SOURCE: Cameron, Alan. “The Garlands of Melaeger and Philip.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9, no. 3 (autumn 1968): 323-31.

[In the following essay, Cameron considers the order in which Meleager collected his poems, and the headings he utilized in his Garland.]

The principal sources used by Constantine Cephalas for the Anthology of which the greater part is preserved in the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies were the Garland of Meleager (put together in the last decade or so of the second century b.c.),¹ the Garland of Philip (some time probably not too long after a.d. 53)² and the Cycle of Agathias (ca. a.d. 567).³ Some of the material from these three major collections Cephalas broke up and rearranged, together with material from a variety of minor sources,⁴ but fortunately for us he was not energetic enough to carry out his reorganisation systematically throughout, and long stretches of up to 100 or more consecutive epigrams by poets who are known or may reasonably be conjectured to have been contributors to the two Garlands and the Cycle occur in most of the major books (v, vi, vii, ix, x, xi, xii) of the Palatine Anthology, which may be regarded as an expanded version (but with omissions as well as additions) of the Anthology of Cephalas.

I MELEAGER

Our knowledge of Meleager's Garland has benefitted greatly from the labours of Radinger, Weisshäupl, Wifstrand and (more recently) of Gow.⁵ For a long time no one saw fit to question the statement of the Palatine lemmatist that it was arranged alphabetically (that is to say, according to the initial letter of the first word of each poem. Indeed some scholars still perversely cling to this long exploded notion⁶—presumably the result of a confusion between the two Garlands (an easy slip), for Philip's was arranged alphabetically.

As early as 1894 Radinger showed that there were unmistakable traces of two quite different but complementary methods of arrangement in the longer Garland sequences, especially those of [Palatine Anthology; hereafter cited as AP] v, vii and xii. First, poems by the more prolific poets recur in a sort of rhythmical alternation, with the work of lesser figures distributed evenly between. Second, poems are grouped according to subject matter (epitaphs on philosophers, soliders and so on together: imitations follow the original), and there are sometimes verbal parallels linking poems on different themes. The latter pattern was discovered independently by Weisshäupl two years later, who showed that the three successive Meleagrian sequences in AP 7.406-506, 646-664, 707-740, had certain obvious similarities both in overall pattern and individual subjects, suggesting the conclusion that all three were different excerpts from the same source—obviously the Garland itself. If so, we would have three witnesses to the same pattern of arrangement among Meleager's epitymbia.

The same line was followed by Wifstrand, proving that AP v, heterosexual, and xii, homosexual erotica, were originally not so divided, and that the Meleagrian sequences in v and xii must have derived from a common source containing both sorts mixed up together. This source, again, can only have been the Garland itself.

Of course, caution is requisite. Although Cephalas probably did not tamper in any substantial way with the arrangement of the more solid of the Garland sequences in AP, he probably did omit some of Meleager's material (for example, three of the poets Meleager names in his preface are not represented in AP). But no one who has studied the tables of Radinger, Weisshäupl and Wifstrand will find it easy to ascribe the simple but skilful and consistent pattern they trace through all the substantial Garland sequences in AP to mere chance. It would have to be a curiously consistent chance—the more so since Mattsson has demonstrated beyond question that precisely the same twofold system was followed by Agathias for his Cycle.⁷ And though there must always be reservations about Cephalas' handling of his Meleagrian material, we can at least be sure that he did not significantly rearrange his Agathian material. For we know from Agathias' preface that he employed a third, more basic device as well. He divided his material between seven books according to subject matter: anathematica, epideictica, epitymbia, protreptica, sympotica, erotica and scoptica. Cephalas took over these convenient basic divisions for his own Anthology, and thus we can have every confidence that the Agathian runs in the major Cephalan books directly reflect the order and arrangement of the original Agathian books.

It can easily be shown that Agathias and his fellow poets were influenced by the poems Meleager had included in his Garland,⁸ and it is almost inevitable that he should have been influenced by the way Meleager had arranged them too. And, predictably enough, we do find the same grouping according to topic and verbal links, and the same rhythmic procession of ‘Hauptdichter’ (Paul, Macedonius, Julian and Agathias himself, instead of Callimachus, Asclepiades, Leonidas and Meleager) that Radinger, Weisshäupl and Wifstrand (without reference to the striking Agathian parallel)⁹ detected in Meleager.

This much, then, we may accept as proven. But there is one further point about the arrangement of Meleager's Garland on which a little more light can perhaps be cast before we move on to Philip's, a point barely mentioned in the recent work of Gow and Page.¹⁰ How many and what sort of books went to make up the Garland? For there must have been some sort of subdivision: (a) because the Meleagrian poems in AP and [Planudean Anthology; hereafter cited as APl] total some 4000 lines (ca. 800 poems), not counting the several hundred more that would be required by the titles and ascriptions to individual poems—far too long for a Greco-Roman book of poetry. Birt long ago showed that 700 lines was considered the optimum length, 1000 on the long side. The 1779 of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica iv is unique. (b) More prosaically, 4000 lines (nearer 5000 with titles and ascriptions) would be far too long for one papyrus roll. (c) Philip refers to Meleager's Garland in the plural as στέφανοι.

Naturally, certainty here is unattainable. But following and developing some hints of Wifstrand we can perhaps profitably guess at least at the principle of book division Meleager used, which will in turn suggest a number. The most obvious and easy principle would have been that followed by Agathias, division by subject matter. There are in AP something like 270 Meleagrian erotica, 290 epitymbia, 135 anathematica and 50 epideictica (to which we can add another 45 from APl). These are the only four of the seven Agathian divisions to which Meleagrian poets made any contributions. There are no Meleagrian poems at all in AP x and xi. Scoptica, protreptica and straightforward sympotica seem not to have been to their taste (such as we do find are generally classified under one or other of the other four: e.g. most Meleagrian sympotica are also erotic and hence in AP v). Split up into these four divisions, the 4000-odd lines of the Garland would have comprised four books which would have satisfied both contemporary canons of propriety and the length of an average papyrus roll.

There are, I believe, several pieces of evidence in favour of this proposed division. We have seen that Meleager used a twofold system: regular alternation of the major poets together with thematic and verbal links. And we have seen also that this same twofold arrangement is no less clearly visible in the Agathian sequences of AP, which we know to have been divided up according to subject. Does not the very fact that such a twofold pattern is still discernible in the major Meleagrian sequences strongly suggest that they too were drawn from similarly arranged continuous sequences of poems on the same subject? And further confirmation is surely to be found in the fact that the Meleagrian sequences in AP v and xii (erotica) are arranged on the same principle—two different excerpts from the same original sequence. Strong evidence in favour of this hypothesis is provided by the continuous run of Meleagrian erotica (AP 12.76, 77, 78; 9.15, 12.106, 5.152, 12.19) in the first-century anthology fragment Berliner Klassikertexte V.i 75f, which if not (as Wifstand has shown)¹¹ a fragment of the Garland itself, is clearly related to it, presumably an excerpt therefrom. Further evidence may be seen in the parallel arrangement of the three successive Meleagrian sequences in vii.

To what might have seemed the natural implication that these are three successive excerpts from the same original continuous sequence of epitymbia, Lenzinger objects¹² that other sorts of epigrams must have been intermingled among the epitymbia, for (he argues) if all the Meleagrian epitymbia had been concentrated in one section of the Garland, Cephalas would not have had to conduct more than one search for them. He contrasts the one Agathian sequence in vii. But we do not know that Cephalas “had to” (rather than chose to) look more than once for Meleagrian epitymbia. Nor can I see why Lenzinger's assumption makes such repeated “searches” more comprehensible. It is relevant to observe that there are well over three times as many Meleagrian as Agathian poems in vii. It may be that Cephalas distributed his Meleagrian material as he did at least partly because he had so much more of it than anything else. I suspect that he had originally intended to rearrange the material which now appears as the two rather broken minor Meleagrian sequences into a thematic pattern of his own, like the thematic arrangement he devised for the first half of the book, before the major Meleagrian sequence. But here (as elsewhere) his energy and enthusiasm flagged towards the end of the book, and he did not finish the job.

