these poems in the West chiefly in the textual tradition of the bucolic poet Theocritus , the supposed author of the ‘ Syrinx ’ (‘ Pipe ’), a poem which first appeared in print in 1495 surrounded by a pictorial ‘ frame ’ to emphasise its visual referent . By 1516 the Theocritan editorial tradition had accreted to it the ‘ Wings ’ and the ‘ Axe ’, but it was only later in the century that these were decisively attributed instead to the fourth-century BC poet Simmias of Rhodes . Simmias was also known to have written an ‘ Egg ’, but the great renaissance scholar J . C . Scaliger in his Poetics , posthumously published in 1561 , knew of the poem only through a comment in the ancient metrist Hephaestion , which he then used to manufacture two new examples , in turn directly imitated by Willes . English writers , however , remained confused about what Simmias ’ ‘ Egg ’ was , and the poem itself , in a rather corrupt form , entered the editorial tradition only while Willes was writing . 5 The final poems of this set were two ‘ Altars ’, of which the first , by one Dosiadas , was already a byword for obscurity in Late Antiquity . 6 All of these were available from 1570 , as part of the French scholar Jean Crespin ’ s handy edition of the Greek poets , but questions of attribution and textual reliability remained unsettled . Scaliger ’ s even more famous son , J . J . Scaliger , along with his correspondent Salmasius , the rediscoverer of the Palatine Anthology , turned conjectural emendation of these texts into a seventeenth-century scholarly parlour-game . 7
The second strand originates with the fourth-century African Christian Publilius Optatianus Porfirius (‘ Optatian ’). He laboured over a set of twenty-eight extraordinarily intricate poems , in which exactly regular grids of letters can be read left-to-right as perfectly comprehensible verses , but which also contain internal multi-directional patterns , picked out in a different colour or by running lines , forming new shapes , themselves comprising yet more verse . Perhaps Optatian ’ s most spectacular poem is a grid from which emerges a trireme with the Christian Chi-Rho as its mast . Others contain shapes which are themselves giant letters , consisting of further words , all forming verses . This kind of poetry inspired many later medieval Christian writers , and it was itself at least partly indebted to the Greek tradition , as suggested by Optatian ’ s poems in the forms of a pipe and an altar . Although a proper edition of Optatian did not appear until 1595 , the connection was picked up by Renaissance scholars , for instance the younger Scaliger , who included Optatian ’ s pipe and altar in his own
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