The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  The story of Archilochus is not over. In 1974 the manuscript of a poem attributed to him was published. It had been used in a papyrus mummy-cover housed in a Cologne museum, identified, meticulously restored and edited. The longest surviving fragment of his work, it may in fact conflate two poems, the first a savage continuation of his attack on Neobulé, the second his most erotic and sustained narrative of consummation. The girl he is seducing has resisted, mentioning his previous love. He dismisses his ex with scorn. He has a single desire and objective. Is the girl now in his power, as some critics conjecture, Neobulé’s sister? Does this new fragment make Archilochus an even darker cad than the evidence we had before? He is recounting his exploit to an audience, giving himself credit for persuasion and proving his skills even as, incidentally, causing arousal in listeners. This is Davenport’s inventive version:

  “She should get herself a job as a scarecrow.

  I’d as soon hump her as [kiss a goat’s butt].

  “A source of joy I’d be to the neighbours

  With such a woman as her for a wife!

  How could I ever prefer her to you?

  “You, O innocent, true heart and bold.

  Each of her faces is as sharp as the other,

  Which way she’s turning you never can guess.

  “She’d whelp like the proverb’s luckless bitch

  Were I to foster get upon her, throwing

  Them blind, and all on the wrongest day.”

  I said no more but took her hand,

  Laid her down in a thousand flowers,

  And put my soft wool cloak around her.

  I slid my arm under her neck

  To still the fear in her eyes,

  For she was trembling like a fawn,

  Touched her hot breasts with light fingers,

  Spraddled her neatly and pressed

  Against her fine, hard, bared crotch.

  I caressed the beauty of all her body

  And came in a sudden white spurt

  While I was stroking her hair.24

  The cruelty of the poem and its intense sexual drive are, as it were, the poles of Archilochus’ verse. He always seems to be hungry, and to speak directly to us of his hungers. Revenge is one of them.

  His language, compared with the formulaic heightenings of the Homeric poems and the formal rusticity of Hesiod, is comparatively coarse and to the point, the language of a peasant and a soldier, rich in metaphor and straightforward in sense. Perhaps that is why even the briefest snatches of language, by a curious metonymy, suggest the poem they came from. It is certainly why readers believe in the “I” of Archilochus despite the absence of hard evidence of his existence.

  The use of a spoken, low diction characterises the kind of verse which Archilochus is credited with having invented, the iambic, though Aristotle is reluctant to deprive Homer, the father of all poetry, of this as of other honours. “A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were. But from Homer onward, instances can be cited—his own Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate metre was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse.”25

  Aristotle’s is the simplest and clearest definition of iambic verse: “For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation.” Poetry as a heightening of speech, but still dependent on speech. Iambic at first denotes less a metrical patterning (its later sense), more a genre: satirical, savage invective addressed to an everyday audience; a poetry in what the compilers of the English Prayer Book called “the vulgar tongue.” Early iambic poetry can be in non-iambic metres; indeed, the term is used to describe trochaic tetrameters.26 “Too iambic” can mean “too coarse.”

  There are three classic iambopoioi—writers of iambics. After Archilochus comes Semonides of Amorgos (pages 150–58) and then Hipponax of Ephesus (pages 232–38), the limping beggar whose invectives (like Archilochus’ attack on Neobulé) caused his victims, who began as his persecutors, mortal ill. Hipponax invented the “limping iamb,” a trimeter with a spondee or a trochee in the final foot. It may have been because of the figurative title given to this metre that the poet himself was portrayed, in retrospect, as lame. The iambic poets were the forefathers of Attic comedy, not only in their savage tones and colloquial metres but in their coarse diction. Iambic poetry was close to the idiom of the male populace and voiced, sometimes radically, its everyday concerns. Athenaeus recalls how the comic writer Diphilus made both Archilochus and Hipponax Sappho’s lovers.

