Born: Tarentum (now Taranto, Italy); fl. early third century B.C.E.
Died: Place and date unknown
PRINCIPAL POETRY
Epigrams, third century B.C.E.
OTHER LITERARY FORMS
Leonidas of Tarentum (lee-AHN-ihd-uhs uhv tuh-REHN-tuhm) is not known to have written anything but epigrams.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Although a poet of the second rank in a period of scant literary achievement, Leonidas of Tarentum is notable for his attention to classes of people who had been ignored before the Hellenistic era. He was greatly admired by later epigrammatists, as is shown by scores of imitations produced in subsequent generations. More than any other Hellenistic writer, Leonidas can be credited with the expansion of poetry’s vision to include the poor, the farmers, hunters, fishermen, tradesmen, merchant seamen, prostitutes, weavers, and others whose lives, although in no way remarkable, bore the common stamp of humanity in their labors. Although he did not limit his scope to the working world, Leonidas made proletarian life his special preserve, much as Theocritus made singing shepherds his poetic domain. Judging by the number of his immediate imitators, in fact, it would appear that Leonidas had a greater influence in his own time than the more celebrated Theocritus. When Vergil revived the pastoral, Theocritus had inspired barely two imitators (Bion and Moschus), whereas Leonidas’s followers, both before and after Vergil’s time, were legion.
The great paradox of Leonidas’s achievement is his remarkable affinity for elaborate language to describe simple people. His poetry is full of ornamental adjectives and novel compounds and is characterized by a vocabulary that appears nowhere else in ancient Greek. His style is commonly characterized as baroque, exuberant in its highly calculated arrangement of words and ideas. Leonidas is an excellent Hellenistic example of the phenomenon of a writer vastly popular and influential in his own time but virtually unread today. Modern estimations vary widely: Gilbert Highet has called him “the greatest Greek epigrammatist of the Alexandrian era,” but C. R. Beye finds him “heavy-handed, pedantic, and [overly] detailed”; Marcello Gigante sees him as the high-minded prophet of a new egalitarian society, and A. S. F. Gow as “a competent versifier, [but] hardly ever more than that.” Whatever his merits as a poet, Leonidas deserves a careful reading by anyone who wishes to understand the dynamics of the age that gave classical Humanism its definitive shape.
BIOGRAPHY
Leonidas of Tarentum’s biography, like that of most Hellenistic poets, is strictly conjectural and, in the absence of contemporary references to him, is completely dependent on the evidence of his epigrams, in which he says very little about his own life. Most authorities place him in the first or second generation of Hellenistic poets, either early in the third century B.C.E., with Asclepiades, Callimachus, and Theocritus, or nearer the middle of the century, closer to such poets as Dioscorides and Antipater, whose epigrams echo his style. An epigram purporting to be his own epitaph (epigram 715 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 93 G.-P.) represents him as a wanderer who died far from his native Tarentum, itself a plausible claim, because his one hundred-odd surviving epigrams represent people and places scattered all over the Greek-speaking world, the eastern Mediterranean littoral loosely referred to as the oikoumenē.
Though a native of Italy, Leonidas (like the Sicilian Theocritus) was in every sense of the word a member of the Greek world. His city (the modern Taranto) was colonized at the end of the eighth century B.C.E. by Spartans, and from the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. it was the leading Greek city of southern Italy. By the end of the next century, however, Tarentum came under pressure from Italian tribes to the north and depended on various mercenary leaders for protection. The last of these was Rome’s famous adversary Pyrrhus, who left Tarentum to the Romans in 275. From about that time until the Hannibalic wars at the end of the century, the city regained stability and prosperity under Roman rule. Leonidas’s supposed departure from Tarentum has been linked to the period of insecurity early in the third century, though, like other literary and intellectual figures from the Greek west, he would have been naturally attracted to such Greek capitals as Athens and Alexandria. His epigrams do not, however, suggest residence in any particular place, but rather an itinerant existence and a life shared mainly with the rural poor. Would-be biographers have leapt to the conclusion that Leonidas was in fact a destitute wanderer by choice who wrote about people with whom he shared his meager existence. This speculation is strengthened by occasional suggestions in Leonidas’s epigrams that he was an admirer of the Cynic philosopher Diogenes and shared Cynic beliefs concerning poverty, simplicity, and the frailty of human life. It is possible that he followed in the footsteps of the popular Cynic philosopher Crates, adopting poverty as a way of life and traveling about the oikoumenē spreading a gospel of voluntary poverty and independence and consoling the victims of hardship, perhaps by celebrating their simple lives in his epigrams. Crates himself is said to have written poetry as a vehicle of his teaching, and some students of Leonidas see him as playing a similar prophetic role in his poetry.
