The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  His poetry corresponded closely to the art of the period, and what is missing can be imagined, if not read, in other artefacts. When Pausanias describes the Chest of Cypselus and the Amyclean Throne, part of the matter is provided by Homer, but much more by Stesichorus: “it seems more likely that the artists drew on Stesichorus than that he drew on them.”40 There is, too, the famous Tabula Iliaca, a first-century AD Roman copy of an earlier piece by Theodorus based (the inscription says) on Stesichorus’ poem about the fall of Troy. It was found on the Appian Way at Bovillae and can now be viewed in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Narrative sculpture is most satisfactory when the text to which it answers survives. There are, Bowra insists, discrepancies between the carving and the missing text. All the same, not only was Stesichorus the authority the original sculptor followed; his copyist retained the attribution. If the inscription had not survived, we would be inclined to read the stone as Virgilian. The greatest Roman star borrowed its light from a lesser Greek star, which had also borrowed its light. It’s how poetry works; nothing need ever be quite lost, even when it passes out of memory.

  XVI

  Ibycus of Rhegion (fl. 560 BC)

  of Ibycus, who prayed to the birds

  STATIUS, Silvae1

  Polycrates came to power on the island of Samos around 540 BC, aided and abetted by his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, and ruled for the next decade or more, playing both ends against the middle (the Persians against the Egyptians, the Spartans against the Persians).2 He built up a substantial naval force and conquered several neighbouring islands. Samos established colonies, some as far away as Sicily. His combined policy of trade and piracy paid off for a time, though it earned him foes. At last Oroetes, the Persian satrap, lured him into captivity and, in 522, on the mainland opposite his magnificent island, crucified him.3

  Still, even in ruins his palace, Suetonius reports, made the emperor Caligula jealous. Herodotus says that three of the greatest human creations in the world were down to Polycrates: the aqueduct constructed by Eupalinos to bring fresh water to the city of Samos, the mole of the harbour there, and the unfinished temple of Hera, designed by leading architects of the day. Modern travellers can view the foundations of this giant temple on the island’s southern shore; it was intended to be 357 yards long and 57 yards wide. The cult of Hera was already well established on the island; his edifice was a massive acknowledgement to Zeus’s often-wronged spouse. “He also established,” Michael Grant says, “a brothel, based on those at Sardis in Lydia.”4

  When Polycrates’ father, Aeaces, was ruler, Ibycus came to Samos, perhaps as one of the tutors for the young tyrant-to-be. Anacreon was imported to tutor the boy in music. Ibycus may have been imported for similar reasons: he had invented the sambuke, “a kind of three-sided kithara.”5

  When he assumed power from his father, Polycrates rapidly developed and improved his land and retained at his brief, spectacular court both poets. He is reputed to have had the scattered songs of Homer brought together, edited, and an authoritative copy made for recitation. He patronised the jeweller Theodorus and, Herodotus adds, the noted physician Democedes. The king of Egypt told Polycrates he was simply too lucky: he should cast away something of value to guard against bad fortune. Polycrates threw away a precious ring. A few days later, Herodotus says, a fisherman presented him with a delectable fish, and in its belly the ring was found.

  A substantial papyrus fragment, attributed to Ibycus, promises to recall the sack of Troy, but ends with a passage praising the everlasting fame of Polycrates.6 This may refer to the tyrant before he came to power, because his immortality is inferred from his dazzling beauty rather than his might and the writing is eroticised. After Polycrates’ death, it is likely that Ibycus chose to leave Samos and the rule of Polycrates’ embittered brother. He and Anacreon departed around 522 BC, Anacreon for Athens, Ibycus for home. He may have spent the last twenty years of his life in “the West.”

