Philoxenus fr. 9

ὦ καλλιπρόσωπε

χρυσεοβόστρυχε Γαλάτεια

χαριτόφωνε, θάλος ᾽Ερωτών

v. 1 acephalous pherecrateus; vv. 2-3 trochaic dimeters

2 χρυσεοβόστρυχε (I), (II): χρυσοβόστρυχε Bergk Γαλάτεια (I): om. (II) 3 θάλος Bergk (θάλλος iam Fiorillo, Observ. Crit. in Athen. 1803 et Jacobs, Addit. Animadv. in Athen. Deipn. 1809): κάλλος (I), (II)

Fair-faced Galatea,

by the golden hair,

with the beautiful voice, shoot of Loves

The fragment belongs to the Cyclops or Galatea, a dithyramb composed by Philoxenus of Cythera and certainly performed in Athens before 388 BC, the date of the performance of Aristophanes’ Pluto: in this comedy, at vv. 290-301, the Cyclops is parodied by Aristophanes, as confirmed by the scolii to the play (see fr. 7-8 Fongoni = frr. 819-820 Page/Campbell; Fongoni 2021). The source of the verses is Athenaeus who, in Book 13 (564b-f) of the Deipnosophists, opens a digression on the beautiful eyes of the youths sung by the poets. After Pindar’s praise of Theoxenus (fr. 123 Snell/Maehler), Athenaeus quotes Philoxenus’ Cyclops: in love with Galatea, the character praises everything about the Nereid except her eyes. As both sources (both Athenaeus and Eustathius) attest, ancient critics put forward the hypothesis that Philoxenus wanted to suggest in this way that the Cyclops was somehow presaging his future blindness: they therefore wittily called these verses τυφλὸς ἔπαινος ‘blind eulogy’, and contrasted them with Ibycus’ encomium for Euryalus, mentioned immediately afterwards by Athenaeus (564f).
Just as Theocritus in Idyll 11 presents us with the lonely song of the Cyclops on the seashore whose dominant motif is the praise of the pastoral life, with which Polyphemus tries to persuade the nymph to abandon the sea life, it can be assumed that the verses of the Philoxenus’ Cyclops also constituted the beginning of a monologue by Polyphemus: a monodic and virtuosic song in which the Cyclops laments the reluctance of his beloved (on monodic and astrophic songs and their place in the structure of the dithyramb see Fongoni 2014, 26 f.; 101 f.).
Three compound epithets, a typical example of dithyrambic style, are concentrated in the song of the Cyclops. In his use of neologisms, Philoxenus stands out among the other representatives of the new dithyrambic style for the creation of a personal and highly original lexicon. It is not only in the verses of the Cyclops declaiming the beauty of Galatea that newly minted terms and high-sounding epithets appear (καλλιπρόσωπε, χρυσεοβόστρυχε, χαριτόφωνε), but also in other fragments that tradition attributes to him (ἀρκεσίγυιον fr. 22 Fongoni = fr. 832 Page/Campbell; στρεπταιγλᾶν fr. °26 Fongoni = fr. 830 dub. Page/Campbell). In fact, the comic poet Antiphanes (fr. 207 K.-A. = test. 40 Fongoni) appreciates him because he uses original and new words in each of his compositions; this originality contributed to characterising Philoxenus’ style as a true genre, as opposed to Pindar’s style (cf. Aristox. fr. 76 Wehrli = test. 35 Fongoni; Philod. De mus. 4, col. 31, 6-15 p. 44 f. Delatte = test. 36 Fongoni).
The fragment presents textual and, consequently, metrical problems. In v. 2, Eustathius (the second source of the fragment) omits Γαλάτεια and Wilamowitz, considering the term a gloss, eliminates it from Athenaeus’ text, interpreting the verses as a sequence of dactyls and trochaei (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1921, 360). Keeping Γαλάτεια in the text, one can interpret the first verse as an acephalus pherecrateus, a rare structure in incipit but nevertheless attested in Sappho (fr. 141 Voigt), followed by two trochaic dimeters of identical metrical structure with a tribrachic solution in the first and third place, considering the υ of χρυσεο- short (LSJ s.v.). The presence of even entirely solute metrical structures was particularly prevalent in the compositions of the new musicians, testifying to the adaptation of the tempo of the diction to the rhythm of the melody; see, for example, the wholly solute anapaestic structures of Pratinas (fr. 708, 1-3 Page/Campbell) and Timotheus (fr. 799 Page/Campbell/Hordern).
In v. 3 θάλος is Bergk’s widely accepted proposal as opposed to the betrayed κάλλος, which in fact would seem to be a repetition of what Athenaeus said in the presentation of the fragment (ἐπαινῶν αὐτῆς τὸ κάλλος). Moreover, while κάλλος ᾽Ερωτών makes no sense and finds no occurrence in the literature, θάλλος on the other hand, as an alternative to ἔρνος, appears frequently in the sources in similar contexts as early as Ibycus (fr. 288, 1 Page/Davies).

D. L. PAGE, Poetae Melici Graeci, Oxford 1962; D. A. CAMPBELL, Greek Lyric V. The New School of Poetry and Anonymous Songs and Hymns, Cambridge Mass.-London 1993; A. FONGONI, Philoxeni Cytherii Testimonia et Fragmenta, collegit et editit Adelaide Fongoni, Pisa-Roma 2014.

A. FONGONI, ‘La parodia del Ciclope di Filosseno nel Pluto di Aristofane’, FAEM n. s. III, 2 (XXXI, 52), 2021, 113-132; B. GENTILI – L. LOMIENTO, Metrica e ritmica. Storie delle forme poetiche nella Grecia antica , Milano 2003; G.R. HOLLAND, De Polyphemo et Galatea, Leipziger Studien zur Klassischen Philologie 7, 1884, 139-312; G. IERANO’, Il ditirambo di Dioniso. Le testimonianze antiche, Pisa-Roma 1997; J. H. HORDERN, ‘The Cyclops of Philoxenus’, CQ n.s. 49, 1999, 445-455; B. KOWALZIG – P. WILSON, Dithyramb in Context, Oxford 2013; B. ZIMMERMANN, Dithyrambos. Geschichte einer Gattung , Berlin 2008 (seconda edizione); U. von WILAMOWITZ-MOELLENDORFF, Griechische Verskunst, Berlin 1921.

Philoxenus, Cyclops, Galatea, neologism

[Adelaide Fongoni]