The First Poets Read online

  What we would give to see even an ankle or wrist of Nanno, or her lips on the aulos accompanying the poet. She is erased. The love poems and elegies on short-lived pleasures were collected under the title, possibly an Alexandrian addition, of Nanno. The Hellenistic poets Hermesianax and Posidippus allude to it, but they are not dependable witnesses, being fanciful in their readings of other work. All the same, Allen plausibly declares: “It is hardly likely … that she is wholly fictional, a late classical or Alexandrian invention.”11 Stobaeus omitted her among other specifics and made Mimnermus’ celebration of “the urgent, insurgent now” airy and abstract-feeling, merely poetic. There was a real flesh-and-blood woman, graceful and talented, at the end of his expressed desire, the Alexandrian editors insist. He had a complementary affection, as Solon did, for lads.

  Apart from Nanno, his other book was called Smyrneis, a narrative about the founding of Colophon, Smyrna’s mother city. There were also poems that told of the war between the people of Smyrna and the Lydians. Smyrna was built on a gulf that bore its name, at the end of a deep harbour. The Hermus River, with its long valley, ran to the north and east of Smyrna, and fifty miles east along the Hermus was the strong Lydian city of Sardis. Smyrna stood between Sardis and its nearest exit to the sea. The usurping Lydian shepherd-king Gyges attacked Smyrna around 680 BC, in the early years of his reign. His grandson Alyattes finally captured and razed it to the ground around 600 BC. Mimnermus was dead by then.

  Given Mimnermus’ debt to Homer, it is hard to think of him as an abstracting poet. The impact of Homer on those his work touched is, first of all, prosodic; second, it affects the way detail is perceived and recorded in language and determines elements of diction and description. Forms and phrases in Mimnermus grow out of Homer; there are echoes of a very close and direct nature.

  Alexandrian tradition assigns Mimnermus to Colophon, one of the twelve cities of lonia (the Dodecapolis), where many other poets, including Polymnestos, Phoenix, Antimachus, Hermesianax (who tells of Nanno), Nicandor and Xenophanes, the sage and poet, were born, as well as some great early musicians. It even laid claim to Homer, but then much of Ionia did. In political and social terms, early Colophon was an unusually attractive city. It was said to have been founded by Andraimon, from Pylos, the city which Neleus, son of Tyro and the sea god Poseidon, founded. Heracles killed Neleus when he refused to offer the sullied hero purification. He killed, too, all of Neleus’ sons except for Nestor. After Andraimon’s time there was a further influx of Ionian Greeks. Though the Pyleans arrived by sea, the archaic city was built eight miles inland on a gradient, with an emphatic citadel. Colophon ruled the fertile, broad plain to the east and southeast, embraced by a river called the Caystros. The families of Colophon possessed wide estates where they bred horses. Aristotle declares that the oligarchy that ruled Colophon was unusual in that the ruling class outnumbered the poorer folk. They were a vigorous people, more free-spirited than their contemporaries at nearby Ephesus.

  In the eighth century a number of political exiles from Colophon took over and settled in Smyrna, an Aeolic town. M. L. West is keen to adjust the record. He calls the poet “Mimnermus of Smyrna.” “His name may commemorate the Smyrnaeans’ famous resistance to … Gyges at the river Hermus sometime before 660 BC, which would imply his birth at that time.” (It certainly would.) Archibald Allen agrees with West that Smyrna has a claim to the poet. It is an issue that can never be resolved.

  Allen says the poet was born around 670 BC. From the evidence of fragment 9 he deduces the Smyrna connection, but the fragment can be taken to belong to a narrative, perhaps part of a missing Jason story. Like some of Mimnermus’ poetry, this passage has a Homeric, not a confessional, ring to it. This is West’s translation:

  Aipy we left, and Neleus’ city, Pylos,

  and came by ship to Asia’s lovely coast.

  We settled at fair Colophon with rude

  aggression, bringers of harsh insolence;

  and there we crossed the river Asteïs

  and took Aeolian Smyrna by God’s will.

