The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  On the face of it, there would seem to be no expressed animosity between Pindar and Bacchylides. Pindar celebrated the island of Cos as a provider of poets, and he must have been referring to Simonides and his nephew. But the scholiast, considering Pindar’s Olympian II,15 declares that it targets the garrulity of uncle and nephew, comparing them to crows “stuttering out pointless words against Zeus’ holy bird,” the eagle, namely himself.16 Carrying forward the bird analogy, elsewhere he appears to refer to Bacchylides as a jackdaw, to himself again as the eagle.17 And is Bacchylides the monkey, entertaining to children but ridiculous to a man of mature judgement like Hiero? Perhaps. Some say that Bacchylides, in his turn, slandered Pindar privately to Hiero, stressing his obscurity, his bookishness, the cold artifice of his compositions.18

  The rivalry, if it existed, was probably due to the fact that both poets were trying to beguile a single patron, their customer and tyrant. Tradition says that Hiero preferred Bacchylides, the easy-going Ionian, to the severe, courtly manner of the Boeotian who kept reminding his listeners of ancestry and seemed to praise his patrons for their wisdom in associating with him.19 He could understand Bacchylides’ poems more easily, and Bacchylides was less prone than the sometimes arrogant Pindar to insert himself into the poem as a dominant “I.” It may not be mere chance that, whereas in 476 and 470 BC both Pindar and Bacchylides wrote Hiero epinicean odes, in 468, the most important of Hiero’s victories, only Bacchylides would appear to have been asked, though Pindar composed an ode for another victor from Syracuse (Olympian VI).

  Bacchylides’ three odes celebrating Hiero’s victories can be dated with some certainty. Ode V commemorates Hiero’s single-horse-race victory—the most augustly sung of Greek horses, Pherenicus, is stabled here—at Olympia in 476, as does Pindar’s Olympian I. The brief Ode IV celebrates the 470 Pythian chariot race, and Pindar’s Pythian I does the same. In 468 BC Hiero won the Olympic four-horse chariot race, and Bacchylides composed Ode III.20 Here he pays the highest praise to Hiero’s taste and judgement in poetry.

  Marking Hiero’s Olympic victory, the poet invokes Clio, the Muse of history. He goes on to celebrate the tyrant’s wealth, power and open-handedness. The myth he explores is that of Croesus and his dreadful plight when the Persians were over-running his city, Sardis. He built his pyre and mounted it, lamenting, his dear wife and daughter with him. It is a brilliant evocation, with something like a Homeric pathos about it. “The death that can be seen advancing from far off is most dreaded by mortals.” At the last moment Zeus quenches the pyre with a downpour and Apollo bears the old king, his wife and daughter off to the Hyperboreans, where he settles them, in recompense for their pieties (Croesus’ people, meanwhile, fall under the dreadful yoke). What point could such a story have in the Olympic context? Is it that Hiero has sent even more gold to Delphi than Croesus did? Or is the poet aware that Hiero is dying, and is this a delicate acknowledgement and consolation? If so, the connection is less tenuous; the story moves us. Bacchylides then adds the myth of Apollo, compelled by Zeus to be servant to Admetus because Admetus killed the Cyclops. Apollo speaks to Admetus, but as we listen, the voice modulates into the voice of Bacchylides himself, counselling Hiero and including himself, Pindarically as it were, in the kite-tail of the offered praise. Here is how it goes:

  “You are mortal, Admetus, remember,

  And hold these two opposing thoughts in mind:

  Tomorrow is your final day of sunlight;

  You’ll live for fifty years in utter wealth.

  Do right things and be glad at heart, that’s best.”

  I speak the words that a wise man will hear:

  The deep skies are stainless, the ocean depths

  Do not decay, gold pleases, but no man

  No matter who he is, can cast aside

  Ashen age and get back budding boyhood.

  The flame of good deeds does not flicker with

  The body, but the Muse will fan and fuel it.

  You, Hiero, have shown to men wealth’s fairest blossoms.

  When a man has prospered, silence does not grace him:

  As well as celebrating what you’ve done, for ever men

  Will speak too of the honey-tongued, the Cean nightingale.

  In Ode IV he refers to himself as lyre-mastering Urania’s “sweet-crowing cock.” No wonder Pindar likened his foes to coarse-voiced, rough-plumed birds: he found the birds in their own poems. And then, in his Ode X, Bacchylides becomes “the clear-voiced island bee.”

  What is cloying about Bacchylides’ verse, and what puts us in mind of the weaker of the Homeric Hymns, which they sometimes resemble, is the profusion of adjectives, praised by some ancient critics as “epithets.” Clearly their intention is Homeric and conventional, but in Ode IV, when Heracles goes into Hades to bring back Cerberus, for example, not a single noun escapes without having to carry an adjective or two on its shoulders. These words are not “uniquely chosen.” Copious ornament stiffens the work. Many of the epithets are compound words used nowhere else in Greek poetry, perhaps Bacchylides’ own effusive coinings.

  His similes, too, while sometimes effective, can be over-elaborate: too much gold in the brocade, so that the poem cannot dance, can hardly move. He is paying a tribute to Homer, but his similes work to quite different ends, not (as Homer’s do) to produce sudden clarification, but rather to add a frill, a decoration, to what is already clear. His satisfaction as a poet would have derived from the sense that he had produced something expected and acceptable to his patron or his audience, rather than something that touched deeply upon his subject. At times the flash of metaphor does illuminate in both directions, the audience and the subject, as when he sees the afterlives of men lining the river Cocytus like wind-shuddered leaves on “Ida’s shimmering promontories.”21

  What redeems the over-wrought passage in Ode IV is not a suddenly successful simile but the power of narrative realisation. Heracles meets the afterlife of Meleager and seeks to re-slay him. Instead they have a conversation. Meleager tells of his father’s failure to appease Artemis, and how the goddess sent the Calydonian boar to hunt him down. Meleager’s speech is wonderful, recounting pell-mell what the boar hunt and battle were like, the victims, the blind rage and the sad consequences. Heracles weeps only once in his life, and this is the occasion.

  One can imagine how the object of the epinicean ode, the patron who commissioned it, would hearken as the poet and the chorus recited, waiting to see how the long mythical narrative might relate to his life and achievement. It is not easy to say exactly how the exchange between Heracles and Meleager relates to Hiero’s achievement. It may have to do with the ephemerality of even the greatest heroic achievements, which survive as narrative alone. The poem ends with Heracles asking Meleager if he left any suitable maiden sisters in the mortal world, and Meleager saying, yes. His sister was in fact Deianira, who, an audience would have realised, was to be Heracles’ wife and, when he proved unfaithful to her, was inadvertently to cause his death, having presented him with a shirt impregnated with the blood of Nessus, his centaur victim. What interests the poet is not the later, but the present story, so he leaves the future unspoken. This narrowing of narrative focus can be highly effective.

  Whatever the connection of the poem with the occasion of victory, Ode IV is dramatic. Dithyramb XV is also a play of voices. The sons of Antenor request the return of Helen. Odysseus and Menelaus attend the court of Priam, arguing the toss for giving Helen back on the grounds of justice. Very near at hand, the forces of the drama are gathering. Indeed, Aeschylus is less than ten years Bacchylides’ junior and will predecease him. Dithyramb XVI, with the (poetically postponed, as it were) cloak of Nessus and the death of Heracles, also verges on dramatic form.

  The most beguiling Bacchylidean poem is Dithyramb XVII, which had a direct impact on Virgil.22 A ship is conveying the seven young boys and the seven young girls to Crete, the annual tribute of protein for the Minotaur (the story of whose mother Pa
siphae, Minos’ wife, with her bestial appetites, Bacchylides tells).23 Minos, who is accompanying the sacrificial victims along with Theseus, finds one of the seven girls, Eriboia, sexually irresistible. Theseus tells him to behave, a chivalry dictated as much by necessity (the fourteen victims were supposed to be virgin) as out of humane concern. Then both Minos, son of Zeus, and Theseus, son of Poseidon, boast of their parentage. Minos asks Zeus to send a thunderbolt to prove his lineage, and Zeus obliges. Then Minos throws a jewel into the sea and challenges Theseus to retrieve it with Poseidon’s help. Theseus dives off the stern and Minos maliciously orders that the ship keep course and speed on. The Athenian crew are worried and weepy. But the dolphins do their trick, carrying Theseus to his father’s deep mansion, which is evoked in sumptuous and erotic images. He returns “unwet” from the sea depths to great rejoicing; Minos is compelled to control his lust.

  Dithyramb XVIII is stageably dramatic. Aegeus and a chorus of Athenians conduct a dialogue which may have been composed for an ephebic festival.24 The chorus questions Aegeus: What’s happening? Why is there this terrifying trumpeting? Aegeus replies: a herald has come from the Isthmus bringing news that a stranger (Theseus, Aegeus’ son, though Aegeus does not yet know it) is on his way along the (widely familiar) road from Epidaurus to Athens. He has destroyed a sequence of legendary malefactors:

  Sinis, who tied victims to bent pine-trees and let the trees go;

  The man-killing sow “in the vales of Cremmyon”;

  Sciron, the robber who threw his victims over the Scironian cliffs;

  Cercyon, who forced passers-by to wrestle with him and killed the losers; and

  Procoptes, the Cutter, also known as Procrustes.

  The herald, Aegeus says, reports that the stranger is accompanied by two lesser men, that his eyes are fiery, his sword heroic … Bacchylides creates dramatic tension of a real if rather dogged kind.

  There are other Bacchylidean fragments, two—reported by Clement of Alexandria—with the force of Simonides’ apophthegms. “One gets his skill from another, now as in days of old,” the poet says, in a definition of tradition which few pre-Modernists would gainsay. He adds that it is hard “to discover the gates of verse unspoken before.”25 The quest for originality, within the strict confines of conventions of form and diction, is a serious challenge for a poet, and Bacchylides does not consistently rise to that challenge. Yet sometimes he does, occasionally in a long run, occasionally in brief:

  … Fate that metes out all things moves

  A cloud; it hangs now here above this

  Country, then there hanging above that.26

  He is certainly impersonal, sharing with his uncle a degree of reticence, including himself in the frame of a poem only when convention would seem to dictate it.

  The Alexandrian critics set Bacchylides ungrudgingly among the nine canonical lyric poets.27 Didymus, the Alexandrian grammarian, composed a commentary on the Odes. Horace studied and imitated him, Virgil took bearings from him, and the historians and anthologists went to him as a dependable and authoritative source. The benign and maligned emperor Julian the Apostate, a lover of Greek culture who was compelled to serve an empire against his will, loved Bacchylides.28 And then, between the fourth and twentieth centuries, the poet virtually disappeared.

  XXIII

  Callimachus of Cyrene (310–240 BC)

  Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas

  It is in your grove I would walk,

  I who come first from the clear fount

  Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,

  and the dance into Italy.

  EZRA POUND, “Homage to Sextus Propertius”

  Oral cultures value what is old, attested, legitimate. There is little room for what is novel or goes against the grain of legend or custom. No copyright inhibits the transmission of oral poems: everyone, from bard to ploughboy, can store them in the retrieval system of memory and repeat them at will. But if you add lines and passages you run the political risks of that great forger-editor Onomacritos. The word “original” has a pejorative sense.

  Accuracy of fact in such verse is secondary to fidelity of transmission. Facts are local, poetry universal. Historical fact can give way, in epic narrative and hymn, to the demands of poetic pattern. A singer of tales is after characteristic rather than specific truth. In epic, things are too far in the past to be verified. It is another country peopled by larger men. Hyperbole, unlikely connections between disparate narratives, anachronism, all have a place there. A synthesis of elements, even of dialects, in a single, specifically poetic idiom occurs. Oral tradition is an arresting amber: words, images and forms survive beyond extinction. Oral traditions develop at a glacial pace. Then comes writing, and, gradually at first, the thaw commences. A millennium before the Trojan War, a boy called Pepy was being taken up the Nile to be placed in a writing school. Khety, Pepy’s father, declared, “I shall make you love writing more than you love your own mother; and thus I shall make beauty enter before your face.” The main thing, Khety insists, is that a scribe will always have work.1 Egyptians valued writing because it was a source of control and therefore of power. The Greeks in due course came to love it for itself.

