The following textual and interpretative notes were informed by the preparation of the first volume of the revised Greek Anthology for the Loeb Classical Library.

Anth. Pal. 1.20 (Claudian)

Line 1 πολιοῦχε has long been doubted. As Quintino Cataudella has noted,Footnote ¹ the first line seems to contain a chiastic pair of contrasting epithets: the recent birth (υἱὲ νεογνέ) and appearance (ἀρτιφανές) of Christ contrast with his ancient birth (παλαιγενές) and with—something, it is usually thought, that has been corrupted to πολιοῦχε. Certainly the idea of protecting a city is unsatisfactory, and Jacobs's πολοοῦχε (printed by Beckby) is no better.Footnote ² To this Cataudella proposes retaining the manuscript reading but selecting a different definition, ‘gray-haired’ (LSJ πολιοῦχος [B]). This suggestion forms a contrast to Christ's recent birth, but Christ's recent appearance would be better contrasted with a word meaning something on the order of ‘long-awaited’.

A possible solution along these lines may be suggested by a line from Achilles Tatius: μόλις ἡ πολύευκτος ἠὼς ἀναφαίνεται (4.17.4). The adjective πολύευκτος is especially favoured when referring to the birth of a child (Themistius, Ἐρωτικὸς ἢ περὶ κάλλους βασιλικοῦ 180a4 and Περὶ τῆς τοῦ βασιλέως φιληκοΐας 224c2; Himerius 8.177; see also πολυεύχετος in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 165). Eusebius (Commentaria in Psalmos 23.1257.47) uses πολύευκτος to refer to Christ's appearance at his resurrection, and Cyril (De adoratione et cultu in spiritu et veritate 68.653.48–52), an approximate contemporary of the Claudian who wrote Anth. Pal. 1.20, embeds πολύευκτος in a construction that makes a point very similar to that of the epigram—that a short time can reveal the answer to many prayers:

It is probable, then, that πολύευκτε should be preferred.

Another, bolder possibility suggests itself: perhaps Claudian wrote πολύευχε. This word is otherwise unattested, but it is easily enough coined, and there can be no doubt of its meaning. Such an unusual word would easily be corrupted to πολιοῦχε.

Anth. Pal. 2, lines 32–5 (Christodorus)

Line 34 διανεύμενος is problematic. It has been taken as a form of διανέομαι (cf. Anth. Pal. 9.96.2), with a meaning on the order of ‘carrying out’, as is possible for the similar word διέρχομαι.Footnote ³ A number of factors make the word unlikely. First is the simple fact that it is otherwise unknown, and Christodorus is not an innovator in vocabulary. The second is best seen by comparing a parallel passage later in the poem (lines 180–5). It describes Hecabe:

Here Christodorus uses the phrase ὡς δὲ δοκεύω to introduce speculation about the mental state of the person whose statue he is describing. (The one other time he uses the phrase, line 336, it also is to speculate on a mental state, though in that case it refers to the intentions of the sculptor.) He speculates that Hecabe's sorrow is for more than Hector, and then bolsters his speculation with evidence from the appearance of the statue: the state of her clothing is more dishevelled than would be expected for the death of a son.

Lines 32–5 clearly present a similar circumstance; certainly Euripides' internal dialogue with the Muses is part of his mental state, and his thyrsus-shaking is adduced as evidence of it. But ‘carrying out’ works of prudence is unlikely to be a description of an internal state. It would be preferable for the line to indicate that Euripides was contemplating such works; and a solution along these lines is easily found.

Christodorus' preferred metaphors for thinking involve some kind of rotation:

The same is true of the fostering of emotions:

In line 34, then, Christodorus likely wrote δινεύμενος, a form attested in Anth. Pal. 7.273.5. While this is a form of δινέω, Christodorus has already shown a willingness to use the closely related δινεύω in this meaning above (line 156). The idea of spinning is also helpful in this context, because it leads the reader easily to thoughts of the manic dance in the worship of Dionysus that occupies the remainder of the Euripides passage.

Anth. Pal. 5.30 (Antipater of Thessalonica)

The last sentence of the epigram has puzzled editors and commentators. What does it mean that only those greedy for wealth injure poverty? And how is it relevant to the preceding theme, of the greed of prostitutes—especially since the greedy people of the last sentence are so clearly marked as masculine? Beckby translates as if πλεονέκται were πλεονεξία—but the emphatic μόνοι then seems pointless.Footnote ⁴ Desrousseaux alters μόνοι to νόμῳ, which Waltz accepts and translates adverbially, ‘O hommes avides de richesses, quel crime vous commettez, légalement, envers la pauvreté’—an awkward rendering.Footnote ⁵ Gow and Page throw up their hands, stipulating only that πλεονέκται must be feminine (perhaps contextually desirable, but otherwise unknown), and obelizing the entirety of the sixth line (with its offending masculine forms), commenting ‘No corrections of this line are plausible enough to deserve mention. It may however be noted that οἱ may be a relative and is so accented by Pl, and that ὡς might be accented as a demonstrative adv. Πλούτου and μόνοι however remain intractable.’Footnote ⁶ Cataudella, while noting that the gnomic character of the sentence (as all previous editors have seen it) should not have prevented feminine αἱ and μόναι, nevertheless retains οἱ and emends only μόνοι (‘a me sembra che nel verso solo μόνοι non dà senso alcuno’) to μόνην.Footnote ⁷ This makes more sense, but the word still seems unnecessary.

Giuseppe Giangrande, in a lengthy consideration of the problem, prefers to retain the manuscript reading, as well as the plain implication that the πλεονέκται are masculine, and to gain sense from hyperbaton and an extended meaning of μόνοι.Footnote ⁸ Taking πλούτου not with πλεονέκται but with μόνοι, he paraphrases the sentence ‘O receivers of more than your fair share of love (ὦ πλεονέκται), you who (οἵ), deprived of wealth (πλούτου μόνοι), thus (ὥς) wrong the poor.’Footnote ⁹ This interpretation cannot be supported; πλούτου seems too clearly connected to πλεονέκται, and μόνος taking a genitive means ‘apart from’ nearly always when the genitive denotes a group to which the μόνος would ordinarily have belonged; certainly it does not refer to loss of one's possessions. What is more, the imposition of this interpretation, as he proposes it, requires intermediary logical steps, in which wealthy patrons drive up the going rate for prostitutes, and then themselves become destitute as a result. The epigram gives no hint of this narrative line or, in fact, any understanding of inflationary economics.

In the face of this controversy, Paton's Loeb edition quietly offered a solution a hundred years ago. Since Paton made no argument for his emendation, and since it has largely been ignored, it may be worthwhile to outline here some reasons for its acceptance.Footnote ¹⁰ Paton's change is simple: he alters μόνοι to νόμοι, rendering the sentence ‘Oh! grasping code of wealth, how dost thou oppress poverty!’Footnote ¹¹

The greatest difficulty with this reading is its high level of abstraction. Rather than accusing the wealthy of oppressing the poor, the sentence claims that the rules by which wealth operates (which must be the meaning of οἱ πλούτου … νόμοι) oppress poverty. The sentence also does a number of other things that, while only slightly unusual individually, when added up create a significant impediment to understanding. In order, they are: 1) πλεονέκται is not ordinarily an adjective, and its placement relative to ὦ and οἱ does not help the reader to see it as one; 2) πλούτου, appearing so close to πλεονέκται, tempts the reader to construe it as an objective genitive with πλεονέκται, rather than with νόμοι, which is delayed to the end of the line; and 3) πενίην must be read as abstract for concrete, which is relatively rare in Greek. While an ancient reader could work his way through these issues, once νόμοι became corrupted to μόνοι (among the easiest of scribal errors), they would have combined to prevent its correction.

