The First Poets Read online

  The city of Cyrene was established a little way inland, at the edge of a plateau known today as Jebel Akdar, the Green Mountain. It was around 630 BC. A port was built fifteen kilometres away, and it became in time the city of Apollonia. Cyrenaica remained closely integrated into the Greek and then the Hellenic world, its people, culture and religion part and parcel of them. The layout of the city of Cyrene imitated the actual layout of Thera (now Santorini), the founding city which sent Battus and his people out because Thera’s population had outgrown its environment. The temples and the divine images of the new city imitated the great temples of mainland Greece. With the rise of the Ptolemies, Cyrene looked east and acknowledged the finally irresistible presence of Egypt. It defied, now successfully, now tragically, until it became part of Africa.

  Callimachus, even when he was in Alexandria, remained aware of his native city. During the expansion of the agora, when the old prytaneum, or public hall, was demolished, the new one was described by Callimachus. It was built on the south side of the ceremonial way, the Skyrotà, a building with a handsome portico and peristyle. In the last two hymns the movement of the celebrants seems to follow closely ceremonial ways which we can trace (without Roman anachronism) on the archaeological maps of the site.

  The Temple of Zeus in Cyrene was restored during the Ptolemaic period, and the portrait of Ptolemy III, raised in the “area of the heads,”28 possibly relates to this event. Later restorations during the Roman ascendancy are irrelevant here, as is the fact that the temple was totally destroyed in an earthquake in AD 365. The Temple of Apollo had a more organic development, extended in the sixth century BC with a rectangular peristyle, six columns by eleven, with further modifications in the fourth century BC. The unfluted columns we see today are much later, part of the restoration after the Jewish uprising. There is a handsome fourth-century BC door through which we can step into the sacred space, as perhaps the poet did.

  This temple casts a curious spell, even though there is such a confusion of elements exposed by earthquake, quarrying and erosion. Inside it, though Apollo’s name is “over the door,” there are temples to other gods, just as saints have chapels inside a church dedicated to another saint. Thus Artemis (significantly), Latona, Isis and Hecate had their “chapels,” as well as other, more obscure deities, some perhaps local to the area. The Temple of Artemis inside the Temple of Apollo was substantially increased and emphasised in the fourth-century BC reconstruction and would have been familiar to the poet.

  Early in the morning or towards evening, it is not too hard to get to the Sanctuary of Demeter, on the opposite side of the site of Cyrene from Apollo’s temples and outside the city walls, where Wadi Ben Gadir shelves to the south. Looking back one has a clear view of the agora. This is a very ancient part of the site. In the second century the place was monumentalised, but in the poet’s time it retained the darker mystery and magic of its deity.

  The “Hymn to Zeus” was composed between 280 and 275 BC. It begins with rather a dramatic aetiology: the origins of Zeus. But the poem serves multiple purposes: Zeus’s birth ties in with other origins. Arcadia, a desert when Zeus’s mother, Rhea, delivers the baby, gives birth (at her behest) to great rivers, so that she can wash away the gore of afterbirth and bathe the infant god. When Callimachus deals with origins, he also, always, deals with connections: the divine and transcendent always find expression in the realm of the literal; consequences are never merely heavenly and apart. As the poem progresses, other aetiologies are adduced, for example, the place where the baby Zeus’s navel-cord drops away becomes (unsurprisingly) the Plain of the Navel. The bees arrive because of Zeus’s birth and are graced by him with their gold stripes.

  Callimachus favours Arcadia’s claim over Crete’s when it comes to specifying Zeus’s birthplace, but he reconciles the legends: born in Arcadia, Zeus was spirited away to a Cretan cave to be out of father Cronus’ vindictive range, and there he was cradled by Adrasteia, looked after by Meliae of Dicte, fed with honey by the Panacrian bees and suckled by Amalthea the she-goat. The Curetes danced and kept Cronus away. Zeus got the top job on Olympus by agreement with his brothers: he was manifestly supreme among them. Callimachus rejects the legend that the realms of earth, sea and underworld were distributed by lots. His reading takes legend more seriously, less cynically. The old poets told untruths: when he dispenses fiction (poets lie to tell a truth), it should persuade the listener.29 This Callimachean calculation was part of his legacy to the Roman poets, not only to the playful ones but to Virgil himself.

