The Collective Moment: Reading Time in the Greek Anthology

This thesis argues that anthologies are texts of multiple temporalities, taking as its case study the Greek Anthology. My analysis demonstrates that ancient Greek anthologies’ negotiation of the diverse temporal perspectives of their constituent epigrams offers a complex source for literary-historical thinking in antiquity. This project examines the temporality of Greek epigram and the experience of reading diachronic difference in the Greek anthological tradition to argue for the importance of transhistorical, non-linear reading to the construction and interpretation of Hellenistic, Imperial, and late-antique anthologies. My work builds on an extensive body of scholarship discussing the self-reflective and retrospective quality of Hellenistic literary epigram and elucidating the complicated process of re-collection by which the Greek Anthology known to mediaeval and modern readers evolved. Reading epigram as a form of discourse based on kairos, my thesis examines the conflict within the genre between the temporal extension implicit in inscription and the format’s defining brevity. Anthologies, meanwhile, gather epigrammatic kairoi across centuries to construct transhistorical choruses which invite non-linear reading. While multiple poetic moments are compiled into one anthological ‘now’, individual epigrams’ attributions to known poets of different eras encourage diachronic reading. Readers therefore carve an interpretive path between pretended synchrony and literary-historical awareness. Anthologies collect epigrammatic lieux de mémoire in virtual form, connecting them in a spatiotemporal network which points equally to the future of reception and repetition. I trace a spatiotemporal journey through the Greek Anthology, considering three proto-anthological spaces to underlie its layering of temporalities. I treat the symposium, the sanctuary, and the cemetery as settings of synchronisation, spatial realisations of non-linear literary-historical experience. Following an introduction to the concepts and methodology used and background of earlier research against which my work is set, the thesis proceeds through each anthological space in turn examining multiple authors drawn principally from the Garlands of Meleager and Philip. Chapter 1 (‘Symposium’) sees private erotic kairoi, urgent in their dread of a looming future, synchronised and unified through an emphasis on the institution’s ritual repetitions. Chapter 2 (‘Sanctuary’) sets in dialogue dedicatory epigram’s claims to continuity, rooted in its inscriptional origins, with the disappearing kairoi of encounter and original dedication. Chapter 3 (‘Cemetery’) considers epitaph’s negotiation of the terminus of an individual life with the cyclicity of commemoration alongside the spatial expansion beyond the static gravesite through an ahistorical, omnipresent reader conceived as dislocated from every time and place, thus uniquely capable of traversing the collected eras and environments of the anthological cemetery. Chapter 4 (‘Cycle’) examines Agathias’ anthology’s endeavour to replicate the natural diachrony of earlier anthologies using only newly-composed poetry. His work, set at once in an ancient pre-Christian past and in a late-antique Christian present, sees epigrammatists wrestle with alienation from a past which they seek to repeat, exemplifying the tension of existing alongside an irretrievable antiquity. Concluding, I look to the anthological tradition’s Byzantine reception in Anthologia Palatina, which attempts a Christianised, partly historicising introduction to its unruly material, and recapitulate the study’s findings and contributions to the study of epigram, anthologisation, and literary time.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• McDougall, Benedick

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Gagne, Renaud
• Goldhill, Simon

• Agathias Scholasticus
• Anthologies
• Constantine Cephalas
• Epigram
• Greek literature
• Hellenistic poetry
• Late antiquity
• Meleager of Gadara
• Palatine Anthology
• Philip of Thessalonica
• Temporality
• Time

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0fb9006c-ad13-4a7a-8368-faf8431818b2/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.115988

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/380018