~by David
Aiken~
Pre-Scriptum: A former colleague, who is an art historian at an American
university, asked Phrontisterion to help in translating a group of Greek
inscriptions in the context of her research project on ancient Roman tombs and
funerary frescos depicting garden scenes. Dated at around the first century BC,
the inscriptions were discovered in 1842, and excavated along with “frescoes
of exceptional quality,” just south of Rome near the ancient Circus Maximus.
The inscriptions were interpreted, catalogued, and published for the Musée
National du Louvre in Les Inscriptions
Grecques, interprétées par W. Fröhner (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Réunies, 1864/5).
Figure 1: "Trompe-l'oeil Paintings" of Exceptional Quality at
Patron's Tomb
To my knowledge there is still no other published
translation specifically of the Patron inscriptions, other than the rather perfunctory
renderings, in French, which were advanced in the 1860s by the Louvre curator, Fröhner (1834-1925).
I have translated the funeral poems concerning Patron that are available, which
are the Greek fragments 233, 234, and 235. Fröhner had originally suggested a reconstruction of several significantly
corrupted passages, notably in fragment 233, but these have since been more
meaningfully reconstructed by the editors of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG: University of California Irvine,
USA). The Greek electronic text used for these translations is from the TLG.
The following is the reconstructed glimpse over
the netherworld’s fading threshold, which history permits us, into what was once
the life and death of Patron, the doctor.
Figure 2: Engraving of Patron's Tomb
(Secchi, Monumenti Inediti d'un Antico Sepolcro (Roma: 1843)
A
Matter of Life and Death. At the emplacement of his
tomb near the Palatine Hill in Rome, which is one of the most ancient parts of
the Eternal City, the story of Patron’s life and death was found etched in
stone, rendered in Greek heroic verse.
Patron’s tomb
dates from approximately the time of Augustus Cesar, ca. 18 BC (vide Bagnani in Fröhner), and is
situated at the Porta Capena,
which is the southern gateway in Rome’s Servian Wall, opening out onto the Via Appia. The Servian Wall had the
formidable reputation of being capable of repelling the elephant-equipped
armies of the great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, who, in today’s geography, would
have been a Tunisian, an even more remote son of ancient Phoenicia. That said,
the Wall never had the opportunity to live up to its daunting reputation—apparently,
and certainly notwithstanding Hannibal’s efforts to the contrary, the Punic
general and his armies only ever got to within 5 km of Rome. Which to the
Romans at that time, must have seemed just a little too close.
The stone inscriptions of Patron’s life and
death are composed in ancient Greek. The curiosity here, of course, is that a
non-specialist like this Phrontisterion philosopher would not necessarily have
expected to find Greek language funeral inscriptions in Rome. But, then, that
is part of the intrigue in this story; because this detail reveals to us
something about this immigrant medical doctor, Patron: according to one fragment
in the inscriptions, which are composed in Doric, as opposed to Attic Greek,
Patron says that his native land was Lycia, which is today found in
southwestern Turkey on a finger of land pointing to, and including the island
of Rhodes (light brown on the map below).
Figure 3: The Inscription Blocks from
Patron's Tomb
Scholars talk about the Dorians as a
people, an ethnicity certainly familiar to students of art history for its plain-spoken
Doric columns—which are considered simpler than those of either the Ionians or
the Corinthians; they are also known for art of the Geometric period (ca.
950
BC). But then again, scholars talk about
many things and not everything is necessarily interesting or worthwhile. For
example, there is a common albeit not unproblematic scholarly notion of a
so-called Dorian “invasion”
of the Peloponnesus, which should perhaps be more correctly called a migration
of Dorian peoples, which is thought to have taken place sometime around 1150
BC.
Figure 4: Architectural Columns
The Doric or Dorian dialect of Ancient
Greek, commonly known as western Greek, which was spread about Greece by means
of the migration of the Dorian peoples, is fairly indigestible to a simple Hellenophile,
like myself, who has been nurtured on the sweet milk of Attic and Koine Greek.
In addition to being more or less the standard style of ancient Greek that one
studies at school, Attic, or eastern Greek, is also the Greek dialect of
Athens, spoken from ca. 500-300 BC. This is the Greek of the classical period
of Athens, in which are embodied the works of the dramatists Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedian Aristophanes, the historian Thucydides,
and of course the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Historically speaking,
Attic Greek would slowly evolve into the Koine or common Greek spoken during
Hellenistic and Roman antiquity—this is the “superregional” or lingua franca Greek that was spoken from
roughly 300 BC to 300 AD all across the Mediterranean basin, and which will
also include the writings of Epictetus and the Christian New Testament.
