7 Greeks

by Guy Davenport

  Nor was Sappho’s ingenuous Aphrodite as wildly sweet to a world whose religions moved in confusion, eclecticism, and despair. Sappho’s Aphrodite is Botticellian and her Graces dance again in his “Primavera.” The flower was the pattern for her sense of beauty; she delighted in the frilled leaves of dill and celery–lace upon a slender stalk, so that her girls seem crossbred with flowers. “She wreathes the rose with encomia,” Philostratos says of Sappho; rose is symbol of girl; girl, of rose, “roses pale as the forearms of Graces, sleeves tucked back at the elbow.”

  Neither Sappho nor Botticelli separated beauty from the intelligence, of which it is the specious film. Bright eyes, bright mind; balanced walk, balanced nature. The perfect unity of strength and grace in horse, ship, and javelineer underlies her sense of the beautiful, and immediately she demands the enveloping appetence that identifies and completes the beautiful, the untranslatable imeros, that yearning that was at once love, sexual longing, adoration, and fascination. Never has a poet been as clear about predilections and attractions. A man should have something of tree, of horse, of a god about him; a woman should have the elegance of the rose and the accomplished Graces. Music, water, air, voices, wine—they must be of a crystal clarity. Where the aesthetic departed from these sharpnesses was in her womanly feeling for the soft and tender: all things colored violet or pink, moonlight, fine cloth, wild flowers, and children.

  Her Aphrodite laughs. Sexual frenzy was as respectable a passion to Sappho as rapacious selfishness to an American. Few societies have been as afraid of the body as ours, and in the West none has, within history, been as solicitous as the Greek of its beauty. The Egyptian eye first saw dignity and suave elegance in the body, transferring man’s millennia of appreciation of the animal’s splendor to his own physique. The Egyptian, though wigged in porcelain, braceleted, ringed, and painted, went all but naked; women’s clothes kept to the contours of the flesh. It was for the Greek to see the natural growth of the body in full health as a beautiful thing, abhorring all mutilations, scarrings, tattooings, elongations of skull, circumcisions, subtractions of teeth or fingers. The old Aphrodite was fat and long of breast and behind, and the cow was her rich sign. Sappho’s Aphrodite was slender, trim of line.

  What remains of Sappho, like all of Greek art, is in ruins. But her troubles do not stop there. “The face of Greece,” Nikos Kazantzakis has written, “is a palimpsest bearing twelve successive inscriptions: Contemporary; the period of 1821; the Turkish yoke; the Frankish sway; the Byzantine; the Roman; the Hellenistic epoch; the Classic; the Dorian middle ages; the Mycenaean; the Aegean, and the Stone Age.” He might well have added, since it is constantly before our eyes, the Counterfeit. Enter the National Museum in Athens; once you are beyond the great Sounion kouroi and the bronze Zeus, or Poseidon, poised to hurl his javelin, you are in a forest of Hellenistic sculpture, Roman copy after Roman copy. Like the Wmged Victory of the Louvre, what’s before you is not only a copy of a copy, but just as likely part real, part conjectural plaster.

  At Knossos, deafened by crickets, you see, surrounded by terebinth, dog rose, and oleander, the ruins of Minos’s palace. From here Sappho summoned Aphrodite in a hymn, and here now lovely goddesses stage their epiphanies among wiid flowers and doves, on wall after wall, in the most beautiful frescoes to have survived from antiquity. Here are throne rooms, chapels, long stairs, great jars, cypress pillars rising in the most transparent of light. Did not Daedalos build these walls? A few miles away is a city so old it has had ten names and answers now to three (Candia, Megalo Kastro, Iraklion); its streets have known Hercules, El Greco, Dorians, and Nazis. Yet beside Knossos it is young.

  One looks. These polychrome frescoes, can they have lasted from a time that was as remote to Homer as Tiglath-pileser to us? There is no warning posted that they are twentieth-century reconstructions, yet they are, like practically all the rest of the surrounding stage set. The charred originals, themselves pieced together by painted plaster to eke out the design, are in Iraklion. Some frescoes are less than a tenth Knossan, as blackened as Sappho’s papyrus and parchment fragments, nine tenths the extrapolation of the reconstructor. If they look surprisingly Art Nouveau, that was the style prevalent at the time of their restoration. And these columns, rooms, stairs, balconies? They are so much the work of Sir Arthur Evans, the Stalin of archaeology, that one despairs of knowing Minoan from Victorian Imaginary Minoan.

