No more the Lesbian Dames my Passion move,
Once the dear Objects of my guilty Love;
All other loves are lost in only thine,
Ah Youth ungrateful to a Flame like mine!
The vocalic values of the third line are uncannily apposite, true to the art of Ovid and through his to Sappho’s.
What we know as fact is only a little more certain than what the comic poets tell us. Was there in Lesbos a female group of hetairai (mistresses, unmarried women) parallel to Alcaeus’ male symposium? In fragment 160, Sappho declares that she will sing to delight her female companions who are called hetairai, a word which for her was not burdened with moral denigration but which later came to mean “courtesans” or something worse.
There may have been competing “colleges” of women, and Andromeda and Gorgo are named by Maximus of Tyre as her rivals.59 Did her group lounge about, drink and strum like the male symposiasts? Or was it Sappho’s vocation to instruct girls leading them towards marriage? Did she run a kind of academy or finishing school teaching what one commentator calls “only the noblest girls” of Lesbos and Ionia, with perhaps other students from further off—boarders—such as Anagora of Miletus, Gongula of Colophon and Eunica of Salamis?60 Was it her task to initiate them? Did she teach them, too, to make lyric verses?
Her poems generally touch upon a girl’s life between childhood and marriage: would it be reductive to regard the poems as in some sense pedagogic —teaching not only expression but types of feeling, as well as ways of regulating feeling? Are they exercises for the voice, the hands, the dancing body and the shaping spirit of her charges? The epithalamia, composed for performance to a wider audience, were in all likelihood “put on” at actual weddings in Lesbos. Her dialogue poem, for members of the cult of Adonis,61 was also intended for more public performance. Leslie Kurke suggests that Sappho led “a thiasos of young women, engaging in ritual homoeroticism to prepare them for marriage.” It is not unthinkable: in a sense, such an arrangement might replicate some of the purpose and dynamic of the male symposium.
What if we take, as readers down the ages have tended to do, Sappho’s first person as a genuine “I,” trying at the same time to keep the “I” clear of our individualistic and bourgeois investments in first-person poetry, our hunger for disclosure, confession and individual voice? Sappho’s desiring “I” is artful, aware that what she says has to be true to the form she has chosen and must be suitable for performance before an audience; whether a male or female symposium or a class of girls it is for us, and the poem, to determine. Kurke likes this approach, though it breaks the very rules she establishes for reading male lyric poets: “we might read the more intimate and personal quality of Sappho’s poetry as a phenomenon of the marginalization and containment to the private sphere of women as a group in ancient Greek culture. Thus the poet spoke intimately to other women, with whom she shared the experiences of seclusion, disempowerment, and separation.” Would Sappho have had any sense of what Kurke means? Or is Kurke, like earlier moral critics, applying familiar contemporary ideology to the unfamiliar and unknowable? Scholarly criticism and scholarly projection (which is a form of invention and distortion) are different in kind.62
The longing for other women or for girls taken from her to be married, or friends far away, compelled to go by marriage or by exile, not out of their own desire or on their own quests, might have given rise to Sappho’s peculiarly plangent and erotic tonalities. “Because of this pattern of separation, memory played a much greater role in the texture of Sappho’s poetry than that of the other lyric poets (and conjures up for us perhaps a stronger sense of the speaker’s interiority).” Yet it is not the poetry of separation that makes us return to Sappho over and over again. It is the poetry of presence. The world is present, and the beloved. Even when she—or he—is far away, the beloved is evoked or conjured. In Sappho, too, poetry does make something happen. The magic in it has nothing to do with hocus-pocus, everything to do with the unaccountable force of love which has found phrases and patterns to keep it real. As Horace remarks in the Odes, “her fiery passions, committed to the lyre, live on.”63
Alcaeus, since he knew her and her work, is the best contemporary witness—if we assume, that is, that the words attributed to him are actually by him. He called her “lilac-haired, sacred, sweet-smiling Sappho.”64 Dulce ridentem, as Roman Catullus would write in a translation of and a tribute to her. There was something less, and more, than sexual love between them: they are poetic complementarities, and together they provide a lyric sufficiency. A whole tradition springs from them.
