Snakes in the Grass, or On the Vertical Within the Horizontal

October 5, 2023 6:54 AM

As with any disruptive phenomenon, there are both enthusiasts, whose close-meshed nets catch some dubious fish, and deniers, who insist that even the big ones should be thrown back. For many years, insanity was a common metaphor employed for those who believe acrostics in ancient poetry are intentional. The most influential one-paragraph Classics article ever written, Don Fowler’s playful intervention about the acrostic MARS spanning Vergil’s description of the Gates of War, ends with the memorable sentence: ‘I await the men in white coats.’ What Fowler did not anticipate was that, four decades later, acrostics would begin to be recognised as not just an occasional jeu d’esprit in ancient poetry, but a widespread phenomenon and a major source of meaning. from Vergil’s secret message
posted by chavenet (17 comments total)

Nearly every Vergil enthusiast really goes overboard nitpicking / naysaying acrostics. God. If Vergil even y

I can’t. I’m sorry.
posted by Mchelly at 7:05 AM on October 5, 2023 [30 favorites]

Anyway I hope I didn’t derail right out of the gate… this is really fascinating. I don’t know a lot about Greek classical scholarship, so I had no idea that finding acrostics (or looking for them, or even suggesting they might be intentional) could be taboo. As the article briefly touches on, they’re all over Hebrew Biblical poetry, from alphabetized psalms to later prayers like the 16th century Lecha dodi , with the first lines written as an acrostic of the author’s name. So to me (admittedly someone who knows nothing except the Hebrew/ scriptural side), it makes perfect sense that a writer who was in any way aware of other writing traditions - or that any writer who loved language - might use them.

If this is genuinely a newly accepted idea for Greek classics, this potentially could be a huge development of things no one discovered before - and with AI tools, the speed at which they’ll be found could be amazing.
posted by Mchelly at 7:59 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yah the first thing I thought after reading this is, somebody write a script to pull the first letter from each line of every classical text in existence and see what else might be out there.
posted by nushustu at 8:19 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

@nushutu I think you would maybe run into formatting issues.

Acrostics depend on the text having a specific 2-D layout, and a big subset of "every classical text in existence" is resolutely 1-dimensional, I seem to recall, lacking punctuation or even spacing.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:29 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whether or not classical authors used acrostics, the specific readings in this article seem incredibly strained and implausible to me. The argument is (1) the Hellenistic poet Nicander embedded his own name as an acrostic in some lines about a snake stealing humanity's gift of eternal youth from a donkey; (2) a passage in Vergil about Eurydice dying from a snakebite is a reference not only to those lines from Nicander but to the biblical story of the Fall; (3) we know this because Vergil's lines start with ISAIA AIT, i.e. "Isaiah says." But the only actual connection between the Vergil and Nicander passages is that they both refer to myths involving snakes -- completely different myths and different snakes, in fact; the supposed thematic connections are pure speculation and not particularly grounded in the text. And why would Vergil use Isaiah's name to allude to a story from Genesis, which was traditionally attributed to Moses? I feel like this is the sort of thing that gives acrostics a bad name.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:25 AM on October 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

While I wouldn't put myself on the same level as the greats of the classical era (though even Ovid wrote self-help books), I've hidden messages, quotations and even acrostics in many of my book-length works, and I'm constantly surprised that so few authors do this. Writing is meant to be fun, you know?

(Very, very occasionally someone lets me know they've spotted one. I think that only my editor caught that a chase sequence in a video-game novelisation I did was based around quotes from the radio bulletin about the JFK assassination that Steinski sampled for 'The Motorcade Sped On', which was nice as I'd mostly done it to amuse him.)
posted by Hogshead at 9:39 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

If this is genuinely a newly accepted idea for Greek classics, this potentially could be a huge development of things no one discovered before - and with AI tools, the speed at which they’ll be found could be amazing.

