Brett Evans, Georgetown University
Scholars of Hellenistic Sicily have paid increasing attention to how Hieron II of Syracuse (r. 275-215) used cultural patronage to assert his status on the Hellenistic world stage (Lehmler 2005; Zambon 2006; Veit 2013; Krüger 2022). His most famous prise de position was his construction of the massive grain ship Syracusia described by Athenaeus (5.206d-209e). While earlier scholarship debated the ship’s size and historicity (e.g. Casson 1971; Page 1981: 26-9; Turfa and Steinmayer 1999), current approaches instead examine its ideological valence as an advertisement of Hieron’s royal ‘brand’ (Lehmler 2005; Roller 2019). This marvel of engineering impressed the authors of its day: Athenaeus cites both a certain Moschion’s prose treatise describing Syracusia and its construction (FGrH 575 f. 1 = Ath. 5.206d-209e) as well as an epigram by an Archimelus which Moschion quotes (SH 202). Since no trace of Syracusia survives, we depend entirely on these authors to understand Hieron’s project. Both authors’ works have benefited from recent commentaries (Archimelus: Olson 2017; Moschion: Roller 2019); still, not much attention has been paid to the literary significance of these works (cf. Gramps 2019). In this paper I argue that both Archimelus and Moschion aim to distinguish Hieron’s cultural patronage from the Ptolemies’; Moschion, moreover, cites Archimelus’ epigram in order to highlight the superior value of his prose ecphrasis as an advertisement of Hieron’s cultural politics.
At eighteen lines long, Archimelus’ epigram stretches the genre to its limit, as befits Syracusia herself. More pointedly, however, I demonstrate that Archimelus alludes to and rejects the aesthetic prescriptions of slimness in Callimachus’ Aetia prologue. The speaker’s inference that the Giants must have made this ship with its huge masts for their attack on heaven (SH 202.7-10) recalls Callimachus’ pious declaration οὐκ ἐμὸν βροντᾶν ἀλλα Διός (fr. 1.20); the speaker’s subsequent identification of the ship’s cables as those Xerxes used to cross the Hellespont (SH 202.11-12; cf. Hdt. 7.36) reverses Callimachus’ claim that poetry should be measured by τέχνη, not by the Persian schoenus (fr. 1.18). If the Ptolemaic poet Theocritus could suggest with his sixteenth Idyll that Hieron was not the right patron for his bucolic art, Archimelus makes a positive virtue out of anti-Callimachean grandeur. That Hieron rewarded Archimelus with 1,000 medimnoi of wheat (Ath. 5.209d) suggests that he agreed.
I argue that Moschion includes Archimelus’ epigram and the story of Hieron’s gift to the poet so as to showcase the superior value of his own treatise in advertising the breadth of the king’s patronage. For example, Archimelus’ speaker asks, but never answers, how the huge ship was launched (SH 202.3-4). Moschion, however, narrates the problem and its solution by Archimedes, who invented the windlass for the purpose (Ath. 207b). Hieron may have rewarded Archimelus handsomely, but Moschion suggests that his epigram is inferior to the task of communicating the breadth of Syracusia’s scientific, artistic, and literary patronage. What should Hieron do but reward Moschion all the more lavishly in return?