The First Poets Read online

  Herodotus says he left Athens for another reason: “He was on his travels, having left Athens to be absent ten years, under the pretence of wishing to see the world, but really to avoid being forced to repeal any of the laws which, at the request of the Athenians, he had made for them. Without his sanction the Athenians could not repeal them, as they had bound themselves under a heavy curse to be governed for ten years by the laws which should be imposed on them by Solon.” He did come back, unlike the Spartan Lycurgus who, having made the laws, compelled Sparta to agree not to change any of them until his return. They are still waiting.

  Solon expressed greatest satisfaction with what he called seisachtheia, the “shaking off of the burdens.” This entailed exonerating numerous citizens of debt, a cause of deep unrest given the excessive power of the landed and lending interests. Solon’s legislation liberated land that was mortgaged and entailed and freed people sold as slaves or exiled because of debt so that they could return. He was also responsible for easing the dues of the hekte-moroi, or “sixth-parters,” citizens who had been reduced to a state of virtual servitude because they had, for one reason or another, to give a sixth of whatever they produced to a lord. Solon saw to it that enslavement for debt, when the borrower used himself as collateral, ceased. A free citizen could not be held as collateral and could not offer himself either. In verse he describes his achievement, how he

  lifted out

  The mortgage stones that everywhere were planted

  And freed the fields that were enslaved before.22

  Solon introduced other reforms. He made immigration easier for people with craft skills. They were even made citizens. Exports of agricultural produce were restricted, apart from olive oil. Athenian farmers concentrated on olive production and this helped to develop a single-product export economy.

  The social structures he proposed, under the eye of the Areopagus, the governing council, enfranchised every class of citizen, from the wealthy pentakosioimedimnoi, or 500-bushel men, the larger farmers, through the hippeis, or knights, to the zeugitai (yoke-men) and the thetes, peasants worth less than 200 measures a year. Each group had defined flexibility. Now it was a man’s material substance rather than his birthright that determined his place in the order of things. He also reorganised the boule (senate) of 400 members and each adult Athenian was given a seat in the ecclesia (popular assembly). The Heliaea (popular tribunal) was established as a final court of appeal, and it was possible for even the poorest man to bring a legal action. Solon’s reforms strengthened the peasants’ position, weakened that of the aristocrats, put muscle in the courts and the judiciary, and laid a foundation for the institutions of classical Athens. It was a responsive and subtle series of checks and balances. Solon did not throw his power behind any one group. Aristotle in his Constitution of Athens quotes a wonderfully calm and even-handed passage of Solon’s verse:

  I’ve given common folk sufficient rights

  Without surrendering or taking back;

  The rich who were resented, and the mighty,

  I saw to it that they were undiminished.

  I took my stand, my shield defends both sides

  And neither can come at and hurt the other.23

  It would have made a worthy epitaph: he advanced the art of the possible, pushing forward no more than would be accepted or could be enforced. He sees himself as a man between contesting parties, insisting on compromise. Dialogue is at the heart of his most inventive poems. He imagines voices speaking against him, criticising him; or he works himself into the voices of contesting parties, speaking for them and then speaking for their opponents, translating conflict into argument. He begins by overhearing a critic: “Solon isn’t a sage or counsellor.” He listens to his critic and then frames a response. He reports speech and enters into semi-dramatised debate.24

  “In great matters it’s not easy to please everyone,” Plutarch quotes him as saying.25 Was he offered absolute power and did he refuse it? One account suggests as much. He shrank from tyranny because a tyrant, to achieve power, must compromise with one interest at the expense of others. Tyranny can work, he admits, but there is no easy political way back from it. As an institution it depends on individuals: a good political institution should depend upon the proper enforcement of equitable laws.

  He left Athens and his travels took him, legend says, to several destinations, though the stories may tell, to use Lefkowitz’s term, representative rather than factual truths, illuminating his exemplary character rather than his biography. Let us believe, with Herodotus and Plutarch, that there is something to the stories.

