LESS CARE, MORE STRESS: A RHYTHMIC POEM FROM THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Abstract

This article considers a short text that was widely circulated in the mid- Roman Empire, in both a four-line and a six-line version, usually on gemstones. The text is a poem of sorts, but of a quite distinctive type. Part of it can be scanned according to the rules of classical (quantitative) metre, but more striking is the consistent rhythmic (stressed) pattern. Stressed poetry is not otherwise attested so early; this text may point to a substrate, now largely hidden from view, of popular verse that preceded the metrical revolutions of late antiquity and the Byzantine world. The poem is also a piece of visual artistry, designed to be looked at (particularly in its gemstone format). This hybrid status, between high art and popular culture, can also be detected in the content of the poem, which gestures towards both the poetics of intellectual elitism (using intertextual allusion, and dismissing the views of the masses) and a level of sexually aggressive assertion of embodied selfhood. It is a valuable witness to a form of middling literature (and a middling demographic), caught between aspirations to elite-style individuality and the mimetic imperative of an empire-wide consumer culture.

Scholarship on Greek poetry of the second and third centuries CE has boomed in recent years.¹ The old assumption (as old as Plutarch, at least in one form)² that the era was definitively prosaic is no longer tenable: that poetry retained both its centrality in civic life and its prestige within literary culture is now undeniable. By and large, however, attention has focused on elite poetics.³ In this article I consider an anonymous popular text – a poem, I believe, but that identification presumes the discussion below – that was widely circulated across the Empire. My aim is twofold: to collate and publish it; and to reflect on what it can tell us about Greek metrics, poetics and literary value in the Roman period. This brief text, I argue, shines important new light on the emergence of stress-based (as distinct from quantitative) poetry. It has much to tell us about the ingenuity of ‘subliterary literature’, the interaction between material form and poetic content possible in such texts, and the complex psychology of popular literary production and circulation in the eastern Roman Empire.

The text

In Appendix 1 I collect twenty recorded versions of our text, some fragmentary and some abbreviated by design.⁴ The majority survive in the form of inscriptions on gemstones (mostly cameos); one is a graffito from Cartagena, Spain. I begin with an edition:

Apart from the fragmentary item 20, all gemstone versions give the colometry reproduced above. The graffito version seems systematically to amalgamate two lines into one, producing a three-line text (see Appendix 2).

In those cases where the artefacts (including the graffito) on which the text is recorded have been dated by modern specialists, estimates have all ranged between the second and third centuries CE. The transmitted spelling is also compatible with that era, although the evidence is not decisive. There are two noteworthy features:

1. (i) An imperial date is suggested by the general substitution of -ι for -ει endings in the third person singular of the present tense (μέλι, συνφέρι), and in the second-person singular imperative of the ε contract verb (φίλι). On inscriptions this substitution is attested as early as the third century BCE, but becomes commoner after 100 CE.⁵ The confusion of -ι and -ει (which is in fact commoner in the inverse form) is indicative of a gradual phonetic convergence that seems to have left pronunciation of the two largely indistinguishable by the second century CE.⁶

2. (ii) Less indicative for the purposes of dating are the spellings συνφέρι and συφέρι. In inscriptions συνφ- is ‘comparatively well attested in the last three centuries before Christ’, although συμφ- is approximately twice as common.⁷ συφέρι is more unusual, but the loss of nasals before stops can be paralleled in inscriptions already from the classical period.⁸

Of course, there is no guarantee that the text itself is not older, and the very variability of the spelling should caution us against any prima facie assumption that what we have is anything like the ‘original’ text. But given that the material artefacts indicate a consistently Roman date-range, and no comparable Hellenistic-era inscriptions have been located to date, it seems safe to conclude that our text probably originates in the Roman period, i.e. in the first or second century CE.

