The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  We can hear the voice of a famous Athenian rhapsode, though he comes on the scene a century and a half later than Solon. His name is Ion, and he turns up in Athens like a peacock with its tail fully fanned. Plato in the Ion re-stages his conversation with Socrates.51 The philosopher begins, as is his wont, by disarming his interlocutor with a mixture of flattery and shrewd irony. “I often envy the profession of a rhapsode, Ion,” he says. “You have really nice clothes; you have the continual company of good poets, especially Homer; and you develop understanding to an unusual degree.” In fact, what Socrates establishes is how little understanding the rhapsode actually possesses as he enunciates, with stage feeling and received emphases, the greatest poem in Greek. “No man,” says Socrates, “can be a rhapsode who does not understand the meaning of the poet. For the rhapsode ought to interpret the mind of the poet to his hearers, but how can he interpret him well unless he knows what he means? All this is greatly to be envied.”

  In what follows Ion gradually reveals his vanity and his vacuity: “neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus, nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos, nor Glaucon, nor any one else who ever was, had as good ideas about Homer as I have, or as many.” He finds all poetry apart from Homer’s boring and insignificant. But, “you really ought to hear how exquisitely I render Homer. I think that the Homeridae should give me a golden crown.” Socrates demurs: “I shall take an opportunity of hearing your embellishments of him at some other time.” “Embellishments” are precisely what a living oral tradition is proof against.

  In the light of the Ion, we must distinguish between the rhapsode of the fifth century and the original carriers of the oral tradition through the archaic period, from whom the written texts were written down at Pisistratus’ command, so that authoritative versions would exist for the festivals, and so that, the text being in written form, it might be scrutinised and (when politics required) added to, enhanced. The memorising performer in Plato’s time is a diminished figure, compared with the Homeric “bard.” The bard improvised on existing stories, while the rhapsode recited from texts which he had memorised or carried up his sleeve on a scroll. The rhapsode recited music, drumming out the emphases with a staff; the bard performed—perhaps—with a lyre. In time the word detached itself from music, gaining precedence over its accompaniment and then displacing it.

  The writing-down of the Homeric poems was a risky process. In the life of Orpheus, we met with Onomacritos, the pious forger. Here, in the flickering life of Homer, he makes another appearance. Written texts in the age of the tyrant Solon were potent legitimisers. Solon, a poet himself, is reputed to have forged a line in the Iliad’s catalogue of ships to enforce Athens’ claim to Salamis.52 If a tyrant was a noted forger, it is not surprising that, among the subjects, we will find successful emulators.

  Onomacritos was a respected figure in the Athens of Pisistratus and his sons, an advisor to the tyrant, guardian of the oracles and texts of Bacis and Musaeus. One day Lasus, the son of a rival poet, apprehended him in the act of adding a line of “ancient prophesy” to one of the oracles.53 Pisistratus’ son, by then in power, had no choice but to expel his editor and counsellor from the city. After his departure, when the prophecies of Bacis and Musaeus failed to come true, people could blame the exiled interpolator. Onomacritos was probably among the first to write down, at the tyrant’s command, an “official” text of Homer’s poems, not for the general reader, who did not yet exist, but in order to hold and preserve the power of the poems, as it were to bring them under control, to make them ruly. After the text was established, there could be no radical deviations from the main lines of the narrative, no further interpolations. A rhapsode like Ion might embellish, but he could not otherwise distort the poems.

  If Onomacritos was more than an occasional and strategic forger, it is not impossible (though given the quality of the poems, it is implausible) that he “forged” the Iliad and the Odyssey out of legendary and other materials. Ignorance, or a desire to archaise and give the text an authenticating varnish, led him to mix dialects and to the other anachronisms. Such a supposition would accommodate, too, the theory that the poems originate in an oral tradition and elements in the surviving text relate to that tradition. One or two critics advance this theory, just as some critics assign the plays of Shakespeare to Bacon or Oxford or another “properly educated” contemporary of the Swan of Avon.

  When the stories that the poems of Homer tell were originally sung, Athens was nothing and the revival of what would become Greek culture was most energetic on the coast of Asia Minor and the eastern islands. In about 1200 BC, a period of Greek history ended and what most historians describe as “a dark age” (because there is so little evidence of what was going on at the time) followed. In the ninth century BC, the curtain begins to rise once more, though what existed on the other, previous side of the darkness was hard to make out. The Greeks had to re-learn how to write (there was, despite what Herodotus says, writing from the period 1600–1200, none from 1200 to 900 BC).