  He went to Egypt and stayed “at the Nile’s great mouth, near Canopus’ shore.”26 From Egypt, either on this or on an earlier visit, he imported, says Herodotus, a momentous notion: income tax. “It is said that the reign of Amasis was the most prosperous time that Egypt ever saw, the river was more liberal to the land, and the land brought forth more abundantly for the service of man than had ever been known before; while the number of inhabited cities was not less than twenty thousand. It was this King Amasis who established the law that every Egyptian should appear once a year before the governor of his canton, and show his means of living; or, failing to do so, and to prove that he got an honest livelihood, should be put to death. Solon the Athenian borrowed this law from the Egyptians, and imposed it on his countrymen, who have observed it ever since. It is indeed an excellent custom.”27 Such self-assessment, issuing in a payment (the duty of “liturgies” which the rich citizen “volunteered”) or in death, sounds positively modern.

  During his stay “at the Nile’s great mouth” he philosophised with Psenophis of Heliopolis and Sonchis of Saïs, learnèd Egyptian priests. He began to gather information about the lost city of Atlantis and started to write a poem about it but gave up on the task, being too old and sceptical to proceed with the necessary intensity. Plato says he gave up because he was too busy, but Plutarch disagrees. Modern critics sniff a forgery: Plato invented the Atlantis story for his own political argument and assigned it to Solon to give it “factual” probity. Benjamin Jowett, introducing his translation of Plato’s Critias, is categorical: “we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato.” He continues, “To the Greek such a tale, like that of the earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East narrated by Herodotus and others.” But why did later ages believe the myth to such an extent that they set out to discover the lost island “in every part of the globe, America, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Palestine, Sardinia, Sweden”?

  Plato’s eponymous speaker, Critias, recounts the provenance of Solon’s story: “His manuscript was left with my grandfather Dropides, and is now in my possession.” It tells how, “in the division of the earth Poseidon obtained as his portion the island of Atlantis, and there he begat children whose mother was a mortal. Towards the sea and in the centre of the island there was a very fair and fertile plain, and near the centre, about fifty stadia from the plain, there was a low mountain in which dwelt a man named Evenor and his wife Leucippe, and their daughter Cleito, of whom Poseidon became enamoured. He to secure his love enclosed the mountain with rings or zones varying in size, two of land and three of sea, which his divine power readily enabled him to excavate and fashion, and, as there was no shipping in those days, no man could get into the place. To the interior island he conveyed under the earth springs of water hot and cold, and supplied the land with all things needed for the life of man. Here he begat a family consisting of five pairs of twin male children. The eldest was Atlas, and him he made king of the centre island, while to his twin brother, Eumelus, or Gadeirus, he assigned …” And so the intriguing story proceeds until the manuscript ends abruptly just as Zeus is about to speak. Critias says the manuscript “was carefully studied by me when I was a child.” It is fantastic and magical and belongs to the realm of childhood and of make-believe more than to t
hat of political fable.

  Herodotus reports that, in his travels, Solon stayed with Croesus, the last king of Lydia, who wanted his guest to deem him the happiest man in the world. Solon conceded that he was fortunate, but not happy, a state which can only be finally affirmed at the conclusion, and in the conclusion, of a life. When the Athenian moved on, Croesus was not sorry to see him go. This story is almost certainly legendary because Solon’s and Croesus’ dates do not coincide, but Herodotus takes the opportunity to display a sage’s wisdom in action. On his way back from Egypt he may have stopped off in Cyprus and stayed with Philocyprus, a tyrant whose rule he much admired. Diogenes says he died in Cyprus, aged 80, “leaving instructions to his kinfolk that his bones should be carried to Salamis and there burnt to ashes and scattered over the soil.”28

  Most agree, however, that he returned to Athens and found it in a troubled state. A good set of constitutional balances was not proof against democratic weakness: in 561 the assembly voted Pisistratus a body-guard and he was about to begin his distinguished career as tyrant. Solon rushed in, as in the Salamis intervention, but this time to the agora, not the assembly, and in full armour, not a comic hat, to urge the case against. His intervention was unsuccessful; the man whose boyhood had unsettled his heart was now in a position to destroy all that Solon had created.

  There was no rancour between them, however. Solon lived to see his constitution overthrown, but then restored with some changes. He stayed on in Athens, a lonely, monitory elder who inevitably became an advisor to Pisistratus and even approved some of his actions. Solon died old. Lucian says that he, like the sages Thales and Pittacus, lived a century.29 Eighty was a more widely accepted age. Perhaps his ashes were scattered, as Aristotle says, agreeing with Diogenes, on Salamis. Perhaps they were not.

  When Solon got back to Athens, something else troubled him. Diodorus Siculus quotes a passage in which Solon likens Athenians to wily foxes trusting in shifty speeches rather than examining closely men’s deeds.30 Thespis, hardly a political figure but preying upon the fashion for public speaking, was just starting his activities. Thespis celebrated make-believe. “Yes, but if we allow ourselves to praise and honour make-believe like this, the next thing will be to find it creeping into our serious business,” Solon declares, striking the ground with his stick. For him poetry is not make-believe. It is instrumental, didactic, monitory; it is a language of distilled moral truth. “Obey the archon, right or wrong.”31 Solon’s attitude to Thespis and the birth of thespianism may have contributed to Plato’s declared hostility to poets.

  There is a change in the purpose of iambic poetry and its public performance. He uses it to defend his political programme, a use that Archilochus and Hipponax would have found odd. Solon does not satirise and scapegoat but justifies himself, in a language the people could understand and easily remember. His verse is preserved in fragments within the texts of writers like Aristotle and Plutarch.32 His developments of iambic trimeter and trochaic tetrameter may have contributed to the emergence of Attic tragedy, bringing into a popular form a higher style and more elevated content.

  Solon, it is easy to forget, wrote poetry of private pleasures as well as public responsibilities. Some of his poems would have been appropriate to a symposium, though we visualise him more readily as a public orator. At the beginning of the sixth century, his alone was the merit of Athenian poetry. Bowra declares, “Solon had written his political and patriotic elegiacs, less skilful indeed than those of his friend Mimnermus but noble and undeniably moving. But after him there is hardly a trace of poetry until the patronage of the Pisistratids gradually helped into existence the majestic forms which were to dominate the succeeding century.”33

  A humourless pithiness marks much of his writing, and because quite substantial chunks of it survive (time preserving unjustly the political at the expense of the lyrical—historians are to blame) we wonder whether the firebrand of Salamis did not become a little like Polonius in Hamlet, with Pisistratus as his dear Laertes. There is wisdom in Polonius, if we do not laugh at his resignation. Solon points out how wealth passes from hand to hand; but nobility is non-transferable and non-negotiable. He reminds us that “No man is happy, not one under the sun.”34 He writes a poem about the ages of man, working not by decades but by seven-year periods, and he dwells vividly upon the growth of teeth. At his most succinct and elegiac, he speaks with great candour and authority.

  My heart pains me as I watch

  Ionia’s oldest country

  Going down.35

  Perhaps “poets tell many lies,”36 but they can also learn to tell the truth.

  XV

  Stesichorus of Himera

  I am exhorted to sing the palinodia, to confess errors in regard to a paragraph of the apostle’s writing, and to mimic Stesichorus, who, vacillating between discredit and praise of Helen, recovered the eyesight he had forfeited by speaking against her, by praising her.

  ST. JEROME, writing to St. Augustine, AD 402

  At Tivoli, outside Rome, a headless herm bears the inscription “Stesichorus, Euclides’ son, Himeran.” When Himera in Sicily was itself destroyed by the Carthaginians in 409 BC, the resilient Thermitani (as the people were called) regrouped and, a year later, founded a new settlement nearby, Thermae Himeraeae.1 There they set up some of the works of art from their razed city, including, Cicero tells us, a much-prized statue of Stesichorus, “a bent old man holding a book, a masterpiece of art, so they believe.”2 This was one of the sculptures which Verres, the evil public administrator of Sicily attacked by the young Cicero, was keen to possess.3

  Stesichorus was among the most prolific of ancient poets. The Suda says that, at Alexandria, twenty-six books of his works were preserved, compared with nine of Sappho, ten of Alcaeus, seven of Ibycus, five of Anacreon. With seventeen, Pindar was runner-up.

  He did become the “bent old man” of the statue. Like Anacreon, he lived to be eighty-five.4 Pythagoreans—Antipater of Thessalonica, for example, early in the first century AD—were convinced that something larger than Stesichorus lived inside him. Because in scale and theme his work was Homeric, it followed that the soul of Homer must have passed into him.

  Stesichorus, abundant unbounded mouth of the Muse,

  In Catana, under Aetna’s soot, was laid to rest.

  Pythagoras said that souls pass from man to man:

  Homer’s found its next home in Stesichorus’ breast.5

  If he died in the year, even on the day, of Simonides birth,6 then his body would have released the soul of Homer for yet another poetic outing. Simonides inherited, as well as Stesichorus’ venerable soul, his proclivity for survival, dying at the age of ninety.

  From the moment he appeared in the world, Stesichorus was special. In his Natural History Pliny tells us that new-born Stesichorus was visited by a nightingale that perched on his lips and sang its richest song.7 Christodorus, the fifth-century epic poet, describing statues at the Baths of Zeuxippus in Constantinople, evokes the scene and insists that Apollo “taught the tuning of the lyre” while the poet was still in his mother’s womb.8

  Of course, neither Pliny nor Christodorus tells us who the mother of this prodigy was. As usual, there are several candidates for paternity, but we have only one implausible nominee for mother. Tzetzes quotes Aristotle as saying that Stesichorus was the son of Hesiod by Ctimene, whom the Boeotian poet was believed to have raped. Hesiod was murdered by Ctimene’s brothers because they thought he had had his will of her.9 Stesichorus was portrayed, then, as a child of an ill-starred but poetically charged relationship.10 Proclus gives her name as Climene.11 The chronology does not work, however promising the gene-pool, but already Stesichorus is associated metaphysically with Homer, physically with Hesiod. That gives a measure of his ancient importance. Can we get any closer to the actual facts of the matter?

  The Suda provides us with multiple choices for father. He was Euphorbus, Euphemus, Euclides, Euetes or Hesiod. He was born in Himera—the river
and the city are mentioned in his poems. Or in Matauria (Metauron) on the north of the toe of Italy, or perhaps Locri (under the toe). Or he was born in Arcadia, at Pallantium, and was deported to Catana, where he was eventually buried in front of the eponymous Stesichorean gate. His brother was Mamertinus (or Mamercus),12 a notable geometer; and he had another brother called Helianax, a law-giver. If these were indeed his siblings, he came of a distinguished family.

  So far we have little to build on confidently, and even with this little we must go cautiously because there may actually have been three Stesichoruses at three different dates. A modern Mr. Smith may not shoe horses, but a Stesichorus probably had something to do with a chorus: the name describes a vocation rather too specific to become a common monicker. “Stesichorus” means “director of the chorus” or “stabiliser of the chorus,” what Ezra Pound would have called a choral “unwobbling pivot.” Our poet’s original name was Tisias or Teisias, the Suda says: he was Stesichorus “because he first set up choruses of singing to the lyre.”13

  There are other things we know for uncertain about his life. Athenaeus claims that he composed boy-songs, though none survives. Stesichorus “was immoderately amorous,”14 and in this as in his verse is a forerunner of Ibycus. At one point his poetry appears autobiographical. Plato quotes it in the Phaedrus. Stesichorus was struck blind by Helen because he slandered her in his poem Helen, and she restored his sight when he un-slandered her in a Palinode. Translated literally, Palinode means “back-song,” recantation (recant has the element of song in its etymology too). Poetry, again, made something happen. We may take the story literally, or accept the suggestion that Stesichorus wrote his Palinode to please a Spartan audience, because Helen was virtually divine in that city, and if he arrived with only the abusive poem Helen to his credit, he would not endear himself to the locals. So with a slightly archaic air, he removes the real Helen from the awful fray of Troy, replacing her with a phantom: