Tombs of the Ancient Poets: Between Literary Reception and Material Culture Nora Goldschmidt (ed.), Barbara Graziosi (ed.) https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826477.001.0001 Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780191865442 Print ISBN: 9780198826477 CHAPTER Verity Platt https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826477.003.0002 Published: September 2018 Pages 21–50 Abstract This chapter investigates the relationship between materiality and textuality in the Hellenistic period, by focusing on real and imagined tombs of poets. At a time not only of feverish activity when literary texts were being collected, copied, catalogued, canonized, and archived, but also when contemporary poetry was carefully situating itself in relation to an emerging library culture, and, what is more, when texts were being reframed and circulated in the context of anthologies, the tomb as inscribed marker of the poet’s literal corpus o ered a rich analogy to the physical objects that sustained his or her surviving corpus of work. Keywords: Epitymbia, inscription, Archilocheion, papyrus, tomb, Hellenistic Greece, materiality Subject: Classical Literature, Classical Poetry Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 1 Silent Bones and Singing Stones: Materializing the Poetic Corpus in Hellenistic Greece  Implements from the ʻTomb of the Poetʼ (Piraeus Archeological Museum) On the journey to the mundane afterlife, You travel equipped to carry on your trade: A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs, The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper, Wax tablets bound into a little book. Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box. Here is the harp’s wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed Into a pure Pythagorean music. The beeswax, frangible with centuries, Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence. I think you were a poet of perfection Who ed still weighing one word with another, Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision. 1 From Hapax by A. E. Stallings p. 22 In 1981 a salvage excavation in Daphne, Athens, brought to light a limestone cist grave dating to 430–425 2 BCE , which belonged to a man in his early twenties. The belongings carefully buried with him (now displayed in the Piraeus Museum) identi ed the youth as a poet-musician: fragments of a harp, tortoiseshell lyre, and wooden aulos implied pro ciency in performance (perhaps even training in the making of instruments, as suggested by a saw and chisel), while a stylus and inkpot, wax tablets and a papyrus roll 3 demonstrated a facility with (and investment in) written texts (Figure 1.1). Gathered as eternal accessories to the poet’s profession, this assemblage reminds us that words do not, despite our best imaginings, have wings. Nor are they immortal. Rather, poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body; it makes its way into the world by means of instruments, whether vocal, musical, or notational; and it is stored and circulated on inscribed objects, whether temporary compositions impressed into wax tablets, or more enduring texts inked onto papyrus. Adept in both oral and literary media, the occupant of the Daphne tomb poignantly demonstrates how all poetry depends upon material vehicles for its own survival, whether the singer’s jawbone, the decomposed strings of his spindle-harp, or his treasured papyrus (which bears traces 4 of epic verse—tantalizingly lost to posterity, the author(s) unidenti ed). For A. E. Stallings (a living poet herself), it is the wax lingering on the ancient poet’s polyptychon, ‘frangible with centuries’, that proves most haunting, since its malleable capacity for revision by the warm, living body is hardened by time once active composition has been suspended in the coldness of the tomb. The poet’s relics thus speak of endless possibilities—of awless compositions not yet crafted by ‘a poet of perfection’—while reminding us that poetry is nevertheless a corporeal, a fallible, and a perishable art. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara, Figure 1.1. Photograph: Chelsea Gardner. The Daphne tomb gives us a poet without a name, a craftsman-musician accompanied by the tools of his p. 23 trade, with no surviving grave-marker or epitaph. Here we have all the accoutrements of ancient poetry (including the body of an actual bard), but no corresponding works with which to associate them, the poet’s instruments ‘all empty’ of sound. The ancient epigrammatic tradition, conversely, gives us names and p. 24 epitaphs that oat free of their poets’ bodies. Tethered instead to a familiar body of texts, the Hellenistic epitaphs (epitymbia) gathered in Book Seven of the Greek Anthology draw upon the metapoetic potential of 5 poets’ tombs as a means of securing and shaping their occupants’ literary legacies. But they do this not in blind celebration of the immortality of the word. Rather, as I argue here, a preoccupation with poets’ tombs during the third to rst centuries BCE emerges from a keen awareness among living poets of their work’s dependence upon its material vehicles—on the fraught relationship between embodied performances and bodies of verse, and the diverse media that make possible poetry’s transmission, preservation, and retrieval. Hellenistic epitymbia cleave more closely to the Daphne poet’s entombed belongings than we might initially assume. For at a time when literary texts were being feverishly collected, copied, catalogued, canonized, and archived, when contemporary poetry was carefully situating itself in relation to an emerging library culture, and when texts were being reframed and circulated in the context of anthologies, the tomb as inscribed marker of the poet’s literal corpus o ered a rich analogy to the physical objects that sustained his or her 6 surviving corpus of work. Tombs signify the presence of the body, but they also mark a site of absence and loss. As Jean-Pierre Vernant observed, the Greek concept of the sēma, or tomb, is profoundly ambiguous: while situating the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 Objects recovered from the ʻTomb of the Poetʼ, Piraeus Museum, Athens. remains of the dead, it simultaneously points beyond itself, to the intangible and dematerialized realm of 7 the departed—to the silenced voices and unread words of Stallings’ ‘mundane afterlife’. The sēma constitutes both a physical marker and a threshold—a monument to be viewed in its own right, and a point p. 25 8 of mediation between the living and the dead. It is also an object that both displays and calls for acts of 9 writing and reading. At the tomb, the material and aesthetic qualities of the written word are strikingly displayed; at the same time, poetry not only memorializes the dead, but also gives them the power of speech by harnessing the voices of its readers. The sēma thus marks the loss of the poet’s living voice and the impossibility of witnessing his or her embodied performance, while o ering new possibilities for object, script and voice, are made manifest in the context of enduring tensions between life and death, memory and loss, the material and metaphysical. For literary epigram—an intermedial genre poised between ‘scroll and marble’ (in Peter Bing’s compelling formulation) and exceptionally attentive to poetry’s material substrate—the aesthetic potential of ctionalized poets’ epitaphs would prove a temptation 10 impossible to resist. Tomb and Book Whether real or imagined, the poet’s tomb marks the presence of his or her physical remains. It thus testi es to its occupant’s historical, embodied existence and the erstwhile vitality of his or her voice, while pointing incontrovertibly to its silencing in death. In performing remembrance through an inscribed epitaph, the tomb draws attention to the role of the written word in the operations of memory—in both sepulchral inscription and the storage of the poet’s words on wax or papyrus. There is a clear relationship between tomb and book, for in highlighting the ‘death of the author’, the poet’s tomb parallels the transition that any literary work undergoes in publication, from the active authorial agency of the 11 composing and performing poet to his or her reception via ‘the solemn silence’ of the written word. In marking the poet’s physical body and its temporal limits, the tomb thus indicates a crucial transition p. 26 from living performance to 12 inscribed ‘body’ of verse. entextualized script, and to the poet’s posthumous survival in the form of an Like the written sēmata of the book roll, the sepulchral sēma signi es the poet’s presence-in-absence through the commemorative power of an inscribed object. Consequently, the Greek Anthology includes within its section of poets’ epitaphs a poem attributed to Asclepiades that explicitly blurs 13 the categories of epitaph and epigraph, or book tag (7.11): ὁ γλυκὺς Ἠρίννης οὗτος πόνος, οὐχὶ πολὺς μέν, ὡς ἂν παρθενικᾶς ἐννεακαιδεκέτευς, ἀλλ᾽ ἑτέρων πολλῶν δυνατώτερος· εἰ δ᾽ Ἀΐδας μοι μὴ ταχὺς ἦλθε, τίς ἂν ταλίκον ἔσχ᾽ ὄνομα; This is