Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posts about a striking example of ancient macaronic poetry:
Inter ‘eils’ Goticum ‘scapia matzia ia drincan’
non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus.
It’s quoted from D.R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Anthologia Latina, I: Carmina in Codicibus Scripta, Fasc. 1: Libri Salmasiani Aliorumque Carmina (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1982), p. 201 (number 279), where it’s titled “De conviviis barbaris” [On barbarian banquets]. In Bailey, it’s followed by this (number 280):
Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho,
ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.
Gilleland then cites Magnús Snædal’s excellent article “The ‘Vandal’ Epigram” (Filologia Germanica/Germanic Philology 1 [2009]: 181-213), which concludes that the Germanic words are Vandal rather than (as often previously thought) Gothic and that the verses were probably composed around the beginning of the sixth century; Snædal “regards 279-280 as one poem and translates the Latin thus (at 184)”:
On foreign guests.
Among the Gothic ‘eils scapia matzia ia drincan’
No one ventures to recite decent verses.
Calliope hurries to depart from the wet Bacchus,
So it does not happen that a drunken muse doesn’t stand on her feet.
He adds:
The simplest assumption is that the author had himself tried — with limited success — to recite poetry among drunken Vandals, had witnessed such an attempt, or had been told about one. He composed the epigram about this and, although it is presented as a general truth, most likely he had a certain incident in mind. He is not making fun of Vandal poetry but only saying that dignified verses cannot been [sic, i.e. be] read while they are always ordering food and drink because Calliope flees from there. This is indeed all we can say with some certainty about the occasion of the epigram.
I refer you to Snædal for pretty much everything you could want to know about these verses, and to Gilleland for further conjectures and notes; what puzzles me is Snædal’s assumption that the verses form a single poem. The first two lines (number 279) are a pair of dactylic hexameters, while the second (number 280) comprise a line of dactylic hexameter followed by one in dactylic pentameter — in other words, a standard elegiac couplet. I do not recall ever seeing those two forms combined (a number of hexameters followed by a line of pentameter), so I am dubious about the assumption. But then my understanding of late classical Latin verse is exiguous to say the very least, so I am probably wrong. Anybody know about this stuff?
The second line of an elegiac couplet is dactyl dactyl spondee anapaest anapaest.
No it’s not: An elegiac couplet “consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter,” and dactylic pentameter “consists of two halves, each consisting of two dactyls, for which spondees can be substituted in the first half only, followed by a longum.”
Fascinating post!! I don’t have my copy of Souter to hand, but I’m curious as to how ‘(se) iungere’ could apparently come to mean ‘to depart’; I would have thought it much more natural to take ‘…trepidat se iungere Baccho…’ as ‘she fears to join Bacchus’, but I don’t recall seeing such a reading mentioned. As for the metrical question, I have no idea what sort of things one finds in late Latin verse, but the switch to pentameter for the final line could simply be a nice nod to the notion of Calliope’s absence -she is, after all, the muse of epic poetry, which is of course composed in hexameters. Taking ‘pedibus’ as a pun on its other meaning of ‘metrical feet’ also supports this idea, though obviously I’m just guessing.
I just don’t believe in the sudden invention of an unprecedented form to express some nuance in the poetic subject — that’s not the way they wrote poetry back then. If there’s a tradition of XXXY, where Y is a final pentameter, then this can belong to it, but otherwise I think it’s two separate two-line poems.
Well, it would be easy enough to find examples of Greek and Roman poets doing occasional unprecedented things with the metre for just this purpose, but they are fairly trivial compared to what we have in this instance, so I certainly take your point. Anyway, whatever, some very early morning googling has finally revealed some instances of three hexameters followed by a pentameter, along with lots of other surprising combinations, in the Greek Anthology! So it is a thing. I hope some of your readers can shed more light on these…
I refer you to Snædal for pretty much everything you could want to know
Yes, I do not remember when I read it (I did – interested in connection between North Africa in Antiquity and Muslim North Africa, I am interested in vandalism as well) but I enjoyed it.
