The First Poets Read online

  Theognis does not like women, though to Cyrnus he briefly praises that unlikely thing, a good marriage. He loves adolescents, but there is no suggestion that he ever made children of his own. His sense of perpetuating a value system is essentially pedagogic: choose beautiful youths and teach them what is good. Yet they are themselves susceptible to contrary influence, and there is nothing stable under the sun. When he gives what seems like bad advice, we realise that he is not only an earnest man but also an ironist:

  Do not pray for rank, son of Polypas, or riches:

  All a man needs now is good luck.17

  The ironic tone almost endears him to us, but when he speaks of “the mindless people” and uses other terms of disaffection, our incipient warmth is checked.

  Theognis writes not in his native Doric but in a deliberately Ionic dialect, Ionic being the chief poetic currency of the time. To write in an idiom that sets the poems apart from the immediate community in which he lives is an act of distancing, of aloofness, as if they are for a small élite who share a formal language. It also acknowledges that the poems are part of a wider culture, not a merely local exercise. They were composed to be recited with aulos accompaniment, for the entertainment of the symposium.

  There is an austerity about Theognis which makes his verse fall short of the erotic in its terms, whatever his desires might have been; it falls short of the bibulous ribaldry of the symposium, too: when he got together with his friends, the evenings may have passed in a pensive spirit, more under the spell of Apollo than Dionysus. It is hard to drink deep when, on waking from the long sleep, the world one wakes to is as bleak-seeming as Theognis.’ Perhaps it is kindest and most just to see him as the unsmiling symposiast, the lover whose hand rests only on the shoulder of his beloved.

  O son of Polypas, I have heard the crane’s voice crying shrilly18

  To tell men that the time is right to plough and sow.

  It bruises my heart melancholy black, the thought

  That others now possess my flower-dotted fields

  And the mules do not for me draw the yoke of the plough

  Because …19

  Though he stands at the end of a political moment, he also stands near the beginning of an epigrammatic tradition.

  XIV

  Solon of Athens (640–560 BC)

  Some poems of Solon were recited by the boys. They had not at that time gone out of fashion, and the recital of them led someone to say, perhaps in compliment to Critias, that Solon was not only the wisest of men but also the best of poets. The old man brightened up at hearing this, and said: “Had Solon only had the leisure which was required to complete the famous legend which he brought with him from Egypt he would have been as distinguished as Homer and Hesiod.”

  PLATO, Timaeus 21c1

  Compared with Theognis, his sour-faced neighbour and near contemporary, Solon of Athens could talk and walk. He wrote verse, but he also was offered power and exercised it with prudence. One of his laws established that at a time of civil strife a citizen who did not take sides would lose his citizenship. Every man had an unshirkable responsibility to choose what he regarded as the good, and to bear the consequences of his choice. This was a non-negotiable civic expectation in an evolving democracy.

  Solon’s was one of the rare moments in history when a poet was an acknowledged legislator. Shelley, defending a nineteenth-century corner for the unacknowledged poet-legislator, might have approved of Solon’s kind of leadership. What made it extraordinary was Solon’s instinct for balance and counterbalance, his understanding of the perspectives not only of his own class but of all classes. He also had a responsible eye for the medium and long term: expediency played only a small part in his calculations. He was a man of self-effacing integrity.

  This, at least, is the version of Solon that originates in his own writings and that historians, including Herodotus and Plutarch, believed to be true.2 Solon may not have bequeathed sculpture, painting or architecture to the city, but he helped to restore its balance and gain, or regain, contested Salamis. Also, he reformed its written laws in a radical way. And finally, he was the first poet of Athens.

  It is not possible to separate his poetry from his political and civic activities. Solon is the Hesiod of the city-state, using poetry to address social husbandry, the ills, needs, and aspirations of his city. He reflects on power and its effects, but also finds room in verse for the sensual man. Plutarch’s Life quotes the verse at large. In tone, texture and even in phrasing it recalls Hesiod’s. Urban and rural values are not so profoundly at odds as they would be when, later on, city and sustaining countryside became divorced.

