The First Poets Read online

  The island of Paros, where Archilochus was born, bears on the map an uncanny resemblance to Thasos, the island he helped to colonise, engaging in battle with the mainland Thracians, and which some of his poems sourly evoke. Paros is well out at sea, one of the Cycladic flotilla that includes Naxos and, to the north, Miconos, Andros and others, all sailing towards Euboea. Thasos, part of a more scattered archipelago, seems solitary, stalled ten kilometres off the coast of eastern Greece. It is important and therefore vulnerable: it lies on a border. In the time of Archilochus the border divided ancient Macedonia and Thrace. It has been occupied and exploited by a dozen empires in its time.

  Both islands appear to be remarkably round. And a mountain rises at the centre of each, a mountain with not inhospitable slopes where agriculture developed. Thasos is larger than the relatively treeless Paros and once boasted mature forests which maritime nations harvested for their fleets, most recently the Russians in the late eighteenth century. Both islands possess celebrated marble quarries. Those at Paros were revived after long neglect when Napoleon’s tomb was being built in Paris and only proper classical materials were deemed appropriate. Thasos had legendary gold mines and was called “golden Thasos” as a result. Herodotus mentions how he visited the mines, and how in pursuit of ore generations of men had overturned a whole mountain.4

  When Archilochus writes specifically about Thasos, he says some curious things. In one fragment, he declares (in M. L. West’s translation)

  … while Thasos stands here like the

  spine of a donkey, wreathed with unkempt forests …

  The American poet Guy Davenport renders the same fragment with fuller eloquence, providing it with closure it does not possess:

  This island,

  garlanded with wild woods,

  Lies in the sea

  like the backbone of an ass.

  West’s translation in this case is closer to Archilochus: it acknowledges that these words are a snatch of song, not a song in themselves. That larger song, which we can tenuously infer, includes the evocation of the island of Thasos, not as a conceit, which it becomes in Davenport’s “garlands” and “backbone” and “Lies,” but something quite literally visualised, the spine of a donkey, rising hard and rough under its skin, with the whirls and tufts of its coat down the lean, labour-frayed sides. It is a work-animal, standing up rather than lying in the sea. The image is political. It also suggests a literal point of view. From what perspective would the poet have such a vision of Thasos? This is how the island appears to a traveller approaching from the south … But the image is fraught with half-affectionate familiarity. The speaker is not any sailor coming, but a sailor returning to a known, tried and troubled shore.

  Perhaps that is what the longer poem was about, the return from home to exile. Davenport carves this archaic poet and innovator out of Thasian or Parian marble. In fact he is as close to the earth as Hesiod, and closer to the sea; he is as unillusioned as that dogged husbandman, and a good deal more erotically charged. There is Paros, the home in defence of which he dies, and colonial Thasos. “All Greece’s misery has flowed down to Thasos,”5 he exclaims. No man in his right mind would die for that place.

  Some modern historians say, with the satisfaction of a schoolteacher wiping the blackboard clean, that we know, as provable fact, nothing about Archilochus. We cannot even affirm that a single “he” wrote, or recited, the fragments that survive over his name. Some critics insist that the name itself denotes a rank rather than a person (“first sergeant,” Davenport proposes), and that the people whom he names—Neobulé (“she who makes new plans”), Glaucos (“grey eyes”)—are also types, not based on actual people. In legend Archilochus flickeringly lives, and since there is often substance, and always entertainment, in legend, it is worth recounting what we can never claim to know. A surprisingly real person fills out our ignorance.

  Almost seven hundred years after his time—he lived from around 680 to 640 BC—the Roman poet Gaetulicus struck off a Greek epigram which alludes to many salient elements of the legend. Edward Lucie-Smith translates it thus:

  Here, by the seashore, there lies

  Archilochus, whose Muse was

  Dipped in viper’s gall, who stained

  Mild Helicon with blood. The

  Father knows it, mourning for

  His three daughters hanged, shamed by

  Those bitter verses. Stranger,

  Tread softly, lest you rouse the

  Wasps that settle on this tomb.

