Friday, November 22, 2002

Discovery of Long-Lost Poems Saves an Ancient Author From History's Remainder Table By SCOTT McLEMEE Until recently, Posidippus, a Greek poet who worked in Egypt during the third century BC, was scarcely anyone's idea of an important writer. To be sure, he enjoyed a measure of success during his lifetime -- winning a position as writer in residence at the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, the cultural capital of the Greek-speaking world. It was, by any standard, a good gig. The pay was generous and came with library privileges. But the last 2,200 years have been hard on Posidippus's reputation. Only 20 of his poems survived, all of them short. In reference books, his name merited only a brief entry, when it was listed at all. Unfortunately, there was another author, also named Posidippus, who worked in a genre the ancients called "the new comedy" -- fairly lowbrow stuff, full of wily slaves and dirty old men. And then (as if sharing the name of a sitcom writer weren't bad enough) Posidippus suffered the greatest insult of all: Classicists have long paid far more attention to Callimachus, an Alexandrian poet and scholar with whom he had a famous (if now little understood) literary dispute. Posidippus's fortunes are improving, however. Over the past year, there have been three international conferences on him (the most recent at the University of Cincinnati in early November) as well as smaller gatherings devoted to his poetry, including a session at the annual convention of the American Philological Association. It is a striking change of pace for classical scholarship -- a field not exactly known for wild sprees of trendiness. The canon of Greek and Latin literature is, after all, about as closed as it can be. Then again, Posidippus has done something few ancient authors ever manage. After more than two millenniums of neglect, he has a new book out. A Day at the Races Last year, a scholarly press in Milan published an annotated edition of more than 100 epigrams attributed to Posidippus, all but two of them previously unknown, from a papyrus discovered inside a mummy casing in 1992. Where in Egypt it was dug up, and how the mummy came to be owned by an Italian bank, are details that (like many things in the antiquities market) remain murky. It is clear that the scroll was not entombed to provide reading material for the afterlife; on the contrary, it had been cut up to make a kind of papier-mâché mask for the body. Thanks to that bit of recycling, scholars from the Universities of Milan and Cambridge have reconstructed the earliest surviving collection of verse by a single author. Until this discovery, the first such volume had been the works of a Roman poet, Catullus, from the first century AD. The November gathering in Cincinnati was called "The New Posidippus" -- a fitting title, given the surprises found on the papyrus. Scholars had classified most of the author's previously known works as "erotic and sympotic" (addressing the pleasure of love and of drinking parties, respectively). The new material covers a much wider array of topics: horse racing, bird omens, and sculpture, among others. The poems are arranged into nine titled sections. Most of the divisions are self-explanatory; poems under the heading lithika ("On Stones") all concern precious gems, for example. But scholars are puzzled by a group called tropoi ("Turnings") -- and tantalized by the scraps of an untitled 10th section, all but a few words of which have been destroyed. The poetic miscellany offers "a slice of life from upper-crust society in the third century BC," says Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in papyrology and Greek literature at the University of Oxford. "But there is also a whole series of epitaphs for common people -- slaves, old women, people from ordinary life. There is a degree of fictionalization in the poems, a kind of novelistic or storytelling quality, with some dedicated to people who lived centuries before," which Mr. Obbink says allowed Posidippus to insinuate himself into their historical contexts. Classical historians are searching the poems for evidence about Posidippus's own context. At the Cincinnati conference, Dorothy J. Thompson, a lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge, presented an analysis of references to people and events from the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled from 285 to 246 BC. She finds the poems about horse racing particularly interesting. "We had no idea the degree to which members of the royal family were involved," she says. "The poems show that they were going back to the old world, to Greece, to compete in the big games with their horses." Rivalry among Greek rulers made poetry itself "a large-scale, very international enterprise," she says. "The rulers would fight on the battlefield, but another way to compete was through patronage." In the global literary market of 2,200 years ago, the benefits of sponsorship worked both ways, bringing prestige to sovereign and poet alike. "For Posidippus," says Ms. Thompson, "his readership is there, in Alexandria, where he's writing. But at the same time Alexandria is a world center. I think he was getting outside the court, into the wider world." The quality of the scroll may well confirm the idea that Posidippus had readers outside the court. With the work's tiny script, slips of the pen, and low-grade papyrus, contemporary readers would have considered it "rather utilitarian, far from a showpiece designed to impress elite friends with the quality of the book as object," according to William A. Johnson, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. At the same time, he notes that the papyrus lacks the sorts of marks familiar from scrolls used in the classroom, reading circles, or scholars' studies. It may have been the ancient equivalent of a cheap paperback edition -- but it is, for