  He lived to be old. There was a statue of him, said to be by Praxiteles, now lost, showing him as elderly, bent and bearded.7 Plato’s Parmenides remembers a passage of Ibycus, also lost, about how, like an old horse put in the traces to run a chariot race, he trembles and shudders, knowing what it was like before: for against his will he is falling in love again.8 There is excitement and fear, the ingredients of love, and as man grows older, fear gradually outweighs excitement. Spring comes, in Cydonia the quinces and the vines flower in the maidens’ garden, growth is thick and urgent; for the poet at such times desire never sleeps but bursts upon him like a north wind alive with lightning and love, unbridled, unconsidering, driving him mad and grasping the very root of his heart.9

  There is something real about Ibycus’ passion, the way it takes a conceit and draws it deep into the body, until the poetry runs like sap in the veins of a tree. The nets of Cyprian Aphrodite are not to be eluded: young Love glances up from under downcast lids and the old heart is impaled on the gaze, helpless and hurt and grateful.10

  Before he was adopted by Samos, Ibycus belonged to Italy. After Polycrates, he returned to the place where he had been born around 590 BC, Rhegion (modern Reggio in Calabria), a town on the very toe of Italy, on the mainland side of the Straits of Messina, with Sicily a choppy ferry crossing away. He came of a well-established family. His father was Phytius,11 or the historian Polyzelus of Messene, or Cerdas, or Eelides.12 Polyzelus is the least likely candidate: there was no such vocation as “historian” per se in the sixth century BC. Cerdas may have been an invention of the comic poets. Phytius has the best claim, perhaps a leader of the party and class which ruled Rhegion until Anaxilas came to power in 494 BC. Some say Ibycus père was a celebrated Pythagorean legislator “and received divine honours after his death.”13 This may be as much an anachronism as “historian,” since Pythagoras didn’t leave Samos until Polycrates came to power. But so much concern with an uncertain pedigree indicates the esteem in which Ibycus was held. The poet’s sole Pythagorean statement is that the star of morning and the star of evening are one and the same. He is the first poet to make this connection.14 He may, though it seems farfetched, have been in line to become tyrant of Rhegion, but chose to leave instead, taking with him elements of the regional dialect, and it is because of this that the grammarians, fascinated by variation, have preserved so many of his and Stesichorus’ brief phrases.

  The Suda tells us something else about Ibycus: he was “most ardent in ephebic love,” or, in a more recent translation of the same passage, “He was completely crazed with love for boys.”15 Philodemus is censorious: “… Ibycus, Anacreon and the like debauched young men not by their songs but by their ideas.” Cicero saw Ibycus as “aflame with love,” based on rather more evidence than remains to us.16 There are moments of rapture, but it is gazing rather than embracing rapture:

  Euryalus, sprung from the grey-eyed Graces,

  Beloved of the lovely-coifed Seasons, you were

  Nursed by her of Cyprus and by

  Persuasion among abundant rose-buds.17

  It is not only rose-buds that abound in this Keatsian lushness: “myrtle, violet, goldenrod, apple-blossom, roses and tender bay-leaves.”18 And among the foliage and blossom, high up, “sit variegated dapple-throated wild drakes and hidden birds of purple hue and the wide-winged halcyons.”19

  Ibycus had a master, and that master was Stesichorus of Himera, who had taken the choral ode that Alcman perfected in Sparta and travelled west with it, to Himera in northern Sicily.20 There is no conclusive evidence that Ibycus ever met his master, though they were separated only by the Straits of Messina and half of the rugged island of Sicily. One story tells that when Ibycus went to Sicily, perhaps on his way to Himera, travelling from the landing at Catana (why did he not land at Zankle?), he had a carriage accident and crushed his hand “and for a long time he gave up his music, dedicating his lyre to Apollo.”21 The story is vague, and there is no licence for asserting that he was on his way to visit Stesichorus at the time. But the a
uthorship of one key work has been disputed between them (Simonides assigning the text to Stesichorus) and they are conveniently lumped together. Bowra seems to regard Ibycus as a kind of extension of Stesichorus, a living bit, as it were, since so much of Stesichorus is erased, and so much of what survives is inert with literature.

  Ibycus as disciple probably also composed long poems on mythological themes. The poems were assembled by later editors into seven books, and he was best known in antiquity for the erotic variations he played on mythological themes. His myth-clusters, like Stesichorus’, include tales associated with Heracles,22 Meleager, the Argonauts, Troy and the returnees from Troy. Deiphobus rivals Idomeneus for the love of irresistible Helen; Menelaus, intending to slay his estranged wife, drops his sword at her feet; Achilles marries Medea—in the Elysian fields.23 Inevitably Ibycus lingered over the rape of Ganymede, and is said to have written on the rape of Tithonus by the Dawn; he could not resist the beauty or the doleful death of Troilus. Endymion’s dalliance with the Moon, Talos as erastes of Rhadamanthus the Just and other charged intimacies brought his Muse alive. His editor David A. Campbell writes, “he played a part in what K. J. Dover calls ‘the homo-sexualisation of mythology.’”

  The earliest epinicean poetry is ascribed to Simonides, but perhaps (recent papyruses suggest) Ibycus precedes him.

  The remaining verse does not feel like choral writing. As is the case with Alcman, the fragments of Ibycus suggest a lyric poet whose themes would be more appropriate in the symposium than in the theatre or market-place: his paideioi hymnoi (“hymns to boys”). We can assume that the objects of erotic praise were generally young noblemen; the eroticism perhaps courtly and conventional rather than literal. From the little that exists, we gain a sense of much narrative activity, the production of short epyllia and maybe even of longer epics, though not of Stesichorean proportions, literary in character, light in texture, engaging all the senses.

  Whatever his relations with Stesichorus, no fragment survives that we can confidently assign to this first “Italian” period. He visited Syracuse and the fleeting descriptions of the area of Ortygia have a first-hand feel about them. The connection of Ortygia to the mainland by means of a man-made causeway was still recent.24 The connection of the fabled Fountain of Arethusa on the island of Ortygia with the equally fabled river Alpheus in Greece was earlier and strictly fabulous, but Ibycus evidently alluded to the legend that “the cup of Olympia” was thrown into the river Alpheus at Olympia and bobbed up to the surface in the Fountain of Arethusa, several hundred miles away.25

  Still, mention of those rivers inevitably puts us in mind of Orpheus, or in any event of the far-travelling head of Orpheus, and Ibycus was the first poet to mention the name of “famous Orpheus,” either in celebration or with satirical intent. What is curious is that the phrase survives uniquely and without context in the Roman grammarian Priscian’s Grammar, dating from the early sixth century AD, 1,200 years after Ibycus lived.

  Nothing in life became Ibycus so well as the leaving of it. He is best remembered for his death. Ibycus’ name may derive, the Suda tells us, from the Greek word for crane, and cranes play a crucial role in the story alluded to by Antipater of Sidon among others.26 As an old man, Ibycus was on his way to Corinth to a chariot race and a musical contest. Successful poets were not poor men in those days: they had patrons, and sometimes they received substantial awards for their performances in contests. The awards were presented in public and the poet had to carry them about his person. Bandits and pirates found such poets lucrative prey (we remember the young Dionysus, kidnapped by pirates in the Homeric Hymns, and Arion thrown overboard by pirates).27 Ibycus’ fate was equally colourful and miraculous.

  When he came ashore, proceeding energetically, venerable and resolute, he passed through a lonely place, the sacred grove of Neptune. A flock of cranes flew overhead and he blessed them as a good omen. He and they were both far from home and were seeking hospitality. Suddenly two robbers surprised him. He could wield a lyre but not a sword, and soon he was overpowered. Only the cranes, screaming in the sky, saw the dreadful deed that followed, the poet murdered and stripped of his wealth. He called on them to avenge him, and died. His body, despoiled and mutilated, was discovered and identified by a friend.

  The festival went ahead, and in the large theatre at Corinth a huge crowd, among which the bandits were numbered, assembled to hear the recitation and music. There was grief and anger at news of the death of Ibycus, and calls for vengeance. Even as the choruses performed, the flock of cranes flew over the theatre and the bandits in terror cried out, “Look! The cranes of Ibycus!” Having given themselves away, they were apprehended and dealt the justice they deserved. It is not quite certain what that justice was, but Ibycus having been a poet, it is to be hoped that it was harsh. Having done their duty, the cranes flew on to Africa.

  In the Palatine Anthology Ibycus enjoys a beautiful, anonymous epitaph:

  Of Rhegium I sing, at the toe of Italy, and its shallows,

  A city which tastes for ever the water of Sicily;

  Of Rhegium I sing because it fostered, beneath a leafy elm,

  Ibycus, lover of the lyre, of boys, after he’d

  Enjoyed sufficient pleasures. Rhegium banked

  Much ivy and laid a bed of white reeds on his tomb.28

  XVII

  Anacreon of Teos (and His Offspring, the Anacreontea of Alexandria)

  His poems are littered with the shorn locks of Smerdies and the bright gaze of Cleobulus and the graceful youth of Bathyllus. But even in such verses, you can see how moderate he is.

