr. 23a Radt). Whether or not Apollonius was thinking of that story here, the role of Orpheus points to the unity of all the events on the island.

14 Cf. 673 jal\t\ pokup^lomi ; for the j\lator brought on by rowing cf. esp. Il. 7, 4 – 6. The simile which compares the heroes rowing to oxen ploughing (662 – 668) is an elaboration of a common metaphor, cf. Pfeiffer on Call. fr. 572; R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard on Hor. C. 1, 7, 32. 15 Cf. P. Desideri, Studi di storiografia eracleota, SCO 16 (1967) 366 – 416; Thynias was colonised from Heraclea and thus attracted the attention of Herodorus, Nymphis and others. 16 Sw. 2, 684, Jq|dyqor owm vgs·m (FGrHist 31 F 48) :`om )p|kkyma pqosacoqe}eshai ja· byl¹m aqtoO eWmai 1m t0 m^s\, oq jah¹ eqhqou 1v\mg aqto?r, !kk± jah¹ oR )qcomaOtai eqhqou eQr aqtµm jat]pkeusam ; for discussion cf. Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen I3 (Berlin 1959) 22; Blumberg (n. 6 above) 43. 17 On the identification of Apollo and the sun in Greek poetry and thought cf. J. S. Rusten, Dionysius Scytobrachion (Papyrologica Coloniensia 10, 1982) 33 n. 18; J. Diggle on Eur. Phaethon 224 – 225, and F. Williams on Call. Ap. 9. 18 Cf. Jessen, RE 8 (1912) 5S. 19 [Eratosth.] Catasterismoi 24; for text and discussion cf. M. L. West, BICS 30 (1983) 63 – 71 and TrGF 3, 138 – 139.

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For the temple to jl|moia the scholia to Apollonius for once fail us, but the oath to help each other in the future which the Argonauts take on the island does find an echo in the version of the Argonautic saga preserved in the fourth book of Diodorus Siculus. There we read that, at the suggestion of Heracles, the heroes swore to help each other again in the future after they had completed the quest for the Fleece (Diod. Sic. 4, 53, 4). Diodorus’ main source here is the rationalising account of the myth given by Dionysius Scytobrachion, and we may perhaps use this passage as evidence that the oath at 2, 715 – 716 is not Apollonius’ own contribution20. Fortunately, however, uncertainty about the poet’s sources does not prevent us from trying to understand his art. The foundations of the cults of Apollo :~ior and of jl|moia are not separate, unrelated events21, but part of one Apolline experience. The role of Orpheus stresses Apollo’s function as the god of music, and the links between musical and social ‘harmony’ would have been familiar to any educated contemporary of Apollonius. The most famous expression of these ideas is the opening passage of Pindar’s First Pythian, a poem in which Apollo is asked to help Hiero to guide his people s}lvymom 1r Bsuw_am (70). Plato’s discussion of the etymology of )p|kkym is particularly relevant here (Cratyl. 405 c-d) 22 : jat± d³ tµm lousijµm de? rpokabe?m fti t¹ %kva sgla_mei pokkawoO t¹ bloO, ja· 1mtaOha tµm bloO p|kgsim ja· peq· t¹m oqqam|m, otr dµ p|kour jakoOsim, ja· peq· tµm 1m t0 ád0 "qlom_am, D dµ sulvym_a jake?tai, fti taOta p\mta, ¦r vasim oR jolxo· peq· lousijµm ja· !stqomol_am, "qlom_ô tim· poke? ûla p\mta· 1pistate? d³ oxtor b he¹r t0 "qlom_ô blopok_m aqt± p\mta ja· jat± heo»r ja· jat’ !mhq~pour· ¦speq owm t¹m bloj]keuhom ja· bl|joitim ‘!j|kouhom’ ja· ‘%joitim’ 1jak]salem, letabak|mter !mt· toO ‘blo’ ‘!-’, ovty ja· )p|kkyma 1jak]salem dr Gm jlopok_m, 6teqom k\bda 1lbak|mter, fti bl~mulom 1c_cmeto t` wakep` am|lati.

20 Jacoby, FGrHist Ia p. 517, suggested that Dionysius invented the oath in his version. Rusten (n. 17 above) 85 – 92, makes Dionysius roughly contemporary with Apollonius and (p. 95) finds it impossible to decide priority in the two main incidents shared by the two writers, the halt at Samothrace and the epiphany of Glaucus. 21 Contrast, e. g., Fränkel, Noten (n. 6 above) 229. 22 1, 759 – 762 ( Jason’s cloak) alludes to an etymology of )p|kkym from pokk|r (cf. Pl. Crat. 404 c-e; Call. Ap. 2, 69 – 70). For etymologies of Apollo in earlier poetry cf. Archilochus fr. 26, 5 – 6 West; Aesch. Ag. 1080 – 1082; Eur. Phaethon 224 – 226; Timotheus, PMG 800 (cf. below p. 59), and perhaps Hipponax fr. 25 West.

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The foundation of the cult of jl|moia is linked to Apollo’s epiphany by the god’s function as bestower of harmony and concord (in both literal and transferred senses) 23. In Book 1 of the Argonautica a cosmological song by Orpheus restored harmony and bl|moia among the Argonauts (1, 494 – 515); in Book 2 Apollo and Orpheus combine again to reaffirm these qualities24.

II. In historical times the island on which the Argonauts see Apollo was also known as Apollonia and was largely given over to the cult of Apollo25. This interest dominates Apollonius’ account, and two passages call for particular notice. The first is the description of the Argonauts’ arrival on the island (669 – 676): 670

Glor d’ out’ %q py v\or %lbqotom out’ 5ti k_gm aqvma_g p]ketai, kept¹m d’ 1pid]dqole mujt· v]ccor, f t’ !lvik}jgm lim !mecq|lemoi jak]ousi, t/lor 1qgla_gr m^sou kil]m’ eQsek\samter Humi\dor jal\t\ pokup^lomi ba?mom 5qafe. to?si d³ KgtoOr uR¹r !meqw|lemor Kuj_ghem 1nev\mg.

Apollonius uses the Glor … t/lor formula sparingly and with care26. The Glor clause may describe an action in ‘the real world’ which reflects or is like the action of the t/lor clause (1, 1172 – 1177; 3, 1340 – 1343; 4, 109 – 114) or the Glor clause may give the reason for the action of the t/lor clause (1, 450 – 453. 1280 – 1283; 2, 516 – 518) and in these latter 23 Cf. Ovid Met. 1, 518 (Apollo to Daphne) per me concordant carmina neruis; for some speculations on the political dimension of *qlom_a cf. R. G. A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1982) 48. 24 Just as Orpheus’ song in Book 1 has strong links with Empedocles, so too bl|moia and "qlom_a are important notions in pre-Socratic and sophistic thought, cf. Diels-Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker II p. 356; G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers2 (Cambridge 1983) 232 – 234. The evidence that Empedocles identified Apollo and Helios (Men. Rhet. 337, 2 – 6 Sp.-RW) will not bear examination. 25 Cf. K. Ziegler, RE 6 A (1936) 718 – 720. 26 Cf. 1, 450 – 453. 1172 – 1177. 1280 – 1283; 2, 516 – 518; 3, 1340 – 1343; 4, 109 – 114; for discussion cf. W. Bühler. Die Europa des Moschos (Hermes Einzelschriften Bd. 13, 1960) 210 – 211 and Fränkel, Noten (n. 6 above) 141.

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35

instances the Glor clause, as at 2, 669 – 671, describes a natural phenomenon. We may therefore reasonably enquire why Apollonius has chosen this particular moment to display his knowledge of the Homeric hapax !lvik}jg27. The Homeric scholia connect this word with kuj|vyr and k}cg, but the scholia to Aratus, Phaen. 747 make a connection with k}jor, the sacred animal of Apollo. I suggest, therefore, that !lvik}jg has a peculiar appropriateness as a time for seeing Apollo, and that Apollonius has helped us to see this by making the god travel Kuj_ghem. The cult title of Apollo K}jior was very variously explained in antiquity; connections with keuj|r, k}jor and Kuj_a were all postulated28. Homer’s !lvik}jg m}n is in fact adduced to support a derivation of K}jior from k}jg ( !p¹ toO keujoO) in the course of Macrobius’ discussion of the cult title (Sat. 1, 17, 36 – 41). Macrobius is known to depend upon Apollodorus of Athens peq· he_m (FGrHist 244 F 95), but we can hardly assume that Apollodorus too had connected !lvik}jg and K}jior29. Even if he had done so, we would still not have traced the connection as far back as the time of Apollonius. Nevertheless, with or without grammatical precedent, Apollonius has established the connection by the repetition of the kuj-root; some confirmation that etymology and verbal games are important in this passage may be found in the account of the worship of Apollo in vv. 701 – 713:

705

710

!lv· d³ daiol]moir erq»m woq¹m 1st^samto, jak¹m Zgpai^om’ Zgpai^oma Vo?bom lekp|lemoi. s»m d] svim 1»r pa?r OQ\cqoio Bistom_, v|qlicci kice_gr Gqwem !oid/r· ¦r pote petqa_, rp¹ deiq\di Paqmgso?o Dekv}mgm t|noisi pek~qiom 1nem\qine, joOqor 1½m 5ti culm|r, 5ti pkoj\loisi cecgh~r Rk^joir aQe_ toi, %man, %tlgtoi 5heiqai, aQ³m !d^kgtoi· t½r c±q h]lir· oQ|hi d’ aqtµ Kgt½ Joioc]meia v_kair 1m· weqs·m !v\ssei pokk± d³ Jyq}jiai M}lvai Pkeisto?o h}catqer

27 !lvik}jg is also found at Aratus, Phaen. 747, and v. 670 seems to echo Phaen. 80, keptot]qg c±q t0 ja· t0 1pid]dqolem aUckg ; there is a sensitive discussion of vv. 669 – 671 by Fränkel in DLZ 51 (1930) 874. On the actual etymology of !lvik}jg cf. D. J. N. Lee, ‘Homeric kuj\bar and others’, Glotta 40 (1962) 168 – 182, and H. Koller, ‘Kuj\bar’, Glotta 51 (1973) 29 – 34. 28 Cf. Sch. Hom. Il. 4, 101; Servius auctus on Verg. Aen. 4, 377; Kruse, RE 13 (1927) 2268 – 2270; F. Williams, CQ n.s. 21 (1971) 138 – 139. 29 R. Münzel, De Apollodori peq· he_m libris (Diss. Bonn 1883) 16 in fact derives this passage of Macrobius from Apollodorus.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

haqs}mesjom 5pessim, ‘Vg Ve’ jejkgcu?ai, 5mhem dµ t|de jak¹m 1v}lmiom 5pketo Vo_b\.

If the cult of Apollo :~ior was new, the story which Orpheus here tells was very old30. In particular, Apollonius has in mind the version of this story in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. In the Hymn, as in Apollonius, a group of weary seafarers found a new cult of Apollo with a title derived from their experience of the god, Dekv_mior in the Hymn, :~ior in Apollonius. Both poems also use the title Zgpai^ym for Apollo (H. Ap. 272; Ap. Rhod. 2, 702) 31, and as the Hymn derives the name of the monster P}hym and the title P}heior for Apollo from p}heim (363, 371 – 374), so Dekv}mgm in Ap. Rhod. 2, 706, the other name for the monster, suggests an etymology for the place-name Delphi; the juxtaposition of petqa_, rp¹ deiq\di Paqmgso?o (the actual location of Delphi) and Dekv}mgm points us towards this etymology. In the context of Apollo’s epiphany in the Argonautica, it may also be worth remarking that the Homeric Hymn presents Apollo and Helios working together for the destruction of the monster (368 – 374); there Apollo uses the power of the sun, rather than himself representing that power. The slaying of the Delphic serpent was traditionally an act of Apollo’s youth or even his earliest infancy. In Callimachus’ accounts in the Hymn to Apollo (cf. below p. 39 – 40) and in the fourth book of the Aetia32 Apollo was still a pa?r when he performed this act. At first sight, Apollonius’ indication of the god’s age (707) is puzzling. The style of the verse is, however, familiar from many hymns of praise33, and we may compare a typically Callimachean achievement of Apollo’s baby sister Artemis (Call. Dian. 72 – 77):

30 Cf. T. Schreiber, Apollon Pythoktonos (Leipzig 1879); J. Fontenrose, Python (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1959). 31 702 – 703 rework Il. 1, 472 – 474, oR d³ pamgl]qioi lokp0 he¹m Rk\sjomto / jak¹m !e_domter pai^oma joOqoi )wai_m, / l]kpomter :j\eqcom. Ancient scholars, like modern translators, disputed whether jak|m in v. 473 was adjectival or adverbial; jak¹m 1v}lmiom in v. 713 seems to give Apollonius’ view. For adjectival jak|r cf. Euphorion fr. 80, 2 Powell. 32 Cf. Dieg. II 24 (Pfeiffer, Vol. I p. 95). 33 Cf. the repetition in the ‘hymn’ to the Argonauts at 4, 1384, Ø b_,, Ø !qet0 Kib}gr !m± h?mar jtk.; Call. Jov. 2. !e_ in hymnic style is fully documented by K. Keyssner, Gottesvorstellung und Lebensauffassung im griechischen Hymnus (Stuttgart 1932) 39 – 44.

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75

37

joOqa, s» d³ pqot]qy peq, 5ti tqi]tgqor 1oOsa, ewt’ 5lokem Kgt~ se let’ !cjak_dessi v]qousa, Jva_stou jak]omtor fpyr apt^qia do_g, Bq|mte~ se stibaqo?sim 1vessal]mou com\tessi, st^heor 1j lec\kou kas_gr 1dq\nao wa_tgr, ¥koxar d³ b_gvi·

Apollo’s age is less narrowly specified than Artemis’. Young boys dedicated the hair cut from their head either in infancy or on reaching sexual maturity to a god, often Apollo34 ; the ancients connected joOqor with je_qeim, and that is obviously important for the interpretation of this passage35. 707 nicely hints that Apollo might one day cut his hair and dedicate it to himself. No wonder that the poet cuts in jocularly to ask the god’s forgiveness. His apology turns on the ambiguity of 5ti, which can mean ‘still at that time (though it later changed)’ or ‘still (to this day)’36. We naturally read v. 707 in the former way, but the repeated aQe_ of vv. 708 – 709, picking up the repetition of 5ti, assures us and the god that we were wrong. culm|r in v. 707 presents a further, and more difficult, problem. It has often been taken to mean ‘beardless’ and this would be very attractive37; Apollonius commonly denotes a man’s age by the presence or absence of facial hair (cf. 1, 972; 2, 43 – 44. 779; 3, 519 – 520), and we may compare Callimachus’ description of Apollo’s youthful beauty (Ap. 36 – 37): ja· l³m !e· jak¹r ja· !e· m]or· oupote Vo_bou hgke_air oqd’ fssom 1p· wm|or Gkhe paqeia?r.

Nevertheless, I have been unable to parallel either culm|r or nudus used by themselves to mean ‘beardless’. Three alternative approaches have been tried. One is emendation, but nothing very satisfactory has been devised38. Secondly, some critics have seen a reference to the nakedness 34 Cf., e. g., Euphorion, AP 6, 279 (= Gow-Page, Hellenistic Epigrams 1801 – 1804); L. Sommer, Das Haar in Religion und Aberglauben der Griechen (Diss. Münster 1912) 18 – 34; M. L. West on Hes. Theog. 347. 35 Cf. Sch. Hom. Il. 21, 204; Eustathius, Hom. 582, 20; 1403, 3; the importance of this etymology for v. 707 was pointed out by M. Campbell, RPh 47 (1973) 78 – 79. 36 Cf. Gow on Theocr. 17, 134. 37 Cf. Nemesianus, Ecl. 2, 17 ambo genas leues, intonsi crinibus ambo. Archilochus apparently used culm|r to mean ‘with shaven head’, !pesjuhisl]mor (fr. 265 West = Hesychius c 1001). 38 tumm|r Schneider, tuth|r Morel.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

of Greek statuary39 ; 5ti is, however, awkward with this explanation which may also be thought to lack the desired wit. Thirdly, we may adopt the explanation of the scholiast who glosses culm|r as %mgbor : Apollo is already a joOqor, but not yet an 5vgbor40. Again the lack of a parallel for such a use of culm|r is disconcerting. If the word is sound, therefore, we might consider the possibility that the first half of v. 707 draws on the version of the legend in which Apollo was still a babe-in-arms when he killed the serpent. In Euripides’ account, for example, the god is 5ti bq]vor, 5ti v_kar j 1p· lat]qor !cj\kaisi (IT 1250 – 1251), and at 1, 508 Apollonius describes Zeus in the Dictaean cave as 5ti joOqor, 5ti vqes· m^pia eQd~r. If this is right, then Apollonius has, not untypically, combined two versions of the story in his narrative; indeed here the two versions appear side-by-side in the one verse. The aspect of this passage of the Argonautica which has attracted most recent attention is its relationship to the aetiology of the cry Rµ Rµ pai/om which Callimachus gives in his Hymn to Apollo (97 – 103):

100

Rµ Rµ pai/om !jo}olem, ovmeja toOto Dekv|r toi pq~tistom 1v}lmiom evqeto ka|r, Glor 2jgbok_gm wqus]ym 1pede_jmuso t|nym. Puh~ toi jati|mti sum^mteto dail|mior h^q, aQm¹r evir. t¹m l³m s» jat^maqer %kkom 1p’ %kk\ b\kkym ¡j»m aist|m, 1pg}tgse d³ ka|r· ‘Rµ Rµ pai/om, Vei b]kor’.

At first glance the two versions have little in common. Scholars have looked rather to the opening story of Aetia 4 for Apollonius’ source41; the Apollonian scholia tell us that Callimachus also somewhere named the Delphic serpent Dekv}mgr (fr. 88 Pfeiffer) and if this was, as commonly assumed, in Aetia 4 then this would seem to strengthen the case for eliminating the Callimachean hymn as a possible influence upon Argonautica 2. Even relative poetic chronology is extremely difficult to establish for this period, but the full implications of the possible links between these two passages have not yet been properly explored. 39 Cf. Vian, ad loc. 40 Cf. Campbell, loc. cit. (n. 34 above), Solon fr. 27, 1 West pa?r l³m %mgbor 1½m 5ti m^pior jtk. 41 Cf., e. g., Wilamowitz, Hellenistische Dichtung (Berlin 1924) II 85; Pfeiffer on Call. fr. 88; Eichgrün (n. 3 above) 168 – 169; there is an interesting and cautious discussion on p. 82 of F. Williams’ edition of Call. Ap. (Oxford 1978).

1. Apollo and the Argonauts

39

That both poets use the etymological games42 and changes of person traditionally associated with hymnic style is of no significance for relative chronology; Apollonius certainly did not need the Aetia to teach him the stylistic tricks of vv. 707 – 710. Of some interest perhaps are the similarity of v. 702, jak¹m Zgpai^om’ Zgpai^oma Vo?bom, to v. 21 of the Callimachean hymn, bpp|h’ Rµ pai/om Rµ pai/om !jo}s,, and the fact that whereas Apollonius has indicated an etymology for Delphi (cf. above p. 36), Callimachus refers to both names for the holy shrine, Delphi (98) and Pytho (100); no strong argument for priority can, however, be derived from either of these observations. Suggestive also is the word 1v}lmiom which both poets use. This word is first found here and at Call. fr. 384, 39 (The Victory of Sosibios) where t^mekka jakk_mije is described as )qwik|wou mija?om 1v}lmiom43 ; 1v}lmiom has been thought to be an invention of Callimachus, but no good argument for this has been produced44. The dating of The Victory of Sosibios is notoriously uncertain45, and Callimachus could have used the word in other now lost poems (for example, the opening of Aetia 4). The sudden appearance of this word in the parallel passages of Callimachus and Apollonius remains curious, however, and it may be worth suggesting that Callimachus’ emphatic toOto j Dekv|r toi pq~tistom 1v}lmiom evqeto (98 – 99) points to the ‘invention’ of the word 1v}lmiom as well as of the ritual cry. A new papyrus could, of course, easily destroy such a speculation. A further point of contact between the two passages is 1nem\qinem and jat^maqer. The second half of Ap. Rhod. 2, 706 reproduces a Homeric (Il. 5, 842) verse-ending46, and Apollonius uses 1nemaq_feim in three other places (1, 92; 3, 398. 1226), always at verse-end; 2, 706 is, however, the only occasion when he uses this verb with a non-human ob42 For the use of etymology in Hellenistic hymns cf. M. Hopkinson, ‘Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus’, CQ n.s. 34 (1984)139 – 148. 43 Eratosthenes too seems to have called t^mekka jakk_mije an 1v}lmiom, cf. Sch. Pind. Ol. 9. 1 (= FGrHist 241 F 44 = Archilochus fr. 324 West). The other Greek words for ‘refrain’, 1pilek]dgla, 1p_qqgla, 1p_vheccla and 1p\d|r (cf. F. Williams on Call. Ap. 98) do not occur in extant literature until a later period, although 1pivh]cceshai occurs as early as Aesch. Ch. 457, cf. N. Hopkinson (Cambridge 1984) on Call. Cer. 1. 44 Certainly not in the works listed in F. Williams’ note on Call. Ap. 98. 45 Cf. Herter, RE Suppl. 5 (1931) 407; P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford 1972) II 1004 – 1005; P. J. Parsons, ZPE 25 (1977) 44 – 45. 46 Apollonius’ aorist follows the text of, inter alios, Zenodotus, cf. Sch. Il. 11, 368 b.

40

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

ject. Callimachus’ jat^maqer47 reproduces a Homeric hapax (Od. 11, 519) and reflects Homeric usage (cf. Il. 21, 485 h/qar 1ma_qeim). The evidence is thus quite inconclusive, but it may be thought that Callimachus here has slightly the better claim to priority. Two further matters deserve notice. Callimachus leaves us in no doubt about the nature of Apollo’s opponent, dail|mior h^q, j aQm¹r evir. In Apollonius Dekv}mgr is merely given the general epithet pek~qior48 and there is no explicit indication of what sort of creature it was. We may contrast 4, 1396 – 1398 where K\dym, the serpent of the Hesperides, is described explicitly as wh|mior evir, and Apollonius’ obvious interest in dragons is fully displayed at 4, 127 – 161. His silence at 2, 706 may therefore be added to the cumulative argument that he is writing in this passage with his eye on an already existing poetic version. A final consideration can be adduced which seems to me to add considerably to the weight of this argument. The derivation of the cry Rµ R^ from R]mai (b]kor) will have had a long history before Callimachus and Apollonius. It is visible already, I would suggest, in a brief passage of Timotheus preserved by Macrobius in his discussion of Apollo’s titles (PMG 800): s} t’ § t¹m !e· p|kom oqq\miom kalpqa?r !jt?s’ Nkie b\kkym, p]lxom 2jab|kom 1whqo?s b]kor s÷r !p¹ meuq÷r, § Ve Pai\m.

These verses seem replete with etymological games: !e· p|kom, !e_ … b\kkym, 2jab|kom… b]kor all seem to point to )p|kkym, and Ve surely picks up, and is thus explained by, p]lxom. Be that as it may, the link between R]mai and the ritual cry to Apollo was certainly familiar in the third century49. Callimachus makes the derivation completely clear, but in Apollonius we have only t|noisi in v. 706 to help us. This may seem not very significant as all of Apollonius’ readers (ancient and modern) know already how Apollo killed the dragon, but it is worth noting that until Hermann Fränkel restored Vg Ve to the text of v. 712 the whole point of the aetiology was lost on many critics. 47 Pfeiffer’s Index Vocabulorum mistakenly derives jat^maqer from jatemaq_feim. 48 Cf. H. Ap. 374 p]kyq, Eur. IT 1249 c÷r pek~qiom t]qar. 49 Cf. Clearchus fr. 64 W2 (Ath. 15, 701 c-d) and Duris, FGrHist 76 F 79 (Et. Mag. 469, 45 – 47); the same explanation is given later by Aristarchus (Et. Mag. 469, 53) and the scholia to the present passage of Apollonius.

Addendum

41

Thus Seaton, for example, printed Y^ie which he translated as ‘Healer’ without explaining why the nymphs should call Apollo by such a name at this critical moment. At least one intelligent critic thought the nymphs’ cry to be merely a meaningless shout of encouragement50. That it certainly is not, but it is tempting to ascribe Apollonius’ very elliptical treatment of the aetiology to the existence of Callimachus’ Hymn. The case is, of course, far from proved, and so I leave it to others to try to draw general literary lessons from the possible links between these two passages51.

Addendum This epiphany of Apollo is discussed again from a rather different perspective in Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming).

50 Blumberg (n. 6 above) 43. 51 Cf., e. g., M, J. M. Margolies, Apollonius’ Argonautica; A Callimachean Epic (Diss. Colorado 1981) 147 – 148. I am grateful to Neil Hopkinson for casting his sceptical eye over an earlier draft of this paper.

2. Medea’s flight: the fourth Book of the Argonautica* If Medea has attracted more readers to the Argonautica than any other character — thereby also determining which parts of the poem have become generally familiar — she has also provided critics of the poem with their major (sometimes their sole) topic for discussion.1 The main charge, particularly among critics writing in English,2 is that the various aspects of Medea — awakening love, deadly magic, fratricide — form neither a consistent nor a credible whole. One quotation, from an article which explicitly aims to summarise recent criticism, may stand as representative: ‘[Medea’s passion] produced an inconsistency [Apollonius] either ignored deliberately in the confidence of his Medea in love, or, just possibly, may not have noticed. The same emotionally immature and helpless Medea is the competent, unfrightened servant of Hecate, the cool instructress of Jason in taming the bulls, the calm soother of the dragon… the behaviour of Medea later in the *

1

2

Classical Quarterly 37 (1987) 129 – 39 Earlier versions of this paper were read to seminars in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Sydney and Zurich; I am grateful to those audiences for much advice and criticism. I am also indebted to Dr D. C. Feeney who kindly commented upon the penultimate draft. The following works are cited by author name only: C. R. Beye, Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Carbondale, 1982); M. Campbell, Studies in the Third Book of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (Hildesheim, 1983); H. Fränkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich, 1968); M. Fusillo, Il tempo delle Argonautiche (Rome, 1985); P. Hübscher, Die Charakteristik der Personen in Apollonios’ Argonautika (diss. Freiburg i.d. Schweiz, 1940); G. Paduano, Studi su Apollonio Rodio (Rome, 1972); U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Hellenistische Dichtung (Berlin, 1924). Particularly helpful are Hübscher 10 – 38, Paduano and the survey by H. Herter, Bursian’s Jahresbericht 285 (1944/55), 291 – 4. Of criticism in English most can be learned from E. Phinney, ‘Narrative Unity in the Argonautica, the Medea-Jason Romance’, TAPA 98 (1967), 327 – 41 and Campbell 37 – 77. Cf. Fusillo’s strictures (p. 287 n. 54)’ II problema della “doppia Medea” e forse il piu ozioso e il piu falsato nell’ impostazione di quelli su cui si e soffermata la bibliografia apolloniana’.

2. Medea’s flight: the fourth Book of the Argonautica

43

[fourth] Book is, against all reason, quite untouched by what we would think of as a shattering experience, at the very least destructive of any real trust between her and Jason … It is as if Apollonius has thrown in [Apsyrtus’ murder] without care or realisation of its consequence for the consistency of her character’.3 Behind criticism of this kind lies both an understandable desire to relate the characters of ancient literature, if not to our own experience, at least to what instinct tells us is possible, and the whole tradition of criticism which descends from the Poetics of Aristotle. In recent years other approaches have gained currency,4 but in this paper I shall explore the presentation of Medea as a whole (Part I) and particularly of her flight from Colchis (Part II) within a traditional framework in an attempt to clarify what seem to me to be critical misunderstandings.

I. Two related observations are in order at once. First, Medea’s ‘credibility’ can hardly be the object of serious debate. Whether or not homicidal sorceresses can also be impressionable virgins (and vice versa) is a subject about which people may reasonably disagree. Moreover, we are here concerned not with any young Colchian girl, but with the hypothesised adolescence of a familiar figure of myth and literature. The murder of Apsyrtus foreshadows the later murder of Medea’s own children, just as, mutatis mutandis, Heracles’ strangling of the snakes foreshadows his later elimination of some of Greece’s most hideous monsters.5 Such neat patterns may indeed be more common in myth and literature than in real life, but at any event simplistic notions of ‘credibility’ have no place here. The apparent paradoxes in the presentation of Medea occur in both Book 3 and Book 4. Well known is 3.858 – 68: t/r oVgm t’ 1m eqessi jekaimµm Qjl\da vgcoO Jasp_gi 1m j|wkyi !l^sato vaql\sseshai,

3 4 5

C. Collard, ‘Medea and Dido’, Prometheus 1 (1975), 131 – 51 at 138 – 9. Cf., e. g., S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 169 – 98; for a ‘revised Aristotelianism’ cf. J. M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975), pp. 20 – 3. Apsyrtus goes to his death like an !tak¹r p\ir (4.460); cf. also 3.747 – 8, Fusillo 338.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

2pt± l³m !em\oisi koessal]mg rd\tessim, 2pt\ji d³ Bqil½ jouqotq|vom !cjak]sasa, Bqil½ mujtip|kom, whom_gm, 1m]qoisim %massam, kuca_gi 1m· mujt· s»m aqvma_oir vaq]essi. lujghl_i d’ rp]meqhem 1qelmµ se_eto ca?a, N_fgr telm|lemgr Titgm_dor· 5steme d’ aqt¹r Yapeto?o p\ir ad}mgi p]qi hul¹m !k}ym. t| N’ F c’ 1namekoOsa hu~dez j\theto l_tqgi F te oR !lbqos_oisi peq· st^hessim 5eqto.

Medea is here an aroused and arousing virgin who holds converse with chthonic powers and who stores the physical torment of others between her beautiful breasts. A less bizarre example of these contrasts, but one very relevant to the argument of Part II of this paper, occurs in the description of her flight to the Argo (4.50 – 3): oq c±q %idqir Gem bd_m, hal± ja· pq·m !kyl]mg !lv_ te mejqo»r !lv_ te duspak]ar N_far whom|r, oXa cuma?jer vaqlaj_der· tqoleq_i d’ rp¹ de_lati p\kketo hul|r.

So too, Medea’s last two appearances in the poem form a tellingly contrasted pair. At 4.1521 – 2 she and her maids flee when Mopsus is bitten by a snake: they behave like ordinary young girls.6 In her final appearance, however, the magic powers of her eyes save the Argonauts by causing the destruction of the bronze giant Talos (4.1651 – 88). Thus, the picture we have of her does not change; rather, different aspects are emphasised as the narrative moves through a wide range of action and emotion. We may compare the Medea of Euripides. She too is clever and dangerous, even if her magical powers are, until the end of the play, given less prominence than in Apollonius,7 but she is also a woman who expresses concerns which Euripides represents as common to all women8 and whose situation, that of being discarded in favour of another, is not peculiar to clever and dangerous women. 6 7 8

Vian’s note on 1521, ‘Médée a aussitôt compris le danger et le caractère irremediable de la blessure’, is hard to believe; contrast, e. g., Paduano 232. Cf. B. M. W. Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, YCS 25 (1977), 193 – 225 at 211 – 16 ( = Word and Action, pp. 307 – 11). This, of course, simplifies a highly complex subject, cf., e. g., S. C. Humphreys, The Family, Women and Death (London, 1983), pp. 72 – 3, Goldhill, op. cit, pp. 115 – 17.

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45

The murder of Apsyrtus is the hinge around which most discussion of Medea’s character has swung. Interpretation is hindered by the very elliptical narrative of the events surrounding the deed.9 Critics differ as to whether at 4.404 – 5 Jason reveals a plan to kill Apsyrtus which had been part of the Argonauts’ strategy all along,10 or whether the idea suddenly occurs to him as an ad hoc way of soothing Medea’s rage.11 What is crucial, however, is that the uncertainty the modern reader feels is precisely the situation in which the poet has placed Medea herself, and it is this uncertainty about her position that marks and determines her behaviour throughout the fourth book. She is no more clear than we are what game Jason is playing. The actual manner of Apsyrtus’ death — lured by Medea’s false words and struck from behind by Jason — should surprise nobody. Medea’s guile was apparent already in the third book in her handling of Chalciope (3.681 – 739) and her maids (3.891 – 912). It has, moreover, long been recognised that the d|kor which lures Apsyrtus to his death recalls the d|kor which killed Creon and his daughter in Euripides’ Medea, just as Medea’s speech of reproof to Jason is clearly a reworking of the parallel speech in the tragedy (Med. 465 – 519). The tragic Medea makes no bones about what is likely to happen when a woman is wronged 1r eqm^m (cf. 265 – 6, 1367 – 8), and the chorus of the play sing of the dangerous excesses to which love can lead (627 – 43); the comparison of Apollonius’ curse on sw]tki’ =qyr (4.445 – 9) to a choral song has often been made. So too, the Apollonian Medea’s frightening potential has always been clear. In Book 3 she threatened to materialise on the other side of the world if Jason forgot her (3.1111 – 17),12 and here in Book 4 there is no doubting the seriousness of her situation. She will not merely be abandoned like Ariadne,13 but handed over to her father whose taste 9 Cf. P. Händel, Beobachtungen zu epischen Technik des Apollonios Rhodios (Munich, 1954), pp. 75 – 7, Vian’s edition of Book 4, pp. 20 – 1, Fusillo 283 n. 37. 10 Cf., e. g., Vian’s edition, p. 22. I do not find Vian’s reconstruction of Apsyrtus’ strategy credible. 11 Cf., e. g., Wilamowitz ii.202. Beye 162 hedges his bets, perhaps wisely. 12 I do not agree with Vian (Note complmentaire to 1116) that Medea is saying that she will torment Jason ‘comme un revenant’. Magical transport seems to suit her magical powers. 13 Catullus used Medea’s speech for Ariadne’s lament in Poem 64; note 4.385 – 7/ Cat. 64.192 – 7. There are other more general similarities, which might arise merely from the similarity of situation or from the common debt to Euripides. It is noteworthy that a cloak decorated with the story of Ariadne (4.423 – 34) is

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for cruelty she well knows (cf. 3.378 – 9). Her desire to burn the Argo (4.392) in fact echoes an intention of Aietes himself (3.582, cf. 4.223); in her anger, she is her father’s daughter,14 and Jason must resort to the same tactics with her which he used to calm Aietes.15 The horror of the murder of Apsyrtus, even if epic legend knew much more horrible versions,16 is real enough — echoes of the murder of Agamemnon17 as well as the poet’s !popolp^ of Eros (4.445 – 9) bear witness to that — but it comes as a climax in a pattern of events and not as an isolated and inexplicable catastrophe. Intimately connected with the question of Medea’s behaviour in Book 4 is, of course, her relationship with Jason. Much discussion, taking its cue from Wilamowitz,18 has been concerned to establish whether or not love still exists between the pair on the return journey. This discussion has, of course, been bedevilled by the fact that love is not always easy to identify and different observers may apply this label to different phenomena. A glance at what the poet tells us about the characters rather than what he gives them to say may, however, establish certain ‘facts’. During the meeting at the temple of Hecate love works on Jason as it had already worked on Medea (3.1022 – 4, 1078). Under its power, Jason tells Medea of his home (thus watering the seed of flight which had been planted earlier) 19 and promises to marry her if ever she were to come to Greece.20 Nevertheless, the gulf between them is not hidden.21 When they part, Jason goes back ‘rejoicing’ to his companions (3.1148) and tells them of Medea’s help, which causes them in turn

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

part of Medea’s way of avoiding Ariadne’s fate; this cloak was a gift from Hypsipyle, the first ‘Ariadne’ in the poem. Note 3.368/4.391, 740. Note 3.386 – 8/4.395 – 8; 3.396/4.410 (rpossa_mym). Apollonius avoids any gruesome butchery by Medea herself, cf. Hübscher 34 – 5. 4.468, cf. Od. 4.535, 11.411. It is interesting to compare the episode with Circe to the Iphigeneia in Tauris of Euripides: a couple, stained (in Medea’s case literally, cf. 4.473 – 4) with the blood of a relative of one of them, come at the command of a divine voice to receive purification. The purifier, who is related to murderer and victim, is forewarned of the arrival in a dream. The crucial difference between the two works is the moral status of Orestes and Medea. ii. 196 – 7, 203, 21. Cf. 3.680 (Chalciope’s expressed wish to live Vma lgd] peq oumola J|kwym). Hübscher 12 – 13 well observes that Jason’s conditional undertaking is very typical of him. His partial revelation of the story of Theseus and Ariadne would, of course, have to be considered in any full account of his behaviour in this scene. Cf., esp., Paduano 199 – 200, Fusillo 259.

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to rejoice (3.1171). The group-solidarity of the Argonauts, which has always been an important feature of the expedition (cf. 1.336 – 7, 3.171 – 5) and which strongly distinguishes it from Homer’s account of Odysseus’ adventures, is here emphasised to mark the support which Jason enjoys: 2t\qoir (1163), s»m to?si (1165), Bq~ym 1r flikom (1166), bloO (1166). On the other hand, Medea, ‘stunned’ (1157), goes home silent and aloof to fail into a gesture of lonely mourning and despair (1159 – 62).22 This is the last we see of her until the opening of the fourth book. There, in her terror, she finds the heroes celebrating with an all-night party (4.69); the contrast between her emotions and theirs could not be greater. When she begs them to rescue her, offers to secure the Golden Fleece for them and reminds Jason of his promises, he ‘rejoiced greatly’ (92 – 3) and repeated his pledge to marry her in Greece. Vian23 comments, ‘Jason does not merely rejoice selfishly at the thought of getting the fleece; it is Medea’s presence which makes him happy.’ Such matters are, of course, hard to judge and there is certainly room for disagreement. Nevertheless, this passage should be set beside 3.1014 where Jason receives the magic drug from Medea ‘rejoicing’, and 4.171 where he lifts up the fleece again ‘rejoicing’. Joy is not otherwise an emotion which comes readily to Apollonius’ Jason. He rejoices when Heracles imposes his election as leader (1.350) — a scene rich in nuance and irony — and he tells Phineus that if the gods should restore the old man’s sight as well is his fortunes he ( Jason) would rejoice as much as if he had reached home (2.441 – 2). This is indeed Jason’s motivating impulse: the need to complete the tasks imposed by Pelias and the desire to get home. To these ends he exploits Medea who alone holds the key to success.24 His complete dependence upon her, emphasised by eVpeto d’ AQsom_dgr pevobgl]mor (4.149) and jo}qgr jejkol]mgr (4.163), is suggested also in the description of the dragon’s roar (4.136 – 8): de_lati d’ 1n]cqomto kewy_der, !lv· d³ pais· mgpi\woir, oV t] svim rp’ !cjak_dessim Uauom, No_fyi pakkol]moir we?qar b\kom !swak|ysai.

22 The curious phrasing of 1162, 2/i jaj¹m 5qcom 1pinum~sato bouk/i, points to the fact that Medea’s only partner is herself. 23 Note complmentaire to 4.93. 24 Cf. Hübscher 18.

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That Medea protects Jason as a mother cares for her child25 is an idea which has already been suggested in the description of gathering night in the third book (3.747 – 8). This idea gives bitter point to Medea’s exploitation of Andromache’s famous plea to Hector (Hom. Il. 6.429 – 30) at 4.368 – 9: t_ vgl· teµ jo}qg te d\laq te aqtojasicm^tg te leh’ :kk\da ca?am 6peshai.

In Colchis, Jason had been thus dependent upon Medea; now the tables are turned and Medea is equally helpless.26 Medea’s isolation, the tragic ironies of her position, have thus been carefully laid out long before the poet’s rueful intervention at the moment of her defloration (4.1165 – 7): !kk± c±q ou pote vOka dugpah]ym !mhq~pym teqpyk/r 1p]bglem fkyi pod_· s»m d] tir aQe· pijqµ paql]lbkyjem 1uvqos}mgisim !m_g.

Between the visit to Circe and the marriage on Drepane we learn that Achilles is destined to marry Medea in the Elysian fields (4.811 – 15); this is not an idle utilisation of a variant myth, but a strategically placed warning that Medea and Jason will not ‘live happily ever after’. While the sleepless Medea waits to hear of Alcinous’ decision, her swirling emotions are compared to the spindle turned by a grieving widow as her children cry round about her (4.1060 – 7). Just at the point where Medea is formally to be given to Jason, the meaninglessness of the match is marked by the figure of the woman who has lost a husband.27 This simile acts as counterpoint to the comparison of the onset of Medea’s passion to a fire lit in kindling by a working woman at 3.291 – 7. 25 For a different interpretation of 4.136 – 8 cf. A. Hurst, Apollonios de Rhodes: manire et cohrence (Rome, 1967), pp. 105 – 6. On the transference of the language of family relationships to amatory contexts in general cf. C. W. Macleod, ZPE 15 (1974), 218 (= Collected Essays, p. 17). 26 aqtojasicm^tg in 369 clearly foreshadows Medea’s betrayal of Apsyrtus, cf. Frankel 481, Paduano 219. There is a similar effect at Eur. Med. 257 (cf. Page on 231). Medea exploits the same Homeric verses in her pledge to Chalciope at 3.730 – 2; that is not simple hypocrisy, as Medea’s motives are complex and apparently contradictory impulses exist side by side. 27 For other possible resonances in this simile cf. Hurst, op. cit., pp. 122 – 3, Beye 154, Fusillo 338.

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The two similes mark the progress of Medea’s suffering; neither gives any cause for optimism. Finally, Medea’s isolation is marked by echoes of Homer. The contribution of the Homeric Nausicaa to the Medea of Book 3 is widely recognised, and we seem to catch a bitter echo of this in the account of Medea’s tale to Circe (4.736 – 7): v|mom d’ !k]eimem 1mispe?m )x}qtou, tµm d’ ou ti m|yi k\hem.

When Nausicaa asked her father for a cart, aUdeto c±q hakeq¹m c\lom 1nomol/mai patq· v_kyi· b d³ p\mta m|ei … (Od. 6.66 – 7)

The substitution of v|mor for c\lor marks how far Medea has come from the innocence of a Nausicaa. Later, when she must plead with Arete, she is placed in the position of Odysseus in Odyssey 7 who begs Arete to intercede to secure safe passage home for him.28 That, of course, is the last thing Medea wants. Her actual words to Arete seem to rework not so much those of Odysseus’ plea to the queen as the hero’s first words to the queen’s daughter in Odyssey 6.29 In a ship full of heroes30 Medea is as alone as the shipwrecked Odysseus. When threatened earlier in the book, Medea was saved by the gruesome murder of her brother. Now she is saved by a hastily arranged marriage; the parallelism may be thought to point forward to the subsequent history of Jason and Medea.

28 Note Od. 7.142/Arg. 4.1012 – 13. 29 Od. 6.149/Arg. 4.1014; the doubt about whether the addressee is human or divine (cf. Livrea on Vkahi in 1014); Od. 6.175/Arg. 4.1025; Od. 6.180 – 2/ Arg. 4.1026 – 8. For other Homeric passages cf. M. Campbell, Echoes and Imitations of Early Epic in Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden, 1981), p. 80. 30 Note the stress on the plurality of potential protectors at 4.1030. The lack of any specific reference to Jason marks the increased seriousness of Medea’s position since the murder of Apsyrtus and the visit of Circe. For Wilamowitz (ii.203) Jason’s silence here was ‘das Allerbezeichnendste für die erloschene Liebe’, and subsequent critics have elaborated this view.

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II. Whereas the proem to Book 1 had asserted the poet’s independence from previous poets and reduced the prominence of the Muses (1.18 – 22),31 the invocation to Erato at the head of Book 3 assigns this Muse a leading role (loi 5mispe) beside the poet. At the head of the last book, the poet abandons the field entirely to the Muse, whom I take to be Erato, who is to take over the narrative herself: aqt^… he\ is thus a splendid example of Apollonius’ skill at breathing new life into familiar epic tags.32 Whereas Homer had pleaded human ignorance and physical weakness in his request to the Muses before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484 – 93), Apollonius professes an inability to choose between two apparently exclusive alternative labels to attach to Medea’s flight from Colchis. Like Homer, Apollonius pleads lack of certain knowledge, but the ignorance is now not of action but of interpretation. Before considering why Apollonius has chosen this poetic strategy, we should note that it has a precedent even in our limited remains of Greek literature. In the eleventh Pythian Pindar considers two explanations of why Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon and Cassandra: p|teq|m mim %q’ Yvic]mei’ 1p’ Eqq_pyi svawhe?sa t/ke p\tqar 5jmisem baqup\kalom eqsai w|kom ; C 2t]qyi k]wez dalafol]mam 5mmuwoi p\qacom jo?tai ;

(Pyth. 11. 22 – 5)

In Pindar also the action in question is the shameful deed of a female. It may be true that men frequently find the actions of women inexplicable, and it may be thought revealing that both Pindar and Apollonius consider love or sex as possibly major motive forces in the action of their female characters — revealing of Pindar and Apollonius, that is — but we may also see here an illustration of the adoption by Hellenistic hexameter poets of a voice that was more suited to their ambivalent 31 On the much disputed rpov^toqer of 1.22 cf. most recently Fusillo 365 – 6. 32 The desire to be read against Homer may also be marked out by echoes of Il. 1.1 in 4.1 and Od. 1.1 in 4.2, cf. L. E. Rossi, RFIC 96 (1968), 159 – 60. That 4.1 – 2 is ‘a concentration of tags’ (M. Campbell, Mnem.4 36 [1983], 155) does not disprove specific echoes, as the Iliad and the Odyssey have privileged status for later poets.

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stance with respect to the narrative of mythical material than was the authoritative, but impersonal, Homeric voice. What then is the import of the invocation at the head of the fourth book? It is important that the five verses are replete with echoes of Medea’s suffering in the previous book: j\latom,33 d^mea34 and %tgr p/la dus_leqom35 all take us back to crucial stages in the earlier book. The new element, v}fa !eijek_g, is thus given prominence: to the picture of Medea in Book 3 a new detail is to be added. The grouping of ‘fragments’ of the earlier book at the head of Book 4 suggests that the new book is going to rework, and therefore revalue, scenes and language from Book 3. This is indeed precisely what happens. Those who are not content merely to dismiss these verses as a jokey ‘Callimachean conceit’ have offered two explanations for them, both of which contain some truth. First, the poet is calling attention to the fact that his version runs counter to the common tradition, in which Medea fled solely out of love for Jason.36 The key witnesses to that tradition are Pindar’s Pythian 4 and Euripides’ Medea. In Pindar, love makes Medea give Jason the necessary magic drugs and marriage is promised before the contest of the bulls (vv. 213 – 33); Jason ‘stole’ Medea (v. 250), and nothing is said of fear of her father. In Euripides’ tragedy, the nurse asserts in the prologue that Medea came to Iolcus because of her passion for Jason (v. 8); the chorus says that she left her homeland laimol]mai jqad_ai (v. 434), and Medea herself ruefully admits that she came pq|hulor l÷kkom C sovyt]qa (v. 485) and she links the evil which love works with separation from her country (vv. 328 – 30). The second stasimon deprecates 5qyter rp³q %cam 1kh|mter (v. 627) and places death before exile in verses which might serve as a motto for the opening of Argonautica 4: § patq_r, § d~lata, lµ d/t’ %pokir cemo_lam t¹m !lgwam_ar 5wousa dusp]qatom aQ_m’, oQjtq|tatom !w]ym. ham\tyi ham\tyi p\qor dale_gm "l]qam t\md’ 1nam}sa-

33 Cf. 3.288—9 (the onset of love) %gmto j stgh]ym 1j pujima· jal\tyi vq]mer, 961 (the first sight of Jason). 34 Cf. 3.661 (the simile of the m}lvg). 35 Cf. 3.773, 798 (Medea’s suicide speech), 961, 973 (first encounter with Jason). 36 Cf. p. 4 of Vian’s edition.

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sa· l|whym d’ oqj %kkor vpeqhem C c÷r patq_ar st]qeshai.

(Med. 645 – 53)

A second interpretation of the proem to Book 4 sees the poet concerned with the causation of human action: are we responsible for what we do, or are the gods? 37 Later in Book 4, Medea herself has no doubts that the gods have been at work on her (4.413, 1040), and Jason recognised this before he had exchanged a single word with her (3.973 – 4). As, however, Hera and Eros are responsible for the %tgr p/la dus_leqom and Hera for the v}fa (4.11, 22 – 3), the alleged dichotomy seems illusory.38 What remains, however, is the difficulty which the poet claims to have in assessing Medea’s flight. Perhaps we too should not assume that the answer is an obvious one. Against the apparently authoritative statements of v. 11 and vv. 22 – 339 may be set the mocking remarks of the moon as she sees Medea fleeing to the ship (4.57 – 65). The moon picks up the language of the invocation’s first alternative (%tgr, !migq|m … p/la) to mock Medea’s passion. Of itself, this does not, of course, contradict the assertion of Hera’s responsibility for Medea’s flight as the fact of Medea’s passion is not in doubt. Nor is it a necessary, or even attractive, conclusion from these verses that the moon has misunderstood the immediate reason for the flight.40 Rather, the moon’s speech reinforces the illusoriness of the opening poetic dilemma, just as the verses which describe Medea’s decision to flee sustain a delicate interplay between the language of fear and the language of love. Hera’s responsibility for Medea’s abandonment of Colchis was announced in 3.1133 – 6 where Hera’s purpose, her vendetta against Pelias, was also stated. As in the third book (3.250, 818), Hera intervenes crucially at the opening of the fourth book to determine Medea’s action.41 In both books the temptation of suicide is rejected in favour of a movement towards Jason and the offering of her help in the two 37 Cf., e. g., H. Faerber, Zur dichterischen Kunst in Apollonios Rhodios’ Argonautica (die Gleichnisse) (diss. Berlin, 1932), p. 88. 38 Cf. (from a different perspective) Paduano 206. 39 Cf. also Livrea on v. 4, citing Kühner-Gerth ii. p. 173 for ce attached to the apparently preferable of two alternatives 40 As asserted by Fränkel 458 – 9 and Beye 146, 164; a better view in Livrea’s note on v. 55. 41 Cf. Campbell 52.

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great tasks which he must confront.42 In both books the movement takes the form of a journey. In Book 3, however, the journey is conducted in the light of day (3.823 – 4), whereas Medea’s flight needs the cover of night; in Book 3 Medea drives a waggon and is accompanied by attendants through the broad road (3.872 – 4), in Book 4 she flees alone, on bare feet, by the narrow back-streets (4.43); in Book 3 the people look away for fear of catching her eye, but in Book 4 she must cover her face for fear of being seen;43 in Book 3 she is compared to Artemis driving her deer-drawn chariot as the wild animals fawn around here in fear, whereas in Book 4 she is herself terrified and is successively compared to a deer, startled by the baying of hunting-dogs, and to a wretched slave-girl. Here too, then, Book 4 exploits the situations of Book 3 with powerful poetic effect. A direct Homeric model for the simile of the deer (4.12 – 13) is not easy to find, although a number of passages may have contributed something.44 The Iliadic flavour of the simile is, however, crucial to its interpretation: Medea’s fearful flight is like the rout of a soldier or an army in battle.45 If caught, she will suffer a terrible fate at the hands of her vengeful father. Her groans (v. 19) are expressed by the verb bquw÷shai, used by Homer of the groans of dying soldiers;46 the Iliadic reminiscences mark the seriousness of her struggle. Young deer, however, suggest other areas of meaning as well. The comparison of girls to deer is well-established in poetry before the Hellenistic period,47 and we 42 Note the parallelism of 3.817 and 4.24 – 5, perhaps (as Dr Feeney suggested to me) emphasising Medea’s reduction to the status of a servant. mg|mde in 4.50 would suit the matching of the two scenes, but I do not believe that it can stand. Some of the parallels between Books 3 and 4 have now been noted by A. Rose, ‘Clothing Imagery in Apollonius’ Argonautika’, QUCC 21 (1985), 29 – 44 at 36 – 7. 43 Note also 3.874 – 5/4.45 – 6. Medea’s isolation from her people is emphasised by the description of Aietes’ procession, accompanied by !pe_qitor ka|r, at 3.1237 – 45. 44 Cf. Il. 10.360 – 2, 11.473 – 81, 544 – 7, 22.189 – 93. 45 Cf. Il. 22.1 pevuf|ter A}te mebqo_ (of the Trojans); Homer calls v}fa the v|bou jqu|emtor 2ta_qg (Il. 9.2). Cf. Beye 144 – 5. 46 Nowhere else in Apollonius of a person, but note 2.831 of the dying sounds of the boar which killed Idmon. Soph. Tr. 1071 – 2, fstir ¦ste paqh]mor j b]bquwa jka_ym, is (despite v. 904) a pointedly oxymoronic description of Heracles. 47 Cf. h. Dem. 174, Bacchyl. 13.84 – 90, Eur. Ba. 866 – 76. For some of the associations of the fawn in these contexts cf. A. P. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets (London, 1983), pp. 93 – 4.

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might have guessed that it had found a place in amatory poetry even without tantalising fragments of Anacreon (PMG 408), Sappho (fr. 58.16 LP-V) and Archilochus (the ‘Cologne Epode’, SLG 478, v. 31) and Horace’s later exploitation in Odes 1.23. In Anacreon and Horace the fawn has become separated from its mother; Medea is about to abandon her parents in favour of a man. It can be no more than a guess that a reader must see an erotic as well as an epic tradition behind Apollonius’ simile; if the guess were correct, however, the image would serve perfectly Medea’s ambivalent emotions. Interpretation of the simile of the slave-girl at vv. 35 – 40 is made difficult by the uncertainty of the text of v. 35. Broadly speaking, the critics may be divided into those who see the kgi\r of the simile escaping from servitude48 and those who have her being taken into it.49 The former view, which might seem superficially attractive, founders for want of an adequate interpretation of v. 39, eWsim !tufol]mg wakep±r rp¹ we?qar !m\ssgr.50 Medea is, therefore, probably compared to a girl from a rich family who has recently been captured in war and has entered slavery far from her homeland and who has not yet become accustomed to hardship and the demands of a cruel mistress. I would prefer to believe that Medea’s d}g, do}kia 5qca and j\lator are not the perils and hardships she is to face on board the Argo (as Fränkel and Vian argue), but rather emotional perils (cf. the echo of j\lator from v. 1). The Medea of Euripides too can claim, in an extravagantly rhetorical passage (vv. 253 – 8), that she was 1j c/r baqb\qou kekgisl]mg. This is not simply the distorting effect of bitterness, but has links with a recognised aspect of the Greek view of marriage. In a famous fragment of Sophocles’ Tereus, for example, a woman contrasts the pleasant life young girls lead in their father’s house (cf. Arg. 3.811 – 14) with the exile of marriage, which is merely a matter of trade (fr. 583 R): aT m]ai l³m 1m patq¹r Fdistom, oWlai, f_lem !mhq~pym b_om· teqpm_r c±q !e· pa?dar "mo_a tq]vei. ftam d’ 1r Fbgm 1nij~leh’ 5lvqomer,

48 Cf. G. Pompella, ‘Su Apollonio Rodio IV35 – 40’, Annali…Napoli 19 (1976/7), 53 – 61, Beye 150. 49 Cf. Wilamowitz ii.212 n. 2, Fränkel 456, and the notes of Livrea and Vian. 50 Pompella’s ‘teme di andare, è terrorizzata all’ idea di finire sotto la padrona’ (op. cit. 57) simply cannot be got out of the Greek. For rp| with the accusative ‘in the power of’ cf. N. Hopkinson on Call. h. 6.62.

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¡ho}leh’ 5ny ja· dielpok~leha he_m patq~iym t_m te vus\mtym %po, aR l³m n]mour pq¹r %mdqar, aR d³ baqb\qour, †aR d’ eQr !kgh/ d~lat’, aR d’ 1p_qqoha.† ja· taOt’, 1peid±m eqvq|mg fe}ngi l_a, wqe½m 1paime?m ja· doje?m jak_r 5weim.

As Medea leaves for a life in exile, an exile that means marriage (vv. 29 – 30), Apollonius exploits, as many poets had before him, the similarities between Greek marriage and funerary ritual (vv. 27 – 9).51 With gestures familiar from the prelude to the death of women in tragedy, Medea finally abandons the virginal chamber which had played such a crucial role in the third book (3.645 – 64) 52 and opts, not for death, but for life and marriage. This tension is reflected in the otherwise surprising dissonance of eWsim (v. 39) and 1n]ssuto (v. 40), and in the echoes of Sappho, fr. 31 LP-V in the description of the physical symptoms of Medea’s terror. This most influential of amatory poems had naturally been used in the earlier descriptions of Medea’s passion;53 here the same poem is invoked to describe the consequences of that passion. What distinguishes vv. 15 – 19 from the Sapphic poem is the violence of Medea’s terror;54 in both love and fear she knew no half measures. I have been exploring some of the implications of the poet’s declared uncertainty which introduces the description of Medea’s flight. Beyond these verses, there are three passages in which the status of Medea’s flight is explicitly at issue. At 355 ff she reproaches Jason bitterly: she has brought disgrace upon women through her laqcos}mg, and left Colchis oq jat± j|slom !maid^tyi Q|tgti (360), trusting in Jason’s promises of marriage. Secondly, Circe’s speech of dismissal to Medea at 739 – 48 is framed by echoes of the v}fa !eijek_g of the proem, and Jason becomes simply a nameless stranger to be contemptuously ignored. Finally, in her plea to Arete at 1014 – 28 Medea blames the %tg to which all mortals are prone, denies that she left Colchis willingly — contrast Jason’s proud assertion at 194, tµm l³m 1c½m 1h]kousam !m\nolai oUjad’ %joitim — but through the persuasion of hateful fear, and denies 51 Cf., e. g., J. M. Redfield, Arethusa 15 (1982), 188 – 91, R. Seaford, CQ 35 (1985), 318 – 19. 52 Cf. JHS 105 (1985), 192. 53 Cf. 3.284 – 90. 54 For the very strong emotions indicated by ‘fire in the eyes’, cf. L. Graz, Le feu dans l’Iliade et l’Odysse (Paris, 1965), pp. 240 – 7.

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laqcos}mg. Any apparent contradictions may, of course, be explained

by the demands of each rhetorical situation,55 but there is perhaps more to it than just that. Circe’s view is plainly the Colchian view of Medea’s behaviour — when the poet tells us that Medea and her aunt speak in Colchian (731), this is not merely a playful recognition of the unreal linguistic assumptions of the plot — but there are other views also. The one action, Medea’s flight, is variously interpreted by Jason, Circe and Medea herself according to the partial knowledge which each has, as well as to the changing course of events. The poet thus exposes the frailty and relativity of explanation for human action, particularly when that action occurs within epic narrative. This is the problem to which the opening quandary has directed our attention. Behind Apollonius’ Medea lies not only the Euripidean character but also the figure of Helen, whose flight from Sparta with a n]mor provoked a war and whose motives had been variously analysed by poets, philosophers and historians.56 Helen’s power was an almost morethan-human beauty, whose dangerous force could be not unlike that of Medea’s magic: aRqe? c±q !mdq_m ellat’, 1naiqe? p|keir, p_pqgsim oUjour· ¨d’ 5wei jgk^lata.

(Eur. Tr. 892—3)

The Helen of the Odyssey in fact is, like Medea, a worker in drugs (4.219 – 34),57 who claims to have been the victim of %tg from Aphrodite which caused her to commit an 5qcom !eij]r, the abandonment of her home and family (4.259 – 64, 23.218 – 24). The regrets of the Iliadic Helen (3.171 – 80, 6.343 – 58, 24.761 – 75), moreover, clearly look forward to Medea’s bitter reproaches in Euripides and Apollonius. Apollonius indeed structures Medea’s dilemma in Book 3 as a choice between following the example of Penelope and becoming a Helen.58 So too, the question of how her flight should be judged, so crucial to Book 4, draws upon a rich tradition. Of particular importance is Euripides’ Trojan 55 Cf. Vian on 375, Beye 154. 56 There is a useful survey by N. Zagagi, ‘Helen of Troy: Encomium and Apology’, WS 98 (1985), 63 – 88. 57 This passage is echoed at 3.803 (Medea’s drugs). 58 Cf. 3.641 (corresponding to Il. 3.180, 6.344, 356), following a dream description based on Penelope at Od 18.187 – 9, 19.516 – 17, and 3.793 – 4 (corresponding to Il. 3.411 – 12).

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Women in which Helen lays the blame for her behaviour on Aphrodite (vv. 940 – 50) and Hecuba blames Helen’s laqcos}mg (987 – 97); Gorgias’ alternatives,59 love as a god or love as !mhq~pimom m|sgla ja· xuw/r !cm|gla (cf. Arg. 4.1015 – 17), offer a rather different choice, but point broadly in the same direction. Finally, it is important that the story of Helen embodies the clash between Europe and Asia,60 a conflict which has an important structural role in Argonautica 4. The Colchian maiden (cf. 4.2 – 5) rescues the Greek expedition and in return receives Greek protection (4.195 – 7, 202 – 5, 1074 – 7); knowledge of the disastrous consequences of this assimilation of a foreign body is something which every reader must bring to the Argonautica. 61 It is finally worth remarking that Vergil used Medea’s oath to Arete (4.1019 – 22) in composing Aeneas’ defence to Dido in the Underworld: Usty Req¹m v\or Iek_oio, Usty mujtip|kou Peqsg_dor eqcia jo}qgr, lµ l³m 1c½m 1h]kousa s»m !mdq\sim !kkodapo?si je?hem !vyql^hgm·

per sidera iuro, per superos et si qua fides tellure sub ima est, inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi. (Aen. 6.458 – 60)

The Apollonian model is curiously overlooked by Vergilian critics, concerned as they are with Vergil’s use in this passage of Callimachus and Catullus.62 The neglect is curious if only because Aeneas’ speech is introduced by a simile (6.450 – 5) taken from the fourth book of the Argonautica (4.1477 – 80). Both Medea and Aeneas plead that they left un59 Helen 19. 60 Cf., e. g., Isocrates, Helen 67, Zagagi, op. cit., pp. 72 – 4. 61 Herodotus makes the abduction of Medea the last in the series of actions which inspired Paris to abduct Helen (1.2 – 3). His report of Greek opinion, ‘the women obviously would not have been abducted unless they had wanted it’ (1.4.2), shows that the question of female attitude was already inherent in the story. For the later linking of Medea and Helen cf. Propertius 2.34.5 – 8 (behind which may lie Arg. 4.445 – 9). 62 Cf. most recently J. Tatum, AJP 105 (1984), 440 – 4, S. Skulsky, AJP 106 (1985), 447 – 55, J. Griffin, Latin Poets and Roman Life (London, 1985), p. 159. With 4.1021 F. Rütten, De Vergilii studiis Apollonianis (diss. Münster, 1912), p. 71 connected Aen. 4.361, Italiam non sponte sequor.

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willingly, under the compulsion of, in Medea’s case, fear and, in Aeneas’, divine instructions. Aeneas wants to say that love would have made him stay; in her panic, Medea tries to conceal her passion as one of those common human misdemeanours.63 The difference is eloquent.

Addenda The bibliography on Medea, as indeed on every aspect of the Argonautica, has of course grown exponentially in the last twenty-five years; T. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden 2001) is the best introduction to critical trends and bibliography. I have discussed elements of the character of Medea in my commentary on Book 3 (Cambridge 1989) and in The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies (Cambridge 1993). J. J. Clauss and S. I. Johnston (eds.), Medea. Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton 1997) is a wide-ranging collection of different approaches. n. 31 Cf. this volume 349 – 51. p. 52 On the moon’s mockery of Medea cf. M. Fantuzzi, ‘Medea maga, la luna, l’amore (Apollonio Rodio 4, 50 – 65)’ in A. Martina and A.-T. Cozzoli (eds.), L’epos argonautico (Rome 2007) 77 – 95.

63 Vian’s attempt to deny this sense to jo}vgisi … !lpkaj_gisim in 4.1017 is unconvincing.

3. ‘Short on heroics’: Jason in the Argonautica* ‘Jason … chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill, or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea but cowering before her later threats and curses, coldly efficient in the time-serving murder of an unsuspecting child (sic), reluctant even in marriage.’ So Carspecken put the case against Jason’s heroism.1 In the face of such an indictment, Lawall’s plea in mitigation, ‘it must be admitted that [ Jason] often reveals the qualities of a true gentleman’, seems somehow inadequate.2 Criticism since Carspecken has found various overlapping categories for Jason which both take account of the earlier negative judgements and preserve the centrality of his ‘personality’ and character in the poem: Jason is the quiet diplomat who works through consensus rather than force,3 his is a heroism of sex-appeal,4 he is an anti-hero,5 the *

1 2 3

Classical Quarterly 38 (1988) 436 – 53 I am indebted to members of the Cambridge Ancient Literature Seminar for much instructive criticism. The following works are cited by author and date only: C. R. Beye, Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Carbondale, 1982); J. F. Carspecken, ‘Apollonius Rhodius and the Homeric Epic’, YCS 13 (1952), 33 – 143; H. Fränkel, ‘Ein Don Quijote unter den Argonauten des Apollonios’, MH 17 (1960), 1 – 20; id., Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich, 1968); M. Fusillo, Il tempo delle Argonautiche (Rome, 1985); R. L Hunter, ‘Apollo and the Argonauts: Two Notes on Ap. Rhod. 2, 669 – 719’, MH 43 (1986), 50 – 60 [= this volume 29 – 41]; id., ‘Medea’s Flight: the Fourth Book of the Argonautica’, CQ 37 (1987), 129 – 39 [= this volume 42 – 58]; G. Lawall, ‘Apollonius’ Argonautica: Jason as Anti-Hero’, YCS 19 (1966), 119 – 69; F. Vian, ‘üGSYM ALGWAMEYM’, Studi in onore di Anthos Ardizzoni (Rome, 1978), Vol. 2, pp. 1025 – 41. G. O. Hutchinson. Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford, 1988) appeared too late to be used in the preparation of this paper. Carspecken (1952), 101. Lawall (1966), 168 n.13. E.g. Herter, RE Suppl. 13, 36; Vian (1978); G. Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry (London, 1987), pp. 202 – 3.

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embodiment of Sceptic ‘suspension of judgement’,6 or, alternatively, he is ‘one of us’, credible and lifelike.7 Carspecken himself tried a different tack: the poem is concerned not with individual heroism but with the heroism of the group (cf. 1.1, 4.1773 – 81).8 Some of these approaches have, in varying degrees, made a real contribution to the understanding of aspects of the Argonautica, and most can claim some support from that part of the literary tradition used by Apollonius which survives to us. Thus, for example, already in Pindar Jason deals with Pelias in the ‘diplomatic’ manner which becomes familiar in Apollonius,’ letting drip the soft words in his gentle voice, he laid a foundation of wise speech’ (Pyth. 4.136 – 8). In Euripides’ Medea, Jason’s opening words are a rejection of inflexibility (vv. 446 – 7, cf. 621 – 2), and he claims to have tried to soothe the rulers’ anger (vv. 455 – 6), just as in the Argonautica he has to calm Aietes down (Arg. 3.385 – 96). So too, the Euripidean Jason argues that marriage with a princess is the best way out of sulvoqa· !l^wamoi (vv. 551 – 4), and such an attitude, which I for one would not label ‘cyn4

5 6

7 8

C. R. Beye, ‘Jason as Love-hero in Apollonios’ Argonautika’, GRBS 10 (1969), 31 – 55; this view was closely foreshadowed by A. Hübscher, Die Charakteristik der Personen in Apollonios’ Argonautika (diss. Freiburg i.d. Schweiz, 1940), pp. 22 – 3. Cf. J. K. Newman, The Classical Epic Tradition (Wisconsin, 1986), p. 76 ‘[ Jason’s] heroism will smell of the boudoir’. Lawall (1966); Fusillo (1985). Lawall’s article contains many acute observations, and it would be a pity if the very dated title deterred potential readers. T. L. Klein, ‘Apollonius’ Jason: Hero and Scoundrel’, QUCC 13 (1983), 115 – 26 (and cf. already Beye [1982], 60). Klein’s interesting suggestion is, unfortunately, entirely improbable in the form in which he offers it. It is true that 1.1287 – 8 (on which see below p. 71 – 2), oqd] ti to?om 5por letev~meem oqd] ti to?om j AQsom_dgr, may call to mind Sceptic 1pow^, but Jason’s piety and propensity to despair (1.1286, 1288 – 9) would be anathema to a Sceptic sage: 1pow^ was supposed to lead to !taqan_a, which is not Jason’s foremost quality. Jason’s attitude to the tasks imposed upon him (e. g. 3.386 – 95, 427 – 31) differs markedly from the unconcern of the Sceptic response, cf. M. Burnyeat in M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat and J. Barnes, Doubt and Dogmatism (Oxford, 1980), pp. 40 – 1. The value of Klein’s article, which despite its polemics, seems to develop an idea found at Lawall (1966), 149, lies in its attempt to tie the Argonautica to attested intellectual and social attitudes. However unsuccessful, this represents a considerable advance on vague generalising about ‘Hellenistic values’. There are, however, serious doubts whether a formal philosophy of Scepticism can be identified as early as the third century B.C. Cf. Fränkel (1960), 1; Beye (1982), 79; Zanker, op. cit. (n. 3), p. 201. Carspecken (1952), 111 – 25.

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ical’, has seemed to many critics the basis of Jason’s dealings with Medea in the Argonautica.9 It is, nevertheless, difficult not to feel dissatisfied with modern assessments of Apollonius’ Jason. Much of what has been written is little more than a by-product of what now seems a rather old-fashioned kind of Virgilian criticism — the ‘Virgil is unhappy in his hero’ school — and it ignores both Aristotelian and modern warnings10 against the assumption that an epic must have a single ‘hero’ of extraordinary skills at its centre. Even where due acknowledgement has been given to the fact that Jason plainly shares the limelight with several of his colleagues, there is among modern critics a persistent (and indeed not unnatural) curiosity in Jason’s ‘psychology’. It is, for example, entirely typical when Hermann Fränkel writes of Jason’s behaviour after the loss of Heracles (cf. below p. 71 – 2): ‘For Jason, conscious of his responsibilities, the dilemma was insoluble, because the need to complete his great task was as powerful a force driving him forwards as the loyalty to his colleague which pulled him back. But the reticent poet [der zurckhaltende Dichter] says nothing of this [my italics], and here, as often, Apollonius’ Jason disappoints as the epic’s central figure.’11 The belief that close study of what Apollonius chose not to say may grant us access to the workings of his characters’ minds, particularly Jason’s, which in turn will lead to an understanding of the narrative, has certainly resulted in a more sophisticated criticism than the simple assertions of Jason’s ‘credibility’, but the great variety of Jasons available in the modern literature ought perhaps to make us pause to consider the value of the method in general. Part II of this paper, therefore, considers the principal passages from the first half of the Argonautica around which the debate has centred, and Part III explores one of the patterns into which the story of Apollonius’ Jason certainly does fall; as Apollonian criticism must always begin with Homer, Part I offers a brief survey of the similarities and differences between the heroes of the archaic and the Hellenistic epic. By way of preliminary, it may be useful to recall the Aristotelian position on dramatic character. Ancient literary criticism is, of course, a 9 On the links between the Euripidean and Apollonian Jasons cf. K. von Fritz, ‘Die Entwicklung der Iason-Medea-Sager und die Medea des Euripides’, A&A 8 (1959), 33 – 106 at pp. 66 – 71. 10 Cf. e. g. D. C. Feeney, ‘Epic Hero and Epic Fable’, Comparative Literature 38 (1986), 137 – 58. 11 Fränkel (1960), 4 (my translation).

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very limited guide to the ways in which we should approach ancient texts, but Aristotle’s belief in the very close relationship between epic and tragedy12 at least makes his views of some interest here. For the sake of convenience I cite from Stephen Halliwell’s recent study of the Poetics: ‘Psychological inwardness is a major assumption in modern convictions about character, and this in turn leads to typical emphases on the uniqueness of the individual personality and on the potential complexities of access to the character of others. If character is thought of in strongly psychological terms, then the possibility readily arises that it may remain concealed in the inner life of the mind, or be only partially and perhaps deceptively revealed to the outer world; but, equally, that it may be glimpsed or intimated in various unintended or unconscious ways. Such ideas and possibilities, which find their quintessential literary embodiment in the novel … are by their very intricacy and indefiniteness the antithesis of the theory of dramatic character presented in the Poetic …. [For Aristotle] character is most clearly realised in the deliberate framing of ethical intentions which Aristotle calls prohairesis … character is a specific moral factor in relation to action, not a vague or pervasive notion equivalent to modern ideas of personality or individuality … dramatic characterisation, to correspond to Aristotle’s concept, must involve the manifestation of moral choice in word or action … when communicated through language, characterisation will take the form of declarations of decisions, intentions or motives … character [cannot] be obliquely indicated through any kind of speech’.13 The possible relevance of this summary to recent Apollonian criticism is immediately clear. Here, for example, is what Charles Beye has to say about Apollonius’ main character: ‘the emphasis now turns upon the inner life of the characters, that which is left unsaid. Jason now becomes deep, internal, and personal, as we know people to be. He is not public or emblematic. We have reached, in effect, the begin12 Cf. S. Koster, Antike Epostheorien (Wiesbaden, 1970), pp. 51 – 72; J. C. Hogan, ‘Aristotle’s Criticism of Homer in the Poetics’, CP 68 (1973), 95 – 108; Halliwell (next note) p. 258. 13 S. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London, 1986), pp. 150 – 2, 156. Whether or not Apollonius was actually familiar with Aristotelian doctrine is relevant only as a matter of literary history. There may have been a copy of the Poetics in the Alexandrian library, cf. Diog. Laert. 5.24, a list which some scholars believe to go back to the library’s inventory; I. Düring, Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1966), pp. 36 – 7; R. Blum, Kallimachos und die Literaturverzeichnung bei den Griechen (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 121 – 32.

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nings of the novel.’14 That Apollonius foreshadows later narrative genres has, indeed, become a critical commonplace,15 and one which I have no desire to upset. Nevertheless, it may be worth suggesting that criticism has now moved too far away from Aristotle’s emphasis on what actually happens, on events whose pattern gives meaning to a work, rather than on the unifying power of a particular psychological portrait. The patterns which will here be particularly significant are, of course, those which both reflect and diverge from Homeric ones; it is the failure to keep these patterns in the centre of the argument which is largely responsible for much of the critical embarrassment which Apollonius’ Jason has aroused.

I. The doubts and even despair to which Jason seems prone have close parallels in the Homeric epics. This obvious fact has been too often forgotten, and it deserved the restatement which it has recently received.16 Iliadic heroes are affected by fears and anguish just as strong as those which trouble the Argonauts (e. g. Il. 7.92 – 3, 9.9), and the !lgwam_g which strikes Odysseus and his comrades after the Cyclops’ first bloody meal (Od. 9.295) matches closely the various shocks which the collective of Argonauts receives (cf. 2.408 – 10, 3.502 – 5, 4.1278 – 9). Odysseus’ reaction (Od. 10.496 – 500) to Circe’s proposal of a trip to the Underworld — ‘my heart broke within me; I sat on the bed and wept, and I no longer wished to live and see the light of the sun. But when I had had my fill of weeping and rolling around, I replied’ — is more overtly emotional than the group’s reaction to Phineus’ dread prophecies (2.408 – 10) or the reaction of both Jason and the Argonauts to the test which Aietes imposes (3.422 – 6, 502 – 4), but otherwise the scenes are closely comparable. These similarities between the two epics are, however, less important than two broad and major differences. The tension within a warrior between his role as a defender of his community’s security, for which the community rewards him with 14 Beye (1982), 24. 15 For the Argonautica as a precursor of later romance cf. R. Scholes and R. Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York, 1966), p. 67, A. Heiserman, The Novel Before the Novel (Chicago, 1977), pp. 11 – 40. 16 H. Lloyd-Jones, SIFC 77 (1984), 71; A. W. Bulloch in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature I (Cambridge, 1985), p. 591.

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privileges, and his desire for personal glory is crucial to an understanding of the Iliad and has been particularly well analysed by James Redfield.17 Apollonius’ heroes, however, are not bound to their communities in the same way as are the central heroes of the Iliad. The inhabitants of Iolcus do indeed come in large numbers to see them off (1.238 – 9, cf. 1.310) and take a certain pride in the expedition (1.244 – 5), but they see it largely as an inescapable p|mor (1.246). At the very most, the outcome of the expedition has real significance only for the family of the Aiolidai (cf. 2.1195, 3.339). In this context it is instructive to contrast the description in Thucydides 6 of the public departure of the Athenian fleet for Sicily, a passage which may have been in Apollonius’ mind.18 The opening catalogue of Argonauts does make clear that the expedition carries representatives from all over Greece, and this ‘Panachaeanism’ resurfaces briefly as Argos and Jason seek to win Aietes over (3.347, 391) and in the ‘Greek v. barbarian’ theme which runs through the fourth book. Nevertheless, only once does Jason appear to claim that the fortunes of Greece are intimately tied to the success of his enterprise.19 This passage, 4.195 – 205, describing Jason’s speech to the crew on the point of departure from Colchis, will demand attention in another context (below p. 83), but here its relevance lies in its ambivalence: !t±q uller, )wai_dor oX\ te p\sgr aqt_m h’ rle_ym 1shkµm 1paqyc¹m 1oOsam, s~ete· dµ c\q pou l\k’, a_olai, eWsim 1q}nym AQ^tgr bl\dyi p|mtomd’ Ulem 1j potalo?o. !kk’ oR l³m di± mg¹r !loibad·r !m]qor !mµq 2f|lemor pgdo?sim 1q]ssete, to· d³ boe_ar !sp_dar Bl_seer d^iym ho¹m 5wla bok\ym pqosw|lemoi m|styi 1pal}mete. mOm d’ 1m· weqs· pa?dar 2o»r p\tqgm te v_kgm ceqaqo}r te toj/ar Uswolem· Blet]qgi d’ 1peqe_detai :kk±r 1voql/i A³ jatgve_gm C ja· l]ca jOdor !q]shai.

But do you protect her [Medea], as being the benefactor of all of Achaia and of you yourselves; for I have no doubt that Aietes will come in full 17 Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975), pp. 100 – 1. 18 Thucyd. 6.30 – 2, esp. 30.2. Similarities of language and idea could, of course, simply arise from the similar situations. If, however, we are to think of the Sicilian expedition, then the omens are not good for Jason. 19 Jason does, however, toy with these ideas as he seeks to win over Medea, cf. 3.990 – 6, 1122 – 7.

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force to prevent you passing from the river to the open sea. But all along the ship divide yourselves in two, and let one half sit and row, while the other half holds their ox-hide shields over them, a secure protection against enemy missiles, to protect our return. Now we have in our hands our children and our beloved native country and our aged parents; upon the success of our raid20 depends whether Hellas will know dejection or win great glory.

Jason, the foreign raider who has snatched both the king’s daughter and his favourite possession, adopts the rhetorical pose of the defender of a position against invasion — cf. Il. 15.494 – 9 (Hector), 15.661 – 6 (Nestor encouraging the Greeks in their defence of the ships), Aesch. Pers. 403 – 5 (the Athenians at Salamis) — as a prelude, not to stalwart defence,21 but to hasty flight. So too, Jason’s donning of armour (4.206), which follows this speech, is modelled on Odysseus’ entirely pointless arming before the meeting with Scylla (Od. 12.226 – 30).22 Both the literary history of the verses and the uniqueness of their tone within the Argonautica thus make problematic the status of Jason’s assertion that much is riding on their success, as far as Hellas is concerned. These verses do, however, look forward to the rest of Book 4 and to the future history of Jason and Medea. From the opening invocation to the Muse to tell of how ‘the Colchian maiden’ came to leave ‘the land of the Colchians’ Book 4 is heavy with Jason’s closing theme of Greek v. Barbarian, and Jason’s words here are in part a bitterly ironical foreshadowing of the supremacy of Greece which the Euripidean Jason throws in Medea’s face (vv. 536 – 8, 1330 – 1, 1339); so too, his stress immediately before this passage on Medea’s responsibility for the Argonauts’ achievements (4.191 – 3) must be read against Medea 526 – 33, where Jason proclaims Aphrodite to have been primarily responsible for his success. Beyond these resonances, however, these verses, by recalling the tone and manner of archaic and classical poetry, clearly mark the difference between Jason’s enterprise and the tasks 20 Vian, note complmentaire to 4.205, makes rather too much of 1voql/i ; ‘military incursion’ and ‘enterprise’ can scarcely be distinguished when the latter consists of the former; if Vian’s punctuation is correct at 4.148, we should perhaps there consider !voql^m for 1voql^m. 21 In the version of Dionysios Scytobrachion, the Argonauts and the Colchians did fight in Colchis (cf. S Arg. 4.223 – 30, Diod. Sic. 4.48.4 – 5 = frr. 28 – 9 Rusten). 22 The motif of slashed mooring-ropes is taken from Odysseus’ hasty escape from the Laistrygonians (Od. 10.126 – 7). It is noteworthy that Valerius Flaccus chooses to use the motif more ‘heroically’, at the start of the expedition (1.487 – 9).

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faced in the Homeric poems and the difference in the social context of the two heroic narratives.23 Even the personal glory for which a Homeric warrior can hope is offered to the Argonauts only very conditionally. Failure will here lead only to a miserable and unsung death, where there will be no kleos to alleviate oblivion (2.889 – 93, 4.1305 – 7, cf. 4.401 – 3); anything less than safe return with the Fleece would be as if they had never set out. The subordination of all else in this extremely rich poem to this single obsessive end is a striking departure from the structural organisation of the Homeric poems. In a particularly desperate moment at the start of their Libyan adventures, the Argonauts wish that they had died ‘while attempting some great exploit’ (4.1255), like Hector before his final fight with Achilles (Il. 22.304 – 5), but, unlike Hector, they will not be offered the opportunity to do so. This passage in the fourth book is particularly instructive. The deadly calm which traps the Argonauts in the wastes of the Libyan Syrtis is a reworking and reversal of the storm which destroys Odysseus’ raft in Odyssey 5; the Libyan Bq_ssai who came to Jason’s aid out of pity correspond to Leucothoe in the Odyssey.24 As the divinely constructed Argo cannot perish in the waves (cf. 2.611 – 14), a death of quite another kind is made to threaten the crew.25 Whereas Odysseus in the storm regrets that he did not win kleos by dying gloriously in battle, the Argonauts wish for what amounts to death by shipwreck, a wish made particularly ironic by our knowledge that the Symplegades would have posed no threat on the return journey and that their wish would therefore not have been granted (cf. 2.604 – 6). Here then the gulf between Apollonius’ characters and those of Homer is particularly marked. The second important departure from Homer lies in the relationship between Jason and the other Argonauts, which is obviously and crucially different from that between Odysseus’ and his crew. The modern clich that Jason is primus inter pares is an unsatisfactory half-truth, but the hierarchical organisation of the two voyages is certainly quite different. Odysseus is happy to be less than frank with his men (Od. 12.223 – 5) 23 There are some good remarks in the note on 4.190 – 205 at pp. 553 – 4 of the edition [Milan, 1986] by G. Paduano and M. Fusillo. 24 4.1308 1k]gqam ~ Od. 5.336 1k]gsem. Both divine speeches begin with j\lloqe t_pt’ (4.1318, Od. 5.339). 25 There is a rather similar effect at Lucan 5.424 – 60 where Caesar’s ships are becalmed (cf. 455, naufragii spes omnis abit).

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and, despite his grief at their plight, he is content to make love with Circe while his comrades are still in the pig-pen (Od. 10.336 – 47). An exchange such as Od. 9.941 ff., where the crew seeks to restrain Odysseus from taunting the Cyclops, is as inconceivable in the Argonautica as Arg. 2.622 – 37, in which Jason bitterly reveals the crushing weight of responsibility which he feels for getting the Argonauts home safely (cf. below pp. 445-7), would be in the Odyssey. It is striking that in book 4 no Argonaut explicitly argues that Jason should abandon Medea, although the pact with the Colchians at 4.338 ff — however one interprets it — certainly exploits the motif,26 or criticises the killing of Apsyrtos; this apparently ‘natural’ possibility was not lost on the author of the later Orphic Argonautica where the crew is prevented from throwing Medea to the fishes only by Jason’s earnest entreaties (vv. 1170 – 7). Whereas Odysseus’ cunning and capacity for endurance strongly differentiate him from his largely anonymous crew, Jason, often !l^wamor rather than pokul^wamor, is marked by the absence of extraordinary intelligence and the supernatural skills enjoyed by some of the most prominent Argonauts (Heracles, the Boreads, Peleus, Lynceus, Orpheus). Jason does come into powerful conflict with two of his companions, Telamon and Idas, but the communal solidarity and mutual interdependence of the whole crew (cf. the lion simile of 4.1337 – 44) is a striking and familiar phenomenon, perhaps best expressed by Jason’s words as they sit concealed in the Colchian marshes (3.171 – 5): § v_koi, Etoi 1c½ l³m f loi 1piamd\mei aqt_i 1neq]y, toO d’ ulli t]kor jqg/mai 5oije. numµ c±q wqei~, numo· d] te lOhoi 5asi p÷sim bl_r· b d³ s?ca m|om bouk^m t’ !peq}jym Usty ja· m|stou t|mde st|kom oWor !po}qar.

175

Friends, I shall tell you the plan which I myself favour, but it is for you to give it your assent; for common is our need, and common to all the right to speak. Let him who holds back his view and counsel in silence know that he alone deprives this expedition of its safe return.

The plan which Jason subsequently proposes reworks Odysseus’ words to his men at the start of the Cyclops episode (Od. 9.172 – 6) and his praise of the power of lOhor (3.188 – 90) associates him with Odyssean virtues, but whereas Odysseus gives orders (1j]keusa) and the reaction of 26 Medea, of course, has her own fears about the Argonauts’ plans; for Jason’s speech at 4.395 – 409 cf. Hunter (1987), 130 – 1.

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his crew is not described, Jason’s proposal is greeted with universal agreement (3.194 – 5). To find a Homeric parallel to this assembly in Argonautica 3 it is better to look to the opening of Iliad 14 where the depressed leaders of the Greek army hold a council.27 Agamemnon suggests preparations for flight by night as preferable to staying around to be caught up in a disaster. For this he is reproved by Odysseus, and he then (vv. 105 – 6) says that he will not force the Greeks to carry out his plan against their wishes and he invites suggestions from both young and old for a better plan ( !le_moma l/tim), whereupon Diomedes offers just such an improvement. Agamemnon’s appeal to democracy is a result of a confused and panicky despair; Jason says nothing that has not been said before (cf. 1.336 – 7), and his statement precedes, rather than follows, his own suggestion for action. For him, it is better to rely on pok]ym l/tir (4.1336) than on one pok}lgtir individual.

II. When the Argonauts come to select their leader (1.331 – 62), Jason, ‘wishing what was best for them (1uvqom]ym)’,28 stresses the common task ahead of them and urges them to choose b %qistor to lead them, regardless of anything else. Heracles is chosen instantly — who else could be b %qistor (cf. 1.1285)? — but he refuses and imposes the election of Jason. ‘Warlike’ ( !q^ior) Jason accepts ‘joyfully’. Clearly there is more at stake here than merely the acknowledgement and rejection of a version in which Heracles was the leader of the expedition,29 and critics have very variously interpreted his behaviour. Vian’s remarks are not untypical: ‘Jason is in no way diminished [by the scene]. He knows that, whether he likes it or not, the leadership falls to him, but he is at the same time aware of his inferiority to Heracles … Heracles’ voluntary withdrawal fills him with joy because it re-establishes the natural 27 On this scene cf. M. Schofield, ‘Euboulia in the Iliad’, CQ 36 (1986), 6 – 31, at pp. 23 – 5. 28 This word has caused considerable bother, cf. Vian (1978), 1028 – 9, M. Fantuzzi, Materiali e Discussioni 13 (1984), 94 – 5, but its ‘surface meaning’ seems quite appropriate here. 29 As in Dionysios Scytobrachion, cf. Diod. Sic. 4.41.3, Apollodorus 1.9.19, J. S. Rusten, Dionysius Scytobrachion (Papyrologica Coloniensia X, 1982), pp. 96 – 7. In Antimachus’ Lyde Heracles did not go because he was too heavy for the Argo (fr. 58 Wyss = S Arg. 1.1289).

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order without upsetting anyone’s sensibilities’,30 and ‘[ Jason offers Heracles the leadership] through sincere deference and diplomacy, in the hope that Heracles will refuse it’.31 Here again what the poet has chosen not to say is invoked to explain the narrative (cf. above p. 61). Equally unsatisfactory is what may be termed the ‘straightforwardly ironical’ reading of the scene — Jason enters as a ‘hero’ (the Apollo simile of 1.307 – 11) but is immediately shown up and embarrassed, his weakness revealed by the almost parodic epithet ‘warlike’.32 Such a reading appeals to modern sentiment, and does indeed show us one layer of the text’s meaning, but it is hard to think of any Greek hero (Homeric or Apollonian) who would not be ‘shown up’ when matched against Heracles. Rather, it is, as often, Homer who provides the starting-point from which we should read this scene. Jason’s speech, with its stress on the responsibilities of the leader to the group as a whole, suggests why the expedition could not be led by Heracles, a hero of notoriously solitary and idiosyncratic virtue.33 Jason is indeed b %qistor, if arete consists in the possession of appropriate qualities for a particular task and involves notions of what is fitting in a particular context. Such a view clearly reflects upon a major aspect of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in Iliad 1, a quarrel which, in one important sense at least, is about who is to ‘lead’ the Achaean army; the aspect in question is, of course, the problem of who has the right to the title %qistor.34 In the Iliad Nestor seeks to calm tempers by refusing to grant anyone this title — Agamemnon is merely !cah|r and v]qteqor (Il. 1.275, 281) — and by appealing to Agamemnon to respect Achilles’ prize and to Achilles to give way before the greater til^ due to a king whose power was more extensive. The Apollonian Heracles, more effective and less wordy than Nestor, similarly bases his instruction not on a strict hierarchy of absolute worth but on recognition of what is fitting and appropriate. Whether Apollonius was influenced by scholarly discussion of the ethical issues raised by the Homeric quarrel we do not know, although this quarrel is important again later in Arg. 1, again in connection with Heracles (below p. 71 – 2). What is clear, how30 Gnomon 46 (1974), 349. 31 Vian (1978), 1028 – 9. 32 Cf. e. g. Beye (1982), 31, 82 – 3. Jason is also ‘warlike’ at 2.122 (the battle with the Bebrycians), and cf. the simile of the !q^ior Vppor at 3.1259 – 61. 33 For Heracles in the Argonautica cf. D. C. Feeney, ‘Following after Hercules, in Virgil and Apollonius’, PVS 18 (1986), 47 – 85. 34 Cf. Il. 1.91, 244, 412.

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ever, is that Apollonius structures his narrative so as to offer a ‘reading’ of a famous Homeric scene which in turn can help us to understand what is going on in the Argonautica. The relationship between Jason and Heracles is not the same as that between Agamemnon and Achilles, but only by calling attention to the similarities can the poet stress the differences. Before setting out, the Argonauts pass the night in feasting on the shore (1.450 – 9). Not all is well, however, as Idmon has just prophesied both their successful return after ‘countless trials’ and his own death.35 During the symposium ‘the son of Aison, quite self-absorbed ( !l^wamor), was pondering on everything, looking like one depressed ( jatgvi|ymti 1oij~r)’. At this Idas accuses him of plotting in secret or of being afraid and he delivers a proud and blasphemous speech which leads to a nasty quarrel with Idmon. ‘Self-absorbed’ is Fränkel’s interpretation of !l^wamor here,36 whereas Vian believes that Jason, the vik\mhqypor par excellence, feels anguish in the face of Idmon’s now certain death.37 The structure of the passage, in which the passing of time since Idmon’s prophecy is stressed (1.450 – 2), makes Vian’s view improbable, and Fränkel rightly points to the echo of Jason’s remarks on the duties of the leader at 1.339 – 40 (¨i jem t± 6jasta l]koito) and to the further use of this motif at 2.631 – 3 (on which cf. below p. 445). However that may be, Idas himself is unsure how to interpret Jason’s demeanour, and Idmon’s words at 1.479 – 80, ‘there are other consoling words with which a man might encourage a comrade’, would, if anything, seem to confirm, rather than weaken, Idas’ suspicions. Fränkel argues that Jason was not depressed, he just looked like it. Appearances can, of course, deceive, but they need not do so, and this is what is crucial here. Appearances give no access to truth: you cannot tell with certainty what someone is thinking or what his or her mood is from their facial expression. In particular, 1oij~r and related words are frequently used in literary descriptions of representations in works of art;38 just as in life actions do not necessarily reveal motives, 35 Idmon’s decision to follow the expedition probably picks up the story of the prophet’s son Euchenor at Iliad 13.663 – 72 rather than Achilles’ ‘death and glory’ choice. 36 Fränkel (1968), 75. Vian (1978), 1037. 37 Vian (1978), 1037. 38 Cf. 1.739, 764, Theocr. 1.41.

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so in literature we may need privileged, authorial information to help us to interpret action or, in Jason’s case, non-action. If a poet refuses to provide that information, he places us in the position of viewers of a painted scene and forces us to confront the very fragile basis upon which interpretations of mood and motive are made. In the present case a useful comparison may be made with Aeneid 1.208 – 9. After Aeneas’ speech of encouragement to his shipwrecked comrades, Virgil informs us that the hero’s words did not match his real mood: talia uoce refert curisque ingentibus aeger spem uultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem.

This is precisely the kind of guidance which, time and time again, we look for in vain in the Argonautica. I have argued elsewhere that such considerations are important in assessing the relationship in Book 4 between Medea and Jason,39 and I believe that Apollonius’ persistent discretion in this matter is in large measure responsible for the critical confusion over Jason which reigns in the modern literature. When the Argonauts discover that they have left Heracles behind, a fierce argument breaks out on board (1.1280 – 6). The exact terms of the quarrel are not given to us, and we are probably to imagine confused uproar and recrimination (cf. jokyi|r, 1.1284), involving both the reasons for Heracles’ abandonment and the course of action which they should now follow. Jason, however, ‘helpless and despairing ( !lgwam_gisim !tuwhe_r) said neither one thing nor the other, but he sat deeply crushed by the grim disaster, eating his heart’ (1.1286 – 9). Jason’s despair after the loss of the greatest hero requires no special explanation, although even here psychological criticism has been at work.40 When Telamon then quarrels with Jason, we know that the former’s assertion that Jason was behind the abandonment of Heracles is wrong (cf. 1.1274 – 5), but Telamon speaks in the irrationality of anger, like Achilles in Iliad 1, and his eyes blaze (1.1296 – 7) like those of Agamemnon in the same scene (Il. 1.103 – 4).41 The Boreads restrain his impulse 39 Hunter (1987), 130 – 1, 138. 40 Cf. Vian on 1288, ‘il sait qu’Héracles n’a pas été victime d’un complot, mais ne peut expliquer son absence que par quelque obscur dessein des dieux. Son !lgwam_g est une preuve de lucidité et non un signe d’incapacité’. In as much as such things can be determined, this seems to me incredible; %tg (1288) need not point to the intervention of the divine. 41 Cf., in general, L. Graz, Le feu dans l’Iliade et l’Odysse (Paris, 1965), pp. 240 – 7.

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to violent action, as Athena restrains Achilles. These comparisons are not idle, as the scene of reconciliation between Telamon and Jason (1.1329 – 44) exploits motifs from the Iliadic quarrel in a complex intertextual pattern. Like Agamemnon (Il. 9.115 – 20, 19.88 – 9, 136 – 7), Telamon confesses to %tg,42 although he does not bring the gods into his defence, relying instead on a confession that he acted under the emotion of grief. Jason’s declaration, ‘I shall not nurse a bitter wrath (l/mim) against you, though I was previously pained, since it was not for flocks of sheep nor for possessions ( jte\tessi) that you raged in your anger, but for a comrade’ (1.1339 – 43), looks to the theme of the l/mir as a whole,43 to Achilles’ renunciation of it in particular, ‘but now I have put an end to my anger, nor should I rage ceaselessly forever’ (Il. 19.67 – 8), to the pattern of Achilles’ relations with Patroclus, to Achilles’ taunt to Agamemnon as vikojteam~tate p\mtym (Il. 1.122), and to his regret that they had ‘raged in spirit-devouring strife because of a girl’ (Il. 19.58). So too, the Iliadic quarrel caused the temporary loss to the Greeks of the ‘best of the Achaeans’ (Il. 1.244 etc., cf. above p. 64), just as Telamon’s anger is roused by a similar loss to the Argonauts. In this scene, therefore, the relationship between Apollonian characters is displayed through a reworking of Iliadic motifs which stresses the Argonautic virtues of loyalty and solidarity rather than the highly personal Iliadic emotions. Our attention is also directed to the Homeric details which Apollonius has omitted: nothing remains of the Iliad’s great stress on the gifts of compensation which constitute a visible sign of apology and acknowledgement of wrong, and this too tells us much about the society of Argonauts. In as much as Jason and Telamon behave both like and unlike Agamemnon and Achilles we can, for what it is worth, be said to learn about their ‘characters’. What we cannot say is that revelation of ‘character’ is the dominant motive of the scene: the pattern of action in relation to Homer is what gives the scene its meaning. Similar considerations apply to the famous scene of the peira, 2.610 ff. After the Clashing Rocks have been safely passed, the steersman Tiphys delivers a speech full of optimism, reminding the crew 42 !vqad_gsim (1332) is the same idea as the second part of Agamemnon’s statement, 1pe· !as\lgm ja_ leu vq]mar 1ne_keto Fe}r (Il. 19.137). 43 This much is recognised by Beye (1982), 87. I do not, however, see why Jason’s answer to Telamon is ‘highly ironical’, nor does Il. 22.159 – 61 which Beye adduces seem particularly relevant.

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both of divine favour for the expedition and of Phineus’ prophecy. Jason replies, however, leikiw_oir 1p]essi paqabk^dgm, that he should have refused to come on the expedition, that he is weighed down by the cares and responsibilities of leadership and that they are surrounded by hostile forces. After this speech the poet tells us that Jason had spoken ‘testing the heroes’, !qist^ym peiq~lemor. The heroes in fact shout encouragement, and ‘Jason’s heart within him warmed as they urged him’ and he in turn echoes Tiphys’ encouragement. Nothing further is said about Jason’s attitude. This strange scene has been variously handled by modern critics: perhaps the only point not in dispute is that the scene has some connection with Agamemnon’s peira in Iliad 2, and this is clearly where discussion should start. Agamemnon’s almost disastrous testing of his troops comes at a starting-point, before the Catalogue of Ships, at what is the beginning of the poetic war (despite the unsung nine years which have preceded). So too, the passing of the Clashing Rocks marks the end of the major dangers of the outward journey and the beginning of the Colchian section of the poem.44 This sense of a new beginning is reinforced by echoes and reversals of two scenes which preceded the departure of the Argo. Jason’s despairing speech picks up his mother’s distressed words at his parting (1.278 – 82, cf. 2.624 – 6): where Jason before offered comfort, he now rejects consolation (1.266, 294 – 305 leikiw_oir 1p]essi paqgcoq]ym pqos]eipe, 2.621 – 2 leikiw_oir 1p]esi paqabk^dgm pqos]eipe· jT?vu, t_g loi taOta paqgcoq]eir !w]omti ;) and is forced, like his mother, to lament his ate (1.290, 2.623). Secondly, the peira recalls Jason’s election as leader: here, as there, he stresses the responsibilities of power (1.339, 2.631 – 7), responsibilities which will not allow him to sleep, unlike Agamemnon who was reproved by the dream for sleeping too much (Il. 2.23 – 5); here he laments the loneliness of power, there he declared the solidarity of the group (1.336 – 7), and the affirmation of loyalty and support which he receives here is a kind of confirmation of the command which was entrusted to him then. It is, moreover, clear that Tiphys’ confident words correspond in some degree to the comforting but deceptive dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon, but Jason’s reaction seems more problematic, if no less peculiar, than Agamemnon’s. Before 44 Cf. Hunter (1986), 50. Such considerations are ignored by those who find the timing of the peira absurd, cf. e. g. P. Händel, Beobachtungen zur epischen Technik des Apollonios Rhodios (Munich, 1954), pp. 68 – 9.

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considering what explicit guidance Apollonius gives us here, two further aspects of the scene and its Homeric model deserve comment. The first and last parts of Agamemnon’s peira speech in Iliad 2 are repeated to the Greek leaders at the beginning of Iliad 9 (9.17 – 28): for Agamemnon, the disaster envisaged in the earlier speech of deception has come true. It is interesting that the bT-scholia on 9.17 interpret this second speech as a further peira, on the grounds that the reaction of Agamemnon and Nestor to Diomedes’ taunts differs so much from the reactions provoked by Achilles in Book 1. That Apollonius has Iliad 9 as well as Iliad 2 in mind is suggested by the reaction of the Argonauts to Jason’s speech (2.638 – 9, cf. Il. 9.50 – 1 and contrast 9.29 – 30), and the observation in the scholia both reminds us that Homeric speeches can raise interpretative problems just as acute as Apollonian ones and suggests that if Apollonius is deliberately setting us such a problem, he may not have seen the technique as so radical a departure from Homer as it may appear to us. Secondly, there is the actual substance of Jason’s speech. His opening confession of ate derives, of course, from the peira of Agamemnon (Il. 2.111, cf. 9.18), but whereas Agamemnon proposed the abandonment of the expedition and a return to Greece, Jason has nothing at all to offer. His statement that he should have refused to accede to Pelias’ command ‘even if it meant a pitiless death, my body broken limb from limb’ (2.625 – 6) is remarkably and, for Jason, uniquely physical. Critics have tended to pass over this remark in silence, perhaps because it does not seem to fit with the prevailing picture of the diplomatic Jason. Partly this strange remark may be a pointer to the problematic nature of the whole speech, but partly also, at this turning-point in the narrative, the poet looks forward to an even greater ate (cf. 4.449), the dismemberment of the young Apsyrtos — a version of the myth which the Argonautica will in fact avoid. The safe return to Greece for which Jason craves (2.637) was in most versions of the myth bought at a price like that for which Jason was prepared to pass up the whole expedition.45 These two explanations are, of course, not mutually exclusive, and they do not preclude an attempt to understand what is going on inside Jason’s mind. According to Fränkel, for example, Jason is indeed careworn with the worries of leadership, although not quite as worried as the speech suggests. The speech is 45 That Apollonius in fact uses a different account of Apsyrtos’ death does not seriously affect the argument: it is a familiar Apollonian technique to exploit readers’ knowledge of rejected versions of the myth, cf. Fusillo (1985), passim.

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thus both deceptive and truthful.46 If so, however, it is also remarkably inept. The contrast between the personal worries of an individual and the greater worries on behalf of the collective which weigh upon a leader (2.633 – 7) is familiar enough,47 but the helmsman, who is responsible for everybody’s safe voyage, seems the very least suitable person to charge with such selfishness. Not long afterwards, in fact, Tiphys’ death leads the crew to despair that they will ever return safely (2.862 – 3, below pp. 447-8). The patent inappropriateness of Jason’s words thus points, as does his savage expression of regret which has just preceded, to the problematic nature of the speech. leik_wia 5pea are usually words of comfort, calming words.48 Naturally enough, such words need not convey the whole truth, being rather designed to create a certain effect in the hearer.49 leik_wia 5pea also occur where ‘soothing words’ is not really an appropriate meaning,50 but there seems to be no context remotely like the present one. What then of paqabk^dgm ? This normally seems to mean no more than ‘in reply’, but ‘deceitfully’ is certainly a possible sense (cf. SbT Il. 4.6) which Apollonius may have used at least once elsewhere.51 Moreover, only once elsewhere do leik_wia and paqabk^dgm appear together. At 3.1079 ff Jason, affected by ‘deadly love’, speaks paqabk^dgm to Medea; at the conclusion of the speech we are told that he had spoken leikiw_oisi jatax^wym a\qoisi. That speech begins with a promise that Jason will never forget Medea and concludes with some rather novel mythology about both Minyas and Ariadne; it is, therefore, anything but straightforwardly ‘true’. We may conclude that, in the peira scene, the poet directs our attention to what is most important about Jason’s speech — its relationship to ‘truth’ — but sets us a puzzle by choosing such an ambivalent introduction for it. Only after the speech do we 46 47 48 49

Fränkel (1968), 217. Cf. esp. Soph. OT 62 – 4. Cf. 1.294, 3.319, 385, 4.394, 1317, 1431. Cf. 3.14 – 15 where Hera rejects the possibility that the Argonauts could make Aietes give them the Fleece, 1p]essi paqaiv\lemoi … leikiw_oir. The participle there may, but need not, imply deceit. Cf. also 4.394, where the exact status of Jason’s following speech remains a problem for both Medea and us (Hunter [1987], 131). 50 Cf. 2.467, 3.31, 4.732. 51 3.107, though the interpretation there is disputed, cf. M. Campbell, Studies in the Third Book of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (Hildesheim, 1983), pp. 16 – 17.

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seem to have a surer hold. Jason spoke ‘making trial of the heroes’,52 which does not necessarily imply that the speech was intended to deceive, but certainly does place us in the context of Iliad 2. Jason then responds 1piqq^dgm after the crew’s encouragement has warmed his heart. At 2.847 this adverb must mean ‘by title, by name’, but the scholia on 2.640 have various attempts at it — vameq~teqom, paqqgsiastij~teqom, oRome· !mavamd|m, diaqq^dgm. The comparatives rightly suggest a contrast with paqabk^dgm, and indeed the later word, apparently meaning ‘openly, straightforwardly’, must be intended to suggest by contrast a meaning for the earlier. Nevertheless, 1piqq^dgm is itself rare enough to make its use here noteworthy, and it has been chosen, I think, because the ‘semantic centre’ of this whole episode is not ‘the characterisation of Jason’,53 but rather the whole problem of how to interpret a speech or how to move from what a character says to the ‘meaning’ behind it. For this purpose Agamemnon’s peira provided the classic poetic model. To a large extent, we confront Jason’s speech as his hearers do, and we must make of it what we can. The death of Tiphys, following so soon after the loss of Idmon, causes general despair and loss of belief in a safe return (2.851 – 63). As at other crucial points, Hera intervenes (like the Bq_ssai in the Libyan desert), here by giving Ancaios, a son of Poseidon, the courage to speak to Peleus. Ancaios observes that both he and others on board are quite capable of steering the ship, so they should get on with the job; like Jason after the crew’s reaction to the peira speech, Peleus is greatly cheered by this positive spirit and he addresses the crew openly, basically repeating the substance of Ancaios’ speech, but making no actual proposal for a new helmsman. Jason, !lgwam]ym, replies that the potential helmsmen around him are more depressed than he himself is and he prophesies a miserable fate for them, wasting away where they are, bereft of kleos. At this, four Argonauts, including Ancaios, offer themselves as steersmen, and Ancaios is duly chosen. Fränkel54 and Vian55 have 52 Fränkel (1968), 214 – 15 argues strongly for the meaning ‘provoking (a certain reaction)’ rather than ‘testing’; as Fränkel himself admits, however, the distinction is not a sharp one, and the traditional interpretation seems protected by the echo of Iliad 2. 53 Paduano-Fusillo on 2.638 – 40. For 1piqq^dgm cf. Arat. Phaen. 261; at Phaen. 191 the meaning is doubtful, but Mair’s ‘expressly’ seems close to what is required. 54 Fränkel (1968), 240 – 4; this view is rejected by Paduano-Fusillo on 2.885 – 93. 55 Vian (1978), 1031, cf. note complmentaire to 2.885 and Gnomon 46 (1974), 349.

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taken a similar view of this scene, which may be summarised as follows: the episode is designed as an illustration of Argonautic homonoia; Ancaios approaches Peleus, who is not a possible rival for the job, out of a sense of tact. Jason does not wish to impose a choice among the many possible candidates, so he delivers a speech full of sarcasm and depression in order to prick the amour-propre of potential steersmen. The ploy succeeds, and both the expedition and its democratic structures are preserved. The episode would thus be in some ways comparable — though Fränkel and Vian do not make the comparison — to the scene among the Greeks after Hector has issued his challenge in Iliad 7. When no Greek responds to the challenge, Menelaos abuses them as effeminate cowards lacking in kleos, and he starts to arm himself for the duel; Agamemnon, however, restrains him and, after a lengthy intervention from Nestor, a number of Greek champions present themselves (Il. 7.92 – 169). The central difference between the two scenes is the crucial !lgwam]ym in 2.885, quite different from the Homeric ameid_fym describing Menelaos. Fränkel and Vian deal with this word in different ways. Both agree that Jason is here not ‘resourceless’; for Fränkel !lgwam]ym is therefore a corruption of, exempli gratia, !l^wamor ¦r, whereas Vian understands the word to refer to Jason’s embarrassment before the delicate task of choosing between rival candidates. With many details of this reading I would not disagree, but the emphasis seems misplaced. The loss of Tiphys, who safely negotiated the Argo through the Clashing Rocks, is clearly a crushing blow; though he was elected to his position (1.400 – 1), there was never any real doubt about the choice (cf. 1.105 – 10, 381 – 3). The strength of Jason’s despair, like his very positive attitude at 2.641 – 7, we recognise as similar to the sharp highs and lows of Homeric emotion, notably the fluctuations in Agamemnon’s mood. Whether such despair is consonant with our idea of what a leader should be is of no relevance here. Crucial to the scene is Hera’s intervention, and it is on the indirect nature of divine action — not really all that different from various interventions of Homeric gods — that the poet’s interest is here centred. This mistaken emphasis in the reading of Fränkel and Vian derives again from the modern behaviour of a central hero, rather than with a pattern of events.

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III. It is well known that Jason’s story has strong similarities with myths relating to other young heroes who undergo terrible ordeals before claiming their rightful place in adult society. Three heroes demand particular notice because Apollonius draws explicit attention to them. Aietes’ fire-breathing bulls are described (3.231) with an echo of the Homeric Chimaira, deim¹m !popme_ousa puq¹r l]mor aQhol]moio (Il. 6.182). The myth of the Chimaira, as told in Iliad 6, has interesting links with Jason’s story. Proteus sends the handsome Bellerophon to his father-in-law (Iobates), the king of Lycia, with letters which will ensure the young man’s destruction; Proteus, like Pelias, thus hopes to remove a better man from his kingdom, as well as to punish Bellerophon for the alleged outrage against his wife. Iobates receives Bellerophon hospitably (cf. Aietes at 3.299 – 316), but after reading the treacherous letter he devises a series of trials for the young man which he is not expected to survive. The Chimaira — the ‘equivalent’ of Aietes’ bulls — is one such test; another is the defeat of two hostile tribes, the Solymoi and the Amazons. At 3.352 – 3 Argos tells Aietes that Jason will subjugate one of his enemies, the Sauromatai (Sarmatians), as a quid pro quo for the return of the Fleece. It is noteworthy that this tribe was said to be descended from the Amazons and to retain certain Amazon characteristics.56 Argos’ offer may reflect a version of the saga in which the defeat of this tribe by the Argonauts was a condition imposed by Aietes, like the war enjoined on Bellerophon by Iobates. When Bellerophon successfully completed his tasks, the king gave him half the kingdom and one of his daughters in marriage; Jason will get both daughter and Fleece, though not with the king’s consent. The murder of Apsyrtos is compared to that of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and Aigisthos at 4.468, ‘like a slaughterer kills a great horned bull’, which reworks Od. 4.535 (= 11.411) ‘as someone kills an ox at its stall’. It is not, however, Aigisthos whom Jason closely recalls, but rather Orestes. Euripides has Orestes kill Aigisthos while the latter is sacrificing to the Nymphs, thus himself becoming the sacrificial victim, in a description (El. 839 – 43) which is very like Apollonius’ ac-

56 Cf. Hdt. 4.110 – 17, Hippocr. Aer. 17, Pl. Laws 7.804e-5a, J. Harmatta, Studies in the History and Language of the Sarmatians (Szeged, 1970).

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count of the death of Apsyrtos, struck down like a sacrificial bull57 in the shrine of Artemis. Both Orestes and Jason must receive purification for their actions by having the blood ‘washed off’;58 the patterns are certainly very alike, although the killing of the usurper Pelias is more clearly divorced from the death of Apsyrtos than the death of Aigisthos is from that of Clytemnestra. The similarities, moreover, go much further back in time. As a baby Jason was removed from the city of his birth to be brought up in the wild by the centaur Chiron, because of fear that his usurping uncle Pelias might act against the baby who had a rightful claim to the throne. When he had grown to manhood, he returned to Iolcos to reclaim his inheritance (Pind. Pyth. 4.101 – 15). This pattern is obviously very like that of the baby Orestes, saved from the bloodthirsty Aigisthos and deposited with Strophios in Phocis (Eur. El. 16 – 18). To the similarities in their later careers I shall return below (pp. 450-2). Most striking of all, and most exploited by Apollonius, are the parallels between Jason and Theseus. Like Jason, Theseus returned to the city of his father as a young man in his prime, a pa?r pq~hgbor (Bacchyl. 18.56 – 7, cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.158 of Jason), like Jason both a stranger and a citizen (cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.78). Theseus’ birth tokens, by which he is finally recognised by his father the king, are a sword and sandals;59 the latter can hardly fail to remind us of ‘one-sandalled Jason’, although the use of the token in the two stories is quite different.60 Like Jason, Theseus was put to the test by a descendant of Helios, Minos; the test of Theseus’ divinity imposed by Minos, most familiar to us from 57 This is also, I think, the image suggested by cm»n Eqipe (4.471), cf. 1.427 – 31, 3.1310 (where I accept 1qip|mta). 58 4.560, cf. Aesch. Eum. 281, 452, R. Parker, Miasma (Oxford, 1983), pp. 104 – 43, Hunter (1987), 131 n. 17. 59 Cf. Plut. Thes. 3.4; Herter, RE Suppl. 13, 1057. 60 Here the loss of Callimachus’ Hecale is particularly to be regretted. Frr. 232 – 3 and 235 – 6 concern Theseus’ arrival in Athens and recognition first by Medea and then by his father. Fr. 274, "qlo? pou j!je_myi 1p]tqewe kept¹r Uoukor j %mhei 2kiwq}syi 1mak_cjior, may suggest that Theseus was portrayed as a young ephebe, like Jason; Arg. 1.972 and Call. fr. 274 are obviously connected, and, if Kapp’s interpretation of the latter passage is correct, then Apollonius may be drawing a further link between Jason and Theseus by echoing a Callimachean passage about the latter. Relevant too is the suggestion that Callimachus’ Theseus owed something to Homer’s Telemachus, cf. J. K. Newman, ‘Callimachus and the Epic’, in Serta Turyniana (Urbana, 1974), pp. 342 – 60 at p. 350.

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Bacchylides 17, is recalled at Arg. 3.402 – 3 where Aietes offers to give up the Fleece once he has tested that the Argonauts are ‘either of the race of gods or in some other way no worse [than Aietes himself]’. Jason uses the example of Ariadne to encourage Medea (3.997 – 1007), Medea herself contrasts Minos and Aietes (3.1106 – 7),61 and the overcoming of the bulls with Medea’s help is plainly on a par with Theseus’ success in the labyrinth against the Minotaur. The detailed working out of the parallels between Ariadne and Medea in the Argonautica and later literature is familiar enough to be omitted here. Less obvious perhaps are the shared motifs in the expeditions of the two heroes. The tribute of young men from which Theseus freed Athens was imposed after the death of Minos’ son, Androgeos, in mysterious circumstances in Attica. Minos prayed to Zeus for vengeance, and a plague and famine came upon the city. When the Athenians consulted the oracle, they were told to pay Minos whatever penalty he should demand (Apollodorus 3.15.7 – 8). With the story of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece this story shares the motifs of Zeus’ anger, plague, consultation of an oracle, a long sea-voyage and the death of a tyrant’s son. Finally — and it would be possible to pursue the parallels in these two stories at much greater length — it is noteworthy that Theseus’ desire to imitate and rival Heracles is a leitmotif of Plutarch’s Life of Theseus,62 and this recalls Heracles’ role in the Argonautica, particularly after he has left the expedition.63 Recent scholarship has recognised in these myths and the tragedies based on them a recurrent pattern which reflects the generational passage of a young man into adulthood. The work of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in particular, has established in new detail the connection of such myths with the institution and ritual of the ephebate.64 That the Argonauts as a 61 These verses exploit the familiar fact (cf. Strabo 10.48, Plut. Thes. 16.3, RE 15.1890 – 1927) that two very different accounts of Minos’ character were current in antiquity. Homer had given both Minos and Aietes the epithet ako|vqym (Od. 10.137, 11.322). 62 Cf. 6.6 – 7.2, 29.3 (%kkor oxtor Jqajk/r). 63 Cf. Feeney, art. cit. (n. 33). 64 Cf. ‘The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian ephebeia’, PCPS 14 (1968), 49 – 64 (reprinted in R. L. Gordon [ed.], Myth, Religion & Society [Cambridge, 1981], pp. 147 – 62 and P. Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter [Baltimore, 1986], pp. 106 – 28), and ‘The Black Hunter Revisited’, PCPS 32 (1986), 126 – 44. Already E. S. Phinney, Apollonius Rhodius (diss. Berkeley, 1964), p. 110, associated Jason with Parthenopaeus in Aeschylus’ Septem.

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whole pass through some kind of ‘initiation’ has long been recognised,65 as also of course have the ephebic features of a hero such as Theseus.66 Nevertheless, the impulse of Vidal-Naquet’s work has, for example, allowed the significance of the details of the Pindaric Jason — upbringing in the wild, uncut hair, return at the age of twenty, his ambiguous dress — to be better appreciated.67 These patterns will also throw light on aspects of the Apollonian Jason. Orestes performs his retributive act through guile and cunning; the Sophoclean Orestes, in fact, reports Apollo’s oracle to the effect that he should ‘with trickery secretly carry out the just slaughter himself, unequipped with shields and an army’ (El. 36 – 7). Apollonius presents Jason’s acts of ploughing the field and slaying the earthborn men as complementary: the first requires heroic strength, aided by Medea’s magic drugs, the second relies on metis and on staying out of sight (k\hqgi, 3.1057, 1369). This complementarity points to Jason’s intermediate position on his passage from one stage of his life to another. His preparations for the contest are also interesting in this context. After he has smeared both himself and his weapons with the drug and the strength has entered him, he performs naked a kind of dance, like a prancing warhorse, shaking his shield and spear (3.1258 – 64). The shield and spear — the weapons of both the Homeric warrior and the hoplite68 — are stressed again as Jason goes to the contest n»m douq· ja· !sp_di (3.1279). The dancing and shaking movements strongly call to mind the pyrrhiche, an armed dance which presumably originated in preparations for war and which we know to have been performed at Athenian festivals by all three age-classes of males, %mdqer, !c]meioi and pa?der.69 Plato’s description of the dance, ‘it represents modes of eluding all 65 Cf. F. Graf, in J. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London, 1987), pp. 97 – 8, and the various speculations of R. Roux, Le problme des Argonautes (Paris, 1949), Chapter 3, and J. Lindsay, The Clashing Rocks (London, 1965); for Jason in particular cf. Heiserman, op. cit. (n. 15), pp. 16 – 20. 66 Cf. H. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Courtes (Lille, 1939), p. 323. 67 Cf. C. Segal, Pindar’s Mythmaking: the Fourth Pythian Ode (Princeton, 1986), pp. 56 – 60. 68 Ephebes received !sp_da ja· d|qu after their first year of service and spent the second year on guard duty (Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.4). 69 IG ii.2 2311.72 – 4; for this dance in general cf. K. Latte, De saltationibus Graecorum capita quinque (RGVV 13.3, Giessen, 1913), J.-C. Poursat, ‘Les représentations de danse armée dans la céramique attique’, BCH 92 (1968), 550 – 615, and E. J. Borthwick, ‘P.Oxy. 2738: Athena and the Pyrrhic Dance’, Hermes 98 (1970), 318 – 31.

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kinds of blows and shots by swervings, and duckings and side-leaps upward or crouching’ (Laws 7.815a, trans. R. G. Bury), certainly suits both Jason’s movements at 3.1258 – 64 and also his actual battle with the cgceme?r. The Aristophanic personification of Old Education had contrasted those who fought at Marathon — the hoplite battle par excellence — with young men of the modern day who could not dance Athena’s pyrrhiche properly (Clouds 986 – 9), and it has been suggested that we should see in this dance an enactment of the passage of the ephebe towards hoplite status.70 Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that Apollonius presents Jason in a crucial transitional stage: halfway between Apollo, the model kouros,71 and the war-god Ares (3.1282 – 3), he prepares to meet the great test of his ‘manhood’. It is worth remarking that the only previous killing to Jason’s credit in the poem is that of the equally young prince Cyzicus (1.1026 – 35), and this was a ghastly mistake committed in the confusion of night, in a scene more reminiscent of the Doloneia than of the open duels of Homeric heroes. Finally, one further speculation about Jason’s test may be permitted. The trick of distracting the earthborn men by throwing a great stone into their midst not only associates Jason with the cunning of the ephebe, but perhaps also suggests the role of fighters like Tyrtaeus’ culm/ter, who, in contrast to and support of the p\mopkoi (hoplites), throw large stones and javelins at the enemy from the safety of shield cover (fr. 12.35 – 9 West = 8.35 – 9 GP, cf. Arg. 3.1369).72 Here too, then, Jason would be associated with a type of fighting which is marginal to the main military effort of adult males. The main object of the expedition, the acquisition of the Golden Fleece, is also achieved with the aid of Medea’s magical powers. She and Jason leave the Argo in the early hours, at the time when hunters 70 P. Scarpi, ‘La pyrrhiche o le armi della persuasione’, Dialoghi di archeologia 1 (1979), 78 – 97, accepted by Vidal-Naquet, ‘Black Hunter Revisited’ (n. 64), p. 136. I do not think that Laws 7.796b-c shows that this was Plato’s interpretation. 71 It is tempting to place in this context Orpheus’ account of Apollo’s slaying of the Pythian dragon, joOqor 1½m 5ti culm|r, 5ti pkoj\loisi cecgh~r. I would now be more inclined to such a view of this disputed passage than I was in Hunter (1986), 57. 72 The interpretation of this passage is (inevitably) disputed, cf. H. Lorimer, BSA 42 (1947), 127; A. M. Snodgrass, Arms and Armour of the Greeks (London, 1967), pp. 66 – 7; W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War IV (Berkeley, 1985), p. 40. A recently published fragment of Tyrtaeus refers to culmol\woi (P.Oxy. 3316).

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who begin while it is still dark get up (4.109 – 13). By a familiar Apollonian technique,73 this indication of time embraces the functions of a simile, and the possible significance of this night-hunt for Jason’s position will be obvious to anyone familiar with Vidal-Naquet’s work on ‘the Black Hunter’. Once the Fleece has been attained — with Jason playing very much the secondary rôle74 — his delight in it is compared to that of a paqh]mor who sees the full moon caught on her fine dress (4.167 – 73). The text and interpretation of the simile are both far from clear,75 but the comparison of Jason to a young girl is certainly suggestive. It is well known that rites de passage are often characterised by games or ritual involving sexual reversal; at the moment of Jason’s greatest success — the acquisition of both the Fleece and Medea — the simile of the young girl paradoxically marks his readiness to assume his manhood. If this is correct, then his speech to the crew at their departure, which I have already considered in another context (above pp. 64 – 5), may be seen to mark his emergence from the period of testing. He speaks now as both ‘hero’ and hoplite,76 and he dons ‘the armour of war’ (4.206) to mark his new status. It may even be that his plan for the protection of the ship (4.199 – 202), a close pattern of shields to protect the rowers, is designed to suggest the hoplite phalanx, as well, presumably, as reflecting a historical reality.77 The interpretation of individual details will always be a matter for debate. More broadly, however, it is difficult not to associate Jason’s characteristic !lgwam_g, the doubts and occasional despair to which he is prone, with the ambivalent insecurity of Orestes in Euripides’ Electra and, to a lesser extent, Aeschylus’ Choephoroi.78 Both Orestes and Jason require support and encouragement to accomplish difficult but

73 Cf. Hunter (1986), 54 – 5. 74 Cf. 4.149, 163, Hunter (1987), 132 – 3. 75 Cf. now J. M. Bremer, CQ 37 (1987), 423 – 6, who rightly points to the erotic and nuptial associations of the full moon. Marriage for the young girl corresponds, mutatis mutandis, to membership of the adult warrior class for Jason. 76 Livrea on 4.203 collects the relevant passages. For sex reversal in transitional rites cf. e. g. the remarks of Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter (n. 64), pp. 114 – 17. 77 Cf. Vian on 4.200. In the parallel scene at 2.1069 ff the comparison with a hoplite phalanx is almost explicit (2.1075 – 8), cf. Paduano-Fusillo ad loc. 78 Cf. P. Vidal-Naquet in J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Tragedy and Myth in Ancient Greece (Brighton, 1981), pp. 160 – 1.

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necessary tasks which have been imposed upon them by oracular command.79 Two final observations are necessary here. First, as I have already noted, these patterns operate within the poem largely at the level of the individual episode, and we should not expect to find a simple linear progression through a transitional rite from beginning to end. Thus, at a very simple level, the killing of Apsyrtos follows, rather than precedes, the successful acquisition of the Fleece and the assumption of heroic rhetoric. Secondly, I have been assimilating certain patterns in the Argonautica to patterns in the mythic thought and literature of archaic and classical Greece, as well as to a military organisation which was for Apollonius quite obsolete. It may be objected that a poet of third-century Alexandria was no longer in touch with these patterns in such a way as to use them meaningfully in his poem. Such an objection can, I think, be met on its own terms by two complementary observations. The broad patterns in question are so widespread in both time and space that the onus of proof is clearly on those who would deny access to them to the inhabitants of third-century Alexandria. More importantly, the Argonautica is a creative recreation of a past age, both technologically and in terms of social values and attitudes. Its characteristic flavour derives from the tension between this hypothesised past age and the very Alexandrian concerns of much of the poetic material. In such a poem, the reprise of this familiar pattern from archaic and classical literature, as only one of a number of structural patterns through the work, is very far from surprising. The nature of heroism, and its particular instantiation in the ‘psychology’ of Jason, is not Apollonius’ central concern in the Argonautica. If Jason sometimes resembles the great heroes of Homer and sometimes wears a quite different aspect, it is because of Apollonius’ constant concern with the experimental, with testing the limits and possibilities of the epic form and with exploring what it has seemed to take for granted. This differentiates him both from Homer and, in a different way, from Virgil, who used the results of the experiments to produce a new synthesis. 79 Cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.159 – 67. Apollonius does not explicitly say that the expedition was commanded by divine oracle (contrast 1.8), but the motif of placating Zeus’ anger (2.1194 – 5, 3.336 – 9) perhaps suggests that we are to infer it. The latter passage raises, and leaves open, the possibility that Pelias has invented the oracle as an excuse to get rid of Jason.

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Addenda See the Addenda to the previous essay. Jason is also at the centre of much of Chapter 3 of Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, and see also The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies 15 – 25. C. Pietsch, Die Argonautika des Apollonios von Rhodos (Stuttgart 1999) takes a rather different view of these matters. p. 66 Here and elsewhere I am conscious that I did not bring out sufficiently clearly how the potential for the obliteration of kleos in the Argonautica builds on the Homeric idea (Iliad 12.70, 13.227, 14.70) of perishing m~mulor. p. 81 – 2 The standard study of the pyrrhiche is now P. Ceccarelli, La pirrica nell’antichit Greco romana: studi sulla danza armata (Pisa 1998).

4. Winged Callimachus* 1m· to ?r c±q !e_dolem oT kic»m Gwom t]tticor, h]|qubom d’ oqj 1v_kgsam emym. hgq· l³m oqat|emti pame_jekom acj^saito %kkor, 1c]½ d’ eUgm ork[a]w}r, b pteq|eir, ü p\mtyr, Vma c/par Vma dq|som Dm l³m !e_dy pq~jiom 1j d_gr A]qor eWdaq 5dym, awhi t¹ d’ 1jd}oili, t¹ loi b\qor fssom 5pesti tqick~wim ako_i v/sor 1p’ 9cjek\dyi. oq m]lesir· MoOsai c±q fssour Udom ehlati pa?dar lµ kon_i, pokio»r oqj !p]hemto v_kour.

30

35

(Aetia fr. 1.29 – 38) 1

In ZPE 66 (1986) 269 – 78 Gregory Crane discussed the implications of Callimachus’ self-identification with the cicada in the light of the suggestion of earlier scholars2 that the poet here sees himself as Tithonus, but a Tithonus who is not abandoned by his beloved deities. The present note calls attention to a further pattern of meaning in the passage which may have important implications for its structure. Callimachus, the favourite of Apollo, longs to be b 1kaw}r, b pteq|eir. The reference is to the cicada, but the language can hardly be other than a reworking of the famous words which Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth at Ion 534b: joOvom c±q wq/la poigt^r 1stim ja· ptgm¹m ja· Req|m.3 Callimachus’ familiarity with this passage — which would hardly require proof — is in fact established by an echo of Ion 534c in Iambus 13 (fr. 203.31 – 3).4 Socrates’ ‘light, winged, and holy’ poet is like a bee rather than a cicada, but this hardly weakens the cer* 1 2 3

4

Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 76 (1989) 1 – 2 Supplements: v. 30 Lobel; v. 32 Hunt. Cf. A. Rostagni, RFIC n.s. 6 (1928) 23; H. Diller, Hermes 90 (1962) 120. G. O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford 1988) 80 n. 107 cites the Platonic parallel to Callimachus’ verse but not, apparently, as its source. Dr N. Hopkinson suggests that d_gr in v. 34 picks up Req|m, the third of Plato’s epithets for the poet. Cf., e. g. D. L. Clayman, Callimachus’ Iambi (Leiden 1980) 50. The humour of citing Plato’s Ion in a poem in which the poet defends himself by the example of Ion of Chios has strangely been lost on many critics.

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tainty of the echo; in any case, Callimachus elsewhere suggests a likeness between himself and the bee (h. 2.110 – 12). In his amusing speech at Ion 533c-5a Socrates argues that poets do not compose 1j t]wmgr, but rather 5mheoi, 5jvqomer and jatew|lemoi like bacchants; poets are merely 2qlgm/r t_m he_m.This position is directly opposed to Callimachus’ insistence upon t]wmg as the chief poetic criterion (fr. 1.17) and his self-presentation as the deliberate artist, composing pen-in-hand (fr. 1.21 – 2): ‘not for him the affectation of vatic inspiration’, as Neil Hopkinson has recently put it.5 Thus in offering a poetics quite unlike that of the Platonic Socrates, Callimachus in fact adopts Socrates’ language and partially takes over his view of the poet. The famously problematic6 syntax of vv. 33 – 5 can now be seen as amusingly suggestive of the ecstatic, ‘possessed’, mode which Socrates ascribes to poets and into which Callimachus suddenly changes; the change is mediated through the echo of the Ion in v.32. The whole passage — so typical of Callimachus’ creative use of earlier literature — is thus a powerful assertion of poetic craftsmanship and lyric inspiration. One final speculation. The link between the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ (fr. 1) and the Dream (fr. 2) remains very unclear.7 We also know nothing of the dream’s circumstances. It is usually assumed to have occurred at night, but certain times of the day were also very suitable for dreams and encounters with the divine, and Socrates tells Phaedrus the myth of the cicadas 1m lesglbq_ai and stresses that they should not nod off into sleep in the heat like most men (Phaedrus 5

6

7

A Hellenistic Anthology (Cambridge 1988) 95. Critics differ as to whether vv. 21 – 2 refer to Callimachus’ first attempt at poetry or to his first efforts at writing when a little boy (so, e. g. W. Wimmel, Kallimachos in Rom, Hermes Einzelschrift 16, Wiesbaden 1960, 101). The former seems more likely (cf. the address !oid] and the imitations in Roman recusationes), although the superlative pq~tistom, pa?dar in v. 37, and the tradition that Callimachus was at one time a schoolteacher in Alexandrian Eleusis (Suda j 227 = Test. 1 Pfeiffer) — and therefore only too familiar with writing lessons – may be thought to suggest the latter. It may be in fact that Callimachus thinks of the two moments as coincident. A selection of criticism: Pfeiffer’s note quoting P. Friedländer, Hermes 64 (1929) 383; H. Herter, Bursian’s Jahresbericht 255 (1937) 104 – 6; Wimmel op.cit. 113 n. 4; A. Kambylis, Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik (Heidelberg 1965) 82 – 9; Hopkinson op.cit. 96 – 7. Cf. Crane art.cit. 275 – 8; A. Kerkhecker, ‘Ein Musenanruf am Anfang der Aitia des Kallimachos’ ZPE 71 (1988) 16 – 24.

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259a). If Callimachus’ dream took place in the heat of the day, the image of the cicada may have formed part of the link between it and the Reply. This is no more than a guess, but at least it would not be the only such poetic encounter to be set at such a time (cf. Theocr. 7.21).8

Addenda The ‘Reply to the Telchines’ remains of course one of the most discussed passages of Greek poetry; the starting point is now G. Massimilla, Callimaco. Aitia, libri primo e secondo (Pisa 1996). There is a very useful bibliography of Callimachus to 1998 by Luigi Lehnus (Nuova bibliografia callimachea 1489 – 1998, Alessandria 2000). The language of the prologue in connection with Plato’s Ion is also discussed by M. Depew, TAPA 122 (1992) 326 – 7.

8

Theocr. 7.139, t]tticer kakaceOmter 5wom p|mom, suggests the p|mor of the ‘Callimachean’ poet.

5. Bulls and Boxers in Apollonius and Vergil* In a famous passage of the third book of the Georgics (3.209 – 41) Vergil describes two bulls righting over a formosa iuvenca; the bull which is at first beaten goes off to recover and prepare, returning to attack again its arrogant opponent. The description of the bull’s training blends the toughness of early man,1 the playfulness of a young animal, the suffering of the exclusus amator and the preparations of a human athlete: ergo omni cura uiris exercet et inter dura iacet pernox instrato saxa cubili frondibus hirsutis et carice pastus acuta, et temptat sese atque irasci in cornua discit arboris obnixus trunco, uentosque lacessit ictibus, et sparsa ad pugnam proludit harena.

230

(Georg. 3.229 – 34)

The phrase uentosque lacessit / ictibus has been variously handled by critics, but Page’s note – ‘he acts like a boxer’ – is very likely on the right track; cf. Aen. 5.375 – 7 of Dares answering the challenge to compete in boxing, talis prima Dares caput altum in proelia tollit,/ ostenditque umeros latos alternaque iactat / bracchia protendens et uerberat ictibus auras. Pugna (line 234) is used of a wide variety of sporting contests, but has, through pugnus, a natural affinity with boxing.2 uentosque lacessit / ictibus would, of course, be perfectly appropriate also for the warming-up of gladiators or fencers, and Richter took the phrase both here and in Aeneid 5 to be a poetic version of uentilare, which is twice found used absolutely of a gladiator practising or warming-up.3 An image from gladiatorial contests would suit the sharp horns of a bull, but uerberare rather suggests boxing, and it is, moreover, unclear why Vergil’s phrase should be semantically equivalent to uentilare (which may, in any case, have been used of boxers * 1 2 3

Classical Quarterly 39 (1989) 557 – 61 Cf. R. F. Thomas, Virgil, Georgics, II (Cambridge, 1988), on 229 – 31. Cf. Aen. 5.365. Thomas, however, refers the verse to ‘the sanding of the oiled body in wrestling’. Sen. Contr, 3 pr. 13, Sen. EM 117.25.

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as well as of gladiators). If it is correct that lines 233 – 4 hint at a likeness between the bull and a boxer, then new colour is given to certain earlier elements of the passage: alternantes (line 220), uulneribus crebris (line 221), sanguis (line 221), plagas (line 226) and superbi/ uictoris (lines 226 – 7) 4 may now all be seen to suggest a boxing-match. So too, the theme of the deleterious effect on bulls of sexual passion may be not merely a borrowing from love-poetry but also transference to the bovine world of conventional wisdom about how athletes should conduct themselves.5 Moreover, a iuuenca as a prize in a boxing-match between two bulls gives an amusingly new resonance to an idea from the world of (literary) man: in Homer, Epeios and Euryalos box for a splendid mule, Bl_omom takaeqc|m… 2n]te’ !dl^tgm6 (Il. 23.654 – 5), and in Aeneid 5 Dares and Entellus compete for a iuuencus. 7 Behind Vergil’s poetic fancy lie many different ‘sources’. Some commentators have found the seeds of this passage in technical writing such as Arist. HA 6.575a21 – 2, ‘the victorious bull (b mij_m t_m ta}qym) mounts the cows; but when he is weak because of his frequent mounting, the beaten bull (b Btt~lemor) attacks him, and often wins’; cf. also a preserved fragment8 of Antipater, Peq· f~iym : ‘the strongest ( !kjil~tator) bull in the herd mates with all the cows and does not allow any other bull to mate. But if another bull, trusting in his own strength, withstands and defeats him, then the second bull mates with the cows after that.’ Among poetic models, the lyric account of the fight between Heracles and Achelous for the hand of Deianeira at Sophocles, Trachiniae 507 – 30 has long been acknowledged as a particularly important forerunner.9 The river-god appeared in his bull form and his horns crashed against his opponent, while Deianeira sat far off awaiting the outcome in terror (cf. Trach. 24); in line 520 the fight is 4 5

6 7 8 9

Cf. Aen. 5.473 ‘hic uictor superans animis tauroque superbus’. Cf. Philostratus, Gymn. 52, where however what is at issue is the effect of actual sex rather than of sexual longing, and A. Rousselle, Porneia: on Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford, 1988), pp. 12 – 15. There is a close parallel to this in the folklore of modern boxing. !dl^r and related words are frequently used of young girls, and Vergil may be exploiting this resonance. At Aen. 5.399 Entellus sarcastically refers to the prize as a pulcher iuuencus, cf. formosa iuuenca. Quoted by Schol. Ap. Rhod. Arg. 2.88 – 9a. For Ovid’s later use of the Trachiniae passage cf. F. Bömer, ‘Der Kampf der Stiere’, Gymnasium 81 (1974), 503 – 13, and note on Met. 9.46.

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described in what looks like the technical language of wrestling ( !lv_pkejtoi jk_lajer). Sophocles does not actually say ‘they wrestled like two bulls over a heifer’, but the idea is clearly latent in the passage and is nearly explicit at the end of the ode, where Deianeira’s marriage is compared to the sudden separation of a young heifer (p|qtir 1q^la) from its mother. It is a small step from there to a passage of the Argonautica which is cited by commentators on the Georgics, but whose full importance has not yet been brought out. At Arg. 2.88 – 97 the final round in the boxing-match of Amycus and Polydeuces is compared to the meeting of two bulls in competition for a ‘grazing heifer’: #x d’ awtir sum|qousam 1mamt¸y, A}te ta}qy voqb\dor !lv· bo¹r jejotg|te dgqi\ashom. 5mha d’ 5peit’ -lujor l³m 1p’ !jqot\toisim !eqhe·r bout}por oXa p|dessi tam}ssato, j±d d³ baqe?am we?q’ 1p· oX pek]linem . b d’!_ssomtor rp]stg, jq÷ta paqajk¸mar, ¥lyi d’ !med]nato p/wum tuth|m. b d’ %cw’ aqto?o paq³j c|mu coum¹r !le_bym j|xe leta@cdgm rp³q ouator, ast]a d’eUsy N/nem . b d’ !lv’ ad¼mgi cm»n Eqipem. oR d’ Q\wgsam Fqyer Lim}ai . toO d’ !hq|or 5jwuto hul|r.

90

95

Whereas Vergil presents his bulls warring over a mate as boxers, Apollonius’ boxers are like bulls warring over a mate.10 The simile of lines 88 – 9 leads in to that of lines 90 – 2 where Amycus is compared to a man about to sacrifice a bull; the tables are turned, however, and Amycus himself becomes the sacrificial victim. cm»n Eqipem (line 96) is appropriate both for a beaten boxer and for the bull at a sacrifice,11 and the heroes’ shout suggests not merely the audience of a sporting-contest12 but also the ritual cry which attended sacrifice; Apollonius may in fact have specifically in mind the sacrifice at Odyssey 3.447 – 58 (cf. the akokuc^ in line 450, and line 455 k_pe d’ ast]a hul|r corresponding to Arg. 2.97). Vergil certainly used Arg. 2.90 – 2 and 95 – 6, together 10 It is tempting to believe that the fact that ancient boxing ‘gloves’ were made exclusively of ox-hide (cf. Philostratus, Gymn. 10) has had an important influence in the creation of this image. 11 Cf. Il. 17.520 – 4, Arg. 4.471. Rather similar is Lucretius 1.92 of Iphigenia, ‘muta metu terram … genibus summissa petebat’; the action suits both a terrified girl and a sacrificial victim. 12 Cf. Arg. 3.1370, Theocr. 22.99, Hom. Il. 23.847, 869.

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with Arg. 1.427 – 31, in his description of Entellus’ killing of the prize bull at Aen 5. 477 – 80,13 dixit, et aduersi contra stetit ora iuuenci qui donum astabat pugnae, durosque reducta librauit dextra media inter cornua caestus arduus, effractoque inlisit in ossa cerebro,

and the debt to the opening of Argonautica 2 throughout the boxing description in Aeneid 5 is well known.14 This may encourage us to look for further Apollonian influence in the ‘boxing match’ of Georgics 3. When the beaten bull returns to attack its opponent, its charge is described with a simile of a crashing wave (Georg. 3.237 – 41): fluctus uti medio coepit cum albescere ponto, longius ex altoque sinum trahit, utque uolutus ad terras immane sonat per saxa neque ipso monte minor procumbit, at ima exaestuat unda uerticibus nigramque alte subiectat harenam.

240

The simile is adapted15 from Iliad 4.422 – 6 which describes the Greeks moving, like the Vergilian bull, to battle: ¢r d’ ft’ 1m aQciak_i pokugw]z jOla hak\ssgr eqmut’ 1pass}teqom Fev¼qou vpo jim¶samtor. p|mtyi l]m te pq_ta joq}ssetai, aqt±q 5peita w]qsyi Ngcm}lemom lec\ka bq]lei, !lv· d³ t’ %jqar juqt¹m 1¹m joquvoOtai, !popt}ei d’ "k¹r %wmgm.

425

Apollonius too has occasion to describe the charge of bulls, during the account of Jason’s trials in the third book: 5ddeisam d’ Fqyer fpyr Udom. aqt±q b to}r ce ew diab±r 1pi|mtar û te spik±r eQm "k· p]tqg l_lmei !peiqes_gisi dome}lema j}lat’ !]kkair.

(Arg. 3.1293 – 5)

13 Cf. F. Rütten, De Vergilii studiis Apollonianis (diss. Münster, 1912), p. 19. arduus in line 480 may be another (cf. line 426) reflection of Arg. 2.90 – 1, but cf. Eur. El. 840. 14 Cf. Rütten op. cit. (n. 13), pp. 16 – 19 and Williams’ notes on the Aeneid passage. The reference to Amycus in line 373 directs our attention to Apollonius and Theocritus. 15 Cf. M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Poem of the Earth (Princeton, 1979), pp. 194 – 5.

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This simile is indebted to Iliad 15.618 – 21 which describes the Greek battle-line as it resists the Trojans. Resistance was not the quality which Vergil wished to describe in Georgics 3, but he may have been led to use a wave-simile for his charging bull by this passage of the Argonautica. A further consideration, however, seems to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Vergil’s choice of Homeric model here has been influenced by his knowledge of Apollonius’ epic. The opening exchanges of the bout between Amycus and Polydeuces contain another wave-simile: 5mha d³ Bebq}jym l³m %man, û te jOla hak\ssgr tqgw» hoµm 1p· m/a joq}ssetai, B d’ rp¹ tuth¹m Qdqe_gi pujimo?o jubeqmgt/qor !k}sjei Rel]mou voq]eshai 5sy to_woio jk}dymor.

(Arg. 2.70 – 3)

Amycus, a son of Poseidon,16 is like a mighty wave threatening to burst in on a ship, whereas Polydeuces is the skilful pilot who averts the danger;17 the fact that Polydeuces and his brother had a traditional role as rescuers from shipwreck18 – a role given great prominence in the opening passage of Theocritus’ parallel poem (22.8 – 22) – foreshadows the ultimate futility of Amycus’ efforts. Like so many Apollonian similes, these verses have a complex Homeric origin, but two passages are particularly important. One is Iliad 15.624 – 9 (Hector attacking the Greek lines) which follows immediately after the Homeric model for the charge of Aietes’ bulls in Arg. 3, and the other is the same simile from Iliad 4 that Vergil reworked to describe the bull’s charge: jOla hak\ssgr and joq}ssetai (sinum trahit) point clearly to the adaptation (cf. Il. 4.422, 424). Vergil’s choice of Homeric model thus points again to the confrontation of Amycus and Polydeuces in the Argonautica, which in turn looks forward to the charging bulls of Arg. 3.1293 – 5.19 16 The association of Poseidon with bulls — witnessed most dramatically in the death of Hippolytus — is also important here and in the Georgics passage. 17 The simile is later instantiated in the narrative at 2.580 – 7. 18 Cf. Arg. 2.806 – 8, 4.593, 649 – 53, and the remarks of A. R. Rose, WS 97 (1984), 125. 19 Apollonius’ account of Jason’s struggle with the bulls very likely contains echoes of Callimachus’ Hecale. This lends colour to the suggestion (cf. Thomas ad loc.) that Georg. 3.232 – 4 is indebted to Call. fr. 732 Pf., pokk± l\tgm jeq\essim 1r A´qa hul^mamta a verse of uncertain authorship which has been ascribed, with some probability, to the Hecale.

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Vergil’s technique of allusion here is familiar enough, although a thorough investigation of how he used the Hellenistic epic remains a major desideratum.20 Other parallels between the two passages have less significance, but two further points may be mentioned. The shadow-boxing of Georg. 3.233 – 4 has its parallel in Arg. 2.45 – 7, where Polydeuces prepares for the fight. In both poems careful preparation is to pay off against an arrogant and careless opponent. Secondly, there is the phrase irasci in cornua (line 232). With more or less confidence, editors see here a borrowing from the only earlier instance of the phrase in extant literature, Eur. Bacch. 743, taOqoi d’ rbqista· j!r j]qar hulo}lemoi (of animals attacked by the bacchants). If this is correct — and caution in such matters is always necessary — then it is noteworthy that Malcolm Campbell has argued21 that Apollonius’ description of the contest of Amycus and Polydeuces is indebted to the Euripidean confrontation of Pentheus and Dionysus: the calm, beautiful young man confronts the brutish, ‘earthborn’ tyrant.22 Campbell also argued that oQmypºr of Polydeuces at Theocr. 22.34 showed that Theocritus had picked up the resonance of Apollonius’ account. Does Georg. 3.233 – 4 show that these allusions were not lost on Vergil? Opinions will differ, but no one will want to underestimate his appreciation of detail and nuance in the Argonautica.23

Addenda The study of Virgil’s use of Apollonius was notably advanced by D. Nelis, Vergil’s Aeneid and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (Leeds 2001); cf. also The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies, Chapter 7. p. 91 I should certainly have cited Eros as a boxer at Sophocles, Trachiniae 441 – 2. p. 93 On Arg. 2.70 – 3 cf. M. P. Cuypers, Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 1 – 310, A Commentary (Diss. Leiden 1997) 70 – 6. 20 For Apollonius’ influence on the Georgics, cf. the brief survey of W. W. Briggs in H. Temporini and W. Haase (edd.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 31.2 (Berlin/New York, 1981), pp. 955 – 8. 21 ‘Three Notes on Alexandrine Poetry’, Hermes 102 (1974), 38 – 46, at 38 – 41. 22 H. Fränkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich, 1968), p. 157, had cited Eur. Bacch. 543 – 4 in this connection, but he did not pursue the parallel. 23 I am grateful to Michael Reeve for his comments on an earlier version of this note.

6. Greek and Non-Greek in the Argonautica of Apollonius* Jason’s expedition for the Golden Fleece might almost have been designed as a narrative of cultural and racial difference and interaction. By the Hellenistic period, the geography and people of Colchis were familiar enough to learned Greeks1, but the power of the mytho-poetic construct was far greater than the desire for ethnographic exactitude. The myth told of a journey to the ends of the earth2, a terrible confrontation with the unknown and the “other”, and the ultimate triumph of a Panhellenic crusade and of Greek technology and daring3. Indeed, scholars of Hellenistic and later antiquity rationalised the story as an account of early colonisation and the quest for gold (cf. Strabo 1, 2, 39), an explanation which draws our attention to just how easily the tale could be used to account for or justify various forms of cultural imperialism. The role of cultural difference in the epic has largely been studied from the point of view of what we might call the obviously “ethnographic” passages, such as the Pontic voyage in the second half of Book 2. Here Apollonius is clearly working within the familiar pattern of Herodotean ethnography, which stresses inversion from a hellenocentric model4. Among my concerns in this paper will be the manner *

1

2 3 4

S. Said (ed.), EKKGNISLOS. Quelques jalons pour une histoire de l’identit grecque (Leiden 1991) 81 – 99 I am indebted to the participants in the Strasbourg colloquium for much instructive discussion and to Philip Hardie and Dorothy Thompson for their comments on a written version of this paper. Cf. pp. 16 – 17 of Vol. II of Vian’s edition. The evidence for Ptolemaic interest in the Black Sea area continues to grow, cf. the contributions (in Russian with English summaries) of N. L. Grach in Vestnik Drevnei Historii, 1984, pp. 81 – 88 and L.Y. Treister, ibid., 1985, pp. 126 – 139. For Phasis as the world’s eastern boundary cf. my note on 3, 678 – 680. Cf. now M. Fantuzzi, “La censura delle Simplegadi: Ennio, Medea, fr. 1 Jocelyn”, QUCC n.s. 31 (1989), pp. 119 – 129. Cf. M. Fusillo, Il tempo delle Argonautiche, Rome, 1985, pp. 162 – 167. Among the most important Herodotean contributions are M. Rosellini and S. Said, “Usage des femmes et autres nomoi chez les ‘sauvages’ d’Hérodote: essai de lec-

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in which Apollonius complicates and problematises the essential dichotomy at the heart of the Herodotean system, although I shall not deal directly with his ethnographies. More fundamentally, I want to raise the question of why a third-century Alexandrian poet, writing under royal patronage and, indeed, occupying perhaps the principal “academic” position available under that patronage, should write an Argonautica. The well-springs of such a lengthy artistic achievement are, of course, destined to remain hidden from us, but this aspect of the question deserves far wider airing than it usually receives. Both the date and place of composition of the poem in something like its final form are matters of debate, but the assumption of composition in Alexandria around the middle of the third century B.C., i. e. in the later stages of the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, is unlikely to be dangerously misleading5. The intellectual life and Weltanschauung of third-century Alexandria is a subject endlessly rich in opportunity for speculation. Thus, for example, certain features of Alexandrian poetry – its “realism” (of a very special kind), its high literariness and allusiveness – have recently been ascribed to a “cultural identity-crisis” allegedly experienced by Greek intellectuals in this new city perched on the edge of a barbarian wasteland, far from the seats of traditional Greek culture and without the ties of the traditional Greek colony6. The idea has its attractions, and it can be helpfully adduced to account in part for the importance in Alexandrian poetry of aetiology and of foundation legends of the remote Greek past. It would be easy enough to construct a reading of the Libyan adventures of the Argonauts in the fourth book as an allegory of the Alexandrian Greeks lost in the cultural desert of North Africa, saved only when they reach Euhesperides (modern Benghazi), a town whose attachment to the Ptolemaic cultural orbit was celebrated by the change of its name to Berenike in honour of the Cyrenean princess who married Ptolemy III Euergetes in 247 B.C.7; moreover, the second factor in their salvation is that, like Xen-

5 6

7

ture structurale”, ASNP3 8 (1978), pp. 949 – 1005; and F. Hartog, Le miroir d’Hrodote, Paris, 1980 [English trans., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988]. For a recent survey cf. pp. 1 – 9 of my edition of Book 3 (Cambridge, 1989). Realism: G. Zanker, “The Nature and Origin of Realism in Alexandrian Poetry”, A&A, 29 (1983), pp. 125 – 145; literariness: P. Bing, The Well-Read Muse, Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Hypomnemata, 90), Göttingen, 1988, pp. 74 – 75. The whole of Bing’s discussion (pp. 50 – 90) is of considerable interest; see too the suggestive remarks of G. W. Most in Hermes, 109 (1981), pp. 188 – 189. Cf. RE, 3, 284 – 286.

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ophon’s mercenaries (Anab. 4, 7, 24), they reach the sea (4, 1537 – 1619), a traditional touchstone of Greek consciousness. Be that as it may, such psychological reconstructions must be tempered with a little reflection. Alexandria was in many respects a Greek, rather than a Graeco-Egyptian, city, loosely attached to Egypt rather than a part of it. It was only natural for Alexandrians to associate themselves more with the large areas of the Aegean under Ptolemaic control or influence than with the Egyptian chora at their backs8. Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos is proof enough of that. Some scholars have argued further for an early Ptolemaic period in which, with official encouragement, Greek intellectuals took an interest in Egypt and its people, an interest which gradually withered as the third century progressed and the scholars became more inward-looking, more solely dependent upon the Greek intellectual heritage which they guarded, whereas others have seen persistent neglect by most Greek intellectuals of all things Egyptian9. On either view the high poetry of Alexandria would largely belong to a period when traditional Greek attitudes towards barbaroi reigned supreme. Using this “fact” in a reading of the poems, however, is a particularly delicate business. Callimachus, Apollonius and – for part of his career – Theocritus wrote under royal patronage, and the Ptolemies not only depended upon Egyptian wealth but also very clearly adopted Egyptian religious and institutional customs in their conduct of the kingship. Moreover, the very meaning, juridical and otherwise, which is to be attached to the terms “Hellene” and “Egyptian” in the context of Ptolemaic Egypt remains, at the very least, a matter of debate10. The whole ques8 For this general picture cf., e. g., C. H. Roberts, “Literature and Society in the Papyri”, MH, 10 (1953), pp. 264 – 279; R. Merkelbach, “Das Königtum der Ptolemäer und die hellenistischen Dichter”, in N. Hinske (ed.), Alexandrien (Aegyptiaca Treverensia, I), Mainz am Rhein, 1981, pp. 27 – 35. 9 For a change cf., e. g. Roberts, op. cit. (n. 8); O. Murray, “Hecataeus of Abdera and Pharaonic Kingship”, JEA, 56 (1970), pp. 141 – 171; Bing, op. cit. (n. 6), p. 134, n. 82; against this view, E. G. Turner in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. 2, VII, 1, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 126 – 128. For a recent attempt to trace specifically Ptolemaic themes in Alexandrian poetry cf. H. Maehler, “Poésie alexandrine et art hellénistique à Memphis”, Chronique d’gypte, 63 (1988), pp. 113 – 136. 10 Cf. R. S. Bagnall, “Greeks and Egyptians: Ethnicity, Status, and Culture”, in Cleopatra’s Egypt, Age of the Ptolemies, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, 1988, pp. 21 – 27; K. Goudriaan, Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt, Amsterdam, 1988; D. J. Thompson, Memphis under the Ptolemies, Princeton, 1988,

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tion of Egypt and Egyptians was likely to have been one where court poets trod cautiously. Attic drama, which was so intensively studied in Alexandria, regularly presented Egypt as a barbarous and contemptible land, but such attitudes could clearly not be replicated in Ptolemy’s court. Too much weight should not be placed upon the remark of the absurd Praxinoa in Theocritus’ fifteenth Idyll: pokk\ toi, § Ptokela?e, pepo_gtai jak± 5qca 1n ¨ 1m !ham\toir b tej~m· oqde·r jajoeqc¹r dake?tai t¹m Q|mta paq]qpym AQcuptist_, oXa pq·m 1n !p\tar jejqotgl]moi %mdqer 5paisdom, !kk\koir blako_, jaj± pa_wmia, p\mter !qa?oi.

(Theocr., 15, 46 – 50)

“You have done many good things, Ptolemy, since your father joined the immortals. No villain sneaks up on you like an Egyptian while you’re going along and does you mischief—the sorts of tricks those slippery rascals used to pull. They’re all as bad as each other, a nasty little handful, a cursed bunch!”

Far from showing that “Theocritus seems to participate … with Callimachus in a conspiracy never to reveal that Egypt is not a Greek land”, as one perceptive critic of these poems has put it11, this passage – with its witty satire on ignorance and prejudice – points clearly enough to a non-Greek Egypt ruled by Greek monarchs. (How Ptolemy understood the verses, if he ever read them, is a subject thankfully beyond conjecture.) Moreover, Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy praises the racial and cultural diversity of Egypt (17, 77 – 85), and it is thus obvious that the Ptolemaic court was not the right place for strident assertions of Greek cultural and racial superiority12. Too much loose talk about barbaroi may have been rather too close to the bone. In fact, Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus all fail (like Homer) to register a single example of the simple form b\qbaqor. Tomorrow’s papyrus may, of course, render this assertion untrue, but it is at the moment a modest fact perhaps worthy of note. Moreover, Callimachus’ pp. 82 – 105; more generally, W. Peremans, “Égyptiens et étrangers dans l’ Égypte ptolémaique”, in Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt, VIII. Grecs et Barbares, Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1962, pp. 121 – 166. 11 F. T. Griffiths, Theocritus at Court, Leiden, 1979, p. 85. Griffiths’ discussion of the “obliteration” of Egypt in Alexandrian poetry is a helpful treatment of the subject. 12 Cf. P. R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Imperium’, Oxford, 1986, pp. 129 – 131.

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one example of baqbaqij|r occurs in a rather interesting context. In the Hymn to Delos, the unborn Apollo tells his mother not to bear him on Kos for this is destined to be the birthplace of Ptolemy Philadelphus; the foetus then goes on to prophesy a time when both he and Ptolemy will have trouble with Celts – the reference is to the attack on Delphi in 279 and to a revolt by some of Ptolemy’s Gallic mercenaries which was put down at some time in the mid to late 270 s: ja_ v} pote num|r tir 1ke}setai %llim %ehkor vsteqom, bpp|tam oR l³m 1v’ :kk^messi l\waiqam baqbaqijµm ja· Jekt¹m !mast^samter -qga ax_comoi Tit/mer …

(Call. H. 4 [Delos], 171 – 174)

“One day in the future a common struggle shall come upon us, when the late-born Titans raise up barbarian sword and Celtic war against the Hellenes…”

The only other example of “Hellenes” in Callimachus also occurs in the context of this Gallic invasion (fr. 379 Pf.) 13, and here we may be able to glimpse one of the ways in which the Ptolemies exploited the rich Greek inheritance of “anti-barbarian” rhetoric without exposing too much their own questionable status. The Greeks’ successful fifth-century defence against the Persians was the main source and inspiration of “anti-barbarian” rhetoric in classical literature and ideology14. The successors of Alexander, the “liberator” of Egypt from the Persians, inherited Athens’ patriotic mantle, and were able to adapt the rhetoric to fit a new situation, just as it had been adapted in the fourth century to accommodate the rise of Macedon. Thus we find the struggle against the Persians invoked in the Athenian decree of (?) 268/7 B.C. which marks the alliance of Athens, Sparta and Ptolemy at the start of the so-called “Chremonidean War” against Macedon, a decree which

13 !m\stasim in v. 2 and !mast^samter in the Hymn suggest self-variation by Callimachus in these two passages. 14 On this whole subject see now E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, Oxford, 1989. Hall observes (p. 13) that “by far the most important area in which Greek and barbarian are polarised in classical Greek rhetoric is political”; the rhetoric was that of the democratic polis, and Ptolemaic Alexandria was certainly not that.

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hails Ptolemy as a tireless fighter for Greek freedom15 ; at the very least, Ptolemy will not have been displeased with the rhetoric. The fact that the Egyptians stand first after the Persians in the opening catalogue of attacking forces in Aeschylus’ Persai (vv. 33 – 40) shows just how the traditional rhetoric had to be stood on its head by the Ptolemies. So too the almost total silence about Egypt in the Argonautica 16 must be seen as a deliberate reversal of Herodotus’ Egyptian narrative, the longest and most prominent part of his account of the Persian empire. The silence speaks of how much has changed since Herodotus wrote. In the Hymn to Artemis Callimachus refers to the attack upon the temple of Artemis at Ephesus by invaders from the north in the seventh century B.C.: t_i Na ja· Aka_mym !kapan]lem Ape_kgse K}cdalir rbqist^r . 1p· d³ stqat¹m Rppglokc_m Ecace Jilleq_ym xal\hyi Usom, oV Na paq’ aqt|m jejkil]moi ma_ousi bo¹r p|qom Ymawi~mgr. ü deik¹r bqot_m, fsom Ekitem . oq c±q 5lekkem out’ aqt¹r Sjuh_gmde pakilpet³r oute tir %kkor fssym 1m keil_mi Jaustq_yi 5stam ûlanai most^seim . 9v]sou c±q !e· te± t|na pq|jeitai.

(Call. H. 3 (Artemis), 251 – 258)

“In his madness the outrageous Lygdamis threatened to sack your temple. He brought against it an army of horse-milking Cimmerians, numberless as the sand, who live hard by the Strait of the Cow, daughter of Inachus. O wretched king, what a sin he committed! He was not destined to return again to Scythia, nor were any whose wagons stood in the Caystrian plain; for your bow is always set in front of Ephesus.”

It is an old, and now largely discredited, belief 17 that these verses hint at contemporary attacks upon Ephesus by Celtic invaders. This is not a view I wish to revive. Rather, I wish to stress that there seems every reason to suspect a “Ptolemaic” context for the verses, even if we cannot identify it with any precision. Ephesus was won and lost by Ptolemy more than once in the middle years of the third century, and played 15 Cf. H. H. Schmidt (ed.), Die Staatsvertrge des Altertums, III, Munich, 1969, no. 476, II. 7 – 21 (pp. 129 – 130). For both this decree and the associated war cf. N. G. L. Hammond and F. W. Walbank, A History of Macedonia, III, Oxford, 1988, pp. 276 – 289. 16 For the “Sesostris” passage cf. the Appendix, below. 17 Cf., e. g., Bornmann’s edition, Florence, 1968, p. viii.

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an important role in dealings with the Seleucid empire18. More importantly, for our present purposes, Callimachus’ verses key us in, not only to Homer, but also to Herodotus’ Scythian ethnographies, which form a further significant part of his large-scale analysis of the clash of Greece and Persia. This again is the rhetoric which we should see behind the verses. The themes of hybris, sin and loss of nostos indeed suggest Aeschylus’ treatment of the Persian defeat in Persai. This Callimachean passage may merely be the tip of an iceberg, but our remains of Ptolemaic court poetry are too scanty to allow us to follow these developments in any detail19. In turning more directly to the Argonautica I begin from a detail in the passage just quoted from Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. The unborn Apollo calls the invading Celts “late-born Titans”, thus establishing Ptolemy as an “Olympian” protector of Greece, indeed as Zeus himself, an image confirmed by Ptolemaic iconography. In a recent book Philip Hardie has explored the use of Gigantomachic and Titanomachic imagery for “political” purposes in the ancient world20 ; he rightly observes that, despite this passage of Callimachus, the Ptolemaic situation was less appropriate for the use of such imagery than was the situation of, say, the Pergamene kings or the Roman emperors. Nevertheless, the fact that Colchis and the Colchians have very close links with the Titans – Medea is the great-granddaughter of a Titan, Prometheus the son of one21 – might encourage us to explore the Argonautica for resonances of this kind. I single out here the boxing match between Amycus and Polydeuces which opens Book 2. Amycus, king of the Bebrycians, a tribe inhabiting the land between the Propontis and the Black Sea, is a violent, uncivilised bully, characterised by both Apollonius and Theocritus with echoes of another son of 18 Cf. RE, 5, 2794; R. M. Berthold, Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age, Ithaca and London, 1984, pp. 89 – 90. 19 Of particular interest are the fragmentary elegiacs of Supplementum Hellenisticum 958, which have been interpreted as referring to Ptolemy II’s suppression of his Gallic mercenaries and to coming war with L/doi, i. e. Antiochus (so LloydJones and Parsons). The L/doi seem to be called rbqista_ te ja· %vqomer (v. 9) and are described as softly luxurious (vv. 15 – 16) in a way which clearly draws on the traditional fifth-century Attic picture of the eastern effeminate. If this interpretation of the fragment is correct, then it should be placed in the same context as the developments I have been discussing. 20 Hardie, op. cit. (n. 12), pp. 85 – 156. 21 Cf. my note on 3, 865.

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Poseidon, the Homeric Cyclops22. In imposing a fight upon any stranger who arrives, he is a clear example of a very prominent theme in the poem, that of correct and incorrect hospitality23. The setting of the centre of the poem in the Black Sea, which was called Axeinos, but then later Euxeinos24, foregrounds the theme of hospitality, much in the way that it is prominent in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Tauris, set in the same area. Critics have realised that Amycus’ fight with Polydeuces is presented as a clash between the forces of Olympian fairness and justice and dark, pre-Olympian chthonic forces, or as a kind of Gigantomachy, as made explicit in the comparison of Amycus to “a son of Typhoeus or a Giant” (2, 38 – 40 ; cf. Val. Flacc. Arg. 4, 236 – 238) 25. Heracles fought against Typhoeus in a poorly, but probably adequately, attested myth26 and against the Giants in some accounts of the Gigantomachy27 and in a euhemeristic version which presented the Giants as barbarous and uncivilised men exterminated by the hero as part of his civilising and hellenising function28. Polydeuces therefore here plays a Heraclean role, emphasised by the juxtaposition of this episode to the loss of Heracles at the end of Book 1, by Amycus’ instruction to the Argonauts to put up b %qistor against him (2, 15), and by reflections on Heracles’ absence at the end of the episode (2, 145 – 153). I shall return to Heracles in a moment, after having first noted one further aspect of how this fight is presented as a victory for specifically Hellenic values. Polydeuces is like the victorious recipient of a Pindaric epinician: he gleams with 22 Cf. my note on 3, 176 – 181. Valerius Flaccus (Arg., 4, 104 – 343) makes the similarity to the Cyclops explicit, and his Amycus narrative borrows heavily from Vergil’s “Cyclops” episode (Aen., 3, 588 – 691). 23 For this theme cf. A. R. Rose, “Three Narrative Themes in Apollonius’ Bebrykian Episode (Argonautika 2, 1 – 163)”, WS, n.f. 18 (1984), pp. 115 – 135. 24 Cf. Strabo, 7, 3, 6. The change is generally explained by modern scholars as euphemistic. 25 Cf. H. Frankel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios, Munich, 1968, pp. 157 – 158; Id. in TAPA , 83 (1952), p. 146; Rose, op. cit. (n. 23), p. 124. The great noise of the fight (2, 83 – 84) may be seen as an almost humorous re-use of the great noise of cosmic battles (cf. Hes., Theog., 678 – 683, 858). The use of pkgc^ for the strike of the thunderbolt makes the parallelism an easy one. The end of Typhoeus, 1pe· d^ lim d\lasse pkgc/isim Rl\ssar, / Eqipe cuiyhe_r (Theog., 857 – 858), could easily be the end of a boxer. 26 Cf. Bond on Eur., HF, 1217 f.; A. Loyen, “Hercule et Typhée”, in Mlanges … Alfred Ernout, Paris, 1940, pp. 237 – 245. 27 Cf. Pindar, Nem., 1, 67. 28 Cf. F. Vian, “La guerre des géants devant les penseurs de l’antiquité”, REG, 65 (1952), pp. 1 – 39, esp. pp. 11 – 15.

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the erotic power we associate with Pindaric victors29, “like the star in the heavens, whose rays are the most beautiful when it appears in the dark evening sky” (2, 40 – 42). After his victory he is celebrated with a hymnos, as befits the victor (2, 161 – 163); whether we are to imagine an actual epinician ode30, a poem such as the first part of Theocritus 22 (the Hymn to the Dioscuri) — and it is a nice thought that Apollonius here alludes to Theocritus’ poem (or vice versa) —, or perhaps rather the ‘Hymn to Hercules’ at Aeneid, 8, 288 – 302 (which follows the destruction of Cacus, another chthonic monster) may be left open31. Certainly, however, the clear foreshadowing of Polydeuces’ divine status32 instantiates the familiar epinician theme of the “immortality” and the “divine grace” which is conferred on the victor. Thus the confrontation with Amycus is made to suggest a familiar pattern of Greek aristocratic heroics, rather than the brutal contest envisaged by the Bebrycian king. We do not know enough about how poets presented specifically Ptolemaic themes to attempt anything so banal as a straightforward equation between Polydeuces and Ptolemy or a reading of the episode as “cultural propaganda”. All we can do is to note the important place held by Heracles, who was of course Ptolemy’s ancestor33, and by the Dioscuri in royal cult and court poetry34, and the insistent theme of the success of traditional Greek aristocratic values which permeates this episode. If we cannot place the episode within a Ptolemaic context, we may nevertheless be prepared to accept that such a context exists. In comparing Alexander to Heracles, Plutarch quotes the Euripidean Hera29 Cf. Pind., Pyth., 8, 96, the aUcka di|sdotor which attends victory. For the arousing beauty of the victor cf. the passages collected by C. M. Bowra, Pindar, Oxford, 1964, pp. 167 – 170. 30 Cf. Frankel, Noten…, op. cit. (n. 25), p. 164. In Valerius, Pollux receives an honorum carmen from Orpheus (Arg., 4, 342 – 343). 31 vlmor occurs in Arg. only at 2, 161, and its only occurrence in Homer is Od, 8, 429 of Demodocus’ song, but the context there also associates it closely with Odysseus’ triumph in the Phaeacian “games”. 32 Cf. 2, 806 – 810; Rose, op. cit. (n. 23), p. 126. 33 Cf. Theocr., 17, 20 – 33. For a rather over-elaborate “Heraclean” reading of Theocritus 24 cf. L. Koenen, Eine agonistische Inschrift aus gypten und frhptolemische Kçnigsfeste, Meisenheim am Glan, 1977, pp. 79 – 86; Griffiths, op. cit. (n. 11), also has much of value. For the divinity of the Ptolemies in general cf. A. W. Bulloch, MH, 41 (1984), pp. 212 – 214 and Thompson, op. cit. (n. 10), pp. 125 – 138 (both with good bibliography). 34 Cf. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Oxford, 1972, I, p. 207.

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cles’ catalogue of the monsters sent against him, including “Typhons and Giants” (Mor. 341e, alluding to Eur. HF 1271 – 1273); Heracles was Greece’s greatest benefactor and already in the fourth century Isocrates held him up to Philip as a model for a proposed Hellenic campaign to the east (Phil. 109 – 115). Again it may be that an extant Alexandrian text merely allows us to glimpse what was a much more widely used political symbol. Here perhaps belongs the sculptural type of two wrestlers, the victor a handsome youth wearing a diadem and the loser a man of obviously non-Greek physiognomy, which has been interpreted as symbolising the victory of the Ptolemies over their barbarian enemies35. The matter is, of course, quite uncertain, but the statuettes perhaps lend credence to the suspicion that there is greater “political” depth in this Apollonian scene than is usually assumed. Secondly, we may now see how the fight with Amycus has ramifications for a reading of the epic as a whole. The story of the Argonauts’ expedition, particularly in Apollonius’ version, is a story of growth, transition, rite de passage36. The epic shows how the “heroic” age is defined, how it grew out of what came before, just as the many aitia and foundation legends in the poem tell the material story of Greek civilisation. In this context the replacement of one kind of value by another is particularly important. Apollonius has reshaped Hesiod’s myth of Five Ages: the lawless bronze generation, not very different from the Giants37, is replaced by the juster generation of heroes. We see the slow but certain success of ultimately Hellenic values, celebrated in annual cult, just as the annual repetition of the epic (4, 1774 – 1775) ensures the kleos of the heroes and of the Argonautica in particular. In one sense the expedition covers all of time, as Argos’ narrative of “prehistoric” conquest and settlement in Book 4 makes clear (cf. the Appendix). From Argos we learn that the evolution began with an Egyptian; the final result is Ptolemaic culture. I wish now to move to consider these themes in connection with the principal Colchian protagonists of the epic, Aietes and Medea. Francis Vian has observed that in Book 3 there is a clear presentation of 35 Cf. H. Kyrieleis, “JAHAPEQ EQLGS JAI YQOS”, Antike Plastik, 12 (1973), pp. 133 – 146; Mind and Body, Athletic Contests in Ancient Greece Exhibition Catalogue, MALA, 1989), pp. 165 – 166. I am grateful to Mme Anne Jacquemin of Strasbourg for drawing my attention to these statuettes. 36 Cf. R. L. Hunter, “‘Short on Heroics’: Jason in the Argonautica”, CQ, 38 (1988), pp. 436 – 453 [= this volume 59 – 85], esp. pp. 448 – 452. 37 Cf. West on Hes., Theog., 50; my note on 3, 217 – 218.

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Aietes as an oriental despot and of Medea as a young girl in whom the conflict between barbarism and hellenism plays itself out38. In the poem as a whole, however, the situation is rather more nuanced. The Colchian king is a complex literary portrayal deserving far closer study than I can offer here. A violent temper and a penchant for deceit and tyranny obviously oppose him not only to the quasi-democratic structures aboard the Argo, but also to Lemnos as it is governed by its women and to the Drepane of Alcinous and Arete. But Colchis has no monopoly on tyranny, as Pelias shows, and there are some apparently inconsistent elements in this picture of barbarian nastiness. Early references to Aietes establish an opposition between Greece and Colchis39, but there is no early suggestion that he is something of an inhospitable monster. The first word of reproach is the adjective ako|r which Jason applies to him in a highly problematic (and ? deceptive) speech (2, 890), where at the very least the word cannot be taken as an unmediated authorial description of the Colchian king40. More surprising in retrospect may seem Argos’ description to the Argonauts of Phrixos’ reception at the court of Aietes after he arrived on the flying sheep: t¹m l³m 5peit’ 5qqenem 2/ir rpohglos}mgisi Vun_yi 1j p\mtym Jqom_dgi Di_, ja_ lim 5dejto AQ^tgr lec\qyi, jo}qgm t] oR 1ccu\kine Wakji|pgm !m\edmom eqvqos}mgisi m|oio· t_m 1n !lvot]qym eQl³m c]mor. !kk’ b l³m Edg cgqai¹r h\me Vq_nor 1m AQ^tao d|loisim.

(2, 1146 – 1151)

“Phrixos sacrificed the ram to Zeus Phuxios, and Aietes received him in his palace and, well disposed towards him, gave him in marriage his daughter Chalciope, without receiving a bride-price for her. We are their children. Phrixos died an old man in Aietes’ palace…”

I am interested here not in the apparent contradiction between this account and what Aietes himself later tells his subjects (3, 584 ff.), but rather with the Homeric pattern into which Aietes is here fitted. The pattern is that of the Phaeacian king Alcinous whose apparent desire 38 Cf. pp. 19 – 21 of Volume II of Vian’s edition. 39 Cf. 1, 245, 337. The theme reappears most importantly at 4, 190 – 205 (for which cf. Hunter, op. cit. [n. 36], pp. 439 – 440 and 452). 40 For the problems and interpretation of this speech cf. Hunter, op. cit. (n. 36), pp. 447 – 448.

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to marry off his daughter to a newly arrived stranger, whose identity he does not yet know (Od. 7, 311 – 315), has caused many critics, ancient and modern, to scratch their heads; Alcinous would certainly have allowed Odysseus to grow old gracefully in his palace, as Phrixos did in Colchis. This is by no means the only link between Aietes and the Homeric Alcinous, as the description of the Colchian royal palace and its marvels is heavily indebted to the description of Alcinous’ palace in Odyssee 741. On the other hand, very clear echoes associate Aietes with the grim and uncivilised Cyclops42. What is going on here? No one will doubt the lasting influence of the Homeric poems on the shaping of Hellenic identity and consciousness, particularly as they are reflected in high literature. Just as Odysseus oscillates between the society of the Cyclopes, whose solitary, autarkic lives without “market-places, where decisions are taken, and legal ordinances” define by opposition the value of the settled community, and the hyper-civilisation of the Phaeacians whose nearness to the gods is a dangerous over-stepping of boundaries, so the person of Aietes and his Colchian court combine elements of both extremes, thereby interpreting and giving a more solid reality to the tantalising links and similarities between Cyclopes, Phaeacians and Giants at which Homer hints. When Aietes functions as the traditional good host of epic, as he does when the sons of Phrixos arrive back at his court together with representatives of the Argonauts (3, 299 – 303), or adopts the standard value language in apparently inappropriate circumstances – “for it is not right for a man born agathos to yield to a kakoteros”, he asserts to Jason in explaining why the latter must prove himself against the fire-breathing bulls before being given the Fleece (3, 420 – 421) – we should not too hastily assume that this is to be read merely as cynical hypocrisy (though that is an important element of it). The depiction of Aietes – like the epic as a whole and, indeed, like Ptolemaic culture itself – challenges the oppositions and values of the Odyssey and, by implication, the apparent security of the Hellenic self-definition as we see it in Odysseus and his family. Medea also comes to the Argonautica with a rich dowry of literary and mythical associations. She both imitates and changes the pattern of Helen, whose flight from Greece with a handsome stranger provoked a clash between Europe and Asia, of the kind envisaged by the Apollonian Alcinous as he tries to decide what to do with the fugitive Medea 41 Cf. my note on 3, 215 – 241. 42 Cf. my note on 3, 176 – 181.

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(4, 1103) 43. Hanging over the whole epic is the Euripidean Medea, a barbaros who discovers and exposes Greek treachery and the inadequacy of traditional Greek language to order the relations between the sexes. In a rationalising version possibly contemporary with the Argonautica44, Dionysius “Scytobrachion” presented Medea as a kind of “honorary Greek” living in the wild and barbarous Pontus: while Aietes is characterised by ¡l|tgr, Medea’s main virtue is a merciful Bleq|tgr, which caused her to plead for the lives of strangers who were washed up on the coast. The opposition of these two qualities is, of course, a leitmotif of Greek discussions of Greek identity; most relevantly, we may recall Theophrastus’ definition of education as “a making gentle (BleqoOm) of men’s souls, taking away that which is animal-like and unfeeling (t¹ hgqi_der ja· %cmylom), so that character becomes more at one with others ( joim|teqa) and more flexible (rcq|teqa)” (Stobaeus, II, p. 240 W). We recognise this motif from a similar context in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. In that play, the Greek virgin who was spirited away from imminent death to serve as Artemis’ priestess on the inhospitable Tauric coast reveals how her attitude has changed since she has been convinced by a dream that her last hope, her brother Orestes, has died: § jaqd_a t\kaima, pq·m l³m 1r n]mour cakgm¹r Gsha ja· vikoijt_qlym !e_, 1r hoql|vukom !maletqoul]mg d\jqu, >kkgmar %mdqar Bmij’ 1r w]qar k\boir. mOm d’ 1n ame_qym oXsim Acqi~leha d}smoum le k^xesh’, oVtim]r poh’ Ejete.

(Euripides, IT 344 – 350)

“In former times, my heart, you were placid and fall of pity towards strangers, bestowing tears upon those who shared your race whenever Greek men fell into your hands. But now that dreams have turned me wild (%cqior), you strangers, whoever you are, will find me no kindly host (d}smour).”

This passage makes very clear the link between being “Greek” and the exercise of certain virtues. Just as Aietes in part confounds traditional literary patterns of defining “Greekness”, so too does Medea. Her responses to the emotional 43 Cf. R. L. Hunter, “Medea’s Flight: the Fourth Book of the Argonautica”, CQ, 37 (1987), pp. 129 – 139 [= this volume 42 – 58], esp. p. 138. 44 Cf. p. 20 of my edition of Book 3.

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crisis which Jason’s appearance precipitates are couched in the very traditional language of aidos as it applies to the female (3, 766 – 801); she is scared of public opinion and of bringing disgrace upon her family, and she recognises that any dealings with Jason will be interpreted as laqcos}mg (3, 791 – 797). Her association with death, magic and chthonic powers, on the other hand, is not merely – though it is this also – a way of representing the female “other” (Greek, Colchian, or whatever), but is also a challenge to the inherited pattern of “Hellene” and “barbarian”. It is she, Jason tells his men, who is the benefactor of Greece and saviour of the Argonauts (4, 190 – 198); Jason’s rhetoric makes of her too an “honorary Greek”. The deep irony is that she has in part been persuaded to help by the effect of Jason’s words at their meeting in Book 3 at the temple of Hecate. There Jason held out to her the promise of enjoying the benefits of Greek civilisation, in which disputes are settled by consensus (3, 1100). This is sophisticated deceit, as Apollonius’ text makes clear and as every reader of Euripides’ Medea knows; even the Greek origins of civilisation are to be challenged by Argos’ narrative in Book 4. Jason’s deceit is also a very Greek deceit, relying on the quasi-magical power of muthos whose praises Jason has sung before his first meeting with Aietes (3, 186 – 190) and of which Medea is to prove herself mistress when she lures her brother to his death in the fourth book. This is, however, one gift of Greek civilisation which Medea is to come to regret.

Appendix: The Return Journey and the Route of Aeneas I have already had occasion to refer more than once to Argos’ speech at 4, 257 – 293 in which he tells the Argonauts how they should interpret Phineus’ prophecy that the return from Aia will be “a different journey”, 6teqor pk|or (2, 421). Argos takes his narrative back almost to the beginning of time, to a period before “evolution” was completed, when there were only the Arcadians “who are said to have lived before the moon” and the Egyptians. He tells of an expedition of conquest and settlement led from Egypt by an unnamed individual, among whose traces are maps left behind in his native city of Aia: oT d^ toi cqaptOr pat]qym 6hem eQq}omtai, j}qbiar oXr 5mi p÷sai bdo· ja· pe_qat’ 5asim

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rcq/r te tqaveq/r te p]qin 1pimisol]moisim.

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(4, 279 – 281)

The people of Aia preserve their fathers’ writings, pillars (kurbeis) on which are found all the routes and the boundaries for those travelling, both over land and sea.

It is well understood – and made explicit by both the scholia and Valerius Flaccus (5, 418 – 422) – that Apollonius has here borrowed from the legends of the Egyptian king Sesostris (or Sesoosis or Sesonchosis) of whose expedition Herodotus gives a memorable account (2, 102 – 110) 45 ; Herodotus (2, 103 – 104) makes Sesostris the founder of the Colchian kingdom and asserts the racial identity of Egyptians and Colchians. It is an attractive hypothesis that the pillars46 inscribed with maps of the world are an amusing rationalisation of Herodotus’ story that the king set up monumental pillars (stelai) in the lands that he conquered, and that when he had conquered easily and without too much of a fight he had an image of the female genitals drawn on the pillars “to show that his opponents lacked manly spirit” (Hdt. 2, 102). Apollonius may also have been influenced by the characteristic form of the Egyptian obelisk with which he must have been familiar47; if so, these kurbeis inscribed with maps will be a Graeco-Egyptian mixture of an almost programmatic kind. Be that as it may, it is quite likely that Apollonius’ most immediate source was the late fourth-century account of Hecataeus of Abdera, partly preserved for us in Book 1 of Diodorus Siculus48. Hecataeus seems to have made of Sesostris a brilliant forerunner of Alexander, who was of course the most obvious example of a world conqueror and founder of cities. Vergil recalls this passage of the Argonautica in Book 3 of the Aeneid when he describes how Anchises interprets the instruction of Delian Apollo that the Trojans should seek their antiquam matrem, the land which was the original home of their race:

45 On this Egyptian king and his legends cf. Lloyd’s commentary on Hdt., 2, 102 – 110, passim and Lexikon der gyptologie, V (1984), s.v. “Sesostris III”. 46 The meaning of j}qbiar is admittedly much disputed; cf. the notes of Livrea and Vian ad loc. The parallel/model of Sesostris’ stelai, however, suggests that it would not be misleading to think of publicly displayed pillars. 47 Cf. Lexikon der gyptologie, IV (1982), s.v. “Obelisk”. 48 Cf. Murray, op. cit. (n. 9); Fusillo, op.cit. (n. 4), pp. 53 – 54.

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tum genitor ueterum uoluens monimenta uirorum “audite, o proceres”, ait “et spes discite uestras. Creta Iouis magni medio iacet insula ponto, mons Idaeus ubi et gentis cunabula nostrae. centum urbes habitant magnas, uberrima regna, maximus unde pater, si rite audita recordor, Teucrus Rhoeteas primum est aduectus in oras, optauitque locum regno. nondum Ilium et arces Pergameae steterant; habitabant uallibus imis. hinc mater cultrix Cybeli Corybantiaque aera Idaeumque nemus, hinc fida silentia sacris, et iuncti currum dominae subiere leones. ergo agite et diuum ducunt qua iussa sequamur, placemus uentos et Cnosia regna petamus. nec longo distant cursu: modo Iuppiter adsit, tertia lux classem Cretaeis sistet in oris.”

(Aeneid 3, 102 – 117)

Anchises is, of course, mistaken, as si rite audita recordor in v. 107 hints, and on Crete the Penates appear to Aeneas to tell him that Italy must be his goal; Anchises’ mistake consists in not tracing the origins of the race far enough back. Why does Vergil recall Argos’ narrative in this place? As often, there are answers at more than one level. Egypt and Crete were both places of “origins”. In particular, both could claim to be the original sites of religion and cult49, and cunabula in v. 105 suggests the legend of Zeus’ birth on Crete, as does Curetum (v. 131) which resonates against Cretam (v. 129) to suggest an etymology for the island’s name; Apollonius uses the same pregnant juxtaposition at 2, 1233 – 1234 in the context of Zeus’ birth50. Moreover, Crete was one of the lands which was believed to have been anciently called )eq_a or Ieq_g, the name which the Apollonian Argos gives to Egypt51. There is then, as often, an element of scholarly one-upmanship in Vergil’s use of Apollonius. Furthermore, just as Argos’ speech introduces an unconventional, if not actually

49 For Crete cf. Sallust., Hist, 3, fr. 14 Maurenbrecher, quoted by Servius on Aen., 3, 104; for Egypt cf. Hdt., 2, passim; Diod. Sic, 1, 9, 6, etc. 50 For the etymology cf. Pliny, HN, 4, 58 (citing Anaximander, Philistides and Crates). 51 For )eq_a of Crete, cf. Steph. Byz., s.v. )eq_a·, Aulus Gellius, NA, 14, 6, 4; Pliny, HN, 4, 58; Hesychius, a 1391. The name is applied to Egypt as early as Aesch., Suppl., 75.

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novel52, itinerary for the Argonauts, so the Cretan adventures of Aeneas may have been Vergil’s invention53. The structural similarity merely emphasises the difference: Argos pushes the Argonauts into a primeval and fantastic world, whereas the Trojans approach Crete through the very familiar chain of Aegean islands. At a rather deeper level, the two passages point towards an instructive difference between the two works. To take first the sources adduced by Argos and Anchises. Argos appeals to Egyptian sacerdotal tradition and to a written (or drawn) record54. There is here a clear element of pure literary fun. The fantastic geography of the return trip is “authorised” by an appeal to a sacred record; the learned poet is thus spared the necessity of having to take the responsibility for his creation55. It is tempting to recall Callimachus’ famous !l\qtuqom oqd³m !e_dy (fr. 612 Pf.), ignorant though we are of the speaker and context of those words. There is, however, more to Apollonius’ strategy than this. As Vian and others have pointed out, Argos’ speech is very reminiscent of Critias’ account of Solon’s conversation with Egyptian priests in the early sections of Plato’s Timaeus (21e-25d). When Solon adduces the antiquity of the Flood (22b; cf. Arg. 4, 266), the priests point out how relatively recent this was and note that Egyptian temples preserve written records of deepest antiquity, whereas the rest of the world suffers periodic catastrophe by fire or flood which not only destroys everything but also wipes out knowledge of the art of writing which then has to be re-invented. There is no sign that Apollonius’ Argonauts can write, and this makes more pointed the miraculous and mysterious survival of the prehistoric maps in Aia. Here Apollonius has extended and sharpened a Homeric situation. In Homer the only certain56 reference to writing is the famous s^lata kucq\ in the story of Bellerophon (Iliad 6, 168 – 170), where the scholia reveal that the scholars of later antiquity tried desperately to find an analphabetic explanation. These mysterious 52 On Apollonius’ sources see the excellent account on pp. 16 – 20 of Volume III of Vian’s edition. 53 Cf. Williams on Aen., 3, 121 f. On this passage see now D. Quint, MD, 23 (1989), pp. 20 – 21. 54 We cannot tell for certain whether to envisage maps with inscribed captions and place-indications, or merely sketches. The former seems more likely; on the whole subject cf. O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps, London, 1985. 55 Cf. L. Pearson in AJP, 59 (1938), pp. 455 – 456. 56 The marking of the lots at Il., 7, 175 ff. suggests pre-literate signs rather than the use of the alphabet, cf. P. E. Easterling in JHS, 105 (1985), pp. 4 – 5.

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signs are, however, a thing of the past, preserved as a memory rather than as a science, and are in any case assigned to a non-Greek, Proetus the Lycian. Apollonius’ one apparent reference to writing or drawing has greatly expanded the Homeric time-scale, in keeping with a general tendency of his work. Moreover, the use of the Homeric hapax cqaptOr emphasises the remoteness of the maps. At its only appearance in Homer (Od. 24, 229) this rare noun means “scratches (from thorns)”, and “scratches” might indeed be appropriate for the ancient representations to which Argos refers. More importantly, however, Apollonius’ use of the word calls attention to the absence of writing in Homer: the noun that ought to mean “writings” is used for something much more down-to-earth. The description of Anchises ueterum uoluens monimenta uirorum is rather curious. “Pondering the traditions of men of old” translates Williams, noting that si rite audita recordor in v. 107 “defines” the sense “traditions”; Williams is following Conington who also correctly noted that uoluens suggests “the notion of unrolling a volume”57. Vergil’s phrase gestures towards the inscribed pillars in Aia, but no one will, of course, suggest that Anchises actually consults documents. This phrase ought, I think, to bother Vergilian critics more than it apparently does58, but what is important here is that this phrase firmly anchors the passage within the context of Augustan antiquarian researches into the early history of Rome; Egyptian traditions about lost civilisations are literally a world away from this. I suggest, therefore, that Apollonius and Vergil operate with two rather different time-scales, and some confirmation of this may be found in Aeneas’ casual reference to writing at 3, 286 – 288: aere cauo clipeum, magni gestamen Abantis, postibus aduersis figo et rem carmine signo: AENEAS HAEC DE DANAIS VICTORIBVS ARMA.

57 Cf. Aen., 1, 262 with Conington and Austin ad loc. 58 Aen., 8, 312: exquiritque auditque uirum monimenta priorum (Aeneas with Evander), merely reinforces the oddness. Dr. Neil Wright has suggested to me that the meaning might be “recalling [the inscriptions on] the statues of men of old” or “recalling [what he had been told was on] the statues of men of old”; this is certainly a distinct improvement on the vague “traditions”. The closest Apollonian parallel (in a somewhat similar context) is perhaps 4, 1747 – 1748, heopqop_ar :j\toio / hul_i pelp\fym.

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This is, admittedly, an isolated reference, put in the mouth of Aeneas rather than the narrator, but the significant difference from both Apollonius and Homer remains. In following Argos’ advice the Argonauts in part retrace not only an expedition from the dimmest pre-history, but also a cosmogony itself. An echo of the opening of the description of Hephaestus’ shield (Iliad 18, 485 ~ Arg. 4, 261) takes us back before the construction of the universe was completed59. The passage past the scene of Phaethon’s catastrophe and the meeting with Circe’s “Empedoclean” creatures suggests that the Argonauts’ voyage is also a voyage through time. As the journey nears its end, the Argonauts meet Talos, the last remnant of the Bronze Age which preceded the Age of Heroes (4, 1641 – 1642), are plunged into a “black chaos” (4, 1697) from which Apolline light (? and enlightenment) saves them60, and then take part in the creation and destruction of islands through the clod which Triton gave to Euphemos. For the Argonautica the “present” is a time before Homer, before the beginning; the “past”, therefore, is a distant, all-embracing emptiness waiting for the poet to fill it. Anchises’ speech, like its Homeric model61, takes the history of Troy back before the foundation of the city to a time when people still lived in the forests. When Aeneas reaches Italy, Evander is able to take the story back to primitive, pre-Saturnian man (8, 314 – 320) 62, but in general Vergil’s interest in time is more concentrated and intense than that of Apollonius. At one level the Aeneid commemorates a new beginning for time, marked by Aeneas’ foundation of the Roman line. Whereas Homer began his shield with the encircling stars – or, as later scholars would have it, with the beginning of the universe – Vergil begins his with the immediate descendants of Aeneas (8, 628 – 629). Anchises’ great speech in the Underworld does indeed begin with a “phil59 For cosmogonical readings of Homer’s shield cf. Hardie, op. cit. (n. 12), passim and Id., “Imago mundi: Cosmogonical and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles”, JHS, 105 (1985), pp. 11 – 31. 60 For primeval chaos cf. Hes., Theog., 116. Hesiod juxtaposes the Olympian and Apolline opening of his poem to this dark and blank beginning of the universe. 61 Iliad, 20, 216 – 218 (Aeneas to Achilles). 62 Aen., 8, 315: gensque uirum truncis et duro robore nata, may well, of course, allude specifically to the Hesiodic Bronze Race, born from ash-trees (cf. Arg., 4, 1642, West on Hes., WD, 145 – 146), but the difference in emphasis in the time structures of the two poems remains.

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osophical” cosmogony before passing to eschatology, but this first part63 is rather impersonal and set off from the “Parade of Heroes” in such a way that the two sections seem not merely consecutive but also parallel. The beginning of the Dardania proles is the beginning of a new history which will reach its climax in Augustus. Vergil has here learned from Apollonius, and has brought into sharper focus what the Greek poet chose to leave merely suggested and suggestive.

Addenda pp. 96 – 7 The ‘Egyptian element’ in Alexandrian poetry has been the subject of prominent and generally enlightening debate; there is a survey and some bibliography in my Theocritus. Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus 46 – 53. S.A. Stephens, Seeing double: intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley 2003) offers a good introduction, as well as a strong version, of the ‘Egyptianising’ reading. n. 10 On ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Egyptians’ cf. also D. J. Thompson, ‘Hellenistic Hellenes: the case of Ptolemaic Egypt’ in I. Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Washington DC 2001) 301 – 22, and W. Clarysse and D. J. Thompson, Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt (Cambridge 2002) Vol. 2, 138 – 47 and passim. pp. 98 – 9 On the absence of b\qbaqor from Hellenistic poetry cf. further Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 357 – 8 and The Shadow of Callimachus 121 – 4. n. 19 On SH 958 cf. S. Barbantani, V\tir mijgv|qor. Frammenti di elegia encomiastica nell’et delle Guerre Galatiche: Supplementum Hellenisticum 958 e 969 (Milan 2001). n. 35 On depictions such as the king as a wrestler cf. L. Koenen in A. Bulloch et al. (eds.), Images and Ideologies. Self-definition in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley 1993) 45 – 6.

63 On the relation between the two parts of the speech see esp. Hardie, op. cit. (n. 12), pp. 66 – 83.

7. Callimachus and Heraclitus* eWp] tir, Jq\jkeite, te¹m l|qom 1r d] le d\jqu Ecacem, 1lm^shgm d’ bss\jir !lv|teqoi A]kiom k]swgi jated}salem. !kk± s» l]m pou, ne?m’ *kijaqmgseO, tetq\pakai spod_g, aR d³ tea· f~ousim !gd|mer, Hisim b p\mtym "qpajtµr )_dgr oqj 1p· we?qa bake?.

It is a natural interpretation of this famous poem1 that Heraclitus wrote poetry; for what it is worth, Strabo (14, 556) refers to him as b poigt^r and Diogenes Laertius (9, 17) as 1kece_ar poigt^r2. Anth. Pal. 7, 465 (= Gow-Page, The Greek Anthology. Hellenistic Epigrams, 11. 1935 – 1942) 3 is generally ascribed to him, after correction of the transmitted ascriptions to Jq\jkgtor or Jqajke_dgr. Poems commemorating the immortality of someone’s poetry regularly seek to capture its flavour4, or indeed to allude to or re-write some of it, and it would therefore seem reasonable to wonder about the relationship between Heraclitus’ poetry and Callimachus’ poem. The locus classicus for such a poetic relationship is Ovid’s poem on the death of Tibullus (Amores 3, 9) which contains extensive reworkings of Tibullus’ verse, particularly of Tibullus’ own poem on death (1, 3), and which, in at least one place, seems to exploit * 1 2

3 4

Materiali e Discussioni 28 (1992) 113 – 23 Anth. Pal. 7, 80 = Callimachus, Epigram 2 Pfeiffer = XXXIV GP. I reproduce the text of Gow-Page. This ought to refer not just to epigrams, but to ‘elegy’ in a fuller sense, cf. M. Gabathuler, Hellenistische Epigramme auf Dichter, diss. Basel 1937, p. 59 n. 57, but certainty is hardly to be obtained. In view of the myth of the nightingale, Callimachus’ reference to ‘nightingales’ might suggest lamentatory poetry, though of course other kinds of poetry are not excluded, and I give below some tentative reasons for thinking that Heraclitus ‘published’ at least one collection of funerary epigrams. We know a little more about Heraclitus if W. Swinnen, ‘Herakleitos of Halikarnassos, an Alexandrian poet and diplomat?’, Ancient Society 1,1970, pp. 39 – 52 is correct to identify the poet with a figure known from various proxenos inscriptions. Cf. below pp. 116 – 121. For this poem see also N. Hopkinson, A Hellenistic Anthology, Cambridge 1988, pp. 69, 247 – 8. Cf. Gabathuler, op. cit. passim.

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Callimachus’ poem on Heraclitus5. We cannot, of course, go further with this line of enquiry in the absence of all but one probable example of Heraclitus’ verse, though that, being a funerary epigram, could well be described as a ‘nightingale’. If the guess of some scholars that Heraclitus himself called his poems !gd|mer, whether as a book-title or in the poetry itself, is correct, then Callimachus’ use of the word will indeed enact the survival of Heraclitus’ poetry. If, however, other echoes of Heraclitus lurk in Callimachus’ poem, we will have to wait for T}wg to reveal them to us. In the meantime, I hope that there may be room for a brief study of Heraclitus’ one surviving poem, together with a few related remarks about Callimachus’ commemoration of the poet6. Much of what I have to say will be speculative, but — like many of the best Greek epigrams — these poems are very clearly written as a provocation to speculation. Perhaps no literary genre makes such a direct appeal to the reader’s powers of intellectual reconstruction, to the need to interpret, as does that of the epigram; the demand for concision makes ‘narrative silences’ an almost constitutive part of the genre. In these circumstances, the refusal to speculate amounts to no less than a refusal to read.

I. " j|mir !qt_sjaptor, 1p· st\kar d³ let~pym se_omtai v}kkym Blihake?r st]vamoi. cq\lla diajq_mamter, bdoip|qe, p]tqom Udylem, keuq± peqist]kkeim ast]a vat· t_mor. ‘ne?m’, )qetgli\r eQli· p\tqa Jm_dor· Euvqomor Gkhom eQr k]wor· ¡d_mym oqj %loqor cem|lam,

5

6

Am. 3, 9, 19 – 20, scilicet omne sacrum mors inportuna profanat; / omnibus obscuras inicit illa manus, seems to combine a ‘legalistic’ rewriting of Tibullus 1, 3, 4 with an echo of the final verses of Callimachus’ poem. For other Ovidian echoes cf. now G. D. Williams, ‘Conversing after dark: a Callimachean echo in Ovid’s exile poetry’, Class. Quart. 41, 1991, pp. 169 – 77. Callimachus’ poem has, of course, been much discussed, and my remarks will be limited to what I believe to be new. A brief bibliography (omitting standard editions): B. Snell, ‘Die Klangfiguren im 2. Epigramm des Kallimachos’, Glotta 37, 1958, pp. 1 – 4; C. Meillier, Callimaque et son temps, Lille 1979, pp. 21 – 5; J. G. MacQueen, ‘Death and immortality; a study of the Heraclitus epigram of Callimachus’, Ramus 11, 1982, pp. 48 – 56; N. Hopkinson, A Hellenistic Anthology, cit., pp. 247 – 9; G. B. Walsh, ‘Surprised by self: audible thought in Hellenistic poetry’, Class. Phil. 85, 1990, 1 – 21, pp. 1 – 4.

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diss± d’ bloO t_jtousa t¹ l³m k_pom !mdq· podgc¹m c^qyr, 4m d’ !p\cy lmal|sumom p|sior’.

Who speaks the opening four verses? Wilamowitz7 detected the same undefined voice as that of Callimachus’ Hymns; Hopkinson provides a fuller reading along the same lines: ‘an ill-defined and undefinable speaker addresses a traveller and, apparently out of curiosity at the sight of a newly dug grave, urges that they should read the inscription. The poem thus consists of a pair of speeches, the second quoted by the speaker of the first — curiosity aroused and satisfied’. Perhaps we can define the experience of reading this poem even more closely. The opening couplet suggests the observer coming upon a tomb. In the traditions of funerary epigram such an observer is very often a traveller, a passer-by, whose silent reflections and mental notes form the substance of the epigram;8 this is how we read the opening couplet. The third verse, however, makes us think again. ‘Traveller’ might mean ‘fellow-traveller’, but the leap would be difficult and hardly ‘natural’. An epigram by Antipater (Anth. Pal. 7, 427 = Antipater XXXII GP) shows clearly what is distinctive about Heraclitus’ strategy: " st\ka v]q’ Udy t_m’ 1qe? m]jum. !kk± d]doqja / cq\lla l³m oqd]m pou tlah³m vpeqhe k_hou jtk. Standing at the head of the epigram, without the preceding ‘commentary’, these words are readily identifiable as belonging to the standard ‘passer-by’ of the funerary tradition (note especially v]q’ Udy and d]doqja). In Heraclitus, on the other hand, the voice which invites any traveller to join in the task of deciphering the cq\lla can only be that of ‘the poet’; looking back, we are forced to recognise that it is also ‘the poet’ who has ‘set the scene’ for us in the opening couplet. Why should ‘the poet’ have to study the epigram if it is his own creation? The answer, I think, lies in a particular development of the history of the epigrammatic form. Literary epitaphs are one manifestation of the divorce of the epigram from an association with real objects, but Heraclitus has re-evoked the idea of the poet, not just as a creator, but also as a memorialiser of something real; the poet reacts to a real, already inscribed, object. The strategy of the first half of the epigram is, therefore, to focus attention upon the conventions of the funerary epigram and upon the role of the poet in both creating and being con7 8

Hellenistische Dichtung, Berlin 1924, II, pp. 122 – 3. See now G. B. Walsh, ‘Callimachean passages: the rhetoric of epitaph in epigram’, Arethusa 24, 1991, pp. 77 – 105.

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strained by those conventions, cq\lla diajq_mamter, ‘making out the writing’, refers both to the enacted decipherment of an engraved tombstone partly covered by garlands, and to the interpretation of a poem which, as we shall see, offers puzzles to its readers. The interweaving word-order of the second couplet, mimetically signalled by peqist]kkeim, not only forces us to re-enact the business of decipherment, but also again focuses attention upon the epigram as a written form for the attention of readers. Set off against the first four verses, with their sophisticated concern with ‘poetic voice’, is the second half of the poem which represents itself as a straightforward, factual statement by the· deceased, a statement independent, as it were, of the creating poet. Juxtaposition to the first half of the poem, however, allows us to see that the ‘epitaph’ is no less the work of the poet than is the ‘introduction’; moreover, it is not merely the tombstone which speaks, but the verses are ‘read out’ for us by the same poetic voice of the ‘introduction’. This epigram clearly shows, therefore, that Heraclitus was interested in exploring the implications of a form of writing which, by its very nature, projected an ‘other’ voice, and assumed the anonymity of the poet. That such assumptions should here be tested to breakingpoint accords with all we know of Hellenistic poetry. It is tempting to go further than this in order to draw more general conclusions about this epigram, and indeed funerary epigram in general. The ‘traveller’ whom the poet addresses is in fact a reader on a poetic journey; the act of travelling, of walking past tombstones, is the act of reading. This poem seems to assume a real position within a ‘published’ collection of funerary epigrams, but the literary effect under discussion does not in fact depend upon this9. Originally, funerary epigrams were addressed to travellers because these formed the only readership for such inscriptions. When the epigram became a literary form, but one still very aware of its origins, the ‘fiction’ of travelling readers is maintained and acquires new significance. That poetry itself is a ‘journey’ is a long-established image, particularly familiar in this period from Callimachus (especially fr. 1, 25 – 8 Pf., picking up Pindar, Paean 7b, 10 – 14 M.), and Theocritus, Idyll 7; what we see in Heraclitus’ epigram is the revision of this image, in the light of epitaphic conventions, to 9

For a related example in Dioscorides cf. P. Bing, The Well-Read Muse. Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets, Göttingen 1988, pp. 39 – 40. The whole of Bing’s discussion of these matters (see Subject Index s.v. ‘Sepulchral Epigram’) is very relevant here.

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cover the act of reading a series of epigrams which form the various stages along the path of the journey. Such revision and re-incorporation is again very typical both of the writing practices of the Hellenistic period and, in particular, of the peculiar position of funerary epigram, poised in creative tension between the epitaphic conventions of the past and the new freedoms of the present. When the tombstone speaks we hear the voice of a lady10 who fulfilled her socially allotted role by bearing children to the man to whom she had been given — ¡d_mym oqj %loqor may be ‘brave understatement’ (Hopkinson) but it is also a proud declaration of status. Her dead child will be a reminder of her husband, because he (?) will recall his father physically. In Hesiod’s Just City ‘women bear children resembling their parents’ (Op. 235), and this idea finds echoes throughout Greek and Latin literature;11 what will be a comfort to the dead woman is also a statement to the world at large of Aretemias’ virtue. Even in death Aretemias has not abandoned her husband, for she has left him a support for his old age; podgc|m and !p\cy resonate against each other to mark both this distinction and another: by death Aretemias has escaped the enfeeblement of old age. One aspect of the final couplet which has provoked remarkably little comment is the variation between !mdq_ and p|sior. The closest parallel is a famous passage of Sophocles’ Trachiniae (550 – 1): taOt’ owm voboOlai lµ p|sir l³m Jqajk/r 1l¹r jak/tai, t/r meyt]qar d’ !m^q.

In these verses p|sir must represent the legal position, ‘lord, master’, whereas !m^q denotes the physical relationship12. Such a distinction does not of course hold good uniformly through classical literature, but it is hard to believe that Heraclitus does not intend some point by his use of these ‘synonyms’. For Aretemias, her surviving husband is both p|sir and !m^q, and it may be that the point is that as a living male who fathered her children (her !m^q) he will require support, but he will always be her ‘lord’ (p|sir), whether dead or alive; the epi10 On the problems of her name cf. Wilamowitz loc. cit., Meillier loc. cit. I am doubtful about attempts to find significance in the lady’s name, or that of her husband. 11 Cf. West’s note ad loc. 12 Cf. G. P. Shipp, ‘Linguistic notes’, Antichthon 11, 1977, 1 – 9, pp. 3 – 4, and the remarks of Fehling quoted by Davies ad loc.

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gram thus asserts both faithfulness and submission. Other explanations of the opposition can, of course, not be ruled out, but it may well be thought that the very fact of the opposition, whatever its detailed interpretation, together with the invitation to decipherment in vv. 3 – 4, suggests that part at least of ‘the point’ of the epigram is to be found here. The tombstone wears garlands on its ‘brow’; let~pym (or perhaps better let~pyi) prepares for the full identification of tombstone and deceased in the second half of the poem. Garlands were a standard offering at the tombs of the dead, and the depiction of the deceased garlanded for ‘the symposium of the afterlife’ is a common motif of funerary iconography13. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Hellenistic funerary epigram seems to avoid almost entirely14 the motif of the epitaphic garland. This will be part of the selectivity of any literary stylisation. For epigrammatists, garlands are par excellence the mark of the symposium and the komos; indeed they often act as a kind of metonymic sign which evokes the whole poetic world of eros and the symposium which lies at the centre of so much of Greek epigrammatic production. Heraclitus’ garlands are, therefore, unusual and attract attention. I suggest that, when we have ‘deciphered’ the poem, we see that p|sir means both ‘husband’ and ‘drinking party’, and that the opening couplet has prepared the ground for this. Aretemias has left life as one leaves a symposium — a common image —15 but she takes a ‘souvenir’ with her16 ; her husband, however, requires a guiding support, as one often did on such occasions. Slaves would meet their master outside the scene of a symposium to guide his tottering steps homewards; this is the image which Heraclitus has exploited here17. If my analysis is correct, Heraclitus ex13 Much evidence is collected by M. Blech, Studien zum Kranz bei den Griechen, Berlin/New York 1982, pp. 81 – 108. 14 An exception is Leonidas of Tarentum, Anth. Pal. 7, 657 (= XIX Gow-Page), where the motif is at least partly indebted to the ‘pastoral’ setting of the epigram. I am particularly indebted to Marco Fantuzzi for his help here. 15 Cf. the material collected by J. F. Kindstrand, Bion of Borysthenes, Uppsala 1976, pp. 281 – 2. 16 The practice of taking !pov|qgta away from dinner-parties is probably not relevant, as this looks like a Roman custom, presumably under the influence of Saturnalian gift-giving; cf. Athenaeus 6, 229c of Cleopatra imitating the Romans. 17 I have toyed with the idea that the fact that the garlands are Blihake?r points to the common idea that the collapsing garland marked the lover (cf. Callimachus, Epigram 43 Pfeiffer (= XIII GP); Asclepiades XVIII GP; Athenaeus 15, 669c-

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plores the relationship between funerary and sympotic-erotic epigram by couching one in the language and mode of the other, drawing attention to this by the strategically placed signal of st]vamoi ; in this, as we shall see, he shares a poetic concern with Callimachus himself 18. It might be, of course, that our habit of dividing epigrams by (primary) subject misrepresents the way that poets of the high Alexandrian period perceived this ‘genre’. The usefulness of the procedure, however, lies in allowing us to identify how a poet positions a poem within a large tradition and gives it a distinctive voice.

II. Central to Callimachus’ poem on Heraclitus is a set of oppositions between ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘uncertainty’. The opening of the poem both anticipates the apparent certainty of its conclusion and creates the atmosphere of wretched doubt which colours the whole. Heraclitus’ ‘famous’ name, Jq\jkeite, is set off against tir ; Heraclitus survives even in the speech of the anonymous – death will not touch his name19. On the other hand, we are asked to reconstruct an initial situation, and here all is uncertainty. ‘Someone spoke [?of] your fate’. Did the poet know already (at some level of consciousness) that Heraclitus was dead? The majority of scholars have thought not, though some have followed J. A. K. Thomson20 in understanding that the casual mention of Heraclitus’ death opened an old wound in the poet; I shall adduce later a further reason why Thomson’s proposal deserves serious consideration. The uncertainty and doubt, however, is not of modern scholars’ making, but is a deliberate poetic strategy; eWpe … te¹m l|qom is an odd phrase21, which invites interpreta-

18 19 20 21

70e); the tombstone would therefore declare its continuing love. Blihake?r does not, however, seem the mot juste, and the fading garland was interpreted as a sign of love’s transience. Cf. esp. Walsh, art. cit. (n. 8). For the development of these ideas in Latin poetry cf., e. g., T. D. Papanghelis, Propertius: a Hellenistic poet on love and death, Cambridge 1987, Chapter 5. tir is also of course a novel use of the anonymous passer-by of the epitaphic tradition; as such, it serves as a generic marker within the poem. Class. Rev. 55, 1941, p. 28, followed by (e. g.) P.M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Oxford 1972, I p. 579, Meillier, op. cit. 222. Aeschylus, Choephoroi 1074 is apparently parallel, but however that verse is interpreted (cf. Garvie ad loc.), tq_tor Gkh] pohem syt^q, / C l|qom eUpy express-

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tion and denies clarity: what happened to Heraclitus is unimportant beside the concrete memories of the time spent with him. This lack of clarity in all that pertains to Heraclitus’ fate is reinforced by pou, though (appropriately enough) this word too has been variously interpreted22. Most scholars have taken it to mean ‘I suppose’, though some (usually without discussion) have opted for ‘somewhere’, in which case the word will resonate against the certainness of locality in the address ne?m’ *kijaqmgseO23. Word order might be thought to favour ‘I suppose’, but the strongest argument is to be derived from the pointed contrast between the certain fact of Heraclitus’ poetry and the doubtful uncertainty of his body, expressed by words which no verb can fix in time or language 24. By making us read the poem as a deviation from ordinary funerary epigram, Callimachus forces upon us the absence of the tomb of the deceased. The tomb, particularly in epigrams for the shipwrecked whose bodies are absent, is normally used as a visible sign of what evokes the poem; we have, for example, seen Heraclitus himself exploit the physical presence of the stone in an original and provocative way. Callimachus does something similar with the absence of visible signs. There can be no certainty even about death; that is why we cling to the ‘nightingales’ for both comfort and the security of knowledge. Callimachus turns many of these same ideas to different use in another celebrated epigram for someone lost at sea: ¥veke lgd’ 1c]momto hoa· m]er, oq c±q #m Ble?r pa?da Diojke_dey S~pokim 1st]molem· mOm d’ b l³m eQm "k_ pou v]qetai m]jur, !mt· d’ 1je_mou oumola ja· jeme¹m s÷la paqeqw|leha.

(Epigram 17 Pf. = LV GP)

pou in this epigram conveys both the uncertainty of place and the more

general uncertainty which always surrounds the fate of those lost at sea. Here too the cruel absence of the deceased is set off, again by l]m … d] , against a solid presence, but in the case of Sopolis the presence is no es the chorus’ uncertainty as to how to give a correct name (cf. the similar problem at Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4, 4). That verse, therefore, des not fully alleviate the oddness of Callimachus’ collocation. Cf. further MacQueen, art. cit. (n. 6) 49. 22 For the collocation cf. ]» l]m pou …5]hamem in W. Peek, Attische Grabinschriften II, Berlin 1958, p. 51, no. 185, and Leonidas XV GP quoted below. 23 For ‘somewhere’ cf. Beckby, Meillier loc.cit., Desrousseaux, Fraser loc. cit. For argument against this cf. MacQueen, art. cit. (n. 6) 55 n. 23. 24 See the excellent remarks of Walsh, art. cit. (n. 6) 2.

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comfort. Whereas the poem for Heraclitus contrasts an indeterminate past, a tetq\pakai, with the current reality of the deceased’s poems, the poem for Sopolis evokes a distant heroic age — meaningful only through an allusion to the opening of Euripides’ Medea — and contrasts it with the sad present. The invention, the ‘birth’ (1c]momto), of ships has meant the death of the ironically named Sopolis; it is as though death can only be confronted through oppositions, which allow us to organise our thoughts into the appearance of order, as some kind of self-protection against horror. It may be worth dwelling a moment longer on pou to observe that Callimachus is here exploiting a familiar strategy of funerary poetry. A directly parallel case is Anth. Pal. 7, 652 (= Leonidas XV GP), a commemorative epigram for Teleutagoras. After remonstrating with the sea for its harshness, Leonidas turns to the situation faced by those left behind: w¡ l]m pou ja}gnim C Qwhub|qoir kaq_dessi tehq^mgt’ %pmour eqqe? 1m aQciak_i, Til\qgr d³ jem¹m t]jmou jejkaul]mom !hq_m t}lbom dajq}ei pa?da Tekeutac|qgm.

(Anth. Pal. 7, 652, 5 – 8)

As in Callimachus, we have the contrast of absence and presence, pointed by l]m … d] , and also the extended sense of pou covering both of its normal ‘meanings’. A related case is Anth. Pal. 7, 285 (= Glaucus II GP), where the tomb of Erasippus is both ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’: oq j|mir oqd’ ak_com p]tqgr b\qor !kk’ 9qas_ppou Dm 1soq÷ir avtg p÷sa h\kassa t\vor, ¥keto c±q s»m mg_, t± d’ ast]a poO pot’ 1je_mou p}hetai aQhu_air cmyst± l|mair 1m]peim.

Glaucus has turned the uncertainty of pou into the central thrust of the whole poem, enacted through the indirect question introduced by poO pot’. Commentators on this poem rightly refer to Telemachus’ description of his father to the disguised Athene in the opening book of the Odyssey: !m]qor ox d^ pou ke}j’ ast]a p}hetai elbqyi je_lem’ 1p’ Ape_qou, C eQm "k· jOla juk_mdei

(Od. 1, 161 – 2).

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Here the context — Telemachus’ ignorance of Odysseus’ fate contrasted with the present and visible evidence of the suitors’ hybris — clearly allows us to see how the two ‘meanings’ of pou coalesce in the funerary tradition; in other words, an analysis such as mine which is based on semantic divisions must always to some extent misrepresent the process of reading. We also see how the structuring of such poetry around ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ is built into the very earliest layers of the literary embodiment of that tradition. This example is also interesting in that it shows how the missing and much missed Odysseus can function as the model for those presumed perished at sea; we shall see in a moment how Callimachus has both used and inverted this idea. I wish now to move to a second strategy of Callimachus’ poem, one which concerns the immortalising power of poetry. It would not be surprising if a poem, above all a Callimachean poem, in honour of a poet and attesting to the immortality of poetry were to use the rich heritage of Greek classical poetry. This is indeed what we do find with Callimachus’ poem for Heraclitus, though the matter has occasioned little comment. I shall be concerned here to identify and interpret echoes of Hesiod and Homer. The description of Hades as p\mtym "qpajt^r is a violent expression of the conception of Hades as the ‘universal host’, the pamdoje}r (Lycophron, Alex. 655). In counterpoint with !gd|mer, however, the phrase evokes both the ûqpuiai, the birds and/or winds of death familiar from archaic epic25, and the ûqpg, a bird of prey which, to judge from the passages gathered by D’Arcy Thompson26, was known for attacking other birds. Moreover, the transference to Heraclitus’ poems of the idea of the poet as nightingale allows Hesiod’s tale of the hawk (Uqgn) and the nightingale (Op. 202 – 12) to resonate at the end of the poem. This tale, in which the fate of the poet-nightingale, caught in the grim talons of the hawk, is left uncertain, darkens the apparent confidence of Callimachus’ final assertion. We may claim immortality for poetry, and the example of Hesiod shows that it is possible, but only time will tell; there is always the danger that we are merely ‘whistling in the dark’. Discussion of the third verse has largely been limited to the textual choice to be made at the beginning and to the stylistic level of ‘to sink 25 Cf. E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1979, 168 – 73. 26 A Glossary of Greek Birds, London/Oxford 1936, p. 55.

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the sun’. A step forward was made with MacQueen’s recognition of the relevance of the Homeric A]kior jat]du ;27 he also suggested that we feel the presence of jatad}olai, ‘go down [into Hades]’, so that the phrase ‘carries within itself the ring of death’. I believe that it is possible to refine MacQueen’s insight. Homer’s greatest talker is Odysseus. Alcinous tells him that he could listen to the tales, which he tells like a poet, all through the long night (Od. 11. 368, 373 – 6). Odysseus is also involved in two of the three occasions upon which Homer brings to an end a scene of weeping with the verse: ja_ mu j’ aduqol]moisim 5du v\or Aek_oio eQ lµ jtk.

At Od. 16, 220 it is Odysseus and his son after their reunion, at 21, 226 it is Odysseus and his faithful servants, and at Il. 23, 154 the verses occur in the context of the general mourning for Patroclus. All three places evoke memory, friendship and loss. The emotional contexts range from deepest grief to relief and joy, but for Odysseus relief is always mingled with the sense of loss. I suggest that the motifs of weeping and sunset, which we find conjoined in Homer but separated in Callimachus, point to a typical poetic memory by the Hellenistic poet. Callimachus has turned the syntax around, but the Homeric contexts which well up through his poem layer the text with memory, past happiness and present suffering. If this analysis is correct, then we will also sense in the weeping poet of v. 1 an echo of Odysseus weeping at the song of Demodocus (Od. 8, 521 – 2). In part Odysseus weeps because Demodocus’ song tells of the comrades the hero lost and evokes long buried griefs. Odysseus, the great survivor, is also condemned to be the perpetual mourner; this is the inverse of the pattern noted above in which Odysseus is the model for those missing at sea. Catullus too adopted an Odyssean ‘persona’ in his epitaphic farewell to his brother (Poem 101) 28, and we can now see that he had a Greek precedent for doing so, and indeed in a poet whom we know to have been of central importance for his elegiac poems. If I am correct in identifying the evocation of Odysseus as one of the sources of the power of Callimachus’ poem, then two further 27 Art. cit. 50. 28 Cf. G. B. Conte, The Rhetoric of Imitation, Ithaca-London 1986, pp. 32 – 9.

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points are worthy of note. Odysseus hears Demodocus and weeps at the feast of the Phaeacians. The setting of Callimachus’ poem is deliberately unclear, as is the site where ‘someone spoke Heraclitus’ death’. Nevertheless, casual conversation and reflections upon friendship find a natural home in the symposium; the poem for Heraclitus may therefore be a Callimachean experiment in the mingling of types of epigram. We have already seen Heraclitus himself doing something similar. Secondly, Demodocus sings of what Odysseus already ‘knows’; he is indeed intimately involved in the action of the song. This may be relevant for the interpretation of the opening of Callimachus’ poem. Whereas Heraclitus’ poem remains within the (broadly defined) boundaries of the funerary form, while exploring, with considerable originality, the overt role of the poet in such a tradition, Callimachus moves completely away from these traditional forms; they remain, however, hovering over his poem, advertising its difference. In Callimachus the gradual shift from ‘real’ epitaph to ‘literary’ epigram has been taken a further, and decisive, stage: now there is no tombstone and no corpse, merely memory – not only of Heraclitus, but also of the whole poetic tradition into which Heraclitus has now been absorbed29.

Addenda Greek epigram is enjoying a golden age of study, thanks in part to the stimulus of the ‘Posidippus papyrus’ (cf. ch. 25 below). There is a good introduction to the subject and the bibliography in P. Bing and J. S. Bruss (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram (Leiden 2007). Recent years have seen, e. g., excellent editions of Dioscorides (G. Galán Vioque, Diosc rides Epigramas, Huelva 2001) and Strato (L. Floridi, Stratone di Sardi, Epigrammi, Alessandria 2007), and editions of Asclepiades by Alexander Sens and Meleager by Kathryn Gutzwiller are eagerly awaited. On the arrangement of poems in books and reading as a ‘journey’, cf. K. Gutzwiller, Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic epigrams in context (Berkeley 1998). Some ideas relevant to these poems are discussed in J. S. Bruss, Hidden Presences. Monuments, gravesites, and corpses in Greek funerary epigram (Leuven 2005). On Virgil’s use of Callimachus’ poem cf. The Shadow of Callimachus 132 – 4, with further bibliography.

29 This paper has benefited from the criticisms and suggestions of Peter Bing, Marco Fantuzzi, Alessandro Schiesaro and members of the Cambridge Ancient Literature Seminar.

8. Writing the God: Form and Meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena* This paper aims to elucidate certain features of Callimachus’ Fifth Hymn in ways, which, I hope, will be suggestive for the criticism of all the Hymns. In particular, I am interested in exploring how the mythic and religious dimensions of Callimachus’ poetry can be sensibly discussed, while doing justice to the very strong sense of a changed world which the poems evoke; to this end the concluding section of the paper briefly examines related aspects of the Sixth Hymn to Demeter. Section 1 briefly places Hymns 5 and 6 within Callimachus’ hymnal project as a whole1, Section 2 considers the cultic frame in which Hymn 5 is set, Section 3 discusses the elegiac metre of the poem, Section 4 considers Callimachus’ treatment of the myth of Teiresias, and Section 5 seeks to set Hymns 5 and 6 within our study of Hellenistic culture as a whole.

1. At one very simple level, Callimachus’ Hymns re-write the Homeric Hymns; each, to a greater or lesser extent, borrows directly from its archaic predecessors. As we would expect, this rewriting may be marked in self-conscious ways. Thus, for example, vv. 7 – 17 of h. 6 represent a small-scale re-writing of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; this is, however,

* 1

Materiali e Discussioni 29 (1992) 9 – 34 I hope that the phrase “hymnal project” does not give a misleading impression, but there do seem to be good reasons to think that the six hymns we possess form some kind of group and are, at some level, intended to be read as a unit and against each other, cf., e. g., Hopkinson p. 13. This is, of course, very different from asserting that they were composed close in time to each other.

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not a poem which Callimachus is going to “do” all over again, as v. 17 makes clear2 : lµ lµ taOta k]cyler $ d\jquom %cace Dgo?.

Again as we would expect, the re-writing is full both of virtuoso variation from the model and of learned puzzles3. Moreover, having disclaimed any intention of repeating the Homeric Hymn, the subsequent narrative of Erysichthon’s attack on the tree does just that: a locus amoenus where nymphs play is invaded, the victim screams (Persephone Q\wgse, v. 20; the tree jaj¹m l]kor Uawem, v. 39), but the cries meet different responses (no one hears Persephone, Demeter hears the tree). After the description of the locus amoenus which Erysichthon will desecrate, vv. 29 – 30: he± d’ 1pela_meto w~qyi fssom 9keus?mi, Tqi|pai h’ fsom bjj|som =mmai

2

3

Cf. the more general remarks of T. Fuhrer, Am. Journ. Phil. 109, 1988, pp. 67 – 8. Other interpretations of v. 17 have, of course, been offered: C. Cessi, Eranos 8, 1908, 124 – 5, saw a reference to Philitas’ Demeter, and Malten thought that the verse referred to earlier poetry of Callimachus himself (cf. W. Kuchenmüller, Philetae Coi Reliquiae, diss. Berlin 1928, p. 55). In theory, any number of earlier texts might be involved (note the lyric hymn of Lasus, PMG 702 Page), but the Homeric Hymn is much the most likely (see next note). If in fact another text also is relevant, then Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter (SH 676 – 80) has as good a claim as any; cf. below p. 147. Of particular interest in this regard is Callimachus’ description of Demeter’s travels at vv. 10 ff. In the Homeric Hymn she wanders for nine days “over the earth” (v. 47), but Callimachus typically provides geographical specificity. I suspect that Callimachus evokes a journey from Sicily (cf. next note) to the extreme west of the world, then to the extreme east, back to the west (cf. Mimnermus fr. 5 Gentili-Prato = 12 West), and finally back to Eleusis; tq_r in v. 13 would therefore be quite precisely chosen. Against this is Hopkinson’s objection (note on v. 11) that “the rhetoric of the passage is decisively against this: we cannot have reference to the East sandwiched between two to the west”; I doubt, however, that this objection stands in the context of what is a deliberate puzzle, cf. further Schneider ad loc., A. Griffiths, Journ. Hell. Stud. 108, 1988, p. 233. For a helpful discussion of the whole passage see P. Benvenuti Falciai, Sileno 10, 1984, pp. 55 – 62, who, however, sees vv. 10 – 12 and 13 – 16 as representing two separate searches (the whole world and then Greece).

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proclaim a status for Callimachus’ hymn equal to that of its archaic precedent, which is here represented by “Eleusis” and “Enna”4. To come now to the fifth hymn, two of the minor Homeric hymns (11, 28) are addressed to Athena and celebrate her warrior-status as Pallas, defender of the city (1qus_ptokir), a quality which Callimachus, like the poet of the eleventh Homeric Hymn, sets off against the goddess’ potential destructiveness as peqs]ptokir (h. 5, 43). Homeric Hymn 28 describes the violent cosmic reaction to the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head, and it is this motif to which Callimachus gives prominence at the conclusion of his hymn (vv. 131 – 6). “Epiphany”, “coming out”, has of course a special role in h. 2, 5 and 6, but of all gods it is to be most closely associated with Athena, whose very birth was a sudden appearance in full battle-dress. Callimachus uses this first, natal epiphany of the goddess to form a link between the closing gnome of the myth (vv. 133 – 6) and the teasing “Athena is really coming now” (v. 137) which introduces the epilogue5, thus allowing us to see that the whole notion of what epiphany means is at stake in this poem. Two of the major Homeric Hymns are also relevant. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter explores the theme of “goddess as mother”, a theme which Callimachus allows to resonate both in Demeter’s appeal to Erysichthon (h. 6, 46 – 7 t]jmom … t]jmom … t]jmom), and then, in sharp contrast, in the suffering which Demeter’s punishment brings to Erysichthon’s parents; in h. 5, however, it is “goddess as not-mother” which is crucial, as Chariclo’s suffering fails to persuade Athena whose lack of a mother is explicitly stressed (vv. 134 – 5). Secondly, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells of an encounter between a mortal and a beautiful goddess during 4

5

My interpretation of the reference to Enna assumes that Callimachus placed the rape of Persephone in the archaic hymn in Sicily, cf. previous note, and N. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Oxford 1974, pp. 76 – 7. If my interpretation is correct, then this passage forms a partial exception to Peter Bing’s claim that “the Hellenistic avant-garde is of a piece in never expressing its relationship towards the literary heritage in agonistic terms” (The Well-Read Muse, Göttingen 1988, p. 61). Cf. G. O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry, Oxford 1988, pp. 33 – 4. A late lexicon tells us that Athena was called Hippia because she leapt from Zeus’ head leh’ Vppym “as the hymn to her shows” (Et. Magn. 474, 31). The reference is unclear (cf. Allen-Halliday-Sikes on Hom. h. 28, 13), but it is tempting to believe that Callimachus wants us to know of this: there would then be a neat ring around the main part of the poem. For Athena and horses in general cf. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Cunning intelligence in Greek culture and society, Hassocks 1978, pp. 187 – 213.

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which the mortal sleeps with the naked goddess. Callimachus h. 5 plays, as we shall see6, with the potential eroticism of the meeting of Teiresias and Athena, and it follows a narrative pattern in which sex is indeed a crucial factor. More specifically, Athena appears in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite as the warrior goddess, master craftsman, builder of chariots (cf. Call. h. 5, 14) and teacher of weaving (vv. 8 – 15); in that poem she is one of three goddesses who remain impervious to Aphrodite’s power. Callimachus rewrites this “defeat” by Athena of the archaic laudanda by including in his Hymn to Athena the occasion upon which Aphrodite “defeated” Athena – namely, the Judgement of Paris. At the level of detail, we may note that Athena’s anointing of herself after exercise with her own product (v. 26) is encomiastic one-upmanship on Aphrodite who has the Graces anoint her with 5kaiom %lbqotom for her meeting with Anchises (Hom. H. Aphr. 60 – 2) 7. The most obvious difference between Callimachus’ hymns and their archaic models lies of course in what are traditionally called the “mimetic” hymns, 2 (Apollo), 5 (Athena), 6 (Demeter) 8. The question of how these hymns were “read” or “performed” continues to exercise modern scholarship, but will not be a primary concern in this paper9. These hymns as a whole seek to “envision” narrative through a powerful mode of enargeia, but not in any simple way. oqw bq\air ; “do you (sing.) not see?” asks the poetic voice (h. 2, 4), and we are compelled to answer “well, no”. The question may be a traditional one10, but 6 Cf. below, sect. 4. 7 The Hymn to Aphrodite is, therefore, not quite as neglected in Greek literature as R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns, Cambridge 1982, p. 151 (with p. 268 n. 1) suggests. 8 “Mimetic” is not a particularly good term, but it is harmless enough, and some term is needed, provided that the important difference between h. 2 on the one hand and h. 5 and 6 on the other is not overlooked; cf. (most recently) M. Fantuzzi, Preistoria di un genere letterario: a proposito degli Inni V e VI di Callimaco, in Tradizione e innovazione nella cultura greca da Omero all’et ellenistica: scritti in onore di Bruno Gentili, Pisa 1993. 9 For recent surveys cf. M. R. Falivene, ‘La mimesi in Callimaco: Inni II, IV, V e VI’, Quad. Urb. 36, 1990, pp. 103 – 28, who notes that Callimachus’ intention is “rappresentare, imitare, testi-in-atto, e insomma mimare in scrittura una performance orale: una mimesi di secondo grado” (p. 108), and F. Cairns, ‘Theocritus, Idyll 26’, Proc. Camb. Philol. Soc. 38, 1992, pp. 1 – 38. 10 Cf. Alcman 1, 50 with the remarks of A. Griffiths, Quad. Urb. 14, 1972, 13 and F. Cairns, Tibullus, Cambridge 1979, p. 121. S. Koster, ‘Kallimachos als Apollonpriester’ in Tessera. Sechs Beitrge zur Poesie und poetischen Theorie der Antike,

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the use to which it is put is not. After all, “Apollo does not appear to everyone …” (h. 2, 9), and the reading (or performance) of a written text makes any such epiphany even more problematic. A myth about looking/not-looking such as that of Teiresias and Athena is peculiarly appropriate to a written text of this “mimetic” nature. We will never see the goddess, not only because ‘we’ are men (as opposed to women), but also because the poem ends as she appears (or does she?). In exploiting the traditional slippage between an image and what that image ‘represents’ — i. e. the whole problem of how to represent the divine – Callimachus raises the question of whether, in seeing an image or statue, we are ‘seeing’ the god as Teiresias saw her. Into the whole conception of the poem, therefore, is built a serious “religious” problem; to what extent it receives a serious answer is something to which I shall return.

2. The Bath of Pallas creates for us an Argive ritual in which the statue of Athena is taken out of the temple and bathed. There is no other evidence for such a ritual, but it is of a familiar type; the Athenian Plynteria is perhaps the most familiar example, although in that ritual it was apparently the clothing of the statue, not the statue itself, which was washed11. Bulloch is attracted by the suggestion that Callimachus’ knowledge of the Argive festival derived from the )qcokij\ of Agias and Dercylus which we know the poet to have used elsewhere12, and at several points Bulloch’s interpretation rests upon the assumption that “we probably lack certain crucial items of information which Callimachus could take for granted in his contemporary audience”. What is at stake here, of course, is the very nature of the cultic frame which Callimachus has created. Before considering this further, we should note that the status of the Homeric Hymns is currently being debated in a rather similar way. In particular, Clinton and Parker have recently taken opposed sides on the question of the “Eleusinian” nature of the Homeric Hymn Erlangen 1983, p. 9 – 21, interprets this question as addressed to an initiand into the secrets of Apollo. 11 Cf. L. Deubner, Attische Feste, Berlin 1932, pp. 17 – 22; Bulloch pp. 8 – 9; C. Calame, Les choeurs de jeunes filles en Grce archaique, Rome 1977, I, pp. 232 – 41. 12 Cf. Bulloch pp. 16 – 17.

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to Demeter13, and it is indeed that archaic poem which is so suggestive for Callimachus’ fifth and sixth Hymns, because, in Parker’s words, “in … the Eleusinian Mysteries the association between rite and myth, often in Greek religion so slight and external, was by contrast close and basic”; Callimachus too puts the problem of the relation between rite and myth at the centre of his poems, and modern scholars have found very diverse solutions for that problem. To refer to the details of a cult ritual entirely unknown to us in order to explain a sophisticated work of literature is, in principle, entirely valid, and in various cases can be shown to be so. Nevertheless, scholars should at least mention the possibility that there never was an Argive “Plynteria”, that Callimachus’ mimetic enargeia has envisioned the whole thing, that, to put it another way, our expectation of an external referent is itself Callimachus’ creation. Too often, perhaps, Callimachean criticism has relied on fr. 612, !l\qtuqom oqd³m !e_dy, to explain the otherwise inexplicable. Be that as it may, what interests me here is how reliance upon the assumption of external reference can mask what actually happens in the poem. On the larger question of the relation between the Teiresias narrative and the “Argive ritual” I hope that my views will emerge from the paper as a whole; Bulloch has argued (p. 24) that they may have already been linked in Argive legend — perhaps this was in fact the cultic myth associated with the rite — but there is, I think, more to be said. I shall examine briefly two passages where cultic reference has been used as an interpretative tool to see whether this in fact helps or hinders. The first is the opening passage relating to Athena’s care for her horses: fssai kytqow|oi t÷r Pakk\dor 5nite p÷sai, 5nite· t÷m Vppym %qti vquassolem÷m t÷m Req÷m 1s\jousa· ja· " he¹r eutujor 6qpem· s_sh] mum, § namha· s_she Pekasci\der. oupoj’ )hama_a lec\kyr !pem_xato p\weir, pq·m j|mim Rppei÷m 1nek\sai kac|mym· oqd’ fja dµ k}hqyi papakacl]ma p\mta v]qoisa te}wea t_m !d_jym Gmh’ !p¹ cacem]ym, !kk± pok» pq\tistom rv’ ûqlator aqw]mar Vppym kusal]ma paca?r 5jkusem ©jeam_

13 K. Clinton, ‘The author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter’, Opuscula Atheniensia 16, 1986, pp. 43 – 9; R. Parker, ‘The Hymn to Demeter and the Homeric Hymns’, Greece & Rome 38, 1991, pp. 1 – 17.

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Rdq_ ja· Nah\liccar, 1vo_basem d³ pac]mta p\mta wakimov\cym !vq¹m !p¹ stol\tym.

In his note on vv. 5 – 12 Bulloch observes: “Nowhere in this section [i.e., vv. 1 – 12] is any direct reference made to the celebrants or the ritual, and to the modern reader the passage seems ambiguous: the address to the celebrants seems to have finished and a hymnal account of the Pq\neir HeoO to have begun … but then with v. 13 § Ut’ )waii\der at the beginning of the next section it becomes clear that vv. 5 – 12 also must have been spoken to the celebrants. Retrospectively the transition from v. 4 to vv. 5 ff. looks abrupt, and the selection of Athena’s care for her horses for particular mention is prima facie puzzling. We must assume that, quite apart from such care as the normal attribute of a good warrior, the bathing of the processional horses was an important first stage in the Argive ritual, even though no evidence for this survives …”. Is it “clear that vv. 5 – 12 … must have been spoken to the celebrants”? In purely general terms, we can point to Callimachus’ obvious experimentation with the boundaries between “hymn” and “narrative”, and to his familiar parenthetic style (even if his parentheses are normally introduced by c\q) 14. More specifically, we may ask who is addressed in vv. 2 – 3 of h. 5. According to the standard view, it is the kytqow|oi who are here given the reason – in excited asyndeton – why they should hurry out, but other possibilities are open. Vv. 2 – 3, 5 – 12 and 14 could, in fact, be addressed by “the celebrant voice” to us, the readers of the poem; if this is correct, then not only is the absence of c\q from v. 2 explained, but the poem is seen to begin with what is tantamount to an aside, and we might well think such an opening very “Callimachean”. Alternatively, we might consider the possibility that vv. 2 – 3 are not spoken by the same person as v. 1: excited observations by more than one speaker would be a way of establishing the choric nature of the poem at the very outset. At one level, of course, this is a question of how to punctuate our printed texts15, but this apparently technical problem depends upon an appreciation of the fluid, puzzling interplay between “ritual reference” and “poetic gloss” which constitutes the 14 Cf. Hopkinson p. 99 n. 1; F. Lapp, De Callimachi Cyrenaei tropis et figuris, diss. Bonn 1965, pp. 52 – 3. 15 To avoid misunderstanding, I should add that I do not believe that the various interpretations of the opening verses which I am proposing can be used as arguments for (or against) the actual performance of the hymn.

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heart of the Callimachean experiment. Too great a concern with the external ritual referent flattens out this exciting interplay. We are still left to ask “why all this about horses?”. It does indeed show Athena as the careful and excellent warrior16, but without the supposed cultic reference it might be thought a little extreme. Here again, I would not wish to deny cultic reference, but I would rather stress that this is inadequate as an explanation for what is in the poem. It is cultus, rather than cult, which is central here. The washing of sweaty horses is set off against Athena’s exercise before the Judgement of Paris and against the different kind of washing which Teiresias interrupted (cf. further below). Moreover, from the point of view of hymnal form, the passage takes the place of the familiar listing of a god’s attributes, such as we find in the third verse of the Hymn to Zeus: Pgkac|mym 1kat/qa, dijasp|kom Oqqam_dgisi. The change from such a list to an excited narrative “parenthesis” is of a piece with the whole dramatisation of the hymn which occurs in the “mimetic” mode. The second passage which I wish to consider under this head is indeed the Judgement of Paris and, specifically, Athena’s preparation for it. She is described as running a great distance “like the Lacedaimonian stars beside the Eurotas”, and then anointing herself with oil to produce a marvellous flush on her skin (vv. 23 – 8). Bulloch interestingly argues that, through allusion to Theocritus 18, 22 – 32, we understand that Athena “is identified with the pure and exquisite kind of beauty represented by Helen, who combined femininity with very masculine Spartan athletics” (note on vv. 23 – 8). This is a beauty which the stupid Phrygian, Paris, could not recognise. Bulloch also wonders (p. 12 n. 2) whether the Argive cult involved a “beauty contest”, as we know other cults to have done; this would then “give an added dimension to the … Judgement of Paris”. He does not note that, on his view, in choosing Aphrodite whose bribe was Helen, Paris is actually (and ironically) choosing as his prize the ideal of beauty represented by Athena. Be that as it may, any consideration of this passage must begin from the place of the Judgement in the poem as a whole. In the mountains (v. 18) Paris sees goddesses who have chosen to display themselves to him. Of these goddesses, art of the classical period frequently depicts Aphrodite only partially clothed at the Judgement, and full nudity comes later in the Roman period17. From the early Hel16 Cf. R. Renehan, Class. Phil. 82, 1987, p. 244. 17 Cf. C. Clairmont, Das Parisurteil in der antiken Kunst, Zürich 1951, p. 109.

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lenistic period on, however, the type of the naked Aphrodite “at toilet” is common in sculpture18. This is the image with which Callimachus confronts us in vv. 21 – 22. Paris’ reward is the beautiful Helen, i. e. he is rewarded with sex, but it is a reward which will ultimately destroy his city. This bitter irony is, of course, by implication encomiastic of Athena, whose claims Paris scorned, but what is important for the present are the similarities and contrasts not only with the experience of Anchises in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, but also with that of Teiresias in the central narrative of Callimachus’ poem. Teiresias’ “sexual” encounter (cf. Section 4 below) ends with a blindness compensated for by gifts from Athena pokioOwor which, in some cases at least, will help to save his city (vv. 125 – 6) 19. As often in Greek poetry, then, the major narrative of the poem is foreshadowed and set off by a similar, but different, short narrative, which foregrounds what are to be key themes. Athena’s associations with athletics are well known. Specifically, she was worshipped at Sparta as Athena Keleutheia, at shrines supposedly established by Odysseus “when he had defeated Penelope’s suitors in running” (Pausanias 3, 12, 4) 20. One real or believed feature of Spartan female athletics is particularly relevant here: it was practised nude21. It is also perhaps relevant that such athletics were particularly associated with girls before marriage — indeed Xenophon (Lac. 1, 4) and Plutarch (Lycurgus 14, 2) interpret it as designed to promote healthy babies — and that Spartan girls had their hair cropped on their wedding-night; in both matters, the virgin Athena, with her full head of hair (vv. 31 – 2) 22, stands apart. The Spartan Athena thus shares in the female to some extent, but never makes the transitional moves that ordinary females make. To this extent — like, of course, Teiresias himself — she is both female and “male” (cf. v. 29). The reference to Spartan athletics thus establishes an open, socially approved form of female nudity in which Athena herself willingly takes part; we might almost describe it as a “male” form of 18 Cf. LIMC s.v. Aphrodite, figs. 482 – 525; my note on Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3, 43 – 7. 19 To what extent vv. 125 – 6 are bitterly ironic, given what we know of the house of Labdacus, may be debated. 20 Cf. Detienne and Vernant, op. cit. pp. 226 – 31. It is curious that Bulloch makes no mention of this cult. 21 Cf. Plutarch, Lycurgus 14 – 15, and the discussion of P. Cartledge, Class. Quart. 31, 1981, pp. 91 – 2. Eur. Andr. 590 – 601 is a particularly interesting witness here. 22 Like R. Renehan, Class. Phil. 82, 1987, p. 242, I am not convinced that !p¹ … p]ngtai could be “misunderstood” as “cut off”.

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female nudity which is to be opposed to the private unveiling of female intimacy, marked at the start of the Teiresias narrative by the removal of the clasps from the robes of the goddess and her companion (v. 70): dµ poja c±q p]pkym kusal]ma peq|mar

It may be true that “the Argive ritual may have involved a ceremonial p]pkor” (Bulloch on v. 70), but we must first look to the meaning of the poem as a whole to explain the prominence of this detail.

3. Before pursuing further the myth of Teiresias, I want to consider briefly perhaps the most discussed feature of the poem, its elegiac metre. Why the poem is written in elegiacs we shall never know, and Bulloch is very likely right that “there is no single reason for [it]” (p. 34). New texts constantly undermine our notions of literary history; in a matter such as this, we must always be aware of how much we do not know. Simonides’ elegiac “Hymn to Achilles”, recently unveiled by Peter Parsons, comes as yet another reminder of this constant truth23. Nevertheless, little that is new can, I think, be added about “Doric threnody” or about the possibility of an Argive tradition of elegiac hymns24. Some gain might be made from a consideration of the elegiacs as set in opposition to the hexameters of h. 625, but the results would remain very impressionistic. Rather, I want to consider again the now hoary problem of elegy and t¹ 1keeim|m, a discussion which goes back to Richard Heinze, who saw this as the tonal quality of Ovid’s elegiac narrative — in contrast to the deim|m of hexameter narrative — and suggested tentatively that this same quality dictated Callimachus’ choice of metre in this poem26. There are two immediate problems which must be faced at once. First, although the connection between 5kecor and lamentation is certain 23 Oxy. Pap. 3965. Note also SH 361, Crates’ elegiac hymn to Eqt]keia, on which Hutchinson, op. cit. p. 16 observes: “the effect of parody would have been spoiled had the metre seemed a startling novelty”. 24 Cf. Bulloch pp. 36 – 8. 25 Cf. Hopkinson pp. 16 – 17. 26 R. Heinze, Vom Geist des Rçmertums 3rd ed., Stuttgart 1960, pp. 322, 377 n. 120. For an enlightening discussion of Heinze cf. S. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone, Cambridge 1987, pp. 99 – 114.

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and classical27, there is no clear evidence — beyond the predominant use of the elegiac couplet in funerary epigram — for a classical or Hellenistic link between 1kece?a and lamentation. The copious play in Latin poetry with flebilis elegia does not have a Greek counterpart, and 1kece?om in the required sense does not seem to appear before the Roman period (cf. LSJ s.v. II 2). Secondly, there is the fact that to many modern readers “the Teiresias narrative … is not especially 1keeim|m in mood” (Bulloch p. 34). This second problem is one of “feel” which I cannot pursue here. My concern will be not “Why is h. 5 in elegiacs?”, but rather whether any particular part of the poem exploits the elegiacs for particular effects. The most obvious candidate here is, of course, Chariclo’s lament, where some progress may be possible. " m}lva d’ 1b|ase· ‘t_ loi t¹m j_qom 5qenar p|tmia ; toiaOtai, da_lomer, 1st³ v_kai ; ellat\ loi t_ paid¹r !ve_keo. t]jmom %kaste, eWder )hama_ar st^hea ja· kac|mar, !kk’ oqj !]kiom p\kim exeai. £ 1l³ deik\m, £ eqor, £ :kij½m oqj]ti loi paqit] , G lec\k’ !mt’ ak_cym 1pq\nao· d|qjar ak]ssar ja· pq|jar oq pokk±r v\ea paid¹r 5weir.’ " l³m ûl’ !lvot]qaisi v_kom peq· pa?da kabo?sa l\tgq l³m coeq÷m oWtom !gdom_dym üce baq» jka_oisa, he± d’ 1k]gsem 2ta_qam.

(vv. 85 – 95)

As commentators rightly note, the style and content of Chariclo’s lament strongly suggest funeral lament. The loss of sight is like the loss of life. This is made plain both by the reference to the nightingale’s lament, and by the choice of v\ea “lights” for “eyes”, which not only resonates against d|qjar (connected with d]qjolai), but also reinforces the finality of Teiresias’ fate: the light really has gone out. Moreover, the language of debt and financial transaction in v. 91, which is picked up again in vv. 102 (lish_ … lec\ky) and 105 – 6 ( jol_feu … t]khor aveik|lemom), is an amplification of the epitaphic topos that life is 27 Cf. the evidence collected by D. L. Page in Greek Poetry and Life, Essays presented to Gilbert Murray, Oxford 1936, pp. 206 – 10, B. Gentili, ‘Epigramma ed elegia’, in L’Epigramme grecque (Entretiens Fondation Hardt XIV), Vandoeuvres-Geneva 1967, pp. 39 – 81, and M. L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin/ New York 1974, pp. 4 – 7. At fr. 7, 13 Callimachus seems to use 5kecoi to mean “poem(s) in elegiac couplets”.

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“lent” to us, and that sooner or later death calls in the loan28. Teiresias’ “death” gives point to Athena’s compensatory gifts of long life and retention of intelligence in the Underworld (vv. 128 – 30) — this is a denial of death for the death he has suffered. Chariclo is clearly, though implicitly, compared to Procne who, metamorphosed into the nightingale, grieves forever for the son she killed. “The whole passage is poetically well-worn: the comparison is a stock one” notes Bulloch with full documentation (p. 206). Again, there may be more to be said. The myth of sexual offence, bodily maiming, metamorphosis, and the song of birds has a penumbra of suggestive resonances with the myth of Teiresias; clearly Callimachus wants some kind of analogy between narrative and mythic exemplum to be felt. More specific help may come from two passages of Latin poetry. Catullus uses the image of the nightingale to describe his perpetual lamentation for his brother: at certe semper amabo, semper maesta tua carmina morte canam, qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli. sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae … (65, 11 – 16)

As is now generally understood29, v. 12 programmatically announces a devotion to elegy, “sad songs”, as indeed Poem 65 is the first elegiac poem in what is thereafter an entirely elegiac corpus. This poem introduces carmina Battiadae, and is itself heavily indebted to Callimachus30. The image of the grieving nightingale recurs in Callimachus’ famous epigram on the death of the poet Heraclitus (2 Pfeiffer = 34 Gow-

28 Cf. B. Lier, Philologus 62, 1903, pp. 578 – 83; R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs, Urbana, 111. 1942, repr. 1962, pp. 170 – 1; Bulloch pp. 217 – 18. 29 As far as I am aware, the observation was first made by T.P. Wiseman, Catullan Questions, Leicester 1969, p. 18. A. Barchiesi, Riv. fil. istr. class. 118, 1990, p. 471, has made the attractive suggestion that semper … canam picks up the common etymology of !e_dy, !gd~m etc. from !e_. 30 I have discussed this in ‘Callimachean echoes in Catullus 65’, Zeitschrift fr Pap. und. Epigr. 96, 1993, 179 – 82 [= this volume 206 – 11].

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Page) in which the poet’s “nightingales” live on after his death31. As Hopkinson observes, “the nightingale’s song was proverbially a lamentation (1kece?om): Heraclitus’ !gd|mer can be imagined as bewailing their own poet’s death”32. We have already seen, however, that the meaning “lamentation” for 1kece?om is not demonstrable for Callimachus’ time; nevertheless, this epigram is not without interest in the present context. Of Heraclitus’ poetry it is probable that only one example survives, a funerary epigram (Anth. Pal. 7, 465); Diogenes Laertius does, however, describe him as 1kece_ar poigt^r, and whether or not !gd|mer was actually the title of a collection of his poems, it now appears that at least a circumstantial case can be made for the view that Catullus had Greek, and probably Callimachean, precedent for the use of the nightingale’s song in programmatic connection with elegiac metre. For this tradition we may also cite a passage of Ovid’s Fasti which Stephen Hinds33 has interpreted as containing (in alternis) an explicit allusion to elegiac metre: quacumque ingreditur, miseris loca cuncta querellis implet, ut amissum cum gemit ales Ityn, perque uices modo “Persephone” modo “filia” clamat, clamat et alternis nomen utrumque ciet. (Fasti 4, 481 – 4)

Already, of course, in the fifth century we find 5kecoi used of the nightingale’s lament (Ar. Birds 218), and at Eur. IT 1091, if the manuscript is to be trusted, the halcyon sings an 5kecor oWtor (cf. v. 94 of Callimachus’ hymn) 34. It is also possible that the goddess’ pity in v. 95 activates for us a derivation of 5kecor from 5keor or 1kee?m35, and the sound of 1k]gsem 2ta_qam … 5kenem 5por (v. 95 – 6) almost seems to cry “elegy” at us36. In short, therefore, one passage of the poem at least seems to exploit and to some extent depend upon the fact that it is written in elegiacs. Two connected observations follow from this. First, the case for believing that elegiac metre and lamentatory ethos were connected in the third 31 On this poem cf. ‘Callimachus and Heraclitus’, MD 28, 1992, pp. 113 – 123 [= this volume 115 – 26]. 32 A Hellenistic Anthology, Cambridge 1988, p. 249. 33 Op. cit. pp. 119 – 20, 162 – 3. 34 I am not persuaded by D. Arnson Svarlien, Hermes 119, 1991, pp. 473 – 7, that oWlom should be read for oWtom in Callimachus’ poem. 35 Cf., e. g., Page , op. cit. p. 210, West, op. cit. pp. 7 – 8. 36 I owe this last observation to Charles Segal.

