A Cabinet Of Greek Curiosities

by J. C. McKeown

  A man from Abdera [where the inhabitants were proverbially stupid] owed someone a little donkey, but didn’t have one to give, so he asked to be allowed to give two mules instead (Philogelos Joke Book 127). This may be Philogelos’s best joke, but the wit is lost in translation: a donkey is an ὄνος (onos), and a mule, bred from a donkey and a horse, is a ἡμίονος (hemionos, a “half-donkey”).

  Classical texts suffered particularly in the Victorian era from bowdlerization, expurgation, and other forms of censorship designed to protect delicate sensibilities, no matter what the cost to the actual content. Consider, for example, this version of Diogenes Laertius 6.94, from The lives and opinions of eminent philosophers, by Diogenes Laërtius, Literally translated by C. D. Yonge, London (1853):

  Metrocles was the brother of Hipparchia, and though he had formerly been a pupil of Theophrastus, he had profited so little by his instructions that once, thinking that while listening to a lecture on philosophy he had disgraced himself by his inattention, he fell into despondency and shut himself up in his house, intending to starve himself to death. Accordingly, when Crates heard of it, he came to him, having been sent for, and eating a number of lupins on purpose, he persuaded him by numbers of arguments that he had done no harm; for that it was not to be expected that a man should not indulge his natural inclinations and habits; and he comforted him by showing him that he, in a similar case, would certainly have behaved in a similar manner. And after that he became a pupil of Crates and a man of great eminence as a philosopher.

  No one could be offended by this translation, but it is perhaps not quite literal enough to make any sense. The point may be clearer in this version:

  Metrocles, Hipparchia’s brother, was once a pupil of Theophrastus, the Peripatetic. One day, because he was ill, he farted during a lecture and was so depressed that he locked himself up at home, intending to starve himself to death. When Crates heard about the incident, he came to visit Metrocles. He deliberately ate some lupines and then tried to persuade him by various arguments that he had done nothing to be ashamed of; it would have been a miracle if he had not passed gas, for that was only natural. He finally managed to cheer Metrocles up by farting, consoling him by pointing out that they both did what they did for the same reason. Metrocles subsequently began to attend Crates’s lectures and became quite a distinguished philosopher.

  Discussing this passage, the article on Porde (“Fart”) in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft observes that, while Metrocles was deep in philosophical thought, an a posteriori noise escaped him (Vol. 22.1 col. 237). I do not recall noticing any other such frivolous witticisms in over forty years of consulting this formidable work of scholarship. The updated, and much abbreviated (eighteen volumes as opposed to eighty-three), Neue Pauly is positively whimsical by comparison, even offering a hoax article on the nonexistent sport of apopudobalia, allegedly a prototype version of soccer.

  In 1891, the 54th year of Queen Victoria’s reign, an edition of the mimiambs of the almost entirely forgotten poet Herodas was published in England, based on a papyrus recently found in Egypt. In the sixth poem, and also, but less overtly, the seventh, two ladies discuss the purchase of a red leather dildo. Scholars of the period persuaded themselves that the object in question was a bodice, a hat, or a shoe, but M. S. Buck observed in his limited edition (New York 1921) that “this is puris omnia pura [‘to the pure, all things are pure’] with a vengeance. It is to be hoped that these scholars, realizing the grave danger lurking in references of this sort, have long since turned their attention to butterflies and flowers.”

  Lysistrata: Ladies, if we are going to force our men to make peace, we must refrain—

  Cleonice: From what? Tell us.

  Lysistrata: So you’ll do it?

  Cleonice: We’ll do it, even if it means our death.

  Lysistrata: Well then, we must refrain from cock.—Why do you turn away? Where are you off to? Why grimace like that and shake your heads?

