The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  —uu—uu—uu—uu—uu—u

  Queen Elizabeth I in an experimental spirit composed an English hexameter which was also a diminutive essay on the movement and tone of Latin verse:

  Persius a crab-staff, bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine wag.

  Also from Ionia emanated early examples of iambic and elegiac poetry. Iambic poems were composed generally in trimeter: a template for dialogue in dramatic verse. Other iambic poems are in a trochaic tetrameter catalectic—

  —u—u—u—u—u—u—u

  —used for comic and popular verse.30 Archilochus first practised both forms, and another iambic form which alternates long and short, primarily iambic or dactylic, lines. The lyric forms of Lesbos, i.e., Sapphics and Alcaics, are considered; the choral forms of Sparta, to which Alcman decisively contributed. Boeotia produced Hesiod, whose prosodic similarities to Homer are belied by his themes and forms. Later poets could choose dialect elements which had generic or prosodic overtones. The choice of diction itself became a means of allusion.

  The high classic period of Greek literature, between 480 and 400 BC, was dominated by the dramatists Aeschylus, 525–456 BC, Sophocles, 496–406 BC, and Euripides, 484–406 BC. Writing for the speaking and chanting voice, they combine the lessons of earlier poets, from the subtle and lucid plotting and formal dialogue of the Homeric poems to the kinds of speech and recitation that the lyric developed. The tragedians were less innovators than appropriators. The success of the Athenian drama overshadows other, in some respects more original, achievements in the wide world of Greek poetry, not least the epinicean tradition crowned by Pindar.

  When Greek became a diaspora culture, poetry—that most portable of arts—re-emerged, but under a new aspect, with different strategies and objectives from those which came to a climax in the work of Pindar. Hellenistic culture was of necessity a culture of the book. It could not count on a popular audience: the age of the reader had arrived, and a poet was often a man speaking to a man, not to men. Readers of Greek poetry constituted an élite, as in the Middle Ages readers of Latin did. Poetry became more sophisticated, allusive, an insider’s art, no longer for the street market. A poet established the legitimacy of his work, validated it, as it were, through allusion, imitation, parody. An inherently conservative art became, culturally and even politically, more so.

  When Callimachus writes a Homeric hymn and continually attests to precedent, when he revives the archaic in a deliberate, arch, knowing way, he epitomises the new poetry at its most recondite. Straight formal imitations, for example Apollonius’ attempt to write a Homeric poem, were absurd to his rival Callimachus; and to us, however beguiling the detail. Certain kinds of poetry became no longer viable. The space in which the imagination is free to roam is vast; its very scope hems the poet in. Greece is now memory and fiction, and the poetry that is written writes back into a culture that is, to use Roberto Calasso’s term, uprooted, like the gods whose powers fade as they are carted off from their landscapes and dialects and universalised.

  III A SYNTHETIC LANGUAGE

  For Anglophone readers, the hardest thing to come to terms with in ancient Greek poetry is the prosody, specifically what is meant when we are told that it is not accent or stress but syllable length and quantity that determine metre.

  One of the first things a reader-aloud of early Greek lyric poetry will notice is how long Greek words can grow. Greek is a synthetic language, with declensions and a profusion of prefixes, suffixes, infixes. With almost weightless particles, poets sing long, light lines with great economy; the English translator must generally render this down to shorter words, lines with fewer syllables. There is no easy equivalence between the sound qualities of both languages. The apparent ease of the early Greek lyrics is the result of another quality: how richly vocalic the language can be, a modulation of vowel tones with a sparing punctuation of consonants, lines ideal for singing. And Greek itself is vowel-rich; English tends to be more consonantal.

  Translators note how differently the rhythmic patternings of Greek and English move. The natural rhythms of Greek tend “downward,” falling; emphases gather towards the beginnings of feet and lines. English naturally rises to points of emphasis and closure. There are elements, too, which only experts register: ancient Greek verse had an accent that does not affect the metrical pattern but does affect the sound, and the sense, of what is sung, namely pitch.31 Michael Grant writes, “The accent on ancient Greek words was related to musical tone or pitch, but the relation between pitch and stress is obscure; the accented syllable of a word often seems to have been pitched higher than those that are unaccented. The pitch of the language was seen to relate it closely to music.”32

  The crucial difference between the prosodies is that ancient Greek verse is quantitative, English accentual. Elizabethan and later attempts to write a quantitative English verse have underlined an irreconcilable difference of sound, of the possibilities of natural melodic patterning inherent in the two languages. W. H. Auden, a great prosodist, noted this linguistic otherness: concentrating less on lyric than epic and dramatic verse, he drew attention to the experiments of another great prosodist, Robert Bridges, who attempted to render part of Book XXIV of the Iliad into English quantitative verse, declaring, “The translation is line for line in the original metre.”33 Here is a short specimen:

  And from th’ old king’s seizure his own hand gently disengaged, And each brooded apart; Priam o’er victorious Hector Groan’d, low fal’n to the ground unnerved at feet of Achilles, Who sat mourning awhile his sire, then turn’d to bewailing Patroclus, while loudly the house with their sobbing outrang.

  Auden chuckles at this vain experiment. “But no one can read this except as qualitative meter of an eccentric kind, and eccentricity is a very un-Homeric characteristic.” But how vain is Bridges’ attempt to render the otherness of the Greek in sound and in strange but strangely apposite diction? The words that stand out as odd lexically, “seizure,” “unnerved,” “outrang,” tie this incident into the continuum of the narrative; the word order itself is intended to deliver the sense in the same pattern as it comes to us in the Greek. A modern bias is to make Homer sound quite colloquial, and this approach in itself yields “a very un-Homeric characteristic.” Translations which purge the poem of its linguistic difference are more readable, but not more true.

  The task Bridges set himself was impossible because in Greek, as an inflected language, the word order is not so crucial as it is in English. Auden describes the difference in poetic sensibility between modern English and Homeric Greek in unsatisfactory terms: “Compared with English poetry Greek poetry is primitive, i.e. the emotions and subjects it treats are simpler and more direct than ours while, on the other hand, the manner of language tends to be more involved and complex.” The term “primitive” is so incorrect here, especially in the light of what he says about the language, as to produce a senseless paradox. “Primitive poetry,” he continues, “says simple things in a roundabout way where modern poetry tries to say complicated things straightforwardly.” Is the Iliad periphrastic in expression? No: it is hard to think of any poem in which expression is more economical, direct, swift, summary or characteristic. Auden’s conclusion, however, is quite correct: “The continuous efforts of English poets in every generation to rediscover ‘a language really used by men’ would have been incomprehensible to a Greek.”34 Less incomprehensible to them, perhaps, than the very English Renaissance attempt to create quantitative prosodies in English is to us, an attempt which persisted from the classicising age of Edmund Spenser right up to the twentieth century and Robert Bridges.

  When we get to Greek drama, Auden’s argument is more helpful. Dramatic dialogue is often riddling, ornamented and ornamental, anything but natural, and in general it renders an awkward English translation. This is true of the epinicean tradition and its aftermath as well.

  Greek metre is a complex business. It requires an understanding of the Greek language. In fact, as soon as we
begin to consider metre we realise that there is no such thing among the early Greek poets as a standard Greek language. There is a variety of dialects, and this is one reason it was always considered important to give a poet, almost as a patronymic, his or her town of origin, and why Didymus’ pedantries in seeking the actual birthplaces of poets may have had some editorial and prosodic use. Origin carried not only ethnic, cultural and political but also dialect information in it. In the eighth century BC, certain differentiated strands existed which, in diminishing degrees, persisted right up to the fourth century. Ionian, Aeolic, Dorian, the mainland Greeks of the north-west, the Arcadian, Attic and Boeotian groups spoke and composed in different ways; different metres originate within specific dialects and answer to them. There is no single “original Greek” but a series of equal variations (isoglosses, equal versions, not the Bakhtinian diglossia, where there is a standard form against which a dialect plays).35

  The best modern account is to be found in Martin Litchfield West’s Greek Metre (Oxford, 1982). West is succinct and deploys the technical vocabulary with precision, establishing the origins of quantitative prosody far back in Indo-European traditions. He also provides a useful glossary of terms. But West’s study is not for the beginner.

  Michael Grant’s summary approach to Greek metre in The Rise of the Greeks (1987) provides a more useful starting point. “The ‘foot’ is derived,” he says, “from the dance with which Greek poetry was intimately connected.” The foot is defined by a patterning “of long and short syllables, i.e. possessed a quantitative rhythm (in contrast to the stress accent of our own poetry, in which syllables are not long or short, but stressed or unstressed).” He emphasises the flexibility and versatility of quantitative prosodies. “The dactyl-spondee variation of the Greek hexameter means that it can contain between twelve and seventeen syllables, thus achieving a length and complexity that are unusual in the heroic verse of other literatures.”36

  When we mime iambic feet in English we say, teTUM teTUM teTUM. In Greek we would say shortlooong shortlooong shortlooong. Shortness and length, not unstress and stress, determine the quantitative base of the foot. We can think of it as duration in time rather than emphasis in relation to neighbouring syllables. The shortness and length are functions of the vowels in specific positions in terms of one another and to the consonants that make up the words. Such prosody belongs in the province of a music without percussion.

  To hear the verse as it was intended to sound we should familiarise ourselves with its accompaniments, music and dance. These were already only half-remembered in Hellenistic times; our ignorance, shared with Alexandrians, is only a matter of degree. Musical notation hardly survives at all, though we know the instruments. Like the verse, the music used a range of scales and modes “which differed from one another in the sequence of their intervals and probably in the range of their tones. The Greeks invested each mode with its own distinctive emotional and moral associations.”37 The modes pertained initially to an area of origin (Phrygian, Lydian, Lesbian, Dorian, Ionian, and so on) and were related to specific prosodies. When we imagine this early music, we should not imagine harmonies.

  IV OTHERNESS

  “Why did the whole Greek world exult over the combat scenes in the Iliad?” asks Friedrich Nietzsche. We modern readers do not even begin to understand them “in a sufficiently ‘Greek’ manner.” If we understood them in Greek, “we should shudder.” Nietzsche does not mean in the Greek language but in the Greek spirit. Whoever reads the Iliad, Hesiod’s merciless Theogony, Archilochus at his most vindictive, savage Hipponax and others has to come to terms with the profound “otherness” of one of the very traditions which lies at the root of ours. “When one speaks of humanity,” Nietzsche says,

  the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation. Thus the Greeks, the most humane men of ancient times, have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate—a trait that is also very distinct in that grotesquely enlarged mirror image of the Hellenes, in Alexander the Great, but that really must strike fear into our hearts throughout their whole history and mythology, if we approach them with the flabby concept of modern “humanity.” When Alexander has the feet of Batis, the brave defender of Gaza, pierced, and ties him, alive, to his carriage, to drag him about while his soldiers mock, that is a revolting caricature of Achilles.38

  Alexander re-enacted, with deliberation and conceit, what Achilles, after ten years’ deprivation and struggle, had done instinctively. And in the end Alexander did not hand Batis’ body back to Gaza’s Priam but left it as carrion. Alexander’s crude literary gesture is out of key with Homer’s compelling impartiality, an impartiality determined by the ways in which the poems were composed and transmitted. Alexander is a theoretical reader: an idealist, he understands the Iliad as exemplary and is keen to invest himself in the narrative. An idealist can, at crucial moments, blur categories, appropriate, vulgarise.

  Before we begin seriously reading Greek poetry, Nietzsche urges, we need to exercise and strengthen our concept of humanity; we have to be prepared to recognise a cultural difference so basic that we cannot assimilate it to our own ends. We seek not distance, objective detachment, but engagement that leads to illumination, a self-effacement that yields understanding. Nietzsche is right, but he does not make enough of the formal otherness of Greek poetry—its origins, its prosody, its forms—especially when it comes to Homer and Hesiod. W. H. Auden, too, insists upon the distance between Greek culture and our own, without focusing on formal issues beyond Pindar’s obscure poetics.

  Archaic and classical Greek poetry concentrate on male experience. Sappho is a vigorous, Corinna a frail, exception. Homer’s female figures, apart from his goddesses and sorceresses, are compelling and credible but they move in restricted spaces. Hesiod introduces a strain of misogyny that marks much of the classical tradition. It is not until the Hellenistic phase, and Alexandria in particular, that female experience is given substantial imaginative space, but the poets who clear that space remain male.

  Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt declare that at the heart of early Greek approaches to the world is the individual agon or contest, the desire to prevail. Competition, battle and trial, besting and revenge, keeping face, retaining divine support are compelling male motives. Both men saw the city-state and, paradoxically, the emergence of Athenian democracy as, in the end, culturally and morally destructive. Delphi was the ultimate museum of “Greek hatred for Greeks, of mutually inflicted suffering immortalised in the loftiest works of art.”39 Other critics are less comfortable with this given in Greek and other cultures. The American poet Eleanor Wilner speaks of “the historical horrors attendant on heroising male rage,” and Donald Davie applies this to the two key books, the Iliad and the Psalms of David: “And the darker the deed, the brighter the fiction it has generated, the worst atrocities requiring nothing less than divine sanction.”40 It is in this spirit that Alexander marks his conquest of Gaza.

  Over the Psalms hovers the vindictive figure of Jehovah. A whole society of gods surveys the bloody Trojan plain. Something has happened already, even at the time of Homer, to the realm of the divine. It has become infected with human motive. “Uprooted from their soil,” says the Italian writer Roberto Calasso, “and exposed, in the vibration of the word, to the harsh light of day, [the gods] frequently seemed idle and impudent. Everything ends up as history of literature!”41 His metaphor is apt: the movement from unanalytical apprehension and “worship” to spoken, liturgised and written belief, from a transcendence taken, unquestioningly, as given to a transcendence described and asserted, is a movement towards abstraction, from first to second hand. When the gods were rooted in place, in natural phenomena, they had their own specific potencies. Transported, generalised, carried about on litters, depicted in ever more sophisticated ways, they lose power; they become mere figures. The worshipper, the priest or the poet can dress and und
ress them, ceremonially wash them in the stream, grant them deeds, loves and losses. The narratives that surround them are adaptations of human narratives, their lusts and desires are all too human. They lose their otherness and with it their power.

  The more accomplished poetry is, the more it manages to re-infuse linguistic abstraction with material presence or, rather, with a sense of material presence. In a poem that works, that presence is changed. It is rendered categorically. Characteristic rather than particular, it is given a general character like a template: each reader can invest it with his or her sense of the objects named.

  Even in Homer’s poems the gods were harder to see and appeared in their own form on earth less frequently than in more ancient texts. And if we believe the Odyssey, they “do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeîs],” Calasso writes. Enargeîs is the technical term “for divine epiphany: a word that contains the dazzle of ‘white,’ argós, but which comes to designate a pure, unquestionable ‘conspicuous-ness.’” This “conspicuous-ness,” he adds, “will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.” Achieved poetry paints with at least one colour which can be found nowhere else. Calasso has a notion of poetry as a language of presence, not unlike George Steiner’s “real presence,” but less charged with transcendence. The “real” in Homer is material; language and the things it names exist in a rare harmony. As classical poetry develops, the gods continue to recede: those that we meet in Apollonius are feeble and enervated beside those in the Iliad and Odyssey. When it reaches Alexandria, poetry comes in out of the sun, retires to the library, becomes one with its medium, language. And so it survives in a world where the vulgar tongue is not Greek.