Anthologia Palatina

La mia tesi di Laurea Triennale in Grammatica Greca (Relatrice: Prof.ssa Valentina Garulli, Correlatore: Prof. Camillo Neri).
Un sondaggio in alcuni esempi di παρακλαυσίθυρον della letteratura greca. Si cercano comunanze e differenze per individuare le costanti del 'modulo'.

En la época helenística, los primeros filólogos y gramáticos se enfrentaron al grave problema de la transmisión de los textos antiguos. Conscientes del valor clásico de algunos de ellos, que justificaría la importancia de su transmisión a la posteridad, afrontaron la ardua labor de constituir un corpus que funcionara como canon básico de las obras de la antigüedad clásica. Sin embargo, no fue en el ámbito académico de las bibliotecas donde surgió el primer canon de la literatura griega escrita por mujeres sino en un breve epigrama atribuido a Antípatro de Tesalónica (AP IX 26). Proponemos aquí un estudio de la construcción de este canon de poetisas griegas.

The subject of this monograph is the 8th book of Anthologia Palatina (AP), which includes 254 epigrams of Gregory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocian poet and Church Father as an epigrammatist of the AP is connected with two peculiarities. The first one is that he participates in this poetic collection with the largest, by far, number of epigrams. So, a paradox appears: in a mostly secular anthology the quantitative predominance belongs to a Christian poet. The second singularity lies in the fact that Gregory’s epigrams in a very unique way do not diffuse into various books of AP, as is the usual practice in this collection, but exclusively compose a continuous and massive block, the 8th book.
The object of this study is the systematic examination of form and content of these epigrams. Gregory’s emotional background, topics, language, style, and intertextuality in his epigrammatic poetry are analyzed. The incorporation process of the epigrams into a mainly secular poetical collection, such as AP, is thoroughly explored, as well.

Intellectual puzzles have a tendency to intermix and accumulate in miscellaneous collections, as happens in present-day puzzle magazines. This phenomenon may already be observed in old compilations (cf. Palatine Anthology, book 14, which draws on earlier sources) and theoretical treatises of antiquity (Clearchus’ "On riddles", Athenaeus’ "Deipnosophistae" book 10). Long before such works, fictional and legendary narratives provided a framework for stringing together multifarious types of mental games. The Near-Eastern "Story of Ahiqar" and the Greek "Contest of Homer and Hesiod" use the old theme of the competition between two great sages as a plot structure to accommodate a veritable anthology of genres of riddles. The Greek legend of Homer and Hesiod may have influenced Aristophanic comedies such as the "Frogs" and the "Wasps". But while in the East the narrative form of the miscellaneous riddle contest was a fantastic outgrowth of the mixed compilations of wisdom literature, the corresponding Greek narratives were fictionalizations of the multifaceted entertainments of the symposion.

The narrative form of the miscellaneous riddle contest –that is, the earliest antecedent of the "puzzle magazine model" with its mixture of various puzzles– was invented in ancient Greece and West Asia more or less simultaneously and independently, on the basis of different local traditions. In the Near East the narrative anthology of Ahiqar’s griphoi was a fantastic offshoot of the miscellaneous collections of didactic literature; the bookish medley of wisdom genres was transplanted to the old legend of the confrontation between two masters of wisdom. The Greek stories, on the other hand, were fictionalizations of the multifaceted entertainments of the symposion. The Mesopotamian narrator pored over his learned written scrolls; the Greek one recounted, in the guise of a parable, the live delights of the convivial feast. The two cultures arrived at the same literary creation from different ways; but both of them are connected by the pure pleasure of intellectual play.

It is the same pleasure that also connects us with those remote ancestors, every time we pick up a rivista di enigmistica in order to fill in a crossword, answer a quiz, disentangle a labyrinth, or solve another one of its multifarious mental puzzles.

The historical narratives describing the Battle of the Champions and those describing the Thermopylae were distorted by the Spartan mirage to such an extent that the descriptions of the two battles became more and more similar. This is indeed the result of a number of similarities between the two battles. The Three hundred fought in both battles; in both bottles only one soldier survived and hairstyle played an important role before or after the battle. Consequently, the actions of the heroes of these battles were represented in a very similar manner. The first examples of this can be found in the Exempla literature. The tendency to represent the two battles in a very similar manner was then canonized by the declaimers whose sententiae and controversiae were collected by Seneca the Elder (Suas. 2. 2); and then it is evident also among rhetoricians (Luc. Rhet. Praec. 18. 13-22, Men. Rhet. 3. 365. 5-9 Spengel), philosophers (Max. Tyr. dissert. 23. 2. 55-57 Trapp; 32. 10. 182-192 Trapp) and in the novel (Charit. 7. 3. 11). This tendency probably dates back to no earlier than the imperial age.