  (Aristophanes Lysistrata 120–26)

  In 1912 a reviewer of the latest edition of the widely read translation of Aristophanes by Benjamin Bickley Rogers observed: “Many things that stand unashamed in the Greek are decently clad or put away in the English.” Rogers renders Lysistrata’s decisive term as “the joys of Love.” In that same year a version published anonymously (but supposed, though I do not know why, to be by Oscar Wilde, who had died in 1900) has “we must refrain from the male altogether….” Aristophanes’s term here, πέος (peos), has the same Indo-European root as “penis,” but it is vulgar and obscene, occurring eighteen times in Aristophanes, but not even once in the very much larger corpus of Galen’s medical writings. Galen even avoids the perfectly decorous, but rather direct, φαλλός (phallos), preferring the more delicate αἰδοῖον (aedoeon, “thing to be discreet about”).

  NAMES

  Quite contrary to Greek custom, the Ptolemaic rulers of Hellenistic Egypt quickly adopted the pharaonic practice of marrying their sisters or close relatives. All fifteen of these Macedonian kings were called Ptolemy, and their consorts were all called Arsinoe, or Berenice, or Cleopatra. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (“Brother or, as here, Sister Loving”), for example, was married first to Arsinoe, the daughter of Lysimachus, the ruler of Macedon, but subsequently to Arsinoe, his own full sister, who had been married to Lysimachus. (For this Lysimachus, see also p. 78.)

  A woman tending her phallus-patch.

  Lycophron was famous at that time not so much for his poetry as for his anagrams, such as Πτολεμαῖος ἀπὸ μέλιτος (Ptolemaeos apo melitos, “Ptolemy = from honey”), ’Aρσινόη ἴον Ἥρας (Arsinoe ion Heras, “Arsinoe = violet of Hera”) (Scholion to Lycophron Alexandra ad init.). Πτολεμαῖος actually means “warlike,” and Ἀρσινόη means “virile minded.” The play on his name will have been the more appropriate if Ptolemy was aware that the bee was the hieroglyph denoting the ruler of Lower Egypt. It is not clear how much the new Macedonian rulers of Egypt knew about hieroglyphs, but six hundred years later the soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus recorded that the hieroglyphic system represents a king by the figure of a bee making honey, indicating thereby that a ruler should have stings and not just sweetness (17.4).

  Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II.

  Arsinoe, who was apparently prone to vomiting, will have felt rather less flattered by a guest of Lysimachus, her first husband, when he misquoted a line from an unknown tragedy, changing κακῶν κατάρχεις τήνδε μοσαν εἰσάγων “You begin troubles by bringing here this Muse [tende Mousan]” to κακῶν κατάρχεις τήνδ’ ἐμοσαν εἰσάγων “You begin troubles by bringing here this vomiting woman [tend’ emousan]” (Plutarch Table Talk 634e).

  At the end of many of the biographies in his Lives of the Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius lists prominent intellectual figures with the same name as the philosopher whose life he has just recounted. There are, for example, four more Socrates (one a philosopher), four more Platos (three of whom were philosophers, including one who was a pupil of Aristotle), and seven more Aristotles. Four distinguished philosophers share the name Zeno: Zeno of Elea, famous for paradoxes (see p. 165); Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism; Zeno of Sidon, also a Stoic; and another Zeno of Sidon, who may have been the head of the Epicurean school, the chief rival to Stoicism. A late 3rd-century B.C. tragedian rejoiced in, or labored under, the name Homer, as also did a grammarian of uncertain date, who wrote poetry in many genres (Suda s.vv. Myro, Sellius).

  Pygela is a city in Ionia, so called because some of Agamemnon’s men stopped there when they were suffering from an ailment of the buttocks [πυγαί, pygae] (Theopompus frg. 59). This rather embarrassing name appears on the 5th-century Athenian tribute lists, but less than a century later the city’s coins are stamped Phygela, and a new explanation is given for the new name: Phygela, as the name suggests, was founded by fugitives [Latin fugitivi, Greek
φυγάδες (phygades)] (Pliny Natural History 5.114).

  Agamemnon’s men with sore buttocks are specified as “rowers” in a later version of the story (Etymologicum Magnum 695). Cushions came to be standard equipment on ships, with the technical name being πηρέσιον (hyperesion, literally “the thing under the rower”). Early in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans and their allies secretly crossed the Isthmus of Corinth, intending to man forty ships waiting in Megara harbor and make a surprise raid on Piraeus; each of the rowers carried across not just his oar and his rowlock strap, but also his cushion (Thucydides History 2.93). Broken planks and spars are mentioned as flotation devices after shipwrecks and sea battles, but not cushions.

