The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Some versions of Orphism teach transmigration of souls, retribution in future life, and the eventual release of man from his Titanic legacy if he observes strict purity in action, diet and ritual. Among the earliest surviving evidence of Orphic practice in the fifth century BC is Herodotus’ reference to a prejudice against introducing wool items into temples or burials and against eating animal flesh. Human and other blood sacrifices were also proscribed.

  Aspects of Orphism remind us of Christian doctrines and heresies. Sacrifice and transformation are at its heart. Manicheism, formulated in the third century AD and proposing the co-eternity of Satan with God, is uncannily Orphic in several ways. It is not surprising that it was in the early Christian era that the Orphic texts which survive were collected and, perhaps, composed, though Orphism itself probably came into its own in the sixth century BC and had become a sect and set of superstitions a century later.

  Pausanias reports that there were statues and images of Orpheus all over Greece. Plutarch speaks of a xoanon34 of Orpheus in Macedonia made of cypress-wood. A xoanon was often placed in inaccessible, even hidden, places, an idol not for worship but for the god or demi-god himself; magical in intention, it was not meant to be seen but to do something.

  Orpheus the man, the god, giver of the Promethean gift of selfhood; and Orpheus the false god, enemy of the city, destroyer of pleasure in the here-and-now, thwarter of natural instinct, perverter of the natural order, breaker of taboos … How can there be such confusion, disagreement, such belief and disbelief, around one figure? It is in large part a problem of transmission. Orpheus: the name itself imparts authority because he is the hero with the harp, the brave heart who can also sing. He has seen more than any man can see and done more than any man can do. In order to legitimise a ritual, a religious instinct or deceit, appropriating his name, bending his meanings, was a clever strategy. Christ’s name has similarly been taken in vain. The more Orpheus was invoked, the less clever the strategy became: the paler his poems, his meanings and his legacy. Aristotle says Orpheus never existed. Homer makes no mention of him, though he is supposed to predate the blind poet. Herodotus makes no mention of him either; unsurprisingly, Aristotle omits him altogether from the Poetics. The poems assigned to him were apocryphal, Aristotle believed, and Onomacritos was not only a textual adjuster or partial forger but, in his view, the author himself.

  Onomacritos. At this point we must meet a villain. His villainy landed him in great trouble and blurred the name of Orpheus in aftertime. Here is how Herodotus reports his unmasking: “Onomacritos was banished from Athens by Hipparchus, the son of Pisistratus, because he foisted onto the writings of Musaeus a prophecy that the islands which lie off Lemnos would one day disappear in the sea. Lasus of Hermione caught him in the act of so doing. For this cause Hipparchus banished him, though till then they had been the closest of friends.”35 And it was not only Musaeus he is said to have tampered with, but Orpheus too, and he may even have had a hand in retouching Homer.

  Who did write the Orphic poems that Plato talks about as if they were by Orpheus? Some South Italian devotee centuries later, hiding his light under the bushel of a sacred name? Pythagoras is said to have circulated his own poems under Orpheus’ name.36 But the prime suspicion falls on Onomacritos. He was a flatterer. If a rich or powerful family wanted to legitimise itself, it could pay an editor-scribe like Onomacritos to insert matter into a poem or record which tied that family into the world of the heroes or, more materially, gave them claims on property held by others or secured illicitly from others. If a tyrant wanted to justify an action, the editor-scribe could be suborned to add a line to something as sacred as Homer. Pisistratos was not above such subterfuge. Written records proved mutable, but their authority remained more or less intact until the forger was apprehended, as Onomacritos was.37

  The sixth-century BC poet Ibycus is the first to name Orpheus. He calls him Onomakluton Orfen. Guthrie declares that, from his first mention, Orpheus was famous. But Ibycus may have had an ironic intent: not only famous Orpheus but—by extension, Onomacritos’ Orpheus, punning on the first three syllables of Onomacritos’ name. Yet Onomacritos could not erase, through his fictions, if they were his (and if they were fictions), the durable legacy or the fame of Orpheus.