  Gaetulicus was perhaps paraphrasing Archilochus’ epitaph. The Greek poet died in battle (we assume), a Parian fighting against a Naxian army. In the town of Paros today, in the archaeological museum, visitors will find a winged Victory and an inscription relating to the poet. Not far from Naoussa are the excavated ruins of a seventh-century church constructed on the site of the heroa6 of Archilochus, the Archilocheion. It is associated with his tomb and with a gymnasium, built or else restored three centuries after his death by a man of Paros called Mnesiepes, whose name means “epic collector,” and who followed the instructions of the Delphic oracle in honouring his countryman. Archilochus’ patron, Delian Apollo, has a ruined temple nearby. The inscription from the heroa, partly preserved, includes a sort of legendary life which Mnesiepes claimed to have assembled from ancient tales. In fact he seems to have drawn it largely from Archilochus’ poems, for then as now the untheorised reader tended to believe the poet who wrote “I” and reported that “I’s” actions. An inscription added two hundred years later provides a bibliography and a hypothetical chronology of Archilochus’ life.

  He died, he became an exalted mortal, even a demigod. But when did he live? In the seventh century BC. Hearsay, centuries after his death, says his grandfather was Tellis, a man of distinction who appeared in the Delphic frescoes of the painter Polygnotos (himself from Thasos, two centuries Archilochus’ junior). Pausanias reports, “All I heard about Tellis was that Archilochus the poet was his grandson.” Tellis, depicted as a young man, accompanies Kleoboea: “they say that she was the first to bring the orgies of Demeter to Thasos from Paros.” Those orgies are more tactfully referred to elsewhere as the Eleusinian Mysteries.7

  Herodotus recalls how he went to Thasos, “where I found a temple of Hercules which had been built by the Phoenicians who colonised that island when they sailed in search of Europa. Even this was five generations earlier than the time when Hercules, son of Amphitryon, was born in Greece. These researches show plainly that there is an ancient god Hercules; and my own opinion is that those Greeks act most wisely who build and maintain two temples of Hercules, in the one of which the Hercules worshipped is known by the name of Olympian, and has sacrifice offered to him as an immortal, while in the other the honours paid are such as are due to a hero.”8 Herodotus mentions Archilochus only once, as the author of a poem which, glancingly, refers to Gyges, the rich and mighty king of Lydia, who reigned for three and a half decades. In that poem Archilochus takes a dim view of wealth and power, possessing neither himself.

  It is no longer thought that Phoenicians colonised Thasos; people from Paros certainly did, from about 710 to 680 BC. It was the Parians who claimed to be following Hercules’ orders (or the Pythian Apollo’s, whose sanctuary was on the acropolis in the town of Thasos) in doing so. Archilochus’ grandfather may have founded a town on the colonised island; his father, Telesicles (to whom the Delphic Oracle promised great things from his son), and Archilochus himself slalomed north through the Cyclades. But Archilochus arrived, not as a figure of authority, but—in all likelihood—as a mercenary. Although his father may have been distinguished, his mother, Enipo, was (legend confesses it) a slave. A child of such a misalliance, whatever his ancestry, enjoyed no privileges.

  Why did this particular man, by all accounts a rough diamond, become a poet? For much the same reason as the first English poet, Caedmon, did, two millennia later: because the gods, or God, required it. An illiterate neat-herd,9 “speciall
y distinguished and honoured by divine grace,” the Venerable Bede tells us,10 Caedmon composed his hymn extempore with the collusion of an angel Muse, at the monastery of the abbess Hild in Whitby, Yorkshire. From the remains of the Archilocheion inscription we learn that one day the Parian youth had a curious adventure.