  All kings derive power and legitimacy from Zeus. This includes as much the kings of the birds as the kings of men. But power and legitimacy are not distributed in equal measure. Some kings are more favoured, and one is most favoured: Ptolemy Philadelphus. The poem’s “all hail” to the god is, at the same time, due to the way in which Callimachus has dovetailed the human and the divine, an “all hail” to his Egyptian and Cyrenean king; the hymn would have been performed in the royal presence.

  The “Hymn to Apollo” was written perhaps for the Carnean Festival. The Carnean Festival, dedicated to Apollo as protector of flocks, originated in Sparta. It may also have been celebrated in Cyrene. The poem was written between 258 and 247 BC, when Cyrene and Egypt were on good terms.30 Callimachus creates a series of balances. By alluding to Apollo’s two major ceremonial centres he also alludes to the two Homeric Hymns to Apollo, the Delian and Pythian. His is a hymn to Apollo and a celebration of the god’s lion-slaying human lover Cyrene, her city and its foundation: thus the divine quite naturally counterbalances (having previously embraced) the human, both individual and collective. Callimachus makes it clear through personal reference that he associates himself with the city and the god. The poem’s narratives run from primitive rural to sophisticated metropolitan.

  There are other complementarities. They lead to the celebrated conclusion: the battle at Delphi between Python, the dragon who guards the archaic place, and Apollo, who wrests possession from the monster to make it his own city (as Cyrene slew the lion and made her city). Callimachus translates the contest into a literary confrontation between Apollo and Envy, affirming his own place beside the god. The Homeric “Hymn to Delian Apollo” ends with the poet enjoining his hearers to admit that he, a blind old man, is poet of poets. Thucydides calls that hymn a prooimion, a prologue or overture, to something longer. Some critics regard Callimachus’ poem, which also ends (more contentiously than the hymn) on the theme of poetry, as “leading into” something else, a prelude.

  The “Hymn to Artemis” may have been composed around 260 BC. It is one of the most literary of the poems: according to Michael Haslam, a structure of contrasting language registers, now high, now colloquial, disorient reader—and audience?—and the divine and the human are also interleaved. This makes it of a piece with the first and second hymns not only in narrative but in diction, a deliberate juxtaposition of the demotic and the formulaic. Artemis’ earliest act in the poem (she is portrayed as a little girl) is to pray to Zeus for eternal virginity and for a variety of identities so she can get the better of competitive Apollo. It is as though she addresses Santa Claus, not Zeus: her childish shopping list includes a fetching costume, a virgin choir, and much else. The goddess is infantilised by Callimachus in a curiously ironic-seeming manner. The poem is frisky, full of amusement, leading us off at various tangents. All the hymns are unusual, but this one in especially peculiar ways.31 The theatricality of the “Hymn to Delos,” composed around 271 BC, puts it in the same category of linguistic play and subtlety with Artemis. Haslam draws attention to the intertextual exchange between this poem and the Homeric “Hymn to Delian Apollo,” a deliberate counterpointing with a text familiar to every Greek.

  The last two hymns, “The Bath of Pallas” and “To Demeter” respectively, cannot be dated, though “To Demeter” may be the earliest of the six. Both are in Doric dialect and “The Bath of Pallas” is alone in being in elegiac rather than heroic measure. Bot
h tie in to specific ceremonies and answer uncannily in their “procession” and movement to the actual disposition of the temples in Cyrene. Hymn V accompanies the annual bathing of the holy figure of Athena, and we can follow a kind of imaginative map as the poem progresses, the goddess speaking. It was wholly a female occasion, and a nymph’s son who gazes on the goddess has his sight snatched away, a horrible moment which the goddess justifies in a highly rhetorical way. This awful, irreversible incident is woven in with several other legends of Artemis, but since the deed has happened, as it were, in this world and during the women’s ceremony, it brings home the awful peremptoriness of the gods.