  Mimnermus used elegy with energy and when necessary he used it instrumentally, writing polemic which must have been of use against the Lydian foe. He rallies his fellow citizens by invoking the heroism of an earlier Smyrnaean against the Lydians. A formal hymn, perhaps to Achilles, may have preceded the poem about the battle of the Smyrnaean army against the Lydians. If we are to believe Pausanias, the poet mentioned two generations of Muses, the first the children of Uranus and the second of Zeus, the older arts having, as it were, older tutelary spirits, the younger ones younger.

  The origin of the word “elegy” is obscure: it may have meant, Trypanis suggests, “dirge metre,” and yet it is first found in war songs, the ancient war songs of Callinus of Ephesus (with his invocation of Smyrna) and Tyrtaeus of Aphidna, both near contemporaries of Mimnermus. Their writing was direct and emphatic. Elegiacs diversified: in time they became associated particularly with love poetry. It is important to read Mimnermus not only in the light of his contemporaries but also alongside the elegists he affected, Theognis, Xenophanes and Simonides, for example. His more amorous poetry, like theirs, was composed for recitation in the private symposium.12 Unlike open-air Homer and storm-tossed Archilochus, Mimnermus writes poetry with a roof over its head.

  The statesman and poet Solon of Athens, that city’s first recorded author and one of the Seven Sages, valued Mimnermus as a near contemporary and a celebrator of pleasures. In one poem he took issue with him about how far old age can be tolerated, rebuking him as an editor might, and making an adjustment to an errored line. He quotes Mimnermus’ line first.

  “O let death catch me up when I am sixty.”

  If you take my advice, you’ll scrap that line.

  Allow me this time to be wiser than you:

  Alter it, Ligyastades. Instead

  Sing, “O let death catch me up when I’m eighty.”

  Solon’s fragment 20 belongs to a rare genre, one in which dialogue takes place between poets, places and periods. Solon virtually names the earlier poet when he quotes him. West says that “Ligyastades” could mean “melodious singer.” He also comments that the poem appears to have been written to a living man. If so, Mimnermus was well advanced in years and Solon a little peremptory, unless he was adjusting the poem in order to allow the old poet twenty further years of life and—as Mimnermus would see it—decrepitude.

  For Alcaeus, it is wine and love, for Mimnermus it is love first and foremost that we live for and praise.13 Wine lets us briefly off the hook of old age, and while Solon urges Mimnermus to be lenient with himself, the old man has only to regard his paunch and wrinkles to know the game is up. We read Mimnermus if we read him at all, the phrases that remain, as an elegist of pleasure, celebrating and lamenting in equal degrees. But, as Bowra says, there was more to him than that: “Despite his professed cult of youth and pleasure, Mimnermus has a wide concept of human worth. It is the balance between action and relaxation, between effort and pleasure, which is central to his outlook, and this is why he is truly representative of the Ionian Greeks, who had dangerous enemies on their frontiers …”14 Though we live for pleasure, being young, we fight for it as well, and we celebrate the warrior who moves in the sudden light of the sun, wielding his spear and with a heart intact, unharmed by the missiles of his foes.15 When he has made a free space for himself and his kind, he can take pleasure there.

  X

  Semonides of Amorgos (630 BC)

  Phocylides says this: what’s the use of blue blood

  In people whose talk and opinions lack all grace?1

  Hesiod wrote in hexameters, like Homer, but the strains that he drew from that noble prosody were quite unlike the notes that Homer struck. His verse has a homespun dignity; the reader harvests good advice in digestible maxims and proverbs. So much advice, in fact, that the poems’ larger forms are lost sight of. Works and Days sings, but in a gruff monody that reaches towards peasant ca
ndour. The dirt on his sandals is from fields rather than streets.

  Yet those who learned from him were urban commentators and then satirists. They are not dignified as Hesiod was or elevated like Homer, they are men speaking to men. For Bowra, Semonides “turned the Hesiodic maxim into neat, unpretentious satire, using not the stately hexameter but an iambic line closer to the rhythm of actual conversation. The tone is unaffectedly lowly …”2 This judgement tends to aestheticise a poet with less finish and more sourness, judging from the poems and fragments that survive, than his advocates allow. What are we to make of the curious fragment in which he says, “and I drove through the back door,” in which the “back door” is the anus?3 Is there also, perhaps, the occasional semantic allusion to—farting?4

  The Byzantine encyclopaedia the Suda reports that he was the first poet to write in iambics. He is said to have composed two books of elegies in that form. The Greek iambic is not directly equivalent to the English iamb. If we scan the traditional hexameter like this:

  —uu—uu—uu—uu—uu—u

  the pentameter would look like this:

  —uu—uu—uu—uu—

  The flow is checked not by the counterpointing of syntax which moves the cæsura around the line or even at times introduces two caesuras into a single line. Its flow is broken regularly in the prosodic disposition itself, the two long syllables in the middle of the line forcing a speech pause. It is a form less versatile than the hexameter not only because it is not susceptible to such a variety of variables, but also because it cannot “sing,” being always grounded in mid-line.

