Trustees of Boston University through its publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and

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Epic Annoyance, Homer to Palladas

Author(s): Gordon Braden
Source: Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics , Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring/Summer
2016), pp. 103-124
Published by: Trustees of Boston University; Trustees of Boston University through its
publication Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/arion.24.1.0103

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Epic Annoyance, Homer to Palladas

GORDON BRADEN

N o other poet has as many poems ascribed

to him in the Greek Anthology as Palladas of Alexandria:
155, give or take. Most of these are in books 9, 10, and 11 of
the Palatine Anthology, groupings characterized in the man-
uscript as epideictica, protreptica, and sympotica cai scôp-
tica; there are however enough outliers to secure Palladas’s
appearance in each of the five volumes of the Loeb edition.
The Anthology’s plan of dispersing poems by category gener-
ally obscures the profiles of individual authors, but the heft
of Palladas’s contribution makes his stand out. It has been
theorized that a collected edition of his poems existed and
circulated in antiquity, including more poems than the ones
we have; a box of papyrus scraps at the Beinecke Library at
Yale (to which I will be returning below) might be the re-
mains of such a collection. But it isn’t just editorial book-
keeping that leads one into talking of Palladas’s oeuvre; it’s
long been sensed that there is something about the poems
that come down to us under his name—enough of them at
least—that stands out in an individuated way within the
generically scripted corpus of ancient epigram and prompts
us to speak in relatively modern terms of a special authorial
voice or vision or at least signature. It was in response to the
sense of hearing such a voice that the English poet Tony Har-
rison translated seventy-one of the poems—a shade less than
half the total—in a stand-alone edition.1 A brief preface of
appreciation by Harrison is one of the most interesting criti-
cal essays on the poet.
Central to Palladas’s claim to literary distinction is his talent
for abuse. The classical category is epigramma scôpticon, the
epigram of mockery, officially assigned to share book 11 with
arion 24.1 spring / summer 2016

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104 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

epigramma sympoticon, the epigram of festivity: collectively,

epigrams as party entertainment. The Palatine editor’s under-
standing of genre does not seem especially rigorous or sophis-
ticated, and more than twice as many of Palladas’s poems,
including some of what now seem his most characteristic, are
in other books under other labels. In any case, his practice has
impressed later readers as exceeding the “scoptic” category,
the expectations for which we take to be on view back in the
first century in Lucillius (also in the Anthology, sometimes
right next to Palladas) and especially Martial. Harrison writes
of “the apoplectic energy of his nihilistic scorn”; Gilbert
Highet puts him in the company of “the world’s great pes-
simists,” with Juvenal, Swift, Nietzsche, the author of
Ecclesiastes.2 One poem in particular inspires such claims:

Ἂν μνήμην, ἄνθρωπε, λάβῃς, ὁ πατήρ σε τί ποιῶν

ἔσπειρεν, παύσῃ τῆς μεγαλοφροσύνης.
ἀλλ’ ὁ Πλάτων σοὶ τῦφον ὀνειρώσσων ἐνέφυσεν
ἀθάνατόν σε λέγων καὶ φυτὸν οὐράνιον.
ἐκ πηλοῦ γέγονας. τί φρονεῖς μέγα; τοῦτο μὲν οὕτως
εἶπ’ ἄν τις κοσμῶν πλάσματι σεμνοτέρῳ.
εἰ δὲ λόγον ζητεῖς τὸν ἀληθινόν, ἐξ ἀκολάστου
λαγνείας γέγονας καὶ μιαρᾶς ῥανίδος.
(AP 10.45)3

Harrison’s translation is resourceful:

Think of your conception, you’ll soon forget
what Plato puffs you up with, all that
“immortality” and “divine life” stuff.

Man, why dost thou think of Heaven? Nay

consider thine origins in common clay

’s one way of putting it but not blunt enough.

Think of your father, sweating, drooling, drunk,

you, his spark of lust, his spurt of spunk.

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 Gordon Braden 105

The Palatine anthologist classifies this with the epigrammata

protreptica, epigrams of exhortation—in this case an exhor-
tation to avoid megalophrosynê, overreaching thoughts. But
the antidote to excessive pride is not exactly sôphrosynê; such
a wise exhortation is voiced—Harrison makes it sound bibli-
cal to enhance the effect—but then scorned; it has just been a
set up for the nasty punchline. The recommendation is not
for graceful humility but for self-disgust over something the
addressee can do nothing to change. That addressee in Greek
is simply anthrôpos, which we might translate in a generaliz-
able sense as “mankind,” though the punchline makes it
sound pointedly gendered: the object of disgust is not just the
physicality of our engendering but specifically paternal ejacu-
lation. (The sweat, the drool, and the blood alcohol level are
in the Swiftian spirit of things, and entirely plausible, but they
are Harrison’s contribution.) The targeting of Plato is precise;
the Greek phrase Harrison translates as “divine life” is phy-
ton ouranion, “heavenly plant,” a direct quotation from the
Timaeus (90a), and from a passage in which the speaker is
exhorting his interlocutor always to remember that our roots
are in heaven. For Palladas, that is just a lie. Our roots are the
fury and the mire of human veins.
Palladas is seldom so philosophical. He does tell us in one
poem that all the world’s a stage (10.72), but he only has two
lines on the subject, and is comparatively lighthearted in his
advice: either get with the program and don’t be so serious,
or just suffer through it. That doesn’t show much of
Palladas’s trademark aggression, which in 10.45 is directed
against anthrôpos at large, though it usually has a better
defined, even petty target. I’ve come to think that the mani-
fest pettiness of many of his poems is essential to the aesthetic
of the “scoptic” epigram. Scôptica is often translated as
“satirical,” but that overshoots the mark. Highet, even as he
praises Palladas in the company of Juvenal as a great pes-
simist, is careful not to use the term “satirist”; his reasoning
is on view when he says that Juvenal, “unlike other pessimists
of antiquity, such as Palladas . . . blended his pessimism with