  MAXIMUS OF TYRE, Orations1

  “Anacreon is a poet whose fame and stature come from a collection of poems he did not write,” says Guy Davenport.2 There are in fact two Anacreons, a true and a false one, a poet who lived and an epigrammatic “Anon.” whose refinements are precious in both senses of the word. As luck would have it, the false Anacreon, much copied in the Middle Ages and first printed in Paris in 1554,3 is the one whose impact on European literature, right up to the nineteenth century, was decisive. A source for Ronsard, Herrick and other lyric poets, this “pseudo-Anacreon has been one of the most persistent and rich classical influences of them all. His tradition has been alive—is still very much alive—since the sixteenth century.”4

  The actual Anacreon was only properly identified two hundred years ago and, though a subtler and more complex poet than his doppelgänger, is displaced by him. Scholars at the great library in Alexandria, and the poets and poetasters who surrounded them, started the Anacreontic fashion, which tells us something about the poet who inspired it, just as the Homeric Hymns tell us something about Homer and his authority: his name conferred legitimacy on the work of lesser poets. Similarly, the much more imitable Anacreon legitimised the charming conceits of critics and scholars who imagined they might in their window-boxes plough the same furrow as the master whose work they chronicled and edited. It all began as a tribute to the poet.

  We can imagine Anacreontea symposia. Hellenic Greeks of the diaspora and, much later, after the world had been christened, Byzantine Greeks who were pagan recusants may have spent the occasional evening making Anacreontic verses, as the Japanese do haiku or the English play Consequences. In Alexandria, Athens, Constantinople and elsewhere such activity produced the sixty or so poems of the Anacreontea which survive, composed over a span of centuries and with varying degrees of skill. Thematically and formally it is one of the most complete “collections” to have come down to us. Modern critics find the poems insipid in comparison with the real thing, enervated exercises rather than primary works, and the poetry that derived its energies from them was at times diminished and artificial. Lesky is among the critics who blame the cuckoo, pseudo-Anacreon, for tumbling the actual chick from the nest.

  The Anacreontea abounds not in cuckoos but in conventionalised swallows. Pseudo-Anacreon curses one babbler for waking him out of a delicious erotic dream about the boy Bathyllus.
5 Another—perfumed—swallow he has enslaved and trained. It tells its story (many of the poems are allegorising anecdotes): it goes about doing Anacreon’s errands, more Ariel than Puck, stirring things up, carrying letters. “When he goes off to bed, I nap on the lyre itself,” the bird declares.6 Once the poet frees him, the swallow says he will stay willingly beside him: what the master does is too interesting to leave behind. The loveliest Anacreontea conceit explores the nature of the Loves or the Desires (Erotas) which obsess pseudo-Anacreon. The images of the nest and the cycles of nature which Desires transcend are cleverly exploited.

  Beloved swallow, every year

  You come, you weave a nest

  In Summer, then you’re off,

  Wintering near the Nile, or Memphis.

  In my heart Eros, not regarding seasons,

  Keeps weaving a nest, where one

  Longing is fledgling, another still in egg,

  A third just hatching; and the nest is loud

  With wide-beaked chicks all crying

  For food. The larger feed the baby Longings,

  And when they are mature there in my heart

  They themselves, in Eros’ nest, begin begetting.

  What am I to do, I am too weak

  To shout to silence this vast flock of Longings.7

  As well as swallows and images of old age, pseudo-Anacreon plays with computations: just how many lovers has the old rogue had? More than twice as many as Don Giovanni, if we are to believe one poem.8 Most of the pieces are uttered by an antique voice, and this agedness is inevitably a theme. He drinks too much, complains too much and is terribly conceited in expression. Give him a good metaphor and he’s off.

  The Anacreontea, in the form in which we have it, begins with a dream. The speaker concedes the fictionality of the sequence, a fact which early readers took to be a conceit in itself rather than a crucial signpost. In the dream, a man we imagine to be young and rather attractive (otherwise Anacreon’s ghost would not have spared him a second glance) declares: