DIONYSIUS DIONYSIUS PERIEGETES PERIEGETES
De D e s c r i p t i o n o f t h e K n o w n W o r l d An Introduction
by
J. L. LIGHTFOOT
(C) J. L. Lightfoot 2013
ii
(C) J. L. Lightfoot 2013
ii
‘It’s the world,’ said Dean. ‘My God!’ he cried, slapping the wheel. ‘It’s the world! .... world! .... Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!’ (Jack Kerouac, On the Road , Part Four, ch. 5).
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PREFACE The Periegesis of the Known World by Dionysius of Alexandria is a geographical poem, now known to be of Hadrianic date, which does what it promises, offering a description of the known world in just under 1200 elegant hexameters. It was enormously popular until the early modern period and then sank into obscurity. Is abella Tsavari’s edition (Ioannina, 1990) both marked an epoch and helped to effect a small renaissance in Dionysian studies over the last few decades, which has seen, among other things, a series of still-unpublished theses (Patrick Counillon, Grenoble 1983; Denise Greaves, Stanford 1994; Yumna Khan, London 2002; Ekaterina Ilyushechkina, Groningen 2010), further editions (Brodersen 1994 a, Raschieri 2004, Amato 2005), and six valuable essays presented at a colloquium in Bordeaux ( REA REA 2004). Specialist attention has been paid to particular sections of the poem (to Italy, by Raschieri and Amato; to the Black Sea region, by Ilyushechkina). This is an advance online publication in monograph form of material that will form the introduction to the first fulllength English commentary on the entire Periegesis (to be published by Oxford University Press, 2014). J. L. L.
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CONTENTS
I. Preliminaries
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1. Poetry and Prose 2. Hypotyposis Geographias : The Overview of the Known World 3. Conceptions of Space II. Sources
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III. Language
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1. Lexicon Additional note on the - ij terminations of nouns and adjectives 2. Word-Formation 3. Formulae and Pseudo-Formulae Additional note on naming-formulae 4. Metre Prosody Outer metric Inner metric Other Summary 5. A Language for Geography? IV. Dionysius and Didactic Poetry
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1. Of Catalogues and Lists 2. Didactic The Narrator Addressees and Spectators
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Authors and Narrators 3. Bird’s-Eye Vision Landscape in Motion V. Geopoetics
133
1. Epithets 2. Chorography and Ethnography The landscape Natural resources Peoples and their environment The divine Mythology History and time VI. The End of the Journey
183
Bibliography
194
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References in the form ‘See 178 n.’ or ‘See ad loc.’ are a cue to the reader to the more detailed discussion that will be found in my forthcoming commentary. I have used broadly the same bibliographical s ystem as for my commentaries on Lucian and the Sibylline Oracles. Other than works cited by abbreviated title (listed below), I refer to frequently cited works by author’s name alone. These are listed in the final bibliography. The name – date system is used to distinguish works by authors cited twice or more. The details of works cited only once are given in the passage in question. If a work is cited only in a few, localised references, on second and any subsequent occasions the reader is directed back to the first citation with ‘op. cit.’, ‘art. cit.’, or footnote number. Citations of RE are usually by lemma alone, unless the entry is out of its normal sequence (for example, is in a Supplement volume, or among Nachträge at the end of a volume). Editions and commentaries on classical texts are not usually given separate listing in any bibliography (e.g. West on Hes. Op. 247), but it is as well to make clear here that I have used the following editions of certain geographical texts:
for Agatharchides, De Mari Erythraeo: GGM i. 111 – 95; for Agathemerus, Geographiae Hypotyposis : GGM ii. 471 – 87; for Arrian’s Periplus Ponti Euxini: A. G. Roos (Munich, 2002), ii. 103 – 28; for Avienius’ Descriptio Orbis Terrae: P. Van de Woestijne, La Descriptio Orbis Terrae d’Avienus (Bruges, 1961); for Hannonis Periplus: GGM i. 1 – 14; for Marcianus of Heraclea, Periplus Maris Exteri (cited as Peripl .):GGM i. 515 – 62; Epitome