  Semonides in his iambic verse paraphrases Hesiod. Early commentators, Clement of Alexandria, for example, and Porphyry, set passages of Hesiod parallel to ones from Semonides: there can be no doubt about the derivation. His most famous work, “Iambus on Women,” at 118 lines the longest surviving non-hexameter poem5 from before the fifth century BC,6 is built more or less directly on the foundation of Hesiod’s famous catalogue of misogyny: woman is an almost unmitigated plague which men encounter and endure as best they can.7 Woman is an evil thing, kakon, in Theogony (lines 570 and 600) and in Works and Days (lines 88–89). In Semonides woman is associated with the word kakon no fewer than seven times.

  He plays too with lines of Homer. One famous poem begins, “That man of Chios said something, something so beautiful: ‘The generations of leaves are like those of men.’”8 It repeats the carpe diem argument, yet the effects Semonides achieves are neither heroic nor bucolic. Hesiod’s hexameters may stand behind the iambic tradition, where song cools to speech, but it is Archilochus who first defines the iambic style, and then Semonides and Hipponax who take it a little too far, towards self-parody. The energies of iambic poetry are taken over by the dramatists. One of the dramatists, Aristophanes, had rather a jaundiced view of Semonides, portraying him as a miserable old miser in his play Peace: “now he’s old and shrivelled, he would even set sail on a wickerwork mat if there was profit in it.”9

  Bowra quotes the passage from “Iambus on Women” in which he likens one type of woman to the changing sea, and comments, “This is not very exalted, but it is lively and genuine and makes its point with derision.” It lowers the tone of Hesiod, he adds. Is this right, or does it bring the rural sensibility to town, creating a new tone in the verse, a tone we do not hear in the more individuated passions and rancours of pugnacious Archilochus? Hesiod’s disagreeable women were rural creatures, their animal nature expressed among animals. Animals were not absent from Amorgos, but they did not necessarily follow the poet into the house when he was finished for the day. What for Hesiod was an immediate and natural point of comparison for Semonides has become something of a conceit, or, when he comes to make his comparisons in detail, an allegorical figure. “The high Homeric laughter has turned sour,” Bowra says, “and the poetry of contempt and denunciation, so manifest in Archilochus, has found a place in less unusual circles.”10 In Hesiod there is no contempt for any livestock, and his comparisons are briefer, more glancing and emblematic. “Among people there is no understanding; we abide,” says Semonides, “like livestock, subject to each day’s weather, not knowing how the god” (singular) “will sort and order things.”11

  Bowra speaks of Semonides having “rather a plebeian look, and [he] can hardly have had any social pretensions.”12 This is contradicted by others, who regard him as of better stock (like Hipponax, a twisted branch hacked from a noble tree). The poems themselves seem to go against Bowra’s conclusions, too. The poet was not like that lowest of men, the potter, who provided the magnificent crockery but never drank from or ate off it. The symposium poet, a symposiast himself, was part of the class that the poems addressed. And with Semonides we are in the world of symposia, men reclining with wine, a performer entertaining them not with epic narrative but with lyric song, broad humour, elements of folklore, flattering them with their own prejudices tricked out in the efficient and memorable language of verse.

  The surviving poems are in Ionic dialect and are indebted to popular fables; there is always a moral tone, even in the brisk narrative fragments, but the tone is not earnest or monitory: it invites complicity. A man’s voice speaks, and it speaks to rather than at other men. It can be an ingratiating voice that invites assent, that provokes amusement and laughter, the poet as entertainer but not on a stage—entertaining us intimately, the way an English Augustan poet might have addressed his friends in a coffee house.

