The First Poets Read online

  4. Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée, illustrated with woodcuts by Raoul Dufy (Paris, 1911).

  5. In 1463, Marsilio Ficino, commanded by Cosimo de’ Medici, translated into Latin the rediscovered Corpus Hermeticum. This consisted of fourteen “books.” He called them Pimander (Greek: “shepherd of men”?). Pimander lies behind the Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism.

  6. Hermes Trismegistus and Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, curing and divine will, are one and the same.

  7. Samuel Butler’s prose translation of the Iliad appeared in 1898, of the Odyssey in 1900.

  8. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton, 1993 edition), p. 30.

  9. and was unfaithful to him as he was to her, bearing other children to another god.

  10. Virgil, The Georgics, trans. Robert Wells (Manchester, 1982), ll. 453–527.

  11. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Manchester, 2001), § 82.

  12. Guthrie, op. cit., p. 31.

  13. Dante.

  14. Virgil, op. cit., p. 93.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Metamorphoses X.

  17. Calliope.

  18. John Milton, “Lycidas,” ll. 58–63.

  19. Thomas Taylor (1768–1835), A Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus: “The former part of this fable is thus excellently explained by Proclus in his commentaries (or rather fragments of commentaries) on Plato’s Republic.”

  20. Herus Pamphilius, in Plato, says the soul of Orpheus, which was due to transmigrate into another body at his death, chose to be a swan rather than a man so as not to have to be born of a woman, hating the whole sex as a result of their fatal attentions.

  21. Pausanias suggests that when Eurydice died, having failed to revive her, he took his own life, and that nightingales nested on his tomb, raising their young whose melody surpassed that of every other creature.

  22. Taylor, op. cit. Diogenes was of this opinion and composed an epitaph for his master: “Here, by the Muses placed, with golden lyre, / Great Orpheus rests; destroy’d by heavenly fire.”

  23. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., pp. 373–4.

  24. Apollonius of Rhodes (Apollonios Rhodios), Argonautika, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley, 1997), Book I, ll. 22ff.

  25. Ibid., ll. 496–518.

  26. Ibid., ll. 540f.

  27. Apollonius, op. cit., Book II, ll. 674ff.

  28. Ibid., ll. 705ff.

  29. Grant, op. cit., p. 303.

  30. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., pp. 373–4.

  31. Guthrie, op. cit., p. 11. Alexis, c. 372–c. 270 BC, from southern Italy, lived in Athens. He is said to have written 245 plays and crossed the bridge from Middle to New Comedy. He deployed mythological and contemporary plots and influenced the Roman playwright Plautus.

  32. At the end of the list Alexis introduces, after the epic poets, tragedians and writers of religious explications, a comic writer almost his contemporary, a satirist and a representative of the lower orders of literature; the reductive irony of his inclusion was clear to any play-goer of the time.

  33. Guthrie, op. cit., p. xxiv.

  34. “wooden image or idol.”

  35. Herodotus, op. cit.

  36. Grant, op. cit., p. 229.

  37. Onomacritos later regained favour, when Athens had need again of his skills in deception and persuasion.

  38. A mythical religious poet, Olen developed a cult. Delian hymns are attributed to him. Pausanias, Volume I (op. cit., p. 416), tells how he was celebrated. To Phemonoe, “the greatest and most universal glory belongs”: “she was the god’s first prophetess and the first to sing the hexameter. But a woman of the district called Boio wrote a hymn for Delphi saying Olen and the remote northerners came and founded the oracle of the god, and it was Olen who first prophesied and first sang the hexameter.” Finally she names Olen: “Phoibos’ first interpreter, / first singing carpenter of ancient verse.” Peter Levi comments, “Boio is a very obscure lady. If she was later than the earliest forgeries or attributions to Olen, she was Hellenistic. Clement of Alexandria says the prophetic women were called Boio, Hippo, and Manto.”

  39. Pamphos is perhaps the first of the hymn writers, a legendary figure like the others, and a magnet for forgeries. Pausanias claims he was the first to write a hymn to the Graces.

