The First Poets Read online

  The “Iambus on Women,” rooted in folklore and Hesiod, in turn was a source for Phocylides of Miletus, the sixth-century BC poet, writing in elegiacs and hexameters. He may have borrowed passages from Semonides to flesh out his precepts and moral tags. He managed to insinuate his own name into the verses that survive. “Phocylides says this” is his refrain. The “Iambos” retained readers down the ages. It began its widest English currency when Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator for 30 October 1711, displayed it to his polite readership with a slightly naughty twinkle in his eye. He starts by reflecting on how early art is simple, but as it progresses, “and the more we come downward towards our own times,” this simplicity becomes concealed “in artifices and refinements, polished insensibly out of her original plainness, and at length entirely lost under form and ceremony.” Nowhere is this decline into refinement more clear than in “the accounts of men and women as they are given us by the most ancient writers,” which, says Addison, make one think that one is “reading the history of another species.” For modern readers, the language of the early eighteenth century seems to rise from the lips of another species: we are closer to Se-monides (we tend to think) than to Addison. Or are we merely more at home with Semonides’ coarseness?

  Among the early classics, Addison, as we would expect, feels most at home with satire, and his valuation of Semonides is consequently high. So high, indeed, that he gives his readers a prose version of the “Iambus.” “Semonides, a poet famous in his generation, is I think author of the oldest satire that is now extant; and, as some say, of the first that was ever written.” Decorousness is a later invention: Addison is intrigued by the indecorous choice of simile in the Greek: “the ancients, provided there was a likeness in their similitudes, did not much trouble themselves about the decency of the comparison.” More didactic than his original, he warns his polite readers: “The subject of this satire is Woman. He describes the sex in their several characters, which he derives to them from a fanciful supposition upon the doctrine of pre-existence. He tells us, that the gods formed the souls of women out of those seeds and principles which compose several kinds of animals and elements; and that their good or bad dispositions arise in them according as such and such seeds and principles predominate in their constitutions.” Addison certainly takes the whole performance seriously, much as Stobaeus must have done. “I have translated the author very faithfully, and if not word for word (which our language would not bear) at least so as to comprehend every one of his sentiments, without adding any of my own.”17 He may be attributing rather more intention to the original than it actually had; certainly a “doctrine of pre-existence” attributes more to the philosophical background of the poem than we can reasonably infer. Indeed, such an attribution is an anachronism.

  The “Iambus on Women” is less about women as such, more about women in marriage, wives, and the unrewarding lottery involved in getting and keeping one. Critics who take it as a serious poem insist that it reveals much about Greek attitudes to women. How typical, one must ask, is the (surely ironic) description, intended for a symposium on the easternmost Cycladic island, Amorgos, and composed in the seventh or sixth century BC, of Greek male views about women? The poem does suggest that nine out of ten types of women are a plague; in giving negative types, like all good satire, it suggests by contrast positive types of married women.

  In Hesiod we read of the birth of Pandora, the divine retribution for Prometheus’ sin in bringing fire to man. She is kalon kakon, “beautiful evil,” like the woman Semonides compares to a mare (lines 67–68). Pandora is responsible, like Eve, for visiting evil on the world and for driving a terminal wedge between man and the gods, who, until that time, had existed in a kind of ecological balance. The story of Pandora expresses a widespread sense of the inconstancy and duplicity of women, an unreconstructed male perspective. Helen, whose unstated name obliquely closes the fragment, is another paradigm for female wiles, evil and (or because) inconsistent. Semonides does not repeat either story, or Hesiod’s longer catalogue, but he shows in his language and by thrifty allusion that the same figures are there in his mind and in his poem. He translates what he has learned from Hesiod into a different metre and into the terms of animal fable.