  The Phoenicians who accompanied Cadmus … introduced into Greece on their arrival a range of arts, among them that of writing, of which the Greeks until then, I believe, were ignorant. Originally they made their letters just like the Phoenicians, but in time, they altered their language, and the form of their letters … I myself saw Cadmeian characters engraved upon some tripods in the temple of Apollo Ismenias in Boeotian Thebes … One of the tripods has this inscription: “Amphitryon, coming from the far Teleboans, placed me here.” This would be about the age of Laius, the son of Labdacus, the son of Polydorus, the son of Cadmus. Another of the tripods has this hexameter legend: “I was offered by the boxer Scaeus to far-shooting54 Apollo / When thanks to Phoebus he won at the games.” It is a lovely offering. Perhaps this is Scaeus, Hippocoon’s son; the tripod, if he dedicated it and not another with the same name, belongs to the period of Oedipus, son of Laius.55

  A simplified alphabet, with fewer letters and easier forms, evolved in Ionia out of Phoenician practice. Here began the long process towards general literacy. In time a reading and writing culture emerged, without a clear moment in time when we can say that the oral tradition had been decisively displaced by the writing habit. The demand for written material had to grow, inevitably; the city-states had to develop; the need for numbers and accounts, and for written laws and liturgies, made a gradual highway for literature.

  Most of the surviving writing of the crucial period, where we can say a culture found definition, emanates from Athens, either because it was written or it was recorded there. Lionel Casson believes the Homeric poems were not set down in writing until a good two centuries after the new alphabet was current, “and then only to stabilise the text, not to serve readers.”56 By 500 BC, however, Homer and other poets were probably being read, not merely heard in performance. There is evidence to be found on the Greek vases. Schools developed primarily for boys, but pottery paintings show women reading and singing from scrolls, so some girls too did learn and engage in the arts of recitation.

  Early in the fifth century BC, authors began to write down as well as to perform their work (though “to publish” retained its meaning of “to make public in performance”). This stimulated the growth of prose and prose reading. In his plays, Aristophanes, in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC, could make jokes that assumed quite general literacy, books and their availability.57

  The changes that occurred between the Trojan War, around 1200 BC, and “Homer,” four or five centuries later, were momentous. There is also a yawning gap between “Homer’s” time and the age of Pisistratus. When we consider Homer as a poet we must bear three time-frames in mind: that of the initial Trojan action, that of the early recitations and the formulation of the narrative in the oral tradition, and finally that of the writing-down of the text. These three frames correspond to different cultural phases, the first being a Greek pre-history accessible if at all through archaeology, the second being the period of Greek expansion and trade
and the renewal of contact between mainland Greece, the islands, and Asia Minor, and the third being the well-recorded period of the tyranny of Pisistratus after his friend Solon’s archonate. Each phase makes a different kind of contribution to the poetry and to the “poet” Homer.

  More fragments of Homer survive among the Egyptian literary papyruses so far discovered than of all other literary papyruses combined.58 What is remarkable is the closeness with which they agree, as though the stabilisation of the text actually worked, affecting the way the poems were transmitted in manuscript throughout the Greek world. Accuracy had an authority; the poems were transmitted with the rigour that we would normally associate with the transmission of scripture.

  And this too tells us something of the place the poems held in the classical and then the Hellenistic period. They provided the common culture so that a man of Agatha, beyond Liguria on what is now the French coast, of Alalia in Corsica, Neapolis in Italy, Naxos in Sicily, Kyrene in North Africa, Knossos on Rhodes, Paphos on Cyprus, Ephesus, Chios, Corinth and Athens, not to mention the cities around the Black Sea, had a cultural lingua franca whatever the differences in their dialects. The poems were, in a sense, what kept the Greek from becoming a mere barbarian. And because it was poetry, it meant that those who practised the art of poetry were judged against the best and—if their work had merit—honoured and rewarded: a pension for Simonides of Cos; an invitation to honoured Anacreon to come to Athens.

  The question of the place of writing in Homeric composition, as opposed to transmission, divides scholars. Some insist that the poems were largely taken down from dictation and were in a basic sense oral in conception; others, who concede that there is traditional material in the poems, formulae and the like, believe that the poems were written, adducing the remarkable integration of the material, especially in the Iliad, and suggesting that such close working would not have been possible or even desirable in an oral composition. If we contrast the poetry of Homer with that of Hesiod, as Martin West observes, we sense immediately that the poems attributed to Hesiod were written down, even though the texture is less complex—they have that literary feel; the narrator projects a more or less coherent and consistent “self;” stylistic irony and other devices reify a text. The Homeric poems lack this sense of artifice focussed in a self-aware “I.” They are not spoken, they speak.

  The written text became a battlefield for editors and critics: what truly belonged, what was forged, what was embellishment? Different kinds of exegesis were practised, moral, cultural and political. In the sixth and subsequent centuries, systematic approaches evolved, in particular allegorical reading, which began with Theagenes of Rhegion, one of the first critics to write extensively about Homer (his great work has perished). He claimed that the gods personified irresistible phenomena of nature, their arguments elemental conflicts. Allegorising patristics evolved through the fifth-century biographer and political writer Stesimbrotus of Thasos (who wrote in Athens), Crates of Mallos (librarian of Pergamum and leader of the Pergamene school in the second century) and persisted until the time of the poet-critic Tzetzes in the twelfth century AD.

