The Mimiambs of Herodas

Translated into an English 'Choliambic' Metre with Literary-Historical Introductions and Notes

Anna Rist

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781350004214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias antiguas y clásicas

The third-century BC Greek poet Herodas had been all but forgotten until a papyrus of eight of his Mimiambs (plus fragments) turned up in the Egyptian desert at the end of the 19th century. They have since been translated into various modern languages and supplied with scholarly commentaries. This book is the first to attempt to reproduce in English Herodas' 'choliambic' or 'limping' metre (sic) - distinctive for its signatory reversed final foot, a variant on the standard Greek iambic trimeter.
The present volume provides an accessible introduction to Herodas and his Mimiambs requiring no knowledge of Greek. The translation steers a judicious course between literal accuracy and fidelity to this linguistically very demanding poet's spirit and intention. The contextual introductions and notes on the poems take into account the most recent scholarship, providing explanation of the context of the Mimiambs and guiding the reader to an appreciation of the poetry itself. The General Introduction places the author in his cultural world and context, namely urban society in the Ptolemaic Empire of the hellenistic period. This he conjures up in his Mimiambs with an often scathing vividness.

General Introduction

About this work

With this work I aim to do for Herodas what I previously aimed to do for Theocritus¹: to render the author’s surviving oeuvre into an English verse-form which will, as nearly as can be, convey not only the sense of the original but also something of its flavour and, in the case of Herodas, something of his striking metre. I have provided each poem, or ‘Mimiamb’,² with an Introduction to make it more accessible to the general reader, and notes likely to be of interest to students in that word’s narrower usage, as also in its wider sense of all with ‘zeal’ for what may be known and admired (the sense of the Latin studium = ‘zeal’ extending itself even to our ‘love’). It is thus my hope to have brought out in the scant remains of a little-known poet much that is of abiding human relevance for a wide spectrum of contemporary readers. Even after more than 20 centuries, there is much we can relate to, not least – as must surely strike us – in his evocation of female characters and their homebound lives: be they Metriche of Mimiamb I, hearing a knock at the door which may be her man returning after long absence, or Metrotime of Mimiamb IV, come to the end of her patience with her exacting daily routine and rebellious son – to name but the first two stars in this all-star cast!

Who was Herodas?

The papyrus containing substantially eight of the Mimiamboi was published in 1891 by F. G. Kenyon. It does not provide us with the name of their author, identified from some dozen references in Greek and Roman texts, including a letter of Pliny the Younger (4.3.4). Most of these loci specify that he wrote choliambics, which we can conclude to have been his distinctive, though – as I have argued elsewhere and claim to demonstrate in the Introduction to Mimiamb VIII – not the only oeuvre³ by which he might have expected to be remembered.

Regarding the poet’s name, I have bowed to the form now generally preferred: that is ‘Herodas’. Our oldest witness, the Roman Pliny, gives that name as ‘Herodes’, and although modern writers have normally preferred Herodas or the Boeotian equivalent, Herondas,⁴ there are reasons to hold that ‘Herodes’ would be that which he himself would have used: firstly because it is the Ionic form and the Mimiambs are composed more or less in ‘East Ionic’, the dialect of the poet’s ancient models, Hipponax and Archilochus; secondly, and not negligibly, the poet concludes Mimiamb VIII by proudly professing himself an Ionian – from which we might infer he would have a preference for the Ionic form of his name. Indeed, had he been Doric-speaking, we could presume he would have used not ‘Herodas’ but the contemporary Doric form, ‘Heroidas’.⁵

The presumed date of Herodas – as he shall remain in this work – is based largely on internal evidence, particularly the reference at I 26 (30) to the shrine of the ‘brother and sister gods’ – that is Ptolemy II and his sister-queen, Arsinoe – which we know to have been built by 271 B.C.; also the name Ake (II 13 (16)), since that Phoenician city had, by 266 B.C., been renamed Ptolemais. This yields 270 B.C. as the approximate date for the Mimiamboi, coinciding roughly with the floruit of three other famous poets of whom substantial works have been preserved: Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus. To the ‘urban’ mimes of the last-named (i.e. Idylls XIV, XV and XVI) a similar date, or if anything slightly earlier, is to be assigned. On stylistic and linguistic grounds, the Mimiamboi are clearly Hellenistic compositions; VIII, in particular, refers to characteristic Hellenistic literary feuding.

The Hellenistic age

The period succeeding the far-flung conquests of Alexander of Macedon is known by this name. After Alexander’s premature death in 323 B.C., his generals had, by 301 B.C, parcelled out his empire into three realms, centred on Pella, Antioch and Alexandria. This last would become the cultural centre of the empire of General Ptolemaios, the Macedonian Greek who founded a dynasty of which the last and perhaps best-known incumbent was Cleopatra. Toward the end of a reign which lasted from 323 to 283 B.C., this Ptolemy built the Mouseion or Institute of the Muses (more strictly a ‘sanctuary’, and de facto an institute for advanced study) which is mentioned in Herodas’ first Mimiamb (27 [31]). This the king endowed with stipends for poets and scholars, so amassing a treasury of learning and letters to which the history of civilisation is forever indebted. The ‘good king’ referred to in the previous line of Mimiamb I is his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphos; he completed his father’s plan with the building of the famous Library, and may have put in charge of it the schoolmaster-poet Callimachus whose first Hymn contrives to pay a double tribute to the rulers both of heaven and earth and ends with a double prayer for those goods within their respective gift, namely virtue and riches. Under the second Ptolemy’s generous patronage, Callimachus not only maintained a large output of highly polished and erudite verses, but also compiled a catalogue of the new library: 120 volumes of invaluable information and criticism of the contents of the books and their authors.⁶

Among other poets who at some time came and went in Alexandria in search of patronage were the native-born Apollonius – said to have soon retired to Rhodes, dismayed at the reception accorded his laboured-over epic, the Argonautica – and Theocritus, known as the Father of Bucolic (or Pastoral), who shows by the comparatively wooden Idyll XVII that court panegyric was not his forte. Following this bid for patronage, he too would seem to have withdrawn, perhaps strategically, to Ptolemy’s birthplace, the Ionian island of Kos, which is the dramatic site of at least one of his Idylls: that programmatic VII with which it is inevitable to compare Herodas VIII.

Dramatic location of the Mimiamboi

Kos also appears as the setting for Mimiamb II (see Introduction to II), making it the one dramatic site assignable to any of the Mimiamboi, though some have wanted to make it the location of several or all of them,⁷ and some go on to conclude that Herodas lived and wrote on the island. The existence of a temple of Asklepios on Kos, containing many works of art about which we have some information, has led to the assumption that the island is also the dramatic site of Mimiamb IV, though in view of the fact that none of our information about the temple coincides with the description in IV, arguably a negative conclusion should be drawn (see Introduction to IV). Some slight indications suggest that the scene of VI and VII is the Asia Minor seaboard (see Introductions to VI and VII). For the rest, we can be certain that the dramatic scene of I is not Alexandria, nor anywhere in Egypt, there treated as a far country – which is not to say that any of the Mimiamboi could not have been written there. On the specific mention of the Attic mina at II 18 (24), Cunningham observes that such coins were in use everywhere in the Greek world at the time; the mention, therefore, indicates no more than that Herodas was writing within the Ptolemaic Empire.⁸ We are forced to conclude that, though various Mimiambs are connected with Kos, Asia Minor and Egypt, we neither know where Herodas lived and wrote nor with any precision the locus dramaticus of seven of the eight substantially extant Mimiamboi.

Alexandrian poetry

In Alexandria, and particularly under the guidance of its ‘arbiter of taste’ Callimachus, there grew up a school of poetry which became widely influential for first Greek, then Latin poets – the best known of these last being those of the first centuries B.C. and A.D.: Catullus, Ovid and Propertius – and so on into modern European literature. Classical Greek verse had retained its character as ordered speech, whether narrating history and legend in epic mode, imparting useful information in didactic, or constituting ritual, as originally the Attic drama both ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ – and perhaps, indeed, all verse. With the spread of literacy and prose-writing, verse predominantly became more decorative, or at least more occasional, showing preference for short-scale poems, particularly epyllia – mini-epics adorned with a wealth of learned and literary allusion and making appeal to a well-read auditory of those who had profited from the Ptolemies’ encouragement of learning. Metre is of the essence of Greek poetry, Greek metrics amounting almost to a science, and that Callimachus was master of a great variety of them was consistent with his deep and wide erudition. It has sometimes been inferred – perhaps erroneously – that his authority was challenged by his pupil, Apollonius, whose Argonautica attempted out of season to revive the epic. Be that as it may, certain would-be epic-revivalists seem to have been the recipients of Callimachus’ celebrated gibe (Aitia 1): ‘We sing among those who love the shrill voice of the cicada; let others bray!’ Theocritus – as his epyllia also testify – was and is, in the judgment of most, the outstanding adherent to the ‘small(er) is beautiful’ school.

What little is known to us of Herodas’ antecedents and style is so distinctively personal that there is no reason to suppose him touched by any such controversy. While I have argued (see Introduction to VIII) that it is highly probable he was earlier known for a more standard oeuvre in iambic verses such as had become de rigueur for the aspiring poet, the distinctive Mimiamboi (for which, and almost alone, he would later be barely remembered) were probably received and enjoyed as decidedly relaxed entertainments for occasions when even the graver sort could appropriately let their hair down; of this more later. It is surely significant that even in the ‘low-life’ Mimiamboi he exhibits a Callimachean taste for recondite language and allusion such as seasoned offerings for fastidious palates.

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