A Companion to Ancient Epigram by Henriksén Christer;

Author:Henriksén, Christer; [Henriksèn, Christer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2019-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

You are saving your virginity. But to what profit? For after you arrive

in Hades you will not find someone to love you, girl.

The pleasures of Aphrodite are among the living; in Acheron

we shall lie, maiden, as bones and ash.

Here the point depends in large part on the poem’s engagement with an idea that appears commonly in inscribed epitaphs for young women who have died before marrying, namely that their demise constitutes a “marriage” to the god of the Underworld. The speaker’s claim that “going to Hades” the girl will not find her lover plays on the polyvalence of Hades as a metonym for the Underworld and the name of the god (cf. Cairns 1993 and 1996). In this sense, the relationship between form and content is essential to the meaning: the poem has a length and metrical structure that would befit an inscribed epitaph, but turns a basic commonplace of sepulchral poetry to a very different end.

Several epigrams are constructed in such a way that they resist easy generic categorization. Perhaps most striking is an epigram celebrating the Colophonian courtesan Archeanassa (41 = AP 7.217). The opening words of this epigram “I hold Archeanassa” leave the character of the speaker ambiguous, since they would be equally appropriate as coming from the voice of her tomb or of her lover – or, put another way, the tomb of Archeanassa speaks as if it were her lover, and in this context the speaker’s treatment of the heat of passion experienced by her former lovers as a “pyre” serves as a hinge that blends the two ideas at the conclusion of the poem. Similarly, in 21, the addressee might equally be a young man or an image of one. Whether the poem is “ecphrastic” or “amatory” is thus ambiguous, as is the speaker’s relationship to the addressee: is he a would‐be lover, or an appreciative art critic?

Such poems invite the reader to participate actively in reconstructing the imagined circumstances, and the challenge and fun reside in the difficulty of determining precisely who or what is speaking, and in what context: one of the most distinctive features of Asclepiades’ poetry is the way in which it plays with voice. In a basic sense, he is in this regard typical of the epigrammatists of the early Hellenistic period, who regularly exploited in creative ways the variability and mutability of voice inherent in inscribed epigrams from the earliest period. Thus, for example, 28 (AP 7.11), adopts the formal features of epitaphs that open by asserting, “this is the tomb of” of such and such a person, though in this case the speaker is the “labor” of the poetess of Erinna, so that the poem makes its imaginary physical context not an inscribed tomb but a papyrus roll containing Erinna’s verse. At the same time, the epigram exploits the tendency of inscribed funerary epigrams to shift between the voice of the tomb and that of the deceased, as already in a sixth‐century Attic epitaph for the virgin Phrasicleia (CEG

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