Panyassis was a pain in the ass-is

 

 No one ever wished it longer than it is

Samuel Johnson on Milton's Paradise Lost  

I was tracking down a hapax in Panyassis the other day and stumbled across a hilarious gem in the testimonia. Testimonia are ancient sources which mention or comment on the poet or his works but do not quote from them. They are usually included at the start of a modern edition of an ancient author, especially in editions of fragments. Panyassis of Halicarnassus, apparently a relative of Herodotus, was an epic poet active in the 5th century BC. He is said to have written a Heraclea in 14 Books narrating the deeds of Heracles, as the title suggests.

Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Included in the testimonia is an inscription, apparently made on the back of a bust which is now identified as Panyassis himself.  

The inscription reads: Πανύασσις ὁ ποιητὴς λυπηρότατός ἐστι or 'Panyassis the poet is the most painful'. The bust was found in Herculaneum and now resides in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. I will be going to verify the inscription when all this is over!

It has been supposed, rightly I think, that the perpetrator of this graffito was a bored and frustrated student. To think, Donald Sutherland as the professor in Animal House couldn't even grab his students' attentions by admitting that he also finds Milton boring. 

For someone who spends so much time reading bits and pieces of ancient comedy and digging for humour in other texts, it's a rare pleasure to get some inkling of the everyday banter and student satire of the ancient world. I think it's clear enough that λυπηρότατός means that Panyassis is the most pain-inducing because of his dry and dusty poetry. At any rate a fragment of Cratinus gives us ἄνθρωπος λυπησίλογος 'a man who causes pain by talking'. 

Unlike Milton, and unfortunately for Panyassis too little of his poetry survives for us to know how well-founded the graffiti critic's judgement was. Certainly other ancient sources do not necessarily take a dim view of him, though recommendation by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Quintilian might point exactly to why students might have been sick of him. 

There's something tragicomic about poor Panyassis now being remembered like this because of one disgruntled pupil of rhetoric. They could at least change the picture on his Wikipedia article... But there's also a lesson to be learned here about literary history and how easy it is to construct narratives or to reduce a poet's whole work to a joke or a pithy quote. I only hope the graffiti I used to read in cubicles won't survive for the literary historians of the future.

 Anyway, I'm off to scratch some biting comments about Milton into the local statuary!