LITHIC POETICS: POSIDIPPUS AND HIS STONES

Abstract

The 20 poems collected together as thelithikaof Posidippus, the first surviving poems on a papyrus roll only published in 2001 and dating from the third century BCE, offer a range of spectacular new evidence for a series of issues in Hellenistic history, art and literature. The standard view is that Posidippus was probably author of all the epigrams in the roll known as P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, although this has been contested and by no means need certainly be the case. For my purposes here, I do assume that the interconnected poetics of the poems in thelithikado imply a single poet who is quite likely to be Posidippus, since poem 15—independently anthologised in antiquity and known through a manuscript tradition—was attributed to Posidippus in the twelfth century by the Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes. Historically speaking, the fact that so many of these poems focus on gems from the east gives remarkable insight into the interchange between Hellenistic and Achaemenid cultures: specifically, they signal the prestige of treasures from the east in the Hellenistic courts. In the history of collections, they represent a very early example of exoticism in elite collecting, of the accumulation of valuables in what we may assume was a royal and non-sacredSchatzkammer, of the need for an aesthetic response (in this case through short poems) to ‘label’ and valorise the precious items in the collection. In the history of ancientWissenschaft, the poems’ use of late Classical gem-lore (exemplified in texts like theOn Stonesof Theophrastus) offers a vivid instance of the ways theoretical knowledge circulated at least in elite contexts around the royal circle.