  Fortunately, the sequence of hymns ends on a different note with Demeter, a hymn accompanying the Procession of the Basket. Again the occasion is female, and the poet begins by greeting the basket as it arrives, full of the bounty of harvest. The hymn dwells briefly on Demeter’s bereavement and suffering, but soon turns to the gifts she has made to men in terms of the aetiology of agriculture and the fruition of fields and orchards. There is, however, a harsh story to tell. Some of her devotees built her a garden with which she was passionately pleased. She favoured them, but their foes came to destroy the garden, starting with the tall poplar tree at the heart of the place, where her nymphs danced and played. The poplar cried out and Demeter, disguised as the tutelary spirit of the garden, urged the vandals to desist. They scorned her, and in a rage she took divine form: her feet were on the ground, but her head was Olympus-high. They fled, leaving their bronze axes in the wounded trunks of the trees. The chief of the thugs she imbued with a relentless hunger and an awful illness: the more he ate, the more he hungered. His mother wept, trying to conceal his illness as he wasted away, feasting on the mules, the racehorse, even the cat before whom the mouse had trembled. He ate his father literally out of house and home, and sat at the crossroads begging for crusts. He was the type for the bad neighbour.

  The hymn returns to good cheer, to celebration, having instanced first the goddess’s willingness to be merciful and next her severity in justice. It actually charts the procession: to the new city chambers, and then the uninitiated must stay behind and only the initiates proceed with the grateful burden of the basket to the sacred place. The prayer is for plenty: may the livestock be fed, may the harvests prosper, may peace prevail. Human and divine could not be more closely connected; the connection, too, between the Greek city and the rural order was traditionally intimate and sacred. This must indeed be the earliest of the hymns: it is clearly functional, of a piece with the Homeric Hymns, from which, more innocently, with less irony and artifice than the later hymns, it draws its energy, form and purpose.

  XXIV

  Apollonius of Rhodes (305–290 BC –c. 230 BC)

  What could be more straightforward? Everybody has the same vision, all feel the same dismay, all help build the same altar. But what happens if there are no Argonauts, all sharing the same experience? What if no one knows how to build an altar? What if no one dares make an offering?

  ROBERTO CALASSO, Literature and the Gods1

  Ancient scholars sometimes imposed on literary lives conflictual symmetries which passed for literary history. The conflict between Callimachus and Apollonius is generally seen from Callimachus’ point of view. He was the older poet and the teacher; passages in his writings appear to answer specific critics and criticisms, justifying his own practice and attacking theirs. Callimachus does not stipulate Apollonius, but Apollonius’ Argonautica is a poem vulnerable to Callimachean strictures. It is expansive, elaborate and undramatic. The narrative does not have a single focus, it shifts and blurs, its tone is unstable. Apollonius owes poetic and narrative debts to Callimachus, but his work is different in kind: “the first romantic” according to one Callimachean,2 and the Argonautica “the first Romantic epic” according to another.3 In the poem itself the king of Colchis, from whom Jason wrests the Fleece, has the poet’s number when he declares, “Stranger, no need to bore us with endless details …”4 It is that very endlessness—admittedly, the Argo had a long way to go in leagues and legends—that makes the Argonautica an inexhaustible resource for later poets, most notably (two centuries later) Virgil, and a poem which general readers remember if at all for one relationship in particular, that of Jason and the handsome young sorceress Medea. Most readers know the story of Book III and half of Book IV of the Argonautica and by-pass the journey to Colchis and the journey home. Apollonius is a poet of set pieces and protracted longueurs. He is also something else, something unusual, even unique, in classical and Hellenistic poetry: a writer who understands, honours and even privileges the female perspective. Had feminism walked the streets of ancient Alexandria, it would have saluted Apollonius.

