Early Hellenistic Elegy: P. Sorbonn. 2254

Extract

Apart from Callimachus, I know no new piece of Hellenistic elegy more interesting than P. Sorbonn. inv. 2254, first published by M. Papathomopoulos in Recherches de Papyrologie II and most admirably edited by Professor Barns and Professor Lloyd-Jones in SIFC xxxv, 205 ff.

Lloyd-Jones proves, I believe beyond question, two points:

(a) That this elegy belongs to the world as it was before Callimachus; it is only our fourth large specimen of the literary elegy from the early part of the third century, the others being the long extracts from Hermesianax, Phanocles and Alexander Aetolus most conveniently read in Powell's Collectanea Alexandrina.

(b) That the subject-matter is of a very unusual nature; the lines are ‘spoken by an unknown person threatening an enemy with a punishment quite out of the ordinary’ – viz. with tattooing on his skin the images of punishments suffered by notorious legendary sinners. The poet's enemy is to be tattooed with a picture of the stone of Tantalus, with another of the Calydonian boar sent to punish Oeneus, and with at least one other (there is a fragmentary second column, one line beginning στίξ[ω).