The last decade has seen a growth of interest in the extraordinarily varied poetic production of Mesomedes, a freedman of Hadrian and author of ‘citharodic songs’ (Suda μ 668). His surviving corpus includes hymns to the Muse, the Sun, Nemesis, Nature and Isis, songs on animals (a swan and a gnat), an ode to the Adriatic Sea, descriptions of a sundial and a sponge, a riddle on the Sphinx and a cameo on glassblowing. Mesomedes’ work circulated widely in the imperial period; his metrical arrangements influenced Lucian and Synesius, he is cited by John Lydus, and he enjoyed significant popularity in Egypt in the second and third centuries ce. He was also honoured with a cenotaph by no less than the emperor Caracalla.
Anglophone scholars will probably know Mesomedes either through E. Pöhlmann and M.L. West's Documents of Ancient Greek Music (2001), which contains four poems accompanied by musical notations (an unicum in the entire medieval manuscript tradition), or through N. Hopkinson's anthology of Greek Poetry of the Imperial Period (1994), which features an edition of the poem on the sponge. Apart from these and a characteristically instructive overview (with English translation of some of his poems) by E.L. Bowie in D.A. Russell's Antonine Literature (1990), there has been virtual silence on Mesomedes’ non-musical poems for the entire second half of the past century.
L., who previously authored a commentary to Mesomedes’ Hymn to Physis (2013), and J. Regenauer, the author of an edition with German translation and commentary on all poems (2016, of which L. makes sparing use), championed the recent resurgence in interest. Their work is complemented by some important studies, which probably appeared too late for L.'s consideration, namely S. Psaroudakes's chapter on the music and performance of the Hymn to the Sun (in A. D'Angour and T. Phillips's Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece [2018]) and an article by Pöhlmann (Greek and Roman Musical Studies 7 [2019]) arguing that a second-century ce inscription from the sanctuary of Apollo Hylatas in Courion preserves the text of Mesomedes’ lost Hymn to Antinous, Hadrian's lover (an attribution to Mesomedes was considered by L. in the introduction to her Physis book).
This new commentary is divided into two parts, a detailed study of the reception of the cult of Isis in literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources, and a section devoted to Mesomedes’ hymn, comprising an introduction to the poem (though not the poet), a critical text with apparatus, Italian translation and commentary. Let me start by pointing out what the book does not offer, before moving on to the numerous praiseworthy aspects of L.'s work.
Recent bibliography on Mesomedes’ poems other than Isis (e.g. M. Fernández Nuin, REC 40 [2013], 141–54, and T.R. Keith, CQ 64 [2014], 428–31) is not taken into account. Particularly striking is the exclusion of T. Whitmarsh's study of Hadrian's patronage of the poet (Beyond the Second Sophistic [2013], pp. 154–73), which could have been engaged with in the introduction, and of M. Brumbaugh's chapter ‘Making the Hymn’ (in A. Faulkner, O. Hodkinson [edd.], Hymnic Narrative and the Narratology of Greek Hymns [2015], pp. 165–82), which explores the limited narrative scope of Mesomedes’ hymns and reads the Hymns to Helios and to the Adriatic as praise poetry.
The volume presupposes the reader's knowledge of L.'s previous book, which contained an extended introduction to Mesomedes, an analysis of the historical and cultural context in which he operated, and his relationship with previous hymnographers. The lack of all that here, including the poet's biographical details and his involvement with the Hadrianic court, is a reason for disappointment to the reader, who encounters occasional references to Hadrian (pp. 44, 48) before being told about the patronage of the emperor (who could have commissioned his work, p. 101). In a dense, but succinct general introduction to the text, L. advances the interesting hypothesis that the sollers poëta mentioned in Apuleius, Met. 11.9 is Mesomedes (p. 100 n. 556).
