The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  These bucolic herdsmen are a means and a disguise: the poet speaks through them and hides behind them, their refined rusticity, their arch archaism. The herdsmen stand in for irony: they provide the necessary distance between the poem and the poet, the reader and the poem. Hesiod’s shepherding is credible, the advice he gives homely and even valid. Theocritus’ is stylised, the advice he gives in elegant aphorism has more to do with mannerly entertainment than with herding, germination and harvest. In an age like the Alexandrian, in love with aetiologies, at first the bucolic may seem like a return, in imagination, to beginnings; in fact, it is a parodic strategy, in some instances sending up, as the mimes can do, the search for “origins” itself, in others fulfilling a satirical function.

  Theocritus’ bucolic poetry is leavened by his poetic personality, his gently penetrating imagination, his guilelessness. Later bucolic poetry is less generously, less virtuosically practised. Bucolic Theocritus is the poet our parents and grandparents encountered, hoary and venerable, a figure quite different from the poet we meet today. For them what mattered was the pastoral he gave rise to, an emphasis due to the impact of the idylls on later Roman and European poetry. F. T. Griffiths in Theocritus at Court was one of the first English-language scholars to attend closely to the non-bucolic poems. Many have followed him into this area.

  Theocritus of Syracuse: a poet from a busy city. The scholia to Idyll VII say that his mother was Philina and his father Simichus.19 He was raised in relatively prosperous circumstances, receiving a good education and developing a strong attachment to the place. One particular literary form, the mime, was developed in Syracuse by Sophron (c. 470–400 BC), whom Plato read with pleasure and approval. Indeed mime may have left a mark on the form of Plato’s dialogues. Mime had its place in the growth of Attic comedy and certainly marked the idylls. Idyll XV is deeply indebted to it: the two women embody in their manner, speech and action the tradition initiated by Sophron: in them and other idylls mime itself adjusts to a changing world.20

  In Alexandria Herodas, roughly a contemporary of the Alexandrian poets, developed the form, and eight of his mimes survive. He wrote of lower to low life in satirical iambs which could be made closely to resemble vulgar speech. His subjects too are vulgar: illicit forms of love, truculence, the charms of low life. Idyll XV is about as coarse as Theocritus gets, and even there the formality of the language provides a certain distancing. He does not resort to the iambic. The satire is less in incident and character than in the language, the distances it creates between how and what it says. Had Theocritus aspired to realism, he would have descended to the iambic. The mime tradition ensures, in Lesky’s view, that he does not become over-fanciful. In Idyll II, the magic wheel and spells, the whole drama of a woman trying to charm her lover back, is based on Sophron’s witch mime, a papyrus fragment of which survives. The kinds of magic are “low” and “popular”; there is corroboration for the techniques and spells in some surviving papyruses. Yet it does seem wilful to describe such vignettes as realistic, despite the exquisite and convincing detail.

  The poet, it is generally thought, left Syracuse relatively early in his adult life. During the anarchic aftermath of the death of Agathocles, he may have made himself a refugee.21 Wanting to return later, when the political situation stabilised, around 275 BC he invited Hiero II of Syracuse to be his patron.22 Put another way, he wrote a magnificent begging letter with epinicean elements, Idyll XVI, commonly called “The Graces” or “The Charities,” to which Hiero appears to have remained insensible. Poets and artists, Theocritus says, bring graces, and tyrants, as well as other potential patrons, for the most part turn them away from their doors. In this case the graces who go out begging are the poems themselves, poor waifs; unvalued, they return at evening, dejected. It is a plangent and wry conceit.

  Now the cry is, “Give me the money, keep the praise,”

  And each man cradles silver under his shirt,

  Jealous even of its tarnish, with greed in his eyes

  And a smug rebuff on his lips: “It’s all in Homer”;

  “The gods will look after poets—that’s their job”;

  “Charity begins at home”—and goes no further;

  “The poet I like is the one who costs me nothing.”

