The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  There is another story about transcendental payment being made on an investment of verse. One day Simonides, visiting “a certain island,” found a fly-blown murdered corpse. He buried it and gave it an epitaph cursing the murderers and blessing “those who gave me burial” (namely himself).54 On the point of sailing from the island, the blessing was delivered: the dead man’s ghost visited Simonides and warned him against the journey. Simonides stayed behind when the boat set sail. Of course, the boat went down with all hands: the poem had saved his life.

  It may be that his abusive rivalry with Timocreon helped to besmirch his medium-term reputation. Timocreon made the mistake of going with the Persians to Susa, and he found it hard to come home. He was a famous athlete, and in Susa spent his time gluttonising and then challenging Persians to fight with him, which they did, though he always ended up the victor. He had thought the great Athenian statesman Themistocles to be his friend, but Themistocles did not approve his conduct and left him stranded with the foe. Timocreon came to hate Themistocles and all his friends. Timocreon stood on his dignity when he had no dignity to stand on. There is a mock-Simonidean epitaph for him:

  After abundant drinking, gorging, slandering

  Here lie I, Timocreon of Rhodes.

  This was probably not Simonides’ only attack. For his part, Timocreon parodied Simonides’ style, which he found empty of matter, and satirised his person. Most of the fragments of Timocreon which survive are adjuncts and footnotes to the life of his hated Themistocles, who himself eventually went to work for the Persians, much to his enemy’s delight.

  Simonides could be haughtily dismissive of the “poetic” in writers whose work he disliked. The most famous example is his reply to Cleobolus’ pious poem declaring that a work of art in stone might last longer than nature itself, immortalising its subject.

  Who with his wits about him would endorse

  Cleobolus of Lindus, who against

  Unstanchable rivers, the flowers of spring, the sun’s

  Flame, or the moon’s gold, or swirling

  Sea currents, set up the lastingness of a mere statue?

  The gods are above all things and even mortal hands

  Can crumble stone. He is a fool in judgement.55

  Simonides was certainly back in Athens by 490, when he defeated Aeschylus in composing commemorative verses about Miltiades’ defeat of the Persians at Marathon. His final years—ten or twenty? no one is certain—were spent in Sicily, under the benign wing of Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, a patron too of Aeschylus. There he was joined by his nephew Bacchylides and continued what may have been a rivalry—it was certainly competition—with Pindar, another poet at Hieron’s court. Pindar wrote his first three Olympian odes for Hieron and Theron; he also criticised Simonides for his excessive digressions.56 Simonides, Plutarch declares, re marked that he often felt sorry after speaking, but never after keeping silent.57 From Pindar’s point of view, he spoke too much, and at tangents.

  It is said that Simonides made peace between Theron of Acragas and Hieron of Syracuse when they were on the brink of war. Even after he died, he remained voluble. His tomb was violated and destroyed. Callimachus, in his Aetia, has him speak from beyond the grave against Phoenix of Acragas, who despoiled a substantial tomb “which the people of Acragas, out of respect for Zeus the Host, soon built at the entrance of their city.” Phoenix went so far as to incorporate Simonides’ headstone into a tower.58 None of Simonides’ own surviving poems touches directly on the experience of Sicily.

  Bowra loves Simonides and wants to free him from the biographical opprobrium which dogs him. Having followed him from one court to another, he declares, “He consorted with tyrants, but there is no reason to think that he was servile to them.”59 Well, if they were paying him as a court poet, whether or not they were tyrannous tyrants, there is every reason to think that he was servile to them. There were things he would have been unlikely to say in their hearing, which he might well have said once death had put them beyond his audience.