And I remember that this “The simplest assumption is that the author had himself tried — with limited success — to recite poetry among drunken Vandals, had witnessed such an attempt, or had been told about one.” surprised me but for a different reason: I sympathize to this solution but there are similar complaints by Sidonious at Burgundians and by Venantius Fortunatus at the Germans in general, often compared to this epigram. I mechanically assumed that it was a cliché. On the other hand, there is more than one grain of truth in stereotypes like “Russians drink vodka”, “Brazilians play football” and “it is hot in Africa”.
Venantius Fortunatus
Sidonius
(sorry, ust quick googling)
And speaking of cliché, I wonder of there are any eairlier Classical poems where Muse can’t stand on her feet.
An elegiac couplet “consists of one line of poetry in dactylic hexameter followed by a line in dactylic pentameter”
Quite so: Ovid famously explains the loss of the foot from the second line as due to a prank by his patron:
Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam
edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido
dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.
I was also a bit surprised by “hurries to depart,” but I suspect the problem is that “fears to join” doesn’t clearly imply “avoids joining out of fear.” Perhaps: “Calliope flinches from joining drunken Bacchus, lest an inebriated muse cannot stand on her feet.”
Magnús Snædal, The ‘Vandal’ Epigram, p. 5(195), pdf-version:
Anyway, whatever, some very early morning googling has finally revealed some instances of three hexameters followed by a pentameter, along with lots of other surprising combinations, in the Greek Anthology! So it is a thing.
Ah, thanks very much for that! I withdraw my dubiety and pat myself on the back for my prescient “I am probably wrong.” One’s own ignorance is always a safe assumption…
which concludes that the Germanic words are Vandal rather than (as often previously thought) Gothic
Interesting. I’ve seen it argued that the sound written “ai” in Gothic was a diphthong riding on how heils scans in this poem; that argument would then go out of the window…
OED online revised “macaronic, adj. and n.” in March this year; that etymology refers also to “macaroni, n.,” which was revised last month.
It’s hard to tell when they revised it — they say they updated it in March 2000, then add “most recently modified version published online March 2021”; who knows what that annoying new wording means? Anyway, here’s their discussion of macaronic:
A little more digging has revealed that two or three hexameters followed by a pentameter was a common enough occurrence in later Greek and Latin funerary inscriptions, and could also be used in ‘more popular’ verse. There is actually a good example in the Satyricon 34.10, where Trimalchio composes a (fairly shit) poem:
Eheu, nos miseros, quam totus homuncio nil est!
Sic erimus cuncti, postquam nos auferet Orcus.
Ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene.
I can’t seem to find any reference to what such meters are called, so I’m calling dibs on ‘elegiac tuplets’.
I’m not keen on ‘seiungere’ in place of ‘se iungere’, mainly because to me it sounds kind of off without an overt accusative ‘se seiungere Baccho’. A quick perusal of Lewis and Short also doesn’t yield any examples of the verb used in this sense without an explicit accusative. In terms of the sense though, both clearly work: either Calliope wishes to leave as the drinking gets out of hand, or she decides not to make an appearance at all, as everyone is already trolleyed. I thought Snaedal’s take on the motivation for the poem was interesting, but I too just went with the assumption that it was the old cliché of the hard-drinking Germanic tribes.
@Hans -I suppose it would in any case be risky to pin too much on the scansion of ‘eils’, given that Latin poets could make ‘ei’ scan as one syllable or two in certain contexts, and also because Vandalic was clearly a foreign language to the poet, which again could have afforded him a certain latitude with the scansion.
@Andy
You are being kind. I would say that a Latin poet would have low motivation for a faithful reproduction of any other language than Greek and a high motivation for producing a maximally ugly and unrefined “barbarian” sound (this is even artistically justified here). Of course Ovid reputedly composed poetry in Dacian, but we do not know what the locals thought about it.
@Andy: I am now reading the article, and the author uses eils being a diphthong as argument for the text being Vandal, not Gothic. Tottering towers on a weak fundament…
the passage:
Wrede is a great name for a scholar.
https://www.mijnwoordenboek.nl/vertaal/NL/EN/wreed
two halves, each consisting of two dactyls, for which spondees can be substituted in the first half only, followed by a longum
I think we were just taught two different ways of describing the same thing, but yours is much better at capturing the effect of “dum tiddy dum tiddy dum, dum tiddy dum tiddy dum.”
