The First Poets Read online

  This Alcaeus, mature in years but always young at heart, even when the hairs upon his chest have turned grey,8 is a vital lyric presence, less enigmatic and less emblematic, but no less a virtuoso, than Sappho. He is followed by the ghosts of his dear friends, Melanippus, Bacchis, Agesilaidas, Aesimidas, Menon, Dinnomenes. Anacreon’s libido is more clearly revealed than Alcaeus’, but however gently and circumspectly he expresses himself, the note that is struck, as more forcefully in Solon and Ibycus, Anacreon and Theognis, and then in Pindar, is homosexual.

  Alcaeus’ father may have been called Cicis: one of his brothers certainly bore that name, perhaps the eldest.9 Another brother, almost as famous as Alcaeus in ancient times but in another field, was Antimenidas, the great fighter. His prowess was celebrated by Alcaeus, the man of words imbuing the man of action with immortality in verse. The poem is now almost lost. According to the historian Strabo, writing half a millennium after the events, it recalled how, fighting on the side of the Babylonians, probably under Nebuchadrezzar,10 in the campaign against Ascalon, Antimenidas confronted in single battle a foe who was “only one palm’s breadth short of five royal cubits.” Like David in combat with Goliath, Antimenidas was victorious and rescued his comrades. Strabo quotes a line—the only surviving line—from the poem: “From the earth’s furthest corner you’ve arrived, the hilt of your sword done up with gold.”11

  The second-century AD rhetorician Aelius Aristides quotes “words that Alcaeus the poet uttered long since,” namely, “cities aren’t stone or wood or the skill of labourers; wherever men know how to protect themselves, ramparts and cities stand.”12 Though Alcaeus’ brothers knew how to defend themselves, Alcaeus, by his own account, did not. Herodotus recalls how during the struggle for Sigeum the Mytilenean Pittacus prevailed against the Athenian general by means of a clever ploy he might have learned from Hephaestus, who employed a net to ensnare his wife, Aphrodite, in flagrante with her lover Ares. He caught the Athenian in a net and slew him. But Alcaeus, in another encounter during the same campaign, threw away his armour and fled.13 This image, already familiar from Archilochus, though Archilochus was a mercenary and Alcaeus was fighting for his own city, recommended itself to Horace. He takes it up in a famous ode, justifying his own similar action. You can replace armour; it is harder to get another life.

  Alcaeus, possibly the youngest of the brothers, was the eloquent one. Strabo admires his assault on the Mytilenean tyrants. There was a succession of them in and just before his time. Their effect he famously compared to waves bursting against the bows of a weakened ship. The image becomes a figure, the figure represents the city-state. In one fragment, scholars conjecture that the assaulting weather represents the storms and strifes of civil war.14

  The first tyrant against whom he may have plotted was Myrsilus. Under him he suffered his first exile, in Pyrrha.15 Myrsilus was followed by Melanchrus, then the Cleanactids, and most especially his family’s one-time ally Pittacus, against whom Sappho’s people, too, hardened their hearts. Yet whatever Alcaeus has to say about the matter, Pittacus was different in kind from his predecessors. Alcaeus’ family must have thought so too, at first, since both Cicis and Antimenidas fought alongside him against Melanchrus. But Pittacus, who became one of the Seven Sages and has attributed to him some famous aphorisms,16 used his time in power not to advance the interests of those who helped him seize it; rather, he set out to weaken and defeat the contrary factions that had riven Mytilene. Sappho’s and Alcaeus’ families were implicated in these factions, and their defeat occasioned the poets’ exiles. Alcaeus was in Egypt for a time17 and probably knew Boeotia. “Choose the appropriate moment,” said Pittacus. “Cultivate the appropriate friends.”

  Pittacus fought in the war against Athens when Athens seized the fortress of Sigeum at the entrance to the Hellespont. Then Pittacus killed the tyrant Myrsilus in single combat. He was elected by the Mytileneans to be aisymnetes, a tyrant chosen, initially, by plebiscite, a legitimate dictator, in 590 BC. He may have gone to Sardis to negotiate with Croesus, who, having annexed the coastal towns of western Asia Minor, was casting a golden eye on the islands. When Pittacus had achieved what he was elected to do, and carried through his own reforms, like Solon he withdrew to a decade of studious retirement. His city, with a restored sense of balance, got on with its business, which was at this time—business.