the most part, a clean copy. Desperately Seeking Epigrams Richard Hunter, a professor of Greek at Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, refers jokingly to "the Posidippus industry" that has emerged over the last couple of years. Clearly it is a development he welcomes. "I have now been to three conferences on this papyrus," he says, "And I thought it was clear from Cincinnati that there's been a quantum leap in our understanding." Scholars bringing different sorts of expertise are exchanging ideas, enriching the context in which the poems are read. That was not the case for most of the past decade, when "the new Posidippus" often seemed little more than a rumor. The full text of the scroll did not become available to scholars until last year. "Before that," Mr. Hunter says, "there was only a small and hard-to-come-by book, published in Italy in 1993. A lot of people, including myself, acquired Xeroxes of that book. But it gave only a quarter of the poems, without any scholarly apparatus." More verse by Posidippus started to circulate in the late 1990s, as the few scholars given access to the papyrus began to lecture on it at conferences. "They would show a slide with a few lines," says Mr. Hunter. "You'd have half the audience trying to memorize them or write them down, and the people at the projector snatching the slide from the projector before they could get too much down." Among the scholars reading Posidippus in photocopy during the 1990s was Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati, who organized the recent conference there. While historians scrutinize the poems as documents of life in Alexandria, Ms. Gutzwiller is interested in the scroll as the earliest known case of something modern readers take for granted: a book of poems by a single author. The genre of the epigram, a short poem written for a monument, emerged in Greece during the eighth century BC. By Posidippus's day, writers composed them to be read aloud, without public inscription in mind. Scholars prepared volumes of their favorite epigrams by various authors -- a process culminating in The Greek Anthology, a massive volume from the 10th century AD. In Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context (University of California Press, 1998) -- one of the first scholarly books to discuss the papyrus -- Ms. Gutzwiller studied how the anthology-making enterprise transformed the epigram, which readers usually encountered in large anthologies, arranged long after the poems were composed. The recently discovered Posidippus scroll, besides providing a large selection of previously unknown work, shows what epigram collections originally looked like -- before the poetasters started sifting through them looking for choice passages. "We think the collection was prepared within two or three decades of Posidippus's lifetime," she says, "so there is a very strong possibility that it reflects his own arrangement." The set of poems about sculpture "has considerably enhanced our picture of the aesthetic principles underlying Posidippus's poetry," says Alexander Sens, a professor of classics at Georgetown University. The section opens with a verse praising works that "run past the longstanding rules" for how statues should be made -- a reference, Mr. Sens thinks, to the revolution in sculpture initiated by Lysippus, whose creations were detailed and life-size, rather than generic and monumental. The poet's enthusiasm for sculptural realism, argues Mr. Sens, corresponds to a trend emerging in literature during the third century: an emphasis on "humble and ordinary individuals, who ordinarily use and are described with language traditionally associated with far grander figures." Not Written in Stone Numerous other scrolls by Posidippus may well have crowded the shelves at the library of Alexandria. But his name has been strikingly absent from the catalog of another sizable collection. The Library of Congress contains not one scholarly volume devoted to the poet. (By contrast, there are dozens of titles on his rival Callimachus.) That will soon change. A collection of papers from a conference at the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington, D.C., is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Another volume, drawn from the Cincinnati conference, is being considered by Oxford University Press. It will include an English translation of the scroll. Not everyone is convinced that things are quite what they appear to be, however. A few classicists point out that the scroll nowhere bears the author's name, and contains only two epigrams by Posidippus found in other sources. But most scholars believe the others are by the same poet. They point out that the collection lacks any editorial markings to indicate that the scroll has been assembled from works by several authors. And some who have studied the poems closely believe that they overlap in style with the works previously attributed to Posidippus. Richard F. Thomas, chair of the classics department at Harvard University, is not convinced. "Arguments from quality are hazardous, since poets do nod," he writes in an e-mail message, "but some of these seem pretty feeble. More important however is the oddity of the collection." He notes that the sections devoted to gems and shipwrecks seem anomalous, given the normal categories of third-century epigrams. And he is perplexed by the lack of erotic and sympotic poems -- the verses on sex and strong drink, for which Posidippus had been known. "None of this detracts from the fact that the new text is an exciting find," he says. And then Mr. Thomas adds an afterthought that must fill Hades with howls of anger. The scroll will prove especially fascinating, he says, "if one or two of the poems are, as I suspect, the work of the greater poet, Callimachus." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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