The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Plato’s judgement of Love is generous and unoriginal. In Greek poetry its roots go back at least as far as Hesiod. Love sustains the world: a kind of natural magnetism, it draws together similar elements into the forms of things and beings, and then reconciles them with one another into the tense and volatile harmony which is manifest as Nature. What Plato says of Orpheus is out of keeping with his generous theory: it is dictated by a distrust of the “harper’s” vocation as much as by a proper weighing of the evidence, to which he is much closer than we are. Most accounts of Orpheus present a very different, and usually a heartbreaking, picture. Eurydice died; with his subtle power as a singer and musician he went after, a living man among the dead, to retrieve her; he succeeded against all the odds, and then she died again.

  From the intensity of his second grief, this time irrevocable, we can infer that he had a kind of conversion or (a more appropriate term) a metamorphosis. His own form changed. Wandering along the banks of the Strymon, plaintive and alone, he decided to leave the social world behind, he abandoned women for ever, preferring to haunt the valleys and crags playing to fauna and flora, enchanting them and eventually the men-folk of the Thracian hamlets, who left their hearths and wives and followed him. Some say that he invented, or discovered, homosexual love. Ovid evokes this charmingly.16 When he loses Eurydice, no other woman can take her place; he lavishes affection on boys (what Victorian critics coyly refer to as “puerile love”) and enjoys the “brief spring and early flowering of their youth.” Ovid describes him as “the first to introduce this custom among the people of Thrace.”

  This is how it was: when he sat on a hill and played in the glaring sun, the trees moved close to shade him, becoming creaturely; so too he had reanimated ghosts and breathed souls into beasts, or found them there. Oaks and poplars groved abouthim, and the limes and beeches, the laurel that had been Daphne, the ashes and hazels and firs; there was fruit on them, and acorns; there was maple, and willow straining uphill from the river. Sycamores too, and the lotus and box and tamarisk, myrtles and the blue-black-berried viburnum. And the vines sent out long arms to the first poet; elms, mountain ash, palm trees and the pine that had been Attis and was now dear to the goddess Cybele. And the cypress, which was once a boy but whom Apollo changed to a tree: he came too. Into the trees flew birds. Orpheus sang of love: not love of the gods, but of kind, and perhaps of illicit love.

  Women were strictly excluded from his concerts. Roused into an orgiastic frenzy of revenge, not only by exclusion but by their husbands’ desertion, during a Dionysian festival they apprehended the poet, tore him literally to bits (Plato takes ironic pleasure in this), and threw his body into the sea. These women are variously portrayed as Maenads (mad women, votaries of Dionysus), Bacchants, Bassarids. The tearing apart was a ritual sparagmós, or sacrifice, of the very kind that Orphism as a religion came to oppose. What happened to the poet’s body after that time is uncertain, though there are legends worth considering.

  Ovid tells how the Ciconian women drowned out Orpheus’ song with their cries and broke its magic charm. Then they killed him and they killed the creatures he had charmed. They seized farming implements and hacked him to bits. Vases from as early as the fifth century BC show Orpheus being set upon by women with terrible weapons: rocks and spears and what look like lethal carpet-beaters; Orpheus raises his frail lyre above his head in vain self-defence. The Hebrus swallowed his lyre and his singing head; the lyre kept playing and the dead lips sang. The head was washed up on Lesbos, near Methymna. Milton in “Lycidas” recalls the story:

  What could the Muse herself17 that Orpheus bore,

  The Muse herself, for her enchanting son

  Whom universal nature did lament,

  When by the rout that made the hideous roar

  His gory visage down the stream was sent,

  Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?18

  In Lesbos the head was attacked by a snake, but Phoebus stopped the snake’s assault by turning it to stone and the head was at last buried. Its presence in Lesbos made the island particularly fertile in poets and writers.