Wifstrand himself, while canvassing in a tentative parenthesis the possibility that the erotica comprised a separate book of their own and admitting too that there appeared to have been another such section (he avoided the word book) comprised mainly of epitymbia, was nevertheless loath to suggest a formal division of the Meleagrian material into books. His reason was the presence of what he was inclined to regard as alien matter—viz. a lacing of votive and epideictic poems—matter which in some cases at least there was reason to believe Meleagrian (rather than Cephalan insertion). The answer, I think, is that Meleager interpreted these classifications rather more liberally than we do.

Wifstrand lists a number of poems in the Meleagrian sequences of vii which are not sepulchral: e.g. 409 on Antimachus, 410 on Thespis, 411 on Aeschylus, 709 on Alcman, 713 on Erinna. Yet are these really intruders? One of the commonest types among the epitymbia included in vii is the poem on a famous writer cast in the form of a fictitious epitaph. Many are really no more sepulchral than those mentioned above. So unless Meleager was going to be pedantic, it might well have seemed more appropriate to include poems on writers which did not even pretend to be sepulchral along with those that did. While they might be more correctly placed among the epideictica, they would be in a non-literary context, away from their natural fellows. Similarly with 7.723, a lament for the defeat of Sparta: not an epitaph proper, but not wholly out of place among the epitaphs. ‘Intruders’ are alleged in v too. Gow, for example (Gow and Page II.171), states that 5.146 (Callimachus) on a statue of Berenice is “evidently misplaced” in v and “should have been” in ix. But the poem describes her beauty and concludes by saying that without her οὐδ' αὐταì ταì Kάριτες Kάριτες. This conceit links it closely with 148 (where Heliodora is said to excel αὐτὰς τὰς Kάριτας χάρισιν) and 149.4 (καὐτὰν τὰν χάριν ἐν χάριτι), both by Meleager himself. In fact, it is perfectly clear that Meleager derived this motif directly from Callimachus' poem. This, surely, is why he placed it before his own poems. It was not a true eroticon, to be sure, but it had some of the characteristics thereof, and as the model for later erotica was more appropriately placed among them than with the anathematica or epideictica, where this connection would be obscured. 205 might from the formal point of view be classified as an anathematicon, but the object dedicated is a love charm. 206 is a dedication of musical instruments, but by girls bearing names suitable for hetairai (Gow and Page II.353), one of them being described as φίλερως and a willing performer at revels. Here again the erotic and sympotic elements may in Meleager's judgement have outweighed the formal features. There are similar apparent ‘intruders’ in Agathian sections, where we can be certain that the selection was Agathias' own. For example, 5.217 and 218, though concerned with love, are both really epideictic. 222 on a κιθαριστρίς might have been more appropriately placed together with Leontius' run of poems on dancing girls, presumably included among Agathias' ecphrastica, though now preserved only in APl iv. Yet obviously in Agathias' eyes the erotic element predominated in all three.

I would suggest, then, that there is no real alien matter in these four Meleagrian categories as represented in AP. It is just that, like Agathias, Meleager was prepared to include ‘formal intruders’ if for some other reason they seemed to him more suitably placed elsewhere than in their formally correct context. Indeed, I would go further. It seems to me that the absence of real glaring misfits in Meleagrian sequences is an argument in favour of my thesis of fourfold division by subject. For grateful though we all are to Cephalas for his priceless collection, no one will deny that he threw it together very carelessly.¹³ One of the signs of haste and inattention is frequent wrong classification. One example out of many will suffice at this point (see also below, pp. 333f)—one that will prove relevant to the next part of this paper. AP 7.641 Cephalas classified as an epitymbion, evidently supposing that its opening word σῃ̑μα referred to a tomb. Had he taken the trouble to read the rest of the poem, he would have seen that it referred in fact to a water clock! There are no cases like this in the Meleagrian sequences. Or rather such cases as there are are confined to Cephalas' own division of the Meleagrian erotica into two categories, heterosexual and homosexual. An easy enough task, one might have thought. Yet there are numerous homosexual poems in v and scores of heterosexual poems in xii—to some extent because Cephalas evidently did not realise that names ending in -ιον (Timarion, etc.) were feminine, but often just through sheer carelessness. This was the result when Cephalas was faced with thematically undifferentiated material and had to do his own categorising. Yet though he made such a sorry mess of the Meleagrian erotica, he apparently managed to deal with the Meleagrian anathematica, epideictica and epitymbia without making any mistakes of this order or nature, mistakes of a sort he often made when distributing the undifferentiated Philippan poems under these headings. And the explanation of this is, surely, not that for once Cephalas was extra careful and managed to avoid error, but that he found the Meleagrian anathematica, epideictica and epitymbia already differentiated in his source—the Garland itself.

Let us now have another look at the Palatine lemma referred to above: οὖτος ὁ Μελέαγρος … ἐποίησεν … τòν θαυμάσιον τουτονì τòν τwν ἐπιγραμμάτων στέφανον. συνέταξεν δὲ αὐτὰ κατὰ στοιχει̑ον, ἀλλὰ Κωνσταντι̑νος ὁ ἐπονομαzόμενος Κεφαλὰς συνέχεεν αὐτὰ ἀφορίσας ει̑ς κεφάλαια διάφορα· ἤγουν ἐρωτικὰ ἰδίως καì ἀναθεματικὰ καì ἀπιτύμβια καì ἐπιδεικτικά, ὡς νυ̑ν ὑποτέτακται ἐν τἳ̑ παρόντι πτυκτίῳ. The statement that the Garland was arranged alphabetically is certainly false. But this is not the only feature about the lemma that gives rise to problems. For it also appears to say that Cephalas made use of only four classifications, erotica, anathematica, epitymbia and epideictica. This no one has ever accepted, since, though several of the minor books of the Palatine collection are probably not Cephalan, seven at least certainly were (essentially categories used by Agathias). But if we look a little more closely at the lemma, we discover that it does not in fact state in so many words that there were only four Cephalan books—merely that these were the four categories into which the Meleagrian poems were distributed. And this, as we have seen, happens to be true.

It seems to me that there is a very simple explanation of both the lemmatist's statements. Being under the mistaken impression that Meleager's Garland, like Philip's, was arranged alphabetically, he was surprised to come across a copy (or a reference to a copy) divided up into these four thematic categories. So he assumed that it must have been Cephalas who rearranged it on this principle, an arrangement (he adds) followed also in the Palatine Anthology. What he took to be a ‘Cephalan revision’ of the Garland, divided into erotica, anathematica, epitymbia and epideictica, was surely in fact the Garland itself. For while the Meleagrian poems do indeed fall into these four categories, the Meleagrian material in AP (and therefore Cephalas too) was not divided between these four books only. The poems described in the lemma as just erotica were divided in Cephalas and AP evenly between erotica proper (AP v) and paidica (xii). There were five Cephalan books containing substantial Meleagrian sections. So surely the four books mentioned by the lemma are the four books of the original Garland (where paidica and erotica were undifferentiated).

But for the statement of the lemma and the evidence of Agathias' own preface, no one who had studied the evidence set out above would be likely to doubt that Agathias had modelled his Cycle directly on Meleager's Garland. And this is surely exactly what he did. He took over from Meleager not only the alternation of ‘Hauptdichter’ and thematic linking, but also the preliminary subdivision according to type. Hitherto it has been supposed that this preliminary subdivision was a new departure of Agathias. I would suggest, rather, that all he did was to add three more headings to cover the wider scope of the work of himself and his friends.

Notes

1. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams I (Cambridge 1965) xvi, say “early years of the first century,” but in view of the likelihood (not mentioned by Gow and Page) that the Garland, compiled on Cos (AP 7.418.3, 419.6), was known to the ‘circle’ (I use the term loosely: cf. H. Bardon, EtCl 18 [1950] 145f; E. Badian, Historia 11 [1962] 221) of Q. Lutatius Catulus (cos. 102) in Rome (A. A. Day, The Origins of Latin Love-Elegy [Oxford 1938] 103f; G. Luck, The Latin Love Elegy [London 1959] 40-1), I should prefer to take it back a couple of decades. P. Capra-d'Angelo, RendIstLomb 74 (1941) 292-6, and L. A. Stella, Cinque poeti dell'Antologia palatina (Bologna 1949) 153-5 and 232-8 (both apparently unknown to Gow and Page) follow Diogenes Laertius 6.99 in placing Meleager in the first half of the third century b.c., but Diogenes' error is easily explicable (Gow and Page I.xvi n.2), and it is hardly possible seriously to doubt that the Antipater included by Meleager is Antipater of Sidon, who did not die till ca. 125 b.c. (Gow and Page II.32). On the chronology of the individual poets of the Garland, cf. also now G. Luck, GGA 219 (1967) 24-44.

2. Many scholars still follow C. Cichorius' dating (Römische Studien [Leipzig 1922] 341-55) to the reign of Gaius (e.g. most recently G. W. Bowersock, Augustus and the Greek World [Oxford 1965] 141); but in my opinion K. Müller has satisfactorily demonstrated (ed., Die Epigramme des Antiphilos von Byzanz [Berlin 1935] 14-21) that AP 9.178 cannot have been written before a.d. 53 (cf. also S. G. P. Small, YCS 12 [1951] 71-3). Müller's interpretation is not in fact new (as Small supposes): cf. (in addition to the authorities cited by Müller himself, p. 15) Furneaux on Tacitus, Ann. 12.58 and J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology³ (London 1911) 326. V. Tandoi, StItal 34 (1962) 108 n. 2, and P. Laurens, REL 43 (1965) 318 n. 2, toy unnecessarily with the idea of a second edition under Nero.

3. Averil and Alan Cameron, JHS 86 (1966) 6-25, 87 (1967) 131.

4. On Cephalas' activity cf. Gow, The Greek Anthology: Sources and Ascriptions (London 1958), Gow and Page I.xvii f, and the useful analysis in part i of F. Lenzinger, Zur griechischen Anthologie (Diss.Zürich 1965).

5. C. Radinger, Meleagros von Gadara (Innsbruck 1895) 88-107; R. Weisshäupl, in Serta Harteliana (Wien 1896) 184-8; A. Wifstrand, Studien zur griech. Anthologie (Lund 1926) 5-29; for Gow's works see preceding note.

6. e.g. A. Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, tr. J. Willis and C. de Heer (London 1966) 741. The alleged traces of alphabetical order (on which see most recently Luck, GGA 219 [1967] 51-2) are unimpressive, and can be easily accounted for (in Gow's words) by “similarity of theme and a small element of chance” (I.xviii n. 3, cf. xxii n. 2). E.g. the series of epitymbia opening οὐκέτι are so grouped for stylistic and thematic, not alphabetical reasons; it would no doubt be possible to detect alphabetical runs in the thematic and stylistic groupings used by W. Peek for his Griech. Vers-Inschriften I (Berlin 1955). Anyone who upholds the traditional view will have to explain (a) why an alphabetical order (not merely traces) is unmistakable in all Philippan sequences in AP, yet apparently broken up completely by Cephalas for the Meleagrian sequences (nothing we know about Cephalas' modus operandi suggests that he would have treated one differently from the other); (b) why, on the contrary, a thematic arrangement is perceptible in all Meleagrian sequences. There is also the excellent but neglected point made by J. Basson, De Cephala et Planude (Diss.Berlin 1917) 36-7: the first and last poems of an alphabetically arranged collection will (inevitably) have opened with an alpha and omega respectively. It so happens that we possess what must have been the first and last poems of Meleager's Garland (AP 4.1 and 12.257: cf. Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides [Berlin 1913] 300): they open with mu and alpha (!) respectively. By contrast, Philip's preface opens (of course) with an alpha (see p. 337).

7. A. Mattsson, Untersuchungen zur Epigrammsammlung des Agathias (Lund 1942) 1-16, and for Agathias' sympotica, see Lenzinger, op.cit. (supra n. 4) 22.

8. Cf. Radinger, op. cit. (supra n. 5) 72; Mattsson, op. cit. (supra n. 7) ch. ii; and G. Viansino, ed. Epigrammi di Paolo Silenziario (Torino 1963).

9. Except for a brief aside by Radinger, op. cit. (supra n. 5) 103 n. 1.

10. op. cit. (supra n. 1) I.xix n. 4.

11. op. cit. (supra n. 5) ch. ii.

12. op.cit. (supra n. 4) 13.

13. According to K. Preisendanz, “Kephalas zur endgültigen Redaktion seines Sammelwerkes nicht mehr gelangt ist,” Gnomon 34 (1962) 659.

Daniel H. Garrison (entry date 1978)

SOURCE: Garrison, Daniel H. “Meleager.” In Mild Frenzy: A Reading of the Hellenistic Love Epigram, pp. 71-93. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1978.

[In the following essay, Garrison argues that Meleager used the epigrammatic form to express psychic depths in ways that transcended the form's traditional use.]

MELEAGER AND THE CRITICS

An impressive and growing array of European scholars has for generations maintained a consensus that Meleager was a clever but shallow and uncreative poet. Because this judgment has been so widely agreed upon over the past eighty years, I would like to begin my discussion of Meleager with some examples of the adverse criticism as a background against which to offer some divergent observations.

Qu'est au juste l'esprit syrien, et pouvons-nous l'analyser? Je crois que oui. … [on the Syrians:] frères de Juifs, ils ont comme eux les passions vives, et, dans l'intelligence, moins d'originalité que de souplesse. … Nous retrouverons chez Méléagre tous le traits du caractère syrien. … Les Syriens aiment les voyages [!]. … Pourquoi tant de vers erotiques et de tirades pompeuses? C'est que Méléagre est né dans un pays d'improvisateurs et de courtisanes. … Les Syriens adorent la main qui les frappe …

—Henri Ouvré, Méléagre de Gadara (1894)

Der Einfluß der Rhetorik, die zügellose Phantasie des Syrers und die ungesunde Sentimentalität, die diese zu begleiten pflegt, erklären uns diese Erscheinung. … Ist dieser rhetorische Charakter der Meleagrischen Poesie ein Resultat seines Bildungsganges, so entspringt das Spielende, Sentimental-phantastische seiner Dichtungen der nationalen Eigentümlichkeit des Syrers.

—Carl Radinger, Meleagros von Gadara (1895)

Tutta questa psicologia rimane però esterna. Ed è il difetto dell'arte alessandrina, ed in parte di quella società che manca di sentimenti profondi.

—Ettore Bignone, L'Epigramma Greco (1921)

The verdicts of the harsher critics appear wholly unjustified, but the limitations both of matter and of form which he inherited, and which he accepted without question, are such that it seems to us a misunderstanding of the essential nature of his work to call him a ‘real poet.’

—Denys Page, Hellenistic Epigrams (1965)

Gleichgültig, ob Meleager glücklich oder traurig ist, ob er liebt oder haßt,—alles, was er sagt oder deklamiert, ist mit einem Zuckerguß von Gefühlchen überzogen, und seine Verse verströmen Wohlgerüche. Meleager ist unfähig, die Leidenschaft der Liebe einfach, glaubhaft darzustellen. … Bei allem Talent, aller Virtuosität, die Meleager zeigt, ist das doch ein Leerlauf, und ich verstehe nicht, wie man aus ihm einen bedeutenden Schöpfer und Neuerer machen kann.

—George Luck, Witz und Sentiment im griechischen Epigramm, Entretiens Fondation Hardt (1967)

These criticisms repeat four basic and related themes: Meleager is bombastic and frivolous, he is sentimental, he lacks profound sentiment, and he is unoriginal. It is the nature of some of these that like the poetry itself they make their ultimate appeal to sensibility: there is no objective rule by which one can distinguish between bombast and impassioned discourse, between sentimentality and sentience or profound versus shallow feeling. One can only deduce that Meleager's poetry has left recent West Europeans cold. His fantasies repel them, his emotions seem unreal. And because Meleager is an uneven poet, his critics have little trouble finding excellent examples of his weaknesses. It is often therefore hard to disagree with the critics when they single out this or that epigram for dispraise. Moreover, it would be tiresome to speculate as to how typical those epigrams are of the goodness or badness of Meleager. It is enough to know that some critics (including Bignone above) have admired Meleager as a ‘real poet’ (the phrase is J. A. Symonds').

