Ancient Greek Epigrams: Major Poets in Verse Translation

Chapter 5: Posidippus

91 Posidippus was born perhaps twenty years after Asclepiades in the city of Pella, the capital of Macedonia and the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Some of Posidippus’s poems can be dated from their subject matter and show that he was active at least from 284 bce to 250 bce, the period of the greatest flowering of Hellenistic literature. During much of this time he wrote epigrams in honor of his rulers and other prominent figures in the Ptolemaic kingdom, so he is likely to have spent a large part of his life in Alexandria associated with the court. Surviving inscriptions show that he was given the honorific title of proxenos (foreign representaPosidippus Chap ter Five 92 / Posidippus tive) at Delphi about 276–272 bce, and again at Thermon ten years later, presumably for services rendered. The inscription at Thermon refers to him as an epigrammatopoios, or a professional composer of epigrams. In one of his poems, written when he was an old man, he addresses his native Pella and asks that he still be held dear to his city and that his house and wealth be left to his children. The picture we have, then, is of a poet coming of age in the capital city of Macedonia on mainland Greece, leaving as a young man for Alexandria and establishing himself there as a court poet in association with the Ptolemies, occasionally traveling back to Greece to write epigrams (perhaps in some official capacity), and eventually returning to Pella, where at some point during his life he had acquired a family with wife and children. We do not know when he died. Until quite recently, our view of Posidippus’s poetry was highly colored by the selection of poems Meleager included in his Garland (see chapter 1). Our understanding of Posidippus’s work has changed considerably as the result of the discovery and publication of the Milan papyrus, a scroll from an Egyptian mummy containing an additional 112 epigrams . Sometime in the second century bce, an embalmer was making a mummy using cartonnage—that is, layers of linen or, in this case, papyrus stuck together to make a shell coated with plaster. The papyrus employed for the chest piece of the mummy contained a discarded collection of poems. This particular mummy was later buried near the Egyptian town of Fayum (now Al Fayyum), southwest of Cairo. After being unearthed probably by grave diggers, it passed through several hands, making its way to Europe. It was eventually purchased in the late 1990s on behalf of the University of Milan with funds from the Italian bank Cariplo. Once extracted from the rest of the mummy, the papyrus was found to consist of a book of poetry without its beginning or end and without any title or indication of authorship. The great majority if not all of the epigrams are quite likely by the same author, since they display clear consistencies of style and theme; and fortunately, two of them had been Posidippus / 93 previously attributed to Posidippus. That Posidippus wrote the poems of the Milan papyrus is now widely accepted by nearly all of the scholars who have studied them. A few have objected that the quality of the poetry is uneven, and that some of the verse is too poorly written to be the work of the same author who wrote the love poems collected by Meleager. But all collections of poetry, even by the greatest poets, are uneven, and Meleager may have taken many of the best poems. Even if Posidippus did not write all the epigrams in the Milan papyrus, these poems were clearly written during the Hellenistic period and are just as worthy of our attention as any of the other poetry in this volume. If the poems in the Milan papyrus are by Posidippus, we must significantly modify our view of his interests and range as a poet. Only one or perhaps two epitaphs by Posidippus had been collected in the Greek Anthology, but epitaphs of one kind or another constitute the most numerous category of poems in the Milan papyrus. Most of these poems were written for women and bear a striking resemblance to the epitaphs of Anyte and of Leonidas of Tarentum. There are also many poems about stones, particularly gemstones. We knew previously of one poem like this by Posidippus about a snake stone (XIX), but the...