The First Poets Read online

  She holds in her right hand a stylus, in her left a blank

  Wax tablet. So she starts and pauses; writes and damns

  The tablet; writes then unwrites; alters, blames herself, accepts;

  Now lays the tablets by, now picks them up once more.16

  Pugillares were used into the Renaissance because they were conveniently reusable. Greeks and Romans wrote in the fistbooks with a graphium or stylus. They were especially convenient for drafting and correcting speeches, poems, literary texts, school exercises; the completed work was then transferred onto papyrus.17

  In Greece, and later in Rome, it was not uncommon for people to write with a stylus on leaves: the Sibyl made a habit of it. At Syracuse the ostraka for the ostracism were not the eponymous shards of pottery but olive leaves; the exile was sentenced not to ostracism but to petalismos, from petalon, leaf. We “leaf” through a book, we “take a leaf out of” another’s book, we “turn over a new leaf.” Folium is a Latin leaf, a folio is a book where the standard leaf of paper is folded once. Such modern books, however, were more than a millennium away.

  From the papyrus scroll projected a label called a sillybos with the title of the work and perhaps a titulus or contents list. The full titulus was given, as with Spanish and French books today, at the end rather than at the start of the work; if a scroll was left un-rewound, at least the next reader would know what lay in store. And he would rewind the book on a single wooden roll rod called in Greek omphalos, in Latin umbilicus, the meanings identical. Greek scrolls usually had a single roll rod, Hebrew two, for the sacred works.

  A working scribe organised his text in parallel columns. He would complete a column, roll it in with his left hand, roll out a new column space with his right, and continue thus for yards and yards. Readers handled scrolls in a similar way. The representation of a person holding a roll in the right hand denotes that the scroll is about to be read, in the left that the scroll has been finished and the reader is about to act: to speak, as an orator, for example. No rollers survive, only portrayals of them. Longer works or multiple rolls were kept together in baskets or buckets made of leather or wood. A book of the Iliad or the Odyssey filled a single roll. But a book’s length was also determined, in the case of Homer for example, by aesthetic considerations.18

  When we arrive at the Alexandrian Library and Callimachus’ Pinakes, the ambitious library catalogue, we shall revisit the theme of the book and the editions which that institution and that period of Greek scholarship produced.19 Other issues relating to the manuscript tradition are discussed as they arise in the lives and times of the poets. It is important to remember that, even in Alexandria, there were no firm scribal traditions, rules or governing conventions. Greek scribes could be inaccurate, unlike the meticulous transcribers of Hebrew scripture whose work was judged, character by character, by God himself.

  And no original Greek manuscript, in the hand of an actual author, survives. A gap of a whole millennium separates the earliest surviving manuscript of a Homeric poem from Homer himself. Where books existed in a certain order—the nine volumes of Sappho’s poems, for example, or the six of Alcaeus—we do not know if they were originally assembled or sanctioned by the authors themselves, or if an editor sorted them into thematic or formal categories when the time for the definitive edition arrived. The earliest surviving manuscript is the Persae of Timotheus of Miletus (discovered in a tomb at Abusir, Lower Egypt, in 1902). The author lived between 447 and 357 BC and the papyrus is fourth century, the closest a text comes to the author’s life.20

  We can be confident that, by the fifth century BC, if not earlier, written literature had become a commodity. Scroll—that is book—production and the book trade were established in the larger cities. Eupolis, Aristophanes’ contemporary, collaborator and eventual rival, takes it for granted that there is a book market in Athens.21 Aristophanes himself makes it clear that books were easy to procure in specific markets: he could joke about literary fashion. Xenophon recalls that a wealthy youth known as Euthydemus the Handsome collected scrolls of the poets and philosophers in order to impress his contemporaries. The custom of acquiring spurious cultural bona fides goes back a long way. Plutarch remarks upon Alexander the Great’s purchase of books—plays and poetry—in Athens. Dionysus of Halicarnassus quotes Aristotle saying that political speeches were sold by the hundred in Athens.22 As early as 500 BC, if we credit the images on Greek pottery, Homer and other poets were being read, not merely performed, by individuals.23 Schools developed where reading skills were taught. Boys benefited, but vases show women reading and singing from scrolls, too.