Even in combination, however, these problems are not significant enough to decide against the emendation; what is more, each of them, when seen in the light of the new reading, becomes far less problematic. The power of the reading lies in its last three words: ὣς ἀδικεῖτε νόμοι. This phrase presents a compact irony that Antipater did well to delay until the very end of the poem. The construction of the rest of the sentence then follows more or less directly from this choice. 1) Three words, ὦ, οἱ and ὥς, compete to appear near the beginning of the sentence. It makes the most sense to place the vocative and its particle first; the article, which is useful for a proper understanding of the role of πλούτου, must then be delayed until just after πλεονέκται; ὥς is most powerful just before the verb. 2) While πλούτου can be construed with πλεονέκται, it seems superfluous in that role: greed is usually directed at wealth, and the context of the epigram up to that point has only reinforced that presumptive connection. The word makes much more sense connected to νόμοι, and the placement of οἱ helps that reading along. 3) While an object of ἀδικεῖτε on the order of πένητας would have been perfectly acceptable, the abstraction of πενίην fits well with the general abstraction of the sentence as a whole.

Anth. Pal. 5.60 (Rufinus)

I focus here on the use of the word ‘Eurotas’ to refer to the pubes of the girl in the poem. Many of the issues surrounding this problem have, in my view, been solved by Regina Höschele and David Konstan in their 2005 article.Footnote ¹² I wish here to examine what it is about the Eurotas that makes it possible to use the word as a synonym for pubes (not vagina)Footnote ¹³ without any further cues to the reader. After all, the closest comparandum, Rufinus' use of Μηριόνης (Anth. Pal. 5.36.2) to refer to the same area of the body, clearly contains a pun on the word μηρός. The connection here, however, seems less clear.

Two relevant puns have been suggested; probably both have an effect. First, a pun on εὐρύς seems secure, given that it is the breadth of the not-quite-concealed area that is at issue in the last two lines.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, a pun on the noun εὐρώς seems likely, given that, as Höschele and Konstan point out, its accusative differs from Εὐρώταν by a single letter, and that female genitalia are sometimes characterized pejoratively by their dankness. Though such pejoration seems far from the intent in this poem, the fact that the ‘Eurotas’ here is ‘swelling beyond its banks’ (ὑπεροιδαίνοντα) provides some confirmation of their conclusion.Footnote ¹⁵

An additional connection that allows the reader to identify the Eurotas as the pubes is provided by visual imagery: in the classical period, the Eurotas was often characterized in poetry by the reeds that line its banks. Euripides invokes this image four times, calling the Eurotas δονακοτρόφος (IA 179–80), δονακόχλοος (IT 399–400), δονακόεις (Hel. 209–10) and καλλιδόναξ (Hel. 493). It is also so described in the corpus Theognideum (δονακοτρόφος, line 785). It is possible, then, that the word had come into use as a pun not for female pubes in general, but specifically for pubes with untrimmed pubic hair. Enrico Magnelli, in arguing for the pubes (rather than the vagina or vulva) as the body part in question, concludes, on independent grounds, that the pubes in question were hairy.Footnote ¹⁶ This image also coheres with the above-mentioned puns, as the Eurotas, when flooded, was broad and impassably muddy.Footnote ¹⁷

Anth. Pal. 5.127 (Marcus Argentarius)