FINES
INTER
VANDA
LOSET
GOTHOS
– on a stone in Sicily
among various definitions of her role with respect to nations on the move this is one of the funniest.
they say they updated it in March 2000, then add “most recently modified version published online March 2021”; who knows what that annoying new wording means?
Could be anything from minor formatting changes, to correcting errors in quotation dates and sources, to restoring spelling and punctuation as they appeared in the original editions, to adding or dropping quotations (potato, for example), to adding and updating etymologies ahead of full revision (see December 2020 blog post), maybe even changes to the definition.
The Life of Words is annoyed too: “The impression is of a very up-to-date dictionary, which at least half of OED.com is very much not.” (I just left a long fulminating comment there, waiting for moderation.)
This is not as bad as making all these changes without indicating them at all, which is what they did up until this year (see Examining the OED for some blatant examples), but it’s not as good as it should be.
As for macaronic, since it got a full revision in 2000, I would guess the etymology is very unlikely to have been changed since then; whatever they did in March 2021 is probably very minor.
“most recently modified version published…” was OED’s attempt to address critiques such as Brewer’s about “distinguishing old scholarship from new” — what a fail! But a good illustration of why we need a Variorum OED: https://thelifeofwords.uwaterloo.ca/a-variorum-oed/
Wow. Fail indeed. I love the OED and they do great work, but they need to do better in this regard.
As far as I know, the oldest Vandal inscription in the New World is TAKI 183, written (of course) by a Greek among barbarians.
I’m very dubious about this ails/eils idea, though. Granted that when Little Wolf wrote his Testament, ai had become /ɛ/, but ei had always been a mere digraph for /i/, Greek fashion. I’d say it proves nothing either way.
On the off-chance it’s of interest to anyone, I managed to have a proper look into ‘Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho’. As mentioned above, I was dubious about the translation of ‘trepidat se iungere’ as ‘hurries to depart from’, but unable to check it properly. But it should indeed be ‘[she] shies away from joining B’ (or is fearful, hesitant, vel sim.).
The mistake is taking ‘trepidare’ in its primary senses of ‘to act in panic’ or ‘hurry anxiously’; but there are plenty of Classical examples in the OLD of the verb in its meaning of ‘to fear’ or ‘to be hesitant’ (including this one from Statius, Th.1, 639, construed with the infinitive: ‘(non tu)…certae trepidas occurrere morti’ (nor do you fear to meet certain death)). Once this is established, ‘se iungere’ can only be interpreted as ‘to join’.
Souter’s entry for ‘iungere’ says it can mean ‘to depart’ in absolute use (without citing specific passages) in the Vetus Latina (what he calls S(acrae) S(cripturae). Checking this in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (which covers the same late ground as Souter), I found one entry for ‘iungere’ (absolutely, again) with this meaning, also only from the Vetus Latina, citing passages in Exodus and Maccabees, and most importantly saying that this usage of ‘iungere’ was the result of a literal translation of the Greek ‘ἀναζεύγνυμι’, (of an army) ‘to break camp/ move off to somewhere else’ (the Vulgate in the same passages uses ‘proficisci’). (These sorts of unidiomatic translations are very common in the Vetus Latina.) So ‘iungere’ meaning to depart’ is neither normal, nor idiomatic, nor Classical Latin, and in any case has to be construed absolutely, not with the reflexive pronoun, as in this epigram. As for ‘seiungere’, I mentioned above that the ellipsis of the reflexive felt awkward; I would add that the fact that there is no space between ‘se’ and ‘iungere’ in the Salmasianus isn’t much of an argument, given that it has very few spaces between words anyway.
Apologies for quite a long and nerdish comment; none of this really offers an exciting change of perspective on the poem, but it is the lot of the classicist to have to take pleasure in the smallest of things…
Huh? What? Apologies? I don’t get it.
Yes, this is the internet home of long and nerdish comments, and I think I speak for all of us when I say yours is appreciated.
