Funeral stele at the Met

[jeidsath]

In addition to the permanent Greek and Roman collections, I had the chance to see the Pergamon exhibit at the Met yesterday. The (sculptures of) comic and tragic masks are what stand out most in my mind, but I'm still trying to process everything. However, I saw this and thought that it was strange.

ευψυχι ολυμπου ουδις αθανατος

Or εὐψύχει Ὀλύμπου οὐδεὶς ἀθάνατος. Why genitive Ὀλύμπου? Would that refer to the parent?

[Pros]

εὐψύχει Ὀλύμπου οὐδεὶς ἀθάνατος.

"Be of good cheer Olympus no one is immortal"

Corrected version of my original post.

[mwh]

I expect Ολυμπε was meant, to give a conventional funerary inscription. Olympos is a proper name. Such private inscriptions are often botched.

[jeidsath]

Yes, there were another couple of tablets with the vocative. Since I posted though, I thought it might be this:

εὐψύχει Ὀλύμπ’ οὐ[κ] οὐδεὶς ἀθάνατος.

EDIT: Deleted some speculation on the above being a hexameter.

[mwh]

No I shouldn’t think so. Elision anomalous, and ουδεις αθανατος the invariable formula. Maybe the putative ο is an ε without the crossbar, and the illformed putative υ a filler or something. Or maybe ου is an aborted start of ουδεις. What follows? A stop?, a partial cancellation? The engraving looks very uneven and amateurish, and the inking-in unreliable. And as I said, these inscriptions are often messed up.

I don’t know that the Met exhibit has, but it can’t come close to a visit to the Pergamonmuseum and the entrance Altar, a wonder indelibly fixed in my mind and one that completely overturned my prejudice against Hellenistic art.

[Hylander]

I've never been to Berlin, and the exhibit at the Met is due to close on Sunday, too soon for my forthcoming visit to New York, but one day this spring here in DC I skipped out of work and visited an absolutely breathtaking exhibition of Hellenistic bronze sculpture that included many pieces on loan from the Getty Museum.

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/press/exh/3633.html

[jeidsath]

I was lucky to be in New York this week. I had planned to see the Getty exhibit before it went on tour -- only a short flight from home -- but that never came off.

The standard Met collection was very good along with the few dozen items from Pergamon. I don't think that Hylander would regret a trip even after Sunday. I could have spent much more time there than I had to spend.

The sight did not compare with scale and beauty of the British Museum. The effect of the Elgin marbles on me was almost physical. And like mwh says, not to the images of the Pergamon altar that I can find online. That is in Egypt for a few more years.

Tomorrow I'm in Boston, so any museum or bookstore recommendations would be appreciated.

[mwh]

Best bookstore is the Harvard Coop in Harvard Square but they don’t have anything you can’t get elsewhere. There may be funkier ones but I don’t know of any. While there you could visit the Harvard Art Museum(s), which includes the Fogg. I haven’t actually been in the new building, by Renzo Piano. It’s big, I can tell you that. Back in Boston there’s the Museum of Fine Arts, with good and wide-ranging collections, and the Gardner, which is interesting. All easily reached by the T or cab. Depends on what you want to see really. None of them compares with the Met or the BM or the Smithsonian museums.

[Hylander]

Schoenhof's on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge (a short walk from Harvard Square) actually carries a good selection of classics books in stock, including Greek and Latin texts, Teubners (or should I say Teubnerianas?), OCTs, etc. Many other foreign language books, too, living and dead. You wouldn't be surprised to find books on or in Hittite or Akkadian or Quechua in stock. Well worth a visit.

http://www.schoenhofs.com/

[mwh]

Thanks for that Hylander. Now even more wildly off topic:
The hellenistic poet Posidippus welcomed the new realism in sculpture in a collection of his epigrams discovered some fifteen years ago. The epigram celebrates a lifelike depiction in bronze (with nothing “heroic” about it) of the early hellenistic scholar-poet and royal tutor Philitas of Cos.
The poem goes
X 16 τ̣όνδε Φιλίται χ̣[αλ]κ̣ὸν̣ [ἴ]ϲ̣ο̣ν̣ κα̣τὰ πάν‹θ›{α} Ἑκ̣[α]τ̣αῖοϲ 63
17 ἀ]κ̣[ρ]ι̣β̣ὴϲ ἄκρουϲ̣ [ἔπλ]α̣ϲ̣ε̣ν εἰϲ ὄνυχαϲ,
18 καὶ με]γ̣έθει κα̣[ὶ ϲα]ρ̣κ̣ὶ τὸν ἀνθρωπιϲτὶ διώξαϲ
19 .....]ν’, ἀφ’ ἡρώων δ’ οὐδ̣ὲν ἔμε̣ιξ{ε} ἰδέηϲ,
20 ἀ̣λλὰ τὸν ἀκρομέριμν̣ον ὅλ̣[.. κ]α̣τεμάξατο τέχ̣νηι̣
21 πρ]έ̣ϲβυν, ἀληθείηϲ ὀρ̣θὸν̣ [....] κ̣ανόνα·
22 αὐδήϲ]οντι δ’ ἔοικε̣ν̣, ὅϲωι πο̣ι̣κ̣ί̣λ̣λεται ἤθει,
23 ἔμψυχ]ο̣ϲ, καίπερ χάλκεοϲ ἐὼν ὁ γέρων·
24 .. Πτολε]μ̣αίου δ’ ὧδε θ̣εοῦ θ’ ἅμα καὶ βαϲιλ‹ῆ›οϲ
25 __ ......]α̣ι Μουϲέ{ι}ων εἵνεκα Κῶιοϲ ἀνήρ.

AB 63 (X 16-25) Hecataeus has formed this bronze likeness of Philitas
accurate in every respect to the tips of the fingers.
Following dimensions proper to man in size and form,
he has incorporated no aspect of the heroic,
but fashioned the old man accurately with all his skill,
adhering to the proper canon of the truth. He (Philitas)
is represented as a man about to speak with such realism
that he seems alive, just like an old man, although
he is bronze. In this way by order of Ptolemy, both god and king,
was the Coan man dedicated for the sake of his talent (?). (transl. S.A. Stephens)

And here’s what’s been identified (wrongly, I should think) as the head of the bronze in question:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... sopher.JPG
recovered from the famous Antikythera shipwreck which yielded the amazing computing device known as the Antikythera mechanism and is now yielding still more.

[Hylander]

Thanks, mwh! If I'm not mistaken--I'll check tomorrow--that "head of a philosopher" was part of the Hellenstic bronze exposition. Even if it isn't the statue referred to in the poem, it ought to be!

Callimachi manes et Coi sacra Philitae,
in uestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus.

One of those scraps of poetry knocking around in my head.

[cb]

hi, here's an article showing a few more tombstones where the same error is made, putting the name of the deceased in the genitive rather than vocative (see footnote 12 and top of pg 131):

http://www.academia.edu/7371056/More_Ea ... _U._Dahari

cheers, chad

[jeidsath]

Due to major Amtrak delays, I was only free in Boston for a couple of hours. I did make it to Schoenhof's, which was a real treat. Thank you, Hylander.

mwh, I'm having trouble telling where the hexameters begin and end after line 21 (they still are hexameters, aren't they?) Also, I notice that the poet makes short vowels heavy more often than I would have expected.

Chad, seeing the same error so many times makes me wonder if it really is a simple error. I wonder if Coptic (the article suggests Egyptian being the stonecutter's native language) distinguishes vocative and genitive?

[Hylander]

they still are hexameters, aren't they?

They're elegiac couplets--distichs composed of one hexameter and one "pentameter"--not straight hexameters.

The pentameter consists of the first half of a hexameter through the masculine caesura in the third foot (never a feminine caesura or a fourth-foot caesura), followed by a "hemiepes":

_ υ υ _ υ υ υ

so the full pentameter is:

_ υ υ _ υ υ _ // _ υ υ _ υ υ υ .

There is no substitution of longs for two shorts in the hemiepes.

[mwh]

The poem is in elegiacs, 5 couplets. Hylander quotes the beginning of Propertius bk.3, also in elegiacs. It continues with a claim to be the "first" to take over the hellenistic poetics of Philitas and Callimachus into Latin:
primus ego ingredior puro de fonte sacerdos
Itala per Graios orgia ferre choros.
(EDIT. Crossed with Hylander.)

[Hylander]

ἀφ’ ἡρώων δ’ οὐδ̣ὲν ἔμε̣ιξ' ἰδέηϲ - a Hellenistic manifesto.

[mwh]

Not that hellenistic poetry steers clear of heroes, but it treats them differently. Apollonius’ Argonauts choose as their leader not the mighty Heracles but the wimpy Jason (“an insult to the dignity of the hero”, spluttered one unsympathetic commentator), and Callimachus celebrated a poor old man’s victory over the mice in his hut in the same grandiose terms as Heracles’ victory over the Nemean lion.

[Shenoute]

Chad, seeing the same error so many times makes me wonder if it really is a simple error. I wonder if Coptic (the article suggests Egyptian being the stonecutter's native language) distinguishes vocative and genitive?

Coptic doesn't have cases

[cb]

hi, yep i wonder, i guess other possibilities - beyond just stuffing it up, which seems quite likely - are an implied noun (like soul), or maybe a faulty copying into grk of a syntactical construction from a local language... but when it comes to why unknown people from the distant past made errors, who knows! cheers, chad