Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus

Commentary

Commentary 1–12 Proem. The twelve-verse proem falls into three quatrains, demarcated by the absence of connecting particles in vv. 5 and 9, which gives the sense of three fresh starts: 1–4 Zeus and Ptolemy hold analogous positions on heaven and on earth ; 5–8 The great deeds of the heroes of old were celebrated by excellent poets, but I will hymn Ptolemy [i.e., rather than the heroes of old]; 9–12 The woodcutter on Mount Ida does not know where to begin. Where shall I begin, as there is so much material? Each quatrain, however, is also centrally divided into two couplets, in a pattern that allows both the central hierarchy and the way it is to be blurred to emerge clearly: 93 1–2 Zeus, best of gods and a potential subject of song. 3–4 Ptolemy, best of men and a potential subject of song. 5–6 The archaic heroes have already been suitably celebrated. 7–8 I shall hymn Ptolemy, in the form of song appropriate also to the gods. 9–10 The woodcutter on Mount Ida. 11–12 Where do I begin? Already, then, as the proem establishes apparently discrete categories of being, vv. 7–8 test the boundary (as indeed does Ptolemy) between analogy and identity through a self-conscious acknowledgment that the language and mode of praise, the hymnos (cf. above, p. 8, 8n.), has been transferred from god to man. “Likeness” and analogy, diªerence and similarity, are central to the progress of the proem and of the poem as a whole: How is Philadelphus “like” Zeus? How was his birth like Apollo’s? (Cf. Hunter 1996, 79–82.) Though similar patterns of composition by couplet are found also in the shorter openings of Idylls 11, 13, and 16 (cf. Legrand 1898, 388–95; Hunter 1996, 155–56), the asyndetic juxtaposition of verse units and the “paratactic” comparison of vv. 9–12 (cf. 9–10n.), which forces the reader to construct the nature of the similarity or analogy or identity rather than relying on the poet’s guiding “and in just the same way . . . ,” give these notions structural, as well as thematic, prominence in the opening of EP. The poem will proceed by suggesting a whole series of models by which Ptolemy’s position may be understood: his father, Soter; Alexander; Agamemnon; Achilles; Alcinous; and Odysseus are among the most prominent; so, too, Arsinoe is “like” her mother, Berenice (who herself is “like” Aphrodite); Arete; and Hera. It is, however, the analogy and a‹nity between Zeus, the 94 / Commentary on Lines 1–12 (general) king in heaven (cf. v. 132), and earthly kings, an analogy familiar from Homer and, particularly, Hesiod onward (cf. esp. Theog. 68– 103; Nisbet and Hubbard on Hor. Carm. 1.12.50), but now given a new urgency in changed political circumstances (cf. above, pp. 3– 6), which carries—as it does in Callimachus’s Hymn to Zeus—the greatest weight; the proem is framed by “Zeus” (v. 1) and “the best of kings” (v. 12), by ajqanavtwn to;n a[riston (v. 2) ~ to;n a[riston . . . basilhvwn (v. 12), in a “ring composition” that pushes analogy ever closer to identity. In Egyptian tradition the pharaoh was not only the son of the Sun-god, but also his “living image” (cf., for example, Lichtheim 1976, 26 [Hatshepsut]; Assmann 1975, no. 237.34–35; Peden 1994, 21 [Ramses II]; Goodenough 1928, 80–82; Hornung 1957, 130; Hornung 1967; Otto 1971), or in the Greek of the Rosetta Stone, the “living eijkwvn of Zeus” (OGIS 90.3). In the Hesiodic language of “Zeus-nurtured kings,” Greek tradition oªered poets a pattern comfortably “analogous” to this Egyptian mode, and while the scholars of the Museum fretted about the relationship of Homer’s similes, eijkovne", to the narrative in which they were embedded (cf. Clausing 1913), and epic poets experimented with the boundaries of inherited simile technique (cf., for example, Hunter 1993, 129–38), “likeness to the divine” was exploited by the Ptolemies as a powerful political idea. The priamel is a poetic form in which analogy and likeness play a central role (cf. Race 1982; Fantuzzi 2000, 136–38). The structure of the opening of Idyll 17 has an important a‹nity with (and diªerence from) the priamels that open Pindar’s Ol. 1 (a[riston me;n u{dwr ktl.) and...