Alexandra (Lycophron)

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The Alexandra is a dramatic monologue of an author named Lycophron . This is possibly the tragic Lycophron from Chalkis , who lived in the early 3rd century BC. Was active. According to another hypothesis, the work was created between 196 and 190 BC. The main part consists of a prophecy by the Trojan seer Kassandra , who is called Alexandra here. In a particularly "dark", difficult to understand language, it proclaims the fall of Troy , the fate of the heroes involved and other events up to the time of writing.

Content and character of the work

Kassandra, the "Alexandra" at Lycophron, on a painting by Evelyn De Morgan

The 1474 line work is written in senars ("sixes") or iambic trimeters , the meter of the scenes in Greek tragedy . Paris set out for Sparta to steal Menelaus ' wife Helena , which was to lead to the outbreak of the Trojan War . Kassandra is left in the care of a guard appointed by her father Priam . The text is this watchman's report to Priam about the curses uttered by Cassandra.

After she recalled the first destruction of Troy by Heracles , Cassandra depicts the outbreak and course of the Trojan War, then in a large central part the tragic events of the return of the Greek heroes. The focus here is again on the account of Odysseus' wanderings , his return to the dissolute Penelope and his eventual murder. The fate of the Greeks is contrasted with the successful settlement of Aeneas in Italy and the prospect of the greatness of Rome.

In the final part, the panorama expands to show the "eternal struggle" between Europe and Asia, which has been waving back and forth in fabulous times, leading to the Persian Wars and Alexander the Great , to "in the sixth generation" after him a relative of Kassandra defeat the Macedonians and make a peace that will end the age-old iniquity of mutual wars. Cassandra's speech ends in resignation, as she cannot stop the many catastrophes, and the guard closes with a blessing for the Trojans.

The obscurity of the poem (to skoteinon poiema) already noted in the lexicon entry of the Suda is based on the one hand on its sought-after vocabulary overflowing with archaisms , dialect forms and neologisms : of the 3,000 words in the poem, 518 appear only here, a further 117 here for the first time. As clear as the structure as a whole is, the individual poem is full of digressions, which are often still nested in one another. After the murder of Odysseus and that of his son Telemach , that of Heracles , the son of Alexander the great, is also told or prophesied.

The greatest difficulty, however, is that the main characters and the important locations are generally not named by name, but are described in a variety of ways: people with references to their actions and with animal comparisons, with the same animal name (lion, dragon, wolf ...) always different people means; and geographic locations by identifying them with remote, little-known angles in them. Here the scholars have sought clarification since ancient times, but some puzzles can no longer be solved.

The work captivates with its extraordinary erudition, which made it a popular source for rare names and expressions in late antiquity, but has little genuinely literary appeal. Konrat Ziegler accuses Lykophron of not leaving any register of the psychred (the literary pomposity that Aristotle accused of his namesake from the 4th century) unrecorded , Barthold Georg Niebuhr calls the work almost inedible .

The author's question

The Suda names the tragedy poet Lykophron from Chalkis, who in the early 3rd century BC. Was active. Even in the oldest scholia , which presumably go back to Theon, a grammarian of the Augustan period who edited Alexandra , it is noted that it must be a different lycophron, because later events are reported at the end of the work. Johannes Tzetzes takes over the indication of the Suda in his commentary.

In 1788 the publisher Heinrich Gottfried Reichard tried to save the early dating of the work by revealing the last prophecies of the defeat of Pyrrhus against the Romans in 275 BC. That would have fallen from Chalkis during the lifetime of Lycophron. It was subsequently suggested that the prophecies relating to Rome be viewed as later additions. Barthold Georg Niebuhr , on the other hand, pleaded for the uniformity of the work and for the later dating. The renowned classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff defended the attribution to Lycophron from Chalkis all his life, initially by also connecting the last prophecies with events in the life of Alexander the great, and when this could not be maintained by advocating, that the end of the work could at least be an actual prophecy in its time.

On the other hand, details that were only researched later are given, which are supposed to point to the processing of events of the second Macedonian-Roman war . This ended after the victory of the Romans in the battle of Kynoskephalai in 197 BC. With a peace treaty between Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Philip V of Macedonia, in which the philhellenic Roman general granted the Macedonians and Greeks very favorable conditions.

In the ongoing discussion, the reference of the last prophecies to Pyrrhus and the insertion thesis were represented again and again. B. by Peter M. Fraser in his great work Ptolemaic Alexandria from 1972. The stylistic uniformity of the work and its logical connection, which amounts to the reconciliation of Greeks and Romans, speak against the insertion thesis.

A specific argument in favor of the attribution to the older Lycophron from Chalkis was always that the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium accuses him of using a dialect expression from Evia, which is also found in Alexandra . However, nothing prevents this expression from Lycophron from Chalkis from being used in another work.

Last but not least, the Alexandra lacks any reference to Egyptian conditions, as would have been the case with the older Lycophron who worked in Alexandria , even if he had written the work after returning to Chalkis .

Konrat Ziegler offers a summary of the older discussion in his Realencyclopädie article. As Stevan Josifović noted in 1974, no new arguments against his result had been put forward in the period up to then, and Fraser also joined him in a later publication. It is possible that the author of the work came from Chalkis and had the same name as the Alexandrian author, which then led to confusion. In more recent research, however, the equation of the tragedian Lycophron from Chalkis with the author of the monody is sometimes more strongly supported and sometimes rejected. Simon Hornblower assumes that Lycophron is a pseudonym. He also discusses the question of whether it could be the work of a woman, but ultimately finds insufficient evidence that a woman in ancient times could have used a male pseudonym.

expenditure

  • Eduard Scheer : Lycophronis Alexandra . 2 volumes, Berlin 1881–1908. Reprint 1958 (basic critical edition of Alexandra )
  • Lycophron: Alexandra . Greek and German with explanatory notes. Edited by Carl von Holzinger . Leipzig 1895 ( online at Internet Archive ).
  • Massimo Fusillo , André Hurst , Guido Paduano : Licofrone. Alessandra . Guerini, Milano 1991. ISBN 8878022616 .
  • Lycophronis Alexandra . Texts établi, traduit et annoté by André Hurst. Les Belles Lettres , Paris 2008 (Collection des universités de France).
  • Lycophron: Alexandra. Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction by Simon Hornblower . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015.

literature

  • Simon Hornblower: Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-19-872368-4 .

Web links

Wikisource: Lykophron  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ↑ Suda, Lambda 827 .
  2. ↑ Peter M. Fraser: Ptolemaic Alexandria , Vol. 2, Oxford 1972, pp. 1065-1067.
  3. ^ Peter M. Fraser: Report of the Department of Antiquities Cyprus , 1979, pp. 328-343, after the reference in Bardo Gaudy et al. (Ed.): Musa tragica. The Greek tragedy from Thespis to Ezechiel , Göttingen 1991, p. 297.
  4. ^ Doris Meyer: Lykophron . In: Bernhard Zimmermann, Antonios Rengakos (Hrsg.): Handbook of the Greek literature of antiquity. Volume 2: The literature of the classical and Hellenistic period , Munich 2014, pp. 90-100, here: 90 f.
  5. ↑ Simon Hornblower: Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-1987-2368-4 , p. 19.
  6. ↑ Simon Hornblower: Lykophron: Alexandra. Greek Text, Translation, Commentary, and Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-1988-1064-3 , pp. 39-40.
  7. ↑ Simon Hornblower: Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-1987-2368-4 , p. 7.
  8. ↑ Simon Hornblower: Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2018, ISBN 978-0-1987-2368-4 , p. 7, note 20.