  If there were book “shops,” there was supply and some pattern of manufacture. We can conjecture that booksellers retained scribes and offered copying to order. If so, each bookseller would have had a library of template texts from which to work. Certainly by the beginning of the fourth century BC, bookselling was flourishing in various cities. In Athens the noble orator Lycurgus, who was in charge of the Athenian exchequer from 338 to 326 BC and who oversaw the reconstruction or refurbishment of Athenian cultural institutions, decreed that accurate and authoritative copies of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should be kept, so as to avoid serious textual corruption when the plays were revived. The authoritative control copies were to be housed in an official records office, a kind of civic library, though one that is unlikely to have permitted popular access.

  By the end of the fourth century book collecting was widespread; private libraries had developed. Euripides had one. Aristotle created a large personal collection which, Strabo declares, could “teach the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library.”24 This is precisely what tradition says it did for the Ptolemies. The dates must be stretched, but Aristotle’s disciple Demetrius of Phalerum, a friend of the first Ptolemy, was perhaps a conduit for Aristotle’s actual book collection, or copies of it, to be placed at the heart of the new library at Alexandria. By that time—early in the third century BC— many major cities had substantial libraries.

  One problem with libraries is that they burn. In AD 1204 Constantinople was sacked and our last, richest direct textual link with the classical world was destroyed. Another problem is that, when high-cultural transactions are conducted in a different language from the vulgar tongue of the land in which it lives (Greek in Egypt, Magna Graecia, and later in the Roman world), a library both preserves and excludes. It has walls, racks, scroll-buckets, systems of control and preservation. A linguistically or ethnically separate high culture, like a colonial culture, withdraws into the handsome buildings provided, into the schools and theatres and museums, and what percolates out is careful collations of whole texts, selections, extracts, summaries, material to be used in schools to teach language and moral precept. Certain segments of certain works become canonical; other segments are either discarded or gradually degrade in the dark of their inconvenient scrolls.25

  II HOT AND COLD CULTURES

  Why did Pericles make sure that the texts of Homer’s poems were written down? Was it because the oral tradition was faltering and he was afraid the poems would be lost? Or was it, on the contrary, because the oral tradition was so strong and so widespread and potentially corruptible that the poems needed to be brought under control, stabilised, fixed? A written text, too, could be corrupted. Take, for example, the famous added line in the Iliad: whoever controlled the master copy controlled the poem’s transmission. There is a radical distance between what are sometimes called “hot cultures” with oral traditions, the language alive on the tongue and in the ear, the absence of the first person singular narrator, and “cold cultures” which are literary, reflective, tending towards individualism. Here the poem is not a process of synthesis within family, tribe, village, town or city; it is a product to be possessed not in memory but in the home or the library. We might refer to these categories as “immediate” and “delayed” culture.

  Should a poem transcribed from hot culture into the medium of the cold�
�into writing—be treated in the same way as a poem which was composed on pugillares, or papyrus, in the first place? Some argue that in terms of factuality, the poem from the oral tradition is more dependable, more responsible, than the literary poem, in part because it comes from a source deeper in language and memory than most literary works. Since before 450 BC there was almost no prose literature; our only windows on the ancient world are the poems. Aristotle and Plutarch depended on Tyrtaeus for their sense of Spartan reality and on Solon for their sense of Athens. Homer was read as history.

