The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  “As soon as they arrived, he summoned them and asked if they could give him news of Arion. They replied that he was alive and well in Italy, that they had left him at Tarentum, where he was thriving. Then Arion appeared before them, just as he was when he jumped from the vessel. The men, astonished and found out in their lie, could not deny their guilt … There is to this day at Taenarum an offering of Arion’s at the shrine: a small figure in bronze, representing a man seated upon a dolphin.”

  Arion, as Herodotus says, may have invented the Dionysiac dithyramb, a vigorous answer to the univocal monody of, say, the Song of Linos, though the earliest surviving dithyrambs are attributed to Archilochus. In any event, in Corinth at the beginning of the sixth century BC, Arion perhaps brought into these musical celebrations the circular chorus, moving around an altar rather than processing. He might require the chorus to sing a prosodically regular poem, written or conceived in advance (not formulaic or aleatoric), and concentrating on a definite subject. The chorus would be accompanied by an aulos. Michael Grant is more categorical: Arion “converted” the dithyrambs “into swiftly moving, exciting hymns, sung and danced by a chorus of fifty boys wearing elaborate satyr-like costumes and impersonating their parts with mimetic gestures.”6 Bowra turns it the other way round: “He seems to have found in existence an improvised, ecstatic song to Dionysus and to have transformed it into a formal, choral hymn attached to definite festivals and accompanied by regular dancing.”7

  The dithyramb developed fully in Athens under Pisistratus and his sons, in connection with Dionysian festivals, and became a primary vehicle for narrative in lyric form. It was also adapted for other festivals, including—paradoxically—Apollo’s. In 509 BC there was a celebrated dithyrambic contest in Athens and the successful chorus, hugely celebrated, erected a commemorative tripod. This was a forerunner of later competitions, a kind of Eurovision Dithyramb Contest.

  Originally dithyramb was a form used in drunken (Dionysian) revelry. In the hands of a fine poet, form, repetition, measure and melody are drawn from drunkenness: the lyric itself is born out of dithyramb.8 And was Arion the first to speak as well as write and sing verse? He may have invented tragikos tropos, the musical mode later adapted to dramatic tragedy. Sage Solon says so. Is Arion at two removes the grandfather of dramatic verse?9 Arion’s legacy is palpable in the work of all the choral poets.

  What happened to the dolphin? Arion was not the last man to be saved in this way, but his dolphin was royally rewarded. It accompanied the poet to court (no one is quite clear in what form), and there eventually it died, after a life of tremendous luxury. Arion gave it a memorable funeral. No doubt one day archaeologists will find its aquarium in Corinth, and its tomb. No one is certain of the dolphin’s name.

  Arion at Periander’s court may have studied and worked with the poet Alcman, some of whose poetry does survive, and who has a chapter of his own with more history but no less invention in it.

  Amphion’s name means “native of two lands.”10 Tradition has it that he rebuilt Cadmeia, charming the stones with his lyre (a gift of the Muses themselves, or else of Hermes) and harmoniously drawing them together into temples and stoas and houses and paved streets. Orpheus moved animals and trees, but Amphion’s music managed to find heart and motion even in the inanimate.

  His father was Zeus. On one of his amorous escapades he seduced Antiope, daughter of Nycteus or, according to Homer, Asopos. Pregnant, she fled and married the king of Sicyon; there was then a war against her people and her father was killed. Her uncle prevailed against the Sicyon king, slew him and brought her back. She gave birth to twins, Amphion and Zethus, and Uncle Lycus had the little bastards abandoned to the elements on the side of Mount Cithaeron (with its Dionysian connections). Back in Cadmeia Antiope was cruelly treated by her aunt Dirce, but finally escaped and found out the little hovel where her children, rescued by a passing shepherd and reared by him, now lived. They thought Antiope was a fleeing slave and would not give her hearth room, and then Dirce in a frenzy caught up with her and dragged her away.

  The shepherd recognised her as their mother. He warned them that they would be pursued forever unless they came to her assistance, and so they followed after and eventually freed their mama, tying Dirce by the hair to the horns of a bull. She did not survive. Where her inert body was hurled down, a spring welled up. She was, after all, a servant of Dionysus.

