Nikarchos II: Epigrammata. Einleitung, Texte, Kommentar by Andreas Schatzmann (review)

Was Oedipus right in identifying the four-/two-/three-legged creature of the Sphinx’s riddle as man? Not quite: according to a Greek epigram found on papyrus and published by Peter Parsons in 1999 (P.Oxy. 4502 fr. 4), it is the passive homosexual (ἀνὴρ παθικός), who has two legs when standing upright, four when bending over, and three when he’s got an erection. This witty little poem was authored by Nicarchus, a writer of the first century A.D. whose skoptic epigrams (for the most part transmitted through the Palatine Anthology) have received surprisingly little attention. Besides a handful of articles, we had, up until now, only a slim commentary by Hendrich Schulte (1999), which hardly provides more than the most rudimentary explanations. Andreas Schatzmann’s substantial commentary, based on his 2006 dissertation, therefore fills an important gap. Over the past two decades, the genre of epigram has stood at the center of much scholarly work, which, however, has mainly focused on texts from the Hellenistic period. Satirical epigram is still a largely neglected subgenre, though this will hopefully change thanks to contributions such as this or Lucia Floridi’s forthcoming commentary on Lukillios, a contemporary of, and important model for, Nicarchus.

Schatzmann’s introduction offers, inter alia, a good overview of the poems’ transmission, the development of satirical epigram, its place within the history of the genre, and its various non-epigrammatic models. He is surely right in regarding the seeming orality of the poems and their evocation of a sympotic setting as primarily literary phenomena, paying due attention to the significance of a bookish context for the poems’ reception (pace G. Nisbet, whose 2003 study on Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire subscribes to the rather one-sided view that collections of satirical epigram functioned only as handy sources for jokes at dinner parties, and not as literary works).

In the main part of his study, Schatzmann not only offers lemmatized commentaries to each text, but also interpretative discussions of the individual epigrams as well as their overarching themes. His explanations are, in general, very useful and he shows good instincts for the literariness of the poems, even if his readings do not sparkle with sophistication. Indeed, for a discussion of witty texts such as these, Schatzmann’s remarkably dry prose does not always convey the poems’ humor in the most vivid manner. Nonetheless, his commentary contains plenty of valuable insights. I very much like, for instance, his reading of AP 11.110, an agon between three leptoi who compete for the title of “skinnier-than-skinny” (λεπτεπιλεπτότερος, v. 2), as a metapoetic reflection on the agon between epigrammatists trying to outdo each other with ever more grotesque variations on the theme (“Der fiktive Wettstreit wäre gewissermaßen eine Chiffre für den epigrammatischen Agon in der Realwelt; die Grenze der Fiktionalität ein Spiegel für die Grenze, Epigramme über λεπτοί zu gestalten,” 190).

The study contains a few mistakes, most blatantly Schatzmann’s contention that epigrams by a Hellenistic namesake of Nicarchus (hence Nikharchos II in the title!) still stand in the alphabetical order that Meleager chose as an organizing principle for his edition (21): it has long since been shown that only Philip arranged his Garland alphabetically, whereas Meleager’s Stephanos was ordered thematically. Curious, too, is Schatzmann’s translation of vv. 11–12 in AP 11.328, a poem that brilliantly rewrites the division of the universe between Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon in Iliad 15 as the division of a woman sexually shared by three men. The epigram ends: γῆ δ’ ἔμενε ξυνὴ πάντων· ψίαθον γὰρ ἐν αὐτῇ / στρώσαντες τὴν γραῦν ὧδε διειλόμεθα, which Schatzmann renders as “Die Erde aber blieb gemeinsamer Besitz von allen. Eine Matte also legten wir auf der Alten aus, und so teilten wir sie uns auf.” Surely, though, the mat was spread out on the earth (ἐν τῇ γῇ), not on the old woman!

But these minor quibbles aside, one can only welcome Schatzmann’s commentary as an important contribution and helpful tool in...