  The lyre, Apollo’s gift, had an interesting after-history, too. It was hung in Apollo’s temple and remained there for many years. Eventually Neanthus, the unsubtle son of the tyrant Pitticus, bribed a priest and got hold of the lyre because he had heard that it drew trees and beasts together with its harmonies. Like many a later singer, he confused the instrument with the art and tried to take a short-cut. He took the lyre, leaving a forgery in its place. He knew it was risky to remain in the city with his trophy, so he fled, concealing the harp in his cloak. Once in the unpeopled countryside he began to play—badly, because he had no skill, though he delighted himself and imagined that he was Orpheus’ heir. But he too was destined to be torn to pieces, by dogs whose siesta his dissonances had disturbed.19

  The women of Thrace Dionysus cruelly and justly turned to trees; their toes took root and with desperate helplessness they watched their calves and thighs grow thick and rough with bark. No music would ever ease them back to human form.20 So it was that Dionysus and Apollo both collaborated in making amends for the death of Orpheus, an unusual and highly significant reconciliation between opposing divinities.

  There are many other versions of his death: that he committed suicide,21 that Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt,22 that he was killed by people who disliked his teachings. But the women of Thrace are the most common explanation, and tradition had it that Thracian men beat their wives to continue the punishment for Orpheus’ murder. But they continued to hate his teachings. Some say he was around sixty-three years old when he met his death; others calculate two hundred and seventy. Since he was a hero, the second number should not be ruled out: heroes stretch the possible and the plausible.

  His body was buried by the Muses, though precisely where is uncertain. Legend favours a spot near Mount Olympus. Pausanias sets the original tomb in the town of Libethra on the side of the mountain. But a frightening story attaches to that tomb. It is from Pausanias that we learn of the curse of Orpheus’ bones.23 “The Libethrans received a message from Dionysus through an oracle in Thrace,” he tells us, “that when the sun saw the bones of Orpheus the city of Libethra would be rooted up by a wild boar. They took little notice of the prophecy, thinking a wild beast could not be big and strong enough to capture the city …” It is unwise ever to make light of an oracle. “When the god thought fit, this is what happened to them. A shepherd was lying against Orpheus’ grave during the middle of the day, and he fell asleep: in his sleep he sang the poems of Orpheus in a loud, sweet voice. Of course everyone watching their flocks close by, and even ploughmen, abandoned work and crowded to hear the shepherd singing in his sleep. They shoved and pressed to get closer to him and they overturned the pillar. The urn fell and smashed and the sun saw what was left of the bone of Orpheus. At once the very next night the god poured down water out of heaven, and the river Boar, which is one of the winter streams of Olympus, broke the walls of Libethra, overturned the sanctuaries of the gods and the houses of men, and drowned the people and every living thing in the city, all alike.” Then the Macedonians of Dion took the bones of Orpheus to their country. To have famous bones in a city was a sure way of attracting religious tourists, just as the bones of a saint enriched remote towns in the Middle Ages.

  Most ancient Greeks would have agreed that Orpheus was born in Thrace, though a few dissented and claimed him for the area around Mount Olympus, between Thessaly and Macedonia, where his bones ended up. He flourished in the heroic age, a generation or two before Troy. There is agreement that he travelled with the Argonauts in pursuit of the Golden Fleece. In this story he plays first and only fiddle, as it were (he is the poet in residence), though he is not the main focus of the poem. On the journey Orpheus mixes with forty-nine other great heroes including Jason and, for part of the journey, Heracles himself, against whom the poet may have borne a grudge, given the death of Linos. Also of the
party, coming from Sparta, were the Dioscuri—Zeus’s twin sons by Leda, Helen’s brothers, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux)—and Hermes’ sons Erytos and Echion, and their brother Aithalides; and the brothers Clytios and Iphitos, “lords of Oichalia.” Heroes often came in pairs. Each hero is given a geographical provenance, which, as we shall see when we reach the third century BC, was one purpose of a poem: to provide heroic ancestors for ruling families and to flatter patrons and payers.

  In the third century, the librarian-poet Apollonius of Rhodes retells the tale most famously in the Argonautica or The Voyage of the Argo. He gives Orpheus pride of place, introducing him before all the other heroes.