The diction is unambitious. The verbs belong to the beginner's Greek lexicon; there are no nouns, adjectives or adverbs. There is no sign of Atticism: in particular, the third-person imperative -έτωσαν ending, which is regular for the koine of the era, is censured by Atticist authorities, who prefer -όντων.⁹ -όντων is the more recherché, literary option in prose at any rate (-έτωσαν, however, is found high poetry).¹⁰ The spelling συφέρι (in no. 8) also reflects a feature that is ‘not normally found in decrees and documents in which the writing is of a high standard’.¹¹ In terms of language, then, our text and its inscribers do not lay claim to literary elevation. This is perhaps what one would expect, given the relatively modest value of the gems themselves: agate, onyx and sardonyx, the material on which the majority of texts are inscribed, are all varieties of chalcedony, an abundant mineral in the Mediterranean region.

Metre

In spite of this apparent want of literary ambition, Carlo Gallavotti has claimed that our text is metrical. Combining the six lines into three pairs appears to yield one hemiamb (∪ — ∪ — ∪ — ∪) and two anacreontics (∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — —):¹²

∪ — ∪ — ∪ — ∪

λέγουσιν ᾇ θέλουσιν

∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — —

λεγέτωσαν οὐ μέλι μοι

∪ ∪ — ∪ — ∪ — —

σὺ φίλι με συνφέρι σοι

To scan the first line, however, Gallavotti was forced to interpret its alpha not as the relative ἅ (a short vowel, producing a light syllable) but as (long) ᾇ, explaining this as a Doric form of the adverbial ᾗ (‘in which way’). Given the resolutely unpretentious diction in the rest of the text, however, it is implausible to imagine that readers would avoid the obvious and supply instead a recondite form in a different dialect. While the final two anacreontics are secure, the first verse is not metrical, at least in the form in which we have it.¹³ There are three explanations for the anomalous metrical assemblage:

1. (i) The anacreontics are intended, and the first line represents an attempt at metre (whether hemiambic or otherwise) that is ‘flawed’ by classical standards.

2. (ii) The two lines of anacreontics are intended, but the first is deliberately extrametrical.¹⁴

3. (iii) The ‘anacreontics’ are unintended.

Before we assess these possibilities we should consider another striking metrical feature. Our text appears to make use of the stress accent to govern rhythm, in the manner of post-antique Greek poetry: the accents appear on the first of every four syllables (ἅ and σύ are treated as unstressed for these purposes, as they would be in Byzantine stress-based poetry).¹⁵

It is, to be sure, far from self-evident that the option of adopting a stress-based rhythm would have been open to a poet of the second century CE or thereabouts. As is well known, the shift from pitch to stress accent, accompanying the loss of vowel quantity, seems to have begun in the Hellenistic period.¹⁶ Greek metre was, however, by that stage already congealed in its classical, quantitative forms. Since Wilhelm Meyer's study of 1885 it has been dogma that the earliest unequivocal examples of poetry based around stress rather than quantity come in the form of two fourth-century texts by the experimental poet Gregory of Nazianzus, the De uirginitate ¹⁷ and the Hymnus uespertinus,¹⁸ composed in bipartite lines of 14–16 syllables none of which has any quantitative metre and almost all of which show accented stress on the penultimate syllable. This feature, paroxytonesis, can be detected in some quantitative poetry from the High Empire: the chief examples are the choliambics of Babrius and the so-called meiouric (‘mouse-tailed’) hexameters found in Lucian and various papyri. Some have interpreted the incorporation of paroxytonesis into ‘classical’ metres as a precursor of the later shift to stress-based metre, but this is not universally accepted.¹⁹ Either way, the stress-based rhythm found in our text is of a significantly more elaborate and thoroughgoing variety than mere paroxytonesis, and unparalleled (so far) in poetry of the High Empire.²⁰

The twenty-three (or, in the shorter version, fifteen) syllables can be understood as trochaic verses consisting of four syllables, with a caesura following the word-break in the third syllable (in the first three verses the caesura follows a free-standing word; in the final three it follows an enclitic attached to the previous word).²¹ The final verse is catalectic, ending at the caesura (see Table 1).