  Where does the iambic tradition begin? There are threads of it in Homer and especially in Hesiod, of course, but there it is incidental, not the dominant voice. It may have come from Asia, with so much of the archaic tradition of art and song. It may have risen to prominence thanks to the verse contests at the Greek festivals of Dionysus and Demeter, fertility encouraged, as it were, but with explicit sexual content. Erotic verse and satire, however, do not naturally go hand in glove. The scurrilous and the scatological fall short of the erotic, especially in epigrams. Still, the evocation of orgies and escapades, the naming of familiar names and parts, the power of the word to expose and to wound, were aspects of this archaic tradition of flyting.

  And Archilochus’ poems were recited at festivals alongside those of Hesiod and Homer. Indeed, these three poets were the invariable presences at any festival where verse was performed. With their different takes on poetry and the world, all three were venerated. Pindar calls Archilochus “the insulter” or “the blamer,” nourishing himself on words of hate,27

  For in the past I see

  Archilochus the scold in poverty,

  Fattening his leanness with hate and heavy words.28

  Yet it is Archilochus whose poetry marked that of Horace and Catullus. They respect Pindar but love the earlier master, because of the freshness of his language and his unabashed approach to every sort of experience.

  VIII

  Alcman of Sardis

  Would that, would that I were a cerylus

  Flying with halcyons over wave-blooming waters

  Stalwart and strong, bird blue like the sea.1

  The French king Louis XV, “well-beloved” and dangerously enlightened, was eager to develop his library. He sent two abbés to Constantinople to acquire books from the Sultan’s collection. One of the abbés, Fourmont, on a supplementary quest, went around Asia Minor and Greece collecting—that is, stealing for the king—classical inscriptions as well. In Sparta his scavenging was dramatic and destructive: his nephew located inscriptions, and the abbé instructed that teams of men dig them up, and then that larger teams conduct deeper digging, disrupting the site, the very foundations of the ancient buildings overthrown. More than 300 inscriptions were unearthed, many damaged and some destroyed because Fourmont, a rosaried Onomacritos, to heighten the significance of his piracy enhanced what he had found with additions. He did not want to be rumbled later, so he adjusted the evidence.

  Ancient Sparta (Lacadaimon) occupied a roughly triangular area between the river Eurotas (where Zeus in the guise of a swan had his will of Leda, who bore him Castor, Polydeuces and Helen; to her human spouse, Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, she bore Clytemnestra) and its tributary, the river Magoula. The area is large: when, in the third century BC, Spartans at last decided to build a city wall, the circuit ran to ten kilometres. Castor and Polydeuces (and their horses) inevitably figure large in the legends of Sparta. Not far away is the Menelaion, with inscriptions to Menelaus and Helen together. Also nearby are the remains of the tomb of Hyacinth with an archaic statue of Apollo; the site had been continuously occupied from Mycenaean time
s.

  In the period of its early flowering and for more than two centuries afterwards, Sparta was unwalled. It was defensively well positioned, but also its soldiers were uncommonly brave, and even the most intrepid enemy would stop short of crossing the river Eurotas—its name means “fair-flowing”—to enter the city. If anyone had dared to cross and enter, he would have found a most un-citylike conurbation: even in the fourth century there were five hamlets, “five village settlements of the antique Greek type,” says Thucydides, connected by orchards and cultivated ground, like a garden suburb, with an acropolis and five other not very pronounced hills. The buildings were unusual, too, for a city of Sparta’s importance and influence. They were made of wood, not stone, and as Thucydides predicted, while the architecture of Athens survived, that of Sparta perished quite. The Abbé Fourmont assisted the deep erasure. In fact, there is no telling exactly where the agora was situated.

