The First Poets Read online

  The poetry of the Hesiod of Works and Days, of the lyric Sappho, and especially of Archilochus, is “monodic,” articulated (sung or spoken) by a single voice or a group of voices moving together in time, generally accompanied by an appropriate instrument. By contrast, choral poetry is public, civic, its formal features tied in closely to the context of performance and relating to the individuals who are being initiated or celebrated. An analogy exists between such poetry and the moral purpose of a masque like Milton’s Comus. It takes risks of scale which most monodic verse would avoid: the prosody is more complex and carefully assigned or distributed among performers. There is a sense of elevation, the diction at best decorous, at worst decorated. Underpinning the musical and strophic formal elements is usually an extended narrative based on myth. Such verse has a religious, even a liturgical feel, “where performed as part of a ritual (like Alcman’s partheneia) or more loosely dedicated to a particular divinity (like dithyrambs in Athens).”11 In the first half of Alcman’s partheneion, the chorus sings of the attempted kidnap of the mythical daughters of Leukippos “by a band of violent young heroes.” This, Leslie Kurke suggests, is offered as “a paradigm of overreaching and transgressive failed marriage,” a kind of pre-emptive lesson, before the actual verse of sincere mating is offered. The second half of the poem concentrates on the present, touching upon themes from battle to girlish things, from transgression to propriety and conformity. “This latter half is remarkable for its carefully scripted but ostensibly spontaneous self-referentiality; the choreuts”—members of the chorus—“speak at length about their own ornaments and appearance and about their two leaders … for whom they evince an erotic fascination.”12 This may be the obverse of Ibycus’ paideioi hjmnoi,13 though here sung not in the intimacy of the sympoium but in the open, public air. The poem also, inevitably, celebrates the existing hierarchy.

  Scholars have deduced that this first and longest surviving chunk of partheneion was performed by ten or eleven young women. A twelfth enacted rituals (“offering a cloak or a plough to Orthia at sunrise,” for instance). Kurke insists that “such ritual conforms to the theory that in this instance, choral performance was part of an initiatory experience for the chorus members (or choreuts), perhaps making a life-transition before their marriage.”14 The girls who performed were also on show: their looks, the grace and strength of their movement, could be appraised by the onlooker, whether the lusty youth, the father seeking a partner for his son, the seedy bachelor or the over-sexed duffer. The words they spoke or sang and their choreographed movements were devised, of course, by men.15

  It is possible to hear through the vivid and fresh fragments of the poem a performance. The recitation was accompanied by the aulos. The poet and chorus master directed, and there was a dialogue between the eleven girls and their (two) leaders and between the chorus and their master. They speak to and of one another, and of him. It is for this reason that Alcman is sometimes regarded as the father of love poetry: his verse admires the young women who celebrate, and they turn an affectionate gaze in his direction. Did he, as Athenaeus suggests, fall in love with the poet Mega-lostrata?16 Was he, as Athenaeus also hints, rather incompetent in his non-professional relations with mature women? We cannot deduce such information from the poem.

  But it is true, as Bowra says, that “Alcman gives to his maidens sentiments which are essentially meant for them and not for himself … This delicate art has an air of detachment and impartiality.”17 One girl may be celebrated, as though the whole chorus is in love with her, or the whole chorus speaks in the first person as a collective or characteristic “I.” The language is “more figurative than that of Sappho and more direct than Ibycus.”

  The presiding deity is Artemis. She is to a Spartan woman what Apollo is to a Spartan man, embodying strength, purity and a degree of ascetic discipline. Menander says that Alcman “summons Artemis from countless mountains and countless cities and from rivers too.” Artemis, more than Athena or Aphrodite, is the Lacadaimonian goddess, though both were worshipped there.