Table 1 Trochaic scansion by stress rhythm

Alternatively, of course, in order to respect the word-breaks and the colometry in which the text has been transmitted one might understand the rhythm as iambic with a missing first syllable (the ‘caesura’ would then simply become the verse-end). At one level nothing rests on the trochaic/iambic distinction: our text is surely a sui generis experiment with an attractive, memorable rhythm, rather than an attempt to adhere to a formally regulated poetic scheme. But if we consider it from the wider perspective of the history of Greco-Roman metrics then the trochaic/iambic issue becomes significant. At first sight the ‘missing’ syllable is a curiosity, but two related phenomena provide some important context:

1. (i) The Latin comedies of Plautus make use of iambic and trochaic septenarii in sung sections; this metre appears to have been in common use in oral culture too. The septenarius is in fact a misnomer:²² it is rather a catalectic octonarius, consisting of seven full feet plus a half-foot (i.e. fifteen syllables in all). According to Roman conventions, the short version of our text would be considered a trochaic septenarius (the longer version might be considered an extension of the same scheme over twenty-three syllables). Traditional Latin verse patterns are, like Greek, quantitative rather than stress-based, but as has often been noted accentual patterns can track quantitative ones closely in Latin (unlike in Greek).²³ The uersus quadratus – a trochaic septenarius that often displayed strong correlation between word accent and heavy quantity – was commonly used in acclamations, for example the one that accompanied the return of Germanicus in 19 CE: Salua Roma, salua patria, saluus est Germanicus.²⁴ It is notable too that many such septenarii are (like this one, and like our Greek text) characterised by phonetic repetition.

2. (ii) Our text can also be analysed as seven syllables of stress-based trochaics (λέγουσιν ἁ θέλουσιν) + eight syllables of iambics (λεγέτωσαν οὐ μέλι μοι: short version) + a further eight syllables of iambics (συ φίλι με συνφέρι σοι: longer version).²⁵ The fifteen-syllable Byzantine politikos stikhos (‘political verse’), which gained popularity from the tenth century onwards (but the origins of which have been traced back at least to the sixth century),²⁶ was similarly based around the combination of octasyllabic and heptasyllabic iambic or trochaic cola.²⁷ It has been clearly shown that the late-antique roots of the politikos lie in various different, fluid combinations of eight- and seven-syllable cola,²⁸ and that ‘oral accentual verse based on paired cola of 8 and 7 syllables with mixed trochaic/iambic rhythms was already in use from at least late antiquity’.²⁹

These two parallels offer some evidence, then, that (a) in both Latin and Greek iambics and trochaics were considered congenial to stressed rhythm, and that (b) such rhythms might be delivered in stikhoi of fifteen syllables, which could in Greek (according to a process that began at least as early as late antiquity) be split into hemistichs of eight and seven syllables. If, as Michael Jeffreys once argued, the politikos stikhos was the end result of a slow evolution of the acclamatory Latin trochaic septenarius, then our text might even be seen as evidence for a ‘missing link’ between Latin and Greek stressed poetry.³⁰ Alternatively, if Eduard Fraenkel was right to see the classical Greek (quantitative) trochaic tetrameter catalectic as originally underlying the Latin septenarius,³¹ our text might better be understood as the result of an independent conversion of the Greek quantitative form into a stress-based equivalent. Such questions, however, fall well outside our present remit.

Where does this leave our text, metrically? It seems unlikely that the rhythms might be accidental: can we really believe that a six-fold repetition of a rhythm is the result of chance – particularly when the metrical form is so historically credible? What is more, both the short and the long versions display the same rhythmic pattern (i.e. a combination of seven-syllable and eight-syllable cola), suggesting that the scheme is intrinsic. At the same time, however, the anacreontics seem equally unlikely to be accidental (the non- or sub-metrical first line notwithstanding). What to conclude? One possibility is that an original poem in quantitative verse has been rewritten as a rhythmic poem. Given the frequency of metrical errors in inscribed poetry elsewhere, however, it seems more likely that what we have is the original poem, representing a genuine attempt at (at least capturing some flavours of) quantitative verse, perhaps intended to appeal simultaneously to classically educated readers alongside appreciators of popular verse.³² What seems clear, however, is that in the poem's present state the rhythmic metre is more systematic, and likely to have been experienced as dominant.