  The inhabitants of Sparta were divided into three categories. Those who enjoyed full citizenship were called the Spartiates (also Homoioi, “by each other”), born and bred in the city or admitted to its native ranks because of special qualities. Next came the Perioeci, “dwellers in the neighbourhood,” who were generally free to run the affairs of their communities and thrive on land granted to them by Sparta either in Laconia or annexed Messenia. The Perioeci would, among other services, provide military forces and supplies when required and probably they performed the manufacturing and commercial roles which were beneath the dignity of the Spartiates. Lowest of the social groups were the helots, local inhabitants of Spartan-controlled areas who were owned by Sparta and were required to work for the full citizens virtually as slaves, though they may have had limited property rights and been allowed to remain in their native areas and maintain family structures. Their labour made it possible for the Spartiates to fulfil their higher civic, military and cultural obligations.

  Towards the end of the seventh century BC, when the Eurypontid king was Leotchydas I, Sparta achieved real eminence: the arts of peace and war were perfected. L. H. Jeffrey describes it as a period into which the poems of Alcman give us a “sharp glimpse of a Sparta freed from stress.”2 Alcman’s poetry does not describe Sparta or the poet’s place within it. His “I” does not, for the most part, refer to himself: it is a voice imparted to a chorus, most notably to a chorus of young women who performed poems as part of their educational process, a ritual of socialisation whose ultimate end was preparation for matrimony. The function of such poems is comparable to that of the poems of Sappho, intended to habituate the performer to certain important transitions in life, points of initiation and progression: coming of age, matrimony, battle.

  The girls in Alcman’s chorus are named, and their names indicate the class from which they came, the eminence of their clan. The names of these “girls from the high Spartiate families” tell a story, for the character of the father is visited even upon the girl-child in her name. We meet Astymeloisa (“citadel-care”), Megalostrata (“great army”), Agido (“leader”), Clesimbrota (“renown of man”), Timasimbrota (“honour of man”).3 They may be singing a chorus celebrating beauty, youth, and the womanly accomplishments that lead to mating, and they enjoy secure leisure in which to do so. Sparta had the stability to nurture and sustain a choral tradition because the men were successful warriors. But the Spartan warrior is different in many ways from the Homeric. The Spartan hero fights not for himself but for Sparta: to the city the warrior offers up his strength, his bravery, and if need be, his life.

  Plutarch was fascinated by Sparta, and not least by its poetry. He quotes Alcman’s line “Counterbalanced against the iron is the sweet lyre-playing.”4 In Sparta the arts of peace are secured by the art of war. The unique poetry was intended for performance by groups appropriate to the kind of chorus: maiden songs celebrated vigour, beauty and fertility, while the men participated in generational songs. A group of old soldiers chanted, “We were once courageous and full of youth”; the current cohort pitched in, “Now we are the brave ones; if you dare, put us to the test.” The adolescents followed on: “But we in time shall be more brave than either of you.” Gruff old voices, a baritone middle generation and tenor young carried the poem forward not in harmonies but responses.5 When we read fragments of choral poetry we must remain alert to the possibility of voice changes. Alcman’s verse is one ancestor of Greek dramatic writing. He did not invent the chorus, but he divided and characterised it and distributed the verse among its parts. He wrote in Laconian dialect, regarded by some as poor in euphony. The choral lyric retains a Doric inflection; the choruses in Attic tragedy “continued to be written in Doric.” Pausanias declares that the pleasure of Alcman’s poems was unspoiled even though he used a Spartan dialect “which is not in the least euphonious.”6

  Plutarch recounts how, when the armies of Thebes broke through into the Spartan-controlled territory of Laconia in the fourth century BC, the helots whom the Spartans had kept brutally under control refused to perform for their new masters the poems of Terpander, Alcman and the Spartan Spendon, on the grounds that their routed lords would not approve of them doing so. These were the same helots who were forced to drink undiluted wine so as to demonstrate to young Spartans how vile drunkenness was, and made to perform ridiculous dances and recitations to prove their coarse human inferiority. As Critias said, nothing compares with the freedom of a free man in Sparta, or with the slavery of the slave. Plutarch insists that these inhuman customs developed later in Spartan history, after earthquake and uprising; earlier, including during Alcman’s life, there was a generally fair severity.