XIII
Theognis of Megara
… it is interesting to establish that from those words and roots which mean good there often still glimmers the crucial nuance by which worthy men felt themselves to be of higher rank. Given that in most cases they define themselves simply by their superior power (as the powerful, lords, leaders) or by the most visible signs of superiority, as the rich, owners, … they also evince their superiority by a typical trait of character: This is what concerns us here. They refer to themselves, for example, as the truthful; this is particularly so of the Greek nobility, and Theognis of Megara is their voice. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos,1 means: one who is, one who possesses reality, one who is in fact, one who is true. Then, by means of a subjective turn, true becomes truthful: at this stage of transformation it turns into a motto and byword of the nobility and comes wholly to mean noble, in contrast to the dishonest common man. This is what Theognis considers him and thus he describes him. Finally, when the nobility declines, the word remains to mean nobility of soul and has, as it were, ripened and grown sweet.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, On the Genealogy of Morals
If you went north-north-west from Megara you would come eventually to Hesiod’s steep landscapes. Megara itself is a town which sensible travellers bypass when they take the road from Athens in the east, via once-sacred Eleusis (nowadays where the shipyards are), to Corinth in the west. The boundary between ancient Attica and low-slung Megaris is marked by the Horns, the fractured southern limit of the Pateras Mountains. A long road across the isthmus provides clear views to Salamis, the island wrested from Megara by Athens in 600 BC, and in the other direction to the Gulf of Corinth. The Plain of Megaris sustains vines and olives, and this is the region which most abundantly flavours Greece with garlic.
Megara is a modest county town, the principal conurbation in the eparchy of Megaris, whose main claim to historical fame is that it stood between Corinth and Athens and was able from time to time to play one off against the other, except when they both ganged up against it. Megara is built on two unemphatic hills, citadels of the ancient city.
Pausanias has a great deal to say about the place. Unfortunately, only one of the buildings he describes has survived, in part: the Fountain of Theagenes, built by the eponymous tyrant in the seventh century BC as a fountain house and a tunnelled conduit for water, a construction immediately popular with the people. Theagenes was a patrician populist. Remnants of the ancient city—or rather, the ancient cities that have occupied the spot—turn up, incorporated into churches or civic walls, or surface in excavations for new buildings. Pausanias notes, what modern travellers see, the use of an unusual white mussel-stone in much of the construction. The shrine of Aphrodite, one of the most ancient in the city, had statues carved by Praxiteles (Persuasion and Pleading) and Skopas (Eros, Desire and Sex).2 They were plundered or perished.
According to the poet Theognis, Agamemnon, setting off for Troy, founded a temple to the huntress Artemis, to whom he turns: “hear my prayer, keep me from harm: for you it is a small thing, goddess, but for me it is great.”3 This is the same temple that Pausanias mentions, walking centuries later in Theognis’ town. He ascribes its construction not to Agamemnon but to Alkathous, the ancient leader of Megara. Though this Artemis was an important tutelary spirit of Megara, featuring on the coinage later on, Pausanias tells us little
about the temple itself.
Megara had wealth from maritime trade. It exported red moulded pottery to the Greek world. It sustained a philosophical school, set up by a disciple of Socrates, the sophist Eukleides (450–380). It had important moments. Famous people and semi-divinities, many of them female, came there to die, or at any rate people of the area claimed their deaths and built them memorials. Ino, who as a sea-spirit helped Odysseus, lending him her scarf to save his life, was washed ashore here; the Amazon Hippolyta died here of grief (“the memorial stone is shaped like the Amazon’s shield,” according to Pausanias);4 King Tereus, who married Procne, raped and mutilated Philomela, and is conjured by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, committed suicide here; Iphigeneia, ill-fated daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is claimed as a local ghost, though she is more likely to have died, if she ever lived, in Crimea, or indeed she may have been transmogrified into Hecate and be still alive, a goddess; and Adrastos, the great king of Argos, returning via Megara from taking the city of Thebes, perished here.
In pre-Homeric times Megara was quite independent. Its chief prosperity was said to have been based on wool. In Theagenes, around 640 BC, it acquired a wise and popular tyrant, concerned—he made people believe—with bettering the conditions of the poor, though he was himself not of the people. Megara planted colonies, some of them substantial (legend says that Byzas from Megara founded no less a colony than Byzantium). It became by turns an ally and a prey of Athens; eventually it was reduced to mere provincial status and it has not prospered seriously in the last couple of thousand years.
Theagenes was expelled from his tyranny and from the city by oligarchs, those whose fortune was in the manufacture and export of wool. They were ill-born entrepreneurs of an aggressive and unenlightened kind, and certainly not the sort of whom the poet Theognis, Megara’s most celebrated ancient citizen, could approve. Self-made, they conspired together, a new class which did not value the settled traditions of the old ruling class and despised the people, who despised them in return. Megara echoed the “democratic” tensions more momentously evident in Athens.
During the age of Theognis (his name means “descended from god”), change was certainly in the air. He was born—depending on the authority consulted—around 630, 620, 570 or between 544 and 541 BC in Megara or (a mischievous suggestion) in its Sicilian colony Megara Hyblaea. Perhaps he emigrated to Sicily in later life. He was a man of some inherited property and status, and both his wealth and his social position were vulnerable. This vulnerability is his primary political and cultural subject. Sparta cannot have been an easy ally, or Corinth, and Athens was not a comfortable neighbour. If the reforming spirit that Theagenes had released when he seized power at the expense of the rich still stalked the streets of Megara, there were foes inside the walls as well as outside, and a man of property and breeding might rest uneasy on his couch.
He might have tossed and turned for other reasons, too: many of Theognis’ poems are addressed to a young man called Cyrnus, son of Polypas. Cyrnus, judging from the verses, was showered with advice (much of it civic and political) and affection. But if Theognis wanted some kind of affectionate response, Cyrnus did not comply. Theognis promises delights; Cyrnus finds delight elsewhere.
The poetry of Theognis gained wide currency in Greece, to such an extent that, like other famous makers of verse, he became an anthology. To appropriate his name provided a seal of quality for other poets: by attributing their work to him they tapped into his audience and readership. Editors, too, would attribute to him poems they felt might be more widely read if they were cut free of their original writer. This has kept scholars busy, sorting out which poems are Theognis’ own and which are by his contemporaries, successors and predecessors, including notable figures such as Mimnermus, Phocylides, Solon and Tyrtaeus. Two centuries of poems, writing from after his death and possibly from before his birth, adhered to him. As with Ben Jonson and the Sons of Ben in the English seventeenth century, there is fascinating commerce between them, and the quality of the imitative work can be good enough to displace the originals. Apart from Phocylides, Theognis’ other imitators and followers are omitted from the Greek Anthology and its fourteen centuries of epigrammatic poetry. Perhaps they are a decade or two too early. It makes a certain sort of sense to see the Theognidea—the sons of Theognis—as a necessary adjunct to the Greek Anthology, even a first volume; and the addition of a handful of Solon’s poems would hardly be out of place.
The Theognidea is, according to Leslie Kurke,5 “the only archaic elegy handed down by direct manuscript transmission.” They survive—some 1,388 verses contained in two books, the second centred on pederastic love6—not only excerpted in grammar and rhetoric primers but as a coherent set of texts that miraculously navigated the Middle Ages. The advice given, the rules and rituals of the symposium touched upon, the warnings against association with the kakoi and deiloi (“deceitful inferiors”), the need to choose the “right friends,” agathoi and esthloi, and treat them in the right ways, mean, Kurke says, that “the corpus can be read as a kind of survival manual for an imperilled aristocracy.” The low are base metal, corrupting, the high embody all the civic virtues, while the new entrepreneurs and oligarchs are false metal and merit scorn. The coherence of the Theognidea may have been what drew Nietzsche to the poet, more than the poems whose attribution is authentic.