  At Phaistos, across the island, nothing has been counterfeited, and all is as flat as time has worn it. “There will always be some,” John Bowman says in his Guide to Crete, “who feel that Sir Arthur Evans carried his reconstruction rather too far.”

  Scholarship until quite recently did the same thing with Sappho’s texts. As Sir Arthur’s artists found a bull’s ear and horn painted on a fragment of wall and then added a whole bull for us to contemplate as an example of Knossan art, so a poem by Sappho can be built up within the ruined places of a ten. You can begin by making Sardis out of Sard (a plausible extension) at the beginning of a fragment, and proceed, conjecturing, emending, guessing. Here, from the workbook in which I began my translation of Sappho, is Fragment 43 done from the reconstructed version of J. M. Edmonds in the Loeb Lyra Graeca:

  This white moon in its garden of stars

  Rises over Sardis in the Lydian night

  Where we three in her heart together

  Move in grace,

  As in those girlish days when you, her goddess,

  Sang to adoring ears, before adoring eyes.

  Now she walks tall among the wives of Lydia,

  Finest of them all,

  As brighter among them in her beauty

  As when an early moon in the first hour of night

  Diminishes with her red hand the brilliant stars

  And finds again

  Long fields of flowers, the salt sterile sea;

  And cool dewfall, unfolding the rose, fills the downs

  With parsley and meadows thick with clover bloom.

  There, there she walks,

  In her country, Atthis, among her people,

  And if, holding us in her heart, she calls out in longing

  Across the flower fields, night that has so many ears

  Shall hear her cry.

  This is a tempting way to translate. The restorations here are like tuckpointing in a wall still fairly substantial. The art of conjecture can also, as in the following example, rebuild a wall in ruin:

  Heart, be steady till the anthem come,

  For the sovereign Muses would have me sing

  Swift crystal sound to hymn the young

  Adonis slain.

  Instead, you stagger in a trance of lust,

  Wild, half human, and by desire disgraced

  Fall down before tongue-tying

  Aphrodita.

  Enticement with seducing eyes

  Has poured from her gold two-handled jug

  Honied wine to darken deeper your

  Forgotten mind.

  No such poem of Sappho’s exists. The papyrus indeed has words that can be read, here and there, and artful conjectures can bridge the gaps between them to achieve a poem like the foregoing. The result, however, is as little Sappho’s work as the sentimental ascriptions to her in The Anthology which her severest and best editors, Edgar Lobel and Sir Denys Page, omit as spurious.

  They also omit the fragment that all the world knows, the one that the parrot in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa recited in Greek in a Chinese brothel, and which Burns seems to answer in his melancholy

  The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave,

  And Time is setting with me, oh.

  –the poem that might be Endymion speaking or a woman who has given up hope that her lover will come, as the paths are now too dark to follow:

  The moon has set, and the Pleiades.

  It is the middle of the night,

  Hour follows hour. I lie alone.

  Whoever wrote it (it may be part of a folk song), I f
ollow an old tradition in leaving it among Sappho’s poems.

  There is so little of Sappho that the reader with beginner’s Greek can read the substantial fragments in an afternoon. There are many fine translations of Sappho in English (though none that includes all the fragments), and the only excuse for making a new one lies in the richness of her poetry. Each translator perfonns not so much a linguistic as a critical act, the closest possible rendering of an appreciation. Many of the fragments are mere words and phrases, but they were once a poem, and, like broken statuary, are strangely articulate in their ruin.

  I have generally followed the text as given by Lobel and Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1963), and additions from Page’s Supplemntum Lyrics Graecis (Oxford, 1974), and am indebted to his Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1959). One can only contemplate with humility the labor that lies behind every printed line of Sappho. I have separated one two-line fragment back: into the discrete lines that some editors place together (I loved you once, Atthis, long ago/ You seemed then to me to be an ungainly little girl), and I have distributed the index of first lines of poems that appears in the Bibliographical Fragment, Lobel-Page 103. Several times I have given alternate translations, under Roman numerals, since no English version of language so remote in idiom and estranged in culture can be in any sense wholly accurate or final.