Rather than contest judgments of taste and feeling, I find it more fruitful to question the accuracy of the one criticism which lies in the realm of fact, and on that basis to appeal the whole case of Meleager vs. the West European critics. The statement that Meleager lacks original content can be objectively tested within the limits of data available to us. Our somewhat scanty remains of the Hellenistic love epigram allow us to conclude that there are certain things Meleager says and does in his love epigrams which his predecessors did not say and do. Considered therefore in purely literary terms, his poetry is in those respects “original.” If Meleager employs a more fanciful imagination than his predecessors—as critics commonly observe—that is one respect in which Meleager must logically be called original. If he professes to be moved by love in stronger terms than his predecessors used, then at least within the limits of the literary genre which he used, he was original: original whether or not we are convinced by his professions. Meleager's emotionalism may indeed be sentimentalism, but as long as it is genuinely different from what we find in the poetry of his predecessors, it is original. It appears that Meleager's critics are not really concerned about originality, but about some more substantial poetic quality which is frequently referred to under that rubric.

One is left with the suspicion that Meleager's critics, like the accusers of Socrates, are vaguely uneasy about his activities, and are willing to make whatever accusation they believe most likely to awaken the distrust of others. Specifically, they allege a lack of “originality” in order to summon the ghost of a romantic notion that whatever lacks originality can never bear the stamp of true poetry, poetic genius, sincerity, or anything else supposed to belong in the realm of Art.

But even this defunct notion of poetry is applied with only fitful accuracy. Denys Page talks about “the limitations both of matter and of form which [Meleager] inherited, and which he accepted without question.” If this observation were factually correct, then it might follow that the “essential nature” of Meleager's work is not that of a “true poet.” But if on the other hand we are able to determine that Meleager went outside the inherited limitations, then we are obliged to discard Page's assessment and formulate a new one which, if not more favorable to Meleager, will at least be more accurate.

George Luck cannot believe Meleager's emotions, and he therefore finds that the fine machinery of his poetry is idle, not the work of a bedeutendem Schöpfer und Neuerer. The qualifying bedeutend appeals a question of fact to the judgment of critical sensibility. If Meleager cannot convince the critic of the authenticity of his emotions, then he must relinquish his claim to significant originality. This critical method is by no means indefensible, but I shall proceed here along a different path, separating questions which Luck prefers not to separate. First, is Meleager's love poetry different in its content from that of Asclepiades, Callimachus, and their followers? Second, is that content verifiable in later poetic tradition as pertinent to erotic experience? The third question is one of poetic sensibility, which I will leave moot: is Meleager's poetry good enough to create poetic belief? There is little doubt that Meleager had his poetic failures; but the question of the reader's belief in the deeper emotions of the poet is complicated by the fact that Meleager worked in a genre which tended to avoid deep emotions. Hence when Meleager introduced these into the love epigram he worked against the grain of the genre's expectations. All of this suggests that the judgment of Meleager's poetry is not as simple as his critics have led us to believe, and that it may still be useful to distinguish fact from questions of poetic belief.

Because Meleager's poetry works in ways which were not entirely determined by his Hellenistic literary tradition, it is at least conceivable, as many of the earlier critics of this century contended, that his peculiarities are related to the Syrian culture in which he grew up. This idea has been atrociously misused, as my quotations indicate, as a repository for every real or fancied defect in Meleager's poetry. It may simply have been a source for much of what is new and different (for better or worse) in his poetic vision.¹

The differences in Meleager, whatever their source, grow out of a fairly unrestrained response to erotic impulses; and because that response was less restrained, it had at least the potential of becoming deeper instead of shallower. This point seems to have evaded most of Meleager's critics. He tends in many of his epigrams to represent love as an inner experience, one which involves a fuller totality of the lover than merely his actions and his passions. The Hellenic attitudes of Asclepiades and Callimachus led them to hold love out away from themselves while they wrote about it. Love was externalized (and trivialized) as a naughty cherub; or it was dramatized by way of its symptoms, such as the maudlin frenzy of a comast; or it was materialized through the praise of a boy or a girl. Pleasure and security are assured in this system of poetry because there is always the implication of control, even of reserve. Hellenistic poetry thus makes love a highly mediated experience. When the Hellenistic lover “lets himself go” and wallows in love, he is not really letting himself go, he is letting his emotions go. This assumption is made explicit in epigrams which wave aside the life of the intellect, the labor of wisdom, and the Muses. Hellenistic man had many lives, and only one of them was the life of the lover. Therefore when we read the epigrams we neither expect nor find erotic language which implicates the whole person. Meleager sometimes violates that expectation, because though he works within the Hellenistic tradition he is not wholly of it.

Perhaps because he spent his life on the fringes of the Hellenistic world, he did not participate as fully in Hellenistic culture as did his predecessors. His poetry uses words and phrases suggestive of a deeper involvement, an inner one without the reservations by which the Hellenistic poet-lover protected himself. There are many signs of Meleager's departure from the Hellenistic reserve, none of them conclusive proof of a radically different attitude, but together an impressive argument that he instinctively accepted a love which penetrated the deeper recesses of a person's being. The signs indicate that Radinger was as wrong as he could be when he characterized love in Meleager as ein rein sinnliches Verhältnis.² They even suggest a different base of assumptions about love, that rather than a purely physical and emotional condition which could corrupt the intellect but was unrelated to it, it was an essential condition of the whole man, affecting all of him equally and simultaneously. If the Hellenistic epigrammatists had intimations of this, they kept them so well out of sight that Meleager found in the diction of love epigram few idioms to express it.

THE SOUL IN LOVE

He did find in the tradition one form of expression suitable for communicating his special vision of an internal and generalized condition of love. Other Hellenistic epigrammatists had used words for soul. ψυχή, heart, κραδία, and inwards, σπλάχνα, no more than a dozen times in a total of ten love epigrams.³ Meleager adopted these words and uses them dozens of times, in thirty-four of his love epigrams. Psyche is the most commonly used by him, and kradia occurs almost as frequently; both were used in erotic diction before the Hellenistic period, but the epigrammatists did not find them especially useful in representing the lighter and more recreational varieties of love. The better-known epigrammatists used this vocabulary with caution. The psyche, for instance, never appears in their verse to be fully engaged by love. In Callimachus GP 4 = 12.73 the lover announces that half of his soul is still breathing, but the other half has run away to be with his beloved. As we have already noted (p. 67f.) there is in Callimachus an attritive relation between Eros and the soul. In Posidippus GP 6 = 12.98 the soul manfully resists the torments of love: …

Desire binds the Muses' grasshopper on a bed of thorns and tries to lay it to rest, throwing fire under his sides. But my soul has been worked hard amid the books and ignores other things while it reproaches the cruel god of love.

Posidippus' soul, “the Muses' grasshopper,” has been schooled in the disciplines of the intellect, and therefore can resist the temptations or tortures of the emotions. This is not far from what we find in Euripides, where characters are torn between love and the sensible moderation which their intellect tells them to follow. In Dioscorides GP 1 = 5.56 the implication of conflict is still present, if only vestigially: the lips of a girl are ψυχοτακῆ, “soul-melting” portals of a sweet mouth. Because they make you fall in love, they take away from your soul, not unlike the way in which half of Callimachus' soul has defected to the beloved. Love diminishes the soul. Only Polystratus GP 1 = 12.91, “A double love burns a single soul,” and Anonymous GP 2 = 12.89 “Three arrows are fixed in a single soul,” use psyche in the basic sense of the inner self in love, as Meleager commonly uses it. But the chief Hellenistic models withheld themselves even from a poetic fiction which allows love a firm seat in the undivided soul, presenting love instead as a schismatic or corrosive influence.