  I long to prosper, but to thrive by dishonest means

  I do not wish. Justice may be slow, but it’s true.3

  No cutting corners, on the farm or in Council. In Solon’s Athens a citizen had fields and orchards; the city was small enough for every man who lived on a street to have crops and pastures along a lane. His eunomia, the order of good laws which harmonise the lives of citizens, is not unlike the eunomia Hesiod applies to the rural and the divine order. Hesiod personifies it: Eunomia is daughter of Themis, a Titaness, herself a daughter of Uranus and Gaia. She wedded Zeus and bore him several children and is the source of some of the key ordering principles of the universe.

  A long fragment of Solon sets out, for the first time, to harmonise two quite disparate conceptions. On the one hand stands fallible and limited man, vain and paltry, ambitious and myopic; on the other is an ordered and potentially just society. The latter ought to take the former, provide him a place, a structure within which to work and achieve, and goals which dignify and extend him and those like him. We have human hubris and its unmitigated aftermath and, set against it, we have the mitigation of a just order, eunomia versus dysnomia. A wise moderation leads towards a shared golden mean.4

  The Suda tells us that Solon’s father was Execestides.5 It was a matter of pride to Critias that his great-grandfather, grandfather or father, Dropides (there are variant versions), had been a lover of Anacreon, and was often mentioned in Anacreon’s poetry. Solon and Dropides may have been brothers, their father being Execestides.6 And Plutarch adds: “Solon’s mother, says Heraclides of Pontus, was a cousin of the mother of Pisistratus,” the man who was to become tyrant of Athens when Solon went abroad. Solon and Pisistratus “were great friends to begin with, in part because they were related, in part because of the youthful handsomeness of Pisistratus. According to some writers, Solon was passionately devoted to him.” His is among the earliest poetic testimony of love between boys and men.7 Solon, who was to become the great meter of judgement and lawmaker, could write:

  As soon as there’s a bloom on him, one loves a boy,

  Thighs, and sweet lips, objects of desire …8

  Pisistratus is said to have had a boy lover called Charmus and to have dedicated a statue to love in the academy, where runners in the sacred torch race lit their torches. Solon, similarly inclined, could not resist gazing upon good looks. He adopted his sister’s son Cybisthus. Plutarch says, “The truth is that each man’s soul has planted in it a desire to love; it is as much its nature to love as it is to feel, understand, and remember. It clothes itself in this desire. If it finds nothing to love at home it will fasten on some alien object.” The love of a boy or a young man is the noblest form of love. There is no record of Solon having married or produced an heir. When he came to draft his famous laws, he explicitly forbade boy love to slaves, reserving and dignifying such activities for “reputable men.”

  Celebrating love of this kind was not at odds with the order of individual values he advocates in other poems (the erotic element in his surviving poems is slight, a trace among more serious concerns). Olbios, in Homer a word signifying material well-being, good fortune, in Solon comes to mean a higher blessedness, the pagan beatus of the Latin writers. It begins in a positive reputation, and it entails the love and honour of friends and the ability to terrify and harm foes.9 Olbios,
in one fragment, is a man who has beloved sons, horses, hounds and a hospitable friend elsewhere, a friend one can escape to.10 Herodotus distinguishes olbios from a mere eutuches, one who enjoys superficial or momentary good fortune.

  Before he found his political vocation, Solon wrote “with no serious end in view,” simply to amuse himself when at leisure. He began to philosophise in aphoristic form, using verse also as a historical record and to set down his understanding of the world and his place in it. Poetry was asked to do work which in a later age would naturally have fallen to prose: exhortation, warning, rebuke, prayer. He may have tried to draft his laws in epic verse. One fragment, as if from such an attempt, declares:

  First let us pray to Zeus, royal son of Cronus

  To grant my laws success and wide renown.11

  Poor in his youth, Solon travelled to make his fortune, Plutarch says. In his age a person of good family could work for gain without a stigma attaching to him. Foreign trade was regarded as mind-extending, especially at a time when colonies were being planted far and wide. Both Thales and Hippocrates the mathematician engaged in trade, and Plato paid for the expenses of his stay in Egypt by selling oil. Solon the merchant succeeded in a sufficient, if not a spectacular, way and around 612 BC went home. Athens was in a singularly unhappy state when he arrived back. Among other things, citizens were not permitted so much as to mention the name of the island of Salamis, to which Athens laid claim, but which it had been unable to wrest from the control of the Megarians. This rankling defeat was a focus for wider discontents.

