The Perfect Epigram

Pithy Latin elegiac verse

In English ‘elegiac’ connotes a gentle lament, but in Latin all it means is a particular form of verse, consisting of a couplet with a longer line (hexameter) followed by a shorter one (pentameter). This form was regularly used for love poetry by Propertius, Ovid, and others in the first century BC; but shorter elegiac poems, some consisting of only one couplet, make for polished epigrams (i.e. short poetic statements). The most famous is Catullus’s poem 85:

Odi et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
    Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and love: perhaps you ask how both of these I do.
  I don't know, but I feel it, and it's tearing me in two.

I’ve explained here why Catullus asks ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ (as quare in the first line is sometimes translated). In short, it’s because he knows why he has conflicting emotions about the girl who is cheating on him, but cannot explain how such a contradiction is possible, only that it is.

Pithy elegiac epigrams are a great vehicle for wit, and were so used in Greek as well as Latin. One way to hear how the rhythm works is via this mnemonic:

   −   ∪  ∪ |   −          ∪    ∪ | − ⋮ ∪ ∪  | −     −  |   − ∪∪|  −     −
Everyone knows that Survive is a song by Gloria Gaynor.
      −    ∪  ∪ | − ∪    ∪ | −   ⋮     −      ∪    ∪  | −     ∪   ∪|     −  
  How  e l e g i ac   it  is!    Don't you remember the words?

The poet Martial, some hundred years later than Catullus, echoed his predecessor with an epigram about someone he simply didn’t like (he uses quare to mean ‘why’):

I don’t like you, Sabidius, and cannot tell you why.
All I know is that I don’t – however hard I try!

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare.   
   Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.

Here I've added ‘however hard I try’ to make the rhyme. But the story goes that in the 17th century a student at Oxford, sent for punishment to the college dean Dr Fell, was required to trans­late it on the spot and came up with this clever version:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

Martial wrote loads of barbed epigrams, including a swipe at a “kill or cure” medic called Diaulus, and one to a poet he didn’t care for. I’ve translated them :

Diaulus was of late a doctor true,
Until an undertaker he became.
The things an undertaker has to do –
He did them as a doctor just the same!

Nuper erat medicus, nunc est vispillo Diaulus:
   quod vispillo facit, fecerat et medicus.

“You don’t send me your poems,” you say, “What can the reason be?”
It’s so that you, Pontilian, won’t send your poems to me!

Cur non mitto meos tibi, Pontiliane, libellos?
      ne mihi tu mittas, Pontiliane, tuos.