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century is now, I hope, a strong one. Secondly, Chariclo’s lament in an appropriate metre is seen to be a quasi-dramatic mimesis which evokes earlier threnodic poetry, particulary the threnoi of Attic tragedy. In the presentation of man’s at best partial knowledge of the divine, Callimachus, like Apollonius of Rhodes, was profoundly influenced by tragedy. Some of the details of this debt will be explored in the next section.

4. Callimachus’ story of Teiresias falls into a set of familiar patterns. At one level it is a story of male intrusion into female space, and three other examples of the type will help to shed light upon how Callimachus presents his narrative. The first is the famous Herodotean account of Gyges and the wife of Candaules (Herod. 1, 8 – 12), a story of the secrets of power and of male sight of female nudity. Both Candaules (implicitly) and his wife (explicitly) place a choice before Gyges, a choice which illustrates the relation between knowledge and power. Teiresias too gains knowledge through sight and is empowered; I am tempted — though many may not be — to believe that the warning not to look upon t±m bas_keiam (h. 5, 52) directs us towards the story of Gyges and shows that Callimachus wanted us to use it as a conscious analogue for his myth. Whether conscious or not, however, the importance of such “analogues” lies as much in difference as in similarity. The analogue both allows us to understand aspects of the poetic situation which do not need to be related explicitly, and, by difference, highlights what is particularly distinctive and central to the later writer’s presentation. To this extent, such suggested narrative analogues may be compared to the use of extended similes37. The second case is that of Pentheus, specifically the Pentheus of Euripides’ Bacchae. Some of the echoes of this tragedy in the fifth hymn are generally familiar, but a slightly fuller statement of what amounts to a detailed intertextual relationship may be helpful. Like Pentheus, Teiresias is led by a god (v. 81, Ba. 1080) to a locus amoenus in the mountains in the stillness of nature (vv. 71 – 4, Ba. 1051 – 3, 1084 – 5); Teiresias had been hunting, and Pentheus is famously both hunter 37 I have discussed the Hellenistic use of similes in The Argonautica of Apollonius: literary studies, Cambridge 1993, pp. 129 – 138.

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and hunted. Both are young men, their first beards just showing (vv. 75 – 6, Ba. 1185 – 7); it may be that peqj\fym (v. 76) which usually applies to the darkening of grape clusters is a “Dionysiac signal” of the similarity. Both intrude upon an exclusively female performance, and both, with varying degrees of severity, are punished for it. Most striking of all, throughout the Bacchae (cf. 337 – 41, 1227, 1291), the fate of Actaion — the third of my three cases of male intrusion — resonates as a warning to Pentheus. Actaion is, of course, an expected exemplum in such a Theban story, and Callimachus’ Athena uses Actaion as a consolation rather than as a warning; nevertheless, despite the difference in the reason for the fates of the Euripidean and Callimachean Actaions38, it is hard not to believe that Callimachus is thinking of, and wants us to think of, Euripides’ tragedy. Even with the unfortunate textual loss of the lament of the Euripidean Agaue, which might have shown very interesting links with Callimachus’ poem, it is clear that the Bacchae is a fundamental text for the reading of the fifth hymn. The mother who rejected the god is replaced by the mother who was a special favourite of the god. Both suffer: Athena’s appeal to the immutable laws of Kronos (v. 100) resonates against Dionysus’ concluding appeal to the authority of Zeus (Ba. 1349). Athena’s gifts to Teiresias are obviously contrasted with the bleakness of the end of the tragedy, but the diversity of modern response39 shows how right Ovid was to inscribe explicitly an open response into his Actaion-narrative: rumor in ambiguo est: aliis uiolentior aequo uisa dea est, alii laudant dignamque seuera uirginitate uocant; pars inuenit utraque causas. (Met. 3, 253 – 5)

Ovid’s Actaion seems worse off than Callimachus’ Teiresias, but we can hardly feel confident that we know how we should respond to the Greek story. 38 On the various legends cf. L. R. Lacy, ‘Aktaion and a lost “Bath of Artemis”’, Journ. Hell. Stud. 110, 1990, pp. 26 – 42. 39 Extreme is J. R. Heath, ‘The blessings of epiphany in Callimachus’ Bath of Pallas’, Class. Ant. 7, 1988, pp. 72 – 90, at p. 78: “Callimachus has pulled out all the available stops to exculpate Athena”; for this view cf. also B. Otis, Ovid as an epic poet, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1970, pp. 134 – 5, 396 – 400. Mary Depew takes the opposite position in ‘POxy 2509 and Callimachus’ Lavacrum Palladis: aQci|woio Di¹r jo}qg lec\koio’, Class. Quart. 44, 1994, 410 – 26.

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At another, but related, level, the story of Teiresias is one of transition, of sexual and generational passage. The young man encounters the female at a dangerous pool. Obvious comparisons may be made with Hylas, or Ovid’s Narcissus who, driven by thirst after hunting to drink at a beautiful pond, is captivated by the erotic image in the water (Met. 3, 407 ff) 40. Such a transition has a particular relevance to Teiresias who, in the most familiar version of his story, experienced life and sex as both man and woman. What evidence is there that Callimachus presents the story of Teiresias in “sexual” terms? First, there are simply our expectations founded upon knowledge of the story type; we do not require explanations of the links between blindness and sexual experience41, or much knowledge of Ovid, to sense what should be coming. Chariclo’s lament acknowledges the erotic privilege of Teiresias’ sight: eWder )hama_ar st^hea ja· kac|mar (v. 88); he has seen what should not be seen, just as, in the more usual version of his story, his special knowledge about sexual pleasure breaks boundaries which should be preserved. His blindness marks this transgression42, just as his prophetic gifts and retained intelligence mark him as a perpetual breaker of boundaries. Important aspects of Callimachus’ poem may be illustrated by comparison with Ovid’s version of this scenario in Amores 1, 5 (aestus erat…). That Corinna’s appearance in that poem is presented as an “epiphany” is now well understood43, and vv. 70 ff of Callimachus’ fifth hymn are in fact often quoted in connection with it. Nevertheless, Ovid’s use of the pattern with which I am here concerned does not seem to have been fully appreciated44. In Amores 1, 5 it is the “god” who intrudes upon the mortal’s midday repose in a locus amoenus. The “god” is clothed; 40 Aestu in v. 413 perhaps hints at the “middle of the day” topos. 41 Cf. Bulloch pp. 22 – 3. I have toyed with the notion that the language of vv. 99 – 100, oq c±q )hama_ai ckujeq¹m p]kei ellata paid_m / "qp\fem, has erotic resonances, cf. Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3, 1018 – 19 (with my note). 42 Cf. R. G. A. Buxton, ‘Blindness and limits: Sophokles and the logic of myth’, Journ. Hell. Stud. 100, 1980, pp. 22 – 37, at pp. 25 – 26. 43 Cf. W. S. M. Nicoll, ‘Ovid, Amores I 5’, Mnemosyne 30, 1977, pp. 40 – 8; S. Hinds, ‘Generalising about Ovid’ in A. J. Boyle (ed.), The imperial muse, Berwick, Victoria 1988, pp. 4 – 31, at pp. 4 – 11; T. D. Papanghelis, ‘About the hour of noon: Ovid, Amores 1, 5’, Mnemosyne 42, 1989, pp. 54 – 61. 44 Cf., however, Papanghelis, art. cit. p. 60: “But for toro, the opening couplet might have perfectly introduced the story of a desirable nymph about to be sexually harassed while lying at midday under the canopy of a locus amoenus”.

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the mortal’s state of dress is, presumably, at best informal45. The mortal deliberately strips the “god” to expose her body to his eyes — note the stress on oculos (v. 17) 46 — and feasts his eyes and his pen upon the details of that body. The end is sex and a prayer for many such occasions. Amores 1, 5 therefore offers a complete overturning of the conventions and assumptions of stories such as that of Actaion. Callimachus’ aims are quite different, but shared themes can point to what is distinctive and important in the Greek poet. Ovid has a lot of fun with Corinna’s role in what happened — was she or was she not willing? 47 Ovid has transferred to the “god” an important theme normally associated with the mortal in the story type which we have been considering. The fact that both Teiresias and Actaion erred unwillingly is repeatedly stressed by Callimachus (vv. 52, 78, 113). Bulloch rightly notes that “intrusion on divine privacy is no less a crime because it is unintentional” (note on v. 52), but we may wonder whether he is correct that “the fact that Teiresias’ intrusion was unwitting is not in itself of much significance” (p. 48). Bulloch is rightly trying to prevent the modern reader from imposing an inappropriate moral frame upon an ancient text, but we may well suppose that the poet’s insistence upon Teiresias’ “moral innocence” in fact sets the problem high on the agenda. Moreover, we find this theme centrally positioned in all the stories we have been considering. The case of the Bacchae is notorious. Does Pentheus go to the mountain willingly or unwillingly? The power of Dionysus so confounds those categories as to call them entirely into question (cf. esp. Ba. 811 – 15). So too with Gyges. He has no desire to see the king’s wife, but he is confronted with the realities of power – ¢r oqj 1d}mato diavuce?m, Gm 6toilor (Herod. 1,10,1) — and, like Teiresias, is led by higher authority to the place of spying (note Ecace, 1, 10, 1). When Candaules’ wife confronts him with a second “choice”, which is really no choice ( !macja_gm !kgh]yr pqojeil]mgm, !macj\feir … oqj 1h]komta : 1, 11, 4), Herodotus does not conceal what is really going on, aRq]etai aqt¹r peqie?mai. In asking why such stories foreground such problems, we must of course be wary of assuming that the same explanation (or set of explanations) will suit each case. Nevertheless, it is certainly tempting to associate the problematic of 45 In the comparable scenario of Catullus 32 the resting male is not naked. 46 posito uelamine (v. 17) mischievously suggests that Corinna acted willingly, cf. Call. h. 5, 70, Ovid, Met. 3, 192. 47 For other examples of this theme cf. McKeown on vv. 15 – 16.

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willing choice and the problematic of sight (and its analogue, knowledge). Do we ever choose what we see? This problem can hardly be considered in isolation from views about the nature of vision itself; ancient philosophers seem in fact to have been less interested — though certainly not uninterested —48 in the relation between vision and will than in the mechanics of vision, although the two problems are of course very closely connected, particularly where the viewer must “act” (or “assent”) to turn a perception into a reliable impression49. The tellers of the stories we have been considering were, however, very plainly interested in this problem50. In Callimachus, it is not simply a matter of the traditional idea that “an important aspect of a god’s power was absolute control over whether or not he was visible to mortals” (Bulloch on vv. 101 – 2) — a control whose apparent “failure” in this case raises difficult questions about Athena’s role — but of the very nature of seeing, a faculty in which mortals and immortals are irremediably different. The second theme I wish to pursue briefly here is the related one of cognition. How is the intruder recognised? The brilliant opening of Amores 1, 5 still has serious commentators debating whether or not the poet was “expecting” a visit from Corinna that afternoon; at any rate, vv. 7 – 8, illa uerecundis lux est praebenda puellis, / qua timidus latebras speret habere pudor, clearly portray him as the controller, the artifex, of the situation. In his tale of Actaion, it is apparently the cries of the nymphs which draw Diana’s attention:

48 The mental and physical state of the viewer was, of course, often of prime importance; cf., e. g., Epicurus, On nature 25, 331 ff. Arrighetti; Sextus Empiricus, Against the professors 7, 253 – 260 (English translation in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The hellenistic philosophers I, Cambridge 1987, pp. 246 – 8). The Epicurean 1pibok^ may also be relevant, cf. C. Bailey, The Greek atomists and Epicurus, Oxford 1928, pp. 559 – 76. Lucretius (4, 777 – 815) certainly draws a parallel between the “attention” of the mind needed to see what we want to see and that needed to imagine things. Even this theory, therefore, leaves “grey areas” for a poet to exploit. 49 For useful surveys of ancient theories of vision cf. D. C. Lindberg, Theories of vision from al-Kindi to Kepler, Chicago 1976, pp. 1 – 17; D.E. Hahm, ‘Early hellenistic theories of vision and the perception of color’, in P.K. Machamer and R.G. Turnbull (eds.), Studies in perception, Columbus 1978, pp. 60 – 95. 50 For similar considerations in Vergil and Ovid cf. T. Krier, Gazing on secret sights. Spenser, classical imitation, and the decorums of vision, Ithaca, N.Y. 1990.

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qui simul intrauit rorantia fontibus antra, sicut erant, uiso nudae sua pectora nymphae percussere uiro subitisque ululatibus omne inpleuere nemus circumfusaeque Dianam corporibus texere suis; tamen altior illis ipsa dea est colloque tenus supereminet omnes. (Met. 3, 177 – 82)

The emphasis is on how Actaion is seen, not on what he might have seen; if he saw anything at all, it was only from the goddess’ neck up (vv. 182, 186). Here again Ovid stands at the end of a long line of development in this motif of such stories. When Pentheus is settled in the fir-tree, he is more seen than seeing (Ba. 1075), and in the case of Gyges, Candaules tells him to take care not to be seen (Herod. 1, 9, 3), but the lady does see him as he slips out and “realises” (lahoOsa) that it was her husband’s doing. Her instantaneous understanding51 is an illustration of her intelligence and power. So too with the Callimachean Athena. The elision of anything like “and Athena saw him” after v. 78 suggests the goddess’ powers of cognition of a kind we readily accept in divinity. In one sense, it is all one whether she sees or not, because her power is not bound by physical constraints. Athena’s consolatory exemplum of Actaion is presented as a statement or prophecy in the future tense52, and this can hardly be dissociated from the nature of the gifts which she bestows upon Teiresias. Moreover, it may be that vv. 107 – 9, p|ssa l³m " Jadlg·r 1r vsteqom 5lpuqa jause?, p|ssa d’ )qista?or, t¹m l|mom eqw|lemoi pa?da, t¹m Bbat±m )jta_oma, tuhk¹m Qd]shai,

are intended to evoke the riddling language of prophecy53 ; what can it mean to “pray to see a beloved son blind”? The final phrase, tuvk¹m 51 Contrast the anonymous “Gyges drama” (Trag. Adesp. 664 Kannicht-Snell) in which Candaules’ wife explains that she realised her husband’s guilt when she saw that he was still awake (vv. 21 – 2). 52 Cf. Bulloch p. 218 on the “Hellenisticness” of this device. His observation, however, that “the example of Actaeon is placed in the future as a rhetorical device and not because Athena is a prophetess” sits rather oddly with the gifts she bestows. 53 It may also be that the prophetic voice is evoked too in vv. 80 – 1. Those verses do in any case look forward to Athena’s closing remarks (v. 127 b\jtqom, f oR p|dar 1r d]om !ne? ) — ring composition! — in suggesting the familiar sight of

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Qd]shai, almost suggests the central paradox of the blind prophet, as most famously dramatised in the encounter of Teiresias and Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Thus Callimachus has shaped his Athena in very specific ways, and the familiar classical opposition between two different kinds of knowledge or rationality54 is collapsed as she reaches out to grant powers not usually associated with her.

5. Some aspects of my account of Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena will doubtless seem more “serious” than is now fashionable; Callimachus ludens is, perhaps rightly, the now predominant image of this brilliant poet. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of the presentation of the divine, where there is not even an agreed critical language with which to transcend unhelpful assertions about what poets did or did not “believe”55. Callimachus presents almost an extreme case of the general problem of “religion in literature”, of the relationship (if one exists) between what happens inside and outside texts56. A standard critical move for those who wish to negotiate around this problem is to draw a distinction between “religious” and “secular” categories. Thus, the emphasis on Chariclo’s feelings in h. 5 and on the embarrassed suffering of Erysichthon’s parents in h. 6 are alleged to show that Callimachus’ concerns are “secular”, not “religious”, i. e. not (to put it simply) “pertaining to the nature of the divine”. That there are differences in this regard between a hymn of Callimachus and, say, an aretalogy of

the blind Teiresias led on to the tragic stage (cf. Soph. Ant. 988 – 90, OT 298). Note too how Athena’s t_r … da_lym (vv. 80 – 1) suggests the defensive “it was not a he|r”. 54 Cf., e. g., J.-P. Vernant, Mortals and immortals. Collected essays, ed. F. I. Zeitlin, Princeton 1991, pp. 306 – 7. 55 Extreme in this regard is P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Oxford 1972, I, pp. 662 – 3, “… genuinely religious element [in the Hymns] … a true believer in the traditional gods of Greece…”; note how the subject of religion in poetry leads G. O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic poetry, Oxford 1988, p. 3, straight to “what the poets believed”. 56 For recent discussions of less extreme cases cf. D. C. Feeney, The gods in epic, Oxford 1991; J. D. Mikalson, Honor thy gods. Popular religion in Greek tragedy, Chapel Hill and London 1991.

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Isis is hardly to be denied57, but it may be wondered to what extent “religious/secular” is the appropriate category distinction; “non-literary/ literary” may be more apt. Thus even in an extreme case, such as Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter in choriambic hexameters (SH 676 – 680) which is explicitly written for the delectation of cqallatijo_ (SH 677), we should seek to understand the “religious” and cultic tale offered by the poem; learned paignia, too, have a social and intellectual context. About Chariclo I hope that enough has now been said; I therefore wish briefly to examine the story of Erysichthon in h. 6 to see to what extent it too escapes from this scholarly categorisation. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter records and celebrates the establishment of Demeter’s cult and tells a tale of separation followed by re-integration and happiness. Callimachus’ hymn confirms the continuing power of the goddess and tells an apotropaic tale of ultimate separation and misery. The rich plenty with which the archaic poem concludes (vv. 470 – 3) is replaced in Callimachus by the desolation of Triopas’ stores (vv. 104 – 10). Whereas in the Homeric Hymn the goddess’ anger was revealed by a general famine which threatened not only all mankind (vv. 305 – 11) but also the gods’ supply of sacrifices (vv. 311 – 12), in Callimachus’ hymn the anger is manifested by an illusory plenty — the riches of Triopas’ house (cf. vv. 69, 87 – 90) — which soon becomes a dearth in which sacrifice too suffers (v. 108 ja· t±m b_m 5vacem, t±m :st_ai 5tqeve l\tgq). The relationship between h. 6 and its archaic forerunner is thus a very good illustration of Callimachus’ creative use of his literary heritage. As is well understood, Callimachus sets the warning tale of Erysichthon within a Hesiodic moral frame58. The narrative is a dramatised exemplification of a central message of the Works and Days — the close link between pious observance and agricultural plenty. Framed by echoes of the Works and Days59, Callimachus’ poem tells of a Hesiodic 57 The two genres are directly confronted by A. Henrichs, ‘“Thou shalt not kill a tree”: Greek, Manichaean and Indian tales’, Bull. Amer. Soc. Pap. 16, 1979, pp. 85 – 109. 58 Cf., e. g., H. Reinsch-Werner, Callimachus Hesiodicus, Berlin 1976, pp. 210 – 29, 371 – 3; her discussion is very uneven, but contains much that is true. The Hesiodic frame is well understood, but rather underplayed, by Hopkinson. 59 Note v. 22 ~ WD 828 (the final verse of Hesiod’s poem and known to have been a subject of dispute in Alexandrian scholarly circles), vv. 116 – 17 ~ WD 346 – 8.

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“worst case”, a man loved by Hunger and hated by Demeter (cf. WD 299 – 300), living proof of the Hesiodic dictum that “evil plans ( jajµ bouk^, cf. h. 6, 32) turn out worst for the planner” (WD 266). The crucial passage here is WD 336 – 48 where the link between piety and physical survival is very clearly marked: j±d d}malim d’ 5qdeim R]q’ !ham\toisi heo?sim "cm_r ja· jahaq_r, 1p· d’ !cka± lgq_a ja_eim· %kkote d³ spomd/isi h}ess_ te Rk\sjeshai, Al³m ft’ eqm\fgi ja· ft’ #m v\or Req¹m 5khgi, ¦r j] toi Vkaom jqad_gm ja· hul¹m 5wysim, evq’ %kkym ¡m/i jk/qom, lµ t¹m te¹m %kkor. t¹m vik]omt’ 1p· da?ta jake?m, t¹m d’ 1whq¹m 1÷sai· t¹m d³ l\kista jake?m, fstir s]hem 1cc}hi ma_ei·H eQ c\q toi ja· wq/l’ 1cj~liom %kko c]mgtai, ce_tomer %fystoi 5jiom, f~samto d³ pgo_. p/la jaj¹r ce_tym, fssom t’ !cah¹r l]c’ emeiaq· 5lloq] toi til/r fr t’ 5lloqe ce_tomor 1shkoO· oqd’ #m boOr !p|koit’, eQ lµ ce_tym jaj¹r eUg.

For Hesiod, Erysichthon would be a “bad neighbour” (cf. 6, 117 1lo· jajoce_tomer 1whqo_) 60 because you could expect no help from him, but we also understand that he would threaten to eat you out of house and home; with Erysichthon as a neighbour, your cattle really would be in danger. Here Callimachean “literalism” plays off against the archaic moral voice61. To this point I shall return. For the celebrants the tale is both a warning and a confirmation of their lucky position; soon they will eat62. Demeter is invoked to bring peace and prosperity (vv. 133 – 8), while the terrible fate of famine is reserved for others. If this pattern suggests that of the “scapegoat”, we 60 bl|toiwor in the same verse seems to pick up the Hesiodic t¹m … fstir s]hem 1cc}hi ma_ei. This helps to confirm “neighbour” as the proper sense in Callimachus (cf. Hopkinson ad loc). 61 Cf. Reinsch-Werner, op. cit. p. 221. Hopkinson gives strong support to, though he does not print, Meineke’s jajoda_lomer for the transmitted jajoce_tomer in v. 117. The text is, however, sound, and not just because of the stylistic chiasmus of !pewh^r — bl|toiwor — jajoce_tomer — 1whqo_. The apparent repetitiveness may be ascribed to the “naive” literalism of the poetic voice (a common mannerism in the Hymns), but in fact it is only apparent. Someone who is “hateful to Demeter” is undesirable as a bl|toiwor precisely because ipso facto they are a bad neighbour. The Hesiodic reference thus allows us to unpack the meaning of this stylised, hymnal utterance. 62 Cf. A.W. Bulloch, Amer. Journ. Phil. 98, 1977, p. 99.

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should not be surprised. Plutarch tells us of a rite at Chaeronea which seems relevant to Callimachus’ Sixth Hymn: “There is a traditional rite of sacrifice, which the archon performs at the public hearth but everyone else at home, called the driving out of bulimy (bouk_lou 1n]kasir). They strike one of the servants with wands of agnus castus and drive him out of doors, chanting, ‘Out with Bulimy, in with Wealth and Health’”. (Quaest. Conv. 6, 8; 693e-f, trans. Hoffleit)

Clearly, Callimachus does not offer any simple reproduction of this ritual pattern, which has normally been interpreted as a form of scapegoating, but the common elements are suggestive63. The pathetic reference to Erysichthon as b t_ basik/or as he sits begging at the crossroads (v. 114) can hardly fail to remind us of the vaqlaj|r, as well of course as of the disguised Odysseus (Od. 17, 219 – 22) 64. The king’s son has become the lowest of the low, leaving the house like the disgraced Oedipus or the slave “impersonating” Hunger. By seeking to conceal him within the house, rather than sending him out, his parents deny the ritual pattern and hasten their own ruin. It is, above all, the description of the excuses to which Erysichthon’s parents are reduced as they cover up for him (vv. 68 – 90) which has prompted critics to see the poem as “secular” rather than “religious”65. The phenomenon which these critics are trying to describe will be plain to every reader, but the analysis suffers from a residual commitment to “religion” as something which a modern western audience would recognise as such. The organisation of society — even, or rather particularly, “bourgeois” society — is put at risk by Erysichthon’s hunger. It is “dinners” and “weddings”, those quintessential markers of social union, to which his parents dare not send him, and it is Demeter, the 63 On the rite at Chaeronea cf. J. E. Harrison, Epilegomena to the study of Greek religion, Cambridge 1921, pp. 1 – 5; C. I. Papazoglou, ‘BO£KILO£ ENEKASIS. 5hilom jahaqt^qiom ja· comilij|m’, )hgm÷ 68, 1965, pp. 17 – 32; V. Rotolo, ‘Il rito della BO£KILO£ ENEKASIS’, in Miscellanea di studi classici in onore di Eugenio Manni, Rome 1980, VI, pp. 1947 – 61. For more general considerations cf. J. Bremmer, ‘Scapegoat rituals in ancient Greece’, Harvard Stud. Class. Phil. 87,1983, pp. 299 – 320. 64 For Erysichthon as a vaqlaj|r cf. E. Cassin, ‘Erysichthon ou le vain mangeur’ in M. Detienne and others (eds.), Poikilia. Etudes offertes  Jean-Pierre Vernant, Paris 1987, pp. 95 – 121, at p. 111. For the echo of the Odyssey cf. K. J. McKay, Erysichthon: a Callimachean comedy, Leiden 1962, pp. 71 – 2; Bulloch, art. cit. pp. 108 – 12. 65 Cf., e. g., Bulloch, art. cit. p. 114; Hopkinson p. 8; Henrichs, art. cit. pp. 90 – 1.

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orderer of society, the heslov|qor (v. 18), who is responsible for this; Erysichthon’s punishment is to break those distinctions in social behaviour, established by Demeter, which separate us from the animals66. We may, if we wish, call this “social”, but it is not clear that it does not also “pertain to the nature of the divine”. The very obvious differences between the voice of h. 6 and the voice of any archaic poem should not be used as an excuse to shut off areas of meaning in the later text. The truth is that we have not yet found the proper language in which to discuss these extraordinarily complex poems67. Our problem is, moreover, not limited to Callimachus alone. Classical scholarship is still at something of a loss when it comes to the handling of mythic narrative in the Greek literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In very broad terms, there are two central problems. One is the effect of what Marcel Detienne called “the invention of mythology”, one manifestation of which is the writing and cataloguing of myth and legend such as we know Hellenistic poets to have practised in their scholarly lives and used in their poetry. What difference to the production and poetic use of myth does such activity make? Secondly, it is a common view that the “mythic thinking” of the archaic and classical periods had, by the third century, given way to some extent to different modes of thought which were, if not more rational, at least closer to modes that we ourselves would recognise. Thucydides, the sophists, and Plato are, of course, major figures here. That important changes had taken place is hard to deny, though the work of Geoffrey Lloyd in particular has shown us how misleading simplistic models of the replacement of “non-scientific” by “scientific” ways of thinking can be. The upshot of this widely held view of cultural history is that “myths” in Alexandrian and later poetry (to say nothing of the prose literature of the Second Sophistic) are often assumed to be no more than codified stories, available to poets as narrative material, but lacking that intimate, if hard to define, connection with collective social thought that we regularly ascribe to myth68. Confirmation for such a view might be sought in the social position of Alexandrian poets: a marginal and privileged elite writing for their own amusement. It would, how66 For Demeter’s laws as establishing “civilisation” cf. Isocrates, Panegyr. 28; Diod. Sic. 5, 5, 2; Servius on Aeneid 4, 58 (where see Pease’s note). 67 The complexity is well summarised by Hopkinson pp. 12 – 13. 68 It may not be flippant to observe that this procedure helps to turn Alexandrian “scholar-poets” into people who look comfortingly like modern scholars.

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ever, be very naive to imagine that what Alexandrian poets wrote was produced in a social and intellectual vacuum. It may, of course, be that the kind of evidence which has allowed real progress in understanding the “myths” of classical Athens and Augustan Rome simply does not exist for Ptolemaic Alexandria, or that the nature of the society itself is not amenable to such a study; if so, then the identification of various levels of humour and irony in mythic narrative may be not only a fruitful way to proceed, it may be the only way69. I do not, however, believe that that stage has yet been reached, and I hope that this paper has suggested some of the paths that still beckon. Finally, it is worth observing that the currently standard accounts of Hellenistic religion offer little assistance in this matter. There we are likely to find impressionistic assertions about the spiritual emptiness of life in the great conurbations, an emptiness which was slowly filled by the rise of new cults70. Change there obviously was — although some texts have been remarkably over-interpreted71 — and we must be conscious of the fact that some of this change is presumably concealed from us by problems of naming. “Athena” retains her familiar cult titles, but how can we detect realignments in intellectual and cultural patterns which may be subsumed under that name? Thus Claire Préaux began the chapter on religion in her standard two-volume Le monde hellnistique as follows: “We shall consider here only the gods who developed (volu) under the influence of the contact of cultures. We shall therefore not be concerned with Delian or Pythian Apollo, or with the traditional gods of Olympus”. That Delian and Pythian Apollo precisely did develop under the contact of cultures seems a very reasonable inference from Callimachus’ fourth hymn. What happened to Athena (and Demeter) we shall never know in full, but it would be silly not to see if we can make use of texts which seem to be trying to tell us about these gods. We should not be put off just because these texts carry Callimachus’ name.

69 For an attempt to use the presence of irony to construct a general view of the mythic in Hellenistic poetry cf. B. Effe, ‘Die Destruktion der Tradition: Theokrits mythologische Gedichte’, Rhein. Mus. 121, 1978, pp. 48 – 77. 70 No modern account is more powerful than E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1951, pp. 243 – 4. 71 This is particularly true of the Athenian Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes.

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Addenda For further discussion of Callimachus’ Hymns, both separately and as a group, cf. this volume 405 – 33 and Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 350 – 71; for other recent bibliography on the Hymns cf. 30 below. On Hymn 5 in particular cf. A. D. Morrison, ‘Sexual ambiguity and the identity of the narrator in Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena’ BICS 48 (2005) 27 – 46. D. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome (Cambridge 1998) contains much of interest to the Hellenist. p. 140 – 1 On the debt of Theocritus 26 to Euripides’ Bacchae cf. The Shadow of Callimachus 46 – 8. p. 148 – 9 On the ritual pattern of Callimachus’ Erysichthon cf. now C. A. Faraone, CA 23 (2004) 227 – 31.

9. Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in the Phainomena of Aratus* 1. Introduction The Phainomena of Aratus, probably composed in the period c. 280 – 260 B.C.1, is an account in 1154 hexameters of, first, the fixed constellations and their conjunctions and, secondly, of weather-signs in both heavenly bodies and other natural phenomena2. It draws extensively upon two prose sources which we can reconstruct with some confidence. For the constellations Aratus was very heavily indebted to the prose Phainomena of the pioneering astronomer Eudoxus, written perhaps as much as a century before Aratus’ poem; the debt was conclusively identified by the second-century B.C. astronomer Hipparchus, whose extant commentary (exegesis) on the works of Eudoxus and Ara*

1

2

Arachnion 2 (http://www.cisi.unito.it/arachne/num2/index2.html) I am grateful to Marco Fantuzzi, John Vallance and an audience at the Oxford Philological Society for instructive criticism of earlier versions of this paper. Due to the kindness of Professor D.A. Kidd, I was able (after the substantial completion of my own work) to see a draft of his forthcoming commentary on the Phainomena; I have added references to it where appropriate. The following works are referred to by author name only: M. Erren, Die Phainomena des Aratos von Soloi. Untersuchungen zum Sach- und Sinnverstndnis (Hermes Einzelschrift 19), Wiesbaden 1967; N. Hopkinson, A Hellenistic Anthology, Cambridge 1988; A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge 1987; W. Ludwig, ‘Die Phainomena Arats als hellenistische Dichtung’, Hermes 91, 1963, 425 – 48. I cite the text from the edition of J. Martin (Florence 1956), and refer occasionally also to that of M. Erren (Munich 1971). The (admittedly flimsy) basis for this dating is the patronage of Antigonos Gonatas which Aratus enjoyed. For chronological arguments based on the similarity of the opening verse of the Phainomena to Theocr. 17.1 cf. Gow ad loc. and M. Fantuzzi, MD 5, 1980, 163 – 72. The structure of the poem has been much discussed, but I will be concerned with this only tangentially; a major break after v. 732 was diagnosed very early in its reception, (a papyrus text of the first century A.D. places a coronis before v. 733). For surveys of this problem and the evidence cf. Erren 227 – 33; Ludwig 429 – 39; id., Gnomon 43, 1971, 353; id., RE Suppl. 10. 30 – 1; J. Martin, ‘Les Phnomnes d’Aratos. Étude sur la composition du poème’, in L’astronomie dans l’antiquit classique, Paris 1979, 91 – 104.

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tus preserves many fragments of the former’s treatise3. Although Hipparchus – whose rhetoric has, of course, its own very specific agenda of self-advertisement – alleges that Aratus’ debt to Eudoxus was generally doubted before his own work4, there is no reason to believe that Aratus intended to conceal the debt nor to doubt that many, at least, of Aratus’ first readers fully understood the work’s genesis, as indeed all that we know of the standard techniques of third-century poetry suggests they were expected to do. The second part of the poem, on weather-signs, is clearly indebted to a lost treatise of the fourth-century, perhaps by Theophrastus, which is known principally from a surviving prose version probably later in date than Aratus (= Theophrastus fr. VI Wimmer) 5. Aratus’ use of written sources, in a poem whose stylistic and literary techniques clearly announce it as an ‘élite’ text6, raises general questions about ‘didactic’ poetry and the place of learning in the Hellenistic period, and to these I shall return. Two prominent features of the Phainomena must first be noted, as it is in the intersection of differing modes of presentation that the most characteristic, and perhaps most interesting, literary problems arise in this text; these will form the subject of this paper. What I shall not attempt here – but what is clearly a major desideratum – is what might be termed a ‘modern Hipparchanism’, that is, a detailed examination of how Aratus’ account of the heavens exploits and/or misunderstands contemporary ‘science’. Such an examination is vital, apart from anything else, if we are to see precisely how Ara3 4

5

6

For a brief and helpful account of Hipparchus’ work cf. J. Martin, Histoire du texte des Phénomènes d’Aratos, Paris 1956, 22 – 9. The standard edition is the Teubner of C. Manitius (Leipzig 1894). Cf. 1.2.1. These ‘many’ presumably include the ‘many others’ who, according to Hipparchus (1.1.3), wrote commentaries on Aratus’ poem before him. The story in the Lives that Antigonos Gonatas ‘told’ Aratus to versify Eudoxus’ work is presumably a post-Hipparchan fiction (cf. Knaack, RE 2.393), although the king’s ‘bon mot’ eqdon|teqom poie?r t¹m Eudonom might just be a contemporary joke. For a discussion of the problems cf. O. Regenbogen, RE Suppl. 7. 1412 – 15. Aratus’ combination of astronomy and weather-signs is unlikely to have been an original conception; a parallel prose text was published by C. Wessely, ‘Bruchstücke einer antiken Schrift über Wetterzeichen’, SWAW 142.1, 1900, cf. O. Neugebauer, ‘Über griechische Wetterzeichen und Schattentafeln’, S AW 240.2 (1962). For Aratus’ ‘typically Hellenistic’ use of Homer cf. the (rather limited) surveys by A. Ronconi, ‘Arato interprete di Omero’, SIFC 14, 1937, 167 – 202, 237 – 59, and A. Traina, ‘Variazioni omeriche in Arato’, Maia 8, 1956, 39 – 48.

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tus understood the rôle of the poet to differ from that of the technician, a subject to which I shall return in general, rather than specific, terms. The present essay is concerned rather to sketch out a way of reading and understanding the Phainomena as very much a text of its time, and one which forces us to be clear about what we can and cannot know about ancient reading and writing practices. Aratus presents his poem as a rewriting of Hesiod’s Works and Days7. The opening ‘Hymn to Zeus’ (vv. 1 – 18) is replete with Hesiodic phraseology8, and the echoing and chiastic style of the first four verses not merely enacts their message – that the world is a kind of echo-chamber resounding with ‘Zeus’ – but is also an ‘updating’ of the famous opening of the Works and Days (Phain. 1 – 4): 9j Di¹r !qw~lesha, t¹m oqd]pot’ %mdqer 1_lem %qqgtom . lesta· d³ Di¹r p÷sai l³m !cuia_, p÷sai d’!mhq~pym !coqa_, lestµ d³ h\kassa ja· kil]mer . p\mtg d³ Di¹r jewq^leha p\mter.

From Zeus let us begin. We men never leave him unspoken: full of Zeus are all the streets, all the meeting-places of men, full is the sea and the harbours; everywhere it is Zeus whom we all need. LoOsai Pieq_ghem !oid0si jke_ousai, deOte D_’ 1mm]pete, sv]teqom pat]q’ rlme_ousai. fm te di± bqoto· %mdqer bl_r %vato_ te vato_ te, Ngto_ t’ %qqgto_ te Di¹r lec\koio 6jgti. N]a l³m c±q bqi\ei, N]a d³ bqi\omta wak]ptei,

7

8

About any debt to the Astronomia or Astrologia ascribed in antiquity to Hesiod (frr. 288 – 293 MW) we can say nothing. It would, however, be very surprising if the Phainomena did not contain echoes of that poem. Callimachus’ epigram on Aratus’ poem (27 Pf. = 56 GP) may have both this poem and WD in mind; I wonder whether tropos in v. 1 evokes astronomical tropai. The facts have often been documented, cf., e. g., H. Schwabl, ‘Zur Mimesis bei Arat’, in Antidosis. Festschrift fr Walther Kraus zum 70. Geburtstag, Vienna/Cologne/Graz 1972, 336 – 56 and, more briefly, Hopkinson 138 – 40. The most striking echoes are: the repeated D_a, di\, Di|r (WD 2 – 4, Phain. 1 – 4), %qqgtom (Phain. 2/WD 3 – 4), Phain. 3 – 4/WD 2 – 4, 101, Phain. 6/WD 20, Phain. 15/WD 822 (from the epilogue to Hesiod’s poem); on pqot]qg ceme^ (Phain. 16, WD 160) cf. below. If %qqgtom in v. 2 plays on the poet’s name, then we may compare the ‘play’ on Zeus’ name at WD 2 – 3 and Js_odom at Theog. 22. The ‘pun’ was, to my knowledge, first suggested in print by W. Levitan, Glyph 5, 1979, 68 n.18 and then (presumably independently) by D. A. Kidd, CQ 31, 1981, 353. Cf. further P. Bing, ‘A pun on Aratus’ name in Verse 2 of the ‘Phainomena’’, HSCP 93, 1990, 281 – 5.

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Ne?a d’ !q_fgkom lim}hei ja· %dgkom !]nei, Ne?a d] t’ Qh}mei sjoki¹m ja· !c^moqa j\qvei Fe»r rxibqel]tgr, dr rp]qtata d~lata ma_ei. jkOhi Qd½m !_ym te, d_j, d’ Uhume h]listar t}mg . 1c½ d] je P]qs, 1t^tula luhgsa_lgm.

Muses from Pieria, who glorify by songs, come to me, tell of Zeus your father in your singing. Because of him mortal men are unmentioned and mentioned, spoken and unspoken of, according to great Zeus’ will. For easily he makes strong, and easily he oppresses the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous one and magnifies the inconspicuous, and easily he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud – Zeus who thunders on high, who dwells in the highest mansions. O hearken as thou seest and hearest, and make judgement straight with righteousness, Lord; while I should like to tell Perses words of truth. (WD 1 – 10, trans. M.L. West)

The bipartite structure of Aratus’ poem is presumably indebted to Hesiod’s ‘double-headed’ construction9, and it has long been observed that the gliding transitions between subjects within the Phainomena, which avoid a systematic sectioning such as is familiar from Latin didactic, must be an attempt to reproduce the archaic manner. A remarkable similarity in the metrical technique of Hesiod and Aratus, involving a deviation by Aratus from the tendencies of his age, has even been noted10. More important for our present purposes is the relationship between the subject-matter of the two poems. There is, of course, much in the Works and Days about the use of nature and the movements of the stars to regulate one’s life, both in farming and sailing, and it is to farmers and sailors, although not to them uniquely11, that Aratus directs the didaxis of his poem (vv. 7 – 9, 42, 758 ff etc.) 12. Moreover, the most famil9 Cf., e. g., J. Farrell, Vergil’s ‘Georgics’ and the Traditions of Ancient Epic, New York/Oxford 1991, 163 – 4. West (p. 136 of his edition) notes that the title Works and Days is first attested in Lucian, but ‘was no doubt established a good deal earlier’. 10 Cf. H. A. Porter, ‘Hesiod and Aratus’, TAPA 77, 1946, 158 – 70. 11 Cf. P. Bing, ‘Aratus and his audiences’, MD 31, 1993, 99 – 109 12 At one level there is here an obvious debt to traditional modes of self-presentation by poets, cf. the related trope at Call. H. 3.170 – 82, with the remarks of P. Bing, ZPE 54, 1984, 1 – 8. Observe the difference from the proem of Nicander’s Theriaca in which the poet tells his addressee that, after instruction from Nicander, he will be respected by ‘the ploughman, the oxherd, and the woodcutter’ (three likely victims of snakebite). Nicander’s three levels, instead of the Hesiodic and Aratean two, mark the ‘professionalism’ and specialisation

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iar section of the Phainomena, the myth of Parthenos-Dike (vv. 96 – 136), is a close re-writing of Hesiod’s ‘Myth of Five Ages’; both passages serve to explain the situation in which man currently finds himself. As much as anything, it was the aetiological focus of the Works and Days which so commended it to Hellenistic and later poets. Finally, and by way of transition to the second crucial feature of the Phainomena, we may note an obvious and pointed contrast between the ethos of the two poems. The Works and Days presents us with an allpowerful and all- seeing Zeus (cf., e. g., 267 – 9) who is concerned with justice, but whose mind (noos) is changeable and hard-to-know (483 – 4), and who has hidden from men the means of a life free from toil (42 jq}xamter …) 13. The themes of concealment and hiddenness are, of course, most prominent in the myths of Pandora and the Five Ages. The Zeus of the Phainomena, however, while also being all-seeing and concerned with justice, openly assists mankind through the omnipresence of ‘signs’ (Phain. 10 – 13): aqt¹r c±q t\ ce s^lat’ 1m oqqam` 1st^qinem %stqa diajq_mar, 1sj]xato d’eQr 1miaut¹m !st]qar oV je l\kista tetucl]ma sgla_moiem !mdq\sim ¢q\ym, evq’ 5lpeda p\mta v}ymtai.

Zeus himself set signs in heaven, marking out the constellations, and for the whole year he thought out which stars should most of all give men signs of the seasons, so that all things should grow without fail.

Much remains hidden and further ‘progress’ depends upon Zeus’ benevolence (vv. 768 – 71, quoted below), but the situation is much more promising than that which Hesiod offered (Phain. 771 – 2): b c±q owm cemeµm !mdq_m !mavamd¹m av]kkei p\mtohem eQd|lemor, p\mtg d’ f ce s^lata va_mym.

of the knowledge which Nicander possesses; cf. his repeated rhetoric of access to privileged information (oWda, Ther. 805, 811, 818, 829) which stands in sharp contrast to Aratus. It is in details such as this that Nicander’s true difference from the ‘Hesiodic’ tradition is to be seen; that the three levels are not always consistently maintained (cf. B. Effe, Dichtung und Lehre. Untersuchungen zur Typologie des antiken Lehrgedichts, Munich 1977, 58 n. 6) does not diminish the programmatic significance of the opening. 13 The classic discussions of the theme of ‘hiding’ in Works and Days are those of J.-P. Vernant; cf., e. g., R. L. Gordon (ed.), Myth, Religion and Society, Cambridge 1981, 43 – 79.

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For Zeus openly brings aid to the race of mortals, appearing on every side, and everywhere revealing his signs.

The open visibility of the sky above us carries its own persuasive force. In a sense, no argument is needed to support Aratus’ exposition: we must merely look around14. Zeus in fact actually ‘speaks’ (k]ceim) to men15 ; the Phainomena itself is a ‘sign’ of Zeus’ benevolence, – it comes in fact as a tejl^qiom (‘evidentiary sign’) from the Muses (v. 18) – whereas the Works and Days presents itself as the necessary product of hard times. The importance of Hesiod for Aratus is, therefore, not in doubt16. The second determinative influence which has been identified in the Phainomena is early Stoicism. The extant Lives make Aratus a pupil of Zeno and a contemporary at the court of Antigonos Gonatas of Zeno’s pupil, Persaios, and it is clear from the scholia that a Stoicising interpretation of the poem set in early17. An all-pervasive and beneficent Zeus, who can be identified with nature itself, and whose stars function as helpful signs for mankind seems clearly related to the Stoic cosmic principle. Here, however, modern interpretation must tread carefully. We can hardly speak of a firm body of ‘Stoic dogma’ at a date as early as that normally supposed for the Phainomena18, and the danger of reading later theory back into the poem is thus a very real one. Nevertheless, the risk is worth taking, not merely because a Stoicising reading proves (I believe) a fruitful hermeneutic strategy, but also because it is to some extent unavoidable. A complex intertextual relationship, such as that which Aratus sets up with Hesiod’s Works and Days, is always to some extent an act of appropriation, of making the earlier text ‘speak’ in 14 For the case where the evidence of our eyes and that of tradition conflicts cf. below. 15 Cf. vv. 7 – 8 (in programmatic position), 732; weather-signs, as part of Zeus’ system, also ‘speak’ (vv. 1048, 1071). 16 The ancient Lives and the Suda, in fact, preserve traces of a scholarly dispute as to whether Aratus was more a zelotes of Homer or of Hesiod; the main thrust of the dispute will have been stylistic (cf. esp. Vita II, p. 12 Martin). For what it is worth, Menecrates of Ephesus, a grammarian whom the Suda makes Aratus’ teacher, seems to have written ‘didactic’ poems à la Hesiod (SH 542 – 50). 17 Cf., e. g., pp. 40 – 1, 49 – 50 Martin. The most thoroughgoing, and important, modern Stoicising reading of the poem is that of Erren; I am much indebted to this work throughout. 18 For a helpful orientation cf. the remarks of D. Sedley in M. Schofield et al. (eds.), Doubt and Dogmatism, Oxford 1980, 4 – 7.

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certain ways. There are thus clear affinities between this widespread technique of Hellenistic poetry and the manner in which the Stoics used the evidence of archaic poetry, ‘accommodating’ it to, or seeing in it mythical foreshadowings of, Stoic theory19. Aratus’ use of Hesiod does not, therefore, have to be specifically ‘Stoic’ in inspiration (although it is difficult to explain away all the circumstantial evidence); to ‘read’ Hesiod’s Zeus, for example, as a foreshadowing of intellectual patterns familiar in Aratus’ own day was a move of a type common in the poetic tradition – there are very clear examples in, say, Attic tragedy. A Stoicising reading, however, allows us to make the best use of the comparative texts still extant. It is a lucky chance that the Hymn to Zeus of Cleanthes, who succeeded Zeno as head of the Stoic ‘school’, has survived to allow us to see how a nearly contemporary Stoic ‘accommodated’ the traditional language and forms of hymnic poetry to a new world-view20. Aratus’ ‘accommodation’ is of a different type, but the subject-matter of his poem invites us to see it in the same tradition, and this is what I shall attempt in this paper. Finally, from the poetic point of view, Aratus’ apparent ‘combination’ of Hesiod with Stoicism would be analogous to other standard techniques of mimesis; in particular, Hellenistic poets and their Roman successors constantly echo both an earlier passage of poetry and the (real or ‘constructed’) source of that earlier passage. Viewed from this perspective, Aratus ‘reads’ Hesiod not merely as a forerunner of the Stoics, but as the seed from which they grew.

19 See A. A. Long, ‘Stoic readings of Homer’ in R. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney (eds.), Homer’s Ancient Readers, Princeton 1992, 41 – 66. Whether or not Stoic criticism was allegorising in the full sense is not crucial to the present argument; for much valuable information cf. G. W. Most, ‘Cornutus and Stoic allegoresis: a preliminary report’ in ANRW II.36.3 (1989), 2014 – 65. 20 For Cleanthes’ hymn cf. Hopkinson 131 – 6; Long/Sedley 1. 326 – 7, 2. 326 – 7; A. W. James, ‘The Zeus hymns of Cleanthes and Aratus’, Antichthon 6, 1972, 28 – 38; K. Sier, ‘Zum Zeushymnos des Kleanthes’, in P. Steinmetz (ed.), Beitrge zur hellenistischen Literatur und ihrer Rezeption in Rom, Stuttgart 1990, 93 – 108; R. Glei, ‘Der Zeushymnus des Kleanthes’, in L. Hagemann and E. Pulsfort (eds.), “Ihr alle aber seid Brder”. Festschrift fr A.Th. Khoury zum 60. Geburtstag, Würzburg 1990, 577 – 97.

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2. Cosmic Poetry For the Stoics, the universe (kosmos) is order (kosmos). The word re-echoes through Cleanthes’ hymn21. The earliest poets too were believed to have written about the development of the universe, and ‘cosmogony’ was generally held to be the first subject of poetry22. It is, for example, the subject of the first song of Orpheus, traditionally the first poet23, in the Argonautica of Apollonius, an epic poem probably composed not long after the Phainomena. Aratus’ poem is not cosmogonical in the true sense, but it is certainly cosmological, and to this extent Aratus evokes the originary voice of the archaic theologos, ‘speaker about the gods’, while writing in a very new mode. Similar literary combinations abound in the poetry of the third century. Moreover, from a very early date, notions of kosmos were closely bound up with the idea of poetry and, particularly, truth in poetry. In a famous passage of Odyssey 8, Odysseus praises the Phaeacian bard Demodocus: ‘Demodocus, I admire you beyond any man; either it was the Muse who taught you, daughter of Zeus himself, or else it was Apollo. With what utter rightness ( jat± j|slom) you sing of the fortunes of the Achaeans – all they achieved and suffered and toiled over – as though you yourself were there or had talked with one who was! Come, change now to a later theme – the wooden horse and its fashioning ( j|slom)… If you recount all this for me in the fashion it deserves ( jat± lo?qam), then I will tell the world forthwith how the god has blessed you ungrudgingly with the gift of inspired song’. (Od. 8. 487 – 98, trans. W. Shewring)

The notion of kosmos in this passage has been much discussed24, but ‘proper order’ and ‘sequence’ are certainly of primary importance, as they are also in the phrase jat± lo?qam, literally ‘part for part’. This is 21 Note vv. 7, 19, 28. 22 Cf. esp. P. R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986) Chapter 1. On the history of the word kosmos cf. G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge 1954) 311 – 12, and H. Diller, ‘Der vorphilosophische Gebrauch von KOSMOS und KOSMEIN’, in Festschrift Bruno Snell, Munich 1956, 47 – 60 23 Cf., e. g., Ar. Frogs 1032, Hor. AP 382. On Orpheus’ song (Arg. 1.496 – 511) cf. my The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge 1993, 148 – 50, 162 – 3 (with bibliography). 24 I have found the first chapter of G.B. Walsh, The Varieties of Enchantment (Chapel Hill/London 1984) particularly helpful. Cf. also S. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice, Cambridge 1991, 57 – 9.

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even clearer in the following passage from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes in which the young god first sings for Apollo: ‘He sang of the immortal gods and the dark earth, how they came to be in the first place and how each one was allotted his portion (lo?qa). First of the gods he honoured Mnemosyne in his song, the mother of the Muses, for she had received the son of Maia in her share. Then the glorious son of Zeus hymned the immortal gods according to their age and he told how each was born; he told everything in due order ( jat± j|slom) as he played the lyre in his arm’. (vv. 427 – 33)

Here, again in an originating cosmogony, the young god sings first of the division (lo?qa) of powers, and then of each god in turn, jat± j|slom. Notions of partition and of sequential order are of course very closely related, and as the passage from Odyssey 8 suggests, it is in that proper sequential order that the guarantee of truth lies25. These guarantees are a result of the sense that the kosmos of the song reflects the kosmos of the ‘real world’. This has been well described by George Walsh: ‘kosmos … an order of the world to which song must correspond as representation … kosmos in the song and kosmos of the world should not differ. The song viewed as an articulation of parts stands for one viewed as a representation of serially ordered facts, for the true song must reflect the world’s articulation with its own’26. In singing of the stars and of nature – for the Stoic a perfectly ordered kosmos – Aratus’ poem is its own guarantee of truth. A poem ‘about the kosmos’ must be a poem jat± j|slom. Moreover, in the Works and Days Aratus had an authorising model which also foregrounded order and sequence, as Hesiod sets out for us the passage of the year. The centrality of kosmos in its manifold senses sheds particular light on two important passages of the Phainomena. The first is the acrostic passage discovered by J.-M. Jacques (Phain. 783 – 7) 27: 25 I suspect that order and sequence are also relevant to the morphe of words at Od. 8.170 and 11.367 (where truth and falsehood are explicitly involved). I do not, of course, mean to suggest that kata kosmon and ou kata kosmon always involve notions of truth and untruth, cf. further A. W. H. Adkins, CQ 22, 1972, 12 – 14, although Gorgias’ assertion that ‘truth’ is the kosmos of logos (Helen 1) relies, I think, upon a well-established, rather than a paradoxical, notion. Relevant also is the assertion of the absurd Ion, ¢r ew jej|slgja t¹m nlgqom (Pl. Ion 530d), a claim which reverses the traditional language of poetic kosmos, and thus underlines Ion’s stupidity. 26 Op. cit. 8 – 9. 27 ‘Sur un acrostiche d’Aratos (‘Phén.’ 783 – 787)’, REA 62, 1960, 48 – 61. On acrostics in general cf. E. Vogt, ‘Das Akrostichon in der griechischen Literatur’,

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Keptµ l³m jahaq^ te peq· tq_tom Glaq 1oOsa eudi|r j’ eUg, keptµ d³ ja· ew l\k’ 1qeuhµr pmeulat_g . paw_ym d³ ja· !lbke_,si jeqa_air t]tqatom 1j tqit\toio v|yr !lemgm¹m 5wousa A³ m|tou !lbk}met’ C vdator 1cc»r 1|mtor.

If the moon is thin and her light pure on the third day, there will be fine weather; if thin and her light very red, there will be wind; if, however, she is on the large side and her horns are dull and her light weak on the third and fourth nights, she is being dulled by the approach of the South Wind or of rain.

Some years after Jacques’ article, W. Levitan28 identified a further acrostic in the same area of the poem (vv. 803 – 6 p÷sa) and, more tentatively, a third (partial) acrostic immediately afterwards (vv. 808 – 12 seleg, suggesting sÞma and cognate verbs); recently, Michael Haslam has refined Levitan’s insight by noting l]sg, ‘mid-way’, split between the openings of vv. 807 – 829. Whereas Jacques and others30 connected the kept^ acrostic solely with the famous kept|tgr of ‘Callimachean’ poetry, i. e. had seen it as imitation of Homer (cf. Iliad 24. 1 – 5) and a programmatic marker of style and nothing more, Levitan rightly sought to make sense of it in terms of the central concerns of the poem. He noted that it followed very closely upon a passage which seems to invite us to look for such things (Phain. 768 – 72) 31: p\mta c±q oupy 1j Di¹r %mhqypoi cim~sjolem, !kk’ 5ti pokk± j]jquptai, t_m aU je h]k, ja· 1saut_ja d~sei Fe}r . b c±q owm cemeµm !mdq_m !mavamd¹m av]kkei p\mtohem eQd|lemor, p\mtg d’ f ce s^lata va_mym.

28 29 30

31

A&A 13, 1967, 80 – 95 and (with good bibliography) E. Courtney, ‘Greek and Latin acrostichs’, Phil. 134, 1990, 3 – 13. ‘Plexed artistry: Aratean acrostics’, Glyph 5, 1979, 55 – 68. ‘Hidden signs: Aratus Diosemeiai 46 ff., Vergil ‘Georgics’ 1. 424 ff.’, HSCP 94, 1992, 199 – 204. Cf. Vogt art. cit. 83 – 7 and Courtney art. cit. 10 – 11. See now R. Scarcia, ‘L’isopsefo di Arato’, in R. Pretagostini (ed.), Tradizione e innovazione nella cultura greca da Omero all’et ellenistica. Scritti in onore di B. Gentili, Rome 1993, III 971 – 80. That the acrostic remained concealed until 1960 merely confirms Aratus’ words. On this passage see the helpful exegesis of Erren 255 – 7. The verses leave room for progress in theoretical and empirical science, because although the ‘signs’ are already present in the kosmos, they do not yet ‘signify’ because men have not yet discovered the sign.

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For not yet does Zeus allow us to know all things, but much remains hidden; if he wishes, Zeus will grant us this too presently, for he openly brings aid to the race of mortals, appearing on every side, and everywhere revealing his signs.

Moreover, the successful searching out of acrostic patterns recreates the activity of the anonymous ‘discoverer’ of the constellations who perceived the usefulness of joining together those stars which would make meaningful figures (vv. 373 – 82) 32. Just as this ‘discoverer’ revealed patterns which had always been there, and were ‘put there by god’, so a reader discovers meaningful ‘signs’ in the apparent randomness of the first letters of a succession of hexameters. The notion of kosmos now allows us to carry Levitan’s important insight further. The words which are used to describe the heavenly bodies —kept|r ‘fine’, jahaq|r ‘pure’ (e. g. 383, 783) paw}r ‘fat’ – seem to have been used as descriptions of poetic style in contemporary literary debate; this is most famously attested in the literary polemics of Callimachus33. By this device, poetry and its subject are seen to be symmetrical, illustrating the reciprocal kosmos which I have already discussed. Even if we wish to deny that Aratus’ choice of language carries a programmatic charge in the context of contemporary poetry, – and both chronology and a dearth of other comparative evidence make the matter at best uncertain34 —, the acrostic shows us how the pattern of the universe is reflected in the pattern of the poem. The stars are literally in the poem, and vice versa. Manilius too employs a related strategy in his Astronomica, a massive Stoic poem in which the regularity of heavenly movements is a central theme and in which there is an important, if shifting, relationship between the ordo visible in the skies and the ordo inscribed by the poet in his poem. The second passage which I wish to discuss under this head is Aratus’ explicit refusal to give an account of the planets. The passage forms 32 On the problems of this passage cf. D. A. Kidd, ‘The pattern of Phaenomena 367 – 385’, Antichthon 1, 1967, 12 – 15, and M. L. B. Pendergraft, ‘On the nature of the constellations: Aratus, Ph. 367 – 85’, Eranos 88, 1990, 99 – 106. Pendergraft’s interesting discussion rather overstates the ‘inconsistency’ between the namer’s rôle and that of Zeus. 33 For leptos cf. fr. 1.24 (leptaleos); for katharos, H. 2.111; for pachys fr. 398. 34 The very ‘untechnical’ vagueness of these terms of approbation and disapproval is crucial to the teasing way in which Callimachus uses them, cf. my Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica Book III, Cambridge 1989, 37.

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a transition between the description of the individual fixed stars and that of the four celestial circles (Phain. 454 – 61): oR d’ 1pil·n %kkoi p]mt’ !st]qer oqd³m blo?oi p\mtohem eQd~kym duoja_deja dime}omtai. oqj #m 5t’ eQr %kkour bq|ym 1pitejl^qaio je_mym Hwi j]omtai, 1pe· p\mter letam\stai. lajqo· d] sve~m eQsim 2kissol]mym 1miauto_,

lajq± d³ s^lata je?tai !p|pqohem eQr 4m Q|mtym, oqd’ 5ti haqsak]or je_mym 1c½ %qjior eUgm !pkam]ym t\ te j}jka t\ t’ aQh]qi s^lata’ 1mispe?m.

Mixed with them are five other stars, in no way like them as they whirl all through the twelve figures [of the Zodiac]. Not by looking at other stars could you mark the paths of these, since all move about. Long are the periods of their revolutions, and very far apart the signs of their conjunctions35. Of them I have no longer confidence: may I be competent to tell of the circles of the fixed stars and the signs in heaven.

In this praeteritio Aratus alludes to a notoriously difficult astronomical problem36, the discussion of which would certainly not be in keeping with the style and level of the rest of the poem. There is, of course, no reason to see here a serious and rather embarrassing admission of astronomical incompetence37: the planets (excluding the sun and the moon) are not in fact relevant to an account of star- and weathersigns intended (at least notionally) to be of use to farmers and sailors38. This, however, does not explain why Aratus chose to call attention to his ‘omission’ in such a prominent and striking way. Part at least of the explanation, I suggest, lies in the notion of kosmos. Although the planets are, of course, as much a part of the universe as are the fixed stars – indeed they are much more influential ‘signs’ according to certain ancient views – Aratus stresses their ‘uncertainty’ in order to emphasise the fixed certainty of what he actually does describe. Put very loosely, the planets lack kosmos.

35 On this difficult verse see Kidd’s note ad loc. 36 For Eudoxus’ solution cf. Arist. Met. k 1073b 17 – 32 (= Eudoxus D6 Lasserre). 37 Aratus seems in fact to have dealt with the planets in another work (probably a poem), the lost Kanon (= SH 90), cf. E. Maass, Aratea, Berlin 1892, 219 – 20, Kidd’s note on v. 460. 38 Cf., e. g., Ludwig 439 – 40, followed by Effe, Dichtung und Lehre (n. 14 above) 41 n. 8. For a rather different emphasis cf. Erren 155 – 6.

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The passage on the planets is introduced by verses which stress eternal and regular recurrence in the face of moving time (Phain. 451 – 3): taOt\ je hg^saio paqeqwol]mym 1miaut_m 2ne_gr pak_myqa . t± c±q ja· p\mta l\k’ avtyr oqqam` ew 1m\qgqem !c\klata mujt¹r Qo}sgr.

These stars you can see returning in orderly succession as the years pass, for all these images are very firmly fixed in the heaven through the moving night.

You cannot, however, use the other stars to find the planets because the latter are all metanastai, ‘vagrants’. Not only can the poet and his readers not be ‘confident’ (v. 460) where to look to see the planets, but the same verse also suggests that they are not the kind of signs which inspire confidence that we can read them39. We may compare vv. 1142 – 4 where we are told that the congruence of two weather-signs brings ‘hope’ (1kpyq^) and of three ‘confidence’ (h\qsor). It is, after all, god’s benevolence that both gives us signs and allows us to read them and to act upon our reading. Confidence comes from the repeated pattern (kosmos) of successful ‘sign-reading’; in this, the argument runs, the planets fail us. Such an interpretation anchors the passage firmly within the limited bounds of Aratus’ ‘didactic program’; poets, after all, only use an explicit praeteritio for subjects they do not wish to pass by. It is striking that in his Hymn to Zeus Cleanthes too contrasts the fixed kosmos of nature with the mad changeability and rush of the kakoi, the ‘bad men’: ‘[Reason, logos] is shunned and neglected by the bad among mortal men, the wretched, who ever yearn for the possession of goods yet neither see nor hear god’s universal law, by obeying which they could lead a good life in partnership with intelligence. Instead, devoid of intelligence, they rush into this evil or that, some in their belligerent quest for fame, others with an unbridled bent for acquisition, others for leisure and the pleasurable acts of the body … despite travelling hither and thither in burning quest of the opposite. (Cleanthes, Hymn to Zeus 22 – 31, trans. Long & Sedley)

The kakoi are, of course, very different from Aratus’ planets, but the two play structurally related roles in their respective poems; both carry the 39 The unusual genitive after haqsak]or (cf. Erren 302) helps the double sense here. Kidd compares sov¹r jaj_m at Aesch. Suppl. 453; there, however, %idqir in the same verse is a crucial influence.

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rejected weight of change and disorder. For an astronomer, the difficulty of explaining the movement of the planets was not a serious threat to the idea of an ordered universe, but within the rhetoric of his poem Aratus gives their ‘quirkiness’ a particular importance. Finally, the passage on the planets also finds an instructive parallel in the archaic poem which we have seen to be central for the Phainomena, namely Hesiod’s Works and Days. The catalogue of ‘days’ concludes with a brief glance at the days which have not been mentioned (WD 822 – 5, trans. M.L. West): aVde l³m Bl]qai eQs·m 1piwhom_oir l]c’ emeiaq . aR d’ %kkai let\doupoi, !j^qioi, ou ti v]qousai. %kkor d’ !kko_gm aQme?, paOqoi d³ Usasim. %kkote lgtquiµ p]kei Bl]qg, %kkote l^tgq.

These are the days that are of great benefit for men on earth. The rest are days of changeable omen, doomless, with nothing to offer. Different people commend different sorts of day, but few know that among those ones ‘sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother’.

Interpretation of these verses is disputed, but there seems to be a central contrast between days about which something certain can be said, i. e. the days of Hesiod’s catalogue (vv. 768 – 81), and days which ‘give an uncertain sound’, which may turn out good or bad, and are therefore not suitable material for ‘didactic poetry’. Hesiod’s poem ends (WD 826 – 8) with an affirmation of the power of knowledge to overcome uncertainty, an uncertainty that is a central principle of men’s lives (WD 483 – 4). That knowledge, and the power to offer it to others, is precisely what the poet claims for himself 40. Aratus’ poem carries this claim further by eliminating uncertainty not only from the poem, but also from the world itself.

3. Authority and Truth How and if poets spoke ‘the truth’ is a central concern of both the explicit and the implicit poetics of the Greek world from the earliest days. The history of this concern has often been written, and need not be re40 Who better fits the prescription of the final three verses of WD than the poet himself ? Notice the echo of these Hesiodic verses in Archestratus’ ‘didactic’ culinary poem (SH 169.4 – 5).

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peated here. Certain key periods in the history of this debate must, however, be identified, in order to allow Aratus’ exploitation of this tradition properly to be appreciated. The Muses who appeared to Hesiod famously told him (Theog. 26 – 8, trans. M.L. West), poil]mer %cqaukoi, j\j’ 1k]cwea, cast]qer oWom, Udlem xe}dea pokk± k]ceim 1t}loisim blo?a, Udlem d’ ewt’ 1h]kylem !kgh]a cgq}sashai.

‘Shepherds that camp in the wild, disgraces, merest bellies: we know to tell many lies that sound like truth, but we know to sing reality, when we will’

but more important here than the explicit declaration of the Hesiodic Muses is the way in which the poet presents himself in the Works and Days. The authority of what Hesiod says in that poem stems from the authority invested in the traditional poetic form which he employs41, from the autobiographical mode of the poem – Hesiod knows these things, because he has experienced them – and from the Muses42. All three come together in a perhaps unexpected way when Hesiod turns to instructions about sailing: ‘When you want to escape debt and joyless hunger by turning your blightwitted heart to trade, I will show you the measure of the resounding sea – quite without instruction as I am in seafaring or in ships; for as to ships, I have never yet sailed the broad sea, except to Euboea from Aulis, the way the Achaeans once came when they waited through the winter and gathered a great army from holy Greece against Troy of the fair women. There to the funeral games for warlike Amphidamas and to Chalcis I crossed, and many were the prizes announced and displayed by the sons of that valiant; where I may say that I was victorious in poetry and won a tripod with ring handles. That I dedicated to the Muses of Helicon, in the original place where they set me on the path of fine singing. That is all my experience of dowelled ships, but even so I will tell the design of Zeus the aegis-bearer, since the Muses have taught me to make song without limit.’ (WD 646 – 62, trans. M.L. West) 41 See the survey in West’s edition pp. 3 – 25. 42 For Hesiod’s ‘autobiography’ cf. G. W. Most, ‘Hesiod and the textualisation of personal temporality’ in G. Arrighetti and F. Montanari (eds.), La componente autobiografica nella poesia greca e latina, fra realt e artificio letterario, Pisa 1991, 73 – 92; for Hesiod and the Muses in the context of later ‘didactic’ poetry cf. now A. Barchiesi, Il poeta e il principe. Ovidio e il discorso augusteo, Roma-Bari 1994, 171 – 5.

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Here is an explicit claim for the didactic role of the poet in areas where the poet has no personal expertise43. The idea, of course, is not far from the blind Demodocus’ ability to tell well events at Troy, ‘as though he himself had been there or had heard from another who had’ (Od. 8. 491), but the Hesiodic passage marks an important statement of program, particularly when viewed from the perspective of later ages. Plutarch indeed excised vv. 650 – 62 from Hesiod’s poem as containing ‘nothing of value’ (oqd³m wqgst|m) 44, and Horace amusingly carried the Hesiodic position to its ‘logical’ conclusion in the Ars Poetica, where he undertakes to teach poetry, though he himself cannot be a poet because he is sane and therefore lacks the principal prerequisite of the poet (vv. 301 – 8) 45. Although Aratus does not emulate the Hesiodic importance attached to the autobiography of the poet as an authorising mode – perhaps because this would ill suit the Stoicising stress on the centrality of the fixed order of nature in which no individual is particularly important – it will become clear that the Hesiodic tradition is here, as everywhere, crucial for the Hellenistic poet. In fact, the gap which the Hesiodic verses opened allowed philosophers and ‘experts’ eventually to drive poets from the field. Whereas Parmenides and Empedocles had continued in the Hesiodic mode of using hexameters to offer access to truth and the avoidance of deceit46, the twin developments of prose writing and the idea of intellectual specialisation have always been seen as sounding the death knell for truly ‘didactic’ poetry. It was not, of course, that the use of metre alone was sufficient to condemn a text to the realm of ‘fanciful poetry’; the substance of what was written remained crucial. Thus Plato (Theaetetus 152e) can make a distinction between oR sovo_ (Parmenides, Protagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles) and oR poigta_ (Epicharmus, 43 R. M. Rosen has recently, and to my mind unconvincingly, interpreted these verses ‘programmatically’, in the context of Hesiod’s creation of his own poetic space vis-à-vis Homer, cf. ‘Poetry and sailing in Hesiod’s Works and Days’, CA 9, 1990, 99 – 113. 44 Plutarch, fr. 84 Sandbach, from the scholion to the passage. 45 AP 307 – 8, unde parentur opes, quid alat formetque poetam, / quid deceat, quid non, quo uirtus, quo ferat error, are distinctively ‘didactic’ in style and serve as a generic marker, cf., e. g., Verg. Georg. 1.1 ff, R. D. Brown, HSCP 93, 1990, 315 – 21. 46 Cf., e. g., Parmenides fr. 10, Empedocles frr. 1.9, 17.14, 23.9 – 11, 111, 114. For a brief (and incomplete) account of Aratus’ use of Empedocles cf. A. Traglia, ‘Reminiscenze empedoclee nei Fenomeni di Arato’, in Miscellanea di studi alessandrini in memoria di Augusto Rostagni, Turin 1963, 382 – 93.

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Homer), a distinction which clearly does not depend upon the use of metre, and Aristotle denied metre almost any significance in determining who was and was not a poet (Poetics Chapter 1, on Homer and Empedocles) 47; for Aristotle, ‘didactic poets’ were either theologoi (e. g. Hesiod) or physiologoi (e. g. Empedocles) or even (Met. N 4, 1091b 8) ‘partly theologoi’, depending on the mode of discourse used. Nevertheless, the claim of ‘metrically defined’ poetry to convey ‘useful information’ came under attack from a number of directions, most famously from Plato’s assault on the lack of knowledge of first the rhapsode and then the poet himself (Ion, Republic 10). It was the pleasure and sense of being charmed that we derive from poetry, as defined metrically, that made its lies so dangerous for Plato, and he ingeniously demanded that ‘the friends of the poets’ should defend its usefulness ‘without the aid of metre’ (Rep. 10.607d-e). It is both interesting and amusing to find Hipparchus precisely blaming the charm (charis) of Aratus’ verses for their general success in convincing people of their truth (1.1.7); this ‘Platonic’ tradition in the attack upon ‘didactic poetry’ is what Lucretius turns on its head when he uses the simile of the honeyed cup proudly to advertise the use of poetic charm for serious philosophic purposes (DRN 1.935 – 50 = 4.11 – 25). Manilius too gives the old charge a new twist in introducing the very technical third book of his Astronomica (Astr. 3.38 – 9): impendas animum; nec dulcia carmina quaeras: ornari res ipsa negat contenta doceri. Apply your mind to understand and seek not poetry that beguiles: my theme of itself precludes adornment, content but to be taught. (trans. G.P. Goold)

From roughly the same time as Plato’s attack on the poets survives a series of prose ‘handbooks’, technai, which shed important light upon developing notions of written authority48.

47 Cf. S. Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle, London 1987, 71; ‘Empedocles’ verse writings [are cited] to represent the use of language for directly affirmative purposes – any use of language, that is, which purports to offer true statements or propositions about some aspect of reality.’ Cf. below on poetry’s generalising power. 48 The standard discussion is M. Fuhrmann, Das systematische Lehrbuch, Göttingen 1960, which is, however, not particularly helpful on the issues discussed here.

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I wish here to focus upon two issues in these handbooks which are important for a consideration of the Phainomena, namely the problem of the author’s knowledge, and the scope of a ‘didactic’ work. Whereas the so-called Rhetoric to Alexander49 and Xenophon’s Hipparchikos (On the Cavalry Commander) begin in mediis rebus and authority rests presumably both upon the nature of the work itself and the known position of the author,50 Xenophon begins his Peri Hippikes (On Horseriding) with an appeal to his long experience of the art and his desire to pass on the fruits of this knowledge to his philoi51. Here we can sense a desire to avoid the persona of ‘professional specialist’, a desire confirmed by the claim at the end of the work that it is directed towards the needs of the ordinary rider, the idiotes52. Xenophon is keen to set his work within the traditional frame of aristocratic philia, a frame which could be represented as threatened by newer, more ‘professional’, sources of knowledge. This analysis is, I think, confirmed by the closing sections of the same writer’s Kynegetikos (On Hunting). At the end of Chapter 12 Xenophon adopts what may reasonably be called a Hesiodic voice: ‘For among the ancients the companions of Cheiron to whom I referred learnt many noble lessons in their youth, beginning with hunting; from these lessons there sprang in them great virtue (arete), for which they are admired even today. That all desire Virtue is obvious, but because they must toil if they are to gain her, the many fall away. For the achievement of her is hidden in obscurity, whereas the toils inseparable from her are manifest. … But in the presence of Virtue men do many evil and ugly things, supposing that they are not regarded by her because they do not see her. Yet she is present everywhere because she is immortal, and she honours those who are good to her, but casts off the bad. Therefore, if men knew that she is watching them, they would be impatient to undergo

49 50 51

52

On specifically rhetorical handbooks see T. Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, Baltimore-London 1991. I exclude the spurious prefatory letter. This in fact becomes the standard form, cf., e. g., the second-century grammatical tchne of Dionysius Thrax; a related form is found in the fragmentary technical treatises of Theophrastus. Ovid uses precisely the same rhetoric in his didactic mode, cf. AA 1.29, usus opus mouet hoc: uati parete perito, 3.791 – 2. The identity of Xenophon’s young philoi is disputed (cf. K. Widdra, Xenophon. Reitkunst, Berlin 1965, 72; Delebecque, Budé edition, pp. 10 – 12), but it is the language of philia which is important for present purposes. This final sentence is omitted in one of our two best witnesses to the text, and was condemned by Wilamowitz (Hermes 40, 1905, 146 – 7), but is defended (though for different reasons) by both Delebecque and Widdra. The considerations adduced here may also be thought to tell in its favour.

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the toils and the discipline by which she is hardly to be captured, and would achieve her’ (On Hunting 12.18 – 19, 21 – 2, trans. Marchant).

After this passage, which looks back to Hesiod’s Arete, ‘in front of which the immortal gods have placed sweat, and a long, steep path, rough at first, leads to it’ (WD 289 – 91), but also seems to anticipate Aratus’ watching Dike, the concluding chapter of the work is an attack upon sophistai who, while professing to teach arete, write books on silly subjects full of ‘empty pleasures’ but no arete; if they teach anything, it is bad. Xenophon then goes on: ‘I am a layman (idiotes), but I know (oWda) that the best thing is to be taught what is good by one’s own nature, and the next best thing is to get it from those who really know something good instead of being taught by masters of the art of deception. I daresay that I do not express myself in the language of a sophist (sesovisl]myr); in fact, that is not my object: my object is rather to give utterance to wholesome thoughts that will meet the needs of readers well educated in virtue. … For I wish my work not to seem useful, but to be so, that it may stand for all time unrefuted. The sophists talk to deceive and write for their own gain, and do no good to anyone’ (On Hunting 13.4 – 5, 7 – 8, trans. Marchant, modified).

Xenophon solves the problem of how to present his ‘technical’ knowledge of hunting, a knowledge he is keen to display, without incurring the odium of being a ‘professional’, by distinguishing between kinds of art. He can be an ‘expert’ in a ‘good art’ and remain an idiotes who does not write sesovisl]myr. The use of the words has changed, but the Hesiodic inheritance is manifest. Both the care taken by Xenophon’s rhetoric and the obvious vulnerability of his didactic position point to the importance of the issues involved. To anticipate somewhat, one of the most telling aspects of the Phainomena is the complete elision of this traditional didactic rhetoric of truth and deceit. Aratus imposes a total system upon us; deceit is not a possibility because what is described is t± vaim|lema53. How different are both the task and the rhetoric of Lucretius who must argue from the seen to the unseen and appeal time and again to naturae species ratioque (DRN 1.148) 54. The second 53 Cf. the remarks of Erren 152 – 3. 54 It will be clear that I cannot agree with the characterisation of Aratus’ Phainomena in the opening chapter (devoted to Lucretius) of G. B. Conte, Generi e Lettori (Milan 1991 = Genres and Readers, Baltimore 1994). For Conte, Aratus’ poem is ‘un brillante gioco tecnico- artistico’ (p. 19) in which the style and virtuosity of the text work against its contents; he contrasts the (undoubted) ‘integralità di significazione’ in Lucretius’ poem. As the previous section of this

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issue of importance which the handbooks raise is that of completeness. The Rhetoric to Alexander begins by sub-dividing the topic to be discussed, a strategy which becomes standard in such works and is obviously designed to convey a sense of the completeness of the knowledge being offered55 ; the author then undertakes to discuss the sub-divisions one- by-one ( jahû 4m 6jastom). In On Horse-riding Xenophon notes that he will cover much the same ground as an existing treatise by one Simon, but he will also fill in all the gaps (‘I shall attempt to illuminate all that he has omitted’, 1.1), and in On Hunting, he undertakes to give a full account of each piece of equipment needed (2.2). In On the Cavalry Commander, however, he finds it necessary to deny both the wish for and the possibility of ‘omnicomprehensiveness’: ‘[the cavalry commander] must always act upon what chance offers56, and with his eyes on the current situation, work towards what is advantageous. To give a written account of all he must do is no more possible than to know all of the future …’ (On the Cavalry Commander 9.1 – 2).

Here, as before, we can see Xenophon caught between the conflicting demands of the old and the new. Elsewhere in the same treatise he follows general hypomnemata (‘pieces of advice’) with the full details (6jasta), quite in the manner of the rhetorical treatises57. So too in his Constitution of the Spartans, which begins ‘unprofessionally’ with a kind of chance intellectual curiosity (‘Once upon a time it occurred to me … and I fell to wondering …’) 58, order, sequence and completeness are

55

56 57 58

paper has, I hope, demonstrated, Aratus has his own ‘integralità di significazione’, different though it is from Lucretius’. The virtuoso Hellenistic style is itself a manifestation of control and ordering, of kosmos. Conte’s view of Aratus is, of course, the standard one; cf., e. g., Farrell (above n. 11) 328, ‘[the Phainomena] makes its philosophical subject the paradoxical foil for its poetic qualities’. Cf. Aristotle’s criticism of earlier writers of technai for their lack of completeness, Rhet. 1. 1354a 11 – 16. The ‘apotheosis’ of this strategy is to be found in the Rhetorica ad Herrenium which impresses its omnicomprehensiveness upon us throughout the work; cf. the excellent survey of E. Rawson, ‘The introduction of logical organisation in Roman prose literature’, PBSR 46, 1978, 12 – 34 (= Roman Culture and Society. Collected Papers, Oxford 1991, 324 – 51). Or ‘come up with what happens to meet the situation’, reading 1mmoe?m (Madvig) for poie?m. Cf. 1.9, 3.1 Contrast the Poroi which begins with an unapologetic announcement of systematic enquiry. Clearly, the Xenophontic corpus contains different kinds of work, which must be distinguished (by audience?).

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overtly exhibited59. There is, then, a ‘rhetoric of completeness’ in the handbooks, which may be compared with Thucydides’ claim (5.26.1) to give a fully detailed account of the Peloponnesian war, ¢r 6jasta 1c]meto, a claim which is clearly of a piece with the presentation of his work as ‘serious history’ in comparison with the entertaining display-pieces of others (1.22). It should not now surprise us to find Hipparchus using precisely the same ‘rhetoric of completeness’ in the introduction to his account of the failings of Eudoxus and Aratus (1.1.9 – 11). Aratus uses a form of praeteritio to explain the lack of comprehensiveness in his account of weather-signs (Phain. 1036 – 7): t_ toi k]cy fssa p]komtai s^lat’ 1p’ !mhq~pour ;

Why should I tell of all the signs available to men?

There are so many signs in nature that it would be impossible to tell them all, and in any case Aratus wants us to observe for ourselves and to find our own ‘signs’. As so often, however, we may connect a feature of the Phainomena both with Aratus’ philosophical project and with the tradition of ‘didactic poetry’, for lack of completeness has always presented a problem for anyone wishing to understand poetic didaxis in any simple way. Thus, for example, Malcolm Heath60 has adduced the ‘astonishingly lacunose’ information in the Works and Days as an argument against seeing it as seriously ‘intended to instruct’. This argument is, I believe, open to many objections61, but the observation of poetry’s ‘incompleteness’ does throw light upon the poetic didactic mode, if we connect the ‘rhetoric of completeness’ in Thucydides and the handbooks with Aristotle’s distinction between history and (mimetic) poetry. History deals with individual details in a chronological sequence, t± jahû 6jastom (Poetics 1451b 6 – 7). Mimetic poetry, however, deals with the general, t± jah|kou, and is ‘more philosophical than history’, not merely because it tells of events linked by a causal nexus of necessity or probability, but also because we can extrapolate from, say, the fate of Oedipus to analogous possible occurrences in our own lives. Expanding 59 Cf. 1.3, 2.1, 5.1, 11.1, 12.7 (the fact that the Spartans overlook nothing in military matters accounts for the length of Xenophon’s work, which also by implication ‘overlooks nothing’). 60 ‘Hesiod’s didactic poetry’, CQ 35, 1985, 245 – 63. 61 Not least on the grounds of what is meant by ‘instruction’, cf. below.

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upon Aristotle, we can note that the prominent gnomic element in poetry, which enables verses to be lifted out of their original context and applied to wholly new situations or taken to express general truths rather than specific, character-bound attitudes, encourages such extrapolation; this is indeed what lies at the base of ancient and modern practices of anthologising. Such transfer is in fact explicitly encouraged in Plutarch’s treatise How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, where the Stoic Chrysippus is in fact cited as a precedent (and Hesiod is the poet concerned) 62. The way in which we should approach the question of comprehensiveness in (non-mimetic) ‘didactic poetry’ is, I suggest, analogous to Aristotle’s treatment of mimetic poetry. If a poet tells us how to make a plough, it would be foolish to believe that we can extrapolate from this to the detailed carpentry necessary for a wagon. On the other hand, the plough, the work involved in making it, and the moral conditions which make it necessary, can stand, pars pro toto, as exemplary of the total working conditions of the farmer. ‘Didactic poetry’ does not have to be comprehensive to be ‘didactic’. It gives us examples, exemplary signs, from which we will be able to take our starting-point. The handbook, on the other hand, seeks to offer us a complete techne; in using the handbook, we give up active participation in the acquisition (or confirmation) of knowledge and entrust ourselves to the guidance of an expert63. Aratus was not, as Eudoxus was, an expert astronomer. I have noted before that there is no good reason to think that Aratus ever sought to conceal his debt to the scientist. Indeed, in an age when not only the specialisation of knowledge had triumphed, but – and this was an important factor in that triumph – gknowledge’ was now contained in books and catalogued in libraries, the use of expert written sources was the only way in which the poet could satisfactorily meet the ‘How do you know?’ challenge. An Eratosthenes could be both an expert and (in a small way) a poet, but that was exceptional. Aratus, on the other hand, was an ‘expert’ or ‘professional’ poet, and part of his expertise lay in knowing where to find things out; like Callimachus, he can still appeal to the Muses (vv. 16 – 18), but the Muses 62 Mor. 34b. It would be rash to assume that Chrysippus’ concerns here were the same as Plutarch’s; was the philosopher attempting a joke? 63 Here again (cf. above) we can see an important difference between Aratus and Nicander who promises completeness (Ther. 837), even if that promise is unfulfilled (cf. Effe op. cit. 61 n. 12).

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were now to be found in libraries64. Plato might not have been satisfied with Aratus’ solution, but Hipparchus acknowledges that it might not be fair to attack Aratus for what were Eudoxus’ mistakes (1.1.8). The ‘versifying’ of prose treatises is not inherently an idle game, but is at base a serious response to a crucial question of poetics. Aratus, of course, was not alone. Whereas Apollonius’ Orpheus is given the characteristics of an archaic theologos, his blind prophet Phineus speaks the language of didactic as he gives an account of Pontic geography, and he naturally relies upon written, prose sources65. Callimachus went further in the Aitia and sometimes named his prose sources66, a difference which is perhaps as much one of genre as of poetic judgement, but which throws a final light upon Aratus’ procedure. The constellations were ‘discovered’ and named long ago by a nameless man of high intellect (vv. 373 – 82). In these purely informational terms, Aratus has nothing of his own to contribute, not because he knows nothing of astronomy, but because the truth of what he sings is self-evident, once someone has taught us where to look. This is Aratus’ other response to the ‘How do you know?’ challenge: everyone knows – or could do, if they were willing to read god’s signs.

4. The Stars Look Down Stars are inescapable, and as such collect an extensive mythology. In many cultures they have been regarded as the eyes of god67, and at an early date Greeks adopted catasterism as an explanation for the presence of some stars at least. A remark by a character in Aristophanes’ Peace, 64 On the importance of books to third- century poetry in general cf. P. Bing, The Well-Read Muse, Göttingen 1988. 65 On Phineus cf. my The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge 1993, 90 – 5. For the sources of this passage cf. U. Hoefer, ‘Pontosvölker, Ephoros und Apollonios von Rhodos’, RhM 5, 1904, 542 – 64; L. Pearson, ‘Apollonios of Rhodes and the old geographers’, AJP 59, 1938, 443 – 59; P. Desideri, ‘Studi di storia eracleota’, SCO 16, 1967, 366 – 416. In view of the considerations raised here, it is perhaps tempting to associate Phineus’ disclaimer of ‘comprehensiveness’ (Arg. 2.311 – 16, 388 – 91) with the didactic mode; for the other considerations operative there cf. Hunter loc. cit. 66 Frr. 75.54 (Xenomedes) and (?) 92 (Leandros). Fr. 75.55 and 76 show Calllimachus playing with the ‘truth’ of his source. 67 Cf. R. Pettazzoni, The All-Knowing God, London 1956, Index s.v. stars; W. Deonna, Le symbolisme de l’oeil, Paris 1965, 258 – 70.

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‘Isn’t it true what they say, that we become stars in the sky when we die?’ (vv. 830 – 2) points to a popular folklore belief; perhaps it is what mothers told their young children. In any event, the idea that the psyche escaped to the upper air after death was a familiar one at least as early as the fifth century,68 and the popular imagination presumably contrived many aetiologies for these objects of wonder69. The idea that the stars are ‘heaven’s eyes’ is prominent in an epigram which may be roughly contemporary with Aratus, though it is ascribed to Plato70 : !st]qar eQsahqe?r, !stµq 1l|r . eUhe cemo_lgm oqqam|r, ¢r pokko?r fllasim eQr s³ bk]py.

‘You look at the stars, my star. Would that I were the heaven, so that I could gaze at you with many eyes’.

At a quite different intellectual level, the Platonic Socrates sees the purpose of formal astronomy as the pursuit of ‘truth’, not (or not importantly) to provide weather information for ‘farmers, sailors and generals’71. Thus, at an early date, the existence and regularity of movement of the heavenly bodies became a standard argument in philosophy for the existence of god or gods – we find it used later by the Stoics72 – and it is to philosophical texts of the fourth century that we owe important elaborations of these ideas about the stars. Two Platonic texts are particularly relevant. In the Epinomis, a work emanating from ‘Platonic circles’, we find the notion of stars as living beings which distinguish the good and the bad among us and which report to the gods everything that happens on earth (985a-b) 73. In the Timaeus, the fixed stars are eternal divine beings (40b), and to each was assigned by the demiurge a soul which rides upon it ‘as on a chariot’ (41e). After death the just man returns to his own star, whereas the bad man goes through successive de68 Cf. Euripides, Suppl. 532 – 6, Helen 1013 – 16; Alexis fr. 163 K-A; E. Rohde, Psyche, Tübingen 1898, II 384 n. 2, 387 n. 1; R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs, Urbana 1962, 31 – 4. 69 Note that Phain. 382 ‘no more does any star rise to our amazement (rp¹ ha}lati)’ is deliberately paradoxical: all stars rise ‘to our amazement’, but not in the specialised context which Aratus evokes. 70 Anth. Pal. 7.669 = ‘Plato’, Epigram 1 Page. 71 Rep. 7.527d-e. 72 Cf. Cicero, ND 2.12 – 15 (= Long/Sedley 54 C [Cleanthes]). 73 On this text cf. M.P. Nilsson, ‘The origin of belief among the Greeks in the divinity of the heavenly bodies’, HTR 33, 1940, 1 – 8.

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generative metamorphoses until he finds the right path again (42b-d). Here, then, as in the proverbial ‘eye of Justice’ attested already in the fifth century74, the existence of the stars acts as a protreptic to Justice, an idea which we shall find elaborated in Aratus. Finally, as the later culmination of these developments, we may note an account in Plutarch of the thoughts of Arion as he is carried to safety by the dolphins: ‘At the same time, observing that the sky was dotted with stars, and the moon was rising bright and clear, while the sea everywhere was without a wave as if a path were being opened for their course, he bethought himself that the eye of Justice is not a single eye only, but through all these eyes of hers God watches in every direction the deeds that are done here and there both on land and on the sea’. (Moralia 161e-f, trans. F.C. Babbitt)

It is along the line that leads from Plato to Plutarch that Aratus is to be situated. The most familiar reflection of these ideas in a non-technical context is the prologue of Plautus’ Rudens, an adaptation of a play of Diphilus from (?) the late fourth century75. The prologue is delivered by Arcturus who explains the rôle of the stars to us (Rudens 6 – 21): noctu sum in caelo clarus atque inter deos, inter mortalis ambulo interdius. at alia signa de caelo ad terram accidunt: qui est imperator diuom atque hominum Iuppiter, is nos per gentis alios alia disparat qui facta hominum moresque, pietatem et fidem noscamus, ut quemque adiuuet opulentia. qui falsas litis falsis testimoniis petunt quique in iure abiurant pecuniam, eorum referimus nomina exscripta ad Iouem; cottidie ille scit quis hic quaerat malum: qui hic litem apisci postulant peiiurio mali, res falsas qui impetrant apud iudicem, iterum ille eam rem iudicatam iudicat; maiore multa multat quam litem auferunt. bonos in aliis tabulis exscriptos habet.

74 Cf. Soph. fr. 12 Radt; Livrea on Cercidas fr. 1.12. Although ‘god’s eye’ is normally singular in Greek, Aeschylus offers four exceptions (Ag. 520 – 1, 776 – 8, Suppl. 812 – 13, Eum. 970 – 1 with Sommerstein’s note). 75 On the relevant verses see E. Fraenkel, ‘The stars in the prologue of the Rudens’, CQ 36, 1942, 10 – 14 [= Kleine Beitrge II 37 – 44].

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An attempt to distinguish what is Greek and what Roman here is not germane to the present enquiry; moreover, the ‘sinners’ of vv. 13 – 14 suggest both the complaints of Hesiod about his brother and the ‘bribe-devouring basileis’ and the world of the Roman law-court. What rather is crucial is the link, found already in Plato, between the stars and the maintenance of justice. In a famous passage of the Phainomena Aratus tells a story, a logos, in which Dike is literally a star, and so it is worth going back to the Works and Days, the central Greek text on dike and the central model for Aratus, to see whether we can see here a further case where Aratus has run Hesiod and later thought together. Hesiod’s strongest argument for the practice of justice is the impossibility of escaping Zeus’ eye: ‘You too, my lords, attend to this justice-doing of yours. For close at hand among men there are immortals taking note of all those who afflict each other with crooked judgements, heedless of the gods’ punishment. Thrice countless are they on the rich-pastured earth, Zeus’ immortal watchers (phylakes) of mortal men, who watch over judgements and wickedness, clothed in darkness, travelling about the land on every road. And there is that maiden Right (Dike), daughter of Zeus, esteemed and respected by the gods in Olympus; and whenever someone does her down with crooked abuse, at once she sits by Zeus her father, Kronos’ son, and reports the men’s unrighteous mind, so that the people may pay for the crimes of their lords who balefully divert justice from its course by pronouncing it crooked.’ (WD 248 – 62, trans. M.L. West)

Dike is not one of the ‘countless immortal guardians’, but such an idea is at least not a very bold move from the Hesiodic text. Moreover, if Dike is to be made a star, as in Aratus’ myth, then perhaps Aratus ‘read’ or ‘constructed’ Hesiod’s ‘countless immortal watchers clad in air’ as the countless stars of heaven76. If this suggestion is correct, it would not mean that this is what Hesiod actually meant77, or that Aratus necessarily understood Hesiod in this way; rather Hesiod is read in such a way that his authority reinforces a later conception of Justice and the Stars. The older text is read as foreshadowing the later. Hesiod’s Myth of Ages presents a five-stage progression (or regression) towards the present misery which will result in the abandonment of men to their fate by Aidos 76 Relevant also may be Theogony 901 – 3 where the Horai, Eunomia, Dike and Eirene, 5qcû ¡qe}ousi jatahmgto?si bqoto?si. The verb is something of a mystery, but the ancients glossed it as vuk\tteim (cf. West ad loc.), and this might aid the idea of Dike as a ‘guardian’ or ‘watcher’. 77 As suggested by Pettazzoni op.cit.146.

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and Nemesis. The five ages are structured, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has most fully demonstrated78, by a reciprocal alternation between dike and hybris, and the long-noticed similarities between life in the Golden Age and the blessedness of the city in which men practise justice (vv. 112 – 19/225 – 37) make Hesiod’s myth a protreptic to justice, like Plato’s account of the stars in the Timaeus. Aratus’ vision has taken over Hesiod’s account79, and with it the gradual retreat of Dike; in Aratus this retreat becomes a gradual physical removal of personified Dike from contact with men – first, in the silver age, to the mountains (vv. 115 – 28), and then finally, in the bronze age, to the stars. Like Hesiod’s Aidos and Nemesis, Dike abandoned men to their fates. Unlike her Hesiodic counterparts, however, we can still see Dike when we look up in the night-sky. Aratus reduced Hesiod’s five ages to three, not principally to avoid the potentially embarrassing ‘juster and better’ age of heroes which succeeded the Bronze Age, but in part to fit his scheme of a kosmos shaped and decided ‘long ago’. The age of the Trojan and Theban wars, Hesiod’s heroic age, was not of the necessary antiquity; like the myths of Plato, Aratus’ myth of Dike must be set before ‘recorded history’. Moreover, the catasterism of Dike also carries exemplary force for the creation of the kosmos. We have already noted that in Plato’s Timaeus the just man returns after death to the star which the demiurge had allotted to him; there he leads a ‘blessed and congenial life’80. The catasterism of Dike is obviously parallel to this, and here again, I think, we may see a blending of Hesiod with later philosophy. In the Works and Days, the men of the Golden Age – with whom Aratus’ Dike is so closely associated – after death become ‘divine and revered spirits on the earth, good spirits, protectors from evil, watchers (phylakes) over mortal men, givers of wealth’ (WD 122 – 3, 126). They become daimones who ‘guard, keep their eye on’ mortal men; there is no reason to believe, as Wilamowitz did81, that Hesiod identified these daimones with the ‘countless immortal watchers/guardians’ of WD 252 – 5, but the similarity of wording might 78 Cf. Myth and Thought among the Greeks, London 1983, 3 – 72 79 The introductory k|cor … %kkor (v. 100) picks up 6teqor … k|cor which introduces Hesiod’s myth (WD 106). My account differs considerably from that of Erren 37 – 9, who, if I understand his argument, sees Aratus’ myth as an exemplary story to show how human ‘Gottesbegriff’ has changed. 80 Timaeus 42b, cf. above. 81 Hesiodos Erga, Berlin 1928, 70, 140.

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suggest this easily enough, and indeed WD 254 – 5 seem to have been interpolated back into the passage on the daimones. Just as, therefore, Aratus may have constructed Hesiod’s ‘countless guardians’ as the stars, so I think the Dike myth shows us Aratus reading Hesiod’s Golden Age as the origin of the stars. To modern scholars such a reading may seem perverse, and to avoid misunderstanding I should perhaps stress again that there is, of course, no question of seeking to establish what Aratus thought Hesiod ‘really meant’; the earlier text is there to be exploited, not defended. Hellenistic didaxis is at base the interpretation of prior texts; as such, it is merely a special instance of the most prominent feature of the poetry of this period as a whole82. The purpose of a poet’s ‘interpretation’ of a predecessor is only rarely to establish what that predecessor ‘meant’. What would a Stoic have made of Aratus’ myth? We are told that Chrysippus held that ‘men are changed into gods’ and that the stars are gods83, but at least one recent analysis has noted that this myth hardly seems a model of Stoic pronoia and has labelled it ‘a foreign body in the otherwise optimistic Phainomena’84. What such an analysis misses is the kind of optimism which Aratus promulgates. It is an optimism based on the benevolence of the guiding cosmic principle, which hymnal style calls Zeus. This is a benevolence evidenced by the signs which god offers to man as a help, not by a particularly ‘optimistic’ view of man’s current situation or of human morality. We should all do the best we can and use what god offers us, but without particular expectation (cf. Phain. 1101 – 3). Aratus’ readers, ancient and modern, live in 82 I have deliberately omitted the problem of the meaning of the invocation in v. 186 to Zeus, aqt¹r ja· pqot]qg ceme^, both because I do not know what it means (although I have obvious sympathy with attempts to link it to the Golden Age), and because I think that my analysis of how Aratus has used the Hesiodic Myth of Ages stands without it. Recent contributions include: Erren 28 – 9; D. A. Kidd, CQ 31, 1981, 356 – 7, and (with a different view) his note ad loc. (both unconvincing, to my mind); B. Effe, ‘Pqot]qg ceme^ – eine stoische Hesiod-Interpretation in Arats Phainomena’, RhM 113, 1970, 167 – 82; G. Luck, ‘Aratea’, AJP 97, 1976, 213 – 34. Effe revives and refines Pasquali’s view, expressed in ‘Das Proömium des Arat’, in WAQITES Friedrich Leo zum sechzigsten Geburtstag dargebracht, Berlin 1911, 113 – 22, that the reference is to the primal wise men and inventors whom we know from later Stoicising theory (Seneca, Epistle 90 = Posidonius fr. 284 Kidd). 83 Cf. SVF II 810 – 11, 813 – 15, 1076 – 7. 84 E. Pöhlmann, ‘Charakteristika des römischen Lehrgedichts’, ANRW I.3 (1973) 813 – 901, at p. 883.

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Hesiod’s Fifth Age. If for the Stoic ‘all human beings are, and inevitably remain, bad and unhappy’85, then, when allowances have been made for the different meaning of moral terms, Hesiod and the Stoics to some extent come together, or – and this is crucial for Aratus – can be read as coming together. Let us consider again the passage of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (vv. 21 – 31) which has already been considered in the context of Aratus’ reference to the planets86. In a version of the familiar ‘types of life’ catalogue87, Cleanthes condemns the ‘disordered’ pursuit of (political) reputation, (commercial) profit and (bodily) pleasures. Both Stoic doctrine and the traditional catalogue form suggest that ‘the bad among mortal men’ (v. 22) covers pretty much all of mankind – except for the occasional Stoic sage – and it is hardly fanciful to see here a debt to the language and ideas of Hesiod. The spoudµ dus]qistor ‘belligerent quest’, of v. 26 evokes Hesiod’s double eris (WD 11 – 26), but rewrites it: ‘[The good eris] rouses even the shiftless one to work. For when someone whose work falls short looks towards another, towards a rich man who hastens (spe}dei) to plough and plant and manage his household well, then neighbour vies with neighbour as he hastens (spe}domt’) to wealth: this strife is good for mortals. So potter is piqued with potter, joiner with joiner, beggar begrudges beggar, and singer singer. (WD 20 – 26, trans. M.L. West)

What for Hesiod is spoude provoked by the good eris is for Cleanthes a vain attempt to escape the cosmic logos. What both poets share, of course, is the condemnation of the ‘mindless’ pursuit of kerdos, profit (e. g. WD 323 – 4) and the failure to understand the workings of justice. Cleanthes, then, uses Hesiod’s description of the current situation as a ‘poetically valid’ account of life on earth. This too is what Aratus expects his readers to do. We live in corrupt times, but nature works towards what is good and we must seek to discover that and to live in accordance with it. Knowing about the stars and weather-signs can only help us; neither stars, nor weather-signs, nor the myth of Dike, however, offer any kind of guarantee.

85 F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics, London 1975, 44. 86 Quoted above. 87 See Nisbet and Hubbard’s introduction to Hor. c. 1.1.

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5. Poetry and Philosophy Only the most technical science can avoid using the stars’ ‘inherently double aspect as both points of light and conventional figures’88. This is particularly the case with an author more concerned with the individual stars than with the overall movements and relationships in the heavens89. Even if the whole apparatus of aetiological catasterism is abandoned in favour of ‘pure science’, traces of the former are likely to linger in the less technical parts of any discussion. If we ask where Aratus drew distinctions within his poem between different kinds of material, then no absolutely clear answer will emerge, but certain suggestive patterns can be established. The very first catasterism of the poem is that of the Bears (vv. 26 – 44), and their ‘myth’ is introduced by the familiar qualification eQ 1te¹m d^, ‘if the story is true’. This phrase can, of course, mean many different things90, and is here probably serving more than one purpose – marking, for example, an unusual version of the myth, a version which gives prominence to the benevolence of Zeus. In the context of Aratus’ didactic poem, however, it is not simply that the phrase ‘serves to enhance the objective tone proper to this kind of poetry’91, but rather that it stands here prominently to mark the first introduction of what cannot be seen, but must be narrated. This distinction lies at the very heart of the Phainomena, the ‘truth’ of which, as I have often stressed, is guaranteed by the evidence of our own eyes. We may find it helpful to label the story of the Bears as ‘myth’ rather than ‘astronomy’, but it is more important to see how Aratus uses this distinction in those parts of 88 G.O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry, Oxford 1988, 216 – 17. Hutchinson’s discussion of Aratus is a sympathetic account of certain stylistic features of the work with which I am not concerned in this paper. Hutchinson is rightly much concerned with the confrontation of ‘the astronomical’ and ‘the mythical’, but he does not consider how Aratus suggests we distinguish the two. For Aratus’ poetic imagination cf. also Pendergraft art. cit. 104 – 6 and R. Caldini Montanari, ‘Illusione e realtà nel cielo dei poeti’, Prometheus 19, 1993, 183 – 210. 89 For this distinction cf. the helpful remarks of A. Stückelberger, ‘Sterngloben und Sternkarten. Zur wissenschaftlichen Bedeutung des Leidener Aratus’, MH 47, 1990, 70 – 81. 90 Cf. in general T. C. W. Stinton, ‘“Si credere dignum est”: some expressions of disbelief in Euripides and others’, PCPS 22, 1976, 60 – 89 [= Collected Papers 236 – 64]. 91 Stinton, Collected Papers 240.

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his poem where it is applicable; in the weather-signs, of course, there is almost no ‘narrative’ in this sense because the aetiological apparatus is no longer relevant. Many of the most prominent ‘myths’ of the poem are indeed marked as such by qualifications such as ‘there is a story’ or ‘men say’ (cf. vv. 98, 100, 163, 216, 637, 645). Even where this is not the case, there are often markers of some change. Thus the group of Cepheus, Cassiepeia, Andromeda, Pegasus and Perseus is introduced as the ‘long-suffering family of Cepheus, of the race of Io’ Jgv/or loceq¹m c]mor Yas_dao (v. 179). Not only the affective adjective but also the stress on descent and the family group, with its suggestions of Attic Tragedy, point to material of a ‘poetic’, ‘mythic’ kind. Within this grouping further attention is called to the ‘mythic’ status of the account when, after a description of how to identify Cassiepeia, the poet adds ‘you would say that she was mourning her child’ (v. 196) 92. The evocation of ‘the myth’ and the explicit refusal to countenance it as an explanation is here characteristic of a central tension in Aratus’ poem. Another common device for moving from the visible to evocation of the non-visible is the use of 1je?mor, ‘the one you know about’ to activate the reader’s knowledge of ‘myth’93. Thus, for example, Ariadne’s crown is ‘that crown you know about/have seen’ (v.71), and Andromeda is ‘that dread image’ (v. 197). This small point of technique reveals Aratus’ concern with distinguishing between the visible evidence of the stars and the inherited body of mythical knowledge which he could assume in his readers. There are, however, two important qualifications which prevent us from seeing the operation of very rigid distinctions within the poem. One is the fact that some ‘mythical’ material is introduced without apparent qualification: a case in point is the Lyre which Hermes set in heaven (vv. 268 – 71). More important perhaps is that throughout the poem the movements and appearance of the constellations are described in terms which appeal to their myths. Thus Ketos ‘rushes’ towards Andromeda (v. 354), the Hare is hunted (v. 384), the limbs of Andromeda are ‘weary’ (v. 704), and so forth; further illustration is unnecessary to make the point that the poem makes extensive use of the ‘drama of the heavens’94. Nevertheless, the distinction 92 For other related uses of va_gr jem in Hellenistic poetry cf. Hunter op. cit. p. 132 – 3. 93 Cf. LSJ s.v. I 2. 94 Good remarks on this aspect of the poem in Hutchinson op.cit.

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which I have outlined does inform much of the shape of the poem, and in one place Aratus may comment directly upon it. When Aratus comes to the Pleiades he acknowledges that there is a difference between ‘myth’ and the evidence of our eyes (Phain. 257 – 263) 95 : 2pt\poqoi dµ ta_ce let’ !mhq~pour rd]omtai, 4n oWa_ peq 1oOsai 1p|xioi avhaklo?sim. oq l]m pyr !p|kykem !peuhµr 1j Di¹r !st^q, 1n ox ja· ceme/hem !jo}olem, !kk± l\k’ avtyr eUqetai . 2pt± d’ 1je?mai 1piqq^dgm jak]omtai )kju|mg Leq|pg te Jekaim~ t’ Ik]jtqg te ja· Steq|pg ja· Tg{c]tg ja· p|tmia La?a.

Men tell of the seven Pleiades, though only six are visible to our eyes. No star has disappeared from Zeus’ sky without a trace in all the time of which we know, but the story is told. By name those seven stars are Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Electra, Sterope, Taygete and revered Maia.

The translation offered follows the standard interpretation of these difficult verses, which goes back to the scholia. According to this view, Aratus explicitly denies the truth of the story of the loss of the seventh Pleiad – a story which the scholia tell us he himself treated in a now lost poem96 – by asserting again the fixed pattern of the kosmos established by Zeus; 1j Di¹r does not just mean ‘from the sky’. If this is correct, then there will be a contrast drawn between ‘the tales of men’ and the better evidence needed to establish truth. Erren, however, removes this contrast by understanding the reference of v. 259 to be to the missing Pleiad: ‘the star was not lost without a trace’, that trace being precisely the tales of men97. A full discussion would be beyond the bounds of this paper98, although it will be clear that the standard interpretation fits well with what we have seen to be a central concern of the poem. As with the passage on the planets, therefore99, Aratus here probably uses 95 Hipparchus points out that Aratus is actually wrong about this: you can see seven Pleiades if you try hard enough (1.6.14). 96 This was a consolatory poem To Theopropos (SH 103), cf. E. Maass, Aratea, Berlin 1892, 233 – 4. 97 ‘Immerhin ist der Stern nicht ohne Nachricht aus dem Haus des Zeus verlorengegangen’, p. 21 of his edition. 98 Crucial are the meaning of ceme/hem, which Erren implausibly understands of how the Pleiads arose, and the precise force of lakû autyr, which we might expect to be strongly intensive (cf. vv. 21, 180, 452). 99 Cf. above.

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an authorial comment on the subject-matter of his poem to foreground a crucial issue. The passage on the Pleiades both explains and explains away potential problems that arise throughout the description of the constellations: it is not always easy to match what you see to what you have been told. This question of the distinctions Aratus draws within his material is one prominent instance of the phenomenon with which I have been concerned throughout this paper, namely Aratus’ conscious manipulation of the multiple traditions which lie behind his poem. In a now outmoded form of criticism this might have been expressed as the opposition of ‘the poetry’ and ‘the message’; the history of, say, Lucretian criticism is of course full of such things. Rather than this, I think, we should speak in terms of different modes of organising experience. One mode is that of the (didactic) poet, another is that of philosophy, which after Plato and Aristotle tends towards systematisation and completeness, thereby increasing the gap between the two modes100. As a final study of the didactic, poetic mode, I wish briefly to note certain aspects of Aratus’ account of shipwreck, which offers an interesting case study in many of the things we have been considering. The passage on shipwreck (vv. 408 – 35) stresses the role of ‘ancient Night’ in setting out signs warning of storms because of her pity for men at sea (vv. 408 – 11, 419, 433 – 4). Night as the agent responsible for heavenly signs occurs elsewhere in the poem101, but the prominence of this feature here cannot be adequately explained on a purely Stoicising reading102. She does act as an agent of the cosmic principle, but it is not as a manifestation of that principle that she weeps (v. 409). A close parallel is again from the prologue to the Rudens, where Plautus (and probably Diphilus) combines the idea of Arcturus – a storm-sign with which the shipwreck passage in Aratus is closely connected – as a servant of Jupiter with the traditional notion that stars not merely act as weather-signs, but actually cause the weather (Rudens 67 – 9): ego quoniam uideo uirginem asportarier, tetuli et ei auxilium et lenoni exitium simul: increpui hibernum et fluctus moui maritumos.

100 On poetry’s rejection of systematisation cf. above. 101 Cf. vv. 470, 695, 755. 102 For a helpful account of such a reading cf. Erren 67.

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By acting ‘off his own bat’ in the interests of justice, Arcturus is like ‘Night herself’ (Phain. 419) who gives men signs. In considering Aratus’ passage the parallel from Comedy points away from the systematisation of philosophy, but also perhaps helps us to see how the philosophical project informs the poem. Aratus’ description of shipwreck makes no distinctions between the fates of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ men, although shipwreck was a notorious instance in which the punishment of the unjust often involved the suffering of the innocent. For the Stoic, however, the future is determined, and popular conceptions of the moral status of those on board are neither here nor there; when viewed from this perspective, we see the planning in Aratus’ selection of material. The lucky men are those whose prayers are answered (Phain. 426 – 9): aU je Di¹r paqamissol]moio t}wysim eqw|lemoi, boq]y d³ p\q’ !stq\x, !m]loio, pokk± l\k’ atk^samter flyr p\kim 1sj]xamto !kk^kour 1p· mgý.

If by their prayers they happen upon Zeus’ assistance, and he shows his lightning from the side of the North Wind103, then after many sufferings they yet catch sight of each other on the boat.

Zeus is not a traditional saviour from shipwreck, a function that poetry normally gives to his sons, the Dioskouroi, and it is unclear whether it is to Zeus that the sailors are imagined to pray (which would again be unusual). Here also, then, the prominence of Zeus is a product of Stoicising ‘monotheism’ in which each part of nature works in harmony as part of a single organism. On the other hand, a simple Stoicising reading will not account for certain important details of the passage. What does paqamissol]moio mean? In what sense could Zeus be said ‘to pass near them’ (Martin), ‘[come] to their aid’ (Mair), ‘gegenwärtig erscheint’ (i. e. through his lightning, Erren). Moreover, t}wysim, particularly next to the humorous phrasing of v. 425104, might suggest a randomness of success hardly in keeping with Stoic determinism. Some help is gained from considering the ‘focalisation’ of the verses: ‘Zeus’ might be the word of the Stoicising poet, but ‘passing by’ or ‘arriving’ is rather the notion of an ordinary man thinking in anthropomorphic 103 On this verse see Kidd ad loc. 104 That verse looks to the shipwrecked Odysseus at Od. 5. 319.

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terms, and t}wysim reflects the sailors’ experience of the chanciness of the open sea. That the rhetoric of poetry is thus different from that of philosophy is confirmed by the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of Night’s weeping, a fallacy enacted in language which describes heavenly phenomena in terms applicable to the struggling sailors themselves ( jula_momti m]vei pepiesl]mom 416, hk_bet’ 417); here nature moulds herself to man’s plight. Night, the ‘kindly’ time, euphrone, acts in accordance with her name. Analysis of this kind allows us to see that whereas systematic philosophy and science seek to close down options – to this extent they become paradoxically like ‘history’ in the Aristotelian scheme – the poetic, didactic mode offers multiple readings which draw on diverse traditions. To this extent ‘didactic poetry’ often shares some of the diversity which characterises less ‘scientific’, more popular belief-systems. Modern discussion of ancient didactic poetry has largely focused upon ‘the author’s intention’ rather than on the reception of the poem by different readers, much as some ancient readers were bothered as to whether Aratus was a poet or an astronomer105. Obviously, the Phainomena will be read differently by a convinced Stoic and an un-philosophical reader; ancient theory which saw poetry as propaideutic to philosophy recognised that, as did the standard distinction in allegorising commentaries and technical handbooks between ‘specialist’ and ‘non-specialist’ audiences106. It is the choice of the didactic, poetic mode which precisely advertises the importance of the audience’s role. Aratus’ poem, unlike the work of Eudoxus or Hipparchus, is not merely about the universe, but is also universal in the sense that it presents itself as available to all, farmers, sailors, literary scholars. The poem continues in a new mode the age-old position of the poet as communal repository of wisdom. Aratus’

105 Cf., e. g., Scholium Q to vv. 96 – 7 (Martin p. 124). 106 Cf. already the distinction in the ‘Derveni Papyrus’ between ‘the many’ and ‘those who know rightly’ (Col. XXIII 1 – 2). Again we find this topos in the introduction to Hipparchus’ commentary: ‘I do not think any great intellectual effort is required to expound the meaning of the poem. For the poet is straightforward and concise, and can be clearly understood even by those with a moderate background in the subject. On the other hand, to understand what he has said about heavenly phenomena, to know which parts of his work agree and which disagree with the phenomena, this one might think is what is most useful and requires mathematical skill’ (1.1.4).

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project is to make us all see what we have always seen107, to ‘teach’ us what we have always known. In the works of Eudoxus he found a systematisation of knowledge and experience, which was not only itself a sign of god’s benevolence, but matched the ordered nature all around him; the poetic mode in which to express this cannot have been a difficult choice.

Addenda A revised version of parts of this essay appeared in Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 224 – 45. Since the essay first came out, the principal advances for the understanding of the Phainomena have been the editions of Kidd (Cambridge 1997) and Martin (Paris 1998) and the study of C. Fakas, Der hellenistische Hesiod: Arats Phainomena und die Tradition der antiken Lehrepik (Wiesbaden 2001). Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus has been edited by J. C. Thom (Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus [Tübingen 2005]), cf. Journal of Hellenic Studies 127 (2007) 167 – 8), and (?) Theophrastus, On Weather Signs by D. Sider and C.W. Brunschön (Leiden 2007).

107 V. 733 ‘Do you not see? Whenever …’ draws attention to this concern. Such a question would normally refer to a one-time event (cf. Martin’s parallels ad loc.), but here the verb evokes both physical sight and mental understanding. This ‘oddity’ pertains both to the problem of reading a text about seeing, and to the mental effort required to ‘visualise’ what Aratus is talking about, a visualisation which must of course be based on visual experiences and memories.

10. The Presentation of Herodas’ Mimiamboi* The mimiamboi of Herodas1 reveal familiar hallmarks of the poetry of the third century:2 characters drawn from socially humble backgrounds; a literary re-casting of sub-literary ‘genres’; the revival of an archaic metre;3 the free reconstruction of an artificial literary dialect;4 the reaching back to claim authority for poetic practice in a great figure of the past.5 Obvious links between the mimiamboi and the roughly contemporary ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus (especially Idylls 2, 3, 14, and 15) have always attracted attention since the publication of the major papyrus in 1891. No subject has, however, so dominated discussion of the mimiambs as the question of how they were intended to be presented to the public, and how indeed they were so.6 Were they merely to be * 1

2

3 4 5

6

Antichthon 27 (1993) 31 – 44 In the notes the following are cited by author’s name only: I. C. Cunningham, Herodas, Mimiambi (Oxford 1971); G. Mastromarco, The Public of Herondas (Amsterdam 1984); M. Puelma Piwonka, Lucilius und Kallimachos (Frankfurt 1949); R.M. Rosen, ‘Mixing of genres and literary program in Herodas 8’, HSCP 94 (1992) 205 – 16; C. Miralles, ‘La poetica di Eroda’, Aevum Antiquum 5 (1992) 89 – 113 There seems no good reason to question the consensus, based though it is on very thin evidence, that Herodas wrote during the second quarter of the third century, cf. Cunningham 1 – 3; P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford 1972) 2.876 n.30; S. M. Sherwin-White, Ancient Cos (Göttingen 1978) 94 n. 60, 349 – 52. The choliamb in fact was widely used in the fourth and third centuries, particularly in moralising verse; cf. G. A. Gerhard, Phoinix von Kolophon (Leipzig/ Berlin 1909) 202 – 27. On the language of Herodas see especially D. Bo, La lingua di Eroda (Turin 1962) and V. Schmidt, Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Herondas (Berlin 1968). The actual extent of Herodas’ debt to Hipponax may be debated; cf. E. Degani, Studi su Ipponatte (Bari 1984) 50 – 56 (with bibliography); the wretched preservation of Hipponax must make any conclusions very tentative. Some shared vocabulary seems certain, though here, as elsewhere, Degani overstates the case. In Mimiamb 8 Hipponax is primarily invoked as protos heuretes of choliambic verse (cf. Test. 20 – 44 Degani); for the distinction between ‘narrative’ (Hipponax) and ‘dramatic’ (Herodas) choliambs cf. further below. I do not mean to imply that many scholars have in fact realised that these are two separate issues, perhaps requiring different answers.

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read (privately), or to be ‘performed’ either by a solo performer (with or without the assistance of mute extras), or by a ‘troupe’ of actors? We must not assume, of course, that the mode of reception of all the mimiambs was the same, or that one poem was not at different times ‘performed’ in different ways. Moreover, the history of the debate since 1891, a history of which Giuseppe Mastromarco has given a full account,7 suggests that it is hardly possible on internal grounds alone to prove to general satisfaction that the poems were presented in one way rather than another. A feature which looks as if it derives from the script of an acted, or at least visualised, performance may always be merely a literary imitation of such a phenomenon within a text intended only for reading (or, at most, recitation). The scholarly consensus is that this is precisely what we do find, time and again, in the ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus, and probably also Herodas.8 That, however else they were transmitted, the mimiamboi also assume a reading public is likely enough on purely general grounds of literary history,9 and this too must complicate any investigation into their presentation. In these circumstances, the question of ‘how the mimiamboi were performed’ may become little more than a heuristic device for teasing out distinctive features of these poems, rather than an end in itself. Discussion of this matter seems in fact to have come to a halt precisely because it has been conceived purely as an investigation into theatrical and/or literary history, rather than as primarily an area of poetic criticism. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that this scholarly halt may have been premature; the subject of the presentation of the mimiamboi risked being left to ossify, either because it was considered no longer a problem or because there was insufficient evidence upon which to proceed. To anticipate somewhat, the (unoriginal) conclusion which will, I hope, emerge is of poems composed for the most part in a mode which strongly suggests, and was intended to suggest, ‘performance’ by more than one actor, rather than solo recitation; this is, of course, much 7 8 9

Cf. Mastromarco (n. 1 above), an unfortunately stilted English version (with some expansion) of Il Pubblico di Eronda (Padua 1979). The best discussion of this book is that of Marco Fantuzzi in Lingua e Stile 14 (1979) 721 – 4. For an attempt to distinguish Herodas and Theocritus in these matters cf. further below. Despite Mastromarco’s book, solo recitation seems to be the solution favoured by current scholarship. Cf. Mastromarco 95 – 6. The singular cek÷ir ; ‘do you laugh?’, at 2.74 is formally addressed to Thales, but is also equally effective if aimed at the individual reader or directed by a performer at one of the audience.

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the same conclusion as Mastromarco reached, though the route I shall follow will be rather different. I do not, however, wish to move from this conclusion to the historical question of how these poems were ‘actually’ disseminated. Although I personally am inclined to believe that the mimiambs were ‘performed’ and not just recited, profitable discussion of this question of literary history would require more solid textual or archaeological evidence than we possess; a comparison with our relatively full knowledge of the performance of Attic tragedy and comedy is here particularly instructive. I begin with the question of a reading public, the existence of which may be assumed on purely general grounds, but which may also be approached through the arrangement of the poems on the London papyrus. The obvious starting-points are the two poems, 1 and 8, which seem to bear directly upon the mimiamboi as literary artefacts. It is an old idea that Poem 1 does not appear first on the papyrus by chance, although any deliberate design need not, of course, have been due to the poet himself.10 Bücheler saw the praise of Alexandria and ‘the king’ in vv. 26 – 36 as marking the poem’s—and hence a poetry book’s—‘dedicatee’, a loose term which, we may add, should not necessarily be taken to imply any formal relationship between poet and ruler.11 Theocritus 14. 59 – 64, however, in which generous praise of Ptolemy as the best possible ‘employer’ for Greek mercenaries highlights traditional Greek virtues and the pleasures of polis life and which make it a reasonable (if hardly compelling) inference that Idyll 14 was written in an area of Ptolemaic influence, show that such praise need say nothing about the position of a poem within a ‘collection’.12 More of substance can perhaps be derived from the possibility, acknowledged by surpris10 Pace, e. g., L. Massa Positano, Eroda, Mimiamb I (Naples 1970) 15, little can, I think, be inferred from the fact that Poem 1 starts on a fresh piece of papyrus. As far as the facsimile permits judgement, no more space is blank above Poem 1 than on any subsequent sheet; where a poem ends at the very top of a column (i. e. 3.97 at the top of column 19 and 5.85 at the top of column 29), the same blank space appears above it. We cannot therefore rule out the possibility that Poem 1 was preceded by other poems, and there is no reason to assume that the space above Poem 1 was reserved for a heading. 11 RhM 46 (1891) 636. Bücheler in fact thought that ‘the king’ was Ptolemy Euergetes; Philadelphos is the usual choice of more recent scholars, cf. above n.2. 12 On the encomium of Ptolemy in Idyll 14 see the suggestive remarks of J. B. Burton, ‘The function of the Symposium Theme in Theocritus’ Idyll 14’ GRBS 33 (1992) 227 – 45, at 240 – 2, and W. Beck, ‘Theocritus, Idyll 14: Alcaeus and Megara’ WJA 18 (1992) 171 – 82.

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ingly few critics, that Metriche’s angry response to Gyllis’ speech alludes in an amusingly programmatic way to the choliambic verse in which Herodas writes: taOt’ 1c½ 1n %kkgr cumaij¹r ouj #m Ad]yr 1p^jousa, wykµm d’ !e_deim w~k’ #m 1nepa_deusa ja· t/r h}qgr t¹m oqd¹m 1whq¹m Ace?shai. (1. 69 – 72)

I would not have put up with hearing this from any other woman, but I would have taught her lame to sing a lame song and to consider my threshold no friendly place.

In Poem 8 Herodas appears to refer to the verses of himself and Hipponax as t± j}kka (v. 79), and Callimachus too refers to ‘lame’ choliambic verse.13 When taken together with the praise of Alexandria, such an allusion to the metrical form of the poem would certainly strengthen the case for seeing Poem 1 as somehow introductory, and intended at least in part for a reading audience. Certain general considerations might also lend weight to this idea. Poem 114 presents a visit by the ‘bawd’ (an unhappy term) Gyllis to a younger woman, Metriche, to persuade her to take a wealthy and attractive lover in the prolonged absence overseas of her man (? husband) Mandris. The poem thus combines two apparently common mime scenarios—women visiting each other (cf. Poem 6) 15 and ‘the bawd’ (cf. Athen. 14.621c)—both of which were also familiar in the comic tradition. It is noteworthy that in the poem in which, more than anywhere else in the extant corpus, Theocritus adopts the mode of literary mime, Idyll 15, he chose to begin with a ‘Damenbesuch’. It may therefore be suggested that the old lastqop|r embodies the spirit of Herodas’ ‘lame’ poetry, in a way which foreshadows the more elaborate and detailed female embodiments of Tragedy and Elegy in Ovid, Amores 3.1; Gyllis’ arrival literally ‘opens the door’ to a new poetic form, whose self-con13 Cf. fr. 203.14 t± wyk± t_jteim in a programmatic context. Among the scholars who do reckon with such a reference in Poem 1 are Puelma Piwonka 342 n. 1; Massa Positano ad loc.; J. Stern, GRBS 22 (1981) 165; N. Hopkinson, A Hellenistic Anthology (Cambridge 1988) 240; Miralles 94 – 9. 14 For recent studies of this poem cf. G. Mastromarco, ‘Eine alexandrinische Kupplerin’, WJA 16 (1990) 87 – 99, and Miralles 94 – 9. 15 Such a scenario is not, of course, limited to mime – the opening scenes of Menander’s Synaristosai (= Plautus, Cistellaria) and the third book of Apollonius’ Argonautica are famous examples in other genres.

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scious lowness is marked by her crude beating ( !q\sseim) on the door.16 At the very least, I think it is fair to say that if we knew that Poem 1 was designedly the first of an ordered collection, then it would be hard to resist the reading of it which I have given.17 On this reading, Poem 1 enacts, rather than states, a program, and to this extent it is comparable to Theocritus 1 rather than Theocritus 7 or Callimachus’ first iambos. Here then may be suggestive signs of a poetic collection designed for a literate and literary public. Poem 8 (The Dream) survives only in tantalising glimpses. A farmer wakes up his household with lavish helpings of abuse, and then tells one of them of a dream which he has just had. The details are obscure, but a goat which he was dragging along seems to have been taken, killed and flayed by goatherds. There is someone (probably a young man) dressed in a saffron tunic and fawnskin and wreathed with ivy; there is a game of askoliasmos (trying to balance on a greased wineskin), and an old man who threatens the farmer with a staff. The farmer interprets the dream as follows (I print Cunningham’s text): …….]v aWca t/r v[\qaccor] 1ne?kjom .j]akoO d_qom 1j D[iym]}sou aQ]p|koi lim 1j b_gr [1d]aitqeOmto t]± 5mhea tekeOmter ja· jqe_m 1da_mumto, t± l]kea pokko· j\qta, to»r 1lo»r l|whour, tikeOsim 1m Lo}sgisim. ydecy[]to. t¹ lµm %ehkom ¡r d|jeum 5w[ei]m loOmor pokk_m t¹m %pmoum j~qujom patgs\mtym, jA t_i c]qomti n}m’ 5pqgn’ aqimh]mti ..] jk]or, ma· LoOsam, E l’ 5pea j[ .ec’ 1n Q\lbym, E le deut]qg cm[ .l..r let’ Ypp~majta t¹m pakai[ t]± j}kk’ !e_deim Nouh_dgir †epiousi† (8.67 – 79) 16 For the significance of the verb cf. E. Mogensen, Hermes 104 (1976) 498 – 9. I suspect that the same point is continued by 1n !cqoij_gr (v. 2), which is very likely the correct reading: the loudness of the knocking suggests the !cqoij_g of the knocker. ‘Door-knocking’ scenes are, of course, a familiar feature of many literary genres, especially comedy; the famous scenes in Plato’s Protagoras and Xenophon’s Symposium (1.11 – 12) may be influenced by comedy. 17 The anonymous referee rightly objects that Metriche merely tells Gyllis what she is in fact not going to do to her; pedantically, however, Gyllis’ song is ‘lame’, even if she herself is not (though note also the stress on her difficulties in walking through the streets, vv. 13 – 16). My guess is that different modern readers will inevitably assign different weight to this objection.

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I was dragging the goat out of the gully, a gift from fair Dionysus; the goatherds violently tore it apart as they performed their rites and they dined upon the meat; many shall pluck my songs, which have cost me much toil, amidst the Muses. … Of the many who trod the air-tight skin I thought that I alone secured the prize, and my fate was like that of the angry old man … glory, by the Muse, either my verses … in iambics … or second … after ancient Hipponax … to sing lame poetry to the Ionians …

Few passages of third-century poetry have given rise to so large a body of commentary as these fascinating, though broken, verses, and a full discussion, let alone a full doxography, is unnecessary here. Certain aspects are, however, relevant to the present enquiry. That the goat is a ‘gift from Dionysus’ is most plausibly interpreted as a reference to the (at least notionally) dramatic nature of the mimiamboi;18 Dionysus is likely to be the character referred to earlier as dressed in tunic and fawnskin, and the rustic game of askoliasmos will then probably glance at contemporary theories of the origin of drama.19 The threatening old man is all but certainly Hipponax himself,20 and it is an easy guess that his anger arises from the dreamer’s encroachment upon his own poetic space.21 Such a hypothesis will also give point to vv. 77 – 8 in which the apparent stress upon taking the second position after Hipponax will be intended to appease the archaic poet, the dire consequences of whose anger were only too well known.22 The tearing apart of the dreamer’s goat by goatherds performing Dionysiac rites at one level suggests a likeness between the dreamer and Pentheus or Orpheus,23 but as explained by the dreamer himself, it refers to an attack 18 So, e. g., G.O. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry (Oxford 1988) 240; Rosen, passim. Miralles 103 – 13 explores at length the links between Mimiamb 8, Hipponax and Aristophanic comedy. 19 For tragodia as ‘goat-song’ see Brink on Hor. AP 220. 20 Critics note that v. 60 may look to Hipponax fr. 8 Degani = 20 West. 21 Rosen refines this guess so that the anger arises specifically from the ‘adulteration’ of the iambus with drama, i. e. because Herodas has replaced iambos by mimiambos. 22 Cf. Hor. Sat. 1.10.48 – 9 of Horace’s own position with respect to Lucilius, inuentore minor; neque ego illi detrahere ausim / haerentem capiti cum multa laude coronam. The parallel is particularly interesting in view of satire’s obvious generic links with mimiamb. 23 This is mediated through the pun on l]kea (v. 71) as both ‘limbs’ and ‘songs’ (cf. Longus, Past. 3.23.3). Disiecti membra poetae (Hor. Sat. 1.4.62) is not dissimilar. Perhaps Cadmus is a closer analogy than Pentheus himself: to»r 1lo»r l|whour (v. 71) almost puts the speaker in the relation of parent to his poetry.

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upon his poems. 1m Lo}sgisim, ‘amidst the Muses’, can therefore hardly be other than a way of saying ‘in the Museum (in Alexandria)’,24 although other levels of meaning are not of course ruled out; on the other hand, the ellipse and hyperbaton favoured by many critics, ‘many with the Muses’ (i. e. scholars) are, as Cunningham puts it rather mildly, ‘difficult’. A reference to the Museum takes us back to Poem 1 where it is listed among the delights of Alexandria. 1m Lo}sgisim might also, however, mean ‘in poetry, in their poems’,25 and some support for this interpretation may be found in the fact that these ‘many critics’ are depicted as ‘goatherds … performing religious rites’. We should here be reminded not merely of a traditional association, most familiar to us from Hesiod and Theocritus, between herdsmen and poetry,26 but also of the traditional link between the mania of poetic composition and religious, particularly Dionysiac, inspiration. This link is, of course, particularly important for dramatic, and thus by implication para-dramatic, genres; Aristotle connects the early history of both tragedy and comedy with Dionysiac performances, the dithyramb and the phallic song (Poetics 1449a 9 – 13), and Cratinus in his Pytine gave memorable expression to the equation of poetic inspiration with ‘an excess of Dionysus’.27 A famous passage of Plato’s Ion depicts all poets as ‘full of the god’, like bacchants: ‘All the good epic poets deliver all these wonderful poems not as a result of any craft, but under the spell of the god (5mheoi emter ja· jatew|lemoi). Likewise, the good lyric poets compose those wonderful lyric poems while not in their senses (oqj 5lvqomer emter), like dancing korybants. As soon as they enter upon harmony and rhythm, they are under the bacchic spell, and just as bacchants draw honey and milk from the rivers while under the spell, but cannot do so when in their right minds, so also this is what the souls of the lyric poets do, as they themselves say.’ (533e-4a)

24 So, e. g., Puelma Piwonka 346 n. 2. This interpretation seems to go back to Crusius (p. 76 of his fifth edition of the poems, Leipzig 1914); cf. also R. Herzog, Philologus 79 (1923/4) 431; Mastromarco 69 – 70. 25 Considered ‘improbable’ by Knox ad loc. 26 Cf. K.J. Gutzwiller, Theocritus’ Pastoral Analogies (Wisconsin 1991). There may be a play between aQ]p|koi (v. 69) and pokko_ (v. 71); such play would be of a type very familiar in dream interpretation, and it may be paralleled by Knox’s attractive suggestion that tekeOmter (v. 70) is picked up by tikeOsim (v. 72). 27 PCG IV pp. 219 – 232; cf. C.W. Macleod, Collected Essays (Oxford 1983) 262 – 79.

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Thus the ‘Dionysiac rite’ of Herodas’ goatherds has clear associations with the writing of poetry and may thus provide a valuable clue to the nature of the attacks which Herodas foresees.28 Modern critics have delighted in seeking to identify a specific context for the vision of Herodas 8, and it must be admitted that this is a difficult temptation to resist.29 A dream with programmatic significance naturally reminds us of the prefatory dream to Callimachus’ Aitia;30 dreams are, however, also fully at home in comedy, and as such very suitable for the quasi-dramatic mimiamboi. The description of the poet’s works as ‘my labours’ (to»r 1lo»r l|whour) suggests the third-century language of literary p|mor (Theocr. 7.51 etc.),31 and the prediction of savage criticism obviously reminds us of the familiar picture of Alexandrian squabbling. It may even be that tikeOsim 1m Lo}sgisim, ‘pluck32 amidst the Muses’, belongs to the same rhetoric of abuse as Timon’s famous image of the quarrelsome scholar-birds (SH 786);33 Alexandrian poets seem to have given new and vivid life to the traditional image of the poet as a bird (an eagle, a nightingale etc.).34 Quarrelling scholars lead us directly to Callimachus’ first iambos in which Hipponax also appears, and it is perhaps hard to believe that this poem and Herodas’ eighth mimiamb are unconnected, although the nature of the connection can hardly be divined in the state of our present evidence; enough for the present to note the elaborate and learned poetic self-presentation in this poem, a self-presentation which we cannot but associate with 28 Similarly, we should interpret quite broadly the reference to poets ‘in the holy contests of Dionysus’ at Theocr. 17.112 – 14; even a limitation to epic and dramatic poets would be too narrow. 29 See the bibliography at Cunningham 194 n. 2, adding Puelma Piwonka 345 – 52. There is a helpful survey in Mastromarco 65 – 97. 30 Cf. Rosen 207 – 8, noting also the ‘initiations’ of Hesiod, Archilochus etc. It may or may not be significant that the passage of Plato’s Ion to which I have just referred is also used in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’; cf. ZPE 76 (1989) 1 – 2 [= this volume 86 – 8]. 31 So, with particular point, of Erinna’s Distaff at Anth. Pal. 7.11.1 (= Asclepiades XXVIII. 1 GP), 7.12.5. 32 Cf. Kassel-Austin on Cratinus fr. 276. 33 For a new interpretation of this fragment cf. W. H. Mineur, Mnem. 38 (1985) 383 – 7. 34 Cf. Theocr. 7.47 – 8 Lois÷m eqmiwer … 1t~sia lowh_fomti. The two fighting cocks of the first version of Aristophanes’ Clouds may also be relevant here; Aristophanic influence on Alexandrian polemic is familiar from the Aitia prologue.

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similar phenomena in Alexandrian ‘avant-garde’ poetry. It is also noteworthy that, unless we are badly misled by the poor state of the text, only the address to the slave in v. 43 breaks the monologic ‘address to the audience’ form after the opening abuse of the slaves (vv. 1 – 15). There is thus a clear, and apparently untypical, break in this poem between the dramatic and the non-dramatic. Whereas Poem 1 enacts a program, Poem 8 states one. Poems 1 and 8 thus show signs of composition intended, at least partly, for an educated audience which probably read the poems. The ‘programmatic’ significance of Poem 1 would certainly be enhanced if it stood first in a collection, but that of Poem 8 remains wherever it was placed; clearer cases of the ancient ‘poetry-book’ warn us against assuming that explicitly programmatic poems have to come first or last.35 Gerhard36 in fact sought to group the first seven poems of the London papyrus into matching pairs, and Lawall37 produced a scheme covering Poems 1 – 8;38 only 6 and 7 are, however, undeniably connected (though the nature of the connection remains disputed), and it need hardly have been the poet himself who juxtaposed those poems. If it is not improbable that our collection retains traces of an arrangement of the poems made by Herodas himself (cf. Callimachus’ Iamboi39), scholarly consensus about those traces is perhaps truly unlikely; not merely the existence of the opening of Poem 9 and the ‘book fragments’ of Herodas, but also general considerations of the length of Hellenistic ‘poetry-books’40 should prevent hasty inferences from the order of Herodas’ poems on the London papyrus. Moreover, the extent to which meaning depends upon the ability of an audience to reflect at leiHorace, Satires 1.4 is a good example here. RE 8.1089 – 90. Theocritus’ Coan Pastorals (Washington 1967) 118 – 20. For Lawall, as for some other scholars who have entertained the notion of a Herodan ‘poetry book’, the existence of Poem 9 (and probably more; cf. below) is something of an embarrassment. Lawall is forced to the view that Poem 9 was either ‘the beginning of a second volume or … the beginning of a series of other mimes which were not included by Herodas in his original collection but were added by later writers’. 39 That Callimachus himself is responsible for the arrangement of the Iamboi cannot, of course, be proved, but it is also not unlikely; cf. C. M. Dawson, YCS 11 (1950) 140 – 5. 40 Cf. J. Van Sickle, ‘The book-roll and some conventions of the poetic book’, Arethusa 13 (1980) 5 – 42. 35 36 37 38

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sure over a written text will always produce difference of opinion,41 and so it may be more profitable to turn to other considerations which arise from the substance of the poems. There is much in the mimiamboi about ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’, but the implications of this appeal to vision are curiously ambivalent. In Poem 2 Battaros urges the jury (and us) to look carefully at the naked Myrtale (vv. 68 – 71), but what (if anything) do we actually see, or imagine with the mind’s eye? Battaros is doing what comes naturally – displaying his wares to potential clients42 – but the implications of this passage for the mode of presentation of the mimiamboi are anything but straightforward. In Poem 4 we are apparently invited to see, or at least see through others’ eyes, some fairly elaborate works of art; if Battaros appeals to our visual memory of the female body,43 Poem 4 uses our familiarity with ‘art classics’. So too, part of the appeal of Poem 6 is its provocative play upon our wish to see the marvellous dildo which the women discuss; the description of it, with its emphasis on Koritto’s privileged sight, teasingly mocks our inability to see: !kk’ 5qca, jo?’ 1st’ 5qca· t/r )hgma_gr aqt/r aq/m t±r we?qar, oqw· J]qdymor, d|neir. 1c½ l]m—d}o c±q Gkh’ 5wym, Lgtqo?— QdoOs’ %l’ Qdl/i44 t¥llat’ 1nej}lgma· t± bakk_’ outyr %mdqer oqw· poieOsi —aqta· c\q eQlem45—aqh\· joq l|mom toOto,

41 I am thinking of such readings as that of J. Stern, ‘Herodas, Mimiamb 6’, GRBS 20 (1979) 247 – 54, who sees in Poem 6 a burlesque of Orphic myth and ritual (handling the baubon suggests familiar mystic practices) and a statement of poetics (the brilliantly fashioned baubon as an image for Herodas’ poems). To my mind, this reading contains more of interest than the same scholar’s ‘ritualist’ reading of Poem 1 (GRBS 22 [1981] 161 – 5). 42 I discuss Poem 2 at greater length in ‘Plautus and Herodas’ in L. Benz et al. (eds.), Plautus und die Tradition des Stegreifspiels (Tübingen 1995) 155 – 69 [= this volume 212 – 28]. 43 If Poem 2 was actually performed, we can only guess at how Myrtale was represented. The standard view about the appearance of ‘naked’ women in Old Comedy (Wasps 1326 ff, Peace 846 ff, Lys. 1114 ff), that they were ‘impersonated by men wearing appropriately designed bodysuits and padding’ (Sommerstein on Lys. 1114) may be correct, but there is very little evidence for it. 44 I print Cunningham’s text, though I have no confidence in it. 45 The claim of ‘dramatic’ characters to be alone is a familiar irony, but is certainly not conclusive for the performance of the mimiamb; cf., e. g., Propertius 1.18 (haec certe deserta loca etc.) which will have different resonances for a reader and for someone listening to a recitation.

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!kk’ A lakaj|tgr upmor, oQ d’ Qlamt_sjoi 5qi’, oqj Ql\mter. eqmo]steqom sjut]a cumaij· div_s’ %kkom oqj !meuq^seir.

(6.65 – 73)

‘But his products! Heavens, what products! You will think it the workmanship of Athene, not Kerdon. When I saw them, Metro—he brought two with him—my eyes nearly popped out. We’re alone, so I can tell you: men can’t make theirs so straight and firm! Not only that, they’re as soft as sleep, and the laces are like wool, not leather; you’ll never find another cobbler who has a woman’s interests more at heart.’

This appeal to vision is then a central technique of the mimiamboi, and one which it is not unreasonable to link with the whole mimic tradition;46 it is indeed very likely that the sub-literary mime assumed and appealed to a much more elaborate stage-setting than the audience actually saw. In this context we can see that arguments, say, about the actual bother involved in staging Poem 447 carry very little weight. On the other hand, it may be argued that this knowing game of ‘revealing’ and ‘not revealing’ would carry particular force in a written literature which always asks us to ‘see’ what we cannot actually see.48 Here the mimiamboi may be thought not only to be poised between ‘reading’ and ‘performance’, but also in fact to acknowledge and exploit the problem of their own ‘performance status’. The modern debate about how the mimiamboi were performed thus turns out to have been pursuing one of the very models of reception which the text itself teasingly predicts.49 ‘Performance’, however, covers more than one mode. In seeking to choose between the ‘acting’ of a troupe and recitation by a solo ‘player’, scholars have usually appealed to a series of passages which are alleged to 46 The connections of Petronius’ Satyrica with the mime tradition are well known, and that text revels in the possibilities of deceptive vision. 47 Cf., e. g., Ph.-E. Legrand, ‘Problèmes alexandrins II: à quelle espèce de publicité Hérondas destinait-il ses mimes?’, REA 4 (1902) 5 – 35, at 7 – 8. It is important in assessing Legrand’s influential article to note its assumptions: ‘dans un poème où la réalitè est copiée d’aussi près …’ (p. 12). 48 For related concerns in Callimachus’ hymns cf. ‘Writing the god: form and meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena’, MD 29 (1992) 9 – 34 [= this volume 127 – 52]. 49 Another such potential mode of reception which Herodas himself inscribes in his poems is the ‘mimetic realist’ reading, which has also, of course, had a thorough airing in modern scholarship and remains very much alive; I discuss this with regard to Poem 4 in ‘Plautus and Herodas’ (n. 42 above).

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pose difficulties for one interpretation or the other: 1.79 ff (what do Gyllis and Metriche do while Threissa pours the drinks?), 4.19 ff (when does the sacristan appear, and how in fact is this whole poem ‘staged’?), 5.1 (if Ed’ is the correct reading and the deictic refers to Gastron’s penis, could the verse be understood if Gastron—a speaking character—was not visible on stage?), 5.55 ff (where is Kydilla’s speech imagined to take place?). As I have already noted, general agreement on these questions may be hardly possible, because they depend upon subjective assessments of what is and is not possible in performances.50 More important may be the observations that every poem (including 8) assumes one or more mute characters (a feature familiar in all dramatic genres), every poem (except 8) has more than one speaking character, and in every poem one character predominates (i. e. has at least half of the spoken verses).51 The relative proportions and the number of ‘actors’ varies from poem to poem, but it is at least not unnatural to think of ‘performance’ by a small troupe dominated by the ‘leading mime’. Some refinement of these intuitions may be possible through a comparison with two poets who have much in common with Herodas— Menander, whose plays we know to have been performed, and Theocritus whose poems were almost certainly read and are normally assumed to have been recited when first delivered. A striking feature of the mimiamboi is that each of them contains a vocative address in either the first or the second verse;52 this may establish a setting (Poems 2, 4) or mark the dramatic status of the poem. Beyond this initial marker, however, Herodas’ scene-setting is minimal. With Theocritus, however, the case is both interestingly similar and different. The scene-setting in Theocritus 1, which there are good reasons for believing to carry special programmatic force,53 is careful and elaborate. The vocative address in the opening verse, aQp|ke, may remind us of Herodas, but the locus amoenus is painted in such detail (vv. 1 – 2, 7 – 8, 13, 21 – 3) that we are presented with an over-determined setting 50 Reviewers have frequently charged Mastromarco with underestimating the ability of a single performer to project more than one role; cf. P. J. Parsons, CR 31 (1981) 110,1. C. Cunningham, JHS 101 (1981) 161. 51 Cf. Mastromarco 15 – 16. 52 This seems, from what survives, to have been true also of Poem 9, the )pomistif|lemai. 53 Cf., e. g., F. Cairns, ‘Theocritus’ first idyll: the literary programme’, WS 97 (1984) 89 – 113.

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in which the detail works against any simple ‘mimetic’ or ‘realist’ representation and instead foregrounds its artifice. Here perhaps is a measure of the distance between the mode of a performed text (Herodas) and that of one designed solely with readers in mind (Theocritus). In fact, the first four speeches of Idyll 1 all begin with a vocative address; this is not merely a way to establish the antithetical bucolic style and a poetics of t¹ poilemij|m and t¹ aQpokij|m, but it also overplays the ‘dramatic’ quality of the poem in a way which might be thought foreign to ‘real drama’. Idyll 2, a poem connected already in the scholia with the mimes of Sophron, begins, as does more than one poem of Theocritus, with an address to a slave, and v_ktqa makes clear that we are in the realm of love-magic. Here there seems little difference from a Herodan opening, but what follows is perhaps more significant. ‘Wreathe the bowl with fine crimson wool’ (v. 2, trans. Gow) gives, in ‘crimson’, precisely the detail which betrays the text written to be envisioned by readers; of course, this detail is also ritually correct and has to be spelled out for the benefit of an obtuse servant, but this difference from Herodan practice carries a certain suggestive force in the current context. The following verses begin formally as an explanation to the slave of what Simaitha is doing, but they soon become a private meditation upon her situation and her plans; they are, in other words, a monologue ‘to the audience’ of a kind familiar also in Menander, but strikingly lacking in Herodas. In the mimiamboi, speech is always directed to an addressee; even the monologue of Poem 8 remains addressed to the servant Anna. Herodas’ poems are, of course, a great deal shorter than plays of Menander, but the absence of such monologues from Herodas can hardly be explained merely by a desire for brevity. With Herodas we feel the constant pressure for drama, for interaction between characters; in Theocritus 2, however, Thestylis remains a mere cypher. Idyll 3, like Idyll 2, has only one speaking character, but unlike Idyll 2 it begins with a selfpresentation by the speaker and a narrative of his situation: jyl\sdy pot· t±m )laqukk_da, ta· d] loi aWcer b|sjomtai jat’ eqor, ja· b T_tuqor aqt±r 1ka}mei. T_tuq’, 1l·m t¹ jak¹m pevikgl]me, b|sje t±r aWcar, ja· pot· t±m jq\mam %ce, T_tuqe jtk.

(3.1 – 4)

I go to serenade Amaryllis, and my goats graze on the mountain; Tityros drives them. Tityros, dear friend, graze the goats, and, Tityros, lead them to the spring.

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Both the komastic subject-matter (cf. Ath. 14.621c) and the semi-dramatic form with change, or at least refocusing, of scene point to a debt to the mimic tradition, but the difference between Theocritus and Herodas is here very clear. It may indeed be ‘rustically naïve’ to state aloud to no one in particular the nature of the business upon which one is engaged,54 but this is not something which happens in Herodas. This dramatic form, the ‘entrance monologue’, is of course familiar from Menander. Thus, for example, the soldier’s servant in Perikeiromene explains ‘to the audience’ why he has entered: b sobaq¹r Bl?m !qt_yr ja· pokelij|r, b t±r cuma?jar oqj 1_m 5weim tq_war, jk\ei jatajkime_r. jat]kipom poo}lemom %qistom aqto?r %qti, ja· sumgcl]moi eQr taqt|m eQsim oR sum^heir, toO v]qeim aqt¹m t¹ pq÷cla N÷iom. oqj 5wym d’ fpyr t!mtaOh’ !jo}sgi cim|lem’ 1jp]polv] le Rl\tiom oUsomt’ 1nep_tgder, oqd³ 4m de|lemor %kk’ C peqipate?m le bo}ketai.

(172 – 80)

Our friend who was just now so blustering and warlike, the one who won’t let women keep their hair, is lying down weeping. I left him giving his friends a meal—they have gathered round to help him bear his trouble. He’s got no way of knowing what is going on here, so he has dispatched me to fetch a cloak, but really all he wants is for me to wear my legs out.

To transfer this form to the mimiamboi, it would be as if Herodas 3 began with Metrotime saying ‘I have come to the schoolmaster’s so that he will give my son a thrashing …’. In the avoidance of such monologues which, as we have seen, are found in both Menander and Theocritus, Herodas seems to stand close to the genuine tradition of sub-literary mime, as far as our scanty fragments allow us to judge.55 Here again, the mode of the mimiamboi is that of genuinely ‘performed’ texts. 54 Cf. the citation of vv. 1 – 2 as an example of !v]keia at Hermogenes, Id. 2.3 (p. 322 Rabe). 55 For the texts see pp. 36 – 41 of Cunningham’s Teubner of Herodas (Leipzig 1987); discussion, though far from persuasive where Herodas is concerned, in H. Wiemken, Der griechische Mimus (Berlin 1972). It is noteworthy that Legrand (above, n. 47) 23, having argued with great vigour for solo recitation in the case of Herodas, felt it necessary to hedge his bets by suggesting the use of a brief (unreported) prologue to set the scene, presumably along the lines of the opening of Theocritus 3.

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Although a similar analysis is possible for many of Theocritus’ poems, I note merely two further, but very different, cases. In the first we will see Herodas aligned with a genuinely dramatic text, Menander, against Theocritus. The agonistic form of Idyll 5 is introduced by matching pairs of verses in which the antagonists tell us all we need to know—their names and occupations. The scenery is again depicted with care—a spring (v. 3), a named cliff (v. 16), and particular nymphs (v. 17); none of this is very elaborate, and yet when we compare it with, say, Metrotime’s allusion to the Muses as aUde, ‘these ladies’, with no further explanation (Herodas 3.57), the difference between the two poets again emerges clearly.56 When Komatas and Lakon come to choose an arbitrator, the former has a proposal: !kk± t¹m %mdqa, aQ k/ir, t¹m dqut|lom bystq^soler, dr t±r 1qe_jar t^mar t±r paq± t·m nukow_fetai· 5sti d³ L|qsym.

(5.63 – 5)

‘If you like, we’ll call to the man cutting wood, the one collecting that heather near you. It’s Morson.’

The pictorial detail of Morson’s activity is again what may be thought to betray not merely the bucolic text, but also the text designed with readers in mind. This, of course, is not to say that genuinely dramatic texts are short on pictorial detail – far from it —but the difference from the choosing of Smikrines as arbitrator in the second act of Menander’s Epitrepontes is very marked: Suq. 1pitqept]om tim_ 1sti peq· to}tym. Da. bo}kolai· jqim~leha. Suq. t_r owm ; Da. 1lo· l³m p÷r Rjam|r. d_jaia d³ p\swy· t_ c\q soi leted_doum ; Suq. toOtom kabe?m bo}kei jqit^m ; Da. !cah/i t}wgi. Suq. pq¹r t_m he_m, b]ktiste, lijq¹m #m swok\sair Bl?m wq|mom ; Slij. rl?m ; peq· t_mor ; (219 – 25)

Syr. We must turn this over to an arbitrator. Da. Fine, let’s choose one. Syr. Who then? Da. Anyone suits me. It’s only fair: why did I give you a share? 56 Admittedly, the Muses have been explicitly named in a similar context in the opening verse of the poem.

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Syr. Are you happy with this chap as judge? Da. By all means. Syr. In the name of the gods, good sir, could you spare us a little time? Smikr. You? What do you want?

The different style of the two passages may be explained in various ways, but it is hard not to believe that, at some level, we are dealing with the difference between ‘drama’ and literature intended for reading. Here we find Herodas aligned with the ‘dramatic’ text, and I believe that it is true to assert that this will always be the case except, as in the matter of ‘entrance monologues’, where he stands even closer than Menander to the norms of ‘unelaborated drama’.57 Idyll 15 is in some ways the exception which proves the rule. The opening ‘mimic’ section lacks the fullness of detail which we have found in other Theocritean poems—particularly in the introduction of characters (cf. vv. 60, 70 – 1, 87 – 8)—and the subject of the poem is of course close to Herodan interests. Both stylistically and metrically,58 we are here a long way from the ‘bucolic’ poems. Again, inferences about how Idyll 15 was ‘actually performed’59 are less important than seeing how an interest in this question can reveal the distinguishing characteristics of a text. Our tendency to lump together the various ‘mime’ poems of Theocritus has perhaps done more harm than good, as we have paid insufficient attention to the real differences which are inscribed within them. Idyll 15 is a highly experimental text, as the Hymn to Adonis with which it concludes and which has elicited very 57 Cf. A. Melero, ‘Consideraciones en torno a los Mimiambos de Herodas’, CFC 7 (1974) 303 – 16, who, however, rejects performance for Herodas because the text explains the action to us, ‘someone is knocking on the door’ etc. Such ‘explanations’ are, however, precisely what we find in (performed) comedy. 58 Cf. P. Maas, Greek Metre (Oxford 1962) 94 (on the ‘bucolic bridge’), S. R. Slings, ZPE 98 (1993) 32 (on ‘Attic correption’). The hexameters of the mimic section break Callimachean rules frequently enough to show that we must be dealing with a deliberate stylistic effect, !mtikab^ (the sharing of a single verse between more than one speaker) is much more common in Herodas’ choliambs than in the hexameters of Theocritus (cf., e. g., Melero [above, n. 57] 309 – 16), and here again the opening verses of Idyll 15 are unusual. 59 Cf. Ph.-E. Legrand, tude sur Thocrite (Paris 1898) 414 – 18; Legrand argues that any ‘reception’ of Idyll 15 other than ‘silent reading’ is inconceivable, because of the formal problems raised by (e. g.) changes of place and speaker. His discussion fails to convince because of the limiting assumptions upon which it is based.

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varying critical responses, ought to have made clear. At the very least, Idyll 15 can throw only very ambiguous light upon the question of the presentation of Herodas’ mimiambs. ‘Performance’, then, is not to be conceived as a purely historical question which can be isolated from the broad concerns of the text. We might in any case have expected that poems whose linguistic form is as sophisticated as the mimiamboi would show a similarly selfaware interest in the conditions of their own reception, particularly as we know that other contemporary poetry is marked by such an interest.60 That we can ask of Herodas some of the same questions which we ask of the canonical ‘Alexandrian avant-garde’ is a comforting, if unsurprising, conclusion.61

Addenda The best starting-point on the mimiamboi and modern bibliography is now the two-volume edition of the poems by L. Di Gregorio (Milan 1997, 2004); Oxford University Press is to publish a new English-language edition by G. Zanker. Further recent discussion in the papers of Kutzko, Männlein-Robert and Zanker in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Wakker (eds.), Beyond the Canon (Leuven 2006).

60 Cf. the survey in P. Bing, The Well-Read Muse. Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Göttingen 1988). 61 This paper has benefited from the comments of a seminar audience at the Institute of Classical Studies in London and of Antichthon’s anonymous referee. W. Puchner, ‘Zur Raumkonzeption der Mimiamben des Herodas’, WS 106 (1993) 9 – 34, appeared too late to be taken into account.

11. Callimachean Echoes in Catullus 65*

4

8

12

16

20

24

etsi me assiduo confectum cura dolore seuocat a doctis, Ortale, uirginibus, nec potis est dulcis Musarum expromere fetus mens animi, tantis fluctuat ipsa malis — namque mei nuper Lethaeo gurgite fratris pallidulum manans alluit unda pedem, Troia Rhoeteo quem subter litore tellus ereptum nostris obterit ex oculis. < > numquam ego te, uita frater amabilior, aspiciam posthac? at certe semper amabo, semper maesta tua carmina morte canam, qualia sub densis ramorum concinit umbris Daulias, absumpti fata gemens Ityli. sed tamen in tantis maeroribus, Ortale, mitto haec expressa tibi carmina Battiadae, ne tua dicta uagis nequiquam credita uentis effluxisse meo forte putes animo, ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum procurrit casto uirginis e gremio, quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum, dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur, atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu, huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor.

It is an old idea that the final six verses of this poem reflect Callimachus’ narrative of the love of Acontius and Cydippe. As the poem serves as an introduction to a ‘translation’ of Callimachus, the idea is not a very bold one, but it has recently been explicitly dismissed on the grounds that what we know of Callimachus’ narrative is quite different to Catullus’ image of the young uirgo surprised by her mother into revealing the apple sent to her by her sponsus. 1 In Callimachus, the truth is revealed

* 1

Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 96 (1993) 179 – 82 Cf. H.P. Syndikus, Catull, Eine Interpretation. II (Darmstadt 1990) 197 – 8. It is noteworthy that, whereas Kroll notes the debt to Callimachus, Fordyce does not consider the possibility worthy of mention. Wilamowitz toyed with the

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by the oracular Apollo and by subsequent questioning of Cydippe by her father (fr. 75. 20 – 39); it is also very unlikely that Callimachus’ Cydippe kept the treacherous apple after she had been trapped into swearing to marry Acontius.2 In this note, I wish to assemble again the case for Catullus’ debt to Callimachus, and to comment briefly on the interesting implications of this for our understanding of Catullus 65. Acontius ‘sent’ Cydippe an apple which was also a letter to be read aloud; the inscribed token of love carried with it the required answering token from the beloved in the shape of the binding oath which Cydippe duly utters. As such, the inscribed apple is in pointed contrast to the inscription of the beloved’s name on trees (fr. 73), an inscription which Cydippe will never see or read and which can find no reciprocity from the beloved. Both Catullus 65 and 66 are pledges of the poet’s affection for Hortalus and therefore ‘apples’. Moreover, on at least one reading of the concluding verses of Poem 65, Poem 66 is in fact announced by the simile as an ‘apple’, and, on any reading, the resonance of v. 3 in which poetry is described as dulcis Musarum … fetus allows the ‘poem as apple’ assimilation to be felt clearly.3 Not only are both Poems 65 and 66 ‘apples’, they are also both carmina Battiadae.4 The detailed comparison of motifs is always a risky basis for argument because of the very nature of the commonplace. In this case we are also confronted with the problems of the various compositional techniques of Aristaenetus, our main source for the lost sections of Callimachus’ narrative,5 and of whether the epistolographer worked directly from Callimachus or from an intermediary paraphrase or from

2

3

4 5

idea of influence from Apollonius Rhodius’ similes of ‘everyday life’ (Hellenistische Dichtung II 304 – 5), but there is no concrete point of contact. This would be certain if — as I think likely — the action of !p]qqixem, ‘threw away’, at Aristaenetus 1.10.39 (quoted below) referred, on at least one level, to the apple and was derived from Callimachus; text and interpretation of that passage are, however, uncertain, cf. (for a different interpretation) W. G. Arnott, GRBS 14 (1973) 208. Cf. C. Witke, Enarratio Catulliana. Carmina L, XXX, LXV, LXVIII (Leiden 1968) 21. Commentators and translators are divided over the formal referent of the simile: is the ‘apple’ like tua dicta of v. 17 or like carmina Battiadae of v. 16? Cf. (respectively) the notes of Ellis and Quinn ad loc. The resonance I am exploring remains, of course, even with the former interpretation. For stylistic ‘Callimacheanism’ in Catullus 65 cf. J. B. Van Sickle, TAQA 99 (1968) 487 – 508 W. Clausen, HSCP 74 (1970) 85 – 94. For some brief remarks cf. Arnott art. cit. (n. 2).

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both.6 Nevertheless, the circumstantial case seems very strong here. With casto (v. 20) and the girl’s blush (v. 24) cf. Aristaenetus 1.10.39 – 45: t¹v 1qytij¹m k|com !p]qqixem aQdoul]mg, ja· Bl_vymom jatak]koipe k]nim tµm 1p’ 1sw\tyi jeil]mgm ûte dialmglome}ousam c\lom, dm selmµ paqh]mor j#m 2t]qou k]comtor Aquhq_ase. ja· tosoOtom 1nevoim_whg t¹ pq|sypom, ¢r doje?m fti t_m paqei_m 5mdom eWw] tima N|dym keil_ma, ja· 1q}hgla toOto lgd³m t_m weik_m aqt/r diav]qeim ; both motifs occur also in Ovid’s treatment (blush: Heroides 20.6, 97, 21.112; chasteness: Heroides 20.9 – 10). With furtiuo munere (v. 19) cf. Aristaenetus 1.10.27 k\hqai diej}kisar pq¹ t_m t/r heqapa_mgr pod_m. It is true that we have no good evidence for a major role for Cydippe’s mother in Callimachus, but it is striking that two of our other post-Callimachean sources feature a similar motif of the apple slipping unnoticed out of clothing. In Ovid, Acontius tells Cydippe that she should not be ashamed to tell her mother everything, including how he delivered the treacherous apple: et, te dum nimium miror, nota certa furoris, deciderint umero pallia lapsa meo; postmodo nescio qua uenisse uolubile malum, uerba ferens doctis insidiosa notis. (Her. 20.207 – 10)

In Aristaenetus, the nurse picks up the apple diapoqoOsa t_r %qa toOto t_m paqh]mym let]yqor !p]bake toO pqojokp_ou (1.10.29 – 30). The closeness of this passage to Catullus’ verses has, of course, been noted before,7 but it is worth adding to the circumstantial case here. Moreover, Ovid’s Cydippe hides the letter she is writing trepido … sinu (Her. 21.16); it is tempting to see here a re-use by Ovid of a motif already in the tradition. Other than the oath, we know virtually nothing about how Callimachus treated the incident at the temple, so it would be best not to leave any ‘coincidences’ out of account. 6

7

Pfeiffer follows A. Vogliano, Papiri della Universit di Milano I (Milan 1937) 115, in assuming an intermediary source because both Aristaenetus (1.10.37 – 8) and the Diegesis give Cydippe’s oath in the same words which could not appear in elegiac verse. This is a strong, but not a conclusive, argument Cf. K. Dilthey, De Callimachi Cydippa (Leipzig 1863) 65, though he is not explicit on the subject; L. W. Daly, CP 47 (1952) 97 – 9. let]yqor, ‘careless, distracted’, is a late use (Aristaenetus 1.23.10, LSJ s.v. III 5), though hardly beyond Callimachus.

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After Cydippe, Acontius. Here we enter even deeper into speculation, but not, I hope, unprofitable speculation. In Poems 65 and 68 Catullus explores (among other things) the relationship between grief and love. The careworn and grief stricken figure of the opening verses of Poem 65 does not inevitably recall the distressed and wasted Acontius (cf. Aristaen. 1.10.51 – 2), but the idea may be worth entertaining. In a passage striking both for its imagery and for its dactylic rhythm, Aristaenetus apostrophises the suffering Acontius: t]yr owm t¹m de_kaiom – !kk’ oute hak\ttgr tqijul_ar oute p|hou joquvo}lemom s\kom eqlaq³r !vgce?shai (1.10.47 – 8). That Aristaenetus is here close to the Callimachean model was suggested long ago,8 but it is worth here juxtaposing this passage to Catullus’ tantis fluctuat ipsa malis. The metaphor itself is, of course, a common one, and is used elsewhere by Catullus himself (64.97 – 8, of Ariadne’s erotic passion): the dactylic rhythm is also not conclusive, as Aristaenetus himself might well be responsible for this.9 There is, however, a further point to be made. It is well known that Callimachus’ Acontius was an influential model in subsequent Latin poetry: Vergil, Eclogue 2 and 10, and Propertius 1.18 are the most prominent examples.10 Acontius becomes the classic example of the hapless lover who pours out his woes in song to lonely nature. Part at least of his lament was given in direct discourse (frr. 73 – 4); like Theocritus’ Cyclops, Acontius was made a poet by love ( just as his love provided Callimachus’ Muse with material, fr. 75.77). The parallel is not idle because it is precisely the Cyclops with whom Acontius is combined in the figure of Vergil’s Corydon in Eclogue 2. Nicias’ reply to Idyll 11, Gm %q’ !kgh³r toOto, He|jqite· oR c±q =qyter / poigt±r pokko»r 1d_danam to»r pq·m !lo}sour, reworks the famous verses of Euripides’ Stheneboia, poigtµm d’ %qa / =qyr did\sjei j#m %lousor Gi t¹ pq_m (fr. 663 Kannicht), and it is tempting to suppose that these same verses figured by

8 Cf. Dilthey, op. cit. 69 – 70, followed by A. Dietzler, Die Akontios-Elegie des Kallimachos (diss. Greifswald 1933) 37. Suggestive support for the idea might be sought in joq}sseo at Ap. Rhod., Arg. 4.448, where the image is of the storm-wave of love. 9 A comparison of Callimachus fr. 73 and Aristaenetus 1.10.60 – 1 is very instructive for the latter’s technique. 10 For Vergil cf. D. O. Ross, Backgrounds to Augustan Poetry: Gallus, Elegy and Rome (Cambridge 1975) 85 – 9 and E. J. Kenney, ICS 81 (1983) 48 – 51; for Propertius cf. F. Cairns, CR 19 (1969) 131 – 4.

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echo in Callimachus’ narrative.11 Be that as it may, Catullus’ poem represents a clear inversion of the ‘Acontian’ idea: because of cura the poet cannot compose, and must instead be content with expressa … carmina Battiadae. His ‘removal’ (seuocat, v. 2) a doctis … uirginibus replays Acontius’ flight from his parents and usual company into the loneliness of nature.12 However weak or strong each individual point may be – and there may yet be more to be said —13 it seems hardly possible that Callimachus’ only relevance for the appreciation of Poem 65 lies in v. 16. If even some of the connections I have assembled here hold good, then Poem 65, and especially the concluding six verses, present a creative reworking of Callimachean ideas and motifs taken from an erotically charged aition from Aitia 3 as an introduction to a ‘translation’ of another erotically charged aition from Aitia 4. The very distance of the apple simile from its Callimachean ‘model’ is in fact crucial to its significance. The related, but contrasting, forms of re-writing represented by the two juxtaposed poems raise serious questions about the nature of imitatio, the use of literary models, and the role of the individual poet within a poetics such as that practised by both Catullus and (perhaps) Hortalus (cf. Fordyce on Cat. 95.3). That such questions were of concern to neoteric, as to later, poets hardly requires demonstration. It may well be that the repetition of a passage on his brother’s death in Poem 68 (or between 68a and 68b, if that is preferable) is a further manifestation of the exploration of the parameters of creativity, for that is the use to which Catullus has put Callimachus in Poems 65 and 66.14

11 Callimachus’ familiarity with Theocritus 11 seems suggested by Epigram 46 Pfeiffer (= 3 GP). 12 Witke, op. cit. (n. 3) 14, rightly noted how the opening verses could evoke the idea of the lovesick poet. 13 Acontius, vgco?r rpojah^lemor C ptek]air (Aristaenetus 1.10.57), may well be relevant. Did Acontius complain that Cydippe had forgotten her oath (cf. Cat. 65.17 – 18)? 14 I am grateful to Elaine Fantham and Ludwig Koenen for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this note.

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Addenda For futher discussion of Catullus’ translation practice in Poem 65 cf. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 474 – 5; there are important remarks at A. Barchiesi, HSCP 95 (1993) 363 – 5. The Letters of Aristaenetus have been given a full commentary with up-to-date bibliography by Anna Tiziana Drago (Aristeneto. Lettere d’amore, Lecce 2007).

12. Plautus and Herodas* The history of the reception of Herodas’ mimiambs1 has run the full gamut from enthusiasm for ‘the ancient realist’ to a rather weary dismissal in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, “aesthetic mannerism, not ‘realism’ […] the invitation to prurience and social snobbery which they convey makes them tedious”.2 What kind of ‘realist’ mode informs the mimiambs has always been a (perhaps the) central critical question, particularly for those who have tried to offer a general appreciation of the qualities of these intriguing texts. R. Ussher, for example, asserts: “Herodas’ characters […] are real people, captured in real moments of existence, and drawn with psychological perceptiveness. They are not realistic, inasmuch as they use language which no Greek of their day (or ever) spoke […] what is real is the society within which they live their sometimes unattractive lives […]”,3 and W.G. Arnott similarly seeks to distinguish between what he sees as Herodas’ exact “observation of the small, realistic details of low life”, his “observation of real-life conversations”, and the foolishness of any attempt to label his poems as ‘realistic’. Thus, he notes of Bitinna’s relenting at the end of Poem 5, “this is the way petty pride operates in petty human beings; Herodas’ observation of human behaviour is again exact”.4 A denial of any simple concept of the poems as ‘realist’, based upon language, metre and literary texture, may be accepted without further discussion;5 rather, these features overtly proclaim the mimetic, representational sta-

* 1 2 3 4 5

L. Benz et al. (eds.), Plautus und die Tradition des Stegreifspiels (Tübingen 1995) 155 – 69 This paper has benefitted from the constructive criticism of audiences at The Institute of Classical Studies in London and the University of Freiburg. A. W. Bulloch on p. 612 of Vol. I. There is a survey of ‘realist’ views in G. Mastromarco, The Public of Herondas, Amsterdam 1984, 65 – 68. ‘The Mimiamboi of Herodas’, Hermathena 129, 1980, 65 – 76, 71. ‘Herodas and the Kitchen Sink’, G&R 18, 1971, 121 – 132. Sensible remarks in G. Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry, London 1987, 159 – 60.

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tus of the mimiambs, and are a constant reminder to the audience6 that they are not being offered unmediated access to ‘slices of life’. As to the second part of the dichotomy offered by Ussher and Arnott, the appeal to Herodas’ ‘exact observation’ and ‘psychological perceptiveness’ there is perhaps little that can be said. Everyone forms their own notions of what is ‘true to life’ on the basis of their own experiences (including their experience of art), and such things can hardly be the subject of argument. On the other hand, we may hope to find in the poems themselves a guide to approaching these problems. In this paper I wish to raise some general problems of ‘character’ and ‘voice’ in the mimiambs, as the background to a consideration of the speech of Battaros in Poem 2. My two strategies will be an examination of passages in the poems themselves which seem to be pointing us in a particular interpretative direction, and secondly a comparison with certain aspects of Plautine dramaturgy; suggestive points of contact between the Greek mimiambist and the Roman comic dramatist will, I hope, emerge. In Poem 4 two women visit a shrine of Asklepios to offer thanks for a cure from sickness. While their offering is being presented to the god by the sacristan, they admire the works of art in the shrine; the two sections of ‘art admiration’ are separated by some typically Herodan abuse of a slave (41 – 56). The women’s admiration for the works of art is based on their impressive likeness to life — you could believe them real (27 – 38, 57 – 78). Such a view of art is, of course, familiar in many contexts from the early Hellenistic period, and indeed reflects a ‘professional’ way of appreciating art;7 poetry, for example, offers us the cloak of Jason (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1,721 – 767) and the palace decorations of Theocritus 15.8 Modern discussion of Herodas 4 has rightly refused to assume that what the women say about the works of art they see classifies them, without further ado, as stupid and uneducated, and some critics have indeed wished to see here reflections of Herodas’ own ar-

6 7 8

The nature of the audience for these poems is, of course, a matter of great debate; I have discussed these problems in: ‘The presentation of Herodas’ Mimiamboi’, Antichthon 27, 1993, 31 – 44 [= this volume 189 – 205]. Cf. J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology, New Haven / London 1974, 63 – 66, 125 – 138. I have discussed Jason’s cloak in: The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge 1993, 52 – 59.

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tistic program.9 How we should react to what the women say remains, however, to be investigated. It is now a critical commonplace that the description in a written text, even a dramatic text, of the viewing of a work of art inscribes within that text an analogy — perhaps a deliberately misleading one — of the reception of the written (or heard) text itself. Herodas 4 offers a very clear example of this, for it is not difficult to see the analogy between the women’s reactions to the temple artworks and the reactions to Herodas’ poem that the poet himself both anticipates and exploits, and which we have actually seen realised in the history of criticism since the publication of the London papyrus. In other words, the women are in part created as a potential audience for Herodas’ poems, but this is, of course, very different from seeing them as an ‘ideal’ audience and their reactions as authorially approved. By separating the two sections of ‘art criticism’ with a quintessentially mimiambic passage of slave abuse, Herodas forces us to confront the similarity and difference of the two kinds of ‘work of art’ on display, and to see the women as potential analogues of ourselves. On one hand, we are invited to reject the analogy because of the women’s gender, social class and language — ‘we are not like that!’ —;10 on the other, the inherent attractions of the women’s approach to what they see are very real. If, however, the ‘how true to life!’ school of criticism is to be applied to works of high plastic art, can we apply it to a scene of vulgar slave abuse (particularly one in archaising dialect) without realising its deficiencies, not to say banality? Herodas knowingly exploits a tradition of connecting comedy and subcomic mime with ‘life’; the idea that comedy (and probably, a fortiori, mime) is an ‘imitation of life’ was well established in the theoretical tra9 Cf. (with varying nuances) S. Luria, ‘Herondas’ Kampf für die veristische Kunst’, in: Miscellanea di studi alessandrini in memoria di Augusto Rostagni, Torino 1963, 394 – 415; G. Lawall, Theocritus’ Coan Pastorals, Washington 1967, 119; L. Massa Positano, Eroda. Mimiambo IV, Napoli 1973, 9 – 10; O. Specchia, ‘Gli studi su Eroda nell’ ultimo trentennio’, Cultura e scuola 70, 1979, 32 – 43; T. Gelzer, ‘Mimus und Kunsttheorie bei Herondas, Mimiambus 4’, in: C. Schäublin (ed.), Catalepton. Festschrift Bernhard Wyss, Basel 1985, 96 – 116; Zanker, Realism (n. 5) 43; F.-J. Simon, T± j}kk’ !e_deim. Interpretationen zu den Mimiamben des Herodas, Frankfurt 1991, 61 – 67; C. Miralles, ‘La poetica di Eroda’, Aevum Antiquum 5, 1992, 89 – 113, 100 – 102; S. Goldhill, in: S. Goldhill / R. Osborne (eds.), Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Cambridge 1994, 221 – 222. 10 There are here many assumptions about Herodas’ audience, but I hope in this case that they are not too controversial.

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dition before the third century,11 and Herodas’ scene both dramatises that connection and exposes its limitations. The ‘realism’ of Herodas is thus a realism of irony, of the power of what we say both to reflect and to deflect truth. This is perhaps most obvious in Poem 2 (cf. below) and Poem 7, in which our uncertainty of the relationship between Kerdon and Metro and of what they are really talking about is the crucial element of the poem’s strategy.12 In Poem 4 we may point to the sacristan’s report of the success of the women’s offering: j\k’ wlim, § cuma?jer, 1mtek]yr t± Rq\ ja· 1r k_iom 1lbk]pomta . lef|myr outir Aq]sato t¹m Pai^om’ Epeq owm qle?r. Qµ Qµ Pa_gom, eqlemµr eUgr jako?r 1p’ Qqo?r t/isde jeU timer t_mde 5as’ apuigta_ te ja· cem/r üssom. Qµ Qµ Pa_gom, §de taOt’ eUg.

(4, 79 – 85)

Women, your sacrifice is splendid and correct, and foreshadows good things; no one has pleased Paieon more than you. Hie, hie Paieon! May you look graciously upon these ladies’ offerings, and upon any who are their spouses or family. Hie, hie Paieon! So may it be!

On 80 – 81 Cunningham comments “doubtless a conventional remark”, and this may well be true, but unless we imagine that the effect sought in this poem is one of ‘documentary realism’ we ought not to be satisfied with such an explanation. What is the tone (and the overtones) of the hyperbole? It is true that this god is a god of the people, and the women have displayed irreproachable piety, but can we really read this remark without irony? Consider too the women’s opening prayer. A number of studies have rightly pointed to familiar hymnic and formu-

11 Cf. the summary and bibliography at Zanker (n. 5) 144 – 145. 12 Cf. G. Lawall, ‘Herodas 6 and 7 reconsidered’, CP 71, 1976, 165 – 169. Cunningham’s view (cf. ‘Herodas 6 and 7’, CQ 14, 1964, 32 – 35 and his edition) is that Poem 7 is much less nuanced than this, but 61 – 63 may just be a witticism, and it does not follow from the salesman’s compliments at 108 – 112 that Kerdon actually has first-hand experience of Metro’s body. 127 – 129 remain obscure, despite V. Schmidt, Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Herondas, Berlin 1968, 117 – 127.

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laic elements in this address to the god,13 but the ‘parallel’ passages merely highlight what is different. Here we have not a public, choral performance on behalf of a city, but the humblest of offerings from a humble worshipper, and in spoken choliambics rather than sung lyrics. Kynno – if that indeed is the speaker’s name – stretches stylistically as she brings to the god ‘the herald of the walls14 of my house’, and the effect is a mixture of the comic15 and the bathetic as the god and all his retinue are summoned to enjoy the culinary pleasure offered by one small cock. The complexity of the reaction appropriate to such a passage is unsettling, and the creation of such uncertainty seems to be a persistent literary strategy in the mimiamboi. ‘Slices of life’ can never be understood without a context, and by depriving us of that context Herodas opens the way to an ironic reception, or at least does not permit us to discard the possibility of such reception. Poem 1 further illustrates this technique. We will not imagine that Gyllis speaks ‘the truth’ about Gryllos (50 – 67) because it is her job to make him sound as attractive as possible, and she is hardly acting out of altruism (cf. the reference to gifts in 65).16 More uncertain perhaps is whether or not we are to understand that Metriche believes her encomium of the young man. It is, however, clear that the drink of reconciliation at the end of the poem looks forward to future co-operation and mutual understanding; it opens possibilities, rather than closing them down. At one level, of course, this mode of speech and presentation which I have been investigating is merely the mimiambic version of the tradition of skilful, ambivalent speech which runs through the whole history of Greek literature; Kerdon, indeed, the ‘bald fox’ of Poems 6 and 7, is a very Odysseus of leather-workers.17 The success of such a mode depends, however, on a strongly typological view of character — ‘what young men are like’, ‘what pornoboskoi are like’ — so that very few 13 To the standard commentaries add R. Wünsch, ‘Ein Dankopfer an Asklepios’, ARW 7, 1904, 95 – 116. For the style in general cf. E. Norden, Agnostos Theos, Berlin 1913, 168 – 176. 14 to_wym is certainly difficult, though I am not convinced that it is corrupt; the defence offered by G. Giangrande, QUCC 15, 1973, 92 is, however, inadequate. 15 t!p_doqpa d]naishe in 13 activates the familiar comic motif that the gods actually dine upon what men sacrifice to them, cf. my note on Eubulus fr. 95. 16 Cf. Simon (n. 9) 48 – 49. 17 For the play on his name cf. 7,72 – 75. For Kerdon as Odysseus cf. 6,58 – 62 (comparing Iliad 3,202 – 224).

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words are in fact necessary to allow an audience to understand the dynamics of a situation. Here the mimiamboi stand quite close to New Comedy. To what extent Menander’s characters are individualised, in any meaningful sense of the term, may be debated,18 but it is hardly to be doubted that Menander exploits the traditional, generic conception of character as a motive force within his plays: young men, broadly speaking, behave like young men.19 Herodas’ relationship to the comic tradition has been much studied,20 and although his characters are for the most part drawn from a milieu which is not prominent in Comedy, a close relationship between the two seems hard to deny. The nature of the relationship has usually been seen in simple terms of ‘borrowing’ by Herodas, but a rather more nuanced picture seems possible. The mimiamboi distort comic ideas and scenes by re-staging them at a ‘low’ level of society; the result is perhaps better described as a kind of para-comedy than as ‘parody of comedy’, although the formal dramatic genre can hardly emerge unstained from this deformation.21 To what extent this strategy was assisted by the Hellenistic practice of re-performing bits of plays (especially Euripides and Menander) rather than whole plays we can only guess; we should, however, remember B. Gentili’s warning that this Hellenistic practice is potentially important for understanding the difference between the plays of Greek New

18 For relevant considerations and bibliography cf. P.G. McC. Brown, ‘Masks, Names and Characters in New Comedy’, Hermes 115, 1987, 181 – 202. 19 Aristotle’s account of young men in the Rhetoric (2,1389a3-b12) is perhaps the best point of reference for Menander: young men are 1pihulgtijo_ and tend to act upon their 1pihul_ai (particularly in matters of love), cf. Dysk. 50 ff; they are quick to anger, cf. Samia 616 ff; they have little concern with money because they have not experienced lack, cf. Dysk. 797 ff; they act in pursuit of t¹ jak|m rather than t¹ sulv]qom, cf. Dysk. 77, 309 ff etc. It is, therefore, at best a partial truth that “no Greek seems to have been acquainted with the phenomena which we classify under ‘youthful idealism’” (K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality, Oxford 1974, 104). 20 To the material gathered in the standard commentaries add H. Krakert, Herodas in mimiambis quatenus comoediam Graecam respexisse uidetur, Diss. Freiburg 1902; A. P. Smotrytsch, ‘Die Vorgänger des Herondas’, AAnt.Hung. 14, 1966, 61 – 75; B. Veneroni, ‘Allacciamenti tematici tra la commedia greco-latina e il mimo di Eroda’, RIL 107, 1973, 760 – 772. 21 For many of the effects with which I am concerned ‘parody’ would be a perfectly appropriate label, but for others it would not, and so I prefer the broader (and vaguer) term.

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Comedy and those of Plautus.22 There is certainly an obvious relationship between this ‘anthologising’ habit and the single scenes with which Herodas presents us; here Plautus and Herodas may have taken the same strategy — concentration upon the single ‘scene’ — in rather different directions, but in both cases (as we shall see) the result is a kind of ‘deconstruction’ of comedy. However that may be, this phenomenon of what I have called ‘para-comedy’ is of crucial importance for the appreciation of the mimiamboi. Thus, for example, when Gastron pleads with his angry mistress to forgive him for ‘servicing’ a lady other than herself, B_timm’, %ver loi tµm !laqt_gm ta}tgm. %mhqypor eQl’, Elaqtom.

(5,26 – 27)

Bitinna, let me off this one mistake. I’m human, I made a mistake.

it is our familiarity with this argument in the ‘serious’ contexts of New Comedy,23 as well as the slave’s equivocation with %mhqypor as both ‘man’ and ‘slave’,24 which gives the verses their quasi-parodic force. There is more involved here than just a re-use of common motifs. In the mimiamboi (as also in Plautus) 25 the characters seem to play out rôles which they and we know to be rôles; there is a self-conscious ‘staginess’ in what they say, and this is perhaps the most important constitutive element in the characteristic ironic mode which I have traced. Even a feature such as the prominent use of ‘proverbs’ and semi-proverbial phrases is not merely an inherited generic feature26 or a vehicle for ‘mimetic realism’, but rather marks an ironically distorted representation 22 Cf. B. Gentili, Theatrical Performances in the Ancient World, Amsterdam 1979. Cf. now M. Huys, ‘P.Oxy. LIII 3705: a line from Menander’s Periceiromene with musical notation’, ZPE 99, 1993, 30 – 32. 23 Cf. the commentators ad loc., adding Men. Samia 17 (with Gomme/Sandbach ad loc.), 138. At Petr. Sat. 130.1 ‘Polyaenus’ uses this argument to excuse his failure to commit a sexual indiscretion (he proved less than fully homo), and the effect of that passage, like Herodas 5,26 – 27, depends upon our knowledge of how the topos is usually used. 24 Cf. LSJ s.v. I 7. The equivocation is set up by the very similar 6, B_timma, doOk|r eQli. 25 Cf. further below, and N. W. Slater, Plautus in Performance, Princeton 1985, 160 – 162 for some suggestive remarks. 26 Cf. Demetrius, On Style 156 (trans. W. Rhys Roberts), “Sophron employs two or three proverbs in succession so as to load his style with elegances. Almost all the proverbs in existence might be collected out of his plays”.

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which depends for its effect upon our familiarity with other standard modes of representation, such as those of comedy; such phrases, particularly when delivered in the archaising Ionic of Herodas, are essentially theatrical markers of rôle-playing. When viewed in this light, it is possible to see the relationship between drama and the mimiamboi as more fundamental than the mere study of shared motifs and characters might suggest. We could if we wish, for example, see Mimiamb 3 (The Schoolteacher) as a distorted and ‘low-life’ version of the typical comic scenario of wastrel son and angry parent, with Metrotime playing the rôle of Terence’s Demea,27 or Mimiamb 6 (A Private Conversation) as showing what women ‘really’ talk about when they get together (contrast, e. g., Menander, Synaristosai = Plautus, Cistellaria);28 whatever particular links there might be, these poems depend for their effect upon their audience’s knowledge of other, ‘higher’ modes and representations. It is the ironic perspective provided by that knowledge, even more than the linguistic form of the mimiamboi, which determines the very special nature of their ‘mimetic realism’. This notion of ‘para-comedy’ might seem to bring us very close to (or even be derived from) a famous passage of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistai: The player called a magode (lacyid|r) carries tambourines and cymbals, and all his clothes are women’s garments. He makes rude gestures (swim_fetai), and all his actions lack decency, as he plays the part of adulterous women or bawds (lastqopo}r), or a man drunk and going on a revel to his mistress. Aristoxenus (fr. 110 W2) says that hilarodia is serious and derives from tragedy (paq± tµm tqacyid_am eWmai), whereas magodia derives from comedy (paq± tµm jylyid_am). For often magodes took comic scenarios (rpoh]seir) and acted them in their own style and manner. (Ath. 14,621c-d)

We simply do not have sufficient evidence to allow us to solve the tantalising problems of this passage, and in particular the precise resonances 27 With 44 – 49 cf. Ter. Ad. 84 – 93, esp. 93 in orest omni populo. The smaller scale of Metrotime’s alleged sufferings (3m c±q st|l’ 1st· t/r sumoij_gr p\sgr jtk.) is a fair measure of the ‘distance’ between comedy and mimiamb. 28 A conversation about the merits of ekisboi is indeed preserved as Aristophanes fr. 592 K.-A.; unlike the women in Herodas, however, the Aristophanic women are unimpressed: “they are as like the real thing as the moon is like the sun; they look [good enough], but give no warmth”. S. Ciriello, Sileno 15, 1989, 83 – 88, argues that the fragment comes from The Lemnian Women.

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of paq\.29 I do not necessarily believe that the relationship between Herodas and comedy which I have sketched sheds any light upon this passage of Athenaeus, if only because it is far from clear that Herodas has anything to do with magodia, but it may be that we can see, in the mimiamboi and in magodia, two related exploitations of New Comedy, which very quickly established itself as a ‘classic’ dramatic repertoire available for more than one kind of ‘re-performance’. The Plautine version of the effect which I have been considering here deserves further attention. As I have noted elsewhere,30 Plautine comedy distorts Greek comedy by breaking it down into its constituent elements, by ‘showing how it works’, by exaggerating its standard conceits and assumptions, and the result is again something like a parody of Greek comedy. The recent renewal of interest in the popular and farcical affiliations of Plautine comedy, a renewal that is most associated with E. Lefèvre and his colleagues, is of particular relevance in evaluating this similarity between Plautus and Herodas. In my view, both writers play upon their audience’s knowledge of other modes to produce a complex representation in which we enjoy not merely the scenes presented to us ‘for their own sakes’, but also because we recognise (and laugh at) distortions of other, perhaps more ‘serious’, modes. As Herodas assimilates comic material to the ‘lower’ milieu of mime and iambos, so Plautus often assimilates the plots and characters of his Greek originals to the ‘lower’ milieu of Italian farce. I should add that these generalisations are broadly independent of the closeness or distance of Plautus from Greek drama for which anyone would wish to argue. Even where Plautus composes ‘off his own bat’, he is still exploiting and distorting the classic, authenticating tradition of Greek comedy. In the second part of this paper I wish to apply these general considerations to certain aspects of what is perhaps Herodas’ most famous creation, the pornoboskos Battaros of Poem 2. “I am also surprised, men of Athens, if you who hate pornoboskoi will be prepared to release those who have voluntarily prostituted themselves 29 Cf. Wilamowitz, Kleine Schriften II, 117 – 18; Maas RE 3A.159; E. Fraenkel, Elementi plautini in Plauto, Firenze 1960, 317 n. (= Plautinisches im Plautus, Berlin 1922, 331 n.). For the meaning assumed by my translation cf. LSJ s.v. C I 6a, P. Rau, Paratragodia: Untersuchung einer komischen Form des Aristophanes, München 1967, 8 – 9. Cunningham offers a brief but helpful overview of the sources on 3 – 11 of his edition of Herodas. 30 Drama 2, 1993, 235 – 237.

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(to»r 2j|mtar pepoqmeul]mour)”; thus Aischines in the course of his speech against Timarchus (Aisch. 1,188). In Poem 2 Herodas presents the speech to a Coan court of Battaros, a metic, a pornoboskos and a kinaidos. To what extent his speech may parody contemporary Coan conventions we cannot know,31 but it has long been recognised that the central motive force of the poem is the inversion of legal topoi familiar from our corpus of Attic forensic oratory.32 Although p|qmoi were probably not technically prohibited from speaking in Athenian courts (as opposed to the assembly),33 the whole idea is a preposterous inversion of the ideology and ethos of those courts; as J.J. Winkler put it, “[the kinaidos] constitutes a powerful image […] of a socially and sexually deviant male”.34 The inversion is here marked by Battaros’ name, as Aischines claims (1,126. 131; 2,99) that Demosthenes’ nickname B\takor could denote !mamdq_a ja· jimaid_a, although Demosthenes himself sought to explain it as the result of a childhood speech defect (cf. battaq_feim).35 Battaros is therefore a ‘lowlife’ alter ego of the greatest Attic orator of the classical period. Mimiamb 2 is, however, not merely an example of the devil quoting scripture; Battaros’ speech drives a wedge into the assumption of Attic forensic oratory that the man who is generally sober and law-abiding will also have been law-abiding on any particular occasion. Aristotle notes that the three qualities which make a speaker trustworthy are vq|mgsir, !qet^ and eumoia (Rhet. 2,1378a 6 – 9); Battaros offers a sublime picture of the opposite of all three. Aristotle also observes that the speaker must “put the hearers into the frame of mind of those who are inclined to anger, and […] show that his opponents are responsible for things which rouse men to anger and are people of the kind with whom men are angry” (Rhet. 2,1380a 2 – 4); with Battaros, however, we laugh rather than cry. At one level, the speech is a disaster; at another, it is a masterpiece. Moreover an impor31 The most recent investigator, C. Castello, ‘Sulla legislazione attribuita a Caronda nel secondo Mimiambo di Eroda’, in: G. Nenci / G. Thür (Hgg.), Symposion 1988. Vortrge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte, Wien 1990, 361 – 368, seems inclined to take both the cited laws and their ascription to Charondas at face value; few would be so trusting. 32 Fundamental is O. Hense, ‘Zum zweiten Mimiamb des Herodas’, RhM 55, 1900, 222 – 231. For a recent discussion cf. Simon (n. 9) 83 – 93. 33 This seems a reasonable inference from Aischines’ silence on the subject in his speech against Timarchus. 34 The Constraints of Desire, New York / London 1990, 45. 35 For further discussion cf. Headlam on 2,75 – 76.

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tant part of the effect of the whole is our suspicion that Battaros’ performance is as knowing as our response; he knows just what rôle he is playing. Scholars have rightly looked to comedy for Battaros’ immediate predecessors. The pornoboskos was a stock character of Middle and New Comedy,36 but legal problems are usually the last thing such a character wants (cf. Men. Kolax 132, Ter. Ad. 195); the pornoboskos of drama knows that he stands no chance before the popular courts. In bringing an action, then, Battaros simply inverts one more (comic) norm. In appealing to the public service he has performed by importing prostitutes (18 – 19), he may however have comic precedent. In a fragment of Philemon (fr. 3 K.-A.) an unknown speaker praises Solon’s establishment of brothels: dglotij|m, § FeO, pq÷cla ja· syt^qiom ( ja_ loi k]ceim toOt’ 1st·m "qlost|m, S|kym)

It is not difficult to guess that this speaker who praises brothels as an institution which is ‘public-spirited and serves the general safety’ is a pornoboskos. Moreover, clear affinities have been noted between Battaros and Sannio, the leno of Terence’s Adelphoe, who probably derives ultimately from a play of Diphilos, but whose name also points towards the popular traditions of Italian farce.37 Like Battaros, Sannio loses one of his girls by force and, like Battaros, claims to consider this an outrageous affront to freedom and the rule of law; unlike Battaros, however, we never really believe that Sannio will pursue his ‘rights’ in a court of law (Ad. 163, cf. 248). The substance of Battaros’ complaint against Thales, foreshadowed in 24 – 25, is first set out in 31 – 40: mOm d’ oR l³m 1|mter t/r p|kior jakupt/qer ja· t/i cem/i vus_mter oqj Usom to}tyi pq¹r to»r m|lour bk]pousi jAl³ t¹m ne?mom oqde·r pok_tgr Ak|gsem oqd’ Gkhem pq¹r t±r h}qar leu mujt¹r oqd’ 5wym d÷idar

36 Cf. R.L. Hunter, Eubulus. The Fragments, Cambridge 1983, 179. 37 For Battaros and Sannio cf., e. g. Smotrytsch (n. 20) 69 – 70; Veneroni (n. 20) 237 – 240; R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome, Cambridge 1985, 72 with n. 25. For the farcical connections of his name cf. E. Rawson, PBSR 53, 1985, 98 (= Roman Culture and Society. Collected Papers, Oxford 1991, 470), Hunter, this volume 659 – 60.

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tµm oQj_gm qv/xem oqd³ t_m poqm]ym b_gi kab½m oUwyjem . !kk’ a Vq»n owtor, a mOm Hak/r 1~m, pq|she d’, %mdqer, )qt_llgr, %pamta taOt’ 5pqgne joqj 1pgid]shg oute m|lom oute pqost\tgm out’ %qwomta.

As it is, those who are really on the roof of the city, whose birth gives them far more cause for pride than his, they respect the laws; no citizen has ever thrashed me, the foreign guest, or come to my doors at night, or taken a torch and set fire to the house, or seized one of my girls by force and run off. But this Phrygian, who now calls himself Thales, but, gentlemen, used to be Artimmes, he has done all of these things, without respect for any law or magistrate38 or official.

The scenes which are here evoked are the very way in which pornoboskoi, particularly in literary and dramatic representations, made their money. What Battaros denies ever happened are the very things which are commonplace in comedy, and require no illustration.39 ‘No citizen has ever come to my doors at night …’; if so, Battaros must have conducted a singularly unsuccessful business. What under normal circumstances can be presented to a law-court as outrageous behaviour towards a peace-loving citizen is just what happens every night at a (comic) brothel. Just as the characters of New Comedy can move in a self-referential world in which ‘“everyday experience’ […] is only that which is sanctioned by repeated appearance on the comic stage”,40 so Battaros’ list of adunata are the very stuff of the literary milieu which spawned him. Moreover, when Battaros shows Myrtale to the jury and claims that Thales is responsible for her ‘plucked condition’ (t_klata),41 he is not (or at least not primarily), as some commentators have supposed, aping Hypereides who is said to have displayed his client Phryne to the jury,42 but rather doing what comes naturally – displaying 38 Cunningham and others are presumably correct to take pqost\tgr as a reference to the chief Coan magistrates, cf. S. M. Sherwin-White, Ancient Cos, Göttingen 1978, 199 – 205. The distinction between pqost\tgm and %qwomta is presumably for these purposes academic and the tricolon bathetically humorous. 39 The possible exception is the burning of the house (though see Headlam ad loc. for such komastic threats, and note the end of Ar. Clouds). 40 Hunter, New Comedy (n. 37) 74; on 74 – 76 I discuss some examples from Greek and Roman comedy. 41 The joke was first explained by A.E. Housman, ‘Herodas II 65 – 71’, CR 36, 1922, 109 – 110 (= Classical Papers III 1056 – 1057). 42 Hypereides fr. 178 Jensen.

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his wares to potential clients. Battaros amusingly treats Myrtale as a ‘shy virgin’ whose only contact with men has been with her close male relatives (66 – 68); might we guess that this is to be understood as an actual sales-pitch used to raise the price of a particular girl? Be that as it may, Battaros’ ready willingness to hand her over to Thales in return for money (79 – 83) inverts the Demosthenic rhetoric of “I could have taken the money to drop the case, but I didn’t…” (cf., e. g., Dem. 21,215 – 216). The nearest parallel in extant dramatic literature for Battaros’ displaying of Myrtale is probably Ballio’s parade of prostitutes in Plautus’ Pseudolus, which E. Fraenkel demonstrated to be very largely Plautus’ own work.43 Apart from Ballio’s distribution of his prostitutes according to the occupations of their clients, the main comic conceit of that scene seems to be that Ballio does precisely the opposite of what a pornoboskos should do when his girls display themselves to ‘an audience’: instead of making them seem attractive and desirable, Ballio runs them down as useless and wasteful. From a dramatic point of view, the purpose of this ‘characterisation’ is obvious: Ballio’s rôle is not permitted nuances or complications, he is the pure essence of leno. When Cicero described him as improbissimus et periurissimus leno […] persona illa lutulenta, impura, inuisa (Pro Quinto Roscio comoedo 20) the stereotyped, rather unimaginative colours – in part derived from the play itself —44 catch the certainty and definiteness of the rôle, which are played off against, first, the helpless vacillation and impotence of Calidorus and, then, the shifting craftiness of the Odyssean Pseudolus.45 Like Battaros, Ballio knows both his rôle46 and the rules of the game: Si. quid ait? quid narrat? quaeso, quid dicit tibi? Ba. nugas theatri, uerba quae in comoediis solent lenoni dici, quae pueri sciunt: 43 Elementi plautini in Plauto, Firenze 1960, 136 – 142 (= Plautinisches im Plautus, Berlin 1922, 143 – 150), 414. On the character of Ballio see the (rather exaggerated) account in C. Garton, Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre, Toronto 1972, 169 – 188. 44 Cf. 360 – 368, 975, 1083. 45 For Pseudolus as Odysseus cf. 1063, 1245; more broadly, Odysseus is intimately connected with many major dramatic, and especially comic, themes and motifs (recognition, disguise, trickery). The ‘serious’ counterpart to Pseudolus’ ‘staging’ of the plot to cheat Ballio is Odysseus’ ‘staging’ of the plot to trick Philoctetes in Sophocles’ tragedy. 46 For metatheatre in Pseudolus in general cf. Slater (n. 25) 118 – 146.

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malum et scelestum et peiiurum aibat esse me. (Pseudolus 1080 – 1083)

Ballio’s self-confidence, of course, is in for a rude shock; drama has room for narrative development and surprise of a kind which is hardly possible within the scope of the mimiamb. The shorter form therefore makes greater demands upon our interpretative resources. With Battaros, we are not quite sure where we stand; we do not quite know how far our leg is being pulled. The humour of the central section of Battaros’ speech, 41 – 54 on the law concerning aQje_g, requires little explanation: the appeal to the universality of laws which are not made with specific individuals in mind (cf. Dem. 21, 29 – 30), the intimacy and vulgarity with which Battaros addresses the clerk of the court etc., are all easy enough to appreciate. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the legal humour have not always been well understood and deserve further comment here. In Attic law a d_jg aQje_ar could be brought against someone for unprovoked assault, and this was naturally closely associated with, though quite separate from, a d_jg bk\bgr, which sought restitution for damage to property.47 Coan law may, of course, have been different, but if, as seems likely, the assumed background is not unlike that of Attic law, then it is significant that whereas the scribe cites a law referring to physical assault (46 – 48), Battaros himself reads out clauses which deal indiscriminately with physical assault and damage to property (50 – 54). After all that has preceded, jCm bk\xgi ti ‘if he does any damage’ (54) is ridiculously bathetic. Moreover, whereas at Athens the d_jg aQje_ar was tilgt|r, i. e. the plaintiff had to suggest the damages,48 Battaros cites clauses with fixed penalties. The clauses that he cites are not only more specific than is customary in such laws, but are also uncannily appropriate to what he claims to have suffered. If the law that the clerk cites sounds (comically) strange,49 Battaros’ clauses seem to be made 47 Cf. J. H. Lipsius, Das attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren, Leipzig 1915, 643 – 646, 652 – 663. 48 Cf. Isocrates 20,19, Harpocration s.v. aQj_ar. 49 In view of Dem. 21,43 and Aisch. 1,139, I follow Headlam in reading 1j½m 1p_spgi in 47, ‘follows her about with intention’, 1j½m explains the ‘double penalty’ and adds to the ‘legal flavour’; to the instances cited by the commentators add perhaps Amycus’ oath at Theocr. 22,134 ‘not willingly to harm strangers in the future’. Nevertheless, a double penalty for wrong done to a slave-girl by a free man sounds a decidedly odd inversion of what we

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up as he goes along; he has, after all, taken the statute from the clerk and is ‘reading’ it out himself. Just as the ‘facts’ of the case are a comic mixture of the everyday and the shamelessly invented — there are no witnesses, as Battaros endearingly remarks (85) — so the ‘laws’ adduced in this case are a mixture of trite phraseology and novel content. Before pursuing this in detail, we may note here clear satire of Athenian legal practice in which laws could be partially or indeed erroneously cited and few of the jury would be the wiser;50 the form of the citation — vgs_, 5meile — alerts us to Battaros’ shamelessness. This reading may seem to presuppose an audience with very detailed knowledge of the law, but we easily overestimate the abstruseness of legal practice in a different culture, and we must always remember that the formal aspects of Herodas’ verse suggest (at least in part) an educated and indeed scholarly audience. ‘If someone beats on ( j|xgi) a door, let him pay a mina’ (50). Commentators explain that j|pteim here must be used not in its usual sense of ‘knock at’, but rather as ‘batter down’ (cf. 63 jat^qajtai), perhaps instead of the complex 1jj|xgi.51 In view, however, of the disingenuousness of 34 – 35 (cf. above), we should, on at least one level, understand j|xgi in its normal sense as another example of Battaros’ taunting shamelessness: knocking on someone’s door does not normally carry a fine. ‘If someone burns the house or oversteps the boundaries … ’ (52 – 53). I cite Cunningham’s note: “eqor is the stone marking the boundary between two areas of land […] hence the abstract boundary itself […] The extension to the walls of a house is […] difficult to explain.” There are a number of points to be made here. We ought perhaps not make too much of the fact that Battaros does not own the house which he alleges has been damaged, but merely rents it (64); this does, however, obviously affect his legal position and would certainly not escape the notice of a legally aware audience. What damage has actually been done is also moot, as 36 and 52 suggest large-scale might have expected in an actual law, cf. Law Code of Gortyn col. II 2 – 7, “If a person commits rape on the free man or the free woman, he shall pay one hundred staters […] and if the slave on the free man or the free woman, he shall pay double” (trans. R. F. Willets), and the similar ‘double’ provision at col. II 26. If indeed the clerk’s law is also absurd, this does not mean that Cunningham’s 5jym 1p_spgi ‘pulls her about and belabours her’, should be adopted; 1j½m ‘with malice aforethought’ is just added for the legal atmosphere. 50 There is an excellent example at Aisch. 1,20 – 21; cf. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, London 1978, 24 – 25. 51 Cf. esp. Lysias 3,6 (a komos to get a young boy) 1jj|xar t±r h}qar jtk.

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fire damage, whereas 65 t± qp]qhuq’ apt\ ‘the lintel scorched’ seems rather less serious. The real absurdity lies in ‘oversteps the boundaries’, a quasi-legal phrase which, if it has a meaning in such contexts, would refer either to a public invasion of territory or to trespass in a rural setting; cf. Pl. Laws 8,843c-d ‘Whosoever encroaches on his neighbour’s ground, overstepping the boundaries (rpeqba_mym to»r eqour), shall pay for the damage; and, by way of cure for his shamelessness and incivility, he shall also pay out to the injured party twice the cost of the damage (dipk\siom toO bk\bour)’ (trans. R.G. Bury). Thus Battaros has found an impressive, but entirely inappropriate, phrase to lend legal sonority to his citation of ‘the law’. What makes our laughter uneasy here is the knowledge that this is different only in degree, not in kind, from the normal practice of law courts, at least as that practice was enshrined in the classics of Attic forensic oratory. What Mimiamb 2 does is to dismantle the structure of forensic persuasion by revealing how it operates through a series of codes which can readily be dissociated from ‘the facts of the case’; Battaros’ rhetoric unmasks the pretentious complacency of forensic topoi. It may not indeed be fanciful to see in Battaros and Myrtale a comic dramatisation, or even reductio ad absurdum, of the essentially erotic nature of peih~ in all its manifestations; ‘stripped’ of the theoretical considerations with which Gorgias, say, clothes rhetoric in the Helen, the arguments of the law courts are revealed for ‘what they really are’. In this wonderfully parodic speech, then, Herodas deserves to be recognised as a truly ‘satiric’ writer.52 In this paper I have explored some characteristic features of the mimiambs largely through an investigation of one poem. Despite this limited compass, I hope that one strategy which is shared by Herodas and Plautus is now clear: both writers exploit our knowledge of other texts and other contexts by the ironic deconstruction of those texts and contexts. That the historical explanation for this similarity lies in a shared debt to the popular traditions of mime and farce is a possibility which is well worth considering. 52 Dr. Nick Lowe makes the attractive suggestion that behind Herodas’ strategy here lies the ambivalent status of the written texts of Attic legal speeches themselves: what is their relationship to ‘what was actually said’? It would be the uneasy compromise embodied in these ‘scripts’ which would be part at least of Herodas’ target.

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Addenda Cf. above no. 10 for recent bibliography. p. 217 – 18 For a recent consideration of Gentili’s view cf. S. Nervegna, ‘Staging scenes or plays? Theatrical revivals of “old” Greek drama in antiquity’ ZPE 162 (2007) 14 – 42. pp. 222 For Sannio’s links with popular comedy cf. this volume 657 – 60.

13. Bion and Theocritus: a note on Lament for Adonis v. 55* k\lbame, Peqsev|ma, t¹m 1l¹m p|sim . 1ss· c±q aqt\ pokk¹m 1leO jq]ssym, t¹ d³ p÷m jak¹m 1r s³ jataqqe?.

So Aphrodite complains bitterly in Bion’s Lament for Adonis (vv. 54 – 5) 1. That Bion’s choice of jataqqe? is modelled on Theocritus 1, 5 is obvious, but there is more to be said about the reworking of this passage of Idyll 1, a poem whose central ‘lament’ for Daphnis, with its attendant ‘pathetic fallacy’, gave it a particular importance as a model for Bion’s Lament. In Thyrsis’ opening speech in Idyll 1 he expresses the fact that the goatherd is second only to Pan in musical skill by suggesting a gradation of prizes: aU ja t/mor 6kgi jeqa¹m tq\com, aWca t» kax/i . aU ja d’ aWca k\bgi t/mor c]qar, 1r t³ jataqqe? " w_laqor· wil\qy d³ jak¹m jq]ar, 5ste j’ !l]kngir.

(Theocr. 1, 4 – 6)

Gow finds jataqqe?, ‘falls to your lot’, hard to explain, except as an extension of the idea that gods may ‘pour’ prosperity down upon mortals2. What is certain is that the word picks up the flowing springs of v. 2 and is part of an elaborate pattern of images of water and washing which runs through the poem, a pattern that includes the death of Daphnis, w¡ D\vmir 5ba N|om (v. 140) 3. More specifically, I suggest, the verb * 1 2 3

Materiali e Discussioni 32 (1994) 165 – 8 This note owes much to the criticism and encouragement of Marco Fantuzzi. jataqqe? is Stephanus’ certain correction of the transmitted ja· %qqei. Cf. Hom. Il. 2, 670; at Hor. c. 1, 28, 28 defluat is surely influenced by the ‘watery’ subject of that poem. Cf. C. Segal, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral, Princeton 1981, pp. 25 – 65. Strikingly similar is Hor. c. 3, 13 where the red blood of a kid mingles with the clear, ‘chattering’ waters of the fons Bandusiae; however conventional the picture (cf., e. g., Theocr. 7, 135 – 6, H. P. Syndikus, Die Lyrik des Horaz, II, Darmstadt 1973, pp. 135 – 6), it is hard to believe that Horace was not thinking

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evokes the collapse of the young goat, sacrificed to Pan as a preliminary to the eating of its ‘lovely flesh’; as its life-blood and spirit ‘flow’ out4, the animal sinks, as the ox sacrificed by Herakles and Ankaios for the success of the Argonautic expedition sinks !lvot]qoisi peqiqqgdµr jeq\essim (Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1, 431). The description of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, d_jam wila_qar, at Aeschylus, Agamemnon 228 – 41 is a particularly suggestive example of the ‘flowing’ collapse of the victim5. In Bion, too, jataqqe? is part of a complex pattern of imagery which includes the shedding of tears, even by rivers (vv. 33 – 4), the flowing of blood (vv. 9, 25, 65), the lavish wasting of expensive unguents (vv. 77 – 8), and the final washing of the corpse (vv. 83 – 4). In her bitter address to Persephone (vv. 54 – 5 above) 6, Aphrodite treats the goddess of the Underworld as a successful rival ‘bride’ for her beautiful husband, thereby reversing the sex roles of the more usual topos by which the death of a young girl is seen as ‘marriage’ to (or rape by) death or Hades7. Such reversal responds to a level of meaning which lies at the very heart of the Adonis cult, as may be seen in the Adonis-song in Theocritus, Idyll 158. By rewriting the opening of Idyll 1, Bion also evokes the idea that Adonis has been sacrificed to Persephone, who now holds him forever; to die is to ‘flow down’ the river(s) of the Underworld towards the grim queen. Over Aphrodite’s outburst hovers the paradox that she herself cannot die (v. 53); ‘everything that is fair flows to Persephone’, only if what is immortal, and in particular Kypris herself, is excluded. p\mta qe? is, for Kypris, bitterly untrue. This is not merely a restatement of the unbridgeable gap between the immortals and us, but also speaks to the very nature of t¹ jak|m. The quality of

4 5 6 7

8

of Theocr. 1,1 – 8 (c. 3, 13, 14 – 16 and Theocr. 1, 7 – 8 are particularly close). Note too the pervasive ‘liquid’ imagery in Catullus 65 (on the death of his brother). The compound verb is used of the flowing of blood from a wound at Hom. Il. 4. 149; 5, 870. Cf. also the Latin version at Lucretius 1, 84 – 101. Latin regularly uses “defluo” of collapse to the ground (OLD s.v. 5c); at Aen. 11, 828 Camilla dies ad terram non sponte fluens. For generic parallels to this address cf. Fantuzzi’s note on v. 54. Examples are legion, cf. R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs, Urbana 1942 = 1962, pp. 192 – 4; Fantuzzi on v. 87; R. Seaford, ‘The Tragic Wedding’, Journ. Hell. Stud. 107, 1987, pp. 106 – 30. For marriage and sacrifice cf. also J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, London 1980, pp. 130 – 67. On the Adonis-song of Idyll 15 cf. this volume 243 – 54.

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mortal beauty lies at least in part in its evanescence and in our fearful recognition that, unlike the beauty of the gods or the Form of beauty, it will certainly pass9. Adonis never grows old, but his annual ‘death’ confronts his worshippers with the remorseless decline of their own lives. One text which uses some of these same ideas is Catullus 3, on the death of his girlfriend’s passer. In particular, vv. 13 – 15, at uobis male sit, male tenebrae Orci, quae omnia bella deuoratis: tam bellum mihi passerem abstulistis,

are very like Lament for Adonis v. 55. Catullus has taken the whole process one stage further, by making death ‘the devourer’, an idea which is of course particularly appropriate in a poem on the death of a small bird and which seems to look forward to the well-known late antique and Byzantine epitaphs for animals10 ; Anth. Pal. 7, 203 – 6 is a series of poems on a partridge eaten by a cat. That death ‘devours’ its victims is an idea which has a strong hold on the popular imagination in many cultures; in Greek literature, for example, the figures of Polyphemus and Scylla exploit such terrors11. In his commentary on Bion’s poem, Fantuzzi cautiously accepts that Catullus is directly alluding to Bion12. If so, we have here a very good example of the much discussed technique whereby a poet combines allusion to a literary model with allusion to that model’s model13, and an example which shows us the (unsurprising) sensitivity of Catullus’ readings of Greek poetry. By combining the gnomic bitterness of Bion’s Aphrodite with the fate of the kid in Idyll 1, Catullus creates something wholly new. Another way of saying 9 Cf. the remarks of J.-P, Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, Princeton 1991, pp. 48 – 9. For Adonis as a ‘symbol’ of evanescence cf. M. Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis, Hassocks (Sussex) 1977, pp. 104, 119 – 20. 10 Cf. G. Herrlinger, Totenklage um Tiere in der antiken Dichtung, Stuttgart 1930; P.A. Agapitos, ‘Michael Italikos, Klage auf den Tod seines Rebhuhns’, Byz. Zeitschr. 82, 1989, pp.59 – 68. 11 Relevant too may be Callimachus’ description of Hades as p\mtym "qpajt^r (Anth. Pal. 7, 80, 5 – 6 = Epigram 2 Pfeiffer/XXXIV G.-P.), cf. MD 28, 1992, pp. 121 – 2. 12 Cf. n. on v. 55 ‘forse’; p. 142 ‘sembra presupporre …’. Catullus and Bion may have been very close in time to each other; for a careful survey of the latter’s date cf. Fantuzzi’s edition pp. 141 – 5. 13 Cf., e. g., J. C. McKeown, Ovid: Amores, I, Liverpool 1987, pp. 37 – 45.

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this is that Catullus reads Bion as already hinting at this development: as the ‘lovely flesh’ of the kid in Idyll 1 is to be eaten, so Aphrodite’s bitter allusion hints that Persephone, whose name might be interpreted as ‘death by slaughter’14, is actually going to ‘eat’ the jak|r sacrifice which has been offered to her. Literary imitation is essentially a process of creative reading. If Catullus was not alluding specifically to Bion, then we have at least a further reminder of the persistence of certain generic ways of representing death in ancient literature. Choice between these alternatives is always going to be a matter of judgement, but the opening of Catullus 3, lugete o Veneres Cupidinesque, surely evokes the death of Adonis (cf. Bion, Lament v. 2 etc. 1pai\fousim =qyter), and this seems to me to weigh very heavily in favour of direct allusion.

Addenda J.D. Reed, Bion of Smyrna. The Fragments and the Adonis (Cambridge 1997) is a very important addition to the literature on Bion; some of the themes of the present note are, of course, picked up in my commentary on Idyll 1 in Theocritus. A Selection (Cambridge 1999).

14 No explicit link between Persephone and v|mor is found before Eustathius’ note on Od. 10, 491, but we can hardly rule out less explicit poetic evocations; it need hardly be said that the actual etymology of Persephone is not in question here.

14. Mime and mimesis: Theocritus, Idyll 15* This paper considers various related aspects of Theoc. 15: the poem’s concern with its own form, the relation of the poet to the ruling house, and the representation of important themes in Ptolemaic public ideology. These are all familiar subjects, but I shall argue that they are linked by Theocritus’ exploitation of the range of meanings of mimesis, an idea given particularly dramatic force within a ‘mime’ tradition.

1. Realism and the language of Theoc. 15 When Praxinoa and Gorgo finally succeed in entering the palace, their attention is first caught by the tapestries (t± poij_ka) 1 with their lifelike figures (t!jqib]a cq\llata, 5tula, 5lxuw’ oqj 1muvamt\): sov|m ti wq/l’ %mhqypor exclaims Praxinoa, before moving to describe a representation of Adonis with his first beard just showing. After a brief interruption, Gorgo draws attention to ‘the Argive woman’s daughter’, a pok}idqir !oid|r, and bound to sing something jak|m ; the song itself describes Aphrodite and the young Adonis in a marvellous tableau representing their ‘marriage’, and Gorgo responds with admiration: sov~tatom " h^keia jtk. This brief summary makes clear the obvious analogies between the two palace ‘artefacts’, the tapestries and the hymn, but those analogies allow more than one inference. It may be that we are simply supposed to understand that Gorgo and Praxinoa would respond with such admiration to anything beyond the normal sphere of their experience, and the point lies not in fact in any similarity of the song to the tapestries but precisely in their difference which we, but not the women, can appreciate; Gorgo and Praxinoa have only one register for admiration and use it across widely different categories. Whereas the women emphasise the ‘reality’, the ‘lifelikeness’, of the woven figures, the hymn in fact seems concerned to point the ‘unreality’, the fabulousness, of what it describes – p\mtessi jako?r (111) … * 1

M.A. Harder et al. (eds.), Theocritus (Groningen 1996) 149 – 69 Cf. Gow (1950) on v. 78 for this interpretation.

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fsa (112) … fssa (115) … pamto?a (116) … fssa (117)… p\mta (118). This superabundance of good things which defy cataloguing may reflect a deliberate stress by Ptolemy and Arsinoe on the incredible riches of Egypt, a motif seen also in Theoc. 17 and in the standard representations of Arsinoe with a cornucopia ‘full with all the good fruits of the season’ (Ath. 11.497b-c),2 but there is also a more literary dimension. The analogies direct our attention to the relationship of the two ‘artefacts’, particularly as the designs on the tapestries (81 – 6) and the tableau described by the singer are pointedly similar. The ‘realism’ of the tapestries is based on a comparison with actual experience – they are 5lxuwa ; so also the hymn appeals to, and our response to it must be conditioned by, our experience of such poems (and such tableaux) 3 in ‘real life’. Our sense of familiarity with ‘generic topoi’ is in fact analogous to our sense of the familiarity and variety of ‘ordinary experience’. The effect of this is that the literary mime inscribes possible models of its own reception in the text. It does not require a long survey of the history of discussions of ‘mimetic realism’ to realise how closely the reactions of the women foreshadow familiar modes of critical response. We might not naturally choose Gorgo and Praxinoa as models for ourselves, and their reactions might seem ‘unsophisticated’ but the poem forces us to consider the basis and validity of our own critical judgements.4 This is made particularly sharp by the fact that the women claim to be Syracusans (v. 90) and they have apparently moved from that city to Alexandria. In as much as we may claim to ‘know’ anything about Theocritus, he too appears to have been a Syracusan who certainly worked, if not also lived, at Alexandria. Gorgo and Praxinoa, who describe the scene for us and thus act the role of the informing poet, are fashioned as a comically distorted image of ‘the actual poet’; their visit to the palace may be seen as a rendering of Theocritus’ 2

3 4

Cf. Thompson (1973: 32 – 3); on Theoc. 17 cf. Meincke (1965: 127 – 36). For tquv^ as a Ptolemaic ideal cf. also Tondriau (1948: 49 – 54); Heinen (1978: 188 – 92); Weber (1993: 70). tquv^ is, of course, a double-edged motif, particularly for moralising writers (cf. Phylarchos, FGrH 81 F 40, on the %jaiqor tquv^ of Philadelphos), and we must be wary of lessening the differences between earlier and later Ptolemies; nevertheless, the picture which emerges from the poetry written under Philadelphos is pretty consistent, and cf. Ath. 5.203bc. Cf. Gow (1950: 2.266): “the details of Arsinoe’s tableau are presumably drawn from life”. For the ‘historicity’ of Arsinoe’s festival cf. below n. 61. Cf. Goldhill (1994: 216 – 23).

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‘coming’ to the royal palace in Alexandria and his gaining of ‘admittance’ (i. e. royal patronage), whereas his charites in Theoc. 16, like many of the pressing crowd in Theoc. 15, failed to gain entry through the doors of the great.5 As embodiments of the poetic voice, Gorgo and Praxinoa guide us as we are usually guided by the poet; we cannot simply ignore their voice. The fact that a related strategy seems to be at work in Herodas’s fourth Mimiamb6 might suggest that this concern with its own reception is a genuine and persistent feature of a ‘genre’ which was only too conscious of the fact that it was not really a part of ‘literature’. It is a genre constantly looking over its shoulder to see ‘how it is going down’; its ‘lowness’ is of a very knowing kind. Even if Theophrastus was not responsible for the definition of l?lor as l_lgsir b_ou t\ te sucjewyqgl]ma ja· !sucw~qgta peqi]wym ‘an imitation of life encompassing both the permitted and the illicit’ (Diomedes xxiv.3.16 – 7 Koster),7 there was without doubt already in the third century a clear link between mime and ‘mimesis of life’; the women’s reactions to the tapestries, as we have seen, provide one model for the reception of the poem in which they appear. If, however, there is anything in the report of the Hypothesis in the scholia that Theocritus ‘modelled’ (paq]pkase) his poem on Sophron’s The Women at the Isthmian Festival,8 then we can see that this mimos is a mimesis in another sense too. There are two important aspects of this literary debt. One is that, just as Gorgo and Praxinoa have moved from Syracuse to Alexandria, so has the mime. Even if Praxinoa’s proud assertion ‘we are Corinthians by descent’ (v. 91) does not amusingly glance at Sophron’s mime, and it is pure speculation that Sophron too represented Syracusan women present at a Corinthian festival,9 Gorgo’s arrival at her friend’s house, not unlike the arrival of ‘the bawd’ in Herodas 1,10 marks the arrival 5 Such verses as 61 – 2, ‘Is it easy to get in then?’, and 65, ‘Look, Praxinoa, what a crowd there is around the doors’, lend themselves easily to such a satirical reading. For a related reading of Theoc. 14 cf. Burton (1992: 240 – 2). The relation between poets and the ‘houses’ (real and metaphorical) of the great is a recurrent motif of Roman poetry (cf. now the overview in White 1993), and here too there is a Greek background which should not be ignored. 6 Cf. my remarks (and the bibliography) in Hunter (1995). 7 For discussion and bibliography cf. Reich (1903: 263 – 74); Janko (1984: 48 – 9). 8 Gow (1950: 2.265) enjoins caution in ascribing much except ‘the general idea’ to Sophron; for a less cautious approach cf., e. g., Olivieri (1930: 181 – 2). 9 Cf. Legrand (1898: 132). 10 Cf. Hunter (1993b); Miralles (1992: 89 – 113).

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in Alexandria of a new literary form, embodied in the amusing shapes of Gorgo and Praxinoa and in a rough hexametric technique which may seek to imitate in ‘verse’ the half-way house of Sophron’s rhythmical mimes.11 With their admission to the palace, the Syracusan mime tradition has reached the Alexandrian court.12 Such conscious self-reference, which may be described as a kind of literary history written into the poem, is hardly surprising in any product of Alexandrian poetry, but again we may wish to see a mode which is peculiarly adapted to the mime. Secondly, we can see that it is the literary mime of Herodas and Theocritus which foreshadows, in the implicit poetics of poetry itself, the connection between two senses of mimesis which we find in later poetic theory;13 these senses are the mimesis familiar from Aristotle’s Poetics, that is the transference of the inherent mimetic qualities of human beings to a criterion for (particularly dramatic) poetry as imitative of the actions of men, and mimesis as the imitation of literary models. The literary mime interweaves these two senses in such a way as to explore the relation between them. Thus, for example, Gorgo’s praise of the tapestries, kept± ja· ¢r waq_emta ‘how fine they are and how lovely’ (v. 79), echoes the account of Circe’s weaving at Od. 10.222 – 3 to dramatise the artifice, the mimesis, of the ‘naturalism’ of this mime. Rather more complex perhaps is the episode which separates the admiration of the tapestries from the Adonis-song. A nameless man asks the women to be quiet because their broad vowels (as well as their ceaseless chatter) are driving him to distraction. ‘Unless’, as Dover (1971: 207) notes, ‘there has been interference with the transmitted text on a large scale’, the man too speaks in Doric. If we take this little scene at face value, then either, as Gow (1952: 290) puts it, ‘we are plainly invited to suppose that [despite the dialect of the text] he is not a Dorian’, or we must suppose that Syracusan Doric was thought to sound particularly broad in comparison with other Dorian accents or dialects.14 It seems to be generally true for Theocritus that ‘stylistic variation inside the same idyll does not depend on breaks in the convention of the dialect but on differences of vocabulary, theme and feel11 For the versification of Theoc. 15 cf. Fantuzzi (1995) and n. 49 below. For Sophron cf. Norden (1898: 1.46 – 8). 12 Cf. the remarks of Griffiths (1979: 84,120), on Theoc. 14 and 15 as corresponding male and female mimes. In connection with Theoc. 15 one would give much to know more of Sotades’ Adonis, cf. Escher (1913:32). 13 Cf. Russell (1979: 1 – 16). 14 On the ancient conception of Doric and its local versions cf. Cassio (1993).

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ings’,15 but the second explanation can hardly be ruled out; what for the man is an unbearably grating sound, is for Praxinoa pure and original Doric (vv. 90 – 3). Dialectal questions have, of course, a peculiar significance in a ‘genre’ which advertises its connections with ‘life’; to call attention to the apparent gap between the speech presupposed by what is actually said and the text itself is a striking way of dramatising the tension between literary artifice and the appeal to mimetic realism which lies at the heart of the literary mime of Herodas and Theocritus.16 As all the characters of the poem figure in a ‘Syracusan mime’ they will speak appropriately (cf. below), but what they say and how they say it dramatises the presuppositions of this awkward ‘genre’. In the realm of ‘high’ literature, linguistic style was a product of generic tradition (Ionic for epic, Doric colouring for high lyric etc.), not of the geographical location of the setting or the origin of the characters. This modified linguistic practice, then, is one part of the debt of Hellenistic mime to the comic tradition in all its manifestations, but its exploitation of the ironies thus made available suggests clearly the tastes and concerns of the third century. If the form of the poem offers a particularly loaded kind of mimesis, what of the details of the language? Although the occasional ‘Homeric’ form appears,17 there is no example here of those features of the traditional language of high poetry which are most common elsewhere in Theocritus’ ‘Doric’ poems,18 namely masculine genitive singulars in -oio and dative plurals in -oisi or -aisi ; an unaugmented past tense appears certainly19 only in a homely sententia from Gorgo (v. 25),20 and there is no example of nu ephelkystikon. Theoc. 15 is certainly not unique in this regard,21 but the combination of metrical ‘roughness’ 15 Fabiano (1971: 522). 16 For a similar use of a passage dividing two ecphrases in Herodas 4 cf. Hunter (1993b). The tension between ‘subject’ and ‘linguistic style’ is, of course, quite differently figured in Herodas whose characters speak in an archaising ‘reconstruction’ of the language of Hipponax. Nevertheless, the same aesthetic problem lies behind the practice of both poets. 17 Cf. Di Benedetto (1956: 53). Gallavotti’s text removes even some of these by reading, e. g., ja for jem in vv. 25 and 38. 18 I accept for the purposes of the present discussion the traditional distinctions within the Theocritean corpus (cf. Gow 1950: 1.lxxii); for fuller discussion cf. Hunter (1996: 28 – 45). 19 k]coler (v. 15) may be present (so Dover) rather than imperfect. 20 Cf. Molinos Tejada (1990:268). 21 Cf. Molinos Tejada (1990: 375).

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and linguistic simplicity perhaps aligns this poem most closely with Theoc. 11, the song of the lovesick Cyclops. These poems have something else in common also—their principal characters are Syracusans, a fact which is noted explicitly in the course of the poems (11.7, 15.90). As Theocritus himself came from Syracuse, it would be unsurprising if the Syracusan dialect had had some influence on the Doric of his poems; that Theoc. 15 was indeed composed in the Syracusan dialect was argued by Victor Magnien (1920), but without conspicuous success, which was in any case hardly to be expected, given the dialectal mess presented by our papyri and manuscripts and the fact that the majority of dialectal alternatives are metrically equivalent. Nevertheless, it is in Theoc. 11 and 15, if anywhere, that we might be tempted to seek specifically Syracusan features. Two facts make the case of Theoc. 15 particularly interesting.22 One is the fact already considered that the poem itself makes the dialect of the characters an important issue (vv. 80 – 95), and the other is that, in this same passage, much the earliest witness to the text, P.Hamburg 201 of the first century A.D., preserves a rare dialect form which had been totally lost to the tradition: Pq. p|tmi’ )hama_a, po?a_ x’ 1p|masam 5qihoi, po?oi fyocq\voi t!jqib]a cq\llat’ 5cqaxam. ¢r 5tul’ 2st\jamti ja· ¢r 5tul’ !mdimeOmti, 5lxuw’, oqj 1muvamt\. sov|m ti wq/l’ %mhqypor. aqt¹r d’ ¢r hagt¹r 1p’ !qcuq]ar jat\jeitai jkisl_i, pq÷tom Uoukom !p¹ jqot\vym jatab\kkym, b tqiv_kgtor -dymir, b jAm )w]qomti vikghe_r. Nem. pa}sash’, § d}stamoi, !m\muta jyt_kkoisai, tquc|mer . 1jjmaiseOmti pkatei\sdoisai ûpamta. Pq. l÷, p|hem ¦mhqypor ; t_ d³ t_m, eQ jyt_kai eQl]r ; pas\lemor 1p_tasse· Suqajos_air 1pit\sseir. ¢r eQd/ir ja· toOto, Joq_mhiai eQl³r %myhem, ¢r ja· b Bekkeqov_m, Pekopommasist· kakeOler, dyq_sdeim d’ 5nesti, doj_, to?r Dyqi]essi.

(15.80 – 93)

22 Theoc. 11 would require a separate investigation; commentators note a ‘certain roughness of dialect’ (Gow 1950: 2.209). Of particular interest are teoOr (v. 25, cf. Sophron fr. 59 J-A), t_m (accusative) which occurs three times in this poem and nowhere else, and !v_jeuso (v. 42) which is said by the scholiast, on what authority we do not know, to be a Syracusan form.

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80 xevomasam P.Hamb.: sv’ 1p|masam Q.Ant. codd. 82 !m- P.Hamb., Q.Ant.: 1m- codd. 88 pkati\foisai Q.Ant. 93]qisd[ P.Oxy.1618 (5th cent A.D.):]im Q Ant.: dyq_sdem codd. teste Gallavotti 23 Praxinoa. Lady Athena, what workers they must have been that made them, and what artists that drew the lines so true! The figures stand and turn so naturally they’re alive not woven. What a clever thing is man! And look at him; how marvellous he is, lying in his silver chair with the first down spreading from the temples, thrice-loved Adonis, loved even in death. Stranger. My good women, do stop that ceaseless chattering – perfect turtle-doves, they’ll bore one to death with all their broad vowels. Praxinoa. Gracious, where does this gentleman come from? And what business is it of yours if we do chatter? Give orders where you’re master. It’s Syracusans you’re ordering about, and let me tell you we’re Corinthians by descent like Bellerophon. We talk Peloponnesian, and I suppose Dorians may talk Dorian. (trans. Gow)

xe (v. 80) is a third-person plural pronoun whose appearance in Sophron (fr. 90 K-A) caused the later grammatical tradition to regard it as a Syracusan form;24 it occurs, however, also at 4.3, a poem set in southern Italy, and is attested on Crete,25 and may therefore have had wider currency than we can now tell. Nevertheless, there seem to be good reasons for seeking ‘Syracusan features’ in the speech of the women. There are also good reasons for caution. Although the main features of the language of the Corinthian colonies are well understood, our knowledge of the Syracusan variant is very scanty indeed, and is far too reliant upon the vagaries of manuscript traditions; the epigraphic record is extremely thin.26 Attestations for ‘Syracusan dialect’ in the grammatical tradition very often mean no more than that a word was used by Epicharmus or Sophron, and we can hardly doubt that Theocritus’ Alexandrian readers were interested in the possible difference between an ‘echo’ of one of these Syracusan poets and a genuine feature of (archaising or contemporary) Syracusan speech. Moreover, analogies from other literary traditions (both ancient and modern), such as the presentation of non-Attic dialects in the comedies of Aristophanes, suggest that mimesis of speech forms – particularly for the purposes of humour or some other marked effect – is unlikely to be linguistically ‘accurate’ or consistent; it is ‘difference’ which is important for the reception of 23 24 25 26

Gallavotti’s report of the papyrus readings here is erroneous. Cf. Gow (1950) on 4.3; Gallavotti (1986: 10). Cf. Buck (1955: §§87, 119.5). Cf. Dubois (1989: 89 – 117).

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the represented speech. There has, moreover, been a natural tendency to seek specifically Syracusan forms which distinguish this poem from the other Doric poems of Theocritus. By seeing Theoc. 15 within the Theocritean corpus, however, the mimetic effect of the whole may be obscured, for when Praxinoa and Gorgo use Doric forms, the effect remains mimetically analogous to Syracusan speech, even when those forms were either not specifically Syracusan or in fact not actually in use in Syracuse. If no other Theocritean poem had survived, there would be little critical disagreement about the linguistic mimesis of the poem. It is not merely mimetic form, but also language, which has arrived in Alexandria. Against this background we may consider the nature of the Doric used in Theoc. 15. Third-century Syracusan used -ou and -our for the masculine genitive singular and accusative plural, rather than -y and -yr which are found in some West Greek dialects and throughout the manuscripts of Doric authors; the latter forms, though very far from universal in Doric speech, will have been adopted as the marked forms in literature because the alternative ‘Doric’ forms, -ou and -our, were also the forms of the Attic koine. Grammatical theorising and standardising makes evaluation of the tradition very difficult in such a matter;27 the Hamburg papyrus offers ¨ in v. 47,28 wqgsl~r in v. 63,29 but wqgstoO in v. 75.30 A modern editor who sought to impose -ou forms everywhere through the text might prove more rigorous than correct,31 because this would lessen the perceived difference between the speech of Gorgo and Praxinoa and the Atticising koine; the possibility can, however, hardly be excluded. Other than xe, the following individual forms are particularly worthy of note: (i) 5mdoi (or 1mdo? ) in vv. 1 and 77 is classed as Syracusan by the grammatical tradition, but this will probably be a result of Theocritus’ 27 28 29 30 31

For the evidence cf. Molinos Tejada (1990: 60 – 3, 202 – 11). So also the MSS. So also POxy. 1618 and the MSS; PAntin. has wqgslo}r. So also the MSS; QAnt. has wqgst_. Molinos Tejada (1990: 377) seems inclined to this option; she notes that -ou and -our are found disproportionately often in the MSS of Theoc. 15. Gallavotti (1986: 4 – 5) suggests keeping wqgstoO as a ‘broad’ Syracusan form; his text, however, presents the other form. A particularly interesting case is Gorgo’s first major speech at vv. 4 – 7; the many y-sounds presumably help to establish her ‘character’, although there is significant manuscript support for -ou rather than -y.

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use of the form; such forms are in fact quite widely attested in Doric and Aeolic areas.32 Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that the opening word of the poem (emphatically repeated at the end of the verse) was intended to carry a particular dialectal charge, and it may not be over-hazardous to guess that the form appeared in Sophron. The instructions to a named servant seem also to be a ‘cueing’ device of the mimic tradition (cf. Sophron frr. 14, 15, 17 K-A).33 Thestylis, the servant in Theoc. 2 who, as the scholia inform us, is derived from Sophron, is named in the opening verse of that poem in a similar ‘programmatic’ way. In v. 55 5mdom is universally transmitted, but there 1mdo? certainly deserves a place in the apparatus.34 (ii) dq_vor (v. 2) is another form which had disappeared entirely from the MS tradition, only to reappear in PAntin. The grammatical tradition regarded it as Syracusan, and illustrated it with a phrase which has been plausibly assigned to Sophron (fr. 10 K-A, cf. Gow ad loc.), and indeed to the scene upon which the Theocritean opening is based.35 Its appearance so early in the poem, like 5mdoi, will carry a programmatic charge. (iii) pe? (v. 33) is found only in PAntin. (PHamb. 201 and POxy. 1816 do not survive), but adverbs in -ei are a familiar feature of Corinthian (and indeed other Doric) dialects;36 pe? does, however, occur in Sophron (fr. 4 J-A = PSI 1214a8),37 and may here carry a particular charge. We must, however, always reckon with the possibility that other Theocritean examples have now been removed from our texts.38 32 Cf. Hopkinson on Call. h. 6.76. The Callimachean example – the only other literary attestation known to me – is spoken by Erysichthon’s mother, and that perhaps increases the likelihood that we are dealing with a ‘marked’ (though not Syracusan) form. 33 Without hanging too much upon it, we should also note that v_ka in v. 2 is also a very common mannerism of the mime (Sophron frr. 23, 25, 31 K-A, Herodas 1.73, 4.20, 6.12 etc.). 34 Elsewhere in the corpus only 27.20 where there are obvious reasons for keeping the ‘normal’ form (5mdom Q\mhg at verse-end). 35 Kaibel (1899: 156) also plausibly suggested that pot_jqamom (v. 3) derived from Sophron. 36 Cf. Ammon. Diff. 423 Nickau; Lejeune (1923: 269); Molinos Tejada (1990: 337 – 9). 37 Cf. Gow (1950: 2.34). 38 Thus Ahrens restored pe? for p÷i in 2.1, and bpe? for bp÷i or fpg in 4.24.

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(iv) Usamti (v. 64) and Usati (v. 146) use a form of ‘to know’ which is attested for both Epicharmus (fr. 47.2 K-A) and the Pseudo-Epicharmea (fr. 280.1 K-A), whence the grammatical tradition classed it as Syracusan.39 It occurs also in Pindar (P. 4.248) and elsewhere in Theocritus (5.119, 14.34). Although the Syracusan women also use oWda, it seems reasonable to regard this form as linguistically marked. Cassio (private communication) further observes that in v. 146 fssa Usati is much further from the koine equivalent fs’ oWde than is cuma?jer Usamti of v. 64 and also, unlike v. 64, makes use of the initial digamma of the verb; as such the later case is much the more ‘marked’ of the two.40 (v) In vv. 84 – 5 jkisl|r is treated as a feminine noun, which may be intended as a dialectally marked feature.41 (vi) l÷ (v. 89) is said by the scholiast to be a Syracusan form, but that is probably no more than a gloss on this passage; it is widely used by Herodas’ women,42 which does suggest roots in the mime tradition (? Sophron). The sum total may seem small,43 but the mimetic intention of the whole is clear, provided that mimesis is not taken to be an attempt to reproduce an historically accurate version of the speech of Syracusans living in Alexandria. An archaising debt to the language of Epicharmus and Sophron is, after all, quite a different matter from any attempt at a ‘realistic’ reproduction of contemporary speech. A further control might be sought in the speech of the characters other than Praxinoa and Gorgo, but this in fact provides ambiguous testimony. The few verses spoken by other characters (vv. 60, 61 – 2, 72, 73, 87 – 8) are, as far as the transmission allows us to see, broadly composed in the same manner of Doric as the speech of Gorgo and Praxinoa. Certainly, there is no obvious distinction between the two, even if the other characters do not use the rarer ‘Syracusan’ forms.44 The grammatical tradi39 Cf. Molinos Tejada (1990: 291 with n. 367). 40 This may be relevant to the question of speaker attribution in v.64. 41 Cf. Latte (1968: 528), Gow (1950: ad loc.). Latte also defends the bq_homter of the MSS at v. 119 from potib\mter in the Sophron papyrus; that matter is, however, too uncertain to warrant discussion here. 42 Cf. Headlam on 1.85. 43 I omit Wilamowitz’s attractive p\ppa (v. 16), which EM. 651.7 labels Syracusan, because of the uncertainty of the reading; the emendation is criticised by Latte (1951: 255). 44 hgm (v. 62) in the mouth of an old woman is noteworthy, because this particle is very common in Epicharmus and Sophron and seems ‘almost confined to

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tion explained the Doric ‘broadness’ of which the stranger complains (v. 88) with reference to the long alpha which is so characteristic of all West Greek.45 A glance at vv. 78 – 86, the conversation of the women since entering the palace precinct, will confirm how prominent a feature of their language this is. Whether or not we are to imagine that the stranger is himself a Dorian,46 § d}stamoi !m\muta is presumably intended to mock the sounds the women are making. The language of Praxinoa and Gorgo is thus simply ‘marked’ by its difference from the ‘ordinary’ language of hexameter poetry, whether Ionic or Doric, a difference which consists in the absence of the most familiar features of poetic style. To this extent it lays a claim to a kind of ‘mimetic realism’ which associates it with the language of everyday discourse. On the other hand, it appears (as far as we can tell) to make no attempt to reproduce to any great extent the special and the individual in the speech of Syracusan women living in Alexandria. In a loose analogy, one might say that the panDoric features of their language correspond to the generic features of the literary mimesis (women visiting, ekphrasis of art etc.), so that both the form and the language of the poem illustrate its concern with the tension between the ‘artificial’ and the ‘real’. The language of the poem, no less than the characters and the ‘plot’, gestures towards ‘the realistic’ but determinedly refuses to embrace it. Moreover, as we have noted, to call attention to linguistic differences within a linguistically uniform poem highlights the mimetic artifice of a poetic form which claims on the surface to offer an unmediated representation of ‘reality’; as such, this is precisely the kind of sophisticated device we would expect from Theocritus.

2. Adonis and Ptolemy Gorgo introduces the song of the Argive woman’s daughter as b -dymir (v. 90), presumably ‘the Adonis-song (which is a regular part of the festival)’; it is commonly, and rightly, described in modern literature as ‘a hymn’. The opening and closing of the poem are indeed hymnic, as can Homer and Sicilian literature’ (Denniston 1954: 288); Theocritus uses it freely, but not in the ‘epic-lyric’ poems. Conversely, vuk\nolai (v.72) in the mouth of ‘the stranger’ will be the only ‘non-Doric’ future in the poem, unless has|lemai is correct in v. 23. 45 Cf. Gow (1950: ad loc.). 46 Cf. above p. 236 – 7.

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be seen by a comparison not only with extant cult hymns but also with the hymns of Callimachus; encomium of Aphrodite and Adonis is precisely what we would expect to find in a hymn to them. On the other hand, there is almost no poetry extant47 with which we may compare the Adonis-song, for Bion’s Lament for Adonis is entirely different in both form and occasion. The singer’s foreshadowing of lamentation for Adonis on the following day after the formal farewell of v. 131, a lamentation actually prefigured in the consolatio of the Catalogue of Heroes,48 both calls attention to how this song is not what we might expect an Adonis-song to be and evokes the full compass of the festival; ‘on a literal reading’, as Cairns (1992: 14) observes, ‘the singer is giving in lines 136 – 44 an advance monodic performance of what the chorus will sing next day’. Any such poem at a real festival is likely to have been an astrophic lyric song, composed in the traditional vocabulary and syntax of lyric; the fact that the metre of the Adonis-song is distinguished from the ‘mimic’ part of Theoc. 15 by its rather greater conformity to the norms of Theocritus’ ‘epicising’ poems49 perhaps points to such a mimetic effect. Moreover, the description of the tableau at vv. 112 – 22 uses the simple cumulative syntax and avoidance of sub-ordination which are a frequent mark of such astrophic lyric or verses which emulate this mode.50 The opening eighteen verses of the song (vv. 100 – 17) fall easily into three sextets, the welcome to the gods (vv. 100 – 5), Aphrodite and the royal house (vv. 106 – 11), and the luxuries which surround Adonis (vv. 112 – 7),51 and such a pattern should probably be seen as imitative of the rough correspondence between sense unit and rhythmical period which is regular in such lyric verse. Confirmation for this pattern may be sought in v. 123 which, if the pat47 The one fragment of Praxilla’s Hymn to Adonis in lyric dactyls (PMG 747) is a lament by the god himself; whatever the tone and interpretation of that fragment, it is interesting to find a female poet writing on such a subject. 48 Cf. below p. 251 – 3. 49 Cf. Maas (1962: 94); Fantuzzi (1994); Slings (1993: 32). Cf. in general Stark (1963: 375 – 7), and for the division of the corpus into different styles cf. Hunter (1996: 28 – 45). 50 For this style in ‘dithyrambic’ passages of comedy cf. Hunter (1983: 166 – 7) (citing Aristotle). 51 Cf. Gow (1950: ad loc.) for the punctuation there. For an attempt at a more elaborate structuring of the song into couplets cf. Ribbeck (1862: 571 – 2). Gallavotti’s structuring after two initial sextets (100 – 5 and 106 – 11) is 112 – 4,115 – 8,119 – 22,123 – 6 etc.; complete critical agreement in such a matter is hardly possible.

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tern were to continue, should be end-stopped, but which in fact breaks the pattern, thereby gaining increased emotional emphasis;52 the interlaced word-order and alliteration in the simile of vv. 121 – 2 mediate the transition to this exclamation. Whether, however, the hypostasised ‘model’ was in lyrics or hexameters,53 there is clearly another reason why the song is hard to parallel. The central part of the song is devoted to encomium of Berenice and Arsinoe and to the ecphrasis of the Adonis tableau.54 This ecphrasis may perhaps be seen as the equivalent of the sung description of cultic performance or sacrifice imagined as occurring simultaneously with the song; such descriptions are a not uncommon feature of celebratory hymns. On the other hand, the song has no narrative as such; the muthos of the royal house and the ecphrasis of the tableau have replaced any narrative of, presumably, the story of Aphrodite and Adonis. The content of the song is, of course, dictated by the design of Theoc. 15, not by what was ‘normally’ sung at real Adonis festivals. The singer takes over the role of Gorgo and Praxinoa in describing for us what we could not otherwise see, and the interplay between her voice and theirs is a crucial element in the whole. Thus, for example, the exclamation of vv. 123—4 (£ 5bemor, £ wqus|r, £ 1j keuj_ 1k]vamtor / aQeto_ jtk.) is the ‘lyric’ equivalent of the women’s reactions at vv. 78 – 86, just as both Praxinoa and the singer focus upon Adonis’ young beard (vv. 85, 130). It is, therefore, probably not too hazardous to guess that we would have to look for a very long time to find anything comparable in a ‘real’ festival song.55 In assessing the relation between the Adonis song and the picture of Alexandria and its court offered in the first part of the poem, vv. 128 – 30 offer a way in:

52 The varying prosody of ¥ in the verse may also mark ‘mounting excitement’. 53 In view of Adonis’ eastern connections, the lyric hexameters addressed to the Great Mother in the fragmentum dubium of Menander’s Theophoroumene (F. H. Sandbach, Menandri Reliquiae Selectae, 2nd ed., Oxford 1990, p. 146) may be worthy of note in this context. 54 The pictorialism of this tableau is studied by Manakidou (1994: 104 – 18). 55 Cf. Griffiths (1979: 26): “[the Adonis song] creates its own setting as real hymns would never have had to do”.

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t¹m56 l³m J}pqir 5wei, t±m d’ b Nod|pawur -dymir. ajtyjaidejetµr C 1mmeaja_dew’ b calbq|r· oq jemte? t¹ v_kgl’ . 5ti oR peq· we_kea puqq\.

Kypris embraces him, and the rosy-armed Adonis holds her. Of eighteen years or nineteen is the bridegroom; the golden down is still upon his lip; his kisses are not rough.

The key to understanding these verses lies in the fact that though the poem and the tableau celebrate the ‘marriage’ of Aphrodite and Adonis, the young god will ‘die’ on the following day; this section of the poem thus mixes the hymeneal and the funereal in a novel way which starts from the familiar epitaphic topoi of ‘death before/instead of marriage’ and ‘death as a marriage with Hades’, topoi which exploit the similarities between marriage and funerary ritual and which occur (unsurprisingly) in Bion’s extant Lament for Adonis (vv. 87 – 90), but moves beyond those topoi.57 The hinge of the strategy is the double sense of jk_ma (v. 127) as both ‘wedding-couch’ and ‘funeral bier’ (cf. LSJ s.v. 12). Eighteen or nineteen is just the age when young men die as soldiers, and this age indeed figures in both real and literary epitaphs for young men;58 moreover, the peculiar pathos of death before the first beard is grown is certainly attested as a conventional epitaphic motif by later sources,59 and it is not unreasonable to see that resonance here. In a way appropriate to the whole meaning of the cult, the ‘sex roles’ are reversed, for the bridegroom is here younger than the bride and it is he, not she, who is to die a pathetically early death; the epithet ‘rosy-armed’ (v. 128) is normally applied to women and so both points this reversal and is appropriate to the female perspective of the singer and the women admiring this essentially female festival. The Adonis cult gives the fullest expression to the similarity and (bitter) difference between sexual longing (p|hor) and the regret and longing which attends death; Aphrodite is part lover, part mother mourning the death of her young son, and the tableau representing them suggests both illicit lovemaking (‘incest’) and the grandiose style of Ptolemaic funerals. The poet has caught this strangeness with a powerful fusion of the language of weddings and funerals, which tran56 I print Rossbach’s emendation, though without any great confidence. Both text and interpretation in this area of the poem are problematic. 57 For these topoi in general cf. Lattimore (1962: 192 – 4). 58 Cf. CEG 2.709,739; AQ 7.466 (= Leonidas lxxi GP), 468 (= Meleager cxxv GP). 59 Cf. Lattimore (1962: 197 – 8).

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scends the apparent division of the poem into hymeneal (vv. 100 – 31) and funereal (vv. 132 – 42) sections; the farewell kisses of the dirge (Bion, Lament for Adonis 11 – 4, 45 – 50) are also the first kisses of the wedding night. All discussion of the context of this song must begin with the close and complex association between Arsinoe II and Aphrodite.60 In staging an Adonis festival ‘Arsinoè se posait en Aphrodite et préparait son apothéose’ claimed Gustave Glotz (1920: 173), and provided that we remember (as Glotz had a tendency to forget) that we are dealing with a Theocritean poem and not a documentary account of a ‘historical’ festival, I see no reason to disagree.61 The opening invocation to a specifically Cyprian Aphrodite evokes, as has long been noted, Ptolemaic influence on the island (cf. Theoc. 17.36), and the standard dating of the poem to the late 270s62 adds resonance to the encomiastic citation of Miletos and Samos (v. 126), both of which were then in the Ptolemaic orbit. There is in this poem no getting away from the ruling house. The links between Aphrodite and this house are first explicit in vv. 106 – 8: J}pqi Di~maia, t» l³m !ham\tam !p¹ hmat÷r, !mhq~pym ¢r lOhor, 1po_gsar Beqem_jam, !lbqos_am 1r st/hor !post\nasa cumaij|r·

Lady of Cyprus, Dione’s child, you, as is the report of men, did change Berenice from mortal to immortal, dropping ambrosia into her woman’s breast.