  There is an island called Pordoselene, with a city on it by the same name, and there is another island facing the city; it also has the same name…. Some people say that, for the sake of decency, these places should be called Poroselene (Strabo Geography 13.2). Pordoselene was thought to mean “Fart Moon.” Strabo goes on to suggest adjustments to the names of several other places that might also be supposed to be derived from πέρδομαι (perdomai, “pass gas”; πέρδομαι and “fart” have the same Indo-European root). The larger island’s modern Greek name is the much nicer Moschonisi (“Calf Island”); since it is now in Turkey, however, its official name is Ali Bey Adasi (“Ali Bey Island”), in honor of the Turkish general whose troops occupied it in the war of 1922–1923.

  By the early 6th century B.C., Greek poleis large and small were beginning to mint their own coinage, often representing the names of their communities pictorially rather than, or as well as, in writing. For example:

  • Aegospotami is denoted by a goat (αἴξ, aix).

  • Ancyra, by an anchor (ἄγκυρα, ancyra).

  • Alopeconnesus, by a fox (ἀλώπηξ, alopex).

  • Aspendus, by a slinger (σφενδόνη, sphendone, “sling”).

  • Astacus, by a lobster (ἀστακός, astacos).

  • Delphi, by a dolphin (δελφίς, delphis).

  • Leontini, by a lion (λέων, leon).

  • Meliteia, by a bee (μέλισσα, melissa).

  • Melos, by an apple (μῆλον, melon).

  • Phocaea, by a seal (φώκη, phoce).

  • Rhodes, by a rose (ῥόδον, rhodon).

  • Selinus, by a stalk of celery (σέλινον, selinon).

  • Tauromenium, by a bull (ταρος, tauros).

  • Trapezus, by a table (τράπεζα, trapeza).

  Sparta, with its iron bars instead of coinage (see p. 71), plays with no such visual puns, and surviving coins from Phygela (see p. 240) make do with Artemis on the obverse and a bull on the reverse.

  A rooster on a coin from the Sicilian city of Himera, probably punning on the resemblance between ‘Iμέρα (Himera) and ἡμέρα (hemera, “day”), that is, alluding to a cock crowing at dawn.

  Demosthenes as a herm.

  Ephialtes is a not-uncommon masculine proper name meaning “nightmare.” In postclassical and modern Greek, it retains the same meaning. Writing in the 7th century A.D., Paul of Aegina is uncertain whether an ephialtes is so called after a man or because those who suffer nightmares imagine that someone is jumping on top of them [ἐφάλλεσθαι (ephallesthai, “jump on”)] (Epitome of Medicine 3.15). The man after whom nightmares may have been named is Ephialtes of Malis, the traitor who led Xerxes’s ten thousand Immortals over a mountain path to seal the fate of the defenders at Thermopylae (Herodotus Histories 7.213).

  Aeschines, Demosthenes’s archenemy in the cut-and-thrust of 4th-century Athenian political debate, calls him “Batalos” and “Argas” (On the Embassy 99). An argas is a type of snake. At Against Timarchus 126, Aeschines pretends to suppose that Batalos is an endearing diminutive (“Little Stutterer,” from βατταρίζω [battarizo, ”stutter”]), given to Demosthenes by his nurse, but Plutarch notes that Batalos seems to be what the Athenians at that time called an unseemly part of the body (Life of Demosthenes 4). After suggesting rather naively that “Batalos” refers to Demosthenes’s large buttocks, the scholiast to Against Timarchus goes on to note the homosexual connotations of identifying βάταλος as a vulgar equivalent to πρωκτός (proctos, “rectum”).

  Demosthenes is a little chap, consisting of nothing but syllables and a tongue

  (Demades frg. 89).

  XXIV

  THE SOROS

  The word σωρός (soros) means “heap” and reflects the particularly miscellaneous nature of this final chapter’s contents. Whatever seemed worth including in the book, but could not easily be presented elsewhere, is swept up here. This title may seem casual, but it has a fine precedent as the name of a collection of early Hellenistic epigrams, presumably exquisite in their composition, but now lost. This whole book is a fairly random collection, so lack of coherence may perhaps be excused.

  Coherence and relevance were not always of prime concern to Greek authors. Pausanias, for example, is usually a fairly well-organized writer. He makes a very emphatic announcement that he has omitted the achievements of Diagoras and the other members of his athletic family (see p. 110), “for fear they should seem irrelevant” (Guide to Greece 4.24). Such information would not have been conspicuous by its absence. On the other hand, he cheerfully admits, “I have inserted into my account of Phocis [on the central Greek mainland] a long digression about Sardinia, because it is an island with which the Greeks are so unfamiliar” (10.17).

  If you pluck one hair from a man’s head, does he become bald? What about two hairs? Or three? The same question arises with a heap of wheat. What if one grain of the wheat is taken away, or two, and so on? It is not possible to state when it first stops being a heap (Aspasius On Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 56).

  We should ignore the patently absurd theory that Hermes taught humans to speak. Nor should we heed those philosophers who maintain that names were given to things systematically, for that is ridiculous—or rather, it’s more ridiculous than anything ridiculous…. At a time when no kings, no writing, no languages existed yet, no single individual could have gathered multitudes of people together and taught them the way an elementary schoolteacher does, touching each thing and saying, “let this be called a ‘rock,’ and this a ‘stick,’ and this a ‘person,’ or a ‘dog,’ or a ‘cow,’ or a ‘donkey’” (Diogenes of Oenoanda frg. 12). This is part of an inscription created by Diogenes in his hometown in southwest Turkey. It contains various significant Epicurean tracts, and when intact, it was bigger than any other inscription known from antiquity, being almost ninety feet long and comprising some twenty-five thousand words. About one-third of it has been recovered so far, with substantial numbers of new fragments still being found every digging season.

  Why doesn’t everyone speak the same language? Is it because languages were first devised through the imitation of animal noises, the way little children imitate cows mooing and dogs barking, and because there are many noises produced by the same animal, different people chose to imitate different sounds? (Ps.-Alexander Problems 4.88).

  The same collection raises many other such problems, with the questions often being interesting even without reference to the proposed answers. For example:

  Why is it that, whereas practically all other such actions can take place equally well in the daytime or at night, we never sneeze during the night? (4.40)

  Why does rubbing our eyes stop us from sneezing? (4.41)

  Why is it that sneezing has a sacred significance, but other emissions of air, whether passing gas or belching, do not? (4.50)

  Why do humans sneeze more than other animals? (4.51)

  Why do people breathe less frequently in the winter than in the summer? (4.48)

  Why do we hear better when we are holding our breath than when we are exhaling (which is why hunters urge one another not to pant)? (4.97)

  Africanus devised a test that would detect thieves. Cut off and pickle tadpoles’ tongues and th
en, as need arises, mix them up with barley and feed this to those who are suspected of having taken whatever is being looked for. He claims that the person who took it falls into a sort of trance and makes a clear admission of his guilt. He calls this food “thief detector” (Michael Psellus On Strange Things 32).

  Here is how to make a fruit imitate the face of a person or of an animal. Make a model of the face, cover it all over with plaster or clay, and let it dry. Then cut it in two with a sharp tool, producing a front and back half that fit together. Dry them and bake them as you would a pot. When the fruit is half grown, put the molds round it and secure them carefully, so that they will not come apart as the fruit increases in size. Pears, apples, pomegranates, citrons all take on the features of such molds (Farm Work 10.9). My attempts to revive this lost art have met with very limited success.

  Since the baths are of no practical value, we should avoid them. In the old days, people called them “human laundries,” for they caused the body to wrinkle and grow old prematurely (St. Clement of Alexandria Paedagogus 3.9.46).

  If we fail to pay the rent, the landlord removes the door and the roof-tiles and blocks up the well, and we vacate the house. Likewise, we vacate our little bodies when nature, our landlady, takes away our eyes, our ears, our hands, and our feet (Bion of Borysthenes frg. 68).

  In contrast to the Athenians (see p. 59), the inhabitants of some cities, most notably Abdera and Cyme, were proverbially stupid: