Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece [online ed.] 9780198805823, 0198805829

Table of contents :
Title Pages
Preface
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric
Sailing and Singing
Materialities of Political Commitment?
What is a Setting?
Sappho and Cyborg Helen
Event and Artefact
Hermetically Unsealed
Polyphony, Event, Context
Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener
Lyric Minds
Fidelity and Farewell
Works Cited
Index of Passages Discussed
General Index

Citation preview

Title Pages

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Title Pages Felix Budelmann, Tom Phillips

(p.i) Textual Events (p.ii) (p.iii) Textual Events

(p.iv)

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Felix Budelmann, Thomas Phillips, and the several contributors 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018

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Title Pages Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950853 ISBN 978–0–19–880582–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.v) Preface Felix Budelmann, Tom Phillips

It is a pleasure to record the numerous debts of gratitude we have incurred in the course of editing this book. Charlotte Loveridge, Tom Perridge, and Georgina Leighton at OUP provided encouragement and expert advice throughout the process, Vaishnavi Ananthasubramanyam efficiently oversaw production, Louise Larchbourne was a meticulous copyeditor and Andrew Hawkey an equally meticulous proofreader. Joanna Luke compiled the general index. The anonymous readers greatly improved both the overall design and the detail of the volume with their suggestions. Magdalen College hosted, and Oxford University’s John Fell Fund generously funded, the conference in March 2015 at which earlier versions of many of the chapters were first presented and discussed. Unless otherwise indicated, the numeration used for citations is that of the following editions (see abbreviations list for detail): Voigt for Sappho and Alcaeus; PMG for ‘melic’ texts other than Alcman, Ibycus, and Stesichorus, for whom PMGF is used; IEG2 for elegy and iambus; MW for Hesiod. F.B. T.R.P. Oxford April 2017 (p.vi)

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List of Contributors

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.ix) List of Contributors Felix Budelmann, Tom Phillips

Felix Budelmann teaches Greek literature at Oxford. He is the author of The Language of Sophocles (Cambridge, 2000) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric (Cambridge, 2009). His commentary on selections from Greek lyric will appear in 2018. Giambattista D’Alessio was Professor of Greek at King’s College London, and is currently Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Naples, ‘Federico II’. He has published widely on Hellenistic poetry, Greek lyric poetry, archaic epic poetry, and on Greek literary papyri. David Fearn is Reader in Greek Literature at the University of Warwick. His published work includes Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition (Oxford, 2007), Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry. Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC (ed., Oxford, 2011), and Pindar’s Eyes: Visual and Material Culture in Epinician Poetry (Oxford, 2017). G. O. Hutchinson is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. He has written commentaries on Aeschylus’ Septem (1985), Propertius 4 (2006), selected larger pieces of lyric (2001), and books on Hellenistic poetry (1988), Cicero’s letters (1998), ‘Silver’ Latin literature (1993), Hellenistic and Roman poetry-books (2008), and the exploitation of Greek literature by Latin (2013). Pauline A. LeVen is Associate Professor of Classics at Yale University. Her main research interests are in Greek poetry, aesthetics, and musical Page 1 of 2

 

List of Contributors culture; she is currently finishing a monograph devoted to musical metamorphoses in Greek and Latin myths and working on a series of articles on sound and ancient conceptualizations of listening. Mark Payne is Professor in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge, 2007) and The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (Chicago, 2010), as well as articles on poetry, poetics, and ancient ideas of life. (p.x) Tom Phillips is Supernumerary Fellow in Classics at Merton College, Oxford. He is the author of Pindar’s Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts (Oxford, 2016). His current research focuses on lyric poetry, Hellenistic poetry, and ancient scholarship. Henry Spelman is the WHD Rouse Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of several articles on Greek and Roman poetry and a monograph entitled Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence (Oxford, 2018). Oliver Thomas is an Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author, with David Raeburn, of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students (Oxford, 2011). He is currently completing a commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes for Cambridge University Press. Anna Uhlig is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of California, Davis. She has published on Greek lyric and dramatic poetry of the archaic and classical period and is completing a comparative study of Pindar and Aeschylus. Tim Whitmarsh is the second A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He also holds honorary roles at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Universities of Pretoria and Exeter. He is the author of seven books, including most recently Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London: Faber and Faber 2016).

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List of Abbreviations

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.xi) List of Abbreviations Felix Budelmann, Tom Phillips

ABV J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford) 1956. ARV2 J. D. Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edn (Oxford) 1963. BAdd T. H. Carpenter, with T. Mannack and M. Mendonça, Beazley Addenda: Additional References to ABV, ARV2 & Paralipomena, 2nd edn (Oxford) 1989. BNJ Brill’s New Jacoby. Burstein S. M. Burstein, Agatharchides of Cnidus: On the Erythraean Sea (London) 1989. Campbell D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, Loeb, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA) 1982–93. CVA Corpus vasorum antiquorum, 1922–. D-K H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn, 3 vols (Berlin) 1951–2. Dr A. B. Drachmann, Scholia vetera in Pindari carmina, 3 vols (Leipzig) 1903–27. FGrHist F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin) 1923–. Gerber

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List of Abbreviations D. E. Gerber, Greek Iambic Poetry from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, Loeb (Cambridge, MA) 1999. GGM C. F. W. Müller, Geographi graeci minores, 2 vols (Paris) 1855–82. Giannini A. Giannini, Paradoxographorum graecorum reliquiae (Milan) 1966. Henry R. Henry, Photius: Bibliothèque, 9 vols (Paris) 1959–91. IEG2 M. L. West, Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford) 1989–92. K-A R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae comici graeci, 8 vols (Berlin) 1983– 2010. LfgrE B. Snell et al., Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, 4 vols (Göttingen) 1955–2010. LIMC H. C. Ackermann et al., Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae, 18 vols (Zurich) 1981–97. Littré E. Littré, Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate, 10 vols (Paris) 1839–61, repr. Hildesheim 1961–82. (p.xii) LP E. Lobel and D. L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford) 1955. LSJ H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, revised by H. S. Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon. 9th edn with supplement edited by E. A. Barber et al. (Oxford) 1996. Müller M. Müller, De Seleuco Homerico, Diss. (Göttingen) 1891. MW R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea (Oxford) 1967. Olson S. D. Olson, Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters, Loeb, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA) 2006–12. Para. J. D. Beazley, Paralipomena: Additions to ‘Attic Black-Figure VasePainters’ and to ‘Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters’ (Oxford) 1971. PMG D. L. Page, Poetae melici graeci (Oxford) 1962. PMGF

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List of Abbreviations M. Davies, Poetarum melicorum Graecorum fragmenta, vol. 1 (Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus) (Oxford) 1991. P.Oxy. Oxyrhynchus Papyri (London) 1898–. PSI Papiri greci e latini, Pubblicazioni della Società Italiana per la ricerca dei papiri greci e latini in Egitto (Florence) 1912–. Rutherford I. Rutherford (ed.) Pindar’s Paeans: a Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre (Oxford) 2001. SLG D. L. Page, Supplementum lyricis Graecis (Oxford) 1974. S-M B. Snell and H. Maehler, Pindari carmina cum fragmentis (Lepizig) 1984, 1989. Sider-Brunschön D. Sider and C. W. Brunschön, Theophrastus of Eresus: On Weather Signs, Philosophia Antiqua 104 (Leiden) 2007. Usener-Radermacher H. Usener and L. Radermacher, Dionysii Halicarnasei opuscula, 2 vols (Leipzig) 1899–1929. Voigt E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam) 1971. Wehrli F. Wehrli, Die Schule des Aristoteles: Texte und Kommentar, 2nd edn, 10 vols (Basel) 1967–9. West M. L. West, Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC, Loeb (Cambridge, MA) 2003. West M. L. West, Homeric Hymns; Homeric Apocrypha; Lives of Homer, Loeb (Cambridge, MA) 2003.

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Introduction

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Introduction Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann Tom Phillips

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords After a brief discussion of the anthropological model that has transformed lyric scholarship in recent decades (highlighting both achievements and areas that have received little attention), two meanings of ‘Textual Events’ are set out. The first relates to pragmatics: lyric texts create their own settings, which variously interact with the actual circumstances of the performance. The second gestures to the concept of ‘event’ in contemporary philosophy: lyric creates unique interpretative, sensory, and emotive encounters with each listener and reader. A case is made for applying the term ‘literary’ to Greek lyric, despite (and because of) its anachronism. The remainder of the Introduction develops the notion of context (to encompass intellectual context), discussing continuities and discontinuities with context in book lyric; sets out ‘lyric moves’ (micro-traditions within the genre); and discusses aspects of performance not fully captured by the anthropological paradigm. Keywords:   Greek lyric, event, performance, genre, context, literature

In the end it is the experience which Sappho brings that matters. The pleasure to be found in her artistry is surpassed by that to be found in the emotional and imaginative power of her work, which is the reflection of her sensitive, suffering, passionate self…Her unfailing senses, her delightful fancy, her scrupulous sincerity, her passionate strength, even her outbursts

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Introduction of anger or scorn, are the qualities of a character endowed beyond mortal measure by the Muses and the Graces. (Bowra 1961: 240, modifying Bowra 1936: 247) Scholars no longer write like this about Greek lyric. One can easily imagine the criticism Bowra would incur in today’s seminar room: the apparent naivety of the biographical assumptions, the framing of Sappho’s character in an anachronistically modern idiom, and a focus on Sappho as an individual which seems to marginalize social and performance contexts, would all be obvious targets. Yet while no one would advocate a wholesale return to such language, Bowra still offers a compellingly coherent view of Greek lyric, and reflection on the terms he employs raises intriguing questions about our own ways of responding to Sappho and other lyric poets. The appeal to ‘pleasure’ as the telos of reading is beguilingly simple (and recapitulates ancient models of reading), yet it plays only a minor role in recent criticism. For all its obvious limitations, the idea of reading as an encounter of (p.2) subjectivities aligns easily and compellingly with the sense of intimacy with an author that many readers experience, however difficult it may be for the critic to express this experience in a satisfactory manner. And easy as it is to dismiss the rhetoric of ‘endowed beyond mortal measure by the Muses and the Graces’, it might be more productive to treat the phrase as a prompt (inter alia) to register the numinous quality of Sappho’s poetry, to consider how Sappho’s ‘character’ emerges through her language, to engage with the inevitable tension between the frames of reference we bring to bear on early Greek lyric and those that would have been available to Sappho and her early audiences. The vague yet suggestive notion of poetry as a means for conveying ‘experience’ raises interesting questions about how lyric translates experience into language, what sort of experiences it gives rise to, and what is involved in crossing the experiential divide between ancient and modern. Read sympathetically, therefore, Bowra’s conception of poetry as a vehicle for ‘imaginative power’ and ‘character’ would chime well with what this volume attempts to do: to explore ways of talking about early Greek lyric that do justice to what later centuries would call its ‘literary’ qualities (more on this term below) while also doing justice to the manifold ways in which Greek lyric interacts with its surroundings. The poems of Greek lyric shape idiomatic personas, create worlds of the imagination, and draw attention to their status as highly-wrought verbal artefacts. At the same time, they open out onto the world, invite interpretation, appeal to their audiences, and refigure the performers’ and listeners’ understanding of their subject matter. In examining how the two sides of this dichotomy interact, this volume tries to help us understand more fully how Greek lyric enriches, explores, intervenes in, and indeed creates, its worlds.

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Introduction Following the path-breaking work of Bruno Gentili, scholars have tended to use performance-in-context as the primary lens through which to view the poetry of the archaic and early classical periods: early lyric is poetry for performance, and for performance in particular social settings.1 This emphasis on context has been accompanied by a privileging of poetry’s social aims: instead of seeing poems as free-standing structures of meaning, or locating meaning in the (p.3) designs or consciousness of an author, critics moved towards conceptualizing poetry (or ‘song’, the preferred term in much recent work) as a functional social practice and a mode of public communication.2 Characterized by the often overlapping methods of new historicism, cultural criticism, and ritual poetics, various scholarly approaches to Greek lyric have emerged in the last thirty years that might loosely be grouped under the general heading of the ‘anthropological paradigm’.3 Although varied in their emphases, these approaches are united by careful attention to the material, sociohistorical, political, and ritual environments within which lyric operates. The impact of the anthropological paradigm has been fundamental, and has changed the field out of recognition. What was once the ‘lyric age of Greece’ has become a ‘song culture’.4 The benefits of this shift have been considerable. We have gained a much greater sensitivity to how poetry was embedded in social life. Poetic practices have been fruitfully analysed in connection with ritual actions and settings, and in relation to other art forms. The symposium has emerged as a very significant sociopolitical institution and setting for performance, and the chorus is properly understood as discharging a variety of complex functions that go far beyond the aesthetic. A welcome consequence of these changed priorities has been a renewed interest in texts that had been mostly ignored: sociopolitical readings have done much, in particular, to illuminate fragmentary choral texts that offered little to scholars of Bowra’s generation.5 But everything comes at a cost, and this cost is worth highlighting briefly (and necessarily schematically). First, it is striking that discussion of what Bowra calls ‘artistry’ has tended to be somewhat marginalized by the trends described. Although critics have continued to engage closely with the formal features of Greek lyric, the focus has often been primarily on how these features are geared to or give us access to extratextual realities. As lyric became ‘song’, it lost much of its ‘poetry’. (p.4) Perhaps the main reason for this lies in the particular kind of functionalism that has established itself in the field. Much attention has been paid to how the composition and reception of songs are affected by ritual occasions and political circumstances, and scholars have learned to paint a detailed and varied picture of the multiplicity of ideologies, institutions, practices, and venues that shaped the song culture of early Greece. For all the variation, though, the functions attributed to songs have at times gravitated towards a particular type: poems express and inculcate social roles and group Page 3 of 24

 

Introduction identities, engage in acts of political contestation, reach out to the gods, accrue cultural capital for individuals and communities, and serve to construct and naturalize hierarchies. But of course lyric poems can and did do much more: they can stop you in your tracks, can show you things you had not seen, can make you think, can make you joyful, uncomfortable, or angry. All this cannot be captured in terms of sociocultural functions. The important point here is that the poems do not just communicate precepts, narratives, and attitudes that align with normative ideologies, knowledge, and beliefs, but that they can also be exploratory, opening up new ways of encountering realities and of understanding emotions and ideas. They are stimulating as much as they are assertive, engender reflection as much as belief, and they startle as much as they reassure. When symposiasts hear Ibycus singing about love, or perform an Ibycus poem themselves, they engage in a sociopolitical self-construction, but they also, with various shades of playfulness and seriousness, confront the power of Eros and explore what makes love and erotic experience meaningful. An inclusive concept of function along such lines needs to go hand in hand with a sense of individual agency and responsibility. The main agent in much cultural criticism is, appropriately and powerfully, the culture. Individuals—the authors, performers, and audiences of lyric—are viewed above all in terms of the roles they occupy in a system, and the particular achievement (or indeed failing) of the individual takes second place. Authors are significant in the first instance for their authoritative or authorizing role, while the question of what distinguishes one author from another, or makes one author more successful than another, has less prominence. Much recent scholarship has been relatively immune to the yearning for an author that Greek lyric instilled across the ages. The agency of listeners, too, deserves further consideration. Cultural critics tend to look for a tight fit between texts and their environments, and critique (p.5) the notion of ‘literature’ as a phenomenon that constitutes its own domain, separate from (other) sociocultural practice.6 With this view of poetry as one form of social expression among others often comes a particular view of the audience. Listeners are cooperative participants in a community event more than they are individual, idiosyncratic interpreters.7 The semiotic model that implicitly underpins much (though by no means all) recent work, especially on choral lyric, is one of relatively straightforward communication. Texts communicate social, cultural, and political content, and audiences are compliant receivers. But such a model oversimplifies the sociology of audiences and underestimates just how challenging some of the texts are. Audiences do not in every way act as one, and even if an occasion is conceived as a ritual, context goes only so far in determining (individual and communal) responses. The listeners’ participation in any given context will vary. They will cooperate or resist, be engaged or disengaged, playful or committed.8 This generic issue is heightened by the complexity of some texts in the lyric corpus. The extent of the interpretative demands that poets such as Alcman, Simonides, and Pindar make on their Page 4 of 24

 

Introduction listeners is considerable, and requires a model in which audiences, and indeed individual listeners, play an important part in the creation of meaning. Needless to say, these issues do not lessen the achievements of the anthropological paradigm, which has lost none of its importance, but what they do is open up space for alternative, complementary approaches, which put their focus elsewhere. This volume is not the first to do so. In pursuing such alternatives, the chapters assembled here build on current trends within the study of Greek lyric itself, especially the renewed interest in aesthetics in the work of Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi and others, as well as on lyric criticism more widely.9 (p.6) The overarching aim is to experiment with fresh ways of talking about Greek lyric and its contexts, in particular by thinking about how lyric itself prompts imaginative responses and by exploring more capacious notions of ‘context’. The ‘Textual Events’ of the title expresses this programme in two different but compatible ways, one a matter of pragmatics, the other a rethinking of lyric’s ‘literary’ aspect, with individual chapters foregrounding one or the other. The two meanings of ‘Textual Events’ will be discussed in the two sections that follow, and then subsequent sections will turn to the terms of the subsidiary title, early Greece, lyric, and performance.

Imaginary Occasions Most immediately, the title attempts to capture the capacity of lyric texts to conjure occasions. This is a poetry for performance at real events, but it is also a poetry that evokes imaginary settings, in space and time. The recent burgeoning of scholarship on deixis and more generally pragmatics has brought out the variety and complexity of these textual events.10 Anacreon fr. 417 takes listeners onto a meadow, Sappho fr. 2 situates itself at an apple-grove, Pindar fr. 52p stages a mythical procession attended by the gods. More or less fully developed first-person speakers inhabit and thus contribute to these settings, as do addressees. The real-life performer and real-life audience often interact with a speaker and an audience within the poem. Settings may be sketched with a wealth of detail, as in Sappho fr. 2, or evoked in just a passing phrase. Sometimes they blend concrete description with symbolism or metaphor (again Sappho fr. 2 is a good (p.7) example). Most important for this volume is another level at which different poems, and different performances of the same poem, vary greatly: the relationship between the occasions within and without the text. Poems map more or less closely onto the occasion of their performance; they veer towards the fictional or the real. The element of fictionality is salient when a poem receives a repeat outing in a different context.11 Whatever the circumstances of the first performance of Sappho fr. 2, or of Alcman’s Partheneion 1, or Pindar’s daphnephorikon for the Thebans (fr. 94b), if these poems travelled to other places the apple grove, the chorus carrying a robe, and their leaders Hagesichora and Agido, or the Page 5 of 24

 

Introduction procession led by Agasikles would evidently not have mapped neatly onto the poems’ new surroundings. At such performances the world of the text may have been treated as a fairly self-contained fiction or it may have interacted in complex ways with the realities of the performance. This propensity for creating alternate worlds was imitated and developed by later poets, notably Callimachus in his ‘mimetic’ hymns and Horace in his Odes, and it has remained a characteristic of lyric ever since. Placing a given poem at exactly the right point on the real-to-fictional scale for its first performance is often impossible. Sometimes the fiction is obvious: Anacreon did not sing his poem 417 on a meadow, and Archilochus (probably) did not perform his poem 2 aboard a ship. But for many texts we simply do not have the evidence. Giambattista D’Alessio’s chapter in this volume reminds us that we do not know where any of Sappho’s songs were performed, and demonstrates the vulnerability of the dominant theories. Evidence is more secure for some other authors, but much is and will always remain uncertain. This lack of knowledge can tempt us into framing the question in binary terms— Is a setting real, or is it fictional?—but many performances will sit between the extremes. If Sappho fr. 2 was not performed in a grove (as it may well not have been), the scene it describes may still have variously resonated with features of real settings—perhaps reverence for Aphrodite, perhaps an air of eroticism, perhaps female conviviality. And if the venue was indeed a sacred grove, the poem would still have shaped that setting through metaphor and symbolism; the worshippers’ cups would not (p.8) have been golden (another point stressed by D’Alessio), and Aphrodite would not have refilled them in any literal sense. In their different ways, the chapters by D’Alessio, David Fearn, Anna Uhlig, and G. O. Hutchinson explore the complex interactions lyric creates between imitation or enactment on the one hand, and fictionality or make-believe on the other. Fearn’s readings of Alcaeus remind us that lyric no less than epic uses ecphrasis as an expression of poetic self-awareness. Alcaeus’ descriptions of material objects embed the poems in concrete worlds, appealing to norms of experience and behaviour shared by speaker and listener. At the same time, these ecphrastic discourses involve their listeners in questions about the ways poetry gives us access to imaginative worlds, and create fictional domains that can be transferred elsewhere through reperformance. The metapoetic dimension of these ecphrases is cognate with their ambition to generate forms of shared ethical commitment, but is also crucial to the poems’ capacity to transcend particular contexts. On Fearn’s reading, it is as much through its play with questions of representation and self-reference as through political exhortation or the presentation of a persona wedded to particular political stances that Alcaeus’ poetry gained its classic status.

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Introduction Uhlig uses Alcaeus’ ‘maritime’ poems to rethink the relationship of poem and context. She interrogates the assumption that Alcaeus’ seascapes are necessarily allegorical of life on land. Rather than tethering the poems to the symposium and decoding all their elements through a sympotic lens, a double move that has become influential after Bruno Gentili, Uhlig suggests that we take seriously the idea that these poems are indeed about the sea and seafaring, a central facet of life in sixth-century Mytilene. When we attend to the elaborately crafted surface meaning of the seascapes as seascapes, the sympotic sea emerges as a starting point for thinking about how the notion of performance context always contains a certain shifting quality. Even if they are sung on land, original occasions are not wholly based on solid ground. Looking primarily at Alcaeus and Horace, Hutchinson takes issue with the notion that ancient lyric poems have a single setting, as if the poem were placed into something fixed and decisive. On Hutchinson’s approach, ‘setting’ is any spatial contextualization created by the poem. Settings often alter as a poem goes on, and there are often two spatial elements in opposition: the poems are mobile and dynamic. The opposition of spaces relates to the energetic organization of the (p.9) poems: the poems are often built around an opposition between a problematic situation and a state of affairs which would resolve that situation, however provisionally. The spaces relate to such conflicts in different ways, and in different sequences. Spatial contexts need not be close at hand, and can be palpably imaginary; even when they seem most immediate and symposiastic, an element of fiction is present, and they often develop along unpredictable lines. The chapter attempts a start at investigating what could be called the ‘deep structures’ of ancient lyric poems. Although their methods and emphases differ considerably, these four chapters demonstrate cumulatively that the settings created by the texts have poetic and pragmatic force exactly because their relationship with reality is complex.12

Greek Lyric and the ‘Literary’ On the one hand, then, the title roots the volume in pragmatics, and a number of chapters investigate the blend of reality and imagination that characterizes lyric performance. ‘Event’ in this respect equates to occasion: the performance of a Greek lyric poem is an event, and indeed takes place in the context of a larger event, such as a symposium or festival. On the other hand, however, the title gestures to the language of ‘event’ in contemporary literary criticism, and signals a commitment to a dynamic model of what texts do.13 In Terry Eagleton’s useful formulation, a work is ‘“structure” in the sense of being unalterable and self-complete, yet “event” in the sense that this selfcompletion is perpetually in motion, realized as it is only in the act of reading’.14 For ‘reading’ we have to substitute—a no less (p.10) richly layered—‘listening’, but otherwise this second, more marked, understanding of ‘event’ must be as valuable for Greek lyric as for other texts, and is indeed central to the Page 7 of 24

 

Introduction conception of this volume. It is developed furthest and most explicitly in Mark Payne’s chapter, which draws on Alain Badiou’s conceptualization of ‘event’ as a discourse that ‘brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable’,15 to discuss how Pindar engages his listeners in responses that change and deepen their understanding of the world.16 Other chapters do not engage to the same degree with the philosophical tradition of the ‘event’, but many of them, individually and collectively, seek to explore the various ways in which lyric’s formal features combine with its subjects and themes to create the unique interpretative, sensory, and emotive encounters that are at the core of the idea of ‘event’. The suggestion we wish to develop in this section is that for this project of exploring Greek lyric as event the problematic idea of the ‘literary’ deserves another look.17 Most critics would argue that the invention of ‘literature’ postdates early Greek lyric by several centuries,18 and is predicated on features and ideologies alien to the culture that produced this poetry. Alcman and Archilochus are clearly not ‘literature’ in the same way as Auden or Austen, but ‘literature’ is a flexible term, which gains its specific force and meaning from the purpose for which it is used, and our argument here is that three of its best established associations help to capture vital features of Greek lyric, and (more specifically) help to elaborate how Greek lyric may be said to give rise to events in Eagleton’s sense of the term. ‘Literature’ suggests texts that have a prestige and value that endures across time, that are in some way ‘fundamentally different from the world and our (p.11) other ways of making sense of that world’,19 and that are felt to be at least to some extent autonomous. In what follows, we discuss a number of ways in which Greek lyric exhibits these three qualities. A good starting point is the issue of pragmatic function. Greek lyric is not just ‘marked speech’,20 but in certain respects may be thought categorically different from ordinary forms of communication. As ‘literature’, it does something other than communicate meaning from the author and performer(s) to the listeners; it offers itself to listeners and readers as an object of attention in its own right. A poem by Alcaeus, Ibycus, or Pindar may serve to express ideologies and identities and reinforce the grounds upon which these are considered valuable or important, but it also draws attention to itself as a highly wrought textual artefact that gives pleasure and in which singers and listeners can discover meaning beyond any particular purpose for which the poem is performed. Literary quality in this sense, like all interpretative acts, is an interaction of poem and audience, realized as an ‘event’ in the strong sense. The poem is marked as literary by its heightened form (language, style, structure, rhythm, melody), and audiences and readers are encouraged to respond to these markers.

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Introduction The artefactual qualities of Greek lyric do not render the poems apolitical or divorce them from their social and political environments, but rather inflect the way they contribute to these environments, and allow them to reframe the terms in which listeners might understand themselves as sociopolitical agents. David Fearn, in his chapter, connects the self-awareness Alcaeus demands of his listeners with the forms of sociality his poems posit. Discussing Pindar’s Paean 9, Tom Phillips’s chapter argues that the poem’s capacity to make itself understood as an aesthetic artefact that separates itself from its context is what enables it to succeed in discharging its ritual aims. Its occasional function is therefore inflected by the specifically interpretative mode of response it invites. For both Fearn and Phillips, the social groups projected by these poems are also, in their different ways, ‘interpretative communities’.21 A politics of lyric developed out of their readings would be a politics focused on the changes that poems can bring about in individual subjectivities (p.12) as well as in the contributions poems make to communal self-consciousness. ‘Literature’ also usefully expresses a particular relationship between the text and the world. Some theorists have described this in terms of a suspension of normative frames of reference which affords literary texts a particular kind of expressive freedom.22 This model is suggestive rather than descriptive for Greek lyric poetry, which does not create self-sufficient worlds separated from reality in the fashion ascribed to some modern lyric poets.23 Nevertheless, the notion of ‘literature’ as a type of writing (or speech) that is characterized by the creative freedom of individual agents is useful in dealing with Greek lyric. When Sappho pictures Aphrodite’s chariot drawn by sparrows, the imaginative inventiveness of the statement is more important than its referential accuracy, or indeed its relation to a performance context. This passage is a particularly intense instance of a more common phenomenon, lyric’s ability to unbalance, expand, and reconfigure normative patterns of thought through the use of condensed or unusual language—its ‘transformative’ powers in the language of Derrida and others.24 This effect may be rather temporary, and of course not all poems have the same ‘transformative’ impetus. But it is characteristic of Greek lyric, as of other forms of lyric and literature more widely, that it can jolt its listeners/readers and their apprehension of the world. Such jolting can take place at the level of words, phrases, and images: groves may not look quite the same after one has read or listened to Sappho fr. 2, and one may experience a quickened sense of how a face or glance ‘sparkles’ after reading Sappho fr. 16. Equally, it can occur at the level of sentiments and ethics. On Mark Payne’s reading, Pindar’s celebration of athletic achievement is a case in point. For Payne, the power of the poetry Pindar devotes to athletic victories goes beyond any kind of ‘normal’ response to such occurrences, creating events of meaning characterized by an ‘excess that projects the subject out of its normative, common-sense commitments’. This (p. 13) projection transforms listeners by demanding a ‘fidelity’ to the achievement Page 9 of 24

 

Introduction being celebrated, a reaction the poems elicit not by simply reformulating accepted principles, but by ‘register[ing] the shock of [their] extreme allegiance’ (p. 268) to the subject matter. It is in experiencing the unsettling force of this ‘allegiance’ that the listener responds most fully to Pindar’s demands. Whether we want to prioritize the verbal aesthetics of a poem, the nature of the world a poem puts before us, or something altogether different, the term ‘literature’ can serve as a reminder not to neglect lyric’s ability to startle us. Discussing Greek lyric as ‘literature’ prompts historical considerations as well, because it foregrounds the important point that the texts that make up this corpus transcend contexts at much as they are conditioned by them.25 Changing social, educational, and intellectual contexts necessarily inflect encounters with texts: Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ appreciation and understanding of Pindar’s metres will necessarily have been different from Martin West’s, or from that of a fifth-century listener attending a performance. But using the term ‘literature’ helps to underscore the fact that the linguistic, rhythmic, and conceptual structures to which different readers respond change much less than the contexts in which they are encountered. Such features contribute to a poem’s transcontextual success by generating significance and eliciting attention in ways that are not exhausted by any one setting.26 Similarly, ‘literature’ can be used to emphasize that the cognitive and interpretative resources that modern readers share with the ancient Greeks are as considerable as the cultural divisions between them. (One such resource, ‘mentalizing’, is discussed in Budelmann’s chapter.) We cannot understand Pindar or Sappho or Alcman as their contemporaries did, but nor are we so remote from them as to be unable to approximate at least some of the forms of response into which they would have been drawn by Greek lyric’s ‘experiential affordances’.27 Yet our cultural distance from the Greeks is also of importance to modern readers, and it is here that the indisputably anachronistic associations of ‘literature’ are not simply problems to be accepted in (p.14) return for what the term offers us, but bring their own heuristic benefits.28 Unlike, for example, ‘ritual’ (which equally carries accretions of meaning alien to early Greece), ‘literature’ is today no longer used with the ambition of achieving a snug fit with ancient realities. It is not an emic term, and nobody thinks it is one. Rather, every use of ‘literature’ reminds us that thinking about lyric is inevitably, at least in part, a matter of imposing our own viewpoint. Of course, such is Classics: across the board, we are in the business of reconstructing realities to which we have only limited access, yet we nevertheless have to try. Arguably, though, for early Greek lyric of all fields, a reminder of our own presence in every reconstruction is particularly important. The scarcity of reliable evidence can hide the modern scholar’s role in creating a lyric world in his or her own image: little evidence means not just little evidence on which to build, but also little evidence that might contradict and provide a check on the buildings we erect. Page 10 of 24

 

Introduction The many different versions of Sappho’s world, few of which can be ruled out with complete confidence, even though necessarily most of them must be wrong, are the most obvious example (an issue explored in D’Alessio’s chapter). We cannot give up on attempts to reconstruct the contexts of Greek lyric, but we do need to acknowledge overtly that all engagement with Greek lyric, creative or scholarly, will have a subjective dimension. Embracing the anachronism of ‘literature’ reminds us that we cannot read Greek lyric altogether ‘objectively’. Many of the poems treated in this volume have endured as ‘literature’ in part because of the subtlety, compression, elegance, or intensity with which they capture, heighten, and expand the listeners’ and readers’ sense of what counts as important. Relatedly, the autonomy of these texts rests in their capacity to create for themselves, through charged and memorable language, the grounds on which they are understood and valued. The specific forms these processes take vary considerably from poet to poet. In Pindar, complexity is salient: his epinicians invite a heightened engagement with athletic success through bold metaphors, complex mythical exempla, and difficult trains of thought. Anacreon, by contrast, charms with elegantly simple rhythms, language, and sentiments, and through this controlled simplicity finds his own distinctive ways of capturing the (p.15) onset of love and desire, the anguish of old age, or the easy joyfulness of conviviality. In exploring the encounters these and other poets create, this volume seeks to articulate a multifaceted responsiveness to the ‘literary’ dimension of Greek lyric that corresponds both to a multiple notion of form and its effects, and to the idiomatic variousness with which these effects play out across the corpus.

The Phenomenology of Context An important question that underpins several of the essays gathered here is in what way the performance settings of early Greece were (and were not) distinctive environments for the reception of poetry. To compare early Greek lyric to later literature is to steer a difficult course between the Scylla of a misleading kind of anachronism (to ignore the difference between performance and reading) and the Charybdis of romanticism (to posit a prelapsarian world, altogether unlike the one we know).29 In order to illustrate how this challenge can be and has been met, in this volume and elsewhere, this section focuses on two poetic strategies that are the bread and butter of criticism on Hellenistic and Roman poetry: the creation of personae and the use of intertextuality. The argument here has two sides. It is important to realize properly that early lyric too solicits these modes of reading: there is no unbridgeable abyss between lyric in performance and lyric on the page. Yet it is just as important to understand that in the case of early lyric these phenomena appear in a different guise: writing and reading do make a difference.

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Introduction We begin with the persona. One challenge here is to distinguish between more and less strongly characterized personae loquentes. Examples of the former exist across the lyric corpus, and are responsible for the fascination with the speaker that marks both ancient and modern responses to the poetry of Sappho, Anacreon, Alcaeus, or Pindar. But lyric voices are internally various. Within each poet, and even within a single poem, we often find alongside utterances that seem to issue from a definite persona others that are better described (p.16) as positing ‘statement-subjects’.30 These ‘subjects’ operate primarily as conduits for micronarratives or claims about experiences rather than as characters around whom listeners are invited to construct a life beyond the poem. Pindar, with his shifts between gnomic statements and utterances that seem to pertain to the poet and his life, is a particularly pronounced example, but in a different way one might think of Anacreon or Theognis, who across their corpus build up recognizable identities, yet also composed poems that are minimalist in their persona, and which could have been voiced by any symposiast without incongruity between song and setting. The vertical layering (rather than horizontal variability) of the lyric voice, in which the ‘I’ in the text, the author, and the performer overlap and intersect in a variety of ways, is a theme of Felix Budelmann’s chapter. The force of a given lyric statement will depend in part on how these intersections are understood. The performer is important here, but the author and the speaker in the text each are responsible for effects of their own. Approaching the persona from a related but different angle, Pauline LeVen emphasizes that the lyric voice emanates from opaque origins. Even though the performer’s voice is real, it echoes the voice of a speaker who is not the performer, who in turn echoes an experience. LeVen shows that erotic lyric uses this play of voices to dramatize the elusiveness and power of erotic experience. It follows from LeVen’s discussion that early audiences responding to the lyric ‘I’ would often have faced issues not unlike those that confronted readers of Callimachus or Horace, even though performers create both a form of real presence and a level of distancing between author and listener that are missing on the page. Audiences would also have been closely attuned to the relationship between the textual voice and the performer who embodied it. As we discuss further below, music added a further dimension to this dialogue: a performer’s voice and vocal style are uniquely his or her own, but melodies and instrumentation would have been based on shared forms and practices. The relations between performer and persona therefore reward an approach that emphasizes the intersections between concrete contexts and what happens ‘in the ear of the listener’, between particular embodiments of lyric voices and the voice as a disembedded construct. (p.17) Intertextuality can have powerful effects in Greek lyric as it does in later literature, and as in later literature relationships between texts took numerous forms and created a range of effects.31 It is a truism that performances do not allow for the close comparison of texts that is afforded by books, but while early Page 12 of 24

 

Introduction Greek poems allude to specific passages in previous texts less often than Hellenistic and Roman poems, their intertexts can have considerable force, and can operate in more than one way. There are numerous passages in which Pindar, for example, uses Homeric vocabulary in ways that depart from Homeric precedent to create charged poetic effects. Pindar refers agonistically to Homer’s ‘winged artfulness’ (ποτανᾷ…μαχανᾷ, Nem. 7.22) and its capacity to deceive. As commentators ancient and modern have noted, ποτανᾷ recalls Homer’s ‘winged words’. The phrase ποτανᾷ μαχανᾷ emphasizes the power of Homer’s poetry by advertising its influence on Pindar’s own language. Simultaneously, however, the application of the adjective to a noun with which it is not paired in Homer, and the use of Homer’s language to critique his poetry, constitute a linguistic enactment of Pindar’s appropriative stance. Nor should such subtleties be thought beyond the grasp of audiences. Listeners would have been used to hearing Homer performed, and hence would have been alert to departures from recognized lexical patterns. Pindar’s rhythms and melodies also differed from Homer’s, and thus complemented phraseological appropriation.32 Attention to modal differences between types of intertextuality is as important as sensitivity to microtextual interactions. On Tim Whitmarsh’s reading of Sappho’s fragment 16, the listeners’ attention is drawn to the contrast between the epic Helen, who is ‘the object of others’ choices and judgements’ (p. 138), and the active, decision-taking character of Sappho’s poem. Whereas this relationship between fragment 16 and epic is a matter of concepts rather than verbal detail or phrasing, Alcaeus’ engagement with Sappho’s Helen in fr. 283 (if this is the later of the two poems) has a more narrowly (p.18) intertextual dimension: the interaction between the poems occurs at the level of argument, but seems to be underpinned by verbal reminiscences. Tom Phillips’ chapter identifies several distinct strands of intertextual resonance in Pindar’s Paean 9. At the level of the poem’s language, these include a pointed reworking of a topos, and implicit metapoetic resonances that inform the poem’s distinctive polyphony. Phillips further argues that the poem’s opening lines can be understood as a musicopoetic elaboration of a passage of Archilochus. Grounded in musical and rhythmical features as much as in the language of the text (the former of course now inaccessible to us), this dialogue with Archilochus does not sit easily within established categories of intertextuality and allusion, but nonetheless, on this reading, makes an important contribution to the poem’s handling of its subject. Persona and intertextuality are distinct phenomena but they can combine, and do so notably in the case of song cycles (not discussed in any detail in this volume).33 The emergence of Sappho’s ‘Brothers Poem’ in 2014 stimulated fresh interest in the notion that certain songs relate to one another in sequences. It is now fairly clear that Sappho wrote several poems about the vicissitudes of her family, just as Archilochus composed a sequence of poems about his dealings with Lycambes, and Alcaeus about his exile at a sanctuary. As so often, one runs into some intractable issues of evidence: we do not know whether these Page 13 of 24

 

Introduction sequences were composed at the same time or over a lengthy period, whether they were more commonly performed individually or together, and in the same or different orders, and what audience knowledge the composers or later performers could expect. But what is clear is the resemblance to the Alexandrian and Latin poetry book. Like poetry books, song sequences build up and exploit a persona, and create dense intertextual relationships, as well as inviting listeners to see the meaning of an earlier poem being changed in the light of a later one. And like poetry books, they offer scope for comparison as variations on a theme, and create ironies for those who know subsequent events. Yet there are also important differences, which are emblematic more widely of the distinctiveness of Greek lyric as poetry for performance. Whereas the book imposes an order on poems through its materiality, the song sequence does so through the unfolding (p.19) temporality of the performance. One obvious consequence is variation from performance to performance and creative scope for the performer, but there is also an effect on the listener’s mode of ‘reading’. Exposure is momentary, and memory plays a greater role, with the result that the meaning and the connections generated by the sequence are less dependable but more immediate. In reflecting on issues such as these, the volume highlights what might be termed the phenomenology of context, the assemblage of perceptions, attitudes, and interpretative strategies that listeners brought to bear on a poem. On the view advocated here, context is a matter not just of physical environs and sociopolitical discourses, but also of the listeners’ knowledge of other texts, their interpretative competence, and their expectations. In the mental world that shapes listeners’ responses to a text, the intellectual and imaginative frameworks lyric itself constructs play a prominent role. Exploring these frameworks opens up new ways of treating lyric’s projection of the environments in which it was apprehended and understood.

Genre Moves The challenges posed by genre in Greek lyric and by Greek lyric as a genre have been well rehearsed. The term ‘lyric’ itself was coined only in the Hellenistic period, and over the centuries has been used with different remits. Even the narrower use (which excludes elegy and iambus) is very broad, and comprises a large number of individual genres, such as epinician, paean, and wedding song. In addition, those genres are themselves difficult to define, and the very notion of ‘genre’ is the subject of considerable controversy for the archaic period. This volume does not attempt to address these challenges head-on, but as a phenomenon that puts text and context into a dynamic relation, genre is a thread that runs through it. Occasion is central to genre in early Greece. Epinicians are composed for victory celebrations, wedding songs are performed at weddings, and paeans (usually) Page 14 of 24

 

Introduction address Apollo.34 But not only were some (p.20) genres, such as the paean, performed at a range of occasions and therefore are famously difficult to capture in functionalist terms; more important, lyric genres are characterized both by the occasions at which they are performed and by features in the text. Hellenistic editors did not always find it easy to classify early lyric texts by genre —a well-known problem case is the enkomion—but only an extreme sceptic would want to deny that in many respects they were successful. Occasion may well have been the origin of many genres, but occasions come with more or less strict expectations for the poetry that is performed at them. Epinicians, paeans, and wedding songs all used recognizable tropes. The relationship between occasion and text develops over time, and varies genre by genre, and indeed poem by poem and performance by performance, but is always one of dynamic interaction. At least some of these bundles of typical occasion and typical textual features are sufficiently distinctive for poems in other genres to allude and refer to them. Sappho seems to allude to wedding song in fr. 44, and Pindar variously contrasts his victory odes with iambus and with poetry of desire.35 Oliver Thomas’s is the first of two chapters that try to sharpen our understanding of genre in early Greece by looking at lyric from the vantage point of the related but different genre of the Homeric Hymns. Focusing on the inset songs in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Thomas shows that Hermes represents the lyre as a conglomerate of attributes drawn from different genres. This strategy accentuates the marvellousness of the instrument, but also reminds audiences of, for example, the erotic dimensions of epinician, and of connections between the hymn itself and the bantering of young men at symposia. The composer of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes was well aware that early Greek lyric genres are neither entirely divorced from occasion nor simply expressions of it. Different issues are presented by Greek lyric as a whole. Notoriously, the corpus can be described as a genre only in a weak sense, in part no doubt because the lyric corpus was created retrospectively, (p.21) but it bears emphasizing that Latin and English lyric, too, are highly diverse corpora.36 As a result, a case may be made both for and against the value of the idea that Greek lyric is a genre. Some of the benefits of thinking about features characteristic of ‘lyric’ in general are brought out in Henry Spelman’s chapter, which argues that the narrator’s self-presentation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo shares various features with forms of lyric self-consciousness, in particular an interest in the occasion of performance, the anticipation of future performance, and a notion of authorship. His reading makes the case for seeing lyric and hymnic compositions of the later archaic period as part of a shared literary culture, grounded in trans-generic assumptions about the capacity of poems to transcend a given occasion of performance.

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Introduction Other chapters highlight and investigate some of the particular poetic moves that recur in different types of early Greek lyric and that prompted responses from Hellenistic and Latin lyricists. Such moves fall well short of constituting proper markers of genre, and are better understood as mini-traditions within and beyond the Greek lyric corpus. We here give three examples. Marginality. D’Alessio discusses how Sappho tends to position her poems on the margins of ritual performance rather than presenting them as acts of performance themselves, ritual or otherwise. In the ‘Brothers Poem’, for example, the (singular) speaker asks to be sent ‘to beseech Queen Hera repeatedly’; and in the less well-preserved fr. 27 the (plural) speakers state that they are going to a wedding in the context of asking the addressee (identity uncertain) for some kind of permission. The trope is familiar from other poets. Alcaeus witnesses the ritual cries of the women at the pan-Lesbian out-of-town sanctuary (fr. 130b); and for Alcman fr. 1, G. O. Hutchinson (elsewhere) speaks of a miniature drama ‘staged on the edge of the ritual’.37 In Latin poetry, the position Horace frequently adopts on the edge of ritual scenarios correlates with the oblique relation he constructs (p.22) with his Greek models. Metaphorically, such marginality might be extended to the unfulfilled longing that characterizes early Greek love lyric and to the shrill or morose complaints from the sidelines that characterize the political poetry of Theognis. Lyric speakers of all periods often observe situations or feelings from the outside, and D’Alessio suggests that this feature is a crucial component of Sappho’s enduring appeal. ‘It was, it would seem, not their embeddedness within a ritually formalized communicative occasion, but their ability to look at this occasion from the margin, also providing models of response, that guaranteed their diffusion and survival beyond their original context’ (p. 62). ‘Again’. The particle δηὖτε (‘now again’) is a trademark of Greek love lyric, and the topos is subsequently taken up by later lyric as a marker of a tradition. Pauline LeVen’s chapter discusses how the ‘again’ of Alcman and Anacreon gestures to a background without filling it in, and suspends the possibility of connecting the particular utterance with an ultimate origin. In a single word, δηὖτε encapsulates some of the themes at the heart of this book. Performance and text interact at multiple levels as δηὖτε links this poem and this rendition to the songs the performer sang before, other poems the composer composed before, and/or other poems in the same tradition. Unique and universal. Lyric abounds in exempla. Hieron is like Pelops, Pittacus is like the Lesser Ajax. Audiences and readers may find the connection obvious or difficult to discern, they may accept the comparison or demur. The dual focus on the unique occasion here and now and the timeless generality or mythical paradigm, as well as the impetus to connect the two, are characteristics of many lyric texts. But the specific forms this impetus takes vary considerably according to the context or poetic argument in which the exempla are deployed, as Page 16 of 24

 

Introduction Whitmarsh demonstrates in his analysis of Sappho fr. 16. Within the wider context of a reading of Sappho’s Helen in terms of Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Whitmarsh interprets her as a figure who embodies lyric’s signature combination of ‘performative immediacy’ and generalizing claims. In Sappho’s poem, Helen embodies the ‘transferability of local to universal emotional resonance’, and impels reflection on the poem as an event in which a specific set of emotions experienced by an individual are ‘grasped at the level of the general’ (pp. 144, 145).

(p.23) Performance Events Greek lyric repays readerly responses. It is because the corpus has so much to offer to readers that it has been valued across the centuries, and versions of the interpretative strategies that characterize approaches to the written texts of later eras are relevant to our lyric texts, even though most of them were originally performed much more frequently than they were read. This is one of the claims of the volume as a whole and has been a theme of the Introduction. However, this claim should not be interpreted as an attempt to deny the distinctiveness of performance. This final section will therefore offer an (inevitably selective) account of what performance might contribute to the notion of lyric as a textual event. The anthropological paradigm makes performance a central pillar of the functional approach to Greek lyric, and appropriately so. Performance is interpersonal. It inserts poems into a variety of social and political settings, and in these settings the poems discharge social and political functions for performers as well as audiences, individuals as well as collectives. The achievements of this ideology-centred approach to performance require no further elaboration. The view of lyric explored in this volume foregrounds a different dimension of performance. First, we want to emphasize that music, which is at the core of lyric performance, is non-semantic, and that the same is true for the ‘musicality’ of language itself, to which lyric poetry often calls attention.38 Music can be given political meaning, but such meaning will only ever capture one aspect of what music does for its listeners.39 The sensory complexity of lyric performance and its resistance to being understood in exclusively or even predominantly semantic terms make any purely sociopolitical account reductive. The point made above for the literary is almost self-evident for musical performance. Although the notion of the aesthetic as an altogether separate realm is alien to archaic Greece, there are nevertheless facets (p.24) of aesthetic experience that stand outside the political, the social, and the ritual.40 In the Greek imagination, music pulses and shimmers with non-human energies. In Bacchylides’ description of himself as a nightingale, in Pindar’s ornately material descriptions of his songmaking, in Hermes’ first performance on the lyre, and numerous other mythical narratives, music is represented not just as expressing and stirring up emotions, Page 17 of 24

 

Introduction but as a conduit of forces that can only ever be partially subordinated to the cultural frames through which they are presented.41 When Bacchylides calls himself a ‘Cean nightingale’ in the final words of his poem 3, he is not just employing empty conventional language but is adumbrating the sense that, in a performance, listeners, performer(s), and indeed the words of the poem are inhabited by a music that has more in common with birdsong than with human language. By characterizing himself in this way, Bacchylides makes the nightingale symbolize human subjectivity as informed by, and able to contain, a non-semantic alterity, of which music is a crucial feature. Metaphors such as this remind us that music has a fundamental non-social and non-political dimension. Lyric performance, secondly, is always unique and contingent. Even in the most slickly produced professional show today, each night of the run has a contingent quality. In so far as ‘reperformance’ suggests faithful replication, it is a misnomer where Greek lyric is concerned. Tunes, tempi, and instrumentation will often have varied considerably, to say nothing of textual fluctuation or changes in the size of the performing group. This uniqueness and contingency of every performance do not (of course) contradict the salient fact that lyric performance can be political, but it shows that an exclusively structural and ideological understanding of lyric politics will never do full justice to the individual performance. We lack the evidence to reconstruct any one rendition of a poem, but we can nevertheless attempt to be alive to performance as an event in the strong sense (p.25) sketched above, as a unique realization of the poem. Crucially, contingent factors have a significance that goes beyond making individual performances look and sound unique. When lyric poems are performed by specific groups or individuals in particular settings, and take on particular sonic and visual forms that are not entirely reproducible, this process has consequences for the ethical and psychological encounters that the poems create between authors, performers, and listeners. One aspect of such encounters is highlighted by Payne’s contribution, which explores lyric’s capacity to influence the subjectivities of its listeners through a particular kind of ‘ethopoeia’, understood not as the construction of a persona, but as an attitudinal orientation towards the world of human concerns that a particular lyric text or corpus projects. Payne focuses on two ‘gestures’ in Pindar’s epinicians through which such an orientation is constructed, and which he calls ‘fidelity’ and ‘farewell’. They name respectively a faithful witnessing of the moment of athletic success, and moments at which the poems strive to free themselves of this obligation. Crucially, the ‘ethopoeia’ that lyric poems such as Pindar’s articulate is not submitted for our judgement; rather, its sudden emergence compels us to inhabit ‘a form of life that might really become our own, and whose becoming our own might not be a matter of choice for us’ (p. 260). The contingencies of individual performances inflect each encounter with this ‘ethopoeia’ by making listeners aware that it is this particular version of the poem, mediated by this voice, these gestures, this melodization, that informs the Page 18 of 24

 

Introduction encounter. By the very act of performing the poem, the performer enacts a version of its ‘ethopoeia’, which is simultaneously opened up to listeners as a form of possibility. A different aspect of the contingency of performance is at issue in Budelmann’s chapter. As part of his reading of the psychology of the lyric encounter, he suggests that the dearth of external information about the speaker of a lyric poem encourages a voluntary extension of trust towards him or her. This does not mean that truth claims in lyric are straightforward; audiences are not required to agree with the opinions a lyric speaker expresses, neither do they need to believe that a performer of Sappho fr. 31 is actually, in the moment of performance, experiencing the symptoms enumerated in the poem. Rather, listeners are prompted to accept the existence of these symptoms in the world the poem projects: lyric speakers do not lie. On Budelmann’s reading, lyric models an idealized form of encounter (p.26) grounded in transparent cognitive contact. This modelling has a social significance that exceeds calculation in ideological or political terms, because it pertains to the fundamental psychological mechanisms through which human interactions take place. Lyric stages the possibility of a trust and transparency that are an ideal not just of sympotic discourse but of all dealings with others. For the duration of the performance, lyric fleetingly presents a glimpse of an enchanted world. That such enchanted encounters can take place regardless of the particular circumstances that mediate a given poem, regardless of where or by whom a poem is performed, testifies to the power of lyric’s distinctive psychology. Many of the chapters in this book try to capture what one might think of as the θέλξις generated by lyric performances.42 Lyric ‘enchantment’ takes many overlapping forms, and overruns distinctions between the sensuous and the conceptual, the bodily and the cognitive. It is the bewitching effect of rhythm, melody, and the patterning of choral dance.43 But it is also the sense listeners have of the poem as a particular form of temporal experience, and the apprehension of lyric poems as a distinctive vehicle for imaginative journeying. Lyric enchants when a listener experiences the presence of the speaker as free from many of the constraints that frame everyday communication, or when a poem’s music and idiomatically heightened language disclose hitherto unrealized emotional and intellectual resources in those who hear it. Differently, lyric can also enchant with the interpretative manoeuvres it invites. This therefore is a multifaceted volume. It attempts to attend both to the linguistic and pragmatic configurations that give lyric texts their appeal, and to the conceptual, interpretative, and affective events that these texts create.

The Structure of the Volume The volume falls into three parts. The chapters in Part I (D’Alessio, Uhlig, Fearn, Hutchinson) elaborate the ways in which lyric creates (p.27) imaginary environments and interacts with real environments. Part II (Whitmarsh, Page 19 of 24

 

Introduction Spelman, Thomas, Phillips) shifts from the settings of Part I to the larger intellectual contexts that poems draw on and construe, in particular intertexts, genres, and literary history. Finally, the chapters in Part III (LeVen, Budelmann, Payne) investigate the distinctiveness of lyric by exploring the encounters it creates between listeners, texts, authors, and performers. The chapters are self-standing, but as this Introduction has attempted to show, they all contribute to the larger aims of the volume, and it is hoped that the tripartite organization will not obscure other points of contact between individual essays. The methodologies adopted vary substantially, and one implicit claim of the volume is that the project of ‘textual events’ can be served by (and can prompt) close readings as much as theoretical reflection. Varied too are the texts treated, though it is notable that three poets appear with particular frequency: Sappho, Pindar, and Alcaeus. It is probably no accident that the first two are the Greek lyric authors with the most extensive literary afterlife, while Alcaeus? poetry has often been interpreted as presenting a particularly close fit with its socio-political context, and as a result provides a stimulus for exploring alternative approaches. (p.28) Notes:

(1) Gentili (1988); Thomas Cole’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ traces Gentili’s intellectual ancestry to scholarship on orality, in particular Parry and Havelock. Anna Uhlig’s chapter in this volume engages critically with some of Gentili’s assumptions. (2) Programmatically, see Gentili (1988) 39–40. Elements of this approach are foreshadowed in earlier scholarship, notably Dover (1964). (3) On the interconnectedness of these methodologies see e.g. Kurke (2013) 104– 6. Particularly successful and important representatives include Kurke (1991), Dougherty and Kurke (1993) and (2003), Stehle (1997), Kowalzig (2007), Morgan (2015). (4) The term was introduced into Classics by Herington (1985). (5) Kowalzig and Wilson (2013) on the dithyramb is a good example. (6) For references and discussion see pp. 9–15. (7) According to Gentili (1988), in his programmatic statement on the first page (p. 3), early Greek poetry ‘existed to inform and instruct, most explicitly so when composed with the needs of specific groups and occasions in mind’. More recent formulations of the audience’s relationship with the poem have modified this position, but the emphasis is still often on collective response. For the

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Introduction importance of the agency listeners bring to comprehending poetic performance, see e.g. Thomas (2012) 239. (8) For a case study of different forms of participation in the same (contemporary) ritual see Coleman and Elsner (1998). (9) Revival of ‘aesthetics’ in the study of Greek (and other) literature and culture: Porter (2010), Peponi (2012), Sluiter and Rosen (2012), Destrée and Murray (2015), Cazzato and Lardinois (2016). Another important influence on this volume is the opposition in some quarters to the idea that Greek lyric is fundamentally different from later literature: see Morrison (2007a) 37–42 and the work of Michael Silk (e.g. Silk (2007) and (2012)), and cf. n. 17. See Wohl (2015) 1–8 for an overview of the importance of form to the ‘politics’ of tragedy. Lyric criticism and theory beyond Classics: two important books were published while this volume was in preparation, and have influenced several chapters; Jackson and Prins (2014) and Culler (2015). For examples of what can be achieved by widening the interpretative frame in which one reads Greek lyric, very different from each other, and different too from the routes taken in this volume, see Prins (1999) and Carson (1999). (10) See in particular Calame (1995), Felson (2004b), and the overview in D’Alessio (2009). Bowie (1986) remains fundamental on the question of the relationship between song and setting. (11) On reperformance see Morrison (2007b), Morrison (2011), Phillips (2016) 217–23, Hunter and Uhlig (2017). (12) By implication, these arguments have relevance also for the much discussed issue of lyric mimesis, which is tackled only in passing in this volume (see esp. Phillips, this volume, pp. 193–200). On the nature of lyric mimesis see in particular Nagy (1996) ch. 4 and Rutherford (2001) 175–8, and for issues of mimesis specifically in relation to choruses Henrichs (1994–95), Power (2000), Peponi (2004), Fearn (2007) ch. 3, Agócs (2012). Questions of mimesis also run through much modern lyric criticism. The fictionality of lyric was a cornerstone of New Criticism, but has been drawn into question by some recent writers; see Payne, this volume, p. 258, and Jackson and Prins (2014) 5–6. (13) The term is not original: it is used in an unmarked way by Derrida (1992) 46; cf. Kurke (2013) 104 on ‘event history’. (14) Eagleton (2012) 201. See also Attridge (2004) 56–61. (15) Badiou (2013) 9–10. 16

See Payne’s chapter also for references to the concept of the ‘event’ in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy; cf. Payne (2007).

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Introduction (17) See further Fearn this volume, pp. 99–102, who marshals the term from a similar vantage point. Rudolph (2009) argues for the ‘Literarizität’ of Sappho. Feeney (2016) 153–5 discusses the concept for Latin ‘literature’. For the difficulty inherent in speaking of ancient Greek ‘literature’ see Goldhill (1999) and Dupont (1999). (18) Maslov (2015) sees ‘literature’ as emerging during the archaic and classical periods, with Pindar an especially important figure; his notion of ‘literature’ is based on features specific to historical contexts, such as generic hybridity, author function, and the reuse of social discourses, but he also stresses the transcontextual aspirations of ‘literary’ texts. Spelman in this volume makes the case for a literary historical self-consciousness in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. (19) Felski (2008) 4. (20) On Greek lyric as ‘marked speech’, see Nagy (1990) ch. 1. (21) For reflections on relationships between lyric genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, see Thomas, this volume, esp. pp. 183–5. (22) Cf. Derrida (1992) 44–5 with Culler (2005) 872–3; Attridge (2004). (23) Cf. Badiou (2014) 23–6, focusing especially on Mallarmé. (24) Discussion of literature’s ‘transformative’ aspects at Derrida (1992) 54–5, 64, 69, 72; for a stimulating meditation on literature’s capacity to ‘reorient our perceptions’ see Macé (2013) 222–4. See also Sigelman (2016) 7–11 on the importance of reading Pindar ‘as poetry’, with a stress on the poet’s transformation of his subjects into ‘poetic material’. (25) See further Payne (2007), and his chapter in this volume. (26) In this sense, the reception history of Greek lyric, both in antiquity and beyond, has much to tell us about what makes the poems meaningful. (27) Payne, this volume, p. 272. Further on affordances see Felski (2015) 164–5, who uses the term to highlight the ways in which the formal features of texts entail and open up experiential possibilities for readers, and Cave (2016) 46–62. (28) For a useful discussion of the role of ‘anachronism’ in writing the intellectual history of ancient Greece, see Loraux (2005). (29) For this Charybdis, perhaps discerned more easily from the distant vantage point of critics working on later literature, see Cameron (1995) 72, Feeney (1998) 22–5, and D’Alessio, this volume, pp. 31–3. (30) ‘Statement-subjects’ is Käte Hamburger’s term; see esp. Hamburger (1973) ch. 2. Cf. Payne, this volume, p. 258. Page 22 of 24

 

Introduction (31) For discussions of intertextual methodology in early Greek lyric see e.g. Fowler (1987) ch. 1, Nicholson (2013), Kelly (2015). There is much to be learned from the intense discussions of intertextuality and its limits in early epic. (32) See also Spelman’s and Thomas’s chapters in this volume for the argument that performance poems can play on audiences’ expectations about function and their understanding of generic distinctions. Neither effect depends on intertextuality narrowly conceived as a relation between a text and a model, but both involve textual cues activating awareness of poetic conventions. (33) See e.g. Vetta (1984) (Theognidea), Hutchinson (2001) 192–4 (Alcaeus), Clay (2011a) (Pindar), Peponi (2016) 234–5 (Sappho). (34) For a concise statement of the centrality of function and occasion for early genre terms, and the developments in subsequent centuries, see Ford (2002) 10– 13. (35) The degree to which genres in Sappho’s period are fixed, and the question whether they are indeed genres in a meaningful sense, are contested; see e.g. Yatromanolakis (2004) (on Sa. 2). The case is clear for Pindar; see e.g. Ol. 1 and Ol. 10 with Rawles (2011), and the mention of Archilochus in Pyth. 2. (36) For particularly robust scepticism concerning the usefulness of the term ‘Greek lyric’, see Miller (1994) ch. 1 and Calame (1998). Regarding lyric in general, cf. Jackson and Prins (2014) 1: ‘We take it for granted that we know what a lyric is…Yet it has become as notoriously difficult to define the lyric as it is impossible to define poetry itself’. (37) Hutchinson (2001) 78. (38) For an exploration of the ‘auditory aesthetics’ of Greek lyric (among other forms) see Gurd (2016). (39) For an overview of the place of music in performance culture see D’Angour (2015); for citharody see Power (2010), and for dance Rocconi (2015) and Peponi (2015). The essays in Phillips and D’Angour (2018) pursue the interrelations of music and text further. On music and culture/politics, see especially Murray and Wilson (2004) and again Power (2010). (40) Kristeller’s much discussed claim that antiquity was incapable of separating the aesthetic from other domains is certainly too strong, but a connectedness is undeniable. For a brief balanced account see Destrée and Murray (2015) 1–5. See more fully, for poetry, Ford (2015), who argues for a shift in the fifth century BC, which ‘set the stage for a notion of poetic autonomy in its root sense’ (p. 145); and cf. also the ‘Introduction’ of Peponi (2012).

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Introduction (41) See e.g. Pind. Dith. 2 with Porter (2007), Pind. Pyth. 12 with Martin (2003), Phillips (2016) 255–63. On Hermes’ use of the lyre see Thomas’s chapter in this volume. (42) On θέλξις as conceived in archaic and classical texts see Halliwell (2011) 37–56 and Peponi (2012) ch. 4. (43) Cf. Power (2011), who emphasizes the role of materiality in the imagery of Pind. Pa. 8, reading the poem as an expression of the unsettling powers of musical enchantment.

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric The Case of Sappho Giambattista D’Alessio

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter offers an analysis of the ways in which the language of Sappho’s poems makes use of pragmatic elements that evoke a link to an extratextual world. Through this analysis, the dominant interpretative paradigm is questioned that sees Sappho’s poetry as primarily embedded within a ritual performance context, as well as the alternative reading that explains some of its most salient features as due to strategies enabled by the adoption of writing as a medium of communication. While emphasizing the centrality of performance as a theme and a concern in Sappho’s poems, the chapter shows how the texts often locate themselves outside a proper performative frame, providing a look at ritual from a marginal, personal, and yet powerfully exemplary perspective. Keywords:   lyric poetry, Sappho, Alcaeus, performance, pragmatics, fictionality, occasionality

Lyric poetry and the ‘Occasion’ In the literary and cultural imagination of post-Romantic readers, Greek lyric is often seen as the conceptual place where poetic communication finds its natural origin and telos, embedded, as it is assumed to be, in its link to occasion and performance. Poets and audiences, critics, and scholars not infrequently look back with a certain nostalgia to the lost Golden Age of the ‘lyric’ wor(l)d, with its spontaneous social sense and its practical effectiveness. The formulation of F. W. Schelling stands out as particularly representative of this idea:

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric The spirit of the modern age…introduces the restriction of modern lyric poetry as regards the objects themselves. The lyric poetry in modern states could no longer be the image and accompanist of a public and communal life, a life within an organic whole. For it, there remained no other objects than either the completely subjective, individual, (p.32) momentary emotions in which lyric poetry lost itself even in the most beautiful gushings of the later world, emotions from which a whole life emanates only very indirectly, or enduring emotions directed toward objects themselves, as in the poems of Petrarch, where the whole itself becomes a kind of romantic or dramatic unity.1 This same vision of the crucial link between ‘occasion’ and poetry emerges, with characteristic sharpness, in a section of Walter Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, centred on a reading of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Blödigkeit’ (‘Timidity’, composed after 1802 and published in 1804).2 Benjamin argues that the notion of ‘poetry of occasion’ (Gelegenheitsdichtung), common in interpretations of Goethe, should be re-conceived to dispel a widespread confusion between the concepts of ‘occasion’ (Gelegenheit) and ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis): ‘For the occasion provides the content, and the lived experience leaves only a feeling behind.’ He goes on to cite the opening of ‘Blödigkeit’, ending with the line Was geschieht, es sei alles gelegen dir, which the poet addresses to himself (‘Whatever happens, let it all for you be “occasion”’, as we might, somewhat experimentally, translate).3 ‘This is precisely’, Benjamin comments, ‘the ancient vocation of the poet, who from Pindar to Meleager, from the Isthmian Games to an hour of love, found only higher or lower (but as such always worthy) occasions (Gelegenheiten) for his song, which he therefore never thought to base on experience.’4 ‘Whole life’, ‘communal’, ‘occasion’ (in opposition to ‘private’, ‘outpouring of emotion’, and ‘(subjective) experience’) are keywords that link the Romantic approach to ancient lyric poetry to contemporary (p.33) ‘ritualistic’ interpretations.5 It is as an echo of these concepts that we can (and arguably ought to) read more recent scholarly formulations regarding the opposition between ancient and modern lyric poetry. A good example, which may illustrate the assumptions underlying some of the critical positions examined in this chapter, is the following statement from Reinhold Merkelbach’s influential 1957 article about Sappho’s circle: ‘Now, ancient Greek lyric poets hardly ever composed a poem without an external occasion (Anlaß); book-poetry was not yet known, and even more unknown were the sentimental outpourings of single misunderstood individuals. All poems are meant for a community, an audience: they are firmly anchored to the here and now.’6 What we do have of Greek lyric, however, is the mirage of a lost occasion, and the words: words that were, or might have been, designed to ‘work’ vividly in the performance context, but that survive because they are, or have become, a Page 2 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric text independent from the original occasion. The tension between these words and the lost context has exercised interpreters of Greek lyric poetry like hardly any other issue. My intention in this paper is to have a closer look at the case of the poetry of Sappho. Several considerations suggest that this may be a fruitful exercise. The first is that, of all archaic lyric poets, Sappho poses the greatest obstacles to determining the intended performance contexts: this is partly because very few poems survive from other female poets, and partly because reliable external evidence about the performance culture of early sixth-century Lesbos is very scarce. Secondly, textual evidence has increased substantially in recent years, with two important papyrus publications: the anthology from (p.34) the Hellenistic period preserved in the Cologne papyrus published little more than a decade ago, and the very recent publication of substantial fragments (divided between private collections in the USA and the UK) of a copy of Book 1 of the canonical edition of Sappho.7 The third consideration is that a systematic study of the deictic, and more generally pragmatic, features of Sappho’s texts is yet to be undertaken.8 I will not attempt such a systematic analysis here. Rather, I will concentrate on a set of interesting and relatively neglected texts relevant to these issues (most of them from Book 1, and thus constituting a corpus that is arguably to some degree homogenous). This survey emphatically does not aim to reconstruct any actual performance context: that has too often been a tendency in recent criticism, especially of the newest fragments, with scholars taking for granted what are mostly a priori assumptions about performance scenarios, without sufficient discussion of the methodological issues involved. My focus will instead be on the way in which words are used to evoke deictic coordinates which may or may not be meant to coincide (historically) with any sort of ‘external reality’.9 The texts of Sappho abound with deictic spatial, temporal, and personal elements (personal pronouns and/or references to named individuals), as well as entailing potential pragmatic interactions with various sorts of interlocutors.

(p.35) A. Addresses to Gods, Prayers Fr. 1: Defining the Persona

Fr. 1 is one of Sappho’s best known texts. The addressee is the goddess Aphrodite, called upon to interact with a first-person speaker ‘here’ (line 5) and ‘now’ (25). Embedded in this ‘here-and-now’ frame is a narrative containing reported speech that merges into direct speech (15–24), in which the firstperson speaker becomes the second-person addressee (19) and is identified as ‘Sappho’ (20). The ‘now’ of the frame is thus mirrored in the past through temporal adverbs, projecting the current event to ‘some other time’ (5) and a ‘yet again’ (15, 16, 18). The deictic spatial and temporal references are ‘moveable’, in that no identifying link to a defined context is provided. The deictic personal references, on the other hand, are to named individuals Page 3 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (Aphrodite, Sappho). This example is particularly important since it is generally acknowledged that fr. 1 is not in fact a ‘fragment’, but a complete poem. Its dialogical situation does not present itself as part of, or as compatible with, a ritual,10 nor indeed does it have a song-performance frame. It implies, on the other hand, the identification of the speaker (the first person of the frame) with an individual named Sappho. The prayer involves a third party too, the beloved, but this third ‘person’ is treated in purely abstract terms: her role is explicitly presented as capable of being filled by an indeterminate subject. There is no implication that this third party is to be imagined present in any potential performance context. Indeed, her absence seems required for the scenario to make sense. No further audience is implied in the text. The notional situation of the utterance is not presented as part of a song performance (which, of course, does not imply that the poem could not to be performed as a song), and the dialogue is not framed in a formally cultic context.11 (p.36) Fr. 2: Defining the Place δεῦρύ μ’ ἐκ Κρήταϲ π[ᴗ ᴗ - ] ̣ναυγον ἄγνον ὄππ[αι δὴ] χάριεν μὲν ἄλϲοϲ μαλί[αν], βῶμοι δέ τεθυμιάμε                νοι [λι]βανώτω· ἐν δ’ ὔδωρ ψῦχρον κελάδει δι’ ὔϲδων μαλίνων, βρόδοισι δὲ παῖϲ ὀ χῶροϲ ἐϲκίαϲτ’, αἰθυϲϲομένων δὲ φύλλων                 κῶμα κατέρρει· ἐν δὲ λείμων ἰππόβοτοϲ τέθαλε ἠρίνοιϲ ἄνθεϲιν, αἰ δ’ ἄηται μέλλιχα πνέοιϲιν < ᴗ - - ᴗ - ×>                  ἔνθα δὴ × - ᴗ ἔλοισα Κύπρι χρυϲίαι ἐν κυλίκεϲϲιν ἄβρωϲ ὀμμείχμενον θαλίαιϲι νέκταρ                 οἰνοχόαιϲο̣[ν.

Here to me from Crete (…) sacred, where is a (/your?) beautiful grove of apple-trees, and altars perfumed with incense: in it cold water resounds through branches of apple-trees, and the whole place is shadowed by roses, and from the quivering leaves deep sleep descends; in it a meadow, grazed by horses, blossoms with spring flowers, and the breezes blow sweet as honey (…). Here/there, indeed, Cypris, taking (…) pour in golden cups with grace the nectar mixed with festivities. This ode, much less complete, and highly uncertain from a textual point of view, is again addressed to Aphrodite.12 Here, too, the utterance evokes an extratextual reality through deictic elements: ‘here’ (1),13 picked up by ‘there’ (13), ‘me’ (1, probably; final stanza, again textually dubious). In this case, the ‘identity’ of the first-person speaker (if a first person was present at all in the Page 4 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric text) is not in any way specified.14 On the other hand, the ‘here’ is the object of an (p.37) abundantly detailed description.15 The place is not firmly linked to any named location. The effect of the evocation of the poetic setting, however, will have depended greatly on whether or not this setting corresponded to an actual performance context. The place evoked by the text might, theoretically, be envisaged as the faithful verbal representation of the poem’s intended original performance setting. Yet the pragmatic import of the address to the goddess in lines 13–16 (textually uncertain as these lines are) cautions against a literal interpretation of the text’s pragmatic implications. According to the most widely accepted interpretation, the goddess is invited to pour into golden cups ‘wine mixed with festivities’ (reading imperative οἰνοχόαιϲον at the end of the preserved text).16 This, in turn, can be seen either as a transposition of a psychological/religious experience of divine epiphany, as a poetic fiction that may be built upon an otherwise non-fictional performative context, or as part of a situation whose reality resides entirely in the words of the text itself.17 As in fr. 1, no audience is explicitly present, unless we understand Athenaeus’ mention of hetairoi after his quotation of part of the poem (p.38) as referring to a lost portion of the poem itself (which would in that case have featured female hetairai),18 but the ritual setting, with its ‘altars’ and ‘cups’, does at least imply a human presence. Here too the notional situation of the utterance is not formulated as part of a song performance. The address to Aphrodite is indeed framed in a formally ritual context (mention of a sacred space and of ritual activities that go beyond the utterance of the words themselves). The nature of the ritual evoked, however, is far from clear, as is the possibility that this textual scenario actually matched a ‘real-life’ situation. There is no mention of a sacrifice, and the whole focus seems to be on communal drinking, not of wine, though, but of ‘nectar’ (15) in golden cups (14).19 Both are more appropriate to divine beings than to a group of human cultic performers,20 and are presented in a frame that comes close to that of a symposium, without overlapping it in a ‘literal’ and straightforward way.21 Fr. 5: Defining Interpersonal Relations

This poem also opens with an address to divine beings, the Nereids, and closes with one to Aphrodite.22 πότνιαι Νηρήιδεϲ ἀβλάβη[ν μοι] τὸν καϲίγνητον δ[ό]τε τυίδ’ ἴκεϲθα[ι] κὤττι ϝῶ̣ι̣ θύμωι κε θέληι γένεϲθαι                 κῆνο τελέϲθην, (p.39) ὄϲϲα δὲ πρόϲθ’ ἄμβροτε πάντα λῦϲα[ι] καὶ φίλοιϲι ϝοῖϲι χάραν γένεϲθαι κὠνίαν ἔχθροιϲι, γένοιτο δ’ ἄμμι                 μηδάμα μηδ’ εἶϲ· τὰν καϲιγνήταν δὲ θέλοι πόηϲθα̣ι (…) Page 5 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (…) ϲὺ[δ]ὲ̣ Κύπ̣[ρ]ι̣ ϲ̣[έμ]να θῦ̣μο̣ν̣ ε̣[ὔνοον] θεμένα κάκαν[ ×                 [ ̣ ] ̣ [ ̣ ] ̣ ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ι. [⨂?]

Sovereign daughters of Nereus, grant that the brother may arrive to me here unharmed, and that whatever he wishes in his mind may be accomplished, and that he may undo all his past mistakes, and become (a cause of) joy for his own friends, and sorrow for his enemies, and may to us in no way [text uncertain]; and may he wish to increase the sister’s standing (…) And you, venerable Cypris, with benevolent mind, may you (…) bad/evil. Here too spatial coordinates are provided by the deictic adverb ‘here’ (2), but as in fr. 1 this place is not ‘filled’ by descriptive elements (the reader may be tempted to supplement this by means of the reference to the sanctuary of the Nereids and Poseidon at Pyrrha in Myrsilus 477 FGrHist 14, but this is not required by the text: compare and contrast Alcaeus fr. 129). Here too the addressees interact with a first-person speaker (singular, 1, supplemented). The prayer, though, involves a third party, ‘the brother’ (unnamed, 2),23 who in his turn is (the speaker hopes) to interact with ‘us’ (7), and with ‘the sister’ (9). The parties involved make ‘pragmatic’ sense only if we imagine the text uttered by a speaker whose brother fits within a network of relationships identifiable with that described within the prayer. The use of the article rather than the possessive pronoun in lines 2 and 9 is intriguing. It may have deictic force, but with a vaguer reference, and could thus imply ‘my/our brother’, ‘his sister’; ‘my/ our brother’, ‘our sister’; ‘your brother’, ‘his/our/your sister’, depending on several factors. For the first occurrence (τόν, 2), equivalence with a secondperson possessive (‘your’) is the least likely as such equivalence would be most naturally activated by the presence of an address, but the only addressees in the poem are the Nereids at the beginning, and Aphrodite in what seems to be the last stanza. Equivalence with a third- (p.40) person possessive is also unlikely, since the behaviour of ‘the brother’ affects the individual(s) speaking in the first person. In the absence of further indications, and because τὸν καϲίγνητον immediately follows the first-person pronoun μοι, the implication is that ‘the brother’ is the speaker’s brother.24 In any case, the characters are left unnamed and their identification depends on the context, be it any set of (extratextual) circumstances in the light of which the poem may have been composed (but which would of course have obtained only in the very first performances), or those dictated by the fact that this poem is part of a series (familiarity with related texts would affect the way in which it can be understood).25 As noted, no explicit audience appears in the text. The mention of ‘citizens’, possibly as originators of criticism directed at ‘the brother’ (14), does not imply their actual presence. Again, the notional situation of the utterance is not formulated as part of the setting of a song performance, and the dialogue is not Page 6 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric framed in a formally ritual context (there is no explicit mention of ritual space or of cultic activities). The poem closes with a prayer addressed to Aphrodite at 18– 20. The use of the aorist participle may suggest that Aphrodite is not asked to persist in her attitude but rather asked to move from her previous hostility to benevolence. This is significant if this text were to be read (or performed) after fr. 15, which is closely related to fr. 5, and also included a prayer to Aphrodite, apparently again regarding the brother.26 Only three stanzas are (very fragmentarily) preserved of fr. 15 and only the last two can be reconstructed to any extent. [ὄϲϲα δὲ πρ]όϲθ’ [ἄμ]β̣ροτε κῆ[να λῦϲαι [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]αταιϲ̣(̣)ν̣εμ[ ᴗ – ᴗ – × [ϲὺν…] τύχαι λίμ̣ε̣νοϲ κλ[ ᴗ – ×                 [- ᴗ ᴗ - ×] (p.41) [Κύ]πρι, κα[ί ϲ]ε πι[κροτ́ ̣ ̣ ]αν ἐπεύρ[ – × [μη]δὲ καυχάϲ[α]ιτο τόδ’ ἐννέ[ποιϲα [Δ]ω̣ρίχα τὸ δεύ[τ]ερον ὠϲ ποθε[ ×                 [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ερον ἦλθε.

may (he) undo those past mistakes (…) (with) fortune (…) of the harbour (…) Cypris, and (may) she (?) find you (…) nor may she boast saying this (…) Doricha the second time that (…) came. Line 5, as usually supplemented (after Fraenkel), repeats fr. 5.5 almost verbatim.27 More generally, the remnants of lines 1–8 are compatible with the hypothesis that this was a prayer similar to that for ‘the brother’ in fr. 5. The last stanza is addressed to Aphrodite (as in fr. 5), and mentions another third party, a character named [D]oricha (it is unclear whether she appeared also in fr. 5).28 In tone, however, this wish resembles a curse more than an ordinary prayer: ‘may she find you very harsh’, or ‘harsher’,29 ‘nor may she boast saying this, that he/ she came a second time…’ This utterance makes sense only from the point of view of a speaker related to both ‘the brother’ (by implication) (p.42) and Doricha. This poem is too fragmentary to draw any certain conclusion about its pragmatics. Fr. 17: Setting Up the Context πλάϲιον δη μ̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]⁞οιϲ α[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ω πότνι’ Ἦρα, ϲὰ χ̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ϲ̣ ̣ ἐορτ[ ] ̣ τὰν ἀράταν Ἀτρ[έϊδα]ι̣ π̣ό̣ηϲάν           τοι βαϲίληεϲ, ἐκτελέϲϲαντεϲ μ[εγά]λ̣οιϲ ἀέθλοιϲ̣· πρῶτα μὲν πὲρ Ἴ̣[λιον], ἄψερον δέ̣ τυίδ’ ἀπορμάθεν[τεϲ· ὄ]δ̣ο̣ν γὰρ̣ εὔρη̣[ν]           οὐκ ἐδ[ύναντο,] πρὶν ϲὲ καὶ Δί’ ἀντ[ίαον] π̣εδέλθην̣ καί Θυώναϲ ἰμε̣[ρόεντα] π̣αῖδα. Page 7 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric νῦν δὲ κ[ c.12 missing letters] ̣ ̣ ̣ πόημεν           κὰτ τὸ πάλ̣[αιον ἄγνα καὶ κα̣[ c.12 missing letters ὄ]χ̣λοϲ παρθέ[νων c‘. 12 missing letters γ]υναίκων ἀμφιϲ̣ ̣[           μέτρ’ ολ̣ ̣[ παϲ[ ·[·]· νιλ[ ἔμμενα̣[ι           [Ἦ]ρ’ ἀπίκε[ϲθαι.]