  The twenty-eight-year-old could not abide such enforced silence on an issue of popular concern. He composed “a hundred gracefully turned verses,” of which only eight survive, committed them to memory, and then rushed into the public way, dressed for his madness “with a little cap upon his head,” reciting them with eloquence. Plutarch declares that “a great crowd swarming about him,” he climbed on to the Herald’s Stone and recited his elegy. It began with the words:

  I come, a herald from delightful Salamis,

  On my tongue not a speech but a carcanet of words …12

  I must, he says ironically, be a native of some little island, Sicinus or Phole-gandros, certainly no Athenian: Athenians are Salamis-abandoners (Salami-naphetae). As the poem progressed, it urged fellow-Athenians to renew the war with Megara, to save the delightful island and revive Athenian honour.

  Another late biographer, Diogenes Laertius, says that Solon did not recite the poem himself but hired a herald to do so, thus dissipating some of the impact of the story and the drama of madness. This second version is more in keeping with Solon’s dislike of performance and fiction, but it issues in all likelihood, as Plutarch’s does, from a traditional misreading of surviving texts. Mary R. Lefkowitz, describing how Aristotle used Solon as a source for his Constitution of Athens, shows how misreadings by biographers and critics unaware of semantic change can lead to mis-creation of past scenes. They take agore (speech) for agora (market-place) and thus create a powerful, inadvertent fiction. Did he in fact feign madness when he delivered his poem on Salamis? Was he in fact, later on, offered the tyrant’s crown and did he refuse it? Was he as virtuous as the tenor of his verse suggests?13

  Plutarch tells so good a story that, though we must doubt it, we might as well listen to it all the same. Solon was applauded by many, including Pisistratus. The law against mentioning Salamis was repealed and Athens went to war again with, as commander, the poet Solon himself. To defeat the Megarians he practised a subterfuge. We are given a choice of stories. The first involves cross-dressing. Solon sent an agent who posed as a deserter and persuaded the Megarians to try to kidnap the leading Athenian women who, he assured them, were observing the rites of Demeter at Colias. As the Megarians approached, Solon had young, sparsely bearded men dress in women’s clothing; as the foe came ashore the Athenians killed every last one of them and used their ship to sail back and take the city. The second story is more conventional and Plutarch finds it more credible. It involves an oracle, sacrifices, and a feigned attack to draw the enemy out, and then the main body of men sneaking in behind and taking the city.

  Athens won, but victory was not clear-cut. Conflict continued until Megara and Athens agreed to submit their claim to an arbitrator: Sparta. Solon based Athens’ claim to Salamis on Homer (poetry conferred legitimacy). The question is, were the lines he adduced originally in Homer’s poem, or were they interpolated? We are back with the forger-editor Onomacritos and Iliad II, 557–58. Homer’s great editor Aristarchus rejected both lines. They speak of Salamis’ contribution to the Trojan War as part of the Athenian contingent. It followed that Salamis belonged within the Athenian sphere. “From Salamis,” says Homer, or Onomacritos, “Ajax brought twelve ships, and stationed them where the phalanxes of the Athenians stood.” Never was so much historical weight placed upon (rather poor) lines of spurious verse. Another, Athenian, version says that Solon persuaded the Spartans that Ajax’s sons Philaeus and Eurysaces became citizens of Athens and ceded the island to the city when they settled in Attica.

  The main reason apologists have found for doubting the stories of subterfuge is the character of Solon himself: would he, a man of robust and emphatic self-declared integrity, take such devious routes? Would he feign madness? Would he, Athens’ first poet, misquote the greatest poet in the world for political ends? Would he use cross-dressing as a mode of deceit in war? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” Solon is diminished in their eyes.