  My starting point was the poems and not the Greek language, my knowledge of which is functional rather than philological. I have followed no strict theory. My intention everywhere has been to suggest the tone of Sappho’s words. Had I not accepted as an outer limit to transposing meaning from Greek to English the rule that one must not tamper with grammatical integrity, I could justify, utterly beyond the pale of scholarship, taking the half-visible imagery of Fragment 119, for example, and, using the multiple possibilities for what the torn words might have been in their wholeness, making such a poem as:

  In yellow frock and yellow shawl,

  Stole of topaz and peach-flower hat

  Knit in your hair like a ring of stars,

  In crocus sash and mulberry vest,

  Sandals red as amber wine,

  You stand in the orchard as

  Delicate as the flowering trees.

  This is assuredly not Sappho nor an accepted mode of translation, but it is (or might be, if the guesswork has been lucky) an example of her imagery, much as one displays in a museum ornaments of Mycenaean gold without knowing what they are or how they were articulated in their day. The reading of Sappho is surrounded by passionate dispute in which I am unqualified to join; my translation therefore is without any authority except the dubious one of sentiment.

  AIkman, born in Sappho’s Lydia and a resident in a city where Archilochos would have felt at home, Sparta, is something of a mixture of those two. Like Sappho he wrote songs for girls to sing; like Archilochos he looks at the world with a tempered eye. I have not translated all of his one-and two-word fragments, and I have made multiple translations of his great Hymn to Artemis of the Strict Observance, first, to graph the text (found in an Egyptian tomb at Saqqâra in 1855, part of a funerary library presumably to be at hand on Resurrection Day) as literally as possible, indicating lost portions; second in octosyllabic couplets to indicate something of the music and intricate imagery; third, to conjecture the full shape of the poem (the myth it deals with can be found in Pausanias) with no attempt at translating; and fourth to make the sparest possible faithful version, to show how phrase follows phrase.

  This amazing hymn was sung at the Feast of the Plow by girls dressed as doves. They would have sung (as we gather from the poem) in rivalry with an opposing choir. All over Greece we find all endeavor taking the form of a contest, an agon. Before the age of Archilochos, Sappho, and Allanan, we hear of contests of trumpets, city against city, the splendor of which tantalizes the imagination more than all the Kings and archons in the history books.

  Alkman’s congeniality is in his celebration of the table, the fireside, old-fashioned cooking, and—with a resigned affability—the arthritic good humor of his old age. Goethe admired and imitated his lyric about night coming on and the sleep of animals and birds. Aristotle records that AIkman suffered terribly from lice. My translations were made from Antonio Garzya’s Alcamane: I Frammenti (Naples, 1954) and in part from Bruno Lavagnini’s Aglaia: Nuova Antologia della Lirica Greca da Callino a Bacchilide(Turin, 1964).

  Anakreon is a poet whose fame and stature come from a collection of poems he did not write. The Anakreon translated here is not the poet who inspired and was imitated so beautifully by Belleau, Ronsard, and Herrick. It was not discovered until the nineteenth century that their “Anacreon” (first printed in Paris in 1554) was an Alexandrian imitation, or homage by a group of poets, that was misunderstood to be a text of Anakreon himself from the Middle Ages forward. This pseudo-Anakreon has been one of the most persistent and rich classical influences of them all. His tradition has been alive—is still very much alive—since the sixteenth century. A history of this influence (as, for instance, Michael Baumann’s Die Anakreonteen in englischen Übersetzungen, Heidelberg 1974) touches every period of English and American poetry from Puttenham to Thoreau. These sixty poems are now called The Anacreonta, and are understood to be an anthology of imitations, never meant to deceive, but to honor.

