“Not Enduring the Wanderings of Odysseus”: Poetry, Prose, and Patronage in Pseudo-Scymnus’s Periodos to Nicomedes

Abstract

This article examines the Periodos to Nicomedes within its literary, cultural and political context.After offering an analysis of how and why the anonymous author creates a work which straddles the boundaries between prose and verse while engaging with contemporary Hellenistic literary critical debates, it argues for the significance of the figure of Homer's Odysseus in terms of the author's presentation of an idealized relationship with his real-world patron, the Bithynian monarch Nicomedes.Ultimately the Periodos emerges as a work which is especially fitting for its Bithynian patron in the context of Asia Minor in the late second century BCE.The Periodos to Nicomedes is a poem in comic iambic trimeters addressed to a king Nicomedes of Bithynia, the work's patron.From internal evidence it is possible to determine that the poem dates to the late second century BCE (most likely between 133-c.110/109BCE) and that its addressee is either Nicomedes II Epiphanes (149-c.127BCE) or Nicomedes III Euergetes (c.127-c.94BCE). 1 The identity of the author remains uncertain.Previous attributions to Scymnus, a writer from Chios who authored a lost periegesis at the beginning of the second century BCE, are unquestionably wrong, since the Periodos was composed later than his active period, while more recent suggestions concerning authorship remain highly speculative.2 Since the question is unresolved, modern scholars have tended to continue to refer to the unknown author as 'Pseudo-Scymnus' (henceforth PS). 3 After outlining the work's method and aims in a 138-line prologue, PS embarks upon a geographical catalogue of the lands and peoples of the known world (oikoumene) in the form of a clockwise description of the circuit of the earth from the Pillars of Heracles (Strait of

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