Some Preliminary Soundings

This chapter presents a series of “soundings” of short hexametrical genres. The aim is to investigate the following: (i) how the Homeric poet, in Hector’s description of the burial mound of his antagonist, plays with his audiences’ expectations of the generic and preexisting form of the hexametrical epitaph and how both he and the Hesiodic poet use the hypothêkê, a traditionally hexametrical form of avuncular advice in the Homeric speeches of elders like Peleus or in the Hesiodic address to Perses; (ii) how a mimetic poem composed by Theocritus helps us to imagine the performance context of some fragments of Sappho’s “wedding poems” as epithalamia in hexameters composed in ten-line stanzas and chanted before the door of newlyweds; and (iii) how the short poems embedded in the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer reflect the rich array of short hexametrical performances.

Judeo-Greek wedding poems from the fifteenth century

This paper is the first edition of a new collection of Judaeo-Greek texts. Moscow Guenzburg 746 is a very small ms., a Romaniote siddur, which contains eight wedding poems at the end. Four of the poems are in Hebrew, while the remaining four are in Greek. These poems, which are not attested to anywhere else, show strong relations with much later Christian love lyrics in Greek, that despite being erotic, were not necessarily aimed at weddings. The poetical language between the two traditions is the same, as is shown in the commentary. Since the ms. is dated to 1419, transmitted through an unknown Jewish scribe, it exhibits the oldest collection of Byzantine “tragoudia” known so far.

Starożytny łaciński centon: próba przybliżenia na przykładzie „Centonu weselnego” Auzoniusza

The term „cento” comes from the Latin cento, which means „a cloak made of patches,” „patchwork,” as the Greek does. Poems of Homer and Vergil were favorite sources for the ancient cento poets, who rearranged their frag­ments into totally different stories. The oldest preserved Latin cento is the tragedy „Medea” composed by Hosidius Geta from the fragments of Vergilian poetry circa 200 AD. We know, however, about other centos having been written before that date. Altogether, sixteen Virgilian and one Ovidian cento have been preserved. Thirteen of them, including the earliest and the latest of all extant Latin centos, are contained in the Codex called Salmasianus. Since the terminus ante quem for this manuscript is 534 AD, we assume that all preserved centos have been written between 200 AD, the broadly acknowledge date for Medea, and 534 AD. Ancient Virgilian centos mainly deal with well-known classical myths (8 of 13). Four of them have Christian themes, two treat trivial matters of everyday life, two are wedding-poems. The involvement of Decimus Ausonius Magnus (ca 310-394), a renowned teacher, rhetorician and poet, with the cento is not limited to being the author of a Virgilian cento, which he composed as a response to a similar poem by the Emperor Valentinian I (321-375). Ausonius is the only ancient author we know to have described cento in more detail and to have laid down the rules of the genre. In the introductory letter to the Cento nuptialis, addressed to his friend Axius Paulus, Ausonius maintains that verses of an original text, taken over to the cento, may be divided at any of the caesurae which occur in hexameter. No section longer than one line and a half should be taken over. The quotation may not be changed, although its meaning may change according to the new context. Ausonius compares activity of the cento poets to playing the game of stomachion. Doing so he emphasizes unity within cento and its playfulness as the particularly important traits of the genre. Ancient authors usually followed the technical rules put forth by Ausonius, although not all of them would have agreed with him about the similarity between writing a cento and playing a game. While some twentieth century scholars had treated cento with undeserved contempt, the research of the last decades has given it its honour back. Centos still require our attention, especially that, through their analysis, we may try to obtain a more faithful portrait of the well educated ancient reader. This reader knew his Virgil by heart, worshipped Virgil as the divinely inspired prince of Latin poetry, and preferred Virgil’s words to his own when he ventured to describe his world.