DISTINCTION, CENTRALITY AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN PRE-ALEXANDRIAN COURT POETRY: THE CASE OF LYCIA

Abstract

This article examines allusions to Greek poetry in two Greek verse inscriptions carved on public monuments for Lycian dynasts of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c. (CEG 177, 888). Scholarship on these epigrams celebrating the rule, achievements and outstanding qualities of the dynasts Gergis (Lycian Kheriga) and Arbinas (Erbinna) has largely focussed on the evidence they provide for Lycian history, dynastic ideology and Lycia's relationship to Greece. Less attention has been paid to the possible significance of their long-noted echoes of Greek poetry. Literary analysis of these epigrams has been sidelined, it seems, owing to a prevailing assumption that they were composed and inscribed primarily for Greeks visiting or resident in Xanthus, the Lycian ‘capital’ where they were inscribed, and so their literariness, unheard by Lycian ears, cannot add to our understanding of Lycia and Lycians. Yet, a recent observation of Peter Thonemann suggests that the appropriation and manipulation of Greek poetry is in fact central to the dynastic intent of the epigrams: to assert Lycia's non-Greek, ‘Asiatic’ identity.