Description of an image of laurel/Daphne
created: Transcription from the photograph with help of the previous editors and J.M. Rey
source date: Second to third centuries AD
language: ar; en; fr; de; grc; grc-Latn; el; he
availability: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All citation, reuse or distribution of this work must contain a link back to DOI: https://doi.org/10.60760/unibo/igcyrgvcyr2 and the filename (IGCyr000000 or GVCyr000), as well as the year of consultation. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

[...], pp. 193-196 and fig. 54; [...], whence [...], 9.190 with addenda p. 121; [...], n. 9; [...] 028. Cf. [...], p. 49; [...], p. 39.

τοῖσδε παρὰ προθύροισι καὶ ἕρκεσιν Ἀπόλλωνος ❧
λεπταλέαισι κόμαις δάφνα ἐπ᾿ ἀγρεσίαι ❧
ζαλῶ Κυράναν· τὸ πρὶν γὰρ Δελφίδος εὖχος
καὶ Λιβύανδε φυγὰς νῦν ἱερὸν κατέχω·
ἀλλά τις ἐνθάδε παῖδας Ἀριστίππου ἐδίδασκε ❧
αὐτοῦ μ' ἀνεῖλαι Λητοΐδην γαμέτιν ❧

τοῖσδε[^a1] ἕρκεσιν[^1] λεπταλέαισι κόμαις[^a2] εὖχος[^a3] ἐπ᾿ἀγρεσίαι[^a4] τὸ πρὶν γὰρ[^a5] καὶ Λιβύανδε φυγὰς[^a6] ἱερὸν κατέχω[^a7] ἀλλά τις ἐνθάδε[^a8] ἐδίδασκε[^a9] αὐτοῦ μ᾿ ἀνεῖλαι[^a10] ❧[^a11]

[^a1: τοῖσδε | τοῖσδε]

[^a2: λεπταλέαισι κόμαις | λεπτα[...]ο[...]ς | λεπταλέοις ὅζοις | λεπτακιναῖσι κόμαις]

[^a3: εὖχος | εὖχος | εὔρως]

[^a4: ἐπ᾿ἀγρεσίαι | ἐπ᾿ἀἀκροπόλειι· | ἐπαυξάνομαι | ἐπ᾿ἀκρεμόσι]

[^a5: τὸ πρὶν γὰρ | χρησμῳδοῦ | χαίτας τᾶς | τὸ πρὶν γᾶς]

[^a6: καὶ Λιβύανδε φυγὰς | αὐτὰ τᾶιδε | Πυθῶθεν δὲ | ἐκ Πυθοῦς δὲ]

[^a7: ἱερὸν κατέχω | Λιβύαν κατέχω]

[^a8: ἀλλά τις ἐνθάδε | αδδαι δὲ [...] | ἀλλ' ἄγε σῶσον | ἃ δ᾿ αἰδεστοὺς | ἀλλά τις ἐσθλοὺς]

[^a9: ἐδίδασκε | [...] | στεφανίζω | μαθέτω γε]

[^a10: αὐτοῦ μ᾿ ἀνεῖλαι | αὐτοῦ[...] [...] | αυτου[...] | αὐτοῦ μ' ἀνθέντας]

[^a11: ❧ | τε ❧]

[^1: Wilamowitz's reading]

Auprès de ce portail et de ces clôtures appartenant à Apollon,

de ma chevelure délicate, moi, Laurier Daphnè, j'admire

Cyrène pour son art de chasser; jadis objet de fierté au pays de Delphes

et réfugiée en Libye, j'occupe maintenant le sanctuaire;

mais quelqu'un ici a informé les fils d'Aristippos

qu'en ce lieu le fils de Lètô m'a enlevée comme épouse.

Near this portal and these fences belonging to Apollo,

with my delicate hair, I, Laurel Daphne, am admiring

Cyrene for her art of hunting; once object of pride in the Delphian country

and having fled to Libya, I now occupy the sanctuary;

but one here informed Aristippos' sons

that at this place Leto's son carried me off as a spouse.

Presso questo portale e questi recinti di Apollo,

con la mia chioma delicata, io, Pianta di alloro Dafne, ammiro

Cirene per la sua arte della caccia; un tempo vanto della terra di Delfi

e rifugiata in Libia, occupo ora il santuario;

ma qualcuno qui ha informato i figli di Aristippos

che in questo luogo il figlio di Latona mi ha rapito in sposa.

Surprisingly enough, this could not be read easily at the place where it was clumsily inscribed. It was perhaps the caption of a painting, now disappeared, that would have stood on the wall below and besides. Alternatively, it describes a real laurel, planted near the Propylaea.

The epigram clearly mentions a laurel and at the same time the heroine Daphne. As the myth goes, she was a nymph with whom Apollo fell in love and escaped him as her hair was transformed into the branches and leaves of the homonymous tree (see verse-line 2). Relying on the useful restorations suggested by Cazzaniga and Peek, Dobias-Lalou proposes here some new ones where it seems necessary. Her main aim was to reconcile the three couplets into one and the same statement, allowing Daphne/laurel herself to be the speaker all along. Cyrene at verse-line 3 has also the double meaning of the city surrounding the sanctuary and the nymph with whom Apollo fell in love. She too was a virgin fond of hunting, but according to the myth she did become his spouse, the hierogamy taking place on the cliff just above the sanctuary of Apollo. If that is right, the epigram would say that Daphne, having fled Delphi to Libya, became a kind of duplicate of Cyrene and was also married to Apollo.

The mention of Aristippos' sons is not very clear. The preceding commentators thought that they were the dedicants of the monument and J.M. Reynolds comments: «it may be relevant that (the name Aristippos) occurs as a cognomen of the priest of Apollo for 223 AD, M. Antonius Aristippοs (IRCyr2020 C.152, ll. 6-8)». Another possibility would be that they were followers of the Cyrenaican philosopher Aristippos. In fact, this name is not very common in Cyrenaica. Those philosophers would have approved that the nymph did not avoid the divine union.

Applebaum, on the basis of verse-line 4, which he picked up without any consideration of the rest, attributed the sentence to Apollo, who would have fled Cyrene because of the Jewish revolt and come back again. This idea does not need to be commented further on.

At l. 6, we restore Λιβύανδε, which occurs in the well-known 'stele of the Founders' (IGCyr011000, l. 19). At l. 10, as Cazzaniga already stressed, the two accusatives (a masculine and a feminine) cannot be taken together. We offer a construction that gives to each a different syntactic function. Differently, Peek had to assume that the speaker, changing in the last couplet, was here Cyrene.

An ancient print of the photograph made before the restoration of the Propylaeum was sent by J.M. Reynolds to W. Peek and is kept in the archive of Peek Nachlass at Berlin. We thank Kl. Hallof for providing an excellent digitized copy.

Metrical analysis: three regular elegiac couplets. L. 1: the initial α of Ἀπόλλωνος has the usual metrical lenghtening and the hexameter is spondaic. L. 3, with the restoration, has four spondees, which makes it very slow.