  He was sent into the country by his father, Telesicles, to fetch a cow for market. “He got up very early. It was dark still, the moon shone. He started to lead the cow to the market town. When he came to the place called Lissides, he seemed to see a group of women. Imagining that they were leaving work in the fields to go to market, he approached and began to chide them.” In his disrespect, he was unlike Caedmon. “They greeted him with merriment and, laughing, asked, was he taking the cow to sell? Yes, he replied, and they declared that they would pay him a reasonable price. Then, in an instant, the women vanished, along with the cow. At his feet Archilochus found a lyre. He was frightened and shaken, but gathering his composure he reflected that it must have been the Muses who had materialised there and left him with the lyre. He took it and went on to town, and told his father what he had seen. Telesicles, when the story had been told him and he saw the lyre, was amazed. Immediately he had a search made all over Paros for the cow; but it was nowhere to be found.”11

  The Muses, like their chorus-leader Apollo, who may have been with them on Archilochus’ fateful day, must be obeyed. So Archilochus learned to sing. He would have sung to entertain himself, fellow-countrymen, the sailors with whom he shipped to Thasos, his comrade mercenaries there. He would have sung, too, to his fellow Parians between engagements with the Naxians or the Abantes on the island of Euboea. Even at this early date, the symposium was taking shape, men of a certain class gathering of an evening for pleasure and performance, and Archilochus’ poems might have addressed such an audience in his day, as they did in later times. To entertain he might have invented stories, even the cruelly ended romance with Neobule, though it is doubtful whether his audience would have found a fiction as tantalising as a tale based on real people. And it seems that Lycambes and his daughters were real, as real as Archilochus himself.

  He would have lamented exile, considered political issues, and most particularly touched upon sexual themes. Perhaps he sang to his special friend Glaucos, whom he addresses in several poems. Here he strikes a note of charged intimacy as we overhear him addressing his dear comrade:

  Their nurse brought them both forth, with scented hair

  And such breasts, why, even an aged man

  Would have lusted. Oh, Glaucos …12

  And a Glaucos existed, too. In the agora at Thasos there was a monument of Glaucos and the inscription survives at the museum there. Glaucos took part in the Parian expedition to found trading ports on the mainland opposite Thasos.

  In the first century BC, coins were issued on Paros which show the poet seated on a handsome stool, holding the fateful lyre and, in his right hand, a scroll book. Naked from the waist up, he has a soldier’s strong physique. He is not performing but at rest, his left foot casually tucked behind the right.

  A young man working for his father in the fields, he became a soldier or a mercenary and left home. His motives are uncertain. Perhaps he went after his greatest public humiliation, the cause of his durable poetic triumph that let him prove how poetry can make things happen.

  Archilochus became engaged to a girl called Neobulé. The oldest surviving line of love poetry in Greek, Guy Davenport conjectures, may be “O to touch Neobulé’s hand.” Her father was a rich man, Lycambes. First, he consented to the union between poet and daughter. It might have freed Archilochus from having to follow a soldier’s career. Then, for some reason, Lycambes reneged on his promise. Neobulé’s hand was placed forever beyond Archilochus’ reach.

  He took his revenge in verse: not only on Lycambes but on Neobulé herself, and on her sister or sisters. Was his heart broken (“Zeus, father of the gods, I did not have my wedding feast …”)?13 If so, that was hardly the point. In the surviving fragments of the Epodes he tells an animal fable, perhaps the first in Greek and a harbinger of Aesop’s tales that come in the next century. It is a fable about—offspring. An eagle befriends a vixen, and when her cubs are born it carries two of them off to feed its young. The vixen prays for justice and, sure enough, the gods oblige: the eagle snatches up meat from a sacrificial fire to feed its chicks, but the meat contains a spark and nest and chicks perish in the conflagration. Mark this, Lycambes.

  There are other animal fables and shards of fable in Archilochus, and animal allusions conveyed in verbs, a reptilian eroticism in lines such as “and you have taken in many a blind eel.” In connection with his once-desired, to be sure, more and worse were to come. Archilochus so impugned the honour of Neobulé, and also of her sister, that both girls committed suicide. (Gaetulicus proposes a third martyr-sister and gives the story more Ciceronian proportions.) He claimed to have had his will of Neobulé and her sister, in the very precincts of Hera’s temple. These poems were read in Paros and Thasos, and then throughout the Greek world. Lycambes’ name became a by-word for broken promises.

  The poet’s betrayal of Neobulé has earned him, unaccountably, less opprobrium than fame. Few readers much mind the fact that Archilochus was a cad. The sins of “Father Lycambes” are visited upon his daughters and this visitation is at the heart of the poet’s immortality. The fragments of tender poetry to her are far outweighed by the bitter and destructive.