  Several scholars at the library in Alexandria devoted themselves to Homer. Zenodotus of Ephesus, Ptolemy’s first librarian, early in the third century BC, was the first “scientific” editor of Homer, comparing and collating different manuscripts and making reasoned choices between alternative readings. Zenodotus also edited Hesiod’s Theogony on the same principles. Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–180), who was like Zenodotus head of the library (did chief librarians take credit for the work of their lieutenants, or did they in fact, in the first person, unroll and re-roll the long Homeric scrolls?), regularised the writing of Greek accents (indeed he may have invented the notation) and devised marks to indicate suspect or extraordinary passages (later additions, quotations, etc.). Aristarchus of Samothrace (217–145 BC), who was both a chief Alexandrian librarian and a thoroughgoing scientific editor, followed Zenodotus in applying rigorous comparative standards to Homer and Hesiod, and also to Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar, creating “standard editions” with commentaries. Fragments of his commentaries on Homer survive.

  The Alexandrian editors would have had to collate scrolls from different cities and versions bearing the “names” of different owners who might themselves have added or subtracted matter, following in Solon’s inventive wake. Versions from a specific city might have included interpolations celebrating that city. Aristarchus deleted lines he believed after careful consideration to be spurious; but where his doubts were not overwhelming he merely marked with “a horizontal stroke as a critical sign (obelos).”59

  IV

  The Homeric Apocrypha

  … And through the tortoise’s hard stony skin

  At proper distances small holes he made,

  And fastened the cut stems of reeds within,

  And with a piece of leather overlaid

  The open space and fixed the cubits in,

  Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched o’er all

  Symphonious cords to sheep-gut rhythmical.

  “Hymn to Hermes,”

  translated by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  A modern Aristarchus applies the obelos to the Homeric poems now regarded as apocryphal, spurious, falsely assigned; yet their original attribution to him tells us something about Homer’s audience and his place in ancient culture. They illuminate, by imitation, parody or shadowy allusion, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The lost epic cycle which grew around those poems is dealt with in the next chapter. Here we look briefly at the celebrated Homeric Hymns, the almost vanished Margites and Kerkopes, the epigrams and the Batrachomyomachia. Most, it would appear, are assigned to Homer because of the Homeric metre used, the diction, and the relatively early date. None of them appears to be even an oblique product of the oral tradition, though each was composed within earshot of the Iliad and Odyssey and intended for individual or choral recitation. A poet might borrow the authority of Homer, pretending his work was by the master. Though he thus forfeited his claim to celebrity and copyright, he was a true poet in that he wanted, above all, his poem to be taken seriously.

  The Homeric Hymns, read in the wake of the Iliad and Odyssey, are diverse and uneven. Some seem contrived and literary, others mere fragments. Did the short ones lead into longer epic narrations? Thucydides calls the “Hymn to Apollo” a prooimion, a prologue or overture. Were they preludes, invocations, the remains of the dithyrambs that introduced the festival occasions of Tragedy and Comedy? The most memorable are narratives in their own right, less hymns than forerunners of what would become—at a later date—the epyllion, or miniature epic.

  There are thirty-three hymns, if we agree to divide the “Hymn to Apollo” in two, part dedicated to the Delian, part to the Pythian god; and there are scanty remains of a further hymn quoted in Diodorus. The poems were composed at different periods and places: it is unclear when they were brought together in their present form. “These hymns are wholly in the rhapsodic tradition, borrowing their language from Homer even to complete phrases,” Lesky says.1 They may have enabled a rhapsode, like Ion, to clear his throat before epic recitation. Even when their tone approaches lyric, the hymns are in hexameters. The use of epic strategies in non-heroic contexts yields new tonalities. In the “Hymn to Delian Apollo,” we see how festivals brought people together in celebration.

  When they take narrative form, the hymns concentrate upon the infancy, childhood and youth of the gods: used as preludes, they are also, appropriately, about beginnings. In this they presage the obsessive theme of the Alexandrian poets, the aetiologies of the Aetia of Callimachus, of Apollonius’ and Theocritus’ verse. They are also about change, sometimes the extreme change of metamorphosis, as in “Dionysus II.” The Greek word hymnos means a song, speech or poem that celebrates gods or heroes.

  The first hymn2 is fragmentary, dedicated to Dionysus. In lines 13–15 it quotes directly from the Iliad, Book I, 528–30. The Iliad lines
are so powerful—Zeus nodding acquiescence to Thetis’ demands—that anyone familiar with the epic will hear the echo and wonder whether it is appropriate to plant so large and famous a gem in so modest a setting.

  The second hymn, “Demeter I,” tells of the rape of Persephone and, in due course, the origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The particularity of detail is Homeric, the close-up and unsentimental treatment of feelings and responses to extreme actions. Probably from the late seventh century BC, it is one of the earliest hymns. Pluto (unnamed because it is bad luck to name the god of the underworld) carries Persephone away in his chariot. The over-abundance of adjectives, the sense that everything is posed for meaning, the flow certainly ceremonial if not arrested make for stiffness, a sense of deliberate composition, even of composition to a critical prescription, namely to yield allegorical meanings. However, the metamorphosis of Demeter from an old crone nursing the baby to the goddess herself is dazzling (ll. 275–84).