The Alexandra attributed to Lycophron is a challenging poem, notorious since antiquity for its obscurity and enigmatic character. Couched as a messenger’s report of a long and complicated prophecy by Cassandra, the poem creatively manipulates the Greek literary and mythographic tradition, explores questions of gender, ethnicity and the authority of the poet’s voice, and influenced Virgil’s Aeneid in its focus on the restoration of Trojan glory in Italy. It has nonetheless not been widely read in the modern era, and has sometimes been dismissed as little more than nugatory. In the last two decades, however, it has attracted renewed scholarly attention, as seen in the proceedings of a major international conference, new studies of literary aspects of the poem, annotated translations in French, Italian and German, and a new Budé edition. To this renaissance, Simon Hornblower has been a major contributor. His full-scale edition (Oxford 2015) marked a major milestone, soon augmented by a monograph offering an expansive treatment of the poem’s date and historical context, Lykophron’s Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World (Oxford 2018). Before Hornblower’s edition, those looking to read the poem in English had to consult A.W. Mair’s Loeb (A.W. Mair and G.R. Mair, Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron, Aratus, Loeb Classical Library 129 (Cambridge MA 1921 [rev. 1955])) or the facing translation of G.W. Mooney’s edition (The Alexandra of Lycophron (London 1921)). This freestanding translation, replicating with minor changes the facing translation of Hornblower’s edition and including an introduction, running glosses and a series of more substantial interpretative and exegetical notes, makes the poem more readily accessible to a general English-reading audience than ever before.
The brief introduction includes sections on the poem’s broader mythological context and on some literary qualities of the poem, including its notorious but perhaps exaggerated difficulty, and its structure and themes (including the restored glory of Rome, the failed nostoi of the Greeks, metamorphosis, sexual violence and the diminishment of Greek heroism). Since antiquity, prominently placed references to Roman hegemony have raised doubts about whether the poem was really composed in the early third century BCE by Lycophron of Chalcis, and the section on authorship and date adopts the view, argued more fully by Hornblower elsewhere, that the poem should be dated to the early second century BCE and assigned to a different author. There are also brief sketches of the historical implications of that dating, as well as treatments of the poem’s sources and genre, its representation of Rome and Italy, the possibility of an original performance context and its subsequent reception. There is a select bibliography, a list of abbreviations, an elliptical chronology and a map of the Mediterranean.
A dilemma facing any translator of Lycophron is how to reflect the challenges of Lycophron’s language without either making the poem illegible or underrepresenting the creativity of its diction. Lacking some of the grammatical markers of Greek, English is not ideally suited to manage Lycophron’s wide-ranging sentences (even if, as Hornblower notes, their syntactical structure is usually not in itself a challenge), nor is it is easy in any modern tongue to capture the creativity of the poet’s language and its elaborate imagery. Hornblower’s prose translation makes reasonable concessions to comprehensibility by unpacking some metaphors without attempting to capture Lycophron’s verbal creativity, while also straying less far from the Greek than his predecessors sometimes do (early in Cassandra’s prophecy, cf., for example, 32 where the phrase πεύκαις οὐλαμηϕόροις, literally ‘by pines bearing a throng of warriors’, is rendered ‘army-bearing pine-timbered ships’ by Hornblower, simplified to ‘warlike pineships’ by Mair and effaced almost entirely in Mooney’s ‘foemen from the fleet’). The topics of Cassandra’s prophecy are noted within the translation by italicized interlinear titles. The practice appears not to be explained anywhere, and while the decision not to use running headers or marginal notes is understandable, there is perhaps some risk that readers will be left with the misimpression that these are part of the text.
To decipher the poem’s references, readers need extensive glossing, and the notes of modern translations have tended to draw extensively from ancient exegetical tradition. Mooney’s and Mair’s editions print running commentary relying heavily on the scholia at the bottom of the page. Hornblower, on the other hand, wisely prints footnotes glossing people, gods, places and objects along with more extensive endnotes on a wide range of subjects, including the mythological and literary traditions, onomastics, religious practice and history. Although much of the information in these notes appears also in Hornblower’s edition, it has been reshaped thoroughly and augmented with new comments on various literary aspects of the poem. Many notes include relevant bibliography. As a group, they are rich, and although they are designed to be accessible to a general audience, they will also be useful for scholars. The volume concludes with an index of names and a general index.
Despite its reputation, the Alexandra deserves a wider readership, and indeed it has great potential as a teaching text. Hornblower’s trim volume, locating Lycophron alongside Theocritus and Apollonius as ‘Oxford World Classics’ (cf. vii), marks a new phase in the modern reception of the poem. It is to be wholeheartedly commended.