  There is a keenly unsentimental, functional eroticism in much of what survives, so that we might be inclined to think his expressions of affection for Neobulé were due less to love than to what he calls “paralysing desire.”14 And so we read,

  … she shuddered up and down

  as a kingfisher flaps its wings on a stone outcrop …15

  or:

  Like a Thracian16 or Phrygian slurping beer up through a straw

  she suckled hard, bent double …17

  or an obscure fragment which West confidently sexualises as follows:

  … they stooped and spurted off

  all their accumulated wantonness …18

  In the first fragment there is a sense of sexual urgency and pleasure almost desperate in its figuration; the bird is pleasuring herself, as it were, brilliant in her colours and desires. In the second fragment, the woman is like a barbarian, not a Greek: such people have their own exotic eroticism. Again, the woman is active, and also acted upon. The third fragment, if we follow West, may evoke an onanistic ritual. There is, in any case, frank sensual gratification but little amorous privacy here. Though he was a cad with Neo-bule, this first poet of sexual engagement if not of love acknowledges the libidinal needs of women as well as men. But the spry functionality of his eroticism makes him an early, defining figure of patriarchy, a roguish dissenting son of the sunlit Iliad, not the dank and shadowy Odyssey.

  The Iliad is behind him because one of his crucial themes is soldiering, but he removes from it all the ambiguous glory with which the Homeric poem instilled it. His poems sing not of great battles, with the gods lounging about the amphitheatre of the Trojan plain in amusement and judgement. They sing with the hoarse voice of a soldier paid to fight, keen to save his own skin and make a living. Most famous of all is the poem, imitated by Horace, in which he throws aside his shield and flees from battle. A new life is hard to come by, but you can always get a new shield. There is heroism of a sort in the quality of candour that emerges from the verse. And he is the only Greek soldier-poet we have. The vocation of being a soldier and that of making poems (it is perhaps safe to say that Archilochus wrote poems: he was certainly not ignorant of the art or of his predecessors in it) were not at odds. Homer’s Achilles is not above (or below) chanting and strumming his lyre in the Iliad.19 Later on the soldier fought and the poet sang his deeds. Here we are in a unique presence:

  I am a comrade20 of the warrior lord,

  and of the Muses, too, at one with their fair trades.

  If w
e bear in mind how he acquired his “trades,” we will be moved by the account of his death, and how it made Apollo grieve.

  The poet and the warrior die together, killed in fighting by a character called Corax, or Raven. According to the Delphic Oracle, Apollo drives Raven from the sanctuary at Delphi: “You have killed the Muses’ companion; get out!” “But,” says Corax in his defence, “I killed Archilochus as a soldier, not because he wrote poems.” Corax pleads and pleads with the Oracle and at last is permitted to perform the appropriate rituals to pacify the soul, or psyche, of his victim.

  Archilochus’ military poems go beyond specific deeds to figurative distillations of general experience, for example in a famous epigram that has an air of tight completion.

  The fox has lots of cons,

  the hedgehog has but one, but one’s enough.21

  When Guy Davenport showed Ezra Pound his versions of this poem,22 Pound commented that “there is a magpie in China that can turn a hedgehog over and kill it.” The poem makes a literal observation; it also contrasts forms of military strategy—the cavalry, for example, as the fox, and the tight-moving infantry as the phalanx-hedgehog. There is a political feel about the riddle: the fox is wily, elegant, apparently a higher creature; the hedgehog is unglamorous, slow but strong and determined. Archilochus is a man with a spear who rides on his own two feet. This poem goes with another in which the poet prefers a short, bandy-legged, brave commander, close to the ground, to a tall, trotting (horse-bound), vain and pomaded general.23

  Gaetulicus says: “Tread softly, lest you rouse the / Wasps that settle on this tomb.” Was he reporting legend or, as successful poetry does, creating it? In any case, the wasps are drawn there as much in response to the sweetness of the verse as for its sting. And Apollo was right: Archilochus’ verse will survive, even if only in scraps and tags, as long as humankind reads poetry.