  Cadmus had built the upper city of Cadmeia. Amphion and his twin built the lower part, having expelled the bad king Laius. Zethus chided his brother for playing the lyre all the time, but while Zethus had to wrestle his stones into place, Amphion’s assembled like beads on a string or birds on a branch, without any effort beyond melody. As Pound’s Propertius says,

  And Citharaon shook up the rocks of Thebes

  and danced them into a bulwark at his pleasure …11

  Zethus married Thebe and the city was renamed Thebes after her. Amphion married Niobe, a spirited woman whose sharp tongue led to divine revenges and all but two of whose children, seven sons and seven daughters, were killed by the gods. She made fun of Leto, mother of only two, those two being effeminate Apollo and butch, burly Artemis, whose arrows slew Niobe’s “surplus” children. No wonder her name became synonymous with tears. And Amphion, too, had a troubled later life, but this native of two lands, Sicyon and Thebes, was a mighty poet, having been able with his three-stringed lyre, at Hermes’ behest, to build a city out of ceremonial song.

  Peter Levi says, “Musaeus is a legendary half-divine poet.” Another one, but again quite different. In the Renaissance he was thought to have pre-dated Homer. Now we are wiser: Homer may not have existed at all, and even so, Musaeus was at least two and perhaps four centuries his hypothetical junior. Pausanias says that “Musaeus sings in his poem, if he really wrote [my italics] it, how Triptolemos is the child of Ocean and the Earth, while Orpheus sings, though the poem looks spurious to me, that the father of Eubouleus and Triptolemos was called Dysaules, and Demeter granted them the sowing of crops because they brought news of her daughter.”12 As far as Pausanias was concerned, poets wrote and then sang their poems, and this went as much for the legendary and half-known poets as for those whose identities were fully attested to in history. Musaeus is described in some places as the son of Orpheus.

  Like Homer’s poems, his were tampered with. They had the kind of spurious legitimacy and authority that made them politically useful, especially in relation to the Persian incursions. Herodotus reports that the prime culprit in the act of forgery was Onomacritos. “The Pisistratidae had previously been at enmity with [Onomacritos] … He was banished from Athens by Hipparchus, the son of Pisistratus, because he foisted into the writings of Musaeus a prophecy that the islands which lie off Lemnos would one day disappear in the sea.”13 Musaeus was seen as a prophet, as in the following lines composed before Athens suffered at Aigospotamoi:

  A raging storm will burst over Athens:

  Bad leaders, but there will be one solace:

  The city won’t lie down but get its own back.14

  Herodotus too calls Musaeus a prophet, writing: “As soon as the sea-fight was ended, the Greeks drew together to Salamis all the wrecks that were to be found in that quarter, and prepared themselves for another engagement, supposing that the king would renew the fight with the vessels which still remained to him. Many of the wrecks had been carried away by a westerly wind to the coast of Attica, where they were thrown upon the strip of shore called Colias. Thus not only were the prophecies of Bacis and Musaeus concerning this battle fulfilled completely, but likewise, by the place to which the wrecks were drifted, the prediction of Lysistratus, an Athenian soothsayer, uttered many years before these events, and quite forgotten at the time by all the Greeks, was fully accomplished.”

  Musaeus was depicted in art. Pausanias, describing the paintings in the Shrine of Wingless Victory in Athens, told how, “if you pass over the boy carrying water-jars and the wrestler Timainetos painted, you
come to Musaeus. I have read a poem in which Musaeus was able to fly, by the gift of the north-east wind.” But Pausanias adds, “I think Onomacritos wrote it; nothing of Musaeus exists for certain except the ‘Hymn to Demeter’ for the Lykomidai.”15 For certain? Not even that … Yet the poet flying—a brilliant power, rivalling that of Amphion to move stones and Orpheus to move trees!

