Ancient Greek Epigrams: Major Poets in Verse Translation

Chapter 8: Meleager

159 Meleager tells us (in epigram I) that he was born in Coele-Syria or Palestine in a city called Gadara, now Umm Qais in present-day Lebanon. Gadara was one of ten cities collectively known as the Decapolis, founded by Greek settlers in land conquered by Alexander the Great and occupied mostly by people of Semitic descent (including Jews), in much the way Alexandria was established in Egypt. Earlier critics such as Henri Ouvré explained some of the characteristics of Meleager’s verse from his birth and upbringing in the Middle East, calling them “Syrian,” but this is somewhat like calling the poetry of Callimachus “Libyan.” Although Meleager Chap ter Eight 160 / Meleager there is some evidence that the religion and practices of local cultures were assimilated by the Hellenistic Greeks in the Middle East, for the most part the Greek rulers and colonizers brought their customs with them and had as little to do with the “natives” as possible. Cleopatra, though often depicted in the popular imagination as a dark-skinned Egyptian, was in fact a Macedonian Greek. She spoke Egyptian, but according to Plutarch she was the first of the Ptolemies in more than two hundred years to have bothered to learn the language. That Meleager says “hail” or “greetings” at the end of one of his poems in three different languages, including Syrian, is sometimes adduced as evidence that he could speak the local dialect. This is of course possible, though my knowing how to say adiós amigos doesn’t mean I can speak Spanish. Meleager was an intelligent and well-educated member of the Greek diaspora who inherited all of the traditions of Greek poetry from Homer onward. His verse displays no clear evidence of Syrian influence. At some point in his youth, Meleager’s family must have left Gadara, since he says that it was the Phoenician coastal town of Tyre that “nursed him” and “reared him to manhood.” Most of his love poems to boys were written in Tyre (see notes to IV–XIV), and this may be true of much of his love poetry to women as well. Meleager tells us that when he reached old age, he was made a citizen of the Greek island of Kos. Since Kos is mentioned in epigrams Meleager included in the Garland, he must have written these poems (as well as the introductory and concluding poems of the Garland) and assembled his anthology on Kos during his declining years. His dates are uncertain, but most scholars now believe that the Garland was written and appeared in Rome at the beginning of the first century bce. Meleager was therefore probably born about 160–150 bce and died after 90 bce; he lived more than a century later than all the other poets we have so far considered. Meleager says (in epigram I) that his first literary effort was the composition of a book called the Charites or Graces, which he calls “Menippean” in honor of the Cynic philosopher Menippus. Like Meleager, Menippus lived in Gadara but much earlier, in the first half of the third century bce; Meleager / 161 he wrote satires in a combination of poetry and prose in a style called spoudaiogeloion , or “serious comedy” (see the introduction to chapter 3 and notes to Leonidas VI and XVIII). The Graces of Meleager were probably also written in this style, though only a few fragments have survived. In one passage, Meleager is said to have explained that the heroes of the Iliad did not eat fish even though it was abundant in the waters off Troy, because Homer was a Syrian and Syrians don’t eat fish. This was clearly meant as a joke. No one knows where Homer came from, though half the Greek world claims him—the strongest contenders are probably Chios and Smyrna. But he certainly didn’t come from Syria, where few if any Greeks were living when his poems were written. At some point probably rather early in his life, Meleager began writing epigrams. He must have known the work of the important Hellenistic poets, certainly of Asclepiades and Callimachus, who served as his most significant models. For just as the Hellenistic poets wrote variations on the work of their contemporaries, so Meleager, who may not have had contemporaries to emulate, sought model epigrams in the published poetry of his predecessors. Meleager was conscious of...