The First Poets Read online

  Pythian VIII is dedicated to Aristomenes of Aegina, victor in the wrestling. The poet is an old man, the victor a boy. The world has changed since the triumphs of 476 BC. Aegina, Athens’ old foe, is in a brief ascendancy, soon to be terminated (though Pindar did not live to see his beloved island despoiled in 431 BC, its population exported en masse and its vacancy repopulated with immigrants). In 446 BC Athens had lost Boeotia at the battle of Coronea, the Spartan army was at her borders, Megara was free. Was this Aegina’s moment to bolt for freedom? Pindar sees Athens, beleaguered, as the gods’ enemy, like the mythical giants. The poem may celebrate a wrestling lad; it also subtly probes at the issue of freedom from the Athenian yoke. Pindar’s poem is sombre as befits his age and his theme: the alternation of failure and success.

  Sombre, with a poised beauty, is the brief Olympian XIV, to Asopichos of Orchomenos, victor in the stadion, maybe in 476 BC. Orchomenos was the burial-place of Hesiod, and the first city where a temple of the Graces was consecrated. According to Hazlitt, “The territory was almost undermined by moles.” Be that as it may, Pindar’s poem celebrates the Graces (Charites). This is the only ode with two strophes. In the second he names the Graces: Aglaia (Splendour), Euphrosyne (Good Cheer) and Thalia (Festivity). What is touching is the conceit whereby he asks Echo to convey news of the lad’s victory to his father, who has passed into the underworld.

  It is natural that fathers and sons, families, dynasties, are celebrated in epinicean poetry. In Nemean VI, to Alkimidas of Aegina, winner in the boys’ wrestling, he remembers how Alkimidas’ family has more crowns for wrestling than any other in Greece and praises not his father but his grandfather; not his great-grandfather but his great-great-grandfather. The skill leapfrogs a generation each time. Olympian XIII, to Xenophon of Corinth, victor in the stadion and pentathlon in 464 BC (did Pindar get twice the fee?) opens with an amazing coinage: Trusolumpionikan, “thrice victorious at Olympia,” because Thessalos, the victor’s father, had won the stadion, and Xenophon had a double victory in the same year. Pindar celebrates Corinth for three inventions: the dithyramb, the bridle and bit, and temple decorations. Appropriately, the central narrative concentrates on the bridle and bit of Bellerophon. He offers javelins of praise, a curious image.

  Xenophon of Corinth was from an influential and prosperous family. On top of his epinicean he also wanted Pindar to write a poem glorifying his ostentatious gift to Aphrodite. “The temple of the goddess in Corinth was associated with ritual prostitution … and for this purpose Xenophon gave fifty female slaves. Pindar can never have had a more singular assignment.”89 Pindar obliged with a skolion (he uses the word within the poem) which the editors slotted in among the encomia in error. The poem directly addresses the prostitutes. “Young women, who welcome many guests, attendants / of Persuasion in rich Corinth.” It was their custom to burn incense. “Under compulsion all is fair …” Then he speaks to Aphrodite herself:

  O Cyprian lady, here into your temple precinct

  Xenophon has herded a hundred girls

  To pasture, in his gratitude

  That you fulfilled his prayers.90

  There are in Pindar other sexual surprises in the detail. A fragment tells of Mendes in Egypt, where billygoats mate with women.91

  Pindar is a poet, not a philosopher nor a consistent moral teacher. Yet there are wonderfully clear aphorisms in his writing that excited pagan and Christian minds. Clement of Alexandria quotes with approval the line ti Theos; to pan: “What is God? Everything.”92 In Pythian III (l. 81) he declares, after Homer, “for each blessing the gods give to men, they give two curses also.” The moral of the poem is not generic but specific to the occasion. Hieron of Syracuse is mortally ill. His horse has won in the Pythian Games, and Pindar is celebrating the victory but also alluding indirectly to his patron’s indisposition. Past victory is mentioned, and the famous horse Pherenicus is evoked. The first seventy-nine lines are philosophical, about being content with what is, and the verses are among Pindar’s most famous and “theological,” valued by Plato and by the Christian fathers as an exhortation to humility, to accepting mortality and the human lot and not aspiring to divinity. His real desire is to charm away Hieron’s illness, but for all its power, poetry cannot make this sort of thing happen. The narrative of the ode is the story of Asklepios, the greatest of all healers. Apollo was his father. His mother, heavily pregnant, had sex with another man. Apollo had Artemis kill her in a plague and rescued his son from her dead body. Cheiron the centaur raised the boy, who became a great physician until he was corrupted by money and resurrected a patient, whereupon he was slain by a thunderbolt. Pindar wishes he could bring Hieron a great physician. Instead he prays to the Mother Goddess. This is what art can do: celebrate, pray, console. It can help shape mind and character, but it cannot affect events, except by being an event.

  Callimachus imitated Pindar’s verse and used his phrases. It is Pindar who legitimises his own manner of writing, and he says as much in the Prologue to the Aetia, which owes a debt to Pindar’s Paean VII.93 He begs to differ from those poets who follow Homer’s “worn wagon-road.” He adds that men “who do not compose poetry have ‘blind hearts.’”94 Callimachus portrays himself as following a narrow road, and as being light-winged.

  Pindar’s lightest and purest heir, the perennially acceptable face of Pindaric strategies, is the Latin poet Horace. He registered the Greek ode-maker on his own pulse. When he wanted to eulogise his emperor in Odes I, xii, he used the second line of Pindar’s Olympian II as his base-note.

  Quem virum aut heroa lyra vel acri

  tibia sumis celebrare, Clio?

  Quem deum?

  In Odes IV, ii, 25–32, he writes directly:

  Borne by strong winds, Pindar the Theban swan soars

  high above, Antonius, through the lofty

  realms of cloud: while I, in another fashion—

  just like a small bee—

  sip each sweet blossom of thyme and rove

  the thick groves, over the slopes of Tibur

  rich with streams—and thus, cell on cell, I labour

  moulding my poems.95

  The Greek bee now speaks Latin. Pindar’s imitator, says Horace at the beginning of the poem, is like Icarus strapping on wings of wax and feather; he will leave his name as a dissolving blot upon the waters of some sea. Pindar is, he says, like a deep-voiced river rising above its banks, flowing over into the landscape, rushing down the mountain; the pell-mell song of gods, of legend and of literal men returning home, victors, their names lauded to the skies. The river is a wonderful image: it reflects, it contains, it flows.

  XXII

  Bacchylides of Cos (c. 518–452 BC)

  O ye, who patiently explore

  The wreck of Herculanean lore,

  What rapture! could ye seize

  Some Theban fragment, or unroll

  One precious, tender-hearted, scroll

  Of pure Simonides.

  That were, indeed, a genuine birth

  Of poesy; a bursting forth

  Of genius from the dust:

  What Horace gloried to behold,

  What Maro1 loved, shall we enfold?

  Can haughty Time be just!

  WORDSWORTH,

  “September, 1819”

  In the first half of the nineteenth century, when most readers of poetry—when most readers tout court—had a grounding in the classics, the steady tease of archaeology, turning up ancient papyruses in the Egyptian desert, became tedious. Who cared about tracts on dike building, lists of punishments, accounts, contracts, the débris of the Ptolomaic world? Readers craved a great lost literary work. Classical philologists had run through the store of existing texts. Surely beneath the lone and level sands and crumpled, sneering statuary lurked song, drama, history, oratory. Wordsworth in his 1819 poem expressed a general hunger.

  The German historian Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen—it is just to grant him his full complement of names, so neglect
ed is the Nobel Literature laureate of 1902—Mommsen, who lived for the better part of a century (1817–1903), believed in the historical value of material culture. A History of Rome drew much of its original force from Mommsen’s use of inscriptions and the “new” evidence of non-literary ancient writing. He studied Roman law in a wide cultural context. The nineteenth century, he said, had been the age of epigraphy, reading and interpreting the records held in stone; the twentieth would belong to papyrology.

  Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, papyruses began to find their way into the libraries and museums of Europe, and as the next century proceeded the trickle increased. A problem with papyruses is the skill required to decipher them. Early editors could be fanciful, or they were simply flummoxed by the tiny, deteriorating script. During the nineteenth century expertise developed, and by the century’s end the time between accessing new papyrus acquisitions and their deciphering, transcription and publication had shortened considerably.