Other ‘poetic’ features

Other striking features suggest a design that we might call ‘poetic’. One is the use of half-rhymes. As we have seen, the longer version is best understood aurally as six lines of (stress-based) trochaic tetrasyllables, the last of which is catalectic. These six lines divide naturally into 2 × 3-verse phonetic groups. The first is dominated by the initial sequence λέγουσιν/θέλουσιν/-γέτωσαν, the assonance of which is disguised in visual form, and revealed only once the poem is verbalised with the stress rhythm. In the second group of three verses the half-rhymes are even more pronounced: οὐ μέλι μοι/σὺ φίλι με/συνφέρι σοι. In the first group the half-rhymes occupy the first three positions in the trochaic tetrasyllable; in the second half, they run from caesura to caesura. This transition helps to emphasise the closural nature of the (catalectic) final verse's caesura.

Our text is visually as well as aurally poetic. The creators of the gemstone versions were clearly aiming for symmetry and elegant ‘diagrammatic’ patterns.³³ The Budapest version (no. 5) offers the most stunning example (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. The Budapest version (no. 5). Photograph: Aquincum Museum, reproduced with permission

The six lines are made of nine or eight letters. The first line, which has eight, is slightly distended; the fifth, which also has eight letters, has been elongated by the addition of what is apparently a leaf symbol (the same feature appears in catalogue entries nos. 3 and 7; one of the Paris cameos, no. 9, has μαι (phonetic) instead of με, presumably to fill out the line). The effect is to produce a square, with columnar diagrammatic patterns down either side. On the left, the ΛΕ of lines 1 and 3 and the ΑΘ of line 2 have been deliberately assimilated to create the impression of patterning; similarly in the last three lines the Ϲ has been almost closed, so as to assimilate it to Ο (note how much rounder it is than other sigmas), and so that the repetition of the second Υ is brought out. At the end of lines 1–3 we have ϹΙΝ/ϹΙΝ/ϹΑΝ, and then ΛΙΜΟΙ/ΛΙΜΕ and ΟΙ/ΟΙ. Other patterns include the diagonal run of epsilons going down from the first line. The letters start breaking apart from their positions in the words, and taking on independent lives as visual indices. The cameo takes on a mesmerising quality, as if the letters had a significance that went beyond their immediate function. We have not yet arrived in the fourth-century world of Optatian and the carmina cancellata, where the visual patterning of letters is so intense that the poems ‘vacillate between words and pictures’;³⁴ but we are, it seems, well en route.³⁵

Interpretation

Our text is, therefore, certainly poem-like, then, even if it differs markedly from a classical poem in its use of stress rhythm, its colloquialism, its inconsistent use of quantitative metre, its deployment of rhyme and its play with visual layout. I turn now from form to content. The text appears in two primary forms (leaving aside minor variations in spelling). The commoner version (nos. 2–12 in the catalogue) has six lines; no doubt no. 19 originally was of this kind too. Versions 13–18, however, lack the last two lines. In Appendix 2 I argue that no. 1, a graffito from Cartagena, originally consisted of the short version, and that the longer version was subsequently superimposed by a second hand.

