We’re taking a break from podcast release this week, after the first three-episode block in the Mountains of Greece series –interviews with Fivos Tsaravopoulos (Paths of Greece), Molly Greene (History of the Pindus) and Socrates Koursoumis (Boundary Stones). We have three more blocks of three episodes each coming up soon!
This week’s post is the first in an occasional series of single-text ‘snapshots’: no hiking route — just a brief look at one amazing moment from the long history of how the mountains of Greece have been represented and imagined over the last three millennia!
I have written in a previous post about Kyllini, the mountain of Hermes.
Here I want to zoom in on one of my favourite of all Kyllini texts!
It’s an epigram–in other words a short metrical text of just a few lines. We have thousands of epigrams surviving from ancient Greek and Roman culture. Many of them involve brilliant displays of intense literary ingenuity and inventiveness packed into a tiny space.
Here it is (newly translated):
You have heard of Kyllene, the mountain of the Arkadians.
This is the burial mound that covers Apollodoros.
A thunderbolt from Zeus fell on him and killed him
As he travelled from Pisa during the night.
And now far from Aiani and Beroia
Defeated by Zeus, the runner sleeps. (Greek Anthology 7.390)
The epigram is by Antipater of Thessalonica (i.e. Thessaloniki), from the late first century BCE or early first century CE.
The travelling athletes of the Roman empire
One of the things this text can do for us is open up a window on to the history of ancient athletics.
It gives us a vivid glimpse of the travelling life of ancient sportspeople.
Athletes, and spectators, would travel from right across mainland Greece to the Olympic festival in the Peloponnese (Pisa was the small town next the Olympic santuary). If you want to read more on that you can have a look at my Ancient and Modern Olympics blog posts from a few years ago, for example here and here.
In fact, famous athletes and musicians could spend half their lives travelling to the festival competitions right around the eastern Mediterranean: the Greek festival calendar flourished more than ever before in the Roman period.
Apollodoros is from northern Greece: he’s a long way from home.
Why is he travelling at night? Is he having to rush to get on to his next contest, hundreds of miles away? Or just in a hurry to make the long journey home?
It’s not clear what route he is taking, but perhaps we should imagine Apollodoros and his companions making their way northwards from mountainous central Arkadia, walking over one one of the passes to east or west of Mount Kyllini before heading down to the coast and then on to the Isthmus of Corinth.
The joke is that even this great runner can’t outrun Zeus’s thunderbolt.
This tiny moment of athletic history has been commemorated regularly since 2006 with a race in honour of Apollodoros, organised by the archaeological museum of Aiani, west of Mount Olympus.
A mountainous gravestone
But what I love about this epigram most of all is the way in which it represents the mountain.
Epigrams often accompanied burial monuments–sometimes literary put up on gravestones, sometimes written as if for imaginary funerary situations.
Apollodorus’ companions can’t take his body with them for burial at home. What they can do is give him a mountain for his gravestone!
Is that a sign of honour from Zeus? Or is he equated comically with the various opponents of the Olympian gods in Greek myth who get defeated by Zeus and buried beneath the earth — for example the giant Enceladus, killed by Zeus’s thunderbolt and buried beneath Mount Etna (Virgil, Aeneid 3.578-82).
The vastness of the mountain is also at odds with the smallness of the text that contains it.
Often epigrams contain descriptions of tiny things that stand for the minuscule nature of the genre: mice or mosquitoes, for example.
But here that expectation is reversed — the huge bulk of Mount Kyllini is straining against the smallness of the epigram form.
It’s the most vast funerary monument imaginable, comically squeezed into the tiny framework of the epigram.