The Garland of Philip as Roman Poetry

From its first beginnings until the end of antiquity, Latin poetry is always in conversation with Greek.  Yet, even as the lives of Greeks and Romans become ever more connected, Greek poetry remains resolutely Greek.  ‘If Gibbon was exaggerating when he remarked that there is not one allusion to Virgil or Horace in the whole of Greek literature from Dionysius of Halicarnassus to Libanius, he was not exaggerating much’ (Cameron).  As we have come to understand that the real lives of everyday people in the Roman empire were lives of cultural and linguistic hybridity (Adams; cf. now Mappola for non-elite verse), the undoubted fact that high-concept Greek poetry barely registers the existence of Roman life, let alone of Latin poetry, should be felt as ever more worthy of note.

If there is any mainstream Greek poetic work in which it is reasonable to seek some engagement with things Roman and Latin, it is the Garland of Philip, a mid-first century CE anthology of epigrams compiled by a Greek named Philip of Thessalonica who sought or enjoyed patronage at the Imperial court, and dedicated his work to a Roman named Camillus.  In the face of the dominant critical assumption, and (probably) against the compiler’s own intention, what happens if the Garland is read as Roman poetry? 

Recent discussions are increasingly open to active consideration of the collection’s Roman elements, in a way that the 1968 edition and commentary of Gow and Page conspicuously was not (Bowie, Whitmarsh, above all Höschele 2017 and 2019).  However, so far these investigations have stopped short of seeking any footprints here of actual poetry in Latin.

But ‘Greek poets seem never, or almost never, to have imitated Latin poets’ (Clausen ad Virg. Ecl. 7.4).  It is hard to disagree with this dictum; but the circumstances of the Garland do offer an especial opportunity for some push back.  Given that this collection gathers some 150 years of previous Greek epigram, the question is not only what epigrams may have been written by Greek-language poets in conscious dialogue with Roman or Latin contexts, but also what kinds of reading are generated by later-coming readers (especially but not only in Rome itself) who bring to the Garland a range of cultural expectation, sometimes Greek, sometimes Roman, sometimes a mix.  An epigram written in all innocence of Rome may become Roman when read, or reread, as part of this anthology. 

The paper will present and selectively discuss a dozen epigrams under the following headers:  ‘Greek epigrams read Virgil’; ‘Persuading Piso, praising Caesar’; ‘Aratology’; ‘Anthologizing Antipater, after the Metamorphoses’; and ‘Finding Corinna’s contact zones’.  Adducing here a bilingual pun (Crinagoras A.Plan. 40.5-6 ἐπὶ μεῖζον ἀέξοι / Καῖσαρ), there a trademark Latin poetic topos (Diodorus A.P. 9.219.3 ἄστυ ῾Ρέμοιο), here a Niobe, there a Daphne, and in another place a disguised elegiac domina, I will argue that the sounds of Latin poetry are there to be heard in the Garland, if one listens closely enough.