  Addison translates the first line of the “Iambus on Women” in a rather orotund way, appropriate to the Augustan eighteenth century, which clad every native brick wall it encountered with marble: “In the beginning God made the souls of woman kind out of different materials, and in a separate state from their bodies.” The Biblical inflection gives his version an authority quite out of keeping with the ambiguous, even imprecise, opening which the modern Englishman M. L. West renders, “God made diverse the ways of womankind”; and the American Diane Arnson Svarlien, “From the start, the gods made women different.” Is it God or gods? Are they creating types, or women? Is this something that occurred at the beginning of mankind, something unalterably given? The poet is less interested in metaphysics and process than in the product. Immediately, without apology, we pass from the peremptory introduction to woman as pig.

  Addison’s sow is figurative, she is still in the region of the spirit: “The souls of one kind of women were formed out of those ingredients which compose a swine. A woman of this make is a slut in her house, and a glutton at her table. She is uncleanly in her person, a slattern in her dress, and her family is no better than a dunghill.” Svarlien goes the whole hog, as it were, towards vulgarity, and her rendition is effective but too coarse for the formalised diction of Semonides’ original:

  One type is from a pig—a hairy sow

  whose house is like a rolling heap of filth;

  and she herself, unbathed, in unwashed clothes,

  reposes on the shit-pile, growing fat.

  West makes the sow-woman neither a soul nor a type but an actual extension of the pig she resembles, and he retains a decorousness in his diction which is truer to the original than Svarlien’s guttural version:

  One he created from a hairy sow;

  in her house everything’s a mess of filth

  rolling about untidy on the floor,

  and she herself, unwashed, in dirty clothes,

  eats herself fat and wallows in the muck.

  Addison’s “family” vanishes in both the modern translations. The sow is plain and childless sow. “Filth” and “muck” seem more appropriate farmyard diction than “shit”; and West’s avoidance of the language of simile is a sensible strategy: we are already in the zone of integrated metaphorical language.

  The sow is followed by the wily vixen, notable for being changeable and contrary, praising evil and denigrating good. Then comes the bitch, perpetually on heat or in pup, getting her nose into everyone’s business. Addison omits some importantly brutal lines. The man can’t stop the bitch from barking and prying, not with threats or with violence, in anger knocking her teeth out with a stone, nor by means of gentler persuasion. The order of Semonides’ unavailing correctives is odd, the way in which some human relationships work, from threat to violence to wheedling (when wheedling comes too late).

  Next comes the waddling clay creature, without a sense of good or ill, possessing only appetite. And, Semonides adds, forgetting that he has given us no visual sense of this particular woman, when it is frosty she’s quick to draw her chair up to the fire. So she is not animal at all, but like the rest of us made of clay. This switching off of the basic formal conceit, abandoning metaphor when there is no appropriate figure to convey the sense the poet intends, is one fault of Semonides, as of Hipponax. Their language is only conditionally figurative: if they have something to say that cannot be figuratively accommodated, they abandon the figure rather than bend what we might call the underlying prose sense. In satire there usually is an underlying sense of this kind.

  Nowhere is this more evident than in the fifth comparison: woman is like the sea, changeable: one day dazzling and calm so a visitor declares her the finest wife in all the world, the
next day stormy, “raging mad / like a bitch over her puppies”18 (an intriguing but hardly appropriate back-reference within the metaphor). Semonides repeats the calm-and-storm image (this time with people sailing on the changeable waters). He affirms that some women are like this, but not—he adds—in their looks.19 Such a quip, if that is what it is, drawing attention to the inappropriateness of the metaphor, having first teased out its thematic relevance, is undermining in the way that irony can be, the poet drawing attention to the artifice in order to withdraw a bit from it, to create a space between the saying and the sayer which helps to suggest a sense of complicity with the reader. It could be seen as a form of wry ingratiation, or as a serious poetic flaw, depending on whether we regard the poem as a symposium entertainment or a more public and thematically deliberated utterance.

