Goodwin Award Citation for K. J. Gutzwiller: Poetic Garlands; Hellenistic Epigrams in Context, (U. California Press, 1998)
(The Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, named in honor of a long-time member and generous benefactor of the American Philological Association, is the only honor for scholarly achievement given by the Association.)
photo right: award winner Kathryn Gutzwiller (center), accompanied by 2000 President Julia Gaisser and 2001 President Kenneth Reckford
The new papyrus evidence for collections of epigrams before the Garland of Meleager set out by Alan Cameron in The Greek Anthology has renewed the continuing search to understand the nature of the poetic book and the implications of this form for poems set in its context. Kathryn Gutzwiller's delightful book is at the same time a study of the epigrams and personality of individual poets, and a brave undertaking - to reconstruct the probable and possible arrangements of their own epigrams by poets before Meleager. Conservative critics have stressed the speculative nature of such reconstructions, of which Professor Gutzwiller is well aware, but they cannot ignore the way in which she has enriched the significance of the epigrams themselves. As Neil Hopkinson notes in Classical Review 1999, she has provided "an excellent treatment of the origins and effects of epigrammatic variations on a theme." She offers a deft discussion of the migration of the sepulchral epigram from inscription to papyrus and the formation of the literary culture of the book; later, the emergence of the anthology as a genre and the evolution of a new kind of erotic epigram different from the archaic types.
Her stress on context throughout leads to a virtual tour through the history of certain Greek poetic forms. Much scholarship has been devoted to this recontextualisation in other periods like the Second Sophistic and early Roman literature, but she has pinpointed how to approach an aesthetic of the Hellenistic poet. She has brought to life the poetic techniques and idiosyncrasies of Leonidas, with his class ideology based on Cynic principles, (again quoting Hopkinson), of Posidippus' stoic outlook and the Epicurean coloring of Asclepiades, as well as the work of the woman poets Nossis and Anyte. Without this kind of informed exploration nothing can be gained; epigrams and poets once lost in the Palatine or Planudean crowd are now presented to the classical student with a new significance.
Gutzwiller rightly sees the Garland as "an artistic encapsulation of the Hellenic past." Her splendid book is a fresh contribution to literature drawing welcome attention to a previously neglected genre and to a period in which there will now be increasing interest.
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