Of Tyrants & Wisdom

~by David Aiken~

Periander of Corinth

Ancient ‘How to’s’ for Commencements and Recommencements. Every day brings new chances for us, just as it brings along chances to be new. An ancient king of the Greek city of Corinth, Periander (Περίανδρος; 625-585 BC), left behind two bits of pearly wisdom useful to this idea, and which have served Greek posterity well: “Practice everything”; and "Be farsighted with everything." Now at first blush, this might not seem like much as far as pithy philosophical advice and wise witticisms go from a one-time sagacious king of ancient Corinth. But then, that is precisely our story.

§ On Tyranny, Tyrants, and Pearls of Wisdom. Periander of Corinth was a tyrant. In the Greece of high antiquity, however, tyrants were not necessarily ‘tyrannical’ or oppressive in our modern sense of the word. Rather, throughout much of Greek history the ‘tyrant’ was simply a title given to rulers such as Gyges of Lydia, Oedipus (of Sophocles’ fame) and Periander; it referenced an authoritarian structure for the government of the polis, as opposed to oligarchies or aristocracies. Nonetheless, it is quite evident that a change occurred at some point in the perception of the tyrant and tyrannical governance in ancient Greece, because by the 4^th century the term is clearly become pejorative, particularly in Plato.

Now although Periander was a tyrant, this did not keep him from also being named one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece by, among others, Diogenes Laertius (3^rd century AD). The Seven Sages was a select cast of characters from the 6^th century BC, which was to become for all Greeks the go-to fountainhead of Abbreviated Wisdom, which took the form of witty and sagacious proverbs—the Seven Sages for the Greeks was an early predecessor of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for revolutionary America. This Greek list of seven included Thales, Solon the lawmaker, Periander, Cleobulus, Chilon, Bias, and Pittacus; the list is not always exactly the same, however—in Plato’s Protagoras, for example, Socrates does not include Periander among the Seven Sages.

In his historical incarnation, Periander was the second tyrant of Corinth (following his father, Cypselus, who was the first of that familial dynasty), and was by all accounts an extremely effective ruler, bringing much prosperity and wealth to Corinth through both trade and conquest. It is worth remembering about Corinth that much later in its history, in the early Christian period, the city had already long gone into decline; the letters of the Apostle Paul attest to Corinth as a center of Aphrodite worship and libertine conduct, which apparently caused problems in the Corinthian Christian churches.

During the rule of the tyrant Periander, however, some 5 centuries earlier, Corinth had enjoyed a period of exceptional stability. The historical consensus seems to be that his rule was both just and fair, and that he was interested in the evenhanded distribution of wealth in his polis. In addition to being himself both a philosopher and poet, he also encouraged the arts though a regular fare of art festivals, and had a sustained building program. That said, according to Herodotus (Histories V 91-93) there is one little anecdotal skeleton in this wise and skillful tyrant’s closet, which is his rather erratic attachment to his wife; but perhaps this was only to be expected from a polis devoted to things of the goddess Aphrodite. To wit: first, Periander killed his wife in a fit of rage while she was pregnant, although the exact means of and motive for killing her is in dispute, but then he apparently, writes Herodotus, “baked his bread in a cold oven” –a euphemism suggestive enough to put anyone off their morning brioche.

Diogenes (Ch. 7) records for History the commemorative inscription that was placed by the Corinthians in memory of Periander the tyrant:

[97] In mother earth here Periander lies,

The prince of sea-girt Corinth rich and wise.

My own epitaph on him is:

Grieve not because thou hast not gained thine end,

But take with gladness all the gods may send;

Be warned by Periander's fate, who died

Of grief that one desire should be denied.