In the briefest possible
of wiki-history versions of the Greek dialects,
according to those in the know “it” all boils down to Mycenaean or Late Bronze
Age Greek (16th-12th centuries BC), which was reconstructed
from the Linear B tablets after some first-class linguistic sleuthing by
Ventris and Chadwick. The three forms of Greek that evolved from Mycenaean
Greek are the Aeolic (Lesbos, western Asia Minor, Boeotian and Thessalian =
northeastern Greece), the Doric (northwestern Greece), and the Ionic (western
and southwestern Asia Minor). Attic Greek evolved as a subgroup of Ionian
Greek.
Doric Greek, on
the other hand, which is our present interest, is, historically speaking, an
older dialect of Greek, and spoken provincially, which is to say primarily beyond
the borders of Attica, which, as its name implies, occupies the Attic Peninsula
including, of course, the great polis of Athens. Dating from ca. 800-100 BC,
variations of Doric Greek “were spoken
in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the
southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy,
Sicily, Epirus and Macedon.”
According
to wiki-history, then, the scholarly consensus is that
Doric Greek originated among ethnicities living in the
mountains of northwestern Greece, which is supposed to be the traditional homeland
of the Dorians, and from which the Doric version of Greek was spread to
neighboring regions during the Dorian “invasion” and subsequent regional colonizations.
Per the wiki-map below, the broader group of Doric dialects, which is indicated
by all the various “brownish” regions, will include Doric proper, Northwest
Greek, and Achaean Doric.
Important
for historians of ideas, is the contextualizing historical setting of our
considerations, which is that the two most important ethnicities in 5th
century Greece were the Dorians and the Ionians, who were also the two principal
players in the Peloponnesian War—a total game-changer for the history of the
city of Athens. Prima facie, the war
in the Peloponnesus was waged between Athens and Sparta; but the Athenians and
their allies in Sicily were ethnically Ionian, while the folks in Syracuse and
the Spartans were ethnically Dorian. The war was fought serially, and it was
therefore rather long in that it lasted from 431-404 BC, or for about 27 years;
but, per the prediction of Socrates just prior to his execution at the hands of
the Athenians in 399 BC, the war eventually brought about the decline of the Athenian
polis. It goes almost without saying, of course, that the Ionians of Attica, like
their Dorian ancestral enemies in the Peloponnesus, had their own dialect of
Greek, and their own style of making a column. The Doric areas are color-coded with
a distinctive purple on the wiki-map below.
Figure 5: Spoken Greek According to
Regions (Source: Wiki)
As we were saying, then, Patron was a
medical doctor and ethnically Dorian, which means he spoke Doric Greek, if one
may already begin to deduce his language from the language used in his funeral
inscriptions. Additionally, one discovers from the inscriptions that he originally
hailed from Lycia, which is a whole wide world away from Rome, and that he died
and was buried in a beautiful Roman tomb as an immigrant.
Lycia, which today would be
Anatolia or the southwestern region of Turkey, was a Doric Greek speaking
region of Asia Minor. It was subsumed into the Greek empire that was being
constructed by Alexander the Great, and, after the defeat of the Persian King,
Darius III, at the battle of Issus (southern Anatolia) in 331 BC, Lycia was totally
Hellenized under the rule of the Macedonians. After 168 BC, when Lycia enjoyed
official home rule within the context of the Lycian League, the region enjoyed some
degree of autonomy under the protectorate of the Roman republic; however, Lycia
was neither independent nor a sovereign region, but a self-governing region
under republican principles. It also had the right, apparently for a time, to
mint its own coins. In 43 AD emperor Claudius dissolved the Lycian League, and
Lycia was again incorporated, with provincial status, into the Roman Empire.
This would be about the time, historically, that Patron would have appeared on
the scene.
There
have been some fine heroes in history and myth who claim Lycia as their
homeland. Much of the early foundational history of the region is recounted in The Histories of Herodotus, having to do
with the sons of Europa, Sarpedon (the grandfather of the Homeric one) and
Minos; it was Minos who bested Sarpedon in vying for the throne in Crete, thus
driving him away from Crete and into our narrative. In his flight, grandfather Sarpedon
lands in Milyas, which is the ancient name for later Lycia.
Apparently
Bellerophon, of Pegasus fame and monster-killer extraordinaire, credited with
slaying Chimera, was also later king in Lycia. This story comes to us via Homer
(Il. 6.155-203), being told by his
grandson, Glaucus (Trojan ally), who, one remembers, meets the great Diomedes
(Greek) on the battlefield (Bks. 2 & 6) and, instead of fighting as
enemies, they actually exchange gifts of friendship because their grandfathers
had been befriended. Diomedes got the best of the exchange, however, and
notwithstanding the excellence of the gesture, Glaucus comes down to us as a
somewhat tragic fool of the gods who would later be killed by Ajax.
In a one-thing-leading-to-another
kind of way, though, the first Sarpedon, who fled Crete from his brother, ultimately
yielded a second Sarpedon, through Laodamia (daughter of Bellerophon); this second
hero was killed at Troy. This Sarpedon grandson is famous for having had a good
grump at Hector, the Trojan general (Bk. 5), on the nature of heroism or lack
thereof, and, additionally, for giving a wonderful speech on the honorable,
heroic life (Bk. 12), as well as for living and dying an uncertain number of
times—being a favorite of Zeus, the King of the Gods tried to keep him from
dying at the hands of Diomedes, until Hera reminded her husband that gods did
not have that right (Bk. 16), at which point Zeus backs off. So—spoiler alert,
Sarpedon gets to really die; but the comedy gets played out anyway, because Apollo
recovers the body and has it delivered back to Lycia for funeral honors. All is
well that ends well, in a Greek tragic, heroic kind of a way.
Figure 6: The death of Sarpedon, the Euphronios
krater, ca. 515 BC (Source: Wiki)
Now, all of this chatting about heroes hither
and yon in the pages of Lycian history, necessarily brings us back full circle to
the Roman funeral inscriptions of our good doctor, Patron, which are not
“simply” composed in Doric Greek, but are in fact rendered in the heroic poetic
form and rhythms of the Greek epic.
According to
common sources,
scholarly opinion seems to be that Doric Greek is the “conventional dialect of
choral lyric poetry”; but then I am not sure that this bit of information
advances us much, because choral lyric poetry is not written in the epic form,
which Patron’s inscriptions definitely are. There is equally scholarship suggesting
that ‘epic praise’ will undergo historical transformation already in Classical
Athens, shifting from its traditional expression through Homeric poetry/verse,
and being replaced instead with the more democratically oriented funeral
oration. The strength of this theory is grounded in the funeral oration of
Pericles (Thucydides, History
2.41.4), who, speaking over the Athenian dead, says:
We need no Homer to sing our praise, nor anyone else
who with his verses may delight for a moment…” Instead of relying on more
traditional or customary rhetorical devices to demonstrate their ‘power through
epic poetry’, as had the aristocratic Athens of antiquity, “Pericles
assures the [5th century] Athenians that their city has provided
overwhelming demonstrations of its power, and especially in view of the dead
they were there to honor. Such tangible proofs, he contends, are sufficient in
and of themselves to ensure the glory of the city (http://www.pdf-archive.com/2015/10/14/thucydides-rationalism-2005/, p.
11).
The Greek epic tradition is, first and
foremost, the poetry of Homer. The most anodyne definition of the epic is, as
every schoolboy learns, that it is a lengthy poem containing tales of journeys
and deeds of derring-do. But this definition does not inform us as to why a 1st
century BC funeral inscription would be composed in epic verse, unless, of
course, we give value to the metaphorical element of the deceased’s journey
through life, and then the passage from life to death. This certainly seems a
fitting hermeneutical entry into thinking about and interpreting the Patron
inscriptions.
A second direction
to go in considering the Patron inscriptions is not to consider necessarily the
content of the inscriptions for epic material, but rather for their metrical
form. Standard epic verse, which is traditionally composed in hexameter metrical
lines, is also certainly apparent in the Patron inscriptions (vide Fröhner, 294).
Finally, there
is a consideration of the actual vocabulary used in the inscriptions, which is
in fact and in deed denotationally dominated by Doric epic elements. This seems
consistent with general usage in antiquity, for, according to one site, “All later
Greek poetry relied on Epic practice to a greater or lesser degree. This
included vocabulary, a choice of alternates for noun declension and verb
conjugation, turns of phrase and even particular quirks of syntax.” This
description of “epic practice” is certainly fitting, considering all the Doric language
elements, apparent both in noun/adjective declensions as well as the verb conjugations,
with which the Patron inscriptions are replete to overflowing.
The Patron inscriptions (circa 18 BC).
TOMB OF PATRON
(233.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)
Πάτρω]ν [εἰμί]· πατρὶς Λυ[κίων
μ’]
ἐλοχεύσατο γαῖα. (1)
Ῥώμ]α δ’ ἐν τιμαῖς πρά[γματά
μου δέχ]εται.
Ὦ] μάκαρ, [ἐς
φάος]
ἀελίου πάλιν [οὔ
μ’ ἀπο]πέμπεις,
εὐπά[τριδ’ ἀλλ’ ἐφορᾷς τηλό]θι
θαπτόμενον.
233. I am Patron; and the fatherland that
bore me, Lycia. /
And valor among honors can be expected with
respect to my accomplishments. /
You are blessed, [Lycia] who do not send me
off again back to the light of the sun, /
But rather, from afar you oversee funeral
rites celebrated to honor one of noble family born.
