Absent Muse, Epichoric Memory

Denver Graninger (University of Tennessee)

The extension of performative context caused by the publication of metrical inscriptions in archaic Greece had profound implications for the manner in which poetic memory was created. In the absence of a Muse and at a distance from the symposium or the public festival, upon what authority could inscribed memory rely? In the case of funerary texts, archaic responses to this challenge include: 1) Evaluation of the deceased with the moral lexicon of the symposium; 2) Assimilation of the deceased to Homeric models; 3) Reference to the idealization of the deceased in material form, perhaps as a koros or kore.

Against this background, this paper will present the idiosyncratic response of ed. pr. I. Andreou, AD 41 (1986) A 425-446 (SEG 41.540A), a fragmentary 10 line funerary elegy from sixth-century Ambracia which, apart from its description of the dead as “good” (eslous) in line 1, does not participate in any of the strategies listed above: The dead are depicted in a decidedly unheroic light and there is no conclusive evidence that they were materially represented in the vicinity of the monument. Instead, the text derives its authority from an awareness of its own reperformative potential which culminates in the syntactically ambiguous address to (of?) the reader(s): iste politai. Both “You know, citizens” and “Citizens, know!” are valid translations of the phrase and both senses are operative when viewed diachronically. The stone at first admonishes its audience in the imperative, then, in subsequent encounters, confirms the knowledge of which it was the source. The text’s pointed reminiscence of the knowledge of the Homeric (e.g., Il. 2.485) and Hesiodic (e.g., Theog. 27-8) Muses reflects its awareness of the epic paradigm, but, by situating this knowledge within a civic context, the inscription “closes the gap” between past and present in a manner more akin to nascent epichoric history than epic.