Our knowledge of Hermesianax of Colophon's poetic production is restricted to a limited number of fragments.Footnote ¹ He is mostly known for his Leontion, an elegiac poem in three books that in ancient sources appears dedicated to the female figure from whom it takes its title. Only one of the poem's fragments is of substantial size (98 lines), namely the ‘catalogue of love-affairs’ (κατάλογον … ἐρωτικῶν) from Book 3 of his Leontion, preserved by Athenaeus.Footnote ² Hermesianax offers here an overview of Greek poetry and (to a lesser extent) philosophy from a particular standpoint. Each poet and philosopher is described in a short narrative centred on erotic passion and its consequences. The first two stories are unsurprising. The catalogue begins with Orpheus descending to Hades and persuading the gods of the underworld to let his wife Agriope regain life (1–14).Footnote ³ After that, poets appear for the most part in love with female characters more or less creatively drawn from their poems. It is not too startling to find Mimnermus (35–40) ‘burning’ for Nanno (37) and Antimachus (41–6) ‘struck with passion for Lydian Lyde’ (41–2). The depiction of Homer in love with Penelope, though, is unprecedented (27–34). For her, he set ‘delicate (λεπτήν) Ithaca to verse’ (29–30) and ‘hymned Icarius’ race, Amyclas’ town and Sparta, touching on his distress’ (33–4). This probably refers to the common ancestry shared by Penelope and Helen;Footnote ⁴ both the Iliad and the Odyssey are thus ultimately traced back to Homer's love for Penelope. In Op. 633–40 Hesiod famously recounts that his father left Aeolian Kyme, fleeing from ‘wretched poverty’ (κακὴν πενίην, 638), and settled near Helicon in the ‘wretched village’ (ὀιζυρῇ ἐνὶ κώμῃ, 639) of Ascra. In Hermesianax, by contrast, it is Hesiod himself who leaves his home and comes to AscraFootnote ⁵ in order to woo Eoie or rather ‘Dawn’ (Ἠοίην μνώμενος, 24), a girl whose name is an obvious play on the formula ἠ’ οἵη employed in the Catalogue of Women.Footnote ⁶ If archaic epic poetry leaves little room for the exploration of love qua poetic subject, here the genre's most distinguished representatives are turned into ‘(crypto-)love poets’.Footnote ⁷ A similar process of biographical and/or textual distortion is extended to all other poets included in the catalogue. For each of them, Hermesianax provides us with a sketch built around some detail ultimately taken from their works. These stories are often preposterous or absurd, which is exactly how they are meant to be perceived. On the other hand, Hermesianax deals with philosophers in a different and perhaps less extravagant fashion. Socrates, for instance, is in love with Aspasia (89–94), who is mostly known for her intellectual prowess and for her liaison with Pericles. Both Plato and Aeschines have Socrates meeting with Aspasia and learning from her.Footnote ⁸ In this case, then, Hermesianax's narrative has turned a ‘historical’ interaction into a love story.

How are we to interpret this fragment? Until fairly recently, critics have not really capitalized on the rare luxury represented by such a sizeable portion of Hellenistic elegy. Rather, they have looked at Hermesianax primarily within an interpretative framework that attributed to Callimachus a decisive role both in the evaluation of the literary past and in the establishment of a new poetics that was technically refined and intellectually elitist. This approach placed great emphasis on the supposed gap between Callimachus and the ‘others’ in terms of style and aesthetics.Footnote ⁹ The following pages will explore a different line of investigation by rooting Hermesianax's poetic experiment within the literary culture of the fourth and third century b.c.e. This will prevent us from giving in to a biased ‘othering’ of Hermesianax—a pitfall for the criticism of Hellenistic poetry of which we have grown increasingly aware in recent years.