I have pointed elsewhere63 to the different levels of interpretation exposed by the phrase ‘as men say’; whereas Gow and Dover look only to the fact that such phrases do not necessarily cast doubt on an assertion or may indeed strengthen one, another reading may see teasing play with the apotheosis of the Queen Mother in a tone which can readily 60 There is a large bibliography; for some guidance (particularly on the Greek material) cf. Griffiths (1979, 1981); Fraser (1972: 1.229 – 40); Pomeroy (1984: 30 – 8); Gutzwiller (1992: 365 – 7). 61 That Theocritus’ poem is a literary reflection of a real, ‘historical’ event (for which there is no other firm evidence) is the standard critical position, cf., e. g., Weber (1993: 170 – 1). The matter is, of course, not unimportant, but must also not be allowed to inhibit critical discussion. For the important socio-political rôle of public festivals in the early Hellenistic kingships cf. Dunand (1981: 13 – 40). 62 Cf. Gow (1950: 2.265). 63 Cf. Hunter (1993a: 157).

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be matched in other court poems of Theocritus. The style of the verses, with the almost jingle-effect of !ham\tam !p¹ hmat÷r and the mannered, quasi-chiastic interplay of mortal and immortal in !mhq~pym ¢r lOhor, 1po_gsar Beqem_jam, /!lbqos_am 1r st/hor !post\nasa cumaij|r, reinforces the reality of both readings. The possibility for such a ‘double reading’ is perhaps a marker of one kind of distinction between an Alexandrian poem and the archaic and classical literature to which Gow and Dover appeal. We find a similar ‘qualification’ towards the end of the song when the singer turns to the peculiar felicity of Adonis: 6qpeir, § v_k’ -dymi, ja· 1mh\de jAr )w]qomta Bl_heym, ¢r vamt_, lom~tator

(vv. 136 – 7)

You, dear Adonis, alone of demigods, as men say, visit both earth and Acheron.

Many of the same nuances which surrounded the previous use are also visible here: ‘as men say’ is at one level encomiastic, at another perhaps curiously incongruous at this moment of high praise. The ‘myth’ of the royal house is linked to that of Aphrodite and Adonis —Arsinoe, as the person staging the festival and thus responsible for Adonis’ annual re-appearance, is indeed cast in the role of Aphrodite – but both are subject to this pattern of different readings. Nor should this surprise us, for both cultic ‘myth’ and royal apotheosis are areas where symbols and forms of language convey different things to different people and ‘truth’ consists in social function. Both the Adonis-myth and the apotheosis of Berenice are ideas to be exploited in various ways; both do depend crucially on ‘what men say’ for their significance. The trick of style which links these two ideas, therefore, points to a real affinity between them. The verses describing Aphrodite’s deification of Berenice (vv. 106 – 8 cited above) have a number of close analogues which the commentators cite, but Thetis’ action to preserve Patroclus’ body is particularly suggestive:64 Patq|jky d’ awt’ !lbqos_gm ja· m]jtaq 1quhq¹m st\ne jat± Nim_m, Vma b wq½r 5lpedor eUg.

(Il. 19.38 – 9)

64 Cf. Griffiths (1979: 122).

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Through Patroclus’ nostrils she dripped ambrosia and red nectar to preserve his flesh.

So too Hector’s body is preserved by Aphrodite (Il. 23.184 – 90) so that it avoids corruption: t¹m d’ awte pqos]eipe di\jtoqor )qceiv|mtgr . “§ c]qom, ou py t|m ce j}mer v\com oqd’ oQymo_, !kk’ 5ti je?mor je?tai )wikk/or paq± mg· autyr 1m jkis_gisi· duydej\tg d] oR A½r jeil]myi, oqd] t_ oR wq½r s^petai, oqd] lim eqka· 5shous’, aV N\ te v_tar !qgiv\tour jat]dousim. G l]m lim peq· s/la 2oO 2t\qoio v_koio 6kjei !jgd]styr, A½r fte d?a vam^gi, oqd] lim aQsw}mei . hgo?| jem aqt¹r 1pekh½m oXom 1eqs^eir je?tai, peq· d’ aXla m]miptai, oqd] pohi liaq|r· s»m d’ 6kjea p\mta l]lujem, fss’ 1t}pg . pok]er c±q 1m aqt_i wakj¹m 5kassam. ¦r toi j^domtai l\jaqer heo· uXor 2/or ja· m]ju|r peq 1|mtor, 1pe_ svi v_kor peq· j/qi.”

(Il. 24.410 – 23)

Then Hermes the guide, the slayer of Argos, answered him: ‘Old man, he is not eaten yet by dogs or birds, but he still lies there in Achilleus’ hut beside his ship, just as he fell. This is the twelfth day he has lain there, but his flesh is not decaying, nor the worms eating him, which feed on the bodies of men killed in war. Yes, Achilleus does drag him ruthlessly around the tomb of his dear companion every day, at the showing of holy dawn, but he cannot disfigure him. If you went there you could see for yourself how he lies there fresh as dew, and all the blood is washed from him, and there is no stain on him. All the wounds have closed where he was struck – there were many who drove their bronze into him. Such is the care the blessed gods have for your son, even for his dead body, as he is very dear to their hearts’. (trans. Martin Hammond)

Despite Achilles’ maltreatment, Hector lies in Hecuba’s palace 2qs^eir ja· pq|svator, ‘pristine and fresh, like one slain by the gentle darts of Apollo of the silver bow’ (Il. 24.755 – 6). In his note on 23.184 – 91 Richardson observes that those verses and the parallel passages ‘have been taken as evidence for Greek knowledge of the practice of embalming’. Be that as it may, Theocritus’ evocation of Thetis’ preservation of the body of Patroclus does suggest to me that v. 108 has a reference in the world of Ptolemaic funerary practice. Perhaps it merely gratifies Alexandrian Greeks with their own familiarity with Egyptian mummification, brilliantly finding Homeric precedent for this practice, but per-

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haps also there is more. Alexander’s body must have been preserved in some way, whatever truth lies behind the extant accounts,65 and it is hardly bold to imagine that the early Ptolemies (and their queens) followed suit. We know little of the burial arrangements of the early Ptolemies, but Fraser (1972: 1.225) noted that, before Philopator built the central Sema of the royal house, ‘it seems likely that … the sanctuaries of the individual deified members … were in close proximity to the Sema of Alexander’. We must remember that it was the deification of Arsinoe herself which seems to have marked a major turning point in the development of the royal cult, and the deification of her mother may have been an altogether less grand, ‘more Greek’ affair.66 Nevertheless, we are dealing here not with the documentary history of that cult, but with poetic evocations of it. This evocation of funerary practice is, of course, encomiastic of Arsinoe as well as her mother, as the current queen is credited with this arrangement and thus fulfils at the ‘real’ level the function of Thetis and Aphrodite in Homer and of Aphrodite at the most straightforward level of Theocritus’ poem. Here too light is shed upon the description of Berenice made ‘immortal from mortal’ (v. 106), for such an endless continuation of how the ‘dead’ looked when ‘alive’ is precisely the point of mummification (cf. D.S. 1.91.7). Here too, however, Theocritus forges links between Adonis and the royal house. Patroclus and Hector are the most obvious examples of what Jean-Pierre Vernant (1991: 60 – 74, 84 – 91) has termed the ‘beautiful death’ of the warrior, that death in battle which guarantees perpetual youth and beauty. In the case of the slain warrior ‘all is beautiful’ (p\mta jak\, Il. 22.73); he lies, an object of wonder and desire in death as he was in life (cf. Il. 24.410 – 23, Tyrtaeus fr. 10.21 – 30 West). Adonis ‘the beautiful’, who is always both bridegroom and lost lover, is not a martial hero, indeed in some ways is the very antithesis of such a hero for whom hunting and warfare are two sides of the same coin;67 nevertheless in death he lies, like Hector and Patroclus –

65 Cf. esp. Quintus Curtius 10.10.9 – 13, Strabo 17.1.8. We may compare the story of Agesilaos taken back to Sparta preserved in wax ‘because there was no honey’ (Plut. Ages. 40.3, cf. Cartledge (1987: 334). 66 Evidence and bibliography in Weber (1993: 252 – 4). 67 Cf. Detienne (1977: 66 – 7); Griffiths (1981: 255): “Adonis … surpasses paragons of assertive masculinity like Ajax and Agamemnon … for he alone participates in the triumph of the cyclic female principle over death”. It is obviously tempting to relate Detienne’s whole construction of the ‘anthropology of

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and in another way like Berenice – in perpetual youth, his beauty, like theirs, preserved forever by divine grace. Like Hector and Patroclus also, Adonis’ death brings particular grief to those who loved him. Hector indeed is the subject of the most famous scene of organised female lamentation in Greek literature (Il. 24.719 – 76), and thus a comparison with Adonis is not created ex nihilo. It may even be that the description of Hector as :j\bar b ceqa_tator eUjati pa_dym ‘the eldest of Hecuba’s twenty sons’ (v. 139), is a specifically Hellenistic variation of Hecuba’s address to Hector in her lamentation as 1l_i hul_i p\mtym pok» v_ktate pa_dym, ‘by far the dearest of all my sons in my heart’ (Il. 24.748).68 As for Patroclus, in this very same lamentation Hecuba notes that, despite his efforts, Achilles was unable to raise Patroclus from the dead, and Patroclus’ ghost appears to plead for burial in a famous scene of Iliad 23.69 The catalogue of demigods70 has attracted critical censure principally because the heroes listed do not really fall into a category of Bl_heoi comparable to Adonis.71 We can, of course, never expect strict comparability when the great figures of the past are evoked as exempla, but the

68

69 70 71

spices’ to Egyptian practices of mummification in which the body was filled with spices; I have resisted the temptation. Homer’s Priam explicitly says that he had 19 sons ‘from one womb’, i. e. by Hecuba, but the Theocritean scholiast cite Simonides for the number 20 (PMG 559); for discussion and catalogues of known names cf. Van der Kolf (1954: 1844 – 7); Richardson on Il. 24.495 – 7. I suspect that 20 arose by a (? humorous) interpretation of the Homeric verses in which Hector is counted separately from ‘the 19’; thus t_m pokk_m is taken on this view not as ‘correct[ing] the emotional exaggeration of 494’ (Macleod) but as meaning ‘these many’. Leaf ad loc. indeed seems to exclude Hector from the grand total of 50. If we do have an allusion to a scholarly dispute, then this would be another reason to be cautious about dismissing the Adonis-song as mediocre hackwork. I record as a curiosity Legrand’s suggestion (Legrand 1898: 95 n. l) that 20 has replaced the Homeric 19 for metrical reasons. Gow (1952: 302) notes the possible influence of the ghost scene, but not of Iliad 24. It may be thought somewhat surprising that, as far as I know, deletion of vv. 136 – 42 has never been proposed, for v. 143 would follow perfectly well after v. 135. After death Adonis is a ‘demi-god’ in one sense, but as applied to the figures of the catalogue this term must principally denote ‘heroes’, ‘figures of the heroic age’, a usage perhaps deriving from Hes. Op. 160. Dover refers to 13.69, although the Argonauts as a group were notoriously ‘sons of gods’. Cf. further Hunter (1993: 103, 127 – 8). The discussion of the catalogue in Atallah (1966: 130 – 2) is too general to be helpful.

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apparent difficulty here is that, whereas consolation usually works by invoking greater figures who have suffered equally or more (Achilles citing Niobe, for example), here it may be thought that Adonis’ status is already qualitatively different (and higher) than the other figures listed. The more usual procedure may be well illustrated from a very interesting epitaph in choliambics (Bernand 71) for a young man, probably from Alexandria, and to be dated to the late Hellenistic or early imperial period.72 In the first, unfortunately broken, section the young man is praised as ‘alone among men (cf. 15.137) … he surpassed in virtue all those of his age … a child who seemed an old man in his wisdom’. In the better preserved section of the poem his mother is told to stop grieving for the most familiar of reasons: oqde·r c±q 1n^kune t¹m l_tom Loiq_m oq hmgt|r, oqj !h\mator, oqd’ b desl~tgr, oqd’ aw t}qammor basikijµm kaw½m tilµm heslo»r !tq]ptour diavuce? pot’ ¡i^hg· Va]homta Tit±m oqj 5jkaus’, ft’ 1j d_vqym !p’ oqqamoO jat]pesem eQr p]dom ca_gr ; :ql/r d’ b La_ar oqj 5jkaus’ 2¹m pa?da Luqt_kom !p¹ d_vqym j}lasim voqo}lemom ;73 oqd’ aw H]tir t¹m stemaq¹m 5stemem pa?da, ft’ 1j bek]lmym hm/sje t_m )p|kkymor ; b d’ aw bqot_m te ja· he_m p\mtym %man74 Saqpgd|m’ oqj 5jkausem, oqj 1j~jusem ; oqd’ aw Lajgd½m b basike»r )k]namdqor, dm t_jtem -llym h]lemor eQr evim loqv^m ;

No one escapes the thread of the Moirai, no mortal, no immortal, not even the prisoner,75 not even the tyrant with his kingly power has ever thought to flee from the laws which cannot be changed. Did not Titan weep for 72 Bernand gives a full bibliography and many parallels from other epigrams; I will not repeat that material here. It would obviously be nice to believe that the young man died at the age of eighteen (cf. Theocritus’ Adonis), but the interpretation of DEWOJTO on the stone in line 6 is disputed, cf. Bernand (1969: 287, 289). 73 I do not think that the sense of this line implies corruption despite the ‘faulty’ metre, for which cf. p\mtym %man three lines below and perhaps !m^q at the end of v. 3 (although "m^q might there have been intended); I am inclined to attribute the trimeters to the poet. 74 Cf. previous note. 75 The sense ‘gaoler’ is not, I think, impossible here, cf. Kassel-Austin on Cratinus fr. 201.

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Phaethon, when he fell out of the chariot from heaven to earth? Did not Hermes, the son of Maia, weep for his son Myrtilos carried away by the waves out of his chariot? Did not Thetis grieve for her mighty son, when he was killed by the arrows of Apollo? Did not the lord of all men and gods weep for Sarpedon, did he not lament? Did not the Macedonian, King Alexander, the son of Ammon who took the form of a snake to beget him?

Adonis has, however, escaped death, at least partially; although it is not strictly true that his regular alternation between earth and the Underworld is a unique privilege,76 the hymn suggests that even ‘dying’ for part of the year redounds to Adonis’ glory. Theocritus’ mythological catalogue turns the rhetoric of the epitaph on its head, while evoking its simple, repetitive style. It measures Adonis’ glory against the heroes of epic and tragedy: not just Hector and Patroclus from Homer, but 5pah’ (v. 138) hints at representations of Agamemnon’s fate on the tragic stage, where pathos was critical, and baqul\mior is clearly chosen to point to the circumstances of Ajax’s suicide, most famous in antiquity from Sophocles’ tragedy. Notable by his absence is the greatest hero of them all, Achilles, whose consolations to Priam in Il. 24 hover over the epitaph quoted above, in which he himself becomes a consolatory example. The presence of his son, Neoptolemus / Pyrrhus,77 however, is presumably dictated by more than the desire for alliteration with Patroclus. His beauty is praised to his father in the Odyssey (Od. 11.522), and after his death he became the object of cult at Delphi;78 there are, therefore, points of contact with Adonis. By escaping safe from the war (v. 140) Neoptolemus did not enjoy ‘the beautiful death’ to which Adonis has laid claim. For a Greek the Iliad is the obvious text from which consolatory exempla may be chosen, as in the epitaph quoted above, but in the context of Theoc. 15 as a whole, we can hardly fail to read this list in metaliterary terms also.

76 Cf. Gow (1950) on v.137. 77 The name Pyrrhus is first attested for the Cypria (fr. 16 Davies). We are perhaps to be conscious of the etymology of this name, ‘ruddy’, just as is the colour (puqq\) of the down around Adonis’ lips (v. 130). It is, moreover, at least a strange coincidence that Deucalion’s wife was called P}qqa. 78 One source indeed, Pausanias 1.4.4, reports that cult honours were first paid to him after he brought assistance against the Gaulish invasion in 278; it may, therefore, be that there is an element of topicality in the reference to him in Theoc. 15.

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A poem that began as a reworking of Sophron has opened out to embrace the whole of human history (‘the Lapiths and the Deucalions of an earlier age’), just as the epitaph ranges from the pre-Olympian legend of Phaethon to Alexander. As the court of Philadelphus and Arsinoe is the telos to which Greek history has been moving, as Adonis surpasses the heroes of the past, so Theocritean mime lays claim to unexpected literary grandeur. Not for long, though; and not perhaps with complete seriousness. When Gorgo and Praxinoa have had their glimpse of another world, of a different kind of mimesis, they withdraw back to their own realm to wait for another year. Mime, after all, can never replace the centre, whether that be literary (Homer) or political (the Ptolemaic palace); mime must always live at the edge, on the margins (cf. vv. 7 – 8), because it needs the centre in order to define its own place.79

Bibliography Atallah, W. 1966. Adonis dans la littrature et l’art grecs. Paris Bechtel, F. 1923. Die griechischen Dialekte II. Berlin Bernand, É. 1969. Inscriptions mtriques de I’gypte greco-romaine. Paris Buck, CD. 1955. The Greek Dialects. Chicago Burton, J.B. 1992. “The function of the symposium theme in Theocritus’ Idyll 14”. GRBS 33,227 – 45 Cairns, F. 1992. “Theocritus, Idyll 26”. PCPS 38, 1 – 38 Cartledge, P. 1987. Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta. London Cassio, A.C. 1993. “Parlate locali, dialetti delle stirpi e fonti letterarie nei grammatici greci”. In: Dialectologica Graeca. Madrid, 73 – 90 Denniston, J.D. 19542. The Greek Particles. Oxford Detienne, M. 1977. The Gardens of Adonis. Hassocks Di Benedetto, V. 1956. “Omerismi e struttura metrica negli idilli dorici di Teocrito”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 25,48 – 60 Dubois, L. 1989. Inscriptions grecques dialectales de Sicile. Rome, 89 – 117 Dunand, F. 1981. “Fête et propagande à Alexandrie sous les Lagides”. In: La FÞte, pratique et discours (Centre de recherches d’histoire ancienne 42). Paris, 13 – 40 Escher, L. 1913. De Sotadis Maronitae reliquiis. Diss. Giessen Fabiano, G. 1971. “Fluctuation in Theocritus’ style”. GRBS 12, 517 – 37 Fantuzzi, M. 1995. “Variazioni sull’esametro in Teocrito”. In: M. Fantuzzi and R. Pretagostini (eds.), Struttura e storia dell’ esametro greco. Rome, 221 – 64 Fraser, P.M. 1972. Ptolemaic Alexandria. Oxford 79 This paper has benefited from the constructive criticisms of Albio Cassio, Marco Fantuzzi, and the participants in the Groningen Workshop. An expanded version is incorporated as chapter 4 in Hunter (1996).

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Gallavotti, C. 1986. “Pap. Hamb. 201 e questioni varie della tradizione teocritea”. Bollettino dei Classici 7,3 – 36 Glotz, G. 1920. “Les Fêtes d’Adonis sous Ptolémée II”. REG 33,169 – 222 Goldhill, S.—Osborne, R. (eds), 1994. Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture. Cambridge Griffiths, F.T. 1979. Theocritus at Court. Leiden —1981. “Home before lunch: the emancipated woman in Theocritus”. In: H.P. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity. New York, 247 – 73 Gutzwiller, K. 1992. “Callimachus’ Lock of Berenice: fantasy, romance, and propaganda”. AJP 113, 359 – 85 Heinen, H. 1978. “Aspects et problèmes de la monarchie ptolémaique”. Ktema 3,188 – 92 Hunter, R. 1983. Eubulus, The Fragments. Cambridge —1993a. The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies. Cambridge —1993b. “The presentation of Herodas’ Mimiamboi”. Antichthon 27, 31 – 44 [= this volume 189 – 205] —1995. “Plautus and Herodas”. In: Plautus und die Tradition des Stegreifspiels. Tübingen, 155 – 69 [= this volume 212 – 28] —1996. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge Janko, R. 1984. Aristotle on Comedy. London Kaibel, G. 1899. Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Berlin Latte, K. 1951. “review of Gow’s Theocritus”. Gnomon 23,252 – 7 —1968. Kleine Schriften. München Lattimore, R. 1962. Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs. Urbana Legrand, Ph.-E. 1898. tude sur Thocrite. Paris Lejeune, M. 1923. Les Adverbes grecs en -hem. Bechtel Maas, P. 1962. Greek Metre. Oxford Magnien, V. 1920. “Le syracusain littéraire et l’ldylle XV de Théocrite”. Mem. Soc. Ling. 21,49 – 85; 112 – 38 Manakidou, F. 1994. “Bemerkungen über die Beziehung zwischen Dichtung und bildender Kunst: Bions Klage um Adonis und Theokrits 15. Idyll”. Prometheus 20, 104 – 18 Meincke, W. 1965. Untersuchungen zu den enkomiastischen Gedichten Theokrits. Diss. Kiel Miralles, C. 1992. “La poetica di Eroda”. Aevum Antiquum 5,89 – 113 Molinos Tejada, T. 1990. Los dorismos del Corpus Bucolicorum. Amsterdam Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa. Leipzig Olivieri, A. 1930. Frammenti della commedia greca e del mimo nella Sicilia e nella Magna Grecia. Napoli Pomeroy, S.B. 1984. Women in Hellenistic Egypt. New York Reich, H. 1903. Der Mimus. Berlin Ribbeck, O. 1862. “Theokriteische Studien”. RhM 17,543 – 77 Russell, D.A. 1979. “De imitatione”. In: D. West—T. Woodman (eds), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature. Cambridge, 1 – 16 Slings, S.R. 1993. “Hermesianax and the Tattoo Elegy (P.Brux. inv. E8934 and Q Sorb inv. 2254)”. FPE 98, 29 – 35 Stark, R. 1963. “Theocritea”. Maia 15,359 – 85

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Thompson, D.B. 1973. Ptolemaic Oinochoai and Portraits in Faience. Oxford Tondriau, J. 1948. “La Tryphè, philosophie royale ptolemaïque”. REA 50,49 – 54 Van der Kolf, M.C. 1954. “Priamos”. RE 22, 1841 – 1907 Vernant, J.-P. 1991. Mortals and Immortals. Princeton Weber, G. 1993. Dichtung und hçfische Gesellschaft. Stuttgart White, P. 1993. Promised Verse. Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, Mass.

Addenda A version of this paper was incorporated as Chapter 4 of Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry; for further discussion of Idyll 15 cf. also ‘Speaking in glossai. Dialect choice and cultural politics in Hellenistic poetry’ in W.M. Bloomer (ed.), The Contest of Language (Notre Dame 2005) 187 – 206. The language of Idyll 15, and of Theocritus more generally, is discussed by A. Willi in an important forthcoming paper, ‘“We speak Peloponnesian”: tradition and linguistic identity in postclassical Sicilian literature’. The fragments of Epicharmus and Sophron appear in Vol. I of R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae comici graeci (Berlin 2001), and cf. also J.H. Hordern, Sophron’s Mimes (Oxford 2004).

15. The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica* Epic poetry seeks to map the world, both as a physical and as an ideological construct. Just as Homer was the source of all literature, all philosophy, and all political science, so epic is the all-encompassing literary embodiment of all that is known. If it was the Shield of Achilles – itself both microcosm and macrocosm – which was for later ages the most obvious epic site where spatial and cultural dispositions were clearly interdependent,1 it was the Odyssey which taught for all time how geographic and cultural maps could never be totally distinct entities. The persistence of this pattern of thought in later Greek science (especially medicine) and ethnography has often been documented. Recent years have explored to excellent effect the consequences which this aspect of the Greek heritage had in Roman epic and in the Aeneid in particular; one need only think of the complementary, though very different, books of Philip Hardie and Claude Nicolet.2 It is now well understood that the Aeneid does not merely plot the foundation of Roman imperial power, but also marks out the space of that power, geographically, morally, and politically. A fundamental technique in Vergil’s project is the interplay of “epic time” and “historical time:” the institutions and ideology of Augustan Rome are retrojected into (or, perhaps, mapped on to) the epic past, thus confirming that the new order, far from being “new” in an absolute sense, is of pristine antiquity. In seeking to understand the earlier history of this process, the Argonautica of Apollonius seems an obvious starting-point. The Argonautica — or so I have argued elsewhere – was a crucial text in the development of Vergil’s strategy, both because some of Apollonius’ concerns are similar to those of Vergil, and because the Roman * 1 2

Syllecta Classica 6 (1995) 13 – 27 Cf., e. g., P. R. Hardie, “Imago mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles,” JHS 105 (1985) 11 – 31. P. R. Hardie, Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986); C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the early Roman Empire (Michigan 1991) translating L’inventaire du monde: gographie et politique aux origines de l’Empire romain (Paris 1988). There is also much of interest on this subject in D. Quint, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton 1993).

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poet chose to read the Greek epic in such a way as to fashion the prior text to his own purpose.3 Moreover, there are good reasons to think that the Argonautic story had always been a narrative in which the boundaries of “history” and “myth” were available for negotiation; the aetiological dimension was fundamental to the whole narrative, not merely a casual offshoot of it.4 More specifically, the Argonautica of Apollonius yields close parallels to some of Vergil’s techniques of “mixing time.” Thus, for example, it is now generally accepted that the account, in the mouth of Lykos, of the history of the Mariandynoi reflects recent events and, in particular, the political aspirations of the people of Heraclea Pontica (2.774 – 810);5 whatever the details, it is clear that mythic history is in this passage accommodated to recent history in a way that becomes very familiar in the Roman epic. Moreover, Apollonius lived in a period of considerable interest in geography and geographical writing, some of which is doubtless reflected in his epic.6 There are, therefore, reasons to hope that wider enquiries concerning the relation between the Argonautica and the political and social world in which it was written may not be fruitless, although this relation has, until recently, attracted remarkably little critical attention.7 In this paper I shall examine two different aspects of the Argonautic “map,” in both of which, however, we can see how the geographical and the moral or cultural parameters of the poem run together. In Section I, I shall deal briefly with the passage of the Argo through the Symplegades and the voyage along 3 4 5 6

7

Cf. R. Hunter, The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius: Literary Studies (Cambridge 1993) chapters 6 and 7. For a helpful survey cf. D. Braund, Georgia in Antiquity. A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia 550 BC-AD 562 (Oxford 1994) Chapter 1. Cf. U. von Wilamowitz, Hellenistische Dichtung, vol. 2 (Berlin 1924) 237, n. 2; pp. 159 – 61 of vol. 1 of Vian’s Budé text; M. G. Palombi, “Mito e storia in due episodi delle Argonautiche di Apollonio Rodio,” Prometheus 19 (1993) 154 – 68. On Apollonius’ geographical sources the introductions of F. Vian to the volumes of the Budé edition are invaluable; cf. also id., “Poesie et géographie: les retours des Argonautes,” Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes Rendus (1987) 249 – 62. Of contemporary geographers, one thinks particularly of the peq· kil]mym of Timosthenes of Rhodes, though there is no certain case where the latter has been used (frs. 28 and 31 Wagner, on the Pontic area, are merely suggestive). For Timosthenes cf. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. 1 (Oxford 1972) 522 (with bibliography). Apart from the introductions and notes to Vian’s editions, the field is still largely held by R. Roux (Le problme des Argonautes [Paris 1949]) which does not seem to be much read, although it contains almost equal quantities of the interesting and the fanciful.

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the southern Pontic shore, and in Section II, I shall be concerned with the religious horizons of the epic.

I. Much of Book 2 of Apollonius’ Argonautica is devoted to the passage of the Argonauts eastwards along the southern shore of the Black Sea; the book ends with the arrival at Colchis. As is well known, the local historians of Heraclea, above all the roughly contemporary Nymphis, were a major source for this narrative.8 Apart from his regional history, Nymphis also wrote a history of Alexander and the epigonoi down at least to the accession of Euergetes, and this too suggests why Alexandrian scholars and poets might have found him of interest. More general Ptolemaic interest in the Black Sea region requires no special demonstration, for the cities of the southern Pontic shore had important and well-documented trading links with third-century Alexandria.9 Later history recorded that Heraclea itself had been “given” – whatever that might mean – by Lysimachus to his wife, the future Arsinoe II, and so that might have been another reason for early Alexandrian interest in the city.10 For Apollonius’ purposes, however, the poetic tradition concerning the Black Sea coast seems to have been far less rich than the geographic and ethnographic tradition, even when allowance is made for all that we have lost.11 Thus in Pindar’s Fourth Pythian the account of the Argonautic voyage moves straight from the Symplegades to the Phasis: 1r d³ j_mdumom bah»m Q]lemoi desp|tam k_ssomto ma_m,

8 Cf. P. Desideri, “Studi di storiografia eracleota,” SCO 16 (1967) 366 – 416. 9 Cf., e. g., M. I. Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford 1941) vol. 1, 585 ff, vol. 3, 1454 – 5. 10 Cf. Memnon, FGrHist 434, chapter 5.4 – 5; H.S. Lund, Lysimachus (London and New York 1992) 194 – 5. For a helpful account of the history of Heraclea cf. A. H. M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1971) 148 – 53, and for the earlier period, S. M. Burstein, Outpost of Hellenism: the Emergence of Heraclea on the Black Sea (Berkeley 1976). 11 Hesiod’s account of Phineus may have been particularly important here, cf. Hunter (above, n. 3) 95. The geographical catalogue per se was, of course, no stranger to the poetic tradition; the most familiar example outside Hesiod is Aeschylus, Prometheus Vinctus vv. 706 ff.

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sumdq|lym jimghl¹m !lail\jetom 1jvuce?m petq÷m. d_dulai c±q 5sam fya_, jukimd]sjomt| te jqaipm|teqai C baqucdo}pym !m]lym st_wer· !kk’ E dg tekeut±m je?mor aqta?r Blih]ym pk|or %cacem. 1r V÷sim d’ 5peitem Ekuhom, 5mha jekaim~pessi J|kwoisim b_am le?nam AQ^tô paq’ aqt`.

(Pythian 4.207 – 13 [Snell-Maehler]) And, as they were hastening on into deep peril, they besought the lord of ships, that they might escape the irresistible movement of the rocks that run together. For both were alive and used to roll more swiftly than the ranks of the loud-roaring winds, but at last that voyage of the demigods brought them their end. After that they came to the Phasis, where they pitted their might against the grim Colchians in the presence of Aietes himself. (trans. Braswell)

There is a similar elision of Pontic geography in a passage of Theocritus which, for all its difficulties, seems to rewrite vv. 208 – 12 of the Fourth Pythian:12 s»m d’ aqt` jat]baimem ~kar euedqom 1r )qc~, ûtir juame÷m oqw ûxato sumdqol\dym maOr !kk± dien\ine bah»m d’ eQs]dqale V÷sim, aQet¹r ¦r, l]ca ka?tla, !v’ ox t|te wo_qader 5stam.

(Theocritus 13.21 – 4 [Gow])

With [Heracles,] Hylas went down to the well-benched Argo, which did not touch the clashing rocks, but escaped and came speeding into the deep Phasis like an eagle over a great expanse; whence from that day the rocks stand fixed.

Jacobs’ transposition of the second halves of vv. 23 and 24 would do something to alleviate the omission of the Pontic voyage, and for this reason has seemed very attractive to many editors,13 but the Pindaric model is a good reason for resisting this change at least.14 12 Note bah}m of the danger from the Rocks at Pythian 4.207; that Theocritus uses the adjective in a quite different way seems to me to argue for, rather than against, the borrowing. 13 Cf., e. g., Wilamowitz, Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker (Berlin 1906) 178 – 9: “… als die Argo durch die Symplegaden hindurch war, lief sie eben

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In his note on vv. 211 – 13 of Pindar’s poem, Braswell ascribes Pindar’s technique to “lyric rapidity” whereas Apollonius indulges “the more leisurely manner of epic,” but there is more involved here than merely generic differences.15 In Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris also, the Symplegades are the key geographic marker, functioning almost as a metonymy for the whole Black Sea (cf. vv. 124 – 5); although there is some genuine sense of geography in the play,16 the coastline between the Rocks and the Crimea is very largely ignored. Apollonius’ two versions of a detailed Pontic periplous, on the other hand, are not merely a didactic tour de force or a literary game, in which his blind prophet more than makes up for the notoriously incomplete travel information provided by Homer’s Teiresias,17 or the result of anxiety not to miss any

14

15

16 17

nicht in den Phasis, sondern in den Pontus. Sie schiesst wie ein Adler nicht bloss auf der Passage gerade zwischen den Klippen durch, sondern so geht’s auf ihrer ganzen Fahrt.” Commentators have also seen the possible relevance of Argonautica 2.1246 – 59 (Prometheus’ eagle seen just as the Argonauts reach Colchis), cf. Gow on 13.23 f, M. Campbell, “Argo and L]ca Ka?tla,” Maia 26 (1974) 331. Doubtless like many others, when I first thought about these verses I toyed with changing V÷sim to P|mtom, and this has now been proposed by A. Griffiths in an important discussion which also revives Meineke’s deletion of v. 24, cf. “Customising Theokritos” in Theocritus, Hellenistica Groningana II, A. Harder et al., eds. (Groningen 1996) 101 – 18. If Idyll 13 is in some sense subsequent to the Argonautica, then a metaliterary reading in which Theocritus, “like an eagle over a great expanse,” rushes past (i. e. omits) the rest of Argonautica 2, i. e. the Pontic voyage, is hard to resist. The effect would be not unlike that of ¨m evek|r ti (v. 18) which seems to offer an amusing alternative to Apollonius’ catalogue; cf. L. E. Rossi, “L’Ila di Teocrito: epistola poetica ed epillio,” Studi classici in onore di Quintino Cataudella, vol. 2 (Catania 1972) 279 – 83 (especially 288), B. Effe, “Die Hylas-Geschichte bei Theokrit und Apollonios Rhodios,” Hermes 120 (1992) 309. That the first section of Theocritus 13 rewrites the proem of the Argonautica seems to me very likely, cf., e. g., G. Knaack, GGA 158 (1896) 884; G. Perotta, “L’Ilas di Teocrito,” SIFC 4 (1925) 88; Rossi (above, n. 14). M. Campbell (“Theocritus Thirteen,” “Owls to Athens.” Essays on Classical Subjects Presented to Sir Kenneth Dover, E. M. Craik, ed. [Oxford 1990] 113 – 19) observes that Theocritus’ omission of the Pontic journey shows that his Argonauts are “fully fledged heroes who prosecute their voyage with an effortless ease.” Cf. E. Hall, “The geography of Euripides’ Iphigeneia among the Taurians”, AJP 108 (1987) 427 – 33. Cf. Heubeck on Odyssey 10.539 – 40 in A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. 1, A. Heubeck, S. West, J.B. Hainsworth, eds. For this Apollonian technique cf. perhaps the rôle of Arete whose importance finally fulfils the central position proclaimed, but not really delivered, for her in the Odyssey, cf. Hainsworth’s introduction to Odyssey 7. For other aspects of Phineus’ prophecy cf.

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site of Argonautic legend, but point rather to central concerns of the epic. The fixing of the Rocks by the Argo’s passage is a powerful symbol of achievement; it marks the imposition of order and the creation of known space where before there was shifting and destructive disorder. The account of the passage through the Rocks suggests the cosmic battles of early Greek poetry. With 2.566 – 67: awe d³ p|mtor sleqdak]om, p\mtg d³ peq· l]car 5bqelem aQh^q·

(Apollonius, Argonautica 2.566 – 67 [Vian])

The sea roared terribly and all around the great heaven thundered,

compare Hesiod, Theogony vv. 678 – 80 (the Titanomachy):18 deim¹m d³ peq_awe p|mtor !pe_qym, c/ d³ l]c’ 1slaq\cgsem, 1p]steme d’ oqqam¹r eqq»r sei|lemor

(Hesiod, Theogony 678 – 80 [Solmsen])

The boundless sea resounded all around, the earth crackled loudly, and the broad heaven groaned as it was shaken.

As the Olympians put down their violent predecessors to impose order, so the passage through the Rocks marks the attainment of knowledge and control through the eastward advance of Hellenic culture,19 which can then be manifested in the elaborate geography and ethnography of the southern Pontic shore, as Apollonius writes the cultural aetiology of this rich land. In this case, knowledge really is power. The pattern of “detailed prediction” followed by realisation dramatises the ordered control of (endlessly repeatable) geographical and ethnographic fact which follows upon the passage of the Rocks. What before was known only to a Phineus is now the common property of all Greeks, always available in the written accounts of those who have been there before. This knowledge is, however, not yet shared by the Hunter (above, n. 3) 94 – 5, and for Arete ibid. 68 – 74 and below, pages 269 – 70. 18 Note also 2.553 – 4 with Theogony v. 705 t|ssor doOpor 5cemto he_m 5qidi numi|mtym· there is also a general resemblance to the terrifying roar of the cosmic clash at Iliad 20.41 ff. 19 Cf. M. Fantuzzi, “La Censura delle Simplegadi: Ennio, Medea, fr. 1 Jocelyn” QUCC 31 (1989) 127 – 8.

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Argonauts; they remain ignorant of the fate of the Rocks, and their terror persists until Apollo finally grants them a return home at the end of Book 4. Apollo’s saving intervention at the “Melanteian Rocks” (“The Darkening Rocks,” 4.1707) 20 is a narrative reprise of Athena’s intervention at “the Dark Rocks” which represent the same threatening disorder and lack of control as the dark Aegean chaos (cf. 4.1699 – 1701 for the complete loss of geographical control).21 Just as the triumph of the passage of the Symplegades was followed by the mapped order of the Black Sea, so the trials of Book 4 and the epic itself close with the aetiology of Aegean and ultimately North African geography. The “didactic” catalogues of Hellenistic poetry may be seen as part of the wider project of classifying, reconstructing and adapting the Greek heritage which was focused on the Library at Alexandria.22 Such classification and adaptation is not to be underestimated by dismissing it as the rather unexciting pastime of scholars in libraries. It was, in fact, no less than the reclaiming and control of knowledge, and this can hardly be divorced from the other activities by which Hellenistic kingships, above all the Ptolemies, proclaimed both their power and their right to the Greek cultural inheritance. Not for the only time, we may here perceive suggestive parallels between Ptolemaic and Augustan intellectual culture; as so often, in looking to the past, the poets of the third century showed the way to the future.

20 The scholia associate “Melanteian” with one Melas, the son of the eponymous hero of Naxos. 21 Behind the Apollonian passage lies perhaps Odyssey 10.190 – 2 (Odysseus telling his men that they have lost all sense of where they are). For Apollonius’ chaos cf. Hunter (above, n. 3) 167; I ought there to have noted the Stoic identification (SVF 1.103) of w\or as water, !p¹ toO w]eshai, which is clearly not what is meant at 4.1697, but may have had some influence upon Apollonius’ use of the idea. Pherecydes is also alleged to have identified w\or as water, cf. fr. 1a D-K. 22 G. Weber (Dichtung und hçfische Gesellschaft [Stuttgart 1993] 316 – 7) raises the question of the relation between poetic catalogues and political influence, but sees the question too narrowly.

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II. In a famous passage of Book 2 the exhausted Argonauts land on the island of Thynias and see a vision of the brilliantly gleaming Apollo as he passes on his way north to the Hyperboreans. They found a cult of “Apollo of the Dawn,” and then establish a shrine to Homonoia, a shrine which, so the poet tells us, is standing “still to this day” (2.717), though it features nowhere else in the ancient record.23 This scene is part of a contrast, devised by Apollonius to inform much of the epic, between Apollo, a sun god of beneficent power,24 and the older god Helios25 and his descendants whose light, whether it be the radiance of Aietes’ helmet (3.1228 – 30) or the sinister gleam in Medea’s eye (3.886, 4.726 – 9, 1669 – 72), is threatening and destructive. The episode itself belongs to the Heracleot narrative – Thynias was settled and presumably controlled from there26 – and Apollonius may well have found mention of the shrine in the local histories which he clearly used; the importance of homonoia as a prime Argonautic virtue requires no elaborate illustration. Nevertheless, there may be more to be said about the place of this shrine and the virtue it celebrates in the epic as a whole, and I begin, not in the Black Sea, but to the south on the island of Thera, a crucial Ptolemaic naval base and site of Ptolemaic cult,27 and, as the mother city of Cyrene, the subject of the final aetiology of the Argonautica, the prophetic episode of Euphemos and the clod of earth given to him by Triton. Dating probably from the latter years of Philadelphus’ reign and the early years of Euergetes, there survives from Thera a well known series of dedications by one Artemidorus from Perge in Pamphylia. Of particular interest is a temenos established by Artemidorus at the entrance to the city.28 Together with dedications to Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo and Ar23 On this scene in general cf. R. Hunter, “Apollo and the Argonauts,” MH 43 (1986) 50 – 60 [= this volume 29 – 41], and D.C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic (Oxford 1991) 75. 24 For Apollo as a sun-god cf. the evidence collected by Diggle on Euripides, Phaethon vv. 224 – 5 and Williams on Callimachus, Hymnus in Apollinem v. 9. 25 For Helios as belonging to a previous divine generation cf., e. g., Hesiod, Theogony v. 371. 26 Cf. J. Ziegler, RE 6A.718 – 9. 27 Cf. F. Hiller von Gaertringen, RE 5A.2297 – 8. 28 For this temenos cf. IG WII.3, Suppl. 1330 – 50; F. Hiller von Gaertringen, Thera III (Berlin 1904) 89 – 102; for Artemidorus cf. Prosopographia Ptolemaica

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temis (the patron goddess of his native Perge), this temenos also contained statues and altars to Hekate poku~mulor vysv|qor, Priapos, Tyche, the Samothracian gods, the Dioskouroi, Homonoia (to whom Artemidorus built an altar in accordance with the instructions of a dream), and perhaps also “the heroines” if the noun is correctly restored (IG WII.3, Suppl. 1340). We also find an inscribed Delphic oracle proclaiming Artemidorus (? a future) !h\mator he?or Fqyr (IG WII.3, Suppl. 1349) and a carved portrait of the man himself. Whether or not it is true that Artemidorus was, in Cole’s words, “a curious person,”29 the collection of gods honoured in his temenos does indeed suggest “a man of his time.”30 The disparate origins and regional affiliations of these divinities point clearly to the cultural interchange of the Hellenistic world. It may, then, be worthwhile to “map” Artemidorus’ religious world against that of the Argonautica; this first stage will be a fairly simple task, but the conclusions to be drawn from that map may be much more difficult. The Dioskouroi are themselves leading Argonauts, and Lykos announces the establishment to them of a temple on the Acherousian headland overlooking the Black Sea and a special temenos in front of his city (2.806 – 10); the temple is to be a landmark for sailors who look, in any event, for the special protection of the divine twins. Some scholars have wished to connect the temple with the divine cult of the Ptolemies themselves.31 Certainly the place of the Dioskouroi in Hellenistic and Alexandrian cult and poetry is well established: in his poem on the deification of Arsinoe (fr. 228 Pf.) Callimachus represented the dead queen as carried off by the divine twins, and abundant other evidence points to their significance in the Ptolemaic capital.32 Like

29 30 31 32

VI.15188. For modern discussion cf. Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Basel 1955) 382 – 85; H. Herter, De Priapo (Giessen 1932) 233 – 35; S. G. Cole, Theoi Megaloi: the Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace (Leiden 1984) 61 – 64; F. van Straten, “Images of Gods and Men in a Changing Society. Selfidentity in Hellenistic Religion,” Images & Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World, A. W. Bulloch et al., eds. (Berkeley 1993) 248 – 64, especially 260 – 1. Above, n. 28, 62. Ibid. 64. Cf. H. Fränkel, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Münich 1968) 516; M. Fusillo, Il tempo delle Argonautiche (Rome 1985) 125 – 6. Cf., e. g., E. Visser, Gçtter und Kulte im ptolemaischen Alexandrien (Amsterdam 1938) 17 – 8; W. F. Von Bissing, “Il culto dei Dioscuri in Egitto,” Aegyptus

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so many Hellenistic divinities, it is their soterological aspect – they are heo· syt/qer as Artemidorus calls them (IG WII.3, Suppl. 1333) – which is most prominent in cult and the poetic presentations of that cult. Their special affinity with suffering humankind is forcefully dramatised by Apollonius at 4.588 – 594 where it is they who, on the orders of Zeus’ voice, pray for safe passage as the Argo enters the nightmare regions of central Europe, and they who indeed bring the Argonauts through safe (s|oi, 4.650); their rôle in this scene is a resolution of a nice poetic problem which might be thought peculiarly Hellenistic: how can the Dioskouroi save a ship on which they themselves are travelling? 33 The Dioskouroi are closely connected with another set of soterological divinities, “the Samothracian gods,” who are also honoured by Artemidorus and into whose mysteries the Argonauts are initiated so that they might sail with greater safety, sy|teqoi (1.915 – 21); that it is Orpheus, the central figure of the best known mystery-cult, who advises this step is presumably significant for the nature of the initiation and the blessings which it offered. We know that both Arsinoe, probably even before her marriage to Philadelphus, and Philadelphus himself supported major building activity at the cult-centre on Samothrace, and Ptolemaic favour may have been very important in the spread of the influence of this cult.34 Here again, then, we may see a close link between the religious world of the Argonautica and that of the Ptolemaic Mediterranean. Of Artemidorus’ other divinities, the “heroines” famously intervene to save the Argonauts in the Libyan desert in Book 4. Artemidorus may well have first been introduced to them in North Africa, but their rôle 33 (1953) 347 – 57; H. C. Youtie, “Ostraka from Karanis,” ZPE 16 (1975) 272 – 3; Weber (above, n. 22) 346 – 7. 33 Note the contrast between this scene, in which the Dioskouroi act while the other “Minyan heroes” (4.595) are afflicted with jatgve_g, and 4.1701 – 5 where Jason’s saving prayers to Apollo do not prevent his tears and anguish, jat± d’ 5qqeem !swak|ymti / d\jqua. 34 For the evidence and discussion cf. B. Hemberg, Die Kabiren (Uppsala 1950) 69 – 70, 213; G. Longega, Arsinoe II (Rome 1968) 39 – 42; P. M. Fraser, Samothrace. The Inscriptions on Stone (London 1960) 4 – 9; Cole (above, n. 28) 20 – 22 (with notes, p. 112); M. Fantuzzi, “Mythological Paradigms in the bucolic poetry of Theocritus,” PCPS 41 (1995) 16 – 35. It is curious that the “s_kouqor comedy” (W. H. Willis, “Comedia Duciana,” GRBS 32 [1991] 331 – 53) seems to contain references both to Adonis (v. 7) and to “the Samothracian gods” (v. 22): a sign of Alexandrian authorship?

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in the Argonautica speaks volumes for the welcome which Apollonius’ epic offers to deities with little epic pedigree. Hecate, on the other hand, was a long established member of the Greek pantheon, although in the Argonautica it is her chthonic associations and terrifying powers which are most prominent. Her cult seems to have spread from Asia Minor west to the islands and north to the Black Sea; when Medea founds a shrine of Hekate on the Paphlagonian coast and performs rites in the goddess’ honour (4.246 – 52) 35 we are dealing again with the interweaving of past and present, with charting the religious map of Apollonius’ own day. From the point of view of the epic, Hekate’s early connection with Persephone and later close association with that goddess36 allowed Apollonius to create his Colchis as a place both of the brilliant Sun (Helios) and of the Underworld; the interpenetration of these two normally distinct realms is one of the most terrifying aspects of the disorder of Aietes’ kingdom. As for Priapos, he was originally a god of fertility and plenty whose cult seems to have moved south from Hellespontic Lampsakos; Artemidorus’ juxtaposition of this god to Hekate might seem a rather odd foreshadowing of the ribald meeting of the two in Horace, Satires 1.8, but even this association is perhaps not unparalleled,37 and Priapos is certainly found in Alexandrian contexts. His image appeared together with that of Dionysus, and apparently also in close association with those of Alexander and Ptolemy Soter, in the great pompe staged by Philadelphus.38 His rôle has been interpreted as “symboliz[ing] the potency of Alexander and Ptolemy, their successful rape of Persia, and the prodigious fruits of their triumph,”39 but more prosaic explanations for the presence of Dionysus’ son are also possible; his image, like most in the pompe, was in any case available for interpretation by the spectators in more than one way, and if the 35 Here the scholia cite Nymphis as authority for Medea’s foundation of this cult (FGrHist 432 F 8). 36 Cf. R. Hunter, Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica Book III (Cambridge 1989) note on 3.862. 37 A Pqi\piom ja· :jat]ou (sic) Aqk^ occurs in an imperial inscription from Tralles, cf. BCH 4 (1880) 337; T. Kraus, Hekate: Studien zu Wesen und Bild der Gçttin in Kleinasien und Griechenland (Heidelberg 1960) 32. 38 Callixenus apud Athenaeus 5.201c-d. Text and interpretation are both very difficult, cf. Herter (above, note 28) 12 – 14, E. E. Rice, The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos (Oxford 1983) 99 – 108; whether there was one statue of Priapos or two is not germane to the present discussion. 39 A. Stewart, Faces of Power. Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley 1993) 257.

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god was ithyphallic (which cannot be regarded as certain),40 an erect phallos does not necessarily signify unambiguously. Be that as it may, Priapos seems never to have made it into epic poetry, unless, that is, “holy Pityeia” (the site of the later Lampsakos) past which the Argonauts sail (1.933) contains in the epithet an allusion to the phallic god.41 If so, this would be a striking instance of how Apollonius’ epic gestures towards the contemporary. With Artemidorus’ dedication to Homonoia we encounter a widespread Hellenistic ideal, functioning in both public and private spheres, whose importance in the Roman epic tradition has recently been stressed by Francis Cairns.42 It is, of course, a quintessential Argonautic virtue, as the foundation of the temple on Thynias makes clear. Outside the world of the epic, we find (besides Artemidorus’ dedication) a cult of “Zeus Eleutherios and the Homonoia of the Hellenes” at Plataea at least as early as the third century,43 and then an increasing number of cults of Homonoia attested in subsequent centuries. It is an idea which seems to have strong Ptolemaic links.44 It may not be significant that the Glaukon honoured by the decree which attests the Plataean cult had, as the inscription records, a distinguished career in Ptolemaic service,45 but homonoia is also invoked in the famous treaty (IG II2 687) between Athens and Sparta at the time of the so-called Chremonidean War, a treaty which celebrates Ptolemaic support for those states against Macedonia. It may be in this context that Alexis fr. 246 K-A should be placed: 40 Cf. Rice (above, n. 38) 108. 41 So E. Delage, La Gographie dans les Argonautiques d’Apollonios de Rhodes (Bordeaux 1930) 91. 42 Virgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge 1989) 89 ff. For Homonoia in general cf. H. Kramer, Quid valeat bl|moia in litteris Graecis, (diss. Göttingen 1915); Zwicker, RE 8.2266 – 7; M. Hopkinson, Callimachus. Hymn to Demeter (Cambridge 1984) 134. For its political importance in the Hellenistic world cf., e. g., W. W. Tarn, Alexander the Great, vol. 2 (Cambridge 1948) 409 – 11; M. Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge 1991) 46 – 48, 128 – 9. 43 Cf. R. Étienne and M. Piérart, “Un décret du Koinon des Hellènes à Platées en l’honneur de Glaucon, fils d’Étéoclès, d’Athènes,” BCH 99 (1975) 51 – 75; W. C. West, “Hellenic homonoia and the new decree from Plataea,” GRBS 18 (1977) 307 – 19. 44 Cf. Roux (above, n. 7) 76 – 7, 144 – 49. It seems most unlikely, however, that the Argonautic altar on Thynias actually recalls the altar on Thera (so, tentatively, Palombi [above, n. 5] 160). 45 Cf. Étienne and Piérart (above, n. 43) 56 – 58.

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1c½ Ptokela_ou toO basik]yr t]ttaqa wutq_d’ !jq\tou t/r t’ !dekv/r pqoskab½m t/r toO basik]yr taut’, !pmeust_ t’ 1jpi½m ¢r %m tir Fdist’ Usom Usyi jejqal]mom, ja· t/r jlomo_ar d}o, t_ mOm lµ jyl\sy %meu kuwmo}wou pq¹r t¹ tgkijoOto v_r ;

(Alexis, fr. 246 K-A)

Without drawing breath I have drunk four pots of pure wine in honour of King Ptolemy, and the same amount for the king’s sister, and two more for Homonoia—wine at its best, mixed half and half. In such light what stops me going on a komos without a lamp?

This passage is normally understood as referring to homonoia between Athens and Ptolemy II, although H. Heinen cautiously raises the possibility that the reference is rather to the homonoia between Ptolemy and his wife Arsinoe.46 This suggestion, whether correct or not, usefully serves as a reminder that the demarcation between “private” and “public” homonoia is not always easy to draw, particularly where rulers are concerned, and this has interesting consequences for the epic tradition. As early as the Odyssey, the blovqos}mg between Odysseus and Penelope marks on the private plane what is represented publicly by the good order and harmony in society at large which is destroyed by the suitors. The Apollonian heirs to this blovqos}mg are Arete and Alcinous who together ensure the Argonauts’ safety on Drepane. The scene of Arete and Alcinous in bed, a scene which marvellously dramatises their mutual understanding,47 has no better Homeric parallel than the famous scene at Odyssey 18.250 – 83 in which Penelope solicits gifts from the suitors and Odysseus rejoices48 at her cunning; both Odysseus and Alcinous know what game their wives are playing. I have suggested elsewhere that the Apollonian portrayal of Arete and Alcinous could hardly fail to call to the mind of Alexandrian readers their own ‘brother-sister’ rulers,49 and if, despite chronological uncertainties (cf. below), some version of this interpretation is correct, we would have a characteristic blend of epic tradition and contemporary resonance. Support for this view may be found in Theocritus’ encomiastic description of the 46 Untersuchungen zur hellenistischen Geschichte des 3. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. (Wiesbaden 1972) 135. 47 Cf. Vian, Note complmentaire (Paris 1981) to 4.1110 ; Hunter (above, n. 3) 161. 48 This may lend some support to Vian’s interpretation of Qa_momto at 4.1096. 49 Hunter (above, n. 3) 161 – 2.

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mutual affection of Ptolemy I and Berenice, the parents of Philadelphus and Arsinoe: oupy tim± vamt· "de?m t|som !mdq· cumaij_m fssom peq Ptokela?or 2µm 1v_kgsem %joitim

(Theocritus 17.38 – 9 [Gow])

men say that never yet has wife so pleased her man as Ptolemy’s spouse her lord (trans. Gow)

These verses, which clearly push back the “virtues” of the current ruling couple into the previous generation,50 suggest Homer’s account of Alcinous1 admiration for Arete: …tµm d’ )kj_moor poi^sat’ %joitim, ja_ lim 5tis’ ¢r ou tir 1p· whom· t_etai %kkg, fssai mOm ce cuma?jer rp’ !mdq\sim oXjom 5wousim.

(Homer, Odyssey 7.66 – 68 [Allen])

… Arete, whom Alcinous made his wife and has honoured ever since as no other wife in the world is honoured, of all wives who rule a household under their husband’s eye. (trans. Shewring)

If Arete is indeed one epic model for the women of the royal house, then the significance of the following Homeric verses becomes apparent: ¤r je_mg peq· j/qi tet_lgta_ te ja· 5stim 5j te v_kym pa_dym 5j t’ aqtoO )kjim|oio ja· ka_m, oV l_m Na he¹m ¤r eQsoq|ymter deid]watai l}hoisim, fte ste_w,s’ !m± %stu. oq l³m c\q ti m|ou ce ja· aqtµ de}etai 1shkoO· oXs_m t’ ew vqom],si ja· !mdq\si me_jea k}ei.

(Homer, Odyssey 7.69 – 74 [Allen])

Such has always been, and such still is, the honour paid to Arete by Alcinous and by her children and by the people here, who gaze at her as at a divinity and greet her with loyal words whenever she walks about the town, because she is full of helpful wisdom. If she takes kindly to anyone, she will be a peacemaker in his feuds. (trans. Shewring, adapted) 50 On the ideology of “love” in these verses cf. also the rather different considerations adduced by L. Koenen, “Die Adaptation ägyptischer Königsideologie am Ptolmäerhof,” in Egypt and the Hellenistic World, E. van’t Dack et al., eds. (Louvain 1983) 143 – 90, especially 161 – 2.

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The god-like honour paid to a wise queen is very suggestive when projected forward to Ptolemaic Alexandria.51 Hellenistic encomium found a rich vein of inspiration in archaic hexameter poetry. Alcinous himself is clearly figured by Apollonius as the “Hesiodic good king:” oR d] te kao· p\mter 1r aqt¹m bq_si diajq_momta h]listar Qhe_gisi d_jgisim.

(Hesiod, Theogony 84 – 86 [Solmsen])

All the people gaze upon him as he administers ordinances with straight justice. aqt_ja d’ )kj_moor leteb^seto sumhes_,sim dm m|om 1neq]ym jo}qgr vpeq· 1m d’f ce weiq· sj/ptqom 5wem wquso?o dijasp|kom, è vpo kao· Qhe_ar !m± %stu diejq_momto h]listar.

(Apollonius, Argonautica 4.1176 – 9 [Vian])

Without delay Alcinous came out to reveal his decision about the girl in accordance with the agreement. In his hand he held the golden staff of legal authority with which he administered straight ordinances to the people in the city.

Even the light humour which plays over the allusion – Alcinous has been “got at” by Arete and the ultimate outcome is already a fait accompli — is typical of the poetry written under Ptolemaic patronage. As Alcinous himself has more than one archaic model, so he and Arete, the royal couple, are indebted both to their Homeric selves and to the “ideal couple” of Odysseus and Penelope. In the course of his enlightening discussion of the Ptolemaic aspects of Theocritus’ poetry, F.T. Griffiths notes how many traps lay in store for a poet who wished to “assimilate” royal patrons to the figures and gods of Greek mythology: “Try to find a happy marriage in Greek myth. Hector and Andromache? I am sure neither Philadelphus nor Arsinoe would be flattered.”52 The obvious couple not mentioned by Griffiths is indeed Odysseus and Penelope, for twenty years apart, but finally reunited (even if Odysseus 51 The parallels could, of course, be taken further: the ruler’s piety (Odyssey 6.10, Theocritus 17.108), the powerful navy, and the glorious palace (with more than a suggestion of tquv^) all apply equally to Alcinous and Ptolemy. 52 Theocritus at Court (Leiden 1979) 68.

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must set off on his journeys again). Thus Theocritus exploited a similarity between features of archaic epic and contemporary political ideology to offer “trans-historical” authority to the current rulers. The same is, I believe, true of Apollonius, and it is within this nexus of ideas that the Argonautic ideal of Homonoia is to be seen. It must be stressed that this interpretation does not depend upon any particular chronological assumptions about the composition of the Argonautica. Whether the relevant parts of the epic were first designed under Philadelphus and Arsinoe, after Arsinoe’s death, or even under Euergetes, they reflect familiar themes of Ptolemaic “ideology” which were not just restricted to one period. One very speculative pointer towards the reign of Euergetes may be the oath which Medea swears to Arete as she beseeches her aid: …Usty Req¹m v\or Iek_oio, Usty mujtip|kou Peqsg_dor eqcia jo}qgr, lµ l³m 1c½m 1h]kousa s»m !mdq\sim !kkodapo?si je?hem !vyql^hgm·

(Apollonius, Argonautica 4.1019 – 22 [Vian])

Be witness the holy light of Helios, be witness the rites of the night-wandering daughter of Perses, against my will did I leave my home in the company of foreign men.

These verses, addressed to a queen (4.1014), perhaps rework the oath, by Berenice II’s head and life, which the lock of hair swears to her in Callimachus’ famous poem (fr. 110.40 Pf.); the terms of the oath are known only from Catullus’ translation (inuita, o regina, tuo de uertice cessi, / inuita, Catullus 66.39 – 40), but if it were the case that Apollonius here echoes Callimachus’ witty lock, then he has “epicised” the oath by giving it a cosmic dimension, and was followed in this by Vergil who similarly ‘epicises’ Catullus’ translation of Callimachus in his adaptation (per sidera iuro / per superos et si qua fides tellure sub ima est / inuitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi, Aeneid 6.458 – 60).53 As is too often the case in such matters, neither the fact of the allusion itself nor poetic priority can be firmly established. Nevertheless, Callimachus’ poem (if Catullus is at all a reliable guide) made much of the “brother-sister” relationship between Euergetes and Berenice, and an echo of such a poem would 53 For the importance of Apollonius for this famous “borrowing” cf. R. L. Hunter, “Medea’s Flight: the Fourth Book of the Argonautica,” CQ 37 (1987) 138 – 9 [= this volume 42 – 58].

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fit well into Apollonius’ refashioning of Alcinous and Arete. Be that as it may, I hope that the “political” dimension of Apollonius’ epic emerges clearly, regardless of these uncertainties as to the exact context. No figure is more familiar in the Hellenistic world than that of T}wg, the goddess “Fortune,” whose power was famously celebrated by Demetrius of Phaleron and who becomes a leitmotif of all speculation about the course of human events.54 Apollonius does not use T}wg (or t}wg) in the Argonautica; however episodic the structure of the narrative might sometimes appear, this cannot be ascribed to the workings of Fortune, at least if that goddess is understood in the most straightforward way. Here the Hellenistic epic might be thought strangely out of sympathy not only with the world which produced it, but also with its inheritance from Attic tragedy.55 Be that as it may, there is more than one causal principle at work here. As scholars of late antiquity well knew,56 neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey use the word t}wg,57 and Homer’s remarkable influence upon the Greek epic tradition in a detail of this kind can be seen in the fact that t}wg is also absent from Quintus of Smyrna and from Triphiodorus and occurs only three times in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca.58 Such apparent archaising can itself hardly be the result of t}wg, and this will warn us (if warning were needed) against any assumption that there is a simple relation between the ideological world of a poem and that of the world which created it. Generic factors are clearly important here, and the extraordinary difference in this respect be54 Demetrius: FGrHist 228 F 39 = fr. 81 Wehrli. The best survey of Tyche is now G. Vogt-Spira, Dramaturgie des Zufalls. Tyche und Handeln in der Komçdie Menanders (Munich 1992) 1 – 74. The evidence for a cult of Tyche in Alexandria is late (Visser [above, n. 32] 42 – 3), but Tyche is not always to be distinguished from “Agathe Tyche” and was closely associated with Isis, cf. Fraser (above, n. 6) vol. 1, 240 – 43, Stewart (above, n. 39) 243 – 46. 55 R. Heinze traced Vergil’s use of “chance” in the Aeneid to the influence of drama (Virgils epische Technik, 3rd ed., Leipzig and Berlin 1915) 339 – 40. Cf. also Encyclopedia Virgiliana (Rome 1984 – 1991) s.v. Fortuna. For other tragic features in the “religion” of the Argonautica cf. Hunter (above, n. 3) 80. 56 Cf., e. g., Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.16.8; Herzog-Hauser, RE 7A.1650. 57 Homer does, however, use tucw\my in an appropriate sense; t}wg first appears in extant literature in the Homeric Hymns, cf. N. J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford 1974) 420. That the absence of t}wg from Homer is responsible for Apollonius’ avoidance of the word was suggested by H. Fränkel, “Apollonius Rhodius as a narrator in Argonautica 2.1 – 140,” TAPA 83 (1952) 152. 58 2.669 and 3.356 in the metaphor of life as a sea-journey, and at 16.220 Dionysus addresses pok}loqve T}wg.

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tween, on the one hand, the Argonautica and the epic tradition and, on the other, the Greek “novels” in which the centrality of T}wg is unquestioned raises important questions about two genres which are often thought to be genetically linked.59 Moreover, it is clearly not possible always to differentiate between T}wg and other motive forces such as “fate,” and it might indeed be thought that epic poetry is precisely concerned to explore the overlap between such ideas.60 Some exploration of the possible differences may, however, yield dividends. It is perhaps unsurprising that poems which assume or inherit an “Olympian machinery” offer little scope to “chance”; t}wg appears only twice, and in uninformative contexts, in the Homeric Hymns61 and not at all in Callimachus’ Hymns. As for the Argonautica, the divine favour which attends the Argonauts and which is spelled out in Phineus’ prophecy might seem to preclude a prominent rôle for “chance”. An episode such as the meeting with the sons of Phrixos (2.1093 ff) is a good illustration of this.62 Not only has Phineus hinted at this meeting (2.388 – 9) – and prophecy will always make the workings of t}wg problematic – but Zeus’ rôle in arranging it is not concealed in the course of the episode itself, though typically it is expressed indirectly and not through an explicit scene of Olympian planning (2.1098, 1120, 1123 – 33). Here, where Vergil might have introduced fortuna, Apollonius carefully avoids any such suggestion. So too, much will depend on how “strong” a reading we wish to give to familiar features of epic such as narrative anticipations with l]kkeim, exemplified as Apollonius recounts how the Argonauts and the pursuing Colchians reached Drepane at virtually the same time:

59 For T}wg in the novels cf., e. g., Molinié’s edition of Chariton, page 252; J. N. O’ Sullivan, A Lexicon to Achilles Tatius (Berlin and New York 1980) s.v. 60 Cf. Fränkel (above, n. 55). Pace Fränkel, however, Argonautica 2.135 – 42 is by no means a simple case of “coincidence”: Apollonius makes clear (v. 141) that the Bebrycians and the Mariandynoi were in constant dispute. The recent discussion of L. Nyberg, Unity and Coherence. Studies in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica and the Alexandrian Epic Tradition (Lund 1992) 46 – 58, apparently draws no distinction between T}wg and lo?qa. 61 At Hymnus ad Cererem 420 Tyche is one of Persephone’s companions, and the noun is used in the sense “good fortune” in a brief prayer to Athena at Hymnus 11.5. 62 Cf., e. g., G. Lawall, “Apollonius’ Argonautica: Jason as anti-hero”, YCS 19 (1966) 121 – 69, especially 160 – 62.

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… l]kkom d³ bo0 5pi hyq^neshai· ¨de l\k’ !cw_lokom stqat¹r %spetor 1neva\mhg

(Apollonius, Argonautica 4.1000 – 02 [Vian])

Soon, however, they would have to arm for battle, for right close at hand appeared a huge force of Colchians …

Is some theological “fate” involved here, or is this the omniscient narrator, who knows what the next stage in the story is, refusing to allow the Argonauts’ joy to remain long unclouded? 63 The subsequent wqe~, “necessity,” which forced Jason and Medea to change their wedding plans and to marry on Drepane (4.1165) might also have been ascribed in a different genre to “chance”; the Greek epic, however, eschews such explanation. Like the figures of all Greek literature from Homer onwards, the characters of the Argonautica accept the reality of unexpected, often calamitous, events, but acceptance of the inscrutability of moira did not necessarily mean a recognition of the sovereignty of Tyche, if by this concept was understood a principle of “random chance”. Thus when Jason seeks to console his mother as the Argonauts depart, he does so with words which look to epic principles of self-reliance and endurance by rewriting the words of Hector to Andromache (Iliad 6.486 ff) and Achilles to Priam (Iliad 24.522 ff): l^ loi keucak]ar 1mib\kkeo, l/teq, !m_ar ¨de k_gm, 1pe· oq l³m 1qgt}seir jaj|tgtor d\jqusim, !kk’ 5ti jem ja· 1p’ %kcesim %kcor %qoio. p^lata c\q t’ !_dgka heo· hmgto?si m]lousi, t_m lo?qam jat± hul¹m !mi\fous\ peq 5lpgr tk/hi v]qeim· h\qsei d³ sumglos}mgisim )h^mgr Ad³ heopqop_gisim, 1pe· l\ka deni± Vo?bor 5wqg, !t±q let]peit\ c’ !qist^ym 1paqyc0.

(Apollonius, Argonautica 1.295 – 302 [Vian])

“Please, mother, do not cause yourself too much bitter pain, since your tears will not prevent the suffering, but you will merely add grief upon grief. To mortal men the gods allot woes which cannot be foreseen: despite the pain in your spirit, have the courage to bear your share of these. Take 63 For a similar case at 4.1225 – 7 cf. Hunter (above, n. 3) 88 and (more generally) M. Fusillo, Il tempo delle Argonautiche (Rome 1985) 105 – 16. For such anticipations in Homer cf. I. J. F. de Jong, Narrators and Focalizers: the Presentation of the Story in the Iliad (Amsterdam 1987) 86 – 7, S. Richardson, The Homeric Narrator (Nashville 1990) 132 – 39.

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courage from the assistance of Athena and the favourable oracles of Phoibos, and moreover from the present help of the heroes.”

I hope that this brief discussion has skirted the dangers both of an overly lexical approach to interpretation and of presenting too monolithic a view of what we might, very broadly, call “Hellenistic ideology,” to say nothing of simplifying the wide range of experience implied by tyche; Artemidorus of Perge was, after all, celebrating his “success” in life, his agathÞ tychÞ, not (or, at least, not primarily) buying off the possibility that at any moment “chance” might overwhelm him. It was not only fully paid-up Stoics who refused to bow their knee to Tyche. 64 The relation between the ideological and theological world of an epic poem and that of the society in which it was composed is complex and shifting; the fit is never exact. That the Argonautica archaises (at least in part) in the moral and ethical relations it portrays, as well as in its material and technological world, is hardly surprising, but it must never be forgotten. If, moreover, there is an important “Ptolemaic” aspect to the epic, then this moral archaism is an important tool for the integration of the new order into the timeless Greek heritage. Some things, so the epic teaches us, do not change. The religious map of the Argonautica thus proves to be a remarkable fusion of elements from the epic heritage and from the “new world”. As the Argonauts themselves voyage both through known and unknown territory, so the poem both adopts and expands the territory of Homer. Such cultural and geographical expansion is indeed at the heart of Hellenistic civilisation.65

Addenda The geography of the Argonautica has been well treated by Doris Meyer in various discussions: cf. ‘Zur Funktion geographischer Darstellungen bei Apollonios Rhodios und in der “Perihegese an Nikomedes” (Ps.-Skymnos)’ in K. Döring, B. Herzhoff and G. Wöhrle (eds.), Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption (Trier 1998) 61 – 81, and ‘Apollonius as a Hellenistic geographer’ in T.D. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden 2001) 217 – 35. 64 A fuller investigation of these matters might indeed have interesting implications for the “epic” background of the Stoic aspects of the Aeneid. 65 I am very grateful to James Clauss and Mary Depew for their constructive criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

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n. 13 Cf. my note on Theocritus 13.23 – 4. n. 28 On Artemidorus’ shrine cf. also A. Chaniotis, War in the Hellenistic World (Oxford 2005) 153 – 4. p. 266 – 7 On the ‘heroines’ cf. L. Bacchielli, ‘Apollonio Rodio e il santuario cireneo delle Nymphai Chthoniai’ QUCC 51 (1995) 133 – 7.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)* Callimachus fr. 178 Pf. (= 89 Massimilla) 1 tells how the Athenian Pollis – the name is known from a citation in Athenaeus – continued to celebrate Attic festivals in the Alexandria of the poet’s own day. At Pollis’ party to commemorate the Attic festival in honour of Erigone, the aQ~qa, the poet2 met Theogenes, a visitor from the Aegean island of Ikos (modern Alonnisos):3 A½r oqd³ pihoic·r 1k\mhamem oqd’ fte do}koir Glaq iq]steioi keuj¹m %cousi w|er· Yjaq_ou ja· paid¹r %cym 1p]teiom "cist}m, )th_sim oQjt_stg, s¹m v\or, Iqic|mg, 1r da_tgm 1j\kessem blgh]ar, 1m d] mu to?si ne?mom dr AQc}ptyi jaim¹r !mestq]veto lelbkyj½r Udi|m ti jat± wq]or· Gm d³ cem]hkgm ]jior, ¨i numµm eWwom 1c½ jkis_gm oqj 1pit\n, !kk’ aWmor jlgqij|r, aQ³m blo?om ¢r he|r, oq xeud^r, 1r t¹m blo?om %cei. ja· c±q b Hqgij_gm l³m !p]stuce wamd¹m %lustim fyqopote?m,4 ak_cyi d’ Fdeto jissub_yi. t_i l³m 1c½ t\d’ 5kena peqiste_womtor !ke_sou t¹ tq_tom, ewt’ 1d\gm oumola ja· ceme^m . ‘G l\k’ 5por t|d’ !kgh]r, f t’ oq l|mom vdator aWsam, !kk’ 5ti ja· k]swgr oWmor 5weim 1h]kei. tµm Ble?r— oqj 1m c±q !qust^qessi voqe?tai oqd³ lim eQr !teme?r avq}ar oQmow|ym aQt^seir bq|ym ft’ 1ke}heqor !tl]ma sa_mei—

* 1

2 3 4

5

10

15

Ramus 25 (1996) 17 – 26 The following editions of Callimachus are cited by author’s name only: R. Pfeiffer, Callimachus (Oxford 1949); K. Fabian, Callimaco, Aitia II Testo critico, traduzione e commento (Alessandria 1992); G. Massimilla, Callimaco, Aitia, libri primo e secundo (Pisa 1996). There is an earlier version of Fabian’s discussion in ‘Il banchetto di Pollis’ in K. Fabian, E. Pellizer and G. Tedeschi (eds.), OIMGQA TE£WG : Studi triestini di poesia conviviale (Alessandria 1991), 131 – 66. ‘The poet’ is the simplest way to express the narrating first-person; I hope that the usual caveats can be taken as read. I print, with very few papyrological signs, the text of Pfeiffer-Massimilla; textual uncertainties do not, I think, affect the arguments of this essay. On this reading cf. below p. 283 and n., 21.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)

b\kkylem wakep_i v\qlajom 1m p|lati, He}cemer· fssa d’ 1le?o s]hem p\qa hul¹r !joOsai Qwa_mei, t\de loi k]nom !meiqol]myi· Luqlid|mym 2ss/ma t[_ p\tqiom u[lli s]beshai Pgk]a, j_r ]jyi num[± t± Hessaki]j\, teO d’ 6mejem c^teiom id[..]ut[….]qtom 5wousa Fqyor jah|dou pa[ ?r eQd|ter ¢r 1m]pou[sim je_mgm D peq· sµm [ ouh’ 2t]qgm 5cmyja· t[ ouata luhe?shai boukol]moir !m]wym.’ taOt’ 1l]hem k]namto[r ‘tqisl\jaq, G pa}qym ekbi|r 1ssi l]ta, mautik_gr eQ m/im 5weir b_om . !kk’ 1l¹r aQ~m j}lasim aQhu_gr l÷kkom 1syij_sato.’

279 20

25

30

… nor did the day of the Jar Opening pass him by, nor when the Choes of Orestes bring a white day for slaves. And when he kept the yearly ceremony for Ikarios’ child—your day, Erigone, who are most pitied by women of Attica—he invited to a banquet his friends, and among them a stranger who had not been in Egypt for long, having come on some private business. He was an Ikian by birth, and I shared a couch with him—not by design, but the saying of Homer is not false that god ever brings like to like. For he too loathed draining goblets of neat wine, like the Thracians, but took pleasure in a small cup. To him I said, as the beaker was going round for the third time, when I had learned his name and descent: ‘This indeed is a true saying, that wine would have not only its portion of water, but also of conversation. Therefore—for we do not pass conversation around in ladles, nor will you ask for it by gazing at the haughty brows of the cup-bearers, when the free man fawns upon the slave—let us, Theogenes, throw the drug of conversation into the tedious drink; do tell me in answer to my question all that my heart yearns to hear from you: Why is it the tradition of your country to worship Peleus, king of the Myrmidons? What has Thessaly to do with Ikos? For what purpose does [a girl] holding an onion […] the procession of the hero […] according to the account of those who know […] holding ears ready for those who are willing to tell their story.’ When I had spoken thus […] ‘Truly, you are thrice blessed, happy as few are, if you lead a life which is ignorant of sea-faring. But my life has been spent more among the waves than is that of the gull.’ (after Trypanis)

Lines 9 and 10 allude to Melantheus’ abuse of Eumaios and the disguised Odysseus in Odyssey 17: ‘mOm l³m dµ l\ka p\cwu jaj¹r jaj¹m Bcgk\fei, ¢r aQe· t¹m blo?om %cei he¹r ¢r t¹m blo?om. p/i dµ t|mde lokobq¹m %ceir, !l]caqte sub_ta,

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ptyw¹m !migq|m, dait_m !pokulamt/qa ; dr pokk/ir vki/isi paqast±r hk_xetai ¥lour, aQt_fym !j|kour, oqj %oqar oqd³ k]bgtar· t|m j’ eU loi do_gr stahl_m Nut/qa cem]shai sgjoj|qom t’ 5lemai hakk|m t’ 1q_voisi voq/mai, ja_ jem aq¹m p_mym lec\kgm 1picoum_da he?to. !kk’ 1pe· owm dµ 5qca j\j’ 5llahem, oqj 1hek^sei 5qcom 1po_weshai, !kk± pt~ssym jat± d/lom bo}ketai aQt_fym b|sjeim Dm cast]q’ %maktom.’

20

25

(Od. 17.217 – 28)

‘Now indeed do the worthless lead the worthless and, as always, god brings like to like. Miserable swineherd, where are you taking this filthy creature, this loathsome beggar, this scavenger of banquets? He will be a lounger at many men’s doors, rubbing his back against the posts, seeking for scraps, not swords or cauldrons. If you gave him to me to guard the farmstead, sweep out the pens and take green fodder to the young goats, then he might drink whey and round out his thighs. But no—he has learned bad ways and will never keep at any work; instead, he means to go cringing and begging about the country to fill his never-sated belly.’ (after Shewring)

The Callimachean reworking shows a programmatically ‘un-Homeric’ word-order,5 but, as so often, the original context evoked by the echo is also significant. By moving after three rounds6 to the pleasures of conversation, Theogenes and the poet, like the characters of Plato’s Symposium, will certainly not be dait_m !pokulamt/qer, ‘scourges of the feast’.7 Those who do not follow their lead, on the other hand, are little better than beggars who add nothing to the pleasures of the feast; aQt^seir (‘you will ask’, 19) picks up aQt_fym (‘seeking for’, Od. 17.222, 228) to point this implication. The really ‘free’ man (19) will have freed himself from the tyranny of ‘Dionysos the liberator’, ‘the Looser’ who, paradoxically, ‘binds’ mind and body in the toils of confusion and sleep, thus reducing the free man to the status of a shack-

5

6 7

Cf. Massimilla 407, Pfeiffer on fr.6. I have considered whether part of the point here is that we may be tempted to read ¢r he¹r oq xeud^r together: ‘no lying god’ is not a bad description of Homer. Note also the echoing sound pattern of the Callimachean verse, aWmor jlgqij|r, aQ³m blo?om. For the fourth round as marking the descent into immodest drinking cf. Eubulus fr. 93 K-A (= 94 Hunter) with the notes of Kassel-Austin and Hunter. On the meaning of !pokulamt^q cf. Russo on Od. 17.220; it is not clear how Callimachus would have interpreted the word.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)

281

led slave.8 9keuheqe}r was a title of Dionysos at Athens and Attic Eleutherai; the cult statue of Dionysos Eleuthereus was associated with the theatre of the god at Athens (Pausanias 1.20.3). That Callimachus should allude to this manifestation of the god fits perfectly with the fact that his host was an Athenian interested in the festivals and cults of his home city. Moreover, his insistence on a fastidious independence is marked, as often in Callimachus, by a rare gloss: !tl^m ‘servant’, is the kind of language which ‘free’ men use.9 Callimachus has here appropriated and ‘personalised’ a long tradition of sympotic poetry on the subject of correct and moderate behaviour10 and a more recent prose tradition, particularly associated with the peripatetics, of k|coi sulpotijo_.11 A standard motif of such moralising was an alleged distinction between the moderate drinking and intellectual pleasures of the ‘Greek’ symposium and the drunken excesses of barbarian ‘others’, in this case Thracians, who ‘by definition’ drank unmixed wine in great quantities.12 Callimachus’ use of this theme was probably reinforced by the poet’s apparent innocence of sea-faring (27 – 34), for the imaging of the symposium (particularly one where wine flowed freely) as a sea-voyage was a very common one, as recent scholarship has fully investigated.13 Two sympotic models give shape to Callimachus’ rejection of heavy drinking. One is the ritual frame provided by the introductory verses. The aiora, ‘Swinging Festival’, commemorated Erigone who hung herself from the tree under which her father, Ikarios, was buried after he had been killed by shepherds crazed by Dionysos’ gift of (unmixed) wine.14 The first two festivals named in the surviving verses, the Pith8 Cf. Hesiod fr. 239 M-W. For the paradox cf. Propertius 3.5.21 mentem uincire Lyaeo (‘to shackle the mind with Lyaeus’, with Fedeli’s note). 9 Cf. Pfeiffer on fr. 507. 10 Cf., e. g., K. Bielohlawek, ‘Gastmahls- und Symposionslehren bei griechischen Dichtern’, WS 58 (1940), 11 – 30; W. J. Slater, ‘Sympotic Ethics in the Odyssey’, in O. Murray (ed.), Sympotica (Oxford 1990), 213 – 20. 11 Thus, for example, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Hieronymus and Chamaileon all wrote treatises ‘On Drunkenness’, and cf. Plato Laws 1.637a-642b; cf. further below pp. 282 – 3. 12 Cf C. Corbato, Scritti di letteratura greca (Trieste 1991), 314. Alexis fr. 9.8 – 12 KA contrasts ‘Greek drinking’ characterised by moderately sized cups and pleasant conversation with ‘the other sort’ which is ‘a bath, not a symposium’. 13 W. J. Slater, ‘Symposium at Sea’, HSCP 80 (1976), 161 – 70, remains the seminal discussion. 14 For Callimachus’ use of the ritual background cf. R. Scodel, ‘Wine, Water and the Anthesteria in Callimachus fr. 178 Pf.’, ZPE 39 (1980), 37 – 40.

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oigia and the Choes, were both parts of the Athenian Anthesteria festival, and this passage of Callimachus has played a prominent role in recent re-evaluations of that festival.15 Whether or not these verses confirm that the aiora was—or was believed by Callimachus to be—also part of the Anthesteria, part indeed of the third day of the festival (the Chytroi) as it has been traditionally conceived, need not concern us here. The Pithoigia and the Choes are clearly chosen because of their association with wine. The drinking contests which characterised the Choes presumably encouraged the drinking of neat or only lightly diluted wine, on the model of the victorious Dikaiopolis, ja· pq|r c’ %jqatom 1cw]ar %lustim 1n]kaxa (‘and I poured it in neat and drained the lot in one go’, Ar. Ach. 1229);16 so too, the Choes pattern of solitary, silent drinking (in memory of the hospitality offered in Athens to the matricide Orestes) is one which Theogenes and the poet explicitly reject. The licence granted to slaves (1 f.) becomes, in the Callimachean view of the symposium, a distasteful subservience (19). This poetic pattern clearly informs the passage, regardless of whether the behaviour of Callimachus and his friend also reflects the progression of the Anthesteria itself.17 Neat wine and solitary drinking are also the hallmarks of the other rejected sympotic model which hovers over Pollis’ party. The Ikian’s rejection of excessive drinking is described in the language of pleasure and loathing (11 f.): ja· c±q b Hqgij_gm l³m !p]stuce wamd¹m %lustim fyqopote?m, ak_cyi d’ Fdeto jissub_yi.

15 Cf. the opposed positions of R. Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria: Athenian Iconography and Ritual (Ann Arbor 1992), esp. 119 – 21 – Hamilton (48 f) rejects the standard connection of the aQ~qa with the Anthesteria – and N. Robertson, ‘Athens’ Festival of the New Wine’, HSCP 95 (1993), 197 – 250. 16 Whether or not the wine drunk during the Choes-contest was mixed with water has been the subject of much recent discussion; the most reasonable solution might be that each drinker was given a jug of neat wine and when he poured it into his cup could mix it or not as he chose (cf. Robertson [n. 15 above], 223 f., and contrast A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy [Cambridge 1993], 38; to drink it neat presumably increased one’s chances of finishing first. Callimachus’ point is not affected by the precise detail here. 17 Thus Hamilton’s criticism (n. 15 above, 120 f) of Scodel is to some extent misplaced.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)

283

For he too loathed draining goblets of neat wine, like the Thracians, but took pleasure in a small cup.

jiss}biom appears three times in the Odyssey, twice as a rustic bowl in which Eumaios mixes wine (14.78, 16.52), and once (9.346) as the vessel in which Odysseus offers Polyphemos his powerful wine. Although the word could perhaps be used of a drinking cup of ordinary dimensions,18 we are plainly to understand that Odysseus not merely served the Cyclops with very strong, neat wine,19 but also an unusually large amount of it, which he proceeded to drink wamd|m, i. e. in one go.20 Even if the better attested oQmopote?m is preferred to fyqopote?m in line 12,21 Callimachus rejects the unmixed wine of barbarians at least implicitly – hence the later charges of being a ‘water-drinker’22 – and large cups quite explicitly. When Athenaeus discusses the use of large drinking cups, a practice which Chamaileon had claimed to be a recent import from the uneducated barbarians (fr. 9 Wehrli), it is precisely the jiss}biom offered to the Cyclops which is adduced to prove that very large cups had been in use ‘in the old days’ (Ath. 11.461c-d). Callimachus’ pointed oxymoron ‘a small kissubion’ thus evokes Odyssey 9, an allusion confirmed by the ‘pleasure’ which both drinkers find in their respective cups (Fdeto 12, Fsato Od. 9.353). Whereas, however, three of these capacious draughts befuddled the Cyclops sufficiently for Odysseus’ purposes (Od. 9.361), the third round is the sign for Callimachus and Theogenes to move on to the pleasures of intellectual conversation. The difference between the two occasions is further marked by the fact that the poet follows correct etiquette by learning the identity of his 18 Cf. Ath. 11.476 f-7e, and the sceptical discussion of A.M. Dale, ‘JISS£BIOM’, CR 2 (1952), 129 – 32. My treatment of Callimachus’ use differs somewhat from that of A. Rengakos, ZPE 94 (1992), 29. 19 Cf. Od. 9.205 !jgq\siom ; most modern scholars accept the scholiast’s gloss %jqatom as the sense of this word. 20 This is marked in Homer by the verb 5jpiem (‘drank down’, Od. 9, 353, 361); cf. Eur. Cycl. 417 5spas]m t’ %lustim 2kj}sar (‘he sucked it in, drinking it in one gulp’). Massimilla observes (408) that Homer uses wamd|m only at Od. 21.293 f, Antinous to Odysseus on the dangers of drinking. 21 In favour of fyqopote?m cf. Massimilla 408 (with bibliography) and E. Magnelli, RFIC 122 (1994), 480. 22 Cf. P. Knox, ‘Wine, Water, and Callimachean Polemics’, HSCP 89 (1985), 107 – 19. It is not always made clear in scholarly discussions of this topic that later polemic elides the differences between, on the one hand, drinking ‘water’ and moderate drinking of ‘well diluted wine’ and, on the other, drinking ‘unmixed’ wine and wine that is only lightly diluted.

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companion at an early stage (14), whereas the Cyclops remains notoriously ignorant until the end (note Od. 9.355, ‘tell me your name’). Here again the point of the evocation seems clear: hard drinking at a symposium places you on the same level as the Cyclops, whose story—like that of Ikarios and Erigone—is a classic example of the dangers of wine. Callimachus has fused the drinking contests of the Choes with the fate of the Cyclops to produce a powerful negative image of rejected sympotic behaviour. The ‘perverted komos’ of Euripides’ Cyclops, in which Polyphemus is persuaded to perform the anti-social act of drinking strong wine by himself, confirms that Callimachus was operating within well established patterns of thought about social conduct.23 Fr. 178 Pf. cannot be placed with certainty within the overall structure of the Aitia, but, given our relatively full knowledge of the contents and order of Books 1, 3 and 4,24 there are very strong reasons for placing it in Book 2, and it would be fair to say that there is now something of a scholarly consensus in favour of a suggestion made by Anna Swiderek in 1951.25 Swiderek suggested that fr. 178 belonged to the opening of Book 2 and that it preceded fr. 43 Pf. (= 50 Massimilla), the ‘De Siciliae urbibus’, which is known to come from Book 2. Of particular interest in this context are lines 12 – 17 of the latter fragment: ja· c±q 1c½ t± l³m fssa jaq^ati t/lor 5dyja namh± s»m eq|dloir "bq± k_pg stev\moir, %pmoa p\mt’ 1c]momto paq± wq]or, fssa t’ ad|mtym 5mdohi me_aiq\m t’eQr !w\qistom 5du, ja· t_m oqd³m 5leimem 1r auqiom . fssa d’ !joua?r eQseh]lgm, 5ti loi loOma p\qesti t\de.

…..for certainly all the soft amber ointments and the fragrant garlands I then put on my head swiftly breathed no more, and of all that passed my teeth and plunged into the ungrateful belly nothing remained till the morrow; but the only things which I still keep are those that I laid in my ears. (trans. Trypanis) 23 On these aspects of Euripides’ Cyclops cf. L. E. Rossi, ‘Il Ciclope di Euripide come j_lor mancato’, Maia 23 (1971), 10 – 38. 24 There is a useful summary by P. J. Parsons, ZPE 25 (1977), 46 f. 25 J.Jur.Pap. 5 (1951), 234 n.18; for subsequent discussion cf. J. E. G. Zetzel, ‘On the Opening of Callimachus, Aetia II’, ZPE 42 (1981), 31 – 33; Fabian (n. 1 above), 137 – 40, 315 – 18 (who remains more cautious); A. Cameron, Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton 1995), 133 – 40, Massimilla (n. 1 above), 145, 320, 400.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)

285

These verses are followed in the papyrus by a paragraphos, which may mark the end of an episode or of a particular aetiological subject (e. g. a change from Ikos to Sicily); the poet appears to speak continuously until line 55, where he is immediately answered by Klio. Zetzel noted, only to reject, the possibility that frr. 178 + 43.1 – 55 were a single narrative by the poet to the Muses (in the course of the dream which seems to have occupied all of Books 1 and 2), and this scenario has now in fact been accepted by both Cameron and Massimilla and must be admitted to be very attractive: the dreaming poet tells the Muses of Pollis’ party and of all he learned at it, before asking them to fill in the gaps in his Sicilian knowledge. A passage on the perils of wine-drinking would come well from a poet who was asleep, which is (in literature as in life) a very common result of wine-drinking.26 If fr. 178 does indeed come from the opening episode of Book 2, then fr. 51 Pf. (= 60 Massimilla) — ovmejem oQjte_qeim oWde l|mg pok_ym

… because [Athens] is the only city which knows how to show pity

— which is cited by a scholion on Soph. OC 258 as the final verse of Aitia 2, can be seen to offer a ring composition through allusion to Athens, and perhaps specifically picks up (and gives new point to) )th_sim oQjt_stg in fr. 178.4. Be that as it may, the conjunction of the two fragments allows us to take further the analysis already offered of Callimachus’ account of sympotic behaviour, and perhaps also to draw conclusions of wider significance for the Aitia as a whole. Some of what follows gains point if the two fragments do indeed belong together at the opening of Book 2, but the value of the discussion does not, I think, collapse, should the hypothesis be unfounded. In the dream which introduced Book 1,27 Callimachus had offered himself as a new Hesiod, but it is the Odyssey, with its many included tales and, in particular, four books devoted solely to Odysseus’ account of his diverse adventures, which was the crucial model against which the 26 These considerations make one wonder yet again about the circumstances of Callimachus’ dream: just when did he fall asleep? After a symposium? For another suggestion cf. ZPE 76 (1989), 2 [= this volume 87 – 8]. 27 I deliberately leave the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ out of account, because of the doubts about where it belongs. If Alan Cameron is correct in seeing it as indeed the introduction to Aitia 1 – 2, then the ‘Hesiodic’ relationship between the poet and the Muses in that fragment (lines 36 f, cf. Hes. Theog. 81 f) would fit with the argument which follows.

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Aitia was written. It was the much-travelled hero who ‘saw the cities of many men and came to know their minds’ (or, with Zenodotus, ‘customs’) whose physical journeys Callimachus recreates in the mind, leaving Alexandria only in dreams;28 eQseh]lgm in line 17 may point to this image, as the verb is properly used of loading a ship (LSJ s.v. 2), whereas the despised details of the menu ‘sink to the depths of the belly’, just as the endless food consumed by Erysichthon flowed like rivers ‘into the depths of the sea’ (H. 6.88 – 90). Not for Callimachus the dangers of shipwreck among the tables; whereas the Muses had charged Hesiod and his companions with being ‘mere bellies’, here the poet tells the Muses that he has no interest in the culture of food.29 Just as the Odyssean flavour of fr. 178 was unmistakable, so in fr. 43.12 – 17 we see the poet placed half-way between the Phaeacians and their mysterious guest. As an avid listener, the poet is like the Phaeacians,30 but as someone who recognises the curse of the belly, he resembles Odysseus himself (cf. Od. 7.215 – 21);31 the model to be rejected here is not just the professed hedonist, but precisely the Cyclops, whose devotion to his stomach had been turned by Euripides into a blasphemous worship (Cycl. 334 – 38). The professed lack of interest in garlands and food is not merely the declaration of an elitist, which takes its place within a long tradition of debate about the relative value of physical and intellectual experience,32 but also acts as an introductory recusatio to the following aition, the elaborate account of the origins of the cities of Sicily: this is to be no ‘didactic’ poem on the courses of a dinner (contrast, e. g., 28 This, of course, remains true of the poetry, regardless of whether Alan Cameron’s picture of Callimachus as a frequent traveller be accepted. 29 The possible relevance of Hes. Theog, 26 was suggested by Fabian (n. 1 above), 149. 30 On the Odyssean heritage of the Aitia and on Callimachus’ self-presentation as a listener cf. D. Meyer, ‘“Nichts Unbezeugtes singe ich”: Die fiktive Darstellung der Wissenstradierung bei Kallimachos’, in W. Kullmann and J. Althoff (eds.), Vermittlung und Tradierung von Wissen in der griechischen Kultur (Tübingen 1993), 317 – 36. 31 !w\qistor varies %maktor at Od. 17.228, 18.364. The adjective does not merely make a topical point about the ingratitude of the stomach (cf. Massimilla 323), but marks the symposium where the pleasures of the stomach dominate as lacking in that charis which is the dominant virtue of the well-ordered symposium, as Odysseus himself knew (Od. 9.5); cf. W. J. Slater, ‘Peace, the Symposium and the Poet’, ICS 6 (1981), 205 – 14. 32 Cf. A. Barigazzi, Prometheus 1 (1975), 9 – 11. Callimachus may allude in particular to the famous ‘epitaph’ of Sardanapallos, SH 335.

16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.)

287

Matron’s parodic )ttij¹m de?pmom, SH 534),33 but rather a voyage, like Odysseus’, around the cities of Sicily (cf. Od. 1.3). Contrary to all accepted wisdom – ‘I hate’, says the proverb,34 ‘a drinking-companion with a memory’ – Callimachus proves to have a prodigious memory for what his fellow-symposiasts say. Callimachus’ ‘aural memory’ includes, of course, what he has read in books,35 and fr. 178.27, eQd|ter ¢r 1m]pousi, (‘as those with knowledge assert’), may be a typically Callimachean allusion to his written sources (? the Ikiaka of Phanodemus).36 Such motifs would fit well in the introductory passage of a book. Memory is important also in fr. 178. When the poet suggests to Theogenes that they throw the drug of conversation into the cup from which they are drinking (20), there is an obvious allusion to the (Egyptian!) drug which Helen placed in the wine of Menelaos and Telemachos to make them forget grief (Od. 4.219 – 26).37 It has often been observed that Helen’s drug works very like the power of poetry to erase sadness in Hesiod’s Theogony (98 – 103), and fr. 43 now allows us to see that, for Callimachus, conversation – ‘poetry’ in fact – is not merely a palliative against the tedium of drinking, but actually serves, quite unlike Helen’s drug, as an aid to memory. Theogenes replies to the poet’s ‘tell me all that my heart craves to hear from you’38 with an Odyssean lament (cf. Od. 5.306 f.) for a life spent at sea; the poet, on the other hand, both by his own admission (27 – 30) and by Theogenes’ pointed echo (33) of Hesiod’s own profession of ignorance about ships and the sea (WD

33 It is relevant also that later antiquity knew a substantial literature on garlands (RE 11.1604), some of which was almost certainly available also to Callimachus. 34 Cf. PMG 1002, with Page’s parallels. 35 Cf. Fabian (n. 1 above), 151, Meyer (n. 30 above). 36 Cf. Fabian (n. 1 above), 322 f.; P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford 1972), i.732, Pfeiffer, however, interprets the phrase as a reference to sailors who have actually visited Ikos. 37 For the other resonances of v\qlajom here cf. Massimilla 412. 38 This grand wish (cf. G. Hutchinson, Hellenistic Poetry [Oxford 1988], 27 f) reads almost like a reworking of Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite at fr. 1.26 f, but it may in fact owe more to Odysseus’ words at Od. 9.12 f. Qwa_mei is another typical example of Callimachus’ use of a rare word with contextual significance: the learned gloss points both to the scholastic nature of the poet’s interests and, just as importantly, to his ironic self-awareness of the seeming ‘triviality’ of those interests.

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649),39 is marked as a ‘Hesiod’ who acquires information (whether from the Muses or a human informant) and transmits it to others. Here again we may wish to see a renewal, in the opening of Book 2, of the ‘Hesiodic’ persona established in the opening sequence of Book 1. The figure of the learned, listening poet which emerges from these passages (whether or not they are to be combined) helps us to see the Aitia in the context of two important aspects of Hellenistic literature. First, there is the idea of the writer as a gatherer of vast amounts of information, but a gatherer who may remain stationary in one spot, whether it be a library or a symposium, rather than travelling the world like an Odysseus or a Herodotus. This aspect of the Callimachean persona finds an illuminating parallel in certain details of Polybius’ criticisms of the Sicilian historian Timaeus (c. 350 – 260 BC) in Book 12 of The Histories. Timaeus lived in Athens for fifty years (12.25 h.1 = FGrHist 566 F34), without any experience of fighting or knowledge of topography; for Polybius, therefore, he illustrates the bubkiajµ 6nir, ‘bookish attitude’ which will never produce vivid history (12.25 h.3, cf. 25e.7). By trusting his ears rather than his eyes (12.27.3), Timaeus chose the easy path: ‘Inquiries from books may be made without any danger or hardship, provided only that one takes care to have access to a town rich in documents or to have a library near at hand’ (12.27.4, tr. Paton). The true historian, according to Polybius will rather be an Odysseus, who has travelled the world and had wide experience in peace and war (12.27.10 – 28.1).40 This part of Polybius’ criticisms of Timaeus, whom Cicero called longe eruditissimus (‘by far the most learned’, De Orat. 2.58), constructs a figure not unlike Callimachus’ self-construction in the Aitia fragments I have been considering. This, of course, has nothing to do with any possible relationship between Callimachus and the Sicilian historian,41 but rather with a shared self-posi39 Cf. H. Reinsch-Werner, Callimachus Hesiodicus (Berlin 1976), 383 f. For the importance of this Hesiodic passage for the didactic tradition cf. my remarks in Arachnion 2 (1995), 10 f [= this volume 167 – 8]. 40 For a rather different use of the topos cf. Diod. Sic. 1.1.2. Diodorus too contrasts his own eye-witness knowledge acquired through laborious travel with the ignorance of some other historians, ‘even some considered in the front rank’ (1.4.1), though he too (like Timaeus) enjoyed a very long period of residence in a city with excellent ‘library facilities’ (Rome); cf. 1.4.3 f. Diodorus’ ‘travels’ have been regarded with deep suspicion by modern scholars; cf. E., Schwartz, RE 5.663. 41 Cf. Fraser (n. 36 above), i.764 – 66.

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tioning of the writer in the changed cultural context of the third century.42 Secondly, there emerges a rather different, though related, aspect of the ‘programmatic’ significance of fr. 178 for Callimachean poetics than the stress on smallness and purity to which recent critics have rightly drawn attention.43 In the Aitia the Callimachean voice is constructed out of the appropriation and ‘personalisation’ of very traditional attitudes, ideas and poetic structures, and it, no less than the verses it utters, is a repository and channel for the whole of Greek tradition. Nevertheless, in an Athenian context, and one which specifically evokes the licence of a festival with close links to Athenian comic drama,44 that voice turns away towards the arcane traditions of a small island off the Magnesian coast, just as in the opening section of Book 3 the voice turns from the familiar pan-hellenic story of Herakles and the Nemean lion to the (to say the least) obscure Molorkos and his homely concerns. The ‘Athenian’ tradition, which was already on the way to being constructed as the ‘classical’ tradition, is thus both the necessary background to Callimachean poetry, but also part of what must be set aside as the poet marks out his own poetic space. Pollis’ party thus becomes not a bad metaphor for much that is important in Hellenistic literary culture.45

Addenda A version of this essay appeared in Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 76 – 83. On Timaeus and Hellenistic literature cf. also pp. 16 – 20 above.

42 It ought not to be necessary to note that I am aware that continuity was as great as change in this period. 43 Cf., e. g., Hamilton (n. 15 above), 121, and Cameron (n. 25 above), 136 f. 44 For drama at the Anthesteria cf. A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens2 (Oxford 1968), 15 – 17. In the Acharnians Aristophanes ‘equates’ victory at a Choes drinking contest with the victory of his own play in the dramatic competition. 45 On the relation of third-century culture to the Athenian tradition cf. further Fraser (n. 36 above), i.553 – 5, and my own Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge 1996), 1 – 3.

17. Before and after epic: Theocritus (?), Idyll 25* The 281 extant verses of Theocritus (?), Idyll 25 fall easily into three sections. In the first (1 – 84) 1 an old ploughman tells Heracles (who is not named) about the extensive estates of King Augeias, and then leads him to the stalls to find the king himself; the title Jqajk/r pq¹r !cqo?jom precedes v. 1 in two manuscripts (of the same family), and this title will most naturally apply to this opening section, although (as Gow notes) 2 we cannot, strictly speaking, rule out the possibility that this title was intended to head the whole poem. In 85 – 152 Augeias’ vast herds return to their stalls and Heracles overpowers a large bull which attacks the lionskin he is wearing; D, a composite fifteenth-century manuscript, preserves 1 – 84 after the rest of the poem and heads 85 – 281 with the title 9pip~kgsir,3 but otherwise 85 follows straight on from 84 in the tradition. In 153 – 281, which in all manuscripts follow directly after 152, Heracles tells Augeias’ son, Phyleus, the story of his conquest of the Nemean lion, as the two of them are journeying together from the countryside into the town. In the printed edition of Callierges (Rome 1516),4 a note following 24.140 and deriving from Musurus asserts that both the end of Idyll 24 and the beginning of the following poem (Idyll 25), here given the name Jqajk/r keomtov|mor, are missing. The discovery of the Antinopolis papyrus, which showed that verses have indeed been lost from the end of Idyll 24, seems to have confirmed the first half of this statement, which will, nevertheless, have been based on a literary judgement, not on manuscript evidence. Arguments concerning the date and authorship of the poem are naturally interconnected. There are strong, though not absolutely compelling, grounds for believing that the poet of Idyll 25 knew the Victoria * 1 2 3 4

M.A. Harder et al. (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic Poetry (Groningen 1998) 115 – 32 For the abrupt opening cf. below (p. 305 – 6). Gow (1952: 2.438). On this manuscript see Gallavotti (1993: 341 – 8). Gallavotti (on 85) notes that D seems to treat 1 – 84 as a separate poem. On this edition cf. Gow (1952: 1.xlv-vi); Gallavotti (1993: 361 – 8).

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Berenices of Callimachus which all but certainly stood at the head of the third book of the Aitia (SH 254 – 269).5 The central myth of this elegy – Heracles’ confrontation with the Nemean lion and the hospitality extended to the hero by the humble Molorkos – finds both general and specific resemblances in Idyll 25, although the Idyll does not seem to exploit the aetiological aspect of the Nemean lion story, which was of course foregrounded in the epinician tradition.6 That the poems share a common debt to the Odyssey, particularly to the character of Eumaeus who shapes both the anonymous rustic of the Idyll and Callimachus’ Molorkos,7 need not assume special significance, in view of the fact that Eumaeus seems to lie behind virtually every Hellenistic representation of ‘the good countryman (or -woman)’.8 The interpretation of specific similarities of vocabulary, among which aQmok]ym (SH 257.21, Theoc. 25.168) is the most striking, will always provoke critical disagreement,9 but if it is true that Idyll 25 imitates the ‘Victoria’ (for which there is a t.p.q. of 245), it will be hard to believe, on the conventional dating, that it can be by Theocritus. 5 6

7 8

9

Cf. Parsons (1977: esp. 44); Henrichs (1977: 69 – 75). The strength of the case for a debt to Callimachus is underestimated by Kurz (1982: 10). There is obviously also a general similarity to Callimachus’ account in the Hecale of Theseus at the hut of Hecale (note esp. the exchange of questions in frr. 40 – 2 Hollis), but little emerges in detail. Note, however, that both Nemea (25.182) and Marathon (fr. 69.8 Hollis) are euudqor. Cf., e. g., Fuhrer (1992: 104). Of particular interest in the present context, alongside Callimachus’ Hecale, are the fragments of a hexameter narrative set on Diomedes’ estate near Argos (P.Berol. 10566, cf. Powell [1925: 72 – 5]; Torraca [1971]); a central character of this poem seems to have been the appropriately named bailiff Pheidon, another aged descendant of Eumaeus. Like Idyll 25, this poem exploited the barking dogs of Odyssey 14 (cf. 37 – 40). Wilamowitz thought the poem ‘early Hellenistic’ (1907: 73), and the affinities of subject-matter, if not structure, with Idyll 25 are certainly clear; Torraca speculates that both poems are the work of the same poet, but there is no obvious reason, beyond neatness, to believe this. The apparent use in 114 of 6dmom to mean ‘gift’ rather than ‘marriage-gift’ is normally listed among the similarities (cf. SH 254.1), but too much should not be made of this, given the state of preservation of Greek poetry. Moreover, I am not convinced that the ‘marriage’ connotations of 6dmom are irrelevant in Callimachus, where m}lva follows immediately. If the Victoria and the Coma did indeed frame Books 3 and 4 of the Aitia, then it would be tempting to read m}lva at the head of fr. 110.91 to form a neat ring. Whether or not any of this is connected with the notorious problem of the wedding-ritual in Catullus 66 cannot be pursued here.

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If the story of the Nemean lion perhaps points towards Aitia 3, we should recall that Heracles’ cleaning of Augeias’ stables must have played some part in the aition in Aitia 3 for the ritual practice at Elis whereby men come armed to their wedding (frr. 76 – 7). The reason given by Callimachus for this practice seems to have been that Heracles married off the women of Elis to his soldiers after he had sacked Elis in revenge for Augeias’ treatment of him, but our knowledge of how exactly Callimachus handled this story is exiguous. It is, however, worth noting that Phyleus seems to have figured in this Callimachean aition. More tangible perhaps is the fact that in Aitia 1 Callimachus juxtaposed two stories in which Heracles meets men ploughing: a Lindian peasant whose ox is eaten by the hero (frr. 22 – 3 = 24 – 5 Massimilla), and the cruel Theiodamas who meets a sticky end (frr. 24 – 5 = 26 – 7 Massimilla). If the audience of Idyll 25 knew that the ne?mor of the opening verses was Heracles, either because it knew a title or because this information was contained in verses which have now been lost, then it would have been forgiven for thinking that it had entered upon one of those Callimachean stories. bo_m 1p_ouqor in 1, if that is the correct reading,10 will then gesture towards such stories in which Heracles actually takes one of the cattle away and/or kills it. The rustic’s little homily on the importance of respecting Hermes will then not merely expand upon Eumaeus’ piety towards that god (Od. 14.435), but will also evoke for us the knowledge that giving Heracles the wrong answer can have disastrous consequences; rather similar are 62 – 7 (by which time we, at least, are in no doubt as to the stranger’s identity) 11 in which the rustic delays asking Heracles about himself, ‘because it is hard to know the mind of another’. While the poem presents a polite and ‘courtly’ Heracles who, far from eating an ox in a situation where one would certainly not be missed, is never offered or requests a meal,12 it also exploits our knowledge of other representations of the great hero. When Heracles observes to the rustic that ‘god has made one man dependent upon another’ (50), we can only be amazed at how far this is from the suffering and self-sufficient hero of most nar10 Cf. Gow ad loc. 11 The mention of Augeias in 7 gives the game away; the narrator calls the stranger ‘mighty son of Zeus’ in 42. 12 Contrast Odysseus’ reception by Eumaeus and the return of the pigs at Od. 14.409 – 56 which is attended by a meal.

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ratives.13 To what extent, if any, we are to measure the ethos and detail of the poem specifically against these Callimachean stories we cannot say but, given the importance of the Aitia for subsequent poetry, the possibility that the Idyll poet is rewriting Callimachus is a real one. Many detailed echoes of Apollonius’ Argonautica have been claimed for Idyll 25,14 but their cumulative weight is, in my opinion, rather slight. Two passages of some importance deserve, however, a moment’s attention. One is the similarity between Heracles’ ‘victory’ over the bull Phaethon (145 – 9) and Jason’s yoking of the fire-breathing bulls (A.R. 3.1306 – 10), accompanied in both cases by the wonderment of the onlookers.15 The possibility of a common source (? Callimachus’ Hecale) cannot be ruled out, but it would certainly suit an important theme of the Argonautica if literary allusion made Jason ‘follow after’ Heracles here.16 On the other hand, the second pair of passages seems to point in the opposite direction. Phaethon the bull is introduced in verses which seem remarkably like those in which Apollonius introduces the son of Aietes and Asterodeia (‘Star Lady’), Apsyrtus, whose ‘nickname’ is Phaethon: t_m l]m te pqov]qesje b_gv_ te ja· sh]mei ¨i Ad’ rpeqopk_gi Va]hym l]car, fm Na bot/qer !st]qi p\mter 5isjom, bho}meja pokk¹m 1m %kkoir bous·m Q½m k\lpesjem, !q_fgkor d’ 1t]tujto.

(25.138 – 41)

Far first of these in his strength and power and mettle was the mighty Phaethon, whom all the herdsmen likened to a star because he shone out bright and conspicuous to see as he moved among the other cattle. (trans. Gow) ja_ lim J|kwym uXer 1pymul_gm Va]homta 5jkeom, ovmeja p÷si let]pqepem Aih]oisi.

(A.R. 3.245 – 6)

The sons of the Colchians called Apsyrtus by the name of ‘Phaethon’, because he stood out among all the young men.

13 Chryssafis ad loc. prefers to take %kkou in 50 as neuter, ‘god made each man’s wants different’, but this seems very weak. 14 Cf. esp. Perrotta (1926: 249 – 62). 15 Brief notice of the similarity in Legrand (1898: 19 n. 2), and Gow (1943: 96 n. 1). 16 Cf. Feeney (1986); Hunter (1993: 25 – 36).

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Apsyrtus’ nickname is not original to Apollonius, and the conception of the young man as his father’s charioteer, like the more famous Phaethon, is central to the character;17 this may suggest Apollonian priority. Moreover, the Homeric model for Apsyrtus-Phaethon, Hector’s son Skamandrius-Astyanax, is likened to a star at Il. 6.401, and so Id. 25.138 – 41 may be an example of ‘window reference’, whereby a passage alludes both to a prior text and to the source of that text.18 If so, Apollonian priority would be certain. Not only, however, is the date of Book 3 of the Argonautica itself a thorny problem, but it seems unlikely that these methods will produce a universally agreed relative chronology – not an unusual situation with the poetry of the third century. Perrotta (1926) and Serrao (1962) have assembled an impressive linguistic and metrical case against Theocritean authorship of Idyll 25. The counter-argument (Gow [1952]; Kurz [1982]), or perhaps rather the argument for agnosticism, must be based upon the fact that such linguistic difference may have easy generic explanations; we would have expected Idyll 25 to behave (linguistically) much more like ‘epic’ than do other poems of the Theocritean corpus, and this is indeed what we do find.19 For what it is worth, my impression is that the stylistic arguments adduced in favour of Theocritean authorship stretch credulity a little too far, but I hope that nothing of what follows depends for its validity upon a particular view of the authorship. The three sections of the traditional division all revolve around Heracles’ cleansing of Augeias’ stables, a labour which is never mentioned in the course of the poem, but which must shape our reaction to the whole.20 Why, for example, would ‘stout-hearted’ Heracles marvel at the vast herds (114)? Is it because he is going to have to clean up all that dung? Commentators have long pointed out that the three sections – in the order of most manuscripts and all modern editions – can be fitted, easily enough, into the outlines of the story familiar from our main sources (Ps. Apollod. 2.5.5, Paus. 5.1.9 – 10), but whether or not that is the reading strategy which the poem actually invites is a more dif17 Cf. Hunter and Campbell ad loc. 18 Cf., e. g., McKeown (1987: 37 – 45); Campbell ad loc. also notes the relevance of Il. 2.480 – 1 for Idyll 25.138 – 41. 19 For some further criteria and relevant considerations cf. Hunter (1996: 28 – 45) and Svennson (1937: 70 – 2). 20 Cf. Linforth (1947); Zanker (1996).

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ficult and interesting question. Consideration of it may begin with the transitions between the sections. Although 85 could follow directly from 84, periphrastic time-markers are a familiar device of Hellenistic and Roman narrative for beginning both the narrative itself (cf., e. g.,Theoc. 13.25 – 6) and important new sections within it (cf., e. g., Theoc. 24.11 – 2).21 Descriptions of the onward movement of time strongly suggest that time moves on in the narrative. Nevertheless, A]kior l³m 5peita is a Homeric half-line which occurs in the midst of tightly organised narrative, rather than as the obvious marker of a new development (Il. 7.421, Od. 19.433); as such, this verse suggests continuity (5peita), while gesturing towards a new beginning. More specifically, not only is 84 closural in the sense that it marks arrival at a destination,22 but both 1 and 85 have parallels in Homeric book openings.23 As for 152 – 3, the former both points to the ‘moral’ of the preceding scene (the extraordinary prowess of Heracles) and impressively concludes the description with a four-word hexameter beginning with a patronymic occupying the entire first half of the verse;24 153 has parallels in Homeric book-openings, and the action of ‘leaving the rich ploughlands for the town’ clearly instigates also a new direction in the narrative. There is here a much clearer disjunction in the narrative than at 84 – 5, and it is advertised, rather than concealed, by the fact that 154 (‘Phyleus and the mighty Heracles’) picks up 151 – 2. As for the conclusion of the poem, not only does Heracles himself mark the end of his narration, but death is perhaps the most common and final of all closural motifs.25 A tentative conclusion, based solely upon the formal markers in the text, might be that Idyll 25 presents an exploration of nar21 Cf., e. g., Kenney on Moretum 1 – 2. Particularly close to 25.85 – 99 is Culex 42 – 57 in which there is a similar interplay between the subject-matter of the time description and that of the main narrative; cf. Gutzwiller (1981: 32): “it seems that the westward turning of [Helios’] horses is not merely a natural event, but a private signal to Augeas’ herds to begin their evening trek to the barns”. 22 Gow notes that G Na ja_ opens the last verse of Il. 19 (but cf. also Od. 2.321). 23 For the details see Gow ad loc. On the possible significance of the Homeric pattern cf. below p. 305 – 6. 24 Cf. 13.55 (at the start of a new movement). 25 Cf., e. g., Smith (1968: 101 – 2, 176 – 8). I am unconvinced by the ‘general resemblance’ seen by Gow to the end of the Iliad (and even less by the ‘echo’ of the opening of that epic seen by Bizzarre (1979: 325 – 6)). For what it is worth, I am reminded rather of the close of Plato’s Phaedo (the death of Socrates), Fde B tekeut^ … (118a15 – 7). On closure in general see Fowler (1989).

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rative continuity and disjunction, which is quite different in effect from, say, the articulation and structure of the different ‘scenes’ of Idyll 24. It is also worth noting that the structure of Idyll 25, if indeed, as I believe, the poem is not merely a set of three extracts from a larger whole and if, in particular, there has been no textual loss before 1,26 does not find a real parallel in the narratives of archaic and classical lyric which in so many other ways foreshadow Hellenistic narrative.27 The Argonautic narrative of Pindar, Pythian 4, for example, operates with the selectivity, ellipses and swift transitions familiar to the lyric manner, but with nothing remotely like the break at Idyll 25.152 – 3. Bacchylides 5.56 – 175 tells of Heracles’ fateful meeting with Meleager in the underworld, and the poet of Idyll 25 may well have been conscious of this narrative;28 that narrative proceeds, however, in a straightforward, linear fashion. Lyric poets rely, of course, upon the audience’s knowledge of the mythic events which both precede and follow their narratives (Bacchylides 5 and 18 are excellent examples); it may be that the ‘irony of the unspoken’ which is thereby created is not unlike the irony which hovers over the second ‘scene’ of Idyll 25, but this is something different from the narrative technique itself. In a broad generalisation, it may be said that the complexities of lyric narrative arise from rearrangement and/or enfolding, in such a way as to emphasise the poet’s control of narrative time and theme, rather than in the conduct of narrative itself; Medea’s prophecy in Pythian 4 ‘preceding’ the 26 The d] in 1 of Id. 25 should not be given excessive weight in considering whether or not the text is lacunose; it is imposed by the ‘epic form’ of the verse, and indeed the poet could hardly have chosen a better way of marking the relation between his poem and the inherited epic tradition. For initial d] in other texts cf. Kroll (1936: 91 – 6); Campbell (1967: 140 – 1); Jacobson (1983: 70). Related poetic experiments in other genres are familiar, cf. Ar. Lys. 1; Ov. Am. 3.7.1. Plutarch (Mor. 736e-f) reports that the rhapsode who performed at the marriage of Ptolemy II began from Il. 18.356, Fe»r d’ Nqgm 1j\kesse jasicm^tgm %kow|m te, and it would be tempting to draw wider conclusions from this about ‘rhapsodic’ practice in the third century, cf. below p. 305 – 6, Nagy (1996b: 161 – 2). This rhapsode’s very ‘political’ choice of starting-point is, however, a very special case; Il. 18.369 looks much more like the ‘natural’ place to start. 27 Perrotta (1923) remains a fundamental contribution. Despite Perrotta and others, the relation between archaic lyric narrative and Hellenistic and neoteric hexameter narrative remains insufficiently explored. A starting-point might be the difference between Pindar, Pythian 4 and Stesichorean narrative, about which we are constantly learning more. 28 Cf. Gow on 201.

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sailing of the Argo and the enfolded narratives of Proetus and his daughters at Bacchylides 11.40 – 112 may serve to illustrate both tendencies. To this extent, the true heirs of archaic lyric are (in their different ways) Callimachean narratives, such as the Hecale and the Victoria Berenices, and Catullus 64, rather than the narratives ascribed to Theocritus; even the juxtaposed narratives of Idyll 22, whose interplay is crucial to the meaning of the poem, do not imitate lyric technique. In other ways, of course, such as the fondness for abrupt openings in medias res,29 Theocritus is fully at one with the third-century reproduction of the lyric manner, but these similarities should not be used to elide the important differences. The ‘enfolding’ technique does not merely go back to lyric, but may also be seen as a miniaturising of the narrative structure of the Odyssey. In Idyll 25 Heracles’ account of the Nemean lion is indeed told within the context of another labour; unless, however, the text is more defective than is normally supposed, the Nemean story concludes the poem and is in fact the climax to which it has been leading, and there is no return to the history of relations between Heracles and Augeias. Like Augeias and his people, the Phaeacians have had a chance to marvel at the athletic prowess of Odysseus before he finally tells his story, but in Homer (as regularly in lyric) the story-teller brings his account back to the present context. Idyll 25 is often classed with the so-called ‘epyllia’, but it does not really fall within either of the two broad classes of such poem which our evidence suggests.30 On the one hand are ambitious poems such as Callimachus’ Hecale and the Hermes of Eratosthenes31 which ran well over a thousand verses; on the other are shorter narratives of, roughly speaking, between one hundred and three hundred verses. Neither, however, in the Odyssey nor in the Hellenistic ‘epyllia’ do we find a real parallel for a linear narrative in which narrative time seems always to progress, but we are merely given ‘excerpts’ from ‘the full story’. Unsurprisingly, the effect of Idyll 25 has been compared to a painted triptych lacking an obvious narrative centre.32

29 Cf. Bacchylides 15, 17, 19.15; Perrotta (1923: 216 – 17). On the opening of Idyll 25 cf. below p. 125. 30 Cf. Perrotta (1923), and (most recently) Cameron (1995: 437 – 53). 31 Cf. SH 397. 32 Cf. Kurz (1982: 44). We might compare the three scenes from the story of Io which are depicted on Europa’s basket (Mosch. Europa 37 – 62).

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The unusual structure of Idyll 25 is reinforced by the internal dynamics of the poem. Commentators point out that the fact that Heracles accompanies Augeias on his inspection (110 – 1) implies that ‘in the meantime’ (that is, presumably ‘between’ 84 and 85) he has explained who he is and why he has come. It is indeed a familiar Hellenistic practice to elaborate what might be thought inessential to ‘the plot’ and to pass quickly over ‘the main events’; the Victoria Berenices even offers what looks like an explicit authorial comment on such an elision: aqt¹r 1pivq\ssoito, t\loi d’ %po l/jor !oid/i . fssa d’ !meiqol]myi v/se, t\d’ 1neq]y .

(SH 264.1 – 2)

Let him conjure up these things himself, and thus shorten the song; but all that he said in reply, this will I tell in full.

This seems like a fairly clear invitation to ‘take as read’ what the poet chooses to leave out,33 but two cautionary notes are necessary. Callimachus, more than almost any other ancient poet, was aware that there is no such thing as a ‘canonical version’ of a tale upon which all readers will agree; if he asks us to fill in the details, he is merely making us confront the same bewildering set of choices that confront the poet himself at every turn. Would any two readers, particularly readers of Callimachus, come up with the same story, let alone the story as Callimachus would have told it? If this general consideration should make us at least pause before adopting for any Hellenistic text a reading strategy of simple ‘supplementation’,34 the nature of Idyll 25 as a whole suggests that this is not the reading strategy which this particular text implies for itself. ‘Filling in the gaps’ is, of course, part of reading any text, not just Hellenistic ones, but it will not explain why the poet has chosen to write this poem in this way. To anticipate somewhat, ignorance, identity and recognition are central to the concerns of Idyll 25. At 162 ff Phyleus addresses Heracles first as ne?me and then as Fqyr (178), while asking him whether he is the person who killed the great Nemean lion, for Phyleus had heard an account of this deed from someone who was unable accurately to identify the hero in question. Phyleus thinks he remembers that 33 Cf. Fuhrer (1992: 71 – 5, 121 – 5); Bing (1995: 123 – 4). 34 For Idyll 25 cf. Zanker (1996), who offers a valuable account of the poem’s pictorialism. Epigrams (cf. Bing [1995]) obviously offer a special case, but they too, I think, appeal to our desire to speculate, to make up our own stories, rather than to any simple process of ‘supplementation’, cf. Hunter (1992: 114).

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the informant identified the hero as a descendant of Perseus (Alcmene’s grandfather). Heracles admits that he indeed was the slayer of the lion, for ‘this was the first task laid on me by Eurystheus’ (204 – 5). There is nothing here which makes the inference that Phyleus does not know Heracles’ name inevitable;35 it is, however, not a question of whether or not it is possible to address someone, whose name you know, as ‘friend’ or ‘hero’, or of which reconstruction of the Augeias story best fits this exchange,36 but of why the poet gives Phyleus these forms of address. Heracles’ simple reference to Eurystheus and the %ehka which he has been commanded to perform can indeed be understood by a reader who has ‘filled in the gaps’, but it – and many other such features of the poem – must rather be seen in the context of the traditional epic concern with kleos. Whereas Odysseus comes to the court of Alcinous, to the hut of Eumaeus, and to his own palace ‘in disguise’, that is in clothes which are not his own, and is not recognised, in Idyll 25 Heracles is outfitted in the manner which proclaims his identity at all periods (‘lionskin and massive club’, 63), and yet he too is not recognised. What price then kleos or, rather, when does kleos begin? Idyll 25 confronts us with a world in which no one has ever heard of Heracles, and in which Heracles himself seems unclear of certain familiar ‘facts’ of his life. Thus, for example, the hero’s ignorance of the origin of the Nemean lion (197 – 200) may, with Gow, be put down to the variety of traditions available to the poet, although in the context of Heracles’ labours the predominant tradition, namely that Hera was responsible for it, as in Callimachus (fr. 55 = SH 267), cannot be far away; Heracles’ description of the lion in 199 ( !mdq\si p/la) seems indeed to echo Hesiod’s statement of Hera’s responsibility (p/l’ !mhq~poir, Th. 329). So too, the rustic’s observation that Heracles’ arrival is due ‘to the planning of some god’ (52) says more to us than it does to the characters, but more is at stake here than the ironies created by characters with partial knowledge and readers who ‘fill in the gaps’. The poet has chosen to present the story of the labours in a way which is related to a familiar technique of Hellenistic poetry: we are pushed back ‘before kleos’, here not to witness the youth of a famous literary character (e. g. the ‘early history’ of the Cyclops in Idyll 11),37 but rather to observe Hera35 Cf. Gow on 162, 173. 36 Cf. Zanker (1996: 419). 37 Cf. in general Barchiesi (1993).

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cles before poetic story-telling has gone to work on him and when the meaning of the labours on which he is engaged is quite obscure. In such circumstances, it might be unwise to enquire whether we are supposed to imagine that the killing of his children has already taken place. The elaborate play in the poem with Heracles’ identity and whether and at what stage it is revealed may be seen as reinforcing this concern to create a world ‘before kleos’. The poet ‘teases’ us with our expectation that, at some stage, Heracles will utter the equivalent of ‘I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known to all men for my guile, and my kleos reaches heaven’ (Od. 9.19 – 20), but Heracles himself does not yet know, or at least understand, his own identity (50 is again important here); for all the characters in the poem he remains ‘utterly nameless’, as the Homeric Alcinous asserted that no man could be (Od. 8.552). A similar irony pervades another poem of the corpus in which ‘half-gods’ confront mortals, namely Idyll 22,38 but the narrative concerns of that poem are rather different. To what extent the idea of a ‘world without kleos’ is connected with the unusual form of Idyll 25 will be considered presently.39 It is not merely in the links between the three sections that the poet’s concern with variety and contrast is visible, but also in the nature and subject of the ‘scenes’.40 In the first, Heracles asks questions and receives a long and full answer; in the second, there is no direct speech, and the third is largely a narrative by Heracles himself, who takes over the role of epic poet, similes and all. Each of the three scenes ends with a confrontation between Heracles and animals – first dogs, who might have come off second best in a confrontation with ‘Heracles, son of Amphitryon’ (71), whereas their Homeric relatives would have done dreadful things to Odysseus (Od. 14.32), then a marvellous bull, and finally a truly epic lion. The obvious crescendo of the sequence is another sign of the poet’s concern with similarity and difference.41 So too, the re-writing of Homer, particularly in the first two sections, points in the same direction. In the opening section it is Odyssey 14, Odysseus’ meeting with Eumaeus, which is particularly important; structural similarities to Od. 6 – 8, however, also prepare for Heracles’ narration, just

38 39 40 41

Cf. Hunter (1996: 63 – 73). Cf. below p. 307 – 8. Cf., e. g., Sanchez-Wildberger (1955: 21 – 4). Cf. the appreciation by Herter (1975: 461 – 2).

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as Od. 6 – 8 prepare for Odysseus’ narration.42 In the second section, although the subject is ‘cattle of Helios’, it is the Iliadic manner which predominates. Whoever bestowed the title 9pip~kgsir realised the importance of Iliad 4,43 and beyond Agamemnon’s ‘review’ of his troops, it is the similes of Iliad 4 which are of particular importance. At 4.274 – 9 the mass of armed men around the Ajaxes is compared to dark storm clouds, driven over the sea by the Zephyr,44 which cause a goatherd to bring his flocks under cover. In Idyll 25 it is the l/ka of cattle which come numerous as rain-clouds;45 as these cattle are to be, in one sense, Heracles’ ‘opponents’, the martial resonance of the Iliadic simile is appropriate. So too, at Il. 4.422 – 6 (which immediately follows the conclusion of the 1pip~kgsir proper) the movement of the Greek army into battle is compared to a vast wave crashing on the sea-shore.46 Whereas, however, Homer draws a contrast between the roaring breaker and the silence of the Greek advance (4.429 – 31), the poet of the Idyll suggests a contrast between the soundless sweep of clouds and the noise (lujghl|r) of the cattle. Here we may feel the influence of Il. 4.433 – 5 where the noise of the Trojans is compared to the ‘bleating of countless ewes in the yard of a very rich man, as they wait to be milked’. This typical Homeric simile, which moves beyond the world of war to that of peaceful pastoralism in order to characterise (presumably unfavourably) the Trojans as they await the Greek onslaught, is here expanded into a full ‘genre scene’ of bucolic activity (96 – 107). This expansion of what is subordinate in the Iliad, though of course more prominent in the Odyssey, will have to be accounted for in any assessment of the poem. Before turning to consider the unusual form of the poem, it may be worth attempting a brief characterisation of the overall impression made by it. Like the movement of the cattle, the narrative seems leisurely: 42 Full discussion in Kurz (1982: 1747); for the use of Homer in Idyll 25 cf. also Frohn (1908). 43 For this cf. Kurz (1982: 35 – 6). On this title cf. further below p. 306. 44 Given the appearance of the Zephyr here and at 4.423 (cf. below p. 124), it may be significant that 91 lists only the south and north winds: deliberate avoidance? 45 1kaum|lema in 90 is perhaps a word more appropriate to flocks (cf. 16.36), which has here ‘trespassed’ into the simile. For the notion of ‘trespass’ in general cf. Lyne (1989: esp. 92 – 9). 46 joq}ssetai is shared by the Iliad (4.424) and the Idyll (94), but it is common enough to make conclusions difficult. So too, it might be tempting to associate 115 – 7 with Il. 4.429 – 30, but little seems to hang upon this.

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there is plenty of time to talk, and even Heracles is not merely modest and gentlemanly, but positively loquacious. This expansiveness matches the vastness of Augeias’ estates. Augeias’ careful concern for his people and his property seems to foreshadow the virtue of the grandees of the Greek novel, such as Dionysios in Chariton’s Callirhoe and Dionysophanes in Daphnis and Chloe, both of whom pay visits to their country estates to ensure that everything is in order. Heracles too assumes that Augeias is a ‘good king’, almost on the Hesiodic model:47 eQ d’ d l³m #q jat± %stu l]mei paq± oXsi pok_tair d^lou jgd|lemor, di± d³ jq_mousi h]listar

(45 – 6)

But if he abides in the town among his burghers caring for his people, and they are giving judgements there … (trans. Gow)

The herds which Augeias’ father, Helios, had given to him go one better than their Homeric relatives which neither increased nor – until Odysseus’ men came along – decreased in size (Od. 12.127 – 33); Augeias’ herds constantly increase (118 – 25). The small scale of Eumaeus’ well-ordered pigsty and of the Cyclops’ sheep pens48 becomes a pastoral operation on a truly ‘epic’ scale. At one level, it is obviously tempting to see some reflection of Hellenistic reality; whether or not such considerations could assist with dating the poem may be left as an important, but perhaps unanswerable, question. Although on mainland Greece the rise of very large mixed estates – of the kind suggested by the rustic’s description in 8 – 33 – seems, on our present (very limited) evidence, to have been a phenomenon of the late Hellenistic and Roman periods, there are some indications of a tendency towards larger individual landholdings in the early Hellenistic period also.49 If it is correct to see a sophisticated interplay between ‘epic time’ and modern reality,50 then this too will be seen to fit what emerge as the central concerns of the poem.

47 Cf. Gow and Chryssafis ad loc. The difficulties of the text do not really affect interpretation here. 48 Cf. Kurz (1982: 33 – 4). All of Od. 9.219 – 22 is relevant to 12 and 97 – 8. 49 Cf. Alcock (1993). 50 Relevant here is the possibility that 183 – 5 amusingly allude to the absence of ‘lions’ from the Hellenistic Peloponnese, cf., e. g., Legrand (1927: 69); Beckby ad loc. Legrand (1927: 67 – 71) offers a sensitive general appreciation of the poem.

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In order to understand the place of Idyll 25 within the development of post-classical literature, it will be necessary to move beyond strictly ‘narrative’ poems. Lycophron’s Alexandra begins with a ‘dramatic’ version of the exchange (answer to a question) which, in its epic version, begins Idyll 25: k]ny t± p\mta mgtqej_r, û l’ Rstoqe?r !qw/r !p’ %jqar . Cm d³ lgjumh/i k|cor, s}ccmyhi d]spot’ ·

I shall tell truly everything you ask, from the very beginning; if my tale stretches out, forgive me, master.

As Idyll 25 ‘presupposes’ a speech by Heracles, so the Alexandra ‘presupposes’ questioning by the king. The Alexandra offers a familiar tragic form, the messenger-speech, extended to the length of an independent tragedy; the subject-matter of the poem is ‘epic’ in both scale and inspiration, as also is the monologic form, although complicated by the presence of two voices.51 To what extent the form of the Alexandra exploits a perceived affinity between epic and the tragic messenger-speech we do not know enough to say, but it seems reasonable to suppose that it is not only modern scholars who have explicitly drawn the connection;52 if tragedy as a whole indeed developed from epic, as at least one important branch of ancient scholarship argued, then Lycophron has collapsed tragedy back to its origins. At one level, then, the Alexandra recreates the birth of the tragic genre. At the same time, however, it is also the text of an elaborate, secondary ‘performance’, which presupposes the existence of ‘classical’ texts; central to this construction is the very Hellenistic practice of ‘anthologising’, i. e. copying and/or performing bits of plays, in particular ‘star turns’, rather than whole texts.53 This practice is clearly related to the rhapsodic recitation of epic, to which I shall shortly turn, but what is important in the present context is that the Alexandra suggests both a proto-generic form and a contemporary deconstruction or fragmentation of that form; or, perhaps better, it suggests that the two are identical. The poem’s sense of generic

51 A particularly enlightening discussion is Fusillo (1984). 52 For the ‘epic’ omission of the augment in tragic messenger-speeches cf. Page on E. Med. 1141. 53 Cf. Gentili (1979).

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form is, at any rate, very much a historical sense. As such, its generic concerns will be seen to resemble those of Idyll 25. Another text which may shed light on these developments is the Megara, a poem which seems to have travelled with Idyll 25 in the course of transmission and which has in the past often been claimed to be the work of the same poet.54 This hexameter conversation between Heracles’ wife and his mother has clear links with the epic tradition, but it is drama which seems to have been the determinative influence on the form of the poem. The combination of an opening in medias res with an enquiry about what is distressing Alcmene (cf. E. IA 34 ff, Men. Heros 1 ff, Plaut. Pseud. 1 ff) and a conclusion with a disturbing dream which forebodes ill suggests the suspenseful opening of a drama (cf. perhaps E. IT). Like the poet of Idyll 25, the Megara-poet plays with the identity of the characters in a manner which evokes the mimesis of drama, rather than the diegesis of narrative.55 If the character of Megara seems to owe a debt to Sophocles’ Deianira,56 it is rather the Sophoclean models which all but certainly lie behind the very similar interview of Medea and Chalciope in Argonautica 3.673 – 741 that may have been decisive. The Megara-poet is no less interested than the Apollonius of Book 3 in the boundaries of drama and epic, and here too the practice of ‘anthologising’ may well have been a crucial influence. Whereas the Alexandra is a dramatic form on an epic scale, the Megara presents an epic form reduced to the scale of a scene from drama. This is less a ‘mixing of genres’ than an exploration of their relationship and history. In turning back to Idyll 25, it will be clear that, whereas this poem stays closer than either the Alexandra or the Megara to the epic tradition, its form may exploit the possibilities of scenic organisation which are a fundamental property of drama rather than epic. This seems a necessary gloss, particularly with regard to the opening of the poem, upon what has been a common (and otherwise helpful) approach to the Idyll’s

54 Good doxography in Breitenstein (1966: 13 – 20); for the transmission of the Megara cf. Vaughn (1976: 11 – 20), adding now P.Oxy. 4431. 55 Cf. Perrotta (1923: 216 – 18). Note 1 (‘mother’, but she is really ‘mother-inlaw’); 4 (‘your glorious son endures countless griefs’); 5 (‘like a lion … ’, cf. Theoc. 13.62 of Heracles); 11 (‘no one is more cursed by fate’); 13 (‘the bow …’); 15 – 16, the killing of the children. 17 – 20 (‘With my own eyes I saw …’) may also allude to dramatic presentations of the myth. 56 Cf. esp. 41 – 5 with S. Tr. 31 – 5 (from the prologue).

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structure through the model of rhapsodic recitation.57 Thus as Homer’s Demodocus sings a particular ‘extract’ from a larger narrative continuum, so Idyll 25 would offer us three samplers from a large whole. This model may, however, lead us in a rather different direction from that in which it is normally taken. At a general level, the introduction to Demodocus’ song of the wooden horse does resemble the way some Hellenistic narratives begin: va?me d’ !oid^m, 5mhem 2k½m ¢r oR l³m 1uss]klym 1p· mg_m b\mter !p]pkeom, pOq 1m jkis_gisi bak|mter, )qce?oi, to· d’ Edg !cajkut¹m !lv’ idus/a jtk.

(Od. 8.499 – 502)

[The bard] began his utterance of the lay, taking it up where the Argives had set their huts aflame, had boarded their ships and were under sail already, while the few left behind with great Odysseus … (trans. Shewring)

‘The Greeks had gone away, but Odysseus’ men [who will be the subject of the narration] … ’ offers a very brief contextualisation followed by the subject of the narrative proper; such a technique clearly foreshadows later developments.58 We may perhaps compare Theoc. 22.137 – 40 (the start of the Castor narrative), which in turn is not unlike the way in which the third ‘scene’ of Idyll 25 begins. A conscious alignment with (and not merely historical development from) the rhapsodic tradition may, therefore, be an important element in the development of (relatively) short hexameter poems, not merely in terms of how narratives begin and end, but also in the apparent lack of concern with a central ‘epic’ event.59 I shall return to this point. Secondly, the title 9pip~kg57 Cf., e. g., the introduction to the poem in the edition of Fritzsche-Hiller (1881); Wilamowitz (1906: 222). 58 Some Homeric book-openings themselves are suggestive in this context; Iliad 22 is a good example: ‘So the Trojans in terror … but the Greeks …’. No less interesting for the history of the ‘epyllion’ is the progress of Demodocus’ song. Trojan deliberations as to what to do with the horse are handled at some length (8.504 – 13), whereas once the Greeks ‘pour forth from the horse’ the sack of the city hurries to completion (8.514 – 20). It is hard not to be reminded of, say, the expansive treatment by Moschus of Europa’s abduction, followed by the swift conclusion once Zeus reveals himself. Homer’s 5mhem 2k~m reappears in Callimachean narrative as %qwlemor ¢r (frr. 7.25, 75.56 – with the irony that Xenomedes really did begin at the beginning, h. 3.4). 59 Cf. the remarks of Wilamowitz (1903: 102 – 3), and further below p. 306 – 7.

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sir, as a designation for part of Iliad 4 (presumably 223 – 421), probably has its origins in the rhapsodic tradition (despite the fact that the first attestations for it are relatively late),60 and whoever introduced it into the tradition of Idyll 25 may have had these origins in mind. It is not impossible that Jqajk/r pq¹r !cqo?jom is intended also to evoke the ‘rhapsodic’ titles of Homeric episodes; these vary somewhat in form (they may describe an event or a location), and no canonical title for the meeting of Odysseus and Eumaeus is known.61 It is no argument against this ‘rhapsodic’ interpretation that the beginning of each section and the end of the second resemble Homeric book-divisions.62 Many, though not all, of what became the standard book-divisions will have been familiar as places ‘to start and stop’ long before they became a fixed part of textual tradition. We cannot, unfortunately, say anything certain about the divisions of the Homeric poems with which the poet of Idyll 25 was familiar. Nevertheless, the simple ‘rhapsodic’ interpretation of Idyll 25 cannot, as we have seen, be the whole answer; rather, we must look both to the ‘dramatic’ developments traced above and to broad tendencies in the history of Hellenistic narrative. The life of Heracles was an obvious subject for epic narration (cf. Arist., Po. 1451a16 ff).63 The two best known archaic poems on Heracles were those of Peisander of Rhodian Kameiros and of Panyassis of Halicarnassus. Peisander (7th-6th cent.?),64 who is celebrated in an epigram of Theocritus (22 Gow), is said to have written a Herakleia in two books; Panyassis (early 5th cent.) wrote a Herakleis in some 9000 verses and fourteen books, and we know that he treated the Nemean lion, traditionally – as in Idyll 25 – the first labour, in his first book.65 The story of the labours lent itself readily to ‘cyclic’ treatment and we can hardly doubt that there was a rich tradition of such poems, now largely lost to us; it seems likely, for example, that Idyll 25 and the Coan epic Meropis 60 Strabo 9.1.10, Plu. Mor. 29a. It is not in the list of such titles at Ael. VH 13.14. On these titles cf. Capone (1939). 61 Gow derives the title from iduss]yr pq¹r Eulaiom blik_a, a title for Odyssey 14 found in MSS, but without (as far as I am aware) ancient authority; Eustathius and the scholia preserve light variations on a similar theme. 62 Cf. above p. 295. For the various arguments about the date of the Homeric book-divisions cf., e. g., Alpers (1975: 116); West (1967: 18 – 25); Taplin (1992: 285 – 6). 63 Cf. the testimonia gathered by Davies (1988: 142 – 3); Bond on E. HF 359 ff. 64 Cf. Davies (1988: 129 – 35); Huxley (1969: 99 – 112). 65 Cf. Matthews (1974: 21 – 6).

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(SH 903A) shared at least one common source account of the battle with the Nemean lion.66 From the later third century we know of a fourteen-book Herakleia by Rhianus of Crete, but we know next to nothing of how he treated the subject. Aristotle singles out the poets of ‘Heracleids, Theseids, and such poems’ for unfavourable comparison with Homer because ‘they think that because Heracles was a single individual (eXr) the mythos [concerning him] ought also to be unitary (eXr)’ (Po. 1451a 20 – 2). For Aristotle, of course, ‘oneness’ in a tragic, and probably also an epic, mythos implied the mimesis of a single praxis in which the individual events followed each other by a close causal nexus of necessity or probability.67 Idyll 25 gestures towards a praxis — the cleaning of the Augean stables – but offers us none. A labour (the Nemean lion) is indeed narrated, but within the context of another story. The cyclic ab ouo mode is thereby both suggested and rejected. As the opening verse assumes prior narration, and not merely the existence of antefatti,68 the relation of the ‘unity’ of the text to the ‘unity’ of the mythos it tells becomes a central issue of interpretation; in the light of similar phenomena seen in other texts of the Hellenistic period, I am more inclined to see here the concerns of a poet than the accidents of textual transmission. I have considered elsewhere the possibility that certain forms of Hellenistic narrative were in part a response to Aristotelian ideas of unity.69 Whether there is any truth in this or not, Idyll 25 certainly offers a ‘oneness’ of some kind. Heracles occurs in all three ‘scenes’, Augeias is named in two and appears in one, Phyleus is named in one and appears in two; the poem apparently begins with Heracles’ arrival at Augeias’ estate and ends with his departure; the crescendo of animal challenges clearly invites a ‘unified’ reading. Nevertheless, this poem has no real praxis; its silences are deafening. It offers us not (merely) the break-up of literary ‘epic’ into constituent parts on the rhapsodic (or ‘anthologising’) model, but also (I would suggest) ‘pre-epic’, a form in which the silences wait for b poigt^r to fill them.70 Like the Alexandra, its generic 66 67 68 69

Cf. Henrichs (1977). Cf. Hunter (1993: 192). Cf. Giangrande (1969: 150). Cf. Hunter (1993: 190 – 5). That the Aitia prologue has nothing to do with such ideas has been argued by Asper (1994); my own view is unchanged. Cf. further Cameron (1995: 343 – 5). 70 Duchemin (1963) interprets the story of the poem as ‘pre-Homeric’ in a quite different way.

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consciousness is historical.71 As with the play with Heracles’ identity, we are offered a world before kleos or, rather, before jk]a !mdq_m. The Hellenistic fondness for childhood and beginnings has now been extended to generic form.72

Bibliography Alcock, S.E. 1993. Graecia Capta. The Landscapes of Roman Greece. Cambridge Alpers, K. 1975. “Review of: L.W. Daly. Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Liddle Ages. Brussels. 1967”. Gnomon 47, 113 – 7 Asper, M. 1997. Onomata Allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos. Stuttgart Barchiesi, A. 1993. “Future reflexive: two modes of allusion and Ovid’s Heroides”. HSCP 95, 333 – 65 Bing, P. 1995. “Ergänzungsspiel in the Epigrams of Callimachus”. A&A 41, 115 – 31 Bizzarro, F.C. 1979. “Elementi callimachei e teocritei in [Theoc.] XXV”. RendAccArchNapoli 54, 319 – 31 Breitenstein, T. 1966. Recherches sur le pome Mgara. Copenhagen Cameron, A. 1995. Callimachus and his Critics. Princeton Campbell, D.A. 1967. Greek Lyric Poetry. London Capone, G. 1939. L’ Omero alessandrino. Padua Davies, M. 1988. Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Göttingen Davison, J.A. 1955. “Peisistratus and Homer”. TAPA 86, 1 – 21 Duchemin, J. 1963. “A propos de l’Héraclès tueur de lion”. In: Miscellanea di Studi Alessandrini in memoria di Augusto Rostagni. Turin, 311 – 21 Feeney, D.C. 1986 “Following after Hercules, in Virgil and Apollonius”. PVS 18, 47 – 85 Fowler, D. 1989. “First thoughts on closure: problems and prospects”. MD 22, 75 – 122 Fritzsche, H. and Hiller, E. 1881. Theokrits Gedichte. 3rd ed. Leipzig Frohn, E. 1908. De carmine XXV Theocriteo quaestiones selectae. Diss. Halle Fuhrer, T. 1992. Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Chorlyrikern in den Epinikien des Kallimachos. Basel/Kassel 71 It is very tempting to associate this with the belief that, after Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey were preserved by rhapsodes in ‘scattered’ or ‘broken’ form, until put back together again at the behest of Peisistratus; for the evidence cf. Merkelbach (1952: 43 – 7). Merkelbach would date this theory as early as the fourth century, though few have been inclined to follow him (cf. Davison 1955); for recent discussion cf. Nagy (1996a: 69 – 71), (1996b: 65 – 112). 72 I am grateful to Marco Fantuzzi for his comments on an earlier draft, and to the participants in the Groningen Workshop for a stimulating discussion.

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Fusillo, M. 1984. “L’Alessandra di Licofrone: racconto epico e discorso ‘drammatico’”. ASNP 14.2, 495 – 525 Gallavotti, C. 1993. Theocritus quique feruntur Bucolici Graeci. 3rd ed. Rome Giangrande, G. 1969. “Review of: E. Livrea (ed.). Colluthus. II ratto di Elena. Bologna. 1968”. JHS 89, 149 – 54 Gentili, B. 1979. Theatrical Performances in the Ancient World. Amsterdam Gow, A.S.F. 1943. “GQAJKGS KEOMTOVOMOS (Theocr. Id. XXV)”. CQ 37, 93 – 100 — 1952. Theocritus. 2nd ed., Cambridge Gutzwiller, J. J. 1981. Studies in the Hellenistic Epyllion. Königstein Henrichs, A. 1977. “Zur Meropis: Herakles’ Löwenfell und Athenas zweite Haut”. ZPE 27, 69 – 75 Herter, H. 1975. Kleine Schriften. München Hunter, R.L. 1992. “Callimachus and Heraclitus”. MD 28: 113 – 23 [= this volume 115 – 26] — 1993. The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies. Cambridge — 1996. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge Huxley, G.L. 1969. Greek Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis. London Jacobsen, H. 1983. The Exagoge of Ezekiel. Cambridge Kroll, J. 1936. Theognis-Interpretationen (Philologus Suppl. 29). Leipzig Kurz, A. 1982. Le Corpus Theocriteum et Homre. Un problme d’authenticit. Bern/ Frankfurt Legrand, P. 1898. tude sur Thocrite. Paris — 1927. Bucoliques Grecs, II. Paris Linforth, I.M. 1947. “Theocritus XXV”. TAPhA 78, 77 – 87 Lyne, R.O.A.M. 1989. Words and the Poet. Oxford McKeown, J.C. 1987. Ovid: Amores, Vol. I. Liverpool Matthews, V.J. 1974. Panyassis of Halicarnassos. Leiden Merkelbach, R. 1952. “Die pisistratische Redaktion der homerischen Gedichte”. RhM 95, 23 – 47 Nagy, G. 1996a. Poetry as Performance. Cambridge — 1996b. Homeric Questions. Austin Parsons, P.J. 1977 “Callimachus: Victoria Berenices”. ZPE 25,1 – 50 Perrotta, G. 1923. “Arte e tecnica nell’epillio alessandrino”. A&R 4, 213 – 29 (= Scritti minori II 34 – 53) — 1926. “Teocrito e il poeta dell’ Jqajk/r keomtov|mor”. SIFC 4, 217 – 80 (= Scritti minori II 325 – 87) Powell, J.U. 1925. Collectanea Alexandrina. Oxford Sanchez-Wildberger, M. 1955. Theokrit-Interpretationen. Diss. Zürich Smith, B.H. 1968. Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End. Chicago Svennson, A. 1937. Der Gebrauch des bestimmten Artikels in der nachklassischen griechischen Epik. Lund Taplin, O. 1992. Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad. Oxford Torraca, L. 1971. Epillio di Diomede, in appendice, Idillio XXV Pseudo-Teocrito. Naples Vaughn, J.W. 1976. The Megara (Moschus IV). Bern/Stuttgart West, S. 1967. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer. Cologne/Opladen

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Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. 1903. Timotheos. Die Perser. Leipzig — 1906. Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker. Berlin — 1907. Berliner Klassikertexte V.1. Berlin Zanker, G. 1996. “Pictorial description as a supplement for narrative: the labour of Augeas’ stables in Heracles Leontophonos”. AJP 117, 411 – 23.

Addendum A shorter version of this essay appeared in Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 210 – 15.

18. (B)ionic man: Callimachus’ iambic programme* A concern with the methods and style of praise and blame recurs, unsurprisingly, throughout Callimachus’ Iambi. The iambos is the aggressive mode par excellence, and Callimachus is the most generically-conscious of poets; whether he is writing hymns, aetiological elegy or funerary epigram he is always overtly engaged with the history and development of the literary form in which he operates. The nature of iambic poetry is, however, the explicit subject of two poems in particular, Iambus 1 and Iambus 13, which thus have a special claim to be considered ‘programmatic’. The thirteenth Iambus returns to the choliambic metre of the first four poems, the metre most associated with Hipponax, who appears himself in the first Iambus as the authorising ‘voice’ for these poems, and is apparently spoken in the voice of the poet who to some extent takes up again the themes of Iambus 1 (and indeed of Aitia fr. 1); thus the temptation to see a “closed” poetry book, framed by these two poems, is very strong. Whether or not we should resist this temptation, in view of the fact that the Diegesis marks no break after Iambus 13, but continues straight on with four further ‘lyric’ poems, as Horace wrote seventeen Epodes, has been much discussed;1 at the very least, one can say that it would show a suitably Callimachean disregard for ‘criticism’ to place the four most ‘atypical’ poems immediately after the poem in which he has claimed to be criticized for polyeideia. The issue has, of course, important implications not merely for Callimachus’ poetry, but also for our notions of Hellenistic poetry books – we might perhaps compare Herodas’ ‘programmatic’ eighth mimiambos which seems not to have closed a carefully arranged ‘poetry book’2 – but it is not my intention to pursue that subject here. Rather, I wish to look again at Iambi 1 and 13 to try to tease out the very Callimachean strategy which informs them.

* 1 2

Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 43 (1997) 41 – 52 Cameron (1995) 163 – 73 argues the case with great force, cf. also D’Alessio (1996) I 44 – 5, Fantuzzi (1993) 56 n. 62. Cf. Hunter (1993) 32 – 8 [= this volume 191 – 8].

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I. In vv. 1 – 19 of Iambus 13 we apparently hear the voice of a critic (here given the chance to speak directly, unlike the Telchines of fr. 1): [. out’] ]ysi sulle_nar out’ =vesom 1kh~m, Ftir 1sti. al.[ =vesom, fhem peq oR t± l]tqa l]kkomter t± wyk± t_jteim lµ !lah_r 1ma}omtai . !kk’ eU ti hul¹m C ’p. · cast]qa p. m. e. u. s. .[ eUt’ owm 1p. … !qwa?om eUt’ !pai..[ toOt’ 1lp]pkejtai ja· kakeus[ Yast· ja· Dyqist· ja· t¹ s}lleij[tom. teO l]wqi tokl÷ir ; oR v_koi se d^sousi jtk.

(fr. 203.11 – 19)

‘… neither having mixed with lonians nor gone to Ephesus, which is …, Ephesus, from where those who wish skilfully to give birth to limping verses draw the fire of inspiration. But if something [? fires] spirit or stomach, whether archaic or…, this is woven in and [?] they speak … Ionic and Doric and a mixture. What is the limit of your recklessness? Your friends will bind you up …’

The charge seems to be twofold. First, Callimachus has no right to attempt ‘Hipponactean’ choliambics because he has never even been to Ephesus; taken seriously, this charge might amount to the view that the choliambic ‘genre’ had a well-defined context which could not simply be moved wholesale to modern Alexandria. As we shall see, however, Callimachus is not one to let his ‘opponents’ talk sense. Secondly, Callimachus’ poems use ‘Ionic and Doric and a mixture’. The broken state of the text means that it is not entirely certain that this second charge relates specifically to the Iambi, but this seems in fact much the most likely interpretation. If this is correct, then either Callimachus is being accused of mixing up Ionic and Doric poems within the same poetry book or with mixing Ionic and Doric words in the same poem or both; !qwa?om in v.16 perhaps supports the second interpretation – Callimachus will ‘stick in’ a word, without regard to its obsolescence. Nevertheless, the first two alternatives are by no means quite distinct. Iambi 1 – 13 are in fact divided into poems written in Ionic (1 – 5, 8, 10, 12, 13) and in Doric (6,7,3 9, 11), and are moreover rather traditional in 3

The ‘Aeolic’ tinges in this poem hardly qualify it as ‘mixed’ (pace, e. g., Dawson [1950] 132); such tinges are a familiar feature of Hellenistic literary Doric, and

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their linkage of particular metrical ‘genres’ with particular dialects;4 what is ‘new’ is the grouping of Doric poems under the quintessentially Ionic heading of iambos. In fact, however, we ought not to take the critic’s charge too seriously. ‘Ionic’ and ‘Doric’ are chosen not merely as the two literary dialects in which the Iambi are actually written, but also as the two most prominent poetic languages, between them accounting for almost all of the tradition of high poetry, except for Sappho and Alcaeus; they are constructed as ‘opposites’, thus allowing a middle term (the ‘mixed’) to complete the verse. This pattern – ‘A or the opposite of A or something in the middle’ – is common and probably semi-proverbial,5 and its very familiarity allows us to sense that the critic’s outburst has few roots in reality: we will not need to be told who really is in need of tying up (v. 19). If the point is that some poems use both Ionic and Doric words or forms, or even ‘mixed’ forms, as for example do the Idylls of Theocritus, then ‘mixed’ may, on the surface, be an accurate description, but it ignores familiar facts of linguistic practice. Although our knowledge of third-century thinking about dialect is scanty indeed, it seems clear that individual poets would have been assigned to one dialect (Ionic, Doric, Aeolic); that poets used words or forms drawn from more than one dialect was well known and considered perfectly normal, but this did not alter the basic linguistic category in which a poet was classified.6 The use of, say, Aeolic forms in a Doric context did not render the poem linguistically ‘mixed’, except in a rather banal sense; if this is what ‘the critic’ means, then the ignorance of the utterance condemns itself. The link between the two charges is that of ‘authenticity’. However varied Hipponax’s poems actually were, they were all the product of a particular social context and were all written in Ionic. This seems to be what the Diegesis means when it tells us that Callimachus replied to the charge that he wrote ‘poems of many different kinds’ (pokueide_ai … poigl\tym); the charge is not that, during his life, he wrote in many ‘genres’, but that the iambi are polymorphous.7 The variety (pokueide_a)

4 5 6 7

may, as D’Alessio notes, have a particular resonance in a poem connected with Aeolic Ainos. Cf. Fantuzzi ( 1993) 47 – 8. Cf. Hunter on Eubulus fr. 7.1 (= 6.1 K-A). Cf. A. C. Cassio, ‘Parlate locali, dialetti delle stirpi e fonte letterarie nei grammatici greci’, in Dialectologica Graeca (1993) 73 – 90, esp. 77 – 8. Cf. Clayman (1980) 48 – 51, Gutzwiller (1996) 131 – 2, with further bibliography.

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of these poems may have been an attempt to produce a literary version of Hipponax’s own rich variety, but it was not ‘authentic’. As with the ‘Reply to the Telchines’, however, Callimachus has placed in the mouth of his ‘critics’ features of his poetry which he wishes to advertise: the recreation of archaic poetic forms should not be, as his ‘critics’ are made to suggest, the search for a ‘historical authenticity’ in which the resulting poems, written in conditions as near as possible to those of the original (i. e. by going to Ephesus to ‘give birth to lame verses’),8 would be fit for nothing other than a museum (as opposed to the Museum), but rather a flexible frame in which the various resources of the literary heritage could be used to produce a living poetry. The genres, whether defined by metre or subject, are not to be invoked to preclude imaginative composition. It is the genres, not the poems, which are the secondary and subordinate ‘invention’; whereas the genres are merely the result of scholarly convenience, poetry is the gift of Apollo and the Muses (cf. Iamb. 13.1). The argument has clear points of contact with the ‘Reply to the Telchines’. There Callimachus invokes Apollo’s blessing for a poetics which does not respect ‘tradition’ as narrowly understood: however we wish to interpret 4m %eisla digmej]r, it will designate, presumably with a good splash of Callimachean sarcasm, a literary style sanctioned by time-honoured practice. In the ‘Reply’, the old age which crushes the poet is, at one level, that consciousness of this traditional practice which threatens to hem his every move with qualification, deferral and doubt. On the other hand, the poet allows the Telchines to figure him as a child, because it is children who are free of literary and moral responsibility; when they tell Callimachus ‘to grow up’, what they mean is that he should adopt a poetics sanctioned by time and archaic practice, together with the moral seriousness that attends it. ‘Aged’ Callimachus, however, rejects both the poetics and the gravitas in favour of the ‘play’ of a child. So too, in Iambus 13 the critics demand a reproduction of the original performative context, a ‘going to Ephesus’, although poetry, as properly understood, is now possible only by a frank exploitation of the absence of that context.9 8

9

The repeated phrase is tinged with sarcasm; Pfeiffer connects it with the Amazons who deliberately maimed their male children and who were associated with Ephesus. I suggest that part at least of the resonance is again proverbial, cf. Archilochus’ bitter use of the proverb B j}ym spe}dousa tuvk± t_jtei in the ‘Cologne Epode’ (SLG 478.39 – 41). Cf. Depew (1992) 327 – 8, ‘The challenge to the contemporary poet, who … cannot possess the culture-specific authority to compose in traditional genres, is

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Callimachus’ direct answer to ‘the critics’ is preserved in part: t_r eWpem aut. [….]k. e..q.] s» pemt\letqa sumt_hei, s» d. ’ B. [q_io]m, s» d³ tqacyide. [ ?m] 1j he_m 1jkgq~sy ; doj]y l³m oqde_r jtk.

(fr. 203.30 – 3)

Who said … ‘You compose pentameters, and you hexameters, and your divinely allotted field is tragedy’? No one, I think…

As we would indeed expect, this does not really meet the charge; Callimachus’ answer is part tease, part history lesson. Such a strategy of obliquity is in keeping with the informal argumentative style of iambos, and may be directly compared, for example, with the teasing evasions of Horace’s Musa pedestris, when charged with moral levity (Sat. 1.4.33 – 65). As to the answer itself, it is true that the phenomenon of poets writing in many different ‘genres’ was much more common in the late fourth and third centuries than in earlier periods: Timon of Phlius is reported to have written ‘epic poems, 60 tragedies, satyr plays, 30 comedies, silloi and cinaedic verses, “when he took time off from philosophy”’ (Diog. Laert. 9.110). Nevertheless, not even the most obtuse and archaizing ‘literary critic’ would have been surprised by the notion that the same poet could write elegiacs and hexameters; thus, antiquity believed that Homer wrote in more than one metre (cf. the Margites), and Sophocles wrote elegiacs.10 Callimachus has, of course, chosen his terms with care: ‘pentameters’ and ‘the heroic verse’ are much less generically exclusive than the following ‘tragedy’, and therefore prepare the way for it. The argument thus moves from the less to the more surprising claim, for the mention of tragedy evokes its ‘opposite’, comedy, and the absolute distinction between writers of these two forms, made famous by the Platonic Socrates at the end of the Symposium, seems only to possess sufficient t]wmg to recreate, self-consciously and fictionally, the conditions for their utterance … In these circumstances, why shouldn’t anyone who is sufficiently learned and skilled in representing the occasion-bound conditions of historicized genres be able to compose in any genre whatsoever?’. 10 Thus this passage of Callimachus should not be used to exaggerate ‘the strength and pervasiveness of the doctrine of fixity and its combination with the principle of metrical classification’ (D. M. Halperin, Before pastoral: Theocritus and the ancient tradition of bucolic poetry (1983) 202), though the importance of such a ‘doctrine’ as part of the intellectual context of Iambus 13 cannot be doubted.

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to have been somewhat weakened, never completely eradicated, in the Hellenistic period. That poets can (and did) write in different metres and ‘genres’ is, however, not an adequate answer to a charge of grouping together as ‘Hipponactean’ poems whose form was entirely non-Hipponactean. It may be, of course, that the broken state of the text causes us to lose the argument and that vv.30 ff. are not in fact part of the response to vv. 11 – 19; moreover, these verses avoid the matter of dialect entirely, and this too may have been pursued in the lost conclusion of the poem, although we will hardly expect the ‘iambic’ Callimachus to be concerned to produce a point-by-point rebuttal. Despite these uncertainties, an alternative, and perhaps more ‘Callimachean’ solution, presents itself. The Diegesis reports that in Iambus 13 Callimachus replied to those who criticized his polyeideia by claiming to imitate ‘Ion the tragic poet’; another ancient source (S Ar. Peace 835) tells us that Callimachus said that Ion wrote ‘many things’. Ion of Chios (second half of the fifth century) was indeed a very versatile writer; he is known, for example, to have written tragedies, elegies and lyric poems, as well as prose works of both a historical and a philosophical bent.11 It may be that the very broken vv. 43 – 9 preserve some of Callimachus’ reference to him. Ion would certainly serve as a counter-example to the proposition of vv. 30 – 2, but he would seem to contribute nothing to the question of the form of the book of Iambi. As for dialect, Ion wrote Ionic prose, but he will naturally have composed his poetic works in the dialect appropriate to each genre; we cannot say whether Ion was also adduced by Callimachus in the matter of poetic language. Nevertheless, it might be thought strange that Callimachus would align himself with a figure who, however prolific and however much he seems to us (and seemed to Callimachus?) to be a Hellenistic man ‘before his time’, certainly belonged to the second rank of classical literature; as an answer to his ‘critics’, the example of Ion is unlikely to have done Callimachus much good.12 It was, rather, the great figures of the past, such as Hesiod 11 Cf. K. J. Dover, ‘Ion of Chios: his place in the history of Greek literature’ in J. Boardman and C.E. Vaphopoulou-Richardson (eds.), Chios, A conference at the Homereion in Chios 1984 (1986) 27 – 37; A. von Blumenthal, Ion von Chios. Die Reste seiner Werke (1939). Baton of Sinope wrote a monograph on Ion in the second half of the third century. 12 This is not to say that Ion was not a respected figure (cf. Dawson [1950] 131), merely that he was not in the top league, and it is in that league where Callimachus usually plays. It is to be noted that ‘Longinus’ makes Ion his example of

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and Hipponax himself, to whom the poets of the third century constantly made appeal. It may be, of course, that Callimachus’ point was that a man of Chios could write in various genres which had particular local associations (e. g. tragedy with Athens), without having to spend time in those places, thus meeting the charge about ‘never having been to Ephesus’, but that must remain guesswork. A rather different guess, however, suggests another answer. To the charge of never having ‘mingled with the Ionians’ Callimachus replies with the example of Ion of Chios, a man who shared a name with the eponym of the Ionians. It is at least curious that the biographical tradition records that Ion of Chios was ‘the son of Orthomenes, but called son of Xouthos [the putative father of Ion, the eponymous hero of the Ionians]’;13 what precisely lies behind this curious tradition is unclear (a comic joke?), but it perhaps suggests that part of Callimachus’ suitably joking (i. e. iambic) answer to his ‘critic’ was an equivocation between the two Ions. What, he may have suggested, was good enough for ‘the founder of the Ionians’ was good enough for him. Some colour may be lent to this suggestion by the wellknown fact that vv. 30 – 2 seem to rework a passage of Plato’s Ion in which Socrates is arguing that poets do not compose ‘by techne’ but by divine inspiration: ‘Because poets do not compose by techne and it is not by techne that they can say so many wonderful things about matters, as you can about Homer, but rather by a divine apportionment, each one can only compose well that towards which the Muse has directed him; so one man writes dithyrambs, another encomia, another hyporchemata, another hexameters, another iambics, and each of them is no good in the other kinds. This is because they are not speaking by techne but by a divine force, since, if through techne they knew how to speak well about one thing, they would be able to do so also about everything else …’ (Pl. Ion 534b7-c7)

Socrates’ argument is, of course, deliberately tendentious in its elision of the difference between poets and rhapsodes, but its falsity to known ‘literary history’ recalls Iambus 13; one need only look to Pindar to find a counter-example to Socrates’ allegation. The immediately preceding a ‘flawless’ but non-sublime tragedian, like Apollonius in epic and Bacchylides in lyric (De subl. 33.5), and it would not be unfair to see these writers as ‘Callimachean’ in ‘Longinus’ academic scheme (cf. Ovid, Am. 1.15.14 on Callimachus, quamuis ingenio non ualet, arte valet); Callimachus’ championing of him in Iambus 13 may have helped mould this later tradition, but it in turn cannot help us to understand Iambus 13. 13 Harpocration s.v. Ion, Suda i 487.

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passage of the Ion (‘for the poet is a light and winged and holy thing …’) is evoked in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’, which is one further feature that these two ‘programme’ poems share.14 A Socratic ‘persona’ for Callimachus, and particularly one marked by irony and tendentious argument, would, as we shall see, find its parallel in Iambus 1. Be that as it may, it is perhaps not very surprising that the later scholarly tradition occasionally had trouble in keeping Plato’s Ion and Ion of Chios separate,15 but we must at least consider the possibility that Callimachus has somehow run three different Ions together – the eponym of the Ionians, Ion of Chios and the Platonic character (evoked by the echo of Plato’s work). This would give particular point to the repetition (v. 64) of ‘mixing with the Ionians [the Ions ?]’ at the conclusion of a poem which can only have left any real ‘critics’ spluttering. Callimachus, however, has important patrons. The poem begins with the Muses and Apollo, and concludes with a rite conducted at the site of Apollo’s birth at Delos. Apollo was the father of the legendary Ion and founder and protector of Cyrene, Callimachus’ home city, just as Ephesus was not merely the home of Hipponax, but also site of the most famous cult of Apollo’s sister, Artemis (cf. h. 3.237 – 58). ‘Ionic’ [i.e. Callimachean] poetry thus has their special favour. It may be relevant that at the conclusion of the programmatic eighth mimiambos Herodas seems to establish himself as taking second place after Hipponax in singing choliambic verses ‘to the descendants of Xouthos [i.e. the Ionians]’; that poem too evokes the disputes of Alexandrian scholars, and many critics have wanted to see a direct link between it and Callimachus’ first and/or thirteenth iambus. Be that as it may, it may be worth entertaining the possibility that material in Hipponax about ‘the father of Ion/the Ionians’ has given rise both to Herodas’ proud declaration and to Callimachus’ rather more provocative claims. At this point, however, speculation has certainly gone too far.

II. If part of our difficulty in appreciating Iambus 13, apart from the wretched state of the text, is the problem of tone and irony, then this is merely a striking illustration of the fact that such problems of voice were clearly 14 Cf. Hunter (1989). 15 Cf. Ion, Test. 3 and 4 von Blumenthal.

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central to the whole book of Iambi. In the first poem the voice itself has a name, but the position from which it speaks is at first a puzzle.16 Hipponax returns from the dead and gathers ‘the philologoi’ (or perhaps ‘philosophoi’) together to listen to a tale.17 He claims that he comes ‘carrying an iambos which does not sing of the battle with Boupalos’ (the sculptor who, so later sources explain, committed suicide because of the ferocity of Hipponax’s poetic attacks upon him). The phrasing and enjambment, v]qym Ualbom oq l\wgm !e_domta j tµm Boup\keiom, is a clear provocation: the iambos is carried like a spear,18 but Callimachus/Hipponax is not ‘looking for a fight’, or rather not a fight with Boupalos, thus leaving the poet free to fight with anyone else. As an opening to a book of iambic poems, however, ‘Hipponax’s’ words seem to denote that Callimachus will offer us a poetic world which, though familiar, is profoundly changed, and part of our task as readers will be to measure the extent of that change and what it means.19 The tale which ‘Hipponax’ tells is a version of a famous story about the Seven Sages20 : on his death bed, Bathycles of Arcadia told one of his sons to give a fine gold cup which he owned to the best of the Seven 16 Iambus 1 has a large (and ever increasing) bibliography; Vox (1995) lists many of the most recent studies, and cf. A.-T. Cozzoli, ‘Il I Giambo e il nuovo Qalb_feim di Callimaco’, Eikasmos 7 (1996) 129 – 47. I have not thought it necessary to catalogue my every agreement and disagreement with this literature. 17 For the alternate readings in the papyrus cf. Pfeiffer I 163. Bing (1988) 66 sees the scholars’ excitement as the result of scholarly interest in the return of a famous poet. Perhaps, but it is not unlikely that Hipponax offered some bribe, whether material or intellectual (e. g. the answer to a famous puzzle) in the lost vv. 12 – 15. A joke at ‘scholarly high-mindedness’ would fit well in a poem with such clear affinities with comedy. On the vexed question of whether v. 1 is a citation from Hipponax himself cf. now Cavarzere (1996) 58 – 64. 18 I have wondered whether Callimachus wishes to evoke an ‘etymological’ connection between Ualbor and Q\pteim (cf. Hipponax, Test. 21d Degani) rather than the more familiar link with b\kkeim. Cf., perhaps, the use of mittere in Catullus 116. 19 These issues have obvious importance for the whole idea of what constitutes a genre, in which ideas of similarity and difference are bound to play a central role, cf. the discussion of this aspect of Iambus 1 by D. Konstan, ‘The dynamics of imitation: Callimachus’ first iambic’ in M. A. Harder et al. (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic poetry (Hellenistica Groningana III, Groningen 1998) 133 – 42. E. A. Schmidt, Notwehrdichtung. Modern Jambik von Chnier bis Borchardt (1990) 123 – 30, offers a Callimachus who really means what he appears to say. 20 Cf. Diog. Laert. 1.27 – 9 for some of the various versions. The story also appeared in the contemporary choliambs of Phoenix (fr. 4 Powell, cf. Cameron [1995] 173).

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Sages. His son travelled to Miletus and offered the cup to Thales, but Thales refused and told the young man to give it to Bias of Priene; in this way the cup passed around all seven until it returned to Thales for a second time. Thales then dedicated the cup to Apollo. Both the end of the poem and of the Diegesis are very broken, but it would seem that ‘Hipponax’ drew the (very un-Hipponactean) moral that the philologoi should adopt a similarly non-contentious spirit towards each other. As so often in Greek literature, then, a story from the Underworld is going to be (apparently) a moral tale about how we should live our lives. Callimachus’ principal source is said by Diogenes Laertius to have been Leandrios (or Maiandrios) of Miletus (Diog. Laert. 1.28 = FGrHist492 F18), but the story may at least have been mentioned in Hipponax’s own poetry. Fr. 63 West, in choliambs, would certainly fit a version of the story of the Sages: ja· L}sym, dm ªp|kkym !me?pem !mdq_m syvqom]statom p\mtym

and Myson, whom Apollo declared the most sophron of all men.

If this fragment does refer to the ‘Sages and the trophy’ story, then Callimachus’ Hipponax offers a different version of the story from that of the real Hipponax. Such a technique would be eminently Callimachean – we may compare how in the Aitia the ‘Hesiodic’ Callimachus provided a different genealogy for the Graces from that of Hesiod himself 21 – but it would also foreground issues of similarity and difference, which are to be so important in the poem.22 The story of Bathycles’ cup is a story of competition, both of competing Sages and competing versions, here told to a fiercely competitive group of ‘scholars’.23 Above all, it is a story of competing ‘wisdoms’; Bathycles’ son is to give the cup ‘to the best of the seven sophoi’ (Diegesis 6.9 – 10, p. 163 Pfeiffer).24 Whereas the scholars are currently exhibiting 21 Schol. Flor. 31 – 2 (= Pfeiffer I 13, Massimilla [1996] 76), Hes. Theog. 907 – 9. 22 For a sceptical survey of the arguments about Hipponax’s telling of the Sages’ story cf. E. Degani, Studi su Ipponatte (1984) 46 – 7. 23 Cf. A. Barchiesi. ‘Palingenre. Death, rebirth and Horatian iambos’, in M. Paschalis (ed.), Horace and Greek Lyric Poetry (Rethymnon 2002) 47 – 69; Barchiesi’s discussion, parts of which are summarized by Cavarzere (1996) 59 – 61, moves in a different but related direction to mine. 24 This perhaps adds colour to the original vikos|vour rather than vikok|cour of the Diegesis.

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phthonos (Diegesis 6.5), the Sages appear to act entirely without that (self-)destructive force, and Thales’ act in dedicating the cup to Apollo seems to mark the god’s approval of the Sages’ attitude. This complex of ideas — the judgement of sophia, the presence of phthonos, and the approval of Apollo — can hardly fail to call to mind other famous Callimachean ‘programmes’, notably the ‘Reply to the Telchines’ (fr. 1) and the conclusion of the Hymn to Apollo.25 Whereas the ‘Reply’ evoked a famous contest of sophia in the Underworld, the agon of Aristophanes’ Frogs, to provide a humorous structure for Callimachus’ opposition of two literary styles, Iambus 1 brings Hipponax back from the dead — itself a motif with strong comic resonance (cf. below) — to condemn the whole competitive business through the telling of a tale about another competition in sophia. Both the ‘Reply’ and the Hymn, however, suggest that it would be incautious to assume that the Diegesis provides an adequate account of the poem. In ‘Hipponax’s’ narrative the cup functions like the ‘apple of discord’ at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, but whereas the three beautiful goddesses proceeded to an ultimately destructive strife over who was ‘the most beautiful’, the Seven Sages reveal their wisdom precisely by refusing to claim the prize: the pursuit of vainglorious distinction is the opposite of true wisdom. This standard interpretation of the poem pays, however, too little attention to the particular mode of speech which the Sages use. Unfortunately, in what survives of the poem it is only Thales who speaks — and he indeed may have been the only Sage to use direct speech in the poem — but the large body of anecdote about the Sages, particularly Thales,26 shows them using a half-ironic and half-riddling mode in which the deep truth of what they say is for the listener to work out.27 The closest comparison here is with Socrates, who professed ignorance, but whose professions were notoriously regarded as ‘ironic’; moreover, the Platonic Socrates is constantly encouraging his interlocutors, particularly young men, to study with oth25 Cf. Cameron (1995) 145 – 6, who, however, considers only the relation with fr. 1. Cameron seems correct in rejecting the suggestion of D. L. Clayman, ZPE 74 (1988) 280, that the appearance of Hipponax is to be read as a kind of ‘parody’ of the ‘Somnium’ from the Aitia. 26 Cf. Diog. Laert. 1.35 – 7. For some interesting remarks on the ‘agonistic’ mode of the Sages, cf. R. P. Martin, ‘The seven sages as performers of wisdom’, in C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, Cultural Poetics in archaic Greece (1993) 108 – 28, esp. 120 on the cup of Bathycles. 27 There is a good example in Pittakos’ pithy advice in Callimachus, Epigram 1.

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ers, usually the sophists, for these were (doubtless) the ‘truly wise’. So too, the story of Bathycles’ cup is clearly an educative story for his son: it is the young man, as well as we ourselves, who is to interpret and therefore learn from the Sages’ behaviour. One story about Socrates seems to have particular relevance here. In Plato’s Apology Socrates tells the jurors how Chairephon asked the Delphic oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates and the oracle answered that no one was wiser (Apol. 21a). After many fruitless attempts to understand and disprove the oracle, Socrates concludes that Apollo must have meant that human wisdom is worthless, that Socrates’ wisdom lies precisely in his knowledge of his own ignorance, and that god alone is wise (Apol. 23a-b). Just so does Thales, after receiving the cup for the second time, dedicate it to Apollo. Socrates’ story, which is explicitly placed under the sign of spoudaiogeloion (Apol. 20d 4 – 5), could easily be misunderstood — the jurors’ react with h|qubor — and so could that of the Seven Sages. Whether or not the philologoi understood what was being said to them must remain a matter of conjecture; the picture of their malicious disputes which seems to emerge from the very broken vv. 78 ff perhaps suggests that Hipponax’s story did indeed act more like an ‘apple of discord’ than a bringer of harmony: after all, its interpretation gave the scholars one more thing to quarrel about, and ‘Hipponax’ was no longer there to be questioned. In apparently pleading for peaceful coexistence, Callimachus/Hipponax has in fact asserted his claim to primacy by borrowing the ironic mode of the traditions of Thales and Socrates. Passing round the cup is a test which few know how to pass: to claim the prize, to proclaim oneself worthy, is a now out-dated form of self-advertisement, one more associated with, say, the assertions of an Old Comedy parabasis than with the nuanced ironies of the Callimachean mode. To refuse to claim the prize is thus always a strategy, a moment of deferral rather than defeat, which is not to be confused with an indifference to kleos. When Thales dedicates the cup, he proclaims that he had received this !qist/iom ‘twice’ (vv. 76 – 7); as the memory of Bathycles’ act fades, Thales leaves future generations a memorial of his own greatness, to interpret as they will. Comedy, in fact, is never far away in Iambus 1. In charting a transition from an iambic mode of open aggression to a more understated, ironic mode, Callimachus would have found a parallel in the perceived history of Attic comedy, which too was often represented as having moved from an ‘iambic’ mode of unlimited licence and mockery to

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one which relied rather upon rp|moia and indirectness.28 Attic comedy thus clearly had an important influence upon Iambus 1. The raucous opening, the banter with the listeners, the appeal for silence29 and the promise of brevity are all reminiscent of the joking style of the Aristophanic or Plautine prologus, as well perhaps as of the famous fragment of Sousarion, traditionally the protos heuretes of comedy (PCG VII 664); Pfeiffer noted both the debt to comedy and the paratragic motif of return from the dead in the opening verses, and we may also compare the rushing crowd of scholars to the entry of an Aristophanic chorus.30 So too the description of Pythagoras and his luckless followers (vv. 59 – 63) is in spirit very like much of Aristophanes’ Clouds.31 This evocation of comedy is used to suggest a broad analogy for the changes in iambic style which Iambus 1 has in part offered. It is noteworthy that Horace also, when he came in Sat. 1.4 to plot the space of his Satires against the Lucilian tradition, evoked analogous developments in the history of comedy;32 it seems very likely that it was Callimachus’ first Iambus which showed him the way here.33 Moreover, Callimachus has written the ‘generic history’ of his own iambi, by tracing a descent from Hipponax to Attic comedy and on to his own poetry. As such, this

28 Cf. esp. Arist. Poetics 1449a-b, and the various treatises gathered in Koster’s edition of the comic prolegomena. There are many problems in the interpretation of the Aristotelian material, but it is, I hope, uncontroversial that there was at last one strand of criticism which saw the matter in terms of ‘development’, rather than simply in the existence of two parallel types of comedy. 29 For other aspects of this appeal cf. Falivene (1993) 921 – 4. 30 Cf. R. Kassel, RhM 101 (1958) 236 (= Kleine Schriften (Berlin/New York 1991) 398), Vox (1995) 276 – 7. 31 On this passage cf. H. Lloyd-Jones, CR 17 (1967) 125 – 7 (= Academic Papers II [1990] 128 – 30). 32 Cf. Hermes 113 (1985) 486 – 90. 33 Sat. 1.4.34 seems to echo v. 79 of the iambus, and Horace establishes himself at the beginning of the poem as a ‘Callimachus’ in his criticism of Lucilius’ ‘muddy flow’; so too, those against whom Horace warns are (inter alia) vhomeqo_, cf. vv. 81 – 5, 100 – 3. The aerugo mera of Sat. 1. 4. 101 seems to pick up the Greek Q|r used of both ‘poison’ and ‘rust’; Kiesling-Heinze cite Antisthenes fr. 82 Caizzi (apud Diog. Laert. 6.5) ‘as iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious (to»r vhomeqo}r) are eaten away by their own character’. Was Horace thinking of an etymology of Ualbor from Q¹m b\feim (S Hephaistion 215.1, 281.7 Consbruch; Hipponax, Test. 17a Degani)? The musa pedestris of the Satires is also central to the (ironical) claim in 1.4 that the sermones are not poetry; here again Callimachus’ pef¹r m|lor may have been decisive.

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programmatic poem shares in the constant concern of Hellenistic poetry to construct its own literary history.34 We do not, of course, have to take Callimachus/Hipponax’s protestations at face value; literary history is partly created within Hellenistic poetry in order to prove inadequate to explain the poems themselves. Here too the strategies of Iambus 1 and Iambus 13 (and Aitia fr. 1) are significantly similar: neat generic schematizations are the playthings of silly critics, not real poets. The juxtaposition of the querulous and rude Hipponax to the uplifting tale about Bathycles’ cup itself offers different ‘voices’ and holds out hopes that we are to hear both of these again; neither is cancelled out, and both are in fact authorized as ‘the voice of the poet’. The plea for non-contention appeals to a comic stress upon reconciliation and solidarity,35 but its effect may have been that of the divisive iambos. The promise not to sing ‘the battle with Boupalos’ leaves, as we have noted, other targets open, and there do indeed appear to have been such targets in subsequent poems. At one level, then, Iambus 1 does hold out the prospect of moving from an ‘iambic’ mode of attack against real and named persons to a ‘comic’ mode of more generalized satire (cf. Arist. Poetics 1451b 11 – 15) — this too is a hint upon which Horace elaborated in Satires 1.4 — but it makes no promises.36

Bibliography P. Bing, The well-read muse. Present and past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic poets (Göttingen 1988). A. Cameron, Callimachus and his critics (Princeton 1995). A. Cavarzere, Sul limitare. Il e la poesia di Orazio (Bologna 1996). D.L. Clayman, Callimachus’ Iambi (Leiden 1980). G.B. D’Alessio, Callimaco (Milan 1996). C.M. Dawson, ‘The Iambi of Callimachus. A Hellenistic poet’s experimental laboratory’, Yale Classical Studies 11 (1950) 1 – 168.

34 I have discussed various aspects of this phenomenon in ‘Before and after epic: Theocritus (?), Idyll 25’ in M.A. Harder et al. (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic poetry (Hellenistica Groningana III, Groningen 1998) 115 – 32 [= this volume 290 – 310]. 35 For this is a feature of comedy cf. S Eur. Or. 1691, Hunter (1983) 27 n. 1. 36 I am grateful to Alessandro Barchiesi, Philip Hardie and a seminar audience at Royal Holloway for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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M. Depew, ‘Qalbe?om jake?tai mOm : genre, occasion, and imitation in Callimachus, frr. 191 and 203Pf.’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992) 313 – 30. M.R. Falivene, ‘Callimaco serio-comico: il primo Giambo (fr. 191Pf.)’, in Tradizione e innovazione nella cultura greca da Omero all’ et ellenistica. Scritti in onore di Bruno Gentili III (Rome 1993) 911 – 25. K. Gutzwiller, ‘The evidence for Theocritean poetry books’, in M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker (eds.), Theocritus (Hellenistica Groningana II, Groningen 1996) 119 – 46. R.L. Hunter, Eubulus. The fragments (Cambridge 1983). — ‘Winged Callimachus’, Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 76 (1989)1 – 2 [= this volume 86 – 8]. — ‘The presentation of Herodas’ mimiamboi’, Antichthon 27 (1993) 31 – 44 [= this volume 189 – 205]. G. Massimilla, Callimaco. Aitia, libri primo e secundo (Pisa 1996). O. Vox, ‘Sul Giambo I di Callimaco’, Rudiae 7 (1995) 275 – 87.

Addenda Study of the Iambi has been importantly advanced by A. Kerkhecker, Callimachus’ Book of Iambi (Oxford 1999) and B. Acosta-Hughes, Polyeideia (Berkeley 2002). That frr. 226 – 9 Pf. belong to the book of Iambi (cf. n. 1 of the present article) has been argued again very strongly by E. Lelli, Callimaco. Giambi XIVXVII (Rome 2005). Ion of Chios is (rightly) enjoying more attention than for a very long time, cf. V. Jennings and A. Katsaros (eds.), The World of Ion of Chios (Leiden 2007).

19. The Poet Unleaved. Simonides and Callimachus* Simonides 22 W2 intrigues and tantalizes. Peter Parsons, to whom we owe this combination of POxy 2327 and 3965,1 tentatively interpreted both the journey described in the wretched tatters of the first verses and the “party” that occupies the main bulk of the fragment as a fantasy, perhaps of rejuvenation in the next life: “The extreme view would be this: The aged Simonides longs to escape (now, or after death), carrying his poetry, across the sea to the place of many trees, the Island of the Blest (Elysium), there to meet again the dead Echecratidas in all his desirable youth; they will join in the symposium; the wrinkled Simonides too will recover his youth”.2 In a full and careful discussion of the fragment, Sarah Mace argues that the journey was not a post-mortem fantasy, but a Utopian one—the aging poet desires to consort with a handsome boy on a make-believe island from where, as in all Utopias, old age is banished.3 On her view, the poem is an encomium of a young patron, or a patron’s son, and the Utopian eroticism makes it clear that in the real world the poet is not in fact a potential suitor (he is far too old); for such erotic encomium Mace helpfully compares Pindar’s famous verses on the melting beauty of Theoxenos (fr. 123 Maehler). More recently, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis has seen in the fragments a female lament for Echecratidas or his son.4 *

1 2

3 4

D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 242 – 54 The title of this essay alludes in part to a memorable modern use of the idea that “human generations are as leaves,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.” Parsons 1992: 46 – 47. Parsons 1992: 49. In Hunter 1993 I proposed a different reconstruction on the basis of similarities with the propemptikon for Ageanax sung by “Lykidas” in Theocritus 7. For the sake of simplicity, I shall here adopt the broad outlines of the Parsons-Mace reconstruction, though the question of the relation of the poetic voice to the journey of the opening verses has not gone away; that Theocritus 7 echoes Simonides still seems to me probable, on any reconstruction of the latter. Mace 2001. Yatromanolakis 2001.

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The relation between 22 W2 and the other elegiac remains has also evoked some interest. Potentially the most fruitful suggestion, noted by both Dirk Obbink and David Sider, is that some or all of the “leaves” and “erotic” fragments (19 – 22 W2) in fact belong to the Plataea poem, perhaps as a personal sphragis to an otherwise “public” poem. In Obbink’s words, “As in fr. 11 W2 [i.e., the main Plataea fragment], the poet … lays claim to his unique authorship of the poem, and secures it against tampering and rhapsodic expansion at the end, by means of a ranked comparison with Homer”.5 If something along these lines is correct, then it is likely that the immortal kleos of the heroes of the Trojan War and of the Plataean campaign stood in some kind of contrast to the aging body of the poet. Simonides was one of the conventional makrobioi of antiquity, “[poets] who lived to a ripe old age”,6 and it is indeed themes of immortality and aging that are the most striking shared element running through these fragments; this, rather than the relation between these fragments and the Plataea poem, is the thread which I wish to pursue here. In the sphragis that closes his Persai probably composed towards the end of the fifth century, Timotheus of Miletus claims to have been the object of momos, “blame,” from the young rulers of Sparta on the grounds that he “dishonors the older Muse with new songs”: !kk’ § wquseoj_haqim !]nym loOsam meoteuw/, 1lo?r 5kh’ 1p_jouqor vlmoir. Q^ie Pai\m . b c\q l’ eqcem]tar lajqa_ym Sp\qtar l]car "cel½m bq}ym %mhesim Fbar dome? ka¹r 1pivk]cym 1k÷i t’ aUhopi l~lyi, fti pakaiot]qam m]oir vlmoir loOsam !til_ . 1c½ d’ oute m]om tim’ oute ceqa¹m out’ Qs^bam eUqcy t_md’ 1j±r vlmym . to»r d³ lousopakaiok}lar, to}tour d’ !peq}jy,

5 6

05

10

15

Obbink 2001: 82. The standard list includes Homer, Hesiod, Anacreon, Simonides, Sophocles, and Stesichorus, cf. Cic. De sen. 22 – 23, Val. Max. 9.12.8, Lucian, Macrob. 26. Simonides celebrates the fact that he is eighty years old in an epigram (28 FGE).

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kybgt/qar !oid÷m. jgq}jym kiculajqov~mym te_momtar Quc\r. pq_tor poijik|lousor iqve»r w]kum 1t]jmysem uR¹r Jakki|par < > Pieq_ahem· T]qpamdqor d’ 1p· t_i d]ja feOne loOsam 1m ¡ida?r . K]sbor d’ AQok_a mim )mt_ssai ce_mato jkeim|m . mOm d³ Til|heor l]tqoir Nuhlo?r t’ 2mdejajqoul\toir j_haqim 1namat]kkei, hgsauq¹m pok}ulmom oUnar Lous÷m hakaleut|m.

20

25

30

You who foster the new-fashioned muse of the golden cithara, come, healer Paian, as helper to my songs; for Sparta’s great leader, well-born, longlived, the populace riotous with the flowers of youth, buffets me, blazing hostility, and hounds me with fiery censure on the grounds that I dishonor the older muse with my new songs; but I keep neither young man nor old man nor those in their prime away from these songs of mine; it is the corrupters of the old muse that I fend off, debauchers of songs, uttering the loud shrieks of shrill far-calling criers. Orpheus, Calliope’s son, he of the intricate muse, was the first to beget the tortoise-shell lyre in Pieria; after him Terpander yoked his muse in ten songs; Aeolian Lesbos bore him to give glory to Antissa; and now Timotheus brings to new life the cithara with eleven-stringed measures and rhythms, opening the Muses’ chambered treasure with its abundance of song. (791.202 – 33 PMG, trans. Campbell [adapted])

Timotheus’ response to “criticism,” a programmatic strategy that Callimachus was to make famous, is that no one of (Timotheus’) musical taste is prohibited access to his poetry (v. 215), “neither young man nor old man nor those in their prime,” and he fashions himself as the heir to the greatest lyric poets of tradition, Orpheus and Terpander, who are here brilliantly appropriated for Timotheus’ own musical project.7 Timotheus perhaps says nothing explicit about his own age in this passage,8 but though old poets can sing “new” songs (cf. Od. 1.351—2), the equivocation with neos, both “new” and “young” (cf. 203, 211, 7 8

Cf. Hunter 1996:146 – 47. Qs^bam (v. 214) seems more likely to mean “in the prime of life” than “equal in age to myself.”

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213), and the rhetoric of his argument at least distance him from conservatism; his contempt for those of different musical tastes (216 – 20) is reminiscent of the impatience of the trendily modern “Weaker Argument” and the newly educated Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds. This relation between the age of the poet – his neotes, whether that be understood in purely chronological terms or in terms of the relationship he constructs towards poetic tradition – and the novelty of his songs was to have a long life in Greek and Roman poetry. When at the opening of Odes 3.1 Horace seems to echo Timotheus (215 eUqcy – arceo), his new songs, “carmina non prius audita,” are sung “uirginibus puerisque.” The “old” relation is put to a new use. It is Callimachus, the “fantastically” old man who sings new songs, who most fully teases out these themes: 5kkete Basjam_gr ako¹m c]mor . awhi d³ t]wmgi jq_mete.] lµ swo_myi Peqs_di tµm sov_gm . lgd’ !p’ 1leO div÷te l]ca xov]ousam !oid^m t_jteshai· bqomt÷m oqj 1l|m, !kk± Di|r, ja· c±q fte pq~tistom 1lo?r 1p· d]ktom 5hgja co}masim, )p|kkym eWpem f loi K}jior· “…… !oid] , t¹ l³m h}or ftti p\wistom hq]xai. tµ]m LoOsam d’ ¡cah³ keptak]gm . pq¹r d³ s³] ja· t|d’ %myca. t± lµ pat]ousim %lanai t± ste_beim. 2t]qym Uwmia lµ jah’ bl± d_vqou 1k]÷m lgd’ oWlom !m± pkat}m, !kk± jeke}hour !tq_pto]ur, eQ ja· steimot]qgm 1k\seir.” t_i pih|lg]m. 1m· to?r c±q !e_dolem oT kic»m Gwom t]tticor. h]|qubom d’ oqj 1v_kgsam emym. hgq· l³m oqat|emti pame_jekom acj^saito %kko]r, 1c½ d’ eUgm orkaw}r. b pteq|eir, ü p\mtyr. Vma c/qar Vma dq|som Dm l³m !e_dy pq~jiom 1j d_gr A]qor eWdaq 5dym. awhi t¹ d’ 1jd}oili, t| loi b\qor fssom 5pesti tqick~wim ako_i m/sor 1p’ 9cjek\dyi. …… LoOsai c±q fsour Udom ehlati pa?dar lµ kon_i, pokio»r oqj !p]hemto v_kour.

20

25

30

35

Begone, you baneful race of Jealousy! hereafter poetry by art, not by the Persian chain, and do not look to me for a song loudly resounding. It is not mine to thunder; that belongs to Zeus. For, when I first placed a tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me: “… poet, feed the victim to be as fat as possible but, my friend, keep the Muse slender. This too I bid you: tread a path that carriages do not trample; do not upon the common tracks of others, nor along a wide road, but on

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paths, though your course be more narrow.” , for we sing among those who love the clear voice of and not the noise of asses. Let bray just like the long-eared brute, but let me be the dainty, the winged one. Oh yes indeed! that I may sing living on dew-drops, free sustenance from the divine air; that I may then shed old age, which weighs upon me like the three-cornered island upon deadly Enceladus ….. for if the Muses have not looked askance at one in his childhood, they do not cast him from their friendship when he is grey. (Callimachus fr. 1.17—38, trans. Trypanis [adapted]) 9

In place of the braying ass, traditionally a very un-Apolline animal,10 Callimachus chooses for himself the model of the cicada, beloved of the Muses because its only concern is song (Plato, Phaedrus 259b-d). Against the heavy weight of “ass poetry” is set the fragile lightness of the winged cicada with its pure sound. An Aristotelian treatise on sounds classifies the song of the cicada as liguros “clear, high” and leptos “thin” (On things heard 803b19),11 and (to anticipate somewhat) we may note that the “[song] clear and full of desire” (Rleq|emta kic}m) which probably belongs to the voice of the poet at v. 17 of Simonides 22 W2 would well suit a “young” or rejuvenated singer. The cicada is, however, also a vulnerable creature resembling an old man,12 and one which can so easily be crushed by those who do not appreciate its special beauty. In one respect, however, Callimachus must confess to a likeness to the ass, the quintessential beast of burden. However “light” his song, the poet bears a heavy burden (b\qor),13 that of old age, which cannot be sloughed off. It crushes him as Sicily crushes the giant who rebelled against Zeus, and his only consolation – although no small one – is that the Muses do not abandon their favorites, unlike the dawn-goddess Eos 9 10 11 12

I print Massimilla’s text, and have kept papyrological marks to a minimum. Cf. Ambühl 1995. Good discussion of such descriptions of sound in Asper 1997: 177 ff. Cf. Iliad 3.148 – 53, Wimmel 1960: 111 f. For a discussion of the time at which “old age” sets in cf. Cameron 1995: 174 – 84. 13 The opposition that is evoked here is sharpened by the fact that baq}r is the standard term for “deep” sounds, the opposite of an}r, cf. [Arist.], On things heard 803a8 LSJ s.v. baq}r III 1. The loud “thundering” (cf. Asper 1997: 196 – 98) that Callimachus rejects (v. 20) prepares for this opposition. Callimachus here may not merely be playing with a conventional piety (together with the familiar assimilation of Homer to “Zeus”), but he may also have an eye on Aristophanes’ Clouds, where not only does Pheidippides dismiss Aeschylus as x|vou pk]ym “full of bombast” (1366 f), but thunder is explicitly denied to Zeus by the impious Socrates and the buffoonish Strepsiades (374 ff); by implication, the Telchines are aligned with such tasteless creatures.

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who abandoned Tithonus (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218 – 38). Still in old age the poet is able to write as he would wish: vv. 37 f rework famous verses from the prologue of Hesiod’s Theogony (81 – 84) both to demonstrate the continued poetic power which is the blessing of the Muses14 and, on any reconstruction of the relationship between “Reply” and “Dream,” to prepare for the “Hesiodic” scene that is to follow. The poet’s wish for rejuvenation seems to have been granted in that he proceeded to dream that he really was young again15 and was transported to meet the Muses on Helicon. Callimachus here replays Hesiodic experience in two related ways. Although in the proem to the Theogony Hesiod himself gives no indication of how old he was when confronted on the mountainside by the Muses, it is a reasonable guess that the Hellenistic age constructed Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses as an experience of his youth—the boy sent out “once upon a time” (Theog. 22) to look after the lambs16 – as also were the corresponding encounter between the Muses and the young Archilochus17 and the young Aeschylus’ dream of Dionysus.18 The Hesiodic text itself encourages such a construction by representing the meeting with the Muses as something that happened in the past, “once upon a time” (Theog. 22); Hesiod recalls what the Muses then said to him, as Callimachus recalls the youthful instructions he received from Apollo. Secondly, Callimachus seems to evoke a tradition, attested explicitly only in later antiquity, that Hesiod was in fact rejuvenated and thus lived twice, a tradition 14 Note the elaborate variatio: Di¹r joOqai lec\koio – LoOsai, ceim|lemom —pa?dar. Callimachus’ ehlati … lµ k|nyi perhaps picks up Hesiod’s p\mter 1r aqt¹m bq_si diajq_momta h]listar j Qhe_gisi d_jgisim. 15 Cf. Lynn 1995: 147 f, Andrews 1998: 14 – 17. 16 “Ascraeo … seni” at Verg. Ecl. 6.70 does not, I think, argue against this hypothesis, cf. below at n. 33. Note the virtuoso combination of Homer, Hesiod, and Callimachus at Quintus Smyrnaeus 12.308 – 10 rle?r c±q p÷s\m loi 1m· vqes· h^jat’ !oid^m, j pq_m loi 5t’ !lv· paqei± jatasj_dmahai Uoukom j Sl}qmgr 1m dap]doisi peqijkut± l/ka m]lomti j.t.k. I do not know the evidence upon which McKay 1959: 4 bases his claim that “It is taken for granted by the ancients that Hesiod [became a poet] at a venerable age.” 17 SEG 15.517, inscribed about the middle of the third century in the “Archilocheion” at Paros, cf. Kambylis 1963, below at n. 24. 18 When he was a boy, Aeschylus fell asleep while guarding grapes in the countryside, and Dionysus appeared to him and told him to write tragedy (Pausanias 1.21.2 = Aesch. Test. 111 TrGF).

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that may, as Ruth Scodel demonstrated,19 also be important for the choral song on old age in Euripides’ Heracles Furens (637 – 700), to which Callimachus makes explicit allusion (vv. 35 – 36 ~ HF 638 – 40) and which is important for this whole section of Callimachus’ prologue.20 As the Euripidean chorus asserts that it will never cease to “mingle the Graces with the Muses” (HF 673 – 75), so at the very head of his poem Callimachus does just this, for the Muses are introduced in the “Dream” and are central to the whole structure of books 1 and 2, whereas the first aition of book I is the Parian ritual in honor of the Graces (frr. 5 – 9 Massimilla). Whether or not the legend of Hesiod’s double life was known to Euripides (and Simonides?), it is clear that the Callimachean dream was merely one of a number of poetic strategies by which Hellenistic and Roman poets represented the great tradition (“passing on”) to which they felt themselves heir;21 the metempsychosis of Homer into Ennius (Ennius, Annales frr. 3 – 10 Skutsch) is, along with dream experience, perhaps the best known such strategy. If, however, Callimachus’ rejuvenation takes the form of a dream experience in which he reaches into the distant past to relive the experience of Hesiod, this may prompt us to ask about the nature of the “old age” which oppresses him. When interpreting this literally, we must always allow for humorous exaggeration. The Telchines have accused him of behaving like a child, though he is a grown man, and so he exaggerates just how old he is as part of the demonstration of the absurdity of their criticisms.22 Whatever view is taken of how old Callimachus actually was when he composed the “Reply,” it seems clear that there is more at stake here than just encroaching senility. The approach or arrival of the weakness of old age seems to have been a familiar poetic topos (cf. Alcman 26 PMG [= 90 Calame], Eur. HF 637 – 700), which suggests that it may not be correct to read it at a simple, literal level; it is rather a recognizable poetic code, even when the poet is in fact (and is known to be) old. For Callimachus, the best contemporary witness to the code is the so-called “Seal” of Poseidippos (705 SH), in which the poet from Pella invokes the 19 20 21 22

Scodel 1980. Cf. Basta Donzelli 1991, Livrea 1997. See the excellent discussion of Bing 1988: 56 – 71. Cf., e. g., Lynn 1995: 180 n. 17. On the charge of being a “child” cf. Asper 1997: 149 – 50.

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Muses to join him in singing23 “hateful old age” and, perhaps under the influence of the (?) newly-founded Archilocheion on Paros, wishes to become a second Archilochus, as Callimachus was a “second Hesiod” with honors and a cult decreed by Apollo.24 While his poetry will find immortal kleos, he himself will find his own kind of eternity: lgd] tir owm we}ai d\jquom. aqt±q 1c½ c^qai lustij¹m oWlom 1p· Uad\lamhum Rjo_lgm d^lyi ja· ka_i pamt· poheim¹r 1~m, !sj_pym 1m poss· ja· aqhoepµr !m’ flikom ja· ke_pym t]jmoir d_la ja· ekbom 1l|m.

Let no one shed a tear, but in old age may I travel the mystic path to Rhadamanthys, missed by the citizens and all the people, needing no staff to walk and speaking clearly to the multitude, leaving house and prosperity to my children. (Poseidippos, 705.21 – 5 SH)

What in Callimachus is a wish for rejuvenation is in Poseidippos a wish for good health up until death in old age,25 followed by a journey “on the mystic path to Rhadamanthys.” Whether we interpret this as meaning that Poseidippos was merely initiated into the “mysteries of the Muses” or that he was actually an initiate of a Dionysiac or “Orphic” cult,26 the language has a history of particular relevance in the present context. Poseidippos prays to remain aqhoep^r, “speaking properly,” to the end of his life, whereas the voice of Simonides 22 W2 imagines such fluency ( !qtiep]a myl_m ck_ssam, with West’s very probable supplement) to be the result of newfound strength;27 the prayer for bodily health to the last, being !sj_pym 1m poss_, finds many parallels throughout Greek literature, but it looks here like a reworking of Hesiod’s description of men of the Golden Age, “when there was no terrible old age, but ever undiminished in feet and hands they took pleasure in feasts, free of all ills” (WD 114 f). Whereas, therefore, Callimachus 23 With sumae_sate for the transmitted sumaeisade, rather than Friedrich’s sumae_qate, particularly in view of v. 21. The text is very uncertain, however. 24 I follow Lloyd-Jones 1963: 88; the Delphic decree that Lloyd-Jones discusses was also a very striking example of divine favor to a poet, and must have struck a particular chord with an initiate, if that indeed is what Poseidippos was. 25 For the poetic heritage of such a wish cf. Mimnermus fr. 6 W2, on which see below p. 339. 26 Cf. Rossi 1996: 65, Burkert 1998: 394 f. For the former view see Asper 1997: 86, with bibliography. 27 Rossi 1996: 62 rather understands aqhoep^r as “speaking just things.”

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uses Hesiod to console himself with the Muses’ protection of their favorites and his own piety, Poseidippos prays for public honors from his own people28 and continued good health until old age, followed by the certain reward of the just initiate. Not for Poseidippos the impossible wish of becoming young again (cf. v. 25); his “immortality” will be more certain and more long-lasting. “Old age,” however “hateful” at the opening of the poem, seems itself now almost a mark of poetic distinction. This is, as we shall see, by no means an isolated third-century example.29 As for Callimachus, the wish to rid himself of the burden of old age, like the cicada, arises from Apollo’s poetic program: cicada poetics is the poetics of the “slender Muse” and the narrow path. The sequence of thought suggests that the old age which crushes the poet is at one level what we have learned to call “the burden of the past,” that consciousness of tradition of Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Aristophanes, and the other great figures of the past whose voices well up through Callimachus’ verses, a consciousness that hems our every move with qualification, deferral, and doubt, and that, like old age, restricts the freedom of action we associate with “the light one, the winged one.” In Plato’s myth, cicadas were the first poets, free to sing and honor the Muses as they liked, with no constraining tradition of song behind them. It is Callimachus who, for us, makes the decisive move in understanding “rejuvenation” in terms of the literary tradition, thus completing the triangle of related ideas – the weight of years, the weight of tradition, and the hope for immortality. Tradition is figured in terms of human aging. Callimachus is old and weary, crushed by the immobilizing sense of the years that have preceded. When the Telchines tell Callimachus “to grow up,” what they mean is that he should adopt a poetics sanctioned by time and archaic practice (cf. Iambos 13), together with the moral seriousness that attends it. Callimachus rejects both the poetics and the gravitas in his extraordinary wish to start all over again. The link which both Callimachus and Poseidippos forge between “old age” and poetic success is familiar in the Hellenistic period. Very like Poseidippos’ Seal is the surviving part of an anonymous poem on

28 The model here is not merely Archilochus, but possibly also Philitas of Cos, cf. Hollis 1996, Hardie 1997. 29 The larger questions about the relation between “the Seal” and Callimachus’ “Reply” will not be considered here.

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the death of the Alexandrian poet Philikos of Corcyra, presumably composed near in time to his death (mid-third century b.c.e.):30 5qweo dµ laj\qistor bdoip|qor, 5qweo jako»r w~qour eqseb]ym ax|lemor, V_kije, 1j jissgqev]or jevak/r euulma juk_ym N^lata, ja· m^sour j~lasom eQr laj\qym. ew l³m c/qar Qd½m eq]stiom )kjim|oio Va_gjor, f~eim !mdq¹r 1pistal]mou· )kjim|ou tir 1½m 1n aVlator < > ]o Dglod|jou

Go on your way, blessed wayfarer, go on your path, Philikos, to see the fair land of the god-fearing dead. Your head crowned with ivy, rolling forth your lines of lovely song, go in revel [komos] to the Islands of the Blessed. Happy, that you saw the festive old age of an Alcinous, the Phaeacian, a man who knew how to live. Born of Alcinous’ line ……..Demodocus (980 SH, trans. Page [adapted])

Having lived to the same ripe old age as his countryman King Alcinous, who welcomed Odysseus at his court,31 Philikos is to pass in komos to the Isles of the Blessed, still “rolling forth” his lovely poems. This komos is particularly appropriate to a (dramatic) poet who was a priest of Dionysus (Ath. 5.198b-c), but it may also be worth asking whether the epigram evokes the blessed afterlife that an initiate of Dionysiac mysteries may expect. As such, Philikos will experience the happiness for which Poseidippos can only pray; his ability to take an active and productive part in a komos bears witness to the fact that, at the end, he was in fact !sj_pym 1m poss· ja· aqhoepµr !m’ flikom. Be that as it may, and however common the idea of a perpetuation in the afterlife of the habitual practices (real or constructed) of the present life,32 the link between poetic glory and old age is not merely the conventional one that a long life is a sign of divine favor. Rather, it is to be associated

30 For discussion cf. Gabathuler 1937: 66 – 67, Fraser 1972: I 608 – 9, II 859, FGE 460 f. David Sider has made the interesting suggestion that Philikos composed this epitaph for himself; cf. below on Meleager’s epitaphs for himself. 31 Scheria was standardly identified in antiquity with Corcyra. 32 Cf., e. g., Antipater, AP 7.27 (= HE 260 – 269) on Anacreon, eUgr 1m laj\qessim. )m\jqeom. ewwor Y~mym, / l^t’ 1qat_m j~lym %mdiwa j.t.k.

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also with the presentation of poets and other sages of the archaic and classical past as “old” as well as “of old” (oR p\kai poigta_).33 The “old man” who appears in the programmatic dream of Herodas 8 is, fairly certainly, Hipponax himself; in Iambus 1.58, Callimachus presents Thales as an old man; Anacreon is commonly “old” (b pq]sbur, b c]qym) in the rich tradition of fictitious epitaphs about him and throughout the Anacreontea34, and Alcaeus of Messene designates both Hesiod and Hipponax as b pq]sbur.35 Much of the impetus comes, of course, from these poets’ own poetry and/or the legends about these makrobioi: “Hesiodic old age” was proverbial,36 and surviving fragments of Anacreon’s poetry make much play with his advanced years (cf. 395, 418 PMG). Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising (or new) that great age was invested with symbolic meaning also. Thus Dioscorides praises his older contemporary Machon as both ti t]wmgr / %niom !qwa_gr ke_xamom, “a remnant worthy of the ancient art” (i. e., Old Comedy), and as b pq]sbur.37 Machon may well have enjoyed a long life, but it is the interplay between his age and the nature of his art that is central to the rhetoric of the epigram. More striking still is one of the epitaphs which Meleager composed for himself: !tq]lar, § n]me, ba?me· paq’ eqseb]sim c±q b pq]sbur evdei joilghe·r vpmom bveik|lemom Eqjq\tey Lek]acqor, b t¹m ckuj}dajqum =qyta ja· Lo}sar Rkaqa?r sustok_sar w\qisim . dm he|pair Emdqyse T}qor Cad\qym h’ Req± wh~m. J_r d’ 1qatµ Leq|pym pq]sbum 1cgqotq|vei. !kk’ eQ l³m SOqor 1ss_, sak\l· eQ d’ owm s} ce Vo?min, ma_dior· eQ d’ >kkgm, wa?qe· t¹ d’ aqt¹ vq\som.

Go quietly by, stranger; among the god-fearing ones the old man sleeps the sleep which is due to all, Meleager son of Eucrates, who outfitted Eros, he of sweetness and tears, and the Muses with merry graces. Heavenborn Tyre and the sacred land of Gadara brought him to manhood, and Cos, the love33 Cf. Theocritus, Epigr. 21.1 on Archilochus (b p\kai poigt^r), Dioscorides AP, 7.411.6 (= HE 1596) on Aeschylus ( !qwa_ym .. tir Blih]ym), Bing 1988: 56 f, 1988b. 34 Cf. Antipater, AP 7.27.10 (= HE 269); Leonidas, APl. 411.6 (= HE 1596); “Simonides,” AP 7.24.9 (= HE 3322); Ovid, AA 3.30 “uinosi Teia Musa senis.” 35 AP 7.55.6, 7.536.1 (= HE 75,76). 36 Cf. Scodel 1980. 37 AP 7.708(= HE 1617 – 22).

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ly land of the Meropes, nursed his old age. If you are a Syrian, Salaam!, if a Phoenician, Naidios!, if a Greek, Chaire!, and say the same yourself. (AP 7.419 = HE 4000 – 7)

Meleager makes play with his advanced years at death also in two of the three other epitaphs that he composed for himself,38 but in the present poem he evokes a familiar rhetoric by which the epitaph will be read one day in the (distant) future by a passer-by and Meleager will long have become b pq]sbur in two senses, both “old when he died” and “an old/revered poet.” Meleager thus foresees, and to some extent constructs, his own passage into the pantheon of “great poets of the past.”39 This is the symbolic language that Callimachus actualizes when he implies that the Telchines want him to “act his age.” For Callimachus, however, the poetry of techne must not follow the patterns of the past, but must enact a radical break with the past; it must, in other words, be neos, that is, both “young” and “new.” It is a very Callimachean irony that such poetry is produced by a man whose “decades of years are not few” (fr. 1.6) and is sanctioned by the example of one of the “oldest” of past poets, namely Hesiod. Here, as elsewhere, it is the Telchines who misunderstand the poetry both of the past and the present. This association of age and sophia is neither new nor surprising, and finds its close counterpart in contemporary iconography. “In the Greek imagination, all great intellectuals were old … There exists no portrait of a truly young poet, and certainly not of a young philosopher.”40 From the very earliest representations, Homer is depicted as (sometimes very) “old,”41 but great age, as an almost inevitable characteristic of representations of great poets and thinkers of the past, seems to be a development of the third century.42 Of particular interest for Hellenistic poetry is a wretchedly preserved set of statues of poets and philosophers from the exedra of the Sarapeion at Memphis: if Hesiod is correctly 38 AP 7.417, 418 (= HE 3984 – 93, 3994 – 99): the odd one out is at AP 7.421 (= HE 4008 – 21). On these poems cf. Gutzwiller 1998. 39 Our almost complete ignorance of Tellen makes it difficult to draw conclusions from his designation as pq]sbur at Leonidas, AP 7.719.1 (= HE 2001). 40 Zanker 1995: 22. For much information on ideas about old age cf. Falkner and Luce 1989. 41 Cf. Zanker 1995, ch. 4 (166 – 71 for Hellenistic images of Homer); Schefold 1997. Homer remains, of course, an old man in the sixth-century ekphrastic epigrams of Christodorus, AP 2.322, 325. 42 Cf. Zanker 1995: 68 – 75.

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identified in this group, then he was represented as a very old man indeed.43 However that may be, it is clear that, in the third century, the doubleness of “age” was expressed in the language of both plastic art and poetry. In seeking to trace the history of these ideas in archaic and classical poetry, we may begin again with the same stasimon of Euripides’ Heracles. Under the present dispensation, men, not even good men, can live, or more specifically “be young,” twice (HF 655 – 72); for some fortunate men the consolation for this is the kleos conferred by poetry. Bacchylides 3.88 – 92 (a poet who brings us very close to Simonides) expresses this conventional thought with neat economy: !mdq· d’ oq h]lir, poki¹m paq]mta c/qar, h\keiam awtir !cjol_ssai Fbam. !qet÷r ce l³m oq lim}hei bqot_m ûla s~lati v]ccor, !kk± LoOs\ mim tq]vei.

It is not permitted to a man to dismiss grey old age and recover again the bloom of youth. The light of arete does not, however, fade with men’s bodies, but the Muse nurtures it. (Bacchyl. 3.88 – 92)

It is presumably some version of this sequence that lies concealed in the tatters of Simonides 20.13 ff W2 on the immortality that Homer has conferred. For poets, moreover, there is, as the Euripidean chorus implies, a further consolation in the joy of singing that is itself a perpetuating of life, perhaps even, through the grace of the Muses, a rejuvenation. More ambiguous is the relationship between this rhetoric and eros. In different contexts, old age may be figured as bringing some release from the disturbing passions of eros (so, most famously, Sophocles and Cephalus at Plato Republic, 1.329b-d) or rejection by the objects of desire (Mimnermus 1 W), but in any case eros is intimately connected with the self-presentation of the poet as old. The apparently erotic content of 22 W2, set in the world of the imagination rather than the real present, may in fact be a way of trying to buy eros off, rather as Ibycus seems (? ironically) to wish the passion away:

43 Cf. Lauer and Picard 1955, Ridgway 1990: 131 f. For “Hesiod” cf. Lauer and Picard, figs. 47, 48, 51. The date of the individual sculptures and of the group as a whole remains disputed (early third or early second century?).

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=qor awt] le juam]oisim rp¹ bkev\qoir taj]q’ ellasi deqj|lemor jgk^lasi pamtodapo?r 1r %peiqa d_jtua J}pqidor 1sb\kkei· G l±m tqol]y mim 1peqw|lemom, ¦ste veq]fucor Vppor !ehkov|qor pot³ c^qai !]jym s»m ewesvi hoo?r 1r ûlikkam 5ba.

Once more with melting looks from under his dark brows Eros draws me into the boundless nets of Kypris with enticements of every kind. Ah, I tremble at his attack, as a yoke-horse, a prize-winner but now in old age, enters the contest with the swift chariot unwillingly. (Ibycus, 287 PLG)

So, too, the opening poem of Horace’s fourth book of Odes, in which “the aging poet” resists the renewed call to Venus’ arms and which may begin with an echo of this poem of Ibycus, might owe a debt to Simonides, in view of the Greek poet’s great importance for Odes 4.44 Simonides frr. 19 – 20 deal with the aging of man, the brevity of youth, and the immortality that Homer conferred; they allude also, as many scholars have noted, to Mimnermus’ famous lines (fr. 2) on aging and our likeness to leaves; there is, in other words, an overt engagement in these fragments with the poetic tradition. Stobaeus has in fact preserved a number of fragments of Mimnermus’ Nanno on the curse of old age (frr. 1 – 5), which suggest a “classic” status for this poet on this subject (as, for example, Sappho was in matters of eros): subsequent treatments may therefore call Mimnermus to mind, however fleeting the verbal echo.45 In one other case, at least, we know that Mimnermus was early associated with this theme: his wish (or that of a character in his poetry?) to die at age sixty “free of disease and grievous cares” (fr. 6) was explicitly corrected by Solon (fr. 20) to a wish to die at age eighty. Simonides 21 W2 also concerns the aging process, in this case a physical/sexual awakening, a transition, perhaps, from eromenos to potential erastes, from pais to neos (cf., e. g., Theognis 1319 – 20). Although the language of hybris and dike is the standard language of eros, it is also very much the moral language of Hesiod’s Works and Days.46 Hesiod 44 Cf. Barchiesi 1996; Harrison 2001. 45 Mimnermus’ use of Tithonus as an example of the miseries of old age (fr. 4) may be relevant to Callimachus’ evocation of this figure. Cf. Crane 1986: 269 – 78. 46 So too aQd~r (m. 9), but the supplement is uncertain at best.

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was, as we have seen, granted two lives, though how early the legend starts – and, in particular, whether it was available to Simonides – we cannot say. Be that as it may, Hesiod is par excellence the poet of aging, for the Works and Days deals with the aging of all mankind; the poet himself lives in an age of aging (174 ff), when babies will eventually be born with grey hair, an age that will end up with no respect for dike, and no aidos, but hybris everywhere. The Hesiod of Works and Days, who speaks to Perses as an older advisor to an errant younger brother, seems important for these fragments of Simonides. The tone is didactic ( !kk± s» taOta lah~m j.t.k., 20.11 W2), the rejection of optimistic fantasy seems Hesiodic, and in particular 20.9 W2, however formulaic, finds its closest parallel in WD 40, m^pioi, oqd³ Usasim fsyi pk]om Flisu pamt¹r j.t.k. The later poet speaks to the nepioi, the “young” as well as foolish, with the authority of age, though the message is in many ways non-Hesiodic. The young never imagine that life will change, that they will grow old, but the poet, with the special sophia granted by tradition and his hopes for immortal kleos, he knows (note the pointed !m^q … !mdq_m at the end of successive verses, marking Homer’s knowledge of the human condition, 19.1 W2); but – and it is a big “but”— the poet also grows literally old, and all the sophia in the world does not prevent him from wishing to escape this mortality. Indeed, his very consciousness, his awareness of the truths of the tradition, what Callimachus, as we saw, fashioned as “the burden of the past,” makes him already “old” and adds a new burden – unlike other men, he cannot live carefree. Here is a very non-Hesiodic irony. It is the succession of poets – Homer, Hesiod, Mimnermus – that has taught Simonides that men, and poets, are like the succession of leaves; an allusion to Mimnermus’ allusion to Homer makes the point clear enough – poetic tradition and immortality merely emphasize the mortality of the poet’s own body.47 Perhaps, then, it was from Simonides that Callimachus drew some of his inspiration for the conception of “literary tradition” as a kind of aging; in any event, it is within this nexus of ideas that the famous Horatian passage on the successive generations of words (Ars Poetica 60 – 72) is to be placed.48 47 Simonides’ allusion to Homer “through” Mimnermus is an early example of what critics of Hellenistic and Roman poetry call “double allusion” or “window reference,” cf., e. g., McKeown 1987: 37 – 45. No device could be better suited to demonstrate the weight and depth of tradition. 48 Cf. Sider 2001.

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Much – too much – of this argument has been based on (unspoken) assumptions about the internal relationship of 19 – 22 W2. Papyri, however, invite supplements of more than one kind and, as we grow old, the temptation to see patterns within the broken fragments becomes a mechanism of survival. Simonides, who knew all about consolation, would certainly have understood that.

Bibliography Ambühl, A. 1995. ‘Callimachus and the Arcadian asses: the Aitia prologue and a lemma in the London scholion’ ZPE 105: 209 – 13 Andrews, N. 1998. ‘Philosophical satire in the Aitia prologue’ in M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic Poetry (Groningen) 1 – 19 Asper, M. 1997. Onomata Allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos, Stuttgart Basta Donzelli, G. 1991. ‘La seconda giovinezza di Callimaco (fr. 1, 32 ss. Pf.)’ in Studi di filologia classica in onore di Giusto Monaco (Palermo) 387 – 94 Bing, P. 1988. The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets, Göttingen Burkert, W. 1998. ‘Die neuen orphischen Texte: Fragmente, Varianten, “Sitz im Leben”’ in W. Burkert et al. (eds.), Fragmentsammlungen philosophischer Texte der Antike – Le raccolte dei frammenti di filosofi antichi (Göttingen) 387 – 400 Crane, G. 1986. ‘Tithonus and the prologue to Callimachus’ Aetia’ ZPE 66: 269 – 78 Falkner, T.M. and Luce, J. de (eds.), Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, Albany Gabathuler, M. 1937. Hellenistische Epigramme auf Dichter, St Gallen Gutzwiller, K.J. 1998. ‘Meleager: from Menippean to epigrammatist’ in M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit, G.C. Wakker (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic Poetry (Groningen) 81 – 93 Hardie, A. 1997. ‘Philitas and the plane tree’ ZPE 119: 21 – 36 Harrison, S.J. 2001. ‘Simonides and Horace’ in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 261 – 71 Hollis, A.S. 1996. ‘Heroic honours for Philetas?’ ZPE 110: 56 – 62 Hunter, R. 1993. ‘One party or two? Simonides 22 West’ ZPE 99: 11 – 14 — 1996. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry, Cambridge Kambylis, A. 1963. ‘Zur “Dichterweihe” des Archilochos’ Hermes 91: 129 – 50 Lauer, J.-Ph. And Picard. C. 1055. Les statues ptolmaiques du Serapieion de Memphis, Paris Livrea, E. 1997. ‘Callimachus senex, Cercidas senex ed i loro critici’ ZPE 119: 37 – 42 Lloyd-Jones, H. 1963. ‘The seal of Posidippus’ JHS 83: 75 – 99

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Lynn, J.K. 1995. Narrators and Narration in Callimachus, Diss. Columbia Univ., New York Mace, S. 2001. ‘Utopian and erotic fusion in a new elegy by Simonides’ in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 185 – 207 McKay, K.J. 1959. ‘Hesiod’s rejuvenation’ CQ 9: 1 – 5 McKeown, J. 1987. Ovid: Amores, Vol. I, Liverpool Obbink, D. 2001. ‘The genre of Plataea: generic unity in the new Simonides’ in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 65 – 85 Parsons, P.J. 1992. ‘3965: Simonides, Elegies’ The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 59: 4 – 50 Ridgway, B.S. 1990. Hellenistic Sculpture, Madison, Wisc. Rossi, Laura 1996. ‘Il testamento di Posidippo e le laminette auree di Pella’ ZPE 112: 59 – 65 Schefold, K. 1997. Die Bildnisse der antiken Dichter, Redner und Denker, 2nd ed., Basel Scodel, R. 1980. ‘Hesiod redivivus’ GRBS 21: 301 – 20 Sider, D. 2001. ‘“As is the generation of leaves” in Homer, Simonides, Horace, and Stobaeus’ in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 272 – 88 Wimmel, W. 1960. Kallimachos in Rom: die Nachfolge seines apologetischen Dichtens in der Augusteerzeit, Wiesbaden Yatromanolakis, D. 2001. ‘To sing or to mourn? A reappraisal of Simonides 22 W’ in D. Boedeker and D. Sider (eds.), The New Simonides. Contexts of Praise and Desire (Oxford) 208 – 25 Zanker, P. 1995. The Mask of Socrates: the Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, Berkeley

Addenda Part of this essay was re-used in Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 66 – 76. p. 331 The subject of Tithonus and aging poets has, of course, been given new interest by the ‘Cologne Sappho’. p. 333 On the ‘Seal’ of Posidippus cf. further this volume 555 – 6. p. 335 On the poem on Philikos cf. M. Fantuzzi, ‘Mescolare il ludicro al serio: la poetica del corcirese Filico e l’edonismo dei Feaci (SH 980)’ in G. Lozzi and S.M. Tempesta, L’epigramma Greco. Problemi e prospettive (Milan 2007) 53 – 68. p. 339 On Horace, Odes 4.1 and archaic Greek poetry cf. ‘Sappho and Latin poetry’ in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), I papiri di Saffo e di Alceo (Florence 2007) 213 – 25.

20. The Poetics of Narrative in the Argonautica* 1. For antiquity, the Argonautica was an “epic” (5pg, 1popoi¸a, epos), just as the Homeric poems were. Apollonius himself marks his “generic status” in the opening verse through the phrase which designates the subject of his song, pakaicem´ym jk´a vyt_m. In the Odyssey, Demodokos is inspired by the Muse to sing jk´a !mdq_m (Od. 8.73), Achilles sings of jk´a !mdq_m when withdrawn from the fighting itself (Il. 9.189),1 and Phoenix tells Achilles that there have been “epic” parallels to his own situation (Il. 9.524 – 6):2 ovty ja· t_m pqºshem 1peuhºleha jk´a !mdq_m Bq¾ym, fte j]m timû 1pif\vekor w|kor Vjoi7 dyqgto_ te p]komto paq\qqgto_ tû 1p]essim.

This is what we have heard in tales of the past heroes too, when furious anger came on one of them—they could be won by gifts and words’ persuasion. (trans. M. Hammond)

The opening verse of the Argonautica therefore announces not, as in Homer, the subject of the poem, but rather its “genre”. More specifi* 1

2

T.D. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden 2001) 93 – 125 For Virgil’s “translation” of jk´a !mdq_m in the opening verse of the Aeneid cf. Conte (1985) 48 – 9 = (1986) 72 – 3. Horace’s designation of epic poetry as res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella (AP 73, cf. Epist. 2.1.251 – 2) gives a distinctively public and Roman tinge to the idea. It is sometimes asserted (e. g. Carspecken [1952] 111) that the substitution of vyt_m for the Homeric !mdq_m in this phrase marks the difference between “heroes” and “ordinary mortals”, including women. Too much should not be made of this, particularly if the phrase bears some relationship to h.Hom. 32.18 – 9, cf. Hunter (1993) 129 n. 110; the phrase may have been much more widespread in hymnic poetry than we can now establish. The debt to the Homeric Hymn cannot, however, be established purely on the basis of the prosody of jk´a, scanned as two shorts (cf. also 4.361). A form with long alpha is not certainly attested in early epic (cf. West on Hes. Th. 100, Wyatt [1969] 145). Cf. below 354. For some reservations about the use of the phrase in Homer cf. Ford (1992) 57 – 67.

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cally, Apollonius “begins from Apollo” as did Homer in the Iliad (Il. 1.8 – 9), thus aligning his poem with the most authoritative of all epic texts, the Iliad.3 Unlike Homer, however, Apollonius is able to fill in the background to his narrative without the explicit help of the Muse; the poet now takes responsibility for his poem, and the selective account of the background in 1.5 – 17, itself a reworking of the corresponding section of Pindar’s Fourth Pythian,4 is a virtuoso demonstration of the poet’s freedom.5 Moreover, the poet parades a refusal to repeat the story of Athena’s building of the Argo because other poets have been there before (1.18 – 9); whatever Apollonius’ poetic sources may in fact have been, novelty and freshness are here deployed as genuine virtues. Telemachos’ admonition to his mother that men give the greatest praise to the newest song (Od. 1.351 – 2) is re-employed as Apollonius sites himself in a line of epic poets that includes not only Homer, but also Homer’s bards, Phemios and Demodokos.6 This proclaimed freedom, however, distances the Apollonian design of epic from the primary model which Homer had depicted in his poems. In this model, the bard’s narration is always an act of memory and repetition; “the poet” tells the story as it has been told to him by the Muse.7 In the Hellenistic period this strategy was modified in various ways to meet the new conditions of a world in which knowledge of both past and present was now partly contained in books and poets were no longer the principal repositories of social memory and communal values. Changes in social structure, the successive attacks of the sophists, the views of Thucydides and Plato on the value and social authority of 3 4 5 6

7

For the recreation of the manner of rhapsodic performance here cf. Albis (1996) 19 – 20. Cf. Hunter (1993) 123 – 4. For the invocation to the Muses in 1.22 cf. below 349 – 50. It is tempting to use Od. 1.351, the only occurrence of 1pijke_eim in Homer, as an argument in favour of Brunck’s 1pijke_ousim in 1.18 (cf. [Oppian] C. 3.78 – 9); certainly the Homeric context would be very meaningful within such a reworking. Even with Brunck’s change, the allusion to Od. 1.338 (cf., e. g., Clauss [1993] 20 – 1) would be unaffected. Elsewhere in the Argonautica, however, the compound verb means “call, give a name” and at 3.553 “call upon”, though I do not regard that as a decisive objection. Cf. further 1.59; Fränkel (1968) 39; Giangrande (1973) 1. This is not intended to imply a particularly rigid view of the role of the Muses in Homer; for some of the positions which have been taken cf. De Jong (1987) 45 – 53. On the distinction between bards and other story-tellers in Homer cf. Scodel (1998) and, in general, Ford (1992).

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poetry, and the organisation and practice of scholarship in Alexandria all contributed to a profound (if gradual) shift in the perception of poetry’s necessary relation to “the real world”. An anxiety and debate about the truth status of poetry and the fictionalising power of poets thus surfaces with ever-increasing persistence. One way of dealing with this changed situation is visible in Hellenistic didactic poetry, such as the Phainomena of Aratus which is in part a versification of the fourth-century prose Phainomena of the astronomer Eudoxos. As “truth” could now be stored in books and libraries, poets quite naturally looked there for the source of poetic material, as before they had relied upon “tradition” as transmitted by the Muses. Moreover, the collection of material within books changed the nature and conception of “tradition” itself. Although “innovation” in early narrative is often very difficult to establish,8 it is clear that the poets themselves were principal creators and memorialisers of socially significant traditions. It is entirely in keeping with this pattern that the earliest Greek historians and ethnographers in prose often turned to the poets for their material; by the third century the situation was in part reversed. The preservation of stories in written form slowly lent them a more fixed form, or at least gave urgency to the issue of “fidelity” to a tradition, whether or not that “fidelity” was ever checked or called into question. The existence and use of written “sources” reconfigured the old Hesiodic question of truth and falsehood in poetry;9 the very scholarly practice of source criticism, the ancient ancestor of modern Quellenforschung, confirmed a changed view of the way poetry worked. Although “sideshadowing and awareness of alternatives and sequels were essential features of [epic] poetics” already in Homer,10 the use of books reinforces an awareness of “competing” traditions. In the preHellenistic situation, variant traditions do not necessarily compete with each other for authoritative status; the “authoritative” version is precisely that one which is told at any particular time for particular reasons of context. A poet such as Pindar may call attention to a tradition in order to reject it as “untrue” in favour of a different tradition better suited to a particular rhetorical context (cf., e. g., Pi. O. 1.28 – 53), but it is 8 For Homer cf. Nagy (1996) Ch. 4; Edmunds (1997) 415 – 41, both with fuller bibliography. 9 For some guidelines for the archaic period cf. Pratt (1993); Bowie (1993) 1 – 37. 10 Malkin (1998) 37.

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precisely the activating context which is decisive for this rejection. Collection in written form, however, and subsequent study and repetition outside such an activating context provides a shaped, decontextualised tradition independent of its exploitation in poetry (or any other medium). In the Aitia Callimachus dramatises this process of narrative variation through the naming of prose sources and the emphasis given to competing aitia (cf. frr. 5 – 9 Massimilla, 75, 79 Pf.). It may in fact be the case that the tendencies considered here are enhanced when aetiology is a, or the, prominent narrative trope,11 for the aetiological imperative closes down some narrative options, and thereby privileges others, by dictating a telos towards which narrative must move. Apollonius himself displays both the (alleged) fixity of tradition and the existence of variants in a famous passage of the fourth book which is very likely indebted to Callimachus (4.982 – 92):12 5sti d´ tir poqhlo?o paqoit]qg Yom_oio !lvikavµr p¸eiqa Jeqaum¸, eQm "k· m/sor, Ø vpo dµ je?shai dq]pamom v\tir—Vkate, LoOsai, oqj 1h]kym 1m]py pqot]qym 5por—è !p¹ patq¹r l¶dea mgkei_r 5tale Jqºmor7—oR d´ 2 DgoOr jke¸ousi whom_gr jakalgt|lom 5llemai ûqpgm7 Dg½ c±q je¸m, 1m· d¶ pote m\ssato ca¸, Tit/mar dû 5daem st\wum elpmiom !l¶sashai, L\jqida vikal]mg—. Dqep\mg t|hem 1jk^istai oumola Vai¶jym Reqµ tqov|r7 ¤r d³ ja· aqto· aVlator Oqqam_oio c]mor Va_gjer 5asi.

At the head of the Ionian strait, set in the Keraunian sea, is a large and fertile island, where is buried, so the story goes (your gracious pardon, Muses! it is against my will that I relate a story told by men of earlier generations), the sickle with which Kronos pitilessly cut off his father’s genitals. Others say that it is the reaping scythe of chthonian Demeter, for Demeter once took up residence in the land and, out of love for Makris, taught the Titans how to harvest the rich crop. From that time the sacred nurse of the Phaeacians has been named Drepane [“Sickle”], and so too the Phaeacians themselves are born from the blood of Ouranos.

The apparently ironic apology to the Muses and competing explanations for the name of the island call attention to several important issues of 11 For some important general considerations cf. Goldhill (1991) 321 – 33. 12 Cf. Call. fr. 50 (= 43 Pf.). 69 – 71 Massimilla; Vian (21996) 35. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are by the author.

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poetics.13 The passage implies that poetic traditions are (or should be) subject to considerations drawn from the rhetorical and scholastic category of t¹ pq]pom, “appropriateness, decorum”, particularly in view of the fact that the Muses are decorous virgins. As Hermann Fränkel noted,14 we might have expected the poet here to apologise to Ouranos, but in this place the Muses are to some extent separated from the subject of the narrative, the “literary tradition” itself, as “style” may be separated from “substance”. The Muses who watch over the “style” of the whole poem may blush to hear a tale of castration, but it is the poet, not the Muses, who is responsible for telling the unpleasant aition. The giving of alternative aitia is in fact unusual in the Argonautica,15 and it is tempting to see an implicit causal link between this instance and the poet’s alleged distaste: alternative explanations, so the poet implies, may arise out of dissatisfaction (whether moral or aesthetic) with an existing aition. Whether we should go further and see Apollonius calling attention to the chronological priority of the “cruder” version (cf. pqot]qym 4.985), i. e. recognising the fact that taste changes over time, is less certain. Be that as it may, the reflection upon his own practice here both has Homeric roots and veers away radically from the “discretion” of the Homeric narrator; such a pattern is very typical for the Hellenistic epic. The poet’s own responsibility is humorously acknowledged again when he comes on the return journey to Medea’s rites in honour of Hekate on the Paphlagonian coast (4.247 – 52): ja· dµ t± l³m fssa hugkµm jo}qg poqsam]ousa tit¼sjeto – l^te tir Ustyq eUg l^tû 1l³ hul¹r 1potq}meiem !e¸deim— ûfolai aqd/sai7 t| ce lµm 6dor 1n]ti je_mou, f Na heø Fqyer 1p· Ngcl?sim 5deilam, !mdq\sim axic|moisi l]mei ja· t/lor Qd]shai.

All that was done as the maiden prepared the sacrifice – let no one know, may my heart not urge me to sing of it! – I forbear from telling. From that day, however, the shrine which the heroes built to the goddess on the shore stands still visible to later generations.

13 Cf. further below 367 – 8. 14 Fränkel (1968) 550. 15 Cf. 4.596 – 618 (the tears of the Heliades).

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The poet’s piety in drawing a veil over what must not be told (cf. 1.919 – 21) is expressed through an echo of Alkinoos’ description of Demodokos (Od. 8.44 – 5): t` c\q Na he¹r p]qi d_jem !oidµm t]qpeim, fpp, hul¹r 1potq}m,sim !e_deim.

to him the god has granted the power above all others to give delight with his song, on whatever theme his spirit urges him to sing.

Although the importance of the poet’s thumos belongs to the traditional language of rhapsodic performance,16 the idea is here given a particular twist. In effect, the poet tells us in advance to blame his hul|r for anything untoward which he might sing; such a conceit seems to belong to Hellenistic constructions of the relationship between the poet and his model, far more than to archaic or classical predecessors. Very similar is Callimachus’ interrupted aition for a Naxian wedding ritual (fr. 75.4 – 9 Pf.): Nqgm c\q jot] vasi—j}om, j}om, Usweo, kaidq³ hul] , s} cû !e_s, ja· t\ peq oqw bs_g7 ¥mao j\qtû 6mej ou ti he/r Uder Req± vqijt/r, 1n #m 1pe· ja· t_m Equcer Rstoq¸gm. G pokuidqe_g wakep¹m jaj|m, fstir !jaqte? ck~ssgr7 ¢r 1te¹m pa?r fde laOkim 5wei.

For they say that once upon a time Hera – dog, dog, hold off, shameless thumos, you would sing things which you are not sanctioned to sing. A lucky thing that you have not seen the rites of the dread goddess, since you would have vomited out their story also. Ah, much knowledge is a terrible burden for a man who cannot control his tongue: he really is a child with a knife.

The Hellenistic poet’s thumos now has a mind of its own! 17 Whereas Callimachus’ praeteritio appeals to widely known ritual events, and therefore does not need to be told for the audience to experience the pleasure of knowledge, Apollonius rejects that strategy in favour of what might be called the “compensatory aition”; the permanent memorial which the 16 For another variant cf. Call. Del. 1 tµm Req¶m, ¨ hul´, t_ma wqºmom . . . !e_seir ; The “reverse” of the idea appears not long afterwards, t_ toi hul/qer !joOsai ; (29, addressed to Delos). 17 For the history of this conceit and its fortune in Hellenistic poetry cf. Hunter (1996) 182 – 4.

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Argonauts left behind acts both as the guarantor of the poet’s faithfulness —“Medea really did perform secret rituals” – and as a substitute for the information which the poet witholds: “you will not learn anything from me, but you can go and see the place for yourselves”. Above all, the poet’s power to choose (unless his hul|r takes over) is strongly emphasised through the almost paradoxical implication that the poet would be able to tell of that of which “no one should be knowledgeable (Vstyq)”.18 Callimachus’ paradox is differently fashioned: his lament for the burden of “much knowledge” follows immediately upon the statement that he does not know the Rstoq_g of the rites of Demeter. It is tempting to think that the two passages have some relation to each other.19 More than one pattern of poet-Muse relationship is in fact staged through the course of the four books. Thus at 4.552 – 6 and 4.1381 (see below) the Muses do indeed seem to embody “literary tradition”.20 Nevertheless, the distinctiveness of the construction I have been considering marks an important shift in poetic consciousness. When asking the Muse to tell him the names of the Greek commanders at Troy and the numbers of ships which each brought, Homer apparently gives two related reasons why he would be unable to do this without them (Il. 2.484 – 93). First, the Muses are gods and therefore have true knowledge, whereas mortals only “hear reports” ( jk]or oWom !jo}olem),21 and secondly the task of such a catalogue is beyond the physical powers of a mortal acting without divine assistance. Before his Catalogue Apollonius too invokes the Muses, but the form of the invocation could hardly be more different (1.20 – 2): mOm dû #m 1c½ ceme¶m te ja· oumola luhgsa_lgm Bq¾ym dokiw/r te p|qour "k¹r fssa tû 5qenam pkaf|lemoi7 LoOsai dû rpov¶toqer eWem !oid/r.

18 There is a certain temptation to understand this word as “researcher, enquirer” (cf. Rstoq_g) rather than “expert, knower”; one of the references would then be to the process of writing “learned” poetry – once one conceives the desire to write on a particular subject, the necessary research must be done. 19 The description of Demeter as heµ vqijt^ is noteworthy; it suits the Demeter of the mysteries perfectly (cf. Richardson on h.Dem. 478 – 9, R. Seaford, Hermes 122 [1994] 284 – 5), but out of context might easily suggest Hekate. 20 For 2.845 cf. below 363. 21 For this problematic phrase cf. De Jong (1987) 51 – 2.

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I now shall recount the lineage and names of the heroes, their voyages over the vast sea and all they achieved on their wanderings. May the Muses be the hypophetores of my song!

The precise meaning of the wish that the Muses be the rpov¶toqer (? “inspirers”, ? “transmitters”) of the poet’s song has been much disputed, and unanimity may never be reached; certain inferences may nevertheless be drawn.22 No poetic success is possible without the Muses, not because they supply the information to the poet, i. e. (in the archaic model) are in fact the real singers who select the traditions which will constitute any particular performance,23 but because poetry is their business, and the poet, though personally responsible for what he tells, must have their favour constantly in mind; no poem will ever reach an audience without the approval of the Muses. In one sense, then, the meaning of this wish is not far from the corresponding wish with which the poem closes (4.1773 – 6): Vkatû, !qist/er, laj\qym c]mor, aVde dû !oida· eQr 5tor 1n 5teor ckujeq¾teqai eWem !e_deim !mhq¾poir. Edg c±q 1p· jkut± pe_qahû Rj\my rlet]qym jal\tym jtk.

Be gracious, heroes, children of the blessed gods, and may these songs be from year to year ever sweeter for men to sing. For now I have reached the glorious conclusion of your struggles …

The formal farewell to the heroes24 asks their favour, lest they be offended either by anything the poet has said or because he is now going to stop (cf. 4.1775 – 7); the wish, however, for ever-increasing “sweetness” for his song is in essence a further wish for the Muses’ continued favour.25 Here too, then, a distinction between “subject” and “style”, made possible by the new-found responsibility and freedom of the poet (cf. Rj\my), is suggested. A very close parallel to Apollonius’ wish26 is Callimachus’ invocation to the Parian Graces which seems to

22 For some relevant considerations cf. Fusillo (1985) 365 – 6; Hunter (1993) 125; Albis (1996) 20 – 1. 23 Cf. Ford (1992) 72 – 82. 24 For the implications of this style of address cf. Hunter (1993) 127 – 8. 25 Cf. Hesiod, Th. 96 – 7 on the man whom the Muses love, “sweet (ckujeq^) speech flows from his mouth”. 26 Cf. Harder (1993) 105.

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have rounded off the opening sequence of the Aitia (fr. 9.13 – 14 Massimilla): 5kkate mOm, 1k]coisi dû 1mix¶sashe kip¾sar we?qar 1lo?r, Vma loi pouk» l]mysim 5tor.

Come now, wipe your hands, rich with oil, upon my elegies, so that they last for many a year.

Like the Muses, the Graces offer the sweetness of style which guarantees longevity to the poet’s narrative. One sequence which raises many of these issues within a short space is the epiphany of the Libyan heroines to Jason as the Argonauts despair in the trackless desert. The Libyan scenes follow immediately upon the episode in Drepane where the wedding-bed of Jason and Medea was strewn with the Golden Fleece itself so that the wedding would be til¶eir ja· !o_dilor “an honoured subject of song”. This hope for the future, itself ironised by our knowledge of the real future which lay in store for Jason and Medea, echoes the only occurrence of !o_dilor in the Iliad or the Odyssey, Helen’s observation to Hector that the gods sent this evil fate upon Paris and herself so that they would be !o_diloi 1ssol]moisi, “subjects of song for men in the future”.27 If events on Drepane have indeed assured the return of the Argonauts to Greece and thus made possible what will be a story known to everyone, the Libyan sequence threatens to wipe that future out. Here, where there is hope neither of nostos (4.1235, 1273 – 6) nor of heroic action (4.1252 – 7), the complete absence of spatial orientation marks the potential failure of the aetiological epic of journeying and the dissolution of Argonautic “solidarity” (4.1305 – 7; cf. 4.1290 – 3):28 ja_ m¼ jem aqtoO p\mter !p¹ fy/r 1k_ashem m¾mulmoi ja· %vamtoi 1piwhom_oisi da/mai Bq¾ym oR %qistoi !mgm¼st\ 1pû !]hk\.

There and then they would have all departed from life, the best of heroes with their task uncompleted, leaving no name or trace by which mortal men might know them. 27 Cf. Goldhill (1991) 320. For this word cf. also Hunter (1999) on Theoc. Id. 13.9. 28 Cf. Hunter (1993) 126 and the essay of David Wray in Harder – Regtuit – Wakker (2000).

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In this poetics, the failure to “leave a trace” is as good as never having existed. So too, when Jason fails to understand the instructions delivered to him, as to a sick man in a dream, we are perilously close to a breakdown in the structures of epic as they were handed down from Homer, for epic dreams are normally followed by immediate action; that breakdown seems finally to arrive with the “failure” of the following extended simile (4.1337 – 44): G, ja· !ma@nar 1t\qour 1p· lajq¹m !¼tei aqstak]or jom_,si, k]ym ¦r, fr N\ tû !mû vkgm s¼mmolom Dm leh]pym ¡q¼etai7 aR d³ baqe_, vhocc0 rpobqol]ousim !mû ouqea tgk|hi b/ssai7 de_lati dû %cqauko_ te b|er l]ca pevq_jasi boupek\tai te bo_m. to?r dû ou m¼ ti c/qur 1t¼whg Nicedamµ 2t\qoio v_koir 1pijejkol]moio7 !cwoO dû Aceq]homto jatgv]er.

With these words he sprang up and, filthy with dust, shouted over the wastes to his companions, like a lion which roars as it seeks its mate through the forest; at the sound of its deep voice the mountain-glades far away resound, and the cattle in the fields and the herdsmen of the cattle shudder with fright. But Jason’s voice did not terrify the Argonauts, as it was a comrade calling to his friends. They all gathered round him, their heads lowered in despair.

The normal processes of epic are no longer working. They are restored, however, when Peleus is able to interpret correctly the appearance of the omen which the heroines had predicted;29 the appearance of a fast and powerful horse marks the end of the Argonauts’ ordeal in a nothingness without animal life (4.1240). Here now is the opportunity for truly “heroic” action (4.1375, 1383 – 4), for the Argonauts will have to carry the Argo on their backs. At this point, as at the opening of the fourth book and at the beginning of a new “itinerary” (4.552 – 6),30 the poet resigns his usual authority in favour of the Muses (4.1381 – 4): Lous\ym fde lOhor, 1c½ dû rpajou¹r !e_dy Pieq_dym. ja· t¶mde pamatqej³r 5jkuom alv¶m,

29 That Jason repeats the heroines’ speech in indirect speech, whereas a Homeric character would have repeated the direct speech, is not so much a “failure” of epic structures, but rather a characteristic feature of Apollonian epic, cf. Hunter (1993) 143 – 51. 30 Cf. Fusillo (1985) 370 – 1.

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rl]ar, § p]qi dµ l]ca v]qtatoi uXer !m\jtym, Ø b_,, Ø !qet0 Kib¼gr !m± h?mar 1q¶lour jtk.

This tale is the Muses’, I sing obedient to the daughters of Pieria. This report too I heard in all truth that you, much the greatest sons of kings, by your strength and by your courage through the sandy deserts of Libya …

Whereas, however, the cause of the poet’s resignation at 4.1 – 5 was an alleged inability to choose an explanation for Medea’s flight,31 here, like the asyndetic exclamation Ø b_,, Ø !qet0, it is a rhetorical device designed to emphasise the extraordinary nature of what the Argonauts achieved: “I did not make this up, it is all in the tradition”. The implication is that epic poetry is, to some degree at least, subject to the laws of t¹ eQj|r, “probability”, and any breach of these laws requires justification. The poet has not required such justification before this, and whether the carrying of the Argo is any less an affront to t¹ eQj|r than any earlier event is at least debatable,32 but here a moment of crisis, for both the narrative and epic itself, is signalled. In conclusion, then, the whole sequence of events in the Libyan desert may be seen as an extended exploration of the limits of epic. In structural terms, the Libyan episode is marked as the equivalent of Odysseus’ wanderings in the land of the imagination:33 Odysseus is knocked off course by a north wind as he sails west around the bottom of the Peloponnese and is carried along for nine days (Od. 9.80 – 3); the Argonauts suffer a similar fate as they are sailing south-east and “the land of Pelops was just coming into view” (4.1231). This sense of replaying the Odyssey is reinforced by the emphasis in the immediately preceding Drepane-narrative upon the “Greekness” of the island, which is all but a homecoming for the Argonauts (cf. 4.997, 1074 – 5, 1103); Drepane is the Homeric Scherie (Corfu) on which Odysseus told his tale, and where—for all the oddities of the people—he found that “Greek” values, such as athletics and poetry, were prized. The Homeric Phaeacians were supernaturally skilled seafarers; the contrast with the Libyan Syrtis in which the science of navigation, that most Greek of skills, is entirely useless (cf. 4.1260 – 77) could hardly be more pronounced.

31 Cf. Hunter (1987) 134 – 8. 32 Fusillo (1985) 372 – 4 has a helpful, if rather too one-sided, discussion of Apollonius’ “rationalist” attitude. On this passage see also Goldhill (1991) 293. 33 Cf., e. g., Knight (1995) 125 – 7.

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In this empty nothingness the Argonauts are saved by the pity (4.1308) of the “heroines”, perhaps—though this is not made absolutely explicit—because of their status as “epic heroes” (4.1319 – 21): Udlem 1poiwol]mour wq¼seom d]qor7 Udlem 6jasta rlet]qym jal\tym, fsû 1p· whom¹r fssa tû 1vû rcqµm pkaf|lemoi jat± p|mtom rp]qbia 5qca j\leshe.

We know that you and your comrades went to gain the golden fleece; we know every detail of all your sufferings, all the extraordinary things you have endured on land and sea in your wanderings over the ocean.

These words echo those with which the Sirens seek to lure Odysseus to his doom by the promise of epic song about Troy (Od. 12.184 – 91); here, however, the kleos of the Argonauts saves them, even before they have completed their voyage. Epic poetry is the telling of “famed stories”. The Hellenistic epic intensifies this sense of repetition by the constant suggestion that the Argonauts are not merely journeying towards kleos, but are forever accompanied by, and measured against, previous accounts of their voyage. This palpable sense of a textured tradition is a fundamental feature of the aesthetics of the Argonautica. With the opening generic marker, pakaicem]ym jk´a vyt_m, comes a further mark of Hellenistic distance.34 In the Iliad, Phoenix evoked the deeds of “heroic men before us” in order to encourage Achilles to emulation; the story which he then tells still lives in his memory, though it is “long ago, not at all recent” (Il. 9.527). So too in the Odyssey, Demodokos sings of men and events of his own generation – Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, the fall of Troy. Most striking of all, in book 1 Phemios sings of the nostos of the Greeks from Troy (Od. 1.326 – 7), events which are of very recent happening and are indeed, at least for Odysseus, still going on. Here the poet fashions for us a glimpse of the beginnings of a particular song tradition. The poet of the Iliad himself, as opposed to his characters, draws a famous distinction between the heroic prowess of his characters and “men as they are now”,35 so that the epic itself tells of heroes (cf. Il. 1.4) “born long ago”, though those heroes themselves listen to “contemporary” stories and songs. This difference between the subject of Homer’s song and the subjects of which his bards sing may be seen as a fundamental part of Homer’s creation 34 For a possible relation with “cyclic” beginnings cf. below 372 – 3. 35 Cf. Il. 5.302 – 4; 12.380 – 3, 447 – 50; 20.285 – 7.

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of a distant, heroic world. Nevertheless, despite the gap between “then” and “now”, and however “walled off absolutely from all subsequent times”36 the epic past in Homer may be, Homer does not in fact emphatically foreground the temporal distance between himself and the subjects of his song, as Apollonius does in the very opening verse; even the slighting references to “men as they are now” are rhetorically not much stronger than Nestor’s unfavourable contrast between his own youth and “the present lot” (Il. 1.271 – 2; 7.123 – 60).37 Apollonius, however, in both the proem and the closing envoi stresses his own temporal distance from the Argonauts, a distance which is one manifestation of a self-conscious generic placement: “epic” concerns men and events “long ago”. This poetic stance may now be seen to develop from a related positioning already found in the Homeric poems: it is not a matter of a radical break with the past through the creation of a quite new poetics, but rather of a rearrangement of emphasis giving new meaning to particular elements within a pre-existing repertoire. Whereas, however, this generic placement emphasises distance between “then” and “now”, the powerful aetiological drive of the Argonautica works to break down that distance and to problematise the nature of epic time.38

2. In writing a relatively long narrative poem on a mythological subject, and one which clearly measures itself against the Homeric poems, Apollonius seems in some respects to have gone against the predominant poetic trends of his Alexandrian context. It cannot, however, be too often stressed that the vast majority of Hellenistic hexameter narrative poetry has been lost, and that the meagre fragments which survive, together with the known titles, offer ample opportunity for disagreement 36 Bakhtin (1981) 15. Bakhtin’s very influential account of “the epic past” (ibid. 15 – 18) is really applicable only to the Iliad of all classical epics, and even there important reservations are necessary. 37 This is not, of course, to deny the importance of such passages as the opening of Iliad 12 on the destruction of the Achaean wall (cf. Hunter [1993] 103 – 4, and De Jong [1987] 44 – 5), but it is the explicitness of the Hellenistic poet which is at issue. 38 For aetiology in the Argonautica cf. Fusillo (1985) 116 – 58; Goldhill (1991) 321 – 33; Valverde Sánchez (1989).

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about the nature and scope of the poems from which they derive.39 Cameron has argued forcefully that much of what has been taken for evidence of large-scale Hellenistic mythological epic in fact reflects relatively short poetry, often of an encomiastic or locally regional character.40 Apollonius’ other poetry of which we know, hexameter poems on “Foundations” and a choliambic poem about Kanobos, the site of a Ptolemaic temple of Sarapis, seem very firmly within the interests of the Alexandrian avant-garde, the best (and, in many respects, only) witness to which is Callimachus.41 The Argonautica was, moreover, a fashionable poem with the Roman neoterics (cf. Varro of Atax’s translation, Catullus 64 etc.), who fashioned themselves as the heirs of that Alexandrian avant-garde, and there is no suggestion in the Roman Nachleben that the Argonautica was in any way out of step with the modern “Callimachean” style. It is hard to believe that any such views would not have left traces in the explicit polemising of the Roman elegists against the writing of epic. Callimachus himself seems to have written no “epic” poem, as that term is now understood. The Hekale, a poem of uncertain length (?? c. 1200 hexameters),42 told the story of how Theseus, on his way to fight the bull of Marathon, was entertained in the Attic countryside by a woman called Hekale, when he took shelter in her hut from a storm; on returning after his triumph over the bull, the hero found that Hekale had died, and so he gave her name to the local deme and founded a shrine of Zeus Hekaleios. If much about the Hekale, particularly its aetiological focus and its interest in “ordinary” lives, recalls other areas of Callimachus’ œuvre, the “generic” resonance of the poem was clearly that of epic.43 This is suggested by the metre, the use of “epic” similes (which are otherwise very rare in what survives of Callimachus’ poetry), the extensive use of direct speech with its consequent implications for the ethical presentation of the characters, the rarity, if not in fact total absence, of the intrusive authorial voice so familiar in the Aitia and the Hymns (and indeed in Apollonius’ Argonautica),44 and a verbal style 39 40 41 42 43 44

There is an important survey by Marco Fantuzzi in Ziegler (1988). Cameron (1995) 262 – 302. Cf. Hunter (1989) 9 – 12, Krevans (2000). Cf. Hollis (1990) Appendix II. Cf. in general Cameron (1995) 437 – 47. Cf. Cameron (1992) 311 – 12; Hunter (1993) 115 – 16; Lynn (1995) 71 – 2. The state of preservation of the text obviously enjoins caution, but the clear direction of what does survive can hardly be dismissed as pure chance. In their

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which is closer to Homer than is the style of Callimachus’ Hymns.45 It is a reasonable inference that, for Callimachus, this was “epic”, as he would write it. The wretchedly broken fragments of Callimachus’ treatment in book 1 of the Aitia of the Argonauts’ return to Greece (frr. 9.19 – 23 Massimilla) may illustrate these stylistic differences— these fragments look more like the Argonautica, which all but certainly borrowed from them,46 than the Hekale—though they are also a warning against facile distinctions between “epic” and “elegiac” narrative.47 Much more wide-ranging inferences about Callimachus’ attitude to “traditional epic” (and hence perhaps to the Argonautica) have been drawn from the “Reply to the Telchines”, which stood at the head of the Aitia, and the conclusion to the Hymn to Apollo. Neither passage can be discussed in any detail here, though one issue from the opening of “the Reply” must be considered, as it is of the greatest importance for the poetics of the Argonautica. In these verses Callimachus claims that “the Telchines” criticise him because he did not write one continuous song (4m %eisla digmej]r) in many thousands of verses; he thus advertises the Aitia as not digmej]r. As a pejorative term applied to a poem, digmej]r might mean “continuous, unbroken”, i. e. poetry “in which the poet simply records one event after another without any structure or climax, as though writing a chronicle”;48 the obvious example of such a poem would be the Cyclic epics as represented by Aristotle (Po. 1459a37–b7), poems which started at a beginning given by chance or time (e. g. a hero’s birth) and carried on sequentially to a telos not following causally from the opening. A narrative of all the labours of Heracles would be such a poem.49 More positively, however, the word is used from Homer onwards of speech which is “complete and properly ordered”, and hence “accurate” (in both senses), “genau und vollstän-

45 46 47

48 49

editions, Hollis and D’Alessio note frr. 15, 65 and 149 as probable or possible examples of authorial apostrophe to a character; this type of “intervention” had, of course, good Homeric precedent. Cf. Hollis (1990) 12. On the style of the Hekale see also Fantuzzi (1988) 20 – 1, 25. Particularly close are Jason’s prayers (fr. 20.5 – 8 Massimilla, Arg. 4.1701 – 5). Of particular interest are the style of Aietes’ address at fr. 9.30 ff Massimilla (the new !matq\peka, the colloquial 1poi^samt| le v|qtom (cf. E. Magnelli, Prometheus 24 [1998] 215 – 16), and the repeated soOshe which may also have a “non-epic” feel), the dialectology of fr. 13, and the extraordinary time-designation at fr. 23.4 – 5. Cameron (1995) 343; for this sense cf. also Hunter (1993) 192 – 3. Cf. Hunter (1998) 128.

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dig”;50 to speak digmej]r in archaic epic is to speak well and without concealment or “economy with the truth”. So Odysseus replies to Queen Arete’s questions with an apology (Od. 7.241 – 2): !qcak]om, bas_keia, digmej]yr !coqeOsai j¶deû, 1pe_ loi pokk± d|sam heo· oqqam_ymer.

It is hard, queen, to give a complete account of my troubles, since many are those which the heavenly ones have given me.51

When Virgil’s queen asks Aeneas to tell his story she repeats this sense of fullness and ordering (Aen. 1.753 – 5):52 “immo age et a prima dic, hospes, origine nobis insidias” inquit “Danaum casusque tuorum erroresque tuos …” Come now, my guest, and recount to us from the very beginning the deceit of the Greeks and the sufferings and wanderings of yourself and your men …

Apollonius uses digmej]r of lengthy speeches which cover every detail in full, a style of speaking which the Argonautica sometimes rejects (cf. 1.648 – 9; 2.391; 3.401). The word is most neatly explained by Phineus who tells the Argonauts that he was punished for revealing Zeus’s mind 2ne_gr te ja· 1r t]kor, “sequentially and through to the end” (2.314), but must then pull himself up to prevent once again prophesying t± 6jasta digmej]r “every detail without omission” (2.391); the two phrases are virtually identical in meaning.53 In apparently denying this quality to the Aitia, however exactly the word is understood, Callimachus seems to advertise both the discontinuous, fractured nature of the Aitia as a whole and the partial, selective narrative on view in individual episodes (the narrative of “Akontios and Kydippe”, with its insistent si50 Asper (1997) 218; Asper’s full discussion of this sense should be consulted. Cf. also Lynn (1995) 133 – 6. 51 Cf. also Od. 12.56; Hes. Th. 627. At fr. 30.8 Massimilla Callimachus seems to associate Amej]r with rhapsodic performance. 52 The parallel passage at Od. 8.572 shows how readily digmej]yr and !tqej]yr, “accurately, truly”, overlap. 53 That the subject of Phineus’ narration is a coastal voyage in which sequential order is imposed by geography (cf. 2ne_gr at 2.380, 395) reinforces the primary sense of the term. So too, Jason’s account to Lykos is told 2ne_gr (2.771), and it follows what we know to have been the order of the poem.

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lences, is a striking example). At the very least, it is not unreasonable to infer that narrative continuity and completeness was a live issue among those interested in poetics and to enquire where the Argonautica would fit in such a discussion. There is in fact an intriguing piece of evidence that the Argonautica did indeed figure in some such discussion. A cruelly torn papyrus of the second century A.D. seems to contain a comparison of the oQjomol_a of Apollonius’ poem with at least two other versions of the same story (SH 339A).54 One poem is apparently praised, as Homer is in the grammatical tradition, for its sumtol_a (not so much “brief writing”, but “writing in which every word matters”) 55 and use of paqejb\seir, “digressions”, which allow the reader some respite, whereas another poem seems to tell the story “at length all the way through”. Unfortunately, the state of the papyrus does not allow us to know which poem the unknown critic classed as “more Homeric” and to what the phrase “continuous and of many verses” (sumew]si ja· pokust_woir) refers; the obvious temptation to see a contrast between Apollonian “wordiness” and some different “modern” treatment may be completely misleading. In his discussion of this papyrus, Rusten calls attention to a passage of Polybius (38.5 – 6) which discusses similar issues in the historians (trans. W. R. Paton, adapted): I am not unaware that some people will criticise my history on the grounds that my narrative of events is incomplete and disconnected ( !tek/ ja· dieqqil]mgm). For example, after undertaking to give an account of the siege of Carthage I leave that in suspense and interrupting myself pass to the affairs of Greece, and next to those of Macedonia, Syria and other countries, while students desire continuous narrative and long to learn the issue of the matter I first set my hand to (fgte?m d³ to»r vikolahoOmtar t¹ sumew³r ja· t¹ t]kor Rle_qeim !joOsai t/r pqoh]seyr) . . . My opinion is just the reverse of this; and I would appeal to the testimony of Nature (v¼sir) herself, who in the case of any of the senses never elects to go on persistently ( jat± t¹ sumew]r) with the same allurements, but is ever fond of change and desires to meet with the same things after an interval and a difference. . . . And the same holds good as regards the sense of sight. For it is quite incapable of gazing constantly at one object, but requires variety and change in what is seen (B poijik_a ja· letabokµ t_m bqyl]mym) to stimulate it. But this is especially true as regards the intellect. For hard workers find a sort of rest in change of the subjects which absorb and interest them. And 54 The basic discussion is Rusten (1982) 53 – 64. 55 Cf. the Index to Erbse’s edition of the Iliad scholia s.vv. sumtol_a, s}mtolor, Franz (1943) 26 – 7.

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this, I think, is why the most thoughtful of ancient writers (oR koci¾tatoi t_m !qwa_ym succqav]ym) were in the habit of giving their readers a rest in the way I say, some of them employing digressions dealing with myth or story and others digressions on matters of fact (tim³r l³m luhija?r ja· digcglatija?r jewqgl]moi paqejb\sesi, tim³r d³ ja· pqaclatija?r), so that not only do they shift the scene from one part of Greece to another, but include doings abroad . . . All historians have resorted to this device but have done so in a random way ( !t\jtyr), while I myself use it methodically (tetacl]myr). For these other authors, after mentioning how Bardyllis, the king of Illyria, and Cersobleptes, the king of Thrace, acquired their kingdoms, do not give us the continuation (t¹ sumew]r) or carry us on to what proved to be the sequel after a certain lapse of time, but merely insert these things as in a poem ( jah\peq 1m poi¶lati) and then return to the original subject. But I myself, keeping distinct all the most important parts of the world and the events that took place in each, and adhering always to a uniform conception of how each matter should be treated . . . obviously leave full liberty to students to carry back their minds to the continuous narrative (1p· t¹m sumew/ k|com) and the several points at which I interrupted it, so that those who wish to learn may find none of the matters I have mentioned imperfect and deficient.

The interest of this passage in the present context lies not so much in any novelty of terminology or thought—for both can be amply paralleled in ancient criticism – but in the fullness and clarity with which the issues are presented. There can, of course, be no simple transference from historiography to poetry, for Polybius is defending a synchronic narrative method in which, as it were, many narratives are in play at the same time but none is presented “continuously”; the appeal to the advantages of poijik_a suits the argument, though it is at least debatable whether Polybius’ method really could be described as an ordered (tetacl]myr) use of “digressions”. Be that as it may, the privileging of a narrative method other than the telling of a story largely without interruption all the way through to the end has an obvious resonance against both Callimachus’ 4m %eisla digmej]r and the critical language of the fragmentary papyrus. Relevant also is what Aristotle has to say about epic construction in the Poetics. In Chapter 8 Aristotle discusses the nature of poetic mythos (Po. 1451a 16 – 35, trans. M. Hubbard): Unity of plot is not, as some think, achieved by writing about one man . . . one man’s actions (pq\neir) are numerous and do not make up any single action (l_a pq÷nir). That is why I think the poets mistaken who have produced Heracleids or Theseids or other poems of this kind, in the belief that the plot would be one just because Heracles was one. Homer especially shows his superiority in taking a right view here—whether by art or nature:

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in writing a poem on Odysseus he did not introduce everything that was incidentally true of him, being wounded on Parnassus, for instance, or pretending to be mad at the mustering of the fleet, neither of which necessarily or probably implied the other at all; instead he composed the Odyssey about an action that is one in the sense I mean (peq· l_am pq÷nim oVam k]colem), and the same is true of the Iliad . . . a plot, being a mimesis of an action, should be a mimesis of one action and that a whole one, with the different sections so arranged that the whole is disturbed by the transposition and destroyed by the removal of any one of them; for if it makes no visible difference whether a thing is there or not, that thing is no part of the whole.

In Chapter 23 Aristotle returns to the subject again (Po. 1459a 17 – 37, trans. M. Hubbard): Clearly one should compose [epic] plots to be dramatic,56 just as in the case of tragedies, that is, about one whole or complete action with a beginning, middle parts, and end, so that it produces its proper pleasure like a single whole living creature. Its plots should not be like histories; for in histories it is necessary to give a report of a single period, not of a unified action, that is, one must say whatever was the case in that period about one man or more; and each of these things may have a quite casual interrelation. For just as, if one thinks of the same time, we have the battle of Salamis and the battle of Himera against the Carthaginians not directed to achieve any identical purpose, so in consecutive times one thing sometimes happens after another without any common purpose being achieved by them. Most epic poets do make plots like histories. So in this respect too Homer is marvellous in the way already described, in that he did not undertake to make a whole poem of the war either, even though it had a beginning and an end. For the plot would have been too large and not easy to see as a whole (oqj eqs¼moptor), or if it had been kept to a moderate length it would have been tangled because of the variety of events ( jatapepkecl]mom t0 poijik_ô). As it is he takes one part and uses many others as episodes, for example, the catalogue of the ships and the other episodes with which he breaks the uniformity of his poem (diakalb\mei tµm po_gsim).

Somewhat later, Aristotle actually tries to prescribe a length for epic, and the prescription seems remarkably like the 5,835 verses of the Argonautica (Po. 1459b 19 – 22, trans. M. Hubbard): One should be able to get a synoptic view of the beginning and the end [of an epic]. This will be the case if the poems are shorter than those of the ancients, and about as long as the number of tragedies offered at one sitting.

The first point to be made is that, for all the differences of subject and attitude between Aristotle and Polybius – and some of what Polybius 56 On this term cf. below 369 – 72.

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has to say about his synchronic method seems at first glance like the confirmation of Aristotle’s worst fears about historiography – it is clear that arrangement and structure, the relation of part to whole, are key issues of Hellenistic debate. The influence of peripatetic ideas in the Homeric scholia makes it very likely that a leading Alexandrian scholar such as Apollonius would have been in touch with the literary criticism of the Peripatos, but, whether this is so or not, everything suggests that Apollonius will have expected his readers to take particular note of the oQjomol_a of his poem as a major programmatic marker. If, however, it is easy enough to see how the Aitia is “discontinuous”, and what we know of the Hekale suggests that it too was at least very poij_kom, avoided the linear narrative of the cyclic epics rejected by Aristotle (who, as we have seen, specifically names “Theseids” as a type of poem particularly prone to structural weakness),57 and presented a single praxis of some kind, the case of the Argonautica is more problematic. Apollonius’ decision to write the story of the Argonautic voyage in a linear fashion, beginning at the beginning, reaching the turning-point halfway through (at the end of book 2) and finishing the moment the voyage ends (at the same spot where it began), offers (in one sense) a closed structure to which the term jujkij|m, “having the form of a circle”, might readily be applied; so too might digmej]r, if emphasis is given to the sense of chronological ordering and completeness suggested by the gloss sumew_r (sch. D on Il. 7.321). More than once, Apollonius calls attention to the outward claim of comprehensiveness which is implied in the traditional usage of the term. In book 2 he tells of the rites which followed the death of the prophet Idmon and the visible signs which still persist (2.841 – 50): ja· d¶ toi j]wutai toOdû !m]qor 1m whom· je_m, t¼lbor7 s/la dû 5pesti ja· axic|moisim Qd]shai, m¶ior 1j jot_moio v\kacn—hak]hei d] te v¼kkoir—, %jqgr tuth¹m 5meqhû ûAweqous_dor. eQ d] le ja· t¹ wqei½ !pgkec]yr Lous]ym vpo cgq¼sashai, t|mde pokissoOwom diep]vqade Boiyto?si Misa_ois_ te Vo?bor 1piqq¶dgm Rk\eshai, !lv· d³ t¶mde v\kacca pakaicem]or jot_moio %stu bake?m, oR dû !mt· heoud]or AQok_dao ]dlomor eQs]ti mOm ûAcal¶stoqa juda_mousi.

57 Like the Odyssey, the Hekale tells the story of a crucial episode in the life (and in this case death) of one mortal, but through an enclosed narration much of that character’s past life is also revealed.

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This man’s tomb rises in that land a little below the Acherousian headland; as a marker visible to men of later generations, it is crowned by a ship’s roller made from wild-olive and covered in abundant foliage. If under the Muses I must also tell without constraint of what follows, Phoibos instructed the Boiotians and Nisaians to pay honours to this man under the title “Protector of the City” and to establish a city around this roller of ancient olive-wood; they, however, to this day glorify Agamestor rather than Idmon, the descendant of god-fearing Aiolos.

The apparent reluctance to tell the full story of this aition !pgkec]yr, probably “straight out, i. e. without euphemistic concealment”,58 seems to refer to the fact that the aition honours Agamestor, rather than Idmon; what forces him to do so is his duty to the Muses qua poet of the Argonautic story in all its myriad ramifications, but this apparent “necessity” merely calls attention to the poet’s freedom to include or exclude. “Comprehensiveness”, like all poetic qualities, is a matter of choice.59 So too, at 4.985, in the Drepane aition which was discussed above, the poet’s “unwillingness” (oqj 1h]kym) to tell the tale of Ouranos’ castration of his father in fact dramatises his choice to do so.60 At one level, then, Apollonius tells the story digmej]yr, but the ironic acknowledgement of the impossibility of “completeness”, the awareness that all narration is a process of selectivity, undermines the apparent assurance of the archaic category. In archaic epic the positive virtue of “telling the whole story”, of digmej]r narrative, can sit harmoniously with the fact that tellings (have to) begin at a certain point in the web of story; the essential narrative act is “taking up the tale from the point where . . .”, 5mhem 2k¾m, that narrative move which Callimachus replicates in his “Argonautica” (fr. 9.25 Massimilla).61 The in medias res structure of the Odyssey is not merely a matter of technique, but a way of representing a fundamental fact of the self-presentation of early epic song. In Hellenistic narrative, however, these two tendencies have to some extent been set in opposition, perhaps under the influence of other narrative modes, such as that of choral lyric, where overt selectivity and imbalance had always predominated. One result of these developments may be seen in narratives such as Moschus’ Europa, the so-called “epyllia”, another in the episodic 58 59 60 61

Cf. Livrea on 4.689. On “comprehensiveness” in the Argonautica cf. Fusillo (1985) passim. Contrast Fusillo (1985) 372 who regards the aition as “ineliminabile”. Cf. Lynn (1995) 162.

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structure of Theocritus 25.62 Apollonius “begins at the beginning” and “ends at the end”, thus both avoiding and dramatising the impasse. The end of Aeneid 1, which we considered above, seems to evoke both kinds of narrative: Dido’s insistent questions (vv. 748 – 52) ask first for “epyllia”, and then – to keep Aeneas at the banquet for as long as possible – “the whole story”. In both the Iliad and the Argonautica the opening verses foreshadow what is to come, and then a transitional passage (1.5 – 17; Il. 1.12 – 42) fills in some of the background up to the point at which the narrative proper begins.63 On the other hand, there is in the Argonautica nothing corresponding to the scenes of Iliad 2 – 4 which seem to belong “really” to the earlier part of the war – and the early placing of the Apollonian catalogue might be taken as a “corrective” of the Homeric positioning —whereas there does seem to be a pointed contrast with the elaborate structuring of the Odyssey, which opens with the hero stuck on Kalypso’s island. Moreover, the Argonautica maintains a (relatively) deafening silence about events “before the poem began”, in marked contrast to Odysseus’ narration of his travels. Although we eventually learn of one of the reasons for Hera’s favour towards Jason (3.60 – 75) and there are various scattered hints about the circumstances of Phrixos’ flight from Greece,64 we hear almost nothing of Jason’s upbringing or the background to Pelias’ imposition of the quest; when Jason tells Lykos his story (5pg), he begins precisely where the poem began, with Pelias’ instructions and the catalogue of Argonauts (2.762 – 3).65 A first-person voyage-narrative imposes, of course, its own kind of linearity; when Odysseus recounts his adventures to Penelope (Od. 23.310 – 43), he follows precise chronological order, as he does with his main narration to the Phaeacians (except for his initial references to Kalypso and Kirke, which act as narrative “tasters”, Od. 9.29 – 33). As for the end, both Homeric epics (as also the Aeneid) conclude with an episode not explicitly foreshadowed in the proem – the burial of Hektor, the battle between Odysseus and the suitors’ families – whereas the ending of the Argonautica, which from one point of view seems radically abrupt, is, from another, surprising only in its com62 63 64 65

Cf. Hunter (1998). For ancient praise of Homer’s technique cf. Brink on Hor. AP 148. Cf. Hunter (1989) 21. This silence must be distinguished from the many included accounts of “previous history”, cf. Fusillo (1985) 24 – 98.

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plete predictability: how else could the voyage-narrative have ended? By way of contrast, the actual end of both Homeric poems was disputed in ancient transmission. An alternative “ending” (or, rather, beginning of a new direction) for the Iliad survives, ¤r oV cû !lv_epom t\vom >jtoqor, Gkhe dû ûAlaf½m/-qgor huc\tgq lecak¶toqor !mdqov|moio, “so they conducted the burial of Hektor, but there arrived the Amazon, daughter of great Ares, the man-slayer”, a phenomenon indicative of “the expectation in an oral tradition that an epic narrative will be continued”.66 The conclusion to the Argonautica formally substitutes the hope of ritual repetition (4.1774 – 5) for this expectation. As for the Odyssey, the alternative “end” determined by Aristophanes of Byzantium and later Aristarchus at 23.296, !sp\sioi k]jtqoio pakaioO hesl¹m Vjomto, to which the conclusion of the Argonautica may allude,67 again suggests the openness of epic endings. Every reader of the Argonautica carries knowledge of the future fates of Pelias, Jason and Medea beyond the poem, but the formal ending could hardly be more solid or fixed, for the poet himself announces it as such. A final consideration within the area of narrative continuity is the privileged place epic gives to included narratives, both of direct relevance to “the principal story” (e. g. Achilles to Thetis in Iliad 1) and of more oblique significance (the stories of Nestor and Phoenix in the Iliad or of Menelaos in the Odyssey, for example).68 In this feature also, discretion within generic parameters, sometimes amounting to an apparent preference for silence, is the Apollonian hallmark. In part this is because of the new prominence of the narrator, who himself is able to expand “tangential” stories at length (e. g. the story of Aristaios, 2.498 – 528), and, as the Aristaios narration suggests, there is a sense in which aetiology, which binds the present to the past, has taken the place of “epic” stories which rather accentuate the divide between the two. This distinction between Homer and Apollonius is not, of course, absolute. Phineus’ account of his companion Paraibios (2.468 – 89) evokes familiar epic themes; Lykos’ narrative of Herakles at 2.774 – 810 suggests the various Herakles-epics known to antiquity,69 66 Hardie (1997b) 139. The verses are often associated with the Aithiopis, but cf. Davies (1988) 48 and (1989) 61. 67 For discussion and bibliography cf. Hunter (1993) 119 – 20, Theodorakopoulos (1998). 68 Cf. Hardie (1993) 99, “epic heroes themselves feel a strong pressure to narrate, by telling stories of past heroic events”. 69 Cf. Hunter (1998).

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and athletic competitions at funeral-games (2.780 – 5) is another wellknown setting. Nevertheless, the brevity and ellipse of Apollonian narrative are here striking. Jason himself “summarises the poem” for Lykos at 2.762 – 72, in a catalogue which makes Odysseus’ account of his adventures to Penelope (Od. 23.310 – 43) seem positively verbose. A similar impression is left by a comparison of Argos’ brief plea to the Argonauts for help (2.1123 – 33) with Odysseus’ speech to Nausikaa when in a not dissimilar predicament (Od. 6.149 – 85). So too, in response to Jason’s question as to the identity of the shipwrecked foursome, Argos provides an Apollonian version of the familiar genealogical self-presentation of the Homeric hero (2.1141 – 56). Probably the most famous such speech in Homer is Glaukos’ response to Diomedes at Il. 6.145 – 210 (“as are the generations of leaves, so are those of men . . .”), containing the lengthy narrative about Bellerophon, and that scene does indeed seem to have been in Apollonius’ mind. In both epics the speech of self-presentation leads to a recognition of relationship (Il. 6.215 ~ Arg. 2.1160). Having first rejected the importance of ceme¶ in the face of human change, Glaukos then expatiates at length, noting – with a typically heroic concern for kleos —that “many men know of my family already” (Il. 6.151).70 Argos dispenses with preamble: “That a descendant of Aiolos called Phrixos travelled to Aia from Hellas I have no doubt you yourselves are already aware”. We recognise a typical reworking of an archaic motif—the assumed fame of one’s family history – but the form of the reworking forces us to ask: “Why should these complete strangers (cf. 2.1123 – 4) know this”? Perhaps Argos is so self-absorbed that he cannot conceive of a human being ignorant of the story of the Golden Fleece, but perhaps rather the literate poet, always concerned to put ironising distance between himself and the discursive, repetitive style of archaic epic, not only cuts the storytelling short but, in doing so, lays bare the assumptions of epic form.71 “Commentary” on inherited poetic techniques and themes is a central 70 For other relevant considerations here cf. Scodel (1998) 175 – 6. The claim that the genealogy is already famous is a familiar strategy of Iliadic heroes, cf. Il. 20.203 – 5, Ford (1992) 63 – 7. 71 It is instructive of the difference between Apollonius and Virgil in their approach to epic form that the latter avoids such a difficulty in the comparable scene of Achaemenides’ meeting with Aeneas and his crew (cf. Heinze [1915] 112 n. 4) by having Achaemenides recognise them as Trojans from clothes and weapons (3.596 – 7).

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feature of the Hellenistic epic. It is this poetic voice again which we hear shortly after through Jason’s words (2.1165 – 6): !kk± t± l³m ja· 1saOtir 1m_xolem !kk¶koisi, mOm dû 6ssashe p\qoihem.

But we will talk of these things at a later time; now first put on clothes.

Homeric characters always had time to talk. In books 1 – 2, a relatively familiar geography and then the guiding words of Phineus impose an order and predictability upon the voyage. On the return journey, however, not only are we dealing (as Apollonius’ readers would have been well aware) with a much more fantastic geography, but the very diversity of return routes which tradition recorded for the Argonauts imposed (at least the potential for) greater randomness and chaos to break up any sense of predictable linearity. The major shifts of direction in the return voyage are in fact as follows: (i) At 4.253 ff, while on the Paphlagonian coast, the heroes recall that Phineus had prophesied a “different route” for the return voyage, and Argos tells them of the route marked out by a nameless traveller from the mists of time; Hera then sends a heavenly light to guide them and they head off north-west across the Black Sea. (ii) At 4.552 ff, as the Argonauts are sailing south down the eastern side of the Adriatic, Hera realises that Zeus requires them to be cleansed by Kirke and so she sends southerly winds that drive the Argo back up the Adriatic and into the Eridanos (Po), so that they can make the long and hazardous voyage around to the west coast of Italy where Kirke lives. The shift in direction is introduced by one of Apollonius’ rare addresses to the Muses (4.552 – 6): !kk\, hea_, p_r t/sde paq³n "k|r, !lv_ te ca?am Aqsom_gm m¶sour te Kicust_dar, aT jak]omtai Stoiw\der, ûAqc]gr peqi¾sia s¶lata mg¹r mgleqt³r p]vatai ; t_r !p|pqohi t|ssom !m\cjg ja· wqei¾ svû 1j|lisse ; t_mer sv]ar Ecacom awqai ;

How is it, goddesses, that beyond this sea, in the Ausonian land and the Ligurian islands called Stoichades, many clear traces of the Argo’s voyage appear? What necessity and need took them so far away? What winds directed them?

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Among other considerations,72 the appeal to the Muses, with its implied abrogation of responsibility, marks the suddenness, almost randomness of the change; the poet finds a “causal nexus” – Zeus’ anger at the killing of Apsyrtos – but even he is puzzled by the change (note pou in 4.557).73 “Necessity and need” ( !m\cjg ja· wqei¾) here drive an otherwise rudderless narrative. (iii) It is Hera’s intervention again which prevents the Argonauts from taking a fatal turning at the Herkynian Rock and directs them rather into the safety of the Rhône (4.636 – 44). (iv) It is the action of Hera and Thetis which gets the Argonauts moving again after the stop with Kirke. (v) After the Argonauts leave Drepane, things seem to be going well (4.1223 – 7): Elati dû 2bdol\t\ Dqep\mgm k_pom7 Ekuhe dû owqor !jqaµr A_hem rpe¼dior7 oR dû !m]loio pmoi0 1peic|lemoi pqot]qy h]om. !kk± c±q ou py aUsilom Gm 1pib/mai ûAwai_dor Bq¾essim, evqû 5ti ja· Kib¼gr 1p· pe_qasim atk¶seiam.

On the seventh day they left Drepane. At dawn the weather was clear and a strong breeze blew; they sailed quickly on, propelled by the strength of the wind. It was not yet fated, however, for the heroes to step upon the Achaian land: first they must undergo further sufferings on the borders of Libya.

The Argonauts must go to Libya because it is aUsilom ; a human character quite naturally appeals to aWsa to explain events in retrospect, but for the poet so to do is to advertise the “composite” nature of the narrative, to allow the seams in the “stitched song” to show. (vi) It is a series of divine interventions which save the Argonauts in North Africa and allow them to reach the Mediterranean again. In place, then, of the directed voyage of books 1 – 2, book 4 offers a patternless voyage which can only be explained in terms of divine interventions and a series of intertextual decisions. This is thrown into particular relief by a comparison with the principal intertext, Odysseus’ tale of his voyage. Odysseus is driven off course by north winds and carried for nine days (presumably southwards) to the Lotus-eaters; from there, no further direction is given (Od. 9.105 – 7). So too, when Odysseus and his men leave the Cyclops’ island, they simply start rowing and sail “further” (pqot]qy) to Aiolos’ island (Od. 9.565 – 10.1); from there they are 72 Cf. Fusillo (1985) 370 – 1, and above 345 ff. 73 Cf. Hunter (1993) 108 – 9.

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heading in the right direction until the crew’s foolishness unties the bag of winds, and they are pushed back to Aiolos; when Aiolos throws them out, they once again sail “further”, but with no indication of direction or wind (Od. 9.77 – 9). The next stop is the Laistrygonians, and then, with precisely the same pattern, Kirke (Od. 9.133 – 5). Kirke offers directions for the Underworld and after, and finally the gods take a hand after the eating of the Cattle of the Sun. Under the influence of ancient views of the geography of Odysseus’ travels, Apollonius has mapped the Homeric absence of spatial co-ordinates on to a more modern and “comprehensive” geography, and he has replaced the formulaic Homeric link between stops on the voyage by an almost equally random, but poetically much more self-conscious, set of variations. Indeed, the three major shifts in direction for the Argonauts, (i), (ii) and (v) above, form a progressive sequence of “inexplicability” on the human scale: from Argos’ memory confirmed by omen, to Hera’s decisive and “necessary” intervention, and finally to the unexplained workings of aWsa.

3. A voyage-narrative was never going to be easy to accommodate within an Aristotelian scheme, and Aristotle would certainly not have looked for a causal nexus of necessity or probability in the various stages of Odysseus’ own tale. It is precisely this inherent inconsequentiality, the episodic partition imposed by the very nature of travel, which can be seen at the heart of the Western tradition of “romance”, as opposed to the harsh teleologies of “epic”.74 Such a distinction has, of course, no real significance within ancient criticism, although “Longinus”’ comparison between the Iliad, whose “whole body is dramatic and full of contest” (dqalatij¹m ja· 1mac¾miom), and the Odyssey which is largely narrative (digcglatij|m) is moving towards an important element of what was to become the traditional distinction (De subl. 9.13). Although the thought is not easy to follow in this chapter (and the text may be corrupt), it is clear that “Longinus” associates what he sees as the diminution of Homer’s power in the Odyssey, a relaxing of the stirring tension of the Iliad, with the increased prominence of t± luh¾dg ja· %pista ; even in those episodes of admitted power, 74 Cf. esp. Quint. (1993) 31 – 41 and passim.

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“the mythical element is predominant over action” (toO pqajtijoO jqate? t¹ luhij|m). In rewriting Odysseus’ adventures, Apollonius exaggerates (if anything) the element of t¹ luhij|m—the passage through the Planktai is perhaps the locus classicus—and it is tempting to see here a generic exploration of the nature of epic, in a way that to some extent foreshadows “Longinus”’ discussion of the Odyssey. Two (related) further considerations might lend colour to this suggestion. For both Aristotle and “Longinus” the best epics or epic plots are “dramatic” (dqalatij|m).75 In opposing the dqalatij¹m ja· 1mac¾miom Iliad to the Odyssey which is largely digcglatij|m, “Longinus” is (whether by chance or design) a distant descendant of the fourth-century concern with the distinction between “narrative” and mimesis (in Plato’s sense, cf. Pl. R. 3.392c ff, Arist. Po. 1448a 20 – 5) and, in particular, of Aristotle’s praise for Homer’s self-concealment (Po. 1460a 5 – 11, trans. M. Hubbard): Homer especially deserves praise as the only epic poet to realize what the epic poet should do in his own person, that is, say as little as possible, since it is not in virtue of speaking in his own person that he is a maker of mimesis. Other poets are personally engaged throughout (diû fkou !cym_fomtai), and only rarely use mimesis; but Homer after a brief preface at once brings on a man or woman or other characterized person (%kko ti Ghor), none of them characterless, but all full of character.

The Argonautica holds something of a problematic position when examined by these criteria. On the one hand, the poet “speaks” far more than in Homer: some 71 % of the Argonautica is spoken by “the poet” rather than one of the characters, whereas the figure for the Iliad is 55 % and for the Odyssey only 33 % (as books 9 – 12 are entirely in the mouth of Odysseus).76 So too, the constant presence of a commentating and often ironising poet, “like the sheep dog who barks and nudges his flock down the path”,77 is entirely foreign to the Aristotelian ideal of a poet “who lets his characters do the talking”. On the other hand, the Argonautica seems to make important use of the dramatic tradition itself.78 It was a commonplace of ancient scholarship, as also for Plato and Aristotle, that Homer was the forerunner of tragedy, if not in fact 75 76 77 78

Cf. Po. 1459a 19 (with Lucas’ note); De subl. 9.13 (cited above). Cf. Hunter (1993) 138 – 9. Beye (1982) 13. Cf. Nishimura-Jensen (1996).

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the first tragedian,79 and tragedy’s engagement with, and often apparent avoidance of engagement with, Homer will have given tragedy a privileged status for epic poets; the most familiar result of this status is the “tragedy of Dido” in the Aeneid.80 To what extent books 1 and 2 of the Argonautica are “dramatic” is, of course, a question where difference of opinion is legitimate. It might be thought that scenes such as the leavetaking between Jason and Alkimede and the meetings of Hypsipyle and Jason not only exploit and evoke Homer (the mourning for Hektor, the meeting of Odysseus and Nausikaa etc.) but are also shaped in such a way as to suggest “drama”; other scenes also, most notably perhaps the Phineus-episode, seem indebted to Attic tragedy.81 It is, however, the character of Medea in books 3 and 4 which acts as the catalyst for the poem’s closest reproduction of the tragic manner, and this is hardly surprising. Euripides’ Medea was one of his most famous and most often performed plays,82 and it is the events of that play in which, as we are often reminded, the “success” of the epic quest will end. The angry confrontation betwen Medea and Jason (4.350 – 420) clearly evokes the agon of Euripides’ play, as the murder of Apsyrtos may reflect similar narratives in tragedy.83 So too suggestive parallels with Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris have been identified, and it is clear that Medea and Iphigenia were partial analogues of each other in some mythical traditions.84 It is book 3, however, where the sense of “drama” is most palpable (and the proportion of direct speech by characters higher than anywhere else in the poem): the intriguing of the Colchian sisters immediately recalls the pairs of sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra, and it is in fact all but certain that Apollonius makes important use here of Sophocles’ lost Colchian Women.85 So too Aietes, the cruel and suspicious despot, probably owes not a little to the stage tradition of the tyrant. Book 3 79 Cf. N. J. Richardson, CQ 30 (1980) 270 – 1: “The idea of Homer as a tragedian underlies much of the language used by the Scholia, especially when they are discussing vividly dramatic scenes and those which arouse emotion (p\hor, oWjtor, 5keor etc.). tqac\de?m and 1jtqac\de?m are commonly used, although they often mean little more than ‘to represent dramatically’”. 80 For a survey and bibliography cf. Hardie (1997a). 81 Cf. Vian (21976) 142 – 9. 82 Cf. Page’s edition lvii–lxviii; Séchan (1926) 396 – 422. 83 Cf. Porter (1990). 84 Cf. D. Sansone, “Iphigenia in Colchis” in Harder – Regtuit – Wakker (2000). 85 Cf. Campbell (1983) 41 – 2; Hunter (1989) 19.

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is also marked by a relative fixity of place: but for the scene on Olympus, all the action takes place in or near Aia, and the comings-and-goings in the palace seem deliberately designed to evoke the confined stage-settings of drama. If, then, some aspects of book 4, such as the predominance of t¹ luhij|m, seem designed to pull the epic away from what may well have been seen as narrative virtues in the critical traditions available to Apollonius and his readers, book 3 foregrounds the relation between epic and drama in a manner which (broadly speaking) moves in a rather different generic direction. Such stylistic unevenness may itself be thought characteristic of Hellenistic poetic experimentation.

4. Despite Aristotle’s rejection of the idea that writing about one man can give oneness to a poem, Achilles, Odysseus and Aeneas do all appear by name or periphrasis in the opening verse of their epics, as also does Callimachus’ Hekale, ûAjta_g tir. Jason, however, does not enter the Argonautica until the explanatory narrative of 1.5 – 17, and is never as central to Apollonius’ poem as Achilles or Odysseus or Aeneas are to theirs;86 nowhere is this difference between the organisation of the Homeric and Apollonian poems more visible than in the relatively small role which Jason plays in the complex events of the fourth book.87 The prominent announcement (1.20 – 2) and position of the Catalogue reinforces the statement of the opening verse that the subject of the poem will be pakaicem]ym jk´a vyt_m, “the glorious deeds of men of old”; so too, it is the whole collective of Argonauts to whom the poet bids farewell at the end of the poem, as the singer of the Homeric Hymns bids farewell to the god who has been the subject of his song. We may wish to see the group of Argonauts taking the place of “the central hero”,88 or prefer to see the poem as the story of an action, the bringing of the Golden Fleece to Greece, but the plurality of Argonauts imposes its own shape upon the generic pattern. We must be wary of over-interpreting the difference between Apollonius and Homer in this matter, but it is important that other epic models were also available to Apollo86 For the history of “the hero” in critical approaches to the epic cf. Feeney (1986) 137 – 58. 87 Cf., e. g., Köhnken (2000). 88 So Carspecken (1952).

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nius.89 Thus, the Epigonoi (“Descendants” [of those who fought at Thebes]) began mOm awhû bpkot]qym !mdq_m !qw¾leha LoOsai, “Now again, Muses, let us begin to sing of younger men” (fr. 1 Davies), which might be thought to have had some influence upon Apollonius’ opening pakaicem]ym . . . vyt_m. Although “younger men” may be seen as virtually equivalent to “descendants” and so this verse is not in fact parallel to Apollonius’ “generic” opening,90 nevertheless such a poem, like the “cyclic” Nostoi, is parallel to the Argonautica in having a plurality of “heroes” built into its very structure. So too, the Thebais clearly had a rich cast of warriors,91 and its opening verse, -qcor %eide he± pokud_xiom 5mhem %majter, “Sing, goddess, of thirsty Argos from which the lords . . .” (fr. 1 Davies), points to this multiplicity. The “cyclic” epics found critical favour neither with Aristotle nor, if Ep. 28 Pf. (“I hate the cyclic poem . . .”) is anything to go on, with Callimachus. How precisely the term jujkij|m is to be glossed and to which poems it applies are matters of very considerable debate,92 but the central specimens of the type were clearly poems such as the Cypria, the Aithiopis, the Little Iliad and the Nostoi which “completed” Homer (or at least appeared to do so, when viewed from the perspective of later ages) by telling the stories of what happened before, between and after the Iliad and the Odyssey; some (if not all) were, like the Argonautica, very much shorter than the Homeric poems. The Argonautica is not on a Trojan theme, but deals with what, together with the Theban story, is the most prominent mythic complex set “before the Trojan War” and one to which Homer’s Kirke herself famously refers (Od. 12.69 – 72); the link between the two stories is plainest in the figure of the Argonaut Peleus, Achilles’ father, and is dramatised at 1.557 – 8 where the infant Achilles is shown to his father as the expedition sets off. Argonautic material played a prominent role in the Corinthiaca of Eumelos (? c. 700 B.C.) and the anonymous Naupactia, both of which Apollonius seems to have used;93 it would not, therefore, be dif89 One of the few modern discussions to take the relation between the Argonautica and the “cyclic” epics seriously is Albis (1996), cf. 5, 7, 24 – 5. 90 Cf. above 343. 91 Helpful survey in Davies (1989) 23 – 9. 92 Cf. Pfeiffer (1968) 230; Cameron (1995) 394 – 9; Davies (1989) 1 – 8. 93 Cf. Hunter (1989) 15 – 16 with bibliography. It is a great pity that we do not know more of the probably archaic poem from which P. Oxy. 3698 derives; the broken column offers Orpheus, Jason, Mopsus and talk of m|stor and probably marriage.

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ficult to see the Argonautic story as (in some senses) a “cyclic” one. Moreover, much of what happens in Apollonius’ poem has closer affinities to what modern scholars regard as typically “cyclic” than to Homeric poetry.94 As far as we can judge, superhuman abilities, such as the vision of a Lynkeus95 or the (virtual) invulnerability of a Kaineus (1.57 – 64) or a Talos, were familiar “cyclic” motifs.96 Such characteristics are, of course, almost normal among the Argonauts. So too, the magical and the supernatural seem to have been far more prominent in the cyclic poems than in (most of) Homer; Medea’s lulling of the dragon or Kirke’s purificatory magic would be perfectly at home in such a poetic context, and for some of the “fantastical” tales which are recorded in the Argonautica a cyclic version and/or origin is known.97 So too the treacherous killing of Apsyrtos and the “grotesque” maschalismos performed by Jason on the young man’s corpse more easily find cyclic than Homeric counterparts; at a different aesthetic level, the apparent prominence of erotic romance in what we know of the Cycle has often been remarked, and the whole business of Zeus’ desire for Thetis, which plays such a prominent role at 4.790 – 816, almost certainly owes an extensive debt to the Cypria.98 It was the same poem which was the principal epic source for the character of the blasphemous Idas99 who appears from time to time in the Argonautica to express his displeasure like a frustrated reader. More important perhaps than cataloguing the cyclic forerunners of individual stories and motifs is the overall impression of a poem which revels in much that has no real Homeric analogue, even where verbal echo of the Homeric poems predominates. It is not too much, I think, to view Apollonius’ epic as a cyclic poem done in the “modern” (? Callimachean) style, which is not, of course, to say that it is the object of Callimachus’ distaste in Ep. 28; what Callimachus actually thought (or 94 The most helpful modern discussion is Griffin (1977) 39 – 53; cf. more briefly Davies (1989) 9 – 10. 95 Cf. Cypria fr. 13 Davies. 96 For Lynkeus cf. Cypria fr. 13 Davies; for the invulnerability motif as it relates to the “cyclic” Achilles and Ajax cf. Davies (1989) 58 – 61. 97 For Zeus’ mating with Philyra in the shape of a horse (2.1231 – 41) cf. Titanomachia fr. 9 Davies. 98 Cf. Cypria fr. 2 Davies, Vian (21996) 175 – 6. From the point of view of the Argonautica (and Catullus 64), the loss of Nestor’s account of Theseus and Ariadne in the Cypria (31.38 – 9 Davies) is keenly felt. 99 Cf. fr. 14, 31.28 – 31 Davies.

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would have thought) of the Argonautica, we have no idea, though the extent of the material common to the two poets (whatever priority is preferred) suggests shared aesthetic goals, rather than hostility.

Bibliography Albis, R. V. 1996. Poet and Audience in the Argonautica of Apollonius, Lanham, Mass. Asper, M. 1997. Onomata Allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos, (= Hermes Einzelschrifften vol. 75), Stuttgart. Beye, C. R. 1982. Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius, Carbondale – Edwardsville. Bowie, E. L. 1993. “Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry,” in C. Gill – T. P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, Exeter, 1 – 37. Cameron, A. 1992. “Genre and Style in Callimachus,” TAPhA 122, 305-12. — 1995. Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton. Campbell, M. 1983. Studies in the third Book of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, Hildesheim. Carspecken, J. F. 1952. “Apollonius Rhodius and the Homeric Epic,” YClS 13, 33-143 Clauss, J. J. 1993. The Best of the Argonauts, Berkeley – Los Angeles. Conte, G. B. 1985. Memoria dei poeti e sistema letterario, Turin. — 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation, Ithaca. Davies, M. 1988. Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Göttingen. — 1989. The Epic Cycle, Bristol. De Jong, I. J. F. 1987. Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad, Amsterdam. Edmunds, L. 1997. “Myth in Homer,” in I. Morris – B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer, (= Mnemosyne Supplementum vol. 164), Leiden, 415 – 41. Fantuzzi, M. 1988. Ricerche su Apollonio Rodio, (= Filologia e critica vol. 58), Rome. Feeney, D. C. 1986. “Epic hero and epic fable,” CompLit 38, 137 – 58. Ford, A. 1992. Homer. The Poetry of the Past, Ithaca. Fraenkel, E. (ed.). 1921. Aeschylus Agamemnon, 3 vols, Oxford. Fränkel, H. 1968. Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios, Munich. Franz, M. L. von. 1943. Die sthetischen Anschauungen der Iliasscholien, Diss. Zurich. Fusillo, M. 1985. Il tempo delle Argonautiche. Un’analisi del racconto in Apollonio Rodio, Rome. Giangrande, G. 1973. Zu Sprachgebrauch, Technik und Text des Apollonios Rhodios, Amsterdam. Goldhill, S. 1991. The Poet’s Voice. Essays in Poetics and Greek Literature, Cambridge.

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Griffin, J. 1977. “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer,” JHS 97, 39 – 53. Harder, M. A. 1993. “Aspects of the Structure of Callimachus’ Aetia,” in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (eds.), Callimachus, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 1), Groningen, 99 – 110. Harder, M. A. – Regtuit, R. F. – Wakker, G. C. (eds.). 2000. Apollonius Rhodius, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 4), Groningen. Hardie, P. 1993. The Epic Successors of Virgil. Cambridge. — 1997a. “Virgil and tragedy,” in C. Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, Cambridge, 312 – 26. — 1997b. “Closure in Latin Epic,” in D. H. Roberts – F. M. Dunn – D. Fowler (eds.), Classical Closure, Princeton, 139-62. Heinze, R. 1915. Virgils epische Technik, Leipzig. Hollis, A. S. 1990. Callimachus, Hecale, Oxford. Hunter, R. 1987. “Medea’s Flight: The Fourth Book of the Argonautica,” CQ 37, 134 – 38. [= this volume 42 – 58] — 1989. Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica Book III, Cambridge. — 1993. The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge. — 1998. “Before and after Epic: Theocritus (?), Idyll 25,” in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic Poetry, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 3), Groningen, 115 – 32. [= this volume 290 – 310] — 1999. Theocritus: A Selection. Idylls 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 13, Cambridge. Knight, V. 1995. The Renewal of Epic: Responses to Homer in the Argonautica of Apollonius, (= Mnemosyne Supplementum vol. 152), Leiden. Köhnken, A. 2000. “Der Status Jasons: Besonderheiten der Darstellungstechnik in den Argonautika des Apollonios Rhodios,” in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (eds.), Apollonius Rhodius, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 4), Groningen. Krevans, N. 2000. “On the Margins of Epic: the Ktisis-Poems of Apollonius,” in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (eds.), Apollonius Rhodius, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 4), Groningen. Lynn, J. K. 1995. Narrators and Narration in Callimachus, Diss. Columbia. Malkin, I. 1998. The Returns of Odysseus, Berkeley. Nagy, G. 1996. Homeric Questions, Austin. Nishimura-Jensen, J. 1996. Tragic Epic or Epic Tragedy: Narrative and Genre in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Diss. Wisconsin Madison. Pfeiffer, R. 1968. History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age, Oxford. Porter, J. R. 1990. “Tiptoeing through the corpses: Euripides’ Electra, Apollonius, and the Bouphonia,” GRBS 31, 255 – 80. Pratt, L. H. 1993. Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar, Michigan. Quint, D. 1993. Epic and Empire, Princeton. Rusten, J. S. 1982. Dionysius Scytobrachion, Opladen. Scodel, R. 1998. “Bardic Performance and Oral Tradition in Homer,” AJPh 119, 171-94. Séchan, L. 1926. tudes sur la tragdie grecque dans ses rapports avec la cramique, Paris.

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Theodorakopoulos, E.-M. 1998. “Epic Closure and its Discontents in Apollonius’ Argonautica,” in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (eds.). 1998, Genre in Hellenistic Poetry, (= Hellenistica Groningana vol. 3), Groningen, 187 – 204. Valverde, Sánchez. M. 1989. El aition en las Argonauticas de Apolonio de Rodas: estudio literario, Diss. Murcia. Vian, F. 1974 (21976). Apollonios de Rhodes, Argonautiques. Tome I: Chants I-II. Texte établi et commenté par F. V. et traduit par E. Delage, Paris. — 1981 (21996). Apollonios de Rhodes, Argonautiques. Tome III: Chant IV. Texte établi et commenté par F. V. et traduit par E. Delage et F. V., Paris. Wyatt, W. F. 1969. Metrical Lengthening in Homer, Rome. Ziegler, K. 1988. L’epos ellenistico. Un capitolo dimenticato della poesia greca, Bari.

Addenda p. 350 on the problem of Arg. 1.22 there is a useful survey with bibliography by J.M. González, ‘Musai hypophetores: Apollonius of Rhodes on inspiration and interpretation’ HSCP 100 (2000) 269 – 92. p. 359 Cf. G.B. D’Alessio, ‘Le Argonautiche di Cleone Curiense’ in R. Pretagostini (ed.), La letteratura ellenistica. Problemi e prospettive di ricerca (Rome 2000) 91 – 112.

21. Virgil and Theocritus: A Note on the Reception of the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus* Theocritus’ seventeenth Idyll has not always been well received by modern critics1 but it was clearly an important model of encomiastic poetry for Roman poets, just as Philadelphus himself was constructed by them as a model for certain aspects of Octavian/Augustus. Alessandro Barchiesi has recently shed much light upon Horace’s use of Theocritus’ encomiastic poetry2, and there may also be more to be said about Virgil’s exploitation of the Encomium. Echoes in the Eclogues suggest that Virgil saw the Encomium as an integral element of the Theocritean corpus, whether or not he read this poem in the same collection as the “bucolics”3. The opening verse of the Encomium, 1j Di¹r !qw~lesha ja· 1r D_a k^cete Lo?sai, is evoked at Ecl. 3. 60 f. and 8. 11. In the former case, the Latin verses clearly look also to the opening of Aratus’ Phainomena: ab Ioue principium Musae: Iouis omnia plena; / ille colit terras, illi meae carmina curae. Virgil has here imitated what probably he, and ancient interpretation generally4, saw as a Theocritean citation of Aratus within his own bucolic (i. e. ‘Theocritean’) poem. We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that he has simply replaced the Muses of his principal structural model (Theocr. 5. 80 f) with the Aratean Zeus, but apart from general considerations of coincidence, there may be a further pointer to the Encomium. The closest Theocritean analogy for illi [scil. Ioui] mea carmina curae is 7. 93 in which Simichidas tells Lycidas that “report may have carried my songs even to the throne of Zeus”5 ; the Theocritean verse has often * 1 2 3 4 5

Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca 4 (2001) 159 – 63 Cf. Gow 1952, II, p. 325. Barchiesi 1996. This is not the place for a discussion of this complex matter, cf. Gow 1952, I, pp. IX-LII, Gutzwiller 1996. Cf. schol. Theocr. 17. 1 – 4a Wendel; Kidd 1997, p. 162 f.; Fantuzzi 1980, p. 165. Whether or not 3. 73, partem aliquam, uenti, diuum referatis ad auris, is also related to Id. 7. 93 does not affect this issue.

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been taken by modern critics as an indirect allusion to Philadelphus, and we should allow the possibility that Virgil too interpreted the verse thus (or drew on an existing interpretation along these lines) 6, and made the point clear by bringing the opening of the Encomium, in which Philadelphus is again another ‘Zeus’, and Id. 7. 93 together. As for Ecl. 8. 11, a te principium, tibi desinam, addressed to a patron7, this verse reworks the opening of the Encomium, and again exploits the Theocritean equivalence between ‘Zeus’ and the poet’s patron. Idyll XVII is an important model text for the encomiastic Golden Age prophecies of Ecl. IV, though the debt lies as much in the mere fact of an authorising model for encomium within a bucolic corpus as in specific verbal evocations8. Of particular interest is the future for the newborn child which the poet prophesies: ille deum uitam accipiet diuisque uidebit / permixtos heroas et ipse uidebitur illis, / pacatumque reget patriis uirtutibus orbem (Ecl. 4. 15 – 17). The promise of these verses seems to allude not merely to the Olympian scenes of the Encomium, but also to the categories of “god” and “hero” with which Theocritus’ poem opens. So too, the allusion to the child’s Heraclean ancestry in v. 179 — it was Heracles who ‘pacified’ the world and made it safe for civilisation — seems to suggest the Ptolemies, whose Egypt was often described in Golden Age terms10, as one analogue for the new child. When Virgil begins his poem with an address to the Sicilian Muses, it is indeed natural to suppose that he wants us to think of the only poem in the Theocritean corpus which begins with an address to the Muses, and it is tempting (at least) to connect si canimus siluas, siluae sint consule dignae with the woodcutter simile of vv. 9 – 10 of the Encomium. Virgil thus integrates that simile into the bucolic project of the corpus as a whole. The importance for Virgil of Theocritus’ poem is also clear in Eclogue I. It has long been recognised that Tityrus’ cult for his benefactor is indebted to the sacrifices which Philadelphus and Arsinoe are said by Theocritus to offer to Soter and Berenice (vv. 126 – 130): hic illum vidi 6 There is, however, no trace of such an interpretation in the scholia. 7 Cf. Clausen 1994, p. 236 f. 8 The fullest discussion is DuQuesnay 1977, pp. 52 – 68, building on Kerlin 1908. See also Clausen 1994, pp. 122 – 125. 9 Cf. Clausen 1994, p. 122. Clausen on 4. 10 also suggests that Eileithyia’s rôle at Ptolemy’s birth (Id. 17. 60 – 65) lies behind the prayer to Lucina at Ecl. 4. 10; tuus iam regnat Apollo certainly lends colour to the suggestion, as Ptolemy is another Apollo in those verses. 10 Cf. further below,

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iuuenem, Meliboee, quotannis / bis senos cui nostra dies altaria fumant (Ecl. 1. 42 – 43) 11. The debt is, however, pointed by a structural detail. The notorious fact that the beneficent iuuenis is placed in the exact centre of the poem has rightly12 been connected in a general way with the “first-lastmiddle” topos of the opening verses of the Encomium, but it is precisely the central section of Theocritus’ poem which describes the birth of Ptolemy as a new Apollo, and it is the Apolline nature of the iuuenis which is also foregrounded by Virgil13. Virgil has sharpened the Theocritean device by giving his iuuenis the exact numerical centre of the poem, and such a development of what is present, but less focused in the model text is typical of Roman adaptation of Hellenistic techniques. Less attention has been paid to Virgil’s use of the praise of Egypt at 17. 77 – 85 in the famous laudes Italiae of Georgic II14 : luq_ai %peiqo_ te ja· 5hmea luq_a vyt_m k^iom !kd^sjousim avekk|lemai Di¹r elbqyi, !kk’ outir t|sa v}ei fsa whalak± AUcuptor, Me?kor !mabk}fym dieq±m fte b~kaja hq}ptei, oqd] tir %stea t|ssa bqot_m 5wei 5qca da]mtym. tqe?r l]m oR pok_ym 2jatomt\der 1md]dlgmtai, tqe?r d’ %qa wiki\der tqissa?r 1p· luqi\dessi, doia· d³ tqi\der, let± d³ svisim 1mme\der tqe?r· t_m p\mtym Ptokela?or !c^myq 1lbasike}ei.

Like Theocritus, Virgil uses a priamel form to lead into the favoured land (sed neque Medorum siluae ditissima terra, / nec pulcher Ganges …; v. 136 ff), but even within a context of arboriculture the absence of the proverbially wealthy Egypt (cf. esp. Athen. 5. 203b-c) from Virgil’s list of possible rivals for Italy is striking. Dionysius of Halicarnassus offers Egypt, Libya and Babylon as Italy’s potential rivals in his laus Italiae (Ant. Rom. 1. 36. 3), and when Dionysius comes to the riches of Italy in grain it is Egypt whose primacy he must acknowledge, though without actually having to name the country (1. 37. 2). Moreover, Virgil seems to go out of his way silently to evoke Egypt; some of the suggestions which follow are stronger than others, but the general point seems 11 12 13 14

Cf. Jachmann 1922, p. 115 n. 2; DuQuesnay 1981, p. 43 f. Cf. Wright 1983, p. 119. Cf. Wright 1983, pp. 118 – 120. There is a large bibliography, though the Theocritean associations of the passage have not, to my knowledge, been suggested before. Much of value can be traced through Thomas 1982, pp. 35 – 51.

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clear. Thus, for example, antiquity knew a number of allegedly “goldflowing” rivers, but the Nile was one of them15. Italy may have uer adsiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas (v. 149), but the country most famous for a perpetually warm climate was Egypt16 ; the “Golden Age” shared in fact many features with descriptions of Egypt, the true home of the paradoxical. The absence of tigers, lions (quintessentially North African) and snakes (vv. 151 – 154) is indeed the stuff of the Golden Age (cf. Ecl. 4. 22 – 24), but Virgil’s emphasis upon the size and circular movement of the (absent) serpents may be significant17. The rulers most associated with gigantic pythons were in fact the Ptolemies, especially Philadelphus, for whom “incredible” specimens were said to have been captured in “Aethiopia” and transported back to Alexandria, cf. Diod. Sic. 3. 36 – 37 (drawing on Agatharchides18), Aelian. nat. an. 16. 39, and just such a snake is figured on the Palestrina Nile-mosaic19. Servius’ famous explanation of the Virgilian verses, sunt quidem serpentes in Italia, sed non tales, quales in Aegypto aut in Africa, thus deserves more serious attention than it often receives. Against this background, it should come as no real surprise that the immediately following verses (vv. 155 – 157) are a reworking of vv. 81 – 84 of the Encomium: adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem, tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis fluminaque antiquos subter labentia muros.

tot egregias urbes operumque laborem is an adaptation (with typical shift of sense) of the Greek %stea t|ssa bqot_m 5wei 5qca da]mtym (v. 81) 20, and the repeated tot replaces Theocritus’s arithmetical games, to which, however, adde is a playful allusion21. The rivers of v. 157, a stan15 Cf. v. 8 of the “Nile hymn” published by Cribiore 1995, Athen. 5. 203c; Gulick’s note on the Athenaeus passage is misleading. 16 Cf. Herodot. 2. 77. 3 (with Lloyd’s note: 1976, p. 332 f). 17 Contrast Thomas 1988, p. 185: “tanto here = magno, a snake is a snake, size has nothing to do with venom or danger”. On this last point, at least, ancient writers would disagree with Thomas. 18 Cf. Burstein 1989, pp. 125 – 132. 19 Cf. Steinmeyer-Schareika 1978, p. 68. 20 I have wondered whether adde is an aural echo of the oqd] which begins the Greek verse. 21 The basic sense of adde is, of course, “take into account also”, cf. OLD s. v. 12b.

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dard element in praises of Italy, take the place of Egypt’s Nile, as the towns perched on cliffs seem intended to surpass whalak± AUcuptor. The evocation of the Theocritean passage suggests a set of parallels and contrasts, not just between Italy and Egypt, but between Ptolemy and the maximus Caesar who is now said to be campaigning in the distant East to protect Italy, embodying for all the world the standard public rhetoric of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies22. Though the relationship between ‘king’ and land is different in the two cases, both are ‘Hesiodic’ good kings whose rightness both guarantees and is proved by the flourishing fertility of the land. Ascraeum … carmen with which the laudes ends (v. 176) thus makes a specific point within its context, as well as having more general generic significance. In evoking, but not naming, Theocritus’s Egypt, the land of Cleopatra, Virgil may have had ‘political’ reasons, but the strategy of this rhetoric is clear. The laudes Italiae seek to establish Italy and its ruler as the centre of the poetical world, and to do so they must efface Egypt and its rulers. How ultimately successful this Roman political rhetoric was may be seen in a passage of Pliny’s Panegyric of Trajan (29 – 31): thanks to the efficient arrangements of trade and the corn-supply, Rome has become the new Egypt, to the extent that Rome no longer needs Egypt (and specifically the Nile flood), but Egypt needs Rome, for it is Rome which supplied grain to Egypt during a recent drought when the river failed. Though Pliny does not, of course, say so, in supplying the Egyptians with grain in this time of crisis, Trajan is fulfilling one of the traditional duties of Pharaohs, a duty which the Ptolemies too had performed.23 Thus was the appropriation of Egypt complete.

Bibliography A. Barchiesi, Poetry, Praise, and Patronage: Simonides in Book 4 of Horace’s Odes, “ClA” 15, 1996, pp. 5 – 47 S. M. Burstein, Agatharchides of Cnidus. On the Erythraean Sea, London 1989 W. Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues, Oxford 1994 R. Cribiore, A Hymn to the Nile, “ZPE” 106, 1995, pp. 97 – 106 22 This rhetoric might also help with imbellem which has caused such trouble to critics; note also Xen. Ages. 1. 28: contempt for the enemy increases the eagerness to fight them. 23 Cf., e. g., Posener 1960, p. 60; Préaux 1978, p. 202 f; for the Ptolemies, cf. the “Canopus decree” for Euergetes, OGIS 56.10 – 20.

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I. M. LeM. DuQuesnay, Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue, in F. Cairns (Ed.), “Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar” 1, 1977, pp. 25 – 99 I. M. LeM. DuQuesnay, Vergil’s First Eclogue, in F. Cairns (Ed.), “Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar” 3, 1981, pp. 29 – 182 M. Fantuzzi, 1j Di¹r !qw~lesha. Arat. Phaen. 1 e Theocr. XVII1, “MD” 5, 1980 [1981], pp. 163 – 172 A.S. F. Gow, Theocritus, I-II, Cambridge 19522 K. Gutzwiller, The Evidence for Theocritean Poetry Books, in M. A. Harder – R. F. Regtuit – G. C. Wakker (Edd.), Theocritus, Groningen 1996, pp. 119 – 148 G. Jachmann, Die dichterische Technik in Vergils Bukolik, “NJA” 49, 1922, pp. 101 – 120 R. T. Kerlin, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, An Overlooked Source, “AJPh” 29, 1908, pp. 449 – 460 D.A. Kidd, Aratus. Phaenomena, Cambridge 1997 A. B. Lloyd, Herodotus. Book II. Commentary 1 – 98, Leiden 1976 G. Posener, De la divinit du Pharaon, Paris 1960 C. Préaux, Le monde hellnistique, I, Paris 1978 A. Steinmeyer-Schareika, Das Nilmosaik von Palestrina und eine ptolemische Expedition nach thiopien, Bonn 1978 R. F. Thomas, Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry. The Ethnographical Tradition, Cambridge 1982 R. F. Thomas, Virgil. Georgics, I, Books I-II, Cambridge 1988 J.R.G.Wright, Virgil’s Pastoral Programme: Theocritus, Callimachus and Eclogue 1, “PCPS” n. s. 29, 1983, pp. 107 – 160.

Addenda p. 378 Cf. further Theocritus. Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus 97 – 8. p. 381 with n.18 Cf. L. Bodson, ‘A python (Python sebae Gmelin) for the King’ MH 60 (2003) 22 – 38.

22. The Sense of an Author: Theocritus and [Theocritus]* 1. Authenticity and its consequences In the Preface to his 1995 Cambridge commentary on a selection of Ovid’s Heroides Peter Knox explains the inclusion of the much debated Epistula Sapphus as follows: ‘The Epistula Sapphus, which I do not believe to be Ovid’s, is an interesting poem in its own right, and I have included it as an illustration of the principle that a judgement against authenticity does not necessarily imply aesthetic condemnation’ (Knox [1995] ix). There is much of interest in this statement, beyond the question of the authorship of the Epistula Sapphus, with which I will not here be directly concerned.1 It is probably fair to infer that Knox asserts this ‘principle’, which one might have hoped did not need spelling out, because he is in fact aware that it has too often been honoured in the breach, and anyone with any familiarity with traditional classical scholarship on poems of doubtful authorship will recognise at once that ‘aesthetic condemnation’ is indeed a dominant mode in such criticism. A proper account of the reasons for this would embrace much of Western cultural history, so I content myself here with two brief observations. Although questions of style are naturally central to disputes about authorship (cf. below), subject-matter has been no less at the heart of these arguments at crucial periods of scholarly history. Classical texts were for many centuries — perhaps still are — read as, and proclaimed to be, sources of moral instruction; the lessons of literature were used to cultivate appropriate ethical attitudes in the reader or student, attitudes which could of course vary with time or place or the identity of the teacher.2 The methodology and purposes of Plutarch’s How the Young Man Should Study Poetry remained one dominant mode of reading until surprisingly recently. A sense of the individual author, whose work could be represented as offering a clearly delineated profile from * 1 2

R. Gibson and C. Kraus (eds.), The Classical Commentary (Leiden 2002) 89 – 108 The battle continues (of course), cf. Rosati (1996). Cf. Sluiter (1999).

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which truths of importance about his or her work, life and culture can be won by study, was central to this didactic enterprise. Where better to look for a fulfilled example of someone who has learned those lessons than to the author himself ? ‘Euripides says …’ soon passes to ‘You should follow the example of Euripides …’. Once (the idea of) Euripides has become a guiding practical model, it naturally becomes vitally important not to accept non-Euripidean texts as the genuine article: choices about authenticity are not merely ‘textual’ matters, but concern the scholar’s very moral health, and that of his or her students. As far as style is concerned, descriptions of literary quality (in the broadest sense) very properly continue to play an important rôle in scholarly discussion of the authorship of literary works. Arguments that X’s style differs from Y’s must obviously lie at the heart of debate about whether a particular literary work is to be ascribed to X or Y. In one sense, it does not matter very much that in practice assertions of difference soon pass into assertions of superiority (of ‘quality’ in a narrower sense), though the dangers lurking here are plain to see: a poem judged ‘good’ will likely be assigned to a known poet of good ‘quality’. The discussion of ‘Style and authorship’ in Kenney (1996), a kind of sister volume to Knox’s, relies heavily upon such arguments (though with a tact and discretion which few could match),3 and is admirably honest in its conclusion: ‘the literary historian must always be uneasily conscious of the vast gaps in the record and the dangers of arguments from silence. Nevertheless there is still much virtue in Occam’s Razor: Magni poetae non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem’ (p. 26). However tempted we may be to retort ‘Why not?’, in the present context what is important is the way in which the need to justify such a (spoken or unspoken) principle sometimes leads, almost inexorably, to commentary whose rhetoric is characterised by the award of ‘merits and demerits’. The crucial distinction between ‘not in the manner of X’ and ‘not very good’ proves, in practice, almost impossible to maintain, with potentially ruinous consequences for the writing of commentary. 3

Cf. Alessandro Barchiesi’s observation: ‘thoughts of spuriousness almost unavoidably encourage negative evaluation, but also set higher standards for the opposite view … Kenney’s appeal to the quality of the double letters as a self-evident criterion for authenticity is bound to appear irritating — although it is more understandable, in its undisguised subjectivity, than recurrent, objectivist invocations of Amores 2.18 as a witness to the authenticity or spuriousness of the single letters’ (1997) 40. For other considerations cf. Courtney (1998).

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The ‘authorless’ text (or that which is judged so) has, on the whole, received a cold reception from classicists; for reasons which lie deep in the heart of the history of the subject, classicists have, on the whole, never been very comfortable with the anonymous, and this anxiety may indeed surface in ‘aesthetic condemnation’. Knox’s positive approach is therefore much to be welcomed, even though his observation that ‘the author [of the Epistula Sapphus] was in many respects a talented poet’ (p. 14) might be thought to fall some way short of actual enthusiasm. The reasons for this curious unease, if my sense is accurate, will be complex and cannot be pursued at length here. There has perhaps been a feeling that such texts have ‘slipped through the net’, i. e. through that process of krisis, of collecting and categorising, of filtering and selecting, which lies at the very heart of the notion of ‘the classical’ and which scholars rightly trace back to their spiritual ancestors, the great figures of Alexandrian scholarship. However unfair it might seem, free-floating, ‘anonymous’ poems are cheating the system, and criticism will have its revenge. The range of possible situations with which the commentator is in fact faced is, of course, very large.4 Works may become associated in transmission with the oeuvre of a particular writer, though their original author had no intention to imitate, let alone commit fraud; the corpora of fourth-century oratory apparently offer excellent examples of this phenomenon. ‘Imitations’, on the other hand, may be subsumed within the body of the ‘original’ because of generic similarity (cf. Theocritus 8 and 9), or ‘forgery’ ranging from ‘intention to deceive’ (by author or subsequent editor) to more or less parodic homage, or simple accident. The questions to be asked of a ‘spurious’ text will to some extent, of course, vary as the commentator’s view of the situation he or she is confronted with emerges, but it is the questions which are not asked, simply because of the view taken of the work’s status, which most endanger the commentator’s project. To turn to the Epistula Sapphus itself: (i) ecquid, ut aspecta est studiosae littera dextrae, protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis? an, nisi legisses auctoris nomina Sapphus, hoc breue nescires unde ueniret opus? forsitan et quare mea sint alterna requiras 4

Some of this variety may be traced through Speyer (1971) and Pseudepigrapha I (Fondation Hardt Entretiens XVIII, Vandoeuvres-Geneva 1972).

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carmina, cum lyricis sim magis apta modis. flendus amor meus est: elegia flebile carmen. non facit ad lacrimas barbitos illa meas. (ES 1 – 8) When you saw the letters formed by my learned hand, did your eyes immediately recognise them as mine? Or, had you not read the author’s name, Sappho, would you not have known the origin of this short work? And perhaps you ask why mine are alternating verses, when I am more suited to the modes of the lyre: I must weep for my love; elegy is the song of weeping. The lyre does not suit my tears.

On 1 – 4 Knox comments ‘the opening of Sappho’s epistle is not well developed: the reason for her concern – Phaon is far away in Sicily – is not given until 11’. What is important in the present context is not whether this note commands assent, though, for what it is worth, it seems to me to miss the mark. Sappho imagines Phaon’s reception of the letter with two quatrains which each deal with one fantasised facet of that reception. Moreover, it is not Phaon’s absence that is the cause of her concern, but rather what that absence may betoken about his feelings for her; hence the worry about whether he will instantly recognise her writing (if yes, perhaps she is still in his thoughts …), and whether he will be curious about her unusual choice of metre (if yes, perhaps he is still interested in her …).5 It is also not important here whether we agree with Knox, quoting Richard Tarrant,6 that aspecta est (1), is ‘flat and lifeless’; in the meaning ‘catch sight of’, ‘get a (first) glimpse of’, the verb seems to me entirely appropriate, but this may be a matter of taste as well as Latinity. What is important is the mode of ‘aesthetic condemnation’ into which Knox immediately slips, despite the brave words of the Preface, in a work which properly sets out to demonstrate the inappropriateness of this mode of criticism. (ii) uror ut, indomitis ignem exercentibus Euris, fertilis accensis messibus ardet ager. (ES 9 – 10) I burn as the fruitful field burns when the raging East Winds fan the fire and the harvests blaze. 5 6

On vv. 5 – 8 cf. now Rosati (1996) 213 – 16. Tarrant (1981) 144; Tarrant in fact called the verb ‘vague, flat, and lifeless’, and also noted that this would be the only example of the perfect passive of aspicere in ‘Ovid’.

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This comparison is said to be ‘less apt’ than in parallel Ovidian passages because Sappho’s passion is ongoing, not a sudden conflagration. Despite noting the agricultural metaphor in proueniunt (v. 14), Knox makes no comment upon the fact that Sappho’s description of herself as a fertilis ager makes it clear to Phaon that, like an absentee landlord, he is neglecting his estate and its potential ‘fruits’ (cf. Soph. Trach. 31 – 3): he should not be in the arua of Sicily, but home in Lesbos. That the ‘wind of love’ may in fact come from a surviving fragment of Sappho (fr. 47 Voigt) also passes unremarked.7 Would there have been these silences if the commentator had thought that the poem he was commenting upon was by Ovid? Knox may indeed admire the ES, but his commentary refers repeatedly to its ‘odd’, ‘inappropriate’, ‘ridiculous’ phrasing; it almost goes without saying that, in the poems considered to be by Ovid, such phenomena are regarded by the commentator (at least in the first instance) as a sign of probable corruption or interpolation. Even when the tone is appreciative, morever, doubts linger. On v. 154 we are told that ‘the imitation is not inert’ (as though inertness was to be expected), and the repetition in 123 – 4 ‘heightens the pathos’: (iii) tu mihi cura, Phaon; te somnia nostra reducunt, somnia formoso candidiora die. You, Phaon, are my love; you my dreams bring back, dreams brighter than the clear day.

‘Pathos’ there may well be, but perhaps the most striking thing about these verses is the etymologising of Phaon’s name, a subject which (I think) Knox nowhere discusses, despite the real Ovid’s known love of etymology. I assume that the meaning of the name is relevant elsewhere also, such as in 23 (fies manifestus Apollo) and in 187 – 8, tu mihi Leucadia potes esse salubrior unda; et forma et meritis tu mihi Phoebus eris. You can do more for my health than the water of Leucas; in both beauty and the help you give, you will be my Phoebus.

7

For other relevant passages cf. Hunter on Ap.Rhod. Arg. 3.967 – 72.

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where we must recall that Phoebus was connected (inter al.) with v²or ‘light’, or glossed as kalpqºm ‘bright’ etc.8 How much of this weakness in the commentary (if weakness it be) can be put down to the commentator’s view of the poem’s authorship? Or, to put it another way, how does the ‘authenticity agenda’ affect the way commentaries are written. I have illustrated a general issue from Peter Knox’s excellent Ovid commentary9 to suggest that we are not dealing with a problem merely confined to straw men from the bad old days of literary connoisseurship. Knox’s implicit acknowledgement that judgements about authenticity have often been associated with ‘aesthetic condemnation’ reveals the modern commentator to be (once again) the heir of the ancient. In considering the authorship of literary works, ancient scholars, for whom questions of authenticity, interpolation, plagiarism and literary fraud were endlessly fascinating, had particular regard to waqajt¶q, that is to the individual flavour of a writer’s style:10 ‘Apollonios of Rhodes declared that the Aspis was the work of Hesiod on the basis of its character and from the fact that also in the Catalogue Iolaos is Heracles’ charioteer’ (Hypoth. Hesiod, Aspis) ‘From its very character one would judge that this speech was not by Deinarchos (for it is diluted and weak and frigid), but one would rather assign it to Demokleides or Menesaichmos or one of their kind’ (Dion. Hal. On Deinarchos 11)

Judgements of this kind were probably ‘a purely subjective aesthetic criticism’;11 the anecdotal tradition is full of the mockery of writers who were not thought to measure up, and much serious ancient criticism has at its heart a sense that there are absolute standards of quality which some reach and some do not. The history of the study of ‘interpolation’ in Homer shows a constant reliance upon forms of ‘aesthetic condemnation’, whatever other considerations are also in play. The recognition that subjects and styles have histories and contexts was in fact surprisingly slow to take hold in the critical tradition; Horace’s witty claim that, if Lucilius had lived in his day, he would have obeyed ‘Hora-

8 Cf. Et. Mag. 796.55 – 7. 9 I declare an interest: since Knox’s commentary appeared, I have become one of the General Editors of the series (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics) to which it belongs. 10 There is a useful collection of passages in Ritchie (1964) 13. 11 Ritchie (1964) 14.

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tian’ precepts (Sat. 1.10.64 – 72) constantly surprises by its unusual historical sense. Knox’s use of the phrase ‘aesthetic condemnation’ must not, of course, be pushed too hard. The problem is, at one level, merely one of terminology. If we replace his ‘not well developed’, ‘odd’, ‘inappropriate’ and so forth with ‘in my judgement non-Ovidian’, we may seem closer to ancient practice and on rather firmer ground. Thus Sir Kenneth Dover in the Preface to his commentary on select poems of Theocritus: ‘In excluding certain poems I have been guided in part by aesthetic judgement, in part by the evidence for and against authenticity. These two criteria are for the most part in harmony with each other and have led me in the same direction as the majority of scholars …’. It is a pity that Dover did not spell out what kind of ‘evidence’ he had in mind, although he presumably meant ‘anything which I judge to be relevant to the question of authenticity’. The two most obvious bodies of evidence, transmission and language, are both fraught with potential traps. The transmission of the Theocritean corpus poses particular problems for the scholar interested in the authenticity question; there is both sufficient consistency in the arrangement of the corpus (or corpora) in the ancient and medieval traditions to encourage a belief that positive results are possible, and sufficient uncertainty to discourage over-confidence.12 If Dover was referring also to linguistic criteria, then that is an even thornier area, and it is somewhat surprising that he decided to say nothing about it. As for ‘aesthetic judgment’, it may be worth observing that many critics, who lack Dover’s discipline and rigour, have obviously found it very difficult to keep ‘aesthetic judgement’ and ‘the evidence for and against authenticity’ as separate critical processes until, with a gratifying mixture of pleasure and surprise, they find the two to be ‘in harmony’. It is in fact unclear whether Dover means that he has excluded poems he does not think very good (whether Theocritean or not) or only poems he considers non-Theocritean, whether because they are ‘unworthy of Theocritus’ or not in the Theocritean manner or both. In the event, Dover omitted the poems which the scholarly consensus of this century has deemed non-Theocritean (Idylls 8, 9, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27), together with the Aeolic paidika (Idylls 29 and 30) and two further poems which have generally been regarded as Theocritean: Idyll 12, the monologue of a helplessly deluded paederast, 12 Cf. Gutzwiller (1996). New papyri can, of course, always change the picture: cf. POxy. 4431, fragments of Idyll 25.

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and Idyll 17, the encomium of Ptolemy;13 he appears not to have particular doubts about the authenticity of any of these last four (cf. pp. xviii, 270). The cases of Theocritus and Ovid raise different general, as well as particular, issues. The Theocritean corpus very likely contains poems which range in date from the third century B.C. into the Christian era. The language of the earlier poems — the genuine Theocritus, if you like — is neither uniform14 nor, as far as we can tell, quite like any poetic language which had gone before. Any attempt to explore the linguistic character of these poems is seriously hampered by the various degrees of editorial and scribal ‘normalisation’ (both in the direction of more and of less Doric colouring), which is presumably as concealed as often as it is overt in the papyri and the manuscripts. If we limit ourselves to what are usually understood as the ‘bucolic’ poems, it might seem a reasonable assumption that the language of such poems evolved over time, particularly as the ‘generic solidification’ of bucolic/pastoral literature is essentially a post-Theocritean development.15 From one perspective, the invention of the ‘bucolic genre’ was an act (or series of acts) of historical interpretation imposed upon some of Theocritus’ poems by later poets. The existence of the ‘genre’ then provided a series of linguistic and motival codes by which the status of a poem could be declared. Some of these linguistic codes — for example, how ‘Doricised’ the language was to be — will never be recovered with any certainty, for there are few clear signs, such as metre, which betray them with certainty. Moreover, the once confident belief that so-called ‘hyperdorisms’ are a mark of Theocritean imitators, not of Theocritus himself, is slowly dissipating in the face of a recognition that what constitutes such forms may often be as much a matter of reception and interpretation as of linguistic fact.16 Be that as it may, only someone who be13 Idyll 17, a poem which has only recently come into its own, was perhaps not to Dover’s taste nor, in his view, to that of ‘the learner in the sixth form, at university, or later in life’, Preface p. v; Gow calls it ‘stiff, conventional, and sycophantic’. It is relevant that, in the Introduction to his commentary on Idyll 16 (‘the Graces’, an encomium of Hieron of Syracuse), Dover claims that ‘Modern readers are commonly repelled by an ancient poet’s flattery of a patron or potential patron’. 14 Cf. Hunter (1996) 28 – 45. 15 Cf., e. g., Van Sickle (1976), Halperin (1983), Gutzwiller (1996). 16 Thus Fantuzzi (1985) 42 points out that editors have traditionally changed the transmitted v_kala to v¸kgla in ‘named’ poets (Theocritus, Bion etc.), but kept

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lieves that the ‘meaning’ of an ancient poem is separable from the language in which it is written will regard the state of the bucolic corpus with equanimity.17 This, of course, is not to say that there are any easy paths which the commentator can follow in this matter. In his great Cambridge commentary on Theocritus Gow essentially gave up on these problems, and anyone who has thought hard about them will have a certain sympathy for this resignation in the face of the seemingly inevitable. The basis of our sense of an author — particularly an author doing something quite new — is indeed very often stylistic, and here problems of authenticity reveal how fragile our stylistic sense actually is; in asking us to distinguish between one style and another, between the language of a ‘bucolic’ poem of 250 B.C. and one of 150 B.C, such problems raise central questions about the nature of poetic language and the construction of a poetic idiolect: just how idion is an idiolect? How this affects the writing of commentaries may be less important than the principle itself, but the practical consequences are serious indeed. A commentary upon a collection of poems handed down under a single name invites — indeed imposes — reading by ‘author’, rather than by any other principle, such as ‘genre’. The large-scale commentator, like Gow on Theocritus, traditionally seeks to build up a picture of a poet and his or her language; the ‘perfect’ picture will be a closed circle, its circumference guarded by internal cross references and parallels, like the movie campfire protected by a circle of wagons. Problems of authenticity threaten the foundations of this approach: other poets, all those pseudo-Theocrituses and pseudo-Ovids, keep getting in the way. They permit no closed circle, in which the ‘style’ of the author is fixed as a series of lists and the commentator builds up an alleged authorial style by a system of samenesses and differences, rather as in the analysis of a language. The different parts of a corpus are made both to explain and to confirm each other, and there is no place for the really anomalous; the ‘grammar’ of the language will not allow it. ‘Pastoral’ poetry offers a very special case, for here the ‘anonymity’ of the author is an important textual fact. Among the poems to which Vergil alludes in the Eclogues are Idylls 8 and 9, which are almost certainthe ‘hyperdoric’ form in anonymous texts. For a further illuminating example and discussion cf. Cassio (1993). 17 Cf. Hunter (1996) 31 – 2.

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ly not by Theocritus.18 We may, if we like, assume either that Vergil himself had no reason to doubt their authenticity or that — something which, at one level, is plainly correct and is the standard explanation — the Eclogues are a mimesis of a poetic style, not merely of one poet (Theocritus). Already in the Epitaphios Bionos (? early first century BC), ‘bucolic song’ is ‘Dorian song’ or ‘Sicilian song’, and for Vergil it is ‘Syracusan/Sicilian verse’ (Ecl. 4.1, 6.1, 10.51); to insist that this does not mean just ‘the poetry of Theocritus’ is not to split hairs. If Theocritus does not name himself in the Idylls, but merely confines himself to indications of his Sicilian origin (cf. 11.7, 28.16), so also Vergil remains strictly anonymous, though Mantua gets its due (Ecl. 9.27 – 8). We may contrast the sphragis at the end of the Georgics, where — in keeping with the very different traditions of a didactic poetry which, in various ways, exploits the sense of the authority which attaches to a particular teacher — Vergil inscribes his name upon his poem, as does Ovid (twice) upon the didactic Ars Amatoria.19 Bucolic and pastoral poetry, on the other hand, which presents itself as the formalised version of the pre-literate songs of shepherds, whose names carry no resonance beyond their own locality, and which, so far as we can see, Theocritus instigated, emphasises the shared continuity of a (constantly re-invented) tradition.20 In exploiting poems by more than one author — a fact of which I, for one, would assume Vergil was conscious — the Roman poet includes, rather than excludes, and this is true to the nature of pastoral poetry. The very idea of individual authorship is reshaped in the timeless sweep of tradition. Who was the first to ‘sing’ a particular song was not the crucial question. Vergil’s use of Idylls 8 and 9 is often ascribed to the nature of the ‘edition’ of Theocritus with which he was familiar, whatever that

18 For Id. 8 cf. esp. Ecl. 7.1 – 5 (~ 8.1 – 4), 7.54 – 6 (~ 8.41 – 8); for Id. 9 cf. Ecl. 1.45 (~ 9.3), 3.58 (~ 9.1 – 2), 7.51 (~ 9.20 – 1). 19 AA 2.744, 3.812. Though Hesiod names himself only in the Theogony (v. 22) and not in the Works and Days, no poem is more personally marked than the latter, addressed to his frequently named brother and telling the story of his father’s move to Ascra and his own trip to Euboea in pursuit of poetic success; Aratus alludes to his own name at Phain. 2, Nicander names himself in an acrostic at Ther. 345 – 53, and cf. Dion. Perieg. 109 – 34 (Leue [1884]). 20 Some good remarks in Hubbard (1998).

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may have been.21 The collected ‘bucolic Muses’ of Artemidorus of Tarsus (first half of the first century B.C.) remains a mysterious volume, but at the very least it is reasonable to believe that it contained poems by both Theocritus and his successors. Even the scholarly world, then, may have recognised the peculiar force of ‘pastoral tradition’. The case must not, of course, be overstated. In the Augustan period Theon wrote a zpºlmgla eQr Heºjqitom,22 which (presumably) covered only poems he thought to be by Theocritus, and Wendel at least thought the same was true for the earlier ‘commentary’ of Asclepiades of Myrlea.23 The matter is beset with uncertainty, but we can hardly doubt that there was some activity of krisis, i. e. of trying to sort out ‘real’ from ‘spurious’ Theocritus; the absence of certain poems from the papyrus record would seem to point in that direction.24 Nevertheless, it seems at least curious that no trace of this activity is preserved in the grammatical tradition; there is no notice of the ‘some say that this poem is not by Theocritus’ kind. Distinctions were, of course, drawn. Quintilian praises Theocritus as admirabilis in suo genere (10.1.55), and Theocritus was by common consensus the best t_m t± boujokij± succqax²mtym, though not in fact the first.25

2. [Theocritus] 23 ‘Late’ (and imitative) poems become, almost inevitably, bad poems. Moreover, some of the poems in the Theocritean corpus which are almost certainly relatively late are also in a very bad textual state; this is of itself an interesting phenomenon, but one which cannot be pursued at any length here. Part of the reason presumably lies in the period of transmission before (probably) generic factors led to their inclusion in a canonical bucolic corpus, when some of these poems at least almost certainly did float free. Ancient scholars were, on the whole, as addicted to the cult of the famous name as are their modern counterparts, and unprotected texts suffered from neglect then as now. The second 21 Few matters in the history of bucolic are more controversial. I have found most help in Wilamowitz (1906), Wendel (1920), Van Sickle (1976), Halperin (1983), Vaughn (1981), Gutzwiller (1996). 22 Cf. Wendel (1920) 44 – 5, 80 – 3; RE 5A.2056 – 7. 23 Cf. Wendel (1920) 78 – 80. 24 Cf. Gow (1952) I lxi. 25 Anec.Est. p. 9 Wendel (cf. Van Sickle [1976] 18, 22 – 3).

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stage of the process is that poems which are ‘late and bad (and corrupt)’ scarcely merit serious attention. Thus, Gow tells us, problems of date and authorship with regard to Idyll 20, a monologue by a rustic whose charms have been scorned by a girl from the city, are ‘of slight importance in a poem so imitative and of so little merit’ (II, p. 365).26 On the contrary, we have so little Greek poetry from the crucial period in the late second and first centuries B .C., when the Greek tradition passed to Rome, that anyone even remotely concerned with that transition must be interested in (at least) the date of Idyll 20. An even clearer victim of the syndrome I have outlined is Idyll 23, the story of an erastes’ tragic passion for a cruel and heartless boy who, in Gow’s translation of v.6, ‘would not bend in speech and intercourse alike’. Outside the beloved’s door the erastes pronounces a final paraklausithyron, prescribes his own epitaph, and finally hangs himself; the heartless boy is killed by a statue of Eros as he swims in the gymnasium. This is a poem (and a poet) of the greatest interest for, inter alios, anyone concerned with Latin elegy, perhaps above all with the eroticisation of death in Propertius. For Gow, however, ‘the essential badness of the poem is plainly due to the author not to the scribes. The narrative is bald, frigid, and improbable; the sentiment is sloppy, and embodied in an address to the boy who, ex hypothesi, cannot hear it’. (This last feature, as Gow knew very well indeed, is common to virtually all literary paraklausithyra). Gow is certainly correct that the ‘text is grossly corrupt’, but his personal distaste for the poem has produced a commentary which, to borrow his own words about the Idyll, ‘is the least attractive of the whole corpus’, one designed in fact, in Glenn Most’s words, ‘to show that the text one is commenting on is not worth reading’. Idyll 23 does not groan under a weight of secondary literature, but Gow failed to mention the only serious literary discussion of the poem then available.27 Even more serious is the very half-heartedness of his attempt to find a generic context for the poem. The narrative has important analogues in the exercises of the rhetorical schools, as Wilamowitz had pointed 26 It must be stressed that Gow does not, in fact, operate with a simplistic ‘nonTheocritean’ = ‘bad’ principle, as the helpful discussions of Idylls 8 and 25 make clear. 27 Copley (1940), cf. id. (1956) 138 – 9. Radici Colace (1971) is a helpful study of the poem’s uariatio of language and motifs drawn from Homer and Bion’s Epitaphios Adonidos. Idyll 23 is also treated more sympathetically in the recent editions of B. M. Palumbo Stracca (Milan 1993) and O. Vox (Turin 1997).

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out,28 and in the narrative in Book 14 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses of how the heartless Anaxarete was metamorphosed into a statue (of Venus Prospiciens) after her poor admirer Iphis hung himself at her door.29 Ovid’s tale has long been connected with the very similar narrative of Arkeophon and Arsinoe, found in Antoninus Liberalis with the note that the tale occurred in Hermesianax’s Leontion (fr. 4 Powell). These ‘source’ notes in the manuscript of Antoninus are of disputed value, but at the very least we have here a cumulative circumstantial case for a thick (and early) Hellenistic literary texture; the reader of Gow’s commentary would be pointed towards this background only by following up the brief hints in the note on vv. 16 ff. It is, however, a great virtue of the commentary form that it demands from the commentator ‘close reading’ (in the best possible sense) of the commentated text, a kind of reading which Gow was very well qualified to perform, as his commentary shows time and again; the difference between ‘commentary’ and ‘critical reading’ has in fact been greatly overstated in classical studies,30 more as the result of a particular style of nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentary than for any constraints inherent in the commentary form. The exaggeration is often manifested in the charge that the commentary form almost inevitably leads to a concentration upon the parts at the expense of the whole;31 there are a number of well-known commentaries which could indeed be adduced to support such a view, though I have to say that I believe that the fault, where it exists, lies not in the form but in the commentator. Be that as it may, for poems such as Idyll 23, which are textually and interpretatively difficult and lack any real literary-historical context in which they can readily be placed, the difference between ‘commentary’ and ‘critical reading’ may be (almost) as much a matter of typography as of content. In what follows I will sketch an interpretation of Idyll 23 as an illustration of the artificiality of the barriers which classicists have too often erected. 28 Wilamowitz (1906) 81, citing Sopater, V 59 Walz. 29 Cf. Fauth (1966). 30 For the more flexible situation in other disciplines see, e. g., the essays in Section A of Most (1999). 31 Cf., e. g., Henderson (1980), Most (1985) 36 – 40, Ma (1994) 60 – 9, Goldhill (1999) 411 – 18. To what extent the charge itself suggests that those who make it are operating with a quite unreal sense of the kinds of claims commentaries should make for themselves and of how they are read and/or used may be debated.

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The structuring irony of Idyll 23 is, despite the state of the text, clear enough: cq²xom ja· tºde cq²lla t¹ so?r to¸woisi waq²ssy7

“toOtom 5qyr 5jteimem7 bdoipºqe, lµ paqode¼sgir, !kk± st±r tºde k´nom7 !pgm´a eWwem 2ta?qom.” (vv. 46 – 8) Write also this epitaph which I scratch on your walls: ‘Love killed him. Traveller, do not pass by, but stop and say: “He had a cruel friend”’.

At one level, the closing 2ta?qom, ‘friend’, picks up a word which the doomed lover has already tried to place in the boy’s mouth (45), because he sees their relationship in grandiose ‘epic’ terms, somewhat like the deluded fantasies of the speaker of Idyll 12.32 This epic ideal of ‘comradeship’ is recalled in the request of 44, tºde loi tq·r 1p²usom, ‘call out to me three times as follows’, which is not merely a reference to the triple call necessary for the dead to hear, but alludes specifically to Odyssey 9.62 – 6:33 5mhem d³ pqot´qy pk´olem !jawgl´moi Gtoq, %slemoi 1j ham²toio, v¸kour ak´samter 2ta¸qour. oqd’ %qa loi pqot´qy m/er j¸om !lvi´kissai, pq¸m tima t_m deik_m 2t²qym tq·r 6jastom !Osai, oT h²mom 1m ped¸yi Jijºmym vpo dgiyh´mter.

Thence we sailed on, glad enough to be snatched from death, yet sick at heart to have lost those others, the comrades that we had known; nor had I let the ships go from there till the ritual call had thrice been made for each of these luckless men whom the Cicones had killed on the plain. (trans. Shewring)

The evocation of the epic past constructs the relationship as – perhaps pathetically – paradigmatic, and prepares for the moral with which the poem is to conclude. Unlike the speaker of Idyll 12, however, the ill-fated lover is able to control the future: he prescribes not merely the words with which the heartless beloved is to commemorate the dead on his tomb, but he also urges the boy to perpetuate his own heartlessness forever in the words of passers-by. The final act of kindness for which he asks is also his revenge; the ‘ultimate’ (pam¼statom, 35) favour 32 Cf. Hunter (1996) 186 – 95. 33 Cf. Radici Colace (1971) 333 – 4.

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he seeks from the cruel boy proves indeed to be the boy’s last act. ‘Eros killed him’ is the epitaph of the lover (47), but is to be literally true of the eromenos. The poetic justice enshrined in the narrative has something in common with that of the Ovidian story of Anaxarete, the stony-hearted girl who is turned to stone, but the poet of Idyll 23 has played this motif rather differently. The ‘stony boy’ (k²ime pa?, 20) 34 who refused to make an offering of tears (38, 55) or to establish a permanent (stone) memorial is killed by a stone statue (58 – 60) and his spirit mingles with the ceaseless restlessness of water. The death in a pool, a familiar enough motif,35 is here given further particular point by vv. 22 – 6 where the erastes figures his own death as a journey to the water of forgetfulness: !kk± bad¸fy 5mha t¼ leu jat´jqimar, fpgi kºcor Glem !teqp´ym num¹m to?sim 1q_si t¹ v²qlajom, 5mha t¹ k÷hor. !kk± ja· Cm fkom aqt¹ kab½m pot· we?kor !l´kny, oqd’ ovtyr sb´ssy t¹m 1l¹m pºhom.36

I journey where you have condemned me, where they say is the universal cure for the sorrows of lovers, where there is forgetfulness. But even if I take it and drink it to the end, not even so shall I quench my passion.

The erastes is condemned to seek the pharmakon of ‘forgetfulness’37 in the Underworld, a motif which probably here reflects epitaphic, rather than initiatory or philosophic ideas;38 though he foresees no respite even in death, we sense that he will be allowed to find peace. The eromenos, however, whose cruel behaviour revealed that he had forgotten the 34 Note the assonance of kea¸mar j k²ime (19 – 20). 35 Cf. Segal (1981) 47 – 65. 36 The transmitted wºkom ‘anger’ would have some resonance with the theme of vengeance after death (cf. n. 35), but ‘desire’ seems the required sense. If, however, we should think of Helen’s pharmakon at Od. 4.220 – 1, then this might lend some colour to wºkom (cf. %wokom in Od. 2.221). 37 Cf. Hunter on Theocritus 11.1 – 6. 38 Cf. EG 244.10 Kaibel, a dead woman is pausipºmyi k²har kousal´ma pºlati, ‘bathed in the grief-ending draught of forgetfulness’, ibid. 204.11 – 12, a dead woman addresses her husband, ‘I did not drink the final water (5swatom vdyq) of Underworld forgetfulness, so that, even among the dead, I would find consolation in you’. For such ideas in other contexts cf., e. g., Pl. Rep. 10.621a, Nilsson (1960), Zuntz (1971) 378 – 81 (the gold leaves).

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god’s power, is taught a cruel lesson which he will remember (and pass on to others) forever: the concluding b c±q he¹r oWde dij²feim probably means not just ‘the god is a vengeful god’, but ‘the god knows how to, i. e. finds appropriate ways to, punish’. The boy who ‘forgot’ to utter the words of the lover’s epitaph is finally given the voice of realisation after death. The language of the lover’s epitaph (47 – 8) has been anticipated by the final plea to the eromenos: ‘do not pass by me, but stop and weep a little …’ (37 – 8). The very first ‘passer-by’, the generalised addressee of all epitaphs, is indeed the cruel boy himself. In refusing to heed the plea ‘not to pass by’, just as he pays no attention to all the other requests the suicidal lover makes of him (38 – 42),39 the doomed eromenos is cast in the rôle of a very resistant ‘reader’. The poem thus not only celebrates the power of eros, but also dramatises the power of an epitaph, and indeed of poetry generally, to enact its will. We may thus wonder about the context of Idyll 23: it is a brief anonymous narrative about love’s power, and the most ‘natural’ context for it would be as part of an attempt by the narrator to persuade a young man to yield to his desires. Telling the story of the erastes who killed himself out of despair is part of a strategy for avoiding a similar fate.

39 There are some very difficult problems of text and interpretation in the parallel passages 36 – 40 and 53 – 6. Thus, the lover asks the boy to ‘place his own clothes around the [lover’s] corpse’, but in the event the boy ‘sullied all his clothes on the corpse’. [Zimmerman (1994) 5 understands the clothes in question to be those of the dead lover (‘sullied’ by urinating?), but 1vabij² is difficult with this interpretation (cf. v. 1)]. If the idea is of pollution attaching to a corpse, this phrase might be connected with the theme, hinted at a couple of times, that the boy should beware lest the lover pursue vengeance from beyond the grave: note v. 42, where diakk²neir le ‘you will reconcile me’ may well be correct. [For the first half of the verse Radici Colace (1971) 335 suggests oq d¼malai se di¾jem, cf. Bion, EA 53.] It is striking that in Ovid too the ‘ghost’ motif appears: ipse ego, ne dubites, adero praesensque uidebor / corpore ut exanimi crudelia lumina pascas (Met. 14.727 – 8). We are certainly not very far from Dido’s prayer for an avenger to arise from her bones, and for Aeneas to carry with him the omen of her death (Aen. 4.625, 662).

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3. Classical commentaries often aim not merely to explicate a particular text, but also to be works of ‘wider interest’, which will be used, as indeed some of the most famous modern commentaries are used, not unlike reference works.40 Of itself, such an aim seems both natural and welcome, just as the author of, say, a thematic study of a text may hope that students interested in other texts may learn from, and wish constantly to refer to, the approach taken, the questions asked etc. The serious danger here is not that the accumulation of detail becomes an end in itself, divorced from any contact with the text it purports to illuminate, for in the (not infrequent) cases where this happens, readers and ‘users’ ought to be left to exercise their own discretion and judgement about the commentary they are reading and/or using. Rather, the greater danger is that such accumulation does not serve a particular argument about what a text means, but is used to offer a ‘complete’ picture of part of the ancient world, one whose completeness is allegedly confirmed by its apparent internal consistency (and vice versa). This drive for completeness may seem paradoxical, when what survives of ancient literature and the cultures which produced it is so scanty, but no one who has read far in the commentary literature of the last two centuries will doubt its existence. It must, however, be admitted that, by comparison with ‘books about’ and ‘literary studies’, the commentary form invites such ambitions, as (in some manifestations) it sets out to deal in sequential detail with the grammatical and linguistic structure of a whole text. If language, one might suppose, surely also ‘meaning’? Relevant here are the ‘natural’ tendency of commentary to exhaustive collection,41 and the related fact that commentaries may reproduce material they have taken over from their predecessors almost without change;42 the very layout of the form suggests a ‘summation’ of all that has been said about a text up to the date of the latest commentary. Kurt Latte in fact took Gow severely to task for taking over material not just from his predecessors but also from reference works, dictionaries and grammars, which any scholarly reader of Theocritus would be expected to use alongside a ‘commentary’, and thereby obscuring what was actually 40 Cf. Gibson (2002) 344 – 6. 41 Cf. Gumbrecht (1999). 42 On the tralaticious aspects of commentaries, see Kraus (2002) 11 – 13, 16 – 17.

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new in Gow’s Theocritus;43 most readers will, however, be very grateful for Gow’s acquisitive habits. Arrangement by ‘author’ has in the past proved a very useful organising scheme by which such completeness can be set forth. The ancient world (or at least its literature) could be seen as a progression of ‘great names’, each of which can be made more or less wholly accessible through ‘comprehensive’ commentaries upon their work. Works of doubtful authorship, on the other hand, are an unwelcome reminder of the vastnesses of our ignorance, which the misleading tidiness of the ‘author’ approach tends to conceal; such works are therefore to be shunted aside, as being unrepresentative ‘sports’ and/or simply second-rate. I exaggerate, of course, but I hope that it is clear that the issues which this paper has discussed stretch beyond the detailed interpretation of any particular poem and relate to the larger intellectual context and project of many traditional commentaries. The rhetoric of comprehensiveness, in fact, does a disservice not only to the commentary form, but also to our understanding of the ancient world. It will, however, also be clear that the situation I have described is, in many respects, already outof-date, thanks in part to a series of intellectual and methodological shifts within classics and the humanities generally. This is, of course, clearest in the case of classical Athens, where the growth of the study of Athenian culture and society, and with it of texts as cultural documents or social signs, has inhibited both the rhetoric of ‘completeness’ and attempts to put that rhetoric into practice. It is, for example, my impression (no stronger) that, since Fraenkel’s Agamemnon, Anglophone scholars at least44 have on the whole held back from attempts to deal ‘comprehensively’ with any tragedy; there might now seem something quixotic (to say no more) in such an undertaking, whether it be in commentary form or any other. In this new climate of social and cultural history, ‘peripheral author(ity)less texts’ have a quite new standing,

43 Latte (1951) 257, cf. Stephens (2002) 71 – 5 and contrast Legrand (1951) 371 who has nothing but praise for the ‘summative’ appearance of the work: ‘Cette édition monumentale … est une véritable “somme” de tout ce que nous pouvons, à l’heure actuelle, savoir de Théocrite, de tout ce qui peut conduire à la connaissance et à la comprehension de ses oeuvres’. 44 There is an obvious irony here which I shall not pursue.

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and the commentary form a whole range of new opportunities which it would be a shame to waste.45

Bibliography Barchiesi, A. 1997. Review of Kenney (1996), in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 8, 40 – 7 Cameron, A. 1995. Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton. Cassio, A.C. 1993. ‘Iperdorismi callimachei e testo antico dei lirici (Call. Hy. 5, 109; 6, 136)’, in Tradizione e innovazione nella cultura Greca da Omero all’et ellenistica, 903 – 10, Rome. Copley, F.O. 1940. ‘The suicide-paraclausithyron: a study of Ps.-Theocritus, Idyll XXIII’, Transactions of the American Philological Society 71, 52 – 61. — 1956. Exclusus Amator. A Study in Latin Love Poetry, Baltimore. Courtney, E. 1998. ‘Echtheitskritik: Ovidian and non-Ovidian Heroides again’, Classical Journal 93, 157 – 66. Fantuzzi, M. 1985. Bionis Smyrnaei Adonidos Epitaphium, Liverpool. Fauth, W. 1966. ‘Aphrodite Parakyptusa’, Abh. Mainz 6, 331 – 437. Gibson, R.K. 2002, ‘“Cf. e. g.”: a typology of “parallels” and the role of commentaries on Latin poetry’ in R.K. Gibson and C.S. Kraus (ed.), The Classical Commentary. Histories, Practices, Theory, 331 – 57, Leiden. Goldhill, S. 1999. ‘Wipe your glosses’, in Most (1999) 380 – 425. Gow, A.S.F. 1952. Theocritus, 2nd edition, Cambridge. Gumbrecht, H.U. 1999. ‘“Fill up your margins”. About commentary and copia’, in Most (1999) 443 – 53. Gutzwiller, K. 1996. ‘The evidence for Theocritean poetry books’, in M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit and G.C. Wakker, eds., Theocritus, 119 – 48, Groningen. Halperin, D. 1983. Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry, New Haven and London. Henderson, J. 1980. Review of R.O.A.M. Lyne, Ciris. A Poem Attributed to Vergil (Cambridge 1978), in Classical Review 30, 200 – 4. Hubbard, T.K. 1998. The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton, Ann Arbor. Hunter, R. 1993. The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge. – 1996. Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry, Cambridge. Kenney, E.J. 1996. Ovid, Heroides XVI-XXI. Cambridge. Knox, P.E. 1995. Ovid, Heroides. Select Epistles, Cambridge. Kraus, C.S. 2002. ‘Introduction: reading commentaries/commentaries on reading’ in R.K. Gibson and C.S. Kraus (ed.), The Classical Commentary. Histories, Practices, Theory, 1 – 27, Leiden. 45 I am grateful to Roy Gibson, Christina Kraus, Glenn Most, and audiences in Nottingham and Heidelberg for helpful criticism of earlier versions of this paper.

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Latte, K. 1951. Review of Gow’s Theocritus, in Gnomon 23, 252 – 7. Legrand, P. 1951. Review of Gow’s Theocritus, in Revue des tudes grecques 64, 371 – 9 Leue, G. 1884. ‘Zeit und heimath des periegeten Dionysios’, Philologus 42, 175 – 8. Ma, J. 1994. ‘Black Hunter variations’, in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40, 49 – 80. Most, G.W. 1985. The Measures of Praise, Göttingen. Most, G.W. (ed.). 1999. Commentaries-Kommentare, Göttingen. Nilsson, M.P. 1960. ‘Die Quellen der Lethe und der Mnemosyne’ in Opuscula Selecta III, 85 – 92, Lund. Pfeiffer, R. 1955. ‘The future of studies in the field of Hellenistic poetry’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 75, 69 – 73. Radici Colace, P. 1971. ‘La tecnica compositiva dell’ 9qast^r pseudo-Teocriteo (Idillio XXIII)’, Giornale italiano di filologia 23, 325 – 46. Ritchie, W. 1964. The Authenticity of the Rhesus of Euripides. Cambridge. Rosati, G. 1996. ‘Sabinus, the Heroides and the poet-nightingale. Some observations on the authenticity of the Epistula Sapphus’, Classical Quarterly 46, 207 – 16. Segal, C. 1981. Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral. Princeton. Sluiter, I. 1999. ‘Commentaries and the didactic tradition’, in Most ed. (1999) 172 – 205. Speyer, W. 1971. Die literarische Flschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum, Munich. Stephens, S. 2002. ‘Commenting on fragments’ in R.K. Gibson and C.S. Kraus (ed.), The Classical Commentary. Histories, Practices, Theory, 67 – 88, Leiden. Tarrant, R. 1981. ‘The authenticity of the letter of Sappho to Phaon (Heroides xv)’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85, 133 – 53. Van Sickle, J. 1976. ‘Theocritus and the development of the conception of bucolic genre’, Ramus 5, 18 – 44. Vaughn, J. 1981. ‘Theocritus Vergilianus and Liber Bucolicon’, Aevum 55, 47 – 68. Wendel, C. 1920. berlieferung und Entstehung der Theokrit-Scholien, Berlin. Wilamowitz, U. von. 1906. Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker, Berlin. Zimmerman, C. 1994. The Pastoral Narcissus. A Study of the First Idyll of Theocritus, Lanham, Md. Zuntz, G. 1971. Persephone, Oxford.

Addenda There has been increased interest of late in post-Theocritean bucolic and the transition to the Eclogues – useful orientation and bibliography in the contributions of Bernsdorff, Reed and Fantuzzi in M. Fantuzzi and T. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral (Leiden 2006). Cf. also The Shadow of Callimachus Chapter 4. On Idyll 20 see M. Fantuzzi, ‘The impor-

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tance of being boukolos: ps.-Theocr. 20’ in M. Paschalis (ed.), Pastoral Palimpsests (Rethymnon 2007) 13 – 38.

23. Imaginary Gods? Poetic theology in the Hymns of Callimachus* 1. Introduction The Alexandrian poets’ familiarity with popular cult hymns and the great hymns of the choral and lyric traditions, as well as the so-called Homeric Hymns, is obvious from the surviving texts. What ideas they had, however, about what constituted the form and nature of ‘a hymn’, as indeed of poetic genres in general, remains in need of further research and, perhaps, new information. We have traces of scholarly attempts to classify the lyric poems, among which there were several types of ‘hymns’ in a broad sense (paeans, dithyrambs, ‘hymns’ in the narrow sense, etc.) 1 and, in addition, we have Hellenistic poems which correspond in form and content to whatever we may call ‘a hymn’ in a general sense. As for Callimachus, his obvious close familiarity with the work of Simonides, Pindar2, and Bacchylides may safely be assumed to have extended to their lyric hymns (paeans, dithyrambs, etc.) which were also the subject of intensive scholarly activity in the Alexandrian Library. The Homeric Hymns have, on the other hand, left very little trace in the papyrus record and do not seem to have been the subject of serious Alexandrian exegesis3 ; this apparent neglect, however, * 1

2 3

Callimaque (Entretiens sur l’antiquit classique XLVIII, Vandoeuvres-Geneva 2002) 143 – 87, jointly with Therese Fuhrer. On the Alexandrian classification of poetry cf. A. E. Harvey, “The classification of Greek lyric poetry”, in CQ 5 (1955), 157 – 75; L. Käppel, Paian. Studien zur Geschichte einer Gattung (Berlin 1992); I. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans (Oxford 2001), 152 – 8; cf. also M. Depew, “Enacted and represented dedications: genre and Greek hymn”, in Matrices of Genre. Authors, Canons, and Society, ed. by M. Depew and D. Obbink (Cambridge, Mass./London 2000), 59 – 79; C. Calame, “La poésie lyrique grecque, un genre inexistant?”, in Littrature 111 (1998), 87 – 110, esp. 103. Cf. esp. T. Fuhrer, Die Auseinandersetzung mit den Chorlyrikern in den Epinikien des Kallimachos (Basel/Kassel 1992). That they were not completely neglected is suggested by two places where h.Ap. seems to have affected the Homeric text, cf. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer, ed. by S. West (Köln/Opladen 1967), 32 – 5.

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contrasts strikingly with their obvious importance as model texts for the Alexandrian poets (Callimachus and Theocritus) and for, at least, Ovid after them4. What features of the Homeric Hymns were particularly attractive for third-century elite poets is a question which is asked too rarely. Why did Callimachus pay such attention to these poems? Any answer to this question must, of course, remain speculative, but in this paper we wish to approach the subject from a number of angles in the hope, at least, of establishing some important parameters within which the matter may be considered. It is worth saying at once that one possible answer which we will not consider may lie in the opportunities for poetic performance afforded by the Ptolemaic court5 ; it may be that hymnic writing was positively encouraged, in part for the encomiastic opportunities it offered (cf. Section 5 below). Our concern, however, will be with the inner dynamics of the hymnic form, not with its social setting, and four broad concerns will structure the argument: 1) Hymnic form allowed poets to display their knowledge of cults and rites from all over the Greek world, both in ‘mimetic’ form and through the use of elements of more traditional hymnic encomia (divine epithets, aetiology etc.). The gradual freeing of the hymnic form from necessary ties to a particular cultic locale allowed poets to include cultic material from the widest possible area: hymns, in other words, become panhellenic. 2) Hymnic narrative becomes correspondingly free, and poets are no longer tied to particular narratives for particular settings. Hymns can now accommodate both the arcane and the alarming, and the criticism of myth now also plays a much greater role. 3) Hymnic form allows poets to lay bare and experiment with the technique and rhetoric of encomium, for it is ‘praise’ towards which every element of the poems is directed. In particular, poets broke down the boundaries of ‘mortal’ and ‘divine’ praise, thus re-drawing the very categories of existence. 4

5

Cf. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ed. by N. Richardson (Oxford 1974), 67 ff; S. Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone. Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge 1987); R. Hunter, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge 1996), Chapter 2; A. Barchiesi, “Venus’ masterplot. Ovid and the Homeric Hymns”, in Ovidian Transformations, ed. by Ph. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, S. Hinds (Cambridge 1999), 112 – 26. On this topic cf. G. Weber, Dichtung und hçfische Gesellschaft. Die Rezeption von Zeitgeschichte am Hof der ersten drei Ptolemer (Stuttgart 1993).

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4) We will make use – as a heuristic device – of the possibility that Callimachus put his Hymns together in a poetry-book, thereby creating a dynamic system, a ‘language’ if you like, in which each poem and each divinity may be read in relation to all others; the resulting set of overlapping relations in a divine hierarchy turns this poetry-book into a kind of Theogony. This assumption of a poetry-book is, of course, a large one, but one whose suggestiveness, to which we hope that the present essay contributes, seems to us to justify it6. Even if we stop short of the assumption that the six extant poems which we call ‘hymns’ are intended to be read as a unity, it is still legitimate, and now common practice in literary scholarship, to see them as a (loose) system with inherent crossreferences to each other.

2. The cultic imagination The ‘rhapsodic’ Homeric Hymns were probably performed in very similar circumstances to that of the epic recitations which they often preceded – competitions at festivals, aristocratic symposia and so on. It is standard scholarly practice to distinguish these hexameter poems from ‘cult hymns’, usually choral and lyric, the performance of which formed an important part of the religious celebration itself; whereas the hexameter ‘hymns’ concentrate upon praise of the god and an account of his or her place in the divine scheme, and there is merely an understated (or even just implied) request for the god to favour the poet in return for his song, ‘cult hymns’ have at their centre a request to a god for specific or general favour7. Such favour may extend to the very appearance or epiphany of the god; the ‘cletic’ hymn, literary versions of which are 6

7

For some bibliography cf. A. Kerkhecker, Callimachus’ Book of Iambi (Oxford 1999), 277, adding M. W. Haslam, “Callimachus’ Hymns”, in Callimachus, ed. by M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (Groningen 1993), 111 – 25 and V. Knight, “Landscape and the gods in Callimachus’ Hymns”, in Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 7 (1993), 201 – 11 Cf. A. Miller, From Delos to Delphi. A Literary Study of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Leiden 1986), 1 – 5; W. D. Furley, “Praise and Persuasion in Greek Hymns”, in JHS 115 (1995), 29 – 46. A useful introduction is J. M. Bremer, “Greek Hymns”, in Faith, Hope and Worship. Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World, ed. by H. S. Versnel (Leiden 1981), 193 – 215. There is also much relevant material in AION 13 (1991) which is devoted to L’inno tra rituale e letteratura nel mondo antico.

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most familiar from the poetry of Sappho, will assume a special importance for Callimachus, as two of his hymns (Apollo and Athena) recreate the experience of (waiting for) epiphany, and there are reasons for thinking that the phenomena of epiphany did indeed assume new importance within Hellenistic religious experience. Nevertheless, the distinction, at least in form, between rhapsodic and cultic hymns can be seen breaking down well before the Hellenistic period, and from the fourth century onwards survive a number of hexameter ‘hymns’ which clearly occupied a genuine place in cultic performance. Callimachus’ hymnal experiments with a semi-dramatic, mimetic mode are in part a reflection of (and upon) this gradual fusion of originally separate forms. In this changed situation of the gradual divorce of the cultic referents and aetiology of literary hymns from the actual cultic experience of the audience8, the most important experience of the audience to which the poet appeals is that of prior texts, though we must acknowledge that the power of these poems cannot be explained solely in these terms. Much in the Hymns of Callimachus also appeals to a cultic imagination, which may of course be grounded in a shared experience of literary representations and local chronicles. Nevertheless, the so-called ‘mimetic’ Hymns to Apollo, Athena and Demeter are merely the limit case of a constant appeal to active engagement with what is being described9. Such mimeticism greatly elaborates the important rôle of deixis and of (self-)reference to the festival and its choruses in early hymns by actually scripting a context for performance, whereas such a context needed no such script when the poem was indeed part of a real performance10. Discussion of Callimachus’ Hymns has too often been bedevilled by the (normally silent) running together of two questions which should, at 8 This has been the subject of a series of papers by Mary Depew, cf. “Mimesis and Aetiology in Callimachus’ Hymns”, in Callimachus (n. 6 above), 57 – 77; “Delian Hymns and Callimachean Allusion”, in HSCP 98 (1998), 155 – 82; “Enacted and represented dedications” (n. 1 above); cf. also W. D. Furley, “Apollo humbled: Phoenix’ Koronisma in its Hellenistic literary setting”, in MD 33 (1994), 9 – 31, esp. 25 – 30; Rutherford (n. 1 above), 128 – 30 with the cautionary remarks 177 – 8. 9 ‘Mimetic’ is in fact a rather unhelpful term (cf. M. A. Harder, “Insubstantial Voices: Some Observations on the Hymns of Callimachus”, in CQ 42 [1992], 384 – 94), but it would be foolish to imagine that we can now get away from it. 10 Cf. Depew, “Dedications” (n. 1 above).

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least in the first instance, be kept separate: “What kind of audience reception do these poems construct?”, and “How were these poems first presented and subsequently received?”11 An understandable fascination with the second ‘historical’ question may obscure the merits of asking the first. A similar dichotomy operates with the world of cult which these poems call into being. Of primary importance is not how widely familiar and practised such a cult as the Delian tree-biting (h. 4.316 – 24) ‘really’ was;12 as it happens, the antiquarian tendencies (and a developing tourist trade?) of the third century may in fact have increased the actual practice of rites believed to be ancient. Rather, what matters is that the poems construct an audience interested in rites practised by others, often very remote ‘others’, to a far greater degree than the lyric hymns and the major Homeric Hymns13 ; rites, real or imaginary, now exist in a decontextualised space from which they can at any time be drawn into poetic description. From a theological point of view, then, a god may be the sum of the rites practised, stories told, and epithets ascribed to him or her; the Hymn to Artemis is a very good example of this14. Such a text offers itself as, to some extent, a historical record, a poetic version of a ‘On the cults of Artemis’; its very form has been affected by contemporary readerly and scholarly practices. Though the hexameter Homeric Hymns are themselves more ‘all-inclusive’, less narrowly bound in their concerns to a specific performance context than are lyric cult hymns, these tendencies inherent in the form are taken to new levels and in new directions in the third century. In the Hymns to Athena and Demeter Callimachus abandoned the traditional Ionic language of the hexameter hymn in favour of a Doricising Kunstsprache, itself heavily indebted to the language of epic. This choice 11 A. Cameron, Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton 1995), 64 does seem to acknowledge the separateness of some version of these questions. 12 W. H. Mineur (Callimachus. Hymn to Delos. Introduction and Commentary [Leiden 1984], on v. 317) asserts that the aorists of the description show that there is no certainty that the rite was still in existence; he is right to call attention to this, but these tenses may fall into the very broad category of ‘the gnomic’ (KühnerGerth II 158 – 61). 13 Cf. Depew, “Delian hymns” (n. 8 above), 180. 14 Cf. below pp. 161-4, and G. Vestrheim, “Meaning and Structure in Callimachus’ Hymns to Artemis and Delos”, in SO 75 (2000), 62 – 79. The Hymn to Artemis, whose structure and pattern has always been found so confusing, is the one example among the Hymns of a lengthy account of a major Olympian in the traditional mode of the Homeric Hymns; as such it has a particular importance which has not always been recognised.

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has been plausibly traced to a creative imitation of the public choral poetry of the archaic polis, in which Doric was the predominant dialectal colouring15 ; it must also be relevant that the Hymn to Athena is set in Doric Argos (and is perhaps indebted to Argive sources) 16, and the Hymn to Demeter would, at least, not be out of place in Callimachus’ home city of Cyrene17. The imaginative reconstruction of the choric mode in these hymns extends also to form; a central narrative is framed by dramatic indications of a cult celebration currently taking place (Demeter) or just about to begin (Athena), whereas in the Hymn to Apollo, which advertises its debt to the Ionic tradition, the opening mimetic indications do not recur at the end18. ‘Choral’ poetry composed to be read and recited thus sought a partial analogy to the performative element inherent in the archaic texts19. As for the elegiac metre of the Hymn to Athena, this may not have had the central importance for ancient readers which it has assumed for some modern scholars, whose aesthetic sense is often shaped by the programmatic importance which the Roman elegists gave to the difference between hexameters and elegiacs. Callimachus may have been gesturing towards a real or believed tradition of Argive elegy20, but the two metres had traditionally shared

15 Cf. M. Fantuzzi, “Preistoria di un genere letterario: a proposito degli Inni V e VI di Callimaco”, in Tradizione e innovazione nella cultura greca da Omero all et ellenistica. Scritti in onore di B. Gentili (Roma 1993), 927 – 46. 16 Cf. Callimachus. The Fifth Hymn, ed. by A. W. Bulloch (Cambridge 1985), 16 – 17 on the possible use of the Argolika of Agias and Derkylos. 17 That the Hymn to Demeter has a Cyrenean setting has often been argued, as Demeter had important cult sites there (cf., e. g., A. Laronde, Cyrne et la Libye hellnistique [Paris 1987], 363 – 5; L. Bacchielli, “I ‘luoghi’ della celebrazione politica e religiosa a Cirene nella poesia di Pindaro e Callimaco”, in Cirene. Storia, Mito, Letteratura [Urbino 1990], 5 – 33), and is not improbable, but N. Hopkinson (ed.), Callimachus. Hymn to Demeter (Cambridge 1984), 38 is correct that there is not “a scrap of real evidence”. The festival is of a kind familiar throughout the Greek world; for the cult of Demeter in Alexandria and Egypt cf. D. J. Thompson, “Demeter in Graeco-Roman Egypt”, in Egyptian Religion. The Last Thousand Years, ed. by W. Clarysse, A. Schoors, H. Willems (Leuven 1998), 699 – 707. To what extent the dialect of Hymns 5 and 6 is distinctively Cyrenean (Ruijgh’s thesis) is disputed. 18 Note however v. 97: Rµ Rµ pai/om !jo}olem. 19 See the bibliography cited in n. 7 above. 20 For the evidence cf. Bulloch (n.16 above), 36 – 8. For an argument that, in one section of the poem at least (the lament of Chariclo), traditional associations between elegiac metre and lament for the dead resonate strongly cf. R. Hunter,

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much common subject-matter, and elegiac hymnal poetry is found elsewhere in both literary (e. g. Simonides’ Hymn to Achilles in his Plataea elegy, fr.eleg. 22 West) and non-literary (the Second and Fourth Isis Hymns of Isidorus) 21 contexts. A closely related appeal to cultic imagination is found in the Hymn to Apollo. Important to the design of this poem are not only cult hymns to Apollo (esp. paeans, as the frequent Rµ R^-cries suggest) but also the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a poem upon which Callimachus was also to draw extensively in the Hymn to Artemis and the Hymn to Delos, which re-tells the same birth myth as the ‘Homeric’ poem. It may indeed be that the absence of any explicit treatment of the birth myth in the Hymn to Apollo is in part to be connected with the existence of the Hymn to Delos; although the opening of the Hymn to Apollo does gesture towards the analogy between epiphany and birth (or perhaps rather suggests birth as the originary epiphany) – the natal palm-tree (v. 4), the swan (v. 5, cf. h. 4. 249 – 55), the opening of doors attended by song – and although the birth of the god recurs in the Pythian aetiology at the end of the poem (v. 104), the hymn’s comparative silence about the divine birth may otherwise surprise. If, however, we are to think of the hymns as in some sense a group to be read both separately and together, the surprise will be less. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo is unlike the other poems in its collection in at least two important respects. First, it seems to combine two, presumably originally distinct, hymns, one a ‘Delian’ hymn (vv. 1 – 181) and the other a ‘Pythian’ composition which tells of the foundation of the most important centre of Apolline cult, Delphi. Secondly, the closing verses of the Delian section both describe explicitly a festival on Delos, such as that at which the poem itself might well have been performed, and are also the only passage in the Homeric Hymns in which the poet makes extended reference to himself (Hom.h.Ap. 165 – 77): !kk’ %ceh’ Rk^joi l³m )p|kkym )qt]lidi n}m, wa_qete d’ rle?r p÷sai . 1le?o d³ ja· let|pishe lm^sash’, bpp|te j]m tir 1piwhom_ym !mhq~pym

165

“Writing the God: Form and Meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena”, in MD 29 (1992), 9 – 34 [=this volume 127 – 52], esp. 136 – 40. 21 E. Bernand, Inscriptions mtriques de l’gypte grco-romaine (Paris 1969), 633 – 6. These are, of course, of a much later date, but may well point to a persistent tradition.

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1mh\d’ !me_qgtai ne?mor takape_qior 1kh~m . § joOqai, t_r d’ ullim !mµq Fdistor !oid_m 1mh\de pyke?tai, ja· t]yi t]qpeshe l\kista ; rle?r d’ ew l\ka p÷sai rpojq_mash’ !lv’ Bl]ym . tuvk¹r !m^q, oQje? d³ W_yi 5mi paipako]ssgi, toO p÷sai let|pishem !qiste}ousim !oida_. Ble?r d’ rl]teqom jk]or oUsolem fssom 1p’ aWam !mhq~pym stqev|lesha p|keir ew maieta~sar . oR d’ 1p· dµ pe_somtai, 1pe· ja· 1t^tul|m 1stim. aqt±q 1c½m oq k^ny 2jgb|kom )p|kkyma jtk.

170

175

At the conclusion of his Hymn to Apollo, Callimachus imitates the archaic hymnal poet (‘Homer’) by making a claim for the artistic superiority of his – the poet’s – own verse and puts this in the mouth of the very god of poetry himself (Call. h. 2.105 – 13) 22 : b Vh|mor )p|kkymor 1p’ ouata k\hqior eWpem . oqj %calai t¹m !oid¹m dr oqd’ fsa p|mtor !e_dei. t¹m Vh|mom ¢p|kkym pod_ t’ Ekasem ¨d] t’ 5eipem . )ssuq_ou potalo?o l]car N|or, !kk± t± pokk\ k}lata c/r ja· pokk¹m 1v’ vdati suqvet¹m 6kjei. Dgo? d’ oqj !p¹ pamt¹r vdyq voq]ousi l]kissai, !kk’ Ftir jahaq^ te ja· !wq\amtor !m]qpei p_dajor 1n Req/r ak_cg kib±r %jqom %ytom.’ wa?qe, %man· b d³ L_lor, Vm’ b Vh|mor, 5mha m]oito.

105

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It is Apollo, rather than poet himself, who thus proclaims that Callimachus’ “songs are supreme for ever more” (Hom.h. Ap. 173) and who places Callimachus in a structural parallel with the poet of the Homeric Hymn, thus authorising the claim of the poet to artistic superiority and subsequent kleos. Whatever the verses mean in detail23 – and one of the few things which ought to be undisputed is that Apollo here speaks, appropriately enough, in the riddling language of oracles – it is clear that they privilege quality of verse over quantity. The familiar etymological play between pok}r and )p|kkym (cf. vv. 34 – 5, 69 – 70 etc.) is here given a new direction with the suggestion that the god’s 22 The Callimachean passage is, in one sense, isolated from the rest of the poem (cf., e. g., Haslam [n. 6 above], 1 17), but the importance of the model in the Homeric Hymn is regularly overlooked. 23 The bibliography is now very large, but may conveniently be followed through M. Asper, Onomata allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos (Stuttgart 1997), 109 – 25 and D. A. Traill, “Callimachus’ Singing Sea (Hymn 2.106)”, in CPh 93 (1998), 215 – 22.

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name signifies !-pok}r, i. e. ‘not a lot’ (cf. vv. 108 – 9) 24. The point is made sharper if we compare the archaic hymn in which the poet promises never to cease from hymning the god (vv. 177 – 8); Callimachus’ Apollo has other ideas about how he would like to be celebrated. Moreover, in the Homeric Hymn the usual promise “to remember the god (and another song)” has already been converted into a request to the Delian choir to remember the poet (vv. 166 – 7); god and poet are thus far more closely bound together in this archaic hymn than is usually explicit in the hymnic mode. Callimachus takes this one stage further by virtually equating the epiphany of the god with the performance of his poem, and by making the god the spokesman for the poet’s own aesthetic principles. The description of the Delian festival may have influenced Callimachus’ hymn in another way also. Instead of inscribing such a description in his hymn, Callimachus makes his poem dramatic by inscribing it within a festival in the god’s honour, imagined as taking place during the performance of the hymn and thus making it a representation of a cult hymn. Moreover, Apollo is precisely the god of singing and dance, and the performance of the Delian choir in the Homeric Hymn to this god re-enacts on earth the Olympian music which Apollo leads (vv. 131, 182 – 206). The suggestion in this hymn that the performance of ‘the blind poet’ himself is a mortal reflection of the divine aoidos Apollo is picked up in two ways by Callimachus. First, Callimachus’ Apollo is indeed the divine model of the poet, just as the Zeus of the First Hymn is the divine model for the king, and his hymn in the god’s honour not merely effects the epiphany of the god, but in its power to put an end to the extreme of grief presents itself as a perfect model of poetry (20 – 24) 25 : oqd³ H]tir )wik/a jim}qetai aUkima l^tgq, bpp|h’ Rµ pai/om Rµ pai/om !jo}sgi. ja· l³m b dajqu|eir !mab\kketai %kcea p]tqor, fstir 1m· Vquc_gi dieq¹r k_hor 1st^qijtai, l\qlaqom !mt· cumaij¹r azfuq|m ti wamo}sgr.

20

24 Note too how Apollo’s words (vv. 108 – 10) pick up the play between pok}r and p÷r of vv. 9 and 69 – 70. The paradox is sharpened by a suggested association between Vh|mor and vhom]y / ( ! )vhom_a. 25 On these verses cf. below pp. 422 – 3.

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The Hymn to Apollo thus forms a close counterpoint to the Hymn to Zeus in its debt to Hesiod’s Theogony (94 – 103): 1j c\q toi Lous]ym ja· 2jgb|kou )p|kkymor %mdqer !oido· 5asim 1p· wh|ma ja· jihaqista_, 1j d³ Di¹r basik/er . b d’ ekbior, fmtima LoOsai v_kymtai. ckujeq^ oR !p¹ st|lator N]ei aqd^. eQ c\q tir ja· p]mhor 5wym meojgd]i hul_i %fgtai jqad_gm !jaw^lemor, aqt±q !oid¹r Lous\ym heq\pym jke?a pqot]qym !mhq~pym rlm^sei l\jaq\r te heo»r oT mkulpom 5wousim, aWx’ f ce dusvqosum]ym 1pik^hetai oqd] ti jgd]ym l]lmgtai . taw]yr d³ paq]tqape d_qa he\ym.

95

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Whereas in the Hymn to Zeus it is v. 96 which is quoted (1j d³ Di¹r basik/er jtk.), in the Hymn to Apollo it is the immediately following Hesiodic theme of the power of poetry, which comes from Apollo and the Muses, to postpone grief which is important. Moreover, in both poems the evocation of Hesiod leads to the assimilation of the poet’s king to (respectively) Zeus (h. 1.85 – 90) and Apollo (h. 2.20 – 7) 26. Secondly, whereas the Homeric Hymn describes both the Olympian model and the earthly reflection, the Callimachean chorus tells of the ‘mythical’ model for their present performances, namely the dances of the Dorians and the Libyan women which brought pleasure to Apollo (vv. 85 – 96) 27. The emphasis on performance re-enactment of an event in the immemorial past is typical of the Hellenistic historical sense; the closing sections of the Hymns to Artemis and Delos offer a number of parallel examples. The exciting, but potentially frightening, experience of the god’s nearness and his power to cleanse men of disease (vv. 45 – 6), of threatening monsters (vv. 100 – 4), and of the impure poison of envy and bad poetry (vv. 105 – 12), is a form of ‘possession’, such as that felt by the Pythia at Delphi, and that possession should be disassociated from the ‘mimetic’ form which the poem dramatises. The opening seismic movements which mark the nearness of the god (vv. 1 – 5) 28, indicated for us 26 Cf. further below pp. 426 – 7. 27 Cf. C. Calame, “Legendary Narration and Poetic Procedure in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo”, in Callimachus (n. 6 above), 37 – 55, esp. 46. 28 It is tempting to see here some echo of the ‘trembling’ with which the other gods greet the epiphany of Apollo on Olympus in the Homeric Hymn (v. 2 tqo-

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by an unidentified voice which speaks with pious authority29, are a dramatic version of the ‘natural’ phenomena which standardly attend divine epiphany30, and are thus seen to be particularly ‘Apolline’. The fact that Hymns 5 and 6 also employ ‘mimetic’ frameworks should not obscure the meaning of such mimesis in Hymn 2. The presence and power of Apollo inevitably evokes immediate praise; this is the lesson of the aitiology of the ritual cry in vv. 97 – 104. As this hymn is itself a manifestation of the god, it demands our active response of praise; it cannot simply be received as narrative. The reception of the poem is itself the presence (t¹ 1pidgle?m) of the god. We must respond. This Callimachus has ensured by the ‘mimetic’ mode in which he has constructed his poem; our response is choreographed by the response of the choir. The centre of the poem is formed from a series of verse-paragraphs marked out by the god’s name (vv. 32, 42, 47, 55, 65) which celebrate the powers and spheres of the god. Pride of place is assigned to Apollo’s traditional rôle in the founding of cities, an activity which, at least in cultural memory, standardly began with an oracular response of the god31. The longest section of the poem (vv. 65 – 96) tells of the founding of Cyrene, Callimachus’ home city, and the celebration of the god there under the specifically Dorian epithet, Jaqme?or32. That the poet’s l]ousim). For the subsequent history of this motif in Roman poetry cf. A.

29

30

31 32

Barchiesi, ‘‘Immovable Delos: Aeneid 3.73 – 98 and the Hymns of Callimachus” in CQ 44 (1994), 438 – 43. S. Koster, “Kallimachos als Apollonpriester” in Tessera. Sechs Beitrge zur Poesie und poetischen Theorie der Antike (Erlagen 1983), 9 – 21, argues that the speaker is a “priest of Apollo” and the addressee (cf. v. 4) a young man being introduced into the cultic mysteries of the god. The difficulty with this reading is that the label ‘priest’ is misleading, even allowing for the validity of the category; this is merely one of the relationships between speaker and god which the poem evokes. Particularly relevant, of course, is Apoll. Rh. 2.679 – 80 (the epiphany of Apollo at Thynias), “the whole island shook beneath his feet”; for other links between that scene and Call. h. 2. cf. R. Hunter, “Apollo and the Argonauts: two notes on Ap. Rhod. 2.669 – 719” in MH 43 (1986), 50 – 60 [= this volume 29 – 41], esp. 57 – 60. For an ‘Egyptian reading’ of this section cf. D. L. Selden, “Alibis”, in ClAnt 17 (1998), 392 – 404. Cf. R. Nicolai, “La fondazione di Cirene e i Karneia cirenaici nell’ Inno ad Apollo di Callimaco”, in MD 28 (1992), 153 – 73. These myths have also been much discussed by Claude Calame; his publications are conveniently listed in the article cited in n. 27 above. For the Karneia cf. W. Burkert, Greek Religion (Oxford 1985), 234 – 6.

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city is a central site of Apolline cult is a manifest sign of the god’s favour towards the poet and the special authority with which he speaks; this divine approval, and specifically approval for the extraordinary narrative construction of the Cyrenean foundation story, is then most clearly confirmed in the Apolline epilogue. Beyond this, however, it has also often been argued that we are to understand that the poem is in fact set at a celebration of the Cyrenean Karneia; such a view fits the evocation of the model for Karneian choral performance at vv. 85 – 96 (cf. above), but it may be more accurate to imagine a fluid ‘ritual context’ which can at one moment be the Cyrenean Karneia and at the next a celebration in Delphi, for vv. 97 – 104 (the Pythian aetiology of the Rµ Rµ pai/om cry) provide a further ‘mythical model’ for the celebration being enacted through the poem. Nevertheless, the central section of the poem owes a very clear debt to Pindar’s Fifth Pythian33, an epinician (celebrating the same chariot victory as Pythian 4) for Arcesilas IV of Cyrene, which, at the very least, gives a particular prominence to the cult of Karneian Apollo at Cyrene, if indeed its setting is not the Karneia itself (71 – 81): 5massem !kj\emtar Jqajk]or 1jc|mour AQcilioO te. t¹ d’ 1l¹m caq}ei !p¹ Sp\qtar 1p^qatom jk]or, fhem cecemmal]moi Vjomto H^qamde v_ter AQce@dai, 1lo· pat]qer, oq he_m %teq, !kk± Lo?q\ tir %cem . pok}hutom 5qamom 5mhem !maden\lemoi, -pokkom, te÷i, Jaqm^i’, 1m dait· seb_folem Juq\mar !cajtil]mam p|kim.

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It is thus not improbable that it was precisely the ambiguous identity of the singers of Pythian 5, a matter discussed in antiquity as well as (endlessly) by modern scholars34, from which Callimachus developed the apparently shifting location of the “speaking voice” in his Hymn to Apollo. 33 Cf., e. g., M. T. Smiley, “Callimachus’ debt to Pindar and others”, in Hermathena 18 (1919), 46 – 72; M. R. Lefkowitz, “Pindar’s Pythian V”, in Entretiens Hardt 31 (1985), 33 – 63, esp. 44 – 9; E. Krummen, Pyrsos Hymnon (Berlin/ New York 1990), 95 – 151; Fuhrer (n. 2 above), 40 – 2; W. Kofler, “Kallimachos’ Wahlverwandtschaften”, in Philologus 140 (1996), 230 – 47. 34 Cf. Krummen (n. 34), 138 – 9; Kofler (n. 33).

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As so often, he goes one step beyond his models. His reworking highlights by exaggeration the problems that arise when a performative text, such as Pythian 5, is read away from performance; it is the read and written text that offers the limit case of the text as script. Be that as it may, the reworking of Pythian 5 (cf. esp. vv. 71 – 72 of Callimachus’ hymn) confirms the Hymn to Apollo as an offering to Callimachus’ “king” (v. 27), although it would be rash to infer from this alone that that king must therefore, like Arcesilas, be ‘king of Cyrene’35. The Callimachean scholiast – on what authority we do not know – identified Callimachus’ “king” as Euergetes, and it is at least worthy of remark that Euergetes’ marriage to the Cyrenean princess Berenice, celebrated by Callimachus in the Coma Berenices 36, would make an appropriate (though, of course, by no means necessary) context for the prominence of Cyrenean traditions in the hymn37. Callimachus’ poem thus not only effects the epiphany of the god, but demonstrates, rather than merely describes, his power. Finally, the relatively greater prominence of ritual in Hellenistic hymnic poetry (cf. Theocritus 26), the fact that, as Albert Henrichs has often observed, myth is increasingly presented as explanatory of ritual (i. e. aetiological), may also be seen, in part, as a related instance of the appeal to the cultic imagination. It is again important to remember that such poems are modern ‘versions’ of choral hymns, as well as of the hexameter Homeric Hymns. When reading becomes a, if not the, standard mode of reception, poets must accommodate a potentially very wide plurality of sites of reception. There is no longer a performative context which allows ‘the unspoken’ to be understood by a collective audience. Ritual is thus inscribed within the text.

3. ‘How shall I hymn you?’ In the Hymns to Athena and Demeter, the relation between the choice of narrative and the cultic frame is self-consciously problematised in ways which it is hard to imagine in ‘real’ choral poetry: 35 That the king is indeed Magas of Cyrene has often been suggested, cf. most recently Cameron (n. 11 above), 408 – 9. The position of a Ptolemy as Horus/ Apollo is perhaps more relevant than Cameron seems to allow. 36 Cf. above p. 415 – 16. 37 Cf. Callimachus, ed. R. Pfeiffer, II (Oxford 1953), pp. XXXVIII-XXXIX.

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5.55 – 6 p|tmi’ )hama_a, s» l³m 5nihi . l]sva d’ 1c~ ti ta?sd’ 1q]y . lOhor d’ oqj 1l|r, !kk’ 2t]qym. 6.17 – 23

lµ lµ taOta k]cyler $ d\jquom %cace Dgo? . j\kkiom, ¢r pok_essim 2ad|ta t]hlia d_je . j\kkiom, ¢r jak\lam te ja· Req± dq\clata pq\ta !staw}ym !p]joxe ja· 1m b|ar Gje pat/sai, "m_ja Tqipt|kelor !cah±m 1did\sjeto t]wmam j\kkiom, ¢r (Vma ja_ tir rpeqbas_ar !k]gtai) p< >Qd]shai

20

It would be difficult indeed to find an archaic parallel for the insouciant ti of 5.55. Nevertheless, the starting-point for Callimachus’ technique may well be reflection upon the actual practice of archaic and classical lyric; modern scholars were certainly not the first to ask “Why is this story told here?”38 We may perhaps think of this problematising of the central narrative as a version of the traditional hymnic question “How shall I hymn you?” Implicit in that traditional topos was the question of the poet’s freedom to choose (Hom.h.Ap. 19 – 27): p_r t\q s’ rlm^sy p\mtyr euulmom 1|mta ; p\mtgi c\q toi, Vo?be, mol¹r bebk^atai ¡id/r, Al³m !m’ Epeiqom poqtitq|vom Ad’ !m± m^sour. p÷sai d³ sjopia_ toi %dom ja· pq~omer %jqoi rxgk_m aq]ym potalo_ h’ ûka d³ pqoq]omter, !jta_ t’ eQr ûka jejkil]mai kil]mer te hak\ssgr. G ¦r se pq_tom Kgt½ t]je w\qla bqoto?si, jkimhe?sa pq¹r J}mhou eqor jqama/i 1m· m^syi D^kyi 1m !lviq}tgi ;

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In the archaic poem the hymnic rhetoric functions like a priamel to throw the poet’s choice into relief 39, but that ‘choice’ seems itself to have been contextually (pre-)determined (cf. 169 – 76). It is this inherited hymnic rhetoric which Callimachus lays bare.

38 Good general remarks on hymnic myth in W. D. Furley, “Praise and persuasion in Greek hymns” (n. 7 above), 43. 39 Cf. W. H. Race, The Classical Priamel from Homer to Boethius (Leiden 1982), 47 – 53; Depew (n. 8 above), 61 – 62.

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The two Callimachean narratives are, however, also importantly different. In the Hymn to Demeter an obviously relevant40, if very untraditional, tale is told by the fasting women during their procession, which was the normal place for such hymnic myth. Whereas the Homeric Hymn to Demeter records and celebrates the establishment of Demeter’s cult and tells a tale of separation and famine followed by re-integration, blessedness and plenty, Callimachus’ hymn confirms the continuing power of the goddess of the crops through an apotropaic tale of plenty wasted by folly and leading to ultimate separation and misery. Erysichthon’s punishment is to break those distinctions in social behaviour, established by Demeter the heslov|qor (v. 18), which separate us from the animals. In the Hymn to Athena, however, the story of Teiresias is apparently told to fill in the time before the procession begins. If lOhor d’ oqj 1l|r, !kk’ 2t]qym (56) is not merely an ‘Alexandrian footnote’ acknowledging the use of sources, but also a cautionary apology to the goddess for any offence the story might cause41, there is here a further self-conscious invitation to the reader to reflect on why the tale has been chosen, for potential offence is the very last thing that a hymn ought to offer42. Be that as it may, the crucial point is that, whereas for the archaic performer a Delian context demanded a Delian narrative, the Argive context of the Hymn to Athena no longer ‘requires’ an Argive narrative: the poet claims to be really ‘free’, to have that power of choice to which the archaic hymnist could only pay lip service. The story of Teiresias, who while hunting on Mt Helicon in Boeotia inadvertently saw Athena and his mother Chariclo bathing in the stream Hippocrene and was punished with immediate loss of sight, has of course many links to the Argive festival which Callimachus conjures up, in which a statue of the goddess received a ritual bath43. Pherecydes seems to have been the main source for this rare story of Teiresias, and there is no good reason to think that it was connected with the Argive Palladion before Callimachus brilliantly juxtaposed two different 40 The meaning of the Erysichthon story within a hymn to Demeter is discussed in Hunter, “Writing the god” (n. 20 above), 30 – 33. 41 Cf. T. C. W. Stinton, ‘“Si credere dignum est’’: some expressions of disbelief in Euripides and others”, in PCPS N.S. 22 (1976), 60 – 89, p. 66 (= Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy [Oxford 1990], 243). The relevant parallels are collected in Bulloch’s note and D. Kidd on Aratus, Phaen. 637. 42 On this passage cf. T. Fuhrer, “A Pindaric Feature in the Poems of Callimachus”, in AJP 109 (1988), 53 – 68, esp. 66 f. 43 Cf. Hunter, “Writing the god” (n. 20 above).

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‘baths of Pallas’, thus making the Teiresias story a quasi-aetiological warning to Argive men not to catch sight of Athena. What is clear is that such a myth about ‘looking’ is peculiarly appropriate to a written text of this mimetic, quasi-performative nature44. First, the poem evokes the similarity and difference between the mental images excited by literary enargeia and the experience of ‘epiphany’: is there a difference between our ‘seeing’ Teiresias seeing Athena and epiphanic experience? Secondly, we will never in fact ‘see’ the goddess, not only because ‘we’ are men, but also because the poem ends as she appears (or does she?), and because the acknowledged divorce of the written recreation from any ‘real’ occasion emphasises the artificiality of the mimesis. Moreover, in exploiting the traditional slippage between an image and what that image ‘represents’ — i. e. the whole problem of how to represent the divine – Callimachus raises the question of whether, in seeing an image or statue, we are ‘seeing’ the god as Teiresias saw her45. The ‘oddness’ of this usurpation by Athena of an ‘Artemis’ role further illustrates (and celebrates) the real freedom which poets now enjoyed. The inherited pantheon was a dynamic system of overlapping relations, narratives, and spheres of influence. By exploiting the new possibilities offered by the use of written records, what we might in fact call ‘the pursuit of oddness’, and by a highly allusive textual practice, Callimachus’ interlocking Hymns exaggerated these tendencies to make the system more, rather than less, dynamic, and in so doing to foreground the controlling power of the poet.

4. Intruding upon Apollo Like the Hymn to Zeus, the Hymn to Artemis begins with the god’s name, but whereas Zeus imposes himself as the only possible subject for song46, in the Hymn to Artemis a novel variation of the common hymnic topos of

44 ‘Looking’ and ‘seeing’ are, of course, also very important in the Hymn to Apollo, another epiphanic text. 45 Cf. N. Loraux, Les experiences de Tirisias (Paris 1989), 253 – 71 (= The Experiences of Tiresias [Princeton 1995], 211 – 26). 46 Cf. below p. 430.

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‘forgetting’47 may suggest that praise of the goddess has been deferred, if not indeed, actually overlooked (h. 3.1 – 2): -qtelim (oq c±q 1kavq¹m !eid|mtessi kah]shai) rlm]olem

Who might have forgotten Artemis? Two related answers suggest themselves. The first is the (hexameter) hymnic tradition as a whole: there are two fairly perfunctory Homeric Hymns to Artemis (9, 27), and the goddess makes only a few brief appearances as an adjunct to her brother in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. More pointedly, however, there is the case of Callimachus himself. In the corpus of his Hymns as we have it, the Hymn to Artemis is surrounded by two contrasting rewritings of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and, more specifically, the goddess appears only once in the immediately preceding Hymn to Apollo: at vv. 60 – 3 her endless labour supplies the raw material from which her brother weaves the wondrous altar of goats’ horns. To add insult to injury, her birthplace, according to the Homeric Hymn, was ‘Ortygia’ which in Callimachus had become the site of Apollo’s marvel (h. 2.59). Artemis gets her own back, however: in Callimachus’ hymn to her, Apollo appears in the servile role of unloading the dead animals from her chariot as she returns to Olympus, in a scene which ‘steals’ Apollo’s arrival on Olympus from the Homeric Hymn in his honour (Call. h. 3.140 – 69 ~ Hom.h.Ap. 1 – 13). Thus Callimachus has broken the Homeric Hymn into its constituent parts of ‘Apollo’, ‘Artemis’ and ‘Delos’, and ensured divine favour by a strategy of ever-increasing length; if Apollo approves of short poems, then he will (of course) not be able to complain since his is the shortest of the poems48.

47 Cf., e. g., Hom.h.Dion. 19. In view of this topos at the opening of Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis it may be important that the motif occurs in the opening verse of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Oq c±q 1kavq|m most naturally means ‘it is no light thing…’ (i. e. it has dire consequences) not ‘it is not easy…’ (as P. Bing and V. Uhrmeister, “The Unity of Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis”, in JHS 114 [1994], 19 – 34, p. 27). The consequences of annoying Artemis are uncomfortably familiar from well-known stories, and a closing catalogue of those whom she has punished (vv. 260 – 67) secures a ring around the poem. 48 Delos’ poem, on the other hand, is the longest of all, and this may be seen as a recompense for the fact that she has never before had a ‘hymn’; if, moreover, she feels that she has had to wait too long, then it is the poet’s thumos, not the poet himself, who is to blame (h. 4.1). For this ironic strategy cf. Call.

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The opening of Callimachus’ poem, therefore, appears to use the fact of a ‘poetry-book’ to set up a dialogue between poems and between gods. The shrine of Artemis at Ephesus “would easily surpass Pytho” (v. 250), a jibe whose full force derives from being read against the praise of h. 2.34 – 5: wq}sea ja· t± p]dika . pok}wqusor c±q )p|kkym ja· poukujt]amor . Puh_m_ je tejl^qaio.

So too, the opening of the Hymn to Artemis (oq c±q 1kavq¹m !eid|mtessi kah]shai) invites us to look back to the last poem, the Hymn to Apollo, and to read it again for signs of forgetting. Once we have done this, such signs are not difficult to find. Consider, for example, the case of Niobe, cited as one of the victims of Apollo who nevertheless falls under the spell of poetry in his honour (h. 2.22 – 7): ja· l³m b dajqu|eir !mab\kketai %kcea p]tqor, fstir 1m· Vquc_gi dieq¹r k_hor 1st^qijtai, l\qlaqom !mt· cumaij¹r azfuq|m ti wamo}sgr. Rµ Rµ vh]cceshe . jaj¹m laj\qessim 1q_feim. dr l\wetai laj\qessim, 1l_i basik/i l\woito . fstir 1l_i basik/i, ja· )p|kkymi l\woito.

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The model here is Achilles’ famous account to Priam (in Iliad 24.602 – 17) of Niobe, also used as an exemplum of behaviour which might be thought paradoxical, in which Artemis kills Niobe’s six daughters and Apollo her six sons. In Homer there is an even distribution of killing between the sibling gods; in Callimachus there is no word of Artemis. We could read her into the plural laj\qessim of v.25, but – particularly when we read back from the Hymn to Artemis – the chiastic game of the following verses (26 f.) even squeezes her out of that by bringing the poet’s king into the equation49. The best that the poet can do is to allow her to turn his words of praise against her brother (h. 3.6 – 9): fr.75.5. There are excellent remarks on the Hymn to Artemis in Haslam (n. 6 above), 117. 49 There is much characteristic verbal smartness in these verses: p]tqor is a surprise for pat^q, as a counterpoint to the pathetic l^tgq at the end of v.20. )mab\kketai has a musical sense which is momentarily evoked by the parallel jim}qetai (a related ‘pun’ at fr. 75.43); just as v. 21 foreshadows the etymology of the ritual cry from pa?, pa?, so v. 25 suggests the etymology from Vgli given the fate of Niobe’s children. On this passage cf. also Selden (n. 31 above), 378; Rutherford (n. 1 above), 122.

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‘d|r loi paqhem_gm aQ~miom, %ppa, vuk\sseim, ja· pokuymul_gm, Vma l^ loi Vo?bor 1q_fgi, d¹r d’ Qo»r ja· t|na—5a p\teq, ou se vaq]tqgm oqd’ aQt]y l]ca t|nom.’

The inversion of h. 2, and the childish desire for supremacy over her brother in a poem (the ‘Artemis’) at whose heart will indeed lie eris with ‘Phoebus’, makes plain the textual game upon which this encomium is based. The infant god’s request for pokuymul_g is perhaps not just a request for ‘many names’, as her brother has, but also for ‘the name of pok}r’, a standard etymology for Apollo’s name, of which Callimachus has made much in the preceding poem (cf. h. 2.34 – 5, 69 – 70). By the middle of the poem, the poet will have granted her even this (137 – 9): eUgm d’ aqt|r, %massa, l]koi d] loi aQ³m !oid^ . t/i 5mi l³m KgtoOr c\lor 5ssetai, 1m d³ s» pokk^, 1m d³ ja· )p|kkym, 1m d’ oV seo p\mter %ehkoi…

The prominence of ‘sibling rivalry’ as a motif and narrative impulse in the Hymn to Artemis is in fact too obvious to require lengthy discussion; in the Homeric Hymns in her honour, Artemis’ identity was already crucially dependent upon that of her brother, and Callimachus explores the potential tensions within such familial structures. If, however, he rewards the sister with her own hymn, he restores the balance in the Hymn to Delos from which she is all but entirely absent. Artemis makes in fact at most two appearances in the Hymn to Delos: the slavish50 Iris is compared to one of her hunting dogs (v. 228 – 9), a comparison which casts at best an ambiguous light on the goddess, and the final verse may refer to her by circumlocution, ‘the girl whom Leto bore’, though both text and interpretation are disputed. Artemis’ painless gestation and birth (h. 3.24 – 5) is thus written against Leto’s sufferings with the foetal Apollo in the following poem. The relative age of Apollo and Artemis is indeed a very grey area in the tradition. That they are twins is an idea “surprisingly rare outside Pindar”51 and nothing in Callimachus’ Hymns suggests such a notion; though Delian cults of Ar50 She is in fact a ‘comic’ serva currens, cf. Hunter, Theocritus (n. 4 above), 96; for the ‘breathlessness’ motif cf. Soph. Ant. 224; Ar. Av. 1122; R. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge 1985), 165. On this scene cf. also Depew, “Delian Hymns” (n. 8 above), 171. 51 I. Rutherford, “Pindar on the Birth of Apollo”, in CQ 38 (1988), 65 – 75 p. 72.

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temis are amply attested52, it is Apollo alone with whom the island is intimately associated. The place of Artemis’ birth remains as mysterious as the ‘Ortygia’ of the archaic Homeric Hymn to Apollo (v. 16).

5. ‘From Zeus are kings’ Throughout the first four hymns53, we are engaged in a constant struggle to control a shifting set of ways of talking about the nature of power – similes, analogues, suggestive juxtapositions54. In any state with strongly centralised power, be it Alexandria or even Cyrene, writing of this kind is ‘political’, because of the distribution of power within society. The divinity or quasi-divinity of the ruler, even before the formal institution of ruler cult, can change the contours of the pantheon by offering a point of reference (the ruler) through which new overlapping spheres within the ‘generic system’ are created; here too it is reasonable to think that poets often ran ahead of more broadly disseminated representations. Moreover, the first two hymns in the collection, Zeus and Apollo, establish fairly explicit links between human and divine power; thereafter, the reader is always held by the possibility of a thoroughgoing ‘system’ running through the corpus, particularly as both Olympian and Ptolemaic structures are based on family relationships. Thus, for example, it is tantalising that a poem about Artemis is surrounded by two poems in honour of her brother Apollo, one of which at least makes quite explicit the similarities between Apollo and Philadelphus55. The hymns must be contextualised within the social structures which produced them, and it is here that Callimachus’ Alexandrian context becomes determinative upon interpretation.

52 Cf. Ph. Bruneau, Recherches sur les cultes de Dlos  l’poque hellnistique et  l’poque impriale (Paris 1970), 171 – 206. 53 It is worth pondering how the Hymns to Athena and Demeter are different from the rest in many more ways than just dialect. 54 Depew, “Delian Hymns” (n. 8 above), 175 n. 51 makes the nice suggestion that “Iris’ sycophantic address to Hera (h. 4.216 – 39) provide[s] a negative exemplar of more overt praise”. 55 P. Bing, The Well-Read Muse. Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Göttingen 1988), 126 n. 57 suggested, on the basis of certain shared motifs between h. 3 and h. 4, that they were “originally companion pieces, the one perhaps written for Arsinoe, the other for Philadelphus”.

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Hymnal writing and performance flourished at all levels of Hellenistic society, as papyri and inscriptions amply attest, and the range of beings who were the object of hymnic praise was also greatly increased. The political upheavals of the later fourth century had placed the safety of cities (and later empires) in the hands of powerful military dynasts, and we find many of these celebrated in similar terms and similar poetic modes to those in which the Olympian ‘saviours’ or ‘protectors’ of cities had earlier been, and continued to be, glorified56. The distinction between men and gods, rather than some unchanging value associated with the language in which they were each described, was the crucial issue. Traditional Greek culture had always been uneasy with men whose good fortune seemed to threaten the privileges of the divine, and Pindar (like Homer before him) is constantly at pains to warn of the dangers and the unbridgeable divide which separates the two; in the third century and after, some men did in fact cross over, but only in very particular circumstances and often only after death. The old pattern persisted with remarkable tenacity: the apparently drily scholastic division in late antique rhetoric between ‘hymns’ to gods and ‘encomia’ to men is a manifestation of that persistence. Nevertheless, poems such as Theocritus 17 (Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus) and Callimachus’ Hymns to Zeus and Apollo, like the epinician tradition before them, creatively explore the boundaries between ‘analogy’ and ‘identification’ in ways which must have reflected the fluid search for new modes of praise in a changed situation57. One modern difficulty in understanding this poetry arises from the assumption that there must be a simple and consistent analogy between two classes of being who are described or praised in similar language; rather, we must consider the occasion-specific rhetoric of Greek praise and always be prepared to ask after the function of praise, rather than after some (probably illusory) ‘essential meaning’ for the terms in which the praise is couched. Praise exists to offer thanks for benefactions received and/or to create the circumstances for benefactions in the future; the pragmatics of hymnal discourse may thus be a more useful subject than its ‘religion’. 56 For a helpful discussion and list of references to such compositions cf. Cameron (n. 11 above), 291 – 5: Kerkhecker (n. 6 above), 289 draws attention to Callimachus’ generic sensitivity in avoiding ‘hymns’ directly addressed to mortal kings. 57 Cf. R. Hunter, Theocritus. The Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Berkeley 2003) 94 – 6.

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A feature of the Homeric Hymns which assumes great importance within the changed conditions of poetic composition which prevailed in the Hellenistic period is that these poems have at their heart the link between the past and the present. The hymns tell of the birth of gods or the establishment of their powers or of incidents in the heroic past which exemplify that power. Like mythological narrative in general, the hymns look to the past for the validation of the present order, particularly where they touch upon the position of kings and patrons, for here, more than anywhere else, an authorising tradition is of the greatest significance. Hymns thus take their place within the array of techniques by which Hellenistic poets both sought continuity with the past and also advertised their disjunction from it58. There is no major Homeric Hymn to Zeus59 but the opening of Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus evokes a setting where the celebration of Zeus was a familiar act: the third introductory libation before the start of the symposium proper was to Zeus Soter (Athenaeus 15.692 f-693c), and the singing of paeans was a regular part of the symposium60. In the absence of a formal model in the Homeric Hymns, Callimachus’ narrative of the birth and power of Zeus is, as has long been recognised, in part a rewriting of sections of Hesiod’s Theogony61; in describing the creation, coming to power and timai of Zeus, the Theogony is, in any case, importantly like a hymn. If the central concern of the major Homeric Hymns is the placing of their respective gods within the overall Olympian scheme, what Jenny Clay has termed “the politics of Olympus”, then the absence of a hymn to Zeus, the god who is responsible for that scheme, is unsurprising; a ‘theogony’ which tells of the creation of the whole scheme must, on the other hand, inevitably be in some sense a ‘hymn to Zeus’. Moreover, Hesiod’s poem explicitly foregrounds the relationships between Zeus and powerful men on earth, 58 Cf. Bing (n. 56 above), passim. 59 Hymn 23 is a four-verse proem to Zeus. 60 Cf. Rutherford, Paeans (n. 1 above), 50 – 2; thus, for example, Ariphron’s paean to Hygieia (PMG 813) is most naturally associated with the standard sympotic toasts in honour of that goddess (Hunter on Eubulus fr. 94.2 [= PCG 93.3]). Relevant also are the hymnal themes of some of the Attic skolia, cf. PMG 884, 885, 886, and cf. also the self-referential opening of one of Alcman’s paeans (PMG 98). 61 Cf. especially H. Reinsch-Werner, Callimachus Hesiodicus (Berlin 1976), 24 – 73; W. Meincke, Untersuchungen zu den enkomiastischen Gedichten Theokrits (Diss. Kiel 1966), 165 – 82.

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the aristocrats whom Hesiod calls basileis, and between the basileis and poets (Theog. 80 – 103). Both of these relationships are of crucial importance to Callimachus writing in the world of the Alexandrian court, under the patronage of a new kind of basileus whose ‘assimilation’ to Zeus seems to have been a commonplace of contemporary Greek poetry (Theocritus 17 etc.) 62. The analogy between the master of Olympus and the great king on earth became a commonplace of Hellenistic kingship theory, by no means restricted to the ambit of the Ptolemaic court, and is indeed foreshadowed in the Iliad in the similarity (and tragic dissimilarity) of Zeus and Agamemnon. A poem such as Pindar’s First Pythian which establishes a close analogy between Zeus’ harmonious control of the cosmos, based upon the crushing of his enemies, and Hieron’s harmonious guidance of his people shows how powerful, and how traditional, such ideas were. In his Hymn to Zeus Callimachus cites this passage of Hesiod – 1j d³ Di¹r basik/er – to position himself within a traditional negotiation between poetic encomium and kingly power, while celebrating what was (in some ways) a radically new kind of power. One crucial difference, however, between Callimachus and Hesiod is that, in the Theogony, the good king on earth follows (or imitates) the immortal pattern of Zeus, at least in the functions of diakrinein, “of physical and intellectual distribution”, and imposing dispute settlement. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus, however, Zeus and the good king are, at least potentially, fused together: we are almost dealing with one paradigm, rather than two related figures. Both the political and religious reality of the Ptolemy-Pharaoh, the first of whom was called, like Zeus, Soter, and the evolution of Greek poetic encomium contribute to this change. Such a fusion, however, foregrounds questions of ‘control’: When is Ptolemy ‘like’ Zeus? Always, or only at certain moments and in 62 We hope that uncertainty as to the date of the hymn and the identity of “our ruler” (v. 86) does not rob these general considerations of all their force. We ourselves would identify the ruler as Philadelphus (cf. J. J. Clauss, “Lies and allusions: the addressee and date of Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus”, in ClAnt 5 [1986], 155 – 70; Cameron [n. 11 above], 10), but other proposals are current (Magas: C. Meillier, Callimaque et son temps [Lille 1979], 61 – 78; Soter: J. Carrière, “Philadelphe ou Sôter? À propos d’un hymne de Callimaque”, in Studii Clasice 11 [1969], 85 – 93). For a reading of the Hymn to Zeus in the light of Egyptian as well as Greek ideas cf. S. Stephens, “Callimachus at court”, in Genre in Hellenistic Poetry, ed. by M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (Groningen 1998), 167 – 85.

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certain circumstances? How and when is Arsinoe ‘like’ Helen (Theocr. 15.110)? 63 As Egyptian monarchs, the Ptolemies were both in some sense divine, but were also mortals under the special protection of the gods; this doubleness can be amply illustrated from the iconography of the early reigns64. A sense of overlapping, of shared but not identical characteristics, and of present copies of timeless models is thus built into the very nature of kingship. It is perhaps no accident that the allusive practice of Alexandrian poetry shows similar features: can a reader’s receptiveness to explicit allusion be controlled in such a way as to block off (as far as possible) unhelpful associations and echoes; is one of the criteria of ‘rightness’ in reading knowing how far to read ‘intertextually’ and when to stop? 65 The Hymn to Zeus begins on a note of certainty (1 – 3): Fgm¹r 5oi t_ jem %kko paq± spomd/isim !e_deim k~zom C he¹m aqt|m, !e· l]cam, aQ³m %majta, Pgkac|mym 1kat/qa, dijasp|kom Oqqam_dgisi ;

Zeus’ name stands, as is only proper, at the head of the hymn, and perhaps of the collection of hymns. Within this certainty, however, unsettling doubts lurk, and not merely about the meaning of the riddling third verse66. At first we assume that the opening words mean “What 63 Cf. Hunter, Theocritus (n. 4 above), 165 – 6 on the “process of selective memory” which the use of such mythological figures imposes und which poets dramatise and ironise 64 Cf. Selden (n. 31 above), 350 – 1, 386 (with bibliography). 65 Some of the issues are set out with great clarity in S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext (Cambridge 1998), esp. Chapter 2. 66 On Pgkac|mym (Etym.Gen.: Pgko- MSS) cf. Pfeiffer II 41. The traditional interpretation, current already in antiquity (cf. Scholia ad loc.; Nonn. Dion. 18.266, and perhaps Hor. carm. 3.1.6 – 7 Iovis / clari Giganteo triumpho, in a very Callimachean context [S. J. Heyworth, “Some allusions to Callimachus in Latin poetry”, in MD 33 [1994], 51 – 79, pp. 54 – 6]), of the first half is “router of the Mud-born, i. e. the Giants (the cgceme?r, “born from earth”) and/or the Titans”; if this were correct, we would have a brief allusion to the establishment of Zeus’ rule, and this interpretation would seem to find support in Theogony 820, “when Zeus had driven (1n]kase) the Titans from heaven…”. Adolf Köhnken, “Pgkoc|mym 1kat^q. Kallimachos, Zeushymnos v. 3”, in Hermes 112 (1984), 438 – 45, however, has argued that the ‘Mud-born’ are mortals, traditionally fashioned by Prometheus from mud; 1kat^q will, therefore, mean “gatherer, controller”, as of flocks of sheep, and this would be a Callimachean way of re-writing the Homeric poilµm ka_m, “shepherd of the peo-

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other than Zeus would it be better to sing at libations?”, and it is only when we reach C he¹m aqt|m in v. 2 that we realise that the opening Fgm|r actually belongs with spomd/isim, “at libations to Zeus”67. Although we have ‘misconstrued’ the syntax of the opening verse, we have in fact correctly appreciated the meaning: Zeus is the only possibility, regardless of grammatical construction. Zeus, whose precocious power (v. 57) is shared only with “our king” (vv. 87 – 8) and overturns all our accepted notions of progression and generational succession (vv. 58 – 9), is the only certainty amidst the treacherous shoals of competing ‘mythologies’ (vv. 4 – 9), Cretan paradoxes (v. 8) and the untruths of poets (vv. 60 – 5). That the opening verses themselves appear to be written ‘in competition’ with a famous Pindaric opening is itself a manifestation of the shifting layers of tradition68. The verbal style of Callimachus’ opening is close to the opening of a Pindaric prosodion (fr. 89a Sn.-M., presumably to Artemis): T_ j\kkiom !qwol]mois(im ?) C jatapauol]moisim C bah}fym|m te Kat~ ja· ho÷m Vppym 1k\teiqam !e?sai ;

Nevertheless it seems very likely that we are primarily to think of Pindar’s own Hymn to Zeus69 which began with a priamel listing of possible Theban themes for song (fr. 29 Sn.-M.):

ple”. Not only would this interpretation offer the witty equation of human beings to sheep, but it would also play off the origins of men (‘mud’) against the origins of the gods (‘sons of Ouranos’). 67 The syntactic ambiguity is noted already by the scholiast. 68 The brilliant insubstantiality of the poetic voice in the Hymn to Zeus has often been discussed, and we shall say little about it here; among recent accounts cf. N. Hopkinson, “Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus”, in CQ 34 (1984), 139 – 48; S. Goldhill, “Framing and Polyphony: Readings in Hellenistic Poetry”, in PCPS 212 (1986), 25 – 52; K. Lüddecke, “Contextualizing the voice in Callimachus’ ‘Hymn to Zeus’”, in MD 41 (1998), 9 – 33. 69 This poem seems to have stood first in Aristophanes of Byzantium’s seventeenbook edition of Pindar (cf. Pfeiffer [1968], 183 – 4), but we cannot necessarily extrapolate back from this to the scholarship of a previous generation; there must, however, be a strong suspicion that Callimachus’ contemporaries also knew it in a very prominent position. For Horace’s use of Greek poems which were significantly placed in their respective books cf. A. Barchiesi, “Rituals in ink: Horace on the Greek lyric tradition”, in Depew-Obbink, Matrices (above n. 1), 167 – 82, esp. 171 – 3.

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Yslgm¹m C wqusak\jatom Lek_am C J\dlom C Spaqt_m Req¹m c]mor !mdq_m C t±m juam\lpuja H^bam C t¹ p\mtoklom sh]mor Jqajk]or C t±m Diym}sou pokucah]a til±m C c\lom keujyk]mou *qlom_ar rlm^solem ;

5

Against Pindar’s embarrassment of choice is set by Callimachus a confidence that there is only one possible subject for song. Pindar’s hymn appears to have made extensive use of Hesiod’s Theogony, especially if Bruno Snell was correct in arguing that Pindar depicted Apollo and the Muses performing at the wedding of Kadmos and Harmonia “ein grosses mythisches Gedicht … das vom Werden der Götter und Menschen erzählte”70. In reading the Theogony as a ‘Hymn to Zeus’ Callimachus is also interpreting Pindar. As Callimachus here appropriates Pindar and is soon to incorporate Homer, whose account of Achilles’ killing of Lykaon is re-written in Rheia’s creation of rivers to wash the new-born infant71, so Zeus surpasses all other gods; the eternal constancy of Zeus’ power (v. 2) is set off against the agonistic struggles of poets and the myriad voices of the poetic tradition. Another one of those voices also demands special attention. As has long been recognised, vv. 5 – 6 which oppose the Cretan and Arcadian birth legends of Zeus seem to rework parallel verses from the fragmentary Homeric Hymn to Dionysus (1 – 7): oR l³m c±q Dqaj\myi s’, oR d’ Yj\qyi Amelo]ssgi v\s’, oR d’ 1m M\nyi, d?om c]mor eQqavi_ta, oR d] s’ 1p’ )kvei_i potal_i bahudim^emti jusal]mgm Sel]kgm tej]eim Di· teqpijeqa}myi, %kkoi d’ 1m H^bgisim %man se k]cousi cem]shai xeud|lemoi . s³ d’ 5tijte patµq !mdq_m te he_m te pokk¹m !p’ !mhq~pym jq}ptym keuj~kemom Nqgm.

70 Die Entdeckung des Geistes (Göttingen 1975), 82 – 94. With fr. 30 L. cf. Hes. Theog. 901 – 6, which Pindar appears partially to ‘correct’. 71 Cf., e. g., A. Griffiths, in JHS 101 (1981), 160. J. K. Newman, “Pindar and Callimachus”, in Illinois Classical Studies 10 (1985), 169 – 89, pp. 184 – 5 makes the interesting suggestion that the stress on the sudden appearance of water carries particular resonance as the Ptolemies, the heirs of the Pharaohs, were lords of the Nile; the reign of Zeus/Ptolemy thus ensures abundant fertility for thirsty Egypt. Cf. further Stephens (n. 62 above).

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Whereas the archaic poet himself declares the variant traditions of Dionysus’ birth to be ‘lies’ and imposes the ‘true’ account, in the case of Zeus Callimachus leaves the choice up to Dionysus’ father himself 72. Despite the loss of so much hymnic poetry, the relationship between the two passages seems reasonably clear73. There may in fact have been a formal reason for Callimachus’ choice of model. Although the quoted verses survive only in the indirect tradition, the close of what is pretty certainly the same poem introduces the text of the hymns in the damaged Mosquensis manuscript of the early fifteenth century. This manuscript, which by common consent is the best witness to the text of the hymns74 also preserves uniquely the Hymn to Demeter which follows the Dionysus-fragment; all other manuscripts begin with the Hymn to Apollo (Hymn 3 in T.W. Allen’s standard Oxford edition). It is not possible to tell from the manuscript how much of the Hymn to Dionysus is lost nor whether this was the first hymn in that text, though this seems indeed very likely. As the order of the preserved hymns is standard in the vast majority of witnesses75, there is a presumption that this order goes back to the collection of Homeric Hymns which was at some date incorporated into a larger collection of hymnic and Homeric material. If so, we must at least reckon with the possibility that the Hymn to Dionysus was the first poem in a collection of Homeric Hymns known to Callimachus. In the opening verses of his opening hymn, therefore, Callimachus may have alluded to the ‘opening’ poems of the two major hymnic collections of the past, the ‘Homeric’ and the Pindaric. In doing so, Callimachus not merely places himself within a tradition, but calls attention to the written form of collected ‘poetry-books’ which offered new possibilities for beginnings and ends. The ludic wit with which Callimachus juxtaposes “the eternal Zeus” with the story of his birth in all its physical detail is of a piece with the games which he plays with notions of truth-telling and the 72 Is p\teq in v. 7 a hint at the model text being used? 73 The Hymn to Dionysus also shares with the story of Zeus’ birth the motifs of hiding the baby from the wrath of another god (in Dionysus’ case, Hera) and birth on a thickly wooded mountain (cf. Call. h. 1.11, perhaps a rewriting of the description of Nysa in vv.8 – 9 of the archaic hymn). On this Homeric Hymn see now M. L. West, “The fragmentary Homeric Hymn to Dionysus”, in ZPE 134 (2001), 1 – 11. 74 The most accessible account is the Introduction to the edition of T. W. Allen -W. R. Halliday – E. E. Sikes (Oxford2 1956). 75 A small sub-group (HJK) have the order 8 – 18, then 3.1 – 186.

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‘Hesiodic’ claim of poetry to be able to convey both truth and falsehood (Theog. 22 – 28) 76 ; the poet’s demand for “plausible fiction” (v. 65) is not merely a way to dismiss the Homeric account of the division of the universe among the three sons of Kronos in favour of the Hesiodic version77, but it also of course undermines any temptation we might have to ‘believe’ his own narrative of Zeus’ birth. The physical vividness of this narrative is not merely a technique for disorienting the reader, let alone a tool of ‘realism’, but is rather one of the ways in which it is made clear that what is at issue is not literal ‘belief’ in the story. The strategy of the poem is to divorce the power and nature of Zeus from the ‘mythology’ of Zeus, so that the former does not depend upon the latter. The learned poet can have lots of fun with the absurdities of traditional stories and the inconsistent tales of poets, and yet still expound the realities of power. There is, moreover, a broader context of ‘religious’ ideas into which Callimachus’ poem and its tradition fits78. Greek poetic reflection upon the nature of Zeus, and hence upon the nature of power, tended to stress not the god’s (perhaps original) rôle as the elemental sky-god, but rather the universality and uncertainty of supreme power. When Callimachus excuses himself at the end of the hymn (92 – 3), d_toq !pglom_gr, te± d’ 5qclata t_r jem !e_doi ; oq c]met’, oqj 5stai . t_r jem Di¹r 5qclat’ !e_sei ;

76 Particularly valuable is A. Barchiesi, Il Poeta e il Principe. Ovidio e il discorso augusteo (Bari 1994), 169 – 75. 77 Iliad 15.187 – 93. Appeals to t¹ eQj|r and t¹ piham|m are very common in the Homeric scholia, and we should catch here the tones of the scholar, as well as the calculating peasant. There was a rich tradition of allegorising this Iliadic passage, and it is not impossible that Callimachus alludes to an actual scholarly argument; cf. Ps.-Heraclitus, Probl. 41.5 where the division is described as !m~lakor. Moreover, in the Iliad ‘Hades’ is the name of one of the brothers, not a term for the Underworld, and ‘Olympos’ remains common to all three (15.191 – 3); Callimachus is, therefore, demonstrating how scholars “play fast and loose” with the text in their interpretative arguments 78 S. Pietsch, Die Argonautika des Apollonios von Rhodos (Stuttgart 1999), 181 – 92 is a serious attempt to pay attention to the background of theological ideas in the Hymn to Zeus, as well as to the poem’s obvious humour, though our analysis would be very different.

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this is not to be dismissed as merely a “bold-faced inversion of one of the most conventional motifs of praise-poems”79 or as a ‘scholarly’ allusion to the absence of a major ‘Homeric Hymn to Zeus’, though it is, of course, both of those things; there is no point seeking to celebrate or catalogue ‘the deeds of Zeus’, to write, if you like, a Hymn to Zeus on the lines of Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis, because to do so is to misrepresent the nature of Zeus, and it is that nature which is the object of hymnic form. To an important extent, Zeus is ‘process’, to be perceived only as the pattern of events which have already unfolded, what Aeschylus calls ‘Zeus’ valid law’, p\hei l\hor, “learning through experience”. Everything which happens is ‘Zeus’.80 This is, however, not a matter of ‘what Callimachus believed’ (which we shall never know) or ‘the religion of Callimachus’, but rather of the literary and cultural tradition in which his poem fits. So much about the style of his poetry seems revolutionary, that the traditional matrix of ideas into which it fits is often forgotten.

Addenda Cf. 8 above. Callimachus’ Hymns continue to attract considerable attention, cf., e. g., M. Vamvouri Ruffy, La fabrique du divin (Liège 2004), A. Ambühl, Kinder und junge Helden (Leuven 2005), I. Petrovic, Von den Toren des Hades zu den Hallen des Olymp: Artemiskult bei Theokrit und Kallimachos (Leiden 2007). p. 408 An important study of hymnic epiphany is J.F. García, ‘Symbolic action in the Homeric Hymns: the theme of recognition’ Classical Antiquity 21 (2002) 5 – 39 p. 429 – 30 G.B. D’Alessio has made a very strong case for believing that the poem that stood first in the Alexandrian edition of Pindar, and of which we possess considerable fragments, was not in fact a ‘Hymn to Zeus’, but a ‘Hymn to Apollo’, cf. ‘Il primo inno di Pindaro’ in S. Grandolini (ed.), Lirica e teatro in Grecia: il testo e la sua ricezione (Naples 2005) 113 – 49.

79 Haslam (n. 6 above), 116, cf. also Vestrheim (n. 14 above), 63 – 4. More promising, though equally limiting, is Newman (n. 71 above), 185, “evidently [Zeus’ deeds] have been sufficiently replaced by what we have heard of the deeds of Ptolemy”. 80 Some key texts: Aeschyl. Ag. 160 – 83; Soph. Trach. 1278; Eur. Tr. 884 – 8; Cleanth. Hymn to Zeus; Arat. Phaen. 4.

24. Theocritus and the Style of Cultural Change* The meeting and song exchange of Lycidas and Simichidas in Theocritus’ seventh Idyll, the Thalysia, has a fair claim to be among not only the most discussed1 but also the most powerful and strangely compelling scenes of all Greek poetry. Its hold over us lies in part not merely in the familiar attractiveness of the mysterious and riddling, but also in our pervasive sense of witnessing a dramatization of changing fashion, and one in which the present confronts, but perhaps fails to meet the challenge of, the past. In this chapter, I want to look anew at certain aspects of this encounter in the hope of teasing out some strands of Hellenistic reflection upon poetic and cultural practice.

Thinking about Style As the narrator, Simichidas, and his friends are walking from the town of Cos to a harvest festival in the countryside, they happen to fall in with Lycidas (but is it “chance”?), who is very obviously a goatherd (or is he?). Both Lycidas and Simichidas are poets, and they agree to an exchange of “bucolic song” as they travel together. Lycidas introduces his song as follows (Idyll 7.42 – 51): So, with a purpose, did I speak, and the goatherd answered, sweetly laughing, “I will give you my stick, because you are a young shoot all fashioned by Zeus for truth. So I abhor the builder who seeks to raise his house as high as the peak of Mt. Oromedon, and the cocks of the Muses who labor in vain, crowing against the Chian songster. But come, let us quickly begin bucolic song, Simichidas. And I – see, my friend, whether you like this little song which I recently worked out (exeponasa) on the mountainside.”

* 1

H. Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 2003) 213 – 34 For recent bibliography, see Hunter 1999: 151, Köhnken and Kirstein 1995: 279 – 96. In what follows I have not always thought it worthwhile to signal my debts to and disagreements with the extensive modern discussion.

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As has often been remarked, the final verses of this passage look to an ideal of small-scale, careful workmanship (ponos, “labor”), which finds many echoes in Hellenistic and Roman poetry.2 Theocritus’ contemporary, Posidippus, for example, portrays his soul in an epigram as “previously laboring amongst books” but now tortured by desire.3 That Lycidas’ stylistic effort took place “on the mountain” sits in paradoxical juxtaposition to this ideal of modern craftsmanship. In composing “on the mountain”, Lycidas is, of course, replaying the setting of Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses in the opening of the Theogony, but Lycidas lays no claim to such inspiration. Indeed, he himself plays the role of the Muses in promising to give his staff to the young Simichidas, who has just declared himself to be a “clear voice of the Muses” (Idyll 7.37). That differing ideas about the sources of poetry are indeed relevant here is clear also from Lycidas’ rejection of the “cocks of the Muses” who crow vainly against “the Chian songster” (i. e., Homer). These verses seem plainly to rework one of the most famous passages of Pindar’s epinicians (Olympian 2.83 – 8):4 I have many swift arrows under my arm in their quiver that speak to those who understand, but for the generality they need interpreters. Wise is he who knows many things by nature, whereas learners who are boisterous and long-winded are like a pair of crows that cry in vain against the divine bird of Zeus. (trans. Race, adapted)

The ideal of knowledge derived from “natural gifts” (physis) is here set against the poverty of “learning,” though the ancient commentators on the Pindaric passage – with a fine eye for self-justification and advertisement – saw not just a hit at two of Pindar’s “rivals,” Simonides and Bacchylides, but also a statement of the need for poetic commentary, which would be one further way in which Pindar anticipated Hellenistic trends.5 However we interpret these difficult Pindaric verses, the idea of “learning” takes us very close to imitation (mimesis) as a model for poetic composition and to what we might, with an eye on later developments, be tempted to call “craftsmanship” (techne¯). Pindar’s dichotomy 2 3 4 5

Hunter 1999: 166. For ideas of ponos throughout the poem, see also Berger 1984: 17 – 20. 1m b}bkoir pepomgl]mg (PA 12.98 = VI Gow-Page). There is a useful discussion by Cozzoli 1996: 7 – 36. Scholia Pindarica I.98 Drachmann. It will be relevant to the ideas pursued in this essay that Dionysius of Halicarnassus similarly notes that the obscurity of Thucydides and Demosthenes “requires interpreters” (Lysias 4).

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between nature and learning – or at least one strong reading of that dichotomy – was at the heart of most ancient discussion of the sources of poetry; it was the almost unanimous view of ancient critics that the aspiring poet or orator needed in fact a mixture of natural gifts and studied craftsmanship: the requirements, as listed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, are “natural gifts, careful study, laborious practice.”6 If, like Pindar, Lycidas speaks “to those who understand,” it would seem that Simichidas, the “professional” poet from the city with a repertoire of songs ready to hand (Idyll 7.92 – 5),7 is not to be included in this privileged group, for when it is his turn to perform he adopts the fiction of “poetic inspiration” as though he has not understood the message of Lycidas’ verses (Idyll 7.90 – 5): After him I spoke in my turn as follows: “Lycidas my friend, me too the Nymphs taught many other songs as I tended my herd (boukoleonta) on the mountain, excellent poems, which public report has perhaps carried even to the throne of Zeus. But this with which I shall do you honor is much the finest of them all: listen then, since you are dear to the Muses.”

Simichidas sets himself up as a latter-day Hesiod whose poetic “initiation” by the Muses as he herded his lambs on Mt. Helicon is recorded in the opening of the Theogony. He is making a move very familiar in the poetry of the third century, however relevant Hesiod is for bucolic poetry in general and Idyll 7 in particular.8 We may think particularly of Callimachus replaying Hesiodic experience in the Aitia or reconstructing the voice of Hipponax in the Iambi. The very fiction that Simichidas employs marks him, indeed, as a modern poet of a quite different kind from the model that he claims. Divine inspiration, whether from the Muses or the more appropriately bucolic nymphs, is now merely a “technical” gesture, a code shared between a poet and his audience. It is a code that Simichidas, like all modern professionals, can adopt or 6

7

8

v}sir deni\, l\hgsir !jqib^r, %sjgsir 1p_pomor (On Imitation fr. 2 Usener-Radermacher). For “art and nature” in the Hellenistic critics, see Brink 1971: 394 – 5 on Horace, Ars poetica 408 – 18; McKeown 1989: 399 – 400 on Ovid, Amores 1.15.13 – 14. Hutchinson 1988: 203 noted, in order to reject, the possibility that in Idyll 7.43 – 8 Lycidas may be referring to stylistic grandeur. Lycidas teases Simichidas with the behavior of a parasite (24 – 5). If we ask what Simichidas would give in return for entertainment, the answer must be not the jokes of a parasite, but poems. In some respects, Simichidas is a forerunner of Petronius’ Eumolpus. Partly, perhaps, as a result of Idyll 7, subsequent tradition made Hesiod a founding figure of pastoral; cf. Virgil, Eclogue 6.69 – 71.

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abandon at will in accordance with the generic demands of any particular song. When, however, Lycidas offers the first performance of a song that he has “recently crafted on the mountain,” we have at least no prima facie reason to disbelieve him. Before moving to the two songs themselves, it will be worth setting these ideas within a broader historical context. The most famous early statement of what we might call the ideal of “labor” (ponos) is the programmatic chapters of the first book of Thucydides’ History. Here the “labor” of research (1.20.3, 22.3) is intimately linked to the pursuit of an account that is saphe¯s, both “true” and “clear” (1.1.3, 22.4), and akribe¯s, an “accurate and detailed” record of what was said and done (1.22.1 – 2). Those to whom Thucydides opposes himself are characterized not merely by intellectual sloppiness (1.20.3), but in particular by a reliance on “the mythical” in order to make their poems or logoi more attractive to listeners; here style and subject are equally at fault. Over these chapters there hovers a sense of another dichotomy, that between the written and the oral (especially 1.22.4). As a stylistic and intellectual ideal, “detailed accuracy” (akribeia) seems in fact to reflect an originary use for writing in the fields of record keeping, law codes, public decrees, and so forth, where the potential deceptiveness of oral traditions is most to be deprecated (1.20).9 So, too, the fourth-century rhetorician Alcidamas, in his work On the writers of written speeches or On sophists, a defense of “improvised” speeches and an attack upon the use of carefully prepared texts, repeatedly associates such akribeia with written texts.10 Thucydides’ broad dichotomy between himself and all others finds a familiar analogue in the stylistic and thematic distinction constructed between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs. The facts are too well-known to need rehearsing here. Put broadly, the swollen, grand style of Aeschylus, which depends for its effects on irrational, emotional power (ekple¯xis), is set beside the careful, clear, and accurate style of Euripides. There is no exact fit either with Thucydides’ rhetoric or with any simple dichotomy of nature-art, but both the basic distinction 9 On these dichotomies in Thucydides’ self-presentation, see Yunis 2003: 198 – 201. 10 Cf. Alcidamas, Sophists 14, 16, 20, 25, 33 – 4. So, too, Alcidamas associates writing with “working out speeches in detail” [kata mikron exergazesthai, Sophists 16], a phrase that may remind us of Lycidas’ ekponein (p. 214), and with the imitation of one’s predecessors (Sophists 4), like Pindar’s “crows,” whose song comes from mere “learning” (above p. 435). See Thomas 2003: 186 – 7, on Alcidamas.

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between “grand” and “plain” and the link between stylistic and intellectual qualities (i. e., between the how and the what), which were to persist for centuries, are already there for all to see.11 That the same or similar language is used to describe both what was said and the style in which it was said is crucial for the developments this chapter will trace, though a certain caution is needed. Thus, for later critics, Thucydides’ style, particularly in the denser passages, was notoriously grand and “obscure” (asaphe¯s),12 whatever intellectual virtues he might claim for his history. Nevertheless, the interplay of the stylistic and the intellectual will emerge as a fundamental leitmotif of what was ultimately a radical shift in Greek literary culture. It must be stressed that these critical categories, whether applied to rhetoric or poetry, do not depend upon a distinction between the written and the oral, a distinction that, expressed in those terms, would be meaningless in the ancient world. Nevertheless, at least two immediate qualifications to this assertion are necessary. First, it is clear that some of the stylistic distinctions between the grand and the plain do in fact correspond to observable distinctions in other cultures between oral and literate “literature.”13 Second, from Aristophanes to Longinus and beyond, the power of the grand style is intimately connected to its emotional effects upon an audience; the “transport” (enthousiasmos) of the poet or orator is transmitted in performance to the minds of the audience.14 In an instructive passage of his essay on Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that the emotional thrill that he derives from reading a speech of Demosthenes makes him wonder what must have been the extraordinary emotional experience of the original audience who actually heard the great man speaking. What is crucial here is that Dionysius sees in the words of the speech their own stage directions, as it were.15 Here we see how the performative, oral mode (even when it 11 Wehrli 1946; O’Sullivan 1992. Demetrius, On Style 36 notes that some people (with whom he does not agree) hold that there are only two types of style, the grand (megaloprepe¯s) and the plain (ischnos), because these two can never be combined. 12 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Lysias 3, Demosthenes 1, 10, Thucydides 24, etc. For Thucydides’ sublimity, cf. Longinus, On the Sublime 14.1, 38.3. 13 This is particularly so in the matter of redundancy and copia; cf. Ong 1982: 39 – 41. Cf. further Bing 1988: 46 – 7 on Callimachean aesthetics. 14 So, too, Plato’s portrayal of the Homeric rhapsode Ion; cf. Yunis 2003: 190 – 2. 15 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes 22, cf. also 53. Cf. Thomas 2003 on the oral features of epideixis as preserved in written texts of epideictic speeches.

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is of the imagination) has in fact very close links to notions of grandeur. Moreover, it is precisely this emotional and imaginative “transport” that explains and excuses the lack of “precision” and “accuracy” (akribeia) in the grand and the sublime. One manifestation of this dichotomy that I have been sketching is the distinction, most familiar from an exposition in the third book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (3.12), between the “written style” (lexis graphike¯) and the “performative style” (lexis ago¯nistike¯). The “written style” is “most accurate” (akribestate¯), whereas the “performative,” marked by such techniques as lack of connectives (asyndeton) and repetition, is “most suited to delivery” (hypokritiko¯tate¯). Two aspects of this chapter of the Rhetoric are of particular interest in the present context. In one passage, Aristotle seems to link the presence or absence of “precision” (akribeia) to the type of speech being delivered: a public political speech to a large audience is the wrong place for precision because it is not subject to very close inspection, whereas the courtroom, and particularly a case heard by only one judge, is the proper place: “where most hangs on delivery, there is there least precision” [1414a15 – 16].16 Commentators have been puzzled by what seems to be a confusion between, or at least running together of, “precision” as a stylistic quality and precise reasoning or argumentation that will stand up to close examination.17 In fact, however, such ambiguity is, as we have seen, a feature of the discourse of akribeia at least from the Frogs on; the how and the what travel together. Second, “written” and “performative” describe stylistic tendencies within drama and oratory rather than actual differences in the intended mode of reception; it is not that works that display the “written style” were only intended for reading.18 Nevertheless, the possibility, indeed perhaps inevitability, of a parting of the ways between reading and performance is here at least foreshadowed.19 This strikes with particular force when Aristotle introduces a class of poets whom he calls “the poets for reading” (hoi anagno¯stikoi, Rhetoric 1413b12 – 17):

16 The speaker of Antiphon 3.2.1 – 2 (Second Tetralogy) apologizes to the jury for what might seem like excessive akribeia; cf. Dover 1968: 155. On this notion in general, cf. Kurz 1970. 17 Cf. Cope 1877: 3.151 – 2 on Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.12.5, quoted with approval by Kennedy 1991: 256. 18 Zwierlein 1966: 131. Demetrius, On Style 193 is particularly instructive here. 19 Zwierlein 1966: 133.

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But poets who write for reading are [also] much liked, for example, Chaeremon (for he is as precise [akribe¯s] as a professional speech-writer [logographos]) and, among the dithyrambic poets, Licymnius. On comparison, some written works seem thin when spoken, while some speeches of [successful] orators seem amateurish when examined in written form. The cause is that [their style] suits debate. (trans. Kennedy, adapted)

The logographos to whom the tragedian Chaeremon is compared must get the details right, but he has nothing whatsoever to do with how his writings are performed; that lies in the hands of others. The style that is “most appropriate to delivery” is also likely to lack “precision” because the performance context excludes careful inspection by the mass audience. This stylistic analysis of oratory has obvious roots in the realities of Athenian democracy, but it finds a close analogue (and perhaps descendant) in the later criticism of poetry, where the popular audience is replaced by the individual reader or hearer. Longinus notes that “strong and appropriate emotions and genuine sublimity are a specific palliative for multiple or daring metaphors, because their nature is to sweep and drive all these other things along with the surging tide (parasyrein) of their movement. Indeed, it might be truer to say that they demand the hazardous. They never allow the hearer leisure to count the metaphors, because he too shares the speaker’s enthusiasm” (On the Sublime 32.4, trans. Russell). To the idea of “hazard” I will return, but it should be noted that we are here plainly in the realm of oral delivery – we have not in fact progressed far from the transport of both rhapsode and audience in Plato’s Ion — and that the activity that is blocked off by “the transport of the sublime,” namely, “leisured examination,” is itself redolent of the Thucydidean ideal, the Aristophanic Euripides, Aristotle’s account of “precision” (akribeia) in oratory, and the practices of Hellenistic scholarship. The image of surging water (parasyrein) appears again in one of the most famous passages of On the Sublime (33.3 – 5): All human affairs are, in the nature of things, better known on their worse side; the memory of mistakes is ineffaceable, that of goodness is soon gone. I have myself cited not a few mistakes in Homer and other great writers, not because I take pleasure in their slips, but because I consider them not so much voluntary mistakes as oversights let fall at random through inattention and with the negligence of genius. I do, however, think that the greater good qualities, even if not consistently maintained, are always more likely to win the prize – if for no other reason, because of the greatness of spirit they reveal. Apollonius is an error-free poet in the Argonautica; Theocritus is very felicitous in the Idylls … but would you rather be Homer or

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Apollonius? Is the Eratosthenes of that flawless little poem Erigone a greater poet than Archilochus, with his abundant, surging flood (parasyrein), that bursting forth of the divine spirit which is so hard to bring under the rule of law. Take lyric poetry: would you rather be Bacchylides or Pindar? Take tragedy: would you rather be Ion of Chios or Sophocles? Ion and Bacchylides arc impeccable, uniformly beautiful writers in the polished manner; but it is Pindar and Sophocles who sometimes set the world on fire with their vehemence, for all that their flame often goes out without reason and they fall down dismally. Indeed, no one in his senses would reckon all Ion’s works put together as the equivalent of the one play Oedipus the King. (trans. Russell, adapted)

The influence of this “manifesto directed against what we may call the Callimachean ideal”20 on modern attitudes to Hellenistic poetry would itself make for an entire book, but let us stay for the moment with ancient attitudes. As has often been remarked, stylistic metaphors are remarkably persistent over time throughout antiquity. Thus, for example, loud thundering is the hallmark of Homer’s Zeus, Aristophanes’ Aeschylus (Frogs 814), Callimachus’ Zeus, and perhaps his inimitable Homer (fr. 1.20 Pfeiffer), and the unsurpassable “greatness” (megethos) of Longinus’ Demosthenes (On the Sublime 34.4).21 So, too, the same famous passages may remain central to critical discourses over centuries. Thus, the origin of the familiar image of the surging flood of language seems to be an Iliadic simile describing Ajax attacking the Trojans (Iliad 11.492 – 7): As when a river swollen in winter spate courses down to the plain from the mountains, sped by rain from Zeus, and sweeps into its current many dead trees, oaks and pines, and washes a mass of driftwood into the sea, so then glorious Ajax swept havoc over the plain, cutting down horses and men. (trans. Hammond)

It is this passage that lies behind Aristophanes’ description of Cratinus, like Archilochus another daring and unruly drunkard, at Knights 526 – 8,22 Callimachus’ “great Assyrian river, which sweeps along 20 Russell 1989: 308. 21 Asper 1997: 196 – 8. 22 Both Aristophanes himself and the ancient scholastic tradition fashion “the drunkard” Cratinus as a “grand” and daring poet who, unlike Aristophanes, paid insufficient attention to stylistic polish; cf. Cratinus PCG test. 2a (Cratinus like Aeschylus), 11, 17, 19. Cratinus PCG fr. 198 is also relevant. Note that in this same parabasis of Knights, Aristophanes represents himself as understanding what a tough job being a comic poet is and thus the need for a proper apprenticeship. This is not quite Cratinean “nature” versus Aristophanic “craftsman-

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much filth of earth and much rubble” (Hymn 2.108 – 9),23 and Horace’s contrast of himself and Pindar, which will bring us back to Theocritus (Odes 4.2.1 – 12,25 – 32): Anyone who strives to compete with Pindar, Iullus, trusts in pinions by Daedalean Expertise wax-joined and is doomed to name some Glassy-clear ocean. Like a mountain stream rushing down, which heavy Rain has swollen over its recognised banks, Pindar seethes and unconfined races on with Deep-thundering voice. Winner of the crown of Apolline laurel Whether he rolls down in adventurous dithyrambs his new-coined words and is borne along by Free-flowing rhythms, … Strong the air-stream lifting the Swan of Dirce Every time, Antonius, he soars aloft to Spacious cloudland. I, as a Matine bee in Manner and method, Harvesting sweet thyme with intensive labour Round the woodland glades and the river-banks of Watered Tibur, small-scale I fabricate my Painstaking lyrics. (trans. Lee)

Much in Horace’s contrast between Pindar and himself requires little explanation in the light of the critical contrasts I have been tracing, but I note three points that are of particular relevance. In the second stanza, Horace describes Pindar with a further adaptation of the simile from Iliad 11 in order, I would suggest, to make the point that Pindar’s power in part derived from his own aemulatio of Homer.24 Longinus notes that “imitation and emulation of great ship” (techne¯ and ponos), but it is not far from it. Perhaps, Cratinus himself acknowledges the constructed dichotomy in the famous PCG fr. 342. 23 The Homeric model is surprisingly often overlooked, but cf. Asper 1997: 116. Asper’s whole discussion of “Wassermetaphorik” (pp. 109 – 34) rewards close study. Note that the Homeric hapax !vuscet|m in the description of Ajax, which does not recur until Nicander and then Oppian, is glossed in the DScholia as suqvet|m, the word that Callimachus uses in the parallel passage. 24 Sources for Horace are sometimes sought in Pindar’s own verse, but no convincing passage has been adduced, though in principle the idea of a Pindaric model is perfectly sensible. The river “fed by rain” seems to go straight back

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writers and poets of the past” is one path to sublimity (On the Sublime 13.2). Further examples are Herodotus, Stesichorus, Archilochus, and Plato, who, like the rain-fed river that is Pindar, “diverted to himself countless rills from the Homeric spring” and reached the heights by daring to compete with Homer. “It is a noble contest and prize of honour, and one well worth winning, in which to be defeated by one’s elders is itself no disgrace” (On the Sublime 13 – 4, trans. Russell). This is the positive version of what in Horace is, quite literally (and, of course, ironically), a “fear of flying.” It is at least suggestive that Horace’s verb for how the rains cause rivers to swell, alere (“nourish”), is elsewhere used of intellectual nourishment of the relevant kind.25 Be that as it may, much hangs on the identity and nature of the models you follow; this will become important when we return to Theocritus. Second, if Pindar is an irresistible “life force,” Horace, with his intricate and laborious efforts, is a “poet” (carmina fingo), and one who works (or does not) to order, as this poem demonstrates. So, too, is the Theocritean Simichidas, ever conscious of the need to measure himself against other poets, and one who even has a favorite from his own repertoire; we may compare Plato’s rhapsode Ion, another competitive prize winner with a strongly developed sense of his status with regard to “professional rivals” (Ion 530c). This does not, of course, mean that “singers” like Pindar and Homer are not “poets,” merely that within the dichotomy we have been tracing, an emphasis upon one’s professional craft (techne¯) can go hand in hand with an alignment on the side of craftsmanship (techne¯ also), as opposed to natural endowment and power. Seen in this light, Longinus’ description of Apollonius as an “error-free poet” carries a loaded charge in both words. It is tempting to see here either a faded echo or a vigorous reconstruction of the gradual replacement in the fifth century of one kind of knowledge by a more professional and agonistic set of inquiries and experts.26 Finally, Horace sets the contrast of himself and Pindar within a poem that (in a narrow sense) is profoundly political; we should therefore ask about the link between politics and style. What is wrong with the emulation of Pindar is simply that it is too risky; one is almost certain to crash like Icarus, so it is better to keep your head low like the to Homer, and I wonder whether profundo / Pindarus ore mimics the alliteration of the Homeric passage. 25 Cf. Ars poetica 306 – 7, docebo …, quid alat formetque poetam, Velleius 1.17.5 aluntur aemulatione ingenia. 26 Lloyd 1987: Chapter 2.

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buzzing bee. Here, Horace gives life to the stylistic metaphor of falling,27 itself very common in Longinus, and illustrates that critic’s observation that “it may also be inevitable that low or mediocre abilities should maintain themselves generally at a correct and safe level, simply because they take no risks and do not aim at the heights, whereas greatness, just because it is greatness, incurs danger” (On the Sublime 33.2, trans. Russell). It is “risk taking” that unites great writers to the sociopolitical context in which they live. As the correspondent of Dionysius of Halicarnassus puts it: “It is not possible to achieve great success in anything without taking and facing the kind of risks that inevitably involve failure.”28 In fact, Longinus is one of our witnesses to a cultural narrative, which flourished in the first century C.E.,29 according to which political quiescence, that is, an absence of democracy, is responsible for the dearth of literary grandeur (On the Sublime 44.2 – 5). In such a narrative, freedom of expression and greatness of thought go hand in hand with political freedom. Risk taking (and its avoidance) is yet another phenomenon shared by subject and style. Unsurprisingly, then, a written “private” poetry (note how Horace represents his voice drowned out by the throngs cheering Augustus) is associated with a concentration of power. When power lies with the one or the few, you have to watch what you write, for it will indeed be open to “close inspection”; one mistake, one nodding off, may be one too many. From our perspective, of course, this is radically misleading in the case of, say, Pindar, who wrote for the commissions of powerful men, but it is easy enough to understand how distinctions within classical power structures are flattened out by a critical narrative that looks back over centuries and is fundamentally concerned with the present, not the past. As it happens, Longinus rejects this “common explanation” for the decline in literary grandeur in favor of a more moralizing, “philosophical” one. But if some of the stylistic differences I have been tracing, and their import, may be found on show in Idyll 7, then Simichidas’ self-presentation as a poet who may hope for (or even claims) royal patronage – this surely is the implication of verse 93, “[my songs] which report has perhaps car27 %ptytor, !di\ptytor, p_pteim, etc. 28 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Letter to Cn. Pompeius 2.15. For these ideas, and Horace’s “theoretical” reservations, cf. Brink 1971: 363 on Horace, Ars Poetica 352. 29 This remains true whatever date we assign to Longinus (on which, cf. Heath 1999). For a summary of these narratives, cf. G. Williams 1978: Chapter 1.

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ried even to the throne of Zeus” – suggests perhaps that this cultural narrative has relevance in the Hellenistic world also.30 Nor would this be surprising. To some extent, the first century C.E. modeled itself upon the Hellenistic experience, both in its (partly self-constructed) “anxiety of influence” and in its adoption, or forcible rejection, of “Callimachean” ideals.31

From Songs to Poems? The undoubted differences between the two songs of Lycidas and Simichidas are perhaps easier to sense than to describe;32 descriptions such as “high” versus “low” and “lyrical” versus “comic” are not inaccurate, but simply not very helpful, and the first task must be to try to be more precise about the qualities of these two poems. Lycidas’ song falls roughly into four verse paragraphs (52 – 60, 61 – 70, 71 – 82, 83 – 9) defined by repetition (52/61) and framing (61/69 – 70, 83/89).33 Connections between the sections and between individual sentences are unelaborated — normally a simple connective (de, kai) suffices — and such noncomplex structures are very familiar in both classical lyric and its Hellenistic imitations.34 The most marked features of the verbal style of this song, however, are a tendency to amplification and repetition (a “fault” for which “Euripides” criticizes “Aeschylus” in Frogs 1152 – 76), features that work strongly against ancient critical notions of “precision” (akribeia) and “clarity” (saphe¯neia).35 30 On the representation of poetic patronage in Hellenistic poetry, see Hunter 2003: 24 – 45. 31 Relevant here is Velleius’ analysis of decline in terms of cyclical epochs at 1.16 – 17; his parallel for what has happened to Rome is (unsurprisingly) postclassical Athens. 32 The bibliography is large. I have found particular profit in Krevans 1983; Segal 1981: 135 – 48; Kühn 1958; Ott 1969: 157 – 9; Lawall 1967: 87 – 101; Walsh 1985: 11 – 16. 33 Cf. Weingarth 1967: 127. 34 “Lykidas’s song unfolds in the discursive manner familiar to us from Pindaric odes (and, indeed, for choral lyric in general)” (Dover 1971: 155 on Idyll 7.52 – 89). 35 So, too, hyperbaton: 80 – 1 (sila· … l]kissai), 82 (ckuj» … m]jtaq), repetition: 52 – 3/61 – 2, 57/59 (contributing to grandeur and pathos), 84. Amplification is produced by lists: 57 – 8, 63 – 4, 68, 76 – 7, 88. On the rising tricolon of verse 68, a kind familiar in high poetry, see Hunter 1999: 278 on Idyll 13.45. It is tempting also to associate the repeated connective te with Demetrius, On

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Poeticisms are not rare,36 and the history of reception shows how “unclear” (asaphe¯s) is the extraordinary expression “you labored through the spring of the year” (85).37 Lycidas’ use of epithets in particular marks a “poetic” style: for example, “hot love burns” (56), “to the box sweetsmelling with soft flowers” with a mannered chiastic arrangement (81), and “wet waves” (53 – 4), which not only has good parallels in high poetry38 but might serve as an illustration of Aristotle’s dictum that “in poetry it is appropriate to speak of white milk, but in prose it is less appropriate” (Rhetoric 1406a12). As marks of “poetic” style, perhaps we ought to add internal rhymes (62, 80) and matched synonyms (55 – 6, 74).39 The opening image, in which cosmic signs in some sense imitate the human characters, as Orion “sets his feet upon the Ocean” while Ageanax heads for Mytilene (52 – 4), is a trope taken from the highest forms of poetry.40 At one level, the structure of Simichidas’ song is rather looser: the sense units are short,41 and the direction changes rapidly, though never so as to create obscurity. Gilbert Lawall helpfully refers to Simichidas’ “jocular, offhand manner as if he were extemporizing,”42 though we know that this poem is Simichidas’ prize composition (91 – 5). Simichidas’ level of diction is certainly “plain,” verging indeed on what ancient stylistic theory would call “humble” or “lowly” (tapeinon). Virtually his whole lexicon is derived from “ordinary words” (kuria onomata), the language appropriate to a style that aims at “precision” (akribeia) and “clarity” (saphe¯neia), as first and most properly exemplified in Euripides43 and one also appropriate to the low physicality of some of his subject matter. Simple epithets are sparsely used, largely in the more elevated prayer

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Style 54, where such repetition is said to be capable of lending grandeur even to insignificant things; Demetrius’ example is a list of Boeotian towns at Iliad 2.497. E.g., jaja?sim !tashak_aisim (79). 5tor ¦qiom 1nep|masar. See Hunter 1999: 168 on this passage. Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1405a1 on the usefulness of synonyms to poets. To some extent, the verses function as what Philip Hardie, in his study of “general correspondences between events in the natural cosmos and events in the human, historical world” in epic, calls a “cosmic overture” (Hardie 1986: 63). Note the programmatically concise opening (96). For short ko¯la as a mark of the plain style, cf. Demetrius, On Style 204. On the structure of Simichidas’ song, cf. Weingarth 1967: 151—2. Lawall 1967: 95. Aristotle, Poetics 1458a19; Rhetoric 1404b24 – 5; Demetrius, On Style 190, 203.

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mode of 103 – 4 and 115 – 16. Repetition and variation take place within the plainest of ranges (99, 102). We may even wish to associate the harsh, mimetic alliteration of 109 – 10 with Demetrius’ observation that such “harshness of sound” (kakopho¯nia) may be conducive to “envisionment” (enargeia), which is a particular feature of the plain style (On Style 219). Most striking of all, perhaps, is Simichidas’ careful use of connecting and antithetical particles, which suggests an elaboration quite at odds with the loose “extemporizing” structure. He begins with a neat men/ de opposition — every move in this poem is very much planned — but particularly remarkable is the (scarcely translatable) triple sequence of such connectives at 106 – 14: [I] And if (kei men) you do this, dear Pan, may the Arcadian lads not whip you with squills about the flanks and shoulders, whenever meat is scarce. But if (ei de) you decide otherwise, [2] both (men) may you be bitten and with your nails scratch your whole body and sleep in nettles, and (de) may you [3] both (men) be on the mountains of the Edonians in midwinter, turned towards the river Hebrus, near the north star, and (de) in summer may you herd among the furthest Ethiopians, beneath the rock of the Blemyes, from which the Nile can no longer be seen.44

In discussing the characteristics of elevated style, Demetrius notes: “Connective particles such as men and de should not answer each other too exactly (akribo¯s). Exactitude is petty” (On Style 53, trans. Innes). Later in the same treatise, Demetrius observes: ‘Asyndeton and lack of all connection leads to a complete lack of clarity (asaphe¯s) ... This disconnected style is perhaps more suited to the immediacy of debate, and is in fact called the dramatic style (hypokritike¯), because the lack of connectives stimulates dramatic delivery, whereas the written style is easier to read and because its parts are fitted together and, as it were, secured in place by connectives” (On Style 192 – 3, trans. Innes, adapted). Longinus too sees such careful patterning as inimical to sublimity (On the Sublime 22.1 – 2). Thus, Simichidas’ style tells a clear story: here is modern poetry for a modern, literate audience. The analysis of verbal style may be supplemented by other approaches. In an important discussion, Nita Krevans contrasted Lycidas’ 44 jeQ l³m taOt’ 5qdoir, § P±m v_ke, l^ti tu pa?der / )qjadijo· sj_kkaisim rp¹ pkeuq\r te ja· ¥lyr / tam_ja last_foiem, fte jq]a tuth± paqe_g . / eQ d’ %kkyr me}sair, jat± l³m wq|a p\mt’ am}wessi / dajm|lemor jm\saio ja· 1m jm_daisi jahe}doir· / eUgr d’ Idym_m l³m 1m ¥qesi we_lati l]ssyi / =bqom p±q potal¹m tetqall]mor 1cc}hem -qjty, / 1m d³ h]qei pul\toisi paq’ AQhi|pessi mole}oir / p]tqai vpo Bkel}ym, fhem oqj]ti Me?kor bqat|r.

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use of high, archaic poetry (Sappho, Stesichorus, etc.) with Simichidas’ recourse to classics of the lower iambic mode, such as Archilochus and Hipponax, and with the obvious links in Simichidas’ poem to fashionable third-century poetic forms, such as the curse poem and nearly contemporary poets such as Asclepiades.45 Through a study of these echoes and the use of geography in the poem to evoke literary tradition, Krevans concluded that “Theocritus establishes two interwoven patterns of opposition … the contrast between poetry which arises from divine or natural inspiration and poetry which evolves from earlier poetry … Second, there is the contrast between the archaic authors, with their halfmythical world, and the immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Theocritus.”46 It is certainly the iambic mode that is evoked by Simichidas’ liberal use of (to us at least) obscure proper names, the sense that the poem is full of in-jokes,47 the joking prayer to Pan, and the persistent detached irony that is so remote from the true pathos that is productive of elevation (Longinus, On the Sublime 8.4). This last quality could be extended to much Hellenistic poetry and is in good measure responsible for its lukewarm modern reception. In recreating the iambic mode, as in his adoption of the Hesiodic fiction, Simichidas is again entirely modern. Poems such as Callimachus’ Iambus 13 and Herodas 8 show that the modern imitation of archaic iambus was felt to be a particularly exemplary case of reconstructive poetic archaeology; whatever popular poetic traditions continued unbroken, imitation of archaic iambus, particularly choliambic poetry, was a notable example of artful and artificial “resurrection,” and quite literally in fact in the case of Callimachus’ Hipponax. The very lowness of such poetry – its claim to a “popular voice” — made it a paradoxically perfect vehicle for the exploitation of the new possibilities of written poetry and new types of audience. Thus, for example, whereas Lycidas speaks in a prophetic, incantatory, semimystical manner that hints at a magical control of the world (the halcyons, etc.) and recalls the original link between poet and seer, Simichidas includes the description of a distant, but allegedly contemporary, rustic magical rite, with which he himself has 45 Cf. Weingarth 1967: 164 – 5; Seller 1997: 133 – 6. Lycidas’ song may, of course, also contain echoes of (e. g.) Philitas and other near-contemporary poets. 46 Krevans 1983: 212. 47 We may see here one version of the technique for establishing a sense of community between poet and different audiences that Scodel 1996 has studied for Alcaeus, and Schmitz 1999 for the much-changed reception context of Callimachus.

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nothing to do and about which he has learned, so we are to understand, from a book. It must be stressed that there can be no suggestion that the stylistic contrast between the songs of Lycidas and Simichidas is a simple “grand-plain” contrast, or even “oral-written.” Both poems, like both characters, are of course Theocritean products that reflect Theocritean poetics.48 Moreover, the stylistic level of Lycidas’ song seems more “smooth” (glaphyron) or “decorated” than grand, and it would in any case be more than surprising if the Theocritean contrast formed a perfect fit with any of the dichotomies of rhetorical teaching, let alone with Longinus’ treatise. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a sense in which, within the parameters of Theocritean poetics, the difference between the songs is not merely an exemplification of two different elements within contemporary poetry, but also maps or constructs an evolution in poetic style that has intimate links to wider cultural practice. The next step will be to see whether anything similar is observable when we move from style to subject.

A catalogued world Simichidas’ interest in cult and geography that is (to us at least) obscure clearly belongs to his “modernity”; neither a connection of Pan with the Thessalian plain of Homole, nor the Arcadian squill rite, nor the “rock of the Blemyes,” nor the spring of Hyetis are otherwise attested. It is not, however, these erudite fireworks, important though they are, to which I wish to draw attention here. If the world of Simichidas’ injokes remains (perhaps deliberately) closed to us, he makes very sure that we understand his geographical and cultic allusions. The cause of the Arcadian rite is explained (108), the location of the “rock of the Ble48 Whether Theocritus thought primarily in terms of a written reception or reception through recitation/performance for Idyll 7 may be thought relevant to this discussion. Unfortunately, however, we must rely in this matter on general assessments of the Hellenistic context rather than indications specific to Theocritus. For what it is worth, my sense is that Theocritus’ poems are more open to both modes of transmission and reception than is the work of Callimachus and Apollonius, and it is tempting to associate this difference with the fact that there is no evidence that Theocritus worked as a “scholar.” We may compare the palpable difference between Theocritus and “the Alexandrians” in terms of philological engagement with the text of Homer within the poetry itself.

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myes” specified (114), and the relevance of Oikous spelled out (116). Here is “precision” (akribeia) and (perhaps paradoxically) “clarity” (saphe¯neia) of what is said, as well as of how it is said. In his scholastic version of the iambic mode, Simichidas offers no “mythic narrative” as such, just a world marked out by cult sites and practices. Lycidas, however, finds personal, exemplary comfort in the bucolic and aipolic heroes of his own world – Daphnis and Komatas – and what is important, as it had traditionally been in the poetic representation of myth, is how their stories, their pathe¯, act as paradigms for his own experience.49 Lycidas’ telling — or rather the telling which he puts in Tityrus’ mouth — of the stories of Daphnis and Komatas is highly allusive, that is, it seems to assume an audience, whether that be just Lycidas himself or some wider group, to which those stories are known and significant. I hope that the similarity of this last sentence to some familiar “definitions” of myth is apparent. Thus, Richard Buxton posits myth “as a narrative about the deeds of gods and heroes … handed on as a tradition … and of collective significance to a particular social group or groups.”50 How “traditional” the stories of Daphnis and Komatas were is, of course, unclear, and it is hardly worth asking how Lycidas “changes” the narratives to suit his own position. What is important is that the allusive narrative mode, seen most famously in the song of Daphnis in Idyll 1, suggests “tradition,51 as it also constructs for itself an interpretive community. Here, literary allusiveness, intertextuality if you like, and mythic allusiveness function in similar ways.52 The different gods who question Daphnis in Idyll 1 embody different levels of knowledge and curiosity, thus dramatizing the text’s construction of its audience, but this device also foregrounds the allusiveness that implies familiarity while conjuring up the generic world of myth and constructing a community to whom that myth is significant, who need constantly to (re-)interpret it. A search for “the facts,” the “precise” details of “what happened,” would be misguided. Finally, we may note that Lycidas wishes to listen to songs that preserve the fame of great heroes; for him, poetry is both a traditional form and a preserver of tradition. 49 Macleod 1983: 168 – 9. 50 Buxton 1994:15, cf. Hunter 1999: 67. For discussion of such definitions, cf. Bremmer 1986. 51 Cf. Hunter 1999: 63. For the importance of tradition in the definition of “the mythic,” see Burkert 1979: 17 – 8. 52 Bing 1988: 74 – 5 offers a different, but perhaps complementary, account of literary allusiveness.

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It would be tempting to set this contrast between Lycidas’ high allusiveness and Simichidas’ plain specificity within that broad movement that we have come to know, and seek to deconstruct, as the shift from myth to mythology. But let me return first to what Simichidas actually says. The pursuit of novelty, another “vice” that Longinus saw as endemic in his own day (On the Sublime 5.1), is obviously connected to the self-conscious craftsmanship (techne¯) of the professional, but it leaves, as I noted earlier, a world marked out by (often arcane) cult and ritual names rather than by narratives of personal or collective significance.53 Many modern readers of Callimachus’ Hymns might feel at home within Simichidas’ “written” religious world, in which the scholarly gloss is the standard discursive mode, but this “precision” of names, which there is no reason not to connect with the prevalence of systematic written history, has a place in the wider evolution of mythic narrative. The modern study of fiction has taught us that detailed names and places are the “effects of the real” that create the fictional illusion54 – an irony that Thucydides would presumably not have appreciated. Such akribeia goes hand in hand with the telling of stories as coherent, self-contained wholes in which temporal and spatial sequence are of primary importance, and here the link between saphe¯s as “true” and saphe¯s as “clear” comes into its own. If we leap forward from Thucydides to Theocritus, the narrative that most demands attention in this context is Simaitha’s first-person narration of her affair with Delphis in Idyll 2. This self-conscious tale is replete with “effects of the real” – the names of Simaitha’s circle, her clothes, places in the town.55 We are here clearly dealing with some kind of “realistic fiction,” and I would speculate that development toward this new kind of literature is intimately connected to the differing styles of mythic narrative in Hellenistic poetry.56 With hindsight, we 53 This is to be connected with the phenomenon whereby so much Hellenistic mythic narrative is presented as aetiological of ritual practice; Henrichs 1999 is fundamental here. 54 Cf. Barthes 1986; Yunis 2003: 191 n. 5. 55 Note the variation on the “where do I begin?” motif (Idyll 2.64 – 5), familiar from the Odyssey onward; particularly helpful on this narrative is Andrews 1996. 56 There is no evidence that what we call Idylls 1 and 2 were ever juxtaposed in ancient editions, and a lot of evidence is against this; cf. Gutzwiller 1996. Virgil seems to have brought them together in Eclogue 8 on the formal grounds of the shared refrain. Nevertheless, critics have made the obvious connections between Idyll 1 and Lycidas’ song and Idyll 2 (the song of Simaitha) and Simichi-

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can see that the vast sea of Greek myth was fertile ground for the development of fictionalizing instincts: Walter Burkert once noted that what is distinctive and “utterly confusing for non-specialists and often for specialists” about Greek myth is its extraordinarily profuse detail of names, genealogies, and interrelationships with, in other words (though Burkert certainly did not say this), “effects of the real” waiting to happen.57 If we are forced to name a crucial moment in this process, the classicist may think of Aristophanes’ Euripides, whose prologizing gods told “the whole story” (Frogs 946 – 7), that is, organized disparate strands (and disparate names) into a connected narrative; such “narrative exactness” (akribologia) shows the way to later mythography.58 Of course, “graphy” — writing — has a place at the heart of these developments.59 As for Lycidas’ stories of Daphnis and Komatas, it is tempting to suggest that the allusive mode of telling, related forms of which are familiar enough from the choral lyric of the archaic and classical periods, is a direct response to developments in “systematic mythography” and to what I have called the “fictionalizing” impulses that go with that systematization. Quite different poetic responses to these same developments in historiography and mythography are in fact on show in Callimachus’ Aitia and Lycophron’s Alexandra. In the Idylls, Theocritus recreates or invents an oral style of “traditional tale” beyond systematization (and certainly beyond Simichidas) and only preserved in the folk memories of shepherds and goatherds. This would, in fact, be the manifestation in the field of myth of the aetiology of bucolic poetry as a mode of popular song that is written into the surviving poems, particularly Idyll 1.60 The Theocritean corpus makes clear that various thematic and stylistic developments that are usually treated separately are in fact interlinked in ways that shed light on the gradual, often imperceptible, changes in Greek culture that came with the ever deepening assimilation of literacy. Idyll 7 emerges as a remarkable dramatization of such change.

57 58 59 60

das’ song. This is indeed a helpful heuristic device for thinking about narrative technique, but we must not assume an authorized juxtaposition within a poetry book. Burkert 1979: 30. Cf. Demetrius, On Style 209. Rösler 1980. Hunter 1999: 61 – 2.

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Retrospect I have so far ignored one text that seems at the heart of this whole subject, namely, Plato’s Phaedrus. The relation of this dialogue to bucolic literature has attracted previous critical attention,61 but there may yet be more to be said. Like Simichidas, Phaedrus has studied “books” (in his case the written speech of Lysias), but he seeks to conceal the fact, pretending instead to rely on an imperfect memory of a once-heard speech (227a-8e); the speech itself is one that Lysias had “written at leisure, over a long period of time” (228a). Thus, Phaedrus’ intensive study of Lysias’ speech should be viewed as a kind of second-level “labor” (ponos), imitative of the “labor” of the original author, which itself recalls the Thucydidean ideal and looks forward to Horace’s demand for unremitting toil in writing. Be that as it may, the fact that it is Lysias who is the object of imitation is suggestive for the reception of the Phaedrus in Idyll 7. When Phaedrus has delivered the Lysianic speech, he asks Socrates: “How does the speech seem to you, Socrates? Doesn’t it seem to you to be extraordinarily well done, especially in its language?” (234c, trans. Rowe). This seems to be the observation that Socrates picks up a few lines later: “Should you and I also praise the speech on the grounds that its creator has said what he should, and not just because he has said things clearly (saphe¯) and in a well-rounded fashion and each and all of his words arc precisely (akribo¯s) turned?” (234c). For later ages, Lysias was indeed the model of pure, ordinary diction (saphe¯neia), “precise language” (akribeia), “envisionment” (enargeia), and an artful artlessness that avoided all suspicion of poetic tropes and made his speeches appear uncontrived and “natural.”62 The Phaedrus has clearly played its part in this characterization, but the scholastic reception of Lysias may also throw light on one reception of the Phaedrus. Having summarized Lysias’ stylistic virtues, Dionysius of Halicarnassus then characterizes him negatively (Lysias 13): 61 Hunter 1997, 1999: 14 (with bibliography), 145 – 6. 62 Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Lysias passim, especially 8,13. The negative side to this is Alcidamas’ observation that logographoi aim to write speeches that appear improvised and “shun akribeia,” thus showing (in Alcidamas’ view) the superiority of real improvisation (fr. 1.13 Avezzù). This, too, is suggestive for Simichidas. Lysias’ “plainness” is an important element in Socrates’ feigned response of astonishment (ekple¯xis) to Phaedrus’ performance (234d); this is just how one should not react to Lysias.

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There is nothing sublime or imposing about the style of Lysias. It certainly does not excite us or move us to wonder, nor does it portray pungency, intensity or fear; nor again does it have the power to grip the attention, and to keep it in rapt suspense; nor is it full of energy and feeling, or able to match its moral persuasiveness with an equal power to portray emotion. … It is a conservative style rather than an adventurous one. (trans. Usher, adapted)

Horace, too, opted for safety before risk.63 Let me stress again that this is not a matter of Simichidas being merely a “poetic Lysias” – too much of his song lies in the realm of the “vulgar” (to phortikon) for that – but the stylistic analogue between the two (which reinforces the similarity of Phaedrus and Simichidas, both naive enthusiasts who encounter an ironic wisdom beyond their understanding) is indeed suggestive within the overall relation between the Phaedrus and Idyll 7. We do not need the ancient critics to help us ascertain that Socrates’ formal speeches in the Phaedrus, particularly the second one, are characterized by poeticism and sublimity, but it is a help that they do.64 At one level, Socrates is the completely “natural,” untrained orator, though his opening invocation to the Muses (237a) reveals by its playful etymologizing that “inspiration” has little to do with what he will proceed to say; the effect is perhaps not unlike the “mixed signals” that introduce Lycidas’ song. Be that as it may, I intend no disrespect to Plato when I say that he has anticipated Theocritus in dramatizing a cultural difference, in which writing plays a central part, and which both manifests itself in and is represented by perceived stylistic difference. There is, of course, another narrative one could tell.

Bibliography Andrews, N.E. 1996. ‘Narrative and allusion in Theocritus, Idyll 2’ in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Wakker, Theocritus (Groningen) 21 – 53 Asper, M. 1997. Onomata allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos, Stuttgart Barthes, R. 1986. ‘The reality effect’ in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language (New York) 141 – 8 Berger, H. 1984. ‘The origins of bucolic representation: disenchantment and revision in Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll’ Classical Antiquity 3: 1 – 39 63 Longinus also implies that Lysias belongs with the “flawless” writers – those who do not take risks (On the Sublime 32.8, 35.2). 64 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes 7.

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Bing, P. 1988. The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets, Göttingen Bremmer, J. 1986. ‘What is a Greek myth?’ in J. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (Totowa) 1 – 9 Brink, C. O. 1971. Horace on Poetry: the Ars Poetica, Cambridge Burkert, W. 1979. ‘Mythisches Denken. Versuch einer definitio an Hand des griechischen Befundes’ in H. Poser (ed.), Philosophie und Mythos (Berlin) 16 – 39 Buxton, R. 1994. Imaginary Greece, Cambridge Cope, E. M. 1877. The Rhetoric of Aristotle with a Commentary, 3 vols. Edited by J. E. Sandys, Cambridge Cozzoli, A.-T. 1996. ‘Aspetti intertestuali nelle polemiche letterarie degli antichi: da Pindar a Persio’ Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 54: 7 – 36 Dover, K. J. 1968. Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum, Berkeley —1971. Theocritus. Select Poems, London Hardie, P. 1986. Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, Oxford Henrichs. A. 1999. ‘Demythologizing the past, mythicizing the present: myth, history, and the supernatural at the dawn of the Hellenistic period’ in R. Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason? (Oxford) 223 – 48 Hunter, R. 1999. Theocritus. A Selection, Cambridge —2003. Theocritus. Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Berkeley Hutchinson, G. 1988. Hellenistic Poetry, Oxford Kennedy, G. A. 1991. Aristotle: A Theory of Civic Discourse, New York Köhnken, A. and Kirstein, R. 1995. ‘Theokrit 1950 – 1994 (1996)’ Lustrum 37: 203 – 307 Krevans, N. 1983. ‘Geography and the literary tradition in Theocritus 7’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 113: 201 – 20 Kühn, J.-H. 1958. ‘Die Thalysien Theokrits (id. 7)’ Hermes 86: 40 – 79 Kurz, D. 1970. AJQIBEIA. Das Ideal der Exaktheit bei den Griechen bis Aristoteles, Göppingen Lawall, G. 1967. Theocritus’ Coan Pastorals, Washington DC Lloyd, G. E. R. 1987. The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Greek Science, Berkeley Macleod, C. 1983. Collected Essays, Oxford McKeown, J. C. 1989. Ovid: Amores, Vol. 2, A Commentary on Book One, Leeds Ong, W. 1982. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London O’Sullivan, N. 1992. Alcidamas, Aristophanes, and the Beginnings of Greek Stylistic Theory, Stuttgart Ott, U. 1969. Die Kunst des Gegensatzes in Theokrits Hirtengedichten, Hildesheim Russell, D. A. 1989. ‘Greek criticism of the Empire’ in G. A. Kennedy (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. I: Classical Criticism (Cambridge) 297 – 329 Schmitz, T. A. 1999. ‘“I hate all common things”: the reader’s role in Callimachus’ Aetia prologue’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99: 151 – 78 Scodel, R. 1996. ‘Self-correction, spontaneity, and orality in archaic poetry’ in I. Worthington (ed.), Voice into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece (Leiden) 59 – 79

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Segal, C. 1981. Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral, Princeton Seiler, M. A. 1997. POIGSIS POIGSEYS, Stuttgart Thomas, R. 2003. ‘Prose performance texts: epideixis and written publication in the late fifth and early fourth centuries’ in H. Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge) 162 – 88 Walsh, G. B. 1985. ‘Seeing and feeling: representation in two poems of Theocritus’ Classical Philology 80: 1 – 19 Wehrli, F. 1946. ‘Der erhabene und der schlichte Stil in der poetisch-rhetorischen Theorie der Antike’ in Phyllobolia fr Peter von der Mhll (Basel) 9 – 34 Weingarth, G. 1967. Zu Theokrits 7. Idyll, Dissertation Freiburg Williams, G. 1978. Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire, Berkeley Yunis, H. ‘Writing for reading: Thucydides, Plato, and the emergence of the critical reader’ in H. Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge) 189 – 212 Zwierlein, O. 1966. Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas, Meisenheim am Glan.

Addenda On ‘Longinus’ and the differences between sublime, ‘risky’ poetry and that which is safe and flawless cf. also below pp. 549 – 55 and Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming). On Horace, Odes 4.2 cf. also ‘Sappho and Latin poetry’ in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), I papiri di Saffo e di Alceo (Florence 2007) 213 – 25, pp. 217 – 19.

25. Notes on the Lithika of Poseidippos* The first group of epigrams is one of many surprises on the Milan papyrus, though perhaps it should not have been so. Lithika is indeed a genre not previously well attested at so early a date,1 although the considerable interest in precious stones in, say, the Periegesis of Dionysius, to whom a Lithika or Lithiaka is also ascribed, should have led us to expect a rich background in Hellenistic literature; it may indeed be that Poseidippos was an innovator in this type of ecphrastic epigram.2 As for the title, Kihij² is not of course preserved on the papyrus, but lithika is indeed what these poems are; I shall continue to use the title, but shall return presently to the generic sense of the collection. As we cannot be sure how the roll originally began and ended, we must be very cautious about the structure of the whole, but – unless the preserved stichometric marks were added after the roll was damaged – we certainly have the complete lithika section (though, of course, some individual poems *

1 2

B. Acosta-Hughes et al. (eds.), Labored in Papyrus Leaves (Washington DC 2004) 94 – 104 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at colloquia on Poseidippos at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington (April 2002) and in Florence ( June 2002) and at seminars in Cambridge and Oxford. I am grateful to all these audiences and to the editors of the volume for helpful criticism. A (rather earlier) Italian version of this essay has appeared in the papers of the Florence colloquium (Il Papiro di Posidippo un anno dopo [Florence 2002] 109 – 19). I have tried as far as possible to maintain the exploratory tone of the oral presentation and have not at every step cited and/or argued with the outpouring of scholarship on these poems which has appeared or become known to me since I drafted this essay. I would, however, in particular draw attention to Bernsdorff (2002), Lapini (2002), and Petrain (2003) as three important contributions, all written quite independently of each other and of my essay; unsurprisingly, the observations and conclusions of all four of us overlap in important respects. Cf. Gutzwiller 1995. The lithika certainly do not weaken, and may be thought to add some colour to, the case for Poseidippan authorship of SH 978, an ekphrasis of a bathing-house, if chronology allows this; cf. now Lehnus 2002: 12 – 13. The marvellously engraved gem at Heliodorus Aithiopika 5.14 should also be taken into consideration.

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are more complete than others), and the likelihood that the whole epigram collection began with this section seems overwhelming: Peter Bing3 has called attention to how these poems would give a ‘brilliant’ and programmatic opening to the collection through the obvious analogy between the small-scale and detailed craftsmanship of gem-working and the art of the epigrammatist. I turn first to the general shape of the lithika section. The tattered remains of the opening poem offer (probably) Fgm[, perhaps – as the editors suggest – the start of the name of a lady who received the gem as a gift, but whether or not this is correct, the possibility that we here ‘commence from Zeus’ (cf. Aratus Phainomena 1, Theocritus 17.1 etc.), as we still would if the lady’s name began with the god’s, may be at least given a certain colour by ‘Kronios’ in what looks like the second poem, presumably a reference to the jeweller named also in I 32 (= AB 7.3) and perhaps I 25 (= AB 6.2); that this name also suggests Zeus’ paternity, memorialised in the standard appellation Jqom¸ym or Jqºmior (pa?r), is of course a speculation, but I think an attractive one. If there is anything in this, we cannot of course say whether there was a corresponding close to the collection as a whole,4 but we do at least have the close of the lithika, IV 1 – 6 (= AB 20), a prayer to Poseidon which might remind us of the prayers which close hymns (e. g. the end of Callimachus Hymn to Demeter) 5 and poetry books; Gregory Hutchinson6 has noted that the final iamatikon (XV 19 – 22 = AB 101) ‘might be considered an adaptation of the hymnic close on !qet¶ and ekbor’. Be that as it may, the Aetia of Callimachus closes (fr. 112.8) with a prayer to Zeus to save the ‘house of the rulers’ (i. e. Ptolemy III and Berenice II), as the last lithikon seeks to keep ‘the land of Ptolemy’ and the islands free from earthquakes and other natural disturbance.7 Whether we should connect this with the tradition, discussed by Alessandro Barchiesi in connection with Cal3 4 5 6 7

Bing 2002; cf. also Hutchinson 2002: 2 – 3. C. Austin prefers to make all of AB 19 and 20 one poem, but I follow the indications of the papyrus and the arguments of Bastianini and Gallazzi. See Hopkinson’s note on vv. 134 – 7, Richardson on Homeric Hymn to Demeter 490 – 5. Hutchinson 2002: 1. For ‘the islands’ as a designation in the poetry of Poseidippos cf. HE 3102 and perhaps SH 705.15. For the closing prayer cf. also Callimachus Hymn 5.142 Dama_m jk÷qom ûpamta s²y.

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limachus and Virgil,8 that Delos, Apollo’s island, was !j¸mgtom (‘not subject to earthquakes’) 9 is not clear, but both Callimachus and Theocritus make much of Apollo’s relationship to Delos as parallel to that of Ptolemy II to Cos, and a gesture here towards Ptolemy’s divinity would reinforce the weight of the reminder of divine pleading in the second couplet. The actual form of the prayer to Poseidon is a particularly interesting version of traditional modes: the god is first reminded of his power to destroy (Helike), but then of his past willingness to listen to intercession (the da quia dedisti form);10 the central couplet lends the weight of Demeter’s physical supplication (more possible for her than for a mortal) 11 to the current prayer, for the goddess too has been in this position of dependence (the assonance in 1j¼mgse and !jim¶tgm reinforces the parallelism). Her kissing of Poseidon’s hand, an unusual gesture in poetic descriptions of supplication, perhaps recalls the only such Homeric gesture, Iliad 24.478 – 9 where Priam kisses ‘the terrible man-slaying hands of Achilles, which had slain many of his sons’ (cf. also 24.506); the rôle of Poseidon’s ‘hand’ in the ‘natural’ destruction he causes has already been made clear in the previous, closely related epigram (III 38 [= AB 19.11]).12 Unfortunately, we have no idea of the reference of this couplet, but the poetic technique is noteworthy: although the sparing of any ‘Eleusis’ might reasonably be assigned to an intercession by Demeter,13 the god’s previous granting of a prayer is here, as for example in Sappho fr. 1, itself a poetic fantasy of the poet (for who else would know of the relations between Demeter and Poseidon ?), and 8 Barchiesi 1994. 9 Cf. Herodotus 6.98, Pindar fr. 33c.4, Schol. Callimachus. Hymn 4.11. Areas of Ptolemaic power and influence in the Aegean and Asia Minor were, of course, prone to earthquakes, cf. RE Suppl. 4.351 – 8. 10 Cf., e. g., Pulleyn 1997: 17, 65 – 6. 11 On mortal ‘supplication’ of the divine see, however, Pulleyn 1997: 56 – 7. 12 It is probably at least worth noting that the Theocritean Cyclops who appears in the previous poem (cf. below) fantasises about kissing Galateia’s hand (11.55). Alex Sens suggests to me that the motif of Poseidon’s hand varies the emphasis of earlier lithika on the skill of the sculptor’s hands. 13 Lehnus 2002: 13 argues that this is the Eleusis near Alexandria; for Demeter’s important cult status in Alexandria cf. Fraser 1972: I 198 – 201. The matter seems to me, however, to remain at least open. If the Attic Eleusis were meant, the closing lithikon would gracefully plot a shift of power (and divine protection) from the mainland Greece of the classical period to the new Ptolemaic realm of Egypt and the Aegean islands.

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this creates that intimate link between mortal and god which is so crucial for the granting of prayers.14 As for Poseidon, a god with whom anyone named ‘Poseidippos’ might have felt a special relationship, there is (as far as I know) not much evidence for his cult in Alexandria,15 but his famous connection with Euboean Geraistos (IV 5 [= AB 20.5]) appears also in the Argonautica of Apollonius (3.1244) and in Callimachus’ account of the birth-myth of Apollo (h. 4.199), and Ptolemaic interest in Euboea (and dedications at Geraistos?) in the middle of the century would certainly not surprise.16 Although the prayer to Poseidon is tied into the lithika through various links with the preceding poem, it clearly also stands apart as a poem which is not about a single stone or rock, and this too strengthens its force as a closural prayer. Nevertheless, it closes something of a ring around the lithika, in which both the opening and closing pairs are linked together:17 we begin, as I have suggested, with Zeus and close with Poseidon, and – in a complementary structure – we begin with Alexander (the Hydaspes, famous in the mid third century only as the site of Alexander’s victory over Poros) 18 and close with Ptolemy, Zeus’ representative and manifestation here on earth and Alexander’s true successor, as (e. g.) Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy makes clear. The internal arrangement of the lithika has been briefly sketched out by the editors (p. 25): first, incised gems (I 2 – III 7 [= AB 1 – 15]), perhaps themselves divided into gems given as gifts (I 2 – 35 [= AB 1 – 7]) and those not (I 36 – III 7 [= AB 8 – 15]); then, poems about ‘remarkable’ stones or rocks (III 8 – 41 [= AB 16 – 19]), and then the prayer to Poseidon of IV 1 – 6 (= AB 20). A new text such as this naturally tests our interpretative resolve (and our methodology) in finding patterns and meaning in juxtaposition, and the Milan Poseidippos is no exception; 14 Marco Fantuzzi points out that Demeter is a very suitable ‘representative’ for the initiate Poseidippos. 15 Cf. Visser 1938: 30. 16 Cf., e. g., Walbank 1984: 246 – 8; the presence of Euboea in Callimachus’ catalogue of islands led by Delos, the centre of the pro-Ptolemaic Island League, at H. 4.20 is noteworthy in this regard. For different approaches to the ‘Ptolemaic’ dimension of the lithika cf. Bing 2002 and Petrain 2003. There is another prayer to Poseidon on the new papyrus at AB 93.3. 17 Cf. further below. 18 It is not obvious to me that Virgil Georgics 4.211 Medus Hydaspes is ‘an evident use’ of Poseidippos, pace Hutchinson 2002: 3.

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Kathryn Gutzwiller has already opened certain lines of enquiry.19 The lithika offer juxtaposed poems on mother-of-pearl (II 17 – 22, II 23 – 8 [= AB 11 – 12]) and, very probably, juxtaposed poems about a precious necklace (I 24 – 9, I 30 – 5 (= AB 6 – 7). More interestingly, perhaps, we can now see how II 39- III 7 (= AB 15 = Poseidippos XX G-P) begins with a rejection of the ‘river topos’ of, say, I 1 – 2 (= AB 1) and I 30 – 1 (= AB 7.1 – 2),20 as I 36 (= AB 8.1), out’ aqwµm 1vºqgse t¹ s²qdiom oute cumaij_mj d²jtukor, ‘rejects’ the subject-matter of the immediately preceding pair of poems.21 The general impression is that the collection becomes more miscellaneous, and the stones get bigger, as we proceed, but nothing, I think, in either Theophrastus, On Stones or in Books 36 and 37 of Pliny’s Natural History would have prepared us for the poem on the Euboean rock (III 28 – 41 = AB 19) or for the final poem (AB 20). The first of this final pair is linked to what precedes by the opening notion of ‘calculation’, for the central conceit of AB 19 seems to be exact measurement (cf. Callimachus, Iambus 6 on the exact dimensions of the statue of Zeus at Olympia);22 in the current state of the text, a number or measure appears in every verse of this poem except the third, and who is to say that one should not be found there also. As for the final pair of poems themselves, they are both prayers to Poseidon in connection with his brutal natural power (with 2m· j¼lati in IV 1 (= AB 20.1) perhaps picking up III 31 [= AB 19.4]) and both identify famous Euboean landmarks which were also very close together, the Capharean rocks and the temple of Poseidon at Geraistos; both prayers feature Poseidon’s ‘hand’ (III 38, IV 4 [= AB 19.11, 20.4]).23 The penultimate lithikon is apparently imagined as delivered at the site of the rock (perhaps indeed actually inscribed upon the rock),24 and I do not see any reason why the final poem could not be imagined as delivered at Geraistos itself.

19 20 21 22 23

Gutzwiller 2002a; cf. also Hutchinson 2002: 1. Cf. Bastianini-Gallazzi on II 9 (= AB 10.3). Cf. Gutzwiller 2002a: 4. On AB 18 cf. Luppe 2002. With III 38 (= AB 19.11) cf. Iliad 15.694 – 5 t¹m d³ (sc. >jtoqa) §qsem (§sem Aristarchus, cf. AB 19.5) epishemj weiq· l²ka lec²kgi. It may be worth noting that the first oionoskopikon, which follows immediately after the final lithikon, is about dangers to shipping, for which this coast of Euboea was notorious, and the second and third also have waves in them. 24 Cf. Lapini 2002 and Livrea 2003.

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The surprise of the final two poems is not lessened by the fact that one of them is indeed about a lithos, though of a rather different kind than all which have preceded. In interpreting this variety we are hampered by our ignorance of the generic expectations which titles such as kihij², oQymosjopij², and tq|poi would raise in readers of an early collection such as this: how familiar, and how settled in meaning, were such titles? What kind of unity of subject do such titles lead us to expect? Ought we to see the final two poems, or at least the penultimate poem, as a kind of ‘generic joke’, which relies upon a familiar, but unexamined, sense of distinction between types of epigram, or rather as a sign that category boundaries were still far from rigid? The rest of the collection may suggest that the latter explanation is more likely, but a few brief observations about the rest of the collection will, I hope, indicate that the matter may not be straightforward. The oionoskopika collect both poems about ominous ‘birds’ (oQymo¸) and about omens (oQymo¸) drawn from other spheres, but it is birds which predominate and which open the section (the first four poems) and which therefore establish a ‘generic sense’, from which the other poems can be seen to deviate; the final two poems, as with the lithika, are on related subjects and also differ from what has gone before, being about oQymosjopo¸ rather than about omens; as the lithika closed with Ptolemy, the oionoskopika close with Alexander’s defeat of the Persians, which was, of course, for the Ptolemies a very ideologically charged piece of history. As for the dedicatory anathematika, one might have thought that this type of epigram was so common that it would have been easy enough to fill a section with ‘straightforward’ poems, but again this proves not so: the first three poems (to Arsinoe) are indeed dedicatory poems of a very common kind, thereby suggesting that we are indeed in familiar territory, but the fourth, though linked to them through the figure of Arsinoe, is in fact quite different, being on the subject of the temple and cult of Arsinoe as Aphrodite Euploia; the final two, apparently on a carved wolf and a tortoise shell, both appear to have been indeed dedicatory, but are again quite different from what has preceded. As a whole, the section again forces us to wonder what kind of unity is imposed by the collective title. Like the anathematika, the epitumbia, if that is the correct title, collect epigrams of a very familiar, indeed perhaps the original ‘epigrammatic’, type; they are mixed in mode and voice, and a few are barely epitumbia at all (cf. VIII 25 – 30 [= AB 52] on Timon’s sundial). The final two poems are again linked: they are the only two which concern men,

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and both use the theme of a happy death after a fulfilled life which requires no weeping. More striking perhaps is the fact that, although a passer-by is addressed at VIII 27 (= AB 52.3) earlier in the section, only in the final poem do we have the classic ‘stop, passer-by and look at the tomb of …’; this is particularly notable as what is left of the tq|poi section suggests that these poems were standardly epitaphic and address to a passer-by was a regular feature. Perhaps, then, the arrangement of the epitumbia suggests an attempt to impose, rather than disrupt, a generic identity at the conclusion; at the very least, it would seem again that category-boundaries were very fluid or that the arranger of our new collection placed a high premium on generic surprise and uncertainty. About the remaining sections there is less to say. The !mdqiamtopoiij² and the Rppij² have been admirably discussed elsewhere;25 both sections end with ‘Ptolemaic’ subjects (Alexander, XI 16 – 19 [= AB 70], and Ptolemaic chariot-victories, XIII 35-XIV 1 [= AB 88]), but it is noteworthy that the final two Rppij² are again closely linked in subject and theme. In view of the patterns I have been tracing, it is perhaps important that the final mauacijºm clearly signals its affiliation in the opening word, maugcºm le jtk., and that this is the only occurrence of the word in the section; we have already noted how the final iamatikon functions closurally,26 and it is distinguished from the other poems in that section in being a request to Asclepius for ‘moderate wealth and health’. In sum, there is clearly enough variety in the arrangement of the sections to enjoin caution; nevertheless, there are also suggestive indications of play with ideas of ‘unity’ and ‘sameness’, and generic wit of this kind fits easily with the early date of the papyrus: some categories are more obvious and more settled than others, but others are being fashioned for the first time, perhaps never to return. The primary position of the lithika, with its remarkable closing poems, alerts us to this aspect of readerly pleasure. Let me now turn to the penultimate poem itself, the longest lithikon for the largest rock, and one of the three fourteen-verse poems on the papyrus.27 The god’s power, in the face of which all we can do is pray, is marked by the difference between the opening of the poem, where we 25 Cf. Gutzwiller 2002b, and the essays of M. Fantuzzi in Acosta-Hughes-Kosmetatou-Baumbach 2004 and in Gutzwiller 2005. 26 Cf. above p. 458. 27 Cf. AB 74, AB 78, BG p.130.

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are all but certainly advised not to engage in the proverbially fruitless activity of counting waves,28 and its close, where we are told that, with typical divine ease, Poseidon can ‘harvest the sea’, another proverbial waste of time (at least for mortals).29 jatal¶seir, ‘you will reap’, a verb of complex semantics,30 suggests that the wave knocks over, and thus covers, everything in its path (cf., e. g., Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 70 – 8, Plato Timaeus 25d); it is to be seen in counterpoint to Eqao ‘you lifted up’. The huge rock, which stands as testimony to the god’s powerful effort (marked by the heavy spondaic opening of III 32 [= AB 19.5]), and which twice fills the first half of a hexameter with a single measurement (III 32, III 40 [= AB 19.5, 13]), is larger than the most famous rock of the Odyssey, the Cyclops’ door-stone.31 In III 33 [= AB 19.6] sjaiot´qgm (s.v.l.) 32 picks up Nestor’s description of the dangerous Cretan coast:33 !kk’ fte dµ ja· je?mor Q½m 1p· oUmopa pºmtom 1m mgus· ckavuq0si Lakei²ym eqor aQp» Xne h´ym, tºte dµ stuceqµm bd¹m eqq¼opa Fe»r 1vq²sato, kic´ym d’ !m´lym 1p’ !{tl´ma weOe j¼lat² te tqovºemta pek¾qia, Wsa eqessim. 5mha diatl¶nar t±r l³m Jq¶tgi 1p´kassem, Hwi J¼dymer 5maiom ûIaqd²mou !lv· N´ehqa. 5sti d´ tir kissµ aQpe?² te eQr ûka p´tqg 1swati/i Cºqtumor 1m Aeqoeid´i pºmtyi7 5mha mºtor l´ca jOla pot· sjai¹m N¸om ¡he?, 1r Vaistºm, lijq¹r d³ k¸hor l´ca jOl’ !po´qcei.

(Odyssey 3. 285 – 96)

But when he in turn had launched his ships again on the wine-dark sea and came in his rapid course to the sheer headland of Maleia, then thundering 28 Cf. Gow on Theocritus 16.60. 29 Cf. Theognis 105 – 7 (with van Groningen’s note) and certain ancient explanations of !tq¼cetor, cf. LfgrE s.v. 30 Cf. Jebb and Griffith on Sophocles Antigone 601, Petrain (2003). I have considered the possibility that !lgs²lemor at Odyssey 9.247 has been influential here (cf. below). 31 I remain sceptical that the corrupt opening of AB 19.9 really contained the name of Antaios, another monstrous son of Poseidon, though I have nothing better than the editors’ reconstruction to suggest; at the Washington conference Dirk Obbink attractively suggested oqd’ AQtma?or b cuq¹r jtk. 32 Lapini 2002 proposes sjaiºteqom huqeºm. Petrain 2003 suggests that the unusual word is chosen to allow Polyphemos’ uncultured ‘gaucheness’ to resonate. 33 Cf. Bernsdorff 2002: 12.

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Zeus devised a distressing voyage for him, loosing upon him the violent breath of whistling winds and rearing huge heavy waves that were mountains high. Then, dividing his company, he brought some ships to that part of Crete where the Cydonians lived by the waters of Iardanus. There is a smooth cliff in the misty deep at the verge of the territory of Gortyn; it stands sheer above the sea where the south-west wind drives a great surge towards the western headland, and the narrow rock-face checks the great surge on its way to Phaestus.

Here a ‘small rock’ offers protection from a ‘great wave’, and v. 295, 5mha Mºtor l´ca jOla pot· sjai¹m N¸om ¡he?, has been broken up by Poseidippos and distributed over his poem;34 sjaiºr occurs only here in the Odyssey, and the scholia note that opinion was divided as to whether it meant ‘western’ or ‘deim¹m ja· %cqiom’, as it plainly does in Poseidippos. The echo links two coastlines which brought terrible danger to ships (cf. Odyssey 3.298 – 9). Poseidippos appears to have used, perhaps indeed conflated, two distinct elements of Homer’s portrayal of the Cyclops. First, of course, there is the massive (Ak¸bator 9.243, l]car 9.313, 340) ‘door-stone’ to which the Euboean rock is directly compared. The Cyclops can ‘lift it up high’ (rxºs’ !e¸qar 9.240, 340, cf. III 40 [= AB 19.13] Eqao), though ‘twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not have raised it from the ground’ (9.241 – 2), a description which echoes in tetqajaieijos¸pgwum at III 40 (= AB 19.13); Odysseus tells us that he and his men would not have been able !p¾sashai k¸hom ebqilom (9.305, cf. III 32 [= AB 19.5]]pkehqa¸gm ¥sar … p´tqgm), whereas we have seen the Cyclops do this ‘easily’ (9.313). The second part of Odyssey 9 which is relevant here is vv.480 ff in which the blind and enraged monster attacks the departing Greeks: he ‘breaks off’ ( !poqq¶nar 9.481, cf. ? III 30 [= AB 19.3] !p[ …) a mountain peak and hurls it ( j±d’ d’ 5bake 9.482) into the sea (contrast cf. III 31 [= AB 19.4] 1n´bakem); as the rock sinks it causes a great wave (pkgluq¸r 9.486, a standard later term for ‘natural’ floods and ‘tidal waves’ such as Poseidon is here asked not to cause) which drives the Greek boat towards the land. In the epigram, one great wave drove the huge boulder onto the shore, rather than into the sea. After Odysseus has taunted him and he has learned the truth as to what has happened, Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon (who hears the prayer), and then he ‘lifted up a far larger rock’ (pok» le¸foma 34 For another discussion of a Homeric reworking in the lithika cf. Bing 2002: 4 – 6.

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k÷am !e¸qar 9.537, cf. III 40 [= AB 19.13]) and the pattern is repeated, except that this time the wave carries the Greeks to safety. It is clear, then, that there is a complex and sophisticated intertextual relationship between the epigram and Odyssey 9. Where Homer shows us the terrible power of Poseidon’s son, in Poseidippos it is the divine father, now made to resemble his Homeric son, whose ‘great hand’ is to be feared.35 Nothing, however, is as surprising in this poem as the apparent echo36 of Theocritus’ lovesick Cyclops, and specifically of Theocritus 6.6 – 7, b²kkei toi, Pok¼vale, t¹ po¸lmiom " Cak²teiaj l²koisim, dus´qyta ja· [Meineke: t¹m codd.] aQpºkom %mdqa jakeOsa, ‘Galateia pelts your flock with apples, Polyphemus, calling you ill-starred in love and a goatherd’; we must ask how the Theocritean Cyclops and the Theocritean text are superimposed upon the Homeric pattern, for we clearly have here a very interesting example of so-called ‘window allusion’ in which a model text is traced back in turn to its own model.37 Both Idylls 6 and 11 locate the young Cyclops on or near the seashore, and Idyll 11 places him ‘on a high rock’ looking out to sea (11.17 – 18, cf. Ovid Metamorphoses 13.778 – 780), a detail which perhaps turned Poseidippos’ mind to the Cyclops. Be that as it may, though Homer’s monster might have been able to lift the Euboean rock, Theocritus’ unhappy young Cyclops, ‘growing thinner [and hence weaker] day by day’ (11.69), could not have done so: the Theocritean rewriting of Homer allows Poseidippos both to use the great door-stone of the Odyssey and to surpass it, not merely in size, but by identifying a version of the Cyclops who would have found the task beyond him. Unlike Theocritus’ Cyclops, however, who could not swim and seemed to regard the sea as a nasty, inhospitable place, Poseidippos’ Polyphemos ‘often went diving with Galateia’. This is at least odd. The editors note that d¼seqyr most naturally suggests that Poseidippos does not want us to think that Polyphemos and Galateia are a ‘happy couple’, 35 Cf. Virgil Aeneid 3.624, magna manu of the Cyclops; note too how the Virgilian Cyclops is given terrible earth-shaking powers which resemble those of his father (Aeneid 3.673 – 674). For the great hands of marine divinities cf. Ap. Rhod. 1.1313 stibaq/i … weiq_ (Glaukos) and D. Petrain (priv. comm.) adds manu magna at Aeneid 5.241 of another sea god, Portunus, propelling a ship through the water. 36 The onus of proof seems to me clearly upon those who would deny allusion to Theocritus here. 37 Cf., e. g., McKeown 1987: 37 – 45.

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as they are in a rare, but probably Hellenistic, version of the story;38 rather, according to the editors, this Polyphemus appears to have had the courage to go swimming, and Polyphemus is indeed depicted in the water near Galateia in Roman art.39 s»m Cakate¸ai does not, of course, necessitate that Galateia welcomes his presence, but the editors’ translation ‘dietro a Galatea’ reveals the awkwardness they feel. It may be, as Richard Thomas has suggested, that we should understand jokulb¶sar conditionally, ‘the lovesick Cyclops could not have lifted it from the sea-floor, even if he dived frequently with Galatea’, or perhaps the swimming should be seen as taking place solely in the Cyclops’ erotic fantasy (cf. Theocr. 11.54 – 62), but it is clear that aQpokij¹r d¼seqyr identifies this Cyclops as ‘Theocritean’; the words are, as it were, in inverted commas to mark citation. By viewing Homer through Theocritus’ rewriting, Poseidippos can demonstrate that, though he may ransack the text of Odyssey 9 for ways in which to describe this massive boulder, the events and characters of that book offer no real parallel to the marvel he is describing; what Theocritus has done to the Homeric monster has disarmed his threat. Whatever terrors the Homeric Cyclops held, he has now been ‘humanised’, reduced (by poetry) to a ‘lovesick goatherd’. All that remains is the power of Poseidon: the gap which is thus opened between the text and its model is precisely where meaning lies. Finally, let me return to the generic question. It may, or may not, be relevant that Homer too marks the distinction between past and present by the ability of the figures of the past to hurl massive rocks which would be way beyond the powers of men ‘of the present day’ (Iliad 5.302 – 4, 12.380 – 3, 445 – 9, 20.285 – 7), but like all Hellenistic poets, Poseidippos knew that all things flow from the Homeric source: just as Homer certainly wrote about bird omens, ship wrecks, and victories in chariot races, so – Poseidippos assures us – he also wrote lithika: you just have to know where to look.

38 Cf. Hunter 1999: 242, 244. A number of scholars have observed that the combination of a lovesick Cyclops and the hurling of great rocks might make one think of Ovid’s story of Acis and Galatea. 39 Cf BG on III 34 – 35 (= AB 19.7 – 8).

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References AB = C. Austin and G. Bastianini, Posidippi Pellaei quae supersunt omnia, Milan 2003 Acosta-Hughes, B., Kosmetatou, E. and Baumbach, M. (eds.), 2004. Labored in Papyrus Leaves, Washington DC Barchiesi, A. 1994. “Immovable Delos: Aeneid 3.73 – 98 and the Hymns of Callimachus.” CQ 44: 438 – 43 Bernsdorff, H. 2002. “Anmerkungen zum neuen Poseidipp (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309).” Gçttinger Forum fr Altertumswissenschaft 5: 11 – 44 (online at http: www.gfa.d-r.de/bernsdorff.pdf) BG = G. Bastianini and C. Gallazzi, con la collaborazione di C. Austin, Posidippo di Pella: Epigrammi (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309), Milan 2001 Bing, P. 2002. “Posidippus on stones : the first section of the new Posidippus papyrus (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309, Col I – IV 6).” Online at http : www.apaclassics.org/Publications/Posidippus/posidippus.html 2004. “Posidippus’ Iamatika” in B. Acosta-Hughes, E. Kosmetatou and M. Baumbach (eds.), Labored in Papyrus Leaves (Washington DC) 276 – 91 Fraser, P. M. 1971. Ptolemaic Alexandria, Oxford Gutzwiller, K.J. 1995. “Cleopatra’s ring.” GRBS 36: 383 – 98. —2002a. “A new Hellenistic Poetry Book.” Online at http: www.apaclassics.org/Publications/Posidippus/posidippus.html —2002b. “Posidippus on statuary.” in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), Il Papiro di Posidippo un anno dopo (Florence) 41 – 60 —ed. 2005. The New Posidippus, Oxford Hunter, R. 1999. Theocritus. A Selection. Cambridge. Hutchinson, G. O. 2002. “The new Posidippus and Latin poetry.” ZPE 138: 1 – 10. Lapini, W. 2002. “Osservazioni sul nuovo Posidippo (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309).” Lexis 20: 35 – 60 Lehnus, L. 2002. “Posidippean and Callimachean queries.” ZPE 138: 11 – 13. Livrea, E. 2002. “Critica testuale ed esegesi del nuovo Posidippo” in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), Il Papiro di Posidippo un anno dopo (Florence) 61 – 77 Luppe, W. 2002. “Ein gastlicher Stein: Poseidipp, Epigramm Kol. III 20 – 27 (P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309)” MH 59: 142 – 4 McKeown, J. C. 1987. Ovid: Amores, Vol. I. Liverpool. Petrain, D. 2003. “Homer, Theocritus, and the Milan Posidippus (P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309, Col. III.28 – 41).” Classical Journal 98: 359 – 88 Pulleyn, S. 1997. Prayer in Greek Religion. Oxford. Visser, E. 1938. Gçtter und Kulte im ptolemischen Alexandrien, Amsterdam Walbank, F. W. 1984. “Macedonia and Greece” in The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed., VII.1 (Cambridge) 221 – 56

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Addenda The bibliography on the ‘Milan Posidippus’ is now, of course, enormous; V. Garulli, ‘Rassegna di studi sul nuovo Posidippo (1993 – 2003)’ Lexis 22 (2004) 291 – 340 offers helpful guidance, including information about relevant websites (p. 336). Among important collections of papers may be mentioned K. Gutzwiller (ed.), The New Posidippus (Oxford 2005), M. Di Marco et al. (eds.), Posidippo e gli altri (Pisa/Rome 2005), and W. Lapini, Capitoli su Posidippo (Alessandria 2007). On AB 19 see, e. g., E. Livrea, ‘Un epigramma di Posidippo e il Cyclops di Filosseno di Citera’ ZPE 146 (2004) 41 – 6.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry* 1. Looking for the Catalogue Hesiod’s importance for the poetry of the third-century BC is a familiar fact of literary history.1 Most famously, of course, Callimachus presents the Aitia as a Theogony for the modern day through the opening reworking of Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses on Mt Helicon (frr. 3 – 4 Massimilla = frr. 1.41 – 5, 2 Pf.),2 thus himself laying claim to the title which his contemporary Hermesianax of Colophon bestowed upon Hesiod, p²sgr Eqamor Rstoq¸gr ‘keeper of all knowledge/research’ (Hermesianax fr. 7.22 Powell).3 Hesiod’s most long-lasting influence on the western poetic tradition, however, is mediated through the Phainomena of Aratus; in its own right, and through its multiple Latin translations, this poem on the constellations and weather-signs became one of the best known and most widely read of all classical texts in later antiquity and

* 1

2

3

R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge 2005) 239 – 65. Many verbal echoes of Hesiod in Hellenistic and imperial Greek literature may be traced through Rzach 1902, Schwartz 1960: 582 – 608, and West 1969 and 1986. Of particular importance for individual poets are Campbell 1981 (Apollonius), Fakas 2001 (Aratus), and Reinsch-Werner 1976 (Callimachus); I am much indebted to these works. For the importance of the shrine of the Muses at Helicon in the third-century cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 52, with earlier bibliography. The present chapter does not consider the Hellenistic Nachleben of the Hesiodic Aspis, though I hope to return to the matter elsewhere; whatever this poem’s relation to the Catalogue (cf. Martin 2005), some of its structural features (e. g. the profusion of similes at vv. 374 ff, cf. the end of Argonautica 3) foreshadow Hellenistic experimentation in interesting ways. For Hesiod and the Aitia cf. Cameron (1995) passim, Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 51 – 60, where I argue for an intellectual affiliation of the Aitia to (especially) the Theogony, of a kind not considered by Cameron 1995 in his wish to downplay the links between the two poets (cf. esp. pp. 371 – 2). No one, of course, would wish to deny ‘that Callimachus’s dreaming alter ego enjoyed a new and altogether unhesiodic relationship with the Muses’ (Cameron 1995: 370), but that is another matter. Cf. below pp. 495 – 6.

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the Middle Ages.4 In the Phainomena, Hesiod (and, above all, the Works and Days) is a model as ubiquitously visible as god’s heavenly signs, in structure, language, form and meaning,5 and this relationship was celebrated by Callimachus in a famous, and very variously interpreted,6 epigram: Jsiºdou tº t’ %eisla ja· b tqºpor7 oq t¹m !oid¹m 5swatom, !kk’ ajm´y lµ t¹ lekiwqºtatom t_m 1p´ym b Soke»r !p´lanato7 wa¸qete kepta· N¶seir, ûAq¶tou s¼mtomor !cqupm¸g.

Call. Ep. 27 Pf.

Hesiod’s is the song and the style; not the poet in every detail, but I would say that the man from Soloi has skimmed off the sweetest of his verses. Hail subtle phrases, the concentrated wakefulness of Aratus!

Unsurprisingly, it is certain Hesiodic ‘purple passages’ which seem to be most important for third-century poets, and – given the status of our texts – those which we can most readily detect will, inevitably, be from the Theogony and the Works and Days. Thus, the ‘poetic investiture’ of the Theogony lies behind, not only the introductory frame of Callimachus’ Aitia, but also the extraordinary poetic journey of Theocritus’ Seventh Idyll (Thalysia). So too, the famous passage on the relations between the Muses, ‘kings’ (1j d³ Di¹r basik/er), and poets (Theog. 68 – 103) became a central text for poetic explorations of the nature of Ptolemaic kingship (Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus; Theocritus, Encomium of Ptolemy),7 as also did the description of the ‘Just City’ from the WD, which supplies, for example, the paradigmatic model for the blessings of Ptolemaic Egypt in Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (and cf. also Callimachus, Hymn to Artemis 124 – 35).8 The Hesiodic maiden Dike (WD 256 – 62) found unexpected new life as the ‘patron saint’ of curse-poetry9 to whom the aggrieved could turn:

4 5 6 7 8 9

On the ancient reception of Aratus see E. Maass, Aratea (Berlin 1892), J. Martin, Histoire du texte des Phnomnes d’Aratos (Paris 1956), Kidd 1997: 36 – 48; useful summary by M. Fantuzzi in Der neue Pauly s.v. Aratos. Cf. Fakas 2001, Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 224 – 45. Helpful survey in Cameron 1995: 374 – 9. Cf. Fuhrer-Hunter 2002: 164 – 75 [= this volume 424 – 33], Hunter 2003b. Cf. Hunter 2003b: 156, Erler 1987. Cf. below p. 497 – 8.

472

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

le¸dgsem d³ D¸jg paqh´mor !h²mator Fte !mapeptal´moir !tem³r bk´p[ei avhaklo?sim], 1m d³ Di¹r Jqom¸dey st¶hesim 2dqi²ei.

(SH 970.1 – 3) 10

And Justice smiled, the immortal maiden who glares straight, eyes wideopen, and sits in the breast of Zeus, son of Kronos.

Aratus incorporated the maiden into his own version of the Hesiodic ‘Myth of Ages’ (Phainomena 96 – 136): kºcor ce l³m 1mtq´wei %kkor !mhq¾poir, ¢r d/hem 1piwhom¸g p²qor Gem, Eqweto d’ !mhq¾pym jatemamt¸g, oqd´ pot’ !mdq_m oqd´ pot’ !qwa¸ym Am¶mato vOka cumaij_m, !kk’ !mal·n 1j²hgto ja· !ham²tg peq 1oOsa. ja¸ 2 D¸jgm jak´esjom.

(Aratus, Phainomena 100 – 105)

There is, however, another story current among men, that formerly she was indeed on earth, and came face to face with men, and did not ever spurn the tribes of men and women of old, but sat in their midst although she was immortal. And they called her Justice.

The scholium on v. 104 cites v. 6 of the opening of the Hesiodic Catalogue as the origin of Aratus’ notion that the immortal Dike used to ‘sit among mortals’, numa· c±q tºte da?ter 5sam, numo· d³ hºyjoi !ham²toir te heo?si jatahmgto?r t’ !mhq¾poir.

(Hesiod fr. 1.6 – 7) 11

For then were the feasts in common, common too the seats for the immortal gods and mortal men

and it does indeed seem very likely that the frame of the Catalogue of Women, which traces the history of the world from the free-mingling of gods and mortals to their ultimate separation in the catastrophic closure of the Golden Age, has contributed to the Aratean vision. It is cer-

10 For the text cf. Huys 1991. For Dike in curse-poetry cf. also Euphorion, SH 415 col. ii. 11 For other Hellenistic echoes of these verses cf. below p. 479 – 80.

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tainly tempting to see the ‘Hesiodic tag’ vOka cumaij_m in Phainomena 103 as a ‘source’ allusion to the Hesiodic poem (cf. fr. 1.1).12 If echoes of the Theogony and the Works and Days dominate the Hellenistic use of Hesiod, we need not put this down solely to the fact that we know far more about them than we do about the Catalogue. As far as we can tell, the Catalogue was, throughout Hellenistic and later antiquity, one of the ‘Hesiodic big three’, but it was always very much third of three. There will have been more than one reason for this – its original status as a continuation of the Theogony not least among them – but we will consider below other reasons why Hellenistic poets, however often they drew genealogical or mythological details from the Catalogue, may have found it a less congenial text for ‘reworking’ than the other two Hesiodic poems. The division of Theogony from Catalogue was perhaps a product of third-century scholarship,13 but overt reflections of this in scholarly poetry are hard to find. An epigram variously ascribed to Asclepiades and ‘Archias’ describes Hesiod’s poetic output as laj²qym c´mor 5qca te … ja· c´mor !qwa¸ym … Blih´ym, ‘the genealogies of the gods, the Works, and the genealogies of the demigods of old’ (AP 9.64.7 – 8 = HE 1024 – 5), and this would appear to refer to the three poems, but all indications point to a date for the epigram well after the third century; as laj²qym c´mor cites Theogony 33 (as well as glossing Heocom_a) so c´mor !qwa¸ym … Blih´ym ‘genealogies of the demigods of old’ might perhaps allude to c´mor judq_m basik¶ym ‘the race of glorious kings’ in a passage of the proem to the Catalogue which effectively gives the subject of that poem as both the women of the heroic age and their sons (fr. 1.14 – 16).14 More tantalising for the third-century is the speculation that Callimachus might have referred to the Catalogue as well as the Theogony (‘Chaos’) and the Works and Days (v. 5 = WD 265) in describing Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses at the head of the Aitia: poil´mi l/ka m´lomti paq’ Uwmiom an´or Vppou gGsiºdyi Lous´ym 2sl¹r ft’ Amt¸asem

12 Cf., e. g., Fakas 2001: 153 – 4. 13 Cf. West 1966: 48 – 50. The argumentum to the Aspis preserves the information that Apollonius defended its Hesiodic authorship, inter alia, by an appeal both to its kharaktÞr and to ‘the Catalogue’ (fr. 230), and it is likely enough (if not quite certain) that this reflects Apollonius’ own wording. 14 We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that some such phrase also occurred earlier in the proem.

474

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

l]´m oR W²eor cemes[ ] 1p· pt´qmgr vda[ te¼wym ¢r 2t´qyi tir 2_i jaj¹m Fpati te¼wei ]_ f¾eim %niom a[ ]em p²mter se7 t¹ ca[ ] de pq¶sseim eqla[

Callimachus, fr. 4 Massimilla (= 2 Pf.) When the swarming Muses met the shepherd Hesiod as he herded his flocks by the print of the swift horse … origins of Chaos … at the water (?) of the hoof .. that one who fashions evil for another fashions it for his own liver … worthy of living (?) … everyone you … doing

Unfortunately, nothing in this broken scrap allows us to go beyond speculation,15 and if Callimachus did not in fact allude to the Catalogue, we would not be justified in concluding that he did not know it as a separate poem. So too, Francis Cairns suggested that the forward reference (in typical hymnic style) to another work (almost certainly the Iambi) in the last verse of the ‘epilogue’ of the Aitia, aqt±q 1c½ Lous´ym pef¹m 5peili molºm, ‘but I shall advance to the prosaic pasture of the Muses’ (fr. 112.9 Pf.), alluded to the fact that the Theogony, the work against which Callimachus framed the Aitia, had a continuation in the Catalogue. 16 The two cases are very different, but it would at least be in Callimachus’ manner to allude to both editorial and rhapsodic practice at this crucial moment. The investigation of allusion to the Catalogue in later, particularly hexameter, poetry must of course constantly take account both of the fragmentary and/or scholiastic nature of much of our evidence for the Catalogue and of the traditional, often ‘formular’ nature of its language. To take the nature of the evidence first. Many fragments of the Catalogue are citations in mythographers or scholiasts for a particular genealogy or version of a story which is also found in Hellenistic poetry: when are the Hesiodic and Hellenistic citations to be linked? Thus, for example, we know from the scholia on Pindar’s Third Pythian that Hesiod (somewhere) told how a raven informed Apollo that Koronis, who was bearing his child, was marrying Ischys, son of Eilatos (fr. 60). 15 Cf. Massimilla’s note on v. 6. 16 Cairns 1979: 222 – 3; cf. also Koenen 1993: 91 – 2. Cairns’ suggestion is rejected by Cameron 1995: 156 on inadequate grounds. Whether or not the ‘epilogue’ is correctly placed at the end of Book 4 of the Aitia (cf. Cameron 1995: 141 – 62) does not affect this discussion.

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475

This is the earliest attestation for the rôle of the raven (cf. also Pherecydes, FGrHist 3 F3 = fr. 3 Fowler) which Pindar, whose principal source seems to have been the Catalogue itself,17 omits; the scholiast reports the story (Rstoqe?tai c²q …) that, for its pains in bringing bad news, the god changed the bird from white to black, but the cited verses of Hesiod make no reference to this metamorphosis. Both the bad news and the colour-change occur, however, in a famous passage of Callimachus’ Hecale in which a crow appears to warn another bird against bearing bad news (probably the news of Hecale’s death) by forecasting the fate of the raven (fr. 74.14 – 20). Should we connect Hesiod and Callimachus here? 18 In Callimachus the strongest argument may, as often, be linguistic. The similarity of shape between Callimachus fr. 74.19 Hollis, bppºte jem Vkec¼ao Joqym¸dor !lv· hucatqºr, and Hesiod fr. 60.4 EQkat¸dgr, Vkec¼ao diocm¶toio h¼catqa, a similarity which calls attention to Callimachus’ ‘smoother’ metrics (an entirely dactylic verse, avoiding the Hesiodic fourth-foot spondee), suggests that we ought indeed to connect the two passages: the aged Callimachean bird is thus seen to be familiar with the poetry of the past. Unfortunately, we know no more about Hesiod’s telling of the story, and its place in his poetry has been much debated; West doubts whether fr. 60 actually comes from the Catalogue.19 It is indeed likely that it was in the Argonautica where the richest Hellenistic echoes of the Catalogue were to be found.20 A clear case would seem to be the story of Kyrene and her son Aristaios which Apollonius tells in the second book of the Argonautica, in connection with the etesian winds which delay the crew’s progress. The scholia to Pindar’s famous telling of the story of Kyrene in Pythian 9 claim that Hesiod’s ehoie of Kyrene was Pindar’s source and they quote the opening of the Hesiodic version:

17 Cf. Wilamowitz 1886: 58 – 62, D’Alessio 2005b: 234 – 5. 18 Reinsch-Werner 1976: 365 – 6 is quite certain that Callimachus wants us to think of Hesiod, though her arguments do not seem to me very strong. 19 West 1985: 69 – 72. Apollonius’ brief allusion to the story (Arg. 4.616 – 17) may go back to the Catalogue (cf. Schwartz 1960: 591). The ‘Koronis ehoie’ is a central topic of Dräger 1997. 20 For fragments of the Catalogue and the Megalai Ehoiai on Argonautic subjects cf. D’Alessio 2005a: 195 – 9.

476

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

A’ oVg Vh¸gi Waq¸tym %po j²kkor 5wousa PgmeioO paq’ vdyq jakµ ma¸esje Juq¶mg

Hesiod fr. 215

Or such as beautiful Kyrene, her beauty that of the Graces, who dwelt in Phthia beside the waters of the Peneios.

One other fragment and a report in Servius (frr. 216 – 17) suggest that Hesiod’s telling at least included also Aristaios’ rôle as shepherd (cf. Pindar, Pyth. 9.64 – 5, Ap.Rhod. Arg. 2.507, 513).21 Apollonius’ introduction of Aristaios seems to borrow directly from Pindar (and from Hesiod lying behind Pindar?): 5mha d’ ûAqista?om Vo¸byi t´jem, dm jak´ousim )cq´a ja· Mºliom pokuk¶ioi ARlomi/er

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 2.506 – 7

There Kyrene bore to Phoebus Aristaios, whom the Haimonians rich in grain call Agreus and Nomios. h¶somta¸ t´ mim !h²matom, F/ma ja· "cm¹m ûApºkkym’, !mdq²si w²qla v¸koir %cwistom ap²oma l¶kym, )cq´a ja· Mºliom, to?r d’ ûAqista?om jake?m.

Pindar, Pyth.9.63 – 5

[The Hours and Earth] will make him immortal, as Zeus and holy Apollo, a source of delight for dear mortals, closest companion of the flocks, to be called Agreus and Nomios, but by others Aristaios.

The introduction of Kyrene, however, seems to look directly to Hesiod: Juq¶mg p´vata¸ tir 6kor paq± Pgmeio?o l/ka m´leim pqot´qoisi paq’ !mdq²sim7

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 2.500 – 1

The story is told that Kyrene herded her flocks among men of a previous age beside the marsh of the Peneios 21 For the Kyrene-ehoie cf. West 1985: 85 – 9, citing earlier bibliography, D’Alessio 2005a: 206 – 7; it is at least of interest that the extensive Apollonian scholia on this episode do not mention Hesiod. For a helpful account of the correspondences and differences in the various versions cf. Vian’s Note complmentaire to Ap.Rhod. Arg. 2.510.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

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The apparent reworking of Hesiod fr. 215.2 in v.500, together with the double ‘source-note’ (‘the story is told’, ‘among men of earlier days’),22 would seem to clinch the matter. In the Argonautica, the tale of Aristaios is part of an elaborate strategy of narrative delay (note the narrative of Paraibios at 2.467 – 89) to match the delay which the Argonauts experience on their travels. The Hesiodic Catalogue does not have (or at least not in the same sense) a central narrative like the Argonautica, and it may be that Apollonius here not merely alludes to one particular Hesiodic ehoie, but, as part of his (post-Aristotelian) experimentation with epic narrative form, evokes the whole world of ‘catalogue poetry’ as a form of potentially limitless ‘delays’ and ‘expansions’ which moves to a different rhythm than that of teleological epic. There is another, somewhat related, case during the same stop with Phineus. The sons of Boreas chase the Harpies away from Phineus so that they will allow the old man to eat in peace. We know that in the Catalogue (frr. 150 – 7) the story of how the Boreads pursued the Harpies as they carried Phineus around the world was told at some length,23 although its context is unknown and there is no evidence that it was there connected with the Argonautic story;24 between Hesiod and Apollonius intervene so many (lost) texts that there is perhaps little profit in seeking to establish detailed correspondences.25 Nevertheless, Apollonius’ narrative organisation is here of some interest. In the Hellenistic epic the pursuit lacks geographical specificity: the Harpies fly off ‘far away across the sea’ (2.271 – 2), pursued by the Boreads who would have caught them ‘far away at the Floating Islands’ (2.285) but for the intervention of Iris. The Harpies then enter a cave on Crete and the Boreads return to Phineus and the crew to tell them ‘what a distance’ (2.431) they had pursued the creatures. In Hesiod, however, the pursuit is a lengthy and exotic catalogue of places and 22 Cf. Drexler 1931: 457. At Arg. 4.1381 – 2 another ‘source-note’, ‘this is the Muses’ tale, I sing as the follower of the Pierian maidens’, introduces the tale of the Argonauts carrying their ship across the Libyan desert; this seems to be attested for Hesiod (fr. 241), but is for others as well (e. g. Antimachus fr. 76 Matthews = 65 Wyss). 23 Cf. West 1985: 84 – 5, D’Alessio 2005a: 195. 24 For the details cf. pp. 142 ff of the first volume of Vian’s Budé Apollonius and Cuypers 1997: 202 – 9. 25 Thus, for example, a scholium to Arg. 2.296 explicitly cites Antimachus (fr. 71 Matthews = 60 Wyss) as the source for Apollonius’ explanation of the ‘Turning Islands’, whereas Hesiod’s version was slightly different (fr. 156).

478

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

peoples, some of them outlandish (frr. 150 – 3). This (from a Hellenistic point of view) somewhat chaotic periodos is replaced in the Argonautica by the ordered and apparently drily sequential paraplous in which Phineus explains to the crew the route along the southern Black sea coast; that this paraplous separates the Boreads’ departure from their return marks its structural equivalence to Hesiod’s wild chase, while the fact that it is spoken by Phineus, who in Hesiod was being carried helplessly around the world, demarcates its difference.26 Apollonius thus here marks out a poetic space quite different from archaic epic through the parade of geographic and ethnographic material appropriate to, and in form appropriate to, a new ‘scientific’ world.27 To turn now more directly to the question of language. Where the Catalogue is the only earlier attestation of a phrase or collocation, we must be wary of leaping to conclusions, particularly in view of the loss of so much archaic epic; where the language of the Catalogue itself has archaic parallels we must proceed even more cautiously, without (on the other hand) yielding to interpretative inertia.28 In the first book of the Argonautica, for example, the Argonauts enjoy themselves with the women of Lemnos and the whole city celebrates: 5mh’ b l³m g£xip¼kgr basik¶iom 1r dºlom §qto AQsom¸dgr7 oR d’ %kkoi, fpgi ja· 5juqsam 6jastor Jqajk/or %meuhem7 b c±q paq± mg· k´keipto aqt¹r 2j½m paOqo¸ te diajqimh]mter 2ta?qoi. aqt¸ja d’ %stu woqo?si ja· eQkap¸mgisi cec¶hei japm_i jmis¶emti peq¸pkeom7 5nowa d’ %kkym !ham²tym GGqgr uXa jkut¹m Ad³ ja· aqtµm J¼pqim !oid/isim hu´ess¸ te leik¸ssomto.

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.853 – 60

The son of Aison set off for the palace of Hypsipyle, and all the others went where chance led them, with the exception of Heracles. From his own choice he remained by the ship, together with a few comrades who stayed away from the merry-making. Soon the city was full of joyful dancing and 26 Cf. Hunter 1993: 94 – 5. 27 For a helpful introduction to geography in the Argonautica cf. Meyer 2001, citing earlier literature. 28 Many of the allusions to the Catalogue in Callimachus’ poetry which are alleged by Reinsch-Werner 1976 seem to me to lead to no interpretative gain and therefore to be at best doubtful. Magnelli 2002: 38 plausibly identifies an origin for Euphorion, SH 415 col. 1.8 in Hesiod fr. 17a.12.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

479

the rich smoke of feasting; in their hymns and sacrifices they paid honour above all other immortals to the glorious son of Hera and to Kypris herself.

In a passage which apparently appeared at least twice in the Catalogue (fr. 25.30 – 3, fr. 229.10 – 13), Hesiod tells of how Hera’s hatred for Heracles has turned to affection for the now divine hero who has married her own daughter Hebe: t¹m pq·m l´m N’ Ewhgqe he± keuj¾kemor GGqg 5j te he_m laj²qym 5j te hmgt_m !mhq¾pym, mOm d’ Edg pev¸kgje, t¸ei d´ lim 5nowom %kkym !ham²tym let² c’ aqt¹m 1qishem´a Jqom¸yma.

Hesiod fr. 25.30 – 3

Previously the goddess white-armed Hera hated [Heracles] of all the blessed gods and mortal men; but now she loves him, and honours him above all other immortals, except the mighty son of Kronos himself.

5nowom %kkymj !ham²tym ‘above all other immortals’ is language which can be readily paralleled eslewhere in epic, but both Hera and Heracles are involved in the passages of the Catalogue and the Argonautica; in Apollonius, however, the Lemnians are celebrating Hephaestus, not Heracles, and the full force of the labours and of Hera’s opposition still awaits Heracles. The Hesiodic echo, if such it is, would remind us, as we are reminded elsewhere (cf. 1.1319, 4.1477 – 82), of Heracles’ glorious future. It is, of course, often the opening passages of works to which reference is made; we have already noted a possible allusion in an epigram to Hesiod fr.1.16 and seen Aratus perhaps alluding to the opening verse of the Catalogue, as well as taking over the proemial explanation of how gods and men used to live and dine together (fr. 1.6 – 7, above p. 472). Fr.1.6 (cited above) seems indeed particularly resonant in the poetry of the third-century. James Clauss observed that this anaphoric use of numºr is found three times in Hellenistic poetry (Theocritus 7.35 – 6, Ap.Rhod. Arg. 1.336 – 7, 3.173) but nowhere else in the poetic corpus.29 The Theocritean example is particularly interesting. Simichidas, the naively over-confident narrator, urges the mysterious goatherd Lykidas to join him in singing:

29 Clauss 1990. Oppian, Cyn. 4.42 – 4 shows a related, but not identical, usage.

480

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

!kk’ %ce d¶, num± c±q bd¹r num± d³ ja· !¾r, boujokiasd¾lesha7 t²w’ ¦teqor %kkom amase?.

Theocritus 7.35 – 6

“But come – common is our journey and common the bright day – let us join in bucolic song; perhaps each of us will derive some benefit.”

Simichidas is, like the Hesiod of the Theogony, to be presented with a staff by the (? divine) Lykidas, and an allusion to fr. 1.6 – 7 of the Catalogue would here serve a double purpose. On one hand, it would further the characterisation of Simichidas as the modern ‘professional poet’, ever ready with an allusion to earlier poetry to establish his credentials as a ‘pure mouth of the Muses’ (v. 37).30 On the other, the original Hesiodic context helps to confirm our growing suspicion that Lykidas is not all he seems to be (at least to Simichidas): this really is to be a ‘common’ meeting of men and gods. The two examples in the Argonautica seem, however, less pointed. Clauss suggests that Hesiodic allusion in Jason’s speech to his crew before setting out (1.336 – 7) reminds them (and us) of their common heroic parentage, and of course many Argonauts, being ‘sons and grandsons of immortals’ (Arg. 3.366), had indeed appeared in the Catalogue;31 on arriving in Colchis the poet then has Jason echo the Hesiodic allusion of that earlier speech to remind the crew ‘of the need for unified action’.32 However that may be, the broad sweep of the Catalogue, which moves from the free mixing of gods and mortals to the end of the age of the heroes, might well have influenced Apollonius’ presentation of the voyage of the Argonauts back into the recesses of the primeval past before their return to Greece and Greek cultural values.33 If it is profitable to seek allusions to the proem of the Catalogue, it is a natural complement to this search to look for borrowings from the Catalogue in Hellenistic poetic catalogues.34 Apollonius’ ‘Catalogue of Argonauts’ indeed yields some apparently positive results (cf. below), and it is probably not rash to guess that a reference to ‘a tale which 30 For this characterisation of Simichidas cf. Hunter 2003a. 31 Cf. Schwartz 1960: 592. 32 Clauss also floats the idea that Callimachus, Hecale fr. 80.4 – 5 Hollis, vikone¸moio jaki/rj lmgs|leha7 num¹m c±q 1pa¼kiom 5sjem ûpasim, ‘we shall remember your hospitable hut; it was a lodging shared by all’ (perhaps in the mouth of Hecale’s neighbours), continued with a num¹m d´ … 33 Cf. Hunter 1991, Clauss 2000. 34 On elegiac catalogue poetry cf. below pp. 493 – 9, Asquith 2005.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

481

poets tell’ in that catalogue (v. 59 about Kaineus) has the Catalogue in its sights.35 Nevertheless, the very nature of ‘genealogical catalogue poetry’, which imposes series of largely non-variable names, and the variety of sources (both oral and written) which preserved such information, enjoin caution about the interpretation of apparent intertextual allusion. Thus, for example, at Arg. 3.360 – 1 Argos explains to Aietes that Jason is related to them through his grandfather Kretheus: %lvy c±q Jqghe»r )h²lar t’ 5sam AQºkou uXer, Vq¸nor d’ awt’ ûAh²lamtor 5gm p²ir AQok¸dao.

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 3.360 – 1

“Both Kretheus and Athamas were the sons of Aiolos, and Phrixos was the child of Athamas son of Aiolos.”

Argos is drawing on some very recently acquired knowledge (cf. 2.1160 – 4), but behind his words we may be tempted to hear the Hesiodic version:36 AQok¸dai d’ 1c´momto helistopºkoi basik/er Jqghe¼r t’ Ad’ ûAh²lar ja· S¸suvor aQokol¶tgr Saklyme¼r t’ %dijor ja· rp´qhulor Peqi¶qgr.

Hesiod fr.10(a).25 – 7

The sons of Aiolos were sceptre-bearing kings, Kretheus and Athamas and wily Sisyphus and wicked Salmoneus and over-bearing Perieres.

Argos restricts his genealogical information to what is strictly relevant, but, if we yield to the intertextual temptation, his omission of ‘wily Sisyphos, wicked Salmoneus and over-bearing Perieres’ increases our understanding of why he succeeds only in making Aietes angrier and more suspicious of the new arrivals at his court.37 To turn to the ‘Catalogue of Argonauts’ itself: when, for example, Apollonius introduces the Argonauts from Oichalia, t_i d’ %q’ 1p· Jkut¸or te ja· 7Ivitor Aceq´homto, OQwak¸gr 1p¸ouqoi, !pgm´or Eqq¼tou uXer, Eqq¼tou ¨i pºqe tºnom gEjgbºkor7 oqd’ !pºmgto

35 For Kaineus in the Catalogue cf. frr. 87 – 8. 36 Cf. also Euripides fr. 929b Kannicht. 37 Cf. Campbell 1983: 29 – 31, and the notes of Campbell and myself on Arg. 3.317 – 66.

482

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

dyt¸mgr, aqt_i c±q 2j½m 1q¸dgme dot/qi.

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.86 – 9

Next gathered Klytios and Iphitos, the guardians of Oichalia, sons of cruel Eurytos whose bow was given to him by the Far-Darter; but he gained no profit from the gift, for he tried to rival the giver himself.

ought we to see an evocative allusion to their appearance in the Catalogue?: t_i d’ rpojusal´mg jakk¸fymor Stqatom¸jg Euqutom 1m lec²qoisim 1ce¸mato v¸ktatom uRºm. toO d’ uRe?r 1c´momto Dg¸ym te Jkut¸or te Tone¼r t’ !mt¸heor Ad’ 7Ivitor efor 7Aqgor.

Hesiod fr. 26.27 – 30

To Melaneus the fair-girdled Stratonike bore in the halls a very dear son, Eurytos. His sons were Deion and Klytios and godlike Toxeus and Iphitos, a shoot of Ares.

Hesiod certainly passes over the foolish Eurytos’ fate, a story which Apollonius will have known from (inter alia) Odyssey 8.224 – 8. Similar questions arise over, say, the children of Pero (fr. 37.8 – 9, Arg. 1.118 – 21). Elsewhere, however, we may feel rather more confident. When Apollonius notes that, had Meleager been only a little older when he joined the expedition, no Argonaut ‘except Heracles’ (mºsvim c’ gGqajk/or) would have surpassed him (1.190 – 8), it is certainly tempting to see an echo of Meleager’s introduction in the Catalogue, where he is already second only to Heracles (fr. 25.1 – 13, with pk¶m c’ gGqajk/or again at the head of a hexameter). Verbal echo may also signal a debt to the Catalogue when Apollonius brings on the Euboean Kanthos: aqt±q !p’ Eqbo¸gr J²mhor j¸e, tºm Na J²mghor p´lpem ûAbamti²dgr kekigl´mom.

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.77 – 8

Moreover from Euboia came Kanthos; Kanethos son of Abas had acceded to his desires in sending him forth.

A ‘descendant of Abas’, i. e. an early inhabitant of Euboea, had also featured within the ‘Catalogue of Suitors’ in the final book of the Catalogue:

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

483

aqt±q !p’ Eqbo¸gr ûEkev¶myq eqwalor !mdq_m Wakjydomti²dgr, lecah¼lym !qw¹r ûAb²mtym, lm÷to

Hesiod fr. 204.52 – 4

Moreover from Euboia came as a suitor Elephenor, leader of men, son of Chalkodon, commander of the great-hearted Abantes.

V. 53 of the Hesiodic passage also appeared in the Homeric ‘Catalogue of Ships’ (Iliad 2.541, cf. 4.464), and Apollonius allows this rich ‘catalogue tradition’ to resonate within his own catalogue. The case of shape-changing Periklymenos, however, shows that the relation between the two ‘Catalogues’ is not everywhere the same. Hesiod gives a detailed account of this hero’s various manifestations as, for example, eagle, ant, bee or snake (fr. 33(a).12 – 18), as a preface to his fateful encounter at Pylos with Athene and Heracles (fr.33(a).19 – 36), whereas Apollonius, perhaps wishing not to give undue prominence to an Argonaut never to be mentioned again, remains entirely at the level of the general: Poseid²ym d´ oR !kjµm d_jem !peiqes¸gm Ad’, ftti jem !q¶saito laqm²lemor, t¹ p´keshai 1m· numow/i pok´loio.

Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.158 – 60

Poseidon had given [Periklymenos] boundless strength, and the ability in battle to become whatever he prayed to be when in the tight corners of war.

Apollonius, however, directs us to Hesiod’s more detailed description by laqm\lemor at the head of v.160, picking up the beginning of Hes. fr. 33(a).20.38 An even more radical case of suppression of the tradition is Iphiklos, whose supernatural speed over fields of grain (Hesiod fr. 62, Iliad 23.636) is not even mentioned by Apollonius (1.45 – 8); Callimachus, however, apparently alludes to the Hesiodic picture of Iphiklos at fr. 75.46, svuq¹m ûIv¸jkeiom 1pitq´wom !staw¼essim ‘the ankle of Iphiklos which ran over the crops’.

38 For the subsequent tradition of this Hesiodic passage cf. Ovid, Met. 12.556 – 72. Unfortunately, we know virtually nothing of Periklymenos’ appearance in Euphorion (fr. 64 Powell).

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2. Narrative structures Hellenistic poets were clearly attracted by the ‘learning’ of the Theogony, by the engaged personal voice and didactic morality of the Works and Days, and by the autobiography written into both poems. As far as we can see, the nature of the Catalogue was rather different. When every allowance has been made for the state of the evidence and for the fact that the texture of the poem appears, from what has survived, to have been uneven (cf. below), the poetics of the Catalogue emerge as perhaps more ‘impersonal’ and the poetic voice as less obviously intrusive than in the other two poems; such things, of course, mattered very much to Hellenistic poets.39 Ian Rutherford has called attention to the relative paucity of direct speech in the Catalogue fragments (and to the fact that there is as yet no example of speech by a mortal woman) and proposed that catalogue-poetry distinguishes itself by ‘a rapidity of presentation, and a focus on narration rather than speech’.40 If this is broadly true, then in one way the Catalogue anticipated the greatly reduced rôle of direct speech in the only Hellenistic epic which survives, the Argonautica;41 the avoidance of female speech, however, is entirely different from the way in which Hellenistic poets delighted to give their female characters a voice. Among the preserved fragments the primary instances of direct speech are:42 fr. 31, a prophecy by Poseidon to Tyro of the children she will bear him (cf. Odyssey 11.247 – 53);43 fr. 41, a contextless halfverse which may or may not be from the Catalogue, 1c½ d’ 1n !cqºhem Fjy ‘I have come from the countryside’;44 fr. 43.41 – 3, the quotation of the ‘law’ which is to settle the dispute between Erysichthon and Sisyphos over Mestra;45 fr. 75.11 – 25, Schoineus announces 39 Cf. Hunter 1993: Chapter 5, with further bibliography. 40 Rutherford 2000: 87 – 9. On direct speech in the Megalai Ehoiai cf. D’Alessio 2005a: 188 – 9. 41 Cf. Hunter 1993: 138 – 51. 42 Cf. Rutherford 2000: 87. 43 It is noteworthy that Poseidon’s parallel prophecy is the only instance of direct speech in the Odyssean ‘Catalogue of Women’, despite the conversational frame (cf. vv. 231 – 4) and the use of indirect speech (vv. 236, 261, 306). 44 West’s suggestion that the speaker is Jason (cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.102) is perhaps given colour by Ap.Rhod. Arg. 1.5 – 11 (where Platt’s interpretation of dgl|hem as ‘from the countryside’ deserves serious consideration, cf. J.Phil. 35 (1920) 72). 45 Cf. Osborne 2005: 19 – 20, Rutherford 2005: 107.

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the contest for Atalanta’s hand, and fr. 76.9 – 10, Hippomenes addresses Atalanta;46 fr. 136 may contain a prophecy or oracle quoted in direct speech; fr. 165.2, the final scrap of a divine speech to Teuthras is preserved; fr. 211.7 – 13, a makarismos of Peleus by all the people. This is indeed a surprisingly small haul. Nevertheless, other factors suggest that the Catalogue might indeed have offered a poetic model attractive to Hellenistic imitators. The Catalogue-poet makes no effort to conceal his views of the characters he describes: the epithets he attaches to the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ leave it very clear who belongs in which category. So too, there are a few surviving instances of rather fuller judgements: fr. 10(a).97 – 8, ‘hidden is the (?mind) of Zeus, (?and no mortal) can divine it’, seems to round off the metamorphosis-story of Keyx and Alcyone in suitably Hesiodic fashion (cf., e. g., Theog. 613, at the conclusion of the story of Prometheus); fr. 33(a).27 – 9 (Periklymenos, a shape-changer of a different kind), ‘he thought he would stop the strength of horse-taming Heracles: foolish man (m¶pior), he did not fear Zeus’s brave-hearted son and his glorious bow which Phoebus Apollo gave to him.’; fr. 43(a).52 – 4, ‘(Sisyphos was the cleverest of mortals), but he did not know the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus, that the dwellers in heaven would not grant Glaukos children from Mestra and that his seed should be preserved among men’; fr. 61, m¶pior, dr t± 2to?la kip½m !m´toila di¾jei ‘foolish the man who abandons what is readily available and pursues the unattainable’, perhaps to be connected with Koronis (it is cited by (inter alios) the scholiast on Pindar, Pyth. 3.38), but whether in the mouth of the poet or one of his characters is entirely unclear. In these instances the poetic voice is indeed not too far removed from the earnest pieties of a Pindar, or even the apparently pious earnestness of a Callimachus. The Catalogue opens up a whole network of heroic poetry which sometimes can seem like a giant system of cross-referencing to archaic epic – the accounts of Iphimede and Orestes at fr. 23(a).17 – 30 and of Bellerophon (fr. 43(a).81 – 7) are very obvious examples – or a ‘source-book’ of narratives waiting to be written. A later poet could, as it were, write in the narratives which the Catalogue’s genealogical focus had suppressed. Not, of course, that all narratives in the Catalogue are suppressed; it is clear that the narrative texture of the poem was uneven and that the manner in which longer stories were elaborated also 46 On this episode cf. below p. 486.

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varied considerably. We can get some sense of the larger architectural patterns of the work from sequences such as frr. 30 – 5 (Salmoneus, Tyro and her children), fr. 43 (Mestra),47 frr. 72 – 6 (Atalanta), and, of course, the ‘suitors of Helen’, with its extraordinary (and utterly unpredictable) aftermath.48 The ‘romantic’ Atalanta story, which could be seen as literalising the language of erotic ‘pursuit’ and ‘flight’ so familiar from Sappho and later literature, and which features (inter alia) a ‘naughty’ breeze (fr. 75.9 – 10), a cunning lover (fr. 76), and a beautiful girl who shuns ‘Aphrodite’s gifts’, only to be caught by them (fr. 76.6, 10), seems indeed almost already formed as a short, independent poem of considerable narrative sophistication. We may be particularly reminded of the story of Acontius and Cydippe from Callimachus’ Aitia, another tale of how the deities of love helped a man to gain the woman he loved by tricking her with an apple.49 Very different in construction and mode (the poet passes up, for example, the chance to put a deceptive speech to Alcmene in Zeus’ mouth), if no less interested in narrative ironies and no less suggestive for Hellenistic narrative, is the Alcmene-ehoie from Book 4 (fr. 195, Aspis 1 – 56), a story in which the necessary avoidance of sexual contact (vv. 15 – 19) becomes a transgressive excess, and in which Amphitryon ‘accomplishes’ a ‘great (military) feat’ (vv. 22, 38) while Zeus ‘accomplishes’ his desires with Amphitryon’s wife (v. 36).50 47 Cf. Rutherford 2005. 48 Cf. Cingano 2005, Clay 2005. 49 That Callimachus’ verses did indeed allude to the Atalanta-ehoie cannot be demonstrated, but seems to me very likely, both on general grounds and in view of some specific indications (of uneven weight). (i) Hippomenes’ apples seem to have been a gift of Aphrodite, and Aristaenetus at least (1.10.25 Mazal) reports that Acontius took his apple from ‘the garden of Aphrodite’. For the sources cf. Hunter on Theocritus 3.40 – 2. (ii) According to Aristaenetus, the lovestruck Acontius resolved on ‘marriage or death’ (1.10.21 Mazal), a dichotomy which is very real in the case of Hippomenes (fr. 76.7 – 8). (iii) In Aristaenetus Cydippe’s servant ‘snatches up’ ( !m¶qpasem, 1.10.28 Mazal) the apple, as does Atalanta (fr. 76.18 – 19, with an apparent etymological play on -qpuia). 50 If the opening of Theocritus 24 alludes to the Alcmene-ehoie (cf. Fantuzzi in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 258), this is presumably an allusion to the Aspis rather than to the fourth book of the Catalogue. It is tempting to think that the description of Alcmene at Aspis 4 – 10 — beautiful, clever, and ‘she honoured her husband as no other mortal woman has done’ — is not merely preparation for her unwitting infidelity, but a specific glance at the description of Arete at Odyssey 7.67 – 8 ‘[Alcinoos] honoured her as no other woman on earth is honoured’. Such a reversal would not be out of place in a much later poem.

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A general influence of the Catalogue, with its very varied elaboration and predominantly light or even amused tone,51 upon the shape of later poetic structures must indeed be considered very likely. In a few cases, where the Catalogue shares subject-matter with a later poem, we may also be able to trace the outlines of a specific debt; one such case is that of Moschus’ Europa. Europa’s only appearance in Homer is in the catalogue of Zeus’s ‘conquests’ (Iliad 14.321 – 2), but a Homeric scholiast tells the story: ‘Zeus saw Europa the daughter of Phoinix when she was gathering flowers in a meadow together with nymphs and fell in love with her. He came down and changed himself into a bull and the breath from his mouth was saffron. In this way he deceived Europa, carried her off, transported her to Crete, and had intercourse with her. Then he married her to Asterion the king of Crete. Being pregnant she bore three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon. The tale is told by Hesiod (fr. 140) and Bacchylides (fr. 10 S-M).’52 A broken papyrus fragment (fr. 141) offers us the end of the Hesiodic narrative: ]p´qgse d’ %q’ "kluq¹m vdyq ]Di¹r dlghe?sa dºkoisi. ]patµq ja· d_qom 5dyjem N]vaistor jkutot´wmgr Qdu¸]gisim pqap¸dessi pa]tq· v´qym7 d d³ d´nato d_qom7 jo¼]qgi Vo¸mijor !cauoO. 5l]ekke tamisv¼qyi Eqqype¸gi, ]patµq !mdq_m te he_m te m¼]lvgr p²qa jakkijºloio. D d’ %qa pa?d]ar [5tijt]em rpeqlem´i Jqom¸ymi po]k´ym Bc¶toqar !mdq_m, L¸my te jqe¸omta] d¸jaiºm te gQad²lamhum ja· Saqpgdºma d?om] !l¼lom² te jqateq[ºm te. Hesiod fr. 141.1 – 14 … crossed the briny sea … overcome by the tricks of Zeus … father [i.e. Zeus] (slept with her?) and gave her a gift … it was made by Hephaistos the glorious craftsmen … skilled heart … bearing it to her father; he received the gift … to the daughter of noble Phoenix. … intended for the slenderankled Europa .. the father of men and gods … from his fair-tressed bride. 51 Cf. Rutherford 2000: 86. 52 Europa’s abduction by Zeus also figured (though at what length we do not know) in the Europia of Eumelos of Corinth, cf. West 2002: 126 – 7.

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She bore sons to the mighty son of Kronos … leaders of many men … Minos the ruler and just Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon, godlike, excellent and strong.

The fragment (and cf. frr. 144 – 5) continues with the futures and families of Europa’s sons. There is nothing in the scholiast’s summary which would surprise in Hesiod (or Bacchylides), though we simply cannot say whether Europa’s subsequent marriage to Asterion figured in the Catalogue (though it fits a very familiar narrative pattern). Comparison of this evidence with Moschus’s poem shows broadly the same narrative in both poets, but also significant differences, particularly where Moschus has enriched the narrative from other parts of the poetic tradition (Europa’s dream, the ecphrasis of the basket etc.).53 We do not, of course, know how extensive Hesiod’s narrative was, but it is a more than reasonable assumption that there was nothing in the archaic poem to match the active speaking rôle which Europa enjoys in Moschus;54 whether it is her response to her dream or her marvellous puzzlement as she is transported across the sea, Moschus’ heroine has much to say. Here then it seems that the Hellenistic poet has indeed written in the details of a suppressed narrative, as also with the elaborate description of the pageant at sea (Europa 113 – 29); the opening verse of fr. 141 ‘… she crossed the salt sea’ may in fact have been the sum total of attention which Hesiod gave to the matter. As for Zeus himself, his ante-coital prophecy (Europa 154 – 61, the virgin Europa certainly knew what was coming!), which bears a strong generic resemblance to the post-coital words of Poseidon to Tyro (Hesiod fr. 31.1 – 4, Odyssey 11.247 – 53),55 may perhaps have found some analogy in Hesiod before the preserved fragment opens, but this seems in fact rather unlikely; the final verses of Zeus’s speech, ‘you will bear me glorious sons, who will all be sceptre-bearing (kings) among men’ (Europa 160 – 1), looks like a reworking of vv. 11 – 14 of the preserved Hesiodic fragment (cited above) in which it is the narrator who tells of the children. Though, moreover, Hesiod may indeed have given the divine bull an arousing saffron breath (cf. vv. 68, 91 – 2 of Moschus’s poem), it is hard to believe that there was any equivalent of the erotic ‘foreplay’ in which Europa and the 53 Cf. esp. Campbell 1991: 1 – 3 to which I am indebted. 54 Cf. above p. 484 on the apparent absence of female speech. 55 Cf. the notes of Bühler and Campbell ad loc. Note too the greatly expanded and varied (a female speaks!) version of this form at HH.Aphrodite 192 ff.

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bull indulge (Europa 93 – 6).56 As the bald ‘Europa’ with which the poem begins both gestures towards and entirely avoids the genealogical style of a Hesiodic narrative (we do not learn her father’s name until v.7),57 so too, as Malcolm Campbell notes, the conclusion of the Europa, ‘she who was before a maiden became Zeus’s bride, bore children to the son of Kronos and became a mother’ (vv. 165 – 6), looks like a marker of this poem’s space against that of the Catalogue, where the bearing of children is just the beginning of the story.58 In the Catalogue Zeus, in a familiar narrative motif, gives Europa a gold necklace59 made by Hephaestus, which she then passes to her father (cf. Apollodorus 3.4.1 = Pherecydes, FGrHist 3 F89 = fr. 89 Fowler); this was to become a ‘family heirloom’ with a rich and fateful future over which Hesiod passes in meaningful silence.60 Moschus chooses to omit this as he brings things to a speedy end, but Europa takes with her to the fateful meadow another family heirloom which Poseidon had given to her grandmother after their love-making (vv. 39 – 42), and which was also the work of Hephaestus; in sharp contradistinction to the archaic ‘model’, Moschus describes the wondrous basket in loving detail. The decoration is ‘scenes from the life of Io’,61 another heroine from the Catalogue (fr. 124) whose story will have been told (in whatever detail) not too far away from that of Europa. Moschus’ innovative ecphrastic structure of story within story must be seen, inter alia, as a variation upon and avoidance of the sequential catalogue-technique, in

56 Cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 219 – 20. 57 The opening pote, again typical of Hellenistic narrative, is entirely foreign to the Hesiodic manner. 58 The last two verses of the Europa are, admittedly, textually uncertain, and here we feel the loss of Bacchylides’s version particularly acutely. Were the phrase not such a common one, it might be tempting to see in the immediately preceding v. 164 kOse d´ oR l¸tqgm ‘he undid her maiden’s girdle’ an allusion to Hesiod fr. 1.4, thus acknowledging Moschus’ debt to the Catalogue, cf. Campbell 1991: 1. For such abrupt conclusions as typical of Hellenistic narrative cf. Griffiths 1996. 59 This must be restored on the papyrus, but in view of the testimony to the subsequent history of the necklace it is hardly in doubt. Nicander apparently somewhere used a version in which Zeus gave Europa a marvellous bronze dog created by Hephaestus (fr. 97 Schneider). 60 It was with this necklace that Eriphyle was to bring her husband Amphiaraos to his doom at Thebes; for the various versions cf. Gantz 1993: II 506 – 8. 61 On this ecphrasis see Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 221 – 3.

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which one ‘story’ only gives way to another when it has been played out to the end. Despite the very considerable gaps in our knowledge, then, Moschus’ Europa offers us a rare chance to see a Hellenistic poet overtly engaged with a text from the Catalogue. It might have seemed reasonable to entertain similar hopes of the narrative of Erysichthon in Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter, as substantial fragments survive of Hesiod’s narrative of Erysichthon and his daughter Mestra, apparently here represented as Athenians (fr. 43).62 Whereas, however, Hesiod (in what survives) says nothing about why Erysichthon is so hungry, Callimachus, on the other hand, has no mention of Mestra.63 His Erysichthon is younger than Hesiod’s and certainly has no children; his disappearance from the poem, begging for scraps at the crossroads (vv. 114 – 15), leaves his future open (contrast the Ovidian version), despite his desperate physical condition (vv. 92 – 3). We ought perhaps, then, associate Callimachus’s narrative with the Hellenistic interest in the ‘early lives’ of characters known from the poetic tradition (e. g. the youth of Homer’s Cyclops); moreover, just as Callimachus ostentatiously (v. 17) avoids retelling at length the story of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, so a simple reworking of the Catalogue story would have occasioned surprise. There is, however, a possible trace of the ‘well-trodden path’ not taken: Hesiod certainly used Erysichthon’s other name, AUhym ‘Burning’,64 and explained it as a reference to his hunger (fr. 43(b)), and on the basis of this and vv. 66 – 7 of Callimachus’ poem (Demeter cast into Erysichthon kil¹mj aUhyma jqateqºm ‘burning, powerful hunger’) Merkelbach restored vv. 5 – 7 of fr. 43(a): t¹m d’ AUhym’ 1j²kessam 1p]¾mulom eVmeja kiloO aUhymor jqateqoO vOka] hmgt_m !mhq¾pym aUh]yma d³ kil¹m ûpamter

Hesiod, fr. 43(a).5 – 7

Mortal men [called him Aithon] as a nickname, because of the [burning, powerful] hunger … burning hunger all men

Whether or not this reconstruction is correct, it is certain that the Hymn to Demeter is a very ‘Hesiodic’ poem, a narrative about piety, plenty, and 62 Cf. Rutherford 2005. 63 Helpful survey in Hopkinson 1984: 18 – 26. For Ovid’s treatment of the story cf. Hopkinson 1984: 22 – 4 and Fletcher 311 – 14. 64 On this name cf. Levaniouk 2000.

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lack which is set within and illustrative of the morality of the Works and Days, and one which derives much of its effect from the productive clash between a sternly archaising moral voice and a modern poetic style.65 Callimachus has thus written the missing narrative of Erysichthon which lay apparently suppressed within the Catalogue,66 and in so doing has maintained a ‘Hesiodic’ voice: this is how, so Callimachus would have us (not) believe, Hesiod would have told the story. If Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter looks only obliquely to a heritage in the Catalogue, the closely related Hymn to Athena may be rather more engaged with the archaic poem.67 An Oxyrhynchus papyrus published in 1964 (POxy. 2509) contains a scene in which a daughter of Zeus, almost certainly Athena, apparently tells the centaur Cheiron that in the future Dionysus will use Cheiron’s dogs on the mountain and that, when Dionysus ascends to heaven, the dogs will return to Cheiron. The broken last lines of the text appear to refer to Aktaion, and if this is correct, then it seems likely that the promise of future glory for the dogs is offered to Cheiron as consolation for the fact that the dogs have torn apart Cheiron’s pupil, Aktaion.68 Lobel tentatively ascribed the text to the Catalogue, and strong arguments have been adduced in support of this view, despite Martin West’s continued disbelief.69 Hesiod certainly told in the Catalogue (fr. 217A), perhaps in the Kyreneehoie, how Aktaion was torn apart by his dogs as a punishment for lusting after Semele.70 Mary Depew has suggested that Athena’s unusual consolation to Teiresias’ mother for her son’s blinding in Callimachus’ hymn – ‘the day will come when Aktaion’s parents would give anything to receive back their son blinded, and besides I will grant Teiresias extraordinary mantic powers’ – looks back to the text of POxy 2509: 65 Cf., e. g., Reinsch-Werner 1976: 210 – 29, 371 – 3, Hunter 1992: 30 – 1. 66 This is, of course, not a matter of whether Callimachus ‘invented’ the tree-felling, cf. Hopkinson 1994: 26, but of the narrative invitation which the Hesiodic text offers. 67 For the links (and contrasts) between the two poems cf. Hopkinson 1994: 13 – 17. 68 Cf. Apollodorus, Bibl. 3.4.4. 69 Cf. esp. Casanova 1969, Janko 1984. If the passage is from the Catalogue, then it will, of course, have to be added to the examples of direct speech in that poem, cf. above p. 484 – 5. 70 For the various versions cf. Bulloch on Call. Hymn to Athena vv. 107 – 18, Lacy 1990. The verses on Aktaion’s dogs cited by Apollodorus 3.4.4 (= Epica adespota fr. 1 Powell) are held by some also to be from the Catalogue, but need not be considered here. I would be surprised to learn that v. 7 at least was archaic.

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Athena, who has absolutely no understanding of maternal feelings, reworks a consolation for the death of Aktaion, which is based on what will happen in the future, to console her best friend for her son’s suffering with the very thought of Aktaion’s coming fate.71 Aktaion has suffered for his desire for Semele and thus brought pain to Cheiron, but Semele’s glorious son will bestow honour which will be more than adequate recompense for that suffering. In both texts, Athena acts as Zeus’s daughter and his closest agent. Moreover, as Depew pointed out, Chariclo, the name of Athena’s friend in the Callimachean Hymn, is also the name which tradition gave to Cheiron’s wife (cf. Pindar, Pyth. 4.103 with scholia),72 and such a putting together of homonymous characters from disparate myths would hardly surprise in Callimachus. The scene of Teiresias’ blinding also takes place in the Hesiodic spot par excellence, the pool of Hippocrene on Mt Helicon. The case is a strong one, and we may add that the young Teiresias at his entry (vv. 75 – 6) is not unlike the Dionysus ‘on the mountain’ of the papyrus text, as well as perhaps suggesting the young Dionysus of the Bacchae, as part of the hymn’s complex intertextual relation with that tragedy.73 There is no sign that Teiresias appeared in the Catalogue, though the story of his two genders and his blinding by Hera for giving the ‘wrong’ answer about sexual pleasure seems to have appeared in the Melampodia (frr. 275 – 6). Just as Moschus’ ecphrasis of Europa’s basket in the Europa offers a way of combining analogous stories (both found in the Catalogue) so as to avoid the sequential, catalogue form, so Callimachus juxtaposes the stories of Teiresias (apparently from Pherecydes) and Aktaion (? from the Catalogue) in a way which not only avoids the form of a catalogue, but also does not have one story merely illustrative of the other, in the form of a warning example (as, for example, the Aktaion story is used in the Bacchae, or the Meleager story in the Iliad). Here again, then, it is the stimulus towards narrative experimentation which the Catalogue bequeathed to later poets which is seen to be 71 Depew 1994; her whole argument should be consulted. 72 In the papyrus text Cheiron’s partner is a ‘naiad nymph’; a misunderstanding of this (if it is from the Catalogue) or a similar passage might have given rise to the report in the Pindaric scholia that Hesiod named Cheiron’s wife Nais (fr. 42). As Lobel noted, this is an argument for the Hesiodic origin of the papyrus text; Depew’s alternative suggestion (p. 414), however, that ‘the Scholiast meant his Hesiod clause as a supplementary detail (Chariclo was a Naiad)’ is not the natural way to read the note. 73 Cf. Hunter 1992: 23 – 4.

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most important. Even if POxy 2509 is not from the Catalogue, Callimachus’ way of intertwining his stories is in part a product of the stimulus to collection and analysis of the ocean of mythical story which the Catalogue, and poems like it, passed on to poets and scholars with the leisure and resources to benefit from that inheritance.74

3. Catalogues and Catalogue According to a very commonly expressed view, the greatest debt of Hellenistic poetry to the Hesiodic Catalogue lies in a series of very imperfectly known ‘catalogue poems’ which (in various ways) seem to have gestured towards the Hesiodic form. We know nothing of the (hexameter or elegiac?) ‘Catalogue of Women’ of Nicaenetus (fr. 2 Powell), but the equally mysterious Io?oi (note the masculine form) of one Sosicrates or perhaps Sostratos (SH 732) suggests what may be involved: the reduction of the rich scope and uneven texture of the Catalogue to its most memorable, if not most significant, repetitive feature, which is used as a tool for connecting disparate stories or exempla. Scholarly attention has been focused, particularly by those interested in the antecedents of Roman erotic elegy, upon a series of poems (? Philitas, Bittis, Hermesianax, Leontion, Phanocles, Erotes or Beautiful Boys) in which the catalogued stories were erotic in nature and, to a greater or lesser extent, the poet may have framed or interspersed these stories with supposedly autobiographical material in the first person.75 Some evidence suggests that these poets looked to Mimnermus’ Nanno (? second half of the seventh century) and Antimachus’ Lyde (late fifth-early fourth century BC) for authorising ‘classical’ models for the form; Hermesianax and Antimachus were both from, and Mimnermus at least associated with, Colophon. This elegiac form is then often represented as a kind of cross between the tradition of Colophonian ‘personal’ elegy and ‘Hesiodic’ catalogue poetry. The key question in the present context will be just how deep the debt to Hesiod may be. We may start with a general consideration. As far as we can tell (cf. above), the Catalogue was largely ‘impersonal’ in its poetic voice; there is 74 Cf. my remarks above p. 485. 75 Helpful surveys in Cairns 1979: 214 – 24, Knox 1993, and cf. Asquith 2005. About the Bittis we know practically nothing; to Knox’s discussion add Sbardella 2000: 53 – 60, Spanoudakis 2002: 29 – 34.

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no sign, in our exiguous remains, of the kind of first-person material found in the Theogony and WD. If it is the case that these Hellenistic poets saw themselves as recreating the Hesiod of the Catalogue in poems containing an important ‘personal’ element, then it is to be stressed that this was an engagement with ‘the idea of Hesiod’, rather than with what we can reconstruct of the nature of the Catalogue itself. Our relatively rich information about Callimachus’ Aitia, in which – particularly in the first two books – the stories of cult origin were introduced and sometimes linked by first-person ‘autobiographical’ material, offers an important analogy here.76 The Aitia, so Alan Cameron, above all, has argued,77 was Callimachus’ very original version of this mode of ‘Hesiodic elegy’ as it was to be found in, say, Antimachus and Hermesianax; if so, Callimachus has reclaimed for his poem a ‘truer’ version of ‘Hesiod’ than that which is imagined for the catalogue-poems, and it is, significantly, not the Hesiod of the Catalogue. We are told by the Plutarchan Consolatio that Antimachus (Test. 12 Matthews = 7 Wyss) consoled himself for the death of his beloved wife by writing a full account of heroic sufferings (1naqihlgs²lemor t±r Bqyij±r sulvoq²r). The source might be thought to make this information suspicious (and ‘wife’ may indeed be at best an approximation to the lady’s actual status), but the general picture is also that painted by Hermesianax (Test. 11 Matthews = 6 Wyss, cf. below) and there is no very good reason to doubt it. In the nature of things, women will have played an important rôle in the Lyde, but it is also clear that the style and tone of these elegiacs was ‘epic’ and so was much of the material. The story of the Argonauts, for example, was treated at some length, an account which was an important model for Apollonius. No doubt Antimachus knew the Catalogue and borrowed details from it,78 but, despite what is often asserted,79 there is no sign that the Catalogue was for him a privileged model, and we have no evidence as to how one story was linked to another. It is much more likely that he gave a special place of honour to Mimnermus’ Nanno, which was perhaps in fact no more than a collection of Mimnermus’ elegies, and Martin 76 Cf., e. g., Cairns 1979: 221 – 2. 77 Cameron 1995, esp. Chapter XIII. The whole debate about Callimachus’ attitude to Antimachus and his poetic descendants is not germane here. 78 Cf., e. g., Wyss 1936: xx, Schwartz 1960: 584. 79 Cf., e. g., Wyss 1936: xxii. When Hesiod and Antimachus are linked or compared in the critical tradition, it is as ‘epic’ poets, cf. Antimachus, Test. 23 – 4 Matthews = 25, 28 Wyss.

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West’s suggestion that the Hellenistic picture of this archaic poem (such as it was) is largely the result of Antimachus’ fashioning of Mimnermus as a model for his own work is an attractive one.80 The Leontion of Hermesianax (early third century), in three books, clearly contained a series of (sometimes transgressive) erotic stories and characters drawn from all over the Greek world (frr. 1 – 6 Powell); there is nothing to prove that women did not play a major rôle in every episode. How these stories were linked together, we do not know. Athenaeus, however, preserves a fragment from Book 3 of ninety-eight elegiacs which one of his characters describes as a jat²kocor 1qytij_m and which pairs famous poets (from Orpheus to Philitas) and philosophers with alleged girlfriends (fr. 7 Powell).81 Mimnermus, the ‘inventor’ of the ‘soft pentameter’, and hence a privileged model of Hermesianax himself, is here juxtaposed to Homer (who was in love with Penelope …). The shift from poets to philosophers is marked by a transitional passage (‘not even the sternly virtuous could escape love …’, vv. 79 – 84), and some such introduction presumably preceded the opening of our fragment, which is also the opening of the ‘catalogue’: oVgm l³m v¸kor uR¹r !m¶cacem OQ²cqoio ûAqciºpgm Hq/issam steik²lemor jih²qgm *idºhem7 5pkeusem d³ jaj¹m ja· !peih´a w_qom …

Hermesianax fr. 7. 1 – 3 Powell

Such as Thracian Argiope whom the dear son of Oiagros, equipped with his lyre, brought up from Hades. He sailed to that horrible and inexorable place …

The story of Orpheus, the longest in the passage, gives way to Mousaios (oq lµm oqd’ uR¹r L¶mgr jtk.), and then Hesiod himself: vgl· d³ ja· Boiyt¹m !popqokipºmta l´kahqom gGs¸odom p²sgr Eqamom Rstoq¸gr )sjqa¸ym 1sij´shai 1q_mh’ gEkijym¸da j¾lgm7 5mhem f c’ ûGo¸gm lm¾lemor ûAsjqaijµm pokk’ 5pahem, p²sar d³ kºcym !mecq[\xato b¸bkour rlm_m, 1j pq¾tgr paid¹r !meqwºlemor.

Hermesianax fr. 7. 21 – 6 Powell 80 West 1974: 72 – 6. For Mimnermus as an ‘honorary Hellenistic poet’ cf. also Spanoudakis 2001: 426 – 8. 81 Cf. esp. Ellenberger 1907, Bing 1993. There is a commentary in Kobiliri 1998, and a new edition by C. Caspers and M. Cuypers is in preparation.

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I say too that Boeotian Hesiod, the keeper of all research, left his house and, being in love,82 came to the Heliconian village of the Ascraeans. There he suffered much as he wooed Ascraean Ehoie, and as he sang he filled up all the books of his catalogues, (?) taking his start from the girl first.

Interpretation and text of the final phrase are uncertain, but it would seem that, in addition to making a young lady of Ascra called ‘Ehoie’ into Hesiod’s beloved and thus the Catalogue into a celebration of her, Hermesianax represents the Catalogue as a series of episodes all beginning C oVg ; here is the simplification of a complex model to which I have already referred. In fact, Hermesianax’s catalogues of both poets (v. 1) and philosophers (v. 85) begin oVg(m) l´m, but otherwise only v. 57 (Sophocles) )th·r d’ oXa jtk., v. 71 – 3 (Philoxenus) oXa timawhe·rj … cicm¾sjeir, and v. 89 (Socrates) oVyi d’ gesture towards the Hesiodic form, and all three examples are variations, not reproductions, of that form; Hermesianax clearly takes pains to vary the way exempla are introduced, as a way of surpassing in refinement the Hesiodic model. It is also at least worth noting that the pattern of vv. 25 – 6 finds its closest (indeed only) analogue in vv. 45 – 6 describing Antimachus: cºym d’ 1mepk¶sato b¸bkour Rq²r, 1j pamt¹r paus²lemor jal²tou.

Hermesianax fr. 7. 45 – 6 Powell

He filled his sacred books with lamentations, ceasing from all suffering.

Does this pattern fashion a ‘special relationship’ between the Lyde and the Catalogue? 83 It is obvious that Hermesianax’s version of Hesiod’s biography draws closely upon Hesiod’s own account of his father’s life at WD 633 – 40; genuine traces of the Catalogue, however, are hard to find, other than the young lady’s name. The compound participle !popqokip¾m is attested for the Megalai Ehoiai (fr. 257.3), and might have been intended to sound ‘Hesiodic’, and lm¾lemor (v. 24), the only example of ‘wooing’ in the extract, is perhaps a general reference to the subject-matter of the Catalogue, if not a specific allusion to the ‘Catalogue of Helen’s suitors’ (as, just conceivably, is the competition between Alcaeus and Anacreon for Sappho’s love (vv. 47 – 56)). It is per82 This is an emendation for the meaningless ‘having’ of the transmission. 83 For what it is worth, Hermesianax also uses !popqokip¾m of both Hesiod and Antimachus (vv. 21, 44), cf. further below.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

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haps not unfair to suggest that, for Hermesianax as probably for many Hellenistic and Roman poets, the form of a poem may nod to the Catalogue, but when it comes actually to dealing with Hesiod, it is one of the other two Hesiodic poems which comes into play. Moreover, beyond the passage on Hesiod, there is nothing particularly Hesiodic about Hermesianax’s style or language; far from it in fact.84 The Leontion shows that the Catalogue was known, not necessarily that it was closely read. Much the same is true of what we know of Phanocles’ Erotes or Beautiful Boys.85 One fragment is a gnomic expression in the first person (fr. 2 Powell), but it is not known whether the voice is that of the poet or one of his characters. The major preserved fragment of 28 verses tells (again) of Orpheus: C ¢r OQ²cqoio p²ir Hqg¸jior ûOqve»r 1j huloO J²kazm st´qne Boqgi²dgm, pokk²ji d³ sjieqo?sim 1m %ksesim 6fet’ !e¸dym dm] pºhom jtk.

Phanocles fr. 1.1 – 4 Powell

Or how the Thracian son of Oiagros, Orpheus, loved with all his heart Kalais, the son of Boreas, and often he would sit in shady groves singing of his desire …

One other fragment (fr. 3 Powell) introduces Dionysus’ love for Adonis with C ¢r,86 and it is a reasonable speculation that each new story was introduced by this formula, which was probably dependent upon a verb of saying or knowing expressed in a (lost) introduction. Given the Hellenistic fondness for catalogue-poems and poetic catalogues, we may assume that such ‘sub-Hesiodic’ formulas were not uncommon in poems of more than one kind.87 Thus, for example, Euphorion uses variations of E … E to move from threat to threat in two of his curse84 Cf. Ellenberger 1907: 58 – 67, 69, Huys 1991: 77 – 98. 85 See Hopkinson 1988: 177 – 81 (citing further bibliography), Lloyd-Jones 1990: 212 – 14. 86 The emendation of the transmitted eQd¾r looks certain. 87 For fragmentary lists of exempla in Hellenistic elegy cf. Butrica 1996. In POxy 3723 (= SSH 1187) a new exemplum (Heracles) is introduced by the non-Hesiodic ma· l¶m, but something ‘Hesiodic’ may lurk behind the ambiguous g at the head of verses in POxy 2885 fr. 1 (= SH 964). Even if the Apollo and Muses of Alexander Aetolus were catalogue poems (cf. Magnelli 1999), there is nothing ‘Hesiodic’ about their manner or style.

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poems (fr. 9 Powell, SH 415);88 another example of that genre, however, the famous ‘tattoo elegy’, introduces each new threatened tattoo by st_ny d] ‘I will tattoo (on a particular part of your body) …’.89 The different tattoos are separated from each other on the second-century BC papyrus by paragraphoi, as also happens on some papyri of the Catalogue; this is a good illustration of how the Hesiodic poem ‘could … be seen as a collection of … smaller units’,90 by the familiar mimetic process of reducing a model text to a univocal idea. More interesting than these unsatisfactory (for present purposes) fragments is the song which the lovesick goatherd sings outside Amaryllis’ cave in Theocritus’ Third Idyll: Zppol´mgr, fja dµ t±m paqh´mom Eheke c÷lai, l÷k’ 1m weqs·m 2k½m dqºlom %muem7 " d’ )tak²mta ¢r Udem, ¤r 1l²mg, ¤r 1r bah»m ûkat’ 5qyta. t±m !c´kam w¡ l²mtir !p’ mhquor üce Lek²lpour 1r P¼kom7 " d³ B¸amtor 1m !cjo¸maisim 1jk¸mhg l²tgq " waq¸essa peq¸vqomor )kvesibo¸ar. t±m d³ jak±m Juh´qeiam 1m ¥qesi l/ka mole¼ym oqw ovtyr ®dymir 1p· pk´om %cace k¼ssar, ¦st’ oqd³ vh¸lemºm mim %teq lafo?o t¸hgti… fakyt¹r l³m 1l·m b t¹m %tqopom vpmom Qa¼ym 9mdul¸ym7 fak_ d´, v¸ka c¼mai, Yas¸yma, dr tºssym 1j¼qgsem, fs’ oq peuse?she, b´bakoi.

Theocritus 3.40 – 51

Hippomenes, when he wished to wed the maiden, took apples in his hands and accomplished the race; Atalanta saw, became crazed, and leapt into a deep passion. Melampous the seer also led the herd from Othrys to Pylos. In Bias’ arms lay the lovely mother of wise Alphesiboia. Was not the beautiful lady of Kythera so driven to madness by Adonis as he herded his flocks on the mountains that she does not put him away from her breast even in death? Lucky in my view is Endymion who slumbers in a sleep without release. Lucky too, dear Lady, I count Iasion, whose fate was such as you non-initiates will never learn.

We may imagine that the goatherd pauses for a ‘response’ after each three-verse section, and this effect is reinforced by the minimal links be88 Cf. Watson 1991: 96 – 7. 89 Cf. Huys 1991. Identifiable ‘Hesiodic’ elements of style in this poem are all from Theogony or WD, cf. Huys 1991: 86. 90 Rutherford 2000: 89.

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

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tween the sections.91 Of these exempla, however, Atalanta and Hippomenes (frr. 72 – 6),92 Melampous and Bias and (very likely) Alphesiboia (fr. 37), Adonis (fr. 139), and Endymion (fr. 10(a). 60 – 2) appeared in the Catalogue, and Iasion’s story was told of Eetion (fr. 177), who was later identified with Iasion,93 and there was another Iasion in the Catalogue (fr. 185.6). It is more likely that this is a ‘parody’ of contemporary poetry (very likely elegiac) than of Hesiod,94 and Theocritus has overloaded the ‘Hesiodic’ material as a way of laying bare – as parody does – the history and affiliation of the parodied form. We may also note that the story of Melampous and Bias appears in the Odyssean ‘Catalogue of Women’ (Od. 11. 281 – 97) and that of Demeter and Iasion in the catalogue of goddesses who slept with men in the Theogony (Theog. 969 – 74). Here then is a ‘mythical’ song with a personal frame of the kind that historians of Roman elegy seek, and a poem which in some ways may bring us closer to the Catalogue than do the so-called ‘catalogue poems’. It would be left to Ovid fully to realise the potential of the catalogue form in a changed poetic world.95

Bibliography Asquith, H. 2005. ‘From genealogy to Catalogue: the Hellenistic adaptation of the Hesiodic catalogue form’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 266 – 86 Bing, P. 1993. ‘The Bios- tradition and poets’ lives in Hellenistic poetry’ in R.M. Rosen and J. Farrell (eds.), Nomodeiktes. Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald (Michigan) 619 – 31 Butrica, J. L. 1996. ‘Hellenistic erotic elegy: the evidence of the papyri’ Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar 9: 297 – 322 Cairns, F. 1979. Tibullus: a Hellenistic poet at Rome, Cambridge Cameron, A. 1995. Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton Campbell, M. 1981. Echoes and Imitations of early Epic in Apollonius Rhodius, Leiden —1983. Studies in the Third Book of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica, Hildesheim —1991. Moschus, Europa, Hildesheim 91 Cf. my note on w¡ (v. 43). The simple connective d] in v. 46, which Meineke wished to delete, is a very common form in Hesiodic catalogues, cf., e. g., Theogony 930 – 62, Catalogue fr. 10(a). 92 Cf. Meliadò 2003. 93 Hellanicus, FGrHist 4 F23 (= fr. 23 Fowler). 94 Cf. Hunter 1999: 122 – 3, citing further bibliography. 95 Cf. Obbink 2004, Fletcher 2005.

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Casanova, A. 1969. ‘Il mito di Atteone nel Catalogo esiodeo’ Rivista di Filologia e Istruzione Classica 97: 31 – 46 Cingano, E. 2005. ‘A catalogue within a catalogue: Helen’s suitors in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (frr. 196 – 204)’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 118 – 52 Clauss, J. J. 1990. ‘Hellenistic imitations of Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr.1, 6 – 7 M.-W.’ Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 36: 129 – 40 —2000. ‘Cosmos without imperium: the Argonautic journey through time’ in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (eds.), Apollonius Rhodius (Leuven 2000) 11 – 32 Clay, J. S. 2005. ‘The beginning and end of the Catalogue of Women and its relation to Hesiod’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 25 – 34 Cuypers, M. P. 1997. Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica 2.1 – 310, Dissertation Leiden D’Alessio, G. B. 2005a. ‘The Megalai Ehoiai: a survey of the fragments’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 176 – 216 —2005b. ‘Ordered from the Catalogue: Pindar, Bacchylides, and Hesiodic genealogical poetry’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 217 – 38 Depew, M. 1994. ‘POxy 2509 and Callimachus’ Lavacrum Palladis: aQci|woio Di¹r jo}qg lec\koio’ Classical Quarterly 44: 310 – 26 Dräger, P. 1997. Untersuchungen zu den Frauenkatalogen Hesiods, Stuttgart Ellenberger, O. 1907. Quaestiones Hermesianacteae. Dissertation Giessen Erler, M. 1987. ‘Das Recht (DIJG) als Segensbringerin für die Polis. Die Wandlung eines Motivs von Hesiod zu Kallimachos’ Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 80: 22 – 36 Fakas, C. 2001. Der hellenistische Hesiod. Arats Phainomena und die Tradition der antike Lehrepik, Wiesbaden Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge Fletcher, R. 2005. ‘Or such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses …’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 299 – 319 Fuhrer, T. and Hunter, R. 2002. ‘Imaginary gods? Poetic theology in the Hymns of Callimachus’ in F. Montanari (ed.), Callimaco (Geneva-Vandoeuvres) 143 – 87 [= this volume 405 – 33] Gantz, T. 1993. Early Greek Myth, Baltimore Griffiths, A. 1996. ‘Customising Theocritus: Poems 13 and 24’ in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (eds.), Theocritus (Groningen) 101 – 18 Hopkinson, N. 1984. Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter, Cambridge —1988. A Hellenistic Anthology. Cambridge Hunter, R. 1991. ‘Greek and non-Greek in the Argonautica of Apollonius’ in S. Said (ed.), :KKGMISLOS. Quelques jalons pour une histoire de l’identit grecque (Strasbourg) 81 – 99 [= this volume 95 – 114]

26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry

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—1992. ‘Writing the god: form and meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena’ Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 29: 9 – 34 [= this volume 127 – 52] —1993. The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies, Cambridge —1999. Theocritus: a selection, Cambridge —2003a. ‘Reflecting on writing and culture: Theocritus and the style of cultural change’ in H. Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge) 213 – 34 [= this volume 434 – 56] —2003b. Theocritus. The Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Berkeley Huys, M. 1991. Le pome lgiaque hellnistique P.Brux.Inv.E 8934 et P.Sorb.Inv. 2254, Brussels Janko, R. 1984. ‘P.Oxy. 2509: Hesiod’s Catalogue on the death of Actaeon’ Phoenix 38: 299 – 307 Knox, P. E. 1993. ‘Philetas and Roman poetry’ Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar 7: 61 – 83 Kobiliri, P. 1998. A Stylistic Commentary on Hermesianax, Amsterdam Koenen, L. 1993. ‘The Ptolemaic king as a religious figure’ in A. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and A. Stewart (eds.), Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley) 25 – 115 Lacy, L. R. 1990. ‘Aktaion and a lost “Bath of Artemis”’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 110: 26 – 42 Levaniouk, O. 2000. ‘Aith n, Aithon, and Odysseus’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100: 25 – 51 Lloyd-Jones, H. 1990. Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek religion, and Miscellanea, Oxford Magnelli, E. 2002. Studi su Euforione, Rome Martin, R. 2005. ‘Pulp epic: the Catalogue and the Shield’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 153 – 75 Meliadò, C. 2003. ‘Un nuovo frammento esiodeo in uno scolio a Teocrito’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 145: 1 – 5. Meyer, D. 2001. ‘Apollonius as a hellenistic geographer’ in T. D. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden) 217 – 35 Obbink, D. 2004. ‘Vergil’s De pietate: from Ehoiae to allegory in Vergil, Philodemus and Ovid’, in Vergil, Philodemus and the Augustans, ed. D. Armstrong et al. (Austin) 175 – 209. Osborne, R. 2005. ‘Ordering women in Hesiod’s Catalogue’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 5 – 24 Reinsch-Werner, H. 1976. Callimachus hesiodicus, Berlin Rutherford, I. 2000. ‘Formulas, voice, and death in Ehoie-poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos, and the Odysseian Nekuia’ in M. Depew and D. Obbink (eds.), Matrices of Genre. Authors, Canons, and Society (Cambridge, MA) 81 – 96

502

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—2005. ‘Mestra at Athens: Hesiod fr. 43 and the poetics of panhellenism’ in R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge) 99 – 117 Rzach, A. 1902. Hesiodi Carmina. Accedit Homeri et Hesiodi Carmen, Leipzig Sbardella, L. 2000. Filita. Testimonianze e frammenti poetici. Rome Schwartz, J. 1960. Pseudo-Hesiodeia. Recherches sur la composition, la diffusion et la disparition ancienne d’oeuvres attribues  Hsiode, Leiden. Spanoudakis, K. 2001. ‘Poets and Telchines in Callimachus’ Aetia-prologue’ Mnemosyne 54: 425 – 41 —2002. Philitas of Cos. Leiden Watson, L. 1991. Arae. The Curse Poetry of Antiquity. Leeds West, M. L. 1966. Hesiod. Theogony, Oxford —1969. ‘Echoes and imitations of the Hesiodic poems’ Philologus 113: 1 – 9 —1974. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin/New York —1985. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Oxford —1986. ‘Further echoes and imitations of the Hesiodic poems’ Philologus 130: 1–7 —2002. ‘“Eumelos”: a Corinthian epic cycle?’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 122: 109 – 33 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U von. 1886. Isyllos von Epidauros, Berlin Wyss, B. 1936. Antimachi Colophonii Reliquiae, Berlin.

Addenda Interest in the Catalogue has been further promoted by the appearance of M. Hirschberger, Gynaikon Katalogos und Megalai Ehoiai. Ein Kommentar zu den Fragmenten zweier hesiodeischer Epen, Leipzig 2004, and G. W. Most, Hesiod. The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments, Cambridge MA 2007. n. 2 On Hesiod and the Aitia cf. further 30 below. p. 473 Several reviewers have rightly pointed out that the Catalogue was not ‘very much third of [the Hesiodic] three’ if the recovery of papyri is given serious weight. p. 498 – 9 On Theocritus 3 and Hesiod cf. now A.-T. Cozzoli, ‘Modalità di ricezione dell’epica arcaica in età ellenistica: l’Idillio III di Teocrito, Melampo e la Melampodia’ QUCC 86 (2007) 55 – 75.

27. The prologue of the Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’)* The Periodos to Nicomedes (henceforth PN) 1 is a periegetic account of the world in ‘comic’ iambic trimeters, addressed to a King Nicomedes of Bithynia, either Nicomedes II Epiphanes whose reign lasted from 149 BC for an unknown number of years or his son, Nicomedes III Euergetes.2 The prologue of this work raises important questions of literary history, criticism, and patronage, many of which we simply cannot answer because we do not have sufficient evidence from this crucial transitional period of later Hellenistic poetry. The purpose of the present paper is to open up this interesting text for further discussion; I am conscious that certain important aspects of the text receive hardly any treatment here.

1. Comic Clarity The opening verses identify the addressee and assert the chief hallmarks and virtues of comedy to be brevity allied to proper detail, clarity, and psuchagogia: p²mtym !macjaiºtatom B jylyid¸a, heiºtate basikeO Mijºlgder, toOt’ 5wei t¹ ja· bqaw´yr 6jasta ja· vq²feim sav_r

* 1

2

M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker (eds.), Beyond the Canon (Groningen 2006) 123 – 40 The standard text is Marcotte (2000). Korenjak (2003a) offers a Greek text based on Marcotte (for divergences cf. also Korenjak [2003b]), together with a German translation and a brief Introduction and notes. The recent monograph of Boshnakov (2004) argues that the author was in fact Semos of Delos, who is thus to be dated rather later than is usual, and discusses the sources for the author’s account of Pontic geography. For the date and identity of the addressee cf. Bianchetti (1990: 23 – 35), Marcotte (2000: 7 – 16), Boshnakov (2004: 4 – 6, 70 – 78). For a brief survey of the relevant kings cf. Der Neue Pauly s.v. Nikomedes 4 – 6.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

ja· xuwacyce?m p²mta t¹m rci/ jqit¶m.

Periodos to Nicomedes 1 – 4

The most crucial virtue of all in comedy, most divine King Nicomedes, is to explain everything concisely and clearly and to win over (? entertain) every healthy judge.

There is some obvious irony in the prologue’s repeated stress on its own brevity (cf. also vv. 7, 13 – 15, 69 – 74, 91) and that of the work which it introduces, but it is precisely the prologues of comedy which seem most in the poet’s mind. Thus, for example, the very ‘factual’ prologues of Tyche in Menander’s Aspis, of Auxilium in Plautus’ Cistellaria (= Menander, Synaristosai), or the Lar in Plautus’ Aulularia (from Menander?) would seem excellent examples of what the PN has in mind. The stress on brevity and clarity is in fact something of a topos of the Plautine prologue (cf., e. g., Plaut. Aul. 1, Capt. 53, Cist. 155, Men. 6, Trin. 4), and one which forms the humorous background to such performances as Mercury’s deliberate verbosity in the prologue to the Amphitruo (note especially the drawn-out formalities of vv.1 – 16). So too, the chattiness of Pan who opens Menander’s Dyskolos ought perhaps to be understood against an audience expectation of ‘brisk, no-nonsense’ prologising deities, or at least ones which claim this virtue. Pan in fact concludes his account of the plot with a version of the same dichotomy between t± jev\kaia (‘the main points’) 3 and their detailed working-out which we find later in the PN prologue: taOt’ 1st· t± jev²kaia, t± jah’ 5jasta d³ exesh’] 1±m bo¼kgshe – bouk¶hgte d´.

Menander, Dyskolos 45 – 6

These are the main points – how they work out in detail [you will see] if you wish to – and please do wish! to¼tym d’ fsa l³m eusgl² t’ 1st· ja· sav/ 1p· jevaka¸ou sumtel½m 1jh¶solai, fsa d’ 1st·m aqt_m oq sav_r 1cmysl´ma, b jat± l´qor taOt’ 1najqib¾sei kºcor.

Periodos to Nicomedes 69 – 72

3

For this idea in ancient criticism cf. the report that Zenodotus athetised the description of Achilles’ shield because he thought that the jevakai¾dgr pqo´jhesir was sufficient (schol. A, Iliad 18.483a).

27. The prologue of the Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’)

505

What is well known and clear I will set out concisely, paying attention only to the main point, but things which are not clearly known will be explained in careful detail.

It is clearly within the same framework of motifs that we should set the well-known criticism of prologising lajqokºcoi heo¸ by a very good specimen of the type (perhaps Dionysus himself) in a fragmentary comic prologue preserved on papyrus (Adesp. 1008 K-A).4 PN (and perhaps Apollodorus before it) is therefore in touch with comedy itself, not just with critical theory.5 So too, the language of ‘judging’ in v. 4 takes us (in part) to the world of dramatic festivals and the Hellenistic Artists of Dionysus, who carried Attic comedy all over the Greek world; in other words, to the world of performance. It is, however, most unlikely that the PN was (literally) performed before the king; the ‘judge’ here is also a reader, a ‘critic’ of literature (cf. further below). The language of the opening verses is in fact poised between ‘live performance’ and reading, between practice and theory, between the theatrical experience of comedy and its reception through private reading, recitation, and critical discussion; so too, as we shall see, the author’s ‘brief meeting and conversation’ (6 – 7) with the king is similarly situated between different models of patronage, some of which play with (fictions of) face-to-face encounter between patron and ‘performer’.6 The use of the language of speech to describe what the written word ‘says’ is, of course, as common in ancient texts as it is in our own society, but it is here given a new and literal importance. The stress on the brevity of the encounter between author and king picks up, of course, the comic virtues of which we have just heard, but it may also remind us in this context of Horace’s assurance to Augustus that he will not delay the princeps long: cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus, res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes, legibus emendes, in publica commoda peccem, si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Caesar. Horace, Epistles 2.1.1 – 4

4 5 6

Recent discussion in Del Corno (1999). For brevity and clarity as hallmarks of comedy in literary theory cf., e. g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On imitation 2 fr. II (II p. 207 U-R = IX, 2, 10 Aujac). Cf. further below on Horace, Satires 1.6.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

Since you carry by yourself so many and such heavy burdens – protecting the Italian state by arms, embellishing her with morals, improving her by laws – I would harm the public good if I were to keep you long with my talk, Caesar.

Verse 4 of the Epistle to Augustus is, I think, usually taken to mean, ‘if I were to waste your time with a long poem’, but the Periodos might make us wonder whether the meaning is not rather ‘if I were to waste your time with a long introduction’; cf. PN 11 – 16: boukºlemor owm soi pq_tom 1jh´shai sav_r t¹m !pokocisl¹m t/r fkgr sumt²neyr, aQt_ doh/mai t/i pqoejh´sei kºcom lµ pok¼m7 1lo· c±q jq¸metai kajymij_r peq· lec²kym 1k²wista pqacl²tym k´ceim. 5sti d’ $ cq²vy toiaOta.

I first wish to set out clearly for you an account of my whole work, and thus I ask to be allowed a few words of introduction. I have decided, in the Laconian manner, to speak very briefly about large matters. The substance of my writing is as follows.

Here the author requests the chance for a brief ‘oral’ introduction to what he has written for a reception through reading.7 sermo ‘conversation’ (Epistles 2.1.4) is, of course, also the word Horace uses for his ‘pedestrian’, though hexameter, Satires, which – or so he argues in Satires 1.4 – have very clear affiliations with comedy. In that poem, Horace recalls the critical view, which many have wished to trace back to Theophrastus, that comedy is not ‘poetry’ because it differs from ordinary spoken discourse only in the use of metre, and he uses this analogy to suggest that, when writing satire, he himself is not a poet. The author of PN also wishes to converse (diakec/mai, v.7) with his patron, but – unlike Horace – he does so in the metre which famously most resembles ‘prose’ (Arist. Rhet. 3.1404a31 – 2, 1408b34 – 5, Strabo 1.2.6 etc.); moreover, as we shall see, many aspects of the prologue of the work conspire to suggest that this is not a ‘poem’ and that the use of metre is certainly not to be taken as a sign that works of this kind are poetry. 7

It is tempting to see in the strategies of PN and Horace a conventional understanding that the patron was in fact only expected to read the introduction of a work addressed to him. The necessary brevity of any preliminary remarks is, of course, a familiar topos of many literary genres, cf., e. g., ‘Letter of Aristeas’ 8 ‘so as not to be annoyingly garrulous by stretching out a long proem …’, Diodorus Siculus 1.4.6.

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507

The Periodos in fact helps to fill in crucial areas of the Greek background against which the programmatic elements of Horace’s hexameter works are to be seen. Like those works of Horace, the prologue of the PN also takes us into the world of Hellenistic literary criticism. The virtues of comedy to which the opening verses point suggest not merely the virtues which comedy claimed for itself but also some of the standard !qeta· kºcou (or k]neyr) of Hellenistic criticism: :kkgmislºr, sav¶meia, sumtol¸a, pq´pom, jatasjeu¶ (cf. Diogenes Laertius 7.59). The list goes back to Theophrastus,8 but sumtol_a seems to be a later addition under Stoic influence, and here we might wonder, as we shall again, how much the opening verses owe to Apollodorus of Athens, whose Chronika are the explicit model for the PN (vv. 16 – 49) and in whose work Stoic influence has long been detected; the PN itself declares Apollodorus a pupil of Diogenes (of Babylon) ‘the Stoic’ (v. 20),9 who is in fact regularly taken as the source for the list of ‘virtues of speech’ given in Diogenes Laertius 7.59 ( = Diogenes of Babylon fr. 24 von Arnim).10 Be that as it may, it is clear from Philodemus’ discussion in On Poems 5 that sumtol_a as a poetic quality was the subject of lively Hellenistic debate (cf. cols. VI-VII Mangoni);11 one of the views which Philodemus rebuts in Book 5 saw good poetry as ‘the composition (sunthesis) which clearly and concisely (sav_r ja· sumt|lyr) makes clear the underlying thought while preserving the poetic character’ (col. XXXI.8 – 10 Mangoni), and this indeed is likely to be ‘indebted to the Stoics’,12 as indeed the whole collection of views attacked by Philodemus has a Stoic colouring. !macjai|tatom in the opening verse of PN seems also to catch some of the flavour of these debates, on to which Philodemus opens a window, about the ‘necessary’ and ‘optional’ characteristics of poetry (cf. col. VI.11 – 12, 21 on what is the pq_tom

8 Cf. Stroux (1912). 9 Philodemus seems (the text is very broken) to associate Apollodorus, not with Diogenes of Babylon, but with Panaetius, cf. Dorandi (1994) col. LXIX, with pp. 29, 170 – 171. In col. LIII there is (?) another ‘Apoll[…] of Athens’ who (with Panaetius) was a pupil of Antipater of Tarsus. 10 Cf. Asmis (1992: 403 n. 47). 11 Recent discussion and bibliography by Fantuzzi in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 454 – 5. There is a translation of On Poems 5 by David Armstrong in Obbink (1995: 255 – 269). 12 Asmis (1992: 406).

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ja· 1k²wistom requirement, cols. VII.1 – 5 on what is ‘best’, XII.25 on

what is ‘necessary’). The stress in the prologue on the combination of usefulness (¡vek¸a) and pleasure (t]qxir) that the work will provide (vv. 8 – 10, 92 – 3) recalls the critic Neoptolemus’ view, as cited by Philodemus (On Poems 5.XVI Mangoni), that the ‘perfect poet’ combines psuchagogia with B t_m !jouºmtym ¡v´kgsir ja· wqgsilokoc¸a (cf. Horace, Ars Poetica 333 – 4).13 The use of xuwacyce?m in v. 4 has naturally led Marcotte (2000: 26) and others to see here a simple compromise between Eratosthenes’ famous rejection of the ‘factual’ basis of poetry, which was nothing but psuchagogia (Strabo 1.1.10, 1.2.3), and more optimistic views of poetry’s didactic possibilities.14 The matter may, however, be rather more nuanced than that. In the literary debates for which Philodemus is now an important witness, psuchagogia is a fundamental quality of all poetry and rhetoric, but how it operates is a fiercely contested issue. The word and its cognates are, of course, often used of the entrancing effect of poetry on mass audiences, but it is also clear that the nature of psuchagogia was in fact by no means agreed. Thus, much of what survives of On Poems 1 is taken up by Philodemus’ insistence against ‘the euphonists’ that psuchagogia works through the meaning, not just the sound, of the verse and that it is (at least in part) a rational activity (cf., e. g., cols. 109.9 – 11, 151, 166 Janko).15 Moreover, it is also clear that the nature of the audience involved was a crucial element in such debates. Thus Philodemus appears to see true psuchagogia as operative ‘with logos’ on the souls of the educated (oR 1jpaideuºlemoi, Tract. D, fr. 19.1 – 5 Nardelli, cf. fr. 20 Nardelli), and different theories held that good poetry could ‘move the educated’ (On Poems 5, col. XXXVI.2 – 6 Mangoni) or that the best poetry was that which ‘exercised psuchagogia on the masses’ (Tract. D, fr.18.7 – 9 Nardelli). Where does the claim that the psuchagogia of good comedy acts upon ‘every healthy judge’ (PN 4) fit in this discourse? It is, of course, the ‘healthy’ man whose judgements about, say, sense perceptions (or indeed anything else) one would trust (cf. Plato, 13 The text of Philodemus is uncertain here (I adopt Mangoni’s text), but the general sense is not in doubt. 14 For other expressions of the Eratosthenic view cf. Janko (2000: 147 – 8) and for its background cf., e. g., Halliwell (2002: 269 n. 19). 15 Cf., e. g., Schächter (1927); Nardelli (1983: 115 – 116); Mangoni (1993: 319).

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Theaetetus 159c-d, 167a-b, Aristotle, EN 3.1113a22 – 31, 10.1173b20 – 5 etc.), but it is here tempting to refer the health of the judge to the health of his psuche. Psychic health is a familiar theme of the philosophical tradition descending from Socrates, who Plato makes wish that, when he faces his ‘judge’ in the Underworld, he will be able to reveal a psuche which is ¢r rciest²tg, ‘in as healthy a state as possible’ (Plato, Gorgias 526d4 – 5); the Stoics too expressed the need for a ‘healthy soul’ (cf., e. g., SVF III frr. 197, 278, 471). The rather remarkable expression in PN, which is clearly (if indirectly) encomiastic of Nicomedes, should, I think, be set both within this context and within the more purely literary discussions of the nature of the audience for poetry. The ‘judge’ whose approval is to be won will inevitably be both educated and in good moral health. We ought perhaps here remember Aristotle’s discussion of the different modes of jesting, as exemplified by ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ comedies, and how these modes reflect upon the character and education both of those who make the jests and of those to whom they appeal (EN 4.1127b33 – 1128b9, cf. Horace, Satires 1.4.78 – 106). The apparent implication of Aristotle’s discussion, that ‘new comedies’ appeal to the eleutherios and the pepaideumenos (4.1128a19 – 25), has an obvious resonance for the claims in the PN about the virtues of comedy and hence of the PN itself.

2. Didactic clarity The author of PN adduces as his model Apollodorus’ chronographic work16 in trimeters which has brought ‘immortal glory’ to King Attalos to whom it was dedicated (48 – 9), a parallel the significance of which Nicomedes will immediately grasp, though the author later spells it out for him (106 – 8). Apollodorus is not named, but allusively described:17

16 Cf. Jacoby (1902); id. FGrHist 244 F1 – 87. Jacoby (1902: 60 – 74) is a valuable survey of the iambic ‘didactic’ tradition. For the history of the discussion of the identity of PN’s ‘Attic scholar’ cf. Boshnakov (2004: 10 – 19); Boshnakov himself (2004: 27 – 31) argues that the author did not in fact know the scholar’s name, for he had never seen a complete copy of the text bearing the name. 17 Marcotte (2000: 43 – 46) very tentatively suggests that Apollodorus himself is the author of PN, but this is (frankly) hard to believe (cf. Korenjak (2003a: 12), Boshnakov (2004: 25, 43 – 53)), and what little metrical evidence can be

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t_m ûAttij_m tir cmgs¸ym te vikokºcym, cecom½r !joustµr Dioc´mour toO StyijoO, sumeswokaj½r d³ pok»m ûAqist²qwyi wqºmom jtk.

Periodos to Nicomedes 19 – 21

… one of the genuine Attic scholars, who had been a pupil of Diogenes the Stoic and had studied for a long time with Aristarchus …

The practice of alluding to poetic predecessors by geographic circumlocutions (the ‘man of Chios’ style) is of course very common, but here we might first rather think of the practice of some hexameter ‘didactic’ poets of referring to great predecessors and models by circumlocution: Empedocles on Pythagoras (Empedocles fr. 129 D-K) and the imitation of that passage in Lucretius’ praise of Epicurus (Graius homo, DRN 1.66) are the best known examples:18 Gm d´ tir 1m je¸moisim !mµq peqi¾sia eQd½r pamto¸ym te l²kista sov_m 1pi¶qamor 5qcym7 dr dµ l¶jistom pqap¸dym 1jt¶sato pkoOtom, bppºte c±q p²s,sim aq´naito pqap¸dessim, Ne?’ f ce t_m emtym p²mtym ke¼ssesjem 6jastom ja¸ te d´j’ !mhq¾pym ja¸ t’ eUjosim aQ¾messim.

Empedocles fr. 129 D-K19

And there was among them a man of surpassing knowledge, master especially of all kinds of wise works, who had acquired the utmost wealth of understanding: for whenever he reached out with all his understanding, easily he saw each of all the things that are, in ten and even twenty generations of men. (trans. Kirk-Raven-Schofield) humana ante oculos foede cum uita iaceret in terris oppressa graui sub religione, quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans, primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra; quem neque fama deum nec fulmina nec minitanti murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis acrem inritat animi uirtutem, effringere ut arta naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret. ergo uiuida uis animi peruicit, et extra processit longe flammantia moenia mundi brought to bear on the question certainly does not point in that direction, cf. Jacoby (1902: 64 – 65); West (1982: 160). 18 Cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 228 – 9. 19 I use the text adopted by Kirk-Raven-Schofield (1983: 218 – 19).

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atque omne immensum peragrauit mente animoque etc. Lucretius, DRN 1.62-74 When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, it was a man of Greece who dared first to stand forth to meet her: him neither the stories of the gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to be the first to break through the close-set bolts upon the doors of nature. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed on far beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole … (trans. Bailey)

Two particular aspects of this tradition are noteworthy. Both Pythagoras and Epicurus are praised in what may seem rather hyperbolic terms, but in both cases the fervent praise of them as ‘supermen’ with more than human intellectual gifts is general and universalising. Nothing could be more different from the explicit naming of Apollodorus’ teachers and intellectual affiliations. Moreover, the fact that Apollodorus is a philologos marks him as a scholar, not a unique visionary like Pythagoras and Epicurus or even a poet (cf. the philologoi, perhaps rather than philosophoi, summoned by ‘Hipponax’ in Callimachus, Iambus 1), and raises the expectation that his work was in prose; that the work was in fact metrical comes as a pointed surprise in vv. 33 – 5. There is, of course, also an ad hominem argument in play here. The mention of Diogenes of Babylon and Aristarchus as the teachers of the unnamed philologos flatters Nicomedes’ cultural grasp, just as the fact that the philologos was ‘Attic’ by both birth and by the genuineness of his learning20 foreshadows the conceptual division of the world into (cultured) Greek and (uncultured) barbarian which is to inform the PN;21 Nicomedes may be assured that paying attention to a work which follows in Apollodorus’ footsteps will do nothing but good for his Hellenic credentials.22 Secondly, both Pythagoras and Epicurus are praised for the superhuman reach of their understanding: Pythagoras’ grasp covered ‘ten and twenty generations of men’, and Epicurus’ mind roamed far beyond the limits of our world. 20 For the implications of cm^sior cf. Jacoby on FGrHist 244 T2, Marcotte (2000: 151). 21 For this shaping of the PN cf. Meyer (1998: 74 – 81). 22 Marcotte (2000: 41 – 2) sees a kind of test for Nicomedes: someone with his cultural claims must be able to identify the philologos.

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With Apollodorus, however, the great reach is rather that of his scholastic enterprise: a brief account of all that was worthy of note in 1040 years. Apollodorus, then, is for the PN ‘the great forerunner’, but, unlike Pythagoras and Epicurus, he is a near contemporary and what he has taught our author is a literary form, not a way of understanding the world. Here, again, the PN marks out its own generic space by using a didactic, poetic tradition in a quite new way, precisely to differentiate itself from that tradition. Although we have a reasonable idea of the nature of Apollodorus’ Chronika, there are very few surviving fragments – other than passages of Philodemus concerned with succession in the philosophical schools – which are long enough to allow any real appreciation of Apollodorus’ undertaking. One of the lengthier excerpts (fr. 32 Jacoby) concerns Empedocles; the text is preserved in Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Empedocles and has suffered various forms of adaptation to the prose in which it is now embedded, but the general run is clear. I cite the text offered by Marcovich in his Teubner of Diogenes: Gm l³m L´tymor uRºr, eQr d³ Houq¸our aqt¹m meyst· pamtek_r 1jtisl´mour CkaOjor 1khe?m vgsim. eWh’ rpob²r7 oR d’ RstoqoOmter ¢r peveuc½r oUjohem eQr t±r Suqajo¼sar let’ 1je¸mym 1pok´lei pq¹r t±r ûAh¶mar !cmoe?m tek´yr lo· dojoOsim7 C c±q oqj´t’ Gm C pamtek_r rpeqcecgqaj¾r, fpeq oq va¸metai.

Diogenes Laertius 8.52 (= FGrHist 244 F32a)

He was Meton’s son, and Glaukos says that he went to the newly founded colony of Thurii … Those who claim that he was exiled from his home, went to Syracuse, and fought with the Syracusans against Athens seem to me completely wrong. For at that time he was either no longer alive or very old indeed, and this does not seem to have been the case.

Among features of interest for PN are the citation of a named source (cf. PN 214, 370, 412, 565, fr. 15 Marcotte) and the historiographical, one might almost say ‘Herodotean’ (or ‘Timaean’ or ‘Polybian’), manner in which predecessors’ views are rejected. It is a mode which PN uses against Herodotus himself: b d³ gGqºdotor 5oijem !cmoe?m k´cym 1j t/r Jikij¸ar p´mte rp²qweim Bleq_m

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eqhe?am bdºm, ¢r aqt¹r Rstoqe? cq²vym jtk.

Periodos to Nicomedes fr. 25.11 – 13 Marcotte

Herodotus seems to show his ignorance when he says that the direct journey from Cilicia lasts five days; his words are …

In manner, then, PN clearly aligns itself with the historiographic and geographic traditions, as can be most clearly seen perhaps in its many differences from the later hexameter Periegesis of Dionysius, which by contrast cites itself very clearly within an epic and didactic poetic tradition.23 Nowhere is this difference more striking than in the citational and mimetic technique of PN. Certain of PN’s literary techniques are obviously familiar from high poetry: Apollodorus is alluded to with a version of one of his own verses,24 and the proem of the Odyssey is reworked in a familiar manner (vv. 101 – 2).25 Moreover, as I have already noted, the prologue very likely echoes Apollodorus in many places beyond the (very probably) verbatim quotation in vv. 37 – 44. We might perhaps compare the prologue of the somewhat later iambic Description of Greece by Dionysius, son of Calliphon,26 which claims to be ‘a brief and metrical account of things said at greater length by old prose-writers’ (vv. 8 – 10), but which also seems clearly to echo PN. 27 Nevertheless, the initial list of PN’s sources (vv. 112 – 127), all of them prose, the practice of explicitly naming sources within the body of the work (cf. above), and the division of his own research labours as heat^r, Vstyq and ‘traveller’ 23 Cf. Hunter (2004). 24 V.21 sumeswokaj½r d³ pok»m ûAqist²qwyi wqºmom (describing Apollodorus) is usually taken as a borrowing from Apollodorus, FGrHist 244 F58.3 Rjamºm t’ ûAqist²qwyi sumeswokaj½r wqºmom (about Melanthios of Rhodes), and it would be a familiar poetic technique to echo a poet’s own words to describe that poet; Marcotte (2000: 42 – 43), however, reverses the relationship. Cf. further below. 25 On the figure of Odysseus here and in other geographical poems cf. Hunter (2004: 228 – 229). 26 Cf. Marcotte (1990). The author’s name is given in an initial acrostic. 27 Vv. 18 – 19 seem indebted to the simile of PN 37 – 44; note also v. 21 tµm pqaclate_am (cf. PN 49), v. 22 spoud\sar (cf. PN 6), v. 23 sulvikol²hgsom (cf. PN 10). It is possible that the opening verses which (ironically, as we may think) seek to distance the author from those who ‘appropriate the work of others’ is a direct glance at PN. Dionysius presumably means something more sinister than normal mimetic techniques involving the ‘appropriation’ of material (cf. Brink (1971: 208 – 209)).

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(vv. 128 – 36) all very clearly align PN with prose traditions (including scholarly and scientific traditions).28 The PN was composed at a time when the intertextual practices of poets (and indeed of writers more generally) were increasingly theorised – one of the views which Philodemus attacks in On Poems 5 held that good poetry consisted in ‘the good imitation (t¹ ew lelil/shai) of the poems of Homer and those handed down like him’ (col. XXXIII.25 – 6 Mangoni) 29 – and the ‘prosaic’ citational practice of PN must thus be seen as having clear generic significance. Callimachus may occasionally cite prose sources of his poetic materials or even, as in the notorious case of Xenomedes of Ceos, summarise part of their work,30 and didactic poets, as for example Aratus and Nicander, freely versified prose sources, but it would, I think, be very difficult to parallel in Hellenistic poetry the open and verbatim quotation of an extensive (and obviously noteworthy) passage of a (not very distant) model in order to justify one’s own literary practice. ‘Epitomes’ and verbatim quotations are, perhaps paradoxically, not in fact ‘mimetic’ in any literary-critical sense of that term. According to PN, Apollodorus chose to present his Chronika in metre because metre was an aid to taking in a great diversity of material and retaining it in the memory and because the combination of history and rhythmical expression (Rstoq¸a ja· k´nir 5lletqor) was productive of charis (vv. 33 – 44); he chose comic trimeters for the sake of their sapheneia (v. 34).31 Like comedy itself, Apollodorus took the material of his illustrative simile ‘from life’ (v. 36): ¦speq c±q eU tir !makab½m h´koi v´qeim n¼kym kekul´mym pk/hor, oqj #m eqweq_r

28 Cf. Effe (1977: 185 – 187); Marcotte (2000: 22). With the division into different kinds of knowledge we should compare not merely historiographical traditions, but also scientific ones. In the dedicatory epistle to Ptolemy (? Auletes) prefaced to Apollonius of Citium’s Commentary on Hippocrates, On Dislocated Joints, Apollonius distinguishes between his own developments and what he had seen done when he was a pupil. 29 Cf. Asmis (1992: 408 – 410). 30 Cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004: 63 – 66); Krevans (2004: 178 – 181). 31 One element of that sapheneia, though of course not one on which the ancients explicitly comment, is the freedom to ‘say what one wants to say’, including the use of metrically difficult proper names, which the freedom of resolution in the comic trimeter allows, cf. Korenjak (2003a: 13). We may contrast the extremely strict trimeter of that most !sav]r of poems, the Alexandra of Lycophron, cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004: 440) [= 2002: 522], with bibliography.

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to¼tym jqat/sai, dedel´mym d³ Naid¸yr, ovty kekul´mgm k´nim !makabe?m taw» oqj 5sti, t_i l´tqyi d³ peqieikgll´mgm 5stim jataswe?m eqsjºpyr ja· pistij_r7 5wei c±q 1pitq´wousam 1m 2aut/i w²qim, ftam Rstoq¸a ja· k´nir 5lletqor pkej/i.

Periodos to Nicomedes 37 – 44

As when someone wants to pick up and carry a large number of loose bits of wood, he will have problems, but will do it easily if the wood is tied together, so it is not possible quickly to grab hold of words which are untied, but words which are held together by metre can be grasped firmly and truly. Charm runs over the work which combines historical research and rhythmical language.

The origin of this simile lies in the use of vkg to denote the ‘material’ of a poetic composition32 and in a creative exploration of the ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ senses of !makalb\meim, and it illustrates a very interesting stage in the long ancient debate about the function and nature of poetry. Metre is here seen as something quite separable from subject matter, something which is, if you like, an ‘optional (though desirable) extra’ which binds the otherwise ‘untied’ material together, but in no way affects the nature of the material;33 despite the resultant w\qir (v. 43), metrical form carries with it no inevitable expectations of style or content (in particular, of course, there is no suggestion of fictional content). The evidence of Philodemus in particular has, as we have seen, made clear just how debated in Hellenistic poetics was the relation between form and content; thus, for example, Neoptolemus is attacked for ‘separating the composition of the style (B s¼mhesir t/r k´neyr) from the thoughts (t± diamo^lata)’ (On Poems 5, col. XIII.32-XIV.2 Mangoni). Nevertheless, we may be inclined rather to see in Apollodorus and PN a descendant of the Aristotelian views that the use of metre does not make a poet (Poetics 1447a28-b20, 1451b1 – 5) 34 and that metrical discourse is

32 Cf., e. g., Theocr. 17.9 – 10 (with Hunter [2003: 105]), Rispoli (1988: 76 – 105). 33 With the use of k}eim in this context cf. Horace’s soluere (Sat. 1.4.60). 34 For different aspects of the later history of this view cf. Horace, Satires 1.4 on comedy and satire (above p. 506), Petronius, Sat. 118.1 – 5 (Encolpius on the effort involved in becoming a real poet), and Plutarch, How to Study Poetry 16c on philosophical and didactic verses.

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easier to remember than the non-metrical (Rhetoric 3.1409a35-b8).35 Be that as it may, the apparent absence of any claim to stylistic elaboration strongly differentiates this text from the claims and practices of hexameter ‘didactic’ poets. One such text which shows us how the themes of Apollodorus and the PN could be used in different circumstances is Lucretius’ famous account of why he has written in verse (DRN 1.921 – 50, cf. 4.1 – 25).36 Lucretius aligns his work very clearly with the stylistic, not just (unlike the author of PN) the metrical, aspects of the high poetic form he has chosen, but like the PN, he too is conscious that he is writing magnis … de rebus (1.931 = 4.6, cf. PN 15 peq· lec²kym … pqacl²tym). His assertion that obscura de re tam lucida pango j carmina (1.933 – 4, 4.8 – 9) appeals (inter alia) to the same virtue of sav^meia which is so important to the PN (and, of course, to Epicurus);37 in particular we may here recall the PN’s division of its subject-matter and way of working:38 to¼tym d’ fsa l³m eusgl² t’ 1st· ja· sav/ 1p· jevaka¸ou sumtel½m 1jh¶solai, fsa d’ 1st·m aqt_m oq sav_r 1cmysl´ma, b jat± l´qor taOt’ 1najqib¾sei kºcor.

Periodos to Nicomedes 69 – 72

What is well known and clear I will set out concisely, paying attention only to the main point, but things which are not clearly known will be explained in careful detail.

If Lucretius claims to dip his poem musaeo … lepore (1.934, 4.9), PN claims 1pitq´wousa w²qir for itself as a result of the use of metre (PN 43); broadly speaking, we might say that the sweetening ‘honey’ of Lu35 It is noteworthy, though perhaps not more, that Aristotle observes that metrical speech is more easily remembered than t± w¼dgm (Rhet. 3.1409b7 – 8) and PN describes Apollodorus’ work as an epitome p²mtym … t_m w¼dgm eQqgl´mym (v. 32) immediately before discussing the mnemonic power of metre; whereas, however, Aristotle must mean ‘prose/speech without metre’, PN refers to ‘all that has been said at abundant length’. 36 There is a helpful survey and discussion of the themes of the Lucretian passage in Gale (1994: 136 – 151). 37 Cf., e. g., Diogenes Laertius 10.13. A stress on sav^meia might have passed from Aristarchus to Apollodorus, and thence to the PN. 38 The claim to be ‘making clear’ what is difficult and obscure is, of course, a topos of scientific and technical prose; cf. again (see n. 28 above) the introductory epistles to the three books of Apollonius of Citium’s Commentary on Hippocrates, On Dislocated Joints, and the closing words of that work.

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cretius’ style fulfils the same structural rôle as the PN claims for metre. If the purpose of using metre was mnemonic, to allow us to ‘hold on to’ the information of the PN, the Roman poet’s purpose in adopting these tactics is rather his wish to ‘hold Memmius’ (and our) minds on his verses’ (1.948 – 9, 4.23 – 4), and this surely (though the standard commentaries are strangely silent) evokes xuwacyc_a, which the PN also claims for itself. Lucretius avoids the potential charge that poetic xuwacyc_a is simply an irrational ‘enchantment’ by the repetition in different senses of ratio (1.943, 946, 948 = 4.18, 21, 23), and we have seen that PN too notes and avoids this danger (v.4). These similarities and differences between the rhetoric of Lucretius and that of the PN remind us that, in the phrase ‘didactic poetry’, the meaning of both words is up for grabs.

3. How to approach a patron 1c½ d’ !jo¼ym diºti t_m mOm basik´ym lºmor basikijµm wqgstºtgta pqosv´qeir, pe?qam 1peh¼lgs’ aqt¹r 1p’ 1lautoO kabe?m ja· paqacem´shai ja· t¸ basike¼r 1st’ Qde?m, Vm’ aqt¹r 2t´qoir p²kim !pacc´kkeim 5wy.

Periodos to Nicomedes 50 – 54

When I heard that you are the only contemporary king who displays the virtue of a king, I decided to test this myself and to come to see what a king is, so that I might be able to report back to others.

What Apollodorus’ Chronika has done for Attalos, the PN will do for Nicomedes (cf. also vv. 106 – 8), just as Theocritus offers to do for his potential patrons what Homer and Simonides did for theirs (Idyll 16). Not, of course, that Nicomedes is currently an unknown: far from it, as vv. 50 – 1 (above) make clear. The king’s reputation has gone before him and so the poet decides to try his luck; Nicomedes’ hearth is already a common refuge for vikolahe?r, and this too bodes well. First, however, like Xenophon before joining Cyrus or Jason faced with the Argonautic expedition, the poet consults Apollo’s oracle at Didyma, which encourages him in his undertaking (vv. 55 – 64); that the poet comes with the god’s blessing carries a clear message for Nicomedes, and this, together with the wish of v. 64 (he¹r d³ sumev²xaito t/i pqoaiq´sei), functions as the invocation to the god of poetry (cf. 60 lousgc]tgm) at the opening of a poem (we may be – strangely – reminded

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of Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.22). Here too, the PN does not set its face against all poetic traditions. The author decides (apparently) not merely to dedicate his poem to Nicomedes, but to come himself in person t¸ basike¼r 1st’ Qde?m, ‘to see what a king is’, and then to carry the news back to others. The issue was of the greatest cultural and philosophical interest, but this author, who likes to do his own research (vv. 128 – 36), is not to be satisfied with merely reading the extensive corpus of Hellenistic kingship treatises; he will come to see for himself.39 Nevertheless, the plan of investigation is at least, as Marcotte (2000: 153) puts it, ‘étrange’.40 The implication may be that, just as Apollodorus was at home in the company of kings, so – in order to complete the analogy – our poet too must broaden his experience. The author of PN presents himself unsummoned, unlike Horace in Satires 1.6, another poet who speaks only briefly (pauca) to a great man before leaving him in peace: nulla etenim mihi te fors obtulit: optimus olim Vergilius, post hunc Varius, dixere quid essem. ut ueni coram, singultim pauca locutus (infans namque pudor prohibebat plura profari) non ego me claro natum patre, non ego circum me Satureiano uectari rura caballo, sed quod eram narro. respondes, ut tuus est mos, pauca: abeo, et reuocas nono post mense iubesque esse in amicorum numero. Horace, Satires 1.6.54 – 62 It was no chance that put you in my way: at one time Virgil, best of men, and then Varius told you about me. When I came into your presence, I stammered a few words through my gulps, because shyness gripped my tongue and prevented me from saying any more: I told you not that I am the son of a distinguished father, not that I ride around my country estate on a Tarentine pony, but I told you what I am. In reply you said little, as is your custom; I went away, and nine months later you called me back and bid me be counted among your friends.

As both his supporters and Horace himself tell Maecenas ‘what Horace is’ (vv. 55, 60), so our poet wishes to learn ‘what a king [in the true sense] is’, and where better to do so than from the only contemporary 39 I am grateful to Ruth Scodel for focusing my attention on this point. 40 Marcotte’s very tentative suggestion ja¸ ti basikeO s’ eWt’ Qde?m (cf. Men. Perik. 159 – 160 Sandbach, S. Radt, ZPE 81 [1990] 8) offers very defective sense.

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basileus who demonstrates basikijµ wqgstºtgr. Like Aeschinas in Theocritus 14 (vv. 60 – 5), the poet of PN will present himself to the king after having heard of his ‘virtues’. Aeschinas will go to serve in Egypt as a mercenary soldier, whereas the poet of PN (apparently) travels to an audience with the king. Both literary constructions may, however, be ways of figuring a relationship between poet and (real or hoped-for) patron, rather than ‘literally true’ undertakings;41 Gorgo and Praxinoa’s trip to the palace in Idyll 15 is clearly another such literary imaging of the poet-patron relationship. This is not (necessarily) to say that we are to understand Satires 1.6.54 – 62 as a way of figuring Maecenas’ first encounter with Horace’s poetry, rather than with the poet himself, though an account of ‘what Horace is’ (v. 55) is not a bad description of the autobiographical mode of these ‘conversations’, in which Horace himself is a prime example of ‘how one should live’ (cf. vv. 65 – 70).42 Nevertheless, we are clearly here in the realm of the same fiction of personal encounter as we find in PN, a fiction which, as we have seen, hangs together with language which situates the poem between oral presentation and written reception. Horace too frames the opening sermo of Book 1 between a conversational gambit (qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo …) and a reference to written texts (vv. 120 – 1). Another narrative of patronage may also be helpful here. In Virgil’s First Eclogue Tityrus tells of a young god who created for him the otium within which he can make poetry (6 – 10). In order to ‘know’ (cognoscere) this god, Tityrus travelled to Rome and it was there that he found his protecting ‘patron’,43 tam praesens, as Nicomedes is an 1pivam´stator !qwgc´tgr … vik²cahºr te pqost²tgr for the Periodos (vv. 103 – 4).44 As Marcotte notes,45 !qwgc´tgr suggests a similarity between Nicomedes and Apollo, the !qwgc´tgr par excellence,46 and links the ‘mapping’ of the world which the poet will undertake with the real business 41 For ideas of patronage in Theocritus cf. Hunter (2003: 24 – 45). 42 For other aspects of these verses cf. Gowers (2003: 78 – 79). 43 It will, I hope, be clear that this analysis of Tityrus’ ‘patronage narrative’ does not depend on any particular view of Virgil’s patronage at the time of the Eclogues. 44 It is hard, despite Marcotte’s caution, not to see here a reference to Nicomedes II Epiphanes, though the title of the son who succeeded him, Euergetes, would of course also have appealed to men looking for a patron. Boshnakov (2004: 70 – 78) favours a date c. 120, under Euergetes. 45 Marcotte (2000: 13 – 15, 108). 46 The term is, of course, by no means restricted to Apollo, cf. LSJ s.v.

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of exploration and the founding of colonies. The association between the royal house and the god has, in any case, already been firmly established in vv. 55 – 64. So too, as is well understood, Tityrus’ iuuenis is shaped as an oracular Apollo who gives his blessing to what the enquiring shepherd himself wished to do and to the reason why he had come to Rome; as the poet of PN is encouraged by Apollo’s logos to present himself at Nicomedes’ hearth (vv. 62 – 3), which seems to mean (cf. above) to write poetry addressed to Nicomedes, so Tityrus is encouraged by the Apolline iuuenis to carry on with his country pursuits, i. e. to write pastoral poetry,47 one aspect of which will be, in the words of PN, ‘carrying report [of the patron] back to others’ (PN 54). Virgil’s use of the motif of Tityrus, his creation and representative, ‘travelling to the city’ may have derived its generic authority from a kind of creative fusion between the Syracusan women of Idyll 15, creations and representatives of the Syracusan poet, who travel to the royal palace, and the Simichidas of Idyll 7 whose initiatory trip and encounter with the (?) divine is ‘away from the city’ (v. 2), but PN allows us to see how Virgil has also shaped a flexible set of ideas about the social position of poetry in the late Hellenistic world and a flexible set of images for figuring the encounter of poet and patron. The body of material shared between PN and both Lucretius and Virgil reminds us (inter alia) how little we have of Greek poetry (in the broadest sense) of the late second and early first centuries. In considering the Greek background of the Latin poetry of the late Republic and early Empire we tend instinctively to return to the high period of Hellenistic, and particularly Alexandrian, poetry; the instinct continues to serve us well, but the Periodos to Nicomedes issues a warning which literary historians neglect at their peril.

Bibliography Asmis, E. 1992. “An Epicurean survey of poetic theories (Philodemus On Poems 5, cols. 26 – 36)”. Classical Quarterly 42, 395 – 415 Bianchetti, S. 1990. Pkyt± ja· poqeut±. Sulle tracce di una periegesi anonima. Florence Boshnakov, K. 2004. Pseudo-Skymnos (Semos von Delos?). Stuttgart Brink, C. O. 1971. Horace on Poetry, The ‘Ars Poetica’. Cambridge 47 Cf. Wright (1983: 114 – 120); for Virgil’s Theocritean model for his use of Apollo cf. Hunter (2001: 160 – 161).

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Del Corno, D. 1999. “Come si deve fare una commedia: programmi e polemiche nel teatro ateniese”. F. Conca (ed.), Ricordando Raffaele Cantarella (Milan) 119 – 35 Dorandi, T. 1994. Filodemo. Storia dei filosofi. La Sto da Zenone a Panezio (PHerc. 1018). Leiden Effe, B. 1977. Dichtung und Lehre. Munich Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry. Cambridge Gale, M. R. 1994. Myth and Poetry in Lucretius. Cambridge Gowers, E. 2003. “Fragments of autobiography in Horace Satires 1” Classical Antiquity 22, 55 – 91 Halliwell, S. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Princeton Hunter, R. 2001. “Virgil and Theocritus: a note on the reception of the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus” Seminari Romani 4, 159 – 63 [= this volume 378 – 83] —2003. Theocritus, Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Berkeley —2004. “The Periegesis of Dionysius and the traditions of Hellenistic poetry” Revue des tudes Anciennes 106, 217 – 31 [= this volume 718 – 34] Jacoby, F. 1902. Apollodors Chronik. Berlin Janko, R. 2000. Philodemus On Poems, Book 1. Oxford Kirk, G. S., Raven, J. E., Schofield, M. 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd ed. Cambridge Korenjak, M. 2003a. Die Welt-Rundreise eines anonymen griechischen Autors (“Pseudo-Skymnos”). Hildesheim —2003b. “Textkritische und interpretatorische Bemerkungen zu Pseudo-Skymnos” Philologus 147, 226 – 37 Krevans, N. 2004. “Callimachus and the pedestrian Muse”. M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker (eds.), Callimachus II (Leuven) 173 – 83 Mangoni, C. 1993. Filodemo. Il quinto libro della Poetica. Naples Marcotte, D. 1990. Le pome gographique de Dionysios, fils de Calliphon. Louvain —2000. Gographes Grecs, Tome I. Paris Meyer, D. 1998. “Zur Funktion geographischer Darstellungen bei Apollonios Rhodios und in der ‘Perihegese an Nikomedes’ (Ps.-Skymnos)”. Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption (Trier) 61 – 81 Nardelli, M. L. 1983. Due trattati filodemei . Naples [ = F. Sbordone (ed.), Ricerche sui Papiri Ercolanesi, Vol. IV] Obbink, D. (ed.) 1995. Philodemus and Poetry. New York/Oxford Rispoli, G. 1988. Lo spazio del verisimile. Naples Schächter, R. 1927. “Philodemus quid de psychagogia docuerit”. Eos 30: 170 – 173 Stroux, J. 1912. De Theophrasti virtutibus dicendi, Pars I. Dissertation Leipzig West, M. L. 1982. Greek Metre. Oxford Wright, J. R. G. 1983. “Virgil’s pastoral programme: Theocritus, Callimachus and Eclogue 1”. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 29, 107 – 60.

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Addendum There is a discussion of Boshnakov 2004, Marcotte 2000 and Korenjak 2003a by G. Shipley in CR 57 (2007) 348 – 54.

28. Sweet nothings – Callimachus fr. 1.9 – 12 revisited* Callimachus’ ‘Reply to the Telchines’ can still provide surprises, or rather we are constantly reminded that we still have things to learn about it.1 Thus, for example, the very recent restoration of more of Sappho’s poem on old age has shed some new light from an unexpected quarter on the poetic voice which Callimachus adopted in ‘the Reply’.2 No papyrological observation on Callimachus of recent years, however, has been more disturbing than Guido Bastianini’s demonstration that aR jat± keptºm cannot be read at the end of v. 11 of fr. 1.3 The influence of the now discredited reading on the modern discussion of both Greek and Roman ‘Callimacheanism’ would itself make for a small book (if not indeed for a l]ca bibk_om), but Bastianini’s demonstration does at least prompt a new look at these verses, even if only in a spirit of ever increasing despair. It should not be necessary to say that what follows suppresses the doubts, caveats and footnotes which arise at every turn. ……] ..qegm [ak]icºstiwor7 !kk± jah´kjei ….pok» tµm lajqµm elpmia Heslovºqor to?m d³] duo?m L¸lmeqlor fti ckuj¼r, a[ ] B lec²kg d’ oqj 1d¸dane cum¶. Callimachus fr. 1.9 – 124 * 1

2 3 4

G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), Callimaco: cent’anni di papiri (Florence 2006) 119 – 31 I am grateful to Kathryn Gutzwiller and to audiences in Florence and Thessaloniki for their comments on versions of this paper, which is here reproduced substantially as delivered in Florence; I am conscious that the footnotes do not do justice to the bibliography on this subject. I am grateful also to Claudio Meliadò for sending me part of his unpublished dissertation, Frammenti papiracei di poesia esametrica adespota (Catania 2003). Gronewald-Daniel 2004a and 2004b; cf. also West 2005. Bastianini 1996. Massimilla’s text (adapted). For bibliographical surveys of the problems in these verses cf. Wimmel 1960: 87 – 92, Pretagostini 1984: 121 – 36, Massimilla 1996: 206 – 12, Allen 1993: 146 – 56, Asper 1997: 153 – 6.

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Interpretations of these tormented verses fall, of course, into two broad categories: either the long poems of Mimnermus and Philitas are compared unfavourably with shorter poems or the poetry of a third poet (? Antimachus) is compared unfavourably with the poetry of Mimnermus and Philitas. In this paper I want to concentrate on the first of these interpretations, not necessarily because I am wedded to it, but rather because I think it allows us to tease out aspects of these verses and their later reception at Rome to which sufficient attention has not always been paid. To the second interpretation I will return briefly at the end. I hope that a non-controversial statement of the broad outlines of the first view (deriving from the Florentine scholia) would go something like this. In vv. 9 – 10 Callimachus compares ‘the lajq¶ (i. e.? tall) …’ unfavourably with ‘the bountiful Thesmophoros’ (an epithet of Demeter); here we probably have a comparison between two poems of Philitas of Cos, of which one is, almost certainly, the Demeter (an epyllion on Coan legend and antiquities), but the identity of the other remains a matter for conjecture. In vv. 11 – 12 Callimachus claims that one of the poems of Mimnermus, the seventh century elegist from Colophon, a poem here described as ‘the lec\kg woman’, demonstrated that poet’s sweetness (ckuj}tgr), whereas another did not. What that ‘other’ was, of course, is now – after Bastianini – even more uncertain than before. Luppe’s aV c’ "paka¸ toi/ m¶mier has won a certain favour,5 and it is at least worth reminding ourselves that Ovid’s poetry is sung by tenerae puellae (Amores 3.1.27) and that the poems themselves are teneri … Amores (Amores 3.1.69, cf. 3.15.1), but I have to say that, to my inexpert eye, the reading of the papyrus still looks anything but secure. The most important explanatory parallel for these verses of the Aitia-prologue has long since been identified in the long fragment of Hermesianax which catalogues the great literary and philosophical lovers of the past: L¸lmeqlor d´, t¹m Bd»m dr evqeto pokk¹m !matk±r Gwom ja· lakajoO pmeOl’ !p¹ pemtal´tqou, ja¸eto l³m MammoOr …

Hermesianax fr. 7. 35 – 7 Powell

There is a clear implication in Hermesianax’s text that the poets previously mentioned in the catalogue of poetic lovers – Orpheus, Musaeus, 5

Luppe 1997.

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Hesiod, and Homer – all wrote hexameters (only), and Mimnermus is indeed one of the competing ‘first inventors’ of elegiacs in a scholarly tradition attested later from Didymus (p. 387 Schmidt).6 When Hermesianax describes the pentameter as lakaj|m ‘soft’, he refers to elegiac couplets as a whole, not just to the pentameter (as also does Callimachus in Iambus 13, fr. 203.31), though it is the pentameter which gives the couplet its ‘softness’; the Roman elegists too habitually call their verses mollis. 7 Theorists did in fact point to and seek to explain the weakness and collapse of the pentameter,8 a collapse which Ovid famously suggests is like the post-emissive flaccidity of a penis and/or (temporary) impotence (Amores 1.1.17 – 18, 27).9 Be that as it may, Hermesianax’s critical language for elegiacs – Bd¼r ‘sweet, pleasant’ and lakajºr ‘soft’ – is very close to Callimachus’ description of at least one of the poems (or collections) of Mimnermus, the ‘first inventor’ of elegy – ckuj¼r ‘sweet’ and (if Luppe were right) perhaps also "pakºr ‘soft’ – and this parallelism has perhaps even now not been sufficiently exploited. The Aitia prologue is clearly intended to be a provocatively impressionistic ‘reply’ to (real or constructed) criticism. Thus, lajq¶m is not the ‘natural’ opposite of elpmior : elpmior is in fact even found with the sense ‘well-fed, large’ (LSJ s.v. II), and there are famous scenes of both the Homeric and the Callimachean hymns to Demeter in which the goddess’ great stature is crucial (cf. HDem. 188 – 9, 275 – 80, Call. h.Dem. 58). Whatever stood at the end of v.11 may well thus not have been an obvious antonym of lec\kg ( just as it is dangerous to assume that ‘girls’ stood at the head of v. 12 to contrast with ‘woman’). Of a literary work, the most natural meaning – if that is not too tendentious a phrase – of l]car is ‘long’, and this resonates well against akic|stiwor. 6 7 8

9

The others are Archilochus and Callinus. For other authorities for this notice cf. De Stefani 1920: 451 – 2. Cf., e. g., Owen on Ovid, Tristia 2.307, Fedeli on Propertius. 1.7.19, Kennedy 1993: 30 – 4. For the Roman critical terminology of elegy in general cf. e. g., Cairns 1979: 3 – 6. The same passage of Didymus links the nature of the pentameter to the supposed original use of elegiacs in lamentation, ‘they joined the pentameter to the hexameter; the former cannot keep pace with the power of the first line, but seems to expire and die away together with the fortune of the deceased’. Cf. Brink on Hor. AP 75 – 8. Brink notes that ‘Didymus’ description of the metre is highly metaphorical and a poetic source is not by any means excluded’. Cf. Kennedy 1993: 59.

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Of a woman the most natural meaning of lec\kg is ‘tall’, and tallness was an admired female characteristic (women in visions and dreams tend to be lec\kai), which is normally accompanied, at least in literature, by physical beauty.10 The pattern is seen, for example, in a fragment of the fourth-century comic poet Theophilus, where an enthusiastic lover describes the girl he loves as j²kkei jak/r, lec´hei lec²kgr, t´wmgi sov/r (Theophilus fr. 12.7 K-A). Here, then, is a lec\kg girl who is also, in the best Callimachean manner, ‘skilled in techne’. Thus although lec\kg in ‘the Reply’ may be thought to draw some negative resonance from the context which follows it, we cannot simply assume that it is unremittingly pejorative in v. 12. Moreover, the use of lajq|m in v. 15 to mean ‘far, from afar’ and of l]ca in v. 19 to mean ‘loudly’ is clearly intended to cloud, rather than clarify, the argument. The direction of much critical discussion has in fact been determined by the gloss of the preserved Florentine scholia on these verses: ‘he compares the poems of Mimnermus of Colophon and Philitas of Cos which have few verses, saying that they are better than their11 poems of many verses’. The scholiast had of course more of the text than we do – which is of course not to say that his interpretation must be right – but all we can say is that Callimachus appears to say that one poem (or set of poems) ‘taught that Mimnermus was ckuj}r, whereas “the tall woman” did not’; we may think that the Florentine scholiast is only drawing a natural conclusion, but there are grounds for pause here. ‘Sweetness’ may of course be ascribed to any poet or poem,12 but the fact that Hermesianax seems to apply Bd¼r and lakajºm programmatically to elegiacs may suggest that Callimachus’ use of ckuj}r carries a particular charge: Callimachus does not, after all, use words thoughtlessly, and lekiwq|teqai in v. 16 would seem both to repeat and to vary the point. Theocritus associates Bd¼r with his bucolic verse (cf. 1.1, 65, 7.89 etc.),13 with reference to the sound of the pan-pipes, and Hermesianax’s terminology perhaps has a particular reference to the aulos which was traditionally associated with elegiacs. It is also worth noting that, in describing how different types of poetic compo10 Cf., e. g., Verdenius 1949, Fordyce on Catullus 86.4. 11 Cf. McNamee 1982. 12 Meliadò (see n. 1) 16 n. 47 calls attention to an interesting passage of Eustathius, where Homer is praised for being both akicºstiwor and ckuj¼r (Hom. 369.43, p.583 van der Valk). 13 Cf. Hunter 1999: 70 – 1.

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sition should be read out, Dionysius Thrax prescribes a kicuq_r manner for the reading of t± 1kece?a (Ars 2 = I 6 Uhlig). Following the scholia to Dionysius, modern scholars usually explain this as a reference to the association of elegy with mourning, which was traditionally ‘shrill’; in this passage, however, which concerns reading jat± diastok¶m, Dionysius moves, as we would say, by genre: tragedy, comedy, t± 1kece?a, epic hexameters, lyric, and then finally oWjtoi (to be read rveil´myr ja· coeq_r). We ought, therefore, perhaps not limit t± 1kece?a to ‘lamentation in elegiacs’, but rather understand the term more broadly of elegiac composition,14 and it is difficult then not to recall Callimachus’ kic»m Gwom j t]tticor (fr. 1.29 – 30), as the sound with which he wishes his elegiacs to be associated; kicuq_r will, therefore, be something like ‘clearly, sharply’.15 Be that as it may, ckuj}tgr ‘sweetness’ was later an identifiable feature of rhetorical prose, to be found in poetic quotation, in mythical material, and in ‘sweet and pleasant’ subject-matter; as we do not know to which poems Callimachus is referring, it is hard (to say the least) to pursue the enquiry much further, but some speculation may be in order. The treatise On Style ascribed to Demetrius (?? first century BC) has a very interesting discussion of the nature and sources of w\qir or w\qiter in literature; w\qir is not the same as ‘sweetness’, but the two qualities are often ascribed to the same writers and styles.16 If we set this discussion alongside the account of rhetorical ckuj}tgr in the (?) late second-century AD treatise of Hermogenes,17 who also treats ‘pleasantness’ (Bd}tgr) as essentially the same thing, we find that Sappho is the primary example of both qualities, both derive from descriptions of natural beauty and, above all, eros, and both can be found in myth and poetic diction, particularly epithets. ‘Demetrius’ may thus help us to reconstruct what a discussion of poetic sweetness might have looked like. The discussion begins by considering the interaction of style, for which the poet is solely responsible, and subject-matter, which may or may not possess desirable qualities such as w\qir :

14 Cf. further West 1974: 3 – 4. 15 Cf. LSJ s.v. For further relevant passages on the sound of poetry cf. Krevans 1993: 157 – 8. 16 For the links between w\qir in Demetrius and Hellenistic poetry cf. also Gutzwiller 1998. 17 Cf. Hunter 1983: 92 – 8, Wooten 1987: 75 – 81.

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t± l³m owm eUdg t_m waq¸tym tos²de ja· toi²de. eQs·m d³ aR l³m 1m to?r pq²clasi w²qiter, oXom mulva?oi j/poi, rl´maioi, 5qyter, fkg B SapvoOr po¸gsir. t± c±q toiaOta, j#m rp¹ gIpp¾majtor k´cgtai, waq¸emt² 1sti, ja· aqt¹ Rkaq¹m t¹ pq÷cla 1n 2autoO7 oqde·r c±q #m rl´maiom %idoi aqcifºlemor, oqd³ t¹m 7Eqyta ûEqim»m poi¶seiem t/i 2qlgme¸ai C c¸camta, oqd³ t¹ cek÷m jka¸eim. ¦ste B l´m tir 1m pq²clasi w²qir 1st¸, t± d³ ja· B k´nir poe? 1piwaqit¾teqa, oXom ¢r d’ fte Pamdaq´ou jo¼qg, wkyqg·r !gd¾m, jak¹m !e¸dgisim, 5aqor m´om Rstal´moio. 1mtaOha c±q ja· B !gd½m w²qiem aqm¸hiom, ja· t¹ 5aq v¼sei w²qiem, pok» d³ 1pijejºslgtai t/i 2qlgme¸ai, ja· 5sti waqi´steqa t_i te “wkyqg¸r” ja· t_i “Pamdaq´ou jo¼qg” eQpe?m 1p· eqmihor, ûpeq toO poigtoO Udi² 1sti.

Grace of style has, therefore, a certain number of forms and characteristics. The grace may reside in the subject-matter, if it is the gardens of the Nymphs, wedding-songs, love-stories, all of Sappho’s poetry. Such things possess grace, even if spoken by Hipponax, and the subject-matter has a pleasantness of its own. No one would sing a wedding-song while angry, and no style can turn Eros into a Fury or a Giant or laughter into tears. While grace is sometimes inherent in the subject-matter itself, diction may lend added grace, as in (Odyssey 19.518 – 19) As the daughter of Pandareos, the pale nightingale, Sings her lovely song at the very beginning of spring. This refers to the nightingale which is a graceful bird, and to spring which is naturally graceful, but the passage is much embellished by the style; the passage acquires added grace from the description ‘pale’18 and ‘daughter of Pandareos’ applied to the bird. These are the contributions of the poet himself. (‘Demetrius’, On Style 132 – 3; trans. W. Rhys Roberts, adapted) 19

Demetrius’ example of w\qir arising from both subject and style is the nightingale of Odyssey 19.518 – 19; the nightingale is of course a very common image for both poet and poetry,20 but Demetrius’ choice of example takes on new colour in the light of Callimachus’ ‘Reply’ (cf. v. 16 with Housman’s supplement). We should also remember in this connection that it is exactly this Homeric passage which Catullus uses in Poem 65 to mark his future poetry as ‘sad’, i. e. (very probably) ele18 The actual meaning of wkyqg¸r is disputed. 19 I print Rhys Roberts’ text; variations from the transmitted text do not affect the present discussion. 20 Cf. Massimilla 1996: 215.

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giac and, specifically, elegiac in the manner of Callimachus (carmina Battiadae).21 If Demetrius ascribes w\qir to Homer’s ‘personification’ of the bird, Hermogenes would certainly have regarded such mythical material as ckuj}r. Moreover, as Demetrius makes clear, some themes are intrinsically waq_emta. Demetrius opposes Eros (the waq_em subject par excellence) to a Fury (9qim}r) and a giant (c_car); is it just with hindsight that we might be tempted to stick ‘generic’ labels on these figures? A Fury is a quintessential tragic figure (cf., e. g., Aristophanes, Ploutos 423), and often used to symbolise the dramatic genre, as the giants were the subject of theogonic poetry and are a standard example in Roman elegy of the subject-matter of the grandiose poetry which the elegists reject (cf. Propertius 2.1.19 – 20, 39 – 40, picking up the giant Enceladus at Call. fr. 1.36). As is clear from what follows, w\qir for Demetrius can readily be found in epic (and doubtless tragedy), but Demetrius’ choice of examples remains suggestive for (at least) Roman poetry. As for Callimachus, his complaint about old age weighing upon him like Sicily upon Enceladus echoes, of course, the opening of a famous chorus of Euripides’ Heracles, which has had a major influence upon the opening sequences of the Aitia:22 " meºtar loi v¸kom7 %whor d³ t¹ c/qar aQe· baq¼teqom AUtmar sjop´kym 1p· jqat· je?tai, bkev²qym sjoteim¹m v²or 1pijak¼xam.

Euripides, Heracles Furens 637 – 41

In adding an explicit reference to the giant buried beneath Etna to the complaint of the Euripidean chorus, Callimachus has integrated this imagery into a traditional opposition, which assumes considerable importance also in the Hymn to Delos, between Apolline order and harmony and the disorder represented by the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy (cf., e. g., Pindar, Pythian 1.1 – 20, Euripides, Ion 205 – 18), a disorder which is also for Callimachus that of the grandiose poetry which he rejects (cf. Aristophanes, Frogs 825 cgceme? vus^lati of Aeschylus); however Apolline the poet would wish to be, ageing imposes an unbridge21 For further discussion and bibliography cf. Hunter 1992: 21 – 2, Wray 2001: 198 – 200. 22 Cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 73 – 4 with further bibliography.

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able distance from the ever-youthful god. As Apollo is so closely connected in Callimachus’ poetry with his poetic ideals, it is perhaps unsurprising that the subsequent tradition (at least) turned these two poles of Callimachus’ self-presentation – the Apolline and the suppressed giant – into a clear generic opposition between types of poetry. The consideration of Demetrius and Hermogenes could go further – it is, for example, clearly of some interest for Callimachus that Demetrius sees ‘brevity of expression’ (sumtol_a) 23 as productive of w\qir – but I hope it is clear that the Florentine scholiast’s interpretation of vv. 11 – 12 may be, at best, a misleading simplification. When Propertius famously tells Ponticus plus in amore ualet Mimnermi uersus Homero: / carmina mansuetus lenia [v.l. leuia] quaerit Amor (1.9.11 – 12), he reflects the tradition of Mimnermus as the ‘inventor’ of elegy and as a poet devoted to a mistress (‘Nanno’); he probably, however, also has this passage of the Aitia-prologue in mind,24 and what he is doing is drawing out the implications of Callimachus’ ckuj}r against a background both of his own agenda as a poet and of fairly widespread critical ideas, upon which I have here only touched.25 How much of this critical background is relevant to the interpretation of Callimachus may of course be debated, but recognising that Callimachus has in mind particularly ‘sweet’ qualities in one or more poems of Mimnermus allows us to see that ‘the tall/big woman’ need not be as pejorative as the Roman poets would sometimes lead us to believe. We can hardly doubt, given the rhetoric of the whole passage, that ‘the tall/big woman’ is here regarded as second of two, but Callimachus is above all concerned to construct an ancestry for his own style. In some poem or poems of Mimnermus he found a ‘sweetness’ which Hermesianax perhaps suggests was thought to be a particular characteristic of the elegiac couplet; on the interpretation of Callimachus’ verses which I have been exploring, this ‘sweetness’ was absent from another poem or poems apparently by the same poet. Roman poets took this distinction and created a generic edifice upon it. 23 For the critics’ ‘brevity’ and Hellenistic poetry cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 454 – 5. 24 Cf. Fedeli’s note ad loc., though Fedeli accepts – as many would not – the importance of Antimachus for the Callimachean verses. 25 It is, of course, tempting to adduce Luppe’s lenia in support of "paka¸ in Callimachus (and vice versa – Fedeli and others adduce the now discredited jat± keptºm in favour of lenia in Propertius).

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Let me return for a moment to questions of weight and size. In the weighing-scene of Aristophanes’ Frogs (vv. 1378 – 1410), which lies behind some of Callimachus’ set of contrasts in the ‘Reply’, the greater weight of Aeschylus’ verses resides (comically) in their relatively ‘heavy’ subject-matter (landscape v. a ‘flying’ ship, death v. airy Persuasion, a pile of chariots and corpses v. a single weapon).26 It is, however, already clear in this text that weight of subject-matter cannot be divorced from stylistic weight, here measured in terms of the huge size and obscurity of Aeschylus’ words (vv. 923 – 30, 1056 – 60). By the time of Callimachus, ‘weight’ was an integral part of the theory of styles. Moreover, theorists extended the concept of weight both ‘upwards’ from individual words and verses to whole poems (and then genres) 27 and ‘downwards’ from individual words to their constituent letters and syllables. The critics whose work has become known to us through Philodemus’ On Poems place a lot of emphasis upon ‘weight’ in all its manifestations; thus in one place we hear of a critical scheme involving ‘solider and bigger (le_fy) poems’ which require ‘fullness’ and ‘weight’ (1lbq¸heia); critical discourse of this kind must be one of the languages with which Callimachus plays in the ‘Reply’.28 In On Style ‘Demetrius’ borrows the terminology of oR lousijo¸ to discuss the matter: paq± d³ to?r lousijo?r k´ceta¸ ti emola ke?om, ja· 6teqom t¹ tqaw¼, ja· %kko eqpac´r, ja· %kk’ acjgqºm. ke?om l³m owm 1stim emola t¹ di± vymg´mtym C p²mtym C di± pkeiºmym, oXom AUar, tqaw» d³ oXom b´bqyjem7 ja· aqt¹ d³ toOto t¹ tqaw» emola jat± l¸lgsim 1nem¶mejtai 2autoO. eqpac³r d³ 1palvoteq¸fom ja· lelicl´mom Usyr to?r cq²llasim. t¹ d³ acjgq¹m 1m tqis¸, pk²tei, l¶jei, pk²slati, oXom bqomt± !mt· toO bqomt¶7 ja· c±q tqaw¼tgta 1j t/r pqot´qar sukkab/r 5wei, ja· 1j t/r deut´qar l/jor l³m di± tµm lajq²m, pkat¼tgta d³ di± t¹m Dyqislºm7 pkat´a kakoOsi c±q p²mta oR Dyqie?r.

Musicians are accustomed to speak of words as ‘smooth’, ‘rough’, ‘wellproportioned’, ‘weighty’. A smooth word is one which consists exclusively, or mainly, of vowels, e. g. Ai s [the name ‘Ajax’]. bebr ken [‘he/she/it dev26 On the meaning of jah]kjei in v. 9 of the ‘Reply’, I remain in an unproductive state of aporia, despite the attractive suggestion of Gargiulo 1992. 27 Of particular interest is the opposition in the preserved Life of Aeschylus (T 1 Radt) between the grandeur and ‘weight’ of the poetry of Aeschylus, the ‘epic tragedian’ par excellence, and t¹ sulpah³r keptºtgtor required by elegy (or epigram?). However this last phrase is interpreted and however indebted the whole analysis is to Aristophanes’ Frogs, it is noteworthy that this text seems to combine ‘lightness’ and a connection with mourning in its account of t¹ 1kece?om. 28 On Poems 5, VII 25 – 32 Mangoni, cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 71 – 2.

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oured’] is an instance of a rough word; and the very roughness of its formation is designed to imitate the action it describes. A well-proportioned word is one which partakes of both characters and shows a happy blending of various letters. Weight consists in three things: breadth, length, and how the word is shaped. bront [‘thunder’], rather than brontÞ, may serve as an example. This word derives roughness from the first syllable; and from the second it derives length owing to the long vowel, and breadth owing to the Doric form, the Dorians being accustomed to broaden all their vowels. (‘Demetrius’, On Style 176 – 7; trans. W. Rhys Roberts, adapted)

Despite Demetrius’ analysis,29 it is hard to believe that the ascription of ‘bulk’ (t¹ acjgqºm) to the word for ‘thunder’ has nothing to do with the word’s meaning, and Callimachus’ rejection of bqomt÷m30 may thus not merely be indebted to Aristophanes’ description of Aeschylus as the ‘loud-thunderer’ (1qibqel´tar, Frogs 814) and to a probably familiar association, best known to us from the ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ relief of Archelaos of Priene,31 between Zeus and Homer. The idea of the grandiose poet as a god involved in cosmic battle may in fact have had a wide critical currency. Philodemus quotes the following prescription for the poet from the (? late third – early second century BC) critic Andromenides: de? … lµ nemºstola lºmom 1jk´ceim, !kk± < ja·> j²kkista, j²kkista d’ eWmai t± t±r sukkab±r 5womta pokko?r cq²llasim 1spahgl´mar, ja· [eqg]w/ dq²nashai t¹ stºla ja· N¸pteim acj¾deir suk[kab±r] kalpqot\[tym vh|]ccym, !kk± kalpqºtatom eWmai t¹ k²bda, ja· c±q j²[kkistom j]a· toO kalpqo[t\tou] joquva?om eWmai ja· toO st¸kbeim, ¢r aUtiom toO vkoc¾dour 1m t/i diak´jtyi cimºlemom.

‘[the poet] must select (words) that are not only exotic to the mouth but most beautiful, and those are most beautiful which have their syllables densely woven with many letters, and the mouth grasps euphonious ones and hurls weighty (acj~deir) syllables of the most resplendent (kalpqot\tym) sounds; but lambda is the most resplendent, for it is most beautiful and chief among what is most resplendent and what gleams, as it is a cause of the flamboyant (t¹ vkoc_der) in language.’ (Philodemus, On Poems 1 181 Janko; trans. Janko) 32 29 On the affiliations of this analysis cf. Chiron 1993: 118. 30 The use of the infinitive brings Callimachus’ word very close to Demetrius’ long and broad Doric form. For ‘thunder and lightning’ in the description of rhetorical writers cf. O’Sullivan 1992: 107 – 12. 31 Cf. Hunter 2004: 235 – 6, with further bibliography. 32 See also 1 21 Janko.

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Here the poet is figured as Zeus hurling his blazing thunderbolts. Callimachus’ rejection of a ‘greatly sounding song’ (l´ca xov´ousa !oid¶) and the fact that both paw¼r and keptak´or suggest (inter alia) qualities of sound33 may suggest that one element of the critical mélange which Callimachus has constructed as ‘the opposition’ may be a forerunner of such ‘euphonist’ criticism, that is a criticism which emphasised the sound, rather then the verbal meaning, of poetry. I conclude with two issues, both of which may require further evidence before we can feel confident about the answer. First, in seeking to tease out some of the implications of Callimachus’ use of ckuj}r in the prologue to the Aitia, I started from what is still perhaps the dominant interpretation of vv. 9 – 12. A rival interpretation of the crucial verses has it, of course, that the short poems of Mimnermus and Philitas are there compared to the longer poem or poems of a third poet (Antimachus’ Lyde being the favoured option). The argument I have been tracing so far may perhaps suggest (and the matter should certainly not be put any more strongly than that) that the lec\kg cum^ at least was in hexameters, and hence, almost by definition, not glukeia; this is, of course, not a necessary conclusion, but nor – I think – is it just to be dismissed out of hand. As far as we know, Mimnermus did not write hexameters, and so the matters pursued in this paper may perhaps contribute something to the principal question which has driven discussion of this locus conclamatus. Finally, we can hardly doubt that Callimachus regarded both the ‘Reply’ and the Aitia which followed it as ‘sweet’.34 Indeed, it is tempting to recall the belief that the swan, just before its death, sang a mournful song (elegy?) which was also its sweetest utterance;35 it has often been thought that in the very fragmentary final two verses of what sur33 Cf., e. g., Krevans 1993. 34 It is obviously relevant both to the Aitia and to its reception at Rome that important elements of the critical language I have been tracing were also applied to the poetry of Hesiod, in deliberate counterpoint to the poetry of Homer. Most of the evidence is, of course, later than Callimachus, although he himself famously refers to Aratus’ taking of t¹ lekiwqºtatom of Hesiod’s verses (AP 9.507 = Epigram 27 Pf.). Dionysius of Halicarnassus counts Hesiod, along with Sappho, as an outstanding example of the ckavuq± k´nir (De comp. Verb. 23.9 = II 114.3 U-R, Dem. 40.11 = I 217.15 U-R) and in the De imitatione (2.1 = II 204.14 – 15 U-R) he notes that the hallmarks of Hesiod’s style are Bdom¶, amol²tym keiºtgr, and s¼mhesir 1llek¶r ; cf. also Velleius Paterculus 1.7.1, Quintilian 10.1.52. A full discussion of this cannot be pursued here. 35 For texts and bibliography cf. Nisbet and Hubbard on Horace, Odes 2.20.10.

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vives of the ‘Reply’ the (real or fictionally) ‘aged’ Callimachus did indeed compare himself to a swan.36 Be that as it may, we should still ask in what the ‘sweetness’ of the Aitia resides? 37 The first aition proper of the poem, though one that still has at least one foot in the prologue, is the ritual of the Charites (‘Graces’) on Paros, at the conclusion of which the poet (perhaps rather than the internal narrator) 38 asks the goddesses to wipe their oiled hands upon his elegies so that they will last many a year. Is this just because of a general and positive association of the Charites with the Muses and poetry, or is Callimachus thinking of specific qualities which the Charites can bestow and which critics would call w\qiter and/or ckuj}tgr ? This question is, I think, related to the reception of the Aitia at Rome, particularly in the poetry of Propertius. At least until the fourth book, Propertius offers us a very skewed view of the Aitia: Callimachus and Philitas are his principal models not solely because of their pre-eminence in elegy and learned poetry, but because they are also constructed as love-poets. In 3.3, for example, Propertius rewrites the dream of Callimachus as an initiation into love-poetry, thus retrospectively turning the Aitia into an erotic poem. What was the basis for this? This is now a very old problem, but I do not think that it has yet been satisfactorily answered.39 Are we dealing with a development which is purely internal to the programmatics of Latin poetry, a development in which Callimachus’ stylistic demands are now matched, as we have seen was regular in the critical tradition, by an equally ‘sweet’ and ‘graceful’ subject-matter,40 or did Callimachus himself show the way? How important was ‘Acontius and Cydippe’? Propertius’ interpretation of fr. 1.11 – 12 suggests the directions in which discussion of Callimachus, the Mimnermus rediuiuus, might well have gone: how strong, then, was the control which Callimachus himself exercised on his own Nachleben?

36 Cf. Massimilla 1996: 230 – 1. 37 One critic who has at least recognised that the question is worth asking is Lyne 1984: 18 – 19, but his answer lies in an aesthetics of ‘art for art’s sake’. 38 For discussion and bibliography cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 52 – 4. 39 The bibliography is, of course, huge; Puelma 1982 remains an important contribution. 40 Cf., e. g., Hutchinson 1988: 279 – 80, Cameron 1995: 473 – 4.

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Bibliography Allen, A. 1993. The Fragments of Mimnermus, Stuttgart Asper, M. 1997. Onomata allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos, Stuttgart Bastianini, G. 1996. ‘JATA KEPTOM in Callimaco (fr. 1.11 Pfeiffer)’ in M.S. Funghi (ed.), jdo· dif¶sior, le vie della ricerca. Studi in onore di Fr. Adorno (Florence) 69 – 80 Cairns, F. 1979. Tibullus: a Hellenistic Poet at Rome, Cambridge Cameron, A. 1005. Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton Chiron, P. 1993. Dmtrios, Du Style, Paris De Stefani, A. 1920. Etymologicum Gudianum II, Leipzig Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge Gargiulo, T. 1992. ‘L’immagine della bilancia in Callimaco, fr.1, 9 – 10 Pfeiffer’ Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 42: 123 – 8 Gronewald, M. and Daniel R. W. 2004a. ‘Ein neuer Sappho-Papyrus’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 147: 1 – 8 —2004b. ‘Nachtrag zum neuen Sappho-Papyrus’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 149: 1 – 4 Gutzwiller, K. 1998. ‘Meleager: from epigrammatist to Menippean’ in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (eds.), Genre in Hellenistic Poetry (Groningen) 81 – 93 Hunter, R. 1983. A Study of Daphnis & Chloe, Cambridge —1992. ‘Writing the god: form and meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena’ Materiali e Discussioni 29: 9 – 34 [= this volume 127 – 52] —1999. Theocritus, A Selection, Cambridge —2004. ‘Homer and Greek literature’ in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge) 235 – 53 Hutchinson, G. 1988. Hellenistic Poetry, Oxford Kennedy, D. 1993. The Arts of Love, Cambridge Krevans, N. 1993. ‘Fighting against Antimachus: the Lyde and the Aetia reconsidered’ in in M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit, G. C. Wakker (eds.), Callimachus (Groningen) 149 – 60 Luppe, W. 1997. ‘Kallimachos, Aitien-Prolog V. 7 – 12’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 115 (1997) 50 – 4 Lyne, R. O. A. M. 1984. ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Callimachus, and l’art pour l’art’ Materiali e Discussioni 12: 9 – 34 Massimilla, G. 1996. Callimaco, Aitia, libri primo e secondo, Pisa McNamee, K. 1982. ‘The long and short of Callimachus Aetia fr. 1.9 – 12’ Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 19: 83 – 6 O’Sullivan, N. 1992. Alcidamas, Aristophanes and the Beginnings of Greek Stylistic Theory, Stuttgart Pretagostini, R. 1984. Ricerche sulla poesia alessandrina, Urbino Puelma, M. 1982. ‘Die Aitien des Kallimachos als Vorbild der römischen Amores-Elegie’ Museum Helveticum 39: 221 – 46, 285 – 304 [ = M. Puelma, Labor et Lima (Basel 1995) 360 – 407]

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Verdenius, W. J. 1949. ‘JAKKOS JAI LECEHOS’ Mnemosyne 2: 294 – 8 West, M. L. 1974. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin/New York —2005. ‘The new Sappho’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 151: 1 – 9 Wimmel, W. 1960. Kallimachos in Rom, Wiesbaden Wooten, C.W. 1987. Hermogenes’ On Types of Style, Chapel Hill Wray, D. 2001. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood, Cambridge.

Addendum n. 34 On ancient accounts of Hesiod’s style cf. ‘Hesiod’s style: towards an ancient analysis’ in F. Montanari, A. Rengakos and C. Tsagalis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hesiod (Leiden, forthcoming).

29. The Reputation of Callimachus* This paper1 concerns three related moments, stretching (probably) from the early imperial period to late antiquity, in the reception of Callimachus; all attest to the importance attributed to this figure, but also to the very different ways in which that importance was negotiated. Callimachus and his poetry were awkward presences.

1. Sebgqiamºr … t± l³m owm t_m %kkym poigt_m !ped´weto letq¸yr, t¹m d³ Jakk¸lawom eQr we?qar kab¾m oqj 5stim fte oq jat´sjypte t¹m K¸bum poigt¶m7 !mi¾lemor d³ 1p· l÷kkom, Edg pokkawoO ja· t_i bibk¸yi pqos´ptue.

‘Severianus did not mind the works of other poets, but whenever he took up Callimachus, he only had words of mockery for the Libyan poet. When he was particularly upset, his habit was even to spit on the book.’ (Suda s 180 Adler = Callimachus T 85 Pfeiffer)

Under the lemma of ‘Severianus’ the Suda preserves extracts about this man from Damascius’ Philosophical History, also known as the Life of Isidorus (i. e. the 5th century neo-Platonist from Alexandria).2 Severianus came from a distinguished family and was to have a very active, if ultimately unsuccessful career (Damascius’ judgement on him is that he never allowed sufficient time for reflection before acting). As happens to many, Severianus wanted to be a philosopher, but his father rather wanted him to make money by being a lawyer. As soon as his father * 1

2

D. Obbink and R. Rutherford (eds.), Culture in Pieces (Oxford, forthcoming) I am much indebted to Doreen Innes, Luigi Lehnus, Dirk Obbink, Lucia Prauscello, Richard Rutherford and an Oxford audience for helpful discussion and corrections; the structure and style of the oral presentation has been preserved as far aspossible. It is a very great pleasure to be able to offer this paper to Peter Parsons, as an utterly inadequate return for all that his work has taught me. Cf. Athanassiadi 1999; Zintzen 1967 may also be consulted. On the problem of the title and nature of the work cf. Athanassiadi 1999: 39 – 42, 63 – 4. The passage discussed here is fr. 108 Athanassiadi.

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died, however, Severianus seized the chance for a long hoped-for trip to study with Proclus in Athens; he was on the point of setting out when he was stopped by a dream. He dreamed that he was seated on the ridge of a mountain and that he was driving the mountain as though it was a chariot; something seems to have gone wrong with the text at this point, but it would seem that fate led him in this curious position up towards another life, one which ‘seemed to be lofty and grand, but was rough (tqaw}r) and impossible to achieve ( !m¶mutor)’. Severianus thus abandoned philosophy and, as Damascius says, ‘blessed quietness’ ( !pqaclos¼mg eqda¸lym), and threw himself instead into political life. He was an ambitious and stern man, did not like coming second, and (inevitably) ended on the wrong side; an apparently rather bloody career as a judge came back in the end to haunt him. Severianus was, however, also an extremely learned man and supporter of literary study; Damascius ranks him among the top three jqitijo_ of his lifetime (fr. 106b Athanassiadi = 276 Zintzen). Certainly, his dream has a rich literary pedigree, befitting a man of wide reading in classical literature. The trail begins with the Hesiodic path to Arete, which is ‘long and steep and rough (tqgw}r) at first’ (WD 290 – 1), and continues through any number of ‘life choices’ passages, many descending of course from Prodicus’ ‘Heracles at the crossroads’, one of the foundational texts of sophistic self-identity.3 We may, however, be reminded particularly of Lucian’s Dream (32 Macleod) in which our hero has to choose, not between philosophy and politics, but between Paideia and Sculpture. Paideia takes Lycinus in her chariot for a bird’s eye view of the world and of the fame that he will win; when he returns from the trip he is dressed in the fine robes of the powerful. Severianus’ dream may have lacked the irony of Lucian’s self-presentation, but it itself may have been a Proclan way of setting Proclus aside. In his Life of Proclus Marinus relates how Athena, the guardian goddess of Byzantium and goddess of wisdom, appeared to the young Proclus and turned him from the pursuit of rhetoric to that of philosophy (chap. 6, 9);4 this is not quite a ‘life choices’ dream on the Prodican model, but it is not far away, and Severianus might have borrowed from it to dignify his choice of the non-contemplative life.

3 4

Cf. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 482 – 3. Cf. Saffey-Segonds 2001: 79.

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Severianus, then, was a man whose judgement, in both legal and literary matters, was to be feared. Why did he spit on Callimachus? 5 Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in fact in his connections with neoPlatonism, despite his turning away from the pursuit of wisdom. We know from Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Timaeus that Critias’ report in that dialogue that his like-named grandfather was of the view that if Solon had been given a chance to fulfill his career as a poet he would have surpassed Hesiod and Homer and all other poets in fame (Timaeus 21c-d) had caused deep worry, but that the explanation which literary scholars had offered was that this (manifestly crazy) view had been put in the mouth of an Qdi~tgr ; moreover, it had been established long ago by Porphyry’s teacher Cassius Longinus, the greatest authority of his day, that Plato had no peer as a judge of poets (Longinus fr. 34 Patillon-Brisson). To this notice Proclus adds the perhaps now better known report of Plato’s preference for Antimachus (T 4 Matthews) over the fashionable Choirilos: ‘Callimachus (fr. 589 Pf) and Douris (FGrHist 76 F83) are thus talking idle rubbish when they claim that Plato was not up to the task of judging poets. The text before us shows that his was the judgement of a philosopher’. Proclus’ standard move in distinguishing between literary and philosophical learning need not concern us here; suffice for the present that a criticism, such as Callimachus’, of Plato was never to be forgotten or forgiven, and Severianus’ spitting may perhaps be traced to this old wound. It is normally assumed,6 on the basis of this passage of Proclus, that it was Plato’s well attested fondness for Antimachus which led to Callimachus’ strictures, but another passage of Proclus refers to criticism of Plato’s poetic judgement by some of Proclus’ (unnamed) predecessors because of the Timaeus passage, and Kroll and Festugière at least saw there a further reference to Callimachus and Douris.7 The two grounds for grievance probably in any case infected each other: the fondness for Antimachus in later antiquity, and particularly among the neo-Platonists, is well known.8 If it is true that, in the Against Praxiphanes, Callimachus called 5 6 7 8

Cobet 1873 is worth recording: ‘Fastidio et ipse et contemno poesin Callimacheam, sed nihil ad Severianum’; I imagine that the librarians of Leiden were very relieved. Cf., e. g., Pfeiffer 1968: 94, Cameron 1995: 304. Proclus, Commentary on the Republic 1.43.9 – 14 Kroll (cf. Festugière 1970: 61). Cf. Wyss 1936: lv-lvi, Matthews 1996: 75.

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Aratus pokulah/ ja· %qistom poigt¶m (fr. 460 Pf.), then one can readily imagine what later antiquity might have made of that judgement.9 It might prove interesting to collect all the extant references to Callimachus in the neo-Platonists and those in their orbit, but I have made no attempt to do this systematically. Porphyry and Proclus both cite Callimachus in support of their views, though it is perhaps worthy of note that Proclus manages on both occasions to avoid naming Callimachus explicitly (he is ‘the Cyrenean poet’ or just ‘some poet’).10 Of some interest is the long discussion by Porphyry of the words "latqowi² and "qlatqowi².11 Thanks to Peter Parsons, we know that the former of these appeared in the great elegy for Berenice II which opened the third book of the Aitia. Porphyry says that it is no surprise if many contemporary critics of Homer get some things wrong, when even Callimachus, who has the reputation for being !jqib´stator ja· pokucq²llator, did not know the difference between these words, and he returns to Callimachus’ ignorance at the end of a rather laboured note. That most scholars now think that it was Porphyry who could not understand Callimachus, not Callimachus who could not understand Homer, may be left to speak for itself.12 Spitting declares allegiances as well as enmities; the world moves in oppositions, and the opposite pole to Callimachus was, of course, Homer. Callimachus T 84 Pf. is taken from Eunapius’ account of the rivalries among sophists (i. e. Professors of Rhetoric) to succeed Julian of Cappadocia in fourth century Athens:13

9 It has often been guessed that it was in this same work, in which Plato seems to have appeared as a character, that Callimachus (or one of his characters?) criticised Plato’s judgement, cf. Immisch 1902: 273, Brink 1946: 25 n. 2, Pfeiffer 1968: 136. 10 See fr. 588 Pf. and the citations apparatus in Pfeiffer’s edition of the Hymn to Delos 84 – 5; for Porphyry cf. frr. 413 (= Porphyry fr. 374 Smith), 427, 588 Pf. This relative infrequency of citation contrasts markedly (if unsurprisingly) with the prominence of citations from Callimachus’ poetry in the Homeric scholia; I count some 40 in Erbse’s edition of the scholia to the Iliad, but no explicit citations from the grammatical works. Among Hellenistic poets, Callimachus is followed in the Iliad scholia at some distance by Euphorion (12), Aratus’ Phainomena (8), Apollonius’ Argonautica (perhaps 5) and Theocritus (4). 11 Porphyry, Quast. Hom. 1.263 – 4 Schrader = Sodano 1970: 15 – 17 = Schlunk 1993: 12 – 13. 12 Cf. Luppe 1978. 13 On these events cf. Kennedy 1983: 137 – 41, Penella 1990: 85 – 8.

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B d³ aqtµ dºna t_m !mhq¾pym Pqoaiqes¸yi j!je?mom !mt¶ceiqem, ¢se· Jakk¸lawor gOl¶qyi tir !mast¶seiem.

The same popular opinion set up Diophantus in opposition to Prohaeresius, which is like setting Callimachus against Homer. (Eunapius XII 1, p. 49414 = Callimachus T 84 Pfeiffer)

Eunapius’ ‘Homer’ is Prohaeresius, the (Christian) sophist and teacher to whom the pagan Eunapius owed unrepayable personal debts;15 the language in which Eunapius describes Prohaeresius’ rhetoric, teaching, and indeed physical appearance is that of a god – he is b heiºtator Pqoaiq´sior (X 2.1, p. 486), Eunapius thought of him as !c¶qym ja· !h²matom (X 1.3, p. 485) – and however debased the currency of such language was by this time, there is no doubting the power of the sway which this man, who ‘filled the oikoumene with his logoi and his pupils’ (X 8.4, p. 493), held. Eunapius reports that after one of his marvellous performances, built on a prodigious memory, the audience showed their appreciation by licking his chest, as though he was a statue of a god (X 5.4, p. 489). If, however, Eunapius knew how to praise, he certainly also knew how to stick the knife in: Prohaeresius’ enemies are depicted as snakes waiting to attack (X 4.1, p. 488), and Eunapius’ account of Prohaeresius’ rival, Diophantus, the ‘Callimachus’ of the story, is gloriously venemous. According to Eunapius, Diophantus, who in fact delivered a funeral oration for Prohaeresius, only got as far as he did because of the vh|mor of men (a very Callimachean motif) who never like to see one individual, in this case Prohaeresius, as the undisputed master of a field. Here is part of the close of Eunapius’ brief notice about Diophantus: ‘The present writer knew Diophantus and often heard him speak in public. It has, however, not seemed appropriate to include in this work anything which the writer has remembered of those speeches, for the present work is a record of important men, not a satire … He left two sons who devoted themselves to extravagance and money-making’ (XII 4, p. 494). The opposition which informs Eunapius’ contrast between Prohaeresius and all his rivals is, as the opposition between Homer and Callimachus shows, that of the difference between the god-given gifts of inspiration and the petty struggles of ordinary t]wmg, the lijqokoc¸a ja· peqittµ !jq¸beia (X 6.14, p. 491) of ordinary sophists. Eunapius stresses 14 References to Eunapius follow the dual system of Giangrande’s edition (Rome 1956). 15 On Prohaeresius cf. Penella 1990: 83 – 94.

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Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception

Prohaeresius’ l´cehor v¼seyr ; the sophist speaks in a great flood (N¼dgm X 5.2, p. 489) and 1mhousi_m (X 5.3, p. 489), and his enemies are struck by thunderbolts (X 5.6, p. 490), such as a Zeus or the ‘Zeus of poetry’ would hurl; he himself is not just a Socrates (X 7.2 – 3, p. 492), but also a character from Homer, a Priam or an Odysseus (X 3.6 – 4.2, p. 488). Opposed, as we have seen, to Homer is Callimachus. Consider the case of the hapless Sopolis, another rival of Prohaeresius. Eunapius introduces him as a piece of worthless scum brought in to make up the numbers of professors (X 3.9, p. 487), and his formal notice of Sopolis is worth reproducing in full: ja· Sypºkidor Ajqo²sato pokk²jir b taOta cq²vym. ja· Gm !mµq eQr t¹m !qwa?om waqajt/qa t¹m kºcom !mav´qeim biafºlemor, ja· t/r rciaimo¼sgr Lo¼sgr xa¼eim aqicm¾lemor. !kk’ 5jqoue l³m tµm h¼qam Rjam_r, Amo¸ceto d³ oq pokk²jir7 !kk’ eU pou ti ja· xov¶seiem 1je?hem, keptºm ti ja· !shem³r paqyk¸shaimem 5syhem toO he¸ou pme¼lator7 t¹ d³ h´atqom 1lel¶mesam, oqd³ tµm pepiesl´mgm Nam¸da tµm Jastak¸am v´qomter. to¼tyi pa?r 1c´meto7 ja· 1pibebgj´mai toO hqºmou t¹m pa?da v²sjousim.

The present writer often heard Sopolis lecture. He was a man who sought to force his style to match that of the ancients and he strove to touch the Muse in sound health. But though he knocked loudly enough at her door, it did not open very often. If ever it did creak open a little, a faint and weak whiff of the divine spirit slipped out from within; the audience, however, went mad, for they could not take even a single drop squeezed out from Castalia. Sopolis had a son, and people say that this son too was elected to a chair. (Eunapius XIII, p. 494)

Beyond the marvellous barb of the closing v\sjousim (‘people say …’) and the presentation of Sopolis’ efforts at poetry as a piece of comic door-knocking, it is hard here not to be reminded by ‘the Castalian drop’ of the small but pure Apolline trickle of the end of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, particularly when we remember Prohaeresius’ contrastingly great flood of words; that Sopolis’ inspiration is kept|m would seem also to point towards Callimachus. The key to understanding what lies behind Eunapius’ intellectual structure here is, of course, his reference to Sopolis knocking on the Muse’s door, for this takes us directly to a famous passage of Plato which was of great importance to neo-Platonists and late antique culture generally: dr d’ %meu lam¸ar Lous_m 1p· poigtij±r h¼qar !v¸jgtai, peishe·r ¢r %qa 1j t´wmgr Rjam¹r poigtµr 1sºlemor, !tekµr aqtºr te ja· B po¸gsir rp¹ t/r t_m laimol´mym B toO syvqomoOmtor Avam¸shg.

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But whoever comes to the doors of poetry without madness from the Muses, in the belief that craft (technÞ) will make him a good poet, both he and his poetry, the poetry of a sane man, will be incomplete16 and eclipsed by the poetry of the mad. (Plato, Phaedrus 245a)

Plato’s distinction between poets who write under divine inspiration and those who write merely 1j t´wmgr was to become a principal source of Homer’s authority in later antiquity.17 In his commentary on this passage of the Phaedrus, the fifth-century neo-Platonist Hermeias (p. 98 – 9 Couvreur) illustrated the distinction from, on the one hand, Homer and Pindar and, on the other, Choirilos – rightly, I think, identified by Adrian Hollis as Choirilos of Samos – and Callimachus.18 Whereas poets of technÞ ‘do not even approach the doors of the Muses’, inspired poets – Homer above all – ‘all but hammer on their doors and are filled from that source’. Eunapius’ treatment of sophists stands squarely in these same traditions.

2. Spitting on Callimachus inevitably calls to mind the infamous and anonymous distich which is Callimachus T 25 Pfeiffer: Jakk¸lawor t¹ j²haqla t¹ pa¸cmiom b n¼kimor moOr7 aUtior b cq²xar AUtia Jakkil²wou.

Anth. Pal. 11.275

Text and punctuation are disputed, and the meaning – apart from the fact that it is not flattering to Callimachus – anything but obvious.19 The emendation Jakk¸lawor in v. 2, a change which Luigi Lehnus has pointed out is not due to Bentley alone,20 is now regularly adopted without discussion, as for example by Denys Page and by Alan Camer16 Commentators rightly note that !tek¶r both means ‘uncompleted’ and also suggests ‘uninitiated’. 17 Other passages too (e. g. Laws 3.682a) were, of course, adduced in support; cf. Proclus, Commentary on Timaeus 1.64 Diehl, Russell 1989: 326 – 8. 18 Cf. Hollis 2000, Hunter 2006: 92 – 3. For the connection between this observation and ‘Longinus’, De subl. 33 (below p. 549) cf. already Immisch 1932: 189 – 90, although Immisch identified Hermeias’ ‘Choirilos’ with the encomiast of Alexander. 19 For a tentative translation cf. below p. 547. 20 Cf. Lehnus 1990: 291 – 2.

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on, in the course of his helpful discussion of this epigram.21 The distich is bound to remain mysterious, but a little further ground-clearing may be possible.22 It was observed long ago that the form of this distich resembles the description of the presentation copy of a book;23 we might think of Martial’s apophoreta on literary texts (14.83 – 96), one of which might be rude about the book offered (14.196), or indeed of Crinagoras’ famous poem on Callimachus’ own Hecale ( = T 28 Pfeiffer): Jakkil²wou t¹ toqeut¹m 5por tºde7 dµ c±q 1p’ aqt_i ¢mµq to»r Lous´ym p²mtar 5seise j²kyr7 !e¸dei d’ gEj²kgr te vikone¸moio jakiµm ja· Hgse? Laqah½m otr 1p´hgje pºmour. toO so· ja· meaq¹m weiq_m sh´mor eUg !q´shai, L²qjekke, jkeimoO t’ aWmom Usom biºtou.

Callimachus’ is this chiselled poem; the man shook out all the Muses’ sails in its composition. He sings of the hut of the hospitable Hecale and of the labours which Marathon set for Theseus. May you too achieve the youthful strength of his hands, Marcellus, and an equal praise for a glorious life. (Crinagoras, Anth. Pal. 9.545 = XI G-P)

We might think also of Callimachus’ own epigram on Aratus’ Phainomena: Jsiºdou tº t’ %eisla ja· b tqºpor7 oq t¹m !oid_m 5swatom, !kk’ ajm´y lµ t¹ lekiwqºtatom t_m 1p´ym b Soke»r !pel²nato7 wa¸qete kepta· N¶sier, ûAq¶tou s¼lbokom !cqupm¸gr.

Hesiod’s is the subject-matter and the manner: not the ultimate of songs, but it may be that the man from Soli has skimmed off the sweetest of verses. Hail subtle lines, the evidence of Aratus’ sleeplessness. (Callimachus, Anth. Pal. 9.507 = Epigram XXVII Pf.24) 21 Page 1981: 17 – 18, Cameron 1995: 227 – 8. 22 For the view that the distich mimics lexical entries, whether offering different definitions listed asyndetically for ‘Callimachus’ or successive parodic entries from a Callimachean ‘glossary’, cf. Cairns 1995. 23 Cf. Knaack 1891: 771, Susemihl 1891: 350 – 1, 895. 24 The translation is intended as an aid to readers of this essay, not as an interpretation of the poem; I discuss this poem further in F. Montanari, A. Rengakos and C. Tsagalis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hesiod (Leiden, forthcoming). For !oid_m in v. 1 cf. now POxy 4648.

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Callimachus’ poem is framed by the name of the source of Aratus’ inspiration (Hesiod) and by Aratus himself; for the author of the abusive distich, which is framed rather by the repetition of Callimachus’ name, Callimachus can blame (aUtior) no one but himself.25 We might therefore consider reading Jakkil\wou in v. 1, a text printed (together with Jakk_lawor in v. 2) by Wilhelm Christ, though never, as far as I can ascertain, discussed by him.26 pa_cmiom, which commentators have found difficult in its application to Callimachus himself, is not rare as a term to describe a single piece or form of literature (cf. LSJ s.v. III 3), and is of course paralleled by the Latin nugae (cf. Catullus 1, Martial 14.183 of the Batrachomyomachia). One of Leonides of Alexandria’s numerological games uses the term for a presentation epigram: t¶mde Keym¸dey hakeqµm p²ki d´qjeo LoOsam, d¸stiwom eqh¸jtou pa¸cmiom eqep¸gr. 5stai d’ 1m Jqom¸oir L²qjyi peqijakk³r %huqla toOto ja· 1m de¸pmoir ja· paq± lousopºkoir.

Look once more at this example of Leonides’ flourishing Muse, a twoverse plaything of wit and grace. This will be a beautiful toy for Marcus at the Saturnalia, and at dinner-parties, and among those engaged with the Muses. (Leonides of Alexandria, Anth. Pal. 6.32227)

With Anth. Pal. 11.275 Pfeiffer linked, as Callimachus T 25a, the final two couplets of Martial 10.4: qui legis Oedipoden caligantemque Thyesten, Colchidas et Scyllas, quid nisi monstra legis? quid tibi raptus Hylas, quid Parthenopaeus et Attis, quid tibi dormitor proderit Endymion, exutusue puer pinnis labentibus, aut qui odit amatrices Hermaphroditus aquas? quid te uana iuuant miserae ludibria chartae? hoc lege, quod possit dicere uita ‘meum est’. non hic Centauros, non Gorgonas Harpyiasque inuenies: hominem pagina nostra sapit.

25 Eustathius (Hom. 1422.30) cites v. 2 of the anonymous epigram to illustrate aUtior in what Eustathius claims is the post-Homeric sense ‘guilty, deserving punishment’. If Jakk¸lawor is retained in v. 1 (cf. below), the most likely sense of j\haqla will be ‘outcast’, ‘rubbish’, vaqlajºr. 26 Cf. Christ 1889: 402 [ = 1890: 437]. 27 Cf. Page 1981: 515 – 516.

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sed non uis, Mamurra, tuos cognoscere mores nec te scire: legas Aetia Callimachi. You who read of Oedipus and Thyestes in the gloom and Colchian women and Scyllas, what are you reading about but monstrosities? What use to you will be ravished Hylas or Parthenopaeus and Attis, what use the sleeping Endymion, or the boy who shed his drooping wings or Hermaphroditus, who loathes the waters which love him? What pleasure do you get from the worthless mockery of a wretched sheet? Read this, of which life can say ‘It’s mine!’. Here you will not find Centaurs or Gorgons or Harpies: my page knows real people. But, Mamurra, you don’t want to recognise your own habits or to know yourself; you can read Callimachus’ Aitia. (Martial 10.4)

Martial’s subject is the earthy realism and immediacy of his poems in comparison to the arcane mythology of the Aitia. Pfeiffer presumably associated the two testimonia on the grounds of the shared hemistich with which both poems end, but the earlier part of Martial’s poem should also attract attention in the present context. Poem 10.4 is part of an introductory series to Book 10, and – like the distich against Callimachus – it develops from the form of a ‘book advertisement’ (hoc lege …); ludibria in v. 7 is clearly not too far away from pa_cmiom. As Lindsay and Patricia Watson note in their commentary, ‘Since ludibrium can also mean a jest, there is an implication that it is elevated poetry which is frivolous rather than the humble genre of epigram’.28 Martial may in fact have been thinking of the Greek couplet, though I do not know whether that sheds any further light on its provenance. For what it is worth, confronted with t¹ j²haqla t¹ pa¸cmiom as a description of a poem of Callimachus, my first thought would have been of the Ibis, and it is, I suppose, not out of the question that Anth. Pal. 11. 275 is intended as a mock ‘advertisement’ for that poem rather than for the Aitia.29 b n¼kimor moOr awaits (in my view) convincing interpretation,30 but applied to a literary work moOr is likely to 28 Cf. also Hutchinson 1993: 24. 29 Watson 2005: 271 suggests that j\haqla picks up Callimachus’ own image from the end of the Hymn to Apollo. He also suggests (an issue which I had pondered before reading his article) that pa¸cmiom picks up Callimachus’ self-presentation as, in the view of the Telchines, writing pa?r ûte. 30 Lucia Prauscello has attractively suggested that the reference may be to the (frequently mocked) ‘bookish’ character of Callimachus’ poetry, notably the Aitia; the point would be that the tablet or pinax, a mark of the poet (cf. esp. Callimachus fr. 1.21 – 2), was made of wood. Other usages which might be relevant

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mean ‘intention, meaning’ (cf., e. g., Plato, Symposium 222a2).31 A first shot at a translation – reading Jakkil\wou in v. 1 – would therefore be something like: ‘Callimachus’ is the piece of refuse, the plaything, the wooden (?) meaning; responsible is he who wrote the Aitia of Callimachus’; much of course awaits elucidation.32 A final point. With either nominative or genitive forms at the beginning and end of the distich we have a stylistic trick which is in fact much more common in Latin than in Greek.33 Here it might just be intended to be itself a parody of Callimachus:34 )staj¸dgm t¹m Jq/ta t¹m aQpºkom Fqpase m¼lvg 1n eqeor, ja· mOm Req¹r ûAstaj¸dgr.

A nymph snatched Astakides the Cretan goatherd from the mountain, and now Astakides is a sacred one. (Callimachus, Anth. Pal. 7.518.1 – 2 = Epigram XXII, 1 – 2 Pf.)

3. Wondering which poems of Callimachus (or was it a complete edition?) Severianus is most likely to have spat on can help fill in an idle minute. One can imagine, for example, that no one with connections to the neo-Platonists would have cared much for the Hymns;35 a glance

31 32

33 34

35

are rpºnukor of a poet or sophist who looks good, but is worthless ‘inside’ (i. e. whose wooden substance is coated with gold or silver, cf. Phrynichus, Praeparatio Sophistica 115.12 – 15 Borries), and the book-collector’s suj¸mg cm¾lg at Lucian, Adv. Indoctum 6 (where, however, the choice of adjective is influenced by the context). I am inclined to compare tq|por in Callimachus’ epigram for Aratus (above p. 544 – 5), but the matter is clearly not yet resolved. Martin West notes that, with the genitive in v. 1 and Bentley’s nominative in v. 2, one could also punctuate after pa¸cmiom : ‘Callimachus’ is the piece of refuse, the plaything; the wooden mind is responsible, Callimachus who wrote the Aitia’. Cf. McKeown on Ovid, Amores 1.9.1 – 2, Wills 1996: 430 – 5. A related, but different, effect is found in Callimachus, Epigram 19 Pf. It is very unclear whether such framing is the effect signalled by Graecula quod recantat echo at Martial 2.86.3, but that poem is another rejection of ‘Callimachean’ poetry in favour of poetry such as Martial’s, which (ironically) is designed for a readership of connoisseurs. Lehnus 2002: 27 assumes that it was the Aitia, Callimachus’ best known and ‘signature’ work, upon which Severianus vented his impatience.

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at the Hymns of Proclus will show that we are moving in a very different world, and it is a nice irony that the survival of both texts was to be so intimately linked. Just as the poetic criticism of the neo-Platonists was rooted in various modes of allegorical interpretation, which – as is well known – had found little favour in the Alexandria of Callimachus and Aristarchus,36 so neo-Platonist poetry was a very different thing from the spare detachment of Callimachean verse. Porphyry tells a self-congratulatory story about one of his own poems: At the feast in Plato’s honour I read a poem entitled ‘The sacred marriage’. Much of it was expressed mystically and in the veiled language of divine inspiration, and someone said that Porphyry was crazy; Plotinus, however, said in the hearing of everyone, ‘You have shown us the poet, the philosopher, and the expert in mysteries’. (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 15)

No one would, I think, have said this about Callimachus. Just as he himself was a cqallatij|r, so, in the anti-Callimachean tradition, his poetry – like, for example, that of Erinna – was an object of study for pedants and cqallatijo¸, whereas Homer was a worthy study for true jqitijo¸.37 Crates of Mallos’ famous distinction (fr. 94 Broggiato) between the jqitij|r, who must be the master of all of kocijµ 1pist¶lg, and the cqallatij|r, who needs to know only about glosses, prosody, and such matters, is here broadened out (in a quite different philosophical environment) to the kind of poetry which falls into their respective spheres. In many ways Callimachus was (perhaps paradoxically) an Aristotelian; Peter Struck has recently described the revolutionary Aristotelian idea of ‘the poet as master craftsman, who produces a finely wrought piece of art marked by clarity and elegance’, and that does not seem a bad description of Callimachean ideals.38 A similar picture emerges from a consideration of poetic dianoia. Peter Green has remarked on how surprisingly little trace both allegorisation and rationalisation have left in the Argonautica of Apollonius,39 and even if he has overstated the case, the basic point remains, particularly when we compare Apollonius’ epic with Virgil’s. As for Callimachus, he did not write an epic as such, 36 Cf., e. g., Feeney 1991: 35 – 40. Lamberton 1986 offers a convenient introduction to the later traditions of allegorical interpretation. 37 Cf., e. g., Antiphanes, AP 11.322 (= Callimachus T 71 Pf, Erinna T 11 Neri). For the explicit linking of Callimachus and Aristarchus cf. Philip, AP 11.347 (= LXI G-P); the final two verses are Callimachus T 70 Pf. 38 Struck 2004: 68. 39 Green 1997: 25 – 40; cf. also Feeney 1991: 81 – 2 on Eros in Book 3.

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and what he did write neither suggested any real interest in allegorical interpretation nor offered the ‘higher interpreters’ any footholds from which to operate within his text, should they have wished to do so.40 The poetry of inspiration and the poetry of pure technÞ differ in much more than just style. Perhaps the best known discussion of this subject are the famous chapters (33 – 36) of On the Sublime about the difference between ‘faultless’ and ‘sublime’ writing.41 ‘Longinus’ elsewhere acknowledges the place for allegorical reading of some at least of Homer’s sublime poetry,42 although he himself does not pursue this (and his remarks on Homer’s gods in 9.7 are in fact of a decidedly non-allegorical kind) and he lays no stress upon this style of interpretation in comparing poets of the two kinds. Rather, he appeals to his own views about ‘grandeur’ and the relative ‘size’ of different literary virtues. More than one modern reader of these chapters of On the Sublime has been deafened by the silent absence of the name of Callimachus, for everything from the opening reference to the jahaqºr tir succqave»r ja· !m´cjkgtor (33.1) to Archilochus’ chaotic flood-tide (33.5) and on to our real admiration for big rivers (35.4) seems to point to the language and imagery of the poet of Cyrene; Donald Russell has indeed called this section of On the Sublime ‘a manifesto directed against what we may call the Callimachean ideal’.43 Callimachus’ apparent absence from On the Sublime deserves more attention than it often receives. 40 It is instructive to compare Callimachus’ dismissal of the Homeric story (Iliad 15. 192 – 4) of the cosmic lot-drawing (Hymn to Zeus 60 – 7) with the later allegorical interpretations of the scholia and ‘Heraclitus’, Hom. Probl. 41; Callimachus’ alleged disdain for the Homeric story sounds not unlike ‘Heraclitus’ 41.5, but this attitude then takes them in very different directions. 41 I here accept the now most common dating of On the Sublime to the first century AD, although much of the argument would not be affected if the treatise was significantly later; for the claims of Cassius Longinus (above p. 539) cf. most recently Heath 1999. 42 9.6 – 7, concerning the theomachia of Iliad 20, which seems to have been one of the earliest passages to be interpreted allegorically, cf. Plato, Republic 2.378d-e (probably echoed by ‘Longinus’ here), Theagenes fr. 2 DK, cited in the B scholia to Iliad 20.67. It is noteworthy that both Porphyry (1.240 – 1 Schrader from the same scholium) and ‘Longinus’ observe that the literal sense of the passage offends against t¹ pq´pom, for this is not a common criterion of judgement in what survives of On the Sublime. There is, incidentally, no trace of such allegorical readings in the fragments of Cassius Longinus; for him !kkgcoq¸a is matter of verbal style, cf. fr. 48.258 – 79 Patillon-Brisson. 43 Russell 1989: 308, cf. Fuhrmann 1992: 199 – 202. I have discussed some aspects of this passage in Hunter 2003: 219 – 25.

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The structure of ‘Longinus’’ discussion seems to be by genre, a term which is here helpfully vague but in which metre obviously plays an important rôle: to Homer are opposed Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus, both of whom wrote epos, though of very different kinds; to Pindar ‘in the field of l]kg’ is opposed Bacchylides, and ‘in tragedy’ Sophocles is opposed to Ion of Chios. The odd one out seems at first to be the opposition between Archilochus and the Erigone of Eratosthenes. The standard explanation, adopted for example by Wilamowitz and Russell,44 is that iambus, of which Archilochus was the undisputed master, and elegy belong together as differentiated from both hexameters and lyric. There is no doubt that elegy and iambus are often treated together,45 but there may be more to be said here, before we accept this apparent anomaly in ‘Longinus’’ system. It is of course no surprise to find Archilochus in a roll-call of sublime poets: throughout antiquity he travels with Homer as one of the two premier expressions of Greek poetic genius.46 It is, however, iambus, and particularly its aggressive power, with which Archilochus is normally associated: for Theocritus, for example, Archilochus is simply t¹m p²kai poigt²m j t¹m t_m Q²lbym (Epigram 21 Gow). Which iambic poet could have been held up against him to exemplify flawless skill rather than flawed genius? In one sense, of course, this is idle speculation as ‘Longinus’ could doubtless have found an iambic poet and/or a poem, had he wanted to do so. That said, there were not many options available. One name of course occurs to us immediately – that of Callimachus – but here there were problems. Callimachus’ iamboi are avowedly imitative of Hipponax, one of the other canonical iambists, and an opposition between Callimachus and Archilochus in the field of iambus might well have looked at least rhetorically unconvincing. More funda44 Cf. Wilamowitz 1904: 238, Russell 1964: 159. Doreen Innes has suggested to me that we should see the contrast between Archilochus and Eratosthenes not as a contrast within a separate poetic category, but ‘as a coda to the epic genre’ which ‘repeats with uariatio the overarching antithesis of the whole section’, i. e. between flawed genius and flawless skill. This is an attractive suggestion, inter alia, because it leaves ‘Longinus’ operating with just the three ‘big’ genres – epic, tragedy and choral lyric – and removes genres which are naturally ‘unsublime’, such as iambic and elegy. On the other hand, the rhetoric of the passage and the transitional t¸ d´; seem to force us to ask what the link between Archilochus and Eratosthenes is; cf. further below p. 554 – 5. 45 Cf., e. g., Pfeiffer 1968: 182. 46 Cf., e. g., Plato, Ion 531a, Dio Chrys. 33.11; a particularly striking statement is Velleius Paterculus 1.5.

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mentally, however, we may well believe that iambic poetry did not fit easily into a work concerned with vxor ; however we understand the pef¹r molºr of the epilogue to Callimachus’ Aitia (fr. 112.9), iamboi were unelevated, and though this certainly did not rule out flashes of ‘the sublime’, it made iambic less promising territory than, say, epic. Quintilian reports the view that, if Archilochus falls short of the highest place in the poetic hierarchy, it is a fault of his subject-matter, not of his ingenium (10.1.60).47 So too, Galen contrasts the iambics of Archilochus and Hipponax with Homer 1m 2nal´tqyi tºmyi … rlm¶somtor and Pindar %isomtor rxgk_r (X.12 Kühn = Archilochus T 68 Tarditi); the choice of verbs is there very telling. ‘Longinus’ refers to Archilochus in only two other places. In 10.7 there is a reference to an obviously sublime passage describing a shipwreck; in his most recent note on the passage, Russell refers this to the storm description in trochaic tetrameters of frr. 105 – 6 West,48 but the actual identification of the passage in question (and its metre) must remain uncertain. In 13.3 Archilochus is listed among the jlgqij~tatoi, and most scholars would, I think, accept that ‘Longinus’ could there be referring, and referring accurately, to all or any part of Archilochus’ output. The structure of Longinus’ analysis of poets in chapter 33 is first hexameter poetry, then Archilochus/Eratosthenes,49 then lyric, and then finally tragedy; alongside ‘Longinus’ we may place the organisation of what survives of the epitome of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On imitation50 – hexameters, lyric, tragedy, comedy – and of Quintilian’s account of the Greek reading recommended for would-be orators in Institutio oratoria 10.1 – hexameters, elegy, iambus, lyric, Old Comedy, tragedy, New Comedy. The similarities between all three structures are obvious, and it has long been accepted that, if Quintilian did not actually use Dionysius himself, those two texts at least draw from a common Hellenistic source.51 As ‘Longinus’ is all but certainly taking aim at 47 Juxtaposition to the ‘grand’ virtues of Pindar (10.1.61) reinforces the point. 48 In the 1995 revision of the Loeb edition; some support is lent to this identification by the citation of that poem by ‘Heraclitus’, Homeric Problems 5.3. 49 Cf., however, above n. 44. 50 Cf. Aujac 1992, Battisti 1997, Dion. Hal. II 202 – 14 U.-R. 51 Cf., e. g., Steinmetz 1964. We may note also Horace, AP 73 – 85, where the order of metrically defined ‘genres’ is epic (Homer), elegy, iambus (Archilochus), drama (as the heir of iambus), lyric; with Horace’s exiguos elegos (v. 77) compare perhaps ‘Longinus’’ description of Eratosthenes’ Erigone as !l¾lgtom poi¶latiom (33.5).

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Caecilius of Calacte, a contemporary of Dionysius and certainly one sharing many of his literary sympathies,52 it may be that he also reflects a discussion in Caecilius which drew on similar sources to those of Dionysius and Quintilian. It was not ‘Longinus’’ purpose to produce a comprehensive and consistent literary survey, but some conclusions may be drawn from the similarities between these three texts. The absence of comedy from these chapters of ‘Longinus’ is most easily explained by the fact that comedy, like iambus, was not naturally promising territory for the ‘sublime’, though even Aristophanes had his moments (De subl. 40.2). Secondly, it is clear that, in both Greek and Latin literature (cf. 10.1.93 – 6), Quintilian treats elegy and iambus quite separately;53 he may have had a particular reason for wishing to include elegy – the desire to be able subsequently to name the Roman practitioners of a genre in which Graecos prouocamus (10.1.93) – but it is his choice of elegists which particularly attracts attention: elegiam … cuius princeps habetur Callimachus, secundas confessione plurimorum Philetas occupauit. In elegy Callimachus is considered the leading poet, with Philitas, in the opinion of most judges, taking second prize. (Quintilian 10.1.58)

Whether or not there was a standard Hellenistic list (or canon?) of elegists, as there certainly was later (cf. Callimachus T 87 Pfeiffer), may be doubted,54 but Quintilian’s failure to mention, say, Callinus or Mimnermus remains striking. Callimachus’ fame in the Roman world cannot be doubted (cf., e. g., Horace, Epist. 2. 2. 100, Ovid, Amores 1.15.13), but – whatever the identity of the nameless judges to whom Quintilian appeals – elegy is the only poetic genre in his survey in which a Hellenistic poet takes primacy, for Menander and New Comedy represent a special case; elsewhere, Quintilian has, of course, no qualms about naming Hellenistic poets and does so freely in this chapter: beyond Philitas and Callimachus we have Apollonius, Aratus, Theocritus, Nicander, Euphorion.55 As for Dionysius, he moves directly from epos to lyric. 52 Cf. Russell 1964: 58 – 9. 53 For this separation cf. also Dio Chrys. 18.8. 54 Cf. Kroehnert 1897: 30, contra Steinmetz 1964. The choice of the relatively obscure Callinus alongside Mimnermus in later lists could be explained in more than one way. Flashar 1979: 85 seems to accept that Philitas and Callimachus appeared in Hellenistic lists as the latest poets to be included. 55 Steinmetz 1964 argues that, in taking a view of Greek literary history not marked by unbridgeable epochal distinctions, Quintilian adopts a typically

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This could perhaps be the result of the activity of Dionysius’ epitomator, or it could simply be that Dionysius saw no value for would-be orators in elegy, as Quintilian too treats Greek elegy as little more than relaxation after the serious business. Nevertheless, when we see which elegists Quintilian names, whether or not he has taken the names from an earlier (Greek) list, Dionysius’ reticence about elegy (at least) seems susceptible of another explanation.56 In what survives of his critical works Dionysius never directly names a Hellenistic poet qua poet (Menander again being a special case);57 Callimachus is mentioned four times, but only in his capacity as grammarian.58 If we only had Dionysius’ testimony, we would have no idea that Callimachus ever wrote poetry. In this damnatio memoriae, we see the full force of Dionysius’ classicising agenda, and we see it perhaps also in the omission of elegy from the De imitatione. What then of ‘Longinus’? He too could simply have passed over elegy in silence, but it may be that the temptation to stick the knife into ‘the Callimacheans’ proved too strong. There were, however, dangers. Callimachus’ reputation as an elegist, perhaps indeed the elegist (cf. Quintilian 10.1.58 above), stood second to none (including Archilochus); if Longinus had posed the question ‘Would you rather be Archilochus or Callimachus in the field of elegy?’, he could not be sure of the answer. Callimachus was, not to put too fine a point on it, just too big a fish, in both the Greek and Roman critical traditions,59 for ‘Longinus’ to take on: Callimachus’ silent absence from the firing-line in On the Sublime 33 is in fact a most eloquent tribute to his reputation. Nicholas Richardson suggested that ‘Longinus’’ silence was owed to the fact that ‘with his great range of invention, variety of style, and constant ability to take us by surprise, [Callimachus] stands apart from and above the other

56 57 58 59

Roman perspective. Stephen Harrison has suggested to me that Quintilian has simply borrowed Callimachus and Philitas from Propertius 3.1.1; the influence of Roman poetry on Quintilian’s lists can hardly be doubted, but although Quintilian explicitly cites Horace, Odes 4.2 in describing Pindar’s virtues at 10.1.61, it is clear from Dionysius’ closely parallel account of Pindar that, there at least, Quintilian was using Greek sources as well as Horace. Cf. Tavernini 1953: 24 – 5. At De comp. verb. 4 he mentions Sotadean verses. Isaeus 6, Demosthenes 13, Dinarchus 1, 9. For the imperial period at Rome cf. the remarks of Jaillard 2000 on a letter of Hadrian in which Callimachus seems to be numbered among ‘the most noteworthy (1kkocil¾tatoi) poets of Greece and Rome’ (SEG 51 [2001], no. 641).

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poets of his period’;60 that judgement would, I think, be shared by many moderns, but we should rather seek an explanation within ‘Longinus’’ own agenda and ideology. Callimachus was in fact almost that most paradoxical of creatures, a third-century ‘classic’, a poet supreme in his own genre, even when set in competition with the great figures of the past, and ‘Longinus’ simply could not allow ‘Hellenistic classics’. Eratosthenes, on the other hand, famously t¹ b/ta, was never in any danger of carrying off t¹ pqyte?om (De subl. 33.1). Callimachus is the absent presence made manifest through lesser mortals. Both Apollonius and Eratosthenes were, in the ancient biographical tradition, pupils of Callimachus,61 and – for what it is worth – modern scholarship at least sees the poetry of both as imitative of Callimachus: why shoot the organgrinder when you can kill off his monkeys? As for the other poets named, Theocritus is said in the biographical tradition, obviously on the basis of Idyll 7, to have been a pupil of Philitas and Asclepiades and is associated with Aratus, Callimachus, Nicander and Ptolemy Philadelphus,62 and Ion of Chios is a model famously appealed to by Callimachus himself in Iambus 13.63 Nothing, we might think, would have suited ‘Longinus’’ apparent purpose better than an opposition between Homer and, say, the Hecale, Callimachus’ toqeut¹m 5por (Crinagoras, Anth. Pal. 9.545.1, above p. 544), but Callimachus makes no explicit appearance in what survives of On the Sublime. Such studied neglect, both like and unlike Severianus’ public displays of distaste, speaks volumes. Having selected the elegiac Erigone as his target, where then was ‘Longinus’ to go? A poem about the invention of wine and a drunken murder might well, of course, have made a critic think of Archilochus, himself a famous drinker and devotee of the wine-god; if Erigone hung herself in Eratosthenes’ poem, Archilochus’ poetry had notoriously made the daughters of Lycambes do the same thing out of shame. Although the number of testimonia for Archilochus’ place in the pantheon of elegy is indeed far outweighed by those for iambus, there are enough 60 61 62 63

Richardson 1985: 398. Cf. Callimachus T 11, 12, 13, 15 Pf. Cf. Vita Theocriti A pp. 1 – 2 Wendel, ‘Anecdoton Estense’ p. 9 Wendel. We have more to learn about the choice of Ion to set against Sophocles; it may be that Ion’s versatilty is relevant (cf. Eratosthenes’ many-sidedness), and I wonder also whether the fact that Ion related an anecdote about Sophocles which Athenaeus at least thought worth preserving (13.630e-4 f = Ion fr. 104 Leurini) is relevant here.

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ancient indications and enough papyri, now of course happily joined by the ‘Telephus’ of POxy 4708, to show that this side of his poetic activity was certainly not entirely forgotten within scholarly classifications: he was indeed claimed by some to be the inventor of elegy.64 Here is not the place to discuss whether the ‘Telephus elegy’, which by any standards is certainly jlgqij¾tatom, can help us with ‘Longinus’’ description of how Archilochus’ flood carries with it pokk± ja· !moijomºlgta, but for the moment we should be content with recognising that the ‘Telephus elegy’ has perhaps slightly altered the balance of interpretation for this passage of On the Sublime.65 One of the poems which appears in Supplementum Hellenisticum in a form unrecognisable from that which it had twenty years before is the so-called ‘Seal’ of Posidippus (SH 705 = Posidippus 118 A-B). As suggested by Hugh Lloyd-Jones in 1963, Posidippus here wishes for himself posthumous honours such as those which Archilochus enjoyed, but he also forbids weeping and lamentation at his death, though one may shed tears for the ‘Parian nightingale’.66 Why did Posidippus choose Archilochus as the poet with whom to contrast himself ? The standard answer is (rightly) Archilochus’ fame and cult and perhaps the new life given to that cult in the middle of the third century, to which the ‘Mnesiepes inscription’ bears eloquent witness.67 Does, however, Posidippus also think of Archilochus specifically as a poet of elegiacs, and hence as the great founding figure of his own 64 Cf. Archilochus T 118, 146 Tarditi, Mimnermus T 21A, 21B Allen (all concerning rival claims to the ‘invention’ of elegy), Aristotle fr. 937 Gigon. The absence of Archilochus from Hermesianax fr. 7 Powell is open to more than one interpretation. For the characteristics of the Alexandrian edition of Archilochus’ elegiacs cf. Obbink 2006: 1 – 2. 65 That ‘Longinus’ was indeed here thinking of Archilochus’ narrative elegies was suggested, before the publication of the ‘Telephos’, by Bowie 2001: 51 – 2. Bowie pointed both to the general structure of ‘Longinus’’ synkrisis and to the criticism of Archilochus’ abundantia in a passage (from a poem of unknown metrical genre) about the rape of Deianeira at Dio Chrysostom 60.1 ( = Archilochus fr. 286 West), and suggested that both Dio and ‘Longinus’ had the same poem in mind, perhaps the only ‘mid-length elegiac mythical narrative’ of Archilochus to have survived. He further noted that, in describing the Erigone, ‘Longinus’ uses a word, !l¾lgtom, which Archilochus had used (fr. 5 West) of the shield he had abandoned. 66 Lloyd-Jones 1963: 87 – 8, 90 – 2. There is now, of course, a huge bibliography; a good starting-point is still Dickie 1998: 65 – 76. 67 Cf. Clay 2004; for Posidippus cf. Clay 2004: 30 – 1.

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‘genre’? Does ‘nightingale’ not just mean ‘poet’ here, but – particularly in a context of mourning – evoke the nightingale as itself a mourner (cf. Aristophanes, Birds 217), itself an ‘elegiac’ bird? 68 However that may be, Posidippus chose Archilochus, whereas Callimachus, in the ‘Reply to the Telchines’, apparently chose Mimnermus, one of Archilochus’ rivals for the title of ‘inventor’ of elegy, as his authorising archaic model.69 The ‘Reply’ and the ‘Seal’ are often thought to be related intertextually – usually not to the credit of Posidippus, who is, of course, among the list of ‘Telchines’ offered by the Florentine diegeseis – but we simply do not know enough about literary debate in the third century to know just how charged these respective choices of authority were. What with hindsight we can say is that the appeal to Archilochus and Mimnermus as models may be seen to evoke a dichotomy which was to inform a great deal of later poetry and criticism. 70 Whereas, however, Callimachus’ critical fame came to surpass that of the model he claimed, Posidippus, though his wish for a statue seems to have been fulfilled, has never remotely threatened the luq¸om jk´or of the Parian nightingale.

Bibliography Athanassiadi, P. 1999. Damascius. The Philosophical History, Athens Aujac, G. 1992. Denys d’Halicarnasse, Opuscules Rhtoriques, Tome V, Paris Battisti, D.G. 1997. Dionigi di Alicarnasso, Sull’imitazione, Pisa/Rome Bowie, E.L. 1986. ‘Early Greek elegy, symposium and public festival’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 106: 13 – 35 68 Cf., e. g., Callimachus, Anth Pal. 7.80.5 ( – Epigram 2 Pf.), Catullus 65.10 – 14. How early the elegiac couplet was specifically connected with mourning remains a difficult question: for some relevant considerations cf. Bowie 1986: 22 – 7, Hunter 1992: 18 – 22, 2006: 29 – 30. 69 I have wondered whether the ‘Telephus elegy’ might shed light on Callimachus’ rejection of long poetry concerning Fqyar (fr. 1.5). 70 I do not, of course, mean to imply that Posidippus’ choice of Archilochus involved a conscious rejection of Mimnermus (cf. AP 12.168 = Posidippus 140 A-B), any more than we should assume that Callimachus turned his back on Archilochus (too much weight is often placed upon fr. 544 Pfeiffer). When in Odes 2.20 Horace both turns into a swan (cf. Call. fr.1.39 – 40) which flies beyond inuidia and also forbids mourning at his death, he may be combining the ‘Seal’ of Posidippus’ with Callimachus’ ‘Reply’; for possible links between the ‘Seal’ and Odes 3.30 cf. Di Benedetto 2003: 14 – 15.

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— 2001. ‘Ancestors of Historiography in Early Greek Elegiac and Iambic Poetry?’ in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford) 45 – 66 Brink, C. O. 1946. ‘Callimachus and Aristotle: an enquiry into Callimachus’ PQOS PQANIVAMGM’ Classical Quarterly 40: 11 – 26 Cairns, F. 1995. ‘Callimachus the “woodentop” (AP XI 275)’ in L. Belloni, G. Milanese, A. Porro (eds.), Studia classica Iohanni Tarditi oblata I (Milan) 607 – 15 Cameron, A. 1995. Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton Christ, W. 1889. Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, Nördlingen [2nd ed., Munich 1890] Clay, D. 2004. Archilochos Heros. The Cult of Poets in the Greek Polis, Washington D.C. Cobet, C. G. 1873. ‘Severianus et Callimachus’ Mnemosyne 1: 204 Di Benedetto, V. 2003. ‘Omero, Saffo e Orazio e il nuovo Posidippo’ Prometheus 29: 1 – 16 Dickie, M. 1998. ‘Poets as initiates in the mysteries: Euphorion, Philicus and Posidippus’ Antike & Abendland 44: 49 – 77 Feeney, D. C. 1991. The Gods in Epic, 1991 Festugière, A. J. 1970. Proclus, Commentaire sur la Rpublique, Paris Flashar, H. 1979. ‘Die klassizistische Theorie der Mimesis’ in Le classicisme  Rome aux Iers sicles avant et aprs J.-C. (Entretiens sur l’antiquit classique XXV, Vandoeuvres-Geneva) 79 – 97 Fuhrmann, M. 1992. Die Dichtungstheorie der Antike, Darmstadt Green P. 1997. The Argonautika by Apollonius Rhodios, Berkeley Heath, M. 1999. ‘Longinus, On Sublimity’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45: 43 – 74 Hollis, A. 2000. ‘The reputation and influence of Choerilus of Samos’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 130: 13 – 15 Hunter, R. 1992. ‘Writing the god: form and meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena’ Materiali e Discussioni 29: 9 – 34 [= this volume 127 – 52] — 2003. ‘Reflecting on writing and culture: Theocritus and the style of cultural change’ in H. Yunis (ed.), Written texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge) 213 – 34 [= this volume 434 – 56] — 2006. The Shadow of Callimachus, Cambridge Hutchinson, G.O. 1993. Latin Literature from Seneca to Juvenal, Oxford Immisch, O. 1902. ‘Beiträge zur Chrestomathie des Proclus und zur Poetik des Altertums’ in Festschrift Theodor Gomperz dargebracht zum siebzigsten Geburtstage (Vienna) 237 – 74 —1932. ‘Horazens Epistel über die Dichtkunst’ Philologus Suppl. 24.3 Jaillard, D. 2000. ‘A propos du fragment 35 de Callimaque’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 132:143 – 4 Kennedy, G. A. 1983. Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors, 1983 Kroehnert, O. 1897. Canonesne poetarum scriptorum artificum per antiquitatem fuerunt Lamberton, R. 1986. Homer the Theologian, Berkeley Lehnus, L. 1990. ‘Notizee Callimachee II’ Paideia 45: 277 – 92

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— 2002. ‘Callimaco prima e dopo Pfeiffer’ in Callimaque (Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique XLVIII, Vandoeuvres-Geneva) 1 – 33 Lloyd-Jones, H. 1963. ‘The seal of Posidippus’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 83: 75 – 99 [ = Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea (Oxford 1990) 158 – 95] Luppe, W. 1978. ‘O£DEIS EIDEM ALATQOWIAS (Kallimachos fr. 383, 10 Pf.)’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 31: 43 – 4 Matthews, V.J. 1996. Antimachus of Colophon, Leiden Obbink, D. 2006. ‘A new Archilochus poem’ Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 156: 1 – 9 Page, D. L. 1981. Further Greek Epigrams, Cambridge Patillon, M. and Brisson, L. 2001. Longin, Fragments, Art Rhtorique. Rufus, Art Rhtorique, Paris Penella, R. J. 1990. Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Century A.D.. Studies in Eunapius of Sardis, Leeds Pfeiffer, R. 1968. History of Classical Scholarship, Oxford Richardson, N. J. 1985. ‘Pindar and later literary criticism in antiquity’ Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar 5: 383 – 401 Russell, D. A. 1964. ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime, Oxford — 1989. ‘Greek criticism of the Empire’ in G.A. Kennedy (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge) 297 – 329 Saffey, H. D. and Segonds, A.-P. 2001. Marinus, Proclus ou Sur le Bonheur, Paris Schrader, H. 1880. Porphyrii quaestionum Homericarum ad Iliadem pertinentium reliquiae, Leipzig Schlunk, R. R. 1993. Porphyry, The Homeric Questions, New York Sodano, A. R. 1970. Porphyrii quaestionum Homericarum Liber I, Naples Steinmetz, P. 1964. ‘Gattungen und Epochen der griechischen Literatur in der Sicht Quintilians’ Hermes 92: 454 – 66 Struck, P. T. 2004. Birth of the Symbol, Princeton Susemihl, F. 1891. Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit I, Leipzig Tavernini, N. 1953. Dal libro decimo dell’Institutio Oratoria alle fonti tecnico-metodologiche di Quintiliano, Turin Watson, L. 2005. ‘Catullan recycling: cacata carta’ Mnemosyne 58: 270 – 7 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von. 1904. Griechisches Lesebuch, Berlin Wills, J. 1996. Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford Wyss, B. 1936. Antimachi Colophonii Reliquiae, Berlin Zintzen, C. 1967. Damascii Vitae Isidori Reliquiae, Hildesheim.

Addendum I return to some of the themes of this paper in Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming).

30. Hesiod, Callimachus, and the invention of morality* My concern in this paper is POxy XIX 2208 [MP3 198, LDAB 505] fr. 1 = Callim. fr. 4 Mass. ( = 2 Pf.):1 poil´mi l/ka m´lomti paq’ Uwmiom an´or Vppou gGsiºdyi Lous´ym 2sl¹r dt’ Amt¸asem l]´m oR W²eor cemes[ ] 1p· pt´qmgr vda[ te¼wym ¢r 2t´qyi tir 2_i jaj¹m Fpati te¼wei ]_ f¾eim %niom a[ ] em p²mter se7 t¹ ca[ ] de pq¶sseim eqla[

5

When the bevy of Muses met the shepherd Hesiod as he grazed his flocks beside the print of the swift horse … the creation (?) of Chaos … at the water (?) of the hoof … a man who fashions harm for another fashions it for his own liver … to live worthily (?) … everyone you … easy (?) to achieve

The indirect tradition allows us to know much more about this passage than we might reasonably have hoped to do, and ever since the publication of the papyrus it has been accepted that the passage comes from the Dream sequence which followed the “Reply to the Telchines” and preceded the first aition (the Parian Graces). In this passage Callimachus apparently compared his dream experience to that of Hesiod’s meeting with the Muses on Mt Helicon. Lobel and Pfeiffer understood vv. 3 – 5 to be a statement that at that meeting the Muses taught Hesiod not just the Theogony (v. 3), but also the Works and Days (v. 5),2 and this inter*

1 2

G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), Esiodo: cent’anni di papiri (Florence 2008) 153 – 64 I am indebted to Lucia Prauscello, Helen Van Noorden, and members of the audience in Florence for instructive criticism; Johannes Haubold kindly supplied information about Boys-Stones-Haubold forthcoming. Papyrological marks are excluded unless they affect the argument. This reconstruction assumes that the locations referred to in vv. 1 and 4 are the same (Hippocrene). There have been many efforts to find a reference to the

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pretation has, I think rightly, held the field ever since and guided suggested reconstructions.3 The choice of the (?) creation of Chaos to stand for the Theogony is readily understandable. In vv. 104 – 13 of that poem Hesiod invokes the Muses who have been the subject of the extended proem and asks them to sing of the earlier gods, the creation of the cosmos, and the Olympian gods and the distribution of honours and functions among them; vv. 114 – 16 conclude the invocation and move on to the first subject: taOt² loi 5spete LoOsai ûOk¼lpia d¾lat’ 5wousai 1n !qw/r, ja· eUpah’, fti pq_tom c´met’ aqt_m. Etoi l³m pq¾tista W²or c´met’7

Tell me these things, Muses who dwell on Olympus, from the beginning, and say which of them was created first. First of all was created Chaos … (Hesiod, Theogony 114 – 16)

Both !qw^ and pq~tista strongly mark – or could by later readers be seen as so doing – these verses as the beginning of ‘the poem proper’; Chaos is the first thing about which the Muses told Hesiod.4 On the standard interpretation of Callimachus fr. 4 Mass., Callimachus has rewritten Works and Days 265, or perhaps 265 – 6 (which are cited both separately and together in antiquity),5 and made this rewriting a kind of ‘shorthand’ reference to the whole Hesiodic poem: oX t’ aqt_i jaj± te¼wei !mµq %kkyi jaj± te¼wym, B d³ jajµ boukµ t_i bouke¼samti jaj¸stg.

The man who devises evil against another devises evil against himself; evil plans turn out worst for the plotter himself. (Hesiod, Works and Days 265 – 6)

Why has Callimachus chosen these verses to represent the whole Hesiodic poem? The naively proverbial structure certainly captures an important signature of Hesiodic expression, particularly when set within the refined structures of Callimachean verse and the Callimachean po-

3 4 5

Catalogue of Women in vv. 6 – 7 (cf. Asclepiades or Archias, AP IX 64 = HE 1018 – 25). Cf. Di Benedetto 1995. Cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004, p. 53, citing further evidence for Chaos as the ‘beginning’ of the Theogony. Callimachus’ replacement of two Hesiodic hexameters by one may be seen as part of the epideixis of a style which is truly keptak]om.

30. Hesiod, Callimachus, and the invention of morality

561

etic voice, but the most obvious answer lies within the patterning of the opening of the Aitia. By using these Hesiodic verses, Callimachus can pick up in the Dream sequence the Reply’s theme of malignant phthonos and the damage it does to the liver of the malignant (fr. 1.8),6 an idea which is thrown into relief by Callimachus’ introduction of Hpaq into his rewriting; the Telchines themselves become prime examples of the wisdom of Op. 265 – 6. Lurking in the background will be the opposition between phthonos and Apolline wisdom which is most familiar to us from the close of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, but which is also of course a prominent structure within the Reply. Hesiod’s constructed position as Callimachus’ forerunner and authorising model is thus reinforced; both stand under the protection of Apollo and the Muses (cf. Th. 94 – 5), and both suffer from the machinations of those who really only harm themselves. The Hesiodic couplet stresses – for our benefit and the benefit of the Telchines – that “evil plotting” has serious consequences for the plotters themselves, not just for their descendants or their societies (vv. 238 – 47). If we push the verses hard, we might say that the spiteful muttering (1pitq}feim) of the Telchines amounts to “plotting” with the prospect of future “(evil) action” rather than action in the present, and so this Hesiodic warning is precisely what they need. Callimachus, on the other hand, speaks directly and straightforwardly to the Telchines in a demonstration of Qh}meim l}hour, whereas the Telchines’ indirect mutterings are as sjoki² as one could hope to find (cf. Op. 263 – 4).7 This Hesiodic couplet is cited in antiquity rather less often than one might have expected. A distorted version of these verses was used before Callimachus by Demetrius of Chios to mock the long anabolai of the musician Melanippides (Aristotle, Rhet. III.1409b26 – 9), but later quo6

7

Cf., e. g., Cameron 1995, pp. 129 – 30; for further aspects of this presentation of the Telchines cf. Cozzoli 2008. The idea that vhomeqo_ damage themselves is a very common one (cf., e. g., Cingano on Pindar, Pythian II.91: Gentili 1995, p. 404). I owe part of this formulation to Lucia Prauscello; for the contrast between the modes of speaking in fr. 1 cf. Hunter 1993: 190 – 1. I have pondered whether a ‘Hesiodic’ reading of the Telchines’ complaints lends colour to Neil Hopkinson’s suggestion to read vOkom ![kitqºm at the end of fr. 1.7, cf. Op. 241 (on the consequences for a whole city of one bad man) fstir !kitqa¸mei ja· !t²shaka lgwam²atai ; for ![kitqºm cf. also Lehnus 1991. I forebear to observe that Op. 240 begins pokk\ji, as does Callimachus fr.1.1 with Pontani’s supplement.

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tations of Hesiod’s gnomic thought, sometimes indeed confused with Callimachus’ adaptation,8 do not really shed light upon Callimachus’ choice, though they attest to the general familiarity of the thought.9 Perhaps the most interesting citation in the current context is the appearance of versions of the Hesiodic verses as the moral of the opening episode of the Life of Aesop, in prose in the (older) G text and in iambic trimeters in the W text; here the gnomic wisdom of Op. 265 – 6 both introduces the Life and marks it very specifically as a ‘Hesiodic’, and non-Homeric, text.10 Nevertheless, although the Hesiodic idea there “evokes a whole poem and a whole ethos”,11 chronology may make us unwilling to use the Life of Aesop as good evidence for a general recognition in antiquity that these verses held a special place in the Works and Days and could be used without further contextual support as a way of referring to the poem (as its ‘opening’, if you like). More fruitful might be a reconsideration of the Callimachean passage itself. On the standard interpretation of fr. 4 Mass., Callimachus here suggests, without actually insisting upon, the chronological priority of the Theogony over the Works and Days; this order, suggested of course by the works themselves, has also been fruitfully explored by modern scholarship in terms of Hesiod’s narrative presentation of his poetic self.12 There is, however, more at stake in this order, when it becomes established as traditional reading practice, than mere chronology. To put it very simply, the cosmos and the divine order must first be established through the performance of the Theogony, and then human morality and the conduct of human life through the Works and Days; there is thus a meaningful structure to this sequential narrative, not just an accident of the flow of poetic inspiration. Moreover, this structure may be thought to be a ‘natural’ interpretation of the relevant passage of the Works and Days itself. Hesiod appeals to the basik/r to practise justice, because (c\q in vv. 249, 252) Zeus’ “thrice countless” guardians and Dike herself are watching (Op. 248 – 64). The verses with which we are concerned then follow, to some extent repeating the thought of the previous section, but also making more explicit that evil plotting, 8 Cf. West’s index fontium ad loc., Massimilla 1996, p. 71. 9 A particularly interesting case is Josephus, Ant. Iud. XI.268 where the Hesiodic wisdom is adapted to show the wisdom of the Jewish god. 10 Cf. Hunter 2007, pp. 45 – 6. 11 Hunter 2007, p. 46 n.23. 12 Cf. Most 1993 and id. 2006, pp. XXI-II.

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not just evil actions, has nasty consequences for the plotter; Zeus’ eye which “sees and understands everything” (v. 267) is not explicitly said to be the reason why “evil plans turn out worst for the plotter”, but the juxtaposition, together with the sequence of thought which has immediately preceded, makes that inference overwhelmingly easy. Gods are a necessary precondition, as well as a reason, for human beings to behave properly to one another. We may be strangely reminded of the famous verses of (probably) Critias in which Sisyphus argues that the idea of gods, “who hear everything which is said among mortals and see everything which is done”, was invented by some very clever man as a way of stopping mortals doing wrong secretly (fr. 19 K-S); the idea of that passage, despite its very contemporary resonances, is in fact a reworking of Hesiodic ideas, with ‘real’ gods replaced by fictional ones.13 Callimachus’ citation of the Works and Days fashions it as a poem about morality and shared communal values. It is important not to overstate this; poems are cited in many different ways in antiquity, some more meaningful than others. Moreover, it is broadly true that, with the exception of particular forms of allegorical interpretation, ancient readers were less concerned than some moderns with finding a “holistic reading” of a poem and more concerned with the memorable effects of individual parts; the report that Anaxagoras was the first to show that the poetry of Homer was ‘concerned with (peq_) virtue and justice’ (Diogenes Laertius II.11) is very striking for its unusualness, though, in the state of our ignorance of what Anaxagoras actually said, we cannot push this very hard.14 For us, on the other hand, it seems natural to think of the Works and Days as a text concerned with, a text ‘about’ some people might say, morality, virtue and Justice (however !qet^ is to be understood in the Works and Days), but such an attitude is perhaps rarer in antiquity than we might have expected. The Aristophanic Aeschylus sees its principal lessons as agricultural (Ranae 1033 – 4) and, whatever the particular demands of the comic context in that passage, this was to remain the dominant thrust of the poem’s reception. There are, of course, high-profile exceptions to this sweeping generalisation. The 13 The idea was probably a commonplace of sophistic thought; cf. Antiphon on how one should follow nomoi “in the presence of witnesses”, but phusis “when there are no witnesses present” (fr. 44a 1 DK-Pendrick). 14 The case of the Works and Days would differ from Homer in that ‘virtue and justice’ are explicitly elements of the former.

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presence of Hesiod, both in thought and language, in some of Solon’s moralising and political elegiacs has been described as “pervasive”,15 and Solon’s concentration on Op. 213 – 326 has been argued both to fashion “a certain image of Hesiod” and to suggest “that Hesiod is already by the early sixth century a definitive authority on d¸jg”;16 be that as it may, by the time of Aratus’ Phainomena, at least, the special place of Justice in the Works and Days had been firmly established, and inscriptions attest to this continuing association (cf. e. g., Testimonia 105, 107 Most). At a less complex level, Hesiod must always have been an indefatigable source of gnomic wisdom.17 Philosophical prose naturally engaged with the Hesiodic inheritance.18 The myth which Protagoras tells in Plato’s Protagoras about the coming to mankind of aQd~r and d_jg and hence the habit of socialised communality clearly reworks elements of Hesiod’s story of Prometheus and the poet’s exhortations to Justice, particularly his insistence (Op. 274 – 80) that it is this which defines the difference between mankind and the animal kingdom. Hesiod himself is not mentioned by name, but it would in fact be very surprising if these Hesiodic verses, which play a significant rôle in later arguments about natural law, the eating of meat etc.,19 had not been brought into the fifth-century discussion of natural law and the growth of civilisation. As for the famous verses on the “steep path to Arete” (Op. 286 – 92), which many have seen as the direct or indirect ancestor of Apollo’s advice to the poet in the “Reply to the Telchines” and which are reworked as early as Simonides PMG 579, these are cited three times by Plato as a familiar Hesiodic cm¾lg,20 and it is particularly noteworthy that Xenophon’s Socrates uses them to introduce his telling of Prodicus’ fable of ‘Heracles 15 Irwin 2005, p. 155. 16 Irwin 2005, p. 163 with n. 22. 17 For Pindar’s use of Homer cf., e. g., Ford 2002, pp. 79 – 80, D’Alessio 2005, pp. 230 – 1. The history of the early reception of the Works and Days remains to be written, but cf. West 1978, p. 61 for a brief orientation and Irwin 1998 for part of the possible place of Archilochus within this history. 18 For various aspects of Plato’s engagement with the Works and Days cf. Buzio 1938, pp. 132 – 45, Solmsen 1962 and Van Noorden 2007; Boys-Stones-Haubold forthcoming will put the subject, which is well beyond the scope of this brief essay, firmly on the scholarly map. 19 The relevant passages can be found through the apparatus of citations in West’s edition. For some discussion cf. Renehan 1981, pp. 254 – 6. 20 Cf. Plato, Protagoras 340d, Republic II.364c-d, Laws IV.718e-19a, Solmsen 1962, p. 176.

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at the crossroads’ (Memorabilia 2.1.20), a fable which in one sense may be seen as itself an extended gloss on the Hesiodic verses. The Works and Days thus played their part in fifth- and fourth-century debates about Justice and morality, and it may well be precisely to those debates that Callimachus fr. 4 Mass. directs us. If the Works and Days teach us that life is hard and one has to get the better of one’s neighbour before he gets the better of you,21 from another perspective Op. 265 – 6 seem to point ahead to ideas that we most associate with the Platonic Socrates; the Hesiodic scholia interpret their lesson very much in a Platonic mode: If we really knew that our attempts to harm others harmed ourselves more, we would avoid doing harm; for no one would willingly harm himself. But through ignorance we are caught in this evil and, while thinking that we are benefiting ourselves, we are harmed by ourselves, and the harm we do to ourselves is greater than the harm we do to others; for in such cases we damage others with regard to their wealth, but we damage ourselves with regard to what is most important, our souls. It is our souls which are affected by doing injustice, whereas the person who is harmed is injured with respect to external things. (Scholium on Hesiod, Op. 265 – 6)

As this scholium seems to derive from the neo-Platonist Proclus, the Platonic nature of this interpretation is not a cause for surprise;22 probably from Proclus also stems the citation (scholium on Op. 207 – 12) of Thrasymachus, presumably the Thrasymachus of Republic 1, as an example of b t_m "qpajtij_m mºlor which the Hesiodic fable of the hawk and the nightingale encapsulates.23 Be that as it may, in his set of recipes for how young men should be taught to read poetry, Plutarch (Moralia 36a), who also wrote an extensive commentary on the Works and Days (frr. 25 – 112 Sandbach), had already connected Op. 266 with the doctrines of the Gorgias and the Republic as an illustration of how teachers should bring the poets into line with philosophical teaching, and another scholium on v. 266a, which cannot be traced certainly to the commentaries of either Plutarch or Proclus,24 explicitly cites Socrates’ cross-examination of Polos at Plato, Gorgias 474c on the subject of whether doing wrong is j\jiom and aUswiom than being wronged. So too, in his commentary on Op. 286 (‘Very foolish Perses, I will give you some good advice’), Plutarch contrasted Hesiod’s ‘philosophical charac21 22 23 24

For the ‘world of Hesiod’ cf. Millett 1984, Edwards 2004. Pertusi 1955, p. 90. Pertusi 1955, p. 76. Pertusi 1955, p. 91.

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ter’ in seeking to correct his brother through admonition (mouhete?m) with other poets and philosophers who resorted to the abuse of those who had offended them: [Hesiod] knew the saying of Socrates that every bad man is unwillingly bad, and thus requires admonition (mouhes_a) and will perhaps recognise his own badness.25 (Scholium on Hesiod, Op. 286 = Plutarch fr. 40 Sandbach)

Sandbach is doubtful that this reason for Hesiod’s mode of proceeding actually goes back to Plutarch, but the Platonising reading is certainly of a piece with an ancient tradition of interpretation which we can still identify. Between Hesiod and Callimachus fall indeed the shadows of Socrates and Plato, the ‘inventors’ – when viewed from a certain perspective – of a theorised morality which should govern the way we live. There is an obvious analogy, which Callimachus may have seen, between the arguments of the Platonic Socrates with such as Thrasymachus in Republic 1 and Callicles and Polos in the Gorgias and Hesiod’s attempt to persuade his brother and the basik/r that d_jg should be the governing principle among mortals, rather than the (natural) rights of the “stronger” (oR jqe¸ssomer Op. 210) to behave as they wish against the weak, like hawks towards nightingales.26 Of particular importance in the present context may be the ‘devil’s advocate’ speech which Plato gives to Adeimantos in Republic II to persuade Socrates that his task is to show the young men that justice must be chosen for its own sake, not because of any material or social advantage which arises from it (362e-7e). Homer and Hesiod are here naturally cited as standard sources for the common view that justice is a good thing because of its consequences (363a-b),27 and Op. 287 – 9 (“the hard path of virtue”) are adduced as a passage which “wizards” (c|gter) use to demonstrate the simplicity of a life of vice (364c-d), but the general thrust of Adeimantos’ argument may owe more to Hesiod than is usually allowed; Hesiodic argu25 The Platonic Socrates says such things in more than one place, but the reference here, as in the scholium on v. 15, may well be, as Pertusi 1955, p. 96 has it, to Laws V.731c. 26 The fable of the hawk and the nightingale has, of course, been interpreted rather differently by some modern scholars (cf., e. g., Hubbard 1995, Nelson 1998, pp. 77 – 9), but ancient readers were on the whole in no doubt; for a helpful reading of the fable cf. now Mordine 2006. 27 Socrates recurs to this passage and to these poets in claiming to have fulfilled his undertaking at X.612b-c.

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ments have, of course, been adduced before as in a general way relevant to this speech,28 but there may be more to be said. In putting forward arguments in favour of appearing rather than being morally upright, on the grounds that it is appearance which will bring the reward, Adeimantos notes that if there are no gods or if they have no concern with human affairs, then there is no point in worrying forever about keeping our immorality secret (kamh\meim); if gods do exist and are concerned with our affairs, it is precisely the poets (and particularly those who have given us the genealogy of the gods, i. e., presumably, above all Hesiod in the Theogony) who teach us how to buy them off (365d-e). Here, as throughout this part of the speech, Hesiod is not named, but in Hesiod t¹ kamh²meim is simply not possible (or so Hesiod would like the basileis to believe, cf. v. 268 oqd´ 2 k¶hei jtk.) because of Zeus’ numerous guardians (vv. 252 – 5), the maiden Dike herself and Zeus’ omnipresent eye. Adeimantos sharply points out that “all who claim to be supporters of Justice, like you Socrates, beginning from the original heroes (1n !qw/r Bq¾ym) whose works (k|coi) survive right down to men of the present day” (366d7e2) find fault with injustice and recommend justice only because of the “reputation and honours and gifts” which arise from each. It would be tendentious to claim that the move from heroes to “men of the present day”, in the context of k|coi in praise of Justice, must evoke Hesiod – clearly Plato is taking a fairly broad aim – but the possibility is at least worth raising. No one, says Adeimantos, “either in poetry or normal discourse (Udioi kºcoi)” has given an adequate account of justice and injustice “when they are in the soul of the possessor and escape the notice of gods and men”. If, he continues, the champions of justice had considered the matter as he suggests and trained the young in that way, “we would not now be guarding against one another’s wrongdoing and each would be his own best guardian (v}kan), out of fear that by committing injustice he would dwell with (lit. “be sunoikos with”) the greatest evil” (367a3 – 5). Here too, it may be difficult to resist the temptation to link “guardians of injustice” to Zeus’ “thrice countless immortal guardians of mortal men who watch over (vuk\ssousi) dikai and wicked deeds” (Op. 252 – 3); in any case, the flavour of this part of Adeimantos’ speech does seem quite close to the Hesiodic verses with which we are concerned. 28 Cf., e. g., Solmsen 1962, pp. 173 – 4; see also Ford 2002, pp. 214 – 16 on the general question of how Glaukos and Adeimantos use the poetry of the past.

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Adeimantos concludes by urging Socrates to “leave it to others to praise the rewards and reputation (that arise from justice), for while I could endure others praising justice and finding fault with injustice in this way … I could not endure this from you …” (367d). Who are these “others”? Again, presumably, Plato’s aim is broad, but Hesiod seems to brood over this whole discussion. One other reader of Hesiod and Plato, at least, has trodden some way down this same path. Plutarch excised all of Op. 267 – 73, according to part of the Proclan scholium: If justice ought to be chosen (aRqetºm), even if there is no Providence (pqºmoia), and injustice avoided (veujtºm), it is clear that all this argument is superfluous. Therefore Plutarch excises the seven verses [Op. 267 – 73] as unworthy of Hesiod’s judgement on justice and injustice. (Scholium on Hesiod, Op. 270 – 3 = Plutarch fr. 38 Sandbach)

How much of Proclus’ argument in this note goes back to Plutarch may be debated, but the argument itself seems clear enough: the existence of a watching god and hence the possibility or otherwise of getting away with injustice ought to be irrelevant to a protreptic to justice, if justice is worth choosing for its own sake. With Plutarch’s excision, vv. 265 – 6, the verses from which this set of soundings began, provide a suitably gnomic closure to the address to the basileis, before Hesiod turns back to his brother. If the scholium reproduces the Plutarchan argument at all fairly, then Plutarch is here in a very Platonic mode, and it is indeed Adeimantos’ plea to Socrates in Republic II which seems most clearly evoked; vv. 270 – 2, which Plutarch removes, ask, as Adeimantos does, a very awkward question about the value of being just. We need not, of course, suppose that it was indeed this passage of the Republic that Plutarch has specifically in mind, but the possibility that one ancient reader at least – whether that be Plutarch or Proclus – brought this passage of Hesiod and this passage of Republic II into alignment may be entertained. Plutarch’s critical method, which seeks to harmonise Hesiodic and Platonic teaching, will not, of course, be the same as ours: for Plato, Hesiod – with all his talk of how difficult virtue is and of the agricultural rewards which flow from it – is part of the problem, not the solution (cf. Republic II.363e-4d). Nevertheless, Plutarch and Proclus can illuminate the reception and importance of the Works and Days in Greek culture for periods much earlier than those in which they themselves wrote, and they may well shed light on Callimachus’ choice of Hesiodic passage with which to introduce the Aitia.

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In their different ways both Callimachus and Plato attest to a reading of the Works and Days as a moral poem about how we should live; for Callimachus, such morality stands under the protection of, and is promoted by, Apollo. For Hesiod too, of course, piety and morality go hand-in-hand; it is the powerful presence of the divine which guarantees both. In the matter of piety, as with morality, the Works and Days inevitably follows the Theogony, as knowledge of that divine presence necessarily precedes pious attitudes; impiety is a mark of those, like the cannibal Cyclops, who do not understand the power of the divine. Piety at many levels of sophistication is, of course, a striking hallmark of the poet’s persona in the Works and Days. Callimachus’ pious persona throughout the Aitia is thus in part an element of his ‘Hesiodic’ selffashioning, as well as dictated by the subject-matter of the poem and by the special relationship with Apollo which the Reply establishes; we may, however, also wonder whether this is another way in which the Aitia presents itself as the sequel to the Theogony:29 not merely in the fact that it tells of the rites and the cults of the gods whom the Theogony has established, but that it promulgates the pious moral attitudes which the certain existence of the Olympian order requires, even if the nature or resonance of that ‘piety’ is irrevocably changed by Callimachus’ knowing exploitation of tradition. What is clear, however, is that the Telchines are disfigured in both moral and poetic terms: their malignancy, as Hesiod could have taught them, damages only themselves and they are, unlike both Hesiod and Callimachus, “no friends of the Muse”. Callimachus’ apparent adoption of a Hesiodic moral and religious position is thus intimately tied to his implicit and explicit poetics, in which the use of moral and ritual language is an important element;30 what Plato would have made of this Callimachean mixture is probably beyond conjecture.

Bibliography Asper 1997 = M. Asper, Onomata allotria. Zur Genese, Struktur und Funktion poetologischer Metaphern bei Kallimachos, Stuttgart 1997 29 Cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004, pp. 51 – 60. 30 Cf. e. g., Asper 1997, pp. 94 – 5, 98 – 9. The most prominent example is perhaps jahaq|r, but the implications of 1shk|r at Hymn to Apollo 9 are also worthy of reflection.

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Boys-Stones-Haubold 2008 = Plato and Hesiod, G. Boys-Stones and J. Haubold (edd.), Durham forthcoming [2008] Buzio 1938 = C. Buzio, Esiodo nel mondo Greco sino alla fine dell’et classica, Milano 1938 Cameron 1995 = A. Cameron, Callimachus and his Critics, Princeton 1995 Cozzoli 2008 = A T. Cozzoli, ‘“Come un fanciullo …” (Callim. fr.1, 6 Pf.)’, in Callimachea II, A. Martina and A.T. Cozzoli (edd.), Rome forthcoming [2008] D’Alessio 2005 = G. B. D’Alessio, ‘Ordered from the Catalogue: Pindar, Bacchylides, and Hesiodic genealogical poetry’, in The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Constructions and Reconstructions, R. Hunter (ed.), Cambridge 2005, 217 – 38 Di Benedetto 1995 = V. Di Benedetto, ‘Callimaco, fr.2, 4 Pf.’, RFIC 123 (1995), pp. 169 – 71 Edwards 2004 = A. T. Edwards, Hesiod’s Ascra, Berkeley-Los Angeles 2004 Fantuzzi —Hunter 2004 = M. Fantuzzi – R. Hunter, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge 2004 Ford 2002 = A. Ford, The Origins of Criticism, Princeton 2002 Gentili 1995 = Pindaro, Le Pitiche, edd. B. Gentili, P. A. Bernardini, E. Cingano and P. Giannini, Verona 1995 Hubbard 1995 = T. K. Hubbard, ‘Hesiod’s fable of the hawk and the nightingale reconsidered’, GRBS 36 (1995), pp. 161 – 71 Hunter 1993 = R. Hunter, The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies, Cambridge 1993 — 2007 = R. Hunter, ‘Isis and the language of Aesop’, in Pastoral Palimpsests. Essays in the Reception of Theocritus and Vergil, M. Paschalis (ed.), Rethymnon 2007, pp. 39 – 58 [= this volume 867 – 83] Irwin 1998 = E. Irwin, ‘Biography, fiction, and the Archilochian ainos’, JHS 118 (1998), pp. 177 – 83 — 2005 = E. Irwin, Solon and Early Greek Poetry, Cambridge 2005 Lehnus 1991 = L. Lehnus, ‘Callimaco fr. 1.7 Pf.’, ZPE 86 (1991), pp. 9 – 10 Massimilla 1996 = Callimaco. Aitia, Libri Primo e Secondo, ed. G. Massimilla, Pisa 1996 Millett 1984 = P. Millett, ‘Hesiod and his world’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 30 (1984), pp. 84 – 107 Mordine 2006 = M. J. Mordine, ‘Speaking to kings: Hesiod’s aWmor and the rhetoric of allusion in the Works and Days’, CQ 56 (2006), pp. 363 – 73 Most 1993 = G. W. Most, ‘Hesiod and the textualization of personal temporality’, in La componente autobiografica nella poesia greca e latina fra realt e artificio letterario, G. Arrighetti and F. Montanari (edd.), Pisa 1993, pp. 73 – 92 — 2006 = Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. G.W. Most, Cambridge (Ma) 2006 Nelson 1998 = S.A. Nelson, God and the Land, New York-Oxford 1998 Pertusi 1955 = Scholia vetera in Hesiodi Opera et Dies, ed. A. Pertusi, Milano 1995 Renehan 1981 = R. Renehan, ‘The Greek anthropocentric view of man’, HSCPh 85 (1981), pp. 239 – 59

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Solmsen 1962 = F. Somsen, ‘Hesiodic motifs in Plato’, in Hsiode et son influence, Vandoeuvres-Genève, pp. 173 – 211 Van Noorden 2007 = H. A. Van Noorden, Hesiod’s ‘Myth of the Races’ in classical Antiquity, PhD Diss. Cambridge 2007 West 1978 = Hesiod, Works and Days, ed. M. L. West, Oxford 1978.

Richard Hunter On Coming After Part 2

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Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabe´ · Margarethe Billerbeck · Claude Calame Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 3/2

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

On Coming After Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception by

Richard Hunter Part 2 Comedy and Performance Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire The Ancient Novel

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN 978-3-11-020441-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

쑔 Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover Design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen

Contents Part 2 Comedy and Performance 31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 32. Philemon, Plautus and the Trinummus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 33. The Aulularia of Plautus and its Greek original . . . . . . . . . . . 612 34. Middle Comedy and the Amphitruo of Plautus . . . . . . . . . . . 627 35. ‘Acting down’: the ideology of Hellenistic performance . . . . 643 36. Showing and telling: notes from the boundary . . . . . . . . . . . 663

Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire 37. Generic consciousness in the Orphic Argonautica? . . . . . . . . . . 681 38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius . 700 39. The Periegesis of Dionysius and the traditions of Hellenistic poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 718

The Ancient Novel 40. History and Historicity in the Romance of Chariton . . . . . . 737 41. Longus and Plato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 775 42. Growing up in the ancient novels: a response . . . . . . . . . . . . 790 43. The Aithiopika of Heliodorus: beyond interpretation? . . . . . . 804 44. ‘Philip the Philosopher’ on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus . . . 829

VI

Contents

45. Plato’s Symposium and the traditions of ancient fiction . . . . . 845 46. Isis and the Language of Aesop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 867 47. The curious incident …: polypragmosyne and the ancient novel 884 General Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897 Passages Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 902

Part 1 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 On Coming After . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Hellenistic Poetry and its Reception 1. Apollo and the Argonauts: Two notes on Ap. Rhod. 2, 669 – 719 29 2. Medea’s flight: the fourth Book of the Argonautica . . . . . . . . 42 3. ‘Short on heroics’: Jason in the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4. Winged Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 5. Bulls and Boxers in Apollonius and Vergil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6. Greek and Non-Greek in the Argonautica of Apollonius . . . . 95 7. Callimachus and Heraclitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 8. Writing the God: Form and Meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 9. Written in the Stars: Poetry and Philosophy in the Phainomena of Aratus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 10. The Presentation of Herodas’ Mimiamboi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 11. Callimachean Echoes in Catullus 65 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

Contents

VII

12. Plautus and Herodas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 13. Bion and Theocritus: a note on Lament for Adonis v. 55 . . . . 229 14. Mime and mimesis: Theocritus, Idyll 15 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 15. The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . 257 16. Callimachus swings (frr. 178 and 43 Pf.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 17. Before and after epic: Theocritus (?), Idyll 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 18. (B)ionic man: Callimachus’ iambic programme . . . . . . . . . . . 311 19. The Poet Unleaved. Simonides and Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . 326 20. The Poetics of Narrative in the Argonautica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 21. Virgil and Theocritus: A Note on the Reception of the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 22. The Sense of an Author: Theocritus and [Theocritus] . . . . . 384 23. Imaginary Gods? Poetic theology in the Hymns of Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 24. Theocritus and the Style of Cultural Change . . . . . . . . . . . . 434 25. Notes on the Lithika of Poseidippos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 26. The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . 470 27. The prologue of the Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’) 503 28. Sweet nothings – Callimachus fr. 1.9 – 12 revisited . . . . . . . . 523 29. The Reputation of Callimachus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537 30. Hesiod, Callimachus, and the invention of morality . . . . . . . 559

Comedy and Performance

31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century* Although our evidence for the later development of Attic Comedy has increased greatly in the present century, the gaps in our understanding remain very wide indeed. One of the larger of these gaps concerns the history of the comic chorus. In many matters connected with the chorus we must be content with an honest profession of ignorance.1 I hope, however, that a new survey of the relevant passages may be able to clarify certain issues.

I. The Ekklesiazousai and the Ploutos Discussion of the chorus in the last two extant plays of Aristophanes has largely been concerned to establish what precisely is in the manuscripts and how it got there,2 and with the meaning of WOQO£, i. e. with the exact nature of the choral performance, if there was a performance at those places where this mark is found in our texts. Little further progress seems likely in this second direction. It may, however, be possible to determine with some degree of confidence whether or not there was a choral performance, whatever its nature might have been, at certain pla* 1

2

Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 36 (1979) 23 – 38 Cf. the remarks of F. H. Sandbach in A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford 1973) 12. Among the more important discussions of this subject are Capps, ‘The Chorus in the Later Greek Drama etc.’, AJA 10 (1895) 287 – 325; Koerte, ‘Das Fortleben des Chors im gr. Drama’, Neue Jahrb. Alt. 5 (1900) 81 – 9; Bethe, ‘Der Chor bei Menander’, Berichte kgl. schs. Ges. Wiss. Leipzig, Phil.-hist. Kl., 60 (1908) 209 – 25; Maidment, ‘The Later Comic Chorus’, CQ 29 (1935) 1 – 24; Sifakis, Studies in the History of Hellenistic Drama (London 1967) Appendix I; id., ‘Aristotle EN 4. 2. 1123a 19 – 24 and the Comic Chorus in the Fourth Century’, AJP 92 (1971) 410 – 32; Pöhlmann, ‘Der Überlieferungswert der woqoO – Vermerke in Papyri und Handschriften’, WJA n.f. 3 (1977) 68 – 81. Of particular importance for Roman drama is J. Andrieu, Le Dialogue Antique (Paris 1954) 54 – 86. Cf. E. Handley, ‘WOQO£ in the Plutus’, CQ n.s. 3 (1953) 55 – 61, W. Koster, Autour d’un Manuscrit d’Aristophane crit par Dmtrius Triclinius (Groningen and Djakarta 1957) 117 – 35, Pöhlmann art.cit. passim.

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ces where in these two plays no words are preserved for the chorus. My investigation will be based not on the evidence in the manuscripts for the WOQO£ mark, but on the known structural role of choral performances in both Old and New Comedy. That a chorus did actually perform in the New Comedy i. e. that, when at the end of Act I a character announced the approach of “some drunken revellers”, “some drunken revellers” did actually appear and that this announcement was not simply a matter of time-honoured convention, is, of course, an assumption, but one that seems justified in view of the inscriptional evidence for the existence of a chorus,3 as we may well wonder what this chorus did if it did not perform between the acts. The strongest internal4 argument for choral performances in the New Comedy seems to me to be from the variations in the stereotyped formula of introduction which appear on occasion: cf. Men. Dysk. 230 – 2 and Alexis fr. 112 K-A; Latte’s suggestion5 that the vukajµ of Adesp. 1091.26 K-A is a further variation on the normal formula is an attractive one. If this whole matter was one of convention, then these variations would seem particularly pointless. A choral performance in these act-breaks remains, nevertheless, an assumption, but one that shall, I hope, prove more useful than dangerous. 1. Ekkl. 729/30: Here, in the fifth century, we would have expected the parabasis.6 A particularly close parallel to this break is Ach. 201 ff where Dikaiopolis’ departure to arrange his goods in procession and his return with the goods are separated by the parodos; similarly at 623 ff Dikaiopolis’ departure and re-entry are separated by the parabasis. In the Ekklesiazousai Aristophanes may simply have repeated the pattern, leaving an empty stage in place of a choral performance.7 This, however, seems very unlikely. An empty silence of this kind, framed by the exit and re-entry of the same character is a very rare occurrence on the Greek stage, however brief the silence may be. Tragedy knows but one example. A. Eum. 33/4.8 The one possible instance9 in surviving 3 4 5 6 7 8

Cf. Sifakis loc.cit. (1967). The external evidence, such as the notices joll\tiom woqoO and l]kor woqoO in ancient texts and references to a chorus such as Aischin. 1.157, has been collected many times; for the former cf. now Pöhlmann’s article. Gnomon 27 (1955) 497 (= Kleine Schriften [München 1968] 794 – 5). The suggestion of Capps that Heros fr. 1 Sandbach (= 8 Koerte) refers to a chorus is very uncertain. Cf. E. Fraenkel, Beobachtungen zu Aristophanes (Roma 1962) 164. Cf., e. g., p.xxviii of Ussher’s edition. Cf. O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977) 362.

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Comedy in Greek is Men. Dysk. 908/9, where the break would be only momentary. Against this must be set the number of occasions in the New Comedy when the exit and re-entry of the same character or characters to an otherwise empty stage are separated by an act-break,10 cf. Dis Exapaton 63/4, Dysk. 232/3, 783/4, Mis. 275/6, Perik. 266/7, Samia 420/1.11 The pattern of exit: empty stage: re-entry of same character is found on a number of occasions in Roman Comedy, which had no chorus; these cases are difficult to judge, both because of the possibility that the Latin dramatists have altered their Greek models and because our detailed knowledge of the Greek New Comedy is restricted to Menander and we cannot necessarily assume that his five-act structure reflects a practice universal among the poets of his period. In only a small number of cases can the act-breaks in the Greek originals be securely identified in Roman Comedy; the undertaking is not, however, a fruitless one, as witness the now confirmed break at Plaut. Bacch. 525 (= Dis Exapaton 63), although this same example is also a clear call to exercise caution.12 The following cases are relevant to the present discussion: a) Asinaria 809/10: Although great uncertainty still surrounds the Greek original of the Asinaria,13 an act-break between the entry of Diabolus and the parasite into the lena’s house and their re-emergence, now in full possession of the facts,14 is not improbable. The “contract” 9 Dr. Austin has kindly drawn my attention to Ar. Thesm. 279/80 where it appears that the Old Man leaves and then reappears, the scene having changed in the meantime (presumably by use of the 1jj}jkgla). Unfortunately, it is unclear whether he disappears from sight at this point or, for example, simply walks around the orchestra. In any case, the changing scene distinguishes this example from the others under discussion. 10 All references to Menander use the numeration of Sandbach’s Oxford text. 11 Epitrepontes 418/9 is not included as Onesimos presumably goes in when he finishes speaking at 414. 12 The necessity for act-division at Bacch. 525 was seen by, e. g. A. Freté, REL 8 (1930) 43 – 6. This and other discussions are overlooked by N. Holzberg, Menander: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (Erlanger Beitrge 50, Erlangen 1974) 44. 13 The most useful discussions are A. Traina, ‘Plauto, Demofilo, Menandro’, PP 9 (1954) 177 – 203, F. Munari, ‘La composizione dell’Asinaria’, SIFC n.s. 22 (1947) 5 – 32 and T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy 2 (Manchester 1970) 253 – 7. 14 The idea of Havet, RPh n.s. 29 (1905) 98, that a scene in which the lena explained the situation to Diabolus has been omitted after 809 is unnecessary. The

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would make a very suitable conclusion to an act, as it would certainly hold audience attention across the break. Nevertheless, the Greek original of the Asinaria at this point is a possible parallel for Ar. Ekkl. 729/ 30. b) Aulularia 627/8: An act-break in the Greek original at this point seems out of the question, as speed is the essence of the humour here, (which is not the case at Ar. Ekkl. 729/30).15 c) Cistellaria 630/1: Act-break, during which the conversation of ‘Melainis’ and ‘Selenium’ takes place, may be regarded as certain at this point in Menander’s Synaristosai. 16 Trinummus 601/2: Act-break at this point in Philemon’s Thesauros is certain, unless Philemon differed radically from the conventions of Menander’s theatre; cf. Men. Dysk. 232/3 and Perik. 266/7 for a choral interlude separating the exit of a character, (in these cases, as in the Trinummus, a slave), to fetch someone and the return of that character in conversation with the person who has been fetched. Pseudolus 573/4: Pseudolus’ remark upon exit that the tibicen is to entertain the audience during his absence is most plausibly interpreted as reflecting a musical interlude in the Greek original. Ter. Adelphoe 854/5: In broad terms, there are two possible inscenations for the Menandrean original of this often discussed passage. Demea may have remained on stage after Micio’s departure to deliver his monologue. This seems possible even with the traditional and, in my view, certainly correct ascription of 854 to Micio rather than (with Kauer) to Demea.17 Such a view might find support in the obvious parallelism between 81 ff. and 787 ff. In both places a debate between the brothers is followed by a “characterising” monologue from audience will have had no difficulty in understanding what it is that Diabolus and the parasite have discovered; Havet later abandoned the notion. Cf. also Georgine Burckhardt, Die Akteinteilung in der neuen gr. und in der rçm. Komçdie (Diss. Basel 1927) 23 – 4. 15 I hope to discuss the Aulularia on another occasion (cf. this volume 612 – 26), but I should note that I suspect that this scene does not faithfully reproduce its Greek model. Freté, REL 7 (1929) 290, classes Aul. 628 with Captivi 908/9, but in this latter scene it is not the same character who enters after the vacant stage. 16 For the act-divisions of the Synaristosai cf. Webster, Studies in Menander (Manchester 1950) 91 – 7, Mette, Lustrum 10 (1965) 85 – 8, Ludwig, Entretiens Fondation Hardt 16 (1970) 47 – 58. 17 Cf. C. Conrad, The Technique of Continuous Action in Roman Comedy (Diss. Chicago: Menasha 1915) 77 – 8.

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one of them.18 In fact however, the structural differences between the two monologues are as great as the similarities, and this indeed is what we should have expected from Menander: in formal terms, 141 – 54 is an ‘Abgangsmonolog’ and 855 – 81 would be an ‘Übergangsmonolog’.19 Those who adopt this interpretation place the start of the fifth Menandrean act at 786/7,20 where it is certainly not necessary21 and perhaps even harmful to the comedy of the scene,22 or even at 712/3,23 which is far too early. These difficulties disappear with the adoption of the alternative hypothesis, which is that 854/5 represents the break between the fourth and fifth Menandrean acts.24 The parallel of the Samia,25 a play which shows several similarities to the Adelphoe,26 is important here; in the Samia the fourth act ends with one old man calming another down and then the two going off to prepare a wedding-feast. The fifth act begins with the quite unexpected speech of Moschion, in which he declares his intention to stage the charade of going off on military service. The parallel of the Samia seems to me almost decisive for the structure of Menander’s Second Adelphoi. 27 In any case, a vacant stage without the WOQO£ mark is here out of the question. d) Ter. Andria 171/2: Terence’s changes to the scene of exposition make conclusions about the Greek original hazardous. In Menander, Simo may have remained on stage at (Terence’s) 171,28 as he perhaps 18 Cf. Holzberg o.c. 165. 19 For these terms cf. F. Leo, Der Monolog im Drama (Abh. Gçttingen, 10/5, 1908) 48. 20 Cf., e. g., Holzberg loc.cit. 21 Cf. the fourth act of the Samia for the wild rushing in and out of houses. 22 Cf. O. Rieth, Die Kunst Menanders in den Adelphen des Terenz, mit einem Nachwort hgb. vom K.Gaiser, (Hildesheim 1964) 79 – 81. 23 Cf. Webster, Studies in Menander 90. 24 Cf. Burckhardt o.c. 11. 25 Cf. Rieth o.c. 112 – 3. 26 Cf., e. g., M. Treu, RhM 112 (1969) 244 – 5. 27 Adelphoe 882 does not, as is often asserted, imply that Demea has not yet entered the house at all, cf. the corresponding request to Syrus at 776; a close parallel is Epitrepontes 142 where Habrotonon (?) comes out at the request of Charisios to fetch back Chairestratos who probably came out earlier – why we do not know – and addresses him thus Waq_si]|r se pqosl]mei, Waiq]stqate. (Alternatively, Chairestratos and Habrotonon may have entered the stage together and the latter gone into the house, leaving the former to observe Smikrines). 28 Cf. Drexler, Hermes 73 (1938) 39 – 50. Lefèvre, Die Expositionstechnik in den Komçdien des Terenz (Darmstadt 1969) 49 – 59.

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did in the Roman play;29 alternatively, the divine prologue may, as frequently in Menander, have been postponed to this position,30 making this passage parallel to Heauton Timoroumenos 170/1. In any event, there is again no reason to postulate an empty silence at this point. e) Ter. Heauton Timoroumenos 170/1: The clear parallel of the Aspis makes it all but certain that the coming and going of Chremes at this point marks the omission of the divine prologue which stood here in the Greek play.31 f) Ter. Heauton Timoroumenos 873/4: An act-break at this point of the Greek original, during which the events which Menedemus proceeds to narrate to Chremes take place, may be regarded as certain. In short, Greek Comedy provides only three possible parallels to the dramaturgy assumed by those who deny a choral performance at Ar. Ekkl. 729/30, and of these only the most uncertain (the Greek original of Asinaria 809/10) is really parallel, as in the two remaining instances (Men. Dysk. 908/9 and the Greek original of Aulularia 627/8) only a few moments of “real time” are necessary for the off-stage action. If, however, we assume that the chorus did perform at this point in Ekkl., then the scene will adhere to the norms of Greek dramatic practice, norms which hold for both Old and New Comedy. The WOQO£ mark in our texts could have arisen in more than one way; the question of its origin, however, should not be allowed to obscure considerations of ancient dramatic technique. 2. Ekkl. 876/7: “no lapse of time whether actual or dramatic is necessary” (Ussher, p. xxviii of his edition). It is, however, clear from the j_lor of the young man that the dinner is imagined to take place between 876 and 877.32 How did ancient Comedy handle the lapse of dramatic time? 33 In Menander, significant lapse of dramatic time occurs between acts, although, of course, an act-break does not necessarily entail a significant lapse of dramatic time. Thus, for example, a return trip within the town, (or the immediate countryside, if the play is set in the 29 Cf. Donatus on 173, Conrad o.c. 78. For a bibliography on this problem cf. B. Denzler, Der Monolog bei Terenz (Zürich 1968) 8 n. 29. 30 Cf. Holzberg o.c. 71. 31 For the literature prior to the publication of the Aspis cf. Marti, Lustrum 8 (1963) 46 – 7, and Denzler o.c. 12 with notes 37 – 8; Denzler’s analysis appears to take no account of P.Oxy. 2534 ( = Men. fr. 76 K-A), which was published by R. A. Coles and J. W. B. Barns in CQ n.s. 15 (1965) 55 – 7. 32 Cf. Pöhlmann art.cit. 75. 33 For “time” in ancient drama cf. now Taplin o.c. 290 – 4.

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country), may be completed within one act,34 and indeed within a fairly short time (cf. Mis. 237 – 59), but any longer trip is spread over at least two acts.35 For Aristophanes general rules are harder to formulate, but it is clear that “significant” time lapse does not occur during a moment of 34 Although it cannot be assumed that Menander used a time scheme which was universal in New Comedy, there are in fact very few difficult cases in the Roman plays. Trachalio’s errand at Rudens 779 – 839 is to the immediate neighbourhood (the beach) – for the intervening scene cf. Diggle, RhM 117 (1974) 86 – 94; Parmeno fetches Pamphilus from within the town at Ter. Hecyra 815 – 41; an act-break can fall between Amphitruo 854 and 1009, and probably Mostellaria 528 and 541, cf. M.Knorr, Das gr. Vorbild der Mostellaria des Plautus (Diss. München 1934) 31 – 2. In general, I think it more likely that Plautus has on occasions successfully obscured the act-divisions and time-relationships of his Greek models than that Menander differed radically from the other poets of the New Comedy. While we may only entertain doubts as to whether the break at Captivi 908/9 accurately reflects the Greek play (cf. Prescott, HSCP 21 [1910] 37 – 9), it is clear that the Menaechmi is not the problem it is sometimes held to be (cf. Hough, CP 31 [1936] 247, Webster, Studies in L.G.C. 2 70): a necessary act-break at 446 brings the first part into line with the Menandrean convention, and the quick arrival of the senex at 753 and the slaves at 990 does not breach the familiar conventions. W. Steidle, ‘Zur Komposition von Plautus’ Menaechmi’, RhM 114 (1971) 247 – 61, has made the attractive suggestion that Plautus added the scenes with the doctor to his model, presumably from another Greek play. They are, however, more integral to the play than he allows: there is a neat parallelism between 835 ff and 939 ff, i. e. both brothers behave in such a way as to convince others that they are mad. The call for slaves at 952 – 5, which Steidle considers weakly motivated in comparison with 844, is in fact an amusing characterisation of the stupid and cowardly doctor. That the senex expects Menaechmus still to be with his wife when he returns with the doctor and that Menaechmus I does not connect the attack of the slaves with the previous scene do not seem to me particularly improbable in a Graeco-Roman Comedy. It might be suggested as an alternative that Plautus has expanded the first mad scene (835 ff) much beyond its original length; his audience will have been familiar with such scenes both from Comedy (cf. Ter. Phormio 6 – 8) and Tragedy (cf. Ennius’ Alcmeo fr. XV Jocelyn [ = 25 – 31 R3]). If this is right, then Plautus has used the call for slaves as a convenient way of stitching together his composite mad-scene. This suggestion would remove the problem of the awkward length of time which it takes to get rid of the senex and would make the parallelism of 843 and 962 more pointed. On this view, of course, 938 means either that 852 ff belong to the Greek Menaechmi or that Plautus has covered his tracks with some skill. 35 Cf. Webster, Studies in L.G.C. 2 190 – 1, Sandbach o.c. (n. 1) 19. The overseas trip in the Captivi is an extreme case, but still fits this pattern; if the original followed the five-act scheme then the departure probably occurred in the second and the return in the fourth act.

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Comedy and Performance

vacant stage36 and that what may be termed “significant off-stage actions” regularly coincide with choral performances;37 by this term I refer to such events as the victory of the Sausage-seller in the boule (Knights 497 – 611), the education of Pheidippides (Clouds 1114 – 1131), the re-education of Philokleon (Wasps 1008 – 1122), and the break between the two halves of Frogs. The locus classicus for those who believe that “time” in Aristophanes is entirely anarchic has always been the trip to Sparta of Amphitheos in the space of fifty lines in the Acharnians. 38 It should be noted, however, that Amphitheos is a minor character and that his trip takes place before the parodos — contrast Lys. 1013 – 75 — and must, therefore, be covered by stage action rather than by a choral performance; it does not, and this is what is important, take place during a vacant stage. These considerations make it very probable that a choral performance of some kind occurred at Ekkl. 876/7; for a choral performance “covering” an off-stage dinner cf. Lys. 1189 – 1215. Two further observations may be made about this passage, (i) The Old Hag stresses the length of time that she has been waiting, t_ poh’ ûmdqer oqw Fjousim ; ¦qa d’ Gm p\kai. It is, I suppose, possible that this is merely a grotesque joke reflecting the eagerness of this character for a man, in which case the dinner may be “covered” by the duet of the Hag and the Young Girl. I do not, however, think that this is the natural way to interpret the passage, and two other passages where great stress is laid upon the length of time that a character has been waiting may be compared. In the Thesmophoriazousai the Old Man remains bound on stage waiting for Euripides during the parabasis (785 – 845); immediately after the parabasis he expresses his impatience, Qkk¹r cec]mglai pqosdoj_m· b d’ oqd]py. / t_ d/t’ #m eUg toqlpod~m. Similarly, in the Menaechmi of Plautus the senex leaves the stage to fetch the doctor at 875 and 36 It is sometimes asserted that five days “elapse” at Lys. 705/6 (cf. R. Weissinger, A Study of Act-Divisions in Classical Drama [Iowa Studies 9, 1940] 37 – 8), but this is quite misleading. The preceding parabasis is sufficient “to divert attention away from any unhelpful preoccupation with ‘clock time’” (Taplin o.c. 293), as wh³r in 725 neatly shows. This is, moreover, long forgotten when 6jtgm Bl]qam occurs in 881. 37 Cf. Weissinger o.c. 41, M. Landfester, Handlungsverlauf und Komik in den frhen Komçdien des Aristophanes (Berlin und New York 1977) 210 – 12. R. Kent, TAPA 37 (1906), collects much material, but much of his analysis is misleading. 38 I see no sign that Aristophanes is here parodying stage conventions, as is suggested by C. Dearden, The Stage of Aristophanes (London 1976) 41 – 2.

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returns six lines later complaining, lumbi sedendo, oculi spectando dolent, / manendo medicum dum se ex opere recipiat. An act-break in the original of the Menaechmi after 881 is likely enough,39 but in any case the complaint does not follow a momentarily vacant stage, and I think that the same can be said for Ar. Ekkl. 877 with great confidence. (ii) The “loyal citizen” (Chremes?) leaves the stage at 871 after he has finished speaking, and the other man remains behind to speak five lines before departing also. It appears to have passed unremarked that this is the earliest example in extant Comedy of the conventional ‘Abgangsmonolog’ familiar from the New Comedy; in such a situation “der nach einer Dialogscene Zurückbleibende geht mit einer Rede ab” (Leo, Monolog 48), and this monologue regularly consists of “a reaction to the preceding action or existing situation and a statement of more or less immediate future action” and concludes “with a statement of the speaker’s intended movements and action” (Prescott, CP 37 [1942] 3). In chorusless Roman Comedy such (and related) monologues often indicate the passing of dramatic time,40 but such an interpretation of Ekkl. 872 – 6 would be quite foreign to Greek dramatic practice. We are not to imagine that the dinner takes place while one character announces that he is going off to dine.41 3. Ekkl. 1111/12: At this point no lapse of time is necessary, as the maid has had more than long enough to get drunk, and there is no conventional pattern which suggests a choral performance. A performance here might also obscure the obvious, perhaps ironic,42 contrast between the cries £ tqisjajoda_lym (1098 ff) and laj\qior l³m d/lor (1112 ff).

39 Cf. Freté, REL 8 (1930) 57. 40 Cf. Prescott, ‘Exit Monologues in Roman Comedy’, CP 37 (1942) 1 – 21. Monologues in Menander may cover “significant off-stage actions” (cf. Dysk. 639 – 65), but the use of short speeches to cover a considerable lapse of time seems to be a purely Roman convention; the locus classicus is Plaut. Bacch. 526 – 9, cf. Handley, Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (Inaugural Lecture, London 1968) 14. 41 Menander appears to use such monologues to conclude sections within acts (Aspis 94 – 6, Dysk. 381 – 92, 514 – 21) more often than acts themselves (Epitrep. 414 – 8 and, perhaps, Samia 614 – 5). The early tragic examples of this convention (E. Ion 1039 ff, IA 742 ff, cf. Leo, Der Monolog 28 – 9, Schadewaldt, Monolog und Selbstgesprch [Berlin 1926] 236) are naturally followed by choral songs. 42 Cf. Gelzer, RE Suppl. Bd. 12.1497.

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Comedy and Performance

4. Ploutos 321/2: Some form of performance at this point seems likely,43 even with the most sceptical interpretation of 1p’ %kk’ eWdor in 317. No lapse of dramatic time is necessary in this place. 5. Ploutos 626/7: We here expect that a “significant off-stage action” (the healing of the god) should be marked by a choral performance, and, further, that the passage of time before a messenger-speech should be clearly indicated, cf. Ach. 1174, Wasps 1292 etc44. In Menander the lapse of time before a messenger-speech is marked either by an act-division, (as with Demeas’ speech at the start of Samia Act III), or by an onstage monologue (Dysk. 639 – 65). 6. Ploutos 770/1: This passage is greatly complicated by the difficult problem of the god’s opening words, ja· pqosjum_ ce pq_ta l³m t¹m Fkiom, / 5peita jtk.. The explanations offered have been many,45 but Denniston’s46 appears to hold the field at the moment,47 “Ploutos enters continuing a speech which he has begun off the stage”, in which case ce will have its regular function “to stress the addition made by ja_”. The technique of entry in mid-conversation is already familiar in the late fifth century, cf. Ar. Wasps 1122, Frogs 830, S. Phil. 1222, E. IA 303,48 but there seem to me to be certain difficulties in the way of this interpretation. It is quite unclear what we are to imagine the god as having said off-stage, as the parallel passages, (Men. Aspis 491, Fraenkel on A. Ag. 503, Austin on Men. Samia 101), make it certain that the address to the sun and to Athens would be the healed god’s initial utterance. Secondly, it is unclear to whom Ploutos is speaking. It might be Karion, although the fact that no reference is made to him in this scene makes it very likely that, despite 770, he did not reappear until 43 Cf. Handley art.cit. (n. 2) 59. The objection of Holzinger to a choral interlude here, that a further interruption to the ‘Handlung’ would be ‘störend’, seems to depend upon modern notions of dramatic construction. 44 Cf. P. Rau, Paratragodia: Untersuchungen einer komischen Form des Aristophanes (Zetemata 45, München 1967) 166, Taplin o.c. 293. 45 Meineke posited a lacuna, which has removed both a choral song and the opening of Ploutos’ speech, after 770, van Leeuwen a very unconvincing transposition and lacuna, and Holzinger argues that ja· … pq_ta l³m … 5peita … te is a poetic variant of ja· … ja· … ja_. The ja· of 771 is, however, not parallel with pq_ta and 5peita. Among emendations should be mentioned de? pqosjume?m le (Blaydes), cf. Men. fr. 449 K-A. 46 The Greek Particles 2 (Oxford 1954) 158. 47 Cf. S. Radt, Mnem. 4 29 (1976) 260. 48 E. Hipp. 601 ff is different in kind, and for A. Eum. 64 cf. Taplin o.c. 363 – 4. For a survey of related phenomena cf. Fraenkel o.c. (n.6) 103 – 4.

31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century

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802.49 It is often maintained that Chremylos enters at 771 with the god and ‘‘lurks in the background’’ until 782.50 This is most unlikely, as b\kk’ 1r j|qajar should be the words of an entering character, whether they be purely expletive or specifically directed at the (invisible) 51 crowd which has been detaining him.52 Chremylos makes it clear in his opening speech that he has been delayed 1m !coq÷i. In view of these difficulties I have toyed with the possibility that Ploutos’ ja· pqosjum_ ce might be in response to a welcoming exhortation from the chorus. This is not to claim that Aristophanes wrote a special song for the chorus which has been lost from our manuscripts, but it seems not impossible that the poet (as producer ?) continued to indicate or control the type of ditty to be sung even after he had ceased to write special songs for the play. Other structural indications are, however, lacking in this place53 and the question of choral performance must remain an open one. 7. Ploutos 801/2: Lapse of dramatic time may be necessary for the magic refurbishing of Chremylos’ house, but that the scene could be played without a pause at this point seems clear. 8. Ploutos 958/9, 1096/7, 1170/1: No structural necessity or lapse of dramatic time calls for choral performance at these places, although pause is necessary in the last two cases if the play is to be performed by three principals.54 49 If the Ploutos was performed by only three actors, Karion, jyv¹r in this scene, would have to be played by an extra; if even a silent Karion entered the house at 801 to re-emerge at 802, this might seem, in view of my earlier discussion, an argument in favour of a choral performance at 801/2. Rather, I think, the earlier discussion demonstrates the improbability of the hypothesis. If Karion does not return with the god at 771, then 770 might seem strange unless a choral performance between these lines masked the discrepancy. 50 So, e. g., van Leeuwen and Holzinger. 51 Contrast Dearden o.c. (n. 38) 178: “at 771 Wealth and Chremylus appear in the orchestra surrounded by a large swarm of people whom the latter drives off (782)”. 52 The simple 1r j|qajar is normally a pure expletive, but cf. Hipparchos fr. 1 KA; longer forms of this and related expressions normally have a specific object, although %pac’ eQr t¹ b\qahqom at Men. Dysk. 575 appears to be purely expletive, b\kk’ 1r j|qajar is used in both ways: Ar. Thesm. 1079 is presumably specifically directed, but Clouds 133 (cf. Ach. 864) and fr. 462 may be purely expletive. I prefer to take Wasps 835 as purely expletive rather than, with the scholiast, as a curse aimed at the dog inside the house. 53 760 – 1, however, suggest, but do not prove, that the chorus performed after 770. 54 Cf. Handley art.cit. (n.2) 60.

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Comedy and Performance

Internal evidence therefore strongly suggests choral performances at Ekkl. 729/30, 876/7, and Ploutos 321/2 and 626/7. There are, further, certain indications that the role of the chorus in the Ploutos should be extended even further. In general, if certain features of these plays fit patterns familiar from both earlier Aristophanes and from Menander, it seems more sensible to adopt these patterns than to postulate techniques unique to two plays.

II. The Fragments In this survey I shall follow broadly the order of the most recent full discussion, which is that of Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy 2 58 – 63.55 1. Aristophanes frr. 8 and 9 K-A: Of these passages from the Aiolosikon fr. 9, a ditty of five aristophaneans, might very well come from a choral song; for the self-address § cuma?jer cf. Lys. 686, Thesm. 598. Monody cannot, however, be ruled out and the thought is that expressed by Lysistrata at Lys. 138. Fr. 8 in trochaic dimeters is not necessarily choral, but this is the natural inference from bq_lem in the first verse.56 As Aristophanes wrote two plays entitled Aiolosikon (Ath. 9.372a) these fragments are normally assigned to the earlier version of indeterminate date in order to accord with Platonios’ statement that the fourth century play oqj 5wei t± woqij± l]kg (1.22 – 3 Koster).57 This may, however, be to take Platonios too literally; fr. 9 is reminiscent of the simple aeolics at Ekkl. 289 ff. 2. Timokles fr. 27 K-A: peq· d³ t¹m pam\hkiom evdousi cq÷er, M\mmiom, Pkacc~m, K}ja Cm\haima, Vq}mg, Puhiom_jg, Luqq_mg, Wqus_r, †Jomak_r†, Zeq|jkeia, Kop\diom.

55 For the passages which Webster includes and I omit cf. n. 77. 56 For the “poetic” plural in Comedy cf. D. Bain, Actors and Audience (Oxford 1977) 198 – 200. 57 Cf., e. g., Gelzer RE Suppl. Bd. 12.1413. P. Händel, Formen und Darstellungsweisen in der aristophanischen Komçdie (Heidelberg 1963) 128 – 130, has a useful discussion.

31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century

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Whether the ladies named in this fragment performed as a chorus in the Orestautokleides is a question which most critics sensibly leave open. Even if the ladies appeared on the stage, perhaps taking the place of the Eleven for a trial of Autokleides in the Parabyston (cf. fr. 28 KA),58 it does not necessarily follow that they also performed choral numbers. This play was presumably inspired by a reproduction of the Eumenides, but unfortunately it cannot be dated more precisely than to some time in the 330s or 320s.59 3. Heniochos fr. 5 J-A: It is a possible inference from this fragment that the cities to which the prologist60 refers formed the chorus of this play, but it is by no means a necessary inference. The speaker undertakes to name the cities which have gathered, and this distinguishes this play from the Birds of Aristophanes and the Cities of Eupolis (cf. frr. 245 – 7 K-A) where there is a choral parade during which the individual choreuts are introduced. Unfortunately, the date to be assigned to this very interesting passage remains obscure and so does its place, if it has one, in the later history of the comic chorus.61 58 Was Autokleides charged, as a jajoOqcor, with cumaij_m 5qca mujteq^sia (-e_sia R: corr. Dobree) / jk]pteim rvaqp\feim te h^keiam J}pqim (Ar. Thesm. 204 – 5)? It is, of course, pure surmise that the Parabyston was mentioned in this context in the play. I do not know who first identified the eleven hetairae with the Eleven of the Parabyston: Meineke thought of them simply as the chorus and considered that the Eleven were also represented on the stage as in the Aeschylean model, cf. Historia critica comicorum Graecorum (Berlin 1839) 432. I have not come across the other interpretation earlier than Maidment art.cit. (n. 1) 13. 59 Autokleides’ period of notoriety is quite uncertain; he is mentioned so casually at Aischin. 1.52 that attempts to date Timokles’ play to the period of the Timarchos scandal (cf. Koerte, BPhW 26 [1906] 900 – 3, id. RE 6A.1261) must be doubtful. Elaborate chronologies have been devised on the basis of the careers of the various hetairae, but cq÷er need not be strictly accurate for all of them and careers presumably varied greatly in length. 60 For mol_fete in v.8 cf. Men. Dysk. 1. 61 The facts relevant to the dating are as follows: (i) The ‘Hesychian’ Life in the Suda (cf. Schultz RE 8.1323 – 4, R. Wagner, Symbolarum ad comicorum Graecorum historiam criticam capita quattuor [Diss. Leipzig 1905] Cap. III, Adler’s edition of the Suda I xxi) describes Heniochos as jylij¹r t/r l]sgr jylyid_ar (g 392 Adler). The conventional “epoch date” for the Middle Comedy seems to have been 376 – 3 (cf. Kaibel, RE 1.2078); part of the reason may have been, I suggest, that this was the date of Anaxandrides’ first City victory: the report that he pq_tor … 5qytar ja· paqh]mym vhoq±r eQs^cacem (Suda a 1982

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Comedy and Performance

4. Alexis fr. 239 K-A: mOm d’ Vma lµ pamtek_r Boi~tioi va_mgsh’ eWmai to?r dias}qeim rl÷r eQhisl]moir, ¢r !j_mgtoi mOm eWmai bo÷m ja· pome?m l|mom ja· deipme?m 1pist\lemoi di± t]kour tµm m}wh’ fkgm, culmoOh’ arto»r h÷ttom ûpamter.

These eupolideans are most naturally either choral or delivered by a character leading a chorus, like Karion at Ar. Pl. 316 ff;62 choice is not easy, but it should be noted that self-address by a chorus in the sec-

Adler) suggests that he was regarded, by at least one tradition, as the pq_tor erqetµr of the new form. (ii) If Heniochos’ Polyeuktos was named after an historical figure, then one of the at least two (cf. RE 21.1614 – 23) politicians of the second half of the fourth century is an obvious likelihood. (iii) The Pauson of fr. 4 is not obviously the same character as the starveling familiar from Old Comedy (Ar. Thesm. 949, Pl. 602, Eupolis fr. 99.5 K-A), although he does appear in a “food context”. The reference to beans recalls the very many jokes at the Pythagoreans found in the Middle Comedy, but not the Old; the same joke is put into a fifth century context at Philostr. Vit. Soph. 1.483. (iv) If Hyquj_ym is a true correction of the Suda’s Hyq}jiom (cf. Meineke o.c. [n. 58] 422), it is presumably a proper name and the only man of this name of whom we know anything is the fraudulent tax-collector of Ar. Frogs 362 – 3 (with SR on 363) and 381. (v) The reference to the v|qoi in v. 11 has been thought to refer to the Social War (cf. Webster, Studies in L.G.C. 2 44), but, as is well known, the term s}mtanir replaced v|qor in the 2nd Athenian Confederacy (Theopompos FGrH 115 F 98), and I know of no evidence that the older term remained in colloquial use. If the reference is rather to the empire of the fifth century, this does not, of course, date the play to 411, as is suggested by Edmonds in his edition of the fragments. The gathering at Olympia may well come from the poet’s imagination rather than from history, and the description of Greek politics in 12 – 18 is vague enough to fit many periods of the late fifth or fourth centuries. In short, a date in the first quarter of the fourth century fits all the evidence best, but any confidence would be misplaced. Did the play celebrate the foundation of the Athenian Confederacy in 377/6? Cf. Wilamowitz, Menander: Das Schiedsgericht (Berlin 1925) 145 n. 1. 62 Cf. Sifakis, AJP 92 (1971) 422 – 4. Sifakis also suggests that Euboulos fr. 2 K-A (= 3 Hunter), in iambic trimeters, is a further example of an invocation to a chorus: at least as likely, I think, is that this fragment is a Middle Comedy example of a character speaking back into the house from which he enters. That such speeches are often addressed to women (Men. Aspis 164 – 6, Ter. Adelphoe 511 – 2, 636 – 7, 888 – 9) is not surprising in view of the conventions concerning the appearance of citizen women on the comic stage.

31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century

589

ond person plural would be without a certain parallel in extant Comedy.63 5. Anaxilas fr. 12 K-A: to»r l³m aqeim|lour rl_m poi^sei d]kvajar † rkib\tour to»r d³ p\mhgqar, %kkour !cq~star k}jour, k]omtar.

This is a reworking of Odyssey 10.432 – 3, F jem ûpamtar C sOr A³ k]omtar, and so may come from a monody by Eurylochos. On this view rl_m presumably refers to Odysseus’ companions (who may, of course, have formed a chorus); if the lines were sung by the chorus, rl_m may refer to the audience. The metre, the dactylic length D-e-D64 followed by a pure cretic tetrameter, “should be choral” (Webster, o.c. 61). We ought rather to compare Antiphanes fr. 172 K-A, which is a standard dinner narrative65 and therefore likely to have been delivered solo, composed in a mixture of trochaic tetrameters and the dactylic length DD.66 Thus, monodic performance (by Eurylochos) seems far the likelier alternative for this fragment. 6. Anaxilas fr. 13 K-A: deim¹m l³m c±q 5womh’ r¹r N}cwor, § v_ke Jimgs_a67

These aeolics may well be choral. 7. Euboulos frr. 102 and 103 K-A (= 104 – 5 Hunter): Lyric dactyls of this nature are most naturally interpreted as choral; as choruses normally advertise themselves in the parodos, fr. 102 on the glories of the wed63 At Ar. Lys. 539 !pa_qet’ (Brunck: aUqesh’ RC) is accepted, inter alios, by Wilamowitz and Coulon. 64 In v. 1 Meineke’s aqeim|lour, not otherwise attested before Hellenistic epigram, seems the best solution: for the various forms of this word cf. Fraenkel, Kleine Beitrge zur klassischen Philologie (Roma 1964) I 431 – 2. 65 Cf. Fraenkel, De media et nova comoedia quaestiones selectae (Diss. Göttingen 1912) 22 – 3. Euboulos fr. 111 K-A (= 112 Hunter), a dinner narrative in stichic cretic tetrameters, was also probably delivered solo. 66 Cf. Wilamowitz, Griechische Verskunst (Berlin 1921) 431. 67 § v_ke, jmgsi÷m Meineke.

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Comedy and Performance

ding-night enhanced by fragrant garlands would fit well in the parodos of Stephanopolides,68 and we have a famous example of such a dactylic parodos in the Clouds of Aristophanes. It is clear, both from late Aristophanes and from Menander, that special provision was still made for the initial entry of the chorus in the fourth century, cf. infra on the Rudens. The unusual (i. e. technical ?) language of frr. 99, 103 and 105 would fit well in the mouths of professional garland-sellers.69 8. Alexis fr. 42 K-A: 1mtaOha peq· tµm 1sw\tgm de? jeqj_da rl÷r jahifo}sar heyqe?m ¢r n]mar.

This fragment, from the Gynaikokratia, is obviously strikingly parallel to the Ekklesiazousai of Aristophanes, but we should not be too hasty in assuming a choral role equally as large for Alexis’ play. 9. Adesp. 1032 K-A: It would appear from the mark WOQO£ in this text that the choral interludes were handled in the normal New Comedy fashion; if, however, %mdqer in 18 and 26 refers to the chorus and the speaker of 24 – 5, ûpamter Ble?r c’ oR paq|mter jtk., is the leader of the chorus then the chorus must have taken a more active role in this play than was normal. In New Comedy the vocative %mdqer regularly refers to the audience,70 but it is to be noted that virtually all cases71 occur in monologues or what amounts to a monologue. The facts are best suited by the suggestion of Zuntz72 that we have here an example of a secondary chorus like the aduocati in the Poenulus of Plautus. The situation in Adesp. 1032 K-A is vaguely like that of the events at Eleusis reported in the Sikyonios of Menander; there %mdqer in a reported speech 68 W. G. Arnott, G and R n.s. 19 (1972) 68, suggests that AQc_diom in fr. 103.1 is an example of the naming of an individual choreut during the parodos, cf. Ar. Wasps 230 ff., Lys. 24, 321, 293 – 4. 69 There is very little to be said for the suggestion of Fielitz, De Atticorum comoedia bipartita (Diss. Bonn 1866) 10, that this play was the model for Naevius’ Corollaria, which should be “The Play about a Garland”. 70 The instances are usefully collected by Bain o.c. (n. 56) 190 – 1. 71 The apparent exception is Men. Dysk. 194, %mdqe[r in an aside. For %mdqer to the audience in the earlier period cf. Diokles fr. 14 K-A and Ar. Pl. 802; those, like van Daele, who refer this latter passage to the chorus are, I feel sure, wrong, but I doubt that this can be demonstrated. 72 Mnem.3 5 (1937) 60.

31. The Comic Chorus in the fourth century

591

was addressed to the crowd that gathered to watch the proceedings (Sik. 240, 269). Roman Comedy has preserved two important pieces of evidence for the history of the comic chorus. It must remain an open question whether the piscatores of Rudens 290 – 324 also performed as the regular chorus between the acts, if it is safe to assume the same structure for Diphilos as for Menander, but it is obviously tempting to equate their entry and self-description with the parodos, i. e. the end of the first act.73 As for the Poenulus, the structure of the Greek original74 does not emerge clearly from the Plautine version,75 but the slow entry of the aduocati recalls a number of choruses from the fifth century, and, although the aduocati appear in only one scene, they clearly trace their ancestry from comic choruses. It is they, rather than the piscatores in Rudens, who best parallel the %mdqer of Adesp. 1032 K-A.76 The object of this survey77 has been simply to reassess the evidence in surviving Comedy itself for the role of the chorus in Middle and New Comedy. Of at least as much significance for the historian of drama as 73 The alternative end for the first act would be 184, but we would normally expect at least two scenes and the prologue in the first act; I do not think that the metrical integration of the piscatores scene with the surrounding context carries any great weight. 74 Probably the Karchedonios of Alexis, cf, K. Kunst, Studien zur gr.-rçm. Komçdie (Wien und Leipzig 1919) 123 – 31, Maurach’s edition pp. 58 – 61, Arnott, Dioniso 43 (1969) 355 – 60. 75 Cf. the summary in Maurach’s edition pp. 229 – 31. 76 For the Greek parallels to the entry of the aduocati cf. Maurach’s edition p. 241. In particular, they recall the chorus of the Wasps in both character and occupation; Wasps 258/Poenulus 516 – 7 is very striking. 77 I have omitted the following fragments which are often included in discussions of this subject: Euboulos frr. 34 K-A (= 35 Hunter) and 137 K-A (= 139 Hunter) – although the possibility of choral performance is not to be excluded, nothing in either subject-matter or, in view of Anaxilas fr. 12 K-A and Antiphanes fr. 172 K-A, metre specifically argues for it; Antiphanes frr. 108 – 9 K-A – if any conclusion is to be drawn from these fragments and the title Knights, it is that the play concerned a few individuals, perhaps only two, who join the cavalry, rather than that the fragments are “a description of the chorus by its leader” (Webster o.c. 62); Antidotos fr. 2 seems more likely to have been addressed by a pompous parasite to a couple of his “students” than to be “a unique reference to the chorus after their entry” (Webster loc.cit.). There is no pressing reason to think that the “guests” of Mnesimachos fr. 4 ever appeared on the stage, let alone formed a chorus, and the later development of the choral formula (cf. Sandbach on Men. Epitrep. 169) is rather against such an interpretation.

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Comedy and Performance

the paucity of such evidence is, perhaps, the metrical variety revealed by fragments which were almost certainly delivered solo.78

Addenda The later history of the chorus continues to attract attention, particularly in the light of epigraphic evidence, cf., e. g., W.J. Slater, ‘Three problems in the history of drama’ Phoenix 47 (1993) 189 – 212. The late plays of Aristophanes have been edited by Ussher and Sommerstein (Eccl.) and Sommerstein again (Pl.); see also Sommerstein’s ‘Act division in Old Comedy’ BICS 31 (1984) 139 – 52. Two important publications for the history of Middle Comedy have been H.-G. Nesselrath, Die attische mittlere Komçdie (Berlin 1990) and W.G. Arnott, Alexis. The Fragments (Cambridge 1996); both are relevant to several of the passages discussed here. I returned to some of these passages in Eubulus. The Fragments (Cambridge 1983). n.9 Cf. now the note of Austin-Olson on vv. 280 – 1. n.34 The Menaechmi has been further discussed, cf., e. g., E. Woytek, ‘Zur Herkunft der Arztszene in den Menaechmi des Plautus’ WS 95 (1982) 165 – 82, A. Primmer, ‘Die Handlung der Menaechmi’ WS 100 (1987) 97 – 115, 101 (1986) 193 – 222. p. 587 On Heniochos fr. 5 cf. M. Revermann, ZPE 128 (1999) 25 – 8, with the response of M.L. West, ZPE 130 (2000) 12. p. 587 On Alexis fr. 239 cf. Arnott, Alexis (above) pp. 669 – 75. p. 590 Adesp. 1032 K-A was re-edited by Arnott in ZPE 102 (1994) 61 – 70.

78 I am very grateful to C. F. Austin and F. H. Sandbach for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

32. Philemon, Plautus and the Trinummus* The Trinummus 1 is certainly neither the most read nor the most obviously enjoyable of the plays of Plautus: Wilamowitz’s damning judgement has often been repeated with approval2. This play does, however, lend itself readily to the study of Plautus’ method in adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage; analysis of this play is not complicated by any serious structural problems, as the plot is simple and moves in a straight line. In this paper I propose to discuss two aspects of the Trinummus which illustrate different sides of Plautine method; in Part 1 I shall consider the allegorical prologue figures of Luxuria and Inopia and in Part 2 the role of the slave Stasimus in the second half of the play.

1. Luxuria and Inopia Wilamowitz3 argued that the allegorical prologue figures of the Trinummus were a creation of Plautus; he reasoned that since Luxuria and Inopia say nothing about the coming play, which was the function of Greek prologists4, and nothing which is obviously taken over from

* 1

2 3 4

Museum Helveticum 37 (1980) 216 – 30 In the footnotes the following works are cited by author name only: K. Abel, Die Plautusprologe (Diss. Frankfurt 1955); E. Fantham, ‘Philemon’s Thesauros as a Dramatisation of Peripatetic Ethics’, Hermes 105 (1977) 406 – 21; Ed. Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus (Berlin 1922), translated by F. Munari as Elementi Plautini in Plauto (Firenze 1960); G. Jachmann, Plautinisches und Attisches (Berlin 1931); P. Langen, Plautinische Studien (Berlin 1886); F. Leo. Plautinische Forschungen 2 (Berlin 1912); T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy 2 (Manchester 1970). All references to Menander, unless otherwise indicated, follow the numeration of Sandbach’s Oxford Classical Text. “langweilt man sich selbst bei Plautus”, Menander: Das Schiedsgericht (Berlin 1925) 165; cf. Jachmann 226, H. Haffter, in: E. Lefèvre (ed.), Die rçmische Komçdie (Darmstadt 1973) 100. Op. cit. 148. Cf. Ter. Andria 5 – 7, nam in prologis scribundis operam abutitur, / non qui argumentum narret sed qui maleuoli / ueteris poetae maledictis respondeat.

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Comedy and Performance

Greek they must be a Plautine conception5. It is certainly true that there seems to be nothing in the pqopepqacl]ma of the play which would demand a narrative prologue of the type to which we are becoming accustomed in Greek New Comedy. One lesson, however, that Menander’s Dyskolos has taught us is that we must not interpret too strictly the “need” of any play for a narrative prologue6. We are by no means at the stage where a play of the Greek New Comedy may be assumed to have had a narrative prologue (divine or human) until it is proved not to have had, but it is true that the papyri have more to offer to those who believe that most plays did have narrative prologues than to those who hold the opposite view7. The obvious striving after novelty in the expository section of their plays by poets of the Greek New Comedy 8 probably resulted, however, in the complete omission of any formal prologue in at least some plays and these two factors suggest that the structure of the expository part of the Trinummus will be as good a guide on this matter as the difficult question of “need”. A preliminary problem which must be considered is that of the stage setting assumed by our text of the Trinummus. Although Plautus presumably visualised the stage arrangements when writing his script and the three-door setting was standardised in the theatre both in his time and the subsequent centuries, we need not assume that the arrangements were the same at every performance of the Trinummus and, as our texts 5

6

7

8

Wilamowitz is followed, inter al., by Jachmann 242, A. Körte, Philemon 7, RE 19, 2 (1938) 2142 – 3, Abel 22 – 4, Fraenkel, Elementi 434. Wilamowitz further argued that, as Lesbonicus has long been inops, the sending in of Inopia is silly and hence (of course) Roman. Webster 140 observes, however, that the young man is “now at a new crisis because he has spent all the money from the sale of his father’s house”; I doubt in fact whether even this defence is necessary. Any contradiction seems to be amply compensated by the effectiveness of the scene and could just as well be Greek as Roman. On the prologue of the Dyskolos cf. A. Schäfer, Menanders Dyskolos: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (Meisenheim-am-Glan 1965) 31 – 4, and W. Ludwig, in: Entretiens Fondation Hardt 16 (1970) 84 – 90. An instructive discussion of the “need” for a prologue is D. Sewart, ‘Exposition in the Hekyra of Apollodorus’, Hermes 102 (1974) 247 – 60. K. Büchner, Das Theater des Terenz (Heidelberg 1974) 484 – 97, is right to warn against the bland assumption of a prologue for any Greek play, but his attempt to deny narrative prologues to the Epitrepontes and Terence’s Greek models is unsuccessful. Cf. Ed. Fraenkel, Class. Quart. 36 (1942) 12 – 3 (= Kleine Beitrge II 42) citing Adesp. 1008 K-A. A good example is the Cistellaria which combines both a human and a divine narrative.

32. Philemon, Plautus and the Trinummus

595

are ultimately derived from various acting scripts9, it need occasion no surprise that inconsistencies in these matters are sometimes to be found, and we should not be too quick to ascribe these difficulties to “Plautine carelessness”. With this general proviso, the evidence for the Trinummus may be set out and assessed as follows: The house of Charmides, which has been bought by Callicles, is on the stage (v. 40, 124). Where is the entrance to the posticulum (v. 194) in which Lesbonicus new lodges? The most obvious alternatives10 are that Lesbonicus and Stasimus use either the same entrance as Callicles or another of the doors which communicate directly with the stage-front11. The latter alternative may seem to require an initial effort of imagination from the audience, but is much the more likely solution. V. 3, 12, 194, 390 and 1085 strongly suggest that the posticulum is visible to the audience and v. 600 – 1 spoken by Stasimus, ibo huc quo mi imperatumst, etsi odi hanc domum, / postquam exturbauit hic nos nostris aedibus, and v. 1078 – 85 in which Stasimus prevents Charmides from entering his former residence are, at the very least, difficult to follow on the assumption that both the house and the posticulum were represented by the same door12. The fact that the sycophanta knocks at Lesbonicus’ former house (v. 868) is perhaps not to be explained as a detail intended to convince Lesbonicus that Charmides, who is ignorant of what has happened, has despatched this messenger, as no attention is drawn by the poet to this fact; in the minds of the audience the other house is still a posticulum and, of course, the sycophanta must knock at the former residence in order to attract Charmides’ attention. As for Megaronides, the text clearly suggests that he is imagined to live “off-stage”. Only thus are v. 853 – 4, ille qui me conduxit (sc. Megaronides), ubi conduxit, abduxit domum: / quae uo9 On the transmission of Roman dramatic texts cf. H. D. Jocelyn, The Tragedies of Ennius (Cambridge 1967) 47 – 57. 10 On the alleged alley running between the houses at right-angles to the stage cf. W. Beare. The Roman Stage 3 (London 1964) Appendix C, and id., Class. Rev. n.s. 4 (1954) 6 – 8. 11 For the former alternative cf. (most recently) V. Rosivach, Trans. Am. Philol. Ass. 101 (1970) 458 – 61, and for the latter A. Frickenhaus, Die altgriechische Bhne (Strassburg 1917) 26 and K. O. Dalman, De aedibus scaenicis comoediae novae (Kl.-Phil. Studien 3, Leipzig 1929) 22 – 3 and 77 – 8. 12 Cf. Langen 221 – 2. Not all of Langen’s objections are valid: v. 422 does not necessarily refer to the door from which Lesbonicus has just entered, and v. 390 refers, on my view of the stage arrangement, to the posticulum and not to the house now owned by Callicles.

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luit mihi dixit etc., comprehensible to the audience13, and the description of Megaronides at v. 1147 – 8 seems to me to be good evidence for this view; if he were a uicinus, this would almost certainly have been mentioned. His apparent ignorance of local events during the first scene (cf. v. 193 – 4) is not, however, relevant here, since this ignorance is vital to the expository function of that scene14. The lack of an exact parallel for his initial entry15 is hardly an important obstacle in the way of this interpretation. As for Philto and Lysiteles, the most natural conclusion from the textually uncertain v. 276 – 7, quo illic homo foras se penetrauit ex aedibus?, is, I think, that at v. 223 Lysiteles entered from a house on the stage and that Philto does the same at v. 276; cf. Hegio’s words about Tyndarus at Captiui 533 when both have entered from the same stage-house, quo illum nunc hominem proripuisse foras se dicam ex aedibus. In fact, however, there are considerable difficulties in the way of this view. At v. 590 Lesbonicus goes off with Philto to find Lysiteles and at v. 627 the two young men enter the stage from one of the side-entrances (cf. v. 622 – 5); it seems an obvious inference from this that Philto and Lysiteles live “off-stage”. Similarly, the meeting of Lysiteles and Stasimus (v. 1120) takes place off the stage16 and at v. 716 Lysiteles presumably went home because he did not say that he was going anywhere else17. In the final scene there is nothing to indicate that Charmides and his new son-in-law are neighbours and, although the meeting of Stasimus and Lysiteles could be the result of the omission of a scene from the Greek original or even of “Plautine carelessness”, there is no reason not to adopt the simpler explanation, which is that Philto and 13 Cf. Rosivach, art. cit. (n. 11) 459. 14 Cf. infra n. 25. 15 This worried M. Johnston, Exits and Entrances in Roman Comedy (Diss. Columbia 1933). There is, however, no reason why, for example, Diniarcus in the Truculentus should live on the stage. It is perhaps worthy of note that a similar vagueness surrounds two other Plautine senes who are, like Megaronides, cast in the role of assistant to the leading senex. One is Apoecides in the Epidicus: there seems no reason why he should live on the stage and either cum Apoecide (Fay, Leo) or et Apoecidem (Acidalius) conveys the sense demanded by v. 187 (cf. Duckworth on v. 186), but it would be open to any producer to place his house on stage if so desired. Secondly, Callipho in the Pseudolus certainly lives on the stage (v. 410 – 1. 952), but this house has no part to play in the action of the Latin play, cf. Jachmann 250 – 1; the contrast between Pseud. 411 and Epid. 186 – 7 is instructive. 16 This is quite independent of the correctness of Ritschl’s domi in v. 1120. 17 Cf. Rosivach, art. cit. (n. 11) 460.

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his son live “off-stage”18. Only two stage-doors, therefore, are used in this play, one by Callicles and one by Lesbonicus and his slave. With his entrance monologue (v. 23 – 38) Megaronides immediately places himself in a class of comic characters, the most familiar member of which is Chremes in the opening scene of Terence’s Heauton Timoroumenos. These are characters who stick their noses into other people’s business; they are pokupq\clomer19. An experienced Greek audience would know that Megaronides condemns himself from his own mouth20, and by the end of the scene he has realised his folly. It does not affect this necessary interpretation of the opening scene that Megaronides’ later role in the play is entirely laudable (cf. v. 1147 – 8); his experience has taught him a lesson and, in any case, it is far from certain that Attic Comedy was more interested in “consistency of character” than in the value of the individual scene. Megaronides’ behaviour in the opening scene accords, as has been recently emphasised21, with the peripatetic idea that one has a duty to correct the faults of a friend. If Philemon and Megaronides are here indebted to contemporary moral philosophy22, then the steeper and more comic is the latter’s fall from his 18 Langen 224 compromises by placing Philto’s house in the vicinity of the stage but not quite on it. 19 The earliest example is Blepsidemos in Aristoph. Pl., cf. Leo 139, F. Wehrli, Motivstudien zur gr. Komçdie (Zurich 1936) 75 – 6; for Chremes cf. H. D. Jocelyn, ‘Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto’, Antichthon 7 (1973) 14 – 46, and E. Fantham, Latomus 30 (1971) 979 – 81. V. 760 – 2 are too uncertain to be adduced as evidence of Megaronides’ ‘Geiz’, cf. A. Fleckeisen, Philologus 2 (1847) 73 n. 7. 20 Megaronides pleads fides as the excuse for his actions and it is worth tracing this word through the play. At v. 142 Callicles pointedly observes that Megaronides is forcing a breach of fides upon him, after M. has earlier accused him of a voluntary breach (v. 117, 128); after M. has seen the error of his ways his cures tuam fidem (v. 192) is a neat touch by the poet. The theme reappears in Stasimus’ monologue (cf. Part 2 of this paper): the reference to those who male fidem servant (v. 1048) in a matter of money recalls Callicles whose behaviour has been the very opposite, but who is to be suspected of “bad faith” by Charmides and whose fides is to be stressed in the outcome (v. 1096. 1111. 1126). Thus it is Callicles who embodies fides in this play and the irony of v. 27 is apparent. 21 Fantham 410 – 12, following F. Zucker, Freundschaftsbewhrung in der neuen Komçdie, SB Leipzig 98, 1 (1950) 11 – 2. 22 The idea that one should correct one’s friends is an old one: Leo 139 n. 2 cites Eur. Alk. 1008 – 10 and cf. Plat. Laws 1, 635 a; most aspects of the peripatetic view of friendship have, of course, deep roots in traditional Greek thinking, cf. F. Dirlmeier, V_kor und Vik_a im vorhellenistischen Griechentum (Diss. München 1931).

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pretensions; that Callicles welcomes his friend’s interest (v. 90 – 6) merely highlights the irony in this scene. The scene between Megaronides and Callicles is striking first for its very great length; it is the longest first scene in extant Comedy23. The nearest parallels are the Asinaria, the Pseudolus, and particularly the Andria, Heauton Timoroumenos, Phormio and Hecyra of Terence in which opening expository dialogues almost certainly replace Greek narrative prologues24. That some at least of Callicles’ account must be known already to Megaronides is no real objection to the dialogue form, since this is inherent in the expository function of the scene and is a phenomenon which can be well paralleled25. It should, however, be noted that expository information given in a prologue may be later repeated in dialogue and vice versa26, so that only minor changes in the first scene would be strictly necessary to accommodate a narrative prologue as well. Callicles and Megaronides make way for Lysiteles who proceeds to sing a canticum in which he outlines his decision to devote himself to res rather than amor; he in turn is followed by Philto and then father and son converse. Fraenkel27 has observed that in the Latin play we do not learn Lysiteles’ name until v. 604 and that of his father until v. 432. Stranger than this, I think, is the fact that we do not learn what role these two men are to have in the drama until Lysiteles broaches the subject of Lesbonicus in v. 326 ff. This may be because Plautus’ interests lie for the moment elsewhere, but it should be noted that, with one exception, the only other example in ancient Comedy where the second entry is not immediately comprehensible to the audience in the light of the first scene or a narrative prologue is the Persa of Plautus, and 23 An obvious way to shorten the Greek scene is to ascribe the jokes of v. 42 – 66 to Plautus, cf. J. Wright, Dancing in Chains (Rome 1974) 123; such captatio beneuolentiae jokes are, however, a time-honoured part of the Greek comic tradition (cf., e. g., Aristoph. Knights 16 – 35) and Men. Samia 96 – 112 is a good reason for caution – ja· taOta l³m / 2t]qoir l]keim 1_lem (Samia 112 – 3) is not far from Plautus’ aufer ridicularia. 24 Cf. the relevant discussions in E. Lefèvre, Die Expositionstechnik in den Komçdien des Terenz (Darmstadt 1969), and N. Holzberg, Menander: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (Nürnberg 1974); for the Hecyra cf. Sewart, art. cit. (n. 6). 25 The initial conversations of Aristoph. Pl. and Plaut. Curculio are good examples; Curc. 14 acknowledges and pokes fun at the convention. 26 Cf. Men. Dysk. 328 – 35 which largely repeats the relevant parts of Pan’s speech. 27 Elementi 441. Ancient drama, in fact, abounds in similar “obscurities”, cf. J. Andrieu, Le Dialogue Antique (Paris 1954) 276 – 7.

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in that play Saturio introduces himself at once with a stock parasite’s monologue28. The exception to which I referred is the Asinaria, one of the plays which, like the Trinummus, opens with a lengthy dialogue. I believe that Havet29 was correct to identify the young man of I 2 – 3 as Diabolus the rival, not Argyrippus the unhappy lover; any audience might, however, be forgiven for believing this young man to be Argyrippus in the light of the opening conversation between the senex and his slave30. In the Mostellaria, for example, a conversation about a young man is followed by a lengthy canticum from that young man, and in the Mercator Acanthio’s account of Demipho at the harbour is followed by Demipho’s entrance-monologue. This confusion in the Asinaria is, I think, a strong argument in favour of a narrative prologue in the Greek original of that play31. As for the Trinummus, if the structural oddity which I have noted requires an explanation, then more than one answer suggests itself. The unusual sequence of entries32, first Lysiteles and then Philto, may not accurately reflect the Greek play, and an easy explana28 G. Müller, Das Original des plautinischen Persa (Diss. Frankfurt 1957) 82 – 8, argues for a narrative prologue in the Greek original of this play, but the positive indications are very scanty. In Aristoph. Ekkl. the audience presumably realise at his entrance that Blepyros is Praxagora’s husband because they know (cf. v. 33 – 4) that her house is “on stage”, regardless of whether she entered from a stage house at v. 1 – I assume at least two on-stage houses for this play. In Tragedy, the nature of the subject-matter means that characters may appear one after the other without a link or explanation, but even here the first scene regularly directs our attention to the person(s) who will enter second, cf. Soph. El. 80, Eur. El. 48, Eur. IT 56. 29 Rev. Phil. 29 (1905) 94 – 103, cf. F. Munari, Stud. It. Fil. Class., n.s. 22 (1947) 17 – 8. Other critics (cf. Leo on v. 127) believe that Plautus simply took this scene from another play. Havet’s change solves the problem of Demaenetus’ knowledge of the twenty minae needed by his son (v. 89); the lena charges both young men the same and she implies at v. 231 that there is a rival. This change also makes sense of v. 533 – 4 and v. 634 – 5. Despite Cistellaria 522 – 7, the harsh threats of Asin. 130 ff perhaps suit Diabolus better than the love-struck Argyrippus. 30 J. Hough, Am. Journ. Phil. 58 (1937) 24 – 6, observes that we expect to see the amator after the first scene and that Diabolus is not a normal rival. Both observations are true, but the most striking feature of the Asinaria, the very number of different motifs and scene types which the play contains, explains both departures from the norm. On the character of this play cf. A. Traina, ‘Plauto, Demofilo, Menandro’, Par. Pass. 9 (1954) 177 – 203, and Webster 253 – 7. 31 Cf. G. Burckhardt, Gnomon 7 (1931) 422. 32 Cf. Th. Ladewig, Philologus 17 (1861) 248 – 50; there is, however, no reason to posit (with Ladewig) a lacuna between II 1 and II 2.

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tion can be found in Plautus’ need to bring on the young man alone to deliver his canticum, for most of which there was probably no model in Philemon. A word about this canticum is necessary at this point. An apparent contradiction between the views expressed by Lysiteles on amor and res and his very proper behaviour towards his father and Lesbonicus has worried certain critics33, but the contradiction is not, in fact, a real one. The amor which Lysiteles describes is that of the loose bachelor who is involved with hetairai and the expenses that these women bring in their train; there is no reason to doubt that his knowledge comes from first-hand experience34. No normal35 Athenian equated syvqos}mg or 1cjq\teia for a young man with a monkish abstinence, and so this canticum does not destroy the pointed contrast in the play between the two young men, who are clearly the descendants of Aristophanes’ jatap}cym and s~vqym36. Lysiteles rejects this type of amor for the proper path of family alliances, respect for inherited property and assisting poorer friends37; he makes the regular change from carefree youth to responsible adulthood. It is, therefore, possible that a core of Greek material which originally formed a monologue by Lysiteles has been incorporated into this canticum, and in the Greek monologue he may have made both his past life and his present intentions clear to the audience. Nevertheless, a narrative prologue suggests itself as an obvious way to introduce this character to the audience. If, on the other hand, the canticum had no counterpart whatsoever in the Greek play and, for example, Philto and his son originally entered together, a hypothesis which would help to explain the awkwardness of v. 276, then the need for such a prologue becomes pressing. If Philemon’s Thesauros contained a narrative prologue, then the matters it covered can only be the subject of guesswork. Two possible features are, however, worthy of mention. The prologue may have outlined Lesbonicus’ exact financial position which remains somewhat unclear during the play. The small farm which he retains and which is of 33 Cf. Langen 222 – 4, I. Kistrup, Die Liebe bei Plautus und den Elegikern (Diss. Kiel 1963) 35 – 6, E. Burck, Vom Menschenbild in der rçm. Literatur (Heidelberg 1966) 47 – 8; for the amor / res contrast cf. Donatus on Ter. Adelphoe 94 – 5. 34 Pace, e. g., H.-W. Rissom, Vater- und Sohnmotive in der rçm. Komçdie (Diss. Kiel 1971) 64. 35 Cf. W. S. Barrett on Eur. Hipp. 79 – 81. 36 Cf. Leo 139, Wehrli, op. cit. (n. 19) 49. 37 For the duty to help friends in financial trouble cf. Antiphanes fr. 226 K-A, Men. Samia 15 – 6, Fantham 412 – 3.

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crucial importance, as much of the central part of the play is concerned with whether or not his sister is to receive it as a dowry, makes a rather sudden appearance at v. 50838. Ownership of a small farm is, of course, quite consistent with pem_a or !poq_a39, but a greater clarity would have been welcome, and a divine prologist could easily have given the necessary details. Secondly, a divine prologist would probably have foreshadowed the return of Charmides, although the play as it stands contains a number of warnings (v. 156, 589 – 90, 617 – 9, 744 – 5) and it is clear that the audience is well prepared for this return without the actual timing of the entry losing its effect40. Returns from overseas, whether occurring early or late in the drama, always appear to have been adequately foreshadowed41: in the Mostellaria (Philemon’s Phasma?), a play with a technique of exposition similar in certain respects to the Trinummus42, the return of the father is clearly foreshadowed (v. 10, 57, 77 ff) and the audience will have been in doubt only as to the timing of the arrival. Careful preparation in a similar situation occurs in Terence’s Phormio (v. 147 ff) 43, a play which seems to have lost a narrative prologue in the course of adaptation into Latin44. In Menander’s Samia the audience is given a clear hint in Moschion’s prologue (v. 5345) that it may expect the return of the fathers at any time. The closest parallel to the late return of Charmides is the return of Kleostratos in Act IV of Menander’s Aspis, a return which is explicitly predicted in the prologue (v. 110 – 3) and foreshadowed again at v. 284 – 6 and probably elsewhere in the lost central sections of the play. This last case differs from all the 38 Cf. Abel 23, who, however, misunderstands the issues involved. 39 In the Dyskolos, pem_a (m. 209) is the curse which afflicts those who own a wyq_diom lijq|m (v.23). 40 Contrast Rissom, op. cit. (n. 34) 167. 41 Cf. P. Harsh, Studies in Dramatic “Preparation” in Roman Comedy (Diss. Chicago 1933, 1935) 14 – 5, Sandbach on Men. Aspis 283. 42 The similarities are exaggerated by M. Knorr, Das gr. Vorbild der Mostellaria des Plautus (Diss. München/Coburg 1934) 24 – 5, and D. Fields, The Technique of Exposition in Roman Comedy (Diss. Chicago 1935, 1938) 94 – 100. 43 Cf. Donatus on v. 149 mire paratur inopinatus subito aduentus senis: nam ipse ueniet, cuius epistolam sperat. 44 Cf. Lefèvre, op. cit. (n. 24) 81 – 3. 45 For the text cf. Sandbach ad loc., and add now S. Slings, Zeitschr. f. Pap. u. Ep. 30 (1978) 228. It is not necessary to believe, with H.-D. Blume, Menanders Samia: Eine Interpretation (Darmstadt 1974) 20 – 1, that Moschion has already received word that the old men are about to appear or that he himself sent Parmenon to the harbour to keep watch (despite Plaut. Stichus 150 – 4).

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others in that the character who is to return is believed to be dead and not just absent, and a divine prologue was necessary to put the record straight, as such a death would be out of keeping with the comic tone; this example does, however, belong in the same general category. It appears that, although there is no “need” for a prologue in Philemon’s play, there are certain hints which point in that direction and nothing which tells positively against the hypothesis46. Before turning to the role of the prologue figures in the play, the extant Latin prologue must be considered. Fr. Osann47 excised the didascalic information in v. 18 – 20, together with the other places in Plautine prologues where Plautus’ name is mentioned or didascalic information given. This criterion was fully elaborated by Ritschl48 and, although this view is normally disregarded now, the circumstantial case against these passages must be considered a strong one. Terence clearly felt no need to provide full didascalic information in his prologues, and in the Andria, the Eunuch and the Adelphoe what information there is forms part of his polemic, not a separate part of the prologue49, and it seems more likely that later scholars or actors interpolated this information into some prologues than that Plautus provided this information in some prologues and not others on an apparently random basis. Rather limited evidence, moreover, suggests that in Plautus’ time plays were advertised in the name of the Greek poet rather than that of the Latin translator50. As for the use of the name Plautus, the one “fact” agreed by all is that this occurs three times in the Ca46 Pace Abel 22 – 3, a narrative prologue which hints at what is to happen does not, of course, detract from the significance of the choices made by the characters in the course of the play. 47 Analecta Critica Poesis Romanorum Scaenicae Reliquias Illustrantia (Berlin 1816) 176. Th. Bergk, Opuscula Philologica I (Halle 1884) 615, placed a lacuna after v. 17 to alleviate the suddenness of the transition to the didascalic details. 48 Parerga zu Plautus und Terenz (Berlin 1845/Amsterdam 1965) 233 ff.; cf. H. D. Jocelyn, Yale Class. Stud. 21 (1969) 119 – 20. 49 Only in the Andria and the Eunuch does Terence name the author of his Greek original; in the Adelphoe he provides full information on the interpolated scene from Diphilos, but does not mention Menander; for HT 7 – 9 cf. infra n. 52. E. Handley, Dioniso 46 (1975) 119, has some useful remarks on the Plautine prologues. 50 Cf. Plaut. Rudens 86, H. D. Jocelyn, Yale Class. Stud. 21 (1969) 103 with n. 24, and id. Ennius (cf. supra n. 9) 5 – 7. The importance of Ter. Eunuch 19 – 20, nunc acturi sumus / Menandri Eunuchum, is somewhat diminished by the fact that this is in the context of the debate about contaminatio and the Greek models.

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sina prologue, part of which at least is known to be post-Plautine, once in a certainly post-Plautine section (v. 12), once in the didascalic information (v. 34), and once in the narrative of the plot (v. 65) 51. To this may be added the often observed fact that Terence always refers to himself as poeta52 and names only dead poets, using circumlocutions for the living; in doing this Terence is following a dramatic tradition as old as the Aristophanic parabases53 and it would be Plautus who would be the odd man out in this regard54. I, therefore, consider the case against v. 18 – 21 to be very strong and that against v. 8 only slightly less strong55. With a couple of exceptions56, however, the rest of the extant prologue 51 Casina 5 – 34 seems to me to form an integrated and coherent passage, but a consideration of the problems of this prologue is well beyond the scope of this present paper. 52 K. Dziatzko, ber die plautinischen Prologe (Progr. Luzern 1866) 2, cites Ter. HT 7 – 9 as evidence for the possibility of saying ‘Terentius’, but this joke seems to refer to the Greek poet and there is, in any case, a great difference between using a word and threatening in a joke to do so. Leo’s conclusions (p. 246) from this passage are equally unjustified. 53 Cf. Leo 239 – 40. Certain traditional features of the comic prologue made it well suited to inherit the role of the parabasis, cf. W. Suss, ‘Zwei Bemerkungen zur Technik der Komödie’, Rhein. Mus. 65 (1910) 442 – 50, G. Jachmann, Terentius 36, RE 5 A, 1 (1934) 610. 54 Although poets as early as Hesiod (Theog. 22), Alkman (fr. 17.39.95b Page) and Sappho (fr. 1. 65. 133 L.-P.) name themselves freely, this seems to have been alien to the dramatic tradition throughout the Greek period: no credence is to be given to the well known lines ascribed to ‘Sousarion’ (fr. 1 K-A) and there is at least a doubt about the origin of Plaut. Mostellaria 1149; on this whole subject cf. W. Kranz, ‘Sphragis’, Rhein. Mus. 104 (1961) 3 – 46. 97 – 124 (= Studien zur antiken Literatur und ihrem Fortwirken, Heidelberg 1967, 27 – 78). Greek comic poets had no scruples about naming rivals (cf., e. g., Alexis fr. 184 K-A on Araros), but the circumlocutory style of Terence’s maleuolus poeta is present at an early date, cf. Eupolis fr. 89 K-A on Aristophanes t_i vakajq_i. 55 On the difficult problem of the word ‘Trinummus’ I can shed no light; for discussion and bibliography cf. J. Stein, Am. Num. Soc. Mus. Notes 12 (1966) 65 – 9. 56 V. 6 – 7 were deleted as a doublet of v. 4 – 5 by K. Dziatzko, De Prologis Plautinis et Terentianis Quaestiones Selectae (Diss. Bonn 1863) 25, and this case is certainly more striking than the other repetitions discussed by J. Blänsdorf, Archaische Gedankengnge in den Komçdien des Plautus (Wiesbaden 1967) 144 – 53, and even than Asinaria 6 – 10. V. 6 – 7 are obviously tied to the Trinummus more closely than are v. 4 – 5, but this fact is ambiguous in its implications. Brix-NiemeyerConrad ad loc. suppose that after v. 5 the speaker pauses to receive the assent of the audience and then starts afresh, but at Cas. 3 and Truc. 4 this procedure is

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may well be Plautine and, in particular, there is no good reason to doubt the genuineness of v. 1 – 5. Do these verses correspond to anything in Philemon? Frantz57 and Leo58 argued that the allegorical prologue was modelled upon certain scenes in Attic Tragedy in which gods travel in pairs59, and specifically the Iris and Lyssa scene in the Herakles of Euripides. This postulated literary parentage might throw light upon the relevance of these characters to the play as a whole. The central apologia of Lesbonicus (v. 657 – 8), scibam ut isse me deceret, facere non quibam miser: / ita ui Veneris uinctus otio aptus in fraudem incidi60, clearly recalls Phaidra’s apologia at Eur. Hipp. 380 ff 61: t± wq^st’ 1pist\lesha ja· cicm~sjolem, oqj 1jpomoOlem d’, oR l³m !qc_ar vpo, oR d’ Bdomµm pqoh]mter !mt· toO jakoO %kkgm tim’· eQs· d’ Bdoma· pokka· b_ou, lajqa_ te k]swai ja· swok^, teqpm|m jaj|m, aQd~r te.

Like Phaidra, Lesbonicus associates his harmful erotic attachments62 and the failure to do what is known to be right with otium ( !qc_a and swok^63). Although the theme is a very common one64, it is likely that Philemon had this scene from Euripides in mind here; when in v. 667 – 73 Lysiteles describes the nature and power of Amor which has mastered Lesbonicus, he plays the role, mutatis mutandis, of the

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

made explicit. V. 16 – 7 are virtually identical to Ter. Adelphoe 22 – 3 and, although this does not condemn them, it is a reasonable basis for suspicion. De Comoediae Atticae Prologis (Diss. Aug. Trev. 1891) 56 – 7. P. 201 – 2; cf. also P. Legrand, Daos (Lyon/Paris 1910) 509. This was a normal practice, cf. Ed. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford 1957) 198 n. 2; for this reason, and because Lucian himself is fond of personification, Timon 10 is no more than broadly relevant here. otio aptus A, captus otio Hermann. Zucker, op. cit. (n. 21) 16 n. 27, and Webster 128 observe Hipp. 380 – 1a, but not the continuation. I see no good grounds for the view of E. Lehmann, ‘Der Verschwender und der Geizige’, Gymnasium 67 (1960) 73 – 90, that Plautus himself is responsible for the erotic part of Lesbonicus’ activities. By the end of the fourth century the distinction between !qc_a and swok^ often seems insignificant, cf. Demosth. 3, 35; 8, 53; Men. Dysk. 357. 366. 755; J. André, L’Otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle Romaine (Paris 1966) 55. There is a useful collection of material in A. Woodman, ‘Some Implications of Otium in Catullus 51. 13 – 6’, Latomus 25 (1966) 217 – 26.

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Nurse in Euripides who replies to Phaidra’s speech of analysis with a description of the power of J}pqir (Hipp. 443 ff) which found its way into the anthological tradition (cf. Stobaios 4, 20, 5, IV p. 435 Hense). I would like to think that Philemon consciously gave a Euripidean form both his prologue and to this central scene65. The intimate connection in ancient thought between the notions of “extravagance” (tquv^, luxuria) and “idleness” ( !qc_a, swok^, otium) is well known66 ; the two ideas are often found together (Plat. Rep. 4, 422 a, Laws 10, 901 e), with the regular progression of wealth leading to extravagance and idleness (Plat. Rep. 4, 422 a, Laws 11,919 b) which in turn lead to poverty, i. e. pem_a, !poq_a and inopia. A variant of this genealogy is one relevant to the case of Lesbonicus: 5qyr or amor is the result of tquv^ and otium. Theophrastos defined 5qyr as p\hor xuw/r swokafo}sgr (Stobaios 4, 20, 66, IV p. 468 Hense [= Theophr. 114 fr. W.]), and evidence for this commonplace is abundant67. This interpretation of the relevance of the prologue for the play as a whole also fits well with the possible influence of peripatetic ethics on the Trinummus, which Fantham has recently discussed: in the Aristotelean system !jqas_a ja· lakaj_a ja· tquv^ are opposed to 1cjq\teia ja· jaqteq_a (EN 7, 1145 a 35) and, like Lesbonicus, the !jqat^r does not act in ignorance but knows that he is doing wrong (EN 7, 1151 a 21 ff), but he is also letalekgtij|r and thus curable (EN 7, 1150 b 30). In short, the links that bind the divine prologists to the main body of the play are strong ones, and are, I think, more likely to be the work of the original poet than of a later adapter. 65 The question of how many of Philemon’s audience appreciated the parentage of these scenes is one relevant to a consideration of Philemon’s merits as a practical dramatist, but only marginally useful as a criterion by which to judge the existence of a tragic model. The neat contrast between model and imitation – the Nurse seeks to persuade Phaidra into sexual misdemeanour and Lysiteles seeks to persuade Lesbonicus out of it – means added enjoyment for those who see the point, and the others do not know what they are missing. I acknowledge, of course, the possibility in other cases of “unconscious” borrowing. 66 Cf. Fraenkel, op. cit. (n. 59) 211 – 3, and Woodman, art. cit. passim. 67 Cf., e. g., Diogenes apud Diog. Laert. 6, 51, Longus Past. 1, 17; in the Dyskolos Sostratos falls in love because Pan makes him do so, but he is just the sort of tquveq|r (cf. R. Kassel, Zeitschr. f. Pap. u. Ep. 12, 1973, 6) from whom such behaviour is to be expected, cf. v. 294 – 5. 755. Similarly, the servant’s reproaches at Men. Phasma 28 – 43 reveal the type of well-to-do bachelor who is likely to fall in love with apparitions.

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If it is correct that in Philemon’s Thesauros the goddess Tquv^ delivered a narrative prologue, then the extant Latin prologue still requires an explanation. It may be that Plautus reproduced in detail the Greek prologue and that remnants of the Plautine version are visible in the present text. More likely, I think, is the alternative, namely that Plautus omitted the narrative part of the prologue and kept only the dramatic appearance of the two figures. The extant text is, therefore, basically what Plautus wrote, together with certain later accretions. Unfortunately, the extant prologue of the Asinaria is too doubtful and that of the Vidularia too uncertain for further conclusions to be drawn from these plays about the extent to which Plautus foreshadowed Terence’s fondness for the expository dialogue68, but it seems likely that some of the Plautine plays which lack a prologue are examples of this same phenomenon69. If in Philemon’s play the conversation between the two old men did, to any great extent, reproduce information contained in a prologue, then the omission of this prologue by Plautus was a relatively simple matter. The traces of this surgery are faint, but clear enough.

2. Stasimus and the Talent Loan Stasimus’ monologue in IV 3 is the subject of a lucid analysis by Eduard Fraenkel70. He observed that the monologue fails into two parts: v. 1008 – 27 concern the loss of a ring at a drinking bout, and v. 1028 – 58 are reflections on current mores prompted by Stasimus’ experience in being cheated of a talent which he had lent to a friend. Plautus has closed a ring around the whole with references at the beginning and the end (v. 1009 – 11, 1058) to the beating that may be lying in store for Stasimus. Although the two parts of the monologue are quite dis68 About the prologues of Caecilius we can say nothing, despite the intelligent speculation of H. Oppermann, ‘Zur Entwicklung der Fabula Palliata’, Hermes 74 (1939) 113 – 29; cf. also Jachmann, op. cit. (n. 53) 609 – 10. If it is true that the Greek originals of the Asinaria, the Trinummus and the Vidularia all had narrative prologues, it seems more likely that Plautus did not translate these narratives than that his versions have all been lost in the course of transmission. The same might well be true of the Truculentus, but Abel’s defence (p. 26) of the extant text is not wholly successful. 69 Turpilius was not necessarily imitating Terence when he used a dialogue in place of Menander’s monologue for the opening of his Epiclerus (fr. I R.3). 70 P. 154 – 8 ( = Elementi 146 – 50).

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tinct, the transition is eased by the fact that the lament over mores is a not unnatural outgrowth of the slave’s experience at the hands of his boon companions. As Fraenkel notes, however, the first part of the monologue has absolutely nothing to do with the Trinummus and was presumably taken over by Plautus from another Greek play, whereas the second half not only corresponds to Stasimus’ stated intention on leaving the stage at v. 728, but also is concerned with certain of the major themes of the play, notably fides 71 and the decline of mores. It seems an obvious conclusion that it is the second part of Stasimus’ monologue which is taken from Philemon’s Thesauros72. Despite these considerations, the very Roman colouring of the second part of the monologue is striking. I find it hard to believe that all this talk of mores maiorum, leges, ambitio and honor corresponded closely to anything in Philemon73 ; this is not, of course, to exclude some Greek basis for these reflections upon which Plautus has expanded74, since happy memories of the “good old days” and a lament for the corrupt nature of modern ways is a commonplace of orators and comic poets at least as early as the fifth century B.C., and Mercator 836 – 41 suggests that it was well known to Philemon. The main themes of Stasimus’ monologue are most fully elaborated elsewhere in the play in the entrance monologue of Megaronides (v. 27 – 38) and the corresponding lecture of Philto to his son (v. 281 – 300); that these themes form a coherent pattern in the play perhaps suggests that they are the work of the original poet rather than of Plautus, as normally it is a lack of coherence which is regarded as the hallmark of Plautine material. Some of this monologue, however, is clearly not taken from Greek (e. g. v. 1037 – 40), and it would be useful to be able to cite Bacchides 540 – 51 as evidence of Plautus’ own interest in the subject of mores and false 71 Cf. supra n. 20. 72 Stasimus has some of the characteristics of the seruus currens, but he is bearing no message; cf. Amph. 984 ff where, however, the play with the comic topoi is more than sufficient justification. It is not unlikely that in the Trinummus these characteristics were added by Plautus for comic effect. 73 It seems very unlikely that v. 1037 reproduces a pun on the various senses of m|lor. 74 Trin. 1057 – 8 echoes a formula found at Persa 75 – 6 after a passage of, at least, Roman colour and perhaps more, despite J. Partsch, Hermes 45 (1910) 598 – 602, and U. Paoli, Iura 4 (1953) 174 – 81. Charmides’ aside at v. 1041 – 2 matches that of Euclio at Aulularia 523 – 4 during a section which has certainly been expanded by Plautus, cf. Fraenkel 137 – 40 (= Elementi 130 – 2).

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friends, but the origin of that passage is, unfortunately, uncertain75. At the very least, I think, Plautus has as good a claim as Philemon to the credit for fully working out this theme in the play76 ; his reasons for doing this may be the subject of historical speculation77. In short, Plautus appears to have taken a monologue from one Greek play and to have added it to a second monologue containing a considerable original element and to have included the whole in his adaptation of the Thesauros. He has attached this new unit to his play by the theme of the talent which Stasimus has lent and lost. This enormous sum has naturally aroused suspicion, and it has been combined with the harmless joke of v. 413 to support the thesis that Stasimus’ thefts are a major cause of his master’s poverty78. There seems, however, to be nothing of substance in this view79 ; it may be that Plautus has simply enlarged the sum named in the Greek play, since a slave could lend money at both Athens and Rome and other sums of money in Plautus seem to have been greatly exaggerated80. Alternatively, the suggestion of H. J. Rose81 that talentum here refers not to the Attic talent but to the Siculo-Italian talent, a very small sum of money, is very attractive and may well be correct. In either case, the role of Stasimus in the second half of the play perhaps requires a further examination. At v. 717 Lysiteles and Lesbonicus leave the stage with their dispute still unsettled: Lesbonicus is resolved to give his farm as a dowry for his 75 Cf. E. Handley, Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (Inaugural Lecture, London 1968) 17 – 8; H. Tränkle, Mus. Helv. 32 (1975) 118 – 23. 76 For v. 27 – 38 and v. 281 – 300 cf. Blänsdorf, op. cit. 203 – 5. 238 – 42. 77 Cf. T. Frank, Am. Journ. Phil. 53 (1932) 152 – 6, and D. Earl, Historia 9 (1960) 235 – 43; it is perhaps worthy of note that, although the theme of money lent and lost because of evil mores doubtless occurred in Greek Comedy (cf. Axionikos fr. 10 K.), it appears at Ter. Phormio 55 – 6 in the mouth of a character who may well be a creation of Terence himself, cf. Donatus on v. 35, Lefèvre, op. cit. 88 – 102, and F. H. Sandbach, Bull. Inst. Class. Stud. 25 (1978) 132. 78 Cf. Brix-Niemeyer4 on v. 728, and E. Schild, Die dramaturgische Rolle der Sklaven bei Plautus und Terenz (Diss. Basel 1917) 75. 79 Cf. Langen 225 – 6 and Fraenkel 156 n. 3 (= Elementi 149 n. 1). 80 Cf. Fraenkel, loc. cit., and A. Watson, The Law of Persons in the Later Roman Republic (Oxford 1967) 178 – 81; it is generally agreed that the dowries of Roman Comedy are unrealistically exaggerated, cf. Gomme-Sandbach on Men. Epitr. 134 ff. 81 Class. Rev. 38 (1924) 155 – 7, cf. G. Shipp, Glotta 34 (1955) 141 – 3. Rose’s explanation, if correct, is not of course sufficient demonstration that these passages are Plautine, as Plautus might merely have substituted the Italian talent for a correspondingly small Greek sum.

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sister, and Lysiteles is equally resolved not to accept it. Stasimus remains on stage and it is clear that he believes that Lesbonicus will win the argument as he decides to collect a talentum which he had lent in the forum so that he will have money for the soldiering expedition which he is certain Lesbonicus will undertake, once all the property at home is exhausted. This may seem slightly odd as Stasimus has no apparent reason to believe that Lysiteles will move from his stated position; it is odder, I believe, that Stasimus’ monologue at v. 718 – 26 is both a repetition and a parody of his monologue at v. 592 – 9 in which he expressed the view that, if the farm was lost, Lesbonicus would take off in Asiam aut in Ciliciam82 to serve as a mercenary. In the second speech this is replaced by a vision in which Lesbonicus attaches himself aliquem ad regem and Stasimus is armed with a bow and arrows. The point of this second speech of Stasimus seems largely to be a series of jokes at the weakness of his master and to provide for the introduction of the talentum; in Bacchides 505 and 507 – 8 we have a clear illustration of Plautus’ fondness for paq± pqosdoj_am jokes, and the suspicion that this speech in the Trinummus has been introduced by Plautus on the model of the certainly Greek v. 592 – 60183 seems to me at least strong enough to be entertained. It may be objected that this speech of Stasimus belongs to a familiar type and that this type is known to be Greek, cf. Adesp. 1096, 13 ff. KA; Plaut. Epidicus 81 ff; Pseudolus 394 ff 84 ; indeed Stasimus’ non sisti potest (v. 720) with reference to the soldiers’ boots of which he is thinking directly echoes Epid. 84. I do not think, however, that this objection is a decisive one. That Plautus should use familiar comic forms in passages of his own creation is only what we would expect85 and, in any case, the Plautine material may begin at v. 719 rather than v. 717; it may, further, be significant that Trin. 718 ff. differs from the other examples of this style in that the slave does not think up a plan of action with which to deceive, but uses the monologue to express despair. 82 The mention of Cilicia perhaps suggests the campaigns of Seleukos in 296/5 (cf. P. Grimal, Rev. Et. Lat. 46, 1968, 134), but the need for mercenaries in this part of the world was by no means limited to that period, cf. G. T. Griffith. The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge 1935) 142 – 70. 83 V. 595 – 9 have a very close Greek parallel in Men. fr. *159 Austin (perhaps from the Karchedonios). 84 On these passages cf. T. Williams, Rhein. Mus. 105 (1962) 193 – 207, and Ed. Fraenkel, Mus. Helv. 25(1968) 231 – 4. 85 Bacchides 526 – 9 may be well paralleled from Greek Comedy.

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In the above discussion I have suggested a rather moderate view, namely that v. 719 – 28 (or perhaps v. 717 – 28) are Plautus’ own work, but it may be possible to carry speculation one step further and consider whether Stasimus’ very presence as an eavesdropper in III 3 is a contribution of Plautus. V. 615 – 21 would make a very suitable “Abgangsmonolog” after Stasimus’ conversation with Callicles, being exactly parallel to Grumio’s lament at Mostellaria 76 – 83, a play which is quite probably adapted from an original by Philemon86. The unannounced entry of the two young men in the midst of a quarrel at v. 627 would be a thoroughly Greek technique (cf. Soph. Phil. 122287, Eur. IA 303), and there is nothing in v. 622 – 6 which must come from Philemon. Stasimus is given only one bomolochic intervention in the course of the long debate (v. 705 – 10); this intervention may be based upon a Greek reference to competitions for actors, but there is no good reason why Plautus himself should not be responsible88. In short, although certain grounds for a decision on this question are lacking, there seem to be good reasons for believing that Plautus’ hand can be detected here. If the above reasoning is correct, then we can see Plautus preparing the way for his own additions with greater care than is often thought characteristic of him. It is also significant, I think, that these additions by Plautus grow from something already in his Greek model and are not simply random accretions89.

Addenda Subsequent bibliography includes A. S. Gratwick, ‘Curculio’s last bow: Plautus, Trinummus IV 3’ Mnemosyne 34 (1981) 331 – 50 and W.F. Richardson, ‘Nummus in the plays of Plautus’ Prudentia 15 (1983) 27 – 34. The apparent structural problems of the Asinaria have been considered by J. C. B. Lowe, ‘Aspects of 86 Cf. Leo 136. 87 For Phil. 1218 – 21 cf. O. Taplin, Gr. Rom. Byz. Stud. 12 (1971) 40 – 4; in his edition Dawe casts doubt on the verses, but does not refer to Taplin’s discussion. 88 This passage would be the earliest evidence for actors’ competitions at Rome, but there is no evidence the other way, cf. Jocelyn, Ennius 23. 89 I am very grateful to H. D. Jocelyn for many helpful criticisms of previous drafts of this paper. F. H. Sandbach was also kind enough to comment upon an early version.

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Plautus’ originality in the Asinaria’ CQ 42 (1992) 152 – 75, and J. Henderson, Asinaria. The One about the Asses (Madison 2006) 224.

33. The Aulularia of Plautus and its Greek original* The Aulularia1 has always been one of the most popular and most studied of Plautus’ plays, both because of its intrinsic interest and quality and also because of its later influence in the European dramatic tradition. In the large amount of scholarly work which has been devoted to this play the identity of the author of Plautus’ Greek model and the alterations which Plautus may have made in this model have been much discussed. Research on these questions was, however, placed on a quite new footing in 1958 by the publication of Menander’s Dyscolus: the striking similarities2 between these plays have now produced a loose consensus of scholarly opinion, although the dissenting voice can still be heard.3 The two conclusions upon which most scholars who have written recently on this subject seem to agree are that the Plautine changes to the Greek model were relatively minor, consisting in the omission of one or two scenes and the expansion of a couple of others, and that Menander was the author of the Greek original. Although it will become clear that I am very sceptical of the former of these propositions and have at least an open mind on the latter, the aim of this present paper is simply to re-open discussion of the relationship between the Aulularia and its Greek original by pointing to some problems which * 1

2

3

Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 27 (1981) 37 – 49 In the footnotes the following works are cited by author name only: S. Batzer, Die Umformung der Aulularia (1956); Ed. Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus (1922) which was translated by F. Munari as Elementi Plautini in Plauto (1960); W. Ludwig, ‘Aulularia-Probleme’, Philologus 105 (1961) 44 – 71 and 247 – 62; T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Menander ed. 2 (1960). Volume XVI of the Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt (1970) is cited as Mnandre and all references to Menander, unless otherwise indicated, follow the numeration of Sandbach’s Oxford text. Cf. W. Kraus, ‘Menanders Dyskolos und das Original der Aulularia’ in R. Muth (ed.), Serta philologica aenipontana (1962) 185 – 90 and C. Corbato, Studi Menandrei (1965) 104 – 7. The differences between the two plays are well discussed by A. Schäfer, Menanders Dyskolos: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (1965) 100 – 3 and W. MacCary and M. Willcock, Plautus: Casina (1976) 13 – 16. The most important warnings against the assumption of a Menandrean origin for the Aulularia have come from F. H. Sandbach: cf. Mnandre 97 – 8 and the note on p. 4 of the Gomme-Sandbach commentary.

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have been neglected and to others which have not yet been satisfactorily answered. In Part I I discuss the division of the Greek original into five acts and the conclusions to be drawn from difficulties in this division and in Part II I examine a further problem in the Aulularia which might have some bearing on the question of the authorship of the Greek original.

I. I assume that the original of the Aulularia was divided into five acts by choral performances, which are marked only by the note WOQO£ in our texts of Menander, and that the time-relationship between these acts was roughly as it is in Menander: short trips to somewhere in the vicinity of the stage-setting and back may be completed within the same act, but longer trips must be spread over at least two acts.4 The utility of these assumptions seems to me to outweigh whatever uncertainty might surround them. At 119 Euclio leaves to attend a local distribution of money and he returns empty-handed at 178; an act-division seems necessary between his departure and return and this presumably occurred either after the equivalent of 119 or just before Euclio’s return, in which case 177, nescio unde sese homo recipit domum, would be a Plautine makeshift to cover the act-division. A choice between these alternatives is not independent of the question of whether or not Plautus has omitted scenes in either place or indeed before the entry of the Lar.5 The scholars who have argued for one or other of these hypotheses consider that we are introduced to the young lover Lyconides and his slave impossibly late in the play as it stands and they seek to remedy this by the inclusion of an appropriate 4 5

Cf. T. B. L. Webster, Studies in later Greek comedy ed. 2 (1970) 190 – 1 and W. G. Arnott, ‘Time, plot and character in Menander’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 2 (1979) 343 – 60. I think it most unlikely that Plautus has omitted scenes before the prologue, cf. N. Holzberg, Menander: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (1974) 43 – 5; the opposite case is argued by Ludwig 70 – 1. In extant Comedy divine prologists announce the next entry if the prologue begins the play (Men. Dysc., Plaut. Amph., Aul., Rudens; Plaut. Trin. 17 is a special case), but do not do so if the prologue is postponed (Men. Aspis, Periceir., Plaut. Cist.). This may not, however, have been an invariable practice and Plautus himself could be responsible for Aul. 37 – 9; Webster 122 n. 4 sees Eur. Hecuba 52 – 3 as the model for Aul. 37 – 9, but the dramatic situations are quite different.

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scene at either or both of these points in the Greek original. Although I do not completely share this dissatisfaction, it is true that a scene involving Eunomia and another character at the end of which Eunomia entered her brother’s house would fit neatly after 119, and the omission by Plautus of such a scene would be an obvious way of avoiding the hiatus between Eunomia’s exit and re-entry which would have been marked in the Greek play by a choral performance.6 A second act-division is required between the departure for the market of Megadorus and his slave (264) and the return of the slave at 280 and it seems certain that this break occurred after 279, i. e. just after Euclio himself has left to do his shopping.7 A further act-division is required to cover the events at the grove of Silvanus where Lyconides’ slave made his successful attempt upon Euclio’s pot; this division presumably occurred either after the equivalent of 681, i. e. as soon as Euclio and the slave have set off for the grove, or more probably after 700.8 Although very few critics have resisted the obvious temptation to place a further act-division between 280 and 700 (or 681) 9, there seems to me to be a strong circumstantial case against this. In Menander’s Samia the frantic Nikeratos learns of the wrong which Moschion has done to his daughter at the end of the fourth act (cf. Aulularia 790 – 802) and it may be worth noting that in the Cistellaria (= Menander’s Synaristosai) Halisca’s desperate song when she has lost the casket of recognition tokens (Cist. 671 – 704), which is very like Euclio’s lament at Aulularia 713 – 30, almost certainly occurred in the fourth act of Menander’s play. It is clear from the Samia and from Terence’s Adelphoe that the fifth act of a comedy was not necessarily limited to the clearing up of loose ends and our present evidence suggests that in Menander the fourth act was on the whole the climactic one.10 It therefore seems to 6 Ludwig 259 – 62 demonstrates that Eunomia and Lyconides do not share a house with Megadorus; this is, in any case, implied by the silence of the prologue as was realised by K. Kunst, ‘Zur Aulularia des Plautus’, Zeitschrift fr die çsterreichischen Mittelschulen 1 (1923/4) 212 – 36, p. 214. 7 For a shopping-trip ‘covered’ by an act-division cf. Men. Samia 198 – 283, Plaut. Bacch. 100 – 109 and, presumably, Plaut. Menaechmi 225 – 73. 8 Christopher Lowe points out that the break after 700 is more likely as Euclio’s daughter is in labour at 691 but has been delivered of her child by 798. 9 I have found only W. Kuiper, The Greek Aulularia (1940) 32 – 3, but cf. also P. Legrand, Daos (1910) 479 and Georgine Burckhardt, Die Akteinteilung in der neuen griechischen und in der rçmischen Komçdie (1927) 50. 10 Cf. E. Lefèvre in G. A. Seeck (ed.), Das griechische Drama (1979) 342 – 3.

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me probable that the final act-division of the Greek original occurred either after 80711 or in the now lost ending and that more has been lost from the end of the Aulularia than is normally imagined.12 If the third act of the Greek play is represented by 280 – 700 (or 681) of the Aulularia then this act would be a long one, but not in my view impossibly so. Some of the first scene with the cooks (II.4) 13 and some of the monologue of Megadorus and his conversation with Euclio (III.5) 14 show clear signs of Plautine verbal elaboration and in the Cistellaria it is very likely that over 500 Plautine verses correspond to the second Menandrean act;15 the third act of Menander’s Epitrepontes is over 280 Greek trimeters long. Nevertheless, the size of the section of the Aulularia which corresponds to the third act of the original (if my scheme is correct) may provide a clue to the location of any major Plautine alterations in his model. A second clue to the relationship between the Aulularia and its model is perhaps provided by two omissions from the information which the Lar familiaris gives the audience in his relatively brief 16 pro11 In favour of a break after 807 Christopher Lowe argues that the slave needs time to hide the gold and I would add that a break at this point would help to explain the curious similarity between 696 – 700 and 804 – 7; Plautus may have simply repeated an earlier passage when he needed to keep Lyconides on the stage to disguise the act-division. I cannot follow the discussion of this problem in Batzer 135 – 9. 12 The cooks may well have reappeared at the end of the play (cf. T. Williams apud W. G. Arnott, Phoenix 18 [1964] 236 – 7) and at Men. Aspis 218 a cook complains that his work is interrupted when t]toje t_m 5mdom juoOs\ tir k\hqai which reminds one of the end of the Aulularia; the cook in the Aspis is certainly referring to a stock comic situation, if not in fact to a particular scene from a particular play. 13 On this scene cf. E. Burck, ‘Zur Aulularia des Plautus (Vs. 280 – 370)’, WS 69 (1956) 265 – 77 (= Vom Menschenbild in der rçmischen Literatur [1966] 36 – 44) and F. Klingner, ‘Über eine Szene der plautinischen Aulularia (280 – 349)’, SIFC 27/8 (1956) 157 – 70 (= Studien zur griechischen und rçmischen Literatur [1964] 114 – 25). 14 Cf. Fraenkel 137 – 40 (= Elementi 130 – 2). 15 Cf. W. Ludwig in Mnandre 49 – 59. 16 The 39 Latin trimeters of the Lar’s speech compare with 51 Greek trimeters in the prologue of Menander’s Aspis, 49 in the Dyscolus, 51 in the extant part of the Periceiromene prologue and 53 Latin ones in the divine part of the Cistellaria prologue, to consider only Menandrean examples and not much longer prologues such as those of Mercury in the Amphitruo and Arcturus in the Rudens. Particularly striking in the Lar’s speech is the brevity of his description of Euclio’s character which is to be contrasted with Pan’s description of Knemon in

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logue speech. The Lar does not inform us that Euclio has moved the gold from the hearth where he had found it, as is proved by 65, nunc ibo ut uisam sitne (Pylades: estne codd.) ita aurum ut condidi, and fr. III Leo-Lindsay, ego ecfodiebam in die denos scrobes; this has misled more than one critic,17 but it is perhaps of no great significance. More interesting is the failure of the Lar to inform the audience that there is a temple of Fides on the stage, as is clear from the fourth (Plautine) act.18 In extant Comedy a divine prologist, particularly if he or she appears as the opening scene of the play, provides full information about the houses represented on the stage,19 but after the Lar’s speech the audience is able to identify only the houses of Euclio and Megadorus, the senex de proxumo. Many explanations may be offered for the Lar’s silence about this temple — a lacuna in the text, the infamous ‘carelessness’ of Plautus, or the scene which Plautus is alleged to have omitted before the prologue20 — but this omission may also give a further indication that we are justified in looking for Plautus’ handiwork in the middle section of the play. A minor problem of some interest is raised by the end of the Lar’s speech. As the god would most naturally return into Euclio’s house after his speech, there must have been a slight pause after 39 in order to avoid an awkward confrontation between the divine and mortal characters

17

18 19

20

the Dyscolus and Tyche’s description of Smikrines in the Aspis; it is, I think, partly as a result of this that scholars have been able to doubt whether auiditas really is a part of Euclio’s innate nature. A. Krieger, De Aululariae Plautinae exemplari Graeco (1914) 24, and D. Konstan, Arethusa 10 (1977) 309, think that the gold is still hidden in the hearth during the first part of the play and A. Klotz, Philologische Wochenschrift 61 (1941) 590 – 1, supposes that after trying a number of locations Euclio had put the gold back in the hearth. This temple is missing from the stage-setting in Nixon’s Loeb edition and cf. Wagner on v. 102, ‘there is a temple of Fides in the vicinity’. If Pataikos’ house was on the stage in Menander’s Periceiromene, this was presumably pointed out in the lost part of that prologue in which reference must have been made to him, cf. Gomme-Sandbach, Menander pp. 501 – 2. In the Cistellaria it is stated before the postponed prologue that Demipho and Phanostrata live on the stage (100) and it is also probable that in Menander’s play these characters appeared in the first act in a scene which Plautus has excised, cf. Webster 92 and W. Ludwig in Mnandre 54 – 5; the Greek prologist may also have used a deictic to make their house clear, like 1mhad_ at Men. Dysc. 24. If Melaenis’ house was also on the stage (cf. E. Woytek, ‘Ein Cistellariaproblem’ WS 84 (1971) 110 – 22), then the lena identifies this by huic meretrici in v. 133. Cf. n. 5 supra.

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(unless the poet is extracting humour from the invisibility of the divine). This seems more satisfactory than to suppose that the Lar simply moves off to one side21 or that in the Greek play he appeared on the roof or suspended in the lgwam^.22 By itself this slight awkwardness does not suggest any Plautine alteration of the original, but I shall refer to it again below as part of the cumulative case for believing that the relationship between the Aulularia and its model is not a simple one. A consideration of the structure of the Greek play in terms of acts and an examination of the Latin prologue have both suggested that the middle section of the Aulularia requires closer investigation. It has often been observed that the role of the Fides-temple is restricted to the fourth (Plautine) act and the events around this shrine are perhaps some of the most lively and surprising in the whole play. Euclio believes that Megadorus’ intention is to make him drunk during the wedding celebrations and so he decides to hide his pot in the temple of Fides, which is now mentioned for the first time (583).23 After Euclio’s departure into the shrine, Lyconides’ slave24 enters and seats himself on the stage-altar in order to observe proceedings around the houses of Megadorus and Euclio and from this position he overhears Euclio announcing at least three times that he has hidden a pot of gold in the shrine. Euclio then leaves the stage in order to wash before sacrificing; he could be intending to go to the public baths for a full wash as it is a special occasion, but more naturally we would suppose that he goes back into his house to perform a ritual purification. In the case of the bridegroom Megadorus who also leaves to wash at 579 it seems certain that he merely goes home: we do not see him again after 579 but it is clear from IV.10 that Lyconides found him at home and persuaded him to renounce his claim to Euclio’s daughter. If Euclio did go back into his house, then it is per21 This is the view of Batzer (p. 1); in Aeschylus’ Eumenides the priestess must leave by a side-exit at 63, but there this abandonment of the shrine has obvious symbolic importance. 22 Cf. K. Abel, Die Plautusprologe (1955) 43. 23 That this door represented a temple might, of course, have been made clear by special decoration of some kind, but in the ancient theatre audiences were not normally left to infer such things by themselves. On the Roman legal joke with which Euclio leaves the stage (v. 584 – 6) cf. A. Watson, ZRG 79 (1962) 329 – 34. 24 For the problem of the two slaves in the Aulularia cf. Ludwig 255 – 8 and B. Bader, Szenentitel und Szeneneinteilung bei Plautus (1970) 112 – 6. M. Marcovich, Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977) 212 – 15, points out that we might have expected Lyconides’ slave rather than Megadorus’ to be called ‘Strobilos’.

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haps a little surprising that what caused him to rush out again was a coruos which called ab laeua manu25 (624), although this is not a difficulty which I would wish to press too hard. Euclio now dashes into the temple and drags out the slave after what must have been a very short void on the stage;26 after a thorough check of the slave’s person Euclio rushes back into the shrine because he thinks that he hears further activity inside27 and he then re-emerges with the pot. He announces to the audience his intention to hide the pot in a grove sacred to Silvanus outside the city-wall and then leaves the stage; the slave has, however, overheard him again and he too heads for the grove. This repetition of the overhearing-motif has been much criticised28 and, however effective such slapstick would be on the stage, we ought to admit that such a repetition without obvious point or conscious variation is without parallel in Menander and virtually without parallel in extant Comedy. The oddities in this scene are, moreover, not limited to the clash of Euclio and the slave but begin as soon as the slave enters. The entrance-monologue of the slave (587 – 607) is one of a series of monologues in Plautus on the theme of the seruus bonus and a good case has been made by Fraenkel and others for regarding these as largely the work of Plautus himself.29 Such spying missions are, however, known from Menander (Periceir. 172 – 85 and perhaps Ter. Andria 412 – 15) and so the slave’s entry is not by itself suspicious. As however the slave tells us that he has been sent to spy (speculatum 665) it is distinctly curious that in 815 Lyconides informs the audience that he had sent the 25 The Greek bird might have been a j|qan, but an owl is as likely; cf. Men. fr. 844.11 K-A, Theophr. Char. 16.8, M. L. West on Hes. WD 747. 26 Such a hiatus in the middle of an act is most unusual in Greek drama; cf. ZPE 36 (1979) 24 – 8. 27 This imaginary noise is never explained, although an explanation is hardly necessary for a character such as Euclio: cf. Xen. Symp. 4.30, Lucian, Gallus 29, Hor. Sat. 1.1.76 – 7, V. J. Rosivach, TAPhA 101 (1970) 450 – 1; Euclio’s similar behaviour at 202 – 3, 242 – 50 and 444 – 9 is, however, either explicitly motivated or subsequently explained. 28 Cf. Legrand (n. 9) 403 – 4 and G. Norwood, Plautus and Terence (1932) 80 – 1. 29 The other examples are Menaechmi 966 – 89, Mostell. 858 – 84 and Pseud. 1103 – 23; cf. Fraenkel 243 – 5 (= Elementi 234 – 6 and 430) and G. Williams, Tradition and originality in Roman poetry (1968) 580. It is true that a feature which is common in Latin comedy is likely to have a Greek ancestry (cf. D. Bain, Actors and audience [1977] 154 – 5) and Men. fr. 314 K-A might come from such a monologue, but what is important is the prominence and frequency of this motif in Plautus.

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slave to see the girl’s nurse and in 807 the nurse is said to know what is happening although at the start of the play it seemed that she did not know who had raped Euclio’s daughter.30 A further indication that something is amiss in this scene may be given by 592 – 8 of the slave’s speech: as these verses must refer to an erus who becomes involved in a wasteful love affair (presumably with a courtesan) and not to a man in Lyconides’ position and as 599 would follow quite naturally after 591, the intervening verses were excised by Brix31 and most editors adopt this solution. Wagner’s transposition of the verses after 60232 does not remove the inconsistency and so Brix was probably correct to see here one of the many cases in Plautus where two parallel passages have been conflated.33 Nevertheless, in view of the other signs of difficulty to be found in this scene, it is worth noting the possibility that Plautus composed 587 – 607 as a unit to stand where it does in the Aulularia and was not too concerned with the inconsistency between the sentiment of 592 – 8 and the main plot of the play. Such a view would make Wagner’s transposition very attractive, but in any case enough has been said to show that there is much in this scene which calls for an explanation. It has occasionally been suggested that the temple of Fides and the scene in which it figures are additions by Plautus to his Greek model,34 but this view has never received the consideration which in my view it deserves. If it were excised from the hypothesised Greek original, then Euclio would decide at 580 – 6 to hide his pot in the grove of Silvanus rather than in the temple of Fides and this would reduce the size of the third Greek act to a more manageable length. If this thesis is correct, then we cannot hope to recover the action of the Greek play in this act, but 815 to which I have already referred suggests a scene in which the slave told Staphyla of the identity of the rapist and perhaps overheard Euclio’s plan to hide the gold in the grove of Silvanus as he was leaving the house after his discussion with Staphyla. The emphasis 30 Cf. Webster 121. Ludwig’s explanation (69 – 70) of these difficulties is quite unconvincing. 31 Neue Jahrbcher fr Philologik und Paedagogik 91 (1865) 56 – 7. 32 W. Wagner, De Plauti Aulularia (1864) 27 – 9. Wagner is followed by Ussing and Marcovich (n. 24) 213 n. 55. 33 Cf. A. Thierfelder, De rationibus interpolationum Plautinarum (1929) 77, Batzer 98 – 102. 34 This was the view of Krieger (n. 17) and Kuiper (n. 9).

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on slapstick in the clash of Euclio and the slave outside the temple35 and the innumerable jokes on fides, fidelis, and fiducia do not of course prove that the whole scene is of Plautine invention, but these may certainly be added to the cumulative argument for this thesis which offers a neat solution to some, though not all,36 of the problems of the middle section of the play. To this thesis it was objected long ago37 that the scene of the Fides-temple fits well into the general scheme of the play: as each successive hiding-place proves insecure and all the gods in turn, the Lar, Fides and Silvanus, conspire against him Euclio is forced to move his gold farther and farther from home until he finally loses it. With this view of the pattern of the play I am in complete agreement, but I see no reason to believe that anything which makes coherent dramatic sense in a Plautine play comes ipso facto from the Greek original; the problems in this section of the play to which I have pointed may all admit of a quite different solution, but the thesis that Plautus himself is responsible for the scene of the Fides-temple is not to be dismissed simply because of preconceived notions about his lack of concern with dramatic coherence.

II. Even in the very small fraction surviving today of plays which were written in the New Comedy period there is enough evidence to show how stylised this genre was and how similar plays by different poets could be. It may therefore be worthwhile, before turning to con35 For slapstick as a characteristic of Plautine comedy cf. G. Jachmann, Plautinisches und Attisches (1931) passim. 36 Any complete account of the Fides-scene would have to explain Euclio’s correct description of Greek marriage practice in 613 (cf. Men. Samia 157 – 9), although this is not a serious objection to the thesis of Plautine workmanship. Ludwig’s suggestion (p. 63) that the third act of the Greek play ended after II.7 is most unlikely as that act would then be entirely devoted to the slave’s conversation with the two cooks; Webster (p. 122), however, supposes that Plautus has omitted scenes featuring Lyconides, his slave and Staphyla after 362. On the short monologue of the cook at 398 – 405 cf. Fraenkel 163 n. 1 (= Elementi 155 n. 1) who demonstrates that this speech is almost certainly from the Greek play; to his examples should probably be added Men. Epitrep. 603 – 9 and for the thought Webster 124 compares Ter. Adelphoe 375 – 81. 37 Cf. G. Jachmann, Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift 35 (1915) 1015, and W. Ludwig in Mnandre 76 – 7.

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sider the similarities between the Aulularia and the Dyscolus, briefly to examine the relationship between other pairs of comedies which seem to us very alike. The Mercator of Plautus, which is adapted from Philemon’s Emporos, shares a ‘dream-narrative’ with the Rudens, which is adapted from a play by Diphilus,38 but more significant here are the similarities between the Mercator and the Casina (= Diphilus’ Kleroumenoi) which have often been observed.39 Both plays concern a contest between father and son for possession of a young lady and in both plays the father plans to ‘enjoy’ the girl at his neighbour’s house. The conception of the two plots is, however, quite different as the Mercator is not a ‘recognition’ play and even in those scenes in which the greatest similarity might have been expected (Casina II. 3 ~ Merc. IV. 3 – 4) the differences are very great indeed. This then is not a case of one poet imitating another, but of two poets working along different lines in the one tradition. A second instance which may be cited is the case of the Epitrepontes of Menander and the Hekyra of Apollodorus (= Terence’s Hecyra). It is a commonplace of criticism that Apollodorus was deeply indebted to Menander’s play, but the way in which the alleged model has been used is of particular interest: in the Epitrepontes a husband leaves his wife and goes to a courtesan but does not touch her, whereas in the Hecyra a husband gives up a courtesan and returns to his wife but will have nothing to do with the wife physically; in the Epitrepontes it is the young girl who has been raped who comes after the incident in a bedraggled condition to the courtesan, whereas in the Hecyra it is the young man who committed the rape who comes in a similar condition to the courtesan; in the Epitrepontes the young man during the rape loses the ring by which the final ‘recognition’ is to be achieved and in the Hecyra the young man takes the vital ring from the girl during the attack. If the traditional view of the relationship between these two plays is correct, Apollodorus has changed the details of his model with great virtuosity and the similarities between the plays are of a quite different kind from those between the Aulularia and the Dyscolus.40 In the final case 38 Merc. 225 – 71 ~ Rudens 593 – 614, cf. Fr. Leo, Plautinische Forschungen ed. 2 (1912) 162 – 5, Fraenkel 198 – 206 (= Elementi 187 – 95). 39 Cf. Leo (n. 38) 164 n. 1, Marx’s edition of the Rudens pp. 269 – 71. 40 Sidonius Apollinaris’ description of the Epitrepontes and the Hecyra as similis argumenti (Epist. 4.12.1) is correct if argumentum means the pqopepqacl]ma of the two plays; for the ancient division between argumentum and oratio cf. H. D. Jocelyn, The tragedies of Ennius (1967) 24 – 8.

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which I wish to consider here the two plays may or may not be by the same poet. The fragmentary Vidularia of Plautus is very like the Rudens: a lonely coast, a shipwreck, a lost casket of recognition tokens, an honest farmer, a young man from the city, an arbitration and a shrine of Venus. This ought to establish Diphilus as the author of the Greek original of the Vidularia even without the title Schedia which Studemund deciphered in what remains of the prologue.41 Nevertheless, if the Rudens did not exist, Menander would have a good claim to the Vidularia: to the ‘atmospheric’ parallels of Menander’s Halieis and Leucadia would be added the dispute between two slaves over a box of recognition tokens, which occurs in a famous scene of the Epitrepontes, the fact that the motif of a man working as a labourer for his own father whom he does not recognise is known elsewhere in comedy only in Menander’s Heros and possibly also the Georgos,42 and the similarity between Sostratos in the Dyscolus whose labours in the countryside give his body a tan (Dysc. 754) and Nicodemus in the Vidularia who, when told that his body is too soft and white for hard work, observes that the sun will soon change that situation (Vid. 31 – 6).43 Although this survey could be extended much further, it should be already clear that the similarities between the Aulularia and the Dyscolus are different in kind from the similarities between other related pairs of comedies. With these two plays it is not so much the details which are strikingly alike but rather the general conception of the plot: both plays combine a ‘character-comedy’ with a romantic plot and the problems of the latter are solved when the leading figure of the ‘character-comedy’ suffers a disaster but is saved by an act of kindness. This overall likeness, together with the other parallels between Menander’s work and the Aulularia,44 means that the case for a Menandrean origin for the Aulularia 41 The reading Schedia is rejected by Marx, Rudens p. 213. For a detailed discussion of the Vidularia cf. W. Friedrich, Euripides und Diphilos (1953) 199 – 21. 42 In the Georgos Gorgias helps the distressed Kleainetos oRome·/mol_sar 2autoO pat]qa (58 – 9) and many scholars have picked up this clue; cf. Gomme-Sandbach pp. 106 – 7. Plaut. Rudens 410 where Ampelisca says that the priestess Ptolemocratia helped herself haud secus quam si ex se simus natae is perhaps a warning against overconfidence in the case of the Georgos. 43 For this motif cf. also Sosicrates fr. 1 K-A, TrGF Adesp. 161 and Ter. Adelphoe 849 (from Menander). 44 The conflict between Megadorus and Lyconides finds its closest parallel in Menander’s Georgos (and cf. also Ter. Adelphoe 636 – 712); the misunderstanding between Lyconides and Euclio in Aulularia IV.10 is very like the scene between Moschion and his father in the fourth act of the Samia: cf. A. Katsouris, Tragic

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hardly requires the likeness of Choricius’ description of a character in Menander, Slijq_mgr b dedi½r l^ ti t_m 5mdom b japm¹r oUwoito v]qym (32.73), to the description of Euclio at Aulularia 300 – 1, diuom atque hominum clamat continuo fidem,/de suo tigillo fumus si qua exit foras. Nevertheless the case of the Rudens and the Vidularia perhaps justifies a few doubts and so I wish to consider a similarity between the Aulularia and the Dyscolus which may be ambiguous in its implications. At the start of the third act of the Dyscolus Knemon tells his old servant not to let anyone in while he is away working; he is of course a misanthrope in all matters but he specifically mistrusts the intentions of the strangers (cf. toiwyq}woi 447). After the arrival of Sostratos’ mother and her party Knemon delivers a tirade on a familiar comic subject, the fact that the sacrifices are more for the benefit of the participants than of the gods (447 – 52).45 This monologue is not, however, an irrelevant piece of traditional comedy as it is this sacrifice and party which Knemon will be made to join at the end of the play and he must at this stage appear completely isolated from these events. Immediately after his monologue follows the scene in which first Getas and then Sikon, coming from Pan’s shrine, try to borrow kitchen utensils from Knemon but receive only blows. Aulularia 1.2 has much in common with this sequence in the Dyscolus. In that scene Euclio orders Staphyla to admit no one during his absence at the local distribution of money and he too delivers a tirade on a familiar theme, borrowing from one’s neighbours (89 – 100): abi intro, occlude ianuam. iam ego hic ero. caue quemquam alienum in aedis intro miseris. quod quispiam ignem quaerat, exstingui uolo, ne causae quid sit quod te quisquam quaeritet. nam si ignis uiuet, tu exstinquere extempulo. tum aquam aufugisse dicito, si quis petet. cultrum, securim, pistillum, mortarium, quae utenda uasa semper uicini rogant, fures uenisse atque abstulisse dicito. profecto in aedis meas me absente neminem uolo intro mitti. atque etiam hoc praedico tibi, si Bona Fortuna ueniat, ne intro miseris. patterns in Menander (1975) 140 – 3. Aulularia 255 – 387 is strikingly like the sequence of action at Samia 170 – 404. 45 Cf. Handley’s commentary pp. 214 – 15.

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Euclio does not want people in his house for the obvious reason of the buried gold, but these verses also characterise him as lijqok|cor (cf. Theophr. Char. 10.13) and %pistor (Char. 18.7).46 Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising that this speech does not foreshadow any later action in the play, as 398 – 405 in which the cook in Megadorus’ house goes to borrow an artopta from his friend in Euclio’s house but then changes his mind do not seem to fit the bill. By way of contrast, 113 – 17 in which Euclio claims that people on the street are now nice to him because of his ‘hidden charms’ clearly function as dramatic preparation for his encounter with Megadorus (182 – 9) and a similar complaint in the Rudens (133 – 6) about neighbours borrowing things foreshadows a splendid scene later in that play.47 This is hardly a serious weakness in the Aulularia and there is certainly no good reason to consider the verses as a Plautine addition to the original as a number of scholars, on quite diverse grounds, have done;48 this passage vividly illustrates how neurotic Euclio has become. I hope, however, that the slightly maturer technique of the Dyscolus in this matter may justify a further speculation about the original of the Aulularia. It is noteworthy that in the two extant New Comedy ‘borrowing scenes’ in the Dyscolus and the Rudens it is people from a shrine represented on the stage who try to borrow something from a neighbour.49 Euclio’s list of forbidden items would well suit the lavish meal which attended a sacrifice and so his tirade may be used to argue that there was a temple represented on the stage in the Greek play. If it was the god of the temple rather than the house-god who delivered the Greek prologue,50 then this would explain why it is so difficult to find a Greek model for the Lar, why the prologue is not clear in its description of the movements of the pot, why the prologue is silent about 46 On Euclio’s character cf. P. Enk, ‘De Euclionis Plautini moribus’, Mnemosyne 2 (1935) 281 – 90, Ludwig 55 – 8 and Marcovich (n. 24). Euclio’s denial of fire and water is a particularly anti-social act; cf. Plaut. Rudens 434 (= 438 Marx) cur tu aquam grauare, amabo, quam hostis hosti commodat, Xen. Oec. 2.15, Longus Past. 3.6.3, Konstan (n. 17) 309 – 10. 47 Cf. Jachmann (n. 35) 71. 48 Cf. Kunst (n. 6) 216 – 17, Batzer 21 – 3, C. Stace, CPh 70 (1975) 42. 49 This type of scene is as old as the confrontation of Dicaeopolis and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Acharnians. 50 Ludwig 46 – 50 argues that 385 – 7, nunc tusculum emi hoc et coronas floreas:/haec imponentur in foco nostro Lari,/ut fortunatas faciat gnatae nuptias, demonstrate that a house-god must have spoken the prologue in the Greek play; does 351 of the Epitrepontes mean that T}wg spoke the prologue of that play?

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the temple and, for what it is worth, it would also remove the slight awkwardness of the Lar’s movement at the end of the prologue. The identity of this Greek temple cannot be recovered with certainty. A prologising P_stir is not impossible (cf. Theognis 831, 1137), although Wilamowitz was probably correct to outlaw the idea of a temple to P_stir in Menander’s time as ‘ganz undenkbar’.51 An interesting possibility is raised by 100 – 2: Euclio si Bona Fortuna ueniat, ne intro miseris. Staphyla pol ea ipsa credo ne intro mittatur cauet, nam ad aedis nostras nusquam adiit, quamquam prope est. 102 numquam D adit Leo quaquam Pylades est B: om. ceteri

It is an old inference from these verses that there was a shrine of Fortuna, i. e. T}wg, in the vicinity of Euclio’s house52 and T}wg would have been a very suitable prologist for this play as hgsauqo_ were normally considered to be the gifts of T}wg ;53 it would also be very effective rhetorically if Euclio’s speech ended with a curse on the divinity of the temple at which his anger was directed. It may, therefore, be worth adding that Fides, Fortuna and Spes are known to have been linked together in cult54 and so a temple to T}wg might well have suggested to Plautus the comic possibilities of Fides. Unfortunately, critics have been in wide disagreement about the text and interpretation of 102: Leo thought that the reference was to the idea that Fortuna wanders around the streets and chooses to visit some houses but not others (Cassius Dio 64.1 – 2, Suet. Galba 4, Sen. Dial. 2.15.5), and Wagner prints numquam adiit quaquam prope with numquam … quaquam forming a strong negative. I would not wish to insist upon the interpretation of the verses which I have outlined, but in a play where so much about the Greek original is 51 Menander: Das Schiedsgericht (1925) 136. The paroemiographers record a Req¹m P_steyr in Athens (Diogen. 2.80, Apostol. 4.25), but no indication of date is given and the notice must be considered very doubtful. For what it is worth, I do not think that Skutsch was correct to infer from Casina 2 that Fides is the prologist in that play. 52 This was observed as early as Lambinus and again by Eduard Fraenkel apud Jachmann (n. 37) 1015 n. 3. 53 Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1.1362 a 9, id. Eth. Nic. 3.1112 a 27, Hor. Sat. 2.6.10, K. J. Dover, Greek popular morality in the time of Plato and Aristotle (1974) 174 – 5. 54 Cf. K. Latte, Rçmische Religionsgeschichte (1960) 182 n. 1, R. Nisbet and M. Hubbard on Hor. C. 1.35.21.

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unclear it would not be sensible to ignore clues of possibly major significance.55 I have argued that in the Greek original of the Aulularia there was an on-stage temple and that the divine prologist entered from that temple, but that the action which takes place around the temple of Fides in the Aulularia is largely an addition by Plautus to his Greek model. Even if, however, all of these hypotheses are correct, we cannot hope to recover more than the broad outlines of the Greek play until a new papyrus comes to our assistance and so I do not wish to propose any comprehensive scheme for the original of the Aulularia, particularly as I have already devoted too much space to speculation. My hope rather is that by stressing the uncertainties to which an analysis of the Aulularia leads this paper will help to prevent some current notions about how Plautus transformed his originals from hardening into a rigid formula assumed to be applicable to every case. It is my impression that the variety of approaches which Plautus adopted when reworking Greek plays is at least as striking as the common thread which runs through all his work.56

Addenda Helpful subsequent discussions include the edition of W. Stockert (Stuttgart 1983), Arnott, Alexis (above under 2) pp. 859 – 64, and A. Primmer, ‘Der “Geizige” bei Menander und Plautus’ WS 105 (1992) 69 – 127. For the Vidularia cf. R. Calderan, Tito Maccio Plauto. Vidularia (Palermo 1982).

55 J. Blänsdorf, Archaische Gedankengnge in den Komçdien des Plautus (1967) 110 – 11, sees in the repetition introduced by profecto in 98 a typically Plautine figure of thought and speech, but this hardly proves that it is a Plautine insertion. Of the reference to Bona Fortuna Blänsdorf states ‘die grobkomische Uebersteigerung hat hier im Munde des Euclio keinen Platz’; Euclio’s remarks are, however, singularly mild by the standards of a Knemon. For the thought expressed cf. Rudens 501, Malam Fortunam in aedis te adduxi meas. 56 I am most grateful to David Bain and Christopher Lowe for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

34. Middle Comedy and the Amphitruo of Plautus* In his remarkable doctoral dissertation Eduard Fraenkel compared scholars working on post-Aristophanic comedy to parasites picking over ‘yesterday’s leftovers’, and Middle Comedy he declared to be as elusive as an emaq sji÷r.1 Since 1912 our knowledge of Attic New Comedy has increased significantly, but Middle Comedy continues to offer a de?pmom uere )ttij|m, more emou sji\ than sji÷r emaq. The old question of the origin and validity of the term ‘Middle Comedy’ still manages to attract interest2, but our most pressing need – new comic texts from the first eighty years of the fourth century – has not been met3. Middle Comedy has been described as a ‘Verlegenheitsbegriff’4, and the person asked to lecture about it might well sympathise with the term. Nevertheless, a number of possible approaches to our present corpus of material are available – the typology of characters, Realien, politics, vocabulary and style – and, in view of the splendid edition of Poetae Comici Graeci by Rudolf Kassel and Colin Austin which is making many fragments really accessible for the first time, the time may be right to look again at Middle Comedy as a whole. Here I will concentrate on only two aspects of fourth-century comedy, albeit very important ones. First, by working back from Menander, I will consider what sorts of comic structures are visible in our fragments of the Middle period, and secondly I will examine one example of comedy’s presentation of

* 1 2

3 4

Dioniso 57 (1987) 281 – 98 De media et nova comoedia quaestiones selectae (diss. Göttingen 1912), pp. 1, 63. For a summary and bibliography cf. my Eubulus: the fragments (Cambridge 1983) 4 – 6; add now R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy (London 1984), 244 – 50, S. Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London 1986) 273 – 4. S. M. Goldberg, AJP 106 (1985) 519, takes me to task, perhaps rightly, for not flogging this particularly weary horse a little further in Eubulus. D. F. Sutton, ‘P. Lit. Lond. 77: a rebuttal’ ZPE 56 (1984) 33 – 4, restates his belief that CGFPR 350 is Middle Comedy. He may be right, but I have given my reasons for doubting it in ZPE 41 (1981) 19 – 24. My doubts remain. T. Gelzer in G. A. Seeck (ed.), Das griechische Drama (Darmstadt 1979) 297 n. 50.

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the divine in a text which may or may not derive from a Greek comedy of the Middle period.

1. A play of Menander is given shape and pattern by the interaction of three ‘structures’ into which the raw material of the drama is moulded: the division into five acts, the internal or dynamic structure, which often works in creative tension with the division into acts, and finally the formal structures, in particular the alternation between monologue and dialogue or between spoken and musically accompanied verse. Our fragments of Middle Comedy allow us to say something about the development of each of these three between the Ploutos and the Dyskolos, but virtually nothing about their interaction. The probably universal New Comedy division of plays into five acts presumably arose from a gradual fixing and standardising of a typical pattern, associated with the divorce of the chorus from the main action of the play. The Ekklesiazousai and the Ploutos clearly point the way ahead, but the seeds of the later pattern may be discerned already in the comedies of the fifth century5. Here the fragments of Middle Comedy are only helpful in as much as they occasionally demand or suggest the presence of a chorus6 or, in at least one case, preserve part of a choral song in lyric dactyls for a chorus of ‘garland-sellers’ (Euboulos frr. 102 – 3 K-A = 104 – 5 Hunter). It is attractive to believe that this song formed the parodos of its play, just as Aristophanes’ chorus of clouds sings its first song in this same high-style rhythm. It may be that the piscatores of the Rudens show us the persistence of a special parodos in the New Comedy period. The fact that in Menander, as probably in a fragment of Alexis (fr. 112 K-A), the first entrance of the chorus is announced and that this announcement can vary from play to play suggests again that the parodos was the last choral structure to be abandoned completely by poets. Here too may belong Aristotle’s reference to the man who re-

5 6

Cf. now A. Sommerstein, ‘Act division in Old Comedy’ BICS 31 (1984) 139 – 52 Cf. “The comic chorus in the fourth century’ ZPE 36 (1979) 23 – 38 (= this volume 575 – 92), pp. 33 – 7.

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veals his bamaus_a ja· !peiqojak_a by “bringing on purple in the parodos, as at Megara, while comic choregos”7. Although Menander’s comedies were probably all divided into five acts, the organisation of the plot shows striking differences from comedy to comedy. Three plays, Dyskolos, Epitrepontes, and Samia are sufficiently well preserved to allow comment. The main emotional and comic weight in the Dyskolos falls in the fourth act, and particularly on Knemon’s speech in trochaic tetrameters. As is well known, some aspects of this speech have links with tragedy — the stricken hero speaks his mind8 — and others can be traced through the comic tradition, for example the use of trochaic tetrameters for ‘didactic’ purposes9. Just as Knemon claims to have been taught that the ideal of self-sufficiency is a pipe-dream (Dysk. 713 – 17), so a character in Antiphanes recommends a trip to the public latrine as a way of realising one’s common humanity (fr. 42 K-A). As Knemon recommends his solitary existence as a cure for the world’s ills (Dysk. 743 – 5) 10, so a character in Alexis recommends removal of the stomach from the human anatomy (fr. 215 K-A). Menander, then, is writing in a well-established comic mode, but it is an isolated example of this mode in our still very limited corpus of this poet. The second act of the Dyskolos presents another countryman striving to deliver a formal lecture; and the same act of Epitrepontes goes one better and shows us two countrymen, a shepherd and a charcoal-burner, arguing a legal matter before an arbitrator. The tragic affiliations of this scene have long been noted and are, in fact, signalled by Menander himself 11, but the comic tradition behind this scene has perhaps received insufficient attention. Daos, the shepherd, relies on a simple statement of the facts (which his opponent happily admits) and an appeal to common sense (vv. 280 – 92), whereas his opponent argues with the verbal and strategic devices of formal rhetoric, even if of a rather comic kind. This is much the same opposition that we find in varying degrees in the agones of Clouds, Wasps, Birds, Frogs and Ploutos, in which 7 EN 4.1123 a 23 – 4. The meaning of Aristotle’s example is, of course, disputed, cf. T. B. L. Webster in A. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy2 (Oxford 1962), p. 180. 8 Cf. The New Comedy of Greece & Rome (Cambridge 1985), hereafter NCGR, p. 127. 9 Cf. Handley’s edition of the Dyskolos, pp. 252 – 3; W. G. Arnott, G&R n.s. 19 (1972) 79 – 80. 10 On these verses cf. NCGR 144 – 5. 11 Cf. NCGR 134 – 6.

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‘old-fashioned’ common sense and inherited wisdom are pitted against modern intellectualism and kocisl|r. There is little doubt that our fragments of Middle Comedy include remnants of such agones (cf. perhaps Antiphanes fr. 142 K-A, Anaxandrides fr. 34 K-A), but they are naturally difficult to identify in the absence of any scenic articulation. A fragment such as Anaxandrides 50 K-A (from the Pharmakomantis): fti eUl’ !kaf~m, toOt’ 1pitil÷ir ; !kk± t_; mij÷i c±q avtg t±r t]wmar p\sar pok» let± tµm jokaje_am. Fde l³m c±q diav]qei.

You reprove me because I am an imposter? Why so? This art beats all others by far, except flattery. That art is certainly the best.

seems to speak with the same ironic voice as the ‘Unjust Argument’ of Clouds, but scenic contexts other than an agon could be imagined for it. I have speculated elsewhere12 that the famous fragment of Antiphanes on the advantages which tragic poets enjoy (fr. 189 K-A) comes not, as is both plausible and generally assumed, from a prologue but from an agon between the two dramatic genres (cf. Ar. Frogs), and it seems very likely that many of the moralising fragments of Middle Comedy derive from similar scenic structures. One particular form of debate which we may be able to trace through Middle Comedy from Aristophanes (cf. Wasps) to Menander (Dysk. 784 – 820, Epitr. 714 – 58 adding POxy. 3532 – 3) and on to Plautus (Asin. 504 – 44, Persa 329 – 99) is that in which a child seeks to correct the ‘morals’ or behaviour of his or her parent13. Here again we have a scene with both comic and tragic affiliations (cf. Haimon and Kreon in Sophocles’ Antigone), and the New Comedy form was presumably crystallised during the Middle Comedy period. It is noteworthy that a character in Antiphanes (fr. 228 K-A) quotes from the debate between Haimon and Kreon to make a quite different point: t¹ d³ f/m eQp] loi t_ 1sti ; p_meim v^l’ 1c~. bq÷ir paq± Ne_hqoisi weil\qqoir fsa

12 Cf. NCGR 158 n. 21. 13 Cf. Antiphanes fr. 42 K-A, Anaxandrides fr. 54 K-A; p\teq is not, however, a decisive indicator, cf. Gomme-Sandbach on Men. Epitr. 231. A further scrap is added to the Epitrepontes scene by P. Mich. Inv. 4733, cf. M. Gronewald, ZPE 66 (1986) 1 – 13.

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d]mdqym !e· tµm m}jta ja· tµm Bl]qam bq]wetai l]cehor ja· j\kkor oXa c_metai, t± d’ !mtite_momh’ oRome· d_xam tim± C ngqas_am sw|mt’ aqt|pqelm’ !p|kkutai.

Tell me, what is living? I say that it is drinking. You see beside river torrents that all the trees which are soaked day and night grow tall and beautiful, whereas those that resist, as though they suffered from some thirsty dryness, are utterly destroyed.

We may guess that if we had more fourth-century comedy we would see here an example of the blending of a tragic form with its comic counterpart. Unfortunately, we do not have the evidence to convert such speculation into something more tangible. Dyskolos and Epitrepontes, then, use comic modes whose faint traces are just discernible in our fragments of Middle Comedy. The Samia, on the other hand, eschews formal debate, and its critical fourth act is given over to lively three-sided farce; this play does, however, offer at the opening of the third act a monologue by Demeas of some eighty trimeters in which he tells the audience what has happened inside the house. We recognise such a dramatic form both from earlier drama (cf. Ar. Ploutos 802 – 22, Eur. Alc. 747 – 72) and from elsewhere in Menander (cf. Dysk. 666 – 90). Characters who deliver such speeches may (cf. Ploutos 821 – 2, Dysk. 685 – 9) or may not (Alcestis, Samia) offer motivation for their entrance, although “psychological” explanations could no doubt be devised for the latter cases. It is clear both from Menander (cf. Dysk. 543 – 5) 14 and from the fragment of Philemon (fr. 82 K-A) in which a cook introduces his narrative by quoting from Euripides’ Medea, ¢r Vleqor l’ rp/khe c/i te joqqam_i, k]nai lok|mti touxom ¢r 1sje}asa.

Desire has come over me to come out and reveal to the earth and sky how I prepared dinner.

that poets were aware of the comic effect to be gained from acknowledging the artificiality of this theatrical convention. A passage from Plautus’ Casina shows us a very developed stage of the convention. 14 The irony of these verses works alongside the other aspects which critics have identified — the irrational behaviour of the lover (cf. Tib. 2.6.14) and the influence of Pan.

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Pardalisca comes out without explanation to tell the audience how the women are fooling their husbands inside the house (vv. 759 – 79) and is then challenged by her master who comes out after her: LYS. quid tu hic agis? PA. ego eo quo me ipsa misit. LYS. ueron? PA. serio. LYS. quid hic speculare? PA. nil equidem speculor. LYS. abi: tu hic cunctas, intus alii festinant. PA. eo. LYS. What are you doing here? PA. I’m going where my mistress sent me. LYS. Really? PA. Seriously. LYS. Why are you spying here? PA. I’m not spying. LYS. Be off with you; you’re hanging about here, while all the others are busy inside. PA. I’m going.

This exchange calls our attention to the fact that Pardalisca has been given no reason to emerge except to entertain and inform the audience. We may feel sure that Middle Comedy had a significant role to play in developing this convention. A number of Middle Comedy fragments, again excellently collected and analysed by Eduard Fraenkel15, clearly derive from fairly lengthy reports – to the chorus, the audience or another character – of the progress of a banquet imagined to have taken place ‘off the stage’. Some of these speeches will have been parallel to the narratives of Karion in the Ploutos and of Philemon’s cook, others will have been ‘messengerspeeches’ in the more usual sense of the term. In the case of Euboulos’ Ion, for example, there can be little doubt, in view of the major messenger-speech in Euripides’ famous tragedy. The predominance of ‘banquet narratives’ in our fragments is due partly to Athenaeus’ interests, but the apparent frequency of this narrative form remains noteworthy. The narrative report was one dramatic form which could accommodate the kind of verbal luxuriance which had previously been confined to the lyric parts of plays16. As the chorus diminished in importance, for whatever reasons, poets used extended narratives in trimeters and occasionally more exotic rhythms (cf. Antiphanes fr. 172 K-A, Euboulos fr. 111 K-A [= 112 Hunter]) to provide a comic effect related to that afforded by complex lyrics. Other factors, such as the influence of Euripidean 15 Op. cit. (n. 1) 13 – 32. For stylistic links between ‘banquet’ narratives and other messenger-speeches cf. my introduction to Euboulos fr. 112 (= 111 K-A), adding Alexis fr. 263 K-A. 16 Cf. Eubulus (n. 2) pp. 19 – 20.

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tragedy, were, of course, operative as well, and the growing refinement of the comic monologue, which our fragments suggest, was not confined to accounts of extravagant eating. It is presumably chance that the two extant plays of Aristophanes from the fourth century both contain long reports of events ‘off-stage’, one with what looks like explicit acknowledgement of the conventionality of the device (Pl. 632), but this does fit with the other phenomena I have mentioned. A fragment of Antiphanes’ Metragyrtes (fr. 152 K-A) in fact sounds very like Karion’s report of events in the temple of Asclepius: t^m te pa?d’ !ke_llata paq± t/r heoO kaboOsam eWta to»r p|dar 1j]keu’ !ke_veim pq_tom, eWta t± c|mata. ¢r h÷ttom B pa?r d( Fxat’ aqtoO t_m pod_m 5tqix] t’, !mep^dgsem.

He told the girl to get some ointment from the goddess and then to rub his feet and than his knees with it. As soon as the girl touched and rubbed his feet, he leapt up.

One form of monologue where the continuity of comic tradition is very readily apparent is the prologue17. Karion’s opening speech in the Ploutos, for example, finds a close echo in Sosia’s entrance speech in the Amphitruo and allows us to see how a divine prologue has been grafted on to an existing comic structure and how Plautus has typically expanded his Greek model18. The fragments of Antiphanes, in particular, suggest a number of different prologue traditions. Fr. 19 K-A from the Aiolos clearly burlesques the tragic style and subject: Lajaqe»r 5qyti t_m blosp|qym li÷r pkgce_r, t]yr l³m 1pejq\tei t/r sulvoq÷r jate?we h’ art|m. eWta paqakab~m pote oWmom stqatgc|m, dr l|mor hmgt_m %cei tµm t|klam eQr t¹ pq|she t/r eqbouk_ar, m}jtyq !mast±r 5tuwe ¨m 1bo}keto.

Macareus, struck by passion for one of his siblings, for a while controlled his misfortune and kept himself in check. Then one day he took wine as 17 Much may still be learned from W. Frantz, De comoediae Atticae prologis (diss. Strasbourg 1891); for a general survey cf. NCGR 24 – 35. 18 Cf. E. Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus (Berlin 1922) 181 – 4 = Elementi Plautini in Plauto 172 – 5.

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his general, wine which alone leads men’s recklessness in front of their prudence; rising up at night he achieved his desires.

We cannot tell whether or not this passage was delivered by a divine prologist, and a similar doubt attaches to fr. 210 K-A from the Hydria, a title which suggests (though does not, of course, prove) a recognition drama: oxtor d’ dm k]cy 1m ceit|mym aqt_i jatoijo}sgr tim¹r Qd½m 2ta_qar eQr 5qyt’ !v_jeto, !st/r, 1q^lou d’ 1pitq|pou ja· succem_m, Gh|r ti wqusoOm pq¹r !qetµm jejtgl]mgr, emtyr 2ta_qar· aR l³m %kkai toumola bk\ptousi to?r tq|poir c±q emtyr cm jak|m.

The chap who I’m talking about saw and fell in love with a hetaira who lived next door. She is a citizen, but has no protector or relations. Her character is golden and virtuous; she’s really a hetaira (lit. ‘companion’). Other girls bring this essentially honourable title into disrepute by their evil character.

It may be thought that the probable combination of a recognition drama with the definitive character assessment in vv. 4 – 5 (cf. Men. Dysk. 34 – 6) points to an omniscient divinity, such as the prologising gods of Menander. As is well known, such gods have antecedents both in Old Comedy and in tragedy, and it is a reasonable guess that very many mythological burlesques in the fourth century had divine prologues; traces of these have long been identified in our fragments19. Plautus’ Amphitruo, like the Ion of Euripides, has a prologue delivered by Hermes/Mercury, and Meineke thought that he detected the presence of Hermes in the following fragment which, after Hermann’s change of )qistov\mgr to )mtiv\mgr, is ascribed to the latter’s Ganymede (fr. 74 KA) 20 : bq÷ir ; 1m t/ide l³m b t_m Vquc_m t}qammor oQj_m tucw\mei c]qym, †!p’ aqc/r† Kaol]dym jako}lemor.

19 Cf., e. g., CGFPR *215, Euboulos fr. 68 K-A. 20 The etymologising of v. 3 recalls Eur. IT 32 and Helen 13 – 14 in prologues (cf. Kannicht on Helen loc. cit.).

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… Do you see? Here lives the king of the Phrygians, an old man, who gets his name Laomedon (lit. ‘ruler of the people’) from …

We cannot know whether or not Hermes is involved in this fragment, but it may serve to remind us again that, although we think of Middle Comedy as the period in which tragic form most influenced comedy, it is often misleading to regard a dramatic form as originally belonging exclusively to either genre21. Should we associate Antiphanes fr. 74 K-A with the pattern of the opening of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai (esp. vv. 26 – 30) and Frogs or with that of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which also concerns a ‘rape’, though of a rather different kind from that presumably perpetrated or described in Antiphanes’ Ganymede? Finally, Antiphanes fr. 166 K-A raises an interesting question: pa?r £m let’ !dekv/r eQr )h^mar 1mh\de !vij|lgm !whe·r rp| timor 1lp|qou, S}qor t¹ c]mor ¥m . peqituw½m d’ Bl?m bd· jgquttol]moir abokost\tgr £m 1pq_ato, %mhqypor !mup]qbkgtor eQr pomgq_am, toioOtor oXor lgd³m eQr tµm oQj_am lgd’ ¨m b Puhac|qar 1je?mor Eshiem, b tqislajaq_tgr, eQsv]qeim 5ny h}lou.

When I was a child I was brought here to Athens by a merchant; I am a Syrian by race. As we were being sold, this money-lender came upon us and bought us. He is unsurpassably wicked, the kind of man who brings nothing except thyme into the house, not even any of the things which the thrice-blessed Pythagoras used to eat.

This passage seems to come from a narrative prologue, either postponed or initial22, delivered by a central character, like Moschion’s prologue in the Samia. The story which he tells suggests a recognition drama23, and we are therefore confronted with the possibility – these speculations can carry no more weight than that – that a comedy of c. 340 B.C.24 which presented a recognition eschewed an omniscient prologue and the effects of dramatic irony arising from it, preferring instead to rely on dramatic surprise and a ‘knowing’ audience for any irony. If so, Terence’s abandonment of the narrative prologue is seen to be both a throwback 21 Cf. NCGR 117 – 18. 22 The implications of bd_ (v. 3) are uncertain, cf. my note on Euboulos fr. 15.2 (= 14.2 K-A), adding J. Diggle, CR n.s. 29 (1979) 208. 23 Cf. Eubulus (n. 2) pp. 159 – 60. 24 Cf. fr. 167 K-A.

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and an innovation, a phenomenon with many parallels in the history of ancient comedy. Alternatively, the prologue of the Curculio, split between a human and a divine narrator, suggests another possible interpretation of these facts. Whatever the truth, it is questions like this which it is reasonable to ask of the fragments of Middle Comedy. For a less disjointed analysis we have to go elsewhere.

2. It is no surprise that scholars interested in the history of comedy between Aristophanes and Menander have regularly turned in search of enlightenment from the Greek kekeill]ma to the Roman cena dubia. No play of Plautus can be said with certainty to derive from a Greek comedy of the ‘Middle’ period, but a reasonable case can at least be made for the Persa 25 and the Amphitruo. In choosing here to discuss briefly the presentation of Mercury in the Amphitruo, I do not wish to be understood necessarily to share the belief in a Middle Comedy original for this play. I remain agnostic, but, if pressed, I would say that I can see no good reason not to place the original in New Comedy26. Nevertheless, the Amphitruo is crucial evidence for mythological burlesque, which played such a prominent part in Middle Comedy, and it can hardly be overlooked in any consideration of this ‘dark age’. I shall examine only one aspect of Plautus’ play – the role of Mercury – in an attempt to suggest that some current notions of how ancient comedy burlesqued the gods are, if not wrong, perhaps too simple. Discussion of the roles of Jupiter and Mercury has naturally concentrated on how their behaviour is assimilated to that of their human comic counterparts, in particular that of Mercury to the slave or para25 Woytek has made an interesting case for regarding the Persa as an adaptation of a very late, i. e. nearly contemporary, Greek play. Problems remain, however (cf. H. D. Jocelyn, CR ns. 33 (1983) 196 – 7). Woytek’s comparison of the Persa and the Asinaria is instructive, but two features demand further investigation: the vast metrical difference between the two plays (although this may, of course, be a purely Plautine phenomenon), and the fact that Persa does not seem openly to exploit earlier comedy as Asinaria does. 26 Cf. Eubulus (n. 2) p. 20 n. 2, adding now H. Tränkle, ‘Amphitruo und kein Ende’. LG 40 (1983) 217 – 38 and E. Lefèvre, Maccus Vortit Barbare: vom tragischen Amphitryon zum tragikomischen Amphitruo (Abhandlungen Mainz, 1982.5).

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site who assists a lover in his affairs27, and on how the pattern of events in this comedy bears a striking resemblance to the pattern of Euripides’ Bacchae28. I will be concerned rather with how the play exploits aspects of the ‘real’, as well as the comic, Hermes/Mercury. Mercury presents himself as the god of commercial exchange – mercimoniis (v. 1), with a play on his name – and as the divine messenger (vv. 1 – 16). He has taken the form of the slave Sosia whose first appearance is as the human counterpart of the divine nuntius (cf. v. 195). At one level, Sosia’s message – the report of the battle with the Teleboeans – is a lie, a mendacium; he himself happily admits that lying is his normal mode of discourse (v. 198). Two points call for comment here. A ‘messenger-speech’ delivered by a character who saw nothing of what he reports, but merely repeats and embroiders hearsay (v. 200), seems to mock lightly the conventional omniscience of the messenger, particularly in tragedy, and is of a piece with the ‘playing with conventions’ which is such a prominent aspect of this play29. Secondly, Hermes is the divine model for both messengers and liars; it is in the nature of communication that it should be so30. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes makes lying one of the young god’s fundamental properties (cf. vv. 13, 260 ff, 368 ff). The form of the messenger-speech in the Amphitruo exploits and dramatises this aspect of the nature of Hermes. Moreover, when the god prepares to meet his human counterpart and observes me malum esse oportet, callidum, astutum admodum (v. 268), we smile because we know that these are the god’s very qualities – pok}tqopor, aRlukol^tgr, Apeqopeut^r, dokovqad^r, jajolgd^r as the Hymn calls him (vv. 13, 282, 389). Only someone like Sosia would trust the fides of Hermes (vv. 391 – 2). The ‘Hermaic’ quality of the comic slave is already apparent in the scene between Karion and Hermes in Aristophanes’ Ploutos; Hermes the thieving deserter (cf. Ar. Pl. 1150 – 1), an eQqgmij¹r he|r who does not covet military glory (cf. Hom. Il. 21.497 – 501 with scholia), and Sosia the lying coward are truly alike. 27 Cf., e. g., D. Guilbert, ‘Mercure-Sosie dans l’Amphitryon de Plaute’ LEC 31 (1963) 52 – 63. 28 Cf. W. H. Friedrich, Euripides und Diphilos (Munich 1953) 271 – 3; F. Stewart, ‘The Amphitruo of Plautus and Euripides’ Bacchae’ TAQA 89 (1958) 348 – 73. 29 Cf. Friedrich op. cit. 263 – 78, NCGR 79 – 82. 30 Cf., in general, L. Kahn, Herms passe ou les ambiguits de la communication (Paris 1978).

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As Sosia approaches his master’s house through the nocturnal gloom, he sees a menacing figure in the street and takes terrible fright. Hermes, of course, not merely protects travellers31 but also poses a great danger to them. With this scene we can hardly do better than compare Priam’s encounter with the disguised god in Iliad 24, where the old king, like Sosia (v. 295 dentes pruriunt), shows physical symptoms of fear32. Hermes traditionally works at night33, and in the Amphitruo he has a ‘long night’ in which to work his tricks. When he pretends to Sosia that he is an official uigil nocturnus (v. 351), it is hard not to think of the mujt¹r apypgt^q of the Hymn (v. 15). Sosia, moreover, finds Mercury ante aedis (v. 293), guarding the house as pukgd|jor (cf. h. Herm. 15). Athenians, at least, would have understood what it meant to have Hermes in front of the door, but this aspect of the god was by no means confined to Athens. Hermes stood at the door, controlling the boundary between inside and out and ‘repelling thieves because he is himself the thief’34. In the comedy, however, he keeps out those who rightly belong inside. A later scene of the play recalls and parallels the scene of Mercury and Sosia. This is, of course, the scene in which the god, pretending to be the drunken Sosia, refuses to admit Amphitruo to his own house (vv. 1009 ff). This scene has connections with a number of different comic traditions. It is a kind of reverse komos in which a man rather the worse for drink and wearing a wreath refuses entry to a sober husband who has every right to the woman inside. We should remember also comedy’s fondness for scenes involving the doorway35. It is indeed tempting to think of Hermes stqova?or (cf. Ar. Pl. 1153) when Mercury accuses Amphitruo of nearly breaking the door off its hinges (v. 1026) 36, and of Hermes the divine oQmow|or37 when, as far as our broken text allows us to judge, he pours water over Amphitruo from his vantage-point on the roof. Two scenes from earlier comedy are particularly 31 Cf., e. g., Hom. Il. 24.334 – 5, Gow on [Theocr.] 25.4. 32 Il. 24.358. Priam’s servant (v. 355) leaps to the same kind of conclusions as does Sosia. 33 Cf., e. g., h. Herm. 15, 97, 290, 578. 34 J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London 1983) 129. 35 Cf. Ar. Frogs 37 ff, 465 ff, Ekkl. 976 ff., Men. Dysk. 456 ff, Plaut. Asin. 381 ff, Bacch. 581 ff, L. Radermacher, WS 43 (1922/3) 107 – 108. 36 Cf. Asin. 388 for this motif. 37 Cf. Sappho fr. 141 LP, Ar. Peace 433 ff, Eitrem, RE 8.780. I was remiss in not referring to this aspect of Hermes in my note on Euboulos fr. 96 (= 95K-A).

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relevant here. In Aristophanes’ Peace, Hermes acts as heaven’s doorkeeper and gives Trygaios a very rude welcome38. At Ploutos 1097 ff there is a reversal of this scene-type: Hermes seeks admission, but is rudely rebuffed by a slave door keeper39. These three comedies all present variations on a comic routine based on an important function of the ‘real’ Hermes. Just as Mercury ‘plays’ the comic messenger (vv. 984 ff), so he ‘plays’ the comic door-keeper. In neither case, however, does he have to step outside his own traditional nature and attributes; it is funny to see a god pretending to be an imperfect model of himself. Hermes is the god of sleep and dreams40 and it has frequently been remarked that the Amphitruo is full of references to sleeping, dreaming and waking41. When Sosia observes that Mercury is the chap who will put him to sleep (v. 298) or when Mercury considers how many men his fists ‘have put to sleep’ (vv. 303 – 6), we recognise the irony. If Amphitruo and Alcmena think that they are in a dream, it is hardly surprising with such an adversary. If the pattern of the play resembles that of the Bacchae, it is Mercury, not Jupiter, who plays ‘the Dionysus role’; as the action of the tragedy represents some aspects of the meaning of Dionysus, so the comedy shows us part of what ‘Hermes’ means. At any event, it is clear that the ‘religious texture’, if I may use such a grand term, of the comedy is both thicker and more subtle than many critics would have us believe. It is a play in touch not only with the traditions and techniques of the comic stage, but also with the realities of traditional Greek religious thinking. I should stress that this conclusion is, to me at least, deeply unsurprising. It seems, moreover, very unlikely that this was the only mythological burlesque of which this was true. If what I have been saying, or even part of it, is true, then this might be thought to have consequences for the nature and date of the Greek original of the Amphitruo, were it not for two related problems which I have left out of account. These are the question of the relationship of the Greek Hermes to the Roman Mercury and the whole problem of 38 Cf. A. C. Cassio, Commedia e partecipazione (Naples 1985) 59. 39 Whether or not Hermes does actually knock at Karion’s door, as the scholiast and modern editors assume, is far from clear. Plaut. Asin. 381 – 91 and Ter. Ad. 636 – 41 show that there is more than one way to play such a scene. Similar problems arise at Ekkl. 976 – 7. 40 Cf., e. g., h. Herm. 14, Hom. Il. 24.343 – 4, Od. 5.47 – 8. 41 Cf., e. g., W. E. Forehand, AJP 92 (1971) 644 – 6, N. W. Slater, Plautus in Performance (Princeton 1985) 171. Relevant passages include 313 – 14, 407, 621, 696 – 8, 702, 726, 738.

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‘Plautinisches’ in the Amphitruo. The former is a matter of dispute even in the standard histories of Roman religion42, and raises important theoretical issues far beyond the scope both of this paper and of my competence. The second is a particularly cluttered path where only the brave will tread: as Sosia might have said, inritabis crabrones. The presentation of Mercury in the play does, I think, shed some light on both problems, but I cannot pursue these matters here. I wish, rather, to return to the prologising gods of New Comedy to note that the role of Mercury in the Amphitruo can suggest a way of approaching the vexed question of the relationship between these gods and the plays in which they appear. I shall limit my remarks to a very brief indication of how such an inquiry should proceed in the case of the Dyskolos, as this is the only play preserved in Greek in which the prologue is delivered by a familiar divinity rather than an abstraction and because Pan seems an obvious character to follow his father Hermes. Discussion of Pan’s role has naturally centred upon his effect on Sostratos and the ironies which arise from the audience’s knowledge that the divine has intervened in the young man’s life43. Less attention has been paid to Pan’s role in the story of Knemon. Where this has been discussed44, the fifth act of the play is seen as the fun-loving god’s triumph over the sour and unsociable farmer whose style of life suggests a rejection of the god not far removed from Hippolytos’ rejection of Aphrodite45. The apparently cruel mockery which Sikon and Getas inflict on the old man in fact represents the forced ‘socialisation’ which is necessary in order to enjoy Pan’s blessings. There is certainly some truth in this view, although we may agree with Armin Schäfer that Sikon and Getas ‘show no sign of divine inspiration’46. The jolly, musical side of 42 Contrast G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Rçmer2 (Munich 1912) 305 with F. Altheim, Griechische Gçtter im alten Rom (RGVV 22.1, Giessen 1930) 73 – 7. The discussion of the Amphitruo in B. Combet-Farnoux, Mercure Romain (Rome 1980) 406 – 11 is uninformative. 43 Cf. P. J. Photiades, ‘Pan’s prologue to the Dyskolos of Menander’ G&R n.s. 5 (1958) 108 – 22; W. Ludwig, ‘Die plautinische Cistellaria und das Verhältnis von Gott und Handlung bei Menander’ in Entretiens Fondation Hardt XVI, pp. 45 – 110; P. Borgeaud, Recherches sur le dieu Pan (Geneva 1979), pp. 241 – 7. On the style of this prologue see also S. M. Goldberg, ‘The style and function of Menander’s Dyskolos prologue’ SO 53 (1978) 57 – 68. 44 Cf. Photiades (n. 43) 112, Borgeaud (n. 43) 242. 45 Eur. Hipp. 88 – 113 and Men. Dysk. 11 – 13 may usefully be compared. 46 Menanders Dyskolos: Untersuchungen zur dramatischen Technik (Meisenheim am Glan 1965), p. 69.

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Pan does indeed alleviate the hardship of a life spent ‘farming the rocks’, just as Polybios explains that the dwellers in Pan’s homeland, Arcadia, avidly pursue music and the gaiety of festivals in order to soften the hardness of character which is produced by the harshness of the life they must lead and the climate in which they must live (Polyb. 4.21.1 – 4). One of the verbs used by Polybios, 1ngleqoOm, recalls to us Getas’ remark at Dysk. 902 – 3; t¹ d’ fkom 1st·m Bl?m / ûmhqypor Bleqyt]or (Kassel: -teqor), ‘it is absolutely essential that we tame the man’. Schäfer has suggested that a humorous use of Theophrastan ideas on education lies behind these verses47, and an interpretation in terms of Pan’s sphere of influence may complement, not oppose, such a view. Before proceeding, it may be worth noting that the same set of ideas, and perhaps the same word, lies behind an exchange between Bacchis and Pistoclerus in Plautus’ Bacchides (v. 73): B: ah, nimium ferus es. P.: mihi sum. B.: malacissandus es.

Here too a ‘wild’ creature is ‘softened’ to the delights of parties, although there are obvious differences between these characters and Knemon and his tormentors. The parallel confirms the light irony with which Menander treats the idea that such a ‘softening’ is necessarily an improvement. Pan, the cave-dwelling god who operates largely in the remote countryside or on the margins of towns and cities, raises by his very ‘oppositeness’ the problem of why men bind themselves together in social units48. Knemon’s acknowledgement that the dream of pure autarky is indeed a dream (Dysk. 713 – 17) provides one answer to that problem, just as the double marriage of the play celebrates the continuity of the family and, thereby, of social cohesiveness. Sostratos’ exposure to comedy’s version of life in the countryside is matched by Knemon’s exposure to the life of the city, as comedy sees it. At the boundary of the two stands Pan. In the Amphitruo, then, and to a lesser extent in the Dyskolos, the prologising god is important not merely for what he says or for his direct intervention in the action, but also because some of the events of the play fall into patterns which we recognise as belonging to that god’s sphere or set of associations. This suggests that we should not necessarily 47 Ibid., pp. 71 – 4. 48 The Homeric Cyclopes are relevant here, cf. NCGR 145 with 173 n. 9.

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approach the question of the effect of such a god on the action of his or her play in too literal-minded a way. Much, of course, will depend on the nature of the particular divinity. Nevertheless, considerations such as these should cause us to pause before we assume too readily that we can grasp the nature of mythological burlesque in Middle Comedy, even though no single example of the genre survives, at least in the original Greek. I am sorry to end on a negative note, but the nature of the evidence hardly gives cause to hope for more.

Addenda The Amphitruo continues to attract scholars, cf., e. g., N. W. Slater, ‘Amphitruo, Bacchae, and metatheatre’ Lexis 6 (1990) 101 – 25, Z. Stewart, ‘Plautus’ Amphitruo: three problems’ HSCP 100 (2000) 293 – 9; there is a recent edition by D. M. Christensen (Cambridge 2000), which considers the Greek original on pp. 47 – 55. n. 3 Cf. D. F. Sutton, Papyrological Studies in Dionysiac Literature (Oak Park, Illinois 1987). p. 640 – 1 On the end of the Dyskolos cf. this volume 655 – 7 and FantuzziHunter, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 415 – 17.

35. ‘Acting down’: the ideology of Hellenistic performance* 1. Cultured movements In Chapter 26 of the Poetics Aristotle raises the question of whether epic or tragic mimesis is ‘superior’ (bekt¸ym): ‘One might pose the question whether epic imitation or tragic is superior. If the less vulgar (Httom voqtij¶) art is superior, and in all cases what is addressed to a superior audience is less vulgar, then it is perfectly clear that the art which imitates indiscriminately is vulgar. Assuming that the audience is incapable of grasping what the performer does not supply in person, they engage in a great deal of movement (as second-rate pipers (oR vaOkoi aqkgta¸) spin round if they have to imitate throwing a discus, and drag the chorus-leader about if they have to play the Scylla). Tragedy is like that. This is in fact the opinion which older actors held about those who came after them; Mynniskos used to call Kallippides ‘monkey’ because of his excesses, and Pindaros was viewed in much the same way. The whole art of tragedy stands in the same relation to epic as these do to the others. So it is argued that epic is addressed to decent audiences (heat±r 1pieije?r) who do not need gestures, while tragedy is addressed to second-rate audiences (va¼kour); if, then, tragedy is vulgar, clearly it must be inferior (we¸qym). First of all, this is not a criticism of the art of poetry but of the art of performance. A rhapsode performing epic poetry can make exaggerated use of gestures (like Sosistratos); so can a singer (this is what Mnasitheos of Opus used to do). Next, not all movement is to be disparaged (any more than all dance is), but only that of inferior (va¼kym) persons. This is the objection that used to be made against Kallippides, and is made now against others, on the grounds that the women they imitate are not respectable. Also, tragedy has its effect without movement, just as epic does: its quality is clear from reading. So if tragedy is superior ( jqe_ttym) in other respects, this criticism at any rate does not necessarily apply to it. …’ (Poetics 1461b 26 – 1462a 14, trans. M. Heath).

This fascinating text links ‘realistic’ acting in the form of imitative gestures to the moral qualities of the audience; such exaggerated gestures are the tricks of actors catering to vulgar tastes. So too, Aristotle else*

P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors. Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge 2002) 189 – 205

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where observes that hypokrisis ‘delivery’, in both drama and oratory, was rightly considered vulgar (voqtij|m), and therefore only the subject of serious study at a comparatively late date (Rhet. 3.1403b 22 – 30).1 For Aristotle, tragic gestures are in fact vitally important and, as far as possible, are to be visualised by the poet as he composes (Poet. 1455a 29 – 34); they are, however, also to be strictly controlled in the interests of decorum (t¹ pq]pom). When Kallippides played female rôles in tragedy, he may have made things too ‘realistic’.2 Plato too had censured excessive ‘imitative’ effects (cf. Rep. 3.396b5 – 9, 397a3 – 7), but whereas Plato had been principally concerned with what mimesis would do to the soul of the imitator, Aristotle’s downplaying of the performative element of drama is of a piece with a whole élite attitude to personal bearing and the moral qualities which that bearing reflects.3 Paul Zanker has expressed it thus: ‘In Classical Athens, the appearance and behaviour in public of all citizens was governed by strict rules. These applied to how one should walk, stand, or sit, as well as to proper draping of one’s garment, position and movement of arms and head, styles of hair and beard, eye movements, and the volume and modulation of the voice … Almost every time reference is made to these rules, they are linked to emphatic moral judgements, whether positive or negative. They are part of a value system that could be defined in terms of such concepts as order, measure, modesty, balance, selfcontrol, circumspection, adherence to regulations, and the like … It is no wonder that the individuals depicted on gravestones, at least to the modern viewer, look so stereotyped and monotonous.’4

With Aristotle’s strictures on mimetic performance and the very marginal place he gives to the staging of plays we seem to be watching 1 2 3

4

Cf. Wiles (1991) 19 – 20. For the rôle of gesture in fourth-century oratory and expressions of similar disapproval cf. Dem. 18.232 (with Wankel’s note), Hall (1995). Cf. Janko’s note on Poetics 1462a10 – 11. ‘Élites’ are, of course, very hard to define and lie, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder, but Aristotle’s division of the citizen body (Politics 4.1291b17 – 30) into the demos, i. e. the ‘ordinary people’, and the gnorimoi, the ‘known’/ ’notable’ ones, who stand out for ‘wealth, nobility of birth, arete, education and the like’ serves well enough for the (élite) rhetoric (both Greek and Roman) of the whole timespan with which we will be concerned. For some relevant considerations cf. Ober (1989) 11 – 17. Zanker (1995) 48 – 9. Much relevant material is discussed in J. Bremmer, ‘Walking, standing, and sitting in ancient Greek culture’ in Bremmer-Roodenburg (1991) 15 – 35. Plutarch is a central witness for this élite discourse; cf. Hunter (2000).

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‘the birth of a new form of élite performance’.5 After Aristotle, the cultural élite of the later Hellenistic and Roman world would in fact constantly represent themselves as reading or listening to readings of ‘the literary classics’, including drama,6 rather than joining public audiences. In this (Platonic) narrative of cultural history, the tyranny of an uneducated audience had destroyed poetry’s civilising and educative force; in order to preserve that force, the only proper audience for poetry now was either oneself, or oneself and a few like-minded friends, who would give proper attention to the text, not to a frivolous performance in which it might be clothed. The gradual change from a performative, communal culture to the narrower circulation of ‘texts’ paradoxically offered a way to preserve, while reshaping to a less universal need, poetry’s didactic, communal function. The subsequent tradition took its cue from Plato and Aristotle and carefully censored excessively ‘mimetic’ effects. Much of our evidence comes from Roman rhetorical writers who saw that actors had something to teach the aspiring orator but, partly reflecting the contempt for actors which is a standard element of Roman élite discourse,7 also took pains to warn against excessive mimicry and ‘hyper-realism’; the orator was to play the hardest rôle of all — concealing his theatrical mastery.8 Of particular importance is the distinction Quintilian draws between the ‘movements’ of different characters in plays: in fabulis iuuenum senum militum matronarum grauior ingressus est, serui ancillulae parasiti piscatores citatius mouentur, ‘on the stage, young men, old men, soldiers and matrons move in a stately fashion, whereas slaves, serving-girls, parasites and fishermen move more rapidly’ (11. 3. 112).9 In part, such prescriptions are to be seen within the long history of élite self-fashioning, characterised by remarkably close attention to ‘body language’, gait and gesture. Aristotle’s lecak|xuwor, ‘great-souled man’, ‘walks slowly, has a

5 6 7 8

9

I owe the phrase to Mary Depew. Cf. Dio 18.6 – 7 on the advantages of having someone read Menander to you. Cf. Edwards (1993) 98 – 136. Cf. Cicero, De orat. 2.242, Quintilian 1.111 – 3, 11.3.91, 181 – 3 (on the playing of the opening of Terence’s Eunuchus). On this material cf. Fantham (1982), (2002) 370 – 3. See also Graf in Bremmer-Roodenburg (1991) 36 – 58 and Connolly (1998). Cf. 11. 3. 178 on the differing styles of the comic actors Demetrius and Stratocles. For the Greek background here cf. Wiles (1991) 192 – 208.

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deep voice and speaks calmly’ (EN 4.1125a 12 – 14). A character in a play by Alexis comments specifically on the importance of gait:10 4m c±q mol¸fy toOto t_m !mekeuh´qym eWmai, t¹ bad¸feim !qq¼hlyr 1m ta?r bdo?r, 1n¹m jak_r7 ox l¶te pq²ttetai t´kor lgde·r c±q Bl÷r, l¶te tilµm dºmta de? 2t´qyi kabe?m, v´qei d³ to?r l³m wqyl´moir dºngr timû ecjom, to?r dû bq_sim Bdom¶m, jºslom d³ t_i b¸yi, t¹ toioOtom c´qar t¸r oqj #m art_i jt_ito v²sjym moOm 5weim·

(Alexis fr. 265 K-A) 11

‘For this is one thing which I regard as unbecoming to any gentleman, namely walking gracelessly in the street, when it is possible to do so with beauty. This is something where no one exacts a tax from us, nor must one acquire it by paying a fee to another. Those who do walk with finesse gain an increase in their standing, those who see them are rewarded with pleasure, and kosmos is added to life. What man with any pretensions to common sense would not acquire such a prize for himself ?’

The identity of the speaker is unknown, but the concern with what befits a free man, with doxa, ‘reputation/standing’, which involves the belief that other people look at you in the street, and with ‘good order’ (kosmos) all suggest the values of the élite. As the context is clearly something which has happened or been narrated in the play, and it is reasonable to suppose that the speaker regards himself as a positive model of how to walk (and perhaps indeed parades around the stage in the approved manner), it is tempting to understand ‘the onlookers’ here (v. 6) as, in part, a metatheatrical reference to ‘the audience’. Be that as it may, in a very similar passage of Plautus12 a metatheatrical dimension is hard to resist (Poenulus 522 – 3): liberos homines per urbem modico magis par est gradu ire, seruile esse duco festinantem currere. Free men should proceed through the city at a moderate pace; I regard running and hurrying as what slaves do. 10 For other relevant passages cf. Arnott (1996) 741. 11 For the textual difficulties of vv. 3 – 5 cf. Arnott (1996) 741 – 2. 12 Arnott has argued that the Alexis fragment is the original of the Plautine verses which are spoken by the aduocati (cf. RhM 102 (1959) 252 – 62), but the matter seems to me unproven.

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The ‘running slave’ of Roman Comedy, who enters in haste with an important message,13 carries a socio-political, as well as a theatrical, resonance. Stage discussion of ‘how to walk’ can thus shed light on what actors actually did on the stage. Horace expresses his disdain for Plautine farce in comparison with the sophistication and educative value of Greek tragedy (and perhaps also Menander) by representing Plautus as running in disorderly fashion across the stage, concerned not with art but with getting paid: aspice Plautus quo pacto partis tutetur amantis ephebi, ut patris attenti, lenonis ut insidiosi, quantus sit Dossennus edacibus in parasitis, quam non astricto percurrat pulpita socco. gestit enim nummum in loculos demittere, post hoc securus cadat an recto stet fabula talo. (Horace, Epist. 2.1.170 – 6) 14 See how Plautus maintains the rôle of the young man in love, of the careful father, of the pimp who lays traps for you; see what a Dossennus he is among greedy parasites, how he runs across the stage with his shoes loose. He’s desperate to pocket the cash and beyond that doesn’t care what the play is like.

In view of the persistence of theatrical metaphors for the conduct of ordinary life, it is not surprising that theatrical traditions followed analogous paths to those of the élite’s concern with physical and moral deportment. The actor’s prologue of Terence’s Heauton Timoroumenos divides stage rôles into two broad types: ne ille pro se dictum existumet qui nuper fecit seruo currenti in uia decesse populum: quor insano seruiat? de illius peccatis plura dicet quom dabit alias nouas, nisi finem maledictis facit. adeste aequo animo, date potestatem mihi statariam agere ut liceat per silentium, ne semper seruus currens, iratus senex, edax parasitus, sycophanta autem inpudens, auarus leno adsidue agendi sunt seni 13 For the seruus currens as a stock character cf. Ter. Eun. 36, HT 37. I do not mean to imply that there is no Greek background here, cf. Csapo (1993). 14 On this passage cf. Jocelyn (1995).

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clamore summo, cum labore maxumo. (Terence, HT 30 – 40) This is not to be regarded as a defence by that man who recently made the people in the street give way to a running slave: why be a slave to a madman? The poet will speak further about that man’s errors in the course of future plays, unless he put an end to his slanders. Give this play a fair hearing, and allow me to perform a quiet play in silence, so that I don’t always have to act the running slave, the angry old man, the greedy parasite, the shameless trickster, and the rapacious pimp; I’m an old man, and those parts need a lot of shouting and a lot of physical effort.

The point is not just that the actor claims to be too old for ‘lively’ parts, but that those parts somehow lack dignity; the line from this theatrical concept of a fabula stataria, ‘a stationary play’, one ‘lacking violent movement’,15 to the privileged concepts of élite ethics is shown by a passage of Cicero which adapts this language to the practices of oratory: uolo enim ut in scaena sic etiam in foro non eos modo laudari, qui celeri motu et difficili utantur, sed eos etiam quos statarios appellant, quorum sit illa simplex in agendo ueritas, non molesta. (Brutus 116) As on the stage, so I wish that in the forum also praise should be bestowed not only on those who accomplish rapid and difficult movements, but also on those who are termed ‘stationary’, in whose acting there is a ‘truth’ which is straightforward, not irksome.

simplex ueritas indicates a whole ‘moral’ attitude, not just a style of oratory; so, Aulus Gellius (NA 2.23.12) castigates Caecilius for replacing what in Menander is ‘taken from the life of men, and is simple and true and gives pleasure’ (de uita hominum media sumptum, simplex et uerum et delectabile) with buffoonery more suited to mime. It is indeed the plays of Menander, and to some extent New Comedy as a whole, which hold a specially privileged place in this construction of an élite world. No theme is more prominent throughout ancient writing about Menander than his pre-eminence in the reflection of ethical character (t¹ Ahijºm), and as such he was always likely to appeal to Hellenistic and Roman élites, almost obsessively concerned with how they looked and how they really were inside. For both Greek and Roman élites of the early imperial period, much of the experience of Menander may have come through ‘readings’ at occasions such as din15 Cf. further Jocelyn (1995) 243 – 4.

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ner-parties, rather than in fully staged theatrical performances.16 Menander had been fully appropriated into élite literary culture; drama has become literature. It is indeed likely enough that readings or performances from drama at dinner-parties and other social gatherings avoided excessively imitative effects; such an inference, at least, makes sense of the extreme mimesis that reigns in Trimalchio’s house of horrors in the Satyrica. We must not assume, of course, that reality corresponded closely to the picture painted by a literature concerned to mark out the proper space of the educated. It is certainly possible to identify aesthetic techniques and styles which seem to belong to the ‘book culture’ of an élite, rather than to a more widespread performance culture,17 and which were presumably a prime weapon with which the élite marked itself off from the chaos beneath it. Nevertheless, the construction of any simple ‘élite’ — ‘popular’ dichotomy within the rich patterns of Hellenistic performance would simply be untrue to the rich spectrum of ‘theatre’ which that world offered. Doubtless, some members of the cultured élite stayed away (? ostentatiously) from popular and often vulgar ‘mimes’,18 just as they made clear in their writings what kinds of sympotic entertainment they enjoyed, but there is no reason to imagine great gulfs between the classes in what was watched in the theatres: the élite attended and offered enthusiastic patronage for all kinds of theatrical performance. Nevertheless, the ideological picture, the portrait of itself which the élite wished to present, emerges clearly enough. As often, a letter of Pliny, standing in a long tradition of discussion as to what type of entertainment and conversation is proper at gatherings of cultured men (cf. Pl. Prt. 347b-8a), suggests the issues with great clarity. With a demonstration of admirable ‘philosophical’ mildness, Pliny advises a correspondent not to be too angry with the entertainment provided at a dinner-party, though he certainly shares his friend’s refined taste:19 16 Cf., e. g., Fantham (1984). For what can be said on the other side cf. Jones (1993) and Green (1994) 144 – 71. 17 Cf. Hunter (1996) 7 – 13, comparing Theocritus 2 and the Fragmentum Grenfellianum. 18 Cf. below pp. 650 – 5. 19 For Pliny’s tastes in entertainment cf. also Epist. 1.15.2, 3.1.9, 9.36.4. Plutarch speaks elsewhere of entertainment at symposia including ‘mime-actors, impersonators (Ahok|coi) and performers of Menander’ (Mor. 673b); for the subject in general cf. Jones (1991), Davidson (2000).

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‘I have received your letter, in which you complain of being highly disgusted lately at a dinner, though exceeding splendid, by a set of buffoons, lewd entertainers and clowns (scurrae cinaedi moriones) who were wandering around the tables. But let me advise you to smooth your brow a little. I confess, indeed, I admit nothing of this kind at my own house; however, I bear with it in others. “And why then” (you will be ready to ask) “should you not have them yourself ?” The truth is, because the soft gestures from a cinaedus, the pleasantries from a buffoon, or the idiocies of a clown, give me no entertainment, as they give me no surprise. It is my taste, you see, not my principles, that I plead against them. And indeed, what numbers are there, think you, who find no pleasure in the entertainments with which you and I are most delighted, and consider them either trivial or wearisome! How many are there, who as soon as a reader, a musician, or a comic actor is introduced, either take their leave of the company, or if they continue at the table, show as much dislike to this kind of diversion, as you did at those awfulnesses (prodigia), as you call them! Let us bear therefore, my friend, with others in their amusements, that they in return may show indulgence to ours. Farewell.’ (Pliny, Epist. 9.17, trans. W. M. L. Hutchinson, adapted)

2. Miming drama A standard move of the discourse I have been tracing is a contrast between, on the one hand, texts and performance styles which are morally improving and, on the other, the ‘debased’ traditions of ‘mime’. In fact, however, when we move away from élite texts which are concerned to demarcate the boundaries of culture, those boundaries become very hard to find. ‘Mime’ is a term used by modern scholars to cover a very wide range of ancient performances, from solo singing to ‘playlets’ performed by a small group of ‘actors’, almost anything in fact which does not fit the classical categories of tragedy, satyr drama, and comedy. In the present context such looseness is useful, for it is true to the strategy of élite rhetoric.20 A crucial text here is a tantalisingly brief account (14.620a21 f), drawing on Hellenistic sources, of types of performance in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistai (c. 200 AD). The passage repays detailed consideration.

20 For ‘mime’ see Reich (1903), Wüst, RE 15. 1727 – 64, Cunningham (1971) 3 – 11, Wiemken (1972), McKeown (1979), Fantham (1989), Csapo-Slater (1995) 369 – 78, and the essays in Section III of Benz-Stärk-Vogt-Spira (1995).

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Athenaeus begins with ‘performances’ of Homer by the so-called ‘Homeristai’.21 The Hellenistic ‘performance’ of Homer ranged from private reading and recitation through singing and full-blown acting, and this very spectrum reinforced within élite discourse a distinction between ‘serious’ study and reading and the theatrical pleasures of the common people. It is telling that Petronius has Trimalchio’s ‘Homeristai’ (Sat. 59) engage in violent mimetic action. That such performances are seen as debasements of ‘high’, educative texts will emerge as a central leitmotif of the mode of self-representation which we are considering. Athenaeus then lists various kinds of solo performer, about most of whom we know very little — hilaroidoi, simoidoi, magoidoi, lysioidoi. It is typical of élite attitudes that Strabo (late first century BC) views the last three of these forms as ‘corruptions’ of the practices of earlier lyric poets.22 About the magoidos Athenaeus proceeds to report: ‘The player called a magoidos (lacyid|r) carries tambourines and cymbals, and all his clothes are women’s garments. He makes rude gestures (?),23 and all his actions lack decency (kosmos), as he plays the part of adulterous women or bawds or a man drunk and going on a revel to his mistress. Aristoxenus (fr. 110 W2) says that hilarodia is serious and derives from tragedy (paq± tµm tqacyid_am eWmai), whereas magodia derives from comedy (paq± tµm jylyid_am). For often magoidoi took comic scenarios (rpoh]seir) and acted them in their own style and manner’. Such performers scandalise by their absence of decorum and taste, but the hypothesised relation with ‘formal drama’ sheds important light not only upon mime itself, but also upon élite attitudes to it. Whatever the exact nature of this relationship,24 such performances are perceived as a ‘perversion’ of classical drama. With Athenaeus’ next category, the ionikologoi and kinaidologoi, it is the explicit sexual nature of both verses and performance25 which élite discourse represents as vulgar, and indeed subversive. It is striking that the most famous such performer, Sotades of Maroneia, was believed to have fallen foul of Ptolemy Philadelphos because he joked about Ptolemy’s marriage to his sister Arsinoe (Ath. 620 f-21a).26 Just as Sotadean verse (an ionic tetrameter) ‘parodies’ 21 22 23 24 25 26

Cf. Husson (1993), Nagy (1996) 158 – 86. Strabo 14.1.41. The verb Strabo uses is paqavhe_qeim. The exact sense of swim_fetai is uncertain. Cf. Hunter (1995) 160 – 3. Note Strabo 14.1.41 on the ‘mimetic’ quality of cinaedic verse. Cf. Hunter (1996) 78 – 9.

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the repetitive structure and regularity of the hexameter, and the kinaidos challenges the assumptions of the male hierarchy by ‘performing’ as a man who enjoyed the passive rôle in homosexual intercourse, so Sotades is made to embody a threat to good ‘political’ discipline. It is of fundamental importance that the discourse of theatrical decorum and kosmos is one in which the élite had a real political stake. The excessive theatricality of a Trimalchio threatens to lay bare what is hidden by this veil of ethical values: to turn the ‘theatre’ of master-slave relations into real theatre, as Trimalchio does, is potentially destabilising in ways which he certainly would never have imagined. If we turn from what is said in our sources about mimes to the chance survival of papyrus texts, a rather similar picture emerges. The standard collection27 begins with the so-called Fragmentum Grenfellianum (2nd cent. BC), a solo song in which a woman (presumably played by a man) adopts the rôle of exclusus amator to complain bitterly that she has been abandoned by her lover.28 Faint echoes of familiar themes from high poetry, but the substitution of a ‘female’ voice, mark this text as analogous to, but also pointedly distinct from, the modes of high classical poetry. Two prose texts (2 and 3 Cunningham) of the second or first century BC are ‘scripts’ for more than one actor, and show themes familiar from the New Comedy: hopeless infatuation and a man, the worse for drink, going on a komos to his beloved. Here we seem to have clear evidence for the close relationship between ‘mime’ and comedy, which is also asserted by the scholastic tradition and suggested by a terracotta lamp of the late third century BC showing three performers and inscribed lilok|coi rpºhesir gEjuq², ‘mime-speakers, plot, Mother-in-law’ (a familiar comic title).29 So too, the best known mimetext, the Charition mime (6 Cunningham),30 restages the escape-plot of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris on the shores of an outlandishly barbarian India; if the narrative motifs, such as escape by intoxicating the enemy, are familiar enough, the extreme ‘vulgarity’ of what survives, in which farting plays a major rôle, seems worlds removed from Euripidean melodrama. This is perhaps less ‘parody’ than ‘para-drama’. 27 Cunningham (1987) 36 – 61. 28 For more detailed discussion cf. Hunter (1996) 7 – 10. The closest parallel may be the female rôle in the ‘love duet’ of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazousai, cf. Olson (1988), Parker (1997) 546. 29 For hypothesis as a generic name for a kind of dramatic mime cf. Plut. Mor. 712e. For the lamp cf. Watzinger (1901), Bieber (1920) 176 – 7. 30 Cf. Santelia (1991).

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A similar picture emerges again from the extant mimiamboi of Herodas (first half of the third century BC). These choliambic poems are a curious cross between the traditions of the dramatic mime and the archaic Ionic iambos of Hipponax, a cross forged by the literary-historical interests of the sophisticated poets of the high Hellenistic period. Here too, however, the ‘high’ traditions of epic, forensic oratory (Mim. 2),31 and comedy are replayed at a ‘lower’ level which casts ambivalent light upon the model texts: thus, for example, the high moral tone of New Comedy is amusingly stained by the common mime-scenario of a mistress who forces her male slaves to satisfy her lust (Mim. 5, Adesp. 7 Cunningham). The social exchanges of formal drama become revelations of what women really talk about when alone — adultery (Mim.1) and masturbation (Mim. 6). In feeding off ‘high’ culture, ‘lower’ performance traditions, and the literary imitations of them written by Herodas and Theocritus, dramatised the ambivalent status of epic, tragedy and comedy, which — partly because of a deadening fossilisation of rôles — could no longer deliver on the grand moral and educational promises which they made and which were made for them. Society had moved on. Elite rhetoric constantly drew attention to the ‘lower’ traditions of mime in order to advertise what it perceived as its own superiority; mime itself constantly evoked ‘higher’ traditions, but with a rather more complex agenda. Of particular interest is a text preserved on a copy probably written in the early first century A.D., perhaps not far from its composition date: p]aid¹r 1v¼kassem b v¸kor lou tquv_m t´]jmom tgq_m 1m ta?r !cj²kair !poqoOlai poO bad¸sy. B maOr lou 1qq²cg. t¹m j]atah¼liom !pok´sar eqmiha lou jka¸y v]´qe t¹ 1qm¸om tqovµm aqtoO peqik²by toO law¸lou toO 1peq²stou toO gEkkgmijoO. w²qim to¼tou 1jako¼lgm l´car 1m t_i b¸yi ja· 1kecºlgm laj²qior, %mdqer, 1m to?r vikotqov¸oir. xuwolaw_7 b c±q !k´jtyq Astºwgj´ lou ja· hajahakp²dor 1qashe·r 1l³m 1cjat´kipe. !kkû 1pihe·r k¸hom 1lautoO 1p· tµm jaqd¸am

31 Cf. Hunter (1995).

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jahgsuw²solai. rle?r dû rcia¸mete, v¸koi.

(Frag. mim. fr. 4 Cunningham = GLP 75 Page) 32

‘From its childhood my friend (? Tryphon) guarded it, watching over it like a baby in his arms. I know not whither I may go: my ship is wrecked. I weep for the darling bird that I have lost! Come, let me embrace its chick, this child of the fighter, the beloved, the gallant Greek! For his sake I was accounted a success in life, I was called a happy man, gentlemen, among those who love their pets. I fight for life — my cock has gone astray: he has fallen in love with a sitting hen [or with ‘Thakathalpas’], and left me in the lurch. I will set a tombstone above my heart, and be at rest. And you, my friends — goodbye to you!’ (trans. Page, adapted).

This is a lament for a prize fighting-cock which has apparently not died, but rather fallen in love (with a hen) and fled the coop; the final lines seem to be a resolution to commit suicide. From the earliest days (i. e. the Iliad), lamentation was a discourse which gave a special place to the norms and consensual values of society. The importance of the family and respect for parents, as well as the qualities of the deceased, are standard lament themes: the lament is a very public, communal discourse, and this parodic lament obviously gestures towards such traditions. The speaker alludes to his doxa — he was ‘called fortunate among pet-lovers’ — and it is at this moment that we get the address to the audience (%mdqer, ‘gentlemen’), because reputation and status is precisely a matter of communal consent — this is something which the audience will understand. The speaker is male — it was males who indulged in cock-fighting — but public lamentation was essentially a female discourse, and in the anguish of our speaker we hear distant echoes of the heroines of high literature (cf., e. g., Apollonius, Arg. 1.284 – 91). Here then is a further suggestion that one feature of the mime tradition, certainly not an inevitable or necessary one, was a change of gender voicing by rôle transference; one aspect of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ performance forms, if the hierarchical terminology is to be retained, lay in the maintenance or subverting of inherited rôles and voices. Such transference, as we have seen in the case of kinaidologia, makes such traditions (at least potentially) culturally and morally subversive; in the context of the élite rhetoric of paideia, 32 Papyrological marks have been kept to a very minimum, and I will not consider here the many problems of the text which do not affect the argument. So too, the old problem of whether or not the text is rhythmical will be left out of account, cf. Cunningham’s introductory note.

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such traditions lack kosmos, they disturb proper social and moral hierarchies. As Plutarch memorably puts it, ‘they throw one’s soul into greater confusion than any amount of drink’ (Mor. 712 f). For a Plutarch, of course, such disturbance is also connected with the frank eroticism of some of these performances. Whereas the sexy Dionysos and Ariadne mime in Xenophon’s Symposium arouses the diners so much that ‘the unmarried swore that they would get married, and the married men mounted their horses and rode off to enjoy their own wives’ (Symp. 9.7), Plutarch outlaws mimetic paignia from the dinner-party as staging things which should not even be seen ‘by the slaves who fetch our shoes’ (Mor. 712e-f).

3. Mimic elements in New Comedy New Comedy itself is, of course, a major source for and reflection of élite values, particularly in its focus upon the continuity and stability of the oikos, i. e. of the wider family unit and the property which went with it. In the light of the foregoing discussion, it may be worth asking whether our extant New Comedy texts construct a truly homogeneous culture, or whether the plays themselves foreshadow the later developments, and in particular the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ performance and acting modes, which we have been tracing. Of the plays which have survived, it is probably Dyskolos which is most obviously concerned with social solidarity and cohesion. What is at issue in Dyskolos is socialisation, some kind of normative education, the inculcation of particular social and moral values. Through Knemon, who shuns human society because of his distaste for what he sees as the hypocrisy of human motives (cf. 447 – 53, 719 – 20), Menander explores the difference between being lisop|mgqor ‘a hater of wickedness’ and being lis\mhqypor ‘a hater of men’; in Knemon the difference may be thought to have collapsed. The result, from one point of view, is a withdrawal which society simply cannot tolerate, because such a withdrawal threatens society itself. At another level, however, the apparently bitter realism of Knemon’s Weltanschauung is shown to be an inadequate response in the face of communal strategies, such as festive sacrificing, which make up for in positive ‘social’ results what they may lack in self-analytical frankness. Comedy itself is implicated in this ‘noble lie’,

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through the fashioning of a double end to the play around different performance traditions. At 867 – 73 the two young men, Gorgias and Sostratos, take their leave of Knemon and of the play, and proceed to join the party inside the cave: Sy. Ble?r dû Uylem. Co. S¾stqahû, rpeqaisw¼molai cumain·m 1m taqt_i —Sy. t¸r b k/qor ; oq pqºei oQje?a taOtû Edg mol¸feim p²mta de?.

(Dysk. 871 – 3)

So. Let’s go. Go. Sostratos, I feel very embarrassed — there are women in there … So. What nonsense! Get a move on. All of this is oikeion to you now.

The ‘high comedy’ thus closes with an expression of properly decent manners and an affirmation that the oikos has been preserved and broadened (873 oikeia). The closing scene which follows, in which Sikon and Getas tease Knemon mercilessly, functions not merely as a reprise of the earlier door-knocking scenes in which he had abused them, but incorporates into the play a ‘low’ or farcical reflection of the main action, marked by the use of nearly unparalleled iambic tetrameters to the accompaniment of the aulos. The use of music, the extravagant gesture and dancing and the rare, perhaps old-fashioned metre seem something of a throwback to a livelier style of comedy, as though Menander was exploiting his awareness (and that of his audience?) of the general drift of comic history. The values promulgated by the ‘high drama’ are almost parodied by the self-serving plans of the slave: hºqubºr 1stim 5mdom, p¸mousim7 oqj aQsh¶setû oqde¸r7 t¹ dû fkom 1st·m Bl?m ûmhqypor Bleqyt´or7 jgde¼olem c±q aqt_i, oQje?or Bl?m c¸metû7 eQ dû 5stai toioOtor !e¸, 5qcom rpemecje?m.

(Dysk. 901 – 5)

‘There’s a lot of noise; they’re drinking – no one will notice. The main thing is that we must make this man tame. We’re related to him by marriage, he is a member of the family (oikeios). If he’s always going to be like this, it won’t be easy to put up with.’

Oikeios (904) picks up Sostratos’ closing words and marks the perverted variation of socialised values which we are about to witness. Knemon

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must be ‘trained’ in the ways of the élite symposium: comedy had indeed long used the correct conduct of the symposium as the marker of correct social behaviour (cf. the finale of Ar. Wasps). What Getas and Sikon offer in fact is an extraordinary inversion of the komos in which the paraclausithyron (serenade) precedes the drinking; Knemon is forced to witness ‘socialised behaviour’ turned upside down and made ridiculous, very far from the p|tor jak|r, ‘jolly party’, (855 – 6) which the other characters are now enjoying inside Pan’s cave. In what could be taken for an almost paradigmatic confirmation of ‘the two cultures’ view of the Hellenistic world, the values of comedy are both confirmed and lightly ironised by a scene which derives a quite different kind of humour from an exploitation of the same comic motifs; the smutty, genital jokes of 892 and 89533 offer a rather low-life perspective upon the formal marriage formula of 842 – 4: !kkû 1ccu_ pa¸dym 1pû !qºtyi cmgs¸ym tµm hucat´qû Edg leiq²jiºm soi pqo?j² te d¸dylû 1pû aqt/i tq¸a t²kamta.

I now betroth my daughter to you, young man, for the begetting [lit. ploughing] of legitimate children, and I bestow a dowry of three talents upon her.

Knemon had wished to remove himself entirely from society; his ‘punishment’ consists of removal from the realm of ‘civilised’ comedy into a quite different mode of performance where parodic farce stains the values of the higher mode. A suggestive parallel for this dramatic technique of doubling and inversion is to be found in Terence’s Adelphoe (‘The Brothers’), which was based on a play of the same title by Menander. Here the abduction of Ctesipho’s beloved and the subsequent rough handling of the pimp Sannio, which follows the opening confrontation of the older pair of contrasted brothers, Micio and Demea, and which was, at least in part, added by Terence from the Synapothnescontes (‘Those Who Die Together’) of Diphilos (cf. vv. 6 – 11), functions as a kind of parodic reprise of the opening debate. Like the fathers, Sannio appeals to notions of aequum (‘the equitable’) and iniuria (‘wrong’), and, like them, the pimp 33 Just as Sikon takes Getas’ question of 891 as the opportunity for a sexual joke on p\sweim, ‘suffer’ and ‘be penetrated anally’, so Getas in 895 puns on Sikon’s use of !mast/mai, ‘get up’ and ‘get it up’, cf. Hunter on Theocr. 1.151 – 2.

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must put up with iniuria adulescentium, (‘the outrages of young men’, 207); his threat to exact the full measure of his ius, ‘legal rights’, (163) is a farcical version of the strict legality to which Demea had appealed in his complaints against Aeschinus (84 – 6) and which Micio had rejected as inappropriate to the business of fatherhood (51 – 2, ‘I do not think it necessary to enforce the full measure of my rights in all things’). When Syrus advises Sannio that it would be to his financial advantage not to insist on the strict letter of his rights, but rather to oblige his clients (adulescenti esses morigeratus, 218), we can hardly fail to recall the differences between Micio and Demea which the opening scenes had laid out with such clarity. When Sannio refuses to follow the slave’s advice and Syrus observes that Sannio is destined to be a failure as a pimp, nescis inescare homines ‘you don’t know how to entrap men’, the language evokes the behaviour of the flatterer and the prostitute to foreshadow what will be an important theme at the close of the play. There Demea’s assertion that the point of his final charade of generosity was to show Micio that his popularity non fieri ex uera uita neque adeo ex aequo et bono, j sed ex adsentando indulgendo et largiendo, ‘does not derive from a sincere way of life nor from the pursuit of the equitable and good, but from complaisance, indulgence and extravagant generosity’ (987 – 8) makes the point that not only does Micio’s attitude turn others into flatterers (cf. 877 – 80),34 but Micio himself is characterised by the hypocrisy and feigned attitudes of the flatterer. In Demea’s view, Micio has made the classic mistake of confusing ‘friendship’ (philia) with ‘flattery’ (kolakeia or areskeia); his behaviour is that of the Aristotelian areskos35 or the more familiar kolax,36 ille suam semper egit uitam in otio, in conuiuiis, clemens placidus, nulli laedere os, adridere omnibus. (Ad. 863 – 4) 34 The best commentary on these verses is Arist. EN 8.1159a 12, ‘Because of love of honour most men prefer to be loved rather than to love; that is why most men like flatterers’. 35 Cf. EN 4.1126b 13 – 14: ‘some men are thought to be obsequious (%qesjoi), viz. those who to give pleasure praise everything and never oppose, but think it their duty to give no pain to the people they meet’ (trans. W. D. Ross). 36 Cf. Plut. Mor. 50b ‘Just as false and counterfeit imitations of gold imitate only its brilliancy and lustre, so apparently the flatterer, imitating the pleasant and attractive characteristics of the friend (toO v¸kou t¹ Bd» ja· jewaqisl´mom), always presents himself in a cheerful and blithe mood (Rkaq¹m ja· !mhgqºm), with never a whit of crossing or opposition’.

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He has passed his entire life in ease and social jollity; always forgiving and calm, never offended anyone, has a smile for everyone …

These are the issues which are jokingly previewed in the banter of Syrus and Sannio. So too, Sannio’s disingenuous appeal to his own ‘free’ status (182 – 3) and Aeschinus’ possibly improvised claim that the girl is freeborn (193 – 4) moves to a farcical mode the ‘who is free?’ theme of the central drama, embodied rather more high-mindedly in Micio’s views about the education of liberi (57). So too, the debt of reciprocal gratitude which Aeschinus should owe Micio on the basis of the first scene becomes, in the second, a sum of money owed to a greedy pimp. In short, the central themes of the framing play are here replayed in a ‘lower’, more farcical mode. From this perspective, Sannio bears an interesting name, which points in two (related) directions. sannion seems to be a word for the penis (cf. Hesychius s.v.), and therefore appropriate to the pimp’s trade, but sannio appears at Cicero, De Oratore 2.251 as a word (apparently) for a performer in a clownish and low entertainment; Cicero is discussing appropriate types of humour: hoc etiam animaduertendum est, non esse omnia ridicula faceta. quid enim potest esse tam ridiculum quam sannio est? sed ore, uultu, uoce, denique corpore ridetur ipso; salsum hunc possum dicere atque ita, non ut eius modi oratorem esse uelim, sed ut mimum. ‘It is also important that not everything which is laughed at is witty. For what could be more to be laughed at than a clown (sannio). But he produces laughter with his face, his expression, his voice, his whole body. I could say this is amusing, but in the way a mime-actor is amusing, not as I would wish an orator to be.’

What is absurd about this ‘buffoon’ is precisely that excessive mimicry which we have already seen to distinguish ‘serious’ from ‘clownish’ actors and actors from orators. Though Sannion and Sannon are attested historical names, sannas is an old word for an idiot,37 and sannion appears with this sense at Arrian, Epict. 3.22.83. Among the known bearers of the name is a third-century komoidos who performed at Delphi (Stephanis 2211), and the possibility that such names had ‘theatrical currency’ in the Greek world, as well as the Roman, is strengthened by the name Sannyrion which Alciphron gives to one of the leaders of the mimoi 37 Cf. Kassel-Austin on Cratinus fr. 489, Rhinthon fr. 20 K-A (where it is tempting to see a ‘theatrical’ term).

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at his farcical ‘banquet of the philosophers’.38 Be that as it may, Novius wrote an Atellane farce called Sanniones,39 and there are thus good reasons to associate the name of Terence’s leno, as well as the scene in which he appears, with theatrical traditions of a rather ‘lower’ kind than formal comedy; unsurprisingly, brothel-keepers and slave-traders were familiar characters in the mimic tradition. If this analysis is correct, Terence has pointed to the different levels inscribed in his play by giving his leno a name from the traditions of farce and mime. That the themes of the leno’s scene replay the themes of the framing drama — a kind of ‘play within the play’ technique — reminds us of what we have already learned from both Athenaeus and the papyri, namely that ‘mimes’, both Greek and Roman, often borrowed the plots of ‘formal comedy’ and performed them in their own style. Both Dyskolos and Adelphoe are concerned with ‘education’ in behavioural and social norms, precisely those themes which later élite moralists saw as most valuable in New Comedy. These plays, moreover, highlight these themes by juxtaposing versions of them as interpreted by different traditions of performance. Such an inclusive practice marks the genuinely theatrical nature of these scripts, a nature which was always likely to be obscured once the texts had moved from the stage to the schoolroom.40

Bibliography Arnott, W. G. (1996). Alexis: the Fragments. A Commentary. Cambridge. Benz, L., Stärk, E. and Vogt-Spira, G. (eds.) (1995). Plautus und die Tradition des Stegreifspiels. Tübingen. Bieber, M. (1920). Die Denkmler zum Theaterwesen im Altertum. Berlin and Leipzig. Bremmer, J. and Roodenburg, H. (eds.) (1991). A Cultural History of Gesture. Cambridge. 38 Alciphron 3.9.10 Benner-Fobes, cf. Reich (1903) 429 – 30. ‘Sannyrion’ is listed among legendary idiots at Aelian, VH 13.15. Alciphron’s other mime-leader, ‘Philistiades’, most likely evokes the famous, though very mysterious, mimepoet Philistion (cf. Wüst, RE 19.2402 – 5), and ‘Phoibades’ the citharode can hardly fail to recall the divine citharode himself, Phoebus Apollo. 39 Cf. Frassinetti (1953) 72; Rawson (1991) 470, discussing Diod. Sic. 37.12 (a gelotopoios called Saunio or Sannio). 40 I am much indebted to Mary Depew, Pat Easterling, Edith Hall, Susan Lape, David Wray, and many seminar audiences for their helpful criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.

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—(1997) A Cultural History of Humour. Cambridge. Connolly, J. (1998). ‘Mastering corruption. Constructions of identity in Roman oratory’ in S. R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan (eds.), Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture (London) 130 – 51. Csapo, E. (1993). ‘A case study in the use of theatre iconography as evidence for ancient acting’ Antike Kunst 36: 41 – 58. Csapo, E. and Slater, W. (1995). The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor. Cunningham, I.C. (1971). Herodas, Mimiambi. Oxford. —(1987) Herodae Mimiambi cum appendice fragmentorum mimorum papyraceorum. Leipzig. Davidson, J. (2000). ‘Gnesippus paigniagraphos: the comic poets and the erotic mime’ in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes (London) 41 – 64. Edwards, C. (1993). The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge. Fantham, E. (1982). ‘Quintilian on performance: traditional and personal elements in Institutio 11.3’, Phoenix 36: 243 – 71. —(1984). ‘Roman experience of Menander in the late Republic and early Empire’, TAPA 114: 299 – 309. —(1989). ‘Mime: the missing link in Roman literary history’ Classical World 82: 153 – 63. —(2002). ‘Orator and/et actor’ in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors (Cambridge) 362 – 76. Frassinetti, P. (1953). Fabula Atellana. Saggio sul teatro popolare latino. Genoa. Green, J. R. (1994). Theatre in Ancient Greek Society. London. Hall, E. (1995). ‘Lawcourt dramas: the power of performance in Greek forensic oratory’ BICS 40 (1995) 39 – 58. Hunter, R. (1995). ‘Plautus and Herodas’ in Benz-Stärk-Vogt-Spira (1995) 155 – 69 [= this volume 212 – 28]. —(1996). Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry. Cambridge. —(2000). ‘The politics of Plutarch’s Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander’ in S. Gödde and T. Heinze (eds.), Skenika. Beitrge zum antiken Theater und seiner Rezeption (Darmstadt) 267 – 76. Husson, G. (1993). ‘Les homeristes’ Journal of Juristic Papyrology 23: 93 – 9. Jocelyn, H. D. (1995). ‘Horace and the reputation of Plautus in the late first century BC’, in S.J. Harrison (ed.), Homage to Horace (Oxford) 228 – 27. Jones, C. P. (1991). ‘Dinner theater’, in W. J. Slater (ed.), Dining in a Classical Context (Ann Arbor) 185 – 98. —(1993). ‘Greek drama in the Roman empire’, in R. Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World (Michigan) 39 – 52. McKeown, J. C. (1979). ‘Augustan elegy and mime’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 25: 71 – 84. Nagy, G. (1996). Poetry as Performance. Cambridge. Ober, J. (1989). Mass and lite in Democratic Athens. Princeton. Olson, D. (1988). ‘The “love duet” in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae’ CQ 38: 328 – 30. Parker, L. P. E. (1997). The Songs of Aristophanes. Oxford Rawson, E. (1991). Roman Culture and Society. Collected Papers. Oxford.

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Reich, H. (1903). Der Mimus. Berlin. Santelia, S. (1991). Charition Liberata (P.Oxy. 413). Bari. Watzinger, C. (1901). ‘Mimologen’ MDAI 26: 1 – 9. Wiemken, H. (1972). Der griechische Mimus. Bremen. Wiles, D. (1991). The Masks of Menander. Cambridge. Zanker, P. (1995). The Mask of Socrates. The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, trans. A. Shapiro. Berkeley.

Addenda p. 643 The essays of Csapo and Slater in the Greek and Roman Actors volume also discuss this passage of the Poetics. p. 647 Horace’s attitude to Plautus is discussed at greater length in Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge, forthcoming). p. 652 There is now a useful edition of the Fragmentum Grenfellianum by Elena Esposito (Il fragmentum Grenfellianum [P.Dryton 50], Bologna 2005). pp. 656 – 7 Cf. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry 416 – 17.

36. Showing and telling: notes from the boundary* This paper1 considers a few of the ways in which ancient poets, particularly tragedians, and theorists of poetry explored the boundary between the visible and the unseen, and how they exploited this boundary as (inter alia) a crucial marker of generic identity.

1. I begin from one of the most familiar ancient texts on the proper limits of the visible in drama: aut agitur res in scaenis aut acta refertur. segnius inritant animos demissa per aurem quam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus et quae ipse sibi tradit spectator: non tamen intus digna geri promes in scaenam multaque tolles ex oculis quae mox narret facundia praesens: ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet aut humana palam coquat exta nefarius Atreus aut in auem Procne uertatur, Cadmus in anguem. quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi. Horace, Ars Poetica 179 – 88

The most obvious parallels for Horace’s rules as to what can and cannot be shown, rules which in his commentary Brink would trace to Neoptolemus of Parium, have long been collected.2 Thus, for example, the bT-scholia on Iliad 6.58 – 9, where Agamemnon urges Menelaos not to spare any Trojan, not even an unborn child, note that such bestial cruelty rouses the hatred (t¹ l?sor) of the hearers with their human sen* 1

2

Eikasmos 16 (2005) 179 – 91 I am very grateful to audiences in Bari, Bologna, Melbourne, Rethymnon, Rome and Thessaloniki for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I have here kept as close as possible to the oral form of the paper; as a result, footnotes and bibliography are minimal. To the commentaries add Bremer 1976, Brink 1963: 114.

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sibilities, and so tragedians have such murders happen off-stage, either with the cries of the dying only heard by those on stage and by the audience (as, most famously for us, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon — to which I shall return) or with events subsequently narrated by a messenger;3 the scholiast explains that the tragedians are afraid that, if such actions are shown on stage, they themselves will incur the hatred of the audience, along with the horrible events (lµ aqto· sullisgh_si to?r dqyl´moir). The language of ‘hatred’ is very striking here (cf. further below), but the suggestion that poetry has a range of resources with which to meet different situations echoes a major feature of the ancient conception of poetry, both dramatic and non-dramatic. The matter is well expressed by the words put into the mouth of the (slightly envious) sculptor Pheidias by Dio Chrysostom in the course of a famous disquisition on the nature of artistic composition (12.64): For poetry is an abounding (daxik]r) thing and in every respect resourceful (eupoqom) and self-reliant (aqt|molom), and by the resources of the tongue and a multitude of words it is able by itself to express all the plans of the soul, and whatever it conceive concerning any shape or action or emotion or magnitude, it can never be at a loss, since the voice of a messenger relates everything with perfect clearness …

As for Horace’s examples, modern scholars might argue that there is no need to show the actual killing of Medea’s or Thyestes’ children, for the focus of any dramatisation of the relations of Medea and Jason or of Thyestes and Atreus is not the killings themselves, but rather their antecedents and consequences; so too, the metamorphoses of Procne and Cadmus are certainly neither central to, nor even strictly necessary for, the plots in which they appear. Nevertheless, the thrust of Horace’s argument clearly lies elsewhere. His verses both extol the advantage which drama has over narrative – what we see with our ‘trustworthy eyes’ is more immediately xuwacycij|m than what we hear, presumably because ‘in real life’ it is our eyes which we trust (a point which Dio also makes in Oration 12) – and also suggest that a proper sense of decus or t¹ pq]pom will place limits on what can be directly shown.4 Lines of descent to this passage can be traced from Aristotle’s observations in the Poetics that poets who seek to arouse terror through monstrous spectacle hardly deserve the name of tragedians (Poetics 1453b7 – 11) and that epic 3 4

Cf. the scholia to Sophocles, Ajax 815 and Electra 1404, Brink 1971: 244 – 5. Cf. Brink 1971: 247 on v.183.

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is more tolerant of t¹ haulast|m and t¹ %kocom than is tragedy (Poetics 1460a11 – 18).5 Another very familiar system of classification is also important for Horace’s verses, though that importance has not always been properly understood. One of the most important theorists in this area, Asclepiades of Myrlea (early first century BC), divided Rstoq_a into ‘the true, the false, and the as if true’ (Sextus Empiricus Adv. Gramm. 252). In one citation of Asclepiades’ theory, Sextus Empiricus goes into rather more detail:6 In addition to this, one of the subjects of history is history (Rstoq_a), another is myth (lOhor), and the third is fiction (pk\sla). Of these, history is an exposition of true things which actually happened, such as that Alexander died in Babylon poisoned by plotters, and fiction is when things which did not happen are told like those that did, such as comic plots and mimes, while a myth is an exposition of things which have not happened and are false, such as when ‘they sing that’ the race of venemous spiders and snakes was born ‘from the blood of the Titans’ [Nicander, Theriaca 8 – 10] and that Pegasus sprang from the head of the Gorgon when her throat was cut [cf. Hesiod, Theogony 280 – 1] and that the companions of Diomedes turned into sea birds, Odysseus into a horse, and Hecuba into a dog. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Grammaticos 263 – 5 (trans. D.L. Blank)

The examples of ‘impossible and false things’ which Sextus cites make clear the association of lOhor with the wilder edges of epic,7 but they also have an obvious interest for the passage of Horace from which I started, and I will return to this in a moment; first, however, we may note another ancient system of classification which seems related to that of Asclepiades. A well known bT-scholium on Iliad 14.342 – 51 defends the love-making of Zeus and Hera from Plato’s censure by making sub-divisions within the material of poetry: tqe?r d´ eQsi tqºpoi, jah’ otr p÷sa po¸gsir heyqe?tai7 b lilgtij¹r toO !kghoOr, vikop²tyq, lisoc¼mgr, %pistor, paqqgsiast¶r7 b jat± vamtas¸am t/r !kghe¸ar, dm de? lµ jat± l´qor 1net²feim, oXom, fti xuwa· ce¼omtai ja· kakoOsi, p²mtyr 1qe? tir ja· ck_ssam 5wousi ja· bqºcwom7 tq¸tor d³ b

5 6

7

Cf. further Section 3 below on the pursuit of Hector by Achilles in Iliad 22. For discussion and further parallels see Blank 1998: 266 – 70. The roots of Asclepiades’ system are of course very old; passages such as Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus 65 and Plautus, Pseudolus 401 – 3 suggest that poets of the high Hellenistic period were able already to play with such distinctions. In the passage to which Sextus alludes, Nicander ascribes the story of the origins of venemous creatures from the blood of the Titans to Hesiod.

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jah’ rp´qhesim !kghe¸ar ja· vamtas¸am, J¼jkyper, Kaistqucºmer ja· taOta t± peq· he_m.

There are three categories under which all poetry may be considered: that which is mimetic of the truth – the person devoted to his father, the woman-hater, the suspicious man, the free speaker; that which involves imaginative elaboration of the truth,8 and which is not to be examined in detail, in the manner of deducing from the fact that the ghosts [in Odyssey 11] can taste and talk that they have tongues and throats; and thirdly, that which involves surpassing the truth as well as elaborating imaginatively upon it – the Cyclopes, the Laistrygonians, and these passages about the gods [like Iliad 14].

The scholiast’s first category clearly corresponds to Asclepiades’ ‘plasma / the as if true’, whereas the second and third are both subsumed into Asclepiades’ final category of (untruthful) muthos; the scholium offers nothing corresponding to Asclepiades’ first category of the factually true because (presumably) it is dealing solely with poetry and poetry — by a familiar ancient concept — excludes the factually or historically true. Just as Asclepiades illustrates his second class of (what we might – I hope not tendentiously – call) ‘plasmatic fiction’ from ‘comic plots and mimes’, so the scholium’s class of the ‘mimetic of the truth’ clearly looks to the characters of New Comedy: Lisoc}mgr and -pistor are titles of Menandrean plays, and Vikop\tyq the title of comedies by Antiphanes, Posidippus, and Turpilius. Now, character is also at the heart of the section of the Ars Poetica which immediately precedes the passage from which we began. The playwright, says Horace, must compose realistic (within, of course, the parameters of received notions about character-types) and consistent characters (vv. 154 – 78); the principal line of influence here descends, of course, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but of the dramatic genres it is again comedy which is most evoked. Tragic ‘character’ had to some extent already been dealt with in vv. 119 – 27, in which Horace advises poets either to stick to the known characteristics of known characters (the angry Achilles etc) or to ‘invent’ thoroughly consistent characters. Horace’s strategy in this section of the Ars Poetica, however, is to deal with ‘drama’ as though it were a single whole, and he moreover disguises his debt to systems such as that of Asclepiades by combining it with a concern with decorum and with 8

I borrow the translation of Halliwell 2002: 305. For further discussion see Meijering 1987: 67 – 98, Halliwell 2002: 305 – 7, Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 139 – 40.

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the use of messenger-speeches: we are allowed to see plasmata, but muthoi should only be heard. Horace’s list of t± haulast\ is in fact a very mixed one. The language in the first two examples suggests plays in which the horror is laid on very thickly indeed: Medea ‘butchers’ (trucidet) her children, and Atreus, nefarius like some pantomime villain, openly ‘cooks’ the organs of Thyestes’ children, as though striving for his first Michelin star. As for the metamorphoses of Procne and Cadmus, both occurring, of course, though Horace does not spell this out, after unspeakable horrors, here it would seem that it is Horace’s sense of belief (incredulus) which is offended. Here again classifications such as Asclepiades’ can help us to understand the Roman poet’s strategy. We know and accept that ‘myth’, particularly outlandish lOhoi of metamorphosis and cannibalism, is false (xeud^r), and so to put it on stage, before our eyes, which believe what they see, destroys the conventional understanding between playwright and audience, an understanding founded upon a shared knowledge that what is usually dramatised is ‘as if true/mimetic of the true’ events. A scholarly critic like Horace knows about such classifications and conventions, and to bring such muthoi before his eyes is merely to offend him and his refined sensibilities; vv. 91 – 2, indignatur item priuatis ac prope socco / dignis carminibus narrari cena Thyestae, had already made clear that the cena Thyestae is a subject for narratio, not for scenic presentation. The scholarly and indeed elitist implications of odi (we think of Odes 3.1.1 and Callimachus’ 1wha¸qy t¹ po¸gla t¹ jujkijºm jtk.) are an important signal of Horace’s argument here; Horace has in fact adopted the language of t¹ lise?m which we saw in the scholium to Iliad 6.58 – 9, but given it his own, we might think very Horatian, nuance. The rejected scenes offend against canons of taste and educated, aesthetic judgement. (It is worth recalling that these scenes of metamorphosis take us back to the snakes and birds of the proem which must not go together (v. 13), in another passage in which Horace lays down the law and establishes his educated, didactic voice). We may further recall Aristotle’s dismissal of the %tewmom effect of ‘scary scenes’ and of t¹ teqat_der (Poetics 1453b1 – 11), a passage which clearly also aligns itself firmly against any idea of ‘mass entertainment’; when Aristotle notes that ‘one must not seek any pleasure from tragedy, but only that which is oikeion to it’ (1453b10 – 11), we (and he) may recall Plato’s (elitist) laments about what happened to poetry when the ‘pleasure’ of the popular au-

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dience came to dictate what was composed (Laws 3.701a-e). Horace’s attitudes, as so often, have a long history.

2. When we move from theory to practice, the apparent limits of action on the tragic stage can only be discussed within the broader context of how ‘drama’ is conceived and of the significance of the boundaries between the seen and the unseen. To what extent fifth-century tragedians themselves policed the conventions of ‘viewing’ and ‘hearing’ which Horace exploits in the passage we have been considering is a very interesting question, but one which cannot be pursued at any length here. Certain passages might indeed be thought almost to allude to such self-imposed restrictions: Euripides’ Medea repeatedly sends her children inside (vv. 1053,9 1076), and at the end of Sophocles’ Electra Orestes insists that Aigisthos enter the palace to be killed and Aigisthos taunts him with an unwillingness to do the deed in the light of day (vv. 1491 – 9); the poetic justice of ‘death within the house he himself has stained’ may here be combined with obedience to dramaturgical and conventional necessity.10 What is clear, however, is that Horace’s verses have a complex relationship with one of the most important, almost indeed programmatically generic, of tragedy’s concerns. In its presentation of space ‘off’ and ‘on’, the ‘unseen’ and the ‘seen’,11 tragedy dramatises the difference between ‘viewing’ and ‘listening’ as one of different sorts of belief and knowledge; Plato was to dismiss the images of the theatre as ‘imitations’ quite distanced from ‘reality’, but tragedy’s own epistemological concerns are not to be underestimated. I want to consider this a little further through what is perhaps the most obvious tragic scene for the purpose, but also one to which Horace offers a lead, namely the Cassandra-scene of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Cassandra ‘sees’ Thyestes’ dead children holding their own organs (vv. 1215 – 1222, cf. 1096, 1125) and she knows (eQd]mai) the truth (v. 1196). What, however, do the chorus know? In their first exchange 9 Onofrio Vox notes that vv. 1053 – 5 suggest that the audience are to be excluded from Medea’s infanticide as profani were excluded from seeing ritual action. 10 Cf. Kaibel on v. 1493. 11 The bibliography is, of course, huge; Padel 1990 and Rehm 2002 offer guidance of different kinds.

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with the prophetess (vv. 1101 – 6), the chorus claim not to understand (to be %idqir of) her words, which for the audience evoke the coming killing of Agamemnon, but to have recognised (cicm~sjeim) her allusions to Thyestes’ children, ‘for the whole city screams (of the matter)’. The chorus’ ‘knowledge’ – so, I think, we are to understand – is based on ‘what everyone has heard’, it is the ‘talk of the town’;12 it is in fact not so different from the knowledge of ‘myth’ which we might attribute to the watching audience. When Cassandra confronts the chorus with her knowledge, they are forced to admit her powers: haul²fy d´ sou, pºmtou p´qam tqave?sam !kkºhqoum pºkim juqe?m k´cousam ¦speq eQ paqest²teir.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1199 – 1201

The echo of Odysseus’ praise of Demodocus seems unmistakable: Dglºdoj’, 5nowa d¶ se bqot_m aQm¸fol’ "p²mtym7 C s´ ce LoOs’ 1d¸dane, Di¹r p²ir, C s´ c’ ûApºkkym. k¸gm c±q jat± jºslom ûAwai_m oWtom !e¸deir, fss’ 5qnam t’ 5pahºm te ja· fss’ 1lºcgsam ûAwaio¸, ¦r t´ pou C aqt¹r paqe½m C %kkou !jo¼sar.

Homer, Odyssey 8. 487 – 91

In Cassandra’s case, of course, Apollo really is responsible, as her immediate answer to the chorus makes clear, l\mtir l’ ûApºkkym t_id’ 1p´stgsem t´kei (v. 1202). The chorus ‘translate’ Cassandra’s knowledge into a pattern familiar to them – hence the evocation of the Odyssey – but Cassandra’s ‘sight’ has in fact moved a step beyond the powers of Demodocus. Odysseus is able to judge Demodocus’ performance because he really was at Troy; the chorus of the Agamemnon have less ground for certainty. Although Cassandra’s insight is compared, both by the chorus (1093 – 4) and herself in echo (1184 – 5), to the tracking of a huntingdog, it is not Cassandra who in this scene embodies the ‘hermeneutic process’ and the interpretation of signs, but rather the chorus itself (probably also compared to a hunting-dog at 1245); Aeschylus dramatises their stumbling progress towards understanding: 12 It would be nice to be able to appeal to v. 1197, kºcyi pakai±r t_md’ "laqt¸ar dºlym, for support here, but k|cyi has been doubted (West obelises), and, if sound, it can hardly go with eQd]mai in v. 1196, as Fraenkel takes it.

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Ja.

Wo. Ja.

Wo.

Q½ pºpoi, t¸ pote l¶detai t¸ tºde m´om %wor l´ca, l´c’ 1m dºloisi to?sde l¶detai jajºm, %veqtom v¸koisi, dus¸atom7 !kj± d’ 2j±r !postate?. to¼tym %idq¸r eQli t_m lamteul²tym, 1je?ma d’ 5cmym7 p÷sa c±q pºkir bo÷i. Q½ t²kaima, tºde c±q teke?r ; t¹m blod´lmiom pºsim koutqo?si vaidq¼masa, p_r vq²sy t´kor ; t²wor c±q tºd’ 5stai7 pqote¸mei d³ we?q’ 1j weq¹r aqecol´ma. oupy num/ja7 mOm c±q 1n aQmicl²tym 1paqc´loisi hesv²toir !lgwam_.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1100 – 1113

Cassandra’s first utterance tells of a new, but non-specific (except perhaps for %veqtom v¸koisim) catastrophe, and the chorus claim not to understand (%idqir). She then becomes more detailed – a husband, a bath – and the chorus respond oupy num/ja … !lgwam_. We may be reminded of Socrates’ young interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue trying to grasp his meaning as he leads them forward. Despite the fact that failure to understand the language of prophets is a familiar enough dramatic motif (Oedipus and Teiresias are the most notorious couple), the chorus of the Agamemnon is sometimes presented in modern criticism as at least slow to grasp the obvious, as being a bit ‘thick’, but this is to miss the thrust of the dramatist’s concern. One audience – the one sitting in the theatre – suspects, on the basis of what it has ‘heard’ (from, inter alios, Homer and other poets) that it knows what is going to happen; another audience, the chorus, must seek to understand as Cassandra’s words unfold. The gap between how these two audiences interpret (or fail to interpret) her words marks how ‘meaning’ is retrospectively imposed upon the interpretation of oracular utterance. Nevertheless, although the experience of the chorus is, in some respects, quite different from that of the audience, there are areas of intersection (as there always are). ‘I say’, declares Cassandra, ‘that you shall see (1pºxeshai)’ — a verb that might make us think of epoptic mysteries – ‘the death (l|qom) of Agamemnon’ (1245); the line is addressed to the chorus, but it is as true for the audience, who may well feel themselves addressed directly here. Of course, there is also a pointed dramaturgical misdirection, which perhaps exploits the conventional limitations of stage-action

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from which I began: l|qor is an ambiguous word, and what the chorus will actually ‘see’ (when the inside is brought out) is the king’s corpse. What prompts Cassandra’s unusually explicit declaration (v.1246) is the chorus’ repeated confession that, though they know exactly what she is talking about with regard to Thyestes, the second half of her message remains obscure: tµm l³m Hu´stou da?ta paide_ym jqe_m num/ja ja· p´vqija, ja· vºbor l’ 5wei jk¼omt’ !kgh_r oqd³m 1ngijasl´ma7 t± d’ %kk’ !jo¼sar 1j dqºlou pes½m tq´wy.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1242 – 5

In the best kind of tragedy, according to Aristotle, ‘terror and pity’ (vq¸tteim ja· 1kee?m) would come over someone who just heard the story of a play without actually seeing it, ‘as would happen if someone were to listen to the plot of the Oedipus’ (Poetics 1453b2 – 7). The chorus of the Agamemnon feels ‘shuddering and fear’ at (apparently) the very thought of the banquet of Thyestes; this is not the kind of experience which Aristotle has in mind, but their horror, like that of a theatrical audience, does indeed depend upon the imaginative memory of past horrors either seen (in the theatre) or heard about (in story and myth), not upon the kind of awful spectacle which Horace deprecates. vq_tteim and its cognates are used by Plato of the effect of the terrifying images of the Underworld which poets inflict upon their audiences (Republic 3.387c), and it is hard here not to think of Gorgias’ famous description of the effect of poetry (including, we may assume, tragedy, if tragedy is not in fact particularly in his mind): to»r !jo¼omtar eQs/khe ja· vq¸jg peq¸vobor ja· 5keor pok¼dajqur ja· pºhor vikopemh¶r jtk., ‘there comes over the audience a shuddering full of fear, a pity full of tears, and a longing mixed with grief’ (Helen 9). In the Agamemnon, the pity will indeed also arrive, but it is for Cassandra herself, not for the children of Thyestes: § tk/lom, oQjt¸qy se hesv²tou lºqou (1321). In its negotiation of the permeable boundary between ‘viewing’ and ‘listening’, between ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’, a boundary whose exploration seems here almost a programmatic marker of genre, tragedy uses various modes and structures for allowing exchange: the messenger-speech and the ekkyklema are the two most obvious. Cassandra herself, of course, who can ‘see’ things ‘offstage’ is another such medium; the Agamemnon uses all three devices. In a well-known fragment of fourth-century or

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perhaps Hellenistic tragedy (Adesp. 649 K-S), Cassandra ‘sees’ the duel between Achilles and Hector which is happening ‘offstage’ and describes it to Priam.13 It is an attractive idea that part of the power of that scene arises from the appearance on stage (i. e. inside Troy where Cassandra and Priam are standing) of Deiphobus, for Cassandra may have ‘seen’ (in her prophetic mind) Athena disguised as Deiphobus beguiling Hector to stand his ground (Iliad 22.226 – 47); the sudden entrance of the real Deiphobus carries genuine dramatic power. Such an interplay between the prophetess ‘seeing’ in her mind and the audience and other actors seeing with their eyes would be a very striking theatrical effect. Seneca, of course, combined (as it were) the Cassandra-scene of Aeschylus’ play with scenes such as that of the anonymous papyrus to have his Cassandra describe the murder of Agamemnon as it is taking place within the stage-building (Seneca, Agamemnon 867 – 907). Whatever the literary history of such an effect, the fact that the ‘Cassandrapoet’ realised the dramatic potential of this scene from Iliad 22 is itself worthy of note in the present context, and I will return to this epic moment in order to push the pursuit of these themes a little further back in time. First, however, there is another area of dramatic technique on which this Cassandra-text (Adesp. 649 K-S) sheds light. Cassandra ‘sees’ typical heroic actions (spear-throwing etc) taking place offstage; what she sees is a kind of narrative, Homer’s narrative in fact. The description of ‘offstage actions’, by for example messengers, is of course usually limited to actions in the past; accounts of what is present in the time of narration and visible to one or more characters, but not to the audience, are normally rather descriptions of people or objects — we might think of the teikhoskopia of Euripides’ Phoenissae, to which I will return. By the end of the fourth century, however, the technique seems to have evolved. In Plautus’ Rudens, which is based on a comedy by Diphilus, a slave describes the scene as two shipwrecked girls survive huge waves and make it safely to shore (Rudens 154 – 80); he watches this scene unfold from the stage, but the girls are invisible to the audience until they enter in the following scene. We cannot of course be sure that Diphilus, as well as Plautus, had this dramatic narrative, though it seems overwhelmingly likely; shipwreck descriptions were very dear to the heart of Greek poets. The technique of Diphilus-Plautus here finds, I think, very few ancient parallels, and for once the word ‘evolu13 For bibliography and further discussion cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 433.

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tion’ might be justified. We can contrast this scene, not just with the teikhoskopia-scenes, but also with the tattered remains of the corresponding scene in Aeschylus’ Diktyoulkoi in which (probably) Diktys and Silenus see (offstage) the seaweed-covered casket in which Danae and Perseus were set afloat (fr. 46a Radt). There may there have been a ‘narrative’ in the Diktyoulkoi of the struggle of mother and child, i. e. one of the characters on shore might have described the coming-ashore as happens in the Rudens, but what survives of the text makes that in fact very unlikely; in the fifth-century satyr-play, what is seen from the land is a strange object, in the comedy of a century and a half later, it is an exciting piece of action.

3. To conclude, I return briefly to the confrontation of Hector and Achilles in Iliad 22. This famous scene is given its own viewing audience within the narrative: ‘old Priam was the first to see him …’ (v. 25), and Priam is soon joined by Hecuba (v. 79); they, however, fail to persuade their son (v. 91), who remains unmoved, like some Sophoclean hero, until the fateful approach of Achilles. The presence of an audience for the race around the walls is not merely recalled by the repeated reference to the walls at v. 144 and v. 146 and implied by the very ‘athletic’ nature of the scene (cf. esp. vv. 159 – 60, 162 – 6), but is made explicit both with regard to the gods (v. 166) and with regard to the Achaean army, to whom Achilles signals that they must not intervene (vv. 205 – 7). A vital technique of enargeia here is precisely to evoke for the listening audience ‘theatrical’ occasions such as athletic contests, and we may well wonder at the particular effect of this passage when it was recited at festivals where athletic contests actually took place. This was not, however, the reason why this scene attracted the attention of ancient critics. In the Poetics Aristotle twice refers to the episode of the chase: at 1460a11 – 17 he uses it as an illustration of the fact that epic is more receptive to t¹ %kocom and hence to t¹ haulast|m than is tragedy, because the agents are not actually seen; the pursuit ‘would be laughable on stage, with the Greeks standing still and not pursuing, and Achilles prohibiting them with nods, but in the epic this is not noticed’. At 1460b26 the pursuit becomes an example of an adunaton which nevertheless serves proper poetic purposes. In using this example, Aristotle may have been influenced by or reacting to contempo-

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rary Homeric criticism.14 The Homeric scholia tell us that the fourthcentury Homeric critic Megakleides15 had claimed that the whole business (taOta p²mta) of the duel between Achilles and Hector was a plasma, i. e. an implausible poetic fiction (bT-schol. Iliad 22.36, 205 – 7 = Megakleides fr. 6 Janko): ‘for how could Achilles have kept back so many thousands with a nod?’. Megakleides probably had other grounds for criticism as well, but the controversial nature of this complex episode and its apparent use in debates about what is appropriate to drama and what to narrative ought to make us look at it again.16 The chase around the walls is in fact a remarkable piece of narrative. It may be simplest to set it out in tabular form: 136 – 8 139 – 44 145 – 6 147 – 57 158 – 61 162 – 66 166 – 87 188 189 – 93 194 – 8 199 – 201 202 – 4 205 – 7 208 – 13 214 ff.

Hector takes off with Achilles in pursuit Bird simile Narrative: ‘they ran …’ The washing troughs and the marvellous streams ‘They were not running for an ordinary prize …’ Horse-race simile Events on Olympus Narrative Hunting simile Narrative of respective tactics Dream simile Address to the audience: ‘How could Hector have escaped, unless …’ Narrative: the nod of Achilles Zeus’ weighing The intervention of Athena and the beginning of the end.

14 Cf. Gudeman 1934: 410. 15 On Megakleides cf. Janko 2000: 138 – 43; for this critic and the shifting uses of plasma in ancient criticism cf. Papadopoulou 1999. 16 From the bT-scholia to Iliad 22. 36 we learn that there was a zetema as to why no other Greek had fought Hector in Achilles’ absence, and a corrupt T-scholium on 22.205 – 7 (= Megakleides fr. 6a Janko) suggests that the issue of how anyone could fight against Achilles’ divinely made arms had been raised. That anyone could escape from ‘swift-footed’ Achilles was also a cause for scholarly surprise.

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If the pursuit was indeed the subject of Megakleides’ criticism, one can see why he might have thought that there was poetic plasma (though not in the technical Asclepiadean sense) here; we might recall that Aristarchus athetised the dream simile of vv. 199 – 201, which is criticised in the scholia as stylistically and intellectually weak, as inconsistent with what is said elsewhere, and as damaging to the sense of Achilles’ pre-eminent speed. More than one modern scholar continues to be disturbed by the passage, and Bentley’s deletion of vv. 202 – 7 still finds a place in West’s apparatus. The narrative poet has in fact pulled out all of the stops in a passage which itself seems to push at the boundaries of narrative, in an attempt to convey an extraordinary scene, even by Homeric standards. The bT-scholia on vv. 147 – 56 (the streams and washing troughs) comment appropriately: ‘With marvellous skill the poet did not leave the time of the pursuit empty, but as though providing occupation for the hearers, he says that the heroes are running, and he himself entertains (xuwacyce? ) the audience’. The poet of the ‘Cassandradrama’ (Adesp. 649 K-S) seems to be an early witness to this unusual power of this scene from Iliad 22; he has used Cassandra, who herself breaks down the barrier between seen and unseen, between narrative and drama, in a dramatisation of the Homeric scene’s particular brand of enargeia. The teikhoskopia of Book 3, which is pathetically echoed by the scene we have been considering in Iliad 22 — Priam finds himself again on the walls but to witness a sight of a very different kind, and now sees Achilles who was so ominously absent from the teikhoskopia — holds a very special place in the history of the exploration of the boundaries between ‘viewing’ and ‘listening’. The messenger in Aeschylus’ Septem, who brings the ‘unseen outside’, i. e. the encircling Argives with their shield-signs, inside the walls of Thebes and on to the visible stage, may owe it not a little.17 In Euripides’ version in the Phoenissae, as of course (even more so) in Aeschylus, the armour of the unseen warriors is important, whereas in Homer it is merely the physical stature of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, and Idomeneus to which attention is called. The bT-scholia on Iliad 3.166 try to explain the ‘anachronism’ of the teikhoskopia by suggesting that Priam did not ask Helen for this information previously because the Greeks were then wearing armour and it would have been easy to make mistakes about identity, 17 Cf. further Hunter 2004: 243.

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as famously happened in the case of Patroclus.18 It is tempting, if not more, to speculate that the origins of such a zetema and its solution go back to the fifth-century flourishing of Homeric studies,19 and as such are reflected in Euripides’ virtuoso rewriting. The young Antigone’s ignorance is more ‘plausible’ than that of Priam, and we may thus wish also to add this scene to the development of ‘realism’ in drama, in which Euripides is usually (and rightly) given a pivotal rôle. Be that as it may, it is noteworthy that Euripides gives particular stress to verbs of seeing in his teikhoskopia (cf. Phoenissae 127, 131, 141 – 4 [del. Stahl], 147, 161); there are, of course, Homeric precedents (cf. Iliad 3.234 – 6), but it may be that Euripides felt a special need to encourage the enargeia of spectators who cannot see what the characters on stage can ‘see’. So too, the stage-business with the ladder as Antigone mounts the wall makes very clear that this is ‘theatre’, not narrative.

Bibliography Blank, D. 1998. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Grammarians, Oxford Bremer, J. M. 1976. ‘Why messenger-speeches?’ in J. M. Bremer, S. L. Radt, C. J. Ruijgh (eds.), Miscellanea Tragica in honorem J. C. Kamerbeek (Amsterdam) 29 – 48 Brink, C. O. 1963. Horace on Poetry. Prolegomena to the Literary Epistles, Cambridge —1971. Horace on Poetry. The ‘Ars Poetica’, Cambridge Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge Gudeman, A. 1934. Aristoteles Peq· Poigtij/r, Berlin/Leipzig Halliwell, S. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis, Princeton Hunter, R. 2004. ‘Homer and Greek literature’ in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge) 235 – 53 Janko, R. 2000. Philodemus, On Poems Book 1, Oxford Meijering, R. 1987. Literary and Rhetorical Theories in Greek Scholia, Groningen Padel, R. 1990. ‘Making space speak’ in J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos? (Princeton) 336 – 65 Papadopoulou, T. 1999. ‘Literary theory and terminology in the scholia: the case of pk\sla’ Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 43: 203 – 10 Rehm, R. 2002. The Play of Space, Princeton Richardson, N. J. 1975. ‘Homeric professors in the age of the sophists’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 21: 65 – 81 18 Cf. also Schrader 1880: I 56. 19 Cf., e. g., Richardson 1975.

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Schrader, H. 1880. Porphyrii quaestionum Homericarum ad Iliadem pertinentium reliquias, Leipzig.

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37. Generic consciousness in the Orphic Argonautica?* My title may surprise, as a good proportion of the scholars who have given any thought to the Orphic Argonautica (henceforth ‘OA’) have wondered whether its author was conscious at all. The problems of this text are certainly not to be underestimated: on one side, a very corrupt tradition of a difficult and obviously linguistically idiosyncratic poem; on the other, a literary technique, particularly with regard to the treatment of the poem’s principal model, the Argonautica of Apollonius, which seems utterly inconsistent, lacking in all rhyme or reason. Hermann Fränkel indeed considered the diction and the ‘entire artistic character’ of the author to be ‘irrational and capricious’ and was pessimistic that ordinary scholarly methods could make much progress in understanding what was going in this poem.1 In this paper I want to pick away at one particular issue – the poem’s sense of its own ‘genre’ – to see whether there are at least interesting questions which can be asked, even if many answers will continue to elude us; in this undertaking I will, of course, lean heavily upon Francis Vian’s excellent Budé edition of 1987.2

1. §man Puh_mor led´ym, 2jatgbºke, l²mti, dr k²wer Akib²tou joquv/r Paqmass¸da p´tqgm, sµm !qetµm rlm_7 s» d´ loi jk´or 1shk¹m ap²ssair7 p´lpe d’ 1p· pqap¸dessim 1la?r 1tulgcºqom aqd¶m, evqa pokuspeq´essi bqoto?r kic¼vymom !oidµm Ap¼sy Lo¼sgr 1vetla?r ja· pgjt¸di pujm/i. mOm c²q soi, kuqoeqc´, v¸kom l´kor !e¸domti hul¹r 1potq¼mei k´nai t² peq ou pote pqºshem 5vqas’, ftam B²jwoio ja· ûApºkkymor %majtor j´mtqyi 1kaumºlemor vqij¾dea j/k’ 1p¸vasjom, hmgto?r !mhq¾poisim %jg, lec²k’ eqcia l¼stair7

* 1 2

5

10

M. Paschalis (ed.), Roman and Greek Imperial Epic (Rethymnon 2005) 149 – 68 AJP 65 (1944) 398 (review of Venzke [1941]). Where the reading is not at issue I print Vian’s text.

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!qwa¸ou l³m pq_ta W²our !l´caqtom !m²cjgm, ja· Wqºmom jtk.

(OA 1 – 13)

‘O Lord who rules over Pytho, far-darter, prophet, whose lot is the Parnassian rock with its lofty peak, yours is the power I hymn. May you grant me glorious fame, and send to my mind a true-speaking voice, so that, through the command of the Muse and with the aid of my solidly-wrought lyre, I may deliver a clear song to the numberless races of mortals. And now, O worker with the lyre, singer of sweet songs, my spirit rouses me to speak of things of which I never previously told, when I was harried by the goad of Bacchos and lord Apollo and spoke of their terrible shafts, remedies for mortal men and great mysteries for initiates. First I sang of the inescapable necessity of ancient Chaos, and of Time …’

After a six-verse invocation of Apollo, Orpheus (apparently) addresses, though does not name, Mousaios (cf. v. 308) 3 and explains to him that the song which follows will be quite new: while he had been under the ecstatic inspiration of Bacchus and Apollo, he had sung to Mousaios ‘Orphic’ cosmogonic and religious poetry of a kind which antiquity knew well, but now that he is no longer so inspired, freed as we subsequently learn by his mother’s action (v. 104), he will tell how Jason came to Thrace to ask for his assistance in the Argonautic expedition and the subsequent history of the expedition. The not-to-be-repeated poetry of the past is listed in a catalogue of ‘Orphic’ poems which begin with the Chaos of the ‘Orphic Rhapsodies’.4 This recusatio has a formal model5 in Apollonius’ rejection of the story of the building of the Argo which had been the subject of previous poets’ songs (Arg. 1.18 – 19), but – as we shall see – its closest analogues seem to lie elsewhere. In very loose generic terms, we might say that the shift which Orpheus marks is that from didactic to epic.6 Throughout antiquity the 3

4 5 6

The difficulties of v. 7 – 8 are ignored or played down by too many critics, including Luiselli 1993 in his otherwise very helpful account of the proem. After what has gone before it seems very hard to understand v. 7 as addressing anyone other than Apollo, though v. 9 makes this seems highly unlikely. There is a just appreciation of these difficulties in Giangrande 1993, 148, but I cannot share his view that the double proem of the Orphic Lithika sheds much light on the proem of OA. Cf. West 1983, 38, 252. Missed by Venzke 1941, 26. For ancient generic considerations of ‘didactic poetry’ cf. Koster 1970, 130 – 51, Effe 1977, 19 – 22.

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Hesiodic and Orphic poetic traditions intertwine at every turn, and the ‘Hesiodic’ flavour of Orpheus’ catalogue of the poetry of his past is unmistakeable; the closeness of the two traditions is, of course, most obvious in the Theogony and in later Orphic poems such as the Ephemerides (cf. Hesiod’s ‘Days’), which was addressed to Mousaios (fr. 271 Kern).7 Much Orphic poetry was indeed addressed to Mousaios, who variously appears in ancient accounts as Orpheus’ son, pupil, and successor,8 and in the OA he fulfills the ‘addressee’ rôle of didactic poetry, familiar from Hesiod’s feckless brother on;9 thus in the catalogue Orpheus reminds Mousaios that from him he had ‘learned’ about divination (v. 33).10 A ‘didactic’ strain persists, of course, in OA, just as ‘epic’, most notably Homer, was a genre of instruction throughout antiquity: Mousaios is first addressed explicitly at v. 308, where his attention is drawn to the careful ritual description which follows and from which, we are to understand, he is to learn, and in general the extensive ritual descriptions of the poem should not be dismissed as merely lending ‘Orphic colour’. Nevertheless, the generic shift to ‘epic’ represented by Orpheus’ ‘previously unheard’ song is very clear. Raffaele Luiselli points out that the opening invocation to an Apollo who seems indistinguishable from the Apollo of the pagan literary tradition is already a marker for the knowing reader that this is not the usual voice of ‘Orpheus’,11 and we may add that Orpheus’ initial explanation to Mousaios, hul¹r 1potq¼mei k´nai jtk. (8), ‘my heart bids me to tell you …’, picks up Alcinous’ description of the Homeric ‘epic’ bard par excellence, Demodocus: t_i c²q Na he¹r peq· d_jem !oidµm / t´qpeim, fppgi hul¹r 1potq¼mgisim !e¸deim, ‘for the god gave him the special gift of song, so that he might give delight in whatever way his spirit urged him to sing’ (Od. 8.44 – 5). Certain elements of Orpheus’ proem may, however, remind us of another epic beginning with very clear generic concerns, the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora: di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa) 7 8 9 10

Cf. Kern 1922, 274 – 9. For the testimonia cf. Kern 1922, 50 – 1; West 1983, 39 – 44. Cf. A. Schiesaro, P. Mitsis, J. Strauss Clay (eds.), Mega Nepios = MD 31 (1993). Cf. the opening of the proem to the collection of ‘Orphic Hymns’: ‘Learn, Mousaios, the rites …’. 11 Luiselli 1993. Luiselli seems justified in his scepticism that this opening invocation is a marked reworking of Orph. Fr. 62 Kern.

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adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

(Ovid, Met.1.1 – 4)

‘My spirit moves me to tell of shapes changed into new bodies: Gods, breathe favourably upon my enterprise – for you have changed this too – and lead my unbroken song from the first beginnings of the universe down to my own times.’

With Ovid’s opening cf. OA 8 – 9 (cited above), and with the prayer for divine favour cf. OA 3 – 4; Orpheus’ catalogue of his previous poetry does indeed cover prima … ab origine mundi down to his own time, and begins, as do both Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from chaos. Curiously (or not), the opening of the Ovidian Orpheus’ song in the Metamorphoses also marks a generic shift of repertoire away from the same kind of poetry which the Orpheus of OA consigns to his own past: ‘ab Ioue, Musa parens, (cedunt Iouis omnia regno) carmina nostra moue. Iouis est mihi saepe potestas dicta prius: cecini plectro grauiore Gigantas sparsaque Phlegraeis uictricia fulmina campis; nunc opus est leuiore lyra, puerosque canamus dilectos superis, inconcessisque puellas ignibus attonitas meruisse libidine poenam.’ (Ovid, Met.10.148 – 54) ‘From Jupiter, mother Muse, (all things yield to the command of Jupiter) begin my song. Often before have I sung the power of Jupiter: with a heavier plectrum I have sung the Giants and the victorious thunderbolts scattered over the Phlegraean fields. Now I require a lighter lyre: let me sing of boys loved by the gods above, and of girls, distraught with illicit fires, whose desires have earned them punishment.’

In Ovid, Orpheus moves ‘down’ the generic scale from theological poetry of epic grandeur to lighter themes of love, which evoke (inter al.) Hellenistic catalogue elegy, such as we know it from Hermesianax and Phanocles, and which are more suited both to his current situation and to the pastoral nemus which the bard’s music has gathered around him. The Argonautic Orpheus’ shift from ‘didactic-cosmogonic’ to ‘narrative’ epos is perhaps more of a sideways move (cf. further below). It is, of course, hard to know what, if anything, to make of these similarities. The recusatio in all its forms is, as is well known, much more at home in Latin than in Greek poetry, and examples such as

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Culex 26 – 34, a list of themes (and their generic flavour) which are not to be found in the poem which follows, well illustrate the pattern of which OA shows an interesting variant. On the Greek side, we may perhaps think of Bion fr. 10, a catalogue of the ‘bucolic’ songs which the poet used to sing and which he tried to teach Eros, but all of which he has forgotten since all he can now sing is 1qyt¼ka, and of certain poems of the Anacreontea.12 It is, however, the poetic biography of Virgil which offers the clearest analogue for the movement from didactic to narrative epic, as also for certain other elements of the generic consciousness of the poem (cf. below). Later antiquity constructed Hesiod too as moving from pastoral to grand themes through the intervention of the Muses (an easy enough ‘reading’ of the proem of the Theogony), but – as, for example, in the well known acrostic poem of imperial date in which Hesiod turns his back on pastoral after his ‘initiation’ —13 such a tradition is of course not interested in ‘narrative epic’. OA thus stands as an isolated Greek witness to a consciousness of distinctive types within epos available to a single poet; the opposition of the types themselves was, of course, exploited as early as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.

2. As it happens, OA too stages a song-contest between two great poets, Orpheus and Cheiron,14 as well as the now traditional contest between Orpheus and the Sirens (OA 1268 – 90). Whereas Apollonius’ Argonauts perhaps see15 but certainly do not meet Cheiron and his family, in OA Orpheus and his comrades visit the centaur’s cave, are entertained by him, and Orpheus and his host compete in song as after-dinner entertainment. The scene itself is a version of a standard epic ‘hospitality scene’, appropriate to the new epic voice of Orpheus. When, however, the Argonauts find Cheiron listening with pleasure (vq´mar d’ 1pet´qpeto We¸qym, ‘Cheiron delighted in his heart’, v. 398) to the 12 Cf. Reed on Bion fr.10.12 – 13, citing M. Fantuzzi, ‘On the metre of Anacreont. 19W’, CQ 44 (1994) 540 – 2, and Rosenmeyer 1992, 96 – 106. 13 POxy. 3537 (ed. P. J. Parsons), cf. Agosti 1997, Bernsdorff 1999. 14 Vian and others have sought for predecessors of this episode in Latin epic (Val. Flacc. 1.252 – 73, Silius Ital. 11.459 ff); cf. Nelis 2005. 15 deid_sjeto in Arg. 1.558 leaves uncertain whether Peleus actually sees the baby Achilles held up on the shore.

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lyre-playing of the young Achilles, we may be reminded, not just of scenes from art,16 but also of the embassy to Achilles in Iliad 9, which finds the hero vq´ma teqpºlemom vºqlicci kice¸gi, ‘delighting his heart with the clear lyre’ (9.186, cf. 189). Like Achilles (Iliad 9.193), Cheiron leaps up ( !mºqouse, v. 400) when he sees the visitors and proceeds to offer lavish, if rustic, hospitality. This echo of the Iliad, if correctly identified, reminds us of Orpheus’ masterly control of narrative epic, just as we are about to see him perform in a different, but more familiar, genre. A song-contest in such a setting inevitably suggests pastoral, and Orpheus’ cosmogonic performance may in fact seem strangely reminiscent of that of another half-beast in a cave, the song of Silenus in Eclogue 6, who is explicitly compared to Orpheus (Ecl. 6.30) and whose song is clearly indebted to both ‘Orphic’ (e. g. Arg. 1.496 ff) and ‘didactic’ poetry (Lucretius etc.).17 In another connection, Martin West has speculated that there existed ‘some sophistic fable of a contest between Mousaios and Orpheus, like the contest between Homer and Hesiod’,18 and it is certainly tempting to wonder what other lost ‘great fights’ lie behind the OA’s conceit. In generic terms, the contest of Orpheus and Cheiron matches narrative epic against theogonic didactic, and echoes of Hesiod in the opening verses of Orpheus’ account of his own song (421 ff) do indeed suggest that there is something of the ‘Homer vs Hesiod’ about this contest.19 According to Orpheus, Cheiron’s epic was a tale of jk´a jemta¼qym, more specifically the battle with the Lapiths and the centaurs’ clash with Heracles in Arcadia; what is particularly remarkable about this is, of course, that both of these battles resulted in terrible defeats for the centaurs, in some versions indeed in the death of Cheiron himself.20 These stories traditionally depicted Cheiron’s colleagues (at least) as violent, stupid, and drunken, and so we will want to ask about the ‘focalisation’ of Orpheus’ account of Cheiron’s song; abqiloh¼lym ‘violent-hearted’ (v. 415), !tashak¸gr ‘recklessness’ (v. 416), l´mor oWmor 5ceiqem ‘wine roused their spirits’ (v. 418): is this really how Cheiron depicted his colleagues? 21 It may be that these were in16 17 18 19 20 21

Cf. Vian’s note on 398. For Silenus and Orpheus cf. Breed 2000, citing earlier bibliography. West 1983, 43. See the loci similes collected by Vian. Cf. my note on Theocr. 7.149 – 50. The matter is not treated adequately in the narratological account of OA in Sánchez Ortiz 1996.

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deed the two best known (or the only two) ‘centaur-Iliads’, but at the very least the choice of subject weights the contest strikingly in Orpheus’ favour. So too does the manner of the telling. Orpheus is at first shy about competing, restrained by aidos from matching himself against an older man (vv. 409 – 10) – verses with a clear ‘didactic’ message for Mousaios —, until Cheiron himself urges the ‘unwilling’ narrator to take part. Cheiron’s performance is given six verses, two of which are devoted to the ‘beautiful’ lyre which Achilles passes to his tutor, and no audience reaction is described (vv. 413 – 18). In Orpheus’ hands, however, the lyre is k¸ceia, ‘of pure sound’ (v. 419), and Orpheus describes his own voice as lek¸cgqur, ‘honeyed’ (v. 420, cf. v. 432); after a ten-verse summary of his theogonic song, Orpheus describes how (as usual) nature gathered to listen in wonder to his voice, just as Cheiron himself signalled his pleasure in Orpheus’ song: the outcome of this contest is thus never in doubt (cf. v. 448). To Orpheus’ reliability as a narrator I shall return.22

3. On three occasions the poet of OA breaks off his narrative or calls explicit attention to the process of poetic selection. The first such ‘break off’ occurs in the brief account of the Argonauts’ stay at Lemnos: Simtiaja?r d’ avqOsim 1j´ksalem ¡j¼akom maOm K¶lmyi 1m Acah´gi, tºhi jaj± 5qca lel¶kei hgkut´qair7 aR c²q jem !ist¾samto sume¼mour sv/isim !tashak¸gisi, ja· B jkutµ g£xip¼keia 1kdol´mair jqa¸mesje, cumaij_m eWdor !q¸stg. !kk± t¸ soi peq· t_mde pok»m kºcom !lvad¹m eQpe?m, fssom 1v’ Vleqom §qsem !caua?r Kglmi²dessi J¼pqir 1qytotqºvor Lim¼air eQr k´jtqa lic/mai ; v¸ktqoir g£xip¼kgm 1qato?r 1d²lassem ûI¶sym, %kkgi d’ %kkor 5lijto7 ja· 1jkek²homto poqe¸gr, eQ lµ !potqop¸oir 1mopa?r hekn¸vqom¸ h’ vlmyi Blet´qyi hekwh´mter 5bam pot· m/a l´kaimam, eQqes¸gm poh´omter, 1pelm¶samto d³ lºwhou.

22 Cf. Section 4 below.

475

480

(OA 471 – 83)

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‘We landed our swift ship on the rugged Sintian coast of holy Lemnos, where the women had committed monstrous acts. In their outrageousness, they had killed their husbands, and famed Hypispyle, finest among them in beauty, ruled over them with their consent. But what is the point of declaring a long account of these matters to you, how Kypris, nurse of passion, stirred desire in the noble Lemnian women to make love with the Minyans? Through the powerful charms of love, Jason possessed Hypsipyle, and the other Argonauts made love with the other women. They would have forgotten their voyage, had they not been bewitched by my restraining utterances and mind-bewitching song and so gone to the dark ship, longing for rowing and mindful again of their task.’

The structure of the passage broadly follows the Apollonian model, with severe curtailment of length: arrival at Lemnos (471 – 2a, cf. Arg. 1.607 – 8; in both poems the island is identified by its ‘prehistoric’ inhabitants, the Sinties), the women’s crime (472b-4a, cf. Arg. 1.609 – 19), Hypsipyle’s position (474b-5, cf. Arg. 1.620 – 26), the encounter of the Argonauts and the Lemnians (476 – 80a, cf. Arg. 1.633 – 860), the departure (480a-3, cf. Arg. 1.861 – 914). This is one of the most striking abbreviations of the whole poem – %kkgi d’ %kkor 5lijto, ‘the other Argonauts made love with the other women’, (480) is a particularly noteworthy epitome (cf. cf. Arg. 1.849 – 60, esp. 854) – and the self-conscious reference to the brevity of the account (v. 476) is a pointed reworking of the first such break-off in Apollonius’ poem, which occurs precisely within the Lemnian episode: !kk± t¸ l¼hour AQhak¸dey wqei¾ le digmej´yr !coqe¼eim ;

(Arg. 1.648 – 9)

‘But why should I give a complete account of the stories of Aithalides?’

Whereas Apollonius breaks off in order to return to ‘the main story’, Orpheus decides to dispense with the whole pok»r kºcor, ‘long tale’, of the model text, a prolixity which consists not merely in the very length of the Apollonian episode, but also in its diversity and digressiveness (the fate of Hypsipyle’s father, the assembly at Lemnos, the ekphrasis of Jason’s cloak with its included mythic stories, the nuanced exchanges between Jason and Hypsipyle etc.); here really was a challenge for the epitomator, but Orpheus simply sees no point in the literary game. The decision to get in and out of Lemnos as quickly as possible may, of course, be connected with the narrator’s notorious rejection of the

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love of women (a rejection which ultimately cost him his life);23 be that as it may, Orpheus brilliantly uses erotic language in vv. 481 – 3 to explain how the ‘magic’ powers of his music were more potently seductive than the charms of the women.24 At vv. 858 – 9 Orpheus introduces a summary of (roughly) the events of Book 3 and the first part of Book 4 of Apollonius’ Argonautica: mOm d´ soi, § Lousa?e, paqadqol²dgm !coqe¼sy oX² peq aQmºloqoi Lim¼ai p²hom Ad’ fs’ 5qenam·

‘Now, Musaios, I shall give you a summary account of all which the illfated Minyans did and suffered.’

The language of v.859 picks the words of Odysseus to Demodocus, in which the hero describes the subject of the bard’s poetry: ûAwai_m oWtom !e¸deir fss’ 5qnam t’ 5pahºm te ja· fss’ 1lºcgsam ûAwaio¸

(Od. 8.489 – 90)

‘You sing of the fate of the Achaeans, all that they did and suffered, and all the labours of the Achaeans.’

Odysseus’ words function almost as a definition of (Iliadic) epic, as is clear also from the way in which Apollonius too introduces his own subject : mOm d’ #m 1c½ ceme¶m te ja· oumola luhgsa¸lgm Bq¾ym dokiw/r te pºqour "k¹r fssa t’ 5qenam pkafºlemoi7

(Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.20 – 2)

‘I now shall recount the lineage and names of the heroes, their voyages over the vast sea and all that they achieved on their wanderings.’

As the reference to wandering makes clear, here is the Odyssean, rather than the Iliadic, version of ‘what constitutes epic’ (cf. Od. 1.2 – 4). Orpheus uses similar language again in the third passage to be considered 23 Cf. Vian 1987, 15. This might also explain why Orpheus does not give himself a role at the wedding of Jason and Medea (vv. 1331 – 46; contrast Arg. 4.1159, 1193 – 5). 24 For Orpheus’ reliability as a narrator here cf. Section 4 below.

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under this head, namely the introduction to the brief summary of Argonautic adventures in North Africa and the Mediterranean: 5mha t¸ toi, Lousa?e hegcem´r, 1nacoqe¼sy fss’ 5pahom Limu/er bloO pot· S¼qtim !¶tair, C p_r 1nes²yhem "kipk²cjtoio poqe¸gr, fssa d’ %q’ 1m Jq¶tgi p²hom %kcea tetkg_ter jtk.

(OA 1347 – 50)

‘To what purpose, god-born Mousaios, should I now tell you in detail all that the group of Minyans suffered through the winds at Syrtis, or how they were rescued from their wandering voyage over the sea, and all the pains they endured and suffered at Crete …’

‘Wandering’ and ‘suffering’ tell their own story – it is ‘epic’ with which the narrator here dispenses.25 Moreover, just as vv. 858 – 9 (cited above) had drawn our attention to a major, and very clearly demarcated, episode of the Argonautica, so too v. 1346 ()lpqaj¸ou jºkpoio diapq¶ssousa j´keuha, ‘[the Argo] cutting its path through the gulf of Ambracia’), immediately before the apostrophe to Mousaios, picks up Arg. 4.1228 ( jºkpom 1p¾mulom ûAlbqaji¶ym, ‘the gulf named for the Ambracians’), which immediately precedes the ‘magical’ journey to Syrtis (Arg. 4.1229 ff). This latter shift in Apollonius’ Argonauts’ fortunes had been clearly marked as a new and major episode by echoes of Od. 9.80 ff, the beginning of Odysseus’ adventures (losing the Peloponnese, nine days of drifting caused by akoo¸ northerly winds etc.), and m|stor in Arg. 4.1235 had marked that passage generically.26 Thus in both cases, Orpheus’ rhetorical address to Mousaios marks the radical curtailment of a well-defined and complex episode in the model text, an episode which itself almost constitutes a mini-epic. The language I have been tracing could of course be used of any complex narrative, not just ‘epic’ poetry, though it is tempting to believe that when Xenophon of Ephesus’ characters set up at the end of the Ephesiaka a graphe27 p²mtym fsa te 5pahom ja· fsa 5dqasam, ‘of all they had suffered and done’, the ‘epic’ heritage of the novel resonates strongly. Perhaps, however, the most famous use of such language is in fact to differentiate poetry from history: at Poetics 1451b 6 – 11 Aristotle characterises the historical mode as t¹ jah’ 6jastom [k´ceim], t¸ 25 For such language cf. also Clare 2002, Chapter 1. 26 Cf. in general Knight 1995, 125, 146 – 7. 27 I take this to be a written record, rather than a painting.

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ûAkjibi²dgr 5pqanem C t¸ 5pahem, ‘giving a detailed account of what Alcibiades did or what he suffered’, whereas poetry pursues ‘the general’. Aristotle’s view of what constitutes epic and tragic ‘poetry’ was of course not universally shared, but epic poets seem at least to have used the language, with certain shifts of meaning, of both elements of his definition of history (namely, a detailed account jah’ 6jastom and an account of ‘doing and suffering’) as part of their own sense of genre, a fact which is not without interest for the history of the relations between these two narrative forms. Later poets found this language, of course, already waiting in the Homeric texts. Thus, whereas Homer’s Sirens tempt Odysseus with their knowledge of ‘all the sufferings (fsa … lºcgsam) of the Greeks and the Trojans at broad Troy through the will of the gods’ (Od. 12.189 – 90), i. e. of the Iliadic epic tradition, Apollonius’ Libyan ‘heroines’ tell Jason that they know of the epic through which he is currently living:28 Udlem 1poiwol´mour wq¼seom d´qor7 Udlem 6jasta rlet´qym jal²tym, fs’ 1p· whom¹r fssa t’ 1v’ rcqµm pkafºlemoi jat± pºmtom rp´qbia 5qca j²leshe

(Arg. 4.1319 – 21)

‘We know that you went to gain the golden fleece; we know every detail of all your sufferings, all the extraordinary things you have endured on land and sea in your wanderings over the ocean.’

Here the generic signals, ‘labours, wandering etc.’, are very clear, and it seems likely that 6jasta (1319) is to be added to the list of such signals. So too, at 4.730 ff Medea tells her aunt (in Colchian!) the epic story so far, and the poet’s account of this is again couched in the language I have been tracing: B d’ %qa t/i t± 6jasta dieiqol´mgi jat´kene, Jokw¸da c/qum Re?sa, baq¼vqomor AQ¶tao jo¼qg leikiw¸yr, Al³m stºkom Ad³ jeke¼hour Bq¾ym, fsa t’ !lv· hoo?r 1lºcgsam !´hkoir, ¦r t’ !pomºsvim %kunem rp´qbia de¸lata patq¹r s»m pais·m Vq¸noio. vºmom d’ !k´eimem 1mispe?m )x¼qtou, tµm d’ ou ti mºyi k²hem7

(Arg. 4.730 – 6)

28 Cf. Hunter 1993, 126.

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‘In reply to her detailed questions the daughter of cruel-minded Aietes gave a full and gentle response in the Colchian language. She told of the expedition and the heroes’ travels, of all their efforts in the tough challenges, how her anguished sister had persuaded her to act falsely, and how she had fled away with the sons of Phrixos from fear of her father’s violence. Of the murder of Apsyrtos she did not speak, but Circe’s mind was not deceived.’

t± 6jasta (Arg. 4.730) does not merely prepare for Medea’s silence

about her brother’s death, but – together with the language of suffering – identifies her re-telling of ‘epic’ for what it is; we may compare the introduction to Odysseus’ summary to Penelope of what he knows of the Odyssey: aqt±q b diocemµr ûOduse»r fsa j¶de’ 5hgjem !mhq¾poir fsa t’ aqt¹r aif¼sar 1lºcgse, p²mt’ 5kec’7 B d’ %qa t´qpet’ !jo¼ous’, oqd´ oR vpmor p?ptem 1p· bkev²qoisi p²qor jatak´nai ûpamta.

(Od. 23.306 – 9)

‘Noble Odysseus gave her a full account of all the troubles he had caused men and all that he himself had grievously endured; she took delight as she listened, and sleep did not come over her eyes until he had related everything in order.’

In the other epic summary of the Argonautica, as Jason and Lykos ‘delight their hearts with words (5pessim)’ (2.761), Jason tells his host 2ne¸gr ‘in sequence’ (2.771) of the events so far, including (in an obvious reference to the ‘Catalogue’) ‘the family and name of each (2j²stou) of his companions’ (2.762 – 3); here too a ‘rhetoric of completeness’ may be associated with the generic sense of ‘epic’,29 as it very clearly is already in one of the Homeric models for Lykos’ reception of the Argonauts, Odysseus’ stay with Aiolos: l/ma d³ p²mta v¸kei le ja· 1neq´eimem 6jasta, ]kiom ûAqce¸ym te m´ar ja· mºstom ûAwai_m7 ja· l³m 1c½ t_i p²mta jat± lo?qam jat´kena.

(Od. 10.14 – 16)

29 For the ‘rhetoric of completeness’ as a way in which technical handbooks distinguished themselves from ‘didactic poetry’ cf. my remarks in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004, 233 – 5.

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‘For a whole month he entertained me and enquired about every detail – Troy, and the Argive ships, and the Achaeans’ homeward voyage. I gave him a full account in due order.’

A particularly striking example of such language occurs as Triphiodorus decides to bring his ‘swift song’ (v. 5) of Troy’s final hours to a close: p÷sam d’ oqj #m 5cyce lºhou w¼sim !e¸saili jqim²lemor t± 6jasta ja· %kcea mujt¹r 1je¸mgr. Lous²ym fde lºwhor7 1c½ d’ û peq Vppom 1k²ssy t´qlator !lvi´kissam 1pixa¼ousam !oid¶m.

(Triphiodorus, Capture of Troy 664 – 7)

‘I could not tell of the whole flood of carnage, telling in complete detail the sufferings of that night. That is a labour for the Muses. For myself, I am guiding my song, like a racing horse, very close to the finish.’

Homer had called upon the Muses’ help immediately before the vast undertaking of the Catalogue (Il. 2.484 – 93), but Triphiodorus abandons the whole epic business to the Muses: lºwhor wittily replaces lOhor in Apollonius’ ‘apology’ at 4.1381 for the story of how the Argonauts carried their ship on their shoulders, Lous²ym fde lOhor, ‘this is the Muses’ story’, and suggests the poet’s distaste for a ‘long epic’, in which the poet must ‘labour’ as long as his characters. Whereas we first read vv. 664 – 5, ‘I could not tell of the whole flood of carnage, telling in complete detail the sufferings of that night’, as referring to the poet’s incapacity (cf. Il. 2.488, picked up by Triphiodorus 664), what follows shows that this poet is not incapable, simply unwilling.30 The generic consciousness of an ‘epyllion’ writer is here overtly on show, and I hope to have suggested that the abbreviating poet of OA shares something of this self-knowledge.

4. The language of epic ‘labour’ appears for the first time in OA as Orpheus responds to Jason’s request: t¹m l³m 1c½ l¼hoisim !leibºlemor pqos´eipom7 “AQsom¸dg, t¸ le taOta paqaiv²lemor 1qee¸meir,

30 For further epic (and other) parallels to these verses cf. the notes in the Budé edition of Triphiodorus.

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evqa jem 1r Jºkwour Lim¼air 1pi¶qamor 5khy, mg· s»m eqs´klyi pke¼sar 1p· oUmopa pºmtom ; Edg c²q loi ûkir jal²tym, ûkir 5pketo lºwhym, ¢r Rjºlgm 1p· ca?am !pe¸qitom Ad³ pºkgar, AQc¼ptyi Kib¼gi te bqoto?r !m± h´svata va¸mym. ja¸ l’ !p’ !kgte¸gr te ja· 1n oUstqou 1s²yse l¶tgq Blet´qg, ja¸ N’ eQr dºlom Ecacem "lºm, evqa t´kor ham²toio j¸wy let± c¶qai kucq_i.”

100

(OA 97 – 105)

‘In response I addressed him as follows: “Son of Aison, why do you make this beseeching request of me, that I should travel to Colchis as a help for the Minyans, sailing in your sturdy boat over the wine-dark sea? Already I have enough of labours, enough of toils! I travelled over the boundless earth and its cities, revealing oracles to men in both Egypt and Libya. My mother rescued me from wandering and from the gadfly and brought me to my home, so that I might die during grim old age.”’

Here Orpheus fashions himself as an Odysseus, now finished with ‘labours’ and ‘wandering’ and ready to meet a death in old age (cf. Od. 11.135 – 6); such self-fashioning shows how completely Orpheus has absorbed his new rôle as epic poet. The address to Jason echoes31 Odysseus’ initial refusal to take part in the Phaeacian games: t¹m d’ !paleibºlemor pqos´vg pok¼lgtir ûOdusse¼r7 “Kaod²la, t¸ le taOta jeke¼ete jeqtol´omter ; j¶de² loi ja· l÷kkom 1m· vqes·m E peq %ehkoi, dr pq·m l³m l²ka pokk± p²hom ja· pokk± lºcgsa, mOm d³ leh’ rlet´qgi !coq/i mºstoio wat¸fym Hlai, kissºlemor basik/² te p²mta te d/lom.” Od. 8.152 – 57)

‘Cunning Odysseus addressed him in reply: “Laodamas, why do you urge me to this with abusive words? Griefs, not games, are what concerns my heart. Previously I suffered very much and laboured greatly, and now I sit in the midst of your gathering, making my request of the king and the whole people.”’

Odysseus is an epic hero ‘in retirement’; echoes of the proem (cf. 1.1 – 4) 32 make that clear, to the audience, if not to Laodamas.33 31 Cf. Sánchez Ortiz 1996, 198 – 9. 32 Thus pºkgar at OA 101 perhaps picks up %stea at Od. 1.3. 33 That the proem of the Odyssey may be taken only to introduce the story of Odysseus’ wanderings, not of his adventures when back on Ithaca, is important for the generic significance of ‘wandering’.

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So too, Orpheus is dragged out of ‘retirement’ to take part in an epic venture and become thereby an epic poet. The turn to epic in ‘old age’ (itself, of course, a very flexible concept) 34 finds its closest parallels in some of the language of Roman recusatio poetry: thus Propertius, with very obvious disingenuousness, aetas prima canat Veneres, extrema tumultus ‘let my youth sing of love-making, my old age of wars’ (2.10.7). It may, therefore, be that this idea is simply part of the shift from didactic to narrative epic, but if, as with Virgil, epic occupies both the final poetic stage of a poet’s life and the final years of his life tout court, then it is indeed reasonable enough to associate epic with ‘old age’.35 Ancient views of Homer do not really offer much parallel material, though his opera minora were naturally placed chronologically earlier than the major poems.36 Of some relevance, however, to the OA may be the famous assessment of the Odyssey in ‘Longinus’, On the Sublime: ‘In the Odyssey … Homer demonstrates that when a great mind begins to decline, a love of story-telling characterizes its old age. We can tell that the Odyssey … was his second work from various considerations … The Odyssey is simply an epilogue to the Iliad … most of the Odyssey consists of narrative, which is characteristic of old age. Homer in the Odyssey may be compared to the setting sun: the size remains without the force … We see greatness on the ebb … Homer is lost in the realm of the fabulous and incredible (1m to?r luh¾desi ja· !p¸stoir pk²mor) … I am speaking of old age – but it is the old age of a Homer. The point about all these stories is that the mythical element in them predominates over the realistic.’ (De subl. 9.11 – 14, trans. D.A. Russell)

As the subject of the Odyssey follows after that of the Iliad, so both epic characters and epic poets tend to ‘fictional story-telling’ in old age; Homer is like his own Odysseus, ‘wandering’ amidst marvels,37 and Orpheus, to whom redounds the kleos of both poet and character (cf. OA 3), can hardly escape such a critical fusion. The move from ‘didactic’ to ‘epic’ is analogous to the move from the Iliad to the ‘mythical’ Odyssey. 38 34 Cf., e. g., Cameron 1995, 175 – 81. 35 Bernsdorff 1999, 73 n. 36 rightly raises the question of whether this idea lies behind Call. fr. 1. 5 – 6, or at least certain ‘readings’ of that passage. 36 Cf. Bernsdorff 1999, 72. 37 Text and interpretation here are admittedly very uncertain, cf. Russell ad loc. 38 That the Iliad was indeed far more ‘didactic’ than the Odyssey, i. e. had a much more prominent rôle in ancient education, is clearly relevant here, cf., e. g., Morgan 1998, 105 – 11, Cribiore 2001, 194 – 7.

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In the opening invocation to Apollo, Orpheus asks the god for a ‘true’ utterance (OA 4, cited above p. 149).39 This version of the traditional appeal is seen by Giangrande40 as preparing the reader (perhaps paradoxically) to hear ‘wondrous, incredible tales … which are nevertheless true’: to insist on truth is, as Lucian knew, to advertise fiction. Such an interpretation fits well with the Odyssean strain of the poem and the self-consciousness which I have been teasing out. Nevertheless, the appeal to truth must, at least in retrospect, acquire significance in the light of the relationship between OA and Apollonius’ Argonautica.41 Where Orpheus’ account differs from that of Apollonius, he (and his creating poet) knows that we will know; when, for example, Orpheus explains that it was his intervention that brought the Lemnian dalliance to an end, we have another account, Apollonius’, which flatly contradicts this one. To explain, as is often done,42 that the poem presents itself as an ‘archaic’ composition pre-dating the Argonautica looks only to its form, not to the business of how it is to be read; it would seem, in any case, that the poet does not set great store by attempting to conceal his relationship with the Hellenistic epic.43 At the heart of such problems lies (again) the apparently random fluctuations of how the OA uses (or does not use) its principal model; entirely free composition seems to jostle cheek-by-jowl with very close paraphrase. In considering this matter, critics have been a little too trusting of Orpheus as narrator (perhaps lulled by their general low opinion of the poem), or at least have not fully taken on board his Odyssean character. Odysseus as !kaf¾m, the character who lays claim to personal achievements and qualities which are not his, is a familiar ‘reading’ of Odysseus, and Orpheus lays claim to this mantle too. When there is a clash of authority, we may of course simply note to ourselves that all poets are liars and that the Argonautic expedition is ‘pure fiction’ anyway, so that the question of ‘who is correct?’ does not arise. Such an approach is true at the scholastic level, but untrue to the importance ancient poets ascribed to models and authorities and to the mode of reading and interpretation which OA plainly implies.

39 40 41 42 43

The sense is clear, though the text at the end of the verse is uncertain. Giangrande 1993, 156. Cf. Luiselli 1993, 305. Cf., e. g., R. Keydell, RE 18.1333 – 4. Cf. Vian 1987, 21, Luiselli 1993, 305.

37. Generic consciousness in the Orphic Argonautica?

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When we do enter the spirit of agonistic reading which the OA establishes, we may be tempted always to prefer Apollonius’ account to that of Orpheus, for Apollonius came first and has of course no personal stake in the matter; Apollonius himself was not, in the strict sense, an Argonaut. Nevertheless, we cannot ever be sure, and it is precisely Orpheus’ apparently chaotic use of his model which creates that doubt: when some details match Apollonius exactly, we are clearly not dealing with an absurd ‘pack of lies’. As Strabo (and doubtless others) observed, the most plausible way of lying is to mix in some truth (Strabo 1.2.9). It is the close, though partial, use of Apollonius which bestows authority upon the whole of Orpheus’ account and offers whatever claims to credibility his differences from Apollonius might have; our doubts about his alazoneia arise precisely from the ‘authority’ which he has nested in the text. So too, the fact, which regularly surprises critics,44 that Orpheus is not more central to the poem than he actually is, that we are not offered one Orpheus-centred episode after another and indeed that some incidents of the Argonautica in which Orpheus plays a rôle find no place in OA,45 strengthens our uncertainty: compared to the Argonautica, the OA is certainly written ad maiorem gloriam Orphei – it is after all his magic and his skill which secures the Fleece, the object of the expedition – but this poem is not how we would expect a ‘braggart Orpheus’ to magnify his own rôle, for it seems too understated for that. The OA is thus to be seen as a brilliant exercise, not in undermining the authority of the past, but in how to create one’s own literary space when confronted with that solid wall of authority. There is, however, at least one reader who will be taken in completely and who will not (be able to) play Orpheus’ intertextual and Odyssean game. Mousaios, the devoted Orphic pupil, is unlikely to have read the Argonautica: these are events of which Orpheus has never spoken before (OA 8 – 9, 49), a new kind of mystery now revealed to the young man’s eager ears. Mousaios has no ‘control’ text or past experience by which to judge whether what he hears is true, ‘like truth’, or mythos, pure and simple: his saving grace is that he has 44 Cf., e. g., Vian 1987, 14 – 15. 45 The most striking case is perhaps the omission of Orpheus’ ‘hymn’ to Apollo at Thynias (cf. 714), but OA says nothing of this epiphany ( just as, indeed, Apollo is all but written out of the poem after the opening invocation – perhaps a revenge for his rôle (v. 9) in Orpheus’ earlier ‘madness’; for the exceptions cf. 382, 1299, 1356).

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no reason or need to worry about such academic distinctions, but can listen to the ‘truth’ of ‘his master’s voice’ with a heart unsullied by worry. We, however, cannot escape the literary past.

Bibliography Agosti, G. 1997. “P.Oxy. 3537r: etopea acrostica su Esiodo”, Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 119: 1 – 5. Bernsdorff, H. 1999. “Hesiod, ein zweiter Vergil? (Bemerkungen zu P.Oxy.3537R, 3 – 28)” in S. Döpp (ed.), Antike Rhetorik und ihre Rezeption (Stuttgart) 63 – 83. Breed, B.W. 2000. “Silenus and the imago uocis in Eclogue 6”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100: 327 – 39. Cameron, A. 1995. Callimachus and his Critics. Princeton. Clare, R. J. 2002. The Path of the Argo. Cambridge. Cribiore, R. 2001. Gymnastics of the Mind. Princeton. Effe, B. 1977. Dichtung und Lehre. Munich. Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge Giangrande, G. 1993 “Poetic programmes in the Orphic corpus”, Habis 24: 147 – 58. Hunter, R. 1993 The Argonautica of Apollonius. Literary Studies. Cambridge. Kern, O. 1922. Orphicorum Fragmenta. Berlin. Knight, V. 1995. The Renewal of Epic. Responses to Homer in the Argonautica of Apollonius. Leiden. Koster, S. 1970. Antike Epostheorien. Wiesbaden. Luiselli, R. 1993. “Contributo all’interpretazione delle Argonautiche orfiche: studio sul proemio” in A. Masaracchia (ed.), Orfeo e l’orfismo (Rome) 265 – 307. Morgan, T. 1998. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge. Nelis, D. 2005. “The Orphic Argonautica and the epic tradition” in M. Paschalis (ed.), Roman and Greek Imperial Epic (Rethymnon) 169 – 92. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1992. The Poetics of Imitation. Cambridge. Sánchez Ortiz de Landaluce, M. 1996. Estudios sobre las Argonuticas rficas. Amsterdam. Venzke, H. 1941. Die orphischen Argonautika in ihrem Verhltnis zu Apollonios Rhodios. Berlin. Vian, F. 1987. Les Argonautiques Orphiques. Paris. West, M. L. 1983 The Orphic Poems. Oxford.

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Addendum n.13 On POxy 3537 see now G. W. Most, ‘Two Hesiodic papyri’ in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), Esiodo: cent’anni di papiri (Florence 2008) 55 – 70.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius* That Callimachus and, particularly, Apollonius of Rhodes were important models and sources for Dionysius Periegetes is well known.1 Elsewhere I have considered Dionysius’ intellectual debt to the didactic example which these poets offered2, but here I wish to illustrate the mimetic technique of the Periegesis by a few examples chosen from Dionysius’ use of these two poets, in the hope that this brief essay may act as a stimulus towards the full-scale treatment which the subject deserves. In the first section I consider “allusion” and textual borrowing, and Section 2 discusses the most notable and familiar feature of Dionysius’ style.

1. In considering Dionysius’ use of earlier poetry we must be constantly aware of how much Hellenistic poetry we have lost, and – just as importantly – try to exploit that awareness in our reading, not just pay lip-service to it. Moreover, although a specific model in surviving poetry for a particular passage or phrase is often very obvious, both the nature of our evidence and Dionysius’ mosaic-like technique of working mean that we must simply accept that there will be many places where we can do little more than collect “parallel passages” from earlier poetry to try to gauge what Dionysius is up to, without assuming a specific re-

* 1

2

D. Accorinti and P. Chuvin (eds.), Des Gants Dionysos. Mlanges offerts F. Vian (Alessandria 2003) 343 – 56 Cf. Schneider 1882, pp. 21 – 24, Kuiper 1896, Index, s.v. Dionysius Periegetes, Bernays 1905, pp. 34 – 46; for echoes of Callimachus and Apollonius, the “fontes” in Tsavari’s edition (Ioannina 1990) are very largely derived from Schneider. A new consideration of Dionysius’ poetic echoes is a major desideratum for the study of this poet. For Apollonius’ influence in imperial epic more generally cf. Vian 2001. Cf. this volume 718 – 34.

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lationship of mimesis between Dionysius and any of these passages.3 Furthermore, it is clear that Dionysius’ interest in the original context of the texts he echoes varies very widely. Thus, for example, it would seem obvious that when, in the course of his fervent celebration of Rome, he writes (v. 355) U~lgm til^essam, 1l_m l]cam oWjom !m\jtym,

he has deliberately chosen a model from the “epilogue” of Callimachus’ Aitia, celebrating the Ptolemaic royal house: wa?qe, FeO, l]ca ja· s}, s\y d’ [fko]m oWjom !m\jtym.

(fr. 112.8) 4

This politically charged echo takes its place in the long history of how Rome and her rulers appropriated, in order to surpass, the language and ideas of Alexandrian encomium and self-projection.5 Elsewhere, however, we may doubt whether an original context resonates so strongly, if at all. One mode of Dionysian imitation is well illustrated by his obvious borrowing from Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus in the account of Arcadia: j±d d³ l]sgm m/som jo_kgm wh|ma maiet\ousim )qj\der )pidam/er rp¹ sjopiµm 9qul\mhou, 5mha L]kar, fhi Jq÷hir, Vma N]ei rcq¹r Y\ym, Hwi ja· ¡c}cior lgj}metai vdasi K\dym.

415

(Dion. Per. 414 – 417)

K\dym !kk’ oupy l]car 5qqeem oqd’ 9q}lamhor, keuj|tator potal_m, 5ti d’ %bqowor Gem ûpasa )fgm_r· l]kkem d³ l\k’ euudqor jak]eshai awtir . 1pe· tgl|sde, U]g fte k}sato l_tqgm, G pokk±r 1v}peqhe saqym_dar rcq¹r Y\ym Eeiqem, pokk±r d³ L]kar ¥jwgsem "l\nar, pokk± d³ Jaq_ymor %my dieqoO peq 1|mtor Qkuo»r 1b\komto jim~peta, m_sseto d’ !m^q pef¹r rp³q Jq÷h_m te pok}sti|m te Let~pgm dixak]or· t¹ d³ pokk¹m vdyq rp¹ poss·m 5jeito.

20

25

(Call., H. 1.18 – 27)

3 4 5

The best guide to many of these issues is the second chapter of S. Hinds, Allusion and Intertext, Cambridge 1998. Cf. Pfeiffer ad loc. Cf., e. g., Hunter 2001.

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Dionysius’ extraordinary pattern of four different prepositions and conjunctions (5mha … fhi … Vma … Hwi) seems not merely to mimic the plenitude of the local rivers, but also proudly to assert and advertise the poet’s power to influence and control. Of the seven Arcadian rivers of the Hymn, Dionysius re-uses four, and another, the Erymanthos, is replaced by the homonymous mountain-range; the first word (and name) of Callimachus’ catalogue, “Ladon”, becomes the last word (and name) of Dionysius’, but the Callimachean ordering is otherwise abandoned. Other “fragments” of the original are, however, preserved: rcq¹r Y\ym remains a verse-end, and ¡c}cior moves from the “childbed of Rheia” to the Iaon. The Arcadians are )pidam/er, as in v. 14 of the Hymn, but )qj\der )pidam/er in fact comes from 4.263 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, where it ends, rather than as in Dionysius begins, the verse. The assertion of difference through a borrowing from a poet other than the principal model is in fact a very common Dionysian technique. Further questions, however, arise in connection with the present example: Did Dionysius etymologise )pidam/er as “non-drinkers”, a label thus paradoxically (in)appropriate to a catalogue of rivers, as in Callimachus it suits people for whom the rivers did not yet flow? 6 Did Dionysius insert the Apollonian phrase into an imitation of Callimachus because he took Apollonius to be an earlier imitator of this same Callimachean passage? For us, the Hymn to Zeus is all but certainly considerably earlier than Book 4 of the Argonautica, but was it so, and was the matter important, for Dionysius? I see no way of answering these questions. Callimachus’ description of the birth of Apollo on Delos in the Hymn to Delos is exploited more than once by Dionysius. I begin with vv. 1056 – 1062 on the wealth of Persia: loOmoi c\q t’ )s_gr basike}tatom 5hmor 5wousi, loOmoi d’ %spetom ekbom 1m· lec\qoisim 5hemto, bpp|te Lgiom_gm ja· S\qdiar 1nak\panam. wq}se\ toi je_mym l³m 1p· wqoz` te}wea vyt_m, wq}sea d’ Rppe_oisim 1p· stol\tessi wakim\, wqus_i d’ !lv· p|dessim 1josl^samto p]dika . t|ssor c±q svisim ekbor !pe_qitor.

1060

(Dion. Per. 1056 – 1062)

6

For the etymology cf. Eustathius on v. 414, Hopkinson 1984, pp. 141 – 143.

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Although it might be thought that the polyptotic anaphora of wqus|r in vv. 1059 – 1062 need not be indebted to the even more extended example of the same phenomenon at Call., H. 4.260 – 264, the immediately preceding mention of Maionia (v. 1058) makes it very likely that Dionysius did indeed have this passage of Callimachus in mind, cf. H. 4.249 – 250 j}jmoi … / Lgi|miom Pajtyk¹m 1jujk~samto kip|mter, and the case will, I think, be strengthened by the other instances of imitation of this passage. In vv. 525 – 532 Dionysius comes to the Cyclades and the Sporades, and the passage is marked by two striking images which may in part owe their place in the poem to the fact that we are here in the last part of the second acrostic (EQLGSEPIADQIAMO£), where Dionysius is both constrained by the need to begin verses with the correct sequence of letters and also free to “indulge” himself creatively more than usual, as witness the simile of the snake at vv. 123 – 125 in the first acrostic.7 aT d’ )s_gr pq~tgm aWsam k\wom, !lv·r 1oOsai D/kom 1jujk~samto, ja· oumola Jujk\der eQs_ . N}sia d’ )p|kkymi woqo»r !m\cousim ûpasai, Rstal]mou ckujeqoO m]om eUaqor, ewt’ 1m eqessim !mhq~pym !p\meuhe j}ei kic}vymor !gd~m. m/soi d’ 2ne_gr Spoq\der peq· palva_mousim oXom ft’ !mev]koio di’ A]qor eUdetai %stqa, rcq± m]vg jqaipmo?o bigsal]mou boq]ao.

525

530

(Dion. Per. 525 – 532)

V. 526 derives from Call. H. 4.300 – 301, )steq_g hu|essa, s³ l³m peq_ t’ !lv_ te m/soi / j}jkom 1poi^samto, and v. 527 comes from v. 279 of the Hymn, p÷sai d³ woqo»r !m\cousi p|kger. In Dionysius’ universe it is no surprise that Delos and the Cyclades are cited from their celebration in the greatest of Hellenistic poets, and that Callimachus’ implicit etymological games (cf. v. 198, as well as vv. 300 – 301) are now made explicit; for the image of the nightingale, however, which has here perhaps replaced the swans of the Callimachean poem, Dionysius’ source is the famous simile of the nightingale which Homer places in Penelope’s mouth in the nineteenth Book of the Odyssey: ¢r d’ fte Pamdaq]ou jo}qg, wkyqg;r !gd~m, jak¹m !e_dgisim 5aqor m]om Rstal]moio, demdq]ym 1m pet\koisi jahefol]mg pujimo?sim,

7

Cf. Reeve 1996 – 1997.

520

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F te hal± tqyp_sa w]ei pokugw]a vym^m, pa?d’ akovuqol]mg ]tukom v_kom, fm pote wakj_i jte?me di’ !vqad_ar, joOqom F^hoio %majtor, ¢r ja· 1lo· d_wa hul¹r aq~qetai jtk.

(Od. 19.518 – 524)

Whether in Dionysius kic}vymor !gd~m is an “inserted” fragment of Theocritus (cf. 12.7 – 8) may be debated, but j}ei (v. 529) is remarkable enough to tempt the thought of a “lost source” (not always a sign of despair). At issue perhaps is less the correctness of Dionysius’ ornithology (cf. Arist., HA 5.542b 26 – 27, 8.632b 20 – 27) or the rare application of jue?m / j}eim to a bird than surprise at the absence of an explicit reference to the most famous element of the “nightingale in spring” topos, namely the bird’s lament.8 The Sporades are honoured with a striking and rare image: they gleam visibly like stars after the wind has cleared the sky of clouds. Behind this image perhaps lurk the famous simile of Iliad 8.555 – 561 in which the Trojan campfires are compared to the stars on a clear night and the related image of a bright night after Zeus has cleared the clouds at Iliad 16.297 – 300, but “island stars” are found twice in Pindar: at Paean 125 – 6 Aegina is the “bright star of Zeus Hellanios”, and in the Gymn to Zeus (fr. 33c.5 – 6) “far-seen star of the dark earth” is the name given by the gods to the island which men call Delos.9 Whether or not the second passage contains an allusion to Delos’ earlier name of Asterie,10 Callimachus certainly explains clearly the earlier name at vv. 36 – 38 of the Hymn: oumola d’ Gm toi )steq_g t¹ pakai|m, 1pe· bah»m Fkao t\vqom oqqam|hem ve}cousa Di¹r c\lom !st]qi Usg.

(Call., H. 4.36 – 38)

8 For the topos cf., e. g., Bulloch on Call., H. 5.94 – 95. Emendation ( !we?m might be suggested by Homeric Hymn to Pan 17 – 18 with Ilgen’s interpretation) is, in these circumstances, an unattractive option. Neil Hopkinson observes that j}eim might link the nightingale to Apollo’s birth on Delos. A formal model for vv. 528 – 529 might be sought in Hes., fr. 204.129 – 130 M.-W., ¦qgi 1m eQaqim/i, fte t’ %tqiwor ouqesi t_jtei / ca_gr 1m jeuhl_mi tq_tyi 5tei tq_a t]jma. 9 The latter passage was noted in connection with Dion. Per. 531 by Reeve 1996 – 1997, p. 250, who suggests that the “star passage” is an allusion to Aratus, who also included an acrostic in the Phainomena. 10 Cf., e. g., Rutherford 2001, p. 371.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

705

We may therefore speculate that the influence of the Callimachean Hymn has spread from the Cyclades to the neighbouring Sporades. One further text must, however, be brought into play. In the Argonautica, one of Dionysius’ principal model texts, the Sporades are mentioned at the end of the fourth Book, when Apollo reveals to the Argonauts the island of Anaphe, which appears to them as a bright gleam (aUckg) through the impenetrably black darkness in which they had found themselves, a darkness broken by “no stars and no bright rays of the moon” (4.1696 – 1697). For Dionysius all the Sporades shine out like stars, but it may have been the little “Revealed Island” which gave him the clue. The final passage to be considered in this connection is the description of the Ionian coast at vv. 826 – 838: t\ym d’ !lvot]qym ce boqeiot]qgm 1s_doio paqak_gm =vesom, lec\kgm p|kim Yowea_qgr, 5mha he/i pote mg¹m )lafom_der tet}jomto pq]lmyi 5mi ptek]gr, peqi~siom !mdq\si haOla. Lgiom_g d’ 1p· t/isim 1p’ !mtok_gm tet\mustai Tl~kyi rp’ Amel|emti, t|hem Pajtyk¹r bde}ym wqus¹m bloO d_mgisim 1vekj|lemor jekaq}fei . toO d’ #m 1p· pkeuq/isi jah^lemor eUaqor ¦qgi j}jmym eQsa_oir kicuqµm epa, to_ te jah’ vdyq 5mha ja· 5mha m]lomtai !enol]mgr 5ti po_gr· pokko· c±q keil_mer 1m )s_di tgkeh\ousim, 5nowa d’ %l ped_om Lai\mdqiom, 5mha JaLstqou Fsuwa pavk\fomtor 1piqq]ei !cka¹m vdyq.

830

835

(Dion. Per. 826 – 838)

The description of the temple at Ephesus is a good illustration of Dionysius’ technique, for his three-verse description (vv. 827 – 829) is a close reworking, with an obvious striving after uariatio, of three verses of Callimachus’ Hymn to Artemis: so· ja· )lafom_der pok]lou 1pihul^teiqai 1m jote paqqak_gi 9v]syi bq]tar Rdq}samto vgc_i rp¹ pq]lmyi, t]kesem d] toi Req¹m Zpp~.

(Call. H. 3.237 – 239)

The most striking change here is the substitution of pq]lmyi 5mi ptek]gr for Callimachus’ vgc_i rp¹ pq]lmyi, a change which simplifies Calli-

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machus’ mannered and difficult syntax,11 but seems also a deliberate correction of the model. Ptek]a was believed to be an ancient name for Ephesos,12 and so this may be a rare case where Dionysius uses a learnedly allusive aetiology, without explicitly signalling it as such. It must have given him enormous pleasure to “out-Callimachus” the master himself within an imitation of that master. The second half of v. 829 seems to be another example of Dionysius’ signature technique of the inclusion of a “fragment” of one poet within the reworking of another, cf. Ap. Rh., Arg. 1.1307 h\lbor peqi~siom !mdq\si ke}sseim (of the “waving” tombs of the Boreads), 4.1430 h\lbor peqi~siom (the Hesperides);13 whether it is relevant that a ptek]g is involved in the latter passage (cf. 4.1427), I do not know. With Maeonia, the Paktolos, and swans we return to Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, vv. 249 – 252: B l³m 5vg· j}jmoi d³ he¹m l]kpomter !oido_ Lgi|miom Pajtyk¹m 1jujk~samto kip|mter 2bdol\jir peq· D/kom, 1p^eisam d³ kowe_gi Lous\ym eqmiher, !oid|tatoi petegm_m.

250

(Call. H. 4.249 – 252)

Although Callimachus does not explicitly use the very common idea of the Paktolos as a “golden” river,14 we ought perhaps to feel it activated by the following stress on the gold which attended Apollo’s birth (vv. 260 – 264);15 in other words, our initial puzzlement as to why the Paktolos is chosen is subsequently erased. Other than in Callimachus and Dionysius, swans are associated with the Paktolos only at Arg. 4.1300 – 1304: C fte jak± m\omtor 1p’ avq}si Pajtyko?o j}jmoi jim^sysim 2¹m l]kor, !lv· d³ keil½m 2qs^eir bq]letai potalo?| te jak± N]ehqa . ¢r aR 1p· namh±r h]lemai jom_gisim 1he_qar

11 Cf. Bornmann ad loc. 12 Cf. Eustathius on v. 827, S Theocr. 7.65b Wendel, Steph. Byz., s.v. Ptek]a, J. Keil, Ptelea 3, in RE XXIII 2 (1959), c. 1480. 13 The collocation goes back to Od. 16.203 oute ti haul\feim peqi~siom out’ !c\ashai. 14 Cf. J. Keil, Paktolos, in RE XVIII 2 (1942), c. 2439. 15 Cf. above p. 703.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

707

pamm}wiai 1keeim¹m Q^kelom ¡d}qomto.

(Arg. 4.1300 – 1304)

Here, more explicitly than in Callimachus, the repeated stress on the “beauty” of the river and the yellow hair of the young women16 suggest that the poet is indeed mindful of the Paktolos’ most famous association. In both Hellenistic poets, of course, the swans are fully contextualised: in Callimachus by their association with Apollo, and in Apollonius by the association of their song with imminent death. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to believe that one poet has taken the association of swans with the Paktolos from the other, and most would, I think, identify Apollonius as the borrower here. If so, Apollonius has expanded the simple idea of “Maeonian swans” by borrowing, for the second of a pair of similes, from the second simile in the great set of similes which introduces the Homeric Catalogue of Ships: t_m d’, ¦r t’ aqm_hym petegm_m 5hmea pokk\, wgm_m C ceq\mym C j}jmym doukiwode_qym, )s_yi 1m keil_mi Ja{stq_ou !lv· N]ehqa 5mha ja· 5mha pot_mtai !cakk|lema pteq}cessim, jkaccgd¹m pqojahif|mtym, slaqace? d] te keil~m, ¤r t_m 5hmea pokk± me_m %po ja· jkisi\ym 1r ped_om pqow]omto Sjal\mdqiom . aqt±q rp¹ wh½m sleqdak]om jom\bife pod_m aqt_m te ja· Vppym. 5stam d’ 1m keil_mi Sjalamdq_yi !mhel|emti luq_oi, fssa te v}kka ja· %mhea c_metai ¦qgi.

460

465

(Il. 2.459 – 468)

In so doing, Apollonius may be constructing his Callimachean model as itself gesturing towards this Homeric passage, by the familiar technique of “window reference” or “double allusion”.17 Be that as it may, Dionysius has gone one better by including a full-scale rewriting of this Homeric passage,18 which allows him to include not just the Paktolos, from Callimachus and Apollonius, but also the Cayster, which flows into the sea at Ephesos, and where Homer had placed the great flocks of birds; it ought not now to surprise us that, for Dionysius, Maeonia is to be celebrated through its most famous product, the “Maeonian poet” himself. 16 Cf. Livrea ad loc. For other aspects of these verses cf. Reitz 1996, pp. 133 – 135. 17 Cf. e.g, McKeown 1987, pp. 37 – 45. 18 This too may be marked by a “fragment” of another poet, if Fsuwa jawk\fomtor is correctly read in v. 838, cf. Theocr. 6.12.

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Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire

As well as thoroughly re-arranging the Homeric details – rather than the birds “sitting”, the human listener may do so; “spring” moves from a separate image in Homer (the fighters are as many as the flowers in a springtime meadow, Il. 2.467 – 468) etc. – Dionysius also seems to comment on the processes of mimetic uariatio with his observation that “there are many meadows in Asia…”; the innumerability of the Homeric birds and fighters becomes the innumerability of mimetic possibilities: one does not have to limit oneself to the Cayster.19 In turning to Dionysius’ use of Apollonius’ Argonautica, I will focus upon the most obvious example of that debt, namely Dionysius’ version of the Apollonian Phineus’ account of the southern shore of the Black Sea (Arg. 2.345 – 401). Dionysius moves west from Colchis, whereas Phineus, and subsequently the Argonauts, move eastwards towards Colchis, but Dionysius follows the Apollonian Phineus’ order of geography and Pontic tribes almost exactly (in reverse); the differences consist merely of the omission of one tribe (the Sapeires, Arg. 2.395) and a few geographical features, including two which played important roles within the Argonautic plot (Thynias and the Island of Ares).20 The very unusual faithfulness of the imitation of Phineus’ paraplous is precisely marked, and intended to be understood as such, by the one major geographical discrepancy between the two poets. Dionysius tells a version of the story of Sinope which associates her with the Thermodon (vv. 774 – 779); Phineus did not mention Sinope, but a different (though related) version of her story is told in the course of the Argonautic voyage itself (Arg. 2.946 – 961), where she and her city are placed (correctly) well to the west of the Thermodon.21 Dionysius’ variant version of the story of Sinope borrows details not only from Apollonius’ Sinope, but also from the same poet’s account at Arg. 4.566 – 570 of an-

19 Ov., Her. 7.2 associates swans with the Maeander, another major river of the area (cf. Dion. Per. 837). Mineur on Call., H. 4.250 suggested that Callimachus had used the Paktolos as “a mere variation for the Cayster”. This seems unlikely, both in view of the Apollonius passage, and in view of the habitual care Callimachus seems to take over such matters. 20 Also omitted are the “Ankon” (Arg. 2.369 – 370), the “Long Beach” (2.364 – 365), and the Black Headland (2.349). 21 For the various myths cf. Vian, Note complmentaire to Arg. 2.953.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

709

other daughter of Asopos, the girl who gave her name to “Black Corcyra”.22 In re-writing Phineus’ geographical catalogue, Dionysius also raids not only other prose and poetic sources (the description of the entrance to Hades at vv. 788 – 792 is an excellent example), but also the Argonautic voyage itself, to produce a complex and sophisticated mimesis. Whereas Apollonius had offered an elaborate description of the many channels of the Thermodon (2.972 – 984), for Dionysius the river is noteworthy for its precious stones and crystal (vv. 780 – 783), a particular interest of Dionysius; in describing this crystal oX\ te p\wmgm / weileq_gm Dionysius echoes a passage of the Argonautic Black Sea voyage which he had otherwise omitted, namely the description of the cave of Hades: 1j d’ aqt/r eUsy jataj]jkitai Epeiqom d³ jo_kg vpaiha m\pg, Vma te sp]or 5st’ )_dao vkgi ja· p]tqgisim 1pgqev]r, 5mhem !utlµ pgcuk_r, ajqu|emtor !mapme_ousa luwo?o sumew]r, !qcim|essam !e· peqit]tqove p\wmgm, F te lesglbqi|ymtor Qa_metai Aek_oio.

735

(Arg. 2.734 – 739)

It is tempting to speculate that in the brilliant crystal of the Thermodon Dionysius offers a “rationalising” explanation of Apollonius’ paradoxographical “white ice”. A related mimetic technique is seen in Dionysius’ account of the Chalybes, to?r d’ 1p· ja· W\kuber stuvekµm ja· !pgm]a ca?am ma_ousim, loceqoO dedagj|ter 5qca sid^qou, oV Na, baqucdo}poisim 1p’ %jlosim 2stg_ter, oupote pa}omtai jal\tou ja· azf}or aQm/r.

770

(Dion. Per. 768 – 771)

which combines elements of the two Apollonian passages which deal with this tribe: let\ te sluceq~tatoi !mdq_m tqgwe_gm W\kuber ja· !teiq]a ca?am 5womter,

22 Note )syp_da in the same sedes (v. 775, Arg. 4.567), the verse-endings m\ssato w~qgi (v. 776) and m\ssato jo}qgm (Arg. 4.567), and the motif of detention away from the native land (v. 778, Arg. 4.568).

710

Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire

1qcat_mai – to· d’ !lv· sid^qea 5qca l]komtai jtk.

(Arg. 2.374 – 376)

to?si l³m oute bo_m %qotor l]kei oute tir %kkg vutakiµ jaqpo?o lek_vqomor, oqd³ l³m oV ce po_lmar 2qs^emti mol_i 5mi poila_mousim . !kk± sidgqov|qom stuvekµm wh|ma catol]omter §mom !le_bomtai biot^siom. oqd] pot] svim A½r !mt]kkei jal\tym %teq, !kk± jekaim/i kicm}i ja· japm_i j\latom baq»m atke}ousi.

1005

(Arg. 2.1002 – 1008)

Thus, for example, in Dionysius’ phrase stuvekµm ja· !pgm]a ca?am (v. 768), the first adjective comes from Arg. 2.100523 and the second is an “auditory” variation (of a kind to which modern critics should pay more attention) of Apollonius’ !teiq]a (2.375).

2. The most striking stylistic feature of Dionysius’ poem is his fondness for various forms of anaphora, epanalepsis, and repetition. Sometimes the sought-after effect seems easy to discern. Thus at vv. 441 – 443, t_i p\qa Puh_mor hu|em p]dom, Hwi dq\jomtor Dekv}mgr tqip|dessi heoO paqaj]jkitai bkj|r, bkj|r, !peiqes_gisim 1pivq_ssym vok_dessi jtk.

(Dion. Per. 441 – 443)

the repeated bkj|r wraps around the verse-break like the body of the great snake being described, as the curling ivy similarly covers a verse-division at Theocritus 1.29 – 30. At vv. 354 – 355 the anaphoric Tiber literally cuts “lovely Rome” in two, and the verse structure imitates the doubleness of the divided city: H}lbqir 2kiss|lemor jahaq¹m N|om eQr ûka b\kkei, H}lbqir 1uqqe_tgr, potal_m basike}tator %kkym, H}lbqir dr Rleqtµm !pot]lmetai %mdiwa U~lgm,

23 The scholia on Arg. 2.1005 – 1006 make clear that stuvek|r was a much discussed “gloss”.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

U~lgm til^essam, 1l_m l]cam oWjom !m\jtym.

(Dion. Per. 352 – 355) 24

711 355

More commonly, however, such repetitions, particularly when introducing further information about a proper name, seem little more than a stylistic mannerism. A simple and common type may be illustrated from vv. 248 – 250, Al³m fsoi H^bgm 1qijud]a maiet\ousim, H^bgm ¡cuc_gm, 2jat|lpukom, 5mha cecym½r L]lmym !mt]kkousam 2µm !sp\fetai I_.

(Dion. Per. 248 – 250)

and a more complex variant from vv. 195 – 197: to?r d’ 1p· Jaqwgd½m poku^qatom !lp]wei fqlom, Jaqwgd~m, Kib}ym l]m, !t±q pq|teqom Voim_jym, Jaqwgd~m, Dm lOhor rpa· boz` letqgh/mai.

(Dion. Per. 195 – 197)

Even Tycho Mommsen, one of Dionysius’ greatest modern admirers, saw this stylistic feature as a blemish, but one he was prepared to forgive, “es hat eben jeder Dichter seine Schwächen”;25 Ewen Bowie considered the technique “perhaps overworked”, but has been one of the very few scholars to seek a contextualised explanation for the four occasions on which a place-name is repeated three or four times, usually at the head of the verse (vv. 195 – 197, 350 – 356, 793 – 796, 815 – 819).26 There may be more to be said about the antecedents and effects of this style, and here I wish merely to give renewed emphasis to one aspect of the earlier use of this stylistic trope, which may shed light upon the effect which Dionysius sought. It is, of course, Homer who supplies the models for later poets: aqt±q Puqa_wlgr %ce Pa_omar !cjukot|nour tgk|hem 1n )lud_mor, !p’ )nioO eqq» N]omtor, )nioO, ox j\kkistom vdyq 1pij_dmatai aWam.

(Il. 2.848 – 850)

Miqe»r aw S}lghem %ce tqe?r m/ar 1@sar,

24 On the echo of Callimachus in v. 355 cf. above p. 701. 25 Mommsen 1895, p. 807. 26 Bowie 1990, pp. 74 – 75.

712

Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire

Miqe»r )cka@gr uR¹r Waq|poio t’ %majtor, Miqe}r, dr j\kkistor !mµq rp¹ ]kiom Gkhem )mdqol\wg, huc\tgq lecak^toqor Iet_ymor, Iet_ym, dr 5maiem rp¹ Pk\jyi rkg]ssgi tq_tor d’ Gm -sior Fqyr, -sior zqtaj_dgr, dm )q_sbghem v]qom Vppoi aUhymer lec\koi, potaloO !p¹ Sekk^emtor.

(Il. 2.671 – 673)

(Il. 6.395 – 396)

(Il. 12.95 – 97)

!kk’ b l³m AQh_opar letej_ahe tgk|h’ 1|mtar, AQh_opar, to· diwh± deda_atai, 5swatoi !mdq_m, oR l³m dusol]mou zpeq_omor, oR d’ !mi|mtor.

(Od. 1.22 – 24)

Aristarchus observed that whereas such epanalepsis was common in the Iliad, the Ethiopians of 1.22 – 23 were the only example in the Odyssey. 27 As striking, however, is the fact that whereas Homer clearly uses such turns of style both when narrating in the third-person and when one of his characters is speaking, there is a very clear bias in the distribution of examples. Of the twelve Homeric cases listed by Wills,28 seven are in the voice of the narrator (Il. 2.671 – 673, 837 – 838, 849 – 850, 870 – 871, 6.395 – 396, 12.95 – 96, Od. 1.22 – 23), and five are spoken by characters (Il. 6.153 – 154, 7.137 – 138, 18.398 – 399, 21.85 – 86, 157 – 158); of the six Iliad examples in the first group, four come from the Catalogue of Ships, and a fifth (12.95 – 96) from a passage which may be considered a “mini-catalogue”. The sixth (6.395 – 396) may perhaps be explained as an emotive touch at a moment of great emotional power (the introduction to Andromache’s last meeting with her husband before his death). Be that as it may, the Homeric scholia see the device as one of emphasis, and the rhetorical and educational traditions, in which Dionysius will have been steeped, distinguish three categories of use:29 to provide information (cf. Od. 1.22 – 23), to introduce a character (cf. Il. 2.671 – 673), and to reinforce a trait of character (cf. Il. 20.371 – 372). 27 Cf. the scholia to Il. 2.837 – 838, 6.154, 6.396, 7.138,12.96. 28 Wills 1996, pp. 125 – 126; cf. also Fehling 1969, pp. 183 – 184, S. West on Hom., Od. 1.23 – 24. 29 Cf. Hermogenes, pp. 423 – 425 Rabe.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

713

For the Pseudo-Plutarchan work on Homer which cites a couple of Homeric examples, including Od. 1.22 – 23, such repetitions “reveal the emotion ( j_mgsir) of the speaker and also move the hearer” (2.32); this is a hardly surprising (and certainly not unique) gloss upon the standard explanations, but it assumes particular interest when applied to places in which the Homeric narrator, rather than one of his characters, is speaking, or to a poem, such as the Periegesis of Dionysius, in which there is only one speaker, the narrating poet. What kind of emotion does the poet wish to convey? The fact that the “Catalogue of Ships”, the authorising Homeric model for later Periegeseis, contains four examples within a relatively brief space (Il. 2.671 – 673, 837 – 838, 849 – 850, 870 – 871), and that the only example in the Odyssey became a standard reference for later poetry and geographical writing, is suggestive for the history of such repetitions; Dionysius’ familiarity with the divided Ethiopians of the Odyssey and with ancient scholarship upon them is clear enough from vv. 179 – 180 and 218 – 219. Stylistic repetitions of this kind are standardly thought of as a Hellenistic mannerism,30 although, as Jeffrey Wills has rightly emphasised,31 there are in fact fewer cases in extant poetry than such a label might have led us to expect. Certainly, a more nuanced characterisation of the figure in Hellenistic poetry is required in order to appreciate Dionysius’ usage. I limit myself to Callimachus32 and Apollonius, though a more complete re-examination of the poetic corpus is a clear desideratum.33 There are only two examples34 in extant Callimachus of what I will call a “Dionysian” epanalepsis with a proper name. The first is Hymn to Delos 224 – 225: )steq_g d’ amolast· paqeqwol]mgm 1j\kessem, )steq_g, p|mtoio jaj¹m s\qom . oWsha ja· aqt^.

(Call. H. 4.224 – 225)

30 Cf., e. g., Kroll’s very useful note on Catullus 64.61. Further discussion and earlier bibliography in Gimm 1910, pp. 87 – 94. 31 Cf. Wills 1996, p. 128; for later poetry see also Gerlaud’s note on Triphiodorus 448 – 449. 32 A basic resource here is Lapp 1965, pp. 54 – 65. 33 I have said nothing about Latin poetry, because of the excellent and readily available treatment in Wills 1996. 34 The emphatic repetition of Jqe?om eqor at H. 5.40 – 41 is an obviously related phenomenon, but no “new information” is added in the second member.

714

Greek Poetry of the Roman Empire

This case is a perfect illustration of Pseudo-Plutarch’s dictum: the fawning Iris is here trying to stir Hera’s wrath against the island which has given Leto shelter.35 Different in its effect but still very clearly showing the emotion of the speaker is Hymn to Demeter 7 – 8: =speqor 1j mev]ym 1sj]xato (pam_ja me?tai ;) =speqor, fr te pie?m Dal\teqa l_mor 5peisem.

(Call. H. 6.7 – 8)

Callimachus, then, seems to restrict this particular form of epanalepsis to “character speech”. Apollonius, however, whose importance to this whole stylistic area is well recognised,36 seems to offer more fertile material. The “classic” type is illustrated by three examples, all in the mouth of characters rather than that of the narrator, from the fourth book: oWoi d’ 5sam )qj\der )pidam/er, )qj\der, oT ja· pq|she sekgma_gr rd]omtai f~eim, vgc¹m 5domter 1m ouqesim

(Arg. 4.263 – 265)

!t±q ja· 1r AUokom 1khe?m, AUokom fr t’ !m]loir aQhqgcem]essim !m\ssei .

(Arg. 4.764 – 765)

A³ paq± Sj}kkgr stuceq¹m jeuhl_ma m]eshai — Sj}kkgr Aqsom_gr ako|vqomor, Dm t]je V|qjyi mujtip|kor :j\tg, t^m te jke_ousi Jq\taiim —.

(Arg. 4.827 – 829)

Of these passages two are echoed by Dionysius: 4.263 – 265 at v. 415, and 4.764 – 765 at vv. 461 – 463.37 Apollonian examples in the voice of the narrator again show an interesting distribution: 1.87 – 88 (the Catalogue), 1.191 – 192 (the Catalogue), and 3.861 – 862, which is a special case, as it imitates the multiple invocations, and almost the “voice”, of a character:

35 A similar instance in direct speech, though not with a proper name, is the repetition of wqus|m at fr. 384.14 – 15 (Sosibios). 36 Cf., e. g., Wills 1996, pp. 128 – 130. 37 Cf. Wills 1996, p. 162 n. 87.

38. Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius

715

2pt\ji d³ Bqil½ jouqotq|vom !cjak]sasa, Bqil½ mujtip|kom, whom_gm, jtk.

(Arg. 3.861 – 862)

There are, of course, elsewhere other related mannerisms in the mouth of the narrator, but it is again the Catalogue of Argonauts which shows greatest interest in such effects.38 A case such as 1.202 – 203 seems to show self-consciousness about the familiar Homeric form, for here the “new information” provided by the second verse in fact undermines the first: s»m d³ Pakail|mior K]qmou p\ir ©kem_oio, K]qmou 1p_jkgsim, ceme^m ce l³m Jva_stoio.

(Arg. 1.202 – 203)

The fourth book, from which the three “classic” examples cited above were drawn, seems in fact notably different in this matter, as in many others, for here we find a number of related stylistic experiments in the voice of the narrator: aqt±q 1pe_ t’ -ccouqom eqor ja· %pyhem 1|mta )cco}qou eqeor sj|pekom paq± Jaukiajo?o.

(Arg. 4.323 – 324)

aqt±q 5peit’ 1p· t/isi paqa· J]qjuqam Vjomto, 5mha Poseid\ym )syp_da m\ssato jo}qgm, A}jolom J]qjuqam, 2j±r Vkeioumt_dor aUgr.

(Arg. 4.566 – 568)

oT pq·m l]m pote dµ Simtg_da K/lmom 5maiom, K^lmou t’ 1nekah]mter rp’ !mdq\si Tuqsgmo?si Sp\qtgm eQsav_jamom 1v]stioi.

(Arg. 4.1759 – 1761)

The second of these examples, in which the repeated name occurs not in adjacent verses but in the first and third of a triplet, is particularly interesting, as here again the narrator seems to gesture towards, while refusing to use, the familiar form, a dislocation marked by the shift from

38 Cf. 1.41 – 42,58 – 59,71 – 73 etc.; 1.955 – 957 offers a related, but significantly different effect.

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“Corcyra” as a place (clearly indicated as such by v. 567) to the name of the eponymous heroine.39 The conclusion, then, is neither surprising nor novel: Dionysius followed and extended Homeric and Apollonian precedent in imparting to his Periegesis the engaged and emotional tone which epanalepsis brought, but which both earlier poets had (with certain exceptions) restricted to “character speech”; the primary exceptions are the Catalogue form, where such figures seem not merely allowed, but positively sought out, and the fourth book of the Argonautica, which seems to mark a stylistic “advance” towards Dionysian freedom. Dionysius’ use of the figure is, therefore, an acknowledgement of generic debt; it is one of the ways in which he writes into his poem the literary history of the form he has chosen.40

Bibliography Bernays 1905 = U. Bernays, Studien zu Dionysius Periegetes, Heidelberg 1905 Bowie 1990 = E. L. Bowie, Greek poetry in the Antonine age, in D. A. Russell (ed.), Antonine Literature, Oxford 1990, pp. 53 – 90 Fehling 1969 = D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969 Gimm 1910 = R. Gimm, De Vergilii stilo bucolico quaestiones selectae, Diss. Leipzig 1910 Hopkinson 1984 = N. Hopkinson, Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus, “CQ” N.S. 34,1984, pp. 139 – 148; Hunter 2001 = R. Hunter, Virgil and Theocritus: a note on the reception of the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus, “SemRom” 4,2001, pp. 159 – 163 [= this volume 00] Kuiper 1896 = K. Kuiper, Studia Callimachea I, Leiden 1896 Lapp 1965 = F. Lapp, De Callimachi Cyrenaei tropis et figuris, Diss. Bonn 1965 McKeown 1987 = J. C. McKeown, Ovid: Amores, I, Liverpool 1987 Mommsen 1895 = T. Mommsen, Beitrge zu der Lehre von den griechischen Prpositionen, Berlin 1895 Reeve 1996 – 1997 = M. D. Reeve, A rejuvenated snake, “AAntHung” 37, 1996 – 1997, pp. 245 – 258 Reitz 1996 = C. Reitz, Zur Gleichnistechnik des Apollonios von Rhodos, Frankfurt 1996 Rutherford 2001 = I. Rutherford, Pindar’s Paeans, Oxford 2001 39 For Sinope, another beloved daughter of Asopos who gave her name to a place, cf.above pp. 350-351. 40 I am grateful to Neil Hopkinson and Michael Reeve for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

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Schneider 1882 = M. Schneider, De Dionysii Periegetae arte metrica et grammatica, Diss. Leipzig 1882 Vian 2001 = F. Vian, Echoes and imitations of Apollonius Rhodius in late Greek epic, in T. D. Papanghelis, A. Rengakos (edd.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius, Leiden 2001, pp. 285 – 308 Wills 1996 = J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996.

Addenda The most recent edition of the Periegesis is E. Amato, Dionisio di Alessandria: Descrizione della terra abitata (Milan 2005). For recent discussion and bibliography cf. also E. Amato, ‘Per la cronologia di Dionisio il Periegeta’ Revue de Philologie 77 (2003) 7 – 16, and J. Lightfoot, ‘Catalogue technique in Dionysius Periegetes’ in K. Carvounis and R. Hunter (eds.), Signs of Life? Studies in later Greek hexameter poetry (forthcoming). Cf. also 39 below.

39. The Periegesis of Dionysius and the traditions of Hellenistic poetry* 1. Dionysius frames his Periegesis with echoes of the opening and closing frame of Apollonius’ Argonautica. For the opening of the poem this is generally acknowledged:1 !qwºlemor s´o, Vo?be, pakaicem´ym jk´a vyt_m lm¶solai oT Pºmtoio jat± stºla ja· di± p´tqar Juam´ar basik/or 1vglos¼mgi Pek¸ao wq¼seiom let± j_ar 1¼fucom Ekasam ûAqc¾.

(Arg. 1.1 – 4)

Taking my start from you, Phoibos, I shall recall the glorious deeds of men of long ago who, at the command of King Pelias, propelled the wellbenched Argo through the mouth of the Pontos and between the Dark Rocks to gain the golden fleece. !qwºlemor ca?²m te ja· eqq´a pºmtom !e¸deim ja· potalo»r pºki²r te ja· !mdq_m %jqita vOka, lm¶solai ûYjeamo?o bahuqqºou7

(Dion. Per. 1 – 3)

In beginning to sing of the earth and the broad sea and the rivers and the cities and the uncountable tribes of men, I shall recall the deep stream of Ocean.

The final envoi of Dionysius’s poem is usually associated in general terms with the closing farewells of archaic and Hellenistic hymns.2 In fact, however, this farewell to the lands and seas and the Ocean of the opening invocation, which have formed the subject of Dionysius’s song, * 1

2

Revue des tudes Anciennes 106 (2004) 217 – 31 Cf. Müller’s note on Eustathius’ commentary on the opening verse (GGM II 216 – 17). Effe (1977) 193 rather stresses Dionysius’s undeniable debt to the Phainomena of Aratus (cf. below p. 727 and Vox (2002)); note in particular how Dionysius makes Ocean resemble Aratus’ Zeus (v. 28). Cf. the ‘fontes’ in Tsavari’s edition.

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seems to have two direct antecedents.3 One is the closing invocation at Hesiod, Theogony 963 – 4, together with the echo of those verses in v. 267 of Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos:4 rle?r l³m mOm wa¸qet’, ûOk¼lpia d¾lat’ 5womter, m/so¸ t’ Epeiqo¸ te ja· "kluq¹r 5mdohi pºmtor.

(Hes. Theog. 964 – 5)

Now farewell, you dwellers on Olympus, and islands, and continents and briny sea within. p¸omer Epeiqo¸ te ja· aT peqima¸ete m/soi

(Call. h. 4.267)

[Delos addresses the] ‘fertile mainland stretches and the islands which surround me’

Dionysius, however, also picks up Apollonius’ farewell to the !qist/er,5 a label which recalls and varies the pakaiceme?r v_ter of the opening verse, and his wish for the future of his poem: Vkat’, !qist/er, laj²qym c´mor, aVde d’ !oida· eQr 5tor 1n 5teor ckujeq¾teqai eWem !e¸deim !mhq¾poir. Edg c±q 1p· jkut± pe¸qah’ Rj²my rlet´qym jal²tym, 1pe· ou tir ullim %ehkor awtir !p’ AQc¸mghem !meqwol´moisim 1t¼whg, out’ !m´lym 1qi_kai !m´stahem, !kk± 6jgkoi ca?am Jejqop¸gm paq² t’ Aqk¸da letq¶samter Eqbo¸gr 5mtoshem ûOpo¼mti² t’ %stea Kojq_m, !spas¸yr !jt±r Pacasg¸dar eQsap´bgte.

(Arg. 4.1773 – 81)

Be gracious, heroes, children of the blessed gods, and may these songs be from year to year ever sweeter for men to sing. For now I have reached the glorious conclusion of your struggles, since no other challenge confronted you as you sailed up from Aegina, nor did wind-storms block your path, but undisturbed you sailed past the coast of the Kekropian land and past Aulis within Euboea and the cities of the Opuntian Lokrians, and gladly you stepped out on to the shores of Pagasai.

3 4 5

Cf. now Vox (2002). A nice example of ‘window allusion’; cf., e. g., McKeown (1987) 37 – 45. I would accept Fränkel’s emendation, but the echo of the opening verse is not dependent upon it.

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Edg c±q p²sgr l³m 1p´dqalom oWdla hak²ssgr, Edg d’ Ape¸qym sjoki¹m pºqom7 !kk² loi vlmym aqt_m 1j laj²qym !mt²nior eUg !loib¶.

(Dion. Per. 1184 – 6)

For now I have traversed the swell of the whole sea, and now too the twisting path of the continents. May the blessed gods themselves grant me a reward worthy of my song.

Dionysius has ‘traversed’ the world, as the Argonauts themselves did; 1p´dqalom bears also the sense ‘treat briefly’,6 thus not only marking the poet as both ‘author’ and ‘fellow traveller’, a position in which Apollonius too clearly, if implicitly, placed himself (note the poet’s ‘arrival’ in 4.1775),7 but also gesturing, with suitably ‘epic’ restraint, to the ‘brevity topos’ of periegetic poetry, which is, for example, repeatedly spelled out (at ironical length) in the proem of the iambic Periegesis often referred to as ‘Pseudo-Scymnus’ or the Periodos to Nicomedes (GGM I 196 – 9).8 Moreover, Dionysius offers his pupils and readers a chance themselves to become Argonauts when he first spells out the purpose of his poem: mOm d´ toi Ape¸qou luh¶solai eWdor "p²sgr, evqa ja· oqj 1sid¾m peq 5woir euvqastom apyp¶m7 1j toO d’ #m ceqaqºr te ja· aQdoi´steqor eUgr, !mdq· paq’ !cm¾ssomti pivausjºlemor t± 6jasta.

(Dion. Per. 170 – 3)

But now I shall tell you the shape of the whole land-mass, so that, even though you have not seen it, you may have a clear vision; as a result you will be honoured and more revered as you explain every detail to a man who is ignorant.

Apollonius twice uses pivausjºlemor t± 6jasta, ‘explaining every detail’, of Jason (3.1165, 1346),9 the leader of the expedition which serves as an authorising model for Dionysius’ journey of the mind. As Homer 6 7 8

9

Cf. LSJ s.v. 1pitq´wy II 5. Cf. Vox (2002) 167 – 8 with earlier bibliography. Cf. Marcotte (2000), S. Bianchetti, pkyt± ja· poqeut². Sulle tracce di una Periegesi romana (Florence 1990), Meyer (1998) 72 – 81; this volume 503 – 22. Note also the appearance of the topos in the proem of the iambic poem of Dionysius, son of Calliphon, (GGM I 238, Marcotte [1990]) v. 10, taOt’ 1ll´tqyr Ngh¶set’ 1m bqawe? wqºmyi. F. Jacoby, Apollodors Chronik (Berlin 1902) 60 – 74 is a valuable survey of the iambic didactic tradition. These are the only two occurrences in Arg., but cf. 1.1097.

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and Apollonius are Dionysius’ two most important poetic models, so Odysseus10 and Jason are exemplars upon whom the attentive (cf. v. 882 – 3) reader of the Periegesis may model himself. Finally, it may be noted that Apollonius’ proem is also echoed in the invocation to the Muses which introduces Dionysius’ account of the peoples of Asia:11 mOm d’ #m 1c½ ceme¶m te ja· oumola luhgsa¸lgm Bq¾ym dokiw/r te pºqour "k¹r fss² t’ 5qenam pkafºlemoi7 LoOsai d’ rpov¶toqer eWem !oid/r.

(Arg. 1.20 – 2)

I now shall recount the lineage and names of the heroes, their voyages over the vast sea and all they achieved on their wanderings. May the Muses be the inspirers12 of my song! mOm ce l³m 5hmea p²mta di¸nolai, fss’ !q¸dgka 1mma¸ei7 LoOsai d’ Qh¼mtatom Uwmor %coiem.

(Dion. Per. 650 – 1)

Now I shall range over all the tribes which dwell there clear to be seen: may the steps of the Muses be straight and true.

By means of the Apollonian frame Dionysius turns Apollonius into a privileged forerunner: Why? Some reasons are not difficult to guess. Dionysius will almost certainly have regarded Apollonius as, like himself, an Alexandrian,13 and one whose hexameter poem was not only full of geography and made, as the scholia to Apollonius make clear, extensive use of geographical texts, as Dionysius himself does, but also one whose heroes traversed the world in a great circle. The Apollonian scholia, which may well contain material from scholarship contemporary with Dionysius,14 also make clear that Apollonius was read as a geographical and mythographical authority, to be set alongside the vast resources of learned Hellenistic prose.15 Apollonius thus combined the two principal features of Dionysius’ poem, epic style and authoritative 10 Cf. below. 11 Cf. already the scholiast on Dion. Per. 651. 12 The meaning of rpov¶toqer is of course hotly disputed, but the matter does not affect the present argument. 13 For the evidence cf., e. g., Hunter (1989) 1 – 4. 14 The date of Loukillos and Sophokleios who are named in the subscription to the Laurentian manuscript, is quite uncertain, but Wendel placed them (not improbably) in the second century AD; cf. further Maehler (1993) 105 – 9. 15 For Apollonius and Hellenistic geography cf. Meyer (1998) and (2001).

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geographical subject-matter. Moreover, the synoptic ‘bird’s eye vision’ of the world, which was identified as early as Eustathius as a remarkable characteristic of Dionysius’ poem,16 finds close parallels in Apollonius’ epic, though not of course there alone. In a famous passage of the third book, well known to Dionysius,17 Eros flies down to Earth to beguile Medea and the world opens before him: b/ d³ di³j lec²koio Di¹r p²cjaqpom !ky¶m, aqt±q 5peita p¼kar 1n¶kuhem Oqk¼lpoio, aQheq¸ar. 5mhem d³ jataib²tir 1st· j´keuhor oqqam¸g7 doi½ d³ pºkom !m´wousi j²qgma oqq´ym Akib²tym, joquva· whomºr, Hw¸ t’ !eqhe·r A´kior pq¾tgisim 1qe¼hetai !jt¸messi. meiºhi d’ %kkote ca?a veq´sbior %stea t’ !mdq_m va¸meto ja· potal_m Reqo· Nºoi, %kkote d’ awte %jqier, !lv· d³ pºmtor, !m’ aQh´qa pokk¹m Qºmti.

160

165

(Arg. 3.158 – 66)

Through the fruitful orchard of great Zeus he went, to emerge at the celestial gates of Olympos. From this point the road from heaven descends, and two peaks of soaring mountains hold up the sky, heights of the earth, where the risen sun blushes red with its first rays. In his passage through the vast sky, the fertile earth, the cities of men and the sacred streams of rivers opened up beneath him; elsewhere were mountainpeaks, and all around the sea.

It is less important that the catalogue of ‘earth-cities-rivers-mountainssea’ is close to Dionysius’ own subject (cf. vv. 1 – 2, 1181 – 3) than that the perspective of the two poets is here very similar; va¸meshai is a standard verb in Dionysius for how geographical features ‘come into view’. Behind this passage of Apollonius lies a rich archaic tradition; the scholia trace a particular debt to a poem in which Ibycus described the rape of Ganymede (with whom the Apollonian Eros has just been playing),18 but it is likely that this is not the only influence on the passage, nor of course on Dionysius (the Eratosthenean Hermes gazing upon the cosmos is never far away). Be that as it may, it is also relevant that Aphrodite has just bribed her son with a marvellous ball, which is 16 Cf. GGM II 210 – 11, Jacob (1990) 23 – 7. 17 150 echoes Arg, 3.161, 1110 echoes 3.163, and 389 perhaps echoes 3.162. 18 PMG 289, cf. Hunter on Arg. 3.158, and Campbell on Arg. 3.158 f and on 159 – 63. Campbell draws attention to the report that the wandering soul of Aristeas saw ‘the earth and the sea and the rivers and the cities and the tribes of men’ (Test. 19 Bolton); cf. further below p. 730.

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suggestive of the cosmic globe and perhaps of third-century spheres depicting the universe.19 These two passages suggest a poet with concerns very close to the didactic tradition in which Dionysius places himself. A further passage which has been associated with a developing geographic, and indeed cartographic, sense is the famous (and famously difficult) simile of Arg. 2. 541 – 8 which compares Athena’s swift movement on a cloud to the flashing thoughts of a homesick traveller (cf. Il. 15.80 – 3):20 ¢r d’ fte tir p²tqghem !k¾lemor – oX² te pokk± pkafºleh’ %mhqypoi tetkgºter, oqd´ tir aWa tgkouqºr, p÷sai d³ jatºxio¸ eQsi j´keuhoi svyit´qour d’ 1mºgse dºlour, %ludir d³ j´keuhor rcq¶ te tqaveq¶ t’ Qmd²kketai, %kkote d’ %kkgi an´a poqv¼qym 1pila¸etai avhaklo?sim7 ¤r %qa jaqpak¸lyr jo¼qg Di¹r !¸nasa h/jem 1p’ ûAne¸moio pºdar Humg¸dor !jt/r.

545

(Arg. 2.541 – 8)

As when a man who wanders far from his own land – as indeed we wretched men often do wander, and no land seems distant, but all paths are spread before us – can picture his own home, and as he sees in a flash the path there over land and sea, his thoughts dart quickly and his eyes grasp one place after another, just so did the daughter of Zeus swiftly leap down and place her feet on the Thynian coast of the Inhospitable Sea.

This passage, whose force depends upon the power of the mind to envision distant places, describes an experience comparable to the ecphrastic power of the complete poems of both Apollonius and Dionysius (note esp. v. 171 of Dionysius (cited above) evqa ja· oqj 1sid¾m peq 5woir euvqastom apyp¶m, ‘so that, even though you have not seen it, you may have a clear vision’):21 we are all turned into ‘wanderers’ without leaving home.22 Other than the Homeric poems, the Argonautica is in fact probably the most important poetic model for Dionysius. In particular, of course, Phineus’ account of the southern shore of the Black Sea (Arg. 2.345 – 401) inscribes within Apollonius’ text a small-scale example of Dionysius’ own ‘genre’ (narrowly understood), and one which 19 20 21 22

Cf. Campbell on Arg. 3.135 – 41. Cf. Meyer (1998) 69 – 70, Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 101 – 2. Cf. Jacob (1990) 28 – 35. For the use of the figure of Odysseus in this connection cf. below p. 229.

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Dionysius copied with extraordinary and very unusual fidelity.23 So too, Argos’ account of the ‘prehistoric’ circumnavigation of an unnamed Egyptian (Arg. 4.259 – 93), a text which Dionysius knew well,24 together with Apollonius’ Argonauts’ actual return route, gave the Argonautica the scope and breadth of a c/r peq¸odor. Unlike a ‘didactic’ poet, however, Apollonius gave no explicit indication of how his poem was to be read, what it was to be ‘good for’. I have argued elsewhere25 that Apollonius has in fact inscribed within his poem the generalising power of Homer’s epics and, in particular, the educational purposes to which those epics were put. It is, however, very noticeable that the scholia use Apollonius as a geographical and ‘mythological’ authority, and it is here that his particular importance for Dionysius lies: Dionysius reads his illustrious Alexandrian predecessor as a ‘didactic’, geographical text.26

2. Ngid¸yr d’ %m toi koip¹m pºqom aqd¶saili cai²ym ûAs¸gr7 b d´ toi kºcor 1m vqes·m 5sty, lgd’ !m´loir voq´oito pomgh´mtym w²qir 5qcym. eQ c²q loi s²va t¶mde jatavq²ssaio j´keuhom, G t²wa j#m %kkoisim 1pistal´myr !coqe¼oir ja· potalo»r pok¸ym te h´sim ja· ca?am 2j²stgm.

885

(Dion. Per. 881 – 6)

Easily could I tell you of the remaining path of the lands of Asia. Let my words remain in your mind, and do not allow the grace of these works over which I have laboured to be carried away by the winds. If you can form a clear vision of this path, then perhaps you could give a knowing account to others also of the rivers and the situation of the cities and of every land.

The promise of vv. 884 – 6 is, of course, not really fulfilled: the rapidity of Dionysius’ outline of Asia would not really allow a reader to offer a ‘knowledgeable’ account of ‘each land’. The very rapidity, however, is part of the poet’s rhetoric of command – information is something which he can ‘easily’ supply (cf. vv. 345, 707, 881), as demonstrated 23 24 25 26

Cf. Hunter (2003) = this volume 700 – 17. Arg, 4.263 – 4 is echoed at v. 415 and 4.287 at v. 315. Cf. Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 98 – 104. Cf., e. g., Jacob (1990) 47 – 50.

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by the very flow of names and places with which we are bombarded. This rhetoric of poetic ‘ease’ (Ne?a, Ngid¸yr) is one which Nicander also foregrounds in both his extant poems (Ther. 1, Alex. 4). Traditionally, of course, ‘ease’ is a characteristic of divine action (Hes. Theog. 442 – 3, WD 325 etc.), or of the action of ‘godlike’ kings (Hes. Theog. 90), whereas human life, except perhaps in a Golden Age or a Hesiodic ‘Just City’, is characterised by the absence of ‘ease’ (Hes. WD 43, Virg. G. 1.122 etc.); the exception proves the rule – what humans find ‘easy’ is precisely ignorance and sloth (WD 287 – 92). Dionysius, like Nicander before him, uses the language of ‘ease’ as part of his self-presentation as a poet who can dispense knowledge, as Zeus dispenses success and failure. ‘Learning’ is genuinely empowering: those who heed the poet will themselves have ‘easy’ access to knowledge (cf. v. 280). This rhetoric of ‘ease’ throws into particular relief those passages in which the poet admits his inability to supply information: tºssar l³m m¶sour 1p´wei Nºor ûYjeamo?o eqqut´qar7 6teqai d´ t’ !peiqes¸ai cec²asim, aR l³m 1p· pqowo/isi Kibust¸dor !lvitq¸tgr, aR d’ ûAs¸gr, aR d’ awte peq· jk¸sim Eqqype¸gr. %kkai d’ %kkohi m/soi !pe¸qitoi, aR l³m rp’ !mdq_m maiºlemai ja· mgus·m 1p¶qatom fqlom 5wousai, aR d³ bah¼jqglmo¸ te ja· oq ma¼tgisim 2to?lai, t_m oq Ng¸diom loi 1misp´lem oumola pas´ym.

615

(Dion. Per. 612 – 19)

Such are the islands of greater extent which the stream of Ocean holds in. There are countless others, some amidst the flows of the Libyan sea, others of the Asian, and others again near the sweep of Europe. The countless islands in different places differ from each other: some are inhabited by men and have excellent anchorage for ships, others have steep cliffs and are unsuitable for sailors, and it is not easy for me to tell the names of all of them. 1j toO !peiq´sioi potalo· jamawgd± N´ousim, oR l³m pq¹r boq´gm, oR d’ 1r mºtom, oR d’ 1p· Nipµm euqou ja· fev¼qoio7 t¸r #m p²mtym emol’ eUpoi ; oq l³m 1pymul¸gm l¸am 5kkawem, !kk’ 1m 2j²stgi oumol’ 5wei stqov²kicci7 t± d’ #m je¸moisi l´koito !mdq²sim, oT jat± w_qom blo¼qiom oWjom 5wousi.

645

(Dion. Per. 644 – 9)

From this [the Taurus mountains] countless rivers flow roaring down, some to the north, some to the south, some towards the blast of the east wind and

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the zephyr. Who could tell the names of all of them? No single label has been allotted to them, but each small stream has its own name: let these be the concern of the men who have their homes bordering each stream. tºssoi l³m jat± ca?am rp´qtatoi %mdqer 5asim7 %kkoi d’ 5mha ja· 5mha jat’ Ape¸qour !kºymtai luq¸oi, otr oqj %m tir !qivqad´yr !coqe¼sai hmgt¹r 1¾m7 loOmoi d³ heo· N´a p²mta d¼mamtai. aqto· c±q ja· pq_ta hele¸kia toqm¾samto ja· bah»m oWlom 5deinam !letq¶toio hak²ssgr7 aqto· d’ 5lpeda p²mta b¸yi dietejl¶qamto, %stqa diajq¸mamter, 1jkgq¾samto d’ 2j²styi lo?qam 5weim pºmtoio ja· Ape¸qoio bahe¸gr

1170

(Dion. Per. 1166 – 74)

Such are the leading men over the earth. Others, beyond counting, wander here and there over the continents: no mortal man could give a clear account of them, but only the gods can easily accomplish everything. They it was who marked out the first foundations and revealed the deep path of the measureless sea; they gave signs of all that is constant in life by making the patterns of the stars, and they allotted to each man a share in the sea and the deep land.

In the face of the ‘boundlessness’ of the material, the poet must resign his task, not because he is incompetent, but because only gods could encompass the breadth of the material:27 here the rhetoric clearly descends from Homer’s invocation to the Muse before the “Catalogue of Ships”, itself of course a very important ‘didactic’ text for later ages. Any rhetorical pretence that a poem could give a ‘complete’ account of the inhabited world had in fact already been undercut in the iambic description of Greece by Dionysius, son of Kalliphon (vv. 124 – 5),28 %kkai d’ eQs·m 1m Jq¶tgi pºkeir, t²r 1stim 1qc_der vq²sai jtk.

There are other cities in Crete, of which it would be tedious to tell …

but epic hexameters do not perhaps always allow such honesty. Be that as it may, in discussing vv.648 – 9 (quoted above), Eustathius notes that these verses illustrate t¹ pawuleq]r (‘the broad brush approach’) in Di-

27 Xenophon, Mem. 1.4.17 is a very interesting part of the intellectual history of this idea. 28 Cf. Marcotte (1990).

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onysius’s poem and refers to Hesiod’s very similar remark about rivers, the children of Ocean, at Theogony 369 – 70: t_m emol’ !qcak´om p²mtym bqot¹m %mdqa 1mispe?m, oR d³ 6jastoi Usasim, fsoi peqimaiet²ousi.

It is hard for a mortal man to relate the names of all of them, but those who live around each of them knows that name.

This Hesiodic plea of difficulty, which itself is obviously related to the invocation before the Homeric Catalogue, has been taken over by Dionysius to provide an authorising model for his inability; at the same time, Dionysius has drawn from the Hesiodic text the inference that not only are individual river names known only to those who dwell by them, but it is also only to them that these names are of interest. As is well recognised, Dionysius’s final plea of inability to encompass the boundless diversity of his material (vv. 1166 – 80, partly quoted above) is heavily indebted to the Phainomena of Aratus, particularly to the proem:29 a ‘world full of Zeus’ becomes at the end of the poem a ‘world full of Aratus’. Moreover, in now stressing that only the gods can do everything ‘easily’ (1169), Dionysius goes back to Aratus’ principal forerunner, the ‘Hymn to Zeus’ which opens Hesiod’s Works and Days.30 In an extraordinary poetic move, Dionysius makes his own inability to be ‘comprehensive’, itself a familiar topos of ‘didactic’ poetry,31 a confirmation of the divine order: the stars offer a stable (5lpeda) basis, but all else is diversity and, so we may suppose, change. That diversity is ‘literally’ expressed through the sound-play of 1167, %kkoi d’ 5mha ja· 5mha jat’ Ape¸qour !kºymtai, an effect which Dionysios may in fact have derived from Phain. 1101 – 2:32 ovty c±q loceqo· ja· !k¶lomer %kkohem %kkoi f¾olem %mhqypoi jtk.

So it is that we men live in struggle, all of us wandering in different places.

For Aratus the stars are helpful signs established by god for suffering men and are themselves signs of divine pity and care; Dionysius has taken this 29 30 31 32

Cf., e. g., Effe (1977) 192 – 3, Jacob (1990) 73 – 4. On the didactic use of this topos cf. above p. 724 – 5. Cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 233 – 5. Commentators ad loc. note Od. 17.376, !k¶lom´r eQsi ja· %kkoi.

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one stage further so that human and geographic diversity is itself a sign of divine care. Just as, however, the Phainomena itself is a sign of Zeus’s care,33 so too the Periegesis takes its place in the wider scheme of things: it is not, after all, merely erudition for the sake of erudition.

3. Christian Jacob has rightly focused our attention upon Dionysius’s enthusiasm for the acquisition of knowledge about the world, a knowledge whose principal importance seems to lie, not in any practical use to which it may be put, but rather in the fact that it can be displayed to others, with consequent gains for one’s status and esteem (172 – 3, 884 – 6).34 Dionysius here seems to represent a development, which we might be tempted to call ‘scholastic’, from the ‘Hesiodic’ rhetoric, in which poetry has important practical consequences for the addressee in his every day life (WD passim, and esp. the conclusion, vv. 826 – 8). This is the rhetoric to which Aratus in the Phainomena remains committed, and which Nicander echoes, while in fact subverting it: Ne?a j´ toi loqv²r te s¸mg t’ akyv¾ia hgq_m !pqoid/ t¼xamta k¼sim h’ 2teqakj´a j¶deur, v¸k’ gEqlgsi²man, pok´ym jud¸state pa_m, 5lpeda vym¶saili7 s³ d’ #m pok¼eqcor !qotqe¼r bouja?ºr t’ !k´coi ja· aqoit¼por, ewte jah’ vkgm C ja· !qotqe¼omti b²kgi 5pi koic¹m adºmta, to?a peqivqash´mtor !kengt¶qia mo¼sym.

(Nicander, Theriaca 1 – 7)

Readily, dear Hermesianax, most honoured of my many kinsmen, and in due order will I expound the forms of savage creatures and their deadly injuries which smite one unforeseen, and the countering remedy for the harm. And the toiling ploughman, the herdsman, and the woodcutter, whenever in forest or at the plough one of them fastens its deadly fang upon him, shall respect you for your learning in such means for averting sickness.

The peasant farmer or agricultural labourer may ‘respect’ ( !k´ceim) Hermesianax for his learning, but that learning will do them no good: when 33 Cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 225. 34 Cf. Jacob (1982) 229.

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the snakebite comes, the illiterate will only be able to wish that they too had read Nicander.35 In the representation of the desire to accumulate ‘knowledge’, Callimachus has an importance for Dionysius as the poet of intellectual enquiry, beyond the echoing of individual passages and phrases and beyond even his status as the ‘Alexandrian’ poet par excellence. The pressing need for ‘facts’ finds its strongest (and perhaps wittiest) expression in 1053, eQ d´ se ja· P´qsar Qd´eim ckuj»r Vleqor aRqe?, ‘if sweet desire to know also of the Persians seizes you’, where the sexual desire of a Paris (cf. Il. 3.446) or a Zeus (cf. Il. 14.328) is translated into a craving to know, indeed to ‘see’ (Qd´eim) the Persians, a craving which will be satisfied only by the ‘vision’ which an ecphrastic verbal account (aqd¶saili, 1054) can offer.36 Such a naively scholastic enthusiasm finds no better parallel than the voice of the Aitia, in which the childlike enthusiasm of the poet revels in the display of his own erudition.37 Particularly close to the tone of v. 1053 is the narrator’s plea to the Ikian stranger at Aitia fr. 178.21 – 2 (= 89.21 – 2 Massimilla): fssa d’ 1le?o s´hem p²qa hul¹r !joOsai Qwa¸mei, t²de loi k´nom …

‘All that my spirit yearns to learn from you, tell me this …’

Here the emotive gloss Qwa¸mei (‘yearns’) lends to the poet’s wish (to hear about the traditions of a small Aegean island) something of the same imbalance of the ‘sweet desire’ for Persian ethnography which Dionysius imputes to his pupil.38 Both Callimachus and Dionysius derive (at least much of) their information from books, as Dionysius all but acknowledges when he explains why he is able to describe the Caspian sea, although he has never been there, as – like Hesiod (and Callimachus) – he is not one for long sailing trips: 35 If Hermesianax was a doctor (cf. Theriaca 495 – 6, Jacques [2002] lxix-lxx), this will obviously be important for the interpretation of the proem; nevertheless, it is unlikely that many poor rustics were included in Hermesianax’s patients. 36 Vox (1999) 172 notes that there is also an authorising didactic precedent in Hesiod, Works and Days 618, eQ d´ se mautik¸gr duspelv´kou aRqe?. 37 For discussion of Callimachus’ curiosity cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 59 – 60. 38 On this passage of the Aitia cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 77 – 83; for Qwa¸mei cf. ibid. 80 n. 143.

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!kk² le Lous²ym voq´ei mºor, aVte d¼mamtai mºsvim !kglos¼mgr pokkµm ûka letq¶sashai ouqea t’ Epeiqºm te ja· aQheq¸ym bd¹m %stqym.

(Dion. Per. 715 – 17)

But I am transported by the mind of the Muses, who without aimless wandering can measure the vast sea and the mountains, the continent and the path of the stars through the air.

Hesiod too held the Muses responsible for his ability to reveal the Fgm¹r mºom aQciºwoio, ‘mind of aegis-bearing Zeus’, despite his very limited experience of ships (WD 661 – 2), but for Dionysius it is the ‘mind of the Muses’ which ‘transports’ him, as others recklessly put their lives at risk in ‘transporting’ goods by sea. The development from the Hesiodic formulation may make us think of the ‘shamanistic’ experiences of an Aristeas of Proconessus,39 but it marks in fact the scholastic book-learning which lies behind Dionysius’s work; the Muses here embody, as they often do, ‘education’: Eustathius rightly glosses the ‘mind of the Muses’ as aR 1j t_m lah¶seym cm¾seir, ‘the knowledge which comes from education’ (p. 343.29 – 30 Müller). Dionysius’s way of writing, the plundering, dismantling, and recombination of earlier poets and prose-writers, displays his mastery of the task in hand. This is Hesiod seen through the lens of the long tradition of Hellenistic antiquarian poetry and prose, and a long debate – in which Polybius’ scathing criticism of Timaios is one of the prominent landmarks – about the relative merit of learning based on research from books and that from first-hand experience, but it is again Callimachus of whom we may be tempted to think. At the opening of the Aitia Callimachus dreamt that he encountered the Muses on Mt Helicon, a dream described by one ancient witness as ‘raising Callimachus from Libya to Helicon and transporting him (Ecacer … v´qym) into the midst of the Muses’ (AP 7.42.5 – 6); Dionysius, then, is not merely the new Hesiod, he is also the new Callimachus, who can be an ‘Odysseus’ without leaving the library or, as Dionysius himself puts it, mºsvim !kglos¼mgr.40 The topos had been laid out ex-

39 Cf. Jacob (1990) 26. 40 For Callimachus as an ‘Odysseus’ in the Aitia cf. Hunter in Fantuzzi-Hunter (2004) 78 – 80. There are suggestive remarks about the ‘global’ outlook of Callimachus’s prose works in Lelli (2002).

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plicitly more than two centuries before by ‘Pseudo-Scymnus’,41 which, in an echo of the opening of the Odyssey,42 offers its reader: oqw· tµm ûOduss´yr !maden²lemor, ¦r vasim oR lOhoi, pk²mgm, 1p· t/r Qd¸ar d³ jatal´mym eqdailºmyr, oqw· lºmom 2teqºvukom !mhq¾pym b¸om, 1hm_m fkym cm¾set’ %stg ja· mºlour. (vv. 98 – 102)

Not undertaking the wanderings of Odysseus, of which the myths tell, but remaining happily in his own land, he will know not only the varying life of men, but the cities and customs of all peoples.

It may be the figure of Odysseus before the Phaeacians (cf. Od. 11.368 1pistal´myr jat´kenar) who also resonates in Dionysius’s offer to his

pupil at 884 – 6 (already cited above):43

eQ c²q loi s²va t¶mde jatavq²ssaio j´keuhom, G t²wa j#m %kkoisim 1pistal´myr !coqe¼oir ja· potalo»r pok¸ym te h´sim ja· ca?am 2j²stgm.

If you can form a clear vision of this path, then perhaps you could give a knowing account to others also of the rivers and the situation of the cities and of every land.

If Dionysius nowhere more closely specifies the nature of ‘the mind of the Muses’, this is in accord with the high generic demands of hexameter poetry. We may contrast not merely Callimachus’ occasional naming of his sources in the elegiac Aitia, but more particularly the listing of named sources in the proem to the iambic ‘Pseudo-Scymnus’ (vv. 109 – 27) and the more general reference to pakaio· succqave?r ‘ancient writers’ in the proem of Dionysius, son of Kalliphon (v. 9). The ‘highest’ genre imposes the most ‘sublime’ standards, and it is indeed the author of On the Sublime who can shed important light upon Dionysius’ claims. In his famous discussion of the difference between the inconsistency of achievement often visible in the most sublime writers and the flawless mediocrity of others, ‘Longinus’ comments on the innate human desire for the grand and the paradoxical: 41 Cf. this volume 503 – 22. 42 The Zenodotean mºlour is noteworthy, cf. Nicolai (1991), Marcotte (2000) 155. 43 Cf. above p. 724.

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‘What then was the vision which inspired those divine writers who disdained exactness of detail and aimed at the greatest prizes in literature? Above all else, it was the understanding that nature made man to be no humble or lowly creature, but brought him into life and into the universe as into a great festival, to be both a spectator and an enthusiastic contestant in its competitions. She implanted in our minds from the start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural. The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings. If anyone wants to know what we born for, let him look around at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhere abounds. It is a natural inclination that leads us to admire not the little streams, however pellucid and however useful, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. Nor do we feel so much awe before the little flame we kindle, because it keeps its light clear and pure, as before the fires of heaven, though they are often obscured. We do not think our flame more worthy of admiration than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions bring up rocks and whole hills out of the depths, and sometimes pour forth rivers of the earth-born spontaneous fire. A single comment fits all these examples: the useful and necessary are readily available to man, it is the unusual that always excites our wonder.’ (‘Longinus’, De subl. 35.2 – 5, trans. D.A. Russell)

The combination of intellectual speculation going beyond the constraints of our surroundings and the extraordinary power of great rivers to excite our admiration may well remind us of Dionysius’ claims: this is no ordinary text, but one which lays claim to the highest purposes of literature. As for the fact that the most sublime writers reject akribeia as an ideal, we have already noted Eustathius’ correct identification of Dionysius’ ‘broad brush approach’, which does not, of course, mean that Dionysius is not concerned for the accuracy of his account (cf. esp. vv. 895 – 6). Nevertheless, there is a clear contrast with the claims which ‘Pseudo-Scymnus’ makes to Nicomedes: 1j t_m spoq²dgm c±q Rstoqgl´mym tis·m 1m 1pitol/i soi c´cqava t±r !poij¸ar jt¸seir te pºkeym, t/r fkgr te c/r swed¹m fs’ 1st· pkyt± ja· poqeut± t_m tºpym. to¼tym d’ fsa l³m eusgl² t’ 1st· ja· sav/ 1p· jevaka¸ou sumtel½m 1jh¶solai, fsa d’ 1st·m aqt_m oq sav_r 1cmysl´ma, b jat± l´qor taOt’ 1najqib¾sei kºcor, ¦ste, basikeO, t¹m p²mta t/r oQjoul´mgr

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5weim se peqioqisl¹m 1pitetlgl´mom jtk.

(Periodos to Nicomedes 65 – 74)

Using the scattered researches of others, I have written you a short account of the colonies, the foundations of cities, and the places accessible by sea or land over almost the entire world. I will set out for you in brief the important and certain facts about these places, noting the essential; things which are not clearly known will be examined in careful detail. Therefore, King, you will have a complete abbreviated survey of the entire inhabited world.

The repeated stress in the proem of ‘Scymnus’ upon the sapheneia of the comic trimeter (vv. 3, 11, 34) is in keeping with these claims to akribeia:44 this is the closest which poetry gets to the detail and clarity of prose. The distinction which ‘Scymnus’ makes between the style and metre of his work, on the one hand, and its subject, on the other, points in the same direction. Style and metre are a deliberate choice made subsequently to the choice of subject: the reasons for the choice of ‘comic trimeter’ are its clarity of expression, its power to involve and lead the hearer (psychagogia, v. 4), and the fact that it aids memory and retention (vv. 33 – 44).45 Such a distinction is entirely foreign to the claims of the epic tradition into which Dionysius places himself: the Muses provide both grand subject and grand style – the two are not to be separated.

Bibliography U. Bernays, 1905. Studien zu Dionysius Periegetes, Heidelberg B. Effe, 1977. Dichtung und Lehre, Munich M. Fantuzzi and R. Hunter, 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge S. Hinds, 1998. Allusion and Intertext, Cambridge N. Hopkinson, 1984. ‘Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus’ Classical Quarterly 34: 139 – 48 R. Hunter, 1989. Apollonius of Rhodes. Argonautica, Book III, Cambridge — 2002. ‘Theocritus and the style of cultural change’ in H. Yunis (ed.), Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece (Cambridge) 213 – 34 [= this volume 434 – 56]

44 Cf. Hunter (2002). 45 The simile of the bundle of wood ‘tied together’ by metre which ‘Scymnus’ cites from Apollodorus obviously exploits the use of vkg for the ‘subject matter’ of a literary work, cf., e. g., Hinds (1998) 11 – 14.

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— 2003. ‘Aspects of technique and style in the Periegesis of Dionysius’ in D. Accorinti and P. Chuvin (eds.), Des gants Dionysos: Mlanges de mythologie et posie grecque offerts Francis Vian (Alessandria) [= this volume 700 – 17] C. Jacob, 1982. ‘Le sujet et le texte. Sur l’identité de Denys le Périégète’ Lalies 4: 215 – 39 – 1990. La description de la terre habite de Denys d’Alexandrie ou la leÅon de gographie, Paris J.-M. Jacques, 2002. Nicandre, Oeuvres, Tome II, Paris K. Kuiper, 1896. Studia Callimachea I, Leiden. E. Lelli, 2002. ‘Il fantastico Atlante di Callimaco’ in E. Lelli (ed.), Arma virumque. Studi di poesia e storiagrafia in onore di Luca Canali (Pisa/Rome) 31 – 40. J. C. McKeown, 1987. Ovid: Amores, Vol. I, Liverpool H. Maehler, 1993. ‘Die Scholien der Papyri in ihren Verhältnis zu den Scholiencorpora der Handschriften’ in F. Montanari (ed.), La philologie grecque

l’poque hellnistique et romaine (Vandoeuvres-Geneva) 95 – 141 D. Marcotte, 1990. Le pome gographique de Dionysios, fils de Calliphon, Louvain —2000. Gographes Grecs, Tome I, Paris D. Meyer, 1998. ‘Zur Funktion geographischer Darstellungen bei Apollonios Rhodios und in der “Perihegese an Nikomedes (Ps.-Skymnos)”’ in Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption (Trier) 61 – 81 —2001. ‘Apollonius as a Hellenistic geographer’ in T. D. Papanghelis and A. Rengakos (eds.), A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius (Leiden) 217 – 35 R. Nicolai, 1991. ‘Zenodoto e Pseudo-Scymno (Hom. Od. 1,3)’ Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica 119: 181 – 7 M. D. Reeve, 1996/7. ‘A rejuvenated snake’ Acta Antiqua Hungarica 37: 245 – 58 C. Reitz, 1996. Zur Gleichnistechnik des Apollonios von Rhodos, Frankfurt I. Rutherford, 2001. Pindar’s Paeans, Oxford M. Schneider, 1882. De Dionysii Periegetae arte metrica et grammatica, Diss. Leipzig I. Tsavari, 1990. DIOM£SIO£ AKENAMDQEYS OIJO£LEMGS PEQIGCGSIS, Ioannina O. Vox. 1999. ‘Noterelle di epica ellenistica’ Rudiae 11: 163 – 72 —2002. ‘Dionigi Alessandrino e Apollonio Rodio: cornici innodiche’ Lexis 20: 153 – 70.

The Ancient Novel

40. History and Historicity in the Romance of Chariton* Uniquely among the Greek romances which survive in a manuscript tradition, Chaireas and Callirhoe1 is in one obvious sense ga historical novel’.2 Set in the period following the failure of the Athenian expedition to Sicily and filled with characters whose names and positions correspond to those of historical characters, the work, at one level, seeks to evoke a world long past, whatever date between c. 100 B. C. and c. 150 A. D. we may wish to give to the romance itself.3 In this essay I wish to consider how Chariton uses this sense of the past as a constitutive feature of his work, and how he uses his readers’ awareness of the differences between his narrative and historiography (of all kinds) as a literary stratagem of considerable sophistication to advertise the romance’s virtues and generic affiliations.

* 1

2

3

W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin/New York 1994) 1055 – 86 I use this title because it is found in the only manuscript of the work and is familiar, although what little other evidence there is — the conclusion of the work, tos\de peq· Jakkiq|gr sum]cqaxa, P. Michaelidae I, where the work appears to be cited as t± peq· Jakkiq|gm digc^lata, and perhaps Persius 1.134 his mane edictum, post prandia Callirhoen do — perhaps points rather to ‘Callirhoe’ or the ‘tales (digc^lata) concerning Callirhoe’, vel sim. For further discussion cf. Plepelits 28 – 9, Hunter 1 – 2. Cf. Hägg (1987). It is, however, clear that antiquity knew more than one such work; most important for the study of Chariton are the remains of the Romance of Metiochus and Parthenope, in which the heroine was the daughter of Polycrates of Samos and the hero the son of Miltiades of Athens, cf. G. Maehler, ‘Der Metiochos-Parthenope-Roman’, ZPE 23 (1976) 1 – 20, and T. Hägg, ‘Metiochus at Polycrates’ court’, Eranos 83 (1985) 92 – 102. The question of the date has been amply treated elsewhere by Plepelits 4 – 9 and Ruiz Montero (1980) and (1987) 89. Papyri forbid a date much later than c. 160 A. D., cf. Lucke.

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I. The Historiographical Frame Of the central characters of the work the following are readily identifiable in history:4 a) Hermocrates, the father of Callirhoe, was the Syracusan politician who organised the successful opposition to the Athenians. b) Artaxerxes, the Persian king, is clearly Artaxerxes II Mnemon, who ruled 404 – 358 B.C., and is the subject of one of Plutarch’s Lives. c) Stateira, the Persian queen to whom Chariton assigns a major role, is known from historical sources as the wife of Artaxerxes II. Some minor characters also have names drawn from history, while their actual identity has been distorted: Bias, the strategos of Priene (4.5.7, 5.6.8), presumably owes his name not only to its appropriateness for a commander (‘Man of Force’), but also to Bias of Priene, one of the Seven Wise Men of archaic Greece; Pharnaces, the Lydian satrap, bears a name familiar from various eastern potentates;5 Rhodogoune, the beautiful Persian eclipsed and then befriended by Callirhoe, is known from Plutarch, Artax. 27.7, as the name of one of Artaxerxes’ daughters; Rhodogoune’s father, Zopyros, and her husband, Megabyzos, presumably reflect the Persian Megabyzos, son of Zopyros, in Thucydides 1.109; so too, many critics have wanted to see in Ariston, Chaireas’ father and a political opponent of Hermocrates (1.1.3), a character derived from Ariston of Corinth, a clever and resourceful admiral on the Syracusan side in the fighting with the Athenians (cf. Thuc. 7.39.2; Plutarch, Nicias 25.4; Diod. Sic. 13.10.2). Somewhat different is the case of the wicked son of the tyrant of Rhegium (1.2.2), who draws colour from the reference in the sixth book of Thucydides – a crucial text for Chariton – to an early tyrant of that city, Anaxilas (Thuc. 6.4.6). The central characters themselves, Chaireas and Callirhoe, take us even further away from ‘real’ history. The heroine has been connected6 with a daughter of Hermocrates, whose name is not recorded, who married the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse; according to Plutarch (Dion 3; cf. Diod. Sic. 13.112), this woman was so physically abused 4 5 6

The historical setting of the narrative has been much studied, cf. Perry (1930) 100 – 2; Plepelits 14 – 19; Salmon; Zimmermann; Scarcella 344 – 52. Cf. D. Miller, RE 19.2 (1938) 1849 – 53, s.v. Pharnakes. Cf. Perry (1930) 101 – 2; Plepelits 30 – 2.

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by Syracusans hostile to her husband that she committed suicide. The similarities between this story, which presumably involves rape and sexual outrage of various kinds7, and Chaireas’ kick to his wife’s stomach, which leads to her premature burial, may appear small, but both concern tyranny and in both stress is laid upon the wrong-doers as an unholy band of plotters.8 It is, therefore, not unlikely that traditions concerning this woman lie behind the figure of Callirhoe, particularly as she too marries a man called Dionysius. As for Chaireas, no single historical character has moulded his presentation, in which rhetorical and novelistic influences predominate,9 but two historical models may be particularly important in shaping his bold and imaginative generalship as he fights on the side of the Egyptian revolt in Books 7 and 8. Traditions concerning Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre in 333/2 B.C. have clearly influenced Chaireas’ successful stratagem for taking the same city in the romance (7.3 – 4),10 and the suggestion that Chariton has also been influenced by the figure of the Athenian admiral Chabrias is an attractive one.11 Chabrias, whose name is very like that of Chariton’s hero, commanded the Egyptian fleet in the attack upon Syria mounted by the Egyptian king Tachos in 360 B.C., during the reign of Artaxerxes II, and it is likely enough that he too is evoked by Chaireas’ exploits. No single historical event, however, lies behind the Egyptian revolt portrayed by Chariton, which rather combines many different traditions into a plausible combination. Scholars have long since collected the anachronisms which it is not difficult to find in Chariton’s presentation of the historical setting.12 Thus, the reign of Artaxerxes II did not quite overlap with the life, let alone the period of greatest influence, of Hermocrates who died in 408/7 B.C.; Miletus only became a Persian possession in 386 B.C.; the use of the theatre for public assemblies (1.1.12, 8.7.1) reflects late Hellenistic, rather than classical, practice, and so on. Most striking of 7 Plutarch writes of “terrible physical outrages contrary to nomos” deim±r ja· paqam|lour vbqeir. 8 Diodorus presents the attack upon Dionysius’ wife as a ‘pledge of their common cause for the attack upon Dionysius’. Cf. Chariton’s presentation of the mutually suspicious suitors finally making common cause in order to attack Chaireas (1.2.1). 9 Cf. below pp. 765 – 70. 10 Cf. Zimmermann 343; Plepelits 17 – 18. 11 Cf. Salmon, and already W. Bartsch 5 and Rohde 523 n. 2. 12 Cf. Plepelits 14 – 15; Scarcella 347 – 9; Hägg (1987) 196.

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all perhaps, from a modern perspective, is the way that the romance treats the failure of the Athenians at Syracuse and the defeat of Athens as virtually identical events. None of these anachronisms, however, acts as an obvious ‘foreign body’ within the narrative, as – to take an extreme case – space technology would in a modern historical novel set in the nineteenth century.13 The picture of the classical period which Chariton paints is consistent and, in its own terms, plausible enough. As Hägg has put it, “accuracy and authenticity in historical fiction is … to be seen in relation not to historical reality, but to the picture of an age which writer and reader share from reading the same history books. For instance, Chariton’s image of the Great King and his court … will have impressed his contemporary readers as authentic as long as it did not manifestly depart from the image given by Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ctesias. It is completely irrelevant that we happen to know better”.14 At one level this is obviously true, but at another it will become clear that Chariton exploits his readers’ superior knowledge of history to create sophisticated effects which play with notions of truth and fiction. In other words, the general ‘plausibility’ of the historical setting nevertheless leaves a gap in our willingness to accept it, and it is this gap with which Chariton teases us. Together with the use of historical traditions in shaping the characters goes an important debt to historiography in certain crucial scenes. Thus, the participation of the whole people at the launching of the search-vessel from Syracuse, and the mixture of emotions which attends the event (3.5.2 – 3), recall, appropriately enough, Thucydides’ description of the launching of the Athenian expedition aimed at the destruction of Syracusan freedom (6.30 – 1), and – though this may be more speculative – the return of Chaireas and Callirhoe in triumph (8.6) seems to reflect accounts of Alcibiades’ triumphant return to Athens from Samos in 407 B.C.15 Alcibiades, of course, had been intimately connected with Syracusan fortunes, and Chaireas is explicitly compared to him at 1.1.3.16 The grim choice placed before Callirhoe at 6.7.7 by 13 Perhaps the best candidate is the reference at 2.1.6 to “Adrastus, who has the greatest experience of law”; here it is tempting to suspect some kind of private joke by Chariton, the lawyer’s clerk. Even if this is correct, however, the effect is not of jarring anachronism. 14 Hägg (1987) 196. 15 For this return cf. Duris, FGrHist 76F 70; Diod. Sic. 13.68.2 – 3; Plutarch, Alcib. 32; Athenaeus 12.535c – d. 16 On this passage cf. below p. 765 – 6.

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the king’s eunuch Artaxates – sleeping with the king in return for magnificent gifts and the husband of her choice or horrible torture from which death would be a longed-for release —17 inevitably recalls the choice of death or empire (and a wife) which Candaules’ wife laid before Gyges (Hdt. 1.11.2). We therefore measure Callirhoe’s nobility of mind against Gyges’ understandable decision to commit an ‘immoral’ act for personal advantage.18 It is, however, not Herodotus, but Xenophon’s Anabasis which provided the model for Chariton’s narrative of Greek mercenaries engaged in a revolt against Artaxerxes II. Throughout the central ‘Persian’ books of the romance, with their concern with the details of Persian policy-making, court arrangements and military organisation,19 the pervasive influence of Herodotus and Xenophon (particularly the Cyropaideia) is clearly felt; these authors are also commonly recalled at the level of the individual word and phrase.20 Particularly to be regretted in this connection is the loss of the twenty-three colourful books of Ctesias’ Persica, which (despite Plutarch’s disparagement of Ctesias) 21 served as a major source for Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes. The only extensive fragment of Ctesias’ own words which survives is of particular interest for the study of Chariton: 1c½ l³m se 5sysa ja· s» di’ 1l³ 1s~hgr . 1c½ d³ di± s³ !pyk|lgm ja· !p]jteima aqt¹r 1laut|m . oq c\q lo_ su 1bo}kou waq_sashai . 1c½ d³ taOta t± jaj± ja· t¹m 5qyta … oqj aqt¹r eRk|lgm . b d³ he¹r owt|r 1stim joim¹r ja· so· ja· %pasim !mhq~poisim … 1c½ c±q soi jataq\solai l³m oqd]m, 1pe}nolai d] soi tµm dijaiot\tgm eqw^m . eQ l³m s» 1l³ d_jaia 1po_gsar…

“I saved you and it was by me that you were saved. But I have been ruined by you and have killed myself, because you were unwilling to grant me your favours. I did not of myself choose these evils and this passion, but this god is one in whom you and all mankind share… I will call down 17 Chariton seems to have taken this motif from Xenophon, Anab. 3.1.29 “[those who rebelled against the king] are being beaten, tortured, outraged and the poor wretches cannot even die, though they desire to”. 18 4.2, in which Chaireas and Polycharmus are saved from crucifixion, perhaps owes something to Herodotus 1.86 (Croesus on the pyre). 19 Good examples at 4.6.5 (the king consults his philoi), 5.2.2 (each satrap has their own set of quarters in the capital city, Babylon), 5.4.5 (the location of the royal court), 6.8.7 (Cyrus’ arrangements for military contributions). 20 Cf. Papanikolaou 17 – 21; his list of ‘borrowings’, however, contains both plausible and very implausible examples. 21 “Ctesias stuffed his work with all manner of unconvincing and crazy stories” (Artax. 1.2).

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no curses on your head, but will make this prayer on you behalf, the fairest that can be: if you had acted justly by me …” (POxy. 2330, trans. C. H. Roberts)

This letter, from a man to a woman whom he believes to have wronged him, can hardly fail to recall Chaireas’ letter to Callirhoe at 4.4.7 – 10: h\matov l³m c±q %mhqypor £m pqosed|jym, t¹m d³ s¹m c\lom oqj Ekpisa. !kk’ Rjete}y, letam|gsom. jatasp]mdy to}tym lou t_m cqall\tym d\jqua ja· vik^lata. … !kk± 1fgkot}pgsa. toOto Udi|m 1sti vikoOmtor. d]dyj\ soi d_jar. 1pq\hgm, 1do}keusa, 1d]hgm. lµ loi lmgsijaj^sgir toO kajt_slator toO pqopetoOr· j!c½ c±q 1p· stauq¹m !m]bgm di± s] , so· lgd³m 1cjak_m. eQ l³m owm 5ti lmglome}seiar, oqd³m 5pahom . eQ d³ %kko ti vqome?r, ham\tou loi d~seir !p|vasim.

“I expected death, as I am a man, but I never imagined that you would marry. But I beg you, change your mind. Over these words I pour out to you my tears and my kisses. … I was jealous: lovers are. I have paid you full requital: I was sold, I was enslaved, I bore chains. Do not bear against me a grudge for my hasty kick; for you I have been placed upon a cross, but I uttered no reproach against you. If you still remember me, my sufferings are nothing; but if this is not how you feel, you will condemn me to death.”

Stylistically, Chaireas’ letter falls somewhere between the passage of Ctesias and the mannerism of Cleitophon’s letter to Leucippe at Achilles Tatius 5.20.5 – it is in fact not unlike the letter of Leucippe herself at 5.18.3 – 6 – but the similarities are sufficient to emphasise how much the Persica might have told us both about Chariton, and about the development of the romance in general. One significant trend in Greek historiography after the classical period was away from the self-proclaimed austerity of a Thucydides and towards a more overtly dramatic, emotional and rhetorical style aimed clearly at delighting and moving readers.22 The links between this 22 A very selective bibliography: F. Wehrli, ‘Die Geschichtsschreibung im Lichte der antiken Theorie’, in: Eumusia: Festgabe fr H. Howald (Zurich, 1947) 54 – 71; F. W. Walbank, ‘History and tragedy’, Historia 9 (1960), 216 – 34 (= Id., Selected Papers 224 – 31); Id., ‘Profit or amusement: some thoughts on the motives of Hellenistic historians’, in: Purposes of History (Studia Hellenistica 30, Leuven, 1990) 253 – 66; Wiseman; Woodman; E. Gabba, ‘True and false history in classical antiquity’, JRS 71 (1981) 50 – 62. I am concerned here nor with what may or may not be true about Thucydides’ way of writing history, but how ‘the idea of Thucydides’ can be used by later historians to demarcate their own positions. A similar phenomenon is observable in the use by Hellenistic and Roman poets of ‘the idea of Homer’.

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kind of writing, which we associate particularly with historians such as Duris and Phylarchus, and the romance of Chariton were thoroughly investigated by Werner Bartsch. A classic program for this style is found in the letter of Cicero (Ad fam. 5.12) in which Cicero asks Lucceius to write a monograph on his consulship. Cicero notes that the story is full of the kind of exciting vicissitudes which are both worth describing and which will delight readers, producing a mixture of amazement, anxiety, joy, despair, hope and fear. It is obvious that at one level Chariton seeks to exploit a similar range of audience reaction, often by describing the emotions of the fictional onlookers or hearers.23 This device is particularly prominent in the final book as Chaireas tells his tale to the admiring Syracusans, and cf. 3.4.1, “everyone rushed to the shore, and there was a swirl of conflicting emotions as they wept, wondered, enquired and refused to believe, for the strange tale had bowled them over (1n]pkgtte).”

So too, Cicero’s observation that “if the historical account reaches a glorious conclusion, the mind is filled by a most delightful pleasure in reading” (Ad fam. 5.12.5)

inevitably recalls the introduction to Chariton’s final book: mol_fy d³ ja· t¹ tekeuta?om toOto s}ccqalla to?r !macicm~sjousim Fdistom cem^seshai … oqj]ti kgiste_a ja· douke_a ja· d_jg ja· l\wg ja· !pojaqt]qgsir ja· p|kelor ja· ûkysir, !kk± 5qyter d_jaioi 1m to}tyi ja· m|liloi c\loi.

“I think that my readers will find this last book very delightful… There is no more piracy, slavery, trials, battles, suicide, war and conquest, but honourable love and lawful marriage” (8.1.4).24

Two areas where similarities between Chariton and Hellenistic historiography are particularly clear are the didactic, moralising tone of the work – what in historiography is the important element of t¹ ¡v]kilom – and its links with drama. The didactic, moralising flavour of Chaireas and Callirhoe is not hard to illustrate. On one hand, the narrative is frequently punctuated by brief gnomai which serve to confirm that the characters and their actions conform to familiar human patterns: “a woman is easily caught when she imagines that she is loved” (1.4.2, not, of course, about Callirhoe); 23 Cf. Hägg (1971) 260. 24 On this passage cf. below p. 754 – 5.

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“conscience is powerful and truth supreme” (3.4.13); “by nature barbarians arc crazy about women” (5.2.6); “an unhappy man is easily deceived” (7.1.4). Such maxims are also sometimes expanded into lengthier disquisitions. Thus, “by nature man clings to life and not even in the most desperate plight gives up hope of a change for the better; the creating (dgliouqc^samtor) god has implanted this instinct in everybody so that they cannot escape from the misery of life” (3.3.16).25

Here too we may also place the explanation of why Eros is depicted in literature and the visual arts with a bow and a torch (4.7.6), a rationalising explanation explicitly linked to the reflections of an educated man ( !mµq pepaideul]mor).26 Certain important events in the romance are shaped in a didactic mould. That Theron’s comrades should die miserably of thirst, surrounded by undrinkable water and their ill-gotten but useless gains (3.3.11), has the stark moral clarity of a parable. On the other hand, Hermocrates’ refusal (3.4.15 – 16) to allow delay in Theron’s execution, although such delay might have assisted the search for his daughter, has been criticised as a naive device for avoiding an early end to the narrative; in fact, however, it is a powerful manifestation of what is one of the principal themes of the work – the supremacy of the rule of law over inequality and tyranny, and is an important defining act in the presentation of Hermocrates’ position.27 Closely related to this theme are two others, the supremacy of Greeks and Greek culture over all things barbarian, and of free men (particularly those of high birth) over slaves and those of low status.28 The former theme employs not merely the dichotomy traditional in Greek thinking, but also the Thucydidean representation of the contrast between Periclean Athens and the other Greek states. Thus Pericles’ proud assertion about the Athenian pursuit 25 The context is Theron threatened with death by thirst on his drifting ship. The sentiment may be thought to sit oddly with Chaireas’ repeated (and repeatedly unsuccessful) attempts at suicide, but it is in fact confirmed by his behaviour when enslaved in Caria, “though he wished to die, he was prevented by the slender hope that he might one day see Callirhoe again” (4.2.1). 26 For this explanation cf. Plutarch, Mor. fr. *135 Sandbach. 27 Cf. below p. 763 – 4. 28 Cf., e. g., 2.10.7 (Callirhoe well-born and ignorant of the cunning of slaves), 6.6.5 (the queen’s jealousy bound to be terrible, when even a Greek like Chaireas fell victim to this emotion), 6.7.12 (the awe which barbarians feel for the Great King); Zimmermann 331 – 3; Bowie 94; Fusillo 60 – 1.

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of beauty becomes a brusque dismissal of the Tyrians in the mouth of a Syracusan (!): ak_coi ja· jatavqom^sei let’ !kafome_ar, oq vqom^lati let’ eqbouk_ar wq~lemoi.

“they are few in number; disdain and bluster, not prudence and good planning are their specialties” (7.3.9).29

These themes are most fully embodied in the characters of Artaxates, the Great King’s eunuch, and Dionysius, the governor of Ionia who marries Callirhoe. Artaxates, “a eunuch, a slave, a barbarian [who] knew nothing of Greek nobility of mind (vq|mgla :kkgmij¹m eqcem]r)” (6.4.10), imagines that Callirhoe will be willing to sleep with the King on a casual basis (6.7.7). Dionysius, on the other hand, is an educated and sensitive Greek in the service of the Persians, and, like the narrator himself,30 is able to see through Persian superstition to the ‘reality’ of events.31 At her first meeting with him, Callirhoe appeals to Greek solidarity and paideia, and she uses the paradigm of the hospitality of the Homeric Alcinous to win him over (2.5.10 – 11); Dionysius’ noble bearing in his darkest hour when the final truth that he has lost Callirhoe is revealed to him (8.5.10 – 15) shows him to be a worthy foster-father for her child. This positive moral evaluation of Dionysius is reinforced by literary echo: twice (2.7.4, 3.1.3) a dark, Homeric mist is said to descend over him when he receives amazing or frightening news. No other character is affected in quite this way,32 and the device suggests not only his sensibility, but also his ‘Greekness’: his behaviour is assimilated to the most notable pattern of Greek heroics. In the end, however, he has to settle for the Persian happiness of great political power (8.5.12), rather than the Greek ideal of homonoia towards which we are directed; Callirhoe’s request to him not to marry again (8.4.5, 8.5.15) makes this contrast very clear.

29 Cf. Thucyd. 2.40.1 vikojakoOl]m te c±q let’ eqteke_ar ja· vikosovoOlem %meu lakaj_ar. The echo is noted by, inter alios, Perry (1930) 105 n. 17 and Anderson (1982) 18. 30 Cf. 6.8.3 (the outbreak of the revolt), “the rumour-mongers and the prophets said that the King’s dream had foretold what would happen”. 31 Cf. 6.2.7 – 8: Dionysius realises that the King has fallen in love and that his “dreams” are merely a pretence. 32 Other characters do, of course, suffer analogous shocks, cf. Callirhoe at 1.1.14 etc.

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One particular lesson dear to the heart of Hellenistic historians was the lower of Fortune, Tyche.33 Chariton’s characters constantly appeal to Fortune, and the narrator himself makes repeated observations on the role of this tyrant “which is the only force against which human reasoning (kocisl¹r !mhq~pou) has no power” (2.8.3), although its role within the narrative is carefully circumscribed. Of the major incidents of the romance, only Callirhoe’s pregnancy (2.8.3 – 4),34 the discovery of the pirate ship floating somewhere in the Mediterranean (3.3.8), the discovery by Dionysius’ men of the letters from Chaireas and Mithridates to Callirhoe (4.5.3), and the sudden revolt in Egypt which breaks off events in Babylon (6.8.1) are explicitly ascribed by the narrator to the workings of Fortune.35 The most extraordinary of these cases is clearly the finding of Theron’s ship, and the narrator takes the opportunity to reflect upon the fact: B l³m owv !mhqyp_mg bo^heia pamt\pasim Gm !shem^r, B t}wg d³ 1v~tise tµm !k^heiam, Hr wyq·r 5qcom oqd³m t]keiom .

“Human aid was entirely ineffectual, but Fortune brought the truth to light, Fortune without which no action may be brought to accomplishment” (3.3.8).

In a fictional literary narrative, ‘Fortune’ as a motive force will always involve a negotiation between the author and readers who are aware that in such a narrative even random ‘chance’ is planned;36 in the present case, Chariton’s wry acknowledgement of the devices of fiction creates a distance between himself and his narrative, such as is more often associated with Longus and Achilles Tatius. To this extent the effect differs from that of a historian who must ascribe to ‘Fortune’ events believed to 33 Cf. W. Bartsch 8 – 9; F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius I (Oxford, 1957) 16 – 26. 34 On this passage cf. below p. 758 – 9. 35 1.1.6 (the first meeting of the lovers 1j t}wgr, but under the management of Eros), and 7.2.2 (the finding in the Egyptian army of someone who spoke Greek jat± t}wgm) should perhaps be added. At 8.1.3 Aphrodite is said to overturn Fortune’s wretched plans. On Fortune in the work cf. Laplace 101 – 112. 36 It may be objected that I assume a level of sophistication beyond that which ought to be assumed for Chariton’s readers (and can be demonstrated for many modern readers of fiction). I hope that the present essay will amply demonstrate Chariton’s ‘sophistication’, and that of his ‘implied reader’; I doubt that we know anything for certain about his real readers, but I see no reason to imagine that they did not appreciate what they were reading.

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be ‘real’, that is, whose ‘reality’ does not depend upon an imaginative entering into a fictional world. Like Hellenistic historiography, Chaireas and Callirhoe shows plainly the influence of classical drama. In common with all the novelists, Chariton frequently compares the action of his story to a drama,37 partly as a device for enargeia, for helping his readers envisage the action he describes: t_r #m vq\sai jat’ !n_am 1je?mo t¹ sw/la toO dijastgq_ou ; po?or poigtµr 1p· sjgm/r paq\donom lOhom ovtyr eQs^cacem ; 5donar #m 1m he\tqyi paqe?mai luq_ym pah_m pk^qei . p\mta Gm bloO, d\jqua, waq\, h\lbor. 5keor, !pist_a, eqwa_.

“Who could worthily describe the appearance of that court-room? Which poet has ever produced on the stage so extraordinary a happening? You would have thought yourself in a theatre awash with a myriad of mixed emotions – tears, joy, amazement, pity, disbelief, prayers; all were there, mingled together” (5.8.2).

There are also specific borrowings from classical drama. Chaireas’ kick38 resembles in both motive – angry jealousy – and narrative function the soldier’s assault on Glycera’s hair in Menander’s Periceiromene 39, and when Callirhoe spurns Dionysius’ love and he is unwilling to use his force, we are inevitably reminded of the situation of Thrasonides in Menander’s Misoumenos. Of particular interest is Dionysius’ complaint to Leonas at 2.6.1: “I am completely wretched and hated (liso}lemor) by Eros. I have buried my wife, and the new slave, whom I hoped was Aphrodite’s gift to me, flees from me….”

Whether or not this is an explicit acknowledgement of debt to Menander, Chariton certainly does illustrate Dionysius’ later plight with a quotation from the Misoumenos (4.7.7 = Misoumenos A9 Turner). A further debt to drama has been seen in the structure of the romance. Reitzenstein40 divided Chaireas and Callirhoe into the canonical five ‘acts’ of 37 Cf., e. g., 1.4.2 (“the creator of the drama [against Chaireas] discovered a second actor …”); 1.4.8 (“that evil slanderer arranged the scene …”); 4.4.2 (“Fortune has imposed a miserable drama upon you…”); 6.3.6 (“she has prepared this whole drama…”). For discussion of the matter in general cf. Kuch 17, Fusillo 34 – 6, 70. 38 For this scene of. below p. 765 – 70. 39 Cf. Corbato; Borgogno. 40 Cf. Reitzenstein 95 – 6.

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Hellenistic drama (1.1.1 – 3.2.17, 3.3.1 – 4, 5 – 6, 7, 8), and this has been widely, though not universally, accepted.41 Whether or not this represents a pattern intended by Chariton, these divisions have nothing except their number in common with the dynamic structure of a Menandrian comedy (at least as far as we are at present able to reconstruct this).42 The plot summaries prefaced to Books 5 and 8, clear marks of literary ‘closure’ at the ends of books,43 and the description of Book 8 as ‘this final book (s}ccqalla)’ rather suggest a different division of the work, perhaps into individual books.

II. The Narrator’s Voice A very marked characteristic of both the so-called ‘sophistic’ novelists, Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus, and of Petronius and Apuleius is the literary self-consciousness of their narrative voice.44 With regard to Chariton’s narrative voice, recent critics have not been unanimous. Thus, for Arthur Heiserman “[Chariton’s] almost obsessive play with the paradox and the intrigue, his arch comments about drama, recognition, reversal, and catharsis, all suggest that his art derives as much from theories of narrative as from naive imitations of history”45 ; for Graham Anderson on the other hand, “among the four competent (sic) narrators Chariton is probably the most anonymous, or rather the least obtrusive … the final effect is of the competent and economic presentation of a particular story by a skilled storyteller, rather than one more example 41 Cf. Perry (1967) 141 – 3; Plepelits 13. For some valid objections cf. Müller 119 – 20 and Kuch 20. Holzberg 53 proposes a fourfold division into pairs of books (Callirhoe: Chaireas: Chaireas and Callirhoe: Chaireas), with each half of the work occupying one papyrus roll. 42 For the internal structure and act-division of New Comedy cf. R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge, 1985) 35 – 42; Id., ‘Middle comedy and the Amphitruo of Plautus’, Dioniso 57 (1987) 281 – 98 [= this volume 627 – 42]. 43 Book 1 closes with lamentation by Callirhoe and then sleep; Book 2 with her decision to marry Dionysius; Book 4 with a decisive movement away from Ionia; Book 5 with grief and attempted suicide; Book 6 with war and the leaving of Babylon; Book 7 with the ‘suspense’ of the lovers in the same place but not knowing it, and a meeting foreshadowed. 44 For Longus cf. Hunter; for Achilles Anderson (1982) 23 – 32, S. Bartsch; for Heliodorus Winkler and Morgan. 45 Heiserman 87.

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of the mannerisms of a genre”.46 The matter is important in the present context, because our assessment of how Chariton exploits the historical setting and the historiographical frame of his work must be firmly rooted in a more general consideration of literary self-consciousness. Before turning to narrative voice proper, it is worth noting that Chariton has not inconsiderable stylistic and literary pretensions, such as make the search for narrative self-consciousness a quite reasonable one.47 His clear and rhythmical prose is adorned with quotations from epic, historiography and oratory, and with stylistic devices such as rhyming parallelisms,48 effective chiasmus,49 and alliteration.50 His style encompasses extended metaphor – Dionysius’ emotional ‘storms and shipwreck’ at 2.4.4 and 3.2.6 are part of a complex net of associations which link Callirhoe to the sea and to the goddesses who came from the sea, Thetis and, above all, Aphrodite —51 and simile.52 When the royal hunt is described (6.4.2 – 4), artistically arranged cola, ring composition and a careful use of synonyms mark a raised level of style, in keeping with the grandeur of the material and a subject we know to have been used in the rhetorical schools.53 So too, we find a few conceits of which a secondcentury sophist would have been proud.54 There remains, of course, a considerable difference between the style of Chariton and that of, say, Achilles Tatius, but there is more than enough stylistic evidence of the ‘literary’ nature of Chariton’s work.

46 Anderson (1984) 36. 47 Cf. Heibges, Papanikolaou, L. D. Reeve, ‘Hiatus in the Greek novelists’, CQ 21 (1971) 525 – 8. 48 Cf. 5.9.8 di± t/r v}seyr eqst\heiam ja· di± paide_ar 1pil]keiam. 49 Cf. 2.9.1 mij^sei syvqos}mgm cumaij¹r lgtq¹r vikostoqc_a. 50 Cf. 2.4.4 of Dionysius’ suffering. 51 Cf. 1.1.2, 1.14.1. 3.2.14 – 17, 4.7.8, 6.3.4, 8.6.11; below p. 760 – 1. 52 Note especially 8.1.10: Chaireas and Callirhoe hear themselves addressed (¦speq tim³r 1m vq]ati bahe? bebaptisl]moi l|kir %myhem vymµm !jo}samter, “like people at the bottom of a deep well hear a faint voice from the top”). 53 Cf. Libanius 8.487 – 9 Foerster. For Chariton and rhetoric in general cf. Anderson (1982) 19. 54 Cf. Chaireas’ mannered lament at 3.10.4 (probably echoing Plato, Symp. 180a I, 208d2 – 4); toso}tyi d³ 5done jqe_ttym 2aut/r, fsyi t¹ pq|teqom t_m %kkym cumaij_m, “Callirhoe seemed to surpass herself by as much as before she surpassed other women” (5.5.8); Ap_stoum d³ flyr fti d}mata_ tir paq’ 1lo· 1loO cem]shai dumat~teqor, “I did not believe that anyone with me would be powerful enough to have more power than me” (6.3.2).

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Chariton overtly intervenes in the story in a number of ways.55 He can emphasise the marvellousness of an event by asking “Who could properly describe it”,56 urge upon us the value of his story, “it’s worth hearing what happened” (2.8.3), and stand outside the narrative to guide our reactions, “I think that then even the king would have wanted to be Chaireas” (6.9.4). Authorial intrusions such as these are notably absent from Longus and Achilles Tatius, and have been variously interpreted. Some critics see in them signs of Chariton’s close links with popular, oral story-telling of a kind far removed from the literary fiction of the Second Sophistic.57 For others they indicate, in however rudimentary a way, the beginnings of self-conscious literary narration.58 These two views are, of course, not wholly incompatible. “It’s worth hearing what happened” is both naive and knowing in the way that the conclusion to the proem of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, lector intende: laetaberis, blends the traditions of sophisticated writer and oral fabulist. So too, the plot summaries which head Books 5 and 8 may be seen as borrowed from the techniques of oral narration, or as a specifically literary imitation of Xenophon’s Anabasis,59 depending upon which aspect of the work one wishes to stress. In a number of places Chariton calls attention to his work as a story or a set of tales. Thus Callirhoe defends her silence before Dionysius on the grounds that she does not wish “to seem a liar and to tell tales (digc^lata) which uninformed hearers would not believe” (2.5.9), and Dionysius encourages her to speak with the assurance that “every splendid story (kalpq¹m di^cgla) is less grand than you” (2.5.10). Even if we choose not to believe that this last utterance not only refers to Callirhoe, the character in the fiction, but also hints at the telling of her story, i. e. Chariton’s Callirhoe, it is clearly a small step from such passages to the more obvious play of Longus and Achilles Tatius with the fictionality of their narratives.60 After Polycharmus and Chaireas realise that the 55 56 57 58 59

Cf. Hägg (1971) 96, Fusillo 117 – 19, I. Stark in Kuch 98 – 9. Cf. 1.1.12, 1.6.2, 4.1.11, 5.6.2, 8.1.14, 8.4.I. Cf. Scobie 22 – 3. Cf. Stark 258. The summaries which introduce ‘Anabasis’ 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are spurious, but probably pre-date Chariton. 60 It is worth noting that digc^lata is used for both “true tales in the context of the novel” (3.2.7, 3.4.1, 4.3.5) and “false tales in the context of the novel” (1.10.6, 2.4.7, 2.5.9 etc.); this is, of course, not surprising, but there are good reasons to assume that Chariton has exploited this doubleness. In Xeno-

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king has left Babylon, they determine to join the rebels in the belief that Callirhoe has been awarded to Dionysius. Polycharmus asserts that 5mdonom ja· to?r vsteqom 1sol]moir di^cgla jatake_pomtar fti d}o >kkgmer !dijgh]mter !mtek}pgsam t¹m l]cam basik]a ja· !p]hamom ¢r %mdqer, “it

will be glorious to leave behind for future generations the tale of how two Greeks who had been wronged paid the Great King back and died as men” (7.1.8). To the Egyptian leader they quote the words of Hector when he realises that Athena has tricked him and that death is imminent: lµ l±m !spoud_ ce ja· !jkei_r !poko_lgm, !kk± l]ca N]nar ti ja· 1ssol]moisi puh]shai.

“May I not die ignobly without a fight, but having done a great deed for future generations too to learn” (7.2.4, cf. Il. 22.304 – 5).

Such a concern for kleos finds a very appropriate home in the military narrative which dominates the last two books. It is in fact not only male characters who reveal this traditional concern with their fame. A related phenomenon is Callirhoe’s plaintive di^cgla ja· t/r )s_ar ja· t/r Eqq~pgr c]coma, “I have become a common story throughout Asia and Europe” (5.5.3), and there is at least something wrily amusing in her wish (2.9.5) that her unborn child, when grown up, should go to Sicily to tell his father and grandfather his mother’s story (t± t/r lgtq¹r digc^sgi). How self-conscious these devices are in a work of prose fiction is an obvious subject for disagreement, but Apuleius too uses a version of this strategy when Charite promises Lucius that “the simple story of ‘the princess escaping from captivity on an ass’ back’ will be listened to in stories and kept alive by the pens of learned men” (Met. 6.29).61 The kleos of the fictional characters is the kleos of the fiction. Two particular passages of interest for this subject are Chariton’s direct addresses to his readers which open and close the work and also close the proem to the final book. phon of Ephesus, also, characters refer to their past history as ‘my stories’ (t± 1l± digc^lata), cf. 3.1.5, 3.2.15, 5.1.3, 5.9.7; here too it is significant that events exist not just ‘for themselves’, but to be narrated to an audience. 61 Cf. Hunter 44. Leucippe’s defiance of Thersander at Ach. Tat. 6.22.2 – 3 is closely related to these examples: “You do not realise that your shamelessness will win me greater praise. If you kill me in your madness, people will say Leucippe was a virgin after the boukoloi, a virgin after Chaireas, a virgin even after Sosthenes …”.

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Xaq_tym )vqodisie}r, )hgmac|qou toO N^toqor rpocqave}r, p\hor 1qytij¹m 1m Suqajo}sair cem|lemom digc^solai, “Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary to Athenagoras the lawyer, I shall recount a story of love which took place in Syracuse”;62 tos\de peq· Jakkiq|gr sum]cqaxa, “such is my narrative concerning Callirhoe”. These two statements frame the romance. In announcing himself at both ends of his work in this way, Chariton differs from Xenophon of Ephesus who, if the text of what seems to be an epitome can be trusted, begins in mediis rebus and whose only formal conclusion is to end the work with the names of his two lovers, and he stands closest to Longus, with whom he is usually thought to have little in common. The style of the opening sentence is obviously intended to recall fifth-century historiography, hereby placing us in the proper atmosphere for this tale of Syracusan ‘history’; Chariton’s most obvious models for this placing of name and place of origin at the head of the work are Hecataeus, Herodotus and Thucydides. What we shall be reading, then, is like a continuation of, or extended footnote to, their work. On the other hand, as Müller has excellently analysed,63 there is a witty tension between the historiographical form of the opening, familiar in contexts of great public events, and the announced subject, ‘a story of love’, which immediately suggests a fictional (poetic) tradition of private and hidden lives. There is a similar counterpoint in the final juxtaposition of Jakkiq|gr and sum]cqaxa, a standard verb for the writing of history. That we are assured at the beginning that this story really did happen (cem|lemom) 64 points clearly to the paradox. Müller well compared the opening of Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, quid actum sit in caelo ante diem III idus Octobris anno nouo, initio saeculi felicissimi, uolo memoriae tradere, where the tension is between the dry historiographical form and the fact that the narrated events took place in caelo.

62 The exact sense of this opening sentence may be disputed: does p\hor 1qytij|m just mean “a story of a love affair”, as the translators take it, a story whose known bounds far exceeded Syracuse, or does it refer specifically to the young couple’s first meeting (cf. 1.1.6, 3.2.6), or even to Chaireas’ kick? 63 Cf. Müller 123 – 4; Kuch 68 well notes that “das recht Prosaische der Vorstellung, das jedoch der Reputation des Verfassers dienen soll, wird dann abgelöst durch die doch verlockende Intention des Autors, eine Liebesgeschichte zu erzählen”. 64 For t± cem|lema as the proper subject of history, cf., e. g., Thucyd. 1.22.4, Arist. Poet. 145la36.

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A comparison of the opening of Chaireas and Callirhoe to the way in which Cleitophon’s narrative is introduced in Achilles Tatius will throw further light upon Chariton’s exploitation of various literary traditions: “Though the entire painting was worthy of admiration, I devoted my special attention to this figure of Eros leading the bull, for I have long been fascinated by passion, and I exclaimed, “To think that a child can have such power over heaven and earth and sea.” At this point a young man standing nearby said, “How well I know65 it – for all the indignities Love has made me suffer (tosa}tar vbqeir 1n 5qytor pah~m).” “And what have you suffered, my friend? You have the look, I know it well, of one who has progressed far in his initiation into Love’s mysteries.” “You are poking up a wasps’ nest of narrative. My life has been very storied.” (sl/mor !mece_qeir … k|cym t± c±q 1l± l}hoir 5oije). “Well sir, by Zeus and by Eros himself, please don’t hesitate. The more storied the better.” I clasped his right hand and we walked to a grove nearby where many plane trees grew in dense array and a stream meandered, cold and clear as if from fresh-melted snow. When we had found a low bench to sit on, I said, “See, here we have the perfect spot for your story – a delightful place (t|por Bd}r) and a setting most appropriate for tales of love.” (Achilles Tatius 1.1 – 2, trans. J. J. Winkler)

Cleitophon here lays claim to knowledge, to the “this has happened” of the historical narrative. The irony of this claim within the romance tradition requires no detailed elaboration; the opening chapters of, say, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses are full of such pointers. The equivalent in Chariton’s third person narrative – beyond the assertion of cem|lemom – is the narrator’s status as rpocqave}r, a status which suggests a move away from the authorial control of the material to the accurate recording of ‘external fact’, again the ‘this has happened’.66 Moreover, Cleitophon’s complaint of vbqeir suffered at the hands of love acts as the same generic marker as Chariton’s p\hor 1qytij|m, or Rstoq_am 5qy65 MSS are divided between taOta #m eQde_gm and taOta #m 1de_jmum. 66 O. Müller 124: “Empfehlung, an den Leser, dem damit bedeutet wird, daß der Autor ein Mann ist, der sich aufs Hören und gewissenhafte Niederschreiben versteht”. Others have wanted to see this role of answering the potential ‘how do you know?’ challenge to the author, the guarantee of authenticity, as performed by the closing device of a public assembly (8.7.9 – 8.8.11) where the events of the novel are re-told, cf., e. g., A. Wouters, ‘The eQj|mer in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe IV 39,2; “Beglaubigungsapparat?”’, Sacris Erudiri 31 (1989/90) 465 – 79, p. 474. This seems to me unnecessary – there is no hint of this in the assembly scene – and we have seen that any ‘guarantee of historicity’ is made problematic from the very first sentence of the work.

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tor, t}wgm 1qytij^m and p\mta 1qytij\ in the proem of Daphnis and Chloe; such generic self-reference seems in fact to have been a generic feature of ancient romance, and this is important in assessing how these works were classified in antiquity and how their authors thought of them. We find also in this chapter of Achilles Tatius the same concern with truth, pleasure and fiction as is now familiar from Chariton 1.1.1 and 8.1.4. In Achilles these concerns appear in the particular form or the lOhor-k|cor distinction,67 and are amplified by echoes of Plato’s Phaedrus, a ‘classic’ discussion not only of things erotic but also of the different fields of rhetoric and truth;68 Achilles makes the point with a brilliant pun on t|por which shows the ‘real’ setting, the place, to be merely a creation of rhetoric, a topos. 69 Chariton’s concern, then, with the gap between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ is not his alone, although it is his in a very special way because of the historical setting and characters of his work. mol_fy d³ ja· t¹ tekeuta?om toOto s}ccqalla, to?r !macim~sjousim Fdistom cem^seshai . jah\qsiom c\q 1sti t_m 1m to?r pq~toir sjuhqyp_m. oqj]ti kgiste_a ja· douke_a ja· d_jg ja· l\wg ja· !pojaqt]qgsir ja· p|kelor ja· ûkysir, !kk± 5qyter d_jaioi 1m to}tyi ja· m|liloi c\loi.

“I think that this final account will be the most pleasant for my readers, for it will cleanse away the sadness of the earlier books. No longer will there be piracy and enslavement, lawsuits and battles, suicide, war, and the capture of cities, but honourable love and lawful marriage” (8.1.4).

With this declaration Chariton introduces the denouement of his work. It has long been recognised that, whatever else it suggests, katharsion retains a distant echo of the katharsis effected by poetry in Aristotle’s Poetics (1449b 28).70 This prompts a closer examination of the ideas which lie behind this sentence; it will become clear that there is an important link between Chariton’s concerns here and those of the opening sentence. 67 Cf. Hunter 47. 68 The allusion to the famous locus amoenus of the Phaedrus (230b-c) is manifest; for the Phaedrus in the literature of the Second Sophistic cf. L. Trapp, ‘Plato’s Phaedrus in second-century Greek literature’, in: D.A. Russell (ed.), Antonine Literature (Oxford, 1990), 141 – 73. 69 Note that Hermogenes quotes this very passage of the Phaedrus to illustrate ekphraseis which produce Bdom^ (cf. Bd}r in Achilles) and ckuj}tgr (pp. 331.22 – 332.2 Rabe). Such sweetness of style is, of course, intimately associated with mythoi and love, cf. Hunter 92 – 8. 70 Cf. most recently Rijksbaron.

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Thucydides’ famous discussion of the principles behind his work (1.20 – 2) became the starting-point for all subsequent historiographical theorising; it is echoed time and again in Hellenistic reflection on the writing of history. Two aspects are particularly relevant here. First, the apparent Thucydidean rejection of ‘pleasurable fiction’ in favour of the benefit to be derived from a truthful, but not necessarily ‘pleasant’, account gave rise to much consideration of the desirable balance between ‘usefulness’ (¡v]keia) and ‘pleasure’ (t]qxir).71 Neither theory nor practice, of course, ever envisaged a completely strict division between, on the one hand, pleasure-giving fiction (usually associated with poetry) and, on the other, a truthfulness which was indifferent to pleasure and usually associated with prose.72 Much ancient scholarship, for example, was at pains to stress the accurate historical and geographical information to be found in Homer (cf., e. g., Strabo 1.2). Nevertheless, both sides of a traditional way of presenting the Thucydidean dichotomy are clearly present in Chariton: the didacticism which benefits readers, and the pleasure of fiction. A second, and perhaps more speculative, matter concerns Chariton’s description of his audience as ‘readers’. Thucydides apparently distinguished between those who wish to listen to or read73 a work for pleasure (1.21.1, 1.22.4) and those “who wish to have a clear view of what happened” (1.22.4). Polybius regularly describes his potential audience as oR !macim~sjomter or oR 1mtucw\momter, but he also distinguished between ‘hearers’ of history or tragedy and the ‘scholars’ (vikolahoOmter) of history;74 the former were, in Walbank’s translation, ‘casual readers’. Elsewhere, Polybius notes (9.2.6) that his purpose is “not so much the readers’ pleasure as benefit for the serious student (oR pqos]womter)” and (10.26.10) that his method is oQje?om (rather than Bd}) for “both writers and readers”; the despised Phylarchus, on the other hand, is accused of “trying to evoke pity in his readers” (2.56.6). Dionysius of Halicarnassus75 distinguished three types of potential readers, “those seriously concerned with the rhetoric of public life, or with speculative philosophy, and those who want some trouble-free entertainment from reading his71 72 73 74 75

Cf. Hunter 48 – 9; Walbank (above n. 22). Cf. Bowie 91 – 2, Wiseman, Woodman. Cf. Gomme on 1.21. Cf. Polybius 2.56.10, 7.7.8, 11.19a.2. Cf. C. Schultze, “Dionysius of Halicarnassus and his audience”, in: I. S. Moxon, J. D. Smart, and A. J. Woodman (eds.), Past Perspectives (Cambridge, 1986) 121 – 41.

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tory”.76 To the first two kinds correspond the rhetorical (1mac~miom) and speculative aspects of history; unfortunately, a lacuna conceals the type relevant to those reading for pleasure,77 but a later passage (AR 11.1.2) makes clear that the essentially serious interests of the first two groups are opposed by Dionysius to the harmless pleasure sought by the third group. In another work, Dionysius identifies the first task of the historian (a task performed better by Herodotus than by Thucydides) as finding a noble ( jak^m) subject which will please the readers,78 and in the De Oratore Cicero makes the orator M. Antonius say that he reads history for pleasure because, unlike poetry and philosophy, it is accessible to men who are not eruditissimi (ch. 59). Behind Chariton’s references to his ‘listeners’ (2.8.3) and his ‘readers’ (8.1.4), therefore, lies the long struggle to appropriate Thucydides’ distinction between two types of possible use for history to a wide variety of different types of writing; juxtaposition to a claim for the pleasure to be derived from this reading activates for us the resonances of this literary history. The final book is thus introduced by the same concerns and the same problematic distinctions as introduced the work as a whole.

III. Reading Callirhoe A particular aspect of the general problem raised in the preceding section is that of ‘character’. How can we ‘read’ a piece of such highly typological literature as an ancient novel, when that novel professes to be ‘historical’? How can we say anything about Chariton’s characters which is not merely (or also) about the characters of the whole genre? How does Chariton invite us to generalise ‘historical’ experience? In this and the following section I shall consider these problems as they arise in connection with Chariton’s two central characters, Callirhoe and Chaireas. :qlojq\tgr b Suqajous_ym stqatgc|r, oxtor b mij^sar )hgma_our, eWwe hucat]qa Jakkiq|gm toumola, ‘‘Hermocrates, the Syracusan strategos, the one who defeated the Athenians, had a daughter whose name 76 AR 1.8.3, plainly echoing Thucyd. 1.22.4. 77 Stephanus’ supplement would admirably suit the present argument, but other supplements are also possible; in the Loeb edition Cary proposes . 78 Dion. Hal. Pomp. 3.

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was Callirhoe …” (1.1.1). The important thing here is not what historical traditions may (or may not) lie behind the figure of Hermocrates’ daughter,79 but how Chariton presents her. The narrator needs to tell us her name, revealing a presumption that we do not know it. Next to her father, someone we all know, “the one who beat the Athenians …”, this is like the juxtaposition of p\hor 1qytij|m and cem|lemom. History (Hermocrates) and fiction, or at least para-history (Callirhoe). In the first three chapters of the romance Callirhoe’s name recurs only twice. Once in 1.1.5 where the happy couple set out on the fateful day of their meeting, — i. e. the beginning of the story, and again in 1.1.8 in a report in indirect speech of Chaireas’ despairing words to his parents; we take the word there as part of what he actually said, and as an indication that he knows who it is with whom he has fallen in love.80 Otherwise, in these opening chapters, Callirhoe is B paqh]mor (1.1.8, 1.1.14, 15) or after marriage B cum^ (1.3.3, 1.3.5, 1.3.7), except at 1.3.1 where she is B j|qg and her liminal status as a new bride is precisely what is at issue: she can not yet appear in public.81 Chariton’s careful use of nomenclature is very important: this is to be a narrative of statuses, and Callirhoe’s status – virgin, wife, mother – is to be crucial. In part her problem is a confusion of statuses: whose wife is she? She is a mother who gives her child away. Her marriage to Dionysius is not, in the world of the novel, a real marriage; it does not represent a transition from paqhem_a.82 For Dionysius, his marriage is ‘proved’ by the birth of 79 Cf. above p. 738 – 9. 80 We are, I think, to understand that Callirhoe did not know the identity of the man she met in the street. Her prayer to Aphrodite at 1.1.7 “make my husband the man whom you showed to me” suggests this, and her ignorance would suit a paqh]mor who had not been out before (1.1.5); 1.1.14 “she did not know who she was going to marry” would also then be nicely pointed. (Her ignorance of course also dramatises a real or imagined position of women at marriage). 81 LSJ s. m. j|qg is very confused. For Chariton’s care in nomenclature in general cf. T. Hägg, “Some technical aspects of the characterization in Chariton’s romance”, in: Studi classici in onore di Quintino Cataudella (Catania, 1972) II 545 – 56. For the motif of the public reserve of the newly married girl cf. Heliodorus 6.11.1. 82 Nothing is said by anyone – and it is Plangon’s silence which is most surprising (after all, she knows about abortions) – about why Dionysius finds nothing but joy in his wedding-night. Some modern critics have wondered why he is not apparently bothered by his wife’s absence of virginity, although parallels in myth and literature (Euripides, Ion; Menander, Epitrepontes) are available. If

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the child which, in a sense, also retrospectively proves his wife’s status at marriage; for us it ‘disproves’ it. In dealing with one of the changes of status which Callirhoe undergoes in the course of the work, that from bride to mother, Chariton does not eschew a physical ‘realism’ based upon contemporary science, and this is one way in which the experience of ‘a historical’ character may he generalised. Callirhoe’s pregnancy is a stratagem of Fortune,83 but it is explained as the result of the vigorous and equal desire which the young couple felt for each other during the early days of their marriage (2.8.4). This idea, apparently natural enough, in fact accords with some ancient medical theory.84 Her failure to notice her pregnancy during its first two months is, as the narrator observes (2.8.5), hardly surprising in view of the stressful time she has had, and doctors (as well as women) were well aware that apparent irregularities in the menstrual flow were in fact perfectly regular.85 We must, moreover, see in Callirhoe’s feigning of seasickness (1.11.2, 1.13.9 cf. 2.2.8) a hint by the author at the revelation to follow; Soranus recommends that women suffering from what is now termed morning sickness should fast for a day, like sea-travellers who can prevent sea-sickness in this way.86 That “at the beginning of the third month Callirhoe’s belly began to swell” (2.8.5) has been criticised as unrealistic,87 but not only do such things follow no immutable pattern, it is Plangon, who is very experienced in these matters, who makes the decisive discovery. Finally, Callirhoe’s death-like collapse after she has been kicked by Chaireas88 is explained by Chariton in what may be termed, in comparison with his normal

83 84 85 86 87 88

we are to be bothered about such things, a number of answers suggest themselves: he was so happy he didn’t care or didn’t notice or didn’t understand; or perhaps a quite different conception of ‘virginity’ is operative, cf. G. Sissa, Le Corps virginal (Paris, 1987) [= Ead., Greek Virginity (Cambridge, Mass. 1990]). Cf. above p. 746. Cf. Soranus, Gyn. 1.36 – 7; [Arist.] HA 11.636b14 – 18. I am grateful to Dr. Helen King for her advice in these matters. Cf. Soranus. Gyn. 1.49.2 – 3. Soranus also observes that active women or women going on long journeys pass less blood in menstruation (1.22.6). Gyn. 1.49.2 – 3. For ancient views on nausea in pregnancy cf. A. Rousselle, Porneia. De la matrise du corps la privation sensorielle (Paris, 1983) 59 – 60 [Engl. translation: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford, 1988) 42 – 3]. Cf. Hägg (1971) 27 n. 1. For this scene and its origins cf. below p. 765 – 70.

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style, medical language,89 while stress is laid upon the fact that the burial followed unusually quickly after the collapse (1.5.7). In having the force of the kick affect Callirhoe’s ‘diaphragm’, Chariton both explains her collapse and prevents us asking (in retrospect) why the foetus was not damaged by the blow, as common sense, medical wisdom,90 and a common narrative pattern91 would otherwise have suggested. “… Callirhoe, a maiden of amazing beauty and the ornament (%cakla) of all Sicily. Her loveliness was not mortal but divine, and not of a Nereid or mountain nymph, but of Aphrodite Parthenos herself” (1.1.1 – 2).

Thus we do not learn what Callirhoe looks like, just that she is incredibly, divinely beautiful. The technique of introduction here is familiar enough in the Greek and Latin romances, and the lack of specificity in the physical description may in part be ascribed to a desire to avoid a physiognomic reading.92 Rohde commented upon this lack of specificity in describing female beauty, which he saw as a peculiarly Greek phenomenon, and he connected it with the richness of Greek statuary, familiarity with which allowed the novelists a shorthand way of indicating the physical perfection of their heroines (and heroes).93 “Idealisation [is] the first step toward a suspenseful and melodramatic threat of desecration”94 and this is indeed just what constantly threatens heroines such as Callirhoe. Comparison of beautiful women to statues is indeed so common throughout ancient literature – the locus classicus being Lucian’s Imagines 95 – that Heliodorus is able to turn it round in a striking way: when the bandits see Charicleia, they assume that their friends must have plundered a temple and that she is either the priestess or a living statue of the goddess, aqt¹ 5lpmoum … t¹ %cakla (Heliodorus 1.7.2). This tradition is surely an important resonance in the description of Callirhoe as %cakla t/r fkgr Sijek_ar. “Le vrai trésor de la Sicile” translates Molinié, “the pride of all Sicily” is Reardon’s version, and such renderings do certainly capture a primary sense of the phrase. We must, how89 1.4.12, 1.8.1; note especially di\vqacla, !mapmo^, and the attractive conjecture of Zimmermann !v]seyr (1.8.1). Cf. Molinié 23. 90 Cf. Hippocrates, Mul. 1.25 (Littré 8.66). 91 Cf. below p. 767. 92 For the potential of a physiognomic reading, cf., e. g., Philostratus Iun., Imag. 3. 93 Rohde 165 – 6, echoed by Hägg (1983) 17. 94 M. Riffaterre in ICAN II 73. 95 Cf. Pl. Charm. 154c; Men. Dysc. 677 (with the note of Gomme-Sandbach); Nisbet and Hubbard on Hor. C. 1.19.6; McKeown on Ovid, Am. 1.7.51.

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ever, allow full play to %cakla as ‘statue’, particularly as it is matched by the words linking Chaireas to statues and paintings of handsome male figures (1.1.3),96 and this resonance deserves closer attention than it has normally received. I begin with the scene in Book 2 of Callirhoe in the bath: eQsekhoOsai d³ Ekeix\m te ja· !p]slgnam 1pilek_r, ja· l÷kkom !podusal]mgr jatepk\cgsam ¦ste 1mdedul]mgr aqt/r haul\fousai t¹ pq|sypom ¢r he?om pq|sypom 5donam QdoOsai· b wq½r c±q keuj¹r 5stikxem eqh»r laqlaquc/i timi floiom !pok\lpym . tquveq± d³ s\qn, ¦ste dedoij]mai lµ ja· B t_m dajt}kym 1pavµ l]ca tqaOla poi^sgi.

“The women went in, rubbed her with oil, and wiped it off carefully; when she undressed, they were even more awestruck – indeed, although when she was clothed they admired her face as divinely beautiful, when they saw what her clothes covered, her face went quite out of their thoughts. Her skin gleamed white, sparkling just like some shining substance; her flesh was so soft that you were afraid even the touch of a finger would cause a bad wound” (2.2.2, trans. B. P. Reardon).

Despite some uncertainties concerning the text, it is clear that the motif of the flesh which would be bruised by touching is a motif of ‘realistic’ art criticism; one thinks particularly of the ‘naive’ women looking at statues in Herondas 4.59 – 62 and Ovid’s Pygmalion with his beloved creation: oscula dat reddique putat loquiturque tenetque et credit tactis digitos insidere membris et metuit, pressos ueniat ne liuor in artus (Met. 10.256 – 8).

We can, I think, be more specific than this. The association of Callirhoe with, and comparison to, Aphrodite is recurrent throughout the novel; the two are often confused by onlookers. A famous statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles on Knidos represented the goddess just before her bath – copies often have the robe that she has just taken off hanging beside her.97 That this is the statue type which Chariton has in mind cannot 96 For this passage cf. below p. 765. %cakla is translated as ‘cult statue’ by K. Scott, “Ruler cult and related problems in the Greek romances”, Classical Philology 33 (1938) 380 – 9, p. 384, but his concerns are very different from mine; whether or not at this date an %cakla was specifically a cult statue is not important for my argument. 97 Cf. Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Zurich and Munich, 1981 – 1999) s.v. Aphrodite 391 – 408.

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be proved, but seems likely enough. That it is, however, a statue that is being evoked should not be in doubt: laqlaquc/i evokes l\qlaq ‘marble’.98 An interesting analogue and contrast may be drawn with the introduction of Circe in Petronius’ Satyrica: … mulierem omnibus simulacris emendatiorem. nulla uox est quae formam eius possit comprehendere, nam quicquid dixero, minus erit. crines ingenio suo flexi per totos umeros effuderant, frons minima et quae radices capillorum retro flexerat, supercilia usque ad malarum scripturam currentia et rursus confinio luminum paene permixta, oculi clariores stellis extra lunam fulgentibus, nares paululum inflexae et osculum quale Praxiteles habere Dianam99 credidit. iam mentum, iam ceruix, iam manus, iam pedum candor intra auri gracile uinculum positus: Parium marmor exstinxerat. (Satyrica 126.1.13 – I8)

Here Petronius has clearly perpetrated a joke on the reader’s voyeuristic expectations. We expect Encolpius to praise or comment upon, for example, Circe’s breasts, even if they are concealed (cf. Ach. Tat. 1.1.10), but we are led – as Encolpius is soon to be – down the garden path. Petronius, of course, is notoriously salacious, Chariton notoriously ‘decent’. The suggestion that Chariton encourages us to linger over an image of naked female flesh, filling in the details as we go, might therefore seem an improbable one; and yet it fits with a consistent pattern of imagery in the work. One of the most famous occurrences of the Knidian Aphrodite in literature is in [Lucian’s] Amores. The central concern of that work are the relative merits of heterosexual love-making and paederasty. The statue itself is not described in any detail, but a front view of it causes the heterosexual Charicles to start kissing it (ch. 13), while the back view produces an outburst of enthusiasm from the paederast Callicratidas (ch. 14). The viewers are told the story of a young man, crazed with love for the statue, who locked himself in the temple overnight, and a 98 Note how translators cope with this: Blake and Plepelits adopt ‘marble’, Reardon ‘some shining substance’. 99 Encolpius compares Circe to a Praxitelean Artemis; Jahn suggested reading Dionen, a standard poetic name for Venus, instead of Dianam (Encolpius being given to poetic language) and Müller and Heseltine are clearly attracted by the conjecture. It is an interesting problem – Dianam would suit Circe’s claim to be relatively inexperienced in sex (127.1), and Encolpius praises those parts of the body which are overtly visible on a lady wearing a tunic, whereas Aphrodite-statues – for which Praxiteles was much more famous – are more likely to have been naked. Encolpius may, of course, have got his art history wrong.

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blemish on the goddess’ thigh records the appalling thing which happened during that night. Callicratidas is quick to point out that the youth made love to the statue paidij_r (17). This story can offer very useful guidance to the way in which Chariton has used the idea of ‘Callirhoe as a statue’. Statues are almost limitlessly readable – we encode our own patterns, our own desires upon them; the familiar phenomenon of ‘hermaphroditic’ statues seems to be, in part, both a recognition of this fact and a more explicit provocation to the same kind of ‘open’ response that the Knidian Aphrodite evokes in the story. When the sculptural mode is transposed (or, perhaps better, transplanted) to literature, this open readability is not lost. So too, the proem of Daphnis and Chloe overtly raises the question of the narrative’s potential to create desire and to remind the reader of his or her own past and present desires,100 and in Achilles Tatius Cleitophon coyly admits that a logos erotikos stokes up desire (1.5.6). On a rather more mundane level, Theodorus Priscianus, a doctor of late antiquity, recommended the reading of love-romances as a cure for impotence in males.101 Chariton’s novel is not, of course, in any simple sense pornographic, if we take that to mean “intended to arouse male sexual desire”. Rather, the ‘Callirhoe = statue’ equation, prominently positioned at the head of the romance, where, as we have already seen, there are other programmatic and generic indicators shared with the so-called ‘sophistic’ romances,102 is a central stratagem both in allowing us to generalise from Callirhoe’s experience to our own,103 and in preventing any naively simple acceptance of the ‘historicity’ of the work. Arthur Heiserman described Chariton’s work as “a fantasy of erotic power … in conflict with, and therefore sanctioned by, a fantasy of 100 Cf. especially F. I. Zeitlin, “The poetics of eros: nature, art, and imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe”, in: D. M. Halperin, J.J. Winkler, and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.). Before Sexuality. The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Creek World (Princeton, 1990) 417 – 64. 101 Cf. Hunter 51 n. 108. 102 Cf. above p. 748 – 56. 103 I do not, of course, mean to imply that such ‘generalising’ holds good only for female readers of the romance; our ‘experience’ includes our imaginative experience. I believe that the famous passage describing Menelaus and ‘lovely statues’ at Aeschylus, Agamemnon 416 – 19 reflects the same set of ideas that I have been exploring for Chariton.

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moral power’’.104 According to this view, Callirhoe is a woman who is desired by every man who sees her, but who remains faithful and chaste, even through a second, consummated marriage. Chariton points us towards this important paradox, which forms a crucial structuring pattern in the whole work, in the very opening chapter by comparing Callirhoe’s beauty to that of )vqod_tg paqh]mor, “Aphrodite the virgin”.105 Callirhoe carries with her the charms and dangers both of the goddess of desire and of the untouched (and untouchable) virgin. To express this in terms influenced by Tanner’s study of adultery in the nineteenth-century novel, we would say that Chariton has produced a socialised narrative of adultery, a triumph of the patriarchal order, an adultery that actually confirms rather than threatens that order. Nowhere is such an order more visible than in the structures of public power, and it is clearly part of the ‘Callirhoe-fantasy’ that her power extends across continents and to the thrones of kings. To this public side of Callirhoe I now turn. Chariton’s Syracuse is, in modern terms, a guided democracy, not in fact fabulously unlike the Syracuse of Thucydides,106 but also not very far from ‘Sophistopolis’, the imaginary city of the declaimers which Donald Russell described in his ‘Greek Declamation’. There is, as in the declaimers, a stqatgc|r – Hermocrates – who exercises ‘executive authority’ and gives what amounts to binding advice in times of crisis. A reading of Thucydides would certainly not have suggested that Hermocrates was personally in charge of military operations against the Athenians, but it is easy enough to see how writers of later antiquity assimilated his position to situations more familiar to them.107 Hermocrates’ reasonableness, his preference for the request over the order (cf. 3.4.16), and his strict adherence to the rule of law, even when his own daughter’s safety is at stake,108 are set against the absolute power of the Great King and the fear and flattery which that power inspires. 104 Heiserman 77. 105 Laplace 124 rightly notes that the epithet sets up Aphrodite as a rival in power to Athena Parthenos; this is part of Syracuse’s ‘usurpation’ of Athenian glory, cf. below p. 764. 106 Cf. Gomme – Andrews – Dover on Thucyd. 7.55.2. 107 Cf. Zimmermann 336 – 7. Diodorus 13.96.3 describes Hermocrates as “he who defeated the Athenians in war” ( jatapokel^samtor), cf. Chariton 1.1.1; for Hermocrates as a serving admiral cf. Diodorus 13.34.4 where he is described as b pqyte}ym t_m pokit_m. 108 Cf. above p. 744.

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We may be reminded not only of the stqatgc|r of a declamation, but also of a princeps acting through auctoritas, rather than of the control exercised by the Thucydidean Pericles. In Chariton’s Syracuse, as in ‘Sophistopolis’, “there is a popular assembly, easily moved to tears or anger and even to riot” and “potential tyrants are a constant danger’’.109 We expect tyrants (or sons of tyrants) to plot against democracies; here they plot against Callirhoe’s marriage, which was not merely sanctioned (indeed instigated) by the Syracusan people, but is also a symbol for its power and freedom. The difference between Hermocrates and Syracuse, on the one hand, and the tyrants of the other states, on the other, is related to the ‘Greek v. barbarian’ theme which is so prominent through the work.110 At 3.4.16 Hermocrates insists that the rule of law must take precedence over the chance of getting more information out of Theron, and he urges an embassy to make enquiries: tµm 1keuh]qam !pok\bylem. Doubtless the sense is, as Reardon translates, “she is a freeborn woman – let us recover her”, but we surely also hear 1keuheq_am resonate. The loss of Callirhoe has deprived Syracuse of its ‘freedom’; it has done what the Athenians failed to do, a point virtually spelled out in 3.4.18: 5bkepem !p¹ toO stauqoO tµm h\kassam 1je_mgm, di’ Hr aQwl\kytom 5veqe tµm :qlojq\tour hucat]qa Dm oqj 5kabom oqd³ )hgma?oi.

“from his cross [Theron] looked out over that sea, across which he had transported as a prisoner the daughter of Hermocrates, a girl whom not even the Athenians had captured”.

5kabom, “captured” would be at least as natural if used of a city as of an individual; it is as if Callirhoe had been the object or the Athenian expedition.111 Callirhoe thus embodies the state. Not only does the launching of the search-vessel from Syracuse (3.5.2 – 3) recall Thucydides’ description of the launching of the Athenian expedition (6.30 – 1),112 but the recovery of Callirhoe replays the day of celebration of the great victory over the Athenians (8.6.10), and the Syracusans ‘appropriate’ the Athenians’ finest hour, the victory over Persia, as Chaireas returns laden with Persian spoils (8.6.12). ja· pok]lou ja· eQq^mgr Gm bloO t± Fdista, 1pim_jia ja· c\loi, “victory and marriage are the sweet109 110 111 112

Russell 22. Cf. above p. 744 – 5. Cf. Müller 126. Cf. above p. 740.

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est parts of war and peace”, we are told (8.1.12), and in Callirhoe they come together. Another way of looking at them is as the public and private sides of the same coin, and this interplay of public and private, which is always important in the ancient romances where ‘private lives’ are played out against the affairs of state,113 assumes particular importance in a ‘historical’ novel. This is most obvious in scenes such as the trial at Babylon, and in the figure of the Great King, Artaxerxes, who is torn between public function and private emotion. From the moment of the lovers’ meeting at a public festival (1.1.4), the relationship of Chaireas and Callirhoe is never a purely private affair – there is always a state interest, in as much as Callirhoe is to some extent the state.114 Callirhoe, then, embodies political power over which men struggle – and not just democratic power, as it is through her that two satraps and the Great King play out their power games. She is placed at the centre of a shifting set of related polarities – truth/fiction (was there really such a woman? – Chariton is well aware of the historical uncertainties), public/private, power over others/Love’s power over oneself, war/peace – and the literary forms which traditionally embodied those polarities.115

IV. Reading Chaireas Chaireas is introduced as being as handsome as sculptors and depict Achilles, Nireus, Hippolytus and Alcibiades.116 Achilles and Nireus were the two handsomest Greeks at Troy (Iliad 2.673 – 5), and Gippolytus combines beauty, powerful sexual attractiveness, and notorious chastity; he too, like Chaireas, suffered at the hands of Aphrodite. Alcibiades is the paradigm of beautiful brilliance, a man of affairs, an ero-

113 Cf. Fusillo 77 – 9. 114 For an exploration of how these features may contribute to a reading of the work as a ‘reaction’ to Roman power cf. Edwards. I am grateful to Prof. Edwards for sharing with me further, as yet unpublished, work in which he expands these ideas. 115 There is obviously an important relationship between these polarities and their literary embodiments and Bakhtin’s work on the ‘dialogic’ form of the novel. 116 For the mixing in this list of ‘mythical’ and ‘historical’ characters cf. below p. 770 – 1.

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tikos without par, famously attractive, like Chaireas (cf. 1.3.6),117 to both sexes. Nevertheless Chaireas has received even worse treatment at the hands of modern critics than has Callirhoe, despite this intriguing introduction. There has been some fruitful interest in the apparent gap between his decisive role and ‘macho’ joking in the wars of Books 6 – 7 (see esp. 7.6.10) and his more usual despair and indecision; a step forward is represented by Helen Elsom’s observation that the fact that he can only really be ‘a man’ when he believes that he has lost Callirhoe for good is related to the gender patterning of the whole work.118 It is indeed the case that as soon as she is recovered, Chaireas devotes his attention to her rather than to his duties (8.6.9), and it is she who now has to teach him how to be cunning with his men (8.2.4). It is, however, not with these later scenes that I shall be concerned; rather, I want to go back to his attack upon his wife to show how this sequence of action is crucially integrated into Chariton’s concern with history and historicity. At one level, it appears to be merely a ‘genre-scene’, familiar from a range of ancient literature: man hits /does violence to his beloved girl. Chariton presents us with one extreme – he’s ‘killed’ her; Ovid gives us another – he’s messed up her hair (Amores 1.7).119 At another level, however, the scene may be thought programmatic of many of Chariton’s most important concerns. Chariton presents this scene twice in order to develop a sense of progression and climax. On the first occasion, Chaireas returns from the countryside and sees outside his house the signs of a komos and a large crowd of sightseers; he then 1mhousi_m eQstq]wei “rushes in crazed” (1.3.3). He beats on the door which a maidservant opens and 1pipes½m t/i Jakkiq|gi tµm aqcµm let]bakem eQr k}pgm jtk. Momentarily – and, in view of what is to follow, with a kind of narrative foresight – we are tempted to translate “attacking Callirhoe he (vented) his anger”, but let]bakem “he changed” changes everything.120 On the second occasion, 117 Cf. Plutarch, Alcib. 1.3, Diod. Sic. 13.68.5, Plepelits ad loc. B. Effe, “Der griechische Liebesroman und die Homoerotik. Ursprung und Entwicklung einer epischen Gattungskonvention”, Philologus 131 (1987) 97, wrongly asserts that Chariton’s work excludes all references to homosexuality. 118 ICAN II, 87. For the use in these books of traditions concerning Alexander cf. above p. 739. 119 Ovid too treats his crime as potential sacrilege, vv. 5 – 6 (with Mc Keown’s note for the type of legal argument). 120 His bloodshot eyes (a standard sign of anger) find an interesting parallel at Men. Epitr. 900 (Sandbach) in the slave’s account of how Charisios abused himself

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a more elaborate plot will give Chaireas the evidence of hid own eyes. He asks to see the grim sight fpyr eqkoc~teqom 1laut¹m !m]ky . Jakkiq|gr c±q ja· !dijo}sgr ve_solai.

“so that with better reason I might kill myself; for I shall spare Callirhoe, though she wrongs me” (1.4.7).

I think that the ‘natural’ way to read this is that Chaireas’ words envisage

the possibility of killing a wife taken in adultery, an act not permissible under the Greek laws we know most about, those of classical Athens.121 This is, of course, not the only way to take it – he could be sparing her harsh legal penalties, or merely the shame of exposure and divorce. I shall consider shortly another reason for thinking that the ‘natural’ way is the right way, but we may note here the irony that Chaireas does in fact ‘kill’ her, as far as anyone in Syracuse knows. In kicking his (as it is to turn out) pregnant wife, Chaireas acts out a familiar pattern in the stories of the cruelty of tyrants.122 Similar deeds are described in various narrative traditions to Periander (Diog. Laert. 1.94), Cambyses (Hdt. 3.32), Herodes Atticus (Philostratus, VS 2.1.8) and Nero (e. g. Tacitus, Ann. 16.6.1, Suetonius, Nero 35.3). Particularly close is the story of Periander whose angry action was prompted by “the slanders of his serving-women”.123 Thus, jealousy here reduces Chaireas to the level of the ‘tyrants’ who are plotting against him; he ‘imitates’ them in becoming their tool. It is probable also that Chaireas’ action was a signal to the alert reader that Callirhoe was in fact pregnant; the narrative pattern seen here and in the stories of tyrants is by no means confined to these contexts.124

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122 123 124

angrily when he realised how unfairly he had treated his wife. It may be worth recalling that Gerald Browne, “Ad Charitonem 1.3.7” (AJP 102 [1981] 321), suggested that 1.3.7 ‘concealed’ a catalectic trochaic tetrameter, eujokoi d³ to?r 1q_s_m aR diakkaca_, a sentiment, if not a metre, which would fit easily into current reconstructions of the end of the Epitrepontes. Cf. Dem. 59.85 – 7; D. Cohen, “The Athenian law of adultery”, RIDA3 31 (1984) 147 – 65. One of the most interesting features of Lysias I is precisely the speaker’s silence about what happened to his wife from the point of discovery on. Cf. W. Ameling, “Tyrannen und schwangere Frauen”, Historia 35 (1986) 507 – 8. Ameling notes that this story “paßt … den vielen hellenistischen Novellismen, die sich um die Person Perianders rankten”. At Heliodorus 1.10 Demainete falsely alleges that when Knemon discovered that she was pregnant he kicked her in the belly.

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When Chaireas sees the ‘adultery’ unfold before his eyes, he can no longer control himself but “rushes in to kill the adulterer caught in the act (1p’ aqtov~qyi)” (1.4.10). Reardon’s footnote “This was legal in Greece”, accompanied by a reference to Lysias 1, is typical of commentators, but there is more to be said in the context of Chariton’s concern with ‘historicity’. Given that Chaireas acts in a fit of jealous passion, the scene need not in fact strictly be predicated upon a law allowing the killing of an adulterer caught in the act, but on the other hand 1p’ aqtov~qyi has the air of a legal phrase, and again this seems to be the ‘natural’ interpretation. Where was it legal to kill an adulterer so caught? For only two states, classical Athens and Rome before Augustus established special courts, can we feel reasonably confident that, under certain circumstances, the law permitted summary execution of an adulterer. Our knowledge of the law in other states is of course very patchy, but where we do have relatively trustworthy evidence adulterers caught in the act appear to have been punished in other, often brutal, ways;125 it would not, of course, be surprising if other Greek states, at various periods, had (at least in theory) the same rigorous law as Athens,126 but it is important to register that, at the very least, Chariton archaises by assimilating the law of fifth-century Syracuse to that of the best-known (particularly to a legal clerk) classical city.127 At one level, this has historical verisimilitude, and certainly does not jar with the rest of the novel; but it also points us again towards Chariton’s concern with the status of his tale. Death or the threat of death for adulterers is common enough in the narrative fiction of later antiquity;128 it obviously possesses a narrative power denied to less violent legal processes. In particular, it is in the world of declamation (both Greek and Roman) that adultery is rife 125 Cf. J. H. Lipsius, Das attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren (Leipzig, 1915) 433; R.F. Willets, The Law Code of Gortyn (Berlin, 1967) 28; S.G. Cole, “Greek sanctions against sexual assault”, CP 79 (1984) 97 – 113; G. Hoffmann, Le Ch timent des Amants (Paris, 1990). 126 One attested explanation for the proverb ‘axe of Tenedos’, an explanation attributed to, inter alios, Aristotle (fr. 593 Rose), is that ‘a certain king’ enacted a law that a man catching a couple in adultery could kill them both with an axe; he then had this harsh penalty enforced when his son was so caught. We need, however, give little credence to the story or the legal situation it assumes, cf. Fiehn, RE 5A.1 (1934) 495, s.v. Tenedos I. 127 The influence of Lysias I is particularly important here. 128 Cf, e. g., Apul. Met. 9.25; Lucian, Toxaris 17; Heliodorus 1.11 ff.

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and adulterers summarily killed. Two of the elder Seneca’s Controuersiae (1.4, 9.1) are based on a law which is stated as “an adulterous couple caught in the act may be killed without penalty, provided that both are killed”.129 With the world of declamation fits the paradox of Chaireas’ self-condemnation at 1.5.4 – 5: dglos_ai le jatake}sate . !pestev\mysa t¹m d/lom, vik\mhqyp|m 1stim #m paqad_t] le dgl_yi. toOto ¥veikom pahe?m, eQ ja· heqapaim_da :qlojq\tour !p]jteima. tq|pom fgt^sate jok\seyr !p|qqgtom, we_qoma d]dqaja Reqos}kym ja· patqojt|mym. lµ h\xgt] le, lµ li\mgte tµm c/m, !kk± t¹ !seb³r jatapomt~sate s_la.

“Stone me to death in public; I have robbed our community of its crowning glory! It would be charitable to hand me over to the executioner; that would have been my proper punishment if it had been merely Hermocrates’ servant girl I had killed; try to find some unspeakable way to punish me. I have done something worse than any temple robber or parricide. Do not give me burial; do not pollute the earth – plunge my criminal body to the bottom of the sea!” (trans. B. P. Reardon)

Self-condemnation is one of the commonest legal processes in ‘Sophistopolis’ as well as being very familiar in the novel tradition.130 We may in this case even be able to be more specific than this. Behind Chaireas self-loathing lies, I suggest, the Herodotean Adrastus who unwittingly killed Croesus’ son and then, unlike Chaireas, succeeded in killing himself at his victim’s tomb. Such a resonance lends significance to the ‘religious’ tone of Chaireas’ speech, for Adrastus had come to Croesus to be purified for the killing of his own brother; I would thus hazard the guess that ‘Adrastus pleads to be put to death’ was a standard theme in the rhetorical schools. The figure of Adrastus certainly lies behind the sad story of Menelaus killing the boy he loved at Ach. Tat. 2.34. For the study of Chariton this analysis has an importance beyond that of simple literary history. Chariton has deliberately made problematic the question of which ‘frame’ or ‘code’ we should use when reading these scenes. Do we use a historical one, a comic one,131 a rhetorical/declamatory one? How are we to read Chaireas’ near-fatal kick? Even if we are to understand that this blow was aimed at the adulterer rather than at Callirhoe, the assumption of a kind of realism in this scene, de129 Cf. S. E. Bonner, Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Liverpool, 1944) 120; Russell 33 – 4. 130 Cf. Russell 35 ff; Ach. Tat. 7.7, Heliodorus 8.8.5. 131 It is particularly tempting to think of Menander’s Orge.

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spite the care which Chariton has taken over the medical details,132 presents almost insuperable problems to the interpreter.133 Rather we must recognise in this scene an interplay of various codes which, and this is crucial, we are supposed to recognise. We notice the legal situation – historically plausible, but also problematic; we recognise that the situation Chaireas finds himself in is both ‘possible’, that is, conforms to some extent with our experience (real or imaginary) of both literature and life, but is also shaped by the adultery-narrative of Lysias 1,134 and by the historical tradition. Chaireas is a man destroyed by wild, innate jealousy (8.4.4), but he is also playing out the role of Adrastus, as at other times he plays out Homeric roles. Another way of saying this is that the fact that, as scholars since Rohde have painstakingly shown, many genres have contributed to and are exploited in the ancient novel is of interest not just as ‘literary history’ but as a central piece of information which we bring to our reading of these texts, and in particular of Chariton’s work.

V. Conclusion The successful plot against Chaireas’ marriage finds a close analogue in Demainete’s scheme against Knemon at Heliodorus 1.1. 1 – 12, a story set in classical Athens which assumes that under certain circumstances both partners in adultery could be killed (even stoned, cf. Chariton 1.5.4). We cannot, however, use Heliodorus to dismiss the scenes in Chariton with which I have been concerned as merely a “typical novel scenario”, even if we believe that Heliodorus borrowed from Chariton, because Chariton’s overt concern with “being a historian” – which is a quite different concern from, say, Heliodorus’ use of historiographical devices135— forces us to read his typical novel motifs in very specific ways.

132 Cf. above p. 758. 133 There is a good illustration of the difficulties in the note of Plepelits ad loc, who finds himself reduced to citing a ‘parallel’ from Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’. 134 Trenkner 159 does not convince me that Chariton 1.4 is independent of Lysias 1.15 – 28, although she is correct in identifying Lysias’ debt to the novella tradition. Cf. further U. Albini, “Noterelle esegetiche”, PP 17 (1962) 383 – 4. 135 Cf. Morgan.

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Set against the historiographical frame is Chariton’s overt assimilation of his action and characters to the patterns of myth136 and Homeric poetry. Callirhoe is as faithful and as beautiful as Penelope,137 but also has the power of Helen to cause unhappiness;138 Chaireas variously suggests Odysseus, Achilles (4.1.5), Diomedes (7.3.5, 7.4.6) and Hector (3.5.6, 7.2.4), and the relationship of the two lovers is constantly compared to that between Achilles and Patroclus, a friendship notoriously faithful even after death.139 The quotations and allusions to Homer serve, of course, more than one purpose, and Müller argued that Chariton actually saw himself as an epic poet.140 Rather, he consciously exploits the gap between epic and historiography, and the fact that Greek history had constantly appropriated epic to its own patterns, to create a new literature which openly proclaimed its appropriations. Hägg’s quite proper conclusion from his examination of ‘Chaireas and Callirhoe’ as a historical novel was that Chariton’s aim “was … to create that titillating sensation peculiar to historical fiction, which is the effect of openly mixing fictitious characters and events with historical ones. This is not to try to pass the novel off as something else, but, rather, to make the most of the contrast; in his first and last sentences, Chariton shows that he is well aware of the possibilities”.141 The opening chapters immediately juxtapose Hermocrates and his daughter,142 Alcibiades and Nireus;143 the central problem of ‘historical fiction’ is thus posed at the very head of the novel. In the introduction to the final book we learn for the first time that Chaireas’ sufferings were a deliberate punishment by Aphrodite for the wrong he had done to Callirhoe. Although this goddess’ influence has, of course, never been far 136 Prominent examples are the paradigms of Ariadne (cf. 1.6.2,3.3.5 – with an equivocation between Dionysus and Dionysus – , 4.1.8, 8.1.2), and of Orestes, Pylades and Electra. 137 Cf. 4.4.5, 4.7.5. 138 Cf. 1.2.1, and the remarks of Laplace; at 5.5.9 linked Homeric quotations referring to Helen and Penelope emphasise Callirhoe’s various powers. 139 Cf. 1.4.6, 2.9.6, 4.1.3, 5.2.4, 5.10.9, Chaireas’ attitude at 7.4.10 is strongly reminiscent of Achilles’ attitude to fighting after the death of Patroclus. 140 Müller 133 4; cf. the remarks of Kuch 60 n. 21. 141 Hägg (1987) 197. 142 Cf. above, p. 756 – 7. 143 This is, of course, not to say that there was any permanent difference in ‘status’ between Alcibiades and Nireus, even if much more was ‘known’ about the former, cf. Thucyd. 1.3, 1.9 – 11; Herodotus, however, distinguishes between the earlier period of Minos and the ‘generation of men’ (3.122.2).

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away, the only actions explicitly ascribed to her are Callirhoe’s two marriages,144 and the motif of the wrathful god has not been used before, except ironically at 7.5.3 where Callirhoe raises the possibility that she has wronged the goddess. The only earlier indication of Aphrodite’s motive was that she shared her son’s taste for paradox and change (2.2.8). The most famous instance of this motif is the wrath of Poseidon in the Odyssey, and it can hardly be without significance that Chaireas’ punishment has turned him into an Odysseus !p¹ d}seyr eQr !matok±r di± luq_ym pah_m pkamghe_r, “wandering with countless sufferings from west to east” (8.1.3). Chariton introduces this motif at the head of the final book because he wishes to mark this gap between ‘history’ and ‘epic’, a gap signalled in this chapter by the reference to Paris and Helen. Chariton here acknowledges the two poles between which his work swings, and which this essay has investigated. It was not modern scholars who first discovered the links which bind epic, historiography, and romance.

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A. Scobie, Aspects of the Ancient Romance and its Heritage. Essays on Apuleius, Petronius, and the Greek Romances, Beitrge zur klassischen Philologie 30 (Meisenheim am Glan, 1969). I. Stark, ‘Zur Erzählperspektive im griechischen Liebesroman’, Philologus 128 (1984), 256 – 70. T. Tanner, Adultery in the Novel. Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, 1979). S. Trenkner, The Greek Novella in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1958). J. J. Winkler, ‘The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative strategy of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika’, YCS 27 (1982), 93 – 158. T. P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics. Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature (Leicester, 1979). A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London and Sydney, 1988). F. Zimmermann, ‘Chariton und die Geschichte’, in: R. Günther and G. Schrot (eds.), Sozialçkonomische Verhltnisse im alten Orient und im klassischen Altertum, Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft. Tagung der Sektion Alte Geschichte der Deutschen Historiker-Gesellschaft vom 12.–17. 10. 1959 in Altenburg (Berlin, 1961), 329 – 45.

Addenda There are now two reliable and accessible texts of Chariton – G. P. Goold’s Loeb (1995) and B. P. Reardon’s Teubner (2004). The bibliography, as on the ancient novel generally, is voluminous, and little point would be served in trying to give a proper account here (or for the essays which follow); much of the recent bibliography on Chariton may be reached through S. D. Smith, Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton: the Romance of Empire (Groningen 2007) and T. Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge 2008). Other recent discussions include J. Alvares, ‘Chariton’s erotic history’ AJP 118 (1997) 613 – 29, R. K. Balot, ‘Foucault, Chariton, and the masculine self’ Helios 25 (1998) 139 – 62, and S. Schwartz, ‘Callirhoe’s choice: biological vs legal paternity’ GRBS 40 (1999) 23 – 52. n. 1 On titles, cf. T. Whitmarsh, ‘The Greek novel: titles and genre’ AJP 126 (2005) 587 – 611. n.3 On dating cf. E. Bowie, ‘The chronology of the earlier Greek novels since B. E. Perry: revisions and precisions’ Ancient Narrative 2 (1992) 47 – 63. n.84 Add Plutarch, Moralia 681 f: ‘they say that conception is more likely when those who have intercourse love each other’. p.768 On the possible use of Lysias 1 cf. further the discussions of K. Kapparis and J. R. Porter in Hermes 128 (2000) 380 – 3 and 131 (2003) 433 – 40.

41. Longus and Plato* That Longus’ work contains echoes of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, the two ‘erotic’ works which held a primary, ‘classic’ status in the second century A.D. is well known; the practice of allusion to these two Platonic works was ‘part of the standard learning of any rhetorician’,1 as Michael Trapp’s helpful essay fully demonstrates,2 and recent scholarship on Daphnis and Chloe (henceforth D&C) has continued its assiduous search for verbal and thematic allusions to them.3 As far as the Phaedrus is concerned, the similarities between I 22.4, Ehek|m ti, Acm|oum f ti h]kousi. toOto l|mom Eidesam, fti t¹m l³m v_kgla, tµm d³ koutq¹m !p~kesem, and Phaedrus 255d, 1q÷i l³m owm, ftou d³ !poqe?· ja· ouh’ fti p]pomhem oWdem oqd’ 5wei vq\sai jtk., and between II 7.1 and Phaedrus 249d 6, which both concern the ‘wings’ which Love gives to the soul, have long been noted, and further detailed echoes may yet await detection4. So too, in 1983 I suggested that Plato’s story of the origin of cicadas (Phdr. 259a-d) may be relevant to the incident of the tettix and the following story of the phatta (I 25 – 7),5 and the passing years * 1 2

3 4

5

M. Picone and B. Zimmerman (eds.), Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption (Basel 1977) 15 – 28 R. L. Hunter, A Study of Daphnis & Chloe, Cambridge, 1983, 109 n. 43. M. B. Trapp, Plato’s Phaedrus in second-century Greek literature, in Antonine Literature, ed. by D.A. Russell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 141 – 73. B. D. MacQueen, Myth, Rhetoric, and Fiction. A Reading of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Lincoln and London, 1990, gives a prominent place to Longus’ engagement with the Phaedrus, and although I cannot agree with the arguments of that book (cf. Classical Journal 87 [1992], pp. 175 – 8), it has stimulated me to think again about this whole matter. I should also note that, since 1983, D&C has been the subject of a minor flood of critical work, some of it very sophisticated; I have not thought it worthwhile always to footnote my agreements and disagreements with this body of work. See especially G. Danek and R. Wallisch, ‘Notizen zu Longos, Daphnis und Chloe’, in Wiener Studien 106 (1990), pp. 47 – 60. Thus, for example, I would like to believe that Lykainion’s lesson at III 18.3 – 4 is indebted (almost by way of parody) to Phaedrus 256a; note esp. spaqc_msvqic_mta, peqib\kkei-peqib\kkeim ; Danek-Wallisch, ‘Notizen’, p. 58 prefer to connect 256a with III 9.5 (Daphnis and Chloe’s father). Hunter, Study, pp.56 – 7.

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have not brought much reason to change my mind. At one level, such allusions – even the more structural final example – fall well within the usual field of ‘the literary texture’ and need not carry special significance, beyond signalling the author’s awareness of a central, authorising text. Thus, Trapp dismisses the debt to the Phaedrus of the novelists as a group – not just Longus – as ‘used to infuse either a modicum of philosophy, or a little of the stylistic sweetness for which [the Phaedrus] was so admired by the rhetors’;6 the picture of Longus’ use of Plato presented in my 1983 book was not essentially different from this. Such a picture is, however, if not wrong, at least inadequate, and it is that inadequacy that I hope to go some way towards repairing in this paper. I shall confine myself largely to the Phaedrus, though this by no means exhausts the possible Platonic aspects of D&C; the novel’s overt concern with mimesis, for example, might allow a fruitful confrontation with the Republic. 7 In exploring what can be gained from a confrontation between novelist and philosopher, I shall oscillate between a literary-historical claim about the genesis, as well as the meaning, of D&C, and a less complex claim merely about its meaning; in the latter instance, confrontation with the Phaedrus functions more as a heuristic device than as an explanatory model. The justification for such a procedure — which is not unlike that of Walter Forehand’s attempt to read the gardens and ordered spaces of the novel as both analogous to and derived from the cave of the Republic —8 is of course that the two claims can often hardly be separated, particularly in view of Plato’s status in the second century. It will, I hope, emerge that while I am sympathetic to the larger, genetic claim, little of what follows actually depends upon it.

6 7

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Trapp, Phaedrus 155. Cf., e. g., B. Zimmermann, ‘Liebe und poetische Reflexion. Der Hirtenroman des Longos’, in Prometheus 20 (1994), pp. 193 – 210. Zimmermann also considers the claim of the proem that D&C will ‘remind he who has loved’ in the context of Platonic anamnesis theory. Michael Reeve has pointed out to me a striking verbal similarity between the opening of Proem 3 (Qd|mta le ja· haul\samta jtk.) and Plato. Rep. 2.359d 5; the echo, if this is what it is, helps to confirm Reeve’s punctuation for Longus. W. E. Forehand, ‘Symbolic gardens in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe’, in Eranos 74 (1976), pp. 103 – 12.

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1. I begin with the famous episode of the Phaedrus in which Socrates both shows himself knowledgeable about the rape of Oreithyia by Boreas and refuses to cast doubt upon its truth, noting that he accepts what is commonly held (peih|lemor t_i molifol]myi, 230a 1); in particular, he refuses to ‘rationalise’ the story away by reducing it to what is probable (t¹ eQj|r), as the sophoi would do, on the grounds that there are so many myths that a rationaliser will need ‘a lot of leisure’, and because it would be ridiculous for a man who does not yet know himself to be concerned with such matters (Phdr. 229b-230a). This episode does, of course, more than one job for Plato.9 It foregrounds the question of how to read myths and rejects one obvious ‘clever’ method of doing so. In rejecting what we might call, rather grandly, the appeal to science, Socrates does however suggest another, perhaps more favoured, reading: ‘I inquire … not into these but into myself, to see whether I am actually a beast more complex (pokupkoj~teqom) and more violent (1pitehull]mom) than Typhon, or both a tamer and a simpler creature, sharing some divine and un-Typhonic portion by nature’ (230a 3 – 6, trans. Rowe). Here it is clearly not just a matter of men having reason where Typhon does not, but also of the potential of monsters like Typhon to represent emotional facts about ourselves. A distinction is thus at least adumbrated between ‘clever’ rationalisation – Oreithyia was not carried off by Boreas but blown over by the north wind – and what we might call, for want of a better (and perhaps less anachronistic) term, allegorical readings. Plato clearly has his eye here on prior and contemporary exercises in ‘allegorisation’, such as he refers to explicitly in the Republic (‘we must not accept into the city battles of the gods such as Homer depicts, whether allegorised or not’ (out’ 1m rpomo_air pepoigl]mar oute %meu rpomoi_m) II 378d 5 – 7).10 The importance of this kind of reading for the remainder of the Phaedrus hardly requires demonstration. Such allegorising of poetic myth was, of course, a common strategy, particularly in later antiquity, but it is important to be reminded that Longus’ readers will have been prepared, might indeed have expected, to read the muthos of Chloe (II 27.2) in this way, and I 9 Cf., e. g., G. R. F. Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 1 – 36; C. Osborne, Eros Unveiled. Plato and the God of Love, Oxford, 1994, pp. 96 – 8. 10 Cf. R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, Oxford, 1968, p.10; D. C. Feeney, The Gods in Epic, Oxford, 1991, pp. 8 – 12.

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shall return to this point. Both Plato and Longus thus offer an aetiology of eros expressed in mythic terms. There is a further matter here which leads us towards D&C. Socrates describes the skill needed for myth rationalisation as %cqoij|r tir sov_a ‘a boorish/rustic kind of cleverness’ (229e 3). This might surprise us, as simple belief in muthoi might be thought more obviously %cqoijom than ‘clever’ rationalisation. In the context, however, we can hardly fail to associate Socrates’ choice of adjective with the setting in which he finds himself.11 Plato wishes to associate such rationalising activity with the setting in a locus amoenus: both the rationalisations and the setting are waq_emta ‘charming’ (note 229b 7, 229d 2, 230b 6), and Socrates rejects both in favour of the pursuit of self-knowledge which is primarily an activity of the city. The country setting has nothing to teach Socrates (230d 3). When therefore the narrator of D&C enters upon his locus amoenus, which is in fact, as we shall see, the literary space of the Phaedrus, and proclaims a tale that will bring instruction as well as delight, the Phaedran background, at the very least, ironises the claim. This is particularly so as what the novel has to teach us is itself expressed in Platonic terms, and it is to the novel which I now turn. The Platonic opposition between muthos and logos, an opposition which we may gloss in various ways — ‘imagination-science’, ‘description-metaphor’, ‘fiction-truth’ —, is explicitly signalled in D&C and may be thought to inform the whole work.12 The description of the growth and functioning of eros operates within two broad modes of explanation which are set in creative tension with each other. One we may fairly call the ‘mythic’ mode, the muthos being that which is explicitly declared to be Eros’ purpose (II 27.2). This mode depends in part upon one of the most familiar features of the novel — the ‘incredible’ inability of Daphnis and Chloe to discover how to make love. To ask of this muthos ‘is it true?’ (or even ‘credible’, what Socrates calls jat± t¹ eQj|r, Phdr. 229e 2) is to ask the wrong question, as Phaedrus did beside the Ilissos (229c 5). The other fundamental mode of the novel is based upon the readers’ experience and knowledge; this mode is most clearly instantiated in the characters of Philitas, Lykainion, Gnathon and the 11 It is noteworthy that the Aristophanic Socrates charges Strepsiades with being !cqe?or … ja· sjai|r, ‘rustic and stupid’ (Clouds 655). For further discussion cf., e. g., R. B. Rutherford, The Art of Plato. Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation, London, 1995, 174. 12 Cf., e. g., Hunter, Study, pp. 47, 114 n.99.

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narrator himself. From the interweaving of these two modes Longus has created his tale. The ‘mythical’ mode is most obvious in the three short included narratives of loss and metamorphosis, the stories of the phatta (I 27), of Syrinx (II 34), and of Echo (III 23).13 Like the novel which frames them, these stories both tell a ‘once upon a time’ story which explains something in our world (wood-pigeons, pan-pipes, echoes), and also present a mythical paradigm for crucial features of the relations between the sexes, as Daphnis and Chloe come to know them: the strength of the male, the loss of the female, and the inevitable violence of male desire.14 These included stories follow the development of the narrative in as much as the absence of an explicit relationship of eros between the two cowherds in the phatta story reflects the fact that in Book I Daphnis and Chloe do not know what eros is, and the word and its cognates are used only by the narrator. The cowgirl’s sense of loss and helplessness after the musical victory of the young man suggests Chloe’s despair that she is not as beautiful and musical as Daphnis (I 13 – 14) and also, we might suspect, a male author’s representation of the perceived female desire to share the privileged status of the male. The increasing violence through the three stories must, at some level, reflect the approaching consummation of the young people’s love, and the fact that it is again Daphnis who tells the echo story suggests his new status as possessor of special knowledge after his lesson from Lykainion. He can now take over the rôle of praeceptor which, until that time, had been held successively by Philitas and Lykainion. His knowledge of echo (eQd½r t¹ pqatt|lemom, III 22.1) in fact points to a wider knowledge, recently acquired. He is moving from one world to another, or from being a figure in one mode of representing experience to a figure in another. Longus seems explicitly to direct us towards these competing modes of explanation in the episode of Echo (III 21 – 3). Here Daphnis is the experienced praeceptor, whereas Chloe is hearing an echo for the first time and must therefore be told its muthos. At the very least. Longus plays with our uncertainty as to whether Daphnis knows the ‘true’ explanation of the phenomenon and thus ‘believes’ the muthos which he tells Chloe no more than we do (cf. III 22.1, 22.4, 23.5). The parallel 13 On these stories cf. Hunter, Study, pp. 52 – 7 (with bibliography). 14 On these features of the novel cf. especially J. J. Winkler, ‘The education of Chloe: hidden injuries of sex’, in The Constraints of Desire, New York and London, 1990, pp. 101 – 26.

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with the presentation of eros in the novel is at least suggestive: Daphnis and Chloe are introduced to the muthos of eros before they learn its science. The incident of the echo points in several different directions. One, to which I shall return, is mimesis, for an echo stands as the limit case where nature must ‘imitate’ man, for without human initiative no music is produced (cf. III 23.4 – 5). Nature, in fact, acts like an eqcamom, a man-made tool (III 21.4).15 For the moment, however, we may note that the explanation of the echo effect which is offered by the narrator (III 21) has, unsurprisingly, important points of contact with the surviving ‘scientific’ explanations of the phenomenon, of which the most important are Aristotle, De anima II 419b26 – 420a3, [Arist.] Problems XI 23.901 b17 – 23, 51.904b27 – 33, Lucretius IV 565 ff, and Philoponus’ commentary on the De anima passage (pp. 360.19 – 363.14 Hayduck).16 The importance of the hollow setting for the production of an echo is found in these sources, and I think that it is clear that III 21.4 seeks to reproduce the flavour of a technical discussion, not merely by the use of such words as aqk~m and eqcamom, but also by the explicit contrast between conditions in which sound is lost in the air and those under which an echo is produced.17 Like Longus, Lucretius also juxtaposes a ‘scientific’ and a ‘mythic’ explanation of the phenomenon of echo; his myth is full of imaginary satyrs and nymphs and a musical Pan (IV 580 – 94).18 The opening chapters of the Phaedrus, therefore, provide an important origin for one of the central focuses of D&C. Moreover, just as Plato seems to link the question of the use and interpretation of myth with an opposition between urban and rural settings, so Longus introduces this same opposition through the fishermen whose songs produce the echo: ‘they were hurrying to get their freshly caught fish to the city in good condition for one of the rich men there’ (III 21.1). Here we can see that muthos-logos, country-city, phusis-techne are related and analogous pairings which shape the text: the fishermen’s livelihood depends upon fresh fish reaching ‘one of the rich’ (we may imagine the phrase as

15 It may be that III 21.4 images the hollow glen not as ‘a musical instrument’ but as a living body; both aqk~m and eqcamom would suit such a reading, cf. esp. Arist. PA III 664a 25 – 32. I offer this suggestion without great confidence in it. 16 Philoponus’ commentary is partly reproduced in the Suda (g 685). 17 With III 21.3 cf. Lucr. IV 569 praeterlata perit frustra diffusa per auras. 18 There is a similar juxtaposition of explanations at Lucian, De domo 3.

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focalised by the fishermen themselves), and these ‘rich’ inhabit a world beyond muthos. Although the two modes of explanation which I have been exploring inform the whole work, they do not always operate at the same level of explicitness as we have found in the incident of echo. Often the ‘scientific/realistic’ mode is merely implicit and works through Longus’ reliance upon his readers’ knowledge. We know (or think we know) the facts of life, and so they do not have to be inscribed explicitly in the text. When they are, most notably in the scenes of Philitas’ instruction (II 3 – 7) and Lykainion’s seduction of Daphnis, it is important that these characters must present themselves to Daphnis and Chloe in the ‘mythic’ mode, Philitas with his account of the epiphany of Eros, and Lykainion with her story of the dream appearance of the Nymphs (III 16.2). We have already seen how the ‘experienced’ Daphnis must introduce Chloe to the phenomenon of echo through the ‘mythic’ mode. If we interpret the stratagems of Philitas and Lykainion as amusingly knowing — they are very much creatures of logos —19 we must nevertheless admit that they are here serving a larger pattern in the work which goes beyond mere characterisation. Many of us would, after all, admit that whether love is to be understood in mythic or physical terms is still an open question. One aspect of the harsher world of logos is logos as ‘definition’, the search for the correct name or names, which was of course a crucial part of the Socratic-Platonic search for knowledge. In D&C this search is the search for both the name and the nature of eros, and this search must be conducted within the world of muthos, as only in that world is eros unknown. Thus Dryas and Lamon are unable to name the little winged boy armed with bow and arrows, whom they see in a dream (I 8.2), despite their advanced years. When Chloe’s emotions are first stirred by Daphnis in the bath, we are told that she had not even heard anyone ever say ‘the name/noun of love’ (I 13.5), and her ‘naive’ suffering is described as she ‘searches for the name/noun of love’ (I 15.1). Her would-be seducer Dorkon, however, knows ‘both 19 See the excellent discussion of G. Bretzigheimer, ‘Die Komik in Longos’ Hirtenroman “Daphnis und Chloe”’, in Gymnasium 95 (1988), pp. 515 – 55. Some aspects of Bretzigheimer’s analysis have been criticised by K.-H. Stanzel, ‘Frühlingserwachen auf dem Lande. Zur erotischen Entwicklung im Hirtenroman des Longos’, in Wrzburger Jahrbcher fr die Altertumswissenschaft 17 (1991), p. 153 – 75.

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the name and the deeds (5qca) of love’ (I 15.1). When Daphnis is similarly afflicted, he laments that he cannot even name the disease from which he suffers (I 18.1); without knowing what eros is, ‘he tastes the deeds and words of love for the first time’ (I 19.1). Recent critics have rightly seen here an instance of one of Longus’ prime concerns, the question of whether eros and the behaviour associated with it is ‘natural’ or an ‘artificial’ cultural construction.20 Rather than rehearse this now familiar discussion, I wish to dwell for a moment on the fact of the search for the name. When the children have received from Philitas what amounts to both the name and the definition of eros (II 7.7), they must proceed to see whether their experiences match the definition (II 8.2 – 5), but the transition to logos through logismos is a gradual one: When they were left on their own, now that they had heard for the first time the word “love” (t¹ =qytor emola), they felt a spasm of pain in their souls; and when they went home to their farms at night, they compared their own experiences with what they had heard. Lovers feel pain – and so do we. They neglect their food – and we have neglected ours in the same way. They cannot sleep – and that is happening to us at this moment. They seem to burn – and there is a fire inside us. They long to see each other – and that is why we pray for the day to come more quickly. Surely this is “love”, and we are “in love” with each other without realising it. Or is it that this is love and that I alone am in love? 21 But why then do we feel the same pain? Why do we seek each other? Everything that Philitas said is true. (II 8.1 – 4)

It is one of the paradoxical ironies of eros that recognition of it involves wanting physical satisfaction for it, which is tantamount – as is natural with a disease – to getting rid of it (cf. III 14.1, t¹ l|mom 5qyta paOom v\qlajom). This paradox is most explicit in the description of the second spring when the behaviour of the animals affects Daphnis and Chloe who were svqic_mter ja· pok»m Edg wq|mom 5qyta fgtoOmter, in Gill’s translation, ‘blooming with youthful energy, … long since … searching for love’ (III 13.3). In fact, eros is a name now well known to them; what they do not know is what to do about it. Thus Reeve is 20 Cf. esp. Winkler, ‘Education’; F. I. Zeitlin, ‘The poetics of eros: nature, art, and imitation in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe’, in Before Sexuality, ed. by D. M. Halperin, J. J. Winkler, and F. I. Zeitlin, Princeton, 1990, pp. 417 – 64; D. Teske, Der Roman des Longos als Werk der Kunst, Münster, 1991; D. F. Kennedy, The Arts of Love, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 77 – 82. 21 The text at this point is uncertain.

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right to give Valckenaer’s 5qytor a place in the apparatus here.22 A further instance of the search for logos through logismos may be seen in the aftermath of Lykainion’s lesson in Book III. Daphnis’ knowledge is still incomplete, he is !qtilah^r (III 20.2), and he can only engage in reasoning (kocisl|r, III 20.1) within his own limited horizons: ‘he shrank from pestering’ (diowke?m) 23 Chloe for more than kisses and embraces. He did not want her to cry out at him as though he was an enemy or weep as if she was hurt or bleed as though she had been killed.24 For being newly instructed, he was frightened of the blood and thought it was only from a wound that blood came. What I have traced as the novel’s concern with naming and definition, Gerlinde Bretzigheimer has traced as a comic version of the philosopher’s development from ignorance to knowledge. If, to quote Aristotle, ‘all men by nature aim for knowledge’, here the knowledge concerned is ‘how to make love’, and Daphnis and Chloe do finally attain wisdom.25 The Platonic works in which sexual arousal and the contemplation of physical beauty were represented as a stimulus to the philosophic pursuit were clearly suited to Longus’ project. The analogy is, of course, an ironical and humorous one, suggesting as it does that Platonic eros is nothing more than a nice-sounding excuse for hanging around with pretty boys. Moreover, as we have already noted in the context of the opening conversation of the Phaedrus, the place and style in which Daphnis and Chloe conduct their search seems entirely wrong. The rural beauty of the locus amoenus is, paradoxically, just the wrong place in which to try to learn ‘the facts of life’; the Aristotelian desire for knowledge is inevitably doomed to prolonged frustration by the very texture of its setting. It is not merely the Platonic heritage which 22 Note that Schönberger keeps the transmitted text, but feels compelled to translate as ‘die jung und blühend waren und sich schon seit langer Zeit nach Befriedigung ihrer Liebe sehnten’. A relevant parallel with which to defend the transmitted text might be Theocritus 2.143, 1r p|hom Emholer %lvy. 23 This and related expressions are regularly used to mean ‘to importune, pester for sexual favours’ (cf., e. g., Plato, Alc. I 104d; Xen. Symp. 8.4; Theocr. 29.36) and so the use here – with Daphnis as ‘embedded focaliser’ – reveals the quantum leap in his knowledge since his lesson with Lykainion. For his ‘shrinking’, ejmor, cf. Alcibiades’ mistaken view of Socrates at Pl. Symp. 218c. 24 Castiglioni’s deletion of jah\peq pevomeul]mg from Lykainion’s speech at 3.19.2 is surely correct (though it is retained by Schönberger and Vieillefond). 25 Bretzigheimer, ‘Komik’, pp. 524 – 9.

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is in play here; Longus also uses two aspects of the Theocritean world. This is a world of carnality and the pursuit of sex, but it is also a place of loss, absence, separation and unfulfilled longing. Whereas Theocritus tends to embody these characteristics in different people so that one may be set off against, or frame, another, Longus’ heroes are enmeshed in the toils of both.

2. The most obvious point of contact between D&C and the Phaedrus is of course the locus amoenus setting: By Hera, a fine stopping-place! This plane-tree is very spreading and tall, and the tallness and shadiness of the agnus are quite lovely; and being in full flower it seems to make the place smell as sweetly as it could. The stream, too, flows very attractively under the plane, with the coolest water, to judge by my foot. From the figurines and statuettes, the spot seems to be sacred to some Nymphs and to Achelous. Then again, if you like, how welcome is the freshness of the place, and very pleasant; it echoes with a summery shrillness to the cicadas’ song. Most delightful of all is the matter of the grass, growing on a gentle slope and thick enough to be just right to rest one’s head upon. So you have been the best of guides for a stranger, my dear Phaedrus (Plato, Phdr. 230b-c, trans. Rowe).

This lovely spot sacred to the nymphs – shade, flowers, cool water – is very like the Lesbian grove in which the narrator of D&C saw the picture which he proceeds to describe. Longus is of course drawing upon a very long tradition of such descriptions, and of itself nothing much could be made of the similarity, even in the light of the special status of the Phaedrus in the second century; the explicit verbal evocation of the Phaedrus at the start of Achilles Tatius’ novel is very different, although that passage might in fact encourage us in the belief that the Platonic work is important for Longus also. The absence of the most familiar Phaedran landmarks, the plane-tree and the cicadas,26 suggests a rewriting at the level of theme and structure, not merely a verbal allusion. Be that as it may, I wish to suggest that the proem of D&C marks an entry into the space of Plato’s work, in which the famous locus amoenus of the Phaedrus functions as a kind of metonymy for the whole work. That the grove which the narrator enters is a literary site is not in doubt (cf., e. g., Propertius III 1, 2), and such beautiful markers of lit26 Cf. Danek-Wallisch, ‘Notizen’, p.47.

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erary inspiration are a commonplace of (particularly Roman) poetry.27 Moreover, the description of the grove plays with the language of style, as well as with that of ekphrasis. !mhgq|m, floridum, is, according to Quintilian (XII 10.58), a name for the middle style, the primary function of which is delectare or conciliare (XII 10.59), the primary characteristic lenitas, and the effect of which is very like that of a locus amoenus (for which purpose it was presumably often used): medius hic modus et tralationibus crebrior et figuris erit iucundior, egressionibus amoenus, compositione aptus sententiis dulcis, lenior tamquam amnis et lucidus quidem sed uirentibus utrimque ripis inumbratus (Quintilian XII 10.60). This is the middle style which Cicero connects with epideictic and sophistic, a style marked by suauitas and the use of Gorgianic figures and short, rhythmic phrases (Orator 37 – 9, 42, 91 – 2, 95 – 6).28 Although Byzantine theory assigns bucolic to the Qswm|m or tenue, rather than to the middle style,29 we are plainly dealing in the proem of D&C with an evocation of stylistic terminology descriptive of the pleasures of the work we are about to read; !mhgq|m is in any event associated with bucolic style in the late Prolegomena. 30 Entry into the grove on Lesbos is thus entry into a particular style and content, and there is reason to think that this is marked as entry into the space of the Phaedrus. When in the Ars Poetica Horace complains about the unsuitable insertion of ‘descriptive’ passages, his complaint is both about style and content: inceptis grauibus plerumque et magna professis purpureus, late qui splendeat, unus et alter adsuitur pannus, cum lucus et ara Dianae et properantis aquae per amoenos ambitus agros aut flumen Rhenum aut pluuius describitur arcus;

27 Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard on Hor. C 1.1.30 – 1 (where the poet’s grove and association with the nymphs is contrasted with the life of the hunter); Fedeli on Prop. 3.1.1. On the related bucolic Musenweihe of Aesop cf. E. Mignogna, ‘Aesopus bucolicus. Come si “mette in scena” un miracolo (Vita Aesopi c.6)’, in Der sop-Roman. Motivgeschichte und Erzhlstruktur, ed. by N. Holzberg, Tübingen, 1992. pp. 76 – 84, and Hunter, this volume 867 – 83. 28 Cf. M. Winterbottom, ‘Cicero and the middle style’, in Studies in Latin Literature und its Tradition in honour of C.O. Brink, ed. by J. Diggle, J. B. Hall, and H. D. Jocelyn, Cambridge, 1989, 125 – 31. 29 Cf. Scholia in Theocritum vetera p. 11 Wendel. 30 Cf. p. 12. 1 Wendel.

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sed nunc non erat his locus.

(Hor. AP 14 – 19)

Seriousness (grauitas) of style and subject has given way to the different mode of the locus amoenus, as particularly exemplified by descriptions of a sacred grove.31 This linkage of subject and style is, of course, very familiar in the Greek rhetorical tradition, and its importance for the understanding of the ‘sweetness’ (ckuj}tgr) of D&C now well understood.32 Michael Trapp33 has already drawn attention to chapters 5 – 7 of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatise on Demosthenes in which the soothing and pleasant (Bd}) effect of Plato’s ‘plain’ style is described in terms influenced by the locus amoenus of the Phaedrus. Dionysius’ classification of style is idiosyncratic – Plato as a whole is made an example of the ‘mixed’ or ‘middle’ style because he uses both the ‘plain’ and the ‘grand’ —34 but the essential point is clear: the locus amoenus of the Phaedrus was famous for both content and style and was a classic instance of the close inter-connection between the two. Both the Phaedrus and D&C show how nature itself is constructed from sophisticated mannerisms of language. Just as the opening of Plato’s dialogue brings Socrates into a new site for the practice of philosophy, so the opening of the novel brings us and the narrator into the arena of the Phaedrus. In this way the work both patterns itself upon and marks its progression from Plato’s work.35 By entering a grove of the nymphs, the narrator exposes himself to the same danger of ‘nympholepsy’ as that to which the Platonic Socrates succumbs (Phdr. 238c-d, 241e) when he leaves his normal haunts in the city; that the narrator of D&C too presents himself as a city-dweller is a reasonable inference from the fact that he is hunting (cf. Astylos at IV 11.1).36 This condition of nympholepsy has recently been studied by 31 32 33 34

For other references to such descriptions cf. Brink ad loc. Cf. Hunter, Study, pp. 84 – 98. Trapp, Phaedrus, p. 145. Cf., e. g., S. F. Bonner, ‘Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the peripatetic mean of style’, in Classical Philology 33 (1938), pp. 257 – 89. 35 It might also be worth considering how the obsessive parallelisms and repetitions of D&C reflect and move away from the Phaedrus’ overt concerns with literary unity. The very problematic ‘one-ness’ of that dialogue give way to a work which parades its structural tautness. 36 On the sophistication of the narrator’s interests see further Bretzigheimer, ‘Komik’.

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W. R. Connor,37 who notes that ‘nympholepts’ often dedicated reliefs of their experience, or established ‘a cult place, usually a rustic one, remote from the city … not a place for purely private or individual religiosity. Prophecy and perhaps healing or purification can be found there … the nympholept might remain … on the fringes of society, but the spot he had chosen might be visited by those who shared his veneration for the nymphs and, from such consultations or confrontations, receive from time to time recognition and respect’.38 The possible importance of this pattern for the interpretation of D&C is clear. Both Daphnis and Chloe and the narrator play out a pattern first established by the nameless nympholept who set up the statues of the nymphs. Daphnis and Chloe ‘decorated the cave and set up images in it’ (IV 39.2), like that nameless nympholept, and the narrator sets up his own healing shrine (i. e. the text) in imitation of the pictures set up by Daphnis and Chloe which already attracted visitors. The idea, familiar from Plato and elsewhere, that eros is a kind of mania is obviously important in associating the narrator with his characters in their relation to the nymphs. As the sight of Daphnis’ body inspires Chloe, so a beautiful sight inspires in the narrator both wonder and desire, and then a longing to imitate (cf. I 13.5). This similarity between the experiences of the narrator and those of his characters has often been discussed in connection with the presentation of eros in the novel,39 but two further points — of varying significance — may be added here. The loss of sophrosune which the narrator fears cannot be divorced from the potentially possessing forces of the grove;40 nympholepsy, the ‘elevated sensibility and power of expression’41 from which the Platonic Socrates suffers is, in one sense, a loss of sophrosune. In this case possession by the nymphs and eros, the two forces so closely linked in the novel, amount almost to the same thing: in the language of the early part of the Phaedrus, eros is a nosos (‘disease’) which manifests itself 37 ‘Seized by the nymphs: nympholepsy and symbolic expression in classical Greece’, Classical Antiquity 7 (1988), pp. 155 – 89. 38 ibid. pp. 165, 179. For some extant dedications see also Roscher s.v. Nymphen; RE 17.1558 – 72; N. Himmelmann-Wildschutz, HEOKGPTOS, MarburgLahn, 1957; P. Amandry, ‘Le Culte des nymphes et de Pan à l’antre Corycien’, in Bulletin de Correspondance Hellnique Suppl. 9 (1984), pp. 395 – 425. 39 Cf. esp. Zeitlin, ‘Poetics’; A. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Princeton, 1986, pp. 86 – 90. 40 On the conclusion of the proem in general see esp. Zeitlin, ‘Poetics’. 41 Connor, Nymphs, 160.

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in a loss of sophrosune (231d, 233c, 236a, 237e). In praying to keep his sophrosune the narrator is praying to avoid the power which his own work celebrates. One could, however, read this rather differently in the light of the familiar distinction between 5qyr s~vqym and 5qyr p\mdglor, a distinction which at one level informs the contrast between the eros felt by Daphnis and Chloe and that which Gnathon feels for Daphnis and Lampis for Chloe. One of the central questions of the work is indeed the nature of sophrosune: to what extent does it, like eros, depend upon changeable cultural constructions? Secondly, there is the notion of imitation. Phaedrus’ relation to Lysias is like that of echo, a limit case — Phaedrus who, in one sense, is ‘in love with’ Lysias,42 wants to learn Lysias’ speech by heart, to get as close as possible to reproducing the original (228a-e). The similar situation in Plato’s Ion may be instructive here. The parallels between the two dialogues extend not merely to the situation — Ion arrives from a poetic festival and Phaedrus from a lecture (diatqib^) by Lysias —43 but also to central concerns of both works. Socrates claims to count rhapsodes fortunate because they have the chance to learn (1jlamh\meim) not just Homer’s verses but also his thought (di\moia), 530b 10. This the stupid Ion interprets as praise for the fact that he can say ‘more fine dianoiai about Homer’ than anyone else (530d 2). Here the attitudes of Phaedrus and Ion towards their ‘models’ are quite close; moreover, both are ‘inspired’44 and both can transmit this loss of sophrosune to their audience.45 The ‘emotional involvement’ of the rhapsode or performer of someone else’s work is obviously closely analogous to the position of the narrator of D&C.46 Whereas, however, Plato denies techne to rhapsodes and poets, and presumably would do so to reciters like Phaedrus, Longus fa42 Cf. Socrates’ teasing at 228b, a description of the restless lover vaguely reminiscent of Catullus 50. Just as Socrates compares Phaedrus’ behaviour towards him to that of a boy eromenos (cf. 228c2 1hq}pteto etc.), so the preliminaries to Socrates’ first speech are conducted in the language of eros: 236d-7a contain a lover’s oath and the scarcely veiled threat of rape. Granting Phaedrus a speech on eros becomes tantamount to allowing him to satisfy his desire physically. Rowe’s observation that ‘none [of the dialogue’s banter] is obviously of an erotic kind’ (p. 168) is a remarkable misreading; contrast, e. g., M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, 1986, p. 211. 43 Note Ion 530b 8, rhapsodes are fortunate because they can spend time with (diatq_beim) great poets; cf. Phaedrus’ relationship to Lysias. 44 Ion 533e-4a, 536c; Phdr. 228b 7. 45 Ion 535e, Phdr. 234d (obviously ironic). 46 Cf. e.g, D. Konstan, Helios 18 (1991), pp. 24 – 5.

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mously lays claim to t]wmg … peqitt^. Literary theory had long since reclaimed techne or ars for creative literature, though Plato would never have agreed. Moreover, the narrator’s desire !mticq\xai t/i cqav/i, whatever precise force we wish to give the compound, is a way of ‘performing’ the painting, here mediated through another performer or imitator, the exegetes. Without such ‘performances’ the paintings would remain unspeaking and silent, as the Platonic Socrates says all writing and painting, all graphe, must remain (Phdr. 275d-e). It is almost as though Longus’ work activates the paradox of the Phaedrus’ written status: the novel is written to speak for, defend and explain a painting — it, however, has no one to speak for it.47

Addenda There are two excellent recent editions of Longus, John Morgan’s Aris & Phillips (2004), and Maria Pia Pattoni’s contribution to the BUR series (Longo Sofista, Dafni e Cloe, Milan 2005). For further reflections on the Phaedrus and Greek bucolic cf. 31 above. p. 781 On the logos of eros cf. T. Whitmarsh, ‘The lexicon of love: Longus and Philetas grammatikos’ JHS 125 (2005) 145 – 8. p. 784 – 5 On literary ‘groves’ cf. further The Shadow of Callimachus Chapter 1.

47 Earlier versions of this paper were read to audiences in London, Munich, and Ascona; I am very grateful for the helpful discussion on all those occasions.

42. Growing up in the ancient novels: a response* The main thrust of Dr Morgan’s essay seems to me unquestionably correct: the Greek novels have very little in common with the themes and set-pieces of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. At the edges, of course, there will always be room for skirmishing about the interpretation of individual passages. Thus, for example, when Anthia explains to the pornoboskos, into whose power she has fallen, that her (feigned) epilepsy is the result of a nightmarish experience in childhood (Xen. Eph. 5.7.6 – 9), we may wonder whether the heroine of Book 1 would have been capable of such an elaborate lie; the fact that her false tale seems indeed to draw upon her own experiences (strange things in tombs etc.) suggests that she now resembles Odysseus in more than just being well-travelled. The speech (5.14), to which Dr Morgan (henceforth M.) points, in which Anthia tells Habrokomes that since their separation she has ‘employed every scheme to remain chaste’ (p÷sam syvqos}mgr lgwamµm pepoigl]mg),1 seems explicitly to acknowledge the Odyssey parallel (‘after wandering over vast expanse of land and sea’, pokkµm c/m pkamghe?sa ja· h\kassam), and we should here not forget the ‘allegorical’ and ethical uses to which the figure of the suffering and ‘learning’ Odysseus was put in antiquity (and not only at the higher levels of culture).2 Here, then, there may well be a sense in which Anthia ‘grows up’, and I myself doubt that ancient readers would consider her, in M.’s phrase, ‘emotionally unaltered’ by her

* 1 2

A. H. Sommerstein and C. Atherton (eds.), Education in Greek Fiction (Bari 1996) 191 – 205 We are perhaps to remember (and contrast) 1.3.2 in which Anthia was less than s~vqym in her stratagems to attract Habrokomes. Cf., e. g., E. Kaiser, ‘Odyssee-Szenen als Topoi’, MH 21 (1964) 109 – 36, 197 – 224. The allusion to the Odyssey may well, of course, have had almost ‘generic’ status, cf. Chariton 8.1.3 (discussed in my ‘History and historicity in the romance of Chariton’, in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin/New York, 1994) 1055 – 1086 [= this volume 737 – 74], p. 1084); such status functions alongside the particular exploitation of the idea in each individual novel in which it appears.

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experiences; nevertheless, this hardly affects the basic point which M. makes. As for Achilles Tatius, M.’s analysis of the novel as ‘a devious game with the possibilities of a Bildungsroman’ is persuasive, and his emphasis upon Kleitophon’s apparent failure to ‘learn’ from what goes on around him – the fact that his life really is a muthos — offers a helpful way into the construction of the plot.3 When, however, we are told that Kleitophon ‘gives himself away’ by the style of his utterances which are ‘booklearning, recycled experience, empty [my italics] rhetorical commonplace’, there are grounds for pause, not so much about the analysis as about the inferences drawn from it. What actually constitutes paideia is a particularly pressing issue in a social and intellectual milieu where much is at stake in being pepaideumenos, but not all paideia will qualify you for that status. Kleitophon’s rhetorical and para-philosophical view of life is in fact a claim to real insight, in a world in which all experience must be measured against classical paradigms and rhetoric is a significant and privileged way of ordering experience. This is not to say that the gulf between ‘reality’ and paradigm is not a source of (often very broad) parodic humour, but rather that our notion of what constitutes paideia (Bildung, if you like) must not be too narrow; we must not assume that ‘learning by experience’, what M. labels ‘the education … of the fictional characters by their fictional experiences’, will reveal itself in just the one way in which we ourselves might have expressed it. Although M. does not actually consider whether or not the whole concept of ‘character’ can or ought to be applied to these ancient texts4, I do welcome his recognition that the distinction between ‘development’ for the characters of these works and ‘learning’ for the readership is at best problematic. This is not a matter of the obvious moral didacticism of some at least of the novels5, but rather of the imagistic power of how their characters are fashioned. Recent discussion of the emotional and didactic force of Attic tragedy has explored the ways in which the audience ‘learns’ as the characters ‘suffer’, partly through 3 4 5

M.’s analysis also brings out, without actually mentioning the parallel, how alike in some respects are Kleitophon and Encolpius; cf. further below on the Satyrica. Important general observations in D. L. Selden, ‘Genre of genre’ in J. Tatum (ed.), The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore and London, 1994) 39 – 64, esp. 45 – 7. I have discussed Chariton in this light in ‘History and historicity …’ (n. 2).

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emotional and cultural identification with them, and it may prove useful to think of the effect of the narrative (and other) vicissitudes of the Greek novels in similar ways. Some recent discussion of the female characters of novels has already opened various paths in this direction6. Longus, as M. points out, comes closest to making explicit the analogical relationship between the events of Daphnis and Chloe and the lives of his readers, but the importance of the subject reaches much further. Here again, however, the narrower confines of M.’s edifice stand secure. In the face of this security, I shall merely poke around briefly in the foundations, to try to see this feature of the novels in a historical perspective. It is well known, and has been commented upon frequently in recent years7, that the aetiological account of eros which Plato places in Aristophanes’ mouth in the Symposium offers a paradigmatic model for the all-consuming mutual devotion of the couples at the centre of the Greek novels, particularly those of Xenophon, Chariton and Heliodorus; the Platonic pattern also remains crucial, if somewhat blurred (in different ways), in both Achilles Tatius and Longus. ‘Aristophanes’ offers an explanation for both hetero- and homosexual eros, but the key thing is that here we find the eros which eliminates from the focus of the lover everything other than the person of the beloved; the Aristophanic-Platonic search for one’s other half is actually played out in the novel characters’ roamings in search of the partner from whom they have become separated. The recent books of Massimo Fusillo and David Konstan, picking up the language of Foucault8, have considered at length how this eros in the novels may be viewed as a change from a classical paederasty, in which the relation between erastes and eromenos was an unequal 6

7

8

Cf., e. g., B. Egger, ‘Women and marriage in the Greek novels: the boundaries of romance’, in Tatum (n. 4) 260 – 80, and (from a quite different perspective) H. Elsom. ‘Callirhoe: displaying the phallic woman’ in A. Richlin (ed.). Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (New York/Oxford, 1992) 212 – 30. Cf., e. g., M. Fusillo, Il romanzo greco (Venice, 1989) 187; J. J. Winkler, ‘The invention of romance’ in Tatum (n. 4) 23 – 38, especially 37 – 8. For the application of this general observation to specific cases cf. (for Xen. Eph.) M. M. J. Laplace, ‘Récit d’une éducation amoureuse et discours panégyrique dans les phsiaques de Xénophon d’Èphèse: le romanesque antitragique et l’art de l’amour’, REG 107 (1994) 440 – 79, and (for Heliodorus) ead., ‘Les thiopiques d’Héliodore, ou la genèse d’un panégyrique de l’amour’, REA 94 (1992) 199 – 230. Cf. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit 3. Le souci de soi (Paris, 1984) 262 – 6. Foucault’s discussion in fact contributes little to the interpretation of the novels, but his pages are replete with the language of ‘symmetry’.

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relation of power, to a ‘symmetrical’ heterosexual relation, the most surprising aspect of which is the dethroning of ‘natural’ male dominance in favour of a pure reciprocity9 : ‘Whenever the lover of boys – or any other person for that matter – has the good fortune to encounter his own actual other half, affection and kinship and love combined (vik_ai te ja· oQjei|tgti ja· 5qyti) inspire in him an emotion which is quite overwhelming, and such a pair practically refuse ever to be separated even for a moment. It is people like these who form lifelong partnerships, although they would find it difficult to say what they hope to gain from one another’s society. No one can suppose that it is mere physical enjoyment (B t_m !vqodis_ym sumous_a) which causes the one to take such intense delight in the company of the other. It is clear that the soul of each has some other longing which it cannot express, but can only surmise and obscurely hint at.’ (Symp. 192b5- d2, trans. W. Hamilton)

From Plato’s point of view, this ‘Aristophanic’ model will not do because it explains nothing (except what it feels like to be in love), and because the eros involved is unfruitful, i. e. it does not serve any recognisably worthwhile moral or educational purpose. When Hephaistos asks the happy couple, ‘What do you want from each other?’, the answer, at some level, should be, ‘knowledge’, ‘to become better’, ‘to be more philosophical’; instead, the couple merely wish to live and die ‘as one’, fused together in unchanging bliss (Symp. 192d2-e9). In this erotic dream is precisely the lack of change and development which M. has traced in the novels. The Symposium offers, of course, other models which do involve the desire for change and improvement. Beyond Diotima’s philosophically sophisticated encounter with Socrates, best known of these alternative models is Pausanias’ account of ‘educational paederasty’ (Symp. 180c4 – 5c2), which has become a fundamental text in the modern study of Athenian sexuality. At the heart of the relationship depicted by Pausanias lies a young man’s desire for moral and intellectual improvement, for the sake of which he may sometimes allow sexual access to the older man who is helping him along the path to arete. The objections of the Platonic Socrates to this model, as they are formulated in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, need not concern us here, except as they 9

Cf. Fusillo (n. 7) passim, and D. Konstan, Sexual Symmetry (Princeton 1994); cf. also S. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge, 1995) 87. The rich material in Peter Brown’s The Body and Society (Columbia, 1988), particularly Chapter 1, has not yet been properly exploited by students of the ancient novel.

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touch upon later developments. As is well known, Pausanias’ model offers no room for eros on the part of the young man; he may feel affection and gratitude, which may be expressed in the ‘favours’ (charis) he allows the older man, but he is most certainly not ‘in love’. When Alcibiades offers Socrates the chance for sex because he sees in Socrates the best chance for ‘becoming as good as possible’ (Symp. 218d2), Socrates pours scorn on the notion of any such ‘exchange’, and Alcibiades spends as chaste a night with Socrates as he would have done ‘with a father or an older brother’ (219d2). This last remark, which has an obvious apologetic twist in view of the accusation that Socrates ‘corrupted young men’ – diavhe_qeim presumably being chosen in part for its wide semantic range – points us towards an important aspect of this educational model. Whatever the similarities and differences between Socrates and the sophists, the nature of Socratic teaching may be seen, and was certainly represented, as the replacement of a model in which a young man’s ‘father or older brother’ was also his teacher by one in which the two were not merely different men, but might also be represented as opposed to each other. It is Aristophanes’ Clouds which offers the most potent dramatisation of this replacement, but the idea can be traced as far back as paederastic literature survives. When the Theognidean poetic voice gives advice to a young man ‘as a father to his son’ (v. 1049), or when the Platonic Socrates allows the good erastes to touch the eromenos ‘like a son’ (Rep. 3.403b5), we can see how the earlier model may be used in different ways to help to legitimate the later. The strong insistence in Plato and Xenophon that Socrates did not approve of (or practise) sex between ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’10 shows just how explosive this newly explicit coincidence of ‘education’ and eros was. To anticipate a later stage in the argument, the apparent punch-line of Eumolpus’ famous story of the Pergamene boy, aut dormi aut ego iam patri dicam (Petr. Sat. 87.5), is to be seen as one (extreme) development of this wedge that was driven between family and education. When we leap forward to the world of the Greek novel, very much has changed, and those changes need no description from me in the context of this ‘Response’. It may be worthwhile, however, to focus on paederastic relationships in the novels, both because of the classical model of education to which I have already referred, and because of the competing models established specifically in the Symposium. The homoerotic aspect of the novels of Longus and Achilles Tatius has re10 Cf. K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978) 159 – 60.

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cently been discussed with great sophistication by Massimo Fusillo, Simon Goldhill and others, and there is much ground that need not be covered again. A helpful survey of the subject by Bernd Effe11 concluded that the novels tended to exclude homoeroticism of all kinds – not completely, of course – because of a generic self-consciousness through which the novelists saw themselves as the heirs of Homer. I myself doubt that this is an adequate explanation; too many complex cultural movements, and too many imponderables about (e. g.) the readership of the novels, are involved here to allow such a neat answer. Rather than address these thorny cultural questions, I want rather, in the light of M.’s concerns, to examine briefly two texts where a more nuanced understanding of what is going on may be possible. My first text is one to which M. has already drawn attention. In the novel of Xenophon of Ephesus, the brigand Hippothoos tells Habrokomes the story of his life: ‘I belong,’ he said, ‘to one of the leading families of Perinthos, a city close to Thrace. And as you are aware, Perinthos is an important city and its citizens are well-to-do. There while I was a young man I fell in love with a beautiful youth (m]or £m Aq\shgm leiqaj_ou jakoO), also from Perinthos, called Hyperanthes. I first fell in love with him when I saw his wrestling exploits in the gymnasium and I could not contain myself; during a local festival with an all-night vigil I approached Hyperanthes and begged him to take pity on me. The boy (t¹ leiq\jiom) listened to me, took pity on me, and promised me everything. And our first steps in lovemaking ( ja· t± pq_ta ce toO 5qytor) were kisses and caresses, while I shed floods of tears. And at last we were able to take our opportunity to be alone with each other; we were both the same age, and no one was suspicious. For a long time we were together, and loved each other very much (st]qcomter !kk^kour diaveq|mtyr), until some evil spirit envied us. One of the leading men in Byzantium (the neighbouring city) arrived in Perinthos: this was Aristomachos, a man proud of his wealth and prosperity. The moment he set foot in the town, as if sent against me by some god, he set eyes on Hyperanthes who was with me and was immediately captivated, amazed at the boy’s (toO leiqaj_ou) beauty, which was capable of attracting anyone. When he had fallen in love (1qashe_r), he could no longer keep his passion in check, but first made overtures to the boy (t_i leiqaj_yi); when that brought no result (for Hyperanthes would let no one near him because of his affection (eumoia) for me), he won over his father, a villainous man not above bribery. And he made over Hyperanthes to Aristomachos on the pretext of private tuition, for he claimed to be a teacher of rhetoric (k|cym tewm_tgr).’ (Xen. Eph. 3.2.2 – 3.2.8, trans. G. Anderson [adapted]) 11 ‘Der griechische Liebesroman und die Homoerotik’, Philologus 131 (1987) 95 – 108.

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In this tale we certainly recognise some ‘classic’ topoi of paederastic love: the wrestling-school, the pleas of the erastes etc.,12 and subsequently Hippothoos cares for and tries to save his beloved in the classic manner of the erastes. On the other hand, Hippothoos and Hyperanthes are at least close together in age (3.2.4): Hippothoos represents himself as m]or with Hyperanthes as a leiq\jiom. There is, moreover, no suggestion of an ‘educational’ relationship between the two. Hyperanthes’ father indeed ‘sells’ his son to the evil Aristomachos ‘on the pretext of having him educated’ (3.2.8), and Hippothoos subsequently finds his rival in bed ‘with the pais’ (3.2.10). This sudden change of terminology makes it very clear that the relationship between Aristomachos and Hyperanthes is assimilated by the narrating Hippothoos to a perverted form of ‘classical paederasty’, or (in Socratic terms) to the bad eros in which the lusts of the body predominate.13 The narrative itself thus blocks any simple reading of the relationship of Hippothoos and Hyperanthes ‘on the classic paederastic model’. This latter relationship in fact suggests competing narrative and cultural models: it is as though some features of the ‘classic’ pattern have seeped into a narrative of a quite different kind, in which we may be able to see the potential for a homosexual ‘symmetrical’ love on the pattern offered by the Platonic Aristophanes.14 We may compare the relationship of Kleinias and Charikles in Achilles Tatius’ novel: Kleinias is m]or (though two years older than Cleitophon, 1.7.1), and his beloved Charikles is constantly referred to as t¹ leiq\jiom. Kleinias is clearly cast in the role of erastes and feels eros for Charikles; Charikles obviously has strong feelings for Kleinias, as well as a general distaste for women (1.7.4), but those feelings are never explicitly named. Kleinias’ gift of a horse to his beloved gestures again towards classic ‘paederastic’ models (cf. below), and yet here too we clearly have the potential for a new kind of relationship. 12 Fusillo (n. 7) 203 n. 45 interprets Hippothoos as falling in love with Hyperanthes ‘at first sight’, but I do not think that, though attractive, this is a necessary inference from the Greek; contrast Aristomachos’ ‘fatal attraction’ (3.2.6). 13 Xenophon seems to use 5qyr sv|dqor only of adulterous and disgraceful passions felt by other characters for one of the heroes, cf. 1.14.7, 1.15.4, 2.3.7, 2.11.1, 5.4.5. This last example is particularly interesting as it is preceded by the attentions of a robber who turns out actually to act ‘honourably’ towards Anthia; he is described merely as 1qytij_r diaje_lemor and feeling vikostoqc_a towards her (5.2.3). So too, Hippothoos comes to feel ‘desire’ (1pihul_a) for Anthia (5.9.11), but not apparently eros. 14 Cf. Konstan (n. 9), 27 – 8.

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This potential is never fully realised in Xenophon’s novel. Hyperanthes remains t¹ leiq\jiom, and he is never said to feel eros for Hippothoos, unless t± pq_t\ ce toO 5qytor (3.2.4) is taken to apply to both partners. This silence in this relationship is particularly marked by the contrasting opening of Aigialeus’ parallel heterosexual tale: ‘Thelxinoe loved me back ( !mteq÷i) …’ (5.1.5).15 In place of eros, Hippothoos ascribes to Hyperanthes ‘affection’ (st]qcomter !kk^kour, 3.2.4) and ‘good will’ (eumoia, 3.2.7). When Anthia applies these two terms to Habrokomes’ feelings for her at 2.4.5, it is precisely at the moment where she offers to go away to allow him to satisfy the lustful Manto’s desires; her words thus minimise Habrokomes’ feelings for her in order to make parting easier and to soften the blow. Hyperanthes’ feelings for Hippothoos, however, never surpass this level of expression. So too, when Korymbos conceives a passionate eros for Habrokomes, the latter becomes merely t¹ leiq\jiom (1.14.7, 1.16.3).16 Xenophon’s novel presents us with a more open and less ‘directed’ narrative than any of the other four Greek novels which survive in a manuscript tradition. As a result of this open form, we are given a rare chance to see the literary and cultural layers which make up the text exposed to view, the boundaries between them subject to constant shift and what I have called ‘seepage’. This dialectic openness makes Xenophon of Ephesos one of the most fascinating pagan Greek texts to have survived from later antiquity; the surface of its riches as a cultural document have barely been scratched, and this ‘Response’ will not even pretend to make an indentation.17 Let it be asserted dogmatically that the social didacticism of this work lies precisely at those edges where different phases of Greek social history meet; one kind of narrative and cultural paradigm continually seeps into another. The site of 15 For the parallels between the two tales cf. J. N. O’Sullivan, Xenophon of Ephesus. His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel (Berlin/New York, 1995) 52 – 5. The ‘reciprocal’ homosexual eros of Pl. Phdr. 255d-e can, I think, be left out of account here. 16 Why Effe (n. 11), 98 n. 7 denies that Habrocomes is a leiq\jiom at this point I do not know; the key issue is not ‘How old is Habrokomes?’, but what are the social and cultural resonances of leiq\jiom. Cf. Dover (n. 10) 85 – 6 for the social and emotional, rather than purely chronological, use of leiq\jiom, pa?r etc. 17 The best introductions to modern criticism of the Ephesiaka are H. Gärtner, RE 9A.2055 – 89, and C. Ruiz-Montero, ‘Xenophon von Ephesos: ein Überblick’ in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin/New York, 1994) 1088 – 1138.

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some of these principal narratives is eros, and the question of ‘character development’ can only be considered in that context and in the light of various traditional patterns of erotic teaching and development. Whether or not this is done ‘knowingly’, to borrow M.’s term, is something which different readers may well judge differently.18 What is clear is that the ‘Bakhtinian chronotope’ needs emendation to encompass the fact that this novel, in the various narratives which it embraces, moves through all of Greek history; if this novel resembles epic, it does so as a repository of social memory. If Habrokomes and Anthia do not really change, centuries of cultural development pass before their eyes and ears; perhaps it is time that we ‘learned’ how to read this text. My second text is, almost inevitably, the Satyrica of Petronius. At its centre, as far as the fragmentary state of preservation allows us to judge, is the relationship of Encolpius and Giton. Ever since Richard Heinze’s classic statement of the case,19 this wonderful twosome has many times been treated as a parodic perversion of the heterosexual couple at the centre of the Greek novel. Be that as it may – and too little thought has usually been given to what ‘parody’ might mean in this instance – it is a different, though related, question to ask about the models for this relationship. In his recent book, David Konstan sees this couple – like Hippothoos and Hyperanthes – as ‘represented on the asymmetric model characteristic … of classical Athens’.20 There is undoubtedly some truth in this, although it overlooks the perversely ‘symmetrical’ frater relationship of Encolpius, Giton and Ascyltus which represents a significant deviation from the ‘classical’ model.21 For an adequate account we should begin again with what is (apparently) most strikingly absent, namely any suggestion that Encolpius has anything to teach Giton or makes any pretence at so doing, or that Giton has any (real or feigned) desire to learn anything from this erastes. In as much as conclusions are possible in the current state of the text, it is Encolpius rather than Giton who ‘learns’ in this work. Most famously, perhaps, the Cena Trimalchionis dramatises (quite literally) a social theatre, which bears an 18 M. is clearly correct in interpreting (somewhat tentatively) Hippothoos’ forecast of a happy outcome for Habrocomes (3.3.2) in terms of ‘a … sense of literary form’. Such an insight might well be taken over into other parts of the text. 19 ‘Petron und der griechische Roman’, Hermes 34 (1899) 494 – 519. 20 Konstan (n. 9) 116; cf. T. Wade Richardson, ‘Homosexuality in the Satyricon’, Classica & Mediaevalia 35 (1984) 105 – 27, at pp. 114 – 17. 21 Cf. F. Dupont, Le Plaisir et la loi (Paris, 1977) 164 – 9.

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alarming resemblance to ‘real life’, and one where Encolpius must learn the rules; this he does with some, admittedly partial, success. Elsewhere Encolpius, like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, must listen to long diatribes on the present state of morality and the arts (e. g. Eumolpus at ch. 88), and in particular he receives instruction in affairs of the heart from Circe and her maid. Repeated reference to Encolpius as iuuenis or adulescens reinforces the sense that it is he who is being instructed. The work has, moreover, an explicit and persistent concern with education, particularly of course rhetorical education (Agamemnon’s speech at chs. 3 – 4 is particularly telling). The absence, however, of any educational element in Giton’s relationships may be due to his age (cf. again Hippothoos and Hyperanthes), or to differences between Greek and Roman constructions of such relationships, but we may also see this within Petronius’ wider concerns. As with Aristomachos in Xenophon of Ephesus, so Petronius has his licentious ‘teacher’ in the poet Eumolpus.22 The famous story of the Pergamene boy (85 – 7), ascribed (not unreasonably) to Eumolpus in the sixteenth-century witnesses to the text, was apparently told by the poet to Encolpius as he looked upon paintings of paederastic myths. It is both an educative story and a story about education; the sequel (92.3 – 4), like Eumolpus’ poem on the theme of Troiae Halosis,23 shows us that Encolpius has not proved a very quick pupil. Examples of this technique could be greatly multiplied, but the upshot is, I think, that Petronius presents a kind of deconstructed version of ‘classical paederasty’ in which the various elements are separated out and then recombined in new ways. When – again if we can trust the transmitted speaker attributions – Giton taunts the impotent Encolpius with treating him as Socrates treated Alcibiades (128.7), we recognise an allusion to one, brilliantly inappropriate, model for their relationship. It is, however, Encolpius himself who must be shown how little he knows. ‘Character’ thus becomes merely one manifestation of Petronius’ wholesale appropriation and subsequent refashioning of Greek (and Roman) literary culture. The social relationships of the Satyrica are thus both instantly familiar and also truly novel. 22 On the figure of Eumolpus cf. also J. Elsner, ‘Seductions of art: Encolpius and Eumolpus in a Neronian picture gallery’, PCPS 39 (1993) 30 – 47. 23 One of the few attempts to integrate the Troiae Halosis with its context and poet is F. I. Zeitlin, ‘Romanus Petronius: a study of the Troiae Halosis and the Bellum Civile’, Latomus 30 (1971) 56 – 82. Cf. also Selden (n. 4), 41.

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It is the story of the Pergamene boy, to which I have already alluded, in which these concerns are clearest. The lacunae in the narrative prevent us from seeing the full pattern of how Petronius distorts the educational paradigm, but the main outlines are clear enough. At the heart of Eumolpus’ story lies, of course, the familiar figure of the lecherous and hypocritical paedagogue (cf., e. g., Callimachus fr. 195, Lucian, Symposium 26), a figure whose development followed almost inevitably from the classical representation of the stern moral guardian who kept admirers away from his handsome charge (Aristophanes, Clouds 964 – 83, Pl. Symp. 183c etc.). More specifically, it has been noted that the tale represents an amusing reversal of the Platonic Alcibiades’ famous story of how he tried (unsuccessfully) to seduce Socrates.24 The links between the two texts may indeed be very close. Eumolpus ingratiates himself with the boy’s family by pretending to be outraged whenever in conuiuio de usu formosorum mentio facta est (85.2). If we ask when such a subject was likely to arise, then two answers suggest themselves: either at a ‘philosophical’ conuiuium, a symposium (? Symposium) in fact, or in a household which concerned itself with things of the flesh. Eumolpus’ story is told as one of personal experience, but it creates a literary world with a heavy debt to the social world of classical texts. De usu formosorum suggests perhaps the title of a scholastic discussion or treatise, a peq· wq^seyr pa_dym, but the fact that Eumolpus convinced the boy’s mother that he was as upright ‘as a philosopher’ shows in fact how ‘unphilosophic’ this Pergamene household is.25 The role of the boy’s father in this story is, moreover, surely more nuanced than has often been appreciated. His snoring (87.1) is not necessarily a sign of blissful ignorance (cf. Juvenal 1.57), and we should not be too confident that we know what his response would have been, if Eumolpus did indeed at the end feel compelled to inform on his young charge’s sexual appetite. As with Alcibiades and Socrates, the first stage26 of the seduction involves arranging to be alone together. At 218c2 Alcibiades stirs Socrates ( jim^sar aqt|m) and asks him if he is asleep; Socrates may well have 24 Cf., e. g., A. Cameron, ‘Petronius and Plato’, CQ 19 (1969) 367 – 70. 25 The figure of the really or allegedly chaste philosopher is, of course, a commonplace, cf., e. g., Goldhill (n. 9), 98 – 100. Niall Slater, Reading Petronius (Baltimore/London, 1990) 94 n. 12, notes, ‘There may be a double-edged irony here, in that pederastic tendencies were by no means alien to some philosophers’. 26 It is, of course, possible that the lacuna after 85.3 conceals a lost first stage.

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been, but no longer, as his laconic reply, oq d/ta, suggests. The Pergamene boy, however, is constantly awake and waiting (85.4). The progress of the seduction, with its gifts of doves and fighting cocks, follows the ‘classic’ pattern familiar from the Attic literature and iconography of the fifth and fourth centuries;27 with his offer of a splendid horse, however, the narrator overreaches himself. Horses may have been known as erotic gifts in the highest echelons of Athenian society,28 but Eumolpus is not in this league: scis quanto facilius sit columbas gallosque gallinaceos emere quam asturconem. The game is up when Eumolpus thus abandons the role of paedagogus completely. The young man has boasted to his friends that he has a rich teacher/admirer (87.4), and as the horse cannot be produced, he has been made a laughing-stock (or so he would have Eumolpus believe). We are probably to understand that his claim is that his fellow-pupils laugh at him, not merely because the horse is nowhere to be seen, but also because he has given Eumolpus access to his body without securing adequate return. Here again we can see a reversal of the ‘classic’, ideological paradigm in which a young man’s friends are supposed to take a stern view of any untoward contact between erastes and eromenos (Pl. Symp. 183c7 – 8). Moreover, the straightforward ‘commercial’ exchange of goods for sex ‘cashes out’ the ironies of Socrates’ warning to Alcibiades not to exchange ‘gold for bronze’ (218e2 – 7), just as the ending of the Pergamene tale, as our texts present it, subverts the joking conclusion to Alcibiades’ seduction narrative (219d1 – 2). As I have already indicated, the conclusion of the Petronian tale both relies upon and overturns the social model which Alcibiades’ speech presupposes. The speeches of the Platonic Alcibiades, like the Clouds of Aristophanes, make clear that the Socratic educational project represented something radically new; unlike Aristophanes, however, Alcibiades also makes clear that the Socratic project was in no way morally corrosive. The story of the Pergamene boy shows how that project could be represented ‘in the wrong hands’. Whereas, or so I have argued, Hippothoos’ account of his love for Hyperanthes reveals the fault-lines where different representational and erotic models meet, the story of the Pergamene boy evokes and dramatises a familiar, classic past, while proclaiming its modernity (‘this hap27 Cf. Dover (n. 10), 92. 28 Thus there seems to be a socio-political point to Ar. Pl. 157; note particularly oR wqgsto_. In Achilles Tatius, Kleinias’ gift of a horse to Charicles is noted as a remarkable show of affection (1.7.1).

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pened to me …’). As such, we may see it as one specific manifestation of how the Satyrica as a whole replays the (social and literary) past of epic and tragedy, while at the same time overturning almost every moral and literary assumption upon which those genres were based.29 Another such manifestation, of course, is Eumolpus’ later story of the Widow of Ephesus. Where ‘the Pergamene boy’ had turned Plato upside down, here it is (above all) Vergil who is distorted; where the Pergamene boy exploits the classical pattern of ‘noble paederasty’, the Widow of Ephesus dramatises, through the pattern of the Roman uniuira, a heterosexual devotion which is only too familiar in the novels and novellas of the imperial period; where the former tale presented itself as the personal experience of the narrator, the latter offers us a ‘once upon a time’ story which, on one level at least, is not tied to any particular time. (On another level, of course, the tale is at least ‘post-Vergilian’). That same cultural dialectic which is inscribed (in different ways) within Plato’s Symposium and the Ephesiaka of Xenophon is here paraded as two racy stories by a brilliant (a)moralist. If we had more of the Satyrica, we might find that these two stories in fact offer us a transposition into narrative mode of the ‘Are boys or women better?’ theme, which has such a lively history in the Second Sophistic. What I hope has emerged from these thoughts provoked by M.’s paper is the unsurprising conclusion that ‘education’ or ‘character development’ must never be considered in isolation from the overall concerns of a work. If the central characters of the Greek novel do not ‘develop’, we must, as M. urges us to do, examine these novels as products of particular social and political conditions, even though I myself remain very suspicious of the homogeneous view of late Hellenistic and early Imperial culture with which M.’s paper closes;30 we must also, however, remind ourselves that it is cultures, not ‘characters’, which actually grow up.31

Addenda This brief essay was written as a response to John Morgan’s essay ‘Erotika mathemata: Greek romance as sentimental education’ which appears in the Education in Greek Fiction volume immediately before it. In my discussion of Petronius’ 29 Cf., e. g., Selden (n. 4), 42. 30 Cf., e. g., CR 45 (1995) 57. 31 This ‘Response’ owes much to conversations with Dr. Neil Wright.

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‘Pergamene boy’ I should have cited R. Dimundo, ‘Da Socrate a Eumolpo. Degradazione dei personaggi e delle funzioni nella novella del fanciullo di Pergamo’ MD 10/11 (1983) 255 – 65. For the Symposium and the ancient novel cf. this volume 845 – 66.

43. The Aithiopika of Heliodorus: beyond interpretation?* At the heart of the Aithiopika lie the questions ‘What is known?’ and ‘How is it known?’; Heliodorus’ novel is, in the words of recent critics, both ‘a hermeneutic sponge’1 and a ‘hermeneutic hothouse’.2 The curiously mismatched, but appropriately Heliodoran, metaphors refer, on the one hand, to how the work is, or should be, read today, and on the other to the obvious dramatization of the hermeneutic process within the novel itself. At least since Jack Winkler’s seminal study of 1982, however, it has been widely accepted that our reading strategy and the strategies of ‘reading’ which form part of the narrative itself are very closely related phenomena. The different levels and methods of interpretation which are displayed in the novel represent different interpretations and interpretative processes which the novel itself generates; not only does the Aithiopika seem to privilege certain modes of reading, it also delineates inadequate modes and, just as importantly, suggests how such readings arise. The present essay is a kind of extended gloss upon this theme, and should be seen as a tribute to the imaginative and enlightening criticism which has been devoted to the Aithiopika in the last twenty years or so.

1. Much recent scholarship on the narrative techniques of the Aithiopika takes as its starting-point the (related) distinctions Winkler drew between the nature of Knemon’s narrative of what happened to him in Athens and that of Kalasiris’ narrative which occupies much of Books 2 – 5, and between Knemon’s performance as interpreter or ‘narratee’ * 1 2

R. Hunter (ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge 1998) 40 – 59 I am very grateful to Philip Hardie and Tim Whitmarsh for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Doody (1997) 105. Morgan (1996) 445.

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and a better mode of ‘reading’ which Winkler saw embodied in Kalasiris. I shall first consider Knemon’s narrative against the background of these distinctions. For Winkler, Knemon’s narrative represented a paradigm of everything the Aithiopika as a whole was not — a simple, intelligible story of uncomplicated motivation, told in a sequential, non-digressive style, a model of the kind of ‘romance’ which Heliodorus set out to bury forever. Objections have been raised,3 but the broad outlines of Winkler’s characterization of Knemon’s narrative seem in fact hard to dispute. The strict chronological sequence of events is paraded when the narrative resumes after a break (2.8.4, picking up 1.17.6), and the lengthy recapitulation at 6.2.3 – 4, when Nausikles finally gets to hear Knemon’s story, is a narrative feature most closely associated with oral story-telling and relatively ‘simple’ literature;4 this is not to deny the presence of a few (shorter) recapitulations elsewhere, and in the voice of the principal narrator (cf. 7.24.2, 8.1.6 – 7), but their very scarcity over the course of such a long narrative seems noteworthy. There is, of course, more to be said. It may be thought that, by the time Book 6 is reached, all readers need their memories of Knemon’s narrative refreshed. Moreover, the fact that Knemon’s recapitulation is in indirect speech makes plain that he, no less than Kalasiris, has in the second half of the novel given way to the narrator (whom we may as well call Heliodorus).5 Book 6 begins ‘Kalasiris and Knemon retired to bed …’:6 the narrator now has them where he wants them — as the third-person subjects of his own narration. Knemon’s recapitulation is thus not to be dismissed as a simple mnemonic for inattentive readers and/or listeners. ‘Technique’ is never neutral in the Aithiopika. Similar lessons may be drawn from the ways in which Knemon’s narrative is framed. When Charikleia and Theagenes beg Knemon to tell his story (1.9.1), the narrator explains that the young couple ‘thought that listening to misadventures similar to their own would be a very great consolation (paqaxuw^)’. This is, of course, a view of the effect of poetry or story-telling with a very long pedigree (cf. 3 4 5 6

Cf. Morgan (1989a) 105 – 6. Winkler’s view is adopted in the course of the excellent discussion of the Aithiopika in Fusillo (1989). Cf. Fusillo (1996). The father of this technique is, of course, Homer, whose Odysseus ‘recaps’ Odyssey 9 – 12 in indirect speech at 23.310 – 41. The translations of Heliodorus in this essay are either mine or taken from Morgan’s excellent translation (in Reardon [1989]), often adapted.

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Hes. Theog. 98 – 103), and the almost total silence of the listeners during the narration — ‘charmed’ like the Phaeacians? — might be thought to confirm the power of story-telling to ‘take one out of oneself’. Nevertheless, when Knemon threatens — like Odysseus — to break off, pleading the lateness of the hour,7 Theagenes recurs to what he sees as the purpose of the narration: ‘You will cause us even more pain if your story leaves the wicked ( jaj_stgm) Demainete unpunished’ (1.14.2). I shall consider presently the moral outlook embodied in this plea, but for the moment we may note that, as a consolation, Knemon’s narrative is not a success. When he does finally draw to a close, ‘he wept, and the strangers [i.e. Charikleia and Theagenes] wept also, ostensibly at his misfortunes, but in fact remembering their own (lm^lgi d³ t_m Qd_ym 6jastor). They would not have ceased from their lamentations, had not sleep, fluttering down through the pleasure of the sorrowing, put an end to tears’ (1.18.1). Far from consoling and drawing together, Knemon’s narrative breaks the group apart into their separate worlds of private grief. The allusion to Iliad 19.301 – 2, ‘so Briseis spoke weeping, and the women lamented after her, ostensibly for Patroclus, but in fact each for her own troubles’, makes the point clear: the women weep because Briseis’ account of her suffering and enslavement is close enough to their own to recall past sorrows,8 but Charikleia and Theagenes are completely absorbed in their own ‘story’, which, despite the hopes of 1.9.1, bears in fact little relation to their own fate. Knemon’s narrative is a self-contained exhibit in the literary workshop, neither touching nor touched by those at its heart. The conclusion to Kalasiris’ narration (5.33.4) recalls this earlier passage: ‘At this [Kalasiris] wept, and those with him wept, and the party changed to a lamentation mixed with a kind of pleasure, for wine disposes men to tears’. Here, of course, the listeners are, in different degrees, involved in the story which Kalasiris has told, but the variation at 5.33.4 of 1.18.1 (the conclusion of Knemon’s narrative), which is as clear as the allusion to the start of that narrative at the start of Kalasiris’ tale,9 calls attention to a different (and privileged?) model for narration: 7 8 9

Od. 11.330 – 4, cf. Hardie 1998. Odysseus threatens to break off after the ‘Catalogue of women’ which concludes with the ‘wicked’ Eriphyle; just so does Knemon threaten to break off at the point of Demainete’s punishment. This passage of the Iliad was much used by the novelists in such situations, cf. Chariton 8.5.2, Ach. Tat. 2.34.7. Cf. below p. 818.

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a truly ‘sympathetic’ relation between narrator and narratee means that those listening or reading will never remain untouched. Kalasiris’ parallel account of his reaction upon reading Charikleia’s story on the shawl (4.9.1), itself a ‘version’ of the novel we are reading,10 helps to confirm this interpretation: ‘I was filled with a mixture of pleasure and sadness and had the peculiar experience of being moved simultaneously to joy and tears … [my spirit] was filled with pity for the life of man, whose instability and insecurity, whose constant changes of direction were made all too manifest in the story of Charikleia’. From this narrative, therefore, Kalasiris draws lessons for his own, and our, life. When, on the other hand, Knemon is induced to repeat his tale for the benefit of Nausikles, Kalasiris adds (teasingly?) that the story will ‘ease the labour of the journey by giving us a story as companion’ (6.2.2); here again, a traditional function of oral performance11 suggests the complete ‘irrelevance’ of the story. Which narrative model is likely to be applicable to the story of the royal family of the Sun, told by Heliodorus, ‘one of the Descendants of the Sun’, and what might this suggest about its audience? In fact, of course, Knemon’s story is neither irrelevant (particularly for Nausikles) nor totally sealed off from the framing narrative; the main point at which they touch is Thisbe, the slave-girl responsible for Knemon’s initial troubles and object of Nausikles’ affections. Thisbe herself has been harshly judged since late antiquity itself,12 and some modern critics are none too kind: Dowden (1996) 273 writes of ‘the just punishment of the sinner Thisbe’.13 Thisbe is indeed shaped to some extent as a ‘low-life Charikleia’, with whom she swaps identity more than once, but more than one account of the slave-girl forced by economic and social circumstances to look after her own position before any consideration of ‘conventional morals’, let alone being able to afford the idealized chastity of a descendant of Achilles and an Ethiopian princess, is surely possible. As we oppose the morality and values on show in

10 Cf. Hilton 1998. 11 Cf. Virgil, Ecl. 9.54. 12 Cf. the view of ‘Philip the Philosopher’ (p. 368.67 – 8 Colonna) that Thisbe’s grim death at the hands of Thyamis illustrates what happens to those who ‘weave deceit against others’; he places her on the same level as Kybele. 13 Cf. M. J. Anderson (1997) 316 on the letter she leaves behind: ‘her cunning flattery exposes her self-serving and mercenary character’.

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Knemon’s tale with that of the main narrative,14 we must at least ask after the authority behind those values, and this brings us back to an assessment of Knemon as both narrator and character. As far as Thisbe is concerned, we have for once her words, as well as Knemon’s report of them. On Thisbe’s body is found a letter which she was going to have passed to Knemon (2.10). Its rhetorical winningness is a tour de force: all she asks is to be among Greeks, even if that means death, and what we are about to learn of Thermouthis suggests that death would indeed be preferable to being the object of his affections. She offers to tell Knemon the story of Demainete’s death ‘face-to-face’ (paqoOsa digc^solai 2.10.1); thus does she play upon Knemon’s insatiable appetite for stories, in order to procure a meeting in which the sexual power that she could exert over him would lead him to give her his aid.15 How harshly the novel invites us to judge her may be debated, but the frame which Heliodorus has given this letter cannot be ignored. After Knemon has told Theagenes and Charikleia what he knows of Thisbe who lies dead before them, he concludes (2.9.5 – 10.1): ‘How Thisbe came to be in the cave, and who killed her here, we may well need some god to tell us. But perhaps we should examine the writing tablet that we found in her bosom. It’s reasonable (eQj|r) to assume that we shall learn something more from this source.’ I shall return to the notion of the eikos later,16 but what is important now is the obvious fun which Heliodorus here has with story-telling conventions: of course the tablet will provide information, because that is what tablets found on dead bodies do … It is worth asking, even if no clear answer may emerge, whose ‘voice’ we hear most strongly at this point. If it is Heliodorus’, then the joke is at Knemon’s expense, for the banality of the observation will do little credit to the latter’s sharp-wittedness. If it is Knemon’s voice we hear, then perhaps he here sees himself in a tragic role, like Theseus reading Phaedra’s suicide note;17 the recent careful discussion by Thomas Paulsen, however, has 14 For an important reading of the novel around these two poles see Morgan (1989a). The matter is further elaborated by Keul-Deutscher (1997). 15 We may think of Helen’s continuing hold over Menelaos (cf. Eur. Tr. 1049 – 52). 16 Cf. below p. 823 – 4. 17 Cf. Eur. Hipp. 856 – 7 5a 5a· j t_ d^ poh’ Fde d]ktor 1j v_kgr weq¹r j Aqtgl]mg ; h]kei ti sgl/mai m]om ;

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shown very clearly how we are unable to take that ‘tragedy’ seriously.18 We could, of course, see a knowing joke by Knemon himself about story-telling conventions, but for what it is worth, nothing else in the portrayal of the young Athenian makes this interpretation itself eikos, though Knemon’s familiarity with (and ability to use) some conventions is not to be doubted. If either of the first two interpretations is on the right lines, then we see that the introduction to Thisbe’s letter marks Knemon in a particular way. The sequel to the letter (2.11.1 – 2) is no less striking: ‘Thisbe’, said Knemon, ‘I am glad you are dead, that you were yourself the messenger who brought us word of your misfortunes, for it was your very corpse that delivered your narrative to us! It seems indeed that an avenging Fury pursued you over all the world and did not still her whip of Justice until she had brought you to Egypt, where I, the victim of your crimes, happened to be, and presented me with the spectacle of the retribution she exacted from you. I wonder what new scheme you were concocting against me beneath the cloak of this letter, when Justice pre-empted your plans with death. Even dead I regard you with suspicion, and I am haunted by the fear that the story of Demainete’s death is untrue, that the friends who brought me the news were deceiving me, and that you have come across the sea to make me the victim of another Attic tragedy, but in an Egyptian setting! (2t]qam jah’ Bl_m sjgmµm )ttijµm ja· 1m AQc}ptyi tqacyid^sousa)’.

This is too much, even for Theagenes: ‘“Enough (oq pa}sgi)”, exclaimed Theagenes, “of your superhuman courage! And of your dread of ghosts and phantoms!’”.19 At the point where we hear, for the first time, Thisbe’s voice unmediated by other narrators, her principal accuser is characterized by paranoia and a penchant for absurd melodrama.20 It may be true that some of the simple moral certainties of Knemon’s tale resurface in Heliodorus’ later account of events in the palace of Arsake,21 but ‘Heliodorus’ is not marked in the same way as Knemon, and nothing compels us to give their ‘moral judgements’ similar authority. That Knemon is a partial (in both senses) narrator was already clear both from the loaded vocabulary of his earlier narrative and, in particular, from the deceitful speech to his father which he places in

18 19 20 21

Paulsen (1992). The text is uncertain, but the sense is clear. Paulsen (1992) 107 – 9. Morgan (1989a) 110 – 11.

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the mouth of Demainete at 1.10.4, in the most striking example of narrative ‘omniscience’ in his whole account. Knemon’s story is often referred to as a ‘novella’, and the associations of the term with oral story-telling are, in this context, not unfair; this is another nuance of Thisbe’s offer to recount the story of Demainete’s death in person — such a narrative is (paradoxically) not to be committed to writing, as the repeated emphasis upon its oral transmission and sources (from Thisbe to Charias to Knemon (cf. 1.14.5) and from Antikles to Knemon (cf. 2.9.4)) suggests. Against Thisbe’s silence is to be set the ‘inscribed tale of woe’ (5ccqavor hq/mor) which Persinna leaves with her exposed infant daughter (4.8.1), a narrative which is given voice in being read (4.8.8), thereby substituting for ‘face-to-face’ communication (t±r 1lx}wour ja· 1m avhaklo?r blik_ar); when set down in writing, such a narrative may even be preserved for some future use which is not yet knowable.22 It is not hard, I think, to move from Persinna’s hopes for her narrative of ‘Charikleia’ to Heliodorus’ for his. Be that as it may, the nearest analogues for the Athenian Knemon’s ‘novella’ are probably to be found in the narratives of Attic forensic oratory and in the Athenian story-telling tradition, which was absorbed into ‘the Greek novel’ and which has been studied by Sophie Trenkner.23 Winkler’s classificatory instincts seem right here, though he perhaps should have compared Knemon’s narrative not so much to the novel of Xenophon of Ephesus as to the ‘novella’ in Book 1 of Chariton’s Kallirhoe in which the unsuccessful suitors lead Chaireas to believe that Kallirhoe has been unfaithful. That ‘novella’ itself may well have been influenced by the adultery narrative of Lysias I,24 but whatever the lines of descent, the shared motifs, however differently ordered, are striking. When Knemon fails to yield to Demainete after she has visited him in his room, she accuses him to his father of kicking her in the belly when she tried to upbraid him for his supposedly riotous lifestyle, despite (or because of) the fact that he knew she was pregnant (1.10.4). Where we expect the ‘wicked stepmother’ to accuse the stepson of im22 Thisbe’s letter to Knemon and Persinna’s to her daughter are linked by Knemon’s introduction to the former (above p. 808) and Kalasiris’ observation at 4.5.1 that ‘it was to be expected (eQj|r) that I would learn from the shawl of the girl’s country and parents, whose identity I already suspected’. The last clause is a typically Kalasiran touch. 23 Trenkner (1958). 24 Cf. Hunter (1994) 1080 – 2 [= this volume 823 – 4].

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proper advances or attempted rape, the ‘kick in the belly’ motif comes as quite a surprise; Demainete is, of course, playing upon Aristippos’ hopes for another child (cf. 1.9.1), and the motif assimilates the behaviour of Knemon to that of tyrants, the most hated of all creatures within democratic Athenian ideology,25 but it is hard not to be reminded of how Chaireas kicks his (as it turns out) pregnant wife when he bursts into their house, thinking that he will find her in bed with a lover (Chariton 1.4.10). Demainete’s second strategy is to use Thisbe to entrap Knemon: Thisbe, playing a role not unlike that of Apuleius’ Fotis who reveals her mistress’ secrets while in bed with the narrator, offers to show Knemon Demainete in the very act of being unfaithful, 1p’ aqtov~qyi paqad~sy t¹m loiw|m (1.11.4, cf. Lysias 1.21, Chariton 1.4.6). She waits a couple of days, and then rouses Knemon at night, saying that Aristippos has gone off to his farm and that Demainete’s lover is in the house, so that he should come armed to confront ‘the man committing hybris’ (t¹m rbqist^m, cf. Lysias 1.23).26 In a violent rage (cf. Chariton 1.4.12) Knemon reaches his father’s bedroom where a light is burning, a sure sign of illicit love-making and a motif which is reworked at 1.17.2 in Thisbe’s subsequent plot against her mistress (and cf. Chariton 1.4.11); he bursts in shouting sarcastic abuse, whereas Chaereas in a similar situation could not even articulate his distress (vymµm l³m oqj 5swem ¦ste koidoq^sashai, 1.4.12). As his father begs for mercy (cf. Lysias 1.25), the amazed Knemon drops his sword and is seized and bound, meeting the fate which ‘should’ have befallen the adulterer. As soon as the new day comes, an assembly is convened (cf. Chariton 1.5.2), and Knemon’s wanderings begin.27 All ‘romance’ narratives — Knemon’s, Kalasiris’, Heliodorus’ — make use of shared motifs and situations, and there is a real danger of overestimating the significance of such parallels. Nevertheless, the present instance seems shaped to fit Heliodorus’ concern with the nature and techniques of narrative. The general similarities between the details 25 Cf. Hunter (1994) 1080 [= this volume 767], adding Herodes Atticus (Philostr. VS 555). It is worth noting that Knemon reports these instructions of Thisbe in indirect speech (1.12.1) — how self-exculpatory is this narrative? 26 This is ironically picked up immediately afterwards when his terrified father admits ‘I committed hybris against you, but not of the kind to be punished with death’. 27 In the light of Heliodorus’ narrative, it is noteworthy that Chariton’s Chaereas pleads to be punished because he has ‘done worse things than temple-robbers and parricides’ (1.13.1).

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of Demainete’s plot against Knemon and that of Thisbe’s subsequent revenge upon her openly display how such narrative material is ‘held in common’ for almost infinite reuse. If there is an overt debt to Chariton’s novel, then the intertextual relation makes this lesson a more pointed one: we may note, as Heliodorus may have done, the similarities between Xenophon of Ephesus and Chariton which have led many modern scholars to posit direct borrowing between those works;28 even if there is no debt, however, the lesson is clear enough. Moreover, the parade of successive narrators — Knemon, Charias, Thisbe, Antikles — shows that this story is open to all and does not depend upon the idiosyncratic voice (and intelligence) of a single narrator; in this it could not be more different from Kalasiris’ story. The central characters of Knemon’s narrative, Knemon, Demainete, Aristippos, and Thisbe, are the most conventional of archetypes, whether drawn from ‘popular storytelling’, forensic oratory or New Comedy; their ‘invention’ is not tied to the specifics of the story in which they happen to find themselves. It is this very conventionality of Knemon’s story and the characters in it which gives it an almost unstoppable narrative momentum; once under way, it moves inexorably towards its appointed telos. This is, of course, not to say that this narrative is without surprises, although it is striking that the most ‘surprising’ event in Knemon’s world, the finding of Thisbe dead in an Egyptian cave, is not itself part of his narration; of itself, ‘surprise’, even when dressed as T}wg, is simply one of the structural mechanisms of narrative and may itself exercise a powerful teleological force (as it does, for example, in Chariton). Rather, simple narrative (even the value-laden narrative of a Knemon), which presents itself as pure ‘event’, paradoxically offers an account of ‘what happened’, which is in fact sealed off as ‘story’ to be listened to and then (if the listener so chooses) dismissed. The very iterability of such narrative forms denies them their claims to represent ‘what happened’29. In stark contrast to this iterability stands the ‘particularity’ of Theagenes and Charikleia, an Ainianian (!) descendant of Achilles30 and the white daughter of a black king and queen; if the characters of Knemon’s story could hardly be more familiar and common, Theagenes and Char28 For discussion and bibliography cf. O’ Sullivan (1995) 145 – 69. 29 Morgan’s discussion ((1989a) 108 – 10) of ‘Athenian love’ as ‘promiscuous and ephemeral … devalued by its ready availability’ is a kind of ‘moral’ version of this narrative iterability. 30 Cf. Whitmarsh 1998.

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ikleia (and to some extent Kalasiris) could hardly be more specifically ‘invented’ for the story in which they occur, and this ‘particularity’ is, I would argue, more significant for the overall meaning of the Aithiopika than, say, the fact that Chariton makes his heroine the daughter of Hermokrates of Syracuse. This ‘particularity’ is reflected in the very progress of the narrative. The two central ‘movements’ of the main story are the abandonment of Delphi at the end of Book 4 and the incorporation of Charikleia and Theagenes into the Ethiopian court at the very end; both events are marked by aetiology of a rather special kind. At 4.20.3 – 21.2 the Delphic assembly readily agrees to the proposals of the strategos Hegesias that the descendants of Theagenes should be prohibited from taking part in future ceremonies for Neoptolemos and that in future the priestess of Artemis should not be involved in the running race, on the grounds that Theagenes’ sacrilegious scheme was probably first hatched when he saw Charikleia at the games. As Morgan notes,31 we have here ‘an aetiology for the usual practice, which might have been familiar to Heliodorus’ readers’, although we may wonder how many of those readers would have been bothered by the apparent lack of documentary realism in the role assigned to the priestess; the aetiology is in part a knowing device for calling attention to the shifting distance between fiction and history in the account of Delphic practices. Be that as it may, a more important function of these Delphic decrees is to prevent any possibility of this narrative being repeated in the future; no ‘Theagenes’ and ‘Charikleia’ will ever again fall in love just like this — the events at Delphi will remain a one-time, never-to-be-repeated narrative. So too, at the very end of the novel, Sisimithres imposes the abolition of all blood sacrifice, thus removing the narrative structure of the whole of the last book: no ‘Theagenes’ and ‘Charikleia’ will ever again face sacrifice (and the virginity tests which precede it), and so no heroine will ever again be ‘recognised’ as Charikleia is recognized.32 In interpreting this strong closure which Heliodorus imposes not just on his own story, but apparently on the form as well, the exercise of hindsight is dangerously attractive. Whatever the date of the Aithiopika, it does seem to have marked a boundary in the history of the novel, but it may seem improbable (at least) that Heliodorus set out to ‘finish off’ the genre by giving it nowhere else to go. What we 31 apud Reardon (1989) 826 – 7. 32 For the relation of this ‘solution’ to the hermeneutic concerns of the novel cf. below pp. 58-9.

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can say, I think, is that the all-consuming nature of the Aithiopika, in which almost every Greek literary and non-literary genre is appropriated, refashioned, and made subservient to a larger and very ‘particular’ enterprise, and the decision to juxtapose three different types of narrative and three different narrators in a quintessentially ‘dialogic’ structure, might well seem to have exhausted the generic pool.

2. Before considering certain aspects of Kalasiris as narrator and Knemon as audience, I want to consider briefly what has become something of a touchstone of Heliodoran interpretation. In 2.16 Charikleia has a nightmare: ‘a man with matted hair, with cunning in his eyes and blood on his hands, with one stroke of his sword struck out her right eye’. She herself reports the dream as follows: ‘A wicked, evil man ( !mµq rbqistµr … ja· !t\shakor), undaunted by your [i.e. Theagenes’] invincible strength, assaulted (1pej~lafe) me with a sword as I lay against your knees, and I dreamt that he put out my right eye’. The most obvious symbolic interpretation of a dream of violent penetration – rape or attempted rape – is, I think, suggested by Charikleia’s account and language, for Theagenes stands precisely between Charikleia and her possession by any other man.33 She herself, however, suggests another interpretation: she will be separated from Theagenes, whom she considers ‘my eye, my soul, my all’. At this point Knemon intervenes; having established that Charikleia believes both her parents34 to be living, he interprets the dream to mean that her father is now dead, because ‘we all know that our parents are responsible for our coming into the world and partaking of the light of day. So it is not implausible (eQj|tyr) for dreams to use our two eyes to symbolize our mother and father, for it is through them that we perceive the light and are presented with images of the visible world’. In a discussion which has been widely accepted,35 Win33 We (and the ancients?) might well think of the double sense of j|qg, both ‘girl’ and ‘pupil of the eye’; hence diaj|qgsir will be both ‘defloration’ and the forcible removal of an eye. A late rationalizing interpretation of the Cyclops story had Odysseus carrying off Polyphemos’ daughter (cf. W. Dindorf, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Odysseam [Oxford 1855] I 3 – 4). 34 Knemon uses pat]qer for parents (cf. LSJ s.v. VII 2), thus creating an unwitting irony: Charikleia does indeed have more than one ‘father’. 35 Cf., e. g., Bartsch (1989) 99, Doody (1997) 99.

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kler ([1982] 115) argued that Knemon’s interpretation was correct, even if not in the most obvious way: the dream foreshadows the death of Kalasiris some five books later (7.11), for – as Winkler rightly pointed out – the Egyptian priest is very frequently fashioned and treated as Charikleia’s ‘father’. That readers will recall Charikleia’s dream when Kalasiris dies seems indeed likely enough, but there may be more to be said. Winkler based his interpretation upon a misrepresentation of the text — ‘… must mean that Charikleia’s father will die’, whereas Knemon’s interpretation has him in fact already dead (t¹m pat]qa soi tehmgj]mai m|life) — but other factors are at least as important in assessing what Heliodorus is up to here. The ‘incidental detail’ of the dream seems entirely remote from Kalasiris’ peaceful and foreseen death; the old man dies in his sleep after celebrating with his newly reconciled sons, in a literalization of the common idea that it is best to leave life as a satisfied guest leaves a splendid banquet.36 Not every detail of a dream need be significant, but the yawning disjunction between this dream and its alleged actualization would seem designed to render ‘interpretation’ pointless. Winkler rightly noted that ‘loss of eye = loss of parent’ is an interpretation found also in Artemidorus’ handbook (1.26), but this authority should perhaps make us less, rather than more, confident about Knemon’s interpretation. There might, of course, be a nice Heliodoran joke that the ‘correct’ interpretation is given to a character whose lack of hermeneutic skills has already been put on full display. We could, moreover, argue that the words ‘our parents are responsible for our … partaking of the light of day’ hints, for more subtle readers, at Kalasiris’ role in restoring Charikleia to her rightful place at the heart of the cult of Helios, but even at a rather simpler level Knemon’s language should give us pause. The ‘technical’ language of the passage translated above, toO pqoekhe?m eQr t¹m t/ide b_om ja· toOde toO vyt¹r letakabe?m to»r v}mtar Uslem aQt_our, ¦ste eQj|tyr 1p· pat]qa ja· lgt]qa tµm all\tym sufuc_am ¢r #m vyteimµm aUshgsim ja· bqat_m rpouqc¹m oR emeiqoi sov_fomtai (2.16.6), sounds like nothing so much

as Kalasiris fooling Charikles with his disquisition on the evil eye (3.7 – 8);37 like Kalasiris’ lecture, Knemon’s explanation is taken from 36 There is, of course, something amusingly paradoxical about the idea of the water-drinking vegetarian ‘feasting splendidly’ (2stiah/mai kalpq_r), 7.11.3. Kalasiris’ death is somehow reminiscent of the death of Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, but there do not seem to be verbal echoes. 37 Cf. below p. 820.

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a textbook, and one thing the Aithiopika teaches us is that textbooks are not necessarily the best guide to ‘the real world’. Unlike Kalasiris, however, Knemon offers his interpretation in all seriousness — for him, hermeneutics is simply the application of prefabricated solutions — though his certainty as to the interpretation may perhaps stem from a wish to close down discussion and get Theagenes and Charikleia to concentrate on their serious situation (cf. 2.16.7). To anticipate somewhat, a rather similar pattern may be illustrated from Knemon’s reactions to Kalasiris’ narrative. Consider 2.26.2 – 3 where Kalasiris describes Delphi: ‘The city seemed like an abode fit for the lords of heaven, especially as regards the nature of its surroundings: Parnassos towers above the city exactly like a fortress or a natural citadel, enfolding the town in the fond embrace of its foothills (kac|si tµm p|kim 1cjokpis\lemor).’ ‘An excellent description!’ exclaimed Knemon. ‘You have truly felt the breath of the oracle’s inspiration. It was exactly so that my father described the setting (h]sir) of Delphi to me when the city of Athens sent him as a representative to the Holy Council.’

For Knemon, who has never seen Delphi, Kalasiris’ topothesia is excellent because it matches that of his father. We, however, may conclude from Knemon’s exclamation that Kalasiris’ description is conventionally banal. The relation between ‘truth’ and rhetorical commonplaces was, of course, different in late antiquity from how the relation is normally constructed today, and a ‘textbook’ description was in important ways ‘true’; we may, therefore, see Knemon’s reaction as that of a man well-versed in commonplaces and the role of enargeia and phantasia in ekphrastic description,38 or we may take a rather less sympathetic view of his skills as narratee. In either case, however, an (undue) respect for ‘book-learning’ is at best problematic in this of all novels. One problem with the ‘prefabricated solutions’ of book-learning is that they are unequal to the variety of experience which demands interpretation; nothing can prepare you to meet the white daughter of a black king and queen. What is important is that in a world where everything — such as the movement of a crocodile (6.1.2) — carries ‘meaning’, signs themselves are necessarily polyvalent; it is this excess of meaning which the various attempts to interpret Charikleia’s dream dramatize. All the suggested interpretations — attempted defloration 38 Cf. Hardie 1998.

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by a cut-throat, loss of Theagenes, loss of a father — could find support in the subsequent events of the novel, and we may indeed come to doubt whether (in this case) one is inherently to be privileged over others. It is in fact not the polyvalency of signs or the multiplicity of hermeneutic paths which the novel dramatizes, so much as the necessity to choose between those paths and the reasons why we make different choices. In a famous passage at 1.18.4 – 19.1 Thyamis dreams that Isis entrusted Charikleia to him with the words: ‘you will have and not have her, but you will do wrong and you will slay the foreign woman; she, however, will not be slain’; this Thyamis interprets as Isis’ sanction for his ‘marriage’ to Charikleia, ‘for it was his desire which was interpreting’. Later, he is forced by events to revise this interpretation (1.30.4). For Winkler, Thyamis is a model of ‘the inadequate reader’, one who is swayed into hasty interpretation, rather than showing the limitless patience of a Kalasiris. Interpretation, however, is not a neutral activity, carried on in isolation from desire, circumstance and character; we must never forget, for example, that our evidence for Kalasiris’ interpretive practices comes very largely from the mouth of Kalasiris himself. The final interpretation of the novel, that of Sisimithres, will illustrate only too clearly its contingent character.39

3. Kalasiris is a practised, enthusiastic,40 and self-conscious (cf. 2.24.5) story-teller: he knows the classic exemplars of the Odyssey (2.21.5) and Plato’s Phaedrus (2.21.6),41 as well as the more recent ‘novel tradi39 Cf. below p. 825 – 7. 40 Cf. 2.21.6, “I myself am longing (¡d_my) to tell my story to someone — if I had not met you I might have told it to these reeds, as in the myth”. This self-presentation might be thought odd, in view of the caution and epoche which Kalasiris elsewhere practises, but it comes to make sense in the light of the teasing delays which subsequently precede the narrative proper: these delays are not the result of reluctance, but rather are themselves part of his narrative technique (cf. 2.23.6, and above). The choice of ¡d_my perhaps looks to the fact that Kalasiris has currently lost ‘his children’. Only in telling his story can they be found again. 41 The famous locus amoenus of the Phaedrus, itself revised as the setting for Kleitophon’s narration in Achilles Tatius, lies behind Kalasiris’ rejection of the hot banks of the Nile as a place for story-telling.

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tion’,42 and he knows that pleasure postponed is pleasure heightened. Not that such ‘postponements’ are purely a game: in the course of his diversions before starting we learn that Theagenes and Charikleia are his ‘children’, and that Thisbe is somehow involved, and we are introduced to Oroondates. Whereas Knemon conceives of ‘narrative’ as a journey in a straight line (cf. 2.24.4 paqav]qeim peiq~lemom), neither Kalasiris nor Heliodorus shares this simple conception, however much the path of the Nile in fact offers a kind of linearity to the novel.43 Moreover, for Kalasiris, ‘narrative’ is not just ‘what happened’: all events require ‘commentary’, because of the forces which he sees at work in the world and in his own life. The opening three-and-a-half Budé lines of his ‘narration’ are followed by a passage of commentary three times as long (2.24.5 – 7). At one level, Kalasiris’ practice as a commentator is simply a particular version of the tendency of all ‘novelists’ to draw gnomic lessons from what they narrate; Chariton’s Kallirhoe, for example, is full of brief ‘morals’ to be drawn from and used to explain the narrative,44 and Achilles Tatius’ Kleitophon is given to extended ‘scientific’ disquisitions. On the other hand, Kalasiris’ concern with the pursuit of ‘meaning’ serves to elide the distinction between ‘event’ and ‘commentary’. We will not, moreover, be surprised that Kalasiris can on occasion parody this novelistic technique. When, for example, at 4.13.3 – 5 he advises Charikleia to pretend (pk\tteshai) to consent to marriage with Alkamenes, she not unreasonably asks what the purpose of such a pk\sla might be; his answer sounds remarkably unconvincing: ‘Events will reveal all … When a plan is disclosed to a woman in advance, it can sometimes cause her alarm, and often an enterprise is executed more boldly if it is carried through without forethought’. Kalasiris is indeed a believer in waiting for something to turn up, but as a piece of temporizing (and to Charikleia of all heroines) this explanation would indeed be more at home in, say, Chariton.45 Within the hermeneutic hothouse, it is Kalasiris who in fact carries most of the compost. 42 With sl/mor jaj_m (2.21.5) cf. Ach. Tat. 1.2.2; Kalasiris’ expansion, t¹m 1j to}tym b|lbom %peiqom, looks like a humorous attempt to ‘exhaust’ the image. 43 Cf. Whitmarsh 1998. 44 Cf. Hunter (1994) 1061 [= this volume 743 – 4]. 45 A related passage is 7.21.4 where Charikleia advises Theagenes to pretend (pk\tteshai) to go along with Arsake’s wishes: ‘with the gods’ help it is not impossible (eQj|r) that the time you buy might bring about our deliverance’. Here, however, we may feel that the metaliterary flavour is Heliodorus’, not his character’s. For eQj|r as a criterion in the novel cf. below p. 823 – 4.

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The opening of Kalasiris’ narrative ‘proper’, ‘My city is Memphis, my father’s name was Kalasiris, as is mine …’ (2.24.5), is plainly fashioned to recall the opening of Knemon’s narrative, just as the advent of Rhodopis after the death of Kalasiris’ wife replays the advent of Demainete after the death of Knemon’s mother. On one hand, it is clear that Kalasiris’ narrative starts in a conventional way — unattached male sees beautiful woman — and could have developed along equally conventional lines, like Knemon’s ‘novella’; the technique throws particular emphasis upon the rejection of the conventional when Kalasiris punishes himself because he had ‘sinned in his heart’ (2.25.4). It is a whole story-world, not just Memphis, which is here left behind. On the other hand, we may suspect that Kalasiris’ narrative is to some extent shaped to suit the audience. Not, of course, that Kalasiris yet knows Knemon’s story, but we do, and Kalasiris has clearly already got Knemon’s measure. When Kalasiris says of his decision to leave Memphis, ‘I made reason my judge (dijast^m) and punished my desire with exile’ (2.25.4), the echo of Knemon’s fate at the hands of Athenian jurors (1.14.1) can hardly be missed. Is the parallel simply to establish that both story-tellers are exiles, not of course an unimportant fact in a novel about return, or do we sense that the parallel is fashioned in part to draw Knemon in by the similarity, while our attention is directed towards the differences between the two narratives? A ‘special relationship’ between narrator and audience, so conspicuously lacking from Knemon’s story, is here established as a prerequisite for advanced narration. The nature of this relationship between Kalasiris and his different audiences — Knemon, the other listeners depicted within the story, and we ourselves — is a subject to which Heliodorus explicitly calls our attention. Kalasiris presents himself as having conducted learned discussions in the temple precincts at Delphi, as a kind of cross between Socrates in the Athenian market-place and Solon or Lycurgus questioning the wise men of Egypt.46 We are allowed (by Kalasiris) to infer that the Delphians were full of admiration for Kalasiris’ learning, though we are presumably to draw our own conclusions from the fact that, though he prefaces his account of the Nile as ‘everything I knew, all that is recorded … in sacred texts, things of which none but members of the priestly caste may read and learn’ (2.28.2), he proceeds to give an ac46 Cf. Pl. Timaeus 21e-5d. The Lycurgus parallel is ironically acknowledged at 2.27.1; KujoOqc|m tima Spaqti\tgm is a nice touch.

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count which would surprise no Greek interested in the subject,47 while not neglecting to dismiss rival versions, in a standard move of sophistic epideixis (2.28.3, 5). As for Charikles, it would probably be agreed that his reaction to Kalasiris’ account of the evil eye, ‘your solution is brilliant and completely convincing (sov~tata ja· pistij~tata)’ (3.9.1), says more about Charikles, who does not seem elsewhere to be given to irony, than the quality of the explanation; what Kalasiris says about the evil eye is certainly not pure nonsense within the context of Greek para-science, but at the very least we know that Kalasiris himself does not believe that it meets the case of Theagenes and Charikleia.48 The internal audiences for Kalasiris, then, are used to set off Charikleia, who is not so easily fooled (4.5.4). Critical assessments of Knemon’s performance as audience have varied widely in recent years. In keeping with his general reading, Winkler saw him as ‘characterized in ways which have the effect, first, of identifying his response with our own as readers, and second, of parodying his over-eagerness and emotionalism in such a way that we disassociate ourselves from him’.49 In a familiar scholarly pattern, subsequent criticism expanded Winkler’s insight and, in the process, lost its nuanced expression; both parts of Winkler’s quoted assessment deserve emphasis, and John Morgan’s protests against attempts to see Knemon as a simple ‘parody figure’ were timely.50 Whether, on the other hand, we should go the whole way and agree that ‘Knemon presents an exact fit, cognitively and affectively, with the reader’51 seems much more doubtful; when Morgan describes the Aithiopika as ‘a particularly directive text, armoured against misreading and minutely scripting the responses of its implied reader’,52 it becomes clear that, to some extent, the debate is a question of degree. I have already considered one instance — Kalasiris’ description of the topography of Delphi — where there seem to be grounds to posit an ironic distance between Knemon’s reaction and our own. If Charikles’ admiration is presented ironically by Kalasiris, why not Knemon’s by Heliodorus? The problem, of course, is that, though 47 For ancient views on the sources and flooding of the Nile cf. RE XVII 556 – 61, 571 – 90. 48 For an excellent study of this scene cf. Dickie (1991); cf. also Paulsen (1992) 173 – 4. 49 Winkler (1982) 141. 50 Morgan (1991). 51 Morgan (1991) 99. Paulsen (1992) 17 – 18 broadly repeats Morgan’s position. 52 Morgan (1991) 99.

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Knemon is a quite engaged narratee, most of Kalasiris’ tale finds no response at all inscribed in the text. We have then no guide, except extrapolation from the relatively few scripted reactions, and it ought not to be surprising that judgements may differ. Let me consider one interesting case where we have to make up own minds. At the opening of Book 3 Kalasiris teases Knemon with the possibility that he will not give a detailed description of the Delphic procession, whereupon the latter demands to be made a ‘viewer’ (heat^r, 3.1.1); Kalasiris repeats the ploy at 3.2.2 when he merely summarises the Thessalian ‘Hymn to Thetis’, and this time Knemon demands to be a ‘hearer’ ( !jqoat^r) as well as a viewer. Kalasiris agrees: !jo}oir %m, 5vg b Jak\siqir. 1peid^peq ovty soi v_kom . eWwe c±q ¨d] pyr B ¡id^· t±m H]tim !e_dy, wquso]heiqa H]tim, Mgq]or !ham\tam eQmak_oio j|qam t±m Di¹r 1mmes_gi Pgk]i cglal]mam t±m "k¹r !cka_am "let]qam Pav_gm, $ t¹m douqolam/ t|m t’ -qea ptok]lym :kk\dor !steqop±m 1n]tejem kac|mym d?om )wikk/a, toO jk]or oqq\miom, t_i vpo P}qqa t]jem pa?da Meopt|kelom, peqs]pokim Tq~ym, Nus_pokim Dama_m. Rk^joir Fqyr %lli Meopt|kele, ekbie Puhi\di mOm whom· jeuh|leme, d]wmuso d’ eqlem]ym t\mde hugpok_gm, p÷m d’ !p]quje d]or "let]qar p|kior. t±m H]tim !e_dy, wquso]heiqa H]tim. b l³m owm vlmor, § Jm^lym, t/id] pgi sum]jeito jah’ fsom 5wy dialmglome}eim.

(3.2.3 – 3.1)

‘Listen then’, replied Kalasiris, ‘if that is what you want. The hymn went something like this: Of Thetis I sing, the golden-haired goddess. Daughter of Nereus, the Lord of the Ocean, Married to Peleus at mighty Zeus’s wishing, The star of the sea waves, our own God of Paphos. The child of her womb was the noble Achilles, Who fought like the War God and raged in the battle, Whose spear flashed like lightning, Whose fame lives forever. Neoptolemos, the son Pyrrha bore him. Death-dealer to the Trojans but Greek city-saver, Neoptolemos, we pray you, be gracious;

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Showered with blessings in your tomb here in Delphi, Smile and accept the offering we bring you. From all tribulation deliver our city. Of Thetis I sing, the golden-haired goddess. To the best of my recollection, then, Knemon, the hymn was along these lines.’

On the surface at least, Kalasiris seems very uninterested in this hymn. His frame, ‘the song went something like this … To the best of my recollection, the hymn was along these lines’, stands in sharp contrast to his habitual eye for detail and his paraded concern for the accurate interpretation (pq¹r t¹ !jqib³r !miwme}eim) of the elegiac oracle which concluded the previous book. What in fact are we to make of this hymn? Is the extraordinary metre, stichic pentameters,53 a virtuoso tour de 54 force nonchalantly tossed off by the apparently unconcerned Kalasiris, or rather a sign that Kalasiris’ version is at best only half the truth? Is the fact that three of the verses have a short syllable before the central caesura simply a feature of contemporary versification,55 and the ‘anachronism’ in a supposedly traditional poem of the archaic period not to be noticed, or a sign that the narrator is here not trying very hard? Is the fact that Neoptolemos’ mother is here called, uniquely in extant literature, ‘Pyrrha’ a clever obscurity well suited to Kalasiris, or a further sign that this ‘hymn’ is not all it may seem? 56 In what sense was Neoptolemos ‘the city-saver of the Danaans’? Is ‘our Paphian’ a clever or a silly description of Thetis? and so on. We have here no Knemon upon whom to model our answers to these questions, should we choose to do so, but it may be worthwhile to ask, ‘What difference would it make?’. There is one famous passage where Knemon’s reaction seems to cause Kalasiris momentarily to lose narrative control. The priest’s ekphrasis of the appearance of Theagenes and Charikleia at the Delphic festival is just what Knemon has been looking for: ‘It’s them!’ exclaimed Knemon. ‘it’s Charikleia and Theagenes!’ ‘Where are they? In the gods’ name, show me!’ implored Kalasiris, supposing that Knemon could actually see them. 53 Cf. Philip, Anth.Pal. 13.1; Peek, GVI 1805 (first century A.D.). 54 So Bowie (1989) 228. 55 Cf. West (1982) 181. There are no examples in the pentameters of Heliodorus’ elegiac distichs. 56 On the various accounts of Neoptolemos’ mother cf. RE XVI 2441 – 2.

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‘They are not here, Father,’ replied Knemon, ‘but your description portrayed them so vividly (1maqc_r), so exactly as I know them from my own experience, that they seemed to be before my eyes.’ ‘I doubt,’ said Kalasiris, ‘that you have seen them as Greece and the sun gazed upon them that day … Such a sweet deception, such a pleasant mistake (£ t/r Bde_ar !p\tgr, £ t/r ckuje_ar oQ^seyr), Knemon! My heart was all aflutter when I thought you could see my beloved children and were telling me they were here. But I think you have been deceiving (1napat÷m) me all along …’ (3.4.7 – 9)

There is a great deal which could be said here about the role of enargeia, the reversal of the standard language of apate, in which it is the narrator not the narratee who is ‘deceived’ and so on,57 but I wish merely to note how this passage dramatizes the strength of Kalasiris’ longing for his ‘children’, signalled by Knemon’s address to him as § p\teq (3.4.7). In Kalasiris’ case, there could be no more powerful manifestation of that longing than the loss of awareness of the techniques and effects of narrative description; for Kalasiris, narrative and emotional control largely overlap, except in this place. Otherwise, that control only slips when he ceases to narrate; after Book 5 he must share the limelight with such as Charikleia, Nausikles, and even an Egyptian corpse.

4. Kalasiris was, as it turns out, merely an agent working for the reunification of the Ethiopian royal family.58 At the end he gives way to Sisimithres, who ‘solves’ the apparent puzzles – as he began them by entrusting an infant girl to Charikles – and inaugurates a new stage of Ethiopian religion with the abolition of blood sacrifice. To some extent, of course, Sisimithres functions in Book 10 like a reader who has read the whole work and can therefore interpret the signs, whereas the slower Hydaspes reflects the puzzlement, not merely of someone who does not know the story, but of a reader who applies inappropriate models of interpretation, in his case ‘probability’, t¹ eQj|r (10.14.5). Whereas, in the case of Thisbe’s appearance in an Egyptian cave, a similar appeal to t¹ eQj|r (2.8.3) eventually brought an explanation in purely ‘human’, or ‘novella’, terms, that black parents should have a beautiful 57 Cf. Whitmarsh (1994) 10 – 11, Hardie 1998. 58 Unless, of course, the story of his audience with Persinna was a lie to persuade Charikleia to escape from Delphi with him, cf. Baumbach (1997).

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white daughter requires a quite different level of explanation, in this case the ‘maternal impression’ from the painting of Andromeda; however widespread belief in the reality of such a phenomenon,59 the very existence of Charikleia is a clear sign of divine patterning (cf. 4.8.4). At one level, both Thisbe’s reappearance and the existence of Charikleia call into question, not perhaps without an authorial smile, the appropriateness of t¹ eQj|r as a reading criterion for any kind of ‘fiction’, or perhaps prompt us to revise our notions of just what t¹ eQj|r might be.60 At another level, Thisbe and Charikleia belong to different fictional worlds. Thisbe’s death, which is also Charikleia’s Scheintod, seems not merely drawn from the most familiar of ‘romance’ material, but also to belong to that low type of Egyptian ‘wisdom’ (sov_a) which Kalasiris, as self-promotional as ever, dismisses in comparison to his own higher knowledge: ‘There is one kind that is of low rank and, you might say, crawls upon the earth; it waits upon ghosts and skulks around dead bodies; it is addicted to magic herbs, and spells are its stock-in-trade; no good ever comes of it; no benefit ever accrues to its practitioners; generally it brings about its own downfall, and its occasional successes are paltry and mean-spirited – the unreal made to appear real, hopes brought to nothing; it devises wickedness and panders to corrupt pleasures. But there is another kind, my son, true wisdom, of which the first sort is but a counterfeit that has stolen its title; true wisdom it is that we priests and members of the sacerdotal caste practise from childhood; its eyes are raised towards heaven; it keeps company with the gods and partakes of the nature of the Great Ones; it studies the movement of the stars and thus gains knowledge of the future; it has no truck with the wicked, earthly concerns of the other kind, but all its energies are directed to what is good and beneficial for mankind.’ (3.16.3 – 4)

Kalasiris makes this distinction in the context of Theagenes’ erotic desire for Charikleia, which itself has the potential to become the most conventional of ‘romantic’ tales. So too, when he recurs to the distinction at 6.14.7, it is in the context of the necromancy, a scene which seems to take us straight to the world of, say, Lollianus’ Phoinikika. It is hard to resist a metaliterary reading of the priest’s distinction, particularly as the introduction to the necromantic scene – the arrival at a ‘killing 59 Cf. Reeve 1989, Hilton 1998. 60 The most common use of t¹ eQj|r in the Aithiopika seems to be to ‘naturalize’ narrative, that is to create the impression that what is being told accords with our experience of the way the world works. The whole subject needs (and deserves) a proper study.

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field’ (6.12.2) – so clearly revises the opening scene of the whole novel.61 There is, of course, much more going on here as well. In Book 6, as in Book 3, Kalasiris is concerned with his own position – he is the prophet of this story, and he does not want some corpse stealing his thunder (as the prophetic corpse immediately proceeds to do).62 Alas, however, Kalasiris is no longer in control of the narrative and is helpless before Heliodorus’ power: when Kalasiris asserts that even the sight of such rites is impure (oqj eqac/), we will note that Heliodorus has certainly allowed us the pleasure of being hearers and viewers (heyqo_). The distinction between types of sophia is, after all, Kalasiris’, not Heliodorus’, and Kalasiris is not there at the end.63 We have already seen reasons for thinking that the Aithiopika distinguishes itself from other fictions, not by a complete abandonment of the tradition, but by a voracious consumption and refashioning of all traditions. Nevertheless, one aspect of Kalasiris’ distinction might be thought to have particular significance for the novel as a whole. The prophet stresses that ‘the higher wisdom’ works towards the benefit of mankind, whereas the vulgar kind enjoys merely brief successes — the odd séance, for example — but has ‘no good telos’ in mind. Winkler and others have used this distinction to explain some of Kalasiris’ charlatan-like behaviour, but there is a clear application also to the narrative patterns of the work. Knemon’s narrative and the story of Thisbe have, as we have seen, their own inevitable momentum, but the very ‘iterability’ of the material means that the teleology of such stories is, in the end, weak and temporary. Knemon may end happily married to Nausikles’ daughter, but what happens if he has a son and his wife dies, or his wife dies and a sexy lady moves in next door, or… ? Closure in such stories is always merely a pause. The story of Theagenes and Charikleia, however, ends both ‘conventionally’ — they are married — and with a radical finality that, as we have seen, cuts off the possibility of repetition and uses the story ‘for a good telos’. What, then, are we to make of Sisimithres’ intervention? For Winkler, Sisimithres’ intervention is a kind of meta-narrative ‘rabbit out of the hat’, which suddenly reveals that God has written 61 Cf. Dowden (1996) 279, who sees the echo in terms of the distinction between ‘heavenly love’ and ‘low life’. 62 The corpse plays the Teiresias/Anchises role in Heliodorus’ ‘epic’, cf. 7.1.1 t± 1j t/r meju_ar lelamteul]ma. 63 The narrative effect of Kalasiris’ death is well described by Doody (1997) 99.

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the Aithiopika;64 others have (rightly) stressed that blood sacrifice was indeed a major contemporary issue, that Sisimithres represents the highest level in an ascending order of priests — Charikles, Kalasiris, Sisimithres —, and that the end of the novel should therefore be taken more or less ‘straight’, i. e. as an authorizing aetiology for particular religious practices.65 Sisimithres’ intervention should properly be viewed within the rhythm of the final book as a whole,66 but let me make merely one final observation. The opposition of Sisimithres and the Gymnosophists to blood-sacrifice of all kinds is expressed as early as 10.9.6 – 7, and many scholars have found it a structural problem in the narrative that this opposition has not led to the abolition of the practice long ago. Be that as it may, when his chance comes, Sisimithres, the knowing reader, seizes it in front of the puzzled king: ‘Sire… it seems that a surfeit of joy can cloud even the most intelligent of minds. You ought to have realized (sulb\kkeim) long ago that the gods have no desire for the sacrifice you are making ready to offer: first, on the very altar of sacrifice, they revealed the blessed lady Charikleia to be your daughter and dramatically transported her foster-father here from the heart of Greece; then they cast fright and panic among the sacrificial bulls and horses and so gave a sign that those sacrifices that are thought superior would also be cut short; and now, to make our happiness complete, as a theatrical climax they have revealed that this young stranger is betrothed to the maiden. Let us not be blind to the miracles the gods have wrought (toO he_ou haulatouqc^lator); let us not thwart their purpose; let us abolish human sacrifice forevermore and hold to purer forms of offering!’ (10.39.1 – 3)

It is at least an open question whether the evidence adduced by Sisimithres leads to the sweeping conclusion he draws from it. Abolition of human sacrifice will certainly prevent the Ethiopians ever sacrificing a future king’s daughter, but it is not clear that this aetiological ending is the only possible interpretation of what has happened. Sisimithres has thus imposed his own kind of ‘probability’, and prefaced it with some harmless flattery of the king to make it seem even more ‘natural’. It is not natural, of course. The interpretation which he offers is as much a product of his own ‘agenda’ as Thyamis’ mistaken interpretation of his dream. These two characters may belong to different fictional 64 Cf. already Heiserman (1977) 202. 65 Cf., e. g., Szepessy (1957) 252 – 3. 66 Helpful discussion in Morgan (1989b).

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worlds, but real ‘closure’ – how a novel is finally to be ‘read’ – is always an act of interpretation, and interpretation is a profoundly political act, the seizure of the moment in the furtherance of a cause. It is not that there is no such thing as ‘right interpretation’, particularly in a world governed by divine ordinance, whose direction we may sometimes glimpse through oracles and other signs, but rather that ‘getting it right’ is not an abstract intellectual challenge, but a way of controlling the world. In understanding this, Kalasiris, Sisimithres and Heliodorus are as one.

Bibliography Anderson, M. J. 1997. ‘The syvqos}mg of Persinna and the romantic strategy of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica’ CP 92: 303 – 22 Bartsch, S. 1989. Decoding the Ancient Novel, Princeton Baumbach, M. 1997. ‘Die Meroe-Episode in Heliodors “Aithiopika”’ RhM 140: 333 – 41 Bowie, E. L. 1989. ‘Greek sophists and Greek poetry in the Second Sophistic’ in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 33 (Berlin/New York) 1209 – 58 Dickie, M. W. 1991. ‘Heliodorus and Plutarch on the evil eye’ CP 86: 17 – 29 Doody, M. A. 1997. The True Story of the Novel, London Dowden, K. 1996. ‘Heliodoros: serious intentions’ CQ 46: 267 – 85 Fusillo, M. 1989. Il romanzo Greco: polifonia ed eros, Venice — 1996. ‘Il romanzo antico come paraletteratura? Il topos del racconto di ricapitolazione’ in O. Pecere and A. Stramaglia (eds.), La letteratura di consumo nel mondo greco-latino (Cassino) 49 – 67 Hardie, P. 1998. ‘A reading of Heliodorus, Aithiopika 3.4.1 – 3.5.2’ in R. Hunter (ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge) 19 – 39 Heiserman, A. 1977. The Novel before the Novel, Chicago/London Hilton, J. 1998. ‘An Ethiopian paradox: Heliodorus, Aithiopika 4.8’ in R. Hunter (ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge) 79 – 92 Hunter, R. 1994. ‘History and historicity in the romance of Chariton’ in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin/New York)1055 – 86 [ = this volume 737 – 74] Keul-Deutscher, M. 1997. ‘Heliodorstudien II. Die Liebe in den “Aithiopika”’ RhM 140: 341 – 62 Morgan, J. R. 1989a. ‘The story of Knemon in Heliodoros’ Aithiopika’ JHS 109: 99 – 113 — 1989b. ‘A sense of the ending: the conclusion of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika’ TAPA 119: 299 – 320 — 1991. ‘Reader and audiences in the Aithiopika of Heliodoros’ Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 4: 84 – 103

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— 1996. ‘Heliodorus’ in G. Schmeling (ed.), The Novel in the Ancient World (London) 417 – 56 O’Sullivan, J. N. 1995. Xenophon of Ephesus. His Compositional Technique and the Birth of the Novel, Berlin/New York Paulsen, T. 1992. Inszenierung des Schicksals. Tragçdie und Komçdie im Roman des Heliodor, Trier Reardon, B. P. (ed.) 1989. Collected Ancient Greek Novels, Berkeley Reeve, M. 1989. ‘Conceptions’ PCPS 215: 81 – 112 Szepessy, T. 1957. ‘Die Aithiopika des Heliodoros und der griechische sophistische Liebesroman’ Acta Antiqua 5: 241 – 59 Trenkner, S. 1958. The Greek Novella in the Classical Period, Cambridge West, M. L. 1982. Greek Metre, Oxford Whitmarsh, T. 1994. Art and Narrative in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica: perception, deception, desire, MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge — 1998. ‘The birth of a prodigy: Heliodorus and the genealogy of Hellenism’ in R. Hunter (ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge) 93 – 124 Winkler, J. J. 1982. ‘The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative strategy of Heliodorus’ Aithiopika’ YCS 27: 93 – 158.

44. ‘Philip the Philosopher’ on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus* The prefatory letter to Anatolius which introduces Porphyry’s Homeric Questions1 begins with a statement of principle: ‘Frequently in our conversations with one another, Anatolius, questions concerning Homer arise, and while I try to show that although he regularly provides the explanation of his own verses, we, because of our childhood instruction, read into him rather than reflect upon what he is saying (peqimooOlem l÷kkom 1m to?r pke¸stoir C mooOlem $ k´cei)’. Porphyry proceeds to issue a challenge: no ‘interpretation’ (1n¶cgsir) may be offered until the interpreter has made absolutely clear to himself what the verses actually mean – we might be tempted to speak of their ‘literal meaning’; such clarification will require the closest attention to the poet’s language (vq\sir). Porphyry explicitly distinguishes between this exercise in interpretation and the ‘higher criticism’ of Homer (t±r le¸four eQr GOlgqom pqaclate¸ar). Critical interpretation is thus assumed to take place within a clear hierarchy of possible scholastic situations, and this hierarchy – however porous it may have proved in practice – was the necessary ‘institutional’ support for all academic criticism: ‘higher’ criticism builds on ‘lower’ foundations, of greater or less solidity, such as detailed linguistic exegesis. We recognise here a version of the familiar progression along the stages of ancient education. Homer is, of course, in every way a special case, but his very specialness allows us to see how paradoxical might be the very idea of ‘interpretation of the novel’, given that there were no ‘lower’ exegetical foundations upon which to build; as far as we know, novels never permeated into the educational system in which such exegesis was rooted, at least before the Byzantine period. The textual transmission of the novel in fact suggests that a relatively low premium was put on the maintenance of ‘the actual words’ of the text.2 * 1 2

S. J. Harrison et al. (eds.), Metaphor in the Ancient Novel (Groningen 2005) 123 – 38 Cf. Schlunk 1993. The translation which follows is an adapted version of Schlunk. Cf., e. g., Reeve 1986, xi-xii.

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‘Higher’ interpretation aims, for the most part, at ‘higher’ art forms. Interpretation of genres which could be represented as offering an ‘imitation of life’ (comedy, iambic poetry etc.) was on the whole restricted to linguistic exegesis and to the highlighting of moral and social lessons to be learned by the award of praise or blame to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters; this after all is what such ‘realistic’ forms themselves regularly claimed to do. Such a mode could, of course, be transferred easily enough to the novel, and the text with which this essay is concerned indeed offers, in one part, just such a case. Nevertheless, certain of the novels stand out among ancient narrative texts for the manner in which the discourse of (more or less) ‘higher’ interpretation is incorporated into the extraordinary texture of the works themselves, thus also pushing readers (ancient and modern) towards the practice of such interpretation. The case of Heliodorus has been very much discussed in the last couple of decades,3 that of the Metamorphoses for much longer. Apuleius not only himself offers a ‘high’, Platonising interpretation of an apparently ‘low’ Greek text, but – again taking his cue from Plato – also creates in Cupid and Psyche an allegorical narrative which itself both requires interpretation (as a remarkable tradition beginning with Fulgentius bears ample witness) and seems also to offer an interpretation of the narrative in which it is embedded; the Metamorphoses both teaches and requires interpretation.4 If Apuleius thus shows us very clearly how ‘interpretative’ and ‘compositional’ allegory may be fully merged,5 the included narratives of the phatta, of Syrinx, and of Echo in Daphnis and Chloe gesture rather more tentatively towards ways of drawing out the meaning of the mythos of Chloe (cf. 2.27.2), of finding the general within the particular – which was indeed the aim of all higher interpretation; in a different mode, the ekphraseis and ‘scientific’ disquisitions of Achilles Tatius’ novel put ‘interpretation’ and its discontents very obviously at the centre of readers’ concerns.6 When, however, novelists themselves – to put it very crudely – overtly write ‘interpretation’ into their own works, they are not merely challenging the scholastic hierarchy, they are also challenging us to have the critical courage and/or naiveté to take them seriously. The history of the interpretation of – to use the strongest case – Apuleius’ Metamorphoses shows that the 3 4 5 6

Cf. Sandy 1982, Winkler 1982, Hunter 1998b. Particularly suggestive is Dowden 1998. For these terms and further bibliography cf. Dawson 1992, 4 with 245 n. 12. Cf. Bartsch 1989, Morales 2004.

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interpretative community (both before and after J. J. Winkler’s Auctor and Actor) is far from making up its mind on this matter. This critical uncertainty arises in large part precisely from the fact that, as the novelists (and, we may assume, at least many of their readers) knew only too well, the practice and modes of interpretation to which they direct us arose from and were designed for texts which occupied a very different cultural position. This unsettling gap is in fact crucial to the literary effects of these techniques. All of our extant novels lay claim, with varying degrees of explicitness and persistence, to the Homeric mantle, and as Homer is the privileged font and subject of all interpretative practice, so an internal discourse of interpretation must be considered as a (ludic or otherwise) part of those generic and cultural claims. Here, Heliodorus is both the most obvious and a special case: most obvious, because of the novel’s persistently overt hermeneutic concerns,7 and special because one of its principal characters and narrators is a (self-confessed) expert in Homeric interpretation (cf. especially 3.12 – 15). Heliodorus has, of course, a good claim to be the first interpreter of his own work, but it is the extraordinary sense within the text of an existing tradition of interpretation, of already competing explanations of the novel, which is so striking. It is thus perhaps not surprising that one of the most interesting (and familiar) texts from the reception of the ancient novel is an example of ‘higher’ criticism practised upon the Aithiopika itself. The ‘interpretation (2ql^meula) of “Charicleia the virtuous” from the voice (1j vym/r) 8 of Philip the philosopher’ survives in a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Aithiopika from southern Italy;9 the end of the work is lost. The date and authorship of this essay remain matters of fierce dispute.10 7 Cf., e. g., the works listed in n. 3 above. 8 On the meaning of this phrase cf. Richard 1950, Tarán 1992, 229 – 30. Tarán properly reminds us that the title may be later than the work itself. 9 Venetus Marcianus gr. 410, D in Colonna, X in Rattenbury-Lumb, who do not, however, cite its readings (cf. pp. xxix-xxxi); the manuscript is described in Mioni 1985, 166 – 7. The text of ‘Philip’ is most easily accessible in Colonna’s edition of Heliodorus (pp. 365 – 70); proper attention was first called to it in Hercher 1869. There is an English translation in Lamberton 1986, 306 – 11. The best modern discussions are Gärtner 1969, Lamberton 1986, 148 – 56 (Lamberton seems not to have known Gärtner’s article), and Tarán 1992. On the Byzantine reception of the Aithiopika see also Agapitos 1998. 10 Cf. Colonna 1960, Lamberton 1986, 148, Longo 1991, Tarán 1992, Sandy 2001, 170 – 1.

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Both Hans Gärtner11 and Nigel Wilson12 have accepted Colonna’s identification of Philip as a Sicilian cleric who became Theophanes, Archbishop of Rossano in Calabria, in the first half of the twelfth century; as, however, it has been shown that Theophanes’ Homilies are in fact the work of Philagathos of Cerami (Sicily), whose ‘secular’ name had been Philip, authorship of the essay on Heliodorus has been re-assigned to that twelfth-century cleric.13 Strong voices have, however, also been raised in favour of a date in late antiquity, most probably in the fifth or sixth century,14 although such a discussion of one of the novels at this early date would be remarkable indeed. If the dating were secure, then we would be able to site the essay within a specific intellectual and political context, as indeed Hans Gärtner did on the assumption of a twelfth-century date; with such a date the essay would take its place within the history of Byzantine debate about whether and how one should read pagan, and particularly pagan erotic, literature.15 Without that security, much that can be said concerning Philip’s essay must remain provisional. Nevertheless, the critical practices on show in the essay were familiar both in late antiquity and the Byzantine world – and were indeed, as the Aithiopika makes clear, familiar to Heliodorus himself – and so we may cautiously hope to understand what ‘Philip’ is doing, even in the absence of a known context. In a close imitation of the opening of the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, a work which teaches that death is a liberation of the soul to be welcomed (a Platonic theme particularly close to the hearts of Christians),16 the first-person narrator tells how, once upon a time, two friends, one a royal scribe, urged him to come with them to defend ‘Charicleia’, for many ‘students of literature’ (philologoi) had gathered outside a temple and were reading the novel (presumably aloud) and subjecting it to mockery and ridicule, although the grounds for this ridicule are not stated. The friend, who describes himself as ‘a lover (erastes) of Charikleia’, pleads with the narrator to use his wisdom to prevent ‘the chaste maiden from being outraged’ by demonstrating that ‘the narrative of Charikleia is beyond all reproach’. The language of ‘loving’ literature is entirely 11 12 13 14 15 16

Cf. Gärtner 1969, 61. Cf. Wilson 1983, 216. Cf. Lavagnini 1974, Tarán 1992, 207 – 8. Cf. especially Tarán 1992. Brief summary in Dyck 1986, 80 – 5. Cf., e. g., Basil, On Greek Literature 9.1 – 6 (Wilson 1975, 30 – 1). At ll. 64 – 5 Colonna Philip’s phraseology is very close to 5.38 – 9 of Basil’s essay.

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standard,17 but the friend’s apparently playful rhetoric which fuses the novel Charikleia and ‘Charikleia’, the chaste maiden with whom all men fall in love and some would wish to outrage (hubrizesthai) and others to protect from outrage,18 picks up a stylistic trick of the novels themselves.19 It also perhaps suggests a rather simple-minded ‘emotional engagement’ with the heroine and her novel, which is to be shown to be very different from Philip’s higher, intellectual understanding. In his naïve enthusiasm, the friend is in fact the counterpart of Heliodorus’s Knemon, who ‘lives’ the stories which he hears (and tells) and for whom stories of love and love itself are virtual equivalents (cf. 4.4.2 – 3).20 What follows will show that, just as in the novel itself, the ‘Knemon-figure’ is here set against a ‘Kalasiris’. That critical mockery of the book is tantamount to the rape of its heroine might perhaps also help us with the grounds for that mockery. The criticism of the philologoi may simply have been the self-conscious contempt of an élite for allegedly ‘trashy literature’ or it may, more particularly, have been aimed at the damage which the reading of such fictional ‘erotic’ narratives could do; Gärtner helpfully pointed to a late Byzantine Protheoria on the Aithiopika by Johannes Eugenikos,21 in which Heliodorus’ novel is defended against the charge of being ‘damaging to the bodies, or even more the minds, of the young’. The lusts on display in the Aithiopika will promote the vices of those who read Heliodorus’ words too literally. The existence of such criticism seems also to be implied by Psellus’ earlier defence of the morality of both Charicleia and Kalasiris, whom, in Psellus’ reading, Heliodorus has cleared of ‘the blame (l´lxir) attaching to being a pander’.22 Nevertheless, there may be more at stake here than just simple ‘literalism’. A way of reading characterised by the ‘wanton licentiousness of pigs’ (l. 36 Colonna), as 17 Cf., e. g., Porphyry, Homeric Questions Proem di± s³ ja· to»r %kkour gOl¶qou 1qast²r … 18 Thus Thamyris, the noble bandit, gives orders to his men tµm jºqgm !m¼bqistom !p¹ p²mtym diavuk²tteim ‘to preserve the maiden free from all outrage’ (1.7.3). Gärtner (1969) 67 identifies analogies in biblical interpretation for this play on the doubleness of the name. 19 Cf., e. g., Aith. 4.4.3, Hunter 1994, 1066 – 7 on Chariton. 20 On Knemon cf. Winkler 1982, Hunter 1998b. 21 For the text see Bandini 1770, 322 – 3. 22 Cf. Psellus, Synkrisis 43 – 53 Dyck. Psellus also defends Heliodorus against the allegedly widespread charge (pke¸stour … 1paitiyl´mour) that Charicleia’s language is too elevated and ‘sophistic’ for a woman (36 – 42 Dyck). It seems unlikely that it is this which lies behind the mockery of Philip’s philologoi.

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‘Philip’ (playfully) teases the philologoi, suggests that it may have been the high (and perhaps highly implausible) moral tone of the Aithiopika, in which the pair of lovers are constantly together and yet remain entirely chaste, that was the object of the mockery of the philologoi. The philologoi, then, like Thersander in Achilles Tatius,23 may be cynical ‘realists’ who apply inappropriate standards to their reading of the text and thus drag it down to their own ‘swinish’ level. If one of them were left alone with ‘Charicleia’, she would certainly not long remain a virgin; the cloak in which she wraps herself for protection against ‘those who wish her harm’ (ll. 77 – 8 Colonna) is certainly needed when there are such readers about. It is clearly not only modern readers who have been struck by the extraordinary tension powering Heliodorus’ narrative between the drive towards sexual fulfilment and its constant deferral; Photios (50a17, ch. 73) observes how the Aithiopika ‘displays the longing for chastity’ (syvqos¼mgr … de¸jmusi pºhom), and this oxymoronic phrase well captures something of the flavour of this creative tension. Eugenikos dismisses readers who read ‘simply, or only superficially, or are quite knocked out by any low realism’; this last phrase is an uncertain guess at the meaning of pq¹r eU t¸ pou letan» t/i v¼sei 2pºlemom 1lpah_r jewgimºsim,24 but an enthusiasm for, say, the ‘diarrhoea’ episode would sit easily beside an impatience with the improbably ‘unnatural’ physical control of the central couple. An ancient text which dramatises the manner of reading which ‘Philip’ may ascribe to Charikleia’s critics is Seneca, Controuersia 1.2 which concerns a girl who, like Tarsia in the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyrii, preserved her virginity in a brothel, but (unlike Tarsia) killed a man who tried to rape her, and now wants to be a priestess.25 The main arguments put forward by the lawyers against the girl’s story are that it is incredibile (Did every potential customer pity the girl?, 1.2.8) and that there is no way of confirming it: cetera nescio (1.2.1, with a nice echo of the end of Ovid, Amores 1.5), quid inclusa feceris nec quaerere debemus nec scire possumus (1.2.2), or ‘How do we know that she did not bargain with her visitors to keep her virginity at the expense of some other brand of lust?’ (1.2. 22), and the brilliant bon mot of Murredius, fortasse dum repellit libidinem, manibus excepit (1.2.23). These jurists, like Thersander and perhaps like Philip’s philologoi, do ‘violence to the text’. The author of the His23 See the discussion of Thersander in Morales 2004. 24 Gärtner 1969, 65 sees a passion for the novel’s ‘anrüchige Episoden’. 25 Recent discussion in Panayotakis 2002.

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toria, incidentally, has blocked off the possibility of such a reading: in this text, through the use of the ‘spying’ motif we know what happened in the brothel.26 Philip at first seems unwilling to help his friend because, as he explains, he has left ‘childish toys’ behind and is now concerned with the higher mysteries of philosophy; ‘erotic narratives and stories’ (1qytija· 1ngc¶seir ja· digc¶lata) are suitable for young men in their prime, not for the elderly. There is perhaps here an echo of the scene in Republic 1 in which Cephalos recounts with approval an anecdote in which Sophocles expresses his thankfulness at being too old to be subject to erotic desire (Rep. 1.329b6-d6); as Philip’s friend is a ‘lover of Charikleia’, so Philip himself claims to be too old for both eros and erotika diegemata. The rhetoric here, if not necessarily the tone, is not dissimilar to that of Macrobius who scornfully dismisses ‘fictional narratives of the doings of lovers’ (argumenta fictis casibus amatorum referta), of which Petronius and Apuleius are prime examples: ‘a philosophical treatise banishes that whole class of stories, which aim only to gratify the ear [cf. Apuleius, Met. Proem], from its sanctuary and relegates them to the infant nursery’ (Comm. Somn. Scip. 1.2.8). The claim is a special case of the familiar positioning of ‘literature’ as (at best) ‘childish’ preparation for philosophy, a claim reversed, for example, by the Platonic Callicles in his attack upon ‘childish’ philosophy (Gorgias 484c6d). We may remember Horace’s nunc itaque et uersus et cetera ludicra pono; quid uerum atque decens, curo et rogo et omnis in hoc sum. (Horace, Epistles 1.1.10 – 11)

As Horace shows just how such claims may be readily adapted to different levels of irony, so we must ask about the manner in which ‘Philip’ accedes to his friend’s request.27 He cites Plato’s Phaedrus as an authorising model for the wise man devoting time to the discussion of erotika, and it is important here that the Phaedrus was already an element in the ‘myth of origins’ which Longus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus himself (cf. 2.21.6) construct for their novels. ‘Philip’ had already set himself as ‘a Socrates’ through the opening quotation of the Axiochus, and Socrates 26 On this scene cf. further Hunter 2008, 270. 27 Lavagnini 1974, 9 rightly notes that the fact that the request came from a friend with court connections increases the apologetic force of the opening narrative.

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is clearly one ‘wise man’ after whom Philip fashions himself. Just, however, as the Socrates of the Phaedrus can reproduce the Lysianic rhetorical manner to perfection, the Socrates of the Protagoras is fully at home in ‘literary criticism’, and the Socrates of the Cratylus in etymology,28 so Philip’s epideixis of the higher criticism reproduces a familiar didactic style with uncanny precision. Not content with placing his performance under the sign of the ironic Socrates,29 he actually advertises it as a mixture of ‘gravity’ and ‘playfulness’ (ll. 26 – 7 Colonna), though his modern readers have tended to overlook the smile on his face.30 This is all the more surprising as, together with Socrates, Philip’s most important model is Heliodorus’ knowing Egyptian priest Kalasiris. Both Philip (at Rhegium or wherever the work is set) and Kalasiris (at Delphi) hold learned conversations in front of temples, subject texts to ‘higher’ interpretation, and play games with those less intellectually quick than themselves. Philip’s eulogy of Kalasiris as ‘orderly in word and deed … a teacher who draws the soul to the good31 and leads it to initiation into the knowledge of the divine … a good counselor in practical things, leading the soul in a state of calm through the salt sea and the waves of life’ (ll. 111 – 14 Colonna, trans. Lamberton) is clearly how Philip sees himself also. If Philip’s interpretation of the novel, in Bob Lamberton’s words, ‘verges at times on parody’,32 then this is a playful mode very familiar from Kalasiris himself. ‘Philip’ begins by distinguishing two ways of reading and two kinds of reader: ‘This book, my friends, is very like Circe’s brew (kukeon): those who take it in a profane manner (beb¶kyr), it transforms into licentious pigs, but those who approach it in a philosophical way, in the manner of Odysseus, it initiates into higher things’ (ll. 35 – 7 Colonna, trans. Lamberton). In comparing Heliodorus’ novel to Circe’s potion, Philip places himself within

28 Socrates’ etymologising in the Phaedrus (244c-d, 251 c5 – 7), in a passage which is in ‘Philip’s’ mind, is also to be noted. 29 Philip’s irony is, of course, not quite the same as that for which Socrates is most famed, but both the link between ‘irony’ and ‘allegory’ (cf., e. g., Lausberg 1960, 442) and the intellectual superiority which the ironist may claim for himself (cf., e. g., Nehamas 1998, 51 – 2) are relevant here. 30 Thus for Tarán 1992, 229, Philip is ‘an eclectic dilettante’; Sandy 2001, 176 finds his hermeneutics ‘puerile’. 31 ‘Kalasiris’ is here etymologised as b pq¹r t± jak± s¼qym. 32 Lamberton 1986, 152.

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a long and familiar interpretative tradition,33 but – however familiar the rhetoric – it is Kalasiris who is directly invoked. Heliodorus’ holy man distinguished between two Egyptian ‘wisdoms’, one vulgar and common, ‘pandering to wanton pleasures’ (cf. Philip’s accusation of ‘swinish aselgeia’), and another ‘true wisdom’ which ‘looks upwards towards heavenly things’ (3.16);34 Kalasiris himself had distinguished between the ways in which the many and the profane (pokko¸, b´bgkoi) understand Homer and the phenomena to which the great poet refers, and the higher readings of interpreters such as himself (3.12.2 – 13.3). In applying Homeric hermeneutics to the Aithiopika, Philip acknowledges the generic and cultural claims which Heliodorus himself had made. Such doubleness of reading (in all its different varieties) is, of course, a staple of late antique and Byzantine hermeneutics, in no way limited to Kalasiris and his admirers. A key text, as Gärtner has rightly emphasised,35 is the Song of Songs, together with its very rich interpretative tradition. Philip implicitly (ll. 23 – 4 Colonna) and Eugenikos explicitly compare the proper way to approach the Aithiopika to the proper way to read Song of Songs, a way which is founded, in the language of Rufinus’ translation of Origen’s commentary on the Song, on the distinction between ‘literal’ and ‘inner’ meaning, between historica intelligentia and interior intellectus. As love itself may be spiritual or carnal, so may ways of reading. Part of Origen’s introduction to his commentary is worth quoting in this context: ‘Just as in childhood we are not affected by the passion of love, so also to those who are at the stage of infancy and childhood in their interior life … it is not given to grasp the meaning of these sayings [i.e. the mystical utterances of Song of Songs which require explication]. … If those whom we have called children were to come on these passages, it may be that they would derive neither profit nor much harm, either from reading the text itself, or from going through the necessary explanations. But if any man who lives only after the flesh should approach it, to such a one the reading of this Scripture will be the occasion of no small hazard and danger. For he, not knowing how to hear love’s language in purity and with chaste ears, will twist the whole manner of his hearing of it away from the inner spiritual man and on to the outward and carnal; and he will be turned away from the spirit to the flesh, and will foster carnal desires in himself, and it will seem to be the Divine Scriptures that are thus urging and egging him 33 Cf. Kaiser 1964, 200 – 13. ‘Philip’s’ version finds a close parallel in Pseudo-Heraclitus, Quaest. Hom. 72.2; cf. also Hor. Epist. 1.2.23 – 6. 34 Cf. Hunter 1998b, 56 – 7. 35 Gärtner 1969, 66 – 8.

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on to fleshly lust. For this reason, therefore, I advise and counsel everyone who is not yet rid of the vexations of the flesh and blood and has not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature, to refrain completely from reading this little book and the things that will be said about it. For they say that with the Hebrews also care is taken to allow no one even to hold this book in his hands, who has not reached a full and ripe age.’ (Origen, Commentary on Song of Songs, Prologue p. 62.1 – 24 Baehrens, trans. R.P. Lawson).36

So, too, Eugenikos argues that the chance to read the Aithiopika can be witheld from those who are ‘young, whether physically or, even more, intellectually’ (meyt´qoir eUte t_i s¾lati eUte l÷kkom t_i vqom¶lati), on the same principle on which Song of Songs is witheld from them, and the philologoi who mock Charikleia show how right he is. Throughout the interpretative tradition, it is a persistent theme that the Song is to be made available only to those who have mastered and internalised the ‘true meaning’ of less provocative texts; this is the Christian version of the pagan system from which I began – ‘allegorical’ reading (however we understand that) is the highest form of interpretation, whether it be seen in the progression in the books of Solomon from Proverbs to Ecclesiastes to Song of Songs which Origen again traces in his Commentary 37 or, for single works, in Origen’s three levels of ‘literal’ (sylatij|m), moral (xuwij|m), and spiritual (pmeulatij|m) interpretation of Scripture,38 a system which finds a clear counterpart in ‘Philip’’s progression from a moralising/ethical reading of the Aithiopika to an allegorical/spiritual one.39 Philip proceeds to offer two forms of ‘higher’ reading, of which one (ll. 37 – 76 Colonna) is a moralising, but ‘non-mystical’ or ‘non-allegorical’ reading, of a kind familiar, for example, from Plutarch’s How to Study Poetry; it stands comparison with, say, Horace’s ‘ethical’ reading of Homer (Epistles 1.2) or Pseudo-Heraclitus’ summary of why Homer is ‘chock full of proper virtue: there is prudent Odysseus, brave Ajax, chaste Penelope, the always just Nestor, Telemachos who shows piety towards his father, and Achilles who is the most loyal friend’ 36 R. P. Lawson, Origen. The Song of Songs, Commentary and Homilies (Westminster, MD/London 1957). 37 Prologue pp. 75 – 79 Baehrens ( = pp. 39 – 46 of Lawson’s translation). 38 Cf., e. g., Hanson 1959, 235 – 58. 39 Plato’s practice in the Phaedrus and the Symposium was crucially influential upon later hermeneutic practice (both pagan and Christian); I offer some brief remarks in Hunter 2004, 129 – 30.

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(Quaest. Hom. 78.2 – 3).40 Heliodorus’ novel becomes an educational introduction to ethical philosophy and a protreptic to virtue, working through clearly delineated ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters, and the sharply distinguished ends which they meet (it is hard not to recall Miss Prism’s ‘the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’); the novel becomes indeed ‘an archetypal portrait of the four cardinal virtues’ (ll. 61 – 2 Colonna).41 It is no surprise, if somewhat disappointing, that the morality which Philip apparently rejoices in seeing triumphant is a conservative and hierarchical one (‘If a woman wishes secretly to betray her husband’s bed, let her consider the passions of Arsake which ended in inglorious strangling; if someone is plotting against his masters (desp|tai), like Achaimenes he may not escape the Ethiopian spear …’), backed up by some (? amusingly) banal sententiousness (‘vice is more endemic in women than men’, l. 43 Colonna); virtue will be rewarded. In a textually difficult transitional passage (ll. 76 – 9 Colonna), Philip appears to say that his moralising reading has enabled them to see the ‘sacred chiton which Charicleia wore beneath the brilliant robe which protected her from evil-wishers’. Here the familiar neo-Platonic42 (and other) idea of interpretation as a process of revealing layers, an idea which resonates with the textual experience of reading books and which takes its classical authority from the description of the Platonic Alcibiades of the necessity of ‘getting inside’ the words with which Socrates’ logoi are ‘clothed’ (Symposium 221e), playfully hints at the possibility that we readers, all of course ‘lovers of Charikleia’, are actually taking Charicleia’s clothes off; the allegorical interpretation which follows is to do precisely that,43 thus allowing her beauty to be revealed ‘in its pure glory ( !jqaivm´r)’. Philip is obviously alluding to the sacred chiton which marks Charicleia as a priestess of Artemis (cf. 3.4.2, 6.11.3), a chiton which she dons just before the virginity test of the ‘gridiron’ where her superhuman and undefiled beauty dazzles the onlookers (10.9.3). Here too the critical essay follows the path of the novel, for 40 Pseudo-Heraclitus’ point here is a comparison of Homer and Plato, very much to the former’s advantage. 41 This too is a central theme of Eugenikos’ essay. 42 Cf., e. g., Sandy 2001, 174 – 5. 43 Lamberton seems to mistranslate !mapet²sai as ‘to take wing’. For the image here cf. again Macrobius, Comm. Somn. Scip. 1.2.11, approving fictions in which rerum sacrarum notio sub pio figmentorum uelamine honestis et tecta rebus et uestita nominibus enuntiatur.

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the ‘gridiron’ test is the event which moves the novel to its denouement, to the revelation of the truth. That truth is, of course, inscribed on the band exposed with Charicleia and available only to those able to read ‘royal Ethiopian script’ (4.8.1). For the bulk of the novel this truth is a mystery understood only by Kalasiris, thanks to his position and learning, and by Charicleia herself (thanks to Kalasiris). As the end of the novel dramatises both revelation and (in the character of Sisimithres) interpretation,44 so the critical essay proceeds up the hierarchy of interpretation to culminate with that known only to the truly sophos. As for Philip’s allegorising interpretation itself,45 this is a Neo-Platonically flavoured mixture of familiar hermeneutic tools which are used to read the novel as (another) ascent of the soul (i. e. Charicleia) to the intellectual world: metaphor and allegory (Kalasiris guides Charicleia/the soul ‘in calm’ ( !j¼loma) through ‘the salt and the waves of life (t_m biytij_m jul²tym)’, protecting her from the plots of Trachinos, i. e. ‘the rough (tqawe?a) confusion of the emotions’46), numerology (‘Charicleia’ adds up to the triply holy number of 777), and etymology (‘Arsake’ as ‘carnal pleasure’, B Bdomµ B saqjij¶ etc.) all play their part. Here again, Philip takes his impetus not just from contemporary critical practices, but from the Aithiopika itself. Thus, numerology confers special status on the Nile according to the priests who show Hydaspes around: the letters of Me?kor add up to 365, the number of days in the year (Aith. 9.22.6). The etymology of names is central to the crucial Delphic oracle (2.35.5 – 36.1 – 2) which is to guide Kalasiris’ searches for the ‘accurate meaning’ (t¹ !jqib³r !miwme¼eim, 2.36.2) and which is recalled to bring narrative closure to the novel (10.41.2). The meeting of Charicleia and Theagenes at Delphi (3.5.4), as described/interpreted by Kalasiris, itself gives impetus to Philip’s Platonising reading of the soul’s pursuit, under the power of eros, of the higher understanding which it now craves (ll. 101 – 110):47 ‘In that instant it was revealed to us, Knemon, that the soul is something divine and partakes in the nature of heaven. For at the moment when 44 Cf. Hunter 1998b, 56 – 9. 45 There is a helpful account in Tarán 1992, which should be consulted for the details. 46 That tqaw}r may be used of the sea and st\sir of the winds is relevant to Philip’s extended metaphor. 47 Cf. also 4.2.3 where Theagenes explains that the sight of Charicleia ‘gives [him] wings and draws [him] uplifted (let\qsiom) towards herself’. On ‘Platonic’ elements in Heliodorus cf. especially Dowden 1996.

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they set eyes on one another, the young pair fell in love, as if the soul recognised its kin at the very first encounter and sped to meet that which was worthily its own’. (Aithiopika 3.5.4, trans. Morgan)

Of particular interest is Philip’s reading of Charicleia’s suffering at the hands of Arsake: ‘Carnal pleasure in the form of Arsace plots against her, with Cybele for her pimp, representing the senses, who conceives the weapons for the assaults, showers logic with arrows, and draws contemplation to herself in order to debauch the thoughts of the mind. Here let the strong will be made yet tougher! Let it be cast into the fiery furnace of temptation! The ruby [pamt²qbg] will keep her unblemished, for the ‘ruby’ is that which ‘fears all’ or ‘is afraid’ and hints at the fear of god, since God is all things [t¹ p÷m]’ (ll. 119 – 125, trans. Lamberton). This interpretation of the events of Aithiopika 8.9 – 11 again draws directly upon the novel itself. Charicleia is indeed saved by the gods acting through the ‘pantarbe’ jewel (8.11.8), and by her piety and virtue, but Philip has here chosen an episode of the novel which precisely foregrounds problems of interpretation and the conditions which govern individual interpretative choices.48 In 8.10 – 11 the couple debate the rôle of the gods in Charicleia’s miraculous rescue and each remembers a dream prophecy delivered by Kalasiris or a god in his shape (itself an allusion to contentious matters of dream-interpretation). Charicleia speaks first: “Such a dream I dreamed last night – if dream it was and not reality! At the time it somehow slipped from my thoughts, but now it comes back to me. The dream was in the form of a line of verse, and it came from the lips of Kalasiris, most blessed among men. Either I fell asleep without realizing, and he came to me in a dream, or else I saw him in the very flesh. It went something like this, I think: If you wear pantarbe fear-all, fear not the power of flame: Miracles may come to pass: for Fate ‘tis easy game.” Theagenes shook like a man possessed … “I have an oracle from the selfsame prophet; be it Kalasiris or a god in Kalasiris’s shape, he appeared to me and seemed to speak these words: Ethiopia’s land with a maiden shalt thou see: Tomorrow from Arsake’s bonds shalt thou be free.

48 Cf. Dowden 1996, 274 – 5.

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Now, I can guess (sulb²kkeim) the meaning of the prophecy as it affects me: by ‘Ethiopia’s land’ it signifies, I think, the netherworld,49 ‘with a maiden’ means I shall be with Persephone, and the release from bonds is the departure of my soul from my earthly body. But what sense do your lines make? They are full of contradictions! The word pantarbe means ‘fearing all things’, but then the commandment requires you not to be afraid of the pyre.” “My darling Theagenes,” replied Charicleia, “misfortune has been so constant a companion that you have grown used to putting the worst construction on everything, for people are apt to allow their circumstances to shape their thoughts. But it seems to me that the words of the prophecy presage a brighter future than you are disposed to see. Perhaps ‘the maiden’ is me, and you are being given an assurance that, at my side, you will come to Ethiopia, my fatherland, free of Arsake and her bonds.” (Aithiopika 8.11.1 – 5, trans. Morgan)

Theagenes’ ‘allegorical’ (almost neo-Platonic) reading of his dream prophecy proves amusingly wrong; the words (for once) mean what they appear to mean. Philip could, of course, appeal not just to the whole shape of the episode for his view that the ‘pantarbe’ is really ‘fear of god’, but also to Charicleia’s own interpretative move at 8.11.11: ‘we have a second pantarbe in the prophecy the gods have made. So let us trust in the gods …’. Nevertheless, Philip’s choice of this episode will not be innocent. Interpretation and its aims are contextually determined – Charicleia wants to cheer Theagenes up – and Philip is a master of the rhetoric of interpretation. He sets out to show that Heliodorus’ novel is an improving work ‘beyond all reproach’; perhaps if he had been set a different task he would have accomplished that too with equal ease. The 2ql¶meula of Philip thus takes its place within one of the central questions in the history of interpretative practice, a question to which texts such as the Derveni papyrus have given new impetus: what should be the relation between the work being studied and the hermeneutic tools to be applied to it? If Philip does more explicitly what Kalasiris all but did in the course of the novel itself, we may see this as a remarkable anticipation of modern critical practice.

49 This passage may already have been in Philip’s mind at 1.92 – 3 where he interprets Charicleia’s Ethiopian birth as a sign that man moves from ‘the darkness’ towards the light.

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Reeve, M. D. 1986. Longus, Daphnis et Chloe (2nd ed.). Leipzig: Teubner. Richard, M. 1950. ‘APO VYMGS’, Byzantion 20, 191 – 222. Sandy, G. 1982. ‘Characterization and philosophical décor in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 112: 141 – 67. — 2001. ‘A neoplatonic interpretation of Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story’, in A. Billault (ed.), OPYQA. La belle saison de l’hellnisme (Paris) 169 – 78. Schlunk, R. R. 1993. Porphyry. The Homeric Questions, New York. Tarán, L. 1992. ‘The authorship of an allegorical interpretation of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica’ in SOVIGS LAIGTOQES, “Chercheurs de sagesse”, Hommage Jean Ppin (Paris) 203 – 30. Wilson, N. G. 1975. Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature, London. — 1983. Scholars of Byzantium. London. Winkler, J. J. 1982. ‘The mendacity of Kalasiris and the narrative strategy of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika’, Yale Classical Studies 27: 93 – 158.

Addendum For allegorical practice within Heliodorus’ novel itself cf. now G. Most, ‘Allegory and narrative in Heliodorus’ in S. Swain et al. (eds.), Severan Culture (Cambridge 2007) 160 – 7.

45. Plato’s Symposium and the traditions of ancient fiction* Among the most striking products of the literature of the Roman empire are large-scale fictional narratives in prose, or occasionally a mixture of prose and verse. Such ‘novels’ – the validity of the term is much debated but its usefulness seems undeniable – appear in both Greek and Latin, and cover a remarkable range of tone, style and milieu.1 At the heart of most of these narratives lies a pair of lovers, usually but not always (cf. Petronius, Satyrica) heterosexual, who eventually find happiness and each other after the most extraordinary adventures. In different ways, through both allusion and direct reference, most of the extant novelists acknowledge Plato as one of their ‘authorising’ models, second in importance perhaps only to Homer. In this paper I wish to explore two particular instances of that acknowledgement in the Latin novel, in both of which Plato, and particularly, though not exclusively, the Symposium, is indeed combined with Homer in scenes in which, through the figure of Socrates, the novelists seem to reflect upon their literary heritage and upon the business of creating fiction. Critical interest in the links between Plato’s Symposium and later traditions of fictional narrative has, broadly speaking, concentrated in two areas. The first is how Plato’s work itself foreshadows these later developments. Many critics, including Nietzsche and Bakhtin, have seen the dialogues as foreshadowing the later novel and/or providing a paradigm for it and/or (to simplify a complex argument) as themselves the first novels (cf. further below).2 Alongside (and in part stimulated by) * 1

2

J. Lesher et al. (eds.), Plato’s Symposium. Issues in Interpretation and Reception (Washington DC 2006) 295 – 312 The Greek material is most accessible in translation in Reardon 1989 and Stephens-Winkler 1995. The Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius have been translated many times, but Walsh 1994 and Branham-Kinney 1996 are good places to start. There is now a huge bibliography on the ancient novel, but Schmeling 2003 offers a helpful way into the whole subject. For Nietzsche see The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. F. Golffing (New York 1956) 87 – 8. For Bakhtin cf. Bakhtin 1981: 21 – 6, and the discussions of, e. g., Gold 1980, Corrigan–Glazov-Corrigan 2005. For

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this, the very obvious concern of the Symposium, as also of (say) the Phaedo, with its own status as a fiction, i. e. with the historicity of what is reported within it,3 can with hindsight be seen to foreshadow a similar (and much discussed) feature of some of the novels of later antiquity, which display a partly playful and partly anxious concern with the ‘truth status’ of their fictional narratives (is this logos or is this muthos?);4 it is a small step from noting this similarity to seeing in these concerns a move by the later novelists to trace their literary genealogy back to Plato and/or to claim the philosopher as ‘one of them’. I will return presently to another way in which Apuleius seems to claim Plato as ‘the father of the logos’. The second principal area of scholarly interest has been with the actual influence of the Symposium in the later novels, both in terms of intertextual echoes and, more broadly, with how later fiction reproduces and varies Platonic paradigms of ers, particularly those of the Symposium.5 Interest has centred on the apparent similarity between the mutual obsession with each other shown by Aristophanes’ ‘separated halves’ in the Symposium and the devotion and constant searching of the central couples at the heart of the novels of later antiquity, though other patterns, such as the reversal of ‘Pausaniac’ ers in Petronius’ famous story of the sex-mad ‘Pergamene boy’, have not been neglected. In this paper I will to some extent be pursuing these same paths, although this essay should also be seen within the broader context of an investigation of the interest of the novelists, one they inherited from (inter alios) Plato himself,6 in contemporary interpretative practices. In an earlier contribution to this theme,7 I put the matter (not very elegantly) as follows: When … novelists themselves – to put it very crudely – overtly write ‘interpretation’ into their own works, they are not merely challenging the scholastic hierarchy, they are also challenging us to have the critical courage and/or naiveté to take them seriously. The history of the interpretation of –

3 4 5 6 7

Bakhtin and the ancient novel more generally cf. Branham 2002b, Branham 2005; in one sense, at least, the Symposium is a limit case of ‘polyglossia’. Cf., e. g., Hunter 2004: 20 – 9, Corrigan–Glazov-Corrigan 2005. For this distinction in the novels and further bibliography cf. Hunter 1994 and 1997. For bibliography and discussion cf. Hunter 1996 and (more briefly) Hunter 2004: 125 – 9; cf. further Branham 2002: 173 – 4. For the Symposium as a key text for the history of ‘interpretation’ cf. Hunter 2004: 11 – 12, 128 – 30. Hunter 2005b: 125.

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to use the strongest case – Apuleius’ Metamorphoses shows that the interpretative community … is far from making up its mind on this matter. This critical uncertainty arises in large part precisely from the fact that, as the novelists (and, we may assume, at least many of their readers) knew only too well, the practice and modes of interpretation to which they direct us arose from and were designed for texts which occupied a very different cultural position. This unsettling gap is in fact crucial to the literary effects of these techniques. All of our extant novels lay claim, with varying degrees of explicitness and persistence, to the Homeric mantle, and as Homer is the privileged font and subject of all interpretative practice, so an internal discourse of interpretation must be considered as a (ludic or otherwise) part of those generic and cultural claims.

Of rather more interest is a passage of Origen, which all but certainly has Plato’s Symposium in mind, in which the Christian scholar finds pagan ‘parallels’ for the Song of Songs – parallels for that work’s subject (love), for the fact that it can be (and has been) ‘misread’, and for its form (dialogue):8 ‘Among the Greeks, indeed, many of the sages, desiring to pursue the search for truth in regard to the nature of love, produced a great variety of writings in this dialogue form, the object of which was to show that the power of love is none other than that which leads the soul from earth to the lofty heights of heaven, and that the highest beatitude can only be attained under the stimulus of love’s desire. Moreover, the disputations on this subject are represented as taking place at meals (conuiuia), between persons whose banquet, I think, consists of words and not of meats.9 And others also have left us written accounts of certain arts, by which this love might be generated and augmented in the soul. But carnal men have perverted these arts to foster vicious longings and the secrets of sinful love.’ (Origen, Commentary on Song of Songs, Prologue p. 63. pp.6 – 16 Baehrens, trans. R.P. Lawson)

Plato’s Symposium is indeed a text which, in Origen’s terms, has a very great deal invested in the distinction between ‘carnal’ and ‘higher’ love, between bodies and souls, and in the various ways in which erotic texts can be read.

8 9

For Origen’s debt to the Symposium here and elsewhere cf. Rist 1964: 195 – 212, Osborne 1994: 164 – 64. For this topos cf., e. g., Lucian, Symposium 2.

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1. Of the surviving ancient novels, it is the Metamorphoses of Apuleius which is perhaps most called to mind by Origen’s words. This novel, probably composed near the middle of the second century AD, tells the story of Lucius, who, through misplaced curiosity about magic, is transformed into an ass and thus witnesses and experiences terrible cruelty and ‘carnality’ until he is finally saved by the grace of the great goddess Isis, whose priest he becomes. Apuleius was steeped in the works of Plato and the trends of second-century Platonism, and the debt of the Metamorphoses to Plato, and particularly to the Symposium, is very obvious;10 it is particularly felt in the central books of the novel in which Lucius listens to the famous tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, in which the beautiful young Psyche (‘Soul’) is indeed finally led by Love ‘from earth to the lofty heights of heaven’, as Origen puts it. Moreover, the whole plot of the Metamorphoses seems structured around the opposition between two forms of pleasure, the slavish and carnal on one side and the higher pleasure of true knowledge on the other, and we are at least invited to ponder throughout the work how much ‘seriousness’ (spoudaion) lies concealed beneath the humour (geloion), as Alcibiades famously describes the logoi of the silenic Socrates.11 Behind the Metamorphoses lies a Greek novel which survives in a version ascribed to Lucian, the Onos (‘Ass’).12 Apuleius is, then, not just, as is his own Isis-priest (Met. 11.15), a self-conscious reader and interpreter of his own gloriously metaliterary Metamorphoses, he is also the first reader and exegete, of whom we know, of the Greek Onos, and he revels in displaying the operations of, in his own words, a lector scrupulosus ‘busybody reader’ confronted with that remarkable tale; the shifting and multi-faceted relationship between translation and interpretation is one to which Apuleius himself draws attention in the prologue. The very addition of an introductory prologue to the Greek model suggests ‘intentionality’ in the narrative, i. e. that it is being told for a particular purpose, while simultaneously teasing us with the story’s (alleged) lack of seriousness.13 10 Cf. (briefly) Hunter 2004: 128 – 9; further bibliography and discussion in Münstermann 1995: 16 – 23 and Dowden 2006. 11 Cf., e. g., Schlam 1970: 486 – 7, who compares Alcibiades’ words to Lucius’ plea at Met. 1.3 for ‘close examination’ of what at first seems absurd. 12 Translation by J. P. Sullivan in Reardon 1989: 589 – 618. 13 For the prologue of the Metamorphoses cf. Kahane-Laird 2001.

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The Greek Onos can be read – as Apuleius’ transformation of the tale above all proves – as a parody of the philosopher’s progress. Lucius feels a powerful ‘desire’ (1pihule?m, chs. 4, 5, 11, 12) to see or ‘learn’ (lahe?m, ch. 11) paradoxical things; he in fact feels ers for such knowledge (chs. 4, 5). Lucius wanders about aimlessly, ‘at a loss ( !poq_m) as to where to begin the search’ (Onos 4, cf. Met. 2.1 – 2), like the aimless philosopher without a guide (Plato, Symp. 173a1 – 2);14 the Luciuses of both the Onos and the Metamorphoses are indeed afflicted with the obsessive ‘desire to know’ (cf. Met. 1.2) of which Apollodorus is so conscious in the Symposium (172e5 – 6, cf. further below). The desire to see metamorphosis (Onos 4, 11) would seem, however, to be the parodic opposite of the philosopher’s ascent in the Symposium where, through the beneficent effects of ers and a guide, the philosopher may catch sight of eternal, unchanging Beauty. Apuleius’ Lucius at any rate imagines the Thessalian town of Hypata as a kind of Platonic limit-case, a site of Heraclitean flux in which everything visible is both changeable and indeed changed (Met. 2.1). It is against this background that we must consider the name of the central character of the opening story in the Metamorphoses, Socrates, a name which has, of course, not gone unremarked.15 In the opening pages of the Metamorphoses, Lucius (not yet transformed) listens to his travelling companion, Aristomenes, telling how a friend of his called Socrates was killed by a vengeful witch, Meroe, with whom Socrates had lived and slept but whom he had then left. That Aristomenes’ story both foreshadows many of the themes of the work which it introduces and acts as something of a microcosmic taster of that work is well recognised, and it is made explicit in Lucius’ farewell to a more sceptical travelling companion, who has also listened to Aristomenes’ tale; Lucius’ words echo the prologue, and thus draw an analogy between the whole work and the tale of Socrates: sed ego huic credo hercule et gratas gratias memini quod lepidae fabulae festiuitate nos auocauit, ‘for my part I believe him and I am very grateful to him for having 14 Cf. Hunter 2004: 24 – 5. 15 Cf., e. g., O’Brien 2002: 27 – 31, Smith-Woods 2002: 185 – 91, Keulen 2003, 2004. Most scholars limit themselves to observing that the name is ironical, though the reasons for that irony may differ, cf., e. g., Walsh 1994: 242, Harrison 1990: 194. Münstermann 1995: 22 sees the Apuleian Socrates as a ‘Zerrbild’ of the Platonic character. The most elaborate ‘Platonic’ reading of the episode is that of Thibau 1965: 104 – 17, but the direction of that reading is at least problematic.

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distracted us with a charming and pretty tale’ (1.20). As the adventures of both Socrates, another pursuer (like Lucius) of ‘pleasure’ (uoluptas, 1.7),16 and Aristomenes (cf. the curiositas of 1.8.1 and 1.12) to some extent parallel those of Lucius, so Meroe foreshadows ‘the witch’ Pamphile, who fascinates Lucius in Hypata, and acts as a warning to the listening Lucius; Lucius even claims that his horse enjoyed the story of Socrates (1.20), as he himself is soon to have to listen to a great many such stories in the shape of an ass.17 The ambivalent relationship between the narrator ‘Lucius’ and the author ‘Apuleius’ – a relationship upon which so much Apuleian bibliography is founded – may even find a parallel in the unsurprising fact that the Platonic Socrates was one of the many classical models after whom ‘the real’ Apuleius fashioned himself (cf. Apuleius, Florida 2). That the central character of Aristomenes’ story is called ‘Socrates’ suggests philosophical parody at more than one level (the Phaedrus, for example, is very obviously prominent in Met. 1.19 – the Apuleian Socrates dies beside a plane-tree); both Plato’s and Aristomenes’ Socrates end their life with a drink, though Plato’s stress on his Socrates’ unchanged complexion and demeanour in the face of death (Phaedo 117b) resonates curiously against the deathly pallor of the Apuleian Socrates as death approaches (Met. 1.19.1). Whatever intertextual echoes there may be, Apuleius chooses to begin his novel with a story about (the death of) Socrates, and in such a way as to make clear that this story is emblematic for the longer narrative we are about to read and for the possibilities of interpretative reading which it is to offer. The death of Socrates is in fact the beginning of fiction, as Plato’s Socrates himself is a figure of myth and fiction.18 What is at issue is not how overtly fictional Plato’s own account of his Socrates’ death is,19 but rather how ‘stories about Socrates’ act as paradigms of fiction. Most obviously, perhaps, we may wish to compare the paraded concern with historicity at the opening of the Phaedo and, even more so, the Symposium with the obtrusive concern with truth, fiction, and gullibility with which Aristomenes’ tale is framed. That the introduction to the 16 For Aristomenes’ Socrates foreshadowing Lucius cf., e. g., Tatum 1969: 493 – 501, Smith-Woods 2002: 185 – 7, Keulen 2003: 108 – 9, citing further bibliography. 17 Cf. Winkler 1985: 36 – 7. 18 For some brief remarks and bibliography cf. Hunter 2004: 28, 110 – 12. 19 Cf., e. g., Gill 1973.

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Symposium makes it very clear that we are not to be overly concerned with its documentary historicity is very familiar critical territory, and it is also to be remarked that both Apollodorus’ story in Plato and Aristomenes’ in Apuleius are ‘repeats’: Apollodorus had told his tale to Glaukon a couple of days earlier and Aristomenes had told (all or some of) his tale to his sceptical companion before Lucius intervenes and asks him to begin again.20 The repeated telling of oral tales inevitably foregrounds – as both Plato and Apuleius make explicit – the rôle of the audience, and this too carries its own familiar implications for fictionality; Plato’s Aristodemus (himself hardly an impartial narrator) found as receptive an audience in Apollodorus as Apollodorus then found in Glaukon, and as Aristomenes found in Lucius. At the heart of ancient notions about fiction lies precisely the attitude of the teller to his tale (the prologue of Lucian’s True Histories makes this very clear), the attitude with which the audience receive it, and the effect of the tale upon them; whether what is told is, in a historical sense, strictly true or not is – as often as not – of secondary importance. A ‘true’ tale can in this sense be fictional.21 The telling of the story of Agathon’s symposium beguiled a ‘journey to town (eQr %stu)’ for Apollodorus and Glaukon (173b7 – 8), just as Aristomenes’ tale brought Lucius very pleasantly ‘to the very gates of the city’ (Met. 1.2, 20). Pleasure, of course, is crucial here – it is what the Metamorphoses promises, what ‘Cupid and Psyche’ quite literally delivers (the last phrase of the tale tells of the birth of their child Voluptas, Met. 6.24), and the state in which Lucius finishes his narrative (Met. 11.30); it, along with benefit (t¹ ¡veke?shai), is what Apollodorus derives from telling or listening to ‘logoi about philosophy’ (Symp. 173c2 – 5). This last passage of the Symposium seems a remarkable foreshadowing of the Hellenistic concern with the utile and the dulce in literature; we may wonder to what extent Apollodorus’ remarkable enthusiasm (rpeqvu_r ¢r wa¸qy) marks him as someone who is never going to get very far in philosophy, but it certainly makes him of a piece with Apuleius’ Lucius. Apollodorus should perhaps have been doing and listening to ‘philosophy’ rather than ‘logoi about philosophy’, if he wishes to make progress, but this phrase, together with the idea of benefit mixed with pleasure, strongly suggests a form of literature (a term 20 Cf. Van Der Paardt 1978: 82, who directly links Apollodorus’ telling of Socrates chez Agathon with Aristomenes’ tale of his friend Socrates. 21 Cf. further, though with very different concerns, Gill 1993, esp. 66 – 9.

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here used, I hope, neutrally) such as we enjoy every time we read the Symposium. So too does Alcibiades’ account of the effect of the logoi of Socrates/Marsyas: ‘when we hear you speaking, or listen to even a second-rate report of one of your arguments, then it doesn’t matter who we are – woman, man or child – we’re all overwhelmed and spellbound’ (215d2 – 6, trans. Waterfield). This description of the effect of Socrates’ logoi, which are in non-musically accompanied prose (215c7), 1jpepkgcl´moi 1sl³m ja· jatewºlesha ‘we are overwhelmed and spellbound’, is of course dictated by the context of ecstatic music (cf. 215c5), but it also looks both forwards and backwards in ‘literary theory’: if the former word makes us think of ekplÞxis, that quality of high poetry, particularly epic and tragedy, which ‘knocks out’ the audience with its powerful clarity,22 the latter recalls the whole idea of poetry as thelxis, ‘enchantment’, an idea which has a powerful hold in the Greek tradition from the Odyssey onwards.23 Neither critical notion, of course, suggests the literal ‘truth’ of what is being represented, and often indeed the very opposite. Again, then, we may wonder whether the terms in which Alcibiades describes the effect of Socrates’ logoi reveal the lack of depth of his own philosophical nature (and cf. 215e1 – 4),24 but the idea that Socrates’ logoi could be related by someone else – as indeed Apollodorus and Plato relate the Symposium – shows again how these logoi now have a life and circulation of their own, quite independent of Socrates himself. Yet another testimony to this idea is Phaedo’s willingness to tell the story of the great man’s death: ‘for remembering Socrates, whether by speaking myself or listening to another, brings me the greatest pleasure in the world (p²mtym Fdistom, Phaedo 58d5 – 6)’. Here then is the blueprint for Aristomenes’ tale. In the Poetics Aristotle famously makes a distinction between poetry and history: ‘… the historian speaks of events which have occurred, the poet of the sort of events which could occur. It is for this reason that poetry is both more philosophical and more serious than history, since poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars. A “universal” comprises the kind of speech or action which belongs by probability or necessity to a certain kind of character – something which poetry aims at while adding particular names. A “particular”, by contrast, is what Al22 Cf. Heinze 1915: 466 – 7 [ = 1993: 384 – 5], Russell on ‘Longinus’ 15.2. 23 [Plutarch], De Homero 2.5 sees a combination of xuwacyc¸a and 5jpkgnir in Homer’s use of the gods conversing with men. 24 Cf., e. g., Hunter 2004: 101.

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cibiades did or experienced’ (Poetics 1451b4 – 11, trans. Halliwell, adapted). Although Aristotle’s focus is utterly different, this passage can with hindsight be seen as (directly or indirectly) a significant step along the path of the justification of higher interpretation. Poetry can be seen as ‘more philosophical’ because it is not tied to the historicity of what it relates, a claim which – if taken in ways which Aristotle did not apparently intend – also frees the interpreter to consider the ‘value’ and real ‘meaning’ of what is written, rather than just the surface literal meaning. The language of ‘doing and suffering’, together with the idea of detailed completeness which Aristotle identifies as the hallmark of historiography, find (perhaps paradoxically) a striking parallel in the language used in epic poetry and then in the later novel (cf. Xenophon of Ephesus 5.15.2) to describe such extended (fictional) narratives themselves.25 Against this background, Apollodorus’ claim that he now takes care ‘every day to know what [Socrates] says or what he does’ (Symp. 172e5 – 6) points in more than one direction. Apollodorus, of course, is interested in the ‘historical record’, as his concern to check his source (Symp. 173b4 – 6) shows; for him the tale he tells, his ‘Symposium’, is not just ‘logoi about philosophy’, it is also historia. 26 We, on the other hand, will wonder whether these things are compatible. Once, however, we have been alerted to the problems with using ‘historicity’ as a criterion, we will be looking for alternative interpretative strategies to help us with the fact that, in Aristotle’s terms (and one imagines he would have agreed with the sentiment), Plato’s Symposium, as opposed to Apollodorus’, is ‘more philosophical and more serious’ than historiography. Here, then, is another way in which the death of Socrates is the beginning of fiction, particularly for a writer such as Apuleius. The large body of Socratic dialogues to which Socrates’ death gave birth can be seen as the first major prose ‘genre’ (and one very largely in the first person) which deliberately re-creates a past and asks us to read it with ‘philosophical’ strategies. If we concern ourselves with whether or not the Phaedo is a literally ‘historical’ account of Socrates’ last hours, we will 25 Cf. Hunter 2005a: 109 – 14. 26 The influence of Plato’s depiction of Apollodorus is also visible in the characterisation of Damis, Philostratus’ alleged principal source in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is of course another ‘Socrates’ (e. g. 1.2.2, 4.25.1 etc), as also another Pythagoras, and Damis was a follower who is said to have written a complete account of all of Apollonius’ doings and sayings so that ‘nothing about Apollonius would not be known’ (1.19.3, cf. 1.3.1, 7.28.1).

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probably have missed much of the point; similarly, if we concern ourselves with the ‘historicity’ of Aristomenes’ tale we will have also missed the point, as surely as we would do so if we read ‘Cupid and Psyche’ with such an attitude. Socrates is not, of course, the only, nor indeed the most famous, originary hero of fiction. Plato’s Alcibiades makes Socrates himself a latter-day Odysseus in the Symposium (220c),27 and the paradigmatic rôle of the polutropos hero and of the Odyssey as a whole in the ancient novel (and particularly in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses) requires no demonstration. In Aristomenes’ tale, his Socrates is compared by Meroe to the cunning Odysseus who deserted Calypso (Met. 1.12), and it is clear that much about this Socrates recalls the Homeric hero.28 When we first meet Socrates in Aristomenes’ tale (1.6) he is shabbily dressed and very obviously down on his luck: ‘he was sitting on the ground, halfcovered in a torn cloak, almost unrecognisable in his pallor and wretched emaciation, like those who beg at the public crossroads’ (humi sedebat scissili palliastro semiamictus, paene alius lurore, ad miseram maciem deformatus, qualia solent fortunae +deterrima+ stipes in triuiis erogare). This description has been referred to particular features of ‘the’ Socrates and the Socratic tradition,29 but we may here rather recall the beggarly state to which Athena reduces Odysseus for the purposes of disguise (Odyssey 13.429 – 38);30 moreover, both Odysseus and the Apuleian Socrates are hard to recognise, both are believed dead in their homelands, their wives given to extremes of weeping and the pressure to remarry,31 both cover their heads for shame (aUdeto, prae pudore) at crucial moments of recollection (cf. Odyssey 8.83 – 6),32 and a bath does both of them a lot of good. More generally, Socrates is a victim of the twists and 27 Cf. Hunter 2004: 109. There is much relevant material in Montiglio 2000, and see also Lévystone 2005. 28 A useful discussion in Münstermann 1995: 8 – 26, who does not, however, catch everything. 29 Cf., e. g., Keulen 2003: 111 – 12. 30 Cf. James 1987: 48. 31 Cf. James 1987: 48, Münstermann 1995: 9 – 11. 32 In doing so, Socrates reveals the lower part of his body, including the genitals (discussed by Keulen 2003: 114 – 16); cf. perhaps Odyssey 18.66 – 9, a famous passage in antiquity, and one which Apuleius may recall at 7.5.2, cf. Harrison 1990: 199 – 200. The Apuleian Socrates’ covering of his head is usually taken as recalling familiar gestures of his Platonic namesake (cf., e. g., Thibau 1965: 106, Van Der Paardt 1978: 82, Keulen 2003: 112 – 13), but the gesture is, at the very least, both Odyssean and Socratic.

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turns of fortune no less than Homer’s polutropos hero (cf. Met. 1.6 ‘the dangerous twists, unsteady assaults and winding changes of our fortunes’, fortunarum lubricas ambages et instabiles incursiones et reciprocas uicissitudines),33 and no less than Lucius himself, who endured ‘the winding twists of most terrible journeys’, asperrimorum itinerum ambages reciprocae (11.15), and whose debt to the figure of Odysseus requires no demonstration; Socrates’ lament in 1.6. is echoed and varied in the Isis-priest’s famous words of consolation to Lucius in 11.15, as for example at the beginning of his speech: ‘having endured many and varied tribulations and driven by the great storms and terrible blasts of Fortune, you have at last come, Lucius, to the altar of pity’, multis et uariis exanclatis laboribus magnisque Fortunae tempestatibus et maximis actus procellis ad portum quietis et aram misericordiae tandem, Luci, uenisti. Here too, we can hardly fail to think of the hero who ‘endured in his heart many sufferings upon the sea’ (Odyssey 1.4).34 Finally we may note that the Apuleian Socrates tells his story over food and drink, preceding it, as does Odysseus (cf. Odyssey 8.535, 540, 9.13), with the noise of sadness, ‘drawing up a tortured sigh from the depths of his chest’, imo de pectore cruciabilem suspiritum ducens. It is of course no surprise that the long-suffering Apuleian Socrates is an Odysseus figure, particularly as his ‘Calypso’ is very obviously a ‘Circe’,35 but the fusion of these two originary figures of fiction at the head of Apuleius’ novel deserves more attention than it has re-

33 Cf., e. g., Keulen 2003: 121. 34 Apuleius’ verb, exanclare, should be allowed its full weight here; cf. also Horace’s translation of the opening verses of the Odyssey at Epist. 1.2.21 – 2. Book 10 ends with Lucius ‘oppressed by sweet sleep’ (dulcis somnus oppresserat) at Cenchreae: he has found a harbour which is, literally, a ‘very safe anchorage for ships’ (tutissimum nauium receptaculum, 10.35), but which – in a paradigmatic example of ‘interpretation’ – he will learn is, at a higher level of reality, a ‘harbour of quiet’ in which he has been ‘received into the protection of the Fortune which has sight’ (in tutelam … receptus Fortunae … uidentis, 11.15). Very obviously, the sleeping Lucius embodies (once more, cf. esp. 9.13) the figure of Odysseus, ‘overcome’ (dedlgl]mom Od. 13.119) by sweet sleep (cf. Od. 13.79 – 80), first on the Phaeacian ship and then subsequently at the harbour of Phorkys on the shore of Ithaca, itself a safe haven for ships (Od. 13.100 – 1); Odysseus has, like Lucius, safely arrived ‘home’, did he but know it. Cf. further Dowden 1998: 13 – 14. 35 Cf., e. g., Harrison 1990: 194 – 5.

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ceived.36 Such self-conscious concern with the history of the form in which Apuleius is writing is very much of a piece with the concerns and self-positioning of the prologue of the Metamorphoses, but – like the prologue itself – the appeal to the models of Odysseus and Socrates is also an appeal to an interpretative tradition and a nudge to us as to how we should read this text; how misleading that nudge is may, of course, be another question.

2. Petronius’ Satyrica wears its ‘culturedness’ very openly; it strokes our self-importance as ‘knowledgeable’ readers/interpreters, but the ‘low realism’ of the text works to close down its educational value, by leaving very little (no?) room for interpretability of a moralising or even quasiallegorical kind, such as flourished in ancient school-rooms and with which the poet Eumolpus introduces his ‘Capture of Troy’ (Sat. 88) and which is written into his own epic ‘The Civil War’ (Sat. 119 – 124). There is apparently nothing you can do with this text, which it has not already done to itself; this has not, of course, stopped modern scholarship. This aspect of the text is, for example, made very obvious by a comparison between the Satyrica and the most ambitious and complex of all surviving Greek novels, Heliodorus’ Aithiopika; both works are laden with cultural knowledge of all kinds, but whereas the Satyrica dares us to ‘interpret’, to ‘know’ things (if you like) at our peril, the Aithiopika rather invites us to wallow in interpretative excess.37 With this preliminary warning, I want to look at the episode of the Satyrica; in 36 It is tempting to suggest that in Meroe’s sister, Panthia, we have another acknowledgement of generic affiliation: this is the name of the ‘heroine’ of Xenophon’s ‘romantic novella’ in the Cyropaideia (and of Leucippe’s mother in the novel of Achilles Tatius). Griffiths 1975: 140 associates the name ‘Panthia’ with the worship of the cosmic Isis. 37 Bibliography and discussion in Hunter 1998. A third path is followed in the novel of Achilles Tatius: many of his moralising and generalising disquisitions form a kind of commentary upon the narrative, which explains why, in their particular cultural context, the characters behave as they do (weep, fear, fall in love etc), cf. Morales 2004: 106 – 30. This is very different from the mode of both Heliodorus and the Roman novels; Achilles in fact is very resistant to any form of ‘higher interpretation’ beyond moralising disapproval (cf., e. g., Photius, Bibl. 87 = 2.11 Henry, 94 = 2.34 Henry), and it is the very superstructure of explanation which shuts out our ‘desire to know’.

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which Encolpius, pretending to be a slave called Polyaenus (‘much praised’, an epithet of Odysseus),38 becomes involved at Croton with a rich woman called ‘Circe’; one reason for choosing this episode in the current context is that it forms part of an elaborate ‘fiction’ of rôle-playing staged by Encolpius and his companions, and part of that fiction is explicitly a rewriting of the Odyssey. Here perhaps we are being nudged as Apuleius was later to do.39 At Croton Encolpius’ persistent impotence disappoints not merely Circe, but also his boyfriend Giton, whose sarcastic response is preserved: ‘I am grateful to you for loving me in the manner of Socrates: Alcibiades was not so untouched when he lay in his teacher’s bed’, itaque hoc nomine gratias ago, quod me Socratica fide diligis. non tam intactus Alcibiades in praeceptoris sui lecto iacuit (Sat. 128.7). The barb reminds us of how little of the ideal ‘Pausaniac’ relationship there is between Encolpius and Giton, his ‘brother’ (frater), in the terminology of the Satyrica;40 Petronius may here be pointing (by the familiar technique of ‘window reference’) to the (real or constructed) ‘model’ of verses from the Ovidian poem which is so important to these Petronian scenes, namely Amores 3.7, in which Ovid relates how he too proved impotent at a crucial moment: sic flammas aditura pias aeterna sacerdos surgit et a caro fratre uerenda soror

38 It is relevant that the epithet is only used in the Odyssey by the Sirens, as they offer Odysseus knowledge, cf. Satyrica 127.5. In view of the Epicurean material reflected in this episode (cf. further below), it is at least curious that one of Epicurus’ closest followers was Polyainos of Lampsacus, the town which also gave Priapus to the world, cf. Usener 1887: 415 – 16, K. Ziegler, RE 21.1431; a connection of that philosopher with Petronius was suggested by Knaack 1883: 33. The anecdotal tradition presented Polyainos as, like Epicurus himself, the teacher and/or erastÞs of Pythocles, Epicurus’ ‘star pupil’, cf. Usener 1887: 402, Alciphron, Letters of Courtesans 2.2.3 (= 4.17.3 Benner-Fobes), ‘Epicurus … wants to be a Socrates … and he considers Pythocles to be an Epicurean’. 39 I pass over on this occasion the familiar echoes of the Symposium in our best preserved part of the Satyrica, the ‘dinner party of Trimalchio’ (cf. Hunter 2004: 126, with bibliography), and cf. above for other well-known links. It is worth noting that Judith Perkins has recently tried to draw (perhaps surprising) structural and other parallels between Diotima and Trimalchio (Perkins 2005: 148). 40 Cf. Hunter 1996: 200.

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Thus does a virgin priest rise to approach the holy flames, or a modest sister from beside her dear brother. (Ovid, Amores 3.7.21 – 2)

Petronius has in mind, of course, Alcibiades’ famous words: ‘I rose up after having slept with Socrates no differently than if I had slept with my father or an older brother’ (Symp. 219c7-d2); it is indeed with ‘an older brother (frater)’ that Giton has slept ( just as ‘sister’ (soror) Circe also is disappointed with her ‘brother’s’ performance in bed (cf. Sat. 127.1 – 2)). At the heart of these scenes lies a very obvious Homeric parody: Odysseus must fear that Circe will make him ‘unmanned’ ( !m¶myq, Od. 10.341), but in Petronius Encolpius is already in that state and thus no good to Circe at all. Giton’s remark, however, suggests that Socrates too, that other paradigmatic hero of fiction with which we are concerned, may have left Alcibiades intactus, not because of some high philosophical attitude, but simply because he was impotent; as so often, the alluding text makes us read the model with new eyes – allusion is interpretation. The final mystery (Plato, Symp. 218b5 – 8) revealed by Alcibiades, the new Dionysus, which corresponds to Diotima’s ‘epoptic’ vision, turns out to have been of an impotent teacher; if some Dionysiac mysteries revealed an erect phallus to initiates,41 here the revelation, the ‘what Alcibiades saw’ and the ‘what phantasia allows us to see’, is somewhat less exciting. Socrates is also important elsewhere in these scenes. Circe warns Encolpius in a letter of the mortal danger in which he finds himself: ‘if that same chill attacks your knees and hands, you might as well send for the funeral trumpeters’, quod si idem frigus genua manusque temptauerit tuas, licet ad tubicines mittas (Sat. 129.7). Here again we seem to have both Ovid and Plato. In Amores 3.7 the poet blames his tools for missing a golden opportunity: tacta tamen ueluti gelida mea membra cicuta segnia propositum destituere meum. My lifeless limbs, as though I had drunk chill hemlock, could not perform as I wished (Ovid, Amores 3.7.13 – 14)

The reference to the coldness induced by hemlock can hardly fail to recall Plato’s account of the final hours of Socrates, as the cold numbness moves up from the feet to the legs and lower abdomen (Phaedo 117e41 Cf. Burkert 1987: 95 – 6.

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18a8). The prison-warder’s observation that ‘when the coldness reached Socrates’ heart, he would die’ (Phaedo 118a4) is all but translated in Circe’s warning to Encolpius (Sat. 129.7 above). If Apuleius’ Socrates resembles Odysseus, Petronius’ Odysseus resembles (the Platonic) Socrates. This ought to make us look again at how we are encouraged to read the Circe-scenes of the Satyrica. The most common ancient interpretation of the Homeric Circe-episode, as of course also (inter alia) of the land of the Lotus-eaters and of the Sirens (with whom Encolpius compares his ‘Circe’, Sat. 127.5), was that it was a story about the dangers of the pursuit of irrational pleasure;42 in such interpretations Circe is often portrayed as a hetaira (cf. Horace, Epistles 1.2.25) who controlled men ‘because of the desires which irrationally inclined them towards pleasure’ (‘Heraclitus’, De incred. 16), whereas Odysseus overcomes her by reason, education, and through the aid of Hermes and/or his mly, i. e. rational logos (cf., e. g., ‘Heraclitus’, Homeric Problems 72). Such a reading, which has roots as early as Plato’s Cratylus (407e-8a) 43 and which was apparently promoted by Cleanthes (SVF I 526), in fact makes an explicit appearance at the close of Apuleius’ ‘On the god of Socrates’ (ch. 178), in a passage which associates Socrates and Odysseus and suggests that there was a great deal more such material available which has been lost to us. Be that as it may, this reading was by no means universal: thus, for example, the Homeric scholia preserve remnants of a moralising interpretation in which Circe invites Odysseus into her bed ‘not for pleasure, but as a pledge of good faith’ (scholium on Od. 10.334) or ‘not out of wantonness, but because, on the basis of what Hermes had told her, Odysseus was dear to the gods’ (scholium on Od. 10.296). Nevertheless, it is usually of the dangers of Circe of which the interpreters warn. Of particular interest is the set of interpretations preserved in the Homeric commentary of the twelfth-century bishop of Thessaloniki, Eustathius, which certainly draw on much earlier material. Here Circe is, as usual, pleasure (1656.6 on v. 231, 1656.41 – 55 on Od. 10.241), and particularly the irrational pleasures of appetite and of the flesh, by which men become 42 There is much relevant material in Buffière 1956: 289 – 96 and Kaiser 1964: 201 ff.; cf. Schlam 1992: 15, 68 – 9 on the ‘Circe model’ in Apuleius. A more philosophical version of the ‘reason v pleasure’ reading is to be found at Porphyry fr. 382 Smith and [Plutarch], De Homero 2.126, cf. Buffière 1956: 506 – 16. 43 Cf. also Xenophon, Mem. 1.3.7 – 8, Cornutus, Theol. Comp. 16, p. 20.18 – 20 Lang.

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beasts; these are, however, short-lived pleasures which ‘flatter us with the appearance (vamtas_a) of good’ (1656.30 – 1 on v. 241). 44 According to Eustathius, Circe’s own character (if read outside the allegory) is base: she likes sex far too much and she shows the cowardice of a woman (1659.62 – 1660.2 on v. 323). As for Hermes, he is logos and the mly is education: its root is black because for those who set out on the path of education the end is obscure, hard to grasp, and not pleasant (Bd¼) to reach, but its flower is white, because the end of education is of a brilliant purity, both pleasant and nourishing; armed with these weapons Odysseus ‘the philosopher’ conquers the pleasures of the flesh (1658.25 – 40 on Od. 10.277, 1660.26 on Od. 10.337). Odysseus extracts from Circe an oath that she will do him no harm, thus guaranteeing ‘like a philosopher’ that he can sleep with her ‘with sphrosynÞ and without suffering harm’ (1660. 32 – 6 on Od. 10.343). In the fiction which he creates, Encolpius is indeed a ‘slave to pleasure’: the fact that he plays the rôle of a slave (Sat. 126.5) makes the point forcefully. Nevertheless, it is perhaps his very control of logos, his ‘culture’ and education, his knowledge of how narratives such as the Homeric Circe are to be read, which keeps him impotent in the face of Circe’s charms; he lives out the Odyssean nightmare, a fate with which Ovid’s disappointed mistress also charges her useless lover (‘either the witch of Aia has pierced woolen dolls to put a spell on you or you come tired after lovemaking with another’, aut te traiectis Aeaea uenefica lanis / deuouet, aut alio lassus amore uenis, Amores 3.7.79 – 80). If ‘the ancients depicted the older bearded Hermes with an erect penis … because in men of advanced years logos is productive and complete (cºmilor ja· t´keior)’ (Cornutus, Theol. Comp. 16, p.23.16 – 21 Lang), in the case of Encolpius logos has produced the very opposite effect; education truly is here disempowering. Fortunately for Encolpius, however, the god who 44 It is worth noting in regard to the Apuleian Lucius’ dalliance with the sexy slave-girl Fotis that the Homeric Circe’s drugs were designed to make men forget their homeland (10.236), a fate which Eustathius ascribes to the hold of pleasure: ‘for pleasure makes the pleasure-seeker entirely her own possession and leads him away from more serious matters’ (1656.22 on v. 236), cf. Onos 11, Met. 3.19 (Lucius to Fotis) ‘I am bound and given to you like a willing slave; I no longer seek my home or want to depart, and spending the night with you is the most important thing in the world’, in seruilem modum addictum atque mancipatum teneas uolentem: iam denique nec Larem requiro nec domuitionem paro et nocte ista nihil antepono.

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takes away can also restore (Sat. 140.12).45 Be that as it may, the Eustathian account of Circe may again recall the Platonic Socrates to us. After his night of chastity, Alcibiades immediately expresses his wonderment at Socrates’ ‘physis 46 and sphrosynÞ and andreia’, for he had never imagined that he would meet a man so distinguished for phronÞsis and karteria, ‘intelligence and endurance’ (Symp. 219d3 – 7). Socrates’ sphrosynÞ, that quality which, in the Eustathian reading, allowed Odysseus to enter Circe’s bed, has become in Petronius impotence, andreia (‘the quality of a man’) has become anandria, and we will not, I think, accuse Encolpius of sharing in phronÞsis and karteria, which are again the hallmarks of the Eustathian Odysseus. In the interpretation of [Plutarch], De Homero, the wise Odysseus was not metamorphosed by Circe because ‘he had received impassivity (t¹ %paher) from Hermes, that is from logos’ (2.128); impotence is not what a Sceptic or a Stoic normally meant by apatheia, but that is certainly what this Odysseus enjoyed (or, rather, did not).47 If Odysseus and Socrates are the ‘beginning’ of fiction, what is its end (t]kor)? The answer is sex, both in the Alexandrian ‘end’ of the Odyssey (Od. 23.296) and in a prominent part of the ancient novel tradition (note the end of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and the reversal of the idea at the end of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses which celebrates chastity); the famous elegiacs of Satyrica 132.15 adduce the authority of Epicurus for sex as the telos of all life.48 More broadly, perhaps, texts such as 45 The importance of an ithyphallic Hermes is seen by, e. g., Conte 1996: 98 – 102, though he does not connect this with Homeric interpretation. My discussion is not, of course, intended to deny the rôle of Priapus, but rather to see how the ‘novel within the novel’ carries its own interpretative logic: it is always ahead of its readers. 46 I forebear from suggesting that readers of Petronius may be tempted to take this in the sense ‘genitals’; Circe was certainly amazed, though not pleased, at this part of Encolpius’ nature. 47 Eustathius notes that when Odysseus expresses his fear to Circe that she will make him ‘wretched and unmanned’ jaj¹m ja· !m¶moqa (Od. 10.341), he means that he will become a coward, because cowards are ‘without weapons at critical times’ oR 1m deimo?r %opkoi (1660.42 on v. 341); ‘I was ready to serve but had no weapons’ (paratus miles arma non habui) pleads Encolpius (Sat. 130.4), and even here there may be an Odyssean tinge. 48 The reference is to Epicurus peq· t´kour ; cf. fr. 67 Usener = 21L L-S. It is perhaps worth remarking that Epicurus fr. 2 Usener ( = 21R L-S), B d³ waq± ja· B eqvqos¼mg jat± j¸mgsim 1meqce¸ai [ or 1m´qceiai] bk´pomtai would very readily lend itself to double entendre; 1meqce?m is one thing which Encolpius cannot do.

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‘Cupid and Psyche’ suggest that the end of fiction, as of life, is pleasure, Bdom¶, and this is not without interest in the context of the interpretative tradition of the Circe-episode which we have been tracing and of the parodic mise-en-abîme of the ‘novel within a novel’ which the charade at Croton represents.49 Moreover, this idea seems to be thematised in what survives of the text: Circe and Encolpius sport on the grass ‘seeking more robust pleasure’ (quaerentes uoluptatem robustam, Sat. 127.10), and when Circe flounces off Encolpius is left to ponder ‘whether I had been cheated of genuine pleasure’ (an uera uoluptate fraudatus essem, Sat. 128.5). It looks as though Petronius’ comedy overturns not just Homeric models, but also models of Homeric interpretation: the end of life (as of fiction) really is sexual pleasure, that very lesson which the Homeric Circe-episode was read as disproving. On his side of the argument, Petronius/Encolpius musters some powerful allies: Homer himself, for one. The foreplay of Circe and Encolpius (Sat. 127.9) rewrites the very end of the Iliadic ‘Deception of Zeus’, in which Hera tricks her husband into making love so that he will be distracted from the battle at Troy, to ‘set the reader up for the failure of Encolpius to perform with Circe’;50 the parody allows us to see Circe’s words at 127.7 ‘there is no need to fear any busybody [seeing us]’, neque est quod curiosum aliquem extimescas, as a rewriting of Iliad 14.342 – 3, ‘have no fear that a god or any man will see this’ (with a typical move from simple ‘sight’ to the voyeuristic curiositas of the Roman novel tradition). Zeus and Hera lend powerful authority to any argument.51 There was of course one great philosophical school devoted to Bdom¶ and uoluptas, namely the Epicureans. The Epicurean resonances which surface in many places in the Satyrica have long been catalogued, and it is familiar that ‘genuine pleasure’ (uera uoluptas) in 128.5 takes us 49 For Circe as a ‘novel heroine’ cf., e. g., Hunter 1994: 1074 – 5, Conte 1996: 91. 50 Slater 1990: 174. 51 Connors 1998: 42 makes the attractive suggestion that rosae in the poem at 127.9 reflects ancient discussion of the Iliadic passage (cf. scholium on Iliad 14.347). We might add that concesso … amori, which seems certain for the transmitted confesso … amori, may also reflect the ancient observation (scholium on 14.342 – 3) that ‘any place is a proper chamber for lawful (i. e. married) sex’. I suspect that the very close of the Dios apatÞ, ‘the glistening dew came down’ (Iliad 14.351), had been parodically read as a reference to ejaculation; perhaps as early as the ‘Cologne Epode’ of Archilochus?

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immediately to Lucretius and his master.52 The poem which follows, on how we take pleasure in what we possess only in dreams and regret its loss when we awake, may fairly be described as sub-Lucretian, and it is, as Marina Di Simone noted,53 precisely the famous passage of Lucretius 4 on the frustrating pursuit of sexual uoluptas to which we are directed:54 nocte soporifera ueluti cum somnia ludunt errantes oculos effossaque protulit aurum in lucem tellus: uersat manus improba furtum thesaurosque rapit, sudor quoque perluit ora et mentem timor altus habet, ne forte grauatum excutiat gremium secreti conscius auri: mox ubi fugerunt elusam gaudia mentem ueraque forma redit, animus quod perdidit optat atque in praeterita se totus imagine uersat. As when in the deep sleep of night dreams deceive our wandering eyes and the earth is exposed to reveal gold; a wicked hand turns over what it has stolen and grabs the treasure; sweat bathes the face and a deep fear grips the mind, lest someone who knows about our secret gold robs our bursting pocket. When such joys have abandoned our minds which have been tricked and true appearances have been restored, our hearts long for what they have lost and are completely absorbed in the image which has gone. (Petronius, Satyrica 128.6)

The pleasure and excitement of sudden riches is as short-lived as the pleasure and relief which sex with a desired partner brings. Even without the Lucretian resonances, it is clear that Petronius’ poem paints the illicit pleasure of unexpected wealth in sexual terms: dreams in the night, the wicked hand (manus improba), sweat, the fear which attends adultery as much as secret riches (cf. Horace, Satires 1.2.127 – 31), fleeting joys. Thus, whereas ‘philosophy’, as embodied in the wisdom of 52 Cf., e. g., Di Simone 1993: 98 – 9. 53 It is not clear to me, pace Di Simone, that uera uoluptas (128.5) need refer to the Epicurean distinction between kinetic and catastematic pleasure. Encolpius’ point is that Circe’s sudden disappearance suggests to him that the whole love-making might have been a figment of his imagination, cf. Lucretius 4.1057 uoluptatem praesagit muta cupido; it is, however, correct that his language lets us see how philosophical issues and ideas are here being abused. On the philosophical flavour of 128.6 cf. also Kragelund 1989: 444. 54 Note especially v. 1101 Venus simulacris ludit amantis, 1103 – 4 manibus … errantes, 1128 Veneris sudorem, 1135 conscius ipse animus. The same passage of Lucretius 4 lies behind Petronius fr. 30 Müller on the relation between our dreams and our daytime activities.

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Odysseus, is normally opposed to the life of pleasure which Circe represents, here philosophy, as represented by the self-defensive Encolpius, fights on Circe’s side; so would Socrates have done, if his manhood had been up to it.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, Austin Branham, R. Bracht, 2002. ‘A truer story of the novel?’ in R. Bracht Branham (ed.), Bakhtin and the Classics (Evanston, Ill.) 161 – 86 — (ed.) 2005. The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 3), Groningen Buffière, F. 1956. Les mythes d’ Homre et la pense grecque, Paris Burkert, W. 1987. Ancient Mystery Cults, Cambridge, Mass. Connors, C. 1998. Petronius the Poet, Cambridge Conte, G. B. 1996. The Hidden Author, Berkeley Corrigan, K. and Glazov-Corrigan, E. 2005. ‘Plato’s Symposium and Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogical character of novelistic discourse’ in Branham 2005: 32 – 50 Di Simone, M. 1993. ‘I fallimenti di Encolpio, tra esemplarità e modelli letterari: una ricostruzione (Sat. 82,5; 132,1)’ Materiali e Discussioni 30: 87 – 108 Dowden, K. 1998. ‘Cupid and Psyche. A question of the vision of Apuleius’, in M. Zimmerman et al. (eds.), Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Volume II (Groningen) 1 – 22 — 2006. ‘A tale of two texts: Apuleius’ sermo Milesius and Plato’s Symposium’ in W.H. Keulen et al. (eds.), Lectiones scrupulosae (Groningen 2006) 42 – 58 Gill, C. 1973. ‘The death of Socrates’ Classical Quarterly 23: 25 – 8. — 1993. ‘Plato on falsehood – not fiction’ in C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter) 38 – 87 Gold, B. K. ‘A question of genre: Plato’s Symposium as novel’ Modern Language Notes 95: 1353 – 9 Griffiths, J. G. 1975. Apuleius of Madauros. The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses, Book XI), Leiden Harrison, S. J. 1990. ‘Some Odyssean scenes in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’ Materiali e Discussioni 25: 193 – 201 Heinze, R. 1915. Virgils epische Technik, 3rd ed, Leipzig/Berlin [translated as Virgils Epic Technique, London 1993] Hunter, R. 1994. ‘History and historicity in the romance of Chariton’ in Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin/New York) 1055 – 86 [= this volume 737 – 74] — 1996. ‘Response to J.R. Morgan’ in A. H. Sommerstein and C. Atherton (eds.), Education in Greek Fiction (Nottingham) 191 – 205 [= this volume 790 – 803]

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— 1997. ‘Longus and Plato’ in M. Picone and B. Zimmermann (eds.), Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption (Basel) 15 – 28 [= this volume 775 – 89] — 1998. ‘The Aithiopika of Heliodorus: beyond interpretation?’ in R. Hunter (ed.), Studies in Heliodorus (Cambridge) 40 – 59 [= this volume 804 – 28] — 2004. Plato’s Symposium, New York/Oxford — 2005a. ‘Generic consciousness in the Orphic Argonautica?’ in M. Paschalis (ed.), Roman and Greek Imperial Epic (Rethymnon) [= this volume 681 – 99] — 2005b. ‘“Philip the Philosopher” on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus’ in S. Harrison, M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis (eds.), Metaphor and the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 4, Groningen) 122 – 38 [= this volume 829 – 44] James. P. 1987. Unity in Diversity, Hildesheim Kahane, A. and Laird, A. eds. 2001. A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Oxford Kaiser, E. 1964. ‘Odyssee-Szenen als Topoi’ Museum Helveticum 21: 109 – 36, 197 – 224 Keulen, W. H. 2003. ‘Comic invention and superstitious frenzy in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: the figure of Socrates as an icon of satirical self-exposure’ American Journal of Philology 124: 107 – 35 Knaack, G. 1883. ‘Analecta’ Hermes 18: 28 – 33 Kragelund, P. ‘Epicurus, Priapus and the dreams in Petronius’ Classical Quarterly 39: 436 – 50 Laird, A. 1990. ‘Person, “persona” and representation in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses’ Materiali e Discussioni 25: 129 – 64 Lévystone, D. 2005. ‘La figure d’Ulysse chez les Socratiques: Socrate polutropos’ Phronesis 50: 181 – 214 Montiglio, S. 2000. ‘Wandering philosophers in classical Greece’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 120: 86 – 105 Morales, H. 2004. Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Cambridge Münstermann, H. 1995. Apuleius. Metamorphosen literarischer Vorlagen, Stuttgart/ Leipzig O’Brien, M. C. 2002. Apuleius’ Debt to Plato in the Metamorphoses, Lewiston, NY Osborne, C. 1994. Eros Unveiled, Oxford Paardt, R. Th. Van Der. 1978. ‘Various aspects of narrative technique in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’ in B. L. Hijmans and R. Th. Van Der Paardt (eds.), Aspects of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Groningen) 75 – 94 Perkins, J. 2005. ‘Trimalchio: naming power’ in S. Harrison, M. Paschalis, S. Frangoulidis (eds.), Metaphor and the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 4, Groningen) 139 – 62 Rist, J. M. 1964. Eros and Psyche, Toronto Schlam, C. 1970. ‘Platonica in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 101: 477 – 87 — 1992. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, London Schmeling, G. 2003. The Novel in the Ancient World, 2nd ed., Boston

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Slater, N. W. 1990. Reading Petronius, Baltimore/London Smith, W. S. and Woods, B. 2002. ‘Tale of Aristomenes: declamation in a Platonic mode’ Ancient Narrative 2: 172 – 95 Tatum, J. 1969. ‘The tales in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 100: 487 – 527 Thibau, R. 1965. ‘Les Métamorphoses d’Apulée et la théorie platonicienne de l’Erôs’ Studia Philosophica Gandensia 3: 89 – 144 Usener, H. 1887. Epicurea, Leipzig Walsh, P. G. 1994. Apuleius. The Golden Ass, Oxford Winkler, J. J. 1985. Auctor & Actor, Berkeley.

Addendum A different approach to the same subject is taken by K. Dowden, ‘A tale of two texts: Apuleius’ sermo Milesius and Plato’s Symposium’ in W. H. Keulen et al. (eds.), Lectiones scrupulosae (Groningen 2006) 42 – 58.

46. Isis and the Language of Aesop* In the G recension of the Life of Aesop, which survives in a solitary tenth century manuscript and which seems to offer a fuller (and probably in origin older) version of the narrative than the better attested W version,1 the ugly and mute slave Aesop is granted a voice and a ready facility with story by Isis2 and the Muses in return for kindness offered by him to a travelling priestess of the goddess. He is visited by the divinities as he sleeps out the burning mid-day heat in a marvellous locus amoenus, which is described in considerable detail, even though the text is in several places corrupt beyond more than hopeful conjecture. I reproduce below (without apparatus) a text based on that of Perry 1952, with some modifications in the light of Papathomopoulos 1990 and Ferrari 1997; the sole purpose of the text printed here is to facilitate the reading of this paper, not to argue for particular textual choices. The translation which follows is, of necessity, in some places closer to a paraphrase: b d³ AUsypor, svodqoO ja¼lator emtor, eWpem pq¹r 2autºm7 “d¼o ¦qar 5wy !p¹ toO pqost²tou eQr !m²pausim7 joilgh¶solai t±r toO ja¼lator ta¼tar”. 1piken²lemor d´ tima tºpom toO jt¶lator eqhak´steqom ja· !paqemºwkgtom, demdq¾dg ja· jat²sjiom, eQr dm wkoeq÷r bot²mgr palpo¸jikom %mhor 1pg¼namem ja· di± tµm paqajeil´mgm vkgm ja· kib²da t¹m tºpom jah´kissem, AUsypor ta?r bot²mair pqosjk¸mar ja· t/i cgpºmyi pqosbak½m t/i dij´kkai t¹m l²mdija ja· tµm lgkytµm pq¹r jevakµm h´lemor, !mepa¼eto 5mha 1j t_m p´qin d]mdqym b potal¹r Ewei7 lakajoO pme¼lator emtor Fev¼qou, t± wkoeq± timawh´mta vut± jat´pmeusem auqam Bd´am ja· pqosgm/. ja· pok»r 1p· jk²doir 1teqet¸feto t´ttin, ja· poij¸kym aqm´ym

* 1

2

M. Paschalis (ed.), Pastoral Palimpsests. Essays in the Reception of Theocritus and Virgil (Rethymnon 2007) 39 – 58 Cf. Perry 1936, 2 – 26, id. 1952, 10 – 17 , La Penna 1962, Ferrari 1997, 12 – 20. I will not enter here into the whole question as to what extent the Life is a unitary conception (most strongly argued by Holzberg in Holzberg 1992); whether or not the considerations adduced in this paper can contribute to that debate I leave to others to judge. In W (and the ‘Planudean’ version, cf. Eberhard 1872), Isis is replaced by Tyche, who however may be seen as a manifestation of Isis (for Isis-Tyche cf., e. g., Griffiths 1975, 241 – 2), or by Vikonem_a, cf. Perry 1936, 12 n. 11. In one part of the W tradition and in the ‘Planudean’ Life, the priests of Isis are replaced by priests of Artemis.

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ja· pok¼hqoum Ewei t¹ hq¼kgla. fpou l³m c±q Gm ja· pok¼hqgmor !gd¾m … 1p· d³ keptot²tgr p¸tuor bqlµ !eqopotµr !ped¸dou l¸lgla joss¼vou7 ja· licmul´mg sumyid¹r B vymºlilor ûla p÷si jat´jqafem Aw¾. aqt¹ d³ t¹ jejqal´mom 1n "p²mtym eqlek³r xih¼qisla. 1v’ ¨m xuwacyco¼lemor b AUsypor eQr Bd»m vpmom jat¶ceto. 1mtaOha dµ B heºr, B juq¸a 8Isir, paqac¸metai ûla ta?r 1mm´a Lo¼sair, eWta 5vg7 “bq÷te, hucat´qer, t¹m %mhqypom toOtom, pepkasl´mom l³m !lºqvyr, mij_mta d³ eQr eqs´beiam p²mta xºcom7 oxtºr pote tµm 1lµm di²jomom pepkamgl´mgm ¡d¶cgsem7 1c½ l³m owm tµm vymµm !pojah¸stgli, rle?r d³ t/i vym/i t¹m %qistom waq¸sashe kºcom.” eQpoOsa d³ taOta ja· t¹ tqaw» t/r ck¾ttgr !poteloOsa, t¹ jykOom aqt¹m kake?m, aqtµ dµ B 8Isir 1waq¸sato tµm vym¶m, 5peisem d³ ja· t±r koip±r Lo¼sar 2j²stgm ti t/r Qd¸ar dyqe÷r waq¸sashai. aR d³ 1waq¸samto kºcym evqela ja· l¼hym gEkkgmij_m pkojµm ja· poi¶seir, jateunal´mg d³ B he¹r fpyr 5mdonor c´mgtai, eQr 2autµm 1w¾qgsem. ja· aR LoOsai d´, 2j²stg t¹ Udiom waqis²lemai, eQr t¹ gEkij_ma !m´bgsam eqor. b d³ AUsypor aqt¹ t¹ tawh³m rp¹ t/r v¼seyr rpm~sar diec´qhg ja¸ vgsim7 “oq÷, Bd´yr vpmysa.” ja· t± bkepºlema amol²fym – d¸jekka, p¶qa, lgkyt¶, l²mdin, boOr, emor, pqºbatom – “kak_”, 5vg, “l± t±r Lo¼sar. pºhem 5kabom t¹ kake?m ; pºhem ; memºgja p²mtyr !mh’ ¨m eqs´bgsa eQr tµm Reqovºqom t/r ]sidor. ¦ste jakºm 1stim eqsebe?m. pqosd´wolai owm !p¹ he_m k¶xeshai wqgst±r 1kp¸dar.”

As it was very hot, Aesop said to himself: “The overseer gives me two hours’ break; I’ll sleep during this hot time”. He chose a spot which was fertile and undisturbed, full of trees and shade; flowers of all kinds grew amidst the thick grass, and a spring watered all the vegetation in the place. Aesop stretched out in the meadows, leant his wallet against his labourer’s pick, put his skin tunic under his head and had his rest where the river burbled through the trees. The Zephyr was blowing softly, and the green bushes which grew all around shook and gave off a sweet and gentle perfume. On the branches above many cicadas chirped, and the noisy chattering of birds of all kinds sang out. The mournful nightingale … The breeze in the graceful pine gave out a sound imitative of a blackbird and, joining in the orchestra of all the other sounds, mimicking echo could be heard. The mixture of the whole produced a lovely whispering; seduced by these surroundings, Aesop fell into a sweet sleep. The goddess, Lady Isis, appeared together with the nine Muses, and she said: “Daughters, you see this man: his appearance is very ugly, but in piety he has escaped all censure. When my servant had lost the way, this man guided her, and I have now come with you to repay him. I shall restore his voice, and do you grant that voice the finest power of speech”. When she had said this and cut away the roughness from his tongue which had prevented him from talking, Isis herself bestowed a voice upon him and at her prompting each of the Muses bestowed their own gift. They bestowed the invention of stories and the weaving and creation of Greek fables. The goddess prayed that Aesop should win great glory and

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then returned to her own abode. Having bestowed their individual gifts, the Muses went up to Mt Helicon. Having slept as much as nature allowed, Aesop woke up and said, “Ah, that was a pleasant sleep!”. He then named the things he could see – pick, bag, skin, wallet, ox, donkey, sheep – and exclaimed “I can talk by the Muses! Where did I get the power of speech? Where? I’m sure it’s because I acted piously towards the priestess of Isis – piety is an excellent virtue! I can expect the gods to fulfil my hopes of success!” (Life of Aesop 6 – 8)

It is with this scene and its place within an important theme of the Life that I will be principally concerned in this paper; two preliminary observations are, however, necessary. The first matter of importance is the rôle of Isis within a story which has the appearance of an ‘aretalogy’, or first-person setting forth of the god’s powers and gracious interventions, transposed into a third-person narrative. In his discussion of Isis’ rôle in the Life, John Dillery3 rightly focused on the appropriateness of this goddess, in view of her association with the invention of writing and indeed of language more generally. These are among the traditional gifts which Isis claimed for herself, as for example on the famous inscription from Kyme (Totti 1985, No. 1, 31), or with which she is associated through Hermes-Thoth (cf., e. g., Diodorus Siculus 1.16.1). In the ‘Praise of Isis’ from Maroneia (Totti 1985, No. 19) 4 the encomiast appears to express the wish that he will not have too short a flow of words to tell of the greatness of the goddess’ benefactions. We may compare5 how the Apuleian Lucius introduces his description of the appearance of the goddess to him on the shore at Cenchreae: eius mirandam speciem ad uos etiam referre conitar, si tamen mihi disserendi tribuerit facultatem paupertas oris humani, uel ipsum numen eius dapsilem copiam elocutilis facundiae subministrauerit. I shall try to describe her marvellous appearance to you, if the poverty of human speech grant me the ability to express myself, or the deity herself supply a lavish abundance of rhetorical eloquence. (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.3.3) 3 4 5

Dillery 1999; see also Finkelpearl 2003 and Robertson 2003, 250. None of these scholars discuss the locus amoenus. Cf. Grandjean 1975. As does Merkelbach 1976, 234 n. 1. The motif recurs at Apuleius, Met. 11.25.5 in another ‘Praises of Isis’ by Lucius: nec mihi uocis ubertas ad dicenda quae de tua maiestate sentio sufficit, nec ora mille linguaeque totidem uel indefessi sermonis aeterna series.

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In both narratives it is the goddess herself who will bestow the linguistic facility, the copia, to allow herself to be praised adequately. Indeed, there is a striking analogy6 between the story in the Life of Aesop and the immediately preceding passage of the Metamorphoses in which the exhausted Lucius utters a rhetorically ample prayer of praise to the regina caeli (11.2). It is very easy when reading this striking prayer to forget that Lucius is still an ass and is supposed to be unable to speak, a fact which is subsequently foregrounded when he recovers human shape (quid potissimum praefarer primarium, unde nouae uocis exordium caperem 11.14); to explain that the prayer of 11.2 is to be understood as a silent prayer seems to explain away, rather than to explain, the text. As an ass Lucius is %vymor, i. e. he is in that state to which animals were reduced after, in the appropriately Aesopic fable, a Golden Age in which they had all spoken. The similarities between Lucius and the extraordinarily ugly – to the point of his common assimilation to an animal – and phallically well-endowed Aesop have often been noted.7 In her discussion of the Apuleian scene, Ellen Finkelpearl rightly associates Lucius’ sudden rhetorical skill with the presence of Isis as a goddess of language: ‘Isis is a sort of Muse responsible for Lucius’ regaining of a voice’.8 Critics have focused too narrowly upon the question of whether or not Lucius knows the identity of the great goddess to whom he is praying, without sufficient attention to the fact that we will know and that we will recognise his rhetoric as inspired by, and appropriate to, Isis; the opening emphasis, for example, upon the goddess as one identified with Demeter-Ceres (with whom Isis is identified as early as Herodotus 2.59.2) and particularly associated with Eleusis has gained new resonance in the light of the very similar passage in the Maroneia-text for Isis.9 Isis has heard Lucius’ prayer, as she heard the prayer for healing of the Maroneia-encomiast (1p¶jousar), and just as she hears (rp¶jousem) the prayer of her priestess in the Life of Aesop, ‘for a report of piety swiftly reaches the ears of the gods’ (VA 5); she is one of many gods to whom thank-offerings as 1p¶joor, often accompanied by votive

6 7 8 9

Robertson 2003, 251 – 3 argues that Apuleius has here borrowed from the Life of Aesop. Cf. Anderson 1984, 211 – 12, Winkler 1991, 279 – 86; cf. further below on the origin of language. Finkelpearl 1998, 208; cf. also Finkelpearl 2003. Cf., e. g., Grandjean 1975, 92 – 8.

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representations of ears, are familiar documents of the Hellenistic religious world.10 Other aspects and identities of Isis are also relevant to Aesop’s good fortune. Isis’ concern with Justice (dedications to Isis Dikaiosyne and to Isis Nemesis are, for example, found in the Serapeum on Delos) 11 allows us with hindsight to understand that the goddess’ power is already at work before Aesop is granted a voice: the two men who try to pin the blame on him for eating the master’s figs ‘pay the penalty (5tisam d¸jar) for wronging the man who could not speak’ (VA 4); Isis protects the weak and helpless. Isis as a healing goddess is naturally also evoked by the story of Aesop’s ‘cure’; Isis Hygie is another of the goddess’ manifestations at Delos,12 and the Maroneia-encomiast has had his eyes healed by the goddess. In conjunction with Sarapis, temples of Isis seem to have known the practice of incubation – which is better known to us from the cult of Asclepius – and Aesop’s cure while asleep has obvious resonances of temple-medicine. The records from the temple of Asclepius at Epidauros in fact record three cases of the curing of !vym¸a,13 and the description of how Isis ‘cut away’ the obstruction of Aesop’s speech (ch. 7) clearly represents her as working in the way that ‘real’ doctors worked, and this is a familiar aspect of the inscriptions and literature celebrating Asclepius’ cures;14 it is indeed hardly improbable that in their temples Isis and Sarapis had also revealed their power by effecting miraculous cures. The extraordinary nature of Aesop’s cure – he is not just able to speak, but now gifted with remarkable fluency and invention – finds an amusing parallel in Posidippus’ iamatikon for the profoundly deaf Cretan who, after Asclepius’ healing intervention, can hear what is said on the other side of a brick-wall (99 Austin-Bastianini). Finally, there is good evidence for the association of Isis with the Muses, particularly in Egypt: she is ‘leader of the Muses’ on the great Isis-text from Oxyrhynchus (Totti 1985: No. 20, 128).15 10 Cf., e. g., Roussel 1916, 194 – 5, Grandjean 1975, 30 n. 33 with further bibliography. 11 Cf. Roussel 1916, 147, with nos. 117 and 122 (Dikaiosyne); nos. 138 – 40 (Nemesis). 12 Roussel 1916: 150. 13 IG IV, 2nd ed., 1, 121 (V), 123 (XLIV) and ibid. lines 47 – 50; cf., e. g., Papathomopoulos 1999, 42. 14 !vym¸a is of course a very common symptom of illness in the medical writers. 15 Cf., e. g., Perry 1952, 2; Dillery 1999, 274 – 5.

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The second important element which frames the bucolic locus amoenus is what might be thought of as the generic resonance of the whole narrative. Aesop receives divine favour after the prayers of the goddess’ priestess whom he has helped; this reverses the opening narrative of the Iliad in which Apollo’s priest prays to his god that the Greeks should ‘pay for his tears’, the god hears, and responds with sickness and death for the Greeks, not the curing grace which Isis bestows upon Aesop.16 It is in accordance with this reversal of the heroic-tragic ethos of the Iliad that its hero has, as has often been recognised, more than a little of the Thersites about him;17 both are, of course, shockingly ugly, and their stories move in parallel, though, opposite directions. Thersites was given to a flood of uncontrollable language ( !letqo´pgr … dr 5pea … %josl² te pokk² te Eidg, Iliad 2.212 – 13) until Odysseus silenced him in an assertion of hierarchical power; Aesop is granted speech and proceeds to demonstrate time and again that real wisdom resides in the lowest reaches of society. It is with this overtly non-epic pattern that we should associate the Hesiodic resonances of this opening scene of the bestowing of special powers of speech upon a lowly rustic.18 The moral of the ‘fig-episode’19 is that ‘he who devises evil against another does not realise that it is against himself that the evil falls’ (VA 3). This moral goes back of course to Hesiod, Works and Days 265 – 6: oX t’ aqt_i jaj± te¼wei !mµq %kkyi jaj± te¼wym, B d³ jaj± boukµ t_i bouke¼samti jaj¸stg.

The man who devises evil against another devises evil against himself; evil plans turn out worst for the plotter himself. (Hesiod, Works and Days 265 – 6)

These often anthologised and cited verses20 occur within Hesiod’s exhortation to the basik/r to practise d¸jg, including straight-speaking 16 It is of course tempting to associate this contrast – one largely to the credit of Isis – with the thematic contrast between Isis and Apollo which runs through the Life; for this latter cf., e. g., Perry 1936, 15, Finkelpearl 2003, 42 – 7. 17 Cf., e. g., Winkler 1991, 288. The ‘Planudean’ Life explicitly compares the two in point of ugliness (p. 228.3 – 4 Eberhard). 18 Cf. Mignogna 1992: 80 – 4, whose concerns are, however, rather different, 19 It is perhaps surprising that only in the ‘Planudean’ version is the behaviour of Aesop’s wicked workmates called sujovamt¸a (p. 231.1 Eberhard). 20 See the citations apparatus to West’s edition ad loc. and to Massimilla’s edition of Callimachus on fr. 4.5.

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(vv. 263 – 4); a principal argument of the exhortation is precisely the fact that the maiden daughter of Zeus, Dike herself, reports outrages to Zeus and that he then takes action. In the present context it becomes of interest that not only is Isis closely associated with Justice (see above), but that the constellation Virgo, Aratus’ Paqh´mor, was variously identified with Hesiod’s Dike, with Isis and with Tyche;21 Isis Dikaiosyne is not very far from a putative Isis Dike. Here then we find a striking blend of Hesiodic tradition and Hellenistic religion, or rather we see some of the various elements which have gone into the brew of Hellenistic religion; the story of the figs is in fact an illustration of the Hesiodic text transposed to a low and prosaic mode.22 In the course of the Life the Hesiodic voice of the narrator blends into the Hesiodic voice of Aesop himself.23 Much could be said about the relation between Hesiodic and Aesopic wisdom,24 but in the present context we may note a confluence of two traditions. On the one hand, Hesiod and Hesiodic epic are, as so often, constructed as ‘other than’ Homer and Homeric epic; such a tradition goes back for us at least to the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. Secondly, the bucolic scene of Aesop’s blessed sleep associates the bucolic tradition with the Aesopic-Hesiodic. Here the author is not merely using the fact that the Works and Days can be (and, of course, was) constructed as an authorising text for the bucolic tradition, as a protopastoral text, but also the fact that the bucolic tradition, very consciously and from what it took to be its beginning (i. e. Theocritus 1), constructed itself as ‘other than’ Homer;25 the locus amoenus in fact reinforces the generic lesson of the opening narrative. That the locus amoenus is described in a poetic style26 quite removed from that of the rest of the Life will be, like the rhetorical and religious copia with which Lucius is suddenly 21 Cf. the texts assembled in Robert 1878: 84 – 5 and Martin 1974: 125 – 6. 22 It is noteworthy that Callimachus too evoked the Works and Days by v. 265 (fr. 4.5 Massimilla); this is a Hesiodic tag which evokes a whole poem and a whole ethos; cf. this volume 559 – 69. 23 Thus, for example, in chapter 94 Aesop explains the two ‘roads’ of freedom and slavery in a ‘parable’ which is heavily indebted (at how many removes we cannot tell) to Works and Days 287 – 92. 24 Hesiod was credited with being the first writer of ‘Aesopic fables’ (Quintilian 5.11.19), presumably because of the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in WD. 25 Halperin 1983 remains a fundamental study. 26 Papademetriou 1989, 41 – 2 points out a rhythm in part of the description which is very close to a dactylic hexameter.

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endowed (cf. above), a sign that Isis is at work in the narrative before she explicitly appears. The writer feels her power, as Aesop is about to do. Moreover, as Elisa Mignogna notes, it is important that nature makes this complex and harmonious sound shortly before Aesop acquires a voice.27 The relation between Aesop’s miraculous cure and the setting in which it occurs will repay somewhat closer attention. Before considering further the bucolic scene in the Life, however, it may be useful to glance at another religious aetiology for Aesop’s powers of story-telling from a period probably close in time to that of the ‘original’ Life of Aesop. In the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (5.14 – 17), Philostratus tells how the great man and his followers reached the area of Mt Etna in Sicily (an area, of course, with very rich ‘bucolic’ associations). There the locals told them the story of the imprisoned giant responsible for the fire of the mountain, but the visitors themselves were to reach explanations which were ‘more credible and appropriate to philosophers’ (5.14.1). In his most Socratic mode,28 Apollonius defends ‘Aesopic fables’ against the values of other kinds of muthoi, such as that of the giant imprisoned beneath Etna: Aesop ‘teaches great lessons from small things’ (5.14.2), makes quite clear what lesson is to be drawn from the fable (5.14.2, 3), makes no pretence that his fables are ‘true’, but uses fiction for the benefit of his audience, and is a ‘charming’ story-teller as well (5.14.3). Apollonius then proceeds to repeat a muthos about Aesop which he says his mother taught him. Aesop was a shepherd of down-to-earth common sense, who frequently prayed for sophia at a nearby shrine of Hermes, offering the god the humble gifts which were all he had – some milk, a honeycomb, a few flowers – whereas others, who also came to ask for sophia, were able to afford very costly offerings. When the day for divine distribution arrived, Hermes made his allotment in accord with the lavishness of the gifts he had received – first philosophy, then rhetoric, then astronomy, music, epic poetry, iambic poetry and so forth, until there was no part of sophia left for Aesop. Hermes then, however, remembered how the Hours who had nursed him as a baby used to tell him a muthos about a talking cow, 27 Mignogna 1992, 84; cf. also Ferrari 1997, 22 – 3. Jennings 2000: 224 – 31 offers an interesting reading of the locus amoenus as a parodically idealistic view of the countryside, which is then fatally undermined by the earthy realism of the surrounding work. 28 In addition to the use of Plato’s Phaedrus (cf. below), Apollonius’ opening gambit seems also to rework Socrates’ discussion of muthoi at Republic 2.376e-7a.

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and it was this story which had inspired his desire for Apollo’s cows (and was thus, so we are to understand, in some sense responsible for the high status on Olympus which he enjoyed); as a result, he gave Aesop muthologia, ‘the first thing which I learned’ (5.15.2). After this ‘Aesopic digression’, Apollonius returns to the matter in hand and produces an explanation for volcanoes drawn from natural science, to set against the common mythical ones. A number of features of this passage are of interest in the present context. Aesop is again cast in a very ‘bucolic’ role, both by profession and by the humble offerings which he brings to the god; in fact, the story of the cow which inspired the baby Hermes makes this fable very boujokijºm indeed. Apollonius’ story makes it clear that muthologia is at the very bottom (or, rather, the very start) of the generic hierarchy – it has educational value, but remains as marginal to sophisticated literate culture as are herdsmen. To the opposition between ‘scientific’ and ‘mythical’ explanation I will return presently (cf. below). Although this passage of Philostratus apparently moves at a different level of literary ambition from the Life of Aesop, both accounts of the origins of Aesop’s gifts draw on similar assumptions about the place and value of fables and myths and assume similar structures of relationship between Aesop and those around him. We must not exaggerate the extent to which the Life of Aesop runs against the grain of ‘official culture’. Isis’ granting of speech to Aesop and the Muses’ gift of lousij^ (‘the art of the Muses’), for that in effect is what their gift is, to a previously mute creature replays one account of the invention of language; in the different versions of this account, language was the gift of a god (cf., e. g., Euripides, Supplices 201 – 4) or the invention of a marvellously talented individual. The wise moloh´tgr of Plato’s Cratylus (esp. 389 – 90e) may have been influential on many such accounts. In competition, and often explicit competition (cf., e. g., Lucretius 5.1041 – 55),29 with such an account lies a spectrum of explanations for the origin of language which stress its gradual development; language, according to these views, was not a one-off gift or invention, but something which arose through a process not unlike trial-and-error.30 Thus, for example, 29 Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 12.III Smith ridicules the notion that Hermes had anything to do with the development of language; as Hermes-Thoth, he often works together with Isis in the spread of language. 30 There is helpful guidance in Campbell 2003, 283 – 94 and in various contributions to Frede-Inwood 2005.

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in the anthropology of Diodorus Siculus Book 1, a gradualist account of the development of language and of language-variety (1.8) precedes an Egyptian version in which Hermes-Thoth plays a central rôle (1.16.1). With either narrative, however, as Aesop names (amol²fym) his possessions and the animals around him (ch. 8), we may well be reminded of the original imposition (h´sir) of names, whether by a ‘first inventor’ or by communal convention; it is important to stress that this is not to say that the Life dramatises the invention of language – plainly language is fully formed in the world in which Aesop lives and Aesop does not lack understanding of language, merely the power to produce it – but rather to suggest that the development of language is one of the cultural narratives to which Aesop’s own story looks. Starting as a low slave of incredible ugliness, Aesop’s story will almost inevitably be one of social and cultural ‘rise’; the development of language from its beginnings to a very advanced state is one element of that story and an element, as we shall see, that helps to plot the course of the story (cf. below). It is interesting, but perhaps no more, that the famous story of King Psammetichus establishes Phrygia, the home of Aesop, as the oldest nation and Phrygian as the oldest language, and it too has a very pastoral framework (Herodotus 2.2). The move which the children in Herodotus’ story make from ‘unmeaning cries’ (%sgla jmuf¶lata) to ‘speech’ (vym¶) implies the widespread view that what distinguishes human speech from the noises of animals is that it is articulate (5maqhqor).31 In those versions of the Life in which Aesop is not at first completely mute, but merely, as in the W tradition, ‘slow and unclear of speech’ (bqad¼ckyssor ja· bolbºvymor) 32 or, as in the Planudean Life, ‘characterised by speech which was slow and unmeaning and unarticulated’ (t¹ bqad¼ckyssom ja· t¹ t/r vym/r %sglºm te ja· !di²qhqytom), the change which divine favour brings more closely replicates the development of Psammetichus’ children or indeed of early man in standard developmental accounts, but

31 Cf., e. g., Plato, Protagoras 322a, Diogenes of Babylon, SVF 3.212, Schol. Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4.257 – 62c Wendel (on the Psammetichus story), Dion. Hal. Comp. Verb. 14.1, Babrius, Proem 7. 32 The two conditions are of course similar and are indeed related in ancient thought, cf. Vettius Valens p. 375.25 – 9 Pingree. bqad¼ckyssor ja· bolbºvymor in fact sounds like a description of the speech of someone who is profoundly deaf.

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both G and W versions, broadly speaking, reflect similar patterns of historical explanation.33 Aesop’s move in the G version from gestures (di± t_m meul²tym 3, pointing things out to the priestess in 4) 34 to meaningful language replays both the development of the child (e. g. Lucretius 5.1028 – 32) and the development of the human race more broadly.35 One of the most influential models in such explanations is the idea that language, in all its variety, arose through the imitation of nature. This idea is, of course, a very powerful one in bucolic literature, where what is involved is, however, usually music and poetry, rather than language itself (cf., e. g., Lucretius 5.1379 – 89). The opening of Theocritus 1, which in fact it is hard not to recall when reading of nature’s eqlek³r xih¼qisla in the Life,36 suggests a (suitably bucolic) !c¾m between the sounds of nature and the sounds made by the herdsmen; the complex inter-relations of dependence and rivalry between ‘natural’ sound and the sound of bucolic music are marked by the use of lek¸feshai to refer to the sound of trees, the use of xih¼qisla, which itself is a word imitating both nature and the nature of that to which it refers (cf. the scholia on the opening verse), and by the assonance of xih¼qisla and suq¸sder to reinforce the parallel structures within the opening verses. The opening of Virgil, Eclogue 1, however, reverses the conventional model of historical anthropology and has the herdsman ‘teaching’ nature, rather than the other way round.37 In Daphnis and Chloe we must assume 33 After the intervention of Isis and the Muses in the W recension, Aesop has been granted %qistom kºcom ja· t¹ taw» t/r ck¾ttgr ja· 2toilokoc¸ar evqesim di± poij¸kym l¼hym ; this is in keeping with bqaduckyss¸a, as the gifts of the G recension, kºcym evqela ja· l¼hym gEkkgmij_m pkojµ ja· poi¶seir, are with !vym¸a. If Aesop’s disability was indeed more total in G than in W, the presence of the locus amoenus, with its resonances of the invention of language, in the former, but not in the latter, makes sense; this, of course, is not to say that this is a ‘historical’ explanation of the difference, but it is perhaps some confirmation of the essential coherence of the G narrative. 34 In both versions, when Aesop is about to get a beating, ‘he pleaded (paqej²kei) with his master to wait’; it is perhaps uncertain whether we are to see here an inconsistency in the narrative, particularly in the G version, or whether we are to understand that this ‘pleading’ too took place through gesture (so, e. g., the translation of Bonelli and Sandolini in Ferrari 1997). 35 Note the implicit analogy at Plato, Cratylus 422 f-3a between the imitative nature of the gestures which those who cannot speak make and the manner in which names must ‘imitate’ the nature of that to which they refer. 36 Cf. Mignogna 1992, 82. 37 Cf. Breed 2000, 14 – 16.

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that the children can (like Aesop) understand and indeed even speak before they are sent into the fields to tend the flocks (cf. 1.8.2 – 3), but much of the learning, including music, of these ‘young imitators of what they heard and saw’ (1.9.2) is the result of the imitation of nature.38 As the story of Aesop suggests, but does not reproduce, the story of the invention of language, so the story of Daphnis and Chloe approximates to, rather than reproduces, an account of the movement of early or Golden Age man towards modern culture (including lovemaking). What Tityrus is teaching the woods at the opening of Eclogue 1 is to re-echo his song of ‘fair Amaryllis’, and echo has an important place in the discourse about language with which we are concerned. Lucretius offers a purely materialist explanation for the phenomenon of echo (4.570 – 9), but then follows it with the ‘pastoral’ fantasies of rustic explanation (satyrs, nymphs, Pan etc.: 4.580 – 94). So too, Longus juxtaposes a ‘scientific’ explanation of the phenomenon (D&C 3.21.3 – 4) with a mythical one (3.23).39 As we have seen, the same combination of explanatory modes is used by Philostratus in the Life of Apollonius with regard to volcanoes; that passage clearly reworks a founding text for the bucolic tradition, Plato’s Phaedrus, both in its concern with the value(lessness) of mythical explanations (cf. Phaedrus 229b-30a) 40 and in how Apollonius is ‘carried away’ into ‘irrelevant’ matters (5.16.1, cf. Socrates at Phaedrus 238c). Whether or not chapter 6 of the G version of the Life contains vestigial echoes of the locus amoenus of the Phaedrus,41 what is important in the present context is the repeated link between this pattern of multiple explanation and the bucolic/ pastoral world. The Life of Aesop offers, I suggest, a similar double explanation for the originary moment of language which Aesop’s cure represents. We are, of course, at the mercy of a very badly corrupt text,42 and one which shows signs of containing doublets conflated 38 Cf. Hunter 1983, 20, 107 n. 20 citing Democritus fr. 154 D-K, Alcman 39, and Chamaileon fr. 24 W. Already in antiquity, of course, the sound uttered by Psammetichus’ children could be explained as an imitation of the animals among which they had been brought up (Schol. Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4.257 – 62c Wendel). 39 Cf. Hunter 1997, 19 – 20. 40 For the importance of this passage for Daphnis and Chloe cf. Hunter 1997, 16 – 23. 41 Cf. Mignogna 1992, 79. 42 Cf. Papathomopoulos 1989, 20 – 2.

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from different versions, but some progress may be possible. The breeze seems to ‘imitate’ the blackbird, and ‘harmonious, voice-imitating echo’ hovers over the whole scene, while Aesop sleeps beside the sound of the water. The typical songsters of bucolic, cicadas and birds, are of course present, and the noun hq}kgla seems chosen to emphasise the similarity between human language and birdsong, imitation of which – as we have seen – played an important part in theories of the origin of music and musical speech.43 We may compare how the poet of the Lament for Bion recalls how Bion ‘delighted the birds and taught them to talk’ (kak]eim, Lament for Bion 46 – 7); Bion in fact has turned the birds into antiphonal bucolic singers. This, as does the opening of Eclogue 1, reverses the more usual pattern which we also see in the Life of Aesop. What the G recension of the Life offers is, then, a narrative in which Aesop’s piety is miraculously rewarded with the gift of speech, but one which also gestures towards another explanation of a different, more ‘scientific’, kind. As we have seen, such compound aetiology is common in bucolic literature, and we may wish to associate it with the productive tension within such literature between the naiveté of the characters and the sophistication of the art which describes them. Be that as it may, it is perhaps worth adding here one further example of a related phenomenon. The famous locus amoenus at Theocritus 7.131 – 46, which has (unsurprisingly) many elements in common with the locus of the Life, follows Simichidas’ ‘investiture’ as a Hesiodic-bucolic poet by Lycidas and introduces a pastoral-mythological effusion unlike anything we have heard from Simichidas before. Do we have here, at one level, another case of ‘double explanation’, with Lycidas in the rôle of Isis and the Muses, while nature just does what comes naturally? Problems of communication remain central to the Life, as Franco Ferrari has rightly emphasised.44 The series of episodes in which Aesop ‘misunderstands’ his master’s instructions by taking his words literally (e. g., in 38 he brings the oil-flask but no oil, because he had only been told to bring the flask; in 41 he boils only one lentil because the master had used a ‘collective singular’; in 44 – 6 he gives food to the dog rather than to the master’s wife because he is told to give it to ‘her who 43 Cf. also Ferrari 1997, 22, Pervo 1998, 92. 44 Ferrari 1997, 22 – 32. Ferrari’s discussion sees Aesop’s linguistic progress in terms of the intellectual progress of a single individual, rather than of the history of human language more generally, but it remains an innovative contribution in this area and one which has allowed me to keep my remarks brief.

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has [Xanthus’] interests at heart’) may be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, precision is required for language to function; from a linguistic point of view we may consider this to be a form of orthoepeia, in which words must convey one thing and one thing only. This is the second stage after the development of articulated language itself: without this ‘precision’ language will not allow meaningful communication. Thus, the confusions of chapter 40 would not have occurred if !p| had one, and only one, meaning, or of chapters 65 – 6 if %mhqypor were similarly unambiguous. Language is thus structurally analogous to the master-slave relationship; on one view, slaves must do exactly as they are told (cf. the opening of the unfortunately lacunose ch. 38), and this of course requires that the language in which instructions are given avoid all ambiguity and excess or deficiency. It may well be true that ‘wilful misunderstanding … was a common enough problem with slaves’,45 and Keith Hopkins has helpfully set these passages within the context of the imaginaire of Roman slavery,46 but what is important in the present context is how these scenes continue the narrative of linguistic history which the opening scenes have set up. Viewed, however, from another perspective, and from the perspective of the lesson which Aesop teaches his master about how to issue orders and instruction (chs. 38, 43), language can only function through conventional (and very often unspoken) understandings which act in excess of ‘the literal meaning’; the master-slave relationship, taken in its most extreme – perhaps we should say ‘theorised’ – form, can thus never function as a proper analogue for language. Unless the slave is in practice given some ‘freedom’ to interpret (and indeed think) beyond the ‘literal meaning’, he will be unable properly to perform his duties, just as humans would be unable to function if every utterance was to be interpreted ‘literally’ and in isolation from our previous experience as social beings. Human communication of all kinds requires a sophisticated development of language which goes well beyond the stage in which words denote one thing and one thing alone, and this lesson is built into the very fabric of the Life of Aesop. Examples of that sophisticated level of language include images, allegories and fables, in which language plainly looks beyond itself to denote something ‘other’. If the early stages of ‘one word – one meaning’ are appropriate to one view of slave status, we might expect the higher 45 Hopkins 1993, 18. 46 Hopkins 1993, 18 – 23.

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levels to correspond to the speech of free men, and it is noteworthy that Aesop tells his first fully-fledged fable, complete with ‘moral’, only after he has been freed (VA 97); the link between social status and mode of speech is in fact made explicitly in the course of the negotiation which leads to Aesop’s freeing (VA 89 – 90). Once again it must be stressed that the Life does not offer any kind of simple dramatisation of this pattern; while still a slave, Aesop uses various forms of figured and sophisticated speech which have moved very far beyond a simple ‘functional’ level of language. In chapter 33 he amusingly tells Xanthos’ wife a story about the relations between Zeus and Apollo, a story in some ways reminiscent of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, which explains why some dreams are truly predictive and others are misleading; in chapter 37 he explains to a gardener through a kind of parable why natural vegetation grows more quickly and strongly than that which men plant; in chapter 67 he tells an aetiological ‘just so’ story about why we always look down at what we have produced during defecation. Most striking of all perhaps is chapter 76 (largely omitted in the G recension) 47 in which Aesop tells Xanthos a highly metaphorical story to secure a tunic that Xanthos’ wife had promised him, although he had successfully made love to her only nine times in a row instead of the ten she demanded; in this story, successive acts of ejaculation are replaced by ten plums being knocked off a tree ‘with one throw’, although one of them landed ‘in the dung’. Here Aesop very clearly uses a mode in which language looks beyond itself to denote something ‘other’. It could, however, be argued that, just as he is here usurping the ‘duty’ and pleasure of a free man, so he is also speaking in the coded language of free men – sex is a subject in which euphemism and allegory are never far away in ‘free’ society. The point is made all but explicitly in the narrative, as it is in this coded language in which Xanthos’ wife lays down her ultimatum: ‘I hired you to dig my field, but you climbed over the dividing wall and dug in my neighbour’s property. Give me the service you owe and get your tunic’ (VA 75). The linked rise of linguistic sophistication and socio-legal status is thus one of the patterns of the Life and, as such, the Life takes, at least in part, a different view from that which saw fables as inherently tied to servile status, as allowing slaves to say what they want to say without 47 This chapter is however preserved on a third-century AD papyrus (POxy 3331).

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directly offending their masters;48 this ancient view is, of course, close to the modern view of fables as a form of expression of opposition to the dominant ideology or of ‘unofficial culture’, as indeed they have been in many historical periods and in many cultures, often explicitly tied to the name and story of Aesop.49 For ancient Greek culture, and specifically for the Life of Aesop, the truth is rather more complex. As a cursory glance at archaic literature will show, fables and allegories may be used as markers of the speech of ‘free men’, as modes used by empowered equals who understand how the codes work both to include and exclude, as much as by the powerless, whether they be slaves or ‘free men’ living under a tyranny, to express their dissatisfaction; the poetry of, say, Archilochus and Theognis offers two complementary and, in part, contrasting patterns here. There is, in other words, no simple matching in Greek culture of mode of discourse to social status, but I hope that it is clear that the Life employs a developmental narrative in which status and language ‘rise’ together, if not always in perfect step. If this analysis is on the right lines, then the Life of Aesop takes its place in a long history of the exploration of the relationship between language, power and status. The rôle of bucolic and pastoral literature in that exploration is not to be underestimated.

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction. London. Breed, B. W. 2000. “Imitations of originality: Theocritus and Lucretius at the start of the Eclogues”, Vergilius 46: 3 – 20. Campbell, G. 2003. Lucretius on Creation and Evolution. Oxford. Dillery, J. 1999. “Aesop, Isis, and the Heliconian Muses”, Classical Philology 94: 268 – 80. Eberhard, A. 1872. Fabulae romanenses Graece conscriptae I. Leipzig. Ferrari, F. 1997. Romanzo di Esopo. Milan. Finkelpearl, E. D. 1998. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius. Ann Arbor. — 2003. “Lucius and Aesop gain a voice: Apuleius Met. 11.1 – 2 and Vita Aesopi 7”, in S. Panayotakis, M. Zimmerman, and W. Keulen (eds.), The Ancient Novel and Beyond: 37 – 51. Leiden. Frede, D. and Inwood, B. eds. 2005. Language and Learning. Cambridge. Grandjean, Y. 1975. Une nouvelle artalogie d’Isis Marone. Leiden. 48 For this view of the fable cf. Phaedrus, 3. Prol. 33 – 7 (with Henderson 2001, 81 – 2), Julian 7.207c. 49 Patterson 1991 is an important study here.

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Griffiths, J. G. 1975. Apuleius of Madauros. The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses, Book XI). Leiden. Halperin, D. M. 1983. Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry. New Haven/London. Henderson, J. 2001. Telling Tales on Caesar. Oxford. Holzberg, N. ed. 1992. Der sop-Roman. Tübingen. Hopkins, K. 1993. “Novel evidence for Roman slavery”, Past and Present 138: 3 – 27. Hunter, R. 1983. A Study of Daphnis & Chloe. Cambridge. — 1997. “Longus and Plato”, in M. Picone and B. Zimmermann (eds.), Der antike Roman und seine mittelalterliche Rezeption: 15 – 28. Basel. [= this volume 775 – 89] Jennings, V. J. 2000. Representing Aesop. PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge. La Penna, A. 1962. “Il romanzo di Esopo”, Athenaeum 40: 264 – 313. Martin, J. 1974. Scholia in Aratum Vetera. Stuttgart. Merkelbach, R. 1976. “Zum neuen Isistext aus Maroneia”, Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik 23: 234 – 5. Mignogna, E. 1992. “Aesopus bucolicus. Come si “mette in scena” un miracolo (Vita Aesopi c.6)”, in Holzberg 1992, 76 – 84. Papademetriou, J.-Th. 1989. Ais~peia jai Aisypij\. Athens. Papathomopoulos, M. 1989. Aesopus Revisitatus. Recherches sue le texte des Vies sopiques. Ioannina. — 1990. j b¸or toO AQs¾pou. gG paqakkacµ G. Ioannina. — 1999. j b¸or toO AQs¾pou. gG paqakkacµ W. Athens. Patterson, A. 1991. Fables of Power. 1991. Perry, B. E. 1936. Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop. Haverford Pa. — 1952. Aesopica. Urbana, Illinois. Pervo, R. I. 1998. “A nihilist fabula: introducing The Life of Aesop”, in R. F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, J. Perkins (eds.), Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative: 77 – 120. Atlanta GA. Robert, C. 1878. Eratosthenis Catasterismorum Reliquiae. Berlin. Robertson, N. 2003. “Aesop’s encounter with Isis and the Muses, and the origins of the Life of Aesop”, in E. Csapo and M. C. Miller (eds), Poetry, Theory, Praxis: 247 – 63. Oxford. Roussel, P. 1916. Les cultes gyptiens Dlos du IIIe au Ier sicle av. J.-C. Nancy. Totti, M. 1985. Ausgewhlte Texte der Isis- und Sarapis-Religion. Hildesheim. Winkler, J. J. 1991. Auctor & Actor. Berkeley.

47. The curious incident …: polypragmosyne and the ancient novel* There is always something slightly ‘voyeuristic’ about novel-reading, always the sense that we should not really be taking an interest in other people’s affairs.1 As is well known, both the novelist and his readers, concerned to discover ‘what is going on’, are curiosi and/or pokupq²clomer, and this paper will be concerned with exploring some of the ways in which the novelists exploit their, and their audience’s, knowledge of this framework. My principal text will be, not one of the canonical ‘ideal’ novels, but rather the Life of Aesop which takes an explicit and repeated interest in social convention, whether that be the decencies of urination (ch. 28) or the use of language;2 at its centre is a character who can observe (in both senses) and/or break the unspoken rules of a world to which he does and does not belong. ‘Curiosity’ has a very particular place in the philosophical tradition, and not just because of their close genetic relationship. Plato’s dialogues both foreshadowed and were incorporated as authorising models within the Greek and Latin novels; an obvious link are the figures of Apollodorus, his nameless friend, and Aristodemus in the opening chapter of the Symposium, figures with an insatiable curiosity for every detail of Socrates’ life, thus foreshadowing, inter alios, the inquisitive heroes of the Lucianic Onos and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius.3 If, however, the curiositas, the ‘desire to know’, of these novel figures is not only a descendant of Odysseus’ inquisitiveness, but also a distortion of the philosophic desire for wisdom, it is entirely appropriate that in the Life of Aesop it is a vikºsovor, Aesop’s master Xanthos, who challenges *

1 2 3

S. Panayotakis, M. Paschalis and G. Schmeling (eds.), Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel (Groningen, forthcoming) I am grateful to audiences in Rethymnon and Athens for helpful discussion of earlier versions, and to Tim Whitmarsh for allowing me to read the discussion of pokupqaclos}mg in his forthcoming book on the ancient novel. There are important remarks at Morales 2004, 86 – 7. Cf. Hunter 2007. Cf. Hunter 2006.

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Aesop to produce a man who is !peq¸eqcor, that is someone who does not have any interest in or interfere in the affairs, and particularly the misfortunes, of others; the occasion of the challenge is Aesop’s verbal attack upon one of Xanthos’ pupils for sticking his nose into other people’s business, just like a peq¸eqcor (ch. 55). Xanthos issues this challenge as one which will be impossible to fulfil, thus giving him an excuse to whip Aesop, but for him it is also a challenge with a certain philosophical interest: !pºdeinom owm loi eQ 5stim b %mhqypor !peq¸eqcor, ‘prove to me that man can lack curiosity’ (ch. 56) suggests a general philosophical interest in the human condition.4 There is a nice irony: an interest in whether or not !peqieqc¸a is possible, let alone organising an experiment to test the hypothesis, is itself peq¸eqcom : philosophers, with their curiosity and haOla, are, like grammarians,5 classic peq¸eqcoi/ pokupq²clomer. ‘By nature, all men’, said Aristotle, ‘desire to know’ (Metaphysics 1.980a21), so a man with absolutely no interest in the affairs of his fellows will, apparently, be very hard to find; Xanthos’ challenge to his slave is firmly rooted within the context of Aristotle’s bon mot. Aesop’s first effort to meet the challenge (largely omitted from the G recension) is a man who seems to be minding his own business in the agora (obviously a rare sight).6 When he accepts Aesop’s invitation to dinner, however, his first mistake is to insist that his hosts are served before he is, though Xanthos had given a contrary instruction; his second and third are to insist that the food is fine, though Xanthos criticises the manner in which it has been prepared, and finally to try to dissuade Xanthos from beating his slaves. Clearly, then, peqieqc¸a here covers some of what would pass for ordinary ‘politeness’ in our society; Xanthos takes a radically hard line about what ‘minding your own business’ means. Aesop’s next move (after having endured a beating for the first failure) is to go to the countryside to look for an !peq¸eqcor ; this is in keeping with Plutarch’s observation in his peq· pokupqaclos¼mgr that pokupq²clomer avoid the countryside because nothing happens there 4

5 6

Unfortunately both text and interpretation are disputed; the printed text is that of the G version with !peq_eqcor as Papathomopoulos’ correction of the transmitted peq_eqcor. Some take this sentence as referring explicitly to Xanthos’ friend (‘the man’), but what follows seems to disallow that interpretation. The W version offers the much simpler (and hence simplified?) de?n|m loi %mhqypom !peq_eqcom. Cf. below p. 893. For this as a promising sign of !peqieqc_a cf. Plutarch, De curios. 521e.

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(Mor. 518 f-19a). Here Aesop has much more success and brings back a self-confessed !peq¸eqcor, a man who deals fairly with others (and his donkey), has never heard of Xanthos and has apparently no interest in him, and – perhaps most amazing of all – no interest in whether Aesop (or anyone else) is slave or free.7 The rustic comes to dinner without bothering to wash or take his boots off, resists all attempts to make him interfere in the apparently unusual ‘local customs’ of Xanthos’ house, asks no questions about the food he is served and eats in an appropriately hearty and rustic manner; when Xanthos has his cook beaten for alleged under-performance, the rustic does not interfere (though he thinks Xanthos a bit mad), and finally, when Xanthos threatens to burn his wife alive for failing to buy honey necessary for a cake, the rustic’s contribution is to ask Xanthos to hang on for a moment so that he fetch his own wife from the countryside to add further fuel to the fire. At this point Xanthos admits that he is beaten.8 The exploration of the origins and ‘necessity’ of social custom and convention, such as we see them carefully observed in the ‘ideal’ novel, here surfaces as a principal interest of the text. Moreover, the obvious similarities and differences between these scenes and aspects of Petronius’ cena Trimalchionis deserve attention in this regard.9 When the opportunity for dinner is first announced, Encolpius and his colleagues take a bath, the proper action which had preceded elite dining since the Homeric poems; no such social niceties, of course, for the !peq¸eqcor in the Life of Aesop. What, moreover, is most striking about these early sections of the cena, if read with the Life in mind, is both the narrator’s insatiable interest in his host and all his doings and the minute detail of the opening descriptions of Trimalchio and his house. At one level, this is the literary equivalent of polite social convention, here carried, of course, to an extreme; we may think of the lessons offered to Philocleon in Aristophanes’ Wasps about how to behave in polite society before dinner is served (Wasps 1212 – 15). haOla,

7 8 9

The force of this declared lack of interest may be measured, for example, by comparing the sensitivities on show in the somewhat similar exchange at Theocritus 5.72 – 7. On this scene see also Merkle 1996, 231. Jouanno 2006 notes some of the most striking parallels, and cf. also Anderson 1984, 212 with n. 8, Winkler 1985, 284.

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admiratio, and particularly a wonder induced by strange sights,10 is precisely the state to which Trimalchio’s house and its guests reduce Encolpius and his colleagues (Sat. 27.4, 28.6, 63.1, 64.1 etc.). Here too we may be tempted to see in Petronius’ heroes a distortion of a philosophical paradigm, for it is of course t¹ haul²feim which lies at the root of philosophy.11 Such narrative detail is, however, also a manifestation of a literary peqieqc¸a : if readers have to be scrupulosi, then novelists must, of course, be curiosi, or, in the language of the Satyrica they, no less than their readers,12 must put the oculus curiosus to the door to watch the spectaculum (Sat. 26.4). curiositas or pokupqaclos¼mg is not just a narrative ‘driver’ in novels: novels are the literary manifestation of these ‘vices’. Once in the house, Encolpius is endlessly inquisitive (29.9, 41 etc.); he wants, for example, ‘to test whether the whole household sang’ (31.5). His greed for news (ut quam plurima exciperem, 37.1) leads him to ask about a woman who was scurrying around the dining-room and who turns out to be Trimalchio’s wife, Fortunata; such an interest in other men’s wives might well make us think (again) of Plutarch’s essay, in which pokupqaclos¼mg is compared to adultery, that is an undressing of other men’s secrets (519b-f, 522a); in the Life of Aesop, of course, it is Xanthos’ wife who satisfies her lust for ‘rough trade’ with the enormously phallic Aesop. Trimalchio and Fortunata are not, of course, ones to be slow in coming forward to display themselves, but it is Encolpius’ questioning which elicits the stories behind the display. The interest in ‘other men’s affairs’ of Trimalchio’s guests knows of course no bounds, and here too the contrast with the !peq¸eqcor of the Life of Aesop could hardly be stronger; Trimalchio’s guests show just that very interest in the racial and social origins of others which characterises Plutarch’s pokupq²clym (Mor. 516b). The matter could be illustrated at great length, but two related points may suffice here. One is the fact that it is ‘novelties’, res nouae, which most arouse Encolpius’ admiratio (27.3, 35.1 nouitas … omnium conuertit oculos); here too we 10 The juxtaposition of he\sai and ha}lasom in Wasps 1215 is noteworthy: later, at least, an etymological connection between the words was made, cf. Et. Mag. 443.37 – 48 Gaisford; some discussion in Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004, 59 – 60. 11 Cf. Plato, Theaetetus 155d, Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.982b12 – 17. Plutarch cites the saying of Pythagoras to the effect that what he had gained from philosophy was t¹ lgd³m haul\feim (Mor. 44b, cf. Horace’s nil admirari [Epistles 1.6.1]), but that is a rather different point. 12 Cf. Hunter 2008.

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are not very far from the Plutarchan pokupq²clym (cf. Mor. 517 f-18a, 519a-b). It is news (in our sense) which most attracts this latter character, but as we have seen ‘news’ and ‘new sights’ are jumbled up together in Trimalchio’s world. Secondly, as is well understood, Petronius scripts a ‘second-time’ reader into this description, by giving Encolpius an informant who has ‘been here before’ (33.8, 36.7 – 8), who can read the signs which suggest that not all is as it seems (33.8), a conviva scrupulosus in fact, who can explain to Encolpius just what is going on (Sat. 36.7 – 8, 41.3 – 5). The scenes in the Life of Aesop in which Xanthos tries to provoke his guests to show peqieqc¸a by beating (or threatening to beat) his cooks can hardly fail to recall scenes of the Satyrica; before Encolpius and his colleagues are even inside the triclinium they have intervened to save a slave from punishment (30.7 – 31.2). The charade of Sat. 49 in which the cook who allegedly forgot to gut the pig is summoned for a beating seems very close to the Life: deinde magis magisque Trimalchio intuens eum ‘quid? quid?’ inquit. ‘porcus hic non est exinteratus: non mehercules est. uoca uoca cocum in medio’. cum constitisset ad mensam cocus tristis et diceret se oblitum esse exinterare, ‘quid, oblitus?’ Trimalchio exclamat, ‘putes illum piper et cuminum non coniecisse. despolia.’ ‘What, what’s this?’, said Trimalchio, who was inspecting the pig ever more closely. ‘This pig hasn’t been gutted. No, it certainly hasn’t. Call, call the cook before us’. When the cook stood before his table all glum and said that he had forgotten to gut it, Trimalchio shouted, ‘What, forgotten? You’d think he hadn’t put in the pepper and the cumin. Strip him!’ (Petronius, Satyrica 49.3 – 5) b N²mhor ceus²lemor ja· h´kym 1jjak´sashai t¹m %cqoijom, Vma eQr kºcom vam/i peq¸eqcor, k´cei “gO pa?r, j²kei t¹m l²ceiqom”. b d³ eQs/khem. b N²mhor k´cei7 “K´ce loi, dqap´ta, di± t¸ kalb²mym t± 1pit¶deia oute !qjet¹m 5kaiom 5baker oute c²qom oute p´peqi· 1jd¼sate aqt¹m ja· de¸qate”.

Xanthos tasted [the fish] and, wishing to tempt the peasant to say something to show himself a busybody, he said, “Boy, call the cook”. The cook came in, and Xanthos said, “Tell me, scoundrel, though you have all the ingredients, why didn’t you put in sufficient oil or fish-paste or pepper? Strip him and beat him.” (Life of Aesop 62)

When Trimalchio contrasts the cook’s forgetfulness with something less heinous, ‘you would think he had forgotten to put in the pepper and cumin!’, we may be tempted to see here a piece of novelistic one-upmanship; in the charade of the Life it is indeed only ‘oil and fish-paste

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and pepper’ which has been forgotten – Petronius/Trimalchio has gone well beyond that. We need not, of course, assume that Petronius was borrowing from and alluding to the Life or – on the usual chronology of both works – one of its ancestors; too much novelistic and sympotic literature has been lost for such an argument to carry conviction. Nevertheless, this case is, I think, qualitatively different from, say, the (unsurprising) fact that both works include parodic distortions of the (real and literary) practice of learned discussion (fgt¶lata) at the dinner table (VA 47 – 8, 68, Sat. 48, 55). There are a number of other ‘parallels’ (to use a convenient but dangerous term) between the two works – both Xanthos and Trimalchio have ‘wife trouble’, both drink too much at dinner (VA 68), both have dogs which are ‘their best friend’ (VA 44 – 6, 50, Sat. 64), and (at a rather larger scale) the relations between masters and slaves are central to both works13 – but I am less concerned here with questions of literary genesis than with the implications for the staging in both works of what we might call ‘novelistic practice’. In the Life, of course, the first guest intervenes to save the cook, whereas the second guest, the true !peq¸eqcor does not; in the Satyrica (49.6 – 7) all the guests immediately spring to the cook’s defence. Encolpius himself, however, has strong views on the matter: ego crudelissimae seueritatis non potui me tenere, sed inclinatus ad aurem Agamemnonis, ‘plane’, inquam, ‘hic debet seruus esse nequissimus: aliquis obliuisceretur porcum exinterare? non mehercules illi ignoscerem si piscem praeterisset.’ In a fit of savage strictness I could not contain myself, but I lent over and whispered to Agamemnon: ‘This must be the world’s most worthless slave; how could someone forget to gut a pig? I wouldn’t pardon him, if he had overlooked a fish’. (Petronius, Satyrica 49.7)

Encolpius has of course been taken in, or rather he has become ‘engaged with’ the charade that he is witnessing, he treats it as ‘true’ and relates it to, and judges it by, his own life. He is like the (naïve) reader of a novel (or spectator of a film) for whom what he or she is reading is ‘true’ and who projects his or her values into narratives of others; he is, in other words or in the language of the Life of Aesop, peq¸eqcor. Whether the other guests, who plead with Trimalchio to spare the cook, are similarly 13 On a smaller scale, note (for what it is worth) that both works use the familiar dichotomy between laughter and mockery (VA 36.1, Sat. 61.5); for the history of the dichotomy cf., e. g., Plato, Symposium 189b.

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taken in, or are rather knowingly playing the rôle assigned to them in this fiction, may be debated.14 Where then does all this lead? Two points perhaps. Petronius and the Life of Aesop examine ‘social convention’ both by putting it under the strain of those who do not feel bound by it (though in very different ways) – Trimalchio and Xanthos’ guests – and also by having convention observed and ‘focalised’ by those on the outside, the slave Aesop and the social-wannabe/outlaw Encolpius. Secondly, in his essay on pokupqaclos¼mg, Plutarch offers a series of ways to divert this ‘vice’ down innocuous paths. One of these is reading: If your curiosity (t¹ peq¸eqcom) must always graze and spend its time among worthless things, like a maggot in dead matter, let us turn it to histories (t±r Rstoq¸ar) and toss it a limitless supply of misfortunes ( jaj\). For there you will find, ‘the overthrowing of men and the casting away of lives’15 seductions of women, attacks of slaves, slanders of friends, preparation of poisons, acts of envy and jealousy, houses wrecked, kingdoms overthrown. (Plutarch, De curiositate 517e-f)

These Rstoq¸ai may, of course, be what we would call ‘histories’, but the word may also cover a rather wider field; in this same essay and elsewhere, Plutarch uses Rstoq¸ai where we would probably wish to translate (neutrally) as ‘stories’ (Mor. 514a, 516b, 518c). In a very familiar passage, Julian makes a distinction within the category of Rstoq¸ai on the basis of historical truth: We should read histories composed about events that happened. We must avoid all those fictional narratives in the form of history (1m Rstoq¸ar eUdei … !pgccekl´ma pk²slata) of men of old, stories of love (1qytij±r rpoh´seir) and quite simply all such material. ( Julian, Epistle 89. 301b)

This last passage is standardly cited as one of the few ancient references to ‘(historical) novels’,16 and in the present context it at least offers food for thought about Plutarch’s recipe for dealing with pokupqaclos¼mg. Plutarch’s list of what you can find in Rstoq¸ai could certainly be as well illustrated from those texts which we call ‘ancient novels’ as from the 14 Slater 1990, 67 suggests rather that Encolpius’ strong reaction is ‘an attempt to spoil Trimalchio’s trick’; this seems to me very improbable. 15 Aeschylus, Supplices 937. 16 Cf., however, Whitmarsh 2005, 607 – 8.

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‘history’ of the ancient world.17 Here then we have the reader ‘theorised’ as pokupq²clym, and in keeping with the nature of the ‘vice’ this reader does not like ‘good news’, such as (lawful) marriages, but prefers seductions and lawsuits: Curiosity (pokupqaclos¼mg) seems to take no pleasure in stale misfortunes, but rather in ones which are warm and fresh; it likes to watch new tragedies, and is unwilling to be bothered with comic and cheerful things. Therefore, whenever someone is relating a wedding or a sacrifice or a procession, the polypragmn is an inattentive and unengaged listener, and he says that he has heard most of it before and asks the speaker to cut it short and move swiftly on. But if someone sitting near him tells the story of the seduction of a virgin or adultery with a wife or preparations for a lawsuit or a dispute between brothers, he no longer nods off or has another engagement, And he seeks further words and freely offers his ears.18 (Plutarch, De curiositate 518a)

Here it seems very difficult not to think of Chariton’s famous declaration at the head of the final book of his novel:19 I think that this last book will be the sweetest for my readers; for it is recompense ( jah²qsiom) for the grim events of the earlier books. Here there are no longer piracy and slavery and lawsuits and battles and suicide and war and captivity, but upright loves and lawful marriage. (Chariton 8.1.4)

What we can now see is that Chariton may not only be referring to ‘novel theory’, if such a term has meaning, but that he is offering us a way of reading a novel, or at least its end, without being pokupq²clomer, without revelling in other people’s jaj².20 The ‘happy end’ of nov17 I have idly wondered whether Plutarch’s choice of metaphor in mau\ci’ oUjym was influenced by the frequency of shipwrecks in the novel. Textual corruption, e. g. an original mauac_ym oUjym, seems unlikely. 18 I do not know the source of this hexameter. 19 For other aspects of this passage cf. Hunter 1994, 1070 – 1. 20 An important passage is Life of Aesop 56, where Aesop apparently draws an analogy between, on the one hand, eating and drinking ‘your own’ and concerning yourself with your own business and, on the other, eating and drinking t± !kk|tqia and minding other people’s business; the text is uncertain, but we seem here to have another paradigm as well, the ‘reader as parasite’. Behind this passage and, indeed, behind some ancient ‘theory’ of polypragmosynÞ seems to lie a traditional idea about the different reactions one will have to ‘one’s own’ and ‘other people’s’ misfortunes, cf. Pindar, Nem. 1.53 – 4, Herodotus 6.21.2 (on the Athenian punishment of the dramatist Phrynichus), and [Menander], Monostichs 653 Jaekel, ‘don’t concern yourself (pokupqaclome?m) with other people’s troubles’.

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els is thus a way of breaking the spell, of slowly prying us away from our (potentially unhealthy) interest in the terrible things which are happening to the characters; if, in Tim Whitmarsh’s words, Chariton’s novel is indeed ‘a narrative pandering to the pokupqaclos¼mg … of its readers’,21 the final book is to give us a chance to make our excuses decently and leave. Much is at stake for our moral health: as ‘Philip the Philosopher’ puts it in his essay on Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, ‘the story screams at us that if someone ignores justice and busies himself (peqieqc²fetai) with money or a girl who have nothing to do with him, then he will suffer the misfortunes of Trachinos and Peloros and the boukoloi’ (p. 368.64 – 7 Colonna).22 As for the novelist himself, his business is, again in Plutarch’s description of the pokupq²clym, ‘the failures and errors and solecisms of [men’s] lives’, and the novelist’s memory – that skill which, from Homer on, lies at the heart of all literary composition – is ‘a most unpleasant ( !teqp´statom) filing-cabinet of jaj²’ (520b); Chariton too, then, as well as his readers, may be redeemed by his final book. What is in fact most audacious about Chariton’s claim is that it is this part which will be ‘sweetest’, which will be the reward for all the earlier sjuhqyp²; Plutarch, Petronius, and the Life of Aesop have all suggested that it is the jaj\ in which we are really interested. The matter is, of course, not really quite like that, for ‘pleasure’ is indeed the most familiar end-product of reading (ancient) fictions, and most fictions end happily. Chariton is thus not really swimming against the tide here. Rather, we can see one aspect of a complex set of considerations about writing and reading. In his famous letter to Lucceius asking the historian to write the history of his consulship, which has often been brought into connection with the traditions of ancient fiction,23 Cicero (Ad fam. 5.12.4 – 5) notes that his story contains perfidiam, insidias, proditionem, a list that might call to mind part of what Plutarch tells the pokupq²clym he will find in Rstoq_ai, and observes that it is temporum uarietates fortunaeque uicissitudines that bring the greatest pleasure in reading; here too we are not far from Plutarch’s pokupq²clym for whom pleasure lies ‘in a plentiful supply of disasters and troubles, in novelty and change’ (Mor. 519b). Moreover, says Cicero (and here again we think of Chariton), if the exciting narrative comes to a splendid (i. e. splendidly positive) conclusion, ‘the mind is filled with the 21 Whitmarsh 2005, 606. 22 On this text cf. Hunter 2005. 23 For what follows cf., e. g., Perry 1967, 144 – 6.

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sweetest pleasure reading offers’ (Ad fam. 5.12.5). As is well known, Cicero’s ‘recipe’ for a successful ‘history’ is here not far from what he (De inuentione 1.19) and the Ad Herennium (1.13) elsewhere refer to as a narratio in personis, which should consist ex rerum uarietate, animorum dissimilitudine, grauitate, lenitate, spe, metu, suspicione, desiderio, dissimulatione, errore, misericordia, fortunae commutatione, insperato incommodo, subita laetitia, iucundo exitu rerum (De inuentione 1.19). Reading or listening to such narratives is indeed a way of being healthily pokupq²clym, because it all turns out for the best. Let me finish with two further aspects of novelistic pokupqaclos¼mg which have perhaps not yet received their due. Of all the extant novels we associate this weakness most with the Onos and, particularly, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses with their curiosi central characters.24 The Metamorphoses is, of course, not just an adaptation of the Greek work (or the work which lies behind it) but also an interpretation, a ‘reading’, of it; the Metamorphoses is one of our great storehouses of information about ancient reading practices, and Lucius is one of antiquity’s most fervent lectores scrupulosi and (over-) interpreters. Such interpretative activity is precisely a form of peqieqc¸a and/or pokupqaclos¼mg. Aristarchus seems to have used peqieqc²feshai in a negative sense in promoting a ‘mythical’ approach to poetic texts and deprecating excessive allegorical readings which went beyond what the poet actually said,25 but – be that as it may – grammarians were notorious peq¸eqcoi,26 and in the Homeric scholia we find peq¸eqcor/yr used of unnecessary intervention and interpretation and pokupqaclome?m of the reader’s rôle.27 The Metamorphoses and its readers are therefore pokupq²clomer/curiosi in a special sense; they play the game of interpretation for all it is worth. Lucius of course is particularly curiosus in that, as an ass, he can take an interest in and observe what people do to a far greater extent than is normally possible. One particular area which is always exposed to the dangers of pokupqaclos¼mg and where Lucius did more than his fair share of observing is sex. It is therefore of some interest that one of the places where the scholia use pokupqaclome?m of the reader’s rôle 24 Cf., e. g., Winkler 1985, 60 – 4, 192, Keulen 2004. 25 Cf. D-scholium Iliad 5.385, Eustathius, Hom. 40.28 – 34, 561.29 – 30, Porter 1992, 70 – 74. 26 Cf. Antiphanes, AP 11.322.1 ( = Gow-Page, Garland of Philip 771). 27 Cf., e. g., Schol. A Iliad 22.410 (peq_eqcor), Schol. BT Iliad 12.116 – 17, 14.347 – 51 (pokupqaclome?m); cf. further below.

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is in a note on the flowers which spring up as Zeus makes love to Hera in Iliad 14: As [the poet] is narrating a vulgar matter he turns his verses to other matters, the flowers which grow up from the earth and the cloud [which conceals Zeus and Hera], and thus prevents us from asking further questions (peqait´qy pokupqaclome?m). (bT-scholium Iliad 14.347 – 51)

We are not to be allowed to put our oculus curiosus to the keyhole, as do Encolpius and Quartilla at Satyrica 26.4 – 5, or to conceal ourselves as do Athenagoras and his friend to watch Tarsia perform in a brothel in the History of Apollonius, King of Tyre;28 the poet, so the scholiast tells us, shuts off our ‘desire to know’, no less firmly than does Ovid with his brilliant cetera quis nescit?. 29 The scholiast almost reads Zeus’ words to Hera, ‘Hera, have no fear that any god or man will see this [i.e. our lovemaking]’ (Iliad 14.342 – 3) as a self-referential allusion to Homer’s narrative technique, and we may be tempted to go where the scholiast stopped short. Certainly, when Circe, perhaps under the influence of the kind of Homeric criticism reflected in the scholium, picks up Zeus’ words in encouraging Encolpius to do his manly duty, ‘There is no reason to fear any curiosus: your brother is far away from here’ (Satyrica 127.7), we may think that Petronius has indeed picked up Homer’s narrative hint;30 this scene of the Satyrica seems to contain clear elements of parody of the ‘ideal novel’, and as such its narrative practices are of particular interest. If, as the Homeric and Petronian scenes suggest, excessive pokupqaclos¼mg is indeed associated with an unhealthy interest in what the boy and girl of a novel do with each other when they finally get together, we may see a striking variation on this motif when Melite finally gets her man in Achilles Tatius’ novel: When she embraced me, I did not hold back; when our limbs drew close, I did not refuse the touch. Everything happened as Love willed. We had no need of bedding or of any of Aphrodite’s accoutrements; for Love is handy and resourceful, and a clever bricoleur (aqtouqc¹r … ja· aqtosw´dior sovist¶r), who can turn any place into a chapel for his mystic liturgy. The casual (t¹ !peq¸eqcom) in sex is far more sweet than the carefully prepared (toO 28 For this scene as a dramatisation of the reading experience cf. Hunter 2008. 29 Another interesting parallel is the parecbasis before the actual description of lovemaking in Ausonius’ Cento Nuptialis; the poet offers his readers the chance to stop before the physical description, cetera curiosis relinquite. 30 Cf. Roncali 1986, 109; on this passage see also Hunter 2006, 311.

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pokupq²clomor): its pleasure springs up like an untended plant. (Achilles Tatius 5.27.4, trans. J.J. Winkler; adapted)

Over Love’s true mystery, a proper silence is drawn; pokupqaclos¼mg has no place here. As Aesop too knew well, sex manuals, just like too much scholarship, spoil the pleasure.31

Bibliography Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction. The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World, London Fantuzzi, M. and Hunter, R. 2004. Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Cambridge Hunter, R. 1994. ‘History and historicity in the romance of Chariton’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der rçmischen Welt II 34.2 (Berlin) 1055 – 86 [= this volume 737 – 74] — 2005. ‘“Philip the Philosopher” on the Aithiopika of Heliodorus’ in S. Harrison, M. Paschalis, and S. Frangoulidis (eds.). Metaphor and the Ancient Novel (Groningen) 123 – 38 [= this volume 829 – 44] — 2006. ‘Plato’s Symposium and the traditions of ancient fiction’ in J.H. Lesher, D. Nails, and F.C.C. Sheffield (eds.), Plato’s Symposium. Issues in Interpretation and Reception (Washington) 295 – 312 [= this volume 845 – 66] — 2007. ‘Isis and the language of Aesop’ in M. Paschalis (ed.), Pastoral Palimpsests (Rethymnon) 39 – 58 [= this volume 867 – 83] — 2008. ‘The readers of the ancient novel’ in T. Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge) 261 – 71 Jouanno, C. 2006. Vie d’sope, Paris Keulen, W. 2004. ‘Lucius’ kinship diplomacy: Plutarchan reflections in an Apuleian character’ in L. De Blois et al. (eds.), The Statesman in Plutarch’s Works (Leiden) 261 – 73 Merkle, S. 1996. ‘Fable, “anecdote” and “novella” in the Vita Aesopi. The ingredients of a “popular novel”’ in O. Pecere and A. Stramaglia (eds.), La letteratura di consumo nel mondo greco-latino (Cassino) 211 – 24 Morales, H. 2004. Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Cambridge Perry, B. E. 1967. The Ancient Romances, Berkeley/Los Angeles Porter, J. I. 1992. ‘Hermeneutic lines and circles: Aristarchus and Crates on the exegesis of Homer’ in R. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney (eds.), Homer’s Ancient Readers (Princeton) 67 – 114 Roncali, R. 1986. ‘La cintura di Venere (Petronio, Satyricon, 126 – 131)’ Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 79: 106 – 10 31 That Clitophon’s plea for ‘lack of preparedness’ as the key to sexual pleasure itself adopts the didactic mode of a teaching manual is an irony typical of this work, cf. in general Morales 2004, 106 – 17.

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Slater, N. W. 1990. Reading Petronius, Baltimore/London Whitmarsh, T. 2005. ‘The Greek novel: titles and genre’ American Journal of Philology 126: 587 – 611 Winkler, J. J. 1985. Auctor & Actor. Berkeley.

General Index Achilles: 72, 253 Achilles Tatius: 746, 791 Acontius (and Cydippe): 206, 486 acrostic: 161 Actaion: 141 act-division: 613 acting: 643 Adonis: 230, 244 Adrastus: 769 adultery: 768 Aeolic: 313 Aeschylus: 14, 437 – Agamemnon: 664 – Diktyoulkoi: 673 – Persians: 20 Aesop: 867 Agamemnon: 72 Aietes: 104 aetiology: 346 Aktaion: 491 Alcibiades: 740, 794 Alcinous: 269 Alexander: 250 Alexandria: 97, 235, 278 – Library: 263 allegory: 777, 840, 882 Anaphe: 705 Anaxagoras: 563 Anthia: 790 Antimachus: 494, 539 Aphrodite: 134, 246 Aphrodite by Praxiteles: 760 Apollo: 29, 264, 569 Apollodorus (comic poet) – Hekyra : 621 Apollodorus of Athens: 35, 507 Apollonius: 29, 90, 721 – Argonautica: 31, 59, 60, 257, 343, 475 Apsyrtus: 45, 78, 294

Apuleius: 830 – Cupid & Psyche: 830, 862 – Metamorphoses: 848, 893 Aratus: 378, 540 – Phainomena: 153, 470, 727 Archilochus: 550 Arete: 49, 269 Argonauts: 47 Ariadne: 80 Aristaenetus: 207 Aristaios: 475 Aristarchus: 13, 511 Aristeas of Proconessus: 730 Aristomenes: 849 Aristophanes: 239, 575, 581 – Ekklesiazousai: 575 – Frogs: 437 – Ploutos: 575 Aristophanes of Byzantium: 13 Aristotle: 9, 62, 169, 643 – Poetics: 9, 360, 643, 852 – Rhetoric: 666 Arsinoe: 234 Arsinoe II: 247 Artaxerxes II: 739, 765 Artemidorus of Perge: 264 Artemidorus of Tarsus: 394 Asclepiades of Myrlea: 394, 665 Asclepiades (epigrammatist): 554 Asclepius: 871 Asianism: 12 Athena: 129, 419 Athenaeus: 220, 651 Attic Comedy: 575 Atticism: 12 Augeias: 292 Augustus: 378 Bacchylides: 296 “banquet narratives”:

632

898

General Index

Bathycles of Arcadia: 319 Berenice: 245 Bion: 229 Black Sea: 259 bucolic poetry: 393 Callimachus: 14, 23, 57, 86, 115, 127, 278, 328, 537, 559 – Aitia: 285-6, 346, 452, 533, 569 – Victoria Berenices: 290-1, 297 – Hecale: 297, 356 – Hymns: 130, 405 – H. 1: 413, 426 – H. 5: 419, 491 – H. 6: 419, 491 – Iambi: 311 Callinus: 552 Callirhoe: 738 Cassius Longinus: 539 Catullus: 57, 138 Cassandra: 668 Chabrias: 739 Chaireas: 738 Charikleia: 812 Chariton: 812 – Chaireas and Callirhoe: 737 Cheiron: 685 Choirilos: 539, 543 choliambic genre: 312 chorus: 575, 628 Chremonidean War: 99, 268 Chrysippus: 180 Circe: 56, 761, 859 Cleanthes – Hymn to Zeus: 159 comedy, history of: 322, 503 commentaries: 400 Ctesias: 740 Curiosity: 884 Cyclic: 306, 357, 373 Cyclops: 465 Cyrene: 264, 415 Damascius: 538 Daphnis: 23, 229, 450 Delphi: 813 Demeter: 149, 459 Demetrius

– On Style: 527 dialects: 313 didactic poetry: 169, 345, 514 Dike: 179, 471 Dio Chrysostom: 11, 664 Diogenes of Babylon: 511 Dionysius I of Syracuse: 738 Dionysius (character in Chariton): 745 Dionysius (son of Calliphon): 513 Dionysius: 700 – Periegesis: 513 Dionysius of Halicarnassus: 12, 438, 755, 786 – On imitation: 551 Dionysius Scytobrachion: 33, 107 Dionysius Thrax: 527 Dionysus: 194, 267, 280 Diophantus: 541 Dioscorides: 336 Dioskouroi: 265 Diphilos: 657 Doric: 237, 312, 391, 409 Duris of Samos: 539, 743 dreams: 196 echo: 878 Egypt: 382 elegiac metre: 136, 525 envoi: 355, 718 epanalepsis: 710 ephebate: 80 Ephesus: 312 epic endings: 364 Epicharmus: 239 Epicurus: 511, 862 epigrams: 116, 457 epiphany: 30, 129, 415 Epitaphios Bionos: 393 epitaphs: 117 epyllia: 297, 363 Eratosthenes: 13, 174, 554 – Hermes: 297 – Erigone: 554 Erysichthon: 147, 490 Eudoxus: 153 Eumaeus: 292 Eumolpus: 799, 856

899

General Index

Eunapius: 541 Euphorion: 497 Euripides: 14, 437, 604, 675 – Bacchae: 140, 637 – Medea: 44, 51 – Trojan Women: 56-7 Eustathius: 732, 859 fables: 882 Fortune: 273, 746 Fragmentum Grenfellianum:

652

garlands: 120 genre: 462, 550, 682 gods, prologising: 640 Gorgias: 671 Gyges: 140 Harpies: 477 Hecataeus of Abdera: 109 Hecate: 267 Helen: 56 Heniochos: 587 Heliodorus: 748, 770, 804, 829, 856 Heracles: 68, 102, 290 Heraclitus: 115 Hermes: 637, 860 Hermesianax: 396, 493, 524 Hermocrates: 738 Hermogenes: 527, 529 Herodas: 189, 212, 318, 653 Herodorus: 32 Herodotus: 95, 109, 140, 288, 740 ‘heroines’, Libyan: 266, 351 Hesiod: 148, 155, 286, 331, 435, 470, 559, 873 – Catalogue: 470 – Theogony: 426 – Works and Days: 156 Hipparchus: 153 Hipponax: 192, 314, 317, 319, 653 Homer: 15, 111, 300, 344 – book-divisions: 306 – Iliad, Catalogue of Ships: 713 – Iliad 22: 673 – Odyssey: 353 homoeroticism: 795 Homeric Hymns: 129, 405

– H.hym.Ap.: 411 – H.hym.Dion.: 430 homonoia, Homonoia: 77, 264 Horace: 311, 323, 329, 389, 442, 506, 647 iambus: 448, 551 impotence: 857 Ion of Chios: 316 Isis: 867 Jason: 46, 59 Johannes Eugenikos:

833

Kalasiris: 817 Karneia: 416 Komatas: 450 komos: 335, 638, 657, 766 Kyrene: 475 language, invention of: 875 Life of Aesop: 562, 867, 884 Lemnos: 688 locus amoenus: 778, 872 “Longinus”: 19, 444, 549 Longus: 746, 775 – Daphnis & Chloe: 875 Lucian: 538 – Onos: 848 [Lucian] Amores: 761 Lucilius: 323 Lucretius: 516, 780 Lycophron – Alexandra: 303, 452 Lysias: 453, 788 – Or. 1: 768, 810 Machon: 336 Manilius: 163 Medea: 42, 65, 104, 107 Megakleides: 674 Megara: 304 Meleager: 336 Menander: 200, 553, 579, 580, 601, 628, 649 – Dyskolos: 594, 612, 622, 629, 655 – Epitrepontes: 621, 629 – Samia: 579, 614, 629, 631

900

General Index

Mercury: 636 messenger-speech: 637, 671 Mestra: 490 Middle Comedy: 627 mime: 235, 650 mimiamboi: 189 Mimnermus: 524, 552 – Nanno: 493 Molorkos: 291 Moschus – Europa: 363, 487 Mousaios: 682 mummification: 249 Muses: 167, 286, 349, 867 Museum: 314 mythic narrative: 150 Nausicaa: 49 Nemean lion: 292 Neoptolemus of Parium: Nicomedes of Bithynia: Nile: 381 Niobe: 422 novel: 790, 884 Nymphis: 259 Nymphs: 786

508, 663, 503

Odysseus: 125, 286, 772, 854 old age: 332 Orestes: 81 Origen: 837, 847 Orpheus: 32, 495, 682 Orphic Argonautica: 681 Ovid: 141, 208, 384, 499 – Ibis: 546 [Ovid] Epistula Sapphus: 384 Pan: 640 Panyassis: 306 Paris: 134 pastoral poetry: 393 patronage: 519 Peisander: 306 Pentheus: 140 periodization: 12 Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’): 503, 720 Petronius: 761

– Satyrica: 798, 856, 886 Phaethon: 294 Phanocles: 493 Pherecydes: 419 Philemon: 593 – Thesauros: 606 Philicus: 335 – Hymn to Demeter: 147 Philip the philosopher: 831 Philitas: 493, 524 Philodemus: 14, 507, 532 Philostratus: 874 Phylarchus: 743 Pindar: 60, 296, 345, 435, 442 Plato: 86, 334, 344, 539, 566, 644, 775 – Ion: 317, 788 – Phaedo: 850 – Phaedrus: 453, 775, 835 – Symposium: 775, 792, 845, 884 – Timaeus: 111 Plautus: 212, 581, 593, 612 – Amphitruo: 627 – Asinaria: 599 – Aulularia: 612 – Casina: 621 – Menaechmi: 581 – Mercator: 621 – Poenulus: 591 – Pseudolus: 224 – Rudens: 591, 622, 672 – Trinummus: 593 – Vidularia: 622 Pliny: 649 Plutarch: 168, 565, 655, 885 poetry books: 311, 407 Polybius: 17, 288, 360, 755 polyeideia: 311, 316 pornoboskos: 222 Porphyry: 539 – Homeric Questions: 829 Posidippus: 332, 457, 555 – lithika: 457 Poseidon: 460 Prodicus: 538, 564-5 Prohaeresius: 541 Priapos: 267 Proclus: 538, 565

901

General Index

Prodicus: 538, 564 prologues: 504, 602 Propertius: 395 Protagoras: 168, 564 Pseudo-Scymnus, see Periodos to Nicomedes Ptolemies: 97, 428 – Ptolemy Euergetes: 417 – Ptolemy Philadelphus: 234, 378 pyrriche: 81 Pythagoras: 511, 564 Quintilian:

11, 551, 645

realism: 212 recusatio: 695 Rhetoric to Alexander: 172 Rhianus: 307 Roman Comedy: 577 ’running slave’: 647 Samothracian gods: 266 Sannio: 222, 657 Sappho: 339, 388, 408, 527 Sarapeion at Memphis: 337 Seneca: 672 Sesostris: 109 Seven Sages: 321 Severianus: 537 Shield of Achilles: 257 Sicily: 287 simile: 352, 356 Simonides: 326 Sirens: 691, 859 slavery: 880 snakes, giant: 381 Socrates: 317, 566, 794, 845 Solon: 564 Song of Songs: 837, 847 Sophocles: 304 Sophron: 235 Sopolis: 542 Sotades: 651 Sousarion: 323 Sparta: 135 spoudaiogeloion: 322 stars: 175 Stoicism: 158, 507

Strabo: 697 symposium: 281 Syracusan dialect: 239 Syracuse: 235, 763 technai (prose handbooks): 169 teichoskopia: 675 Telchines: 334, 561 Teiresias: 130, 419, 492 Terence: 601, 602 – Adelphoe: 614, 657 – Phormio: 601 Thales: 320 Theagenes: 812 Theocritean corpus: 390 Theocritus: 20, 189, 229, 233, 384, 434, 784 – Id. 2: 451 – Id. 6: 466 – Id. 7: 434 – Id. 11: 299, 466 Theon: 394 Theophrastus: 154, 235, 507 Thera: 264 Thersites: 872 Theseus: 79 Thucydides: 16, 344, 437 Thynias: 264 Timaios: 16, 288 Timon of Phlius: 315 Timotheus of Miletus: 327 Tiphys: 76 Tithonus: 86, 331 Tyche: 273, 275, 746 Virgil: 61, 84, 90, 257, 382, 392, 685 – Eclogues: 392 – Ecl. 1: 519 Xenophon: 170, 740 – Kynegetikos: 170 Xenophon of Ephesus: 795, 812 Zeus:

157

690, 752,

Passages Index (See also General Index under author names) Achilles Tatius 1.1-2: 753 Adespota (fragmenta comica, Kassel and Austin) 1032: 590 Adespota (fragmenta tragica, Kannicht and Snell) 649: 671-2 Aeschylus Agamemnon 1100-1113: 670 1101-6: 668-9 1199-1201: 669 1242-5: 671 Alexis fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 239: 588 246: 268-9 265: 646 Anaxilas fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 12: 589 Anth. Pal. 7.285: 123 7.465: 115 11.275: 543 Antiphanes fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 19: 633-4 74: 634-5 166: 635 189: 630 210: 634 Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica 1.1: 343, 372 1.5-17: 344 1.20-2: 349, 689 1.77-8: 482

1.86-9: 481-2 1.158-60: 483 1.190-8: 482 1.331-62: 68 1.450-9: 70 1.853-60: 478-9 1.1280-6: 71 1.1286-9: 71 1.1339-43: 72 2.70-3: 93 2.88-97: 91 2.273-300: 477 2.345-401: 708, 723 2.500-1: 476 2.506-7: 476 2.541-8: 723 2.566-7: 262 2.610ff.: 72 2.669-713: 264 2.669-719: 29 2.762-771: 30 2.774-779: 708 2.774-810: 258 2.780-5: 366 2.841-50: 362-3 2.851-63: 76 2.885: 77 2.1123-33: 366 2.1146-51: 105 2.1165-6: 367 3.158-66: 722 3.171-5: 67 3.245-6: 293 3.360-1: 481 3.1258-64: 81 4.1-5: 50 4.12-13: 53 4.35-40: 54 4.57-65: 52

Passages Index

4.92-3: 47 4.167-73: 83 4.195-205: 64 4.247-52: 347 4.257-93: 108 4.259-93: 724 4.350-420: 371 4.368-9: 48 4.404-5: 45 4.552-6: 367 4.588-94: 266 4.730-6: 691-2 4.736-7: 49 4.739-48: 55 4.982-92: 346 4.1000-02: 275 4.1014-28: 55 4.1019-22: 57, 272 4.1060-7: 48 4.1176-9: 271 4.1223-7: 368 4.1255: 66 4.1300-04: 706-7 4.1305-7: 351 4.1319-21: 354, 691 4.1337-44: 352 4.1381-4: 352-3 4.1773-6: 350 4.1774-5: 365 Apuleius Metamorphoses 1.6: 854 1.19: 850 6.29: 751 11.2: 870 11.3.3: 869 11.15: 855 Aratus Phainomena 1-4: 155 10-13: 157 100-105: 472 257-263: 184 408-35: 185 454-61: 164 783-7: 161-2 1036-7: 173 Archilochus

POxy 4708: 554-5 Aristophanes fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 8, 9: 586 Frogs 929-30: 14 946-7: 24 1378-1410: 531 Ekklesiazousai 729-30: 576 876-7: 580 1111-12: 583 Ploutos 321-2: 584 626-7: 584 770-1: 584 801-2: 585 Aristotle Poetics 1451b4-11: 852-3 1451b6-7: 173 1451b6-11: 691 1461b26-1462a 14: 643 Rhetoric 3.12: 439 Athenaeus Deipnosophistai 14.620a-21f: 650 Bion Lament for Adonis 54-5: 229 106-8: 247 128-30: 245-6 136-7: 248 Callimachus Aetia (Pfeiffer) fr. 1: 314, 357 fr. 1.3: 357 fr. 1.9-12: 524 fr. 1.17-38: 329-30 fr. 1.20: 532 fr. 1.29-30: 527 fr. 1.29-38: 86 fr. 1.33-6: 529 fr. 2: 87 fr. 7: 534

903

904 fr. 43: 284 fr. 51: 285 fr. 74.14-20: 475 fr. 75.4-9: 348 fr. 75.46: 483 fr. 112.9: 474 fr. 178: 278-9 fr. 178.21-2: 729 SH 264.1-2: 298 Epigrams (Pfeiffer) 2: 115, 473-4, 559 17: 122 27: 544 28: 14-5 Hymns H. 1 1-3: 428 5-6: 430 92-93: 432 H. 2 22-7: 422 97-103: 38 105-13: 412 H. 3 1: 422 1-2: 421 6-9: 422-3 250: 422 251-258: 100 H. 4 171-174: 99 224-5: 71-3 316-24: 409 H. 5 1-12: 132-3 23-8: 134 55-56: 418 85-95: 137 107-9: 145 H. 6 7-17: 127 10 ff: 128 17-23: 418 29-30: 128 Iambi fr. 203.11-19: 312 fr. 203.30-3: 315 Catullus

Passages Index

carmina 3.13-15: 231 65.11-16: 138 Chariton Chaireas and Callirhoe 1.1.1: 751 1.1.1-2: 759 1.3.3: 766 1.4.7: 767 1.5.4-5: 769 2.2.2: 760 2.5.10: 750 2.6.1: 747 2.9.5: 751 3.3.8: 746 3.4.16: 764 3.4.18: 764 4.4.7-10: 742 5.5.3: 751 6.7.7: 740 7.1.8: 751 7.2.4: 751 7.3.9: 745 8.1.4: 754, 891 8.6: 740 8.8.16: 751 Cicero Ad familiares 5.12: 743 5.12.4-5: 743, 892 Cleanthes Hymn to Zeus 21-31: 181 26-44: 182 Cleon of Kourion SH 339 : 359 Critias fragmenta (Kannicht and Snell) 19: 563 Dionysius Periegesis 1-3: 718 170-3: 720 352-5: 710-11 355: 701 525-32: 703 414-17: 701

Passages Index

441-3: 710 612-9: 725 644-9: 725-6 650-1: 721 715-7: 730 768-71: 709 780-3: 709 826-38: 705 881-6: 724 1053: 729 1056-62: 702 1166-74: 726 1166-80: 727 1181-6: 718 Empedocles fragmenta (Diels and Kranz) 129: 510 Eubulus fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 102: 589-90 103: 589-90 Eunapius Lives of the Sophists XIII, p. 494: 542 Euripides Hercules Furens 637-700: 332 655-72: 338 Medea 645-53: 51-2 Heliodorus Aithiopika 1.7.2: 759 1.9.1: 805 1.10.4: 810 1.18.1: 806 1.18.4-19.1: 817 2.10: 808 2.16: 814 2.26.2-3: 816 3.2.3-3.1: 821-2 3.4.7-9: 822-3 3.16.3-4: 824 4.9.1: 806 4.13.3-5: 818 5.33.4: 806

905

8.10-11: 841 10.39.1-3: 826 Heniochos fragmenta (Kassel and Austin) 5: 587 Hermesianax fragmenta (Powell) 7 : 495 7.21-6: 495-6 7.35-7: 524 Herodas Mimiambi 1.69-72: 192 2.31-40: 222-3 2.41-54: 225 2.68-71: 198 4.79-85: 215 5.26-7: 218 6.65-73: 198-9 8.67-79: 193 Herodotus 2.2: 876 Hesiod Theogony 114-16: 560 Works and Days 248-62: 178 265-6: 560, 872 274-80: 564 286-92: 564 646-62: 167 fragmenta (Merkelbach and West) 1.16: 479 Homer Odyssey 8.487-98: 160 8.499-502: 305 sch. bT Iliad : 665-6 14.347-51: 894 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 427-33: 161 Horace Ars Poetica 179-88: 663 carmina 4.1: 339 4.2.1-12: 442 4.2.25-32: 442

906 Epistles 2.1.1-4: 505-6 Satires 1.6.54-62: 518 Lament for Bion 46-7: 879 Life of Aesop 4: 871 6-8: 867-9 56: 885 62: 888 76: 881 “Longinus” De sublimitate 9.11-14: 695 9.13: 369 32.4: 440 33-36: 549 33.3-5: 440-1 35.2-5: 732 44.2-5: 444 Longus Daphnis and Chloe Proem : 784 1.25-7: 775 1.27: 779 2.8.1-4: 782 2.34: 779 3.13.3: 782 3.21-3: 779 3.23: 779 Lucretius De rerum natura 1.62-74: 510-11 1.921-50: 516 Martial Epigrams 10.4: 545-6 Meleager Anth. Pal. 7.419: 336-7 Menander Dyskolos 867-73: 656 895: 657 902-3: 641 901-5: 657

Passages Index

Epitrepontes 219-25: 203-4 Nicander Theriaka 1-7: 728 Orphic Argonautica 1-13: 681-2 97-105: 694 406-41: 685 471-83: 687-8 858-9: 689 1347-50: 690 Ovid Amores 1.5: 142-3 3.7.13-4: 858 3.7.21-2: 857-8 Metamorphoses 1.1-4: 684 3.177-82: 145 10.148-54: 684 [Ovid] Epistula Sapphus 1-8: 386-7 9-10: 387 123-4: 388 187-8: 388 Periodos to Nicomedes (‘Pseudo-Scymnus’) 1-4: 503-4 11-16: 506 19-21: 510 37-44: 514-5 50-54: 517 69-72: 504-5, 516 98-102: 731 Petronius Satyrica 49.3-5: 888 49.7: 889 85-7: 799 85.2: 800 87.4: 801 126.1.13-18: 761 126-31: 856-7 127.7: 862, 894

Passages Index

127.9: 862 128.5: 862 128.6: 863 128.7: 857 129.7: 858 Phanocles fragmenta (Powell) 1: 497 Philicus SH 980: 335 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 5.14-17: 874 Pindar Pythian 4.207-13: 259-60 11.22-5: 50 Plato Phaedrus 229b-230a: 777 230b-c: 784 245a: 542-3 Republic 2.362e-7e: 566 Symposium 172e5-6: 853 173c2-5: 851 180c4-5c2: 793 192b5-d2: 793 215d2-6: 852 Plautus Asinaria 809-10: 577 Aulularia 89-100: 623 587-607: 619 627-8: 578 Cistellaria 630-1: 578 Poenulus 522-3: 646 Pseudolus 573-4: 578 1080-1083: 224-5 Rudens 6-21: 177 67-9: 185 154-80: 672

907

Trinummus 1-22: 593 601-2: 578 615-21: 610 657-8: 604 718-26: 609 1008-27: 606 1028-58: 606 Plutarch De curiositate 517e-f: 890 518a: 891 Polybius 38.5-6: 359-60 Posidippus Epigrams (Austin and Bastianini) 1: 458 19: 460 20: 459 118 ( = SH 705): 333, 555 Propertius 1.9.11-12: 530 Quintilian 10.1.58: 552 Seneca Controversia 1.2: 834 Simonides fragmenta (West) 19-20: 339 22: 326 Terence Adelphoe 854-5: 578 987-8: 658 Andria 171-2: 579 Heauton Timoroumenos 30-40: 647-8 170-1: 580 873-4: 580 Theocritus Idylls 1.1-6: 877 1.4-6: 229 3.1-4: 201

908 3.40-51: 498 5.63-5: 203 7.35-6: 480 7.42-51: 434 7.52-89: 445 7.72-89: 22-3 7.90-5: 21, 436 7.93: 378, 444-5 7.96-119: 21-2 7.96-127: 446 7.131-46: 879 13.21-4: 260 15.46-50: 98 15.80-93: 238-9 15.100-44: 243 17.38-9: 270 17.77-85: 380 25.1: 296 25.84-5: 295 25.96-107: 301 25.138-41: 293 25.145-9: 293 25.152-3: 295 Thucydides 1.20-2: 437, 755 Timocles fragmenta (Kassel and Austin)

Passages Index

27: 586 Timotheus PMG 202-33: 327-8 PMG 800: 40 Triphiodorus Capture of Troy 664-7: 693 Virgil Aeneid 3.102-17: 109-10 5.477-80: 92 6.458-60: 57, 272 Georgics 2.136 ff: 380 2.155-7: 381 3.209-41: 89 Eclogues 1.1-5: 877 1.42-43: 379-80 3.60 f : 378 4.15-17: 379 8.11: 379 Xenophon of Ephesus 3.2.2-3.2.8: 795-6 5.14: 790