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106 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

a strong sense of moral purpose.”4 Such purpose is implicit in

the term “satire”—this mockery, however entertaining, is
being carried on in the name of some intelligible scheme of
values—but Palladas is doing something different. Georg
Luck is willing to call him a satirist, but only with some
things clearly understood: “If it is true that every satirist is a
frustrated moralist, Palladas must be the exception to the
rule. . . . His eloquence is . . . the eloquence of the manager
of a freak show; he does not have to appeal to moral stan-
dards in order to attract his public.”5
Such eloquence has its pedigree; it is established as a part of
the Greek literary repertoire a millenium earlier by the
Ephesian poet Hipponax. Hipponax’s legacy is of indelible if
often cryptic hostility to human beings of his acquaintance:
λάβετέ μεο ταἰμάτια, κόψω Βουπάλῳ τὸν ὀφθαλμόν (120; some-
body hold my coat, I’m going to hit Boupalos in the eye).6 His
is, I believe, the earliest documented use of the term “moth-
erfucker”: ὁ μητροκοίτης Βούπαλος . . . (12.2. Hapax legomenon
in Greek; Hipponax may have made the word up, though
there’s no mistaking what it means.) The fragments of
Hipponax that have survived show little if any pretense to
nobility; as David Campbell puts it, in something of an under-
statement, “He seems deliberately to have lowered the tone of
poetry.”7 Mary Renault imagines him quite plausibly in her
novel about Simonides of Ceos and Greece’s lyric age:

That his clothes were dirty, I put down to his having no wife; but
I thought that in a city not short of water, he could have washed
himself. He ate noisily, and was helped twice. . . . Poor old Metriche,
who had been cooking half the day to honor a guest . . . was not out
of hearing before he mocked at her fat buttocks. This started him on
women, his favorite theme. . . . Not that one had to offend him, for
him to cut one up; he only needed to hear anyone praised. Before
supper was over, he had accused the city’s best sculptor of stealing
bronze; the least greedy of the nobles, of being too cowardly to risk
a quarrel; and a gentle old priest, gifted with prophecy, of vices I’d
never heard of till that night.8

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 Gordon Braden 107

A couple of centuries later, the Alexandrians fell in love with

him, and preserved his poems in a collection of two or possi-
bly three books.
The presumption of such poetry—I take it to be the
enabling presumption of scoptic epigram generally—is that
ill-nature needs no justification, except perhaps the wittiness
of its expression. Or to put it another way: its justification is
an underlying irritability that is one of the constants of
human nature, a basic annoyance at the mere existence of
other people, a gut reaction to the experience of having to
share the planet with so many of them. That irritability is
stronger in some people than in others, and in everyone it has
to share psychic space with very different emotions, and also
with whatever moral and practical intelligence we can muster
to remind ourselves that, well, sharing does mean sharing.
Still, there it is, so commonplace and familiar an emotion that
we don’t quite have a name for it. The closest we come is
when poets write about it: most economically, perhaps, in
Martial’s famous theorizing of the scoptic epigram: “Non
amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare: / hoc tantum pos-
sum dicere, non amo te” (1.32; I do not love you Sabidius,
and I cannot tell you why. This much I can say: I do not love
you). There are a couple of places where Palladas writes of
his own craft of ad hominem verbal abuse—psogos is the
word in Greek—as an almost rapturous end in itself:

Αἰνίζειν μὲν ἄριστον, ὁ δὲ ψόγος ἔχθεος ἀρχή,

ἀλλὰ κακῶς εἰπεῖν Ἀττικόν ἐστι μέλι.
(AP 11.341)

Dudley Fitts’s translation catches that note especially well:

Praise, of course, is best: plain speech breeds hate.

But ah the Attic honey
Of telling a man exactly what you think of him!9

Fitts’s only fault is at the end; “exactly what you think of

him” suggests some reasoned process of judgment behind the

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108 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

abuse. The Greek suggests no such thing; it’s cacôs eipein,

trash talk pure and simple. This two-liner distills the autobi-
ographical vignette in the previous epigram:

Ὤμοσα μυριάκις ἐπιγράμματα μηκέτι ποιεῖν,

πολλῶν γὰρ μωρῶν ἔχθραν ἐπεσπασάμην·
ἀλλ’ ὁπόταν κατίδω τοῦ Παπφλαγόνος τὸ πρόσωπον
Πανταγάθου, στέξαι τὴν νόσον οὐ δύναμαι.
(11.340)

I swore ten thousand times to make no more epigrams, for I have

drawn upon myself the hatred of many morons; but when I see the
face of Pantagathos of Paphlagonia, I cannot hold back the disease.