From this perspective, the first question we need to consider is to what extent our fragment is representative of the Leontion as a whole. There is no evidence that the catalogic structure of fr. 3 L. = 7 P. informed all three books of the poem.Footnote ¹⁰ The very structure of this fragment suggests that Athenaeus has excerpted it as a self-contained unit. The list of the twelve poets is meticulously organized: it is arranged in chronological order and in pairs, covers most of the main genres of Greek poetry (epic, elegy, lyric, drama) and ends with a contemporary figure, Philitas of Cos (75–8), c. 340–280 b.c.e. Furthermore, beginning as it does with Orpheus and Musaeus, it encompasses both myth and history: it is designed to be all-inclusive. The second list, on the other hand, while maintaining a similar chronological order, is not organized in pairs and consists of just three philosophers, the last one (95–8) being Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435–360). Even admitting that Athenaeus has cut it short, the philosophers’ catalogue cannot have matched, in terms of length and structure, the poets’ catalogue. This indicates that, in broad terms, in this part of Book 3 of the Leontion ‘philosophy’ appears as a coda to ‘poetry’. Why do we find this coda here? One possible answer may be related to our fragment being from the last book of the poem. As Kelly has argued with respect to extant early epic poems, a rather consistent strategy of closure at work in these poems is to present a concluding narrative doublet that closely recalls a larger and more elaborated section of the poem.Footnote ¹¹ Such ‘decreasing doublets’, as Kelly names them, are employed in order (a) to direct the audience towards the larger (and prior) element as the more significant and (b) to discourage the audience from expecting continuation. With all the caution required by the fact that we are not dealing with an orally-derived work, Kelly's analysis may offer a valuable insight into the peculiar nature of Hermesianax's double catalogue. It invites us to take the philosophers’ list as a decreasing doublet. As such, while establishing a close connection between poets and philosophers in matters of erotic suffering, it effectively marks the poets’ list as the more relevant of the two. The close connection between the two groups also serves to foreground a crucial difference. Only for poets does love provide ‘professional’ inspiration, as is particularly clear in the case of Hesiod and Eoie/‘Dawn’ (25), Homer and Penelope (29–34), Antimachus and Lyde (45–6), Alcaeus and Sappho (47–8), and Philitas and Bittis (77–8). When it comes to philosophers, however, love has strong connotations of intensity and madness. They cannot shun its maddening force (οὐδ’ οἵδ’ αἰνὸν ἔρωτος ἀπεστρέψαντο κυδοιμὸν | μαινομένου, 83–4), which in fact controls them as a ‘dreaded charioteer’ (δεινὸν … ἡνίοχον, 84); madness (μανίη, 85) strikes Pythagoras and an angry Aphrodite burns Socrates (Κύπρις μηνίουσα πυρὸς μένει, 91).Footnote ¹² In a consistent fashion, it brings havoc in their lives and marks a point of no return. As a result, it plays no part in the process that leads to their philosophical works or to their discoveries in other fields (80–4, 87–8). On the contrary, it is at odds with their intellectual paths. It is tempting to see in this difference a metadiscursive statement: however much philosophy may claim to offer rational tools to understand the complexity of the world and improve human life, it is ultimately defenceless against love, that love which in Hermesianax's catalogue turns out to be the very essence of all forms of poetry.Footnote ¹³

A distinctive feature of Hermesianax's catalogue is its addressee: on a few occasions the narrator addresses a female figure only to remark that she is familiar with some of the poets and their œuvre. She is acquainted with Alcaeus (Λέσβιος Ἀλκαῖος … γινώσκεις, 47–9), Philoxenus of Cythera (ἄνδρα δὲ τὸν Κυθέρηθεν … γινώσκεις, ἀίουσα μέγαν πόθον κτλ., 69–73), and Philitas of Cos (οἶσθα δὲ καὶ τὸν ἀοιδόν κτλ., 75). We have no information on the identity of this woman, but it is not unlikely that she may be Leontion herself.Footnote ¹⁴ Some scholars associate her presence with the exemplary and personal nature of the catalogue, which in their opinion would be ultimately designed to illustrate the power of love from the point of view of Hermesianax's own experience.Footnote ¹⁵ Admittedly, nothing in our fragment explicitly betrays that the narrator may be sharing in the sorrows of his characters (particularly evident at lines 25, 31, 35, 41–2, 63–4, 91), but this might have been an easy assumption for anyone who had access to the whole Leontion. In this regard, it may be relevant that all the stories included in the catalogue are stories of heterosexual love.Footnote ¹⁶ Remarkably, even Sappho appears only as the love interest for which Alcaeus and Anacreon contend (47–56). She is somewhat ambiguously portrayed as ‘arrayed among the many Lesbians’ (στελλομένην πολλαῖς ἄμμιγα Λεσβιάσιν, 52), but there is no reference to Sappho's own erotic passion in this context.Footnote ¹⁷ In all likelihood, such an exclusive focus on heterosexual love is intimately related to the nature of the ‘conversation’ that is taking place between the narrator and his addressee. Besides, the specific emphasis on her familiarity with the poets’ works at least to some extent evokes the appeal to the Muse's knowledge, particularly in its traditional form in Homeric and in lyric poetry.Footnote ¹⁸ In this respect, then, Hermesianax looks like his ‘Muse’, who is both a learned interlocutor and the woman he loves—thus the ‘inspiration’ for his poetry.