While some editors are happy to retain the rather anodyne expression κείνης λάλον in line 5,Footnote ¹⁸ several suggestions have been made to emend it. Jacobs's κλίνης σάλος is attractive;Footnote ¹⁹ it shifts the focus to the bed, the movement of which was likely to have attracted the mother's attention. It seems, however, that σάλος is an expected enough word for the context that, had it been present originally, it would not be corrupted to λάλος or λάλον; the idea of ‘blabbing’ is ironic, given the silence the poet and Alcippe are presumably attempting to keep (λαθριδίως, κρυπτά). Thus, it is best to assume that λάλον or something like it is genuine, as Huschke did, suggesting κλίνη λάλος—the bed is the one blabbing, giving away the couple's secrets.Footnote ²⁰ Giovanni Salanitro suggests that the passage does not require emendation at all; it is perfectly possible to take λάλον as a substantive, rather than as an adjective agreeing with μητέρα (which cannot work, as Gow and Page point out).Footnote ²¹ On the other hand, this would require the girl, rather than the bed, to be the one blabbing, which seems unlikely; furthermore, κείνης seems a rather austere way to refer to her. I suggest a slight correction to Salanitro's idea: κλίνης λάλον, ‘the bed's blabbing’, as the subject of οὐκ ἔλαθεν. This requires only one letter's correction to the manuscript reading, and it could easily have become corrupted once the substantive nature of λάλον was not perceived; then the scribe would have made λάλον agree with μητέρα, and changed κλίνης to κείνης to designate whose mother she was.

Anth. Pal. 5.144 (Meleager)

It might be considered somewhat unexpected to find the mix of Doric and Ionic dialects in this epigram; P tolerates even so simple a difference as the feminine article ἡ in line 3 and ἁ in line 6. Some editors attempt to regularize the entire poem to Doric,Footnote ²² but the differences are unlikely to have arisen by chance. Alexander Sens, addressing dialect diversity in the Milan Posidippus papyrus, has observed that Posidippus' dialectal irregularity may well be original, even within a single epigram.Footnote ²³ The reasons for this irregularity are complex and not always discernible, but they seem to include imitation of the speech of the epigram's characters, allegiance to Macedonian kings, and nods toward relevant poetic traditions, such as epinician odes, which originate in the Doric dialect.Footnote ²⁴ In this case, it is not too difficult to detect Meleager's intent. When he observes the blossoming of flowers, he speaks in a dialect that is roughly his default—Ionic. But then, when he turns to address the meadows themselves, he uses Doric. The implication is that the meadows ‘speak’ (or at least understand) Doric—something we might well expect, given the pastoral implications of the Doric dialect since Theocritus.

Anth. Pal. 5.160 (Meleager)

The text as found in the manuscript, with two words, ὑπὸ χρῶτα, cannot be supported. It might be argued that ὑπὸ χρῶτα ‘under (his) flesh’ would implicitly mean ‘under his body’; while χρώς can sometimes extend from its usual meaning of ‘flesh’ to incorporate the whole body, this is a difficult meaning to support with the preposition ὑπό. Even when χρώς is used in such a way as to imply the involvement of the whole body, it still focusses the attention on the surface of the body, the skin;Footnote ²⁵ with ὑπό, the meaning ‘under the surface of the body, under the skin’ cannot be avoided: certainly it is never avoided when the expression is used by other authors.Footnote ²⁶

Editors generally accept Hecker's emendation to ὑπόχρωτα; this word has generally been taken to mean that the unnamed lover held Demo to his breast, on the analogy of the word ὑπόχειρ.Footnote ²⁷ Thomas Gärtner rightly points out that the word and its intended meaning are unknown in erotic epigram. He supports Graefe's emendation to ὑπὸ χλαίνᾳ.Footnote ²⁸ But it is difficult to see how this easy and expected phrase could have been corrupted to something so unusual.

The word ὑπόχρως itself appears only one other time, in the scholia to Nicander, Alexipharmaca 470, where it is used to gloss ῥυπόεις, a word used to describe the sea-hare. The scholiast is probably taking ὑπόχρως there to mean something on the order of ‘slimy’. It is unlikely that such a meaning is intended in Meleager's epigram.

While the scholiast to Nicander seems to have used the -χρως phoneme to refer to the skin (his understanding of ὑπο- in the compound is much less clear), it is likely that it can be taken to refer to colour instead. The word χρώς means both ‘skin’ or ‘flesh’ and the colour of the skin—or ‘colour’ generally, and the idea of colour is particularly prominent when the word appears in compound adjectives.Footnote ²⁹ The word εὔχρως is particularly instructive; Theophrastus uses it to describe the wood of the fir, which rather than being the expected white is filled with pitch, and therefore ‘well coloured’. People described with the related term εὔχροος have a healthy complexion, one in which the colour of the skin is not pale, but more flushed, demonstrating a healthy circulation.

A word ὑπόχρως formed on the analogy of εὔχρως would thus refer to a complexion demonstrating slightly less ruddiness than is healthy, just as ὑπέρυθρος, ὑπόγλαυκος, ὑπόκιρρος, ὑπόλευκος, ὑπόμελας and ὑπόξανθος indicate less pronounced versions of their respective colours. This interpretation of the word has the advantage of fitting well into the narrative thread of the epigram. Demo is first described as λευκοπάρειος, a term that indicates that her face is pale, but has positive connotations: Demo is fair-cheeked. The word ὑπόχρως describes the same condition; only the connotation has changed: she is slightly pallid; perhaps she is not quite well. With the second couplet, we realize the reason for her pale appearance: Demo is passing a chilly Sabbath; she needs her lover to keep her warm.

Anth. Pal. 5.170 (Nossis)

The last line of this famous epigram has long lingered just outside of clarity, with some scholars attempting correction and others finding some different meanings in the text with as few changes as the metre will allow.Footnote ³⁰ I wish to draw attention to the above text, which is that printed in Denys Page's Epigrammata Graeca, and which has largely been ignored.Footnote ³¹

Here the pronoun τήνας could be taken to refer either to Cypris or to Nossis, and thus τήνας τἄνθεα could be either the charms of love or Nossis' poetry—a salutary ambiguity, and one consistent with Nossis' purpose in associating her labours with those of Aphrodite. Additionally, the comma provided by Page guides the reader to a better understanding of the prolepsis of ἄνθεα. Most literally, the line would be rendered ‘he (or she—the text allows either) does not know her [i.e. Nossis' or Cypris'] blossoms, what roses they are’. By placing ‘roses’ clearly in the predicate, unlike most readings, this eliminates the problems with a definite article attached to ἄνθεα and allows the quality of the metaphorical blossoms gradually to be revealed as the line develops: first they are merely blossoms, though blossoms of unknown power. Then the reader learns that these blossoms are roses, and roses of a quality (ποῖα) that remains elusive to the uninitiated.

Anth. Pal. 5.258 (Paulus Silentiarius)

The expression ὀπὸς ἥβης is given special notice in LSJ. Under the entry for ὀπός, normally meaning ‘juice’, LSJ defines this phrase as ‘the juicy freshness of youth’, justifying this definition by the clear need for contrast with ῥυτίς. Translators and commentators have worked along the same lines.Footnote ³² The metaphor, however, is quite extended, and it is possible to gain better sense with a simple correction of ἥβης to ἥβη. The word ὀπός then becomes a genitive, and the phrase ὀπὸς ἥβη | πάσης may easily be rendered ‘the youth of any (other) face’—a more appropriate contrast to ῥυτίς. The sigma of ἥβης was likely added by a scribe who felt that ἥβη should be made to agree with πάσης.

Anth. Pal. 5.285 (Agathias Scholasticus)

The πορθμός to which Rhodanthe's ζώνη is compared in line 8 has been rendered as a ferryFootnote ³³ or a bridge,Footnote ³⁴ but certainly Giovanni Viansino comes closest to the right idea, paraphrasing the passage as ‘stretto passaggio che le nostre labbra univa’.Footnote ³⁵ The metaphor of the poem is one of irrigation (see especially lines 3–5), and thus the word should be thought of not as a strait that needs to be crossed or as a ferry that crosses it but rather as a canal or conduit that itself conducts water from one place to another. This gives a second, and much later, witness to LSJ s.v. πορθμός I.2, previously attested only in Empedocles.