The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  In antiquity, because he mentioned specific foods and wines with such relish and clearly enjoyed his mealtimes, he came to be regarded as a type for gluttony. Athenaeus comments on the number of specific wines Alcman names, and on how in Sparta at his time most wine was mulled, or “fired.”32 He also evokes “lettuce-cakes” (thridakiskai) and “pan-cakes” (kribanai, cakes shaped like breasts).33 There is bean porridge, white frumenty (boiled wheaten grains), honey; poppy-seed loaves, linseed and sesame loaves, and chrysocolla, a dish made with honey and linseed.34 We savour “Cydonian apples,” which are quinces or medlars, depending on the authority you choose.35 Spring, he says famously, is the season when things grow but a man cannot eat his fill. Athenaeus is bound to linger over Alcman’s eating habits in a work entitled Scholars at Dinner. He puts words in Alcman’s mouth: the tripod soon “will be filled with pea-soup, the sort that he, who eats everything that’s set before him, enjoys piping hot after the solstice: he eats nothing special [sweet confections?] but looks for everyday food like common people.”36 A man of the people, then, so that when Athenaeus speaks of the “seven couches and an equal number of tables fully laid,”37 we realise that this is not a symposium or the seat of privilege but one of the Spartan “messes” (in the military sense) where people ate together (though men and woman probably did not share mealtimes).

  He wrote, we are told, six books: choral poetry, lyric poetry and a mysterious scroll entitled the Diving Women. He was the first poet to “introduce the custom of reciting poetry in metres other than the hexameter.”38 If this was the case, he was a genuine radical, breaking the tyranny of Homer’s example. Arion may have been a student of his.

  The choral tradition should remind us that, in certain city-states, the poet was more than a marginal figure. Indeed, he had specific functions which were regarded as necessary to be performed, functions which included exhortation to virtue and to action, putting the law into succinct and memorable form, establishing rites of initiation and public ritual, celebrating the collective in the individual. Epitaphs, elegies, victory poems, verbal rewards and rebukes, too, were not optional extras but necessary affirmations.

  Alcman knew the matter of Homer’s poetry and may have known the poems themselves and the earlier Homeric Hymns, which share the sense of proemes with a number of his fragments. If Terpander developed music to go with Homeric recitation, Alcman would have heard it. He certainly alluded to the same subjects and legends as Homer and wrote some hexameters, though the direct echoes are so few as to be possibly fortuitous. Like Hesiod, he is a servant of the Muses. Bowra believes that he had a very concrete and literal belief in their presence; they were certainly (symbolically at least) of central importance for composition. The Muses, taken together, embody the complex of gracious skills that his choir needed in terms of language, accompaniment and movement. He seems undecided whether the Muses are daughters of the primal Uranus and Gea, Heaven and Earth, and hence almost on a par with the highest gods, or the daughters of Zeus. Perhaps what determined their nature was specific context.39 At one point he speaks of them as full of memory, but not mothered by her: Mousai Mnamosuna. Whether he was a believer or not, when he invokes a Muse’s assistance he does not command but entices and courts her. She delivers him new-minted songs.

  We cannot experience choral Alcman because the music is lost, the movements are forgotten, and time has so eroded the texts that all we have are scraps. Most of them have a lyric aspect. Alcman is in the traditional list of “the nine lyric poets,” a list which survives with the same names, though in different order, in two epigrams: Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides and Stesichorus.40 It is as a lyric poet that Goethe read and adapted him. Goethe’s most famous single lyric is a version of Alcman (“Über allen Gipfeln …”),41 the almost-perished Greek, who draws such a powerful and delicate spell in his three-millennia wake.

  If we take him at his word, his magic owes much to the natural world. He claims to know the tunes of all the birds, a conceit which puts him almost orphically in touch with nature. “Alcman invented the words and the tune, by listening to the partridges’ sharp cry.”42 The word Alcman uses for partridge is kakkabides, which we are told is the chukar partridge, whose cry transliterates as kakkabi. The word comes from the islands of the eastern Aegean (these partridges did not live on mainland Greece): such diction supports the view that Sparta imported Alcman from Asia Minor. The word for patridge-speak suggests rapid, rather harsh articulation. In the famous partheneion fragment, a girl admiring Hagesichora would like to praise her but is shy and “like an owl from a rafter, chatters emptily.”43 In another fragment a voice declares, “and I know the strains of all the birds.”44 The song of the choir is like “that of a swan on the waters of the Xanthus”: it is hard not to think of Leda.

  “And the peaks are asleep and the valleys, the headlands and the riverbeds, all the creeping creatures nourished by the damp black soil, the wild creatures that live on the mountains, the tribe of bees, and the large deep-dwelling creatures of the deep, turbulent sea; and the race of long-winged birds is sleeping.”45 We are so accustomed to his comparing birds and the girls of his chorus that we wonder: are these long-winged birds, asleep, not the girls? If they are, the poem moves from literal evocation into a kind of allegorical sense. Elsewhere, “The girls went their own ways when their chores were complete, like birds when the shadow of a hawk passes over.”46 The editor of the fragments refers us to Homer’s Nausicaa and her companions, fluttering away when they discover naked Odysseus on the shore. The editor also calls attention to the number of allusions to horses, especially those of Sparta’s Castor and Polydeuces, and Alcman has a talking horse, a relation of Xanthus, Achilles’ articulate steed.47

  He has, like Homer and Archilochus, an ability to see from above, looking down from the perspective of a circling bird or from a cliff top. Thus a mountain “blossoms” with forests;48 the sea “blossoms” with waves: bursts of trees, the breaking waters, foreshadowing the imagism of H.D.’s most famous poem, “Oread.”49

  Alcman, if we have identified him correctly, appears to have been a benign character, and the manner of his death, recounted by Aristotle in his History of Animals, seems unjustly gruesome. Lice, Aristotle says, are produced from the flesh; a little pusless lump appears and if you prick it lice come out. Too much moisture in the air creates this condition. This is how Alcman perished, infested with lice. Dissolute living was seen as a contributory factor.

  His tomb, Pausanias declares, was to the right of the temple of Sebrus in Sparta, close to the tombs of the slain sons of Hippocoön. It is as if he had been inserted into the first half of his most celebrated poem. Nearby was Helen’s sanctuary, and not far off the sanctuary of Heracles.50 History and legend are here interred together. Their site was plundered, ploughed over, erased. But out of the soil, out of the remote sands of Egypt, the poems are still audible and still accumulating. A Palatine Anthology epitaph survives: “Graceful Alcman, the swan, singer of wedding-hymns, a singing that did justice to the Muses, lies in this tomb; he delighted Sparta, and it was there that the Lydian, having cast his burden aside, departed to Hades.”51 The “burden” may have been slavery, from which his poetic skills released him.

  IX

  Mimnermus of Colophon (or Smyrna) (c. 630 BC)

  … You say there is no substance here,

  One great reality above:

  Back from that void I shrink in fear,

  And child-like hide myself in love:

  Show me what angels feel. Till then

  I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

  WILLIAM JOHNSON CORY (1823–1891)

  “Mimnermus in Church”

  The salt market of Dardania was called Stoboe or Stobi, says William Hazlitt in his Classical Gazetteer. It was a town of Pelagonia, in Paeonia, on the Erigonus River, near where it joins the Axius, between Gurbita and Antigonea. Despite this abundance of clues, it is still hard to find on a map. It
became a Macedonian administrative centre. In the fifth century ad, a wealthy man of Stobi called John, known today (if known at all) as Johannes Stobaeus, had a son. Attentive to the boy’s education, he compiled for him an anthology of extracts from poets and prose writers. It served as an aide-mémoire, giving the boy useful off-the-peg phrases and stanzas to enrich his conversation. It was also intended to edify him.

  Stobaeus garnered the extracts for his anthology (much of the poetry is fragmentary) from earlier anthologies. For centuries anthologies had been popular. They were enhanced, revised and copied, generation after generation. Meleager of Gadara in the first century AD compiled a famous, now-lost anthology, mainly of epigrams (in the extended sense of the term). It may have been a source for the tenth-century Palatine Anthology of Constantinus Cephalas, discovered seven hundred years later in the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. It contains work by 340 authors. Most famous of all is the Greek Anthology with material drawn from seventeen centuries of Greek poetry, starting in 700 BC and consisting of verse from earlier anthologies, inscriptions and other texts. It contains over six thousand epigrams.

  It is fortunate that Stobaeus’ anthology of elegies, our chief textual source for certain poets, survived. It was arranged in four books: a theme was stated, then the verse extracts, followed by passages from the prose writers, were assembled to illustrate it. Fragment 25 of Archilochus, who survives in part thanks to this collection, begins with the line “I lie tortured by desire,” which Stobaeus files under the heading, “Concerning the Vulgar Aphrodite Who Is the Reason for Procreation and About Desire for the Pleasures of the Flesh.” Stobaeus Junior must often have turned for solace and arousal to the cautionary poems in this section. There are other chapters: “That Marrying Is Not Good,” contrasted with “That Marriage is Most Fair.” Good husbandry and metaphysics also feature in this book of counsel and consolation.1 Stobaeus is the source of eight pieces of Archilochus, six of Simonides of Cos, five of Semonides of Amorgos, four of Phocylides, two each of Tyrtaeus, Solon and Sappho, one of Hipponax, Xenophanes, Callinus and Anacreon, and seven of Mimnermus.

  In the Middle Ages, Stobaeus’ anthology “was transmitted in two separate parts of two books each (Eclogae and Florilegium).”2 The texts are much corrupted, copied from centuries of copying, and then recopied for centuries. The distortions are not quite so rapid as Chinese Whispers, but they may be as extreme, especially in terms of the original forms. In the absence of authoritative manuscripts, educated conjecture is the only judge. All the same, Stobaeus’ book is a necropolis in which we can glimpse some very important, very faded ghosts, including that of Mimnermus of Colophon, from the second half of the seventh century BC.3

  He was not, it is believed, a prolific poet. His entire oeuvre may have been accommodated on a single papyrus scroll at the great library in Alexandria. The title Nanno may have covered the elegies, both erotic and those intended for the soberer moments of the symposium, and the Smyrneis was a long, historical elegy. He was perhaps an auletes, or oboe-player, himself.4

  For Callimachus, Mimnermus was an innovator, one of the first to compose love elegies. The Alexandrian poet-librarian celebrates his Ionian forebear in the prologue to Aetia, passages of which survive, including the mysterious broken lines which Trypanis translates, “… and not the Large Woman taught that Mimnermus is a delightful poet …” Mimnermus and the much later poet Philetas of Cos seemed to license Callimachus to concentrate upon the shorter poem, to dignify it in such a way as to make it possible for a poet not to feel compelled to embark upon the extended work, the epic or historical narrative. It may be, too, that Callimachus found in Mimnermus an instance of that allusiveness to earlier poems that appeals to settled and to colonial literary cultures; the act of reading one text is enhanced if that text is itself reading and redeploying recognisable elements from a dozen earlier texts. This seems to be the spirit in which Mimnermus is glancingly mentioned in the shards of Callimachus’ Iambus 203 that survive.

  He may have taken pleasure in some of the Mimnermean conceits, which are themselves rooted in myth and legend. For example, he knew that the sun travelled back in a cup of sorts from when it set in the west to when it rose again in the east, and alluded to this in fragment 12, “telling how he is borne over the water in a winged, golden vessel, made by Hephaistus, from the Hesperides to the land of the Aethiopians, where his horses and chariot await him.”5 The conceit taken up by Stesichorus is that Heracles could travel back in the cup or on the couch when it returned empty to its starting point.