  After an elaborate interpretative reconstruction of the Sakkarah partheneion, Bowra concludes that, though Alcman’s art speaks always with a single voice, never breaking into descant or harmony, this voice is variously pitched and distributed; the individual girls in the chorus, with their names acknowledging family, and their variety of status, age and beauty, are allowed different points of view. Preference wavers between Hagesichora (“one leader”) and Agido (“leader”), and there is even the hint of a contest between them. Bowra insists, too, that there is unity of tone, “a kind of gaiety, in which praise, badinage, self-depreciation, and a keen eye for physical things all play a part.” Pindar, by contrast, has abrupt shifts of tone and mood. As Alcman’s heir to the estate, he alters the mansion and the landscape completely.18

  Men were responsible for all the verse, music and dance of Sparta. Alcman’s contemporary Tyrtaeus, who at times seems a rival of the gentle poet, established another kind of civic verse from Alcman’s, composing marching songs to rally the warriors; he set down too, in oracular form, a skeletal Spartan constitution, the work gathered under the title Eunomia (Law and Order).19 “There is a story,” says Plutarch, “that when Leonidas of ancient times was asked his impression of Tyrtaeus’ quality as a poet, he replied: ‘A good one for firing the spirits of the young.’ For the poems filled them with such excitement that they stopped caring for themselves in battle.”20 He was clearly a figure of considerable power, though judging from the fragments that survive, that power tended to the gnomic, to sibylline ambiguities. The Spartans took him to heart. Plutarch says, “When someone was asking why they made the poet Tyrtaeus a citizen, he said: ‘So that a foreigner should never be seen as our leader.’”21

  Tyrtaeus was profoundly conservative and committed to the Spartan order. It was subtle in its devising and remarkably durable, if not responsive to change. Sparta had two hereditary rulers called kings, one from the Agiad, one from the Eurypontid line. Under the kings was a council of twenty-eight elders (sixty or more years in age), and under them a citizen’s assembly that could approve or reject its rulings but could not initiate legislation. The established and the militarily tried and tested won Tyrtaeus’ approval. He sang of heroes, a propagandist who believed what he was singing.

  He was writing during and after the Second Messenian War (around 660–640 BC) when the Messenians, conquered by the Spartans in the war of 740–730, rebelled. Tyrtaeus’ most famous line is this: “It is beautiful when a good man falls and dies fighting for his country.” English schoolboys used to know Tyrtaeus’ verse filtered through Horace’s celebrated Latin translation, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,22 the bitter, ironic punch-line of Wilfred Owen’spoem about a gas attack in the First World War.23

  Victory in the Second Messenian War was a mixed blessing for the Spartans: they annexed fertile territory, but also so numerous a population of helots that one of the chief tasks for the victors, for centuries to come, was policing them. This necessity made Sparta, internally and externally, much more militaristic in its structures and its basic culture. Three centuries later, the adjective “Spartan” had become synonymous with “Philistine.”24 The helot problem inhibited Sparta from sending out colonies and ultimately paralysed it.

  In the seventh century Sparta was famous for its music, pottery and poetry as well as for its military prowess. Not only did Tyrtaeus and Alcman work there, but Terpander of Lesbos had started his school of music. He invented the seven-stringed lyre on the banks of the Eurotas; he is even said to have set passages of Homer to music. Musical reforms during the century led to the establishment of a coherent musical scale, which legend attributed to Olympus of Phrygia. Terpander fitted the scale to the lyre, and as a result accompaniment to song could be played in any key. Poets—choral poets in particular—were enabled to compose, confident that the form they gave would be at least roughly replicated and respected. What Terpander did for the lyre, Clonas did
for the aulos. The tunes they composed survived, and, such was their fame, later tunes were attributed to them.

  Sparta may not have had a strong native culture but it imported its artists with a wise discretion. Thaletas of Gortyn in Crete, now entirely lost, made songs for the lyre which espoused civil obedience and unity, a lyrical complement to Tyrtaeus’ choral work. There were Ionian and Aeolian contributions, their practice based on what may have been Asian traditions of musical composition. Polymnestus of Colophon, mentioned by Alcman, may have been his master, a figure very different from monodic Thaletas. Certainly the Sparta that Alcman lived in was a place of rich and conflicting musical composition.

  The generic differences in early poetry have much to do with the relationship between language and musical accompaniment. Lyric poets originally composed their poems for lyre accompaniment. Thus they differ from dramatic poets, whose verse was spoken; from iambic and trochaic poets, whose verse was recited highly rhythmically rather than sung; and from elegiac poets, who were accompanied initially by an aulos. The distinctions, real to begin with, became blurred: lyrics were variously accompanied, the lyre was sometimes far away from the poet and his accompanist. The nature of the accompaniment (or lack thereof) initially determined genre, and some of the characteristic features of a genre keep faith with etymology.

  Sappho, Alcaeus and Anacreon are poets whose work was devised, for the most part, to be performed before a group (a symposium or an open audience) by an individual, even the poet him- or herself. Alcman is different: he is giving voice, or voices; only occasionally can we say that he is, or may be, speaking “in his own person.” Homer was aware of the existence of choral poetry. There are the four threnoi, or mourning songs; the paean to Apollo; the wedding hymn on the shield of Achilles, which meant so much to Keats; and finally the song accompanied by steps and dancing, Demodocus’ account of Ares and Aphrodite, which seems to invite participation.25 Alcman was less an inventor than a consummate practitioner.

  The stanzas in choral verse tend to be longer than those in monodic verse. Sappho, Alcaeus and Anacreon write short, while Alcman, Pindar and Bacchylides write long. Length may have something to do with dance, providing sufficient verbal and musical space in which bodies can complete their ceremonial movements.

  Once there are groups of performers, a degree of competitiveness enters in: in the seventh century Sparta was famous for holding competitions in choral and lyric poetry at its religious festivals. Only Alcman survives substantially enough for scholars to tease out the characteristic elements of the genre. The surviving sample is too small to sustain more than tentative generalisations. The opening stanzas of the partheneion are long, employ a variety of metres, and depend on an underlying narrative which is not foregrounded but upon which allusions hang. There are complex gnomic passages (a foretaste of Pindar and of Bacchylides) in which the performers suggest the larger meaning of their actions. The truths the performers tell can be profound and affecting, but the effect is not intimate, as it would be in monodic or lyric verse: an audience, not an individual, responds, hence the nuancing is of a different order from that of the lyric poet.

  We live in a monodic culture and those who would break with it can appear austerely arcane, “élitist,” expecting more of their audience than that audience can deliver. It is ironic that the modern poets who have most in common with the civic, choral tradition—Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, David Jones and W. H. Auden, Charles Olson and Geoffrey Hill—are often construed as “élitist,” when in fact the intention of their poetry is to embrace and include the present, the past and the future, in the spirit of Whitman, and of Alcman.

  Related to choral poetry is the hymn, a shared song addressed to a god rather than to a man (early hymns were often accompanied by the cithara) and a still-standing chorus; the processional song, or prosodion, frequently aulos-accompanied; the dithyramb, associated with Dionysus, less formal than the prosodion; and all forms of song for living beings—encomia rather than elegia. The victory odes (epinicia), the skolion and erotikon are forms of encomia and belong in this choral, civic zone of poetry.

  When alternatives to epic poetry emerged, they were the result not so much of the inadequacy of the epic mode as of social changes which made the epic archaic, in the light of the evolving towns and independent cities and the civic cultures that came with them: different forms of expression were required to touch on different parts of life. Music was inseparable from this emergence of new forms, and the early history of poetry is inextricable from the history of music. Indeed we must remind ourselves over and over again that the fragments we have of ancient texts are fragments twice over: not only is the poem’s larger form often absent, indeterminate; its music has vanished altogether. We must also remember that choral song, even in secular and epinicean use, retained a ceremonial, even a liturgical, formality, reflecting its origins in sacred ritual. This ceremonial dimension has vanished along with the music and the padding feet of the chorus.

  Greek music lacked harmony as our modern ears hear harmony. What mattered were tune, patterning and repetition of strophes and stanzas, with expressive variation. “The main form of variation in choral poetry was to compose not in single strophes but in triads. Each triad was a whole which balanced metrically with every other triad, but inside it, while the strophe and the antistrophe were composed on one plan, the epode was composed on another.”26 This happened less in Alcman than in such works as Ibycus’ poem to Polycrates; it may have been invented by Stesichorus. Another kind of variation, though no examples survive, might have been to change the metre in the second part of the poem.

