THE FIRST POETS
Michael Schmidt
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About The First Poets
A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination.
Starting with the legendary Orpheus and the possibly mythical Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, ‘the dirty old man of poetry,’ to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses – the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of our cultural ancestors.
For Angel García Gómez
“fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles”
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About The First Poets
Map
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
I Orpheus of Thrace
II The Legend Poets
III Homer
IV The Homeric Apocrypha
V The Iliad and the Odyssey
VI Hesiod
VII Archilochus of Paros
VIII Alcman of Sardis
IX Mimnermus of Colophon
X Semonides of Amorgos
XI Alcaeus of Mytilene
XII Sappho of Eressus
XIII Theognis of Megara
XIV Solon of Athens
XV Stesichorus of Himera
XVI Ibycus of Rhegion
XVII Anacreon of Teos
XVIII Hipponax of Ephesus
XIX Simonides of Cos
XX Corinna of Tanagra
XXI Pindar of Thebes
XXII Bacchylides of Cos
XXIII Callimachus of Cyrene
XXIV Apollonius of Rhodes
XXV Theocritus of Syracuse
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About Michael Schmidt
Also by Michael Schmidt
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Preface
… that which hath receiv’d Approbation from so many, I have chosen not to omit. Certain or uncertain, be that upon the Credit of those whom I must follow; so far as keeps aloof from impossible and absurd, attested by ancient Writers from Books more ancient, I refuse not, as the due and proper subject of Story.
JOHN MILTON, The History of Britain
In “Mythistorema,” the Greek poet George Seferis recalls waking from a dream with “this marble head in my hands.” It is weighty, and he has no place to put it down. Its eyes are neither open nor closed. It is trying to speak but can say nothing. The bone of the cheeks is breaking through the skin. What was at first stone becomes flesh and bone. The poet has not asked for the burden and is not free to discard it.1
Things that inadvertently shape us draw upon structures, forms, legends, and myths that have their origin in ancient Mediterranean cultures. Our mother tongue may not be Greek, but—thanks to Rome’s adoption of the Hellenic spirit—we, too, inherit that fragmented legacy of ideas and figures, stories and histories that can be as real to us as our own more immediate past. Even its strangest elements rise out of the darkness almost with the force of memory.
When we listen to the verse phrases and whole poems that have made the hard journey through time, space and language, phrases and poems that Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Shelley, Pound, Rich and others may have heard at different times and in different ways, we are enthralled as much by what we cannot know as by what we hear. Though we are seldom certain that a text is accurate, though we cannot approach its sound, invent its musical accompaniment and ceremonial, join the general audience or the élite symposium, or affirm that something said is literally true, we do understand what is true in a sense, and in what sense it is true. Yet we must retain an awareness of the otherness of the cultures we are exploring.
This is a protestant book in a fundamental sense: it both affirms the importance of the Greek texts and believes in the possibility of English vernacular access to them. I concede that in academic terms, the scope of this book is unrealistically, perhaps improperly broad; no amateur can begin to master the accretion of two and a half millennia of patristics that by turns illuminate and obscure the core texts. The decline in the study of Greek in schools and universities has not been accompanied by a decline in critical and theoretical studies nor yet by a deliberate “opening out” of the subject. What was once a key discipline has become a series of specialisms.
The First Poets attempts an opening out. I have been beguiled by several modern scholars and wanted to follow them further than I could in an introductory book of this kind. I wanted to write a book that instructs and entertains, to suggest some of the theoretical and critical issues of the present and earlier ages, but primarily to honour ancient patterns of belief. I allow myself to err with the Alexandrians when it comes to telling about the poets’ lives, because the nature of Alexandrian “error” tells us about their culture and its priorities. If I had adhered to the strictures of modern historians and theorists, who insist that because we cannot prove them we should not credit the ancient tales nor believe in the ancient gods, I would not have begun to write these lives nor wished to read these poets.
The grands absents are the dramatic writers of the classical period. Their omission is intended to do two things: to release the poets whom they and their Athenian shadows have obscured, and to suggest that poetry and drama are generically distinct, despite the lessons one can learn from the other.
I am indebted to many individuals for support and help with The First Poets. The oldest debt I owe is to the late Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College when I was an undergraduate, who gave me texts (his own included) and encouraged my curiosity. I also had the privilege at Harvard of attending Robert Fitzgerald’s celebrated seminars on “The Epic,” which, though they were intended to take us up through Perse, concentrated with passion on Homer. Evelyn Schlag commented on this informal history as it was written, providing suggestions and references, and without her I could not have completed it. Colleagues at Carcanet Press and PN Review, Pamela Heaton and the late Joyce Nield in particular, encouraged me. At the John Rylands University Library Stella Halkyard has always provided a reassuring presence, advised and allowed me to consult the library’s astonishing holdings. To my wonderful editor at Orion, Maggie McKernan, to her indefatigable assistant, Kelly Falconer, and to Keith Egerton, proof-reader, my warmest thanks are due. Other friends and authors made suggestions which proved invaluable to me: Robert Wells, John Peck, and in particular Frederic Raphael, whose acute reading prevented some inaccuracies and many infelicities, though no responsibility for the concept or the shortcomings of this volume should attach to anyone but the author.
Introduction
Didymus the grammarian wrote four thousand books: I would pity him if he had merely read so many useless works. In some he investigates the birthplace of Homer, in others, the real mother of Aeneas, whether Anacreon was addicted more to lust or to liquor, whether Sappho was a prostitute, and other matters that you would forget if you ever knew them; and then people complain that life is short.
SENECA, Letter to Lucilius1
I MATERIALS
Didymus of Alexandria, who lived between 65 BC and AD 10, was nicknamed “Brass-Bowelled”2 because of his prodigious digestion of
intellectual matter. He was also called “Book-Forgetting”3 because he contradicted himself from book to book. The Roman writer Seneca, constructed as he was on a foundation of Greek culture, developed a dislike for literature’s parasites and for the secondary literature—the criticism, theorising and investigation—which men such as Didymus produced. Works of that kind interposed verbiage between a poem or play and the reader. So many of them, he tells his friend Lucilius, are simply irrelevant. Pedantry is a cuckoo in the nest: the poem is crowded out. Or it becomes a text, and the text a pretext for mere speculation. Such speculation—on language, prosody, historical context, audience and author—has a place, but only if the poetry is in place.
And little ancient Greek poetry is in place. None of the surviving bodies of work by named authors is whole or nearly whole; some writers are at best a scatter of phrases, preserved by grammarians, philologists and other Didymuses to illustrate a lexical point or for amusement, as in Athenaeus of Naucratis’ rambling Deipnosophistae (Scholars at Dinner or Learned Banquet). This is an inadvertent parody of pedantry, the apotheosis of the sybaritic symposium, imagined as stretching over a week of evenings. It is worthy of Laurence Sterne.4 Athenaeus quotes more than ten thousand lines of verse in it, many not preserved or attested elsewhere. Pace Seneca, we owe much, albeit few entire poems, to Brass-Bowelled and his nitpicking kin.
We owe a debt to the Egyptian desert as well. In the ruins of the Memphis Serapeum, near Cairo, in 1820 an earthen pot filled with papyrus scrolls was uncovered by local people. The texts, some of the earliest so far found, date from about the second century BC. The plundered scrolls and fragments were dispersed to libraries in Leyden (where important research in papyrology has been pursued), Rome, Dresden, Paris and London. In 1821 W.J. Bankes bought a roll containing Book XXIV of the Iliad, the first major literary papyrus that the desert yielded to scholarship. Decade by decade philological resources gathered in unprecedented quantities. The nineteenth century, a great classicist declared, belonged to epigraphy; the twentieth would see papyrology in the ascendant.5 The discoveries at Memphis, at Fayyum in 1877, Oxyrhynchus in 1906 and elsewhere supported his contention.
Without such papyri, we would have no Greek texts at all. By the middle of the fifth century BC, “all civilised people” wrote on papyrus scrolls.6 Papyrus was used centuries earlier than this and not only for making paper. “The papyrus, which grows in the marshes every year, the people of Egypt pull up,” says Herodotus, “cut the plant in two and, keeping the top part for other uses, take the lower, about a cubit in length, and eat or sell it. Whoever wants to get the most delicious results will put it in a sealed vessel and bake it until it glows.” He was fascinated with the uses of papyrus. “On alternate days the priests shave their bodies all over, so no lice or other vermin attach to them while they are dedicated to serving the gods. They dress in linen exclusively, and their footwear is made of the papyrus. No other materials are permitted.” Their lives were privileged in the Egyptian heat: “They bathe two times a day and two times a night in cold water …” Papyrus was used to caulk the seams of Nile boats, and their sails were made of papyrus. Xerxes was not alone in employing papyrus and flax cables to suspend bridges, consulting his Phoenician and Egyptian engineers.7
However, had papyrus not existed, we might have had even more Greek literature to read than we actually do. Some of the earliest whispers of Greek verse are preserved on pots, for example a cup manufactured in Rhodes but excavated from a grave on Ischia, in the Bay of Naples.8 The tablets on which the scribes of Sumeria set down their accounts, laws, legends and literature have lasted much longer and rather better than Greek texts: nine epics (including Gilgamesh) survive in part, the events dating from the fourth and early third millennia BC: myths of origin, not least a Paradise and a Flood story, dating from the eighteenth century BC; hymns, poems of religious and secular praise; laments and elegies for the destruction of cities such as Ur, Nippur, Agade and the land of Sumer; aphoristic statements, proverbs, fables and other didactic material. The Sumerian is the earliest hoard of written literature that we have, and it is notable for its accomplishment. We can contrast Hammurabi’s Code with the Biblical articulation of Mosaic law and appreciate the subtlety of the first. The Code was inscribed on a block of black diorite well over two metres in height and set up in Babylon for all to see.9
My words are well considered; there is no wisdom like mine. By the command of Shamash, the great judge of heaven and earth, let righteousness go forth in the land: by the order of Marduk, my lord, let no destruction befall my monument. In E-Sagil, which I love, let my name be ever repeated; let the oppressed, who has a case at law, come and stand before this my image as king of righteousness; let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words: the inscription will explain his case to him; he will find out what is just, and his heart will be glad …10
The period of Hammurabi (1795–1750 BC), half a millennium before the war at Troy, was a high point for Babylonian culture. Over 500,000 Babylonian and related tablets were recorded as having survived in 1953. Thousands more have been discovered since.
God made man of clay; man makes tablets of clay. In 1929 in Syria a city of 1400 BC, Ugarit, was discovered, with a library containing tablets from the fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries BC. The language of Ugarit related to Biblical Hebrew and to Phoenician; the language of Canaan, perhaps. Many of the tablets are in poetic form, and their manner is close to that of Hebrew poetry, suggesting analogies with Old Testament passages, the Psalms in particular. Elements in Hesiod and in Homer, too, originate in Mesopotamia, whence they passed, via Phoenicia or some other route, to Asia Minor, the Greek islands and subsequently to Greece itself. Certainly Greek and Hellenistic astrology and astronomy are prefigured by Babylonian. Our evidence, given the relative poverty of Greek records and sustaining archaeology, is limited to the number of parallels in narrative and detail between texts, the hidden origins of the Greek religions—Orphic, Dionysian, and others—with their parallels too, and the archaeology of the texts. But we should bear in mind that their transmission and revision down the centuries may have blurred and excised crucial elements.
In ancient Egypt, the scribe was a trained official with religious and civic duties; it is unlikely that a common man, or indeed that most uncommon men, could read. In Babylon, all but the lowliest and even some of them were expected to write and read. In every city, a storehouse of tablets existed. “I had my joy in reading of inscriptions on stone from the time before the Flood,” said Ashurbanipal, last of the great Assyrian leaders (669–622 BC). An effective general, he was also a learned philologist; he built up a royal library in some respects as comprehensive as and more durable than the Alexandrian mouseion. His intellectual curiosity prompted the collecting and cataloguing of the contents. Substantial remains of his library were discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in Kuyunjik, Niniveh, in 1853. Some twenty thousand Kuyunjik cuneiform tablets ended up in the British Museum. “Writing,” proclaims one, “is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists.”
The period of the Trojan War had passed when Ashurbanipal flourished; the poems of Homer and Hesiod were already being recited and codified on parchment and papyrus. Archilochus was pursuing his wars and amours. Greek oral and literary culture was not unique. It participated in traditions that went far back in time, and drew their energies from other, no less inventive, cultures. Ashurbanipal represents the climax of one such cultural line: he sent scribes all over the known world to copy and translate into the Assyrian language and script every significant text that could be found. Knowledge was power; but for Ashurbanipal knowledge was also knowledge, a reward in itself.
The easier writing materials—papyrus in particular, but also parchment—were obviously more perishable than the tablets: we learn more from Niniveh about Babylonian and Assyrian culture than we can from most Greek and Roman sources about Greek culture.11 We cannot even chart precisely the streets of ancient Alexandria nor
plot on an archaeological map the foundations of the library and its subsidiary collection. Papyrus was a great enabler; it made the act of writing easier, with the introduction of a simplified alphabet and, given the grain of papyrus, the ability to vary letter-forms. It was inevitable that a scroll-making industry should develop and the literary arts spread far and wide. But when a palace or library burned down, clay tablets were baked into stone; papyrus and parchment burned, stoking the flames. We possess substantially more textual material from the millennia before the Greeks than from the Greek periods themselves.
The Greek word for a book, that is, a papyrus scroll or roll, is biblíon, the diminutive of biblos, “the inner bark or pith of the papyrus.”12 Hence, in the plural, we get ta biblia or “the books,” the library of scrolls which was, for the Jews, the Bible. St. Jerome referred to the Scriptures collectively as the bibliotheca, a collection of books, the source of the word for “library” in many languages. A volumen, in Latin, is a thing rolled up (from volvere), a volume; the Greek equivalent is kylindros13 (cylinder). To unroll a volumen is evolvere, which in Latin means “to read.” When the book is read, when the roll runs out, explicatus est liber; the things it has said to the reader are then explicit. For its part, the Latin word for book, liber, has a derivation similar to biblíon. Liber described the inner bark of a tree, bast or rind, from which writing material was derived, and from liber, of course, we derive library, libretto and other words.
Such etymologies are also aetiologies, taking us back to the starting points of the material culture of writing and textual transmission. The word for anything made of wood, for example a wooden tablet, is caudex or codex. Later it was used to refer to a wooden tablet coated with blackened wax on which a writer could draft a text, the pugillares (fistbooks, handbooks, from Latin pugillus, handful or fist) of poets, historians, astrologers and schoolchildren. In his Natural History Pliny says that these wooden tablets were used in Greece before Homer made his poems.14 His account is based on “an unreliable source,” Homer.15 He also claims that the first writing was done on palm leaves, then on tree bark, afterwards on sheets of lead for public documents, then sheets of linen or, again, pugillares for private documents. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid brings us up close to a woman writing on one of these slates, Biblis, granddaughter of the river Maeander, ravaged by desire for her own lovely brother Caunus and at last risking a love letter to him:
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