His translation of trepidat… perplexed me too when I first read the article, but I am confindent that he (and you and many others here) knows Latin better than me, particularly poetry. So I thought, maybe there are some issues with ‘hesitates to join’ that I am unaware of. As I said, I enjoyed his article: not because of his conclusion but because of the effort he put in describing existing translations and editions.
For trepido with infinitive in the sense “hurry” dictionaries readily offer Virgil and Horace. Textbooks note that that the usage is rare and poetic.
In Statius the meaning is opposite, and we have two conflicting trepido. That is funny. Would be interesting to know which (if any) was common when the poem was composed…
Maximianus ELEGIARVM LIBER Book 1 Lines 1-10
Aemula quid cessas finem properare senectus?
cur et in hoc fesso corpore tarda uenis?
solue precor miseram tali de carcere uitam:
mors est iam requies, uiuere poena mihi,
non sum qui fueram: periit pars maxima nostri
hoc quoque quod superest langor et horror habent.
lux grauis in luctu, rebus gratissima laetis,
quodque omni peius funere, uelle mori,
dum iuuenile decus, dum mens sensusque maneret,
orator toto clarus in orbe fui.
To make this scan:
[] = ignore syllable
CAPS = add syllable
[Ae]mula quid cessas finem properare senectus
[cur] et in hoc fesso corpore tarda uenis?
[sol]ue precor miseram tali de carcere uitam
ET mors est iam requies, uiuere poena mihi,
non sum qui fueram: periit pars maxima nostri
[hoc] quoque quod superest langor et horror habent.
lux grauis in luctu, rebus gratissima laetis
quodque omni peius funere, uelle mori
dum iuuenile decus, dum mens sensusque maneret
orator toto clarus in orbe fui.
So are late Latin elegiac couplets allowed to skip or add a beat here and there or am I missing something?
@Hat: Thanks for that!
@drasvi: The example from Vergil of ‘trepido’ with infinitive meaning ‘to hurry’ initially caught me out, as Lewis and Short put it together with the example from Statius without any comment! Thank goodness for the OLD. ‘Trepidare’ really seems to dislike the infinitive, so my guess is that neither meaning in that construction was ever predominant.
@Paddy: Unless I’ve somehow misunderstood what you wrote, there are no issues with the scansion in those lines you quoted, they’re perfectly good elegiacs. I haven’t read Maximianus -sounds kind of depressing…
To make this scan
Like Andy, I don’t understand this; it scans perfectly well as is.
Yes, I recant. I felt the rhythm was distorted by first syllables in some of the first few lines and looked at whether removal (or addition) of a syllable would lead to a line which scans “better”. But I probably just looked at too many of these couplets and got confused about what was a good rhythm.
29 Martial’s Early Works: The Liber Spectaculorum, Xenia, and Apophoreta 505 T. J. Leary 30 Micro to Macro: Martial’s Twelve Books of Epigrams 521 Sven Lorenz 31 Carminis Incompti Lusus: The Carmina Priapea 541 Eugene O’Connor 32 Pseudo?Senecan Epigrams 557 Alfred Breitenbach PART V Epigram in Late Antiquity 575 33 The Late Latin Literary Epigram (Third to Fifth Centuries ce) 577 Luca Mondin 34 Greek Epigram in Late Antiquity 597 Gianfranco Agosti 35 Damasus and the Christian Epigram in the West 615 Dennis Trout 36 Gregory of Nazianzus and the Christian Epigram in the East 633 Christos Simelidis 37 Inter Romulidas et Tyrias Manus: Luxorius and Epigram in Vandal Africa 649 Anna Maria Wasyl PART VI The Fortleben of Ancient Epigram 665 38 Epigram in the Later Western Literary Tradition 667 Peter Howell 39 The Epigram in Byzantium and Beyond 679 Andreas Rhoby Index 695
But this epigram wasn’t written in Greek or Gothic letters, it’s in Latin ones, where ei was not an established digraph at all, so we must take it literally as some kind of [ɛɪ] or [ei].
It isn’t limited to this epigram either. The king of the Vandals in Africa is known as Geisericus with another such ei for *ai (PGmc *gaiza-rīkaz “spear king”, Gothic **Gaizareiks, German **Gerrich to rhyme with Erich). It really looks like the Vandals had done a sound shift that the Goths didn’t participate in.