New Releases: Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, translated by Gideon Nisbet

Epigrams from the Greek Anthology

Translated by Gideon Nisbet

288 pages. Oxford World's Classics. $13.95.

I.

Hebrus, locked solid in the winter frosts:

The little boy was skating, and fell through.

But as the current carried him away,

A jagged chunk of the Bistonian stream

Severed his neck clean through. His headless trunk

Was tumbled in the flow; upon the ice 

The head alone remained. The mother wept

To bury it, poor dear: ‘My son, my son!

The pyre gives part of you its funeral;

The cruel water buried all the rest.’

This is epigram number 542 from the seventh book of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the Greek Anthology, as translated by Gideon Nisbet, who also edited, introduced, and abridged the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Epigrams from the Greek Anthology under review in this column. This epigram was written in the first half of the first century AD by Flaccus, a Roman poet, and it seems so unlike what I expect from ancient Greek poetry. The wintry setting, the meaninglessness of the child’s death, the outpouring of maternal grief - do any of these come to mind when we list off ancient Greek values? But, as any careful reader of Homer or Euripides will understand, “ancient Greek values” are something of a modern invention, a narrative that erases the evidence against it. 

This epigram, it should be said, was written hundreds of years after the age of Plato and Sophocles, by a man who was not a native Greek speaker. It was first collected by Philip, a close contemporary of Flaccus, in an anthology of Greek epigrams with the title of Garland - an allusion to an earlier, Hellenistic epigram anthology of the same name by Meleager. I haven’t been able to find whether Philip’s Garland contained only Roman-era Greek epigrams or if it collected ones from centuries before, but, according to Nisbet, Phillip claimed in his preface to his Garland that his “discriminating taste [had] delivered artful compositions that are more than the sum of their parts” - like a careful arrangement of flowers. 

Why choose such a grisly tale as part of your garden? Perhaps Philip meant it to be a deliberate note of discord, as a reminder that not all death is heroic or meaningful.

Whatever his intention, the epigram made its way into the Greek Anthology - a book that seems at times to be nothing but discord. The best way to think of it is not as a single work from a single author but as an anthology, continuously updated over the years, that covers several hundred years of poetry in the Ancient Greek language. Most anthologies of English-language poetry, if they begin around Chaucer, span about the same length of time as the Greek Anthology, but they are usually organized chronologically, while the Greek Anthology is organized thematically. There are books of religious epigrams, books of sexual epigrams, books of epigrams for the dead. The largest book is one of epideictic epigrams - verse intended to demonstrate different types of rhetoric.

Though it was later used as a pedagogical tool, the original purpose behind the Greek Anthology seems to be one of pure encyclopedic scholasticism, a desire to record all the different ways a literary form had appeared throughout the world. It eventually grew to around 4,000 epigrams. Nisbet has selected a few hundred of these epigrams from each of the major books in the Loeb anthology (due to the haphazard nature of ancient Greek publishing, two of the books contain no or few epigrams).

Despite the Greek Anthology’s importance as a resource for the ancient world, there have been only a few translations of its contents, and Nisbet’s is the first for many decades. Though he says, “We are all liars, we translators,” in his note on the text, Nisbet has structured the selections to provide not just a look at individual epigrams but at the anthology as a whole, and he provides endnotes to around half of the epigrams he’s included - endnotes that are frequently longer than the epigrams themselves.

II.

Putting literature of the past in its social or political context can be a fraught task. It’s quite possible for a commentator to over-explain and over-determine a piece of writing as simply the confluence of certain historical trends, and say nothing of the individual expression that went into it. From such an attitude follows condescension to the reader and philistinism towards the arts in general. At the same time, a sparsity of explanatory material, especially for a work of several authors such as the Greek Anthology, can so de-contextualize the work in question that a reader can easily approach it in a way that would have been totally alien to the world it originally appeared in. Misinterpretation of this kind can be artistically fruitful, but it shouldn’t be the only, or even primary, way past literary works are published. 