Near indeed (…) Lady Hera, your (…) festival (…) which the Atreid kings established for you as a vow, having accomplished great tasks, first around Ilium, and then having sailed back here, for they could not find the way, before approaching you and Zeus Antaios, and the charming son of Thyona. And now we do, as in days past, pure and (…) crowd (of) girls (…) of women (…) measures/metres (…) be (…), Hera, to come. This poem, the first three stanzas of which are framed as an address to Hera, is too fragmentary to draw any firm conclusion. The recent additions yielded by the Green papyrus raise as many issues as they solve. The first word evokes a form of proximity (πλάϲιον, ‘near’), though the state of the text does not allow one to decide what is described as being close to what: the presence of a first-person pronoun here is not certain. The particle δή in πλάϲιον δή was (p.43) presumably meant to make the reference more vivid.30 The new papyrus has shown that the focus of the address was quite specific, mentioning the ‘festival’ of the goddess: the reconstruction ϲὰ χ[αρίε]ϲϲ᾽ ἐόρτα (‘your graceful festival’) appears very probably in line 2.31 It follows that a main verb is lost in line 1, with ἐόρτα as its subject. The solution envisaged in the editio princeps, with a middle/passive imperative, seems the most reasonable choice, and the editors’ ἀ[γέϲθ]ω (‘let (your festival) be performed’) is certainly the best proposal offered so far. Lines 3–10 provide the historical/mythical background for the festival, which was originally established by the Greeks during their Trojan expedition. The narrative was probably linked to the deictic frame of the present through a second-person personal pronoun, in line 4 (‘to you’), referring to the goddess addressed in the first lines.32 With line 11 we move back to a ‘now’ (νῦν δὲ καί) that is presented as being in continuity with the past (κὰτ τὸ πάλα[ιον, 12), with an action expressed with a first-person plural verbal form (πόημεν), which echoes, in the same metrical position, the πόηϲαν of line 3. (p.44) The two forms require two different translations in English—‘we do’ and ‘they established’—but this is very much the same verb, and πόημεν presents the speaker as part of a wider community. (In passing, it is worth noting that lines 11–12 describe ritual continuity with the past but do not imply that the celebration is taking place during the song.) The following lines seem to have included a description of the crowd of girls and Page 8 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric women, and perhaps also a performance (if that is the implication of μέτρ᾽ at 17). The setting can be usefully compared to that of Alcaeus frs 129 and 130b, which make reference to the same sanctuary and the same festival.33 The text of those two poems is rather better preserved, and pragmatic articulation more clearly discernible. In Alc. fr. 129 the temple is straightforwardly referred to with the proximal deictic (τόδε, 1), used also to indicate the god Dionysus (τόνδε, 8), and again Hera is addressed. The deictic pronouns also serve to formulate a complex curse (proximal: τῶνδε, 11; distal, with debated interpretation, κήνων, 14 and 21), with the whole discourse making pragmatic sense only if imagined as uttered within the sacred space. Fr. 130b has been widely misunderstood as a message from the distance, sent to Alcaeus’ comrades from afar for a performance in the speaker’s absence.34 But the articulation of the deictic elements points to a situation in which the poet who laments his exile from his polis is, or imagines himself as being, physically present in the sanctuary before the citizens gathered for the festival.35 This would chime with the fact that in the first part of the poem the fellow citizens from whom Alcaeus has been driven away (6) are referred to with the proximal deictic (‘these, here’): the poem makes much better sense if the citizens are imagined as actually present at the festival itself, rather than evoked through a vivid fictional deixis (Deixis am Phantasma), as is usually assumed.36 In the case of Alcaeus, the poems project (p.45) themselves against a very concrete communicative situation, evoking a well-defined speaking persona, a sociopolitical setting, an audience and/or one or more human addressees, and a clear pragmatic function. Interestingly, though, they clearly present themselves as part of a political discourse rather than as performed songs. The situation in Sappho’s poem is more difficult to define (partly due to its lacunose state). There is certainly nothing in the text that even implies that the poem presents itself as part of a song performance, let alone a choral performance, as taken for granted by Burris, Fish, and Obbink.37 Such an interpretation derives, more than from the text itself, from our extratextual information and/or expectations regarding the contexts of Sapphic poetry.38 In fact, the emphatic opening with a word meaning ‘close’ might actually be suggestive of a discourse that locates itself not quite at the centre of the performance itself, but at its margins. The fragmentary state of the text of course leaves many other alternatives open, and I would not press this point. Looking at cultic performance from the margin, as we are going to see in greater detail, though, is a characteristic feature of Sappho’s poetry in other texts. To sum up, none of the prayers examined so far presents a pragmatic articulation of the text that evokes, let alone establishes, performance as a song within a cultic context. Such an interpretation is certainly compatible with the formulation of frs 2 and 17 in particular, but no more than that. In linguistic Page 9 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric terms, the texts all present themselves as speech acts addressed to divine addressees. The function of the speaker varies considerably, ranging from the most generic (fr. 2), to the most specific (fr. 1, where the identity of the speaker is fixed as ‘Sappho’), including the case of frs 5 and 15, where the (p.46) speaker is defined as part of a familial network marked by precise relationships (‘the brother’, ‘the sister’) and a proper name (Doricha). The context ranges from the most definite (fr. 17, indicating a precise location and its significance for the community) to the most abstract (fr. 1), again, passing through the intermediate case of fr. 5 (and fr. 15). The sheer variety of these communicative strategies embedded in the texts should dissuade modern interpreters from looking for a univocal reading of the intended ‘original’ occasion (and ‘original’ mode of performance) of these prayers, and from assuming that all were necessarily intended as cultic songs, let alone choral cultic songs: that reading is intrinsically improbable for fr. 1 (where any larger community is purposefully elided), and potentially problematic in the case of the prayers for ‘the brother’ (and the associated ‘curse’ against Doricha). The texts themselves avoid establishing any verbal link to their modes of performance, whatever those may have been, and attempts at filling the gap between texts and (alleged) performances have not always been productive. In the case of fr. 1, to take one example, the hypothesis of an original performance ‘accompanied by a group of dancers’ has been advocated by Lardinois,39 even if the text stands out exactly for its almost abstract ‘context’. Eva Stehle, on the other hand, felt that such a text would be possible only as part of written communication, envisaging this (and other poems) as ‘written for a woman to sing to herself’, ‘poetry detached from performance, that is, poetry as written text’.40 I wonder what makes this poem a ‘written’ poem any more than, say, Anacreon fr. 358 or fr. 413. The issue seems to be that it is apparently easier to imagine a female poet composing for performance only within a ritual frame, while in the case of male poets modern readers (at least) seem to be ready to resort to the catch-all label of ‘sympotic’ poetry, which makes almost everything acceptable.

B. Stage Directions? To be sure, there exist (in many cases very fragmentary) texts in the Sapphic corpus which seem to include what look like self-referential instructions for (or descriptions of) the performers’ movements. This (p.47) group of poems includes fr. 6; frs 21, 22, and 27 (for which see also section C); frs 30, 43, 58, 81 (not necessarily self-referential in relation to the performance of the text itself: note the instructions about how to prepare the crown), and 111 (blending pragmatic illocution with hyperbolic imaginary projection). Yet the way in which pragmatic self-referentiality is configured in all of these poems is far from straightforward. Reference to movements pertaining to the first person, by way of a present indicative, occurs in fr. 27; reference to movements pertaining to the second person, by way of imperatives, occurs in frs 6, 27 (ἄπ[π]εμπε, 10), and 30. Frs Page 10 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric 6.7 ff. (the opening lines of a poem from Book 1, very fragmentary) and 30 (the end of the last poem of Book 1) present remarkable similarities, as follows. Fr. 6.7–14: στεῖχ[ ὠϲ ἰδω̣[ τ̣ὰϲ ετ̣[           ποτνια̣[ χρυσοπ̣[ κᾰππο[ ̣ανμ[           κ̣ᾶρα̣[ move (…) so that (I/we) may see (…) lady (…) gold- (…) fate (…).

Fr. 30:           νύκτ[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] ̣ [ πάρθενοι δ[ παννυχιϲδο̣ [ . ]α̣ ̣[ ϲὰν ἀείδοι̣ ( ̣ )ν φ[ιλότατα καὶ νύμ          φαϲ ἰοκόλπω. ἀλλ’ ἐγέρθε̣ι̣ϲ, ἠϊθ[ε ϲτεῖχε ϲοὶϲ ὐμάλικ̣[αϲ ἤπερ ὄϲϲον ἀ λιγ̣ύφω̣[νοϲ           ὔπνον [ἴ]δωμεν

night (…) girls celebrating all night long (…) sing/may they sing of the love between you and the violet-bosomed bride. (…). But you wake up, young (…), and go (to?) your age-mates (…) so we may see (less) sleep than the shrill-voiced one. The first poem opens with an invitation to ‘move’ (ϲτεῖχ[ε), addressed to an individual whose identity cannot be recovered because of the (p.48) very lacunose state of the text. It is apparently followed by a final clause in the first person (‘so that I/we may see’), and, just possibly, by a mention of a female divinity, perhaps Dawn. Fr. 30, on the other hand, in its penultimate stanza mentions girls who sing/may sing something related to a male addressee and his bride.41 This is followed by a request to the addressee to ‘wake up’ and ‘go’ (ϲτεῖχε, 7) to his age-mates in order that the first-person speakers of this sentence may see (plural: [ἴ]δωμεν, 9) as little sleep as ‘the shrill-voiced one/ bird’ (presumably the nightingale). In order to make sense from a pragmatic point of view, the two texts must be imagined as uttered in the presence of an interlocutor thought capable of reacting to the illocution. The movement that the (apparently male) addressee is invited to perform in fr. 30 does not seem to have a self-referential dimension,42 in the sense that there is no expectation that the movement should involve also the speakers themselves (contrast Pind. fr. 94b. Page 11 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric 66–7, νῦν μοι ποδὶ ϲτείχων ἁγ̣έο̣, ‘now lead my way stepping with (…) foot’). The speakers might be identified with the group of girls whose performance in a night ritual is described in the previous strophe, but the fact that in that case the third person is used does not make this a necessary implication. The preserved portion of the text presents itself as a prompt for a sort of performance (movement, but not necessarily song), that does not include, at least prima facie, the text itself. The situation might have been different, from this point of view, in fr. 43 (from Book 2, the first text we are examining that is not from Book 1). This text, once again very fragmentary, closes with a rather vague address (8 ἄγιτ᾽) to a group of female friends and a reference to approaching daybreak, thus suggesting a context similar to that of frs 6 and 30. Too little is preserved to permit the inference that these friends are (members of) the chorus performing this song itself, rather than (members of) the audience and involved in some other aspects of the performance. A similar, but more complex, situation seems to be involved in the better preserved fr. 27. (p.49) Fr. 27.4–13: ̣ ̣ ̣ ] ̣ καὶ γὰρ δ̣ὴ ϲὺ πάιϲ ποτ[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ι̣λ̣ηϲ μέλπεϲθ’, ἄγι ταῦτα[ ̣ ̣ ] ζάλεξαι, κἄμμ’ ἀπὺ τωδεκ[            ̣ ]δρα χάριϲϲαι· ϲ]τείχομεν γὰρ ἐϲ γάμον· εὖ δε[ κα]ὶ ϲὺ τοῦτ’, ἀλλ’ ὄττι τάχιϲτα[ πα]ρ̣[θ]ένοιϲ ἄπ[π]εμπε, θέοι[                      ]εν ἔχοιεν             ] ὄδοϲ̣ μ[έ]γαν εἰϲ Ὄλ[υμπον             ἀ]νθρω[π    ]αίκ̣[

For you too (were?) once a child (and loved?) to sing and dance, come, these (…) consider, and us from (this?) grant us (generous?) favours. For we are going to a wedding, and you too (know?) this well. Come, let the maidens go as quickly as possible, gods (…) may have (…) road to great Olympus (…) humans. Here we have a plural first-person subject (κἄμμ᾽, ‘and us’, 6, and ϲ]τείχομεν, ‘we are going’, 8) and a singular addressee. The speakers describe themselves as ‘going to a wedding’ (present indicative). The focus of the preserved stanza is not, however, on their performance, but on the attempt to persuade their interlocutor to ‘converse’ or ‘consider’ (ζάλεξαι, 6), to ‘grant’ them something (χάριϲϲαι, 7), and to ‘let the maidens go (or: send the maidens away) as soon as possible’ (9–10).43 The interlocutor is of a mature age, and in the context it is reasonable to infer that she is a woman (though the gender is not Page 12 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric unambiguously confirmed by the text). In the past, when she was younger, she used to ‘love to sing and dance’ (4–5, with Di Benedetto’s κἀφ]ί̣λ̣ηϲ).44 The address as a whole does have an illocutionary import (10 ἄπ[π]εμπε), but the emphasis is on the (perlocutory) process of persuading the interlocutor rather more than on the possible ‘stage directions’, and thus directs the audience’s attention away from the action of the speakers as an actual performance. What the speakers (p.50) describe themselves as performing in this text is a preliminary activity, the prelude to the performance that will be made possible by the persuasion of their interlocutor. Aloni has argued that the interlocutor is the bride, who is asked to send away her companions.45 Ferrari has rightly remarked that neither her age nor what she is asked to do (send away her companions) is consistent with this hypothesis.46 Following Di Benedetto (who compares Il. 18.491–6, where the women standing in their porches marvel at the performance of wedding songs),47 Ferrari imagines that the song is performed by a choral group; this choral group is inviting (mockingly, one would assume) a further group, attempting to persuade their leader, whom Ferrari tentatively identifies with one of Sappho’s rivals.48 If we look at the relationship between speakers and interlocutor in a potential performance, the fragment is perhaps more usefully compared to the ‘Brothers Poem’, which will be discussed in the next section. In both cases, the interlocutor is a person who has the authority to make a proper performance happen, and the speakers urge her to do so. To different degrees, the focus seems to be more (indeed in the case of the ‘Brothers Poem’, exclusively) on the possibility of the future performance than on the one implied in the text itself. A similar tension between the text itself and an envisaged performance emerges from two further fragmentary poems, frs 21 and 22, both belonging to Book 1. Fr. 22.9–13: ̣ ] ̣ ̣ ε̣ ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ κ]έλομαι ϲ̣[ ̣ ̣ ] ̣γυλα̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]α̣νθι λάβοιϲα̣α̣[ ̣ ̣ ]κτιν, ἆϲ̣ ϲε δηὖτε πόθοϲ τ̣ ̣ [                  ἀμφιπόταται τὰν κάλαν·

I order (you to sing?) having taken (…) the paktis (…), while desire now again flutters around you, the beautiful one (…). (p.51) In this fragment (lines 1–8 belong to a different poem),49 the speaker orders (κ]έλομαι, 9) an interlocutor50 (the reading ‘Abanthis’ at line 10 is disputed) to perform an action, having taken a musical stringed instrument (πᾶ]κτιν, 11, Lobel, after Castiglioni):51 the action, therefore, is almost certainly that of singing (ϲ᾽ ἀ̣[είδην, 9, West).52 Various aspects of the poem’s content are uncertain and debated, but the text clearly invites an addressee to perform a

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric song, which is presented as not this song.53 Once again, the text locates itself on the margins of a performance, rather than at its centre. The other text, fr. 21, is rather poorly preserved, and it is not even possible to determine whether its three extremely lacunose stanzas belong to one or two different poems.                     ] ̣ επαβοληϲ̣[                     ]α̣νδ’ ὄλοφυν[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]ε̣.                     ] τρομέροιϲ π̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]α̣λλα                     ]                     ] χρόα γῆραϲ ἤδη                     ]ν ἀμφιβάϲκει                         ]ϲ πέταται διώκων                         ]                         ]ταϲ ἀγαύαϲ                     ]ε̣α, λάβοιϲα                         ] ⌊ἄειϲον ἄμμι τὰν ἰόκολπον⌋]                               ]ρ̣ων μάλιϲτα                               ]αϲ π[λ]άναται

meeting/receiving (?) (…) pity/lament (…) trembling (…) skin old age already (…) goes around (…) flies in pursuit (…) splendid ones (…) taking (…) sing to us the violet-bosomed one (…) most of all (…) wanders. (p.52) The second preserved stanza focuses on the effects of old age, a theme most prominently developed in fr. 58.11–12. The third stanza includes an address to an unidentifiable female interlocutor, inviting her to ‘sing to us of the violet-bosomed one’ (ἄειϲον ἄμμι τὰν ἰόκολπον, 12–13) after having ‘taken’ (λάβοιϲα, 11) something, presumably a musical instrument. The sequence ‘sing, having taken’ is the same as in fr. 22. What in this case is the pragmatic force of the first-person plural pronoun, and of the illocutive address at line 12? Here, too, the performer of the song is distinct from the speakers of the text, who seem to present themselves as her audience. If the second and third stanzas belong to the same poem (as is usually assumed), the sequence could suggest that the speaker invited somebody else to sing, adducing her own inability because of the effects of old age (in this case the plural would include a singular speaker, ‘Sappho’, and the wider audience). If the third strophe was the opening of a new poem, on the other hand, the request to sing could conceivably be addressed to a Muse (for the plural ἄμμι cf., e.g., Od. 1.10). For what it is worth, this form of the imperative aorist of ἀείδω is attested in addresses both to human performers (cf. Od. 8.492, Aristoph. fr. 223) and to the Muse (Eur. Tr. 513), though the participle λάβοιϲα, inviting the interlocutor to take up her musical instrument, is perhaps easier to envisage in an address to a human interlocutor. Further supporting the first option is the similarity to the situation Page 14 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric in fr. 21, which we have already examined, and, at least to a certain extent, to that in fr. 58. Fr. 58 (now integrated by the ‘new’ Cologne papyrus as the ‘Tithonus Poem’) opens with an address to the παῖδεϲ, followed in the next line by a mention of the lyre (in the accusative in line 2), and then by an elaborate description of the effects of old age on the speaker (first person singular), who laments that she is no longer able to dance.54 ‘Tithonus Poem’, 1–4:      ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδεϲ, τὰ]ν̣ φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν·      ] π̣οτ̣’ [ἔ]ο̣ντα χρόα γῆραϲ ἤδη ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχεϲ ἐκ μελαίναν· (…) the beautiful gifts of the violet-bosomed ones, girls, (…) the songloving shrill tortoise. (…) (my) skin once (smooth) old age already (…) and my hair turned (white) from black (…). (p.53)

It is not clear what action the girls addressed in line 1 were invited to perform, and several alternative reconstructions have been proposed. Most scholars accept that the girls were asked to pay attention to the song, or to dance to the accompaniment of the lyre (the ‘tortoise’), rather than to sing themselves. In this case, the pragmatic situation would be far more straightforward than that in fr. 21 (if all its stanzas belonged to the same poem). Even, however, if we accept the idea that in the first two lines the speaker invites the girls to perform a song, rather than for example describing what they usually do, there is (at least with the present state of the text) nothing to suggest that the girls are meant to perform this text. The text in fact emphasizes the speaker’s exclusion from the performance (or at least from some of its features). The same sequence of ‘singing having taken up the lyre’ that we noted in some of the texts we have discussed appears at the end of the new poem preceding fr. 58 in the Cologne papyrus, where it is now applied to the speaker.           ]̣ου̣[           ] ε̣ὔχ̣ο̣μ̣[         ]  ̣ νῦν θαλία γε̣[        ] ̣ν̣έρθε δὲ γᾶϲ γε̣[νοίμα]ν̣·        ] ̣ν ἔχο̣ι̣ϲαν γέραϲ ὠϲ̣ [ἔ]οικεν       ]ζ̣οῐεν̣, ὠϲ νῦν ἐπὶ γᾶϲ ἔοιϲαν       ] λιγύραν [α]ἴ κεν ἔλοιϲα πᾶκτιν χε]λύ̣ν̣ν̣αν̣   ̣αλαμοιϲ ἀείδω.

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (…) pray(-) (…) now, festivity (…) (may I?) be under the earth (…) having the privilege as befits (me) (…) as now that I am above the earth (…) shrill, if taking the paktis (…) the tortoise (?) (…) I sing. This reference to music-making seems to describe a situation that recurred frequently during the speaker’s life and which she hopes will continue recurring after her death. From a strictly pragmatic point of view, the first-person statement here (introduced as part of a potential sentence, [α]ἴ κεν ἔλοιϲα πᾶκτιν… ἀείδω) does not necessarily point to a self-referential description of the performance of the song itself. That the idea is expressed in a potential construction, with all the caveats deriving from the fragmentary state of the text, would seem to tell against any straightforward pragmatic implications.

(p.54) C. On the margins of a Ritual Frame? The majority of the examples I examined in the last section show that even in the case of what seem prima facie to be self-referential performance directions, the text of Sappho’s songs locates itself on the margins of, if not entirely outside, the ritual performance that is its pragmatic focus (frs 21, 22, and 27). This feature emerges even more clearly in the recently published so-called ‘Brothers Poem’.55 The papyrus preserves, almost without gaps, the text of the last five stanzas of the poem. For our purpose only the first section is relevant. ‘Brothers Poem’, 1–10: ἀλλ’ ἄϊ θρύληϲθα Χάραξον ἔλθην νᾶϊ ϲὺν πλήαι. τὰ μὲν̣ οἴο̣μα̣ι Ζεῦϲ οἶδε ϲύμπαντέϲ τε θέοι· ϲὲ δ̣’οὐ χρῆ               ταῦτα νόηϲθαι, ἀλλὰ καὶ πέμπην ἔμε καὶ κέλεϲθαι πόλλα λίϲ̣ϲεϲθαι βαϲίλ̣η̣αν Ἤ̣ραν ἐξίκεϲθαι τυίδε ϲάαν ἄγοντα               νᾶα Χάραξον κἄμμ’ ἐπεύρην ἀρτε̣μ̣́εαϲ.

The speaker addresses a not clearly identifiable interlocutor, reproaching him or her for blabbering about the return of Charaxos (the ‘brother’) with a full ship. This is considered inappropriate: ‘you must not entertain such thoughts, but you must send me and also command to beseech Queen Hera repeatedly that Charaxos may arrive here with a safe ship, and find us unharmed’ (3–9). Subsequently, the discourse shifts to a wish-mode, involving the gods, ‘us’, and a further male character, Larichos, who from other sources can be identified as a further, younger brother of Sappho. The speaker is not pragmatically identified through verbal deixis in the preserved text, but analogy with other texts (e.g. fr. 5) and the indirect evidence suggest identification with ‘Sappho’, Charaxos’s sister. The exact import of the χρή-sentence at 3–6 is not entirely clear, and different solutions have been proposed. Emphasis and word order very strongly Page 16 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric suggest that, as in the translation given, the emphatic ϲέ placed at the head of the sentence should (p.55) be considered the subject of the three infinitives νόηϲθαι, πέμπην, and κέλεϲθαι.56 A change of subject (advocated by Lidov) seems very unlikely: one would expect the new subject to be placed prominently at the head of the new syntactic segment (after ἀλλά), and the change of subject would leave the two verbs without an expressed object.57 The speaker therefore addresses an interlocutor who has the authority to ‘send’ her (marked by the choice of the emphatic form of the pronoun), and to order her to pray to Hera. Such a mission could involve the performance of choral songs in honour of the goddess, but does not necessarily imply it.58 The identity of the addressee is a matter of debate: this must have been a male or older female member of the family, and the most natural assumption is that the speaker is addressing her mother.59 A ‘mother’ is addressed in fr. 102, where it is far from certain that the young speaker should be identified with ‘Sappho’. Fr. 98a mentions the mother of a speaker identifying herself as the mother of Kleis, viz. (on the strength of the biographical tradition) ‘Sappho’. More importantly though, it is very likely that fr. 9, as now supplemented by the new Green Collection papyrus, might have included an address to the ‘mother’ in the (textual) context of a religious festival.60 It now appears that line 3 of the fragment (the final line of a stanza) should be supplemented as μ]ατερ ἐόρταν.61 Bierl and, more cautiously, Lardinois suggest that the ‘mother’ in question here could in fact be (p.56) the goddess Hera.62 But as noted by Bierl himself, quoting an important remark of Walter Burkert,63 Hera is not elsewhere addressed as ‘Mother’, and if these lines deal with the problems related to the preparation of the festival, as seems likely (at least provisionally), Sappho’s own mother would appear to be a more obvious addressee.64 This parallel with fr. 9, which features an address to (or mention of) the ‘mother’ in a context dealing with ritual celebrations, strengthens the hypothesis that the speaker’s ‘mother’ was addressed in the ‘Brothers Poem’, too.65 The address to a senior member of a community, who is to be persuaded to send someone to take part in a ritual activity, is paralleled also by the address in fr. 27 already discussed. The difference is that in fr. 27 the speakers seem not to coincide with the individuals under the authority of the interlocutor. Even though the ‘Brothers Poem’ is relatively well preserved, the loss of the opening stanzas leaves its interpretation from a pragmatic point of view somewhat uncertain. Whatever option we prefer, though, it is clear that, while the speaker hopes that a ritual performance will come about, this performance is evidently projected into the future, and (depending on the interpretation of the syntax of lines 5–6, discussed earlier in this section) is probably presented as in the gift of the addressee rather than the speaker. By contrast, the dialogical situation in which the speaker and her interlocutors are situated here and now (the poem itself) does not bear the traits of any cultic or sympotic circumstances Page 17 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric of song performance. The ‘Brothers Poem’ locates itself not only on the margin, but altogether outside the frame of the ritual performance that the addresses of the interlocutor themselves are attempting to trigger.66

(p.57) D. An Abstract Frame (fr. 31), and some Provisional Conclusions The discussion so far has shown that the texts of Sappho’s poems very rarely use indexical markers to embed themselves pragmatically within their own contexts of performance. The majority of cases in which such indexical markers can be identified locate the texts on the margins of, or clearly outside, a ritual performance context. This, of course, does not directly say anything about the actual way in which these poems were originally performed, and subsequently reperformed. That is a historical question to which, for most of these cases, it is intrinsically impossible to find an answer based on the texts alone. It is nevertheless a question that interpreters will continue to ask, as they look for a provisional hermeneutic model against which to respond to the fragments, in their need to provide a context for ‘Sappho’. It is a question that reflects our knowledge (or rather our lack of knowledge) of the historical circumstances, as well as revealing our prior assumptions. The hypothetical answers to this question put forward by different scholarly theories indeed often tell us more about the perspectives and cultural context of modern interpreters than about available historical and textual data. This is arguably the case for two interpretative paradigms that have been much debated recently: the theory that Sappho was a public chorus leader,67 and the idea that she was expressing a female private perspective that transcends (perhaps even rejects) any performance context, or at least any male-dominated public performance frame (e.g. Stehle (1997)). (p.58) A text that has attracted particular attention from this point of view is fr. 31 (see, in the first instance, Latacz (1985), Rösler (1990a), Stehle (1997)), which may therefore serve as a litmus test here. Fr. 31.1–10 and 15–18: φαίνεταί μοι κῆνοϲ ἴϲοϲ θέοιϲιν ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττιϲ ἐνάντιόϲ τοι ἰϲδάνει καὶ πλάϲιον ἆδυ φωνεί                 ϲαϲ ὐπακούει καὶ γελαίϲαϲ ἰμέροεν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν καρδίαν ἐν ϲτήθεϲιν ἐπτόαιϲεν, ὠϲ γὰρ ἔϲ ϲ’ ἴδω βρόχε’ ὤϲ με φώναι                 ϲ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ἔτ’ εἴκει, ἀλλὰ κὰμ μὲν γλῶϲϲα †ἔαγε (…) (…)                              χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίαϲ ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω’ πιδεύηϲ                  φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτ̣[αι· ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα†

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric That man appears to me to be equal to the gods, the one who/whoever sits in front of you and listens close to you sweetly talking and desirably laughing. This, indeed, troubled my heart in my breast. For as soon as I glance at you, I cannot control my voice any more, and my tongue breaks (?) (…) and I become greener than grass, and appear to myself to be little short of dying. But everything can/must be endured as even a poor (?) (…). Sappho’s poems often verbally evoke communicative situations which, for a range of reasons, do not fully coincide with that of their (or indeed any) notional performance. They envisage performance situations, but very rarely situate themselves straightforwardly as the focal point of the performance itself. The much discussed interpretative problems related to this fragmentary poem, I suggest, appear in a different light when examined in the light of these observations. The communicative setting evoked in fr. 31 is striking. It involves an unnamed first-person speaker and an unnamed (but not generic) second-person female interlocutor.68 The appearance of the interlocutor (p.59) and her behaviour are vividly described, as is the presence of a male character sitting in front of her. Even more remarkable for their enargeia are the details of the physical and psychological reaction of the narrator. The shift of focus toward the symptoms is marked first by an aorist indicative (6), implying an anchoring in (what is presented as) an actual event. In the following lines (7–16), however, the phrasing presents the symptoms as a repeated occurrence,69 and the verb forms used to describe them are either in the perfect or in the present tense. The fact that this description is framed by references to subjective appearance (φαίνεταί μοι κῆνοϲ, 1, ‘that man appears to me’, and φαίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔ[ται, 16, ‘I appear to myself’) does not imply per se that the situation is described by the speaker as an imaginary one.70 And yet, it seems difficult to envisage an occasion on which all these deictic elements would work felicitously together as part of an extratextual pragmatic context. The physical situation of the speaker would be incompatible with her actually performing the song while describing herself as incapable of communicating.71 The third party (the male character) does not make sense as a recipient of the message. If the situation described implies that the addressee and the third party are a married couple,72 it has been argued, it would be awkward to envisage a communicative situation in which the speaker could address the girl as she does in these lines.73 The closest parallels have therefore been found in Sappho’s so-called Trennungsgedichte, although these poems naturally imply a physical separation (Trennung) between ‘Sappho’ and the girls on whom the song focuses. And this would be at odds with the fact that our text implies the presence of the addressee. In order to envisage a performance situation compatible with this, Latacz resorts to the extreme assumption that the present/perfect tenses used in the section 3–16 should be understood as ‘prophetic’ futures.74 The (p.60) performed poem would address the girl before the actual separation, presenting its consequences as vividly Page 19 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric present. Rösler, on the other hand, argued that the poem was meant not for the person actually addressed in the text, but for the other members of the circle, who were likely to suffer symptoms similar to those of the speaker.75 The fact that the addressee is anonymous would make the poem easier to perform repeatedly on several similar occasions.76 Through her example, and through the consolatory gnome that closed the poem, Sappho would teach them how to overcome their grief. This is a potentially attractive interpretative approach. It is telling, however, that the reconstruction of its alleged performance frame is based on elements conspicuously absent from the text itself, where there is no mention at all of a circle of other female companions. This reading transforms one of the ancient lyric texts most impressively centred around an almost abstract description of the subjective experience of the individual into a work concerning a wider ‘social’ group. But it does so by interpolating this wider concern into a text from which it is, at least on the surface, glaringly absent, and establishes a definite communicative frame based on a conjectural performance context that is at odds with the pragmatic elements present in the text itself. Rösler finds justification for this interpretative manoeuvre in the fact that this poem is situated at the intersection between an oral and a literate culture. Moving further in this direction, Stehle argued that this poem ‘had no specific performance context because it was written for a woman to sing to herself’ (my italics, but the written communication of this poem is crucial for Stehle too).77 The idea here is that any divorce between the communicative situation inscribed in the text and its actual performative context must depend on an alteration of the ‘natural’ identity between (p.61) the two in orally communicated and performed poetry. At the other end of the spectrum, Lardinois considered this poem the equivalent of a ‘praise poem’, an enkomion, and argued for choral performance during the wedding itself.78 Once again, however, the performance context depends entirely on the reader’s (in this case Lardinois’) own assumptions on the poem’s function, and not on any textual element provided by the poem itself.79 Most of these positions are based on what I would consider an over-simplified view of how ‘oral’ poetry historically behaves. Sappho’s texts are fully immersed in a performance context, to which they often refer. This was part of the culture and of the everyday life to which they belonged. In very few cases, however, do these texts present themselves as straightforward scripts of ritual performances, to be staged. They rather evoke such performances, or look at them sideways. Or they create their own communicative context, which was not meant to match the actual context in which they might have been performed. For the poems to be able to do this, they do not need to be conceived as transmitted through writing, and, eventually, as being privately read. There is no reason to think that performance (p.62) poetry commands substantially less freedom to manipulate the pragmatic features of language than poems intended for reading.80 As we saw, scholars seem to find it far less difficult to acknowledge this liberty in soPage 20 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric called ‘sympotic’ poems, allowing male poets to address distant interlocutors, to evoke fictional situations (impending waves, keeping the guard on a ship) and to express their feelings in abstract terms. In the case of Sappho, the options have been polarized between two extremes (not always necessarily represented by different scholars): Sappho the chorus-leader, fully immersed in the ritual life of her community, and/or the inward-looking author, producing poems meant for written dissemination. We should allow for the possibility that many, if not perhaps most, of Sappho’s poems were intended to be performed outside the ritual performance proper, on which their words provided a very much needed (and obviously valued) commentary and interpretation. It was, it would seem, not their embeddedness within a ritually formalized communicative occasion, but their ability to look at this occasion from the margin, also providing models of response, that guaranteed their diffusion and survival beyond their original context. Notes:

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a conference to mark Chris Carey’s retirement from UCL in September 2014, and before audiences at Oxford, Lyons, and Venice in 2015: I am grateful for the feedback I received in the ensuing discussions. Various written drafts have benefited from comments, corrections, and suggestions by Luigi Battezzato, Hayden Pelliccia, Lucia Prauscello, Giuseppe Ucciardello, and the editors of this volume. (1) Schelling (1985) 211, my italics (translation slightly modified). The German original was written in 1802–3 and published posthumously in 1859. Cf. Szondi (1974) 270–1 = his (1986) 293–4, who also discusses Schelling’s debt to the vision of Greek lyric as the fruit of Greece’s political freedom, which Friedrich Schlegel had developed in the 1790s. The development of these concepts was also affected by the reaction to French republicanism. (2) For the important links between Schelling’s theory of literary genres (and his thinking about lyric poetry in particular) and Hölderlin, see Szondi (1974) 257–8 = his (1986) 288–92. (3) The term gelegen (literally ‘laid out’), is clearly related to the term Gelegenheit (‘occasion’: literally, the state of being gelegen), and replaces the term gesegnet (‘blessed’), which Hölderlin had used in previous drafts. The differences between the various versions of this poem had been analysed in great detail by Benjamin in an earlier essay (1914–15), ‘On two poems of Hölderlin, Dichtermut and Blödigkeit’: cf. Hanssen (1997). (4) Benjamin (1996) 328–9, translating Benjamin (1924–5): translation slightly modified.

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (5) These underlying assumptions are of course not limited to ‘ritualistic’ approaches (on which I focus here): see, for example, Silk (2009), who, in an article that engages mainly with British definitions of ‘lyric’, attributes to ‘the Romantic revolution of sensibility and usage’ (374) the practical and theoretical shift towards poetry as ‘identified with its creative source, in the shape of the individual poet’s personal-emotional response to experience’ (375–6, with reference to Wordsworth), without noting the very origin of the oppositional distinction exactly in German Romantic theories (in his brief survey, Silk considers Hölderlin’s position as ‘exceptional’ (381)): compare, for example, Silk (2009) 375: ‘within the world of modern lyric poetry, particular individuals are answerable, primarily, to themselves, because any wider community is either absent or problematic’ (i.e., as opposed to the situation in ancient Greek lyric), and the passage from Schelling quoted at the beginning of this chapter. (6) Merkelbach (1957) 5–6 = (1996) 91, my translation. For a critique of this position, cf. also Parker (1993): 337–8, with previous bibliography. (7) See Lardinois and Bierl (2016), with previous bibliography. (8) Stehle (2009) focuses on time-markers in Sappho. A wide-ranging survey is provided by Calame (2012). Unlike Calame, however, I question the assumption that the descriptive coordinates of these texts were necessarily designed to work in correspondence with an actual performance context. Indeed, I raise the possibility that the two levels (textual pointers and performance contexts) might, in principle and in practice, have not been designed necessarily to coincide: cf. Yatromanolakis (2004) 65–6, who correctly points out the potential fallacy of identifying ‘descriptive context’ with ‘performative context’. It is important to stress that I am in this essay using the term ‘pragmatics’ in a linguistic sense: by ‘pragmatics’ I mean the way in which certain linguistic elements (mainly deictics in the broader meaning of the term, which includes, for example, also verbal persons, modes, and tenses) work in relation to an (actual or imaginary) external context (cf. D’Alessio (2004) and (2009) with earlier bibliography). I therefore do not intend the term in its more general sense (influentially established in the field of Greek lyric by the work of Bruno Gentili and his school from the 1970s on, and the object of criticism, for example, of Schmitz (2002), with further bibliography; cf. the Introduction to this volume, pp. 6–9), which focuses mostly on the pertinence of literary works to a social and religious context and function, and which is adopted, for example, in most of the essays collected in Lardinois and Bierl (2016). (9) Given the broad remit of the chapter, the bibliography I refer to is unavoidably selective (and selected mainly for its relevance to my main focus). (10) In this article I use the term ‘ritual’ as a way to refer to communal performances situated in a formalized cultic and/or public frame. Page 22 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (11) Bowie (2016) 154 offers a reading of this poem as a ‘sympotic prayer’: this is based entirely on extratextual hypotheses, as are readings that assume choral performance in a ritual context involving a fictional persona (as, for example, in Lardinois (1996) 164). For bibliography on ‘choral’ readings of this and other poems, see nn. 17, 39, 66 and 67. (12) For a recent treatment of some of the main textual problems, see Caciagli (2015), with previous bibliography. (13) A proximal deictic pronoun has been restored by most scholars in the gap in line 1, but the reconstruction of Ferrari (2011) 449–50 (cf. also Caciagli (2015)) shows that this approach should not be considered inevitable. (14) On this point, cf. Ferrari (2011) 461. (15) The hypothesis that the elaborate description in 2–11 refers not to the ‘here’ of line 1 but to the location from which Aphrodite comes (probably Crete, on most reconstructions of line 1), elaborated (and rejected as unlikely) by Caciagli (2015) 47, seems close to impossible to me. The last preserved stanza with its address to Aphrodite, inviting her to interact with the speaker, is introduced by the local adverb ἔνθα, which can work as both relative and demonstrative. When demonstrative, it is anaphoric (‘in this place’, pointing to something that has already been described, not straightforwardly ‘here’) and cannot stand by itself: Caciagli’s translation ‘qui’ (‘here’) cannot be taken as introducing deixis ad oculos (or even am Phantasma). It is hardly conceivable that ἔνθα is capable of referring back to the ‘here’ of line 1 while being kept distinct from the location described in the eleven intervening lines. (16) This is indeed the meaning suggested also by the way in which Athenaeus quotes the text of the last stanza, and is adopted (with different reconstructions of the text) by practically all interpreters apart from Ferrari (2011). (17) On the other hand, a reconstruction such as that of Ferrari (2000) 41–4, who reads δόϲ με θέλοιϲα (…) οἰνοχόαιϲαι, implies that it is the speaker who asks Aphrodite for permission to act as wine-pourer, allowing, at least in theory, a more straightforward projection of the text against a possible performative situation. Note, however, that even in this case the conclusion that the pragmatic address describes a real cultic act is far from unavoidable. Ferrari (2003) 67 argues that nectar here stands for Sappho’s poetic production (a metaphor particularly dear to Pindar); so already Theander (1937) 466 n. 3. For a list of proponents of the interpretation of fr. 2 as a choral poem, see Burzacchini (2007) 97; Aloni (1997) LI is more nuanced; on the other hand, cf. ibid., LIX: ‘addirittura, potremmo pensare che, all’interno di un gruppo solidale e unanime come quello saffico, l’io corale sia il tratto non marcato nell’opposizione

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric con l’io solistico, e che spetti a questo (…) attestare la propria presenza’. I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion. (18) Burzacchini (2007) 92–3, with references to earlier discussions. (19) Commentators compare the fragmentary description (in the past tense) of the activity of Aphrodite and Peitho in fr. 96.26–8. (20) Drinking nectar in golden cups: divine context, e.g. Il. 4.1–3, H.Ap. 10, H.Aph. 206; mythical context, Pind. Isthm. 6.37–40; hyperbolic realistic context, Philox. 836d PMG. Note that in the two last cases, where the agents are not gods, we find not the noun νέκταρ but a cognate adjective modifying a noun that generically indicates libations or drinks. (21) A sympotic performance context has been envisaged by, e.g., Parker (1993) 344–5, Bowie (2016) 154–5, and Schlesier (2016) 372 and n. 16. More to the point is Yatromanolakis (2004) 63–7, who observes (introducing a reading of this poem, but also with wider implications) that ‘the merger of diverse ritual discourses, that is, allusions to ritual contexts, in Sappho’s poetry makes the identification of specific ritual occasions more difficult than most often assumed’ (66–7). This is an important issue, to which I hope this paper can contribute from a different perspective. (22) For a new text (still problematic), cf. Obbink (2016a) 22–3; for the reconstruction of the last stanza, see D’Alessio (forthcoming). (23) Burris, Fish, Obbink (2014) 24 note a possible word-play between Χάραξοϲ and χάρα (‘joy’) in line 6. (24) The defence of an alternative interpretation in Lidov (2016a) 69 is unconvincing. (25) This is an important point, which will have affected both the form of the textual circulation of these poems (oral and written) and the development of a biographically oriented exegesis. For good remarks on this aspect, see Peponi (2016) 233–7 (focusing on the ‘Brothers Poem’). (26) We now know that fr. 15 preceded fr. 5 in the edition represented by our papyri (presumably the standard edition in circulation). This would obviously affect the way the two poems were read. (27) The doubts about this reconstruction expressed in the edition of Lobel and Page, and echoed in Voigt’s edition, as well as by later scholars, have been effectively dispelled by Franco Ferrari (and Daniela Colomo) in Ferrari (2014) 11.

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (28) Lidov (2002) maintains that the first trace is not compatible with an omega. The trace is very uncertain but Yatromanolakis (2007) 330–2, based on inspection of the papyrus, has confirmed omega as a possible reading, and, based on the plate published with the editio princeps, I cannot see anything incompatible with an omega. There is no other word that fits traces, metre, and context. And the name of Doricha is independently attested as that of a mistress of Sappho’s brother. On current evidence I have no serious doubt that [D]oricha is the right supplement here. Lidov’s lengthy renewed defence of his previous interpretation of this and other related texts in Lidov (2016a) 78–80 does not, in my view, alter the balance. (29) The subject of the first sentence (if we accept a reconstruction with an optative form and supplement a form of πικρόϲ, ‘harsh’, as predicative of Aphrodite) could be either ‘the brother’ or Doricha, whose name appears at line 11. For ‘the brother’ as the subject, cf. Lardinois (2016) 171, who follows Ferrari (2010) 159: the Italian version in Ferrari (2007a) 150 leaves both options open, while his translation in Ferrari and Di Benedetto (1987) 107 takes Doricha as the subject of both sentences, as most interpreters do (including Rayor and Lardinois (2014) 32). Schubart (1948) 314 thought of a form of πιϲτόϲ (‘trustworthy’) but in the context of a reconstruction that supplemented a firstperson form (ἔπευρ[ον, ‘I found’) at the end of the line. A form of πιϲτόϲ would be compatible also with a wish/prayer having Charaxos (but not Doricha) as subject of ἐπεύρ[οι, which would not affect the interpretation of the following sentence as a wish that Doricha may not boast about something. The discussion of the issue in Lidov (2016a), defending the interpretation of Lidov (2002), does not in my view add convincing new arguments. (30) Cf. also fr. 2.13 ἔνθα δὴ ϲύ, ‘where you indeed’, in the invocation of Aphrodite. (31) For a detailed treatment of the difficulties posed by the reconstruction of this passage I refer to D’Alessio (forthcoming). (32) In spite of the acute accent in the Green papyrus (no accent in the other papyri), West (2014) 4 interprets τοι (4) as the enclitic form of the secondperson pronoun rather than the article (as in the editio princeps). This interpretation has been rejected because of the late position in the clause of the enclitic pronoun (most fully by Lidov (2016b) 421–2). But such forms (and other enclitics) occur not only after the first constituent of the clause but also after the main verb, or in even later positions: cf. e.g., Sa. fr. 95.11, Alc. fr. 50.1 and fr. 336 (text conjectural but widely accepted), Alc. fr. 130.15 (variant reading), and several Pindaric cases (e.g. Ol. 3.4, 10.1, Pyth. 9.55, Nem. 4.72, Isthm. 5.47). Even in Homer, later positions (following the verb) are attested: e.g. Il. 24.53 μὴ ἀγαθῶι περ ἐόντι νεμεϲϲηθέωμέν οἱ ἡμεῖϲ, and H.Ap 75 ᾗ κεν ἅδηι οἱ. In fact, some of the authorities quoted by Lidov formulate the issue in quite different Page 25 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric terms (e.g. Dik (2007) 21: ‘it was probably prosodic peaks more generally, rather than only first words of clauses, that attracted postpositives’). The position can be explained as the result of the foregrounding of the predicate ἀράταν. Nagy (2016) 464–70 interprets the pronoun as orthotonic. There is a consensus, however, based on consistent evidence, that in epic poetry, Aeolic, and Ionic the orthophonic form was ϲοί, and the enclitic τοι (cf. e.g., Obbink (2016a) 21 and Lidov (2016b) 421). As for the alternative articulation ποήϲαντ᾽ οἰ βαϲίληεϲ (editio princeps, Neri (2014) and Obbink (2016a) 20–1), one would expect at least one of the three available papyri to indicate the elision mark, as this interpretation would have been potentially problematic already for ancient readers (note that the accent in the Green papyrus would not per se imply word division, as suggested by Neri (2014) 15); the middle, furthermore, would affect the potential impact of the echo at 11. (33) Cf. Caciagli (2016) 425–34, 443–4, and Nagy (2016) (both with copious previous bibliography). For a survey of the deixis in the two Alcaic fragments, cf. Edmunds (2012). (34) Cf. Ferrari (2016) 480–3, with bibliography, starting with Rösler (1980) 272– 85. (35) The presence and exact nature of a demonstrative adjective referring to the ‘gatherings’ at 15 is complicated by a textual problem and a variant reading. For Alcaeus’ songs located in the context of festive gatherings (πανήγυριϲ), cf. Alc. fr. 448. This is not to say that this issue has necessary implications regarding actual performance contexts, but that the texts make best pragmatic sense assuming an utterance in this deictic form. (36) So, for example, Edmunds (2012) (‘it is clearly imaginary deixis’) and Ferrari (2016) 481 (with bibliography). Note, however, that immediately after describing the citizens with the proximal deictic (‘my father and my father’s father have grown old among these citizens (who are here)’, 6) Alcaeus adds ‘from these (citizens/institutions) I have been driven away’: a sequence that considerably weakens, it seems to me, the rhetorical point of the alleged Deixis am Phantasma. (37) Burris, Fish, Obbink (2014) 5: ‘the poem is not “personal” in theme but is (or at least is presented as being) a choral song intended for cultic performance, as has already been suggested by Calame’, with reference to Calame (2011a) 518– 19 (but cf. already, for example, Calame (2009a) 4–5). Cf. (though more cautiously) Lardinois (1994) 66. The use of the first-person plural in line 12 implies that the rite described involves not only the speaker as a single individual but the larger community, and of course has no implication for the (actual or evoked) circumstances of the performance of the song (cf. e.g. Anacr. fr. 410). Page 26 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (38) Cf., in the very first place, AP 9.189, with its description of a choral performance in the sanctuary of Hera led by Sappho. (39) Lardinois (1996) 164. (40) Stehle (1997) 295, 311. (41) Lobel, in the editio princeps, expressed a preference for a form of the optative here, since the indicative would involve the use of movable ny in a verbal form, which he found alien to the Lesbian vernacular, and, therefore, to the diction of Sappho, but cf. Voigt ad loc. (42) Fr. 6 is too lacunose for the gender of the addressee and the possibility of self-referentiality to be judged. (43) Cf. the request to πέμπην (‘send’, probably the speaker) in the ‘Brothers Poem’, line 5, discussed in section C. The point of the compound verb here is not entirely clear. Its most common meaning is to ‘dismiss, send away’, but it can occasionally have a ritual meaning, as for example when referring to the sending of offerings to Delphi. The only occurrence I know of that involves some sort of song-and-dance performance is in the peculiar Lydian story of the chorus of the reeds and their king as reported by the paradoxographer Isigonus (fr. 13 Giannini). (44) Di Benedetto (1986) 20. (45) Aloni (1997) 57. So, again, Caciagli (2009); Tognazzi (2009) argues that the addressee is the mother of the bride. (46) Ferrari (2007a) 39–40, and already idem (2003) 52. (47) In Ferrari and Di Benedetto (1987) 51. (48) For a critique of all these positions see Benelli (2013) 85–103. Benelli himself argues that Sappho addresses another member of her group (Mika), who behaves as if she were in control of the whole group. While I do not find this reconstruction more persuasive than the others, it would further strengthen my point. (49) Cf. Yatromanolakis (1999). (50) For another case of first-person κέλομαι, cf. Alc. fr. 368; in the ‘Brothers Poem’ (5), discussed in section C, it is the speaker’s interlocutor who is the subject of the verb, which, again, has the purpose of triggering a ritual performance. (51) If the reading is confirmed, the supplement looks unavoidable; I have not been able myself to inspect the original or any reproduction of the papyrus. Page 27 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (52) West (1970) 319 = (2011–13) ii.40. (53) Note the contrast with the usual self-addresses that identify the present song as the object of the performance. Stehle (1997) 302–5 thinks that the poem was written to be performed by Abanthis: a case of ‘split subjectivity’ within the performed utterance that is even more difficult to envisage. (54) The details of the reconstruction and the interpretation of this text do not require elaboration here. See in general Greene and Skinner (2009). (55) First published in Obbink (2014); a revised text now in Obbink (2016a) 25–6. The literature on this new poem is already quite substantial. A whole section of Lardinois and Bierl (2016), 165–336, is dedicated to this poem, with full bibliography. (56) On κέλεϲθαι see n. 50, on πέμπην see also n. 43. (57) So Lidov (2016a) 57–9. For criticism of this position (and other less convincing alternatives), see also Lardinois (2016) 175–6. (58) Cf. also ἄπ[π]εμπε in fr. 27.10, discussed in section B. (59) For a survey of the various hypotheses see Lardinois (2016) 182–4, with previous bibliography (I do not find his tentative identification of the addressee with yet another brother of Sappho, E(u)rigyios, persuasive). Stehle (2016) 266– 92 argues that the addressee is Larichos, with a shift to his presentation in the third person in the last stanza; an abrupt change Stehle argues for, unconvincingly in my opinion, by comparing fr. 96. In that text the move from the second to the third person (which is in any case far from certain: cf. e.g. Hutchinson (2001) ad loc.) would have a plausible rhetorical raison d’être in the shift in focalization from the point of view of the absent girl ‘then and here’ (when and where she rejoiced in ‘you’) to that ‘now and there’ (when and where she remembers ‘Atthis’). (60) I address the reconstruction of this text in greater detail in D’Alessio (forthcoming). (61) On the whole, the presence of a double accusative, μάτερα and ἐόρταν, looks rather less likely than that of a vocative followed by an accusative (‘mother, the festival’): cf. D’Alessio (forthcoming). (62) Bierl (2016a) 324 and n. 57, and Lardinois (2016) 173. (63) Burkert (1985) 133. (64) I agree with Lardinois, however, that the second part of the preserved fragment might indeed have mentioned Charaxos. Page 28 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (65) A similar point, from a different perspective, was made by Kurke (2016). Kurke (2016) 246–8 (cf. also 238) speaks of ‘a “behind-the-scenes” vignette of the preparation for a festival’: I hope that my study will help place this feature in a wider interpretative frame. Unlike Kurke, however, I would distinguish these cases from the use of futures in cases such as Alcman’s Astymeloisa partheneion (247 n. 30), for which I refer to D’Alessio (2004). Cf. also the implications of one of the possible, tentative reconstructions of fr. 17.1, μ[άτρι] μέλοιϲ(α) (‘a concern for the mother’) referred to ἐόρτα (‘the festival’) in D’Alessio (forthcoming). (66) According to Nagy (2016) 489, ‘[t]he whole song is staged as a choral performance, which is public, and the speaker will be speaking as a choral personality in the precinct of Hera’, but this depends entirely on the interpolation of Nagy’s own interpretative frame in a text where these elements are not present, but projected onto a future occasion, and quite clearly a distinct one. The shift towards a fictional reading of the situation may, somewhat paradoxically, help to make a ‘ritualistic’ construal of the poem easier to accept —along the lines followed for other poems by Nagy (1996) 97: ‘a merger of the performer’s identity with an identity patterned on an archetype—a merger repeated every time the ritual occasion occurs’ (italics mine); and now, for the ‘Brothers Poem’, also by Lardinois (2016), Obbink (2016b), and Bierl (2016a). Yet this approach involves, in this as in other cases, the creation from scratch of a whole system of fictitious characters. Such ad hoc attempts are destined to be multiplied with the increase of any new texts. (67) For an interpretation of Sappho’s songs (including fr. 1) in terms of choral performance see, for example, various papers by Nagy (ranging from (1990) 371, to (2016) 489, where Nagy integrates the song within an interpretative frame developed by means of a comparative perspective, but without any actual basis in the text itself); Lardinois (1996), and several contributions by Bierl, the latest of which are Bierl (2016a) and (2016b) 302–36 and 339–52. For a critique of this position see also n. 66. (68) The loss of the final part of the poem limits of course the validity of any description/interpretation. Since the scant remains of the fifth stanza strongly suggest a shift from the deictically oriented description toward gnomic comment, however, it seems unlikely that the names of the speaker and her addressee were provided at this point in the poem. Wilamowitz, followed by many other scholars, had supplied the name of the interlocutor at the end of line 16, but this was famously proved wrong by PSI 1470. (69) Cf. 7 ὠϲ…ἴδω, ‘when I see (you)’, with the subjunctive implying potentiality.

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Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric (70) A point too often stressed: see Race (1983) 94–5, Latacz (1985), Rösler (1990a) 281–2. (71) Good points on the gap between text and context in Rudolph (2009) 343–7. (72) The best argument in this sense was formulated by Latacz (1985). (73) The implication would be the same even if we suppose that the couple is represented as merely in intimate conversation. (74) Latacz (1985) 91–2 n. 31 does not seem to me to provide any satisfactory parallel for this. (75) Cf. already Burnett (1983) 230–43. (76) On this aspect see already also West (1970) 315 = (2011–13) ii.36–7. (77) Stehle (1997) 288–96 (quotation from 295), cf. also 311: ‘it is poetry detached from performance, that is, poetry as written text’. Most (1996) 34 mentions both the possibility of a ‘transition from a first performance within a small group, where all the allusions would presumably have been immediately understood by those who needed to, to a wider form of publication among later, unknowing audiences, for whom the text would have become ambiguous and less determined (and not for that reason any less attractive)’, and the ‘emancipation of a written mode from originally oral circumstances’. (78) Lardinois (1996) 168–9. In considering this as a praise poem, Lardinois follows, e.g. Race (1983) in comparing fr. 31 to Pindar’s fr. 123. The rhetorical balance (and, one would presume, the purpose too) of the two poems is clearly different, and the (by far) most frequently accepted interpretation/ reconstruction of the fragmentary last stanza as a self-consolatory reflection, with which the speaker urges herself to bear her suffering (e.g. West, Rösler, Ferrari: cf., more recently, D’Angour (2006) and Livrea (2016)), would be difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of a praise poem. Note also that Ferrari (2007a) 159–66 (and in previous publications) has argued that the symptoms described in fr. 31 are not those of erotic passion per se, but those of a panic attack, caused by the expectation that an erotic relationship is coming to an end. (79) These remarks are relevant also to the recent discussion by Caciagli (2016), in particular 446–7. Caciagli criticizes the position of Burnett (1983) 6, who (correctly in my opinion) warned against naïve readings of Sappho’s poems as straightforward reflections of poetic occasions. While accepting ‘fictional elements in archaic Greek poetry’ (quoting the cases of frs 1 and 31), Caciagli maintains that ‘their link to the concrete context of the performance has to be postulated, even if the content is fictional’ (emphasis mine). Yet the problems involved in this approach become obvious as soon as we accept that the nature of many, if not most, of Sappho’s preserved texts is (from a pragmatic point of Page 30 of 31

 

Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric view) not at all straightforwardly performative, as I have strongly argued in this paper. One of the most popular consequences of this ‘postulate’ (based on historical verisimilitude though it may claim to be), the reconstruction of the poems’ actual communication contexts, therefore becomes more the object of historical speculation (and the result of projections of more or less a priori assumptions) than the result of the reading of the texts themselves. (80) See D’Alessio (2004) for an exploration of this issue from a comparative and linguistic point of view, focusing mainly on Pindar and time-deixis (with several examples), and D’Alessio (2009) for a brief, more general survey. The materials collected in Finnegan (1977) and her considerations on this matter are still fundamental to the appreciation of the full range of orally performed poetry, but are too often overlooked in theoretical (and also in practical) discussions on the relationship between orality and written culture in ancient Greece.

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Sailing and Singing

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Sailing and Singing Alcaeus at Sea Anna Uhlig

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter suggests that it is time to take a new look at Alcaeus’ so-called ‘ship of state’ poems. Although few scholars now question that these poems should be read allegorically, this consensus is a relatively recent phenomenon, due, it is contended, to a desire to situate the poems in a historical performance context (whether political or otherwise) that is now lost to us. The interpretative emphasis on conditions of performance context obscures the maritime concerns of these poems, grounded as they are in the very real seafaring trade of Alcaeus’ native Mytilene. The chapter suggests that scholars should pay more attention to the maritime ‘surface’ meaning of Alcaeus’ work, and that such ‘surface reading’ can serve as a model for how lyric poetry strives to create imaginative spaces beyond the frames of its historical performance. Keywords:   Alcaeus, ship of state, allegory, surface reading, sea, maritime, Mytilene, Bruno Gentili

What does it mean to sing the sea? The sea was at the centre of the ancient Greek world, both literally and figuratively. Yet, despite its prominence in recent historical scholarship,1 the marine sphere is often given short shrift in studies of poetry, treated as a symbol which only gestures towards other, more weighty matters. The tendency to suppress the poetic sea finds its clearest expression in the near universal agreement that a series of poems that vividly describe the struggles of sailors at sea in fact functions as a set of allegories for the political fortunes of their author, Alcaeus, and his confederates in early sixth-century Mytilene. These poems are most commonly referred to as Alcaeus’ ‘ship-of-state’ Page 1 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing poems, though I prefer, for reasons that will soon become clear, the designation ‘maritime’ poems. Contrary to what many now believe, our scholarly consensus regarding the allegorical status of these verses is surprisingly recent and coincides, and not by chance, as I will argue, with our interest in questions of performance context and our desire to see our surviving archaic poetry situated within the song culture of ancient Greece. But precisely because of the strong links between Alcaeus’ poems and the modern notion of archaic song culture, a reappraisal of the maritime element of Alcaeus’ so-called ‘ship-of-state’ offers an important (p.64) corrective to recent approaches to poetic performance in two related ways. Firstly, it can help us to better understand some of the unspoken assumptions, not all of them credible, that guide our current thinking about archaic song. Secondly, because the sea is a realm of revelations and transformations, of shapeshifters and unexpected wisdom, the precinct of Athena and Dionysus as much as that of Poseidon,2 it allows us to re-imagine ancient performance in terms that fit the shifting and uncertain character of the sea rather than the fixed and unyielding structures of dry land. My argument falls into three main sections. In the first, I explore the broader frame for reading maritime and marine poetry in terms of dry-land context. In particular, I examine how William Slater’s discussion of the metaphor of a ‘symposium at sea’ has led to a certain blurring of the boundaries between content and context when it comes to the marine sphere. In the second section, I turn to the more specific question of allegory and analyse the motivation behind the recent return to an allegorical reading of Alcaeus. I focus my examination on the seminal work of Bruno Gentili, and the crucial role that an allegorical understanding of Alcaeus played in his larger project of placing archaic song within its original performance context, a goal which, however much it has been revised by scholars in subsequent years, still largely informs our approach to the analysis of archaic lyric in performance. Finally, I turn to the poems themselves and suggest that a renewed attention to their surface meaning reveals a maritime aesthetics that can form the basis of a new model of ancient performance.

Land and Sea I begin not with Alcaeus, but with the thirsty sailor of Archilochus fr. 4, calling to his shipmates to join him in a drink. In both content and interpretative history, this lovely fragment perfectly encapsulates the ways in which marine themes complicate our sense of the boundary between the real and the figurative. I quote the entire fragment as printed by West. (p.65) φρα[       ξεινοι̣̣[ δεῖπνον δ’ ου[       οὔτ’ ἐμοὶ ωσαῖ̣[ Page 2 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing ἀλλ’ ἄγε σὺν κώθωνι θοῆς διὰ σέλματα νηὸς       φοίτα καὶ κοίλων πώματ’ ἄφελκε κάδων, ἄγρει δ’ οἶνον ἐρυθρὸν ἀπὸ τρυγός· οὐδὲ γὰρ ἡμεῖς       νηφέμεν ἐν φυλακῆι τῆιδε δυνησόμεθα.

…guests…meal…nor to me… But come, pass through the benches of the swift ship with the drinking cup and pull the lids from the hollow casks, draw the red wine down to the lees, for we cannot be sober on this watch.3 At its heart, the song expresses a straightforward and easily intelligible scenario: a sailor wants to get drunk with his crewmates. He calls for the wine to be poured and entreats his comrades to drink to excess. Yet this simple scenario is presented in terms that have proved stubbornly inscrutable to modern critics. In fact, there are few details in these four lines that we can claim to fully understand. Are the σέλματα of line six benches or the ship’s decking? If benches, are the hollow casks (κοίλων κάδων) of the following line stored under them? When the speaker instructs his unidentified companion to pass through the benches (φοίτα), does he want his addressee to make a single trip down the ship or is it an iterative action that he is hoping for? Does πώματ’ ἄφελκε refer to the pots’ lids being removed, and if so, is it for the first time? or does the instruction call for draughts to be drawn from the vessels? And, most pointedly, is the boat in motion, with the singer and his comrades aboard and rowing, as the reference to σέλματα suggests? Or is the vessel beached (perhaps for the night?) with the men deployed on the strand, as ἐν φυλακῆι τῆιδε would seem to indicate?4 The confusion points to one obvious difficulty of maritime poetry; seafaring is a highly technical business, and while archaic poets could, or at least so it seems, expect their audiences to be notionally conversant with the jargon of ships and the sea, we modern interpreters are all too often flummoxed by specialized terminology and the (p.66) intricacies of a life lived on the water.5 But even if we miraculously acquired a full working knowledge of ancient Greek seafaring, a more basic gap between past and present would remain. Some decades ago queries about benches and wine jars or the relative positioning of speaker and ship might have been thought to exhaust the question of ‘context’, on the assumption that the conditions of the poem’s performance would be indistinguishable from the words deployed therein. But few critics today would conflate the fictional or ‘mimetic’ performance scenario created within the frame of a lyric poem with the ‘real-life’ circumstances in which such a song historically found voice. We are now much more circumspect in our treatment of, for example, Sappho’s whimsical prayers to Aphrodite (discussed by D’Alessio in this volume, p. 35) or the various contexts—private symposia, formal public ceremonies, marriage rituals—that Pindar invokes in his epinician songs.6 We Page 3 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing have learned to discern the play between what Claude Calame has called ‘the “real,” referential communication situation, with its particular social and psychological parameters, and the enunciation situation as it is glimpsed in the utterance through the use of language’.7 Or, put somewhat less artfully, between context and content. In the light of our heightened appreciation of this distinction, the idea that the declarations of a poetic speaker should be taken literally can appear almost comically misguided. Ewen Bowie lampooned the foolishness of such pedantic disputes thirty years ago, when he considered the possible circumstances surrounding the lines of Archilochus now under consideration: Should we conclude that Archilochus sang this song for the first time while on guard by a beached ship? If so I am tempted to suggest that the reason we have no more of the song is that the singer’s throat was cut by a Thracian guerrilla: for real guard-duty is not effective if punctuated by drunken song.8 Bowie argued that despite their maritime setting, the verses were in fact intended for performance at a symposium. Archilochus was (p.67) singing about a sailor’s watch, but he was singing for a sympotic audience, men who may once have been to sea, and may well have been bound to return there in the future, but who were, at least for the duration of Archilochus’ song, firmly planted on dry land, enjoying their drinks in the communal institution that, perhaps more than any other, defined life in an archaic polis.9 For Bowie, these verses would allow for a kind of ‘vicarious sailing’, to paraphrase Nancy Felson,10 inviting the participants in the symposium to imagine themselves aboard ship—or on the strand beside one—from the comfort of their drinking couches. By conjuring the rough-and-ready atmosphere of the marine world within the secure confines of the sympotic gathering, the audience could delight in momentarily assuming the louche mores of the sea. Much of their pleasure would derive from an awareness of the contrast between the ‘real’ circumstances of their sympotic gathering and the ‘imagined’ world of song. And there is support for such a reading within the poem itself, particularly if we take account of the fragmentary opening lines, which speak of guests (ξεινοι̣) and a meal (δεῖπνον), references which might plausibly be linked to a sympotic context in which comrades gather for food and drink,11 though this is certainly not the only possible direction for interpretation.12 Our difficulty in pinpointing the speaker’s location may also arise from a more general tension between land and sea in the poem. As noted, the mention of σέλματα (whether benches or decking) points towards a position aboard ship, whereas the designation ἐν φυλακῆι suggests that the sailors have already disembarked and are speaking from the shore. If the ambiguity is not simply a result of our modern ignorance, Page 4 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing then we should understand the bifurcated setting as a conscious attempt to unsettle the poem’s internal geography. The two locations divide the sailor’s song between land and sea, mirroring the relationship between the poem’s marine content and its terrestrial context. It hardly needs to be stated that such poetic play between real and fictive settings is not limited to poems with marine themes. Yet it is also true that the sea seems to have been particularly amenable to this type of contextual manipulation. William Slater first identified (p.68) this much broader figurative network which imagined urban, and in particular sympotic, contexts in terms better suited to the marine sphere, dubbing the phenomenon the ‘symposium at sea’.13 Through the analysis of diverse passages, from Pindar to Timaeus of Taurominium to Horace, Slater identifies a tendency to imagine the symposium taking place on the water, arguing ‘that the behaviour, language, and apparatus of the symposium gave rise to a metaphor of the symposium-ship which is related in some way to Dionysiac cult, and that this formalized metaphor persisted until Roman times’.14 As Bowie himself recognized, Slater’s identification of the deep-seated affinities between sympotic and maritime spheres lends further weight to a sympotic contextualization of Archilochus fr. 4.15 But Slater’s model adds an additional layer of symbolism to Bowie’s schema. Slater’s argument is not simply a question of understanding marine poems within the historical context of sympotic performance. He does not merely set the maritime content in some nebulous relation to, or tension with, a sympotic context. By introducing the idea of a ‘formalized metaphor’, Slater claims that these maritime images figuratively represent elements of the symposium. In other words, he invites us to understand poetry of the sea as not only for but, more pointedly, about the symposium. There is an important distinction to be drawn between the positions of Slater and Bowie, that is, between historical questions regarding performance context and interpretative questions about what a given poem might ‘mean’. In recent years the boundary between these two spheres has tended to be somewhat vague, and those of us who study archaic poetry have, at times, been guilty of treating context and content almost interchangeably. Without wishing in any way to question the fundamental accuracy of Slater’s insight, it is nevertheless important to remember that not every maritime image is a metaphor for the symposium, though it might be influenced by a discourse that at times links the two. It is possible to imagine the symposium as a ship at sea, but it is equally true that the symposium was a widespread and heterodox institution that served as host to songs of all shapes and sizes, including songs about one of the most (p.69) essential features of life in the ancient Mediterranean, namely seafaring. As scholars we should not limit ourselves to the single interpretative strategy of plotting equivalences, however captivating, between ‘this’ and ‘that’. There are, as they say, many more fish in the sea.

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Sailing and Singing The Old Allegory and the Sea Within an interpretative climate that has taught us to read poems of the sea as metaphors for what we do on the land, an allegorical reading of Alcaeus’ socalled ‘ship of state’ poems appears quite natural and unremarkable. But the near-universal acceptance of this position can mask the reasons behind the relatively recent shift in our current assumptions. Central to this shift is the work of Bruno Gentili and his desire to situate Alcaeus’ poetry within the cultural and political context of early sixth-century Mytilene.16 In ascribing such importance to Gentili, I do not mean to imply that he was first to suggest that Alcaeus should be read allegorically, or even that his reading of these works decisively turned the tables of twentieth-century scholarship. Rather, Gentili represents the link between (maritime) allegory and performance that has made an allegorical interpretation of Alcaeus such a resilient, or what William Clark would call charismatic,17 idea amongst scholars today. But in order to better understand how Gentili shapes current scholarly orthodoxy, it is useful to first briefly explore what an allegorical approach to Alcaeus looked like before his intervention. Our modern allegorical approach to Alcaeus has its roots in ancient critical commentary, a pedigree that has done much to solidify the recent scholarly consensus. It is, for that reason, worth noting that the ancient evidence is far less conclusive than is often assumed, and tends, so far as it can be coherently construed, towards a rather different picture from that which Gentili communicates. Our most compelling evidence for ancient allegorical reading of Alcaeus comes from the noted late first-century AD Homeric scholar, Heraclitus, (p.70) whose penchant for allegorical reading was so extreme as to earn him the moniker ‘the Allegorist’ amongst his contemporaries and successors.18 In the course of his treatise on Homeric Problems, Heraclitus famously identified Alcaeus’ excessive use of naval allegories, engaging, along the way, in some playful puns at the poet’s expense: ‘The islander (i.e. Alcaeus) is awash in a sea of allegory (κατακόρως ἐν ταῖς ἀλληγορίαις ὁ νησιώτης θαλαττεύει) and compares the majority of the ills that he suffered at the hands of the tyrants to storms at sea’.19 This comment is at the root of all modern claims that Alcaeus’ ships are political allegories, and as such it is worth exploring in some detail. Heraclitus’ observations are rooted in a long-standing ancient tradition of allegorical reading,20 yet this approach was far from universally accepted by ancient critics. Heraclitus himself acknowledges this resistance when he openly disparages those who reject allegory, and respond, as he sees it, to the superficial meaning of the texts while missing their deeper truths.21 There are few ancient discussions of Alcaeus’ maritime poems which might give us a sense of how Heraclitus’ approach compared to those of other ancient critics (one important exception is treated later in this section). But such comparative

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Sailing and Singing analysis is possible, at least in one instance, for Archilochus, and it proves illuminating. Heraclitus points to the lines that we refer to as Archilochus fr. 105 at the beginning of his treatise, immediately preceding his discussion of Alcaeus’ allegorical ships, as the paradigmatic example of what it means to say one thing but mean another.22 The lines describe the onset of a storm at sea as perceived, or so our ancient sources tell us, from aboard ship. Γλαῦχ’, ὅρα· βαθὺς γὰρ ἤδη κύμασιν ταράσσεται πόντος, ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄκρα Γυρέων ὀρθὸν ἵσταται νέφος, σῆμα χειμῶνος, κιχάνει δ’ ἐξ ἀελπτίης φόβος.

