The First Poets Read online

  Callimachus affected the Romans: Virgil, Ovid (whose Metamorphoses are indebted directly to the Aetia), Propertius, and Catullus adapted his account of the Lock of Berenice.16 The 7,000-line Aetia (only portions remain), translated as The Causes,17 is an elegy in four books. It recounts Greek legends to do with custom, history and ritual, and we have no idea how many Causes, or aetiologies, were included. Each Cause can be taken as a single, separate and separable poem. The text of the overall elegy is so tattered that it is impossible to determine whether it had a more organic form.

  The prologue, clearly written after the Aetia and other poems had been in circulation and had received some bad reviews, strikes a defensive note: “Responding to the Telchines,” rebutting his critics. In legend the Telchines were the earliest inhabitants of Rhodes, Cyprus, Cos and Crete: magicians, workers in metal, wise men, reluctant to share knowledge. They were slain by the gods on Cos as a result of their hubris. Callimachus’ Telchines are backstabbers of the Muse, ignorant, and they do not like his poems. Their case against him, which he summarises, is that he never wrote a continuous poem “of thousands and thousands of lines” on some epic theme but, like a child, even though he is advanced in years, he “spools out a short tale.” He proceeds to defend the short poem, probably making a case for the superiority of Philetas’ and Mimnermus’ shorter poems to their long ones, and proceedes by stages to himself.

  From now on, assess poetry not by the chain the Persians use

  To measure distances but by the rules of the art.

  As a lad, propping his writing tablet on his knee, he had heard Apollo’s command “Feed up the victim, make him really fat,” but “keep the Muse quite trim.” He also urged the boy not to take the wagons’ road, to avoid the highway and choose “the road less travelled by,” even if the going got hard. Zeus makes the thunder; a human poet makes a different noise. His own would be the voice of the cicada, considered sweet by the Hellenic Greeks. That persistent, maddening creature was believed to live on air and mist, to sing ceaselessly, and to slough old age seasonally as a snake does, with its shell. Cicada’s song, not the heehaw of donkeys: he rests his case and his hopes upon the Muses, his friends in youth and therefore now in age.

  It is a thrifty defence, embodying the case in the economy and clarity both of argument and metaphor. The Aetia proper begins in a dream. The poet, borne away from Cyrene, finds himself on Mount Helicon. There the Muses provide him (as they had Hesiod and Pindar) with tutorials about all sorts of things, and much of the magic of the fragments is his first-person, or first-persona, response. Books I and II were connected by the conceit of instruction, while what is left of Books III and IV suggests that Callimachus let the later stories stand unframed. The narratives are characterised by a variety of approaches and forms. Almost immediately a maxim swims clear of the broken text: “harming another, man harms his own heart.” Succeeding poem-shards are disappointingly brief, though the occasional run of lines gives an impression of a precise, witty poet, alive to the world of the senses, the implications of legend and the possibilities of language.

  That elder ages with a cheerfuller heart

  Whom young boys love and lead up to his door,

  Taking his hand as if he was their father …

  The fragment that may have opened Book II, concerning the cities of Sicily, appears to describe sea-sickness, making the crossing all the more credible, and the cities of that island and their history are briskly evoked. About some of the conceits there is a freshness, as when he invokes the nymphs of the Argive springs, and the water of the springs is itself the flowing nymphs, not so much embodiment as identity.18 When Acontius is about to court Cydippe, she is conjured with economy and paradox:

  No one stepped down to the slow-welling spring of hairy old

  Silenus with a face more full of dawn than she …

  This is one of the fullest surviving Aetia, and it makes the reader hope the Egyptian sands will prove generous and give back more. The snatches of Epilogue deliver us back to Helicon, the Muses conclude their narrative instruction, the poet sets off for prose pastures.