The catalogic structure of the fragment and its possible address to Leontion are commonly read as markers of the poem's literary ancestry, which is traced back both to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and to the tradition of love elegy represented by Mimnermus’ Nanno and especially Antimachus’ Lyde.Footnote ¹⁹ We saw earlier that Hermesianax introduces Hesiod's love for Ἠοίη (24) by rewriting and romanticizing the poet's autobiography narrated in the Works and Days: Hesiod ‘composed whole catalogues in homage, with the girl heading the list’ (ἐκ πρώτης παιδὸς ἀνερχόμενος, 25–6).Footnote ²⁰ ‘Hermesianax represents the Catalogue as a series of episodes all beginning ἢ οἵη’,Footnote ²¹ then, but this formula is avoided at the beginning of both lists of poets and philosophers, where we find the less characteristic οἵη(ν) μέν (οἵην μὲν … Ἀγριόπην, 1–2; οἵη μὲν … μανίη, 85).Footnote ²² The use of these phrases may nod to the Catalogue Footnote ²³ but, as R. Hunter has remarked, ‘there is nothing particularly Hesiodic about Hermesianax's style or language; far from it, in fact. The Leontion shows that the Catalogue was known, not necessarily that it was closely read.’Footnote ²⁴ In fact, the idea that Hermesianax was following closely in the footsteps of Hesiod's Catalogue predates the age of papyrological discoveries.Footnote ²⁵ While improving our knowledge of the archaic text, papyri have also revealed that Hermesianax's representation and adaptation of the Hesiodic poem betray a substantial degree of simplification.Footnote ²⁶ As a matter of fact, the formula on which Hermesianax's joke Ἠοίη is based is surprisingly infrequent in the Catalogue: it occurs about ten times in extant fragments and its exact function is unclear.Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, as an alternative title for the work itself it occurs almost exclusively in Pausanias (e.g. 2.2.3, 2.16.4) and Athenaeus (8.66, 10.32), i.e. the two writers who preserve most of Hermesianax's own fragments.Footnote ²⁸ Possibly it was Hermesianax himself who first came up with the idea of playing on the ἠ’ οἵη formula, and his playful pun later found its way into the scholarly tradition.Footnote ²⁹ In this respect, then, our poet may not have merely reflected an existing state of affairs but rather, perhaps unwittingly, he may have contributed to establishing a new way of framing the literary past, here with regard to the critical reception of the Hesiodic corpus.

The notion of literary ancestry is also crucial for the section of the fragment on elegy. Mimnermus (35–40), introduced as the inventor of ‘the pentameter's soft breath’ (εὕρετο … μαλακοῦ πνεῦμ’ ἀπὸ πενταμέτρου, 35–6), ‘burns’ for Nanno (37). Antimachus (41–6), meanwhile, in a section that is partially obscured by textual corruption, is struck by passion for ‘Lydian Lyde’ (Λύδης δ’ … Λυδηΐδος, 41), laments her death (43), and fills his books with tears (45–6). This narrative, marked as it is by travel and motion, finally brings Colophon to the fore: if Lydia brings Antimachus close to Lyde and Dardania is where he buries her, Colophon is the place where his sorrows finally become poetry. For all intents and purposes, this section of the fragment amounts to a laudatory portrayal of the two poets that share with Hermesianax both the composition of elegiac verses and Colophon as their hometown. Furthermore, Mimnermus, qua inventor of the ‘pentameter’, i.e. elegy, appears as the genre's founding figure—a bold, if understated, claim that should be read against the backdrop of competing claims that associated the birth of elegy with Callinus of Ephesus or Archilochus of Paros.Footnote ³⁰ As we have seen earlier with Hesiod, in dealing with the elegiac poets of previous generations Hermesianax may have contributed to shaping a particular version of literary history, in this case one in which he may have had a vested interest both as an elegiac poet and as a Colophonian. Even though it remains difficult to differentiate what is ‘historically’ accurate from what is humorously (or conveniently) distorted, it is nevertheless extremely noteworthy that Hermesianax's lines on the two elegiac poets have a crucial place in the ancient reception of their work. Not only is Hermesianax the first to credit Mimnermus with the invention of the pentameter, he is also the first author to use the word πεντάμετρον.Footnote ³¹ He is also the first of only two sources connecting Antimachus’ Lyde to the death of the poet's beloved (43–4).Footnote ³²