Such speculation is difficult to reconcile with the highly sophisticated style of Leonidas’s actual poems, which are seldom as austere or simple as the people he liked to write about. There is also the cosmopolitan range of his subjects, which include the most celebrated artistic, literary, and intellectual events of his time and, indeed, of previous generations. Wherever he spent his time, Leonidas did not isolate himself from the tastes or the events and concerns of his age. The public for whom he wrote was urban and well educated, with a sophisticated nostalgia for the simple lives of peasants and rural tradespeople. Like Theocritus’s shepherds, Leonidas’s working folk are as much a product of imagination as of observation, and there is no need to speculate that he spent most of his life among them. In short, no solid facts can be drawn from the epigrams to illuminate the mystery of Leonidas’s life.
ANALYSIS
It is not known in what form Leonidas of Tarentum published his epigrams. A large number were published after his death in the Garland of Meleager, an anthology of epigrams put together early in the first century B.C.E., but it is probable that Meleager himself depended on earlier collections. Meleager’s Garland is lost, although large parts of it were included when Constantine Cephalas, a church official in the palace at Constantinople in the late ninth century C.E., made a larger anthology of Greek epigrams. Within a century, Cephalas’s collection (itself also lost) became a source of a still much larger anthology of Greek epigrams from the Byzantine, Roman, and earlier Greek eras, now known as the Greek Anthology or the Palatine Anthology. Cephalas’s collection was also the source of an independent selection of epigrams put together in 1301 by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes. Eight or nine epigrams by Leonidas are extant only in the Planudean Anthology. The Palatine Anthology is so called because of its rediscovery in the Count Palatine’s library at Heidelberg in 1606; modern editions are based on that tenth century codex as supplemented by the later Planudean collection. The numbering system used for references is either that of the Palatine Anthology (AP.) or that of the standard edition, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams (1965), edited by A. S. F. Gow and D. L. Page (G.-P.).
THE EPIGRAM FORM
Historically and etymologically, an epigram is an inscription on something, usually a tomb, a statue, or a dedicatory plaque. At an early stage, epigrams were sometimes set to verse, and in time it was customary to write them in elegiac couplets consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a shorter pentameter line. The conciseness required of an inscription on metal or stone was a special challenge to the first epigrammatists, and from these circumstances evolved a miniature literary form that became extremely popular in the Hellenistic age, whose reading public was tired of rambling heroic poetry and prized concise workmanship.
One effect of this development was that by Hellenistic times, the epigram had become more or less independent of its origins as an inscription, not being intended for actual writing on anything more substantial than a piece of paper; still, it sometimes retained vestiges of its origins by masquerading in the form of an inscribed dedication or epitaph.
Newtypes were also invented: The epideictic, or display, epigram is a versified comment about a statue, poem, or any other object, such as a fig tree or a carved piece of incense. The love epigram is a short poem about love, often not even ostensibly inscriptional or memorial in character. The protreptic, hortatory, or admonitory epigram is likewise not formally associated with an object; it is simply a versified bit of wisdom—“what oft was said but ne’er so well expressed”—usually in Hellenistic times a commonplace of popular Stoic, Cynic, or Epicurean philosophy. The tone as well as the type could vary, from somber to declamatory, playful, or mocking.
GREEK ANTHOLOGY
Leonidas of Tarentum’s epigrams are arguably all epideictic, although most of them take the form of an epitaph or a dedication. If any were actually inscribed, however, it was probably after the fact and beyond the intentions of the author. The Greek Anthology preserves them, scattered among epigrams by other authors, under three main categories: Book 7, devoted to epitaphs or sepulchral epigrams, includes the largest number; book 6, containing dedicatory epigrams, has nearly as many; fifteen are preserved as epideictic epigrams in book 9. These three books of the Greek Anthology account for nearly all of Leonidas’s epigrams, with a dozen others distributed elsewhere, chiefly in Planudes’ collection. The assignment of categories in the Greek Anthology is often careless, however, and is useful only as the most general guide to the kind of poems that Leonidas wrote.
RURAL THEMES
Too much attention to Leonidas’s special interest in peasants, artisans, and the poor can obscure the fact that these subjects account for scarcely more than one-third of his epigrams. He can be credited with the “discovery” of simple folk as a subject of epigram, and he made himself their poet laureate, so to speak, but he did not limit himself to that subject any more than Theocritus limited himself to the poetic shepherds that made him famous. As has already been noted, Leonidas’s complex style seems made for purposes other than the depiction of simple folk.