§ Greek Proverbial Wisdom #1: “Rehearse (repeatedly) everything.” So, Periander the philosopher and poet left behind proverbial pearls of wisdom, among which one of the aphorisms that interest us, which is commonly translated as, “Practice everything” (μελέτη τὸ πᾶν; meleth to pan-TLG, Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, Bk 1, section 99, ln. 5). The ‘practice’ bit of Periander’s adage, which is μελέτη [meleth; feminine noun], generally means care or attention; and the everything bob is τὸ πᾶν [to pan; an accusative of respect], which means with respect to everything. Assembled, this gives us: Give care with respect to everything. Now the bob, everything, is straight-forward enough to pass over quickly; but it is actually the practice bit that gives us some food for wise thinking.

Life as a martial art. The noun μελέτη [meleth] is generally rendered by translators as an imperative: practice. Be that as it may, this noun comes from the verb mello [μέλω], whose first sense is to have care for, attention to action. But this fuses into a second denotative meaning, which is practice or exercise, such as the kinds of exercises one might do consistent with Spartan discipline. This second sense is reinforced even more strongly, again drawing upon Thucydides, by its use in a military context as a training exercise or practice or drill.

            In the most radical sense of this wise saying, then, in addition to the idea of simply practicing everything, as the majority of translators render it, μελέτη τὸ πᾶν has more the sense of training or drilling with respect to everything. The difference may seem pedantic, but there is a world of color and intensity in the military connotation that is lacking with just practice. With this martial coloration, μελέτη τὸ πᾶν describes the frame of mind of someone who accomplishes the days of his life with attention to detail and precision in execution—perhaps much like the world-class athlete who trains unceasingly for the day he will have to compete for the prize, with only this difference: that for the Wise Man each day is its own competition. In this sense, Periander’s adage is better translated: Train for everything.

Life as staged performance. A second denotative coloring of this proverb (μελέτη τὸ πᾶν; meleth to pan), is based on μελέτη [meleth] as a theatrical or speechifying term. It is used frequently of orators who practice their speeches (cf. Demosthenes), or of actors (per Aristotle) who study and rehearse their lines and gestures and movements for a performance. Rendered with this coloring in mind, Train (repeatedly) for everything begins to look more like, Rehearse (repeatedly) everything.

Finally, with the addition of (repeatedly) in Periander’s adage, Rehearse (repeatedly) everything, the Phrontisterion translator is able to provide an additional bit of color that is also the proper of μελέτη [meleth]—the idea that we should study and rehearse everything we do until all of the articulations and intonations and gestures of our Live Performances should become habit, until we become so accustomed to the dramatic ‘show’ of living out our lives, that the enactment of each hour of each day is the equivalent of Opening Night in the Theatre of Life.

§ Greek Proverbial Wisdom #2: “Always look ahead.” A second piece of wisdom attributed to Periander the tyrant is, "Be farsighted with everything" (Greek: Ὅρα τὸ μέλλον, hora to mellon). Quite briefly, Be farsighted, which is the common rendering, is an effective translation for the entire expression; with everything is an addition that is neither in the Greek proverb, nor necessary to the sense. Now the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae does not formally attribute this second precept specifically to Periander; but it is certainly attributed to the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. Other sources do indeed link it specifically to our one-time tyrant of Corinth.        
            Ὅρα [hora] is the present imperative of the verb ‘to see’, thus giving us: watch, look, observe, or the older, behold. The sense is clearly banal enough: to keep something before the eyes; keep in sight; keeping an eye on it. The second denotation, however, is perhaps even more interesting to the astute insight on offer here, because the imperative, Ὅρα [hora], invites us, with some sense of urgency, to look out for, or to make provision for the future (pro-vision (Latin) whence the notion of fore-sight). Tὸ μέλλον [to mellon], which is an accusative single neutral participle being used as the direct object of the phrase, means something like: whatever is about to come about. In mind, of course, is simply future time—we should not be neglectful of the future [the unknown?].

So, this tidbit of wise insight invites us, individually, to take into consideration, to keep an eye on, not just the today of our life, but to keep in mind as well the Unknown Tomorrow that constantly attends us. The admonition is not just preventative, as in la Fontaine’s fable of the cicada and the ant (La cigale et la fourmi), where one tries to forestall ‘grim Necessity’, as Homer might have said, but it encourages us, also, to look forward in optimism to that which attends us, and with a spirit of adventure, to see what Tomorrow holds in store for us.

