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Chapter 3: Leonidas of Tarentum
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47 Meleager preserved more epigrams of Leonidas of Tarentum in his Garland than of any poet apart from Meleager himself. Leonidas may have been a special favorite of the anthologist or particularly prolific, but the large number of his poems must surely also reflect his immense reputation in antiquity. Leonidas’s epigrams were the most frequently imitated of any of the Hellenistic poets; they were cited by Cicero, translated by Propertius, and inscribed on the walls of houses in Pompeii. He was famous for his portraits of simple working people, of weavers and carpenters and fishermen, in poems that have a touching charm and sympaLeonidas of Tarentum Chap ter Three 48 / Leonidas of Tarentum thy. Although the subjects of the poems are often humble and from the lower classes, the poetry itself is erudite, with many novel word forms and complex syntax. It could have been written only by a man of great culture with a highly educated audience in mind. Nearly everything we know about the life of Leonidas must be inferred from his poems. He came from Tarentum, which at the beginning of the third century was a bustling Greek settlement and seaport in the south of Italy (now Taranto). The many learned allusions and literary expressions scattered throughout his poetry indicate that he had received an extensive education, which would have been possible only if he had been born into privilege. He speaks with some bitterness of the life of a wanderer (see for example XXVII), and this and other evidence suggests that he left Tarentum, probably under duress; since there are no references in his poems to the Romans, it is probably a safe assumption that he left before Tarentum fell to the Roman army in 272 bce. He says he was poor (XIV, XXVII, and XXVIII), perhaps having run out of money after a long absence from home; but we should not necessarily take him at his word, since we have no way now of separating reality from poetic stance. The emphasis in his poetry on the common man and the presence of rural themes in several epigrams indicate that Leonidas was familiar with the poetry of Anyte. His epigram XX in particular is modeled on her XI (and his X on her IX). It is reasonable guess, then, that Leonidas was born after Anyte, but we cannot exclude the possibility that the two poets were near contemporaries. We do not know when Leonidas died, but he may have lived to an old age, since he refers to himself as old in one of his poems (XXVIII). What Leonidas meant by “old” is difficult to tell; Horace thought himself old (and indeed may have been) in his early fifties. Like Anyte, Leonidas wrote poems mostly in the form of epitaphs and dedications, only a small fraction of which could conceivably have been written to be engraved on stone. Also like Anyte, he wrote about common people and rural subjects in poems often addressed to gods of the forest and field instead of to the usual pantheon of Greek mythology, [44.200.23.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:46 GMT) Leonidas of Tarentum / 49 but his extant poetry encompasses a wider range of subjects than does hers. Many of his epitaphs are portraits in miniature, sometimes bizarre and improbable, often good-natured and compassionate with evident feeling for his subjects. He used the form of a dedication to assemble long lists of tools—for example, of a carpenter (XVI) or a fisherman (XVII); in so doing, he gave a glimpse into the lives of workmen of his time. A dedication in his hands could also be satire (XVIII) or a pretext for a story on a rural theme (XXI and XXII). He wrote epideictic or “display” poems on many different subjects and was among the first to compose invective epigrams like those later made famous by Lucillius and Martial, addressed to fictitious characters representing types rather than actual people. He was also among the first to write epigrams to Priapus, the god of fertility, and his epigram XXX and similar poems by later Greek writers had an enormous influence on Latin poetry. Much of his work was influenced by Cynic philosophy, whose founder Diogenes wore the garb of a vagrant beggar and advocated extreme asceticism. It is Diogenes who is said to have traversed Athens holding a lighted lamp in daylight, looking for an honest man. Throughout the third...