  What we have of the real Anakreon (who lived in Teos, now Sighalik in Turkey, and later in Athens, in the sixth century BC) is precious little, and that is in fragments: six ruins of lyrics on papyrus, 155 brief quotations from other writers, mainly grammarians, and one line, partly conjectural, written on a vase painting. Obviously nothing—neither tone nor imagery nor meaning—is certain in these piecemeal remains of a great poet admired by all antiquity.

  Of Herakleitos we know only that he lived in Ephesos between 540 and 480 BC, and that he wrote a book dedicated to Artemis, fragments of which have survived through quotation by later writers.

  The astuteness and comprehensiveness of his insight into the order of nature have commanded attention for 2500 years, exhibiting a freshness for every generation. Plato counted him among the transcendent intelligences, as did Nietzsche, Gassendi, Niels Bohr, Spengler. His presence as a spirit in both modern poetry (Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hopkins) and modern physics makes him peculiarly a twentieth-century guide, one of our daimons.

  There are many studies of Herakleitos, and many translations. This one hopes merely to provide the simplest and most transparent English equivalent for the Greek that I can manage.

  In Fragment 69 I have departed from literalness and accepted the elegant paraphrase of Novalis, “Character is fate.” The Greek says that ethos is man’s daimon: The moral climate of a man’s cultural complex (strictly, his psychological weather) is what we mean when we say daimon, or guardian angel. As the daimons inspire and guide, character is the cooperation between psyche and daimon. The daimon has foresight, the psyche is blind and timebound. A thousand things happen to us daily which we sidestep or do not even notice. We follow the events which we are characteristically predisposed to cooperate with, designing what happens to us: character is fate.

  Among the tombs that line the road into Corinth, Pausanias says in his Travels, you can see in a stand of cypress and pine near the city gate the grave of Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher whom the Athenians called the Dog, “a Sokrates gone mad.”

  He died at Corinth in his eighty-first year (some say ninetieth), a slave belonging to Xeniades, who bought him from the pirate Skirpalos (or, according to Cicero, Harpalus). “Sell me to that man,” Diogenes had said at the slave market, “he needs a master.” Diogenes had come up for sale when he was captured at sea, on his way to Aigina. In the world at that time, as now, kidnapping for ransom was a Mediterranean enterprise. Diogenes was a stray, a citizen of no city-state, a man without property or kin.

  He seems to have welcomed slavery. He became the teacher of Xeniades’ sons, a member of the family. “A benevolent spirit has entered my
house,” Xeniades said.

  Diogenes was born in 404 BC in Sinope on the Black Sea, the modern Sinop in Turkey. His father, an official at the mint, was convicted of debasing the coinage, and the family was disgraced and exiled. Diogenes made his way to Athens, where he took up the jibe of being an outcast’s son by saying that he, too, was a debaser of the coinage: meaning that, as a philosopher, his business was to assay custom and convention and sort the counterfeit from the solid currency.

  He studied philosophy under Antisthenes, a crusty type who hated students, emphasized self-knowledge, discipline, and restraint, and held forth at a gymnasium named The Silver Hound in the old garden district outside the city. It was open to foreigners and the lower classes, and thus to Diogenes. Wits of the time made a joke of its name, calling its members stray dogs, hence cynic (doglike), a label that Diogenes made into literal fact, living with a pack of stray dogs, homeless except for a tub in which he slept. He was the Athenian Thoreau.

  All of Diogenes’ writings are lost: some dialogues, a Republic, and his letters. What remain are his comments as passed down through folklore to be recorded by various writers. These have obviously been distorted, misascribed, and reworked. The ones I have chosen are from Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch.

  He was a public scold, a pest, a licensed jester. He was also powerfully influential as a moral and critical force. It was at a school of Cynics in Tarsus that a Roman Jew named Shaul Paulus learned to command rhetoric, logic, and rigorous candor. We can even hear the sharp voice of Diogenes in his turns of phrase. Diogenes had said that the love of money was the metropolis of all evil; Paul, that the love of money was the root of all evil.

  Diogenes and Alexander the Great died on the same day: a traditional belief that shows a curious affinity. Alexander said, “If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” meaning, one supposes, that if he could not have all of the world, he would have none of it. Neither knew anything of compromise. They were perfect specimens of their kind.