The voice of the poems that are by Theognis leaves little doubt that it comes from lips that regard themselves as aristocratic:
When I compose, Cyrnus, lock the poems away
But if they are stolen, they’ll still be recognised;
No one selects the poor when there is better,
They’ll always say, “This verse Theognis made,
The Megarian.” My name’s known far and wide
Though there are critics of my statesmanship.
Hardly surprising, son of Polypas: why, Zeus himself
Can’t please them all, if he sends shine or rain.7
Theognis’ story, if we piece the poems together into a kind of narrative, wary at each moment of drawing too much circumstantial evidence from them, is one of having been as disappointed by his peers as by his inferiors. Now he can add to his disappointments a deep disappointment, body and soul, in Cyrnus as well.
It’s hard to put one over on your foe,
Cyrnus, but simple for a friend to cheat his friend.8
To Cyrnus, through love and a skill at making verses, he brought immortality; his name will endure, and yet the poet has nothing, neither a touch nor a token, in return:
… Violet-crowned, the Muses
Ensure your fame forever by their charm
And everywhere, while sun and earth survive
You will be sung of in my words, but I
Cannot wrest from you the tiniest due:
You cheat and lie to me, like a child to a child.9
Poor Theognis, we are tempted to say, unlucky in life, unlucky in love.
His property has been taken, he has experienced exile, yet he is a conscience and could become a law-giver if the city would recognise “my statesmanship” as it recognises his verses. A would-be Solon, he has no intention of marketing himself or his views, however: that would be to violate the very values by which he is sustained, whose truth he takes to be self-evident to right-thinking men. Theognis has a voice, that of a certain style and type of man; and if the world his poems evokes is not as rich in detail as we might wish it to be, aspects of it come into sharp focus. The diction is generally plain, heightened by vivid images, sometimes condensed into tight-lipped epigrams. Thus he says,
I’m the dog who’s crossed the flooding river,
I’ve shaken everything off in the winter torrent.10
Is this the fragment of a fable, or a vivid and precise metaphor for his own reduced condition?
At first we sympathise with Theognis and through him with his kind. The end of an era always elicits elegies whose reactionary tone is beguiling and mela
ncholy, but if we assent we lose sight of the wider society and the necessity for change. Theognis’ tone of voice and the things he says draw us sharply to attention: his harsh dismissiveness of others, his self-righteousness, and his hubris in relation to Cyrnus make him a curious figure, archaic and coldly sentimental, like the German-language poet Stefan George.
… don’t mix with scoundrels,11
But seek out and abide with worthy men.12
Drink with and eat, sit with and seek them,
And their good will, the rich and influential.
You’ll learn true lessons from true men.
Mingle with scoundrels and you’ll waste
Even what sense you have …13
Cyrnus is perceived to be morally a little frail and vulnerable (“what sense you have”). And sound men are those of wealth and power: soundness resides nowhere else. Not all men of wealth are sound, of course: the oligarchs are beneath contempt.
It’s still a city, Cyrnus, though it has new people who
Never before knew justice or the rule of law.
They clad their rumps in draggled goat-skins, lived
Beyond the city walls like beasts; and now
They’re the élite, son of Polypas, while the élite
Of yesterday is residue. It’s hard to bear:
Worthy men14 despised, the worthless15 walking tall.
Good lineage tries to splice itself with poor.
Men con one another, cheering rack and ruin,
Helpless when it comes to telling good from evil.16
This voice-portrait of a man of parts and privileges is sympathetic if at all because it is unvarnished, it wears no mask but itself. His terms and his eloquence celebrate what is passing. Readers may feel excluded from his consideration, and if they do they will get an adequate purchase on his partial and retrograde politics. We may weep for him but not with him, once he has cantankerously edged himself into perspective.
The First Poets Page 30