233.bis.
Commentary: Our native lands send us forth into the light of the sun as
immigrants, whether literal or metaphorical, and observe from a distance as we
are given again to the shadows. The valor of our accomplishments between sun
and shadow is ours to win, but it does not belong to us alone; our honors are
also those of our native soil. The individual is always surrounded by a crowd
of witnesses.
233.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 295). Je suis Patron, [……]
est mon pays natal ; maintenant l’Hadès m’a reçu, moi qui fus si bienveillant
pendant mon administration. Heureux Hadès ! tu ne me renvoies plus à la
lumière du soleil, car j’ai appartenu à une noble famille, moi qui suis enterré
ici.
(234.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)
Εἰς τὸν αὐτόν. (n)
Οὐ βάτοι, οὐ τρίβολοι τὸν ἐμὸν τάφον ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν @1 (1)
οὐδ’ ὀλολυγαία νυκτερὶς ἀμπέταται·
ἀλλά με πᾶν δένδρος χαρίεν περὶ ῥίσκον ἀνέρπει
κυκλόθεν εὐκάρποις κλωσὶν ἀγαλλόμενον.
Ποτᾶται δὲ πέριξ λιγυρὴ μινυρίστρι’ ἀηδὼν (5)
καὶ τέττιξ γλυκεροῖς χείλεσι λιρὰ χέων,
καὶ σοφὰ τραυλίζουσα χελιδονὶς, ἥ τε λιγύ
πνους
ἀκρὶς ἀπὸ στήθο[υς ἡδὺ χέουσα μέλος].
Πάτρων ὅσσα βροτοῖσιν ἐράσμια πάντ’ ἐτέλεσσα
ὄφρα καὶ εἰν Ἀΐδᾳ τερπνὸν ἔχοιμι τόπον· (10)
τἆλλα δὲ πάνθ’ ἃ λέλοιπα καὶ ἐν νεότητι κατέκτην
ᾤχετο πλὴν ἃ πρὶν ζῶν ἀπεκαρπισάμην.
234. Neither brambles nor burdocks are
gathering around my tomb, / (1)
Nor does any shrilling bat turn overhead; /
But rather every tree gracefully spreads
upwards, twisting in a circle all about my vault, /
Which is made glorious from all sides by
their branches heavy laden with fruit. /
And flitting around and about is a clear-voiced
warbler, a songstress, / (5)
And a cicada boldly holding forth from between
sweet lips, /
And a clever swallow quietly intoning, or
even a cricket’s shrill chirping, /
When a pleasant song is pouring forth from
her breast. /
[I], Patron, achieved all sorts of lovely
things among mortal men /
In order that I should also have a delightful
place as well in Hades; / (10)
But, also, I have left behind all those
things I used to seek after in my youth; /
It is all gone, save that fruit which I harvested
before, while alive.
234.bis.
Commentary: Patron’s tomb is not a place of decay and abandon, but is
surrounded by the beautiful, the pleasant, and the fruitful. This is obviously also
true of Patron’s life, which was a ‘place’ of fruitful and pleasant plantings
and sowing. The goodness that Patron sowed during his life spent among men, is
the only abiding fruit that Patron gets to leave behind.
234.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 294). Ni ronces ni épines
n’entourent mon tombeau ; nulle chauve-souris aux cris perçants ne tournoie
au-dessus ; mais toutes sortes de charmants arbustes, les branches ornées de
beaux fruits, poussent autour de mon cercueil et on y voit voltiger le
rossignol aux mélodies retentissantes et la cigale à la voix douce et
harmonieuse, et l’hirondelle aux doctes gazouillements, et la sauterelle aux
cris sonores, qui, du fond de sa poitrine, répand ses jolies chansons. (Moi)
Patron, j’ai rendu aux hommes beaucoup de bons services pour avoir aux enfers
une place agréable. De tous les biens que j’ai quittés et que je possédais dans
ma jeunesse, il ne me reste rien, si ce n’est (le souvenir) des jouissances que
j’ai goûtées durant ma vie.
(235.) ΑΛΛΟ. (t)
Πατὴρ Πάτρων μὲν, Ἀπποληΐα δ’ ἐγώ· (1)
τεκνῶ δὲ δισσὰ τέκνα, πατέρα δ’ εὖ λέγω.
235. My father is Patron, and I am
Appoleia;
I have brought two children into the world,
and I commend [eulogize] my father.
235.bis.
Commentary: The children, and the children’s’ children, are the fruit of a
parent’s planting, but a harvest for the future.
235.ter. Fröhner French (1864/5, 295). Mon père est Patron,
moi je suis Appuleja. J’ai eu deux enfants et je bénis mon père.
(Reprised and
reworked from an original essay published on Phrontisterion in March
2016.)