This is me, firing up the Abulafia program from Foucault's Pendulum and saying get in, loser, we're going davinci-coding.
posted by mhoye at 9:44 AM on October 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

I guess I am required, as in any thread even tangentially related to this subject, to show up and link to Gertrude Chataway.
posted by The Bellman at 9:46 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Richard Thomas, from the beginning of the story, is a legitimate Virgil scholar at Harvard and I think has identified a few far less momentous acrostics in the Georgics, but from a quick search I note that this current idea has not succeeded in getting published in a fully-developed way in a high-level classics journal and has, in fact, been adopted primarily by the author of this piece.

So...it's the kind of thing it can be fun or intellectually liberating to think about, but, yes, must watch out for apophenia.
posted by praemunire at 9:54 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The reason why scholars take acrostics seriously is that Greeks and Romans developed that technique very far. The most extreme is fourth century CE poet Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius, who I made a post about way back when.
posted by Kattullus at 10:02 AM on October 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

While we're on possible allusions to Genesis in classical Latin poetry, here is Ovid describing the deluge in Metamorphoses 1:

occupat hic collem, cumba sedet alter adunca
et ducit remos illic ubi nuper ararat.

Which is perfectly normal Latin, and means "This man occupies a hill, another sits in a curved boat and plies oars where he had recently plowed". Except that the verb ararat "he had plowed" appears nowhere else in Latin poetry, and happens to be identical with the name of a not irrelevant mountain. Could be sheer coincidence, of course, but I like to think Ovid was winking at fellow comparative mythology nerds.
posted by hoist with his own pet aardvark at 10:02 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

> As the article briefly touches on, they’re all over Hebrew Biblical poetry

I read closely for the same point and didn't find it in the text. I read the article as saying that acrostics aren't taken seriously in classical studies, and the connection between pre-Christian (pagan) and Christian writings is minimized, but actually here are some acrostics in Christian texts with conceptual roots in Jewish ideas.

The dog that really didn't bark at me was that the author never seems to acknowledge that acrostics are common in serious Hebrew texts of all eras. That seems to provide significant support for taking acrostics in Greek and Latin texts more seriously. But the article covers "acrostics and Judaism" as separate topics, without any knowledge of acrostics in Judaism. What did I miss?
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 10:55 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

PresidentOfDinosaurs, I think you're right. I was so sure that of course they knew it was there, that I saw "acrostics and Judaism" and acrostics in Christian writing generally, and just assumed they were talking about psalms and acknowledging the rest.
posted by Mchelly at 11:12 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Richard Thomas' unnamed student is Alexei Grishin who appears to have gone in a more tech direction since his 2009 master's thesis Acrostics in Vergil's Poetry: The Problem of Authentication. Referring to the Isaia ait acrostic, Grishin finds the acrostic "lacks sufficient evidence of a meaningful relation to the text of the Georgics".

Prof Hejduk respectfully disagrees at greater length in her article WAS VERGIL READING THE BIBLE? ORIGINAL SIN AND AN ASTONISHING ACROSTIC IN THE ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE , Julia Dyson Hejduk, Vergilius, Vol. 64 (2018), pp. 71-102
posted by BWA at 11:22 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mchelly, the hint that maybe the scholarship really did have that big a gap was: Baylor.
posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 11:30 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess I'm wondering if these acrostics are maybe a memorization aid? Like for a crucial part of the poem, which was typically delivered from memory, you had these lines that each began with a specific letter so you could remember to deliver those very specifically. As I'm sure there was a lot of interpretation or improvisation in the lengthy telling of these works.

Also, Vergil? I'd always been it written as Virgil before this post.
posted by hippybear at 1:22 PM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

the poem, which was typically delivered from memory

Unlike the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid was originally composed in (as opposed to reduced to) written form and intended to be read from a text. Conversely, when the Homeric poems were being composed, they were not intended to be written down and so wouldn't have used an acrostic as a memory aid. There are many other sophisticated techniques deployed in those poems to assist with remembering a form of the text for performance.

His name was "Publius Vergilius Maro," so "Vergil" is strictly speaking correct. "Virgil" is, however, so old as a variant that it's not treated as a mistake.
posted by praemunire at 2:51 PM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]