  Still, it must be confessed that we cannot point to a single line of verse or prose that is undenibly by Orpheus. Pausanias names five major early hymn writers: Homer, Olen,38 Pamphos,39 Musaeus40 and Orpheus. We cannot point to a single line that is uncontestably by any one of them. Eighty-seven “hymns” to various gods survive under Orpheus’ name. These are neo-Platonist efforts, assembled and perhaps even composed early in the Christian era. They give us an opportunity to look at the hymn genre, so important a form in the early period of Greek poetry and so crucial as a source of allusion and resonance to later poets. The Orphic hymns are in not very subtle hexameters (though Greek hymns are found in a variety of metres and also in prose). A hymn is a praise poem, often with religious intent. It may have served as a first course in the feast of epic recitations, and perhaps also as a dessert.

  The most famous Greek hymns are those attributed to Homer. They provided models for Pindar, Callimachus and others. Charles Boer, who translates them over-fancifully in formal terms,41 tells us in an afterword that the word hymn is of eastern derivation and the Greek word hymnos relates to the word for woven or spun. Bacchylides in Ode V, line 8, speaks of “weaving a hymn.” Homer (Iliad III, line 212) “speaks of Menelaus and Odysseus as having ‘spun’ (hyphainon) ‘their words and their counsels.’” Boer says: “in its primal sense, a hymn was thought of as what results when you intertwine speech with rhythm and song. And it is in this sense precisely that the word ‘hymn’ appears in its oldest recorded usage, in the Odyssey (VIII, 429) when Alcinoos invites Odysseus to ‘enjoy dinner and listen to the spinning of a yarn’ (aoides hymnon).”42 Boer’s “yarn” is an English rather than a Greek figure of speech.

  Is there an Orphic manner, a characteristic style? The language of the surviving hymns makes them peculiarly rebarbative as poetry. Introducing his translations in the late eighteenth century, Thomas Taylor declared, “Thus most of the compound epithets of which the following Hymns chiefly consist, though very beautiful in the Greek language, yet, when literally translated into ours, lose all their propriety and force. In their native tongue, as in a prolific soil, they diffuse their sweets with full-blown elegance, but shrink like the sensitive plant at the touch of the verbal critic, or the close translator. He who would preserve their philosophical beauties, and exhibit them to others in a different language, must expand their elegance, by the supervening and enlivening rays of the philosophic fire; and, by the powerful breath of genius, scatter abroad their latent but copious sweets.”43

  There is something cloyingly Palgravian about the elaborate conceit of the translator, a manner in keeping with the baroquery of the hymns, where verbal thickness and opacity must pass for depth of thought and symbol. Certainly every detail in the poems requires symbolic reading, and since there is no dictionary of symbols to which we can refer, an excess of interpretative activity, and an excess of freedom, is allowed.44 The poems can come to mean whatever the explainer wants them to. A person or a god is generally addressed, but not as in a prayer; his or her nature is blurred in the elaborate mirror of the forger’s language. Here is an initiation hymn to Hecate, which, like the other hymns, is prefaced by a note of the appropriate incense to be burned during the recitation:

  Hecate, lady of the path, I conjure you, lovely mistress of the trivium,45

  Of heaven and underworld, of sea, of the saffron gown,

  Of the grave, celebrant of Dionysus’ mysteries among dead souls,

  Perses’ child, happy alone, rejoicing among the untamed creatures,

  At home in the midnight, lady of hounds, unconquerable queen,

  Of the beasts’ cry, of the ungirded robe, of the ravishing form,

  Herder of livestock, you the g
uardian of the doors of all the world, lady,

  Mistress betrothed who nourish the young, who wander the ridges,

  Be present, I beg, at our sacred rites, rites of passage,

  Giving your grace, gracious lady, to the young oxherd …

  Voluminous explanatory notes to a poem of this size deal with untranslatable phrases, the connections each epithet attempts to make with other gods, other areas of the fluid theology that follows from the very instability of myth. Thomas Taylor speaks of “philosophical mythology,” as though the argument in early philosophy can be conducted solely through narrative, symbol and metaphor.