  It is tempting to draw analogies between Callimachus’ take on Mimnermus and Modernist practice. Pindar, too, may have found suggestions in Mimnermus’ shorter narratives, and among the Latin poets Propertius declared that in love Mimnermus is of greater worth than Homer.6 He is one of those poets whose reputations we must take on trust because so little of his work remains in textual form, though it helped to shape the imaginations of others. Trypanis dubs him “the first hedonist in Western literature.” In his verse he explored both sexual and intertextual pleasures, and like no other poet reflected on the horror of growing old, the horror consisting not in the death of sexual desire but in the end of sexual desirability:

  … Old age then arrives and with it

  Pain, and transformation to repulsive, foul,

  And the heart galled by malignancies:

  He takes no joy in the brightness of the sun

  Now, and boys revile him, women loathe:

  This is what God devised for long survivors.7

  How short are the days of youth, how long the years of unfulfilment. The fruit ripens and as suddenly is rotten. There are two ends in view, a long and horrible old age, or death, and death is preferable. Yet to die poor, to die childless, to die sick … One is not far from the anxieties and regrets of Hesiod in some of the verse, though there is a noble elevation in Mimnermus which the callused Boeotian poet does not possess.

  Much of the sensual particularity is gone from the fragments that remain, as though they have been washed and tidied. But he is not entirely bleached out: “One might object that there is a grotesqueness in the description of erotic sweat which is out of place in a reflective elegy of the seventh century.”8 For a poet steeped in Homer, as his excellent modern editor Archibald Allen knows Mimnermus to be, this seems a censorious view to take. Lovers do sweat, it is part of the experience and even of the pleasure of love, and until poetry moves off from the body into the language of amorous conceit, it is not unwholesome that the literal smell and texture of love should find its way into the verbal celebration of the act. David Mulroy translates fragment 5,

  Sweat drenches my skin and I start to tremble

  when I see adolescence in bloom,

  pleasant and fair as it is, since I wish it were more,

  but precious youth is like

  a fleeting dream and hideous age, its destroyer,

  hovers overhead from the first;

  hateful, worthless, it stupefies the man it envelops,

  blurring his eyes and mind.9

  There is a textual problem here. The first six lines of this poem appear as a poem in themselves in the Theognidean Anthology (poems gathered under Theognis’ name as a flag of convenience for transmission). Lines four to eight are preserved in Stobaeus with Mimnermus’ name attached. Editors bring the two texts together into one satisfactory poem, arguably greater than the sum of its parts and either a restoration or a suggestive fabrication.

  Allen’s take on Mimnermus’ Eros may have something to do with Stobaeus. He preserved most of the fragments that survive,10 and it is he, after all, who got rid of the sweat and left us lamenting harsh old age without the occasion of lovely youth. This may be why we are inclined to see Mimnermus as rather deodorised, like Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra passed through the filter of Dryden’s couplets and turned into the marmoreal attitudes of All for Love: on a different scale, of course, but the effect may be similar. There are no remaining fra
gments where we see or touch the delectable auletes Nanno (was she delectable?), and the homosexual overtones are unspecific, unsweaty.

  We must remember that Stobaeus made his selection according to certain educational and generic criteria. Our very sense of early elegy is conditioned by the works that survive, and the works that survive did so largely through anthologies with a pedagogic mission. We have a selective sense of elegy for this reason: we cannot know what the anthologists left out, where what seems a poem is actually a fragment, where what seems fragmentary is actually a poem, or where the attributions are wilful or suspect. In short, the anthology is a treacherous fossil ground because in the end the vertebrae that survive do not necessarily fit together into a credible skeleton. If all we had of the English eighteenth century was Palgrave’s saccharine selection, or the sole record of Tudor verse was Tottel’s amazing but narrowly based Miscellany, published in 1557 and the most popular book of its day, our take on our own past would be quite different and partial.

  Strabo and Athenaeus preserve a few more fragments of Mimnermus, lines and phrases from what must have been complex narrative verse, quite different from the material in Stobaeus. Had the sources he drew on discarded Mimnermus the narrative poet and mythographer, or did he regard that kind of poetry as inappropriate for his son’s education? Anthologies neglected occasional verse, too, whenever the occasion had vanished from view. Archilochus is said to have composed elegies on men who died at sea, but Stobaeus chiefly preserved the moralising passages. He also sometimes altered verses to make the sense more general.