  It is sad that so little of Simonides’ choral, narrative and dithyrambic poetry survives. The dithyramb was closely associated in antiquity with narrative in lyric form.60 A lovely fragment about Danaë floating in the chest with baby Perseus and emitting her plaintive lament gives us an idea of his lightness of touch and the uninsistent nature of his prosody, even when the plot material is intense. The passage about Orpheus, possibly from a poem about the Argonauts, is almost a lyric in itself and could attach to various phases of Orpheus’ life:

  Countless birds flocked

  Above his head, the fish

  Out of dark blue water leapt

  Straight into the air at his

  Beautiful song.61

  Recent papyrus finds have helped to illuminate the nature of the mixed dithyrambic genre.62 Volume LIX of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (1992) includes a poem by Simonides about the battle of Plataea, which M. L. West has done much to reconstruct. The fragments indicate a substantial, not excessively long work, a few hundred lines in extent. It may have opened with the fanfare of a formal hymn, perhaps (West suggests) to Achilles. It was found with the remains of a roll containing symposium poems, and, not long enough to fill up a roll of papyrus, it could have been included with the Nanno.

  Much of our knowledge of the choral tradition is conjectural, given the paucity of substantial surviving texts. Stesichorus and Ibycus provide shards. In the second half of the sixth century Simonides took the form further. His epinicea owe much to the choral and the dithyrambic tradition, and working back from the fragments of his poems and the substantial texts of Pindar, by means of a kind of regression we draw tentative conclusions. One thing is clear, a poet in ancient Greece had a place within the city and a serious, even a crucial, role to play composing work for religious and secular occasions, from exhortation and prayer to ode and epitaph. He was not innocent of thought, and some of the thought was original. When by a sly elision Simonides slides from “gods” to “god” (theon to theos), something important is happening in imagination as well as in argument: “no man has ever attained distinction unassisted by the gods, no city and no mortal. God knows everything, for men misery is in everything.”63 This god is a sudden table-turner, man is always at the whim of chance.64 There is a theme in Simonides which troubled Plato, who found the poet inconsistent and morally deficient in this place.

  Here’s a story:

  Arete65 lives on unscalable

  Cliffs and near the gods tends

  A holy place. She can’t be seen

  By everyone, but certainly by him

  Who strives and sweats within, the man

  Who draws near to the very peak

  Of manliness66

  It is hard for a man to be truly good, “four-square in hands, in feet and in mind, fashioned without a flaw,” because man lives in time, and time means change, so a man may achieve moments of the highest good, but they pass; even a good man’s life is at best an interplay of striving and lapsing. Only the gods can be good, rather than pass through moments of goodness. “When his luck is good, any man is good; when it’s bad he’s bad (and by and large those men are best whom the gods love).” Simonides, Plato believed, was teaching that it is not worthwhile pursuing an impossible quest to be good; it is good enough not to be bad: “against necessity not even the gods fight.” “I’m no fault-finder: I’m satisfied if a man is not bad or too shiftless, and understands the justice that helps his city, a sound man. I won’t find fault with him; but the generation of fools is numberless. Everything with which baseness is not mixed is fair.”67

  There is always danger in translating poetry into the consistent categories of philosophy, because, like man in Simonides’ reckoning, poetry exists in time and delivers not absolute but relative truths. Werner Jaeger shares Plato’s concerns but is more forgiving because he historicises. He says that Simonides’ poetry shows how “the true nature of areté in general was coming to be the central problem for the men of t
he early fifth century.” Simonides evokes it and how rare it is. It lives, he says, “on difficult peaks, surrounded by the holy choir of lightfoot nymphs; few mortals can see her unless soul-torturing sweat has been wrung out of their vitals.” Jaeger draws attention to the word andreia: “it still has the general meaning of ‘manly virtue.’ It is explained by the famous skolion which Simonides addressed to the Thessalian Scopas—a poem which reveals a conception of areté involving both mind and body. ‘Hard it is to become a man of true areté, foursquare and faultless in hand and foot and mind.’ The deliberate, severe, and lofty art which underlies areté was in these words made clear to Simonides’ contemporaries …”68 What for Pindar is an unarguable moral verity for Simonides is a noble but difficult category. A world of relative truths is his. Simonides can play with ideas which, for Pindar, are truths that underpin the very mission of his verse. For Pindar seems to have mission, while Simonides has, at best, a vocation.

  What makes Simonides so answerable to the “modern”? It is not just his life with its material hungers, real or imagined. It is not only his moral relativism, though that is certainly modern in a sense: “Simonides praises the man who does not willingly do what is base.”69 It is not his sense of irreversible transience, “All things thus swirl into Charybdis’ terrible pool, / What is greatly good and great goods too.”70 Horace latched on to his line about the pointlessness of cowardice, a motive in itself for heroism:71“but Death snares too the man who flees the struggle.”72 These are elements that make Simonides familiar. His strong sense of the eikon and the connection between words and the things they name, the power of language to make real, his imagistic instinct, put us in mind of Pound. His arresting sense of paradox makes us rethink a cliché or a commonplace into lived language, for example, “It isn’t that the soul leaves the body: the body leaves the soul.”73

  He says, “The city is the teacher of the man,” and this sets him down among us.74 I do not wish for a moment to appropriate him or to diminish his instructive otherness. But it is likely that he would have been more at home with Baudelaire than with Wordsworth, with Eliot than with Frost, and, like it or not, when we are not sentimental, so might most of us. The Augustans were enamoured of the Greeks because their nature was formal, more a moral than a material space, and the art of writing creates such common spaces, in which disparate elements harmonise, so that storm and calm, within and without, hold together in a single skein of words: “The city is the teacher of the man.” Simonides’ most hopeful poem, and we can only hope that it is by him, is an epigram celebrating the skill of two painters to make a real space. It is “real” and “space” in the sense that Wallace Stevens teaches us.

  Cimon painted the door there on the right.

  Dionysius painted the door on the right where you come back out.75

  XX

  Corinna of Tanagra

  When to her lute Corinna sings,

  Her voice revives the leaden strings,

  And doth in highest notes appear,

  As any challeng’d echo clear;

  But when she doth of mourning speak,

  Ev’n with her sighs the strings do break.

  And as her lute doth live or die,

  Led by her passion, so must I …

  THOMAS CAMPION, “When to Her Lute”

  In northern Boeotia are the meagre ruins of Anthedon. There the “sweet-voiced Myrtis”1 is said to have lived, her remains even more meagre than those of her city. Plutarch claims that Myrtis taught Pindar to compose. Do we believe the Suda, which says that she also initiated Corinna, nicknamed “the Fly,” into the art of verse? Or did Corinna, a Boeotian, too, of Tanagra, not far from Pindar’s Thebes, honour her as a foremother with such familiarity as to make us believe they were close in time rather than in spirit? Myrtis starts with confidence: the first poem in what may have been the first book of her work declares: “Terpsichore calls on me to sing pleasant tales for Tanagra’s white-gowned women.”2

  Though Myrtis’ poems do not survive, Plutarch summarises the narrative of one of them, a kind of epyllion about love, lying, and a heroine who betrays her unresponsive lover and then plunges from a cliff to her death. It is a more exhilarating story than those of the main fragments of Corinna that survive. Plutarch, several centuries after the events he recounts, says that Corinna, like Myrtis, counselled the young Pindar. Your poetry, she tells him, is too poor in myth and legend, too dependent on obscure diction, over-stretched meanings, periphrasis, mere prosodic virtuosity—all patterned icing, as it were, with no cake underneath. Taking her words to heart, he came back with a poem so freighted with myth that she burst out laughing.3 A poet should “sow with the hand, not the whole sack.”4 The poem becomes, in her image, a furrow or field, and composition is part of an organic process, an approach quite at odds with the mature poetics of Pindar.

  Ancient Tanagra is situated three or four miles from the modern town, on a round hill. To the north flows the river Asopos, whose daughter-bearing god is the subject of one of Corinna’s poems. Gazing down from the round summit a modern traveller sees, but must be careful not to photograph, a Greek Airforce airfield and, further off, an airplane factory built on the site of an extensive necropolis. The military installations have a certain appropriateness: this is the area where Sparta famously defeated the armies of Athens and Argos in 457 BC. Further off, to the south, the brow of Mount Cithaeron, protagonist of Corinna’s other surviving fragment, can sometimes be seen. In her day the crown of fir trees with which the gods garlanded the mountain’s brow survived. Critics surmise that, in keeping with the regional dialect of her poems, the themes she chose were strictly local, even parochial. The people of Tanagra were civilised provincial folk, known for their good husbandry, their loyalty and their open hospitality. The land was not notably fertile: little wheat was produced, but some of Boeotia’s finest wine came from the area. Tanagra was also noted for its fighting-cocks.

