The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  Peter Levi favours a late date for Corinna, arguing from the evidence of the poems. She writes in a period when local mythology had been systematised (fourth century) “and the personification of mountains as amiable savages which occurs only on late nymph reliefs” was accepted.12 For Edgar Lobel, she is a Hellenistic poet affecting an archaic style. He judges this from the orthography, and the victory over Pindar he regards as fantastic and anachronistic. Had it occurred, there would surely have been accounts of it from the fifth century, yet the first surviving account dates from virtually half a millennium later.

  Corinna’s most famous fragments were discovered on a papyrus from the second century AD. The first, judging from the concluding passages, which are all that remain, told of a singing contest. In the Boeotian corner was the underdog, Mount Cithaeron, famous not only for separating Boeotia from Megaria and Attica, but as the place where Actaeon was hounded to death, where Pentheus perished, and where the infant Oedipus was exposed and left to die. Opposite Cithaeron is ranged the favourite, Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, who taught Hesiod to sing. We do not hear even a fragment of Helicon’s song, but Cithaeron is delivering the closing lines of his account of how baby Zeus, concealed in a Cretan cave, survived the murderous wrath of father Cronus. Immediately the song is over, the Muses as returning officers require the gods to choose between the rival singing mountains. Hermes declares Cithaeron victor, a cry goes up, and Helicon, enraged, heaves up a huge smooth boulder and hurls it down. It bursts into pebbles, like the pebbles the gods used to cast their votes in the contest.

  In two reliefs, Levi says, higher mountains peek over the rims of lower mountains and we see Helicon as a “shock-haired giant peeping over the mountain top”13 on a third-century votive tablet. Disputes between mountains were apparently not uncommon in later Greek folk-song and verse right down to the nineteenth century. Corinna’s contest, with the underdog victorious, is a paradigm for the contest between herself and Pindar: plain provincial simplicity pitted against the elaborated strains and the stilted diction of cosmopolitan convention.

  The second major fragment is about a father and his nine daughters. The river Asopus, a god in the same way mountains are, by means of personification, rises in Mount Cithaeron near Plataea, passes through or near several towns and cities named after his daughters, then feeds into the long, narrow gulf of Euripus, near Oropus. All nine of his daughters have vanished. A human seer, Acraephen, reassures him. Don’t fret, he says, they have been kidnapped and you are in luck, because the kidnappers are divine: Zeus has three, Apollo three, Poseidon two and Hermes one. (Hermes had Tanagra herself.) The gods, spurred on by Venus and Cupid, sneaked into your house and removed them. All will be famous: they will breed, and thanks to the divine stud farm, “a race of heroic demigods” will result, “and shall dwell in faraway places.”14 Acraephen then spends some time giving his own credentials. He is “the best of my fifty valiant / brothers,” all sons of Orion. He and his progeny make an appearance in other fragments, for he was a Tanagran, and he reclaimed the land and cleared the wild beasts from it.15

  Reflecting on the history of prophecy, Acraephen claims that he has been endowed by Apollo with skills and instincts first visited upon Euonymus, then on Poseidon’s son Hyrieus. He was himself divine and is now starry Orion’s most distinguished son. Corinna’s seer speaks some haunting and memorable words, an Orphic echo perhaps: “Your part is to yield to the gods, / freeing your mind from grief.” Asopus grasps him by the right hand and responds with a gratitude that disintegrates with the papyrus into a stutter of unconnectable phrases.

  It may well be that “Corinna’s style was simple, like Bacchylides.”16 But the critic who declares that she drew parallels between the world of mythology and ordinary human behaviour stretches a point. There is nothing ordinary about her gods, be they mountains or rivers; and the petulance of Mount Helicon, the easy consolation of Asopus for his nine raped daughters, suggest the great distance between the divine, mythological sphere and the human.

