12. Talents are money. Greedy Tantalos was punished in Hades by never being able to touch the food and drink that always receded when he reached.
14. Deunysos: Dionysos.
15. Hermann Fränkel says in his Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (translated by Moses Hadas and James Willis, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973) that Eros’ red ball is the earlier version of his arrows.
16. An imitation of Archilochos’ satiric
Now that Leophilos is the governor,
Leophilos meddles in everybody’s business,
And everybody falls down before Leophilos,
And all you hear is Leophilos, Leophilos.
In each poem the proper name appears with case ending genitive, dative, and accusative.
18. A wish on Amalthiê’s horn got you anything you wanted. Tartessos is Spain. King Arganthonios was believed to have made all his subjects happy.
19. Posideion was a month corresponding to the end of December and the beginning of January.
29. See 45: the fragment is satiric.
33. Comic hyperbole. Throwing oneself off a cliff because of unrequited love was a detail of Ionian folklore.
34. The Mysians, an ancient people mentioned by Homer as allies of the Trojans, inhabited a vague area of northeast Asian Minor. Teas, Anakreon’s birthplace, was at the edge of, or just within, this territory.
41. Peitho (persuasion, Seduction) was a sister or companion to Eros. She is prominent in Sappho, but fades away in later mythology.
55. Garlands around the neck were proper dress for a banquet.
56. Knucklebones, a game like jacks: the traditional pastime of schoolboys.
61. Ta dikaia (the just, proper, right things) of the beloved is in his or her beauty. The thought is Erewhonian (and Shakespearean) to our ears.
68. Greek poetry of Anakreon’s time, and earlier, was convinced that does have antlers.
72. Bassarids: women celebrants of the Bacchanalia. They were dressed in fox skins. The dance described here was one in which the legs were apart, as if straddling something.
78. Colt or filly: same word for both.
100. “Mixed thighs.” There’s also the phrase “mingling feet.”
105. The source is a speech by Protogenes in Plutarch’s “Dialogue on Love” (Moralia, Vol. 9) in which he says that just as there is only one true eagle, Homer’s Black or Hunter Eagle (other and lesser eagles lacking its nobility), so there is only one true love, that of adolescent boys, who, unlike girls, do not go around “glowing with desire” or “gleaming with spiced oil,” giving Anakreon as the author of these phrases.
126. Athamas, Strabo says in his Geography, was the founder of Teos, Ankreon’s birthplace.
136. Perhaps “the beauty of Bathyllos.”
146. A simile that has become science: calyx.
149. Lydia was the trend setter for refinement in manners and styles.
151. Polykrates: of Samos from 535 to 522 or thereabout. Anakreon served as his court poet. He was what we would now call a pirate.
158. An editor’s note on the phrase “the beautiful bedroom” in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica has survived except for his quotation from Anakreon which demonstrated that the beauty of things and people is not in their appearance but in our love for them.
HERONDAS
The translations follow the order and Greek text of I.C. Cunningham’s Herodas: Mimiambi (The Clarendon Press, Oxford 1971), the best and most recent edition. (I have, however, reversed XII and XIII, so as to end with the fragment about Grandpa’s nap rather than the grim one about family trouble). Whilst working, I had before me Herodas: The Mimes and Fragments, with Notes by Walter Headlam, edited by A.D. Knox (Cambridge University Press, 1966 [first printing 1922]; Hérondas: Mimes Texte établi par J. Arbuthnot Nairn et Traduit par Louis Laloy, Paris: Société d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, 1928; and Frederic Will’s Herondas, Twayne World Authors Series, New York 1973.
I. THE MATCHMAKER
The setting is a house in town, probably on Kos. Time: early third century BC.
Threissa: Slaves tended to be named for their native land: this one is from Thrace.
The Goddess: Aphrodite.
Five prizes in athletics Gryllos’ achievements are meant to sound as exaggerated as the description of Egypt before.
Kytbera: Aphrodite.
Misa: Originally a Phrygian goddess. In the myth of Demeter and Persephone, she persuaded Demeter to eat during her long grief. The festival parade would be part of the Eleusinian mysteries.
Tippy: The Greek is Simé, snub-nosed. Myrtle and Tippy would seem to be acquaintances of Gyllis with a similar bent for genteel pimping.
II. THE WHOREHOUSE MANAGER
The setting is a court of law in Kos. Battaros, the pornoboskos of the tide, is arguing his case of assault and arson against Thales, a shipowner. Time: before 266 BC.
Akê: Seaport in Phoenicia.
Tyros: Tyre.
Attika: The region of Greece of which Athens is the great city. Battaros thinks of it as a fashion center.
wildman Phrygian: a racial insult.
Plug the water clock: Time for speeches in court was measured by pots of dripping water, on the principle of the hourglass. The reading of the law was on the court’s time, not that allotted to Battaros. His vulgar joke is that if the attendant spills some of the water, it will look as if he has pissed.
Brikindera is in Rhodes.
Abdera is in Thrace.
Phaselis is in Lycia, and had a bad reputation for wickedness, civic corruption, and piracy.
the mouse in the tar bucket: a proverbial situation. That Battaros does not use it correctly (it should mean trouble that you brought on yourself) is part of his characterization.
He has pulled every hair out of her thing: This is (cbutzpah. Battaros is counting on the magistrates’ not knowing that prostitutes depilated their pubic hair. Or is the joke that they can’t afford to admit that they know?
Philippos the Locust of Samos: a boxer famous for having been strangled when his opponent twisted his long hair around his throat.