  After Salamis, Solon was famous. His fame grew when he defended Delphi against the people of Cirrha, who threatened to “profane the oracle.” As one of the Seven Sages, his maxims “Moderation in all things” and “Know thyself” were inscribed, Pausanias reports, in an antechamber of the temple of Apollo. That they were there in Pausanias’ time proves how durable Solon’s admittedly rudimentary wisdom was. The Sages used to meet in conclave at a wooden version of the temple that burned down in the middle of the sixth century BC.

  Solon was the only poet among the Seven. The Sages were wise men who performed their wisdom in some way.14 The Greek word for their brand of sagacity is metis: practical wisdom enhanced with more than a dash of cunning. Despite the Sages’ generality of expression, metis itself is highly particular, alive to the complexities of individual and social life. A man with metis “has a keen eye for the main chance, for what the Greeks called kairos—the right thing at the right time.”15 When the poet Simonides arrived in Athens, kairos had been translated and devalued: no poet ever evinced such an intensely successful form of it, and that success was wholly material.16

  Membership of the ancient Sage club varies, according to the historian one reads, but Solon is always present on the list. From Plutarch’s point of view, the only genuine sage among them was Thales of Miletus. He had originality. The others, applying morality to politics, are purveyors of rather commonplace maxims. The expression (as in some of Solon’s more generalised verse) is humdrum. Other sages included Bias of Priene, Chilon of Sparta, Cleobulus of Lindos (on Rhodes), Pittacus of Mytilene and Perian der of Corinth or Epimenides of Phaestus or Myson of Chen. The geographical spread is broad. Sages were not concentrated in one place.

  In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates argues that “the Spartan gift for laconic and pointed comment showed that their intellectual ability was well trained, and that certain people in the past had realised ‘that to frame such utterances is a mark of the highest culture.’”17 They were echoed, for example in Plato’s tag, “Prosperity leads to satisfaction, satisfaction to insolence,” which may derive from Solon’s “Satisfaction begets hubris, whenever great wealth follows men whose minds are not sound.”18

  Conflict between the old landed families, the aristocracy also known as the Eupatridae, and the various groups of common people developed, sometimes into bloody encounters. Certainly the situation in nearby cities, Megara for example, was worrying for anyone with a stake in the “old order” of Athens.
Solon himself was a scion of the old order, and when in 594–93 he was appointed archon,19 it was a delicate time. He was also named diallaktes, the mediator or reconciler, to negotiate between the powerless and powerful parties. Either at that time or twenty years later (scholars are divided) he introduced his famous constitution, intended to balance conflicting interests and to promote a harmony which was at once just and stable.

  Before Solon reformed the laws, Draco was the legendary Athenian legislator. In 621–20 BC, he was given authority not so much to make up new laws as to set out the existing laws in terms which answered the needs of the city. His objective was to move beyond a tit-for-tat, vendetta-based tradition of common law and to replace it with authority at a remove, a public justice, an “objective” standard. To give such justice legitimacy and impact, the punishments he proposed needed to be—Draconian. Solon’s task was more subtle and urgent. He had to unstitch laws which served the ruling interests and frame a new system in which equity rather than retribution was the governing dynamic. From Draco’s system he preserved only the homicide laws.

  His laws were known as “axles” (axones: “pivot boards”), the turning wooden blocks on which they were inscribed. They were also called kyrbeis after the bronze tablets where they were written down. A fifth-century visitor to Athens could have conned them right up to 461 BC on the Acropolis. At that time they were moved to the Agora, and “sections were later published on stone.” Many of the laws postdate Solon, but his name remains in place to legitimise them.20 In Aristotle’s (or his philosophical atelier’s) Constitution of Athens Solon declared that his laws should stand for a hundred years. Then he went abroad, ostracising himself like the Duke in Measure for Measure, vowing not to return for a decade. He saw himself, after a few years in power, as the cornered quarry of a hunt: “I turned and was held at bay, like a wolf among a pack of hounds.”21