DICKIE, MATTHEW W., Which Posidippus? , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.373 Which Posidippus? Matthew W. Dickie .A;.STATUE IN THE VATICAN MUSEUM (Inv. no. 735; see PLATE 4) bears on its plinth the inscription IlOLEIMIl­ IlOL. Miss Richter says of this statue: "There seems little doubt that the man represented in the Vatican statue is the comic poet Poseidippos, the only bearer of that name sufficiently important to have had a statue erected to him, and one, as we saw, popular in Roman times.» 1 The statue depicts a seated man with his right hand resting on his lap; in it he holds a papyrus roll. On stylistic grounds, Miss Richter would date the statue to the middle of the third century B.C., as would other scholars. There is also virtual unanimity about the subject's identity.2 Thus the latest edition of Helbig's guide assumes that the Posidippus in question is the playwright. 3 The statue, together with another seated male figure also holding a roll in its left hand, was found on the Viminal in a small round building that was part of a larger complex. At first the two statues were thought to represent Marius and Sulla. From the early nineteenth century the other statue was taken to be Menander, but is now thought to represent a Roman and to belong to the first half of the first century B.C.4 1 G. M. A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks II (London 1965) 238, fig. 1647. K. Schefold, Die Bildnisse der antiken Dichter, Redner und Denker (Basel 1943) 110, suggests that it is a Flavian copy of a bronze original dating to ca 250 B.C.; H. von Heintze, "Zu Poseidippos und 'Menander' in Vatikan," RM 68 (1961) 81-87, argues that the face was damaged and subsequently recut ca 1700 after a likeness in a manuscript of Menander; R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London 1991) 38, accepts the attribution to the comic poet but is more cautious about what has happened to the face. 2 For an exception see ALAN CAMERON, Callimachus and his Critics (Princeton 1995: hereafter 'Cameron') 79, who raises the possibility that the statue may be of Posidippus the epigrammatist. 3 W. Helbig, Fuhrer durch die offentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Alter­ tumer in Rom 4 I (Tubingen 1963) 96. 4 Von Heintze (supra n.l) 91. Schefold (supra n.1) 164, suggests it may be the portrait of a Roman comic poet and that it was the counterpart to the portrait of the Greek comic poet. 373 DICKIE, MATTHEW W., Which Posidippus? , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.373 374 WHICH POSIDIPPUS? Three considerations favor attribution to the comic play­ wright: (1) most Roman portrait statues of Greeks are copies of Athenian statues of men prominent in the life of the city in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (sic Smith [supra n.l] 39); (2) the fragment of a statue base that stood in front of the temple of Apollo on Delos and bore the inscription TIOLEJ~JTInON KALLAN~PEI[ suggests a Delian statue of the comic playwright erected perhaps by the people of his place of birth, Cassandreia in Macedonia (Suda s.v. TIocribl1t1toC;);5 (3) he was popular with the Romans (so Richter [supra n.l] 238). The last of these considerations has little to recommend it. Posidippus may in his day have been the most successful comic poet competing in Athens, but his fame docs not compare with that of Menander and he is certainly not as famous as most other Greeks whose statues were to be found in Rome. We may reasonably doubt whether he was ever well-known there. The case for his Roman popularity is based on the sole reference to him in Latin literature: the antiquarian Aulus Gellius says (NA 2.23.1ff) that in his day comedies by Roman poets based on and translated from Menander, Posidippus, Apollodorus, Alexis, and some other comic poets were read, but that if these renderings are compared with the Greeks plays that inspired them, then the Latin versions seem poor. A learned antiquarian's awareness that Posidippus lay behind some Roman comedy of the second century B.C. docs not prove Posidippus' popularity in Rome. Furthermore, Gellius gives no indication that he has read Posidippus. It is inherently unlikely that he did; his limited knowledge of Greek comedy seems con fined to one play of Aristophancs and one of Menander. 