Armand D'Angour's recent posting of a lyric of Anacreon (https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:c2i5hfc7ezyxfuhjt2a27f4y/post/3ltfcqpn2zc27) reminded me of reading a sepulchral epigram of Callimachus when I was a schoolboy:

Δωδεκέτη τὸν παῖδα πατὴρ ἀπέθηκε Φίλιππος ἐνθάδε, τὴν πολλὴν ἐλπίδα, Νικοτέλην

Here's a computer generated phonemic transcription:

dɔː.de.ké.tɛː tòn pâi̯.da pa.tɛ̀ːr a.pé.tʰɛː.ke pʰí.lip.pos en.tʰá.de, tɛ̀ːn pol.lɛ̀ːn el.pí.da ni.ko.té.lɛːn

Translation:

Here Philippos, a father, laid his twelve year old son, his great hope, Nikoteles.

As a teenager, I was struck by the elegant simplicity and pathos of these lines.

Decades later, as a parent, the pathos of the lines strikes me so much more deeply. I also feel a bond both with Philippos, separated as we are by oceans and millennia, and with my younger self, sensitive in adolescent way to the pathos, yet then unacquainted with the paternal emotions stirring that father's grief and disappointment. A triad of sensibility....

"Um, actually," I hear some reply guy ask, "are you sure that Philippos and his son even existed and that they're not just fictions created by Callimachus?"

I'm not sure, because I don't know enough about this literature, but I'm also not sure if anybody, even amongst classical scholars, knows for sure whether these two people had any material existence. I am sure, however, that their material existence or otherwise doesn't matter to me, because as characters, fictional or not, they are real to me; my triad of sensibility endures. But now we're wading into philosophy...

If you can't read the Greek, try your best with the phonemic transcription, so that you can hear the alliteration and repetition of the sound /p/ and that heartbreaking conclusion with the sound of the boy's name.

#Literature #Callimachus #GreekLiterature #Epigrams #Greek #Parenting #Fathers