1. La pubblicazione dell'Anthologia Graeca, raccolta di sedici libri di epigrammi greci, quale oggi noi la conosciamo, è abbastanza recente. Per quanto la silloge contenuta nel codice Palatino (ora Palatinus 23 + Parisinus Suppl. Gr. 384 [sigla P]) fosse già nota verso la fine del XVI sec., solo Friedrich Jacobs ne diede (tra 1813 e 1817) 1 quella che potremmo definire l'editio princeps 2 , con l'attuale numerazione, in quindici libri, seguiti da un'appendice di 388 epigrammi (il cosiddetto XVI libro) tratti dal manoscritto Marcianus Gr. 481 [sigla Pl], scritto a Bisanzio da Massimo di Planude tra il 1299 e il 1301. Fino all'inizio del XIX secolo, dunque, i testi dei poeti epigrammatici erano noti attraverso la raccolta testimoniata appunto da questo codice planudeo, che faceva parte della biblioteca del cardinal Bessarione, e da suoi numerosi apografi. Da uno di questi -e non direttamente dal Marciano -deriva l'editio princeps pubblicata da Jean Laskaris presso lo stampatore Alpa di Firenze nell'agosto del 1494 3 . Ad essa, nel 1503, sarebbe seguita la prima aldina 4 . Ma già intorno al 1460 5 , grazie al diffondersi di copie manoscritte, la raccolta aveva suscitato l'interesse tra gli altri di Poliziano, autore di epigrammi in greco 6 , mentre lo stesso Laskaris, Marullo e Merula ne fornivano qualche prima traduzione in latino, cui si sarebbero aggiunte tra le altre quelle del ferrarese Celio Calcagnini, e soprattutto di Andrea Alciati, su cui avremo occasione di tornare.

The Aesopic fable and the riddle are primarily folk genres and have a close affinity with each other. Both of them are based on ambiguity and employ metaphor and analogy in order to refer to a deeper layer of meaning under their superficial imagery. This generic kinship was already noted and discussed in antiquity. The oldest specialized name for “fable” in the ancient Greek language, ainos, is etymologically connected to the term ainigma, “riddle”. Greek scholars, rhetoricians, and scholiasts, from the Peripatetic Clearchus to the Byzantine Eustathius, comment on the kinship between the two genres and their nomenclature. Plutarch even dramatized this literary relationship in his Banquet of the Seven Sages, by presenting Aesop and Cleobulina (the emblematic figures personifying fable and riddle respectively) as close friends who mutually appropriate each other’s genre. Above all, consciousness of the affinity between riddle and fable took concrete form in the field of popular poetic creation, through the category of narrative enigmas — that is, riddles which assume the form of a brief tale, instead of offering a static, accumulative description of their object. The constituents of the object are symbolically represented as human or animal characters and involved in a rudimentary scenario of action, narrated in the third person. Thus, the riddle becomes similar to the conventional form of the Aesopic fable. In the present article the term “mythogriph” is introduced for this type of narrative riddle, and a series of examples are discussed, drawn from the literatures of various ancient peoples. Many of the oldest and most pristine riddles of the ancient Greeks belong to this type, which is already attested in the proverb collections of the Sumerians, the earliest wisdom literature of the world.

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the Histories of Herodotus and the excerpta of the Γοήτων φώρα of Oenomaus of Gadara (II century AD), which constitutes a not yet adequately-studied case in the context of the documentation concerning the oracles of Del-phi. The goal is to determine the genesis and the developments of these two literary traditions, rejecting those hermeneutic approaches which connected the main source of Oenomaus to Herodotus. The textual comparison of the versions transmitted by the two authors allows to identify a set of lexical and syntactic differences, mutual lacunae and additions of verses, revealing a distinct appearance of the two oracular traditions in terms of chronology, origin and inclinations.

Bachelor's dissertation (it. Lettere Classiche) at the University of Naples Federico II in Greek Literature entitled “La tradizione della Saffo epigrammatica. La ricezione della figura di Saffo nell’epigramma greco” (eng. THE TRADITION OF EPIGRAMMATIC SAPPHO. THE RECEPTION OF SAPPHO’S FIGURE IN GREEK EPIGRAM); supervisor prof. Giulio Massimilla.

