The First Poets Read online

  through whose breast doth run

  A rocky cave, near which the King the Sun

  Cast to contrive a temple to his mind,

  And said, “Now here stands my conceit inclined

  To build a famous fane, where still shall be

  An oracle to men, that still to me

  Shall offer absolute hecatombs …”

  To all those who come with worship and with offerings “will I / True secrets tell, by way of prophecy.” Locating the scene, Chapman invents an elegant schoolboy-translation phrase: “under the with-snow-still-crowned / Parnassus.” One of the original temples at Delphi was made of wax and feathers; one temple had women in it who lulled men until they wasted away, as with a drug, by the sweetness of their singing, until Zeus sent a thunderbolt and it was swallowed by the earth. Pindar alludes to them in Paean VIII, lines 70–79. They were earthbound sisters of the Sirens, a source or analogue for them, perhaps their inspiration.

  Here Castalia was the Muses’ spring, and a poet novice did well to drink of it. When the Christian era began and Pan was pronounced dead, the power of Delphi and of pagan truth declined. At last the oracle sent word to the emperor Julian, the benign pagan, the so-called Apostate, to say that the spell of centuries was broken:

  Go tell the king—the carven hall is felled,

  Apollo has no cell, prophetic bay

  Nor talking spring; his cadenced well is still.64

  And as Cleopatra says in a no less tragic context, “there is nothing left remarkable / Beneath the vis’ting moon.”

  The other two festivals were important, but not quite so central to the unifying life of Greece. The Isthmian Games (a crown of dry parsley or pine branches) were established in 581 BC to celebrate the Festival of Poseidon at Corinth. Last, in 573 BC, come the Nemean Games (a green parsley or wild celery crown), another festival dedicated to Zeus. In Nemea, where now stands the little ancient mountain township of Phlious, Heracles slew the Nemean lion. The games were established, legend says, by members of the second expedition of the Argives against Thebes.

  The poetic association of sporting competition with great battles and with actual, historical or legendary engagements is a Pindaric commonplace. As in modern journalism, a similar diction is used for reporting sporting and military encounters. Competition is always and undeniably a form of controlled aggression. The fruit of competition is not only victors but losers. Some of the epinicean odes chide and scorn the losers as part of the celebration of the victor.65 In Pythian VIII Pindar talks of the different homecomings of four of the defeated athletes.

  At all the games, with few variations over time, a dozen sports and arts featured. Most coveted of all was the wreath for the chariot race (tethrippon). The chariots, drawn by four horses, had to complete twelve laps around the hippodrome. The apene, or mule car race (abandoned later as undignified), and the single (bareback) horse race were the other events that included quadrupeds. Pindar immortalised one horse, Pherenikos, Hieron’s fleet steed, twice over; Bacchylides, too, celebrated him.

  Individual and team sports were sometimes divided into three categories, one for the men, one for the boys, and one for the ripe adolescents. Thus in the footrace (stadion), wrestling, and boxing, there were epithalamia for victors at various stages in their lives. There was also the double footrace (diaulos) and the long footrace (dolichos), and most unpleasant of all, the race in full armour (hoplites dromos). Among the “single sports” was aulos-playing, inviting the presence of a coiffed and perfumed Muse into the sweaty arena.

  Two of the combined events required extraordinary stamina. The “five events,” or pentathlon, required excellence in the stadion, the long jump, javelin, discus and wrestling. Most brutal and, for the bloodthirsty, most entertaining was the trial of strength, the pancration. A victor here deserved at least an ode, and a loser earned a year in traction, or a bier.

  Pindar is less inscrutable than critics suggest, at least for readers accustomed to the poetry and prose of the Modernists. Our ancestors had problems with the forms. They strike us as relatively straightforward, a series of allusions and expressive juxtapositions with an associative if not a logical progression between them. The problem for us is historical and educational: we do not any longer carry with us the points of classical reference that our ancestors, puzzled by Pindar’s forms, possessed by second nature. They had no trouble recognising Proteus or Polydeuces or Teucer. What they struggled with was the way the poet moved from image cluster to image cluster, or drew pithy morals from apparently quite inappropriate classical narratives. For the modern reader, Pindar is less difficult than obscure, and we project on to the poem our distrust of a seeming obscurity (our problem rather than the poem’s). Our insecurity is much diminished when we recognise without footnotes one, or two, or three allusions and can infer how and why they are connected, and infer too what the other unfamiliar allusions are doing, just as from a clear context we can deduce the meaning of a strange word. If we bear in mind that Pindar wrote not only the epinicean odes but other poems for occasions, that those occasions were public triumphs with strong political and cultural overtones, we will make, if not sense, a sense of sense of them.

  He surprises us by the way he handles and combines elements, seldom twice in the same manner. The speed of his movement from particular to general and back again must have recommended him to Auden. His narrative is never straightforward or Homeric, though many of the stories he refers to share character and incident with the Iliad, the Odyssey and what we imagine was included in the vanished epics about the Argonauts and the Seven Against Thebes. It is useful that Homer’s heroes have defined geographies and antecedents: a later Greek poet, seeking to glorify a present-day champion, can find geographical bearings; if the athlete is from a colony, there are ways to relate him to the founding city heroes.

  Pindar assumes that his audience knows the main narrative and so he plays by brief allusion or variation, selects a narrow band from within the larger story, attempts to essentialise. There are moments of real drama, but they work only if we know the surrounding story. The poem modulates thought, feeling, a series of experiences; the ode reads us and plays us like an instrument, as Auden says a poem should do. If we are missing strings, the music fails. The enchantment depends upon us as readers; the magic works only if we can hear the spell.

  One of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, surviving epinicean ode of Pindar is Pythian X, commissioned from the twenty-year-old poet by Thorax, a senior member of the Aleuad clan. He wanted to commemorate Hippocleas of Thessaly’s victory in the boys’ double foot-race in 498 BC. Hippocleas was from Pelinna, Thorax from nearby Larissa. These become important geographical points of reference: each has a place in Thessalian history. Though simpler than many of the subsequent odes, Pythian X illustrates Pindar’s techniques and skills. His manner is defined, and in the poem he characterises it in a few deft images that illustrate the glancing transitions. Here the Pindaric bee moves from bloom to bloom, going briskly about its business.

  An ode generally has several narrative elements with one particular strand dominant over the others, drawing the others in. Here the story of Perseus’ visit to the Hyperboreans takes precedence. The Hyperboreans—“people from beyond Boreas, the north wind”—achieve more than the highest human achievement. Why this story? The Pythian Games were dedicated to Apollo. The Hyperboreans were his favourites: he spent three months of the year among them. Their easy prowess underlines human limitation, a caution against excessive pride.

  The poem is seventy-two lines long and consists of four triads. A triad is a sequence of three stanzas: a strophe, an antistrophe and an epode. The strophe (turn) and antistrophe (counter-turn) are in the same stanza form (often enjambemented not only line by line but between stanzas). Their very names indicate their source in music and in dance movement. After the antistrophe has prosodically replicated the strophe, the epode (after-song, what Ben Jonson calls the “stand”) brings the triadic mov
ement to a conclusion. The epode, generally a shorter stanza, often delivers moral counsel in a highly condensed manner and is usually end-stopped. The triads, carefully designed within themselves, are juxtaposed within the larger architecture of the poem. When the poem was performed, we can imagine that the accompaniment and the choreography was repeated triad by triad, the variations between them being of pace, volume, tone. The form itself would create expectations upon which variations were played, variations which did not violate form but altered emphases within it.

  An audience would respond to a series of stimuli (visual, aural, intellectual): it would follow a narrative or elements of narrative, it would await the repetitions and conclusions of the antistrophe and the rounding off of the epode, and then it would begin to hear epode against epode, a sense of aural and visual repetition, reinforcement, but as the performance proceeded what took precedence (choreographic and musical patterns established and accepted) was the specific language of the triads. An opening triad might, therefore, be expected to be subordinate to the music and movement of the reciting chorus; as the poem progresses, however, the words foreground themselves. When Lattimore declares that many of the odes open with ceremonial elaboration and then move peremptorily or end abruptly, he touches on the basic dynamic of the ode, which begins in a subordination of language and ends in its release.66 This feature is not, as Lattimore and other critics are tempted to suggest, a loss of poetic control, a failure of integration: on the contrary.

  If we briefly paraphrase Pythian X, we can show how the poem elides from theme to theme, key to key. It begins with a celebration of those well-governed areas of Greece, Sparta and Thessaly whose leaders are descended from Heracles. (The poem concludes, too, with an image of good government.) Having raised the figure of Heracles, Pindar leaves him there, a heroic conjuration hovering above the poem, and corrects himself, coming into the present: he is supposed to be celebrating Pytho, where the games are being celebrated, and Pelinna, Hippocleas’ home town, and the Aleuad clan, because (the antistrophe begins now and the poet evokes the victor) the vale of Parnassus—a place, but also an oblique way of saying, the poem itself—proclaims him victor over all the other boys in the race. Apollo is invoked: the games are his, and so too is the poem. A man achieved what the gods willed, having inherited the skill to perform from his father. We turn then to the epode, in which Hippocleas’ father is remembered for his achievements in the race in armour in the same games.67 The epode ends by conjuring Apollo’s blessing on the whole clan.

  What has happened in these eighteen compact lines? First a hero is evoked, then a young athlete, then the god, then the athlete’s antecedents. A moral is drawn, a prayer is made.

  In the opening of the second triad, the prayer is teased out and moralised: having achieved so much, the poem implores, let the victor and his clan go on to greater and better things and suffer no setbacks from the gods. May the victor’s success not pain the gods (so many human victors, in legend, call down divine retribution because they overreach the human mark). It is a blessing to be a victor oneself (the antistrophe begins, the turn, marking a movement forward in time) and then to live long enough to witness your son as victor, too. Yet there is a point beyond which a victor cannot go, a limit to human body and spirit. The Hyperboreans are beyond that limit, and the poet takes us (in the epode) thither with Perseus: having shown how high a victor can scale, he shows the much higher heights beyond human victory (a counsel against hubris).

  Perseus dined among the Hyperboreans, and the epode evokes his surprise, upon arrival, at the huge sacrifices they are making, hecatombs of jackasses to Apollo. The god takes the greatest pleasure in their praises and their sacrifices (no wonder he spends three months a year among them).68

  The third triad begins with a sharp contrast of imagery and the poem becomes more complex. There is poetry among the Hyperboreans, says Pindar, maiden choruses, lyres and wind instruments, golden laurel crowns (victors at the Pythian Games were crowned with laurel), feasting. The human body is not subject here to disease or old age, to labour or to war (antistrophe), but they have escaped vindictive justice. We are back then with Perseus (he is not named but is characterised as the son of Danaë and the Gorgon’s slayer). He was subject to vindictive justice. With the Gorgon’s snake-haired severed head Perseus turned his enemies to stone, making justice and freeing his captive mother from her foes. He is led by Athena herself, Apollo’s sister.

  All this may seem far-fetched, but the poet is not surprised, because (the epode begins), whatever the gods will is done, and nothing is beyond belief. Suddenly we encounter the poetic compression which some readers balk at. The speaker of the poem has identified himself as one able to believe in the power of the gods. He now shows obliquely how this kind of poem can work:

  Stay the oar; quick, strike anchor in seabed

  from prow, guard against jagged reef,

  for the glint of praise songs

  flits beelike from story on to story.

  First a halt to stabilise us on an image: it brings the ship to a stop at the brink of danger; then the song speeds on to the next narrative.

  The final triad begins. The poet imagines Hippocleas’ people singing his ode beside the river and increasing by its means the victor’s glory among his people, exciting too the girls. The image of the lovely girls (picking up, perhaps, an echo of the Hyperborean maidens in the previous triad) suggests desire, the various desires that affect men. In the antistrophe he reflects how whoever achieves what he most strives for will find other things falling into place. Still, we cannot foresee the future. The poem begins to come down from its grand afflatus into the present tense. The poet is content to put faith in his patron’s hospitality. It is his patron who, keen to favour the poet, has harnessed four steeds to the Muses’ chariot of this poem (that is, paid him a handsome fee), behaving as a friend and as a leader.

  The concluding epode moralises: when tested, gold shines, and so does a good man’s virtue. Not only Thorax but his brothers, Thessalian leaders, too, are worthy of celebration. On such men, and on such clans, depends the stability of cities and their continuity. We are back, as it were, with the elliptical opening lines about good government.

  A paraphrase does little justice to the proportions of the poem; by marking where strophe, antistrophe and epode begin it can give a sense of the shape, but not the ways in which the audience will set parallel the elements that “rhyme,” as it were, but are not connected by narrative or syntax. The echo of a cadence, of a word or epithet, makes aural connections within language which have an effect on the meanings that cannot be approached by paraphrase. A musical paraphrase is required; and if we could reconstruct the choreography, that too would be a key to meaning.

  What is the unity of the epinicean ode? “The decisive answer,” says Lesky, “has been given by Hermann Fränkel: the epinicean elevates the significant event of victory into the realm of values, the world from which the poet’s creation flows. This world of values is displayed and exemplified in its various spheres: in the divine itself, in the tales of the heroes, in the rules of conduct and not least in the poet’s own creative activity as an artistic realm in its own right.”69 That feels too much like literary criticism, which so often seeks closure. Pindar is, however, assured of certain certainties, and if we understand them (we are unlikely to share them), we can understand the poems better line by line and perhaps even triad by triad.

  Each man has an inborn character, a phuá, a nature that nurture cannot alter. This ties in with Pindar’s sense of innate nobility and is part of his aristocratic frame of mind (“best by nature is best”); the common man too has an unregenerable phuá, we can surmise. Men are lowly (he is impatient of “the violent crowd”) but strength of will and purity of spirit can raise the exceptional man to moments of parity with the gods, as in Nemean VI. In Pythian VIII he says that man is the dream of a shadow, but it can come briefly awake in deeds and achievements: the light of the gods can shin
e down and illuminate and realise (in the sense of make real) the dream. His respect for the gods means that he invariably takes their part and asserts their right. He takes Hesiod and Homer to task for their impieties. When he comes to tell the story of Pelops in Olympian I, he alters it to exonerate the gods from cannibalism.

  For Pindar the connection between the world of athletic achievement and that of legend, between the world of legend and the divine, seems real: they are analogous, the highest is made visible in the world in achievements. The instrument which negotiates between these realms—literal, historical and legendary, divine—is poetry. Poetry does not merely witness what happens but connects those events to the larger structure of reality, lifting them above contingencies and setting them, in a kind of equivalence, in the timeless space occupied by legend and myth. Poetry is memory but more than that. And the poet functions thanks to an Olympian grace bestowed upon him. The poet is a kind of priest whose skills and whose vision of wholeness privilege him, so that he in turn can privilege and bring into the higher realm what his language touches.

  As in Simonides, there is in Pindar a curious elision towards monotheism, a speaking of the gods in the singular, as a coherent and coherence-imparting force. Theia in Isthmian V, for example, contains a number of forces.

  When Pound calls Pindar a prize windbag, one reason is that he is impatient with the Greek poet’s elusiveness, just as many modern readers are when they approach Pound’s own Cantos. Another reason may be the subtle and nuanced regularities of Pindar’s prosody. “It is impossible to reproduce Pindar’s metres in English,” says Bowra, “and even in Greek, where the quantitative system allows so much more variety and assurance than our own accentual system, it takes a little time to catch their lilt and movement, but once it is caught it has no rival in variety, speed, and lightness.”70 For Pound such schematic regularity and such deliberate architecture into which matter is compelled to fit, to which the voice is forced to conform, were contrary to the nature of poetry itself, where words and the world reached a natural accommodation (as in Archilochus or Sappho or Alcman), where language sought equivalences in the material world, at the same time clarifying and sharpening vision like a lens. In Pindar, language has become less a means than an end in itself: a tissue of references and cross-references, where the words point towards stories and earlier texts, and where the poem’s occasion is led away from the very contingencies that shape and make it real. Once the victor is named and the poet paid to celebrate him, the poem, having bowed in the direction of its subject and its patron, takes its own course away from its moment, towards timelessness or abstraction. The architecture of the poems enforces a stability on the language which amounts to a kind of stasis, a series of balances and counter-balances which are subtle and sometimes precarious but seldom glow with a real sunlight. The bee that flits through Pythian X gathers no pollen.