The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Anacreon, the Teian singer, in a dream

  Saw and called to me. I ran and kissed him.

  I hugged him. He was old but still quite handsome

  And Love was working in him, the wine scented

  His lips. Since he was old, unstable on his pins,

  Eros clutched his hand and guided him.

  The poet lifted from his brows the garland

  And passed it to me, and it smelled of him.

  I was a foolish boy, I placed it on

  My own head as a crown, and ever since

  I’ve not lived a single moment without love.9

  The poems are artificial but not as artful as they might be. Some are metrically irregular or incorrect. Some use refrains that give them an inappropriate balladic feel. A refrain may come at the beginning of a stanza: “When I drink wine,” for example, followed by consequences.10 One poem starts and ends with the same couplet: “Grant me Homer’s lyre / Without the killing chord.”11 The wish to share Homer’s skills without participating in his brutal themes is repeated elsewhere. In one of the pleasantest conceits the poet says that he set out to recount heroic tales. But he can’t do it. He changes the string on his lyre. It’s no good. He changes the lyre itself, but all he can ever sing about is love.12 He asks Hephaistus to make him, rather than armour or a shield, a deep silver goblet, decorated not with gloomy galaxies and the mythology that shaped them but with grapes and vines and with Bacchantes gathering them in, a wine-press, laughing satyrs …13

  The Anacreontea is all about seizing the day and making the most of it; and that “most” has nothing to do with fighting or competing for gain; it has to do with creature pleasures, with living the present to the full, even when—especially when—that present is approaching twilight. The real Anacreon is a man of intense pleasures, but in moderation. The fictional poet knows less restraint and longs to lose his mind in drink as the heroes had lost theirs in passion. He must do so without weapons or battles. So passions themselves become disproportionate, the microcosm of a passion for a boy displaces everything else. Against Desires, the macrocosm hasn’t got a chance. This wry disproportionality reminds us less of John Donne’s than of the English Anacreon Robert Herrick’s verse.

  Now reigns the Rose, and now

  Th’ Arabian Dew besmears

  My uncontrollèd brow,

  And my retorted hairs.14

  Pseudo-Anacreon commissions paintings, first of a girl, then of his beloved Bathyllus. Bathyllus is quite detailed in what he wants depicted, including “a natural member already swelling with desire for the Paphian,” namely Venus and the arts of love. But he is disappointed that the artist cannot portray the backside of his beloved. He concludes that in future the artist should model his Phoebus from Bathyllus and not vice versa.15

  Wine, women, boys, song: many elements of Anacreon are there in pseudo-Anacreon, but in the wrong proportions, with the wrong inflections. The true poet is more various in tone and subject-matter than his shadow; his poems go deeper into language and experience than the imitations do. Gilbert Murray finds the very artificiality of the imitations at odds with the quality of the original. “The dialect, the treatment of Eros as a frivolous fat boy, the personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are marks of a later age … Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can understand him, and he ripples into music. But the false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon … Very likely our whole conception of the man would be higher, were it not for the incessant imitations which have fixed him as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian.”16

  There is something delightfully contrary about Anacreon’s imagination as it emerges from the fragments that are preserved. (Pseudo-Anacreon was better served by time.) He provides a corrective to the love poetry that has preceded his. If we contrast his poetry with that of Sappho, with whom salacious legend links his name, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a poet who will not let even the deepest of feelings destroy the balance of his expression. Legend hurled poor Sappho, heart-broken when Phaon would not respond to her, off the Leukadian cliffs into the sea. Many a lover climbed the two thousand feet to bid the cruel world adieu. Sappho’s leap was a trope for unhappy love, until Anacreon turned its vertigo into a positive point of departure.17 His leap was a deliberate surrender to, not an escape from, passion, an act of affirmation rather than defeat. There are many ways to translate his famous fragment. Guy Davenport says,

  I climb the white cliff again

  To throw myself into the grey sea,

  Drunk with love again.18

  Barbara Hughes Fowler’s version is different: no “grey sea” or “white cliff” but a cliché “foaming wave” and a cliff whose name is retained to underline the Sapphic connection:

  Once again from high upon

  the Leukadian cliff I dive

  into the foaming wave,

  drunk with love.

  Davenport’s visual economy chips too much of the fragment, including its prosody, away. Fowler insists on linguistic context and completeness but has not quite seen the poem.

  The ways in which Anacreon builds his poetry into the very structure of the language is illustrated by a much-translated fragment about one of his actual or would-be lovers, Cleobulus. “I love Cleobulus, I am mad about Cleobulus, I gaze at Cleobulus.”19 The lines are quoted by the second-century grammarian Herodion to illustrate a figure of speech he calls polyptoton, in which one word, differently declined, is used, the effect depending entirely on the inflection. Translated into an uninflected language it is hard to snare the effect. David Mulroy has:

  Yes I am Cleobulus’ [Kleobulou] lover, [genitive]

  am mad for Cleobulus [Kleobuloi], [dative]

  ogle Cleobulus [Kleobulon] [accusative]

  Barbara Hughes Fowler successfully transposes the wit onto the prepositions:

  I’m in love with Kleoboulos.

  I’m mad for Kleoboulos.

  I’m agog at Kleoboulos.20

  Martin West is less successful because he does not go for syntactical variation:

  Cleobulus is who I love,

  Cleobulus I’m mad about,

  Cleobulus I ogle.

  In the move from Greek to English, West seems to insist rather than to vary.

  Another fragment in which the actual Greek form of words is the poem declares, “and the room in which he didn’t marry but was married.”21 Aman marries (active voice), a woman is married (passive voice), and if a man gets married it implies that he is effeminate. We can ask, when the poet prays to Dionysus that Cleobulus reciprocate (or accept) his love, if “accept” means “allow himself to be passive.” How obliquely can we read his subtleties?

  Quite obliquely, in some cases. His wonderful satire of Artemon,22 the rent-boy turned catamite, is uncharacteristically waspish. The first fragment tells of blonde Eurypyle’s infatuation with “that litter-rider Artemon.” The second, one of the longer fragments, is more circumstantial. Davenport’s version, despite its dated diction, is the best:

  Time was, he wore a tunic from a rummage sale,

  A barbarian kind of hat, knucklebones in his ears,

  And a cloak that used to be a rawhide shieldcase,

  Artemon the pimp who got rich selling the use

  Of bakers’ apprentices and teenaged nancy boys,

  Often seen in the stocks by his neck,

  or on the wheel, Or having the lash applied to his bleeding back,

  Or his beard and the hair on his head pulled out,

  And now he rides in a mule cart, wears golden earrings,

  Says he’s the son of Kylê, and carries an ivory parasol

  Like the women …23

  The economy here, as Bowra makes clear, is that the list of specific punishments tells the informed reader what specific crimes Artemon committed. The stocks were used to punish market fraud, the wheel for public incitement, scourging answered a
multitude of sins, and the pulling out of hair was for adultery or other sexual misdemeanours.24 Davenport is more specific in sexualising the nature of Artemon’s transgressions than other translators have been.

  Anacreon and sexual themes are never far apart. Few poets are so frank in expressing their desires, or so various in the objects of desire they choose, though it must be said that Anacreon’s libido targets the male more readily than the female, and boys rather than men. A number of vase painters portray Anacreon: he strums his lyre while young men dance about him.25 In one verse fragment, the poet calls for water, wine and garlands, “so I may enjoy further fisticuffs with love.”26 These words were preserved “with a portrait of Anacreon on a second-century AD mosaic at Autun.”27 His garlands consist of coriander and anise (a heady range of scents), myrtle, willow and naucratis. Also hyacinth, roses … Thus crowned, he would have resembled a hanging flower-basket.28

  Asked why he celebrates young boys rather than the gods, he replies, “Because they are my gods.”29 How young were the boys? Probably adolescent, their cheeks and chins not quite on the turn, only vaguely fuzzing up with beard. What did he want from these boys? Affection? Sexual satisfaction? How culpable, morally, are the occasions of his poems, how unexceptionable? Are these symbolic encounters or more? For what is unsaid in them has its own eloquence. There is a kind of relishing which suggests initiation rather than violation; he is drawn to boys who are discovering their own beauty, their magnetism. A vivid fragment tells how a mother imagines her son is safe at home; in fact he has escaped to “the hyacinth fields” and there encountered either the goddess of Love or Love itself: “you flitted down to where the people are, and many found their hearts change pace at you …”30 In another place, he evokes a fawn:

  Unweaned, almost new-born in fact, afraid,

  Abandoned in woods by its antlered

  Mother, that’s how he is, be gentle …31

  Love never takes him wholly by surprise because he is always on the lookout for it. Bowra calls Anacreon’s and Ibycus’ take on love “courtly.” This medievalising is not helpful, suggesting that each encounter is merely symbolic. Some clearly are. The poem in which Anacreon falls in love with, legend has it, Sappho, is wry and amused in a way true passion cannot be. The girl with the fancy sandals fancies someone else.

  Once more love with his golden curls

  Pitches his purple ball at me

  So I’ll play the age-old game with the lovely girl

  Who sports those curious sandals …

  She harks from the island of the handsome cities,

  Lesbos, and she finds my hair too white,

  And anyway, she’s gazing past me towards

  Another girl …32

  There is a beguiling theory that Eros’ ball preceded Eros’ arrow. Love was something unexpectedly tossed to you which you caught as a reflex and then couldn’t dispose of. Later, this was replaced by the bow and arrow, the sense that love begins with an unexpected, inextricable penetration.

  Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry VIII fell in love with the same woman, Anne Boleyn. Both Athenaeus and Aelian33 record how Anacreon and the tyrant Polycrates of Samos fell in love with the same Thracian lad, one Smerdies. Anacreon had come to Samos from Thrace, where boys wore their hair long. Did Polycrates cut off the boy’s hair in a spate of jealousy or to make him more Samian in aspect? Certainly Anacreon in several fragments laments the shearing of the lad, but being politic does not blame the tyrant but Smerdies himself for thus marring his charms.34 The contest for Smerdies’ locks is hyperbolic, suggesting (not insisting on) a struggle for Thrace itself, and Smerdies’ own loss of cultural identity.

  Was boy-love something Polycrates promoted at Samos and was Anacreon, who until that time seems to have chosen his imagery in a more heterosexual spirit—writing about fillies, for example—conforming to his patron’s proclivities in writing poems of intense desire and gentle contest? The second-century rhetorician Maximus of Tyre saw it the other way around: “… Anacreon made Polycrates more gentle to the Samians by mingling love with tyranny—the hair of Smerdies and Cleobulus, the beauty of Bathyllus, and Ionian song.”35

  Though he is profligate of loves, Anacreon is not profligate with language. There is a generally direct, colloquial quality to his diction, a precise economy of image. “Love’s dice, one is madness, one is frenzy.”36 “I am borne over hidden shoals.”37 “Once more bald-pate Alexis goes awooing.”38 Set beside the abundance of Apollonius, for example, where the sheer amount of language far outweighs the occasion, Anacreon’s thrift is exemplary. He “has left the formulaic style of the epic far behind him and chooses his words individually for their special merits.”39 A refusal to be solemn does not make him any less serious as a poet. Love is not something to be endured: it is to be played and boxed with, to be knocked down by, to be pondered in its aftermath.

  Charioteer, who glance up like a girl,

  You, boy, I am after you,

  But you’re not after me, you do not know

  You hold in your two fists the very reins of me.40

  The charioteer metaphor comes out of nowhere and brilliantly realises the passion. The would-be tamer becomes the wild steed, and the boy he would tame, in this strange reversal, is empowered by the man’s unexpressed love. Again the theme is one of control rather than loss of control. The wine must be carefully watered:

  Boy, come, bring a big bowl so that I

  May gulp and gulp and never pause for breath;

  Pour in for me ten ladlesful of water

  To temper five of wine, so that again,

  Without relinquishing my wits I can perform

  The bacchant and yet retain my self-possession.41

  Growing older and still unable to stop loving, the poet has to change gear, even change vehicle, in pursuit of love.

  Up to Olympus on light wings I’m soaring

  Looking for Love; for the boy

  Won’t condescend to share the joy of his youth with me.42

  He resorts to prayer, first to Dionysus: please make Cleobulus succumb to my blandishments.43 He even prays to the boy himself, a drink in one hand: “Come, dear boy, pledge your lean thighs to me …”44 This thing called love will not stop happening. “Again, like a smith with a huge mallet, / Love struck then dunked me in his icy current.”45 He falls ill, but as soon as he is better he tunes his lyre and greets his dear loves once more in song.46

  Plutarch declares, “Thus there’s only one real Love, that’s the love of boys: he does not ‘glisten with desire,’ as Anacreon describes the love of girls, nor doused with perfumes, ‘glowing’; when you see him he will be un-embellished …”47 A papyrus reflects on how delightful the old age of Anacreon and Socrates was. Old age without art is poor, but with art and language, love is available in all its variety, recurring with its ecstasies and its relaxations.

  Again I love again I do not love

  am mad again and am not mad again.48

  Pindar and his rival Bacchylides refer to poems in Anacreon’s manner as paideioi hymnoi (“hymns to boys”). The objects of praise were often young noblemen: the eroticism may sometimes have been conventional, without expectation of fulfilment. Whatever the case, he “strummed nightlong on his boy-loving lyre,” in the words of one epitaph doubtfully attributed to Simonides, in which the later poet shades the poet’s tomb with grape tendrils:

  May he forever be kept damp by your sweet dew,

  Less sweet than poems the old man breathed from tender lips.49

  Half a century divides Sappho and Alcaeus from Anacreon. The difference in the spirit of their verse could not be more marked. For Sappho and Alcaeus, sprung as they were from ruling families, a tyrant was a foe and the system of tyranny a misfortune. For Anacreon, the tyrant was patron. He made himself at home with various powerful persons: “Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and Echecrates the Aleuad in Thessaly.”50 The process that leads from aristocratic to democratic rule passes through the phase of
tyranny which dispossesses hereditary privilege and interests, and the protracted moment of tyranny fosters a kind of art quite different from that which flourishes before and after. As Lesky says, “The tone of the conversation, whether at the Samian or the Athenian court, must have been very different from that in Lesbos.”51

  The tone of the poetry, even when the themes are similar, is different too. The life of the symposium was different in scale and in balance from the court of the tyrant. A host is a very different character from a king, and a friend differs in kind from a patron, no matter how benign that patron is. In a court, “respect” is a prerequisite, the whims of the tyrant must be borne, questions of politics cannot arise in any but the most oblique or attenuated form. When Michael Grant describes Anacreon’s verse as intended for the symposium he archaises it. When he insists that the verse is strongly political in a conservative, Theognidean way, he most uncharacteristically misreads the context in which Anacreon wrote, from the moment he accepted the invitation of Polycrates to become a tyrant’s resident poet.

  I dislike it when, stretched out beside the full

  Wine crater among friends, a drinker talks

  Conflict, battle sorrow; but the man who mixes

  Muse-gifts and Aphrodite, remembering how the feast

  Is lovely, I love him.52

  Through Anacreon we enter a world of politeness, play, obliquity, irony. These terms are embodied in his spiritual patroness, Euphrosyne, whose name means “good cheer.” It is she whom Milton invokes in “L’Allegro.” “The peculiar charm of this mature Ionic art,” Lesky says, “consists in a singular union of opposites. The poet who hates all excess and maintains such a careful balance between love and indifference, between drunkenness and sobriety,53 is always master of his medium; yet the magic of his art lies in that gentle resignation which invests everything with an unconscious inevitability.”54 Athenaeus made the same point: Anacreon was sober when he wrote, an upright man feigning excess.55