  All the documents and artefacts that relate to the historical Orpheus are late and wildly out of “historical” range. Even though Aristotle insists that Orpheus never existed, tentative details can be fitted together. How close can they take us to his flickering presence? “It is no mere frivolity,” says W. K. C. Guthrie, “to remind ourselves that in Orpheus we are dealing with someone who has many of the qualities of the Snark and one important point of resemblance to the Cheshire Cat.”46 Part of the problem is that the accounts we have of the poet differ so fundamentally. Orpheus’ name became a kind of candle drawing the forger moths, who singed their wings there and perished; but also thinkers who wanted their ideas to be taken seriously and immolated themselves in the interests of illumination. Orpheus is a flame; or Orpheus is a tribe of writers anonymising themselves in order to grace their words with the authority of the Thracian bard.

  More schematically, Orpheus is, as Marsilio Ficino suggested in the fifteenth century, the third in the six steps to theological wisdom which begin in Zoroaster, “the greatest of the Magi,” and—via Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophamus and Pythagoras—leads to Plato, in whose writings all wisdom is distilled.47 For Apollinaire, he “invented all the sciences and all the arts. Rooted in magic, he inferred the future and predicted the coming of the Saviour, Christ.”48

  From our point of view, he is at least the first poet.

  II

  The Legend Poets

  … O had I lived when song was great

  In days of old Amphion,

  And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,

  Nor cared for seed or scion!

  And had I lived when song was great,

  And legs of trees were limber,

  And ta’en my fiddle to the gate,

  And fiddled in the timber!

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Amphion”

  A first-century Roman acquired an ancient statue of the comic poet Poseidippus (c. 316–250 BC).1 He had a local craftsman resculpt it into—or after—his own face and form, appropriating the features but not the identity of the poet. As in palimpsests, the earlier identity shows through in a shadowy way. Poseidippus being a comic poet, it is appropriate that his individual identity should be retained not in the bold nose nor in the ambiguous restraint of the expression (if we see the poet, he seems to be holding back a guffaw; if we see the Roman, he looks as if he is controlling wind), but in the retention of an unkempt emblematic detail. “The careless sculptor who reworked the poet’s head into that of the Roman left a few locks of Poseidippus’ hair on the nape of the neck, and those locks enabled Fittschen to recognise the true Poseidippus in a previously anonymous portrait type.”2 Fittschen, an admirable Poirot when it comes to such sculptural identity parades, is a patient man who, in discovering what appears to be an actual identity, also illuminates the ways in which identities are overlaid, obscured, but never entirely lost.

  Never entirely found, either. There is not very much to go on when we come to Poseidippus, a stone shadow. In stone, shadows possess a vivid, almost human presence, displacing more or less the same volume of air that we do; but they are frustratingly mute. We read their white faces and it is hard to say for sure even what colour the skin would have been, and the hair. A tubbiness in Poseidippus’ cheeks suggests—as do the chefs in his plays—that he ate well and would have been a ruddy sort, a Dionysian; his small boyish—girlish?—mouth suggests a certain delicacy, though not of constitution. Black hair, of course. Or grey? The statue is good, but for our purposes little better than a ghost, a Greek ghost carrying a Roman passenger.

  We have a clearer and more complex image of some of the earliest Greek poets, four and more centuries Poseidippus’ seniors, than we do of him, even though we can see the whites of his eyes. They survive as legends only, with at best a handful of attributable fragments of verse. As legends they are complicated, inconsistent, memory rather than stone palimpsests, but they tell us something of the kinds of regard in which poets were held, their relationship with the gods and the rulers of the day, their Odyssean wiliness in getting the better of their foes, and the simple power of their language to enchant, memorialise and condemn.

  In the last chapter we met Linos, possibly Orpheus’ brother, some say a victim of the infant Heracles, his name the refrain of a holy chant. He has had more parents, divine and human, attributed to him than almost any other poet in history. This befits the greatest musician who ever lived, whom Apollo, jealous of his divine prerogatives, could not tolerate alive. There wasn’t room in Greece for both of them. Diodorus Siculus says Linos actually invented melody and rhythm. On Mount Helicon, Pausanias says, if you drew near the Grove of the Muses, you would find a little artificial cave in which Linos’ likeness was carved on a wall. Sacrifices were made to him, before the worshippers proceeded into the Grove and paid their respects to the Muses themselves.

