Euenus of Ascalon

Abstract

GP contains eleven epigrams attributed to a poet or poets named Euenus; nine of these were preserved in AP, two additional ones in API only. They are all in distichs and amount altogether to forty-six lines. One of the poems is assigned to Euenus of Ascalon, one to Euenus of Sicily, one to Euenus of Athens and one to Euenus the grammaticus, in the rest the name appears without further qualifi­cation. It is the purpose of the present paper to investigate which poems and what characteristics are attributable to Euenus of Ascalon. Euenus is one of the thirteen named poets in the Proem of Philip. This in itself should create a very strong presumption in favour of the view that most, or all, of the epigrams ascribed to Euenus are the work of one poet. A discussion of some of the features of the poems will strengthen this presumption and suggest that in all probability this poet was Euenus of Ascalon. Like other poets in the Anthology, Euenus may well have written with varying success in a very wide range of styles. On the present evidence it seems not implausible that most, and perhaps all, the epigrams of Euenus in the Anthology were written by a poet from Ascalon, perhaps a grammaticus who possibly also emigrated to Athens and some of whose poetic antecedents and linguistic pe­culiarities are still recognizable.