  It is time to turn to Egypt, where the closing chapters of The First Poets are set. “As Mesopotamia may be considered the cradle of writing, so may Egypt be considered the cradle of ‘the book,’” says David Diringer. “From the earliest ages the Egyptians had the greatest veneration for books, writing and learning.”2 Greek literature could hardly have found a more hospitable long-term home: without the climate of Egypt, papyrus, and a religion which involved mummification, we would have only a fragment of the fragment of Greek poetry that survives.

  Writing borrows energy from the oral tradition and at first seeks to replicate its means and serve its ends. But the reciting bard and the individual writer engage their subjects—place, character, legend, myth—rather differently. A writer composes away from the undifferentiated audience; perhaps he has scrolls of other texts around him which he can draw upon. He has in mind as his reader or fellow symposiast a crowd different from Homer’s or Hesiod’s, different from those who frequented the theatre. It consists of almost-individuals, better washed, fed and informed than common men. A written tradition as it evolves encourages variation, individuality, even originality in handling forms, metres and subject-matter itself. What was sacred or legendary becomes “textual”; what is “textual” can be a specifically literary resource.

  By the end of the classical period, the written tradition, still grounded in Homer and Hesiod, had become a theatre of originality and variety. Theatre itself took hold of the tradition, and from 450 BC onwards—after Pindar, pending Alexandria—verse thrived primarily in the drama. Before 450, prose literature was limited: we see into earlier ages through poems—there we hear voices, view landscapes, hear the sounds of the street and the worlds of love and conflict. Aristotle and Plutarch depend upon the poets for a sense of place and moral reflection: they read Tyrtaeus to learn about Sparta, Solon to learn about Athens. There is a special kind of truth in such poetic traditions, but they pass. The arts of prose develop alongside the drama.

  Already in Pindar there is the baroque elaboration that an unkind critic calls “merely literary,” as though that heavily political and earnest author was a pince-nezed art pour l’artiste. His poems are certainly not spontaneous (but then not even the freshest-seeming, the archaic Greek poetry, is off the cuff as modern readers would like it to be). Greater elaboration, in Pindar, appeals to a specialised audience; if an audience loves puzzles, a poet will be a riddler; if a patron delights in obliquity and allusion the poet will be obligingly oblique and allusive. The more a poet tunes in to a particular audience, genre and approach, the fewer (and fitter) his readers and hearers will be. But with Pindar, however local the victor he celebrates, we know that the poem is intended for transmission to the entire Greek world, or those audiences within that world primed
to the epinicean tradition.

  Cultural accompanied the political changes of the ancient world. In 404 BC, Athens was decisively defeated: the Old Comedy and much else went out of fashion. The century after 360 BC saw transformation and a reformation of the Greek world; the centre of gravity moved from Athens, south and west. Philip II of Macedon defeated the Greeks at Chaeronea in Boeotia in 338 BC, sealing “classical Greece” as such in its tomb. Between 334 and 323 BC, Alexander conquered the Near East and Egypt, then went on as far as Pakistan, perhaps crossing the Indus. But the polis system of agora, gymnasium, theatre and other accoutrements, along with Greek-style administrative structures, he imposed in facsimile over a huge area. There were many Alexandrias, especially to the east. The koine, the Athens dialect, was a sort of lingua franca. Ancient Greek texts have been found as far east as Afghanistan. Hellenism, the version of Greek culture that Alexander spread so successfully with his conquests, survived under later patronage, set apart from the cultures of cities whose first language was not Greek. Greek common folk had provided the nurturing context for epic, drama and their familiar, familial geographies. The literary culture of the non-Greek cities was Hellenistic, and in many places a “native” tradition was displaced by this pious imposition, an imposition taken further and deeper still by the Romans in their imperial travels.