The Paradigm of Simias: Essays on Poetic Eccentricity 9783110640106, 9783110635935

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Jan Kwapisz The Paradigm of Simias

Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes

Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Associate Editors Evangelos Karakasis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie Stephen J. Harrison · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 75

Jan Kwapisz

The Paradigm of Simias Essays on Poetic Eccentricity

ISBN 978-3-11-063593-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064010-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-063604-8 ISSN 1868-4785 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967078 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Editorial Office: Alessia Ferreccio and Katerina Zianna Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com



For Mikołaj Szymański

Contents Acknowledgements  IX Introduction: The Paradigm of Simias  1  . . .

The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes  17 Philology  20 Formal experimentalism  28 Paradox, eeriness, fantasy  40

 . .

Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers  54 Dissecting the Phoenix  60 Conversing over centuries  78

 . .

Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers 89 Optatian and the Greeks  90 A postscript on isopsephy  106

 . .

The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium  112 Nuancing the picture  112 Reading and viewing figure poems in Byzantium  118

Appendix: A New Alexandria and its Little Museum  135 Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior  138 Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Little Museum  150 Bibliography  167 Index of Sources and Passages Cited  181 General Index  189

Acknowledgements This libellus was written out of a genuine pothos to learn more about its main characters, but also pro gradu, as a Habilitationsschrift at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of Warsaw. It originated in a project funded by the Polish National Science Centre under grant No DEC-2013/11/B/HS2/02628, without which generous support this book could not come into existence. Chapters 1 and 3, and roughly a half of the Appendix, are adapted from essays that were earlier published separately: Chapter 1 = Kwapisz 2018b: ‘The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes’, in: J. Kwapisz (ed.), Hellenistica Posnaniensia: Faces of Hellenistic Lyric, Aitia 8.1 (2018), an online journal. Chapter 3 = Kwapisz 2017: ‘Optatian and the Order of Court Riddlers’, in: M. Squire/J. Wienand (eds.), Morphogrammata/The Lettered Art of Optatian: Figuring Cultural Transformations in the Age of Constantine, Paderborn 2017, 165–190. Appendix – cf. Kwapisz 2015: ‘Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior’, in: Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo 5(8) (2015), 167–182. In addition, Chapter 2 re-uses, as its small part, a short note that also appeared separately (Kwapisz 2018a): ‘An Unnoticed Fragment of Laevius?’, in: Philologus 162 (2018), 178–180. One advantage of this book’s earlier publication in instalments is that I was fortunate to be able to either react to or to incorporate in it precious responses to its different parts from different readers and audiences, none of whom, however, saw more than what was to become a single chapter of this book. I presented earlier drafts of Chapter 1, 3 and the Appendix at seminars and conferences at Cologne, Poznań and Warsaw, and papers that included some of the ideas this book develops at Reading and Vandœuvres, Geneva. For stimulating comments, inspiring suggestions and general support I am extremely indebted to Krystyna Bartol, Simone Beta, Peter Bing, Jerzy Danielewicz, Halina Dudała, Patrick Finglass, Lucia Floridi, Joshua Katz, Peter Kruschwitz, Pauline LeVen, Rachel Mairs, Barbara Milewska-Waźbińska, Alexandra Pappas, Marco Perale, Mark Saltveit, Michael Squire, Mikołaj Szymański, Marek Węcowski, Johannes Wienand and the audiences at the above-mentioned conferences. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to those who either shared with me their publications, at times ahead of print, and other priceless materials, including private notes, or in other ways helped to access some obscure publication or an early print: besides nearly all of those mentioned above, Börje Bydén, Jim Clauss, Michał Czerenkiewicz, Elena Ermolaeva, Michael Fontaine, Luigi Galasso, Wolfram Hörandner, Katarzyna Jażdżewska, Max Leventhal, Angelika Modlińska-Piekarz, Monika Mydel, Jaromír Olšovský, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-202

X  Acknowledgements Jolanta Polanowska, Piotr Rypson, Karolina Sekita and Olga Staroštíková offered such assistance. I also wish to warmly thank the two anonymous readers for the ‘Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes’ series, whose valuable comments helped to improve the manuscript, and the series’ editors for shepherding this book to publication. For their continuous support I am deeply grateful to my family (including the cat Magali). Most of all, my love and gratitude is to my wife, Kasia Pietruczuk, for her wisdom, for being a source of constant inspiration, and for bearing with me, and also with the hare-brained Optatian and the noseless Holobolus, while I was working on this book, at a time when so much else happened in our lives, including our son Stefan. I dedicate this book to Mikołaj Szymański, my friend and teacher, who probably owes something to the paradigm of Simias, but who has also invented, the biggest marvel of all, his very own paradigm.

Introduction The Paradigm of Simias There were good reasons not to write this book, and there are good reasons not to read it. Its main characters – Simias of Rhodes, Laevius, Leonides of Alexandria, Julius Vestinus, Optatian Porfyry, Constantine the Rhodian, Manuel Holobolus, and also Johann Klinger and Mikołaj Lubomirski – are by no means heroes of popular imagination; even as I am writing this it strikes me as a rather odd assortment of names. Even to classicists most of these individuals are largely obscure.1 And those who are familiar with them rarely have warm feelings towards them. For all these poets and scholars’ business was primarily with linguistic games, riddling diction and poetic obscurity (a set of phenomena to which modern criticism applies the term technopaegnia as a useful collective label2), in short – with exploring, with notable persistence, more recondite regions of poetry and literature; an array of preoccupations which has so often made modern critics question these individuals’ sound judgement in litterary matters. It would be an amusing, and also instructive, exercise to compile an extensive catalogue of denigrating remarks that the critics of many periods cared to formulate at the expense of Simias and the others, yet this task I leave for others. For now, let us just recall that the Belles Lettres edition of Theocritus judges the literary merit of Simias and his followers’ technopaegnia to be ‘thin, if not non-existent’,3 that it is characteristic that when a serious scholar notes that Catullus may have been interested in Laevius’ works, he feels compelled to immediately add: ‘though stylistically I suspect that they served above all as an awful warning’,4 that readers of Pauly–Wissowa get to know Optatian as ‘the author of hare-brained frivolities in verse’ (!),5 and, in sum, that it is an almost established critical convention to accuse these poets (and as a consequence also scholars who are flippant enough

 1 Cf., e.g., Squire 2017b, 55 on Optatian’s obscurity. 2 On the history of this term, see the Appendix, n. 14 (and cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 9–11 and Kwapisz 2015, 169 n. 8). 3 Legrand 1927, 227: ‘leur mérite littéraire est mince, sinon nul’. 4 Brown 1980. 5 Helm 1959, 1928: ‘Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius … ist der Verfasser hirnverbrannter Versspielereien’, transl. Squire 2017b, 55. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-001

2  Introduction to develop interest in them) of tastelessness and futility.6 No one can say he or she was not warned. If the reader of this book is reckless enough to ignore this warning, then they may be interested in finding out that some aspects of this trolling discourse deserve attention on their own. For instance, it is noteworthy how often the issues of monsters and monstrosity emerge in connection with what was spawned by Simias, Laevius, Optatian and the like; such comments may be pejorative in their tone, but one often feels these are uttered with a certain amazement. Legrand recognizes the pseudo-Theocritean figure poem Syrinx as the most successful poem in its genre, but nevertheless calls it a monstrum.7 Laevius’ lexical coinages are regularly referred to as monstrosities,8 and this is also how the linguistic games of Optatian’s fifth- and sixth-century followers Flavius Felix, Florentinus and Luxorius were characterized,9 whereas Levitan quite famously wrote of Optatian himself that he ‘is not a good poet; he is not even a bad poet’, for ‘[h]is

 6 Cf. Gow 1952, 553 on the technopaegnion Syrinx attributed to Theocritus: ‘however futile or tasteless we may judge the Syrinx to be, we cannot pronounce it spurious on that account’, which picks up on Fritzsche and Hiller 1881, 296: ‘Gegen Th[eokrit] sprechen, abgesehen von der Geschmacklosigkeit des ganzen …’; Wheeler 1964, 76: ‘Thus in many ways Laevius was a true forerunner of Catullus but on the whole the fragments create an unfavorable impression of his skill. He seems to have been schoolmaster turned poet – one who knew his material from the technical side, but who lacked the ability and the taste to accomplish much that as art was worth while’; Schanz 1914, 13 on Optatian: ‘Verwunderlich ist es nur, dass ein Mann so unendlichen Fleiss auf solche Abgeschmacktheiten und Nichtigkeiten verwenden wollte’; Raby 1957, 45, again on Optatian: ‘the fifteenth poem is the triumph of the poet’s futility’; Bandtkie 1815, 427 on Wawrzyniec Susliga’s Technicometria, i.e. one of the compilations of ludus poeticus I discuss in the Appendix: ‘pisemko Susligi nikczemne, anagramata iałowe i akrosticha dzikie; ramota cała pewny dowód gustu upadającego’ (‘Susliga’s vile booklet, futile anagrams and wild acrostichs, the whole scribbling being a sure proof of declining taste’). I have collected further comments of this sort in my edition of the Greek figure poems, Kwapisz 2013a, 3–4 and 138, whereas Squire 2017a, 25–26, and 2017b, 55–56, offers a selection of similar remarks on Optatian. 7 Legrand 1925, 218–219: ‘S’il fallait croire que l’auteur prenait cela au sérieux, on devrait le juger pédant et médiocrement spirituel. Mais sans doute il s’en amusait; et peut-être entendaitil, en rédigeant ce monstrum (très réussi en son genre), se moquer du langage obscur, prétentieux et entortillé qui faisait la gloire d’un Lycophron’. 8 Wheeler 1964, 75: ‘Such monstrosities occur as silentus, meminens …, pudoricolor, trisaeclisenex, and subductisupercilicarptores …’; Sandy 1997, 52: ‘To their credit, they reject as too poetic such Laevian monstrosities as subductisupercilicarptores (“eyebrow-raising supercilious carpers”)’. 9 Gaselee 1931, 7: ‘We find in them the tiresome technopaegnia or tricks of verse which became all too popular in the more strictly Christian poets of the time … Luxorius is the best of the three, and cares less than the others for these artistic monstrosities’.

The Paradigm of Simias  3

poems are prodigies, monsters in the literal sense’.10 In a slightly different context, Wilamowitz sees monsters in the fantastic shapes the scribes gave to the Greek figure poems in Byzantine MSS.11 Perhaps it is even possible to trace this evidently useful metaphor to Antiquity, if I am right in suggesting that when Julius Vestinus’ figure poem Altar says in lines 23–24 that it is free of venomous monsters, this may be a metapoetic reference to the exasperating riddles of Dosiadas’ similar Altar, on which Vestinus’ poem was modelled.12 If the technopaegnia, in the broad sense of the word, are monsters, then critical attitudes towards these rather strikingly correspond with perceptions of Beowulf by modern scholarship; the literal monsters of this now famous Old English poem, and consequently the poem itself, had largely been neglected until Tolkien vindicated it by focusing on its monsters as the central theme in his famous 1936 essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’. This is how an Anglo-Saxon scholar characterizes this momentous turn of literary criticism: To previous generations of critics, visibly obsessed with the Homeric model, there was little dignity in the hero’s struggles with monsters that were at once improbable and disgusting, and the view that the poem was ‘cheap’ or ‘trivial’ encouraged the opinion that it was also irrelevant: the real epics of the Anglo-Saxons must have been lost … Tolkien argued powerfully that, for the Germanic mentality that gave birth to the myth of Ragnarök, the monsters of the poem were the only appropriate enemies for a great hero, and thus shifted Beowulf from the irrelevant fringes to the very centre of the Anglo-Saxon world.13

Well, we have just seen that to previous generations of critics, probably quite obsessed with the Homeric model, and also ‘classical’ model, of ancient poetry (not just epic but also lyric), there was little dignity in Simias’, Laevius’ and Optatian’s struggles with (poetic) monsters that were at once improbable and disgusting. As it happens, it is also not difficult to demonstrate that the view that the technopaegnia were ‘cheap’ and ‘trivial’ encouraged the opinion that they were also irrelevant; that such poetic creations are marginal phenomena is an often-made point. Even more recent discussions emphasize their marginality, although these

 10 Levitan 1985, 246; cf. Miller 2009, 50. 11 Wilamowitz 1906, 246 on Simias’ technopaegnia: ‘Es hat gar keinen Zweck, im Abdrucke der Gedichte die Kontur typographisch nachzubilden und das Verständnis des Sinnes zu beeinträchtigen; dabei kommen nur Monstra heraus ähnlich wie in den Handschriften der Byzantiner’. 12 Kwapisz 2013a, 189. 13 Wormald 2006, 35.

4  Introduction are careful to avoid biased judgements as to their literary merits, or are even capable of finding some merit in their marginal playfulness.14 Does it mean that the ‘hare-brained frivolities’ may, in the end, turn out to also have place, like Beowulf, not in the irrelevant fringes, but in the very centre of the relevant periods of literary history? I am not so sure, after all. For one thing, the intellectuals with whom this book is preoccupied no longer need their Tolkien, since a number of recent studies have did them justice by quite seriously approaching them from a variety of perspectives and consequently placing them in relevant cultural contexts; this critical turn will be clearly and richly documented in the subsequent chapters. On the other hand, I should advise caution in dismissing the dismissive opinions regarding the technopaegnia as resulting merely from mistaken notions about ancient literature. The persistence with which such views recur throughout the reception of the technopaegnia may suggest, I think, that the pronounced tendency to trigger such responses may be an intrinsic feature of these poems and poetic devices; perhaps even a generic feature in the sense that it was deliberately planted in them by their creators.15 It may be telling that depreciating verdicts concerning the literary value or cultural significance are not limited to the responses from modern readers; in fact, one who undertook to compile their catalogue would have to start the inquiry with Antiquity. Meleager’s characterization of Simias’ epigrams as βρωτὴ ἀχράς (1.30 Gow/Page), i.e. probably ‘an edible wild pear’ (see further Chapter 1), suggests that he had problem digesting his poetry. Lucian in his Lexiphanes (25) denounces Dosiadas’ figure poem Altar alongside Lycophron’s Alexandra (ὁ Δωσιάδα Βωμὸς … καὶ ἡ τοῦ Λυκόφρονος Ἀλεξάνδρα, καὶ εἴ τις ἔτι τούτων τὴν φωνὴν κακοδαιμονέστερος – we will see a Byzantine poem scolding Lycophron for his awkward diction in Chapter 4). Certain Greeks present at a conuiuium depicted by Gellius at 19.9.7 dismiss Laevius, alongside other allegedly inelegant Latin poets, for the tortuosity of his verse and on the whole for being clumsy and ear-hurting (Laeuius inplicata … ac deinceps omnes rudia fecerunt atque absona).  14 The two obvious references at this point are Fantuzzi/Hunter 2004, 37–41 (the subsection entitled ‘Marginal aberrations?’ – note, however, the question mark), and Guichard 2006, 83– 103 (whose title is ‘Simias’ Pattern Poems: The Margins of the Canon’), whose conclusions I share and develop in this book. 15 This, as well as what follows, picks up on the conclusions reached by Guichard 2006, 95–96, who argues that ‘Pattern Poems have been considered “aberrazioni” both by past and present orthodoxy in great part because they present themselves as such; a type of poem existing in almost all literatures and periods can hardly be marginal, except if one of its basic features is that they want to appear as marginal’.

The Paradigm of Simias  5

Even more telling is the fact that apart from the Greek figure poems and Optatian’s pattern poetry (on whose survival see Chapter 4), most of the output of the authors such as Simias and Laevius, both poetic and prose, has been lost to us. What survives is for the most part an assortment of lexical and metrical curiosities preserved in such authors as Hephaestion, Gellius and lexicographers. Even the considerably better preservation of Optatian may be an illusion and in fact our picture of his poetry may be distorted and misleading, as is suggested by the fact that of his epigrams we have one quatrain and a single-line fragment (Carm. 29–30 Polara; see Chapter 3). This only suffices to show that he was something more, and perhaps something different, than the extravagant poet whom we know today. What we should infer from this non-preservation is not only that these poets were viewed as marginal; there was, or better – there has been, a marked tendency to focus on what was particularly susceptible to being viewed as marginal, curious and bizarre in what they had produced. One of the things this books attempts to do is precisely offer a broader and unbiased picture of what its main characters may really have been. As important as non-preservation, however, is these poets’ survival, and here we are arriving at the central issue this book addresses. Whether we decide that almost nothing or quite much has reached us of what Simias, Laevius and Optatian wrote is, in fact, a matter of perspective; my book takes its origin precisely in an amazement over the paradox of the preservation of relatively much of what is so commonly regarded as at best marginal experiments, if not wild creations of haunted minds, in comparison with the non-survival of so much of the ‘canonical’ literature of the Greeks and Romans. It is a stunning fact, when one contemplates what was lost, and when the emergence of every new scrap of papyrus with a fragment of Sappho or Archilochus is sufficient to keep the community of classicists electrified for several years, that thirty-six MSS containing at least one of the Greek figure poems are extant (although only one, the MS of the Palatine Anthology, has all of them),16 and that we know of twenty-three MSS of Optatian (of which three have been lost).17 Yet a large part of the community of classicists still does not care for these poets and insists on dismissing them as marginal. Of course, the poets take as much blame for this as the readers; it is they, after all, who created the notorious monstra that overshadowed everything else they had done. When an author of an influential synthesis on Roman literature tells us of Laevius that ‘[h]is rococo Erotopaegnia go extraordinarily far in their verbal  16 See Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 215–216; for a detailed survey of the textual tradition of the technopaegnia, see Strodel 2002, and for a concise account, Kwapisz 2013a, 50–56. 17 On the MS tradition of Optatian, see Polara 1973, 1.vii–xxxvi.

6  Introduction creativity, thus condemned by their author to remain a dead end in Latin literature’,18 he certainly has a point. There is only the wall behind Laevius; it is impossible to go further not only in coining eccentric neologisms, but also in devising intricate metrical patterns or inventing bizarre poetic images (for these features, see Chapter 2). Moreover, there are reasons to believe that this is as Laevius wanted things to be. As we will see in Chapter 2, in conceiving his extravagant poetic project he follows closely in the footsteps of his Hellenistic predecessor Simias of Rhodes; not only is his figure poem Phoenix modelled on Simias’ Wings of Eros (and also, to some extent, on Simias’ Egg), but also the lyric polymetry of his fragments, unparalleled in Roman literature, must have owed a lot to Simias, who with his Egg and other polymetra presented himself as the chief metrical innovator of the Hellenistic age and a strikingly important, if neglected, trendsetter in the field of Hellenistic metre. The fact that there was such a clear precedent for Laevius’ poetic path of outsiderism makes it evident that the creation of his own poetic personality was dictated by a deliberate choice. Everything goes back to Simias; there is evidence to connect him not only with Laevius, but furthermore with each and every individual with whom this book is concerned.19 In three of his pattern poems Optatian clearly imitates, if not directly Simias’ technopaegnia (although we will see that this is also a possibility), then surely the poems belonging to the mini-genre invented by Simias (see Chapter 3). Byzantine scholars are interested in collecting Simias’, and his followers’, figure poems, which additionaly receive their close editorial and exegetical attention (Chapter 4; this essay has, however, a broader aim, insofar as a reflection on the Byzantine transmission of the paradigm of Simias becomes my starting point for discussing a Byzantine shift in perception of pattern poetry, and even the formation of the modern notion of this genre). An exciting chapter of the reception of Simias’ pattern poetry opens with its being transferred to printed editions; in this period, his technopaegnia become not only a commonly imitated model, but also inspire the nascency of an immensely rich tradition of playful poetry. This is practiced not only for the sake of poetic exercise, but furthermore becomes a focal point for the entire system of poetic education (which is the central theme of the Appendix), a phenomenon already anticipated by a more limited  18 Von Albrecht 1997, 334. 19 That the poets on which this book focuses were all fundamentally connected was noticed by Castorina 1968; his approach, if flawed due to its insistence on conforming all these poets active over the span of several centuries to the overarching label of ‘neoterism’, is nevertheless rewarding and may be viewed as a prefiguration of my own approach in this book, which, however, focuses on the intellectual and cultural background of these poets’ output rather than on registering formal links between the poems they composed.

The Paradigm of Simias  7

concern with the poetic obscurity and refinement of this sort in the Byzantine epoch (which takes us back to the themes explored in Chapter 4). Although the figure poems play a key role in the transmission of the intellectual model Simias invented, my realization of the importance of this relatively minor genre for broader cultural processes that unfolded over the many centuries of their reception suggested to me that his creative and scholarly profile, as well as the ensuing reception history, might deserve a more careful and more multiaspectual reflection than the preliminary treatment I offered in the edition of the Greek figure poem I prepared several years ago.20 What I realized is that a model of intellectualism that emerges from a scrutiny of the extant fragments of Simias, both poetic and scholarly (which I discuss in Chapter 1), and that we find quite dedicatedly, and probably self-consciously, duplicated by a number of individuals in subsequent epochs (as Chapters 2–4 and the Appendix demonstrate), which proves its enduring appeal, is nowhere paralleled before or contemporarily with Simias. To be sure, the activity of Philitas of Cos, Simias’ much more famous contemporary, is suggestive of an intellectual profile in many respects similar to his (see Chapter 1 for these correspondences), yet the very fact that he was recognized as a canonical figure by Augustan poets as well as ancient crititcs (see Philit. test. 18–19 and 24–26 Lightfoot = 19–21 and 28–38 Sbardella = 18–19 and 23–25 Spanoudakis) shows that even he was, in the end, an entirely different figure. Although like Simias, Philitas indulged in composing playful poetry, apart from undertaking ‘serious’ poetic endeavours, and like Simias, he compiled a lexicon of rare and obscure glosses (in fact, one undoubtedly much more influential than Simias’ Glosses) – and he is even portrayed as a conventional figure of the eccentric professor of literature in anecdotal tradition; a misanthrope who values books over anything else (test. 21–23 Lightfoot = 5–8 and 18 Sbardella = 20–22 Spanoudakis) – he lacks a crucial element that defines Simias’ intellectualism. I should try to describe this element as an irresistible penchant for poetic eccentricity and, consequently, marginality. Everything in Simias’ creative personality seems to be ultimately governed by this compelling urge; his poetry, which is so strongly influenced by his being a philologist – an indefatigable researcher of the limits of the language – always, in the end, turns out to take some unexpected, novel or bizarre turn by inventing an unconventional metrical pattern, by retreating into some obscure corner of lexical invention or by confronting the reader with a fantastically unconventional image. As a result, the reader is forced to question its very poeticness, for the overpowering feeling this poetry evokes is  20 Kwapisz 2013a.

8  Introduction that it does not want to be simply enjoyed as poetry, but rather at once marvelled at as a feat of intellectual ingenuity and studied as a fastidious philological accomplishment. Of course, other poets do the same, at times; surely Callimachus and others like him frequently embark on similar (untrodden) paths in the Hellenistic age. Yet this sort of poetic ‘tour-de-forcism’ is always relegated to the margins of their poetic production; for example, it is a telling fact that Callimachus’ poem (?) Athena, composed ‘of the deepest riddles and impenetrable diction’ (γρίφῳ βαθίστῳ καὶ δυσευρέτοις λόγοις), appears last in the catalogue of his poems contained in a Byzantine epigram (test. 23 Pfeiffer) and is mentioned nowhere else. Simias, on the contrary, does nothing else; he is always a poet, a scholar and an eccentric – all in one and all at the same time. He embraces the marginality as the chief defining feature of his activity. There is a number of poets in subsequent epochs who exhibit the same indifference towards finding acceptance from a group of readers broader than the reclusive club of similar adherents of poetic experimentalism and outsiderism, but arguably there is no one quite like Simias before him. It is in this sense that his activity establishes an archetypal intellectual model. The fact that he is also the inventor of the carmen figuratum is only a corollary to his culturally more momentous invention of the intellectualism of a novel sort. So exactly how marginal is this outsiderism, and what exactly is its cultural import? In order to answer these questions, let us observe a curious pattern in ancient – and, more broadly, European – literary history. I have already mentioned that there is a shared component in Simias and Callimachus’ intellectualism, as the latter also, at times, indulged in the poetic playfulness that Simias so emphatically cultivated in all his compositions; this is evidenced not only by the reported obscurity of his lost Athena, but also, obviously, by his occasional polymetry, his liking for recherché diction, the emphatic self-referentiality of his poetry – in particular of the Prologue to the Aetia, which was prefigured by Simias’ Egg – and the overall taste for experiment and sticking to untrodden poetic paths.21 These correspondences and the fact that Simias probably preceded Callimachus by one generation (on his date, see Chapter 1) obviously suggest that Simias exerted some influence, despite his alleged or real marginality, on the development of Hellenistic poetics. It is certainly a curious cultural fact that it is possible to appreciate the canonical Callimachus without even acknowledging the marginal Simias, even though the latter in many respects foreshadows the  21 I have suggested these correspondences in Kwapisz 2013a, 22, 32, 107, and esp. 119, where I discuss the anticipation of Callimachus’ programme, in particular as expressed in the Prologue to the Telchines, in the poetic manifesto of Simias’ Egg.

The Paradigm of Simias  9

former, a fact which suggests the possibility that there would not have been the canonical Callimachus without the marginal Simias paving the way for him. What is more curious, however, is that practically every follower of Simias and his outsiderism with whom this book is preoccupied has his own Callimachus to follow in his footsteps. Laevius’ Callimachus is, obviously, Catullus, who is besides, in many respects, a Roman Callimachus, perhaps even the Roman Callimachus, although it is Propertius who claims this title for himself (4.1.64).22 The potential importance of Laevius’ extravagant poetic project for a more ‘mature’, or better suited to becoming recognized as canonical, endeavour of Catullus has been noticed by a number of scholars, even if some of these studies downplay the implications of Laevius’ Erotopaegnia providing a model for Catullus’ polymetry and, more broadly, his Alexandrianism.23 It may be argued that what Laevius was for Catullus (and at an earlier period Simias for Callimachus), Optatian Porfyry, in turn, was for Ausonius, who ‘[wrote] in Optatian’s immediate aftermath’.24 Recent studies have shown how Ausonius’ poetic programme, in particular the poetics of his Cento nuptialis as presented in the letter prefacing it, mimics, in several respects, the procedures of composing poetry having been carried out by Optatian in his Panegyric.25 There is, of course, a broader analogy between Ausonius’ penchant for poetic playfulness – as evidenced by not only his Cento nuptialis, but also the linguistic games of his Technopaegnion, the riddle of Epigr. 85 Green and his general liking for wordplay – and Optatian’s poetics of playful obscurity. This brings to mind the relationship between Laevius and Catullus, since like Catullus, Ausonius was interested in composing poetry that had appeal for wider audiences and which enabled him to escape the label of poetic extravagance, and to eventually come to be regarded as a major, canonical poet of his times. Speaking of Laevius, it is telling that in the prose conclusion to Cento nuptialis, i.e. precisely the composition which manifestly interacts with Optatian’s poetics, Ausonius refers with reverence to Laevius when he mentions antiquissimi poetae Laeuii Erotopaegnion libri, ‘that ancient poet Laevius’ books of Erotopaegnia’. As Green observes, ‘[t]he epithet is meant to suggest a character of traditional virtue’;26 we need to hold this thought so as to return to it promptly.  22 The literature on Catullus’ Callimacheanism is vast; for a useful introduction, see Knox 2007. 23 See e.g. Wheeler 1964, 74–78, Castorina 1968, 23–30, Granarolo 1971; Ross 1969, 155–160 argues that these are ‘circumstantial similarities’. 24 Squire 2017a, 93. 25 See, for the analogies between Optatian and Ausonius’ Cento nuptialis, Squire 2017a, 93–95 and Körfer 2017, and for a more general discussion, Squire 2017b, passim; cf. also Green 1991, xxi. 26 Green 1991, 525.

10  Introduction Now let me conclude the listing of curious pairs, in which an eccentric poet foreshadows the emergence of an iconic figure of their times, by more tentatively noting that even the professors and alumni of Jesuit colleges at whose obsession with linguistic games we will have a closer look in the Appendix may be seen to prepare the ground for the advent of a major poet and theoretician of poetry. Despite being formed by the same Jesuit education and despite exhibiting, on the whole, a similar intellectual profile to those masters of playful poetry and obscure philology, this individual was, much like Catullus and Ausonius, concerned with receiving wider acclaim, and indeed came to be recognized as one of the most accomplished poets and intellectuals of his time – a new Horace. The figure I have in mind is Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), or Casimir, as he was so popular in England that the came to be known by his middle name alone.27 So what is it that we are discovering here? Is this a law of (literary) history?28 The notion of laws of history may go too heavy on mysticism, and at any rate these are for predicting the future, whereas my concern is with untangling the patterns of the past; here, at any rate, a curious pattern emerges, which allows us to reach several conclusions precisely about the past. One of these is that when we compare Callimachus, Catullus and Ausonius with Simias, Catullus and Optatian we see quite clearly that the latter ones are, indeed, marginal poets; at least judging from what has reached us (which surely somewhat obscures the actual character of their output) the range of their poetic skills is, if not limited, than deliberately subordinated to the broader principle of treating poetry as a means of talking about what poetic language and poetic form may achieve. Rather than compose poetry for its own sake, they treat poetry as a Dr Frankestein’s laboratory in which new forms may come to life from animating the corpses of old genres, and from replanting and hybridizing the tissues of traditional diction. These experiments are something that a common folk abhors; something strange and unsettling that is better sent off to be played at at the fringes of real poetry. Real poetry is what Callimachus, Catullus and Ausonius composed; the difference between poetic monstrosity and real poetry may be elusive, but there is no need to pinpoint it, as it is clearly enough defined precisely by readers’ responses. What  27 The literature on Sarbiewski is vast, but has mostly been written in Polish; Fordoński/Urbański 2008 may be used as an introduction for an English-reading audience. 28 In addition, one may wonder whether there may have been a similar relationship between Julius Vestinus, the author of the acrostich figure poem Altar, and Dionysius Periegetes, whose geographical poem, a major poetic accomplishment of Hadrian’s era, includes acrostichs; yet nothing certain can be said about these two poets’ relative chronology. For an attempt to situate Dionysius Periegetes in the context of his times, and in particular on the epoch’s Alexandrianism and possible neoterism, see Lightfoot 2014, 183–193.

The Paradigm of Simias  11

is included in the canon is, naturally, real poetry. What lurks at its fringes are monsters. But then, paradoxically, the engagement of the major poets like Callimachus, Catullus and Ausonius with the results of the experiments which so many readers have found revolting proves that the marginality of the intellectual model which gives birth to the monsters of poetic eccentricity had, in the end, an important role to play in forming the literary canon. Perhaps even a double role in forming, not one, but two canons. We have just seen Ausonius positioning Laevius, by applying to him the epithet antiquissimus, as ‘a character of traditional virtue’. This is something new to us, a label rather different from the more familiar modern characterization of Optatian as a hare-brained versifier we had seen earlier. The only context in which Laevius may become a venerable poetic ancestor is, obviously, within the restricted circle of poets-initiates for whom the paradigm of Simias is not a deviation, either quite harmless or deserving vehement contempt, but an inspiring cultural invention. This brings us to the realization that outside the proper literary canon, there exists – a paradoxical fact of literary history – a canon of marginal poets. These are recognized as canonical mostly by themselves; this self-created canon emerges from sanctioning a predecessor’s membership by the act of imitation by a follower, a chain of allusions at one end of which we find Simias. Yet the unexpected canonicity of the poets like Simias and Laevius can also be affirmed by those who, like Ausonius, managed to escape the narrow boundaries of this minor canon of poetic marginality and legitimately belong to the proper canon. Their affirmation, which is manifest above all from the procedures of imitation they implement in their poetry, obviously validates the minor canon, yet we may suspect that the major poets also gain something from this relationship, insomuch as their brief excursions to the fringes ultimately point to their belonging somewhere else, i.e. in the proper canon. Therefore the dismissive remark on Laevius being ‘schoolmaster turned poet’ I earlier quoted29 does, after all, hit the point; for Laevius and others like him are schoolmasters in a school of poetry that is quite eagerly attended by a number of major poets. What this further implies is that we should, after all, view this minor canon of marginal poets as a part of the proper canon, only located at its fringes.30 As a

 29 See n. 6 above. 30 Cf. the intuitions voiced by Guichard 2006, 96: ‘Pattern Poems and the extensive widespread archipelago of related poetic types have thus a very important role in the canon: the forms that present themselves as the outsiders are in fact a part of a strong tradition and, paradoxically, are very conservative inside their own type … Literature needs a territory that seems to be free, fresh and new: a territory at the limit of poetic discourse, that is in itself the limit of literary discourse’.

12  Introduction shield is defined by its extremities (and as Earth is encompassed by the Ocean), so the canon is defined by its margins: the furthest point one can reach, behind which there is nothing. I note in passing that it is rather noteworthy, and tells much about the emphatically intellectual character of ancient post-oral literature, that its fringes are defined by such poets as Simias, Laevius and Optatian, who elevate poetry and poetic diction to the highest level of sophistication, which results from a careful deliberation over their mechanisms. The unexpected survival of the technopaegnia of these marginal poets surely has much to do with their equally unexpected canonicity. One should not, however, view the poetry of Simias and his followers merely as a reminder of what monstrosity ancient poetry may become when its conventions are too much tortured by an ambitious poet. If Simias, Laevius and Optatian are somewhat extravagant schoolmasters, then they found a way of encapsulating, for didactic purposes, the mechanisms of poetry they taught about in units of condensed ancient poeticness we now refer to as technopaegnia. It would be a grave mistake to think that, being marginal, these poets rejected the canon. On the contrary, they fully embraced it and explored not only its fringes, but also its very core. Consider how this is done by Optatian in his Carm. 15 Polara (on which see also Chapters 1, 2 and 3). Here is how the poem is characterized in a recent discussion (footnotes suppressed):31 The poem amounts to an unparalleled display – or rather catalogue – of linguistic consciousness. Its words are not primarily selected on the basis of their meaning, sonority or poetic evocations (as they would be in a conventional poem), but rather according to a series of ‘external’ requirements, calling the reader’s attention to the specificity of their inescapably linguistic nature; the very words of the poem betray a sense of their ‘objectness’ – the fact that language too is but an articulate system of measurable units known as signs. Thus, the poem’s first line contains only disyllables, the second trisyllables, the third foursyllable words and the fourth one, words of five syllables each; the units of v. 5, by extension, progress gradually from a monosyllable to five-syllable words. In the sixth verse, the words have to be metrically interchangeable, whereas v. 7 gathers together eight representatives of the eight parts of speech (interjection, adverb, preposition, noun, participle, conjunction, verb and pronoun), thus providing an exhaustive catalogue of all the basic units language is made of. The game continues: just as v. 8 can be declined in all cases, the rest of the lines can be read both forwards and backwards, thus giving birth to different metrical forms.

 31 Hernández Lobato 2017, 465.

The Paradigm of Simias  13

Yet Carm. 15 is more than a lesson of grammar and poetic proficiency. First, the crucial fact is that all the things this poem does it does to hexameter, thus demonstrating the technical limits of this particular metrical convention (which happens to be the most emblematic metrical convention of the whole Greek and Roman poetry). Second, as important as what the poem teaches about the linguistic aspect of poetry is the fact that the hexameter oddities the poem catalogues do not appear out of the blue here, but find parallels in earlier hexameter poetry; therefore this is also a lesson of peculiar intertextuality. The four verses in which each word has a fixed number of syllables are paralleled by Simias’ fr. 3 Fränkel (= CA 7), which is composed of five trisyllabic words, and also by Il. 8.42 = 13.24, which consists of four tetrasyllabic words (on Simias’ fragment, see Chapter 1). The rhopalic hexameter in which each word is one syllable longer than the preceding also finds a parallel in Simias, fr. 11 Fränkel (= CA 15), which is not a hexameter, but echoes, in turn, Il. 3.182, whose peculiarity did not escape the attention of the Homeric scholiasts (see, again, Chapter 1).32 Hexameters that can be read backwards to produce different metrical patterns were also discussed by ancient scholars and either imitated or alluded to by Roman poets, perhaps including, as we will see in Chapter 2, Laevius, whose Phoenix may have had a ‘boustrophedonic’ metrical pattern.33 A hexameter that illustrates all Latin parts of speech was, again, seen by the Homeric scholiasts to occur in the Iliad (22.59).34 All in all, Optatian’s list of odd hexameters resembles catalogues compiled by ancient metrical scholars, although the one put together by Optatian was translated into poetry.35 It is no accident that a web of intertextuality connects this poem with Simias, Laevius, metrical and Homeric scholars, and with Homer himself. This is just a particularly conspicuous example of what may arguably be found in every other technopaegnion of Simias, Laevius and Optatian; this poem’s playfulness clearly results from a pedantic reflection on earlier ‘real’ poetry, Homer being the primary concern, whereas sporadic interactions with other poets-riddlers only confirm their belonging to one club whose members are characterized by shared preoccupations. In other words, whereas it is true that Optatian’s Carm. 15 may be read as a linguistic lesson on its own, in order to properly grasp how it comments on the tradition of hexameter poetry the reader has to be equipped with a special sort of

 32 See further Kwapisz 2014a. 33 On references to this sort of wordplay in ancient scholarship, see Levitan 1985, 248–249. 34 Cf. Levitan 1985, 247–248. 35 On ancient, mediaeval and modern lists of peculiar hexameters, see Mayer 2002.

14  Introduction Homeric learning that one can acquire by very thoroughly studying ancient Homeric scholarship; getting oneself acquainted with earlier technopaegnia by the poets such as Simias and Laevius is also useful. When approached from this perspective, technopaegnia turn out to be vehicles of at once deep ancient learning and ultimate poetic proficiency, which explains their didactic role both in the Byzantine epoch and in the modern era (see Chapter 4 and the Appendix). What they transmit is the last chapter of a virtual manual on composing ancient poetry, whose first chapter is, of course, Homer. Technopaegnia may fail to provide a satisfactory reading experience on their own, but once their reader reaches an advanced level of intimate familiarity first with Homer, and subsequently with everything between Homer and the technopaegnia (and can we really imagine anyone approaching them for their own sake?), they at some point may start to make sense, precisely because they require from their reader to familiarize him or herself with as much of ancient poetry as he or she can get hold of. The reward they have to offer is in providing a key to what may easily be recognized as the most sophisticated sort of poetic erudition one can acquire through studying ancient literature. It is quite all right to dismiss them as futile and tasteless and to relegate these (para?-)poetic creations to the margins of the canon, where they properly belong. And yet the narrow and twisting path at the peripheries of ancient intellectualism that each of these technopaegnia is evocative of leads all the way from Simias, who first embarked on it, through such major figures as Callimachus, Catullus and Ausonius – to where exactly? Perhaps eventually to us, i.e. the author of this book, and even to its readers? For is it not true that by reflecting on how Simias reflected on earlier poetry, and on how Simias’ followers reflected on his, and also their own, intellectual outsiderism, we learn something about the essence of what Classics is about? * As I earlier mentioned, this book may be seen to develop a brief section on the Nachleben of the Greek figure poems of Simias and his imitators, which occupies slightly more than two pages in the introduction to my 2013 edition of these poems.36 Although the present book covers an even broader chronological scope than that edition focusing on the poets active between the early Hellenistic age and Hadrian’s era, I am tempted to repeat here what I wrote in the introduction to that book, namely that I intend this collection of essays as, above all, a study of Hellenistic poetry. This is because this book starts with the Hellenistic poet  36 Kwapisz 2013a, 30–33.

The Paradigm of Simias  15

Simias and although it is to some extent concerned with the poetry, scholarship, and even careers, of his Roman, Byzantine and post-mediaeval readers and followers, its primary preoccupation is with the reception of the intellectual model he arguably invented. Simias is always there, at least somewhere in the background. In addition, this book may be seen within the current trend of exploring the reception of Hellenistic poetry by nonetheless taking the close reading of Hellenistic poets as the starting point.37 I admit, however, that the approach I take is in various respects idiosyncratic, in accord with the various idiosyncrasies of this book’s main characters and perhaps unavoidably resulting from its broad scope; there is no real precedent for this.38 At the same time, this will be easily recognized as a contribution to the recently burgeoning scholarship on ancient, and post-ancient, wordplay.39 I should like to emphasize that my concern is with humanizing this field by focusing on the individuals who brought the many monsters that will appear on this book’s pages to life as much as on the monsters themselves. The reader may feel somewhat disheartened by my reckless entering too many different fields at once, especially if he or she happens to be an expert in one of these fields. Chapter 1 is focused on Simias and Hellenistic poetry, Chapter 2 deals with Laevius and therefore Roman poetry, Chapter 3 – with Optatian Porfyry, i.e. a voice of the Latin poetry of nascent Christianity (but also with Leonides of Alexandria, a Greek epigrammatist at Nero’s court, and Julius Vestinus, who was active under Hadrian). Chapter 4 takes us to two rather different epochs of Byzantium, so as to offer a reflection on the process of the re-invention of pattern poetry and simultaneous decline of other technopaegnic forms, which seems strictly tied to the development of broader, characteristically Byzantine aesthetic and intellectual trends. Finally, I felt that it would be fitting to wrap up this study by offering a discussion of the modern reception of the archetype this book sets out to define, and although this is too broad a field to single-handedly explore, I have nevertheless ventured to go some of the way there in a more narrowly conceived postscript (the Appendix), which deals with the unexpected triumph of the paradigm of Simias in a Central European scholarly centre at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It should by no means be inferred from this bold uarietas that I approach all these fields with equal confidence, although, of course, I had to equip myself with basic knowledge about each of these. What I

 37 The studies I have in mind include Hunter 2006 and Acosta-Hughes/Stephens 2012. 38 The book I may have had in the back of my mind is Zieliński 1912. 39 Although we still await the appearance of a handbook of ancient linguistic games, Luz 2010 and Kwapisz/Petrain/Szymański 2013 are steps towards providing such a ‘companion’ volume.

16  Introduction think made such a venturesome task conceivable, however, is the intrinsic ability of the technopaegnic poetry with which this book is concerned to create a context of its own across chronological and cultural boundaries, a peculiar feature at which we will have a closer look in subsequent chapters (see especially Chapters 2 and 3). In a way, therefore, the main topic of this book is a phenomenon that exists outside any strictly defined historical reality, or better – should be pictured as unfolding in a broadly conceived continuum of European literary history. A word on how this book may be read. Although three of its chapters were earlier published as self-contained discussions (see the Acknowledgements), the five essays of which this book consists, albeit rather differing in their subjectmatter, methodology, form and even style, were from the start intended to form one whole. This is my way of recounting the continuous, if fragmented, story of the formation, preservation and ultimately triumph of the intellectual paradigm that emerged in the early Hellenistic age with the activity of Simias of Rhodes. Therefore even though I assume that most readers of this book will be interested in reading one or two of its chapters rather than the whole of it, it may prove rewarding in all cases to familiarize oneself with Chapter 1, i.e. a discussion of what we have of Simias’ poetry. This is where the remaining chapters are intended to look back to. Although as a rule I do not provide an edition of each passage I discuss throughout the subsequent chapters (I do provide a critical text at times, though, as is to some extent the case with Simias’ fragments in Chapter 1 and above all with Laevius’ Phoenix in Chapter 2), one of the chief merits of my approach may be in collecting material that is largely obscure and often neglected. To facilitate access to this material, all quotations in Greek and Latin (and sporadically in Polish and Russian) are supplied with an English translation, with the exception of the modern Latin quoted in the Appendix. The translations are mostly taken from recent scholars; wherever a reference is missing the translation is my own. The subject-matter of this book is a mélange of poetic playfulness and scholarly rigour, and writing it was, accordingly, as much (specific) fun as hard work. To be sure, I should be glad if reading it were more of the former than of the latter. But if such a desirable outcome proves impossible, then let us keep in mind that all this is, after all, not about entertaining ourselves. Our serious business is with doing historical justice to a marginal and neglected, yet not negligible, component of European culture.

 The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes Perhaps not all admirers of Hermann Fränkel’s contribution to the study of Classics are aware that his long and rich scholarly career began with a rendezvous with the Hellenistic grammarian and poet Simias of Rhodes,∗ whose fragments he edited and commented in his PhD thesis published in 1915.1 This counts as one of few attempts to approach all of what is left of Simias’ output,2 and at once to see in him more than the founding father of the tradition of figure poems in Europe, for which he is notorious (see, however, Chapter 4 for the problems with defining the genre of visual poetry and pinpointing the exact time of its invention).3 The present book sets out to show that he was, in fact, the inventor of something more momentous – a model of intellectualism in which a special liking for poetic experimentalism intertwines with scholarly mentality and a touch of eccentricity; a culturally fruitful blend, which we find re-embodied in and creatively modified by a chain of his followers throughout European literary history, both self-conscious and unknowingly subscribing to the model he created. This overarching aim provides an obvious rationale for renewing the effort of supplying a full and nuanced depiction of Simias’ intellectual profile, which is the concern of this chapter. The extant remnants of Simias’ poetic and grammatical works hardly form a large corpus (Fränkel’s edition comprises four testimonies and thirty-two fragments). Notwithstanding, this is a colourful assortment, and many of these bits may say something instructive about their author to a keen ear. As a matter of fact, they try to tell us so much that it is difficult to discern meaningful patterns in this clamour of untuned voices. Yet such patterns exist, and the methodology I adopt to uncover them is simple. I borrow it from Arnott’s essay on Theocritus, where he summarizes it in one sentence:

 ∗ This chapter is adapted from Kwapisz 2018b; see the Acknowledgements. 1 Fränkel 1915. 2 An earlier such attempt was made by Sternbach 1886, 111–117, a recent one by Di Gregorio 2008, and a number of fragments were treated by Perale in a series of articles: Perale 2010, 2011a, 2011b and 2014 (in addition, he is working towards providing a comprehensive discussion on Simias). Besides Fränkel, the fragments of Simias were edited by Powell 1925, 109–120. 3 See Kwapisz 2013a, with further references. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-002

18  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes In this paper as a confirmed idolater I should like to pick out three preoccupations, three points of emphasis that make Theocritus at one and the same time distinctive, memorable and yet typical of the new Hellenistic world.4

This is what I have in mind too. Yet one difference between Theocritus and Simias is, obviously, that the preserved opus of the latter is much more fragmentary than what has reached us of the former, and the handful of accidentally preserved fragments we have may not suffice to identify what truly mattered to Simias. I do not claim, therefore, to do more than draw an arbitrary portrayal of my Simias (I realize that the preoccupations of Simias which I point out happen to be my own preoccupations), and that the same evidence might be used to portray other Simiases is, I admit, a possibility. To ensure a minimum dose of objectivity, however, I will be careful to invoke at least two fragments of two different types to illustrate each of the intuitions in giving expression to which I will indulge in what follows. For Simias’ fragments clearly belong to several different categories. The most obvious division is between poetic and grammatical fragments. What we find in the editions is in accord with what the Suda tells us in the entry for Simias: Σιμμίας Ῥόδιος, γραμματικός. Ἔγραψε Γλώσσας, βιβλία γ´· ποιήματα διάφορα, βιβλία δ´. Simias of Rhodes, grammarian. He wrote three books of Glosses and four books of miscellaneous poems.

Extant are merely four tiny fragments of the Glosses, but even those, as we will see, tell us something about the lexicon of which they were a part. It may not be by accident that the poetic fragments we have can be grouped in four categories, which might correspond to the four books of miscellaneous poems the Suda mentions. First, there are hexameter fragments, most of which are ascribed by our sources to two poems, Apollo (frr. 1–2 Fränkel and Collectanea Alexandrina 1–5) and the enigmatic Gorgo (frr. 3–[3a] Fränkel = CA 6–7 – the poem is enigmatic because we know very little about it,5 not because of a resemblance to, for instance, Lycophron’s Alexandra). Then there is a fragment of what seems to have been a didactic poem, Months (Μῆνες; fr. 4 Fränkel = CA 8), to which Meineke gave an elegiac form:6

 4 Arnott 1996, 55. 5 Yet see Perale 2010. 6 Marco Perale points out to me (per litteras) that Meineke’s Ἀμύκ|λαντος is probably better than Fränkel (and Powell) and Bergk’s ὅν ῥ᾿ [or τ᾿] Ἀμύκλαντος |, as Homer and Hellenistic poets have Ἀμυκ|λ-. For κικλήσκω going with ἀπό, Perale compares Aesch. fr. 402 Radt ἀφ᾿ οὗ δὴ Ῥήγιον κικλήσκεται.

The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes  19

ὅν ῥ᾿ Ἀμύκλαντος παιδὸς ἄποφθιμένου λαοὶ κικλήσκουσιν. … which [month] people call after the dead son of Amyclas.

Son of Amyclas is Hyacinth, and Meineke is surely right that Simias speaks here of the (Dorian and also specifically Rhodian) month of Hyacinthius.7 The elegiac didactic poem dealing with the names of the months brings to mind, on the one hand, Callimachus’ Aetia, and, on the other, the same author’s obscure grammatical work on precisely the same subject Simias’ Months was concerned with.8 If Meineke was correct in supposing that the Months was elegiac (and this is, I admit, quite an ‘if’), then this gives us a hint about what might have filled the second book of Simias’ poetry. The third book of the four mentioned by the Suda may have consisted of poems in various metres of lyric origin, whose several incipits are preserved by Hephaestion (frr. 9–14 Fränkel = CA 9 and 13–17). The fragments strongly suggest that these compositions had hymnic contents. I argued elsewhere that one and the same poetry book may have included Simias’ three famous technopaegnia (Axe,9 Wings and Egg), all in experimental metres, and the metrical novelties whose fragments Fränkel’s edition groups in the section ‘Variorum metrorum fragmenta’.10 This conjecture is still appealing to me. To corroborate this supposition, I note, in addition, that the poetics of the Axe oscillates between a dedicatory epigram and a hymn, both addressed to Athena, that the Wings is a minitreatise on Eros, and that even the Egg, which I posited to make an appropriate sphragis for Simias’ book of poems in miscellaneous metres,11 prominently features Hermes. This makes the technopaegnia fit for the book of polymetric hymnic poems on gods and heroes. I admit, however, that evident epigrammatic features of the technopaegnia may also suggest another context of ‘publication’, namely among epigrams. Several epigrams that have been ascribed to Simias have survived through the Palatine Anthology (frr. 22–[28c] Fränkel, CA 18–[23], 1–7 Gow/Page). As we will see,  7 Meineke 1842, 100. Cf. Di Gregorio 2008, 112–113. On the month of Hyacinthius, see Samuel 1972, 93 and 109. 8 See Pfeiffer 1949, 339; cf. Powell 1925, 121. On Callimachus’ Month Names according to Peoples and Cities and the Hellenistic preoccupation with months, see Kwapisz/Pietruczuk forthcoming. 9 Hornblower 2015, 356 (cf. 362) suggests that the attribution of the Axe to Simias was rejected by Gow and Page, but this is mistaken; the authenticity of the three technopaegnia has not been doubted. 10 Kwapisz 2013b, 160–163. 11 Kwapisz 2013b, 163 and 2013a, 13.

20  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes at least two of these exhibit links with the Egg. At any rate, Simias’ Book 4 might have contained his epigrammatic production. At the end of this brief introduction, I should mention that in what follows I assume that it is a correct view that Simias was a contemporary of Philitas of Cos, who was probably one generation older than the Golden-Age poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus.12 It is striking that Simias curiously resembles the famous Philitas in more than one respect (which confirms their belonging to the same epoch), as they both were simultaneously poets and grammarians, they shared aesthetic interests and they even both either originated from or lived in the Dodecanese. It might prove rewarding to think more about how deep these similarities are and where they end (for some preliminary thoughts, see the Introduction). Here, however, my business is only with Simias.

. Philology In what precedes, I have been careful to refer to Simias as not only poet, as he is normally viewed, but at once as poet and scholar. The fact that we have significantly more poetic fragments of Simias than the fragments of his grammatical work may distort the actual character of his output.13 We have seen that the Suda refers to him simply as γραμματικός, but this may not mean much, because this is how its author also refers, for instance, to Alexander of Aetolia, although he is subsequently introduced as a member of the Pleiad, and Philitas is, according to the Suda, γραμματικὸς κριτικός, although his poetry is also mentioned (I note, however, that Antimachus of Colophon is called by the Suda γραμματικὸς καὶ ποιητής). Yet Strabo, who famously refers to Philitas as ποιητὴς ἅμα καὶ κριτικός (14.2.19), also styles the inventor of the technopaegnia Σιμμίας ὁ γραμματικός when he lists famous Rhodians (14.2.13), which is a strong indication that this is how he was regarded in Antiquity. What do his four extant grammatical fragments tell us?14 In an enlightening discussion of Philitas’ scholarly interests, Bing persuasively argued that the Coan scholar had a penchant for exploring ‘exotic diction and local customs’.15 One fragment suggests that Simias may at times also have felt this inclination. In a passage dedicated to a certain species of fish called  12 See Kwapisz, 2013a, 21–23 and esp. Perale 2011a, 367–368 n. 7. 13 Cf. Pfeiffer 1968, 90 n. 1: ‘It may be significant that he is never called ποιητής, but only γραμματικός’. 14 For an introduction to Simias the grammarian, see Meliadò 2008. 15 Bing 2009, 16.

Philology  21

φάγρος, Athenaeus informs us that Simias explained φάγρος as a Cretan word for whetstone (ἀκόνη; fr. 32 Fränkel ap. Ath. 7.327e–f). This is the sole attestation that φάγρος may have this sense. In this fragment, Simias betrays the same interest in how dialectal usage may twist the standard meaning of words that Bing found so striking in Philitas’ lexicographical pursuits.16 Yet two other fragments may indicate that Simias’ lexicon substantially differed from the famous Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι compiled by Philitas. In a corrupt passage in which Athenaeus reports how various grammarians interpreted the Homeric hapax ἴσθμιον (Od. 18.300), the definitions from both Philitas and Simias are quoted (Ath. 15.677b–c = Philit. fr. 13 Dettori = 41 Spanoudakis = Sim. fr. 29 Fränkel). The quotation from Philitas suffers from textual corruption, but it is clear enough that he offered a longer comment, in which he mused about how the word had, homonymically (the term ὁμωνυμία appears in the text), several different meanings.17 Simias, in turn, and one or two later grammarians ‘render it by one word’ (ἀποδιδόασιν ἓν ἀνθ᾿ ἑνός; this phrase recurs nowhere else in Athenaeus): ἴσθμιον· στέφανον. Athenaeus gives us a glimpse of Simias’ lexicographical method: unlike Philitas, who adduced several meanings of the problematic Homeric gloss, Simias reduced his explanation to one authoritatively chosen word. The fact that he ignored variant meanings suggests that he was focused on deciding what the word’s true or original sense was. We can probably see Simias applying the same method in his gloss on κοτύλη, a word which receives, unsurprisingly, a lengthy discussion in Athenaeus (11.478d–479c). Athenaeus first describes what sorts of vessels are called κοτύλη by what poets. Then he goes on to discuss more unusual meanings attested for this word: the hollow part of the hip-joint (yet he adds that the grammarian Marsyas’ designation for the hip-joint is ἄλεισον or κύλιξ), the suckerpads on an octopus’ tentacles, which are called κοτυληδόνες, and cymbals. At the very end of this passage, he quotes Simias (fr. 31 Fränkel): Σιμμίας δὲ ἀποδίδωσι τὴν κοτύλην ἄλεισον. Simias renders kotyle by aleison.

 16 Philitas’ approach to lexicography is likely to have created a paradigm of grammatical thinking. Olson 2008, 548 n. 445 points to Ath. 9.398b–c, where Athenaeus wryly comments on the grammarians’ habit to say, ‘It’s a type of plant, or a type of bird, or a type of stone’, in answer to whatever question is asked. 17 See Bing 2009, 18–19 n. 19.

22  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes This example of Simias’ technique of glossing ἕν ἀνθ᾿ ἑνός is perplexing, as he explains one Homeric word for a cup with another, literally σαφηνίζων Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου. Yet precisely the constraints of this exegetical method must be the reason why he does so. If one word has to be chosen, there may be no better equivalent of κοτύλη than ἄλεισον, since not only do both words refer to similar vessels in Homer, but they moreover cover the same semantic field by denoting various sorts of hollow objects, as Athenaus is careful to point out by quoting the grammarian Marsyas. In glossing ἴσθμιον and κοτύλη, Simias apparently strove to find what he believed was the closest equivalent, whereas sorting out the connection between the two words he left to the reader. Did he also gloss φάγρος with a single word, perhaps in the belief that its original meaning was preserved in the Cretan dialect? The final extant fragment of his Glosses may provide another instance of the word-for-word technique, but on this occasion Simias corroborated his interpretation with a quotation (fr. 30 Fränkel ap. Ath. 11.472e): Κάδος. Σιμμίας ποτήριον, παρατιθέμενος Ἀνακρέοντος [PMG 373.1–2]· ‘ἠρίστησα μὲν ἰτρίου λεπτοῦ μικρὸν ἀποκλάς, οἴνου δ᾿ ἐξέπιον κάδον’. Kados. Simias [identifies this as] a cup, citing Anacreon: ‘I broke off a bit of crisp sesame-cake and had it for lunch, and I drank a kados of wine’.18

This is another counterintuitive explanation, as κάδος is normally ‘jar’ rather than ‘cup’ (cf. Archil. fr. 4.7 West). Perhaps Simias’ assumption was that what goes with μικρὸν ἰτρίου λεπτοῦ was an equally small cup (which would have missed all the fun inherent in the image of eating little and drinking from a jar19). Again, this against-the-current philological thinking may suggest that he was strongly committed to getting to the bottom of what the word actually meant. Yet what matters more, to us, is that this fragment is instructive about the range of Simias’ philological interests, as κάδος, although poetic, is not a Homeric word. That these interests extend beyond Homer is also illustrated by the previously discussed fr. 32; the appearances of φάγρος before Simias are, predictably, limited to comedy and the philosophers who wrote on zoology.

 18 Transl. Olson 2009, 293. 19 As noted by Dettori 2000, 47. Cf. the translation of Anacreon’s fragment provided by Campbell 1988, 67: ‘I dined by breaking off a small piece of thin honeycake, but I drained a jar of wine’.

Philology  23

To sum up, my impression is that Simias’ four grammatical fragments are concise to the extreme not because Athenaeus decided to omit the rest of these glosses, but because the glosses were meant to be such. This is not to say that this was what Simias’ Glosses looked like throughout. For one thing, fr. 30 is the illustration of a more substantial entry, and below I will posit a reconstruction of a gloss of somewhat different structure. Yet I like to think that the one-for-one pattern prevailed in Simias’ lexicon.20 Incidentally, would that philological restraint not explain why only four fragments of this work have reached us and why Philitas has completely outshone Simias as lexicographer? It may not be by accident that when Athenaeus quotes Simias, the quotation is dismissed to the end of his lexicographical discussions three times out of four (frr. 29, 31 and 32), and only once does it appear at the beginning (fr. 30). What about Simias’ poetry? Bing was able to find a close parallel for the grammatical pursuits of Philitas’ Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι among his scant poetic fragments.21 It is not difficult to find much more in Simias’ surviving poetry. On the whole, the extant fragments clearly attest his broad range of interests in literature of many genres and several periods. To give only four particularly telling examples, I point out that, as Perale has demonstrated,22 a passage in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (fr. 150.8–35 Merkelbach/West) was notably a model for the geographical catalogue which the longest extant fragment of Simias’ Apollo contains (fr. 1 Fränkel/CA); that, as Finglass shows,23 Simias’ Axe, which describes the dedication of the tool/weapon with which Epeius built the Wooden Horse/destroyed Troy to Athena, clearly picks up on the opening of Stesichorus’ Sack of Troy (fr. 100 Finglass); that the Wings, as I suggested,24 is permeated with Platonic intertexts, with Plato’s Symposium providing the most prominent source of inspiration; and finally, that Simias composed two epitaphs for Sophocles (AP 7.21–22 = frr. 22–23 Fränkel = CA [23] = 4–5 Gow/Page).25 In the subsequent section of this chapter, I will furthermore argue that Simias’ novel metrical techniques are another significant means of dialoguing with the past of Greek poetry. Now I turn to a more direct application of philological thinking in Simias’ poetry. It has already been well documented that this poetry contains numerous  20 This may shed further light on the methods of the Homeric Γλωσσογράφοι as described by Dyck 1987. 21 Bing 2009, 26–27. 22 Perale 2011a. 23 Finglass 2015, 197–202. 24 Kwapisz 2013a, 91–105. 25 On these epigrams, see Gabathuler 1937, 46–48 and below. On the problem of authorship, see Gow/Page 1965, 513–514.

24  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes instances of filologia interna, i.e. the purely philological practise of commenting on more or less rare and obscure glosses excerpted from other poets by inserting them in a newly created context. Fränkel’s index Graecitatis lists more than seventy such glosses, hapaxes, unusual lexical formations and uses, which are evenly distributed throughout the surviving corpus of the fragments of Simias, and we owe an instructive discussion of the philology of Homer in Simias’ epigrams to Sistakou.26 To illustrate how deftly Simias could operate this exegetical tool, I offer a follow-up on Sistakou’s comments on a pair of Simias’ epigrams, namely AP 7.203 and 193 (frr. 24–25 Fränkel = CA 19–20 = 1–2 Gow/Page), which will again be my concern in the final part of this discussion. Οὐκέτ᾿ ἀν᾿ ὑλῆεν δρίος εὔσκιον, ἀγρότα πέρδιξ, ἠχήεσσαν ἱεῖς γῆρυν ἀπὸ στομάτων, θηρεύων βαλιοὺς συνομήλικας ἐν νομῷ ὕλης· ᾤχεο γὰρ πυμάταν εἰς Ἀχέροντος ὁδόν. No longer, my decoy partridge, do you shed from your throat your resonant cry through the shady coppice, hunting your pencilled fellows in their woodland feeding-ground; for you are gone on your last journey to the house of Acheron. Τάνδε κατ’ εὔδενδρον στείβων δρίος εἴρυσα χειρὶ πτώσσουσαν βρομίας οἰνάδος ἐν πετάλοις, ὄφρα μοι εὐερκεῖ καναχὰν δόμῳ ἔνδοθι θείη, τερπνὰ δι’ ἀγλώσσου φθεγγομένα στόματος. This locust crouching in the leaves of a vine I caught as I was walking in this copse of many trees, so that in a well-fenced home it may make noise for me, chirping pleasantly with its tongueless mouth.27

These are clearly intended to be companion epigrams; they form a complex poetic creation, which ultimately reflects on poetry itself. Both epigrams describe musical animals. As it happens, partridges may emit a sound resembling the cricket’s chirrup.28 By putting emphasis on the animals’ resonant voice, both poems exhibit a similar metapoetic potential. As such, they place themselves in the midst of the broad universe of metapoetic images involving musical animals in Greek

 26 Sistakou 2007, 393–395. 27 Transl. Paton 1919, slightly altered. 28 I realized this when I came across ‘the partridges calling like crickets’ in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (The Ill-Made Knight, Ch. 7).

Philology  25

literature.29 In fact, the cricket and the partridge are not just any musical animals, but, in view of the intertextual baggage they carry, ones that are particularly emblematic of their sort. There are also more superficial links between the two epigrams, which help the reader discover their interconnectedness. Both copiously resort to Homeric diction, which contrasts with their quasi-bucolic subject-matter, and this is to mock-heroic effect (this effect is clearer in fr. 24 Fränkel; see further below). Both purport to be inscriptions, although of different sorts. Fr. 24 is an odd epitaph for a decoy partridge, which assisted the hunter by luring its companions; 25 is, as the epideictic τάνδε implies,30 a caption for the cage containing a captive locust. Given the fact that decoy partridges are also kept in cages (cf. LXX Si. 11.30 πέρδιξ θηρευτὴς ἐν καρτάλλῳ, οὕτως καρδία ὑπερηφάνου), one may feel tempted to imagine that the locust was captured to fill the emptiness (and to break the silence) of the cage in which the late partridge was held, so that this pair of epigrams would almost form a continuous narrative.31 On the textual level, they share two words, στόμα and δρίος. To στόμα I will return later; now my attention focuses on the latter word. The gloss δρίος is retrieved from Od. 14.353–354: ἔνθ’ ἀναβάς, ὅθι τε δρίος ἦν πολυανθέος ὕλης, κείμην πεπτηώς.

 29 For all differences between locusts and cicadas with regard to their biology or the literary contexts in which they appear (and even their grammatical gender), it is relevant to mention such powerful literary visions as, from the time before Simias, Pl. Phdr. 258e–259d on the dialoguing cicadas of the Muses (see below on the impossibility of insects’ dialoguing; for a seminal discussion on this passage and the musical cicadas, see LeVen forthcoming, Ch. 3: ‘Cicadas: On the Voice’), and, from the generation after Simias, the cicada featuring in Call. Aet. fr. 1.29–36 Pfeiffer/Massimilla/Harder. As for the partridge, according to Alcman, fr. 39 Davies = 91 Calame, the invention of the lyric song was due to the imitation of partridges; note that this passage probably contained a prominent mention of a glôssa (unfortunately obscure due to textual corruption; for a sensibly cautious discussion of this problem, see Calame 1983, 482; on Alcman’s partridges as teachers of poets and the glôssa in this fragment, see Bettini 2008, 43–45 and esp. 118– 122, and in addition 274–275). Alcman’s sphragis with its glôssa was more than likely to have attracted the attention of the glossographer Simias (cf. below on the aglôssia of the partridge epigram). The importance of Simias’ partridge epigram for later poets, in turn, is suggested by a connection between this epigram and Catullus’ lament for Lesbia’s sparrow; Catull. 3.11 qui [sc. passer] nunc it per iter tenebricosum probably echoes line 4 of Simias’ epigram. Cf. Ellis 1876, 8. On the Hellenistic musical animals (birds, crickets, cicadas etc.) and their poetic connotations, see Männlein-Robert 2007, 202–243 (and LeVen quoted above in this footnote). 30 Cf. Fränkel 1915, 102. 31 I am grateful to Pauline LeVen for a remark which suggested to me this interpretation.

26  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes Then I went up, where there was a growth of flowering thicket, and lay there, cowering.32

Sistakou observes ‘how Simias twice varies the Homeric δρίος πολυανθέος ὕλης’ by putting ὑλῆεν, εὔσκιον and εὔδενδρον next to δρίος in the two epigrams and, consequently, how he ‘points to the semantic obscurity of δρίος: but this enigmatic glossa needs to be further modified by additional adjectives’.33 In the footnote, she adds: The explanation in Σ Q ad Od. 14.353, δρίος] σύνδενδρον χωρίον, δρυώδης καὶ σύσκιος τόπος (‘a place full of trees, woody and thickly shaded’), is misleading, because the scholiast glosses the hapax noun δρίος along with its context.

I should like to take us in another direction. One may get the impression that the Homeric scholiast compiles two explanations, and I am struck by the resemblance of the second part of what he provides to how Simias glosses δρίος in his two epigrams. It is a tempting supposition that δρυώδης καὶ σύσκιος τόπος in the Homeric scholia looks back, directly or not, to Simias’ Glosses. This would be different from the glosses we saw earlier in that it steps aways from the one-for-one pattern. It is not difficult to imagine, however, that Simias was not always able to find one word to illustrate the true meaning of the gloss he commented on, and in such cases resorting to a vague noun with a specific modifier (or two of these) may have still complied with the rigorous standards of his philological method. If this is correct, and Simias alludes to his own Glosses in his companion epigrams, then this is a particularly intricate case of filologia interna. On one level, this invites the reader to join in an elaborate poetic game, in which he or she needs to discover the connection between the two poems first, so as to be allowed to sort out the full meaning of the obscure Homeric gloss only subsequently. Yet this is also effective on the philological level, as the distribution of the explanation between the two epigrams emphasizes the ambiguity of δρίος. If this word denotes a place shaded by the thickness of the forest, then the glossator has to find a way to wed shadiness and trees in the comment. This emphatically literary game implies a special audience. A fragment of the Hymn to Demeter composed by Philicus of Corcyra, one of the Pleiad, whom we

 32 Transl. Lattimore 1990. 33 Sistakou 2007, 395.

Philology  27

see as a priest of Dionysus in Ptolemy II’s Grand Procession,34 sheds light on the character of this target group of readers (SH 677): καινογράφου συνθέσεως τῆς Φιλίκου, γραμματικοί, δῶρα φέρω πρὸς ὑμᾶς. Grammarians, I bring you the gift of the innovative written composition of Philicus.35

Hephaestion quotes this line to comment on Philicus’ allegedly false pretension to the title of the inventor of this sort of verse (i.e. the choriambic hexameter), which, Hephaestion says, was earlier employed by Simias in his Axe and Wings (Heph. pp. 30.21–31.13 Consbruch).36 ‘Unless’, Hephaestion prudently adds, ‘it be that Philicus does not speak as being the first inventor of the metron but as being the first to write poems entirely in this metron’.37 This reservation is important; after all, it would be naïve to think that Philicus ignored the immediate ancestry of the verse he chose for his hymn. This ancestry is, I argue, silently implied in what Philicus says; the choice of the metre itself is sufficient to mark his debt to Simias, even if his name remains unmentioned, and it is highly unlikely that Philicus would not have anticipated the recognition of the source by the γραμματικοί he addressed. One implication of this realization is that καινόγραφος may be, to some extent, a generic characterization, which can be applied not only to Philicus’ hymn, but also to the model provided by Simias with his technopaegnia; the meaning of the word would be almost ‘neoteric’. The position of the article τῆς and its omission before καινογράφου συνθέσεως may support this reading: ‘[i]n this arrangement the attributive is added by way of explanation’,38 so that the emphasis is on ‘I give you a novel composition’, whereas ‘one by Philicus’ comes as a supplement, which, I think, detaches καινόγραφος from the agency of Philicus. Another conclusion is that the society of γραμματικοί to which Philicus dedicates his poem includes not only his audience, and not only himself as the author of the poetry for γραμματικοί, but also himself as the reader of Simias, and Simias as the initiator of this club.39  34 On which see Rice 1983, in particular 55–56 on the role of Philicus. Note, however, that the contextualization of the Grand Procession and in particular its dating are highly problematic; see recently Erskine 2013, 46–47. 35 Transl. from Fantuzzi/Hunter 2004, 38. 36 This is a locus classicus in the discussion of Simias’ date; cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 21–22. 37 Transl. van Ophuijsen 1987, 92. 38 Smyth 1956, 293, §1159. 39 Importantly, Danielewicz 2015, 145 points to several correspondences between the proem to Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter, especially if SH 677 and SH 676 are taken as one two-line unit, and the opening couplet of Simias’ Axe, which, alongside the choriambic metre, suggest deliberate

28  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes It is telling that when Simias has to find one quality to praise in Sophocles, what he singles out is εὐμαθίη πινυτόφρων – a sort of learnedness which one would more readily associate with philological activity than with tragic poetry (AP 7.22.5 = fr. 23.5 Fränkel = 5.5 Gow/Page).40 The poets such as Simias remain grammarians even when they compose poetry – the conclusion is the same as that of the discussion of the two epigrams on the musical animals inhabiting the δρίος of Simias’ poetry. This is perhaps what the author of the entry in the Suda means when he states simply, ‘Simias of Rhodes, grammarian’. Much effort has been spent, to good and refreshing effect, in showing that the Hellenistic poets were not imprisoned in an ivory tower.41 Yet this δρίος, this shady grove, into which Simias lures his readers, disturbingly resembles that solitary place of confinement. Does he try to lock us in the cage with his partridge and locust, and may this be what was to become the famous Μουσέων τάλαρος of SH 786?

. Formal experimentalism Even if Simias liked to remain in the solitude of the thick coppice of his philological interests, it would be a mistake to view him as no more than a practitioner of l’art pour l’art. He lived in a period which witnessed one of the most momentous transformations in European cultural history, namely the efflorescence of the sophisticated culture of the book and bookishness, and there is much to suggest that he was a self-conscious contributor to this change. In two poems, he reflects on the ongoing process of the translation of poetry from the oral domain onto the papyrus scroll. The first to come to mind is the Egg, to which I will soon return.

 allusion (footnotes suppressed): ‘The shared elements are: the god’s name in the dative, the name of the donor, the object offered as a gift (δῶρον) and its praise, the article τά used as a deictic. Note also that in both cases the relation of the dedicatee(s) to the dedicator is comparable and can be described in terms of hierarchical interconnection: consummate master and judge of art’s quality (Athena, grammatikoi) – artisan or artist. Last but not least: the beginnings of both poems are characterized by self-referentiality. Epeius’ πέλεκυς in Simias not only denotes the material object whose history is described, but also – by mere insertion of this word in the carmen figuratum formed in the shape of an axe – acquires the metatextual/metapoetic function of a pointer to the visual concept of the poem. Similarly, the phrases καινογράφου συνθέσεως … μυστικὰ … δῶρα in Philicus, as an utterance about the general character of the poem inserted intratextually in its beginning, reflect the “meta-” perspective of the author qua creator of the text’. I add to this list the significance of the fact that both poems programmatically begin with hapaxes; see Danielewicz 2015, 139–140 and Kwapisz 2013a, 80. 40 On εὐμαθίη in this epigram, see Fantuzzi 2006, 76–77 and 2007, 481–482. 41 Most notably, of course, by Cameron 1995.

Formal experimentalism  29

Yet it is the other one which gives expression to this awareness in a more straightforward manner. It is a pseudo-epitaph for Sophocles, whose relevance for the discussion of Hellenistic book culture has already been highlighted by Bing42 (AP 7.21 = fr. 22 Fränkel = 4 Gow/Page; it makes a pair with the subseqent epigram in the Anthology, to which I will shortly return): Τόν σε χοροῖς μέλψαντα Σοφοκλέα, παῖδα Σοφίλλου, τὸν τραγικῆς Μούσης ἀστέρα Κεκρόπιον, πολλάκις ὃν θυμέλῃσι καὶ ἐν σκηνῇσι τεθηλὼς βλαισὸς Ἀχαρνίτης κισσὸς ἔρεψε κόμην, τύμβος ἔχει καὶ γῆς ὀλίγον μέρος, ἀλλ’ ὁ περισσὸς αἰὼν ἀθανάτοις δέρκεται ἐν σελίσιν. You who sang in the choruses, Sophocles, son of Sophillus, Cecropian [i.e. Athenian] star of the tragic Muse, whose hair the twisting Acharnian ivy, blossom-bedecked, often crowned by the orchestra’s altar and on the stage, a tomb and a little plot of earth now holds you; but the rest of time beholds you in the deathless columns of your writing.43

The emphasis is on presenting Sophocles as singer (line 1) and performer (3–4). Yet in the closing couplet, the author’s attention shifts to Sophocles’ eternal life guaranteed by the columns of writing (σελίδες) in the papyrus scrolls with his plays. The immediate context for the latter is provided by the momentous projects undertaken both in Athens and Alexandria in the fourth and third centuries BC to ensure the restoration and preservation of the plays of the three great Athenian tragedians, culminating in the production of the authoritative edition by Aristophanes of Byzantium. Simias’ epigram may be roughly contemporary to one of these projects, namely the preparation of a sort of edition (διόρθωσις) of the Athenian dramatic texts, which was commissioned by Ptolemy II, by Alexander of Aetolia (Alex. Aet. test. 7 Magnelli).44 These were monumental enterprises, which may

 42 Bing 2008, 59–61. 43 Transl. Bing 2008, 59, slightly altered. On the sense of line 6, see Gow/Page 1965, 514. Accordingly, I assume, with Bing, that δέρκεται takes the σέ of line 1 as the object and that περισσός has the meaning similar to that in τὸ περιττὸν τῆς ἡμέρας (Xen. Ephes. 1.3.4). Cf. Magnelli 2007b, 38 n. 10, who, in addition, points out a possible echo of this passage in a second-century AD inscriptional epigram. 44 A detailed overview of the early textual history of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in Athens and Alexandria is provided by Pietruczuk 2013 (in Polish) and forthcoming (in English). For a discussion of the Lycurgan restoration project in fourth-century Athens, see Hanink 2014,

30  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes have been thought to have a long-lasting effect, and it is tempting to see Simias’ epigram as a response, even if indirect, to such philological activity.45 Perhaps he composed it for a copy (more likely a private copy; not necessary an ‘edition’, such as that prepared by Alexander of Aetolia) of the collection of Sophocles’ plays.46 Whereas the epitaph for Sophocles illustrates Simias’ reflection on how another author’s poetry enters the domain of the book, in the Egg his concern appears to be more self-focused.47 This is one of the most unusual creations which Antiquity has given us (‘the most complex product (metrically) of all Hellenistic book-poetry’ according to Martin West).48 And it knows it. From the formal point of view, the Egg is a newly-created weft of long-familiar metrical units, mostly of lyric origin, whose number grows from one in the first pair of lines to ten in the last one, each of these distichs being one unit longer than the previous. Incidentally, the previous sentence almost literally quotes what is said by the poem itself: ‘new weft’ is taken from line 3 (ἄτριον νέον; this brings to mind the ‘neotericness’ we saw in the fragment of Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter), whereas the description of the increasing number of metrical units comes with lines 9–10. This instance of poetic egotism is paralleled in ancient literature perhaps only by Optatian Porfyry’s equally eccentric creation.49 Yet when in the introduction to my  60–92 and for introductions to the early transmission of the three Athenian tragedians, Raeburn/Thomas 2011, lxix–lxxi, Avezzù 2012, 39–45, Finglass 2012, 10–14 and forthcoming. 45 A parallel, as Jerzy Danielewicz points out to me, is provided by the ᾠδῆς … λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες of Sappho in Posidippus’ epigram on Doricha (122.6 Austin/Bastianini = 17.6 Gow/Page), the context for which is provided by the early third-century edition of her poems. The two epigrams are also compared in Klooster 2011, 27–29. For an expression of the same awareness of the preserving force of the book (which takes precedence over images) in an early Byzantine anthologist, see AP 4.4.9–10, i.e. Agathias’ second epigrammatic preface to his Cycle (I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers of my book manuscript for this reference). 46 In the light of how Simias reflects on the culture of writing, it is also tempting, as Peter Bing has suggested to me, to view the locust’s singing with ‘the tongueless mouth’ in AP 7.193 as a metaphorical reference to literary communication through the papyrus scroll. This adds to the list of potential deeper meanings of ἄγλωσσον στόμα I put together in this discussion (see Section 3 below). 47 What follows takes much not only from Kwapisz 2013a, 14–16, 35–7 and 106–37, but also Männlein-Robert 2007, 142–150. The illuminating recent studies on the place of the technopaegnia in ancient visual culture are Pappas 2013 and Squire 2011, 231–236. Here my interest is in the metrical, rather than visual, aspect of the innovativeness of Simias’ technopaegnia (on this dichotomy, see Chapter 4). 48 M.L. West 1982, 151. 49 On Optatian and, inter alia, his self-focus, see Chapter 3 and the extensive collection of essays in Squire/Wienand 2017.

Formal experimentalism  31

edition of the Egg I gave expression to the feeling I once had that ‘[the poem] focuses utterly on itself’,50 I did not get it all right (although I do not think I got it all wrong). One may read the Egg, as Männlein-Robert did,51 as a hermeneutic reflection on the process of poetic creation in the new literary world. In this reflection, the vivid and pictorial description of Hermes’ demiurgic dance (lines 7–12 and 20) provides an allegory of poetic communication; the god mediates the arrival of the poet’s song to us, ‘the tribes of mortals’ (φῦλα βροτῶν, line 8). This mediation takes place on the ‘pages’ of the papyrus scroll. Simias returns here to the theme we saw in his epitaph for Sophocles by creating a paradox: the poem copiously refers to singing,52 but this strikingly contrasts with the technopaegnion’s intense Schriftlichkeit. My intention here is to focus on the narrower application of this experiment as an expression of the poetic programme behind Simias’ book of polymetric poetry. If the Egg presents itself as an experiment in translating the song onto the papyrus scroll, then what Simias experiments on is primarily the traditional metrical fabric of the song. His description of the Egg’s metrical pattern in the central lines 9–10 is supplemented by the abundance of words allusive to the metrical terminology of feet and metra in the subsequent part of the poem: μέτρον appears twice, in lines 9 and 20, and there are no less than ten instances of the occurrence of πούς, ἴχνος, κῶλα and foot-related nouns and adjectives in lines 9–20.53 All this implies the concept of metre as the amalgam of structural units, or ‘the measures of the song’ (μέτρα μολπᾶς, line 20). Though simple at first glance, inherent in this concept is a remarkably early instance of what may be called ‘proto-colometric consciousness’.54 The metrical analysis of the Egg’s pattern enables the reader (reader-grammarian, no doubt) to compile the catalogue of the feet and metra the poem so insistently speaks of, all of them surely discerned by Simias in the treasury of earlier poetry through the application of his usual philological

 50 Kwapisz 2013a, 106. 51 Cf. n. 47 above. 52 Cf. Männlein-Robert 2007, 149 and Kwapisz 2013a, 107. 53 For a full list, see Kwapisz 2013a, 123 and an instructive recent discussion of Simias’ use of contemporary metrical terminology in Ermolaeva 2017; cf. the reflection on the Egg’s ‘self-conscious lexis’ in Prier 1994, 88. 54 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 14–16, with further references.

32  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes scrutiny. This catalogue would include iambic metra, dactyls, spondees, anapaests, cretics, two types of paeons, choriambs, and bacchiac clausulae (whose appearance mimics the traditional metrical practice).55 What can one do with the metrical fabric of old songs once their melody is gone? On a papyrus sheet, one can do whatever he or she wants. The traditional sequences can be rearranged in a haphazard manner – as they are in the Egg, whose metra are ‘manifold’ (πολύπλοκα, line 20), since they mirror the disorderly movement of Hermes’ feet in his trickster-dance (cf. φέρων νεῦμα ποδῶν σποράδην, line 11). The same metrical units can be re-used in a more orderly fashion, yet still to various novel effects. If the length of the lines is manipulated by adding or subtracting metra, then the metrical fabric may be moulded to produce a visual shape.56 Choriambs and bacchiac clausulae – both present in the catalogue provided by the Egg – are arranged to this effect in the Axe and the Wings. Or these units may be applied to create a verse that would offer a novel replacement for one of the standard stichic metres, such as hexameter or iambic trimeter. To this effect, Simias made liberal use of the assortment found in his own catalogue in composing his polymetric poems. He created several innovative stichic patterns:57 (1) cretics form the tetrameter of frr. 9–10 Fränkel = CA 13–14; (2) completely resolved cretics with a paeon IV as the clausula appear in fr. 11 Fränkel = CA 15; (3) choriambs are the base of the variation of asclepiad of fr. 12 Fränkel = CA 16; (4) anapaests create the trimeter of fr. 13 Fränkel = CA 9; (5) good old dactyls produce the pentameter of fr. 14 Fränkel = CA 17. These metres may be, and were,58 shown to have had antecedents in earlier lyric poetry, and there is little doubt, especially now, when we are well aware of Simias’ preoccupation with philology, that he looked back to various lyric sources when he was ‘inventing’ the above-listed stichic metres.59 However, at the same time their  55 See Kwapisz 2013a, 40–43 for the Egg’s metrical scheme and a discussion of it. For an instructive metrical discussion of the poem and a new interpretation of what it does, see Lukinovich 2016, 55–78. 56 Cf. Danielewicz 1996, 48. 57 Cf. Kwapisz 2013b, 160–161. 58 Leo 1897, 66. 59 The re-invention of various lyric metres for stichic uses apparently enjoyed a certain vogue in the third century BC (which almost completely died out subsequently), as is evidenced above all by Theocritus’ Aeolic Idylls (28–31), the epigrams of AP 13, Sotades’ fragments (CA pp. 238– 240), and the fragments of Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter mentioned above (SH 676–680); see further

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creation can be conveniently explained in view of the instruction implicit in the Egg, and it would be mistaken to dismiss the possibility of their genetic affinity to the technopaegnia. Greek metrical writings seem to provide confirmation that Simias was recognized as the inventor or propagator of these experimental forms: No. 5 from the above list is known as Σιμίειον to Hephaestion (p. 21.10–12 Consbruch) and No. 4 is called by the same name in the scholia to Hephaestion (p. 275.26–29), whereas Trichas refers to the same verse as Σιμμιακόν, as he explains, ‘since Simias uses it a lot’ (p. 383.28–29). It may be argued, then, that when the Egg speaks of the ‘new weft’, what it has in its mind (yolk?) is not only itself, but also other metrical innovations from the laboratory of Simias. They all display the same level of metrical consciousness, which is implied both by the analytical reflection on earlier lyric poetry and the capability of re-moulding the identified metra to produce novel patterns. It is in this sense that the Egg presents itself as a sphragis for a book of Simias’ experimental polymetry,60 whether such a book actually existed or not. Simias’ penchant for experimentalism does not end with his purely metrical innovations and reworkings of the fabric of old songs. Fränkel noticed a curious pattern emerging from the surviving incipit of Simias’ hymn to Dionysus (No. 2 among the polymetric fragments listed above):61 Σέ ποτε Διὸς ἀνὰ πύματα νεαρὲ κόρε νεβροχίτων … O youthful son of Zeus, dressed in a fawnskin, [they say] that once upon a time [you went] to the farthest [ends of the earth].62

In this sequence of resolved cretics, each consecutive metron starts with a word one syllable longer than the previous (σέ:ἀνά:νεαρέ:νεβροχίτων). I suggested elsewhere that this so-called rhopalic pattern is likely to be reminiscent of the

 M.L. West 1982, 149–152, Fantuzzi/Hunter 2004, 37–40 and Barbantani 2017, 362–368 (yet for another view on the developments of such metres as a stage in the continuum of the history of Greek lyric, see Hutchinson 2018). See also Chapter 2. May Simias have been the initiator of this trend? 60 Cf. n. 11 above. 61 Fränkel 1915, 48. 62 On the meaning of this fragment and on the unnecessary attempts to emend the text in CA, see Kwapisz 2014a, 618–619 n. 31. In addition to my comments on the Klangspiele in this fragment, one of the anonymous readers of my manuscript ingeniously points out to me the striking chiastic pattern of νε-ρε-ρε-νε in νεαρὲ κόρε νεβροχίτων.

34  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes remarkable rising verse in the Iliad (3.182), in which Priam addresses Agamemnon from the walls of Troy by employing the courteous language of highly refined praise.63 The uniqueness of this line was commented on by the scholiast, which makes it all the more probable that Simias did not miss it also. The rising effect in his own creation is probably used for emphasis, but above all this is a display of Simias’ masterly poetic control over the substance of language, as he added the difficulty of creating the rhopalic pattern to the necessity of overcoming the constraints posed by the unusual innovative metre. At the same time, this is another example of his preoccupation with translating oral diction to book poetry. The rhopalic verse, through its increasing weight, creates an effect of solemnity when it is heard, but I am not sure that reading aloud Simias’ hymnic incipit would immediately reveal the rhopalic pattern woven into its structure. More likely, this is a treat for attentive readers-grammarians, who are trained to re-read the poem as many times as they feel is necessary in order to see through what the poet may have concealed.64 Yet the effect of reading aloud even book poetry must not be downplayed. The poetic experiments with rhopalic patterns should probably be viewed in the broader context of various rising structures widely attested in Indo-European oral poetry and magical incantations,65 and as for more broadly defined rising structures (incidentally, the titles of the sections in this essay may serve as a leçon par l’exemple), we are already well familiar with another example provided by Simias’ poetry. The galloping sequence of the Egg’s μέτρα μολπᾶς is grouped in the successively increasing pairs of lines, to an effect which Simias may have designed for the ear rather than for the eye.66 The constant tension between the acoustic effect and the Schriftlichkeit is an identification mark of Simias’ poetry and confirms its immersion in the context of the transformation of Greek culture at the dawn of the Hellenistic epoch. In addition, this overarching feature of his poetry may have had been part of its appeal for later readers (which will be our concern in the subsequent chapters), in view of continuing appreciation of the oral element even in strictly literate poetry throughout Antiquity and Byzantium. The tendency to put more weight towards the end of the line is richly documented for the Greek hexameter, and traditional epic has been shown to favour

 63 Kwapisz 2014a. 64 Here as elsewhere, my reading is much informed by Bing’s interpretations of Hellenistic book poetry; see in particular his essay entitled ‘Allusion from the Broad, Well-Trodden Street: The Odyssey in Inscribed and Literary Epigram’, in Bing 2009, 147–174. 65 See, again, Kwapisz 2014a and cf. Lunn-Rockliffe 2017. 66 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 36–37 and 107.

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rising patterns of several sorts, which have been variously labelled (‘tricolon crescendo’, ‘rising threefolder’, ‘augmented triad’, ‘rhopaloid line’).67 It may be rewarding to think in this context about the reversal of this practice as exemplified by the Hellenistic poets’ tolerance for the hexameters ending with a monosyllable.68 This tolerance seems to have become almost a habit for Simias, as there are three examples of such lines in the nineteen hexameters that can be attributed to him with relative certainty (excluding epigrams):69 τοῖς ὤμων ἐφύπερθεν ἐϋστρεφέων κύνεος κράς … (fr. 1.10 Fränkel/CA) χρυσῷ τοι φαέθοντι πολύλλιστος φλέγεται κράς. (fr. 7 Fränkel = CA 4) … Ἰγνήτων καὶ Τελχίνων ἔφυ ἡ ἁλυκὴ ζάψ. (fr. 8.2 Fränkel = CA 11.2)70

I suggest that such endings play on the anticipation of the regularly rising flow of words, which is characteristic of traditional hexameters.71 This realization sheds new light on the subversive effect of deliberately producing the hexameters that are headed (i.e. have κράς at the end) or mouse-infested (cf. Hor. Ars 139). This subtle subversiveness is in keeping with Simias’ taste for experiments with metre and acoustic instrumentation. In slowly bringing this part of my discussion to a close, I should like to supply a handful of further examples of Simias’ notable Formspiele, excerpted from his non-technopaegnic fragments. I leave to the reader to decide whether these have more in common with traditional oral diction or they are instances of Hellenistic bookish experimentalism. Or may they be both at the same time, providing yet another illustration of the clash of these two modes of poetic communication on the pages of Simias’ poetry?

 67 See Kwapisz 2014a, 615–617. 68 For an instructive discussion of this phenomenon, see Magnelli 2002, 79–80; cf. Di Gregorio 2008, 97 n. 340. 69 In addition, I hesitantly exclude from my count the extremely problematic fr. [3a] Fränkel = CA 6, in the light of its suspicious incompatibility with the coherent colouring of the diction of the other fragments; cf. already Fränkel 1915, 38. For a recent eloquent attempt to place this fragment in Simias’ Gorgo, see Perale 2010, with an extensive summary of the status quaestionis. 70 This rough hexameter, with its double hiatus and no third-foot caesura, is perplexing. It may be true, as Marco Perale suggests to me, that this is not a hexameter at all, but I hesitate to rule out an instance of Simias’ metrical eccentricity. At any rate, ἁλυκὴ ζάψ is more likely than not the ending of Simias’ genuine hexameter; this appears as the clausula of SH 389 (Dionysius Iambus), which may well be, as Fränkel 1915, 46 suggests, an echo of Simias. 71 Cf., in contrast, the following near-rhopalic hexameters to be found in Simias’ fragments: ναίουσιν τόξοισι πεποιθότες ὠκυβόλοισιν (fr. 1.4 Fränkel/CA; the pattern is 3:3:4:5); χρυσῷ δ᾿ αἰγλήεντι προσήρμοσεν ἀμφιδασείας (fr. 5.1 Fränkel = CA 3.1; the pattern is 2:4:4:5).

36  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes Perhaps the single most remarkable hexameter in what we have of Simias’ poetry is the one-line fr. 3 Fränkel = CA 7, which, as Athenaeus tells us in a passage discussing variant names for the Pleiades, comes from Gorgo (11.490e–491c): αἰθέρος ὠκεῖαι πρόπολοι πίλναντο Πέλειαι.

The translation which Olson supplies is, ‘The Peleiai, swift servants of the upper air, were drawing near’.72 To my mind, however, this is only one among many possibilities. To stir up the pot, I suggest that αἰθέρος may be a separative genitive,73 especially if πίλναντο was originally accompanied, as is usual (cf. LSJ s.v.), by οὔδει or χθονί; the problems we have with this line suggest that it is not a self-contained whole. Why would ‘the servants Peleiae’ have flown down from the sky? Obviously, to nurture the child Zeus with ambrosia, precisely as the doves-Peleiades do in the fragment of Moero which directly precedes the quotation from Simias in Athenaeus (CA p. 21, 1.9–10; cf. Hom. Od. 12.62–63); subsequently, Zeus thanked the Peleiades by catasterizing them. If this was the story told by Simias’ poem, how was its title connected to it? There is an account of Zeus’ youth, obscure in details, which seems to imply that he was the Gorgon-slayer (Musaeus, frr. 83–84 Bernabé).74 Or αἰθέρος might be a genitive of place,75 whereas πίλναντο could have the sense ‘drew near each other’, as at Hes. Theog. 702–703 γαῖα καὶ οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθε | πίλνατο, so that the line would describe the gathering of the Peleiades in the upper sky… Perhaps the safest course of action here is to admit that the lack of context prevents choosing one preferable reading. In a characteristically instructive recent discussion, Perale opts for printing, with several other scholars, αἳ/αἱ θέρος, but besides the fact that this is perhaps not unproblematic,76 I have my own reason to favour αἰθέρος. With this word, we receive a striking pattern – a hexameter that is composed entirely of trisyllabic words

 72 Olson 2009, 389; cf. Fränkel 1915, 37. 73 Cf. Kühner 1898, 394–395. 74 Fränkel 1915, 40, following Wilamowitz 1913, 226–227 n. 2, felt inclined to think that Gorgo may have recounted the Perseus myth. If Gorgo was centred around Zeus, then fr. 6 Fränkel = CA 10 on Dodona may have belonged to this poem. 75 Cf. Kühner 1898, 384–385. 76 Perale’s 2010, 510–511 n. 38 preference is αἵ as a possessive pronoun (LSJ s.v. ὅς, ἥ, ὅν I), but this pronoun must not be separated from the noun. For that matter, the separation of αἱ would also call for some explanation. It is true that the article and the noun can be separated, but in such cases the article is normally followed by μέν, δέ, γε or γάρ, as in every instance of this phaenomenon listed by Maass 1893, 97 for Aratus, who shows a special predilection for splitting the article and the noun. Two exceptions to this rule can be found in Callimachus’ Hymns, at Ap. 1

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(cf. the caption for Section 3 of the present discussion). I have been unable to find the like of this elsewhere in Greek poetry,77 but Optatian’s Carm. 15 Polara, which offers a stunning gallery of hexametric and elegiac eccentricities (including a rhopalon),78 begins with four verses consisting entirely of isosyllabic words whose length increases with each line, so that line 1 has seven disyllables, line 2 five trisyllables, line 3 four tetrasyllables, and line 4 three pentasyllables. This evidences that the poets-grammarians were interested in such unusual patterns, which bring to mind the previously discussed rhopalic verse. Another striking feature of Simias’ line on the Peleiae is the alliteration of π–λ in the three last words, which Fränkel suspected to be intended to imitate ‘alarum agitatarum crepitus’.79 One may wonder whether it can be more than just a curious coincidence that a similar alliteration features in the spectacular passage of the Iliad, twice repeated, so that its distinctiveness is less likely to be missed, on the spear which Peleus handed down to Achilles (16.140–144 = 19.387–391):80 … ἔγχος βριθὺ μέγα στιβαρόν· τὸ μὲν οὐ δύνατ’ ἄλλος Ἀχαιῶν πάλλειν, ἀλλά μιν οἶος ἐπίστατο πῆλαι Ἀχιλλεύς· Πηλιάδα μελίην, τὴν πατρὶ φίλῳ πόρε Χείρων Πηλίου ἐκ κορυφῆς φόνον ἔμμεναι ἡρώεσσιν. … the spear, huge, heavy, thick, which no one else of all the Achaians could handle, but Achilleus alone knew how to wield it; the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father from high on Pelion, to be death for fighters in battle.81

Here the insistent repetition of παλλ/πηλ must be meant to subtly evoke the presence of Peleus, whose name is absent from this passage, without bringing him in

 and Cer. 120. In the former, however, perhaps the speaker’s agitation may account for the separation, and in the latter, ‘[t]he extreme hyperbaton … (τὸν κάλαθον between the article-noun group, αἱ … ἵπποι) has the effect of locating the κάλαθον upon the chariot’; Stephens 2015, 294 (note, at any rate, that here the separation results from a textual emendation). 77 Jerzy Danielewicz, however, calls to my attention Il. 8.42 = 13.24, which consists of tetrasyllabic words (ὠκυπέτα χρυσέῃσιν ἐθείρῃσιν κομόωντε). 78 On this poem, see the Introduction, Chapters 2 and 3, and Levitan 1985, 246–250 and Hernández Lobato 2017, 465–466. 79 Fränkel 1915, 36–37. 80 For a sensible comment on the replication of this passage, see Armstrong 1958, 352. 81 Transl. Lattimore 1990.

38  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes in person.82 It is impossible to say whether Simias had a similar effect in mind, yet I like to think that the remarkable Homeric passage had stuck in his head as it has in mine. Simias’ liking for the acoustic wordplay is confirmed by other passages. We have already seen the ‘headed’ fr. 7 Fränkel = CA 4; perhaps this was, as Perale attractively suggested,83 the opening of an epigram for the base of a Rhodian statue of Helios: χρυσῷ τοι φαέθοντι πολύλλιστος φλέγεται κράς. Your head, much-invoked with prayers, blazes with radiant gold.

The alliteration of λ interplays with the emphasis this line puts on the sun’s golden shine. The anaphoric assonance of εὐ-/ἐ- in another fragment (fr. 10 Fränkel = CA 14, cretic tetrameters), perhaps from a hymn to some hero (cf. fr. 14 Fränkel = CA 17, which probably addresses Heracles84), may have no other effect than to emphasize precisely εὐ-, i.e. prosperity and abundance: Σοὶ μὲν εὔιππος εὔπωλος ἐγχέσπαλος δῶκεν αἰχμὰν Ἐνυάλιος εὔσκοπον ἔχειν. Spear-wielding Enyalios, who has many horses and many foals, gave you your unerring spear.

Occasionally, the awareness of Simias’ taste for such Klangspiele may prove helpful in the textual criticism of his fragments, as in the following line of Simias’ Apollo (fr. 1.10 Fränkel/CA; another ‘headed’ line, already quoted): τοῖς ὤμων ἐφύπερθεν ἐϋστρεφέων κύνεος κράς …

The standard editions have καθύπερθεν, but Perale’s choice is the variant ἐφύπερθεν; he follows Magnelli’s perceptive suggestion that the acoustic effect of wedding ἐφύπερθεν and ἐϋστρεφέων in this highly musical line is symmetric to the effect created by the alliteration of κύνεος κράς.85 This argument may be

 82 Cf. Janko 1992, 335 and Edwards 1991, 280. Note that an important context for this instance of alliterative wordplay is provided by the popularity of aetiological wordplay in oral poetry, a phenomenon whose echoes can be detected in Callimachus; see Clauss forthcoming. 83 Perale 2011b. 84 See Fränkel 1915, 50. 85 Perale 2011a, 369 n. 14.

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reinforced by the observation that Simias’ technical ingenuity manifests itself elsewhere in the passage surrounding this line (fr. 1.7–11 Fränkel/CA):86 ἐκ δ’ ἱκόμην ἐλάταισι περὶ χλωρῇσιν ἐρεμνὰς νήσους ὑψικόμοισιν ἐπηρεφέας δονάκεσσιν. Ἡμικύνων τ’ ἐνόησα γένος περιώσιον ἀνδρῶν, τοῖς ὤμων ἐφύπερθεν ἐϋστρεφέων κύνεος κρὰς τέτραφε γαμφηλῇσι περικρατέεσιν ἐρυμνός. I came to islands which were darkened throughout by green firs, and covered with towering reeds. I noticed an unusual race of men who were half man and half dog, and above whose well-twisting shoulders was a dog’s head, which was protected by grasping jaws.87

Fränkel comments, with some astonishment, on the unfathomably ‘mirus parallelismus’ created by how the syntax and sound of line 7 ἐλάταισι περὶ χλωρῇσιν ἐρεμνάς (or ἐρυμνάς, as Fränkel wants to have it) echoes line 11 γαμφηλῇσι περικρατέεσιν ἐρυμνός.88 Additionally, we ought to take note of how the latter phrase almost exactly replicates the former, although (probably) not one element is left unaltered. If we keep in mind that this effect of ring-composition is enhanced by the unusual acoustic properties of line 10, and in addition that this passage notably contains two clear-cut tetracola (lines 8 and 11),89 then this becomes a particularly striking example of how careful Simias may have been about the artful orchestration of his verse. Such musical sensitiveness is what permeates all his poetry, from the effusive self-referential loquacity of the Egg to his strangely polished hexameters. The blending of this taste for formal experiments and the poet’s scholarly perspective gives birth to a poetry that is both rich in formal nuances and emphatically selfreflexive; a poetry that results from the painstaking study of its predecessors and wants the reader to contemplate its formal sophistication with precisely the same dedication. Simias’ preoccupation with the alchemy of Formspiele may have had source in his philological obsession, and at any rate both traits are in harmony with each other.

 86 The text as in Perale 2011a, 368–369, except that I prefer ἐρεμνάς in line 7, a conjecture put forward by Jacobs 1798, 6, instead of ἐρυμνάς, as I believe a slight variation between the two adjectives is more in place here than the almost exact repetition, which is likely to be due to an easy corruption; see further below. 87 Transl. White 1982, 173–184, adapted. 88 Fränkel 1915, 23 n. 1. 89 Tetracola, which become a characteristic feature in late hexameter poets, are rare in Callimachus and Theocritus; see Agosti/Gonnelli 1995, 322.

40  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes

. Paradox, eeriness, fantasy For modern readers, even those having a fancy for the literature of the Greeks and the Romans, Simias is an almost entirely obscure figure, and therefore an instance of his reception, as much striking as it is isolated, in a twentieth-century Polish poet very much deserves our attention here. The Polish essayist and translator Zygmunt Kubiak (1929–2004) is known, inter alia, for his translations of epigrams from the Palatine Anthology. A particularly elegant edition of such a selection, which included the pair of Simias’ epigrams on musical animals, was published in 1978.90 A few years later, the prolific poet Jerzy Harasymowicz (1933– 1999) included the following epigram-like poem in one of his numerous poetry books; the title, Simas and the Cricket (Simiasz i świerszcz), clearly points to the source of inspiration:91 Nie wstydził się mędrców Simiasz i rozmawiał ze świerszczem siedzącym na listku epigramu I świerszcza obrał sobie za przewodnika po świecie I prowadząc go wszędzie jak pies świerszcz pieśń Simiasza ocalił na wieki Simias was not ashamed before the sages and talked to a cricket sitting on the leaf of an epigram. And he made the cricket his guide through the world. And leading him everywhere like a dog, the cricket saved the song of Simias forever.

Harasymowicz is known for his fondness for the nature and rural landscapes of Eastern Europe. There is little doubt that the reason why he evokes the intertext of Simias’ epigram is that he feels that the Rhodian poet is his soulmate; he finds in his poetry the same sensitivity to bucolic scenery and its petty detail he cherishes himself. This intuitive poetic vision of Simias corresponds with a fully developed scholarly proposal, which was put forward by Méndez Dosuna, to view Simias as a precursor of the bucolic poetry of Theocritus.92 What led Méndez  90 Kubiak 1978. 91 Harasymowicz 1982, 17. This poetry book was commissioned for the 1982 Olympic Games in Moscow, but its publication was delayed; my guess is that the subtle classicizing poetry Harasymowicz composed on this occasion was found unfit for the spirit of Soviet celebration. 92 Méndez Dosuna 2008, 192–206.

Paradox, eeriness, fantasy  41

Dosuna to formulate this suggestion was the observation of the tantalizing verbal correspondences between three passages in Theocritus’ poems (Id. 13.62–63; 18.41–42 and 30.18) and the extended simile in the second part of the Egg (13–19), in which Hermes’ dance is likened to the swift dash of the fawns through mountain pastures in search of their mother. Although this simile is predominantly epic in tone, the scenery it describes may be characterized as bucolic. We recognize a similar scenery in the landscape of the epigrams on the partridge and the locust, as if confirming Simias’ predilection for bucolic motifs. Yet it would be a superficial and inadequate picture if we attempted to portray Simias as no more than a tender enthusiast of bucolic landscapes. For one thing, the images of nature which we find in his poetry contain a disquieting number of murky copses and foliage tangles. Most of these may be seen to provide, as the dense coppice we saw in the pair of the epigrams on the partridge and the locust, an apt metaphor for sophisticated poetry. In one of Simias’ epitaphs for Sophocles, the Dionysiac foliage abundantly and densely creeping on the tomb of Sophocles corresponds with the tragedian’s εὐμαθίη (AP 7.22 = fr. 23 Fränkel = 5 Gow/Page): Ἠρέμ’ ὑπὲρ τύμβοιο Σοφοκλέος, ἠρέμα, κισσέ, ἑρπύζοις χλοεροὺς ἐκπροχέων πλοκάμους, καὶ πέταλον πάντῃ θάλλοι ῥόδου ἥ τε φιλορρὼξ ἄμπελος ὑγρὰ πέριξ κλήματα χευαμένη, εἵνεκεν εὐμαθίης πινυτόφρονος, ἣν ὁ μελιχρὸς ἤσκησεν Μουσῶν ἄμμιγα καὶ Χαρίτων. Gently over the tomb of Sophocles, gently creep, o ivy, flinging forth your green curls, and all about let the petals of the rose bloom, and the vine that loves her fruit shed her pliant tendrils around, for the sake of that wise-hearted learnedness that the Muses and Graces in common bestowed on the sweet singer.93

In the above-quoted fragment of Apollo (fr. 1.7–11 Fränkel/CA), the dense cover of the shady tangle of trees and reeds hides an uncanny race of Half-dogs.94 The descriptions of the Half-dogs and their habitat complement each other; this is underscored by the verbal parallelism between lines 7 and 11. This consistent poetic

 93 Transl. Paton 1919, adapted. 94 There has been some debate about whether the Half-dogs inhabit the islands described in lines 7–8 or rather lines 7–8 and 9–13 refer to two separate lands. Most scholars incline toward the latter view; see Perale 2011a, 381–382 n. 50. However, the ring-composition created by lines 7 and 11 strongly suggests that these lines embrace one whole.

42  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes picture may be contrasted with Theocritus’ depiction of the appearance of Amycus in the space of a locus amoenus (Id. 22.37–52), in which the monstrous silhouette spoils the beauty and tranquility of the bucolic landscape. The shadowy landscape of Simias’ poetry inevitably brings to mind Sistakou’s recent study of ‘darkness’, i.e. Romantic motifs, in Hellenistic poetry. Although her discussion does not include the fragments of Simias, she mentions him as one of those poets who might potentially be ‘pertinent to the idea of darkness’.95 It might appear somewhat surprising to find this said of the Rhodian poet who wrote about Helios’ head ‘blazing with radiant gold’ (the above-quoted fr. 7 Fränkel), but it is true that the dark, the eerie and the uncanny is not alien to Simias’ poetry. If his fragments also supply brighter images, or even the images that can be interpreted as the visions conceived by an unpretentious bucolic poet, it is because his predilection for fantastic imagery is coupled to the taste for paradox. It is significant that the fragments of Simias evidence his interest in the nonHomeric epics. The Axe deals with what was the subject-matter of the Little Iliad (cf. Il. parv. arg.4 West), and so does the problematic fr. [3a] Fränkel = CA 6, if it says anything at all about Simias’ poetry.96 It has been observed by Griffin that in other early epics, the fantastic element was much more prominent than in Homer.97 Superhuman powers, magical transformations, dragons and other marvellous creatures all abounded in the stories, now mostly lost, which contributed to shaping the collective imagination of the Greeks. My impression is that Simias’ poetic imagination was particularly eager to embrace such fantastic visions. His Apollo probably recounted the altogether fabulous story of one Clinis, who was Apollo’s favourite and frequently assisted the god in his visits to the land of the Hyperboreans (see fr. 2 Fränkel/CA). Fr. 1 Fränkel/CA, a thirteen-line excerpt from this poem, is likely to contain Clinis’ account of his wondrous aerial trip;98 several lands are described, each in a two-line unit, but special attention and seven lines are reserved for the description of the land of the Half-dogs and its fantastic inhabitants. The Eros of Simias’ Wings, in turn, is a powerful primeval deity paradoxically residing in the immature body of an ephebe;99 the eeriness of his deceptive countenance is clearly intended to make the reader feel uncomfortable (‘do not tremble’, Eros addresses us in line 2). Another technopaegnion portrays the

 95 Sistakou 2012, 47. 96 See n. 69 above. 97 Griffin 1997, 39–53; cf. Griffin 1980, 165–167. 98 See Perale 2011a and 2014. 99 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 91 and 96–99.

Paradox, eeriness, fantasy  43

humble carpenter Epeius through implying, para prosdokian, a grand vision of the superhuman hero destroying the god-built walls of Troy with his supernatural weapon (Axe 2–4; such a portrayal owes much to Stesichorus,100 and similar was the representation of Epeius in Polygnotus’ painting in Delphi; cf. Paus. 10.26.2).101 The extant incipits of the polymetric hymns say little about their contents, but it is telling that the already quoted fr. 11 Fränkel = CA 15 apparently referred to a story of Dionysus’ journey – fabulous, no doubt – to the world’s farthest end (perhaps to India?).102 Judging from what has reached us, the character of Simias’ poetry owed more to the Epic Cycle than Homer. Moreover, even when he is concerned with, not fantasy, but the tangible reality of nature, he is keen to focus on its paradoxes and disturbing aspects. Our point of departure for this discussion will be the extended simile of the Egg, in which Simias depicts fawns rushing through mountain pastures. Their quick movement excites commotion in the bucolic landscape of the simile (lines 16–19); the bleating (βλαχαί) of startled sheep resounds through the mountains and penetrates the caves. Eventually, ‘the echoing sound’ (ἀμφίπαλτος αὐδά) reaches the lair of a ‘cruel-hearted beast’ (ὠμόθυμος θήρ), which springs from its den in pursuit of the fawns, following ‘the sound of the cry’ (βοᾶς ἀκοά). The Homeric θήρ suggests a lion (see LSJ s.v.), but the imprecise designation enables us to imagine any sort of monster, and on the whole, the narrative is highly disconcerting. I suggested elsewhere that the image of the beast aroused in its lair by joyful sounds may have been a common folk motif, as it resembles the depiction of the awakening of Grendel, enraged by the noise of banquets at Heorot (Beowulf 86–90).103 Yet what is the function of the insistence on sound in this part of Simias’ poem? One would not be mistaken to describe the Egg as a poetic treatise on sound and voice, as this theme notably recurs throughout the poem.104 It is not surprising to find out that Simias is interested in the representations of and metaphors for song and singing, yet the ominous tone of the passage on the awakening of the beast, with the implied characterization of the voice as a source of danger, is somewhat perplexing. I suggest that other passages  100 See Finglass 2013, 7–13, esp. 13. 101 See Kwapisz 2013a, 82–83. 102 Unless Dionysus’ katabasis is meant, as Marco Perale thinks (private communication); cf. πυμάταν εἰς Ἀχέροντος ὁδόν in line 4 of the partridge epigram. On the text of the fragment on Dionysus, see n. 62 above. 103 Kwapisz 2013a, 133–134. Note that the Homeric ὠμοφάγος, to which ὠμόθυμος is clearly allusive, is used of, besides lions (e.g. Il. 5.782), various animals, savage men, fantastic creatures and demons; see LSJ s.v. 104 See n. 52 above.

44  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes in Simias’ extant fragments may shed light on the ambivalent reflection on the nature of voice and speech as offered by the Egg. We earlier saw, in a fragment of Simias’ Apollo, the depiction of the race of Half-dogs as humanoids with canine heads, but I omitted the following two lines describing, with almost scientific precision, their (half-)communication (fr. 1.10– 11 Fränkel/CA): τῶν μέν θ’ ὥστε κυνῶν ὑλακὴ πέλει, οὐδέ τι τοίγε ἄλλων ἀγνώσσουσι βροτῶν ὀνομάκλυτον αὐδήν. Their bark is like that of dogs, but they well understand the articulate speech of other men.105

This description is not Simias’ invention, as it is probably based on the account provided by Ctesias (FGrHist 688 F 45.37),106 but the interest in how the hybrid nature affects the communication between the fantastic creatures is, nonetheless, striking. In describing human speech (αὐδή), Simias uses a word whose interpretation has caused some difficulty. Fränkel instructively comments on how ὀνομάκλυτον results from a re-interpretation of Od. 9.364 Κύκλωψ, εἰρωτᾶς μ᾿ ὄνομα κλυτόν (‘Cyclops, you ask me for my famous name’107); according to the Homeric scholiast, κλυτόν does not mean ‘famous’ here, but ‘by which I am called’ (κλυτὸν οὐκ ‘ἔνδοξον’, ἀλλ’ ‘ἐξ οὗ καλοῦμαι’; cf. Od. 19.183 with the scholion), and by pursuing a similar chain of thought, Simias employs the adjective to mean, ‘[speech] in which names of things [ὀνόματα] are heard’ or ‘discerning ὀνόματα’, i.e. ‘articulate’.108 What I should like to indicate is that the word ὄνομα, which is inherent in this compound, had already at the time of Simias had a history as a linguistic terminus technicus; intriguingly, it appears in connection with a mention of animal voice in Aristotle’s De interpretatione (16a19–29): Ὄνομα μὲν οὖν ἐστὶ φωνὴ σημαντικὴ κατὰ συνθήκην … τὸ δὲ κατὰ συνθήκην, ὅτι φύσει τῶν ὀνομάτων οὐδέν ἐστιν, ἀλλ’ ὅταν γένηται σύμβολον· ἐπεὶ δηλοῦσί γέ τι καὶ οἱ ἀγράμματοι ψόφοι, οἷον θηρίων, ὧν οὐδέν ἐστιν ὄνομα. Now a noun is a vocal sound, which is meaningful by convention … I say ‘by convention’ because nothing is a noun by nature, but only when it becomes a symbol; since even the

 105 Transl. White 1982, adapted. 106 Cf. Fränkel 1915, 22. 107 Transl. Lattimore 1990. 108 Fränkel 1915, 22–23.

Paradox, eeriness, fantasy  45

unspellable noises, such as those of wild animals, communicate something, but none of them is a noun.109

It is tempting to assume that ὄνομα in Simias’ description of the communication of the Half-dogs has an Aristotelian colouring. The cited passage of Aristotle implies the negative definition of animal speech as a basic system of communication which lacks conventionally meaningful ὀνόματα. Such is the Half-dogs’ bark; like some animals, they communicate something on a simple level, but this communication lacks the meaningful units whose presence characterizes human speech. This scientific precision of description helps to underscore the uncanniness of the fantastic biology of the Half-dogs; the hybrid amalgam of their animal features and the properly human Weltanschauung, implied by their capacity to discern and comprehend ὀνόματα, defines their monstrosity.110 The disturbing paradoxes of voice communication are not, however, peculiar to the distant realms inhabited by fantastic creatures. One collateral result of Aristotle’s scientific reflection on the animal world is that it brings out the paradoxical, perhaps even uncanny, characteristics of animal speech.111 The chief point of the study of animal voice is, of course, to gain insight into the nature and boundaries of humanity; such reflection is driven by the hope of finding criteria for identifying the uniqueness of human speech. Aristotle discusses animal voice in several passages throughout his corpus, especially at De anima 2.8 and Historia animalium 4.9, and although these observations do not necessarily form one coherent doctrine, they give us a general picture of his views.112 He discerns three categories of sounds produced by animals: noise (ψόφος), voice (φωνή), and speech (διάλεκτος). The bleating of sheep, for instance, qualifies as voice, as its production involves the apparatus of pharynx and lungs (Hist. an. 535a27–30; cf. De an. 420b26–421a6) and, moreover, it is ‘a certain meaningful sound [σημαντικός τις ψόφος] and not merely the sound of inhaled air, like a cough’ (De an. 420b32–33). Voices of various animals have various, albeit rudimentary, communicative functions, as ‘each animal has its own particular vocalizations [ἴδιαι φωναί] for the purpose of intercourse and association, as, for example, those of pigs, goats, and sheep’ (Hist. an. 536a13–15). Some creatures are devoid of the  109 All translations of Aristotle are from Zirin 1980. 110 On the Half-dogs’ impaired linguistic skills as a mark of their primitiveness, see Gera 2003, 185–187; cf. Nichols 2011, 124–125. 111 What follows is vaguely inspired by the discussion of how science and ‘darkness’ intertwine in Nicander’s didactic poetry in Sistakou 2012, 193–250. 112 Such a picture was sketched by Zirin 1980; see also Fögen 2007, 46–49. Lachenaud 2013, 85–87 puts the hierarchy of voices in a broader context.

46  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes apparatus of voice, but ‘make noises [ψοφεῖν] with other parts of their bodies’, as, for example, insects, some of which, as bees, hum or buzz (βομβεῖν), whereas others, as cicadas, are said to sing (τὰ δ᾿ ᾄδειν λέγεται; Hist. an. 535b2–7). This is all clear enough, yet it has been noted that when Aristotle speaks about διάλεκτος, i.e. the most advanced form of communication, he does so haltingly and with a certain ambivalence.113 First, he says that ‘the genus of birds emits a voice [φωνή]’, but if they have the right kind of tongue (γλῶττα), they have more than that, i.e. speech (διάλεκτος; Hist. an. 536a20–22). Yet not much later he states that speech is peculiar to man (ἴδιον τοῦτο [sc. διάλεκτος] τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐστίν; 536b1–2). And then again, when he proceeds to discuss the differentiation of articulate voice in various birds and he says that ‘one might speak of [this articulate voice] as “speech” [διάλεκτος]’ (ἣν ἄν τις ὥσπερ διάλεκτον εἴπειεν; 536b11–12), the optative and the cautious ὥσπερ betray his reluctance. Clearly, Aristotle is not comfortable with admitting that his definition of διάλεκτος is broad enough to show that this advanced form of communication is, after all, not peculiar to men (language is,114 and Aristotle is aware of this fact,115 but this does not need to bother us here; I focus on what is said in Historia animalium). As a result, the encounter with Aristotle’s reflection on animal voice can make one question the intuitive notion of the rigid borders of humanity. I suspect that a certain perturbation resulting from encounters, direct or not, with Aristotle’s thought, or simply from having being born in an epoch whose worldview had been shaped by the thought of Aristotle and his Peripatetic followers, may be what underlies Simias’ obsession with sound, voice and speech. This obsession is reflected not only in the Egg and the fragment of Apollo dealing with the Halfdogs, but also, quite conspicuously, in his pair of the interconnected epigrams on musical animals (frr. 24–25 Fränkel on, respectively, the partridge and the locust), whose engagement with philology I discussed earlier. If one stops to think about it for a moment, these are both rather odd epigrams. It is one thing to employ decoy partridges in hunting,116 but it is quite another to build tombs and to compose epitaphs for them. There is something surreal about the epigram on the partridge, and that ancient readers may have had similar feelings about it seems to be confirmed by the fact that its reminiscences

 113 For a discussion of this hesitancy, see Zirin 1980, 339–342 and Long 2011, 79–81. See also Payne 2010, 84–88. 114 See, e.g., Tecumseh Fitch 2010, 173–175. 115 See Payne 2010, 86–87. 116 They still do this in France, as Pauline LeVen tells me.

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can be traced in Catullus’ subtly ironic lament for Lesbia’s sparrow.117 The epigram on the captive locust is similarly odd. Gow and Page make a deadly serious comment (in their discussion of AP 7.200 = Nicias 4, an epigram on the same theme) on how ‘cicadas live on the sap of trees and quickly starve to death in captivity’.118 This is true; capturing cicadas, grasshoppers and locusts is childish (cf. AP 7.190 and 200–201), and locking them up in a cage is even more so. These two epigrams, however, are not simply innocent frivolities. They both reflect on the astonishing phenomenon of the musicality, and even poeticness, of various animal voices. The appearance of the word στόμα in both epigrams underscores Simias’ interest in the mechanism of this musicality. Strikingly, the production of sound by both partridges and locusts is discussed by Aristotle in the already quoted chapter of his Historia animalium, devoted to the phenomenon of animal voice (4.9); additionally, the same treatise contains a separate discussion of the idiosyncrasies of the partridge (9.8). The musical skills of both partridges and locusts are peculiar: ἀκρίδες produce sound (ψόφος) by rubbing their hind legs (535b11–12), whereas partridges are notable since their various species have various voices (536b13–14 οἱ μὲν κακκαβίζουσιν οἱ δὲ τρίζουσιν; 614a21–22 οὐ μόνον δ᾿ ᾄδει ὁ πέρδιξ ἀλλὰ καὶ τριγμὸν ἀφίησι καὶ ἄλλας φωνάς),119 and above all because of their musical displays in combat (536a26–27; 614a10–21). In Book 9 of Historia animalium (8 in the Balme/Gotthelf edition), a longer (and wonderfully entertaining) excursus is devoted to the uses of decoy partridges in hunting (614a10–28). This is, I submit, Simias’ source of knowledge for his epigram. Aristotle describes the partridges as extremely combative, deceitful and sexually promiscuous birds (he has a comment on their questionable moral conduct, or τοῦ ἤθους πανουργία; 614a30). The hunter can make use of either male or female birds. When a cock is used as a decoy, his provocative chant attracts other male birds as they sense a sexual rival; a hen, in turn, attracts a group of competing cocks. Gow and Page note that ‘if Simias’s genders can be trusted his bird was a cock’,120 and what points in the same direction is that, as I mentioned earlier, the Homeric diction of this epigram strongly suggests that a mockheroic effect is intended; this epitaph is for the tomb of an epic warrior, i.e. for a cock which fought other cocks. It may be tempting to see here a jocular metapoetic allusion to the combativeness of poets, but what I choose to focus on is an

 117 See n. 29 above. 118 Gow/Page 1965, 431. 119 On ancient views on the polyglottism of partridges, see Bettini 2008, 121, with references to Theophrastus and Aelian. 120 Gow/Page 1965, 512.

48  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes arresting paradox pictured by Simias, in the literal sense of παράδοξον as something that shakes the common-sense view of the world. Both epigrams on animals clearly evidence Simias’ interest in the most proficient singers of the animal world (recognized as such, as we have already seen, by earlier writers and poets). What must have struck him about the partridge is the realization that the bird’s legendary musical skills, so astonishing when one thinks of how much toil it takes for human musicians to reach a similar level of technical proficiency, are developed as merely a by-product of its peculiar mating habits. The anthropomorphization of the partridge in the mock-heroic epitaph, which puts emphasis on how the bird cunningly uses its musical skills to deceive other partridges, as if mimicking and perverting the human use of voice for social interaction, underscores this eerie paradox. One might get the impression that the addressee of this epitaph approaches the verge of humanity – the illusion to which Alcman famously succumbed. Yet this is absurd; Aristotle dispels the illusion. What remains is the paradox. The paradox of the musicality of the locust is no smaller. As I suggested elsewhere,121 this epigram (fr. 25 Fränkel) presents itself almost as a riddle: the word ἀκρίς is, as a matter of fact, missing, and ‘singing with the tongueless mouth [ἄγλωσσον στόμα]’ in the final line is a riddling paradox (‘I sing, although I have no tongue. What am I?’). The students of this epigram are surely correct in suggesting that ‘the tongueless mouth’ does not imply Simias’ erroneous views on the production of sound by the locust, but is rather a metaphoric reference to what Fränkel calls ἄστομον στόμα, i.e. the mechanism of friction described by Aristotle.122 The sound produced by locusts is a ‘noise’, the lowest in the Aristotelian hierarchy of ψόφος, φωνή and διάλεκτος. Yet at least from the poetic viewpoint, this noise is, like the chant of the partridge, a melodious song, so skilful that it famously becomes a model for poets. This paradox is underscored by the use of the adjective ἄγλωσσον, which does much more than just point out that the mouth to which it refers is not really a mouth. We have seen that according to Aristotle, the tongue is a sine qua non for producing speech (διάλεκτος), which is, ideally, peculiar to man, yet also, as Aristotle reluctantly admits, found in birds (like partridges). It is, therefore, particularly paradoxical that locusts ‘sing’ (ᾄδειν). As we have seen, Aristotle resolves the paradox by explaining that ᾄδειν is merely a terminus technicus for the ψόφος produced by cicadas (and locusts, we may add), but Simias, of course, prefers to emphasize the paradox by drawing

 121 Kwapisz 2016c. 122 Fränkel 1915, 102; cf. Gow/Page 1965, 512.

Paradox, eeriness, fantasy  49

our attention to how the biologically primitive mechanism of the locust utters a delightful song (τερπνὰ φθέγγεται). May there be even more to the pointed appearance of the adjective ἄγλωσσον? More tentatively, I note that it may have yet another meaning, in view of the fact that glosses are Simias’ spécialité as much in this epigram as elsewhere. There may be a faint suggestion in Simias’ use of ἄγλωσσον in reference to the locust that the locust’s ‘song’ is different from, for instance, his own poetry, or the poetry of Homer, in that because it lacks words, or γλῶσσαι, similarly as the Half-dogs’ bark lacks ὀνόματα, it precludes any possibility of hermeneutic interpretation. Simultaneously, the use of this word highlights Simias’ interest in glosses. Again, all this points to the paradox inherent in the insects’ ‘singing’ – its enchanting sophistication offers delight despite the fact that it lacks the distinctive qualities that define the sophistication of human poetry. How does all this relate to the Egg? My impression is that Simias’ chief purpose in composing the two epigrams, in spite of all their Aristotelian tinge, was to offer a playful poetic-philological comment on the obscure Homeric gloss δρίος (see Section 2 above). However, this provided an apt occasion for developing the motif of the diversity of voices in nature, to which Simias obsessively returned in his poetry. There are curious similarities in wording and imagery between the epigram on the partridge and the Egg; whereas it may not be surprising that Simias uses similar phrasing to depict the utterance of song in both poems (cf. Egg 20 μεθίει μέτρα μολπᾶς vs. fr. 24.2 Fränkel ἠχήεσσαν ἱεῖς γῆρυν), one may wonder whether it is meaningful that the partridges in the epigram are as dappled as the mother deer is in the Egg (Egg 18 ματρὸς … βαλιᾶς … τέκος vs. 24.3 βαλιοὺς συνομήλικας). Probably it is not. I suppose that what these similarities suggest is that there was a haunting, powerful image stuck deep in Simias’ head, whose reflections flash in several passages in his fragments. Consequently, we find in Simias’ poetry a whole gallery of creatures variously equipped with communication skills, which occupy various positions in the spectrum between humanity and non-humanity. This gallery includes the hybrid Half-dogs, who cannot speak articulately but comprehend such speech, the locust, whose ‘noise’ resembles human music although it is produced in an entirely non-human fashion, and the similarly (or even more, if we keep in mind Alcman fr. 39 Davies) musical partridge, which, in addition, uses a sort of speech, and even various dialects, to communicate with other partridges, which disturbingly parodies human language. Finally, there is the Egg. Among the many human and divine voices of this poem (e.g. the chant of the Muses; line 12), the most conspicuous is the voice described in the first part of the poem (lines 1–8), where Simias exploits the popular metaphor of the poet as a nightingale (κωτίλα ἀηδών). This

50  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes is very different from the ambivalent and even uncanny presentation of the partridge. The nightingale embodies the sublime perfection, cherished by the gods, of the voice of the poem itself, and perhaps the voice of poetry in general. Everything in the poem is calculated to highlight precisely how outstanding this poetic voice is. The appearance of the ‘cruel-hearted beast’ in the second part of the poem provides a counterpoint to the ultimate musicality of the nightingale. Like Grendel, this beast is mute (this is one case where the argument ex silentio should have some force).123 It can hear, yet unlike the Half-dogs, who understand human language, its participation in voice communication is limited to the simple and brutal response to vocal stimuli. If the nightingale is at one end of the spectrum, then this beast is at the other end – the abstract opposite of what the song of the nightingale represents. This is perhaps the most disturbing creation of Simias’ poetic imagination, and at the same time testimony to its breadth and richness. In the end, this often dark imagination turns out to be rather distant from the bucolic simplicity which Harasymowicz wanted to associate with Simias. * What strikes me about the extant fragments of Simias is that despite their colourful multifariousness, those that can be attributed to him with relative certainty show a remarkable coherence in what they care about and how they put it. One can hope that if a new fragment emerged, no one could fail to recognize Simias, since the fragment would look very like one of his.124 Yet his perseverance in blending philology, the experiments with the poetic form and more or less eerie tales and imagery was not necessarily a path of success. One of the few available testimonia for the reception of Simias’ epigrams suggests that he was not regarded as an accessible poet in Antiquity. Although we see Simias among the flowers Meleager picked in the first century BC for his Garland, it appears that it was with some reluctance that Meleager included in his anthology the Rhodian grammarian’s epigrams, and those that

 123 On the muteness of Grendel, see Lerer 1991, 28 and 175. 124 The ‘close-but-no-cigar’ rule applies here; on an unconvincing attempt to ascribe to Simias a new papyrus fragment, see Perale 2014.

The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes  51

can be ascribed to him with some confidence amount to only five (frr. 22–26 Fränkel = CA 18–20 and [23] = 1–5 Gow/Page).125 It has been observed more than once126 that in Meleager’s poetic preface to his Garland, Simias is characterized, curiously enough, as βρωτὴ ἀχράς (1.30 Gow/Page). As Gow and Page note, this ‘seems to mean a pear which, though wild … is nevertheless edible’. They observe that ‘[f]ruit, as distinct from the foliage of fruit-trees, is rare in this proem … and Meleager appears to be characterizing Simias’s contribution more carefully than usual, but it is difficult to guess what exactly he means’.127 Gow and Page doubt the paradosis so much that in the text they print they actually substitute βρωτή with the βλωθρή (‘tall’) once conjectured by Hecker. There are, nevertheless, reasons to retain the transmitted text. One was given by Fränkel,128 who confirms that βρωτή has the meaning suggested by Gow and Page by adducing a passage of Archestratus (fr. 29 Olson/Sens), in which a certain species of fish is said to be ‘bad at all times, but it is most edible [βρωτὴ μάλιστα] when the grain is being harvested’.129 Furthermore, although βλωθρή, conventionally used of trees in poetry, is a well-thought-out conjecture, βρωτή has the advantage of being particularly apt for describing ἀχράς.130 Near the beginning of AP 9, we find a series of three late epigrams (4–6), one ascribed to Cyllenius and the two remaining to Palladas, which describe how the crafty insertion of a graft by a gardener transformed ἀχράδες, producing ‘bastard fruit’ (νόθη ὀπώρη; 9.4.1), into ‘fragrant pears’

 125 One reason for the inclusion of Simias’ epigrams may have been that they were a part of longer sequences of variations on one theme, which would have seemed incomplete without them. The epigrams on the partridge and the locust belong to a series of eighteen epigrams (AP 7.189–206) on cicadas, locusts and birds (including, conspicuously, partridges), to which Meleager himself contributed two or three pieces (195–196; cf. 207). Simias may have started off this catena or at least was one of the first to contribute to it (if I were to guess I should say that it all began with Anyte’s 190 and 202; for the dependence of Simias’ epigrams on Anyte, see Reitzenstein 1893, 119–120). Analogously, the epigrams on Sophocles are a part of the long sequence of epitaphs for poets, philosophers and other uiri illustres with which AP 7 begins, and Simias’ AP 6.113 = fr. 26 Fränkel = CA 18 = 3 Gow/Page has a place in the middle of a gallery of hunters’ trophies (AP 6.110–116). 126 Recently by Perale 2014, 209. 127 Gow/Page 1965, 511. 128 Fränkel 1915, 10, who follows in the footsteps of Wilamowitz 1913, 226–227. 129 Transl. Olson/Sens 2000. Cf. their comment ad loc. on p. 125: ‘the σάλπη is bad all year round, but if one has to eat it, one ought to do so in the summer’. 130 The word can refer either to a tree or its fruit; see LSJ s.v.

52  The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes (εὔπνοος ὄχνη; 9.5.4). This may have metapoetic overtones (the craft of the gardener may be allusive to the poetic excellence), and is vaguely suggestive of Meleager’s characterization of Simias.131 That Meleager had ambiguous feelings about the epigrammatic output of Simias and his likes is further suggested by his other editorial choices, as attested by the selection of the early Hellenistic epigrams we find in the Palatine Anthology. Philitas, whose epigrams may have tended to display a philological perversion similar to that for which Simias was notable,132 is altogether absent both from the collection of the Garland and from Meleager’s proem to it, although the existence of his book of epigrams is well enough attested by the Suda and by Stobaeus (4.17.5 and 56.10–11 = Philit. frr. 6–7 Lightfoot = 13–14 Sbardella = 23–24 Spanoudakis). Tellingly, even among the extant epigrams of Callimachus there is only one whose diction appears to owe something to the philologically-oriented epigrams and paignia by Simias and Philitas, namely the famous dedication of a nautilus shell to Arsinoe-Aphrodite-Zephyritis (Ep. 5 Pfeiffer = 14 Gow/Page).133 With this single exception, Callimachus’ epigrams are, as Magnelli has observed, notably plain and straightforward, and lack the learned complexity and recherché vocabulary of the Aetia, Iambi or the Hymns.134 Be that as it may, one may get the impression that the sort of poetry for which Simias developed a special liking did not generate wide enthusiasm. Not that he really cared. A metapoetic reading of his Axe may enable us to spot in this poem a glint of the poet’s self-awareness, which might suggest his indifference to criticisms. This technopaegnion purports to be inscribed on the tool used by Epeius to construct the Trojan horse. The humble carpenter is an outsider in the ranks of the Greek army, and it is only with the help of Athena that the unheroic figure is capable of entering ‘the path of Homer’ (Ὁμήρειον κέλευθον; line 7). The poem says that it is Epeius who is dedicating this axe graphically pictured before our eyes to Athena, but is it not at the same the poet himself who is making this offering? Perhaps the reason for which Simias chose to appropriate precisely this outsider hero is not so much that he wanted to secure Epeius’ κλέος, since this is what Stesichorus had done before him,135 as rather that he sensed  131 The image of βρωτὴ ἀχράς is even more graphic if Meleager had in mind Ar. Eccl. 355, where the constipating effect of the ἀχράς is referred to (cf. sch. ad loc.). I am grateful to Marco Perale for this suggestion. 132 Perhaps his more conventional epigrams were eclipsed by the definitively riddling paignia; see Kwapisz 2013b, 154–160. 133 See further Kwapisz 2016c. 134 Magnelli 2007a, 165–166. 135 See nn. 23 and 100 above.

The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes  53

that his own vocation of philologist-experimentalist resonated with the role of the water-carrier for the Atridae (cf. Axe 6), whom his divinely-inspired ingenuity (κρατερὰ μηδοσύνα in line 1) had elevated to wondrous heights. After all, what I have been trying to show in this chapter is how Simias kept watering the garden of Greek literature by constantly exploring its various nooks and crannies both as grammarian and as poet (who never ceased to be a grammarian). If Simias was already at his time surrounded by some unfriendly Telchines,136 then the tone of the response he gave them with the Axe was quite different from Callimachus’ lively tirade – even though ultimately Simias can also be seen to commend an unobvious career choice (on further correspondences between the two poets, see the Introduction). Even if Callimacheanism for a great part obscured the eccentric mélange of Simias’ preoccupations, there were, nevertheless, ancient poets – not many, but perhaps each epoch of Antiquity knew one – for whom the formula of intellectualism Simias invented had a special appeal. These were at first no more than wellwishing sympathizers, like Philicus.137 Later, the more professed followers started to appear, like Laevius and Optatian Porfyry, whom we will meet in the subsequent chapters. Yet can we legitimately speak of Simias as the inventor of a new intellectual paradigm? Yes, we can, at least in the sense in we can speak of Theocritus as the inventor of bucolicism; an invention needs reception in order to become more than an isolated fact of history, to define and substantiate its identity. From this point of view, Laevius and Optatian, who are to Simias what Bion and Vergil were to Theocritus, play no smaller role in defining the paradigmatic model whose emergence this book attempts to capture.

 136 Incidentally, there is a mention of Telchines in Simias’ extant fragments (frr. 8 and 17 Fränkel = CA 11), yet probably the inhabitants of Rhodes, rather than malicious demons, are meant. 137 Theocritus may also have dropped in from time to time (cf. n. 92 above).

 Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers If one undertook, in Plutarchian fashion, to write Parallel Lives of Greek and Roman Poets, then Simias and Laevius would make an ideally matched pair in such a work. About Laevius’ uita, however, just as is the case with Simias, we know hardly anything. Every attempt to establish a precise date for his activity – and quite a few such attempts has been made, since the Laevian scholarship is, somewhat surprisingly, a substantial field1 – is fragile and open to question. There is a fragment which explicitly mentions the sumptuary lex Licinia (6 Blänsdorf = 23 Courtney), but the exact date of introducing this law is disputed (c. 140 BC? c. 107 BC?),2 and there is little to prove the topicality of Laevius’ fragment.3 Even after the law was revoked by the tribune M. Duronius c. 97 BC,4 one might imagine contexts for an antiquarian reference to the old legislation, such as the implementation of new sumptuary laws, or even precisely Duronius’ attack.5 In fact, below I will argue precisely for the non-topicality of this fragment. Another fragment (34 Blänsdorf = 31 Courtney) connects a Laevius Melissus (to be precise, ‘Laevius’ is variously corrupted in MSS) with Q. Lutatius Catulus (d. 87 BC), but our Laevius is nowhere else (nick?)named Melissus and this association, if tempting, should be approached with a dose of scepticism.6 Courtney states that a terminus post quem for Laevius’ floruit can be inferred from Pliny the Elder’s account of how Manilius primus atque diligentissime told the Romans the legend of the Phoenix (NH 10.3–5) – Laevius devoted to the fabulous bird a poem (fr. 8 Blänsdorf = 22 Courtney), which we will see in detail in this chapter – but Leo pointed out the unlikelihood of Laevius’ not knowing Greek sources about the

 1 Two standard editions are Blänsdorf 2011 and Courtney 2003; the former is more conveniently consulted for bibliographic references, the latter – for a rich discussion of the text. A summary of the scholarship on Laevius has recently been provided by Mantzilas 2013. 2 See Crawford 1974, 624–625, Brown 1980 and Holford-Strevens 1981 for the earlier dating and Tempesti 1988 and Pignatelli 1999 for the later; Zanda 2011, 123–125 offers a sensible treatment of the problem, which ‘remains, and will probably continue to remain, unsolved as result of the imprecision of the evidence’ (p. 124). 3 Cf. Courtney 2003, 138. 4 See Zanda 2011, 125. 5 Cf. Leo 1914, 180 n. 1. 6 Cf. Kaster 1992, 41–47 (even if Brugnoli 1996, 198–199 rightly advises equal scepticism in approaching Kaster’s proposal to identify that Mellisus as C. Melissus, a freedman of Maecenas). Lammert’s 1927 suggestion that Melissus may be a corruption of in Melissis (which would be analogical to other titles of Laevius’ poems) deserves attention, but will remain merely a guess until any evidence for such a title emerges. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-003

Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers  55

Phoenix (we will see that Laevius’ erudition did indeed feed on strange forage).7 Finally, there is a fragment which portrays a Varro in a pensive mood (3 Blänsdorf/Courtney), but however appealing it is to see in this figure the Varro, namely the famous polymath (116–27 BC) – for which see below – there is no guarantee that every pensive Varro is Terentius,8 and besides even if Varro was a prodigy, his dates seem relatively late in comparison with the dates listed above. On the other hand, however, it is striking that all this doubtful evidence points in the same direction. Certainty and precision may be beyond reach, yet that there are more reasons to place Laevius’ floruit in the second half of the second century, or in the early first century BC, than in any other period. Moreover, it is a cliché which has to appear in every discussion of Laevius that, as Courtney puts it (yet dozens of other quotations might be used): The chief characteristic of his writing is bizarre novelty, which appears both in metre and diction. To mention a few striking features of the latter, we find neologisms formed by analogy …, etymological play … or words given a new meaning through etymology …, diminutives …, compounds …, Greek loan-words, etc.9

The bizarreness of his diction is coupled by an archaic touch (as evidenced, e.g. by examples of alliteration such as fr. 5 Blänsdorf/Courtney lasciuiterque ludunt; fr. 6 Blänsdorf = 23 Courtney lex Licinia … | lux liquidula and fr. 9 Blänsdorf = 6 Courtney humum humidum); the archaisms used by Laevius, however, prove little since they may be antiquarian. All in all, the impression the reader of Laevius’ fragments gets is that this poetry must be pre-Catullan,10 yet its recherché novelty makes it inconceivable that it significantly predates Catullus. This intuitive dating coincides with the dates suggested by the potential historical allusions we have just seen. Much or even all of Laevius’ poetry was gathered under the collective title Erotopaegnia, which clearly ties his production to the early Hellenistic tradition of paignia such as those composed by Philitas, which I mentioned in the previous chapter.11 The generic affiliation of Simias’ poems was similar,12 even if the term technopaegnia, which is now often applied to his figure poems, is used of them  7 Courtney 2003, 137 (but see p. 509), Leo 1914, 180 n. 1. 8 Cf. Holford-Strevens 1981, 181. 9 Courtney 2003, 118. 10 Cf. Wheeler 1964, 74: ‘it is an almost certain inference from the crudities of his technique that his work belongs to the early part of the first century, ca. 100–75 B.C.’ (I am not convinced, though, whether the word ‘crudities’ appropriately characterizes Laevius’ diction). 11 On this class, see Kwapisz 2013b and 2016. 12 See Kwapisz 2013b.

56  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers anachronistically.13 We have evidence for at least six books of Laevius’ Erotopaegnia (fr. 5 Blänsdorf/Courtney), but it has been suggested that the arrangement into numbered books may be late, since the earliest author to mention the numbers is Nonius.14 A notable revival of interest in the poetry of Laevius dates from the second century AD,15 when his poetry was perhaps imitated and, as we will see in this chapter, certainly studied. This may have been when Laevius’ output was re-edited and re-arranged. In earlier sources Laevius’ poems are quoted either simply from the Erotopaegnia, without book numbers, or by referring to a particular poem under its own title (the attested titles are Adonis, Alcestis, Centauri, Helena, Ino, Protesilaodamia, Sirenocirca and Phoenix). These poems, as Courtney saw, are likely to have been included in the all-encompassing collection of the Erotopaegnia, since precisely this double affiliation is attested for the Phoenix (fr. 8 Blänsdorf = 22 Courtney).16 Nevertheless, Courtney observes that Laevius’ ‘responses to critics … indicate that his work was published in instalments’;17 this may imply that consecutive books of the Erotopaegnia were published by Laevius himself. Various labels have been invented to contextualize the phenomenon of Laevius, such as ‘l’Alexandrinisme’,18 ‘pre-neoterism’19 and even simply ‘neoterismo’,20 or ‘espressionismo’.21 To be sure, the present discussion will, too, attempt to situate Laevius in a broader context. Yet my approach will be different; I will focus on stressing Laevius’ poetic individuality and the fact that he not only was, but also probably wanted to be regarded as the only one of his kind. The titles of his poems and their erotic contents which the generic label Erotopaegnia, i.e. Love Jests, underscores suggest ‘a Hellenistic tender-sentimental manner; and exploration of erotic themes in myth’22 in the way which immediately brings to  13 The fact missed by Courtney 2003, 119; it is the title of Ausonius’ Technopaegnion that is modelled on the Laevian title Erotopaegnia, not the other way round. I discuss the history of this term in the Appendix, n. 14 (cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 9–11 and Kwapisz 2015, 169 n. 8). 14 Cf. Wheeler 1964, 245–245 n. 17. No evidence is available to substantiate Kroll’s 1924, 225 n. 2 suggestion that Laevius may have imitated Simias’ editorial decision to collect his poetry in four books. 15 Cf. Castorina 1968, 24, Courtney 2003, 372. 16 Courtney 2003, 119. 17 Courtney 2003, 118. 18 De la Ville de Mirmont 1903, 221–227, Bardon 1952, 189–195. 19 Conte 1994, 139–140. 20 Castorina 1968. 21 Zaffagno 1987 – although she notes that ‘Levio non merita di esserre ricondotto come Mazio all’espressionismo’ (p. 97). 22 Hinds 1998, 79; cf., e.g. Bignone 1950, 14–15, Courtney 2003, 119.

Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers  57

mind Parthenius of Nicaea’s output23 and the generic concept of the epyllion.24 But the chance survival of a bunch of titles may somewhat blur the actual character of Laevius’ poetry; that there was more to it is suggested by the notable presence of Roman allusions,25 and I will later argue that several fragments suggest the presence of themes that had little to do with conventional topoi of the Hellenistic epyllion. The mishmash of lyric metres we find in Laevius’ fragments is also instructive of the fact that Parthenius-like sentimentalism was not necessarily the dominating, and surely not the only, trait of his output. This requires a longer digression. The tradition Laevius clearly undertook to revive was that of third-century BC metrical experimentalism. In that period, various lyric metres of archaic songs were re-invented for stichic use to widen the repertoire of stichic metres (see Chapter 1); this metrical experimentalism was no doubt an element of the broader programme of translating the (orally performed) archaic song into bookish poetry of a new type.26 Our evidence (although this is an argumentum ex silentio) suggests that this vogue was transient and limited to the third century BC.27 At any rate, it seems that Meleager of Gadara, the compiler of the earliest stratum of the Greek Anthology through whose lenses we viewed the Hellenistic epigram before new evidence from papyri came to light in recent decades (such as the Milan papyrus roll containing the epigrams attributed to Posidippus), had no liking for polymetric epigrams such as those collected in AP 13.28 Their popularity in the third-century BC, however, is now confirmed by the recently published so-called ‘Vienna epigrams papyrus’ (P. Vindob. G 40611).29 This late third-century roll, albeit highly fragmentary, preserves a list of the incipits, with stichometric information, of ἐπιγράμματα (this is how the scribe refers to them), whose number amounts to 226; one of these incipits may be identical with the beginning of a famous epigram by Asclepiades (col. i 14 = AP 12.46.1 = Asclepiad. 15 Sens/Guichard). Their double fragmentariness (as these are fragments of incipits, which are essentially fragments in themselves) precludes any firm conclusions, but it is suggestive that the editors note the possibility of a non-

 23 Cf. Hinds 1998, 74–83; on Parthenius, see Lightfoot 1999. 24 For an introduction, see Baumbach/Bär 2012. 25 These are listed by Courtney 2003, 119. 26 On this broad trend, see Acosta-Hughes 2010. 27 See Dale 2010, 211–212. 28 See Dale 2010. 29 Parsons/Maehler/Maltomini 2015.

58  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers elegiac (i.e. lyric) metre in as many as 27 epigrams.30 It is noteworthy that the predominant themes in the Vienna incipits appear to be ‘literary’ (sympotic, erotic and scoptic) rather than ‘epigraphic’ (funerary and dedicatory), unlike the more strictly ‘epigraphic’ epigrams in the Milan Posidippus roll (P. Mil. Vogl. 8.309; another relatively recently published breakthrough find), whose contents are, in addition, exclusively elegiac. That sympotic (this broader category also embraces erotic and scoptic) contents meets with lyric metres is notable; this confirms that the metre may be an element of sympotic stylization. We will soon see how Laevius endeavours to retrace the steps of third-century Greek metrical experimentalists in composing his Phoenix; here, we will take a brief look at the metre of the other poems. A certain predilection for iambic metres has been detected in Laevius’ fragments;31 it may be significant that iambic and trochaic metres seem to abound among the lyric incipits of the ‘Vienna epigrams’ (about the half of them; although here epodic and asynartetic combinations, which have not been found in Laevius, were likely to have made a prominent appearance).32 This may be taken to suggest that Laevius’ metrical preferences were more firmly rooted in the Greek third-century BC tradition than one could once have suspected. To be sure, however, there is no evidence for Laevius having written epigrams. In view of the mythological subject-matter of his poems, the most obvious comparandum to come to mind is the tradition of Hellenistic polymetric hymnic, or quasi-hymnic, compositions. As we saw in the previous chapter, Simias’ poems in lyric metres may have treated myths of gods and heroes, and certainly his three technopaegnia did. This, and a dose of epyllion-like sentimentalism, is arguably likely to have been a direct model for Simias. Similar third-century polymetric poems are attested by the fragments of Philicus’ Hymn to Demeter (SH 676–680), whom we met in the previous chapter, and the following truly tantalizing fragment of Sotades’ Adonis (fr. 3 Powell): τίνα τῶν παλαιῶν ἱστοριῶν θέλετ᾿ ἐσακοῦσαι; Which ancient story do you want to hear?

Any story would be great, but we have only this incipit. At any rate, we note that we happen to find Adonis among the poems attested for Laevius (fr. 9 Blänsdorf = 6 Courtney; an iambic fragment, yet he uses sotadeans elsewhere). When a scholiast on Horace tells us that Laevius’ poems are not properly lyric since, unlike  30 Parsons 2015, 14. 31 Courtney 2003, 118. 32 Cf. Parsons 2015, 14.

Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers  59

Horace’s Carmina, they do not seem to follow ‘the Greek rules’ (Porph. on Hor. Carm. 3.1.2 sed uidentur illa [sc. Laeuii lyrica] non Graecorum lege ad lyricum characterem exacta), this may be due to the fact that Laevius does not reach out directly to Greek archaic poetry, but his metrical practice is heavily mediated through the Hellenistic tradition.33 If Laevius does revive the third-century BC tradition of experimental polymetricism, then ‘revival’ is a crucial word here, since, as we saw, the Alexandrianism of Laevius is to a significant extent antiquarian – a studied reinstatement of an already closed chapter of ancient poetry. His experimentalism is to be seen primarily in transplanting and re-adapting Hellenistic metrical experiments to Roman ground; the Protean diversity of his metrical choices even within a single poem suggests that he was interested, more than Catullus soon after him, in inventing new forms in the way the Hellenistic experimentators had been. In effect, Laevius’ fragments as we see them today are marked out by their eccentricity and outsiderism rather than by an appeal for a place within any specific ‘school’, ‘circle’ or ‘movement’ – although, to be sure, as such an experimentator he has a strikingly similar precedent in Simias. We will now see the most striking example of Laevius’ eccentric poetic technique through a close reading of the fragment(s) of his Phoenix. The subsequent discussion of Gellius’ precious testimony on how Laevius’ poetry was read in the second century AD will have a twofold aim. Secondarily, it will provide us a bridge to the next era of the persisting influence of Simias and the cultural paradigm which he incarnates. In the first place, however, I will argue that this testimony reflects not only on how Laevius’ poetry was read, but also, indirectly, on how Laevius himself read poetry, so that the two sections of this chapter will allow us to look at Laevius from two different perspectives.

 33 See further Styka 1995, 169–172, who instructively discusses the notion of lyricism in Porphyrion’s scholion and points to the possible influence of Hellenistic and dramatic lyricism on Laevius. Pace Courtney 2003, 119, who argues that ‘overall his [sc. Laevius’] links seem to be more with archaic … and classical Greece, Anacreon and his era in versification …, and Euripides’. I should argue that Laevius’ liking for anacreontics also has much to do with the popularity of ‘the figure of Anacreon’ among the Hellenistic poets and above all with ‘the distinctive reanimation of Anacreon in the Anacreontea’ (on this phenomenon, see Gutzwiller 2014; the quotations are from p. 47). This complicates the picture of the history of ancient lyric from Greek archaic poetry and Athenian drama to Plautus’ cantica, with Hellenistic lyric as an intermediate stage, as drawn by Leo 1897 (for a criticism of his too simplified view, see Fraenkel 2007, 219– 251). For a recent nuanced sketch of this evolution, see Hutchinson 2018 (who, however, dismisses Laevius as ‘just bizarre’).

60  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers

. Dissecting the Phoenix Reading Laevius’ Phoenix involved, metaphorically, but also quite literally, plunging deep to the very bottom of his book of the Erotopaegnia. The fourthcentury AD grammarian Charisius, who preserves the only fragment explicitly attributed to the Phoenix in a rather unhelpful discussion of the Saturnian verse, informs us that this was the final poem in Laevius’ book (pp. 375.13–376.2 Barwick):34 Sunt item Saturnii quinum denum et senum denum pedum … et solent esse summi pterygiorum senum denum, sequentes quinum denum, quales sunt in pterygio Phoenicis Laeuii, nouissimae odae Erotopaegnion [the text of Laevius’ fragment follows; its two lines are divided by tum in Charisius’ text]. Saturnian verses count fifteen or sixteen feet … and it is customary for the outermost lines of pterygia to have sixteen feet, whereas the following ones have fifteen, as in the pterygion of Laevius’ Phoenix, the last ode in the Erotopaegnia.

It is crucial to understand, I argue, the implications of the Phoenix having been placed last in Laevius’ poetry book.35 The response of the reader who unrolled the scroll of Laevius’ Erotopaegnia for the first time must have been astonishment, for this exotic assortment of metres and the inventiveness of diction was unlike anything the Roman reader was used to or knew. Unrolling the scroll was a journey through a strange and mysterious realm, which almost prepared the reader to expect the unexpected at the last stop. The last stop had to be, and was, the biggest wonder of all, so that Charisius’ nouissima might be taken to have a double meaning, not only ‘last in position’, but also ‘the most extreme, greatest’.36 Now we are set to read the two long verses which Charisius quotes:37 Venus amoris altrix, genetrix cu

piditatis, mihi quae diem serenum hilarula praepandere cresti, opseculae tuae ac ministrae, etsi ne utiquam quid foret expauida grauis dura fera asperaque famultas potui dominio accipere superbo.

 34 On the discovery of the pertinent section of Charisius’ treatise and for a discussion of this source, see the instructive discussion in Galasso 2004. 35 The importance of the position of the Phoenix within the poetry book is underscored by Galasso 2004, 38. 36 Cf. OLD s.v. 6 and 8. 37 For a recent sensible discussion of the text, see Galasso 2004, some of whose conclusions I share (e.g. with regard to the position of and cuppiditas).

Dissecting the Phoenix  61

O Venus, who nourishes Love and gives birth to Desire, by whose decree, when you were in a cheerful mood, a clear day spread out before me, so that I became your follower and your maid servant, even though I had no means of apprehending what frightened, heavy, hard, rough and harsh subjection to haughty rulership was.

My text is similar to what we find in Blänsdorf’s FPL (fr. 8 = 22 Courtney), but several textual choices as well as the overall presentation of the text call for some explanation. First of all, these are no Saturnians, but ionics, as was first seen by Müller and as has commonly been accepted since then38 – in the first line, these are ten ionics a minore (anaclasis as in anacreontics is admissible; in foot 6, the final longa is resolved, but there are no contractions), and nine ionics a maiore, the final one catalectic, follow in the second line (resolutions are frequent, though only of the second longa; again, no contractions). This might sound complicated to someone unfamiliar with the Hellenistic metrical tradition, but in fact the ionic rhythm here is remarkably pure in comparison with Sotades’ unruliness (even if we think of Sotades’ more restrained original patterns rather than of the later licentious sotadeans of the Imperial age).39 For the reader’s convenience, I provide the following metrical scheme (in view of anaclasis and the fact that word-breaks and feet not always coincide, there is no point in graphically indicating where one ionic ends and another begins; the reader will have to figure this out him or herself guided by my numbers, keeping in mind that ⏑⏑−− is the basic rhythm in the first line, with the anaclastic ⏑⏑−⏑−⏑−− providing a possible substitution for ⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−−, and −−⏑⏑ in the second): ⏑⏑−⏑−⏑−−⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−⏑−⏑−⏑⏑⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−⏑−⏑−− 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

−−⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−⏑⏑⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−⏑⏑⏑⏑−−⏑⏑−⏑⏑⏑⏑−⏑⏑⏑⏑−− 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Now a textual commentary. Venus is Morel’s conjecture;40 it is better for the rhythm than Leo’s Venus41 in view of the regularity of the rest of this verse. Müller’s cuppiditatis is somewhat eccentric, yet so is Laevius, and above all I do

 38 Müller 1874, 77–78; cf. Müller 1894, 119–120. For a recent metrical discussion, see Courtney 2003, 136–137. 39 See M.L. West 1982, 44–45. 40 Morel 1927, 60. 41 Leo 1914, 184 n.

62  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers believe we need a long syllable here; Lucretius’ cuppedo is amittedly not a perfect parallel, but it is certainly not out of place to adduce it.42 A lacuna was posited between the two lines (cf., e.g., Blänsdorf’s text), but I believe that Courtney rightly takes them to be the two uninterrupted initial verses (as he notes, ‘[t]he second line means “(now) your servant, although (previously) I could by no means grasp what terrified, heavy, cruel, harsh slavery under proud dominion was”’).43 This continuity is arguably implied by Charisius’ summi and sequentes (uersus), the latter evidently applied to the second line; it is an inconceivable scenario that he would have quoted the first verse and after that not the immediately following, but one coming from somewhere else in the poem. The tum which we find inserted between the two lines in Charisius’ text does not imply a lacuna, but must be intended to indicate where the first unusually long line ends and the second begins; this is necessary to properly illustrate the two types of verses he discusses.44 Although I follow Courtney in the general understanding of the text, I refrain from accepting his alterations at the end of the second line, which seem to him ‘required by both metre and sense’.45 The text he prints is dominio concipere superbo (−]⏑⏑⏑−−⏑⏑⏑−⏑−−); this is not satisfactory from the metrical viewpoint. Besides the fact that the penultimate foot thus produceed seems to be short of a short syllable, two so-called longae irrationales appear at the end of the last and the antepenultimate feet. It is not that their appearance is a priori impossible; it is better to say that they are unlikely in view of the fact of the clear distinction between Sotades’ original poetry (and possibly other Hellenistic sotadeans not authored by Sotades himself) in which fewer metrical licenses are admitted and the more liberal, patently Roman-originated approach to metre as evidenced by the (Greek) fragments belonging to the Sotadic tradition of the Imperial age.46 Longae irrationales are apparently absent from the fragments of Ennius’ Sota (we will soon see that this collection was in other respects heavily indebted to Sotades’ poetry), which suggests that the Roman poets who adapted sotadeans to Roman ground in the early period of the process of the appropriation of Greek

 42 Cf. Müller 1894, 119–120. 43 Courtney 2003, 137. 44 Similarly Galasso 2004, 33. 45 Ibid. 46 On this distiction, which is also confirmed by further differences (in dialect and subject-matter) between Sotades’ fragments and the post-Sotadean tradition, see Bettini 1982, 65–66, Pretagostini 2007, 145 and Kwapisz 2016b, 150–152.

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metrical tradition were prone to follow the stricter rules to which the original sotadeans conformed.47 The relative metrical regularity of the metre of Laevius’ Phoenix, on which I commented above, may speak against the presence of more unorthodox solutions in Laevius’ adaptation of ionic metres. At any rate, a reasonable methodological position would be to avoid conjectures which would result in creating dubitable metrical patterns. Without great enthusiasm, I print dominio accipere superbo.48 Accipere has the sense of Courtney’s concipere, i.e. ‘to grasp’.49 I take dominio superbo to be datives, which should be connected with famultas on the analogy of famulari + dative as in Pl. Am. 166 opulento homini … seruitus.50 With Bücheler, I assume that the ‘Greek epic hiatus’ such as between dominio and accipere (resulting in the shortening of -ŏ) may be admissible in old Latin poetry.51 Even if the potential parallels provided by Enn. fr. 45.1 Blänsdorf/Courtney Enni imaginis and inc. fr. 5 Skutsch Scipio inuicte are inexact as these involve proper names, it has been noted that the phenomenon may have been more widespread.52 In our case, the hiatus may have been permitted by Laevius due to (1) the poem’s heavy debt to Greek tradition (see below), (2) the fact that Laevius may have imitated Sotades in being open to more freely, though within certain limits, treat prosody (cf. Sotad. frr. 3 Powell τίνα τῶν παλαῐῶν, 4c Zεὺς ὁ καὶ ζω̆ῆς and even 4a σείων μελίην Πηλι̯άδα),53 and (3) the fact that -ŏ coincides with the end of the foot. If one decides that hiatus is out of question, then Müller’s dominio accipere is probably the best solution.54 What we ultimately receive is a catalectic ionic enneameter. This is, in fact, preferable to the ending −−⏑⏑, a full ionic, since the ionic tetrameter (i.e. sotadean) which clearly provides a model for this eccentric verse is also catalectic. The rhythm created by a departure from this pattern would be somewhat harsh, and the important thing is that this verse consists of nine feet even with catalexis.  47 Russo 2007, 259–261 rightly postulates a more nuanced picture of the two traditions of the poetry composed in sotadeans (cf. Kwapisz 2016a, 126–127), but the suggestion that metrically more liberal patterns could be found in Sotades’ and Ennius’ poems should we have more of them fails to be convincing; this ignores the fundamental differences between the character of Hellenistic metre and the transformation of metrical practice in later periods. 48 Any text of this poem as appearing in modern editions is an approximation; that such sophisticated compositions easily succumb to corruption in the process of textual transmission is illustrated by the editorial problems with Simias’ Egg; see Kwapisz 2013a, 107–118 and 110–113. 49 Cf. OLD s.v. 19. 50 Cf. Christenson 2000, 169 ad loc.: ‘dative with seruitus on the analogy of seruire’. 51 Bücheler 1875, 306. 52 See Skutsch 1985, 53–54. 53 Cf. Bettini 1982, 64. 54 Müller 1874, 77; cf. Müller 1894, 120.

64  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers Why it is crucial to have nine feet in the second line? This is where serious problems begin. It was Bücheler who first stated that these two long lines must have belonged to a figure poem in the shape of the Phoenix’s wings, which was modelled on Simias’ technopaegnia in which the number of metra in consecutive verses is manipulated so as to create a desired shape on papyrus. Bücheler noted the resemblance of Laevius’ pterygion in particular to Simias’ Wings of Eros.55 This view is now accepted commonly and without hesitation,56 but although I share it, it is prudent to stop to think for a while and to notice that things are not as simple as most discussions of Laevius’ Phoenix would make us believe – after all, the fragment consisting of two lines cannot allow us to see any shape. Müller was doubtful; he thought it had been unlikely that Charisius (or rather his source) would have failed to report what they were dealing with.57 Yet if these lines circulated as an example of the Saturnian verse, then the crucial information about their provenance from a pattern poem may easily have been lost in transmission. In fact, the explanation that we have before us a fragment of a figure poem in the shape of wings is probably the only one which accounts for the facts that Charisius (1) calls this poem a pterygion, (2) that his text implies that there were more pterygia, and (3) that he speaks of summi (uersus), ‘outermost lines’, which is by no means a natural way of referring to the first verse of a poem. Yet it makes sense to use this adjective when speaking of two outermost lines of a wingshaped poem, i.e. the first and the last. Πτερύγιον, as a matter of fact, appears elsewhere in the scholarly discourse on figure poems; it is three times used in reference to Simias’ Wings in the scholia to this poem as well as to Simias’ Axe (pp. 341.11 and 12, and 343.16 Wendel), although the poem is titled Πτέρυγες (Ἔρωτος) in the MSS. These scholia are preserved both in the Palatine Anthology and the Byzantine MSS of Theocritus and may be, ultimately, of ancient origin. It is known that the ancients lacked a proper term for figure poems;58 pterygion was apparently a sort of substitute terminus technicus for poems in the shape of wings. This does not necessarily imply that such poems were numerous; Charisius’ solent may be exaggeration arising from a misunderstanding of his source, which used the plural pterygia in reference to Simias’ Wings and Laevius’ Phoenix. That we are dealing with two really long lines is confirmed by their scansion. Although we seem to be able to discern two cola in the first line, the anacreontic

 55 Bücheler 1875, 306. 56 Cf., e.g. Courtney 2003, 136–137. For a prudent reconsideration and corroboration of this view, see Galasso 2004, 32–34. 57 Müller 1894, 119. Wilamowitz 1899, 52 is also sceptical. 58 Cf. n. 13 above.

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Venus amoris altrix and the ionic dimeter genetrix cu

piditatis, which might suggest a more complex colometry (yet this may mimic Simias’ practice insofar as the coincidence of word breaks and metra is a characteristic feature of his technopaegnia59), the metrical boundaries soon cease to be marked by wordbreaks. On the other hand, we clearly see where the first line is intended to end in view of the lack of synaphia between the two lines (ministrae || etsi). The metrical structure of our fragment is a fascinating invention, unparallelled anywhere else in Latin poetry. I submit that Laevius’ resourcefulness is inspired by Simias’ creativity which the later made a show of not only in his Wings, but above all in his Egg. Unlike the Wings and the Axe, which are composed of choriambs, the Egg is curiously polymetric, the fact underscored by a self-reference to its own metre in lines 9–10, in which it announces that it grows ‘from a onefooted measure unto a full ten measures’. The fact that the Phoenix’s first line consists of ten ionics must owe something to how Simias has structured the Egg.60 As I argued in the previous chapter, the Egg is an exercise in showing how various metra isolated from old songs can be re-used to artificially construct new poetic forms. Although the Phoenix does not reach the level of the striking self-awareness or complexity the Egg exhibits, it is, nevertheless, a virtuoso show of dexterity not only in adapting Greek metre to Latin poetry, but also in replaying the most advanced Hellenistic poetic experiments. As such, it implies a sophisticated metrical reflection. Laevius’ motivation behind choosing an intricate ionic system rather than the choriambs of the Wings for his own pterygion may have been, besides the attempt to imitate the Egg’s complexity, difficulties with kneading Latin to the desired effect. It is worth observing, in addition, that ionics are equivalent to choriambs in terms of length. But ionics are extremely flexible; in fact, in view of the diversity of metrical variants ‘this Protean metre’61 offers by allowing anaclasis and all sorts of resolutions and contractions, no other metre is probably more appropriate for moulding a figure poem. It is possible, I believe, that the (re)invention of the catalectic ionic tetrameter a maiore for stichic use by Sotades aimed not just to widen the choice of available stichic patterns, as the other Hellenistic experiments did, but much more than that – to create a metre which would transcend the constraints of metre; a metre tailored to accommodate, with relative ef-

 59 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 40 and 42. 60 As was observed by Bücheler 1875, 306. Galasso 2004, 34 n. 6 notes that the Phoenix and the Egg must have shared the number of verses. 61 The formulation applied to sotadeans by M.L. West 1982, 145.