  The case for supporting poets is straightforward: material need (on their part) and transcendent need (on the patron’s). “We remember even their horses” when they—the rich and powerful—commission wisely. As wit ness he calls Homer’s poems into the box, proving by demonstration how they have memorialised men, and deftly evoking in a small space Homer’s vast narratives. It is a strategy of miniaturisation which Callimachus would have praised, as he would the closing prayer for Hiero himself and for Syracuse. The poem was, sadly for Theocritus, its own reward: Hiero II got a free advertisement. When Theocritus delivers the much-quoted line “Homer is enough for everybody,”23 his intention is ironic: the sufficiency of Homer is a tactic that those who do not wish to patronise a new poet, a new poem, deploy. It lets them off the hook.

  From Syracuse the young poet went to southern Italy and then to Cos, to which he is deeply indebted. There he may have become a disciple of the native poet Philetas, whose works perished. Perhaps he knew and studied under Asclepiades of Samos, the epigrammatist. The Vita says, “he listened to Philetas and Asclepiades, whom he mentions.”24 The fact that he mentions them may be why the Suda suggests he studies with them. Did he also pursue medical studies under Praxagoras on Cos?25 He certainly met Nicias of Miletus—poet and physician—who became a friend and earned three warm mentions in the poems. Indeed, Idyll XXVIII, called “The Distaff,” talks about the journey from Syracuse26 to Miletus, the poet carrying a Sicilian distaff as a gift for his friend’s wife, Theugenis. He addresses the distaff as though it were a person, female, his travelling companion. The poem owes much to Sappho and Alcaeus.

  The bucolic poems, judging from the plants Theocritus mentions, were composed on Cos, not in Alexandria or back in Sicily. Theocritus, Wells suggests, has two aspects: the Syracusan, which is bucolic, and the Alexandrian, which explores myth and legend. One revels in relative freedom; the other, while not cowering, feels the weight of asserted authority as a burden. Cos is the pivot, as it were. “Dorian in culture yet a part of Ptolemy’s empire, Cos enabled him to hold the contradictory elements in his life more fully in play.”27 It is a persuasive, though a schematic, account.

  Cos, just off the coast of Asia Minor, a whole archipelago north of Rhodes and two away from Egypt, was important to the Ptolemies. Ptolemy Philadelphus was born on the island; Cleopatra, a generation later, may have parked some of her treasures there. The island was “in the family,” as it were, and to live on Cos was to be subject to Ptolemaic rule, though authority was attenuated by remoteness. When his poem to Hiero went unanswered, Theocritus wrote another kind of begging letter to Ptolemy Philadelphus, Idyll XVII, an encomium to the king and to his deified mother and father. Starched with respect, it is a kind of epinicean grovel. Addressing a patron who regards himself as divine and with whom, unlike Hiero II, the poet can share little in common, Theocritus does not make himself heard.

  Where Hiero II remained silent, Ptolemy Philadelphus responded; or, in any event, Theocritus arrived in Alexandria and remained there long enough to become identified, with Callimachus and Apollonius, as one of the great Alexandrian poets. Lesky insists there was contact between Theocritus and Callimachus, and a close aesthetic understanding. It is reckoned that his verse was composed on Cos and in Alexandria, but the Doric dialect was a form of the speech of Syracuse, the idiom of all but Idyll XXII, which is in Ionic, and Idylls XXVIII, XXIX and XXX, which are in Aeolic. The issue of dialect arises with Callimachus as well: he was, after all, a scholar of dialects. Each dialect has different literary associations: a poet might signal generic or thematic elements, affiliations or shifts by choosing one dialect over another. Among the epinicean poets, the choice of dialect often relates to the provenanc
e of the patron, but by the time of the Alexandrian poets, practical had given way to poetical considerations. The choice of dialect was part of the artifice of a poem. Dialect becomes an important element in a poem’s technique.28

  Theocritus’ poems survive in relative abundance. “The most complete representative of our manuscript tradition,” Lesky says, “the Ambrosianus 104 (15 th/—16th c.), contains thirty Idylls and the Epigrams.”29 Papyrus fragments of a thirty-first idyll have been found, and a Syrinx, which, as a technopaignia, uses a variable prosody to imitate objects. Not all the idylls and epigrams that survive under his name were by Theocritus.30 If we divide the attributable poems into categories, thirteen are bucolic (including in this category poems of a personal nature), three are mimes, four poems are based on legend and two are addresses to kings.31 Athenaeus in Scholars at Dinner preserves a fragment of a Berenice, probably a tribute to Ptolemy Philadelphus’ mother,32 but the passage that detains Athenaeus is not about Berenice or her locks but about the sacred white-fish:

  And the fisherman prays, prays for a fortunate catch,

  For full nets, since from the sea’s fields he draws his living,

  His trailing nets are ploughs, at evening he pays the goddess

  A sacrifice, the sacred white mullet, most sacred of all,

  So his nets will be bursting when, straining, he reclaims them

  Rich with the sea’s abundance.

  At his most original, Theocritus is a poet of love in a similar spirit to Alcaeus or Sappho, but in a different key. His Idyll XXIX, “Drinking Song,” is written in Aeolic dialect as a kind of tribute to them. It envisages a traditional man-boy love, the kind that is usually sudden, passionate and brief, which might—the poem reflects—become a friendship and endure, without losing the ingredient of love. The foe to such relationships is inequality in love between the partners, and time. Theocritus starts with Alcaeus’ words “Wine, my dear young fellow, and the truth.”33 The poet counsels a young man to find a single nest and stay in it rather than play around.

  No satisfaction? But it’s there to find

  Where it went missing. Has pride made you blind?

  Keep faith with me.

  The original lover, referred to as a slight acquaintance while the young man cruises from mate to mate, from bough to bough, calls him back. Youth briskly passes, a man grows old apace. In Idyll XXX, “The Fever,” the poet is seriously overwhelmed by desire for a young man. He reminds himself that his hair is turning white, he counsels his very soul, and the soul replies: you cannot control love any more than an astronomer can count the stars. After all, even Zeus and Aphrodite succumbed to passion. The last three idylls are a suite for middle to old age.

  Theocritus’ poems reconcile by example the positions that Callimachus and Apollonius are assumed to hold. They integrate epic narrative with the particularity of focus that Callimachus advocates. The introduction of mime elements multiplies the poet’s resources for irony, obliquity and indirection, without (as sometimes happens in Callimachus) obscuring the surface of the poem. The kinds of wholeness Theocritus achieves in his “little pictures” are satisfactory in ways that Callimachean aetiologies or protracted Apollonian narratives are not. They are tonally consistent in themselves, often wry or humorous, and when they have a satirical sub-text it is generally patent and unobscured. In prosody, narrative and allusive structure they have the strictly poetic wholeness we look for in vain in the other Alexandrians. And they are dramatic in cast, so that each poem balances voices, or makes consistent voices speak. Though we infer things about the poet from the poems, what matters at every stage is the staging, the poem itself.

  The scale of such poetry is appealing; it also suggests that poets no longer dared—or this poet no longer dared—to tackle larger forms. He flatters and praises, wheedles and complains, but he will not climb Olympus or dive into the underworld; he will not wrestle with power but remains gentle; he will linger in imagined fields rather than throw up barricades and fight tyranny, or democracy, in the streets. When the people of Syracuse rose up in the aftermath of Agathocles’ populist tyranny, Theocritus was sailing as fast as he could to Italy. He is not a conservative spirit but a poet bent on survival. His heart may belong to Syracuse, but the rest of him belongs somewhere more prosperous and stable. For poets in the third century BC, the committed political “belonging” of Theognis and Solon is over; a poet goes where there is demand for writing, where there are patrons, or libraries, or simply peace in which to write. He gains in personal freedom but loses the authority to speak on certain themes. To write—which is what the Alexandrian poet does—can seem an indulgence, given the Homeric precedent.