Peripli Maris Interni (cited as Epit .): GGM i. 563 – 73; for Nicephorus Blemmydes’
Gewgrafi/a Sunoptikh/ (based on a paraphrase of the
Periegesis): GGM ii. 458 – 68;
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for Ptolemy’s Geography: books 1 – 5, K. E. Müller (Paris, 1883 – 1901); books 6 – 8, C. F. A. Nobbe (repr. Hildesheim, 1966); for ps.-Scylax: G. Shipley, Pseudo-S kylax’ s Periplous: The Circumnavigation of the
Inhabited World: Text, Translation and Commentary (Exeter, 2011); the numeration is based on Müller’s, but with added subsections; for Stephanus of Byzantium: M. Billerbeck (Berlin, 2006 – ) for a – i, thereafter A. Meineke (Berlin, 1849); for Strabo: S. L. Radt, Strabons Geographika: mit Übersetzung und Kommentar , 10 vols. (Göttingen, 2002 – 11); for the anonymous Hypotyposis Geographias:GGM ii. 494 – 509; for the Paraphrasis of Dionysius’ poem: where there is no further indication I have used the edition that Müller substantially reproduced from Bernhardy in GGM (ii. 409 – 25, cf. pp. xxxi f.), but on 1170 Ludwich’s edition, based on his own collation of fresh manuscripts and leaning heavily on T (Parisin. gr. 2723) (cf. Ludwich, 553 – 5); for the anonymous Periplus Maris Erythraei: L. Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei:
Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, 1989) (cf. GGM i. 257 – 365); for the anonymous Periplus Ponti Euxini: A. Diller, The Tradition of the Minor Greek
Geographers (Lancaster, Pa., 1952), 102 – 46; for the anonymous Stadiasmus Maris Magni , GGM i. 427 – 514.
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WORKS CITED IN ABBREVIATED FORM ACO
Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum, iussu Societatis scientiarum Argentoratensis, ed. E. Schwartz (Berlin, 1914 – ).
ANET
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament 3, ed. J. B. Pritchard (Princeton, 1969).
ANRW
Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung , ed. H. Temporini, W. Haase, et al. (Berlin, 1972 – ).
BNP
Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World , 15 vols., ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider (Leiden and Boston, 2002 – 10).
Buck – Petersen
C. D. Buck and W. Petersen, A Reverse Index of Greek Nouns and
Adjectives (Hildesheim, 1945). CA
Collectanea Alexandrina , ed. J. U. Powell (Oxford, 1925).
CAG
Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca
CCAG
Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum , edd. varr., 12 vols. (Brussels, 1898 – 1953).
CEG
Carmina Epigraphica Graeca , ed. P. A. Hansen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1983 – 9).
CGF
Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta , ed. G. Kaibel (Berlin, 1899).
Chandler
H. W. Chandler, A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation (Oxford, 21881).
CLE
Anthologia Latina: Pars Posterior . Carmina Latina Epigraphica , ed. F. Buecheler, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1895 – 7).
CMG
Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (Leipzig, 1908 – ), edd. varr.
ix
Diodore
Diodore de Sicile, Bibliothèque Historique, edd. varr. (Paris, 1972 – ); individual volumes are cited as P. Bertrac, Diodore, i.
(Livre I) etc. D. – S.
C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques
et romains : d'après les textes et les monuments , 5 vols. in 10 (Paris, 1877 – 1919).
EtGen
Etymologicum Genuinum . a – b ed. F. Lasserre and N. Livadaras, Etymologicum magnum genuinum: Symeonis etymologicum una cum Magna grammatica ; Etymologicum magnum auctum (Rome, 1976 – ).
EtMag
Etymologicum Magnum, seu verius Lexicon , ed. T. Gaisford (Oxford, 1848).
FGE
D. L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge, 1981).
FGrH
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker , ed. F. Jacoby (Leiden, 1923 – 58).
FHG
Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, ed. K. Müller (Paris, 1841 – 51).
Garland
The Garland of Philip , ed. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page (Cambridge, 1968).
GCS
Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte
GG
Grammatici Graeci, edd. varr.
GGM
Geographi Graeci Minores , i – ii, ed. C. Müller (Paris, 1855 – 61).
