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  • Fantasy and Metaphor in Meleager
  • Kathryn Gutzwiller

meleager of gadara is one of those increasingly rare greek authors whose works are somewhat known to many classicists but whose influence on ancient and later literature remains underappreciated. Meleager’s anthology of Greek epigrams called the Garland produced Latin imitations shortly after its creation in the early first century b.c.e., and allusions to Meleager’s own, mostly erotic poems are found in prominent programmatic passages of Latin poetry. Examples include the first three poems and the last poem of the Catullan liber, the opening of Propertius’s Monobiblos, the first speech in Vergil’s Eclogue 1, and the opening lines of Tibullus 1.2.1 I would assert that as a model for Latin erotic poetry Meleager rivals Callimachus in both direct allusions and as a source of topoi and imagery. Alessandro Barchiesi has spoken of the Garland as a model for elegant poetry books because of its careful arrangements,2 but what was it about Meleager’s own poetry that appealed to Roman poets? Pointing toward an answer to that question, I here examine [End Page 233] some unique features of Meleager’s poetry involving his use of fantasy and metaphor, which distinguish him from the epigrammatists he anthologized.

When poets of the third century b.c.e. adapted verse inscriptions to book epigrams, the most paradoxical new type of epigram was the erotic, because there was no tradition of lover’s speech versified for inscription. To cite a motif shared by Meleager and Catullus, a lover’s words are written not on stone, but on wind and water (Anth. Pal. 5.8; Catull. 70).3 In the erotic section of the Garland Meleager worked variation after variation on the tropes of Asclepiades, Callimachus, and other epigrammatists; by grouping these poems in short sequences on related themes, he gave his own compositions an intertextual context through juxtaposition with his models. But despite persistent, acknowledged borrowing, Meleager’s epigrams have a different texture and effect. He takes his amatory mode to a place far from inscription, to a place of interiority where image and fantasy interact to convey the felt experience of desire. Like other emotions, desire cannot be seen directly, but may be intuited by those with similar experience. Callimachus explains in one epigram that he can spot the hidden heartache of a fellow symposiast just as a thief recognizes a thief (Anth. Pal. 12.134). For Meleager it is not enough to know it when you see it. He is rather concerned to convey directly to the reader’s senses, through words and imagery, what it is like to be a desiring self, someone who cannot escape the cycle of desire and longing for some delicate youth or some charming woman. His method of doing so is to concretize in image, and even to site in the body, eros itself in the form of god and feeling and beloved, all together. For Meleager, the truth of the soul’s experience of desire can only be told through metaphor, dream, and fantasy.

A long sequence of epigrams by anthologized poets from the erotica section of the Garland is preserved in the Greek Anthology. As I showed some years ago, it begins with an epigram cluster thematizing a symposium setting with wine, garlands, love, and song.4 There we find a pair of poems on Meleager’s beloved Heliodora (Anth. Pal. 5.136):

ἔγχει καὶ πάλιν εἰπέ, πάλιν πάλιν, Ἡλιοδώρας·    εἰπέ, σὺν ἀκρήτῳ τὸ γλυκὺ μίσγ’ ὄνομα.καί μοι τὸν βρεχθέντα μύροις καὶ χθιζὸν ἐόντα,    μναμόσυνον κείνας, ἀμφιτίθει στέφανον. [End Page 234] δακρύει φιλέραστον, ἰδού, ῥόδον, οὕνεκα κείναν    ἄλλοθι κοὐ κόλποις ἡμετέροις ἐσορᾷ.5

Pour and say again, again and again, “for Heliodora.”    Say it, mingling her sweet name with pure wine.And crown me with that garland soaked in scent, the one    from yesterday, in remembrance of her.Look, a rose, the friend of lovers, weeps because it sees    her not in my arms, but elsewhere.6

The companion epigram is as follows (Anth. Pal. 5.137):

ἔγχει τᾶς Πειθοῦς καὶ Κύπριδος Ἡλιοδώρας    καὶ πάλι τᾶς αὐτᾶς ἁδυλόγου Χάριτος·αὐτὰ γὰρ μί’ ἐμοὶ γράφεται θεός. ἇς τὸ ποθεινόν    οὔνομ’ ἐν ἀκρήτῳ συγκεράσας πίομαι.

Pour a cup for Persuasion and Cypris Heliodora,    and again for the same sweet-speaking Grace,since for me she is written as one goddess. Her much-longed-for    name I will drink down, mixed with pure wine.

The call for the slave to pour wine, an old poetic motif, signals the symposium setting. Yet the dramatized speech act...

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