Look, Glaucus, already the deep sea is stirred by waves and a cloud stands straight around the peaks of Gyrae, a sign of storm, and all of a sudden fear overtakes me. (p.71) For Heraclitus the verses are a martial allegory, an image of the toils of war that menaced the poet while he was ‘caught up in the perils of Thrace’.23 But when we compare Heraclitus’ position to those espoused by others who discuss these lines elsewhere, we find the Allegorist’s claim of hidden meaning to be the exception. Theophrastus quotes the same lines in his treatise On Weather Signs (45.332–7 Sider-Brunschön) as an example of how one can detect a coming storm; he treats the verses as an accurate reflection of meteorological conditions and betrays no knowledge of any allegorical import.24 Plutarch also quotes the verses in his Moralia (169a), as an example of how men’s behaviour is warped by superstition, causing them to act against their own interests even in the most perilous circumstances. As with Theophrastus, we find a complete indifference to any hidden symbolic import. Indeed, the gravity of the situation described by the poem’s literal content (i.e., the mortal danger of a storm at sea) is precisely what motivates Plutarch’s comments on the scourge of superstition: in the face of such dangers, the whole of the sailors’ attention should be focused on their ship, not on prayers to the gods.25 Next to Heraclitus, the most important testimony regarding the ancient interpretation of Alcaeus is the fragmentary commentary found in P.Oxy. 2307 fr. 14 (= fr. 306i). Many, Gentili foremost among them, have pointed to this substantial, albeit highly lacunose, text as proof that Heraclitus’ allegorical claims were justified and widely held.26 It seems clear that these lines contain portions of an allegorical commentary on a maritime poem of Alcaeus.27 The specific import of the comments is quite challenging to construe, but they appear to put forward an allegorical interpretation of a sexual, rather than martial or political, nature. The commentary does not, in other words, support Heraclitus’ specific claim that Alcaeus constantly described his political situation at Mytilene through maritime allegories. Rather it presents another type of allegorical approach, with similarities to, but also important differences from, Page 7 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing that of Heraclitus. Particularly when viewed in light of the papyrus’s secondcentury AD date, the commentary can be seen to offer support for Heraclitus’ (p.72) position in only the most general sense, as evidence of other allegorical criticism of Alcaeus in the first and second centuries AD.28 Nor is it a surprise to find such interest in allegory amongst ancient critics, given the popularity of the allegorical approach, particularly during the period in which both Heraclitus and the anonymous commentator of P.Oxy. 2307 were active.29 This approach was applied to poetry of all sorts,30 above all to the epics of Homer, the allegorical interpretation of which, lest we forget, was the main object of the work in which Heraclitus makes his brief, but pivotal, reference to the incessant allegorizing of Alcaeus. Situating Heraclitus within this broader framework of ancient critical approaches exposes the dangers of relying too heavily on the voice of a single ancient critic. Claims of allegorical meaning were not universally accepted, nor did all allegorical readers find the same meanings hidden in their texts; some, like Heraclitus, were attuned to political resonances, while others were drawn to the personal and sexual symbolism of a text, or to yet other themes, philosophical and religious. These invaluable ancient testimonials cannot provide us with a definitive answer regarding the allegorical character of Alcaeus’ poems. They are, rather, witnesses to the great diversity of interpretative strategies available in the ancient world. And, as with all questions of interpretation, each approach is determined by a mix of sociohistorical conditions and personal sensibilities. There is no doubt that Alcaeus was read allegorically in the ancient world, probably for many centuries before Heraclitus. This fact does not prove that Alcaeus’ poems were allegories, only that they, like so many other ancient poems, could be fruitfully interpreted as such. My aim in raising these doubts is neither to criticize allegory nor to question its relevance to poetry and poetics. I am interested, rather, to examine why allegorical reading, and in particular allegorical reading of the marine sphere, exerts such a hold on us at the moment. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many modern (p.73) critics were quite happy to reject Heraclitus’ allegorical claims as unsuited to their purposes.31 As Wilamowitz rather bluntly put it: without clear evidence from within the text itself, we should not suppose allegorical import ‘nur auf der Autorität der antiken Ausleger’.32 Why, then, do we find such value in the assertions of an ancient critic now?33 As a mode of textual interpretation, allegory poses particular challenges. Allegory is often referred to as ‘extended metaphor’, and in some respects the identification is apt. Like metaphor, allegory uses one set of words or images to represent another, creating meaning that does not correspond to the literal or surface sense of the language. But in other respects the shorthand of ‘extended metaphor’ can be badly misleading, since it obscures the stark differences Page 8 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing between the interpretative dynamics that these two forms of figurative composition activate.34 Metaphor, and likewise simile, work at the level of the word or phrase and signal their symbolic status through a disruption to the surface of a text. Allegory, by contrast, works at the level of the sentence and does not overtly indicate its figurative status. As Andrew Laird describes it, ‘metaphor and other tropes must be essentially distinct from allegory (pace Quintilian) because they are features of diction which are part of the internal fabric of a text. They are, as it were, scientifically detectable.’35 In other words, metaphor can be identified by all, even if the import of any given figure may remain the subject of debate. In allegory, by contrast, the impetus to draw a figurative connection is left entirely to the discretion of the individual. (p.74) In considering the question of how allegory makes itself known, it is helpful to consider the stark ‘ship-of-state’ poem most often attributed to Theognis, which concludes with a declaration that the speaker has been communicating in riddles.36 ταῦτά μοι ἠινίχθω κεκρυμμένα τοῖς ἀγαθοῖσι (681), the poet asserts, inviting his audience to search for hidden meanings in the image of the foundering ship that he has just so vividly described. Alcaeus, by contrast, never suggests that his ships should be scrutinized for hyponoia, at least in the lines that remain to us. As Gauthier Liberman comments in his recent discussion of fr. 208a, ‘on affirme souvent que le vaisseau représente ici, commes dans les fr. 6 et 73, la πόλις, mais cela est en réalité très douteux’.37 One possible exception is found in fr. 305a, which preserves fragments of a commentary dating to the second century AD.38 The papyrus contains only one line of Alcaeus’ poem, ὠς ἄλος ἐ πολίας ἀρυτήμεν[οι, surrounded by substantial paraphrase indicating a martial theme, ὡς ἐκ θαλάσσης ἀντλο[ῦ]ντες ἀνέκλειπτον πόλε[μο]ν ἕξετε.39 Although there is no decisive proof that the reference to war is indeed original to Alcaeus’ poem, it is nevertheless noteworthy that the figurative status of the sea is clearly marked by the use of a comparative adverb in both Alcaeus’ verses and the gloss (ὠς ἄλος 10, ὡς ἐκ θαλάσσης 11–12). Moreover, the reference to the marine sphere is made in the briefest and most generic terms,40 with no suggestion of a ship or sailors, or of any of the highly detailed description that characterizes Alcaeus’ maritime poems, a subject to which I will return in detail in the next section. This explicit figurative connection between the sea and (what seem to be) martial affairs provides a valuable contrast to the vivid reality of Alcaeus’ more expanded (p. 75) seafaring scenes and, more pointedly, stands as a reminder of the absence of reliable markers linking the sea and land elsewhere. Since the fragments of Alcaeus generally classed under the heading ‘ship of state’ do not readily suggest that they contain any hidden meaning, that the ships and waves and sailors that they depict are meant to represent anything other than ships and waves and sailors, the decision to understand these poems allegorically falls entirely to the personal judgement of the interpreter. While one person will hear the hidden meaning with perfect clarity, another may see Page 9 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing no warrant for figurative interpretation. Laird, again, describes the situation aptly: ‘the detection of allegory is really a subjective issue, or to be more accurate, a question of ideology’.41 Ancient critics had their own varied, and often idiosyncratic, reasons for adopting allegory as a means of textual interpretation.42 But whatever their aims, they were quite clearly distinct from our own. Which leads us to ask: what ‘ideology’, to use Laird’s term, guides our current allegorical reading of Alcaeus? It is not hard to locate the motivation behind our contemporary fascination with the allegorical Alcaeus. As I have already made clear, I believe that the approach is fundamentally linked to our scholarly preoccupation with performance context. The work of Bruno Gentili is emblematic of this connection, and I will turn to his important contribution in a moment. But even before our performative turn was in full swing, the deep affinities between modern allegorical interpretation and questions of performance are readily apparent. In his 1955 study of Sappho and Alcaeus, Denys Page argued strongly for an allegorical reading of Alcaeus’ maritime poems, classing frs 6, 208a, 73, and 249 as ‘political poems’, under the subheading ‘Ship-of-State’.43 Page was uncommonly sensitive to the challenge of proving his allegorical assertions and rejected much of the evidence that would be marshalled by other modern scholars.44 Yet he found himself unable to reconcile the literal content of Alcaeus’ poems with his conception of how the verses were sung. Noting the vivid present tense used in fr. 6, Page declared it impossible to identify a performance context that could accommodate a literal reading of the poem. ‘If then it is a real storm, Alcaeus must have recited his poem either during it or after it, and one of the two inferences must be made, the first absurd, the second unbelievable.’45 So far, the (p.76) resistance to a maritime performance context is not unlike that of Bowie in his discussion of Archilochus fr. 4. But Page then conflates performance context and content, a distinction that, as we have seen, tends to blur when set along the boundary between land and sea. The perceived impossibility of shipboard performance, or of so vivid a re-creation of the marine circumstances on land, leads Page to the conclusion that the poem is not, in fact, about a ship at all. For Page, allegory solves a problem of performance, quite literally bringing the songs back onto solid ground. But in doing so, the sea is abandoned almost entirely. The influence of performance is even more apparent when one examines the allegorical Alcaeus of Gentili. Alongside Wolfgang Rösler, whose influential Jaussian study of Alcaeus appeared in 1980,46 Gentili argued that Alcaeus’ songs had been composed for performance within a very specific context: the sympotic gatherings of the closely knit hetaireia, in which Alcaeus’ poetic and political affairs were one and the same. It was only with respect to the unique circumstances of this original performance, Gentili contended, that his poems could be properly interpreted.47 Declaring the purpose of Alcaeus’ hetairia to be principally political in nature, both Gentili and Rösler identified allegory as the Page 10 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing most effective tool in the poet’s repertoire. Only an allegorical interpretation could accurately reflect the strong political messages concealed in his verses and recover their true relationship to the social upheaval taking place in Mytilene at the time that they were composed. Strikingly, four allegorical interpretations (frs 73, 6, 208a, and 140) inaugurate the second part of Rösler’s study, in which he set out to demonstrate the validity of historical Rezeptionsästhetik.48 They were, as Rösler saw it, the strongest evidence in support of the links between political context and content for which he was arguing. To make the connections between Alcaeus’ maritime poems and the political turmoil of sixth-century Mytilene required a bit of (p.77) detective work. But unlike Page, Rösler and Gentili believed that certain terms and gestures constituted definitive proof of the poems’ political import. Deemed especially potent in this regard was the use of the first person plural, which was seen to reflect the tight bonds and communitarian spirit of the hetairia.49 The cryptic nature of the encoded messages only added to the allure. If Alcaeus consciously crafted his songs for a singular performance context—before the small audience of like-minded Mytilenian aristocrats with whom he hoped to thwart the political aspirations of a string of aspiring despots and save his beloved city from the harsh grasp of tyranny—a twentieth-century interpreter would naturally need to attune himself to those aspects of the text that now sounded least obvious. Allegorical interpretation met these needs perfectly. By looking past the superficial meaning of the poems, with their focus on ships and storms, the critic was able to demonstrate his commitment to the pursuit of Alcaeus’ original performance context. Indeed, one can hardly imagine a better way to make good on the promise to reveal the intimate conversations of Alcaeus’ coterie and to place scholars amongst their number as listeners able to hear the hidden code. Never mind that the secret allegorical codes could be understood only by means of texts born of vastly divergent political, social, and historical circumstances,50 Gentili was unequivocal in his assessment: the hidden meaning of Alcaeus’ songs could be unlocked only by means of what he called the ‘symbolic key’ of allegory.51 But what does it matter if we now read a handful of extremely fragmentary poems from a relatively neglected sixth-century Lesbian poet allegorically? Rösler’s and Gentili’s focus on the hyper-localized context of Alcaeus’ Mytilenian hetairia can at times distract from the far more powerful, and farther-reaching, claim being made for the importance of allegory. This twofold aspiration is particularly pointed in the case of Gentili, whose allegorical analysis of Alcaeus forms part of his most ambitious study of archaic poetry, Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica, published in Italy in 1984 and in an English translation by Thomas Cole, as Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece, four years later.52 Although his was neither the first, (p.78) nor the most sophisticated, account of what we have come to call the ‘song culture’ of archaic Greece, Gentili described the Page 11 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing basic assumptions and parameters of the performance-guided approach in such a clear and decisive fashion that his work has gone on to serve as the cornerstone for any number of subsequent studies in nearly every area of Classics. Our thinking about performance may have evolved a great deal in the three decades since Gentili’s volume was first published, yet the fundamental premise of his work—that an interest in the oral performance of archaic Greek lyric poetry entails the study of its occasional and hyper-localized features—is a view that is still widely, if by no means universally, accepted, even by those who expand their compass to questions of lyric reperformance. And at the very heart of the position that Gentili staked out in Poesia e pubblico are Alcaeus’ allegories. Gentili’s chapter on the ‘The Ship of State’ is found towards the tail end of the work, yet the relative marginality of its position should not obscure its signal importance.53 The hidden symbolism of Alcaeus’ ships serves as a critical model for Gentili, who believes that the allegorical approach developed in his readings of Alcaeus must be exported to all interpretative scenarios. The allegory of the ‘ship of state’ is crucial to how Gentili understands the study of all Greek poetry in the light of its performative nature. As he explains in his chapter on ‘Modes and Forms of Communication’, in many respects the theoretical heart of the book, oral poetry is grounded in ‘a mental attitude focused on performance’, a disposition that seeks above all to establish an emotional rapport between speaker and audience. Hence the frequent use of metaphors, images, and similes that in particular social contexts were able to take on connotations relevant only to the individual or collective aspects of the life of a single small community—an esoteric coterie language, so to speak, evident above all in the allegories of Alcaeus.54 Just as the hidden politics of Mytilene serve as the ‘symbolic key’ to Alcaeus’ poems, the allegorical interpretation of Alcaeus is itself, in turn, a symbolic key to archaic Greek lyric at large. Reading archaic poetry in terms of its performance context requires the critic to decode the secret language that would have been heard by its original (p.79) audience, to detect the meanings hidden beneath the surfaces of our texts. Thus for Gentili, allegory becomes a vital interpretative tool, a means by which to bridge the apparent gap between the content of a poem and its performative context. It hardly needs stating that Gentili’s interest in allegory’s ability to excavate a now lost contextual frame for our ancient texts did not emerge in a vacuum. His claims connect with a much larger trend towards broadly contextualized readings that can be grouped under the heading of ‘New Historicism’, which, in the study of archaic Greek poetry (and many other ancient texts) is more or less synonymous with the analysis of performance context. Without the abundant Page 12 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing archives that fuelled New Historicist approaches in other fields, Classicists turn to allegory as the means to recover the resonances that accompanied these poems in their original performance. This interpretative disposition is astutely described by Victoria Wohl in her recent book, Euripides and the Politics of Form, when she explains that a properly contextualized understanding of Greek tragedy requires one to recognize that all tragedy is, at base, allegorical. ‘This allegorical nature’, she explains, is the grounding premise of historicizing approaches to the genre. While the hunt for direct and specific historical references has largely gone out of style, virtually all historicist (including New Historicist) readings are predicated on the same allegorical logic and the assumption that tragedy is ‘speaking otherwise’ through the medium of its mythic scenarios about the oikêia kaka, the issues and concerns, of fifth-century Athens.55 Particulars aside, Wohl’s observations about our contemporary approach to tragedy could be applied with equal validity to archaic lyric. Allegory, whether explicit or, more often, not, has become the foundation on which our understanding of ancient poetry is based, and the ‘real-life’ objects towards which we believe these allegories point us are almost always of a sociopolitical nature. Whether in the analysis of Pindar’s mythical digressions or in that of Alcman’s Hagesichora and Agido, we want the narrative of archaic song to allegorize the context in which the song was performed. It is easy to forget that, while allegory is not the only means of locating meaning in a text, the scholar in search of allegory will, as Page warns, almost always find his object.56

(p.80) Sea Legs Having argued that an allegorical reading of Alcaeus is born of an ideology that also motivates our current scholarly interest in performance context, I should make clear that I have no desire to abandon questions of performance in the approach to ancient texts, nor do I want to challenge the validity of allegory as a mode of poetic interpretation. The poetry of ancient Greece emerged within what we have learned to call a ‘song culture’, a society abounding in formal and informal venues for oral performance, and while oral performance was certainly not the only means by which ancient poetry was transmitted and considered, the study of ancient song cannot be attempted without including it. Similarly, there is no question that Alcaeus’ poems can be read allegorically to powerful effect, whether with the political bent of Rösler and Gentili, or with the more selfreferential sympotic import promoted by Burnett.57 But I do believe it is worth asking if something is lost in our eagerness to transform these maritime poems into symbolic representations of or commentaries on events on land. And if so, whether a sensitivity to this oversight might help us to better formulate our approach to the complex relationship between poetry and performance.

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Sailing and Singing If, through the critical intervention of Gentili, Alcaeus’ maritime poems have become emblematic of a much broader methodological approach, one in which our desire to place poetry in its original performance context results in a default posture of allegorical interpretation, they are also an ideal platform from which to question, and perhaps walk back, some of the theoretical assumptions that inform our thinking about ancient poetry and performance. But it is not only because of Gentili that these maritime poems raise larger questions about the nature of (archaic Greek) performance. The marine sphere is possessed of a unique character within ancient Greek thought, as a place of uncertainty and unmooring, but also, as Marcel Detienne famously explored, of cunning arts, radical transformations, and unexpected truths.58 By their very nature, Alcaeus’ maritime poems ask us to contemplate modes of meaning other than the strict equivalences (p.81) that one finds on solid ground. They invite us to consider what it might mean to sing at sea, even if only in a figurative sense. To reach this figurative landscape, I begin with an emphatically literal observation about the way in which the naval themes of Alcaeus’ verses relate to the context of their performance in sixth-century Mytilene. Unlike the mythological tales of the tragic stage, the maritime perils that Alcaeus so vividly relates are drawn quite unambiguously from his contemporary world. Mytilene was an important port, strategically positioned in the far eastern waters of the Aegean, and its flourishing economy depended heavily on sea trade.59 The reality of the sea, the force of its waves, and the terrible costs they could exact, would have been all too familiar to the many Mytileneans who had endured life aboard ship, as well as to those, certainly the vast majority of the population, whose lives were linked, whether closely or more tangentially, to maritime trade or other forms of sea-based livelihoods, such as fishing. The influence of seafaring in Mytilenean society is clearly borne out by Alcaeus’ evocative prayer to the Dioscuri, who ‘leap upon the tops of well-benched ships’ (εὐσ̣δ[ύγ]ων θρώισκοντ[ες̣ ̣] ἄκρα νάων, fr. 34.9) and in the work of his contemporary, Sappho, who depicts the effects of maritime affairs on those who are left behind, as in her evocative depiction of the anxiety felt by those attending the return of a ship in the recently discovered ‘Brothers Poem’.60 Life at Lesbos, it seems fair to say, was as much affected by real seafaring as it was by real politics. To suggest that maritime affairs be taken seriously and treated as real and compelling features of sixth-century Lesbos, that is, of the context in which Alcaeus’ and Sappho’s poetry was composed and first performed, does not necessitate the adoption of any single interpretative strategy. The spectrum is quite wide, from biographical literalism to Marxist critique.61 My own approach to Alcaeus’ (p.82) maritime poems falls in line with an approach that Stephen Best and Marcus Sharon have called ‘surface reading’, a mode of analysis that turns away from the type of symptomatic reading that construes elements readily apparent in a text as ‘symbolic of something latent or concealed’.62 Best and Sharon suggest that one can resist this type of treasure hunt by privileging Page 14 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing those features that can be discerned at the surface of the text and by adopting an interpretative disposition that situates symbolic meaning along, rather than against, the grain of the text.63 Expressing a similar desire to attend to the more self-evident aspects of the texts that he studies, Bruno Latour has also rejected the ‘critical barbarity’ of the hermeneutics of suspicion, calling for a ‘second empiricism’ that is sensitive to the way in which (interpretative) concerns are related to facts.64 It is hard to think of a more suitable candidate for surface reading, for the need to relate interpretation to the ‘facts’ of poetic content, than Alcaeus’ maritime poems, verses brimming with detailed depictions of life on the sea, the value of which has been more or less discounted by scholars for the past three decades. And what emerges most notably from a renewed attention to the surface of Alcaeus’ maritime poems is, perhaps surprisingly, a heightened sense of specificity. The pointed first-person descriptions of the elemental forces of wind and waves communicate the singularity of a unique occasion, albeit not of poetic performance but of the imagined experience at sea, something which, despite quite contrary goals, is often eroded by the allegorical approach of Gentili.65 (p.83) The particularity of the maritime scene can be readily discerned in the floundering ship of fr. 208a. Here a sailor cries out in distress from aboard his faltering ship. Buffeted by wind and wave, the vessel is succumbing to the sea. ἀσυνέτημμι τὼν ἀνέμων στάσιν, τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἔνθεν κῦμα κυλίνδεται, τὸ δ᾽ ἔνθεν, ἄμμες δ᾽ ὄν τὸ μέσσον         νᾶϊ φορήμεθα σὺν μελαίναι χείμωνι μόχθεντες μεγάλωι μάλα· πὲρ μὲν γὰρ ἄντλος ἰστοπέδαν ἔχει, λαῖφος δὲ πὰν ζάδηλον ἤδη,         καὶ λάκιδες μέγαλαι κὰτ᾽ αὖτο, ] χάλαισι δ᾽ἄγκυραι,      ] [                 ] ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] ̣ [                                        ]         τοι πόδες ἀμφότεροι με̣νο̣[         ] __ ἐ βιμβλίδεσσι· τοῦτό με καὶ σ̣[άοι ] μ̣όνον· τὰ δ’ ἄχματ’ ἐκπεπ[ ̣ ] ̣ άχμενα ̣ ̣ ]μεν̣[ ̣ ]ρ̣ηντ’ ἔπερθα· τὼν̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ]̣         ]ε̣νοι̣ς ̣ [         ]           ]νεπαγ̣[ ]πανδ[           ]βολη[

I do not understand the direction of the winds, for a wave rolls now this way, now that, and in the middle we are borne along with the black ship suffering much in this great storm. The bilge water covers the masthold Page 15 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing and the whole sail is in tatters with great rips throughout. The anchors are unstrung, the rudders…both feet…in the cords. This saves me alone, and the cargo…above… Despite the danger the sailor faces, we find the poet relishing the practical particulars of life at sea. This attention to technical detail lends fr. 208a a sense of specificity very different from the political (p.84) messages identified by Gentili. After the opening lines establish the circumstances of the storm, the description is firmly trained on the components of the ship; the masthold, the sail, the anchors, the rudders, the cords. In her discussion of the poem, Anne Pippin Burnett notes Hermann Fränkel’s description of the verses as stoffhungrig, ‘as if’, she explains, ‘the singer’s chief pleasure lay in his knowing use of nautical terms’.66 The catalogue of specialized terminology is marshalled without pause, as relentless as the storm waves buffeting the ship. To many modern ears (certainly to mine), the idioms are challenging. As we found with Archilochus’ drunken sailor, the general sense can be grasped, but their specific import is often difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend.67 Alcaeus sings of rudders and cords with an intimate affection that is markedly alien to those of us who go through life largely unaware of the maritime networks that make our quotidian existence possible.68 The inscrutability of these technical descriptions suggests a hidden meaning not unlike a secret code, and perhaps we can hear in them some of the motivation for our allegorical exploits. We cannot know if these seafaring terms would have been understood by Alcaeus’ first audiences in Mytilene, or for those who heard his verses reperformed years or centuries later across the Greek Mediterranean. Whether intelligible or not, the technical vocabulary, used in such a dense and insistently practical manner, produces a kind of maritime aesthetics, a poetic beauty that reflects the beauty of seafaring itself.69 In this celebration of what is particular and specific in the marine sphere, Alcaeus’ nautical poetics are deeply informed by the spirit, if not always the language, of Homer’s epics, poems which themselves dwell with delight on the technical minutiae of seafaring, epitomized (p.85) by the detailed description of Odysseus’ raft at Odyssey 5.70 Like Homer, Alcaeus treats ships as objects of beauty and the sea in which they sail as a place of great danger.71 The maritime aesthetics of fr. 208a do not allow our gaze to linger on the perfection of a wellbuilt ship, but rather invite us to watch as it is destroyed piece by piece; water flowing up from the bilge, sails shredded by the winds, anchors and rudders and ropes slack and useless. The sailor’s reliance on the maritime technology is made all the more evident as its protections are removed and his disorientation and despair, surrounded by wind and waves, no longer certain of the ship that has brought him out on the water, are boldly evoked; he is, quite literally, at sea.

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Sailing and Singing Alcaeus colours his maritime aesthetics through the occasional use of striking metaphors that bridge the gap between land and sea. These moments often invoke the world of terrestrial warfare or politics. But rather than identifying these ‘intrusive’ usages as markers of Alcaeus’ allegorical disposition, as Gentili does,72 it is possible to approach these moments from a different perspective, as examples of how Alcaeus enriches his depiction of the marine sphere through the use of language that reminds us of the stark contrast between land and sea. At times the effect can be quite subtle, as with the mention of στάσις at fr. 208a. 1. The term has a well-established meteorological meaning that perfectly suits the context,73 yet does not entirely erase the suggestion that the behaviour of the winds is somehow like that of men in the confusion and agitation of political revolt.74 But the contrast here is as strong as, if not stronger than, the similarity, as the incomprehensible movements of the winds are not described with (p.86) reference to any divine will or guiding intention. Indeed, throughout his maritime poems, Alcaeus refrains from any explanation of the pitiless storms that buffet his sailors. The elements are antagonists entirely unlike those one meets on land, entirely alien to the world of men. Elsewhere Alcaeus more strikingly juxtaposes marine and terrestrial worlds, as with the novel image of manning a ship as if fighting atop battlements (fr. 6.7-8 φαρξώμεθ’ ὠς ὤκιστα̣[ | ἐς δ’ ἔχυρον λίμενα δρό[μωμεν).75 Here Alcaeus uses an obvious terrestrial metaphor to underscore the unfamiliarity of life at sea. Battlements that one mounts on land are stationary objects, the most firmly founded defences of a city that holds fast to its seat when attacked. But the sailors climb the rigging not to defend their ancestral land but to put themselves in motion, to race through the sea in search of safe harbour. They are not being attacked by enemies from afar, but by the very water, the ‘ground’ on which their ship is perched. Alcaeus’ seascapes are wild and alien places that must, at times, be translated into the recognizable language of terrestrial life in order to be properly comprehended. His metaphorical bridges between the terrestrial and marine spheres demonstrate a virtuosic creativity in evoking the terror of the sea, using striking language to render the subject of his verses at once more and less familiar. Alcaeus’ maritime poems are almost exclusively marine affairs, but he does speak explicitly about land at two points, once in fr. 6 and again in fr. 249.76 In both instances, the mention serves to draw a contrast between terrestrial behaviour and that which is required at sea. The terms are most clearly set out in fr. 249, where Alcaeus defines the difference between land and sea in terms of the temporality of one’s thought. The poem, which is extremely fragmentary, describes a ship (νᾶα φ[ερ]έσδυγον, 3) in undetermined, though (p.87) probably perilous (κατέχην ἀήταις, 5), conditions,77 the thought of which leads to a gnomic meditation on seafaring more generally.              ἐ]κ γᾶς χρῆ προΐδην πλό[ον αἰ τις δύνατα]ι καὶ π[αλ]ά̣μαν ἔ[χ]η, ἐπεὶ δέ κ’ ἐν π]όν̣[τωι γ]ένηται Page 17 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing τὼι παρέοντι †τρέχειν† ἀνά]γκα.

from land, it is necessary to take thought for sailing, if one is able and has the means, but when one is upon the sea, necessity [runs?] to the present. The text requires some supplementation and is highly uncertain at points, but the general sense of the verses is evident in the clear contrast between the leisure to plan ahead that is afforded on dry land (ἐ]κ γᾶς χρῆ προΐδην) and the need to respond to immediate demands (τὼι παρέοντι) when at sea.78 Mention of a stratagem (μ]αχάνα, 10) in the lacunose line that follows, supports an interpretation that would fit these verses to the larger discourse of maritime cunning explored so deftly by Detienne.79 The dangers of the sea are here viewed from a slightly different angle from that which we found in fr. 208a, one which highlights the sea as a place in which a man’s mental faculties are most hardily tested. Without the benefit of contemplation, one’s ability to act decisively in the moment, to show one’s true courage and cunning, is all that matters. A similar contrast between land and sea is explored in fr. 6, where sailors on yet another struggling vessel are forced to contemplate their fate and prove their valour. The poem begins with a description of the stormy sea, comparable to that at the beginning of fr. 208a, but with a greater emphasis on the suffering of the sailor and his comrades (παρέξει δ’ ἄ[μμι πόνον π]όλυν | ἄντλην, 2–3). The prominent role given to the ship’s human occupants is further developed when the speaker addresses his comrades, rousing them to action in the hope of saving both their ship and their lives (7–8). Assaulted by the natural elements, it is not the integrity of the ship (as in fr. 208a), but the character of the sailors that is being tested. In his call to action, (p.88) the sailor appeals to his fellow men not to bring shame on their noble ancestors: καὶ μή τιν’ ὄκνος μόλθ[ακος λάβη· πρόδηλον γάρ· μεγ[ μνάσθητε τὼν πάροιθε ν̣[      νῦν τις ἄνηρ δόκιμος γε̣[νέσθω __ καὶ μὴ καταισχύνωμεν[ ἔσλοις τόκηας γᾶς ὔπα κε̣[ιμένοις οἲ] τᾶνδ[      τὰν πό[λιν

and let soft fear not seize anyone. For it is manifest: a great…remember the [?] of the past, and let each man now earn his esteem and let us not dishonour our noble parents who lie under the earth.…this…the city… There is nothing unusual in calling on young men to uphold the honour of those who have preceded them,80 but in Alcaeus’ formulation it also introduces a clear contrast between the terrestrial realm, in the form of the land under which the Page 18 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing sailors’ ancestors lie buried (γᾶς ὔπα), and the marine sphere, in which the sailors must now prove their worth.81 As we saw with fr. 249, the distinction is a temporal one. The actions of the sailors’ parents lie in the past; they have already shown their nobility and, having died, exist in a state of permanent honour. The suffering sailors, by contrast, have yet to prove themselves. They face their trial now, their struggles lie before them (so the deictic emphasis of the opening τόδ’ αὖ]τε (1), the future tense of παρέξει (2), and the urgency of ὠς ὤκιστα̣ (7)).82 When we consider that, by both poetic and historical conventions, those who die at sea are denied a proper burial,83 the distinction between the two (p.89) realms is rendered more substantive. As long as they remain out at sea, the sailors are divorced, perhaps permanently, from the land of their ancestors and removed from the localized context in which familiar traditions and assumptions obtain. They must be reminded of the past (μνάσθητε τὼν πάροιθε) because it is not present with them. Facing disaster on the open sea, the sailors find themselves out of context. I have so far advocated a reading of Alcaeus’ maritime poems that attends primarily to their surface. I have argued that we should take seriously the maritime content of the poems, both as reflecting an important facet of ‘real life’ in sixth-century Mytilene and as comprising a maritime aesthetics that treats ships and seamanship as an object of beauty. In doing so I have suggested that we endeavour, just like Alcaeus’ struggling sailors, to stay above the waters and hold fast to the unique occasions created within the imaginary world of his poems rather than to draw allegorical equivalences with extra-poetic context. But the sea is deep, and it can be agreeable to dive beneath the waves when one is not in mortal danger, and it is in this somewhat contrasting spirit of depthplumbing that I would like now to suggest that the marine world that Alcaeus creates in these poems can serve as a model for us, as modern interpreters of archaic song, of an alternative type of performance occasion, and hence of a different type of relationship between a poem’s context and its content. This alternative model hinges on the sense of immediacy that comes through most clearly in the contrast between land and sea found in frs 6 and 249. When classicists think about performance, we tend to focus, above all, on the singularity of the performative occasion. Lured by the prospect of locating the irrecoverable vitality of performance, we seek to recreate the past by adopting the strategies of historians; we fill in as much of the context as we can, hoping perhaps that if we supply enough of the surrounding material, the contours of an absent performance will emerge. But the sea resists the idea of such historical contextualization. Its pathless expanses do not remain constant from one moment to the next. And while I do not wish to argue, in the face of Bowie’s cutting criticisms, that Alcaeus’ songs were performed at sea, there can be no doubt that the model of immediacy and occasion that they put forward is one that spurns the comparatively static and historicized sphere of terrestrial life.

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Sailing and Singing It is not difficult to imagine the appeal of these maritime poems, which through the immediacy of the poetic jeu d’esprit figuratively (p.90) transport their audience, sympotic or otherwise, to the high seas, as if, as Cazzato observes, the events aboard ship ‘were happening to the “I” and his companions at the time of speaking’.84 But the world to which these poems remove their listeners is emphatically unlike that of the leisurely symposium. The sea is a world of danger and toil, of uncertainty and rootlessness, a world in which beauty is born of the utility of masts and ropes, and decisions must be made without reflection. The repose of the symposium invites contemplation and second thoughts, the very kind of reflection that leads to allegory. As Heraclitus himself asks of Alcaeus’ ships: who would not immediately believe (τίς οὐκ ἄν εὐθύς…νομίσειε) that they were truly about a storm at sea (5.5). It is only upon reflection that their allegorical meaning can be gleaned. But this is not the type of thinking that Alcaeus’ maritime aesthetics invites. As the inversion of the sympotic ideal, the sea presents us with a model for song that is born of, but not beholden to, its historical context. To insist on this rupture does not contradict Slater’s image of a symposium at sea, but adds an important nuance. The vivid depiction of other worlds is not always an extension of or metaphor for the symposium. Songs of the symposium can negate their context, they can trouble their foundations just as an unexpected storm transforms the inviting sea into a place of terror, though, of course, such unsettling of foundations is itself deeply Dionysian in spirit. Sea and land, seen in this way, are not historical places, but imagined settings, places in which we can situate song and explore its contours from our vantage of overwhelming ignorance. These are places that are made real in song, but do not exist, at least for us, outside the poetic imagination. It is in this light that I offer some concluding reflections on Barbara Kowalzig’s excellent recent discussion of the maritime poetics of the dithyramb. Kowalzig has argued, with great insight and subtlety, that the nautical themes so frequently found in dithyramb are a marker of song that ‘defies the musical definition of the place of origin’.85 Like the seafaring themes that it embraces, dithyramb as a genre is not defined by ‘a distinct geographical location, but [by] maritime movement and communication’.86 For Kowalzig, these claims reflect the historical reality of the ‘homogenized’ world of the late sixth and early fifth centuries, when the (p.91) economic and social developments that resulted in a ‘commodification’ of song had eroded local identity. Viewed through a strictly historical lens, Alcaeus’ Mytilenian songs would seem to represent the exact opposite of the panhellenism that Kowalzig describes. Yet, as we have seen, his songs too partake of the maritime discourse that replaces the clear boundaries of local origin with the unsettled and fluctuating world of the sea. They too reject the firm foundations of a ‘distinct geographical location’, preferring instead to incur the dangers, but also the thrilling immediacy, of racing across the seas. In fitting Alcaeus into Kowalzig’s model of a maritime poetics, we can recognize that such Page 20 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing non-local voices have always been a vital part of Greek song culture. The opposite of geographically distinct is not ‘homogenized’, but ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. If we seek to balance the contextual specificity of recent scholarship with an expanded notion of what archaic performance could do, Alcaeus’ ships show us how song culture can embrace distance as much as proximity, isolation alongside community, uncertain waters as well as the security of home. We are not bound to narratives of decline from the ideal of an unspoiled and authentic world of local performance to one of displacement and corruption, commodification, and artifice. Maritime poetics is as authentic a feature of archaic song culture as are the symposia in which songs of the sea were so often sung. When we imagine ancient performance, the sea is always there, whether we float on its surface or penetrate its depths. (p.92) Notes:

I would like to thank the editors, as well as Simon Goldhill, Vanessa Cazzato, Johanna Hanink, and John Henderson for their invaluable comments and suggestions. (1) Most notably, Horden and Purcell (2000) and Broodbank (2013). (2) See Detienne (1996) 53–68, Slater (1976). (3) All translations are my own. (4) For discussion, see Gerber (1981). It is unclear to me why Burnett (1983) 39 states that the poem’s ‘pretended occasion is a storm at sea’ when there is no direct reference to the sea tout court, let alone sailing conditions. (5) The authoritative treatment of ancient maritime technology is still Casson (1995), first edition Casson (1971), who provides a very helpful glossary of Greek and Latin nautical terms (389–402). (6) The mimetic flexibility of these scenarios is elegantly explored by e.g. Athanassaki (2012), Budelmann (2017). (7) Calame (1995) 5. (8) Bowie (1986) 16. (9) On the symposium in general, see Murray (1990), Hobden (2013), Cazzato, Obbink and Prodi (2016). (10) Felson (1999) 6. (11) Bowie (1986) 17. (12) See, for example, Gerber (1981) 2. Page 21 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing (13) Slater (1976) passim. (14) Slater (1976) 161. Scholars have continued to add evidence and nuance to Slater’s initial schema, most noteworthy amongst whom are Lissarrague (1990a) 107–22 and Csapo (2003); see also Davies (1978), Steiner (2011), Kowalzig (2013), and Gagné (2016). (15) Bowie (1986) 17 n. 21. (16) On Alcaeus’ dates, see Hutchinson (2001) 187–8 with bibliography. A very different alternative to Gentili’s approach to Alcaeus from that proposed here is explored in Fearn’s chapter in this volume. (17) Clark (2007). (18) Russell and Konstan (2005) xi. (19) Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 5.9. (20) Lamberton (1986) 26, Struck (2004) 151–6; on early allegory, see Ford (2002) 67–90, Morgan (2000) 62–6, Struck (2004) 77–111. (21) Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 3.2, 26.40; for discussion, see Struck (2004) 152. (22) Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 5.1–4. (23) Heraclitus, Homeric Problems 5.3. (24) Bowra (1940) 127. (25) West (1974) 128 cites this passage in support of connecting fr. 105 to fr. 106, but does not challenge the claim that the poem is allegorical. (26) Gentili (1988) 209–12. (27) Porro (1994) 104. (28) The commentaries of frs 305a (discussed later in this section) and 305b, which claims that the storm of fr. 208.1–9 refers to Myrsilos’ political machinations, are similarly late examples of post-factum allegorical reading informed by interpretative practices that may not have been prevalent in sixthcentury Mytilene. On the remarkably murky documentation of Myrsilos’ career, and the possibility that no such historical person ever existed, see Dale (2011). (29) Struck (2004) 142–61.

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Sailing and Singing (30) Anacreon is also mentioned in P.Oxy. 2307. Allegorical commentary on Pindar and Aeschylus is discussed by Calvani Mariotti and Derenzani (1977) 160 n. 7 (non vidi). (31) For a survey of positions, see Nicosia (1977) 153, also Page (1955) 82 n. 2. (32) Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1914) 234. Although he took a quite different position, Page (1955) 184 too asserts that ‘the question of whether this poem was allegorical is not to be answered by the mere authority of the source (i.e. Heraclitus). Prejudice may beget error when a critic makes it his business to hunt for allegories.’ (33) On the perils of appealing to ancient critics for interpretative guidance, see Feeney (2006). (34) It is telling that Gentili (1988) 198 adopts the model of ‘extended metaphor’. This definition is most famously associated with Quintilian (Inst. Or. 8.6.44), whom Gentili himself cites, but it also underpins the approach of Heraclitus. As Struck (2004) 154–5 makes clear, even amongst the ancients, Heraclitus’ ‘rhetorical’ approach was an exception to the general tendency to treat allegory in a much vaguer and more generalized fashion. (35) Laird (2003) 174. (36) Page (1955) 188 notes the stark difference in tone between the two poets. By contrast with Alcaeus, in Theognis’ verse ‘the [maritime] imagery is never for a moment allowed to obscure the truth’ of the political import. On the authorship of these verses, see West (1974) 40–64, Bowie (1997). (37) Liberman (1999) 86. (38) For analysis of the fragment, see Porro (1994) 33–8, 46–9, and more recently Lentini (1999), and Cazzato (2016) 186. (39) I quote here the text as printed in Voigt. Lentini (1999) makes a strong case against supplementing the participle ἀρυτήμεν[, so Liberman (1999). (40) Compare ἁλὸς πολιῆς Il. 1.350, 1.359, 12.284, 13.682, 14.31, 21.59, 21.374; πολιῆς ἁλός Il. 13.352, 15.691 19. 267 Od. 2.261, 4.405, 23. 236 (also πολιῆς (…) θαλάσσης Il. 4.248, Od. 11.75, 22.385). Alcaeus employs the pairing again at fr. 117b.26–7 in a similarly brief comparison (πό̣ρ̣ναι δ’ ὄ κέ τις δίδ̣[ωι | ἴ]σα κἀ[ς] π̣ολ̣ίας κῦμ’ ἄλ[ο]ς ἐσ̣β̣[ά]λην) and it is regularly found in later poets as well. (41) Laird (2003) 153. (42) Struck (2004). Page 23 of 27

 

Sailing and Singing (43) Page (1955) 179–97. (44) Page (1955) 188–9. (45) Page (1955) 185. (46) Rösler (1980). On Jauss and reception, see Holub (1984). (47) Gentili (1988) 197–215. Recently Caciagli (2011) has presented a far more expansive picture of performance contexts for Alcaeus’ and Sappho’s work on Lesbos. He argues that ‘Il pubblico presupposto dall’esecuzione originaria concepita dal poeta […] poteva variare enormemente secondo i [diversi] contesti’ (12). Nevertheless, Alcaeus’ ships are still treated as political allegories and the insights of Heraclitus are said to ‘spieg[are] determinate espressioni chiarendone la referenza contestuale’ (15, see also 30–1; 236–7). (48) Rösler (1980) 115–58. (49) Rösler (1980) 115, 129, 138–41, Gentili (1988) 201–4. (50) See esp. the arguments of Gentili (1988) 199–208. (51) Gentili (1988) 199. (52) Gentili (1984), Gentili (1988). (53) See the sensitive appraisal of Bernardini (2015) 35–41. (54) Gentili (1988) 42, italics mine. (55) Wohl (2015) 91. (56) Page (1955) 184; and n. 32 of this chapter. (57) Burnett (1983) 121–81. Similarly, Steiner (2012) 44 speaks of wine as the ‘missing piece’ in Archilochus fr. 13. (58) Detienne (1996) 53–68. As noted, Slater too discusses the unsettling and mysterious resonances of the sea, though with reference more to Dionysus than to Athena. (59) Spencer (2000), who further argues that Mytilene far exceeded the other Lesbian cities in its commitment to maritime trade. Vetta (2002) notes that archaic Mytilene was itself an island, so that its inhabitants needed to make frequent sea crossings to access the Lesbian mainland, though he sees this as proof that Alcaeus’ allegorical tendencies were even broader than generally presumed.

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Sailing and Singing (60) Obbink (2014). For further discussion of this poem, see D’Alessio, this volume, pp. 54–6. (61) With respect to the latter, it is noteworthy that our propensity towards allegorical reading has also had the unintended result of producing what Christopher Nealon, in discussing critics of late-twentieth-century poetry, has called a resistance to the economic materialities underpinning the fundamental ‘relationship of poetry to capital’, preferring, instead to imply that ‘poetic writing is prima facie political’. Nealon (2011) 19. Both frs 73 (πὰν φόρτι[ο]ν, 1) and 208a (τὰ δ’ ἄχματ’, 14) make mention of the merchandise that is the ultimate motivation for these perilous maritime voyages, a mark of distinction from the heroic seafaring that one associates with epic (though, of course, the line between heroic and merchant seamanship is already remarkably blurry in epic, a fact epitomized by Menelaus’ successful transactions on his return from Troy: see Od. 3.312, 4.81–5). (62) Best and Sharon (2009) 3. (63) Surface reading represents a range of approaches, with no set methodology other than an interest in abandoning or ‘evolving’ away from the privileging of latent meaning over what is more clearly manifest in a given text; Best and Sharon (2009) 3. Within the field of Classics, Purves (2016) approaches the question of surface through the fascinating lens of touch and tactile sensation. (64) Latour (2004) 230. (65) Much of Gentili’s argument rests on comparisons to unambiguously figurative descriptions of seafaring from Homer and, especially, Greek tragedy. Gentili (1988) 199–200. Gentili claims that the comparisons prove the deep contextualization of Alcaeus’ poem and its roots in the political fortunes of his hetairia. But, far from lending specificity to Alcaeus’ situation, they result in a homogenized picture, equating the meaning of a ship in Athens at the height of empire with that of sixth-century Lesbos. On the prominence of marine and nautical metaphors in Athens, especially following the battle of Salamis, see Goldhill (2007) 130, Dougherty (2014). (66) Burnett (1988) 154; Fränkel (1968) 52. Bernardini (2015) 45 notes a similar celebration of technical terminology in Alcaeus’ description of weaponry elsewhere in his corpus, a reflection, she argues, of his deep concern with the realities of martial experience. (67) One notes the relative obscurity of the obviously technical terms, such as ἰστοπέδαν, ὀήϊα (= οἴαξ printed by Voigt but not Liberman), βιμβλίδεσσι (= βιβλίς), ἄχματ’ (= ἄγμα, glossed as τὰ ἀγώγια) as well as of πόδες, which may refer to the sailor’s feet or ‘the two lower corners of the sail, or the ropes

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Sailing and Singing fastened thereto, by which the sails are tightened or slackened’ but also the nautical sheets, rudder, or steering-paddle, according to LSJ. (68) On the invisibility of contemporary maritime life, see George (2014). (69) In a more general spirit, Hutchinson (2001) 192 argues for the need to consider ‘aesthetic pleasure’ as a goal of Alcaeus’ poetry. (70) For discussion of the Odyssey’s maritime poetics, see Dougherty (2001). (71) On the danger of the sea, see the discussion of Lesky (1947) 188–214 and Heirman (2012) 146–72 (152–7 on Alcaeus). (72) The claim that these moments of ‘semantic boldness can only be accepted by a community that knows the referential code’ ignores the many ways that these metaphors have been appreciated and interpreted over the centuries; Gentili (1988) 205. (73) Kassel (1973) 102–4 and Burzacchini and Degani (1977) 209. Gentili (1988) 297 n. 31 dismissed the usage, for this reason, as an example of Alcaeus’ allegorical thinking. Rösler (1980) 137 was not so circumspect. (74) A similar effect is found in the phrase ἄμμες δ᾽ ὄν τὸ μέσσον fr. 208a.3, which may suggest the Lesbian temple site referred to as the Messon, on which see Robert (1960), Nagy (1993), Caciagli (2010). It is also possible that such ambiguity is at play in the mention of μοναρχίαν at fr. 6.27 (a somewhat different non-allegorical suggestion is put forth by Slater (1976) 169–70), but the context and import of this highly suggestive word remain obscure (see also n. 81). (75) Gentili (1988) 205. (76) Critics have generally understood the latter portion of fr. 73, beginning with νόστου λελάθων (8), to mark a shift to a terrestrial setting in which the narrator enjoys drink and song with his companion, Bycchis. Rösler (1980) 116, Burnett (1983) 140–1, Liberman (1999) 51–2. Without wishing to argue against this interpretation, I would note that the circumstances suggested in such a reconstruction are nowhere made explicit, but must be inferred solely from the sense of relaxation from care implied by λελάθων (8) and pleasure of σύν τ’ ὔμμι τέρπ[ (9). There is no doubt that these terms are well suited to a sympotic context, but I believe it imprudent to declare this the only possible import of the lines, particularly in the light of the new reading νόστου (P.Oxy. XXI 2307 fr. 16) which would fit neatly with a continued nautical theme. (77) It is unclear whether the reading χ[ό]ρον at line 2 refers to the terrestrial sphere, or is used metaphorically, as it might be of dolphins or sea-birds.

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Sailing and Singing (78) Liberman (1999) 91 takes the lines somewhat differently, though not incompatibly, as a reflection on the futility of planning ahead. (79) Detienne (1996) 53–68. (80) See, e.g., the discussion of Crotty (1994) 24–41. (81) Although the lacunose text makes the context all but impossible to determine with any precision, it appears that the mention of μοναρχίαν (27), so central to many political allegorical readings of the poem, relates to this later, explicitly terrestrial section. If so, there would be no difficulty in understanding the term to refer quite literally to conditions adhering within the polis in contrast to those (now) experienced by the sailors at sea. For a different view, see Hutchinson, this volume, pp. 126–7. (82) Cazzato (2016) 185 notes the ‘heightened drama’ and ‘here and now-ness’ of Alcaeus’ maritime poems. (83) Archilochus fr. 13 explores this question from the other perspective, contemplating those lost at sea from his safe position on land; see the excellent discussion of Steiner (2012). (84) Cazzato (2016) 186. (85) Kowalzig (2013) 57. (86) Kowalzig (2013) 58.

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Materialities of Political Commitment?

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Materialities of Political Commitment? Textual Events, Material Culture, and Metaliterarity in Alcaeus David Fearn

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception. Keywords:   Alcaeus, lyric, voice, symposium, proverb, material culture, deixis, ecphrasis, contextualizability, politics

In 1983, Anne Burnett wrote the following remarks about the state of current scholarship on what she called ‘archaic song’: The cri du coeur school has insisted upon the sense of self, the occasionalist upon the sense of community as the informing source of poetry for the early lyricists, and taken together (in their more moderate expressions) these two theses produce a fair description of archaic song, where most of the surviving examples depict poets and listeners who

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Materialities of Political Commitment? externalize and socialize what we would call inner experience. Within this song-created world (which may or may not reflect the real), sacred and secular mingle as the movements of the psyche are ritualised: hatred becomes a formal curse sent against an enemy, love becomes a prayer, and scorn a fable that turns away depravity with apotropaic laughter. This means, however, that while both the standard approaches are right, both are wrong as well, for the passionate critics are mistaken when they deny the conscious conventionality of these lyrics, while their occasional colleagues are equally mistaken when they refuse the archaic singers the freedom to create their own fictions.1 The intervening years, particularly with an increasing eagerness to specify early Greek monody functionally within the symposium as (p.94) a social institution, have not been very kind to Alcaeus the poet. Scholars embarrassed at the romantic excesses of previous modes of reading lyric focused their attention almost entirely on Alcaeus’ politics. The political factionalism of archaic Lesbos has been the ultimate object of scrutiny, within a general trend towards ‘song’ as a way in to society as ulterior, away from the aesthetic or cultural understanding of lyric as ‘poetry’ or ‘literature’.2 We should take Burnett’s notion of Alcaeus’ ‘song-created world’ very seriously; accordingly, the present discussion aims to shed fresh light upon it. The complexities of Alcaeus’ poetic self-consciousness and his evocations of a world, or worlds, of material things are investigated together.3 The artifice of Alcaeus’ world construction is treated in a way that does fuller justice to his underappreciated poetics,4 and also allows us to grasp the importance of reframability, essential to lyric poetry’s survival and ongoing relevance. At the same time, I also seek to recognize and come to terms with the allure of the worlds to which critics have responded so insistently.5 I also hope to generate a deeper and more capacious sense of the cultural relevance of archaic lyric, in ways that provide a proper basis for explanations of subsequent classical fascination with Alcaeus’ lyric distinctiveness. The focus of this discussion is poetic diction and structure understood prior to any social delimitation, rather than as a symptom of predetermined historical frames.6 Further, the implicit self-consciousness of Alcaean poetics provides the basis for the poems’ (p.95) endless reframability and renewed relevance over time. Alcaeus’ poetry preserves within it, and endlessly recycles, a tension between the opposing poles of particularity and remoteness, contextualizability and de- or re-contextualization.7 But what of this ‘Alcaeus’? One of the important factors in play for the prospect of a more nuanced account of Alcaean poetics is the nature and positionality of the voice. In recent theoretical work on lyric this issue has come to the fore. Jonathan Culler outlines an approach according to which lyric is better Page 2 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? considered as epideictic than as representational, based in the subjectivities of performers and readers across time rather than in the representation of fictional space.8 One of the problems Culler is aware of is that to assume the positionality of the speaking voice within a pre-established fictional world is often to miss the sense in which lyric has already flagged positionality as an issue. Culler cites Herbert Tucker approvingly: [T]o assume in advance that a poetic text proceeds from a dramatically situated speaker is to risk missing the play of verbal implication whereby character is engendered in the first place, through colliding modes of signification. It is to read so belatedly as to arrive only when the party is already over.9 Culler is, accordingly, correct to raise the following issue: The notion of the performative has the great virtue for a theory of literature of foregrounding language as act rather than representation, but, beyond that, the performative is the name of a problem, not a solution to the question of the status of literary discourse.10 This is far indeed from the world of conventional scholarship on Greek lyric and on Alcaeus in particular, for which we have the following from Bruno Gentili: Alcaean poetry, born out of and for action and intended for restricted hearing by an aristocratic club, bears the unmistakable mark of lively, direct, and immediate participation in the events that inspired it. (p.96) It reflects the tumultuous life of an archaic political club (hetairía) committed to a combatant’s role in the encounter between conflicting factions. Poetry thereby becomes an indispensable weapon in the political struggle and an expression of the joy or sorrow that the outcome of the contest inspires.11 A strong ‘weaponization’ of Alcaeus’ poetry like this has its limitations. For Tucker captured something about lyric that is very valuable for appreciating Alcaeus. Nevertheless, we can, at the same time, appreciate a tension within Alcaean poetics between epideixis and representation. On the one hand, there is a sense in which Gentili’s desire to see through the text to a world of politically engaged faction-fighting beyond is a fair response to some of Alcaeus’ claims on us. On the other hand, Greek lyric displays a seeming eagerness often to confound contextual particularization and essentializing of the functionality of its voices, by drawing attention to its own reframable tropicality. These two interpretative poles are in constant tension. For one significant way in which Alcaeus’ poetry hits home is through its creation of fictional representations of worlds to which its participants seem very strongly committed, even as we as interpreters experiencing the poetry are made aware of our complicity in the construction of those creations. Ultimately, then, the issue of the extent to which

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Materialities of Political Commitment? we can ever be with Alcaeus before his party is over is, I think, part of what makes Alcaeus’ poetics so distinctively lyrical. In what follows the ways in which the voices of Alcaeus’ poetry both do and do not invite us into ‘his world’ are investigated; scrutiny of material phenomena in Alcaeus’ poetry can help to expose its complexity afresh. We will thus be able to re-evaluate not only his poetics as ‘textual events’ but also the claims we make about the cultural and political value of his work. In making a methodological shift with Alcaeus away from standard anthropological and functionalist paradigms in the turn towards a materialist and positionally complex Alcaeus, I make two methodological moves. The first is to scrutinize deixis in Alcaeus together with the ecphrastic vividness of his constructed events, in order to draw attention to the complexity of the ways encounters are foregrounded. The second move is to offer more selfconsciousness than usual (p.97) concerning the methodological stakes in the classification of Alcaeus as sympotic literature, via scrutiny of the applicability and senses of the twin terms ‘literature’ and ‘the symposium’. First, to deixis and ecphrasis. There is rich potential in the exploitation of overlaps between lyric deixis, the focus of a good deal of recent critical attention, and ecphrasis, a trope that conversely has received scant attention in lyric studies. If lyric deixis is, at heart, all about the understanding of the basic relation between poetic utterances and their contextualization,12 both deixis and ecphrasis, as literary phenomena, are at root about different aspects of referentiality. This is drawn out particularly well by Valentine Cunningham, in a discussion of the reasons why literary texts have, throughout history, been fascinated by art and obsessed with worlds full of material things: Fundamentally, I suggest that thereness is what’s in question. Writing is always tormented by the question of real presence, by challenges to knowability, by the problematics of truth and validity, the difficulty of being sure about what it might be pointing to outside of itself, by its deictic claims and desires, by what its grammar of pointing, its this and that and there might be indicating, by what if anything is actually made present to the reader when the text says, with Jesus at the Last Supper and the priest at the eucharistic table, Hoc est…, this is.… The ecphrastic encounter seeks, I think, to resolve this ancient and continuing doubting by pointing at an allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness. It lays claim to the absolute there-ness of an aesthetic object, the thereness writing is (rightly) so doubtful about, and seeks to corral that evident (or claimed) empirical, real, truthfulness for itself and its own doings. It wants the real presence of the made object to rub off, as it were, on its own proceedings…13

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Materialities of Political Commitment? Cunningham’s articulations of literary texts’ obsessions with verifiability and presence, their use of ecphrasis, and the fundamental interrelation between deixis and ecphrasis as rhetorical tools for evocation are helpful. For they provide a neat starting point for a new (p.98) appreciation of aspects of Alcaeus’ poetry. Moreover, Cunningham’s revelation that verifiability and referentiality are at issue with both deixis and ecphrasis provides a fresh opportunity to articulate, for Greek lyric, a sense that meaning is grounded in its nuanced textuality. That is, the sense in which experiencing or giving voice to lyric poetry is a game of referentiality and contextualizability: the extent to which one can, should, or would want to gain access to the worlds that, in the present case, Alcaeus evokes. This way of thinking with lyric is liberating because it makes the texts work harder on their own terms. It opens up to scrutiny the mechanisms through which the texts frame and thus raise questions about the impact of their assertions, rather than immediately by-passing those assertions in a quest to understand the historical and social conditions behind them. In order to make a connection between this question of lyric’s impact—its potential to transform subjectivity—and Alcaeus’ interest in materiality, we can glance across at art-historical approaches that help to clarify the relation between art’s cultural constructions and the subjectivity of artistic experience. Jaś Elsner follows Norman Bryson in his explanation of visuality as ‘the screen through which [the people of antiquity] had to look and through which they acquired (at least in part) their sense of subjectivity’.14 We can appropriate this idea from the art historians and apply it to lyric, as one element in ancients’ ‘multiple discourses on vision’,15 since vision is an issue in Alcaeus’ own poetics. We will begin to appreciate the range of ways in which Alcaeus’ poetry can evoke worlds of material things to draw self-conscious attention to its own representational poetics, as well as stage politically and/or ethically engaged events and attitudes within and against those worlds. Focusing on poetic voices, sympotic world construction, and Alcaeus’ self-conscious evocation of material things provides a neat way of capturing the distinctiveness and often oddity of the ways in which lyric can not only create but also manipulate a sense of a setting, and transform the subjectivities of its consumers. A poetic voice may both seem authentically part of that setting—indeed an event within it—and yet may also reveal itself, and its sense of setting, as constructed, artificial, and illusory, but also endlessly reframable by subsequent audiences. (p.99) Before we get to the poetry itself, there are two further methodological considerations. The first is the nature of the terminology in play. The second is the question of the extent of the contextual delimitation required to make sense of the events and voices of Alcaeus’ worlds. To tackle the terminological issue first: some may be alarmed at the use of allegedly anachronistic terminology, such as ‘literature’ and ‘the literary’, let alone ‘metaliterarity’, when handling archaic Greek poetry.16 The terminology of literarity is a heuristic device. First, Page 5 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? it is useful as a marker of features of ancient Greek poetics that are distinctively complex. We can acknowledge that the concept of ‘literature’ across time is itself intractable and in some senses impossible to define satisfactorily.17 However anachronistic modern frames of reference may appear to be, the contemporary literary-theoretical perspectives that have grown out of them can be empowering if they help to elucidate what appear as distinctive features of the works under scrutiny. Accepting the ‘literary’ with Greek lyric is a natural way of permitting discussion of formal features of texts we possess as well as of questions of their interactions with their ancient consumers and their social and cultural practices. See most recently Denis Feeney on Pindar: the key point is that in the world of Pindar we are faced with a category of the ‘literary’ to be the subject of adjudication. As with the rest of the developing Greek literary system, the phenomenon of the elaborated Greek hymn looks more and more extraordinary—not necessarily part of any liturgical action, not necessarily part even of a ritual performance, capable of being disseminated widely as texts and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with other texts of the kind and with other literary forms.18 On these terms, ancient Greek lyric’s ‘literarity’ appears as a kind of stimulation. Additionally, allegations of anachronism and impositions of periodization can obscure distinctive features as much as they can elucidate; to appropriate Roland Barthes, a more flexible analysis can ‘open up’ a text, ‘presenting it as an astute resourceful reflection upon its own codes and the signifying mechanisms of its culture’.19 (p.100) More specifically, though, the choice of the terminology of literarity here is designed to raise awareness of a fundamental issue which the use of alternatives such as ‘song’ or even ‘poetry’ may perhaps occlude: the sense that lyric poems cannot straightforwardly, in any coherently authentic or organic sense, ‘present’ the world, as if poetry automatically presented a straight line into context without too many intervening representational obstructions.20 Subjectivity is itself something that can exist only within broader structures—a factor appreciated no less by anthropological theorists.21 And such structures of form and thought can be pragmatically created by poets and other artists in their own traditions as part of the stream of cultural shapings of the world.22 Such shapings are perhaps most acutely at issue, if anywhere in Greek culture, with sympotic discourse, which is a particular locus of attention in Alcaeus. (p.101) The approach taken here prioritizes the literary-theoretical over the anthropological/sociological, while attempting to preserve a sense of the tension between the two that is intended to be helpful in elucidating the nature of the poetry.23 Poetry’s interpretability is sited in the middle between the twin analytical poles of ulterior social functionalism on the one hand and endlessly recontextualizable subjective effects on the other.24 Even if the terminology of Page 6 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? literarity is anachronistic in the sense of being alien to the ways in which we can best guess these works were originally consumed (at least in archaic Greece)—in performance rather than through objectification as texts on the page—thinking with literarity still helps for conceptualization of lyric. On this view, lyric has a coherent and self-contained identity not easily reducible to the things, worlds, activities, and events that it evokes, and continues to evoke through its effects on performers, audiences, and readers. This is an issue that is particularly relevant for sympotic lyric. For in this case the symposium as a space and activity is generally the go-to place within archaic and classical Greek culture for critics wanting an organic model of the intermeshing of poetics with cultural and social practice. Oswyn Murray, in the final sentence of his introduction to what still remains a basic reference-work for thinking with the idea of sympotic culture, writes: ‘It is from the symposiast’s couch that Greek culture of the Archaic age makes most sense.’25 This may be true, but perhaps not in the way that Murray intended. Murray had earlier provided a reasonably open-textured model for the ways in which emerging trends in functionalist studies of lyric could offer insights into sympotic life. Discussing Rösler’s work on Alcaeus, he claimed: ‘[T]hese insights…have laid the basis for a series of studies of individual poems and genres of poetry in relation to their function with the symposion and their wider social purposes; and the interpretation of Greek lyric poetry from this point of view has provided us with the possibility of investigating the mental world of the sympotic group.’26 Understanding mental worlds is right. Yet the danger of essentializing poetry as a means to understanding symposia as the ulterior social institution qua predetermining frame (p.102) (note the use of the definite article: ‘the symposion’; ‘the sympotic group’) is strongly felt.27 I prefer a pragmatist view of sympotic activity and expression, contingently selfconstructed and asserted by poets, artists, performers, and participants in the light of the general absence of ulterior frameworks instructing participants in how to behave or think.28 Sympotic discourse creates, in fact overdetermines, ‘the symposium’.29 Artists and poets provided opportunities for ongoing cultural (re)invention. Any hope of approximating a sense of the full texture of the symposium as Murray’s ‘mental world’ from a literary perspective will only be achievable by experiencing afresh, on their own terms, the poetic texts through their claims upon us. I turn now to my case studies from Alcaeus. First, fr. 140 V:                     ]· · ·[ μαρμαίρει δὲ μέγας δόμος      χάλκωι, παῖσα δ’ Ἄρηι κεκόσμηται στέγα λάμπραισιν κυνίαισι, κὰτ      τᾶν λεῦκοι κατέπερθεν ἴππιοι λόφοι νεύοισιν, κεφάλαισιν ἄνPage 7 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment?      δρων ἀγάλματα· χάλκιαι δὲ πασ⟨σ⟩άλοις κρύπτοισιν περικείμεναι      λάμπραι κνάμιδες, ἔρκος ἰσχύρω βέλεος, (p.103) θόρρακές τε νέω λίνω      κόιλαί τε κὰτ ἄσπιδες βεβλήμεναι· πὰρ δὲ Χαλκίδικαι σπάθαι,      πὰρ δὲ ζώματα πόλλα καὶ κυπάσσιδες. τῶν οὐκ ἔστι λάθεσθ’ ἐπεὶ      δὴ πρώτιστ’ ὐπὰ τὦργον ἔσταμεν τόδε.

…and the great house glitters with bronze, and the whole ceiling is dressed for Ares with bright helmets, down from which white horse-hair plumes nod, meant for the heads of men, as adornments. More bronze hides the pegs from which it hangs: shining greaves, a defence against a strong arrow, and corselets of new linen, and hollow shields thrown down on the floor. Beside these are swords from Chalcis, and many belts and tunics. These we cannot forget, from the first time we undertook this task. Here we are presented with a world of material things, a described set of weapons decorating a space that glitters because of their presence; the weapons indeed hide from view the pegs from which they hang. The poem appears to invite us to have a strong response to these objects because of their embedded connection to an ongoing series of actions continuing into the text’s temporal present. What those actions are is deferred through the deixis of τόδε, but is generally assumed to be the work of war.30 According to canonical readings, this is classic Alcaeus, the factionally engaged poet-warrior exhorting his comrades, within his own world, to action in the here and now (or rather, there and then): a vivid picture of real-life Mytilenean aristocracy.31 Henry Spelman has put some pressure on this traditional view, arguing that rather than being exhortatory, fr. 140 is an expression of an ongoing ethical commitment to violence as part of a just political cause.32 Yet there is more to say. It is entirely possible that Alcaeus and his comrades experienced a space like the one being evoked in the fragment —though it is less easy than is often assumed to come to a clear view of exactly what this space actually might have been.33 Yet there is also a marked representational self-consciousness in play, (p.104) which a focus on the literarity of the text can bring out. The language of description and the use of deixis, taken together, foreground a distinctive ecphrastic poetics of representation and illusion. For there is a clear tension here between the vividness of the description, marked with the initial word μαρμαίρει, ‘glitters’, and the lack of straightforward access to the world being described. The vividness is marked by present- and perfect-tense main verbs, a characteristic technique of ecphrasis, according to which the language figures a textual hopefulness that the representation can become real.34 Modern readers have fallen into Alcaeus’ ecphrastic trap, collapsing the distance between the representation and the represented, by avoiding the literarity through which this Page 8 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? encounter is framed.35 The final word, τόδε, a deictic marker, reiterates across time, through performance, reperformance, and reading, this sense of presence. This is despite a strong sense of absence, or despite at least the likelihood of marked cognitive dissonance in the recognition that alternative, much less edgily militarized, circumstances may provide a backdrop for reperformances and re-imaginings of Alcaeus’ world.36 A further metaliterary reading of the final two lines may be offered. First, the expression τῶν οὐκ ἔστι λάθεσθ’, ‘it is not possible to forget these [weapons]’, can be read and understood metaliterarily. Homer’s Odyssey provided foundational testimony for an archaic Greek text’s ability to figure its own memorability, and its complexities of structure and characterization, through its plays on the language of memory and forgetting.37 Here Alcaeus figures the poetic memorability of his own description, whether or not we are able to access the things described, or the circumstances they might imply. We can endorse (p. 105) here a metaliterary take on the relation between memory and poetry with sympotic lyric that Wolfgang Rösler explicitly eschewed because of his view of the way in which the orality of song bound it inextricably and organically to the social institution of the symposium as a place for remembering the past. For Rösler sympotic poetry merely provided a window onto the symposium as an ulterior space for cultural memory.38 This is surely a disservice to the texts themselves as active constructers of sympotic experience through a poetics of mnemosyne.39 And when Athenaeus, in citing the fragment, states that ‘it might actually have been more appropriate for his house to be full of musical instruments’,40 he articulates the sense of cognitive dissonance that the representationally complex textuality of the fragment anticipates through its own memorability, performable in scenarios that may jar markedly with the sense of events in space evoked by the text.41 We can say ‘anticipates’ because we can articulate in the final phrase, ἐπεὶ | δὴ πρώτιστ’ ὐπὰ τὦργον ἔσταμεν τόδε, a sense in which the open-ended deixis of τόδε can be configured in metaliterary terms as a marker of the reperformability of this text in future settings that continue, and allow performers to evoke a connection with, a sense of (p.106) an original, authentic, Alcaean moment, with the memorialization of the ‘house of weapons’ instantiated at every new moment in the transmission of the sense of that event.42 The combination of vivid materialism and deictic projections of an event or activity to which ‘we’ are implicitly invited to commit ourselves foregrounds the representational qualities of this text as a literary thing. The success of Alcaeus’ poetic voice is built on the literary self-consciousness of the text’s slippery

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Materialities of Political Commitment? anticipation of its own reception, into contexts where viewers and performers may precisely not be able to see the things Alcaeus appears to be describing. The potential for dissonance marks the memorability of the sense of an original authentic commitment to a cause, generating desire in subsequent audiences and performers to reach out and join that moment, or assess whether they feel they ought to, despite and/or because of an awareness that they are unable to breach that representational divide. Further, via reperformances in future sympotic scenarios beyond Alcaeus’ Mytilene, audiences and performers may also enjoy the illusion, experiencing and delighting in a representation of at least a sense of what that milieu might have been like, whatever their own politics. The literarity of Alcaean lyric objectifies the sense of a moment in time as a textual event, but also allows it to be subjectively (re)imagined and experienced through performance and reception. The initially vivid ‘glitter’ of fr. 140 may ultimately figure the illusory allure of those weapons in that textual space. Elsewhere Alcaeus also focuses attention on weapons as objects that may have representational significance in more ways than one. In fr. 350 Alcaeus mocks his brother’s boastfulness about campaigning in Babylon, sending up Antimenidas’ ‘tall story’ via the exotic trophy that appears, at least, to want to claim its authenticity: ἦλθες ἐκ περάτων γᾶς ἐλεφαντίναν λάβαν τὼ ξίφεος χρυσοδέταν ἔχων συμμάχεις δ’ ἐτέλεσσας Βαβυλωνίοισ’ ἄεθλον μέγαν, εὐρύσαο δ’ ἐκ πόνων, κτένναις ἄνδρα μαχάταν βασιλη⟨ί⟩ων παλάσταν ἀπυλείποντα μόναν ἴαν παχέων ἀπὺ πέμπων. (p.107)

You’ve come from the ends of the earth with an ivory sword-hilt bound with gold. In your service with the Babylonians you achieved a great feat, and rescued them from troubles, by killing a man who was only a single palm’s breadth short of five royal cubits tall! Alcaeus is playing back at his brother, but also at us, his brother’s outlandish story based on the object he has brought back with him, a lavish ivory and gold sword-hilt. The text purports to represent a moment in time, when Alcaeus jokily makes fun of his brother’s unverifiable claim to heroic success at the edge of the known world. If we focus on the literary qualities of this poem, we may notice further how the unverifiability of the brother’s heroic claim rubs off on the text’s own claim to authenticity. The materiality of the sword-hilt frames our engagement with the story, yet is also a materiality that we cannot ourselves see or reach out to touch Page 10 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? beyond the text. Again, we may refer to Cunningham’s insights into literary texts’ obsessions with worlds of material things.43 For Cunningham, part of what makes literary texts distinctive entities is their articulation of a hope that the reality of the material world will rub off on their own inevitably representational, textual, events, in the knowledge that nevertheless such an eventuality is impossible. For Alcaeus, the unverifiability of the brother’s claim in fr. 350 serves as a marker of the lack of authenticity inherent in, and recycled by, the literarity of the poem’s brotherly encounter, and the brother’s exotic Babylonian trophy. The illusory quality of exotic ivory is already figured in archaic poetics at Odyssey 19.562–5 in the punning play with the ivory (ἐλέφαντος, 564) gates of illusory (ἐλεφαίρονται, 565) dreams; the association between ivory and illusion becomes a sympotic topos subsequently.44 In Alcaeus, the tension between materiality and immateriality marks, in what I choose to term a metaliterary moment, the oscillation between presence and absence. The exotic otherness of the object that the brother has brought home is a way of prefiguring a response to Alcaeus’ voice and Alcaeus’ textual world, expressive of the tension between, on the one hand, wanting to be (with) Alcaeus, to take on his voice and generate a sense of being ‘there’, and, on the other, realizing that this is illusory, or at least representationally (p.108) mediated. It is this tension—in ecphrastic terms, an oscillation between ‘hope’ and ‘fear’45—that makes Alcaean lyric so fascinating. The final case studies discussed here help to reveal more clearly, first, the ways in which Alcaeus’ lyric claims can be made sense of within a wider view of Greek sympotic experience. Second, they also draw attention to Alcaean metaliterarity. Again we are dealing in terms of Mark Payne’s view of lyric as a ‘forum for truth claims’:46 indeed, Alcaeus’ truth claims about truth itself. Consider fragments 333 and 366. The first of these is cited by Tzetzes on Lycophron (Tzetz. in Lyc. Alex. 212): οἱ οἰνωθέντες τὰ τοῦ λογισμοῦ ἀπόρρητα ἐκφαίνουσιν· ὅθεν καὶ Ἀλκαῖόςφησιν·       οἶνος γὰρ ἀνθρώπω δίοπτρον

Drunks reveal their secret thoughts. So Alcaeus says: ‘for wine is a window onto man’. The second is cited by a scholiast on Plato’s Symposium (Σ Pl. Symp. 217e): παροιμία οἶνος καὶ ἀλήθεια, ἐπὶ τῶν ἐν μέθηι τὴν ἀλήθειαν λεγόντων. ἔστιδε ἄισματος Ἀλκαίου ἀρχή·       οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παῖ, καὶ ἀλάθεα.

‘Wine and truth’ is a proverb used of those who speak the truth when drunk. It is the beginning of a song by Alcaeus: Page 11 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? ‘Wine, dear boy, and truth’. The framing of these citations in their ancient sources provides one opening for interpretation. The fragments can be seen to articulate the truth of how men behave when under the influence of alcohol, revealing things about themselves not available in other less candid environments. This is a valuable view, and it is important to recognize Alcaeus as the originator of these proverbial claims about the nature and effects of the drinking culture of Greek symposia, in which we can assume these poems were originally transmitted.47 Yet we can also make two further moves. First, we can situate these claims within a broader semiotics of sympotic experience, by factoring in the ways in which the material culture of the symposium—in particular the semiotics of sympotic ceramic iconography—is implicated (p.109) in this manipulation and transformation of symposiasts’ subjectivities, their senses of themselves and of each other. Robin Osborne especially has shown the complexity of the ways in which sympotic wine vessels engage and transform the subjectivity of viewers through the material culture of drinking. His discussion of the name-vase of the Berlin Painter is a particularly good example.48 This is a wine amphora whose twin iconographic scheme—Hermes-satyr-fawn/musical satyr—focuses attention on the nature of man’s position in the world, in relation to both the divine and the bestial, through the symbolic role, identity, and representation of the satyr within a sympotic environment.49 For Alcaeus and his sympotic reception, we can interpret ‘wine is a window onto man’ as a nod towards the sympotic environment as always already representational, a world in which the material culture of drinking may already generate a sense of, and indeed overdetermine, men’s nature and presence. One classic iconographic motif of sympotic ceramics, which may be traced back into Alcaeus’ time, is the presence of eyes on the exteriors of drinking-cups.50 The eye-cup as a vessel for the precariously transformatory power of alcohol and the Dionysiac fills out the sympotic space with ever more illusional presences, while also transforming the drinker at the moment of wine consumption.51 Iconographically self-reflexive ceramics become non-human actors, producing new claims and assertions.52 (p.110) Finally, though—and this is my second move—we should appreciate that texts also can, of course, be non-human actors. Alcaeus, in fr. 333, objectifies wine as a material substance, but also sees it as a transformative, representational screen. In gesturing towards the representational aspects of the accoutrements of sympotic drinking culture, this text also produces an additional metaliterary triangulation. That is, implicit here is the claim that poetry itself is a window onto man: one more screen of signs.53 Through the assertion of a truth-claim about wine, and its relation with truth, a truth-claim about Alcaean lyric is also being asserted and projected. Alcaeus’ poetry Page 12 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? constructs a world of sympotic events and sympotic materialism—where wine itself becomes a material thing, a kind of window, or indeed mirror—against which it may bounce, and thus generate, its own implicit claims about the nature of the literary, and why the literary matters. Here again the remarks by Rita Felski are relevant and suggestive: [A]rt’s autonomy—if by autonomy we mean its distinctiveness and specialness—does not rule out connectedness but is the very reason that connections are forged and sustained. There never was an isolated selfcontained aesthetic object to begin with, because any such object would have long since sunk into a black hole of oblivion rather than coming to our attention. Artworks can only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts. If they are not to fade quickly from view, they must persuade people to hang them on walls…, debate them with their friends.54 (p.111) Both sympotic ceramics and Alcaean poetics have a place here. Alcaeus’ sympotic lyric provides a window onto, and makes truth-claims about, Alcaeus’ own worlds, through the diversity of voices his poems offer up.55 And it is the special literary ways in which those things are done, inviting performers and audiences in to think with Alcaeus, and attempt to be part of his world, to try to break down the barriers, despite the inevitable representational divide, that make Alcaeus’ voice-worlds distinctive. Objectifiable as past places in time, they are also capable of creating new subjectivities. The final two words, καὶ ἀλάθεα, of the proverbial assertion of fr. 366, οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παῖ, καὶ ἀλάθεα, hover delicately between a predicative and a disjunctive interpretability in relation to οἶνος, ‘wine’. Is it that ‘wine…is also truth’, or is it that ‘wine…and truth [are different things]’? The very fact that Alcaeus’ text can be interpreted as asking this question reveals the text’s cultural import, implicitly shedding light for Greeks on the ambivalent nature of the sympotic experience they are choosing to construct for themselves. This is a world of presences, absences, and illusions, and of assertive texts and objects. We can now take the opportunity to offer some further thoughts about the role of the proverbial within Alcaeus, as we move towards a close. One of the successes of Alcaeus’ poetry was its creation and preservation of truth-claims about the world that could take on the form of proverbs.56 Here we can add to Yatromanolakis’ account of the survival and transmission of Alcaeus’ poetry: (p.112) The popularity of Alcaeus’ songs during the classical period was based, among other socio-cultural factors, on the fact that they were composed for a politically anxious period, an age pregnant with fundamental concerns relevant to fifth-century Greece. The speaking voice in Alcaeus’ Page 13 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? songs…urged or encouraged audiences to reflect on the vicissitudes of political life in the city-state in the most intriguing, as well as sympotic, manner.57 This goes only so far. In its eagerness to situate Alcaeus predominantly in a sociopolitics of reception, it does not offer a fuller account of what it is about the poetry, other than its political urgency, that made it so memorably reperformable. Yet, if we understand the proverbial quality of Alcaeus’ poetic statements, which are so well-attested in the latter traditions of citation, and accept the deeper complexity of their claims, we are drawn into a semiotic space where lyric representation and lyric epideixis, existing in tension, entice us in, whether through performance or reading, and make us think self-consciously about our attitudes to them, at the same time as we replay the sense of Alcaean subjectivities embedded in them. If, as Culler has it, lyric’s ‘consummate success is, ironically, to become a commonplace, to enter the language and the social imaginary, to help give us a world to inhabit’,58 then Alcaeus succeeded spectacularly. This is not only because of his evocation of a persona of commitment to specific ethical/political stances—though that is one important way of considering his impact. The variety of ways in which his complex poetics toys with questions of access, representation, and self-consciousness is at least as important for the ongoing appeal of his poetry, on its own terms.59 The wider cultural value of Alcaeus is the way in which his plays with language, representation, and voice shaped ancient thought-worlds. From a sympotic perspective, these plays themselves, in their literarity, are contingently constitutive of the symposium as a space for (p.113) and of imagination. This can, and should, include political imagination, but that is not all. One final irony with the poetic creation of proverbs and clichés is the danger of essentialism that is the flipside of their success. The more capacious view of Alcaeus on the basis of his own texts offered here provides a more nuanced explanation for his allure. Yet we also need to be aware that the vicissitudes of transmission, including transmission beyond the worlds of archaic and classical Greece and sympotic culture, have had a tendency to simplify and reduce Alcaeus to a literary decontextualization of attitudes. While Horace, in his first encounter with Alcaeus in Odes 1.32, is balanced in his assessment of the political assertiveness of Alcaeus as only one strand in his poetic make-up, this is not only a response to Alcaeus’ complexity, but also a statement by Horace about his own ambivalence towards political engagement.60 Only a few poems later, Horace adopts the Alcaean mask of political commitment more fully, famously appropriating Alcaeus fr. 332 in his Cleopatra ode, Odes 1.37.61 Horace later, in Odes 2.13, produces a polarization of Sappho and Alcaeus, part of Horace’s selfconsciousness about the choice of Alcaeus as his model for an engaged poetics,

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Materialities of Political Commitment? but also ‘a recognition of the reductive way in which the reception of a tradition works amongst posterity’.62 So we end with a point about tradition. The traditional ways of interpreting Alcaeus in the more recent history of Greek literary criticism are precisely that: traditional, in the sense that their critical manoeuvres, in finding an Alcaeus that fits their purposes, can be traced back to antiquity. In the present piece, though, I have argued for a different take on the traditional with Alcaeus. Opening up his poetry on its own terms, through detailed literary-critical and cultural scrutiny, has revealed a richer set of reasons why his texts entered and became canonical within the traditions, and thought-worlds, of ancient literary history. (p.114) Notes:

Warmest thanks to the editors for stimulating discussions about issues arising. (1) Burnett (1983) 5–6. (2) Notably Gentili (1988); Kurke (1994) (the theoretical perspective of which is critiqued by Hammer (2004) 499–501, though the study is cited with approval in a discussion of the political history of archaic Mytilene by Spencer (2000)); ultimately Rösler (1980), apparently not seen by Burnett. Cf. the Introduction to this volume, pp. 1–5. (3) The focus of my current research on lyric and Pindar particularly, with Fearn (2017). (4) Cf. Yatromanolakis (2009a) 226 and Hutchinson (2001) 192, cited by Spelman (2015a) 354 n. 6. See also Uhlig, this volume, who elucidates Alcaeus’ poetics from a different vantage point. (5) Reframability through reperformance is an issue that Burnett appreciated: cf. Burnett (1983) 4–5, critiquing the ‘law of occasionality’ with reference to work by Denys Page and Martin West. Yet the reframability of the lyric voice has only just begun to emerge once again as a focus of critical attention in recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the idea of lyric: see esp. Culler (2015); also Payne (2006) and (2007) on Pindar. (6) See Felski (2015) 155–7, critiquing New Historicism (expanding upon Felski (2011) 577); furthermore, Felski (2015) 159–60: ‘Context does not automatically or inevitably trump text, because the very question of what counts as context and the merits of our explanatory schemes are often anticipated, explored, queried, expanded, or reimagined in the words we read.’ Cf. Feeney (2004) 18– 20. (7) Lyric and truth claims: Payne (2006) 160; Payne (2007) 8: ‘the poem is a forum for direct truth claims about the world on the part of the poet, regardless Page 15 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? of the particular status of the “I” that speaks the poem’ (cited by Culler (2015) 121); Culler (2015) 309 on the repeatability of such apophthegms. (8) Culler (2015) esp. ch. 3, ‘Theories of the Lyric’. (9) Tucker (1985) 241–2, at Culler (2015) 118. (10) Culler (2015) 131. (11) Gentili (1988) 42. See further Spelman (2015a) 354 with nn. 8–9 on the traditional readings of fr. 140 in particular. (12) See, e.g., Felson (2004a) 253 and the range of discussions in Felson (2004b); Danielewicz (1990). (13) Cunningham (2007) 61. Compare also Peponi (2004) 296 in a broader discussion of deixis in Alcman’s Partheneion 1: ‘Deixis, the verbal process of pointing towards an extra-linguistic context, is essentially — although not exclusively — a way of referring to sight.’ For more discussion of the place of ecphrasis in Classics and critical discourse, see in particular Webb (1999) and (2009), with the corrective of Squire (2013); also Becker (1995); Elsner (2002). (14) Elsner (2007) xvii. (15) Bryson (1988) 91–2: ‘Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.’ (16) On lyric and the literary, see also the Introduction to this volume, pp. 4–6. (17) See most recently Feeney (2016) 153–4; from a different perspective, Maslov (2015) esp. 323. (18) Feeney (2016) 224. (19) Culler (2002) 73 = (1983) 87, discussing Barthes on Balzac in Barthes (1970),trans. (1974). As Culler also points out there, Barthes’ analysis in S/Z has the unexpected outcome of subverting the polarities that structure literary histories. A similar point is made in a different context by Mousley (2013) 11: ‘Literary texts themselves often show little respect for period concepts…Literary history is so full of anachronisms that it begins to look as though anachronism is more the rule than the exception. Literary anachronism…is unsurprising, however, because if it is true that literary works explore what it is to be human, then the likelihood is that their explorations will resonate with subsequently named “isms” that themselves name different kinds of human interest and concern.’

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Materialities of Political Commitment? (20) An associated factor here is the divide within Classics between Latinist and Hellenist approaches to the contextualization of literary texts: cf. Feeney (1993) 55–7 with Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) on Horace; Feeney (1998) 23, 61. See further Phillips (2016) 23 for a review of the notion of performance and textuality within literary-theoretical discourse of writing and speech, and the limitations of a privileging of performance as a category within scholarship on archaic and classical Greek poetry. (21) Cf. Geertz (1972) 28 (quoted by Elsner (1995) 87): ‘Yet because…subjectivity does not properly exist until it is…organised, art forms generate and regenerate that very subjectivity they pretend only to display’. To appropriate the language of anthropology, etic approaches are not irredeemable but in fact essential and fundamental for approximating evaluations of ancient forms of thought and experience. Whether Alcaeus himself would have understood the issues being discussed here (answer: most unlikely!) is a valid question to ask, but only in part; and etic theoretical approaches may shed more light on what an emic experience of sympotic culture may have amounted to, even if inevitably only in approximation. Moreover, on anthropological terms the relation between etic and emic approaches may in fact replay, across different terrain, the issues that the present literary approach to Alcaeus’ evocations of materiality and context already highlights. Recourse to anthropological approaches does not solve the communicational problems of Greek poetics, but may only reframe them in different terms. (22) Payne (2006) for pragmatic approaches to Greek cultural self-invention: see further n. 28. (23) Cf. Hutchinson (2001) 190 for a different articulation of the general issue with Alcaeus. (24) See Harman (2012) 199; Altieri (2007) 75. (25) Murray (1990) 11. (26) Murray (1990) 9 with Rösler (1980). (27) Cf. the ambivalence in Tim Whitmarsh’s articulation of the relation between lyric and sympotic context: ‘Lyric poetry is, or at least presents itself as, poetry in action, explicitly articulating a creative, mutually constitutive relationship with its context’ (Whitmarsh (2004) 56, italics in the original). (28) Here I am influenced by Payne (2006) and Fowler (1994), appropriating the pragmatism of Richard Rorty in his conceptualization of a poeticized culture, as my response to the vast diversity of representations that sympotic material provides evidence for in both literary and visual terms, and as a reaction to traditional anthropological conceptions of archaic and classical Greek culture, in Page 17 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? which the symposium has been viewed as a controlled and controlling institution: e.g. Schmitt-Pantel (1990) 15; cf. Feeney (1998) 61 for critique; Schmitt-Pantel’s model taken further by Węcowski (2014), who speaks in terms of rules and symbolic codes in conclusion at 335–6. Compare, very differently, Rorty (1989) 53–4: ‘A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. It would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are such artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts.’ This is my preferred model for understanding the sympotic: a cultural space that is up for grabs, ongoingly self-authorized and articulated through a complex diversity of interactions between performers, texts, authors, and material culture. (29) For overdetermination in criticism and literary theory, and its application to Greek literature and ideology, cf. Ruffell (2011), esp. 28. (30) Most recently Spelman (2015a) 358. (31) See esp. Murray (1993) 155: ‘a vivid picture of the life style of these aristocrats’. Burnett (1983) 123 adds a note of caution with ‘idealized’ but adopts a similar perspective: ‘The hetaireia that Alcaeus loved was a band of noble friends…Alcaeus made battle and banquet one by reminding his idealized comrades that he sang, and they listened, in the presence of their arms’ (my italics). (32) Spelman (2015a). (33) Ibid. 353 n. 4. See also Clay (2016) 206, with earlier discussions. (34) See Mitchell (1994) 152–4 on ‘ecphrastic hope’; cf. Bartsch and Elsner (2007) i–ii. (35) Cf. most recently Gentili and Catenacci (2007) 178 ad fr. 140.16. (36) Backdrops that may, generally, at least in archaic and classical Greece, be assumed to have been sympotic. Sympotic backdrops are evoked elsewhere in Alcaeus, with gestures towards decorated drinking cups, for instance: fr. 346.1– 2. For Athenaeus (10.430a, following with citations of Alc. frs 338, 347, 367, 335, 332, and 342), Alcaeus is a committed drinker in all seasons and on all occasions: κατὰ γὰρ πᾶσαν ὥραν καὶ πᾶσαν περίστασιν πίνων ὁ ποιητὴς οὗτος εὑρίσκεται. This might now be better reframed as a reaction to Alcaeus’ construction and anticipation of a diversity of sympotic receptions in which the plurality of his voices can be reframed and replayed. Cf. Ibycus fr. 286.7–7 for a sense of the insistency of erotic subjectivity, ἐμοὶ δ’ ἒρος | οὐδεμίαν κατάκοιτος ὥραν. Page 18 of 21

 

Materialities of Political Commitment? (37) E.g. Segal (1994) 124; Vernant (1996); cf. Ford (1992) 49–50. (38) Rösler (1990b) 230. (39) For further interest in the language of forgetting (and, by implication, remembering) in Alcaeus, cf. e.g. Alc. frs 70.9 and 73.8, where the persona speaking wishes to forget previous upheavals that the poems themselves have already projected and thus preserved. (40) Ath. 14.627b. Cf. the claim by Slater (1990) 215–16 that in fr. 140 ‘Alcaeus’ description of the armour that hangs around the andron exploits the emotive force of the symbols of war in the context of peace’. (41) Or, indeed, in scenarios that might provoke other performed reactions from sympotic participants, through other exemplifications of a committed sympotic self-consciousness: for example, the committed anti-strife claim of Anacr. fr. eleg. 2. On the importance of sympotic space in Alc. fr. 140, see also Clay (2016) 206– 7. On the deixis of the final line, Clay observes that ‘the exhortation not to “forget these things” may involve more than merely remembering their symbolic value to inspire courage, but may offer a mnemonic device for recalling the scene and its setting each time the poem is sung, creating for the hetairia a shared communal vision’ (207). The argument of the present paper, however, puts rather more pressure on the relation between literary discourse and its contextualizability, and on the possibility of precise specification for (re-)performance scenarios reconstructable in the text’s image. Rather than being a ‘mnemonic device’ allowing ‘recall’ of the scene evoked, the memorability of Alcaeus’ own text negotiates with particular nuance the very dynamics of its accessibility. (42) Cf. Culler (2015) 294–5 for the continual vivification of a sense of presence and spontaneity as a marker of lyric poetry. (43) See Cunningham (2007) 61. (44) Further Fearn (2007) 62ff. with esp. Bacch. fr. 20B.13; cf. carm. conv. 900–1 PMG = Ath. 15.695cd. (45) Mitchell (1994) ch. 5, ‘Ecphrasis and the other’, esp. 152–7. (46) Cf. n. 7. (47) For Alcaeus and proverbs, Yatromanolakis (2009b) 270–1; further discussion later. (48) Osborne (1998) 25–8 on Berlin F 2160, ARV2 196.1, 1633; Para. 342; BAdd 190.

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Materialities of Political Commitment? (49) For more on satyrs in sympotic iconography and as sociocultural constructions, see Lissarrague (1990b) and (1990c); Hedreen (2006) for interconnections with iambic poetry; further general discussion of ceramic iconography within sympotic culture in Lissarrague (1990a) esp. 47–67. (50) Ferrari (1986); Hedreen (2007). Ferrari (1986) 13–14 (pace Hedreen (2007) 214) with pl. 9 shows that the earliest extant examples are East Greek, subgeometric in style, and datable from the late seventh into the sixth centuries; cf. Alc. fr. 346.2 for decorated drinking-cups (cf. n. 36). For one such early East Greek bowl-fragment, see Oxford Ash. Mus. G116.6, CVA Oxford, Ashmolean Museum 2.76 pl. (392) 1.16. Much the most famous come from Athens towards the end of the archaic period and onwards, by artists such as Exekias with Munich 2044 (ABV 146, 21; Para. 60; BAdd 41, on which, classically, Osborne (1998) 21–5). (51) Hedreen (2007) 241: ‘[T]he aesthetic effect of the eye cup is not limited to those moments when it is lifted to the face and, like a mask, replaces the visage of a drinker. The eye cup…also…evoke[s] the presence of an imaginary figure with whom the viewer is invited to identify.’ (52) From later evidence, we also know that ceramics can provide texts of their own, with their own sympotic exhortations, generating a sense of autonomous agency for themselves: for one such example, see the mid-sixth-century Athenian Little Master cup, signed by Phrynos (London BM B424, ABV 168, 169.3; Para. 70; BAdd 48), with its inscription hailing the drinker and inviting him to drink, XAIΡEKAIΠIEIMENAIXΙ (‘Hail, and drink me, yeah!’), the kind of expression which is also found in excerpted citations of Alcaeus, e.g. frs 401 a) and b): χαῖρε καὶ πῶ τάνδε, and δεῦρο σύμπωθι. (53) Again, cf. Bryson (1988) 91–2: see n. 15. It is also worth noting that ‘window’, as a translation for δίοπτρον, is not all that satisfactory. Though the Greek term literally means ‘something to see through onto something else’, the English ‘window’ may imply a representational transparency not straightforwardly available from the original term. Gentili and Catenacci (2007) ad loc. (p. 186) compare the metaphorical self-reflexive usage of ἔσοπτρον at Pind. Nem. 7.14–16, but do not exploit it. The fact that Pindar produces a markedly self-conscious metaphor for poetic activity and may refer back to Alcaeus in so doing allows a little more confidence in a self-reflexive reading of the original. (54) Felski (2011) 584, part of her broader discussion of non-human actors beginning at 581; cf. Felski (2015) 165–6 (the same discussion in a new and expanded context).

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Materialities of Political Commitment? (55) The multiplicity of voices in Alcaeus is a topic worthy of deeper consideration than I have time or space to go into here. For a sense, though, that the question of speaking personae in Alcaeus, even within individual works, is more complex than the straightforwardly committed assertions to action by a poet-warrior, see, for instance, fr. 73, with fragmentary papyrus commentary preserved at fr. 306 i (P.Oxy. 2307 fr. 14 col. i), where, on one reconstruction, a ship (κήνα, line 7) appears to speak, before the poem shifts to a clearly sympotic scenario foregrounding Bycchis, one of the poet’s associates, as an addressee of Alcaeus. (56) In the extant fragments preserved in citations, later authors refer to or imply the proverbial status of the citation on a number of occasions: fr. 366, παροιμία οἶνος καὶ ἀλήθεια (Σ Pl. Symp. 217e); fr. 439, Πιτάνη εἰμί· αὔτη παρ’ Ἀλκαίῳ κεῖται (Zenob. 5.61, with explanation); cf. fr. 339 (commentator on Aratus), fr. 342 (Ath. 10.430c), fr. 364 (Stob. Ecl. 4.32.35); fr. 393 (Simp. in Cael. 1.4); fr. 427/112 Test Voigt. (Σ M in Aesch. Sept. 398 (385)); fr. 437 (Ael. Aristid. xlv.114); fr. 438 (Plut. De def. or. 410c); fr. 442 (Σ Soph. OC 954). Indeed, many of the shortest citations reveal Alcaeus as a poetic authority on a wealth of Greek lore. Cf. the possibility of a Pindaric borrowing from Alcaeus referred to in n. 53. (57) Yatromanolakis (2009a) 204. (58) Culler (2015) 131. (59) Yatromanolakis comes closest to this view elsewhere, at (2009b) 271. Yet he does not build this account into his explanation for Alcaeus’ reception. The process of extracting and rearticulating Alcaean maxims appears to have started in earnest in Old Comedy and Hellenistic poetry, with Theocr. 29.1 decontextualizing/defamiliarizing Alc. fr. 366: see further Hunter (1996) 171–6, esp. 175, for Theocritus’ reconfiguration of Alcaeus’ ‘triteness’ unflatteringly; for Aristophanes, see esp. fr. 141.3–4, paraphrased at Aristoph. Vesp. 1234–5, and fr. 345, cited at Av. 1410–11; Kugelmeier (1996) 25–6 and 59–60; Collins (2004) 92. And it is likely already to have begun in symposia themselves: in general, Collins (2004) 63–98. (60) Hor. C. 1.32.5–12; Feeney (1993) 47. (61) See Lowrie (1997) 145–6. (62) Feeney (1993) 49 with Hor. C. 2.13.21–40; cf. Feeney (2002) 10–11; Davis (1991) 85.

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What is a Setting?

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

What is a Setting? G. O. Hutchinson

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords The idea that a poem has ‘a setting’, this chapter argues, should give way to a more dynamic sense of changing spatial contexts. These contexts form part of a structuring which informs much personal lyric poetry, as is illustrated from Alcaeus and Horace: in this structuring, situation and resolution are in conflict, and the conflict is often heightened through opposing spaces. Spaces frequently contrast in scale; one spatial context often changes in a poem; spatial contexts are commonly not real or immediate. The poetry is mobile and unpredictable, but shaped by deep structures—which, in contrast with some genres, it does not keep to a normal sequence. Opposed spatial domains are exemplified from Joseph Roth, the search for structures from Lessing. Keywords:   setting, lyric, Alcaeus, Horace, deep structure, space, spatial contexualization

Discussions of Greek and Latin lyric poems often talk about their settings. In posing the question of what a setting is, my hope is not so much to produce a definition as to investigate the notion and bring it into contact with other aspects of the poems (or songs); doing this should enlarge our literary understanding of them. We could start by defining roughly the process of ‘setting’ in a verbal or visual work: bringing the work into any kind of spatial context. Scholars of lyric are particularly interested in ‘settings’ that could tell us about the circumstances of first performance; but the broader approach here is inspired particularly by the use of the term in art history. Sometimes, indeed, scholars mean, by ‘the setting’ of a poem, not a context created or recreated by the poem, but the occasion on which it was, as a matter of fact, first performed,

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What is a Setting? regardless of what the poem is about; to avert confusion, that usage will be avoided here.1 One should begin by objecting to the idea that each poem has ‘a setting’: that idea does not do justice to the dynamic and mobile nature of this poetry. Firstly, the term is singular, and suggests that each poem has one way in which it is located in space. Secondly, it sounds like something decisive which in a sense precedes the poem; even if we learn about the setting later on, we are to think ‘Ah! so the poem is set in…’, or ‘so that is the setting of the poem’. But these poems evolve in time. (p.116) The phenomenon we should be interested in has much more to do with elements that are in opposition to each other. To help us see what is involved, and to defamiliarize the whole matter, we may take a jump away from lyric, poetry, and the ancient world, and look at three passages from a twentiethcentury novel, Roth’s Radetzkymarsch (first published 1932). In the first, our hero is paying a consolatory visit to the widower of the woman who was his own lover—as, so he hopes, the widower is unaware. The embarrassment of the scene is marked by the present tense (Roth (2014) 66): Der Leutnant gießt Wasser aus der Karaffe in den Himbeersaft, man schweigt, es rinnt mit starkem Strahl aus dem geschwungenen Mund der Karaffe, plätschert ein wenig und ist wie eine kleine Antwort auf das unermüdliche Fließen des Regens draußen, den man die ganze Zeit über hört. Er hüllt, man weiß es, das einsame Haus ein und scheint die beiden Männer noch einsamer zu machen. Allein sind sie. The lieutenant pours water from the carafe into the raspberry juice. Both men are silent. The water pours in a strong stream from the mouth of the carafe as it is swung down; it chatters a little, and is like a small answer to the tireless flow of the rain outside, which is heard the whole time. The rain envelops the solitary house, as the men are aware; it seems to make both of them still more solitary. They are alone. In the second passage, our ‘hero’ finds himself leading a military attack on strikers (255). Die Jäger schossen, wie die Instruktionen Major Zoglauers gelautet hatten, die erste Salve in die Luft. Hierauf wurde es ganz still. Eine Sekunde lang konnte man alle friedlichen Stimmen des sommerlichen Mittags hören. Und man spürte das gütige Brüten der Sonne durch den Staub, den die Soldaten und die Menge aufgewirbelt hatten, und durch den verwehenden leichten Brandgeruch der abgeschossenen Patronen. Auf einmal schnitt die helle, heulende Stimme einer Frau durch den Mittag.

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What is a Setting? The privates shot the first salvo into the air, in accord with Major Zoglauer’s instructions. Then things became completely quiet. For a second one could hear all the peaceful voices of the summer midday. And one could detect the kindly brooding of the sun through the dust stirred up by the soldiers and the crowd and through the light smell of burning wafting away from the cartridges that had been fired. All of a sudden the clear, wailing voice of a woman broke through the midday. The third passage is the ending of the novel: the father of our hero is remembered by a friend, with whom he used to play chess (404). (p.117) Und er spielte mit sich selbst eine Partie, schmunzelnd, von Zeit zu Zeit auf den leeren Sessel gegenüber blickend und in den Ohren das sanfte Geräusch des herbstlichen Regens, der noch immer unermüdlich gegen die Scheiben rann.’ And he played a game with himself, smiling privately, and looking from time to time at the empty chair opposite; in his ears was the gentle sound of the autumn rain, which was still pouring tirelessly against the windowpanes. In these passages, there is a lot of border-crossing in the language between the opposed elements or spatial domains: so ‘kindly brooding’ of the non-human sun, the non-human ‘voices’ of summer (second passage); ‘tireless’ of the rain (first passage); the ‘answer’ to the rain, as if the rain is saying something, from the carafe, non-human but in the humans’ indoor space (first passage). But this crossing only brings out the oppositions. In the first passage, the world of the men is spatially enclosed, and its isolation strangely increased, by the alien element outside; in the second, the benevolence ascribed to nature is set against the inhumanity of man; in the last, by a pointed development from the first, the alien domain outside helps to achieve, within the coffee-house and the man, a mysterious harmony.2 Lyric connections will be coming to mind, not least with storms in Alcaeus and Horace; but let us stay with literature in German a little longer, for some other aspects that have already concerned us. The idea that verbal works alter as they go on is seen in the pioneering work of Lessing. In his wide-ranging Laokoon (1766), he robustly places against the slow unfolding of poetry the rapidity with which we combine visual phenomena into a whole (Lessing (1990) 124 (1. Teil, xvii)):3 Wie gelangen wir zu der deutlichen Vorstellung eines Dinges im Raume? Erst betrachten wir die Teile desselben einzeln, hierauf die Verbindung dieser Teile, und endlich das Ganze. Unsere Sinne verrichten diese Page 3 of 18

 

What is a Setting? verschiedene Operationen mit einer so erstaunlichen Schnelligkeit, (p. 118) daß sie uns nur eine einzige zu sein bedünken…Was das Auge mit einmal übersiehet, zählt er [d.h. der Dichter] uns merklich langsam nach und nach zu, und oft geschieht es, daß wir bei dem letzten Zuge den ersten schon wiederum vergessen haben. How do we reach a clear perception of an object in space? First we contemplate its parts individually, then the connection of these parts, and finally the whole. Our senses carry out these different operations with such astonishing rapidity that they appear to us just a single operation…What the eye looks over in a moment, the poet adds on for us bit by bit, with a slowness we notice; it often happens that by the final stroke we have already forgotten the first. This is overstated, to some degree consciously. As it happens, we know more now about the sculptors behind the Laocoön which is Lessing’s starting point; at least one group by the same sculptors, the Scylla scene at Sperlonga, was at least placed in a context where it was to be, not instantly grasped as a whole, but considered in an ensemble with other objects. And it could be thought that in a work as short as a lyric poem, the listener or reader is not likely actually to lose all contact with the beginning by the end.4 It is rewarding to compare Lessing’s work five years later on the epigram. His manner is again down to earth, but there is much more sense of the purposeful alteration and cohesion of the poem as it proceeds; so in what follows (Lessing (2000) 200): Die Hauptregel also, die man, in Ansehnung des Umfanges der Erwartung, zu beobachten hat, ist diese, daß man nicht als ein Schulknabe erweitere; daß man nicht bloß erweitere, um ein Paar Verse mehr gemacht zu haben: sondern daß man sich nach dem zweiten Teile, nach dem Aufschlusse, richte, und urteile, ob und wie viel dieser, durch die größere Ausführlichkeit der Erwartung, an Deutlichkeit und Nachdruck gewinnen könne. The key rule to be observed with regard to the extent of the ‘waiting’ section is not to expand it as a schoolboy might, not to expand it simply to have produced a couple more lines, but rather to prepare for the ‘explanation’ section and judge whether it could gain in clarity and emphasis through the increased elaboration of the ‘waiting’. (p.119) Notable in the whole piece is Lessing’s ambitious attempt to think out a basic underlying structure for the genre. It would be rash to try the same for something as varied and disparate as ancient lyric poetry; but we could perhaps make more of an effort in that direction, in a search for patterns, not rules. This chapter will concentrate particularly on Alcaeus and on Horace. In the case of Page 4 of 18

 

What is a Setting? this sort of lyric, we are not postulating a single sequential form, as from waiting to explanation; rather, we will see the interaction of opposed elements which can move in a variety of unpredictable directions. In epigram, the specific twist is unpredictable; in personal lyric, the poem is. What runs through the conception and shaping of much personal lyric is not one recurring design but this interaction and conflict.5 We may illustrate such opposition first from a very short poem, Horace, Odes 1.11: Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios temptaris numeros. ut melius quidquid erit pati, seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare Tyrrhenum! sapias, uina liques, et spatio breui spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit inuida aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

Leuconoe, do not inquire—it is unlawful to know—what end the gods have given me, and you; do not dabble in Babylonian astrology. How much better to take whatever will be, whether Jupiter has granted us several winters more or this is the last, now wearing down the Tyrrhenian Sea with the rocks confronting it! If you’ve got sense, sieve the wine, and cut back your long hopes into a short space. Even as we speak, grudging time will have fled. Pluck the day, and trust the future as little as you can. The cosmic violence of the winter storm on the sea outside is set against the small-scale, relaxed use of liquid that the speaker suggests. (The contrast is stronger than in the first passage of Roth.) The intimate interior is enhanced, and with it the fleeting moment of time, encapsulated in the extreme brevity of the poem and the breathlessness of the major asclepiads. Within that brevity, various (p.120) extremely short phrases (in lines 6–8) succeed the longer sentence on the storm (3–6). The poem has extension, but only just.6 The poem is itself opposed to 1.9, which leads the reader through many scenes and thoughts and, as we now know, Sapphic, Alcaic, and other intertexts (intertextuality further complicates the simple idea of setting). The opening two stanzas of 1.9 already offer conflicting elements, with a contrast in scale: a mountain and plural woods and rivers against indoor bustle with logs and a jar, freezing and struggle against brisk action; the opposition is swiftly conveyed in dissolue frigus.7 Of course the start of that poem reworks Alcaeus fr. 338. ὔει μὲν ὀ Ζεῦϲ, ἐκ δ᾿ ὀράνω μέγαϲ Page 5 of 18

 

What is a Setting? χείμων, πέπαγαιϲιν δ᾿ ὐδάτων ῤόαι <                                                                       >     — κάββαλλε τὸν χείμων᾿, ἐπὶ μὲν τίθειϲ πῦρ, ἐν δὲ κέρναιϲ οἶνον ἀφειδέωϲ μέλιχρον, αὐτὰρ ἀμφὶ κόρϲαι       μόλθακον ἀμφι γνόφαλλον.

Zeus is raining; a great storm is falling from the sky; the streams are frozen…Down with the winter; heap up the fire, mixing sweet wine unstintingly, and setting a soft cushion round my head. Of the first stanza, we have only the first two lines, but those give us a large scale, with Zeus, the sky, and a big storm, to set against the second stanza, with its indoor mixing of wine and positioning of cushions. The style of the second stanza contrasts with at least the first two lines of the first, and their brief main clauses (the second has no verb): one sentence, in which a main clause is followed flowingly by three participial phrases. The opening phrase (κάββαλλε τὸν χείμων᾿) more strongly than in Horace annihilates the outside world from the perspective of inside. (p.121) After these first examples, we may look more fully at the passage of Athenaeus which gives us the last quotation (10.429f–430d). ἐγὼ δ᾿, ἐπεὶ παρεξέβην περὶ τῶν ἀρχαίων κράϲεων διαλεγόμενοϲ, ἐπαναλήψομαι τὸν λόγον, τὰ ὑπὸ Ἀλκαίου τοῦ μελοποιοῦ λεχθέντα ἐπὶ νοῦν βαλλόμενοϲ. φηϲὶ γάρ που οὗτοϲ [fr. 346.4] ἔγχεε κέρναιϲ ἔνα καὶ δύο. ἐν τούτοιϲ γάρ τινεϲ οὐ τὴν κρᾶϲιν οἴονται λέγειν αὐτόν, ἀλλὰ ϲωφρονικὸν ὄντα καθ᾿ ἕνα κύαθον ἄκρατον [ἄκρ. del. Olson] πίνειν καὶ πάλιν κατὰ δύο. τοῦτο [τ.: οὕτω?] δὲ ὁ Ποντικὸϲ Χαμαιλέων [fr. 12 Wehrli] ἐκδέδεκται, τῆϲ Ἀλκαίου φιλοινίαϲ ἀπείρωϲ ἔχων. κατὰ γὰρ πᾶϲαν ὥραν καὶ πᾶϲαν περίϲταϲιν πίνων ὁ ποιητὴϲ οὗτοϲ εὑρίϲκεται, χειμῶνοϲ μὲν ἐν τούτοιϲ [fr. 338]·             ὔει μὲν ὀ Ζεῦϲ, ἐκ δ᾿ ὀράνω μέγαϲ             χείμων, πέπαγαιϲιν δ᾿ ὐδάτων ῤόαι             <                                                                                   >             —             κάββαλλε τὸν χείμων᾿, ἐπὶ μὲν τίθειϲ             πῦρ, ἐν δὲ κέρναιϲ οἶνον ἀφειδέωϲ             μέλιχρον, αὐτὰρ ἀμφὶ κόρϲαι                         μόλθακον ἀμφι γνόφαλλον. θέρουϲ δέ [fr. 347(a)1–2]· Page 6 of 18

 

What is a Setting?             τέγγε πλεύμοναϲ οἴνωι· τὸ γὰρ ἄϲτρον περιτέλλεται,             ἀ δ᾿ ὤρα χαλέπα, πάντα δὲ δίψαιϲ’ ὐπὰ καύματοϲ τοῦ δ᾿ ἔαροϲ [fr. 367.1]·             ἦροϲ ἀνθεμόεντοϲ ἐπ᾿ ἄϊον ἐρχομένοιο καὶ προελθών [fr. 367.2–3]·             ἐν δὲ κέρνατε τὼ μελιάδεοϲ ὄττι τάχιϲτα             κράτηρα ἐν δὲ τοῖϲ ϲυμπτώμαϲιν [fr. 335]·             οὐ χρῆ κάκοιϲι θῦμον ἐπιτρέπην·             προκόψομεν γὰρ οὐδὲν ἀϲάμενοι,             ὦ Βύκχι, φαρμάκων δ᾿ ἄριϲτον                       οἶνον ἐνεικαμένοιϲ μεθύϲθην. ἐν δὲ ταῖϲ εὐφροναιϲ [Hutchinson: εὐφρόναιϲ A] [fr. 332]·             νῦν χρῆ μεθύϲθην καί τινα πὲρ βίαν             πώνην, ἐπεὶ δὴ κάτθανε Μύρϲιλοϲ καὶ καθόλου δὲ ϲυμβουλεύων φηϲίν [fr. 342]· (p.122)             μηδ᾿ ἒν ἄλλο φυτεύϲηιϲ πρότερον δένδριον ἀμπέλω.

πῶϲ οὖν ἔμελλεν ὁ ἐπὶ τοϲοῦτον φιλοπότηϲ νηφάλιοϲ εἶναι καὶ καθ᾿ ἕνα καὶ δύο κυάθουϲ πίνειν; αὐτὸ γοῦν τὸ ποιημάτιον, φηϲὶ Ϲέλευκοϲ [fr. 79 Müller], ἀντιμαρτυρεῖ τοῖϲ οὕτω ἐκδεχομένοιϲ. φηϲὶ γάρ [fr. 346]· πώνωμεν· τί τὰ λύχν᾿ ὀμμένομεν; δάκτυλοϲ ἀμέρα. κὰδ δ᾿ ἄερρε κυλίχναιϲ μεγάλαιϲ†αιταποικιλλιϲ† — οἶνον γὰρ Ϲεμέλαϲ καὶ Δίοϲ υἶοϲ λαθικάδεον ἀνθρώποιϲιν ἔδωκ᾿. ἔγχεε κέρναιϲ ἔνα καὶ δύο — πλήαιϲ κὰκ κεφάλαϲ, δ᾿ ἀτέρα τὰν ἀτέραν κύλιξ ὠθήτω, ἕνα πρὸϲ δύο ῥητῶϲ κιρνάναι κελεύων. As for me, after my digression while talking about mixtures of wine and water among the ancients, I’ll take my exposition up again. I will pay attention to what the lyric poet Alcaeus said. For he has at some point: pour the wine in, mixing one and two. Some think that in these words he is not talking about mixture: being a restrained sort, he is drinking neat wine in one ladleful and then two. This is how Chamaeleon of Pontus takes it, in his ignorance of Alcaeus’ passion Page 7 of 18

 

What is a Setting? for wine. This poet is found drinking in every season and every circumstance: winter in these lines: Zeus is raining… summer: Wet your lungs with wine [singular imperative]. The star is rising; the season is harsh; everything is thirsty from the heat. spring: I was heeding spring as it came, abundant in flowers with, a few lines later: quick as you can, all mix a bowl of honey-sweet wine disasters: We must not give our heart over to our troubles. We will get nowhere with distress, Bycchis; the best cure is to get wine and become drunk. rejoicing: Now is the time to get drunk and to drink beyond our limits: Myrsilus is dead. His general advice: Do not plant any tree before the vine.

(p.123) So then, how could such a devotee of drink be sober and drink one and then two ladlefuls? The poem itself, Seleucus observes, bears witness against those who take it in this way. What Alcaeus says is: Let us drink! Why are we waiting for the lamps to be lit? Only a finger of day is left. Take the big cups down…Wine was given to men to help them forget their cares by the son of Semele and Zeus. Pour in, and mix one and two from the full top of the jug! Let one cup jostle another! He is explicitly telling someone to mix one with two. As with much ancient scholarship, the passage at first appears remote from our interests, but needs to be looked at both from its own perspective and from ours. How much of the passage is Athenaeus, how much Seleucus, hardly matters for our purposes. As often, the passage has a highly specific focus: what did Alcaeus mean by a particular phrase on the mixing of wine? This question is answered with unflagging rhetorical and argumentative energy. Scornful remarks on Chamaeleon’s ignorance of Alcaeus’ dedication to drink are followed by the claim that Alcaeus drinks at all times and in all circumstances, and demonstration of this from texts. In any case (the passage goes on), the very poem used by Chamaeleon refutes him explicitly. This vigour and flair are characteristic of much ancient scholarship and criticism. But beyond that, we should observe how this analysis has drawn together poems or parts of poems with a related structuring; in most an external element, often one that is Page 8 of 18

 

What is a Setting? spatially defined, is opposed to the scene of drinking. A sense of deep structures lies beneath the scholarly polemic.8 That brings us to a wider structuring. It is characteristic of Alcaeus’ poems, and this sort of personal poetry generally, to set a problematic or unwelcome situation in conflict with a sort of resolution. The resolution may not happen, or it may only be to shelve the problem for now; but it is this sense of opposition that gives energy and movement to the poem. Into this opposition, spatial contextualization fits. ‘Structuring’ does not mean that situation and resolution occur in (p.124) that order: as we will see in a moment, the poem can begin from what will resolve or defer the unsatisfactory situation. The two states of affairs can ‘conflict’, and so can two spatial domains; but there is not necessarily a straightforward equivalence between spaces and states of affairs. The mobility and inventiveness of the poems are pertinent here too.9 The opposition of situation and resolution can be seen in fr. 38a (1–5, 10–12): πῶνε[̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] Μ̣ελάνιππ᾿, ἄμ’ ἔμοι. τι[ ̣ ̣ ] ̣ [ †ὄταμε[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ] διννάεντ᾿†  Ἀχέροντ̣α μεγ̣[ — ζάβαι[ϲ ἀ]ελίω κόθαρον φάοϲ [ ὄψεϲ̣θ᾿;; ἀλλ᾿ ἄγι μὴ μεγάλων ἐπ[ — καὶ γὰρ Ϲίϲυφοϲ…                           ἀλλ᾿ ἄγι μὴ τα[ —] .· ´.· ] ̣τ᾿ ἀβά̣ϲ̣ομεν, αἴ ποτα κἄλλοτα ̣ [ ̣ ̣ ]ην ὄττινα τῶνδε πάθην τα[…10 (p.125)

Drink…, Melanippus, with me. Why (?)…that when you have crossed Acheron you will see…the pure light of the sun? Come, do not…great… Even Sisyphus…Come now, do not…let us sport together youthfully (?), if ever before…to undergo whatever of these things… Here drinking and revelry are set against mortality and wild thoughts of evading it; these excessively large thoughts (μεγάλων) are expressed in large spatial and visual terms: the Acheron, the sun. The clause at the start gives simply the scene of the two men; its opening imperative is taken up in lines 4 and 10 with negative imperatives that return to practicality; the second leads back, it seems, to the enjoyments of this moment. Or take fr. 73.1–11: πὰν φόρτι[ο]ν δ ̣ ̣ [      δ᾿ ὄττι μάλιϲταϲάλ[ —

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What is a Setting? καὶ κύματι πλάγειϲ[ ὄμβρωι μάχεϲθαι ̣ ̣ [ φαῖϲ᾿ οὐδὲν ἰμέρρη[ν,      δ᾿ ἔρματι τυπτομ[έν— κήνα μὲν ἐν τούτ̣[ νόϲτω [or τούτων] λελάθων ὠ̣[ ϲύν τ᾿ ὔμμι τέρπ[ ̣ ̣ ]α̣[   ]ά̣βαιϲ      καὶ πεδὰ Βύκχιδοϲ αὐ̣ ̣ ̣ [ — τὼ δ᾿ ἄμμεϲ ἐϲ τὰν ἄψερον ἀ̣[…

All cargo…struck by waves…fight the rain…says it desires nothing…struck by a reef. That ship…[but I?] forgetting my return/these things,…to enjoy myself with all of you in youthful merriment (?), and…with Bycchis. We again… The labours of the ship at sea, and its own thoughts, unite the ship’s problems and (probably) the speaker’s problems in returning. To this (p.126) spatially depicted situation, even if allegorical, the speaker’s temporary escape is opposed: pleasure with friends and Bycchis.11 In fr. 130b the situation of exile is elaborately depicted, as we shall see, in various spaces; the solution appears only in a despairing question (] ̣[ ´̣] ̣[ ̣]ν̣ ἄπ̣υ πόλλω̣ν πότα δὴ θέοι…), though it is also implicitly represented as a space that the speaker longs for: ἰμέρρων ἀγ̣όρ̣αϲ ἄκουϲαι | καρ̣υ̣[ζ]ο̣μέναϲ̣, ὦ Ἀγεϲιλαΐδα, | καὶ β̣[ό]λ̣λαϲ. In fr. 6, there is a complicated spatial opposition, whatever the status of the wave: the wave and the sea are set against the little space of the ship, which must be protected, and against the secure harbour, which is where the sea ends. The urgent ὠϲ ὤκιϲτα̣[ goes along with the ‘now’ at the start of fr. 332 νῦν χρῆ μεθύϲθην and with striking imperative phrases like κάββαλλε τὸν χείμων᾿, or τέγγε πλεύμοναϲ οἴνωι; the last opens the poem, as does, e.g., πώνωμεν in fr. 346. The action set against the situation is arresting, the conflict full of vitality.12 The same approach applies to many lyrical poems of Horace. So Odes 2.11 begins with worries of the wide world, the warlike Cantabrian and Scythian, and presently opposes them to ‘this pine tree’, hac | pinu. That gesture brings us to the question of reality. The difference between actual and imaginary does not crucially affect the underlying structuring and the clashes of the poems. The vigour of the encounter between situation and resolution is only enhanced if Alcaeus fr. 6 is allegorical, as is made plausible by 9–14, 27 (p.127) μοναρχίαν, and the scholion at the bottom of P.Oxy. XV 1789 fr. 12 Μ̣υρϲίλου.13 Few of the situations and actions in the poems are directly present for audience and singer as the poems display them; this actually applies above all to the symposium. That is not to say the poems are not performed at symposia; but, whereas it Page 10 of 18

 

What is a Setting? might just rain during the performance of Alcaeus fr. 338 ὔει μὲν ὀ Ζεῦϲ, the slave will not hurriedly stoke the fire during the second stanza. Nor will Anacreon’s slave run off for water and wine at Anacreon’s tumultuous imperatives: φέρ᾿ ὕδωρ, φέρ᾿ οἶνον, ὦ παῖ, φέρε δ᾿ ἀνθεμόενταϲ ἡμὶν ϲτεφάνουϲ ἔνεικον, ὡϲ δὴ        πρὸϲ Ἔρωτα πυκταλίζω. (Anacr. fr. 396)

Bring water, bring wine, boy, bring me [or ‘us’] flowering garlands, so that I can box with Love. Nor will his companions conveniently grow rowdy in mid-poem: καὶ προελθὼν τὴν ἀκρατοποϲίαν Ϲκυθικὴν καλεῖ πόϲιν· [Anacr. 356 (b)]        ἄγε δηὖτε μηκέτ᾿ οὕτω        πατάγωι τε κἀλαλητῶι        Ϲκυθικὴν πόϲιν παρ᾿ οἴνωι        μελετῶμεν, ἀλλὰ καλοῖϲ        ὑποπίνοντεϲ ἐν ὕμνοιϲ. (Athen. 10.427a–b)

Later he calls drinking neat wine Scythian drinking: Once more, let us stop the practice of Scythian drinking at our party, with clattering and shouting; rather, let us drink moderately to fine songs.14 Horace’s poems typically go further back in time, and talk of preparing occasions well before they happen. The occasions often include a sacrifice, on a fixed day; a woman might need to be fetched, or enticed (cf. the end of Odes 2.11). The occasion might be tomorrow, or at a (p.128) later hour. The animated immediacy of the Greek poems is more often replaced by a conspicuous gap between poem and event. Many of the spatial contexts we have considered are not directly present for even an imaginary drinker: they can be on any scale. In Horace, Odes 2.11, the Scythian of Quinctius’ worried thoughts is divided from him by the Adriatic. Odes 4.5 addresses the absent Augustus; the desired resolution of his presence is portrayed in a cosmic fashion: he is like the sun and the spring (5–8). lucem redde tuae, dux bone, patriae. instar ueris enim uoltus ubi tuus adfulsit populo, gratior it dies                 et soles melius nitent.

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What is a Setting? Give the light of day back to your country, kindly leader. When your face has shone upon the people like spring, the day proceeds more pleasantly, the suns’ radiance is more kindly. The politics are more grandiose than in Alcaeus; but the next two stanzas turn the national longing into a Sapphic vein: they imitate, as has not so far been noticed, the new poem on Sappho’s brothers (9–16):15 ut mater iuuenem, quem Notus inuido flatu Carpathii trans maris aequora cunctantem spatio longius annuo                 dulci distinet a domo, uotis ominibusque et precibus uocat, curuo nec faciem litore dimouet, sic desideriis icta fidelibus                 quaerit patria Caesarem.

As when a young man has delayed for longer than a year’s space, and the south wind with hostile breath across the waters of the Cretan sea keeps him apart from his sweet home, his mother calls him to her, with vows to the gods, with signs and prayers, and does not move her face from the bending shore, so Caesar’s land yearns for him, struck with faithful longing. icta strikes an amorous note apt to Sappho; an imagined scene conveys, and contrasts with, the large conception of the patria.16 (p.129) The spatial context need not, then, be actual or immediate; and the handling of even the same spatial context need not be static within a poem. So in Alcaeus fr. 130b (1–11, 16–21): ⌊└ἄγνοϲ τ̣ο̣ὶ̣ϲ̣ βιότοιϲ̣.. (.)ιϲ ὀ τάλαιϲ ἔγω ζώω μοῖραν ἔχων ἀγροϊωτίκαν, ἰμέρρων ἀγ̣όρ̣αϲ ἄκουϲαι καρ̣υ̣[ζ]ο̣μέναϲ̣, ὦ Ἀγεϲιλαΐδα,

καὶ β̣[ό]λ̣λαϲ. τὰ πάτηρ καὶ πάτεροϲ πάτηρ καγγ̣ε̣γ̣ήραϲ᾿ ἔχοντεϲ πεδὰ τωνδέων τὼν̣ ἀ̣λλαλοκάκων πολίταν, ἔγ̣ω̣[γ᾿] ἀ̣πὺ τούτων ἀπελήλαμαι,

φεύ̣γ̣ων ἐϲχατίαιϲ᾿.⌋ ὠϲ δ᾿ Ὀνυμακλέηϲ Ὠθάναοϲ ἐοίκηϲα λυκαιχμίαιϲ, φεύ⌊γων⌋ τ⌊ὸν⌋ πό⌊λ⌋εμον…17 οἴκημι κά̣κων ἔκτοϲ ἔχων πόδαϲ·

ὄππαι Λε̣[ϲβί]αδεϲ κριννόμεναι φύαν πώλεντ̣᾿ ἐ̣λ̣κεϲίπεπλοι. περὶ δὲ βρέμει Page 12 of 18

 

What is a Setting? ἄχω θεϲπεϲία γυναίκων ἴρα̣[ϲ ὀ]λολύγαϲ ἐνιαυϲίαϲ

] ̣·[ ´ ̣] ̣[ ̣]ν̣ ἄπ̣υ πόλλω̣ν πότα δὴ θέοι…

I live a life of sanctity,…wretched me, with a country lot. I long to hear the summoning of the agora and the council, Agesilaidas. The things my father and father’s father grew old possessing, together with these citizens who do each other harm, I have been driven away from. I am in exile in the most remote places. Like the Athenian Onomacles, as a (?) I have made my dwelling, fleeing from the war…I live, keeping my feet out of trouble. There the Lesbian women with trailing robes parade as they are being judged for beauty. All around roars the great sound of the women’s sacred annual cry. From…many…when will the gods…? The opening presents a rustic life, which the poetry brings into conflict with the life in a city, marked by civic spaces and citizens. (p.130) After that, the narrator’s context appears as a remote wilderness, with the narrator himself leading a thoroughly abnormal life of rough isolation. Presently the context becomes, presumably at the temple where he is finding sanctuary, the location of picturesque female beauty contests. The scene is not part of his permanent existence in exile, but the projection of an annual festival. It provides community, civilization, and of course beauty; but it contrasts with the masculine world in which the narrator rightly belongs. There may also be an intertextual contrast with the Mytilenean tradition of women’s poetry and its world. The women’s ritual cries to the gods set off the narrator’s contrasting cry of despair. Or consider Horace, Odes 4.11: est mihi nonum superantis annum plenus Albani cadus, est in horto, Phylli, nectendis apium coronis,                 est hederae uis multa, qua crinis religata fulges. ridet argento domus; ara castis uincta uerbenis auet immolato                 spargier agno. cuncta festinat manus; huc et illuc cursitant mixtae pueris puellae; sordidum flammae trepidant rotantes                 uertice fumum. ut tamen noris quibus aduoceris gaudiis, Idus tibi sunt agendae, qui dies mensem Veneris marinae

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What is a Setting?                 findit Aprilem, iure sollemnis mihi sanctiorque paene natali proprio, quod ex hac luce Maecenas meus adfluentis                 ordinat annos. Telephum, quem tu petis, occupauit non tuae sortis iuuenem puella diues et lasciua tenetque grata                 compede uinctum. terret ambustus Phaethon auaras spes et exemplum graue praebet ales Pegasus terrenum equitem grauatus                 Bellerophonten, (p.131) semper ut te digna sequare et ultra quam licet sperare nefas putando disparem uites. age iam, meorum                 finis amorum (non enim posthac alia calebo femina), condisce modos amanda uoce quos reddas: minuentur atrae 35                 carmine curae.

I have a jar full of Alban wine exceeding its ninth year; I have, Phyllis, in my garden parsley for weaving garlands; I have a great quantity of ivy, and when your hair is bound back with ivy you shine forth. The house laughs with silver; the altar desires to be bound with sacred branches and scattered with the blood of a slaughtered lamb. All the band of slaves is hurrying around; hither and thither girls and boys mixed together keep running; the flames shake, as they whirl round grimy smoke. But let me tell you the pleasures you are being invited to. You must spend the Ides in this place, the day which splits up April, the month of Venus, born in the sea. That day is for me rightly one of religious celebration, almost more than my own birthday: it is from this day that my dear Maecenas orders the rich sequence of his years. You are trying to get Telephus; but a wealthy and wanton girl has seized that young man, who is beyond your class, and she holds him bound in fetters that please him. The burning of Phaethon is a terror to greedy hopes; a portentous example is supplied by winged Pegasus, who was irked by the earthly Bellerophon. So you should always pursue things that become you; you should think it a sin to hope for more than you are allowed, and avoid someone whom you do not equal. Come now, the last of my loves—I will not burn for another woman after this— learn a song to perform with your ravishing voice. Song will lessen black anxieties. Page 14 of 18

 

What is a Setting? The poem begins by presenting Phyllis with an attractive picture of the narrator’s estate, to which she is invited. The emphasis at first is on things; the depiction turns round Alcaeus’ description of a δόμοϲ filled with weapons of war: with 7 ridet argento domus cf. Alc. fr. 140.1 μαρμ⌊αίρει δὲ⌋ μέγαϲ δόμοϲ χάλκωι. The place then becomes lively with the activity of the household preparing the celebration. The occasion is next given a temporal and biographical place: the Ides of April and Maecenas’ birthday. A new start now brings in a situation which the narrator wants to change: Phyllis’ inappropriate interest in Telephus is discouraged. (The rival woman is not discouragement enough: exempla bring in briefly a cosmic range.) A resolution is sought through the occasion which was being offered and organized (p.132) at the start of the poem. A pressing imperative, with age and iam, as in Alcaeus, gets Phyllis to act. But now the depiction of the scene changes in character from lines 1–5 and especially from the development in lines 6–12; there is more emphasis now on intimacy and art. The objects, the throng, the animation recede; she will sing his songs, reduce his cares, and be the end (he asseverates) of his life of love.18 To sum up. We have looked beyond the idea of a poem’s ‘setting’ to the spatial contexts which serve conflict and movement in poems, and fit in with basic structuring: the poems are commonly shaped around unsatisfactory situations and their resolution or deferral. The contrasts of contexts include scale. The contextualization typically goes beyond reality, and often beyond even the fictionally immediate. The same spatial context often alters and evolves. The poems are full of life and mobility, and they often develop beyond prediction. Seeing ‘settings’ in a different way brings out more about the nature of these poems. A couple of interdisciplinary comparisons may be ventured. Looking at these deep structures has analogies with coarse geometry, where differences between shapes are reduced to display underlying patterns. With the poetry, we can then come back and find differences between poems and authors, but do so in a more informed and thoughtful way. We could also think of musicology, with its division between history and analysis. Classicists could never renounce history, and some aspects of ‘settings’ naturally relate to things we think we know—sometimes from debatable evidence, or evidence with complexities of its own (for example, Attic red-figure vases). But we could give more attention in the study of lyric to analysis: not just poem by poem—as, say, in commentaries—but with an eye for underlying features and forms. In some respects, the literary study of this poetry is still in its early stages. Notes:

I am grateful to the editors, to the Press’s readers, and to Il-Kweon Sir. (1) For setting in scholarship on art cf. e.g. Hedreen (2001), esp. 221–33.

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What is a Setting? (2) In a work on a smaller scale, a moment from the story ‘Barbara’ (first published 1918) illustrates the opposition of elements. A woman and a man sit on a bench in a not very nice park and fail to express their love: ‘Es war ein Nachmittag, die junge Sonne küßte eine verstaubte Bank (pointed crossing of language, as especially in the second passage, and also of space), und sie sprachen…und im Schweigen zitterte der Frühling.’ (Roth (2011) 28). (3) With Lessing’s views on perception and the whole, cf. Kant (1781) 105, (1787) 139–40. (4) On the sculptors see e.g. Kunze (2009), esp. 38–43. (5) The shaping of, say, epinician poetry may be a somewhat simpler subject; cf. e.g. Hamilton (1974). (6) Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 139 punctuate with a new sentence at seu. But quem mihi, quem tibi | finem di dederint and seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam match closely in language, and mihi and tibi have to be taken from what precedes and understood with tribuit. So it is better if the sentences that contain these words are consecutive. The argument that a full stop after the third syllable ‘would be unparalleled in Horace’s greater Asclepiads’ seems too strongly put for 32 lines in the metre. (7) Cf. Phillips (2014) (including the appendix by Hutchinson); Obbink (2016b) 218–24. (8) For rhetorical gusto cf. the attack on Hegesias by Agatharchides (fr. 21 GGM [vol. i.119–22], fr. 21 Burstein, Photius, Bibl. vii.147–51 Henry); Hutchinson (2014) 35. On Seleucus, see Ucciardello (2006) (Razzetti’s article is no longer available at Lessico dei grammatici greci antichi, not yet available at Brill’s Lexicon of Greek Grammarians of Antiquity). κατά should not mean ‘so much at a time’, which gives a less satisfactory fit with the Alcaeus; rather of a single helping. Cf. Hipp. Fist. 3.1 vi.449 Littré καὶ προνηϲτεύϲαϲ πινέτω μέλιτι παραμίϲγων τὸ ὕδωρ κατὰ τρεῖϲ κυάθουϲ. For the quantities involved note Anacr. fr. 356 (a). (9) It is not intended to define even personal lyric through a unique type of structuring; if we wanted to get at ancient conceptions of what lyric was, we should start from more elemental features, including metre (cf. Hutchinson (2018)). But a few rough thoughts may be given on the relation of the structuring discussed here to that of, say, tragedy and of epigram like Martial’s (Martial to fit with Lessing’s type of epigram; West (1990) 3–25 offers an interesting account of the structure of ‘charging’ and ‘discharging’ in Aeschylean tragedy). Tragedy and such epigram typically have a pressing forward movement to a sudden irreversible event or events (tragedy) or a sharp climax of wit (epigram); personal lyric, as part of its character, is far more varied Page 16 of 18

 

What is a Setting? in movement. In all three types, any individual work shows a significant sequence, which is important even in reperformance (especially for tragedy and archaic lyric) or rereading (especially for Martial’s epigrams and Horace’s lyrics). (Such reruns are particularly integral to personal lyric and epigram; reruns alter reception most saliently, thanks to the recipient’s previous experience of the climax, in tragedy and epigram.) An element of plot is present in all three types; drastic events do not typically occur within the time of utterance for personal lyric and epigram (this aspect commonly brings the odes within tragedies closer to personal lyric poems than tragedies are). Hence in personal lyric enduring resolutions are typically not in the present; the resultant moods vary widely: vehemence, wistfulness…Epigrams and personal lyric poems, much shorter than tragedies, are more instantly grasped as overall entities. (10) In line 1 a high point is placed after ἔμοι in the papyrus (Bod. Ms. Gr. class. b. 18 (P), which I have inspected). With 10–11 cf. fr. 208A col. i.2–3  ]ο̣ϲ ἀλλ᾿ ἄγι |  π]οτα κἄλλοτα. In 11 Diehl evidently proposes ϲύ]ν̣ τ’ ἀβά̣ϲ̣ομεν, which seems to fit the space and traces, even if the accent is quite freely placed. (The supplement had occurred to me before I was aware that Diehl had suggested it; cf. Maehler (1963) 56 n. 1—not in Voigt etc., nor in Diehl (1917) 16, [1922–3] 421, [1936] 4.124; I have not yet seen Diehl (1942).) Cf. fr. 73.9, Anacr. fr. 378.2, 402 (a), Scol. PMG 902 ϲύν μοι πῖνε, ϲυνήβα κτλ. For the tmesis cf. e.g. Alc. frs 76.9, 129.3, 255.5, 298.12, 338.5, 362.3; for the short-vowel subjunctive cf. e.g. fr. 70.10. θᾶϲ τ’ is contemplated by Page (1955) 301, and printed in the text by Campbell (1982) 252; but it would require alteration of the acute accent in the papyrus, and does not suit the height of the trace immediately before τ. Liberman (1999) i.34, cf. also ii.206, misunderstands Lobel and Page, understandably. As Page says, ν̣[ῦν (Diels) would be possible after ἄλλοτα (precede with a comma?). (11) On the poem see Bowie (2007) 40–3; Liberman (1999) i.51–2, ii.111–12. If one dissociates P.Oxy. XXI 2307 fr. 14 from this poem, P.Oxy. XXI 2307 fr. 16 ]ϲτ̣ου λε̣λ̣αθων[ (whence νόϲτω Lobel) seems to tell against an allegorical ship. The ship’s indirect speech, provided we have a singular verb or a participle, makes one think of Catullus 4. (Readers of Catullus could even have contrasted Alcaeus’ despairing ship with Catullus’ successful yacht, especially if the ship failed to take Alcaeus home.) But the matter remains difficult. (12) For ‘now’ and ‘quickly’, cf. Inc. auct. fr. 34.17 Voigt (Alc. fr. 259.16 LP) νῦν δεῖ̣ (‘now one must’); Bacch. 14.20–3 Κλεοπτολέμωι δὲ χάριν | νῦν χρὴ Ποϲειδᾶνόϲ τε Πετρ[αί]|ου τέμενοϲ κελαδῆϲαι | Πυρρίχου τ’ εὔδοξον ἱππόνικ[ον υἱόν (‘now, to give Cleoptolemus pleasure, I must sing aloud of the sanctuary of Poseidon of the Rock, and the renowned son of Pyrrichus, victorious with horses’); Alc. frs 58.15 ὠϲ τάχιϲτα (‘as quickly as possible’); 74.6–7 τ]ὸ ξύλον | ] προίει μόνον, Σ ἀλλά, ὦ Μυτιληναῖοι, ἕωϲ ἔτι καπνὸν μόνο[ν] | ἀφίηϲι τὸ ξύλον, Page 17 of 18

 

What is a Setting? τοῦτ’ (ἐϲτίν), ἕωϲ οὐδέπω τυρανν[εύει,] | καταϲβέτε καὶ καταπαύϲατε ταχέωϲ, μὴ λ[αμπρό]|τερον τὸ φῶϲ γένηται (‘the piece of wood…only sends out…’, scholion ‘Come, men of Mytilene, while the piece of wood is only sending out smoke, i.e. while he is not yet tyrant, quench it, i.e. stop him, quickly, so the light does not get brighter.’) Cf. e.g. Bacch. fr. 15.1 Οὐχ ἕδραϲ ἔργον οὐδ᾿ ἀμβολᾶϲ (‘we don’t need sitting around and delay’), with regard to the beginning of song, which is a standard event and action desired in choral lyric. (13) For the view that fr. 6 need not be read allegorically, see Uhlig, this volume, pp. 85 n. 74 and 88 n. 81. (14) The ‘monodic’ poems are closer in this respect to epinician, etc., than is realized in the important article D’Alessio (2004). The narrator’s instruction to himself to get down the lyre near the beginning of Pindar, Olympian 1 (17–18) is close to Anacreon’s instructions to slaves to get things; in Bacch. fr. 20 B.1–12, cf. fr. 20 C.1–7, the kindred call to the lyre to leave the peg and come to the narrator’s hands occurs in a symposiastic and monodic poem. (15) A further indication that the mother does not think Charaxus has arrived; compare Ferrari (2014) 3. The passage in Horace could be added to Morgan (2016). (16) Cic. Planc. 12–13 offers a different strategy, with the Roman people turned into a single voice; the language of desire at 13 is of interest for the poem (desiderarunt te…oculi mei, sitientem me uirtutis tuae deseruisti ac reliquisti). (17) φεύγων. ἐϲχατίαιϲ (accusative) δ’ is suggested for 9 in Hutchinson (2001) 35, 209. Wider-reaching suggestions in Bowie (2007) 36–40 (on ὄνυμ’ ἀκλέηϲ it would be useful to hear more on the accusative of respect with such a noun). (18) I have not seen the Alcaean intertext at line 7 noticed elsewhere; not in Fedeli and Ciccarelli (2008) 478–9, or R. Thomas (2011) 219. Fraenkel (1957) 417 n. 2 compares the opening est…est with πὰρ…πάρ at 140.12–13, evidently not as an intertext; cf. Spelman (2015a) 357 n. 20. For more discussion of fr. 140, see Fearn, this volume, pp. 102–6.

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Sappho and Cyborg Helen

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Sappho and Cyborg Helen Tim Whitmarsh

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores Sappho’s depiction of Helen through the lens of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory. The epic Helen is presented as a mixture of the human, the divine, the animal, and the artificial, but this interstitiality marks her as an ‘illegitimate fusion’ (as Haraway would put it), an object to be controlled. Sappho, by contrast, depicts Helen (as a number of scholars have noted) as full of agency. The argument is set forth that Helen is for Sappho a cyborg fusion of poet and poem, and indeed an embodiment of the paradoxical nature of lyric poetry itself, which ever mediates between the specific here-and-now and the universal. Sappho’s reclaiming of Helen thus parallels Haraway’s revaluation of the cyborg as a site of feminist resistance. Keywords:   Sappho, Helen, Alcaeus, Donna Haraway, cyborg, lyric poetry

Like many a beauty, Helen has something of the cyborg about her. According to a well-known anecdote, which may go back to Duris of Samos in the fourth century BCE, when the celebrated artist Zeuxis wanted to paint her, he could not find in Croton a model of sufficient beauty, so he created instead an assemblage of different body parts, each belonging to a different female. Here is the story in the version of Dionysius of Halicarnassus:1 Zeuxis was a painter feted among the people of Croton. Now, when he was painting Helen Naked, the people sent the local maidens for him to scrutinize naked—not because they were all beautiful, but because it was unlikely that they were all totally ugly. The aspects that were worthy of painting in each of them were united into a single representation of a body. Page 1 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen Out of the collage of many parts, artistry (τέχνη) composed one complete form. (Dion. Hal. fr. 6.1 Usener-Radermacher) For the literary critic Dionysius, the story is an allegory of the power of human artifice to transcend nature: by judiciously selecting your models, you can create a work of ideally beautiful (written or visual) art that transcends the particularity of the world in front of our eyes. Frankensteinian without the freakishness, Zeuxis’ Helen expresses both a beauty that exceeds the possibilities of real physical bodies, (p.136) and the power of graphic creativity to assemble existing parts into new wholes. The story is also about the gendering of artistic production. Mirroring the judgement of Paris, it presents the male as the possessor of the refined, critical gaze, and the female as the object of that scrutiny, whether in the lapsarian guise of the real Crotonian females, or in the composite, cyborg form of the painted Helen. According to this model, real women can possess beauty only in their ‘pornographed’, dismembered members; true female beauty requires the judicious male eye to assemble the whole. Helen is thus, in aesthetic terms, a paradox, both the summation of all the feminine beauty that is thought to inhere in nature (nature, at least, as manifested among the townsfolk of Croton) and the site of maximally artificed male intervention.2 My use of the term ‘cyborg’ marks an engagement with the tradition of cyberfeminism that finds its point of departure in the work of Donna Haraway.3 For Haraway, however, the cyborg is a positive, enabling figure for feminism, pointing away from the reductive, masculinist association of the female with nature and towards a utopian vista of a future where technology may be aligned with and facilitate feminist goals. In her assessment, women may not have originally chosen their cyborg identities, but they can reappropriate these for a politics of active disruption of received, androcentric categories: ‘cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of “Western” identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind’.4 Does the ancient Helen ever escape the determining power of men’s manufacture?5 Within the mainstream Greek mythological tradition, for sure, her identity is heavily structured by a cyborg (p.137) politics and poetics that are not her own. The product of a strange, violent hybridization between (Zeus in the form of) a bird and a female, born from an egg, she originates from the zoological world.6 These bestial origins are commemorated in her abusive description of herself, in the Iliad, as a ‘dog’ or as ‘dog-faced’.7 She also, however, has something of a god about her. The traditions relating to her death Page 2 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen are scant;8 the most familiar ‘what happened next’ story is of her translation to the Black Sea island of Leuke, where she lives in a state of quasi-eternality with Achilles. According to Isocrates, she gained ‘immortality’ (ἀθανασία) and ‘power equivalent to that of a god’ (δύναμις ἰσόθεος).9 Famously and unusually, in the Iliad she recognizes a god (Aphrodite) through a divine disguise, and upbraids her.10 Across the tradition she veers from dog to god, a (palindromic) duplication of identities that is also an erasure of individual ones. She is also closely associated with the artefactual, the mimetic, the pharmacological. In an equally famous Iliadic scene, she can be found weaving the events of the war, replicating in the textile sphere the narrative of the text.11 In the Odyssey she is responsible for the drug that ‘causes forgetfulness of sufferings’ (κακῶν ἐπίληθον ἁπάντων),12 in much the same way as the song in Hesiod makes its listeners forget cares (δυσφροσυνέων ἐπιλήθεται οὐδέ τι κηδέων | μέμνηται).13 Finally, her ability to mimic the voices of the wives of Greek soldiers, in (p.138) Menelaus’ recollection, suggests the histrionic power of a performer of song (ἐκ δ’ ὀνομακλήδην Δαναῶν ὀνόμαζες ἀρίστους, | πάντων Ἀργείων φωνὴν ἴσκουσ’ ἀλόχοισιν), and indeed has been connected to the emergence of choral performance.14 Like Haraway’s cyborg, then, the mythical Helen embodies ‘illegitimate fusions’: between the bestial, the human, and the divine; between the natural and the mimetic. The mainstream mythical tradition, however, depicts her mobility between categories as a problem to be controlled, rather than as a resource. She is, moreover, limited in her capacity for self-determination; she lacks that rich agency that Haraway posits for the feminist cyborg, the ability to transform her concoctedness into a positive virtue. She is the object of others’ choices and judgements, rather than an autonomous agent. When Iris informs her of the duel in Iliad 3, she concludes with a telling sentence: ‘you will be called (κεκλήσηι) the bedmate of the man who wins’ (3.138). Since καλέω can be used in Homer to indicate one’s name, hence one’s very being,15 this duel—which in fact compresses the War into a synecdochic single combat—can be read as a contest for Helen’s identity; and, indeed, as an attempt entirely to subordinate Helen’s (inscrutable) will to homosocial transactions. In Norman Austin’s terms, the Iliadic Helen is a signifier (of the power that transcendent beauty exerts on the male gaze), but not fully a subject, in the sense of someone who is in control of her own practical–ethical decision-making.16 Ultimately, the Helen of conventional myth is radically low on agency and selfdetermination. She is not, for sure, entirely passive, but the radius of her sphere of opportunity is extremely short. Later in book 3 of the Iliad, she protests to Aphrodite that the goddess makes her go wherever she likes: ‘Will you lead me still further on to one of the well-peopled cities of Phrygia or lovely Maeonia, if there too there is some one of mortal men who is dear to you…?’ (3.400–2). This chattel-like status derives, mythically, from her role in the judgement of the Page 3 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen goddesses, as a prize won by a male (p.139) (Paris). It also issues in the paradoxical thought experiments conducted by Gorgias (and mimicked by Euripides)17 in the fifth century, where her very passivity is presented as the exculpation for her actions. In Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen, she is exonerated as the cause of war on the grounds that she had no choice in accompanying Paris: she was compelled either by force, or by a deity, or by desire—which is also a deity (Eros)—or (the Gorgianic twist) by persuasion, which is also a form of compulsion. Isocrates noted critically that Gorgias’ speech had the form of an apologia rather than the encomium promised by its title.18 But it might be countered that the Encomium in fact artfully highlights the very impossibility of praising a subject who has no agency: ‘she did no wrong’ is the highest, indeed the only, form of praise that can be offered to one who lacks the opportunity for autonomous decision-making. Gorgias’ epideixis—though certainly informed by fifth-century forensic oratory, and indeed fifth-century scientific thought19—thus filters but preserves the conception of Helen’s agency embedded in the mythical tradition (unsurprisingly, since the mythical tradition is Gorgias’ evidence base). In archaic lyric, by contrast, Helen’s capacity for self-determination is emphasized. As has very often been noted, the depiction of Helen in this body of material demonstrates both continuities with and interesting differences from that in the Iliad.20 (For the purposes of this chapter I assume that Sappho and her audience associated the Trojan War myth with military epic of the kind represented by the Iliad, but my argument does not depend upon the hypothesis of a fixed text, whether written or oral, of either of the Homeric poems at this early date.)21 In particular, in Sappho she now becomes an agent (p.140) motivated by a desire that has overpowered her, rather than the source of others’ desire: ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’ ἐπ[ὶ] γᾶν μέλαι[ν]αν ἔ]μμεναι κάλλιστον, ἔγω δὲ κῆν’ ὄτ      τω τις ἔραται. πά]γχυ δ’ εὔμαρες σύνετον πόησαι π]άντι τ[ο]ῦ̣τ’, ἀ γὰρ πόλυ περσκέθοισα κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣ [ἀνθ]ρ̣ώπων Ἐλένα [τ]ὸ̣ν ἄνδρα       τ̣ὸν̣ [ ̣ ̣ ̣ άρ]ι̣στον κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’ ἔβα’ ς Τροΐαν πλέοι̣σα κωὐδ[ὲ πα]ῖδος οὐδὲ φίλων τοκήων π̣ά[μπαν] ἐμνάσθη, ἀλλὰ παράγ̣αγ̣’ αὔταν       – ⌣ ⌣ – ]σαν – ⌣ – ]αμπτον γὰρ [⌣ – ] ν̣όημμα – ⌣ ] ̣ ̣ ̣ κούφως τ[ ⌣ ⌣ – ] ν̣οήσηι̣ – ]μ̣ε̣ νῦν Ἀνακτορί[ας] ὀνέμναι      σ’ οὐ] παρεοίσας. τᾶ]ς κε βολλοίμαν ἔρατόν τε βᾶμα κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω Page 4 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen ἢ τὰ Λύδων ἄρματα κἀν ὅπλοισι       πεσδο]μάχεντας.22

Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed mankind in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no memory at all of her child or dear parents, but [? Cypris] led her astray […] […will is not easily perverted…she has conceived it. And she [Helen; or ‘it’, i.e. ‘this situation’] has reminded me now of Anactoria who is not here; I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry. (Sappho fr. 16.1–20. Text: Obbink. Trans: Campbell, supplemented and adapted) As has been well observed by Williamson and duBois,23 Sappho appears initially entirely in control of her decisions here: she leaves (p.141) (κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’) her husband and child, she goes sailing (ἔβα…πλέοι̣σα) to Troy. This is the only instance in archaic poetry (so far as I know) in which a woman is the active subject of the verb πλεῖν, ‘to sail’.24 The new ‘Brothers Poem’ (P.Sapph. Obbink), by contrast, exemplifies what was surely the more familiar scenario, whereby the women stay at home while the men go to sea. There is no mention in our poem of Paris as an agent: he is only the object of her desire (unnamed, like all males in the poem—and indeed, like her parents and her child, Hermione). The act of departure, indeed, is presented as markedly countercultural (just as the priamel structure positions the poem’s own values as at odds with those of others in society).25 Hutchinson argues that ‘it seems difficult to maintain that Sappho is making no judgement on Helen’s act, let alone that she is celebrating it’.26 But there is no language of moral condemnation in the poem; in fact, there is no moral language at all. It is strikingly amoral. The thrust of it is that intense erotic desire leads one to act in ways that do not mesh with social conventions: it is an observation rather than a judgement. The fact that Sappho compares her own (countercultural) reminiscences of Anactoria to Helen’s decision to leave Menelaus and Hermione is surely a provocation directed at existing mores: Helen has become the paradigm of a lyric eroticism that sets itself against the dominant expectations of society.27 Her choice to forget her family (‘with no memory at all of (οὐδὲ…π̣ά[μπαν] ἐμνάσθη) her child or dear parents’), indeed, presents a striking contrast with the Odyssean Penelope’s recurrent ‘remembering’ of her husband, and vice versa28—a contrast that is all the more pointed if we conjecture that Sappho and her audience knew of the virtuous Penelope.29 Word play, what is more, hints that the act of leaving her family is itself a beautiful thing (κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣…κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’).30

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Sappho and Cyborg Helen (p.142) The other major agent in the poem is, apparently, Aphrodite: line 12 or 13 probably began Κύπρις (‘Cypris’, i.e. the Cyprian goddess), who would then be the subject of παράγ̣αγ̣’ αὔταν (‘led her astray’). In Iliad 3, referred to above, Helen recriminates against Aphrodite: ‘Will you lead (ἄξεις) me still further on to one of the well-peopled cities of Phrygia or lovely Maeonia…’ Sappho’s line looks very much as if it picks up on this or a similar assertion, now lost, of Aphrodite’s role. At first sight this may seem to diminish Helen’s autonomy, by making the goddess responsible for the choice to leave. Indeed, one current proposal is to supplement line 12 so as to read κωὐκ ἐκοῖ]σαν, i.e. ‘unwilling as she was’:31 if that reading is accepted, then it is Aphrodite’s desire that is dominant, and Helen goes back to doing what she is told. But even if that supplement should prove correct,32 it does not cancel out the earlier protestation of Helen’s agency; rather, it stands in a complex, tangled relationship with it. The question is raised, which would later be posed directly by Gorgias, Plato, and Xenophon, of the extent to which an individual possessed by desire is fully autonomous.33 In Sappho, Aphrodite’s agency appears, paradoxically, to be aligned with Helen’s. For Sappho love appears not to ‘enslave’ the subject as it does in Plato: it does not so much reduce the subject’s agency as enrich it. To love is to experience life in a rich sensuality. Sappho’s Helen also retains some of the interstitiality of her epic predecessor. She is, as we have seen, the subject of erotic desire, and as such a mythical analogue for Sappho, the desirous poet or persona. But she is also herself a figure of great beauty, ‘she who far surpassed mankind in beauty’ (I shall, however, revise this translation very shortly). As Felix Budelmann notes,34 this is a surprise: one would expect, following the apparent train of thought, something like this: ‘I say that the most beautiful thing is whatever one loves; as an example (p.143) of this let us consider Helen, who found Paris beautiful beyond compare, and therefore left her family to be with him’. In fact, not only is Helen beautiful, she becomes, in effect, a figure for beauty itself. Campbell’s translation, ‘she who far surpassed mankind in beauty’, which I have reproduced above, may in fact be misleading. This suggests that the object of περιέχω is ἀνθ]ρ̣ώπων, with κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣ as accusative or respect. I know, however, of no parallels for περιέχω + genitive meaning ‘surpass’ (someone): the verb normally takes the accusative, as at Sappho fr. 96.9: ἀ βροδοδάκτυλος | πάντα περέχοισα ἄστρα (‘the rosy-fingered moon / surpassing all the stars’). We would expect, therefore, that κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣ should be the direct object of περσκέθοισα. It may seem a small step from ‘she far surpassed mankind in beauty’ to ‘she far surpassed the beauty of all people’. But it is a significant correction, because it indicates that Helen’s rivals and comparanda are not people but rather the abstract concept of human beauty itself. In this sense, therefore, Sappho’s Helen retains, and indeed revalues, the cyborg messiness of her epic equivalent. She is both subject and object of desire, a transient mode of identity that Ellen Greene identifies as ‘intersubjectivity’.35 Page 6 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen She is both a localized human and a figurative abstraction. This iconic significance, indeed, is also built into the very structure of the poem itself, for Helen is presented here as the embodiment of a general truth about the nature of the world, which exemplifies the specific instance of the Sapphic narrator’s own feelings for Anactoria.36 In one sense, Sappho offers us a familiar rhetorical-poetic gesture, the appeal to exemplarity, exploited for poetic effect across a wide range of archaic and classical texts from Homer onwards.37 Indeed, already in the Odyssey Penelope uses Helen’s choice to travel to Troy as a paradigm designed to illustrate a truth about human behaviour, a truth that elucidates her own situation; and it may indeed be that very passage that inspired Sappho.38 But in our poem the exemplary (p.144) gesture is offered not just as a strategy of persuasion, but as a universal truth for all. The appeal to the paradigm of Helen is designed to make it ‘very easy for anyone to understand’ (πά]γχυ…εὔμαρες σύνετον…π]άντι, 5–6). Hutchinson is right to observe that in this phrase ‘we hear the ringing confidence of a Greek intellectual, and pressing tones of an argument’.39 There may be something Presocratic about this idea that the general principles of the world can be extrapolated from empirically observable reality, and vice versa (we might think, for example, of Anaximander envisaging the cosmos as a giant wheel). Helen has come to represent, by synecdoche, a cosmic truth about human beauty. What does this have to do with questions of performance and textuality? Let us take a step back. The central critical paradox of Greek lyric is that it is a form that, at least in its advanced, ambitious state, is designed both to be performed in multiple contexts and to suggest the immediacy of an individual emotional expression, concretized in a particular hic et nunc. It is particular and universal at the same time. One effect of lyric poetry on the audience or reader is to provoke a cathectic desire for an original moment of plenitude, the point of pure expression when these emotions were experienced primally. This is more than just a matter of ‘reperformance’—a term that still preserves, at least in principle, the idea of an original first performance.40 There is surely no need to assume that for a poem such as Sappho fr. 16. Our text must, of course, have had a première, but as a freestanding work by a great poet it was a classic from the start; it was surely never a poem circumscribed by the demands of a performance occasion.41 If I can risk a generalization: the works of the great lyric poets always mediate paradoxically between a more-or-less fictitious performative immediacy, a speaking-to-you-now, and an awareness of their own imminent canonization.42 Fragment 16 enacts, even theorizes, this lyric paradox, by mediating between the immediacy of Sappho’s feelings for Anactoria in the present (νῦν, 15) and the iconic universality of Helen. It is as if Anactoria stands for the specific dimension of lyric eroticism (a song directed by one real person towards another), and Helen for (p.145) the abstract (the power of love in general). But matters are more complex, since Anactoria herself is not in fact immediate: she Page 7 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen is not ‘absent’ (οὐ παρεοίσας). The song is not, therefore, about the interplay between absence and presence, but about different kinds of absence. The ‘immediacy’ that it narrates is not the immediacy of direct, face-to-face address to another, but a mournful apostrophe to an absent lover. The poem therefore dramatizes the doubly displaced performative gesture of all classic lyric poetry. Your experience of the poem as you read it or hear it carries with it the fantastic trace of an originary immediacy, a saturated present when emotions and experience were rich and full; but that is pushed into the past, into the elusive43 world of memory. At the same time, however, the poem also claims to index an eternal, universal truth. When the Sapphic narrator states that her feelings for Anactoria are ‘easy to understand for anyone, for…’, that γάρ marks the transition from the specific to the general that is characteristic of the lyric mode. The poem itself is grounded in a particular time, place, and configuration of individuals; but it speaks a wider truth, that can be grasped at the level of the general. In fragment 16, it is Helen who stands for that generality, that transferability of local to universal emotional resonance. Aesthetically speaking, indeed, she is a cipher for the poet, the poem, and the ‘reader’44 all at once. She is the object of literary manufacture; but in Sappho’s world, her artificed nature does not exclude her enriched agency as a human subject. She has something of the cyborg—in Haraway’s sense—about her. We can grasp, then, why Helen is such an important figure for Sappho. Fitting her out with positive agency is not just an ethical issue for a woman keen to revise negative judgements on her sex (although that must be a significant part of the explanation); it is also a poetic act, a condensation of the distinctive creativity of the lyric poet herself. Helen’s cyborg constructedness is now a token not of her anomalousness within a patrilocal world, an anomalousness that asks to be subdued, but of the active power of female generativity. (p.146) Sappho’s intervention is thrown into sharp relief by Alcaeus’ treatment of the theme, particularly in fragment 283,45 a poem that ‘could easily be read, in part, as reaction’ to Sappho fr. 16:46 καιν[̣]ων ̣υν̣[     ]ν[             ωνενον̣ππ̣[             ] κἈλένας ἐν στήθ[ε]σιν [ἐ]πτ[όαισε θῦμον Ἀργείας, Τροΐω δ’[ἐ]π̣’ ἄν[δρι ἐκμάνεισα ξ̣[ε ̣]ναπάτα ᾽πὶ π[όντον             ἔσπετο νᾶϊ, παῖδά τ’ ἐν δόμ[ο]ισι λίποισ[ κἄνδρος εὔσ̣τρ̣ω̣τ̣ο̣ν̣ [λ]έχος ̣[ πεῖθ’ ἔρωι θ̣ῦμο[47                   Λήδας] [παῖ]δα Δ[ίο]ς τε           ]πιε ̣ ̣μανι̣[              κ]ασιγνήτων πόλεας ̣[           ] ̣έχει Τρώων πεδίω δά̣[μεντας Page 8 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen              ἔν]νεκα κήνας˙ πόλ]λα δ’ ἄρματ’ ἐν κο̣ν̣ίαισι[       ] ̣εν, πό[λ]λοι δ’ ἐ̣λίκω̣πε̣[ς       ]ο̣ι ̣ ̣[ ]βοντο φόνω̣ δ̣[       ] ̣ ̣[̣ ̣]ευς˙

…and made the heart of Argive Helen quiver in her breast; and crazed by the Trojan man, the deceiver of his host, she followed him over the sea in his ship, leaving in her home her child (desolate?) and her husband’s bed with its rich coverlet, (since) her heart persuaded her48 (to yield?) to love (through the daughter of Dione?) and Zeus…many of his brothers (the black earth?) holds, laid low on the Trojans’ plain for that woman’s sake, and many chariots (crashed?) in the dust, and many dark-eyed (warriors) were (p.147) trampled, and (noble Achilles rejoiced in?) the slaughter… (Alcaeus fr. 283. Text: Voigt (1971); trans: Campbell, adapted)49 Alcaeus’ poem is written in what we now call ‘Sapphic’ strophes. These were not exclusive to Sappho, but they were a favourite of hers and so Alcaeus’ choice of metre will certainly not have discouraged an association with the poetess in the audience’s mind. More powerfully evocative are the apparent linguistic echoes. Lines 3–4, describing the effects of Paris on Helen, are (if they have been correctly restored) a virtual quotation from Sappho fr. 31.5-6: τό μ’ ἦ μὰν | καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν (‘which certainly made my heart quiver in my breast’). We recall that fragment 31 describes an ethically complex love triangle, in which the poet yearns after a woman who is attached to a man. Alcaeus’ allusion is, therefore, a powerful one: is he implicitly accusing Sappho of engaging in Helen-like behaviour in that poem? (Or is Helen being accused of Sappho-like behaviour?) At any rate, Alcaeus seems to understand Sappho’s poetic identification with Helen. In this poem, however, Helen’s agency is once again reduced, and she becomes the object of blame. In Sappho, as we saw, she sailed to Troy in a ship, a sailor in her own right; in Alcaeus, by contrast, ‘she followed [Paris] over the sea in his ship’: Paris takes the lead. In lines 7–10, we find echoes of Sappho’s account of Helen ‘leaving’ (λίποισ[, Alcaeus; ~ κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’, Sappho) her child and husband, and of the persuasive effect of erōs on her soul. In Sappho, her parents were unnamed; here they are ‘Leda and Zeus’, an act of naming that subordinates her to their proper authority. If, as Denys Page suggested, lines 12– 13 refer to the ‘black earth’ holding many male victims, this would seem calculated to evoke the opening of Sappho fr. 16 (‘the most beautiful thing on the black earth’),50 now repurposed: whereas in Sappho the blackness is (to develop a suggestion of Hutchinson’s)51 a formulaic pomposity attributed to and focalized by the ‘some’ against whom Sappho positions herself via the priamel structure, in Alcaeus it has reacquired its Homeric associations with death and gloom, ‘holding’ warriors like night or a cloud (the blackness therefore also Page 9 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen suggests (p.148) clotted blood). The hypothetical chariots (ἄρματα) to which Sappho preferred the sight of Anactoria are now, in Alcaeus, real ones crashed in the dust ‘for her [Helen’s] sake’ (ἔν]νεκα κήνας).52 It is plausible that Alcaeus’ poem engages in a competitive dialogue with Sappho, whose persona is now intimately enmeshed with Helen’s.53 Whereas Sappho celebrates Helen’s erotic autonomy, Alcaeus holds her qua lustful woman, responsible for the wrongs done to men. In doing so, Alcaeus takes over Sappho’s emphasis upon Helen’s agency and subjectivity, but subordinates it to what we might call (in Norman Austin’s terms, which we considered at the outset) male ‘significance’: female action has meaning only insofar as it has an impact on the world of men. Helen retains some of her ‘cyborg’ qualities from Sappho, in that agency is presented as notably complex: it is Aphrodite (or Eros?) who causes her to love, and Paris who takes the initiative; but she is the subject of active verbs (‘she followed him…leaving’), and men die ‘for her sake’ (ἔν]νεκα κήνας)—a phrase that can suggest greater culpability on her part in Greek than its English translation implies. Alcaeus’ poem is certainly more oblique in terms of its commentary on performance than Sappho’s. As it survives, at any rate, it is on the surface purely narrative: there is no indexing of the performance context, or indeed of the contemporary world. Yet the allusions to Sappho might be said to serve that function: they serve to relate the general, paradigmatic, Iliadic hypotext to the specific context of sixth-century Lesbos, and to the gendered contest between its two premier poets. When performed by another singer, however, the Alcaean poem creates a second layer of referentiality: the singer assumes the persona of Alcaeus, negotiating his relationship with Sappho by reference to the contested hypotext of the Helen narrative. Archaic Greece did not have cyber-technologies in the way that we do now: human bodies were not enhanced by prosthetics, implants, and chemical drugs. Yet it was all the same an age of rapid economic expansion and technological change, driven by the new overseas trade links. Technological revolutions in architecture and metallurgy were accompanied by alphabetization and new resources for depicting (p.149) the human form in monumental sculpture and painting. With these rapid technological changes came a culture of material and literary artistry, an understanding of the aesthetic realm as distinct from the pragmatic. The poet thus becomes a privileged artificer, someone whose particular command of a ‘technology’—literary creativity—generates something of value, something lasting, something that survives beyond the here-and-now of each performance.54 What is distinctive about lyric poetry, however—and particularly that branch of it that for us is most closely associated with Lesbos— is that it depends on the evocation of transient moments of sentiment experienced personally by the author. Lyric poems are both eternal and fleeting, both universal and personal, both classic and occasional. What I have called the Page 10 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen ‘lyric paradox’—the irresoluble tension between these extremes—might in fact rather be considered a form of synecdoche, whereby the intense experience of personal emotion is always indexed to a general truth about human nature. Conversely, however, there are no general truths about human nature that do not manifest themselves in personal experience. The part becomes the whole, and the whole becomes the part. By the same token, Sappho the lover, captivated by the ‘lovely walk’ of her beloved Anactoria ‘and the bright sparkle of her face’ is also Sappho the great poet, who knows of great epic themes, whose poems stir her rival Alcaeus to aggressive ripostes. Helen is the cipher for the female lover in the poetic tradition, the icon of female desire translated from the immediate into the abstract realm of the mythical. She is, therefore, an aesthetic object, manufactured and constructed: the cyborg figure of the epic tradition, who occupies an ever-shifting position within the matrix of defining polarities. But Sappho also reanimates her as an agent, making her act with the same intense, reckless impulsivity that every lover feels. The cyborg is not diminished by her paradoxical hybridization of multiple identities; on the contrary, this makes her the embodiment of human passion in its most visceral form, now released from the suffocating constraints of structured social order (family, home, polis). It is by abandoning the social order for the fluid interstices that Helen finally steers her own ship.55 (p.150) Notes:

(1) Variants are also found at Cic. De inv. 2.1–3; Plin. NH 35.64. The attribution of the original story to Duris of Samos is often repeated but, while not inherently implausible, unsubstantiated (Whitmarsh (2013a) 130–2, and n. 7). Blondell (2013) offers a good general overview of the representation of Helen in Greek literature up to Isocrates; see also Worman (1997), and the works cited in n. 14. (2) There exist a number of parallels for this ‘cyborg female’, including Hesiod’s Pandora, Lucian’s Pantheia (in Imagines), the sculpture-woman in Ovid’s Pygmalion story, and Achilles Tatius’ portraits of Europa and Leucippe. On the first two see Hunter (2009) 119–20; on Ovid, Sharrock (1991); on the last, Whitmarsh (2013a) 123–34. (3) Haraway (1991), especially 149–81. (4) Haraway (1991) 176. (5) For the pun ((wo)manufacture) see Sharrock (1991). (6) Normally, of course, her mother is the mortal Leda, but in the Cypria frs 10– 11 [West] it is the goddess Nemesis. For the violence (κρατερῆς…ἀνάγκης) see fr. 10.3–4. On Helen’s divinity see most recently Blondell (2013) 27–52 and Edmunds (2015) 162–88, who is largely sceptical of claims that she was Page 11 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen ‘originally’ a deity. What is undeniable, however, is that the Helen of surviving literature has an ambiguous, shifting association with deity. (7) Graver (1995); Ebbott (1999); Blondell (2010a). (8) Pausanias reports that her tomb is in Therapne (3.19.9; cf. Isocr. Hel. 62–3) or that she was hanged on Rhodes (3.19.10), but these are minor local variants. See Edmunds (2015) 157–9 for this and other echoes. (9) Isocr. Hel. 61. (10) Il. 3.395–412. Elsewhere, a mortal will occasionally recognize a god (e.g. Il. 17.333–4). (11) Il. 3.125–8. See Bergren (1979); Kennedy (1986). More generally on Helen as weaver (a role she also memorably occupies in the Odyssey) see Roisman (2006); Mueller (2010). (12) Od. 4.219–32 (at 221). (13) Hes. Th. 102–3. On the analogy between drugs and song in early epic here (and e.g. at Od. 10.235–6) see Bergren (1981); Walsh (1984) 18–19, 22–4. (14) Od. 4.265–89, at 278–9; Worman (2001), especially 32–4, and particularly Carruesco (2012). Generally on Helen in Homer see also Reckford (1964); Groten (1968); Pantelia (1993); Boyd (1998); Gumpert (2001) 3–98 (on early Greek literary depictions generally); Elmer (2005); Roisman (2006); Maguire (2009) (again ranging broadly); Blondell (2013) 73–95. (15) Austin (1972). (16) Austin (1994) 11–12. (17) On the relationship between Eur. Tro. 914–65 and Gorgias’ Helen see Donzelli (1985) 389–97, arguing that both texts demonstrate an awareness of the kind of arguments made on both sides of the question. (18) Isoc. Hel. 14. (19) Holmes (2010) 211–16. (20) E.g. Calame (2009b); Blondell (2010b); Boedeker (2012). More generally on the Lesbian poets’ treatment of Helen see West (2002) 210–11 and Spelman (2017). (21) See in general West (2002) (concluding that Sappho and Alcaeus knew Ionian epic of the Homeric type, among other possible Trojan War traditions: probably but not certainly the Iliad, and probably not the Odyssey). Spelman Page 12 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen (2017) argues that Sappho fr. 44 may draw on the Iliad, but also that Homer’s poem may be only a single element within a broad array of sources. (22) I owe many thanks to one of the editors for sharing his commentary on this poem in Budelmann (2018). The poem has provoked multiple interpretations of a more philological nature over the years: I mention here only Koniaris (1967), Privitera (1967), Stern (1970), Dane (1981), Most (1981), Tempesta (1999), Pfeijffer (2000), Fredricksmeyer (2001), Bierl (2003). (23) Williamson (1995) 168–9; DuBois (1995) 121–3. (24) S281 fr. 82.4 SLG reads ]πλέωμεν, but it is not clear who the subject is (or whether the poem is by Sappho or Alcaeus). (25) That is, I see Sappho, or her persona, as distinguishing herself from a nonspecific mainstream rather than from some particular group in society (although many have tried to identify such a group: see the survey at Pallantza (2005) 64). (26) Hutchinson (2001) 163. (27) The fragmentary poem 23 also contains what seems to be a laudatory comparison of the addressee to Helen, here given the surprisingly Menelaan epithet, xanthos. (28) Mueller (2007). DuBois (1996) 81 suggests that ἐμνάσθη may pun on μανία. (29) There is, however, ‘no clear sign of the Lesbians showing any awareness of the Odyssey’ (West (2002) 214). See n. 21, this chapter. (30) DuBois (1996) 81. (31) Obbink (2016a) 18 and Budelmann (2018) ad loc. (32) The determining issue is the apparent presence of a grave accent above the second letter, which Obbink (see previous note) takes to be a ‘warning accent’ of the kind that one might find in an unfamiliar crasis such as κωὐκ (= καὶ οὐκ). If this accent is ignored (as it has been by some: see Obbink’s app. crit.) then one could imagine a supplement such as Κύπρις ἑκοῖ]σαν, which would make Helen precisely a willing participant. (33) See Pl. Symp. 184c on ἐθελοδουλεία or ‘willing servitude’; I discuss this theme in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in Whitmarsh (2018). (34) Budelmann (2018) ad loc. (35) Greene (1994). Cf. esp. Sa. fr. 1.21. (36) Calame (2012) 70–5. Page 13 of 15

 

Sappho and Cyborg Helen (37) Goldhill (1994). (38) Od. 23.218–24: Penelope apologizes for her reticence, proposing by way of apparent analogy that Helen would not have gone to Troy if she had known that an expedition would have been sent to retrieve her. It is an undeniably strange and opaque passage, which has often been suspected by textual critics; but its unsettling power (the supposed paragon of marital virtue drawing an analogy with Helen) surely contributes to the Odyssey’s general mystification of Penelope’s intentions. (39) Hutchinson (2001) 162. (40) Hunter and Uhlig (2017). (41) ‘On the concrete question of the desired audience, the fact of address cannot logically be used to limit the poems’ intended reception’ (Hutchinson (2001) 191). (42) This point subtends much of Phillips (2016). (43) And memories do fade, as the poem itself makes clear (‘Helen…went sailing off to Troy with no memory (οὐδὲ…π̣ά[μπαν] ἐμνάσθη) at all of her child or dear parents’, 7–11). (44) ‘Reader’ in the extended sense, of course, i.e. including audience members. (45) Similarly, fragment 42 has been plausibly reconstructed so as to depict Helen as the ultimate source of the destruction of Troy, which is presented as a source of great pity; the apostrophe to Helen seems an accusatory one, designed to contrast her actions with the virtuous behaviour of Thetis. Helen’s name appears in the poem as the result of a supplement, albeit a widely accepted one. Like fr. 283, fr. 42 is composed in Sapphic strophes. See Blondell (2010b) 352–9 and Budelmann (2018) ad loc. (46) Hutchinson (2001) 160. See also Calame (2009b) 648–9 and Budelmann (2018) ad Sappho fr. 16. (47) I have not printed the supplement θῦμο[ν, adopted by Voigt, since it seems to me impossible to tell whether the heart is the subject or the object of the persuasion. (48) Or ‘[something or someone] persuaded her heart’. See n. 47. (49) Pallantza (2005) 34–43 surveys the interpretative problems, and in particular the alleged Homeric echoes.

