The Paradigm of Simias

Essays on Poetic Eccentricity

Jan Kwapisz

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110636048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book's concern is with notoriously obscure ancient poets-riddlers, whom it argues to have been an essential, albeit necessarily marginal, element of the literary landscape of Antiquity, which, in addition, exerted subtle yet lasting influence on European culture. The three first essays in this book trace a direct line of influence between the early Hellenistic scholar-poet Simias of Rhodes, the late Republican Roman experimentalist Laevius and Constantine the Great's virtuoso panegyrist Optatian Porfyry, whereas the fourth essay discusses the preservation and transformation of the model invented by Simias in Byzantium. The Appendix reflects on the triumph of this intellectual paradigm in Neo-Latin Jesuit education by investigating the case of a peripheral yet highly influential Central European college at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book is at once a contribution to the scholarship on the reception of Hellenistic poetry and to the study of ancient 'technopaegnia' (i.e. playful poetry) and their cultural influence in Antiquity, Byzantium and post-mediaeval Europe.

1The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes

Perhaps not all admirers of Hermann Fränkel’s contribution to the study of Classics are aware that his long and rich scholarly career began with a rendezvous with the Hellenistic grammarian and poet Simias of Rhodes,40 whose fragments he edited and commented in his PhD thesis published in 1915.41 This counts as one of few attempts to approach all of what is left of Simias’ output,42 and at once to see in him more than the founding father of the tradition of figure poems in Europe, for which he is notorious (see, however, Chapter 4 for the problems with defining the genre of visual poetry and pinpointing the exact time of its invention).43 The present book sets out to show that he was, in fact, the inventor of something more momentous – a model of intellectualism in which a special liking for poetic experimentalism intertwines with scholarly mentality and a touch of eccentricity; a culturally fruitful blend, which we find re-embodied in and creatively modified by a chain of his followers throughout European literary history, both self-conscious and unknowingly subscribing to the model he created. This overarching aim provides an obvious rationale for renewing the effort of supplying a full and nuanced depiction of Simias’ intellectual profile, which is the concern of this chapter.

The extant remnants of Simias’ poetic and grammatical works hardly form a large corpus (Fränkel’s edition comprises four testimonies and thirty-two fragments). Notwithstanding, this is a colourful assortment, and many of these bits may say something instructive about their author to a keen ear. As a matter of fact, they try to tell us so much that it is difficult to discern meaningful patterns in this clamour of untuned voices. Yet such patterns exist, and the methodology I adopt to uncover them is simple. I borrow it from Arnott’s essay on Theocritus, where he summarizes it in one sentence:

In this paper as a confirmed idolater I should like to pick out three preoccupations, three points of emphasis that make Theocritus at one and the same time distinctive, memorable and yet typical of the new Hellenistic world.44

This is what I have in mind too. Yet one difference between Theocritus and Simias is, obviously, that the preserved opus of the latter is much more fragmentary than what has reached us of the former, and the handful of accidentally preserved fragments we have may not suffice to identify what truly mattered to Simias. I do not claim, therefore, to do more than draw an arbitrary portrayal of my Simias (I realize that the preoccupations of Simias which I point out happen to be my own preoccupations), and that the same evidence might be used to portray other Simiases is, I admit, a possibility. To ensure a minimum dose of objectivity, however, I will be careful to invoke at least two fragments of two different types to illustrate each of the intuitions in giving expression to which I will indulge in what follows.

For Simias’ fragments clearly belong to several different categories. The most obvious division is between poetic and grammatical fragments. What we find in the editions is in accord with what the Suda tells us in the entry for Simias:

Σιμμίας Ῥόδιος, γραμματικός. Ἔγραψε Γλώσσας, βιβλία γ´· ποιήματα διάφορα, βιβλία δ´.

Simias of Rhodes, grammarian. He wrote three books of Glosses and four books of miscellaneous poems.

Extant are merely four tiny fragments of the Glosses, but even those, as we will see, tell us something about the lexicon of which they were a part. It may not be by accident that the poetic fragments we have can be grouped in four categories, which might correspond to the four books of miscellaneous poems the Suda mentions. First, there are hexameter fragments, most of which are ascribed by our sources to two poems, Apollo (frr. 1–2 Fränkel and Collectanea Alexandrina 1–5) and the enigmatic Gorgo (frr. 3–[3a] Fränkel = CA 6–7 – the poem is enigmatic because we know very little about it,45 not because of a resemblance to, for instance, Lycophron’s Alexandra). Then there is a fragment of what seems to have been a didactic poem, Months (Μῆνες; fr. 4 Fränkel = CA 8), to which Meineke gave an elegiac form:46

ὅν ῥ᾿ <ἀπ᾿> Ἀμύκλαντος παιδὸς ἄποφθιμένου

λαοὶ κικλήσκουσιν.

… which [month] people call after the dead son of Amyclas.

Son of Amyclas is Hyacinth, and Meineke is surely right that Simias speaks here of the (Dorian and also specifically Rhodian) month of Hyacinthius.47 The elegiac didactic poem dealing with the names of the months brings to mind, on the one hand, Callimachus’ Aetia, and, on the other, the same author’s obscure grammatical work on precisely the same subject Simias’ Months was concerned with.48 If Meineke was correct in supposing that the Months was elegiac (and this is, I admit, quite an ‘if’), then this gives us a hint about what might have filled the second book of Simias’ poetry.