  Semonides composed his poems in what must have been a new community, or a newly founded one. If we are to believe the Suda, he was born in Samos (his father a well-placed Samian called Crines), and led a party to Amorgos, where he founded a colony. Amorgos, the easternmost of the Cyclades, belongs to the eparchy of Naxos. It is a narrow island, eighteen kilometres long and slanting up from the south-west to the north-east. Today it is sparsely inhabited, with between 1,600 and 1,700 people. In Semonides’ day it would have been a little more populous. It has three mountain peaks. One of them (Krikelas, the highest) lost its forest in the nineteenth century in a three-week fire and has never been the same since. When the poet arrived there from Samos, it was wooded. Landing on the north of the island, he would not immediately have seen the cliffs that hold down the sea along the rough south coast.

  In antiquity, there were three cities to go with the three peaks, all on the northern coast. The Suda credits Semonides with establishing all three, but in fact it is likely that he was involved in the founding of only one, Minoa, the others having been founded by settlers from Naxos. Amorgos is best known not for Semonides or its vintage, but for the fact that in the Lamian wars the Athenian fleet was decisively trounced in its waters, a defeat from which Athens never quite recovered.

  Semonides is an heir, even an echo, of Archilochus: David Mulroy calls him “a poor man’s Archilochus.” Despite the fact that both poets left home to help found new colonies, both were soldiers and perhaps adventurers, Semonides is on a smaller scale than his forebear, his voice higher-pitched, his angers and passions less extreme. Lesky indicates that Semonides, though he was the near contemporary of Archilochus, was neither as accomplished nor as versatile.13 All the same, to be Archilochus’ successor means something very specific. Archilochus, Bowra says, “put the self into poetry.”14 The self the poet invests is not of a kind with the first person in Renaissance and later European poetry; he is a singularly rancorous fellow, for whom art has a use beyond the didactic, the informative. It is a weapon to harm foes, to make things happen. Some of its consequences are fatal. Archilochus used verse so efficiently to defame his enemies that they destroyed themselves, and their destruction goes on ever after since each generation experiences the poems anew. Lucian declares Semonides, along with Archilochus and Hipponax, master of abusive verse. There is an eternity of sorts in the abuse.

  As in the case of Mimnermus, Stobaeus is again a chief source for Semonides’ surviving verse.15 Why did Stobaeus, a responsible father of the fifth century AD, include
a protracted piece of abuse of women in an anthology intended for the instruction of his son? Semonides’ poem is not notably funny, its construction is not subtle, the animal types the poet deploys in degrading his subject, rooted in folklore, not original. It has to be assumed that Stobaeus took the poem seriously, as actually characterising women: aversion therapy for Stobaeus Junior. Was this the poet’s own intention, was he a committed woman-hater, or was he dealing out stereotypes and commonplaces simply to amuse fellow (male) symposiasts? The attack is vivid, relentless, unforgiving. The worst recurrent sin of women seems to be eating. Such a theme in the feasting context of the symposium cannot wholly have lacked irony. What may seem less ironic to modern readers is the violence of male response, which is clearly indicated and, because it is not ironised in the text, is repugnant.

  Yet the violence inheres in the traditional elements that Semonides builds upon. Folk-tales and folk wisdom have a place in the work: “a fragment of a poem by Semonides,” says Lesky, “comes from a story of the dung beetle who punished the arrogance of the eagle.”16 Such uncertain fragments are like shards of pottery with sufficient detail left for us almost to infer the story that they illustrate. Some critics find a philosophical note in the poems. There are ideas, but grasped more with feeling than with thought. Man is portrayed as exiled or outcast, though where he is exiled from (certainly not, in Semonides’ case, an idealised Samos) or why (is it just in the nature of things?) Semonides does not explore. The image of an exile without a homeland has a metaphysical feel about it. It may mean little more (or less) than that any creature alive in time will always be sailing away: away from youth, from moments of love and happiness, but also from pain and terror. The journey ends not in a happy homeland but in death. The best a man can do is to pluck and retain pleasure when it is offered. Where Archilochus says “what the hell” and gets on with it, however, Semonides does not accept, even grudgingly, what fate provides. His voice rises in pitch and volume. Those notes of it we still hear, at least: the Suda credits him with a History of Samos which, with any other elegy he wrote, has perished.