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Sappho and Cyborg Helen (50) Rissman (1983) 35–7 argues that Sappho’s μέλαι[ν]αν is best taken as genitive plural, qualifying the ships rather than the earth. Word order seems to tell against that. (51) Hutchinson (2001) 161. (52) If we are permitted to speak of allusions this early in Greek literature, the allusion is to Il. 19.325 (εἵνεκα ῥιγεδανῆς Ἑλένης; cf. Od. 11.438); but whether Sappho knew the Iliad is uncertain (n. 21). (53) I have often wondered whether this contest between the female ‘champion’ of Sappho and her male opponent is being evoked at Aesch. Ag. 1448–67. (54) As recently emphasized by Stewart (2016). (55) Adventitiously, it is the steersman (κυβερνητήρ) who gives us the word ‘cybernetic’, and hence ‘cyborg’ (‘cybernetic organism’).

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Event and Artefact

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Event and Artefact The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Archaic Lyric, and Early Greek Literary History Henry Spelman

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek ideas of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. The second section describes how the hymn anticipates its own reception on Delos and abroad. Getting the most out of this text, it is proposed, involves approaching it both as an enacted event and as a perpetuated artefact. The conclusion attempts to account for congruencies with lyric. Keywords:   Homer, Hymn to Apollo, lyric, Pindar, reperformance, reception, literary history

Unlike the speaker of many archaic lyric poems, neither the narrator of the Iliad nor the narrator of the Odyssey addresses the audience as a biographical personality located in a specific place and time.1 To a considerable extent the same holds true for the Homeric hymns. Although the narrator in these texts may pray for victory in a contest (6.19–21) or prosperity (2.494), he generally does not emerge as a thick personality outfitted with an individualized biography. Scholars have posited various specific performance contexts behind various hymns, but the hymns themselves generally do relatively little, as compared to many archaic lyric poems, to convey a sense of their specific performance setting. In these regards the Hymn to Apollo is (p.152) exceptional: in a remarkable passage the narrator speaks as a thick personality Page 1 of 21

 

Event and Artefact situated in a particular place and time and describes at considerable length the occasion at which he performs (146–78).2 My essay examines this section of the Hymn to Apollo as a case study in order to explore early Greek conceptions of authorship, occasionality, literary permanence, and reception. The comparanda deployed come from archaic lyric and especially from Pindar’s epinicians, the richest store of surviving evidence. Scholars have naturally and correctly tended to interpret the Hymn to Apollo against the background of other hexameter poetry, but we may stand to gain new insights by comparing different texts with different affinities.3 Students of archaic lyric increasingly appreciate the importance of secondary audiences and subsequent reception for our understanding of these texts. This essay applies to the Hymn to Apollo some ideas and interpretative strategies employed in the study of lyric and in turn tries to situate lyric within a broader literary-historical context. Like Oliver Thomas’s chapter in this volume, this piece also looks at intersections between a hexameter hymn and lyric. The first section claims that the speaker identifies himself as Homer and discusses some implications for how audiences conceptualize the hymn. I am concerned not only to argue against those who do not identify the speaker as Homer, or express uncertainty, but also to convince those who would avoid this debate that it is of great importance to the meaning of the text as a whole. The second section describes how the hymn anticipates its own reception on Delos and abroad. Getting the most out of this text, I argue, involves approaching it both as an enacted event and as a perpetuated artefact. In my conclusion I try to account for congruencies with lyric. Rhetoric is my primary concern throughout, and I therefore set aside some questions which have claimed much scholarly attention: who was the historical author of the Hymn to Apollo and what was its original performance context?4 What was the historical relationship between its Delian and Pythian (p.153) sections?5 At the end of this piece I will return in passing to some of these issues and suggest that our section of the hymn probably dates to the last third of the sixth century, or later.

The Blind Man and His Poems I begin from a different version of the first question just set aside: does the speaker present himself as Homer? From early on hymns were attributed to Homer.6 Thucydides (3.104) attributes to him the Hymn to Apollo in particular. Pindar (Paean 7b)7 and Aristophanes (Av. 575 with Dunbar (1995) 386) probably allude to it as Homer’s work. [Hes.] fr. 357, which may be archaic or classical, has Homer and Hesiod perform on Delos in honour of Apollo. This has been plausibly linked to the hymn (e.g. Janko (1982) 113–15). The Contest of Homer and Hesiod (18 West) has Homer perform the hymn during the Ionian festival on Delos. Perhaps this material, and much else in the Contest, goes back to the fifth century or earlier.8 Such testimonia suggest that the speaker of the hymn was widely understood to be Homer. Indeed, although a claim to Homeric authorship Page 2 of 21

 

Event and Artefact was not universally accepted in antiquity, no ancient text positively identifies the speaker (as opposed to the author) as anyone else or conveys doubt about identifying the speaker as Homer.9 This early tradition of interpretation points in the right direction and has fascinating implications. (p.154) The speaker of the hymn is a blind man who lives in Chios (172), visits Delos (170), and travels widely (174–5)—presumably performing on the festival circuit at occasions like the festival at which he now performs (146–55).10 All of this is familiar from the Homeric biographical tradition. This tradition started early, encouraged, one may readily suppose, by the Homeridai, rhapsodes who told stories about their ostensible namesake.11 It might be thought implausible that such robust congruencies between the self-presentation of the hymnic speaker and the Homeric biographical tradition can be attributed to mere chance. Yet one might question the direction of influence: did the hymn draw on a pre-existing biographical tradition or, as some have thought, was the biographical tradition shaped by a misunderstanding of the hymn?12 In order to answer this question adequately, we must examine the text more closely. The speaker refers to a body of work that has already garnered a singular reputation: τοῦ πᾶσαι μετόπισθεν ἀριστεύουσιν ἀοιδαί (173), ‘whose songs all remain supreme afterwards’.13 Like some other scholars, I find it very hard to imagine this boast in the mouth of an anonymous Chian bard.14 Indeed, these words might sound odd on the lips of any living historical individual from the archaic or classical period (even including Pindar), but they sound plausible as a description of the reception of Homeric poetry placed in the mouth of Homer himself. In fact, as we shall see, there are strong congruencies between the rhetoric of reception in the hymn and the early reception of Homeric poetry. Another argument buttresses this conclusion and attempts to explain what leads some to doubt that the speaker presents himself as Homer. The blind Chian asks the Deliades to identify him as their (p.155) favourite bard when asked by a stranger from abroad (166–73). Yet the script for this notional future encounter conspicuously fails to provide the Deliades with a name to provide in turn to the stranger (172–3). Richardson (2010) 109 writes that ‘our poet does not actually name himself…This looks deliberate, but it remains unclear what exactly is the point of this.’ Why should someone so concerned with his reputation deliberately withhold his name while providing biographical information about himself?15 Because, I suggest, everyone already knows his name. Indirect denomination through a periphrastic description rather than through a proper name can selfreflexively call attention to shared knowledge of a well-known figure.16 Archaic lyric provides especially illuminating comparisons for our passage. Earlier lyric poets name themselves,17 but neither Pindar nor Bacchylides names himself within a relatively large preserved corpus. Both feature prominently in their work as thick personalities, yet, like the speaker of the hymn, each identifies Page 3 of 21

 

Event and Artefact himself only obliquely through references to geographic origins18 and to authorial reputations.19 This thin and indeed transparent veil of anonymity, maintained consistently, as far as we can tell, over the course of two poetic careers, looks very much like the (p.156) same rhetorical strategy at work as in the Hymn to Apollo.20 If this was a rhetorical strategy, it was evidently an effective one: as we have seen, testimonia show that the speaker was widely identified as Homer. The blind Chian withholds his name because his reputation precedes him. His anonymous calling card is its own supreme vaunt. The Deliades are imagined as conversing with ‘someone of mankind’ (τις ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων, 167) who visits Delos from abroad (ξεῖνος…ἐλθών, 168). As Leto promises, all mankind visits Delos (ἄνθρωποί τοι πάντες…ἐνθάδ’ ἀγειρόμενοι, 57–8). The longsuffering stranger of line 167 is thus potentially anyone (cf. πάντων δ’ ἀνθρώπων, 162). If this scripted encounter is to be at all plausible, anyone from anywhere must be able to identify the blind man from Chios. In other words, the extratextual knowledge necessary for identifying him must already be widely shared. Who besides Homer could fulfil this condition? In the archaic and classical periods he is often depicted as familiar to all.21 Richardson (2010) 109 cautiously writes that ‘we cannot know the answer to the puzzle which this bard has set us’. Yet he expects that anyone will be able to solve his ‘puzzle’. This suggests that the correct answer is the only one which might be considered to be the obvious answer. ‘Someone’ (τις, 167) is to identify the blind man from Chios as Homer, much as ‘someone’ (τις) is to identify the Cean nightingale as Bacchylides (Bacch. 3.96–8).22 Since the speaker is Homer, it follows that the Hymn to Apollo has always presented and still presents itself to its audiences as the record of a performance from long ago.23 From the moment when ‘Homer (p.157) springs into life’ (West (1999) 377) as a thick personality, he is always already dead, always already a classic.24 In other words, from the earliest period for which we have any good evidence Homer is thought of as a figure from the past. Probably no Greek ever believed that he listened to Homer in the flesh; very many believed that they listened to Homer’s poetry, and it is easy to imagine a rhapsode presenting a hymn as Homer’s work. Indeed, the Hymn to Apollo is exceptional in prominently inviting reflection on ideas of permanence which were common to the reception of any text as the surviving work of a past poet named Homer.25 The hymn’s claim to be Homer’s preserved words, a claim not universally accepted in antiquity, must have been parasitic upon other works which were commonly regarded to be just that (cf. πᾶσαι…ἀοιδαί, 173).

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Event and Artefact There are striking parallels between the hymn and the way in which Pindar conceptualizes Homer’s poetry and its reception (Isthm. 4.37–44): ἀλλ’ Ὅμηρός τοι τετίμα      κεν δι’ ἀνθρώπων, ὃς αὐτοῦ πᾶσαν ὀρθώσαις ἀρετὰν κατὰ ῥάβδον ἔφρασεν θεσπεσίων ἐπέων λοιποῖς ἀθύρειν. τοῦτο γὰρ ἀθάνατον φωνᾶεν ἕρπει, εἴ τις εὖ εἴπῃ τι· καὶ πάγ      καρπον ἐπὶ χθόνα καὶ διὰ πόντον βέβακεν ἐργμάτων ἀκτὶς καλῶν ἄσβεστος αἰεί. προφρόνων Μοισᾶν τύχοιμεν,       κεῖνον ἅψαι πυρσὸν ὕμνων καὶ Μελίσσῳ…

But Homer, to be sure, has made him [sc. Ajax] honoured among mankind, who set straight his entire achievement and declared it with his staff of divine verses for future men to play. For that thing goes forth with immortal voice if someone says it well, and over the all-fruitful earth and through the sea has gone the radiance of noble deeds forever undimmed. May I find the favour of the Muses to light such a beacon-fire of hymns for Melissus, too… (p.158) Along with the Hymn to Apollo and Simonides’ ‘Plataea Elegy’ (fr. eleg. 11.5–18), this passage belongs among the most extensive early poetic meditations on Homer as an author. Isthmian 4, like the Hymn to Apollo, assimilates Homer to a rhapsode of the sort that recited Homeric epic for archaic audiences.26 Both texts paint a fictional portrait of Homer which owes much to the actual reception of Homeric poetry. Pindar depicts a living tradition stemming from Homer and replicated in subsequent reperformances, such as those known to his contemporaries: Homer uttered his work long ago, but it echoes into the future as his poetry speaks to later generations with the voice of its creator (ἔφρασεν, 38 → φωνᾶεν, 40 → εἴπῃ, 41). There is a blurring of subjectivity as the epic poet’s voice is perpetuated in his work and those who utter it again. The hymn presents itself as the echo of an original performance; Pindar takes Homer’s poetry to be something similar. Both invite audiences to reflect on a disjunction and continuity between past performance and contemporary reception. Pindar’s Homer intends for his work to be enjoyed by later generations: ἀθύρειν (39) is a final infinitive27 that attributes to Homer an aim to have his work remembered. In the hymn, Homer is aware of the afterlife of his work: τοῦ πᾶσαι μετόπισθεν ἀριστεύουσιν ἀοιδαί(173), ‘whose songs all remain supreme afterwards’. Burkert (1987) 55 writes that ‘this is the clearest expression in epic diction of the notion of a classic, an absolute classic, that I can imagine’. These Page 5 of 21

 

Event and Artefact words appeal to a proven poetic reputation and augur the afterlife of this particular poem. It is worth unpacking some of the interrelated concepts at work here. If audiences are asked to believe that Homer once performed a hymn on Delos and that they now experience that hymn in the present, they are thereby asked to conceive of that hymn as a notionally fixed entity transmitted intact through time.28 Line 173 makes (p.159) explicit an idea of permanence implicit in the very existence of the hymn as the preserved work of Homer. In order to remain the best in the future, Homer’s poems must be remembered as poems. This pretty clearly entails reperformances. Historical audiences who in fact conceptualized the hymn as a reperformance, as all historical listening audiences would have been invited to do, could have had little difficulty in imagining this situation. Audiences familiar with lyric reperformances would have been familiar with the experience of imagining a specific original occasion extensively described within the text.29 Line 173 not only implies textual survival but also suggests an implicit explanation for textual survival: Homer’s poems continue to be remembered because they continue to be the best (ἀριστεύουσιν, 173). This claim to superlative excellence is related to the claim that Homer provides the greatest pleasure (ἥδιστος ἀοιδῶν, 169; τέῳ τέρπεσθε μάλιστα, 170).30 Pleasure is central to the immanent poetics of early hexameter poetry,31 but a connection between pleasure and permanence or reperformance is never explicit in the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Hesiodic poems, or other Homeric hymns—whatever the historical individuals responsible for these works might have thought about the matter.32 In the rhetoric of archaic lyric extended reception is often linked to the pleasure of secondary audiences and authorial excellence.33 Thus, for instance, Pindar’s hope to send his ode abroad is immediately qualified by a conditional (Ol. 9.21–7): (p.160) ἐγὼ δέ τοι φίλαν πόλιν μαλεραῖς ἐπιφλέγων ἀοιδαῖς, καὶ ἀγάνορος ἵππου θᾶσσον καὶ ναὸς ὑποπτέρου παντᾷ ἀγγελίαν πέμψω ταύταν,       εἰ σύν τινι μοιριδίῳ παλάμᾳ ἐξαίρετον Χαρίτων νέμομαι κᾶπον· κεῖναι γὰρ ὤπασαν τὰ τέρπν’.

But as for me, while I light up that dear city with my blazing songs, more swiftly than either a high-spirited horse or a winged ship I shall send this announcement everywhere, if with the help of some skill granted by

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Event and Artefact destiny I cultivate the choice garden of the Graces, for it is they who bestow what is delightful. For Pindar, a poem has to be good in order to be remembered (cf. Nem. 4.6–8). Like Pindar’s epinicians, the Hymn to Apollo not only envisions its own survival but also implies a certain rationale for its afterlife: this text has lasted from Homer’s day down to the present because it continues to be the best and because it continues to provide great pleasure. Pindar’s Isthmian 4 suggests a related explanation for the afterlife of Homer’s poetry: his work has endured and spread because he ‘spoke well’ (cf. εἴ τις εὖ εἴπῃ τι, 41).34 In line 173 Homer does not pray for victory in a single contest, as does the hymnic speaker at H.Hom. 6.19–20, but rather lays claim to a different sort of supremacy reaching indefinitely through time. Inherent in the Hymn to Apollo is a conception of literary history which relies on a conception of literary permanence: poems enter the world at a definite point but endure through time to be compared with and understood alongside other, later works; a poem is linked to, yet separable from, a particular moment. Such a sense of immanent literary history is not very prominent in the Iliad, the Odyssey, other Homeric hymns, or the Hesiodic poems.35 In the rhetoric of lyric, by contrast, immanent literary history plays a key role.36 In Olympian 9, for example, Pindar, before envisioning sending abroad (p.161) his poem for a recent victory (21–6), compares his work to an older and simpler poem attributed to Archilochus (1– 10). Later in the same ode the poet issues an imperative: αἴνει δὲ παλαιὸν μὲν οἶνον, ἄνθεα δ’ ὕμνων | νεωτέρων (48–9), ‘praise wine that is old but the blooms of hymns that are newer’.37 The Hymn to Apollo, like Olympian 9, invites an audience to approach the text within the framework of a continuous literary history reaching from the past down to the present. The aesthetics of canonicity are important to both. Experiencing the Hymn to Apollo as the work of Homer entails experiencing it as a monument in literary history. Line 173 comments reflexively on the Hymn to Apollo but also comments more broadly on this poem as part of a body of work. What is at issue here is not just a ‘classic’, as Burkert writes, but rather an entire oeuvre of classics: Homer’s excellence ensures the shared success and survival of a corpus (πᾶσαι…ἀοιδαί, 173). The hymn invites an audience to contextualize this poem alongside other ‘Homeric’ poems. Pindar, for one, does precisely that: his Paean 7b combines allusion to Homer’s Hymn to Apollo with a subtler allusion to the famous invocation before the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad (Pind. Pa. 7b.18–20 → Il. 2.484–6).

The Hymn as Event and Artefact In Isthmian 4 Homer serves as an explicit model and precedent for Pindar’s own authorial ambitions: the lyric poet prays for his epinician first performed in Thebes to transcend this original setting and travel through time and space to Page 7 of 21

 

Event and Artefact realize an afterlife like that already in fact realized by Homeric epic (43–5). Isthmian 4 situates itself within an original performance occasion tied to the recent athletic victory which it commemorates but also envisions an indefinite future in which it will be remembered. Pindar’s poem thus in a sense contains within itself the stages of its life in the world: the text looks toward its debut in Thebes at a particular moment and also toward its subsequent reception elsewhere and at other times. By bringing (p.162) together the various stages of its life in the world, Isthmian 4 prevents its various audiences, who encounter the poem at one stage in its life, from wholly identifying the poem with that particular stage. Any audience, including a first audience, is invited to think of the full lifespan of the ode, from initial performance to later reception, and thereby think of its potential meaning to others. Anyone may view the poem both from the perspective of its original audience as an enacted performance and from the perspective of a secondary audience as a perpetuated literary artefact. We stand to get the most out of the ode by approaching it as both simultaneously.38 The Hymn to Apollo, like Pindar’s Isthmian 4, describes an initial performance context but also looks forward to secondary reception in time to come. Like Isthmian 4, the hymn presents itself to its various audiences as both an event39 and an artefact. This section explores how approaching the hymn as both may enrich a reading of the text. Like many lyric poems, the Hymn to Apollo vividly depicts its debut performance context. An address to the Deliades40 anchors Homer to a moment of face-toface interaction with his contemporaries ‘here’ (ἐνθάδ’, 168) on Delos.41 Present-tense verbs may be and have been plausibly taken to describe the Ionian festival as a recurring event, ongoing in the present.42 But why does the Hymn to Apollo describe an original performance occasion at all? The other Homeric hymns show that this was, far from being an essential generic feature, in fact unusual. One might legitimately invoke pragmatic explanations related to the hypothesized first historical performance of the poem, as scholars have done, but the Hymn to Apollo, as I will argue, is not oriented exclusively toward any single occasion, real or imaginary, (p.163) but envisions (and in fact enjoyed) an extended reception. The salient question then becomes this: why should a poem designed to be remembered in various settings link itself so extensively to one setting? Many archaic lyric poems pose similar questions. In the case of the hymn and of much archaic lyric, devising a satisfying answer to such questions will involve interpreting the inset performance occasion both as a meaningful part of the composition and as a frame through which audiences approach the whole composition. The description of Homer’s performance is integrated into the progression of the text. The Ionian festival confirms Leto’s prediction that Delos will be exceptionally honoured as Apollo’s birthplace (56–60). The god takes the Page 8 of 21

 

Event and Artefact greatest pleasure in Delos (146), and there the most pleasing bard (169–70) sings of the island for his supreme pleasure (cf. Miller (1986) 58). The hymn moves from the distant past into the immediate present as Homer’s Delian performance rounds off the Delian section of his hymn. Some lyric poems similarly transition from the past into the hic et nunc of performance, which has aetiological roots in the ancient events being recalled.43 The depiction of an original performance context also has broader implications for how audiences approach the Hymn to Apollo as a whole. By identifying itself as the record of an occasion, the text encourages various audiences to relate their own experience of the hymn to that paradigmatic occasion. The specificity of this described performance context need not have constituted an obstacle to the broad and lasting appeal of the hymn but on the contrary may have enriched the experience of various audiences in various settings. In what follows I discuss how the hymn anticipates its reception on Delos and abroad and consider how historical audiences might have reacted to the text. Most scholars would agree that the hymn was in fact probably performed on Delos at least once. It is reasonable to suppose, as we routinely do suppose with lyric, that the rhetoric of performance in the text has some bearing on its actual performance history. External evidence suggests that the poem was remembered on the island. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod (18 West) reports that the hymn was inscribed on a tablet stored in the temple of Artemis. In a sense this (p. 164) tablet will have constituted a concrete physical realization of a potential for permanence already advertised within the hymn.44 To any historical audience on Delos, the hymn would have presented itself as the reperformance of a parallel Homeric performance in a related setting long ago. The text situates its debut within a repeating institution: the Ionian festival has taken place in the past, is taking place now, and will take place again. The hymn thus contains a validating genealogy for later performances on Delos: Homer’s hymn can be performed time and again as the Ionian festival is held time and again. More generally, this work can endure in conjunction with the enduring traditions of Apollo’s cult.45 Historical audiences on Delos might have reflected on their experience as forming part of continuous literary and religious practices reaching back into the past and indefinitely into the future. By way of comparison, consider Pindar’s Pythian 1 (92–8):                          ὀπιθόμβροτον αὔχημα δόξας οἶον ἀποιχομένων ἀνδρῶν δίαιταν μανύει καὶ λογίοις καὶ ἀοιδοῖς. οὐ φθίνει Κροί    σου φιλόφρων ἀρετά. τὸν δὲ ταύρῳ χαλκέῳ καυτῆρα νηλέα νόον ἐχθρὰ Φάλαριν κατέχει παντᾷ φάτις, Page 9 of 21

 

Event and Artefact οὐδέ νιν φόρμιγγες ὑπωρόφιαι κοινανίαν μαλθακὰν παίδων ὀάροισι δέκονται.

The posthumous acclaim of fame alone reveals the life of men who are dead and gone to both chroniclers and poets. The kindly excellence of Croesus does not perish, but universal execration overwhelms Phalaris, that man of pitiless (p.165) spirit who burned men in his bronze bull, and no lyres in banquet halls welcome him in gentle fellowship with boys’ voices. These lines suggest that Pindar’s poem will be remembered in time to come in contexts which resonate to some degree with its original performance context (φόρμιγξ, 1 → φόρμιγγες, 97).46 Audiences who encountered Pythian 1 in a sympotic setting not unlike that described by Pindar could have felt themselves in a way linked back to the debut of the poem and even dimly anticipated within that occasion. Audiences who experienced the Hymn to Apollo on Delos could have felt an analogous sense of simultaneous rupture from and connection with Homer’s performance on Delos long ago. The Hymn to Apollo describes a debut performance on Delos, but also envisions indefinite reperformances beyond the narrow confines of the island (174–6):47 ἡμεῖς δ’ ὑμέτερον κλέος οἴσομεν ὅσσον ἐπ’ αἶαν ἀνθρώπων στρεφόμεσθα πόλεις εὖ ναιεταώσας· οἱ δ’ ἐπὶ δὴ πείσονται, ἐπεὶ καὶ ἐτήτυμόν ἐστιν.

And we will carry your glory wherever we go over the earth as we roam the prosperous cities of men, and they will believe it, because it is true. Homer looks beyond the present moment and forward to his career as an itinerant bard of a type familiar to archaic audiences.48 His vision of the future is vague but impressive. These lines recall traditional language describing the dissemination of fame through space49 and summon to mind ample crowds and a broad geographical sweep. One might compare Pindar’s proud prefiguration of his (p.166) own panhellenic career: ‘as long as I live may I mingle with victors and be foremost in wisdom among Hellenes everywhere’ (ἐμέ τε τοσσάδε νικαφόροις | ὁμιλεῖν πρόφαντον σοφίᾳ καθ’ Ἕλλανας ἐόντα παντᾷ, Ol. 1.115b– 16). But precisely how will Homer disseminate the Deliades’ fame? The most relevant parallel is Odysseus’ promise to Demodocus (Od. 8.497–8; cf. 17.418). Yet Homer, unlike Odysseus, is a poet in his own right, and it is therefore reasonable to infer that he will spread the fame of his subject not through a favourable prose performance review, as Odysseus will spread Demodocus’ fame, but rather through his own poetry, that which motivates his travels from city to city. It is a further reasonable inference that Homer will spread the Deliades’ fame through Page 10 of 21

 

Event and Artefact this particular poem.50 In other words, he may envision travelling throughout the Greek world and performing a repertoire that includes this hymn—rather like an itinerant rhapsode performing a Homeric repertoire.51 The hymn, as we have seen, asserts that all of Homer’s poems are remembered (173); it follows that this work will outlive its first performance. In archaic lyric the glory of an addressee is often perpetuated through the same poem in which it is promised much as, on the reading adopted here, Homer promises to preserve the glory of the Deliades through this hymn.52 The Hymn to Apollo is unique among the corpus of Homeric hymns not only in vividly depicting a performance setting but also in vividly envisioning its reception beyond that setting. As Apollo ranges over the Greek world but has a special relationship with Delos (140–6), so the Hymn to Apollo has a special relationship to the island but can travel elsewhere. The hymn, like the god whom it celebrates, enters the world on Delos but journeys far abroad (29; cf. 20–4, 81–2, 140–5). As audiences on Delos could have imagined their experience (p. 167) of the hymn as parallel with Homer’s Delian performance, so audiences throughout the Greek world could have imagined their experience as parallel with Homer’s reperformances of his hymn throughout the Greek world. Homer’s imagined travels may even be taken as an aetiology for the actual reception of his hymn: one can imagine that the poem has travelled widely from Delos in part through and because of the wide travels of its author. In the archaic period the dissemination of poetry and glory through space often proceeds and implies durability through time.53 Homer will personally carry abroad the fame of the Deliades (ὑμέτερον κλέος οἴσομεν, 174), and then their fame will endure beyond his lifetime as his hymn is remembered by later generations, including all historical audiences of this work (cf. κλέος οὔποτ’ ὀλεῖται, 156). There is at least a certain parallelism, if not an implicit causative relationship, between the wide travels of Homer and the wide reception of his hymn.54 As Hunter and Rutherford (2009) 7 write, ‘the itinerancy, both real and imagined, of poets is intimately tied to the ambition of and for their poetry to enjoy fame and reception all over the world’. In promising to spread the Deliades’ fame, Homer confidently presumes that audiences beyond Delos will be interested in hearing about Delian matters (cf. τόδε μέγα θαῦμα, 156). Pindar is similarly confident that widespread audiences will care to hear about the sort of local mythical and cultic matters which his poems describe (cf. e.g. Nem. 5.1–5, 14–18, Isthm. 4.37–45, 61–8). We are not entitled to the assumption that descriptions of local subjects entail an orientation toward an exclusively local audience.55 Indeed, the Hymn to Apollo as we have it asks one to believe that once upon a time on Delos Homer sang about Delos and then sang more than 300 lines about the distant Delphi. Evidently at least some people in the ancient world found this plausible.

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Event and Artefact Looking more closely at the text, one can see that the hymn shows signs of accommodating and engaging audiences beyond Delos. Line (p.168) 176 envisions people without first-hand knowledge of the Deliades who are persuaded by a second-hand report: οἱ δ’ ἐπὶ δὴ πείσονται,ἐπεὶ καὶ ἐτήτυμόν ἐστιν, ‘they will believe it, because it is true’. The indefinite subject and futuretense verb here, as often in Greek lyric,56 implicate indefinite secondary audiences who will experience this poem in the future. The description of the Ionian festival is focalized from the imagined perspective of an ignorant outside (151–2) who might contemplate the scene (κεν ἴδοιτο, 153; cf. φαίη δέ κεν, 163).57 Secondary audiences can see themselves in this faceless portrait. Through Homer’s hymn one can become a spectator of sorts and in a way behold the Ionians.58 One who really sees that scene would take pleasure (τέρψαιτο, 153) much as Homer’s audiences may take pleasure in his description of it (cf. τέρπεσθε, 170). Homer’s description of the Ionian festival can transmit information about Delian matters to the uninformed and transport to Delos those who have not visited in person. Pindar somewhat similarly predicts that one of his cultic poems will in the future make ‘someone living far off’ think of the ritual which his poem accompanied: μνάσει δὲ καί τινα ναίο[ν|θ’ ἑκὰς ἡρωΐδος | θεαρίας, ‘[the Muse] will make even a person dwelling far away be mindful of the delegation in honour of the hero’ (fr. 52o.35–7; cf. D’Alessio (1997) 34). External evidence shows that the Hymn to Apollo did in fact enjoy an extended reception throughout the Greek world and throughout time, as Homer himself implies that it will (μετόπισθεν, 173; ἐπ’αἶαν, 174).59 From the perspective of historical secondary audiences, references to future time within the hymn may assume the character of a past prophecy fulfilled in the present.60 The enduring and widespread (p.169) fame predicted for the Deliades (156, 174; cf. 299) is perpetuated within the text and continually realized anew in each act of reception. If one acknowledges the excellence of the Hymn to Apollo, then Homer’s poems do continue to be esteemed as the best, as Homer predicted (173). If one accepts the truth of the hymn, then later audiences are persuaded by Homer’s account (176), as he predicted. References to future reception can help to guide the reaction of secondary audiences. Audiences like us, far removed from Delos and Homer’s time, may view the text from their own perspective, as the last paragraphs do, but also simultaneously imagine the perspective of others, as previous pages have tried to do. One may, in other words, think of the full lifespan of the hymn and of other people who have experienced it in different settings. Engaging fully with this poem entails engaging with its history in the world. Homer, his various audiences, and the powers of his poetry are part of what this particular poem is about. In

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Event and Artefact experiencing this hymn one may join an imagined community of audiences stretching through time and space.

Homer, Lyric, Literary History The beginning of this essay described the Hymn to Apollo as ‘exceptional’ within the corpus of Homeric hymns. If the arguments that followed have force, then this hymn is also in some respects typical of some other strains in archaic Greek poetics. I have drawn connections between the hymn and lyric. It remains to address the nature and significance of such parallels. Many recent scholars hypothesize that the Hymn to Apollo as we have it debuted on Delos in 523/2 BC (see n. 4). The hymn prominently mentions a temple for Apollo on the island (52, 56, 80). Burkert (1979) 62 argues that, since the earliest known historical temple of Apollo there dates from about 540 BC, the hymn was composed afterward.61 Our passage, I have claimed, must depend (p. 170) on pre-existing and widely disseminated biographical traditions about Homer, and these traditions are not much in evidence until around the last third of the sixth century (cf. Allen (1924) 38, West (1999) 376–9). Without committing to a very specific thesis, I would suppose that at least the section of the hymn that concerns us probably belongs to around this time or even later. If this hypothesis points in the right direction, then the author of our passage, whoever he was, may have been influenced by a sort of lyric rhetoric of authorship, performance, and permanence that we can discern at work in the surviving poetry of Sappho, Theognis, Ibycus, and even Simonides. According to Hippostratus (568 F 5 BNJ), the rhapsode Cynaethus, whom many regard as in some sense the author of the Hymn to Apollo, was active in Syracuse around 504–1 BCE, just a few years before Pindar’s earliest preserved poem (Pythian 10, celebrating a victory won, according to the scholia, in 498). We must thoroughly get past thoroughly discredited notions of a distinct epic age followed by a distinct lyric age.62 It would be odd to suppose that the Hymn to Apollo self-consciously presents Homer as an authorial personality in the model of a lyric poet. Rather than inferring conspicuous intergeneric borrowing meant to be apprehended by audiences as such, one might posit that the hymn and archaic lyric embody rather basic commonalities. As Pindar stresses in Isthmian 4, successful lyric authorship can look a lot like successful epic authorship. Lyric poets often talk explicitly about their own authorial success and about their own relationship to secondary audiences; early hexameter poets generally do not. It may then not be altogether surprising if, on a rare occasion when an early hexameter poem does explicitly address successful authorship and secondary audiences, this passage has much in common with lyric and involves similar ideas pertaining to poetry, reception, and authorship as such (cf. Ap. Rh. Arg. 4.1773–5). Rather than

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Event and Artefact manifesting any direct influence from lyric, the hymn might simply reflect fundamental concepts which were in general circulation. I am suggesting that the Hymn to Apollo emerges from a literary landscape broadly related to that of archaic lyric. The texts themselves provide some of our best evidence for the contours of this overarching cultural environment. In much archaic lyric and the Hymn to (p.171) Apollo authorial excellence entails producing works that outlive their debut performance to survive in other settings. A poem thus may be both simultaneously an event tied to a particular moment and also an artefact reaching through time. In recent decades scholars have tended to concentrate on one of these two facets. Much influential scholarship has been in large part concerned with reconstructing the relationship between the Hymn to Apollo and its hypothesized performance circumstances. Much work on archaic lyric privileges first performance as the focus of research (e.g. Neumann-Hartmann (2009)). This approach to early Greek literature has taught us important lessons, but it has also perhaps narrowed our focus. Scholars of the performance-oriented school often stress the importance of reading a text ‘in context’.63 A concentration on fine-grained contexts of debut performance and immediate reception can occlude larger contexts of literary culture as a broadly shared and historically situated institution and set of constituent social practices.64 Texts discussed in this paper are some of our earliest and most important evidence for a Greek literary culture based on fixed poems which are valued, preserved, and disseminated. To understand these poems we need to situate them not only within the contexts of their initial performance but also within these overarching historical contexts of literary practices. To do so may turn out not only to change our views of early Greek literary history but also to enrich our experience of these texts as literature. (p. 172) Notes:

For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper I am most grateful to Felix Budelmann, Renaud Gagné, Richard Hunter, Adrian Kelly, Oliver Thomas, and an audience in Cambridge. For the Homeric Hymns I refer to West; for Pindar I refer to S-M but cite Isthmian 4 as an independent poem. Translations of these texts are adapted from the Loeb editions of West and Race, respectively. (1) Contradictory attributions of the cyclic epics show that the narrators of these works did not identify themselves. From early on, then, authorial anonymity was conventional in heroic narrative epic. Anonymity is not equivalent to impersonality. The Iliadic narrator, for example, is an interesting character in his own right. Consider e.g. Il. 22.445–6. I use the words ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ to refer to the degree to which a narrator emerges as a personality. A thick personality may

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Event and Artefact be entirely or partly fictional. On lyric personalities, see Budelmann’s chapter in this volume. (2) Griffith (1983) 45, Morrison (2007a) 47–8. See Thomas in this volume on possible performance contexts behind other Homeric hymns. (3) Chappell (2011) 68: ‘the poet’s references to himself and his audience…seem more characteristic of lyric than epic’. Miller (1986) draws many illuminating comparisons with lyric but pursues different concerns. (4) Cynaethus on Delos on 523/2 BCE, when Polycrates celebrated a combined Pythian and Delian festival? See Burkert (1979), Janko (1982) 112–15, Aloni (1989), (2009), West (1975), (2003) 9–12, Sbardella (2012). (5) Were the Delian and Pythian sections originally composed separately? If so, which was composed first? Clearly they were not composed independently of each other and then combined (cf. Chappell (2011) 71–2, Heiden (2013)). The text as we have it constitutes a coherent unity (cf. Clay (2006) 18–19, Miller (1979), not fully countered by Chappell (2011) 63–4). In this essay I will refer to the hymn as we have it, but many of my claims would be applicable to different versions of the text. (6) Cf. Faulkner (2011b) 177, 199–200. (7) This work, first performed on Delos, names Homer (11) and very probably sets itself apart from him (so e.g. Ferrari (2002)). It then tells a version of Apollo’s birth which differs markedly from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Rutherford (2001) 252, who provides an up-to-date text of Pindar’s paean). (8) Jacoby (1933) 10–11, Pfeiffer (1968) 11, Richardson (1981), Graziosi (2002) 106. (9) For testimonia see Förstel (1979) 63–101; note Choricius Laudatio Marciani 2.3 with Graziosi (2002) 224–5. We do not have clear external evidence that either the Delian or the Pythian section circulated independently in antiquity. I suppose that testimonia refer to the whole hymn. (10) For such festivals see the material collected by West (2010). (11) Cf. Pl. Resp. 599e, Isoc. 10.65. A Pindaric scholion (∑ Nem. 2.1c = iii 29 Dr) reports that a Homerid named Cynaethus wrote the Hymn to Apollo and attributed it to Homer. (12) So, for example, Allen, Halliday, and Sikes (1936) 226: ‘this line was the origin of the tradition that Homer was blind and a Chian’ (cf. Richardson (2010) 109). It might seem prima facie improbable that a single line could by itself play such a central role in shaping Homer’s biography. Allen, Halliday, and Sikes Page 15 of 21

 

Event and Artefact (1936) 184–5 date the hymn to the seventh or eighth century, but this hypothesis is not popular now: see the final section of this article, pp. 169–71. (13) For the use of μετόπισθεν cf. Od. 24.84; for the temporal particle with a present-tense verb cf. Il. 1.82. (14) Cf. Burkert (1979) 57, West (1999) 370, and now Currie (2016) 19–21. (15) Anonymity might even be thematized, but the text of line 171 is notoriously problematic. Burkert (1979) 61 reads ἀφήμως and takes this to mean ‘without giving my name’ (cf. De Martino (1982) 92–3, Graziosi (2002) 65). Yet one does not expect the φήμη-root to refer to a proper name. I tentatively read ἀφήμως and translate ‘with one voice’ (cf. West (2003) 84, Condello (2007) 40–6, Richardson (2010) 110). (16) Sim. fr. eleg. 19.1 (man from Chios = Homer, named at 20.14), Pind. fr. 140b.1–6, Callim. Hy. 1.85–90, Ver. Aen. 6.826–31, Stat. Achil. 1.13–19, Krevans (1983) 205–6, Farrell (1991) 33–46, Burton (2011) 66–7. On denomination more generally see de Jong (1993). (17) Alcm. frs 17, 39, Alc. fr. 401b, Sa. frs 1.20, 65.5, 94.5. Maslov (2015) 20 writes that in Pindar and Bacchylides ‘omitting the composer’s name provides but one example of the folkloric, performance-based features retained within the otherwise forward-looking poetics of epinikion’. I doubt this explanation. (18) Pind. Ol. 10.85, Pyth. 2.3, 4.298–9, Isthm. 1.1, 6.74–5, 8.16–16a, Bacch. 2.11, 3.97–8, 5.9–14, 10.10, 19.11; cf. οἰκεῖ δὲ Χίῳ ἔνι παιπαλοέσσῃ (H.Ap. 172). We should imagine Pindar and Bacchylides’s odes circulating among secondary audiences equipped with extratextual knowledge of their author’s identity (cf. Hdt. 3.38.4, Aristoph. Nub. 1356, Av. 939). (19) Pind. Ol. 1.115b-16, 2.86–8, Pyth. 4.248, Nem. 3.76–84, Bacch. 4.7–10, 9.3–4; cf. τοῦ πᾶσαι μετόπισθεν ἀριστεύουσιν ἀοιδαί (H.Ap. 173). Morrison (2007a) 67 writes that ‘the poet of the hymn has adopted the device of grounding the narrator on the biography of the “historical author” which was to be found in Archaic poetry outside Homer, and put it to use as a claim on Homeric authorship’. (20) Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1916) 453 posits that the Chian’s name dropped from the text. This unlikely possibility becomes still less attractive if we recognize a rhetorical strategy at work. Contrast Schwartz (1940) 4: ‘die geistreiche Selbstvorstellung verliert jede Pointe, wenn der Name nicht wirklich fällt’; Förstel (1979) 142–3: ‘Das Fehlen des Dichternamens…erklärt sich zwanglos aus der Vortragssituation: Die Hörer auf Delos wußten, wer der Dichter war’. Jensen (2011) 308–9: ‘an audience listening to a singer who says “I” or “we” when commenting on the current performance arena must believe Page 16 of 21

 

Event and Artefact that he is speaking in his own persona…for me, then, the blind man who lives on rocky Chios is the rhapsode Cynaethus’. (21) Ford (2002) 78, Graziosi (2002) 59. (22) The Margites, which was sometimes regarded as Homer’s work, apparently uses a similar strategy to denominate him indirectly: ἦλθέ τις ἐς Κολοφῶνα γέρων καὶ θεῖος ἀοιδός, | Μουσάων θεράπων καὶ ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος, | φίλη̣ς ἔχων ἐν χερσὶν εὔφθογγον λύρην (fr. 1 West). Cf. Graziosi (2002) 66–72, Gostoli (2007) 70–4. (23) Like West (1999), I regard the Homeric biographical tradition as fundamentally fictional. Graziosi (2002) shows that this tradition can enrich our understanding of historical mindsets. I use the word ‘fictional’ to express my own view about the relationship between a text and reality; I do not want to imply anything about how ancient audiences approached a text. (24) Cf. Foley (1999) 51–2, adducing cross-cultural comparanda. (25) Consider, for example, the reference to the voice (φωνή) of the narrator at Il. 2.490. For any audience who thought that they listened to Homer’s words but not Homer’s voice, this could have pointed up the status of the text as the echo of a vanished personality. (26) Cf. [Hes.] fr. 357, Heraclit. B 42 D-K, Pl. Resp. 600d, Graziosi (2002) 30, Uhlig (2016) 115–17. (27) Cf. Hummel (1993) 280. (28) Cf. West (1999) 370: ‘this is a reference to songs that are learned and perpetuated by other singers’. It is not clear if, for archaic audiences, line 173 would imply written texts. This issue may well be more important to modern scholars than it would have been to those who listened to a rhapsode. Unlike some later works (see Beecroft (2011)), the hymn does not seem concerned with the question of how a blind man was the author of written texts. (29) Felson (2004a) 264–5 discusses how secondary audiences may ‘re-imagine a lost historical performance’ of a lyric poem. Similar dynamics would be involved when a rhapsode assumed the voice of Hesiod addressing his brother Perses. (30) ταλαπείριος (168) means not just ‘of broad experience’ (Clay (2006) 51) but describes someone who has suffered. This stranger wants a pleasurable song to abstract him from his cares (cf. Hes. Th. 98–103, Forderer (1971) 103, Miller (1986) 62). Within the hymn, he is emblematic of the suffering that defines mankind generally (190–3). His question is not idiosyncratic but points toward a broadly shared human rationale for valuing Homer’s poetry. ταλαπείριος ἄλλος ἐπελθών, a text of line 168 preserved in the manuscripts of Thucydides, Page 17 of 21

 

Event and Artefact interestingly implies that Homer is also himself long-suffering (cf. Sbardella (2012) 89–99). (31) E.g. Il. 9.186–9, Od. 8.44–5, Hes. Th. 98–103. (32) Compare and contrast de Jong (2006). (33) Sa. fr. 65, Thgn. 251–2, Ibyc. fr. S151.46–8, Sim. frs eleg. 11.15–18, 23–4, Pind. Nem. 4.6–8, Bacch. 9.82–7. (34) Pind. Nem. 7.20–4 glances at a related explanation for the reception of Homer’s poetry. In ποτανᾷ ‹τε› μαχανᾷ (22) the adjective reflects the broad reach of Homer’s work (Most (1985) 150–1) and the noun connotes the skill that secures such dissemination (cf. Pyth. 8.34). (35) But note [Hes.] fr. 357. In the mouth of Telemachus, Od. 1.351–2 refers to the narration of recent events, not novel treatments of established themes. (36) Already Alcman seems to have discussed his predecessors (cf. 4.4–6, 145). (37) These lines probably not only mention older poems as a category but allude to lines from a particular older poem by Simonides (fr. 602), which the Pindaric scholia preserve (cf. e.g. Pavlou (2008) 556). (38) Spelman (2018) tries to develop this approach to Pindar. (39) The performance occasion, however, need not necessarily be conceived of as a single, one-off event: πωλεῖται (170) describes an iterative action. (40) Cf. the address to the Deliades at Sim. 519 fr. 55a.3. The Deliades were conceived as an ancient institution (Eur. HF 687–90, Hec. 462–5) and so could be depicted as contemporary with Homer. (41) Pindar often uses deictics to indicate a particular performance context (cf. e.g. τάνδ’…νᾶσον, Isthm. 6.21, Bundy (1986) 23 n. 53). Such expressions are always clarified by an explicit preceding reference to the victor’s homeland. Compare and contrast the more generic deictics at H.Hom. 13.3, 24.4. (42) ἠγερέθονται (147) is the first of several present-tense verbs describing reoccurring actions. Cf. the present-tense verbs describing a festival in Pind. Isthm. 4.61–8. Some suppose that this festival constituted the original performance setting of Pindar’s ode (so Krummen (1990) 33–97; contrast e.g. Carey (2007) 202). (43) Cf. e.g. Sa. fr. 17.11–12 (with the recent additions to the text), Pind. Ol. 10.78–83, Bacch. fr. 4.50–7.

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Event and Artefact (44) For texts in sanctuaries see Herington (1985) 201–3. Scholars often cite the story of Pindar’s Olympian 7, dedicated in golden letters in the temple of Lindian Athena (Gorgon of Rhodes 515 F 18 BNJ). Less frequently is it noted that these golden letters, whether they really existed or not, respond to the text which they spell out: they concretely embody and represent the gold which Zeus rained down on Rhodes (χρυσέαις νιφάδεσσι, Pind. Ol. 7.34; πολύν…χρυσόν, 50) and also the golden phiale to which Pindar compares his enduring poem (Φιάλαν… πάγχρυσον, 1–4). (45) ὅταν καθέσωσιν ἀγῶνα (150) is a general temporal clause. Poetry (ἀοιδῇ, 149) features in this reoccurring festival. Cf. Eur. Alc. 445–54, Hipp. 1428–30, Nagy (2010) 57–8, (2011) 292. Note also Hdt. 4.35.3, on the ancient songs of Olen still sung in Delphi. H.Ap. 156–64 has been thought to refer to Olen’s hymns. On a general level Greek cultic poetry had a built-in potential reperformance context within the worship sustained at the site of its original performance (cf. Rutherford (2001) 176). Thomas (2016) 38 interprets Homer’s fictional ancient performance as a way of legitimizing the relatively recent institution of the pan-Ionian festival. (46) See Athanassaki (2009) on the performance and reperformance of this ode. (47) Some refer plural pronoun and verbs to a group of singers or singers generally: Dyer (1975), Aloni (1989) 127–8, Ferrari (2007b) 64, Sbardella (2012) 88–9. But Homer asks the Deliades to remember ‘me’ (ἐμεῖο, 166) as a singular, flesh-and-blood individual. οἰκεῖ (172) refers to a living person (cf. πωλεῖται, 170); an omnitemporal present would lack a solid parallel. Inferring an unmentioned group might be thought to disrupt the parallelism and reciprocity of the contract. A plural for singular ἡμεῖς (174) is unusual but unobjectionable: cf. H.Herm. 491, Floyd (1969), Förstel (1979) 141. Note plural verbs for the poet’s activity at Hes. Th. 1, 36, Epigonoi fr. 1 West. (48) Cf. Stewart (2016) 209. Clay (2006) 52 n. 110 mislabels οἴσομεν (174) as a Pindaric encomiastic future realized with its utterance. To borrow from the framework of Pfeijffer (1999), the verb is rather a future referring to events after the first performance of the hymn (compare and contrast ἀγγελίαν πέμψω ταύταν, Ol. 9.25). (49) Cf. Il. 7.451, 458, Od. 1.344, 4.726, 19.333–4 and especially 3.203–4: καί οἱ Ἀχαιοὶ | οἴσουσι κλέος εὐρὺ καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδήν. (50) Cf. Certamen 15 West ([sc. Homer] περιερχόμενος ἔλεγε τὰ ποιήματα), Thalmann (1984) 132, Clay (2006) 52, Chappell (1995) 283, de Jong (2009) 113. Alternatively, one might think that lines 174–5 look to other poems mentioning the Deliades or other versions of this hymn or excerpts from it. These other possibilities seem less attractive. The idea of exact repetition of a whole work is

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Event and Artefact intrinsic to the idea of this hymn as the surviving words of Homer. We do not know of other archaic hexameter poems mentioning the Deliades. (51) Foley (1999) 55 writes of a Slavic parallel for Homer that ‘descendants can fashion [his] image differently, shaping his biography to mesh with their own life histories and experiences of epic singing’. (52) Sa. fr. 147, Thgn. 237–8, 245–50, Ibyc. fr. S151.46–8, Pind. Nem. 3.83–4, Bacch. 3.90–8. (53) Od. 3.203–4, Sa. fr. 65, Thgn. 237–46, Pind. Nem. 5.1–5. (54) The dissemination of fame may be conceptualized as a journey: Thgn. 237–9, 247–50, Pind. Isthm. 4.40–2, Bacch. 9.47–52. (55) Cf. Clay (2006) 48. Stehle (1997) 182, discussing the description of the Ionian festival, mentions ‘the fact that the poem might not travel well’. In Stehle’s view, the Delian section of the hymn ‘is a mimesis of communal poetry and correspondingly anti-Panhellenic’ (178). (56) μνάσεσθαί τινά (Sa. fr. 147); τις ἐρεῖ (Thgn. 22); τις̣ [μνή]σ̣ε̣τ̣α̣ι̣ (Sim. fr. eleg. 11.24); τις ἀνερεῖ (Pind. Nem. 7.68); μνάσει…τινα (fr. 52o.35); τις ὑμνήσει (Bacch. 3.97). (57) Cf. de Jong (1987) 58–60 on the ‘anonymous focalizer’. (58) Cf. Bakker (1993), Clay (2011b) 16–18 on the poetics of visualization in Homeric poetry. (59) Cassola (1975) 99 writes that ‘è ovvio che l’inno fu cantato per molto tempo anche altrove, da altri rapsodi’. See n. 9 for testimonia. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes has been thought to allude to the Hymn to Apollo: Richardson (2007) 89–91, Vergados (2013) 70–3, Currie (2016) 27. For possible rhapsodic variants in manuscripts of the Hymn to Apollo and the manuscripts of Thucydides see Förstel (1979) 114–45, Janko (1982) 2–3, Chappell (1995) 249, Condello (2007) 34 n. 6, Sbardella (2012) 66–94, Colangelo (2016). (60) Similar phenomena may be observed in other archaic hexameter poems. Thus, for instance, Helen’s prediction that she will be a character in a poem known to future generations (Il. 6.357–8) is confirmed by those who know her as a character in the Iliad. Past predictions of present realities are generally important to the aetiological poetics of the Homeric hymns (e.g. H.Dem. 265–7). (61) On the debated question of the earliest temple of Apollo on Delos see Bruneau and Ducat (2005) 175–6, Constantakopoulou (2007) 43–4. (62) Cf. Fowler (1987) ch. 1, Graziosi and Haubold (2009) 95–6. Page 20 of 21

 

Event and Artefact (63) Caciagli (2014) 57: ‘individuare il contesto performativo di un carme della Grecia arcaica è decisivo per l’interpretazione del suo contenuto’. (64) For literature as an institutional practice, a fairly widespread idea in recent analytical philosophy of art, see e.g. Lamarque (2009) 57–66.

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Hermetically Unsealed

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Hermetically Unsealed Lyric Genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes Oliver Thomas

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords The Hymn to Hermes offers a late archaic or early classical viewpoint on genre in lyric poetry. It compares hymns and theogonies to bantering songs at symposia, apparently in a paradox grounded in Hermes’ ability to control transfers across firm boundaries. However, the comparisons have a latent logic: the Hymn to Hermes is itself bantering intertextually with the Homeric Hymn to Apollo; it alludes to the fact that a komos can involve both praise-poetry and (post-)sympotic erotic songs. Moreover, Apollo’s first interaction with the lyre leads him to engage Hermes in a game of verbal banter, which suggests that this ability of the lyre to unite contrasting performance types will continue under his patronage. In this sense, the Hymn implicitly reflects on its own power to reshape the audience’s attitudes towards music. Keywords:   Homeric Hymn, Hermes, Apollo, music, genre, lyric poetry

Most of the other chapters in this book centre on lyric texts; Spelman’s explores parallelisms between the address to the Deliades in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and passages from lyric on issues such as the presentation of authorship and of textual fixity across multiple performance events. I too will discuss a Homeric hymn, namely the Hymn to Hermes, but what this hymn offers is, by contrast, a late archaic or early classical Greek viewpoint on lyric ‘from the outside’.

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Hermetically Unsealed The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is not ‘lyric’ in either of the word’s normal senses within Classics, but it does describe in detail how to make a lyre, the first two performances on the instrument, and how the instrument’s creator gave its later patron, Apollo, an introductory guide to the range of its performance contexts.1 The Hymn’s engagement with these contexts involves an act of self-definition which is paradoxical, and my main focus here will be on what intuitions about lyric genre(s) that paradox works against, in particular regarding how porous the boundaries were between different types of lyric song. This study has a second relevance to this volume too, in that as in many lyric texts scholars have tended to assimilate the performance contexts imagined within the hymn to the context of its actual performance: I believe the Hymn provides a clear example of this procedure’s being an oversimplification. (p.174) I shall first briefly outline how the question of generic boundaries is rooted, in this text, in features of Hermes’ character. Then I shall lay out how the Hymn relates different subgenres of lyric, and interpret the specific significance of these connections for the poem. I shall end by arguing that the Hymn prompts us not to think that these issues are related only to the specific circumstances of Hermes’ early use of the lyre: Apollo’s first brush with the lyre seems to change him, and to shape his outlook on the instrument he takes away from the poem. We may therefore legitimately integrate the Hymn into readings of lyric (exemplified elsewhere in this volume) as implicitly reflecting on its power to reshape the audience’s outlook on music.

Hermes and Boundaries Hermetic seals are ‘hermetic’ in that they originate in alchemy, which was Hermes’ science: by pouring liquid glass around a leaky seal and waiting for it to set, the alchemist rendered his apparatus airtight and watertight. This chapter, despite the wordplay in its title, is not about alchemy. However, the phrase ‘hermetic seal’ encapsulates a pertinent and important characteristic of Hermes —his control of passage, and by the same token lack of passage, at borders. He allowed souls to pass into the underworld, heralds to cross the patrolled border into enemy territory; more generally, he helped any interstate traveller to traverse the uncivilized and dangerous wilderness in the borderlands between Greek states. Hermes both helped and hindered (depending on who was praying) thieves’ attempts to bore holes through the mud-brick walls of Greek houses. As the god of mercantile exchange, Hermes oversaw the fair matching as one item passed from A to B while another passed from B to A.2 Laurence Kahn emphasized this unifying strand in Hermes’ range of functions in her monograph Hermès passe, and showed that it is a major theme of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes; Kahn drew particular (p.175) attention to verbs of piercing—a mode of allowing passage at a boundary while leaving it broadly intact.3 Hermes finds a tortoise as he is crossing the threshold of his mother’s cave-precinct (23); he pierces the plastron and shell of the tortoise in order to Page 2 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed construct a lyre (42, 48). When he kills two of Apollo’s cows he ‘bores out their life-marrow’ as an alternative to the throat-slitting of normal sacrificial procedure (119). He gets home from his cattle-rustling by entering ‘through the keyhole, like wind or mist’, leaving the door intact (146–7). He threatens to bore into the temple at Delphi (178), and Apollo foresees that he is liable to bore into the houses of herdsmen (283). Eventually Hermes manages to reach the divine threshold (322) and metaphorically ‘break into’ Olympian society. These acts of crossing and piercing physical boundaries are bound up with the paired transit of exchange, and with the broader connections in Greek thought between borders and cunning (μῆτις).4 Hermes is explicitly assigned exchanges as a prerogative (516); his trick of making Apollo’s cattle walk backwards is described as an exchange of front hooves for rear (76–8); he aims for and achieves resolution of the dispute with arbitration—in Greek terms, the ‘give and take’ of justice (312); in the latter part of the hymn he causes an exchange even in something as essential as Apollo’s divine prerogatives. Detienne and Vernant (1974) showed that Greek ideas of cunning relate not only to crossing borders but also to constructing (e.g. weaving) and manipulating them. Hermes indeed weaves and ties on sandals, binds himself in his own swaddling, and metaphorically binds himself with two oath- offers—in all three cases binding himself in such a way as to preserve his liberty by deceiving Apollo (79–86; 151 and 237; 274–6 and 383–4); later Apollo tries to bind him with agnus castus, but Hermes makes the binding magically fall apart and regrow in the soil (409–13).5 This brief survey of Hermes’ control over literal boundaries, and over related concepts such as binding and exchanging, gives the background against which his blurring of conceptual (including generic) boundaries in the Hymn to Hermes is set, namely a group of thematic motifs used to characterize Hermes. It is to the generic boundaries which we now turn.

(p.176) Hymnic Banter The clearest case of bridging mismatched genres in the Hymn to Hermes is Apollo’s response to Hermes’ second song. The song is described in the terms of a theogony with a proem and a starring role for (hence, probably, a proemic hymn to) Mnemosyne (425–33):                                   …τάχα δὲ λιγέως κιθαρίζων γηρύετ’ ἀμβολάδην, ἐρατὴ δέ οἱ ἕσπετο φωνή, κραίνων ἀθανάτους τε θεοὺς καὶ Γαῖαν ἐρεμνήν ὡς τὰ πρῶτα γένοντο καὶ ὡς λάχε μοῖραν ἕκαστος. Μνημοσύνην μὲν πρῶτα θεῶν ἐγέραιρεν ἀοιδῆι μητέρα Μουσάων· ἣ γὰρ λάχε Μαιάδος υἱόν· τοὺς δὲ κατὰ πρέσβιν τε καὶ ὡς γεγάασιν ἕκαστος ἀθανάτους ἐγέραιρε θεοὺς Διὸς ἀγλαὸς υἱός πάντ’ ἐνέπων κατὰ κόσμον, ὑπωλένιον κιθαρίζων.

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Hermetically Unsealed Shortly, as he played clearly, he began to sing as for a proem, and lovely was the voice which accompanied him. He declared both the immortal gods and dark Earth, how they were born originally, and how each was allotted their portion. First of the gods he honoured Mnemosyne in his song, the mother of the Muses—for she had been allotted the son of Maia. Then the treasured son of Zeus honoured the other immortal gods according to both seniority and each one’s nature, uttering everything in due order as he played the lyre which hung from his forearm. I will return to some features of this song later, but of primary interest to us is that the performance elicits a comparison from Apollo (453–4): ἀλλ’ οὔ πώ τί μοι ὧδε μετὰ φρεσὶν ἄλλο μέλησεν οἷα νέων θαλίηισ’ ἐνδέξια ἔργα πέλονται·

However, up to now my senses never got interested in anything like this— things like the actions of young men which move to the right at festivities. Apollo is asking Hermes to pass the lyre on to him from left to right (verse 424 specifies that Hermes is standing on Apollo’s left), from one young male—a baby, in fact, though a precocious one—to another. He compares the situation to young men’s ἐνδέξια ἔργα at festivities, by which he must mean pre-lyric activities— perhaps unaccompanied, perhaps accompanied by the auloi with which Apollo has just declared (p.177) his familiarity (452).6 However, the comparison cues the audience’s knowledge that since Apollo’s comment these left-to-right activities had indeed come to include lyre music. Eupolis describes Socrates singing Stesichorus to a lyre which is being passed ἐπιδέξια (fr. 395 K–A). Hesychius refers to the same procedure, with the lyre later replaced by a myrtle branch, using ἐπιδεξία as an adjective (τ796). This is probably the implication of other references to guests performing in a cycle or ‘each’ performing, whether to auloi or a lyre.7 Such a setup imposes a practical limit on the size of gathering that we imagine, so that θαλίαι here may be understood as indoor symposia of, say, around a dozen guests.8 A wider array of sources point to guests responding to one another in a series of short performances, without specifying whether these happen in a cycle or not. In Aristophanes’ Wasps, where Bdelycleon is trying to train Philocleon to behave at an elite symposium, he assumes that the snatches of song performed by each guest should follow on from one another; in at least one pair of Theognidean distichs and one pair of the archaic skolia quoted in Athenaeus we can detect capping responses.9 Despite the general situational similarity at the root of Apollo’s comparison, he rides rough-shod over some of the most common markers which modern scholars have extracted from the fuzzy patterns in Greek song culture as immanent signs of the poets’ generic awareness.10 A stand-alone solo is compared to a chain of performances, an extensive song to much shorter ones; in terms of content, a theogony is compared to a performance type in which Page 4 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed theogonies (p.178) would be pragmatically out of place. Thus, in spite of the fluidity of what could probably be pressed into service in such left-to-right performances, the Hymn manages to construct a clear paradox.11 The audience in fact had some warning of this, in the form of a similar paradox earlier in the poem; I have taken the two in reverse order here since the specificity of ἐνδέξια ἔργα is not matched in the earlier instance, and to some extent the later passage would have retroactively affected an ancient audience’s view of the earlier one. This is Hermes’ first inset song. He takes the lyre he has just invented, tests the tuning, and then (54–61):                                     θεὸς δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδεν ἐξ αὐτοσχεδίης πειρώμενος, ἠΰτε κοῦροι ἡβηταὶ θαλίηισι παραίβολα κερτομέουσιν, ἀμφὶ Δία Κρονίδην καὶ Μαιάδα καλλιπέδιλον ὡς πάρος ὠρίζεσκον ἑταιρείηι φιλότητι, ἣν αὐτοῦ γενεὴν ὀνομάκλυτον ἐξονομάζων· ἀμφιπόλους τ’ ἐγέραιρε καὶ ἀγλαὰ δώματα νύμφης, καὶ τρίποδας κατὰ οἶκον ἐπηετανούς τε λέβητας.

The god made trial extempore and sang to it well—as youths in their prime make bantering retorts at festivities—of Zeus son of Kronos and fair‐shod Maia, how previously they used to court in friendly love, naming his own genealogy of famous name; and he honoured the nymph’s attendants and treasured house, and the tripods and abundant cauldrons in the home. The song opens with a verse-initial ἀμφί governing gods’ names in the accusative (57), a structure which starts four Homeric Hymns and became a byword for the openings of kitharodic hymnic proems and of dithyrambs.12 This suggests that Hermes is starting a hymn to his parents, with a focus on Maia (60), though there is also a clear mise-en-abyme effect in that the Hymn to Hermes itself began with him as ‘son of Zeus and Maia’ (1), and with the parents’ extended relationship (7–8).13 In any case, the hymn is incomplete: Hermes’ mind turns out to be on (p.179) other things (62), and he never reaches a concluding request. We are not even told that Maia and her attendants are listening. Hermes hides the lyre in his cot and turns to stealing Apollo’s cows. Again the short description of Hermes’ song allows us to identify several important generic clues. Content and purpose betray an unfinished hymn; mode of performance is a solo improvisation to the lyre; audience is either female and domestic or non-existent. Out of all this, the narrator selects improvisation to ground a comparison whose vehicle again is radically dissimilar to the tenor in other respects. The content and purpose in the vehicle are comprised by potentially insulting banter (kertomia), more or less an opposite of hymnic praise whose purpose is to induce charis; multiple performers again take turns, rather Page 5 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed than a soloist being alone; they are again young men in a festive setting.14 It is not clear whether ‘making trial of the lyre’ is part of the grounds for comparison, so the young men’s verbal performance may not be lyric at all—though that is certainly one possible interpretation, reinforced subsequently by Apollo’s comparison to ἐνδέξια ἔργα.15 The very ordering of the sentence shows that the paradox is deliberate: the vehicle’s kertomia and the tenor’s hymnic start are juxtaposed in such a way that one can read or hear the young men riskily ‘performing insults about Zeus’. (Indeed, the text was punctuated like that for 250 years of printed editions; the comma after κερτομέουσιν is due to Clarke (1740).) (p.180) Given that both the comparisons we have examined involve young men, festivities (θαλίαι), and performance-in-series, an audience should understand them as a pair; whether an audience would have taken them to refer to a single performance type—combining scoptic content and left-to-right ordering—is less clear. Either way, the Hymn to Hermes offers a pair of generically paradoxical comparisons, both made by figures with authority to talk about music—the primary narrator and Apollo.

Imagined Settings Some scholars of the Hymn to Hermes have made an interpretative move at this point which readers of this volume will recognize: the ‘imagined occasions’ of Hermes’ songs—here, given their originary nature, the settings for future lyre music which his songs evoke proleptically—are seized on as a possible hint at the original performance context of the Hymn itself, by whose sociological complex its meaning would be shaped. This approach is suggested both in the single best starting point for analysis of the Homeric Hymns, Jenny Strauss Clay’s Politics of Olympus, and in the recent commentary by Vergados. I cite Clay: We must finally admit that we have very little firm knowledge about the circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of these major hymns. I would nevertheless venture to suggest that, like the account by Demodocus of Hephaestus’s successful ruse against Ares and Aphrodite, they were presented at the conclusion of a feast (dais), or what was later called a symposium. Several passages in the Hymn to Hermes, to be discussed, corroborate this suggestion, although they may well be archaizing. While improvisation forms the immediate tertium comparationis [at 55], the simile extends beyond it to draw a comparison between two different genres of music, on the level of form or performance and on the level of content. At first glance, the parallel seems unsuitable on both counts. Yet later on, when he first hears the lyre, Apollo similarly likens Hermes’ playing to the ‘skillful deeds of young men at feasts’ (454). Evidently, the Page 6 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed closest available analogy to Hermes’ new mode of making music is improvisational verse accompanying symposiastic occasions.16 (p.181) I cannot prove that the Hymn was not performed at symposia, and indeed there is a potential piece of evidence after the world of Demodocus for hexameter hymns being performed at symposia, namely the prayer in a Homeric Hymn to Hestia (24.4) to visit ‘this household’.17 However, what is relevant in this context is to observe Clay acknowledging the paradoxical nature of the two comparisons, and yet simultaneously assuming (‘evidently’) that the poet’s aim was to produce ‘the closest available analogy’. But, as the settings constructed by lyric poems are often on close inspection not quite compatible with any plausible circumstances of performance, let alone reperformance, and as that disjunction—as other essays in this volume argue—is suggestive for (e.g.) lyric’s play with the notion of representing unmediated emotional experience, so a more profitable approach in this case is not to collapse the terms of the paradox. We have already seen the thematic and characterizing relevance of crossing categories in the Hymn to Hermes. In the immediate build-up to his first song, Hermes ‘found a tortoise and obtained immeasurable wealth’ (24); he saw in the tortoise’s swaying gait a seductive strut (28 σαῦλα) and lively dance move (31 χοροιτύπε); he transports the tortoise from living to dead, but also thereby from mute to vocal (38).18 All these paradoxes rest on attributing the tortoise to categories from which it is normally excluded, and those attributions rest on Hermes’ instant imaginative leap from tortoise to lyre to lyre-playing hetaira. He calls the tortoise a σύμβολον (30), not least in the sense that Hermes’ merchants used symbola—pairs of tallies whose tesselation is a matter of private knowledge, but which can form a continuum and allow trade.19 The tortoise and the hetaira are such a pair, brought together under the private code of Hermes’ imagination. All this, in Hermes’ emblematic first actions, primes an audience for the possibility that Hermes, if anyone, could make a hymn (p.182) resemble festive banter, without us having to suppose a rather unsuccessful attempt at illustrative comparison, or having to forget that we are dealing with a paradox. Furthermore, Hermes’ ability to see a courtesan in a tortoise reflects the ‘spirit’ of the music the tortoiseshell lyre can produce under Hermes’ patronage—a matter of laughter (29), playfulness (32, 40 ἄθυρμα), sexual allure (31 ἐρόεσσα), dancing, and feasting. These qualities suit the imagined setting of a party where young men take turns at bantering, or at singing snatches of lyric poetry.20 And these connotations continue in Apollo’s heavily eroticized response to the instrument, and in Hermes’ instructions about how to play: Apollo should ‘hold the clear-voiced hetaira in his hands’ (478); this hetaira is personified as able to talk (479) and even to teach the answer to questions (483–4); she is ‘easily toyed with in delicate intimacy’ (485 ῥεῖα συνηθείηισιν ἀθυρομένη μαλακῆισιν).21

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Hermetically Unsealed Granted, Hermes’ lyre belongs with festivities and courtesans, and he passes on to it his own propensity for kertomia (cf. 338): these connections do not explain why Hermes’ solo songs are compared to responses passing between multiple performers. However, even single songs do respond, intertextually. I have argued elsewhere that in the case of Hermes’ first song the paradoxical comparison draws attention to the relation of kertomia between the Hymn to Hermes and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. To summarize: the younger ‘sibling’ text cheekily steals ideas from the older with ulterior motives, and manipulates what it does steal; initially the theft is quite polemical, as the Hymn to Hermes reworks all Apollo’s signs of precocity to his disadvantage, but eventually there is a willingness to reach peaceful and friendly coexistence. This is very much like the relationship of the brothers—a pair of young males competing over social influence—in whose honour each hymn was composed, and explains how the Hymn to Hermes can say that a hymn is like the bantering response in a capping contest, which leads beneath the surface of antagonism to a firmer social bond.22 (p.183) Hermes’ second song is also responding intertextually, to Hesiod’s Theogony. The description at lines 427–8 (θεοὺς καὶ Γαῖαν ἐρεμνήν | ὡς τὰ πρῶτα γένοντο καὶ ὡς λάχε μοῖραν ἕκαστος; already quoted with translation in the section ‘Hymnic Banter’) recalls the phrasing of Theogony 108–12, which also contains ὡς τὰ πρῶτα…γένοντο, the unusual collocation θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα, and reference to division of honours; this allusion makes particular sense given the soothing effect of Hermes’ song on Apollo’s angst—a power whose classic statement comes just before at Theogony 98–103.23 A more playful connection is that Hermes’ choice of Mnemosyne for first place constructs a ‘future reflexive’ allusion to Hesiod’s choice of the Muses: the hymnist alludes to an earlier work, while symbolically suggesting that his own work is a sort of ‘parent’, set well before Hesiod’s day.24 Hermes orders his theogony κατὰ πρέσβιν—by ‘seniority’ (431): this is not how Hesiod proceeded through the family tree, and draws attention to Hermes’ own negotiation of his position within the Olympian family, with references to the gods’ innate characters and set prerogatives (431, 428) which, one can imagine, papered over the fact that he was in the process of changing Apollo’s prerogatives. Thus both intertextually and in its own right Hermes’ song makes a deeper analogy to games of self-assertion in a sympotic context, while remaining at first glance paradoxically different from them.