66  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers fortlessness, many more Greek words than other measures could. On this interpretation, Sotades’ undertaking to rewrite the Iliad in sotadeans (frr. 4a–c Powell) would have been intended to illustrate the potential of his invention.62 This is not to say that the invention of the sotadean verse marked a dramatic break with the tradition of Greek poetry; the subversive character of the non-epic fragments of Sotades suggests that the inventor was conscious that his contribution to the metrical system of Greek poetry afforded him the position of a dissident outside the main current of literary life or poetic traditions. Importantly, Sotades’ invention was early adapted to Latin poetry by Ennius. Only six fragments of his Sota are extant (Enn. frr. 1–6 Blänsdorf/Courtney; Russo’s recent edition excludes frr. 3 and 6 and Goldberg and Manuwald’s even more recent Loeb places fr. 6 among the incerta), yet Ennius’ debt to Sotades is clearly marked not only by the title of his collection (Sota stands for Σωτᾶς, a hypocoristic form of Σωτάδης), but also by the general character of these fragments (esp. fr. 1 Blänsdorf/Courtney/Russo/Goldberg/Manuwald ibant malaci uiere Veneriam corollam, ‘the softies went along to weave Love’s little garland’).63 It has been noticed that the scatological fr. 5 Blänsdorf/Courtney = 2 Russo = 4 Goldberg/Manuwald Cyprio boui merendam (‘for a Cyprian ox a light meal’; as Paulus 51.23–25 Lindsay explains, Cypriot oxen ate human excrement) makes one think of Sotades’ fr. 2 Powell:64 ὃ δ’ ἀποστεγάσας τὸ τρῆμα τῆς ὄπισθε λαύρης, διὰ δενδροφόρου φάραγγος ἐξέωσε βροντὴν ἠλέματον, ὁκοίην ἀροτὴρ γέρων χαλᾷ βοῦς. He opened up the hole of his back alley and expelled an idle blast through his bushy crack, the type an old plow-ox lets loose.65

It has so far been missed, however, that another fragment of Ennius contains an allusion to this fragment. From Athenaeus’ unclear introduction to it (14.621b) we learn that Sotades attacked here either the famous aulêtês Theodorus or his father

 62 That this experiment was, to some extent, successful is evidenced by a certain popularity of sotadeans as attested by epigraphic and papyrological sources from Egypt (see Magnelli 2008, 300–301 n. 9; cf. Gallavotti 1982, 78 n. 6); the flexibility offered by sotadeans may have been appealing to non-native speakers of Greek. 63 Cf. Russo 2007, 256. The translations of the fragments of Ennius’ Sota are from Goldberg/ Manuwald 2018. 64 Cf. Russo 2007, 256. 65 Transl. Olson 2011.

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Philinus, who may also have been an aulêtês; at any rate, it is clear that Sotades’ narrative is a veiled criticism of an aulêtês’s musical skills.66 This must, rather obviously, have inspired the nexus of tibia-playing, cow-like mooing and intensive effort in the following fragment of two sotadeans (6 Blänsdorf/Courtney):67 tibicina maximo labore mugit. The female flute player bellows with maximum effort.

Ennius, then, proves to be a committed follower of Sotades. It is in this light that we should read another fragment of his Sota (fr. 4 Blänsdorf/Courtney/Russo = 5 Goldberg/Manuwald): ille ictu’ retro reccidit in natem supinus. Hit, he fell backward flat on his bum.

‘An undignified brawl is described’,68 which subversively parodies the conventional scene of the fall of an epic hero.69 Yet I believe that there is more to this fragment.70 The hyperbolic emphasis put on ‘backwardsness’ is notable.71 What I hear here are metapoetic overtones, since the ‘backwardsness’ is what characterizes, in more than one sense, Sotades’ poetry. This is noticed by Martial in his famous epigram (2.86.1–2): Quod nec carmine glorior supino nec retro lego Sotaden cinaedum… Because I do not exult in reverse poetry nor read the cinaedus Sotades backward…72

The standard comment is that ‘Sotades also wrote verses that could be read backward’.73 Yet the sense of this passage may be, in several respects, more general.  66 See Danielewicz 2017. 67 Varro quotes this fragment as Ennian but without attributing it to any specific work, and Courtney 2003, 7 notes that ‘it might belong to the satires’, but the allusion to Sotades confirms that the fragment is rightly placed with the rest of the fragments of Sota. 68 Courtney 2003, 6. 69 Cf. Bettini 1982, 74. 70 Fontaine forthcoming independently goes in the same direction. 71 Cf. Russo 2007, 270. 72 Transl. Williams 2004. 73 Williams 2004, 262.

68  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers Martial is likely to think not only of Sotades, but of the Sotadic tradition, including Ennius – in fact, he may mean precisely Ennius, since Martial’s supinus and retro echo Ennius’ sotadean. Some sotadeans can be read retro quite literally. In a stunning poem which is a gallery of things that can be done with hexameter, Optatian Porfyry included two lines which become sotadeans when read backwards (Carm. 15.14–15 Polara).74 Thus he proves to be a careful reader of the grammarians who were interested in such uersus recurrentes; a similar playful verse is ascribed to ‘a certain inglorious poet’ (quidam ignobilis poeta) by Quintilian (Inst. 9.4.90 = inc. 129 Blänsdorf = 21 Courtney).75 What Martial may have had in mind, however, was perhaps not even the exact reversal of the hexameter. Sotades’ fr. 4a Powell (from his Iliad) transforms Il. 22.133 into a sotadean not by reversing it, but by reshuffling the words of the Homeric line. Hence the sotadean can be a distorted image of the hexameter; the hexameter reflected in a carnival mirror.76 The strictly technical, or metrical, manipulativeness of the sotadean verse is in accord with its tendency to distort images and to invert senses in other respects. We have seen how Sotades’ fr. 2 camouflages the obscene sense by using seemingly innocent words (even if there is little doubt about what he actually means).77 Bettini persuasively argues that this strategy was, to some extent, generic; concealing senses and changing meaning must have been intrinsic to this type of poetry. As he notes, this ‘Sotades code’ is likely to be referred to by Pliny the Younger when he says in one of his letters that he listens to comedy, watches mimes, reads lyric poetry and understands Sotadic verses (5.3.2 et comoedias audio et specto mimos et lyricos lego et Sotadicos intellego); the sotadean verse demands from the reader to be, not simply read, but interpreted.78 This camouflage technique was surely employed by Ennius, also; we recognize it when excrement becomes in his poetry ‘lunch for Cypriot oxen’ and when sexual intercourse turns to ‘plaiting a garland of Venus’.79 It is possible, I believe, that when Martial speaks of ‘reading Sotades backward’, he has in mind not only palindromic verses, but

 74 On this poem, see Levitan 1985, 246–250 and Hernández Lobato 2017, 465; I also mention it in the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 3. 75 See Luz 2010, 201. 76 Cf. Bettini 1982, 67–69. 77 As Danielewicz 2017 shows, Sotades’ technique of double, or even triple, entendres in this fragment is even more elaborate, as almost every word he employs has musical overtones, so that they are, in the end, suggestive of the false music played by the aulêtês. 78 Bettini 1982, 66–67. 79 Cf. Bettini 1982, 73.

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also something similar to Pliny’s intellegere Sotadicos, i.e. the fact that Sotadic poetry resists straightforward interpretation. This also sheds light on Ennius’ ‘undignified brawl’. It may have been, at some level, allegorical; it is tempting to imagine a Sotadic cinaedus who lands on his buttocks punched by an epic hero, each of these personages being representative of the poetic tradition that stand behind them. This is, in fact, an oblique characterization of Sotadic poetry, and if it is, it is quite emphatic in giving expression to the thought that this poetry likes to do things backwards. This lengthy digression has taken us far away from Laevius, but it has its use. We see now that at the time of Laevius sotadeans already had a significant poetic history behind them in Rome. The history was of a Hellenistic experimental metre translated into Latin poetry, which self-consciously commented on itself. We are now better equipped to understand Laevius’ metrical choice, and furthermore we are prepared us to see in Laevius’ Phoenix more than meets the eye at first glance. Yet it is only with the second line that the sotadean verse makes its appearance in the Phoenix. It is as if Laevius inverted sotadeans in the first line to their mirror reflection, i.e. ionics a minore. This move is, as we now know, very much in the spirit of this metre. We cannot be sure what metres were to be found in the subsequent lines, but it is tempting to imagine that the poem was composed ‘boustrophedonically’, so that a sequence of ionics a maiore followed a line consisting of ionics a minore. A hint that, indeed, there were ionics in the rest of the poem may be provided by a fragment which Macrobius (Sat. 3.8.3) ascribes to Laevius without stating which poem it comes from (fr. 26 Blänsdorf/Courtney):80 Venerem igitur almum adorans, †siue femina siue† mas est, ita uti alma Noctiluca est. Worshipping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is female or male, just as the Night-shiner [sc. moon] is a nurturing goddess.81

We will later return to this fragment; here it is sufficient to observe that this may well have come from the Phoenix.82 There is enough here to suggest anacreontics or ionics, although the middle of the fragment is corrupt; seu femina isue ascribed

 80 An important discussion of the context in which this fragment was preserved in Macrobius and of fragment itself is offered by Galasso 2010. 81 Transl. Kaster 2011. 82 Cf. de la Ville de Mirmont 1903, 303, Hubaux/Leroy 1939, 6 and Courtney 2003, 139.

70  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers by subsequent scholars to Haupt might do the trick, but the cure seems somewhat forced.83 If this does come from the Phoenix, then it may have been one longer line from anywhere in the poem, perhaps even its ending. Or we could even consider the presence of ionics a maiore in what is now the second line of the fragment (as Baehrens did, who printed si femina si mas est);84 this would be, then, the middle part of the poem, with subsequent lines alternately switching from ionics a minore to ionics a maiore. Yet besides being a mirror reflection of sotadeans, ionics a minore have their own history behind them. As a matter of fact, the sequence of ten such ionics in the first lines of the Phoenix should ring a bell to every classicists. However the forty ionics of Hor. Carm. 3.12 were arranged in stanzas or lines,85 what we have there is without doubt four sequences of ten ionics a minore. This is not to say that Horace looked back to Laevius, although perhaps the curious metrical correspondence between this peculiar poem and Simias’ Phoenix deserves a mention in commentaries on Horace. The important thing, however, is that we know the tradition that Horace’s poem looks back to; it is represented by a sequence of ionics in Alcaeus’ fr. 10B Campbell, a sympotic song with an erotic content, in which a female narrator speaks of her love-induced distress.86 Even if we cannot doubt that the tradition of erotic ionics which Laevius was familiar with had been heavily filtered through the influence of the Hellenistic Anacreontea,87 it is likely that when the Roman reader who was equipped with some knowledge of Greek poetry read the first line of Laevius’ Phoenix, the prayer to Venus in ionics a minore uttered by a female voice brought to his or her mind the personal voice of Greek erotic lyric. Or rather this was only one of the voices that resounded in this poem. Another metrical affiliation, perhaps an even more compelling one, is strongly suggested by the heavily anacreontic rhythm detectable in the Phoenix. Its first verse as I print it consists, effectively, of the following sequence: anacreontic – ionic dimeter – anacreontic – ionic dimeter – anacreontic. We have seen the likelihood of anacreontics recurring further in the poem. Now two anacreontics, the second

 83 Haupt 1875, 116 actually prints seu femina siue. 84 Baehrens 1886, 292. 85 See Nisbet/Rudd 2004, 166. 86 Exactly how important this model was for Horace remains disputed; see D. West 2002, 112–119. 87 See n. 33 above.

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catalectic, with frequent variations (resulting from resolutions and contractions88) are combined to form the so-called galliambic verse of Catullus 63, i.e. his spectacular poem on Attis.89 There were Hellenistic antecedents for a cult poem for Cybele and the Galli, which included a poem that, as we now know, can with relative certainty be attributed to Callimachus (fr. 761 Pfeiffer):90 Γάλλαι μητρὸς ὀρείης φιλόθυρσοι δρομάδες, αἷς ἔντεα παταγεῖται καὶ χάλκεα κρόταλα. Castrate Galli, thyrsis-loving, roaming priests of the mountain mother, whose gear and brazen castanets clash.91

Here, however, there is no anaclasis and consequently no anacreontic rhythm. The specimen is so insignificant that it obviously allows no firm conclusions besides the realization that the original Hellenistic galliambics may have been felt, with regard to the rhythm, as ionic rather than anacreontic.92 We should note, on the other hand, that the few galliambic lines that are preserved among the fragments of Varro’s Menippean satire (79, 131–132, 275, 540 Astbury) bring to mind the Catullan practice.93 As a result, it is difficult to resist the thought that if we were to envisage an intermediary stage between the Hellenistic practice and the Catullan galliambics, then what we find in the opening line of the Phoenix might fit such a picture: namely, galliambics alternating with non-anaclastic ionics. What does this tell us on the thematic level? Besides the more innocent erotic associations that are evoked by the anacreontics per se, there may be darker and more serious cultic undertones that the Phoenix’s metre carries. Particularly striking, however, is how this affiliation evokes the theme of the gender identity, which is obviously central to Catullus’ poem, as much as it must have been central to its Hellenistic models. We have already touched on this subject when we saw Laevius’ fr. 26 on Venus’ uncertain gender, which may have been belonged

 88 The absence of anaclasis in Catullus 63, resulting in a non-anacreontic pattern, has been debated (Skutsch 1976, 20–21; Courtney 1985, 91), yet it is safe to say that its metre is, if not invariably, then prevailingly anaclastic. 89 Nauta/Harder 2005 offers discussions and a text of the poem. 90 Dale 2007. On the Hellenistic tradition behind Catullus 63, see Harder 2005. For metrical discussions of the galliambic metre and its character, see, inter alia, Courtney 1985, 88–91, Kirby 1989, Harrison 2005, 19, Cairns 2016, 454–455. 91 Transl. Cairns 2016. 92 Cf. Harrison 2005, 19. 93 Cf. Kirby 1989, 22 and esp. Courtney 1985, 91. In view of textual difficulties in these fragments one must exercise caution in drawing conclusions on their basis.

72  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers to the Phoenix, and we will soon see that this theme is in further respects very much relevant to Laevius’ composition. What I am trying to demonstrate is that the complex metrical structure of Laevius’ Phoenix resulted from mixing, to stunningly novel effect, several traditions of Greek poetry (one of these having already been adapted to Roman ground by Ennius). Consequently, the poem was suggesting and opening before the reader various interpretative paths. The most important, however, was the poem’s debt to Simias’ Wings of Eros. We need to read Simias’ poem in order to find out that this debt was manifest not only in the visual form of Laevius’ pterygion, but also, arguably, in a gamut of further reminiscences:94 Λεῦσσέ με τὸν Γᾶς τε βαθυστέρνου ἄνακτ’ Ἀκμονίδαν τ’ ἄλλυδις ἑδράσαντα, μηδὲ τρέσῃς, εἰ τόσος ὤν δάσκια βέβριθα λάχναις γένεια· τᾶμος ἐγὼ γὰρ γενόμαν, ἁνίκ’ ἔκραιν’ Ἀνάγκα, πάντα δὲ γᾶς εἶκε φραδαῖσι λυγραῖς ἑρπετά, πάνθ’, ὅσ’ ἕρπει 5 δι’ αἴθρας, Χάους τε, οὔτι γε Κύπριδος παῖς, ὠκυπέτας δ’ ἁβρὸς Ἔρος καλεῦμαι· οὔτι γὰρ ἔκρανα βίᾳ, πραϋνόῳ δὲ πειθοῖ· 10 εἶκε δέ μοι γαῖα θαλάσσας τε μυχοὶ χάλκεος οὐρανός τε· τῶν δ’ ἐγὼ ἐκνοσφισάμαν ὠγύγιον σκᾶπτρον, ἔκρινον δὲ θεοῖς θέμιστας. 1 Look on me, the lord of broad-bosomed Earth, who established the Heaven elsewhere, 2 and tremble not that someone so mighty should have a shade of down on his cheeks. 3 For I was born when Necessity was ruler, 4–6 and all creatures of earth and those that move through the sky yielded to her dire decrees. 7–8 A child of Chaos I was born, not of Aphrodite; 9 I am called swift-flying pretty Love, 10 for in no wise did I rule by force, but by gentleminded persuasion. 11 Earth, the depths of the sea and the brazen heaven yielded to me; 12 I robbed an ancient sceptre to rule them and gave laws to the gods.

As I argued elsewhere, the first-person narrative and even the initial exhortation to (imaginarily) look at whoever addresses the reader, besides the obvious link with the epigrammatic, and in particular ecphrastic, tradition, may suggest the poetics of the riddle.95 The series of paradoxes through which the person speaking is characterized is likewise riddling; ‘I am not a child of Aphrodite, but of Chaos’; ‘I do not rule by force, but by persuasion’, ‘I may look young, but I am very old’.

 94 The text is from Kwapisz 2013a, the translation is adapted from Paton 1918. I extensively discuss this poem in Kwapisz 2013a, 91–105 and 2016c. 95 Kwapisz 2016c; see also Chapter 1.

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The solution of this riddle comes only with line 9, but perhaps not even there, because the text there is uncertain.96 The point of this deliberately confusing diction, besides capturing the perplexingly paradoxical nature of the God of Love, is, obviously, to interplay with the image of a statuette of Eros immediately suggested by the visible pattern drawn by words. Most discussions of Laevius’ Phoenix do not go much further in acknowledging the poem’s debt to Simias than noticing the general resemblance in subjectmatter.97 Yet there are further similarities, even if the fragmentariness of the Phoenix leaves us with merely a sketchy picture of what this poem was. Some of these connections have recently been pointed by Galasso.98 Like Simias, Laevius focuses on the duplicity of Love, although in different ways. First, he highlights its twofold nature, which is evident from the dual manifestation of Venus’ offspring as Amor and Cupido.99 Furthermore, the poem graphically illustrates, as was noticed by its students,100 the paradoxical double-faced nature of Venus; the description of Venus’ cheerfulness (serenitas) and joyfulness (hilaritas) in the first line is immediately followed by the emphatic account of how harsh and cruel her dominion is in the subsequent line. If fr. 26 belonged to the Phoenix, then the obsession with Venus’ doubleness extended to the point of emphasizing the instability of her/his gender identity; if not, then at any rate we have in this fragment the confirmation how this doubleness was crucial in Laevius’ vision of Venus. Yet another link between Simias’ Wings and the Phoenix is the appearance of the motif of yielding to severe rulership (even if the dire decress are issued by Ananke rather than Eros in line 3 of Simias’ poem, it is clear from lines 11–12 that Ananke’s dominion was substituted by Eros’ bittersweet rule). If one may have had legitimate doubts whether the Phoenix was indeed a figure poem modelled on Simias’ Wings when looking at its sole two extant lines, then these suggestive affinities may prove more persuasive. I have so far avoided a crucial question that comes to mind to the reader of the extant fragment of Laevius’ Phoenix – where is, exactly, a Phoenix in all this? I suggest that our problems with answering this question is due to the fact that this was a deliberate riddle, which Laevius modelled on the riddle of Simias’ Wings of Eros; although the shape of the poem overtly suggests the answer from the start, the voice that speaks to us is deliberately confusing. The now prevailing

 96 See my apparatus in Kwapisz 2013a. 97 This goes back to Ribbeck 1887, 304. 98 Galasso 2004, 33–34, who develops on Fränkel 1915, 84. 99 Cf. Wlosok 1975, 172. 100 Alfonsi 1958, 358 and Granarolo 1971, 23–24.

74  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers view on the identity of the persona loquens is that ‘[a]n unidentifiable devotee of Venus addresses the goddess’;101 consequently, the title of the poem remains unexplained.102 Yet there is another view, which classical scholars, with the notable exception of Galasso,103 have been reluctant to accept, although it once enjoyed a certain popularity and still circulates among the non-classicists who are interested in the myth of the Phoenix. It dates back to Bücheler, who once argued that the female gender of the opsecula ac ministra who speaks to us is no impediment to assume that the voice is that of the Phoenix herself, since the Phoenix’s gender is, at least in late Latin poetry, indeterminate, and at times clearly female (as in Dracont. Romul. 10 (Med.) 104 phoenix sola genus; anon. In laudem Solis [AL 385 Shackleton-Bailey] 31 phoenix ustis reparata fauillis; Coripp. In laudem Iust. 1.349–350 phoenix … | a busto recidiua suo).104 This must be the solution of the riddle; the model of Simias’ Wings strongly suggests, as Galasso pointed out, that we should be prepared to recognize that the speaking voice belongs to the same being to whose identity the poem’s visible form provides no small clue.105 One problem with this reading is, I admit, that we must assume that by representing the Phoenix as constrained by the dire servitude to Venus Laevius paradoxically inverted the more obvious motif of the Phoenix as a symbol of liberty (the Phoenix’s indeterminate gender is linked precisely with its being exempt from Venus’ rule in Lactantius’ Phoenix, AL 485a Riese, 161–164). Yet since we now know that Laevius attempted to emulate the riddling paradoxes of Simias’ Wings, we should expect him to do the unexpected. In addition, there is the tantalizing evidence of Laevius’ fr. 26, quoted above, on the indeterminacy of Venus’ gender. Even if we cannot be sure that this fragment was, actually, a part of the Phoenix – which, however, remains at least a possibility – then it clearly enough attests Laevius’ interest in the uncertain gender of deities in Roman archaic religion, which is its characteristic and richly documented feature.106 Equally striking is the fact that another late source, a Jewish apocalypse written in Greek, known as Pseudo-Baruch or 3 Baruch,107 contains a powerful vision of the Phoenix as the  101 Courtney 2003, 137; cf. already Leo 1914, 183 n. 1. 102 Cf. Leo 1914, 183 n. 1: ‘Man sieht also nicht, warum das Gedicht Pterygion Phoenicis heißt’. 103 Galasso 2004. 104 Bücheler 1875, 306–307 (note that his reference to the comparanda collected by Burmann should be ‘AL V 1, 29’, not ‘AL X’); cf. Hubaux/Leroy 1939, 4–7, van den Broek 1971, 268–270 and 360 n. 4. 105 Galasso 2004, 34. 106 See Mantzilas 2016, 26–32. 107 Its date is uncertain, but it was written at least two centuries after Laevius; see Kulik 2010, 12 (and 11 on the Greekness of the text).

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enormous sun-bird with letters on its wings; the writing explains the Phoenix’s origin (6.8 οὔτε γῆ με τίκτει οὔτε οὐρανός, ἀλλὰ τίκτουσί με πτέρυγες πυρός, ‘Neither earth nor heaven give me birth, but wings of fire give me birth’).108 This vision is paralleled by an even later text, the Byzantine redaction of the Physiologus, where, however, the Phoenix is transformed into the griffin; nevertheless, what is important is that a creature of the sun, one much like the Phoenix, carries an inscription on its wings (section 6 πορεύου, φωτοδότα· δὸς τῷ κόσμῳ τὸ φῶς, ‘go, Light-Giver; bring light to the world’).109 This net of intertexuality is impossible to untangle; what further complicates any such attempt is the highly fragmentary state of preservation of our source(s) for the text of Laevius’ Phoenix. In view of the fact that Laevius was still read by Optatian Porfyry (see the Introduction), we should be careful in discarding too hastily the possibility that the image of the Phoenix he had created, even if not directly influenced later writers, than at least contributed to shaping a common imagination and the notion of what the Phoenix looked like. A more sensible approach, however, is to attempt to reconstruct an archetypal text, not necessarily a single written source (orally transmitted tales or pictorial representations may have constituted such a text), which all the above-mentioned accounts of the Phoenix myth ultimately go back to.110 The oscillation between the Phoenix and the griffin in late Greek sources might suggest reminiscences of a shared oriental, or orientally-inspired, tradition. This artificial scholarly construct posits a concept of the Phoenix as a female creature, or a creature of an unstable or indeterminate gender identity, that carries a sacred inscription on its wings in fulfilling its role of a messenger of the deity of Light, Life and Love. Since the remains of the Laevian Phoenix are open to ambiguous interpretation, they cannot legitimately be used as a testimony to such an archetype, but I submit that the reconstruction of this archetype can be used as a legitimate parallel that casts light (pun intended) on the fragment(s) of Laevius’ poem. Where does all this take us? We saw in the previous chapter that Simias’ openness to embrace the fantastic element of Greek culture was one of the most characteristic features of his poetry. The appropriation of the myth of the Phoenix by Laevius echoes this preoccupation; Laevius’ scholarly inclinations clearly manifest in his lexical inventiveness and in his complex intertextual peregrinations through various Greek poetic traditions are remarkably coupled, much in

 108 Transl. Kulik 2010. 109 All these sources are connected by Hubaux/Leroy 1939, 1–6; see also differing approaches in Galasso 2004, 36–37 and Kulik 2010, 238–239 n. 293. 110 An approach suggested by Hubaux/Leroy 1939, 6 and advocated by Galasso 2004, 37.

76  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers the fashion of Simias, with his explorations of darker, more irrational and more exotic domains of Mediterranean culture. This is not just a typically Hellenistic bookish erudition; this intellectual profile entails as much a passion for being a library bookworm as one for old nanny’s tales (the above-quoted opening line of Sotades’ Adonis should be resounding at our ears at this point: ‘Which ancient story do you want to hear?’). The predilection for crossing boundaries of narrow fields of intellectual pursuits is evidenced in how Laevius weds powerful Greek influences to the Roman colouring of his poetry. As we saw, he borrows from Simias not only the conception of the figure poem, but furthermore underscores his debt by a number of allusions. The Roman readers, however, must have immediately recognized that the Greek template was permeated with an element of their own religious imagination, especially if fr. 26, with the characteristically Roman cultic formula referring to Venus’ undefined sex, belonged to the Phoenix. Yet Laevius’ poetic strategy is subtler than simply appending a Roman element to the Greek foundation. A number of scholars insisted that Simias’ characterization of Eros in the Wings (see especially line 2) entails a bizarre and paradoxical image of the god of Love as a child with a bushy beard, at once a youthful figure and a primeval deity.111 In my discussion of the Wings, I argued against this interpretation; on my reading, Eros is represented with youthful down on his cheeks rather than a heavy beard. The confusion, I suggested, may be due to Simias’ deliberately ambiguous characterization, as he presents the attribute of youth as a heavy burden for such a powerful deity.112 Be that as it may, there is a tantalizing possibility that Laevius read this passage with the majority of modern scholars rather than in accord with what I proposed. This would very likely have brought to his mind the GraecoRoman cults of Aphrodite/Venus as an androgynous deity; remarkably, (s)he was worshipped as Venus Calua at Rome.113 Let us note that the introduction of the Hermaphrodite Venus by Laevius may additionally have been inspired by the fact that whereas Simias’ Wings was dedicated to Eros, his Egg, a poem which, as we have seen, the Phoenix seems to imitate in other ways, celebrates Hermes, and thus makes a Hermaphroditic pair with the Wings. Therefore the Latin formula siue femina siue mas in Laevius (whatever form it actually had), with the tinge of

 111 For this opinio communis, see Hopkinson 1988, 176; cf. already Fränkel 1915, 82, who furnishes a parallel for this image from representations in art, and, in a discussion of Laevius, Galasso 2004, 33. 112 Kwapisz 2013a, 97–99. 113 The testimonies to such cults have meticulously been collected by Courtney 2003, 139–140.

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Romanization it brings, is harmoniously woven into the fabric of the Greek model. Galasso suggests that Laevius’ Phoenix may be viewed as a self-referential figure of the poet;114 this is certainly an appealing reading. Whereas, however, Galasso importantly pointed to the intertext of Horace, as Book 2 of his Carmina concludes with the poet’s metamorphosis into a swan, I would suggest that Simias’ Egg furnishes an even more relevant hypotext (for both Laevius and Horace?). I argued elsewhere that like Laevius’ Phoenix, the Egg may have been the last poem in a polymetric poetry book of Simias; his sphragis.115 The Egg introduces itself as an offspring of the Dorian nightingale (line 4); the nightingale may be, I submit, a model for bird-poets in both Laevius and Horace (for whom Laevius was likely a more direct source of inspiration). Whereas ‘the Dorian nightingale’ is ‘a standard Hellenistic expression’, an image deeply rooted in the tradition of Greek poetry,116 its transformation into the Phoenix is a fascinatingly innovative manoeuvre. The concept of the transsexual poet-Phoenix (either becoming a female or perhaps neither male nor female?) must have appeared as provocative, even shocking, to the Roman reader. There is, I think, a carefully designed interplay between this concept and the form of the poem, which alternately switched its metre between two types of ionics, so that it alluded at once to the lascivious and subversive – also sexually transgressive, in a way – sotadeans and the tradition of galliambics, with the themes of castration and gender instability it immediately evoked. Put at the very end of Laevius’ book of Erotopaegnia, this was clearly a programmatic statement, which may tell us a lot about his poetry, perhaps even more than all the remaining fragments taken together, in view of the absence of even one complete poem. The programme is of deliberate outsiderism, with Simias, the first outsider of this sort, being Laevius’ most cherished soulmate. This conscious self-creation as an eccentric outsider does not imply, however, that the poet does not care for receiving recognition from his contemporaries and posterity. On the contrary, such was clearly his ticket to immortal fame. Like Horace’s swan, or even more so, the Phoenix is a bird of rebirth, a creature that transcends the death. By placing the Phoenix at the end of his poetry book

 114 Galasso 2004, 38. 115 Kwapisz 2013a, 13 and Kwapisz 2013b, 163; see Chapter 1. Note that Posidippus’ Seal (SH 705 = 118 Austin/Bastianiani), a comparandum I adduced in these discussions as it was suggested that this may have been the last poem in Posidippus’ epigram collection, is clearly among the models of Hor. Carm. 2.20; see Harrison 2017, 236. 116 Kwapisz 2013a, 115.

78  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers Laevius used the materiality of the ancient book in a stunning semanticallyloaded gesture, for the papyrus roll has two ends, and therefore its end is also a beginning.

. Conversing over centuries After Simias had invented himself as a learned poetic outsider, Laevius’ no less momentous invention was to recognize the appeal of this model of intellectual activity and consenquently to raise it to the status of a new paradigm. Scrutinizing the latter’s remarkable programmatic poem allowed us to see what the adoption of this paradigm looked like in practice. We now turn to have a look at how Laevius’ poetry was read in subsequent centuries; we will see that this provides a general model for engaging with the fruits of such activity, which will also allow us to reflect on how Laevius himself approached the production of his predecessor.117 We are lucky to have a remarkable testimony explicitly depicting a readerly response to a poem by Laevius in the second century AD, too lengthy to quote here in full, so that we will only see its more universally appealing part (Gell. 19.7 = Laevius frr. 10–12 Blänsdorf = 7–9 Courtney; the text is Courtney’s): In agro Vaticano Iulius Paulus poeta, uir bonus et rerum litterarumque ueterum inpense doctus, herediolum tenue possidebat. eo saepe nos ad sese uocabat et olusculis pomisque satis comiter copioseque inuitabat. atque ita molli quodam tempestatis autumnae die ego et Iulius Celsinus, cum ad eum cenassemus et apud mensam eius audissemus legi Laeuii Alcestin rediremusque in urbem sole iam fere occiduo, figuras habitusque uerborum noue aut insigniter dictorum in Laeuiano illo carmine ruminabamur et, ut quaeque uox indidem digna animaduerti subuenerat, qua nos quoque possemus uti, memoriae mandabamus. The poet Julius Paulus, a worthy man, very learned in early history and letters, inherited a small estate in the Vatican district. He often invited us there to visit him and entertained us very pleasantly and generously with vegetables and fruits. And so one mild day in autumn, when Julius Celsinus and I had dined with him, and after hearing the Alcestis of Laevius read at his table were returning to the city just before sunset, we were ruminating on the words in that poem of Laevius’, and as each word occurred that was worthy of notice with reference to its future use by ourselves, we committed it to memory.118

This is followed by a list of odd glosses and phrases discussed by the merry-butalso-quite-serious company on their way back home. In several respects, this is a remarkable passage; embedded within a charming narrative frame is a somewhat  117 The subequent discussion partly draws on Kwapisz 2018a. 118 Transl. Rolfe 1927b.

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tedious glossary, a combination which tells us much about the intellectual tastes of the epoch. The narrative recounts a get-together at a country residence and a conversation during the subsequent walk. As such, it blends, and is a miniature variation on, two well-established literary traditions, namely the familiar topos of ‘the literary symposium’119 and what might be dubbed as ‘the literary walk’, as exemplified by Plato’s Phaedrus and Theocritus’ Idyll 7. The literary walk is, in essence, not much different from the literary symposium and may be characterized as a cognate tradition; a limited number of participants in the former does not make much of a difference, as the character of the Greek sympotic space entails that conversation is confined to include one’s immediate neighbours.120 Hence, for instance, the long learned conversation between ‘Callimachus’ and the Ician Theogenes as depicted in Callimachus’ Aetia (fr. 178 Harder = 89 Massimilla) is structurally not very different from Gellius and his friends’ ‘literary walk’: both offer an ample opportunity of a satisfactory erudite exchange for the participants. One difference is due to wine-drinking at the symposium: certainly the dynamics of, to adduce another example, the narrative of Plato’s Symposium are affected by the use and abuse of alcoholic stimuli, whereas Gellius’ slowpaced narrative exhibits more of a hangover mood. Yet this is not essential. What is important is that we can only regard the passage of Gellius as a literary creation, elaborate in its charming sentimentalism and successful in its illusive realism. Johnson had a look at this passage in his seminal discussion on the mechanisms of group reading in Roman culture;121 he admits, however, with characteristic caution, that the passage’s value as evidence is difficult to assess: ‘How much of this is life, how much art, how much life imitating art, is hard to say’.122 Having duly made these reservations, we can reflect on what Gellius’ creation, fictional as it is, tells us about the reception of Laevius in the second century AD. For one thing, we may observe that even if we cannot be sure that Gellius actually witnessed a performance of Laevius’ poetry, as he tells us, then at least

 119 For a useful introduction, see Relihan 1992, 213–244. 120 On the sympotic space and its dynamics, see Węcowski 2014, esp. 85–124; cf. also Węcowski 2018 on the Hellenistic symposium. 121 Johnson 2010, 104–106 and 118–120. 122 Johnson 2010, 106; cf. 120: ‘What is the reader expected to assume here? Is the idealization so strong that we are expected to accept that Gellius and Celsinus can memorize so much on the fly from a single, uninterrupted reading of the play (by Gellius’s account, they discuss 19 different exempla on their trip home)?’ (it is inconsequential that Laevius’ Alcestis was a relatively short lyric poem rather than a play).

80  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers it retained enough appeal that such a performance at a pleasant informal gathering was still conceivable in his time. This bespeaks an enduring ability of Laevius’ compositions to function simply as entertainment, which must have transcended their purely practical usefulness in providing material for scholarly deliberations to aficionados of games of philology. Yet precisely the scholarly element of Laevius’ poetry remains its crucial aspect for Gellius; the curiously experimental diction Laevius had devised retained enough appeal of novelty for a second-century AD writer to become a learned divertissement. Of course, in view of Gellius’ personal interests, his discussion focuses on what he found useful in rhetorical exercise, yet it is a likely supposition that contemporary poets, at least those with more ‘neoteric’ penchants, developed similar interests in precisely what Gellius dismisses as ‘too poetic’ (quae uidebantur nimium poetica … praetermisimus, 19.7.13), i.e. above all fancy poetic compounds.123 A telling illustration of a nearly contemporary poet’s approach to similar poetic sources is the figure poem Altar by Julius Vestinus, a poem I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, whose language is packed with rare poetic glosses excerpted from much earlier poetry.124 As a result, for all its charm, the Gellian passage that recalls the conversation on Laevius’ poem bears an uncanny resemblance to a strikingly unpoetic genre, namely the glossaries such as those put together by Philitas and Simias (see Chapter 1), or even more mundane documents of such a scholarly approach to poetry, such as papyrus fragments containing a rather tedious list of possibly dithyrambic compounds.125 Even if we are unimpressed, we ought not to ignore this evidence for the persistence of a certain mode of reading. There was a time when this sort of approach to poetry in pursuit of oddities may have become a laughing stock, as is documented by a passage of the comedian Strato in which what is effectively a commented list of Homeric glosses is followed by the assertion that one would need Philitas’ glossary to grasp everything that was said (Strat. Com. fr. 1 Kassel/Austin; cf. a mock-epitaph for Philitas on his death from lexical pursuits in Ath. 9.401e = Philit. test. 22 Lightfoot = 7 Sbardella = 21 Spanoudakis). It is certainly striking, however, that Laevius, who is an almost explicitly self-proclaimed heir to the tradition of Philitas and Simias’ poetic erudition, continues to be viewed as

 123 On the prominence of compounds as a characteristic feature of playful ancient poetry, see my remarks in Kwapisz 2013a, 17–18 and esp. LeVen 2014, passim (see its ‘Subject index’ s.v. ‘language, compound’). 124 See my discussion of the Altar’s diction in Kwapisz 2013a, 177–190. 125 See Kwapisz 2013a, 18 and LeVen 2014, 40 n. 35.

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a noteworthy supplier of this sort of elite, and not altogether frivolous, entertainment. So what exactly is the appeal of this? A large part of it, I argue, derives from the fact that devising such emphatically novel, experimental poetic language (broadly conceived) creates a context outside the historical or literary contexts of a poem’s composition; a context of its own. Not only strikingly new word coinages – which loose little of their striking novelty even as centuries pass, as no ‘ordinary’ poet has an interest in imitating these – but also metrical innovations, the abundance of wordplay, playing with the visible form of poetry, and even, on the thematic level, indulging in creating audacious and bizarre poetic visions are all elements of an intricate game, which differs from the games of other poetic genres insofar as it is more emphatic in inventing its own rules. This marked tendency for self-containedness is underscored by an extremely strong drive for selfreferentiality; the rules may even be explicitly provided within the poetic creation itself, as we saw in the previous chapter is the case with Simias’ Egg, which contains, as an essential constituent, an almost technical description of its own playful design (we will have a closer look at this practice and see further examples in the following chapter). There is a striking parallel for this overt self-referentiality in Laevius, fr. 30 Blänsdorf/Courtney: omnes sunt denis syllabis uersi. All verses have ten syllables.

As Leo notes, ‘this would be prose if this verse did not have ten syllables itself’; he further comments that this may have had place in the proem to a composition which consisted of various polymetric decasyllables.126 At any rate, we recognize an instance of familiar Egg-like self-referentiality. As a consequence, the poets who are willing to follow the paradigm established by Simias’ poetry and, more broadly, the model of intellectualism he embodies gain access into a clearly defined community of readers-demiurges, who, paradoxically, at once emphasize the novelty of their creations and their outsiderism, and share interests in similarly contrived poetic games of their predecessors. Two metaphors come in handy to depict the character of this community. One of these is actually supplied by one of the members of the club – the early Hellenistic poet Philicus. In the two fragments that likely belong to the proem of

 126 Leo 1914, 185.

82  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers his Hymn to Demeter,127 which I briefly discussed in the previous chapter, he simultaneously introduces his composition as an poetically innovative gift for fellow grammarians and a mystic offering for the deities worshipped with mystic rites (SH 677 and 676). This juxtaposition obviously suggests an essential link between the metrical novelty, which requires from the reader a share in the arcane knowledge of advanced poetic techniques, and the poem’s mystic subject-matter; to appreciate it is to become initiated. Our community of learned riddlers is, in accord with what Philicus suggests, a reclusive and mysterious group of initiates; only unlike in real mysteries, the rules of initiation are there for anyone to see – that is, anyone who has enough skill to comprehend them. Laevius obviously subscribes to this sacred fellowship by creating the self-referential image of the Phoenix as a holy priest(ess) of Venus; as a matter of fact, this goes back to Simias’ characterization of the poet of the Egg as ‘a holy mother’, ἁγνὰ ματήρ (lines 5–6).128 The poetics of the Altars of Vestinus and Optatian Porfyry that we will see in Chapter 3 also have much to do with positioning poetry as a domain of mystic rites, whereas the Appendix will show that this was a conventional way of referring to playful, riddling and highly refined poetry by Neo-Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To characterize a community formed by Greek epigrammatists, which is kindred to the community of riddlers I am depicting here, Bing invented another formula that we can re-use for our own purposes, namely the metaphor of the symposium (we may note, incidentally, that like mysteries, the symposium is an institution of religious life). In his words, the symposium in the Hellenistic age and later epochs becomes ‘a figure for the diachronic community of readers – a community whose members count as their close companions the poet-readers of all eras, as well as their creations’; ‘[t]his literary fellowship, in other words, cuts across time, so that even now, if we bring to it the requisite skills, we can join the privileged circle’.129 I devote the rest of the chapter to showing how the figure of the symposium may be, and is, usefully evoked as a virtual setting for creating, and talking about, the sort of poetry the present book is preoccupied with. Let us now return to the passage of Gellius. The very last word excerpted from Laevius’ Alcestis to appear there (in the part omitted from the above quotation) is the Monty-Pythonically long compound subductisupercilicarptores, ‘carpers with

 127 See Danielewicz 2015. I share his views, yet the unity of the two fragments is not crucial to my argument; what is important is that they both are parts of the same poem. 128 On this passage and its intertextuality, see Kwapisz 2013a, 116–117. 129 Bing 2009, 170. I used this quotation to formulate the same thought in Kwapisz 2017, 186, i.e. a version of Chapter 3.

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raised eye-brows’. Courtney offers a characteristically perceptive comment: ‘this refutation of the poet’s critics, which reminds us of a Terentian prologue, will have come at the beginning of the piece’.130 Courtney adds, however, that the compound is clearly modelled on the ὀφρυανασπασίδαι opening an anonymous Hellenistic epigram ridiculing philosophers, which consists solely of such monstrosities (anon. 155 FGE).131 Laevius’ Alcestis, if it belonged to the miscellaneous erotic collection of Erotopaegnia, is unlikely to have contained anything like dramatic vehicles for literary polemic, such as Terentian prologues or Aristophanic parabases. More likely, the erotic stories in the Erotopaegnia, a poetry book that is in many respects based on Hellenistic models, were embedded in a narrative framework, after the fashion of Callimachus’ Aetia. The topic of literary polemic obviously brings to mind Callimachus’ Prologue to the Telchines. Like in the Aetia, this frame may not have had a uniform character; this is confirmed by the selfdescriptive decasyllable we have already seen (fr. 30 Blänsdorf/Courtney). Let us recall at this point the importance of the sympotic setting as a constituent of the narrative frame of the Aetia. Among the extant fragments, such a setting is introduced by Callimachus as a background for two fragmentarily preserved aetiological stories, in fr. 43.12–17 Harder = 50.12–17 Massimilla, where probably an occasion on which the narrator learned what he knows about the cities of Sicily is recounted, and in fr. 178 Harder = 89 Massimilla, where a moderate banquet (cf. lines 11–12) becomes the venue for a learned conversation between the narrator and a merchant from the island of Icus. These two fragments may have or may have not described the same symposium; there is at least a possibility that the symposium was an overarching theme of the narrative frame of Book 2.132 In this context, it is noteworthy that the convivial setting clearly appears at least in one of the three or four further fragments of Laevius that cannot reasonably be placed in any of the erotic or mythological stories the Erotopaegnia mostly consisted of, and are therefore likely fragments of the narrative frame (an additional fragment belonging to this category will emerge in the course of the present discussion).133  130 Courtney 2003, 126. 131 In the Hellenistic and Imperial periods such absurdly long compounds may have been regarded as belonging to the comic as much as the iambic and the scoptic tradition; see Agosti 2001, 234. 132 On the sympotic setting in the Aetia, see Harder 2012, 1.35 and 2.301–302 and 955. 133 These fragments are 6 Blänsdorf = 23 Courtney and 3 Blänsdorf/Courtney, both discussed below, and in addition 28 Blänsdorf/Courtney mea Vatiena, amabo (‘my Vatiena, please’) on which Courtney 2003, 141 has the following comment: ‘This comes from the beginning of a poem like Catull. 32, which opens amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla’. Also here a sympotic context is not inconceivable. Fr. 34 Blänsdorf (dubium) = 31 Courtney Πανὸς ἀγάπημα (‘Pan’s darling’), according

84  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers And in another of these fragments, such a setting is, as we will see, a tantalizing possibility. Fr. 6 Blänsdorf = 23 Courtney is a playful mention, in two carefully orchestrated iambic dimeters, of the sumptuary lex Licinia, which was introduced at some point in the second half of the second century BC.134 This fragment is preserved for us by Gellius (2.24.8–9): huius legis Laeuius poeta meminit in Erotopaegniis. uerba Laeuii haec sunt, quibus significat haedum, qui ad epulas fuerat adlatus, dimissum cenamque ita, ut lex Licinia sanxisset, pomis oleribusque instructam: lex Licinia (inquit) introducitur, lux liquidula [Leo liquida codd.] haedo redditur. This law the poet Laevius mentions in his Erotopaegnia. These are the words of Laevius, by which he means that a kid that had been brought for a feast was sent away and the dinner served with fruit and vegetables, as the Licinian law had provided: The Licinian law is introduced, the liquid light to the kid restored.135

As I have already suggested, no practical attempt should be made to use the mention of the sumptuary law of the second half of the second century BC in dating this fragment or Laevius’ activity (of course, apart from the fact that the fragment vaguely points to a terminus post quem). We can easily imagine that Laevius recalled the old legislation in an antiquarian gesture, to make a characteristic show of his learnedness. Not only ‘the presents may be historic’, as Courtney notes,136 but furthermore it is possible that it is not the historical law that is mentioned here, but, for instance, its jocular reinstatement for the purpose of a single banquet by its participants. There is, though, something else we ought to infer from this explicit evocation of a (past or present) historical context. This fragment has no place in the proper mythological content of the Erotopaegnia, but more likely belonged to the narrative framework. What is the image here? A possible poetic model that comes to mind is obviously the symposium (or symposia) of Callimachus’ Aetia. Even a detail provided by Callimachus, the information that the narrator and his companion chose a mode of moderate drinking, obviously so as to

 to our source (Suet. De gramm. 3) a reference to the grammarian Daphnis, Lutatius Catulus’ freedman, is tantalizing, but everything, from the ascription to ‘Laevius Melissus’ to the fragment’s text, is uncertain; and is this even poetry? 134 The date is debated and varies from about 140 to about 107; see n. 2 above. 135 Transl. Rolfe 1927a. 136 Courtney 2003, 138.

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better concentrate on intellectual exchange (fr. 178.11–12 Harder = 89.11–12 Massimilla),137 finds a parallel in the remarkable (also self-imposed?) modesty of the banquet described by Laevius. It is tempting to surmise, therefore, that the scene in Laevius was too a variation of λογόδειπνον, that is a banquet of words – a setting for presenting one of the stories that formed the main content of the Erotopaegnia. Another Laevian fragment that much more likely belonged to the narrative framework than to the proper content of the Erotopaegnia is fr. 3 Blänsdorf/Courtney (we owe this one to Priscian): meminens Varro corde uolutat.

Holford-Strevens is no doubt correct in insisting that the meaning of meminens is not adjectival – ὁ μνημονικός, as he puts it – but rather participial, so that the sense of the whole would be something like ‘Varro remembers and dwells upon’.138 Perhaps the Varro is portrayed, despite Holford-Strevens’ scepticism and despite what I wrote earlier. In fact, not only the mention of the Licinian law in another fragment does not, as we saw, necessarily disprove this identification, but furthermore that fragment’s possible antiquarianism would, in a quite intriguing way, correspond with the introduction of the famous polymath to the same narrative frame. Certainty is, of course, beyond reach. Be that as it may, it is a reasonable supposition, I think, that what the pensive Roman remembers and emphatically (note the frequentative) dwells upon in Laevius’ poem, and more specifically within its narrative framework, is more likely than not what his poetry essentially consisted of, i.e. either obscure glosses or perhaps some learned (and metrically intricate, no doubt) poem, or a mythological story. My thinking is amittedly still influenced by the possible presence of the Varro; thus I am reminded of the testimionies on the early Hellenistic scholar and poet Philitas of Cos which portray him as ἀκρομέριμνος πρέσβυς (‘a punctilious old man’), whose demise was due to his νυκτῶν φροντίδες ἑσπέριοι (‘nocturnal cogitations’; test. 5.5–6 Lightfoot = 3.5–6 Spanoudakis and 22 Lightfoot = 7 Sbardella = 21 Spanoudakis).139 Meminens, however, is an interesting addition to the conventional (yet so realistic) portrayal of the pensive scholar; altogether the picture that emerges here is that of the enhanced activity of a well-trained memory. Can the setting for

 137 On the tradition of moderate drinking accompanying intellectual pleasures, see Harder 2012, 2.969. 138 Holford-Strevens 1981, 181. 139 Transl. Lightfoot 2009.

86  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers this scene be a banquet, one at which heavy drinking gave place to heavy thinking?140 This is merely a guess, but it is somewhat substantiated by a curious connection between the depiction of the pensive Varro’s searching through the database of his cor in Laevius and Gellius’ depiction of the learned conversation inspired by the performance of Laevius’ Alcestis. In this passage, which recounts a walk that follows a convivial gathering and that, as we saw, itself has much to do with the scenes depicting intellectual discourse at symposia, the use of memory obviously receives a prominent position.141 First, there is a mention of ‘ruminating on the words of Laevius’ poem’, a jocular allusion to the modesty of the meal of fruit and vegetable served on the occasion, which quite explicitly places this account within the tradition of λογόδειπνον. Second, the narrator insists on telling us that the words had been memorized by the members of the convivial company and subsequently recalled on their way back. Both these elements may be seen to be paralleled in the description of Varro’s ‘remembering and dwelling upon’. This is still not enough, I am ready to admit, to convince us that there is more to it than just a fortuitous resemblance. Yet noticing a curious detail in Gellius’ narrative will take us further down the road. When Gellius depicts the feasts given by Julius Paulus at his country residence – one of which became the locus for the performance of Laevius’ Alcestis – he emphasizes their simplicity by saying that the guests were entertained with fruit and vegetables: olusculis pomisque.

Strikingly, this phrase stands out in Gellius’ prose because of its iambic rhythm. In addition, Johnson is surely right that the diminutive ‘shows the narrator’s smile’,142 but it is also typically Laevian, as we have already seen that the abundant use of (often fancy) diminutives is one of the most striking features of Laevius’ poetry.143 This tantalizingly corresponds with Gellius’ introduction of Laevius fr. 6 Blänsdorf = 23 Courtney on the salvation of a kid, where the cena is also depicted as pomis oleribusque instructa. As a consequence, there are good  140 The image might then fit in with the tradition of doing scholarship at symposia; Slater 1982, 346–349 suggested that this was a normal practice at Alexandria. In this light, it is conceivable that the sympotic conversations in Callimachus’ Aetia are poetic reminiscences of his real-life experience. 141 On the remarkable use of the forces of memory in this narrative, see Johnson 2010, 120. 142 Johnson 2010, 105. 143 Cf., e.g., Courtney 2003, 118, quoted above.

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reasons, I suggest, to identify olusculis pomisque as a fragment of Laevius.144 What I suppose happened here is the following: Gellius knew the context of Laevius’ couplet, or at least some of it, and he paraphrased it when he wrote pomis oleribusque in introducing fr. 6. He chose to directly quote only two verses and paraphrase the rest, as the couplet he quoted, with its striking symmetry underscored by the shared prosody and alliteration of lex Licinia and lux liquidula, had an obvious appeal as a self-contained fragment. Later Gellius remembered that convivial passage of Laevius when his thoughts returned to the eccentric poet while recounting the recitation of the same poet’s Alcestis in Book 19 – perhaps he realized the resemblance between the display of self-sufficiency at Julius Paulus’ parties and what the banquet adapted to the regulations of the archaic lex Licinia would have looked like? Or is the depiction of the country banquets more poetic fiction than fact – a fiction which, in this case, is firmly rooted in a poetic image in Laevius? It may be telling that we owe both fr. 6 and the fragments of Alcestis to the same author; are we to infer from this that the sympotic setting described in fr. 6 is precisely the narrative framework which the proper content of Alcestis was embedded in? A tempting thought, but altogether, admittedly, a fragile construction. Whatever the answers to these questions are, I conclude that in a flash of erudition, Gellius explicitly, if nonchalantly, quoted the Laevian phrase. In effect, the convivial atmosphere of Gellius’ account of the day he spent with his learned friends and the depiction of the banquet in what was likely a part of the narrative frame of Laevius’ Erotopaegnia are variously interconnected. The most conspicuous shared element is the modesty of the meal served on both occasions; this convivial restraint strongly suggests that both passages were variations on the familiar literary tradition of λογόδειπνον, a feast of intellectual pleasures. The fragment of Laevius on a Roman individual lost in thoughts, perhaps the famous scholar, is unlikely to belong anywhere but to the narrative framework of Laevius’ collection, and as such it also tantalizingly corresponds with the mode of scholarly activity portrayed by Gellius. Both Gellius and Laevius would display similar interests in depicting, in convivial settings, the world of the contemporary intellectual elite and their erudite diversions. At this point the metaphor of the perpetual symposium at which Simias, Laevius and their followers convene so as to indulge in weaving the tapestry of the obscure and playful poetic

 144 We may imagine that a disyllable beginning with a vowel completed the verse if a monosyllable is better avoided. Note, however, that synaphia is a possibility; cf. Courtney’s text of frr. 15 (= 18 Blänsdorf) and 27. We may also envision olusculis | pomisque distributed between two lines; for further possibilities, see Kwapisz 2018a.

88  Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers discourse for which they are famous becomes something more than just a metaphor – it is an almost tangible fact of literary history. On an even more material level, the poetry books of Simias and Laevius bear striking resemblance to each other as contributions to what we might tentatively refer to, albeit slightly overstating the concreteness of this phenomenon, as a newly-invented subgenre of ‘the literary symposium’ – the banquet of poetic outsiderism (the literary symposium, however, is a well-established tradition in ancient literature, whereas ‘the banquet of the riddlers’ is an impromptu coinage for the sake of the present discussion). In a long fragment of his treatise On Riddles, the Peripatetic philosopher Clearchus of Soli describes various sorts of riddling games at symposia (fr. 63 Wehrli).145 Simias’ and Laevius’ poetry books, which were packed with metrical and other experimental tours de force, may be view as offering two bookish versions of such a banquet of riddles, with philological sophistication and poetic intricacy brought to the extreme. The lyric polymetry of the two collections is another trait that allows us to view them within the tradition of the symposium. The multiplicity of lyric forms these books contained reinforces the impression that the reader takes part in a virtual symposium, which becomes a daring show of the richness of traditions of Greek song, in the case of Laevius translated into a shockingly novel sort of Latinitas specially invented for this purpose. The stichic form of the new inventions points to the purposeful transformation of originally sung poetic models into emphatically bookish compositions. After the music is gone, these stichic poems are successful in imitating the lyric character of original metres designed for performance, but otherwise can, and have to, be experienced as poetry for reading on its own, which does not require the reader to be equipped with knowledge of appropriate modes of performance.146 As a result, both books offer a sort of communal reading experience as portable virtual symposia, which invite each reader to participate in the game of wit as a riddle-solver, but also as a potential contributor to it. To what extent, if any, such a concept of the virtual banquet was consciously used by Simias must remain unclear. We can be sure, however, that Laevius recognized this potential of his predecessor’s poetry book, as he echoed it as such in his own creation. He deliberately emphasized sympotic themes in the narrative frame of his collection, thus joining the banquet across centuries with his own version of the poetic symposium. It is Laevius, then, whom we can legitimately indicate as the self-conscious inventor of such a mode of refined poetic communication.  145 See Kwapisz 2014b for my discussion of this passage. 146 See Chapter 1 and my remarks on the Hellenistic invention of colometry in Kwapisz 2013a, 14–16.

 Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers On September 20, 2004, Nina Buinitskaya, deputy editor-in-chief of Udarny Front, a small local newspaper published in Shklov, Belarus, lost her job.* There are two facts to note with regard to this most unfortunate end of a journalistic career. First, Shklov is the hometown of Alexander Lukashenko, who has been called – too hastily, unfortunately – ‘Europe’s last dictator’; second, September 2004 was a hot political month in Belarus. It preceded a referendum with the aim of allowing Lukashenko to be re-elected as the country’s president for a third term, as well as changing the constitution so as to sanction such a manoeuvre. In this revolutionary atmosphere, Buinitskaya made the fatal mistake of accepting for publication a poem which praised Lukashenko’s firm and enlightened leadership in the infantile style that is typical of regime propaganda of many periods (one distich will suffice as a sample: ‘No storm and no war will surprise us, when we have such a president!’).1 The poem, signed by one ‘B. Kastsuk, veteran of labour’, was printed on the front page, under the heading, ‘Referendum – the right choice’. What the editors of Udarny Front missed was that the first letters of each line spelled out an acrostich; when the acrostich was deciphered, moreover, the poem turned out to declare the precise opposite of what it had purported to say. The acrostich message was: ‘Lukashenko ubiytsa’ (‘Lukashenko – murderer’), the reference being to the president’s alleged role in the disappearance of his political opponents prior to the previous presidential elections that had taken place a few years earlier.2

 * This chapter is adapted from Kwapisz 2017; see the Acknowledgements. 1 Lines 7–8: ‘Нас не застанут бури, войны, | Когда есть президент такой!’. Quotations of the poem are easily available online – but a photographic reproduction is harder to come by (see n. 2 below). 2 Numerous accounts of the story of the poem appeared in Russian newspapers and online portals; see, e.g. Dubnov 2004. An actual image of the poem as printed in Udarny Front is nowhere to be find, yet Ryhor Kastusiou, a Belarusian opposition leader from Shklov and a presidential candidate in 2010, remembers the story and confirms it is true (I am grateful to Andrzej Poczobut for confirming the story with Mr Kastusiou). There are more examples of such political acrostichs in the recent history of Eastern Europe. On 13 February 1982, when Poland was under martial law and the government was usurped by the Military Council of National Salvation (Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, or WRON, popularly referred to as WRONa, transl. ‘the crow’), a review of Amanda Lear’s 1981 album titled Incognito, written by the music journalist Stanisław Danielewicz, appeared in Dziennik Bałtycki, a daily newspaper that was published in Pomerania. It had passed unnoticed by the censorship authorities that the first letters of each paragraph in this review spelled out an acrostich, ‘WRONA SKONA’ (‘the crow will die’). Consequently, Danielewicz was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-004

90  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers It is difficult to find a more telling illustration as to why one’s political education should include the study of obscure and playful poetic techniques. What a powerful thing an acrostich is – it can lead one to lose one’s job, it can be used to outsmart regime functionaries, and, consequently, it can be used to ridicule the dictator behind whom such functionaries stand. But an acrostich can do the opposite too. If you dedicate to a ruler a poem which praises him with a particularly ingenious acrostich – or some other crafty device of this sort – this may be a way of buying that ruler’s favour. For such an offering may show not only that you are capable of suitable appreciation of that ruler’s virtues, but also that you recognize how well he is equipped with subtle wit and learning, i.e. qualities that would allow him to crack the clever riddles you are proposing. When you do this correctly, your encomiastic skilfulness can get you a job at the ruler’s court, or even (we might think) recall you from exile. Obviously what matters is not how the ruler actually responds to the challenge of the riddling poem. Such riddles come with ready anecdotes; the riddle is inherent to a narrative, which immediately implies a response from the riddle solver, i.e. either his or her success or failure. When we decipher Pseudo-Kastsuk’s acrostich, we are sure that the addressee has failed to do so. The opposite is a possibility as well – there are examples from Antiquity of riddling poems which imply the addressee’s unquestionable competence in dealing with the intricate interpretive difficulty involved.3

. Optatian and the Greeks The nexus of politics, poetry and wordplay found its ultimate realization in a dialogue between the poet and the emperor on the pages of the marvellous socalled Panegyric that Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius – or simply Optatian Porfyry – composed for Constantine the Great, a collection of his visual poems and other poetic experiments. The story implied is of how the astonishingly complex intellectual endeavour and Constantine’s inevitable fascination with its result saved Optatian from the bitterness of exile. Although this may be difficult to believe, the scholarly opinio communis has no doubts that this was what really happened; the fabulous course of Optatian’s career at Constantine’s court, his fall and his later redemption and return to imperial favour, which was directly and  imprisoned for nine months and 13 days, losing his job, even though he argued before the court that the acrostich had been accidental. 3 One must decide for oneself how to regard the acrostich lurking in Hölscher 2000 and what to do with its approach to nonsense. At any rate, I should note at this point that there are no (deliberate) acrostichs in this chapter.

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strongly tied to his poetic accomplishments, has recently been reconstructed in detail.4 It has been noticed that Optatian ‘succeeded where Ovid failed’,5 and surely the fact that Ovid, to whom Optatian copiously alludes in his compositions,6 failed to find redemption is crucial here. For imagine that you learned all about it at school, imagine how you, as a schoolboy, pictured yourself saving Ovid if you only had a chance, and imagine that you actually become an emperor and then you are asked for favour by a new Ovid, a master of the Roman poetry of a new sort – did Constantine in fact have any choice; was saving Optatian not, in this context, an act of historical necessity? Regardless of what Constantine’s real motivations were, what is striking, to us, is that with Optatian’s return to courtly favour the model of at once learned, playful and extravagant intellectualism Simias invented several centuries before received highest appreciation from the Roman elite. There is no doubt that Optatian was an incarnation of this model. We will soon see in detail how he directly engaged with imitating the tradition of technopaegnia Simias was famous for having initiated and how he alluded to the poems of Simias himself. One may suspect that the form of the more traditional technopaegnia he strove to emulate and perfect in his three pattern poems, Carm. 20, 26 and 27 Polara, i.e. respectively, Organ, Altar and Panpipe, inspired him to invent his own variation of visual poetry, i.e. elaborate grid-poems, for which he is famous and which turned out to be highly influential as they found numerous imitators in the Middle Ages (see Chapter 4). Optatian’s contribution to the history of pattern poems is the hallmark of his poetry, yet one should not overlook evidence for his interest in other genres. Carm. 29–30, to which we will briefly return later, are fragments of his epigram collection. More telling are Carm. 15, a gallery of things that can be done with hexameter (see further below), and Carm. 25, a hexameter quatrain in which words can freely be re-ordered in a way that makes one immediately think of the Hellenistic poet Castorion of Soli’s Hymn to Pan (SH 310).7 Even if Optatian is concerned with refining the hexameter tradition rathern than dealing with polymetry, this attests to his liking for various sorts of poetic experiments, a tradition clearly rooted in the output of Simias and his Hellenistic followers, and in Roman literature familiar to us from Laevius’ fragments. As is the case with Simias, visual poems obscure Optatian’s other poetic experiments, whose appreciation, however,

 4 See Wienand 2017, with further references. 5 Fielding 2014, 104. 6 Similia are duly noted in Polara 1973; for a discussion of some notable allusions, see Bruhat 2017. 7 On this connection, see Pelttari 2014, 77–79, and on SH 310, Bing 1985.

92  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers allows us to give a fuller portrayal of his intellectualism. In addition, although there is no direct testimony to Optatian’s scholarly activity as a grammarian, his scholarly preoccupations – i.e. his interest in the workings of the mechanisms of literature – are clearly enough manifest both from the emphatic self-referentiality of his poems and, indirectly, the obvious appeal his poetry had for learned commentators, as evidenced by the extant scholia to his poems;8 this is a sort of activity that also the Greek technopaegnia stimulated. Optatian’s career, his poetic production and the complexity of the game in which the readers of the Panegyric find themselves engaged has been explored from a variety of viewpoints in recent discussions, which contribute to a remarkable revival of interest in his poetry.9 The aim of this chapter is more modest – not to shed light on Optatian qua poetic experimentalist at the end of Antiquity and the many intricacies of the game he invites the reader to join in, but rather to demonstrate, in the broader context of my preoccupation with the model of intellectualism Optatian represented, that the courtly game of poetic experimentalism had a rather long literary history before him. By approaching Optatian from a historical, literary and art-historical perspective, recent path-breaking studies have managed, if not subtracting anything from this poetry’s impossibility, then at least to help us understand, how this impossibility was conceived and where it is rooted.10 Yet it seems to me that due to the long-time neglect of Optatian as a poet and of his poetry as, precisely, poetry, there still remains something to be said about the literary traditions in which he sought inspiration. One observation to make in this respect is that prior to Optatian there is an ancient tradition of court poets who sought to entertain rulers by offering them gifts of riddle-poems conceived as linguistic games (or at any rate who wanted to be perceived as such ‘jesters’). Moreover, there are reasons to believe that Optatian deliberately underscored his kinship with those poets so as to suggest the noble parentage of his own offering to Constantine and the respectable nature of the bond he strove to create between the poet and the ruler. The reason why this observation matters  8 Both aspects are explored by Pipitone 2012. 9 See in particular Squire/Wienand 2017, which is in fact a handbook to the study of Optatian, as comprehensive as one can at present offer. 10 Besides the discussions collected in Squire/Wienand 2017, which should now be the starting point for any serious exploration of Optatian, on the historical context of Optatian’s poetry, see Wienand 2012a, 2012b and 2012c; on his place within the history of ancient art, aesthetics and semiotics, see Squire 2015, 2017a and 2017b, and Squire/Whitton 2017; for a discussion of the literary context, see, inter alia, Ernst 1991, 95–142; Bruhat 1999; Hose 2007. Castorina 1968, 275– 295 provides an idiosyncratic yet stimulating discussion on Optatian as one in a chain of ancient ‘neoteric poets’; this may be seen to pave the way for my approach in this chapter.

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in the context of the broader purpose of the present book is rather self-evident: the role of ‘court riddlers’ obviously lent their creations an air of authority and contributed to the preservation, and even prosperity, of the intellectualism to which they subscribed. It is therefore crucial to attempt to answer the questions of when this model of intellectualism first entered courtly circles and to what extent exactly a political dimension was its defining feature. Those studying Optatian have pointed out and explored the connections between his poetry and the tradition of the so-called technopaegnia, or Greek pattern poems.11 In what follows, however, I should like to revisit two poems by Optatian that are clearly modelled on those Greek sources, namely Carm. 26 and 27, i.e. Altar and Panpipe (I will not be concerned with Optatian’s Carm. 20, as its involvement with the Greek carmina figurata is less direct). Let us begin, though, by first looking at the earlier models for these two Optatianic poems.12 The extant collection of Greek carmina figurata, which I will also be concerned with in the next chapter, consists of six poems.13 The earliest three of these examples, namely Axe, Wings and Egg, were composed by Simias of Rhodes at the dawn of the Hellenistic period. The pseudo-Theocritean Syrinx and the Altar ascribed to an otherwise unknown Dosiadas are of uncertain date, but they probably postdate the third century BC and are earlier than Lucian, who himself mentions the Altar in his Lexiphanes (25). Finally, another Altar was attributed to one Besantinus within the Byzantine manuscript tradition. Haeberlin, who edited the technopaegnia at the end of the nineteenth century, saw this poem as having been composed during the time of Hadrian.14 Consequently, the same scholar made a highly ingenious and convincing suggestion, recently developed by Bowie, that ‘Besantinus’ is a scribal corruption of the name of Lucius Julius Vestinus, a sophist and

 11 Cf. e.g. Castorina 1968, 269–275; Ernst 1991, 98–108; Bruhat 1999, 44–75; Squire 2015, 95–97. 12 What follows is based on Kwapisz 2013a; see also Strodel 2002. Important recent discussions of the Greek pattern poems include Guichard 2006; Männlein-Robert 2007, 142–150; Luz 2010, 327–353; Pappas 2013, 199–224; Squire 2011, 231–236 and 2013a, 98–107. 13 These poems are preserved in the Palatine Anthology (15.21–22, 24–27), which is our earliest source, and also in a number of bucolic MSS of Theocritus; the archetype was probably an ancient collection of bucolic poetry. On the MS tradition of the Greek figure poems see Strodel 2002 and Kwapisz 2013a, 47–56, and Chapter 4. The relatively plain and simple layout of these poems in the Palatine Anthology is probably more informative of what they originally looked like than the variously ornamented, and at times fantastically innovative, forms to be found in the other Byzantine MSS; see further Chapter 4. Strodel 2002 has gathered the most extensive collection of MSS images, whereas the finest images are in Ernst 1991 (Kwapisz 2013a – perhaps disappointingly – offers no such pictures). 14 Haeberlin 1887, 65–66.

94  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers prominent official at Hadrian’s court.15 The Altar, which Vestinus arguably authored, is remarkable for the acrostich it contains; it reads, ‘Olympian, may you sacrifice for many years’ (Ὀλύμπιε, πολλοῖς ἔτεσι θύσειας), and it is likely to have addressed Hadrian, who adopted the title of ‘Olympian’ after he had dedicated the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens in AD 131/132. After this date, numerous altars were set up to worship Hadrian in the Eastern empire. Bowie proposes to see Vestinus’ Altar in this context as a very special charistêrion for the emperor. There has been some debate as to which of the two Greek Altars is the direct model for Optatian’s poem of this shape.16 What I should like to contribute to this discussion, however, is the suggestion that both Optatian’s Panegyric and the Greek collection of the technopaegnia are perhaps no different from the Hellenistic and Roman ‘poetry books’: in each case, the poems that these collections contain are variously interconnected so as to form a coherent whole.17 It is easier to understand how such interconnectedness works in the case of Optatian’s singleauthor collection, although the fragmentation of his Panegyric in the MSS prevents us from grasping the author’s precise design.18 Yet the small assemblage of the Greek technopaegnia exhibits similar characteristics, due to the fact that each consecutive contributor to this collection was careful to mark his debt to his predecessors by alluding to earlier poems.19 Consequently, the most recent of these six poems, namely Vestinus’ Altar, contains echoes of each of the five previous instalments of the genre.20 Within this constellation, an at once distinct and self-contained pair is formed by the pseudo-Theocritean Syrinx and Dosiadas’ Altar:21

 15 Haeberlin 1890, 283–284; Bowie 2002, 185–189. I return to the identity of ‘Vestinus’ below. 16 Castorina 1968, 272–274 opts for the dependence of Optatian’s poem on Dosiadas’ Altar, whereas Ernst 1991, 101–102 emphasizes the links between the Altars by Optatian and by Vestinus. Bruhat 1999, 59–62 sensibly argues that, whereas Optatian’s poem takes something from the regularity of the outward form of Dosiadas’ creation, the metapoetic reflection which it offers undeniably owes much to Vestinus’ poem; moreover, she points to the originality of Optatian’s design. 17 The recent literature on Greek and Roman ‘poetry books’ is vast; seminal studies are offered by, or included in, Gutzwiller 1998 and 2005; Bing 2009; Hutchinson 2008. 18 For a succinct and instructive summary of the problem of the fragmentation of Optatian’s extant poetic output in the manuscript tradition, see Squire 2015, 92 (with further references, esp. n. 14); compare also Henderson’s comments in Elsner/Henderson 2017. 19 On the ancient collection of the technopaegnia, see Kwapisz 2013a, 47–50. 20 On these reminiscences, see Kwapisz 2013a, 178. 21 The text and translation are reprinted from Kwapisz 2013a; the latter is adapted from Paton 1918.

Optatian and the Greeks  95

Οὐδενὸς εὐνάτειρα, Μακροπτολέμοιο δὲ μάτηρ μαίας ἀντιπέτροιο θοὸν τέκεν ἰθυντῆρα, οὐχὶ Κεράσταν, ὅν ποτε θρέψατο ταυροπάτωρ, ἀλλ’ οὗ πειλιπὲς αἶθε πάρος φρένα τέρμα σάκους, οὔνομ’ Ὅλον, δίζων, ὃς τᾶς μέροπος πόθον κούρας γηρυγόνας ἔχε τᾶς ἀνεμώδεος, ὃς Μοίσᾳ λιγὺ πᾶξεν ἰοστεφάνῳ ἕλκος, ἄγαλμα πόθοιο πυρισφαράγου, ὃς σβέσεν ἀνορέαν ἰσαυδέα παπποφόνου Τυρίαν τ’ . τῷ τόδε τυφλοφόρων ἐρατὸν πᾶμα Πάρις θέτο Σιμιχίδας· ψυχὰν ᾧ, βροτοβάμων, στήτας οἶστρε Σαέττας, κλωποπάτωρ, ἀπάτωρ, λαρνακόγυιε, χαρεὶς ἁδὺ μελίσδοις ἔλλοπι κούρᾳ, Καλλιόπᾳ νηλεύστῳ.

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1–2 The bed-fellow of nobody and mother of the far-fighter [the wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus, sc. Penelope] gave birth to the swift leader of the nurse of him whose place a stone took [to the goatherd-Pan: the one that guides Amaltheia, the nurse of Zeus], 3 not Cerastas, whom the child of the bull once reared [Comatas, who was fed by bees], 4 but him whose heart once was burnt by the edge of a shield augmented by a pi [who fell in love with Pitys; add pi to itys ‘edge of shield’ to get the name], 5–6 Whole by name, a double animal [Pan] who felt desire for the voice-dividing wind-girl born of a voice [for Echo], 7–8 who inflicted upon the violet-crowned Muse a shrill wound [who put together the panpipe for the Muse], the monument of love hissing like fire [of Syrinx]; 9–10 he who quenched the bravery that had the same name as the slayer of his grandfather [who defeated the Persian – Perseus was the killer of his grandfather Acrisius] and thus saved the Tyrian maiden [Europe]. 11–12 To him Paris, the son of Simichus [Theocritus] offered this beloved possession of the blind-bearers [a panpipe; the instrument of those that bear rustic wallets, i.e. herdsmen]. 13–16 Rejoicing in thy soul at which, you who trample on men [you who climb rocks; of Pan], tormentor of the Saettian woman [of the Lydian queen Omphale], son of a thief [of Hermes], without a father [of an unknown father: as a son of Penelope and one of her suitors], box-footed [hoofed], 17–18 may you sweetly play to the mute girl, 19–20 Calliope the invisible [to the Nymph Echo].

96  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers Εἱμάρσενός με στήτας πόσις, Μέροψ δίσαβος τεῦξ’, οὐ σποδεύνας ἶνις Ἐμπούσας, μόρος Τεύκροιο βούτα καὶ κυνὸς τεκνώματος, Χρύσας ἀίτας, ἆμος ἑψάνδρα τὸν γυιόχαλκον οὖρον ἔρραισεν, ὃν ἁπάτωρ δίσευνος μόρησε ματρόριπτος. ἐμὸν δὲ τεῦγμ’ ἀθρήσας Θεοκρίτοιο κτάντας, τριεσπέροιο καύστας θώυξεν αἴν’ ἰύξας· χάλεψε γάρ νιν ἰῷ σύργαστρος ἐκδυγήρας. τὸν δ’ αἰλινεῦντ’ ἐν ἀμφικλύστῳ Πανός τε ματρὸς εὐνέτας, φὼρ δίζῳος, ἶνις τ’ ἀνδροβρῶτος Ἰλοραιστᾶν ἦρ’ ἀρδίων ἐς Τευκρίδ᾿ ἄγαγον τρίπορθον.

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1–4 The husband of the woman clothed in male attire [of Medea], the twice young Thessalian [Jason] made me; not he who lay on the fire [Achilles], the son of the Empusa [Thetis], whose death was due to the Trojan cowherd [Paris], offspring of a dog [of Hecuba], 5–6 but the friend of Chryse [Jason], when the cook of men [Medea] struck the brazen-limbed watchman [Talos], 7–8 over whom the fatherless husband of two wives [Hephaestus, the husband of Aphrodite and Aglaea, was said to be born of Hera alone], he who was cast away by his mother [Hephaestus was thrown from Olympus by Hera] toiled. 9 And when he had looked at my structure, 10 the slayer of Theocritus [Philoctetes, the killer of Paris], 11 the cremator of the three-night man [of Heracles], 12 shrieked out in great pain, 13–14 for the bellycreeper that had put off old age [a snake] afflicted him with its poison. 15 And him lamenting in the sea-girt place [the island of Lemnos], 17–18 the husband of Pan’s mother [of Penelope, i.e. Odysseus], the thief [of Palladium] with two lives [as he returned from Hades] and the son of the man-devourer [Diomedes, the son of Tydeus, who ate the brain of his enemy Melanippus], for the sake of the shafts that would quell Ilus [the bow of Philoctetes, destined to destroy Troy], brought to the Teucrian city three times sacked [Troy, overpowered by Heracles, the Amazons and the Greeks].

Both poems evidently share a number of characteristics. Unlike the four other technopaegnia, they are both composed in a unique Lycophronian style, built up line by line from a series of riddles.22 No less importantly, both poems also imitate Simias’ own examples in their use of the Doric dialect; likewise, they resemble Simias’ Axe and Wings from a metrical point of view since they both make use of

 22 On the nexus of interrelations between the Syrinx, Dosiadas’ Altar and Lycophron’s Alexandra, see Kwapisz 2013a, 23–29, with further references.

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either dactylic feet, as in the case of the Syrinx, or of iambic metra, as in the case of the Altar (in the same way in which Simias employs choriambs as a structural element that allows him to form the desired visual shape).23 The Syrinx and the Altar are even more clearly connected since we find in them the same riddles and explicit verbal echoes.24 I believe it is the latter poem that imitates the former rather than the other way round,25 but this problem of relative chronology need not bother us here. What is important is that the two poems are manifestly interconnected and that Optatian may have seen them as such. That he indeed did so is strongly suggested by his own manner of imitating the coupled pair: on the one hand, his Panpipe is composed of hexameters, responding to the dactylic metre of the Greek Syrinx; on the other hand, his Altar consists of iambic trimeters which are analogous to the iambic metre of Dosiadas’ Altar. The main and perhaps sole reason why Optatian imitates the pair of Greek pattern poems in his own bipartite composition is, to my mind, to indicate the relevance of the Greek model and to suggest its importance for understanding his own design. The reader is now invited to reflect on the Greek collection more carefully. And when they do, they will be led to the discovery that, whereas the Panpipe exhibits something of the bucolic tone of the Greek Syrinx, what the Altar says is very different from the contents of the poem attributed to Dosiadas. To explain what I mean here, let us have a closer look at Optatian’s own extraordinary altar-poem. Since I want to talk about the text in some detail, it seems fitting to write out the Latin text in full, even if the typography, in itself important in recreating the original experience of seeing the layout of Optatian’s composition, will make it difficult to decipher the text; a preliminary attempt at a translation seeks to provide an aid (this sticks closely to the syntax of Optatian’s Latin):26

 23 See Kwapisz 2013a, 38–45 for a discussion of the metrical structure of the technopaegnia. 24 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 26–27 and further 138–176 (for commentaries on both poems). 25 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 23–29. 26 Transl. adapted from Glanville Downey, in Boultenhouse 1958, 72 (a highly influential essay on visual poetry).

98  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers

VIDESUTARASTEMDICATAPYTHIO FABREPOLITAVATISARTEMUSICA SICPULCHRASACRISSIMAGENSPHOEBODECENS HISAPTATEMPLISQUISLITANTVATUMCHORI TOTCOMPTASERTISETCAMENAEFLORIBUS HELICONIISLOCANDALUCISCARMINUM NONCAUTEDURAMEPOLIVITARTIFEX EXCISANONSUMRUPEMONTISALBIDI LUNAENITENTENECPARIDEVERTICE NONCAESADURONECCOACTASPICULO ARTAREPRIMOSEMINENTESANGULOS ETMOXSECUNDOSPROPAGARELATIUS EOSQUECAUTESINGULOSSUBDUCERE GRADUMINUTOPERRECURVASLINEAS NORMATAUBIQUESICDEINDEREGULA UTORAQUADRAESITRIGENTELIMITE VELINDEADIMUMFUSARURSUMLINEA TENDATURARTELATIORPERORDINEM MEMETRAPANGUNTDECAMENARUMMODIS MUTATONUMQUAMNUMERODUMTAXATPEDUM QUAEDOCTASERVATDUMPRAECEPTISREGULA ELEMENTACRESCUNTETDECRESCUNTCARMINUM HASPHOEBESUPPLEXDANSMETRORUMIMAGINES TEMPLISCHORISQUELAETUSINTERSITSACRIS

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1–2 You see how I stand, an altar consecrated to the Pythian god, polished by the craft of the musical art of the poet; 3–6 so fair am I, bringing most sacred offerings, suitable for Phoebus and fitted for these temples in which the choruses of poets make their acceptable gifts, adorned with so many woven flowers of the Muse, of such kind as must be placed in the Heliconian groves of song. 7–9 No workman polished me with sharp tool; I was not hewed out of the white rock of the mountain of Luna, nor from the shining peak of Paros. 10–12 It was not because I was cut or forced with the hard chisel that I am straight, confined and hold back my edges as they attempt to grow and then, in the succeeding portion, let them spread more broadly. 13–16 Cautiously I force each edge to be drawn in, line by line, by tiny steps, in lines turning in, thus following on, regulated everywhere by the measure, so that my margin, within the limit which rules it, is that of a square. 17–18 Then again, continuing on to the bottom, my line, spreading more broadly, is artfully stretched according to the plan. 19–20 I am composed of the measures whose rhythm the Muses beat out, and the number of feet is never changed. 21–22 As the rules of the learned principle keep these measures unchanged, it is the letters of the poem that increase and decrease. 23–24 Phoebus, may the supplicant who offers these metrical pictures take his place joyfully in your temples and your sacred choruses.

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Optatian’s Altar gives very little indication as to the date of its composition. That said, Polara felt inclined to see in the final couplet – a makarismos in which the wish is expressed that the altar’s creator may find himself among the festivities and the temples of what might be the scenery of Rome – a suggestion that the poem was composed in exile.27 Be that as it may, what the poem does make clear, as has already been noted by Bruhat,28 is that it is closely modelled on the other of the two Greek Altars, i.e. on Vestinus’ poem:29 Ὀλὸς οὔ με λιβρὸς ἱρῶν Λιβάδεσσιν οἶα κάλχης Ὑποφοινίῃσι τέγγει, Μαύλιες δ’ ὕπερθε πέτρῃ Ναξίῃ θοούμεναι Παμάτων φείδοντο Πανός, οὐ στροβίλῳ λιγνύος Ἰξὸς εὐώδης μελαίνει τρεχνέων με Νυσίων· Ἐς γὰρ βωμὸν ὁρῇς με μήτε γλουροῦ Πλίνθοις μήτ’ Ἀλύβης παγέντα βώλοις, Οὐδ’ ὃν Κυνθογενὴς ἔτευξε φύτλη Λαβόντε μηκάδων κέρα, Λισσαῖσιν ἀμφὶ δειράσιν Ὅσαι νέμονται Κυνθίαις, Ἰσόρροπος πέλοιτό μοι· Σὺν Οὐρανοῦ γὰρ ἐκγόνοις Εἰνάς μ’ ἔτευξε γηγενής, Τάων δ’ ἀείζῳον τέχνην Ἔνευσε πάλμυς ἀφθίτων. Σὺ δ’, ὦ πιὼν κρήνηθεν, ἣν Ἶνις κόλαψε Γοργόνος, Θύοις τ’ ἐπισπένδοις τ’ ἐμοὶ Ὑμηττιάδων πολὺ λαροτέρην Σπονδὴν ἄδην. ἴθι δὴ θαρσέων Ἐς ἐμὴν τεῦξιν, καθαρὸς γὰρ ἐγὼ Ἰὸν ἱέντων τεράων, οἷα κέκευθ᾿ ἐκεῖνος, Ἀμφὶ Νέαις Θρηικίαις ὃν σχεδόθεν Μυρίνης Σοὶ, Τριπάτωρ, πορφυρέου φὼρ ἀνέθηκε κριοῦ.

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1–3 The black ink of victims does not dye me with its reddening stream, like that of purple, 4–6 and the knives sharpened on the Naxian stone spare the flocks of Pan; the sweetscented gum of the Nysian saplings does not blacken me with its curling smoke. 7–8 You see in me an altar not composed of golden bricks or the clods of Alybe, 9–13 nor let that

 27 Polara 1973, 2.159 and 2.162. Carm. 26 and 27 are not included in the tableau chronologique of Bruhat 1999, 494–501, but note p. 500 on Carm. 20. 28 See n. 11 above. 29 On the text and translation, see n. 21 above.

100  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers altar match me which the two gods born in Cynthus built, taking the horns of the goats that feed about the smooth ridges of Cynthus. 14–15 For together with the children of Heaven did the Earth-born Nine rear me, 16–17 to whose art the king of the gods granted immortality. 18–19 And may you, who drink of the spring that the Gorgon’s son opened with a blow of his hoof, 20–26 sacrifice and pour on me libations in abundance sweeter than the honey of Hymettus’ bees. Come to meet me with a confident heart, for I am pure of the venomous monsters which lay hid on that altar in Neae of Thrace that the thief of the purple ram dedicated to you, three-fathered one, not far from Myrina.

The Altars by Vestinus and by Optatian both emphasize their paradoxical ontological status: they both draw out the fact that they are immaterial structures built not of stone but of words, and likewise constructed not on the solid fundament of reality but on a page of papyrus or parchment. In both cases alike, the emphatic way of describing the paradoxical properties of the object-poem rests upon the narrative technique of priamel. Both poems first provide a list of what they are not (Vest. 7–13, Opt. 7–10) and, as a consequence, the expression of what they are comes as the clearly climactic finale (Vest. 14–17, Opt. 19–22). In the end, Optatian improves upon Vestinus’ creation, as the perfectly shapely architecture of his Altar is mirrored by the perfectly accurate description of this structure as provided by the poem itself in lines 10–18.30 But it is Vestinus’ poem that supplies the fundament for this wonder of the mixed art of poetry and construction which makes the effect all the more stunning. The realization that Optatian’s Altar is heavily dependent on Vestinus’ poem greatly informs our reading of both compositions. Bowie’s suggestion that the later of the two Greek Altars was authored by Julius Vestinus, who was an official at Hadrian’s court – attractive as it may sound – is merely a hypothesis. However, this hypothesis becomes even more appealing when we realize that if the Altar had indeed been conceived as an encomiastic poem for the Roman emperor, then Optatian would have had obvious reasons to re-use such a model in composing a poem within a larger (and immensely intricate) poetic project aimed at exalting the rule of Constantine.31 I am aware that there are many ‘ifs’ and ‘perhapses’ in the reading proposed here, yet the temptation to pursue this path is difficult to resist. The poem’s encomiastic agenda may not be immediately apparent, yet it becomes visible to the reader who is aware of Optatian’s debt to Vestinus. Thanks to Vestinus, the reader understands how an intimate bond between the learned poet and the well-read emperor can be established and confirmed by offering the

 30 This conclusion is anticipated by Bruhat 1999, 65. 31 On the nature of this ‘panegyric’ project, see Schierl/Scheidegger Lämmle 2017 (with more detailed references).

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latter a gift whose refinedness only few connoisseurs would be able to appreciate. I would argue that noticing this link may prove rewarding even if one think it goes slightly too far to assume that Optatian was aware of the encomiastic aims of his model and that this may have been precisely where he found inspiration for his own undertaking. This is because the realization that there are shared agendas in two closely connected poetic projects sheds important light on the general motivations behind composing technopaegnic poetry in the post-Hellenistic period. At any rate, what makes Vestinus’ poem an even more likely source of inspiration for Optatian is the fact that this poem beats the other technopaegnia in its artful complexity.32 The immaterial structure of Vestinus’ Altar is ingeniously inscribed with an acrostich, and as I have argued elsewhere, this acrostich is remarkable for its metrical pattern.33 Vestinus’ ‘inscription’ grows in weight – the first syllable is short, the second is long, then a double-short unit follows, then double-long, triple-short, and finally triple-long. This pattern makes one think of the so-called rhopalic lines, in which each word is one syllable longer than the previous one. The most famous example is provided by Il. 3.182: ὦ μάκαρ Ἀτρείδη μοιρηγενὲς ὀλβιόδαιμων. O son of Atreus, blessed, child of fortune and favour.34

The playful effect of rhopalic linguistic structures was familiar to Optatian, who made quite a show of it in his astonishing Carm. 15 (in that poem, which is a catalogue of hexametric oddities, line 5 is rhopalic, but note also verses 1–4, which are subsequently composed of disyllables, trisyllables, tetrasyllables and pentasyllables).35 The accumulation of poetic playfulness condensed within Vestinus’ Altar, and in particular in its acrostich, is stunning enough. But the acrostich inscription is effective on yet another level: this line of writing is carved on a structure built of words; it serves as a means of further highlighting the ontological paradox of the Altar, which does and does not present itself as a material object, all at once. The richness of wordplay, as well as the resulting poetic and even

 32 Cf. Bruhat 1999, 61, who refers to the analysis of the intricate architecture of Vestinus’ Altar in Ernst 1991, 86–90. 33 Kwapisz 2013a, 180 and 2014a, 620–621. 34 Transl. Lattimore 1990. I have offered elsewhere a brief account of the history of rhopalic patterns in Greek poetry (Kwapisz 2014a). 35 On Carm. 15, see Hernández Lobato 2017, 465–466; cf. Levitan 1985, 246–250 (who mentions in this context Homer’s rhopalon) and Squire 2017a, 86–87. The poem is also discussed in the Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2.

102  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers ontological refinedness which Vestinus’ Altar exhibits, both correspond with the poet’s encomiastic aims in a similar way as they do in Optatian’s poetry. I like to think that the abundantia offered by Vestinus’ poem may have been one of the important sources of inspiration for Optatian’s poetic technique.36 Yet there may be even more to Optatian’s interest in Vestinus. After all, not only the latter’s poetry, but also his uita supplied a highly attractive model of imitation for a poet striving to pursue a career at court.37 Again, even if the link is fortuitous, then it remains too strong to be easily dimissed as irrelevant – the least it does is tell us something about contexts for cultivating the model of intellectualism invented by Simias in the subsequent epochs of Antiquity, and in the end it even makes us rethink Simias’ own motivations. We learn about Vestinus’ remarkable position at the court of Hadrian from an inscription found in Rome (IG 14.1085 = IGUR 1.62): ἀρχιερεῖ Ἀλεξανδρείας καὶ Αἰγύ- | πτου πάσης Λευκίωι Ἰουλίωι Οὐηστί- | νωι καὶ ἐπιστάτηι τοῦ Μουσείου καὶ | ἐπὶ τῶν ἐν Ῥώμηι βιβλιοθηκῶν Ῥωμαι- | κῶν τε καὶ Ἑλληνικῶν καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς παι- | δείας Ἁδριανοῦ τοῦ Αὐτοκράτορος καὶ ἐπι- | στολεῖ τοῦ αὐτοῦ Αὐτοκράτορος. For the high priest of Alexandria and all Egypt Lucius Iulius Vestinus, head of the Museum and in charge of the Roman and Greek libraries in Rome and in charge of education under the emperor Hadrian and the secretary of the same emperor.38

In addition to such epigraphic testimony, the Suda tells us that Οὐηστῖνος Ἰούλιος, who is most likely once again our Vestinus, was a sophist who authored an Atticist glossary. A philologist and a guardian of the scholarly tradition of Alexandria, a poet, the emperor’s favourite – all of this makes it tempting to think,

 36 Another source worth keeping in mind in connection with both Vestinus’ and Optatian’s Altars is one of the celebrated Tabulae Iliacae (see further Chapter 4) – that is, one of the early Imperial marble objects with miniature reliefs illustrating scenes from early Greek epic, which have recently attracted much scholarly attention (Valenzuela Montenegro 2004; Squire 2011; Petrain 2014; see also Bruhat 1999, 78–80 and Squire 2011, 219–222 for a discussion of the Tabulae Iliacae as a context for Optatian’s poetry; Frontisi-Ducroux 2013 is a path-breaking discussion of the textuality of altars, including Greek and Latin technopaegnia as well as the Tabulae Iliacae). The curious resemblance between the technopaegnic Altar-poems and a letter grid shaped as an altar on one of these tablets has been noticed by Squire 2010, 82–84 and 2011, 231–235 (see already Horsfall 1979, 29 and 1994, 79); for my preliminary comments, see Kwapisz 2017, 177–8 n. 31. In short, there may have been a continuous path of influence between the author of that letter grid, Vestinus and Optatian. 37 On Vestinus and his life, see Bowie 2002 and 2013; Stebnicka 2015 (with further references); Puech 2002, 467–468; Livingstone/Nisbet 2010, 121–123. 38 Transl. Bowie 2013.

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especially in view of the inscription which attests Optatian’s proconsulate of the province of Achaea (AE 1931.6 = SEG 11.810),39 that the role which Vestinus played at Hadrian’s court may have defined Optatian’s aspirations. Incidentally, we recognize another embodiment of the model of intellectualism invented by Simias. I have suggested elsewhere that information stating that Vestinus was Rome’s cultural attaché to Alexandria may be crucial for understanding the nature of his poetic gift to Hadrian.40 Let us further elaborate on this point: when the Director of the Museum of Alexandria, who also earns his living as a librarian, undertakes to compose poetry, he is very much likely to be aware of the fact that he is entering a path once trodden by the great poets of the Golden Age of Hellenistic poetry, such as Callimachus or Apollonius of Rhodes.41 And when he undertakes to compose a poem which clearly locates itself within the tradition initiated by the early Hellenistic poet Simias, and, in addition, weds this tradition to the tradition of acrostichs, which begins for us with the acrostich which Aratus embedded in his Phaenomena (783–787),42 then this must be meaningful too.43 There is a strong likelihood that not only does this poet style himself as a true ‘Alexandrian’ and heir to the famous Alexandrian poets, but also, since he addresses his poem to the emperor, that he casts the addressee in the role of a Hellenistic monarch: the very nature of the poetic gift invites the Roman imperial addressee to feel like a new Ptolemy. The obvious question to emerge at this point is whether Simias may have been a court poet too. We saw in Chapter 1 his striking connections with Philitas of Cos, whom we know to have been tutor to Ptolemy II, much revered by the king (see Philit. test. 1 Lighfoot/Sbardella/Spanoudakis and 5 Lightfoot = 3 Spanoudakis; cf. also the courtly role of Philicus, whom we saw in Chapter 1 as Simias’ follower). May an early Hellenistic Rhodian poet-scholar, in several respects so resemblant of the famous Coan, have had no contact with the Ptolemaic court? Yet this question can be reversed: is it conceivable that no clear trace of Simias’ involvement with courtly circles would reach us (for instance in the fragments of

 39 On this inscription, see Wienand 2017, 135–140. 40 Kwapisz 2013a, 177–178. 41 For an introduction to Hellenistic scholarship, see now Montana 2015. 42 The acrostich was detected by Jacques 1960. 43 Dionysius Periegetes’ acrostichs provide further evidence for awareness as to how the elaborate poetic devices rooted in the poetic tradition of Alexandria can contribute to constructing encomiastic strategies at the court of Hadrian; on these acrostichs, see Lightfoot 2014 (‘General Index’ 558 s.v. ‘acrostich’).

104  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers his poetry)44 had he enjoyed royal patronage? That he was an outsider also in this respect is certainly a possibility. With regard to Laevius, there is one fragment that might be taken to suggest that he composed his poems under patronage from members of the Roman elite, but this particular testimony is in many ways problematic (fr. 34 Blänsdorf = 31 Courtney, on which see Chapter 2). In short, there is no clear evidence for this book’s main characters composing poetry with an encomiastic agenda before the Imperial age. Yet we should not make too much of the last statement, since things were likely to have looked different to such Imperial poets as Vestinus and Optatian. Even if Simias himself was active outside a court context, there is sufficient evidence to show that the Hellenistic monarchs of the third century BC found amusement in the poetic curiosities crafted by the poets of their courts, or at least were commonly regarded to have had such a liking for them. Responses to Aratus’ famous leptê acrostich have been found in the poetry of Aratus’ contemporaries. Three epigrams – attributed to Callimachus (27 Pfeiffer = 56 Gow/Page), Leonidas of Tarentum (101 Gow/Page) and to King Ptolemy himself (SH 712) – praise Aratus precisely for his leptotês, which suggests that his acrostich was acknowledged and appreciated by his contemporaries.45 Scholars disagree whether this Ptolemy in question was Philadelphus or a later king,46 but what is important to note is that the epigram that was believed to have been composed by an Egyptian ruler is in dialogue with Aratus’ acrostich. As Klooster puts it, ‘both Leonidas and Callimachus wish to demonstrate that they are clever readers of a clever poem’;47 by analogy, the epigram composed in the same vein and ascribed to King Ptolemy contributes to his image as a well-read connoisseur of poetic refinement. A more amusing illustration of a Hellenistic ruler’s attitude toward wordplay of this kind may be retrieved from an anecdote which Athenaeus tells us about Sosibius, a third-century Homeric scholar who was tellingly nicknamed lytikos,

 44 I see no reason to see an expression of the Ptolemaic programme, rather than Panhellenic concerns, in the constellation of the deities that appear in Simias’ poetic fragments and the technopaegnia, i.e. Apollo, Athena, Dionysus, Doris (and Nereus), the Erinyes (?), Eros, Helios, Heracles, Hermes, Hestia and Zeus. It may be significant that his fragments point to a more narrowly patriotic concern with Rhodes (fr. 7 Fränkel = CA 4, perhaps on a Rhodian statue of Helios – see Chapter 1; frr. 8 and 17 Fränkel = CA 11 on the Rhodian Telchines – see Chapter 1, n. 136; fr. 4 Fränkel = CA 8 on a month from the Dorian, and also specifically Rhodian, calendar) and Doris (Ov. 4, where Simias refers to himself as ‘a Dorian nightingale’; fr. 9 Fränkel = CA 13, the incipit of a hymn to Doris; the Doric dialect is attested for most fragments). 45 See Klooster 2011, 155–161. 46 For a summary of this debate, see Klooster 2011, 155 n. 22. 47 Klooster 2011, 160.

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or ‘puzzle-solver’ (Ath. 11.493e–494b). Athenaeus recounts how Ptolemy Philadelphus told his book-keepers to inform Sosibius, if he came to draw his stipend, that he had already received his money. When Sosibius went to the king to complain about this outrage, Ptolemy inspected the books of account and confirmed that he had already received his due. To Sosibius he pointed out the names of Soterus, Sosigenes, Bion and Apollonius, as listed in the books, and said, ‘If you take the So- from Soterus, the -si- from Sosigenes, the initial syllable from Bion, and the final syllable from Apollonius, you will find, by applying your own methods, that you have already got your money’.48 It seems that Sosibius’ reputation was something of an irreformable acrostich-hunter.49 One of his interests must have been the wordplay in Homer, and it is evident that his discoveries were not always favourably received. Whatever factual value we choose to assign to this anecdote, it is safe to say that it illustrates Ptolemy’s reputation as a sharp-witted king versed in the art of wordplay – a reputation which he apparently enjoyed in later epochs, including, without a doubt, the time of both Vestinus and Optatian. The talents which Ptolemy is believed to have exhibited in conversing about wordplay are identical to those that characterize a skilful participant in the Greek symposium. Greek symposiasts often proved their worth and competence as members of the elite social group by solving riddles, extemporizing poetry and engaging in various games that tested their wit and versedness in literature; we saw in the previous chapter the importance of the figure of the symposium for contextualizing the activity of poets-riddlers.50 The adroitness in such sympotic exercises is, therefore, emblematic of Hellenic paideia at large, and the display of such sympotic prowess played a special role in the propaganda of the Ptolemies:51 it demonstrated their expertise as participants and creators of Greek culture. This

 48 Transl. Olson 2009. 49 Cf. the wry comment in Tsantsanoglou 2009, 62 n. 11. 50 On the symposium as an emblematic Hellenic cultural institution, see now Węcowski 2014. There is no tangible evidence for figure poems or acrostichs at Greek symposia, but clearly such visual-textual games are in their essence akin to the sympotic games, illusions and manipulations which engage and playfully deceive the gaze of the symposiast: Lissarrague 1990 is a fundamental discussion of the playful in sympotic visual culture; see also Squire 2009, 157–160, with further references. The tantalizing sympotic affiliations of Greek visual-textual phenomena calls for an extensive discussion on another occasion: for some preliminary comments, see now Pappas 2013, esp. pp. 220–221 with n. 55, and note how Squire 2009, 161 suggests continuity between earlier visual culture and the so-called ‘Hellenistic aesthetic’ (the discussion of the technopaegnia closely follows). 51 On Hellenistic royal symposia, see Murray 1996, and cf. Kwapisz 2014b.

106  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers iconic trait of the rulers of Egypt was what Hadrian received from Vestinus together with the poetic gift of the Altar poem. Accordingly, by modelling one of his poems on that Altar, Optatian evoked the essentially Alexandrian gesture of Vestinus and, likewise, revived the courtly poetic tradition of learned Alexandrianism in his own dialogue with Constantine. Perhaps the clearest testimony to the stunning complexity of Optatian’s encomiastic strategy is provided by the opening verse of his Altar, which reads, Vides ut ara stem dicata Pythio (‘You see how I stand, as an altar dedicated to the Pythian Apollo’).52 This may be the boldest single line the poet ever composed. It has been observed that this line evokes at once line 7 of Vestinus’ Altar, Ἐς γὰρ βωμὸν ὁρῇς με (‘You see in me an altar …’), and Λεῦσσέ με (‘Look at me …’), which opens Simias’ Wings.53 We are thus immediately reminded of Vestinus’ dialoguing with Hadrian and of the early Hellenistic ancestry of such an exchange. But there is more to the allusion, I think. Yet another opening which clearly resounds in Optatian’s words is that of the famous Soracte ode: Vides ut alta stet niue candidum | Soracte (‘You see how Soracte stands …’; Hor. Carm. 1.9.1–2).54 Perhaps Optatian echoes Horace solely to show that he has the courage to do so and that he does not limit himself to imitating obscure Hellenistic genres. At the same time, the allusion also evokes Augustus’ patronage of Horace’s Odes and one of the most famous literary dialogues between a poet and a ruler.

. A postscript on isopsephy Optatian’s debt to Vestinus is clear, I think. Moreover, it is a reasonable supposition that it was an element of Optatian’s deliberate poetic strategy to evoke the Alexandrianism of his direct model. Yet, between the Alexandria of the Ptolemies and Hadrian’s Rome, there is one other poet whose playful art may be of relevance to the present discussion, even though we may see no clear proof of his influence on Optatian. That poet is Leonides of Alexandria. Leonides is the author of some forty epigrams that have been preserved in the Palatine Anthology. These may look ordinary enough on casual inspection, but they all share one curious characteristic which still guarantees them a place among the least popular and the least studied of the extant Greek epigrams.55 For all of these poems are  52 Transl. Squire 2015, 94. 53 Squire 2015, 95 n. 19. 54 This allusion is, of course, duly reported by Polara 1973, 1.105. 55 Leonides’ epigrams are edited by Page 1981, 503–541 (FGE); the introduction and commentary which accompany this edition remain the most comprehensive treatment of this neglected

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isopsephic – they play on the fact that the Greeks used letters for numerals by being composed in such a way that the totals of the numerical values of all letters in each distich or each line are the same. The reader who approaches these poems must be prepared to do much counting (hence the usual reading strategy, at least among most modern scholars, is that of avoidance). According to Leonides’ conception, poetry amounts to arithmetic, and for this reason alone his epigrams are worth mentioning in connection with Optatian’s wonders of poetic architecture.56 The sort of word-game which Leonides made his specialty may appear rather different from those practised by Optatian.57 Nonetheless, I would argue that Leonides’ epigrams deserve our attention, if not as a direct model then at least as compositions with which Optatian’s poetry corresponds, intentionally or not, on several levels. Like Optatian, and like Vestinus before him, Leonides was a court poet. Six of his quatrains are gifts, mostly birthday presents, for either Nero or Vespasian, for Nero’s mother, Agrippina, and his wife, Poppaea (FGE 1, 7, 8, 26, 29 and 32). We may note that an indirect confirmation of Nero’s fondness for such games can perhaps be found in the account of Suetonius (Nero 39), who tells us that one of the popular comments on Nero’s matricide was the observation that the numerical value of the name Nero in Greek is the same as the total sum for the words ἰδίαν μητέρα ἀπέκτεινε, ‘he killed his own mother’. This comment is all the more effective if it is seen to poke fun at Nero’s taste for isopsephy.58 No less revealingly, in his birthday presents for the imperial family, Leonides emphasizes his Egyptian origin by calling himself ‘Nile-born’ (FGE 29.1–2 and 32.2; cf. 7.3 and 30.4).59 By doing so he styles himself, I would argue, as an heir to the tradition of Alexandria’s learned and playful poetry. This may be the same game of ‘the Ptolemies and their poets’ that we saw Vestinus to have played. In a programmatic epigram, Leonides emphatically presents his poem as a ‘plaything’ (παίγνιον and ἄθυρμα; FGE 2 = AP 6.322):60

 poetry, but see now also Nisbet 2003, 202–208, Livingstone/Nisbet 2010, 119–120 and, for an instructive study of isopsephy, including Leonides’ epigrams, see Luz 2010, 247–325. Leventhal forthcoming offers an important reappraisal of Leonides. 56 This may be relevant to the reflection on Vestinus’ Altar too; cf. a discussion of this poem’s careful architecture, designed with mathematical precision, in Ernst 1991, 86–90; compare, in addition, an approach to Optatian in Levitan 1985. 57 My attempt to scan Optatian’s Greek for isopsephy has so far proved, perhaps predictably, futile. 58 Cf. Nisbet 2007, 552. 59 Cf. Page 1981, 504 n. 1. 60 Transl. Paton 1920. As for the count, line 1 = 3,360; line 2 = 3,440; line 3 = line 4 = 3,108; therefore, line 1 or 2 is probably (slightly) corrupt. See Page 1981, 515–516.

108  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers Τήνδε Λεωνίδεω θαλερὴν πάλι δέρκεο Μοῦσαν, δίστιχον εὐθίκτου παίγνιον εὐεπίης. ἔσται δ’ ἐν Κρονίοις Μάρκῳ περικαλλὲς ἄθυρμα τοῦτο, καὶ ἐν δείπνοις καὶ παρὰ μουσοπόλοις. Behold again the work of Leonidas’ flourishing Muse, this playful distich, neat and well expressed. This will be a lovely plaything for Marcus at the Saturnalia, and at banquets, and among lovers of the Muses.

This self-characterization pointedly aligns Leonides’ poetry with the early Hellenistic paignia – that is, with the class of riddling epigram-like poems to which Simias’ technopaegnia arguably belong as well.61 This leads me to observe one further peculiar characteristic of Leonides’ epigrams that they share with both the Greek technopaegnia and with Optatian’s poetry. It is rare for ancient poetry to speak explicitly about itself to the reader, as Optatian’s poems so profusely do.62 Yet one of the few examples of such (meta)poetic self-awareness in Greek literature is provided by Simias’ Egg, which explicitly addresses the reader and describes the intricacy of its own metrical design.63 It has been observed that this poem of Simias may be where Optatian found a model for his own metapoetic reflection, whose abundance is so characteristic of his poetry.64 Leonides’ epigrams, nonetheless, do the same more than once. Perhaps it is an inherent feature of such playful poetry that it has to expound the rules of the game it wants the reader to play. I choose to leave unanswered the question of whether either Vestinus or Optatian consciously echoed certain traits of Leonides’ isopsephic epigrams, although it is certainly clear by now that this interpretative path appeals to me. At any rate, the similarities are noteworthy and far-reaching. To add one more minor point, I observe that we find the same  61 On the paignia, which are associated in particular with the poet and grammarian Philitas of Cos, and the place of the Greek figure poems within this class, see Kwapisz 2013b (and cf. Chapter 1). 62 This aspect of Optatian’s poetry is explored by Pipitone 2012, esp. 95–132, as well as by Hernández Lobato 2017. 63 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 116. For another such poem, see the Ars Eudoxi from P. Par. 1 verso (early second century BC), an acrostich iambic poem whose each line is composed of precisely thirty letters, except the final line, which contains thirty-five letters, so that its twelve lines correspond to twelve months and each letter corresponds to one day of the so-called Great Year as measured by the Egyptians. The poem explicitly describes its design; altogether, its playfulness in various ways corresponds with what we find in the Tabulae Iliacae; for a discussion of this interconnectedness see Squire 2011, 116–120. Flores/Polara 1969 suggest, in a discussion that centres on Optatian, that this nexus of playfulness and extreme self-referentiality may also be found in Chinese literature. 64 Bruhat 1999, 54–58.

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technique of priamel which, as we have seen, was notably employed both by Vestinus and Optatian in their Altars so as to capture the peculiarity of the objectpoems which they wrote/constructed in Leonides’ birthday offering to Agrippina (FGE 8 = AP 6.329):65 Ἄλλος μὲν κρύσταλλον, ὁ δ’ ἄργυρον, οἱ δὲ τοπάζους πέμψουσιν, πλούτου δῶρα, γενεθλίδια. ἀλλ’ ἴδ’ Ἀγριππείνῃ δύο δίστιχα μοῦνον ἰσώσας ἀρκοῦμαι δώροις, ἃ φθόνος οὐ δαμάσει. One will send crystal, another silver, a third topazes, rich birthday gifts. But I, look, having merely made two isopsephic distichs for Agrippina, am content with this my gift that envy shall not damage.

After he lists three precious gifts the others may have for her, Leonides concludes that his present is something else – a gift of poetry. But, at the same time, Leonides suggests that his isopsephic poem, albeit immaterial, is a precious stone like the other presents. To us, this mode of characterization is familiar from how the altars of Vestinus and Optatian present themselves. More importantly, this conclusion allows us to see a further similarity between Leonides’ and Optatian’s notions of poetry. Leonides’ concept of a small poem as a little precious thing, intricately crafted, which in its own turn echoes, more or less directly, the poetics of the Hellenistic epigrams such as Posidippus’ Lithika (Epigr. 1–16 Austin/Bastianini), or poems on precious stones,66 paves the way for the almost tangibly material architectural intricacy of Optatian’s poems. The Optatianic Altar boasts of the craftsmanship of its artist (who, however, uses no sharp tool and no hard chisel, so that one may feel a supernatural power to be at play) much in the way in which Posidippus’ epigrams/stones celebrate the artistry of their poet/engravers. When seen from this viewpoint, the programmatic utterance of Optatian’s Altar gains a special significance, insofar as it sensitizes the reader to the craftsmanship of the other poems of the Panegyric and to their ‘jewelled-ness’.67 Regardless of what the exact nature of their relationship was, Leonides, Vestinus and Optatian can be seen as members of the same fellowship of court poets who look back to third-century Alexandria so as to find there a venerable model to praise their mighty patrons. I have suggested in this chapter that the characterization of the Ptolemies as expert riddlers effectively presented them as  65 Transl. Paton 1920, slightly altered. The count is 1+2 = 3+4 = 7,579 (Page 1981, 519). 66 For a recent discussion of the poetics of the Lithika, see Elsner 2014. 67 On Optatian’s ‘jewelled style’ see Lunn-Rockliffe 2017; the term obviously nods to Roberts 1989.