Similarly, but using bugs to carry along his message, in his moral fable with the same wise punchline as the ancient Greek sage-King, Periander, the French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-1695) encourages us to prepare today for all our tomorrows (link).

The cicada (cricket) having sung
All summer long,
Found herself most destitute
When the north wind blew:
Not even one little morsel
Of fly or worm.

[La Cigale, ayant chanté
                  Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue.
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau .]

§ On Periander, the Etymological Man. We have already seen that Periander of Corinth was a wise and philosophically shrewd tyrant in ancient Greece, although he may have had a rather odd conception of baked bread. But there is also another interpretative possibility for reading Periander; and that is to read his all-too human wisdom as truly peri-andros— as brief but perceptive insights for and about all men, which is the lexical meaning of peri-andros. In this sense, the wise king Periander provides for us our daily bread of peri-andros wisdom, of reminders about how to live well and perceptively as men in the world—and peri-andros thus becomes finally a metaphor for each of us.

The wiki-universe tells us that, according to tradition, each of the seven sages of Greek antiquity supposedly represents some specific aspect of worldly wisdom, which was then reduced to its aphoristic quintessence. The list tends to go something like this:

·       "Moderation is best in all things" -- Cleobulus of Lindos (πάν μέτρον άριστον, pan metron ariston).

·       "Nothing in excess" -- Solon of Athens (μηδὲν ἄγαν, meden agan).

·       "Do not desire the impossible" -- Chilon of Sparta (μὴ ἐπιθυμεῖν ἀδυνάτων, mei epithumein adunaton).

·       "Most men are bad" -- Bias of Priene (πλεῖστοι ἄνθρωποι κακοί, pleistoi anthropoi kakoi).

·       "Know thyself" -- Thales of Miletus (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnothi seauton).

·       "Know thy opportunity" -- Pittacus of Mytilene: (γνῶθι καιρὸν, gnothi kairon).

·       "Be farsighted with everything" -- Periander of Corinth: (Ὅρα τὸ μέλλον, hora to mellon).

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear…”

Further reading:

·      http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/01/januarys-blogpostredemptions-memories.html

·      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sages_of_Greece--The Seven Sages

A Matter of Life and Death

"Trompe-l'oeil Paintings" of Exceptional Quality at Patron's Tomb    

Pre-Scriptum: A former colleague, who is an art historian, 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).

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 following Greek electronic text is from the TLG.

Such 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.

Engraving of Patron's Tomb (Secchi, Roma, 1843)

A Matter of Life and Death. At the emplacement of his tomb near the Palatine Hill, 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 his efforts to the contrary, the Punic general and his armies only ever got to within 5 km of Rome.

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. 

The Inscription Blocks from Patron's Tomb

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).

Scholars talk about the Dorians as a people, an ethnicity certainly familiar to students of art history for its columns—which are considered simpler than those of either the Ionians or the Corinthians, as well as 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.

Architectural Columns

The Doric or Dorian dialect of Ancient Greek, commonly known as western Greek, which was spread about Greece by the migration of the Dorian peoples, is fairly indigestible to a 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 the Christian New Testament.

In the briefest possible wiki-history version of the Greek dialects, according to those in the know “it” all boils down to Mycenaean or Late Bronze Age Greek (16^th-12^th 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 Doric 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, which is that the two most important ethnicities in 5^th 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 it eventually brought about the decline of Athens per the prediction of Socrates just prior to his execution at the hands of the Athenians in 399 BC. 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, their own style of making a column, and are color-coded with a distinctive purple on the wiki-map below.

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 of his funeral inscriptions. One discovers additionally 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.

One thing leading to another, 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, 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.

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 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 instead being replaced 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 [5^th 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, 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 1^st 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 through 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, 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 λιγύπνους

  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 hold court 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.