Configuring the Erotic and the Laudatory So far I have examined two passages, which make a pair of related cross-generic connections—from hymn to sympotic flyting, and from theogony to lyric skolia of the capping kind. Both forge a link between praise of the gods and humorous antagonism. A related link arises after this, in Hermes’ list of possible settings for lyre music when he is advising Apollo on how to use the instrument (480–2):

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Hermetically Unsealed (p.184) εὔκηλος μὲν ἔπειτα φέρειν ἐς δαῖτα θάλειαν καὶ χορὸν ἱμερόεντα καὶ ἐς φιλοκυδέα κῶμον, εὐφροσύνην νυκτός τε καὶ ἤματος.

Hereafter, free from all care, take her to the rich banquet and gorgeous dance, and to the celebratory revel—she will bring good cheer by both day and night. Hermes advertises the instrument’s versatility—day and night, dais and chorus and komos. The three occasions mentioned are all underspecified as generic markers: dais covers a notoriously wide range of contexts for sharing food, from small gatherings to state festivals; ‘choral lyric’ comes in a bewildering number of forms; and komos, on which I shall focus, refers to various celebratory contexts for male singing, principally an advanced stage in/after a symposium, and the celebration—not necessarily drunken—of an athletic victory.25 Here the surrounding personification of the lyre as courtesan (see text at n. 21) ensures that the late-sympotic komos comes to mind, so that Hermes casts a future Apollo as inebriated and undignified, rather like the satyrs outside Althaea’s house with barbitoi at Euripides Cyclops 40.26 However φιλοκυδέος simultaneously connects the komos to kudos, a word whose semantic hubs are success and the pride it induces. The adjective therefore activates the epinician sense of komos, which Apollo regularly oversaw at or after the Pythian Games. Hermes thus poises the komos between its two main meanings, which are again typical contexts for banter and for praise-poetry. Compared to the preceding similes, this ambivalence about komos is not so idiosyncratic. Pindar too plays with the two senses of the word in manifold ways.27 The two contexts for lyre music have a linguistic bridge, and we do not need Hermes specifically to make the connection work. Similarly, Hermes applies to choral lyric the formulaic epithet ἱμερόεντα (‘gorgeous’), which has full semantic weight (p.185) in all six of its early epic uses.28 Hence the arena of choral lyric, in which a dominant role was played by hymns at public festivals, is imbued with eroticism. The connection this time is a standard one, though given a particular colour in this context thanks to the recurrent figuration of Hermes’ lyre as providing the soundtrack of courtesans. These lines are, as it were, Hermes’ own brief ‘Companion to Greek Lyric’. He does not separate the erotic focus of sympotic or post-sympotic song from the laudatory functions of epinicia and choral hymns, nor even present them as distant points on a continuum in one or more dimensions, but he presents them as fused together. The hymnist has prepared us for this with two passages which related sympotic and laudatory forms in a paradoxical and ‘Hermetic’ way; now Hermes normalizes that interpenetration, by revealing, through a formula and

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Hermetically Unsealed through a calculated ambiguity with parallels elsewhere (in Pindar) that we already knew something of, how the lyre’s characteristics cross contexts.

Under which Lyre? The Hymn to Hermes was an inspiration for W. H. Auden’s 1946 poem ‘Under Which Lyre’, which casts Hermes and Apollo as opposing forces in post-war Harvard. ‘Pompous Apollo’ governs the bureaucrats and oh-so-practical social scientists, and favours ‘over-Whitmanated’ lyrics about mundane, feel-good topics (‘extol the doughnut…’); meanwhile ‘precocious Hermes’ leads the way for the wits and individualists. Related by antithesis, A compromise between us is             Impossible; Respect perhaps but friendship never: Falstaff the fool confronts forever             The prig Prince Hal.29 (p.186)

I mention Auden’s reimagination of the myth, where Hermes’ lyre and Apollo’s have irreconcilable traits, to focus our attention on whether the Hymn to Hermes prompts an audience to circumscribe Hermes’ attitude to lyric genre as a thing of the past, now superseded under Apollo’s very different governance. Or is the Hymn a ‘textual event’ in the sense that it invites an audience to reshape their perceptions of lyric categories? In my view, the Hymn does imply, in contrast to Auden, that Hermes is too good a negotiator for his thumbprints not to stay on the lyre long after he has handed it to Apollo. Again I shall be brief, since I have argued this point more extensively, though not with the present focus on lyric genres, in Thomas (2017a) 75–81. The key evidence is a game that develops from when Apollo first hears the lyre until the end of the Hymn, i.e. beyond the moment where Hermes hands the lyre over. Apollo opens the game by hearing the lyre’s sound as an ὄσσα (443), a prophetic voice. Hermes picks up on this idea and runs with it: in 482–6 the lyre is not only a girl to stroke, but also a female who can answer questions—a hybrid of courtesan and Pythia. Apollo responds by echoing Hermes’ phrasing when he later describes his prophecy at 541–9.30 Apollo’s injection of the prophetic into Hermes’ lyre might look like a takeover bid by the god of prophecy. But the game conversely drags Delphi towards Hermes. Apollo describes his oracle as ‘herding’ humans (542 περιτροπέων) and even as open to deceiving them for profit (549). This constitutes an admission—however facetious—to a Hermetic side, given Hermes’ deceptions, profiteering, and new role as a herdsman at this point in the poem. This is a remarkable change of emphasis from the unerring though uninterpretable Delphi of so many other sources.

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Hermetically Unsealed An interesting reflection on the lyre’s performative power to change the gods comes within Hermes’ second song (already quoted in the section ‘Hymnic Banter’), where at 427 he is said to be κραίνων the gods with his theogony. The verb normally means ‘ordain, ratify’, and this sense can be defended with the advantage of hindsight as the narrator setting up the game just discussed, whereby the lyre is associated with prophecy. Hermes’ song both advertises the lyre and describes his and Apollo’s prerogatives: in this sense, we can (p.187) infer that it involves a self-fulfilling prophecy of the fact that Apollo will take over the lyre, and in this sense, the song ‘ordains’ a change in Apollo.31 This change is not just one of prerogatives, however. As the Hymn to Hermes continues, contact with the lyre infects Apollo with a willingness to engage Hermes in verbal sport—an exchange of the outré metaphors of kertomia, as the narrator’s comparison foretold—which leaves even Apollo’s role at Delphi in an unresolved state of disconcerting strangeness at the end of the Hymn.

Conclusions The Hymn to Hermes compares a half-formed hymn and a fully formed theogony to sympotic games—to banter and to skolia, which could both take place to the lyre. One approach has been to take the fundamental similarity as being the Hymn’s putative performative context at symposia, while brushing aside the marked dissimilarities. But the latter offends against Hermes, whom the poem shows to be a master of paradox and transformative imagination. (A tortoise is like a courtesan who is like the Pythia…) I therefore took a more circuitous but hopefully more Hermetic hermeneutic path. No seal is closed off to Hermes, including those between genres. The two paradoxical comparisons are typical of his ability to create a passage without destroying normal boundaries, and they thrive on obvious discrepancies in respect of distinctions recognized at the time (though not articulated as such) between lyric genres—distinctions in terms of content, mode of performance, size of audience, etc. Yet my approach also revealed, beneath the surface, a degree of similarity in the comparisons: the Hymn to Hermes is like a capping performance to the Hymn to Apollo, and Hermes’ second song is like one to Hesiod’s Theogony, in that both are a form of competitive bonding with Apollo which involves delimiting his status. Pindar too (p.188) understood that praise in the epinician komos is linguistically connected to erotic banter among komasts, and epic had long mentioned the sex appeal of young choral dancers. So though it at first appeared that such connections were peculiar to Hermes, the hymnist allows an audience to realize that of course the worlds of praise poetry and of courtesans at parties are not totally removed. Even Apollo gets caught up in the exchange of banter and reimagining when he takes over the lyre: ‘I raise you “Delphi is like you”, Hermes!’ The two gods conspire in a verbal game which gives the lie to apparent distinctions such as public and private, dignified and playful, religious and erotic, Apolline and Hermetic. Apollo’s first encounter with lyric is presented as having been formative for his outlook and Page 11 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed interests. And hence the audience is prompted to ponder what kind of formative event Hermes’ songs can be for them. Notes:

(1) Senses of ‘lyric’: e.g. Budelmann (2009a) 2–5. (2) See also Vernant’s contrast (1966, 97–143) between herms controlling the dynamics in and out of a house and Hestia as the embodiment of a house’s stability. Thucydides 6.27 might suggest that herms were still particularly frequent in Athens, though cf. LIMC V(1) 295–9, 301–6 for early findspots and further bibliography. For Hermes’ roles in general see Herter (1976). (3) Kahn (1978). See now Ropars (2016), which I was unable to read before submitting this chapter for publication. (4) For these see Detienne and Vernant (1974), especially the final chapter. (5) For oaths being ‘binding’ in Greek see e.g. Eur. Med. 161–3 ὅρκοις ἐνδησαμένα τὸν…πόσιν. (6) Moving to the right was an organizational principle of parties in other respects: pouring of wine (Il. 1.597), making toasts (in Chios, Thasos, Attica, Lydia: Critias frs 1.7, 6.6, 33 D–K; Eupolis fr. 354 K–A; for elegiac toasts cf. Dionysius of Chalcis fr. 1), trying a contest (Od. 21.141–2), begging (Od. 17.365), and performing speeches of praise (Pl. Symp. 177d, cf. Anaxandrides fr. 1). (7) Cf. Artemon of Cas(s)andreia, quoted in Ath. 15.694a–b on performances where every guest sang κατά τινα περίοδον ἐξ ὑποδοχῆς (‘taking over from each other in a cycle’) rather than in unison. Similarly Dicaearchus fr. 88 Wehrli, which may have been Artemon’s source. Also Plb. 4.20.10 ‘ordering each other to sing in turn’ (ἀνὰ μέρος), of an archaic practice in Arcadian symposia. (8) For the sense of θαλία cf. LfgrE s.v. θαλίη, Schmitt-Pantel (1992) 39–40. See Eitrem (1906, 252) for a suggestive though needlessly precise comparison of such festivities to the Tetradistai, who met in Athens to celebrate Hermes’ birthday. (9) Aristoph. Vesp. 1222–49, Thgn. 579–82, PMG 901 vs 900; less clear cases which could have suited a capping context include PMG 904–5. For such capping see in particular Reitzenstein (1893) 3–44, Vetta (1983), Collins (2004) 84–134; the discussion in Hesk (2007) bridges from these practices to non-poetic banter. (10) On the role of generic markers as understood here, see e.g. Käppel (1992) 10–21, Rotstein (2010) 3–13. (11) For this ‘fluidity’ see Yatromanolakis (2009b) 275.

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Hermetically Unsealed (12) H.Hom. 7, 19, 22, 33; Suda α1700 ἀμφιανακτίζειν, probably derived from scholia on Aristoph. Nub. 595, and Photius α1304. A further example which may be hymnic is Douris’ vase (Berlin F2285) depicting a scroll which starts μοῖσά μοι, ἀμφὶ Σκάμανδρον ἐύρρων ἄρχομ’ ἀείδειν. (13) Vergados (2013, 4) emphasizes the mise-en-abyme effect, but infers that the song is an incipient hymn to Hermes himself. The usage of ἀμφί tells against this. (14) Like many words in the Hymn, the adjective παραίβολα (56) has been chosen to contain multiple suggestions, and it would be reductive to pick between the possible interpretations ‘in rejoinder’ (about performance practice), ‘risky’, ‘indirect’ (about content). For kertomia see Clarke (2001), Gottesman (2008), both of whom aim for a slightly more unified ‘meaning’ than the set of family resemblances I would see in its early uses. (15) Apollonius perhaps took the passage as referring to spoken banter, given 1.457–8 ἀμοιβαδὶς ἀλλήλοισιν μυθεῦνθ᾽, οἷά τε πολλὰ νέοι…as the Argonauts dine together; the speech we hear is Idas riling Jason. For allusion to H.Herm. here and elsewhere in Ap. Rh. Arg. 1 see now Clauss (2016). There is little direct evidence of scoptic lyre music, but Philocleon’s improvised insults in the Wasps (n. 9) are widely taken to imply that the lyre did actually accompany such banter. Rotstein 2010: 233–9 gives the sparse evidence for iambus performed to the lyre. For exchange of apparently spoken insults cf. Xenophon Cyropedia 5.2.18 and Plutarch Lycurgus 12.4 (both probably idealizations fashioned on the basis of Greek practice), and Alexis fr. 160 K–A. The banter in adesp. eleg. 27 συμπόται ἄνδρες ὁμ[ήλικες]…χρὴ…σκώπτειν τοιαῦθ᾽ οἷα γέλωτα φέρειν (‘Fellow-drinkers, men of one age,…we must make such jibes as bring laughter’) could be spoken or sung. (16) Clay (2006) 7, 108. Clay’s inference (originally published in 1989) is casually repeated by Depew (2000) 63–4, and with some caution at e.g. Nobili (2011) 205, Vergados (2013) 272. (17) This is not the place to rehearse in detail other evidence about the performance context of hexameter hymns. Briefly, cf. Faulkner (2011a) 16–19. The hymns’ traditional background was proemic to epic, as demonstrated by (e.g.) their endings and the structure of Hesiod’s Theogony. How readily the Hymns could be decoupled from that traditional context is a matter of speculation. Richardson (1974, 12) mentioned the Eleusinian Games as the primary context for the Hymn to Demeter, Burkert (1979) Polycrates’ Pythodelia festival on Delos for the Hymn to Apollo; I argue that H.Herm. was primarily for Olympia in Thomas (2017b); Faulkner (2012) countenances a court performance of H.Aphr. (18) On the connotations of σαῦλα see Thomas (2015). Page 13 of 15

 

Hermetically Unsealed (19) For symbola in this sense see Gauthier (1972) 62–89. (20) For ‘play’ in the symposium see Ferrari (1988) 221, Collins (2004) 63–83. Hermes strictly invents only the tortoiseshell lyre, but foresees that it can be used in choral contexts (31, 481) where one would expect the louder wooden kithara. I therefore take it to be emblematic of all lyres, within the terms of the Hymn. (21) Apollo’s response: 420–2 γέλασσε, γηθήσας, ἐρατή, ἵμερος; 434 ἔρος, 449 ἔρωτα, 455 ἐρατόν. I have assumed the emendation ἐπισταμένην in 479. (22) There are also parallels of phrasing, especially in the sections of the two hymns which are about Onchestos (H.Ap. 223–38, H.Herm. 87–93, 185–211)— itself a very remarkable coincidence which needs explaining. See further Thomas (2017a), where it is the treatment of sympotic bantering and ἐνδέξια ἔργα which is abbreviated: that essay and this are (partly) complementary. (23) The allusion to Th. 108–12 is noted in e.g. West (1966) 190. For 98–103 see Richardson (2010) 206. (24) For the concept of ‘future reflexive’ allusions see Barchiesi (1993). (25) For dais see e.g. LfgrE s.v. For komos see Budelmann (2012) and Agócs (2012) with further bibliography. (26) For lyres at late-sympotic komoi see also Lissarrague (1990a) figs. 2, 104. (27) See Agócs (2012): at times, the epinician performance is a komos; at times it is presented metaphorically in terms of a late-sympotic komos; at times it is contrasted with such a komos, and so on. Pythian 5.22–3 τόνδε κῶμον ἀνέρων, Ἀπολλώνιον ἄθυρμα (‘this komos of men, an Apollonian toy’) adds to this play on komos a reference to ἄθυρμα, as Hermes adds that one should ἀθύρειν the lyre gently. See also Carey (2009) 31–2 on the two ancient senses of ἐγκώμιον, ‘encomium’ and ‘drinking-song’. (28) At Il. 18.603 the dancers are mixed youths and girls, at Od. 18.194 the Graces, at H.Hom. 6.13 the gods including the bejewelled Horai, at Sc. 280 a girls’ hymenaeal chorus; at Hes. Th. 7–8, where the formula is modified, it applies to the Muses’ dance (accompanied at 63 by Himeros and the Graces). In every case, the adjective ἱμερόεις picks out the ἵμερος generated by desirable performers. (29) Auden (1976) 178–83. I thank Robin Lane Fox for introducing me to this poem.

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Hermetically Unsealed (30) Both passages are delineated into positive, and then negative cases, using similar indefinite subordinate clauses, and include shared stems such as ἐρεείνειν (‘ask’, 483, 487, 547) and μάψ (‘in vain’, 488, 546). (31) Most previous scholarship, failing to see this approach, has tried emending κραίνων, or has accepted Hesychius’ claim that the verb can mean ‘honour’ (κ3922–4). There is no other evidence for the latter, which has a good chance of deriving from a banal attempt to make sense of our passage. For a stimulating and slightly similar account of how Hermes’ song can ‘ordain’ see Jaillard (2007) 199–205.

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Polyphony, Event, Context

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Polyphony, Event, Context Pindar, Paean 9 Tom Phillips

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords This chapter argues that Pindar’s Paean 9 creates a complex relationship between enunciative and performative situations. This complexity is pragmatic, but is also informed by the poem’s intertextuality, its construction of voice, and its self-consciousness about its status as an aesthetic artefact. Paean 9 positions itself in a tradition of poems about eclipses; doing so reinforces its control over the event it memorializes. Its opening utterance is meant to be understood simultaneously as a spontaneous response to the eclipse and a crafted authorial utterance, and attunes audiences both to the gods’ ineffable power and man’s capacities for meaningful if provisional understanding of it. The poem’s capacity to make itself understood as separable from its performance context inflects the specific way in which it discharges its ritual aims. Keywords:   Pindar, paean, mimesis, persona, voice, ritual

Pindar’s ninth paean begins with a shock of radiance, but almost as soon as the ‘beam of the Sun’ has blazed out, it vanishes, ‘rushing on a dark path’, and the poem swerves into a bewildering series of scenarios that the eclipse might portend: ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, τί πολύσκοπ’ ἐμήσαο, ὦ μᾶτερ ὀμμάτων, ἄστρον ὑπέρτατον ἐν ἁμέρᾳ κλεπτόμενον; ἔθηκας ἀμάχανον ἰσχύν ἀνδράσι καὶ σοφίας ὁδόν, ἐπίσκοτον ἀτραπὸν ἐσσυμένα; Page 1 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context ἐλαύνεις τι νεώτερον ἢ πάρος; ἀλλά σε πρὸς Διός, ἱπποσόα θοάς, ἱκετεύω, ἀπήμονα εἰς ὄλβον τινὰ τράποιο Θήβαις, ὦ πότνια, πάγκοινον τέρας ⏓]ρα[– ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ – ] [–– ᴗ – ᴗ –– ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ – ] ]ῶ̣νο̆ς̣ [– –], πολέμοιο δὲ σᾶμα φέρεις τινός, ἢ καρποῦ φθίσιν, ἢ νιφετοῦ σθένος ὑπέρφατον, ἢ στάσιν οὐλομέναν (p.190) ἢ πόντου κενεώσιας ἂμ πέδον, ἢ παγετὸν χθονός, ἢ νότιον θέρος ὕδατι ζακότῳ ῥέον, ἢ γαῖαν κατακλύσαισα θήσεις ἀνδρῶν νέον ἐξ ἀρχᾶς γένος; ὀλοφύδέν, ὅ τι πάντων μέτα πείσομαι…

Beam of the Sun, far-seeing one, what did you contrive, O mother of sight, highest star, hiding yourself in the day? Why did you make men’s strength and the way of wisdom helpless, hurrying on a darkened path? Are you bringing some unexpected disaster? But I beseech you by Zeus, swift driver of horses, to turn this omen common to all, O lady, into an untroubled happiness for Thebes…Do you bring a sign of some war, or the withering of crops, or strength of snow beyond telling, or deadly civil strife, or an emptying of the sea onto the plain, or frost on the land, or a wet summer flowing with torrents of water, or will you inundate the land and make a new race of men from the beginning? I lament nothing that I shall suffer along with everyone…1 Scholars have often noted that one of the poem’s most distinctive features is a disjunction between situation of enunciation and situation of performance. Ian Rutherford points out that ‘the speaking subject seems to imitate the reactions of someone terrified by an eclipse of the Sun, when it seems likely that the song was both composed and performed some time afterwards’,2 probably at the Theban Ismenion (35).3 The anxious questions of 13–20, the supplication of 8–9 with its wish for an ‘untroubled happiness’, dramatize a spontaneous, aporetic reaction, and the audience is invited to experience a corresponding sense of awe at the events of the cosmos.4 But of (p.191) course no ‘real-life’ utterance sounds like this. Self-consciousness about the poem as an artistic construct is explicitly highlighted at 36–40, but the lexical complexity of the invocation and its presentation through song and dance, together with the text’s place in a tradition of eclipse poems, underscore its fictive status from the outset. This is the basic ‘polyphony’ of my title: listeners simultaneously hear the utterance of both a fictional speaker and an author.5

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Polyphony, Event, Context Yet within this enunciative situation further shadings of ‘voice’ emerge. In exploring these, I take my cue from a strand of recent lyric scholarship that has focused on ‘effects of voicing’ such as rhythm, tone, and register.6 My reading will address several effects of this kind in Paean 9, namely the tonal movement, metapoetic undertones, and musico-poetic effects at work in the invocation of the Sun. Analysis of these effects will bring out additional complexities (p.192) in the structures of author, performer(s), and persona loquens through which the poem’s utterance is articulated, and in so doing promote an expanded conception of how we might understand the poem’s ‘vocal’ qualities. These readings intersect with the other two terms of my title. I begin with an element of the poem’s context that has not received much attention in previous discussions, namely the tradition of eclipse poems, focusing in particular on how listeners’ responses to Paean 9 may have been influenced by their knowledge of this tradition. I also consider the possible affective force of the poem’s formal structure. Both structure and the tradition in which the poem situates itself enrich and complicate the poem’s polyphony. The second section of my argument explores the finer details of the language in which the invocation is couched and their consequences for the performance event. Despite the vividness with which it creates the illusion of the eclipse occurring concurrently with the utterance itself, and the corresponding emotional immediacy in which listeners are invited to share,7 the poem does not ask to be heard simply as a mimetic rehearsal of the ‘real-time’ effects of the eclipse. As a stylized aesthetic comparandum of the occurrence it memorializes, the poem as a textual event separates itself from what it describes,8 and in doing so affords the audience precisely the possibility of meaningful reflection that the eclipse itself made impossible. Contributing to both of these levels, the poem’s polyphony invites a correlatively multilayered response that participates in both the aporia of the speaker and the selfconsciousness of the author and chorus. In conclusion, I argue that the poem’s various formal elements combine to produce a distinctive ritual discourse that operates in part through the emotional and interpretative response it invites from its listeners, and the self-consciousness it encourages about their role in the performance.

(p.193) Tradition, Mimesis, Musicality Plutarch tells us that Mimnermus, Archilochus, Stesichorus, and Cydias, as well as Pindar, composed descriptions of eclipses.9 Unfortunately nothing substantial is known of Mimnermus’ or Stesichorus’ poems, but the very presence of such a poetic tradition is significant.10 Knowing, as at least some of Pindar’s early listeners will have done,11 that poems have been composed about eclipses in the past entails knowing not only that eclipses have occurred in the past without producing devastating effects, but also that these events have been integrated into systems of cultural response. Therefore, even without positing detailed knowledge and recollection of particular poems on the part of Pindar’s listeners, we can observe that awareness of a tradition of eclipse poems would have given Page 3 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context a temporal depth to the figuration of the eclipse as a πάγκοινον τέρας. For listeners attuned to the tradition of eclipse poems, the collective referenced by πάντων μέτα (21) would have encompassed the audiences of those earlier compositions and indeed the poets responsible for them.12 Such listeners may also have heard a metapoetic resonance in ἐλαύνεις τι νεώτερον ἢ πάρος, the phrase signalling the status of Pindar’s treatment as the latest in a tradition of poems dealing with this subject. (p.194) Heard in this way, the phrase would also constitute a reference to the fact that among the novel consequences the eclipse has occasioned (ἐλαύνεις) is the paean itself, a point strengthened by the frequent metapoetic use of ἐλαύνειν in Pindar and elsewhere:13 behind the Sun’s chariot lies Pindar’s chariot of song. The phrase opposes the potential new and disturbing events portended with the concretely realized newness of the poem itself. Part of what this ‘newness’ might have entailed for Pindar’s early audiences can be glimpsed by juxtaposing Paean 9 with Archilochus fr. 122. In what follows, I suggest that some of Pindar’s listeners may have heard the opening of Paean 9 as a poetically and musically more elaborate version of Archilochus’ lines about the eclipse. That some of Pindar’s listeners would have known Archilochus’ poem well enough to recognize this connection seems probable. Heraclitus’ famous statement that both Homer and Archilochus should be ‘driven out of the competitions’ (ἐκ τῶν ἀγώνων ἐκβάλλεσθαι, D–K F 42) is evidence for widespread performance of Archilochus in this period. Performances at symposia will have been common; either or both could be the reference for Pindar’s celebrated condemnation of Archilochus at Pythian 2.54–6.14 The pseudo-Plutarchan treatise De Musica provides additional evidence for the early reception of Archilochus relevant to Paean 9. It records a statement by Glaucus of Rhegium, a musical scholar active in the late fifth and fourth centuries BC, concerning the ‘imitation’ of Archilochus by Thaletas of Gortyn ([Plut.] De mus. 10.1134d–e):15 Γλαῦκος γὰρ μετ’ Ἀρχίλοχον φάσκων γεγενῆσθαι Θαλήταν, μεμιμῆσθαι μὲν αὐτόν φησι τὰ Ἀρχιλόχου μέλη, ἐπὶ δὲ τὸ μακρότερον ἐκτεῖναι, καὶ Παίωνα καὶ Κρητικὸν ῥυθμὸν εἰς τὴν μελοποιίαν ἐνθεῖναι· οἷς Ἀρχίλοχον μὴ κεχρῆσθαι, ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ Ὀρφέα οὐδὲ Τέρπανδρον· ἐκ γὰρ τῆς Ὀλύμπου (p. 195) αὐλήσεως Θαλήταν φασὶν ἐξειργάσθαι ταῦτα καὶ δόξᾳ ποιητὴν ἀγαθὸν γεγονέναι. Glaucus [of Rhegium] says that Thaletas was born after Archilochus, and claims that he imitated Archilochus’ songs, extending them to a greater length, and incorporating the paeonic and the cretic rhythm into the composition. Archilochus did not use these rhythms, and nor indeed did Orpheus or Terpander. For they say that Thaletas developed these from the aulos music of Olympus and thus became known as a fine composer.

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Polyphony, Event, Context Glaucus’ account suggests that ‘imitation’ and ‘extension’ of Archilochus preceded Pindar, and that at least some listeners could be expected to recognize such procedures. We cannot be sure what precise precedent Thaletas’ practice constituted, as it is unclear whether the phrase μεμιμῆσθαι μὲν αὐτόν…τὰ Ἀρχιλόχου μέλη, ἐπὶ δὲ τὸ μακρότερον ἐκτεῖναι refers to purely musical ‘imitation’, which would involve Thaletas setting Archilochus’ songs to new melodies and rhythms without changing the words,16 or whether μεμιμῆσθαι… ἐκτεῖναι means that Thaletas used Archilochus’ songs as the basis for verbally and musically original compositions. Despite this uncertainty, μεμιμῆσθαι…τὰ Ἀρχιλόχου μέλη, ἐπὶ δὲ τὸ μακρότερον ἐκτεῖναι is a good provisional description of how the opening of Paean 9 might be said to answer Archilochus’ description of the eclipse (fr. 122.1–4): χρημάτων ἄελπτον οὐδέν ἐστιν οὐδ’ ἀπώμοτον οὐδὲ θαυμάσιον, ἐπειδὴ Ζεὺς πατὴρ Ὀλυμπίων ἐκ μεσαμβρίης ἔθηκε νύκτ’, ἀποκρύψας φάος ἡλίου †λάμποντος, λυγρὸν† δ’ ἦλθ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους δέος.

Nothing is unexpected or beyond forswearing or surprising, ever since Zeus the Olympian father made night appear in the midst of the day, hiding the light of the [shining] Sun so that bitter fear came to men. Both Pindar and Archilochus stress the act of occlusion by which the Sun’s light is made to vanish, Pindar’s κλεπτόμενον a more forceful version of Archilochus’ ἀποκρύψας φάος. Both accentuate the unnaturalness of (p.196) the day being darkened (ἐκ μεσαμβρίης ἔθηκε νύκτ’; ἄστρον ὑπέρτατον | ἐν ἁμέρᾳ κλεπτόμενον). Yet Pindar lavishes a more extensive set of epithets and metaphors on the Sun, and his description of the eclipse’s effects ( ἔθηκας ἀμάχανον | ἰσχύν ἀνδράσι καὶ σοφίας ὁδόν) is more developed than Archilochus’ ἦλθ’ ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους δέος. These juxtapositions show that what we might provisionally call the ‘intertextuality’ at work here is different from the type of interaction between particular passages, grounded in close verbal connections, familiar from Hellenistic and Roman poetry, and even from the echoes of Homer detected in Pindar and other early Greek poets.17 We might contrast the opening of Olympian 9, where Pindar makes reference to ‘the song of Archilochus, sounding at Olympia, the victory song swelling with three refrains’ (τὸ μὲν Ἀρχιλόχου μέλος | φωνᾶεν Ὀλυμπίᾳ, καλλίνικος ὁ τριπλόος κεχλαδώς, Ol. 9.1–2). Here verbal echoing is at work, καλλίνικος recalling the τήνελλα καλλίνικε refrain employed in the ‘song of Archilochus’ ([Arch.] fr. 324). The ornately descriptive language of τριπλόος κεχλαδώς, on the other hand, both advertises and enacts the greater complexity of Pindar’s project.18 In particular, κεχλαδώς invokes the noise of celebrations,19 but its metaphorical dimension accomplishes Pindar’s Page 5 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context imaginative transformation of his subject matter.20 In Olympian 9, therefore, engagement with Archilochus is foregrounded both by mention of its author, and by description of the song and its performance.21 These references provide the frame within which the subtleties of (p.197) Pindar’s language and their relation to the ‘Archilochus song’ can be apprehended by listeners. The opening of Paean 9, by contrast, involves a looser connection, which would have been prompted less by specific verbal detailing than by an awareness of Paean 9’s place in a tradition of musico-poetic reworking of Archilochus’ poems represented by Thaletas, by the character of Pindar’s invocation as a whole, and above all by the fact that both poems are part of a recognizable tradition of poetic responses to eclipses. The fragmentary state of Archilochus’ text precludes a precise understanding of a possible wider relationship between the two poems, but we do have a precious piece of evidence about the enunciative context of fr. 122 in Aristotle’s comment that the lines were spoken by a father about his daughter.22 Scholars have traditionally connected the poem with Lycambes and Neobule, although the identification is not certain.23 It is clear, however, that the tone of Archilochus’ poem was very different from that of Paean 9, with the quoted lines expressing the father’s angry disbelief, perhaps as a vehicle for the narrator’s attitude towards the daughter.24 For an audience familiar with Archilochus’ text, the generic and contextual differences between the two poems may have suggested a more implicit version of the ethical differentiation at work in Pythian 2,25 (p. 198) the poet’s descriptive skills here employed as a way of registering the gods’ power rather than as a tool in human quarrels. Yet listeners may have perceived the difference primarily in formal terms. Audiences familiar with Archilochus fr. 122 would have recognized the greater tonal urgency, ecphrastic detail, and explanatory extensiveness of Pindar’s lines about the eclipse, and the correspondingly greater imaginative work they demand of listeners. The greater length of Pindar’s description is likely to have been complemented by the paean’s performative dimension. Even with only minimal knowledge of the poem’s musical accompaniment,26 we can safely hypothesize that the paean, with its complex rhythms, dance, and ensemble singing, would have presented a more elaborate spectacle than a solo performance of Archilochus’ stichic poem. Understood ‘literally’, therefore, lines 1–6 dramatize the speaker’s aporetic apprehension, but heard against their poetic background they enact the compositional sophistication of their author and the skill of the chorus. The inverse relation between these two ways of understanding the description allows ἐλαύνεις τι νεώτερον ἢ πάρος to be understood as involving different and conflicting senses of ‘new’,27 both the (apparently) threatening unprecedentedness of the eclipse and musico-poetic innovation.

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Polyphony, Event, Context These considerations remind us again of how disadvantaged we are as interpreters by the loss of the music and the spectacle of choral dance that would have constituted such an important element in the poem’s performance(s). As a coda to my discussion of the poem as a musico-poetic event, however, I want to comment briefly on an aspect of the poem through which something of its effect as a musical and choreographic spectacle might be apprehended. Notwithstanding the loss of lines 11–12, there is a clear structural congruence between the first and second stanzas: while the strophe questions what the eclipse might portend, the antistrophe offers a catalogue of potential answers. This congruence at the level of language and poetic argument may have been reinforced by the rhythmical responsion. To the extent that the second stanza echoes the shape of the first,28 it (p.199) complements the invocation’s question-and-answer structure. This effect operates across the stanza as a whole, but it also emerges in individual metrically responding phrases:29 ἢ πόντου κενεώσιας ἂμ πέδον for instance, responds with ἐλαύνεις τι νεώτερον ἢ πάρος, the violent movement of the waters spilling over the plain answering the unexpected movement of the Sun’s chariot diverging from its wonted course.30 A similar effect is at work in the responsion of εἰς ὄλβον τινὰ τράποιο Θήβαις | ὦ πότνια, πάγκοινον τέρας with ἢ γαῖαν κατακλύσαισα θήσεις | ἀνδρῶν νέον ἐξ ἀρχᾶς γένος, the possibility that the latter phrase might be the outcome of the τέρας inscribed into the structural correspondence between the stanzas. The unfolding of a rhythmical structure the pattern of which has been fixed by the strophe might be felt to impart a sense of inevitability, or at least of strengthened likelihood, to the alternative possibilities, hence underscoring the sense of anxiety they occasion.31 Yet these scenarios are not inevitable,32 and the responsion of the antistrophe to the strophe can also be heard as reinforcing this point. While the questions of the antistrophe dramatize an uncertain future in which any number of possibilities could occur, the poem’s rhythmical structure counteracts this unpredictability. The listeners’ experience of hearing the alternative scenarios through the rhythmical and musical frame generated by the first stanza highlights that these scenarios are produced and regulated by the poem, emerging in a temporality shaped by the poem’s recursive structure, and hence possessed of a virtuality that would have been heightened by listeners’ awareness that such events had not actually come to pass. (p.200) This musical and rhythmical framing enacts the poem’s transformation of its subject, and its constitution of an event grounded in its own significational and musical resources rather than (only) in a mimetic relation to an extratextual reality.33 In the absence of a more detailed knowledge of the poem’s performance circumstances, this attempt to approximate the force of the poem’s non-verbal elements is inevitably provisional, and it is easy to imagine how much the basic structural dynamic for which I have argued might have been further inflected and complicated by the specifics of melody, gesture, and vocal intonation. Even Page 7 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context if it captures only a little of the poem’s affectivity, however, this reading adumbrates the complexity of the interactions between semantic and nonsemantic features through which the poem stages its figurations of voice.

Figure, Structure, Metapoetics I turn now to verbal manifestations of the voice, the phrasing of ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, the figurative movement from ‘beam’ to female charioteer (ἱπποσόα θοάς…ὦ πότνια, 6, 9), and the implicitly metapoetic lexis that runs through the invocation. Each of these elements contributes distinctively to the poem’s vocal texture, and to listeners’ apprehension of how the poem responds to and reconfigures the eclipse. The poem begins by invoking a ‘beam of the Sun’, which Furley and Bremer explain as an attribute of Apollo, arguing that the address prepares for the later invocation of Apollo Ismenios (43), citing parallels for the movement from abstract feature to the god him/herself.34 While this explanation accounts for the invocation’s formal structure, the terms in which the address is elaborated call for further comment. Pindar’s poem is the first surviving instance of a female charioteer being connected with the Sun,35 and although we cannot exclude the possibility that such a figure was mentioned in earlier poetry now no longer extant, audiences are likely to have been (p.201) surprised by Pindar’s formulation. Helios’ chariot is well attested,36 but in previous instances of the topos he himself is the charioteer, a scenario also familiar from contemporary vase paintings. The address is also somewhat unusual in lexical terms. ἀκτίς is used by Homer, Hesiod, and Mimnermus only in the plural.37 Although the noun is employed by Aeschylus in a partially personified sense,38 this is the only case in early Greek poetry where a ‘beam’ is given extensive personification. Pindar’s combination of ‘beam’ and charioteer seems therefore to be a self-consciously distinctive creation,39 a point underlined by the concepts expressed. In earlier poetry, the Sun sees by means of his beams,40 whereas here Pindar (partially) detaches the ἀκτίς from the Sun itself and attributes to it a more complex form of agency (ἐμήσαο).41 As well as this being the staging of a mimesis of a spontaneous reaction, the idiomatic nature of the terms employed intimates a specifically authorial activity. Audiences are meant to hear Pindar the innovative poet speaking in these opening lines,42 (p.202) and consequently to be conscious of the poem as a verbal artefact in a poetic tradition.43 A different effect of voicing is at work in the sequence of thought constructed by the invocation. This sequence unfolds a movement by which the Sun and the eclipse become at least incipiently intelligible, while also restaging an emotional response. The characterization πολύσκοπ’ recalls the Homeric notion of the Sun seeing all things,44 but ὦ μᾶτερ ὀμμάτων takes the listener in a more complex direction. The phrase can be understood in relation to two senses of the phrase ἀκτὶς ἀελίου. First, it can be taken as picking up on the ‘Sun’s radiance’; the Sun is a ‘mother’ of sight because it enables individual acts of perception to take Page 8 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context place. But ὦ μᾶτερ ὀμμάτων can also be taken in relation to ἀκτίς understood concretely as ‘beam’. Understood in terms of the ancient conception of sight, according to which light moved outwards from the eyes, each act of sight is, in effect, a miniature version of the ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, a thread of light darting outwards to render things visible.45 Having implied this connection with smallscale acts of perception, the persona loquens returns the audience to the cosmic dimension with ἄστρον ὑπέρτατον. The cognitive (p.203) process of registering the various attributes and functions of the Sun laid out in the poem’s opening lines brings about an experience that is in part mimetic of a real epiphany, as different aspects of the Sun’s character are revealed. Even as this virtual ‘epiphany’ is constructed,46 the personification of the ‘beam’ as a charioteer emphasizes the imaginative construction at work in representing the eclipse, and the indirectness of the mimesis that the poem constitutes. The address to a physical substance or event (ἀκτὶς ἀελίου), its incipient personification (ἐμήσαο), and the invocation ὦ μᾶτερ ὀμμάτων, combine to create a picture that is not clarified until ‘swift driver of horses’ (7) and ‘O lady’ (10) show that the charioteer is being addressed. The wish for ‘a happiness for Thebes’ (10) is therefore underscored by a progression from a disembodied physicality (ἀκτὶς ἀελίου) to a fully realized personification, from the disorientating mix of metaphors in the opening lines to a clearer picture of the agencies responsible for the eclipse. In staging these shifts of lexis and tone, the passage transforms the Sun/beam from a purely material entity into a personified figure with whom dialogue, instantiated by the poem itself, is at least notionally possible. Correlatively, the passage intimates the power of the speaking voice to engage meaningfully in such a dialogue; the persona loquens is no longer the helpless spectator of a purely physical exteriority (ἀκτὶς ἀελίου), but an agent engaged in conversation with a meaningfully structured (πάγκοινον τέρας) and (at least potentially) receptive world.47 Yet for all that this movement asserts the poem’s projection of an ordered reality, the motivations that lay behind the ‘rushing on a darkened path’ remain opaque. Although it is possible that one of the lost sections of the poem ventured an explanation of these motivations, it seems likely that the question of what caused the eclipse would have been left open, stressing the limitations of human knowledge and balancing the (p.204) rhetoric of the potential scenarios in the antistrophe. The experience of listening to the opening strophe keeps the audience guessing, necessitating a process of interpretative readjustment that correlates with, but also transforms, the feelings of anxious uncertainty that the eclipse itself (notionally) gave rise to.48 Another tonal inflection that contributes to the text’s polyphonic richness is at work in the opening two stanzas. The invocation is replete with language that, for some listeners at least, might have evoked metapoetic associations. The phrasing of σοφίας ὁδόν suggests the image of poetry as a path familiar from Homer and Pindar’s own Paean 7,49 as well as Pindar’s frequent use of σοφία in Page 9 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context connection with poetry, and the connection of ἐλαύνεις with poetry has already been discussed.50 In the second stanza, the question about the ‘sign’ that the eclipse constitutes (πολέμοιο δὲ σᾶμα φέρεις τινός) might hint at a contrast between the signifying function of the eclipse and that of the poem itself, in so far as the question leads not to a definite answer, but a virtuoso imaginative performance by the speaker (13–20). More indirectly, the ‘devising’ (ἐμήσαο) in the opening line is picked up by (p.205) the speaker’s μήδεσι…φρενός (37), the latter suggesting that the ‘devisings’ that created the poem have substituted for those of the Sun. In the context of a description with numerous poetic antecedents, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some listeners will have heard self-referential connotations in some of this language. Yet when compared with other self-referential passages in Pindar, the obliqueness of these various phrases is immediately apparent. At Pa. 7b.18–20, for instance, σοφίας ὁδόν occurs in a context where poetry’s status as a source of wisdom is made clear (τ]υφλα̣[ὶ γὰ]ρ ἀνδρῶν φρένες, | ὅ]στις ἄνευθ’ Ἑλικωνιάδων | βαθεῖαν ε̣ ̣[ ̣ ̣] ̣ων ἐρευνᾷ σοφίας ὁδόν, ‘for the minds of men are blind, if someone searches out the deep way of wisdom without the Heliconians’), and there are of course numerous other passages in which Pindar describes poetic craftsmanship or affectivity quite explicitly.51 The opening of Paean 9, by contrast, hints at a metapoetic dimension without compelling listeners to understand the passage primarily in those terms, creating an undertone that emerges cumulatively rather than being clearly articulated in any single phrase.52 But rather than being an argument against detecting any metapoetic force in the invocation, this obliqueness makes a powerful if subtle contribution to the rhetoric of the opening stanzas. The implicitness of the self-referential register means that the lines can be heard both as a mimesis of a ‘spontaneous’ utterance and as an authorial statement, a doubleness which an explicitly poetological statement would obviate.53 The language then has different but complementary effects, depending on which sort of speech act is heard as (p.206) voicing it. Understood as an authorial statement, the ‘metapoetic’ lexis contrasts the eclipse and the poem. Even as the eclipse is presented as an uncanny, disturbing event, the register of the language underscores its transformation into a verbal construct the explanatory detail and connotative force of which both potentiate and reward the exercise of listeners’ interpretative agency. The ‘path of wisdom’ made ‘helpless’ by the eclipse is replaced by the ‘path’ of the poem itself, and the ‘helpless strength’ that (supposedly) greeted the eclipse is replaced by the attentive responsiveness of the audience. Understood as the mimesis of a reaction to the eclipse, the implicit selfreferentiality of σοφίας ὁδόν, ἐλαύνεις, and σᾶμα φέρεις works differently. For audiences familiar with the tradition of eclipse poems, it would have been clear that, regardless of the precise relations between Pindar’s description and those Page 10 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context of Stesichorus and other poets, the opening lines of Paean 9 were the kind of thing that had previously been said in response to eclipses.54 The presence of language such as ἄστρον ὑπέρτατον | ἐν ἁμέρᾳ κλεπτόμενον and ἐπίσκοτον ἀτραπὸν ἐσσυμένα therefore enacts the verbal and conceptual resources available to the speaker in conceptualizing the event. Even this apparently ‘spontaneous’ utterance bears the traces of previous poetry. When heard as a ‘real’ speech act that the poem ‘recalls’, the metapoetic implicitness of σοφίας ὁδόν, ἐλαύνεις, and σᾶμα φέρεις complements this effect by looking forward, inscribing within the ‘spontaneous’ speech act an anticipation of the fully realized utterance that the poem will constitute.55

(p.207) Poetics in Performance Much has been written about how this and other cult songs invoke the gods, establish a shared communicative framework between the human and divine, and function as established forms of ritual practice.56 My main focus in this chapter has been on the text’s formal features and the subtleties of its language. In conclusion, I want to stand back and reflect briefly on how these details would have informed the poem’s function as part of a ritual assemblage. The poem is successful as a ritual because it is a complex, highly wrought artefact.57 Its position in a tradition of appeals to and constructions of the gods and the cosmos give a literary historical dimension to the common hymnic manoeuvre of referencing a past relationship with a god in order to substantiate a claim on the god’s favour. The power of the product with which Helios, his charioteer, and Apollo are presented in the ritual transaction stems not only from the speaker’s respectful comportment towards the eclipse, but also from the artistic skill with which the poet (and chorus) make use of the resources opened up by previous poetry in ‘dedicating your oracle to the Muses’ arts’ (39– 40). Moreover, the artistry Pindar brings to bear on his treatment of the eclipse topos situates his poem in an intellectual context, involving his listeners in an ‘interpretative community’ that reaches beyond the local circumstances of the ritual. This contextualization offsets the idea of the eclipse as a threatening immediacy, but it also promotes a self-awareness in listeners about their participation in a larger poetic tradition.58 (p.208) The poem is also ritually efficacious as an event that precipitates a particular form of intellectual and emotional attunement in its listeners. On my reading of the poem’s staging and refiguration of the eclipse and its effects, listeners are both involved in and placed at a distance from an emotional reaction to the eclipse. In the opening section of the narrative about Tenerus, his courage and intellectual qualities are emphasized (ἀνορέας…σαόφρονος) as reasons why his father Apollo gave him the guardianship of Thebes (44–6). As commentators have noted, this characterization answers the opening duality of ‘men’s strength and the way of wisdom’ (ἰσχύν ἀνδράσι | καὶ σοφίας ὁδόν), making Tenerus exemplify the qualities needed to respond to the eclipse with Page 11 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context equanimity.59 It seems likely that the narrative would have drawn on Theban history for precedents of unsettling divine interventions with outcomes that were happy or at least not disastrous.60 But the cognitive attention the poem precipitates is itself a response to the eclipse: the combination of intellectual agility, emotional engagement, and interpretative self-consciousness demanded by the intertexts and rhetoric of the invocation enacts a form of this ‘temperate courage’. In making its interpretative and imaginative demands, the poem balances the ‘helplessness’ of the opening (ἀμάχανον…σοφίας ὁδόν) by involving listeners in a heightened experience of both their agency and their limitations. Taken together, the various shadings of voice at work in the opening stanzas of Paean 9, along with the musico-poetic frame through which they are mediated, create a rich range of interpretative possibilities, allowing a range of differently calibrated responses. Listeners are invited to attend to various configurations of meaning, and not all listeners will have responded in the same way, or have been conscious of all the resonances that the poem’s language activates. Regardless of the path charted through the poem’s effects by a (p.209) given listener, however, what is important for my reading is the process by which it creates opportunities for response and reflection. In reacting to the eclipse, the poem stages the projection of subjects that emerge simultaneously and overlap:61 the fictional speaker as a cultural agent operating in a world already made meaningful by the intellectual resources with which he is equipped, the poet in dialogue with a tradition, the chorus responding to the poet. The emergence of this (these) subject(s) in turn opens up a space in which listeners can experience by analogy a sense of how their own constitution as responsive subjects is grounded, together with an increased self-consciousness about their role in the event of meaning that the performance makes possible. (p.210) Notes:

I would like to thank the audience at the Textual Events conference for their very helpful responses to the paper out of which this chapter developed, and Felix Budelmann, Armand D’Angour, and Tim Rood for comments at a later stage. (1) The text is that of Snell-Mahler (52k S-M = A1 Rutherford), but I have followed Rutherford in printing πολύσκοπ’ ἐμήσαο instead of πολύσκοπε μήσεαι; cf. Rutherford (2001) 190; Furley and Bremer (2001) ii 153. My translation of ἐλαύνεις τι follows that of Race; Rutherford renders the phrase ‘do you drive a stranger course than before?’. (2) Rutherford (2001) 177. The poem’s date is uncertain. A likely candidate is the total solar eclipse of 30 April 463 BC: this dating is favoured by Furley and Bremer (2001) i 201 on the grounds of ‘the dramatic loss of sunlight indicated by Pindar’s expressions’, but these could be explained rhetorically; the annular Page 12 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context eclipse of 17 February 478 BC is another possibility. There was also an eclipse on 28 April 509 BC, but Pindar would only have been in his early teens at the time. Cf. Rutherford (2001) 192. (3) Rutherford (2001) 192. For further remarks about possible performance scenarios see Olivieri (2011) 198. (4) The latter central to the poem’s reception: see Hunter (2012) 173–7; Porter (2016) 412–14. (5) The question of whether the persona loquens of a lyric poem should be identified with (a version of) the poet or with the performer (usually a chorus) has been extensively discussed in Pindaric scholarship: for a helpful overview and extensive bibliography see Currie (2013) 243–8. Significant contributions to the debate include Lefkowitz (1991) and (1995), who argues that the first person in epinicians is to be identified with the poet, a position followed by Pfeijffer (1999); important qualifications and extensions in D’Alessio (1994). Currie (2013), however, makes a persuasive case for interpreting the athletic victor as the speaker in at least some passages (e.g. Pyth. 8.56–60). On ‘polyphony’ in Bacchylides see e.g. Calame (2011b), who focuses on the different personae that the poems’ first persons represent. For further discussion of the ‘I’ of Greek lyric see Budelmann, this volume. (6) Stewart (2002) 59–90 is a powerful overview of the role played by sound and rhythm in lyric (and other) poetry; see also Blasing (2007) 55–9. I take the phrase ‘effects of voicing’ from Culler (2015) 36, who uses it to name features such as ‘rhyme, assonance,…alliteration, and rhythmic patterning’ which he sees as a ‘fundamental dimension of lyric, on which the impression of a distinctive voice of a speaker is sometimes imposed’. For an elaboration of his notion of ‘voicing’ see e.g. his reading (pp. 31–3) of William Carlos Williams’ XII from Spring and All (‘The Red Wheelbarrow’), in which a statement is made without a ‘character’ being created to whom that statement might be assigned: for further discussion of ‘voicing’ see e.g. pp. 175–6, 256–8. See also Nowell Smith (2015) 12 for the distinction between the ‘voice’ of a persona and what he terms ‘vocal attitudes’ such as ‘registers, address, epideictic versus deictic, embodied versus disembodied’. The situation in Paean 9 is different in so far as the poem constructs a strongly delineated persona loquens, but these critics’ emphasis on effects that resist being conceptualized as the utterance of a ‘voice’ of an author or speaker on the analogy with everyday speech acts is useful for thinking about how rhythm and musical accompaniment configure the ‘voice’ that emerges in the poem. See pp. 198–200. (7) The references to human weakness (3–4) and the speed of the eclipse (ἐσσυμένα… ἱπποσόα θοάς), together with the present-tense vividness of the

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Polyphony, Event, Context narrator’s supplication (λιτανεύω, ἑκαβόλε, 38), help to recreate these feelings: cf. Budelmann (2013) 89. (8) Cf. the remarks of Culler (2015) 34–7 on lyric as constituting rather than representing events, and Payne, this volume, pp. 258–9. On lyric’s artefactuality see the Introduction, pp. 10–11. (9) See Rutherford (2001) 193: these texts are referenced collectively at Plutarch Mor. 931e (see n. 54). Cf. the comments of Budelmann (2013) 90 on the significance of this tradition for Pa. 9. (10) For a useful recent discussion of intertextuality in Pindar’s poetics see Pavlou (2008); similar concerns inform Silk (2012); see also Silk (2007) 184 on Pindar and Homer. My discussion focuses chiefly on connections between ‘literary’ texts, and therefore differs from the use made of ‘intertextuality’ by Nicholson (2013), who uses the concept to read Ol. 10 against the background of a wider set of cultural traditions. Other recent relevant discussions are Hunter (2014) 123–45 on the use of Hesiod in early lyric and elegy, and Kelly (2015) on Homeric intertextuality in Stesichorus. As will become clear below, however, my reading of the ‘intertextuality’ at work between Pindar and Archilochus here focuses more on the musico-poetic elements of the two texts than on specific verbal connections. (11) It is important to recognize that listeners will have brought a variety of knowledge and interpretative competence to bear: see the remarks of Pavlou (2008) 539. Pindar makes reference in fr. 188 to a collective knowledge of the poetic tradition that involves a degree of specificity: φθέγμα μὲν πάγκοινον ἔγνωκας Πολυμνάστου Κολοφωνίου ἀνδρός (‘you recognize the song [or perhaps “saying”] of Polymnastus from Colophon, the one known to all’). However, the subject of ἔγνωκας, the statement’s context, and the precise referent of φθέγμα are unclear. (12) This effect would have been accentuated if Pindar’s ὀλοφύδέν drew on the rhetoric or phrasing of previous eclipse poems: for Plutarch’s application of ὀλοφυρομένους to Pindar and Stesichorus, see n. 54. (13) See e.g. Isthm. 5.38 ἔλα [sc. ἅρμα] νῦν μοι πεδόθεν (‘now drive me up from the plain’); for other references to the chariot in relation to song see Ol.1.110, Pyth. 10.65, Isthm. 8.61, Pa. 7b.13. For discussion of the image see e.g. Simpson (1969), Steiner (2016) 134–5 with further references. (14) εἶδον γὰρ ἑκὰς ἐὼν τὰ πόλλ’ ἐν ἀμαχανίᾳ | ψογερὸν Ἀρχίλοχον βαρυλόγοις ἔχθεσιν | πιαινόμενον (‘I saw from far away Archilochus the blamer often in a state of helplessness, grown fat on heavy words of hatred’): on this passage see

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Polyphony, Event, Context Budelmann, this volume, pp. 248–9. For further discussion of the possible connection between this statement and Pa. 9 see n. 25. (15) On Thaletas see also Käppel (1992) 349–51; Rutherford (2001) 37. For an overview of Glaucus’ musicological activities see Barker (2014) 29–45. (16) This is the explanation given (with due caution) by Barker (1984) 215: ‘Archilochus’ songs were designed for singing to the kithara. The sense of the present passage seems to be that Thaletas, composing for the same kind of performances as Archilochus, extended and elaborated his structures, using new rhythms drawn from the repertoire of the aulos.’ He also notes that there is no reason to think that Thaletas, elsewhere referred to as a citharode, actually composed for the aulos. (17) It is important to note that other eclipse poems may well have provided closer antecedents to Paean 9; my reading does not argue for seeing Archilochus as Pindar’s primary model, but as one of a number of connections that audiences might have perceived. Hesiod is another important intertextual presence: see D’Angour (2011) 47, who notes the connection between ἀνδρῶν νέον ἐξ ἀρχᾶς γένος and Hesiod’s succession of races at Op. 109–201. He points out that Pindar does not specify the characteristics of this ‘new race’; ‘the idea of divine destruction of the current, flawed, world of mortals certainly allows room for the supposition that its replacement would constitute an advance rather than a regress’. See also Rutherford (2001) 195. (18) Cf. Pavlou (2008) 541–5. (19) Thus Giannini (2013) 523; see also his discussion of τριπλόος as a reference to the refrain structure of the ‘Archilochus song’. (20) The phrase may also have an agonistic dimension: if the tradition that τήνελλα represents the sound of the absent cithara (for which see Σ Pind. Ol. 9.1, i 267–8 Dr) goes back to Pindar’s time and before, κεχλαδώς may imply a contrast between Archilochus’ straightforwardly mimetic onomatopoeia, and Pindar’s more transformative description. (21) Ol. 9.3–4 emphasizes the spontaneous performance of the ‘Archilochus song’ at the site of the games. (22) Rhet. 3.1418b28 and scholia. (23) See e.g. Campbell (1983) 207; Carey (1986) 66–7; see Rotstein (2010) 64 n. 4 for debate over the identification with further references. On the poem in general see also Schmitz (2000).

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Polyphony, Event, Context (24) This is Aristotle’s reading of the rhetoric; he analyses the passage as an instance of the technique whereby an author voices through a character thoughts which, if expressed in the author’s own voice, would ‘excite dislike or appear tedious or seem contradictory’ when spoken about oneself (ἔνια περὶ αὑτοῦ λέγειν ἢ ἐπίφθονον ἢ μακρολογίαν ἢ ἀντιλογίαν ἔχει) or make the speaker guilty of ‘abuse or boorishness’ (ἢ λοιδορίαν ἢ ἀγροικίαν) when spoken about another. For a reading of Aristotle’s analysis see Rotstein (2010) 63–5: she notes that the extant fragments of the poems do not contain any ψόγος, and that this element must have come into the poems further on, perhaps via an ‘unexpected twist’ such as a revelation of speaker. (25) Critics have tended to see Pyth. 2.54–6 as constructing an opposition between the poetics of blame (ψόγος) and Pindar’s encomiastic project: for discussion see e.g. Most (1985) 89–92; Brown (2006) 36–46. If a performance date of 463 is posited for Pa. 9 (thus post-dating Pyth. 2), there is the possibility that ἔθηκας ἀμάχανον | ἰσχύν may have recalled for some listeners the description of Archilochus as τὰ πόλλ’ ἐν ἀμαχανίᾳ, acting as a cue for the engagement with fr. 122, and perhaps highlighting the distinction between the ἀμαχανία of Archilochus’ speaker in that poem and the enunciative control implicitly assumed by Pindar’s persona loquens. (26) See n. 48. (27) On the negative associations that novelty could sometimes take on in Greek thought see D’Angour (2011) 29, 95. (28) Pindar’s listeners are likely to have been able to perceive connections between stanzas, and between individual lines in stanzas, over short durations: see e.g. Brewer (1993), esp. 24–6, 32–3 on the mnemonic processing of rhythmical sequences in pieces of music. She shows that ‘episodic memory… mak[es] it possible for us to compare the durations of large segments of a musical piece through the similarity of their contents’ (p. 33). The same holds for the rhythmical articulation of words, a process that would have been facilitated by choral setting: although the precise nature of the movements are obscure, it seems likely that the physical disposition of the chorus would have been reasonably regular across strophes and antistrophes, and would have constituted an aid to identification of repeated rhythmical sequences. For general remarks on the role of rhythmical repetitions in articulating listeners’ understanding of complex sentences see Prauscello (2013) 258–9, 270–2. (29) For a metrical analysis of the poem see Itsumi (2009) 393–5. (30) The regularity of phrasing in the second stanza enables individual phrases to be heard against their counterparts in the strophe more easily.

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Polyphony, Event, Context (31) On the implicative force of rhythmical and metrical repetitions cf. Stewart (2002) 82–3. (32) Cf. n. 17. (33) Cf. Culler (2015) 37, who focuses more on rhythm as enabling the repetition of a poem. (34) Furley and Bremer (2001) ii 152–3. (35) The charioteer’s gender can be explained in purely grammatical terms by the gender of ἀκτίς, but this does not make the characterization of the ἀκτίς as a charioteer any less striking a manoeuvre. (36) Mimn. fr. 12.9 and e.g. H.Dem. 63, 89 (cf. also H.Herm. 68–9, although this may post-date Pindar’s poem). For further references and discussion see Diggle (1970) 78–9, Richardson (1974) 171–2, Vergados (2013) 286. Pindar himself characterizes Helios as a charioteer at Ol. 7.71, where he is ‘lord of firebreathing horses’ (πῦρ πνεόντων ἀρχὸς ἵππων). Night has a chariot at Aesch. Cho. 660–1; see Garvie (1986) 226 for a list of other passages in which this pairing occurs. (37) See e.g. Od. 5.479, 19.441; Mimn. fr. 11a.2. (38) εἰ δ’ οὖν τις ἀκτὶς ἡλίου νιν ἱστορεῖ | καὶ ζῶντα καὶ βλέποντα (‘if some beam of the sun finds him living and seeing the light’, Ag. 676). Cf. also Aesch. fr. 204c ἱερὰ δ’ ἀκ̣τ̣ὶ̣ς σελ̣[. This seems to refer to the moon, and comes from a choral ode in Prometheus the Fire Bearer. The date of the play is unknown, and it is unclear how the description (may have) continued. For other Pindaric uses of the noun in the singular, see Pyth. 4.255, Pyth. 11.48, Isthm. 3/4.6. (39) The basic point would still hold if the charioteer had been mentioned in a previous poem: given that Helios as a charioteer is the norm, Pindar’s use of a female charioteer would still have been unusual, and may have functioned as an allusion to a particular poem rather than an inventive departure from tradition. Olivieri (2011) 201 n. 214 elides the distinction between Helios and the charioteer, but the use of the feminine participle ἱπποσόα θοάς and the address ὦ πότνια preclude seeing them as interchangeable. (40) See e.g. Od. 11.16; Hes. Th. 760; H.Dem. 70 with Richardson (1974) 173. (41) For weaker version of this rhetoric cf. Aesch. Supp. 213, where the chorus call on Helios’ ‘rays’, rather than the god himself, to ‘bring salvation’ (καλοῦμεν αὐγὰς ἡλίου σωτηρίους).

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Polyphony, Event, Context (42) Selene rides a chariot at H.Hom. 32.9–11: the hymn has traditionally been dated to the Hellenistic period on linguistic grounds, but Hall (2013) makes a case for placing it in the archaic period. If this is correct, there is a possibility that Pindar may be drawing on it for his characterization of Helios’ charioteer. The poems share some linguistic details that may suggest a connection: Pa. 9.5–6 ἐσσυμένα…ἐλαύνεις parallels H.Hom. 32.10 ἐσσυμένως προτέρωσ’ ἐλάση καλλίτριχας ἵππους (‘swiftly she drives forward her horses with lovely hair’). Speed is of course a common feature of chariots (see e.g. Mimn. 12.9 and H.Dem. 89 (ῥίμφ’ ἔφερον θοὸν ἅρμα τανύπτεροι ὥς τ’ οἰωνοί, ‘quickly they bore on the swift chariot like long-winged birds’), but the verb σεύω does not occur in conjunction with the gods’ chariots in Homer or Hesiod except at H.Dem. 379 (ἡνία καὶ μάστιγα λαβὼν μετὰ χερσὶ φίλῃσι | σεῦε διὲκ μεγάρων, ‘taking the reins and whip in his dear hands he urged the horses out through the hall’), although it is used of mortals’ chariots: see e.g. Il. 15.681, 22.22 (cf. also Isthm. 8.61 for Pindar’s use of σεύομαι with a chariot). The combination of σεύω and ἐλαύνω in the two texts may therefore suggest that one has influenced the other, although there is no way to determine priority. There may also be a connection between Pindar’s πολέμοιο δὲ σᾶμα φέρεις τινός (13) and H.Hom. 32.13, where the full moon is a ‘a fixed mark and sign for mortals’ (τέκμωρ δὲ βροτοῖς καὶ σῆμα). Given the controversy over dating H.Hom. 32 and the possibility that the two texts’ uses of σεύω could derive from other instances of the verb in early poetry and therefore be coincidental, any suggestion of a link between the poems must remain tentative. For further comments on Pindar’s ἐσσυμένα see pp. 192 n. 7, 203. (43) My position here differs from that of Stehle (1997) 46–51, whose main emphasis falls on the agency of the performers. (44) See e.g. Od. 11.109. (45) Cf. Fränkel (1975) 480 n. 22; Bona (1988) 221–2; Furley and Bremer (2001) ii 154. Rutherford (2001) 194 comments that ‘the description [is] symmetrical in so far as the sunlight is both a mother for human eyes and is also itself capable of sight…a symmetry which has the rhetorical function of creating common ground between deity and worshipper’. (46) On epiphanies requested in cletic hymns, see Furley and Bremer (2001) i 61, and for a parallel with the present text cf. O. Thomas (2011) 151 on the ‘indirection’ of the first line of H.Pan, in which the subject of the hymn is not mentioned: this, he argues, ‘may…have required enough cogitation that the next two words—αἰγοπόδην δικέρωτα—produced a cognitive “epiphany”, in a lowlevel mimesis of the true epiphany which is the notional goal of many Greek hymns’. On the eclipse itself as a type of epiphany cf. Bona (1988) 224: ‘il sole… ha mostrato la sua potenza misteriosa nel fenomeno dell’eclissi’.

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Polyphony, Event, Context (47) Cf. Culler (2015) 216 on ‘the function of apostrophe…to posit a potentially responsive or at least attentive universe, to which one has a relation’, with the remarks of Payne, this volume, p. 258. (48) On the issue of how the eclipse may have been perceived see Most (2000) 150. Possible non-verbal means of conveying these impressions in performance should also be borne in mind. The dance movements may at certain points have imitated forms of agitation, and musical effects such as high-pitched cries and instrumental melismata could also have been used to generate a mood of unease. The song was accompanied by the aulos (ἀγαυὸν καλάμῳ συνάγεν θρόον, 36: the scholium on the line reads μ[ε]τ’ αὐλοῦ τὴν ὠιδὴν π[ο]διδούς, ‘delivering the song with the aulos’), the expressive capacities of which are often noted: see e.g. Wilson (1999). (49) Cf. e.g. Od. 8.74, 481 (οἴμας Μοῦς᾽ ἐδίδαξε), and Pa. 7b.20. The terms of this comparison, and whether the lacuna should be supplemented to make the narrator compare himself with or differentiate himself from Homer, are disputed, but the metapoetic character of the lines is clear. Snell-Maehler print Ὁμήρου [δὲ μὴ τρι]π̣τὸν κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν | ἰόντες, ἀ̣[λλ’ ἀλ]λοτρίαις ἀν’ ἵπποις (11–12, ‘not going on Homer’s worn path but on foreign horses’), but D’Alessio (1992) showed that the lacuna in 12 is too long for Snell-Maehler’s reconstruction; this observation has prompted fresh attempts at supplementation, for which see D’Alessio (1995); Rutherford (2001) 248–9. For other instances of explicit metapoetic discourse in the Paeans cf. e.g. fr. 140b (= G9 Rutherford), which may or may not be a paean: see Steiner (2016) for discussion and bibliography. (50) In addition to Pa. 7b.20, cf. also e.g. Ol. 1.110–11, and Slater, Lexicon to Pindar, s.v. ὁδός b. Rutherford (2001) 194 n. 11 interprets its use here as ‘the complement of physical strength’; cf. Furley and Bremer (2001) ii 154. This does not, however, preclude a metapoetic association. Budelmann (2013) 90 notes that σοφίας ὁδόν ‘suggests poetry’, and that the phrasing of ‘dedicating your oracle to the Muses’ arts’ (Μοισαίαις ἀν[α]τιθεὶς τέχνα[ι]σ̣ι̣ | χρηστήριον̣ [ ̣]π̣ω̣λον̣τ̣[ ̣ ̣( ̣)]ι, 39–40) ‘emphasizes the song as an artistic product’. (51) Cf. e.g. Ol. 1.108–17, Pyth. 6.10–14, Nem. 3.1–12, 5.1–5. (52) In that these implications are ‘there’ in the language, they need not be conceived as emanating from an intention, whether conceived as that of the author or the speaker. Such an understanding is of course possible, and fits readily with a reading of the implicit metapoetic register as an authorial statement, but is not necessary for the implications to be felt. (53) Play on the juncture between authorial and choral activity continues in the phrasing of ἀγαυὸν καλάμῳ συνάγεν θρόον | μήδεσί τε φρενός (‘to link noble voices with the pipe and the counsels of my mind’, 36–7). The singular ἀγαυὸν… Page 19 of 21

 

Polyphony, Event, Context θρόον and the action of ‘linking’ point to choral unity, but the connections of θρόος with ‘noise’ (for which see LSJ s.v. a) underline the process by which music (καλάμῳ) and poetic design (μήδεσί τε φρενός) translate the underlying materiality of the voice into an aesthetic totality. Simultaneously, however, the syntactical function of μήδεσί τε φρενός in modifying the verb intimates that authorial intention is not straightforwardly reflected by the choral utterance, but is rather a constitutive element in the performance assemblage. (54) The nature of Plutarch’s discussion does not allow us to distinguish where Pindar may have been following Stesichorus; as Davies and Finglass (2013) 583 comment ‘the phrase ἄστρον φανερώτατον κλεπτόμενον loosely corresponds to Pindar’s ἄστρον ὑπέρτατον | ἐν ἁμέρᾳ κλεπτόμενον; the following expression, μέσῳ ἄματι νύκτα γινομένην, has no close counterpart in Pindar, but may be an amplification of ἐν ἁμέρᾳ in the Pindaric expression just noted’. Görgemanns (1970) 125–6 notes that the pairing of Stesichorus and Pindar here and at Plin. NH 2.12.54 may suggest that the references are derived from a source other than the poetic texts themselves. It seems probable, however, that members of Pindar’s audiences familiar with the previous eclipse poems would have recognized the topical relation between Pindar’s language and that of his predecessors (see p. 196 for the connection between ἐν ἁμέρᾳ κλεπτόμενον and Archilochus’ ἐκ μεσαμβρίης ἔθηκε νύκτ’). Moreover, the fact that Stesichorus and Pindar could be paired in this way suggests a reasonable similarity between their rhetorics, as perhaps does Plutarch’s application of ὀλοφυρομένους to both. (55) Within the structure of the poem, this anticipatory effect is paralleled by the shift from implicit metapoetics in the opening stanza to the explicit statements about poetic activity at 33–40. (56) See e.g. Rutherford (2001) 193–5. (57) On poems as objects dedicated to a god see e.g. Steiner (1994) 95–6; Depew (2000); for the related idea of the poem as a sacrifice see the texts cited by Rutherford (2001) 324 n. 75. (58) My reading puts rather more stress on audience self-consciousness than some interpretations of Pindar’s ‘ritual poetics’. Kurke (2005) 83, discussing Pa. 6, argues that ‘ritualization works by misrecognition. It is action that locates or draws its authority from some external (usually superhuman) sources or powers, but what it takes as its stable ground it is in fact creating.’ This is based on a notion of ritual as ‘inherently strategic, manipulative, and expedient’; on this account, the ‘logic’ of ritual ‘remains as implicit or instrumental as possible’ (Bell (1992) 82). A similar conception of ritual underpins Kowalzig (2007) 43–55. In Pa. 9, however, the situation is somewhat different, in that attention is drawn to the poem’s created, artefactual status, allowing listeners to

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Polyphony, Event, Context locate the poem’s affectivity in the author’s idiomatic engagement with poetic tradition and their response to it. (59) Cf. Most (2000) 158. (60) Given that Pa. 9 was probably composed for performance at the Ismenion (λέχει πέλας ἀμβροσίῳ Μελίας, 35), and we are told at Σ Pyth. 11.5 (ii 254–5 Dr) that Tenerus had an oracle there, it is possible that the continuation of the poem set up an association between Tenerus’ oracular success and that of the choral narrator. This relationship may have been prefigured by the description of the eclipse as a πάγκοινον τέρας, which associates the narrator’s interpretative attempts with those made by prophets: cf. Stehle (1997) 50–1. On this hypothesis, the continuation of the poem would have offered an alternative but complementary model of narratorial activity: the poem would have articulated a movement from an emphasis on literary intertexts in the opening invocation, to an emphasis on mythical/historical exempla. (61) On ‘voice’ as a site for the emergence of subjectivity in lyric see Stewart (2002) 104, who comments that ‘voice takes place not merely as a presence but as the condition under which the person appears’. See also the comments of Nowell Smith (2015) 12–13.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener Pauline A. LeVen

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords This chapter investigates the notion of lyric listening and concentrates on the particular role of the adverb δηὖτε (‘once again’) in constructing a poetics of delayed repetition in several archaic melic poets (Alcman, Sappho, and Anacreon). Building on the model provided by a reading of the mythical nymph Echo in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe to understand the seduction and role of delay and repetition in lyric listening, it is argued that ‘once again’ works as a form of gramophone, allowing the listener of the poem to experience the immediacy of poetry through the imagined distance and delay introduced by the adverb. Keywords:   lyric poetry, Anacreon, Echo, Daphnis and Chloe, listening, delay, repetition, subjectivity

So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. K. Grahame, The Wind in the Willows In programmatic fashion, let us start from an echo: a late iteration of lyric in the Imperial period. The narrative setting of the text is Lesbos, and the passage describes an arch-melic scene. It stages a musical competition and involves some well-known lyric topoi: desire, jealousy, death, and a statement about the relationship between performance, time, and space. I am referring to the myth of the origins of the echo, as narrated in Longus’ romance Daphnis and Chloe.1 Page 1 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener The scene takes place in book 3 of the novel. Daphnis and Chloe are having a romantic picnic on the beach when they notice a fishing boat at sea, with sailors singing sea shanties. When the boat passes a certain headland, the sound of the men’s singing is received by a hollow ravine, which bounces it back and ‘mimicked everything that was said, the sound of the oars and the sailors’ song, all quite distinct. It was a delight to hear: first came the voice from the sea, and then the (p.214) voice from the land with the same time-lag at the end as at the beginning.’ The text describes how the two protagonists react to this acoustic wonder: Daphnis is delighted and tries to preserve the sound of the sailors’ song in his memory, to record it in his mind in order to recreate it later on his syrinx (τινα διασώσασθαι τῶν ᾀσματῶν ὡς γένοιτο τῆς σύριγγος μέλη, ‘to record some of the songs in his memory to make them tunes for his syrinx’, 3.22), but Chloe is puzzled and looks on land to see where the land twin of the marine chorus might be. To help poor Chloe out of her cognitive predicament, Daphnis tells her a myth (3.23): Νυμφῶν, ὦ κόρη, πολὺ γένος, Μελίαι καὶ Δρυάδες καὶ Ἕλειοι· πᾶσαι καλαί, πᾶσαι μουσικαί. καὶ μιᾶς τούτων θυγάτηρ Ἠχὼ γίνεται, θνητὴ μὲν ὡς ἐκ πατρὸς θνητοῦ, καλὴ δὲ ὡς ἐκ μητρὸς καλῆς. τρέφεται μὲν ὑπὸ Νυμφῶν, παιδεύεται δὲ ὑπὸ Μουσῶν συρίζειν, αὐλεῖν, τὰ πρὸς λύραν, τὰ πρὸς κιθάραν, πᾶσαν ᾠδήν, ὥστε καὶ παρθενίας εἰς ἄνθος ἀκμάσασα ταῖς Νύμφαις συνεχόρευε, ταῖς Μούσαις συνῇδεν· ἄρρενας δὲ ἔφευγε πάντας, καὶ ἀνθρώπους καὶ θεούς, φιλοῦσα τὴν παρθενίαν· ὁ Πὰν ὀργίζεται τῇ κόρῃ, τῆς μουσικῆς φθονῶν, τοῦ κάλλους μὴ τυχών, καὶ μανίαν ἐμβάλλει τοῖς ποιμέσι καὶ τοῖς αἰπόλοις. οἱ δὲ ὥσπερ κύνες ἢ λύκοι διασπῶσιν αὐτὴν καὶ ῥίπτουσιν εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν ἔτι ᾄδοντα τὰ μέλη. καὶ τὰ μέλη Γῆ χαριζομένη Νύμφαις ἔκρυψε πάντα καὶ ἐτήρησε τὴν μουσικὴν καὶ γνώμῃ Μουσῶν ἀφίησι φωνὴν καὶ μιμεῖται πάντα, καθάπερ τότε ἡ κόρη, θεούς, ἀνθρώπους, ὄργανα, θηρία· μιμεῖται καὶ αὐτὸν συρίττοντα τὸν Πᾶνα. ὁ δὲ ἀκούσας ἀναπηδᾷ καὶ διώκει κατὰ τῶν ὀρῶν, οὐκ ἐρῶν τυχεῖν ἀλλ’ ἢ τοῦ μαθεῖν τίς ἐστιν ὁ λανθάνων μαθητής. ταῦτα μυθολογήσαντα τὸν Δάφνιν οὐ δέκα μόνον φιλήματα ἀλλὰ πάνυ πολλὰ κατεφίλησεν ἡ Χλόη· μικροῦ γὰρ καὶ τὰ αὐτὰ εἶπεν ἡ Ἠχώ, καθάπερ μαρτυροῦσα ὅτι μηδὲν ἐψεύσατο. ‘The race of nymphs, maiden, is great: there are Melian nymphs, and Dryades, and Marsh nymphs—all beautiful, all musical. One of them had a daughter, Echo, mortal by virtue of her father’s mortality, beautiful by virtue of her mother’s beauty. She was reared by the nymphs, taught to play the syrinx and the aulos by the Muses, to sing any song to the accompaniment of the lyre or the kithara. So at the peak of her maidenhood, she accompanied the dance of the chorus of the nymphs, and she sang along with the Muses. She Page 2 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener shunned all males, men, and gods, loving her maidenhood. But Pan was angry at the maiden, jealous of the music, and frustrated not to have gotten her beauty. He threw a madness over the herdsmen and goatherds. And, like dogs or wolves, they tore her apart and threw her limbs, still singing, all over the earth. (p.215) And for love of the nymphs, the earth hid all her limbs and preserves her music, and with the wisdom of the Muses she sends forth her voice and imitates everything—gods, men, instruments, wild beasts—as she used to when she was a maiden. She even imitates Pan playing the syrinx, and hearing it, he jumps up and rushes throughout the hills, not desiring to find anything other than who his invisible pupil is.’ Once Daphnis had told the myth, he received not only ten kisses from Chloe but many more; and soon after Echo repeated the same thing as if to prove that he had not lied.2 The myth is fascinating for several reasons. First, it provides a version of the myth of Echo that is very different from the one preserved in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (3.339–510), the one that had the most extended and richest reception and that most people know, and that features Narcissus as Echo’s lover rather than Pan, and the mirrored image as a form of sensory illusion parallel to that of the echo.3 Second, the myth is important within the narrative context of Daphnis and Chloe. It is the last of three inset mythical narratives about musical maidens, Phatta, Syrinx, and Echo, and it is an important locus for reflection on μουσική and how authors engaged with ideas of musical sound and performance in the period known as the Second Sophistic, a ‘performance culture’ itself, even if of a different type from the song culture of the archaic and classical periods.4 It is also a good example of the type of reading enacted throughout the novel. In Zeitlin’s perceptive analysis,5 The pleasures of the text are…doubled as the reader is asked to view through two lenses: that of the naïve child whose primary learning provides the plot of the story, and that of the sophisticated voyeur who is permitted to participate in both domains of perception. Here readers can enjoy the aetiological story about the echo, just as the character does, but they will also feel unsettled by the resemblance (p.216) between Chloe and the maiden Echo, and what significance the story of the dismemberment of a Chloe-like, beautiful musical maiden might have for the plot of the novel as a whole. Finally, and most importantly for my purposes, the myth is a privileged place in which to explore the intersection of questions of performance, representation, subjectivity, technologies of recording, and modes of listening.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener I will start with my interpretation of the passage, and lay out what I view as ancient thoughts on the phenomenology of lyric performance explored in the Longus narrative. Then, going back in time, I will suggest how the Echo myth provides a paradigm to interpret the poetics of a specific set of lyric texts. In this ‘echography of lyric’, I will focus on the poetics of delayed repetition, mostly in Anacreon’s poetry.