This paper deals with an oft-neglected aspect of the complex relationships between the Hellenistic culture and the Archaic and Classical tradition, namely the epigrams handed down to us in both epigraphical and literary sources. These (unfortunately rare) epigrams represent the only opportunity we have to detect the divergence between the original Archaic or Classical texts preserved on stone and their copies transmitted by manuscripts. Indeed, the Archaic and Classical epigrams have usually been handed down to us either as inscriptions or in manuscript copies, but very rarely in both forms. During the literary transmission the epigrams were modified in many ways: e. g. the writing conventions of the Archaic alphabets were abandoned and replaced by the "standard" system, and the linguistic shape suffered remarkable alterations. One of the aims of this paper is to explore the nature of the modifications undergone by some Archaic and Classical epigrams on stone during their literary transmission.

Success in war over rival kings or barbarian invaders was one of the marks of legitimation for the Hellenistic rulers. Depictions of, or allusions to, war are quite rare in the surviving Hellenistic court poetry; however, we can have a glance of military life (and death) through the lens of verse epitaphs for men who served in the army –in every rank, from royal philoi to humble privates–, and from the occasional dedicatory epigrams they commissioned for temple offerings. Poetic portrayal of members of an army involves display (or concealment) of many layers of their individual and public “identity”: social status, ethnicity, cultural background, religious belief, etc. Building a corpus of such epigrams produced in the 4th-1st cent. BC, from every area of the Hellenistic world (mainland Greece, Macedonia, the Ptolemaic, Attalid and Seleucid kingdoms, the independent poleis of Asia Minor) I shall try to assess similarities and differences in self-presentation of men who –often gone unremarked by ancient historians or court poets– helped building the power of their basileis or keeping the freedom of their own polis.

Abstract: Epigram AP 10. 42, attributed to Lucian in the Palatine Anthology, probably is not by Lucian, nor is it originally even an epigram: the allusion to the oral publication of the verses, which must be protected by a “seal” affixed to the tongue, betrays an archaic (rather than classical) mentality, while the almost total thematic coincidence with the Theognidean elegy of the “seal” (Theogn. 19-26), as well as the similarity between the solutions proposed in the two compositions and the broader stylistic and linguistic similarities, suggest that this epigram should be recognized as a couplet from a lost section of the Theognidean corpus, just like other texts attributed to Theognis by Stobaeus.

Chapter 10 studies Hellenistic and Roman military epitaphs, and addresses a number of interconnected issues: the unpopularity of epitaphs for individual soldiers in the Greek Anthology; the near absence of inscribed epitaphs in literary sources, despite the fact that they are often of good literary quality; and the question of their authorship.
Apparently, there was no ‘Hellenistic Simonides’, author of warriors’ inscriptional epitaphs worthy to be gathered in a book. In the seventh book of the Greek Anthology there are many fictitious epitaphs for Homeric heroes or famous historical figures, but funerary epigrams celebrating the death in battle of individual, contemporary military men are only a dozen. This lack may be a choice of later compilers of florilegia, or may be due to the fact that epigrammatists who composed  military epitaphs did not publish them as a collection. There is no evidence that any epigrammatist known from the Greek Anthology also acted as a professional writer of military epitaphs; we can just propose some hypothetical candidates for this role, such as Damagetus  and Posidippus. Epitaphs for common soldiers were usually commissioned to professional poets, most of whom now remain anonymous (only occasionally we find signatures in epigraphic poems); the technitai  found their inspiration in Homer and in the elegiac, lyric and tragic ‘classics’; anthologies like that of Meleager could also offer some models, although the main literary-epigraphic reference was still the Simonidean corpus. The lack of a specific, recognizable personal style makes it difficult to trace the same hand in contemporary epitaphs. It has been suggested that professional versifiers used ‘sample books’ for composing epitaphs, but the very existence and the nature of these anthologies is still to be proved. In some cases, the deceased, especially when he presents himself as a veteran belonging to the local élite, may have had his say on the contents and form of his future epitaph, or even might have been responsible for composing it.

