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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2014
Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in jeux de mots in Greek poetry. It was especially the discovery of the ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic in Aratus' Phaenomena by J.-M. Jacques in 1960 that stimulated the desire for joining the elite club of those capable of detecting such encrypted messages. This period of intensive Rätselforschung recently found its culmination in the publication of C. Luz's monograph on linguistic games in Greek poetry, in which an impressive variety of these is discussed: acrostics, palindromes, anagrams, isopsephic poems, carmina figurata, and so forth. Yet even Luz's list is incomplete, and the present discussion aims to offer a brief supplement to her admirable book. I will discuss a playful device used by Greek poets which may not be as spectacular as acrostics but beats them in one hardly negligible respect – that a plausible new discovery may be easier to make in this field.
1 Jacques, J.-M., ‘Sur un acrostiche d'Aratos (Phén. 783–787)’, REA 62 (1960), 48–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Luz, C., Technopaignia: Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung (Leiden, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Luz's book will now replace Ohlert's, K.Rätsel und Rätselspiele der alten Griechen (Berlin, 1912).Google Scholar See now also Kwapisz, J., Petrain, D., and Szymański, M. (edd.), The Muse at Play: Riddles and Wordplay in Greek and Latin Poetry (Berlin, 2013).Google Scholar
3 But see Luz (n. 2), 251 n. 26.
4 Behaghel, O., ‘Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern’, IF 25 (1909), 110–42.Google Scholar
5 Wilkinson, L.P., Golden Latin Artistry (Cambridge, 1963), 176.Google Scholar
6 E.g. PGM 13.207–8. See also Stanford, W.B., The Sound of Greek: Studies in the Greek Theory and Practice of Euphony (Berkeley, CA, 1967), 81–2.Google Scholar
7 For a succinct discussion, see Katz, J.T., ‘Inherited poetics’, in Bakker, E.J. (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Malden, MA, 2010), 357–69Google Scholar, at 366–7. Katz's example comes from Cicero (Fam. 5.2.10): si acerbe, si crudeliter, si sine causa sum a tuis oppugnatus.
8 On the importance of the number three in Greek and Roman culture, see D. Lowe, ‘Triple tipple: Ausonius’ Griphus ternarii numeri’, in Kwapisz, Petrain, and Szymański (n. 2), 335–52, at 341–2, with further literature in n. 21. It is no wonder that Ausonius' Griphus, an explicit tribute to the number three, provides a good example of the tricolon crescendo at line 84: Gorgones Harpyiaeque et Erinyes agmine terno.
9 Kirk, G., The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1.20. The quotation is from xxiii.
10 ‘Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus’. Translated by Lattimore, R., The Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer (Chicago, IL, 1990 2), 16.Google Scholar
11 West, M., Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a fuller discussion, see West, M., ‘An Indo-European stylistic feature in Homer’, in Bierl, A., Schmitt, A., and Willi, A. (edd.), Antike Literatur in neuer Deutung: Festschrift für Joachim Latacz anlässlich seines 70. Geburtstags (Munich, 2004), 33–49.Google Scholar
12 ‘[E]ither Aias or Idomeneus or brilliant Odysseus’. Translated by Lattimore (n. 10), 3.
13 ‘Ino, Autonoa, and Agava of the white cheeks’. Translated by Gow, A.S.F., Theocritus (Cambridge, 1952 2), 1.215.Google Scholar
14 Richardson, L.J.D., ‘Further observations on Homer and the Mycenaean tablets’, Hermathena 86 (1955), 50–65, at 57.Google Scholar Richardson planned to devote a larger study to this sort of verse, which, as far as I am aware, he never accomplished.
15 ‘O God, our hope, provider of our eternal home’. Translated by Richardson, N.J., ‘Literary criticism in the exegetical scholia to the Iliad: a sketch’, in Laird, A. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford, 2006), 176–210, at 210.Google Scholar For further examples of Latin rhopalic verses, see Müller, L., De re metrica poetarum Latinorum (Leipzig, 1894 2), 579–80Google Scholar.
16 ‘O son of Atreus, blessed, child of fortune and favour’. Translated by Lattimore (n. 10), 33.
17 Richardson (n. 15), 210.
18 Translated by Richardson (n. 15), 209.
19 Keil, Gramm. Lat. 6.505.27–506.6. Plotius says that he has been unable to find an example in Latin poetry, but adapts Verg. Aen. 1.72 so as to produce quae quarum facie pulcherrima Deiopea. Another Roman grammarian who mentions versus ropalicus is Servius: he illustrates its definition with the line which ingeniously comments on itself and aptly appears at the end of his De centum metris (Keil, Gramm. Lat. 4.467.15–17): Rem tibi confeci, doctissime, dulcisonoram.
