The ‘svelte gazelle’’s the girl all skin and bone.
‘Majestic, regal’ means, say, fifteen stone.
Sir Laurence Olivier noticed it at the first dress rehearsal and said it jarred, so two days before the opening the lines became:
The loved one’s figure’s like Venus de Milo’s
even the girl who weighs a hundred kilos.
Palladas
* * *
1974
One of the disadvantages of the traditional organisation of those 4,000-odd epigrams that make up The Greek Anthology is that the poems are arranged according to subject matter and type, thus obscuring the singularity of individual poets. Peter Jay’s decision to rearrange the poems by poet and period for his selection of modern versions allowed distinctive talents to emerge clearly from the welter of reiterated themes; among the most notable of them, that gloomy epigrammatist of the fourth century AD, Palladas of Alexandria.
Gilbert Highet places Palladas among the world’s great pessimists – with Juvenal, Swift, Nietzsche, Bernard de Morval (the author of De Contemptu Mundi) and Ecclesiastes; while J. W. Mackail, somewhat tantalisingly, as he felt unable actually to print the poem in his selection, regards poem 1, sometimes known as ‘The Descent of Man’, as ‘one of the most mordant and crushing sarcasms ever passed upon Mankind’. His dates are usually given as AD 360–430, but C. M. Bowra, in an essay ‘Palladas and Christianity’, argues fairly plausibly for putting his birth at about 319, and – since we know from poem 401 that he lived at least seventy-two years – for placing his death around the end of the century. This would make him an old man at the time of the savage anti-pagan riots and destruction of Greek temples, the looting and burning of pagan objects of worship by Christian mobs given licence by the edicts of the Emperor Theodosius in 391, and inflamed by the rabble-rousing Bishop Theophilus. That his last years should have coincided with the virtual destruction of the system of beliefs to which he owed his always precarious living as a schoolmaster gives us an added insight into the bitter force of his poetry. The new dates calculated by Bowra also mean that he died before he could witness the dreadful murder of the Hellenistic teacher and intellectual Hypatia, whose flesh was scraped from her bones by Christians wielding oyster shells like razors. But there is no doubt that he must have witnessed similar events, even though the well-known poem 182 seems to me more gnomic than specifically about the persecution of non-Christians. I have included the poem (673) which Palladas was supposed to have addressed to Hypatia since their two names, the martyr of Hellenistic culture and the poet of its last exasperated gasp, have been traditionally associated in the drama of its extinction.
Palladas, when noticed at all, is generally regarded as the last poet of paganism, and it is in this role that I have sought to present a consistent dramatic personality in this selection of slightly less than half the poems ascribed to him in The Greek Anthology. His are the last hopeless blasts of the old Hellenistic world, giving way reluctantly, but without much resistance, before the cataclysm of Christianity. It is difficult, if not impossible, at this time of sectarian violence, pagan hopelessness and Christian barbarity to characterise Hellenism as worldly sanity, or Christianity as sweetness and light. Poor Palladas seems to be in the predicament of his murderer in that rather nasty poem ‘The Murderer & Sarapis’ (704). There seems to have been little or no moral sustenance or sense of identity left in the one, and little sense of hope in the other. The choice was between a crumbled past and a future of specious regeneration. This is the conflict of the following rather mysterious poem of his (Greek Anthology 10.82) about the Christian attitude to the Hellenes:
We non-Christians are dead, and only seem
alive; the life we’re living’s a bad dream,
or so THEY say. My version of it’s this:
we’re alive but wonder if life is!
The irony of Palladas’ image as ‘the last of the pagans’ gloomily watching the Christian world view assert itself, even, as I have imagined, in the person of his own wife (see poem 525), is that his is a paganism so turned in on itself that in its hatred of life and the senses, and its scorn of worldly goods and endowments, it seems very like the spirit of early Christianity; ‘a Father of the Church’, Palladas has been called, ‘who has all the proper characteristics except faith, hope and charity’.