A survey of Leonidas’s poems reveals, more than anything else, a love of complexity and variety. His work is a miscellany of people, places, and events that would seem novel to his city readers: They enjoyed reading about subjects outside their usual cosmopolitan ambit in Tarentum, Syracuse, Athens, or Alexandria. Hence the prominence of rural artisans, seamen, and the countryside and the significant absence of urban scenes and subjects. Hellenistic life was concentrated as never before in the cities, but taste was for anything but the here and now. Hence, also, the love of paradoxes, novelties, and curiosity items in Leonidas. He had no special loyalty to the class of people he put in his epigrams, no political posture, and no philosophical ideology with which to indoctrinate his readers. Everything was subordinated to writing an epigram that his audience might find interesting, clever, and unconventional.
TIMELESSNESS
For these reasons, Johannes Geffcken’s attempts to read historical allusions into Leonidas and Gigante’s discovery of revolutionary protosocialist sentiment in the epigrams has had a cool reception among students of Hellenistic poetry. Leonidas is anything but topical; his epigrams, although often ostensibly tied to specific events, such as a fisherman’s death or the dedication to Bacchus of some casks of wine, are almost always timeless or look back to an event in the distant past.
A small number of epigrams may be exceptional in this regard, such as a pair of quatrains dedicating spoils taken from Tarentum’s ancient enemies, the Lucanians (epigrams 129 and 131 in book 6 AP. and Leonidas 34 and 35 G.-P.), but Leonidas’s language is not specific enough to permit a definite dating within his probable lifetime; the epigrams may well be epideictic and patriotic rather than specific to a certain battle. An epigram on the occasion of Antigonus Gonatas’s defeat by Pyrrhus in 273 B.C.E. (epigram 130 in book 6 AP. or Leonidas 95 G.-P.) is a much better candidate for specific contemporary dating, if the ascription to Leonidas is correct.
Of the poets and artists celebrated in some eleven epigrams, only one belongs to Leonidas’s own century: Aratus, the author of a poem on astronomy, the Phainomena, written shortly after 277 B.C.E. In his tendency to avoid the contemporary, Leonidas is like other poets of the third century: They preferred to write about the timeless or the mythical, and they tended to find only the poets and artists of earlier generations to be fit subjects for their praise.
ESCAPISM
This affinity with things set apart from the poet and his audience was not entirely new to Greek poetry; Homer wrote about events that took place nearly five centuries before his own time, and the Greek tragedians used even older myths for their plots. However, the comedies of Aristophanes were unabashedly topical at the end of the fifth century B.C.E., and in the fourth century, Menander’s comedies were also set in contemporary times (although they were not as politically topical). A certain escapism distinguishes Hellenistic poetry from that of earlier periods. Although some of their classical predecessors had used remote settings and characters only as a background for the presentation of their own immediate concerns and controversies, the Hellenistic poets— Leonidas, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Theocritus—used similarly removed situations as a means of turning away from their own milieu, which held little interest for them, to worlds more to their liking.
POETRY AS CRAFT
As a corollary of this impulse, art was cultivated for art’s sake rather than for the traditional purposes of education and inspiration. When it inspired, it inspired disengagement rather than the heroic commitment that was typical, say, of Sophoclean tragedy. Poetry came to be viewed more as a craft than as a vehicle for great ideas. The many epigrams that Leonidas and his contemporaries composed in praise of ancient poets and artists suggest something like a cult of the artist whose art transcends rather than reflects. At the same time, they felt inferior to the geniuses of the past, and, rather than try to compete with them in epic or tragic poetry, the better poets sought uncharted territory for themselves, new kinds of poetry in which they would not be in the shadow of the grand masters of the past. With something of a pioneering spirit, every poet of talent sought to bring his readers something new and distinctive. In this way, Hellenistic poetry was a means of escaping the past as well as the present.
SUBJECT MATTER
Leonidas’s novel attention to common people attracted many imitators—and, one must assume, a large audience. Some of what he provided his readers is now found in “human interest” journalism: “Man Half-Eaten by Sea Monster Buried Today” (epigram 506 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 65 G.-P.), “Lion Takes Refuge with Herdsmen” (epigram 221 in book 6 AP. or Leonidas 53 G.-P.), “Four Sisters Die in Childbirth” (epigram 463 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 69 G.-P.). Others are less sensational curiosities, such as a die carved on a gambler’s tombstone (epigram 422 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 22 G.-P.) or a fisherman who dies a natural death after a lifetime in a perilous trade (epigram 295 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 20 G.-P.).