The outrageous epithet Pantagathos, Mr. Goody Two-Shoes,

may conceivably have been what set our poet off, though
Palladas’s habit elsewhere of making fun of people’s noses
(11.204, 11.255) leads me to put the emphasis on prosôpon,
“face”: I just didn’t like his stinking looks.
Someone in antiquity wrote a poem by Palladas on the wall
of a latrine in Ephesus, Hipponax’s city, an uncanny act of lit-
erary homage worth citing even though its survival and mean-
ing are both probably tricks of history; the poem itself (10.87)
is about what a whore Lady Luck is (Tychê pornê).10 A stur-
dier filiation from Palladas back to Hipponax is documented
on what Renault’s Simonides calls Hipponax’s favorite theme
in conversation and was certainly near the top of Palladas’s
list. Stobaeus preserves a choliambic couplet which he attrib-
utes to Hipponax, and which sounds like a complete poem:

Δύ’ ἡμέραι γυναικός εἰσιν ἥδισται,

ὅταν γαμῇ τις κἀκφέρῃ τεθνηκυῖαν.
(68)

Two days of a woman are sweetest, when you marry her and
when you carry her out dead.

An iambic one-liner with a simplified version of the sententia

is attributed to Menander: Γυναῖκα θάπτειν κρεῖσσόν ἐστιν ἢ

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 Gordon Braden 109

γαμεῖν, it’s better to bury a woman than to marry one

(Monostichoi 151).11 This suggests that the witticism—if that
is the word for it—becomes a commonplace, but Palladas
seems to have the choliambic original specifically in his sights
when he crafts one of his elegiac couplets:

Πᾶσα γυνὴ χόλος ἐστίν· ἔχει δ’ ἀγαθὰς δύο ὥρας,

τὴν μίαν ἐν θαλάμῳ, τὴν μίαν ἐν θανάτῳ.
(AP 11.381)

Every woman is a source of anger; she has two good hours, one
in bed and the other in death.

In this form the sentiment becomes something of a touch-

stone for European literature; Prosper Mérimée uses it in
untranslated Greek as the epigraph to Carmen (1852).12
My English translation doesn’t give any idea why Palladas’s
rewrite seemed worth the effort, but in the original it jumps
out at you: in the pentameter Palladas has rendered the oppo-
site gender’s two good moments as a balancing of two words
that differ in only two letters: en thalamôi / en thanatôi.
Death and the marriage chamber knit together so intricately
that the epigram seems to be fated—which of course was the
idea. Hipponax is just surly in comparison; Palladas is con-
spicuously clever, flaunting the verbal adroitness that marks
his work elsewhere; another poem of his turns on the fact
that the Greek words for crow and for flatterer differ in
exactly one letter (corax, colax; 11.323). And when the poem
appears in print a thousand years later in editions of the
Planudean Anthology, it seems above all its lexical dexterity
that makes it one of the more translated poems in the classi-
cal canon. Peter Jay, in his anthology of English translations
from the Anthology (including quite a few of Harrison’s), was
sufficiently struck by this phenomenon to devote an appendix
to multiple twentieth-century versions of this one epigram
(seven, in addition to the one by Harrison in Jay’s main
text).13 Without making any attempt to be thorough I have
over the years garnered four more from the sixteenth and sev-

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110 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

enteenth centuries. The far more systematic researches of

James Hutton into the diffusion of the Anthology up to 1800
have catalogued the standout popularity of this one poem
with translators into Italian, French, and especially Latin.14 A
final count would be in the dozens.
The challenge to translators is to find in the target language
some equivalent to the providential thalamos-thanatos pairing
in Greek. The relative lack of success is one reason they have
kept trying. It’s somewhat easier in Latin, partly because you
can cheat a bit; Jean Dorat (one of the French Pléiade) comes
perhaps closest with in thalamo / in tumulo. In English, to my
surprise, no one that I’ve found thinks of “marry” and “bury”
(I realize that’s not a rhyme in all anglophone pronunciations).
There’s fondness for the more abrupt “bed” and “dead,”
though the loss of the polysyllabic flourish of the original is
certainly felt. Some translators take a step or two back so as
not to stake it all on two words. Robin Skelton, in the twen-
tieth century, defines the two happy days as “once when she
gives up her virtue, / once when she gives up the ghost”—
though here the wit changes the message, since “gives up her
virtue” doesn’t exactly apply to a wedding night.15 Timothy
Kendall, in the sixteenth century, forgoes wordplay in favor of
coming right out and saying what apparently nobody else
wants to say. It’s really about the money:

Although all women kinde be nought,

yet two good dayes hath she:
Her marriage day, and day of death
when all she leaves to thee.16

The most considerable poet to tackle the poem, Ezra

Pound, bends the sense in yet another direction, and in the
process finds his way to a surprisingly hearty conclusion:

Woman? Oh, woman is a consummate rage,

but dead, or asleep, she pleases.
Take her. She has two excellent seasons.17

“Take her” has a backspin on it, but it introduces an affir-

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 Gordon Braden 111

mative note beyond anything in Palladas. But the real suprise

is that Pound seems to have taken sex out of it: the twin to
death is sleep, not marriage. You could say that the sleep is
implicitly postcoital, but that would be oddly coy, and from
what I know of Pound I suspect he has something else in
mind, a misogyny that may still deserve that label but is less
dire than that in the original: sleep and death are a woman’s
“excellent seasons” because that’s when, for a change, she’s
not talking.
The most interesting of the English translations is an even
better example of a poem mutating in its afterlife precisely
through the loyalty of its fans. The seventeenth-century poet
and playwright William Cartwright is so absorbed by the
challenge represented by Palladas’s poem that he translates it
three times, with three different ideas on how to match thal-
amos / thanatos, and entitles the collective result “Women”:

Give me a Girle (if one I needs must meet)

Or in her Nuptiall, or her Winding sheet;
I know but two good Houres that Women have,
One in the Bed, another in the Grave.
Thus of the whole Sex all I would desire,
Is to enjoy their Ashes, or their Fire.18

Something shifts as he repeats himself. The opening is sour

enough: “if one I needs must meet,” as if not very welcome
friends are determined to set him up with a new partner. But
when he gets to the third and cleverest of his conceits, he
reverses the pattern he has been following and gives the good
hours out of natural order: first ashes, then fire. That may be
no more than the exigency of rhyme, but in poetry such exi-
gencies can have a wisdom of their own, and the effect is to
end the poem with a lilt (where you would expect, as it were,
a choliamb) and a sudden promise of new warmth. And part
of the anticipation is that it’s their fire; he doesn’t imagine
them just as passive instruments of his own pleasure. It is as
though in rehearsing the mantra of his grumpiness he talks
himself out of it. By the last line he finds himself using the

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112 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

word “enjoy,” and the references to death and ashes become

part of what is now a carpe diem poem. Temporarily thrown
off stride, he’s now started looking forward to his next sprint
to the finish line.
My real interest here, however, is not in Palladas’s afterlife,
which has its own paths to follow, but in what his most
famous poem has to do with the rest of his work. Owing your
literary immortality to one of the minor classics of western
misogyny is not a happy fate, and the misogyny of 11.381 is
not, as I’ve already indicated, an isolated thing. His thirteen
poems specifically on the subject of women are distributed
across books 9, 10, and 11 of the Anthology, but if assembled
in a group make a toxic nexus of almost unrelieved hostility
to the opposite gender; a recent comprehensive study of them
stresses their dissonance both with the much more varied atti-
tudes displayed in the rest of the Anthology and with evi-
dence of changing attitudes toward women in Alexandria
since Hellenistic times.19 It is a relief, and something of a sur-
prise, when in a carpe diem poem somewhat ambiguously
ascribed to Palladas (5.72) gynaices are without further com-
ment included along with wine, dancing, and flowery wreaths
in a catalogue of the tryphê of life to be enjoyed before we
die. It used to be possible, if you really wanted to do so, to
meliorate Palladas’s mysogyny by citing his epigram in praise
of the brilliant pagan philosopher Hypatia, butchered by a
Christian mob in 415 ad (9.400). Revised thinking about
Palladas’s dates, however, have made it chronologically
impossible for him to be the author; and in any case scholars
such as Luck and Alan Cameron have argued that the
Hypatia of the poem was not the philosopher (she may have
been a Christian nun).20 Passing references aside, Palladas
saw no reason to write about women unless they could be the
occasion for a display of his choleric wit.
Three of Palladas’s poems in the Anthology and another one
in the tenth-century Sylloge Euphemiana are directed specifi-
cally against his wife. The only evidence that we have about
Palladas’s biography is what we find in his poems, and I don’t

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 Gordon Braden 113

think we have any confidence that he was in fact married, any

more than we would trust a twentieth-century comic telling
“Take my wife . . .” jokes to be giving accurate biographical
information. But the ranting about marriage does acquire a
new dimension when it intersects another favorite topic of
Palladas, one where it’s hard to imagine his making up his per-
sonal investment for the sake of comic effect:

Μῆνιν οὐλομένην γαμετὴν ὁ τάλας γεγάμηκα

καὶ παρὰ τῆς τέχνης μήνιδος ἀρξάμενος.
ὤμοι ἐγὼ πολύμηνις, ἔχων τριχόλωτον ἀνάγκην,
τέχνης γραμματικῆς καὶ γαμετῆς μαχίμης.
(AP 9.168)

Unhappy man, I have taken Destructive Anger to be my wife, and

my profession starts with anger. Oh, I am a man of much anger
through a double necessity: the craft of literary scholarship and a
warrior wife!