  The people chose Pittacus, but because of Alcaeus the poet, Pittacus has had a bad press in afterlife. Aristotle says in the Politics, quoting the poet himself: “as tyrant of that coward bad-luck city they set up low-born Pittacus, and every one of them sang out his virtues.”18 Part of the tyrant’s sin was his low birth (relative to Alcaeus’), part his treachery in having civic principles and vision. According to Diogenes Laertius,19 Alcaeus was especially unpleasant about the tyrant’s appearance, starting at ground level: he was “drag-foot” and “chap-foot” (suggesting that he was lame or splayfooted and chilblained); “mincer” because of the way he moved about; “pot-” and “big-bellied” because he was; “dusk-diner,” “because he did not use a lamp”; and “well-swept,” “since he was slovenly and dirty.” Such puerile invective combined with sophisticated and substantial allegations and durable rhetorical strategies. Dionysius of Halicarnassus remarks: “Consider Alcaeus, how he evinces nobility, succinctness and generosity together with vigour; and where he uses metaphors how directly he communicates, except when his [Aeolic] dialect betrays him. Consider in particular the tone of the poems that deal with political themes. Without the prosody, they would be mere political rhetoric.”20 When we get to the great teacher of rhetoric, Quintilian, in the first century AD, we find Alcaeus transformed into the doughty tyrant-attacker, worthy of the golden plectrum, a contributor to moral education, even though “he declined into light-heartedness and songs made out of love, though he was destined for higher things.”21 And Horace in the Odes speaks of “Alcaeus’ threatening songs.”22

  According to Diodorus Siculus,23 Pittacus actually managed to capture Alcaeus. Instead of executing him, he let him go, because “forgiveness yields a better return than revenge.” It was around 580 BC, after which the poet, we may assume, began to enjoy a serene and bibulous old age. Pittacus’ refusal to punish Alcaeus, like his relinquishing power willingly after a decade of reforms, can be set in the balance against Alcaeus’ bitter words. Whatever his birth, colour, diet or way of walking, he managed to find and occupy, with dignity, the moral high ground, and a mere poet could not compete with such a lenient exercise of temporal power. If Alcaeus managed to live on and die of old age, it was due in large part to the political changes Pittacus introduced.

  Well might Pittacus have admired the sounds made by the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus, his disgruntled subjects. Alcaeus was a melic poet, like Sappho, composing personal and choral lyrics. Unlike other, earlier, forms of verse his admitted the personal and the emotional, even when his intentions were didactic and satirical. But “personal” and “emotional” should not suggest a poetry that is merely subjective or romantic in tenor. In the strophic compositions, very complex rhythms are closely integrated with music (melos, hence “melic”), and the words were intended to be sung or recited with accompaniment in symposia, the intimacy of the evening entertainment. The poems of exile, like the poems of wine, assume not a single reader but a small, informed and sympathetic audience. One critic suggests that in melic poetry we have a point of departure for the first-person, subjective and finally bourgeois lyric. This overlooks the context for which the poems were composed, the necessity of musical accompaniment, and the fact that the emotions and the “personal” elements were shared by the symposium participants. Though modern readers may at first find Sappho and Alcaeus familiar and approachable, the danger of appropriation and misreading is real. Yeats said that lyric poems are not “heard” but “overheard.” Greek melic poetry is heard.

  Like Sappho, Alcaeus was an inventor. He may have invented Alcaics, one of Horace’s favourite measures for ve
rse, with a movement which more or less reverses that of the Sapphic. An Alcaic stanza looks like this:

  Arthur Hugh Clough’s English experiment, “Alcaics,” makes the form sound like this (we read for length rather than accent or stress):

  So spake the voice: and as with a single life

  Instinct, the whole mass, fierce, irretainable,

  Down on that unsuspecting host swept;

  Down, with the fury of winds, that all night

  Upbrimming, sapping slowly the dyke, at dawn

  Fall through the breach o’er holmstead and harvest; and

  Heard roll a deluge: while the milkmaid

  Trips i’ the dew, and remissly guiding

  Morn’s first uneven furrow, the farmer’s boy

  Dreams out his dream; so, over the multitude

  Safe-tented, uncontrolled and uncontrollably

  sped the Avenger’s fury.