His bitterness is compounded of historical pessimism, the poverty of a poor teacher dependent on rich Hellenes for his very precarious existence (see poem 316), and a bad marriage which seems to have led to general misogyny. His ironic poems (such as 637) on the new time-serving roles of the old gods show that bitter sense of humour which prevents a man from toppling over into the abyss of his own creation. There is no sense of joy in his few poems on the carpe diem theme. He recommends drink as oblivion. The sense of death is stronger than any urge to sensual life. The tone of his bitterness ranges from common-room bitchiness (e.g. poem 378), still so much a part of the ‘humanist’ tradition, the donnish moue and pedantic repartee, to a cosmic derision like an orchestrated death rattle. What is unique and even invigorating about Palladas is that there is no sense at all of ‘gracious’ surrender either to the inevitability of death or to historical change. Even the fatalism of poems like 109 seems grudging. If there is only the bleakest of Epicurean attitudes, there is certainly nothing Stoical about Palladas. He is one of those embarrassing but heroic figures who are not dignified in despair, refusing to be noble on the gallows or to make peace with their maker. It is perhaps this aspect of his tone, his ‘raging against the dying of the light’, that makes commentators like Mackail refer to his ‘harsh thought and half barbarous language’, or like Gilbert Highet to regret his lack of ‘great verbal dexterity’. He is certainly not elegant (and most certainly not in that false sense often wished onto the classics by classicists); his is not the stylish after-dinner despair of the high table, the sighing gestures of surfeit, but the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile. He is not, as it happens, incapable of the dexterous play on words, the pedantic pun or the neat turn (e.g. poem 5110). For all his complaints about life as a grammatikos teaching children to learn Homer by rote, he must have been familiar enough with the Greek traditions to have produced any amount of passably smooth imitations, and so we must assume that the undeniable roughness of his tone was worked for. His epigrams are much more ‘pointed’ than most of his predecessors’ in The Greek Anthology, and ‘point’ is somehow the formal equivalent of despair. There is a strong sense of form in Palladas, and it is something which barely seems able to contain the apoplectic energy of his nihilistic scorn. It is as if the formal endeavour and metrical tension were all that stood between Palladas and choking silence, sheer cosmic exasperation and what Beckett’s Lucky calls ‘divine aphasia’.
1.
40
A lifetime’s teaching grammar come to this –
returned as member for Necropolis!
2.
18
Death feeds us up, keeps an eye on our weight
and herds us like pigs through the abattoir gate.
3.
67. Hypatia
Searching the zodiac, gazing on Virgo,
knowing your province is really the heavens,
finding your brilliance everywhere I look,
I render you homage, revered Hypatia,
teaching’s bright star, unblemished, undimmed.
4.
70. The Murderer & Sarapis
A murderer spread his palliasse
beneath a rotten wall
and in his dream came Sarapis
and warned him it would fall:
Jump for your life, wretch, and be quick!
One more second and you’re dead.
He jumped and tons of crumbling brick
came crashing on his bed.
The murderer gasped with relief,
he thanked the gods above.
It was his innocent belief
they’d saved him out of love.
But once again came Sarapis
in the middle of the night,
and once more uttered prophecies
that set the matter right:
Don’t think the gods have let you go
and connive at homicide.
we’ve spared you that quick crushing, so
we can get you crucified.
5.
52
Cuckolded husbands have no certain sign
that trusted wives are treacherous, like mine.
The ugly woman’s not de facto pure,
nor every beauty fast. You’re never sure.
The beddable girl, though every bidder woos
with cash and comfort’s likely to refuse.
There’s many a plain nympho who bestows
expensive gifts on all her gigolos.
The serious woman, seemingly man-shy
and never smiling, does that mean chastity?
Such gravity’s worn only out of doors;
at home, in secret, they’re all utter whores.
The chatty woman with a word for all
may well be chaste, though that’s improbable.