  Poetry was advancing gradually towards what would ultimately be emancipation from musical accompaniment and its rules, though the remaining prosodic rules derived their regularity from the initial adjustment of language to accompaniment. By the second half of the fifth century, when changes in music itself helped to relax the rules of poetic composition, more variety of movement was possible: the drama was in the ascendant.

  By the time of the great dramatists, unflattering legends about Tyrtaeus’ origins were in circulation. He was portrayed as a limping, scatter-brained teacher from Athens (the Athenians liked the idea that Sparta’s great poet and law-giver was an Athenian outcast) or Miletus. Towards the beginning of the Second Messenian War Sparta was urged by an oracle to seek a counsellor from Athens. Athens packed off Tyrtaeus, an act of intended bad faith which backfired, since the poet rose to the occasion. His skill was in composing poems, and in general, poetry, as W. H. Auden remarks, “makes nothing happen.” But Tyrtaeus’ poems were different; they put fire in the Spartan belly and inspired warriors to victory. Lycurgus says the Spartan leaders compelled soldiers to listen to Tyrtaeus’ recite verses before battle. Better death than exile (or retreat), the poet said. The first surviving fragment of Tyrtaeus is unsubtle and effective: “The time has come for a man to take his stand, planting his feet and biting his lip.”27 Later critics make out that Tyrtaeus was a general; a statesman: surely, they insist, a poet with no more than a semi-official brief could not have achieved as much as he did in Sparta.

  Tyrtaeus provides the “iron” in Alcman’s verse, “Counterbalanced against the iron is the sweet lyre-playing.” Alcman’s is the “lyre-playing,” in service of a culture to which he may or may not have been born. Aristotle says Alcman was a Lydian from Sardis, a city due east of Smyrna in Asia Minor, and down the centuries he has been described accordingly. It must have been hard for a fifth- or fourth-century critic to believe that Sparta, that severest of states, could have been the cradle of a poet so subtle and nuanced as Alcman. The Suda contradicts Aristotle and declares that he was from Messoa in Laconia, in the Peloponnese, not a Lydian at all. (Alcman’s language, apart from a few specific words, contradicts Aristotle too.) His father was called Damas, or maybe Titarus. Heraclides Ponticus claims Alcman was the slave of a Spartan by the name of Agesidas, who freed him because of his skills as a musician and poet.28 In o
ne of the Oxyrhinchus papyruses, if he is speaking of himself, Alcman says that he is from Sardis. David A. Campbell, trying to make sense of the confused genealogy, is not the first to suggest that there may have been two Alcmans. One of the bright, ineffective parachutes that scholars deploy when biographical evidence is contradictory, and flying perilous, is this “maybe there were two of them”: two Alcmans, two Homers, two Hesiods, two Sapphos. Of course, maybe there were; but the ancients themselves did not think so. Antiquity could not resolve the question of Alcman’s origin; we are even less likely to be able to do so. We can say that he flourished in Sparta around 630 BC, and he composed choral verse, a form appropriate to early Sparta and a particular part of the Spartan community.

  “Alcman’s world was simple,” Bowra says, “even small. Its literature was limited to the old epics and its own songs. It had no science or history. Its religion was that of local cults which were as yet little influenced by foreign ideas or rationalistic simplification. Its landscape was that of a valley flanked by high, majestic mountains and bounded on one side by the sea.”29 Bowra idealises and simplifies, but we draw from the poems, which serve privilege and power, the sense of a culture that is ordered, simple, strict.

  The Suda tries to tell us about the man himself: “He was extremely amorous and was the first to write songs of an erotic nature.” It is possible to mistake his general statements for individual candour: “and with desire that turns the limbs to jelly, and she gazes [at me?] and sleep or death look not more meltingly, and her sweetness is not wasted”;30 there is a lived, intensifying breathlessness here, as in the praises he heaps upon Astymeloisa and Hagesichora. The kind of vehemence that he achieves is unsentimental: his bacchants have strong arms, sharp nails, and are far from squeamish: “Often among the steep mountains, when it’s feast time and the torches delight the gods, you bear a golden bowl, a great [scyphos], the kind that shepherds use, and emptying into it with your own two hands milk of a lionness, you made a round hardened cheese for the killer of Argus.”31 He was certainly a committed chorus master.