  In total, about forty fragments survive, Asopus being the longest, with some fifty mauled lines. Even though there is so little, Corinna is second in quantity only to Sappho among women writers. Several critics wishfully insist that she “wrote for women.” She declares this intention, but her writing is not exclusively for them. Some verse she composed for choral use at religious festivals; beyond that we can affirm little to support a feminist reading. She deploys local topography, plays variations on familiar legends, and develops a way of writing which can be seen either as subtly combining dialect with a “high style” or as bastardising the high style with Boeotian elements. Her work relates inevitably to Homer’s, and also to Sappho’s “Aeolic forms.” Her effects are not, as earlier critics declared, “naturalistic” but highly artificial.

  Not all women readers like her. The classicist Sarah Rudden finds the conventions in which Corinna writes risible. “I don’t think she even deserves the dignified treatment she gets. She tells, for example, of two mountains having a singing contest and then a fight, with one of them heaving chunks of himself at the other … as in a comic animation sequence.” This over-reads: Helicon’s frustration is that of an angry, not an aggressive, child. Rudden continues: “it would probably be impractical to represent Corinna’s grandiose bad taste with appropriate language.”17 A harsh verdict: Corinna is read only because she is female. This won’t quite do.

  In the first place there are unusual moments not only in the diction of Corinna’s poems but in the wider terms of expression. If there is something comical about a pair of mountains having a poetry contest judged by the gods themselves, is it impossible that the conceit was humorous in intent? To have so large an object as Mount Helicon throwing an infantile tantrum is a classic reductio ad absurdum, the “defeat” robbing that most poetic mountain of any poetic dignity, and leaving Corinna’s favoured mountain to inherit all that Helicon has shed. There is a kind of psychology at work in the poem as in Asopus’ consolation, that inheres less in the characters than in the nature of the incident, which is rendered emblematic. If we had more of the poem to consider, we might ask whether it parodied the apocryphal contest between Hesiod and Homer, not least because Hesiod’s mountain is bested.

  Though only fragments of two of her story poems survive, she seems to have been a maker of verse narratives. Her books bore the title Tales, and she may have been responsible for a Seven Against Thebes, of which three words survive. “… I, for my part, celebrate the distinctions of heroes and heroines,” she declares elsewhere.18 Though she comes from Hesiod’s neighbourhood, she is resolutely impersonal in her narratives. There are attributed voices, none defined as her own, none specifically female. This is, in a sense, what makes Corinna more a disciple of Homer than of Sappho: we come away from the thin evidence of her poems less with a sense of having met a handsome and brilliant woman than of having read some curious, rather beguiling poems, not without folk charm in the traditional elements deployed. In an age of increasing personalisation of poetry, Corinna’s work seems in a genre of its own: self-effacement, the foregrounding of plot, character and subject-matter, the use of dialogue and attributed speech, are skills we associate with dramatic rather than narrative writers—as we do the evidence of a frail psychology.

  XXI

  Pindar of Thebes (518–438 BC)1

  Lift not thy spear against the Muses’ bower:

  The great Emathian conqueror2 bid spare

  The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower

  Went to the ground: and the repeated air

  Of sad Electra’s Poet3 had the power

  To save th’ Athenian Walls from ruin bare.

  JOHN MILTON, “Captain or Colonel,

  or Knight at Arms” (sonnet)

  In a letter dated July 1752 Thomas Gray told his friend Horace Walpole that he planned to send for inclusion in Dodsley’s influential Miscellany his “The Progress of Poesy. A Pindaric Ode.” He describes it as
“a high Pindarick upon stilts, which one must be a better scholar than [Dodsley] is to understand a line of, and the very best scholars will understand only a little matter here and there.”4 That was one version of Pindar. Gray, like Goethe and Herder in Germany, mistook the irregular-seeming prosody of Pindar’s strict triads and viewed him, as Abraham Cowley had done a century before, as inspired and free-spirited. Dryden may have been responsible for encouraging the English to misread Pindar. “Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day” and “Alexander’s Feast” were “Pindaric” and his Pindar was (what the Greek Pindar certainly was not) a poet of enthusiasmos. Pindar is the most careful architect that poetry has ever had; English poets to whom he offered emancipation from regularity, even a Romantic licence, were bending him to their own ends.

  William Congreve in 1706 (prefacing his “Pindarique Ode to the Queen”) described most English Pindarics as “a bundle of rambling incoherent thoughts, expressed in a like parcel of irregular stanzas, which also consist of such another complication of disproportioned, uncertain and perplexed verse and rhymes.” He demonstrated the underlying regularity of Pindar’s odes, the triadic principle of composition. It was Pindar’s prosodic and intellectual exactness, his politeness, that drew him to the ode. Long before, it was the sense of his rigour that attracted Ben Jonson, the most classical poet of his age: for him Pindar was a superb verse builder, inventing complex extended forms and devising a flexible but monumental syntax to hold meaning in various kinds of poise and stillness. Poikilia, variety of style, the use of metaphors of all sorts, characterises Pindar: his language is an almost continuous string of metaphors. Jonson’s “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Carey, and Sir H. Morrison” is the first major English Pindaric poem, with “The Turne,” “Counter-turne” and “Stand” clearly marked. His Pindarics do not lack subjectivity, yet what interests us is not the poet’s voice but the poem’s thematic centredness, its air of legitimate authority. Rejecting the excesses of the stage in its decline, Jonson says in “Ode to Himself”:

  Leave things so prostitute,

  And take th’Alcaic lute;

  Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon’s lyre;

  Warm thee by Pindar’s fire:

  And though thy Nerves be shrunk, and blood be cold,

  Ere years have made thee old,

  Strike the disdainful heat

  Throughout, to their defeat:

  As curious fools, and envious of thy strain,

  May blushing swear, no palsy’s in thy brain.5

  The poem ends in flattery, in the way Pindar’s odes do. Before that inevitable note is struck, Jonson ventures as near to the complexity and purity of Pindarics as any English poet has done.

  Only a few decades later, in 1656, Cowley published his Pindarique Odes with a famous sentence in the introduction: “If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one mad-man had translated another.” C. H. Sisson reflected on the unaccountable fashion for Cowley’s versions, “with their pompous preciosity and their array of notes.” For him, Pindarics “consisted in the irregular number of syllables in the lines, producing, it may be supposed, the effect of surprise, if not astonishment, and a certain wilful lunacy in the sequence of thoughts.”6

  How mad would a “word for word” translation be? Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Pindar’s best friend among the great Romantics, decided to conduct an experiment. He read the opening of Pindar’s Olympian Ode II to a “company of sensible and well-educated women.” Next, he read Cowley’s inventive translation, and the women agreed that it was lunacy itself. Finally Coleridge translated the poem for them word for word. He reports: “the impression was that in the general movement of the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more nearly than any other poetry they had heard to the style of our bible in the prophetic books.” After describing some of Pindar’s strategies, he asks: “But are such rhetorical caprices con-demnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? And are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse save that of metre?” We find in Pindar what Coleridge, expressing himself in a dozen different ways, is always seeking in poetry: a language that achieves synthesis, “the juxtaposition and apparent [my italics] reconciliation of widely different and incompatible things.”7

  W. H. Auden believed that only one English poet who could be regarded as genuinely and deeply touched by Pindar was Gerard Manley Hopkins.8 Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges in 1882 about the rhythm of “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” which Bridges found redolent of Whitman. “No,” declares Hopkins, “but what it is like is the rhythm of Greek tragic choruses or of Pindar: which is pure sprung rhythm. And that has the same changes from point to point as this piece.” He insists that his poem must be read aloud. It is conceived for the ear and is intended, as Pindar’s poems are, for delivery to the ear. The text is, in effect, a score.9

  Most readers do not trouble themselves to consider how partial the written text of an ode by Pindar is. What of the vanished accompaniment of lyre (phormiges, lurai) and pipes (auloi), and the chorus either of singers or dancers or both, made up of men (andres) or youths (neoi) or boys (paides)? Pindar never in the odes alludes to their mode of delivery. Some may not have been choral: a single singer might have recited them. Some may never have been recited in fact, yet the conventions of composition presupposed actual public performance.

  Music pertains to the poems not only metaphorically: they are not “musical” but instances or aspects of music in themselves, conceived in their elaboration as focal elements in a larger ceremonial. Here poetry is ritualised to an unprecedented degree. “His massive sentence-structure,” says Lesky, “in which the heavy weight of ornament scarcely lets the framework be seen, his renunciation of antitheses and particles beloved of Greek authors in favour of a wilful violence in stringing together and interlacing his clauses, the weight which he places on the noun, so that the verb in contrast is little more than a colourless prop to the sentence, his wealth of images, aimed at the nature of the thing, not at its sensible properties, and mingling one with another with a headstrong recklessness—all these qualities went into Pindar’s creation of that ornate style which has characterised the ode right down to modern times.”10 Misreadings of Pindar have to do with his violence to linguistic expectation: to those who could not find a “framework” under the “weight of ornament,” the highly wrought language must seem wilful, subjective, extreme. But it is the extremity of art, not of personality, that makes the poems as they are.

  Ezra Pound had little time for him:11 “Pindar’s characteristic style: difficult, crabbed syntax; obscure transitions; very elevated diction; and elaborate, vivid metaphors and conceits.” “The prize wind-bag of all ages,” he called him, irritated particularly by the subservience of the verbs, and on the strength of his judgement the Anglophone Modernists, the Imagists and poets of a naturally Pindaric bent like Marianne Moore, were absolved from any necessity of reading him for themselves.12 The four books of epinicean odes survive “through direct manuscript tradition,” and had Imagism and the Modernists taken them on board—whole Greek poems rather than the fragments from which they learned their own lessons in fragmentation—the face of early modern poetry might have been, if not less austere, in any event differently so.13 The injustice of Pound’s judgement has to do with his failure to register that the written texts were themselves only a score, a core fragment of a larger artistic whole.

  The first recorded critic of Pindar is Corinna of Tanagra, who knew him, Plutarch says, in his apprentice years.14 She commented on the poverty of myth, which was “the proper business of poetry,” in his verse: he “supported his works with unusual words, strange usages, paraphrases, songs, and rhythms, which are just embellishments of the subject matter.”15 Thereupon, Pindar produced the hymn to Zeus, co
mposed for Thebes, that begins (in Richmond Lattimore’s translation):

  Shall it be Ismenos, or Melia of the golden distaff,

  or Kadmos, or the sacred generation of Sown Men,

  or Thebe of the dark blue veil,

  or the dare-all strength of Heracles,

  or the gracious cult of Dionysus,

  or the marriage of white-armed Harmonia? Which shall we sing.16

  She laughed at his efforts.17 By the time he came to write Paean XX he understood how to organise his material better. The new-born Heracles fights off the serpents sent by Hera. What makes the scene real is not how he throws off his elaborate, elaborated swaddling clothes, but how his mother, fresh from childbirth, leaps unrobed from her couch in fear, while her maids flee the chamber.18 Pindar developed from poverty through profligacy to true economy of means.

  Pausanias tells us about a lad called Lynkeus, “of whom Pindar (and one should trust Pindar) says his sight was so sharp he could see through the trunk of an oak tree.”19 Why should one trust Pindar, when it comes to establishing the truth of history or legend? What authority is vested in a poet that we should believe him, especially when what he says is so unlikely? Are we to take him literally—Lynkeus had X-ray vision—or is he telling a figurative truth? When the most precise of travel writers tells us we must credit Pindar even when what he says is incredible, we have come up against a formidable authority. Among Greeks, previously Homer alone had commanded by right such profound credulity, such fundamentalism of response. Pindar belongs to Apollo. He sups with the gods, he has a chair in the very temple at Delphi.