6 If Gellius knew Posidippus only by name, then few, if any, other Romans of the late second century will have been familiar with him. The situation is unlikely to have been much better in earlier times. The statue on Delos cannot be used to bolster the case for Posidippus the comic playwright. To judge from the restored dimensions of its base (height 0.24 m.; width 0.89 m.; depth 0.99 m.), it was not a seated statue. Beyond the height (1.47 m.), no dimensions are given for the statue of Posidippus in the Vatican. 5 T. Homolle, "Dedicaces deliennes," BCJ-{ 3 (1879) 379 no. 10; IDelos 2486; A. Wilhelm, Urkunden dramalischer Auffuhrungen in Athen (Vienna 1906) 118, would, without having seen the stone, restore the inscription as IToOElbut1tov [KUVlOKOU/ Kuoouvbp£[tC; CtvE81lKUV. 6 cf L. Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gel/ius (London 1983) 174. DICKIE, MATTHEW W., Which Posidippus? , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.373 MATTHEW W. DICKIE 375 If we suppose that the two statues represented the same man, we have to posit his representation in two different statue types, a seated and a standing figure. We do not know enough to say whether this is likely. Certainly the statue on Delos cannot have been the model for the statue in Rome. It is definitely not because Posidippus was a playwright well­ known to the Romans that there was a statue of him in Rome. Other reasons for its presence are not hard to imagine. The statue's location with another seated statue of a poet or writer in what seems to have been a villa points to an attempt to invent an atmosphere suggestive of learning or poetry. Cicero writes a series of letters to Atticus about the sculpture he wishes to acquire for his Tusculan villa. These letters constitute the principal evidence that a desire to create a certain cultural ambience could be the governing factor in determining what was in a collection of sculpture. 7 If that were true in this case, the collector would have seen the statue of Posidippus merely as the statue of a poet or writer. No particular interest in or knowledge of the comic poet would have led him to acquire it. There is also the possibility that the statue does not represent the comic playwright Posidippus but another Posidippus, the epigrammatist. For most Romans he will have been an even more shadowy figure than his namesake. No references to him occur in Latin literature, nor has his influence been detected in Latin epigram, although there is a faint chance that this may change with the full publication of a papyrus of the late third century B.C., containing six hundred lines of Posidippus, of which five hundred are new.s Nonetheless, we do know from a poem he wrote about himself in old age that he hoped to be placed in the agora at Pella, the city of his birth, unrolling a book-that is, he was to be represented by a statue of himself 7 Alt. 1.1.5, 3.2, 4.3, 5.7, 6.2, 7, 8.2, 10.3f, 11.3, analyzed by M. Marvin, "Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series," in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies and Reproductions (=Studies in the History of Art 20 [Washington 1989]) 29-45, who draws general conclusions from Cicero's case. For necessary qualification see E. Bartman, "Sculptural Collecting and Display in the Private Realm," in E. Gazda, ed., Roman Art in the Private Sphere (Ann Arbor 1991) 71-88. 8 For a description of the papyrus and its contents, see G. Bastianini and C. Gallazi, "II poeta ritrovato," Ca' de Sass 121 (1993) 29-34. A selection of twenty-five epigrams have been published by the same scholars as Posidippo, Epigrammi (Milan 1993). DICKIE, MATTHEW W., Which Posidippus? , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.373 376 WHICH POSIDIPPUS? holding a book roll (SH 705.16£).9 The poem is preserved in two wax tablets of the first century A.D., written by the same hand. The writer was careless and may have been writing from memory. His orthography reflects the phonetics of everyday speech. Lloyd-Jones, whose analysis of the poem is fundamen­ tal, has suggested (supra n.9: 95f=190f) that it was a crCPPTlYli; for a collection of the epigrams of Posidippus. We know from a proxeny decree of the Aetolian League at Thermum of 263/262 B.C. that the epigrammatist Posidippus came from Pella and retained his Pellaean citizenship, despite a sojourn in Egypt: ITo[cr]n8i1t1t

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