11.381 begins pasa gynê cholos estin; here a particular

woman is characterized in the same way but using a word
with rather more punch to it, both in its lexcial meaning and
in its literary pedigree. This anger is not just domestic abra-
sion but the murderous anger of Achilles in the Iliad; mênin
oulomenên combines the incipits of the first two lines of that
poem, which are also of course the first lines of Greek litera-
ture, both chronologically and in the curriculum that Palladas
tells us in several poems provided his livelihood as a gram-
maticos, a teacher of language and literature. That livelihood
has proved as infuriating as his marriage; together they have
made him, in an allusion to the second work on the syllabus,
polymênis, a man of much anger, by a change of one letter
from polymêtis, a famous epithet for the hero of the Odyssey.
The way I feel about my wife is the way I feel about my job.
The poem in the Sylloge covers much the same ground:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε μαθὼν καὶ μῆνιν ἄειδε διδάξας

οὐλομένην γαμετὴν ἠγαγόμην ὁ τάλας·

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114 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

πᾶν δ’ ἦμαρ μάχεται, καὶ παννυχίη πολεμίζει,

ὡς παρὰ τῆς μητρὸς προῖκα λαβοῦσα μάχην.
ἢν δὲ θέλω σιγᾶν καὶ μαρναμένῃ ὑποείκεν,
ὅττι περ οὐ μάχομαι, τοῦδ’ ἕνεκεν μάχεται.21

Studying “sing the anger” and teaching “sing the destructive

anger,” I have, unhappy man, taken a wife. All day she battles and
all night she makes war, as if taking combat as a dowry from her
mother. If I want to be silent and retire from the battle, she fights
about the fact that I’m not fighting.

In the Anthology, a trail of epigrams following 9.168 keeps

harping on the opening of the Iliad. In 173 the reference is
extended to the first five lines:

Ἀρχὴ γραμματικῆς πεντάστιχός ἐστι κατάρα·

πρῶτος μῆνιν ἔχει, δεύτερος οὐλομένην,
καὶ μετὰ δ’ οὐλομένην Δαναών πάλιν ἄλγεα πολλά·
ὁ τρίτατος ψυχὰς εἰς Ἀίδην κατάγει·
τοῦ δὲ τεταρταίου τὰ ἑλώρια καὶ κύνες ἀργοί,
πέμπτου δ’ οἰωνοὶ καὶ χόλος ἐστὶ Διός.
πῶς οὖν γραμματικὸς δύναται μετὰ πέντε κατάρας
καὶ πέντε πτώσεις μὴ μέγα πένθος ἔχειν;

The starting point of literary study is a five-verse curse. Line 1 has

“anger,” line 2 “destructive,” and again after “destructive” “num-
berless sorrows” for the Greeks; line 3 leads “souls down to Hades”;
in line 4 “food for swift dogs”; “birds of prey” in line 5, and “the
anger of Zeus.” So how, after five curses and five ptôseis can a
teacher of literature not suffer terrible misery?

Ptôseis is an untranslatable pun: it means both a fall or

calamity and a grammatical inflection, the sort of thing a
grammaticos spends his life dealing with—his wretched life, a
life of curses and cases. It’s a life as wretched as the life of an
Achaean warrior when Zeus is working for the other side.
The seed of the conceit may have been sewn by Lucillius; an
entry ascribed to him in the Anthology weaves the gram-
maticos a garland of words for “anger”:

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 Gordon Braden 115

Οὐδεὶς γραμματικῶν δύναταί ποτε <ὄλβιος> εῖναι

ὀργὴν καὶ μῆνιν καὶ χόλον εὐθὺς ἔχων.
(11.279)

No grammaticos can ever be [happy?]; from the start they’re all

orgê and mênis and cholos.
This sounds so much like Palladas that several scholars have
switched the attribution. Palladas sets out the financial
specifics of the profession’s wretchedness in a bitter little
anecdote for which Harrison’s translation does nicely:

It’s grammarians that the gods torment

and Homer’s fatal wrath’s their instrument.

Monthly (if that!) the grudging nanny wraps

their measly pittance in papyrus scraps.
She nicks some, switches coins, and not content
holds out her grasping claws for 10%,
then lays at teacher’s feet a screw of stuff
like paper poppies on a cenotaph.

Just get one loving father to agree

to pay (in decent gold!) a yearly fee,
the eleventh month, just when it’s almost due,
he’ll hire a “better teacher” and fire you.

Your food and lodging gone, he’s got the gall

to crack after-dinner jokes about it all.
(9.174)

And lest we forget, Palladas reminds us nearby, it all goes

back to women:

Μῆνις Ἀχιλλῆος καὶ ἐμοὶ πρόφασις γεγένηται

οὐλομένης πενίης γραμματικευσαμένῳ.
εἴθε δὲ σὺν Δαναοῖς με κατέκτανε μῆνις ἐκείνη,
πρὶν χαλεπὸς λιμὸς γραμματικῆς ὀλέσει.
ἀλλ’ ἵν’ ἀφαρπάξῃ Βρισηίδα πρὶν Ἀγαμέμνων,
τὴν Ἑλένην δ’ ὁ Πάρις, πτωχὸς ἐγὼ γενόμην.
(AP 9.169)

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116 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

The “anger of Achilles” was the cause of poverty to me when I

became a grammaticos. I wish that that anger had killed me along
with the Greeks before the bitter hunger of grammaticê had ruined
me. But in order for Agamemnon to steal Briseis and Paris Helen, I
have become poor.

Woman, we are told in the poem that initiates this run of epi-
grams, is “the anger of Zeus,” and “Homer knew this”
(9.165.1, 7); then:

Πᾶσαν Ὅμηρος ἔδειξε κακὴν σφαλερήν τε γυναῖκα,

σώφρονα καὶ πόρνην ἀμφοτέρας ὄλεθρον.
ἐκ γὰρ τῆς Ἑλένης μοιχευσαμένης φόνος ἀνδρῶν
καὶ διὰ σωφροσύνην Πηνελόπης θάνατοι.
Ἰλιὰς οὖν τὸ πόνηρα μιᾶς χάριν ἐστὶ γυναικός,
αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσείῃ Πηνελόπη πρόφασις.
(166)

Homer shows that woman is evil and treacherous; chaste or whorish,

in either case ruinous. Slaughter of men came from Helen’s adultery,
and death from Penelope’s chastity. The sufferings in the Iliad are
because of one woman, and Penelope is the cause of the Odyssey.
Making Penelope a malign angel of death has some author-
ization in Homer’s text, though it’s the ghost of one of the
newly slain suitors who sees her that way: “contriving for us
death and a black fate” (Odyssey 24.127). Adopting his
perspective serves the poet’s turn in articulating a vision of
being beset by a world of implacable wrath jointly man-
dated by the founding text of his profession and by the
nature of women.
Which is to bestow a mythic justification upon the aesthetic
of the scoptic epigram: Homeric warfare conducted by other
means amid the crowded downscale indignities of urban life
in the late Empire. Palladas is at perhaps his most forthcom-
ing with an analogy from insects:

Καὶ μύρμηκι χολὴν καὶ σέρφῳ φασὶν ἐνεῖναι·

εἶτα χολὴν μὲν ἔχει ζῷα τὰ φαυλότατα,
ἐκκεῖσθαι δ’ ἐμὲ πᾶσι χολὴν μὴ σχόντα κελεύεις,

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 Gordon Braden 117

ὡς μηδὲ ψιλοῖς ῥήμασιν ἀνταδικεῖν

τοὺς ἔργοις ἀδικοῦντας; ἀποφράξαντα δεήσει
λοιπὸν ὀλοσχοίνῳ τὸ στόμα μηδὲ πνέειν.
(10.49)

They say even ants and gnats have bile; so while the puniest animals
have bile, do you urge me to expose myself to everyone without any
bile, not to fight back even with bare words against those who have
done me wrong with their actions? I’ll have to stop my mouth with
a reed and not breathe.

He intends of course to do no such thing (unless perhaps he’s

implying what he won’t say he will write). In this poem the
sense of being assaulted by the cholos of others is pre-emp-
tively balanced with a retaliatory cholê already in him by
instinct. It is his nature. And his gift.
I wouldn’t sell that satisfaction short—a satisfaction that
anyone who makes a living studying and teaching great liter-
ature will recognize—but there is an undercurrent that gives
Palladas’s case another dimension. The record (which may
well be incomplete) suggests that practicing the craft of the
abusive epigram in (mostly) choice classical Greek was not
just a heroic but also a lonely effort in his day and time. We
don’t really know of any contemporary practitioners, and
without those there would not be a contest worth winning;
Homeric heroism is all about outdoing competition. Even if
we’re wrong about that, there’s an encroaching darkness just
beyond the annoyance. Its most tangible manifestation is
structured like a famous joke of Woody Allen’s: not only is
grammaticê a wretched, unrewarding line of work—bary-
mochthos he calls it, hard labor (10.97.1)—but to make it
worse, he just got fired:

Καλλίμαχον πωλῶ καὶ Πίνδαρον ἠδὲ καὶ αὐτὰς

πτώσεις γραμματικῆς πτῶσιν ἔχων πενίης.
Δωρόθεος γὰρ ἐμὴν τροφίμην σύνταξιν ἔλυσε . . .
(9.175.1–3)

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118 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

I’m selling my Callimachus and Pindar, and the other grammatical

cases, since I’ve got the case of poverty [ptôsis again]. For Dorotheus
has cut off the salary [syntaxis, another pun] that supported me . . .

If 10.97 is about the same professional setback, it happened

at the immensely inconvenient age of 72. But he can also
summon a declaration of Good Riddance, as in one of the
poems where he groups his job and his marriage:

Οὐ δύναμαι γαμετῆς καὶ γραμματικῆς ἀνέχεσθαι,

γραμματικῆς ἀπόρου καὶ γαμετῆς ἀδίκου.
ἀμφοτέρων τὰ πάθη θάνατος καὶ μοῖρα τέτυκται.
τὴν οὖν γραμματικὴν νῦν μόλις ἐξέφυγον,
οὐ δύναμαι δ’ ἀλόχου τῆς ἀνδρομάχης ἀναχωρεῖν·
εἴργει γὰρ χάρτης καὶ νόμος Αὐσόνιος.
(11.378)

I cannot put up with a wife and with grammaticê—impoverishment

from grammaticê and injustice from a wife. From both I suffer death
and fate. But just now I have, with difficulty, escaped from gram-
maticê, but I cannot escape a man-fighting wife; a contract and
Italian law forbid it.

