Technopaegnia

This article is about the figure poem Egg by Simias of Rhodes, a concrete poem known for its visual arrangement
in the shape of an egg, extraordinary metrical composition, sophisticated paronomasia and puns
on metrical termini technici. The question this article explores is what can be learned from Simias’s verses
about the metrical terminology of the late 4th and early 3rd century BC. The poet himself gives instructions in
lines 9–10 how his poem should be arranged for reading, with the lines increasing in length from one foot to
ten. My suggestion is that Simias’s Egg, in the form of an extended pun, might indirectly provide an overview
of some metrical terms that were in use during his time: foot, kolon, metron, rhythmus, etc. Simias’s use of the
word κῶλα, in the so-called “dancing fawns” comparison (l. 13), is particularly sophisticated, alternating its
connotation between that of ‘limb’, ‘foot, leg’ and ‘a metrical unit’. I propose a list of “metrical” words which
Simias used directly or metaphorically and which occur later in Hephaestion’s Enchiridion as metrical terms.
We possess neither the treatises on which Hephaestion built his Enchiridion nor the names of his direct
predecessors. Metrical terminology proves to be quite conservative, and some terms, which Simias used in
his Egg and Hephaestion in the Enchiridion, are still in use today as standard metrical terms. Almost all of
these terms can be found in the Nomenclator Metricus written by Otto Schroeder (1929). The poem is full of
allusions and obscure metaphors later typical of Hellenistic epigrammatic poetry, in particular, the poem’s
sophisticated wordplay on metrical terminology.

This article is about the figure poem Egg by Simias of Rhodes, a concrete poem known for its visual arrangement in the shape of an egg, extraordinary metrical composition, sophisticated paronomasia and puns on metrical termini technici. The question this article explores is what can be learned from Simias's verses about the metrical terminology of the late 4 th and early 3 rd century BC. The poet himself gives instructions in lines 9-10 how his poem should be arranged for reading, with the lines increasing in length from one foot to ten. My suggestion is that Simias's Egg, in the form of an extended pun, might indirectly provide an overview of some metrical terms that were in use during his time: foot, kolon, metron, rhythmus, etc. Simias's use of the word κῶλα, in the so-called "dancing fawns" comparison (l. 13), is particularly sophisticated, alternating its connotation between that of 'limb' , 'foot, leg' and 'a metrical unit'. I propose a list of "metrical" words which Simias used directly or metaphorically and which occur later in Hephaestion's Enchiridion as metrical terms. We possess neither the treatises on which Hephaestion built his Enchiridion nor the names of his direct predecessors. Metrical terminology proves to be quite conservative, and some terms, which Simias used in his Egg and Hephaestion in the Enchiridion, are still in use today as standard metrical terms. Almost all of these terms can be found in the Nomenclator Metricus written by Otto Schroeder (1929). The poem is full of allusions and obscure metaphors later typical of Hellenistic epigrammatic poetry, in particular, the poem's sophisticated wordplay on metrical terminology.

Visual poetry is a poetry emphasising its visual component. First visual poems appear as technopaegnia, or ‘games of mind’ practice. The author of a visual poem provides the reader with a clue to the text as well as deepens the text through interaction of visual and semantic components. A variety of visual poetry forms has historical and cultural fundaments and philosophical and aesthetic meaning. Through the centuries, several images were popular for visual poems, though a simple form of spiral was rare. In a figurative sense, the spiral means permanent development and growth, if seen from inside to outside, and increasing of tension in the inevitable approach to the centre, if seen from outside to inside. Whether it is a spiral of passion, or spiral of hate, or spiral of faith, it is continuously developing, changing and rotating around the centre. As shown in this paper, evolution of poems in the form of spiral generally coincides with the evolution of other visual poems, passing through the same stages of being sacred poem, intellectual poem, amusing poem, avant-garde poem, and children poem. On the other hand, spiral visual poetry has its own characteristic features, such as large time gaps, very rare appearance until the early 20th century, and a surge of interest in the modern era.

Dubellay s'en prend à Ronsard, avec l'arme que celui-ci décochait à un critique inconnu. Cette arme : un acrostiche grec, renversé comme la flèche du Parthe.
Dubellay lashes out at Ronsard, by means of an greek acrostic, to be read from the bottom up. Ronsard used the same weapon a few years before, against an unnamed adversary.  Some Greek acrostics are like Parthian arrows.

