THE PARADOX OF AMATORY EPIGRAM

Kathryn Gutzwiller

In one of his deceptively simple epigrams, shows how well he has mastered the Hellenistic art of variation: Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle quam mihi, non si se Iuppiter ipse petat. dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua. (Catullus 70) My woman says that she prefers to marry no one more than me, not even if Juppiter himself asks her. She says it, but what a woman says to a lover who desires her must be written on the wind and rushing water. Catullus models his poem on a set of three epigrams, by , Asclepiades, and Meleager, preserved in the AP in what was likely the original sequence from Meleager’s Garland. It would be intriguing to explore in detail how Catullus conveys his anguish at Lesbia’s betrayal through a process of intertextual allusion to a series of epigrams that already displayed variation one of the other within the context in which Catullus likely encountered them. I cite the poem here, however, only for a verbal play in the second . In the last epigram from the AP sequence, the one in which Meleager demonstrates his extraordinary ability to rework and make new the best epigrams of his predecessors, an abandoned woman complains that the oaths of lovers are carried away on water (59 GP (= AP 5.8); cf. Callimachus 11 GP (= AP 5.6 = 25 Pf.), Asclepiades 9 GP (= AP 5.7)). Catullus modi es this line not only by reversing the gender roles, making himself the abandoned lover, but also by adding a paradoxical contrast between speaking and writing: what a woman says (dicit) to her lover must be written (scribere), not in a love poem, but on the wind and the water. Although written speech should have a greater permanency than the spoken word, the oaths of an untrue woman are here compared to the most imperma- nent of writing.

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Catullus’ image in poem 70 alludes, I suggest, to the underlying paradox of amatory epigram, namely, that it is love poetry representing private oral speech but cast in a form that descends from the public, written speech of inscription. This paradox lies at the heart of the dif cult question of how amatory epigram originated. The sepulchral and dedicatory epigrams that found their way into epigram anthologies were either copied from their inscriptional sites and then gathered into papyrus collections or composed on the model of such inscriptions, perhaps initially for recitation and, more certainly, for publication in book format. But, apart from the phenomenon of the kalos graf ti,1 there was no similar tradition of public inscription concerned with private erotic life. In earlier Greek culture amatory themes were con- ned either to lyric poetry, and so sung, or to elegiac poetry, and so usually recited at symposia. By about 300 B.C., however, epigrams on amatory topics were being composed by Asclepiades of Samos, and perhaps by and others as well. Some scholars have suggested that epigrams rst entered the list of literary types through oral performance by symposiasts as dinner entertainment.2 Amatory subjects t well in such a performance environment, and many Hel- lenistic erotic epigrams dramatize a symposium setting. But the advent of poetry books, both edited collections of earlier verse and assemblages of new material arranged by the authors, was surely also an important factor.3 In collected form on a papyrus roll, the of Mimnermus or Theognis would visually be quite similar to epigrams arranged in categories, such as the sequences with headings known from the late- third-century papyrus of Posidippus’ epigrams (though erotic themes are missing there).4 In this new context of the book, the essential distinction between and epigram, that one was recited in longer or shorter segments in variable settings and one inscribed in xed, short form in a single location, vanished, though preserved through literary allusion to their generic heritage.

1 On these see Slater (1998). A few erotic epigrams play with the tradition of kalos inscriptions: Aratus 1 GP (= AP 12.129), Anon. 27 GP (= AP 12.130), Meleager 94 GP (= AP 12.41). 2 Reitzenstein (1893), Cameron (1995: 71–103). Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004: 338–49) emphasize the role played by Plato’s exposition of love in the Symposium, as well as by archaic and classical sympotic culture more generally. 3 See Gutzwiller (1998b). 4 P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309, published by Bastianini and Gallazzi (2001) and most acces- sible in Austin and Bastianini (2002).

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