  The Iambi were thirteen poems, about a thousand lines all told, distinguished by their iambic or choliambic metre. In the first poem that sour, disfigured Hipponax of Colophon rises from the dead, convokes the scholars of the world and urges them to stop arguing with one another, telling them a tale about the Seven Sages. Next, an Aesopian animal fable is used to ridicule the disagreeable voices of men and what they say. (Aesop, who criticised the people of Delphos for devouring too much of the sacrificial meat, was stoned and pursued over a cliff.) The third poem chastises the age that prefers wealth to virtue, in particular the self-touting, tarty Euthy-demos, who put himself up for sale. Then comes the quarrel of the laurel (a prophetic tree) and the olive. When the bramble bush tries to broker a peace, the laurel tree stands upon its tenuous dignity and calls on Zeus, with the voice of a wild bull, to dispose of the riff-raff bramble.

  The quite fragmentary Iambus V speaks as a friend urging a teacher not to abuse his pupils again, using imagery of fire and of chariot racing. We read through the images to the central theme. It is an accusation masquerading as a poem of counsel. The sixth iambus consists of scraps of a dull description of the Olympian Zeus at Elis, written to a friend travelling thither and containing so much specific detail that it is inert. Little survives of the seventh, spoken by a Thracian Hermes through the lips of an iconic horse. One lovely line survives of the eighth iambus, an epinicean poem in a simple metre: “Once the Argo, a soft southerly in its sails …”

  We know more about the Iambi than the scraps of text. For example, of IX we have only two lines:

  Hermes, with long beard, say why your penis points

  Up at your beard not down to your feet …?

  We would infer from such a fragment that someone was addressing an ithyphallic image of Hermes: they were not uncommon, standing outside many houses. What else could we deduce? There were learned commentaries on Callimachus dating from the time of Augustus. Three Diegeseis from a much later date survive and they tell us the plots of poems which exist only as tatters. The Diegesis explains that the admirer of a lad called Philetadas—it may be Callimachus sending himself up, or attacking a rival—saw the statue “in a small palestra” and asked it if Philetadas was not the cause of its arousal. Hermes replied in the negative: there was a mystical source for his condition. The poem told the mystical story and then Hermes accused his interlocutor of desiring Philetadas in an inappropriate way. The theme of the fifth iambus is not far away.

  A large part of Iambus XII survives, a poem Callimachus wrote for the seventh-day celebration of the daughter of a friend of his. It is a prayer and a blessing, and it claims that Apollo’s gift—the poem—was better than all the other gifts the child received. Again the theme is competition, the rivalries of the gods over whose gift is the best. The poem survives while all material gifts fade, break or perish. In this case, the poem tells a truth.

  The last iambus addresses literary issues. Though mutilated, we can see in it the verve and assurance of a poet who knew what he was about and was keen to make himself understood. First, he insists that it is good, not bad, to write in a variety of genres. His example is Ion of Chios, a master of all genres and a jack of none. He also weaves in a handsome tribute to Mimnermus of Colophon. If we could wish for the full restoration of only one poem in antiquity, this would be a candidate, characterising the new literature and the reaction to it in a vivid fashion.

  The lyric poems hardly exist at all. The first of them appears to be about the fate of the men of Lemnos. Aphrodite, whose rites they had neglected, inflicted on the women of Lemnos a disgusting smell. The men, as a result, took either concubines or handsome lads from Thrace as lovers. The women killed the men and boys. The Argonauts stopped at the island, coupled with the Lemnian women, and the place was repopulated. Apollonius recounts the story at greater length.19 Of Callimachus’ poem only the f
irst line survives. Another lyric deifies Queen Arsinoë, wife of Ptolemy II, who died in 270 BC. “Wherever you look, the cities of the earth are decked in mourning …”

  There is, next, the Hecale, once a thousand-line mini-epic evoking not so much Theseus’ victory over the bull of Marathon as his stay with old Hecale, a crone who gave him unstinting hospitality and who, when he returned to repay her kindness after his triumph, he found dead. As a result he established a deme, or sector, of Attica (“Once upon a time, on an Erechthean hill, lived an Attic woman …”) and called it by her name, and a sanctuary to Zeus Hecaleios at her hut. While staying with her, Theseus appears to have told her his life story, with its magic and charms; in any case the fragments are full of known details of the legendary life. Hecale too tells her life: she was not poor always, she is of a good family but has fallen on hard times.