20 Another Homeric verse that deserves to be noted in the present discussion is Il. 18.576: πὰρ ποταμὸν κελάδοντα, παρὰ ῥοδανὸν δονακῆα (‘by the river murmuring ever, by the slender, waving reeds’), Homer's most beautiful verse according to Bassett, S.E., The Poetry of Homer (Berkeley, CA, 1938), 156–7Google Scholar (whence the translation), who observes, inter alia, that the first half-verse is almost perfectly rhopalic, whereas the second half-verse is ‘a perfect ῥόπαλον’.
21 Stanford (n. 6), 82.
22 ‘[E]ither bronze or iron or a mass of gold’. Translated by Kovacs, D., Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 185.Google Scholar
23 Barrett, W.S. (ed.), Euripides: Hippolytos (Oxford, 1964), 276–7Google Scholar, ad loc.
24 ‘Bronze, and gold, and difficultly wrought iron’. Translation slightly adapted from Lattimore (n. 10), 68.
25 Note also Soph. Ant. 891: ὦ τύμβος, ὦ νυμϕεῖον, ὦ κατασκαϕής. This line is discussed as a tricolon crescendo by Rutherford, R.B., Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation (Cambridge, 2012), 79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Hellenistische Dichtung in der Zeit des Kallimachos (Berlin, 1924), 1.112.Google Scholar
27 Translated by Sens, A., Asclepiades of Samos: Epigrams and Fragments (Oxford, 2011), 96.Google Scholar
28 McKay, K.J., ‘A Hellenistic medley’, Mnemosyne 21 (1968), 171–5, at 173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Sens (n. 27), 101, ad loc.
30 On Simias, see now esp. Di Gregorio, L., ‘Sui frammenti di Simia di Rhodi, poeta alessandrino’, Aevum 82 (2008), 51–117Google Scholar; Kwapisz, J., The Greek Figure Poems (Leuven, 2013).Google Scholar
31 Powell, J.U., Collectanea Alexandrina (Oxford, 1925), 114Google Scholar, unnecessarily attempts to emend this line, whose correct interpretation was provided by Fränkel, H., De Simia Rhodio (Göttingen, 1915)Google Scholar, 48: σέ ποτε, ὦ νεαρὲ παῖ Διὸς νεβροχίτων, ἀνὰ πύματα [γῆς πέρατα πορευθῆναί ϕασιν] (‘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’). Cf. Di Gregorio (n. 30), 108–9.
32 Fränkel (n. 31), 48. See also J. Kwapisz, ‘Were there Hellenistic riddle books?’, in Kwapisz, Petrain, and Szymański (n. 2), 148–67, at 160–1; Kwapisz (n. 30), 37.
33 ‘O Mars, father of arms, the stoutest of warriors’. My translation.
34 On Philitas' activity as a grammarian, see Bing, P., The Scroll and the Marble: Studies in Reading and Reception in Hellenistic Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI, 2009), 11–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 See e.g. Stewart, S., ‘“Apollo of the shore”: Apollonius of Rhodes and the acrostic phenomenon’, CQ 60 (2010), 401–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 On the technopaegnia, see Strodel, S., Zur Überlieferung und zum Verständnis den hellenistischen Technopaignien (Frankfurt am Main, 2002)Google Scholar; Guichard, L.A., ‘Simias' pattern poems: the margins of the canon’, in Harder, M.A., Regtuit, R.F., and Wakker, G.C. (edd.), Beyond the Canon (Leuven, 2006), 83–103; Kwapisz (n. 30).Google Scholar
37 On Vestinus as the author of the Altar, see Haeberlin, C., ‘Epilegomena ad Figurata Carmina Graeca’, Philologus 49 (1890), 271–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 283–4; and esp. Bowie, E., ‘Hadrian and Greek poetry’, in Ostenfeld, E.N. (ed.), Greek Romans and Roman Greeks: Studies in Cultural Interaction (Aarhus, 2002), 172–97Google Scholar, at 185–9.
38 The text is from Kwapisz (n. 30), 71, translation adapted from Paton, W.R., The Greek Anthology (London, 1918), 5.131.Google Scholar In what follows, I draw on my discussion of Vestinus' Altar in Kwapisz (n. 30), esp. 180.
39 According to Bowie's (n. 37) highly attractive hypothesis, Vestinus used the title ‘Olympian’, which Hadrian adopted after his dedication of the Olympieion in Athens in 131/2, because the poem was composed on this occasion. In return for Hadrian's gift to Athens, numerous altars started to appear in the eastern empire. Vestinus' Altar would be another such charisterion.
40 On the ‘Hellenisticness’ of pre-Hellenistic poetry, including Euripides, see Acosta-Hughes, B., ‘The prefigured Muse: rethinking a few assumptions on Hellenistic poetics’, in Clauss, J.J. and Cuypers, M. (edd.), A Companion to Hellenistic Literature (Malden, MA, 2010), 81–91.Google Scholar