Hermesianax is also the first and nearly the only author who indicates that Nanno and Lyde were Mimnermus’ and Antimachus’ beloved.Footnote ³³ Both poems were diverse in terms of subject matter and we have little evidence about their structure.Footnote ³⁴ One thing is clear: ‘nowhere do we catch a whiff of Nanno herself’Footnote ³⁵—or Lyde, we might add. West supposed that the ‘romantic modern picture of a Mimnermus constantly inspired by the love of a girl’ was ultimately due to Antimachus, for ‘Nanno arrives at Alexandria […] hand in hand with Lyde, the foreign girl mourned by Antimachus’; it was his copy of Mimnermus and anything he said about him in the Lyde that ‘exercised a decisive influence on the older poet's image and left his shorter elegies permanently under the title Nanno’.Footnote ³⁶ But Hermesianax is the first (and almost the only) writer to mention Antimachus’ supposed loss;Footnote ³⁷ he is also the first who explicitly connects the two older poets in the name of love. The two girls, the two poems and their later reception may ultimately have been shaped by Hermesianax himself.

Not too Hesiodic, not really Antimachean or based on the precedent of Mimnermus—what is Hermesianax's fragment really about? The crucial characteristic of this text is its overall picture, its accumulation of stories creatively and playfully built around each one of these figures from the past. In an age of increasingly methodical scholarship, this catalogue fashions a systematized history of poetry (and, to a lesser extent, philosophy) considered sub specie amoris. What is significant is both the process of recreating each individual biography and the broad architecture that encompasses them. Here a few considerations are in order.

First, the character of the catalogue as a whole. Hermesianax begins, as we saw, with Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer (1–34). Their inclusion in a gallery of ancient Greek poets is hardly surprising; yet, in this respect, we find a remarkable (if seldom stressed) correspondence with the lists of ancient poets found in Hippias, Aristophanes and Plato.Footnote ³⁸ The systematic nature of Hermesianax's gallery, then, is also meant to evoke (and rewrite) the kind of exemplary catalogues already popular in fifth-century reflections on, and reconstructions of, the past. If Hippias mentions Orpheus and the other poets as a foil for his own ‘new and variegated discourse’ (καινὸν καὶ πολυειδῆ τὸν λόγον ποιήσομαι), Hermesianax offers a fully-fledged catalogue that advertises his ‘new discourse’—the erotic subject of the Leontion itself.

This brings us to the second point, namely, the biographical sketches. Clearly, they depend not only on the poets’ texts, but also on the critical tradition that interprets, reuses and preserves the poets’ images as parts of a larger cultural history. In turn, Hermesianax's narratives, as we have seen, became a relevant component of that very tradition. In composing his poem, Hermesianax may have drawn on peripatetic works such as Chamaeleon of Heraclea's On Sappho, and it is likely that he did so in a deliberately mocking fashion.Footnote ³⁹ This is likely, especially on the level of individual biographies that make up his catalogue.

In a similar fashion, Hermesianax and his gallery of love-affairs also depend on, and react to, contemporary discourses on love as the subject of literary and especially philosophical interest.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unfortunately, much about this subgenre of philosophical literature remains obscure. The one work we have significant information about is the Ἐρωτικός (or Ἐρωτικά) written by Clearchus of Soli, a pupil of Aristotle and approximately a contemporary of Hermesianax.Footnote ⁴¹ His On Love was a mélange of general reflections, ζητήματα and various exempla drawn from history and poetry. He discussed, amongst other things, the erotic semiotics attached to flowers, apples (fr. 27 D(orandi) = 25 W(ehrli)) and garlands (fr. 21 D. = 24 W.), as Aristotle already had (fr. 41 Gigon); he cited passages from poetry, for instance the lovesick goatherd portrayed by the lyric poet Lycophronides (fr. 21 D. = 844 PMG);Footnote ⁴² he even told of a goose in love with a boy (fr. 22 D. = 27 W.).Footnote ⁴³ Whereas Wehrli thought that the fragments of Clearchus’ On Love were evidence of the ‘shapeless’Footnote ⁴⁴ interest in love cultivated by Peripatetics, White has convincingly argued that the philosopher ‘presented eros in a largely favorable light’ as ‘a natural human impulse, stimulated by visual beauty, driven by affection, aspiring to intimacy, and both an inspiration to poetry and a source of edification’.Footnote ⁴⁵ What needs stressing, however, is that, remarkably, Clearchus’ On Love shares with Hermesianax's catalogue a fair number of ‘case studies’—a fact that to my knowledge has been overlooked by critics.

