The First Poets Read online

  Possibly the culture of Teos in Asia Minor, where Anacreon was born, was already less vigorous and emphatic than the culture of Lesbos had been. Bowra sees the Teian world as louche, laid back and vulnerable. There the mixed Lydian mode of poetry, indebted to the music of Polymnestus of Colophon, prefigured the kinds of poetry Plato despised, “intended more for relaxation than for public affairs and state occasions” and in love with luxury.56 It was a poetry the church fathers loathed. Clement of Alexandria, adducing Anacreon, counsels teachers to stop boys “going along with hips swaying,” a form of meretricious deportment.57 Gregory of Corinth despises the effeminacy of the poems: the ear “is basely flattered” by erotic phrases in Anacreon and Sappho.58 Nor was it all plain sailing in pre-Christian times. The Stoic Diogenes said that Anacreon was a corrupter of youth because of the way he touched upon his subjects, and Cicero declares, not without a trace of disgust, “All of Anacreon’s poetry is erotic.”59

  Anacreon was born around 570 BC and, according to legend, lived for eighty-five years. The Suda says his father was Scythinus. Then, true to form, it blurs the record. Maybe his father was Eumelus, or Parthenius. Aristocritus too has a claim. And his mother? The Suda has no opinion on that subject.

  Teos, now Sighalik, in Turkey, on the northern coast of the Gulf of Caystrus, Ionia, was dedicated to Dionysus and was famous for its wines, fish and cakes. Anacreon began composing his verse there in the Ionic form of Greek and remained, in his peripatetic career, remarkably faithful to the inflections of his childhood.

  The populations of two brave cities in Asia Minor, Teos and Phocaea, migrated en masse to escape the threat of Persian occupation. Persia sacked Sardis around 541 and when the Teians departed were already in control of the outer walls of the city. Anacreon was by then a grown man. The exiles went to Abdera, on the Thracian border. Tradition says Heracles founded the town on the spot where Abderos was killed by the horses of Diomede. The town had been colonised over a century before, unsuccessfully, by Clazomenai. This time, around 545 BC, the settlement took. Abdera was a port city north-east of Thasos which became a key member of the Delian League, famous for its beautiful coins. Democritus, the fifth-century atomic philosopher; Protagoras, the first Sophist;60 Anaxarchos, Alexander the Great’s counsellor: all these hailed from there. Nonetheless, in ancient times Abderans had a reputation for dullness and it is no surprise that Anacreon left his second home without regret and is unlikely to have returned there to live—or die, though legend has him buried in the vicinity. Certain fictional epitaphs take him back to his first home and bury him in Teos.61

  We can surmise that some of his early Abderan poems survive: their imagery draws from Thrace and he seems to celebrate its habits and people. Abdera and its surroundings were rich but, at least initially, hostile. The Thracians were relatively savage. The epitaph for Agathon, probably by Anacreon, is a wonderful war poem:

  Strong Agathon, dead for Abdera, mourned

  By every citizen at the giant pyre:

  In the wilderness of loathsome battle, blood-thirsty Ares

  Never killed a young man quite your peer.62

  This is not a one-off. There is the much-translated lament for Aristocleides. Richmond Lattimore does this poem one kind of justice.63

  Of all my stalwart friends, Aristokleides,

  I grieve most for you, who died young

  To keep your country free.64

  David Mulroy has “pity” for “grieve,” changing the tone of the poem. He sees it as an apocryphal fragment.

  Of gallant friends, Aristocleides, I pity you the most.

  You gave up your youth to save the fatherland from slavery.65

  Barbara Hughes Fowler is more elaborate and Wilfred Owenish: in Anacreon there is no sense of a life wasted, and the translator’s sentiment does violence to the original.

  O Aristokleides,

  I pity you first

  of my stouthearted friends,

  for you wasted your youth

  warding slavery off

  from your native land.66

  West, in turn, in his heavy couplet, gathers up the nuanced sense in prosaic fistfuls:

  Aristoclides, you’re the first I mourn of my brave friends:

  you lost your young life to defend your land from slavery.

  Out of a very short fragment four different poems, each serving a rather different reading of history, have been generated.

  In Thrace, Anacreon must have encountered the “filly” who eyes him without interest. He reflects that he could be the rider, he could break her in; meanwhile, the filly can frisk and nibble grasses in the meadow.67 Anacreon may have seen the Dionysian, bassaridic excesses,68 which reinforced his sense of necessary moderation. Thrace may, too, have contributed to the streak of misogyny which marks the poems, though they portray a lover of women as well as boys. Some appear to exploit a female voice.69 Some appear to solicit, but the woman solicited may be readily available: “You smile at every stranger: let me drink, I’m thirsty.”70 A prostitute is a “generous giver” a “public highway”71 he will travel on. There is a touch of satire in his representation of gossips, and of revulsion in his description of “leg rolling women,” those who wind their legs together during intercourse.72

  No woman’s name is associated with the tyrant Polycrates of Samos, patron of Ibycus as well as Anacreon. He seems to have been closer in temperament to Anacreon. Ibycus was from Magna Graecia, a world away, while Anacreon, speaking with one voice, a monodist, was from nearby Asia Minor and had suffered displacement at the hands of Polycrates’ foes. Polycrates was ambitious for Samos, which is why he provided hospitality to two poets of the highest reputation. Not all his subjects were content. During his tyranny the mathematician Pythagoras, a man of the older school, left Samos to live in Croton, southern Italy, escaping the tyrant’s creative megalomania.

  Anacreon described Samos as the “city of the Nymphs.”73 He came to tutor the tyrant’s son in music, or to teach the tyrant himself: some say that Polycrates’ father imported him to teach the boy.74 Whatever the circumstances, the two men may have become intimate. The poet was with his patron in 522 BC when a messenger arrived to lure Polycrates to his crucifixion. Herodotus reports, not without a touch of scepticism: “According to another account, less generally accepted, Oroetes sent a messenger to Samos to make some request or other … and on his arrival Polycrates was at table in the hall with Anacreon, the poet of Teos. It so happened that Polycrates sat facing the wall of the room with his back to the man as he came forward to say what he had to say; and—either to show his contempt for Oroetes’ power, or perhaps merely by chance—he not only omitted to give an answer, but did not even bother to turn round while the messenger was speaking.”75 Polycrates was murdered in Magnesia, on the river Meander, a Greek city under Persian control.

  Immediately the poet was sent for by another powerful man, Hipparchus, younger son of the greatest Athenian tyrant, Pisistratus. Hipparchus is said to have sent a fifty-oared galley, or penteconter, to fetch him. The vessel promised both speed and protection in a Samos already unsettled and entering a dark phase. When Hipparchus was murdered, Anacreon may have gone back to Thessaly for a time. He lived on and on, dying at last, the gossips say, from inhaling a grape pip. Valerius Maximus is more circumstantial: he “perished when a single pip obstinately stuck in his withered throat as he sustained his poor remaining strength with raisin-juice.”

  Bowra is of the view that much of the surviving poetry, witty, carefree, erotic, was probably written on Samos. Anacreon, in his view, then fled to Athens, revisited Thessaly, and returned to Athens to die. His friends in Athens included Xanthippus, father of Pericles, and Xanthippus’ statue stood near to his own famous likeness on the Acropolis, a tribute Pericles paid his father and the poet, who lived long enough to enjoy the lyrics of Aeschylus.76 Indeed, he survived to learn the outcome of the Battle of Marathon: it was an enormous life, and, in Michael Grant’s view, he was a “new kind of lyric p
oet, not geographically rooted but a travelling professional” like the epic and choral poets of his and earlier times. But Anacreon also “represented the end of an epoch, being the last important composer and performer of solo song.”

  Around 153 BC, Aristarchus of Samothrace, one of the librarians in Alexandria, described by Athenaeus as “the absolute scholar” who was of key importance in putting Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and others in order, collated and edited the poetry of Anacreon into five (or six) books or rolls.77 The work represented one of the climaxes of melic poetry with its personal and choral lyrics. There is little satire here and virtually no didactic content. The poems are for singing or reciting in private, or in the confines of the court, and it is important to remember their close integration with music. The legendary association of Anacreon and Sappho may be due to the fact that Lesbos was the birthplace of the most famous earlier melic poets. Among the lyric, elegiac and iambic work edited by Aristarchus were hymns, love songs, symposium or court poems, epigrams, dedications, epitaphs. If we set this oeuvre parallel to Ibycus’, we immediately see how much more of Anacreon survives, especially the intimate and erotic. In some instances we seem to have the remains of virtually whole poems.78

  The impact of the Anacreontea has already been noted. Nearer his own time, Anacreon’s poetry of voice affected the next great moment of Greek literature. “His output also influenced both the metrical form and subject-matter of later Athenian tragedy,” says Michael Grant.79 Lattimore, from the vantage point of a great translator, feels on the pulse a similar connection, specifically with Aeschylus: “though there is no reason to think that Anacreon himself wrote tragedy, his metrical influence on Attic tragedy may have been very great indeed, perhaps decisive; but this feeling of mine rests on inference rather than positive statement and remains a feeling.”80

  There are no portrayals of Anacreon as a lad. Seven hundred years after his death, Athenaeus describes him as “handsome”: it is about the youngest word or image associated with him. In AD 170 Pausanias saw the famous statue of the poet on the Acropolis, east of the Parthenon, Pericles’ tribute to his father’s friend.81 Anacreon looked “like a man who might be singing in his cups.” The statue perished but by rare good fortune a good copy of it turned up in the ruins of a Roman villa near Rieti. Paul Zanker gives a vivid account of it.82 The lost version probably “originated in the circle of Phidias,” Athens’ greatest sculptor and a key player in Pericles’ Acropolean construction project. Though the Roman statue is broken, Zanker sees the missing parts: Anacreon holds a barbiton. His nudity is commonplace in portrayals of male Athenian symposiasts. “My dinner: a corner of thin honey cake, but also a bowl of wine to wash it down. I strum my lovely instrument now, making a serenade to my dear one.”83

  The poet’s body is strong and unwrinkled, age has not withered him. Broad of beam, almost stocky, but not Bacchic, he has not been bloated by Silenus, he is vigorous despite the length of his beard. He retains his composure, of course; that is clear from his face, however subtly his posture suggests inebriation. Anacreon’s face is neutral, unemotional, not jolly and gay. He “has tied up the penis and foreskin with a string, a practice known as infibulation.”84 It may have been to express abstinence; but in the portrayal of men, and in particular older men, it was regarded as obscene and offensive to show a long penis and, in particular, the penis’ head. The sense we have, from vases and from statues, that ancient Greek men were either ill-endowed or comically over-endowed like satyrs has much to do with genital aesthetics. In the statue, Anacreon’s penis is artificially restrained.

  This strong old age is the subject of many of Anacreon’s most beguiling poems and fragments. Why does an old man still perfume his chest “that is hollower than the pipes of Pan”? Because he cannot resist love.85

  I’m grey on the sides and white on top;

  Youth that was graceful is gone, my teeth themselves

  Ache old and chatter, life’s span is shortening, and I

  Cry more than sometimes, fearing Tartarus;

  For the dark corners of Hell hold terrors for me

  And the pathway drops precipitate and once

  A man starts going down there’s no way back.86

  Better love, he says, than “Amalthea’s horn” (she was the goat who fed Zeus and whose horns issued, respectively, nectar and honey) or even the extreme but vigorous old age that people who live in Tartessus, on the coast of Spain, enjoy.87

  One epitaph, in the Palatine Anthology, ends with the words “for all your life, old man, was poured out as an offering to these three—the Muses, Dionysus and Eros.”88 Anacreon is the perennial old man. As the centuries passed, he was painted as more and more dissolute, but the poets always loved him, whatever the churchmen might say. In the fourteenth-century Planudean Anthology89 his statue is evoked as an emblem of pagan revelry, seedy and stumbling but still a figure to be cherished. Actual and pseudo-Anacreon coexist in the portrait:

  Observe him, old Anacreon, frayed and worn, wobbly

  With wine, how he bends his shape into the stone.

  He gazes, look at him, with eyes that look

  With love, with lust, and see too how his gown

  Trails right down to his heel. In a haze of wine

  He’s lost one sandal, but the other still conceals

  A shrivelled clutch of toes. The poet sings

  Of charming Bathyllus, full-fleshed Megistus

  And he’s strumming his melancholy lyre. O Dionysus,

  Keep him safe, for it would be wrong indeed

  Were Bacchus’ faithful servant to be felled

  By Bacchus’ wine.

  XVIII

  Hipponax of Ephesus (c. 540 BC)

  The poet Hipponax is buried here. If you’re a cad, keep off; if you’re an honest man of blameless lineage, make yourself at ease, relax and doze here if you wish.

  THEOCRITUS ’ epitaph for Hipponax

  Pliny the Elder, always entertaining and undependable, declares in his Natural History, “The face of Hipponax was notoriously ugly.”1 Even six centuries after his death, Hipponax was a byword for rancour; he was a monster, amusing so long as one was not caught in his line of verbal fire. At a time when poetry was becoming more mannered and polite, when the vigour of Archilochus had declined to the conceits of Semonides, it is refreshing to come upon the thoroughly urban disenchantment of Hipponax, his world of textures and smells, in which the human body at its most gross finds its laureate in the privy, on the street, or in a small dimly lit room with a woman even more lecherous than he is.

  When we speak of Hipponax, are we actually speaking of a persona, a voice from which the poet has created an ironic distance? Or are we, as with Archilochus, persuaded that the voice, for all its deliberately pedestrian metrical artifice, belongs to the man who speaks? In a corner of the National Museum in Athens a grumpy second-century BC stone head which scholars suggest is Hipponax’s keeps a blind eye on passing tourists. There are vestiges of a wreath around his brow—laurel, or poison ivy? Battered, like a pugilist who is being restrained, he snarls, the eyes frowning and pursed. Time has cut off his nose but the face refuses to be spited.2 Near his grave, now vanished, wasps were said to nest: to the unworthy or dishonest passer-by they gave chase and stung. He “snarled even at his parents” and his verses still sting in Hades.3 His grave was overgrown with bramble and thorn, and the puckering, thirst-inducing wild pear.

  As with the Hesiod of Works and Days and Archilochus, so with Hipponax one has a sense, except in the deliberately “poetic” and the parodic poems, that this is it, the sensibility itself. The exaggerations are part of the voice, not an escape from it. The obscene diction, with half a dozen nicknames for the vagina (including “Sindian fissure”4 and, in one fragment,5 four untranslatable words in Lydian dialect) and the penis, and a sexual undertone to many an image and detail: such things are candid rather than artful. Even though he delivers himself of a misogynistic epigram, “In a woman’s life two days sta
nd out as most delectable: when she’s wed, when she is carried out dead,”6 it is clear that he, unlike some of his near contemporaries, enjoyed heterosexual intercourse and acknowledged women as human—in any event, as human as he was and rather more human than his foes.

  Hipponax is among the first poets to defecate in verse, to reflect on the stench of faeces and the hungry, pestilential swarming of the dung-beetles, drawn to a reeking pile and to the orifice from which it dropped. M. L. West renders one of his epithets, about the gourmand who frequently retires to defecate in order to continue stuffing his gut, as “an interprandial pooper.”7 This is witty but tonally high-table, almost polite when set beside the actual, coarse and incontinent dumps that take place in the poems. Archilochus, whatever his antecedents and no matter how malcontent he was, generally strikes a warriorly, even an aristocratic, note. There is nothing aristocratic about Hipponax, except possibly his blood. If he is from a distinguished background, then his poetry systematically breaks rank.

  Scholars generally agree that he did come of an established family in Ephesus.8 It is unlikely that a poor man would have been singled out for exile as he was, unless a very early literary precocity earned him enemies. The Suda names his father and mother as the alliterative couple Pytheas and Protis, and adds that he was banished (in the second half of the sixth century BC) by the tyrants Athenagoras and Comas, clients of the Persian Darius I. It may not have been such a bad thing to leave Ephesus. Compared with Colophon, and even Smyrna, it was an altogether darker, less cheerful city. At least in Ionia the threats were Lydian, sunnier than those that emanated from sombre Persia.