Cameron Alan - Ancient Anagrams (AJPh, 1995)

7/28/2019 Cameron Alan - Ancient Anagrams (AJPh, 1995)

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Ancient AnagramsAuthor(s): Alan CameronSource: The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 116, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 477-484Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/295334 .

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BRIEF MENTIONANCIENT ANAGRAMS

In a recent book on the Christian poet Aurelius Prudentius Cle-mens, Martha Malamud makes the interesting suggestion that the clos-ing line of his Hamartigenia conceals an anagram:lux immensaalios et temporavinctacoronisglorificent,me poenalevis clementeradurat.Let boundless light and foreheads bound with crowns bring glory tosome; as for me, maya lightpunishmentburn me gently.

She rearranges the last four words to read as follows: Aurelio Prudentese clamante, "Aurelius the Prudent proclaiming himself." Before turn-ing to this particular anagram, we need to ask a much more basic ques-tion. Did ancient poets play this game at all?Malamud refers to the centos of Ausonius and Proba and thepattern poems of Optatianus Porfyrius as the "background" againstwhich "we must set the poetry of Prudentius" (41). This is a highlymisleading perspective. On the one hand, acrostichs, anacyclica, figurepoems, and the like were already popular in the Hellenistic age.2 Tojudge from an epigram in which Martial sharply attacked such exercisesas pedantic tours de force (specifying palindromes and anacyclica),they enjoyed a vogue in early imperial Rome.3 On the other, the greatbulk of late antique poetry was not in the least influenced by thesetraditions. There is no justification for invoking a late antique mentalityuniquely or innately disposed to "the overt and radical manipulation oflanguage."There is in any case an important respect in which the sort ofanagram Malamud postulates is rather different from most verbal par-lour games. Even when incorporated in passing in a long poem, an

'Malamud, Poetics of Transformation 44-46.2For a succinct overview of all such "Spielerei" see Gardthausen, GriechischePalaeographie II 60-68; in Callimachus and His Critics ch. 2.2, I hope to have shown thatthe earliest figure poems date from the late rather than early Hellenistic age.3Mart. 2.86, with the useful explanatory paraphrase in Sullivan, Martial 74-75.

American Journal of Philology 116(1995) 477-484 ? 1995by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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BRIEF MENTIONacrostich is easy to spot,4 and figure poems (in the shape of altars andorgans) cannot be missed. As for etymological puns, if the similaritybetween form and meaning is not immediately obvious (lucus a nonlucendo), they fail. Some word games do not catch the eye so readily.Isopsepha, for example, as written by their best-known practitioner,Leonides of Alexandria, in the form of epigrams, consist of a distich orquatrain in which the letters are treated as numbers and added up sothat the totals of each line or couplet come to the same.5 Or anacyclica,like the following couplet by Nicodemus of Heraclea,

rInqvEX6ritq,6e ool ()aogo iXKalvaVv 06vaooeiEVEY?yxCvoXtLX?vEav6voag at&a0cov, (AP 6.314)

which scans just as well when read backwards (a&Tgajov eavUoag6oXLXr1V...).6 Nonetheless, such virtuosity was not left to be discov-ered by chance; isopsepha and anacyclica are normally equipped withheadings or notes explaining what they are. For example, an isopsephicencomion by Dioscoros of Aphrodito is actually so entitled in the au-thor's autograph copy (io6Wi?nT])ayxWotXla),nd the numerical totalswritten against each line.7 Moreover, the virtuosity is a purely surfaceepiphenomenon; it adds nothing to the sense of the poem, and if thecasual reader misses it, he misses only virtuosity. But if Malamud'sanagram were accepted, it would add considerably more to the conclu-sion of Prudentius' poem than (say) an acrostich.Anagrams as we play the game today (for example, in crosswordpuzzles) are normally posed overtly and explicitly as riddles, with cluesto guide us, not concealed in a poem without warning (as in the allegedexample in Prudentius) on the assumption that readers will be on thelookout. It is true that medieval vernacular poets were fond of workingtheir names into poems through anagrams and cryptograms, but thereare always clues or a pointer in the context. The most complicated andelaborate are those of Guillaume de Machaut, but he "diligently points

4For a recent survey on the use of acrostichs in ancient poetry see Courtney,"Acrostichs"; see also Cameron, Callimachus and His Critics ch. 2.2.5For full details see Page, Further Greek Epigrams 504-11.