There is a characteristic Homeric allusion behind the word

translated as “man-fighting”; Palladas makes a joke he (or
possibly Rufinos) also makes in 5.71 by using the etymologi-
cal sense of the most distinguished wifely name in the Iliad:
andro-machê (Andromache). It’s still the Trojan war back at
home, but at least I’ve been able to get out of that other house
of wrath I’ve been living in. His most famous joke implicitly
bleeds into this one: the two good days in the choleric life of
a grammaticos are when you get a job and when you get rid
of it. Kevin W. Wilkinson has recently made use of this poem
in his arguments over Palladas’s dates; it would indeed be in
the spirit of the genre for this poem to be, among other
things, a current-events joke prompted by Constantine’s alter-
ation of Roman law in 331 to make unilateral divorce by
either sex all but impossible.22 The new law was unpopular
and the status quo ante was effectively restored by the end of
the reign of Julian in 363, though I agree with Wilkinson that

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 Gordon Braden 119

if this is what the poem is referring to, it would make sense

to date it (and Palladas and hence, if this is indeed something
that really happened, Palladas’s exit from the business of
grammaticê) to 331 or soon thereafter, when it was fresh
news and hence good material for his brand of stand-up.
Whatever the date, the poem voices fervent relief at his retire-
ment, involuntary or otherwise, from the literature business.
Elsewhere he is positively eager about getting out, happy at
the prospect of a new technê that he doesn’t specify, though
it evidently doesn’t involve books or for that matter language:

Ὄργανα Μουσάων, τὰ πολύστονα βιβλία πωλῶ

εἰς ἑτέρας τέχνης ἔργα μετερχόμενος.
Πιερίδες, σῷζοισθε· λόγοι, συντάσσομαι ὑμῖν·
σύνταξις γὰρ ἐμοὶ καὶ θάνατον παρέχει.
(9.171)

I’m selling the tools of the Muses, those books that make you groan,
as I turn to the tasks of a different profession. Farewell, Pierides! I say
good-bye [syntassomai] to you, words, for syntax is the death of me.

In 9.175 he is selling his books because he needs the money;

here that may be part of it, but the main thing is he’s glad to
be done with them. In my ear this rhymes with the rejection
of Platonic idealism in 10.45, a struggling free of that grim,
heavy, wordy tradition to which he has for some reason
devoted his life and which traces its lineage back to that angry,
murderous poem of war. Good-bye to all that.
An old man’s poem, but also one in which we intuit that
Palladas’s implicit subject here and elsewhere is classical cul-
ture itself, the subject of his pedagogy. In his lifetime that cul-
ture came to face the prospect of its own mortality, refracted in
a number of poems about the rise of Christianity (the word
christianoi appears in 9.528), statues of pagan gods melted
down for coinage or repurposed for churches, malign Christian
influences on an unfaithful wife who’s switching her allegiance
from the twelve Olympians to the twelve Apostles (10.56),
and, most dramatically, the dire condition of the “Hellenes”:

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120 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

Ἄρα μὴ θανόντες τῷ δοκεῖν ζῶμεν μόνον,

Ἕλληνες ἄνδρες, συμφορᾷ πεπτωκότες,
ὄνειρον εἰκάζοντες εἶναι τὸν βίον;
ἢ ζῶμεν ἡμεῖς τοῦ βίου τεθνηκότος;
(10.82)

Are we actually dead and only seem to be alive, we Hellenes, fallen

into misfortune and imagining that a dream is real life? Or are we
alive and is life itself dead?

Ἕλληνές ἐσμεν ἄνδρες ἐσποδωμένοι

νεκρῶν ἔχοντες ἐλπίδας τεθαμμένας·
ἀνεστράφη γὰρ πάντα νῦν τὰ πράγματα.
(10.90.5–7)

We Hellenes are men turned to ashes, holding on to the buried hopes

of the dead, for everything now has been turned topsy turvy.

Neither poem actually mentions Christianity, but I am not

aware of anyone who does not take them to concern the cri-
sis of cultural identity that the Christianization of the Empire
induced in the literate elite—and even in his professed
poverty Palladas would have been of that elite—invested in
the old order. The widely accepted dating proposed by C. M
Bowra relates the poem containing those last lines to events
of 391, when a Theodosian edict effectively forbade the prac-
tice of the old religion and several pagan temples were looted
by Christians; Wilkinson has proposed instead that they are
prompted by the victory of the now unmistakably Christian
emperor Constantine over his rival Licinius in 324, arguably
an even more meaningful turning point in cultural history.23
This encounter is registered in Palladas’s poety only in a
spotty way, and is often cryptic in its details, but one thing it
does not include is anything resembling a defense of the
pagan culture whose obsolescence seems to be on offer; say-
ing “we are alive and life itself is dead” hardly counts.
And I don’t think we would expect it of him. The absence
of such a defense has in the past been cited in ill-advised argu-

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 Gordon Braden 121

ments that Palladas actively converted to Christianity, but

that seems to me a blinkered deduction; it misses the special
quality and extremity of Palladas’s despair—the despair of
someone who “has clearly reached a point where he consid-
ers ‘hopelessness’ . . . as a positive achievement.”24 What we
might expect from Palladas as a summary statement is per-
haps indicated for us by the Yale epigram codex, which frus-
tratingly does not contain a satisfactory text of any single
poem, but does allow us to match its fragments to some
extant poems in the Anthology, including two not attributed
there to Palladas. If the codex is indeed, as Wilkinson and his
team have argued, a collection of poems by Palladas, then we
now have reason to make additions to his oeuvre.25 These
include one epigram with I think powerful resonance within
the context I’ve been setting out here:

Ἂν περιλειφθῇ μικρὸν ἐν ἄγγεσιν ἡδέος οἴνου,

εἰς ὀξὺ τρέπεται τοῦτο τὸ λειπόμενον·
οὕτω ἀναντλήσας τὸν ὅλον βίον, εἰς βαθὺ δ’ ἐλθὼν
γῆρας ὁ πρεσβύτης γίνεται ὀξύλοχος.
(9.127)

If a little sweet wine is left in the bowl, that remnant turns bitter; in
the same way, when an old man, having drawn off the whole of life,
passes into the depths of old age, he becomes bitterly angry.