110  Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers ideal symposiasts. Accordingly, it may be best to imagine the poets with whom the present discussion is concerned as guests at one and the same (royal) banquet. This takes us back to the metaphor of a virtual symposium across centuries we saw in the previous chapter; as I mentioned, Bing invented this formula to characterize ‘the diachronic community of readers’ in his discussion of the Hellenistic, and later, epigram. This may be, again, usefully re-applied to our order of court riddlers. Incidentally, their poems exhibit a number of links with the genre of epigram: for one thing, Leonides of Alexandria was an epigrammatist, and the Greek technopaegnia are epigrammatic enough to be classified as a subgenre within the broader generic category.68 It is not out of place to remind ourselves that Optatian was an epigrammatist too, even if only one epigram and a one-line fragment of another survive (Carm. 29–30; both have been preserved for us by Fulgentius, respectively, Mitol. 2, p. 40.18 Helm and Virg. pp. 100–101 Helm). Optatian’s only extant epigram (Carm. 30), which conventionally mocks a Quintus for his arrogance, is not strikingly different from earlier and contemporary scoptic production.69 This implies that Optatian’s own ideas about intertextuality, and his approach to the poetic past, were similar to those of other ancient epigrammatists. It is remarkable that with the appearance of such poets as Leonides, Vestinus and especially Optatian, what was at first a modest symposium, which the reader intimately experienced by unrolling the scrolls of the recondite poetry books of Simias and Laevius, became a pompous royal banquet, at which the reader was getting acquainted not only with the members of the Graeco-Roman cultural elite, but also with the rulers to whom these poets addressed their elaborate compositions. Nevertheless, the rules of the game did not change drastically; even when playful poetry is deeply rooted in the historical context in which it was composed,

 68 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 11–12. Compare the seventeenth-century views on the interconnectedness of ludus poeticus and epigram, on which see the Appendix. 69 A particularly apt comparandum is provided by Palladas’ epigram on the hybris of a certain Sextus (AP 10.99). Note the eloquent recent attempt to date Palladas to the time of Constantine the Great, which would make him a contemporary of Optatian (Wilkinson 2012; this, however, was approached with scepticism by a number of scholars; see e.g. Cameron 2016). I should like to point out in this light that the two poetic corpora share several (not necessarily obvious) themes and characteristics, such as Alexandrianism (note esp. the references to Callimachus, Alexandria and possibly also the Musaeum in the ‘new Palladas’; P. CtYBR 4000, 6.28, 19.33 and esp. 9.25–33 with Wilkinson 2012, 60–63 and 152–156) and bilingualism (see Wilkinson 2010 on Latinitas in Palladas’ epigrams and Squire 2015, 114–115 on Graecitas in Optatian’s poetry). To my mind, these poetic texts must have emerged in a shared context.

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as is the case with the court poetry of Leonides, Vestinus and Optatian, the wordplay on which this poetry is founded – an acrostich, a rhopalon or isopsephia – exists outside any historical reality, or rather creates a context of its own, as we saw is the case with the poetry of Simias and Laevius. This context is an isolated and arcane realm, with its own set of laws and regulations (often described by the poems themselves); such poetry initiates into its realm an elite yet also reclusive fellowship. It is an extraordinary phenomenon that we see members of this mysterious society to have played an important role at the courts of three Roman emperors. The elevation of poets-riddlers, and in particular Optatian at the very end of Antiquity (in fact, the things his poetry does with the hexameter tradition, which is in many respects a synecdoche of all ancient poetry and even of the whole of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, do bring this tradition to an end), laid a solid fundament to ensure the preservation of the intellectualism from which their poetry emerged in the subsequent centuries. It is in the context of the heights attained by Optatian that we should view the activity of Manuel Holobolus, a Byzantine editor of the Greek figure poems, whom we will meet in the next chapter, at the imperial court of Michael VIII, or the prominence of such riddling and obscure poetry in Jesuit education at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a phenomenon that the Appendix will explore. Modern dictators, such as the one with which this chapter began, ought to deplore the decline of this model of elite paideia. Their ignorance makes them vulnerable to the subtle attacks of the distant descendants of those ancient refined gourmets of almost supernatural obscurity, in a way which many ancient rulers would never have allowed.

 The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium The title of this chapter is intended as a provocation. It is customary to begin a discussion dealing with the history of visual poetry in Europe, and in particular a discussion on the Greek figure poems, i.e. the collection containing the technopaegnia of Simias (Axe, Wings of Eros and Egg), the pseudo-Theocritean Syrinx and the Altars of Dosiadas and Julius Vestinus, with the unhesitant assertion that with these the European history of the genre begins and that Simias was the genre’s inventor. I wrote this myself in my introduction to an edition of these poems.1 Yet is this true? Is there a direct line of continuity between these Greek poems and such modern instalments of the genre as Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, or, to mention what I consider the crowning achievement of the genre’s modern history, the hieroglyphic ‘poem’ Zion consisting of three simple line-drawings, without text, the only published work of the fictional poet Cesárea Tinajero, the mysterious heroine of Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novel The Savage Detectives? Well, there is. And then – there is not. In this essay, I will attempt to draw a more nuanced picture, and formulate a more nuanced definition, of what the ancient figure poems are. This will hopefully allow us to re-think some basic assumptions about these poems, but also, more broadly, to reflect on the Byzantine reception of the intellectual archetype this book undertakes to discuss and on the impact of this mode of reception on the paradigm’s development in later epochs.

. Nuancing the picture A point of departure for this reflection is the realization that the collection of the Greek figure poems as we perceive it today was formed over the span of several centuries, and it consists of compositions which, despite obvious similarities, were conceived in significantly different cultural contexts and out of rather different motivations. This is by no means a trivial observation, as recent discussions of these poems have tended to underscore, deliberately or not, their apparent homogeneousness and the uniformity of the collection without paying much attention to its constituents’ differing backgrounds. Much of the modern criticism (rightly) emphasizes the figure poems’ intermediality; the fact that they can be viewed as phenomena crossing rigidly defined boundaries of poetry and visual

 1 Kwapisz 2013a, 11; among recent discussions, cf., e.g., the first sentence in d’Alessandro 2011– 2012, 133, who refers to the authority of Perrotta 1948. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-005

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culture.2 This novel approach, which stems from a more fundamental change in the paradigms of thinking about ancient art and literature, is both refreshing and much rewarding, as it has resulted in our better understanding of the cultural contexts in which such phenomena may have appeared. Yet there may be a onesidedness to this approach, ultimately not unlike the one-sidedness that characterized earlier studies on the pattern poems, which were heavily focused on their philological aspect.3 To point to some potential problems resulting from such an undifferentiating approach, in what follows I briefly discuss the variety of contexts in which the six figure poems were composed by their four poets. As we saw in Chapter 1, Simias was probably active at the turn of the fourth and third centuries BC.4 The main context for his three so-called technopaegnia (a useful term, as there is a possibility that the Egg, which is in various respects unlike the Axe and the Wings, was not originally intended to create a visible shape on papyrus)5 is arguably provided by his penchant for metrical experimentalism; as I argued in Chapter 1, these three poems may have had place in his collection of polymetric poems, to which category they belong. Their intermediality, as encapsulated in the convential ecphrastic formula λεῦσσέ με (‘look at me’) with which the Wings opens, is, from this viewpoint, an important trait, yet not necessarily one that should overshadow their remaining generic features. Therefore it would be, for instance, rewarding to consider how Simias’ technopaegnia engage, within the context of the virtual literary symposium unrolling before the reader’s eyes in the poetry book they are a part of (on this concept, see Chapters 2 and 3), with the tradition of playful visual-textual devices at symposia (such as vase paintings).6 On the other hand, the fact that Simias composed not one but three poems that can be classified as the technopaegnia is noteworthy, as it points to a certain generic consciousness in creating a new poetic form, a novel  2 Noteworthy recent studies within this trend include Männlein-Robert 2007, 142–150; Luz 2010, 327–353; Pappas 2013, 199–224; Squire 2011, 231–236, whereas Strodel 2002, Guichard 2006 and Kwapisz 2013a offer a more philological approach; see also Squire 2013b, a review of Kwapisz 2013a (which conveniently summarizes Squire’s scholarly programme). My remarks on the importance of discerning various contexts in which the six technopaegnia were conceived are inspired by a comment made by Ewen Bowie in the Q&A session following Alexandra Pappas’ presentation at the 2011 Warsaw conference on ancient linguistic games, from which Pappas 2013 stems. 3 I am guilty of being a champion of such purely philological approach; see Squire 2013b. 4 For my views on the dates and authorship of the technopaegnia, which I recapitulate here, see Kwapisz 2013a, 21–30. 5 See Kwapisz 2013a, 35–37. 6 A point I neglected in Kwapisz 2013a, but see some preliminary remarks in Chapter 3, n. 50 and, again, Squire 2013b, n. 6.

114  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium subgenre within the broader class of polymetric experiments, which bespeaks understanding of its potential. Yet even so, in view of Simias’ intellectual profile and the overarching preoccupations of his poetry his technopaegnia remain, above all, philological phenomena created by a philologist who wants to be appraised primarily as precisely a philologist. Their survival should not overshadow their belonging to the much wider category of Simias’ polymetra, most specimens of which are lost to us, but which contained many more poems than the three technopaegnia, and perhaps even further subcategories of metrical experiments (one may note in this context the rhopalic fr. 11 Fränkel = CA 157). From the viewpoint of the entirety of Simias’ output, as I discuss it in Chapter 1, there is no doubt that within his broader poetic project metre takes precedence over intermediality. (Pseudo-)Theocritus’ Syrinx and Dosiadas’ Altar belong in an entirely different epoch, or perhaps even two different epochs. My inclination is to align the Syrinx with the somewhat similar pseudepigrapha of the second century BC, such as Lycophron’s Alexandra – but it is also, famously, of uncertain date8 – or the so-called metrical hypotheses to Athenian plays that are ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium,9 whereas I still believe that Dosiadas’ Altar may come from the Imperial period. At least as remarkable as their visual shape is the fact that both poems are composed of riddles, much like Lycophron’s Alexandra. Again, the philological aspect is of great import in the case of these poems, as the Syrinx plays with the tradition of Theocritean bucolic poetry by alluding to its themes and by manipulating hexameter, i.e. Theocritus’ preferred metre, whereas Dosiadas’ Altar engages in a similar play of intertextuality with re-using the metre of the Alexandra.10 In a way, then, their visible form is secondary to what they do with the metrical form of the poems to which they emphatically allude. Yet with the composition of the Syrinx, and subsequently the Altar, the genre of the technopaegnion becomes a more tangible entity in literary history, as both poems clearly allude to the metrical-visual form of Simias’ poems and were ultimately destined to join them in one collection. In addition, whereas the form of the Syrinx finds, to my knowledge, no parallels in contemporary and earlier visual-textual phe-

 7 On this and other rhopala, see Kwapisz 2014a. 8 See now conveniently Hornblower 2015, 7–41, who also argues for the second-century BC dating. 9 Again, the date is debated, but Michel 1908 makes a convincing case for their second-century BC origin. On these hypotheses, see Pietruczuk in Kwapisz/Pietruczuk forthcoming, Chapter 7.3. 10 The points I make in Kwapisz 2013a.

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nomena, the form of the Altar is tantalizingly paralleled by an altar-grid, a variation on ‘magic squares’, inscribed on one of the Tabulae Iliacae (see Chapter 3, n. 36). The composition of the second Altar by Julius Vestinus under Hadrian marks another notable step in the formation of the genre of visible poetry, since this poem was probably composed to join the other five technopaegnia in one collection (which was arguably appended to an edition of Theocritus’ poems).11 Again, it is remarkable that Vestinus chose the form already known from Dosiadas’ poem and also familiar from one of the Tabulae Iliacae (and subsequently imitated by Optatian Porfyry). What this choice tells us is that using pictorial-textual representations of the form of the altar became at this point, for all practical purposes, a quite well-established convention. In terms of the intermediality of this poem, at least equally important is its playful and allusive engagement with material objects, namely numerous concrete altars built to honour Hadrian.12 An element of this play is the clever manoeuvre of inscribing this poem with an acrostich, which I discussed in the previous chapter (the acrostich itself should be seen as a manifestation of a certain vogue for such poetic devices in the times of Hadrian, as evidenced by the long acrostichs in Dionysius Periegetes’ geographical poem). The paradoxical ontological status of this creation, between concreteness and immateriality, is further underscored by the poem’s content, which knowingly describes its being built of no real construction material and being stained by black ink rather than sacrificial blood. If Vestinus’ awareness of the potential of the genre to which he contributes is arguably greater than is the case with his predecessors, and therefore we might wish to single out him, rather than Simias, as the self-conscious creator of the genre, at the same time he has no smaller awareness of the emphatically philological character of this tradition. In recognizing the importance of metrical playfulness as a defining feature of the technopaegnia, he composed his Altar of various metres that enjoyed popularity in his times.13 In keeping with the glossographic interests of Simias (and Laevius’ similar penchant for rare and recherché words), but also with the preoccupations of the contemporary Atticists, he embellished the diction of the Altar with a number of obscure glosses. A context for his imitation of Simias’ intellectual profile is provided by his functions as a director in charge of the Museum in Alexandria and of libraries in Rome.

 11 See Kwapisz 2013a, 47–50. 12 See Kwapisz 2013a, 177–182. 13 See my analysis in Kwapisz 2013a, 45.

116  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium In sum, what defines the Greek technopaegnia (and Laevius’ Phoenix likewise) is neither philology nor visuality, but a double-sidedness that weds these two aspects, which are differently balanced in different poems. What this doublesidedness calls for, at this point, is no longer a groundwork discussion of the whole collection without differentiating its elements, but a treatment of the visuality of each technopaegnion as a distinct case, to pair what is offered by detailed philological commentaries (such as the one I produced). Such a discussion ought to explore the evolution of the poets’ generic awareness as evidenced by the consecutive instalments by pointing to how these poems develop on the ideas of their authors’ predecessors. Furthermore, this commentary would locate each technopaegnion in relation to a number of especially earlier and contemporary, but also later, textual-pictorial phenomena (careful establishing of a chronological framework will be as crucial in such an approach as in any purely philological commentary). These phenomena include the already mentioned playful sympotic vase paintings, the images and inscriptions of the Tabulae Iliacae, other inscriptions on various sorts of objects (e.g. an inscribed axe, IG 14.64314), those examples of graffiti from Pompeii and elsewhere where graphic representations are coupled with text, Optatian Porfyry’s collection of visual poetry, and also the tradition of ecphrastic literature, in particular the ecphrastic epigram. I lack competence to prepare such a comprehensive discussion, yet even the cursory sketch I am offering here suggests some preliminary conclusions. Despite some obvious similarities, the visual and textual components may play rather different roles in different categories of these phenomena. For example, there is a basic resemblance between the Altars of Dosiadas and Vestinus, the similar poem composed by Optatian and the altar-grid of one of the Tabulae Iliacae.15 Yet the altar-grid obviously lacks most of the literary component of the poetic Altars, and even the poetic Altars differ in their approach to metre and to using text as an instrument of visual representation (the number of letters in each line matters in the orderly architecture of Optatian’s poem, whereas metre takes precedence in the two earlier Altars), as well as in what use they make of the intermediality of text and image (Vestinus’ and Optatian’ poems display a more explicit awareness of it than Dosiadas). Another example. As was noticed by Squire, there is a connection between ship-graffiti from Rome and Pompeii, in which letters form images of ships, and Optatian’s Carm. 19 Polara, the most elaborate

 14 See Kwapisz 2013a, 11–12. 15 See, again, Chapter 3, n. 36 and Frontisi-Ducroux 2013; these altars tantalizingly share other elements of refined textual-visual playfulness besides being shaped in the same way.

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poem in his collection, in which a picture of a ship emerges from the poem’s textual weft.16 Yet as Squire himself admits, ‘[t]here is, of course, a world of difference between such humble graffiti and Optatian’s high-brow literary artefacts’. The difference is obviously both in what we may call ‘the quality of art’ and the poetic component altogether missing from the graffiti. The relevance of such phenomena for understanding Optatian’s potential sources of inspiration is at once obvious and needs to be nuancedly characterized. One last illustration of what approach I postulate. CIL 4.1595 is a Pompeian graffito poem by a Sepumius, which consists of two elegiac couplets written continuously to form the shape of a snake. The text reads as follows:17 [Ser]pentis lusus si qui sibi forte notauit, Sepumius iuuenis quos fac(i)t ingenio, spectator scaenae siue es studiosus e[q]uorum: sic habeas [lanc]es se[mp]er ubiq[ue p]a[res]. If someone by chance should note the games of the snake, | which the young man Sepumius cleverly made, | whether you are in the audience of the theatre or mad about horses, | may you always and everywhere have fair fortune.18

The scholarship on this poem classifies it as a technopaegnion, a remarkable example of carmen figuratum. It has been noted that what it shares with the Greek figure poems is the self-referentiality with which the poet describes his creation.19 I would add that the marked alliteration of s may be argued to parallel the Klangspiele of Simias’ Egg,20 whereas the mention of the reader’s fortune in the final pentameter curiously resembles the ending of Simias’ Axe. On the whole, however, if this poem may be characterized as a figure poem, it belongs to an altogether different class than the Greek technopaegnia, whose shape is produced by metrical manipulations rather than by arbitrarily arranging the line of writing. The fact that the procedure used by Sepumius to create the desired visible form is paralleled by such distant compositions as Lewis Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tale, or the Snake by the Polish poet Ludwik Jerzy Kern,21 suggests that Sepumius’ carmen figuratum may have been a spontaneous invention. Although its visuality is, on the whole, less elaborate than that of the Greek figure poems, in which the visual  16 Squire 2015, 116. 17 See Wojaczek 1988, Courtney 1995, 328–329, Langner 2001, 28–29, Kruschwitz 2004, 56–57 and 2008, 256–257, Milnor 2014, 26–27. 18 The text as in Kruschwitz 2008, transl. Milnor 2014. 19 Wojaczek 1988, 251–252. 20 See Kwapisz 2013a, 107 and passim in my commentary. 21 For a charming Latin translation (which accompanies the equally charming original in Polish), see Marciniak 2015.

118  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium effect is achieved through artful metrical manipulation, at the same time the visuality dominates any other aspect; the graffito poem is exactly all about visuality, or, in other words, it is the picture that matters most here, whereas in the case of the technopaegnia their philological refinement – i.e. their metrical and lexical inventiveness – is at least an equally important defining feature. In several respects, Sepumius’ epigram fits the modern definition of the carmen figuratum better than the Greek technopaegnia and Laevius’ Phoenix. The least we should do, then, is make a distinction between two traditions of ancient visual poetry, similarly as two traditions are discernible within Optatian’s output, as his shape-poems Panpipe, Altar and Organ, i.e. Carm. 26, 27 and 20, are closely modelled on the Greek sources, whereas his grid-poems from which the patterns created by uersus intexti emerge are a distinct innovation.

. Reading and viewing figure poems in Byzantium The above-discussed nuances must carefully be weighed in a detailed commentary devoted to the intermediality of ancient visual poetry whose preparation I postulate. What this essay aims to explore in the first place, however, is not in what ways the Greek figure poems differ and how the awareness of the new genre evolves with each new instalment, but rather how the reception of the whole collection in Byzantium contributed to shaping the modern notion of the carmen figuratum. For at some point in Antiquity, no later than with the composition of the Altar by Vestinus, which crowns the collection, there emerged, in the end, the concept of a single collection of the six figure poems, which is, incidentally, responsible for our difficulties with discerning the peculiarity of its components.22 Byzantine readers experienced these poems as parts of such a collection. Their approach to it, however, was not unvarying; within more than a millennium between the lifetime of Optatian, for whom the collection of the technopaegnia was a source of inspiration for the invention of his own variation of visual poetry, which in turn, as we will see, provided a popular model for numerous mediaeval compositions, and the earliest printed editions of the collection that were made in the West in 1516,23 a rather dramatic shift in the reception of the Greek figure poems occurred. This process arguably affected our own perception of these poems; it is as a result of it that the modern notion of the carmen figuratum emerged.

 22 On the ancient collection of the technopaegnia, see Kwapisz 2013a, 47–50. 23 See Kwapisz 2013a, 52.

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An immediate context for the Byzantine reception of the Greek technopaegnia is provided by the popularity of textual-visual phenomena in that period; recent studies have explored a broad range of specimens of visual poetry found in Byzantine MSS.24 It is striking, however, that all these poems are to be situated within the tradition of grid-poems as founded by Optatian Porfyry (and subsequently developed by Venantius Fortunatus and Rabanus Maurus in the West), whereas no new poems were composed to directly follow the model of the Greek technopaegnia, although these continued to be copied and commented upon.25 The Christian symbolism of the grid-poems of Optatian and his followers, which was starkly contrasted by the sheer paganism of the Greek Altars and the figure poems dedicated to Pan and Eros, surely affected the choice of such a path of reception. Yet the preference for appropriating the originally Latin model, rather than imitating the Greek tradition, was likely to have been influenced, besides religious motivations, by other factors. Indicative of these is the intellectual profile of those Byzantine scholars who are famous for their interest in the Greek technopaegnia and for undertaking major efforts to ensure their preservation. The complete collection of the Greek figure poems, with abundant scholia, is found in one MS only, namely the part of the MS of the Palatine Anthology now in Paris (Parisinus suppl. Gr. 384).26 Cameron convincingly, and quite famously, argued that the scribe to whom we owe the inclusion of the technopaegnia in the Anthology was Constantine the Rhodian, a poet and scholar active in the first half of the tenth century.27 The remaining MSS to preserve the figure poems are the so-called bucolic MSS (Theocritus’ poetry is their important component). Apart from two important textual witnesses, Ambrosianus C 222 inf. and Laurentianus 32.52, all these MSS derive from a commented  24 Important contributions include Hörandner 1990 and 2009, Ernst 1991, 738–765, Cesaretti 2014, 148*–158* (a discussion on Eustathius of Thessalonica’s mini-essay on pattern poetry, on which see n. 38 below), Diamantopoulou 2016, 63–105. A starting point for approaching, more broadly, the playful element in Byzantine poetry is now Agosti 2018, and more generally on interactions of art and literature in Byzantium, see Maguire 2008. 25 Cf. Hörandner 1990, 7–8; Diamantopoulou 2016, 71. 26 For an overview of the Byzantine transmission of the Greek figure poems, see Kwapisz 2013a, 50–56 (with further literature) and a more exhaustive study by Strodel 2002. Particularly valuable is the discussion of both visual and literary aspects of the transmission in Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, which I regrettably did not know at a time when I was preparing my edition of the technopaegnia and which answers some of the questions I posed at the end of my introduction to this edition (Kwapisz 2013a, 55–56). 27 Cameron 1993, 298–328; this was contested by Orsini 2000, but to me (and others) Cameron’s argument still retains enough force; cf., e.g., De Stefani 2011, viii. On Constantine the Rhodian, see also Downey 1955 and James 2012, 131–144.

120  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium recension made in the early Palaeologan age by Manuel Holobolus (c. 1245 – before 1314), a prominent scholar, teacher, orator, diplomat and courtier (although due to his uncompromising political stance he alternately fell in and out of favour at the imperial court, which at some point resulted in his nose and lips having been cut off and at another in having been paraded through the streets of Constantinople while laden with sheep entrails and dung; Pachymeres, Hist. 3.11 and 5.20).28 Although these two savants lived and worked in altogether different epochs and different milieus, tantalizingly similar intellectual patterns emerge from their output. Both displayed clear preoccupations with not only preserving the classical literary heritage, but also with exploring its more obscure and intellectually more demanding (even though disparate) regions. The so-called Book 15 of the Palatine Anthology, which includes the Greek figure poems, is in fact, as Cameron argued, a mini-anthology on its own, intended by its compiler, i.e. Constantine the Rhodian, to supplement the content of Cephalas’ anthology. It is notable that this mini-anthology preserves for us not only the notoriously obscure technopaegnia, but also the collection of the Anacreontea (not included in the editions of the Palatine Anthology).29 This is no doubt an effort of an ardent bibliophile and a devotee of ancient poetry, who conceives his role as that of a guardian of memory. On the other hand, the figure poems are accompanied in this collection by rich assortment of scholia, some of which go back to Antiquity.30 This bespeaks the philological seriousness of Constantine’s intellectual project, an aspect which I will promptly discuss in more detail. Even more serious and uncompromising was Holobolus’ intellectualism, whose character can be captured thanks to recent studies.31 Besides preparing an edition of the technopaegnia accompanied by his own commentary, he is now famous for being the first Greek since the end of Antiquity to have undertaken translating Latin texts.32 Unlike his follower Planudes, however, who translated

 28 On Holobolus, see Treu 1896, Constantinides 1982, 52–59, Fisher 2003, 2006 and 2012, Bydén 2004 (the latter two essays provide particularly accessible introductions to his career); on his recension of the technopaegnia, see Kwapisz 2013a, 53–56 and Bernabò/Magnelli 2011 (both with further references). 29 The standard edition is M.L. West 1993. 30 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 51–52. 31 See n. 28 above. 32 There was a time when Holobolus’ authorship of the translations was doubted and ascribed to his younger contemporary Maximus Planudes (for the persistence of such a view, cf. Wilson 1996, 224–225), yet these doubts are ungrounded; see Canart 1982 and esp. the recent discussions of Holobolus as translator offered by Fisher 2003, 2006 and 2012, and Bydén 2004; cf. also Toth 2011, 95.

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into Greek such evergreens of Roman literature as Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, although he could pick whatever masterpiece he wanted while entering the neglected field of Latin-to-Greek translation, Holobolus chose to focuse on two treatises by Boethius, De topicis differentiis and De hypotheticis syllogismis.33 Even if these were popular in the West, they were of rather narrowly conceived application. Whereas modern scholarship rightly points out that, in Bydén’s words, these treatises, ‘as well as all the others translated by Planoudes, may be said to be culled from the literary canon of the Late Middle Ages’,34 we may also note, in spite of the practical usefulness of those works in contemporary rhetorical training, ‘the contrast between Holobolos’ narrowly practical motives for translating Latin and Planoudes’ broader intentions’ (as Fisher puts it).35 As has recently been argued – convincingly, to my mind – Holobolus also translated into Greek Alfred of Sareshel’s Latin version of (Pseudo-)Aristotle’s De plantis, which, in turn, had been rendered by Alfred into Latin from Arabic (yet the Arabic text was based on a Syriac translation of the Greek text!).36 The latter effort to restore Aristotle’s work lost already in Antiquity to where it properly belonged is illustrative of what Holobolus considered to have been making good use of his knowledge of Latin; this is confirmed by what should probably be recognized as his interest in Boethius’ Aristotelism. Yet particularly telling, I think, is Holobolus’ preoccupation with pursuing a characteristically unobvious path. There is a strong tinge of mystery surrounding the culturally complicated history of the text of De plantis he chose to approach; I suggest that we should not ignore the appeal that the intellectual challenge of the retroversion of a Latin text into Greek must have had to Holobolus’ mentality. This was an ambitious and demanding task, and it is notable that Holobolus was not disheartened by the fact that obviously only a very limited group of readers were capable of appreciating it as such – the ‘true friends’ of his, of whom he speaks in a letter which serves as the preface to his translations of Boethius (section 4) and who were probably his students and perhaps also colleagues.37 Al 33 On Holobolus’ motivations and his ambiguous attitude towards the intellectual achievements of the Westerners, see, again, Fisher 2003, 2006 and 2012. Editions of Holobolus’ translations of Boethius are provided by Nikitas 1982 and 1990. 34 Bydén 2004, 135. 35 Fisher 2006, 97. 36 Fisher 2006. 37 As is suggested by Bydén 2004, 143–144. The text and translation of the letter (which I use in this chapter) are usefully supplied in Fisher 2003; see also Fisher 2006. For a case study on a scholar educated in the circle of Holobolus, see Pérez Martín 1996, 1–16.

122  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium though this endeavour was essentially different from preparing an edition of the Greek technopaegnia, my intuition is that there are, in fact, rather fundamental points of contact between the two philological projects undertaken by Holobolus. To our knowledge, no prefatory essay accompanied Holobolus’ edition of the technopaegnia, yet it may be rewarding to more tentatively consider how Holobolus’ motivations for doing scholarship, as these are expressed in his preface to the translations of Boethius, relate to his preoccupation with the Greek figure poems.38 It is appealing to surmise that he undertook his efforts to collect and elucidate these emblematically riddling, obscure and refined poetic texts also primarily with the circle of his disciples and perhaps learned colleagues in mind; the ‘true friends’ he addresses in the Boethius preface. This pattern would foreshadow the use of technopaegnia, i.e. riddling poetry, in Jesuit education in the West a few centuries later (which is the main point of concern in the Appendix). In section 6 of his prefatory letter, Holobolus justifies his approaching foreign Latin tradition: οὐχ ὡς δεομένης τάχα τῆς παρ’ ἡμῖν διαλεκτικῆς καὶ τῆς ἐντεῦθεν κἂν τὸ βραχὺ συγκροτήσεως, εἴπερ οὐδ’ ὁ μέγας φωσφόρος, ἵν’ οὕτως εἴποιμι, λυχνιαίου χρῄζει φωτός, ἀλλ’ ἵν’ ὧνπερ ἔχοιμεν ἱκανῶς τούτων καὶ ὑπερεκπερισσοῦ εὐποροίημεν καὶ τὰ παρ’ Ἰταλοῖς σεμνολογούμενα, τίνα πεφύκασι, μὴ πάνυ καὶ τοὺς τῶν Αὐσόνων παῖδας διαλανθάνοιεν, οἷς εἴπερ τισὶν ἄλλοις ἡ τῶν λόγων κτῆσις ἐξαιρέτως πέφυκε περισπούδαστον. (I did this) not because our own dialectic now needs even the minimal support from that (Latin) source – no more than the great light-bringing (sun) needs, so to speak, the light of a lamp – but so that what we already possess in sufficiency we might also have to a superabundant degree and so that the nature of the rhetorically sophisticated works produced by the Italians might not entirely escape the notice of those who are also children of Ausonia [i.e. Roman Italy] and who of all people are especially zealous to acquire literary works.

Even though the technopaegnia are hardly an exercise in dialectic, the themes of the Byzantines’ zeal to acquire new literary texts and the chauvinistic pride of the

 38 We do have, however, a general Byzantine discussion on pattern poetry, which predates Holobolus by a century, namely a long excursus in Eustathius of Thessalonica’s Exegesis in canonem iambicum Pentecostalem, Prooem. 146–248 (on which see Cesaretti 2014, 148*–158*). Of interest to us is its warm appreciation for this sort of poetic divertissement (235–248) – which includes a direct reference to Callimachus’ poetics of taking untrodden paths and hence the recognition of the genre’s refined Alexandrianism and elitism (242–244) – and also the fact that it discusses the Greek figure poems of Simias and his followers (235–237) alongside several Byzantine contributions to the genre (146–234), thus emphasizing the continuity of this poetic tradition.

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Greeks’ intellectual achievements that appear in this passage may help us understand, I think, Holobolus’ motivation behind embarking on the project of commenting on the technopaegnia. It is collecting and elucidating these poems that satisfies both needs, to rediscover and put in the spotlight a text that is by definition little studied and relatively little known (it is certainly relevant that, as the evidence of all the Byzantine MSS apart from the Palatine Anthology shows, the ancient technopaegnia as a rule circulated in that period disconnected from each other and no longer as one collection) and to contribute to substantiating the pride of the Greeks’ intellectual accomplishments and their sophistication. In another passage in the Boethius preface, Holobolus both underscores the importance of approaching intellectually demanding texts and gives expression to his notion of the scholar’s role as lucid commentator on such texts (section 8): … ὁ Βοέτιος … πολλοὺς καὶ γενναίους λόγους δεδημιούργηκεν, ἔτι δὲ καὶ Ἀριστοτελικὰς ἑτέρας βίβλους ἐξηγησάμενος, πρὸς ταύταις καὶ τῆς λογικῆς πραγματείας τὸ νύκτερον καὶ δυσπρόσιτον πολλῷ τῷ φωτὶ τῆς σαφηνείας, ὡς εἰπεῖν, ἐξημέρωσεν. … Boethius … authored many excellent works. Furthermore, he wrote commentaries on various works of Aristotle and in addition reclaimed with the powerful light of clarification, so to speak, what is murky and difficult of access in his writings on dialectic.

It is tempting to read this remark on Boethius as commentator on Aristotle as an expression of Holobolus’ own scholarly programme. It is in this light that we should view his role as commentator of the technopaegnia, a notorious example of a text that is ‘murky and difficult of access’. We should, however, resist the temptation of drawing a too simplistic picture, according to which doing scholarship on the poems would be for Holobolus solely a means of asserting his philological sophistication. The model of Byzantine intellectualism he embodies is more complex; remarkably, we will, again, see similarities between how this complexity manifests itself not only in Holobolus, but also in Constantine the Rhodian. In an earlier part of this chapter, I argued that although a gamut of ancient textual-visual phenomena may be used to contextualize the Greek technopaegnia, different phenomena of this sort display varying relevance for different figure poems. There should be no doubt, however, that in Byzantium at least one category of such texts, namely ecphrastic poetry, was thought to provide an immediate context for the collection of the technopaegnia as a whole. This is evidenced by the shared interest of both Constantine the Rhodian and Manuel Holobolus in poetic ecphrasis, which is coupled by their interest in the figure poems; what this community of preoccupations implies is that they both had a share in the same model of a Byzantine aesthetic sensitivity. Constantine’s liking for

124  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium ecphrases and the importance he attaches to the genre is manifest from the fact that the main epigrammatic body of the Palatine Anthology is preceded and followed by two important early Byzantine poems that belong to this class, namely Paul the Silentiary’s ecphrasis of Hagia Sophia and John of Gaza’s Tabula Mundi, an ecphrasis of a painting of the world, both copied by Constantine.39 The Tabula Mundi is followed in the MS by twenty Byzantine epigrams, the first part of the so-called Book 15 (which is in fact, as we now know, Constantine’s self-contained mini-anthology), and only then the collection of the figure poems follows (AP 15.21–22, 24–27), but it is noteworthy that Constantine’s index to the Palatine Anthology lists the technopaegnia immediately after John of Gaza’s ecphrasis.40 This confirms that Constantine recognized an essential connection between poetry that described an artefact and poems that purported to be inscriptions on artefacts. Moreover, Constantine himself remarkably contributed to the genre of ecphrasis by composing a poem on monuments of Constantinople and in particular the Church of the Holy Apostles (not included in the MS of the Anthology and preserved in a sole MS).41 Tellingly, Holobolus also wrote a remarkable ecphrasis. Although this one is in prose, it deserves our close attention due to its formal sophistication and, in addition, an intriguing link with the technopaegnia. Among his orations, one finds three encomia for the emperor Michael VIII, the first of which contains an ecphrasis of two richly embroidered peploi, a gift of Michael VIII to Genoese envoys (1.47.1–34 Treu).42 Holobolus’ highest awareness of how ecphrasis, and literature in general, can cross the boundaries of text and image, or literature and art, is evident from a dazzling rhetorical manoeuvre in this encomium. In a ringcomposition he creates, first – in the introduction (1.30.18–31.14 Treu) – Holobolus employs the metaphor of rhetoric as weaving, so that he likens own oration to an embroidered peplos (cf. 1.45.1 Treu ὁ παρὼν λογικὸς πέπλος, ‘this verbal peplos’), and subsequently – towards the end of the oration – he says that the embroidery of one of the peploi presented to Genoa had such a narrative force that ‘this peplos was not a peplos, but a book’ (οὐ πέπλος ὁ πέπλος ἦν, ἀλλὰ βίβλος, 1.47.23 Treu; the peplos carried Latin inscriptions, which also contributed  39 Cf. Cameron 1993, 298. The two ecphrastic poems are now available in two recent editions, respectively De Stefani 2011 and Lauritzen 2015. 40 Cf. Cameron 1993, 299. 41 A recent edition by Vassis in James 2012. 42 Another edition: Siderides 1926. Holobolus’ ecphrasis has received much scholarly attention, particularly in connection with the actual peplos preserved in Genoa; among recent discussions, see Macrides 1980, 34–36, Schreiner 1988, Papamastorakis 2003, Toth 2011 (which I find particularly enlightening), Hilsdale 2014, 31–87.

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to its bookishness).43 In other words, literature is weft and weft is literature. The wording of the beginning of the passage in which the metaphor of weaving appears deserves our attention: ὑφαίνουσι τοίνυν καὶ οὗτοι πέπλον ἐξ ὑφαντικῆς ῥητορικῆς ἀρτυόμενον, ὕλην ἐκείνην συλλέγοντες, ἣν ἐδημιούργησαν Μοῦσαι καὶ ὁ σοφὸς μεταλλευτὴς ἐφεῦρεν Ἑρμῆς … They [sc. rhetors who offer gifts to the emperor] also weave a peplos, which is made of woven rhetoric, and they collect that material which the Muses created and the wise metallurgist Hermes invented …

The nexus of ancient gods and the imagery of weaving and building materials (ὕλη) in this programmatic passage intriguingly evokes the contents of the technopaegnia, as in Simias’ Egg the poem itself is depicted as a weft that Hermes brought to people (lines 3, 7–8 τόδ’ ἄτριον νέον … Ἑρμᾶς ἔκιξε … φῦλ’ ἐς βροτῶν; cf. 20 πολύπλοκα … μέτρα μολπᾶς),44 whereas in Vestinus’ poem the altar is emphatically described as built not with any real building material (lines 7–10), but with words, whereas its makers are the Muses (lines 14–15). In view of these links, one might think that a reflection on the technopaegnia contributed to laying the theoretical groundwork for Holobolus’ interconnected refined ecphrasis and highly conscious metaphor of literature as weaving. Unfortunately, what makes this hypothesis vulnerable is the possibility, if not likeliness, that the mention of weft, ἄτριον, was missing from his text of the Egg due to textual corruption; the word is found in the MS of the Palatine Anthology, but it is corrupt in the MSS that derive from Holobolus’ recension. Even if there is no direct connection between the technopaegnia and Holobolus’ metaphor, the shared conceptual structure of the two texts is, nevertheless, noteworthy. This tells us something about a remarkable community of ideas across centuries and about how deeply Holobolus’ mentality was indebted to ancient ways of thinking. All in all, it is clear at this point that Constantine the Rhodian and Holobolus’ interest in the Greek figure poems is motivated not only by a philological impulse,

 43 See on this passage Toth 2011, 96–98, who additionally notes how Holobolus’ manoeuvre replicates a Homeric gesture, as in Il. 3.125–128 Homer depicts Helen embroidering a tapestry with scenes of battles between the Greeks and the Trojans, the same that Homer recounts in his poem. The two passages in Holobolus are also discussed jointly by Papamastorakis 2003, 384–385. 44 To be sure, the metaphor of poetry as weaving is widespread not only in the Graeco-Roman world or even Indo-European cultures, but throughout the world cultures (cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 115), but it is intriguing how it is coupled, not really appropriately, with ‘the metallurgist Hermes’.

126  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium but also the recognition of this tradition as a genre defined by its essential intermediality. Still, though, in the spectrum between a purely visual experience and a philological mode of reading – which is focused on the metrical properties, deciphering riddles and learned periphrases, and identifying intertexts – what these two scholars do is to be located at least not too far from the philological end. It is telling that no drawings accompany the text of the figure poems in the MS of the Palatine Anthology and their shape is even somewhat obscured by abundant scholia, which, as if in an emanation of a philological horror uacui, fill any blank space surrounding the text of these poems. The only exception is Dosiadas’ Altar, the scholia to which are missing; to fill the empty space at the bottom of the page, however, Constantine copied AP 9.197 and 196 (in this order), two epigrams on Marinus’ Life of Proclus.45 Their text is followed by the scribe’s explanatory note on this apparently inappropriate addition: τεχνικοῖς κανόνεσσιν ἐφεσπόμενος τάδ᾿ ἔγραψα, ‘I wrote these epigrams being faithful to the canons of art’. This art is, as Cameron remarks, the art of calligraphy;46 for the same reasons, Constantine copied an anonymous epigram on Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations beneath the Axe, whereas Simias’ Wings is copied twice, in cursive and in uncial. In effect, one gets the impression that Constantine is more concerned with a proper scribal technique than with other aspects of the visual form of the technopaegnia. Nonetheless, the subject-matter of the three epigrams on philosophical books may be of some relevance;47 let us have a quick look at these (I quote them in the order in which they appear in the MS of the Anthology, 15.23, 9.197 and 9.196, with the lemma that accompanies the first of these):48 δακτυλικὰ τετράμετρα βραχυκατάληκτα· εἰς τὴν βίβλον Μάρκου Εἰ λύπης κρατέειν ἐθέλεις, τήνδε μάκαιραν ἀναπτύσσων βίβλον ἐπέρχεο ἐνδυκέως,

 45 On the authorship of these two epigrams and their textual transmission, see Saffrey/Segonds 2001, cxix–cxx and 182–183 (they also provide a French translation). 46 Cameron 1993, 321; see already Maas 1913, 296. Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 49–50. 47 My thinking about these epigrams is inspired by an exchange with Alexandra Pappas on the topic in 2012; she kindly shared with me her stimulating thoughts on why it matters that these poems break the sequence of the figure poems in the MS of the Anthology. 48 Transl. Paton 1917 and 1918, adapted; Paton 1918, 127 has an amusing comment on the title On the Book of Marcus: ‘Nothing is known regarding it’; in fact, we know a little bit about ‘the book of Marcus’, as this epigram is also found in the colophon of a MS of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, see Ceporina 2012, 49. The metre and the paroxytonic accentuation points to a late origin; see Maas 1913, 298.

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ἧς ὕπο γνώμην ὀλβίστην ῥεῖά κεν ὄψεαι ἐσσομένων, ὄντων τ’ ἠδὲ παροιχομένων, τερπωλήν τ’ ἀνίην τε καπνοῦ μηδὲν ἀρειοτέρην.

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Dactylic tetrameter brachycatelectic. On the book of Marcus If you would overcome sorrow, unroll and peruse with care this blessed book from which you shall with ease look on wealth of doctrine concerning things to be, things that are and things that were, and shall say that joy and pain are no better than smoke. Καὶ τόδε σῆς ζαθέης κεφαλῆς περιώσιον ἔργον, Πρόκλε μάκαρ, πάντων βρέτας ἔμπνοον ὅττι Μαρῖνον ἀθανάτων μερόπεσσι βοηθόον εὐσεβέεσσιν ἀντὶ τεῆς ἱερῆς κεφαλῆς ψυχοσσόον ἄλκαρ κάλλιπες, ὃς βιοτὴν θεοτερπέα σεῖο λιγαίνων 5 γράψε τάδ’ ἐσσομένοις μνημήια σῶν ἀρετάων. Proclus of blessed memory, this, too, is an excellent deed on the part of your divine self, that as a saviour and protector of souls in place of your divine self you have left Marinus, the living image of all the immortals, the help of pious men. He, proclaiming the story of your life, with which God was well pleased, wrote this book as a record of your virtues for posterity. Ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς κεχαρισμένα πάντοτε ῥέζων καὶ τάδ’ ἐπ’ εὐσεβέοντι νόῳ συνέγραψε Μαρῖνος. Marinus, who ever does works pleasing to the gods, wrote this, too, with pious intent.

These three epigrams seemingly have little to do with the technopaegnia; a counterpoint rather than a harmonious coda. Perhaps the emphasis on philosophical seriousness was intended by Constantine to balance the frivolity of the figure poems, although the unusual metre of the epigram on Marcus Aurelius, which Constantine identifies in the lemma, may have been an additional factor in its selection. It may be relevant, however, how the three epigrams focus the reader’s attention on the theme of bookishness, i.e. writing and the resulting readerly experience. This certainly corresponds with the emphatic Schriftlichkeit of the technopaegnia (on which see Chapter 1), but perhaps this admonishment may also be read as complementing the omission of pictorial elements in Constantine’s sylloge of the technopaegnia. It is as if he wanted to subtly admonish the reader that it is reading rather than watching that matters (‘so you have seen picture poems; now go read some philosophy!’). Whether Holobolus’ edition was illustrated is uncertain, but the discrepancy between drawings that accompany the technopaegnia in some MSS that derive

128  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium from his recension and what was probably the original text of his commentary suggest that like Constantine’s sylloge, his edition of the text of the poems with his commentary may also have lacked pictorial ornaments.49 Be that as it may, it is safe to say that Holobolus developed a strong interest in approaching the technopaegnia as a text that calls for a careful philological treatment. Such a philological motivation was arguably of lesser importance for their other Byzantine readers. This is evident from a number of what we may call pictorial manipulations to which they submitted these poems. It is possible that the process of moulding their text so as to achieve a specific visual effect began as early as Antiquity, if it is true, as I once argued, that the curious ‘antithetical’ arrangment of the verses of the Axe and the Egg we find in the MS of the Palatine Anthology and other MSS is not Simias’ original invention, but results from manipulation by ancient editors who sought to give these poems proper ‘axish’ and ‘eggish’ shapes.50 In this arrangement, the first line is placed at the top of the poem, but the second line at its bottom, and the subsequent lines are analogously distributed between the top and the bottom part. This procedure is already described by Hephaestion (pp. 61.19–62.6 Consbruch; cf. p. 68.7–13) and the scholia to the Axe; they label such a class of poems as ἀντιθετικά. If this does not go back Simias, then what we see here is a nascent awareness of the importance of visuality as a defining feature of the genre. Byzantine scribes go much further. The texts of the poems are, as a rule, inscribed on drawings of altars, a sort of flute, wings, axes and eggs. In some MSS, additional illustrations accompany the text, which are at times highly elaborate specimens of Byzantine art (as is the case with the Eros of Laurentianus 32.52 or with the Triclinian Parisinus Gr. 2832). The textual fabric is variously manipulated to form desired shapes: the two blades of it can become rounded (this is possible when the poem is written ‘antithetically’) and a handle is added to it; this handle is formed of the corrupt text of the last line of the Egg. Particularly revealing is the manipulation of the textual material of the Egg; in all MSS apart from the MS of the Anthology the text is arbitrarily and with a total disregard for what it actually says kneaded to form a more proper egg-like shape.51 What the scribal perfection of the visual form resulted in was that the poem itself had become barely intelligible until Salmasius published his text in 1619 after the rediscovery of the

 49 See on this problem Kwapisz 2013a, 55–56 and Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 219–221, who, however, in conlusion cautiously (and sensibly) pronounce an ignoramus and admit the possibility that there actually were drawings in Holobolus’ edition. 50 Kwapisz 2013a, 34–37. 51 Cf. Kwapisz 2013a, 35 and 107–108.

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MS of the Palatine Anthology.52 Clearly, images mattered more than text to most Byzantine scribes. This is not to say that they in each case disregard the value of the technopaegnia as a specimen of ancient more strictly poetic refinement. We saw how much Constantine the Rhodian and Holobolus cared for this aspect. Another telling example is Laurentianus 32.52, which contains the text of Simias’ Wings (which probably dates from the second decade of the fourteenth century).53 Not only is the text inscribed on a highly refined drawing of Eros, but also this is followed by some preparatory sketches for the drawing.54 This underscores the importance of the poem’s visuality for the scribe(s) (and the artist responsible for the drawings). Yet the poem’s philology is hardly neglected. The text of the poem is accompanied by a commentary, which not only elucidates its content, but also provides a (somewhat confusing) instruction on how to approach the figure poem (it mentions the ‘antithetical’ arrangement of the Axe and the Egg, which is absent from the Wings) and discusses the metre.55 Equally instructive is the company in which Simias’ Wings finds itself in the Laurentianus.56 Predictably, the poem is preceded by Theocritus’ Idylls; this is in accord with the testimony of other MSS preserving the technopaegnia and with the fact that the collection of the figure poems was probably appended to the bucolic collection as early as Antiquity.57 More interestingly, however, the Wings and the accompaying sketches are followed by the closing part of Lycophron’s Alexandra (lines 1410–1474), with scholia. The Alexandra is in many respects another product of the sort of intellectualism I am concerned with in this book, although in this case extended to a size which makes it more easily appreciated as ‘proper poetry’.58 Its riddling diction finds the closest parallels in two technopaegnia, the Syrinx and Dosiadas’ Altar.59  52 I provide an overview of these pictorial manipulations in Kwapisz 2013a, 33–38 and 50–56; Strodel 2002 supplies a more detailed (and illustrated) account (Ernst 1991, 54–94 and 738–765 is also useful). An illuminating discussion of the illustrations accompanying the poems and their sources is offered by Bernabò/Magnelli 2011. 53 Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 213. 54 See Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, with Figs. 1 and 2. 55 The text of the scholia is usefully supplied, with an Italian translation, in Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 205–206. 56 The description of the Laurentianus’s content is provided by Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 190– 202. The MS consists of three independent parts, but the texts I discuss below as accompanying the Wings are all found in the same libellus. 57 See Kwapisz 2013a, 47–49. 58 A number of recent studies are testimonies to such appreciation; see in particular Cusset/Prioux 2009 and McNelis/Sens 2016. 59 See Kwapisz 2013a, 23–29.

130  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium Lycophron was certainly much read in Byzantium,60 although his obscure style may occasionally have been criticized, as in the following anonymous angry iambic verses (App. Anth. 5.50 Cougny):61 Λόγους ἀτερπεῖς πολλὰ μοχθήσας γράφεις, ἀνιστορήτως βάρβαρα πλέξας ἔπη, γωλειὰ, γρῶνας, οὖσα, καὶ τυκίσματα, σὺν ὀρθάγῃ τε, κρίμνα καὶ λυκοψία, μόνον νέοις ἱδρῶτα, μωρὲ Λυκόφρων· οὐδὲν γὰρ ἄλλο, πλὴν κενοὶ ληρῶν λόγοι.

5

Lycophron, you fool, spending much labour at writing unpleasant phrases and ignorantly weaving awkward words, gôleia, grônas, ousa and tykismata together with orthagê, krimna and lykopsia – nothing but sweat for the young students and vain, stupid sentences.

Incidentally, this document of the school use of the Alexandra may be seen to confirm my conjecture that Holobolus’ edition of the technopaegnia was also primarily intended for advanced school education. Yet the elaborate drawing of Eros in the Laurentianus was certainly made with other, more sophisticated recipients in mind. Nevertheless, the fact that Simias’ Wings and a passage of Lycophron are found next to each other in this MS allows us to see that they were regarded as related by the Byzantine erudition, surely as two examples of the highest poetic refinement. There are, in effect, two Byzantines modes of reading the technopaegnia, which are not mutually exclusive, but whose presences are variously manifested in various groups of readers – a scholarly, or intellectual, approach, which puts emphasis on these poems as a source of refined ancient erudition, and a more popular approach which tends to focus on their visuality. The emergence of illustrated collections of the technopaegnia, probably as a result of the increased interest in these poems sparked by Holobolus’ edition (unless it was Holobolus’ edition that contained drawings),62 marks a more dramatic shift in their Byzantine reception towards the focus on their visuality. Whereas the ancient reception of the technopaegnia is defined above all by their re-readings and new contributions to the genre by the parade of poets, from Simias to Laevius on the one hand, and on the other the poet of the Syrinx, Dosiadas, Vestinus, and finally Optatian Porfyry, the Byzantine tradition yields no new poems of this sort. What defines  60 See the abundant material collected in De Stefani/Magnelli 2009. 61 This is adduced and discussed by De Stefani/Magnelli 2009, 615–616, whose translation I quote. 62 Cf. Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 210.

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the reception of the ancient collection in this epoch is on the one hand a philological and exegetical impulse, which led to the emergence of new compilations and commentaries, and on the other – even more importantly, and certainly more manifestly – numerous pictorial manipulations. These are hardly trivial, as what they bespeak is an altogether non-philological way of experiencing visual poetry, with the emphasis switched from (traditionally conceived) poeticness to visuality. In such an approach, the copying of a figure poem begins with a skilled artist drawing an elaborate picture, which can even be preceded by preparatory sketches; only subsequently a scribe fills the contours with words, as was the case with the Wings in Laurentianus 32.5263 (compare the disastrous drawings of Eros and an altar in Ambrosianus B 99, which lack the textual filling).64 In such an approach, a text may even be copied with the utter neglect for its nonsense, as was frequently the case with the Egg. This is because in such an approach a textual fabric may primarily become a pictorial element of a more complex artistic design. It is significant, I argue, that we have no clear indications that the Greek figure poems were aproached in this way in Antiquity, whereas abundant evidence points to the emergence, and even supremacy, of such an approach in Byzantium, particularly since the beginning of the Palaeologan era. In response to reading one of my earlier discussions on the technnopaegnia, Lucia Floridi asked me, in an email exchange, an extremely stimulating question: it is true, she admitted, that these poems were probably in the first place composed by philologists for other philologists, but is it not a part of their appeal that their visible form may at the same time have impressed and pleased non-erudite, and even illiterate, ancient audiences? This is a crucial question, and I would like to attempt to put into words my answer to it now. It should be clear by now that I am prepared to admit that we should not ignore the possibility of even a quite direct influence of the Greek technopaegnia on such phenomena as the altar-grid on one of the Tabulae Iliacae or Sepumius’ Pompeian snake-poem, which I mentioned earlier in this chapter. In these phenomena, visuality takes precedence, as I argued, over their textual content, even if the latter remains in both cases their crucial component. In effect, it is not even necessary to understand the verbal content to realize that these textual-pictorial devices do interesting things with words. This path of reducing the importance of the verbal component ultimately leads to the extreme reductionism of modern pattern poetry, as in Cesárea Tinajero’s three-line poem

 63 See Bernabò/Magnelli 2011, 211 and Kwapisz 2013a, 53. 64 Images provided by Strodel 2002, Figs. 7 and 34.

132  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium without words I mentioned at the beginning of this essay (‘line’ in this case literally refers to a line of drawing, not a line of poetry, although this picture-haiku rather interestingly plays on the double sense of the word). Yet even if such ancient phenomena were directly or non-directly inspired by the technopaegnia, this does not make them the technopaegnia of the same sort. This is because in how the technopaegnia balance visuality and philology it is precisely the primacy of the latter over the former that is their essential defining feature. Why should we believe that this is correct thinking? Because the technopaegnia originally emerged as only one of many emanations, perhaps even a marginal one, of a broader model of intellectualism invented by Simias – a model that can be defined (as I try to show in this book) as a nexus of poetic prowess, scholarly mentality and a liking for experiment, which some may prefer to call extravagance. And also because all the ancient technopaegnia that were composed after Simias, including Laevius’ Phoenix and Optatian’s pattern poems, emerged from, and tried to subscribe to, the same, or a very similar, intellectual model, and analogously balance the two components – visual and philological. In other words, inherent in this genre, as it functioned in Antiquity, is a sort of intellectual elitism; the genre is defined not only by its intrinsic characteristics, but also by how it is experienced by readers. And the technopaegnia retain their generic identity as long as the reader is challenged by the riddle of their intermediality, the proper appreciation of which requires not just a sensitivity to the technopaegnion as a textual art form, but above all an advanced philological competence. It is true that the reader may choose to altogether ignore this aspect and focus solely on their visuality; from the start they undoubtedly include such dormant potential. Yet when he or she does so, the technopaegnia lose an essential element of their generic character, and in the end become, I think, something quite else. This is, I submit, the essence of a transformation this tradition undergoes in Byzantium. It is precisely in this epoch that the figure poems cease to be experienced as primarily philological phenomena, while Byzantine readers find a new way, or new ways, of appreciating their appeal as mainly pictorial forms composed of a textual fabric. It is as a result of this process that the genre of the carmen figuratum as we know it comes to being. There would be no Apollinaire and no Calligrammes without this generic switch redefining the ancient form; it is the pictorial manipulations of the Byzantine MSS, and the subsequent resettlement of the tradition they represent in the West owing to Byzantine refugees, that shape modern imagination. It is surely no accident that Renaissance, and later, printed editions of the technopaegnia reproduce the patterns found in most Byzantine MSS (see the Appendix).