  What remains of Corinna’s world? There are covered and not very dramatically uncovered remains at Tanagra: one can make out the shape of the theatre, and partly exposed are outer fortification walls dating from around 385 BC. If one crosses the Asopos, to the east of ancient Tanagra is the Church of Saint Thomas which has built into it much ancient fabric. Tanagra pottery artists produced human figurines of terra-cotta, expressive and delicately executed, showing stately, draped matrons, but also lively figures: dancers, music makers and figures of less certain virtue.5 In one tomb eight gilded angels were discovered, with little hanging devices: they must have been suspended above the sarcophagus, as if flying; one offers a ball, one a fan, one wears a little cape. One Eros carries a bird, and another Eros sports a Phrygian cap, both figures charred in parts as if touched by the flames of a pyre. There is a boy with ginger hair and a hat or wreath, wearing a long blue cloak, and a little girl bearing a bag of knucklebones. The figurines must all have been richly painted, suggesting in miniature what the now bleached marble statuary might have looked like. Such pieces were intended as votive offerings at temples or tombs, and the name “Tanagra” became generic for all such figures produced within and beyond the borders of Boeotia. There is a “realness” about the world they reflect: seeing them, we get close to the world from which Corinna’s rather stiff legendary narratives emanate. The beautiful female figures and children in particular haunt the imagination. Lord Leighton’s portrait of the poet, on display at his house in London, is altogether too formidable and forbidding.

  Taking Plutarch and other classical accounts seriously, for centuries scholars assumed Corinna to be contemporary with Pindar, writing in the fifth century BC, her poems then lost until the second century BC. She was reputed to have triumphed over Pindar in a poetry contest. This is how Pausanias tells it. “The memorial [tomb?] of Corinna, the only Tanagran composer of songs, is at a conspicuous point of the city; in the training-ground [gymnasium?] there is a picture of Corinna tying her hair with a ribbon for the victory she won over Pindar at Thebes
.”6 The portrait Pausanias saw, and the memorial, if they were in the spirit of the Tanagra figurines, would have touched the heart of any man or woman. Aelian, an abundant and unreliable witness in the third century AD, went one better than Pausanias and declared that Corinna triumphed over Pindar five times, which given the quality of her surviving work seems implausible, as does his allegation that Pindar, “by way of exposing [the Boeotian audience’s] lack of poetic judgement,” called her a “sow,” presumably in his Olympian Ode VI, in which he alludes to the traditional rusticity of Boeotia.7 This contradicts the poem in which Corinna reproves Myrtis of Anthedon for being so unfeminine as to compete with Pindar.

  I disapprove even of eloquent

  Myrtis; I do, for she, a woman,

  contended with Pindar.8

  If Corinna did in fact triumph over Pindar, Pausanias has two plausible explanations, neither of them much to the credit of her verse: “I think it must have been her dialect that won, her songs not being in Doric like Pindar’s, but in the language Aeolians would understand, and the fact (if this portrait is anything to go by) that she was the most beautiful woman of her time.”9 Statius refers to her as “slim Corinna” whose language is full of “mysteries.”10

  Confusions and contradictions are removed if we take Corinna’s celebrity to have been a Hellenistic invention. The first surviving mention of her dates from around 50 BC and is itself “insecure”—that is, not entirely dependable. Unless she was ignored, or her work went missing, she belongs to a later age. Her editor David Campbell declares, “The terminus ante quem for her poems is 200 BC ± 25 years, since they are spelled in the Boeotian orthography of that date.” Of course the transcription may have been modernised to conform to later Boeotian norms, but the language in which we have the poems is the given from which scholarship must take its bearings. As time passed, she became more real. Propertius knew her work; Ovid may have named his Corinna after her. The first-century elegiac poet Antipater of Thessalonica,11 father of the dedicatees of Horace’s Ars Poetica, includes her in his list of Mortal Muses. There are nine, and they are arranged neither chronologically nor alphabetically but, since they are listed in an epigram, to be accommodated in the metre: Praxilla, Moero, Anyte, Sappho, Erinna, Telesilla, Corinna, Nossis and, last of all, one of the first, the familiar “sweet-voiced Myrtis.”