Δωρίχα, ὀστέα μὲν σὰ πάλαι †κοιμήσατο δεσμῶνχαίτης† ἥ τε μύρων ἔκπνοος ἀμπεχόνη,ᾗ ποτε τὸν χαρίεντα περιστέλλουσα Χάραξονσύγχρους ὀρθρινῶν ἥψαο κισσυβίων·Σαπφῷαι δὲ μένουσι φίλης ἔτι καὶ μενέουσιν 5ᾠδῆς αἱ λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες.οὔνομα σὸν μακαριστόν, ὃ Ναύκρατις ὧδε φυλάξειἔστ’ ἂν ἴῃ Νείλου ναῦς ἐφ’ ἁλὸς πελάγη.

The ἰαματικά, a collection of seven short epigrams about healing grouped together and so labelled in the Milan papyrus attributed to Posidippus, present another useful source of information about the cult and cures of Asclepius (AB 95–101;P Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, XIV.30–XV.22). Brief though the epigrams are (all are four lines in length except the first, which is eight lines), they accord well with the picture of the cult presented by material, epigraphic and other literary evidence.

The aim of this paper is to contextualize Posidippus' Kairos epigram (=142 A–B) within the discursive strategies of representation enacted by Hellenistic ecphrastic poetry. From this perspective I will focus on the much-debated line 12 of the Kairos epigram, arguing for a possible metaphorical interpretation of καί ἐν προθύροιc θῆκε διδακαλίην. This interpretation of line 12 sheds light also on Posidippus' involvement in the broader intellectual debates of his time and allows us to contextualize his epigram against the (...) roughly coeval Epicurean reflection on the "right time.". (shrink)

This short note deals with an epigram preserved by the Anthologia Palatina Book IX (360) attributed to a Metrodorus whom, especially for chronological reasons, one tends to identify with the Epicurean Metrodorus of Lampsacus, at least from the Phoinix von Kolophon by Gustav Adolph Gerhard (1909). This epigram looks like a “symmetrical” polemical reply to the immediately preceding one (AP IX 359), which can be attributed (but not without difficulty) to the Hellenistic poet Posidippus. The careful historical-philosophical examination of (...) the contents of this alleged Epicurean epigram (360) leads to believe that it is basically impossible that the author is an Epicurean philosopher such as Metrodorus. (shrink)

This article re-evaluates the 22 so-called Tabulae Iliacae. Where most scholars (especially in the English speaking world) have tended to dismiss these objects as 'trivial' and 'confused', or as 'rubbish' intended for the Roman 'nouveaux riches', this article relates them to the literary poetics of the Hellenistic world, especially Greek ecphrastic epigram. Concentrating on the tablets' verbal inscriptions, the article draws attention to three epigraphic features in particular. First, it explores the various literary allusivenesses of the two epigrammatic invocations inscribed (...) on tablets lA and 2NY; second, it examines the Alexandrian diagrammatic word-games on the reverse of seven Tabulae (2NY, 3C, 4N, 50, 7Ti, 15Ber, 20Par), relating these to the pictorial-poetic games of the Greek technopaegnia; third, it discusses the possible hermeneutic significance of associating six tablets with 'Theodorean techne' (lA, 2NY, 3C, 4N, 50, 20Par), comparing a newly discovered epigram by Posidippus (67 A-B). All of these allusions point to a much more erudite purpose and clientele: the tablets toyed with Hellenistic visual-verbal relations at large. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Epigram into Lyric: Francis Bacon Translates from the Greek Anthology GORDON BRADEN If sir francis bacon did not exactly invent modern science and technology, he did predict it, with remarkable accuracy. The unfinished project of which the writings of his later years were to be component parts is a reformation of the life of the human mind from the ground up—“a complete Instauration of the arts and sciences and (...) all the learning of mankind, raised upon proper foundations ”1—and the most (arguably the only) successful such plan ever drafted. It foresaw both the previously unimaginable worldly triumph of the human race over nature in the centuries that followed and the intellectual means by which that triumph was to be achieved. He also wrote poetry. It is no surprise that someone of his time and place and station should have done so, and its existence is not in itself remarkable. Not much of it has survived, and we have no particular reason to think there was more; and, despite the extensive scholarly and critical scrutiny that Bacon’s work has received, very little attention has been given to this part of it. Still, one poem has achieved something of an afterlife and is worth attention, especially alongside the triumphalism of Bacon’s Magna Instauratio. It concerns hopelessness. Serious attention has been given to Bacon’s remarks on literature and the imagination, including his proposal, amid all his other plans, for what he calls “literary history” (historia literarum).2 But his poems are a different matter. They can be found in the great 19th-century edition of Bacon’s collected works, tucked in between his Prayers and his Christian Paradoxes.3 Most of the poems are from a small volume of psalm translations published under his own name the year before arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 his death; these are now available in one of the published volumes of the new Oxford edition of Bacon’s works.4 There is also 12-line poem in hexameter couplets that begins sounding like a translation of Horace’s Integer vitae but goes on to be a fairly straightforward completion of its opening thesis and never gets around to sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking Lalage; a manuscript in the British Library attributes it to Bacon, though it is also printed in two of Thomas Campion’s books of airs as if it were one of his.5 My own interest is in the one remaining poem, a 32-line translation of a 10-line poem from the Greek Anthology (9.359 in the Palatine Anthology, though known in Bacon’s time from the Planudean). It first appears in print in 1626, anonymously, as “Certaine verses concerning the present estate of Man,” appended with other “characters, and many other witty conceits ” to an edition of Thomas Overbury’s poem “A Wife.”6 Three years later the classical scholar Thomas Farnaby prints it with an ascription to Bacon in a selection of poems from the Greek Anthology, along with the original text of the Greek poem, a Latin translation of it, and the editor’s facing translation of Bacon’s poem back into Greek.7 Bacon’s poem can also be found, both complete and in fragmentary form, in quite a few manuscripts, which are being collated for the first time for The Oxford Francis Bacon, though the editors have not yet decided where to put it. Isolated citations and quotations of the poem occur over the next several centuries; Francis Turner Palgrave includes it in his much-reprinted Golden Treasury, with the title “Life.”8 But there has been little discussion of the poem. It is the subject of an excellent scholarly article by Herbert Grierson, but that was over a hundred years ago.9 Paul Fussell has some sharp observations on Bacon’s use of his stanza form, but they fit onto a single page.10 Other comment is mostly incidental. I want to gather and slightly enhance what has been learned or said about the poem, and explore why it has snagged my interest. The Greek original is variously attributed; the most commonly mentioned name is Posidippus, probably the Mace50 epigram into... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in ContextPeter E. KnoxKathryn J. Gutzwiller. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp.Cloth, $45.The publication of Alan Camerons The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes in 1993 set a coronis upon one stage in the efforts of modern scholars to sort out the untidy garden that we know as ancient Greek epigram. We now (...) know as much about the history of this corpus as we are likely to discover without the introduction of new evidence, and scholarly attention might logically be expected to return to the interpretation and criticism of these poems. Transmitted for the most part in the socalled Palatine Anthology and filtered through the agency of anthologists ancient and medieval, the epigrams of the ancient practitioners of this minor genre have tended to be studied individually, [End Page 628] like gemstones dislodged from their original settings. The luster of each piece may be easily admired, but what has been lost is the color and clarity that is imparted by the contrast with its neighbors. The ambitious task that Kathryn Gutzwiller has set herself in this closely argued and learned book is no less than to recover from the collecta membra of the Palatine Anthology the contours of the epigram books of nine poets from the early Hellenistic period to Meleager in the first century B.C.E.The opening chapter provides an introduction, which, taken together with the following chapter ("Hellenistic Epigram Books"), lays the foundation for the remainder of the work and establishes its basic premise, that all the Hellenistic epigrammatists composed their work for "publication" in carefully constructed books, arranged on principles which Gutzwiller can recover. This is the basis for what she terms "a new interpretative strategy" in the criticism of Hellenistic epigrams, "to read them as if"—her emphasis—"we knew their place in historical collections" (7). The remainder of the book is occupied by her reconstructions of the epigram books of Anyte, Nossis, Leonidas of Tarentum, Asclepiades, Posidippus, Hedylus, Callimachus, Antipater of Sidon, and Meleager. Readers who are convinced by her arguments in these opening chapters will be swept along by her hypothetical arrangements, which she supports with close readings of individual poems set in their new contexts. Others, myself included, will remain suspicious of the solidity of the foundations of this edifice, while still finding much to admire in her sophisticated interpretations of individual poems.Much of Gutzwiller's theoretical underpinning depends upon rather strict adherence to the orthodox view of what she characterizes as the "Callimachean aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented" (4). The Hellenistic epigram books that she posits correspond neatly with Callimachean aesthetics so described. She rejects out of hand Cameron's arguments for the social role of epigram in a sympotic setting, in favor of the bookish background described by (e.g.) Peter Bing. The hypothesis of a neat and well– ordered world of Hellenistic poetry books, as outlined by some modern scholars, is not undisputed, but readers will not hear much about that here. Gutzwiller sweeps aside skeptical challenges to this picture, and the possibility, for example, that Callimachus produced a collected edition of his poetry, advanced only as a hypothesis by Rudolf Pfeiffer, is here (19) represented as "the probability... that Callimachus published his complete oeuvre, ordered and divided into books." Her summary of the papyrus evidence paints a far more stable picture of the situation of books in the manuscript culture of the Hellenistic world than the evidence safely allows. For Gutzwiller, any references to the of a poet "indicate an authorially compiled epigram book" (20). This naïve extension of Pfeiffer's theory of the composition of a "Collected Works" of Callimachus, and unswerving allegiance to the communis opinio of Callimachean aesthetics, are recurring themes in Gutzwiller's reconstructions of ancient epigram books. Having settled upon the essential aesthetic that determines the [End Page 629] configuration of the book, it remains only to attach the surviving poems to this framework. Not surprisingly, the reconstructed books then offer further confirmation of the underlying assumptions. On this shaky foundation, for example, Gutzwiller... (shrink)

Epigram AP XVI 275, by Posidippus, contains an ecphrasis of a statue created by the sculptor Lysippus that is an allegory of Kairos – not in expository form but rather in the form of a dialogue of questions and answers, with the aim of revealing the hidden meaning of its peculiar iconographic features. Lysippus’ statue and Posidippus’ epigram are the oldest testimonies existing in art and in the literary sources for Kairos, which was the subject of other descriptions (...) and of a rich iconography starting at the end of the Hellenistic age. They contain discrepancies in the selection of the features characterizing the concept, which possibly derive from a change in the meaning and the role of the allegory. The text provides an indication of the frequency with which certain abstractions were personified and deified in the Hellenistic age, sometimes to the point of becoming an object of worship. (shrink)

Myron's bronze sculpture of a cow proved an extraordinarily popular subject for Greek and Latin epigram over an exceptionally long time-span (Palatine Anthology 9.713-42, 793-98, Posidippus 66 A-B, Ausonius 63-71, Epigrammata Bobiensia 10-13). But why the fascination? This article reads the image as an icon for the poetic simulations of ecphrastic epigram. First, it emphasises the ambivalence with which the poems celebrates the statue's verisimilitude: Myron's bronze cow at once convinces and fails to convince. Second, it relates the mimetic (...) make-believe of the statue to the illusionism of literary epigram, especially epigrams on artworks: the virtually real cow figures the various pretences of the genre, fluctuating between material image, epigraphic inscription, and anthologised text. The more poems added to the series, the more pressing the replicative agenda: Myron's reproduction of a cow keeps on reproducing itself, in ever more playful (and playfully contrived) ways. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Callimachus and His CriticsFrederick T. GriffithsAlan Cameron. Callimachus and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xiv + 534 pp. Cloth, $49.50, £37.50."Elegy was the great preoccupation of the age of Callimachus, and it was naturally the style appropriate for elegy rather than epic that Callimachus addressed in the prologue to his own original and polemical new elegy" (437). Professor Cameron's keenly anticipated argument (outlined in TAPA 122 (...) [1992] 305-12) does not disappoint, especially now that he includes among the "critics" not only such ancient "Telchines" as Asclepiades and Posidippus but also the Roman Callimacheans and "moderns with Hesiodic initiations on the brain" (415). To counter "the curious modern preoccupation with Hellenistic epic and epyllion" (ix), seen most starkly in interpretation of Catullus and the Augustans, Cameron interweaves two ambitious projects.First, the organizing argument is a reconstruction and dating of the Aetia so as to establish that the prologue (frag. 1 Pf.) introduced books 1 and 2 ca. 270 [End Page 339] B.C. amid debates about contemporary elegy. In place of the now generally discredited "feud" with Apollonius over monumental epic, Cameron posits a quarrel with Asclepiades and Posidippus over the epicizing Antimachean mode of elegy. The prologue is not a recusatio of grand epic (a Roman preoccupation); indeed, "... there is no mention of epic in the Aetia prologue" (457), and elegy would be a curious medium for dictating taste in hexameter. Nor does the prologue claim novelty for the Aetia as catalogue-style "Hesiodic elegy," which had been in fashion since the Lyde, and indeed so much so that "it was pseudo-Hesiodic rather than pseudo-Homeric writing that aroused Callimachus's ire" (363). The "Telchines" are the admirers of the Lyde, a poem that Callimachus assails as an "epic pastiche" (483), a monotonous, and the stylistic antithesis of the interesting subjectivity and personal voice demonstrated in his own Cydippe (ca. 279-274). For having compromised the distance of elegy from epic, Antimachus is left pointedly unnamed next to Mimnermus and Philitas (316) and further overshadowed by allusion to Aratus (in, frag. 1.11) as the proponent and paragon of. In sum, the prologue's polemic lies more completely within the moment and between the lines than has been suspected, and entirely within elegy but outside of theory: "So Callimachus's famous literary theories do not really amount to much-as theories" (452).Second, to understand how the Aetia speaks for its age we must understand the age rightly. To provide "a prolegomena to the study of Hellenistic (and so also Roman) poetry" (ix) Cameron pauses frequently in his reconstruction of the Aetia to launch diatribes against the folly of reducing Hellenistic poetry to the aestheticism and obscurantism of the "ivory tower," or to genre inversion (contra Rossi), Buchpoesie (contra Bing), or, worst of all, some "contest of Homer and Hesiod" about big and small epics. This rarefied "Alexandria" existed first in Rome and at a great remove from the continuities of Hellenic culture that shaped Callimachus' "real literary context, a world of cities as well as courts, a world of private symposia and public festivals" (ix). Multibook epics were too rare (contra Ziegler) to require recusatio, while the popularity of short hexameter poems precluded controversies such as are implied by the term of "epyllion" (contra Gutzwiller) or imputed to Theocritus (Id. 7, 13, and 22) and Callimachus (H. Apollo and Hecale). "To judge from the debate about the Lyde, it was elegy that preoccupied the more reflective poets and critics of the age" (451).Only a scholar with Cameron's range, good ear, and courage could undertake a two-pronged offensive of this sort, which is not less "original and polemical" than the elegy it celebrates. Recently published papyri, Byzantine misreaders, and the shifty tribe of epigrammatists have all been marshaled with equal authority for what is in part the elegiac pre-history to his distinguished The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford 1993). By the nature of the fragmentary evidence, both the elegy-centered age and its important (if not definitive) Aetia can be reconstructed only at the level of hypothesis, and readers will differ as... (shrink)