  We might linger, if there were more to linger over, in the company of Sacadas of Argos. Pindar’s poem about him, mentioned in Pausanias, has not survived. He is said to have composed, in the early seventh century, the first version of the Delphic tune. He was a famous Doric aulos-player.3 “His Pythian tune was a bare, early version, probably for dancing, of the fight of Apollo with the dragon, the Python of Delphi,” Peter Levi says. “An elaborate and fascinating later version which included trumpets and fifes and imitated the whizzing of arrows and the god’s triumphal procession is described by Strabo (9, 3, 10). Sacadas’ tune already had five movements, called introduction, trial, challenge, iambic and dactylic, and pipes.”

  Of these virtually poetryless ur-Homers, the most charmed and charming is Arion, after whom the constellation of the lyre is named. Arion, Robert Graves tells us, means “lofty native.” He was lofty by birth, his father being no less a figure than the sea god Poseidon. A fragment of his hymn to Poseidon survives. We know he sang effectively to the waters and the creatures of the deep, and the sea succoured him.

  His mother was a nymph called Oneaea—five vowels and one gentle consonant. Like the musical revolutionary Terpander,4 who reinvented music and played his changes in ancient Sparta, Arion was a native of the poetry-nurturing island of Lesbos. He was born at Methymna (modern Mithimna) on the northern shore, facing to the west. It was near here that the celebrated Vine of Lesbos grew.

  For the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin he was a type for the survivor, a storm-tossed sailor whose strength as much as his art delivered him from the storm. Seamus Heaney gives Pushkin these words:

  … The helmsman and the sailors perished.

  Only I, still singing, washed

  Ashore by the long sea-swell, sing on,

  A mystery to my poet self,

  And safe and sound beneath a rock shelf

  Have spread my wet clothes in the sun.5

  There was much more to him than that, however. The storm was moral, not meteorological, and the poet’s survival a triumph of his art. For Arion, like Orpheus, knew how to talk to the creatures. His singing was on the side of nature and justice, over against the corrupted motives of men, and the swiftest way to truth was on a dolphin’s back.

  Herodotus tells the story. In the time of Periander, son of Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth and one of the legendary Seven Sages, “a very wonderful thing is said to have happened. The Corinthians and the Lesbians … relate that Arion of Methymna, who as a player on the harp
was second to no man living at that time, and who was, so far as we know, the first to invent the dithyrambic measure, to give it its name, and to recite in it at Corinth, was carried to Taenarum on the back of a dolphin.”

  “He had lived for years in Corinth at the court of Periander when a longing came upon him to sail to Italy and Sicily.” Graves says that he wanted to go “to compete in a musical festival.” If so, he picked up all the prizes: “Having made rich profits in those parts, he wanted to recross the seas to Corinth. He hired a vessel, the crew of which were Corinthians, thinking that there was no people in whom he could more safely trust, and set sail from Tarentum. The sailors, however, when they reached the open sea, plotted to throw him overboard and seize his wealth. Discovering their plan, he fell on his knees, begging them to spare his life and offering them his money. But they refused and told him either to kill himself outright, if he wanted a grave on the dry land, or immediately to leap overboard into the sea.”

  A man waiting execution is permitted a final cigarette. Arion was allowed a final performance. He begged them “to let him climb to the quarter-deck, and there to play and sing,” promising that as soon as he had finished he would jump from their treacherous ship into the waves. “Delighted at the prospect of hearing the best musician in the world, they agreed and withdrew from the stern to the middle of the vessel. Arion decked himself in the full regalia of his calling, took up his harp, and standing on the quarterdeck, chanted the Orthian. His music ended, he did as he had promised and flung himself, fully attired, headlong into the sea.

  “The Corinthians sailed on to Corinth. As for Arion, a dolphin, they say, took him upon his back and carried him to Taenarum. There he went ashore, proceeding to Corinth in his costume, and told what had been done to him. Periander disbelieved the story and put Arion under arrest to prevent his leaving Corinth, while he anxiously awaited the mariners’ return.