  The narrative must have been brisk and strong. In particular, the capture of the bull, and Theseus parading it alive through his father’s city before sacrificing it at the temple, are vividly contained. There are obscuring digressions: a crow speaks, for example, and an old woman who may be Hecale, or another bird of some description. There are noble lines of dedication to Hecale at the end, spoken, I imagine, by Theseus himself.

  The little epics, elegies and elegiac epinicean poems are not accompanied by Diegesis and it is hard to reconstruct their narrative, and what Callimachus was doing with legend and history to give it that turn of novelty, the new perspectives, that are believed to characterise his work. There are other fragments, and what they say, what can be interpreted and inferred from them, make it clear that what he wrote was always full of sense and information, aiming not at classical closure but at a kind of balancing of meanings. Here is lean poetry, every sinew functioning and not the merest gram of fat. No wonder he dismisses the Lydè as “a fat” (that word again) “graceless book.”

  There are over 300 fragments of uncertain provenance, all belonging to Callimachus, who was, after Homer, the most widely attested authority on correct usage. His correctness was not dryly proper but precise and full, like the best English eighteenth-century writing. Some fragments hang in the air like aphorisms: “Always the gods grant little graces to little men,” “Troilus lamented less than Priam,” “I am not niggardly of my poems,” “Anxieties oppress a man less, and one thirtieth of the weight is removed, when he spills his troubles to a friend, a stranger going down the same road, or to the unlistening puffs of a breeze.” “I sing nothing without evidence”—a strictly scholarly aesthetic. When he says, “The good-looking will sell everything for coin,” we can set this beside some of his epigrams and conclude that he was a less-than-successful lover and perhaps not the best looker in Alexandria.

  There are more than sixty complete epigrams, some merely conventional, some strange and replete with philosophical, linguistic and emotional surprises. The most famously translated is Epigram II, which William (Johnson) Cory included in Ionica in 1858, and which subsequent British composers turned into a song lyric:

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

  They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

  A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,

  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

  For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

  Such nightingales are like Yeats’s Byzantine birds, artificial yet beautiful and timeless. Indeed, in reading Callimachus, and in following some of his subtler translations, we are not far from the imaginative world of the Yeats of the Byzantium poems.

  Some of the epigrams dispense social advice with measured elegance (do not marry above your station;20 beware of stepmothers even when they’re dead;21 no one knows what tomorrow will bring;22 be thrifty23). But these are not the most arresting. The ones that stay with us are formally surprising. The use of dialogue can be pointed and dramatic. In this poem a tombstone is addressed:

  “Does Charidas lie beneath you?” “If you mean

  The son of Cyrenean Arimmas, beneath me.”

  “Ho, Charidas, what of the underworld?”

  “A lot of darkness.” “What of the way back?”

  “A lie.” “And Pluto?” “An invention.” “We are doomed.”

  “What I am telling you is true; if you prefer

  A pleasant tale, just think: in Hell

  A great ox costs no more than a penny.”24

  What seem like personal declarations have the purity of rage about them, and poetry is always hand in glove with love.

  I loathe poem cycles, I do not take delight

  In crowded highways. I hate too the lover

  Wandering from love to love. I do not drink

  At every spring. I despise all that’s common.

  You are fair, Lysanias, fair, but before Echo

  Repeats, a voice declares, “He’s someone else’s.”25

  There is much of this kind of desire and recognition in the epigrams. They seldom get beyond the frisson, wry disappointment, or deferral. “This is the way my love works: it pursues what flees it, but lets go what lies to hand.”26

  The most ambitious of Callimachus’ poems were the most potentially conventional, his six hymns, where he set himself in what was regarded as a Homeric tradition, the most sacred line of Greek poetry. All surviving manuscripts of the hymns derive from a Byzantine source collection that combined the Homeric with hymns attributed to Orpheus, Proclus and Callimachus, an amalgamation of work composed and revised over many centuries.

  Changes in the Greek world and in the poetic tradition meant that the “modern” Alexandrian hymn, inevitably conscious of precedent and therefore self-conscious in its voice as a Modernist poem might be, was touched by the epinicean fashion: a god was celebrated in his origins and in his triumphs, and the poems register larger and smaller triumphs, the elements that constitute divine legitimacy. Hymn and epinicean are, short of the drama, the most public forms of poetry and, combined, harmonise the sacred and the civic. “Civic” implies city, it suggests less the places of the gods than the places of men, less their than our places, including those that we build with our hands (or with our words) in their honour. Some of Callimachus’ hymns seem to me—as I think they will to anyone who has stumbled around the fascinating palimpsest of ruins in modern Libya—to have a specific geography and to be conceived for a cityscape not unlike that of Ptolemaic Cyrene, the poet’s birthplace, when the enormous temple of Zeus was restored. In the end it is not so much the god that is Callimachus’ subject as the god manifest in, present and presented in, a certain set of circumstances in history and legend, and in certain physical locations on earth. Presence, if you like, rather than essence.

  This supposition is not scholarly, in part because scholars and critics who are happy to tie Archilochus, Theognis or Solon to specific places are reluctant to do so when the poet is cosmopolitan, and when the poetry is so very literary. Discussing Callimachus’ epigrams, Doris Meyer shows how many pretend to be inscriptions on roadside tombs: a fictional speaker is created, speaking through his stone. This imposes on the reader a role in the poem as well, that of passer-by. The speaker behind the stone and the stroller are within the text, whereas in fact we and the poet are outside this fiction and watch ourselves performing within it.27 In her persuasive essays, she does not dwell on the possibility that these epigrams may indeed have been intended to be carved, or were in reality carved, on actual tombstones, some of them at least: that they were what they purport to be.

  For those less literal-minded than I am, however, her argument might apply to the hymns: the imagined geography of the ceremony they enact may be Cyrene, but the enactment itself can be imagined. As with the epi grams, we stand by a specific (remembered) roadside as a proc
ession goes by, and our relation as living readers with the poet who made the poem is separate from our place within his projected “ceremonial.” Too subtle? Perhaps: my sense of the hymns is that despite their complexity, some were intended for use, and that they were actually used in a specific city. This is especially true of Hymns V and VI.

  There are hymns to Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, to Delos, and then to Pallas and Demeter. In the Homeric canon there are precedents to all except the “Hymn to Delos.” Callimachus, gratifying future intertextual critics, relates this hymn to the Homeric “Hymn to Delian Apollo.” With respect and irony, he weaves threads from the Homeric poems into his own textures. The more general question of Callimachean intertextuality is hard to address, given that many of the texts on which his poems may have drawn no longer exist and any conclusions we draw from perceived echoes will be partial at best. The hymns are the safest place to look because we have Homeric and other hymns, and substantial epinicean texts for comparison as well.

  Cyrene and its territory, Cyrenaica, was originally a kind of fertile island with a sea of sand behind and a sea of water before, linked to Greece by maritime routes, the usual line being via Crete. Settlers had landed in a fertile area belonging to a North African tribe. The tribe agreed that their territory was lovely but proposed to take the colonists to an even lovelier spot where there were “holes in the sky” (signifying generous rainfall). They sherpaed the Greeks by night through (unseen) lush lands to the place that would be Cyrenaica, and that happened to belong to a rival tribe. Having transferred the colonists off their land, the sherpas withdrew. The tribe on whom the Greeks were deposited did not mind too much. Indeed, they picked up Greek habits and worked with the colonists. It was only later that division came.