Sara Lanna’s book provides a new edition, translation, and commentary on six works of Mesomedes: To the Muse, Hymn to Helios, Hymn to Apollo, To Physis, To Isis, and To the Adriatic Sea. It follows the author’s earlier books on Mesomedes’s hymn to Physis (2013) and the hymn to Isis (2021).[1] Included are also eight essays by several authors pertinent to the Mesomedean corpus and its cultural context. The volume is a hodge-podge of thoughts and notes, with several authorial voices, some of which are more relevant to the subject and better argued than others.
There are three major parts of the book. Part A, Introduction, takes up considerable space, but with good reason—it puts Mesomedes in his cultural milieu, provides reflections on the genre(s) of the selected works, and discusses Mesomedes’s reception in the centuries that followed him. This last section is the most compelling. Contemporary scholarly (lack of) attention to Mesomedes’s works gives the impression that the poet was insignificant, but Lanna shows that, to the contrary, Mesomedes was a popular and influential musician who left his mark on the early Christian hymnody. Thanks to this, we can now bridge the gap between polytheistic and early Christian music, and I hope that this new perspective will bring more studies on the topic.
As I was reading, I appreciated the sketch of the cultural context. It shows the complexity of imperial Greek literary production, especially its poetic output. Lanna has read diverse Greek texts starting from the Orphic hymns, through various metrical inscriptions, to Nonnus. She is also well-versed in secondary literature. The amount of scholarship presented in footnotes is impressive and multilingual (Italian, Spanish, French, German, and English). The only two publications that I would consider adding are Renaud Gagné on cosmic choruses (which frequently appear in both Mesomedes and Lanna’s commentary), and Andrew Ford on the so-called Hymn to Virtue by Aristotle, which is discussed in Lanna’s first essay in part C.[2]
Some footnotes were supplied by Richard Gordon, who contributed a large part of labor to produce this book. He revised the Introduction and translation notes, translated Mesomedes’s hymns to English, and wrote a stand-alone essay on religious developments in the Roman Empire, also included in the volume.
In part B, the reader can find the Greek text, translations, and notes. The Italian translation and English notes were written by Lanna, the English translation and revision of the notes by Gordon. The two translations are there not for the sake of readers from various linguistic backgrounds, but rather for scholars who know all three languages and want to appreciate the nuances of the text (this is explained on pp. 56–57 by Andrea Villani and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, the editors of the SAPERE series).
The layout of this section is confusing. Possible versions of the Greek text (lectiones) are listed at the end of the Introduction before part B starts, so there is no apparatus criticus proper. Greek is on the left-hand page, English on the right-hand page, Italian at the bottom of the two pages. As a result, there is a serious infelicity: the English title “2. Hymn to Helios” is inserted in the middle of the Italian translation between lines 12 and 13. Moreover, asterisks in the Greek text refer back to the lectiones at the end of the Introduction, endnotes in the English translation refer forward to the notes. The presence of endnotes has made for halting poetry. E.g., The Hymn to Physis has thirty-six endnotes squeezed into twenty-four verses. A traditional style of commentary that refers to the verse numbers without disrupting the flow of poetry would be more useful. As far as I understand, this choice was dictated by SAPERE series’ editors, since other volumes from the series show the same eccentricity.
The endnotes themselves contain a rich repertoire of linguistic parallels for Mesomedes’s language and style. They are mostly philological, but they do not ignore the religious and material reality of the hymns. They demonstrate that Mesomedes was probably aware of Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and various mystic rites of the imperial period (though Oliver Schelske in his essay in this volume is more careful on that topic). Here, an interesting picture emerges of Mesomedes as a spiritual thinker who was deeply engaged in religious traditions of his time.
Part C includes several essays. Gordon’s essay convincingly argues that the changed form of the hymnic genre (the movement toward enumeration of divine powers instead of mythological narratives) came from the need to recognize the true nature of gods rather than describing their mythos. Egert Pöhlmann’s first essay is a reprint, the second essay is Gordon’s translation of Pöhlmann’s older German publication, the third essay seems to have been written for this volume, but the fourth essay is, again, a reprint. Since those essays were originally published in different outlets, they repeat among themselves a lot of the general information on meter and music. Only the third paper adds more to our knowledge on the connection between the meters of Mesomedes, Clement of Alexandria, and Synesius of Cyrene.
The book has been poorly copy-edited (Mohr Siebeck provided me only with a PDF file of the book but assured me that it is exactly the same as its printed copy). Without looking for errors, I found the following:
- Mistakes in Greek: βαχευτάς should be βακχευτάς, p. 23, n. 9; πρὀς in Hymn to Physis, line 10 should be πρὸς; the same mistake repeats on p. 93; φρυάγμα should be φρύαγμα, p. 84; ἱεροἰ should be ἱεροὶ, p. 92; Ἰσι should be Ἴσι, p. 103, on the same page we find βαθὐκερως which should be βαθύκερως [sic]; ἁγἡτωρ should be ἁγήτωρ, p. 104; Ὀσία should be Ὁσία, p. 128 (= Eur. Bacch. 370); τιμηθήναι should be τιμηθῆναι, p. 189, n. 62; δωδεκσημος should be δωδεκάσημος on p. 226; ὀ should be ὁ on p. 227; έστίν should be ἐστίν on p. 228; and χαρισ]σθείς repeated twice on p. 254 seems like it has one too many sigmas;
- Imprecise translation: Lanna translates Aesch. Ag. 279 τῆς νῦν τεκούσης φῶς τόδ᾽ εὐφρόνης λέγω as “I say, it is the night itself that creates this dawn” (p. 79), though it should read as “I say, the night that now gave birth to this dawn”. I was unable to check all translations equally carefully;
- Typos: font size smaller than the rest of the text (not in block quotations, see pp. 180–181, 184, 192–193); number “1” missing from the Table of Contents (.4.); misspellings (“priod” on p. 140; “ecerpted” on p. 224); BCE for CE, p. 202; Dating mistake on p. 202: “the first specimen of Greek Christian music, the Hymn to the Trinity (3rd to 4th BCE)” should be dated to the Common Era; on pp. 254–255 seven lines of the text are printed twice. I omit missing commas, spaces, parentheses, indentations, and random capital letters.
All in all, this book’s main contributions are the Introduction, Commentary, and Gordon’s interpretative essay. The rest should be read with caution.
Notes
[1] Sara Lanna, Mesomede. Inno a Φύσις. Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e commento, “Quaderni dei Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca”, 15, Roma, Edizioni Quasar, pp. 275, ISBN 9788871405148.
Sara Lanna, Mesomede. Inno a Iside, “Quaderni dei Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca”, 27, Roma, Edizioni Quasar, pp. xii + 260. ISBN 9788854911512.
[2] Renaud Gagné, “Cosmic Choruses” in Cosmos in the Ancient World ed. by Phillip S. Horky. Cambridge 2019. Andrew Ford, Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Context. Oxford 2011.