  Woman as an ass, grey and stolid and only slowly responsive to beating (what Addison renders, “upon the husband’s exerting his authority”), trudging along and delivering the minimum energy, is next in the queue. She too is a great eater, all day, all night, all over the house, and she is sexually voracious to the extent that she will allow herself to be mounted by anyone. She is followed by the loathsome weasel (Addison makes her a cat), bad in bed but insatiable as well, a thief, and so ravenous that she eats the meat intended for holy sacrifice.

  The mare is most familiar of Semonides’ animal-women. She is vain, with her flowing mane; she refuses to work and wastes her time being beautiful. Again the figurative gives way to the literal here: she will not sieve, she will not deal with the chamberpots or cook or do any chores, yet because she is beautiful she makes men love her. She tends to bathe two or three times a day, she wears scent and combs and combs her lovely hair. She is suitable for a king—decorative, to be admired—but a waste of time and space in a normal household. She contrasts nicely with the rampant weasel, being sexually abstemious. Last of the negative portraits is the ape- or monkey-woman, most undesirable of all Zeus’s malcreations. She is so ugly that everywhere she is laughed at. She has no neck to speak of, stiff joints, no rump, unlovable, but she knows what’s what and gets her evil way (she spends her time plotting maliciously).

  But blessed be he who finds himself a busy bee-woman, beyond blame: industrious, affectionate, constant, a good mother both in producing and rearing children (again the metaphorical value of the bee is forgotten, along with the sting). She is essentially good, no gossip but a proper and obedient life-companion to her husband.

  It would have been a nice up-beat note to end on, even if the simile was, as before, unsustained. But no: Semonides recapitulates the negative theme: the other types are always there, lying in wait for unsuspecting grooms. “Yes,” says West’s Semonides, “the worst pestilence Zeus ever made / is women.” Not a day passes in contentment or peace: women find a way of marring it; they break the rules of hospitality, and those that seem the best and most obedient harbour the deepest rancour. Remember: the Trojan War was fought because of a woman.

  The problem with the long iambic fragment is that, though it is verse, the iambs effective and more or less regular, it is not poetry. Semonides does not have the courage of his conventions, not even to the degree that Hesiod did. It is the kernel of allegory, a beginning of systematic figuration, but only that. Its debts to folklore may be close, but it owes very little to the stable, the byre, the burrow; its ape never hung from a tree and its sea never bore a ship.

  Is this the best Semonides has to offer? Probably not, though its subject guarantees the poet a certain notoriety. West’s version of the first elegy is a beautiful and balanced statement about the unalloyed awfulness of life, the poet—having numbered them—declaring that, if he had his way, he would let go of such truths. Other fragments are about letting go as well: forgetting the dead, forgetting pain and evil deeds, leaving them behind, moving on, if not towards pleasure at least away from pain. There are tiny fragments of description: an eel squirmed down into the mud, another eel, caught by a buzzard, snatched away by a heron. And the poet travelled. The heron’s eel in one poem was a delicacy from the river Maeander in Caria. When he is quoted by Athenaeus in Scholars at Dinner, we encounter a Tromilian cheese Semonides brought back from Achaea.20 Food: food for birds and animals, food for men as well as for voracious women. Roasted pork, thigh bones, cups of wine, and in the end a ladleful of dregs.21

  XI

  Alcaeus of Mytilene

  Amazing! Cerberus, lulled by those Alcaics

  Pricks up the black ears on all his heads to harken

  And the serpents twisted in the Harpies’ tresses

  Cease writhing and attend;

  Prometheus, too, and Pelops’ unhappy father1

  Pause in their pointless labours, rapt a while;

  Nor does Orion, all of a sudden, care

  To track the lions or the shying lynxes.

  HORACE, Odes 11.13

  In 1881 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted a large neo-classical canvas entitled Sappho and Alcaeus. Sappho, chin on hands, hands and left forearm on a cushion, cushion on a low oak lectern, gazes enraptured at Alcaeus. Her laurel crown rests on the cushion as well, near her left elbow. Her features are borrowed from Greek statuary but her forehead is low. The hairdresser, whom she has visited quite recently, has fashioned her dark coil into a tight Victorian helmet. Beside her stands a blonde girl, probably her bright-haired daughter Cleis. Flanking them in the little amphitheatre are three more of Sappho’s girls, two attentive, one gazing out to sea. Graffiti (in Greek of course) disfigure the marble surround, as though both poets, unable to contain themselves, have incontinently spilled their verses, or the names of their lovers, on every available surface. A twisting tree stands between us and a sea not wine-coloured but grey-blue like the eyes of Athena. On the horizon we can discern the Turkish coast. Then, at the right of the canvas, reclining on a comfortable chair and wearing a handsome toga, a hunting horn beneath him and an elaborate lyre on his lap, is Alcaeus, concentrating on the strings. He has beautiful feet.

  This picture, portraying ancient Greece as a Mediterranean foretaste of the Victorian life to come, at least for the prosperous classes, is full of mistakes, architectural, sartorial, racial, biographical. Yet the lies it tells are of a kind that the Victorians were ready to believe: poets should be beautiful, the classical world should be familiar and prefigure their world, which revived and extended the classical. Alma-Tadema provides the technicolour equivalent of the plaster casts that decorated many a Victorian hall, avenue and summer house. And the imaginary model Alcaeus, ironically, survived the painter, coming to life again in the middle of the twentieth century when his oeuvre grew with the publication in 1955 of the Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments identified as his verse.2 The ancient Greek poets will never die entirely. The sands of Egypt guarantee that fragments will continue to surface for another millennium at least, extending and reshaping our sense of the Greek imagination.

  In one respect Alma-Tadema was right: Alcaeus’ name3 is intimately linked with that of Sappho, though Alcaeus was probably rather older than she was and, Cicero and others suggest, for amorous purposes preferred the company of his own sex. Both were born on Lesbos, they were near contemporaries, each invented an eponymous prosodic form (Alcaics, Sapphics), both experienced exile. The surviving fragments of their poems, in the Aeolic dialect, use much the same diction, many of the same forms and tropes, and raise similar textual problems. Indeed, scholars dispute the attribution of certain fragments, and two or three dozen bright shards of language are attributed to a composite author, “Sappho or Alcaeus”: incertum utrius auctoris fragmenta.4 Alcaeus was possibly more prolific than Sappho. Almost three times as many fragments of and attestations to his work survive, some 450. When he died, it is said that he left behind, either in memory or on papyrus, a body of work sufficient to have filled four Loeb Classic volumes—five times as much as survives of Theocritus, more than twice as much as his greatest admirer, Horace.5 In his Epistles, after preferring Alcaeus to Ar
chilochus because of his better subject-matter, the Roman declares: “I, Latium’s lyric singer, have introduced Alcaeus to the public: no mouth had uttered his songs here before me.”6

  Alcaeus is not a poet of love in the sense that Sappho is. There is desire and passion in his verse, and venom; debauchery is not absent from the drinking songs. He also has moments of serenity and philosophical clarity. Though not primarily a love lyricist, he knows what love is; he is, on the one hand, a good-time poet, and on the other, a survival poet, enduring exile and hardships with a definite sense of home and a fitful but compelling sense of justice. And there is a civic aspect to his work, too. As Sappho composed epithalamia and marriage poems, Alcaeus wrote hymns: to Castor and Polydeuces,7 to Hermes and others.

  Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric and grammarians made much of his poems of invective and attack in which he levelled against tyrants. Some even present him as a radical and reformer, a champion of the people against usurping leaders. This is a falsification of the actual poet whose hostility to tyranny was, like Sappho’s, less principled than self-interested. He is more an elegiac patrician, like Theognis of Megara, than a man of social vision. His political poems survive in such fragmentary form that it is hard to reconstruct the voice of protest which meant so much to his classical successors. What we can begin to reconstruct is a brilliant poet of wine, its virtues and consequences; of the symposium and its pleasures; of the passing of youth; of survival.