Au début de la seconde partie, météorologique, des Phénomènes (757-762), Aratos place une illustration graphique de l'anémologie péripatéticienne (Météorologiques 361a) : le mot ANEMOI y descend obliquement, d'asteres à andri. Sans oublier comment Apollonios de Rhodes se réapproprie ce jeu (Arg. 1. 1273-1283), nous montrerons que Virgile le reproduit au début de la section météorologique de ses Géorgiques (1.351-356).
En conclusion, nous indiquerons une inflexion que ces vents semblent devoir donner à la discussion sur les jeux de lettres, jusqu'ici plutôt éclairée par la lune.

Isidor Hilberg thought that the "obviously" fortuitous acrostic in Ecl. 4.47-52 was a fatal blow to the idea that a serious poet like Vergil could have played with letters. The problem is, that this acrostic could be intentional and Vergil's poem, not serious at all...

his volume explores one of the most complex, multifaceted and momentous of all western cultural transformations: the refashioning of the Roman principate under the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century AD. It does so through the kaleidoscopic lens of one of antiquity's most fascinating (and maligned) artists, Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius. Optatian's experiments with word and image are little known among classicists. But, as contributors to this volume argue, his 'morphogrammatic' creations uniquely reflect, figure and shape the cultural dynamics of the fourth century. This is the first edited book dedicated to Optatian's picture-poems and their various historical contexts. By bringing together different disciplinary perspectives (including ancient history, classical philology, art history, theology, philosophy and media studies), the volume demonstrates how Optatian gave form to the various political, intellectual and cultural currents of his age. At the same time, contributors champion Optatian as a uniquely creative artist – and one who anticipated some of our most pressing literary critical, art historical and philosophical concerns today.

À paraître dans EOS CII (2015), fasc. 2.
Recension, un peu développée, de l'ouvrage mentionné, qui présente, édite et commente (enfin!) le corpus des "technopaegnia" (Simmias, Ps-Theocrite, Dosiadas, Vestinus). J'y argumente que les (grandes) forces et les (quelques) faiblesses de l'entreprise remontent a) à une salutaire volonté de resituer le corpus au sein de la littérature hellénistique ; b) à une paradoxe occultation de la dimension visuelle de ces textes. Je conteste également son"principe de simplicité", à mes yeux fourvoyant. Aux nombreuses et inventives suggestions de l'auteur, je me permets enfin d'en ajouter deux (sur la Hache, sur l'Autel Ionien.

Keeping the form of technopaegnia (following the model of Simias, imitated later mainly by Ausonius, Iulius Vestinus and Optatianus Porphyrius), Laevius appears as the inventor of a new sub-genre, Erotopaegnion. His bizarre novelty, language experimentation and striking neologisms (combination of sounds, intensified onomatopoeia, intensive use of words having a  rare or a strange sound) originate from the Alexandrine tradition of artificial literature, which brought the “nouvelle vague” of Poeti Novi in Roman poetry, Laevius being a pre-neotericus.
Light and often licentious skits on the heroic myths, based on the Greco-Roman amorous or lascivious poetry, most of his poems consisted of mythical legends recounted in Hellenistic sentimental-erotic style. Moreover, there is a general Hellenistic tinge in his overall ludic tone, his titles, and literary strategies of his self-reflexive (?) poetry.
His poems consciously imitate, subvert, and criticize (in a form of literary polemic) established literary and material traditions from the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, following the usual imitatio and aemulatio procedure, with clear receptions from various poets, especially Anacreon, whose versification he imitates, and Euripides, on whom he probably drew in some of his poems’ heroines. With his turn, he influences Varro in his Menippean Satires, and mainly poets of the second century AD. 
Later on, his work, from which only 33 fragments survive, inspired the Greek poet Musaeus (491-527 AD), who wrote Erotopaegnion Herus et Leandri in both a Greek and a Latin version and also the love poem Alphaeus and Arethusa, the Neo-Latin poet Hieronymus Angerianus Gerolamo or Girolamo Angeriano, who also wrote an epigram collection, called Erotopaegnion (1512), Sepinus, creator of Erotopaegnion libri III ad Apollinem (1553), and Francois Joseph Michel Noel in his Erotopaegnion, Sive Priapeia: Veterum et Recentiorum (1798), a collection of erotic poetry by various poets.

Un parcours (trop?) rapide de ce travail a été présenté aux rencontres CorHaLi 2015.