Most of Leonidas’s subjects are bland in themselves: Three sisters dedicate their spinning and weaving implements to Athena on retiring from their labors (epigram 289 in book 6 AP. or Leonidas 42 G.-P.); a gardener prays to the nymphs to see that his garden is well watered (epigram 320 in book 9 AP. or Leonidas 6 G.-P.). The tone of such imaginary epitaphs and dedications is predictably calm; rarely does Leonidas inject the emotion expressed in epigram 466 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 71 G.-P., where a father grieves for his son, dead at eighteen. More often, there is a humorous note of mockery, as in the imaginary epitaph of a lady who drank too much and has a cup on her tomb: Her only regret in death is that the cup is empty (epigram 455 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 68 G.-P.). There are other joke epigrams, such as epigrams 236 and 261 in book 1 AP. or Leonidas 83 and 84 G.-P., in which a statue of the tutelary god Priapus threatens to abuse troublemakers with his overgrown phallus.
Sometimes an epigram will be built around a paradox: a cult statue of Aphrodite bearing warlike gear (epigram 320 in book 9 AP. or Leonidas 24 G.-P.); a figure of Eros carved in frankincense that will be burned, although not with the fires of love (epigram 179 in book 9 AP. or Leonidas 28 G.-P.). For the most part, Leonidas avoids erotic topics, although they were a favorite preoccupation in nearly all Hellenistic art and literature. He shows a greater interest in the commonplaces of Cynic philosophy; his longest poem is a sepulchral elegy of sixteen lines made up of Cynic sentiments on the frailty of life (epigram 472 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 77 G.-P.). Leonidas is not always consistent in his Cynic views, however, especially on the subject of poverty. Sometimes he praises it in good Cynic fashion because it implies independence and self-sufficiency, but in a rare autobiographical moment he prays that Aphrodite will save him from his “hateful poverty” (epigram 300 in book 6 AP. or Leonidas 36 G.-P.). Moreover, he is as ready to make fun of a ragged Cynic guru (Sochares in epigrams 293 and 298 in book 6 AP. or Leonidas 54 to 55 G.-P.) as he is to mock a man who goes to his grave without ever drinking too much (Eubulus or “Wiseman,” in epigram 452 in book 7 AP. or Leonidas 67 G.-P.). Less a philosopher than a poet, Leonidas shifts his point of view to suit his subject.
CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATION
Without reading Leonidas’s epigrams in the original Greek, one is not likely to understand why they were read, copied, and imitated, even by generations whose tastes were not those of the modern world, because so much of Leonidas’s art is invested in his use of language itself. The literary qualities most admired by Hellenistic readers and authors were highly formal, with relatively little emphasis being placed on the substance of a piece of writing. What mattered was not so much what one said, but how well one said it.
In translation, most of Leonidas’s poetry will seem intolerably bland—as it will even in Greek, so long as one reads for propositional content. To read Leonidas as his admirers did, one must read through Hellenistic eyes focused on felicity of phrasing, effective manipulation of word order (which is much more flexible in Greek than in English), freshness of diction, and creative management of the reader’s expectations to stimulate curiosity, evoke surprise, and elicit humor. In his subordination of content to form, Leonidas (like many of his contemporaries) can be called a poet’s poet. Christopher Dawson has shown by close analysis of several epigrams how successfully Leonidas exploited his material for maximum effect and, in particular, how he arranged his epigrams for a climactic focus at the end. His creation of poems leading up to a play of wit at the end took the epigram a step closer to the modern form first fully realized by the Roman poet Martial.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bing, Peter, and Jon Bruss, eds. Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram. Boston: Brill, 2007. Part of the Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies series, this work brings together many experts to create an introduction to all aspects of the epigram. Provides context and touches on Leonidas.
Clack, Jerry. Asclepiades of Samos and Leonidas of Tarentum: The Poems. Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy, 1999. A collection and translation of the complete extant works of these two Greek epigrammatists, who set the course for this particular genre of poetry. As the book points out, for Leonidas the poetic form of the epigram went beyond the purely personal feelings of the author and allowed for social commentary, often alluding to the suffering and miseries of the poor, the infirm, and the aged.
Fowler, Barbara Hughes. The Hellenistic Aesthetic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. A general survey of the artistic thought and movements of the period that produced Leonidas. Although slight in its treatment of the poet and his individual poems, it is valuable for placing him and his work into an overall context.
Gutzwiller, Katheryn. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A full-length study of the later, more literary Greek epigrams written by professional poets such as Leonidas. Gutzwiller traces the themes in Leonidas’s work, including death, eroticism, and morality, and comments particularly on his epigram for the sponge-fisher Tharsys, attacked and halfeaten by a shark and so buried on both land and sea.
White, Heather. New Essays in Hellenistic Poetry. Amsterdam: Gieben, 1985. A good study of Leonidas and his contemporaries. The essay on Leonidas’s work is useful, although somewhat technical in its examinations of the poetic and linguistic devices of the works of Leonidas. This is the sort of resource best used in conjunction with other more general studies of the poet and his writing.
Daniel H. Garrison