Reading and viewing figure poems in Byzantium  133

We should not assume, of course, that the Byzantine redefinition of the genre makes it in some way damaged or spoilt. It only becomes different, and the important thing is to take the difference into account and distinguish between various traditions of reading the technopaegnia: between how differently single poems functioned and made use of their intermediality as early as Antiquity, and between how differently the whole collection was approached in Antiquity and in Byzantium. There is nothing crude or unsophisticated about the refined drawings that accompany the text of the figure poems, and arguably become their essential part, in a number of Byzantine MSS, or about other pictorial manipulations, which impregnate the poems with a seed of Byzantine imagination. As a result of these, a new competence is required to properly appreciate the poems; a sort of competence in decoding the semiology of pictorial forms that one can only acquire by being constantly subjected to experiencing Byzantine art.65 Certainly, there is nothing crude about the treatment the technopaegnia receive from Holobolus, who differs from numerous other Byzantine recipients of the tradition in that despite his highest awareness of the potential of their visuality he showed no small interest in them as capsules containing a precious load of ancient poetic erudition. This brings as to a crucial paradox of the Byzantine reception of the intellectual model invented by Simias. Perhaps non-preservation should be a key word in an attempt of characterizing it. The scarcity of the extant fragments of Simias – for instance, of his collection of polymetra we have, besides the three technopaegnia, only several incipits preserved in Hephaestion – may be seen as a symbol of the decay of the model his poetry embodied (cf. the Introduction). For an analogy from the Latin tradition, we turn to the fate of Laevius, who, although probably still read by Ausonius (again, see the Introduction), was almost completely disregarded by later generations. Optatian had more luck, as his elaborate pattern poems were more in the spirit of mediaeval cultural sensitivity, both Western and Byzantine (and had more authority as gifts for the emperor, the topic I discuss in Chapter 3), and they continued to be not only copied and preserved, but also imitated in both traditions. One might venture the guess that in view of their striking visuality coupled with a poetically simpler form (at least from the metrical viewpoint) their appeal is more immediate than in the case of the Greek technopaegnia; it may be significant that the attractively regular visible form of the grid-poems bears, at first glance, more resemblance to the letter grids of the Tabulae Iliacae than to the Greek pattern poems. Be that as it may, most of Simias’  65 Bernabò/Magnelli 2011 offer a magisterial discussion of Byzantine art’s influence on the pictorial elements of the text of the technopaegnia in the Byzantine MSS.

134  The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium poetic production was probably unknown to the Byzantine scholars, or perhaps ignored by them. That is, with the exception of his technopaegnia. The paradox is in how the eccentric intellectualism of Simias’ poetic output was almost completely obliterated in Byzantium with much care simultaneously spent on the study of his technopaegnia, which in many respects embody this intellectualism. To be sure, we ought not to overstate the Byzantine concern with the Greek figure poems; most readers regarded them as curious yet appealing relics of Greek Antiquity, which Byzantine culture could have reclaimed as its own characteristic invention, whereas the drive to explore their more essential philological features characterized only a limited group of highly sophisticated individuals, such as Constantine the Rhodian, Manuel Holobolus or the scribe of Laurentianus 32.52, who saw Simias’ connection with Lycophron. Nonetheless, even the activity of this small circle of scholars was sufficient to ensure the preservation of the paradigm of Simias throughout the Byzantine era. No doubt the visuality of the Greek figure poems, which had, as we saw, almost as much appeal to those scholars as to the rest of Byzantine readers, played a significant role in their becoming a vehicle of transmission of the broader intellectual model they represent. Despite transforming into what is essentially a new genre, to whose defining a new set of rules has to be invented and which is much affected by the creative manipulations of those who contributed to their preservation, the Greek figure poems continued to propagate the model of elitist intellectualism and refined playfulness, in accord with their original function within the broader context of Hellenistic (and later) poetic experimentalism. Comprehending the paradox of the preservation of the technopaegnion in Byzantium and its simultaneous modification casts light at once on what the genre of pattern poetry as we experience it is and on the broader issue of the continuity between Simias, his ancient followers, and their readers in Byzantium and in later centuries.

Appendix: A New Alexandria and its Little Museum In the wake of the efflorescence,* or better, explosion, of print culture in postmediaeval Europe, there emerged an almost obsessive vogue for converting ancient figure poems from handwritten text-pictures as found in mediaeval MSS to stunning demonstrations of the almost unlimited possibilities offered by the new medium.1 This trend resulted in broad dissemination of the intellectual model of which the technopaegnia were emblematic and which is the main concern of this book; the category of visual poetry, or poesis artificiosa, as it was referred to in seventeenth-century theoretical treatises (other labels were also in use, such as ludus poeticus),2 was broadened to include, besides proper pattern poems, various sorts of riddling poetry and linguistic games such as acrostichs, palindromes, anagrams, chronograms, hieroglyphic poems, and even riddles (all of these obviously composed in Latin). What we tend to dismiss as silly frivolities played a major role in Jesuit education towards the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ancient specimens of what was recognized as ludus poeticus, in particular pattern poems and also epigrams, were carefully studied in Jesuit colleges throughout Europe, obviously as vehicles of the ultimate mastery of poetic techniques by the ancients, while practitioners of the Playful Muse tested their, and their readers’, wit and ingenuity by composing numerous poetic feats of this sort. These were published in fastidiously designed collections, in which the elegance of typography was as important as the studied elaboration of the poetic content.3

 * This Appendix partly adapts Kwapisz 2015; see the Acknowledgements. 1 Perceptive remarks on this phenomenon are offered by Fowler 1995, 44–45. 2 See Michałowska 1974, 139–141. As she notes, poesis artificiosa was usually viewed as a selfcontained genre, but at times regarded as a subcategory of poesis epigrammatica. 3 Two recent books that trace the steps of the Playful Muse in Antiquity (and to some extent later) are Luz 2010 and Kwapisz/Petrain/Szymański 2013. In the latter volume, see esp. Milewska-Waźbińska 2013, an essay that offers a useful brief introduction to the study of poesis artificiosa in post-mediaeval Europe (though particularly in Poland). For a brief introduction to Neo-Latin visual poetry (which, however, does not acknowledge the relevance of the epigram, riddles and some other sorts of minor virtuoso forms), see IJsewijn/Sacré 1998, 129–131. Higgins 1987 and Ernst 1991 and 2012 are also concerned with more narrowly conceived pattern poetry, but helpfully bridge Antiquity and later epochs. Rypson 2002 results from a painstaking survey of Polish books containing specimens of such poetry published between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas Plotke 2009 approaches seventeenth-century visual poetry from a variety of (post)modern perspectives; see now also the collection of essays on post-Renaissance poesis artificiosa in Borysowska/Milewska-Waźbińska 2013 and for an exemplary treatment of a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-006

136  Appendix Several such collections and a number of aspects of this ludic turn in the nascent age of print might receive closer attention in this book. For instance, one might wish to learn more about the context of Byzantine refugees’ transplanting the Greek technopaegnia of Simias and his followers to the West, which resulted in their inclusion in 1516 editions of Theocritus published independently by Filippo Giunta in Florence and Zacharias Callierges in Rome.4 A more thorough survey of other early editions of the technopaegnia and the contemporary flourishing scholarship on these poems, by such giants of learning as Salmasius and Vossius, is another desideratum.5 One important individual of the time to have already received satisfactory treatment is the English Jesuit Richard Willes (or Willis, or Wills), who published his collection of poesis artificiosa, with an accompanying theoretical treatise and commentary, in 1573; this became, as we will see, a model for many later compilations of this sort.6 This Appendix takes us, however, to a different, more peripheral region (that is, assuming that the West is actually more central than Central Europe). A fascinating, albeit now almost completely forgotten, chapter in the history of the reign of the Playful Muse in Europe was written by vigorous and enthusiastic adepts of her art in the Jesuit college in Moravian Olomouc, during a brief period of several years at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since its establishment in 1566 and until the disastrous occupation by Swedish forces during the Thirty Years’ War and subsequent decline, the Olomouc college was a vibrant, multicultural centre of Central European education, popular among students from many countries, who must have considered it an alternative to Cracow, Prague or even Vienna, a not distant scholarly centre in whose sphere of influence Olomouc remained. In the present discussion, my concern is with shedding light on the force of its cultural impact as evidenced by numerous highly refined, both from the typographic and poetic perspective, collections of poesis artificiosa published in Olomouc, and by the fact that the college’s alumni were the first to publish collections of such poetry in Poland. These were students of a German professor of poetry, who profoundly impressed them despite his residence at  Neo-Latin playful poetic text, Fontaine 2015. Two wonderfully entertaining collections of linguistic games in Latin are Weis 1951 and Tuwim 1950 (in the latter Latin is not the main concern). The present book might well include a chapter on Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), a major poet of the Polish language, who was also a devoted collector of literary curiosities. 4 See my very preliminary remarks in Kwapisz 2013a, 31–32; on Callierges, see Geanakoplos 1962, 201–222 (and p. 156 on Giunta). 5 Galán-Vioque 2012 may serve as a model for such future studies. 6 See Ernst 2000 and 2012, 405–470; an edition of Willes’ treatise De arte poetica, with an English translation and an instructive introductory essay, is provided by Fowler 1958.

A New Alexandria and its Little Museum  137

Olomouc being very short and limited to two years only, namely 1597 and 1598. In the first section of this Appendix, I will focus on this distinguished poet and educator of his time, who despite his prominent role has been but completely erased from European cultural history. The subsequent part approaches a stunningly precious document of his activity, which will first appear in the first section. In sum, this will not only allow us to retrieve the obscure figure of an emblematically European teacher of playful poetry from oblivion, but above all will provide a tantalizing glimpse into the academic life of a major Central European scholarly centre and a vivid illustration of its cultural productivity. We will also see how much this cultural phenomenon owes to the classical model of learned and playful Alexandrianism, in whose formation Simias played no small role. For all its colourfulness and cultural importance, this is admittedly a marginal chapter in Europe’s literary history; a story that played out at the peripheries of its main trends, at least as we perceive these today. This is hardly a reason, however, why the significance of what was going on at Olomouc at that period ought to be downplayed. For one thing, the model of the poetic training that was keenly embraced by the Olomouc educators and their pupils, with a particular prominence afforded to technopaegnic experiments, ancient and modern, is by no means an isolated phenomenon in contemporary Europe. On the contrary, it is representative of broader processes that were shaping the cultural landscape throughout Europe,7 and therefore by focusing on this striking case study one may get a general idea about the overarching European tendency without attempting the impossible task of compiling a comprehensive synthesis on this tendency’s ramifications in various regions. As a matter of fact, the German-born professor with whom this Appendix is primarily concerned, who acquired and refined most of his views on poetry in Habsburg Vienna and whose teaching in Moravian Olomouc resulted in new poetry and feats of typography having been introduced to the Poles, may legitimately be viewed as a European cultural hero and a symbol of the wide-ranging unifying force of the heritage of Mediterranean culture. On the other hand, it is only appropriate for a study of poetic marginality to end with remarks on the reception of the allegedly marginal archetype in Central Europe’s geographical fringes. It is a telling testimony to the vitality of the paradigm invented by Simias in Hellenistic Greece that it not only managed to survive in a distant land and time, but furthermore gave birth to a spectacular document of book culture that emphatically presented itself as a new incarnation of the Museum of Alexandria. Although the Alexandrianism of Olomouc is only one piece  7 See the preliminary observations offered by Milewska-Waźbińska 2013.

138  Appendix in the bigger jigsaw puzzle of contemporary European culture, to my knowledge there is nothing quite like the new, portable version of the Museum we will have a look at in the concluding part of this Appendix. This is where and when the story that occupies us throughout this book may appropriately find an end. A narrower concern of this discussion, however, in comparison with what forms the main body of the present book, has resulted in its being appended to the preceding chapters as a somewhat idiosyncratic postscript.

Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior The beginnings of the history of poetic eccentricity in Poland date to 1598; a preliminary account of this wonderful year is given by Rypson in his seminal book on the early history of Polish visual poetry.8 It is in this year that two apostles of the Playful Muse, Wawrzyniec Susliga and Mikołaj Lubomirski,9 published several books which vividly illustrated their intellectual tastes. Among these books, one stands out as a particularly rich and innovative collection of poetic curiosities, which with remarkable self-awareness presents itself as the first such anthology in Poland.10 This can be deduced from the opening epigram, which is captioned Collector lectori poetico s(alutem) and signed by Mikołaj Lubomirski himself:  8 Rypson 2002, 65–70. To be sure, ludus poeticus was known to Polish poets before this date – e.g. Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584) composed acrostich poems, uersus cancrini and riddles (griphi); see Pelc 2001, 378–379 (on riddles and cancrini) and 423–426 (on acrostichs). Yet the emergence of poetic compilations entirely focused on poesis artificiosa in 1598 may be seen to mark the beginning of a new epoch in this poetry’s appreciation. 9 Both were shaped by Jesuit education. Rypson 2002, 65–70, where Mikołaj Lubomirski is described as ‘a poet known in his time and undoubtedly not lacking a certain talent’, remains the most extensive account of his uita (esp. n. 25 on p. 68); see also Skręt 1966 and Piersiak 1983, 95– 121. Lubomirski composed poetry in both Latin and Polish; he later became a cleric in Cracow and died in 1617. Wawrzyniec Susliga (or Susłyga, c. 1580–1641) studied astronomy in Graz, besides composing poetry wrote on the chronology of, inter alia, Christ’s life, and knew Johannes Kepler; see Łopaciński 1904, 155–157. 10 One is reminded of the Jesuit Richard Willes’ slightly earlier book containing poetic artificia (see n. 6 above), published in 1573 in London under the title Poematum liber, which, as is noted by Fowler 1958, 10, ‘had … an unusually serious intention, and something of the tone of a manifesto’. The connection between Lubomirski and Willes was noticed by Rypson 2002, 70–72. Moreover, MS BJ 5575 (which I extensively discuss below) provides evidence that Lubomirski indeed knew Willes’ book. On fol. 571, Lubomirski adduces an example of a particularly elaborate carmen monosyllabicum (in which each verse ends with a monosyllable, as in Ausonius’ Technopaegnion, yet in addition these monosyllables create a new text), which is, as a matter of fact,

Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior  139

Qui studet Aonii fontem contingere montis Hippocrenaeis uultque salire iugis, euoluat ueteres iterumque iterumque poetas, nec tamen omnino temnat ubique nouos. ecce nouo Musae dederunt haec carmina uati staminaque artifici mira tulere manu. haec lege, quisquis ades, si mens te ducit ad altos Parnassi colles Castaliumque nemus; felici tales uena complectere cantus felicique artes has imitare stylo.

5

10

Much like the programmatic passage in one of Manuel Holobolus’ orations I discussed in Chapter 4, this epigram displays tantalizing points of contact with Simias’ Egg by emphasizing the novelty of the collection it precedes and employing the metaphor of weaving (stamina, line 6).11 The emphasis being put on the novelty of poetic experimentalism may at this point appear, paradoxically, a somewhat worn convention,12 yet one ought not to downplay the significance of Lubomirski’s manifesto. On the contrary, we do know that the collection he presents to us is indeed the first of its sort in Poland; it is true, therefore, that it is a nouus uates who speaks to us through the poems compiled by Lubomirski. The pamphlet which contains these poems – or better, artificia, since this is how the captions refer to them – was published by Jan Januszowski’s Lazarus Press in Cracow.13 There are thirty-four such artificia collected in this booklet, each exemplifying a different sort of wordplay. The full title is Technopaegnion sacropoeticum, uenerabili Corporis Christi festo pietatis ergo consecratum, authore Iano Tyrigeta Germano, a Nicolao uero Lubomirski collectum et in gratiam poeticae iuuentutis in lucem editum.14 It is evident from this that Lubomirski’s role was

 the quotation of Willes’ Poem 66, and introduced as such: Est inuenta [sc. the type of monosyllabicum artificium under discussion] a quodam poeta Anglo, Villaeo. 11 As was the case of Holobolus, however, Lubomirski did not know a version of the Egg’s text in which the word ἄτριον, ‘weft’, occurred, as it was missing from such popular contemporary editions based on the bucolic MSS (see Chapter 4) as Stephanus’ 1579 edition of Theocritus. That we find similar formulations of similar ideas in Simias, Holobolus and Lubomirski is, nevertheless, striking. 12 Cf. a list of similar declarations of poetic novelty in ancient poetry in Kwapisz 2013a, 13–14. 13 The Jagiellonian Library in Cracow and the Library of the Catholic University in Lublin each have one copy; see Rypson 2002, 193. The latter copy is available online in the Digital Library of the Catholic University of Lublin. 14 The title re-invents the word technopaegnion, which was coined by Ausonius as the title for a series of poems whose every line ended with a monosyllable. The term is now used on the one

140  Appendix merely of a compiler, whereas the author of the artificia was a certain John of Thuringia. Who was he? Mikołaj Lubomirski owed his formation as a poet and intellectual to the Jesuit college in Olomouc, where he studied.15 We do not find his name in the college’s archival registers (was he too old to properly enroll as a student?),16 yet his attending Olomouc lectures and taking part in the college’s activity is clearly enough attested by a fascinating album he assembled, partially preserved in the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow (MS BJ 5575), to which Lubomirski himself refers as Musaeolum, ‘a little Museum’ (see further the subsequent section of this Appendix). The extant fragments contain a collection of printed and handwritten poetry, which for the most part takes origin in the academic milieu of Olomouc, accompanied by a sort of lexicon of literary terminology, whose main purpose is, as it seems, indexing the album’s contents and at the same time listing various genres of poesis artificiosa (fols. 560–576v; the rhopalic note at the beginning reads, Omnia legimus, quaedam intelleximus, pauca imitati sumus). The numbers which accompany the alphabetically listed terms refer to earlier pages in the same album, surely where illustrations of the discussed phenomena were to be found; unfortunately, most of the pages listed by the index are missing, but as we will see in the subsequent part of this discussion, a detective investigation will allow us to reconstruct most of the album’s contents.17 This index is followed by

 hand for all sorts of linguistic games and on the other specifically for figure poems, yet its appearance in 1598 is remarkably early; see my discussion of its history in Kwapisz 2013a, 9–11. I would like to supplement that discussion and at the same time to provide the context for the appearance of the word technopaegnion at the end of the sixteenth century by observing that Jakob Henrichmann used the term technopegnia in his 1506 Grammaticae institutiones – which was ‘die erste in Deutschland allgemein verbreitete lateinische Grammatik’ according to Ristow 2001, 711 – when speaking de quibusdam ingeniosis carminum generibus, which looked back, in turn, to the grammarian Paulus Pompilius’ 1488 De pedibus et eorum structura, where tegnopegniorum genera sex were discussed. 15 Cf. Rypson 2002, 67. On the Polish poets of the Olomouc circle, see also Milewska-Waźbińska 2013, 384–386, and on the Poles in Olomouc, Grobelný 1954. 16 An edition of the register in Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016; the relevant lists from 1596–1598, which record many names of Lubomirski’s friends that also appear in BJ 5575, are on pp. 86–91, 193– 194 and 232. Another indication of Lubomirski’s presence in Olomouc is the fact that his name appears, among names of other students at Olomouc, in the Olomouc 1597 print Applausus hieroglyphici sedecim (see below). 17 The importance of this MS was recognized by scholars interested in prominent figures of Polish culture, such as Joachim Bielski, Jan Kochanowski and Samuel Kochanowski (on the latter see below); see Bieńkowski 1962, 52, Pelc 1965, 43, Zathey 1977, Łodyńska-Kosińska 1986.

Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior  141

a copy of three letters to Lubomirski by a Joannes Clingerius, with which the album ends (fols. 577–578v). Only the last letter is signed straightforwardly, Johannes Clingerius; the two others bear a cryptic signature, Ne Luscinia Segnior (sc. ne luscinia segnior sit – an amusing programmatic statement) – which is an anagram of Ioannes Clingerius. The letters are dated May 31, June 11, and October 10, from Olomouc; the year must be 1598 (see below). They imply that Lubomirski was then in Cracow. These letters are prefaced by Lubomirski’s note, which has a form of his own letter to Clingerius and is captioned Ad Clingerium; this caption and Clingerius’ anagrammatic signatures caused some confusion about who wrote to whom. Rypson thought that Clingerius was Lubomirski’s friend in Olomouc and his aemulus,18 but he was evidently more than that – he was Lubomirski’s teacher, one to look up to, and Lubomirski’s album is, on the whole, a testimony to his great reverence and fascination for Clingerius.19 This name recurs many times throughout the album; in particular, he is mentioned in the lexicon of literary terminology virtually whenever some term receives a longer discussion. As a matter of fact, these discussions must derive from Clingerius’ lectures in Olomouc; e.g., the short treatise on anagram begins with Lubomirski’s announcement (on the first page of the lexicon; fol. 560), De anagrammatismo haec mihi dicta a Clingerio memini. Elsewhere we read (fol. 563v s.v. Ecloga hortensis; the reference is to the extant fol. 538, where we find a print entitled Ecloga hortensis hymenaeus, author and publisher unknown – but see below), Ad eclogas scribendas sic me instruit Clingerius. in bucolico, inquit, poemate… These notes, which copiously refer to the academic life of Olomouc (for instance, on fol. 570 Lubomirski refers to a successful public performance of the poem Discordia siue lis, preserved in the

 18 Rypson 2002, 66. That Technopaegnion had been authored by Klinger was realized as early as the nineteenth century by the Cracow polymath Żegota Pauli, who for some time owned Lubomirski’s album (see below); this is evident from Pauli’s notes on Lubomirski to be found in his Nachlass; BJ 5359, 7.123. 19 Another disciple of Clingerius in Olomouc was a poet and self-taught engraver Samuel Kochanowski, whose interest in art was encouraged by Clingerius. Zathey 1977 points out that one of the letter copied at the end of BJ 5575 evidences Clingerius’ practising the art of engraving (fol. 578; N.B. contrary to what Zathey thought, it is Clingerius who writes to Lubomirski, not the other way round: mitto etiam pro sculptura ferreum instrumentum, uel pennam chalybeam, pro tua arte). On Samuel Kochanowski and his relationship with Clingerius, see Łodyńska-Kosińska 1986, with further references. I intend to devote a separate discussion to Samuel Kochanowski’s life and work.

142  Appendix preceding part of the album on fols. 557–559v, by his friend Samuel Kochanowski), afford us a glimpse of the world of oral academic discourse in a Jesuit college that is normally hidden from us. Rypson ingeniously suggested that the John of Thuringia who authored Technopaegnion sacropoeticum and Joannes Clingerius – or Johann Klinger, as Rypson conjectured – were the same person. He goes on to guess that Klinger may have died during the plague which hit Olomouc in 1598, causing the death of many and the scattering of others throughout Europe.20 This is, on the whole, a fine piece of detective work. I am now able to confirm that there was a Thuringian Johann Klinger, who was a professor at Olomouc. That he was Lubomirski’s teacher and the author of Technopaegnion sacropoeticum is, as we will see, beyond any doubt. As a matter of fact, Klinger’s letter dated May 31, preserved in BJ 5575, contains a query about a book of his he hoped would go to press in Cracow. This must be a glimpse of 1598, for the Technopaegnion Klinger speaks of must be the same book that was published in 1598, with which the present discussion is concerned, and which introduces itself as ‘consecrated on the Corpus Christi feast day’ – in 1598, the Corpus Christi feast was celebrated on May 21. It can be inferred from what follows that Klinger initially turned to Samuel Kochanowski, his pupil and Lubomirski’s fellow student,21 asking him to see Technopaegnion to press (fol. 577v; note the amusing mention of Lubomirski’s habit of writing letters in verse): at quid fiet cum Thechnopaegnio Cochanouiano? doleo me illi rem commisisse; attamen non expectabit noua, nisi steterit promissis. quid mihi consilii des, scribe, at potius solute; non enim omnis materia carminibus apta, ut uides in istis. dolerem, quod perire deberent.

Lubomirski must have taken over and in the letter from October 10 Klinger alludes, as it seems, to the completion of the publication process (fol. 578): litteras tuas accepi heri, e quibus tandem aliquando de re diu cupita certior sum factus. nihil itaque meo nomine praelo Cracouiensi comittendum esse censeo, cum sit tam carus typographus. … des, rogo, Technopaegnion Martino cum reliquis carminibus, in quibus nomen eius subscriptum est.

It is evident that Klinger cared very much for this child of his.

 20 Rypson 2002, 66. 21 See n. 19 above.

Deciphering Ne Luscinia Segnior  143

The meticulous records kept by the Jesuits enable us to reconstruct Klinger’s uita. This task has been already accomplished by Lukács, an indefatigable explorer of the Jesuit archives. In the first volume of the Catalogi personarum et officiorum prouinciae Austriae S.I. which he compiled we find a biographical note on Klinger, which at once summarizes his life and by providing references to the material collected in the same and the following volume of Catalogi makes it easy to furnish further details.22 Johann Klinger was born in Greussen, a small town in Thuringia, 30 km north of Erfurt (sumus nati propinqui Hercyniae Syluae Thuringi, he says in one of his letters; BJ 5575, fol. 577), probably in 1557, between August and October.23 He entered the Jesuit novitiate in September 1578 in Vienna and took his simple vows on June 29, 1580 in Graz, where he studied until he began to teach in 1584. 1587 finds him in Vienna, and since 1589 he studied theology in Prague. He returned to Graz to teach as Professor Humanitatis in 1592, but the next year he came to Vienna, again, so as to stay and teach there until 1596. Klinger came to Olomouc in 1597, by then undoubtedly an experienced teacher and a worldly figure. His colourful stay in Olomouc, which exerted a lasting, albeit discreet, influence on Polish culture, was short and limited to two years, 1597 and 1598, when he was Professor Humanitatis (or Poeseos). This was sufficient to impress profoundly not only Mikołaj Lubomirski, but also the already mentioned Samuel Kochanowski, who dedicated to him a charmingly dilletantish Christmas engraving, fortunately preserved in the Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kórnik (C IV 665).24 In addition, the missing part of Lubomirski’s album mentioned above contained the following dedication to Klinger, poeta clarissimus, whose text we know from a nineteenth-century account:25

 22 Lukács 1978, 707. 23 According to the Jesuit records, he was 27 in October 1584 and 29 in August 1587; Lukács 1978, 408 and 436. 24 For a reproduction, see Grafika i rysunki, Fig. 3, and for a charming description, Żebrawski 1858, 439 and Lesser 1872a, 251 and 1872b, 386. I have discovered another copy of this engraving in the Library of the Catholic in Lublin. This is inserted in the 1598 Olomoucian print Strenae natalitiae (KUL.XVI.635; available online at the Digital Library of the Catholic University of Lublin), between fols. 5 and 6, clearly as an illustration of an Onomatopoeianum poema on 5v. This sheds light on the original context in which the engraving was created; in addition, Mikołaj Lubomirski refers to the story illustrated both by the poem and the engraving in his entry on the former in the index to his album on fol. 572v. 25 Lesser 1872a.

144  Appendix Reuerendo patri Joanni Clingerio a Societate Jesu sacerdoti poetae clarissimo, nec non ejusdem professori in alma academia Olomuniensi die natali eius 1597 a Michaele Wude Grotcouiensi [Grotoniensi Lesser] Sileso.26

Yet another expression of youthful admiration for Klinger can be found in a striking poem copied by Lubomirski to his album (fols. 54v–56v) but composed by his friend Petrus Szomovius, otherwise unknown (that this acquaintance was from Cracow rather than Olomouc is to be inferred from references to Cracow in Szomovius’ poems). The elaborate, if somewhat tedious, polymetric poem, titled Musaeum, deals precisely with the album and praises its concept (I will briefly return to it in the closing part of this Appendix). It includes a longer passage, in phalaeceans, dedicated to Klinger, which begins as follow (fol. 56): hic et Clingerii iocosa uatis est luscinia, nocte quae dieque aures Nicolai mei sodalis mulcet …

Vates Clingerius left Olomouc at the end of 1598, as is implied by the farewell letter, already cited, he wrote to Lubomirski on October 10: immo discessus meus, quem in dies expectare soleo, prohibet plura carmina mittere; sum enim praeter opinionem e liberalitate superiorum tandem aliquando e pulueribus scholasticis liberatus, in quibus 14 annis continuis sudaui. utetur mea opera superior in alio forsan collegio, in quo uero, nescio, et in alio ministerio. … de meo discessu scribet tibi Zaidlicius sine dubio.27 … uale, mi Nicolae. sed ego nihilominus non ualedicam sacrae poesi, licet non amplius professurus forsan; solent enim rude donari illi, qui diu docuerunt.

Such was his good-bye at once to Lubomirski, to Olomouc, to teaching, and to composing poetry. To all intents and purposes, since his departure from Olomouc Klinger was dead to the world, just as Rypson suspected. The next ministerium awaited Klinger in Brno, and this journey was a spiritual one, as it led him to pronounce his last vows (ultima uota) on September 12, 1599. He remained in Brno  26 For the Olomouc student Wude, cf. Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016, 193, No. 5218. 27 We see that (brothers?) Joannes and Samuel Zeydlitius from Cracow were enrolled as students at the Olomouc college in 1598; see Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016, 90, Nos. 930 and 931 (in addition, Hieronymus Zaidlitz of Cracow, surely of the same family, was a student at Olomouc in 1610; see Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016, 108, No. 1711), but one of these may have been in fact Daniel Zajdlicz, who studied in Cracow in 1596 and Olomouc in 1598 and therefore must have been Lubomirski’s friend to whom Klinger refers. He later obtained a doctorate in medicine from Padua University and was a prominent burgher in Cracow. On Daniel Zajdlicz, see below and Bieniarzówna 1969, 184 (‘Indeks nazwisk’ s.v. ‘Zaydlic (Zayglic) Daniel’).

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until 1603, which he left for Chomutov, where he spent four years. He performed various administrative duties both in Brno and in Chomutov, and also in Klagenfurt, where he arrived in 1608. In 1609 he moved for the last time, and his final destination was the monastery in Eberndorf, 30 km east of Klagenfurt. Johann Klinger died in Eberndorf on December 27, 1610. Jesuit annals preserve an account of his death, and even his alleged last words, in which he quoted Hebr. 13.14 non enim habemus hic manentem ciuitatem sed futuram inquiramus – that is, if one finds the flamboyant eloquence of this passage trustworthy:28 cum morbis grauibus et diuturnis conflictandum fuit Clagenfurti nostris nonnullis, adeo ut mutandi aeris causa quattuor omnino coacti fuerint magno nostro incommodo alio transmitti; aliquot etiam conspicui et magnis a Deo naturae donis decorati diem suum obierunt. horum unus fuit pater Ioannes Clingerius, coadiutor formatus spiritualis, qui per longam et aetatem, et laborum seriem ad eum uitae terminum uenit. erat in humanioribus maxime uero poeticis apprime uersatus, in quibus fere aetatem suam consumpsit. moribundo ea fuit uox suprema: ‘eia pater Clingeri, non est hic permanens ciuitas tibi, futuram inquire, age ad illam propera’. eodem, quo natus est die, quem et in uita celebrem habuit, sancti Ioannis Euangelistae societate dignus e uiuis excessit.

The last sentence must not be taken to mean that Klinger died on the same day he had been born; he died on the day St. John the Evangelist had been born, i.e. on St. John the Evangelist’s name day (December 27). Above all, however, this account is important for showing that Klinger’s poetic interests were well known. The precise extent of Klinger’s literary output is difficult to assess because of his not-so-laudable habit, surely dictated by an unparalleled modesty, of not signing whatever he intended to publish. Besides the artificia collected in Technopaegnion, we know that he authored a century of epigrams commemorating the prominent Olomoucian bishop and patron of arts Stanislaus Pavlovský, who died on June 2, 1598.29 This print was published with no reference either to the author or place of publication under the title Centum epigrammata parentalia exequiis … Stanislai Pawlowsky, episcopi Olomucensis etc., scripta. However, Klinger’s authorship is practically guaranteed by the information provided by a handwritten note one finds in a copy of this print in the State Archive in Olomouc.30

 28 Annuae litterae 442–443. 29 On the cultural patronage of Pavlovský, see Jakubec 2004, 17–27. 30 Cf. Enchiridion renatae poesis 386. To my eye, this note, which reads, Authore r(euerendo) p(atre) Joanne Clingerio, Soc. Jesu, poeseos professore, may have been written by Klinger himself (on his handwriting, see n. 35 below).

146  Appendix The Inventory of the Manuscripts of the Jagiellonian Library promises that more of Klinger can be found in the MS BJ 5575.31 According to the list of this album’s contents made by the librarian Władysław Wisłocki (d. 1900),32 fols. 126– 132 contain ‘Homiolalage dialogismica Lutheri et uiatoris’ et alii uersiculi Clingerii, and fols. 560–573 – ‘A te principium, tibi desinet’ et alii tractatus et uersiculi Johannis Clingerii. This may be too optimistic and at the same time does not even begin to describe this album’s importance for understanding Klinger’s role among the poets of the Olomouc circle. Homiolalage… is the title of an elegiac poem beginning a series of four poems (or three poems and an artificium). There is no indication as to their authorship; only the artificium, a sort of cipher poem, is captioned Grammatosyllexis aemula Clingerii mei (fol. 129). I suppose that this note made Wisłocki think of Klinger as the author of this sequence of poems, but what it actually means is that the author is, not Klinger, but Lubomirski; aemula Clingerii mei surely means ‘striving to (out)match my dear Klinger’. It is perhaps significant that there is no reference to these poems in the lexicon at the end of the album, not even either s.v. Grammatosyllexis (fol. 567), where two artificia of this sort are listed (both lost), or s.v. Homiolalage (fol. 569v), where the reference is only to a poem, decribed as lepidissimum (and therefore authored by Klinger?), on the missing fol. 360. Unless Wisłocki was told otherwise by some source unknown to me, it is best to assume, I suggest, that the author of the poetic pieces in this section was Mikołaj Lubomirski. However, Wisłocki was surely right about the Klingerian presence in the latter part of the album. A te principium, tibi desinet is the motto (derived from Verg. Ecl. 8.11) of the already mentioned lexicon, which lists the album’s contents. Lubomirski’s Olomouc lecture notes contain numerous references to Klinger and I have little doubt that among the poems quoted exempli gratia there are Klinger’s verses (cf. e.g. fol. 562 – after a longer discussion of anagram, in which several poems are quoted, we read haec ille [sc. Clingerius]. ego uero etc.). Yet these are apparently intermingled with Lubomirski’s own compositions (e.g. at fol. 563v a poem is introduced by placuit et nobis experiri), so that it will take some effort to sort all this out – this is one of the tasks that await future editors of this material. Moreover, it is clear to me that many of the lexicon entries refer to Klinger’s poems

 31 Inwentarz rękopisów Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej 441–444. 32 BJ 5575 arrived at the Jagiellonian Library among the manuscripts which the polymath Żegota Pauli (d. 1895) bequeathed to his friend and colleague Władysław Wisłocki, who catalogued them and donated to the Jagiellonian Library; see [Wisłocki] 1896, 38. On the other hand, the preface to Inwentarz rękopisów Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej credits Wisłocki with writing most of the manuscript descriptions for that volume.

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that were to be found in the now missing part of the album (e.g. 562 Angelicum nouum et Clingerianum refers to the missing fol. 305). Yet the really exciting news is that the information provided by BJ 5575, both in the lexicon and in Klinger’s letters, may help to identify a number of anonymous poems in the extant Olomouc prints as composed by Klinger. This will require a more careful study than I am capable of offering in this book, but even the few examples given below of the poems we probably ought to identify as Klinger’s in view of what BJ 5575 tells us should suffice to show how outstanding figure he was and to whet appetite for further discoveries that are now within our grasp. One of the most charming poems one can find in the Olomouc prints from the end of the sixteenth century is an epithalamium for the wedding of Lady Typography and Student Polygrammus, published anonymously, sine loco and sine anno, under the title Typographiae academicae epithalamium (this allegory is obviously modelled on Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii).33 A copy of this print is preserved in Lubomirski’s album (fols. 532–537). Furthermore, there is an entry dedicated to this poem, with a proper reference, in Lubomirski’s lexicon s.v. Typographiae epithalamium (fol. 576). This entry consists mostly of a one-page discussion of epithalamium as a genre, at whose beginning the source is duly acknowledged: epithalamium his legibus astringit doctissimus Clingerius. Klinger’s discussion of the genre is followed by a brief paragraph in which Lubomirski focuses specifically on the poem to which this lexicon entry refers: haec [sc. the praecepta described in the preceding paragraph] quam diligentissime obseruauit ipse in gnomis, epithalamiis, hymaeneis, thalassicis etc. ceterum Typographiae epithalamium nemo melius cecinisset. quod legi relegi perquam libentissime, et semper placuit. poesi officium gratulor. hinc sitim leuare est eritque animus.

Who is ipse? Undoubtedly Klinger, whom Lubomirski describes as faithful to his own praecepta. The obvious implication is that Klinger is the author of Typographiae epithalamium. And more than that – he is described as a prolific author, credited with numerous poems. At present I would not venture to say the authorship of how many anonymous Olomouc prints should be ascribed to him, but I would cautiously suggest that a great part of the prints collected by Lubomirski in his album is actually Klingerian. Another source worth exploring is a Sammelband, i.e. composite volume, of Olomoucian prints from the end of the sixteenth century preserved in the Library of the Catholic University of Lublin

 33 For a brief summary, see Dobrzyniecka 1975, 10–11.

148  Appendix (KUL.XVI.611–649, which I further discuss in the second part of this Appendix),34 which includes on the one hand the prints already well familiar to us, i.e. Technopaegnion sacropoeticum, Centum epigrammata parentalia and Typographiae epithalamium, and on the other hand a number of pieces by unidentified authors. We will later see that this collection mirrors, to a significant extent, the original content of Lubomirski’s album.35 Klinger’s three letters copied by Lubomirski shed further light on the extent of his poetic production. New facts emerge from the following passage in the letter written on May 31 (1598). Klinger thanks for the artificia sent to him by Lubomirski and speaks of a return gift: en et ego ibo promissis poeticis; accipe igitur, quod interim in absentia tua absoluta, uidelicet Satyram, Typographiae epithalamium, Nymphas Bethlemidas (pro sequenti anno primum distribuendas, at tibi et hoc anno arridebunt).

This confirms that Typographiae epithalamium was composed by Klinger and adds two further pieces to his record. Satyra is surely the print entitled, Satyra: Nemo satisfacit omnibus, preserved sine loco and sine auctore in BJ 5575 (fols. 516– 519), whereas a copy of Nymphae Bethlemides Christo infantulo … genethlia epyllia modulantes, published anonymously in Olomouc in 1597, can be found among the Lublin prints which I mentioned above (KUL.XVI.632). Both Satyra and Nymphae Bethlemides are indexed in Lubomirski’s lexicon (respectively, fols. 574v and 572v; in the latter case, the reference is to the missing fol. 300). What follows is more problematic and may suggest that not only did Klinger neglect to sign his literary production, but also allowed others to take credit for it:  34 Cf. Rypson 2002, 66. A large part of these prints have been digitalized and is available online at the Digital Library of the Catholic University of Lublin. 35 One potential suspect is the forerunner of Technopaegnion sacropoeticum published in Vienna typis Kolbianis in 1597 under the title Vertumnianum artificium nouum et mirabile, whose copies are preserved both in BJ 5575 (fols. 542–547; this is referred to in the lexicon on fol. 576v s.v. Vertumnianum) and among the Olomouc prints in Lublin (KUL.XVI.633). This booklet presents itself as a New Year gift; the title ends with …quod strenae loco pro felicissimo huius noui anni auspicio donat (‘…which [such and such] offers as a new-year’s gift to provide a most felicitous omen for this new year’), after which space is left on the title page for a giver to fill. The copy in Lubomirski’s album exhibits the dedication, Nicolao Lubomierski Joannes Clingerius (the hand is surely Klinger’s). This does not necessarily mean that Klinger authored Vertumnianum artificium; for one thing, Samuel Kochanowski’s already mentioned engraving, which probably was once a part of Lubomirski’s album, has a similar dedication written by the same (i.e. Klinger’s) hand, Clingerius Lubomiersky, which implies that Klinger’s gifts to Lubomirski were not necessarily self-made. However, the possibility of Klinger’s authorship of Vertamnianum artificium certainly becomes more tantalizing in view of what we have just learned.

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misi nuper Nymphas harmonicas per Zaidlicium; utrum acceperis, ignoro. addidi et exemplaria, quae primum distribuentur in promotione baccalaureorum 4. Junii, scilicet Lauream, Hortum parthenium, Hercynia. ultima haec feci meo populari, sumus nati propinqui Hercyniae Sylvae Thuringi; hinc placuit sumere inscriptionem.

Nymphae harmonicae, Laurea (partheniae sodalitatis academicae), Hortus parthenius and Hercynia idyllia were all published in Olomouc in 1598 and there is a copy of each of these prints in Lublin (respectively, KUL.XVI.627, 622, 623, and 621). However, what the title pages tell us is that neither of these works was composed by Klinger. Nymphae and Laurea are said to result from Olomoucian team work, Hortus is per Joannem Styrnsky, cathedralis ecclesiae Olomucensis canonicum … naturalis philosophiae studiosum scriptus, and Hercynia idyllia are dedicata a Daniele Zaidliczio Cracouiensis Polono in eadem academia [sc. in Olomouc] poeseos studioso, i.e. the same Zajdlicz whose glimpses we have already caught twice in Klinger’s letters. So what? – one might ask; after all, Klinger may have wanted to acquaint Lubomirski with Olomouc’s recent poetic developments, including others’ poetry. Yet the point is that Klinger explicitly speaks of Hercynia as of his own work; ego feci, nos sumus nati, he says, and when he adds to this, hinc placuit sumere inscriptionem, what he obviously means is, mihi placuit. It still could be argued that the Hercynia idyllia allegedly authored by Zajdlicz may be different from the Hercynia of which Klinger speaks, but the fact that Hercynia idyllia is dedicated Conrado Rischio Erphordiensi Turingo, i.e. precisely to Klinger’s popularis, seems like too much of a coincidence. In addition, although there is no Hercynia in BJ 5575, there is a relevant entry on fol. 568, with a reference to the missing fol. 397, which reads, Hercynia sylua patria. Now the only reason for Lubomirski to have written patria after Hercynia sylua I can think of is that he thought of patria Clingerii when he was indexing Hercynia idyllia. Another confirmation that the above reasoning is correct can be found in the letter dated June 11, in which Klinger speaks of re-sending to Lubomirski the prints we already heard of: mitto modo alia poemata baccalaureis impressa, uidelicet Cathalogum, carmen in patenti charta,36 Epigrammata. sed haec non sunt mea, ut a stylo cognosces. at sequentia, ut Hortus parthenius, qui conueniet tuo hortulo et Musaeo nouo, Laurea et Hercynia idyllia bina exemplaria – boni his consule.

 36 Perhaps a loose sheet such as Typogramma epithalamium, a sort of poster printed with elaborate picture-letters; see below.

150  Appendix Hortulus and Musaeum nouum is surely Lubomirski’s album. At separates two categories of writings, and if one of them is labelled as haec non sunt mea, then the other must embrace Klinger’s own poetry. Since the information about the author on title pages is either missing or misleading, it is only by comparing the diction that Klinger’s poems can be separated from those composed by others. A formula that may be applied to characterize Klinger is the mélange of striking modesty and well-deserved self-confidence. The same letter ends with a jocular passage, in which Klinger alludes to his poetic fertility and explicitly describes himself as a pen to hire: si indigebis pluribus carminibus quae aliquis sub suo nomine edere vellet, scribe mihi, modo promittat ad summum 40 exemplaria.

It remains to be seen just how often Klinger lent his poetic skills to others. Will we be able to recognize his style, as he expected Lubomirski to do? It may be worth the effort to undertake such a philological project in order to shed further light on the remarkable figure of Klinger, who was so modest that he disappeared from history for four centuries, and yet he was responsible for a significant, if not major, part of the poetry composed in Olomouc at the end of the sixteenth century. This prolific poet and inspiring educator – who was born in Thuringia, who spent his almost entire life within the triangle whose points are Chomutov, Olomouc, and Graz, who eagerly imbibed the many cultural novelties of Habsburg Vienna, and who ultimately brought the Playful Muse to Poland – is to be recognized as (Central) Europe’s go-between, a wonder to which German, Czech, Austrian and Polish culture may lay claim alike. We should be thankful, therefore, to Mikołaj Lubomirski for erecting two monuments to his teacher, which he did by putting together his album and by seeing to the publication of Technopaegnion sacropoeticum – the closest that we have to a book with Klinger’s proper authorial signature.

Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Little Museum In the previous part of this Appendix, we caught several glimpses of MS BJ 5575, Mikołaj Lubomirski’s album documenting his poetic interests and his studies at the Olomouc college. This stunning source of knowledge on the intellectualism of its time deserves our closer attention in this book primarily due to its employment of a subtle rhetoric of Alexandrianism, which also includes referring to poetsriddlers such as Simias and Optatian Porfyry. First, however, let us survey the album’s contents.

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BJ 5575 preserves most of what is extant of Lubomirski’s album, which was compiled towards the end of the sixteenth century and contained for the most part his handwritten notes, a collection of contemporary prints, mostly from Olomouc, and his own handwritten copies of further prints. The extant part contains fols. 1–28, 35, 37–47 (45–57 are placed after 60), 49–60, 92–95, 106–112, four blank folios, 126–132, two blank folios, 516–578; since 578 is Klinger’s good-bye (see above), this is probably the proper ending of the album. What we have, then, is the beginning and the ending. The folios are numbered by Lubomirski’s hand (this is certain in view of the fact that the index to the album – i.e. the lexicon we saw in the previous section – refers to this pagination), which incidentally guarantees that what is catalogued as BJ 5576 in the Jagiellonian Library, another poem clearly copied by Lubomirski’s hand, contains fols. 102–105 taken out from the same album. In addition, nineteenth-century scholars, some of whom briefly owned the album, refer to its removed or lost contents.37 We find mentions of two engravings by Samuel Kochanowski, whom we have already met;38 that these were originally found in Lubomirski’s album is confirmed by his own references in the index to the album (fols. 565 s.v. Emblemata and 572v s.v. Onomatopoeianum).39 One of these engravings is a part of the booklet Emblemata septem artes liberales agalmatice declarantia, for which see below,40 whereas the other – already mentioned – is preserved in the Kórnik Library (C IV 665); this is a fragment of the album, although the engraving has been cut or separated from the page in such a way that there is no trace of Lubomirski’s pagination. Besides, one of the album’s sometime owners quotes from a now missing part, which was according to him captioned Critica, a passage on Samuel Kochanowski (which somewhat resembles Lubomirski’s remarks on the poet Georgius Privicki [Jerzy Przywicki] and his friend and poet Petrus Szomovius [Piotr Szomowski or Szumowski?] in the extant part, fols. 59v–60v),41 whereas another nineteenth-century witness preserves the text of Michael Wude’s dedication to Klinger, which we have already seen, and adds that on one of pages Christus Stichoplagissimus (sic) was drawn with a pen and captioned, Auctore Tyburtio Borinski C. O. (this is probably what the lemma Stychoplagiasmus in the index, fol. 574v, refers to, the reference  37 I intend to devote a separate discussion to fata libelli, i.e. the album’s troubled history and in particular its fragmentation due to its redicovery by nineteenth-century book lovers, which may in many respects serve as an allegory of the equally troubled fate of Poland. 38 Żebrawski 1858, 439, Lesser 1872a and 1872b, Bartynowski 1891. 39 Cf. Zathey 1977 and Łodyńska-Kosińska 1986; see also n. 24 above. 40 For a discussion of this engraving and the book of which it is a part, see Konečný/Olšovský 2003. 41 Żebrawski 1858, 440; a Polish translation in Lesser 1872b.

152  Appendix being to the missing fol. 279; see further below).42 These are our fragmenta and testimonia. Yet there is more. I have already observed, following Rypson, that a composite volume of Olomoucian prints in the Library of the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL.XVI.611–649) exhibits numerous points of contact with the content of Lubomirski’s album.43 I may be able to cast light on this affinity. The first folio of this Sammelband bears a handwritten note, Conuentus Crucigerorum Nissensis, which points to its coming to Lublin from the Silesian town of Nysa (German Neisse), from the Holy Sepulchre monastery; this is confirmed by the stamp on the first folio’s verso, which reads Ex biblioth(eca) Gymnasii Nisseni. Now let us have a look at the following passage of Klinger’s already-quoted farewell letter to Lubomirski (October 10, 1598; fol. 578): boni itaque consule uersiculis hactenus missis. imprimetur adhuc carmen Nyssae, in nuptias mei antiqui discipuli, nunc uero I.V. Doctoris Ioachimi Willenbergeri …

I have been unable to trace Klinger’s print for Willenberger, yet what is important is that Joachim Willenberger was a respected citizen of Neisse and the Rector of the Pfarrgymnasium, i.e. pastoral school, in 1595–1598.44 It is a rather well-reasoned conjecture that he was Klinger’s friend and that Klinger shared prints of his poems with Willenberger just as he shared them with Lubomirski; or perhaps the collection of Clingeriana was a wedding gift. At any rate, the origin of the Sammelband fortunately preserved in Lublin, which probably belonged to Willenberger, appears to be, in a way, similar to that of Lubomirski’s album, even though this collection of prints lacks the element of creativity and resourcefulness that makes Lubomirski’s anthology such a fascinating document. What matters, however, is that the former may be used to shed important light on the latter, since by collating references in the index with which Lubomirski supplied his album (BJ 5575, fols. 560–576v) with the contents of the Lublin Sammelband we may reconstruct most of the original content of Lubomirski’s album. The following tentative sketch of the list of contents results from this collation; although presenting it is probably the main achievement of the present discussion, one may skip this part and immediately proceed to the discussion of the album’s rhetoric that follows it, which more directly engages with the overarch-

 42 Lesser 1872a, 251. The Moravian Tiburtius Borinski was a student at Olomouc in 1590; see Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016, 77, No. 380. 43 Rypson 2002, 66. 44 Kastner 1866, 127–129.

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ing theme of this book, i.e. the reception of the paradigm of Simias. As the reconstruction is based on a series of conjectures, the folios numbers provided must be regarded as merely a rough estimate. The titles (written in italics) are given in abbreviated forms, only so as to give a general idea of what the album contained (although the sole titles do not really illustrate the rich variety of poetic and typographic artificia of which these prints for the most part consist); I have provided some additional notes whenever I thought it would be instructive to do so. In most cases I have omitted the information about authors from the title pages, as we now know it to be mostly useless; in fact, it is quite possible that most of this poetry was authored by Klinger. The information regarding the album’s missing items, which is deduced from collating the index references with Willenberger’s volume (and in some cases with other sources), is put in square brackets. The first number refers to the pagination, actual or reconstructed, of Lubomirski’s album; the numbers that follow the missing items’ titles, preceded by the abbreviation KUL (i.e. Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski), refer to the Lublin Library’s classification (I have spared the reader references to relevant entries in the index, fols. 560–576v, which supply information on the missing items and their placement in the album, at times rather obliquely). The absence of information on handwriting implies that the reference is to a print; the absence of information on the hand implies that the handwriting is Lubomirski’s. fols. 1–11 poems by Klemens Janicki (1516–1543), a handwritten copy. 11v–25 poems by Joachim Bielski (c. 1540–1599), with metrical schemes provided, a handwritten copy followed by an inscription on Bielski handwritten in capital letters on fol. 25v. 26–28 blank pages captioned Notata in hoc tomo (see below); fols. 26–27 are divided in grids marked by the letters of the alphabet, i.e. a sketch of an index. uacat 35 Hieroglyphicon, a handwritten copy, with notes on fol. 35v. uacat 37–38 blank pages. 39–43 poems by Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584), a handwritten copy. 43–44 poems by Andrzej Trzecieski (before 1530–1584), a handwritten copy. 44v an inscription celebrating Jan Kochanowski, handwritten in capital letters and signed Laon. Phil.; Laon. stands for Laonicus, i.e. anagram of Nicolaus (obviously Mikołaj Lubomirski), Phil. may be for Philomeliacus; cf. Authore Musophilo Philomeliaco s(acrae) poieseos studioso academico in the title of the Klingerian print Viridarium lusciniarum (see below). 45–47 bound after fol. 60; see below. uacat 49–57 poems by Petrus Szomouius poeta optimus, obviously a good friend of Lubomirski (who is referred to in one of captions as sibi familarissimus); fols. 54–56v contain a poem titled Musaeum Nicolai Lubomirii, on which see above and below; further poems dedicated to Lubomirski follow; a handwritten copy.

154  Appendix 58–59 Hortus Lugouianus, handwritten, preceded by a dedication to Petrus Szomovius on fol. 57v, written in capital letters, and followed by the signature N(icolaus) L(ubomirius); sc. Mikołaj Lubomirski’s poem dedicated to Szomovius. 59v–60v Lubomirski’s notes on the poet Jerzy Przywicki (cf. the next item) and Petrus Szomovius; cf. above on the similar ‘fragment’ on Samuel Kochanowski. 45–47 Epithalamium by Jerzy Przywicki; a print that seems incorrectly bound here in view of Lubomirski’s pagination, but Epith written at the bottom of the preceding fol. 60v shows that this arrangement goes back to Lubomirski himself. uacat [63–65 Wawrzyniec Susliga’s Technicometria, Cracow 1598, a collection of artificia not included in the Lublin Sammelband, but preserved in the Jagiellonian Library, BJ Cim. 5133; the title’s resemblance to Klinger and Lubomirski’s Technopaegnion of the same year and also published in Cracow is striking.] [69–78 Wawrzyniec Susliga’s Reuerendissimo … Francisco Lacki … gratulatio, Cracow 1598, as the previous item a collection of artificia not included in the Lublin Sammelband, but preserved in the Jagiellonian Library, BJ Cim. 4558.] uacat [80–87 (?) perhaps Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Hymenaeus, uel carmen nuptiale, Cracow 1598, a collection of poetry, including artificia; this is not included in the Lublin Sammelband; a copy is preserved in the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław, XVI.Qu.2848.45] [88–91 Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Sertum academicum siue corona laurea, [Cracow] 1599, a collection of artificia not included in the Lublin volume; a copy is preserved in the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław, XVI.Qu.2427.] 92 ὀνομάστικον, a carefully calligraphed nine-liner, signed L. P., i.e. probably Laonicus Philomeliacus (i.e. Mikołaj Lubomirski, see above); cf. the item on fol. 44v. 92v blank. 93–95 anagrams by David Hilchen (1561–1610), a handwritten copy. 95v blank. uacat 102–105 Carmen histurgicum, Prague 1597, the print’s handwritten copy; this was separated from the album but is preserved in the Jagiellonian Library and catalogued as BJ 5576. 106 blank. 107–108 fine drawings of the Lubomirski family’s simbolum and coat of arms, with epigrams written beneath (i.e. so-called stemmata), preceded by a a dedicatory inscription Sixto Lubomirski p(atri) o(ptimo), i.e. to Sykstus (c. 1550–1612), Mikołaj’s father, signed by Laonicus, sc. Mikołaj.

 45 My conjecture that this print may have had place here rests solely on the observation that what precedes are two Susliga’s Cracow prints and what follows is first Lubomirski’s own Cracow book of artificia and subsequently another composition of his. This conjecture may be wrong, however, in view of the fact that two artificia from Hymenaeus are copied in the index to Lubomirski’s album, as Hologrammata from Hymenaeus’s fol. 5 appears, with some alterations, on fol. 568 in the index s.v. homologrammata, quae et hologrammata, and Poculum poeticum from fol. 6 is copied in the entry botrus on fol. 562v, both without mentioning that these appear elsewhere in the album.

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108v–109v handwritten poetry; birthday poems for Mikołaj Lubomirski by Joachim (1580– 1613) and Sykstus (1590–1651), i.e. his brothers, as is evident from the fact that these are followed by Mikołaj’s elegiac response (signed Nicolaus Lubomirius) addressed to egregii iuuenes … et Lubomiriae gloria prima domus and pii fratres, sc. his brothers. 110–112v Paraphrasis historiae de Susanna by Adamus Placotomus Silesius, 1584, a handwritten copy of a hexameter poem, preceded by a handwritten copy of the title page and a dedicatory epigram, dedicated to Sykstus Lubomirski (probably Mikołaj’s father). uacat, incl. four blank folios 126–127v Homiolalage dialogismica Lutheri et uiatoris, a handwritten elegiac poem, anonymous. 128 Ratio solum hominem regit et gubernat, a handwritten poem in elegiambi, anonymous. 128v a drawing of a monkey accompanied by the word utcumque (‘as best I can’?). 128–130 grammatosyllexis, a sort of rebus poem, obviously by Mikołaj Lubomirski, as the note beneath the title on the ‘title page’ on fol. 128 reads, aemula Clingerii mei, handwritten (cf. the index s.v. grammatosyllexis, fol. 567). 130v–132 Cede maiori, an elegiac poem, handwritten. 132v an engraving of Saint Nicolaus, a birthday present accompanied by an epigram and prose dedication to Mikołaj Lubomirski by his fellow student at Olomouc, the Hungarian Nicolaus Mithiczy, i.e. Miticsy Miklós; the handwriting is probably Miticsy’s.46 uacat [138–149 (?) Nuptiale carmen by the Moravian poet Gregor Tarco (second half of the sixteenth century), Olomouc 1598.47] uacat [184 a poem (artificium?) by Georg Barthold Pontanus (c. 1550–1614)?48] uacat

 46 He was a student at Olomouc in 1597, see Spáčilová/Spáčil 2016, 88, No. 804 (they found it difficult to decipher the pertaining note; they read Nicolaus Mithury [?], Nouiensis, Hungarus). 47 The index’s entry for Aquila gamelica (fol. 562v), a wedding collection of allegorical poems on birds, including Cuculi encomium (see below), has the following annotation: sane imitatus Tarco, fol. 138, the reference surely being to the well-known poet Gregor Tarco’s twelve-folio epithalamium that makes use of an extended animal allegory and includes Encomium asini; see Kolářová 2017, 43–44. It is uncertain whether Lubomirski’s fol. 138 refers to the beginning of this pamphlet or some other part. 48 In his index’s entry on Stychoplagiasmus (fols. 574v–575), Lubomirski briefly discusses a sort of figure poem, which he illustrates by supplying a pentagram drawn with five hexameters, whose points are the repeated word Christe. He refers for illustrations to fols. 279 and 409, both unfortunately missing, but one of these must have been a drawing by Tiburtius Borinski (see below on fol. 279). In addition, he praises another stichoplagiasmus, one from fol. 409, as artificiosissimus and says that it can compete with one by Pontanus on fol. 184; Pontaniano (fol. 184) contendit. I suspect the reference may be to the poet Georg Barthold Pontanus, rather than to Jacobus Pontanus (1542–1626), but if this is correct, then I have been unable to track down the poem or articifium Lubomirski meant, or a book from which this may have come from.

156  Appendix [269–279 a collection of artificia, either handwritten or both printed and handwritten49] [280–287 Chorus Musarum, Vienna 1595, KUL.XVI.618.] [288–299 Technopaegnion sacropoeticum by Klinger, compiled by Mikołaj Lubomirski (see above), Cracow 1598, KUL.XVI.636; there is a copy in Cracow: BJ Cim. 4560.] [300–307 Nymphae Bethlemides, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.632.] [308–313 Congratulatio optatissimae inaugurationi … Joannis Kutassi, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.629.] [314–319 Hodaeporicon, Neisse 1597, KUL.XVI.637.] [320–328 Strenae natalitiae sacropoeticae, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.635; the Lublin copy preserves an engraving by Samuel Kochanowski; see above.] [329–336 Anagramma eponymicium, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.628.] [337–344 Hypocoristica genethliaca infantulo Iesu, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.634.] [345–352 (?) perhaps Emblemata septem artes liberales agalmatice declarantia, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.614 (with Samuel Kochanowski’s engraving on the title page’s verso; see above), but if so, this was one of the two copies of this print in the album; cf. fols. 488–495.50]

 49 Lubomirski’s index contains a plethora of references to a variety of artificia and stylistic devices on these folios (e.g. acrostichon, analogia, cascum, griphus, logogriphus, methateticum [there is a mention of Rome in this entry], paralellon, ropalici, but also Centaurus, inscriptio uetusta from Rome and prosopopoeia Pasquini and Marfory, i.e. the dialogue of Rome’s statue parlanti; I note that Richard Willes’ Poem 21 is Pasquinus, but there seem to be no further correspondences with his Poemata); the recurrent mentions of Rome are noteworthy. The first one of these references is to Technopaegnion on fol. 269 (fol. 575 s.v. Thechnopaegnion), therefore this may have been something similar to Klinger and Lubomirski’s Technopaegnion. The fact that we see a reference to an epigram to Momus (or Zoilus, sc. an address to future critics conventionally placed towards the ending of a book) on fol. 278 (fol. 570v s.v. Momo qui et Zoilus) suggests that these missing folios may have contained a printed booklet, or a handwritten copy of one. On the other hand, however, in the entry on Stychoplagiasmus on fol. 574v there is a reference to fol. 279 accompanied by a mention of the appearance of Christ in that lost artificium; as we have seen, Lesser 1872a reports having seen a drawing of Tiburtius Borinski’s stichoplagiasmus probably titled Christus in Lubomirski’s album. We may infer from all these testimonies that either the missing (printed?) Technopaegnion that began on fol. 269 ended with an address to Momus on fol. 278 and this was a ten-folio booklet followed in the album by Borinski’s drawing, or that we should envision a collection of handwritten copies of miscellaneous poems. 50 The index’s entry on agalmata (fol. 560) refers to fol. 345 and since the elaborate print Emblemata septem artium has Samuel Kochanowski’s engraving of the emblemata (as these are referred to throughout the booklet) or agalmata (a generic label that is clearly enough suggested by agalmatice in the title) on the title page’s verso, and I find no mention of agalmata elsewhere in Olomoucian prints, there are good reasons to think that the reference is to this book. Yet there are difficulties with this conjecture. One is that there are even better reasons to assume that fols. 488–495 had this print; see n. 55 below. Another is that the entry Momo qui et Zoilus on fol. 570v, which lists epigrams to Momus that serve as the conventional ending in contemporary prints, points to one of these epigrams having been found on fol. 353; Emblemata septem artium does have such a Momus epigram on the last of its eight folios, but this should be referenced as fol. 352 (and at any rate, the odd number of folios between Agalmata on fol. 345, i.e. evidently the

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[353–363 (?)51 Alleluia Paschale, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.631.] [364–371 Artificiosae Musarum gratulationes, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.615.] uacat [382 Typogramma epithalamium, sine loco et sine anno, a sort of poster with a monostich written with elaborate picture-letters; KUL.XVI.643.] [383–390 Nouem Heroides Nymphae Marcomanniae, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.616.] [391–396 Melicum poema, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.613.] [397–400 Hercynia idyllia, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.621; according to the title page, the author is Daniel Zajdlicz (but in truth probably Klinger), on whom see above.] [401–408 Hymenaeus Marcomannicus, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.639.] [409 a stichoplagiasmus52] [410–417 Poemata in sacras primitias Francisci a Dietrichchstain, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.626; fols. 2–3 are incorrectly bound in KUL.XVI.612 (see below on fols. 496–511).] [418–423 Nymphae harmonicae, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.627.] [424–429 Artificia talasica, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.640.] [430–441 Gratiae gamelicae cum gnomologicis epithalamicis, [Olomouc] 1598, KUL.XVI.641.] [442 perhaps Poema hieroglyphicum, a sort of single-sheet poster like Typogramma epithalamium on fol. 382, with an elaborate hieroglyphic poem, sine loco, but this claims to be authored by the Viennese student Iacobus Krasiczki, 1593, KUL.XVI.630; one finds the poem’s decipherment in the handwritten notes at the end of the Lublin volume (see below).53] [443–454 probably Epigrammata gamelia, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.638.54]

 beginning of a print, and the Momus epigram on fol. 353 is suspicious). We might assume that the reference in the index is erroneous, but more likely there was a more serious error in pagination, since there is a similar problem with the discrepancy between the reported and actual number of folios in the next item; see the following note. 51 The entry Alleluia Paschale in the index (fol. 560) refers to fol. 353; this must have been the beginning of the ten-folio print bearing this title, but something is plainly wrong since another reference in the index points to a Momus epigram (i.e. the closure of the preceding print) being placed on the same fol. 353 (see the preceding note). Moreover, the entry Luscinecloga refers to fol. 360 and as it happens, the poem titled Luscinecloga allegorica is included in the Alleluia Paschale print and begins on its fol. 7, which would suggest that the booklet actually began with fol. 354 in Lubomirski’s album. This is probably connected with similar problems with the number of folios in the preceding item. What happened? One explanation, I suggest, would be to assume an error, or two errors, in pagination: Lubomirski wrote 353 instead of 352 when he was numbering the folios, then his hand repeated 353 on the next folio while his mind was thinking he wrote 354, and therefore he wrote 355 on the subsequent folio. If there is a better solution, I cannot see it. 52 See n. 48 above. 53 The index’s entry on hieroglyphica (fol. 568) includes a reference to fol. 442 and since there seems to be space for one folio only I connect this with the single-sheet Poema hieroglyphicum in the Lublin Sammelband. 54 This rests on the assumption that the chronographicum alterius formae Lubomirski’s index mentions on fol. 563, with a reference being provided to fol. 454, is identical with the Carmen chronologicon with which Epigrammata gamelia ends.

158  Appendix [455–462 Stella Bohaemica, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.648.] [463–470 Orpheus siue Dryades, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.644.] [471–474 Viridarium lusciniarum, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.611; the closing epigram contains the cryptic signature Ne Luscinia Segnior, i.e. anagram of Ioannes Clingerius; in view of its insistence on the song of nightingales this print, with which the Lublin Sammelband opens, deserves to be recognized as Klinger’s programmatic creation.] [475–478 Cuculus Noe, [Olomouc] 1598, KUL.XVI.646.] uacat [480–487 Laurea partheniae sodalitatis academicae, Olomouc 1598, KUL.XVI.622.] [488–495 Emblemata septem artes liberales agalmatice declarantia, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.614 (with Samuel Kochanowski’s engraving on the title page’s verso); there may have been two copies of this print in the album (cf. fols. 345–352).55] [496–511 Applausus hieroglyphici sedecim, Olomouc 1597, KUL.XVI.612; this is important for including a poem signed Nicolaus Lubomiersky Nobilis Polonus on fols. 3v–4v (the other poems are ascribed to other Olomouc students); two folios from KUL.XVI.626 (see above on fols. 410–417) are incorrectly bound here.] uacat, incl. two blank folios 516–519 Satyra. Nemo satisfacit omnibus, a print without the title page also included in the Lublin volume, KUL.XVI.348a (i.e. a part of Stella Bohaemica); a hexameter poem. 520–531 Aquila gamelica, a print without the title page also included in the Lublin volume, KUL.XVI.641a (i.e. a part of Gratiae gamelicae); an elegiac poem. 532–537 Typographiae academicae epithalamium, a print without the title page also included in the Lublin volume, KUL.XVI.647; iambic trimeters; in Lubomirski’s album, there is an additional trimeter written by his hand on fol. 534 in the listing of the guests that attended the wedding of Lady Typography, i.e. European universities, which reads, cui nata Samoscensis ibat ad latus (i.e. it complements the line beneath which it is written: et e Polono solo Cracouia). 538–541 Ecloga hortensis hymenaeus, a print without the title page also included in the Lublin volume, KUL.XVI.644a (i.e. a part of Orpheus siue Dryades); a hexameter poem. 542–547 Vertumnianum artificium nouum et mirabile, Vienna 1597, with Klinger’s handwritten dedication to Lubomirski on the title page;56 this is also included in the Lublin Sammelband as KUL.XVI.633 (the space for dedication on the title page is left blank). 548–551 Pax exulans, a print without the title page containing a hexameter poem. 552–556 Violarum uernalium fasciculus poeticus, a handwritten copy (without the title page and the closing epigram) of a Vienna 1596 print, which is included in the Lublin volume as KUL.XVI.619; a poem in phalaeceans.

 55 The entry on Emblemata in the index (fol. 565) refers to fol. 488 for emblemata … a Cochanouio in aes incisa, which is no doubt a reference to Samuel Kochanowski’s engraving on the verso of the title page of the print Emblemata septem artium. In addition, the index lists an epigram to Momus on fol. 495, which squares with such an epigram closing the eight-folio Emblemata septem artium. This may have been the second copy of this print in the album (cf. n. 50 above); perhaps Lubomirski received one copy from Kochanowski, who made the engraving, and one from Klinger, who would have authored poetry? 56 See n. 35 above.

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557–559 Discordia siue lis, a handwritten copy of a poem in iambic trimeters by Samuel Kochanowski; the authorship is indicated in Lubomirski’s note in the index s.v. Lis siue discordia (fol. 570). 560–576v Lubomirski’s index to the album, and at the same time a lexicon of literary terminology, which contains his notes from Klinger’s Olomouc lectures and his poems. 577–578 Klinger’s letters to Lubomirski, with Lubomirski’s brief preface on fol. 577 and his even briefer concluding note on fol. 578v.

This gives us a quite detailed picture of what more than two-thirds of Lubomirski’s album contained. If the prints separated from the album have been in circulation, it may now prove possible to track these down in libraries and private collections; these copies may still bear Lubomirski’s pagination or may have been cut in such a way that the pagination is no longer there. In addition, the Lublin Sammelband includes further prints which are missing from Lubomirski’s album and to which I found no references in his index but some of which may well have been included in the album, particularly on fols. 185–268: KUL.XVI.617 Hieroglyphica laurus, Vienna 1596, four folios. KUL.XVI.620 Chorus Musicus Caesareus, Prague 1597, ten folios; this is unlikely to have been a part of Lubomirski’s album since it includes a parallelon on fol. 9v and an epigram to Momus on fol. 10 which do not seem to be referenced in the relevant entries in Lubomirski’s index. KUL.XVI.623 Hortus parthenius, Olomouc 1598, ten folios; since this is mentioned in Klinger’s letters to Lubomirski (see above) it almost certainly was included in the album. KUL.XVI.624 Symbolica poemata, Vienna 1596, seven folios; again, this was probably not included in Lubomirski’s album since his index has no references to anagrammatismus and an epigram to Zoilus from its fol. 7 in the relevant entries. KUL.XVI.625 Ecloga uineatica eucharistica, Olomouc 1597; fourteen folios. KUL.XVI.642 Apologi lusciniani, Vienna 1596, five folios; this is remarkable for the fact that Ne Luscinia Segnior, i.e. Klinger’s anagrammatic signature, appears beneath the epigram on the title page’s verso, yet the fact that the entry listing epigrams to Momus in Lubomirski’s index seems not to list the epigram clearly belonging to this class from this print suggests that it was not included in the album. KUL.XVI.645 Syncharma in aureum uellus, an Olomouc four-folio print without the title page; its pagination begins with C1, therefore this was a part of a longer print; since it follows the eight-folio Orpheus siue Dryades in the Lublin volume it may from the start have belonged with it. KUL.XVI.648b Podagra, a four-folio print without the title page; a hexameter encomium of the gout.

160  Appendix KUL.XVI.649 Centum epigrammata parentalia, a four-folio print without the title page; Klinger’s authorship is guaranteed by a handwritten note in the copy preserved in the State Archive in Olomouc.57

Although Lubomirski’s album and the Lublin composite volume shared much of the material they included, differences are as important as similarities. The Lublin Sammelband consists almost exclusively of a variety of prints; almost, because two pages of blank folios bound towards the volume’s end exhibit handwritten notes, which make one think of Lubomirski’s notes from Olomouc in the index to his album. These notes from the Lublin volume are divided into three sections: Annotata in 9 Heroides: Lectio metasyllabarum, i.e. notes on the artificium titled Metastasyllaba on fol. 4 of the print Nouem Heroides Nymphae Marcomanniae, KUL.XVI.616. In primitias Domini Dietrichstain: Lectio epigraphes antiquae, i.e. notes on the inscription (Epigraphe antiqua) on the verso of the title page of the print Poemata in sacras primitias Francisci a Dietrichchstain, KUL.XVI.626. Lectio hieroglyphici antiqui is particularly useful, as it deciphers the hexameter poem of the Poema hieroglyphicum of KUL.XVI.630.

This points to both documents’ shared origin in the academic milieu at Klingerian Olomouc. Yet on the whole the Lublin volume is much less impressive than what was conceived by Lubomirski’s vivid and immensely creative imagination. The intermediality of his album is a striking feature; the textual component is as important as drawings and engravings, whereas handwritten poems accompany visually elaborate prints. It is remarkable that handwritten copies of poems often attempt to represent, either faithfully or more creatively, the typography of the originals; an almost childlike fascination with print and typography – which is paralleled by Simias and his contemporaries’ interest in the possibilities opening thanks to the efflorescence of advanced bookish culture in the Hellenistic age – is in addition evidenced by numerous references to this aspect of the poetry collections published in Olomouc that are found in Lubomirski’s lexicon and in Olomoucian prints. A particularly charming illustration of this obsession is provided by the already-mentioned poem Typographiae academicae epithalamium, whose copies are included both in Lubomirski’s album and the Lublin composite volume. The poem, an allegorical depiction of the wedding of Typography and Student Polygrammus, consists for the most part of a catalogue of European universities, obviously because these enthusiastically embrace the new invention. The importance attached to typography by Lubomirski is evident from the fact that  57 See n. 30 above.

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his extant album was only the first instalment in a series of volumes whose focus was precisely on typography; his index promises to illustrate ‘all sorts of typefaces’ in Volume 2 of his book project, which he dubs Library (tom. II huius bibliothecae omnium grammatum typos quaere; fol. 382 s.v. typogramma), and to display various typographic feats in Volumes 3 and 4 (tom. III huius bibliothecae and tom. IV, fol. 568v s.v. hieroglyphica; all this obviously implies that the extant album is Volume 1, cf. the caption notata in hoc tomo on fol. 26).58 This penchant for intermediality, although obviously developed during Lubomirski’s stay at Olomouc, also had roots in a specific local tradition. I suspect that the uarietas of Lubomirski’s album was influenced by a curious and endemically Polish genre of sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literacy that was cherished by members of the Polish nobility, namely the so-called silua rerum. The silua rerum was a sort of private family chronicle, an album in which the head of the family recorded notable family and historical events (such as births, deaths, weddings, plague erruptions or natural disasters) and collected not only private and political documents, but also literary pieces, such as occasional orations and poetry.59 The chronicle of Lubomirski’s literary pursuits over the span of his (two) Olomouc years is, if not a poetic silua rerum, then certainly a poetic silua; the tenuous intertextual link is substantialized by the album’s, and Olomouc poetry’s in general, insistent self-referential imagery of gardens and greenery. The predilection for this metaphor is reflected not only in numerous titles of Olomoucian prints – Hortus parthenius, Viridarium lusciniarum, Violarum uernalium fasciculus, Eclogae uineatica and hortensis all stem from this metaphor – but throughout the poems included in these prints. As we earlier saw, Klinger even employs the metaphor of tuus hortulus when referring to Lubomirski’s album in one of his letters, whereas Lubomirski himself explores it in his poem Hortus Lugouianus which he dedicated to his friend Szomovius and which characterized Szomovius’ poetry. The persistent use of this metaphor tantalizingly corresponds with the employment of the imagery of dense groves and foliage tangles by Simias we saw in Chapter 1; this bespeaks shared poetic tastes and community of ideas despite the passage of centuries.

 58 Furthermore, in the entry on anagramma one finds, on fol. 562, a reference to Regestio litteraria, i.e. probably the 1605 (sc. post-Klingerian) Olomoucian print that bears this title, that was to be included tomo quinto huius bibliothecae, and also a reference to fol. 726 in Volume 2, which suggests that at least the first of these later parts was actually completed. 59 For a brief introduction (in Polish), see Niedźwiedź 2001; for a stunning literary illustration, see Kristina Sabaliauskaitė’s 2008 novel Silua rerum, in Lithuanian (a Polish translation appeared in 2015, but unfortunately there is no English translation).

162  Appendix A similar phenomenon is the recurrence, and immense popularity, of the metaphor of poetry as a sacred mystery. We traced its manifestations in Simias and his ancient followers in Chapter 2. In Olomoucian poetry this is even more than an apt expression of poetic self-consciousness; it becomes a conventional and even obligatory way of referring to poetry and addressing poets. In the microcosm inhabited by the community of Olomoucian professors and students, learning Latin is the first step to initiation, getting to read ancient poetry is another, studying poesis artificiosa is being admitted to rites, and composing it is conducting the rites, i.e. the final stage of the initiation. In this little world of arcane poetry, the terms poetae and uates are used interchangeably, poesis is always accompanied, somewhat pretentiously, by the epithet sacra, and a particularly delightful (the adjective iucundus is often used by Lubomirski in his notes of various subgenres of ludus poeticus) way of characterizing artificia is by employing the adjective sacropoetica (e.g. Technopaegnion sacropoeticum, Strenae sacropoeticae), as this novel, and therefore delightful, compound combined the two dearest words. The paganism, or alternative religion, of worshipping poetry does not seem to weigh heavy on the pious consciences of these fellows of the Jesuit college; they worship Apollo and the Muses with the same schizophrenic ardor Optatian displayed, more than a millennium earlier, in the cult of the deities of poetry and in simultaneously supporting Constantine’s Christianity. This takes us to what is to be recognized as the most striking self-referential image in Lubomirski’s album of poetic memorabilia. In his brief note that directly follows the index and prefaces a copy of Klinger’s three letters, Lubomirski charmingly expresses his fondness for his teacher; this passage also tells us about what role he envisioned for his album and therefore deserves to be quoted here (fol. 577): Et lucubratiunculae istae tuae, Clingeri suauissime, immo felicissimi ingenii uberrimi fructus, tam studiose lecti relectique, et imagines illae, quarum alteri in Musaeolo nostro inter doctissimorum uirorum effigies principem locum dedi, alteram adamanti incisam in pectoris huius sacrario asseruo; nomen denique tuum, quod praeterquam quod in ore semper habeo, meas etiam (si quae sunt) uigilias feliciter ubique auspicatur. ista, inquam, omnia testari poterunt posteritati, quam grata mihi fuerit tui memoria.

The last sentence suggests that Lubomirski intended to publish his album or at least his notes, and the whole passage is evocative of his confidence in the importance of his grand undertaking. This is underscored by the label he chooses for the album, namely Musaeolum nostrum, ‘my little Museum’. In his letters to Lubomirski, Klinger also affectionately refers to the album, twice, as tuus hortulus et Musaeum nouum (fol. 577v) and hortulus et Musaeolum tuum (fol. 578v), whereas, as we have seen, Lubomirski’s friend Szomovius even composed an

Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Little Museum  163

elaborate poem praising this undertaking, which he titled Musaeum Nicolai Lubomirii and which Lubomirski did not neglect to include in his Museum (fols. 54– 56). Although the characterization of the album as ‘the temple of the Muses’ should obviously be seen in the broader context of the overarching metaphor of sacra poesis, i.e. poetry as a sacred mystery, there is more to this image; neither should one be misled by the fact that Mus(a)eum and Mus(a)eolum may have the meaning ‘office, study’ in Renaissance Latin.60 The fact that elsewhere, as we have seen, Lubomirski labels his album as bibliotheca, ‘Library’, and that Klinger speaks of ‘the new Museum’, clearly implies that what they had in mind was the Alexandrian Museum and Library. If Lubomirski’s album is a new, albeit little, Museum, this obviously makes Olomouc a new Alexandria, which suggests that as an Olomouc professor Klinger was self-consciously reviving the Callimachean formula of a scholar-poet, as much for himself as for his pupil Lubomirski. Thanks to the self-referential rhetoric of Alexandrianism, the Museum being recreated on the pages of Lubomirski’s volume becomes, to return to the concept I developed in the previous chapters, a shared space of the eternal scholarly conuiuium at which the eminent philologists of their times commune with each other and with the ancients to pay due honours to sacra poesis. What is striking, to us, is that as a matter of fact, the ancient poets-riddlers such as Simias and Optatian and their modern followers played a larger role in the concept of revived Alexandrianism to which Klinger and Lubomirski subscribed than any other poet. This is suggested by a curious constellation of ancient – and later – poets’ names that emerges from Lubomirski’s notes contained in the lexicon that closes his volume. To be sure, Theocritus and Vergil make brief appearances in a discussion on bucolic poetry (fol. 565; the latter is also mentioned on fols. 566v and 575 s.vv., respectively, epitheta, alongside Martial and Propertius, and thiopoema), and other major figures of Antiquity whom Lubomirski mentions in passing are Aristotle (fol. 566v) and Augustine (573v), but of no less import to Klinger and Lubomirski, judging by the number of references (fols. 567 bis, s.vv. griphilogum and Graecolatinum, 570v s.v. monosyllaba), was Ausonius, a major poet, yet at the same time one famous for his preoccupation with ludus poeticus (see the Introduction) and recalled by Lubomirski more than once precisely for this reason. Of particular relevance to us is Lubomirski’s familiarity with Optatian Porfyry, whose mirabilia he mentions on fol. 568v s.v. histurgica, and especially with Simias and the other poets of technopaegnia;61 this is

 60 See Hoven 2006, 349 s.vv. ‘musaeolum’ and ‘museum’. 61 Cf. Rypson 2002, 66.

164  Appendix manifest from a brief yet remarkable note on the tradition of figure poems to be found on fol. 562v s.v. Botrus (which is a sort of carmen figuratum): Similes carminum coadunationes iam olim Theocrito et Simmiae Rhodio usitatae, qui oua, secures, aras, pyramidas, noster uero [sc. Klinger] botrum (fol. 283), citharam (fol. 284), syringa (423) formauere. quod et nobis imitari nonnumquam placuit in poculo [a copy of Lubomirski’s cup-shaped figure poem follows62]. Elegantior calix Laurentii Suslygae, sed sacer, fol. 76.

The reader will easily locate these poems by checking the references provided against the list I supplied above. This is a breathtaking comment, insofar as it without hesitation aligns Susliga, Lubomirski himself and especially Klinger with Simias and his ancient followers (whose synecdoche is ‘Theocritus’). This implies that Klinger is more than just an adherent of Simias’ intellectual programme; his, and his disciples’, intellectualism fully embraces the model invented by Simias, which makes Klinger a new Simias as much as Lubomirski’s Little Museum revives the spirit of Ptolemaic Alexandria’s poetry and scholarship. Noteworthy in this context is an appearance of Philitas in one of the Olomouc prints. The 1598 book Gratiae gamelicae contains on fols. 5–12, under the caption Gnomae epithalamicae, a collection of pseudepigraphic gnomes on the theme of marriage attributed to ancient Greek writers. The iambic ‘fragment’ of Philitas supplied as Gnoma 3 has, in fact, more to do with Horace than with Philitas, but the author note which precedes the gnome is impressive in the extent of erudition it exhibits, especially in view of the fact that unlike we today Klinger and his colleagues did not have access to three recent editions of the fragments of Philitas: Philetas (Cous, elegiographus, praeceptor secundi Ptolemaei, regis Aegyptii [cf. Suda s.v. Φιλήτας = test. 1 Lightfoot/Sbardella/Spanoudakis]. hunc fuisse exili et pertenui corpore tradit Aelianus et Athenaeus [test. 23 Lighfoot = 6 and 8 Sbardella = 22 Spanoudakis], ut pedibus sibi ex plumbo soleas annecteret, ne a uento abriperetur): beatus ille uxore qui semper caret.

This helps us to contextualize the Olomouc scholars’ preoccupation with Alexandrianism. Equally indicative are Lubomirski’s references to more contemporary individuals. His, and his teacher’s, staying au courant of current intellectual trends is illustrated by casual mentions, on fol. 576v s.v. Typographiae epithalamium, of historical and juristic works of Johannes Rosinus (c. 1550–1626) and Barnabé

 62 See n. 45 above.

Mikołaj Lubomirski’s Little Museum  165

Brisson (1531–1591). Yet the Olomoucian erudition concentrates on technopaegnia, contemporary as much as ancient ones. We have already seen that Lubomirski refers to the slightly earlier contemporary Richard Willes’ book of poesis artificiosa,63 and that he collected artificia authored by Susliga, Gregor Tarco and Georg Barthold Pontanus.64 In addition, he mentions further nearly contemporary artificia by Claude Rousselet (d. 1532; fol. 571 s.v. monosyllaba) and Johann Engerd (d. 1587; fol. 573 s.v. paromoeon), and the 1552 emblem book Picta poesis by Barthélémy Aneau (c. 1510–1561; fol. 575 s.v. thiopoema). Unsurprisingly, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) receives more attention than others; Lubomirski references both his Poetics and his playful poems, such as Logogriphi (fols. 566v, 570, 573 and 573v). The selection of the authors Lubomirski refers to is as instructive as what he passes over. Probably in no other period of the history of the European literary canon so strong an emphasis was laid on the poetry so often classified, and even dismissed, as marginal, with interest in the proper canon being markedly diminished, at least among the most proficient users of the ancient heritage. The triumph of the intellectual paradigm invented by Simias was complete; even though so much of his, and his followers, poetry and scholarship had been lost throughout the Middle Ages, the numerous correspondences between the original model and the new intellectualism of Klinger and Lubomirski, as well as the latters’ interest in the extant output of their ancient predecessors, are, nevertheless, striking. At the same time, the translation of this model into the new medium of print secured its preservation in subsequent centuries. Although Lubomirski’s Little Museum never reached a wider audience and much of what it contained was destined to be soon forgotten, the seed his German teacher planted fell on fertile soil. Since there were many others like him in this period, our understanding of European literary history cannot be complete without acknowledging this obscure (in more than one sense) chapter.

 63 See nn. 6 and 10 above. 64 See nn. 9, 47 and 48 above.

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Index of Sources and Passages Cited Aeschylus fr. 402 Radt

18 n.6

Agathias AP 4.4.9–10

30 n.45

Alcaeus (Campbell) fr. 10B

70

Alcman (Davies) fr. 39

25 n.29; 49

Alexander of Aetolia (Magnelli) test. 7

29

Anacreon (PMG) fr. 373.1–2

22

anonyma epigrams 155 FGE 83 AP 9.196–197 126–127 AP 15.23 126–127 App. Anth. 5.50 Cougny 130 In laudem Solis (AL 385 Shackleton-Bailey) 31 74 Anyte (Gow/Page) 11 20

51 n.125 47; 51 n.125

Aratus 783–787

103–104

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-008

Archestratus (Olson/Sens) fr. 29

51

Archilochus (West) fr. 4.7

22

Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae 355 52 n.131 see scholia in Aristophanem Aristotle De anima 420b26–421a6 420b32–33 De interpretatione 16a19–29 Historia animalium 535a27–30 535b2–7 535b11–12 536a13–15 536a20–22 536a26–27 536b1–2 536b11–12 536b13–14 614a10–28 614a10–21 614a21–22 614a30

45 46 47 45 46 47 46 46 47 47 47 47 47

[Aristotle] De plantis

121

Asclepiades (Sens) 15

57

Athenaeus 7.327e–f

21

45 45 44–45

182  Index of Sources and Passages Cited 9.398b–c 9.401e 11.472e 11.478d–479c 11.490e–491c 11.493e–494b 14.621b 15.677b–c Ausonius Cento nuptialis concl. Epigrammata 85 Green Technopaegnion

21 n.16 80 22 21 36 104–105 66–67 21

9 9; 11 9 9; 56 n.13; 138 n.10; 139 n.14

[Baruch] (3 Baruch) 6.8

75

Beowulf 86–90

43

Besantinus see Vestinus, Julius Boethius De consolatione philosophiae 121 De hypotheticis syllogismis 121 De topicis differentiis 121 see Holobolus, Manuel Callimachus (Pfeiffer) fr. 761 test. 23 Aetia fr. 1.29–36 Harder fr. 43.12–17 fr. 178 Harder fr. 178.11–12 Harder Athena Epigrams 5 27

Hymns 52 Hymn to Apollo 1 36 n.76 Hymn to Demeter 120 37 n.76 Iambi 52 Month Names according to Peoples and Cities 19 Castorion of Soli SH 310

91

Catullus 3.11 32.1 63

25 n.29 83 n.133 71

Charisius (Barwick) pp. 375.13–376.2

60

Cicero Somnium Scipionis

121

Clearchus (Wehrli) fr. 63

88

Constatine the Rhodian On Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Apostles 124 Corippus In laudem Iustini minoris 1.349–350 74

71 8 8; 19; 52; 83; 84 25 n.29 83 79; 83 83; 85 8

Ctesias FGrHist 688 F 45.37

44

Cyllenius (FGE) 1 1.1

51 51

52 104

Dionysius Iambus SH 389

35 n.70

Index of Sources and Passages Cited  183

Dosiadas Altar

Dracontius Romulea 10 (Med.) 104 Ennius (Blänsdorf) fr. 45.1 Annals inc. fr. 5 Skutsch Sota frr. 1–6 fr. 1 fr. 3 fr. 4 fr. 5 fr. 6 Epic Cycle Little Iliad (West) arg.4

3–4; 94–99; 112; 114–116; 119; 126–129

74

63 63 62; 63 n.47 66 66 66 67 66 66–67

42

Eustathius of Thessalonica Exegesis in canonem iambicum Pentecostalem Prooem. 146–248 122 n.38 Prooem. 146–234 122 n.38 Prooem. 235–237 122 n.38 Prooem. 235–248 122 n.38 Prooem. 242–244 122 n.38 Fulgentius Mitol. 2, p. 40.18 Helm 110 Virg. pp. 100–101 Helm 110 Gellius 2.24.8–9 19.7 19.7.13 19.9.7

84–85 78–80; 82–83; 86–87 80 4

Hephaestion (Consbruch) p. 21.10–12 33 pp. 30.21–31.13 27 pp. 61.19–62.6 128 p. 68.7–13 128 see scholia in Hephaestionem Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr. 150.8–35 Merkelbach/West Theogony 702–703

23 36

Holobolus, Manuel Orations 1.30.18–31.14 Treu 124–125; 139 1.45.1 Treu 124 1.47.1–34 Treu 124 1.47.23 Treu 124 preface to the translation of Boethius 4 121 6 122 8 123 Homer Iliad 3.125–128 3.182 8.42 13.24 16.140–144 19.387–391 22.59 22.133 Odyssey 9.364 12.62–63 14.353–354 18.300 19.183 Horace Ars 139

125 n.43 13; 34; 101 13; 37 n.77 13; 37 n.77 37 37 13 68 44 36 25–26 21 44

35

184  Index of Sources and Passages Cited Carm. 1.9.1–2 2.20 3.12

106 77–78 70

inscriptions AE 1931.6 = SEG 11.810 CIL 4.1595 IG 14.643 IG 14.1085 = IGUR 1.62

103 117–118; 131 116 102

John of Gaza Tabula Mundi

124

Lactantius Phoenix (AL 485a Riese) 161–164 74 Laevius (Blänsdorf) fr. 3

fr. 8 fr. 26

55; 83 n.133; 85– 86 55–56 54–55; 84–85; 87 55; 58 78–80; 82–83 87 n.144 87 n.144 83 n.133 81; 83 54; 83 n.133; 104 6; 13; 58–78; 116; 118; 132 54; 56 69–74; 76–77

Leonidas of Tarentum (Gow/Page) 101

104

fr. 5 fr. 6 fr. 9 frr. 10–12 fr. 18 fr. 27 fr. 28 fr. 30 fr. 34 Phoenix

Leonides of Alexandria (FGE) 1 2 7 7.3 8

107 107–108 107 107 107; 109

26 29 29.1–2 30.4 32 32.2

107 107 107 107 107 107

Lucian Lexiphanes 25

4; 93

Lycophron Alexandra 1410–1474

129

Macrobius Saturnalia 3.8.3

69–70

manuscripts Ambrosianus B 99 Ambrosianus C 222 inf. Laurentianus 32.52 Palatine Anthology

index Parisinus Gr. 2832

131 119 119; 128–131; 134 5; 19; 40; 52; 57; 64; 93 n.13; 106; 119–120; 123–129 51 n.125 51 32 n.59; 57 120; 124; 126– 127 124 128

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

126–127

Marinus Life of Proclus

126–127

Martial 2.86.1–2

67–68

Martianus Capella De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii

147

Book 7 Book 9 Book 13 ‘Book 15’

Index of Sources and Passages Cited  185

Meleager (Gow/Page) 1.30 12–13 65

4; 51 51 n.125 51 n.125

Moero (Powell) fr. 1.9–10

36

Musaeus (Bernabé) frr. 83–84

36

Nicias (Gow/Page) 4

47

Optatian Porfyry (Polara) Carm. 15 Carm. 15.14–15 Carm. 19 Carm. 20 (Organ) Carm. 25 Carm. 26 (Altar)

12–14; 37; 91; 101 68 116–117 93; 99 n.27; 118 91 82; 93; 97–102; 109; 115–116; 118 1 106 7–10 100 10–18 100 19–22 100 Carm. 27 (Panpipe) 93; 99 n.27; 118 Carm. 29–30 5; 91; 110 Carm. 30 110 see scholia in Optatianum Ovid Metamorphoses 121 Pachymeres History 3.11 5.20

120 120

Palladas AP 9.5–6

51–52

AP 9.5.4 AP 10.99

51–52 110 n.69

Pamphilus (Gow–Page) 1

47

papyri P. CtYBR 4000 6.28 9.25–33 19.33 P. Mil. Vogl. 8.309 P. Par. 1 verso P. Vindob. G 40611

110 n.69 110 n.69 110 n.69 58 108 n.63 57–58

Paul the Silentiary Descriptio Sanctae Sophiae

124

Paulus (Lindsay) 51.23–25

66

Pausanias 10.26.2

43

Philicus SH 676–677 SH 677

27 n.39; 82 26–27

Philitas (Lightfoot) frr. 6–7 test. 1 test. 5 test. 5.5–6 test. 18–19 test. 21–23 test. 22 test. 23 test. 24–26 Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι fr. 13 Dettori

52 103; 164 103 85 7 7 80; 85 164 7 7; 23; 80 21

Physiologus (Byz.) 6

75

186  Index of Sources and Passages Cited Plato Phaedrus 258e–259d Symposium

79 25 n.29 23; 79

Plautus Amphitruo 166

63

Pliny the Elder NH 10.3–5

54

Pliny the Younger Ep. 5.3.2

68–69

Porphyrion Comm. in Hor. Carm. 3.1.2

58–59

Posidippus (Austin/Bastianini) Epigr. 1–16 Epigr. 118 Epigr. 122.6

109 77 n.115 30 n.45

Propertius 4.1.64

9

Ptolemy SH 712

104

Quintilian Institutio oratoria 9.4.90

68

scholia – in Aristophanem Ecclesiazusae 355 52 n.131 – scholia in Hephaestionem (Consbruch) p. 275.26–29 32 – in Homerum Iliad 3.182 34

Odyssey 9.364 19.183 – in Optatianum – in technopaegnia (Wendel) p. 341.11–12 p. 343.16 Septuagint Si. 11.30 Simias (Fränkel) fr. 5.1 fr. 6 fr. 7 fr. 8 fr. 8.2 fr. 17 Apollo frr. 1–2 fr. 1 fr. 1.4 fr. 1.7–11 fr. 1.7–8 fr. 1.7 fr. 1.8 fr. 1.9–13 fr. 1.10–11 fr. 1.10 fr. 1.11 fr. 2 Axe

1 2–4 6 7

44 44 92

64 64

25

35 n.71 36 n.74 35; 38; 42; 104 n.44 53 n.136; 104 n.44 35 53 n.136; 104 n.44 18 23; 42 35 n.71 39; 41 41 n.94 39; 41 39 41 n.94 44–46 35; 38–39 39; 41 42 19; 23; 27; 32; 42; 52; 64–65; 93; 96; 112–113; 117; 126; 128– 129; 164 53 43 53 52

Index of Sources and Passages Cited  187

Egg

1–8 3 4 5–6 7–12 7–8 8 9–20 9–10 9 11 12 13–19 16–19 18 20 Epigrams frr. 22–[28c] frr. 22–26 frr. 22–23 fr. 22 fr. 23 fr. 23.5 frr. 24–25 fr. 24.2 fr. 24.3 fr. 24.4 fr. 25 fr. 26 Glosses fr. 29 fr. 30 fr. 31 fr. 32 Gorgo frr. 3–[3a] fr. 3 fr. [3a] Months

6; 8; 19–20; 28; 30–34; 39; 43– 44; 46; 49–50; 63 n.48; 65; 76– 77; 81; 93; 108; 112–113; 117; 128–129; 131; 139; 164 49 30; 125 77; 104 n.44 82 31 125 31 31 30–31; 65 31 32 49 41 43 49 31; 49; 125 19 51 23; 51 n.125 29–30 41 28 24–26; 46 49 49 43 n.102 30 n.46; 48 51 n.125 7; 18; 26; 80 21–23 22–23 21–23 21–23 18 13; 36–38 35 n.69; 42

fr. 4 Polymetra frr. 9–14 frr. 9–10 fr. 9 fr. 10 fr. 11

18–19

19; 133 32 104 n.44 38 13; 32–33; 43; 114 fr. 12 32 fr. 13 32 fr. 14 32; 38 Wings of Eros 6; 19; 23; 27; 32; 42; 64–65; 72– 74; 76; 93; 96; 112–113; 126; 129–131 1 106 2 42; 76 3 73 9 73 11–12 73 see scholia in technopaegnia Sotades (Powell) fr. 2 fr. 3 frr. 4a–c fr. 4a fr. 4c

66–67 58; 63 66 63; 68 63

Stesichorus (Finglass) Sack of Troy fr. 100

23

Stobaeus 4.17.5 56.10–11

52 52

Strabo 14.2.13 14.2.19

20 20

Strato Comicus (Kassel/Austin) fr. 1

80

188  Index of Sources and Passages Cited Suda s.v. Ἀλέξανδρος Αἰτωλός s.v. Ἀντίμαχος, Κολοφώνιος s.v. Οὐηστῖνος Ἰούλιος s.v. Σιμμίας Ῥόδιος s.v. Φιλήτας

20 20 102 18–20; 28 20; 52; 164

Suetonius De grammaticis et rhetoribus 3 84 n.133 Nero 39 107 Theocritus Idylls 7 13.62–63 18.41–42 22.37–52 30.18 [Theocritus] Syrinx

Timon of Phlius SH 786 Tinajero, Cesárea Zion

79 41 41 42 41 2; 93–97; 112; 114; 129–130

28

Trichas (Consbruch) p. 383.28–29

33

Varro (Astbury) 79 131–132 275 540

71 71 71 71

Vergil Ecloges 8.11

146

Vestinus, Julius Altar

7–13 7–10 7 14–17 14–15 23–24 Vulgate Hebr. 13.14

112; 131–132

80; 82; 93–94; 99–106; 109; 112; 114–116; 118–119 100 125 106 100 125 3

145

General Index acrostich 89–90; 94; 101; 103–105; 108 n.63; 111; 115; 135; 138 n.8; 156 n.49 Aelian 47 n.119; 164 aetiological wordplay 38 n.82 Agrippina 107; 109 Alcman 48 Alexander of Aetolia 20; 29 Alexandria 29; 86 n.140; 102–103; 106; 109; 115; 137; 163–164 see Museum Alexandrianism 9; 10 n.28; 56; 59; 106; 110 n.69; 122 n.38; 137; 150; 163–164 Alfred of Sareshel 121 alliteration 37–38; 55; 87; 117 altar 29; 94; 102 n.36; 114–116; 128; 131 see Tabulae Iliacae see Index of Sources and Passages Cited – Dosiadas, Altar; Optatian Porfyry, Carm. 26 (Altar); Vestinus, Julius, Altar Anacreon (Anacreontea) 59 n.33; 70; 120 anagram 135; 141; 146; 153–154; 158–159; 161 n.58 Aneau, Barthélémy 165 Antimachus of Colophon 20 antiquarianism 54–55; 59; 84–85 Apollinaire, Guillaume 112; 132 Apollonius of Rhodes 103 Aratus 36 n.76; 104 Archilochus 5 Aristophanes — parabasis 83 Aristophanes of Byzantium 29; 114 Aristotle 44–48; 121; 123; 163 Athenaeus 21–23; 164 Athens 29; 94 Atticism 102; 115 Augustan poets 7 see Horace; Ovid; Propertius Augustine 163 Augustus 106 Ausonius 9–11; 14; 133; 139 n.14; 163

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110640106-009

banquet — as a metaphor 82–88; 110–111; 113; 163 — Greek symposium 105–106; 116 — literary symposium 79; 83–88 — λογόδειπνον 85–87 — Roman conuiuium 4; 78–80; 84; 86–87 — scholarly symposium 86 n.140 — sympotic poetry 58; 70 see sumptuary laws; technopaegnia at symposia [Baruch] 74 Beowulf 3–4; 43; 50 Besantinus see Vestinus, Julius Bielski, Joachim 140 n.17; 153 bilingualism 110 n.69 Bion 53 Boethius 121–123 Bolaño, Roberto 112; 131–132 book (poetry book) 19; 28–35; 55–57; 60; 77–78; 82–88; 93; 110; 113; 114; 124–125; 127; 160 — companion poems 24–26; 96–97 Brisson, Barnabé 164–165 bucolicism 25; 40–43; 50; 53; 97; 114; 163 Byzantium — calligraphy 126 — education 6; 121–122; 130 — Latin-to-Greek translation 120–122; 124–125 — MSS 3; 5; 64; 93 n.13; 119–120; 123– 135 — — drawings 126–131; 133 see Index of Sources and Passages Cited — manuscripts — rhetoric 124–125 — scholarship 6; 119–134 — visual culture 119–134 Callierges, Zacharias 136 Callimachus 8–11; 14; 20; 38 n.82; 52– 53; 103; 122 n.38; 163

190  General Index carmen figuratum see grid-poem; technopaegnia, pattern poetry as a genre Carroll, Lewis 117 Casimir see Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz Catullus 9–11; 14; 55; 59; 71 canon (literary) 1–14; 92–93; 111; 121; 165 Cephalas 120 Charisius 60; 62; 64 compound words 44; 55; 80; 82–83; 162 Constantine the Great 90–93; 100 Constantine the Rhodian 119–120; 123– 129; 134 Constantinople 120; 124 conuiuium see banquet court literature 26–27; 29; 89–111; 124– 125; 133 Cracow 136; 139–142; 144; 149; 154; 158 Daphnis (grammarian) 84 n.133 darkness 42; 45 n.111; 50; 71; 76 dialects (Greek) 21; 62 n.46 — Cretan 20–22 — Doric 96; 104 n.44 see Atticism Dionysius Periegetes 10 n.28; 103 n.43; 115 Dionysus 27; 33; 43; 104 n.44 ecphrasis 72–73; 113; 116; 123–125 education — Greek paideia 105; 111 see Byzantium, education; Jesuit education emblem 151; 156; 158; 165 Engerd, Johann 165 engraving 141 n.19; 143; 148 n.35; 151; 155–156; 158; 160 Ennius 66–69 Epic Cycle 42–43 epigram 19–20; 24–26; 28–30; 38; 40– 41; 46–52; 57–58; 67; 72; 82–83; 91; 104; 106–111; 117–118; 124–127; 135; 138–139; 145; 154–155; 156 n.49–50; 157–160 see technopaegnia and epigram epyllion 57–58

Eudoxus 108 n.63 exile 90; 99 fantasy see supernatural filologia interna 23–26 Flavius Felix 2 Florence 136 Florentinus 2 Fränkel, Hermann 17 Gellius 5; 59; 78–80; 82–87 gender uncertainty 71–77 Genoa 124 Giunta, Filippo 136 graffiti see Pompeian graffiti Graz 138 n.9; 143; 150 grid-poem 91; 118–119; 133 griphus see riddle Hadrian 93–94; 100; 102–103; 106; 115 Half-dogs 41–45; 49–50 hapax 21; 24; 26; 28 n.39; 81 Harasymowicz, Jerzy 40; 50 Henrichmann, Jakob 140 n.14 Hephaestion 5; 19; 27; 33; 128 hieroglyphic poem 135; 140 n.16; 153; 157–161 Hilchen, David 154 Holobolus, Manuel 111; 120–134 Homer 3; 13–14; 18 n.6; 21–26; 37; 42– 43; 47; 49; 52; 105; 125 n.43 see scholarship, Homeric Horace 10; 58–59; 70; 77; 106; 164 hymn 19; 26–27; 33; 38; 43; 58; 82; 91; 104 n.44 hypothesis (metrical) see Aristophanes of Byzantium intermediality see seeing isopsephy 106–111 isosyllabic 37 Janicki, Klemens 153 Jesuit education 6–7; 10; 111; 122; 135– 165 jewels, jewelled style 109

General Index  191

Kepler, Johannes 138 n.9 Kern, Ludwik Jerzy 117 Klinger, Johann 139–165 Kochanowski, Jan 138 n.8; 140 n.17; 153 Kochanowski, Samuel 141–143; 148 n.35; 151; 156; 158–159 Kubiak, Zygmunt 40 Leonides of Alexandria 106–111 lexicography 5; 20–26; 48–49; 78–81; 85; 102; 115 Library of Alexandria see Museum Lubomirski, Mikołaj 138–165 Lucretius 62 ludus poeticus see technopaegnia Lukashenko, Alexander 89; 111 Lutatius Catulus 54; 84 n.133 Luxorius 2 Lycophron 4; 18; 96; 114; 129–130; 134 Lycurgus of Athens 29 n.44 magic square 115 makarismos 99 marginality (literary) 1–14; 50–53; 56; 59; 77–78; 111; 137; 165 Marsyas (grammarian) 21–22 Martial 67–68; 163 Meleager of Gadara 50–52; 57 memory 85–86 metapoetic themes 24; 28 n.39; 30; 39; 41; 43; 46–53; 65; 67–69; 77; 80–88; 92; 94 n.16; 100–102; 108–111; 115; 117; 124–125; 139; 147; 160–163 see banquet as a metaphor; programme (literary and intellectual) metre — elegiac 18–19; 57–58; 117; 155; 158 — experimental see metre, polymetry — hexameter 13–14; 18; 32; 34–36; 39; 68; 91; 97; 101; 111; 114; 155; 158– 160 see monosyllable; tetracolon — iambic metres 32; 58; 84; 86; 97; 108 n.63; 114; 158–159; 164 — ionic metres 61–72; 77 — polymetry 6; 8; 19; 27; 30–33; 38; 43; 57–61; 65; 77; 81–82; 85; 88; 91; 96–

97; 108; 113–115; 126–127; 129; 133; 144; 153; 155; 158 — Saturnian verse 60–61; 64 Michael VIII 111; 124 monosyllable 12; 35; 138–139 n.10; 139 n.14; 163; 165 monsters and monstrosity 2–4; 10–11; 42–43; 45; 50 Monty Python 82 Moscow 40 n.91 Museum 102–103; 115; 137–138; 140; 144; 162–163 neoterism 6 n.19; 10 n.28; 27; 30; 56; 80; 92 n.10 see Alexandrianism Nero 107 Nonius 56 Nysa (Neisse) 152 Olomouc 136–165 orality 28; 34–35; 38 n.82; 57; 75; 142 Ovid 91 paignion 52; 55; 108 palindrome 67–70; 135; 138 n.8 Palladas 110 n.69 papyri 5; 29; 57–58; 78 paradox 31; 42–49; 72–74; 76; 100–101; 115 Parthenius 57 Pavlovský, Stanislaus 145 peplos (a gift of Michael VIII to Genoa) 124–125 Philicus 26–27; 30; 32 n.59; 53; 58; 81– 82; 103 Philitas 7; 20–21; 23; 52; 80; 85; 103; 108; 164 Physiologus 75 Planudes 120–121 Plato 23 Plautus 59 n.33 Plutarch 54 poesis artificiosa see technopaegnia polemic (literary) 83 see Zoilus Polygnotus 43

192  General Index Pompeian graffiti 116–118; 131 Pompilius, Paulus 140 n.14 Pontanus, Georg Barthold 155; 165 Poppaea 107 Posidippus 57; 109 Prague 136; 143 priamel 100; 109 print 6; 118; 132; 135–165 Priscian 85 programme (literary and intellectual) 8 n.21; 9; 28 n.39; 31; 57; 77–78; 107– 109; 123; 125; 139; 141; 158 see metapoetic themes pseudepigraphon 114; 164 Propertius 9; 163 Ptolemies 27; 29; 103–107; 109; 164 Rabanus Maurus 119 religion — Cybele cult 71 — mysteries 82; 162–163 — paganism (as opposed to Christianity) 119; 162 — Roman 74–76; 99 see Dionysus; hymn Rhodes 19–20; 38; 42; 53 n.136; 103; 104 n.44 rhopalic patterns 13; 33–35; 37; 101; 111; 114; 140; 156 n.49 riddle 48; 52 n.132; 72–74; 88; 90; 92; 96–97; 105; 108; 114; 122; 126; 129; 135; 138 n.8; 156 n.49; 163 see paignion; technopaegnia ring-composition 39; 41 n.94; 124 Rome 99; 102; 115–116; 136; 156 n.49 Rosinus, Johannes 164 Rousselet, Claude 165 royal patronage see court literature Salmasius 128; 136 Sappho 5; 30 n.45 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 165 scholarship — ancient 7; 17–28; 33; 39; 52–53; 68; 76; 80–82; 85–86; 92; 120; 163 — Homeric 13–14; 21–26; 44; 80; 104– 105

see Byzantium, scholarship scoptic poetry 58; 83 n.131; 110 seeing 106; 112–134; 160–161 see Byzantium, MSS, drawings; Byzantium, visual culture; ecphrasis; emblem; Pompeian graffiti; Tabulae Iliacae; vase paintings self-referentiality see metapoetic themes Sepumius see Pompeian graffiti silua rerum 161 Sophocles 23; 28–30; 41; 51 n.125 Sotades 32 n.59; 58; 61–63; 65–69; 76 Sosibius 104–105 sphragis 19; 25 n.29; 33; 77 Stesichorus 23; 43 stones see jewels, jewelled style sumptuary laws 54; 84 supernatural 41–43; 45; 54; 75–76; 109; 111 Susliga, Wawrzyniec 2 n.6; 138; 154; 164– 165 symposium see banquet Tabulae Iliacae 102 n.36; 108 n.63; 115– 116; 131; 133 Tarco, Gregor 155; 165 technopaegnia — and epigram 110; 135 — at symposia 88; 105 n.50; 113 see banquet — Chinese wordplay 108 n.63 — definition 1; 55–56; 64; 113; 135; 139– 140 n.14 — pattern poetry as a genre 112–134 — the denigrating discourse on - 1–4; 50– 52; 130 see acrostich; aetiological wordplay; alliteration; anagram; compound words; emblem; grid-poem; hieroglyphic poem; isopsephy; isosyllabic; magic square; metre, polymetry; monosyllable; paignion; palindrome; rhopalic patterns; riddle; seeing; tetracolon Terentius — prologues 83 tetracolon 39

General Index  193

Theocritus 17–18; 20; 40; 53; 114–115; 119; 129; 163–164 — Aeolic poems 32 n.59 Theophrastus 47 n.119 Thirty Years’ War 136 Tolkien, J.R.R. 3–4 translation — Arabic-to-Latin 121 — Greek-to-Syriac 121 — Syriac-to-Arabic 121 see Byzantium, Latin-to-Greek translation Trichas 33 Trzecieski, Andrzej 153 Tuwim, Julian 136 n.3 Varro 55; 85–86 vase paintings 113; 116 Venantius Fortunatus 119 Vergil 53; 163 uersus cancrini see palindrome

uersus intexti see grid-poem uersus recurrentes see palindrome Vespasian 107 Vestinus, Julius 10 n.28; 93–94; 99–111 Vienna 136–137; 143; 150 visuality see seeing voice — animal communication 44–50 — human speech 44–46 — musical animals 24–25; 40; 46–49 Vossius 136 walk (literary) 79; 86 Willenberger, Joachim 152 Willes, Richard 136; 138–139 n.10; 156 n.49; 165 wordplay see technopaegnia Zajdlicz, Daniel 144 n.27; 149; 157 Zoilus 156 n.49–50, 157 n.51; 159