Wandering Poets

In the later Roman Empire Egypt, not for the first time in its history, became the home of Greek poetry. “The Egyptians”, wrote Eunapius of Sardis in about the year 400, “are mad on poetry” (ʾεπὶ ποιητιϰῇ μέν σφόδρα μαίνται ¹ ), and indeed it is hardly possible to name a single prominent Greek poet of the fourth and fifth centuries who was not either an Egyptian, or else, like the Lycian Proclus, educated in Alexandria. ² Yet modem scholars, while studying in some detail its more important representatives, have devoted surprisingly little attention to the movement as a whole. ³ The Dionysiaca of Nonnus is familiar to every student of Greek poetry (even if few can claim to have read all its 48 books), the hymns of Synesius ⁴ and the epigrams of Palladas ⁵ have been much studied in recent years, and even the lame epics of Triphiodorus and Colluthus still find an occasional reader. But Nonnus and Synesius are not really the most typical representatives of the movement, and Palladas by any reckoning is an isolated figure. Most of their fellow-countrymen put their talent for poetry to a much more practical use, and though men still continued to call poetry a divine gift, and to invoke the Muses to assist them in their song, the truth of the matter was that for most poets of the later Empire poetry was no more and no less than a profession. ⁶ It is these professional poets whom I propose to discuss. Not, however, at any rate principally, from the literary point of view. This would hardly be possible, for the simple reason that with one notable but slightly atypical exception barely a line of their numerous and voluminous works has survived. The exception is Claudian of Alexandria – atypical because his extant works are written in Latin. ⁷ But paradoxically enough the fact that the work of these poets has so utterly perished is of less importance than might at first sight appear; it is not likely that their literary merit was of a very high order, and their significance, for the modern scholar at any rate, lies elsewhere, in the light their existence and activity cast on the social, cultural and even political life of the later Empire.