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  • Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis
  • Alexander Sens
Sibylle Ihm . Eros und Distanz: Untersuchungen zu Asklepiades in seinem Kreis. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 167. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004. Pp. 156. €78.00. ISBN 3-598-77716-7.

Of the almost fifty epigrams with which the name of the early Hellenistic poet Asclepiades is associated in the Greek Anthology, more than half have to do with erotic matters. Whether (as is sometimes asserted) Asclepiades of Samos was the first to introduce amatory themes into epigram is unknowable, but he certainly played a fundamental role in the development of "love epigram," and his poetry exerted a powerful influence both on his contemporaries and on subsequent generations of epigrammatists. This volume, despite its subtitle, is less an investigation of Asclepiades "in his circle"—except insofar as it sometimes contrasts his epigrams with poems by his contemporaries Posidippus and Hedylus—than a narrowly focused study of Asclepiades' erotic epigrams with virtually no discussion of his other compositions. Its basic starting point is the question of the imagined social status of the women mentioned in the erotic epigrams: most previous critics have simply assumed that they are courtesans, but Ihm follows Alan Cameron in arguing that the majority of them are, though sexually available, not actually hetaeras. Ihm's treatment of the question, which unfortunately misses F. Cairns' lengthy response to Cameron (Eikasmos 9 [1998] 165–93; see also G. Giangrande, Myrtia 15 [2000] 255–58), extends through the first four chapters, comprising more than a third of the volume. Here she rehearses evidence for the status of women in the Hellenistic period and discusses the status of girls designated as parthenoi (following Sissa), concluding that interest in them was a mark of Asclepiades' poetry.

The balance of the volume focuses more closely on Asclepiades' erotic epigrams and the complex of themes that run through them. Ihm argues that these poems show a broad conceptual unity that sheds light on the poet's own emotional state and views about love. Indeed, although she pays lip service to the notion that the poet and his narrators are distinct, Ihm's approach often collapses them in ways that many will find troubling. Thus, for instance, we are told that in Asclepiades 8 Gow–Page the poet furnishes readers "a deep look into his soul and reveals his vulnerability" (63). When Ihm discusses an individual poem, she prints a detailed apparatus, including brief commentary, along with a bibliography and a list of models and Nachleben. But despite calling attention to the place of individual poems in a literary tradition, her discussion of individual poems rarely considers what role the poet's engagement with other poetry—and with erotic lyric in particular—might play in the construction of the narrator's voice. Nor does the book take account either of the great likelihood that the extant poems reflect only a fraction of the author's output (as the Milan papyrus shows in the case of his contemporary Posidippus) or of the reality that they have been preserved as the result of their deliberate selection by Meleager, whose own interests and concerns are also therefore operative.

It is surely true that the way the fictive objects of the narrators' affections are represented is more important than their actual social status, and the book offers some interesting observations on individual poems and the connections between them, but on the whole Ihm's arguments do not do full justice to the complicated tonal shifts and play with narrative voice that characterize Asclepiades' erotic poetry. Scholars working on Hellenistic epigram in general and Asclepiades in particular will consult Ihm's discussion of individual poems, but sadly, it must be said that this is a book that will [End Page 71] be most appreciated by those who have been unimpressed with the last generation's worth of work on Hellenistic poets' narrative techniques and engagement with genre.

Alexander Sens
Georgetown University
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