  To Plutarch’s example of the soldiers’ chorus we can juxtapose Alcman’s most famous poetic fragment. The papyrus was discovered by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette near the second pyramid of Sakkarah in 1855, part of what must have been a tomb library. Known by the generic term partheneion, or “maiden song,” it is now held in the Louvre. Guy Davenport provides it with a highly descriptive title: “Hymn to Artemis of the Strict Observance.” He appends a subtitle that sounds like stage directions: “For a Chorus of Spartan Girls Dressed as Doves to Sing at Dawn on the Feast of the Plough.” This is an over-specific and, textually, not a wholly sustainable take on the poem. Davenport, in presenting it so particularly, arrogates a kind of Augustan authority to himself. He proceeds to translate the poem in four complementary ways. First there is a literal version, which shows what is missing and what survives: what survives fits into the absent shape. At Ephesus restoration entails suspending on an unobtrusive concrete framework actual pieces of temples, leaving gaps between: a column drum, a piece of cornice; the traveller is left to infer from the actual fragments a complete building, to join up the dots, as it were. This is Davenport’s first version, revealing how much is erased from parts of the poem:

  It is as though Abbé Fourmont had ploughed a furrow straight across it. Davenport’s second version, in tetrameter couplets, sets out to suggest (if not to replicate) some of the sound values of the imagined original. The third version attempts restoration, rebuilding conjecturally out of Pausanias’ account of the informing myth, and putting lavish flesh and fat on the existing skeleton, concealing the missing knuckles, ribs and vertebrae. The fourth version, in the sparest possible form, sets out “to show how phrase follows phrase,” wherever the sequence is sufficiently continuous. The last effort is Modernist, the third Romantic, the second Classical, and the first—simply literal.7 He insists that the poem was performed by the dove-disguised girls in competition with another chorus or choruses, a kind of adolescent female agon.

  Most choral works and every epinicean ode have an underlying story, legend or myth. “Myths,” Bowra says, “did for a choral song what sculpture did for a temple. They illustrated the importance of a rite by depicting episodes in legend which concerned the gods and their relations to men.”8 The myth underlying the first part of the partheneion is local to Sparta, and since Spartan audiences would have been familiar with it,
the story is alluded to rather than told, an effect with which readers of Pindar are awkwardly familiar. The story is that of Hippocoön, a legendary king of Sparta whose name, Graves tells us, means “horse stable.” He exiled his brother Tyndareus (whose name means “pounder” and who was to be father at one remove of Castor and Polydeuces, Helen and Clytemnestra). Tyndareus, with the help of Heracles (whose name means “glory of Hera”), returned and slew Hippocoön and his nine (or ten) sons.

  Choral works also had a point of moral release, a maxim, something the audience could take away as the moral pith of the experience. By juxtaposing a tale of extreme disorder and violent action with the peaceful and gracious evocation of the choral ritual, a clear meaning is suggested; but suggestion is not enough, the moral needs to be fixed in an aphorism, a proverb, a summary line. Two memorable examples: “No man should set out to fly to heaven, or seek to wed queen Cyprian Aphrodite …”9—in other words, don’t overreach, especially in love; and “who weaves devoutly to the end the web of his day unweeping finds grace.” In Homer, by contrast, the moral inheres in action and incident. Homer would never paralyse a weaver like Penelope in a stock moral attitude. That is why his poetry is so powerfully itself, unparaphrasable, irreducible.

  A choral work was intended for a specific chorus and thus included remarks, references, characterisation that tied it in to specifics of performance. The poet might even make voices refer to himself. “Alcman allows a greater degree of intimacy and even badinage than Pindar, but the difference is superficial.”10 The first person, the “I” who speaks, is, we must remember, dramatic, being performed, not spoken by the poet as a man. A choral “I” has a different value than the lyric “I.” The choral “I,” as if masked, retains a residue of divine sanction; such a poem’s speech is never merely subjective.