Among other things, in his On Love Clearchus mentioned well-known ἑταῖραι, such as Glycera (fr. 28 D. = 23 W.) and Gyges’ lover (fr. 23 D. = 29 W.). Particularly noteworthy in this context is Aspasia. In Athenaeus Myrtilus is amazed at what Pericles did for her:Footnote ⁴⁶

This passage is intriguing, not only because it follows closely Aspasia's portrayal in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (526–31), but also because it foregrounds that she spent time with Socrates: the verb used here, συγγίγνομαι (τῆς Σωκράτει τῷ σοφῷ συγγενομένης), can refer to either intellectual or sexual association.Footnote ⁴⁷ Does Hermesianax have this passage or a similar one in mind when he depicts Socrates as madly in love with Aspasia (89–94)? In another fragment of Clearchus (fr. 25 D. = 32 W.) the passion inspired by Menalcas in the lyric poetess Eryphanis is the αἴτιον for a pastoral song (νόμιον καλεῖσθαί τινά φησιν ᾠδήν) which includes the words ‘The oaks are tall, Menalcas!’ (μακραὶ δρύες, ὦ Μέναλκα, fr. 850 PMG); we know that Menalcas was treated also by Hermesianax in connection with the theme of unrequited love (frr. 8–9 L. = 2–3 P.). Elsewhere in his treatise Clearchus considered the poems of Sappho and Anacreon to be no different from ‘erotic songs and the so-called Locrica’ (fr. 26 D. = 33 W., Ath. Deipn. 14.639a).Footnote ⁴⁸ According to Athenaeus, Locrica are songs which have to do with adultery or illicit sex (μοιχικαί τινες τὴν φύσιν ὑπάρχουσαι, Deipn. 15.697b); he cites as an example a few lines from a poem in which a woman warns her lover about the imminent return of her husband (fr. 853 PMG). If Clearchus read poems such as this as Sappho's or Anacreon's own words, he may have found the love triangle between Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon in Hermesianax (47–56) anything but implausible. Finally, Clearchus reported that two poets were struck by the barbarian ἑταίρα Lyde, Antimachus and Lamynthius of Miletus, and that both composed poems bearing her name, one in elegiac couplets, the other in lyric meters (fr. 32 D. = 34 W.).Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, the philosopher and Hermesianax agree not only on the personal nature of the Lyde, but also on the status of the woman it was supposedly dedicated to; as our poet playfully writes, she was ‘Lydian Lyde’ (Λύδης … Λυδηΐδος, 41).

In general, critics have long recognized that the multifaceted fascination for love current in fourth- and third-century philosophical circles may have had a lasting influence on Hellenistic poetry. According to Wehrli, for instance, Parthenius’ Sufferings in Love attest to the impact exerted by this intellectual trend on the poetry of later centuries.Footnote ⁵⁰ Our analysis demonstrates that, from a thematic point of view, there is a significant convergence already in Clearchus’ On Love and Hermesianax's catalogue of ἐρωτικά in Book 3 of his Leontion. In this particular area, philosophy and poetry are thus closely interacting from the early days of the Hellenistic age. This need not imply that philosophical works were merely ‘sources’ for poetical treatments; they may have shared, in a broad sense, the same broad cultural milieu. But they exhibit a strikingly similar interest in the phenomenology of love, and Hermesianax has used this phenomenology as a key feature of his catalogue. Perhaps this choice had a programmatic character. In the last book of his poem, Hermesianax presents a playful picture that appropriates and refashions different critical discourses. In doing so, he juxtaposes poets and philosophers in a way that may have been significant on a metadiscursive level. If philosophers like Clearchus could mine poetry to extract examples to discuss in their works, Hermesianax's catalogue effectively demonstrates that poets could pay them back in kind and that, for all their efforts, philosophers were far from immune to the universal power of love.Footnote ⁵¹