  Who was this man? There are two divergent versions of his life, both peremptory, prefacing the manuscript of the Argonautica.5 His father was called Silleus or Illeus, his mother Rhode. He was born after 305 BC and before 290 BC in Alexandria or the suburb of Naucratis, the only major Greek poet to have been born in Egypt itself. He is sometimes called “Naucarites,” an allusion to his lost poem on the founding of the place, “long the sole trading mart of the Greeks in Egypt,”6 or a hostile allusion to his Egyptian origins. Or was he not born in Africa at all? Mary Lefkowitz suggests that he may have been a native of, rather than an exile in, Rhodes.7 Her evidence is his name and the fact that there is no firm factual source for his birth in Egypt. Her speculation has not persuaded many, though occasionally a guidebook assumes the poet was one of the island’s “most famous sons.”8

  One thing is certain, however: while he was in bright Rhodes, a maritime republic whose harbour was during his time bestridden by a wonder of the world, the giant Colossus representing the sun god (built in 304 BC, it fell in an earthquake after six decades), he acquainted himself in detail with sea lore. He understood how ships work, how sailors behave, how masts and sails are raised and lowered, how to navigate by landmarks and by the skies, and the routes real men took to real as well as to imagined places. He may have embarked on long literal sea journeys. When he describes the launch of the Argo, he does so with meticulous particularity. As the Argonauts set sail, the gods and nymphs view them from different vantage-points, creating a kind of mountain and sky theatre. Cheiron comes down to the shore with his wife, and they watch and wave the ship off. Cheiron’s wife holds in her arms the baby Achilles: the hero of Troy, in infancy, witnesses the departure of the Argonauts.9

  The technical and detailed account of sailing is either loving or pedantic, depending on the reader’s interest in boats and the sea. The fish, big and little, follow the ship in which Orpheus serenades, as (a Homeric simile) sheep follow the shepherd home at evening.10 Apollonius, a scholar and a learned poet, was also a man with more than a literary understanding of the world. No matter how fanciful the plot, the contingent world he depicts is credible to the senses. The sea is real, though the metaphorical sheep may have more Theocritus than wool about them.

  There are few attestations to his other poetry. He is thought to have written hexameters about Alexandria’s foundation, and after commemorating the origins of Naucratis, celebrating those of Cnidos, Rhodes and Caunus as well. In choliambics he wrote about Canopus. He composed scholarly works on Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus and Antimachus. In youth he published—that is, performed—what is thought to have been an early version of his Argonautica and it was not a success in Alexandria.11 Humiliated, he exiled himself in Rhodes. He returned, also voluntarily, to Alexandria with the scroll of his revised poem tucked under his arm. This time he was applauded. He was “found worthy” of the library.12 He died around 230 BC and was buried beside Callimachus.

  The last detail has given rise to much speculation, some of it touching on romantic themes: how close were the two men in the first place, during the teacher-pupil period, for Callimachus had a pederastic reputation; why did they fall out, and were they ever truly reconciled (assuming they had actually become estranged)? Or is the reference to
burial merely a way of saying that Apollonius merited burial in a cemetery reserved for those who, like Callimachus, had served the library and musaion? It is startling once again to see how much scholarship is generated by an absence of facts. We do not know anything for certain, and into this ignorance flows a veritable torrent of opinionation, much of it intemperate.

  We do know that Apollonius was not the sole writer of epics in a post-epic age. His immediate predecessor was Antimachus of Colophon, about whom he wrote, and whose Thebaid and elegiac anthology of stories Lydè (so despised by Callimachus) may have been of use to him in composing his narrative poems. The hexameter which Homer and Hesiod had deployed continued to be used for major narratives. But every poet walking in the shadow of the two founders of the tradition was burdened with an awareness of what had been and what could be done in the medium. Apollonius exists at a vast imaginative distance from Homer, and only slightly less far from Hesiod, yet would he have existed without them?

  The Argonautica is the only major poem which substantially survives from the period between the writing-down of Homer and the time of Nonnus, the fourth-century AD poet and author of an epic based on Dionysian myths.13 Many conclusions are based narrowly on Apollonius’ poem, as though it somehow represented all those vanished epics that provided its context. It is safe to say that in a few respects the Argonautica is typical. It never loses sight of Homer as source and legitimator, for example, and every time it stages a simile, it does so imitatively, seeking not so much what is apposite as what will be perceived to be correct. That correctness is seldom formulaic: the language is Homeric in strategy, but tricked out with non-Homeric elements in diction and elsewhere. The tradition being literary rather than oral, formulae have no necessary place.