the sweet labour of Erinna, not great in size, seeing that she was a 19-year-old girl, but more powerful than that of many others. Had Hades not come for me early, who would have had so great a name? Ostensibly inscribed as the preface to Erinna’s Ἠλακάτη (Dista ), Asclepiades’ text gives voice to the deceased poetess in terms that borrow from funerary epigram, as well as the Doric forms and lamentatory themes of 14 Erinna’s own verse. The language of the tomb is combined with a self-consciously literary intertextuality in such a way that the book itself becomes the speaking sēma that preserves Erinna’s voice in death, its slender dimensions (οὐχὶ πολύς, line 1) a gure for both the aesthetic qualities of her verse and the petiteness Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 communion, re-enactment, and reanimation. At the poet’s tomb, complex relations between text and p. 27 15 of both poetic corpus and maiden corpse. Both the book and the tomb it implies stand as oggetti parlanti that enable forms of enduring presence through the borrowed voice of the reader, who is encouraged to ventriloquize Erinna both by reading her own verse and by following Asclepiades’ shift into the rst person with the striking μοι at the end of line 3 (a manoeuvre common to sepulchral epigram, as Rawles discusses in 16 Chapter 2). These practices converge in a later epigram from the same series (attributed to Leonidas or Meleager), in which Erinna’s premature death is likened to that of Baucis, the very subject of her Dista (7.13): παρθρνικὴν νεάοιδον ἐν ὑμνοπόλοισι μέλισσαν Ἀΐδας εἰς ὑμέναιον ἀνάρπασεν. ἦ ῥα τόδ᾽ ἔμφρων εἶπ᾽ ἐτύμως ἁ παῖς. “Βάσκανος ἔσσ᾽, Ἀΐδα.” The virgin Erinna, a newly singing bee amongst singers, as she was plucking the owers of the Muses, Hades snatched for marriage. Yes, the wise girl said 17 this truthfully: ‘You are envious, Hades.’ Others have commented on the epigrammatic conceit whereby Erinna is here turned into both the subject of her own verse and the prophetess of her own fate; the owers she gathers in an echo of the Kore-like Baucis are gured as the anthea of poetry (and, by virtue of the epigram her maiden death inspires, the ‘garland’ of 18 Meleager’s anthology). In the light of the genre’s materializing analogy between book and tomb, we might attend more closely to the use of citation in the epigram’s nal line (“Βάσκανος ἔσσ᾽, Ἀΐδα.”). Like other sepulchral epigrams, both poems take advantage of the reader’s voice so that the dead might speak. But p. 28 Erinna does not address us directly from beyond the grave. Rather, the poet recalls her poetic utterance 19 when ἔμφρων—‘in her senses’, or, by implication, ‘alive’. The words we encounter in the context of her death are thus mediated by means of a written text that performs an act of archival retrieval. In this sense, the epigram-as-epitaph functions not as a means of animation but as an echo, its ghostly e ect serving to underline the tragedy of Erinna’s untimely loss even as it a 20 that enables the poem’s conceit. rms her transformation into the written corpus Strikingly, the same phrase appears in an epigram attributed to Erinna herself, placed later in Book 7, in which the stele of Baucis encourages the passer-by to ‘Say this to Hades beneath the earth, “You are envious, Hades.”’ (τῷ κατὰ γᾶς τοῦτο λέγοις Ἀΐδα, | “Βάσκανος ἔσσ᾽, Ἀΐδα.”, lines 2– 21 3). Given the likelihood that this epigram (the authenticity of which is in question) also cites the Dista , we are thus presented with a series of textual echoes in which the dead poetess’ words—addressed to Death 22 himself—are posthumously quoted by poetic successors at her imagined graveside. Recursively resounding from tomb to tomb, Erinna, her ‘self’-citations and the subjects of her verse are actively incorporated into the text of Meleager’s original Garland and its subsequent iterations. As made objects that can crystallize the past, create foci for memories, and transport them into the present, 23 books and tombs both function as lieux de mémoire (in Pierre Nora’s phrase). Both are dynamic objects that ‘stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to 24 materialize the immaterial’. But they only do so by virtue of the fact that the milieux de mémoire—the 25 active contexts of composition and performance that generated them—no longer obtain. p. 29 with the tombs of late poets such as Erinna by Asclepiades and his A preoccupation epigrammatic successors is a product of the Hellenistic poets’ own sense of belatedness: it expresses the complex equivocation between identi cation and di erence prompted by an intense engagement with the poetry of the archaic and classical past accompanied by archival acts of material reorganization. While tombs ‘ x’ their poets’ bodies in spatial and geographical terms, creating a physical site at which to engage with their literary and cultural legacies, books ‘ x’ their literary output in the form of stable texts, inviting the formation of authoritative editions, literary canons, and displays of knowledge. The once-living voice of Erinna is thus heard in the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 ῎Ηρινναν Μουσέων ἄνθεα δρεπτομένην, form of an epigrammatic echo produced by Meleager/Leonidas—a quotation that is only made possible by the Dista ’s textual storage and subsequent retrieval by the scholar-poet, the latter in service of anthologyformation, whereby the maiden ower—plucked, epitomized, and transformed into an epigrammatic conceit—is woven into the stephanos of literary epigram. Both book and tomb facilitate what Aleida Assmann de nes as ‘Storage Remembrance’ (Speichergedächtnis) —the rei cation of cultural authority in the form of libraries, museums, and archives, ‘institutions of memory maintenance and the mediation of knowledge’ in which factual knowledge of the past can be 26 stored, conserved, and retrieved, primarily in the form of externalized material texts. As a repository of also a ‘storehouse’, while its epitaph o ers a means of recording and preserving information about the 27 deceased. Both book and tomb thus comprise the outsourced media of ‘cultural memory’ (kulturelles Gedächtnis), as opposed to the living, embodied ‘communicative memory’ that characterizes remembrance p. 30 28 of the recent past. In attending to the dormant media of ‘Storage Remembrance’, however, the sepulchral epigrams of the Greek Anthology engage a di erent commemorative mode, responding to the fact that books and tombs also invite acts of dynamic engagement. This reactivates their content through 29 practices of reading or—in the case of tombs—funerary rituals designed to communicate with the dead. For Assmann, the processes of selection, connection, internalization, and identity-formation generated by such gestures de ne them as forms of ‘Functional Remembrance’ (Funktionsgedächtnis), which restore the knowledge stored within memory institutions into public space through acts of performance, commemoration, and renewal. ‘Storage Memory’, in this sense, acts as a reservoir for ‘Functional Memory’, 30 crossing from one category to the other when it acquires additional dimensions of social meaning. As a genre that charts, comments upon, and plays with the status of written texts as they move between monuments and books, or ritual performance and literary culture, Hellenistic epigram is concerned with precisely this relationship—between ‘functional’ modes of remembrance that attest to the continuity of a living poetic culture, and textual means of ‘storage’ that preserve the words of the dead in accordance with 31 an emerging concept of ‘literature’. In this context, ctional epitaphs constitute a dynamic form of reception—a means by which the poetry of the dead might be heard again through modes of functional remembrance that nevertheless acknowledge (and even amplify) the inevitable silence of the past. Life and Nachleben In locating and preserving the physical or poetic corpus, both tomb and text sustain traces of oral performance, active composition, and authorial presence. Both stand as a xed point of contact between author and reader that marks a shift from living poet to literary ‘afterlife’, displacing creative energy from p. 31 acts of authorial production to those of readerly consumption and active reception. If the tomb calls attention to the ‘death of the author’ by marking the end of the poet’s bios, it also marks his or her cominginto-being as the protagonist of a posthumous biographical, honori c, and performative tradition—a form of Funktionsgedächtnis that is both collective and open to individual elaboration. Epitaphs, like epigraphs, function as a paratextual genre which retrospectively frames the poet’s work, shaping and policing the 32 reader’s engagement with a literary corpus, in the act of marking the poet’s literal body. This process receives self-conscious commentary in a series of epigrams in Book Seven of the Greek Anthology concerned with the burial of Euripides (7.43–7). Famously interred in Macedon, rather than his 33 Attic homeland, the playwright also received a cenotaph in