Epigram and the “age of gold”: Paulus Silentiarius, A.P. 5.217, and the Classical Tradition

Angela L. Gosetti-Murrayjohn (University of Mary Washington)

Forty amatory epigrams by the Byzantine poet, Paul the Silentiary, are preserved in the fifth book of the Palantine Anthology from The Cycle of Agathias. While Paulus’ ecphrastic, panegyric celebrating the reconstruction of Hagia Sophia in 562/3 after an earthquake has received a good deal of scholarly attention, his sophisticated epigrams in the Palatine Anthology, roughly half of which are erotic, has received much less attention by either classicists or medievalists.[1]

Largely adhering to the literary conventions of Hellenistic epigram, the epigrams of Paulus engage in epideictic display of classical learning, employing, for example, what Jeffrey Wills has called “divided allusions,” i.e., allusions to more than one source via re-used syntax, diction, and settings, and narrative similarities. [2] This paper examines one such epigram, A.P. 5.217, in light of its literary relationship to the classical epigram and to love elegy, particularly to a pair of epigrams by Antipater Thessalonica (A.P. 5.30 and 5.31) and to the amatory conceits and mythological exempla of Tibullus (2.4.31-34) and Ovid (A.A. 2.277-278 and Am. 3.8.29-30). Using A.P. 5.217 as an exemplum, this essay endeavors to highlight some of the ways in which Paulus innovates pedestrian motifs by championing narrowly defined corrections of earlier, and usually multiple, models. I am particularly interested in drawing attention to the kinds of technical adaptations, corrections, and innovations to earlier epigrams that characterize this Byzantine epigrammatist’s poetic program.