GL
Grammatici Latini, 8 vols., ed. H. Keil (Leipzig, 1857 – 80).
GLM
Geographi Latini Minores , ed. A. Riese (Heilbronn, 1878). x
HE
Hellenistic Epigrams, ed. A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page (Cambridge, 1965).
Jacques ii
J.-M. Jacques (ed.), Nicandre: Œ uvres. Tome II: Les Thériaques (Paris, 2007).
Jacques iii
J.-M. Jacques (ed.), Nicandre: Πuvres. Tome III: Les
Alexipharmaques (Paris, 2007). K. – B.
R. Kühner, rev. F. Blass, Ausführliche Grammatik der
griechischen Sprache , Erster Teil: Elementar- und Formenlehre 3, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1890 – 2). K. – G.
R. Kühner, rev. B. Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der
griechischen Sprache , Zweiter Teil: Satzlehre3, 2 vols. (Hanover, 1898 – 1904). Lasserre, Eudoxos
F. Lasserre (ed.), Die Fragmente des Eudoxos von Knidos:
herausgegeben, übersetzt und kommentiert (Berlin, 1966). Lasserre, Strabon
F. Lasserre (ed. and transl.), Strabon: Géographie , vols. i. (introduction, avec G. Aujac), iii – ix (Paris, 1969 – 81).
Lausberg
H. Lausberg, trans. M. T. Bliss, A. Jansen, and D. E. Orton,
Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study (Leiden, 1998).
LfrgrE
Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos , ed. B. Snell, H. J. Mette, et al. (Göttingen, 1955 – 2010).
LP
Select Papyri , iii: Literary Papyri, Poetry, ed. D. L. Page (Cambridge, MA, 1941).
Merkelbach – Stauber
R. Merkelbach and J. Stauber, Steinepigramme aus dem
griechischen Osten, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1998 – 2004). xi
Nonnos
Nonnos de Panopolis: Les Dionysiaques, edd. var., 19 vols. (Paris, 1976 – 2006); individual volumes are cited as F. Vian, Nonnos, i:
Chants I – II etc. PG
Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne
PGM
Papyri graecae magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri , ed. K. Preisendanz, 2nd edn., rev. A. Henrichs, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1973 – 4).
PL
Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
PMG
Poetae Melici Graeci , ed. D. L. Page (Oxford, 1962).
RE
Paulys Real-Encyclopaedie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft , ed. A. F. von Pauly, rev. G. Wissowa et al. (Stuttgart, 1893 – 1972).
RLAC
Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum , ed. T. Klauser et al. (Stuttgart, 1950 – ).
Roscher
W. H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexicon der griechischen und
römischen Mythologie , 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1884 – 1937). SH
Supplementum Hellenisticum, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones and P. J. Parsons (Berlin, 1983).
TLL
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig, 1900 – ).
Vian i
F. Vian (ed.), Apollonios de Rhodes: Argonautiques , i: Chants I – II (Paris, 1976).
Vian ii
id. (ed.), Apollonios de Rhodes: Argonautiques , ii: Chant III (Paris, 1980).
Vian iii
id. (ed.) Apollonios de Rhodes: Argonautiques , iii: Chant IV (Paris, 1981).