  Wordsworth’s prayer began to be answered, but too late for the poet to enjoy it. And it was not Simonides’ poetry but his nephew Bacchylides’ which materialised out of the duny sepulchre. Poems and other important texts came to light and were published, including six speeches of the Greek orator Hyperides, one of them complete. And then, in 1891, the Mimes of Herodas were dusted down, and what remains one of the most astonishing historical finds, Aristotle’s, or rather the Aristotelian, text on the Constitution of the Athenians was published from the British Museum. The study of papyruses became an important exercise for philologists. A valuable papyrus mine was found at Tebtunis, in the Faytum, one of the chief sources being the crocodile graveyard. Sacred crocodiles were mummified and wrapped in papyrus as if parcelled up in tinfoil for the oven. In 1902 at Hibeh important manuscripts from the period of the Ptolemies were discovered, followed by other major finds at Oxyrhynchus a year later, a period of unparalleled surprise and enrichment. Then in 1908 in Abusir a large body of Alexandrian papyruses was discovered, saved from the unfriendly climate of Alexandria, in which texts readily perished, because they were regarded as rubbish and carted off into the desert.

  More than 650 literary papyruses from Egypt have now been published. Roughly a third are passages of Homer, just under a third are versions of works which survive in other forms, in later copies and include philosophy, oratory, history and drama. What remains consists of fragments and longer portions of work regarded as lost forever: passages of Sappho, Alcman, chunks of Menander’s comedies, of the Iambi of Callimachus, passages of Antiope, Euripides, Hypsipyle, the Paeans of Pindar and (for our purposes here) most important of all, the odes of Pindar’s rival, or competitor, Bacchylides.

  The papyrus with the odes was found in Egypt by local diggers. It arrived at the British Museum in 1896, in the autumn. What had been a roll was now a jigsaw of about 200 friable pieces. The skilful and patient scholarship of F. G. Kenyon bore fruit, and in 1897 he published the editio princeps, the “first edition,” of the poems, increasing the amount of Bacchylides from around a hundred disconnected lines and phrases to more than a thousand lines of relatively continuous verse. In Kenyon’s painstaking reconstruction, the papyrus is in three parts. The first includes twenty-two columns of writing and ends abruptly just after the start of Ode XII. Column 23 has more or less vanished: the second section of the papyrus runs from the vestiges of column 23 to column 29 and contains what is left of Odes XIII and XIV. The last section includes nine further columns, the first again damaged, and includes Dithyramb XV, breaking off suddenly. Each column has between thirty-two and thirty-six lines.

  Fourteen or thirteen epinicean odes2 and six dithyrambs survive in this one papyrus. The odes were arranged like Simonides’, by the type of athletic event celebrated, rather than like Pindar’s, by the place in which the games occurred. To this material were added further fragments, in 1956, from the Oxyrhynchus trove.3 Like Simonides and Pindar, Bacchylides had received commissions from all over the Greek world, from Aegina, Athens, Cos, Macedonia, Metapontion, Philus, Sparta, Syracuse and Thessaly, and these are the remains of his labours. Albin Lesky values Bacchylides principally for the light his poems cast, given the substantial nature of the remains, on Pindar; also because in a quite unique way Bacchylides is “ours,” almost a twentieth-century ancient Greek.4

  Readers of the new Bacchylides were initially disappointed: Simonides’ nephew was not Pindar. Once this factwas accepted, readers began to puzzle out who he was, a writer whose narratives were less allusive, more continuous than Pindar’s, who was on occasion a brilliant describer and evoker of specific details and specific emotional moments; who was, in short, a dramatist avant la lettre, a lucid teller of stories. In the underworld Meleager recalls the moment of his death, and Heracles responds; Croesus, despairing, is saved from his pyre; best of all is the confrontation of Minos and Theseus, and Theseus’ plunge into his father’s, Poseidon’s, churning realm. In the eighteenth ode, Aegeus and a chorus conduct a dramatic dialogue. Or take this brief passage from Ode X, in Campbell’s prose translation: “For when he had come to a halt at the finishing-line of the sprint, panting out a hot storm of breath, and again when he had wet with his oil the cloaks of the spectators as he tumbled into the packed crowd after rounding the course with its four turns …”5 We could hardly get closer to the action.