  From the beginning, millennia before Homer, there was a human hunger for narrative, for making sense by discovering connections and making sequences of events and phenomena. Early poetry finds its stories and then finds ways of remembering them. Mnemonic patterns develop in language, music and dance which collaborate in the ceremony of transmission. The stories told begin in kinds of truth. As events recede in time, they grow not smaller but larger in language. The ancestor who fought locally becomes a hero in a battle which assumes the scale of epic: Colchis, Thebes, Troy. Such traditions are vigorous, the stories can be linked, and if a language for poetry develops which is not quite the dialect of any one place but is known to be the dialect of poetry, the stories can travel.

  In oral cultures, people remember because of rhythmic, consonantal and vocalic patternings of language, formulae which convey an accepted set of meanings in received forms, with slight expressive variations. The formulae stabilise at different times and in different ways, and so the dialect of oral poetry will preserve archaic words and forms, and even elements where the meaning is quite forgotten. Orally transmitted poetry can carry memory that goes back a thousand years, even if the singer of tales is ignorant of the remote sources of his song. The scholar Gregory Nagy concentrates less on the bardic effort of memory than on the dictation of the oral tradition, the ways in which it makes a poem proof against the vagaries of the individual performer or rhapsode.

  People who share an oral culture feel close to their stories because they carry them inside themselves; the narratives have not been downloaded. Performers recite them, but their recital is checked against memory. There is a sense of common or shared possession; the poem is a crucial constituent of community. The Homeric poems were to retain this force—in Asia Minor, the Islands, Greece, North Africa, Magna Graecia—long after writing and reading became commonplace. Because the individual “voice” is unimportant and what matters is fidelity to the poem, the integrity of an oral “text” is easier to preserve, proof against scribal enhancement and distortion.

  Writing arrests oral culture, but we can explore a transcribed oral text as we can excavate an ancient building, and what we find is not necessarily going to be archaeologically less dependable than a potsherd or a stone inscription. It is only when transcribed oral texts begin to be played with and reworked by literary artists that distortions take them beyond historical use.

  Language itself changes when it is codified and written down. When the ability to read and write spreads (as it did rapidly in a world rich in public inscriptions), the idea of culture spreads. An archaic statue might have had only the most rudimentary inscription, or none at all; the text on a classical statue would memorialise and advertise the nature and achievement of the object or person portrayed: memorialise for the people of the city where it was placed, or the sailors familiar with the headland they were passing; and advertise to visitors, enemies, slaves. By the way it is used, language becomes a means of distorting truth, limiting and pointing meaning. We should not be too sceptical of oral traditions; indeed, we might be rather less sceptical of them than of literary traditions. Archaeology is increasingly on Homer’s side.

  And when we come across “I” in early poetry, in Hesiod, Archilochus or Sappho or Alcman, we have to read that pronoun warily. What the “I” says belongs to the performer; it may have been factually true for the author, but we err if we invest it with a modern subjectivity or assume that it expresses an essentially lyric sensibility. The lyric may well be as conventional, as dictated and derived, as the epic. Lyric does not grow out of epic, though there is continual commerce between them. Embedded in Homer’s poems there are lyric passages: “harvest song, wedding song, a paean to Apollo, a threnos or mourning song.” “Thus,” says Leslie Kurke, “epic and lyric must have coexisted throughout the entire prehistory of Greek literature. What suddenly enabled the long-term survival of the lyric … was, paradoxically, the same technological development that ultimately ended the living oral tradition of epic composition-in-performance”—namely, writing.26 Lyric poetry survived thanks to writing, but it, too, began as an oral medium. “Greece down through the fifth century has aptly been described as a “song culture.”27 After that time, it was a reciting culture, moving towards the drama.

  There were numerous and specific occasions when song was required; they were embedded in a culture which was formalised and to some extent ritualised. Lyric was not a personal outpouring but a song in a determined place within the Greek day or night. It entertained, but it also had functions in religious and other terms. Kurke stresses the ways in which poetry—i.e., language—was instrumental in “constructing individuals as social objects,” giving boys and girls the words, and through the words a rehearsal of the experiences, of adult life and action. “This formative process applied to both the singers and the audience of early Greek poetry, since, throughout the [pre-classical] period, the singers would have been non-professionals and members of the same community as their listeners, whether that community be the entire city or a small group of ‘companions’ at the symposium.”28 Modern poetry spends much of its energy deliberately deconstructing the “individual as social subject.” For the ancients, poetry socialised people; for the moderns, it reflects or promotes alienation.