Meleager has none of these scruples. For him, the soul is simply the inner man, the seat of a love which is freely permitted to engage him totally. This willingness to internalize and integrate is nowhere better illustrated than in Meleager GP 81 = 12.52, where Meleager refers to his beloved Andragathus as “half of my soul,” ἥμισύ μευ ψυχaς. The phrase is from Callimachus GP 4 = 12.73 (see p. 67), but it is used with an important difference. There, half of the lover's soul departs to be with the beloved: “I know where it is lingering”—οῖδ' ὅτι που στρέpεται he says at the end of the epigram. Meleager uses the same words to express a nearly opposite condition: not “half of my soul is with Andragathus,” but “half of my soul is Andragathus.” Half of his soul is actually subsumed in the existence of the boy whom he loves. The soul is still divided even in Meleager's epigram, but the appositional phrase ἥμισύ μευ ψυχaς … 'Ανδράγαθον suggests a stronger intimacy than Callimachus had in mind. This is a real difference, typical of Meleager's special idea of love, of the human spirit, and of the conduct of life. This is what distinguishes Meleager from his predecessors: not just rhetoric or sentimentalism or sensuality as is usually claimed, but the meaning of his poetry. He was quite capable of writing Hellenistic love epigrams from the usual point of view, and the majority of what he gave us in the Garland are of the conventional mold. But a large minority of his epigrams bear at least a mark of his own idea of a love which affects a person's vital interior. His adoption of a word seldom used by his models, psyche, is only one symptom of his special attitude. Meleager revived on a purely romantic level Plato's notion of love as an essential function of the soul. But unlike Plato, who was chiefly interested in the doctrine, Meleager also used kradia and even splangchna in the same sense to connote a love which is more than tactile and emotional. Both of these latter terms occur only twice each outside Meleager.

THE MIND IN LOVE

Another dimension of love's total engagement of the lover is mental. For Meleager's Hellenistic models, love was nothing more than a sort of intellectual vacation. Again one is reminded of love epigrams which dismiss wisdom and the labor of the Muses while the lover turns to his love. The old sympotic association of love and drunkenness is also an important part of this tradition. Love, like wine, turns off the brain. For Meleager, whose love poetry is notoriously full of fantasy, love stimulates the imagining mind: dreams, the waking imagination, and memory. The Hellenistic tradition provides no precedent for Meleager's fantasy-themes; they are original with Meleager in this genre.

Meleager GP 52 = 5.166 combines a number of these themes as the anxious lover wonders if Heliodora remembers him: …

Do leftovers of my affection remain, and is some kiss still warmed as a memory in her chill imagining? Does she have tears as bedmates, and does she encompass in her breast a soul-deceiving dream of me, and kiss it?

The language here is too compressed to translate accurately, and it is pure Meleager. The hypallage στοργῆς ἐμὰ λείψανα, which Page notes as without parallel in Meleager, is so much to Meleager's purpose that he stretched his diction to say it. The genitive is exegetic: “my remains, those of my affection.” The meaning of the language is that the lover merges with his love as the separation of identity and function disappears: “Is something left of me, of my affection?” Meleager continues in the same appositive mode: “Is any kiss—a memory—warmed in her chill imagining?” Again, there is no separation: it is not the memory of a kiss, but rather the memory is a kiss, kept warm, the lover hopes, in Heliodora's image-retaining mind, her εἰκασία. The language of the next phrase is equally precise: ἐμòν ὄ]νειρον ψυχαπάτην cannot be translated accurately, but Paton's “cheating dream of me” is misleading in two ways. The dream's deceiving has an object, namely Heliodora's soul, and the dream is not only “of me” but also “my dream” in a sense not readily borne by English idiom. Meleager says it this way because the possessive adjective is stronger than a simple genitive, which is avoided here just as it was avoided in the hypallage ἐμά two lines above: my remains, and my dream. The point is not a quibble because Meleager has a definite purpose which translation tends to obscure. He wants to emphasize the consummate intimacy or inwardness of himself in Heliodora's hoped-for thoughts, in her soul, quite as much as he wants to be in her bed. He imagines a transubstantiation. This is not the poetry of a man for whom love is ein rein sinnliches Verhältnis. Meleager has taken the love epigram a step or two beyond the safe and easy circle drawn by Asclepiades and his successors.

For Meleager, the waking, pleasure-seeking mind is not the sole province of love, just as love is not necessarily isolated in the dimension of the here-and-now, as it was for his Hellenistic models. Meleager gives love an autonomy within the human mind which earlier epigrammatists toyed with but preferred not to explore. Asclepiades' lovers are occasionally downcast by the absence and probable infidelity of a girl, but they never become so obsessed as to have dreams, as Medea dreams about Jason in Apollonius' epic or as Dido dreams about Aeneas. In epic, dreaming is the act of an infatuated person, and its connotations are too serious for the light texture of love epigram. It is therefore acceptable for Meleager's Phanion to dream about the tomb of her pet bunny (GP 65 = 7.207), because the mood is clearly playful. But when he writes about his dream of an eighteen-year-old boy, he borders on what Hellenistic taste might well have considered morbid:

… And even now the memory's longing heats me; in my eyes I constantly have a dream which hunts after the winged apparition. O soul that suffers in love, stop at last from being heated-up in vain by images of beauty which come even in dreams.

(GP 117 = 12.125)

This opens the door of eroticism wider than the Hellenistic canons of pleasure intended, and Meleager's repetition of the excess in an epigram about Alexis (GP 79 = 12.127) confirms the suspicion that Meleager really did not feel the same scruples as did his predecessors. This poem tells how the lover saw Alexis during a mid-afternoon walk and was struck by two beams, one from the sun and the other from the boy's eyes. It concludes as follows:

… But night in its turn laid to rest one set of rays, while in my dreams the image of his form made the others burn the more. For others it is a release from toil, but for me sleep was a maker of toil, having made in my soul an image of living fire, beauty.

Similarities of phrasing in this epigram and the one previously quoted show that these are variations on a theme; one epigram was written while the other was fresh in the poet's mind. The second is perhaps better attuned to Hellenistic taste, but in both the language is fresh as well as clear, for Meleager was introducing an idea which was not only novel to the genre, but different in quality. Dreaming is not something which the will or the conscious mind can control. When love makes its entry into the lover's dream life, it crosses the boundary between pleasure and obsession, a boundary which the Hellenistic Greek epigrammatists had been careful to respect.

The lover's dream life was not the only realm of consciousness which love invaded in Meleager's new poetry. Heliodora's hoped-for obsession with Meleager in GP 52 = 5.166 (p. 77 above) seems to have included an imaginative dimension, somewhat obscured by a textual difficulty at the end of the fourth verse. The precise meaning of εἰκασία, which most editors conjecture here, cannot be determined from other uses of the word in Greek. But other epigrams of Meleager remove all doubt that “fancy” or “imagination” is close to what the word meant: “is some kiss still warmed as a memory in her chill eikasia?” Meleager wants his kisses to live on in Heliodora's sentient mind. The idea recurs elsewhere in a number of forms. The language of GP 10 = 5.212 is imprecise, but it conveys in a general way the notion of obsessive revery which is characteristic of Meleager: …

Always the tumult of love enters in my ears, and my silent eye carries the tear that is sweet to the spirits of longing; neither night nor day brings rest, but because of charming loveliness even now somewhere in my heart the familiar figure is present. O winged loves, do you know how to fly to us but have no strength to fly away?

The first word Αἰεί is thematic: this kind of love does not go away. It is constantly at work on the lover's eyes and ears, and the familiar image of Eros (or the beloved) is imprinted in the lover's heart. This epigram describes a compulsive state which affects the senses from the inside, not a casual episode which impinges upon the senses from the outside, as was customary in this type of poetry. This important distinction can be viewed from another perspective in GP 104 = 12.106, which like the epigram above shows love affecting both the physical senses and the imagination: …

One thing I know completely, one thing alone my greedy eye knows—to look at Myiscus. Otherwise I am blind. Everything reveals his image to me. Are my eyes seeing for the pleasure of the soul, the flatterers?

In GP 10 = 5.212, the kradia had in it the well-known imprint; here, the psyche makes the lover's eyes perceive nothing but visions of the beloved. In the waking dream of love, the imagination dominates the senses to the point of supplanting them. Meleager shows how love can reverse the path of perception, making impressions move from the inside out rather than from the outside in. The poetry is not sentimental but descriptive, setting forth in clear language what happens in the mind of the lover. This is meaning, not empty rhetoric, and it enriches the tradition by expanding the authentic content of love epigram. Moreover, what Meleager says about the mind of the lover applies with equal force to the mind of the poet, whose mental preoccupations give shape and meaning to sense-impressions coming from the outside world. Meleager shares with the classical tragedians an interest in the nature of the impassioned mind—or, as he called it, the soul. In this he differs from his immediate predecessors, who undertook poetry more as mediators than as discoverers.