The third book of the four mentioned by the Suda may have consisted of poems in various metres of lyric origin, whose several incipits are preserved by Hephaestion (frr. 9–14 Fränkel = CA 9 and 13–17). The fragments strongly suggest that these compositions had hymnic contents. I argued elsewhere that one and the same poetry book may have included Simias’ three famous technopaegnia (Axe,49 Wings and Egg), all in experimental metres, and the metrical novelties whose fragments Fränkel’s edition groups in the section ‘Variorum metrorum fragmenta’.50 This conjecture is still appealing to me. To corroborate this supposition, I note, in addition, that the poetics of the Axe oscillates between a dedicatory epigram and a hymn, both addressed to Athena, that the Wings is a mini-treatise on Eros, and that even the Egg, which I posited to make an appropriate sphragis for Simias’ book of poems in miscellaneous metres,51 prominently features Hermes. This makes the technopaegnia fit for the book of polymetric hymnic poems on gods and heroes.

I admit, however, that evident epigrammatic features of the technopaegnia may also suggest another context of ‘publication’, namely among epigrams. Several epigrams that have been ascribed to Simias have survived through the Palatine Anthology (frr. 22–[28c] Fränkel, CA 18–[23], 1–7 Gow/Page). As we will see, at least two of these exhibit links with the Egg. At any rate, Simias’ Book 4 might have contained his epigrammatic production.

At the end of this brief introduction, I should mention that in what follows I assume that it is a correct view that Simias was a contemporary of Philitas of Cos, who was probably one generation older than the Golden-Age poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus.52 It is striking that Simias curiously resembles the famous Philitas in more than one respect (which confirms their belonging to the same epoch), as they both were simultaneously poets and grammarians, they shared aesthetic interests and they even both either originated from or lived in the Dodecanese. It might prove rewarding to think more about how deep these similarities are and where they end (for some preliminary thoughts, see the Introduction). Here, however, my business is only with Simias.

1.1Philology

In what precedes, I have been careful to refer to Simias as not only poet, as he is normally viewed, but at once as poet and scholar. The fact that we have significantly more poetic fragments of Simias than the fragments of his grammatical work may distort the actual character of his output.53 We have seen that the Suda refers to him simply as γραμματικός, but this may not mean much, because this is how its author also refers, for instance, to Alexander of Aetolia, although he is subsequently introduced as a member of the Pleiad, and Philitas is, according to the Suda, γραμματικὸς κριτικός, although his poetry is also mentioned (I note, however, that Antimachus of Colophon is called by the Suda γραμματικὸς καὶ ποιητής). Yet Strabo, who famously refers to Philitas as ποιητὴς ἅμα καὶ κριτικός (14.2.19), also styles the inventor of the technopaegnia Σιμμίας ὁ γραμματικός when he lists famous Rhodians (14.2.13), which is a strong indication that this is how he was regarded in Antiquity. What do his four extant grammatical fragments tell us?54

In an enlightening discussion of Philitas’ scholarly interests, Bing persuasively argued that the Coan scholar had a penchant for exploring ‘exotic diction and local customs’.55 One fragment suggests that Simias may at times also have felt this inclination. In a passage dedicated to a certain species of fish called φάγρος, Athenaeus informs us that Simias explained φάγρος as a Cretan word for whetstone (ἀκόνη; fr. 32 Fränkel ap. Ath. 7.327e–f). This is the sole attestation that φάγρος may have this sense. In this fragment, Simias betrays the same interest in how dialectal usage may twist the standard meaning of words that Bing found so striking in Philitas’ lexicographical pursuits.56

Yet two other fragments may indicate that Simias’ lexicon substantially differed from the famous Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι compiled by Philitas. In a corrupt passage in which Athenaeus reports how various grammarians interpreted the Homeric hapax ἴσθμιον (Od. 18.300), the definitions from both Philitas and Simias are quoted (Ath. 15.677b–c = Philit. fr. 13 Dettori = 41 Spanoudakis = Sim. fr. 29 Fränkel). The quotation from Philitas suffers from textual corruption, but it is clear enough that he offered a longer comment, in which he mused about how the word had, homonymically (the term ὁμωνυμία appears in the text), several different meanings.57 Simias, in turn, and one or two later grammarians ‘render it by one word’ (ἀποδιδόασιν ἓν ἀνθ᾿ ἑνός; this phrase recurs nowhere else in Athenaeus): ἴσθμιον· στέφανον. Athenaeus gives us a glimpse of Simias’ lexicographical method: unlike Philitas, who adduced several meanings of the problematic Homeric gloss, Simias reduced his explanation to one authoritatively chosen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Paradigm of Simias
• 1 The Three Preoccupations of Simias of Rhodes
• 2 Laevius’ Broken Wing and the Banquet of Riddlers
• 3 Optatian Porfyry and the Order of Court Riddlers
• 4 The Invention of the Figure Poem in Byzantium
• Appendix: A New Alexandria and its Little Museum
• Bibliography
• Index of Sources and Passages Cited
• General Index