With regards to this balance, Nisbet acquits himself fairly well. Thanks to his endnotes, no piece of mythology was lost on me, and any custom or artifact from ancient life that appears in the epigrams is explained. At the same time, he does not make any great interpretive leaps in analyzing the poems. He does not make broad generalizations about Greek attitudes towards religion, death, love, sex, war, politics - these subjects all appear in the Greek anthology, but Nisbet wisely lets the reader take them in without his commentary.

Nisbet’s introduction focuses on the history of the epigrams as a form more than the Greek Anthology itself. Epigrams emerged from two sources: the need for compact, memorable written inscriptions carved in stone, and the need for wealthy members of the intelligentsia to have intelligent things to say at their social gatherings. Later, as ancient Greek became a dead language, epigrams were a staple of classical education. The work of reading, translating, and composing epigrams consumed the hours of upper-class schoolboys across Europe for centuries, and the epigrams went on to influence many English language poets - even ones we wouldn’t associate with classical refinement, such as H. D. and Kenneth Rexroth. 

As interesting as the later reception history of the epigrams are, I’m not sure if it’s as useful as explaining what the Greek Anthology was and is - particularly how and why the epigrams were sorted into different books. Without making sweeping claims about ancient Greek society, Nisbet could at least have at least explained why the Greeks so earnestly collected different kinds of rhetoric together in the epideictic book - even if the exact reasons are unknown, some theories would have been helpful. There’s also the fact that several of the poems deal with rape, including the rape of children, and since historical ideas of sexual violence can be a confusing subject for non-experts in historical documents, I think more context would have been worthwhile here as well.

With all these reservations addressed, “Epigrams from the Greek Anthology” is an excellent contribution to the Oxford World’s Classics. As the epigram I introduced this review with shows, the books will expand any narrow ideas you have of the ancient world. I was most struck by the remarkable continuity between the Christian and pre-Christian authors. A collection of Christian epigrams that were intentionally placed at the front of this otherwise largely pagan collection make, all the same, occasional reference to Greek mythology. And Byzantine authors are scattered throughout the rest of the book, some even writing bawdy epigrams that are essentially indistinguishable (in this translation, at least) from Hellenic Greek erotic poems.

III.

What is an epigram?

In the contemporary usage, it usually denotes a single sentence that is in itself a work of literature - an aphorism at a higher literary level.

Here’s one from Oscar Wilde, our language’s finest crafter of prose epigrams: “Patriotism is the vice of nations.” 

That’s six words with no real meter, and it’s very close to a cliche - in fact, it’s a simple inversion of a common sentiment. But the simplicity of the inversion emphasizes the complexity and individuality of the mind that created it.

Greek epigrams don’t work in quite that way. While they’re never the hackneyed sayings that circulate in a society, the ones Erasmus and Andrelini collected, they aren’t exactly expressions of a single personality either. Several of them were originally inscribed on important edifices, and perhaps the best comparison with them would be architecture: beautiful works in so far as they are constructed within certain rules and according to the specificities of a certain time, place, and purpose.

But despite the seeming narrowness of purpose the epigrams have, the best ones contain the universality and complexity of great literature. To illustrate my point, take the most famous English-language epigram to take direct inspiration from the ancient Greek, one that is quoted by Nisbet early in his introduction:

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

The couplet is Kipling’s, and the subject is the First World War. It was based off an epigram (7.249) by Simonides about the defeat at Thermopylae:

Go tell the Spartans, friend, that here we lie;

We heard what they were telling, and comply.

Both are effective, but I probably prefer the ancient Greek one to the 20th century English version. Kipling’s terse directness says more than hundreds of anti-war pamphlets could do, but the ambiguity of Simonides’s epigram - the way it could encompass any number of emotions or points of view - makes it more lasting.

The epigram that has stayed with me the most from this edition of the Greek Anthology is, however, one of Nisbet’s. In the endnote to a very brief fragment of an epigram on the destruction of Catana by a volcano, he remarks: “The city was rebuilt; the epigram cannot be.”