Ancient Greek Epigrams: Major Poets in Verse Translation

Chapter 4: Asclepiades

74 Asclepiades is one of the most interesting and appealing figures of the third century. Among the first of the Hellenistic poets to write love epigrams , he helped turn a genre consisting mostly of epitaphs and dedications into a personal form of expression with many of the hallmarks of lyric poetry. The invention of the love epigram had an enormous effect on the development of Greek verse in the Hellenistic era, and much later on the Latin love poetry of Catullus and the elegists Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. Although Asclepiades wrote traditional dedication epigrams and epitaphs, it was his love epigrams that had the greatest influence; many of the other Greek poets of the third century imitated the themes and even the wording of his poetry. Asclepiades Chap ter Four Asclepiades / 75 Asclepiades was probably a contemporary of Anyte, older than Callimachus , and spoken of as if already an established figure by Theocritus . Theocritus tells us that Asclepiades came from the island of Samos in Ionia, off the western coast of what is now Turkey. It is likely that Asclepiades was personally acquainted with many of the other third-century poets, and since both Posidippus and Callimachus lived for much of their lives in Alexandria and frequented the royal court, Asclepiades too probably spent at least a part of his life in the Egyptian capital. One of his epigrams was apparently written in praise of a mistress of Ptolemy Philadelphus (see XVII and note), and it is unlikely that Asclepiades would have written a poem like this unless he had known Ptolemy rather well. Asclepiades lived at least into his fifties, since he received honorary citizenship in Delphi in 275 bce. He seems therefore to have had a long and illustrious career, and his extant poems doubtless represent only a fraction of his total output. He was called by one ancient scholar an epigrammatographos , or “writer of epigrams,” and from him—unlike Theocritus or Callimachus—we have no undisputed examples of any other kind of poem. It is nevertheless possible that Asclepiades did at times write in a different style, since a metrical form not used in his epigrams (the Asclepiad) was apparently named after him; it would have been odd if he himself had not used this meter, but we have no idea what he might have written in it. Of the epigrams of Asclepiades that have survived, the great majority are about love. Asclepiades presents us with a catalogue of lovers in all of their variety, mostly heterosexual but a few involving male couples and even one rather disapproving epigram about love between women. These poems present lovers at the very beginning of their attraction, well into their affair, and at its end. Lovers are occasionally happy but are more often disappointed; in several poems they are refused entry standing on the threshold of the house of the beloved. We encounter virgins hesitant before their first sexual experience and seasoned professionals. Many of the women in his poems are probably meant to be prostitutes or courte- 76 / Asclepiades sans, but in other epigrams they seem to be just ordinary women, pursuing and pursued. The variety of love in all of its forms is mirrored by a variety of mood. Some poems are flippant and fun, but others are serious and purport to express deep personal feeling (for example XIII and XV). The language of the poems is usually simple, almost conversational, unlike the often convoluted expression in Leonidas and many later poets of Greek epigrams. But this simplicity can be deceptive: these are beautifully constructed poems in which not a single word is wasted. Asclepiades was a master at setting the scene of the poem with just a few opening words. We find ourselves with Hermione in her bedroom as she is undressing, or outside Pythias’s door, or in a tavern with the poet and a drinking companion. The endings are also carefully crafted, occasionally with some surprising feature reserved for the last line or even the last word. It was perhaps the intrinsic brevity of epigrams that encouraged Asclepiades to write his love poems in this compressed style, but he gave a much greater attention to the beginnings and endings of his poems than did Anyte or Leonidas. Another characteristic of the poems of Asclepiades is their freedom of expression and flexible syntax. Many of the epigrams of the third-century Greeks are...