  Theocritus has no time for the cock that crows in competition with Homer.34 There is no rivalling, no emulation. Times have changed and poetry with them. It sings unaccompanied, it is written down on a sheet of papyrus or parchment, it addresses a creature who hardly existed in Homer’s day, the reader. Knowing, as the Alexandrian poets did, what had come before, they knew too their limitations, how far they could and could not go. For Homer anything in the world was possible. The world having been traced, all future poems were transactions which included the first poems and poets. For a poet, understanding history entails understanding literary history, or the parts of it that survive. Late in a tradition, transactions with that history, unstable as it now appears, are half the labour of the writer and half the pleasure of the reader.

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  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  About Michael Schmidt

  Also by Michael Schmidt

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Notes

  PREFACE

  1. George Seferis (1900–1971), Collected Poems (London, 1982), p. 7.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, discussing Sappho, testimonium 22.

  2. chalkanteros.

  3. bibliolathas.

  4. Deipnosophistae dates from around AD 200.

  5. Theodor Mommsen.

  6. David Diringer, The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (New York, 1982); facsimile of the book originally titled The Hand-Produced Book (London, 1952), p. 151.

  7. Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson (London, 1942).

  8. Oliver Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford, 2000), p. 6.

  9. Later it was removed as spoils of war to Syria. The tradition of the upright inscribed black stone survives in the Muslim faith.

  10. Translated by L. W. King (1910).

  11. Diringer, op. cit., pp. 80, 109f.

  12. Charta (Greek khártes) is another word for the pith of the papyrus plant, source of chart, carta and so on.

  13. kylindros.

  14. XIII, 69.

  15. Iliad VI, 168f.

  16. IX, ll. 522–5.

  dextra tenet ferrum, vacuam tenet altera ceram.

  incipit et dubitat, scribit damnatque tabellas,

  et notat et delet, mutat culpatque probatque

  inque vicem sumptas ponit positasque resumit.

  17. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria x, chapter 3.

  18. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale, 2001), p. 26.

  19. See p. 307.

  20. Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (Methuen, 1966; Duckworth, 1996), chapter I: “The Transmission of Greek Literature.”

  21. c. 446–411 BC.

  22. Diringer, op. cit., p. 233.

  23. Casson, Op. cit., pp. 22f.

  24. Ibid., p. 29.

  25. Ibid., p. 3.

  26. Leslie Kurke, “The Strangeness of ‘Song Culture’:
Archaic Greek Poetry,” in Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford, 2000), p. 59.

  27. Ibid., p. 60.

  28. Ibid., p. 60.

  29. Ibid., pp. 64–7.

  30. catalectic: of verse, wanting a syllable in the last foot.

  31. Barbara Hughes Fowler, Archaic Greek Poetry: An Anthology (Madison, Wisconsin, 1992).

  32. Michael Grant, The Rise of the Greeks (London, 1997), p. 335 (notes 38, 40).

  33. Robert Bridges (ed.), The Spirit of Man (London, 1916), item 421 and note 421 (pages unnumbered).

  34. W. H. Auden, The Portable Greek Reader (New York, 1948), p. 4.

  35. Grant, op. cit., pp. 14–16.

  36. Ibid., p. 335.

  37. Ibid., hanging1.

  38. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest” (1872), in The Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 32ff.

  39. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (London, 1998), p. xxiii.

  40. Donald Davie (ed.), The Psalms in English (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. xxvi.

  41. Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods, trans. Tim Parks (London, 2001), p. 3.

  I ORPHEUS OF THRACE

  1. Paul Cartledge, Times Literary Supplement, 31 December 1993, p.9.

  2. Diodorus Siculus, 3.67.2.

  3. Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Volume I, Central Greece, translated by Peter Levi (Har-mondsworth, 1971). Page 421 tells of the singing contests at Delphi. There were various winners. “But Orpheus they say gave himself such an air of grandeur over the mysteries and was so generally conceited that he and Musaeus who imitated him in everything refused to be tested by musical competition.”