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PART ONE INTRODUCTION Helpe therefore, O thou sacred Imp of Jove, The Noursling of Dame Memorie his Deare, To whom those Rolles, layd up in Heaven above, And Records of Antiquitie appeare, To which no Wit of Man may comen neare; Helpe me to tell the Names of all those Floods, And all those Nymphes, which then assembled were To that great Banquet of the watry Gods, And all their sundry Kinds, and all their hid Abodes. (Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book IV, canto XI, st. x) Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! Wha t age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Book I, Chapter 8
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I. PRELIMINARIES A LL the world’s a text . . . . . . or so the postmodernists would have it. And for Dionysius of Alexandria, whose Periegesis of the Known World wraps the whole thing up in less than 1200 very cultivated hexameters, it quite literally is. The mainstream of ancient geography was literary, but the Periegesis is very literary even by those standards. Planting himself firmly in the tradition of ancient didactic poetry, but glancing frequently at epic and hymn along the way, the poet sets out to do for the earth what Aratus had already done for the heavens. Moreover, as he obligingly expounds his subject for a keen and receptive pupil, he presents himself as a Hesiod who is rich, not in personal experience, but in direct contact with the Muses. We are as far as can be from the world in which lack of eye-witness or first-hand experience of a subject was a matter for reproach. 1 Other geographical poems, certainly important for understanding the Periegesis’ background, advertise themselves as manageable digests which substitute for first-hand experience on the reader’s part, 2 but Dionysius goes still further. His untravelled narrator, borne aloft by inspiration, has no knowledge of his subject outside the belles lettres that his Muses represent. We ought to decide what we want from a text like this. Christian Jacob, who has published more on the Periegesis in the last thirty years than anyone else, has distinguished three possible ways of approaching it. 3 The first, ‘lettura referenzionale’, or positivist, studies how it marries up with external realities. The second, ‘lettura interna’, pays attention to matters of composition, structure, ‘la retorica propria’, and so on. The last, ‘lettura contestuale’, directs attention to its context in contemporary culture. What is at stake in deciding which to bring to bear on the Periegesis, or on any other text, is whether it is simply a ‘signifying system’ playing games with itself and with other texts, or there is any use in considering its stance vis-à-vis the world out there. 4 In this case, the poem’s literariness might well encourage the second and third approaches at the expense of the first, yet the first cannot just be given an opprobrious label (‘positivist’) and dismissed, for we might decide that an appreciation of the relationship between the world out there and classical literary representations of it is essential to understanding the strengths and weaknesses characteristic of ancient geography. There is a bend in the Nile at a certain place; what does it tell us about ancient conceptions of space that no ancient geographer registers it? A given feature of the landscape was there to be recognised; what does it say for the Periegesis that Dionysius has decided to pass it over, or that he has distorted it in some describable way? In other words, the text’s relationship to the reality it describes is a measure of the kind of observation we are 1
As it was, famously, for Polybius in his criticisms of Timaeus and Ephorus (12.25 d-h).
2
ps.-Scymn. 98 – 102; Dionysius of Byzantium, GGM ii. 1, ll.14 – 19.
3
Jacob 1985, 83 – 4.
4
Jacob 1990, 39. 3
to expect from it, a measure not to be forgone, whether the text is studied in its own right or as a representative of an ancient genre. Various kinds of ‘lettura contestuale’ have been practised on the Periegesis over the years. Scholars have tried to find contemporary significance in certain names: Hadrian in the repeated reference to the Adriatic; Antinous’ homeland (or Dionysius’ own) in the insignificant little river Rhebas; Hadrian’s family in the references to Gadeira /Cádiz.5 They have seen references to Hadrian’s journeys, and have proposed som e eyebrow-raisingly precise dates for the poem on the assumption that it can be connected to one of the emperor’s visits to Alexandria.6 The second acrostich, which mentions the god Hermes, has lent itself to various contextual interpretations, whether to Hadrian’s visit to Samothrace in 123 (with the poem itself written very shortly afterwards), or with the death of Antinous in 130 and his subsequent deification as Hermes (513 – 32 n.). More generally, the poem can be set against various backgrounds: the literary culture of Hadrian’s court, and perhaps the contemporary character of Dionysian cult, if indeed this can shed light on the god’s portrayal in the poem. 7 Over the last decade and a half a multicultural approach has become fashionable in Hellenistic poetry, in attempts to demonstrate the amenability of Alexandrian literature to native Egyptian mythological paradigms; that approach has now been extended to the 8 Periegesis as well. Something will be said about most of these questions. But the main aim is to understand the Periegesis both in its own terms and as a specimen of ancient geography — for which reason a fourth style of approach, ‘lettura comparativa’, may be added. This introductory chapter lays out some of the main backgrounds necessary for an appreciation of the Periegesis, and the next four consider the Periegesis’ sources and characteristic ways of handling those sources, its language, and relationships to the classical traditions of both didactic poetry and ethnography. A wide range of material has been brought to bear on the poem, in the further hope of shedding light on other areas —and that, given the text’s literary 5
Bowie 1990, 75; Birley, 253; Leo, 149; for Dionysius and the Rhebas, Suda d 1181.
6
Birley, 240 (stating as fact that Dionysius was one of the Alexandrian litterati in the vicinity of the emperor during his visit to Alexandria in 130), 252 – 3. For Leo, 161 – 6, the occasion of the poem was one of Hadrian’s visits to Alex andria, maybe as a special commission; Dionysius was one of the learned men of the Museum who entertained Hadrian during his stay. It was perhaps an e0pibath/rioj written for the arrival of the emperor in 124, or a propemptiko/j, after the death of Antinous and after the visit to Thebes in Nov. 130, but before his departure in spring 131. It was intended for oral delivery (cf. also 155 – 6), in the a0kroath/rion or w0dei=on. Although these interpretations, in my view, press too hard, the present work does assume a Hadrianic date. Heather White’s attempt to take the poem back to the reign of Augustus and Tiberius (‘On the date of Dionysios Periegetes’, Orpheus, 22 (2001), 288 – 90) has been refuted by Amato 2003 and Ilyushechkina 2010, 38 – 41. 7
Literary culture: Leo, 159 – 60; cult of Dionysus: Leo, 149, Counillon 2001 b, 107, 109 – 10, 112. 8
Amato 2005b (but see Ilyushechkina 2010, 47, 121). 4
affiliations, means above all the reception of the high Alexandrian poets in the imperial period. My ‘lettura contestuale’ refers sooner to liter ary, or literary-historical, than to historical context. It is of a different order of difficulty from ‘lettura interna’, on account of the paucity of existing studies and the enormous amount of work that still remains to do. Nevertheless, a final section draws together those findings which might contribute most to further studies on this neglected, yet central, question. Reefs are awaiting us in the oceans ahead. The Periegesis covers a huge amount of space — the whole earth — in less than twelve hundred lines, and in doing so is necessarily brief and economical. The point is to evoke, not so much the places themselves, as the reader’s awareness of them, literary associations and cultural memory. 9 The problem is to gauge how much weight a single word, or an epithet, can carry: in other words, to understand the relationship between the poem’s extreme economy of means and the enormous weight of cultural tradition that underlies it. 10 How many associations are carried in the penumbra of a single name? The question arises with every unembellished geographical name, whose historical, mythological, and other associations — often very rich — do not break the surface. Indeed, it arose already in Eustathius’ commentary on the poem without being posed as a problem, for Eustathius assumes that he is simply expanding whatever already was there: names have their backgrounds already built in. 11 But this is not the end of it, because questions also arise about silences and suppressions; about things that are not mentioned directly but are evoked, if at all, in a roundabout way; about the use of devices that both reveal and conceal. For example, Estelle Oudot has argued that although the Periegesis does not mention Athens, Greece’s most famous city is evoked through the mention of the Attic river, which figures in a famous passage of Plato’s Phaedrus; granted that allusion, further associations are also carried over from the Platonic dialogue that we are entitled to consider as reflections on Dionysius’ poetics. 12 The Periegesis tends to encourage such an approach, but neither confirms that these associations are present nor rules them out. We ought to be aware, if we proceed like this, that we have responded to the text’s imp licit encouragement to read in to it,13 that we are constructing meanings for ourselves. To take a different example, the city of Sinope is mentioned, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, and Dionysius tells the most extensive of his mythological stories about it. But the story turns out to be a composite of earlier myths, and the location is wrong. The real Sinope had a rich history, 9
On cultural memory, see Chaniotis, 255 – 9, with further bibliography in n. 9.
10
Compare Chaniotis, 256: ‘Cultural memory is usually expressed through a few keywords’; ibid. 262, writing of a fragment of an encomium on Athens pronounced by the Hellenistic historian and orator Hegesias of Rhodes: ‘He could afford to be merely allusive in his references, precisely because the sites, persons and events to which he referred were parts of the Athenian cultural memory.’ 11
Eustathius, GGM ii. 205 – 6; cf. Jacob 1981, 68 – 9.
12
423 – 5 n. Oudot also endorses Christian Jacob’s wish to see an allusion to Hadrian’s Panhellenion (also based in Athens) in 333. 13
As did ancient readers (410 n.). 5
