I am a little
disappointed in Professor Nagy’s latest “Classical
Inquiries” Posidippus Epigram 55 According to Nagy this epigram is about a girl named Nikomakhe who dies unwed. Nagy’s translates the opening of the poem as follows:
Somewhat confused the intent of the rest of the paper
slipped away from me. I’m disappointed I
am not smart enough to grasp the technicalities of this paper.
“Everything about
Nikomakhe, all her pretty things and, come dawn, as the sound of the weaving
pin is heard, all of Sappho’s love songs, songs sung one after the next, are
all gone, carried away by fate, all too soon, and the poor girl is lamented by the city of the Argives…But
then, ah, there came the time when all her would-be husbands, pursuing her, got
left behind, with cold beds for them to sleep in.”
(I removed the required line about the local goddess
raising the young person in question like a tender sapling.) My
disappointment with Nagy’s interpretation is that it is so specific that I
found it unsatisfying. I thought the
purpose of poetry was to have several layers of meaning. After all didn’t her mother Demeter loudly
lament the wedding of Persephone to Lord Hades?
Can’t the Argive’s likewise lament the loss of their daughters when “carried
away” by their husbands? Can’t the
age-group maiden’s lament the disappearance of their numbers one after the next
as they are taken to their husbands’ homes? Can’t Nikomakhe and the Argives dread
her becoming a spinster? Only to leave
behind all the would-be husbands when carried away by her own husband. Here is another layer of meaning to the poem
that should be addressed in any interpretation.
Maybe it is obvious to people
smarter than I and that’s why it was included.
The phrase “weaving pin” is now the one used by Nagy instead
of ‘weaving shuttle’ thanks to a friend.
The reason for the change should have been in the footnotes instead of
taking up so many inches in the paper.
After his new found insights on weaving pins, Nagy compares “weaving
pins” to swallows at dawn. [i]I
expected at this point a discussion about how the battle before Troy stops when
Helen stops weaving about it (Iliad 3.151-154). Or how as long as Penelope day by day wove Laertes’ shroud, and then by night would
unravel it[ii]…Odysseus
could not come home and the moment she finished he arrived at her front
door. Surely comparing the actions of
young maidens to the dancing swallows that summon the sun, should have given
rise to notions about the Fates weaving the fabric of destiny. [iii] Disappointingly Nagy does not address this
traditional interpretation of woman weaving either.