  The Alcaic form is more complex than the Sapphic:

  Thomas Hardy accommodates the metre with some archness and archaism, but to unusual effect, in his “The Temporary the All.”

  Change and chancefullness in my flowering youthtime,

  Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;

  Wrought us fellowlike, and despite divergence,

  Fused us in friendship.

  “Cherish him can I while the true one forthcome—

  Come the rich fulfiller of my prevision;

  Life is roomy yet, and the odds unbounded.”

  So self-communed I.

  ’Thwart my wistful way did a damsel saunter,

  Fair, albeit unformed to be all-eclipsing;

  “Maiden meet,” held I, “till arise my forefelt

  Wonder of women.”

  Long a visioned hermitage deep desiring,

  Tenements uncouth I was fain to house in:

  “Let such lodging be for a breath-while,” thought I,

  “Soon a more seemly.

  “Then high handiwork will I make my life-deed,

  Truth and Light outshow; but the ripe time pending,

  Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth.”

  Thus I … But lo, me!

  Mistress, friend, place, aims to be bettered straightway,

  Bettered not has Fate or my hand’s achievement;

  Sole the showance those of my onward earth-track—

  Never transcended!

  In Sapphics the movement is from long to short (analogous to the English movement from stress to unstress), a downward movement or diminution. In Alcaics the movement is from short to long in the first two lines, from short to short in the third, and from long to short in the fourth (reversals within the stanza and then between the lines themselves). Alcaics require a rather different kind of voice, a different music, than Sapphics.

  One Alcaic ode, of which only the opening survives, appears to be addressed to Sappho; and there is a fragment of what may have been her reply. Between the two there is a kind of oblique dialogue which can feel like a friendship if we imagine their age, their dialect, the similarity between their antecedents and their responses to power.

  Why should Alcaics be more complex than Sapphics? Perhaps because they stem from rather a different tradition. Alcaeus is indebted to a form called the scolion, invented (legend says) by Terpander (also) of Lesbos. The Greek word scolios (plural scolia) means “tortuous,” and scolion is an early form of drinking song, performed at symposia, a growing challenge as the wine-bowl circulated. Alcaeus, Anacreon, then Pindar were noted for them.

  Drink, Melanippus, with me, let’s get drunk.

  When once you’ve crossed the swirling24 Acheron

  Do you actually believe you’ll see again the fair

  Sun’s light? No point in aiming high. The son

  Of Aeolus himself, regal Sisyphus the sage

  Came to think that he had bested Death; even so,

  Twice, though he was smart, he crossed the swirling

  River, twice because fate said he must. And Zeus

  Child of Cronus, made a torture for him under ground.

  Do not strive; now you are young, fit to endure

  Whatever trials God throws at us …25

  Thus the poet, with a mixture of wry sophistry and real philosophical resignation, urges his friend—the same friend to whom he confessed his failure in battle—to turn his time to pleasurable account. As Horace would say later, in an Alcaic mood, “Pluck the day.”

  Another fragment celebrates the river Hebrus (now called Maritza), flowing through Thrace, and the maidens bathing in it, laving their thighs “with gentle hands”; they touch and use “your wonderful water like an ointment.”26 The image intends to give us a sense of the texture of their skin beneath their hands: it is erotically charged. Other poems begin emphatically: “The story says,” or with a vocative and then an invocation. “Pour balm over my brow, it has endured so much, and pour it over my grey chest …”27 From such an altering beginning flows a story, and then a moral. Yes, Aesop was a man of Lesbos, too.

  Another genre Alcaeus develops is the poem of civil war and exile, called stasiotika. One such poem is a prayer and invocation, spoken ostensibly by the people of Mytilene, to Zeus and Hera and to Dionysus, against potbellied Pittacus.28 More subtle—hesitating, as it were, between the scolion and the stasiotic genres—are those poems which seem to belong to a rueful time when the poet would like to celebrate but history keeps calling him back to a world of dire events—rather like Sappho’s wonderful poem about the marriage of Hector and Andromache, around which hovers the eventual fact (the poem does not directly mention it) of the Trojan War. One of Alcaeus’ most powerful (and best preserved) poems is similar in texture.

  The story tells it, Helen, how harsh woe befell

  King Priam and his sons because of you, and Zeus

  Afflicted sacred Ilium with fire. Such a girl

  Was not the tender virgin whom Aeacus’

  Noble son,29 inviting all the exalted gods of heaven

  To witness their rites, wed, and took away

  From Nereus home to Chiron, there undid

  Her virgin band, and Peleus’ love found out

  The best of Nereus’ daughters. In a year she bore

  A son, best demigod, graced charioteer, his team

  Of chestnut horses. But on Helen’s account

  All perished, all the Phrygians and their city …30

  This may be a whole poem, starting and ending with Helen and destruction, but at the heart of it abide the happy marriage and the brave, incomparable infant.

  The stasiotic poems borrow the Homeric authority of the Trojan War to talk about “present day” Mytilene and its problems, an indirection poets often practise, saying one thing to mean another. Thus we encounter a procession of beautiful women in the precinct of Hera, the sounds they make,31 or Alcaeus celebrates the Hall of War in a passage which recalls the warriors’ hall in Beowulf.32 Another fragment33 focuses again on Helen. Most powerfully Homeric is the fragment in which Ajax rapes one of Athena’s supplicants in her very temple during the siege of Troy.34 Are we expected to read Pittacus for Ajax, and Mytilene for the ravaged woman? In Homer (or in the later epic The Sack of Troy) Cassandra, the never-believed truth-telling prophetess, is the one whom Ajax violates.

  The mighty fall, the exile returns home. Athenaeus says that Alcaeus “is discovered drinking all the time no matter what the circumstances: … ‘Now men must lose themselves in drink, and drink with all their might: Myrsilus’s dead.’”35 Back to the scolion and the drinking jar, or skyphos, brimming with lightly watered wine. “Don’t give up your spirits at a time of sorrow, grief doesn’t get you anywhere, Bycchis; the best cure is get wine and then get drunk.”36

  Even in the civic poems, the metaphorical expressions seem to draw on the culture of wine. To join battle, for example,37 is “mingling” or “mixing Ares with each other”: Does this evoke the mingling of wine and water or wine and another wine?

  Let’s drink! W
hy wait for lights? Only the merest

  Inch of day remains. Comrade, take that big ornate cup.

  The child of Semele and Zeus granted men wine

  So they’d let sorrow go. Mix in one part.

  Water, two parts wine, pour to the brim,

  Then cheers! Let’s toast with our full cups …38

  And so, as the companions quaff another skyphos, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, the poet declares, “Zeus lets rain fall, a tempest bursts from heaven … Stoke the fire, mix the honeyed wine, don’t stint, bind a soft band around your brow.”39 Unstinting? It can go too far. Proclus, writing on Hesiod, compares a poem by Alcaeus to a passage in Hesiod’s Works and Days (lines 582ff.). Alcaeus writes: “Wash your lungs with wine: here comes the dog star, scorching the weather, everything thirsts in the heat, among the foliage sweetly the cicada plays its voice … the thistle flowers; women are at their plaguey worst, men feeble, because Sirius bakes dry their pates and their knees …”40 Is this a deliberate imitation of Hesiod? It is one of the few moments in Alcaeus when he attacks women: usually he looks towards them with an unenthusiastic but unjaundiced eye. Excess may be the cause: “and if … wine snares his brain, he won’t need catching; bowing down his head, repeatedly blaming his very heart, regretting what he says; but that’s gone for good.”41 Wine brings three things for which Alcaeus uses almost the same word, epialtes: stomach disorder, fever and nightmare.42 Yet wine makes a man honest, as in the Alcaic proverb, taken up later by Theocritus, “Wine, my dear young fellow, and the truth.”43 It also makes a man visible in ways he might not wish: “for wine makes a spy-hole into a man.”44

  Such lines are aphoristic, the sort of thing we get from BenJonson in Timber or from the French epigrammatists who deliver depth-charges masked as clichés: “If you tell what you like, you may hear back what you dislike,”45 or squibs about the importance of money46 and the un-pardonable, almost impertinent base grievousness of poverty.47 Clearly Alcaeus is a moralist, and clearly he is of his class. This does not preclude wisdom in his utterances, a wisdom underscored by balance and melody in expression. Plutarch, in On Love and Wealth,48 remembers a passage from Alcaeus which we might expect from Stendhal’s De l’amour or, in a different kind of context, from Proust: “For it’s a comfort that when pleasure starts to fail, desires, which Alcaeus claims not man or woman ever got away from, start to fail at the same time.”