Even old age gets goaded into lust;
senility’s no guarantee. What can we trust?
I’ve got twelve gods to swear my honour by,
she, convenient Christianity!
6.
31
It’s grammarians that the gods torment
and Homer’s fatal wrath’s their instrument.
Monthly (if that!) the grudging nanny wraps
their measly pittance in papyrus scraps.
She nicks some, switches coins, and not content
holds out her grasping claws for 10 per cent,
then lays at teacher’s feet a screw of stuff
like paper poppies on a cenotaph.
Just get one loving father to agree
to pay (in decent gold!) a yearly fee,
the eleventh month, just when it’s almost due,
he’ll hire a ‘better teacher’ and fire you.
Your food and lodging gone, he’s got the gall
to crack after-dinner jokes about it all.
7.
63. On a Temple of Fortune Turned into a Tavern
i
Agh, the world’s gone all to fuck
when Luck herself’s run out of luck!
ii
Fortune, fortune-maker/breaker,
human nature cocktail-shaker,
goddess one, and now a barmaid
’s not too drastic change of trade!
You’ll do nicely where you are
behind the counter of The Fortune Bar,
metamorphosed to ‘mine host’
the character that suits you most.
iii
Fortune, can you hear them making fun,
all the mortals, now you’re one?
This time you’ve really gone too far
blotting out your own bright star.
Once queen of a temple, now you’re old
you serve hot toddies to keep out the cold.
Well might you complain, now even you
suffer from yourself as mere men do.
8.
37
You brainless bastard! O you stupid runt!
Such showing off and you so ignorant!
When the talk’s linguistics, you look bored;
your specialism’s Plato. Bloody fraud!
Someone says, ‘Ah, Plato!’ then you duck
behind some weighty new phonetics book.
Linguistics! Plato Studies! Dodge and switch,
you haven’t a clue, though, which is which.
9.
10
If gale-force Fortune sweeps you off your feet,
let it; ride it; and admit defeat.
There’s no point in resisting; it’s too strong –
willy-nilly, you’ll get swept along.
10.
51
You invite me out, but if I can’t attend
I’ve had the honour and I’m more your friend.
The heart’s no gourmet, no, it feels
honour stays hunger more than meals.
Phaedra Britannica
* * *
1975
Prétends-tu m’éblouir des Fables de la Grèce? …
Quoiqu’au-dessus de nous ils sont ce que nous sommes,
Et comme nous enfin Héros sont des Hommes.
Do you pretend to dazzle me with the fables of Greece? …
Though above us they are what we are,
And for us heroes are finally men.
Pradon, Phèdre et Hippolyte, 1677
I
Racine took two years to write Phèdre, and I took two years to adapt it for the English stage. My methods, such as they are, a mixture of what Dryden called metaphrase and paraphrase, are no more original than Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes or than Racine’s, who made his play out of the Greek of Euripides and the Latin of Seneca, as well as earlier dramatic versions of the myth in his own tongue. In a pre-Romantic age I would feel little need for self-justification, nor feel I need be defensive about the poet’s role as adapter. Nothing better could be said on that issue than what was written by Lion Feuchtwanger in his poem ‘Adaptations’ (1924), composed after collaborating with Brecht on their version of Edward II after Marlowe:
I, for instance, sometimes write
Adaptations. Or some people prefer the phrase
‘Based on’, and this is how it is: I use
Old material to make a new play, then
Put under the title
The name of the dead writer who is extremely
Famous and quite unknown, and before
The name of the dead writer I put the little word ‘After’.
Then one group will write that I am
Very respectful and others that I am nothing of the sort and all
The dead writer’s failures
Will be ascribed
To me and all my successes
To the dead writer who is extremely
Famous and quite unknown, and of whom
Nobody knows whether he himself
Was the writer or maybe the
Adaptor.