  In Ode XIII, by contrast, his inadequacy is clear: the truisms and truths he tells are morally and poetically undistinguished. They lack focus and pith; they ramble, they are merely ceremonious. “Nowhere,” says Lesky, “do we find the profundity of Pindar’s perception of values.”6 His morals are very like his uncle’s: Ode XIV might have been written by Simonides: “… To be granted a good lot by God [singular] is best for men; but if luck comes with a burden of suffering, she wrecks an admirable man, while even a low-born fellow, set on a happy highroad, can shine.”7

  The myth story in each ode attaches to the victor celebrated, to his city or to his sport, and its purpose is to connect his mortal deeds with the timeless deeds of the gods and heroes, as it were to deposit his achievement in a timeless realm. In his first epinicean ode, for Argeius of Cos, Bacchylides distinguished between mere “lightweight” ambition, which wins honour only for a lifetime, and true excellence, which is hard-won, yet when concluded correctly leads to a man’s fame becoming part of a durable glory. It is as if there is a kind of entity called “gloryness” into which true excellence, at its demise, spills its qualities, the way a soul might rise to merge into an oversoul.

  Pindar and Bacchylides both set out to make such connections, but Bac-chylides is more limpid, less complex and hermetic. This difference between them was noted by a first- (or third-) century critic, possibly Cassius Longinus, or whoever was the author of On the Sublime, which is generally attributed to him.8 He wonders whether faulty greatness in writing is preferable to the smooth and undisrupted work of the great technician. He concludes that greatness is to be preferred. In the area of poetry, we prefer Pindar to Bacchylides even though in the latter we find elegance and polish (the style is glaphuros): he may produce unblemished verse, but he falls short of the higher beauty. In the end, Bacchylides’ art is simpler in conception and easier in execution than Pindar’s. You can imagine buying Bacchylides by the yard: he is, after all, his uncle’s nephew. Pindar delivers his verse in less standard measures.

  Bacchylides is not Pindar, and yet critics and readers keep wanting him to be. Even the textual scholars approach him with Pindaric expectations, and their editorial work—especially in proposing emendations on bridge-passages where text is missing—can be coloured by this predisposition. It is as though we were to edit Christopher Marlowe entirely in the light of Shakespeare’s practice. We distort the structure and the language of both poets in the process.

  Meleager spoke of the “ripe ears from the harvest of Bacchylides.”9 In old age Simonides left Athens and went to Sicily, to the court of Hiero of Syracuse, and seeing there was work to be had,
summoned his nephew Bacchylides of Cos, who was then living in Athens or Thessaly or perhaps was exiled10 in the Peloponnese.11 Poetry was a family business and, in the absence of a son, a nephew would have to do. There was demand for epinicean odes. Pindar was making a good living, and so was Simonides. Some traditions say that Pindar and Simonides were in competition; the latter, being old, needed reinforcements and Bacchylides, already well known, came to the rescue. Other (late) traditions suggest that Pindar studied under Simonides. In any event, Bacchylides may have settled in Syracuse for a serious spell (478–467 BC).

  Bacchylides’ mother was Simonides’ sister, probably a younger one. His father was Meidon, the name deriving, the ninth-century Etymologicum Ge-nuinum tells us, from meidin, “smile.” His grandfather was “Bacchylides the athlete,” so from boyhood he knew about the great sporting fixtures and may have heard some of the poems composed to celebrate the victors, his grandfather included.12

  He was probably some forty-nine years younger than his uncle, and perhaps fifteen years younger than Pindar, though Campbell believes they were more or less exact contemporaries. His first surviving poem may be a drinking song for Alexander, son of Amyntas, king of Macedonia, composed before 490 BC.13 The poet takes up his lyre and plays loudly, “with its seven notes silencing your clear voice.” He longs to send a gift of value and beauty. Drink leads on to amorous thoughts, and then to thoughts of bravery and opulence. He imagines the company of Alexander. The poem celebrates imagination (lubricated and stimulated) and the power of poetry to bring into the open what is imagined, in order to share it.

  The earliest datable epinicean ode is XIV, from 485–83 BC, and the last is from 452 BC, which Campbell believes was the year of his death. Severyns divides his work, and his life, into three phases and geographies, the first concentrated in the east (498–486, Thessaly, Macedonia, Aegina), the second in mainland Greece and points west in Magna Graecia (486–466, Athens, Syracuse), and the last in the Peloponnese and back to points east, including a return to Cos (466–452 BC, Cos, Sparta, Phlius, Asine). At Alexandria his work was edited into nine books, Campbell says, the divisions apparently generic: the epinicean odes, for which he was best known and best paid; paeans; dithyrambs; hymns; prosodia, or processional poems; maiden songs; hyporchemata, or dance songs; erotica; and encomia. There were a few epigrams, of which two survive, and yet Bacchylides is mentioned in the first poem in Meleager’s Garland.14