  First in our record be Orpheus, whom famous Calliope,

  after bedding Thracian Oeagrus, bore, they tell us,

  hard by Pimpleia’s high rocky lookout: Orpheus,

  who’s said to have charmed unshiftable upland boulders

  and the flow of rivers with the sound of his music.

  Wild oaks still form a memorial to that singing:

  on the Thracian shore they flourish, marching in order,

  dense-packed, just as Orpheus long ago bewitched them

  with the sound of his lyre, brought them down from Pieria …24

  Orpheus is the heroic chronicler of the journey: one office of poets is to keep the minutes of meetings. When, before the Argo sets out, Idas taunts Jason and priestly Idmon with cowardice, Orpheus steps in and sings a sort of Hesiodic theogony.25 Orpheus, as the ship sets out on its journey, is cox, his rhythm determining the pace of the oarsmen.26 He also plays a key role whenever loud or magical sounds are needed, or a prayer or ritual song. Such tasks also fell to poets. Thus when dawn is breaking and the Argo is entering the harbour of Thynias, a barren island, and the exhausted sailors tumble ashore full of grief,

  … there appeared before them Apollo, Leto’s

  son, on his way back from Lykia to the swarming

  Hyperboreans; and golden, framing either cheek,

  the clustering curls outfloated as he strode.

  His left hand grasped a silver bow, and about his shoulders

  was slung a quiver of arrows, to hang at his back. His footsteps

  shook the whole island. Shock waves surged up the shore.

  No one doubts the vision, but the crew—heroic as it is—does not know how to respond to this appearance of its great patron.

  When they saw him, helpless terror gripped them: not a single

  man dared look straight into the god’s magnificent eyes,

  but they all stood staring groundward as he dwindled

  airborne into the distance, out over the sea.27

  Orpheus restores their courage by providing a language in which to commemorate and invoke him. First they must sanctify the island, naming it after “Dawntime Apollo,” since at dawn he had shown himself. They must build an altar and make sacrifice; and should the Argo return to Thessaly in one piece, they must promise a much greater sacrifice, with libations and this prayer: “Be gracious, O Lord, be gracious, you who were manifest to us.”

  The crew obeys, and when the altar is complete and the sacrifice has been offered, Orpheus accompanies their chanting on his Thracian lyre, until his voice emerges singly from the chorus, telling an ancient story:

  of how once, below Parnassus’ rocky scarp, Apollo,

  while still a beardless youth, rejoicing in his tresses,

  slew with his bow the monstrous beast Delphynes …28

  The mountain nymphs cheer him as he sings, calling him “healer,” a word which becomes Orpheus’ epithet. His words are fraught with a unique power and magic.

  Orpheus sings. He sings at the ill-fated marriage of Jason and Medea; he sings to distract his shipmates from the irresistible lure of the Sirens onto the rocks; he sings to conjure water from the Hesperides.

  The voyage of the Argo and the adventures of Jason and his crew were common knowledge to the heroes of Troy. Homer takes it for granted that his audience will know them, and alludes casually to the stories. The Argonauts were the first heroes; their adventures defined types of heroism, the mystery of journeys beyond the edges of known maps and the known world, from the Aegean to the Propontis to the Black Sea and then past coasts that even modern cartographers have not rediscovered, along the edge of Ocean, and back into the Sea of Sardinia, the Ausonian and Libyan Seas, the Ionian Gulf, until at last the ship returned to Pagasai and Iolkos, south of Mounts Olympus and Ossa, due west of Pelion.

  Orpheus, whose birth, life and death were claimed by many places (he may have lived beside the Hellespont, in the land of Cicones, in western Thrace near the rivers Axius [Vardar] and Strymon [Struma]),29 saw the whole of the known world and much of the world that remains unknown—not only the kingdom of the dead, but the East, which, pursued to its extreme, becomes the West. In his fantastic adventures, the world was very nearly round.

