created, 2025-02-13 & modified, =this.modified
rel: Praxilla The Orange - Wendy Cope
For anyone who lists cucumbers and rest alongside sun and moon can only be regarded as feeble-minded.
Praxilla of Sicyon (floruit ca. 450 BCE) records Adonis’ response to a question posed to him in the Underworld. He is asked by his companions below what he misses most from his former life on earth. His answer is preserved by Zenobius (early 2nd c. CE), and includes the sun, moon, and stars as well as apples, pears, and cucumbers. Zenobius condemns Adonis’ response, saying, “anyone who lists cucumbers and the rest alongside sun and moon can only be regarded as feeble-minded”. Using comparative material from both Greco-Roman and ancient Jewish sources, this paper considers what we know about the cultural context of cucumbers in the ancient Mediterranean and argues for a shift in blame from Adonis to Praxilla herself for composing such “nonsense”.
The inclusion of cucumbers in particular, even more so than apples and pears seems to have bothered ancient readers.
Questions
- what we know about cucumbers and why Adonis might have thought of them as desirable as celestial bodies?
- We see a shift in blame from Adonis to Praxilla herself.
Hellenistic epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica (AP 9.26) includes Praxilla first in his list of nine “divine-tongued women nourished in song by the Heliconian and Pierian Muses”
Also by Praxilla,
under every stone, my friend, look out for a scorpion
Praxilla’s female identity complicates her poetic reception.
Many think that the material was composed by some other poet, in this case Alcaeus or Sappho. The upshot of this scholarly debate is that either Praxilla is dismissively labeled as a ἑταίρα because she wrote σκόλια, or she is deprived of authorship of the drinking songs attributed to her in antiquity. Both approaches undermine Praxilla’s reputation, whether as a poet or as a “respectable woman” and invite the kind of censure that we may see lurking in Zenobius’ commentary.
Zenobius has subtle disparagement in his text towards her.
The argument seems centered on cucumbers. Apples have a history of “overdetermination in literary or mythological contexts”
- Eris’ golden apple that led up to the Trojan war
- Sapphos apple trees and her comparison of a young woman to a ripe apple on a high branch
- Apples are traditional love gifts, Acontius throws an apple in the path of his beloved
- Pears, along with pomegranates and apples dangle from nearby trees to torture Tantalus in Hades
In his exhaustive catalog of symbolism of the apple in Greek and Roman Literature A. R. Littlewood concludes that the comparison of apples to a woman’s breasts does not appear before the comic poets, and is more akin to marriage and fertility than “flirtation”.
Cucumber
The first point I want to make is that in this context, Adonis’ cucumber is not primarily phallic, just as his apples and pears are not primarily suggestive of female anatomy.
Adonis himself was emphatically not a hypermasculine, sexualized divinity; as Aphrodite’s beloved, he is usually depicted as young, unmarried, sexually passive, and fated to die before reaching maturity.
The next question to ask is, how did the cucumber fit into its cultural context? rel:Stability of Concepts
All these varieties may have had more in common with what we think of as a gourd (also a member of the Cucurbitaceae family) than with our modern cucumber, which has been bred to be less spiny and to possess fewer (or even no) seeds.
While Cucumbers were available in winter by ancient treatment, they were best in Summer.
When Adonis reminisces about cucumbers, apples, and pears alongside the sun, moon, and stars, it is not a case of, if my readers will pardon the pun, apples and oranges. Rather, the ripe cucumbers serve to paint a picture of a time of easy living, good weather, and plentiful seasonal harvests.
Cucumbers must have represented what was enjoyable in life – ripe fruit, long summer days, and natural pleasures – all of which has been stripped away from him in the dark realms of death.
In recuperating Adonis, we may also recuperate Praxilla’s female voice, the voice of a poet who seems to understand the joy of being alive and appreciating food and drink – a mark of being human and not divine, after all –, and, to come full circle in this paper, who might well have been the author of the drinking songs denied to her by later tradition.