  40. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 72: “When Demetrios had freed Athens from dictatorship, immediately after the flight of Lachares he kept control of Piraeus, and later after some military success he brought a garrison into the city itself, and fortified what they call the Museum.”

  41. Charles Boer, The Homeric Hymns (Athens, Ohio, 1970).

  42. Ibid., p. 181.

  43. Taylor, op. cit.

  44. Ibid.: “the Orphic method of instruction consists in signifying divine concerns by symbols alone.”

  45. The crossing where three roads meet.

  46. Guthrie, op. cit., p. xxxvii.

  47. Roy MacLeod (ed.), The Library of Alexandria (London, 2000): Ficino, “De Immort. Anim., XVII.i.386,” quoted by Patricia Cannon Johnson in “The Neoplatonists and the Mystery Schools of the Mediterranean,” p. 145.

  48. From Apollinaire’s own notes on the Bestiaire.

  II THE LEGEND POETS

  1. He is not to be confused with his contemporary the lyric poet Poseidippus of 2. Pella, a contributor to the Greek Anthology.

  2. Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates, trans. Alan Shapiro (Berkeley, 1995), p. 137f.

  3. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 184, note 135.

  4. Terpander was a musician of Lesbos who probably flourished in the first half of the seventh century BC. He was probably adopted by Sparta, founded the Spartan school of music, replacing the four- with the seven-string lyre. He may have invented (or popularised) Aeolian and Boeotian modes. He composed nomes and wrote lyrical songs.

  5. Elaine Feinstein (ed.), After Pushkin (Manchester, 1999), p. 83.

  6. Grant, op. cit., p. 87.

  7. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (Oxford, 1961), p. 82.

  8. The Greek choral lyric was originally connected with Dionysus worship, sung by kuklios choros, or a circular choir, of about fifty singers. The chorus may have been dressed as satyrs. The etymology is uncertain: probably a revel song started by a leader (exarcos) of a band of revellers using traditional or improvised language, answered by refrain. It probably started in Phrygia and came to Greece with Dionysus worship. Arion made it a literary form.

  9. Grant, op. cit., adduces Herodotus (note 22, p. 341) and says, “Sudas, s.v., dubiously ascribes the introduction of spoken verses to Arion. There was also a legend that he invented the paean (in honour of Apollo); and a statement that he presented the first tragic drama was ascribed to Solon (Johannes Diaconus, Commentary on Hermogenes).”

  10. Graves, op. cit.

  11. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London, 1975), p. 80.

  12. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 43.

  13. Peter Levi, op. cit., notes (see page 63): “Onomacritos collected in Athens the oracles attributed to Musaeus and Orpheus, some of which he wrote himself. He was exiled for this by the dictator Hipparchos and ran away to Persia.”

  14. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 429.

  15. Ibid., p. 63.

  16. Ibid., p.72.

  17. Ibid., p. 421.

  18. Ibid., p. 415.

  19. Herodotus, op. cit.

  20. See Iliad II, ll. 590–600.

  III HOMER

  1. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

  2. Ford Madox Ford, The March of Literature (London, 1947), p. 108. The seven birthplaces were Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos and Athens.

  3. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica (London, 1914), p. 533: Amphiarau Exelasis (pseudo-Herodotus “Life of Homer”).

  4. See this volume, chapter XXV, note 23.

  5. Oliver Taplin, “Homer,” in John Boardman, Jasper Griffin and Oswyn Mur
ray (eds.), The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1986).

  6. See also Charles Boer, The Homeric Hymns (Athens, Ohio, 1970), for a modern version, dedicated to Charles Olson:

  Remember me later on,

  whenever someone of the men of earth

  finds himself here, a stranger

  who has suffered a lot,

  and he says to you, “O girls, who is the sweetest man that

  comes here with his songs for you who is it

  that pleases you most?”

  Then, all together, answer him: “A blind man,

  he lives in rocky Chios,

  and all his songs will still be the best

  at the end of time.”

  7. Italo Calvino, “The Odysseys Within the Odyssey,” Why Read the Classics (London, 1999), has the following monitory aside: “(It is worth registering here, since it will recur, that the word for ‘lord’ is basileus, often mistranslated as ‘king,’ which is what it meant in later Greek.)” Liddell and Scott (Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, 1889) do not reflect this evolution in meaning very clearly, and an anachronistic sense of the word’s meaning produces a distorted image in the reader’s mind.

  8. Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 51. See also Iliad XI, l. 807, and Odyssey VIII, l. 4.

  9. Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 51.

  10. The name “Demodocus” might be translated “he who is loved by the people.”

  11. Aristotle, Poetics.

  12. See pp. 114–16, this volume, for an account.

  13. Lesky, op. cit., pp. 15, 40.

  14. Also called Leucas, where Sappho would later commit suicide, according to legend, throwing herself from a now eponymous promontory.

  15. Evelyn-Williams, op. cit., p. 597.

  16. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 467.

  17. Zanker, op. cit., p. 16.

  18. Ibid., p. 164.

  19. On Eratosthenes, see page 306, this volume.

  20. Lesky, op. cit., p. 74.

  21. Samuel Butler, Notebooks (London, 1902), p. 196. 11.

  22. Zanker, op. cit., p. 161.

  23. Richard Bentley, 1662–1742, keeper of the King’s Library (1694), controversial master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  24. On the west coast of Asia Minor, Ionians pushed north, overrunning Aeolic areas such as Smyrna. In the nineteenth century a theory that the poems were composed in Ionic, then revised into Aeolic, made the scholar August Fick translate the poem “back into” Ionic. This revealed that there were places where equivalences could be found, others where Ionic had elements unavailable in Aeolic. We lack knowledge of the dialects at the time(s) of composition: conclusions are tentative. Often in close proximity elements from different dialects and different “periods” are used, without a sense of relative geographical or temporal sources. Thus the new flowed into the old, enhancing and preserving it.

  25. Oliver Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford, 2000).

  26. Ibid., p. 31.

  27. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1975), pp. 223 f.

  28. J. V. Luce, Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven, 1998), p. 176.

  29. Lesky, op. cit., p. 58.

  30. Johnson, op. cit., p. 250, “Dryden.”

  31. Gregory Nagy, “Reading Bakhtin Reading the Classics: Ten Quotes from Bakhtin’s ‘Epic and Novel,’” in R. Bracht Branham, Bakhtin and the Classics (Northwestern, 2002), pp. 80–2.

  32. The “planet” may draw, commentators say, on “the vivid description of Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy given to Keats as a school prize in 1811.” This was five or six years before he wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

  33. Auden, op. cit., p. 20.

  34. Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, Berkeley; Times Literary Supplement, 23 April 1993).

  35. Iliad VI, l. 208, and XI, l. 784.

  36. Ford, op. cit., p. 107, expresses a conventional, anachronistic view of the poem that reflects academic and critical orthodoxies of his day: “the work of Homer is at once a religion, a code of ethics, a map of chivalry, of health, domestic pursuits and of metaphysics.”

  37. Luce, op. cit., p. 65.

  38. Lesky, op. cit., p. 19.

  39. Luce, op. cit., pp. 70f.

  40. Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds, p. 74.

  41. Luce, op. cit., 2.

  42. Luce, op. cit., p. 3.

  43. Ibid., p. 9.

  44. Ibid., p. 38: Alexander the Great is said to have had the Iliad always at hand during his campaigns, to read for instruction or consolation.

  45. Casson, op. cit., p. 17.

  46. Burckhardt, op. cit., 65.

  47. Taplin, op. cit., p. 65.

  48. George Steiner, “From Caxton to Omeros,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 August 1993, text of the TLS Lecture delivered in May of that year at the Hay-on-Wye festival. Steiner does not acknowlege here the fact that the manufacture of papyrus was a major industry in Egypt long before the Greeks sought to stabilise the text of Homer, and that there was no material bar to the setting down of the poems even two, three or more centuries before they are thought to have been set down.

  49. Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Johns Hopkins, 1979, 1999), §3.

  50. Ibid., §5–7: “These theoretical underpinnings have fostered a general attitude of literal mindedness in my approach to the concept of the hero in archaic Greek poetry … I will as a policy assume that the application of an epithet—whether it be fixed or particularised—is thematically appropriate as well as traditional. Moreover, my working assumption extends from the usage of epithets in particular to the usage of words in general: the entire formula, to repeat, is an accurate response to the requirements of traditional theme. I stress this point now in order to prepare the reader for the oncoming plethora of transliterated Greek words that I will be continually citing in my discussion of central poetic themes. My reliance on key words in context cannot be dismissed as a reductive and oversimplified method of delving into the thematic complexities of archaic Greek poetry, if indeed the words themselves are functioning elements of an integral formulaic system inherited precisely for the purpose of actively expressing these complexities. The words should not be viewed merely as random vocabulary that passively reflects the themes sought by the poet. The semantic range of a key word in context can be expected to be as subtle and complex as the poetry in which it is encased.”

  51. Plato, Ion, translated by Benjamin Jowett.

  52. Iliad II, l. 558.

  53. Herodotus, op. cit., VII, 6.

  54. The epithet is familiar from the Homeric Hymns.

  55. Herodotus, op. cit., V, 58.

  56. Casson, op. cit., p. 19.

  57. Ibid., pp. 22f.

  58. Taplin, “Homer.”

  59. Lesky, op. cit., p. 77.

  IV THE HOMERIC APOCRYPHA

  1. Lesky, op. cit., p. 84.

  2. I follow the order of Hugh G. Evelyn-White, op. cit.

  3. Cronus’ only daughter. He ate her first and vomited her up last.

  4. Thus, a withering sacred tree means a dying nymph.

  5. Oar locks.

  6. Epigrams; see Evelyn-White, op. cit., p. xxxix.

  7. Op cit., fr 2.

  8. Lesky, op. cit., p. 89.

  9. See Iliad VII, l. 113 a, editorially disputed.

  10. Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), “Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice with the Remarks of Zoilus” (1917).

  V THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

  1. Quoted by Matthew Arnold in “On Translating Homer,” Selected Criticism, edited by Christopher Ricks (New York, 1972), p. 200.

  2. Every reader is struck by the amount of physical observation in Homer’s poems and how nuanced each speech is. The poems must have been heard many times; each time (as when we se
e a play by Shakespeare) new elements emerge, unnoticed before, in tone, setting, action or inaction. This is language fully charged. There are two approaches to its translation: the first straightforward, to render the sense as directly as possible, in workmanlike verse or in prose; the other to try to find English equivalents for the poetic effects, to choreograph by means of metre, rhyme or enjambement, to poeticise. With longer poems, the less poetic the translation, the better. If a reader dips in, reading a scene here, a description there, a deliberately poetic translation tells more about the texture of language than a prose version whose responsibility is to the whole poem. “Poetic” translations are tedious in extenso: read aloud, they wear out patience. Butler’s prose version is dependably adequate. It may not fly, but it never limps.

  3. In the Sack of Troy it is Odysseus who slays her son, Astyanax.

  4. Samuel Butler, Iliad (London, 1898): “As he held the scales by the middle, the doom of Hector fell down deep into the house of Hades—and then Phoebus Apollo left him” (xxii).

  5. Ford, op. cit., p. 106.

  6. Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds, pp. 78–9.

  7. Taplin, “Homer.”

  8. Oliver Taplin, “The Spring of the Muses: Homer and Related Poetry,” in Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds, p. 23.

  9. Butler Iliad.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Iliad VIII, ll. 73–4.

  12. Iliad VIII, l. 261.

  13. Burckhardt, op. cit.

  14. Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds, p. 49.

  15. Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 137.

  16. Lesky, op. cit., p. 37.

  17. Butler, Notebooks, p. 198.

  18. Lesky, op. cit., p. 1.

  19. The coronis could be given an illustrative shape—a bird for example.

  20. Taplin, “Homer,” p. 74.

  21. Lesky, op. cit., pp. 79ff.

  22. Ibid., p. 43.

  23. See Iliad IX.

  24. Evelyn-White, op. cit.

  25. S. H. Butcher translation (Aristotle, Poetics, New York, 1955).

  26. They are assumed to be eighth century.