In what follows I shall analyse funerary epigrams in which the wayfarer is invited to abstain from violating the tomb. I will deal fijirst with inscriptional epigrams, in order to survey motifs and language of the so called arai epitymbioi. I will then analyse the same theme in literary poems, focussing in particular on Gregory of Nazianzus' treatment of the topos, in order to illuminate the diffferences and especially the similarities between the use of this motif in both inscriptional and literary epigrams. I will try to argue that Gregory consciously plays not only with the Greek literary tradition-which is hardly surprising, considering what a cultivated poet he was-but also that he is well acquainted with epigraphic habits, images, and language. He adapts them, and introduces original twists, which are not purely ornamental, but which help to convey new meanings: in particular, the poet puts his versifijicatory competence to use in a social and moral cause, in a time and in a geographical area in which the desecration of tombs was felt as a matter of topical interest, as is shown by the many preserved arai epitymbioi of the Imperial period coming from the Near East.

The aim of this paper is to show and to analyse the image of youth given by Book XII of the Palatine Anthology, whose subject-matter is homoerotic and ironic, and its representation of the young is created by desirable adolescent ephebes. Thanks to literary resources and clichés, different topics will be studied, such as the ideal age, beauty, exhortation to the enjoyment of youth before it ends (when the hair grows up and the dreaded beard starts to come out), or prostitution.

aula XXII (secondo piano) ore 9.00 apertura dei lavori: introduce Roberto Nicolai ore 9.30 -11.00 presiede Maria Broggiato Giacomo Teti (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "La scelta di Parmenide. Valore storico e simbolico del bivio in VS 28 B 1,2 e 6" Silvia Onori (Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale): "Di padre in figlio: l'eredità del potere. Per una rilettura del fr. 775a Kannicht del Fetonte di Euripide" Chiara Gennari Santori (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Esiodo e il termine δυσπέμφελος: osservazioni a proposito di un intreccio esegetico negli scolî a Omero" ore 11.00: pausa caffè ore 11.30 -13.00 presiede Luca Bettarini Davide Massimo (University of Oxford): "Death by Water. Gli epigrammi per i naufraghi di Leonida di Taranto" Alessandra Grimaldi (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Figure letterarie nei frammenti delle opere storiche di Eratostene di Cirene" Marta Marucci (Università degli Studi della Basilicata): "Alcune osservazioni su un epigramma per Ino (SEG XXVI 683)" ore 13.00: pausa pranzo ore 15.00 -16.30 presiede Agostino Soldati Luca De Curtis (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Liste di libri cristiane: alcune considerazioni «dalla parte del libro»" Sara Contini (University of Bristol): "Quae sit in natura excellentia et dignitas: la dignità dell'essere umano in Cicerone e nei traduttori latini di Origene" Fabrizio Petorella (Università degli Studi Roma Tre): "Quomodo historia rescribenda sit. Realtà e potere politico nell'agiografia tardoantica" ore 16.30: pausa caffè ore 17.00 -18.00 presiede Giorgio Piras Luigi Di Raimo (Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale): "Error e ἁμαρτία. Ipotesi di influenza di generi nell'Ovidio esule" Alessandra Tafaro (University of Warwick): "Lassi viatores e sazietà metapoetica negli Epigrammi di Marziale. Tra convenzioni letterarie ed epigrafiche" ore 18.00: chiusura della prima giornata aula Odeion (Museo dell'Arte Classica) ore 15.00 -16.00 presiede Paola Buzi Alessandro Piccolo (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Pedon, figlio di Amphinnes. Il gioco dei doni?" Valentina Panetta (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Dalla montagna al cielo: manifestazioni divine nei templi rupestri dell'Egitto del Nuovo Regno" ore 16.00: pausa caffè ore 16.30 -17.30 presiede Gianfilippo Terribili Massimiliano Vassalli (Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Gurgīh hūnēnd -procreare lupi: l'episodio di Mazdak nella 'Vita di Zarathuštra' (Dēnkard VII)" Amin Shayeste Doust (University of Tehran/Sapienza -Università di Roma): "Microcosm and Macrocosm in Pre-Islamic Iranian Philosophy" ore 17.30: chiusura dei lavori La partecipazione ai seminari è aperta a tutti gli interessati (studenti, dottorandi, professori, etc.) organizzazione: Jacopo Khalil ([email protected]) grafica: Davide Massimo

Research Seminar presented in Munich at the Department of Greek and Latin - Department II - of Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich, as part of the "Forschungsseminare Latinistik - Wintersemester 2016/2017", coordinated by Frau Prof. Dr. Therese Fuhrer.

Es ist die außerordentliche Fülle an Epigrammen, die sich auf Kreta und auf Personen der kretischen Mythologie beziehen, die dem Forscher der Anthologia Graeca auffällt. Es sind zwar beiläufige Bemerkungen gemacht worden (Ph.E. Legrand, H. van Effenterre, M. Launey, A. Köhnken), an einer ausführlichen Studie und Interpretation dieses Phänomens fehlt es jedoch. Gegenstand dieser Dissertation sind diejenigen altgriechischen Epigramme, in denen literarische Topoi erwähnt werden, die sich auf Kreta und deren Einwohner beziehen, wie auch jene, in denen mythologische Gestalten der kretischen Königsfamilie auftreten.

This paper analyses a group of anonymous skoptic epigrams on rhetors, AP 11.145, 11.149, 11.151, APl 318, illustrating how cleverly they adapt and manipulate the language and conventions of ekphrastic epigram for satiric purposes. It suggests that AP 11.149, APl 318 and AP 11.151 invite a linear reading, and were probably written by the same author, while AP 11.145 is likely to have been composed by another epigrammatist; a possible chronological framework for the poems is also provided. Finally, an appendix deals with Palladas APl 317, which has usually been connected to the series, but which could be of a different nature.

In the present paper I focus on the occurrences of the motif of the lamp (λύχνος) in the fifth book of the Palatine Anthology. It turns out on numerous oc casions the lamp is not merely an element of night scenery but it also performs functions typical of people or gods. An analysis of twelve epigrams from Book V shall demonstrate the variety of contexts in which the lamp appears and give a few remarks about the language used in the poems in which this motif occurs.

Intellectual puzzles have a tendency to intermix and accumulate in miscellaneous collections, as happens in present-day puzzle magazines. This phenomenon is already observable in ancient compilations (cf. Palatine Anthology, book 14) and theoretical treatises (Clearchus’ On riddles, Athenaeus’ book 10). Long before such works, fictional and legendary narratives provided a framework for stringing together multifarious types of mental games. The Near-Eastern Story of Ahiqar and the Greek Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi use the age-old theme of the competition between two great sages as a plot structure to accommodate a veritable anthology of riddle genres. The legend behind the Certamen may have influenced Aristophanic comedies such as the Frogs and the Wasps. But while in the East the narrative form of the miscellaneous riddle contest was a fantastic outgrowth of the medleys of wisdom literature, the corresponding Greek narratives were fictionalizations of the multifaceted entertainments of the symposium.

Dans le "De mensibus" de Dracontius, la poétique mise en œuvre révèle un rapport essentiel entre le genre de l’épigramme et le thème de la nature. Cinq principes d’écriture se conjuguent – énumération, allusion, accumulation, antithèse et style de joaillerie – pour évoquer dans la miniature (microcosme) poétique de l’épigramme la miniature du macrocosme, d’un monde bien ordonné et immuable, d’une nature équilibrée, belle et généreuse. Or ce monde explicitement romain (v. 1-2) l’est également dans le sens où il offre une synthèse de la culture gréco-romaine, antique et chrétienne : ce poème s’inscrit aussi bien dans la tradition des épigrammes calendaires grecques et romaines – ce qui suggère des liens entre Afrique vandale et Égypte, une connaissance au moins scolaire du grec par Dracontius et l’existence d’une ‘‘école de Carthage’’ – que dans l’expression chrétienne du temps et de la nature, comme Dracontius l'illustre également dans "Les Louanges de Dieu".

D i incerta attribuzione, 1 A. P. 11, 102 è una variazione su un tema caro all'epigramma scoptico della prima età imperiale : la derisione di un leptoṽ. 2 ∆Exaiv rwn pot∆ a[ kanqan oJ leptakino; Diov dwro~ auj to; ej truv phsen tw/ podi; th; n belov nhn.

This paper offers a collection of generally neglected Hellenistic epigrams and some literary and epigraphic evidence that attest to the worship of Aphrodite as a patron deity of navigation. The goddess' temples were often coastal not because they were places where "sacred prostitution" was practiced but rather because of Aphrodite's association with the sea and her role as a patron of seafaring.  The protection she offered was to anyone who sailed, including the navy and traders, and is attested throughout the Mediterranean, from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods.  Further, the texts examined here reveal a metaphorical link between Aphrodite's role as patron of navigation and her role as a goddess of sexuality.