  In the archaic period the symposion, or symposium, which occurred after the communal meal and in the evening, was the focal point for entertainment and instruction for the well-to-do and the well-born. The Greeks adapted from the East the reclining mode for these pastimes, which meant that only a limited number could be accommodated in the symposium room, one horizontal symposiast occupying the space of three vertical men. The word “men” is crucial: as far as we know, the symposium was generally a male occasion, except perhaps in Lesbos. Between fourteen and thirty men, two or more per couch, gathered under the guidance of a symposiarch or master of ceremonies. The symposiasts drank rather too much watered wine, wore crowns, perfumes and other embellishments, enjoyed the presence of lovely boys and hired women, and then burst out into the street, spilling their rowdiness on the neighbourhood. Sometimes poems were sung, and the occasion licensed the witty, the erotic, the light-hearted, and sometimes the elegiac, the political or philosophical. The symposium bolstered the self-identity of an élite. The audience was unlike the crowd that attended a Homeric recitation.29

  The term lyric poetry applies to all the non-dramatic, non-didactic, non-epic, non-hexameter Greek verse composed up to 350 BC. A lyric poem was not always accompanied by a lyre. A sort of oboe, the aulos, might accompany it: a musician (auletes) blows into two tubes at once. Does he place his tongue between them to cross-distribute the puff? Most English translators make aulos mean flute. It doesn’t, because it is a reed instrument. References to flutes in translations of ancient Greek should be adjusted. And when we imagine the aulos player we might bear in mind the vase on which the auletes is portrayed with a leather strap drawn across the cheeks for support, because very strong blowing was required to make the pipes sound. Other instruments included the more delicate-sounding harp (Sappho’s barbitos), which Alcaeus and Anacreon also used as an alternative to the lyre.

  There are three basic genres of Greek lyric poetry. Starting with the coarsest, there is the iambic. Iambic poems are not always composed in iambs: they can include trochaic or dactylic metres. Performed at popular festivals, those of Demeter and Dionysus for example, they can be playful, silly, bawdy, lewd. Sexual
narrative, animal fables (with human overtones) and poems of attack come under this head. Slang is used: most of the poems were not sung but recited or spoken. They are at the root of Greek comedy and satire, and Archilochus, Hipponax and Semonides are among the leading iambolators. The chief mainland Greek practitioner was Tyrtaeus.

  Elegiac poems were generally written in elegiac couplets, a dactylic hexameter followed by a dactylic pentameter. The tradition seems to be rooted in Asia Minor because there is a marked Ionic inflection to the diction. Initially the elegy was not restricted to laments. On the contrary, there was the erotic elegy (brilliantly taken up by the Latin poet Ovid in his Amores) and the narrative, probably intended for public recital, often hortatory in nature. Measured by the ways in which they honoured convention, Mimnermus and Theognis are among the great Greek elegists.

  The third category is melic, always composed in lyric metres. Melic poems for recitation in the symposium take the form of monody, a single voice with musical and perhaps dance accompaniment. Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon excelled in this form, but also in the other kind of melic poetry, on a larger scale: choral, sung and danced by a group of performers to a larger audience.

  Different dialects of Greek initially contributed to different genres. Ionic was spoken not only in Ionia, on the west coast of Asia Minor, but also on many of the islands that dot the sea across to mainland Hellas itself. It is here that the main ingredients of Homer’s language developed. Here too the most important of epic verse forms, dactylic hexameter, seems to have taken shape, with its distinctive distribution of quantities and its shortened concluding foot: