The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  That story is unfounded, never did you

  Go on the well-manned galleys, never did you

  Reach the towered city that was Troy.

  Proteus snatched Helen back, away from Paris (Alexandrus), at Pharos and returned her to her rightful spouse, leaving her seducer a wooden panel with her portrait painted on it so he could aridly assuage his desire with that.

  In the fourth century, stories of Stesichorus’ relations with the tyrant Phalaris at Acragas (Agrigento, due south of Himera) are current. Aristotle retells the fable with which the poet cautioned his fellow-citizens.15 The Himerans had made Phalaris their military tyrant. Now Phalaris wanted a bodyguard and they were inclined to oblige. Stesichorus spoke. A horse was alone in his field. A stag came and started grazing there. The horse asked a man’s help to get rid of the trespasser. The man agreed, on condition that the horse allow himself to be bridled and ridden by the man wielding a javelin. The horse acquiesced, and the man made him a slave. The Himerans had allowed Phalaris to bridle them; if now they allowed him to mount them, they risked enslavement.

  It is likely that for a time Stesichorus left Magna Graecia (the term used to describe the Greek cities on the Tarentine Gulf and those on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy), perhaps because of his hostility to Phalaris, perhaps to earn fame and money. It seems most plausible that he went to Sparta, not only because of the care he took to revise his oeuvre to please a Spartan audience, but because he appears to have some first-hand knowledge of their dances and choral movements. He set his version of the story of Orestes in Sparta rather than in Mycenae and made Agamemnon a Lacedemonian, not a Mycenean, with his palace in Sparta. This effectively detaches Agamemnon from Argos, Sparta’s great enemy. Stesichorus keeps out all mention of the house of Atreus, “a discreditable ancestor.” This large poem may have been composed specifically as a choral song for a Spartan spring festival. A surviving snatch of verse speaks of “public song,” “at the approach of spring” and swallow-time.16

  He must have been a rich old man because, like Ibycus, he was—the Suda says—murdered: “it was Hicanus killed Aeschylus the piper and Stesichorus the cithara-reciter.”17 His fame was reflected in the grandeur of his tomb. It was a substantial octagonal landmark, much admired in antiquity. It had eight pillars, eight steps and eight corners,18 and it gave rise to a figure of speech. A throw of eight was called a Stesichorus, hence the proverbial expression “eight all” (for “eight all ways”).19

  The sources of Stesichorus’ verse are obscure. He emerges from a tradition which has almost entirely vanished. He is the first poet of Magna Graecia about whom we know anything much: it is the framing tradition that has vanished. Himera itself was a city rather different from other Greek colonies. It prospered early, minting its own coins before many other Greek cities, and featuring Stesichorus on one, with his lyre and walking stick. Its population was of Dorian and Chalcidian extraction, and although on the northern shore of Sicily, it was at a remove from other colonies, and exposed to Carthage. Such ports are full of storytellers. Stesichorus belongs to no chronicled Greek tradition but draws on several: he combines choral and lyric elements, for example, in ways which prefigure the drama and are remote from Alcman’s choral practice.20

  Though Stesichorus may have contained the soul of Homer, we cannot prove that he knew the Homeric poems in the forms in which the Aegean Greeks had them. He certainly knew versions of the stories. Cynaethus may first have brought the Homeric poems “west” in 504 BC. If so, Stesichorus would have encountered them only in his maturity, travelling in the Peloponnese. Homer apart, Xenocritus of Locri may have been affected by him in musical terms. He is said to have written narrative odes—dithyrambs—and Bowra comments, “it certainly looks as if Stesichorus inherited from him the main character of his art.”21 Another important and quite lost predecessor was Xanthus. He wrote an Oresteia, just as Stesichorus did, and Stesichorus refers to him. Xenocritus and Xanthus, both of Magna Graecia, and representing a popular strand of lyrical narrative, have almost wholly vanished.

  Arion’s poetry vanished, too, not having reached the Alexandrian scholars who made it their business to establish the canon as we partly know it. Was his work current and did it affect Stesichorus? Arion toured Italy and Sicily in the seventh century BC and may have left a mark on Xenocritus and Xanthus. His contribution to the dithyrambic tradition could be the element of narrative which Stesichorus, via Xenocritus and Xanthus, goes on to develop.

  Another plausible influence is the local songs of Himera, Locri and other towns with which Stesichorus is associated. Bowra senses a folk-song tradition of sorts behind some of Stesichorus’ narrative, especially in the bucolic, pastoral elements, early evidence of the spirit of the idyll.22 The legend of Daphnis appears to be local, associated with bay trees and with the river Himera. The term “local” may be better than “folk”: the gap between popular and high art is bridged by choral and narrative poetry, especially of the kind which has a local dimension; but “folk” implies a quite different kind of vernacular.

  Nine of the fourteen long poems of which a few splinters remain would have appealed in Himera and throughout Magna Graecia. Four dealt with the adventures of Heracles, who was popular throughout Italy as the embodiment of the Greek settler and founder and patron of several colonies. The poems not composed for local consumption appear to have been devised for specific audiences in mainland Greece, and in particular a Spartan audience.

  It is obvious why Stesichorus enjoyed such popularity and was read with devotion and dogged respect for over a thousand years, casting a direct, and now an indirect, influence which is ineradicable. He managed to accommodate in a language which has many of the qualities of lyric poetry much that seems by nature to belong to the epic. He scaled down the individual heroisms into compelling and dramatic narratives which were fuller, more prosaic and less allusive than Pindar’s, though his work, for all its archaism, points in a Pindaric direction. “Indeed his special position is at the point where the lyric succeeds the epic as a main means of expressing what concerns a Greek audience, and starts on its task by reshaping and bringing up to date much that the epic had told in a simpler and less ingenious manner.”23 The “existence of the dactylic metres” made it easier for him to adapt epic matter without much adjustment to the language.

  Yet the legacy is more complicated than that, and the new papyrus finds, especially three published in the 1960s, adjust our sense of the poet in an unexpected direction. One papyrus, writes Leslie Kurke, contained fragments of the poem about the monster Geryon. “Calculations based on the size and layout of this papyrus revealed that the poem would originally have spanned 1,300 lines at least (remarkably long for a lyric poem; indeed, analogous in length to an entire tragedy).” The extent of the poem and the apparent oddities in the prosody suggest that it would have been resistant to choral delivery. There might still have been public recitation if not incantation and one bit in particular cries out for a civic setting. New material for the rhapsode?

  The words “setting” and “tragedy” suggest something of the protodramatic nature of the form of Stesichorus’ extended narratives. The poet is giving not voice but voices. We hear Jocasta, Teiresias, Heracles, Geryon. Jocasta, addressing Teiresias’ dire prophesies, wishes for death rather than to witness her sons slaying one another. The speech is full of a kind of raw emotion; it is repetitious and over-insistent, more an aria than part of a dialogue. Teiresias’ reply is equally verbose. In 1977 the Lille papyrus, recovered from a mummy wrapping, was published with thirty-three almost complete lines of the poem, in which Jocasta speaks to her offspring Eteocles and Polynices “on the verge of war, urging them to divide their father’s property by lot and thereby spare their house and city from destruction.” All but two of the lines are speech.

  As with Homer before or the dramatists that follow from him, some borrowing directly from his plots, we can conclude (tentatively of course) that Stesichorus’ choral poetry was point
ing not only towards the obliquities of Pindar but towards the achievements of classic Greek drama. They weren’t in themselves dramatic, however. He could be exhaustingly long-winded. In the Geryon poem, “the speech in which Geryon ponders his death … is separated by nearly 400 lines from the account of his death …” If “his amplitude and nobility of style could be called Homeric,”24 his pacing could not be. The poems for the most part claim as subject-matter damomata (“things common to the citizenry”). Kurke takes speculation to the limit of scholarship: it is tempting to push it further.25

  We can say that Stesichorus’ work represents a transition from epic to lyric, that “he keeps much of the narrative of epic even though he presents it in a lyric form.”26 Narrative yes, un-epic yes, but lyric? Unlike lyric poets, Dionysius of Halicarnassus reminds us, “Stesichorus, Pindar and the like made their periods”—the length of their sentences, their metrical runs and larger structures—“longer and divided them into many metres and colons for sheer love of variety.”27 The length of the periods is another reason why the fragmentary nature of the surviving texts (with ends of lines, beginnings, but few extended runs) is so vexing. It is harder to imagine a long sentence than a short one from a word or two. Tzetzes insists the poems were lyric because they were accompanied on a lyre.28 Quintilian says that, though redundant and diffuse, Stesichorus “maintains on his lyre the full weight of epic poetry.”29 By this time, however, the word “lyric” remembered its origin in the word “lyre,” but no longer carried the instrument under its arm wherever it went. The texture of Stesichorus’ verse is not as close as we expect from a lyric, nor the prosody as subtle in its vocalic variations. The epithets, which probably abounded, were less functional than Homer’s and do not stand up to scrutiny. Quintilian found his excess a form of profligacy, vicious redundancy.30 He lacked concentration, his was a prose mind functioning prosodically, finding the “middle way.” Hermogenes loves his “abundance of epithets,” the absence of a through rhythm, poetry as construction,31 an uncomfortably modern take on the poet’s vices, which are represented as virtues. Still, he had virtues or he would not have survived so long. Statius believes he rises at times to heroic utterance, what he terms “ferocity.”32

  However over-copious Stesichorus’ poetry was, however far the sheer quantity of words outran their matter, he was central to sixth-century poetry and art and to subsequent centuries, though the fragments of his work hardly support the high estimation in which he was held. His impact persisted. He may have been to Virgil what Virgil was to Dante, a kind of spiritual sherpa on the long journey. Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid may be almost as much Stesichorus’ as Horace’s Dulce et decorum est is Tyrtaeus’.

  It is correct to say that little apart from fragments survives; but it is not enough. We do not have actual poems by Orpheus, yet we believe in him and his legacy. There is less magic about Stesichorus, but more history. Because of Simonides, Pindar and Virgil, we know more of Stesichorus than we do of poets whose texts have been less harshly erased by time, Archilochus, for example, or Sappho, near contemporaries to whom he owed nothing, and who owed nothing to him. But because we know less of his life, its irregularities and eccentricities, because he lived long and did not inscribe too much of himself in his verse—it was not that kind of verse that he composed—he arouses limited curiosity. He made a very good living from creating and performing. For a bourgeois age he provides something of an example, an early Grub Street model, as educator-entertainer.

  The poems survive as volume titles. Scholars believe that a mythical narrative poem filled each book (with the exception of the Oresteia, which filled two), composed in what were regarded largely as lyric metres. Thirteen titles, with fragments or attestations, survive. The first and one of the better-known is Geryon, part of the Heracles cycle, recounting one of his twelve labours, the killing of a particularly revolting monster.33 Stesichorus augments the traditional horribleness of three-bodied Geryon. But the perspective, paradoxically, appears to be that of the monster much of the time, “a strange winged red monster who lived on an island called Erytheia (which is an adjective meaning simply ‘The Red Place’) quietly tending a herd of magical red cattle, until one day the hero Heracles came across the sea and killed him to get the cattle.”34

  Anne Carson takes the monster’s part, as she believes Stesichorus to have done. “We see his red boy’s life and his little dog.” We overhear his mama’s appeals—Grendel and his mother are prefigured here—and the gods on Olympus foreknow his doom. Heracles’ arrow slays him. “We see Heracles kill the little dog with His famous club.” Carson capitalises the “h” in “his,” making the hero divine. She appends the word “little” to the red dog, weighing the scales against our more conventional moral instincts and, probably, Stesichorus’. Her reading is delightfully synthetic; I am not sure that it is credible. She has joined up the dots and in order to elicit the figure she has added a few dots of her own. What there is of the poem has its moments of, among other things, baffling lyric incongruity. Geryon, wounded, “drooped his neck to one side, like a poppy which spoiling its tender beauty suddenly sheds its petals and …”35 The redness is apposite, suggesting blood, but the juxtaposition of the poppy and the monster is either risible or surreal. Carson reinvents it this way, making it oddly wonderful:

  Arrow means kill It parted Geryon’s skull like a comb Made

  The boy neck lean At an odd slow angle sideways as when a

  Poppy shames itself in a whip of Nude breeze

  A single attestation survives to the poem called Cycnus, another part of the Heraclean cycle. One version of the story says that Cycnus, son of Ares, lived in a Thessalian mountain pass and offered contest to travellers, then killed them and used their skulls in the decoration of his father’s temple or a temple to Panic (Phobus). Heracles ran into him during one of his labours, perhaps en route to the Hesperides in search of the golden apples, and did him in. Next in the Heraclean cycle was Cerberus, about the three-headed hound that guards Hades, and again only a single attestation survives as to the fourth poem, Scylla.

  The Boar-Hunters, called Suotherai, told of Meleager’s quest for the Calydonian boar and the battle for its hide that followed. A single suggestive line of the poem survives, “and dug his snout tip beneath the earth.”36 Nothing memorable is left of Europa, though the poet played variations, we are told, on some traditional legends: not Cadmus but Athene sowed the dragon’s teeth that turned into warriors at Thebes. The seventh poem, too, explored Theban themes: we do not know how Stesichorus developed the vexed story of Eriphyle, the betrayed wife, the bribed mother.

  Only four small bits and a few phrases survive from The Funeral Games of Pelias (Athla epi Pelia), part of the Argonaut cycle originating in Thessaly and therefore tying in obliquely with Cycnus from the Heraclean cycle. Simonides picked up on this theme and developed it on a considerable scale. It is, however, the ninth poem, The Sack of Troy (Iliou Persis), where more phrases and lines survive, that had a greater impact on later poetry. It told of the wooden horse, of Aeneas’ departure from toppling Troy, and of his trip to Italy. The surviving fragments are tantalising but inconclusive. Closely related to it was Stesichorus’ notorious Helen, probably composed on mainland Greece. Theocritus, in the introduction to Idyll XVIII, “Helen’s Epithalamium,” says that “certain things have been taken from the first book of Stesichorus’ Helen.”37 The Oresteia lies behind Aeschylus’ great cycle of plays. It may also underpin, Bowra suggests, Pindar’s Pythian Ode XI. The poem, divided by Stesichorus’ Alexandrian editors into two books, so vast was it, fully developed its theme.

  The merest hint of Stesichorus’ Nostoi survives.

  It is clear from this brief catalogue of his vanished works that Stesichorus was not an epic poet. The poems were too diverse in their focus, too circumstantial and prosaic, too keen to be narrative history, to bring about the complex integration that epic must perform. They were glosses on epic, as was tragedy; they were entertainments
, devised to appeal to specific audiences in Greece or Magna Graecia. Stesichorus was a performer, which meant that he must flatter his audiences, even if, in doing so, he had to adjust history. He may seem to us less a choral poet than, as M. L. West says, “a singer, performing his own songs to his cithara accompaniment.” But by his own lights Stesichorus’ achievement was to “establish (stesai) a chorus of singers to the cithara.”38 And he left an important formal grid to his successors, a structure that leads directly into the Pindaric tradition and, in another form, into the drama: strophe, turn; antistrophe, counterturn; and epodos, after-song. The Suda identifies these as “the three of Stesichorus … for all the poetry of Stesichorus is epodic.” It conformed—though we can hardly demonstrate this from what remains—to the triadic sequence. “If someone was quite without culture and learning,” the Suda continues, “it was said as insult that he didn’t know even ‘the three of Stesichorus.’”39

  Stesichorus survived on the Himeran currency. He survives elsewhere. In Berlin there is a famous crater (large cup) attributed to the fifth-century BC vase painter Douris. It portrays—the earliest dated vase to do so—educational scenes from ancient Athens. Among the images of dialogue and instruction is a seated teacher holding up a scroll to a young man. On it are written two half-lines attributed to Stesichorus, “To me Muse … I start singing about the broad-flowing Scamander.” Already in Athens this poet from the West, from Sicily, was canonical.