  The Argonautica tells us much about the psychology of Jason and his gutsy bride, Medea; but of the other characters we gain glimpses at best, vivid but, like still photographs, we cannot splice them together into a moving image of a man in his day-to-day life or in his creative rapture—if it was rapture. Did Orpheus write his poems and commit them to memory? Or like his successor Homer, did he “write” with his voice on the white hearing of an audience? Since the only surviving Orphic poems are forgeries—are probably forgeries—this is a question we cannot answer. It seems unlikely that there would have been much space on the Argo for writing materials and parchments, however; and the maritime conditions would have been hostile to the survival of parchment and very hostile to papyrus.

  Poems attributed to Orpheus were common in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Much later, Pausanias writes: “Anyone who has already made a serious study of poetry knows the hymns of Orpheus are all extremely short, and even if they take them together not numerous. The Lykomidai know them and sing them at their mysteries. These beautiful verses are second only to the hymns of Homer, and even more honoured by the gods.”30 Pausanias’ judgement of the poems is not generally corroborated. They were of dubious value because of the hermetic religious applications to which they were put. They came as close as anything in Greek literature to scripture; “Hieros Logos” is the title of the chief of the poems: “the sacred story.” Scripture always seems to remove itself from literary evaluation, at least until belief is in retreat. Perhaps, too (we can judge only their absence, but that may tell us something), they were not very good as poetry, like the poorer hymns that congregations sing in church and are moved by because they know them by heart. Plato was familiar with them, quoting and alluding to them from time to time. Euripides slightingly refers to Orpheus’ writings in the Hippolytus, and the chorus in Alcestis longs for sanides, for remedy: “no charm of Thracian tablets which tuneful Orpheus carved out.” Heracleidos of Pontus says that on Mount Haimon tablets exist with the writings of Orpheus carved on them.

  This is more Orpheus as healer, mystic and magical fixer than poet. He is seen as founder of religious mysteries. Even Horace calls him sacer inter-presque deorum, priest and interpreter of the gods, not a poet in the sense that Homer or Hesiod is. Yet when it came to the bookshop, he was there among the rest of them. Alexis,31 the fourth-century comic poet, “describes a representative pile of books: ‘Come and choose any book you like from here … There is Orpheus, Hesiod, tragedies, Choirilos, Homer, Epicharmis’ (Athen. 4 164).”32

  In considering Orpheus, we cannot ignore Orphism altogether. It does flow from his real or imagined character and words. The first, most important element in all manifestations of Orphism is that it affirms the individual soul, and implicitly the individual conscience and will. Its rituals may be collective, but the consequences of them, of the purifications, the transformations, are strictly individual. Orphism evolves and changes, a reform movement, promising a defined kind of individually tailored salvation to Greeks whose experience of the city and of tradition was communal.33 In Orphism the no
tion of the person takes shape, and it is this perception that touches Pindar in his celebration of the individual athlete and Plato in his exploration of the ways of the human mind.

  There seem to have been as many forms of Orphism as there are of Islam and Christianity. Even a general account of the “beliefs” that define Orphism will be partial. In some ways the thrust of the religion is anti-Dionysian, seeking to channel ceremonial excesses into forms and rituals effective and transcendent; Orpheus preaches, or his followers do, not a new but a modified religion. His mystical interest in Apollo, and Apollo’s manifest interest in him, make him a point of synthesis between opposing cults. To the Thracian, before the time of Homer, he seems to promise something eastern: the human soul as immortal and divine, and immortality to be achieved by acts of will—discipline, ritual and moral purity. He spiritualises the primitively pagan, he channels primal energies into ceremonial and creative forms.

  It is hard to summarise the underlying theology of Orphism. The seemingly abstract “principle” of Time is at the origin of all things. Time formed an egg. The gods emerged from it. Zeus and Persephone conceived a son, Dionysus-Zagreus, who was torn to pieces by Titans who, in a bloody sacrament, devoured his limbs. Athena brought his heart to Zeus, and from the heart emerged the new Dionysus. With his lightning bolts Zeus incinerated the Titans. From their ashes, or the smoke that rose from their pyre, man was formed. The ashes and smoke, and therefore man himself, possess traces of soul because of Dionysus-Zagreus, consumed and digested into the Titans’ physical bodies. Thus man is residually divine, though given the rest of the ash and smoke, largely an enemy of the divine, as the Titans were.