Critics of Phaedra Britannica have provided a spectrum of opinion as wide and as contradictory as that in the Feuchtwanger poem, from the English critic (to whom Racine was, no doubt, ‘quite unknown’) who accused me of taking a ‘crowbar’ to the original, to the French critic Jean-Jacques Gautier, writing in Le Figaro and finding that in my version ‘la noblesse linéaire, la flamme, la grandeur de l’ouvrage original est préservée’.
II
When a play becomes a ‘vehicle’ only, the greater part of it has died. ‘If we go to see Phèdre,’ wrote Roland Barthes, ‘it’s on account of a particular great actress, a certain number of felicitous lines, some famous tirades set against a background of obscurity and boredom. We tolerate the rest.’ Barthes was writing after the production by Jean Vilar at the TNP in 1957 with Maria Casarès, and his reluctant conclusion was prominently displayed in the programme of a production I saw in Paris in 1974 at the Théâtre Essaion: ‘Je ne sais pas s’il est possible de jouer Racine aujourd’hui. Peut-être sur scène ce théâtre est-il aux trois-quart mort.’ Similarly, Jean-Louis Barrault in his Mise en scène de Phèdre (1946) writes that audiences went to see Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre, but they didn’t go to see the piece. They didn’t even go to see the divine Sarah in the entire role, but the two scenes in which she excelled: the declaration of Act II and the despair of Act IV. ‘Phèdre n’est pas un concerto pour femme,’ Barrault warns us, ‘mais une symphonie pour orchestre d’acteurs.’ The solution to the problem offered by Barrault could well apply to the revival of any classic play that has become simply a one-role play by coming adrift from its social origins: ‘Phèdre femme
doit de nouveau s’incorporer dans Phèdre tragédie.’ A play is ‘about’ everyone who sets foot on the stage, principals and mutes alike. The way to re-energise Phèdre, setting aside for the moment the well-nigh insuperable problems of doing that for an English audience, is to rediscover a social structure which makes the tensions and polarities of the play significant again. To make the roles, neglected for the sake of the ‘vehicle’ role, meaningful again. To grasp the play entire. It is only when the characters around her are duly reinstated that the central figure can be seen in her true light. One can begin by going back to the title displayed on the original edition of Racine’s text in 1677: Phèdre et Hippolyte. In order to correct the theatrical imbalance and sharpen the focus, one needs such, perhaps overloaded, assertions as Leo Spitzer’s that Thésée is the most important person in the play. He is, after all, left alive with the awareness of the consequence of his actions, and the knowledge of the deaths of his wife and son. He has the last word.
III
There is a mode of literary criticism, built upon the ruins of neoclassicism, and deriving from a period which was beginning to value intensity of experience at the expense of structure, a mode of criticism that extracts the principal ‘beauties’ of a work, Arnoldian ‘touchstones’, as though the essence of poetry resided in a few reverberant lines, and long works like Homer’s were nothing more than a handful of titillating monosticha, rooted out of grey unappealing tracts by Romantic truffle-hounds. It’s an attitude represented at its extreme by Poe’s opinion that ‘there is no such thing as a long poem’. It made assayer Matthew Arnold call Dryden and Pope ‘classics of our prose’. Racine has suffered similarly in France. Henri de Montherlant thought that there were only twenty-seven lines of ‘poetry’ in the whole oeuvre of Racine, some 20,000 lines. Jean Dutourd thought that Racine’s alexandrines were 99 per cent rhetoric and 1 per cent ‘poetry’. One line which has consistently seemed to glitter from all this dross is one which Flaubert thought the most beautiful line in the whole of French literature, and which Proust valued for its beauté dénuée de signification. It’s a line which, typically, can only be understood, like most of Arnold’s rhapsodical nuggets, by referring it back to the total context from which it was prised, by reconstructing the strata from which it was hastily lifted. One has to assume the responsibility of the archaeologist among so many opportunist treasure-seekers. The line in question is the famous one spoken by Hippolyte describing Phèdre as:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 10