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Cyzicene epigrams

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Cyzicene epigrams

Paton, p. 151

EPIGRAMS IN THE TEMPLE OF APOLLONIS THE MOTHER OF ATTALUS AND EUMENES AT CYZICUS

The epigrams, inscribed on the tablets of the columns, contain scenes in relief, as follows.

1 On Dionysus conducting his mother Semele up to heaven, with Hermes in the lead and Satyrs and Sileni escorting them with torches

This is the fair-haired daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, slain in childbirth by the lightning of Zeus, being led up from Acheron by her thyrsus-loving son; thus he responds to the godless insolence of Pentheus.

2 The second pillar has Telephus recognized by his mother.

Leaving the paths of Arcadia’s deep valleys for the sake of my mother Auge, I, Telephus, myself the dear son of [cont.]

Paton, p. 169

19 On the nineteenth are Remus and Romulus, delivering their mother (Servilia by name)1 from the tortures of Amulius. Ares had seduced her and fathered children from her; they were exposed and suckled by a wolf. When they grew to be men, they freed their mother from bondage, founded Rome, and restored Numitor to the throne.

You are bearing to Ares a hidden brood of children, Remus and Romulus from a single birth. A wild wolf raised them to manhood and nursed them in her cave, and they snatched you out of woes with no easy cure.

Modern

Demoen

p. 231

The 19 so-called Czicene epigrams — there are in fact only 18, the seventeenth being nearly lost — constitute the shortest, and yet probably most enigmatic book of the Palantine Anthology. For the origin of this anonymous but obviously coherent collection, we have to rely on one source : the introductory lemma of AP, III:

Whatever might be the exact meaning of these :stylopinakia".¹, our collection has, at least according to the author of this lemma, an epigraphic origin : it was inscribed on the temple of Apollonis. This temple, however, has completely gone, and as yet no systematic excavations have been done at Cyzicus. Moreover, this text is the only source we have about the monument. It has probably been erected on the occasion of Apolonis' death (between 175 and 159 BC).

p. 231

Now if we trust the author of the introductory lemma, the epigrams too should be dated in the second century B.C., but ever since the first edition of AP, III⁴, a majority of scholars have questioned the reliability of that lemma.

p. 248

As a result, there can remain little or no doubt: the Cyzicene epigrams were written at the earliest in the 6th century A.D.

Livingstone and Nisbet

p. 99

'Epigrams at Cyzicus': the enigmatic title of the Anthology's third and shortest Book introduces a sequence of nineteen sequentially numbered epigrams (one of them a broken scrap) purportedly inscribed by or on behalf of two royal brothers in the early second century BCE. ... The Cyzicene epigrams are alleged by the intoduction to AP 3 to have been incised on the stulopinakia — whatever they are — in Cyzicus' shrine to Apollonis, ... but the introduction is a confusing text of uncertain provenance, consisting of a single sentence of extraorinarily bad Greek²

If we can take what it says at face value, each epigram was originally a kind of subtitle to a carved scene illustrating a story from Greek myth, and each scene-and epigram combination was incised on one of the supporting columns of the temple. In the written-up version 3, a short prose preamble stands in for each carved image (narrating the content in lie of illustration) and so supplies a context for each poem.

² ... Cameron 1993: 147-8 follows Demoen 1988 in assigning a post=Hellenistic date. Conversely, the editors of a recent collection of inscriptional epigrams from the Greek East accept the Cyzicene epigrams at face value as authentic transcripts: Merkelbach and Stauber 2001. Kutner 1995: 186 splits the difference — there really were stulopinakia (whatever those were) with inscribed captions on them, but the AP 3 epigrams are not the real inscriptions.

p. 100

The mythic scenes all illustrated the virtuous love of parents for sons, and sons for parents — mostly mothers.

p. 101

If these epigrams really are Hellenistic — and this is extremely unlikely — ...

Paton

p. 149

Apollonis, who, though not of noble birth, became the queen of the Pergamene monarch Attalus I, was praised in antiquity as the model of motherly love.¹ In response, her sons were loyal and affectionate to her, and showed no signs of rivalry for control of their kingdom. When she died in the mid-second century BC, they built a temple in her honor in her native town of Cyzicus. In that temple, fittingly, were displayed bas-relief scenes depicting sons showing their love to mothers (or, in one case, a father, 3.15).

Later, in the sixth century AD, the epigrams that we now find in Book 3 were added to the temple, describing the scenes in verse.² They are poorly preserved, and their uneven application of even rudimentary metrical rules makes it difficult to correct them, even with the unusually lengthy lemmata that describe the scenes.

¹ Polybius, Histories 22.20.1–8.

² Demoen, AC 1988.