Athens. In problematizing the question of where best to commemorate Euripides, this doubling of monuments became a leitmotif of his reception 34 history. In the context of epigram, tensions between tomb and cenotaph as loci of commemoration in the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 the poet’s body (as well as his texts and instruments, if the Daphne grave is anything to go by), the tomb is Euripidean tradition o ered a rich opportunity for exploring parallel tensions between text and voice, as in this anonymous example (7.47): ἅπας Ἀχαιὶς μνῆμα σόν, Εὐριπίδη· οὔκουν ἄφωνος, ἀλλὰ καὶ λαλητέος. All Greece is your tomb, Euripides, 35 so you are not voiceless, but even to be talked of. 36 elegantly expresses the sense in which voice is relocated in death from the poet to his audience. p. 32 speaks because he is spoken of, and it is the compelling place his plays have a orded him Euripides within literary tradition that ensures all Greece is his ‘tomb’ and ‘memorial’, μνῆμα. At the same time, this verbal activity echoes the very ‘chattering’, λαλία, with which Euripides was associated by his critics (as in Aristophanes’ Frogs), thereby a ording the tragedian the ‘last laugh’, as his trademark ‘chattering’ endures beyond the 37 grave. Strikingly, the verb from which the noun is derived, λαλέω, is also employed in epigraphic contexts to denote theatrical performance (such as an epitaph for an actor from Rome which claims χειρσὶν ἅπαντα 38 λαλήσας, ‘He said everything with his hands’, i.e. in pantomime). The epigram’s use of λαλητέος suggests that Euripides ‘must be broadcast’, that is, given voice through the continued reperformance of his plays 39 throughout the Greek-speaking world (as we know he was). This continuing culture of performance testi es to a Panhellenic ‘envoicing’ of Euripides that is implicitly 40 contrasted with the peripheral location (and ‘voiceless’ silence) of his actual tomb, in Macedon. The topos echoes and responds to an epitaph said to have been inscribed on Euripides’ Athenian cenotaph, preserved in the Life of Euripides as well as the Greek Anthology, and attributed to Thucydides or Timotheus (7.45): Μνῆμα μὲν ‘Ελλὰς ἅπασ᾽ Εὐριπίδου. ὀστέα δ᾽ ἴσχει γῆ Μακεδών. ἣ γὰρ δέξατο τέρμα βίου. πατρὶς δ᾽ Ἑλλάδος Ἑλλάς, Ἀθῆναι. πλεῖστα δε Μούσαις τέρψας, ἐκ πολλῶν καὶ τὸν ἔπαινον ἔχει. All Hellas is the monument of Euripides, but the Macedonian land holds his bones, for it sheltered the end of his life. His country was Athens, the Hellas of Hellas, and as by his verse he 41 gave exceeding delight, so from many he receives praise. p. 33 Here, the tomb’s function as a μνῆμα, a ‘memorial’ or ‘reminder’, is explicitly decoupled from its function as a container for the body (Euripides’ ‘bones’) and applied instead to ‘All Hellas’, and especially to Athens in its role as both Euripides’ ‘country’ and the gurehead of cultured Hellenism. Yet tombs facilitate remembrance by means of their spatial xity, their material durability, and their capacity to act as points of return, inviting repeated communion with the dead. If these commemorative functions are not aligned with the physical containment of Euripides’ ‘bones’, then how should they be performed? At rst reading, we might assume that the tomb’s physicality is to be contrasted with the transcendent qualities of reputation (as the preceding epitaph in Book Seven claims, ‘This is not your memorial, Euripides, but you are the 42 memorial of it. For this memorial/tomb, μνῆμα, is swathed in your glory’). But to accept this interpretation is to suppress the tangible materiality that is both inherent to the μνῆμα as tomb or monument (as opposed to the more abstract μνήμη, ‘memory’) and fundamental to the epigram’s status as an inscribed epitaph (whether real or self- ctionalizing). If Euripides’ reputation simply rests on the widespread fame of his works, then why evoke, address, or purport to speak for his tomb or cenotaph at all? Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 The use of λαλητέος in the personal sense here (as opposed to the impersonal λαλητέον) is unique: translated by Liddell and Scott as ‘to be talked of’, but also carrying a sense of necessity (‘must be talked about’), it The sequence of Euripidean epitaphs in the Greek Anthology is particularly striking for its clear juxtaposition of an epigram apparently transcribed from a known, physical monument (7.45) with more self-consciously 43 ‘literary’ epigrams that respond to and extend its conceit. As a collective corpus of verse, the sequence addresses a fundamental question posed by the original inscription: what is to follow the poet’s τέρμα βίου, ‘the end of his life’? How is the poet’s voice to endure and be heard? And what is the most e ective mode of remembrance for a genre that is primarily mediated through embodied performance? The ‘empty monument’ that Pausanias would later see in Athens o ers a powerful object for pondering poetic loss because it signi es a double absence—of both the living poet and his body, relic of and testament to his p. 34 44 Tellingly, in two further epigrams from the series, both (probably erroneously) attributed to Euripides’ contemporary Ion, the location of Euripides’ body in Macedon is rationalized by its proximity to the Muses of Pieria, whose ‘dark-robed valleys’ prove a tting resting-place for his ‘chamber 45 of eternal night’ (7.43.1–2). In this way, Euripides’ physical remains—traces of the material vessel through which his verse came into being—are situated at the site of inspiration, and associated with the elusive process of poetic becoming, of poiēsis itself: in death, the poet, as ‘servant of the Pierian Muses’, 46 returns to his mistresses (7.44.5–6). Athens, by contrast, is identi ed on Euripides’ cenotaph as the location where his poetry receives its de nitive reception and Nachleben—where it generates pleasure (τέρψας) and is garlanded with praise 47 (ἔπαινον). Euripides’ physical location in Macedon is both spatially and ontologically dematerialized— assigned to the mythological and cerebral realm of the Muses. The Athenian monument, tied to the urban landscape and ritual contexts in which Euripidean drama was most de nitively embedded, stakes its claim as the primary material vehicle of remembrance. As ‘Ion’ observes, Euripides is the ‘ornament of Athens’ p. 35 (κόσμον Ἀθηνῶν, 7.44.3)—the term kosmos conveying the notion of a material entity, a made object that 48 gives honour and delight by virtue of its beauty, order, and well-wroughtness. If ‘Euripides’—as distinct from his ‘mere bones’—is to be apprehended as a rei ed ornament, a monument belonging to all of Greece, and especially to Athens, then how is this ‘Euripides’ to be read? One answer lies 49 in the augmented use of μνῆμα to refer to a ‘record’ or ‘archive’. Although Athens could not lay claim to Euripides’ actual body, it could lay claim to a textual archive of Euripides’ verse which functioned as the physical body of his work—the de nitive entextualization of his plays alongside those of Aeschylus and 50 Sophocles, according to the 330 BCE nomos of Lycurgus. As part of the material and cultural fabric of the polis, this archival repository e ectively established the means of Speichergedächtnis that makes the epitymbia of the Greek Anthology possible—verses that are themselves textually entwined with the epitaph inscribed upon and transcribed from Euripides’ Athenian cenotaph. The use of λαλητέος in AP 7.47 implies that it is this process of transcription and textual monumentalization that, paradoxically, gives voice to the deceased poet: while the claim that Euripides is still to be ‘spoken of’ implies a collective mode of remembrance generated by ‘estimation’ (δόξα: 7.46), the implication that the playwright is still to be ‘broadcast’ or ‘envoiced’ suggests an active performance culture (a mode of Funktionsgedächtnis) that relies explicitly upon the material support o ered by archival acts of storage for its acts of ventriloquism. Reinforced by the unusual use of the verb λαλέω (as opposed to λέγω), this onomatopoeically conveys the sense of ‘chattering’, and is also applied in Hellenistic poetry to the ‘chirping’ of locusts or the ‘sounding’ 51 of musical instruments. p. 36 Rather than prioritizing the meaning of what is said, λαλέω emphasizes language’s 52 function as a channel of transmission. It gestures to the ambient ‘chatter’ that comprises Euripides’ active and ongoing reception, and the oral ‘playback’ of reperformance and citation that the mnemonic storage of Euripides’ textual corpus has made possible. The poetic λαλία for which Euripides was so well known is now itself the object of perpetual λαλία, resounding in an in nite echo chamber of cultural remediation—one in which voices are repeatedly layered upon each other as text moves from theatre to stone to scroll, ampli ed still further by the self-conscious intermedial play of literary epigram itself. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 once-living verse. From ʻDustʼ to Dust In their metatextual games with the material vehicles of poetic legacy, epitymbia associated with Erinna and Euripides generate a textual corpus of their own. As each epigrammatist refers to the works of dead poets and other epitaphs—both real and ctional—within the literary tradition, he also weaves himself into the sepulchral stephanos that comprises this particular mode of reception. While the deceased poet’s entextualized corpus comprises a form of archival storage, the creative acts of intertextuality, emulation, and variation that it generates conduct their own form of Funktionsgedächtnis. The poets included in comprise an active ‘community of remembrance’, generating new vessels for verse (and new textual media) through their dynamic engagement with both the stored and stabilized texts of the past and, crucially, with each other: epigram thereby establishes itself as a living milieu de mémoire in which to encounter the dead 53 anew. As a genre composed for papyrus yet masquerading as text incised into stone, the literary epigram presents p. 37 itself as verse in motion—poetry that has already departed from its original material support, to assert itself in new contexts of reading and reception. If the poet’s tomb invites us to consider the stable qualities of de nitive textual editions, the literary epitymbion—by virtue of its self- ctionalized transition from ‘marble to scroll’—also invites consideration of the text’s ability to transcend the limitations of its physical 54 substrate. In the context of the tomb, the metaphysical properties of text are, inevitably, aligned with a more eschatological notion of the poet’s ‘afterlife’, associated with the immortality of the soul. Consider, for example, an epitaph for Sappho attributed to Pinytus (AP 7.16): ὀστέα μὲν καὶ κωφὸν ἔχει τάφος οὔνομα Σαπφοῦς· αἱ δὲ σοφαὶ κείνης ῥήσιες ἀθάνατοι. The tomb holds the bones and the dumb name of 55 Sappho, but her skillful sayings are immortal. Here Sappho’s silent bones (ὀστέα) are explicitly contrasted with her clever ‘sayings’ (ῥήσιες), so that the mortality of her physical body is countered by the immortality (ἀθάνατοι) of her surviving words. Dematerialized and distinguished from her entombed remains, Sappho’s ‘sayings’ are implicitly like the soul in their ability to exist independently of her mortal frame. Her name, by contrast, is bound to the silence of the tomb, its ‘muteness’ (κωφόν) suggesting the frozen impassivity of the stone surface into which it is (implicitly) incised. This attention to the written status of ‘Sappho’, however, alerts the reader to the fact that the posthumous survival of her ‘sayings’ is itself a gure of speech, since her words are mediated by writing. Gow and Page comment that the epithet κωφός (‘dumb’) is merely conventional here, yet Pinytus arguably lls the silence of the grave with new life by pointedly evoking the ‘sayings’ of Sappho herself, alluding to her own envoicing of the death of her poetic voice in Fragment 31: ‘For when I look at you…no speaking is left in me, p. 38 56 my tongue breaks.…And I seem to myself to lack little of death.’ Sappho’s comment upon her own mortal silencing—recalled as one of her ‘immortal sayings’, yet relayed through the textual storage and preservation of her poetic corpus—is employed to comment upon the silence of her grave. The play between speech and silence that we might claim as a leitmotif of Sappho’s own poetic voice is thus applied to parallel tensions between her physical and textual corpora: just as Fragment 31 paradoxically testi es to Sappho’s ability to overcome the silencing power of her own desire, so the enduring presence of her sayings in written form overcomes—if only by ‘a little’—the silencing power of death. Moreover, this silent envoicing is performed within the context of a literary epitaph that invites its own vocalization by the reader. Crucially, the οὔνομα Σαπφοῦς, as inscribed by Pinytus, is not bound to Sappho’s tomb at all, but to the papyrus that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 Meleager’s Garland (and, arguably, its successors right through to the sixth-century Cycle of Agathias) supports his ctional epitymbion. Here, it resounds in company with other such texts (whether a collection by Pinytus himself or anthologies such as the Garland of Philip through which it subsequently circulated), as part of an active community of remembrance sustained by the very textual practices that Pinytus’ text self57 consciously elides. This paradox characterizes several literary epitymbia, where the textual support that enables poetry’s survival is metaphorically dematerialized in service of its transcendent ‘immortality’, while simultaneously drawing attention to its potential perishability. We might compare an epitaph for Sophocles attributed to Simias, in which the ‘tomb and little portion of earth’ (τύμβος…καὶ γῆς ὀλίγον μέρος) that hold the tragedian are ἀθανάτοις δέρκεται ἐν σελίσιν), where αἰών refers both to the achievements of his ‘lifetime’ and the ‘eternity’ of p. 39 58 his literary legacy. Simias’ conceit, however, lies in the fact that the insistent materiality of Sophocles’ tomb (signi ed by the ‘little portion of earth’ that holds his body) actually parallels the gleaming columns of his literary archive—that is, the text of the Antigone, wherein the ‘light cover of dust’ (λεπτὴ…κόνις) that its 59 protagonist sprinkles on the corpse of her brother proves the catalyst for the unfolding of its tragic plot. The matter of burial, as Sophocles reminds us, is never trivial; indeed it is his complex treatment of this topic that, arguably, generates the authority of his textual monument. Herein lies a further conceit, for the notion of Sophocles’ ‘immortal columns’ introduces an oxymoron that draws explicit attention to the textual vehicles that ensure his work’s durability. A σελίς is the column of script that forms the paginated structure of the papyrus roll, yet as Simias’ notion of ‘gleaming’ columns suggests, its primary sense is 60 architectural, referring to a ‘cross-beam’ used in ceiling construction or a ‘block’ of seats in the theatre. The papyri that ensure Sophocles’ immortality, then, imply a monumental construction that could equally apply to the tymbos on which Simias’ epigram is ( ctionally) inscribed, or the architectural structure of the theatre in which his tragedies are performed. Though Horace would later claim that poetry can transcend the perishability of material monuments (his ‘monument more lasting than bronze’), Simias’ epitymbion demonstrates that while texts may perform their own self-transcendence, they often do so by virtue of materializing metaphors that emerge from the very structural frameworks in which they are heard and 61 read. The dependence of poetic immortality upon the materiality of its textual support takes us back to Sappho, and a sophisticated engagement with the paradox of textual (im)perishability in a much-discussed epitymbion by Posidippus: Δωρίχα, ὀστέα μὲν σὰ πάλαι κόνις ἦν ὅ τε δέσμος χαίτης ἥ τε μύρων ἔκπνοος ἀμπεχόνη, ἧι ποτε τὸν χαρίεντα περιστέλλουσα Χάραξον σύγχρους ὀρθρινῶν ἥψαο κισσυβίων. p. 40 Σαπφῶιαι δὲ μένουσι φίλης ἔτι καὶ μενέουσιν ὠιδῆς αἱ λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες οὔνομα σὸν μακαριστόν, ὃ Ναύκρατις ὧδε φυλάξει ἔστ᾽ ἂν ἴηι Νείλου ναῦς ἐφ᾽ ἁλὸς πελάγη. Doricha, your bones were dust long ago, and the band of your hair and your perfume-breathing shawl, wherewith you wrapped the charming Charaxus, skin to skin, until you took hold of the morning cups. But the white columns of Sappho’s lovely ode are still here and they will go on celebrating your most fortunate name, which Naucratis will thus treasure 62 as long as ships sail from the Nile on the waves of the sea. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 contrasted with the ‘extraordinary life that gleams in [his] immortal papyrus columns’ (ὁ περισσὸς αἰὼν Ironically, Posidippus’ epitaph for Doricha (the Egyptian courtesan supposedly resented by Sappho for seducing her brother Charaxus) has been much on scholarly lips recently for precisely the issues of physical 63 preservation that the poem itself addresses. This is not the place to discuss the textual status, literary quality, or poetic signi cance of the ‘New Sappho’ papyrus, other than to observe that its reference to Sappho’s brothers and their seafaring touches on the very themes later alluded to by Posidippus. Here, he celebrates the enduring power of the ‘white resounding columns’ (λευκαὶ φθεγγόμεναι σελίδες) of Sappho’s poetry—ordered, canonized, replicated, and circulated in its de nitive Alexandrian papyrus edition. He does so in a typically oblique Hellenistic manner, composing an epitymbion not for Sappho herself, but for a 64 p. 41 The seductive presence attributed to Doricha in play with the Sapphic tradition) lines 1–4 of the epigram (characterized by sophisticated intertextual may have dissolved into the Egyptian dust (κόνις), yet they have passed into cultural memory, Posidippus 65 suggests, by virtue of the Speichergedächtnis applied to Sappho’s poetry. It is this monumental literary archiving that ensures a literary