6For other examples see Cameron, Greek Anthology 123.7MacCoull, "An Isopsephistic Encomium."

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ANCIENTANAGRAMSout the lines which contain his name (and which often make no sense intheir context)."8

A recent book by Fred Ahl claims to detect many anagrams inRoman poetry.9But almost all the cases that carry any conviction at allare etymological associations of one sort or another: e.g., Verg. Aen.8.322-33, LATIUmque vocari I maluit, his quoniam LATUIsset in oris.The reader is clearly encouraged to look for the meaning of the namehere, scarcely an anagram as we understand the term, since it is thevery similarity of the words that is held to justify connecting them.Nowadays the better the anagram, the more cunningly it disguisesrather than suggests its other face.In inscriptional acrostichs the reader is helped out by some suchdevice as marking the relevant letters in red, or spacing them out insome way. 0 The last two lines of the epitaph of T. Aelius Faustus actu-ally tell the reader to look for his signum in an acrostich:ut signum nvenias,quoderat dumvitamaneret,seligelitterulasprimase versibusocto. (CLE1814.7-8)

The versus intexti worked into the poems of Optatianus Porfyrius werepicked out in gold letters in the copy Porfyrius himself sent the emperorConstantine. Furthermore, in order to achieve these effects, Porfyriushad to start by engineering exactly the same number of letters in everyline, so that his poem formed a perfect square grid. Naturally, this aloneprepares the reader to search for hidden verses. The familiar case ofROMA/AMOR, though it could be classified as an anagram, is moreimportantly a palindrome, another standard and (of course) easily iden-tified type of word game.Yet another type is the spelling out of words (often obscene) sylla-ble by syllable in epigrams: e.g., PE DI CA RE in Priapea 67.1-2:"PEnelopes primamDIdonisprimasequaturet primamCAdmisyllabaprimaREmi.

8Kooper,"Artand Signature"228-29; Hoepffner,"Anagrammeei Machaut";Kane,Piers Plowman55, 68-70.9Ahl,Metaformations 7-48.'?SeeCameron,"FilocalusandMelania.""See Buchheit,Studien82-87, withmanyexamples.

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BRIEF MENTIONYet again, there is always some (often as here very heavy-handed)pointer in the context to encourage the reader to look for the hiddenword.Another interesting case is an epigram by the Neronian poet Rufi-nus, in which (on the transmitted text) a girl is told to put on a garlandthe poet has sent her and cease to be haughty. There is no indicationwhy the garland should have this effect. More than half a century agoA. M. Harmon pointed out that the initial letters of the first four flowersin the garland together with the whole of the last one (capitalized below)spell xQaviov, "skull," a memento mori:12

EoTlKQivov, Po6Y1 T? x&tXv, VOTEzQT' Av?Ot6vTl,xca N6axLoooc 6y6og, xai xvavavyIs "ION. (AP 74.3-4)Denys Page dismissed this as "an ingenious but improbable notion,"13nor indeed was Harmon able to explain why putting on this garland(Tcarza oTeVptaE'v1, line 5) should change the girl's behaviour. In ancienttimes, to send a girl a garland to wear was in effect to invite her to asymposium,'4 hardly the way to improve her behaviour. On the basis ofa similar epigram where a boy is told to "consider the narcissus" (oxe-~cat vaQxLaoov) and abandon his haughtiness, I suggest the minimalcorrection oxpcaLtEvr. '5The girl is not being told to put on the garland,but to consider it, reflect on its lesson. Flowers are the ultimate symbolof the transience of beauty, and when in addition their initial letters spell"skull," a beautiful girl might well reflect on the proximity of the graveand treat her admirer a little better. My purpose is less to insist on theemendation than to show that without some such pointer, there is noreason why the reader should pause to search for a hidden meaning.Different though all these ways of hiding words behind the surfaceof texts are, the one feature they share is the provision of a pointer inthe context or the structure of the text. The implication is that it wouldnot otherwise occur to readers to look behind the surface. When webear in mind that throughout antiquity texts were written with little or

'2Harmon, "Say It with Flowers."13Page, Rufinus 97.14RobinNisbet in a lecture once characterized the garland as the "black tie of the

ancient world."15Epigrammatum Anthologia Palatina III, ed. E. Cougny (Paris 1890) IV.67,emended and explained in Cameron, Greek Anthology 234-36.

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ANCIENT ANAGRAMS

no punctuation and often even no word division, it is easy to understandthis need for a pointer or clue of some sort. Readers of Ahl's book haveto keep asking themselves how much of their persuasiveness his exam-ples owe to the modern distinction (of which I too have gratefullyavailed myself) between upper- and lower-case letters.Do ancient texts offer any true anagrams? There is a suggestivechapter in Artemidorus' dreambook (4.23) where the word avayQaR-tacXot6og is used, not of the perfect anagram, but for transposition ofletters in a very general sense: "neither transposing syllables, nor re-moving or adding letters" (oi?Te fETa0VTxeg vUXal3g OVTEaeXo6vEg firQ@oo(0v?VEg&Qai&aTa). arlier interpreters (among whom he names acertain Aristandros) mention avayQa[?[taTLo[;og as one possible way ofinterpreting dreams that cannot be made to yield sense any other way.Amusingly enough (he adds), having done this they never quote anyexamples. Artemidorus himself is very sceptical: only use it on thedreams of others unless you want to deceive yourself (Freud of coursewas more receptive to such methods).The word avayQatta itself seems not to be used in this sense. Theentry avaycQa,atcoqt6g in LSJ offers some examples that look promis-ing, anagrams on the names of Ptolemy and Arsinoe Philadelphos, butthere is a catch. The sources cited are both twelfth-century Byzantine:Tzetzes and Eustathius. Eustathius quotes a whole series of what hecalls avayxa[t[tlaTtoLtoL (45.45-46.9 = I 74 van der Valk). One or twoare ancient. For example, the identity of "Ha and aig was read intoHomer (II. 21.6, fIQact6' "HQO rtiiva nxg6ooe S3a0EavEQvxXEtev)byallegorizing interpreters as early as the fifth century. We find it reflectedin Plato's Cratylus(404b-c): it was "because of his concern with meteo-rology that Zeus concealed Hera's name in the word for air" (?T?ETeQo-

Koytbv . . .v &aecta Hacv dOv6ttoasv ixlxgutt6oevog).16 But mostare no more than trivial examples of metathesis purportingto reveal theread meaning of words: X6oog and 6X?og, &x@aand xaea, &aQexr ndeaccti, ()Xkvaog and 4ctXaiog, oXiyog and Xoiyog. Many are surelyByzantine rather than ancient.17Tzetzes claims that Lycophron won fame at the court of Phila-delphus less because of his poetry than because of his anagrams. His'6Buffiere, Mythes d'Homere 106-10. See too a passage of Philo preserved in

Armenian (trans. Lamberton in Homer the Theologian 50-51); Julian Or. 4.136-37.'7"Anagrammatismusspecies veriloquii est, quae apud Byzantinos tantum vigebatneque apud antiquos grammaticos reperitur" (van der Valk ad loc.).

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BRIEF MENTIONtwo examples are 'Agctvo6 = "HQasiov, a piece of flattery designed tosuggest that the queen was "Hera's nosegay," and hTokeXaicog ano'EiXttog kXyEL Schol. Lyc. p. 5.7 Scheer). Here we have the familiarmotif of the king's honey-sweet speech (West on Hesiod, Theog. 83), inthis case concealed within Ptolemy's very name. It may be doubtedwhether this is really a quotation from Lycophron, but even if it is,surely from a riddle propounded in and for itself, not concealed in apoem where it might be missed by inattentive readers. The syntax ofajt6 ?xXLTOgXeyeL is peculiar, nor do the words fit any obvious metricalpattern.Even in its own terms there are problems with Malamud's ana-gram. It is at once too ambitious and yet not successful enough. Itwould be one thing if (say) the last two words could be rearranged togive something simple like "Prudentius Clemens" or "Clemens scrip-sit," especially if the concealed words fitted the original metre andsyntax. But the plausibility-and certainly the decipherability-of ananagram is in inverse proportion to its complexity. How could anyonebe expected to recognize a four-word anagram in the ablative absoluteconstruction?And why those four words? It will be noticed that Malamud arbi-trarily excludes the first word of the clause from her anagram. Havingdone that, she then abandons the original syntax and repunctuates afterinstead of before the me: "Thus the entire last line, when the anagramisset forth, reads: glorificent me: Aurelio Prudente se clamante, 'let themglorify me: Aurelius the Prudent proclaiming himself.'" But what of thepreceding line? The natural rhetoric of the sentence forces the reader topause at glorificent, and prepare for a sharp contrast between the fate ofalios and me: "may light and foreheads bound with crowns glorify oth-

ers, while I...."lux immensaalios et temporavincta coronisglorificent,me poenalevis clementeradurat.

Do we just forget about the fate of the martyrs once the anagram hasbeen detected?There are three further problems. First, there is a (to me) uncom-fortable conflict between the surface conclusion of the poem (in whichthe poet sees himself as too much of a sinner to hope for paradise; thatis for martyrs alone) and the anagrammatic conclusion, in which heboastfully proclaims his name. Second, Prudentius, not Prudens, is his

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ANCIENTANAGRAMSname. An anagram has to be perfect; near misses win no cigar. Third,his diacritical name, the one of the three by which he was known incontexts where one name alone was used, must have been the last,Clemens.18 It would therefore be more than merely odd if this were theone name missing in the anagram. Malamud might perhaps reply thatthis is covered by the original text, and it is certainly intriguing thatoriginal text and anagram together come so close to all three of thepoet's names. But even so, clementer in itself lends no support to thepostulated anagram.Malamud characterized clementer as a "failed signature" in thetext read straight (that is, without anagram). But "failed" surely goestoo far. Given the deeply religious conclusion of the poem, the sugges-tion of the poet's name (his diacritical, be it noted) is enough, the moreso because conclusions were the traditional place for a sphragis.19Thenthere is the role it plays in the final clause, an adverb qualifying thepoet's own punishment, an etymological pun harmonising to perfectionwith the religious context. Prudentius hopes that in the life to come hewill be treated with the clemency his name suggests. To my mind, this isa dignified and appropriate personal touch on which to close.

ALAN CAMERONCOLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

BIBLIOGRAPHYAhl, E Metaformations: oundplayand Wordplayn Ovidand OtherClassicalPoets. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.Buchheit, V. Studien zum Corpus Priapeorum. Zetemata 28. Munich: Beck,

1962.Buffiere, F Les mythes d'Homere et la pensee grecque. Paris: Les Belles Let-tres, 1956.Cameron, Alan. Callimachus and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1995.. TheGreekAnthology:FromMeleager oPlanudes.Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1993.. "Filocalus and Melania." CP 87 (1992) 140-44.

'8Seemydetaileddiscussionof polyonomyand diacriticalnames n "Polyonomy:The Case of PetroniusProbus."'9See Kranz'swell-knownstudy"Sphragis."

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BRIEFMENTION. "Polyonomy in the Late Roman Aristocracy: The Case of PetroniusProbus." JRS 75 (1985) 164-82.

Courtney, E. "Greek and Latin Acrostichs." Philologus 134 (1990) 3-13.Gardthausen, V. Griechische Palaeographie. Vol. II. 2d ed. Leipzig: Veit, 1913.Harmon, A. M. "Say It with Flowers." CP 22 (1927) 219-20.Hoepffner, E. "Anagramme und Ratselgedichte bei Guillaume de Machaut."Zeitschrift fur Rom. Philologie 30 (1906) 401-13.Kane, George. Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship. London: Univer-sity of London/Athlone Press, 1965.Kooper, E. S. "Art and Signature and the Art of the Signature." In Court andPoet, edited by G. S. Burgess, 228-29. Liverpool: F Cairns, 1981.Kranz, W. "Sphragis: Ichform und Namensiegel als Eingangs- und Schluss-motiv antiker Dichtung." RhM 104(1961) 3-46, 97-124. Reprinted in Stu-dien zur antiken Literatur und ihrem Fortwirken,27-78. Heidelberg: Win-ter, 1967.Lamberton, R. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Readings andthe Growthof the Epic Tradition.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1986.MacCoull, L. S. B. "An Isopsephistic Encomium on Saint Senas by Dioscorusof Aphrodito." ZPE 62 (1986) 51-53.Malamud, Martha A. The Poetics of Transformation:Prudentius and Classical

Mythology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.Page, D. L. TheEpigrams of Rufinus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1978.. Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1981.Sullivan, J. P. Martial, the Unexpected Classic: A Literaryand Historical Study.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Cameron Alan - Ancient Anagrams (AJPh, 1995)