  He moved to Athens, and his house, or what was reputed to have been his house, was a sort of monument. Pausanias recalls, “When Demetrios had freed Athens from dictatorship, immediately after the flight of Lachares he kept control of Piraeus, and later after some military success he brought a garrison into the city itself, and fortified what they call the Museum. The Museum is a small hill opposite the akropolis, inside the ancient ring-wall, where they say Musaeus used to sing and died of old age and was buried; later a memorial was erected there for a Syrian.”16

  There are also echoes of the vanished Musaeus at Delphi. We turn once more to Pausanias.17 There were singing contests at Delphi and many powerful performers won, but “Orpheus they say gave himself such an air of grandeur over the mysteries and was so generally conceited that he and Musaeus who imitated him in everything refused to be tested by musical competition.”

  From Pausanias we learn more.18 At the start of time the Delphic oracle belonged to Earth, and Earth appointed Daphne to be prophetess. She was a nymph native to the mountain. “The Greeks have a poem called Eumolpia, which they attribute to Musaeus son of Antiophemos, that says Poseidon and Earth shared the oracle: Earth prophesied herself, and Poseidon’s servant for the prophecies was Pyrcon.” These are the verses:

  Earth then spoke wise words, and the man

  Who serves the mighty, the earth-quaking god,

  Pyrcon, spoke in chorus with her.

  Another doubtful, but influential, attribution. Those who could speak for the ancient poets themselves acquired power. How much more those who spoke as them.

  The very first of the eighty-eight surviving poems doubtfully attributed to Musaeus’ teacher, or father, is “Orphic Hymn I: Orpheus pros Mousaion,” or “Orpheus to Musaeus.”

  Attend Musaeus to my sacred song,

  And learn what rites to sacrifice belong.

  Jove I invoke, the earth, and solar light,

  The moon’s pure splendour, and the stars of night;

  Thee Neptune, ruler of the sea profound,

  Dark-hair’d, whose waves begirt the solid ground;

  Ceres abundant, and of lovely mien,

  And Proserpine infernal Pluto’s queen …

  It invokes the Orphic hierarchy and takes the form of a kind of ritual catechism, Orpheus instructing his spiritual acolyte. In 1792 Thomas Taylor translated the hymn into rather stiff but not inappropriate couplets. The poem is principally evocation, or conjuration, mentioning all the gods; but the pseudo-Orpheus lingers on one goddess in particular, and whereas others, even the most powerful, receive at most two or three lines, this one receives quite a run of verse:

  I call Einodian Hecate, lovely dame,

  Of earthly, wat’ry, and celestial frame,

  Sepulchral, in a saffron veil array’d,

  Pleas’d with dark ghosts that wander thro’ the shade;

  Persian, unconquerable huntress hail!

  The world’s key-bearer never doom’d to fail;

  On the rough rock to wander thee delights,

  Leader and nurse be present to our rites;

  Propitious grant our just desires success,

  Accept our homage, and the incense bless.

  Taylor comments usefully on this poem as first in the Orphic remains. The immediate introduction to Musaeus, “the son of Orpheus, is, as Gesner observes, a summary of the work … and the reader will please to observe through the whole of these Hymns, that the Orphic method of instruction consists in signifying divine concerns by symbols alone.” This tells us why there is no elaborated, as it were prose, theology attached to Orphism, and why the poetic bias throughout the Greek period favours symbolic expression. Taylor is compelled to talk in terms of a “philosophical mythology,” a wonderful term that applies not only to the Greek Orphics but to our own Romantics and their direct and oblique heirs.

  “Indeed nature herself,” he remarks, “fabricating the images of intelligible essences, and of ideas totally destitute of matter, pursues this design by many and various ways. For by parts she imitates things destitute of all parts, eternal natures by such as are temporal, intelligibles by sensibles, simple essences by such as are mixt, things void of quantity by dimensions, and things stable by unceasing mutations: all which she endeavours to express as much as she is able, and as much as the aptitude of appearances will permit.” Not only are metaphor, simile and symbol a way of speaking; they are a mode of true vision. “Now the authors of fables, having perceived this proceeding of nature, by inventing resemblances and images of divine concerns in their verses, imitated the exalted power of exemplars by contrary and most remote adumbrations: that is, by shadowing forth the excellency of the nature of the Gods by preternatural concerns: a power more divine than all reason, by such as are irrational: a beauty superior to all that is corporeal by things apparently base, and by this means placed before our eyes the excellence of divinity, which far exceeds all that can possibly be invented or said.” It is the language of the late eighteenth century, but it touches a profound truth of pre-Hellenic poetry. Taylor may be a little too drawn to the occult, as so many were at the exhausted end of the eighteenth century; but his credulousness lets him see further than a sceptic could.