Friedrich Jacobs, who produced the first critical edition of the

Palatine Anthology, guessed this might be by Palladas. It is
another very old joke, like the one about marrying and bury-
ing your wife; it can be found in a comic fragment from the
age of Aristophanes.26 But as a freestanding epigram in
fourth-century Alexandria it has a new plangency. The
change of something of intoxicating sweetness into some-
thing harsh and sour as it comes to the end of its run doesn’t
really require an explanation; it is no more than the working
out of a chemical reaction, a law of nature—what happens
with the last of the wine.

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122 epic annoyance, homer to palladas

notes

1. Palladas: Poems, Tony Harrison, trans. (London 1975); the volume,

from which I quote several times below, is unpaginated.
2. Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (New York 1961), 142. Similar
philosophical seriousness has been claimed for Palladas in discussions that
Edith Hall has spotted: e.g., Neil Cooper, “Moral Nihilism,” Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society 74 (1973–74), 75–90.
3. Except as noted, I cite Palladas from Anthologia Graeca, Hermann
Beckby, ed., 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Munich 1965–68). Unidentified translations are
my own.
4. Highet (note 2), 173.
5. Georg Luck, “Palladas: Christian or Pagan?” Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology 63 (1958), 467. On “freak show” Luck cites AP 11.353.
6. Citations of Hipponax are from Iambi et Elegi Graeci, M. L. West, ed.,
2 vols., 2d ed. (Oxford, 1971).
7. David Campbell, ed., Greek Lyric Poetry (London 1967), 373–74
8. Mary Renault, The Praise Singer (New York 1979), 36.
9. Dudley Fitts, trans., Poems from the Greek Anthology (New York
1956), 100.
10. Ernst Kalinka, “Das Palladas-Epigramm in Ephesos,” Wiener Studien
24 (1902), 292–95.
11. See also the anonymous fragment currently attributed to Euripides,
though possibly by a comic dramatist: ἔδει γὰρ ἡμᾶς τοῖς θεοῖς θύειν, ὅταν /
γυναῖκα κατορύττῃ τις, οὐχ ὅταν γαμῇ, we ought to make a sacrifice to the gods
when someone buries a woman, not when he marries one; Eurpides, frag-
ment 1112 in Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Bruno Snell et al, edd.
(Göttingen, 1971–2004).
12. Another reference for which I am indebted to Edith Hall.
13. The Greek Anthology, ed. Peter Jay (New York 1973), 379–80.
14. James Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800 (Ithaca,
ny 1935), 612; The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of
the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, ny 1946), 767–68.
15. Robin Skelton, Two Hundred Poems from the Greek Anthology
(Seattle 1971), 43.
16. Timothy Kendall, Flowers of Epigrammes (London 1577), 64r.
17. Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, Lea Baechler and A.
Walton Litz, eds. (New York 1990), 162.
18. William Cartwright, Comedies Tragi-Comedies, with other Poems
(London 1651), 2218.
19. William J. Henderson, “Palladas of Alexandria on Women,” Acta
Classica 52 (2009), 83–100.
20. Luck (note 5), 462–66; Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from
Meleager to Planudes (Oxford 1993), 322–25.

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 Gordon Braden 123

21. Quoted from Cameron (note 20), 262. Cameron also quotes from the
Epigrammata Bobiensia, a collection of poems apparently from late 4th- or
early 5th-century Gaul, a Latin reimagining of Palladas’s poem using the tag
“Arma uirumque.”
22. Kevin W. Wilkinson, “Palladas and the Age of Constantine,” Journal
of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 49–51.
23. C. M. Bowra, “Palladas and Christianity,” Procedings of the British
Academy 45 (1959), 255–67; Wilkinson (note 22), “Palladas and the Age of
Constantine,” 43–48.
24. Luck (note 5), 456.
25. Kevin W. Wilkinson, New Epigrams of Palladas: A Fragmentary
Papyrus Codex (P.CtYBR inv. 4000) (Durham, nc 2012), 41–57. On the
poem I quote here, see pp. 167–68.
26. Antiphanes, fragment 250 in Poetae Comici Graeci, Rudolf Kassel
and Colin Austin, edd. 8 vols. (Berlin 1983– ): σφόδρ’ ἐστὶν ἡμῶν ὁ βίος οἴνῳ
προσφερής· / ὅταν ᾖ τὸ λοιπὸν μικρόν, ὄξος γίγνεται (our life is an awful lot like
wine; when there’s just a little left, it goes bitter).

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