The first half of the book is devoted to the cult of Isis in the Graeco-Roman world and is divided into four sub-chapters. The first is underwhelming: it contains a selection of literary passages on Isis, devoid of any contextualisation, which is merely functional to the interpretation of the hymn in the commentary. I personally did not find the classification of documents as historical, logographic, ‘literary/against the Nile cult’, ‘literary/erudite’, ‘literary/religious’ particularly productive, and I disagree on the exclusion from the list of PSI 844, which I consider a Hymn to Isis (see my Adespota Papyracea Hexametra Graeca [2020], no. 19).
Chapter 2 tackles in detail the spread of the cult of Isis in the Graeco-Roman world through an analysis of the epithets of the goddess, helpfully classified as myrionyma ‘many-named’, kyria ‘mistress’, Isis-Sothis, Isis-Hathor, Isis Regina and Isis Fortuna. It also includes a study of epithets associated with the imperial power of Rome and epicleseis suggesting an assimilation of the goddess to Demeter and Aphrodite. This is a strong chapter: L. investigates the dynamics of interpretatio Graeca in Ptolemaic times, the gradual spread of the cult of Isis and the reasons for her popularity at Rome, and the local vs cosmopolitan aspects of her cult.
Chapter 3 is equally good. It focuses on the mysteric character of the Isis cult in the Mediterranean, analysing the terminology of her mysteric rites and concluding on the basis of epigraphic and literary evidence that initiation rites probably developed no earlier than imperial times and involved a ritual of death and re-birth (L. aptly uses the word ‘Osirization’). Chapter 4 investigates the henotheistic character of the cult of Isis, laying the foundations for the analysis of the hymn's incipit εἷς ὕμνος later in the commentary.
An excellent metrical analysis of the hymn follows. L. brilliantly reconciles the information provided by a metrical scholion to the text, which explains the hymn as a combination of pyrrhics and iambics, with modern scholarly interpretations, i.e. Cretic dimeters with occasional ‘intrusions’ of paeons and palimbacchiacs (p. 103). I wonder whether the reference in v. 15 to the Curetes, the inventors of the Cretan war-dance pyrriche, is not meant to reflect the pyrrhic start of some of the verses in the hymn. Given the complexity of the text at stake, this reader would have welcomed a full metrical articulation of the hymn rather than a simple list of units and more eloquent explanation of technicisms found in the scholion (e.g. ‘decasemic rhythm’ and ‘hypolydian tropos’). H. Husmann's ‘Zu Metrik und Rhythmik des Mesomedes’ (Hermes 83 [1955], 231–6), which engaged with the problematic v. 14, is absent from the discussion.
The critical text is carefully established and is based on the inspection of the photographic reproduction of the codex unicus. L. does a brilliant job at fixing the metrical inconsistencies of the manuscript text; in particular, her emendation of vv. 9–10 (previously proposed in D. Gigli Piccardi, E. Magnelli [edd.], Studi di poesia greca tardoantica [2013], pp. 65–78) is entirely convincing.
The commentary is certainly the strongest asset of the book: incredibly detailed, well-researched and paying equal attention to issues of language, style, metre, textual transmission as well as cultural and religious phenomena. A quick look at L.'s excellent discussion of v. 2 ἁλιπόρος (p. 119) and v. 114 ἄρρητος (p. 161) will give readers a sense of the painstaking philological work behind these entries.
The book offers a table of loci isiaci comparandi and a generous selection of Isis-related texts with critical apparatus and Italian translation, including Isidorus’ Hymns to Isis, three inscriptional hymns to the goddess, nine aretalogies, relevant extracts from Apuleius and the Isis litany from P. Oxy. 1380.
Philologists will certainly welcome a wonderfully detailed 260-page study on just 19 verses and will excuse the frequent repetition of loci similes throughout the various sections of the book and the occasional presence of typos (I counted 31, mostly in the Greek). Overall, whilst there is little attempt to link the poet's corpus to the contemporary historical context, and the book does not discuss the possible performative setting of the hymn, L. has certainly succeeded in providing a good introduction to the cult of Isis in the Graeco-Roman world and an excellent philological commentary to Mesomedes’ Hymn to Isis.