Echo and the Origins of Recording Our scene starts with the familiar mythological personnel of the countryside (the nymphs, Pan, and the divinized Earth, Ge). Echo is depicted as a musical prodigy, trained by the Muses on different instruments, dance, and voice, in other words an embodiment of μουσική herself. This star performer is also an Artemis figure, fiercely protecting her maidenhood—something that only highlights the risk presented by Pan. The motif of the musical competition introduced in the next lines of the story is a form of doubling of the motif of sexual threat, and the reference to ‘not having obtained the nymph’s beauty’ is rather opaque. It collapses the two relationships (musical and erotic) into one of power-turned-into-frustration and leads to the next event: Pan’s all-powerful revenge and annihilation of his musical rival and unobtainable love object. The reference to Echo’s beauty (τοῦ κάλλους) also makes it clear that what resides at the heart of the myth is the body: the beautiful body of the performer, and the body of the performer as producer of musical beauty through her singing mouth and powering lungs, moving hands, and gracefully swaying body.6 The narrative is, as a (p.217) matter of fact, articulated around the fundamental homophony between μέλη as limbs, and μέλη as songs, tunes: as the Earth hides the limbs of the dead nymph, it hides Echo’s live songs.7 One way to interpret the myth would be to see it as revolving around this fundamental pun: it is an aetiology for the acoustic phenomenon of the echo, a sonorous presence without a body attached to it, μέλη (tunes) without μέλη (limbs) after the performer’s death. This scenario itself is parallel to another famous story with roots on Lesbos: that of Orpheus, whose head is said to have continued to sing, detached from the musician’s body, after his death.8 But there is, I think, something else at stake in the myth: it is not simply a story about the metamorphosis of the lyric performer Echo—about the rematerialization of sound—and a statement about the overwhelming power of music to survive its performer’s death. It is also a story about the transformation of the arch-listener, Pan, and about the magic of the experience of recorded and replayed sound—the mythical version of Edison’s first experiment with the phonograph, and something not unlike the uncanny encounter with ‘primal sound’ that Rilke describes in his 1919 essay of the same name.9 In the Longus narrative, Pan is first all consumed by the good looks of the maiden. He conflates Page 4 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener her physical appearance with her musical talent, jealous of her musical power and angered by her sexual unavailability. But after the maddened shepherds have dismembered Echo (and here again we find a flipped-gender variation on the Orpheus myth, where possessed women tear the musician to pieces), after the nymph’s body has disappeared, and once Echo plays music back to Pan, Pan does not look for love any more and can concentrate on the sound itself. Echo, with the help of the earth and the mountains, plays here the role of a complex acoustic machine: (p.218) together (‘for the love of the nymphs and thanks to the knowledge of the Muses’) they constitute a combination of wax cylinder, gramophone, and amplifier. The wax cylinder is the earth receiving the physical imprint of Echo (her μέλη) in its surface. The gramophonic voice is the voice of the disembodied nymph, and the amplifier and loudspeaker are the mountains.10 As the text emphasizes, all these elements need to exist simultaneously—only a specific configuration of voice sounding in a specific space will create the delayed repetition. However anachronistic this idea of technology of recording and replaying might seem, it was actually introduced and elaborated on earlier in the narrative of Daphnis and Chloe. What brought about Chloe’s question and gave Daphnis the opportunity to display his acoustic expertise is the resounding voice of some sailors. Their song is described as echoed by the landscape, a ‘hollow ravine that took the sound into itself like a musical instrument…then returned a voice that mimicked everything that was said’ (πάντων τῶν λεγομένων μιμητὴν φωνὴν ἀπεδίδου). The song of the sailors was itself a form of man-made echo: it is described as a song led by a solo-singer, the boatswain, and responded to, at specific points (κατὰ καιρόν), by a chorus in unison—an antiphonal song (καθάπερ χορὸς ὁμοφώνως). And Daphnis too was focusing his attention on recording the songs of the sailors in his memory, in order to later adapt them for his syrinx, and replay them: he too is a participant in the technology of recording (an oral, memory-based form), and of playing back.11 Thus both the sailors and Daphnis illustrate forms of amplification, recording, and playback of sound. They also illustrate channels through which sound (p.219) can be re-manufactured by different bodies, and move, as it were, from one body to the next. Although I insist on the correspondence between the characters of the myth and modern technology, there is an obvious difference between the experience of the sound of the recorded voice coming from a gramophone and that of the echo, and my image is meant to be more evocative than exact: with the gramophone, the recorded, disembodied voice can be replayed at will, and does not need its original. With the echo, a voice needs to sound first, before it is repeated and enabled to exist separately from its source. Additionally, there is no playing back an echo indefinitely. But my focus is on the nature of the experience from a listener’s point of view, on the reception of an echo and repeated sound, rather than on the nature of the echo itself.12 In both the experience of an echo and the experience of a recorded voice, the main point is the cognitive tension between, Page 5 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener and delight created by, the impression of liveliness and immediacy, and the absence of a live body creating the sound. The notion of delay (between the origin of the sound and the echo, and the origins of the recorded sound and its repetition) brings the echo close to the recorded voice. Both the echoing voice and the technologically recorded and replayed voice are manufactured voices that are estranged from the bodies that originally created them. One concept is particularly useful in helping us refine our way of thinking about the kind of delight brought by a sound not associated with a body or even a sight (the very paradigm brought up by the story of Echo): what the film scholar Michel Chion has called ‘the acousmatic voice’.13 The term is derived from the Greek ἀκουσματικοί, the name given to the students of Pythagoras who, for five years, were (p.220) not allowed to see the master but only could hear his voice behind a curtain—or so goes the myth.14 Recorded and technologically repeated voices as well as echoes are different forms of this ‘acousmatic voice’, and play off the same sense of wonder. The first person to use the term ‘acousmatic’ (in the expressions ‘acousmatic listening’, and ‘acousmatic voice’), the composer Pierre Schaeffer, actually notes something fundamental about acousmatic sounds: ‘the tape recorder has the virtue of Pythagoras’ curtain: if it creates new phenomena to observe, it creates above all new conditions of observation’ (my emphasis).15 This is, I think, crucial for our purposes here: when the earth lets out the sound of Echo, it is not simply a new aural phenomenon to which she exposes Pan (maybe a voice with a new tone), but she also gives him new conditions of observation. She allows the listener to hear again, and to hear with a delay. Pan, in a way, experiences the fascination of the listener facing the voice of the gramophone, reliving the delight of the original music, out of its original performance context and experiencing it as if for the first time. Listening, again, to a sound he has just heard (his own syrinx-playing), Pan is transformed. In introducing the nymph Echo, the myth reflects on how the new sound (or this sound heard anew) blurs subjectivities: whose music is it, that of Pan or that of Echo, that the god hears when Echo reproduces (or imitates, or represents— μιμεῖται) the sound of the god’s syrinx and then sends the sound back in a delayed and amplified way?16 Most importantly, the myth locates in the figure of Echo playing Pan’s music a changed form of subjectivity: when he listens to the echo of his playing, Pan’s perception of music changes. It is not an object that he produces, but a subject that he encounters, somebody playing the same sound as the one he plays, but a sound that is perceived as different because of the delay and distance.17 Just as in (p.221) Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where we find Narcissus facing his own visual imago (tellingly, the Latin word for echo) in the water and not recognizing it as himself, here Pan, hearing his own sound, listens to himself as someone else, at a physical and temporal distance.18 In this duplication and double take on the sound and its producer resides something fundamental for the lyric project, something I will be coming back to. And this is also where the beauty of Page 6 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener the myth is, in not telling us exactly what it is that Pan delights in in hearing his own reflected sound. The story never tells us exactly why Pan finds more pleasure in hearing the echo of his music-playing than in hearing himself the first time around. And we are never told what Echo does to Pan’s playing. All we know is that Pan calls the sound that of ‘an invisible student (μαθητής)’—with the implication that it is a version of himself, both him and another. A μαθητής has internalized the teaching of the master and will continue it, but it will do so in an individually inflected way (there is only one master, but there are no two students alike). The metaphor suggests that the sound develops, and brings up the idea of generation and time (as students are the next generation of their teacher’s teaching). Pan’s vision of the sound as ‘student’ is an additional and perhaps more subtle version of the transfer and reproduction of sound: it goes further than the memory and playback, further than the reproduction of solo voice in choral form, further than the reproduction by means of machine, and it is another version of the acousmatic voice (we never know where the voice comes from). The delight taken in the delayed and developed sound marks the invention of the lyric listener.

(p.222) Lyric and the Acousmatic Condition This approach, and this myth, are fundamental for our purposes in this volume. To begin with, the echo in general is a good image to characterize our own position in the reception of ancient Greek lyric poetry: as scholars of literary and musical history, we will always be in the position of Pan, chasing after the performer of the music, wanting to know what or who emitted the original sound, without any chance of encountering him or her. As students of lyric in particular, we are the echo-chasers par excellence: most of the poetic ‘corpus’ is known from quotations, a practice illustrating and always reproducing the fragmentation and re-embodiment of a poetic voice at a distance, in a form of disembodied echo.19 We, like Pan, embody the acousmatic condition (the overwhelming presence of sound in the absence of sight, touch, and anything else). No matter how passionately we run through the mountains of scholarship, we will not catch a glimpse of the people who uttered the poems whose fragmented echoes we study. And precisely because we embody the acousmatic condition, much work has been done in recent years to compensate for it and recreate the material culture of the symposium, for example, and re-import the senses: scholarship has introduced more smells, more wine, more body, more music to fill in this absence, and the sensorium as a whole has made a reappearance to accompany our text-only approach to the performance. By imagining the room, the cups, the sexy hetairai, the kottabos, the politics, and everything else, we feel we have more of the original performance, we have some of the fleshy body that goes with the voice. The same could be said about public festivals and other contexts of performance.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener But secondly, and perhaps more precisely, we are also like Pan insofar as we need to reckon with technologies of sound-reproduction that make us reflect on different forms of subjectivity, not simply the subjectivity of the lyric ‘I’, the narrator, on which most recent scholarship on lyric has focused, but the subjectivity of the listener as well. As I have pointed out already, the myth is the story of Pan’s transformation, in his encounter with a natural and fantastic form (p.223) of wax-cylinder-cum-gramophone-cum-loudspeaker. And one could easily imagine the process of transmission of lyric via texts as a parallel model for performance recording, playback, and amplification. Again, I am not suggesting an exact correspondence, where the text would be the wax cylinder, the ‘I’ or persona loquens, the voice of the gramophone, and the new performance or the listener more generally would constitute the amplification.20 Instead, the textual transmission of our lyric poetry is a form of disembodied and re-embodied echo of an original, at a remove, with the inevitable slight distortions involved in the process. The written text is the wax cylinder, and our voice as reader is the gramophone that makes the poetry come alive again, as a form of echo far away from the original.21

Reperformance: Between Historicism and Phenomenology With its emphasis on conditions of recording and techniques of listening, the Echo myth provides an essential paradigm via which to think about two features that are built into Greek lyric poetry itself. The first is what I have called the ‘acousmatic condition’ inherent in lyric (the condition of listening without knowing the source of the sound, without associating a sight to a sound). This is a fundamental feature that marks the difference between lyric and drama or epic and their respective modes of representation. The lyric ‘I’ is particularly emblematic of this situation: it is an ‘I’ that is not necessarily the person performing the poem. It is a voice (a persona loquens) momentarily embodied by a performer, and that represents something coming from somewhere else, ventriloquized for a moment by a singer. In contrast to the situation in drama, however, the lyric performer can be that persona loquens—while dramatic audiences tacitly accept upon entering the theatre that there is no relationship between the man performing Antigone and the character Antigone in her tragic world, lyric audiences at a symposium can accept that the man performing a song (p.224) presenting the love of a man for a boy can actually be singing of his love for a boy. The fictional world of the poem can be attached to the performer of the poem, although it does not necessarily have to be: there are no stable conventions in lyric performance. It is always only a world through sound, without any action, drama, or sight correlating with it. The lyric voice is always acousmatic.22 This is where the different features of the Echo myth that I have highlighted above come together; for the figure of the echo also helps us come to terms with a second lyric feature, that of delayed listening (listening, at a remove, to a repetition of an original, that has been preserved in some way). Lyric texts are Page 8 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener always already echoes of something (an original performance and perhaps series of reperformances)—texts are the last ripples in a long string of transmitted sounds.23 But we can distinguish an even more primal level of embodiment and representation. For lyric texts present themselves as verbal echoes of a lived experience. The words give themselves as a trace, a way of preserving and recreating a scene. No matter how much a lyric poem pretends to be in the moment, to be a direct representation of the hic et nunc, it is always only the delayed trace, the verbal repetition, of an experience.24 But it also necessarily duplicates and displaces the narrator in the verbal repetition of the lived experience, putting him or her at a distance, very much like Pan in the very experience of listening to his own playing, at a distance from its original occurrence. Two levels of representation and embodiment, and two rather different issues are thus intertwined here. One has to do with the relationship between the fictional world of the poem through narrative, the creation of the narrator’s subjectivity, and its relationship with an imagined audience. The other is pragmatic and has to do with features of performance, reperformance, and transmission of the actual poem. To be clear: my focus has been, and will continue to be, on the notion of lyric performance, or lyric as vocal and verbal performance. But this does not mean that I am returning to an anthropological model or a historicist (or neo-historicist) view. My approach is actually in reaction to the performance turn: yes, lyric (p.225) happens in performance, but I see its success and significance as residing in the ear of the listener. I am interested in the phenomenology of listening to lyric, such as it is described in the arch-scene represented in the myth of Pan listening to Echo, in its ahistorical essence rather than in some specific set of historical circumstances. In what follows, I will continue to examine the ability of lyric texts both to create a voice and to imagine a listener’s response to this performance (whether it is actually enacted or not). It is an experiment that I view as a middle course between thinking about lyric according to the anthropological paradigm from which we have learned much in the past thirty years, and reading lyric poems as objects isolated in a historical vacuum on the formalist model.25

Listening to Lyric, Again To see this approach in practice, I propose to examine a unique case where these two questions (the representation of a fictional world and the actual performance) operate in conjunction, and to focus on a specific group of texts whose power resides in the conflation of these two issues. This group of lyric poems from the archaic corpus has three features in common: a) they explicitly refer, in the present, to an event as a repetition, or echo of a previous event, and thus thematize repetition;26 b) in doing so, they use the adverb δηὖτε (‘once again’); and c) they stage a first-person narrator (an ‘I’) (for most of them at least). Page 9 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener (p.226) All these fragments represent a speaker describing something that is happening to him or her again, and describing an experience as an echo of an original experience. In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that the δηὖτε poems rely on a specific poetics of listening, one that we can best understand in the light of the Echo myth, and one that I would call a ‘poetics of the gramophone’. I want to focus on some fragments to show that, by offering themselves as fictions of an echo of a previous time and enacting a form of acousmatic listening within the world of the poem, the texts present the acousmatic listening inherent in lyric performance as a boon rather than as a loss. By staging a specific kind of relationship with an internal audience (in which they create, already, the fiction of a listener listening to a gramophonic voice inside the poem), the poems elicit, in turn, a special kind of listening from their external audience, the future generations of lyric listeners.27 The corpus in question consists of twenty fragments, from Alcman, Sappho, Ibycus, and Anacreon; they combine twenty-two uses of δηὖτε; and most of them (although not all) stage Eros.28 δηὖτε is the crasis of δή and αὖτε, the particle δή marks that something is actually taking place in the moment, whereas the adverb αὖτε indicates that something is happening again. This deictic δηὖτε thus works as a wonderful time-and-space machine. As Anne Carson has noted, ‘Crasis in this case produces an uncommonly stereoscopic effect: each of the two words that make up deute has a different vantage point in time.’29 It is difficult to improve on her formulation: ‘“δή” places you in time and emphasizes that placement: now. “αὖτε” intercepts now and binds it into a history of “thens”.’ δηὖτε peers past the present moment to a pattern of related actions stretching behind it. It is a word ‘on which the eyes open wide in sudden perception, then narrow in understanding’. The mechanics of δηὖτε appear, in the light of the myth with which I started, to be particularly (p.227) close to the combination of the earth and Echo: δηὖτε records an event, marks it as present, and amplifies it by bringing attention to itself, but it also presents it, already, as an echo of an initial scene to which the listener does not have access, and sets the origins of this echo at a remove. Let me now take some examples of how this works. Alcman 59A is probably the earliest instance of this form:30 Ἔρως με δηὖτε Κύπριδος ϝέκατι γλυκὺς κατείβων καρδίαν ἰαίνει.

Eros once again, at the command of Cypris, pours sweetly down and warms my heart.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener We do not have any details about the passage.31 As minimalist as the narrative is, this δηὖτε creates a persona with a fictional past: the ‘I’ is a lover experienced in the symptoms and phenomenon of desire, and its dangers.32 This led the authority quoting the fragment (Athenaeus quoting Chameleon quoting Archytas) to describe the historical poet Alcman as ‘liking to spend his time around women and that kind of [depraved—ἀκόλαστον] music’. But even if recent work on biography has clearly shown that the ‘life’ of the poet is often based precisely on the persona created by the poem,33 this is not enough to describe what is at stake in the fragment. The δηὖτε does not simply create a persona (that of the veteran poet in love): it also creates a specific relationship with an imagined listener. By sharing with the imagined audience the description of a repeated recent event, the narrator simultaneously opens a little space to let the audience peek into its fictional past. What interests me here is the embeddedness of the idea of ‘coming after’: on one level, within the poem, the speaker presents his current condition (lovesickness) as a repetition of an original feeling. On another level, the narrative description of the symptoms is itself, by nature, at a remove from the original experience of feeling desire. (p.228) On yet another, when performed orally, the poem is a delayed and displaced repetition of a feeling experienced and described in the past. So even at the original, first performance of this poem, wherever that might have been, the actual audience would only be mirroring an internal listener already witnessing the mere echo of an event that occurred in the fictional past of the speaker. By presenting the feeling as a repetition of a past event, the speaker gives us, in this original presentation in lyric form, the impression of reflecting on an echo. The pragmatics of the δηὖτε are thus best described as implicitly conspiratorial. Even those who have not experienced this sort of thing before know from the rhetoric that they are meant to imagine they have done so. In this process, δηὖτε makes the text a literary, textual event, because it implies competent audiences that will recur indefinitely.34 One can best represent this phenomenon with the image of a series of ripples of ‘coming after’: at the centre, the event (fictional or real) lived by the persona of the speaker; then the first ripple of the repetition (the event repeated in the experience of the narrator); the second ripple is that of the narrator giving verbal expression to that feeling and referring to the event as ‘again’; the penultimate one is that of the lyric performance, giving depth to the meaning of the ‘again’ and enriching the reference to the past of the narrative persona, by hinting at the belatedness of any performance of the song; the fourth and final ripple is that of any later reperformance. This can be repeated at the level of lyric historiography: even if our Alcman fragment is chronologically the first specimen in a series of poems featuring δηὖτε (and Archytas identifies Alcman as the first poet of a lyric tradition), it is ‘already’ a repetition, and it peers back into (and creates) something more

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener remote, which we cannot have access to. We are at the beginning of a tradition, and yet it presents itself already as an echo, an acousmatic voice. A similar type of scenario is described in a fragment of Anacreon (fr. 400): παρὰ δηὖτε Πυθόμανδρον κατέδυν Ἔρωτα φεύγων. Once again I went down to Pythomander’s to escape Eros. (p.229)

We do not know who Pythomander is, nor anything else about the poem (quoted by Hephaestion for its metre, Ench. 12.5), but once again, love is presented as something dangerous (not unlike the ‘poison’ image in the previous text). This time, the focus is on the narrator’s remedy for the disease of love (escape by seeking refuge with someone else) rather than on its symptomatology. But the δηὖτε creates a similar situation of communication with the internal listener: as in the previous fragment, it is already a form of confidence, an intimate confessional, an avowal coming from somebody letting an imagined listener just peek through a small opening into a past. It is not only the fiction of the self that Anacreon gives us, but an entire world that is given to the imagination: the proper name in particular situates the first person in a fictional world with its own space, cast of characters, and time (how many times in the past did the narrator go to Pythomander’s? Once, twice, last Thursday, on and off for the past thirty years?).35 The simple utterance, no matter how enigmatic, gives a single statement an entire fictional fabric and ‘amplifies’ the record of a single event. The amplification can take different levels of intensity and reverberate in different ways. Take Anacreon fr. 413: μεγάλωι δηὖτέ μ’ Ἔρως ἔκοψεν ὥστε χαλκεὺς πελέκει, χειμερίῃ δ’ ἔλουσεν ἐν χαράδρῃ.

Once again Eros has beaten me like a smith with a huge hammer, and dipped me in a freezing torrent. We can say about this fragment what we said of the previous one: it has a capacity to suggest temporal depth in the persona of the speaker, a veteran lover expressing the symptoms of the tyranny of Eros. The δηὖτε creates the same intimacy with an imagined audience and suggests the character of the speaker in a way that a one-time action would not.36 But the δηὖτε might also selfreflectively mark the engagement of a poet with a well-known theme. All of a sudden, the echo suggested by the adverb reflects several things at the same time.37 (p.230) It is a form of temporal kaleidoscope. Besides creating a persona and a relationship of listening, it functions as the marker of a trope. And what matters for the listener is to pay attention to the way the description of the recurring event is accomplished: it is as much an invitation to imagine the other Page 12 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener love-pains of the ‘I’ as to hear the way the other descriptions and other performances were done. What matters is the quality of the echo. Compare this passage of Anacreon with Sappho fr. 130: Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.

Once again Eros the limb-loosener agitates me, bitter-sweet, irresistible creature. When set on the background of Sappho’s description of Eros, Anacreon’s image is not only a ‘new’ event in a series of past personal events of the persona, but also a new poetic event, an echo in dialogue with predecessors and maybe contemporaries. The first-person voice might be channelling the voice of Alcman, or Sappho—or some other poet that we do not have, all working with the same poetic parameters.38 The text imagines other poetic presences, and accounts for a listener who would be taking in this new account of love at a remove—and taking pleasure in the reverberations of this trope. δηὖτε here works in the way Stephen Hinds has attributed to the role of Echo in Ovid, a figure close to that of the narrator in his or her role as ‘annotator’, alluding to another text and marking the allusion.39 What matters then, in a description like Anacreon fr. 413, is the particular form that the description takes again: the pleasure ‘this time’ for the listener, of imagining love as a smith rather than an irresistible creature (as in Sappho fr. 130) or a poison (Alcman fr. 59A) or a recurring threat (Anacreon fr. 400). (p.231) One more function of δηὖτε deserves note, and has been explored in detail by Sarah Mace in her study of the δηὖτε poems: δηὖτε is used for creating a tone and underlining the distance from the ‘I’ with the scenario described.40 Take Anacreon fr. 376: ἀρθεὶς δηὖτ’ ἀπὸ Λευκάδος πέτρης ἐς πολιὸν κῦμα κολυμβῶ μεθύων ἔρωτι.

See, once again I climb up and dive from the Leucadian cliff into the grey waves, drunk with love. For Mace, the δηὖτε here is a way to create tone, irony.41 A jump from the Leucadian cliff was supposed to help cure unsuccessful love—or end all troubles with death.42 But the adverb introduces irony and self-mockery, since if the poet had recourse to it ‘again’, it had not proved the extreme gesture it presents itself to be. In its grandeur and emphasis on selfless loss in love, the statement is also an acknowledgment of self-obsession. The leap, of course, is much more than a physical expedient to love: it is a metaphor for the recurrence of the same poetic persona, and a return to the same type of poetic production: the ‘here I go

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener again’, I, veteran of love, jumping again into the same waters, highlights and simultaneously excuses the poet’s form of self-citation.43 One could multiply examples, but I want to end by coming back to the myth with which I started.44 There is an obvious link between these scenarios: the story of Pan and Echo (like that of Narcissus and Echo), like most of the scenarios of the δηὖτε poems, is one of desire—eros. Desire is always caught up in repetition: desire wants to continue the cycle of yearning and delayed fulfilment as much as it (p.232) wants to be fulfilled. This is no coincidence, and I think the best way to understand this lyric listener I have been referring to is to map him or her onto the figure of Pan. Each δηὖτε poem is a poem that relies, ultimately, on the desire of an imagined listener to hear something again. And this starts by the listener being himself or herself the narrative persona of the δηὖτε poem, yearning to listen, at a remove, to the voicing of his or her own desire. Each of the lyric poems relies on the very same mechanism that we have observed in the Echo myth: an imagined listener getting a jolt from hearing, at a remove, something that she or he has already experienced, and jumping to their feet, because hearing again sparks desire (not desire of an erotic object necessarily, just the experience of desiring and opening oneself to someone else). This is the poetics of the acousmatic voice: like the voice of the gramophone, it is a voice with no body, a voice whose intrinsic pleasure comes from being heard again and at a distance from the source of the initial experience, in a new way every time it is experienced. The listener is the amplifier, turning the volume of desire from a low hum to a resounding boom.

Conclusion: The Fizzle of the Machine I have started with an echo and gone back to the source of the sound: my approach has consisted in thinking about performance not in a specific sociocultural context, but rather in taking one example of poems reflecting on the ontology of lyric performance, performance understood as a speaking voice implying a listener. My main point has been that, even before the recording and radio age, Greek lyric was always already dealing with the issue of recording forms of subjectivity, with accounting for the phenomenon of the recorded, disembodied voice, and amplifying its experience. More than any other genre, lyric gives itself as a voice speaking directly into an ear, and conjuring up immediate complicity with its audience. I have argued that the figure of Pan, who discovers the acousmatic, delayed voice of Echo (an early form of recording-machine-cum-gramophone-cumamplifier) is a crucial paradigm to use in thinking about our condition as scholars of lyric: we are always confronted with the bodiless voices of ancient Greek poetry. But this condition, and the strange desire it arouses, is itself reflected on in a set of Greek (p.233) lyric poems: the δηὖτε poems present themselves as reflections on acousmatic presence, a coming after that does not see, and cannot get access to, the cause of the initial experience. They stage Page 14 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener both technologies of recording and forms of listening. The δηὖτε on which all these poems rely creates a fictional past. I see it as a signal that the poet imagined the echoes of his or her own poem, not in a specific context, but through time. Most importantly, these poems rely, to exist, on a Pan figure as listener: somebody who is unhinged by the pleasure created by the delayed performance and the reflected voice and wants to hear it again. In what I have called the ‘poetics of the gramophone’, the δηὖτε itself works as the fizzle of the machine. It is not part of the poem nor of the imagined world, but a sign of the technology that brings the sound of the voice to life. We know we are listening to a recorded voice, an echo of an initial experience lost for ever, but we enjoy it nevertheless, and we enjoy it precisely for what it is: an echo of Echo. (p.234) Notes:

(1) For a short introduction to Daphnis and Chloe, see Morgan (2004) 1–20. Hunter (1983) remains a fundamental study. On music in Daphnis and Chloe, see Maritz (1991), Hubbard (2006). For an analysis of the three embedded myths in the novel, see MacQueen (1990), Montiglio (2012) with further bibliography. For the myth of Echo in particular, see MacQueen (1990), Laplace (2010) 75–8. (2) The text is from Morgan (2004), the translation is mine, partly inspired by Morgan. (3) There is no way of establishing a chronology between the two texts and which reacted to which, or how they recast an earlier mythic model in different ways. Only the date of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (AD 9) is known. On the myth of Narcissus and Echo, the bibliography is immense, but focuses mostly on Narcissus. Bonadeo (2003) is a good way into understanding the figure of Echo independently from that of Narcissus; also Wieseler (1854). (4) On the Second Sophistic as performance culture, see Whitmarsh (2005) 23– 40. (5) Zeitlin (1994) 154. (6) See Konstan (2015) 35–9 on κάλλος as referring to the body of a person. (7) See Scheid and Svenbro (2014) 13–18 on things (and the words designating them), generating mythical narratives, and specifically 17–18 on μέλη. The pun has a long and learned history. It is fundamental for the myth of Orpheus (which also revolves around dismemberment), we find it in comedy (for example Cratinus 276 K–A—the same pun appears in Herodas Mimiamb 8.71), and it is also central for the myth of Syrinx as told in Daphnis and Chloe (2.34). (8) For anecdotes relating to Orpheus’ death, see Kern (1922) 113–37.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener (9) On Edison’s experiment, see Kittler (1999) 3–7 and 21–9 (Rilke’s essay ‘Primal sound’ is quoted in ibid. 38–42). Rilke records his fascination for a skull, observed by candlelight, which reminds him of a childhood experiment recording sound, with ‘one of those unforgotten grooves, which had been scratched in a little wax cylinder with the point of bristle!’ (10) Kittler (1999) is fundamental for thinking about the recorded and replayed voice (especially 31–3, on the parallel between the phonograph and the brain, and on the notion of memory), and about the relationship between desire and technology. Although I am relying on a metaphor, that of the gramophone, close to that used by Shane Butler in his masterful The Ancient Phonograph (2015), my purpose and my main point are rather different from his: I am concentrating on the idea, and experience, of repetition itself and its connection to the listener’s subjectivity, while Butler describes his book as focusing on ‘the role of sound in Greek and Latin literature’ (17), and more specifically on the idea of voice (which he calls, inter alia, ‘hermeneutic noise’, 57). (11) For an ancient view on recording, memory, and the anxiety of losing the liveliness of sound, see Isid. Etym. III.15: nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, qui scribi non possunt (‘if mankind does not preserve sounds in its memory, they perish, for they cannot be written’). On this question, see also Butler (2015) 99–101. (12) Although the figure of Echo already appears in Pindar’s Olympian 14, the first treatment of the acoustic and semantic potential of the echo is found in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae 1056–96, which highlights the deformative qualities of Echo, as well as its potential to tell the truth: when pieced together, Echo’s words (1069–76) come to read δι’ Ὀλύμπου μέρος ἐξέλαχον θανάτου τλήμων στωμυλλομένη λίαν—‘Through Olympus…in my wretchedness…I have received a share of death… [because I am] excessively chatty’—an account of Echo’s mythology. On Echo in Aristophanes, see Phillips (2015). For further ancient reflections on the acoustic phenomenon of the echo, see also the pseudoAristotelian Problemata 11.6 (noting pitch deformation) and 11.23 ~ 51 (emphasizing similarity to the original, with hints at a physical understanding of it). I thank Oliver Thomas for reminding me of these passages. For more references, Hollander (1981) 13 n. 5. (13) Chion (1982). (14) The fundamental work on this type of ‘sound unseen’ is now Kane (2014). See also Pettman (2011), with interesting insights on technology. (15) Schaeffer in Cox and Warner (2006) 81 (the chapter on ‘acousmatics’ (76– 81) is a translation of passages from Schaeffer (1966)).

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener (16) More could be made of the extensive layering and complex focalization in the myth. The narrator repeats a story that Daphnis tells Chloe, about Echo echoing Pan’s music on a syrinx. Echo herself is reminiscent of another nymph (Syrinx) whose fateful story is told in another part of Daphnis and Chloe (2.34): even as he plays the syrinx, Pan echoes other stories. The text is itself a recording of its own making. (17) This idea of listening to oneself as to someone else (a self that puts itself at a distance from its own sound) is explored in fascinating research on hearing one’s own voice: Holzman and Rousey (1966). There, the two authors interpret the general feeling of horror and disbelief at the sound of one’s own voice (recorded and played back) as ‘a momentary loss of anchorage, a loss of the cathected familiar’ (84). They also point out that ‘listening to one’s own voice may be not only discrepant but disruptive’ (84), possibly on account of ‘a momentary awareness of personal characteristics that are conveyed by the voice qualities’ (85). Most explicitly (85): ‘The voice-confrontation experience suggests that when we are given the opportunity to hear ourselves as others do, to regard the voice as a percept rather than as a mediator of expression, we may hear not only the results of the censoring process but what it is that we are attempting to censor.’ The scenario is of course different in the case of Pan, since it is his instrumental music, not his voice, that he hears. (18) There is a difference: there is no other in the water, but there is another in the forest (at least in Ovid), and the Narcissus myth does not explain why mirrors reflect, but the Echo myth explains why echoes echo. (19) Perhaps the most explicit statement is that most of our lyric poetry comes from quotations, which are themselves forms of echo and dismemberment: Bonadeo (2004) 247: ‘la metafora dell’ eco come recupero del già detto/già scritto affonda, allora, le sue origini nell’ antichità’. (20) For more on the relationship between voice, recording, and text, see Butler (2015). (21) See Jajdelska (2007) 6–12 on the correlation between mode of reading (silent or not) and the reader’s relationship with the narrator. (22) On the layering of the ‘I’, see Budelmann, this volume. (23) See Stehle (2009) on the difference between written and aural cultures. Phillips (2016) 217–23 argues that Pindar’s use of Echo in Ol. 14 thematizes the echoic relationship between performance and reperformance. (24) For other approaches to this issue see Phillips, this volume, pp. 205–6; Payne, this volume, pp. 258–9.

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Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener (25) This middle course is also illustrated in Maslov (2015) (a study that I was able to read only after this chapter was completed). I take the following sentence of his as programmatic for my approach as well: ‘I am particularly concerned with establishing the validity and feasibility of studying literary structures and forms historically, yet in a way that does not break them into separate histories of form (history of authorship, history of metaphor, history of a genre, etc.) but treats them as a constitutive elements of literature approached holistically’ (ibid. 13). (26) These poems embed one issue linked to repetition (that of the transmission to future audiences) by staging another (their recording of a personal event and creating a fictional world). They present themselves as self-consciously belated utterance, or as the echo of something: not so much an echo of an imagined previous utterance (although they can be that too), but more a verbalized echo of something that has happened in the past. (27) My goal here is different from that of Mace, who declares, ‘a study of the range and ethos of the shorter erotic δηὖτε poems holds the promise of shedding some new light on the tone and meaning of these disputed verses [Sappho fr. 1]’ (Mace (1993) 337–8, my emphasis). On my reading, the interpretation of any given poem is not based on some inherent tone-marking quality of δηὖτε but on the kind of fiction of listening it enacts. (28) Alcman fr. 59, Ibycus fr. 287 (αὖτε), Sappho frs 1 (3 times), 22, 83, 99 col.1, 127, 130, Anacreon frs 349, 356 a and b, 358, 371, 376, 394b, 400, 401, 412, 413, 428. (29) Carson (1986) 118. (30) Quoted by Chamaeleon (fr. 25 Wehrli), in Ath. (13.600f), reporting that Archytas (probably not the fourth-century BC Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, expert in harmonics, ‘but the largely obscure Archytas of Mytilene (D.L. 8.82)’ according to Olson ad loc.) said that Alcman led the way in erotic songs (τῶν ἐρωτικῶν μελῶν) and made them public, thus justifying the image of Alcman as licentious. (31) On the fragment: Davies (1983). (32) Contra: Bowra (1961) 283 n. 1: ‘It looks as if δηὖτε did not quite have the full force of our “again” but simply drew attention to a new situation.’ (33) For further discussion of this issue see Budelmann, this volume, pp. 243–52. (34) These last two sentences are indebted (nearly verbatim) to one of the shrewd manuscript readers—whom I warmly thank for his or her insights. (35) Compare Purves (2014) 176, on time and ‘now’ in Sappho. Page 18 of 19

 

Echo and the Invention of the Lyric Listener (36) On lyric as a form of invocation, Greene (1993); Culler (2015) 186–243 on lyric address. (37) It is not a question of context. Contra, Nagy (1973) 142: ‘For an appreciation of the contextual nuances in δηὖτε, I recommend as a fascinating esthetic exercise the consecutive reading of the Lyric passages cited by Campbell 266, with reference to lines 15, 16, 18 of Sappho 1 LP.’ (38) Mace (1993) 354 explicitly states: ‘If Aeschylus acknowledges “Eros…me, again!” as a distinct compositional form by echoing it more or less directly at Cho. 410, and Ibycus does so by evoking it implicitly in fr. 286, Sappho fr. 22 exhibits a distinct “literary” self-consciousness about erotic δηὖτ’, by using the conventions of the motif ‘Eros…me, again!’ to allude to it as a productive genre of poetic composition that (in the dramatic fiction of the poem) her poetessaddressee would be quick to recognize.’ (39) For the notion of ‘the annotator’ who alludes to another text, see Hinds (1997) 6; on Echo or the echo as intertextual marker, see also Brenkman (1976), Hollander (1981) 23–61, Wills (1996) 1–41 and 342–9. (40) Mace (1993) 344. (41) Ibid. 349: ‘Anacreon, whose five erotic δηὖτε poems make him the most prolific of the four in this area, tended, above all, to exploit the comic potential of the motif. In three [frs 413, 376, 428] in particular, he uses his characteristic flair and wit to generate ironic self-mockery.’ (42) See Sappho Testimonia 23 Campbell. (43) With this idea of a ‘once again’, we thus seem closer to the situation of the Neoteric Latin poets rather than to that of archaic oral culture: I am supposing utter consciousness about the notion of tradition, self-referentiality, and belatedness. See also Bonadeo (2004) on the practice of citation. (44) There are other stylistic features that I need to ignore: the relationship between echo and repetition, which can take different forms, including acknowledgment of a split self (as in Anacreon fr. 428, ‘I love and I don’t love, I am mad and not mad’), and incantation (as in Sappho fr. 1, with Segal (1996)).

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Lyric Minds

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Lyric Minds Felix Budelmann

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords Like other lyric, the solo lyric of early Greece creates encounters with another mind. Drawing on the psychological phenomenon of ‘mentalizing’, this chapter attempts to capture the quality of these encounters. In contrast to epic or drama, where we observe a multiplicity of characters as they interact with one another horizontally, lyric minds attain complexity vertically: audiences encounter the mind of the speaker in the text, that of the performer, and of the author. Lyric thus fragments and asks us to reassemble what in ordinary life is one—the flesh-and-blood person before us, the words, and the person from whom the words originate—and thus creates its peculiar blend of immediacy and opacity. In the course of this argument, a case is made for the necessary truthfulness of the lyric speaker. Whereas the lyric performer inhabits words that are not wholly his/her own, the lyric speaker is necessarily truthful. Keywords:   Greek lyric, truth, Theory of Mind, lyric I, persona, psychology, author, performance

Lyric creates encounters. Sometimes hazily, sometimes with startling clarity, poems conjure a mind behind the text. The performed solo lyric of early Greece, which is my topic here, is no exception: it is not for nothing that we used to call it ‘personal’ poetry.1 The project of this chapter is to reflect on the quality of these encounters. It explores what one might call the psychology of the lyric ‘I’. My prop in this exploration will be the intensely researched, albeit diffuse, psychological concept of ‘mentalizing’. Mentalizing is the (perhaps uniquely) human ability to form impressions of other people’s mind-states, and encompasses involved and explicit reflection on what my friend really thinks Page 1 of 20

 

Lyric Minds about me as much as the unconscious, intuitive sense that the child who raises its arms towards me wants to be picked up. More than one cognitive system is likely to underlie this range of phenomena, and both psychologists and philosophers discuss questions such as how automatic, how conscious, how innate, how embodied, or how context-dependent mentalizing (p.236) is. With these debates comes a plethora of terms: ‘Theory of Mind’ (the original label, now felt by many to be misleading), ‘mentalizing’, ‘mind-reading’, ‘social cognition’. Fortunately, for my purposes here it is unnecessary to take a position, and I shall use ‘mentalizing’ inclusively to express the whole range of ways in which we engage with other people’s intentions, ideas, and emotions. What matters is that, whatever the best nomenclature and however exactly the concept is to be understood, mentalizing is a very well-developed human ability and propensity which we exercise continuously in all our social interactions.2 Mentalizing has been used widely in recent interpretations of narrative and dramatic literature (less so in discussions of lyric).3 One of the most substantive pay-offs has been a new lease of life for the notion of ‘character’. Mentalizing solves the conundrum that literary characters are artificial constructs with no existence beyond the author’s words and yet can often feel very ‘real’ to readers. The crucial observation is that what we know of real people is limited too, and that mentalizing systems evolved to cope with those limitations. Not only when reading texts, but also in real-life interaction, we fasten on what sparse information presents itself, and turn those skeletal clues into an impression of what a person is like. Mentalizing turns the question of character from one of ontology (are characters real?) into one of reader psychology (how does a text activate and exploit my mind-reading apparatus?). It is not so much improper to imagine a character’s inner life beyond the words of the text: it is inevitable. It is self-evident that mentalizing underpins lyric encounters no less than it does encounters with characters. The sense of a person that we glean from the poems of Sappho, Anacreon, and Archilochus will owe as much to our propensity to mind-read as does the lifelike (p.237) quality of the people that populate the Odyssey and Oedipus Rex. However, there are also differences, and it is these differences that are my chief concern. How is lyric mentalizing different from epic mentalizing, and indeed from mentalizing in the world? Fundamentally, therefore, this is an essay about genre or mode. Pursuing the question of mentalizing will, I believe, prove a way of clarifying certain distinctively lyric qualities. The organizing framework of the chapter is one of mentalizing at three levels. Greek monody creates encounters with (a) the mind (or minds) projected by the text, (b) the mind of the author, and (c) the mind of the performer. Discussing each in turn, I will (a) develop the idea that the encounter with the textual speaker is characterized by a kind of unqualified trust that we long for but never attain in life; and I will (b) try to contribute to the rehabilitation of authors that Page 2 of 20

 

Lyric Minds has been a trend in recent criticism. (Because of the prominence of performance in current lyric scholarship, (c) discussion of performers will be comparatively brief.) The separation of the three layers is of course, above all, a heuristic device, and what listeners are confronted with is a composite. It is at this aggregate level that the comparison between mentalizing in lyric and other forms of literature is most telling. To use a spatial metaphor: whereas early Greek epic (like many other forms of narrative literature, too) makes us observe, horizontally, how one character interacts with another, with lyric interaction emerges as above all vertical, between the author, the performer, and the text. I shall conclude by considering what follows for the model of the self that solo lyric presented to its ancient audiences and presents to us.

Encountering the Speaker I will start with what the New Critics called the persona and regarded as the only mind that we may legitimately talk about, the mind projected by the text qua text. I shall use the less charged term ‘speaker’ because (as will become clear in the next section) I do not share the assumption, often associated with the notion of the persona (‘mask’), that the author and the ‘I’ in the text are wholly separable. How does the lyric speaker compare to other minds? An obvious starting point for the comparison is scale. Lyric ancient and modern (p.238) glories in brevity, and one immediately obvious feature of encounters with the lyric speaker is that so often they are brief. On the whole, monody does not give us the kind of extensive exposure that we get to Homer’s Odysseus or Sophocles’ Oedipus. However, Odysseus and Oedipus are not the only valid comparanda; many real-life interactions are brief, and our mental systems evolved to cope with exactly that. Indeed, most research on mentalizing concerns one-off brief exposure to another person. Fleeting, anonymous encounters are part of the fabric of our daily lives as much as heart-to-hearts, and we are notoriously prone to sizing up people within seconds. The demands lyric brevity makes on our ability to form impressions of other people’s mental states is well within the range of the normal. This is not to deny, of course, that some poems do more than others. Sappho is well-known for the richness of her mental sketches, most famously in fragment 31.4 φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί        σας ὐπακούει καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν τό μ’ ἦ μὰν καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν· ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ᾿ ἴδω βρόχε’, ὤς με φώναι        σ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ἔτ’ εἴκει, Page 3 of 20

 

Lyric Minds ἀλλὰ κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσά ἔαγε, λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν, ὀππάτεσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἒν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμ        βεισι δ’ ἄκουαι, κὰδ δέ μ’ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ᾿πιδεύης         φαίνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτ̣[αι. ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα†

He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle (p.239) fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since…even a poor man… First-person phrasing, a scene that is very evidently (and explicitly: φαίνεταί μοι…) described as the speaker sees or imagines it, and the evocation of emotional experience through description of bodily symptoms conspire to create a vivid sense of the speaker’s state of mind. The diversity of interpretations demonstrates how much there is we do not know: who is the man, who is the woman, what is Sappho’s relationship with either, and is it love or jealousy that debilitates her? These and other gaps are manifest as soon as one presses the text, and they shape the listening (or reading) experience, but they are not disconcerting: listeners will readily ignore some and speculatively fill others, just as we readily ignore or fill the many gaps in our knowledge of the people we encounter in our lives. Other poems give us rather less to go on, like this elegiac piece attributed to Theognis (1109–14, trans. Gerber). Κύρν᾿, οἱ πρόσθ᾿ ἀγαθοὶ νῦν αὖ κακοί, οἱ δὲ κακοὶ πρὶν     νῦν ἀγαθοί. τίς κεν ταῦτ᾿ ἀνέχοιτ᾿ ἐσορῶν, τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς μὲν ἀτιμοτέρους, κακίους δὲ λαχόντας     τιμῆς; μνηστεύει δ᾿ ἐκ κακοῦ ἐσθλὸς ἀνήρ· ἀλλήλους δ᾿ ἀπατῶντες ἐπ᾿ ἀλλήλοισι γελῶσιν,     οὔτ᾿ ἀγαθῶν μνήμην εἰδότες οὔτε κακῶν.

Cyrnus, those who were formerly noble are now base, and those who were base before are now noble. Who can endure the sight of this, the noble dishonoured and the base honoured? A man who is noble seeks marriage with the daughter of one who is base. They deceive one another and mock one another, with no recollection of what is noble or base.

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Lyric Minds We do not get the same thick sense of a mental presence as with Sappho fr. 31. The person who speaks these lines leaves only the faintest of impressions, but even a faint impression has an effect. Even if we do not try to mirror ancient audiences by bringing to bear what we know about social change in archaic Greece and about the ideological stance of the Theognidean corpus, we have no difficulty imagining a type of person who would say such things. Here as elsewhere, it takes little to prompt the mind to imagine the person who articulates the sentiments, experiences, values, arguments, and emotions of a lyric text. A mentalizing apparatus trained on speech (p.240) since childhood responds effortlessly to the mimicked speech of Greek lyric. If brevity constitutes at best a difference of degree, there are other respects in which lyric mentalizing differs significantly from what is characteristic of reallife interaction as well as of other forms of literature. Much could be said about pragmatic distance:5 lyric speakers are not embedded in a fictional narrative in the way epic and dramatic characters are, and arguably speak more directly to their audience, but they nevertheless afford their audiences a form of distance, and a freedom to contemplate rather than respond, that are not typically available to participants in real-life interaction.6 More interesting, however, for my purposes here is a less well-rehearsed point. This point concerns trust, and it is a product of the monological dimension of lyric. Even though we have learned to think of lyric as dialogical, we should not underestimate the effect of the plain fact that each poem has only a single speaker, who is the only source of information. The whole world of the poem, including the speaker himself or herself, is spun out of the speaker’s own words. We sometimes learn what others think about the speaker, and we get a sense of the speaker’s visual appearance and bodily presence, but only because of what the speaker tells us.7 The difference from the people of epic, drama, and indeed life, all of whom are subject to external scrutiny, could hardly be starker. The common use of the term ‘narrator’, while jarring in so far as the speakers of Greek monody pray, reason, inveigh, voice their suffering, and declare their love as often as they narrate, and thus resemble epic characters more than the epic narrators, is appropriate (p.241) in so far as it highlights our reliance on the speaker for everything we know. This commonplace observation has interesting consequences for how we relate to the speaker. Lyric appeals for our investment in the poem. Anacreon’s speaker asks us to follow him onto a meadow and Alcaeus’ to join him on a boat. Mimnermus’ speaker asks us to accept that he is old, Archilochus’ that he is angry, and Semonides’ that he is distrustful of women. We willingly accept these invitations, not because we have the means to evaluate the reliability of their statements as we do with many characters of epic and drama (we don’t), but because we would be left empty-handed if we refused. Just like drama, which requires that we accept that the stubbly man with the mask is in fact the beautiful Iphigenia, Page 5 of 20

 

Lyric Minds since otherwise there would be no play, so lyric too demands ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.8 It follows that the lyric speaker is infallibly truthful. Authors can lie, performers can lie (see next two sections), but the speaker, who, unlike both author and performer, exists only within his or her own words, cannot. The audience may disagree with a claim the ‘I’ makes (nothing wrong, they may say, with the social change ‘Theognis’ decries), may object to the kind of person the ‘I’ is (too abusive, too sanctimonious, too aristocratic, too ἁβρός), but the contract with the text stipulates that the speaker does not lie. Greek monody has no false narrators.9 It is possible that the real Anacreon was lugubrious and the real Sappho was never in love, and it is likely that the real Hipponax was anything other than the low-life he purports to be, but as far as their poems go we take them on faith. The evident fictionality of the Cologne epode does not prevent us from willingly entering into its narrative world, to the point of facing difficult ethical questions of complicity, certainly in the modern context. Are we culpable in going along with Archilochus’ speaker in the Cologne epode as he tells his nasty tale? How far do we follow him before we renege on the contract? A particularly telling example is a well-known self-contradiction in Sappho’s fragment 31. The description of the physical breakdown (p.242) begins with loss of speech: ‘For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped.’ As critics point out, the professed inability to speak, and the loss of control evoked by the passage as a whole, are contradicted by the highly controlled poetry. The paradox is heightened further in performance, when the singer’s tongue manifestly does not break.10 Even so, though, I strongly suspect, only very few readers, or indeed audiences, will abandon the fiction of the complete mental and physical breakdown. Just as moments of metatheatre temporarily puncture rather than permanently destroy dramatic make-believe, so it is perfectly possible to note (and enjoy) Sappho’s paradox, yet still to commit to the world of the poem. Such is our willingness to take the lyric speaker at face value.11 Evolutionary psychologists have put forward the idea that our mentalizing capacity evolved because it enables us to cooperate, to unmask deceivers, and to manipulate others.12 This may or may not be so, but Greek epic and drama certainly represent exactly that throughout. Most iconically, recognition and deception scenes, staples of Greek literary plotting, put on display the characters’ (pointedly varied) capacity for mentalizing, and at the same time stimulate ours. Lyric, however, stands apart. As it makes us imagine the speaker’s mind—thickly or thinly so—it employs in isolation a mental mechanism that is designed to work in social settings, and extends unquestioning trust by means of a mechanism that elsewhere (p.243) ensures vigilance. Lyric offers enchanted encounters in which we unreservedly trust the other’s words and in which we have access to some of the other’s thoughts in a manner that is Page 6 of 20

 

Lyric Minds uncommon in real life. This enchanted world had an obvious appeal at the symposium, which idealized truthful speech and behaviour among philoi, and it has an appeal in other contexts, too.13 Differently conceived, the relationship between lyric and truth recurs in lyric writing and criticism across periods. Its structural basis, I suggest, may lie in the pared-down form of mentalizing which has only the speaker’s words to go on.

Encountering the Author Interesting effects, I have argued, are created at the level of the text alone, but the intention was not to hearken back to the days when texts were studied in isolation. Behind the ‘I’ of the poem, and interacting with it, there are the ‘I’ of the performer and the ‘I’ of the author. It is the author to whom I turn next. Authors have been enjoying a resurgence in classical studies. Several recent volumes have searched for new ways of talking about the tricky concept of authorship.14 The stakes are particularly high for Greek lyric because of the long shadow cast by the Romantic tradition. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, classicists, most influentially (p.244) Bruno Snell, promoted the idea of lyric as the genre of self-expression par excellence,15 with the result that the backlash against Romantic ideas of authorial self-expression has dominated the field well into the twenty-first century, and much lyric criticism continues to be more at ease with personas and traditional viewpoints than authors.16 The anthropological paradigm has given prominence to the performer (the topic of the next section), but in its wariness of the author scholarship on Greek lyric still feels the constraining effects of New Criticism. This twentieth-century outlook stands in marked contrast to the many ancient texts that read the poems for biographical detail. Scholars have varied in their sympathies for ancient biographical thinking, dismissing it as naive or valuing it as a meaningful and creative response to the poems, but in one way or other they have tended to regard it as the product of a poetic culture that differs sharply from the world in which the lyric poems were originally produced.17 The purpose of this section is to lend support to the opposite view: authors were a vital component of the audience’s experience of lyric performance from the very beginning. I will sketch, with unavoidable brevity, three arguments, one, generically, about mentalizing, one, specifically, about the nature of the poems, and one about the evidence for the early reception of these poems. Mentalizing, one might argue, supports a version of Wayne C. Booth’s controversial idea of the ‘implied author’.18 Booth coined the concept in order to be able to speak about the sense of authorial (p.245) presence that is sometimes part of the reading experience, while avoiding the intentionalist fallacy. As he puts it, the author

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Lyric Minds creates not simply an ideal, impersonal ‘man in general’ but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men’s works. (…) Whether we call this implied author an ‘official scribe’, or…the author’s ‘second self’, it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner—and of course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values.19 As David Herman and H. Porter Abbott have pointed out, the ‘intentionalist fallacy’ results from what Daniel Dennett calls ‘the intentional stance’. A consequence of the human propensity for mentalizing is that we are quick to look for intentions.20 We interpret actions as the outcomes of intentions rather than random occurrences; we even ascribe intentions to objects (cursing the jammed photocopier that doesn’t ‘want to’ work). Cognitive anthropologists see the widespread belief in gods as a particularly momentous example of the intentional stance: we ascribe happy and unhappy events, and the existence of the world itself, to the will of a superhuman mind because we are predisposed to detect intentions. Gods, on this account, are the product of mentalizing misapplied.21 Arguably, reading for intentions in literature is a (less momentous) example of the same disposition. Readers are given to construing the minds of not just the characters but, on and off, also the person who created the work. Whether or not it is ‘correct’, it is natural to take an interest in authors and their intentions, not necessarily in a narrow way, taking any first-person statement as reliably autobiographical, but in the broader sense of seeing the work as the intentional creation of a particular kind of person. Psychological concepts of mentalizing, then, support Booth’s notion that readers sometimes sense the presence of the author in the work. In fact I would go further and ask whether as far as reader- and audienceexperience is concerned the qualifier ‘implied’ is really required. For Booth it was a necessary epistemological defence against New Criticism (‘yes, of course, the real author is out of reach’), but as (p.246) far as the subjective experience of reading or listening is concerned the qualification strikes me as largely irrelevant. When audiences or readers form impressions of the person that created the poem, what they are encountering, subjectively, is simply the author. Booth, of course, wrote at a particular juncture in the twentieth century, but since mentalizing and the intentional stance appear to be human universals (albeit culturally malleable), there is no reason to think that something like this could not have happened in early Greece. Notions of authorship change, and they changed from the archaic to the classical period,22 but the psychology of mentalizing makes it very likely that, in principle, poems were always capable of conjuring a sense of the author.

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Lyric Minds Such theoretical and trans-historical considerations—the ‘in principle’ of the previous sentence—are supported for early Greek monody specifically by several characteristics of the texts that direct attention to the author. As ever, the variation is considerable. There is a difference between a performance by the author, a performance by another performer but to an audience familiar with the author, and a performance long after the author’s lifetime. There is a difference between a text that is thought by the audience to be part-fictional, be it because of what they know of the author or because of its inherent implausibility, and a text the audience believe maps more closely onto the life of the real author. There is a difference between an author like Solon, who uses his poetry to develop a strong (real or imaginary) autobiography, which moreover interacts with his non-poetic public activities, and an author like Semonides, who says little about his life. Recent scholarship has shown how many permutations there are in the relationship between lyric author and lyric poem.23 This variation, however, should not blind us to the textual features, across the corpus, that are capable of invoking an author, and of raising questions not just of autobiography and fiction (did or didn’t Archilochus have an altercation with Lycambes over Neoboule?) but also of personality, ethics, and responsibility (what sort of a person would compose the Cologne epode?). Most obviously the ambiguous pronoun ‘I’, prominent in so many lyrics, makes it difficult to keep the (p.247) author entirely at bay. If on Booth’s model even novels with an unobtrusive extradiegetic narrator have implied authors, authors (implied or otherwise) must loom large in monody. And it is by no means just the first person that creates this effect. Much more than the poets credited with authorship of early epic poems, our canonical lyric poets are each distinctive and recognizable. On the basis of genre, style, metre and subject matter, we are usually confident in attributing anonymous fragments of a certain size to a particular author, or in any case in narrowing down the possibilities to two or three. As Andrew Morrison points out, lyric authors are reasonably consistent in the way they present themselves.24 Despite some obvious variability (Solon the wise man, Solon the politician; Sappho in love, Sappho abusive), they encourage us to construct authorial personalities across their output. The publication of the ‘Brothers Poem’ in 2014 showed how far a poet as early as Sappho could go in constructing a story about herself across a sequence of poems.25 In a number of poems, in fact, they go so far as to refer to themselves as authors. Not only do they say ‘I sing’, a pronouncement which the performer may wrench away from the poet, but they also invoke the Muse, and they express their hope for kleos and reperformance, and to that end insert their names in their poems.26 This is to say, they present themselves qua composer. The speaker of such a poem is not just a woman in love, a betrayed man, or a disappointed politician, but a poet. What the composer sends into the world is not simply a (true or fictional) statement about his or her life, but a poem.

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Lyric Minds Anacreon’s fr. 402c, to give one example, plays with this distinction with his trademark wit (trans. Campbell). ἐμὲ γὰρ †λόγων† εἵνεκα παῖδες ἂν φίλέοιεν· χαρίεντα μὲν γὰρ ἄιδω, χαρίεντα δ’ οἶδα λέξαι.

For children might love me for my words: for I sing graceful songs and I know how to speak graceful words. (p.248) Anacreon is a lover of boys in many of his fragments, and the later tradition speaks of his songs for Bathyllus, Megisteus, and Smerdies. In what we have there is no indication that these boys ever reciprocated (see esp. frs 360, 378), as indeed melic lovers tout court tend to find themselves yearning with unrequited love. This song, then, stands out: the speaker is hopeful that the boys will love him—except, pointedly, it is his graceful song and graceful words that earn their love. Anacreon plays off his erotic and poetic identities against one another. Anacreon the graceful poet hopes for the success that Anacreon the lover never enjoys.27 The third and final piece of evidence for lyric performance as an encounter with the author that I wish to highlight is the portrayal of one poet by another. While we may be inclined to dismiss the biographical writing of later periods as out of touch with early Greek song culture, passages in which archaic and classical poets talk about other archaic and classical poets have a firm claim for our attention. I shall briefly discuss three, all of them well known and all of them, I suggest, expressing an interest in authors in Booth’s sense of the term. The first is Pindar’s Archilochus vignette (Pind. Pyth. 2.53–7, trans. Race):28                                ἐμὲ δὲ χρεών φεύγειν δάκος ἀδινὸν κακαγοριᾶν· εἶδον γὰρ ἑκὰς ἐὼν τὰ πόλλ’ ἐν ἀμαχανίαι ψογερὸν Ἀρχίλοχον βαρυλόγοις ἔχθεσιν πιαινόμενον·

But I must flee the persistent bite of censure, for standing at a far remove I have seen Archilochus the blamer often in straits as he fed on dire words of hatred. Pindar distances himself from ‘Archilochus the blamer’. The reference is obviously to genre: the poet of praise wants nothing to do with the poet of blame. What is interesting is that Pindar couches his (p.249) statement in the language not of politics or of class but of character and morality. He often saw from afar (a reference perhaps to reperformance or reading, or an expression of criticial distance) censorious Archilochus as he feasted on hatred, and he disapproves. For him, iambus is not a traditional and socially sanctioned exercise but the expression of a personality trait. In Booth’s words, just quoted, the Page 10 of 20

 

Lyric Minds ‘reader will inevitably construct a picture of the [author] who writes in this manner’. This is exactly what Pindar is doing. In listening to Archilochus’ poetry he encounters a particular kind of man. It is Archilochus who is ψογερός, not his poetry, and Archilochus does not just compose (vel. sim.) iambic poetry, but ‘fattens himself’ on it. The point is not, I believe, that Pindar is being naively or mischievously literalist, but that he treats Archilochus as responsible for the abusive stance he adopts. Of course he knows as well as we do that Archilochus worked within the expectations of his genre, but that, in Pindar’s view, does not relieve him of responsibility for the nature of his compositions. There is a direct line from Pindar to Critias’ critique of Archilochus. According to Aelian (Aelian V.H. 10.13 = Critias 88 B 44 D-K = Archil. test. 33 Gerber; trans. Gerber), Critias censures Archilochus because he spoke very ill of himself. For if, he says, Archilochus had not made public among the Greeks such an opinion of himself, we should not have learned that he was the son of Enipo, a slave-woman, that because of poverty and difficult straits he left Paros and went to Thasos. (…) Therefore, by leaving behind such a report and such an account of himself, Archilochus was not a good witness of his own behalf. The passage has often been treated as a textbook example of the misguided reconstruction of an author’s life from his poetry, ‘very probably an erroneous deduction based on a faulty understanding of Archilochus’ poetry’.29 But as Albio Cassio noted already in 1984, this view does an injustice to Critias. Cassio points out, rightly, that Critias blames Archilochus not for the life he led but for revealing that life in his poetry.30 In so far as Aelian’s paraphrase can be (p. 250) pressed, the language emphasizes dissemination and reputation (especially τοιαύτην δόξαν ὑπὲρ ἑαυτοῦ ἐς τοὺς ῾Έλληνας ἐξήνεγκεν and ἑαυτῶι τοιοῦτον κλέος ἀπολιπών καὶ τοιαύτην ἑαυτῶι φημήν). Critias holds Archilochus responsible not for his behaviour, but for the poetry that broadcasts such behaviour.31 We may object that this view misrepresents Archilochus’ poetic objectives, but in a fundamental way Critias, who is himself a poet and much closer to the culture that produced Archilochus than we are, is spot on. Not only may poets be thought responsible for the choices they make in their poetry, but poets are in fact defined by their poetry. Archilochus is the man that says ‘I’ in his poems. In the poetry, ancient audiences, Critias, and we alike grasp a real Archilochus: a poet who composed a particular kind of poetry and projected a particular kind of image of himself. My third and final example of poets on poets is Anacreon fr. 358 (trans. Campbell): σφαίρηι δηὖτέ με πορφυρέηι     βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως Page 11 of 20

 

Lyric Minds     νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλωι     συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται. ἡ δ’, ἔστιν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου     Λέσβου, τήν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην,     λευκὴ γάρ, καταμέμφεται,     πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.

Once again golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball and summons me to play with the girl in the fancy sandals; but she—she comes from Lesbos with its fine cities—finds fault with my hair because it is white, and gapes after another—girl. The speaker misleads us into thinking that he is not refined enough for the girl, then suggests that she rejects him as too old, before delivering his punch line: she is after some other woman. Chamaeleon, who cites the poem in the late fourth century BC, reports and accepts the view that it is addressed to Sappho.32 As is often pointed (p.251) out, the poem is not in fact addressed to anybody, but arguably it makes reference to Sappho nevertheless. The combination of Lesbos and female–female desire is likely to have suggested Sappho to anybody familiar with her poetry.33 In so far as the allusion treats Sappho as a lover this is another example of the biographical ‘fallacy’, and thus further evidence that versions of this fallacy seem to have been common during the lifetime of the lyric poets and cannot be dismissed as the anachronistic misunderstanding of later periods: already Anacreon’s Sappho is derived from her poetry. At the same time, there is no denying that Anacreon is interested in her as a poet. Not only may Sappho fr. 31 be close to the surface—another female/female/male love triangle, and another poem in which the speaker half hides the more successful rival behind anonymizing phrasing—but above all this is very much a poet’s poem. As in fr. 402c, Anacreon may not succeed as a lover but he has a clever way with words. Sappho (as it were) turns him down within the world of the poem but he rivals her in poetic prowess. Anacreon encounters both Sappho the lover of women and Sappho the poet, and the listener encounters both Anacreon the unsuccessful lover and Anacreon the poet. It has to be acknowledged, of course, that Anacreon does not take us back to the earliest stages of the lyric record, and that the late sixth and early fifth centuries witnessed some major developments in Greek poetic culture. This is the period when we first find vase paintings of named lyric poets, and first find passages, like Pindar’s Archilochus vignette, in which lyric poets cite other lyric poets by name.34 It seems clear that factors such as the wider circulation of texts and the panhellenic ambitions of such poets as Pindar and Simonides brought about changes in the way authors regarded themselves and were regarded by others. But again the changes should not obscure the continuities.35 Above all, it is important to emphasize that the textual characteristics discussed above were Page 12 of 20

 

Lyric Minds already well developed long before Anacreon and Pindar: a poet as early as Sappho drew attention to herself in a group of poems about herself (p.252) and her family, sang about her kleos, and broadcast her name in several poems (p. 247). Further evidence derives from the fact, often taken for granted but surely significant, that so many lyric poems are attributed to named authors (though of course many more, now lost, will have been anonymous). It is hard to see how the Hellenistic editors and their classical predecessors could have gathered substantive separate corpora for Archilochus, Semonides, Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Alcman, Sappho, and Alcaeus if authors were an invention of the late sixth and early fifth centuries. We do not have the evidence to reconstruct the precise nature of authorship in the earlier parts of the archaic period, but we have every reason to believe that audiences already then would have taken an interest in who authored a particular poem, and would have been attuned to the author’s presence in the words, the rhythm, and the melody.

Encountering the Performer It is with good reason that performers have taken centre stage in much recent work on Greek lyric. Unlike the speaker, and in most cases the author, the performer is physically present before the audience’s eyes. The encounter with the performer is an encounter with a flesh-and-blood person, and over the past two decades a wealth of scholarship has brought out the many ways in which lyrics can serve as scripts that allow that flesh-and-blood person to express his or her identity, politics, or emotions. Eva Stehle put it well when she formulated the manifesto of what is arguably the most important treatment of performance in early Greece: ‘In this book I try to resurrect performers whose appearance and identity interacted with their words to produce the “message” for the audience. In other words, rather than treat the performer as a medium for the poetry, I propose to treat the poetry as a medium for the performer.’36 Without doubt, then, lyric encounters are also encounters with the performer, and very immediately so. Just as evidently, the relationship between the three kinds of ‘I’ varies. To continue with Anacreon’s poem about the woman from Lesbos, one may imagine a scenario in (p.253) which the song becomes a vehicle for a symposiast who wants to show off his musical and poetic refinement, who wants to present himself as a lover without jeopardizing sympotic harmony by boasting about his erotic prowess, and who wants to uphold the ideological fiction according to which the prostitute is free to give and withhold affection as she pleases. On a different (but compatible) scenario, the lead goes to the speaker. Leslie Kurke shows one way of doing that when she suggests ‘that the roles played in lyric performance were traditional and generic’, and that lyric ‘accomplished some real social work in performance…by affirming—indeed, constructing anew on each occasion—the values and roles felt to be proper for the group, simultaneously inculcating them in singers and audience within the frame of performance’.37 Anacreon 358 on this approach might reinforce ideologies of class and gender shared by the entire sympotic Page 13 of 20

 

Lyric Minds gathering. The argument advanced in the previous section suggests that a third, author-centred scenario, had currency too. In so far as the text exhibits characteristic Anacreontean metres and wit, and in so far as it points to its author (Anacreon in dialogue with Sappho), it can exert a pull away from the performer and enable a kind of performance in which the singer serves the author, rendering to the best of his ability a classic piece by a famous poet. ‘Take one of the skolia of Alcaeus and Anacreon and sing it for me’, a character in Aristophanes requests, evidence that certainly in the fifth century, lyric performers performed not only themselves but also the author.38 Just as, historically, critics have variously focused on the author (Romanticism), the speaker (New Criticism), or the performer (recent trends), so individual texts, individual performers, and individual audience members could choose where to place the emphasis. The discrete arguments pursued in this and the preceding sections build up to two general points. The first is about depth. No matter where the emphasis falls for any one listener in any one performance, there will always be some sense of complexity. The lyric ‘I’ is a layered ‘I’, and the lyric ‘I’ in performance (like the ‘I’ of pop music) is even more layered.39 Sometimes the different layers come together, as both song and composer are felt to suit the singer, musically, tonally, (p.254) ideologically.40 On other occasions, with other performers, other texts, other audiences, there will be a sense of mismatch, capable of producing a range of effects (men performing Sappho for laughs, or iambic fictionality again), or the relationship may be altogether uncertain, as a symposiast gazes at a favoured youth as he sings an Anacreon song in an act of non-committal flirtation. This, then, is one answer to the question about the distinctiveness of lyric mentalizing. If Lisa Zunshine is right to suggest that fictional narratives engage us as they ‘titillate our tendency to keep track of who thought, wanted, and felt what and when’,41 then Greek lyric titillates this same mechanism by permitting so many answers to the question of ‘whose is the voice that speaks?’. Lyric too can simulate dialogue, and epic, already in early Greece (and even more so later), can create interaction between author, narrator, and characters; but in general, I suggest, lyric mentalizing generates poetic effects from depth more than breadth. It operates vertically rather than horizontally. The second general conclusion concerns an asymmetry.42 Lyric grants audiences very different modes of access to the performer, the speaker, and the author. There is, first, an encounter with a real person, visibly and audibly there, and in many cases familiar to the listeners, but the words this real person speaks are not his or her own, or in any case (even in a performance by the poet) not spoken spontaneously in a conversation, but preconceived and destined to be repeated more or less identically on future occasions. There is, next, an encounter with a textual creation, a person who does not exist beyond the words, but who allows a level of access to his or her mind that is uncommon in day-to-day interaction: in a profound sense, the audience know the speaker Page 14 of 20

 

Lyric Minds better than they know the performer. Finally, there is an encounter with the person who is ultimately responsible for the words, but who except in the very first performances is absent and who can be divined only dimly through his or her composition. Lyric encounters divide, and force us to recombine, what should be one. Timothy Chesters recently wrote about how certain kinds of literature achieve what he calls (p.255) ‘the strange blend of immediacy and opacity that confronts me when I seek to grasp the minds of others’.43 Greek lyric in performance, I suggest, creates this blend by overtly splitting into three what we want to be one, and giving very different kinds of access to each of the three—the person, the words, and the originator of the words.

Coda: A Lyric Model of the Self The methodological principle underpinning this chapter is one that is shared by much ‘cognitive criticism’: literature, here early Greek monody, draws on psychological mechanisms that evolved for the requirements of everyday life, and it is therefore possible to capture characteristics of literature in general, of a particular work, or (here) of a particular genre, by comparing and contrasting the distinctive use it makes of one or more of these mechanisms (here, mentalizing). This approach gave us our dual conclusion: monody invests in depth rather than breadth, and it slices up asymmetrically what is normally a single whole. Reversing the direction of travel, I will end by thinking briefly about lyric as a model of a particular kind of reality. When my friend, reclining next to me on the sympotic couch, stops chatting, raises his lyre, and begins to sing a lyric, what sort of model of self does he put before me? A striking one, is the answer, and what makes it striking can be expressed negatively or positively. Lyric performance enacts encounters in which we have to reckon with the possibility that the person before us is no more than a skilled ventriloquist. Taken outside the confines of musico-poetic performance, this points one not just to the notion, first popularized by sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s, that people are performers of roles (I am a son, a father, a husband, a classicist),44 but it also chimes with more recent thinking about the nature of identity and consciousness. The lyric performer who sings a text that may be composed by somebody else, and certainly is not wholly spontaneous, and yet makes it his or her own, speaks to us today because he or she enacts the troubling possibility that our very identity is somehow borrowed. The elusive ‘I’ of lyric, and above all of (p.256) lyric performance, which we can never confidently attach to its rightful owner, gives us a glimpse of a world in which the people we encounter are appropriating from elsewhere the thoughts, emotions, and values that seem to be so fully theirs, a glimpse of a world in which it is unclear what kind of unique self there is to be uncovered behind a person’s tangible physical presence.

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Lyric Minds To portray this lyric model of a person purely in terms of absence would, however, be misleading, and would do little to account for the fascination of the genre. At the core of the lyric encounter, I argued, is trust. Lyric performance compensates for the difficulty of reliably identifying the self that attaches to the visible person by offering unusually reliable access to the person projected by the poem. The words that are not wholly the performer’s own are nevertheless wholly sincere within the world of the poem. Lyric performance is not simply a form of dissimulation or pretence; whatever the relationship between performer and words, it invites us to invest the poem with trust. Lyric encounters hold out the promise of a utopian world in which we fully understand one another. They hold out the promise of transparent mentalizing. Notes:

I am grateful to Tom Phillips, Henry Spelman, Raphael Lyne, an audience in Oxford, and the participants in a reading group in Chicago for helpful comments on earlier versions. (1) I shall use ‘solo lyric’ and ‘monody’ in the broad sense, to include not just ‘melic’ (Sappho, Ibycus, etc.) but also iambus and elegy; differences in melodization (sung, chanted, recited) do not affect the argument. Aspects of the argument could be extended to choral lyric, but both the configuration of the first person in the texts and the performance by an ensemble make generalization problematic. I regard epinician as predominantly choral, and do not discuss it here; but see n. 11. Also not discussed are longer narrative elegy and nomes, although this divide could also be bridged. (2) The bibliography is enormous. The following selection offers different ways into the field: Goldman (2006), Apperly (2011), Gallagher (2012) ch. 9. The reason for my choice of the term ‘mentalizing’ is that it seems to me less laden than others with associations that would jar in this context. ‘Theory of Mind’ unhelpfully suggests theorizing, ‘mind-reading’ makes one think of a preternatural ability, and the ‘social’ of ‘social cognition’ is both too narrow and too broad for the experience of encountering the lyric speaker. (3) Again this is only a small selection: Palmer (2004), Zunshine (2006), Leverage et al. (2011), Chesters (2014). In Classics, see Scodel (2009), (2012), and (2015), Budelmann and Easterling (2010), Grethlein (2015). Mentalizing and lyric (rather different from this chapter in approach): Freeman (2013), Steven (2014). (4) Text and translation are those of Campbell. (5) See Peponi (2012) 23–9 for a discussion of restful contemplation as a characteristic of audience response to musico-poetic performance in our textual and visual sources; see also her index s.vv. ‘aesthetic detachment’ and ‘distance, aesthetic’.

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Lyric Minds (6) A closer equivalent would be observers of real-life interaction. It is worth noting, therefore, that much second-person speech in Greek lyric is addressed not to the audience but to a specific addressee (Sappho’s beloved, Kyrnos, a deity): even within the fiction of the text, the audience is often an observer. Cf. Culler (2015) 186: ‘Triangulated address [viz. ‘address to the reader by means of address to something or someone else’] is the root-form of presentation for lyric.’ (7) Views of others: e.g. Aphrodite’s ironical questions in Sa. fr. 1, the Lesbian girl’s lack of interest in Anacr. fr. 358 (quoted p. 250 below). Visual appearance and bodily presence: e.g. ageing bodies in Sa. fr. 58b or Anacr. fr. 395, physical breakdown in Sa. fr. 31, trembling at the onset of Eros in Ibyc. fr. 287, Eros’ hammer-blow in Anacr. fr. 413. (8) The expression is a staple of discussions of drama; Coleridge, in fact, made it when discussing poetry: Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 4 (Collected Works, general ed. K. Coburn, vol. 7, p. 16). (9) It would be interesting to investigate which later forms of lyric do have false narrators. An obvious candidate is Browning’s ‘dramatic monologues’; and it is significant that those have been given a distinct label. (10) Perhaps the most compelling exploration of the paradoxes evoked by Sappho’s broken tongue is Prins (1999) ch. 1. For her, the broken tongue is an emblem of ‘the Sapphic riddle: a riddling that makes lyric reading possible even while resisting it’ (p. 36). (11) Epinician provides an interesting limit case because bought praise soon incurs the charge of insincerity. Scholars have therefore brought out the steps the speaker takes to look trustworthy; see e.g. Carey (2000), Park (2013), Morgan (2015) 115–32. What I would stress here is the contract between poem and audience. If I refuse to believe that the speaker means what he says, I am refusing to enter the lyric contract. It is right and proper for me to take issue with views propounded by the lyric speaker, but my experience of the lyric is degraded if I do not at least provisionally decide to go along with the speaker on his tour de force (and one suspects that this was a conscious decision then as it is now). What distinguishes epinician from other lyric is not the fundamental appeal for willing extension of trust but the fact that many readers (certainly recent readers) have chosen not to grant it but to read against the grain. Epinician, one might say, exploits lyric trust by applying lyric’s pragmatic structures to a subject matter where trust is a rare commodity. Cf. Payne‘s chapter in this volume, for the argument that epinician makes unusual demands for ‘fidelity’ to the event of the victory as commemorated by the poem. (12) See, e.g., Baron-Cohen (2000), Tomasello et al. (2005).

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Lyric Minds (13) For truth and the symposium, see, e.g., Rösler (1995). More broadly on truth in archaic Greek poetic culture see esp. Detienne (1996), Cole (1983), and Maslov (2015) ch. 3. My concern here is with poetic form and the poem– audience/reader contract rather than the historical phenomena discussed in those studies. The two dimensions are of course compatible. (14) See esp. Graziosi (2002), Rocalla (2006), Kivilo (2010), Marmodoro and Hill (2013), Maslov (2015), Fletcher and Hanink (2016). Bakker (2017) appeared as this volume went into production. Also relevant are the arguments put forward by Clay (1998), Mayer (2003), and Whitmarsh (2013b) in favour of the view that antiquity did not have a notion of the literary persona like that of Modernist poets and New Critics (Hose (2003) treats related topics). Mayer’s position is noteworthy (if I understand it correctly): while suggesting (persuasively, in my opinion) that we should ‘look upon modern persona criticism with scepticism’ as far as antiquity is concerned, he accepts the view (unpersuasively, in my opinion) that preliterate early Greek lyric is an exception and that its first person was misunderstood by subsequent readers (p. 58). I am arguing here for considerable continuity between archaic Greece and later periods in the use and reception of the ‘persona’. (15) Snell (1946), multiply modified and reissued; Engl. translation Snell (1953), also variously reissued. (16) The foundation of this approach was laid by Dover (1964). Subsequent scholarship has tempered Dover’s views. Already in 1985, Rösler argued that Dover went too far in accepting the New Critical doctrine of the independence of poetry, and tried to steer a path between the Scylla of New Criticism and the Charybdis of naively autobiographical readings (Rösler (1985)). But, with notable exceptions (see note 17), it remains true that the author receives relatively little attention in discussions of what Greek solo lyric meant for its audiences, and that is my concern here. (17) See esp. Beecroft (2010) and Lefkowitz (2012), and cf. pp. 249–50 of this chapter on Critias. Until very recently there has been little scholarship on lyric that is comparable to Graziosi (2002) on Homer. Partial exceptions include Morrison (2007a), Capra (2009) and Uhlig (2016); see also nn. 23, 24, and 35. (18) Booth (1961). For the current state of the controversy see the special issue of Style 45.1 (2011). My two pages here do not of course attempt to do justice to Booth’s concept (or its critics), but draw on it to make a point about mentalizing in Greek lyric. (19) Booth (1961) 70–1. (20) Dennett (1987), Herman (2008), Abbott (2011).