Problématique générale : Nos éditions modernes de l’ancienne poésie grecque cherchent à rendre celle-ci plus lisible. Toutefois, leur lisibilité fonctionne avec des moyens et des critères très différents de celle dont témoignent les papyrus poétiques d’époque hellénistique. Elles risquent donc de rendre imperceptibles des interactions que les poètes pouvaient créer entre dimensions graphique et discursive du texte. En examinant les papyrus hellénistiques sous cet angle, ou en récrivant ces textes dont n’avons que des copies beaucoup plus tardives en colonne de 20 à 25 vers, en majuscules et scriptio continua écarts, il est peut-être possible de récupérer une partie de ces interactions.

Propos de l’exposé : En nous concentrant sur un passage des Argonautiques d’Apollonios (1.1221-1239), où Hylas est happé par la nymphe, nous argumenterons a) que le poète hellénistique y propose à ses lecteurs, moins un Kino im Kopf (où l’activité visuelle de déchiffrage soutiendrait un regard imaginaire sur les personnages et les lieux de l’action) qu’une redondance entre disposition graphique et référent diégétique – et b) que cette redondance était vraisemblablement proposée comme une relève, moins de l’oralité, que de la successivité propre aux formes homériques. En conclusion, nous proposerons qu’à travers cette scène du rapt d’Hylas, Apollonios créé aussi une image de sa nouvelle agentivité poétique : le mariage initiatique d’une voix masculine et des lettres sans souffles (1221-1225 : ΑΠΝΟΑ).

This three-day workshop explored one of the most complex, historic and momentous of all western cultural transformations: the Christianization of the Roman principate in the fourth century AD. It did so, however, through the kaleidoscopic lens of one of antiquity’s most fascinating (and most maligned) artists: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius. ‘Optatian’ is hardly a household name among classicists, literary critics and cultural historians. But as the workshop explored, Optatian’s picture-poems uniquely figure the cultural dynamics of this period. To have any hope of understanding Optatian’s highly lettered artefacts, a whole range of critical perspectives was required. The Morphomata-workshop consequently stimulated a new sort of interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together historical, literary, philosophical, art historical and theological viewpoints to assess Optatian’s poetics.

Program

Wednesday 1st July

13:30-14:15
Dietrich Boschung (Cologne): Greetings
Michael Squire (London): Introduction. Morphogrammata: The Lettered Art of Optatian

14:15-15:15
Johannes Wienand (Düsseldorf): Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius: Die eigenartige Karriere eines Verfassers "hirnverbrannter Versspielereien"

15:45-16:45
Jan Kwapisz (Warsaw): Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers

16:45-17:45
Anna-Lena Körfer (Gießen): Lector ludens: Spiel und Rätsel in Optatians Panegyrik

18:00-19:00
Ulrich Ernst (Wuppertal): Versus intexti: Optatianus Porfyrius und seine Wirkung auf die mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Gitterdichtung.

Thursday 2nd July

9:15-10:15
Irmgard Männlein-Robert (Tübingen): Morphogrammata - Klangbilder? Überlegungen zu Poetik und Medialität bei Optatian

10:15-11:15
Meike Rühl (Osnabrück): Vielschichtige Palimpseste: Optatians Gedichte als Medium kollektiven und individuellen Erinnerns

11:45-12:45
Marie-Odile Bruhat (Lille): Le traitement de l'espace dans la poésie d'Optatianus Porfyrius

14:00-15:00
Martin Bažil (Prag/Rostock): Textus (in)textus: Der Textbegriff bei Optatianus

15:00-16:00
Aaron Pelttari (Edinburgh): A Lexicographical Approach to the Poetry of Optatianus Porfyrius

16:30-17:30
Thomas Habinek (University of Southern California): Optatian Porphyry: Explorations in Ontology?

Friday 3rd July

9:30-10:30
Petra Schierl (Basel)/Cédric Scheidegger Lämmle (Basel): Herrscherbild und Deutungsmuster: Optatian und die Strukturen des Panegyrischen

10:30-11:30
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe (London): Caelestia signa: Optatian’s Use of Christian Signs

12:00-13:00
Jesús Hernández Lobato (Salamanca): Rethinking Optatian from Contemporary Art: Keys to an Intersystemic Dialogue

14:15-15:30
Michael Squire (London) / Johannes Wienand (Düsseldorf): Round-table discussion

This paper discusses four newly discovered technopaegnia in Musaeus’s Hero and
Leander. The author argues that they are interconnected and constitute a complex
literary game that spreads almost over the whole poem. The characteristic elements
of the technopaegnia discussed in the article are the apostrophes, their palindromic
character, and the numbers 9 and 10. Based on the latter feature, the author tries to
show that lines 1-10 hide references to the Pythagoreans’ teachings about the first ten
numbers.