reception (and dubious reputation) for Doricha that has been entirely shaped—and even constructed—by Sappho herself. Posidippus’ vicarious epitaph for Sappho (by way of Doricha) is prescient in its nod to the contingency of papyrological survival. As Rosenmeyer and Bing have observed, the poet’s claim that Naucratis will treasure Doricha’s name ‘as long as ships sail from the Nile’ may refer to the courtesan’s (probably ctional) tomb in Egypt, but also evokes the papyrus trade, and by extension the role of Ptolemaic book culture in preserving 66 and disseminating the literary achievements of the Greek past. Whereas the tomb xes the body in place, the book roll can travel, converting the ‘winged words’ of poetic performance into an object that stabilizes text yet simultaneously facilitates its circulation and replication (not to mention its later entombment as the by-product of Egyptian funerary practices). At Athens, the de nitive entextualization of Euripides’ plays o ered a material substitute to his displaced tomb, asserting an enduring ‘presence’ that tied literary immortality to his patris. The de nitive Alexandrian edition of Sappho’s verse, by contrast, is presented as a means by which her lyrics can transcend the limitations of space and time, even as it provides Posidippus with a device for linking Sappho to Egypt by means of an entombed body other than her own. Furthermore, this textual mobility is precisely what enables Posidippus’ epigram to stage its own epigraphic selfctionalization, whereby the reader is asked to entertain the fantasy that it has been transcribed from tomb to book. In this way, the epigrammatist purports to have it both ways, evoking the solid xity of tomb and text while celebrating the uid ontology of his own poetic enterprise. How tting, then, that their very retrieval from Egyptian dust has resurrected so many papyrus ‘columns’ ascribed to both Sappho and Posidippus for an eager twenty- rst-century readership (albeit in less ‘white’ p. 42 or complete a form than their third-century BCE manifestations). As in the case of the Daphne poet’s tomb, modern papyrology’s dependence upon the physical traces of ancient verse (even as it attempts to liberate word from medium) reminds us that, as far as literary legacies are concerned, texts and tombs—or 67 literary ‘dust’ and literal dust—are both materially and metaphorically ‘entangled’. Indeed, their mutual implication is expressed in quite literal terms on the purported tomb of the poet Archilochus on Paros. Here an extensive third-century BCE inscription by one ‘Mnesiepes’ commemorating the foundation of the Archilocheion is presented in parallel columns, thereby simulating the appearance of ‘a papyrus roll spread 68 out across a marble wall’. It further employs documentary structuring devices such as reverse indentation 69 (ekthesis), which is used to indicate citations from other texts, including oracles and Archilochus’ poetry. Whereas literary epitymbia evoke funerary epigraphy to draw attention to poetry’s complex relationship to its material support, the Archilocheion inscription evokes literary strategies of structuring text as a means of asserting its authority as a de nitive bios of the deceased poet, incorporating a wide range of sources to support a particular reading of more ambivalent aspects of Archilochus’ verse (such as scurrilous aspects of 70 his iambos). The inscription’s e orts to shape the visitor’s encounter with Archilochus’ actual corpus thus parallel its attempts to frame readings of his surviving body of work. This active formation of a ‘community p. 43 of remembrance’ around both the literal and literary relics of Archilochus is emphasized by the name of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 famously problematic gure within her textual corpus. 71 the inscription’s author, for Mnesiepes is literally ‘He who remembers epē (“utterances”)’. Mnesiepes thus presents himself as an intermediary between poet and reader: he gathers the fragile traces of Archilochus’ legacy into a stable text that claims both the public monumentality and cultic authority of an inscription, and the literary cachet and transmissive potential of a book roll, converting the uid ‘sayings’ of oral tradition into a textual ‘monument’ (μνῆμα) that operates as both archive and tomb. Embodied ‘collective’ memory is transformed into entextualized ‘cultural’ memory by means of a monumental storage device which, located at the site of the poet’s bodily remains, yokes practices of reading to those of cult in order to ensure a form of enduring Funktionsgedächtnis that is both lapidary and literary—both The Living Tomb For Mnesiepes, the Archilocheion’s capacity to serve as a site of active commemoration depends upon ritual performance—both the sacri ces to Apollo that established the tomb’s function as shrine and ongoing sacri ces to Archilochus. 72 In communicating between living visitors and the deceased hero-poet, sacri ce plays out on a ritual level what Mnesiepes’ inscribed text invites of its readers—repeated reactivation of Archilochus’ corpus (whether literal or literary) through acts of remembrance. Mnesiepes himself serves as a channel between the material and the metaphysical, mediating between the living and the dead, while his text occupies an interstitial category between oral and textual traditions, on the one hand, and stone and papyrus, on the other. The transcendent qualities of the poetic are thus harnessed to a speci c location, monument, and body of texts—indeed, to the very location (the inscription implies) where Archilochus p. 44 himself 73 was initiated into his role as poet by the Muses. In contrast to the Euripidean tradition, the Parian Archilocheion unites Archilochus’ body and its ritual remembrance with the location of his poetic production and entextualization; it thus yokes the metaphysics of divine inspiration (as in his encounter with the Muses) to the theology of hero cult (inspired by Mnesiepes’ communications with the oracular Apollo). Signi cantly, it is through the physical preservation and commemoration of such encounters—by means of archival storage and its ritual retrieval—that such a transcendent model of poetic production can endure. By virtue of its mid-third-century BCE date, Mnesiepes’ inscription is contemporary with many epitymbia in the Greek Anthology, and mirrors the literary epitaph in its negotiation of the complex relationship between elusive verse and material monument. In generating virtual encounters with poets’ tombs, epitymbia likewise address poetry’s slippery ontology by drawing on the language and material paraphernalia of cult. In particular, they return repeatedly to the act of libation, as when (in an anonymous epigram) the speaking tomb of the ‘divine Homer’ requests that the traveller ‘pass me not by, but pour a libation (κατασπείσας), just as you would to honour the gods.’ 74 Like the ships of the Nile in Posidippus’ epitaph for Doricha (where repeated launches from Naukratis suggest the recurrent transmission of Sappho’s verse), ritual performance at the tomb suggests continuous communication with and remembrance of the departed. As Jan Assmann observes, ‘cultural memory is imbued with an element of the sacred’: the tomb’s capacity to yoke the transcendent metaphysics of ‘immortal’ poetry to the commemorative functions of funerary ritual is key to the epitymbion’s performance of active remembrance (or Funktionsgedächtnis), drawing its readers 75 into a living community of virtual visitors that extends across time, linking poetic past to textual present. Recurrent observances at the physical site of the poet’s corpus are thus evoked in epitymbia as a parallel to p. 45 repeated activation of his or her textual corpus, such as the libations of milk and honey traditionally o ered to the dead that Alcaeus of Mytilene (or Messene) claims were poured by goatherds at the tomb of Hesiod: ‘For even such was the song the old man breathed who had tasted the pure fountains of the nine 76 Muses’ (AP 7.55.5–6). As in numerous epigrams that play on the pouring of wine on the tomb of the bibulous Anacreon, the fresh ow of liquid in honour of the dead evokes the ministrations of funerary ritual, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 epitaph and epigraph. while both reifying and reactivating the outpouring of song associated with the poet’s living body (and its 77 divine inspiration). Libation ritually gures the process of transmission from one poetic vessel to another, as streams of verse pass from Muse to poet to reader/celebrant, owing between the metaphysical and the 78 corporeal, the dead and the living. Furthermore, libation materializes the content of the poet’s verse in the form of owing substances that evoke particular genres or aesthetic qualities—whether Anacreon’s wine79 fuelled sympotic verse or Hesiod’s honeyed agricultural didactic. At the same time, the epigram presents itself as an inscribed text that, in inviting us to perform a ritual that reactivates the tomb’s function as a memorial, or μνῆμα, collapses the distinction