Sisymbras and Sisymbriskos are both kinds of mint. Flowery names were popular with whores, and, as Cunningham shows, denoted effeminacy in men; he mentions a whorehouse keeper named Hyacinth.
Minos: judge of the dead.
of great Merops: this spate of patriotic mythology is something Battaros could have heard in any political speech.
III. THE SCHOOLMASTER
The setting is a grammar school, and probably its porch, as statues of the Muses are alluded to throughout, and these would be at the entrance or around a courtyard just inside.
Nannakos: a king of the Phrygians who foresaw the flood Deukalion (the Greek Noah) survived, and wept for his people. “To weep like King Nannakos” and “to be from the time of Nannakos” (for something or someone out-of-date) were proverbial expressions.
Simon was a name for a throw of the dice.
Akesiaos: the pilot of Neleus, who always sailed at the full of the moon. So the proverb means to recognize opportunity and to take it, but Lampriskos also means Kottalos’ bare bottom.
the country where the mice eat iron: a country so poor the mice have nothing else to eat?
Tatai!: a cry of pain.
gag you with the mouse: the name of the gag sounds like schoolboy slang. Cunningham guesses that the gag is called a mus (mouse) because of musis (shut).
Hydra: monster that regrew two heads for every one cut off.
Klio: the Muse of history.
coat your tongue with honey: the sense would seem to be “sweeten your mouth, you’re talking foul” and be the equivalent, with what a difference, of washing one’s mouth with soap.
IV. WOMEN AT THE TFMPLE
The setting is a temple to Asklepios, god of healing, Kos. The time (calculable from the artists mentioned) is between 280 and 265 BC. A satire on bourgeois pretension to the appreciation of art. All the remarks, I would conject
ure, are fashionable clichés of the time.
Paiêon: Asklepios. This prayer would be formulaic.
the snake: the animal form in which Asklepios appeared. One was kept in the temple, and frequently in houses.
V. THE JEALOUS WOMAN
The setting is a house of a well-to-do woman.
Davos: stock name for a butler in New Comedy.
Gerenia: nothing is known of this religious festival.
VI. A PRIVATE TALK BETWEEN FRIENDS
The setting as a private house.
dildo: the Greek is baubon, a leather penis for masturbation. The word means “a pacifier.” Sappho’s word was olisbos. Herondas takes this household article for granted.
VII. THE SHOEMAKER
Cunningham and every editor and commentator of Herondas spend a lot of time explaining that this mimiambos is about women shopping for a baubon. This error arises from a similarity of stock comedy names. Despite the names Metro and Kerdon, this play is not a sequel to VI. For the life of me, all I see in this playlet is the perennial comedy of women looking at every pair of shoes in a shop and leaving without buying any: this is the original of Blondie at the shoestore.
cabinet: the word may be simply shoebox.
artist’s beeswax: Greek painters mixed their colors in wax
Mikion’s wild beasts: a local zoo or menagerie?
Women and dogs eat shoes: Cunningham has a long note on shoe fetishism, which he tries to tie in with his conviction that the shoes are not shoes but dildoes, but the proverb seems transparent to me: dogs chew up shoes and women wear them out and buy them with frantic regularity. Human nature is constant, and I assume that Greek women of the Alexandrian period owned, as women now, fifteen to every one pair of shoes belonging to their husbands.
VIII. THE DREAM
Most interpreters see this as a personal statement. It need not be. The papyrus is badly damaged, but the drift seems to be that a poet dreams that he is involved in a contest of balancing on greased wineskins, and that Dionysos and the ancient poet Hipponax are surrealistically in the dream. Herondas clearly took Hipponax as his master, wrote in his “limping” meter and archaic diction, and imitated his satiric stance before the world. If the statement is personal, it is a satiric self-portrait, and may have been written for a highly literate banquet audience rather than for a theatre or public performance.
Latmian: proverbial. Endymion sleeps forever in a cave on Mt. Latmos.
a short fawnskin tunic: this and the ivy crown identify the figure as the god Dionysos.
gift of Aiolos: a bag of wind. Wineskins, blown up and greased, were used as a game won by the contestant who could balance longest on one. Then some dived headfirst into the dust four lines down describes people falling off wineskins.
Hipponax: Ephesian poet, sixth century BC, a bitter satirist.
ALSO BY GUY DAVENPORT
A Table of Green Fields
(Stories)
The Cardiff Team
Da Vinci’s Bicycle
Copyright © 1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1991, 1995 by Guy Davenport
Copyright © 1980 by The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Versions of these translations have appeared before: Archilochos in the magazines Poetry and Arion and as a book, Carmina Arcbilocbi (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964); Sappho as a book, Sappho: Songs and Fragments (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965); Alkman in Arion (Winter 1969). Lukas Foss and Richard Swift have separately set some of the Archilochos fragments to music, and Swift has made a song of Alkman’s “The valleys are asleep and the mountaintops.”
Anakreon was first published in Conjunctions: 6 and as a book by the University of Alabama Parallel Editions, 1991. Herakleitos and Diogenes and The Mimes of Herondas were published by Grey Fox Press, 1979 and 1981 respectively.
First published as New Directions Paperbook 799 in 1995.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
7 Greeks / translations by Guy Davenport.
p. cm.
Contents: Archilochos – Sappho – Alkman – Anakreon
Heraldeitos – Diogenes – Herondas.
ISBN 978-0-8112-1288-5
ISBN 978-0-8112-2456-7 (e-book)
I. Greek literature – Translations into English. I. Davenport,
Guy.
PA3621.A13 1995
881’.0108 – dc20
95–4227
CIP
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
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