This short version of the text means ‘they say what they like; let them say it; I don't care’. This reads as a popular-philosophical proverb: the speaker's view is set in defiant opposition to that of an unspecified majority. As a sentiment, this is almost infinitely adaptable, to suit practically any countercultural context. In a Greek context, however, the claim will have resonated as a claim to philosophical independence. The validation of an individual perspective in contrast to popular belief (δόξα) is of course a definitively philosophical stance, from at least Heraclitus and Parmenides onwards.³⁶ In the Roman era the opposition between δόξα and various modalities of reality (φύσις, τὰ πράγματα, ἡ ἀλήθɛια etc.) is a cornerstone of practical ethics.³⁷ But the shorter version does not specify exactly how or in what field this independent-mindedness manifests itself. Presumably that is the point: what is expressed here is primarily an attitude, adaptable to numerous different real-life scenarios.³⁸

The culminating οὐ μέλι μοι adds a more forceful note of self-assertion. It recalls the programmatic declarations of independence that characteristically mark philosophers as critically independent individuals. τί ἡμῖν … τῆς τῶν πολλῶν δόξης μέλει; asks Socrates in Plato's Crito.³⁹ Such strident assertions of ‘not caring’ are almost a badge of philosophical identity, particularly when it comes to death, about which Socrates and the Epicureans did not care.⁴⁰ Another popular inscription of the Roman Empire carries a prominent assertion of uncaring with philosophical overtones: the epitaph οὔκ ἤμην, ἐγενόμην, oὐκ εἴμι, οὐ μέλει μοι.⁴¹ Both οὐ μέλει μοι inscriptions elevate the individual above the masses by borrowing from a philosophical trope (thus exemplifying the traffic between high philosophy and popular morality that has been well discussed by Teresa Morgan).⁴²

οὐ μέλει μοι, indeed, may even carry a countercultural charge. μέλει μοι means ‘I acknowledge my responsibility’: it is a marker of submission to social expectations. Homer's Hector famously says πόλεμος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει | πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί (Il. 6.492–3), a form of words that also reappears with several different subjects in the Odyssey. For all the multiple ironies compressed into this sentence, for all the subtle prompting for the listener/reader to imagine Andromache's unspoken response, πόλεμος … μελήσει … ἐμοί remains a powerful articulation of the demands of the male citizen-warrior superego. To reject ‘care’ is therefore a defiant rejection of responsibility. We might think of Herodotus’ equally famous story of Hippoclides dancing away his marriage, with its epigrammatic conclusion: ‘that's of no concern to Hippoclides!’ (οὐ φροντὶς Ἱπποκλείδῃ, Hdt. 6.129). To reject ‘care’ in this way is to assert individualism within a social context that demands submission and recognition of obligation.⁴³

Most transmitted versions of the text, however, carry an extra two lines, which change its meaning. We shift suddenly from speaking abstractly about what ‘they’ say to a more dramatic relationship between ‘you’ (σύ, σοι) and the ‘me’ (μοι) introduced at the end of line 4. The aggressive imperative φίλι με and the presumptuous συνφέρι σοι create a new urgency. Gone is the vague proverbialising: readers are now summoned, qua addressees, into a metaleptic ‘drama of position’.⁴⁴ We are now in an apparently erotic scenario, where the words that ‘they say’ ask to be reread retrospectively as an expression of wider society's disapproval of an unconventional relationship. Catullus 5 provides an obvious parallel:

Viuamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,

rumoresque senum seueriorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis!

(5.1–3)

Let's live, darling Lesbia, and let's love;

And let's price all the grouching

Of old grumps at one as!

In Catullus, as has often been noted, the idiom is mercantile: rejecting the rumores … senum seueriorum is couched in terms of revaluing, as if to subvert conventional society's preoccupation with finance and quantification.⁴⁵ In the Greek text, by contrast, we are given no indication of the subjects of the first three lines’ third-person verbs. The emphasis is less upon the social distinction between ‘we’ and ‘they’, and more on that between words (λέγουσιν, λεγέτωσαν) and the ἔργον of ‘love’ (if we take φίλι euphemistically).⁴⁶

The Hellenistic Anacreontea provide further parallels. Gallavotti noted that poem 7 W² begins λέγουσιν αἱ γυναῖκες; the women, we are told, mock him for enjoying sensory pleasure while old, but the poet's contrary view is that the closer we get to death the more appropriate it is τὸ τερπνὰ παίζειν. Gallavotti concluded that in our text too the subject of λέγουσιν must be ‘the women’, and that the speaker is therefore an Anacreontic old man asserting that his virility is unimpaired. The Anacreontea certainly provide rich parallels for the rejection of δόξα in favour of sympotic delights (including sex) – indeed, richer still than Gallavotti saw. In particular, ‘not caring’ is a repeated theme. In poem 8 W² the speaker asserts that the wealth of Gyges οὔ μοι μέλει; what, rather, ἐμοὶ μέλει (the phrase appears three times) is anointing his moustache with perfumes, wreathing his head with roses and living for today. Poem 45 asks τί μοι πόνων, τί μοι γόων, | τί μοι μέλει μεριμνῶν; (4–5). Fr. 4.3 asks τί Πλειάδων μέλει μοι, | τί γὰρ καλοῦ Βοώτου; (10–11).

‘Not caring’ for mainstream tastes is, therefore, not just a philosophical but also a distinctively Anacreontic twist on the lyric persona's idiosyncratic self-definition in defiance of popular tastes (most famously instantiated in Sappho fr. 16 V).⁴⁷ But Gallavotti goes too far in identifying the speaker and the scenario precisely.⁴⁸ As we shall see in the next section, the ‘users’ of this inscription were diverse and widely distributed. The text in fact avoids determining any specific scenario, allowing individuals instead to superimpose a scenario of their choice. Certainly the last lines strongly suggest erotic aggression, and even recall (albeit distantly) magical agōgai that seek to induce passion in the victim, and to lead them forcibly to the spellweaver.⁴⁹ One magical gemstone (now in the British Museum) carries the imperative inscription φίλει με in a context that suggests that the female owner was seeking to secure the ongoing affection of a partner.⁵⁰ But the range of relationships potentially covered by φιλεῖν is broad; this couplet need mean nothing more than ‘show me affection and you'll benefit from it’. Since we all spend much of our time wishing we were loved by one person or another, the sentiment is malleable enough to suit practically any wearer.

Contexts

The few scholars who have considered our text have focused on trying to establish the demography of its wearers and the contexts of its use.⁵¹ Gallavotti, as we have seen, believed it to be a poem in the Anacreontic tradition. Angelos Chaniotis, relatedly, has claimed that such inscriptions may have been read out at night (perhaps at symposia).⁵² Gabriella Bevilacqua, by contrast, places it in a category of intimate formulae that appealed primarily to ‘un pubblico femminile’.⁵³ Given the plasticity of meaning established in the previous section, however, trying to identify one particular class of wearer or user seems the wrong approach. We can track the diversity of the inscription's uses along the axes of both geography and gender. In terms of geography, it was distributed across an extraordinarily wide geographical range: from Spain (no. 1) to Mesopotamia (no. 8). In terms of gender, item no. 5 was discovered around the neck of a young woman buried in what is now Hungary; while the shorter version of item no. 1 was scribbled on a wall in Spain by a man apparently called Eurypylus (see Appendix 2). The inscription's appeal was therefore not limited to one place or to one sex. Perhaps the Anacreontic parallels prompted men to read it as a piece of ironic sexual braggadocio, while parallels with female magical spells encouraged women to see it as an expression of desire to bind someone's affection. But it seems plausible that the text's crucial evolutionary adaptation in the literary contest of survival of the fittest was its very malleability, its openness to multiple renarrativisation in multiple different contexts.

Classicists are trained to locate cultural production with precise authors, individuals, frames; and to consider the reverse-engineering of those elements to be the scholar's primary duty. Who wrote it? In what polis? For what audience? To play what role? With what agenda? These are legitimate questions to ask of classical poetry, but our text is a different kind of animal. Whereas classical poetry achieves fixity and canonicity via its author function,⁵⁴ our text is anonymous;⁵⁵ it is the property not of its creator but of the network that sustains its circulation, and which authorises expansion, compression and variation at the level of detail.⁵⁶ Its real ‘author’ is its consumer, wearer and reader. In a mobile, internationalised economy, accessories that give cultural prestige are those that tie the wearer not to a particular point of origin but to a larger, pan-imperial, elite.

Our text, therefore, appealed not because it identified its wearer as a certain kind of person, but for precisely the opposite reason: because it allowed individuals to escape local pigeon-holing, and claim participation in an indeterminate network of translocal sophisticates who ‘get’ this kind of playful, elliptical discourse freighted with covert sexual aggression. Indeed, the text's content might be held to express precisely this rejection of the epichoric. ‘I don't care what they say’ articulates, as we have seen, a defiant individualism that differentiates those who imagine themselves in the subject position from the trivialities of gossip, and assimilates them instead to archetypes drawn from the literary tradition, whether morally obdurate philosophers or charismatically indulgent lyric personae. The text tells its readers that the logos of the unidentified ‘they’ is to be discounted; what matters is instead the reality of the intimacy shared between ‘you’ and ‘me’. At the same time, of course, the individuality proclaimed by the text is undermined by that text's broad dissemination. The individual who ventriloquises this text asserts autonomy, embodiment and intimacy, but – paradoxically – finds this in a pre-fabricated text. Let us consider briefly the one case where we can see our text ‘in action’, namely the Spanish graffito (no. 1 in the catalogue in Appendix 1):

_________________________

Ευρ]ύπυλος λέγι ὃς κὲ Ἀ[…

λέγουσιν ἃ θέλο[υσιν

λεγέτωσαν⋅ οὐ †μελ{ισ}ο{υ̣α̣}

______________________

(σὺ) φίλι μ]ε, συνφέρι σοι⋅ ταῦ[τα

(προσ)έγ]ρ̣αψα ΣΓ            5

According to my hypothesis (see Appendix 2), the two horizontal lines enclose the original text (the nonsensical ending of which has been ‘emended’), while a different hand has added the final two lines. What is significant for our purposes is the emphasis upon individual identification. Eurypylus’ autobiographical claim to ‘say’ or ‘speak’ (λέγι) these words drags him into the narrative drama, which centres precisely upon the correct use of words (λέγουσιν, λεγέτωσαν). This shared vocabulary, together with the insertion of his own name within the horizontal lines, folds his own assertion of selfhood into the textual scenario (albeit unmetrically). The individual, Eurypylus, has found his own place within the text's capacious narrative space. But such a widely disseminated text cannot be decisively claimed by one individual. If my hypothesis is right, a second author, identifying him- or herself as ΣΓ, has added the eight syllables of the longer version, thus ‘capping’ Eurypylus not only by correcting his text but also by undermining his individualising claim to be the ‘speaker’ of a poem that is in fact common coin.

We are, perhaps, not far (in essence, if admittedly not in terms of scale) from the paradox of ‘mass individualism’ that has been identified as a characteristic of late-capitalist consumer culture⁵⁷ (and which Monty Python's Life of Brian famously satirised).⁵⁸ The ‘I’ performed by our text is always pre-scripted, and whatever claims to anti-conformist individuality it allows one to perform are pre-rehearsed. This individualist paradox becomes prima facie even more marked if we consider the material form of the inscriptions. Some of these gems may have been worked in the same workshops (nos. 13 and 15 in the catalogue in Appendix 1). The glass-paste medallion (no. 5), for all its elegance, is probably a cheap replica created from a mould. No. 14 is an intaglio, which may have been used to seal documents. As Verity Platt notes, seals themselves create secondary images: they ‘combine the beauty and expense of precious stones and metals with a specific practical function, for the seal matrix – the carved image – can be replicated ad infinitum in a variety of pliable materials which are not precious at all’.⁵⁹ Even as the text insists on the embodied, erotic/affective individuality of the bearer, setting the singular μοι against the amorphous third-person plurality of λέγουσιν, the intaglio's material form exists as a material reminder of the text's multiple reproducibility.⁶⁰

Conclusions

Given the two lines of anacreontics identified by Gallavotti, and indeed the Anacreontic flavour of the ‘careless’ rejection of the words of others, it is possible that our text started out life as a quantitatively metical poem; in the canonical form in which it circulated, however, across the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE, its metre was tied to stressed rhythm. This makes it the earliest example of a Greek stress-based poem identified to date. But there is no great surprise in this: it is highly likely that stressed poetry was circulating in oral form long before it manifested itself in high literature. Indeed, its adoption for late-antique Christian hymns, designed as they were to appeal to a broad audience, is strong evidence that stressed poetry was at that stage deeply rooted in oral contexts. If we knew more about the oral culture of the High Empire we would no doubt have many more parallels.

The simple, alluring beat, coupled with its half-rhymes, must have been one reason for the text's popularity. Another was its adaptability into an elegant, patterned colometry that appealed aesthetically to the eye. But form is not the only explanation for its success. Our text allowed its bearer to stake a claim to individuality by rejecting social orthodoxy (what ‘they say’), and asserting instead a strong bond between ‘you’ and ‘me’. Such claims to individuality were, however, pre-scripted, in a double sense. First, the ‘careless’ rhetoric is borrowed from high literature and philosophy. The owner who says ‘I do not care what they say’ does in fact care what the classical litterati say. Second, the materiality of the gemstones themselves – the fact that they are churned out by workshops and exported over the Empire, and that intaglios at least might have been used to create new copies in wax or clay – expose the iterability of these claims to individuality. I have stressed that we need not see this as a failure or an undermining of the text's individualist message; rather, it is a reminder that the identity of the anti-social individualist is itself necessarily a social one. A gem, intimately embraced by the body, can be imagined as a prosthetic extension of one's own truest self; but it is also, and simultaneously, an alien object superimposed on the body, a reminder of our subjection to society's irresistible demands to purchase goods, to display them, to perform our identities through fashion.

The agency that shaped these texts and the artefacts that bore them is thus multiply distributed.⁶¹ The individuals who created the gems were many: the poet, the miners, importers and crafters of the gem and its setting, the new owner who commissioned (or simply bought) it. At a more abstract level, the need for a text like this was created by new social pressures that were the result of the emergence of a pan-imperial, translocal Hellenism.⁶² The paradox of large-scale societies is that while they homogenise cultural expression in terms of language, dress-codes and accessorisation, they also increase the pressure on individuals to seek out new ways of seceding from such normative pressures. These two Newtonian cultural forces are equipollent, leaving the individual suspended in an immobile state, neither fully individualised nor wholly part of the imagined community of the like-minded.

Let us turn in conclusion to our text's relationship to literate culture. The role of paideia (civilised education) as a marker of social distinction in the High Empire is now well established.⁶³ This cultural ‘superego’ can be detected in our text in the traces of quantitative verse and the distant allusions to philosophical and lyric personae; and, indeed, more generally in the lyric mise en scène that is presumed. Wearers of our text will be staking a claim, however indirect, to membership of the educated elite. At the same time, the text displays a number of markers of independence from the strict demands of classicism: subliterary diction and morphology, and most prominently the superimposed stress rhythm (borrowed from the popular uersus quadratus – whether in the well-attested Latin variety or in a Greek form that is otherwise unknown to us). Our text shows that it is aware of the poetic rules established by the canon; it simply does not care to abide by them (let the high theorists of quantitative metre say what they will). This text exemplifies both the pull of and the push against the normative classicism enshrined by the Second Sophistic. This tension was the stimulus for the creation of an experimental poem – let us finally give it that title – that was, apparently, unprecedented in the Greek world, and in formal terms at any rate astonishingly sophisticated.