LOVE'S THIRST FOR THE SOUL

Meleager is most innovative when he is talking about the kind of love that gets inside a person. Although Hellenistic love epigram failed to provide him with all of the idioms he needed, it did offer him themes and phrases which could be modified for his purposes, as for example Callimachus gave him ἥμισύ μευ ψυχῆς to use in a new sense. So also with drinking and toasts. Early Greek poetry supplied the Hellenistic poets with the connection of drinking and love, not only through the associations of the symposium but because love, like wine, made one temporarily lose one's judgment and do foolish or maudlin things. Love, like a good binge (and frequently as part of it), was a useful release of tension, and was accordingly celebrated in symposium poetry and epigram. Although Meleager often goes beyond this shallow type of love, he still makes use of the tradition which grew up around it, namely of drinking a toast to a favorite boy or girl. In the diction which had become conventional, the name of the person toasted was given in the genitive. In GP 42 = 5.136 Meleager uses the customary formula, but he adds to it an un-customary conceit: …

Pour and again say, again and again, “Heliodora's.” Say it, and mix the sweet name with pure wine. …

The added novelty is that he imagines Heliodora's “sweet” name being mixed with the wine instead of water. This is not an idle novelty. The implication that the lover will then drink in Heliodora's name is left unexplored here, but it is specified in a closely related epigram to Heliodora (GP 43 = 5.137): …

Pour to Persuasion's Heliodora, and Cypris's, and again to Heliodora of the sweet-speaking Grace herself. For she will be ascribed by me as a single goddess, whose desire-filled name I mix with pure wine and drink.

Meleager does not explain what it means to drink a person's name. But the context in which a girl is deified as a triune goddess is at least quasi-mystical. The blending of three divinities into one provides the context in which we can interpret the mixture of wine with Heliodora's name, and perhaps it also helps us to understand what happens when the lover drinks that mixture: he lets Heliodora into himself, he internalizes his goddess of love and beauty.⁴ All of these ideas are quite new to love epigram. The desire to drink in someone whom you love grows naturally out of a deep love, but it is alien to the light and easy love prescribed by Hellenistic wisdom.

Another epigram, this one from the series addressed to Zenophila, throws more light on Meleager's internalization of erotic experience: …

The cup rejoices sweetly and says that it is touching the talkative mouth of the friend of love, Zenophila. Happy cup! I wish she would set her lips to mine and in a single breath drink the soul in me as a toast.

(GP 35 = 5.171)

Προπίνω means “drink a toast” as in the epigrams above for Heliodora. Meleager plays on the word “lip” in the usual Hellenistic manner (the “lip” of the cup and the “lips” of the lover), but the point of the epigram, the real novelty-with-a-meaning, is that he wants Zenophila to drink his soul, to take him into herself just as earlier he had wanted to take Heliodora into himself. The difference between this and the usual Hellenistic novelty is that it is more than verbal, more than a toy. It is a novelty of significant content, because it refers to a verifiable state of mind which Meleager's predecessors had disregarded, and because it brought love epigram into contact with a very different, more intense kind of love. This is the kind of love in which one person wants to absorb another and simultaneously be absorbed—mentally, physically, in every way possible. Meleager's “heart” and “soul” are convenient means of expressing that transcendent totality.

It may be objected that this poetry is fantastic and irrational. But love in its full force is not easy to articulate rationally because it does not proceed from a well-ordered part of the mind. It has a good deal in common with mystical experience, which is why love poetry and religious poetry have come together at so many points in the history of literature.

Sensualism itself is transformed by the type of love which Meleager introduced. Hellenistic epigram conventionally employed motifs of sweetness, honey, and the like as metaphors of sensual and emotional pleasure. In GP 84 = 12.133 Meleager makes use of the same themes, not for a saccharine effect but to communicate an emotional condition in which the lover's desire to possess the beloved is perceived as palpably as thirst: …

Thirsting, when in summer I kissed a soft-skinned boy, I quenched my parching thirst and said, “Father Zeus, do you drink the nectar-like kiss of Ganymede? Is that the wine he pours you from the brim of his lips? For I too have kissed one who is fair among boys, Antiochus, and drunk the sweet honey of the soul.

Unless we are prepared to read this on the level of sexual appetites in which “kiss” is a polite word for orgasm, we have little choice but to read it as a poem about the deeper variety of love. Only that kind could make so much of a mere kiss. Of course the epigram is foolish and extravagant if you assume that the lover is a casual thrill-seeker. But it is only the expectation of the genre which supports that assumption, and not the language of the epigram itself. The language says that the need for Antiochus' kiss is as real and palpable as thirst, and its satisfaction is as sweet as honey; but this is the honey of the soul. “Honey of the soul” comes at the climactic point of a poem which begins with the word “thirsting.” Two ineffable experiences of love are given life through the common sensual media of thirst and sweetness. But these are metaphors, not the experience itself. The “soul” spells out the difference. Ben Jonson's ode “To Celia” confirms Meleager's epigram, using the same metaphors to specify the same difference between the sensualist and the lover:

Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes,
          And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
          And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst, that from the soul doth rise,
          Doth aske a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's Nectar sup,
          I would not change for thine.

THE BELOVED AS DIVINITY

One after another of Meleager's peculiarities or alleged extravagances fall into a pattern as soon as we recognize his unwillingness to restrict himself to casual or sensual love. Because Meleager goes to the extreme of falling in love, he goes to the extreme of deifying the beloved. It was perfectly acceptable in the Hellenistic tradition to compare a boy to Eros or a girl to Cypris, but the earlier epigrammatists were not often ready to speak of the person loved as though he were really divine, as Meleager spoke of Heliodora (GP 43 = 5.137—see p. 81 above) or Myiscus (GP 105 = 12.110), or Theocles, in GP 93 = 12.158, which closes with this couplet: …

Be gracious, lord, be propitious, for the divinity has marked you as a god. In you are my limits of life and of death.

The language is religious and the talk is of life and death because the love professed is total, irrational, and obsessive. The earlier Hellenistic epigrammatist tends to avoid these associations.⁵ Meleager's erotic extremism robs man of his reason, his independence, and his individuality, possessions which the Hellenistic temper valued as much as health itself. The Hellenistic love epigram before Meleager celebrated only the healthy, sanitary pleasures. Meleager was interested in love of every kind. The extreme lover, like the drunken comast, is prostrate. But whereas the comast is celebrating a secular ritual of frenzy from which (like the Aristotelian spectator of tragedy) he will go away a happier and saner man, the true lover will not go away. His erotic state becomes a part of him, and it emerges in religious images, such as those cited in Meleager above, in Roman love lyric, in Metaphysical poetry, in Jonson's ode “To Celia,” and frequently throughout love poetry.

TOTAL INVOLVEMENT—ECSTASY

The lines to Theocles quoted immediately above place the lover in a posture of dependency: “in you are my limits of life and death.” In this respect also Meleager goes beyond the point at which his predecessors stopped. The proper Hellenistic lover was free to act as though his life depended on the favor of his beloved, but he never said as much. He might for example spend a night outside a girl's door making a scene and exposing himself to hail and lightning, but the ritual signified no real involvement. Meleager expresses the lover's involvement in a variety of ways: GP 104 = 12.106 (see p. 80) says of Myiscus that “everything shows me his image”. A variation of this theme, GP 95 = 12.60, stresses the dependency which grows out of this state of mind: …

If I look at Theron, I see everything; and if on the other hand I behold everything but not him, then I see nothing.

The opening couplet of GP 108 = 12.159, like the closing couplet of GP 93 = 12.158 (p. 83), states the dependency in terms of life and death: …

On you, Myiscus, the ship's cables of my life are fastened; in you also is whatever soul's breath is still left me.

In the interlocking images of deep love, the pentameter above hints at the way in which lovers interpenetrate and come to share one another's identity. The remaining breath of the lover's soul is in Myiscus; Andragathus is “half of my soul” (GP 81 = 12.52); Meleager wants to drink Heliodora's name; he wants his soul to be drunk by Zenophila (p. 81); he wants to hide Myiscus in his insides (ἐνì σπλάγχνοισι, GP 101 = 12.65). Heliodora is “soul of my soul”: …

Inside my heart Eros formed sweet-spoken Heliodora, soul of my soul.

(GP 48 = 5.155)

All of this is new to Hellenistic love epigram, and it is more than rhetoric and sentimentality because it refers to a type of experience far more extreme than anything Meleager's predecessors cared to represent. And behind the difference in experience is a different way of life, a different concept of the personality. Only Meleager writes about a love in which one person flows into another. This notion is repugnant to the instincts of Greek culture, and it could well be significant that the break with tradition was made by a non-Greek. Whatever the ethnic influences, it is certain that nearly every Meleagrian trait relates in one way or another to this difference in temper. The following quatrain, when compared to its literary “sources,” illustrates the difference in conceptions of character. In combining two epigrams of Asclepiades (GP 1 = 5.169 and GP 24 = 12.163) into a new poem of his own, Meleager adds his own idea of how people love: …

Sweet it is to mix with pure wine the sweet liquid of bees, and sweet to love a boy when you too are beautiful. Just so does Alexis love soft-haired Cleobulus. The two of them are the immortal honeyed wine of Cypris.

(GP 80 = 12.164)

Here the lovers mix as liquids, completely interpenetrating one another and losing their individual characters to form a new substance. In Asclepiades GP 24 = 12.163, the mixture was compared to emerald and gold, ivory and ebony, persuasion and love—a picture of attractive juxtaposition instead of blending. The physical substances were solid and maintained their individual character, but in Meleager they flow together. The difference is essentially the same as when Meleager borrowed Callimachus' ἥμισύ μεν ψυχῆς. Callimachus' half soul was with the boys, while Meleager's was the beloved Andragathus. Because of Meleager's belief that personalities or souls blend together in love, he tends to talk of soul as something liquid or gaseous rather than solid.

This probably has something to do with Meleager's repeated use of another new theme, the “breathless lover.” This recurs over half a dozen times, as for example in GP 108 = 12.159 (p. 85), where Meleager tells Myiscus “in you is whatever soul's breath (ψυχῆς πνεῦμα) is still left in me.” The beginning of GP 22 = 12.132b suggests that Meleager was actively interested in the archaic association of breath with soul: …

Ah, hard-laboring soul, now you are burned from the fire, and now you catch your breath and revive.

'Αναψύχεις πνεῦμα echoes ψυχῆς πνεῦμα in GP 108 = 12.159. A similar expression appears in GP 92 = 12.72, where lovesick Damis is gasping out the last of his breath. … Although the connection is never made more specific than this, it seems that the lover in Meleagrian epigram is “breathless” in a sense not connected with the physiology of sexual excitement. It comes as no surprise to see the theme in English Romantic poetry:

Poor Cynthia greeted him, and sooth'd her light
Against his pallid face: he felt the charm
To breathlessness, and suddenly a warm
Of his heart's blood: 'twas very sweet …

(Keats, Endymion III 103 ff.)

          In lone and silent hours …
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge: …

(Shelley, Alastor 29 ff.)

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration …

(Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous evening …”)

Yet we have no reason to believe that these later poets intended anything more than a physical manifestation of emotion, while Meleager clearly has in mind a metaphysical state. A more appropriate label than romantic would therefore be metaphysical. Donne accordingly comes closer to Meleager than do Keats or Shelley. Here, for example, is a parallel to Damis, who was described above:

Before I sigh my last gaspe, let me breath,
Great love, some Legacies …

(Donne, “The Will”)

And here, from “The Extasie,” is Donne's account of how souls flow together to make a new substance, like the honeyed wine of Meleager:

This Extasie doth unperplex
          (We said) and tell us that we love,
Wee see by this, it was not sexe,
          Wee see, we saw not what did move:
But as all severall soules containe
          Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
          And makes both one, each this and that. …
When love, with one another so
          Interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
          Defects of lonelinesse controules.
Wee then, who are this new soule, know,
          Of what we are compos'd, and made, …

Donne derived his metaphysical themes from Renaissance philosophy; but nothing which we know about Hellenistic philosophy accounts for parallel themes in Meleager, unless it was some outgrowth of Epicurean atomism. It is certain in any case that they did not come from Greek poetry. Even Sappho's Ode to Anactoria, which is supposed to be as intense a love-lyric as anything in Greek, uses as its medium of analysis a catalogue of physical symptoms which the reader then translates into an understanding of the lover's mental or spiritual state. Meleager made use of a metaphysical method, but within that category he is clearly more romantic than classic or classical. Meleager skirted the Hellenic assumption of a solid and consistent nature and inserted his own conceptions of a soul which could be mixed, and which could be breathed out in love, in the original sense of an “ecstasy.”

EFFECTS ON STYLE

Meleager's unconventional ideas about love gave rise to stylistic as well as thematic novelties. We have seen already how in Meleager the soul is transformed through its interaction with another. When the solidity and stability of the lover are lost and he stands outside of himself in a state of ecstasy, he as well as his beloved appear protean, both taking on many forms and projected into them. Meleager introduced the appositional simile to give vividness to this idea. For example, GP 92=12.72 shows Damis hopelessly in love with Heraclitus: …

Already it is sweet dawn, but Damis lies sleepless on the doorstep and gasps out the remainder of his breath. Poor wretch, he has looked at Heraclitus: he stood beneath the beams of his eyes, [like] wax thrown on a live coal. …

It is more vivid to imply that Damis is wax than to say that he is like wax, just as it was more vivid for Meleager to say that half of his soul is Andragathos than to say it is with him. But the difference is more than rhetorical, because it reinforces a vision which Meleager did not inherit from his predecessors. In his note to the Damis epigram, Page notes that “the appositional simile is characteristic of Meleager.” A case in point not only of the usage but of its function in the poetics of Meleager is cited by Page, who offers no explanation beyond what I have quoted. He refers us to GP 100 = 12.59: …

Pretty, by Eros, are the boys whom Tyre nourishes; but Myiscus eclipses them all, a sun outshining the stars.

“Myiscus … a sun” is more sunlike than “Myiscus, like the sun,” and it also better expresses the projective consciousness of the erotic mind. Compare the quatrain of Rhianus from which Meleager derived his epigram (Rhianus GP 2 = 12.58): …

Troezen is a good rearer of lads; you would not go wrong in praising even the least of its boys. And Empedocles is as superior in his radiance as the lovely rose which shines among the other spring flowers.

Rhianus cleverly conceals a sun metaphor in his language. Meleager throws away the flowers and realizes more fully the picture of his beloved as the sun, the brilliance which makes all others invisible. When the sun is in the sky, our eyes do not see the stars, even though they too are in the sky. The appositional simile conveys as vividly as possible the sun-ness of Meleager's Myiscus and at the same time the subjectivity of the lover's eye, a condition in which lovers and beloved alike become fused with the phenomenal world. Damis is wax thrown on coals, Myiscus is the sun, and in GP 94 = 12.41 Apollodotus is a burnt-out torch because Meleager has turned to the love of women. The appositional simile is a special technique of Meleager's subjective vision; the state of the lover contributes more than ever before in love epigram to the quality of what he sees: “If I look at Theron, I see everything; and if I behold everything but not him, then on the other hand I see nothing” (see p. 84). The lover's world is more protean, less secure than it was for Asclepiades or Callimachus.

Other techniques commonly associated with Meleager are less uncommon in the genre, but their increased use gives voice to the emotional intensity of the more obsessive lover, to whom irony and self-control are alien. Both catalogue and anaphora appear frequently as expressions of a love which is as unrestrained in quantity as in quality. Impressions of plenitude are useful even for an eroticism as controlled as Horace's; with Meleager they create an atmosphere in which the lover is overwhelmed, as in GP 29 = 5.139: …

Sweet the tune, by Pan of Arcady, which you play on your harp, Zenophila; by Pan you strike a sweet tune. Where shall I flee you? Everywhere Loves surround me, nor do they allow me scarcely the time to take a breath. For either her shape casts longing into me, or again her music, or her grace, or—what shall I say? Everything! I flame with fire.

The repetitions … in the first couplet and … in the third couplet, emphasize the impression of a lover who is overcome by a woman's charm. He can only exclaim: there is no help in either flight or speech. The catalogue of charms in the third couplet documents the lover's claim that he is surrounded by loves. It is all too much for him, and he is speechless. Love is strong, and the rhetoric imitates the power not of the lover but of his opponents: the “Loves” or charms of Zenophila. The movement of the epigram is aporetic, towards the surrender and dissolution of the lover rather than away from it, as would more frequently have been the case in Meleager's predecessors. Neither the rhetoric nor the attitude of surrender are entirely new with Meleager, but both are closely related to the style and the meaning of his brand of love.

There is little doubt that the seeds of Meleager's romanticism are to be found in earlier Hellenistic love epigram, and it comes as no surprise that Meleager's own mannerisms are sometimes most frequent in epigrams which celebrate unleashed love, and in which the lover revels in his own immolation. Posidippus GP 5 = 12.45 anticipates Meleager in both style and content: …

Yes, yes, shoot, Loves! I lie here a single target for many together. Spare me not, foolish ones! For if you vanquish me you will be noteworthy among immortals as archers who are masters of a mighty quiver.

Meleager borrowed this theme in GP 24 = 5.198, making use (as often) of the same apostrophe, but also pacing it out with a tone and rhythm of anaphora and cataloguing, which he drew from other models. The result is less comastic and less frenzied, but more persistent in expressing a love which fills up and overcomes the lover's life. For Posidippus “many Loves” (or “many arrows”) is an unspecified idea which could refer to the many pangs of a single episode or to a series of affairs. Meleager specifies “many” (πολλοῖκ) as the charms of women with whom he is in love, and swears by them as living proof of his multiple affliction. His epigram conveys thereby a clearer, more forceful (though less dramatized) picture of the compulsive lover's crowded life: …

Not by Timo's hair, not by Heliodora's sandal, not by the scented doorway of little Demo, not by the sensuous smile of dark-eyed Anticleia, not by the fresh garlands of Dorothea, no longer does your hollow quiver hide feathered arrows, Eros; all the shafts are in me.

The apostrophe, anaphora, and the catalogue are equally characteristic techniques of a poet whose notion of love is not qualified by limits: all of love's shafts must be expended on the lover, and he must be wholly consumed by his experience. The asseverative rhetoric is Asianic because the unrestrained emotionalism of Meleager's vita nuova had little corresponding diction in the traditional idiom of Hellenistic epigram. Meleager developed the playful emotionalism which the Hellenistic poets held under close control into a more serious habit. Meleager's more extravagant turns of phrase which Radinger collected and condemned under the category of ungesunde Sentimentalität are perhaps no more than the verbal counterpart of a non-Greek sensibility which was gaining ground as the dominant cultural tone of the Mediterranean world evolved.

THE PROBLEM OF MELEAGER

Because of his extravagant rhetoric, and in spite of the obviously light and playful tone of his predecessors in love epigram, Meleager is usually thought to be especially insincere. How could one poet be so hopelessly in love with so many people in one lifetime? Catullus is more believable for his Lesbia, Propertius for his Cynthia, Petrarch for his Laura, but the catalogue of Meleager's loves is too long for belief. This may be so, but the tradition in which Meleager wrote did not call for this type of naming. None of his predecessors' surviving epigrams names a girl or a boy more than once, no doubt because they wrote about love, not passion. Meleager violated that tradition because of the nature of the material which he introduced, but at the same time he was unwilling or unable to forego the poetic advantage of using a variety of male and female names in his epigrams. Meleager's innovation was to write a series of epigrams to a single person. Like his other innovations, this grows out of the nature of obsessive love with persons corresponding to Heliodora, Zenophila, or Myiscus. But the autobiographical content of those epigrams is incidental to their poetic content, namely that extreme love outlives the writing of a single epigram, or (in the case of Heliodora, for whom we have a very powerfully-worded death epigram) that extreme love outlives the people who are loved. Given the tradition within which he composed poetry—and there is no other measure which is more pertinent—Meleager is remarkable not for the large number of his loves but for breaking out of the tradition to express the continuous character of what we are fond of calling “true” love. No doubt, the love which Meleager projected in his poetry was also subject to change. So, for that matter, was the love of Donne, though we are less inclined to doubt its sincerity.⁶

In this matter, as in many others, Meleager has suffered the fate of being always condemned for the wrong reasons. But most of those reasons stem in one way or another from a single real fault, namely that Meleager failed to make the clear break with Hellenistic tradition that the content of his poetic vision demanded. If he had written all of his love epigrams to a single girl, or even to two or three, and suppressed all the other names which he uses out of metrical convenience and deference to his tradition, he might be ranked with Sappho and Petrarch as one of the greatest lovers of all time, instead of a frivolous and unstable Casanova. If he had suppressed the majority of his epigrams, which in no way transgress the limits of casual, sensual Hellenistic love, then perhaps the radical innovations which appear in the substantial minority would have risen more readily to view. Or on the other hand, if Meleager in assembling the Garland at the end of his life had excluded all of the innovative epigrams and kept only the most conventionally Hellenistic, and if at the same time he had discarded all but one epigram to Zenophila, one epigram to Heliodora, one epigram to Myiscus, and so on, then he would have been accepted more readily as Page accepts him, as a clever but uncreative epigrammatist who “accepted without question” “the limitations both of matter and of form which he inherited.” Meleager's serious fault as a poet was that he chose neither alternative, and left behind a body of poetry which lacks internal consistency. Perhaps he himself failed to analyze the heresies in which his poetry involved him, and to see that when he was most himself he was least Hellenistic. He was, I suspect, a poor thinker, and in many respects a poor thinker is rightly condemned as a poor poet. His greatest failure as a poet was not to realize that the genre in which he wrote carried expectations of a light, sensual, playful, and largely casual approach to love. In using the epigram form to talk about a basically different type of experience, a different conception of human character, and a different way of life, he was stretching his poetic vehicle beyond its capacities. Meleager deserves to be understood for what he was, a sometimes innovative and unconventional poet capable of writing excellent poetry in a number of styles, some of which are uniquely his own. But he is unlikely to be genuinely appreciated by most Western readers, because we cannot fully accept the surrender of one's life to the emotions which his vision entails.

Notes

1. The extent and relevance of Meleager's Syrianism are probably not subject to anything more substantial than moot and uninformed speculation. This is at any rate all that I have found in the criticism. Meleager's contributions to love epigram do however seem to fall in with the general Hellenistic pattern by which Greek art and ideas changed through increased contact with non-Greek cultures and non-Greek art and ideas. At the very least, Meleager's epigrams show the effects of rhetorical Asianism, and there is reason to believe that Asianism was not merely a matter of rhetoric.

2. Carl Radinger, Meleagros von Gadara, Innsbruck 1895, 15.

3. ψυχή: Asclepiades GP 17 = 12.66, Callimachus GP 4 = 12.73, Dioscorides GP 1 = 5.56 (ψυχοτακῆ), Polystratus GP 1 = 12.91, Posidippus GP 6 = 12.98, Anon. GP 2 = 12.89; κραδία: Alcaeus GP 6 = 5.10, Anon. GP 9 = 12.99, Anon. GP 27 = 12.130; σπλάγχνα: Dioscorides GP 1 = 5.56, Anon. GP 31 = 12.160.

4. Cf. Aeneid I 749: infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem.

5. See G. Lieberg, Puella Divina, Amsterdam 1962, 30-32, who calls attention to these exceptions: “Alcaeus” GP 9 = 12.64, Artemon GP 2 = 12.55, Polystratus GP 1 = 12.91, and Rhianus GP 4 = 12.121. See also my remarks on Asclepiades/Posidippus GP 34 = 5.194 (pp. 50f.). This is one of a number of romanticizing tendencies latent in the Hellenistic love epigram which Meleager emphasizes in his poetry. There is no need to suppose that it is evidence of Meleager's Syrianism, but see the interesting remarks on Meleager's romanticism in Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, 112.

6. An extended comparison of Meleager with the Metaphysical poets would be a valuable contribution to our understanding of both traditions, but it is clearly beyond the scope of this monograph. Romantic and Metaphysical poetry are introduced into my argument without the presumption that a comparison with Meleager will lead to close identifications; they are simply points of reference to support the authenticity of Meleager's vision.