  Herodotus is sceptical. He knows the real world has claims that run deeper than those of the ceremonial world; he can if necessary break through hierarchy and recast “respect” in a less hidebound, more necessary spirit. “As for the oracle of which Mardonius spoke, and which he referred to the Persians, it did not, I am well assured, mean them, but the Illyrians and the Enchelean host. There are, however, some verses of Bacis which did speak of this battle:

  By Thermodon’s stream, and the grass-clad banks of Asopus,

  See where gather the Grecians, and hark to the foreigners’ war-shout—

  There in death shall lie, ere fate or Lachesis doomed him,

  Many a bow-bearing Mede, when the day of calamity cometh.

  These verses, and some others like them which Musaeus wrote, referred, I well know, to the Persians. The river Thermodon flows between Tanagra and Glisas.”19

  Thamyris was blinded and deprived of his musical and singing gift because he competed with the Muses and lost. “The men of Pylos and Arene, and Thryum where is the ford of the river Alpheus; strong Aipy, Cyparisseis, and Amphigenea; Pteleum, Helos, and Dorium, where the Muses met Thamyris, and stilled his minstrelsy for ever. He was returning from Oechalia, where Eurytus lived and reigned, and boasted that he would surpass even the Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Jove, if they should sing against him; whereon they were angry, and maimed him. They robbed him of his divine power of song, and thenceforth he could strike the lyre no more.”20

  The legend poets, from Orpheus on, generally meet a sticky end.

  III

  Homer

  Sleepless. Homer. Billowing sails.

  I have read half way through the catalogue

  Of ships, that spreading shoal, that flock of cranes

  Once clouding the heavens above Hellas.

  Birdlike, crossing coasts and borders to

  Strange lands (the brows of kings wet with the spume

  Of gods) where are you sailing to? With no bright Helen,

  What would Troy mean to you, you men of Greece?

  Love moves the sea, moves Homer, but to which

  Ought I to listen now? Homer’s voice is silence

  While the black sea, orator, surf and thunder

  Breaks and breaks on my pillow, like a pulse.

  OSIP MANDELSTAM, “Stone 78” (1915)

  “… I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you
make one quite giddy,” Alice declares.1 “All right,” says the Cheshire Cat; and this time “it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.” (The cat, we note, is an “it,” not a “he.”) “Well!” Alice reflects, “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

  Over time Homer, “the blind poet with seven birthplaces,”2 has appeared, multiplied identities, then vanished like the Cat. He was erased almost completely for a spell in a compelling spate of scholarship into “oral traditions” in the middle of the twentieth century. Now he, she, or it is emerging again, ghostly and attenuated and hedged around with postmodern quotation marks and disclaimers, but gaining a little in solidity with each new book and scholarly paper. The Cat seems to be materialising around the grin once more. We can almost see him as he was imagined more than two and half millennia ago, a travelling rhapsode entertaining and instructing now the powerful and wealthy, now humble men: “Sitting there in the tanner’s yard, Homer recited his poetry to them, the Expedition of Amphiaraus to Thebes and the Hymns to the Gods composed by him.”3 Except that modern scholars are agreed that the Homer who—perhaps—composed the Iliad and—or—the Odyssey was the author neither of the Expedition nor of the Hymns that bear his name.

  Why are readers so very eager to find out who Homer was, so reluctant to consider the possibility that the epics assigned to his name were not “composed” as other poems are? There is certainly a wonderful adequacy about what comes from the poems themselves. Theocritus says, “Homer is enough for everybody,” but he doesn’t quite mean it.4 When we possess the poems, why have critics for millennia tried to track down the poet, a task recognised as impossible even by those who undertake it? We know nothing, but there is a considerable amount of nothing that we know.