The First Poets Read online

  It is Jason who plots the death of Medea’s brother. Apollonius lets Medea off that hook as well. They murder him and his crew; the other pursuing Colchians are furious but Hera keeps them at bay. Zeus takes their part angrily and at last makes a brief intervention, condemning the Argonauts to a series of serious setbacks before they get home, but get home they will. Circe, Aeetes’ sister, absolves but does not welcome Jason or Medea. This Circe has none of the passionate charm and seduction of the one who snares Odysseus.

  Hera eases the way so that the Argo can get through the mysterious geography of the western passages. We meet Thetis attempting to make Achilles invulnerable; we meet the sirens and hear Orpheus’ counter-melody.

  The preservation of Medea’s virginity continues well into Book IV (l. 1024). In Phaiakia, where they land a generation before Odysseus (storm-tossed, he finds lovely young Nausicaa playing on the beach), they are well received. Queen Arete pleads Medea’s cause to her husband, Alcinous, hugging him in wifely arms in bed, a woman arguing the case for another and using not only words but loving persuasion. He judges that Medea, to be saved from the pursuing Colchians, must wed Jason. The ceremony is conducted, Jason obedient as usual, and they consummate their union bedded on the Golden Fleece itself.

  It is a goddess who rouses the heroes later, during the parched Libyan interlude when they expect to perish under the sun’s unremitting disc. This touch of geography would have brought the poem home to Apollonius’ Egyptian audiences. There were further obstacles, some serious but none dramatic. They meet with the sea god Triton, who is suptuously described, especially his tail. When the heroes get home, the poem is over. They step ashore and Apollonius abandons them and us on the beach. The usurper is not overthrown, Jason’s mother is not allowed her moment of relief and joy. The trip is finished, and that’s that.

  Medea is a character: she has motives, she acts, her actions have consequences, she changes. In this, she is alone in a poem that consists largely of cardboard figures. Only Heracles is a proper hero, and he is removed from the poem early on. His beloved Hylas is drawn by a lusty nymph into a pool and drowned. The heroes set sail without noticing that Heracles is missing, even though his seat was at the very heart of the ship.

  As soon as the morning star rose clear above the topmost

  peaks, the wind gusted down, and Tiphys quickly

  urged them aboard, to make good use of the land breeze;

  then straight away they embarked with a will, and raised the

  ship’s anchor stones, and hauled hard on the sheet-lines,

  the sail bellied out in the wind, and they, rejoicing,

  were borne away from shore, past Poseidon’s headland.

  At the hour when dawn’s grey half-light first shines in the heavens,

  rising from the horizon, and paths become visible,

  and dew-pointed meadows glitter brightly, then they

  perceived that, all unknowing, they’d left those two ashore.25

  With so unobservant a captain and crew, the success of the enterprise is little short of miraculous.

  At times Jason reminds us of Telemachus, at times of Agamemnon at his most trying, when he is testing his comrades to see if they want to go home (and suddenly they do). He never calls to mind the serious heroes. At the conclave before the Argo sets sail in Book I, Jason speaks like a company director. It is time to elect a chairman. Heracles? He declines, and the task falls to Jason, whose quest in any case it is.

  He broods. Old-fashioned, hot-blooded Idas confronts him, asking if he is afraid. Idmon remonstrates with Idas for taking this tack with the thoughtful young leader and an argument ensues which Orpheus calms with a song. He sings a creation myth, theogonies, aetiologies. But the question, “Is Jason scared?” is never answered. When the ship departs, Jason weeps to be leaving home. Another argument blows up and Jason, still depressed, says nothing. Attacked for his silence, he does not explain himself. It is Glaucus the sea spirit who comes up out of the depths and with a little emollient prophecy brings things back to calm.

  In Book II Jason and the heroes are actually described as afraid and weak-willed.26 Jason suffers from overwhelming fear and in an Agamem-nonish spirit suggests retreat. “So he / spoke, making trial of the heroes, but they shouted / bold words of encouragement.”27

  Reciting his poem a second time in Alexandria, if we are to believe the lives and legends, Apollonius was greeted with “bold words of encouragement” and stayed, to become librarian and to be honoured, esteemed and buried with pomp. His surviving work is a storehouse of stories and similes. It may be rather more radical in outlook than it is in form. To call it an epic poem because it is written in hexameters and belongs to a Homeric tradition is to sell the idea of epic short. It has elements of epic, deliberately cultivated. It has something else that anachronistic critics call romance. Certainly from Book III through the first two thirds of Book IV an amazing and coherent narrative unfolds and, as in some of the drama, the character of a woman in love and in danger is presented with, as a larger context, more about woman and women, their circumstances and perspectives, than we expect from non-dramatic Greek poetry. It would be fanciful to suggest that it was to this that Callimachus objected. What he didn’t like, if he didn’t like it, was the sheer volubility of Apollonius, the degree to which the language exceeded its occasions, the degree to which the poem fell short of Homer.

  XXV

  Theocritus of Syracuse (c. 308–240 BC)1

  Wordsworth on Nature is like Virgil on boxing; I prefer Theocritus, who had obviously been a bit of a bruiser himself, as his account of the Amycus-Pollux match shows.

  ROBERT GRAVES, “The Road to Rydal Mount”2

  An Athenian poet of the sixth century BC enjoyed an abundance of givens. He knew his fellow-citizens shared his dialect, landscape, history, and traditions, and when it came to poetry itself, expectations having to do with music, genre, and diction. A poet writing in Syracuse in the third century BC couldn’t bank on such a commonality. Syracuse was big, with Alexandria the largest Greek city at the time. It had had a turbulent history, and, despite political vagaries, the messy interregna between tyrants, there was the tenuous memory of a mother culture, the Corinthian source. Unsettling and enriching elements derived from its relations with the rest of Sicily, with Italy and the north of Africa. The population had diversified well beyond the Greek core. A poet writing there could not take much for granted.

  In Alexandria, nothing at all could be taken for granted. In the first century of its existence, few Alexandrians felt like natives. In the busy port, with its wide avenues and narrow alleys, a mess of languages and dialects was spoken. The city was Greek, but the racial mix was unlike that in any previous Greek city. Here religious observances and superstitions were a tangle. At the great library writers and intellectuals from the entire known world—not only Greeks—were at work, many of them supported, scholars suggest, by the Ptolemies themselves. In a few decades Alexandria had grown from a literal backwater into an imperial capital, a spectacular colonial imposition upon Egypt, with dazzling façades, the architectural weight, the colonial determination of a phenomenon intended to last.

  Theocritus’ Idyll XV, “The Festival of Adonis,” evokes the city at his time through the eyes of two immigrant gossips, Gorgo and Praxinoa, who, as he did, came from Syracuse. Arsinoe, Ptolemy Philadelphus’ queen, has organised an exhibition and concert at the royal palace in honour of Adonis. The general public is to be admitted. These gossips, though bumptious and coarse, are independent-minded and agreeably awed by the scale and opulence of festive Alexandria. The little drama of the idyll begins with Gorgo knocking on Praxinoa’s door and urging her to come out into the festive streets. Praxinoa leaves her two-year-old with a maid and the women (they are prosperous) accompanied by two servants set out, chatting about husbands and other brittle subjects. Scene two is set in the street: they struggle through the crowd, exchanging words. In the third scene they reach the palace
, banter with other exhibition-goers, defend the dignity of their dialect, and listen to a famous singer who ends her song by conjuring Adonis. Gorgo adds a little coda, praying that next year will bring around the same plenty and celebration.

  The poem gives Theocritus occasion to note some of the benefits that Ptolemy Philadelphus has effected. There is a sense of popular access to the king, improvements in street safety, a widening prosperity, a general tolerance. The poem also celebrates the resilient virtues of Syracuse in the immigrant women. As they chatter, an Alexandrian tries to silence them:

  Quiet, women! Chattering like two barn-door fowls.

  You set my teeth on edge with your flattened vowels.

  To this, unhesitatingly, remembering that Corinth was the mother city of Syracuse, and that Bellerophon was one of Corinth’s most famous sons, albeit equine, Praxinoa retorts,

  What bird might you be? The crested ignoramus?

  We come from good Corinthian stock, the same as

  Bellerophon.

  C. M. Bowra insists that, for poetry, the move in time and space from Athens to Alexandria entailed a narrowing of imagination and expressive freedom: the “openness” of democratic Greece is attenuated into poetic servility in Ptolemaic Alexandria.3 About these Syracusan women there is nothing servile, nor does the city they inhabit seem restrictive. Bowra forgets how centuries of poets served tyrants with praise: Pindar, his favourite, is hardly a democratic spirit. Poets’ lives themselves were, he declares, “narrower,” as though political integration and the acceleration of history it entails, the freedom to travel, the amazing resource of the libraries in Alexandria and elsewhere, the diversity of cultures on show, impoverished imagination. Bowra’s is an odd take on the growth of cosmopolitan culture, nostalgic for the brief stabilities of tyranny and democracy, with their very different dynamics and their fragmented poetry.

  By destiny and design, Alexandria was cosmopolitan. The sustaining countryside, the fields and olive orchards, the pastures and enclosures close at hand and familiar to the citizen of most Greek cities through to the third century, were unfamiliar in North Africa. Apollonius in Argonautica, Book IV portrayed its climate as mercilessly hot, dry and unredeemed. The steamy Nile delta sustained flora and fauna quite unlike those to which the Greek immigrant was accustomed. Apart from Apollonius, Alexandrian poets came from older Greek cities and brought in their luggage more coherent cultures. They unpacked them gingerly in the shimmering strangeness of a new kind of world. Here diverse Greek traditions come together in a complex flowering of verse, before it atrophies under the devoted care of Rome.

  Idyll II, the magical “Pharmaceutria,” like Idyll XV develops a female character. As with Apollonius’ Medea and Callimachus in the Hecale, an Alexandrian poet creates and explores a feminine sensibility, and here, also, female sexuality. Elsewhere his verse emerges from paedophile and homosexual enthusiasms, but here a woman finds a convincing voice.4 Simaetha, his protagonist, is desperate to draw her lover back. He has gone off with another, male or female, she is not sure which. Simaetha proves to be a sorceress and witch, an apprentice Medea. Her confusion, skittering between emotions, contributes to the clarity of a poem which understands how hate and love, desire and resentment inhabit a single mind, torture and extend without dividing it.

  In the first section Simaetha is desperate for her man Delphis, and not vice versa: a poetic innovation. Delphis has failed to visit her for twelve whole days (and nights). She plans to confront him with his neglect tomorrow at the wrestling school where he spends most of his spare time. Obviously he is a young man of leisure, and she a girl with time to stand and stare—one who owns a slave. Pending tomorrow, she exercises magic to lure him back, calling on the mysterious moon and on Hecate. In the second section she begins to chant. Delphis is from Myndus, a town on the coast of Asia Minor, not far from Cos. He is self-obsessed and has stolen her happiness. Her magic involves melting images, burning bits of his clothes and chanting awful imprecations, all of which end demanding not his death but his desperate and needy return, a fantasy that plainly images her own desire for him.

  In the concluding section, having spun a magic wheel, she evokes the Lady Moon and tells her the story of her love. She went to watch a parade and spotted Delphis and a mate coming from the gym with their shining brown-curled beards and their handsome naked chests. Her heart “burst into flame” and she went into a decline. She sent her slave girl to summon him from the wrestling school. He came, she was paralysed with fear and desire. Her careful stanza-and-refrain account continues until, overcome by the memory of desire, her verse turns to straightforward narrative of what she did, drawing him into her bed, and what he did. They loved. But now his eye has wandered. One detail electrifies the poem. Delphis used to leave his oil-flask, for greasing his body at the wrestling school, at her house. It gave him an excuse to come there three or four times a day. This particular stays in the mind, a token of trust and intimacy—betrayed. The fact that he has left his precious oil-flask indicates the intensity of his supplanting passion. Simaetha ties her story in with Ariadne’s and Medea’s. She bids farewell to the Moon, who has listened patiently and silently to her tale and her lament.

  More characteristically, Theocritus is an elegist; he incorporates into his verse elements from the drama, mime, epic, epinicean poetry and the “new poetics” of Callimachus. There is remarkable wholeness in his artificial poetic world, and integrity of purpose, too: it is a paradox that thematic artificiality and poetic integrity—at odds in earlier phases of Greek culture—go together in Alexandria.

  Theocritus wrote idylls. The term, unrelated to the term “idyllic” in modern English, was first used by Pliny the Younger as a way of describing poems which were not long.5 An “idyll” was originally a small picture or portrait (stressing not only the scale but the human content—an idyll is not merely descriptive but follows a character or set of characters). Tennyson loved the open genre and the term and used it to describe widely divergent kinds of poem in his own oeuvre. In the case of Theocritus, whose surviving poems apart from the epigrams are lumped together under the head, the idyll can include bucolic work, town mimes, panegyrics, hymns, lyrics and brief epics.

  Theocritus’ little epics are among his most compelling work, concentrating on a brief episode in a larger legend or myth. His “scaling down” of narrative tends to foreground characters and their state of mind, or their moral significance. The poems arrest the familiar flow of larger tales—Homer’s, Apollonius’—to distil and define. In Idyll XI, “The Cyclops,” the poet addresses his friend Nicias. Love is incurable. Only the Muses—by way of therapeutic love-song—can alleviate its discomforts. Nicias as a physician and poet should know this. The story of Polyphemus and Galatea takes on a new pathos. Polyphemus is a young Cyclops, his chin only just fuzzing with beard. He may not be handsome, he concedes, but he is rich. He sits above the sea longing and calling to the sea nymph Galatea. He wants to learn to swim so he can dive into the sea and find and kiss her. In this beauty-and-beast fable the beast, sincere and touching, and irredeemably ugly, loses.

  Idyll XIII, “Hylas,” Tennyson’s favourite idyll, retells a tale Apollonius includes in the Argonautica, but here with a thrift that endeared him to Calli-machus. Again, the poet addresses Nicias. Heracles, being in love, took lovely young Hylas with him when he joined the quest for the Fleece. This passion of Heracles proved that boy-love was not effeminate or weak. Hylas’ death is rendered with piercing precision, a star falling out of the sky. Heracles survived his loss and, the poet adds consolingly, Nicias will survive his lover’s passing on to other pleasures. This poem is the pure water which, in his “Hymn to Apollo,” Callimachus says a poet must raise to Demeter’s lips.

  Impure but powerful, Idyll XXII, “The Dioscuri,” is the most discussed and interpreted of the idylls in recent times. It begins by announcing the two parts to follow, the boxing match and the armour and spear contest. The aetiology of Castor and Polydeuces,
sons of Leda and Zeus, is established. Polydeuces’ part combines epic narrative and dialogue, a mixed genre appropriate to an event in which the god is sweetly reasonable and the ensuing conflict not his fault. Castor’s part of the poem is rendered wholly in epic terms and recalls the cruelly wasteful combats in the Iliad.

  The brothers are by vocation rescuers of men in trouble, whether they are storm-tossed, threatened, betrayed.

  You, the twin-helpers of men on earth, excellers

  In words and music, on horseback, at the games …

  Theocritus enters Apollonius’ narrative territory again, but with a light knapsack. The Argo, passing the turbulent rocks, lands at Bebrycia. “Out went the ladders, down the vessel’s side” suggests how high the ship was, how vast its hull. The twins find a lovely unspoiled spring surrounded with trees and prepare to drink. What appears to be a steroid-addicted bodybuilder with thick ears and iridescent muscle confronts them: King Amycus. He challenges Polydeuces: the loser will become the victor’s slave. Amycus blows through a stentorian conch and summons the Bebrycians out of the woods to watch. The threat to Polydeuces is Amycus’ sheer bulk: like a New Zealand All-Black, he strolls down the pitch and scores a try; opponents simply bounce off him. But Amycus has met his match: he is pummelled and dented; he sweats until he seems to melt and at last concedes defeat. Polydeuces makes him swear not to attack future travellers, a gentle fate for one who fights as dirtily as Amycus does. Compared with Apollonius’ circumstantial narrative, Theocritus’ version is more vivid and thematically purposeful.

  The complementary half of the poem concerns Lynceus and Idas, Aphareus’ sons. They were betrothed to the daughters of Leucippus by an old family pact. Castor and Polydeuces stole the girls away. The brothers ambushed the divine rapists at Aphareus’ tomb. In this instance Lynceus and Idas were sweet reason, the Dioscuri the aggressors. Castor chopped off Lynceus’ fingers and when Lynceus turned away he was hacked upward “from flank to navel,” spilling out his guts. This story does little credit to Castor. Idas in rage wrenched a column from his father’s tomb and attacked Castor. Zeus deflected the attack and himself killed Idas with a lightning flash. The moral is that the sons of Tyndareus are invincible, whether their cause is just or not. Theocritus concludes with a paean to poets, blessed by the Dioscuri and by Helen and all the heroes who went to Troy.