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Lyric Minds (21) See e.g. Guthrie (1993). (22) See Beecroft (2010); also the discussion of ‘the invention of poetry’ in Ford (2002) part ii. (23) See esp. the taxonomies in Bowie (1993) and Lowe (2000); also Slings (1990). Morrison’s notion of ‘quasi-biography’ is also helpful (Morrison (2007a) 48–55). (24) Morrison (2007a) 61–7. For Pindaric epinician and ‘cult’ genres (neither of which I discuss here), see D’Alessio (1994), arguing (among other things) that audiences were interested in Pindar’s own person (p. 139). (25) We do not know how fiction and reality mingle in this story. For different views see Bierl and Lardinois (2016). (26) Hope for kleos and reperformance is particularly frequent in Pindar and Bacchylides. In earlier poets see, e.g. Sa. frs 58a (the first poem in P.Köln 21351 + 21376), 65, 147, Ibyc. S151; for the full evidence see Spelman (2015b) 148– 69. Self-naming: Sa. frs 1, 65, 94, 133; Alcm. frs 17, 39, 95; Sol. 33; Hipp. frs 32, 36, 37, 79, 127; Thgn. 22. (27) Sa. fr. 58b plays with the same contrast. (28) The vignette is regarded as an example of biographical criticism, e.g., by Rösler (1985) 141 n. 21. The passage has been much discussed; see esp. Miller (1981), Brown (2006), and West (2011) 56–7. My interpretation here is closest to Uhlig (2016) 106–14. The point that ancient biographies are concerned with ‘the ethos of the poet’s output rather than…factual biographical truth’ is made for lyric by Capra (2009) 461, with reference to Graziosi (2002). (29) Gerber (1999) 59. Already Dover (1964) 208–9 mentions Critias as an example of a writer who may no longer have understood the practice of the preliterate poet Archilochus. Cf. n. 16. (30) Cassio (1984). The point is taken up by Rosen (2007) 248–55. Also on this passage see Pòrtulas (2006), and Rotstein (2007), who thinks Critias deliberately misinterprets Archilochus to attack him for ideological reasons (Archilochus had democratic credentials). (31) Cf. Aristophanes’ treatment of Euripides in Thesmophoriazusae: the women do not deny the truth of what Euripides says about them, but attack him for making their behaviour public. (32) Fr. 26 Wehrli = Athen. 13.599c–d. (33) Not everybody agrees; see Yatromanolakis (2007) 174–83. Page 19 of 20

 

Lyric Minds (34) Vase painting: Schefold (1997) and Yatromanolakis (2007) 51–164. For a convenient list of poets naming poets see West (1999) 378–9. (35) Cf. Stewart (2016), who argues that poets presented themselves as professionals throughout the archaic period, an argument that is in some ways parallel to mine. (36) Stehle (1997) 8. (37) Kurke (2007) 143, 144. (38) Fr. 235 K-A (Banqueters). The ‘Anacreontic vases’ could also be interpreted along these lines. (39) For comparable effects in pop music, see Frith (1996) chs 9 and 10. (40) A particularly pronounced version of this scenario is Gregory Nagy’s account of mimesis, in which performer, speaker, and author merge; e.g. Nagy (1996) ch. 4. Arguably, such complete merging will be the exception. (41) Zunshine (2006) 5. (42) Further on the issues adumbrated in this paragraph as well as the coda, see LeVen in this volume. (43) Chesters 2014: 62 (abstract). (44) The foundational studies are Goffman (1959) and (1961).

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Fidelity and Farewell

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

Fidelity and Farewell Pindar’s Ethics as Textual Events Mark Payne

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198805823.003.0012

Abstract and Keywords This chapter looks at the idea of the event in ‘textual events’. Reading lyric is an encounter with a set of singular ethical gestures. Neither formalism nor cultural poetics adequately describes the experience of shared life in the practice of giving our time to these gestures, whereas the event, as it has been theorized from Heidegger to Badiou, does open up some ways of understanding the purchase on our own historicity that this experience affords. The chapter shows what is at stake in the encounter with what Hermann Fränkel called the ‘enchanted circle’ of Pindar’s ethicality through an examination of the force of gestures toward fidelity and leave-taking in his poems, which gestures are compared with signature ethical gestures of Sappho, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Celan. Keywords:   Lyric, event, Alcaeus, personal, historicity, fictionality, ethics, gesture

There are only two things that we can give to the spirits, the only two things that we truly own: our flesh and our time. Cedric Red Feather, quoted in Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People The present volume proposes a new approach to Greek lyric poetry under the rubric of the textual event. As a preparation for such a reconsideration of what lyric poetry is, or might be for us, the editors have suggested that contributors

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Fidelity and Farewell each propose some forms of critical distance from what they call the ‘anthropological paradigm’, which has dominated the study of this poetry over the last couple of decades, an umbrella term for the blend of New Historicism and cultural poetics whose characteristic hermeneutic position I take to be the assumption that the discursive ambitions of Greek lyric poetry were so radically constrained by their original performance context that valid interpretation consists solely in relating them to that context. I call it an assumption because I think it is one. The weakness of this hermeneutic position, as I have previously argued elsewhere, is its inability to theorize the psychological ground underlying its assumption of difference, such that original performance context is simply posited as a constraint upon meaning in antiquity that is to be emulated by modern scholars, in contrast to the hermeneutic freedom of other cultural contexts, including the ancient reception of Greek lyric, (p.258) which is characterized by the very forms of hermeneutic freedom that scholars working in the anthropological paradigm would disavow.1 The success of the anthropological paradigm in classical studies has been due in part to its pedagogical appeal, and I discuss this appeal briefly at the end of the paper, but I want to begin my consideration of the textual event as an alternative paradigm with Jonathan Culler’s rejection of the fictionality of lyric discourse in his recent Theory of the Lyric. The idea that lyric poetry should be understood as the speech of a fictional person, knowledge of whose situation and motives for speaking is a prerequisite for its appreciation and interpretation, as it is in the case of the monologues of drama and novels, has been a staple of the interpretation of lyric since New Criticism, its great success in the interpretation of classical poetry being the persona theory of Latin elegy. Persona theory has never prospered in the interpretation of Greek lyric, in which there is too little mise-en-scène to support it, and Culler follows Käte Hamburger in suggesting that we should simply abandon it as a mistake. While there are certainly role poems, for which it is appropriate, these are exceptions, not the norm, and treating them as if they were the norm is likely to distract our attention from the most characteristic ambitions of the lyric, such as its efforts to produce a responsive nonhuman world through apostrophe, and to provide its readers with new conceptual resources when it turns away from the mimesis of everyday speech. We should understand lyric as neither the speech of a fictional person, nor the utterance of a historical person, but as assertion about the real world that we receive directly from a lyric statement-subject whose distinctive capabilities are afforded by the special characteristics of lyric discourse.2 One of the foremost among these characteristics, Culler argues, is lyric’s use of a special form of the present tense whose unique temporality is particularly obvious in English. In spoken English, the present progressive is the regular Page 2 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell tense for events that are unfolding in the present moment of the speaker, whereas the simple present tense of the English lyric is performative and iterable: ‘I wander (p.259) through each chartered street’, not ‘I am wandering…’. Lyric is an event, not the representation of an event; it unfolds in a special kind of temporality, which it offers to us for our participation.3 Culler calls this extended moment the ritual aspect of the present tense of lyric. Lyric does not represent an original performance event, or enable its repetition, but is itself a kind of ritual event in which we are able to participate because it has intervened in the DNA of verbs to produce a special strain of time for its own purposes. It is not fictional time, but another real time, that runs parallel to our own. In his ‘Meridian’ speech, Paul Celan points to the tangency of the time of the poem and the time of the reader as the essence of the lyric encounter. As a message in a bottle connects sender and receiver in an unpredictable arc through space, so the lyric poem connects the reader’s time with the time of the poem, and the two coincide for the duration of the poem.4 What does it feel like to inhabit this coincidence of times? We need to distinguish it first from the experience of time recovered. I walk into a coffee shop where a song I once loved is playing, and for a few minutes I belong to the time of the song in exactly the same way as I belonged to it in the past. Wordsworth reflects on such an experience in ‘The Fountain’: ‘My eyes are dim with childish tears, | My heart is idly stirred, | For the same sound is in my ears, | Which in those days I heard.’ What has occurred here is the coincidence of my real time in the present with my real time in the past, which I did not know was still available to me. Wordsworth characterizes this experience as idle, but it is not unreal. Most famously, it is Proust’s involuntary memory, in which we recover our own lost time as it actually was, and such experiences also afford us an unexpected disclosure of our historicity. We cry in part because we had not realized that our being was constituted by such occluded temporality, and that the agent of its revelation might be something as trivial as the sound of running water. What is adumbrated in such experiences is precisely ‘an ontological question about the constitution of being of historical beings’, as Heidegger puts it, through which we might pursue the difference between our own being in time and the being of what is at hand as ontic presence.5 But this is not yet lyric time, in which something still (p.260) stranger happens, namely, that we experience the coincidence of our own time with the time of the poem. If lyric time is not our own time, nor the time of a fictional or historical person to whom we lend our own time for the duration of the poem, then whose time is it, and what do we experience when we live the time of the poem for ourselves? If we distinguish the time of the poem from fictional time, on the one hand, and the time of the historical occasion, on the other, what we can say about it is that it allows us to participate in a time in which others have participated before us. Page 3 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell Just as participation in any ritual means living a time that others have lived before us, what the time of lyric affords us is a special experience of our nonidentity. It is akin to the encounter with non-identity in the experience of historicity, but consists above all in an adumbration of our capacity to assume a different form of life. This, I want to argue, is different from the experience of loaning our time to a fictional or historical person, because it does not involve judgement. Whereas in fiction we typically experience a character’s form of life developmentally, as it is constituted through his or her experiences in the world of the fiction, the form of life that we encounter in lyric poetry already has its characteristic features at the outset. These are given as the experience of the poem to which we accede when we enter the time of the poem, just as others have entered it before us: it is not the temporary inhabitation of a persona, a mask that we put aside when the poem is done, but a form of life that might really become our own, and whose becoming our own might not be a matter of choice for us. Consider, for example, Hermann Fränkel’s account of the appeal of Pindar’s poetry in Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy: To enter the realm of his poetry is like going into an enchanted circle. It is not easy to gain entrance; but he who has once succeeded never leaves it again. One cannot escape from the strength and power of Pindar’s language, the abrupt soaring of his thought, the sharp rigour of his laws and the earnest humanity of his feeling.6 What Fränkel records here is an encounter with the mature ethicality of lyric poetry. Pindar’s ethicality is a sovereign form of life—a ‘realm’—that already has its characteristic features at the outset. This is why it is difficult to enter the enchanted circle in the first (p.261) place, but also why it is impossible to leave. We are not invited to judge whether his ethics are appropriate to the occasions of their emergence, as we are in fiction; we either embrace them as the experience of the poem without assuming cognitive distance, or we refuse them, and the poem. Judgement does not belong to the experience of the poem as it belongs to the experience of fiction. In Fränkel’s analysis, it is the concinnity of ethicality and poeticity that gives Pindar’s poetry the power of enchantment. Everything in Pindar’s poetry had to be justified by his own principles, and it is for this reason that it invites our espousal of its values.7 The argument is akin to the one that Celan makes in the ‘Meridian’ speech, where he suggests that the rhetorical, imagistic, and tropological peculiarities that distinguish lyric from ordinary language and other kinds of discourse have been bestowed on lyric poetry ‘for the sake of an encounter’.8 It is these very features that allow us to live the time of the poem as others have lived it before us.

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Fidelity and Farewell The concinnity of ethicality and poeticity comprises an ethical gesture, and a set of ethical gestures, sustained across a poet’s work, constitutes that poet’s enchanted ethicality, as Fränkel understands it. Pound’s (or rather Bunting’s) dichten = condensare is often cited as the work of lyric poiesis, but this work should not be understood to be merely lexical and formal—to pertain solely to the expressive layer of the poem, and not also to the form of life that lyric expressivity makes available. Consider Baudelaire’s ‘Le guignon’. The poem contrasts the unculled flower that loses its fragrance in the depths of solitude with the work of the poem that is to translate existential burdens into the shared time of the lyric. ‘Art is long and time is short’, the poem exclaims, but the time of art is ethical as well as expressive. Ethopoeia is part of the time of art, the time of making that precedes the time of the poem and prepares what is to be shared with the reader—not in the form of a persona, as in the ethopoeia of rhetoric, but as the condensed gestures of lyric ethicality. Every genuine poet will have his or her own signature ethical gestures, but all will have this in common, that their work presents itself as a fully formed, highly condensed form of ethical being; it crystallizes out a common vector of our ethicality that is offered to the (p.262) reader in its finished form as the possibility of shared time.9 Lyric ethopoeia is what must have already happened for us to be able to participate in the time of the poem. It creates the ritual dimension of lyric time, enabling our entry into a rite that has long been prepared for us, as in Baudelaire’s fatalistic overture to a reader whose common ethicality had only to be given this ritualized form for its commonness to be acknowledged: ‘You know him, reader, this tender monster, | —Hypocrite reader, —my soulmate,—my brother.’ The sectioning of Les Fleurs du mal—‘Spleen and Ideal’, ‘Parisian Tableaus’, ‘Revolt’, etc.—signposts the distillation, or condensation, of this common ethicality into the signature ethical gestures that interpellate the reader in the collection as a whole. This is not to hypostasize a persona that reveals itself in a process like the developmental unfolding of a fictional character—a persona that achieves a steady state in a poetry collection that is organized developmentally like the chapters of a novel. Rather, the sectioning of the collection names a set of ethical gestures common to poet and reader whose acknowledgement as such is actualized in the shared time of the lyric.10 ‘Recueillement’, which thematizes the harvesting of aesthetic pleasure from the lived experience of regret, remorse, and waste, is a particularly good example of the concinnity of form of life and (p.263) aesthetic principle that draws us into lyric’s enchanted circle, its signature gesture ‘tasting in full enjoyment’, to quote an expression of Emanuel Levinas—whatever it may be that we are tasting. Every great lyric poet has such signature ethical gestures. In the work of Sappho, for example, a basic scenario is the memory of pleasure, with the flower as its essentially evanescent marker. Departing lovers remind each other of the Page 5 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell garlands they wore when they lay down together on soft beds (violets, roses, crocuses: fr. 94); the comparison of an absent lover to the moon among stars turns the mind to moonlight on the sea and on fields of flowers, then to dew on garden plants (roses, chervil, clover: fr. 96). Reflective lingering over the claim that human presence leaves no trace on the natural world is a source of consolation. Cultivating the feeling that one is not at home in the world in the way that flowers and grass are at home in it is a way of coping with the loss of those features of one’s lived experience that make the world feel like home. Local details, carefully observed, block the longing for transcendence: what appears in Sappho’s poetry is not a fictional mise-en-scène, but the real earth on which we find ourselves in pain and which we can never feel the same as, but which we cannot stop wanting to be one with when we grieve. What poetic gesture means for the recovery of literariness, or ‘the literary’, in archaic lyric is akin to what gesture has meant in the theorization of painting’s appeal after abstract expressionism. Gesture is both the subject and the object of the artwork, the singular externalization of energy in facture that creates ‘an equilibrium between spontaneity and design’.11 Two celebrated essays by Roland Barthes, ‘Non multa sed multum’ and ‘The wisdom of art’, explore the relation between gesture and the desire for emulation it inspires in relation to the ‘graphism’ of Cy Twombly. Barthes describes the gestures of Twombly’s facture as ‘a little childish, irregular, clumsy’, and he invokes the Latin term rarus to characterize the way in which they occupy the canvas: what is rarus is ‘that which has gaps or interstices, sparse, porous, scattered’.12 For Barthes, this open texture enacts a disavowal of the intention to overpower the viewer that he calls ‘delicacy’ and ‘politeness’ in Twombly,13 and which he locates as the paradoxical source of the compulsive imitation that Twombly’s work inspires in him: (p.264) The ‘simplicity’ of Twombly (what I have analyzed under the name of ‘Rareness’ or ‘Clumsiness’) calls, attracts the spectator: he wants to be reunited to the picture, not to consume it aesthetically, but to produce it in his turn (to ‘re-produce’ it), to try his hand at a technique where indigence and clumsiness give him an incredible (and quite misleading) illusion of being easy.14 The combination of grace and ineptitude in a performative modality of undermarking is the source of the inimitable in Twombly. Other Latin terms for the quality that Barthes calls rarus in Twombly are tenuis and gracilis: gracilitas is ‘the quality of not being full’, while raritas is ‘looseness of texture, open or porous structure, the quality of being thinly dispersed, sparseness’.15 Tenuis and gracilis are terms that regularly translate Callimachus’ aesthetic of thinness in his Roman admirers, and, in its most compulsive version, the emulation of Page 6 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell Callimachus takes the form of a claim to have repeated the gestures that Callimachus made (Propertius 3.1.1), so as to have actually become a ‘Roman Callimachus’, rather than merely taking his work as a model (Propertius 4.1.64). So too Longinus, in On the Sublime, contrasts sublimity as a mode of aesthetic appearing that makes a strong claim on the reader with what he calls χάρις: both charm and politeness.16 It is this charismatic mode of appearing that characterizes the work of the Hellenistic poets in contrast to that of the forceful, captivating, poets of antiquity. For whereas sublime poets compel their readers to experience for themselves the psychic events in which their poems originate, the energy of Hellenistic poetry is at its surface: it is a poetry of facture, not a poetry of the imagination. There is no back country, or remainder, to the work which, as the thing unrevealed in expression, becomes the object of readerly desire for what, as the source of expression, cannot be had in the work itself: what Longinus calls the soul of the poet (15.4). Longinus calls the Hellenistic poets ‘pure’, or better perhaps, ‘purified’, ‘refined’, (καθαρός, 33.1), and his contrast between the charismatic and the sublime names two kinds of poetic gesture by which the poem exerts its appeal on the reader, two different ways of enacting (p.265) the relationship between the presence of the poet in the work and the vitality of its linguistic surface. In the charismatic poem, nothing is held back, and the presence of the poet is fully realized at the surface of the work, rather than remaining outside the work as its source or locus of origination, as it is in the sublime poem. The texture of the charismatic poem is purified of remainder. It enacts a total commitment to the gesture as it is made, and as it appears in the work. The charismatic poem contrasts with sublime poetry, whose appeal is a quality of the imagination that precedes facture. Longinus’ contrast between charismatic and sublime poetry replays his fundamental distinction between the visual and the verbal arts: the production of the former is technical, whereas the production of the latter is psychical. Paradoxically, however, while the withholding of the soul in sublime poetry creates a desire for the psyche in which it originates, as what is not available in the work itself, the very lack of withholding in the gestures of the charismatic poem—what we might call their spontaneity—also gives rise to a distinctive eros with respect to the work that we recognize in Barthes’ desire to reenact Twombly and in Callimachus’ Roman emulators. Barthes claims that vitality of gesture is what makes Twombly himself the real object of interest in his work and hence the real object of emulation: ‘The whole weight of the drama falls back again on the person who is producing it: the subject is Twombly himself.’17 Charismatic poetry likewise instantiates the full presence of the poet in the surface of the work as a kind of gestural selfpresentation. It bodies forth the total involvement of the maker in the scene of Page 7 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell production that Fränkel characterizes as a scene of enchantment in the encounter with the ‘earnest humanity’ of Pindar’s language.18 It is from this perspective, then, of the concinnity of value and poeticity, that I want to think about two signature gestures of Pindar’s poetry that I have called ‘fidelity’ and ‘farewell’. Pindar would always be a problem for the fictional speaker model of lyric utterance since his epinician poems originate in a response to very specific real-world events (‘racing reports’, Pound called them). It is impossible to dislodge their statement-subject from real-world commentary to fictional autonomy, as the frequent citation of Pindar and other lyric poets by ancient philosophers attests. The precise real-world (p.266) origination of the epinician poems in fact allows readers to see very easily the relationship between real-world event and textual event, as real-world responsiveness is translated into the set of signature ethical gestures that are made available to the reader in the time of the poem. In this respect, fidelity, as I have called the first of these gestures, offers a particularly rich area of inquiry. For Pindar, fidelity is the ethical gesture that turns the real-world event into a textual event that can be experienced by the reader as such in the time of the poem. Likewise, for the genealogy of philosophical thought that has articulated the idea of a living ethicality under the rubric of the event, fidelity names the temporal relationship to the event that constitutes it as an event in the continuing time of ethical life. I begin, then, with a brief account of fidelity in evental ethics, before turning to what looks like a counter-gesture on Pindar’s part—the gesture of farewell—in which his poetry seems to want to free itself from fidelity in order to produce a different kind of statement-subject, without the kind of mortal obligations that fidelity enacts. Slavoj Žižek offers a useful formulation of what the event has come to mean as an account of the subject’s responsiveness to what seizes it from the outside: ‘An event is…the effect that seems to exceed its causes—and the space of an event is that which opens up the gap that separates an effect from its causes.’19 Žižek captures a familiar problem for the reading of Pindar’s epinician poems outside the anthropological paradigm. No normal person responds to a victory in an athletic competition in the way that Pindar does; the poems as effects exceed their cause, and they do so massively. The anthropological paradigm deals with this problem by anthropologizing it away. The poems don’t really mean what they say, for they are written in a social code that we have to translate in order to arrive at their pragmatic function (the reintegration of the so-called laudandus into his city, etc.). The poems, like the events they commemorate, belong to a culture so alien to our own that any attempt to understand their excess as responsiveness to athletic competition as we know it can only be an illegitimate anachronistic projection. We have no way to share their responsiveness because we have not been acculturated as ancient Greeks.

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Fidelity and Farewell (p.267) Evental ethics offers a promising alternative because it begins from the premise that what makes an event an event is just this excess that projects the subject out of its normative, common-sense commitments. It is what Heidegger, in The Event, calls the ‘appropriating beginning’,20 in which Dasein’s selfunderstanding as a subject of care emerges. Levinas’ ‘denucleation’ of the subject in ethical acknowledgement is continuous with this endeavour to give an account of a living ethicality as the rupture of complacency,21 and consequent movement towards the outside, but the account of the event that seems to me most helpful in understanding how the emergence into ethicality through external interpellation is configured for another as a textual event is that of Alain Badiou, and, in particular, his concern with the actualization of the event in what he calls ‘fidelity’: the enactment of allegiance to what emerges in the event through which the subject of fidelity comes into being as such. This, then, is how Badiou characterizes the event in Philosophy and the Event: For me, an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility has been ignored. The event is, in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us. Everything will depend on the way in which the possibility proposed is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world.22 The originary force of Heidegger’s ‘appropriating beginning’ is still legible here, but Badiou is, characteristically, more concerned with the human consequences of the event as these are realized in politics, love, art, science, and philosophy, the five domains of human action in which he is concerned to trace the enactment of this appropriating beginning. In any one of these domains, fidelity consists in maintaining oneself as ‘the subjective element of these consequences’, such that ‘one accepts to participate in the new subject made possible by the event’. In the domain of art, the consequences of this fidelity are ‘great mutations that always bear on the question of what counts, or doesn’t count, as form’.23 Poetry’s enchanted circles of ethicality are just such enactments of a concinnity of value and poeticity. (p.268) In the Ethics, Badiou compares the emergence into ethicality, as the possibility of fidelity to what discloses itself in the event, to the experience of reading lyric poetry, with its capacity to interpellate us against our expectations: the event is like ‘the sudden feeling that this poem was addressed to you’, a glimpse of unrealized possibilities that we try to seize in our own being.24 There is an obvious stimulus here to the reading of Pindar’s epinician poems as textual events, for the experience of being seized by what has shown itself in the athletic event, of incorporating it into the poem, and thereby remaining faithful to it, is their fundamental ethical gesture and their explicit claim upon the attention of others. Reading these poems for their enactment of fidelity to an Page 9 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell event that they constitute as an event through their fidelity to it is simply to read them as they ask to be read. Rather than displacing their enactment of fidelity into an ungraspable anthropological background, we should recognize that the extremity of their fidelity to what emerges in the athletic event is constantly thematized in the poems themselves as the difficulty of entering their charmed circle, of giving our time to the time of the poem. The extremity of their fidelity is the fundamental ethical gesture that gives them their event character, and it is constantly thrust towards us as such: ‘I must crown Hieron with song because there is not a single person like him among men of the present time’ (Ol. 1.100– 5); ‘I dare to swear on oath with a truthful understanding that in a century no city has produced a man like Theron’—although calculative thought will never acknowledge this reality (Ol. 2.92–9); Theron’s excellence is like travelling to the pillars of Heracles—‘This is the most extreme utterance I can produce without being called a fool’ (Ol. 3.41–5). And so on. Every poem registers the shock of its extreme allegiance, contrary to the claims of common sense and what any reasonable person would accept as reality.25 To enter their charmed circle is to accept this impossible fidelity as the shared time of the poem. But if Pindar’s fidelity is an enactment of extremity, it is also a modality of limitation. It is to not, after all, go beyond the pillars of Heracles, however nearly one approaches them, for their far side is (p.269) the province of neither the wise nor the unwise; it is a space, real and discursive, in which human difference disappears in a senseless vacuity. The fidelity of human witnessing entails a certain kind of self-limitation to the discourse of the human in the scope and ambitions of the poem. The gesture that I am calling ‘farewell’ chafes at this restriction. It is the movement of thought that wants to transcend this limitation to the human, to offer new modes of poetic utterance that are not inhibited by what has become an occasion for fidelity by virtue of its being seen and acknowledged. Pythian 10, traditionally Pindar’s first public poem, already grumbles slightly at its selfimposed limitation as ‘an act of homage to values, and to human values in particular’.26 There is no human way to find oneself on the wonderful road to Hyperboreans, but Pindar takes us along anyway, in what can only be called a flight of fancy. There we are suddenly, with Perseus and Apollo, among the anarcho-primitivist songsters and the ‘erect insult’ of their asses (Pyth. 10.29– 36). Pythian 10 is a youthful flight of fancy, and its whimsical leavetaking from the serious business of epinician fidelity is just that: whimsical and carefree. The poem swings back to the present with a breezy expression of unconcern: ‘Nothing is too amazing for the gods’ (49–50). It has been an enjoyable side trip that does no harm to the poem’s serious purpose, its ‘unseasonable boast’ (4). Nemean 11, on the other hand, often thought to be one of Pindar’s last poems, and not really an epinician at all, circumscribes its enactment of fidelity with a more sustained movement of leave-taking that projects the poem into a mode of Page 10 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell viewing in which this fidelity seems puzzling, or even counter-indicated; not a whimsical aside, but an ethical gesture that seems to look askance at the fundamental gesture of the epinician poetry. The poem’s commissioning event is the election of Aristagoras of Tenedos to an office of local government, but this event is something of a stalking horse for a non-event with which the poem is more deeply concerned: his parents’ decision not to allow him to participate in the panhellenic games. Pindar offers some brief suggestions about what might have been, but ends by inviting us to witness the life of Aristagoras from the perspective of life as a whole (37–48): (p.270)                                                              ἀρχαῖαι δ᾽ ἀρεταί ἀμφέροντ᾽ ἀλλασσόμεναι γενεαῖς ἀνδρῶν σθένος· ἐν σχερῷ δ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ὦν μέλαιναι καρπὸν ἔδωκαν ἄρουραι, δένδρεά τ᾽ οὐκ ἐθέλει πάσαις ἐτέων περόδοις ἄνθος εὐῶδες φέρειν πλούτῳ ἴσον, ἀλλ᾽ ἐναμείβοντι. καὶ θνατὸν οὕτως ἔθνος ἄγει μοῖρα. τὸ δ᾽ ἐκ Διὸς ἀνθρώποις σαφὲς οὐχ ἕπεται τέκμαρ· ἀλλ᾽ ἔμπαν μεγαλανορίαις ἐμβαίνομεν, ἔργα τε πολλὰ μενοινῶντες· δέδεται γὰρ ἀναιδεῖ ἐλπίδι γυῖα, προμαθείας δ᾽ ἀπόκεινται ῥοαί. κερδέων δὲ χρὴ μέτρον θηρευέμεν· ἀπροσίκτων δ᾽ ἐρώτων ὀξύτεραι μανίαι.

Ancient virtues bring back strength to generations of men in alternation. Black fields do not give their fruit in succession, and trees are not used to bearing sweet smelling flower equal in wealth in all the circulations of years, but they alter. And so fate leads mortal people. And what is from Zeus for humans does not come after a clear signal. And yet we set off on adventures all the same, yearning to do all sorts of things. For limbs are fettered by unabashed hope, and streams of foreknowledge are set apart. But one should seek out moderation of profits. And the franticness of unattainable desires is dazzling. One can grasp fairly easily what these lines mean as a reflection on the missed opportunities of Aristagoras’ promising youth. The net effect of his parents’ timidity is to plough his good qualities back into the ancestral soil as a kind of unconscious fertilization of the gene pool. Aristagoras has taken one for the team. But that does not tell us much about how the lines mean, and especially not about the massive overkill effect in the serial presentation of gnomic abundance that stands in manifest contradiction to the profession of alternation as a natural principle that structures the vicissitudes of human generations. The poem makes itself unnatural in its assertion of naturalness, and this is how the poem ends, the way it takes leave of its subject. Aristagoras and his kin are glimpsed from the airplane window as the poem takes off for a realm of supernal Page 11 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell comprehension, a place where the superabundance of wisdom it has just offered us might actually be at home, as it is not here on earth, where human beings have to set out on their adventures without any such stores of self-certainty. Our bodies may be chained, but this is no obstacle to the lift-off of the mind. The mind that takes off here is something different from the unfettered imagination of Pythian 10. I have named the leave-taking (p.271) it enacts after Karl Heinz Bohrer’s Der Abschied, where farewell means the look of inconsolable detachment that aesthetic modernism turns on a present that it is, in fact, unable to get away from, its gesture towards a transcendence it cannot sustain. The gesture is literalized in Paul Celan’s ‘Cleared for departure’, where poetic ‘soaring’, as Fränkel calls it in Pindar, is imagined as an airplane that departs without the prospect of landing: ‘What’s left of you inclines, | you gain | altitude.’ The technicizing of human capacities is a signature ethical gesture of Celan’s later work, a deflation of human exceptionalism ‘from the far side of humanity’, as he puts it in another poem, and a re-enchantment of the uncanny technology with which human beings have staged their self-overcoming. In Pindar, the agon of the human against itself is staged in the arena of human self-understanding, between the self-elected limitation to human values in the extreme forms of fidelity that are enacted in response to athletic witnessing, and the aspiration towards a horizon of understanding in which such self-elected limitation might be left behind. From the airplane window, human beings shrink to an occasion for reflection, for the production of gnomic utterance that is now uncoupled from the necessity for acknowledgement that is the governing ethical modality of epinician poetry. It is a Promethean discourse, the vantage-point of a fettered spirit; not soaring, but the poetry of finitude endeavouring to escape from itself, and yet pinioned like the other forms of human striving that inform its first fidelity. An account of the end of Nemean 11 from the perspective of an Idealist theory of genre might describe it as a lyric poem attempting to shed its first personal attachment to the things of the world and approach the consciousness of epic; it is trying to transform itself into the utterance of a different kind of statementsubject.27 From this perspective, we can see what is at stake in approaching it for the sake of what Žižek calls the space of the event, as opposed to both the anthropological paradigm, and a certain kind of formalism. For while we might contrast the attachment of the anthropological paradigm to the local, material object, with the attachment of New Criticism to the eternal, noumenal object, we might also note the (p.272) congruity between the anthropological paradigm and this mode of formalism insofar as both of them think of the poem as a kind of object.

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Fidelity and Farewell An ‘ontological critic’, to use John Crowe Ransom’s expression, is, by definition, a critic who thinks of the poem as a certain kind of object, and one whose relationship with it will therefore be the relation between subject and object.28 Likewise, a ‘script for performance’ is an object that has its place in a total performative assemblage; it has the same kind of objecthood as a victor’s crown, or sacrificial animals. Both formalism and the anthropological paradigm present the poem as something that asks to be examined for its ontic characteristics, rather than for its experiential affordances. But a lyric poem does not present itself to us in the modality of objecthood at all, and the way in which we are called upon to respond to it is not as subject to object, but as subject to subject, as the poem beckons us to enter the enchanted circle of its ethicality. This interpellation reaches further into our being than the experience of nonidentity. Lyric crystallizes common potentialities of our ethicality into forms of life that are attractive because we encounter them in their congruence with a mature poeticity, rather than in the developmental modality of fiction that allows for judgement. Pindar’s ethicality may not signal its dangers as Baudelaire’s does, but it is an enchanted circle nonetheless, and, as with Baudelaire, there is always the chance that if we enter it, we will not be able to find our way out again. For by crystallizing a common potential, it risks making the crystallized form of that potential irreversible. While mimetic contagion depends upon contingent ambient triggers, it is in the nature of lyric ethicality to insinuate itself as the inner form of our own ethicality, and so become a kind of shirt of Nessus for the ethical life.29 This is the danger from which the anthropological paradigm and the formalist paradigm alike protect us, closing our ears with their own brands of scholarly wax, so that we see a thing instead of hearing a voice. But if we want a drama to rival the pedagogical excitement of the anthropological paradigm, this is the place to find it. Culler deftly explains how the conception of lyric poetry as the utterance of a (p.273) fictional speaker was solidified in Anglo-American literary studies by the pedagogy of high-school and college English,30 and the idea that ancient lyric poetry is a script for performance whose inner life is inaccessible to us has likewise been solidified by the pedagogy of classical studies. Musealization is a high price to pay for the hermeneutic possibilities that the anthropological paradigm delivers, and, if it is our intention to move beyond it, we are likely to do so only if we can better understand why people have been willing to pay that price; that is to say, we had better understand the first personal satisfactions that the anthropological paradigm offers, over and above what it promises in the way of truth claims. One of these satisfactions is that the anthropological paradigm invests philological gatekeeping with the drama of cultural contact that an actual anthropologist experiences in fieldwork. Anachronism in the anthropological paradigm is closely akin to ethnocentricism in fieldwork, because both originate Page 13 of 17

 

Fidelity and Farewell in unguarded self-projection,31 whereas the transcendence of presentism in the seminar room’s dramas of misreading grants access to the ranks of the professionally competent. But while the anthropological paradigm affords a compelling initiatory drama, in which the masters of the game figure as charismatic icons of the undeceived, we should also not underestimate the appeal of the sacrificial structure of historical philology more generally. It is a compelling form of self-oblation, a role full of feeling for those who, as philologists, have nothing ‘of the poet or of the prophet’ in them, as even the historian must have to a certain extent, but instead give their heart’s blood to sustain what could not live without them, like genuine actors to their role.32 Philology, on this account, is a kind of flesh offering. The other authentic donation is our time. Perhaps these two donations do not differ from each another fundamentally, since the role play of the actor philologist has a durative aspect, but the performative paradigm (p.274) risks reifying a difference between our own real being in time and the purposeful suspension of that being for the sake of the seminar room drama. What I have tried to suggest here, by contrast, is that the time of the lyric poem affords an understanding of something essential about our historicity, where what historicity means is the mystery of a temporal being whose time is subject to unforeseen possession and donation, and of the unfathomability of the time of non-identity that is sounded in these temporal events. Hölderlin points to this historicity in ‘Andenken’, in the contrast between the sea that ‘takes away remembrance and also gives it back’, and the claim that ‘what poets found abides’.33 But the language of foundation that informs this contrast should not be construed as a claim to ontic permanence. It is rather an acknowledgement of poetry’s formalization of the time of possession and donation, which affords us the recognition of our historicity. The shared life that is made available to us in the lyric poem through the gestural concinnity of ethicality and poeticity opens on to our own historicity because it draws us into ways of being in life as others have been in life before us. What we experience in giving our time to the poem is the time of others, and what we come to in that experience is the recognition of shared time. This is what it is to have a temporal relationship with a poem, ancient or modern, rather than a figural relationship in which we stand outside the time of donation and possession, and are free to interpret or appreciate, as we see fit. A textual event, like any event, is an occasion of constraint, an interpellation by what seizes us in our innermost being, and wills our assent. Notes:

(1) See my discussion of the implicit psychology of the anthropological paradigm in Payne (2006), and the paper by Budelmann in this volume.

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Fidelity and Farewell (2) On the non-fictionality of lyric, see Culler (2015) 105–25; on the transformative power of apostrophe, 211–43; and on Kendall Walton’s idea of lyric as ‘thoughtwriting’ as an equivalent to lyric’s discursive ambitions, 119–20. (3) Culler (2015) 275–94. (4) See my discussion of the ‘Meridian’ speech in Payne (2007). (5) Heidegger (1996) 368–9. Emphasis original. (6) Fränkel (1975) 428. (7) Fränkel (1975) 435, 489. (8) Celan (1986) 37, 48–50; I discuss this claim at greater length in Payne (2007). (9) Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, as a self-styled romancer, not a novelist, is more interested in ethical states than ethical development, has some useful insights into lyric ethopoeia as a non-developmental process of ethical self-fashioning, which he frequently thematizes as distillation and condensation, in a literal, alchemical sense. In The Scarlet Letter, Chillingworth’s herbology—‘the process by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency’ (114)—is the image of the soul work by which he is able to turn himself into the unstinting observer of Dimmesdale’s crime, in contrast to Dimmesdale himself, who is the subject of ‘constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify, himself’ (127). Chillingworth concocts his ethical potential such that his ethicality has a kind of final perfection, and Hawthorne returns to the analogy between alchemical herb lore and ethical self-fashioning in ‘The Birthmark’, ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, ‘Dr. Heidegger’s Mistake’, and the Septimius Felton romance. (10) Cf. Culler (2015) 124: ‘Most lyrics are encountered either in isolation or in a collection where there may be little plot to reconstruct and where attention naturally falls on the range of affects, the characteristic verbal and rhythmical techniques, and the general ethos of the poems. In Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, for instance, there is no real plot, despite efforts of critics to find one, nor a consistent fictional speaker, despite the ubiquity of the first person. The collection’s attraction lies especially in the range of attitudes brilliantly made available, as readers accede to a distinctive vision of the world—not a fictional universe but our world, in all its grim and nefarious seductiveness.’ (11) Christov-Bakargiev (1999) 20. (12) Barthes (2002b) 103–5. (13) Barthes (2002a) 100.

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Fidelity and Farewell (14) Barthes (2002b) 111. (15) Oxford Latin Dictionary: s.v. gracilitas 3, raritas 1. (16) 1.4: χάρις as the opposite of τὸ θαυμάσιον; 34.2: Hyperides has Lysianic charm but lacks the grandeur that troubles a reader; no one feels fear when reading Hyperides. (17) Barthes (2002b) 111. (18) Fränkel (1975) 428. (19) Žižek (2014) 5. Emphasis original. Žižek offers falling in love as an example: the lips, smile, etc., of the beloved are not the reason why we fall in love, but when we are in love, they appear as reasons to love. (20) Heidegger (2012) 20–4, 135–7; cf. Heidegger (2013) 153–5. (21) Levinas (1981) 73–4. (22) Badiou (2013) 9–10. (23) Badiou (2013) 48, 68. (24) Badiou (2001) 48–52; cf. Badiou (2013) 112 on becoming the subject of philosophy. (25) Cf. Fränkel (1975) 474: ‘Pindar is no advocate of pusillanimous prudence or of the golden mean of bourgeois contentment.’ (26) Fränkel (1975) 489. (27) See, especially, the account of Homeric consciousness floating above the world of the poems ‘like a higher being touched by nothing’ in Schelling (1985) 216, and the subsequent contrast with lyric cathexis. (28) Ransom (1941) 301 could not be plainer: ‘The poem is an object comprising not two elements but four.’ That the poem is an object is simply assumed in discussing what kind of object it is. (29) As Marion (2002) 111 observes, ‘Nessus’s tunic also arrived as a gift.’ (30) Culler (2015) 111: ‘This model makes the lyric into a mini-novel with a character whose motives are to be analyzed. It is often pedagogically efficacious, since it gives students a task that is familiar from their dealings with novels and their narrators.’

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Fidelity and Farewell (31) Wax (1971) 15–20 notes that the first stage of fieldwork is often the most uncomfortable because fieldworkers struggle to overcome their natural understanding, and want to demonstrate an emic understanding of the situations in which they find themselves, sometimes through ‘needless heroics’ (270–2). (32) Wilamowitz’s Introduction to Greek Tragedy, cited in Pearcy (2005) 39. (33) Our temporality as natural beings, for whom the recovery of our own lived time is in the giving of natural entities, is one of the areas where, as Menninghaus (2005) argues, a Sapphic strain continues to inform Hölderlin’s poetic thinking until the very end.

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Works Cited

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.275) Works Cited Felix Budelmann, Tom Phillips

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Works Cited Bierl, A. (2016a), ‘“All You Need is Love”: Some Thoughts on the Structure, Texture, and Meaning of the Brothers Song as well as on its Relation to the Kypris Song (P. Sapph. Obbink), in A. Lardinois and A. Bierl (eds.), 302–36. Bierl, A. (2016b), ‘Sappho as Aphrodite’s Singer, Poet, and Hero(ine): the Reconstruction of the Context and Sense of the Kypris Song’, in A. Lardinois and A. Bierl (eds.), 339–52. Bierl, A. and Lardinois, A. (eds.) (2016), The Newest Sappho: P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105, frs. 1–4, Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song 2, Mnemosyne Suppl. 392 (Leiden). Blasing, M. K. (2007), Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ). Blondell, R. (2010a), ‘“Bitch That I Am”: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad’, TAPA 140: 1–32. Blondell, R. (2010b), ‘Refractions of Homer’s Helen in Archaic Lyric’, AJP 131: 349–91. Blondell, R. (2013), Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation (Oxford). Boedeker, D. (2012), ‘Helen and “I” in early Greek lyric’, in J. Marincola, L. Llewellyn-Jones, and C. MacIver (eds.), Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History without Historians (Edinburgh), 65–82. Bohrer, K. H. (1996), Der Abschied: Theorie der Trauer: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin (Frankfurt). Bona, G. (1988), Pindaro: i peani (Cuneo). Bonadeo, A. (2003), Mito e natura allo specchio: l’eco nel pensiero greco e latino (Pisa). Bonadeo, A. (2004), ‘Tra ripetizione fonica e memoria poetica: l’eco, da imago vocis a icona intertestuale’, in C. Darbo-Peschanski (ed.), La citation dans l’antiquité (Grenoble), 245–56. Booth, W. C. (1961), The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago). Bowie, E. L. (1986), ‘Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival’, JHS 106: 13–35. Bowie, E. L. (1993), ‘Lies, Fiction and Slander in Early Greek Poetry’, in C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter), 1–37.

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Works Cited Budelmann, F. (2017), ‘Performance, Reperformance, Preperformance: The Paradox of Repeating the Unique in Pindaric Epinician and Beyond’, in R. L. Hunter and A. Uhlig (eds.), 42–62. Budelmann, F. (2018), Greek Lyric: A Selection (Cambridge). Budelmann, F. and Easterling, P. (2010), ‘Reading Minds in Greek Tragedy’, G&R 57: 289–303. Bundy, E. L. (1986), Studia Pindarica (Berkeley). Burkert, W. (1979), ‘Kynaithos, Polycrates, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo’, in G. W. Bowersock, W. Burkert, and M. C. J. Putnam (eds.), Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Berlin) 53–62 [= Burkert (2001), 189–97]. Burkert, W. (1985), Greek Religion, revised English translation, trans. J. Raffan (Cambridge, MA). Burkert, W. (1987), ‘The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century B.C.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichoros’, in J. Paul Getty Center, Papers on the Amasis Painter and his World (Malibu), 43–62. [= Burkert (2001), 198–217 = Cairns (2001), 92–116]. (p.279) Burkert, W. (2001), Kleine Schriften I: Homerica, ed. C. Riedweg (Göttingen). Burnett, A. P. (1983), Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (London). Burnett, A. P. (1988), ‘Jocasta in the West: The Lille Stesichorus’, ClAnt 7: 107– 54. Burris, S., Fish, J., and Obbink, D. (2014), ‘New Fragments of Book 1 of Sappho’, ZPE 189: 1–28. Burton, D. (2011), ‘Response and Composition in Archaic Greek Poetry’, Antichthon 45: 58–76. Burzacchini, G. (2007), ‘Saffo Frr. 1, 2, 58 V. tra documentazione papiracea e tradizione indiretta’, in G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (eds.), I papiri di Saffo e di Alceo. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Firenze, 8–9 giugno 2006 (Florence), 83–114. Burzacchini, G. and Degani, E. (1977), Lirici greci (Florence). Butler, S. (2015), The Ancient Phonograph (New York).

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Index of Passages Discussed

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.305) Index of Passages Discussed Alcaeus fr. 6: 87–9, 126–7 fr. 38a: 124–5 fr. 73: 86 n. 76, 125–6 fr. 129: 39, 44–5 fr. 130b: 44–5, 126, 129–30 fr. 140: 102–6, 131 fr. 208a: 83–6 fr. 249: 86–7 fr. 283: 146–8 fr. 305a: 74–5 fr. 306i: 71–2 fr. 333: 108–10 fr. 338: 120–3, 127 fr. 350: 106–8 fr. 366: 108–11 Anacreon fr. 356b: 127 fr. 358: 250–1 fr. 376: 231 fr. 400: 228–9 fr. 402: 247–8 fr. 413: 229–30 Alcman fr. 59a: 227–8 Archilochus fr. 4: 64–9 fr. 105: 70–1 fr. 122: 195–8 fr. 324: 196–7 Athenaeus Page 1 of 3

 

Index of Passages Discussed 10.429f–430d: 121–3 Bacchylides 3.96–8: 24, 156 Critias B44: 249–50 Dionysius of Halicarnassus fr. 6.1: 135–6 Gorgon of Rhodes fr. 18: 164 n. 44 Heraclitus, Hom. Problems 5.1–4: 70–1 5.9: 70 Homer, Odyssey 8.497–8: 166 23.218–24: 143 Homeric Hymns H.Apol. 146–78: 151–71 H.Herm. 24–40: 181–2 54–61: 178–80 425–33: 176, 183, 186 443: 186 453–4: 176–7 478–85: 182–5 541–9: 186 H.Hom. 32 9–11: 201 n. 42 Horace, Odes 1.9: 120 1.11: 119–20 2.11: 126, 128 4.5: 128 4.11: 130–2 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 3.23: 214–21 Pindar Olympians 1.100–5: 268 1.115–16: 165–6 2.92–9: 268 3.41–5: 268 7.1–4, 34: 164 n. 45 9.1–2: 196 9.1–10, 21–6, 48–9: 159–61 Pythians 1.92–8: 164–5 2.53–7: 197 n. 25, 248–9 5.22–3: 184 n. 27 Page 2 of 3

 

Index of Passages Discussed 10.29–36: 269 (p.306) Nemeans 7.22: 17 11.37–48: 269–71 Isthmians 4.37–44: 157–8, 160–2 Paeans 7b.18–20: 161, 205 9: 189–209 Other Fragments fr. 188: 193 n. 11 Plutarch Mor.169a: 71 [De musica] 10.1134d–e: 194–5 Sappho ‘Brothers Poem’: 54–6, 128 fr. 1: 35, 46 fr. 2: 6–7, 36–8 fr. 5: 38–40 fr. 6: 47–8 fr. 9: 55–6 fr. 15: 40–2 fr. 16: 140–9 fr. 17: 42–5 fr. 21: 51–2 fr. 22: 50–1 fr. 27: 48–50 fr. 30: 47–8 fr. 31: 58–62, 147, 238–9 fr. 43: 48 fr. 58: 52–3 fr. 94: 263 fr. 96: 263 Theognis 1109–14: 239 Theophrastus, On Weather Signs 45.332–7: 71

Page 3 of 3

 

General Index

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198805823 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198805823.001.0001

(p.307) General Index Abbott, H. Porter 245 acousmatic condition 219–24, 226, 228, 232–3 Aelian 249–50 Aeschylus 201 aesthetics 5, 11, 13, 23–4, 110, 149, 161, 240 n. 5, 262–3, 264, 271 and Helen 136, 145, 149 maritime 64, 84–5, 89, 90 Alcaeus 8, 21, 93–113, 121–3 and allegory 8, 63, 64, 69–79, 80, 82, 85, 89, 90, 125–6 deixis in 39, 44, 88, 96–8, 103–4, 105–6 and exile 18, 44, 126, 129, 130 Helen in 17–18, 141 n. 24, 146–8 and historical context 72, 77, 89–91 and Homer 84–5, 107 and Horace 113, 119–20, 131–2 and intertextuality 17–18, 113, 120, 146–7, 148, 149 and metaliterarity 104–5, 107–8 and metaphor 85–7 and opposition 120, 123–7 and performance context 44–5, 66, 69, 75–6, 77, 81, 89, 148 persona of 8, 18, 44–5, 105 n. 39, 111 n. 55, 112, 148 political context of 8, 44–5, 63, 69–72, 75–7, 83–5, 94–6, 103, 112–13 proverbs in 108, 111–12 and reperformance 84, 104–6, 112 and representation 8, 95–6, 98, 103–12 and Sappho 17–18, 113, 146–8, 149 self-consciousness of 8, 11, 94, 96–8, 103–4, 106, 112 and spatial contexts 8, 123–7, 129–30 and the symposium 8, 76, 77, 80, 89–90, 93–4, 96–7, 100–1, 104 n. 36, 106, 108–13, 127 wine in 65, 108, 110–11, 120, 122–3 Page 1 of 14

 

General Index Alcman 5, 7, 10, 21, 56 n. 65, 79, 160 n. 36, 230 deixis in 22, 97 n. 13, 226–8 allegiance 13, 26–8 allegory 80, 135 and Alcaeus 8, 63–4, 69–80, 82, 85, 89–90, 125–6 see also metaphor; symbolism Aloni, Antonio 50 amplification of sound 218, 220, 223, 227, 229, 232 Anacreon 6, 7, 14–15, 53, 127, 241, 247–8, 252–3 δηὖτε (‘now again’) poems 22, 226, 228–31 and persona 16, 228–31 on Sappho 230, 251–3 Anaximander 144 anonymity 60, 151 n. 1, 155–6, 251 anthropological paradigm 3, 5, 23, 102 n. 28, 224, 225, 244, 257–8, 266, 271–3 Aphrodite: in the Iliad 137, 138, 142 in Sappho 7–8, 12, 35, 36, 38–41, 43 n. 30, 66, 142 Apollo 19, 152 and the lyre ch. 8 passim  in Pindar Paean 9 200, 207, 208 temple of (Delos) 54, 163, 169 see also Homeric Hymn to Apollo apostrophe 145, 146 n. 45, 203 n. 47, 258 Archilochus 7, 10, 18, 64–8, 70–1, 193 Critias on 249–50 and performance context 7, 66–7, 68 personality of 241, 248–50 and Pindar 18, 160–1, 194–8, 248–9, 251 Archytas 227, 228 Aristagoras of Tenedos 269–70 Aristophanes 153, 177, 253 Aristotle 197 artefact, lyric poetry as 2, 11, 152, 161–9, 171, 201–2, 207 asymmetry 253–5 Athenaeus 37–8, 105, 121–3, 177, 227 Auden, W. H. 185–6 (p.308) audience (listeners) 12–13, 213–33 agency of 4–5, 11, 206, 208 imagined 224, 227, 229, 232 and the performer 6, 16, 252, 254 and Pindar 10, 13, ch. 9 passim secondary 152, 155 n. 18, 159, 162, 168–70 self-consciousness of 192, 207, 209 and the speaker 6, 8, 25, 49, 78, 191, 240, 254 subjectivity of 218 n. 10, 220, 222 Austin, Norman 138, 148 author(s) 1–2, 4, 16, 25, 132, 149, 191–2, 243–53 Homer as 153, 155 n. 19, 158, 167, 170 and poetic ‘I’ 16, 237, 243, 246–7, 250 implied 244–7 Page 2 of 14

 

General Index and performer(s) 16, 25, 27, 102 n. 28, 237, 247, 253, 254 authorship 21, 152, 155, 201, 243, 247–52 of epic 151 n. 1, 247 and Pindar 155, 170, 205–6 rhetoric of 170, 197 n. 24 autonomy:of literature and art 10–11, 14, 110 of Helen 138, 139, 142, 148 Bacchylides 24, 155, 156, 191 n. 5 Badiou, Alain 10, 267–8 Barthes, Roland 99, 263, 265 Baudelaire, Charles 261, 262, 274 Benjamin, Walter 32 Berlin Painter 109 Best, Stephen 81–2 Bierl, Anton 55–6 biographical tradition 55, 244, 248–52 of Homer 151, 154, 155, 156 n. 23, 169–70 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 270–1 Booth, Wayne C. 244–9 boundaries: and genre 173–4, 176–80, 187 and Hermes 174–5, 181, 185, 187 Bowie, Ewen 66–8, 75–6, 89 Bowra, C. M. 1–3 brevity 119–20, 237–8, 240 Bryson, Norman 98 Bunting, Basil 261 Burkert, Walter 56, 158, 161, 169 Burnett, Anne Pippin 80, 84, 93, 94 Calame, Claude 66 Callimachus 7, 264, 265 Carson, Anne 226 Cassio, Albio 249 Cazzato, Vanessa 89–90 Celan, Paul 259, 261, 271 Chamaeleon of Pontus 122, 123, 250 charis 179, 264–5 Chesters, Timothy 254–5 Chion, Michel 219 chorus 3, 9 n. 12, 137–8, 184–5, 191 n. 5, 205 n. 53, 218, 235 n. 1 and Pindar 191 n. 5, 192, 198, 208 n. 60 and Sappho 35 n. 11, 37 n. 17, 45, 46, 50, 55, 56 n. 66, 57, 61, 62 Clark, William 69 classical period 2, 94, 101, 111–12, 143, 153, 156, 173, 215, 243, 246, 248, 252 Clay, Jenny Strauss 180, 181 context 2, 5, 6, 15–19, 95–100, 207 spatial 8–9, 115, 123, 128, 129, 132 see also historical contexts; performance contexts; political contexts contingency 24–5, 102, 112–13, 272 Page 3 of 14

 

General Index Critias 249–50 Croton 135, 136 Culler, Jonathan 95, 112, 258–9, 272–3 cunning 80, 87, 175 Cunningham, Valerie 97–8, 107 curses 41, 44, 46, 93 cyberfeminism 136 Cydias 193 Cynaethus 152 n. 4, 154 n. 11, 156 n. 20, 170 δαίς 180, 184 dance 26, 46, 49 n. 43, 53, 181, 184, 188, 191, 198, 199 n. 28, 216 deep structures 9, 123, 132 deixis 6, 62 n. 80, 97–8 in Alcaeus 39, 44, 88, 96–8, 103–6 in Pindar 62 n. 80, 162 n. 41 in Sappho 34–46, 54, 58–9, 226, 230 τόδε 44, 88, 103, 104, 105 see also pragmatics delayed repetition 216, 218–21, 224, 226–7, 228, 233 Delos 152, 154, 156, 158, 162–4, 166–9; see also Homeric Hymn to Apollo (p.309) Delphi 167, 175, 186–8 Dennett, Daniel 245 depth 253–4, 255 temporal 193, 229 Derrida, Jacques 12 Detienne, Marcel 80, 87, 175 δηὖτε (‘now again’) 22, 225–32, 233 Di Benedetto, Vincenzo 50 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 135 Dionysus 44, 64, 68 dithyramb 3 n. 5, 90, 178 drama 223, 236, 240–2, 258; see also tragedy DuBois, Page 140 Eagleton, Terry 9–10 Echo 213–33 eclipse poems 189–209 ecphrasis 8, 96, 97–8, 104, 108, 198 Edison, Thomas 217 enchantment 26, 243, 260–3, 265, 267, 271, 272 ἐγκώμιον (encomium) 20, 61, 139, 184 n. 27 epic 8, 158, 188, 242, 254, 271 and authorship 151 n. 1, 247 and lyric 17, 82 n. 61, 142, 143, 149, 158, 170, 184–5, 223, 237, 240–1, 247 epideixis 95, 96, 112, 139, 191 n. 6 epigram 118–19, 124 n. 9 epinicians 19, 119 n. 5, 127 n. 14, 184, 191 n. 5, 235 n. 1, 265–6, 271 and eroticism 20, 187–8 of Pindar 14, 25, 66, 152, 160, 265–6, 268 and trust 242 n. 11, 269 see also Index of Passages Discussed: Pindar Eros 4, 139, 148, 226–30 Page 4 of 14

 

General Index eroticism 16, 183–5, 216 and Alcman 227 n. 30 and Anacreon 231 n. 41, 248 and epinicians 20, 187–8 and Sappho 7, 61 n. 78, 141, 142, 144–5, 148, 226 n. 27, 230 n. 38 and symposia 4, 104 n. 36, 182, 185, 252–3 ethics 8, 12, 25, 241, 246 and Alcaeus 98, 103 evental ethics 266–7 and Pindar 12–13, 25, 197, 257–74 and Sappho 145, 147 Eupolis 177 event 5, 9–10, 11, 23–6, 128, 257–74 in Alcaeus 96, 98, 99, 105–6, 110 in philosophy 9–10, 266–8 and δηὖτε poems 106, 226–8 enacted 152, 162 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 151–71, 173 and Homeric Hymn to Hermes 186, 188 and Pindar 10, 12–13, 189–209, 257–74 repeated 225, 227, 228, 230 textual 6, 10, 22, 23, 27, 96, 106, 186, 192, 198, 200, 228, 230, 257–74 evental ethics 266–7 farewell 25, 265, 266, 269–71 Feeney, Denis 99 Felski, Rita 110 Felson, Nancy 67 Fenn, Elizabeth A. 257 Ferrari, Franco 50 fictionality 7–8, 9 n. 12, 95, 151 n. 1, 224–9, 240, 241, 246, 247, 254, 258, 261, 262 and Alcaeus 8, 96 fictional time 259, 260 and Homer 156 n. 23, 158, 164 n. 45 and Pindar 66, 191, 209, 265 and Sappho 7, 31–62, 66, 230 n. 38, 241–2, 263 of speaker 95, 209, 227, 228, 240, 262 n. 10, 265, 272–3 fidelity 12–13, 25, 265–9, 271 foregrounding 95, 96, 104, 106, 111 n. 55, 196 formalism 225, 271–2 Fränkel, Hermann 84, 260, 261, 265, 271 functionalism 2–3, 4, 19–20, 23, 96, 101 future tense 88, 168 gaze, male 136, 138 genre 19–21 and Homeric Hymn to Hermes 20, 172–88 Idealist theory of 271 lyric as 19–22, 119, 124 n. 9, 169–71, 255–6, 272–3 lyric genres 19, 20, 173–88 Gentili, Bruno 2, 5 n. 7, 8, 34 n. 9, 64, 69, 71, 75–85, 95–6 Page 5 of 14

 

General Index (p.310) gestures, ethical 261–5, 270–1 of Pindar 25, 265–6, 268–9 Glaucus of Rhegium 194–5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 32 Gorgias 139, 142 Grahame, Kenneth 213 Greene, Ellen 143 Hamburger, Käte 258 Haraway, Donna 22, 136, 138, 145 Heidegger, Martin 259, 267 Helen: in Alcaeus 17–18, 141 n. 24, 146–8 as cyborg 22, 135, 136, 138, 143, 145, 148, 149 in Iliad 136–9, 142 in Sappho 17, 22, 135–49 Hellenistic period 15, 17, 19–21, 33–4, 196, 252, 264 Hera 21, 42, 44, 45 n. 38, 54–6 Heraclitus 69–73, 76 n. 47, 90, 194 Herman, David 245 Hermes 20, 24 and boundaries 174–5, 181, 185, 187 and the lyre 20, 24, ch. 8 passim see also Homeric Hymn to Hermes Hesiod 137, 153, 159, 160, 181 n. 17, 183, 187, 201 Hesychius 177 ἑταίρα (courtesan) 38, 185, 222 lyre as a 181, 182, 184, 186, 187 ἑταιρία (political association) 76, 77, 83 n. 65, 95–6, 105 n. 41 hic et nunc (here and now) 22, 33, 35, 56, 88 n. 82, 103, 144, 149, 163, 224 Hinds, Stephen 230 Hipponax 241 Hippostratus 170 historical contexts 10 n. 18, 13, 79, 90, 171, 224–5, 260 and Alcaeus 72, 77, 89–1 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 152–3, 159, 162, 164, 169 and Sappho 43, 57 Hölderlin, Friedrich 32, 33 n. 5, 274 Homer 72, 104, 143, 153, 194, 201, 204 and Alcaeus 84–5, 107 as author 153, 155 n. 19, 158, 167, 170 biographical tradition of 151, 154, 155, 156 n. 23, 169–70 as personality 156–7 and Pindar 17, 153, 157–8, 160, 161, 193 n. 10, 196 reception of 154, 157–8, 160 n. 34 see also Iliad Homeric Hymns 20, 151, 153, 159, 160, 178 Homeric Hymn to Apollo 21, 151–71, 173, 181 n. 17, 182, 187 Homer as author of 153, 155 n. 19, 170 Homer as speaker of 151–7, 166–7 literary permanence of 157–61 original performance of 152, 156, 162–9 Page 6 of 14

 

General Index reception of 152, 154, 158–9, 162–9 reperformance of 159, 162–9 and rhetoric 152, 154, 155–6, 163, 170 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 20, 160, 173–88 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 168 n. 59, 182, 187 performance context of 180–1, 187 Homeric Hymn to Hestia 181 Horace 7, 21–2, 68, 100 n. 20, 117, 127–8 and Alcaeus 113, 119–20, 131, 132 and opposition 119–20, 126 and Sappho 113, 120, 128 and spatial contexts 8, 128–9, 130–2 hymns 7, 99, 151, 161–9, 185 and lyric 21, 152, 163, 169–71, 173 see also Homeric Hymns ‘I' 16, 223, 227, 230, 231, 246–7, 252, 253, 255–6 of author 16, 237, 243, 246–7, 250 of performer 16, 223, 243, 247, 252–6 psychology of 235–56 of speaker (text) 16, 222, 225, 237–43 see also persona; speaker iambus 19, 20, 109 n. 49, 179 n. 15, 249, 254 Ibycus 4, 170, 226 identity 252, 255 non-identity 260, 272, 274 ideology 4, 10, 11, 23, 24, 75, 102 n. 29, 239, 253–4 Iliad 151, 159, 160, 161 Helen in 137, 138, 139, 142 illusion 104, 106, 107–9, 111, 192, 215 imaginary listener 224, 227, 229, 230, 232 (p.311) imaginary occasions/settings 6–9, 59, 67–8, 82, 89, 90, 112–13, 115–32, 166– 7, 180–3 immediacy 22, 89–91, 95, 128, 144, 145, 192, 219, 254–5 intentional stance 245, 246 intertextuality 15, 17–19, 22, 99, 120, 149, 160 and Alcaeus 17–18, 113, 120, 146–7, 148, 149 and Anacreon 250–1 and Archilochus 18, 194–8 and Homeric Hymns 182, 183 and Pindar 17, 18, 20, 110 n. 53, 193–8, 206, 208 and Sappho 17–18, 20, 120, 128, 146–9 Isocrates 137, 139 Jauss, Hans-Robert 76 Kahn, Laurence 174–5 κλέος 247, 251–2 κῶμος 184, 187–8 Kowalzig, Barbara 90, 91 Kurke, Leslie 253 Laird, Andrew 73, 75 Lardinois, Andrė 46, 55–6, 61 Latacz, Joachim 59–60 Page 7 of 14

 

General Index Latin (Roman) poetry 15, 17, 18, 20–1, 37, 68, 100 n. 20, 196, 258; see also Horace Latour, Bruno 82 Lesbos 21, 33, 76 n. 47, 81, 83 n. 65, 85 n. 74, 94, 129, 148, 149, 213, 217, 250–3; see also Mytilene Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 117–19 Levinas, Emanuel 262–3, 267 Liberman, Gauthier 74 Lidov, Joel 55 listening 9–10, 216, 225–33, 239, 245–6 acousmatic 220, 223, 226 metaliterarity 99, 104–5, 107, 108, 110 literary history 113, 160–1, 169–71, 207; see also intertextuality literature 4–5, 10–15, 94, 97, 99–104, 112–13, 171, 255 Longinus 264–5 Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 213–21 Lycophron 108 lyre ch. 8 passim lyric: as a genre 19–22, 119, 124 n. 9, 169–71, 255–6, 272–3 lyric genres 19, 20, 173–88 and hymns 21, 152, 163, 169–71, 173 Mace, Sarah 231 marginality 21–2, 45, 51, 54–7, 62 maritime poetry 8, 63–91 materiality 8, 18, 26 n. 43, 93–113 memory 19, 104–5, 140, 141, 145, 198 n. 28, 214, 218, 259, 263 mentalizing 235–56 Merkelbach, Reinhold 33 metaliterarity 99, 104–5, 107, 108, 110 metaphor 6–7, 24, 37 n. 17, 73, 78, 83 n. 65, 187, 231 in Alcaeus 85, 86, 87 n. 77 in Pindar 14, 37 n. 17, 110 n. 53, 196, 203 in Sappho 6–7, 37 n. 17 symposium at sea 64, 67–8, 90 see also allegory metapoetics 8 in Pindar Paean 9 18, 191, 193, 194, 200–6 mimesis 7, 9 n. 12, 66, 137–8, 167 n. 55, 193–203, 205–6, 254 n. 40, 272 Mimnermus 193, 201, 241 mind, lyric 235–56 of author 237, 243–52 of performer 237, 252–5 of speaker 237–43 mobility of lyric poetry 8, 115, 124, 132 modern lyric poetry 12, 31, 33, 237–8 Morrison, Andrew 247 Murray, Oswyn 101, 102 music 16, 23–4, 26, 194–5, 222, 227 and Echo 213–15, 216–18, 220, 221 and Homeric Hymn to Hermes 174, 177, 180, 182, 183–4 Page 8 of 14

 

General Index and Pindar Paean 9 18, 191, 194, 197–200, 204 n. 48, 208 in Sappho 51, 52, 53 see also dance; lyre; song Mytilene 8, 63, 69, 71, 76–8, 81, 84, 89, 103, 130 Narcissus 215, 220–1, 231 New Criticism 237, 244, 245, 253, 258, 271–2 (p.312) New Historicism 3, 79, 94 n. 6, 257 νῦν (‘now’) 43, 126, 144 Obbink, Dirk 45 occasion 9, 19–20, 22, 31, 32–3 and Alcaeus 82, 89 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 152, 162–3 imaginary 6–9, 180–3 and Sappho 38 n. 21, 46, 61 n. 79, 62 and texts 20, 33, 159 see also performance contexts, settings Olympia 181 n. 17, 196 ontology 232, 236, 259, 272, 274 opacity 16, 143 n. 38, 216, 254–5 opposition 8–9, 33, 116, 117, 119–20, 123–6 orality 2 n. 1, 60–1, 62 n. 80, 78, 80, 105, 218; see also song Orpheus 217 Osborne, Robin 109 Ovid 215, 220–1, 230 Page, Denys 75, 77, 79, 147 Pan 214–17, 220–5, 231–3 panhellenism 90–1, 165–6, 251, 269 paradox 144, 149, 242, 265 of Helen 136, 139, 142, 144 and Homeric Hymn to Hermes 173, 178–83, 185, 187 Paris 136, 138–9, 141–3, 147–8 Penelope 141, 143 Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia 5 performance 23–6, 78, 80, 252–3, 255–6, 259, 273–4 directions for 46–53, 54 hic et nunc (here and now) 22, 33, 35, 56, 88 n. 82, 103, 144, 149, 163, 224 and reading 15, 23, 61–2 and text 15, 18–19, 22, 33, 40, 46, 50–4, 60–2, 100 n. 20, 101, 144, 163, 173, 222, 224 see also performance, original; reperformance performance contexts 1, 2, 8, 63, 64, 66, 68, 75, 78–80, 89, 144, 171, 184 of Alcaeus 44–5, 66, 69, 75–7, 81, 89, 148 of Archilochus 7, 66–7, 68 of Homeric Hymns 151–2, 154, 162, 166, 171, 173, 180–3, 187 of Pindar 66, 161–2, 190, 198, 200, 208 of Sappho 7–8, 33–5, 37–8, 40, 46, 57–62, 66, 76 n. 47, 144 see also settings; symposium as performance context performance, original 7, 8, 40, 57, 79, 80, 115, 144, 171, 222, 228, 254, 257, 259 and Alcaeus 64, 66, 76, 77, 81, 84, 108 of Homeric Hymns 152, 156, 158, 162–5, 169, 180, 181 n. 17 and Pindar 153 n. 7, 161–2, 165 and Sappho 40, 46, 57, 81, 144 Page 9 of 14

 

General Index performer(s) 2, 4, 6, 18–19, 23, 25, 95, 105–6, 241, 244, 252–5 and author(s) 16, 25, 27, 102 n. 28, 237, 247, 253, 254 and the ‘I’ 16, 223, 243, 247, 252–6 and listeners 6, 16, 252, 254 multiple 179, 182 stage directions for 46–53 permanence, literary 152, 157, 158–9, 160, 163–4, 170 persona 15–16, 18, 237, 243 n. 14, 244, 258, 262 of Alcaeus 8, 18, 44–5, 105 n. 39, 111 n. 55, 112, 148 of Alcman 227–8 of Anacreon 16, 228–31 and δηὖτε poems 227–32 in Pindar Paean 9 191–2, 197 n. 25, 202, 203 of Sappho 18, 35, 141 n. 25, 142, 148 personality 56 n. 66, 155, 247 of Archilochus 241, 248–50 and Homeric texts 151–2, 156–7, 170 see also biographical tradition personification 184, 201, 203 phenomenology 15–19, 216, 225 philology 273 phonograph 217, 218 n. 10 Pindar 10, 14, 16, 20, 27, 79, 99, 152, 170, 187, 260 ambitions for poetry’s reception 159–62, 165–8, 247 n. 26 and Archilochus 18, 160–1, 194–8, 248–9, 251 and audience 10, 13, 192, 193–200, 202, 204–9 and authorship 155, 170, 205–6 (p.313) and the chorus 191 n. 5, 192, 198, 208 n. 60 and deixis 62 n. 80, 162 n. 41 epinicians of 14, 25, 66, 152, 160, 265–6, 268 and ethicality 12–13, 25, 197, 257–74 and event 10, 12–13, 189–209, 257–74 and Homer 17, 153, 157–8, 160, 161, 193 n. 10, 196 and intertextuality 17, 18, 20, 110 n. 53, 193–8, 206, 208 metaphor in 14, 37 n. 17, 110 n. 53, 196, 203 performance contexts of 66, 153 n. 7, 161–2, 165, 190, 198, 200, 208 and reperformance 161–2, 247 n. 26, 248–9 and self-consciousness 191, 192, 201 see also Index of Passages Discussed Plato 108, 142 pleasure 1, 84 n. 69, 159, 168, 262–3 Plutarch 71, 193 political context (politics) 11, 23–4, 81, 128 and Alcaeus 8, 44–5, 63, 69–72, 75–7, 83–5, 94–6, 103, 112–13 polyphony 18, 189–209 Pound, Ezra 261, 265 pragmatics 6, 9, 11, 26, ch. 1 passim, 100, 102, 162, 224, 228, 242 n. 11, 266; see also deixis praise poetry 61, 179, 183–5, 187–8, 248 present tense 59, 75, 116, 162, 192 n. 7, 258–9 Proust, Marcel 259 Page 10 of 14

 

General Index proverbs 108, 111–13 psychology of lyric encounter 25–6, 66, 235–56, 257 Pythia 186, 187 Quintilian 73 Ransom, John Crowe 272 reading 1–2, 9–10, 19, 61–2, 168, 223 n. 21, 244–5 and performance 15, 23, 61–2 surface reading 8, 64, 73, 78–9, 81–2, 89 reception 4, 13 n. 26, 15, 113, 124 n. 9, 152, 171, 244, 257–8 of Alcaeus’s poetry 106, 112, 113 of Archilochus’s poetry 194 of Homeric Hymn to Apollo 152, 154, 158, 162–3, 166–9 of Homeric poetry 154, 157–8, 160 n. 34 of Pindar’s poetry 159–62, 165–8, 190 n. 4, 247 n. 26 see also performance contexts; reperformance recorded sound 214, 216–20, 223, 232–3 reframability 11, 94–5, 96, 98, 104 n. 36 reperformance 7, 8, 19, 24, 78, 94 n. 5, 124 n. 9, 144, 223–5, 228, 246, 247 and Alcaeus 84, 104, 105–6, 112 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 159, 162–71 and Pindar 161–2, 247 n. 26, 248–9 and Sappho 57, 60, 144 repetition 199 n. 28, 225, 227, 228, 231 delayed 216, 218–21, 224, 226–8, 233 representation 95, 100, 216, 223–5 and Alcaeus 8, 95–6, 98, 103–12 reputation 154, 155, 156, 158, 249–50 rhetoric 97, 123, 143, 159, 160, 228, 261 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 152, 154–6, 163, 170 in Pindar 159–60, 197 n. 24, 203–6, 208 rhythm 11, 13, 26, 191 n. 6, 252 in Anacreon 14 in Archilochus 18, 195 in Pindar 17, 191, 198–200 Richardson, Nicholas 155, 156 Rilke, Rainer Maria 217 Roman (Latin) poetry 15, 17, 18, 20–1, 32, 68, 100 n. 20, 196, 258; see also Horace Romanticism 32–3, 243–4, 253 Rösler, Wolfgang 60, 76–7, 80, 101, 105 Roth, Joseph 116–17, 119 Rutherford, Ian 167, 190 Sappho 1–2, 12, 22, 26, ch. 1 passim, 170, 238–9, 241–2, 247, 250–2, 263 and Alcaeus 17–18, 113, 146–8, 149 alluded to by Anacreon 230, 251–2, 253 and the chorus 35 n. 11, 37 n. 17, 45, 46, 50, 55, 56 n. 66, 57, 61, 62 and eroticism 7, 61 n. 78, 141, 142, 144–5, 148, 226 n. 27, 230 n. 38 (p.314) and fictionality 7, 31–62, 66, 230 n. 38, 241–2, 263 Helen in 17, 22, 135–49 and Horace 113, 120, 128 Page 11 of 14

 

General Index and intertextuality 17–18, 20, 120, 128, 146–9 and marginality 21, 22, 45, 51, 54–7, 62 metaphor in 6–7, 37 n. 17 performance contexts of 7–8, 33–5, 37–8, 40, 46, 57–62, 66, 76 n. 47, 81, 144 persona of 18, 35, 141 n. 25, 142, 148 and reperformance 57, 60, 144 and song 35, 38, 40, 45–6, 48, 50–4, 56 see also Index of Passages Discussed Schaeffer, Pierre 220 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 31–2 self-consciousness: and Alcaeus 8, 11, 94, 96–8, 103–4, 106, 112 and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 21, 170 of listeners 192, 207, 209 and Pindar 191–2, 201 self, model of 237, 255–6 Semonides 241, 246, 252 settings 2, 23, 25, 98, 120 imaginary 6–9, 90, 180–3 and performance context 37, 66–7, 115, 163–6, 170–1, 181 see also performance contexts shared time 261–2, 268, 274 Sharon, Marcus 81–2 ‘ship-of-state’ poems: Alcaeus 8, 63–91 Theognis 74 simile 73, 78, 180, 184 Simonides 158, 170, 251 Slater, William 64, 67–8, 90 Snell, Bruno 243–4 sociopolitical readings 3, 4, 11, 23, 79, 112 Socrates 177 Solon 246, 247 song 3, 18–19, 63–4, 66–9, 79, 90–1, 93–4, 100, 105, 126 n. 12, 137–8, 216–17 and Sappho 35, 38, 40, 45–6, 48, 50–4, 56 song culture 3, 4, 63–4, 77–8, 80, 91, 93–4, 177, 215, 248 see also music σοφία 204, 205–6, 208 spatial contexts 8–9, 115, 123, 128–9, 132 speaker (narrator) 6, 15–16, 22, 26, 66, 95, 237–43, 247, 258, 272–3 in Alcaeus 8, 44, 66–7, 112, 125–6, 130, 241 in Anacreon 229, 241, 247–8, 250–1 in Archilochus 66–7, 197, 241 and audience 6, 8, 25, 49, 78, 191, 240, 254 and author 16, 191, 237, 254 fictionality of 95, 209, 227–8, 240, 262 n. 10, 265, 272–3 in Homer 151, 155 n. 19 in Homeric Hymns 21, 151–7, 166–7, 179 and performer 6, 16, 52, 59, 254 in Pindar 191, 192, 198, 204–5, 207, 209, 265 in Sappho 22, 35, 36, 45–6, 48–50, 52–6, 59–60, 143, 145, 239, 241–2, 251 Page 12 of 14

 

General Index and text(s) 16, 52, 153, 241 trust in 25, 237, 241–3, 256 see also ‘I’, persona statement-subjects 15–16, 258 Stehle, Eva 46, 60, 252 Stesichorus 177, 193, 206 storms 65 n. 4, 70, 71, 75, 83–4, 86–7, 90, 117, 119–20 structure 9, 119, 192, 198–200 deep structures 9, 123, 132 subjectivity 1–2, 24, 95, 100, 112, 148, 158, 209 n. 61, 232 of ‘I’ (narrator) 222, 224 ‘intersubjectivity’ 143 of listener 218 n. 10, 220, 222 transforming 11–12, 25, 98, 108–9, 111, 220 surface reading 8, 64, 73, 78–9, 81–2, 89 symbolism 6–7, 24, 63, 68, 71–3, 77–8, 80, 82, 102 n. 28, 109, 183; see also allegory; metaphor symposium as performance context 3, 4, 9, 16, 46, 62, 68, 90–1, 93–4, 96–7, 100–2, 105, 107–9, 112–13, 177, 184, 223–4, 253–4 (p.315) and Alcaeus 8, 76, 77, 80, 89–90, 93–4, 96–7, 100–1, 104 n. 36, 106, 108– 11, 112–13, 127 and Anacreon 253, 254 and Archilochus 66–7, 68, 194 and Homeric Hymns 20, 180–1, 183, 187 and Pindar 66, 165 and Sappho 35 n. 11, 38, 56 symposium at sea 64, 67–8, 90 synecdoche 138, 144, 149 temporality 18–19, 258–9 text(s) 12, 171 mind(s) projected by 237–43 and occasion 20, 33, 159 and performance 15, 18–19, 22, 33, 40, 46, 50–4, 60–1, 62, 100 n. 20, 101, 144, 163, 173, 222, 224 see also written text Thaletas of Gortyn 194–5, 197 Thebes 190, 203, 208 Theognis 16, 22, 74, 170, 177, 239, 241 theogony 177–8 Homeric Hymn to Hermes as 176, 183, 186, 187 Theogony (Hesiod) 181 n. 17, 183, 187 Theophrastus 71 ‘Theory of Mind’ 13, 236 Thucydides 153 Timaeus of Taurominium 68 time: fictional 259, 260 shared 261–2, 268, 274 tone 41, 74 n. 36, 191, 197–8, 203–4, 226 n. 27, 231 tragedy 6 n. 9, 79, 81, 82 n. 65, 124 n. 9; see also drama transformative nature of lyric 12–13, 98, 222–3 Page 13 of 14

 

General Index transparency 25–6, 256 tropes 20, 22, 73, 97, 230 trust 25, 26, 237, 240–3, 256, 269 truth 25, 95 n. 7, 108, 110, 111, 143–5, 149, 241–3, 273 Tucker, Herbert 95, 96 Twombly, Cy 263, 265 Tzetzes, John 108 uniqueness 22, 24–5, 76, 82, 89 universality 22, 143–5, 149 vase paintings 108–9, 251 Vergados, Athanassios 180 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 175 voice 15–16, 94 n. 5, 95, 98, 209 n. 61, 254 acousmatic 219–21, 224, 228, 232 and Alcaeus 96, 99, 104 n. 36, 106–7, 111–12 in Pindar Paean 9 191, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 208 vertical layering of 237, 253–4 see also ‘I’ wedding songs 19, 20, 50, 61 West, M. L. 64 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 73 Williamson, Margaret 140 wine 37, 80 n. 57, 109, 127 and Alcaeus 65, 108–11, 120, 122–3 Wohl, Victoria 79 Wordsworth, William 259 written text 12, 15, 46, 60–2, 158 n. 28, 223; see also text(s) Xenophon 142 Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios 111–12 Zeitlin, Froma I. 215 Zeuxis (painter) 135 Žižek, Slavoj 266, 271 Zunshine, Lisa 254

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