between lapidary and literary modes of reading, inviting us 80 In this way, the material presence, geographical speci city, and socially embedded modes of remembrance associated with sites such as the Archilocheion are claimed for the textual community of the literary epigram, where the topos of libation generates repeated outpourings of verse as successive poets adopt and extend the conceit, returning time and again to their predecessors’ tombs as part of their practice of epigrammatic sociality. This simultaneous rei cation and ritualization of poetry in the form of owing liquid brings us to our nal p. 46 (and most thrillingly complex) example of a textualized poet’s tomb—an epitymbion for Sophocles from the Garland of Philip attributed to ‘Erycias’, which brings together many of the themes explored in this chapter (AP 7.36): αἰεί τοι λιπαρῷ ἐπὶ σήματι, δῖε Σοφόκλεις, σκηνίτης μαλακοὺς κισσὸς ἅλοιτο πόδας, αἰεί τοι βούπαισι περιστάζοιτο μελίσσαις τύμβος, Ὑμηττείῳ λειβόμενος μέλιτι, ὡς ἄν τοι ῥείῃ μὲν ἀεὶ γάνος Ἀτθίδι δέλτῳ κηρός, ὑπὸ στεφάνοις δ᾽ αἰὲν ἔχῃς πλοκάμους. Ever, O divine Sophocles, may the ivy that adorns the stage dance with soft feet over your polished monument. Ever may the tomb be encompassed by bees that bedew it, the children of the ox, and drip with honey of Hymettus, that there be ever store of wax owing for you to spread on your Attic 81 writing tablet, and that your locks may never want a wreath. Like many ctional epitaphs, Erycias’ poem treats Sophocles’ sēma as a physical manifestation of his work, 82 whereby plants adorning it embody the genre at which he excelled, tragedy. Here the customary embellishments of the tomb are put to work as signs, sēmata, of literary form, content, and poetics, so that the Bacchic connotations of ivy recall the Dionysiac setting of the theatre. The plant’s ‘soft feet’ suggest actors’ buskins, while Hymettian honey suggests the ‘sweetness’ of Sophocles’ verse, the Attic qualities of 83 his language, and the Athenian context for which he wrote. Erycias takes this conceit further: extending the metaphor of honey from its role in libations to the dead to the use of beeswax as a surface for script, he goes on to pray in lines 4–5 ‘that there be ever store of wax owing for you to spread on your Attic writing tablet’. Here the distinction between tomb and text is fully p. 47 elided, as the ritual accoutrements of the sēma themselves provide the physical surface necessary for textual composition. Not only does the technology of writing preserve Sophocles’ works for posterity, Erycias implies, it even o ers material conditions appropriate for the production of new work in the context of death. Within the virtual medium of the epigram, the tomb already serves as a (stone) surface for the epitaph’s inscription. Yet the image of a sēma spread with wax—a veritable beehive of poetic activity— creates a palimpsest of textual surfaces, whereby stone inscription is layered with wax writing tablet and, implicitly, the papyrus roll that supports Erycias’ text itself. In this way, the impermanence of the wax tablet—as a surface more appropriate for initial composition than the long-term storage of literary texts— Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 into its virtual space. is countered by means of a stone inscription that is nevertheless preserved and circulated in the form of a book roll. This materialization of remembrance upon the surface of Sophocles’ sēma parallels the preservation of his tragedies in the material form of the book (recalling, like the epitymbia of Euripides, the de nitive entextualization of his works in Lycurgan Athens), once more asserting the relationship between tomb and archive as parallel forms of mnēmata. At the same time, Erycias’ hope that wax might ‘always ow’ (ῥείῃ μὲν ἀεί) and that Sophocles will be ‘continually crowned with wreaths’ (ὑπὸ στεφάνοις δ᾽ αἰὲν ἔχῃς πλοκάμους) expresses a desire for the elusive immediacy of poetic composition and theatrical performance that a book It was the wax tablets discovered in the Tomb of the Poet at Daphne, we might recall, that so moved the poet A. E. Stallings, who contrasts the crumbling beeswax ‘frangible with centuries’ now visible in the Piraeus 84 Museum with the pliant substance known to the living poet, ‘still weighing one word with another’. As an organic medium created by bees and employed for ‘work in progress’, the text impressed into wax (rather than inked onto papyrus) maintains the status of an eternal non nito, forever suspended in a state of 85 becoming. p. 48 It is, moreover, the archetypal medium of memory, from Plato’s Theaetetus (which describes how memories are formed when imprinted into the wax tablet of the mind) to Cicero’s model of spatial mnemotechnics derived from Simonides (whereby one stores memories as images within places, ‘as a wax 86 writing tablet and the letters written on it’). In contrast to the impassive hardness of stone or the brittle surface of papyrus, wax conveys a sense of embodied, active memory that is stored in persons rather than things. As a medium for the storage of thought, it mediates between the material and metaphysical—just as the libations of honey poured on Sophocles’ tomb mediate between the living and the dead, and just as the teeming bees that throng it are themselves described as emerging from the dead body of an ox (in an 87 allusion to the bougonia, a famous example of ‘spontaneous generation’ with overtones of resurrection). In marking the textual materialization of Sophocles’ corpus, then, Erycias rei es his work in media that are traditionally invested with both an organic and a transcendent power. Pierre Nora observes that ‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal 88 present.’ In his prayer for perpetually owing wax, Erycias nds an especially apposite means of materializing the elusive nature of poetry at its very moment of emergence, aligning the enduring ritual present of the honey-steeped tomb with the compositional present of the poet, and uniting the embodied storage of memory (in its Platonic formulation) with both the uidity of verse and the material inscription of text itself. As the relics of the Daphne tomb remind us, however, wax needs the warmth of living bodies to remain pliable, impressible, and, ultimately, readable. To retain their functionality and avoid obsolescence, textual media must remain active, operating within networks where they can maintain their ‘ uidity’ through continual reactivation. Ultimately, the poet’s tomb both embodies and problematizes an enduring tension between the transcendent qualities attributed to the poetry of the past and the material vehicles that p. 49 convey this transcendence to future generations. Whether virtual or inscribed, the epitymbion marks out a privileged space for written text as a medium that, in maintaining and even generating poetic memories, holds the potential to circulate them among the living. Yet whether stone, wax, or papyrus, such media exist along a spectrum of impermanence that continually threatens the immortality they attempt to confer. The Muses’ gifts may be ‘deathless’, as Antipater’s epitaph for Sappho claims (AP 7.14), yet they depend for their survival upon a series of mortal bodies, of which the poet’s own is merely the rst in a series of perishable p. 50 89 vessels for verse. Notes 1 Stallings (2006), 19. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher, Northwestern University Press. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 roll (as archival document) can never quite provide. 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 (1998), 78–9; and Höschele (2010), 171–229. On the motif of the maidenʼs abduction by Hades in epigram, see Cairns (1996). LSJ notes that ἔμφρων gains its meaning of ʻin oneʼs mindʼ or ʻsensibleʼ by explicit contrast with the mad, the dead, and the sleeping, citing Soph. Ant. 1237. I borrow the notion of an epigrammatic echo from Hayden Pelliccia, who detects Callimachusʼ use of the device in Ep. 28 Pf. (Pelliccia (forthcoming)). On the pointed use of intertextual allusion (and possible direct quotation) in Asclepiadesʼ reference to γλυκὺς…πόνος at AP 7.11.1, see Sens (2003), 79 and (2011), 190. AP 7.712 = 2 G-P. On the probably spurious attribution of this epigram to Erinna herself, see Neri (1996), 194–201. On the question of citation in 7.712, see Sens (2003), 83, with further bibliography. Nora (1989) and (1996). Nora (1989), 19. Nora (1989), 7: ʻThere are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory.ʼ A. Assmann (1999), 189. The notion of ʻstorage memoryʼ, as opposed to ʻfunctional memoryʼ (discussed below), is outlined in A. Assmann (1999): Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedä chtnisses, ʻCommemorative Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 6 See Pöhlmann (2013) and Lygouri-Tolia (2014). On the instruments, see Terzēs (2013) on the harp, and Psaroudakēs (2013) on the aulos. On fragments recoverable from the tablets and papyrus (the earliest yet discovered in ancient Greek), see Pöhlmann and West (2012); West (2013) and Alexopoulou and Karamanou (2014), with further bibliography. See West (2013) and Alexopoulou and Karamanou (2014). For a sensitive exploration of the materiality of writing (and the metaphors to which it gives rise) in antiquity, see Butler (2011). On epigrammatic epitaphs for poets, see especially Gabathuler (1937); Bing (1988a); Bolmarcich (2002); Sens (2003); Klooster (2011), 15–42; and Kimmel-Clauzet (2013), 163–84, with Montiglio, Chapter 10 in this volume. On the programmatic role played by poetsʼ epitaphs within the anthologies of Meleager and Philip, in particular, see Höschele, Chapter 9 in this volume. On the device of the epitaph as applied by poets to their own works, see Peirano (2014). On sepulchral epigram more generally, see Bruss (2005); Tsagalis (2008); Tueller (2008), 65–94 and Christian (2015), 162–228. On Alexandrian textualization of—and corresponding poetic intertextuality with—the poetry of the past, see especially Bing (1988a); Hunter (1996) on Theocritus; Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004); Acosta-Hughes (2007a) on iambic poetry, and (2010) on Hellenistic reception of Greek lyric, and Klooster (2011). Vernant (1991). On the liminal status of the tomb, see Haarløv (1977) and Platt (2012). See the classic analysis of Svenbro (1993). Bing (2009). On the role of voice in Hellenistic epigram, see in particular the subtle analyses of Männlein-Robert (2007a) and (2007b). Barthes (1967). On the ʻsolemn silenceʼ (σεμνῶς…σιγᾷ) of text, see Pl. Phaedrus 275d. On voice and silence in relation to ekphrastic poetry, see Squire (2010). On ʻentextualizationʼ as ʻthe process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original contextʼ (Sung-Yul Park and Bucholtz (2009), 486), see Bauman and Briggs (1990); Briggs and Bauman (1992); Silverstein and Urban (1996) and Barber (2007). Greek Anthology 7.11 = Asclepiades G-P 28. Text and translation from Sens (2011), 185. For epigrams mourning Erinna, see also 7.12 (anonymous), 7.13 (attributed to Leonidas or Meleager), 7.713 (Antipater), and 9.190 (anonymous), with additional discussion and Montiglio (this volume, pp. 225–6). On these and the series of epitaphs (perhaps falsely) attributed to Erinna mourning her childhood friend Baucis (subject of the Dista ) at GA 7.710 and 712, see Höschele (this volume, pp. 207–8, with further bibliography). On Erinna and other female poets as both authors and subjects of literary epigram, see Murray and Rowland (2007). See Knauer (1935), Neri (1996), Gutzwiller (1997a), Stehle (2001), and Sens (2003) and (2011), 185–93. On lament in Erinnaʼs Dista , see Levaniouk (2008). Sens (2011), 190 notes that ancient witnesses (e.g. AP 9.190.3) set the length of Erinnaʼs Dista at 300 verses. On the use of the first person in Erinnaʼs verse, and its influence on Hellenistic poetry, see Gutzwiller 1997a. On the notion of ʻspeaking objectsʼ, coined as ʻoggetti parlantiʼ by Burzachechi (1962), see Svenbro (1993) and Steiner (1993); on speaking objects in literary epigram, in particular, see Petrovic (2005); Männlein-Robert (2007b), 157–67; Tueller (2008), 141–65; and Squire (2010), 608–16. Text and translation from Sens (2003), 82. On the disputed authorship of the poem, see Neri (1996), 213–16. See Höschele, in this volume, pp. 207–10. On Meleagerʼs Stephanos (especially AP 4.1) and the use of flowers as a metaphor for verse (and thus, by the second century CE , anthologiai), see Cameron (1993), 19–33; Gutzwiller (1997b) and 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 For discussion, see Kimmel-Clauzet (2013), 171–3. AP 7.46 (also anonymous): Οὐ σὸν μνῆμα τόδ᾽ ἔστ᾽, Εὐριπίδη, ἀλλὰ σὺ τοῦδε. | τῇ σῇ γὰρ δόξῃ μνῆμα τόδ᾽ ἀμπέχεται. On the incorporation of ʻauthenticʼ epigrams into the literary epigrammatic tradition, see Bing (2002), 38–66 and (2009), 116–46; Bettenworth (2007); and Christian (2015). Paus. 1.2.2: εἰσὶ δὲ τάφοι κατὰ τὴν ὁδὸν γνωριμώτατοι Μενάνδρου τοῦ Διοπείθους καὶ μνῆμα Εὐριπίδου κενόν (ʻAlong the road [from the Piraeus] are very famous graves, that of Menander, son of Diopeithes, and a cenotaph of Euripidesʼ). On Pausaniasʼ treatment of poetsʼ tombs, see Hanink, Chapter 11 in this volume. AP 7.43 = FGE ʻIonʼ 1: Χαῖρε μελαμπετάλοις, Εὐριπίδη, ἐν γυάλοισι | Πιερίας τὸν ἀεὶ νυκτὸς ἔχων θάλαμον. | ἴσθι δ᾽ ὑπὸ χθονὸς ὤν, ὅτι σοι κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται | ἶσον Ὁμηρείαις ἀενάοις χάρισιν. (ʻHail, Euripides, dwelling in the chamber of eternal night in the dark-robed valleys of Pieria! Know, though thou art under the earth, that thy renown shall be everlasting, equal to the perennial charm of Homer.ʼ) Text and translation from Paton (1917). Page (FGE 157) suggests that AP 7.43–4 were erroneously ascribed to Ion of Chios as a well-known contemporary of Euripides, despite the fact that ʻEuripides outlived Ion by about a dozen yearsʼ (if they were not a deliberate forgery, p. 128). Rather, Page argues, ʻthe style of the epigrams and their pseudo-epitaphic character suit the Hellenistic much better than any earlier periodʼ. AP 7.44 = FGE ʻIonʼ 2: Εἰ καὶ δακρυόεις, Εὐριπίδη, εἷλέ σε πότμος, | καί σε λυκορραῖσται δεῖπνον ἔθεντο κύνες, | τὸν σκηνῇ μελίγηρυν ἀηδόνα, κόσμον Ἀθηνῶν, | τὸν σοφίῃ Μουσέων μιξάμενον χάριτα, | ἀλλ᾽ ἔμολες Πελλαῖον ὑπ᾽ ἠρίον, ὡς ἂν ὁ λάτρις | Πιερίδων ναίῃς ἀγχόθι Πιερίδων. (ʻThough a tearful fate befell thee, O Euripides, devoured by wolf-hounds, thou, the honey-voiced nightingale of the stage, the ornament of Athens, who didst mingle the grace of the Muses with wisdom, yet thou wast laid in the tomb at Pella, that the servant of the Pierian Muses should dwell near the home of his mistresses.ʼ) Text and translation from Paton (1917). AP 7.45.4 (see above, p. 32). On the poets (and their tombs) as ʻornamentsʼ of their cities, see also AP 7.19.3 (Leonidas on Alcmanʼs tymbos as the charis of Sparta); 7.52.1 (Demiurgus on Hesiod of Ascra as the stephanos of Greece and the kosmos of song), and 7.90.2 (Anonymous, on Bias of Priene as the kosmos of Ionia). On the significance of kosmos as both ornament and symbol of cosmic order, see Bloomer (2000), 15–18; Marconi (2004); Hölscher (2009); and Barham (2015), who provides extensive literary and epigraphic examples. LSJ s.v. μνήμη, A III, citing Hdn. 4.8.4 and Cassius Dio 76.14. The primary source is Ps-Plutarch, Vit. dec. or. 841–3. For a discussion of Lycurgusʼ law in the cultural and political context of fourth-century Athens (and its relations with Macedon), see Hanink (2014), 60–89. On the use of λαλέω in Hellenistic epigram, and in relation to animal sounds in particular, see Männlein-Robert (2007a), 214–20, 238–50. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 33 Spaces: Forms and Changes in Cultural Memoryʼ, translated as A. Assmann (2011). On the notion of ʻcultural memoryʼ as embedded in specific social and cultural frames and aided by means of mnemonic institutions, see also A. Assmann and J. Assmann (1989). For an application of these ideas to a number of premodern cultures (including ancient Greece), see J. Assmann (1992). On the tomb as a form of Speichergedächtnis, see Hendon (2000). On this distinction, see J. Assmann (2011), 34–41 and A. Assmann (2011). On allusions to ritual in the context of literary epigram, see below. A. Assmann (1999) and (2011); see also J. Assmann (1998), with helpful discussion by Erll (2011), 34–7. On ʻliteratureʼ and literary criticism as emerging concepts in the Hellenistic period, see Gutzwiller (2010a). On the notion of the paratext, see Genette (1997), with Smith and Wilson (2011) on Renaissance paratexts. See also the papers gathered in Jansen (2014) and Peirano (2014), who addresses the paratextual function of epitymbia in particular. Vit. Eur. Genos Ia.10, and Pausanias 1.2.2: see Lefkowitz (2012), 91–2, who observes that possessing two tombs is a sign of heroic status, Burges Watson (2013b) and Kimmel-Clauzet (2013), 154–60 and 171–3. See Hanink (2010) and (2014), 37, 233–4, with her comments in this volume, pp. 238, 245–6. On the cenotaph theme in literary epigram, and the play it engenders between hidden presence and revealed absence, see Bruss (2005). AP 7.47. My translation. LSJ s.v. λαλητέος, citing AP 7.47. Ar. Frogs 954: τουτοισὶ λαλεῖν ἐδίδαξα. IG XIV 2124, an epitaph from Rome for an actor and teacher of acting, cited by LSJ s.v. λαλέω. I am grateful to Hayden Pelliccia for drawing my attention to this example. On this reception history, see Hanink (2014), 60–91. On epigram and the theatre, see Fantuzzi (2007). This is, of course, to gloss over the active performance of Greek drama (and associated cultural imperialism) in Macedon itself: see Hanink (2014), 68–74. Text and translation from Loeb edition. See also Page FGE ʻThucydidesʼ or ʻTimotheusʼ 1, pp. 307–8, who dates the epitaph to the early fourth century BCE . The epitaph is quoted in the Euripidean Vita (Genos Ia10) and Thomas Magister (Vit. Eur. 6). 52 53 54 55 56 58 59 60 in the Garland of Philip. Fr.31 Lobel-Page, ll. 7–9, 15–16: ὡς γὰρ εὔιδον βροχέως σε, φώνας | ούδὲν ἔτʼ εἴκει· | ἀλλὰ κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε…| τεθνάκην δʼ ὀλίγω ʻπιδεύης | φαίνομʼ ἔμʼ αὔτᾳ. On κοφόν, Gow and Page (1968), vol. 2, 465, citing AP 7.48.3 and Peek (1955), nos. 1263 and 1265. On the play of silence and speech in Fragment 31, see OʼHiggins (1990); Stehle (1997), 288–94; and Montiglio (2000), 103–4 (who also discusses AP 7.16–17 briefly on p. 101). On the reception of Sappho in Hellenistic poetry (and epigram in particular), see Acosta-Hughes (2007b) and (2010), 82–92. Note that Pinytus may also possibly allude here to a play on the tension between voice and silence in a dedicatory epigram ʻin the style of Sapphoʼ at AP 6.269, in which an object (presumably a statue) dedicated to Artemis claims ʻChildren, though voiceless I answer if anyone asks…ʼ (Παῖδες, ἄφωνος ἐοῖσα ποτεννέπω αἴ τις ἔρηται): see Acosta-Hughes (2010), 83, n. 78, who also wonders if ʻthe partly conventional opening of this poem…is not also meant to recall the broken voice of Sappho fr. 31ʼ. AP 7.21, text and translation from Paton (1917). For discussion, see Edmonds (1931); Gow and Page (1965) ad loc.; and Klooster (2011) 27–8. Simias is better known as the author of Hellenistic technopaegnia such as his ʻEggʼ, on which see Méndez Dosuna (2008); Luz (2010); and Kwapisz (2013), 107–37. Soph. Ant. 256. See LSJ s.v. σελίς, A1: ʻcross-beamʼ, e.g. IG 12.374.58; 42(1).103.163 (a fourth-century BCE inscription from Epidaurus); A3: ʻblockʼ of theatre seats, BMus.Inscr. 481.157, 440 (first-century CE inscription from Ephesus). 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 Horace, Odes 3.30.1–2: on this textʼs function as a poetic sphragis in relation to epigrammatic epitymbia, see Peirano (2014), 231–4. On Horaceʼs monumentum as the equivalent to his tomb, see Woodman (1974). On the perishability of poetsʼ tombs, see Rawles, Chapter 2 in this volume. Athenaeus 13.696/G-P XVII/122 AB, text and translation: Austin and Bastianini (2002). See Bing (2005), 131–2, whose interpretation of the epigram is crucial for my argument here. For the ʻnew Sappho papyrusʼ, see Obbink (2014). Sapphoʼs resentment of her brotherʼs lover is mentioned by Herodotus 2.35, who calls her Rhodopis, and Athenaeus 13.596c: see Lidov (2002), who claims the two names must have been connected to each other in the Hellenistic biographical tradition. On Sapphoʼs relationship with her brothers, see Ferrari (2014) and Lardinois (2014). On this phenomenon, see Bingʼs discussion in Chapter 7, as well as Lidov (2002). Doricha appears in Sappho frs 7 and 15 LP, though not in relation to her brother Charaxus. The theme of Sapphoʼs Alexandrian edition also emerges in a series of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology that refer to her as the Tenth Muse, in a play on her (by then) canonical nine books of poetry, or (as Tullius Laureas expresses it), her ʻNine flowers of songʼ (AP 7.17): see Acosta-Hughes (2010). For the theme of κόνις (dust) in epitymbia, see also AP 7.34.2 (Antipater on the ʻdust that holds Pindarʼ) and 7.708.1 (Dioscorides on the ʻlight dustʼ covering the playwright Machon), both discussed by Montiglio, in this volume, pp. 222 and 227. See Rosenmeyer (1997), 132 and Bing (2005), 132. For some fascinating comments on the relationship between papyrology and archaeology, see Obbink (2011). On the notion of ʻentanglementʼ, whereby social groups become invested in the maintenance of complex material worlds, see Hodder (2012). Clay (2004), 11, citing Kontoleon (1952), 36. Clayʼs study of the Archilocheion and its cache of inscriptions is still definitive. On the Mnesiepes inscription (SEG 15 no. 517; Clay (2004) cat. 2) in particular, see Kontoleon (1952) and (1956); Clay (2004), 10–24, 104–10 (with further bibliography); and Ornaghi (2009). On inscribed Hellenistic poetry organized in imitation of texts on papyrus, see Del Corso (2010) and Garulli (2014). Parallel uses of selides can be found on the philosophical inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanada (SEG 52.1445), dated c.200 BCE , and the so-called ʻPride of Halicarnassusʼ inscription (SGO 01.12.01), dated to the second century BCE : see Isager and Pederson (2004) and Garulli 69 70 71 72 (2014), 146–50. On ekthesis in the Mnesiepes inscription, see Clay (2004), 156 n. 16 and Nagy (2008), 261–2. See Clay (2004), esp. 10–24; Ornaghi (2009), 176–80; and Rotstein (2010), 293–8. As observed by Nagy (1990b), 363–4 and (2008), 263. See Clay (2004), cat. 2, section E1 II, lines 3–6 (Mnesiepes sacrifices to the Muses, Apollo, and other deities) and line 18 (Mnesiepes sacrifices in the precinct to Archilochus and other deities ʻaccording to the instructions the god gave us in his Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 57 Chirping of locusts: Theoc. 5.34, Aristoph. 10.6; musical sounds: Theoc. 20.29. Euripides himself uses the term λάλημα to refer to the ʻclever, knavish, deceitful chatterersʼ (σοφῶν πανούργων ποικίλων λαλημάτων) whose ʻSiren wordsʼ convince Hermione to act against Andromache at Andr. 937. See above, n. 25, on Pierre Nora. On this notion, see also Klooster (2011), 26–35. AP 7.16 = G-P, Garland ʻPinytusʼ 1 (vol. 2, pp. 464–5). This couplet, dated to the first century BCE /CE , was probably included 73 74 75 76 77 78 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 (2008); Ornaghi (2009), 133–55; and Rotstein (2010), 293–8. AP 7.2B, lines 2–3 (Anonymous), text and translation from Paton (1917). J. Assmann (2011), 38. See also A. Assmann (2011), on the mnemonic function of ritual ʻscriptsʼ in cultural memory. AP 7.55 (attributed to Alcaeus of Mytilene or Messene): τοίην γὰρ καὶ γῆρυν ἀπέπνεεν ἐννέα Μουσέων | ὁ πρέσβυς καθαρῶν γευσάμενος λιβάδων. AP 7.23.3–4, 7.26.3–4, 7.28.2: for discussion, see Montiglio, Chapter 10 in this volume. On depictions of libation on Greek pots, and the theological implications of its material fluidity, see Gaifman (2013). On libation in Greek religion more generally, see Graf (1980) and Simon (2005). Cf. Montiglioʼs chapter in this volume on the generic significance of plants growing from poetsʼ tombs in Hellenistic epitymbia, where the ivy and vine springing forth from the tomb of Anacreon, for example, function in parallel ways to libations of wine. On the means by which epigrams construct fictional spaces within their anthologies, whether cemetery or gallery, see Höschele (2010), with her discussion of virtual ʻPoetsʼ Cornersʼ, Chapter 9 in this volume. AP 7.36. Translation adapted from Paton (1917). On this epigram, see also Montiglioʼs chapter in this volume. In this sense, the epigram responds to Simiasʼ epitymbion for Sophocles, AP 7.22 (discussed above), which describes him as crowned with the ʻcurving ivy of Acharnaeʼ. Compare the vines, violets, and myrtle that grow upon the tomb of Anacreon—material embodiments of sympotic verse that, appropriately for this most bibulous of poets, accompany the drenching of both his ashes and his sēma with wine (AP 7.23–33), discussed by Montiglio, Chapter 10 in this volume. On the significance of Attic honey here (celebrated by Aristophanes at Pax 252 and Thesm. 1192), see Gow and Page (1968), vol. 2, 286. Stallings (2006), 19 (discussed above). On the phenomenology of the non finito, see Rothstein (1976); Guentner (1993); Carabell (1995) and (2014); Kramer (2008), with Gurd (2007) and Platt (2018) on the aesthetics of the incomplete in Hellenistic epigram. On the ontological complexities of beeswax as a medium for writing and image-making, see Platt (forthcoming). Plato, Theaetetus 191c–d; Cicero De oratore 2.86. On the relationship between wax and memory in antiquity, see Penny Small (1997), and on the role of wax in the phenomenology of memory, Ricoeur (2004), 13–17. On the uncanny organicism of wax as a medium, see Didi-Huberman (1999). On Simonides as the inventor of memory techniques and as the object of memorialization, see Rawles, Chapter 2 in this volume. The locus classicus for the bougonia is Virgil, Georgics 4.281–314 and 538–58: see Perkell (1989) and Habinek (1990); on bees in the Graeco-Roman poetic tradition, see Engels and Nicolaye (2008) and Carlson (2015). Nora (1989), 8. I am most grateful to Barbara Graziosi and Nora Goldschmidt for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and for the wonderful opportunity to learn from the Living Poets project at Durham University. I would also like to thank colleagues who have given me invaluable feedback during the writing of this paper, including Hayden Pelliccia, Pietro Pucci, Alex Purves, Victoria Wohl, Nancy Worman, and the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press. Chelsea Gardner and Carolyn Laferrière provided invaluable help in securing the image of the ʻTomb of the Poetʼ. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/2590/chapter/142944071 by University of Cambridge user on 09 November 2023 79 oracleʼ). On the Delphic oracles cited by Mnesiepes, see Parke (1958), and on relations between the Archilocheion and Delphi, see Ornaghi (2009), 181–256. See Clay (2004), cat. 2, section E1 II, lines 20–40. On Archilochusʼ epiphanic Dichterweihe, see Clay (2004), 14–16; Corrêa