The First Poets
Page 57
54. Epigram LXXXIV, p. 589.
55. fr 581.
56. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 55.
57. test 47 (h).
58. Callimachus, fr 64.
59. Bowra, op. cit., p. 323.
60. Ibid., p. 320.
61. fr 567.
62. Kurke, op. cit., pp. 74–81.
63. fr 526.
64. fr 527.
65. “Virtue, excellence of body and mind.”
66. fr 579.
67. frs 541, 542.
68. Jaeger, op. cit., p. 213.
69. Ibid.
70. fr 522.
71. Carm 3.2.14.
72. fr 524.
73. fr 641.
74. Mulroy, op. cit., p. 142, eleg 15, p. 517.
75. Epigram XXXIII(b).
XX CORINNA OF TANAGRA
1. Campbell, Greek Lyric IV, p. 15, fr 4, by Antipater of Thessalonica.
2. Ibid., p. 37, fr 655.
3. See p. 262 for Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the offending verses.
4. Campbell, Greek Lyric IV, p. 15, test 2.
5. The British Museum has a quite wonderful collection.
6. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 354.
7. Lines 89f.
8. Lattimore, op. cit., p. 53.
9. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., 354.
10. Campbell takes these “mysteries” to be the “result of the Boeotian orthography.”
11. A poet whose work is so similar to that of Antipater of Sidon as to be virtually undistinguishable.
12. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit., p. 354.
13. Ibid.
14. Mulroy, op. cit.
15. fr 673.
16. Mulroy, op. cit., p. 168.
17. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.3.4: Sarah Ruden, review of Andrew M. Miller (trans.), Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Indianapolis, 1996), p. 184.
18. Campbell, Greek Lyric IV, p. 45, fr 664b.
XXI PINDAR OF THEBES
1. 522–446 BC Perseus.
2. Alexander the Great.
3. Euripides. Lysander spared Athens from destruction, moved by the beauty of the chorus in Electra.
4. Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longman, 1969), p. 156.
5. 1640, published posthumously.
6. C. H. Sisson (ed.), Johnathan Swift: Selected Poems (Manchester, 1977), pp. 11–12.
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London, 1956), chapter 3.
8. Auden, op. cit., p. 5.
9. John Pick (ed.), A Hopkins Reader (Oxford, 1953), letter to Robert Bridges, 18 October 1882, p. 112.
10. Lesky, op. cit., p. 202.
11. He did actually quote the second line of Olympian II in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” but the intention was ironic.
12. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters 1907–1941, p. 87.
13. Kurke, op. cit.
14. See page 286.
15. Commentary to fr 29.
16. fr 29.
17. See page 286.
18. William H. Race (ed.), Pindar: Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997), p. 293.
19. Pausanias, Volume II, op. cit., p. 108.
20. Quoted in Richmond Lattimore, The Odes of Pindar (Chicago, 1947), pp. v–xii.
21. Many later and some near-contemporary writers despised the games as useless, the residue of a discredited age, and the poems of victory as pointless exercises.
22. Zanker, op. cit., figs 7 and 8, pp. 28f.
23. C. M. Bowra, The Odes of Pindar (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. xii.
24. Lesky, op. cit., p. 191.
25. Ibid.
26. See p. 25.
27. J. G. Frazer (trans.), Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches (London, 1900).
28. Ibid.
29. fr 193.
30. Milton, sonnet VIII.
31. fr 120.
32. Pausanias, Volume I, op. cit.
33. Pythian X.
34. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 61.
35. Pythian V, 76.
36. Lesky, op. cit., p. 191n.
37. Lesky, op. cit., p. 197, says daphnephorica were “sung at Thebes where a staff wreathed in laurel, flowers and ribbons (the koto) was carried in procession to Apollo Ismenius.”
38. Lefkowitz, op. cit.
39. fr 94c.
40. fr 127, Vol. II, p. 359.
41. Bowra, op. cit.
42. Campbell, op. cit., p. 15.
43. fr 198a.
44. Bowra, op. cit.
45. Lesky, op. cit., p. 191.
46. C. M. Bowra, Periclean Athens (London, 1971), p. 136.
47. Bowra, op. cit., p. 133.
48. Lefkowitz, op. cit., pp. 57–9, ridicules over-interpreters and biographical subtilists.
49. Olympian VI, ll. 89–90.
50. Bowra, op. cit., p. 133, Dithyramb fr 76, “For the Athenians,” Loeb II p. 313.
51. C. M. Bowra, The Odes of Pindar (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. xi.
52. Olympian VIII, ll. 54–5. Bowra, Periclean Athens.
53. Olympian VIII, l. 22.
54. Lesky, op. cit., p. 193.
55. Bowra, Odes of Pindar, p. x.
56. Lesky, op. cit., p. 195.
57. Ibid., p. 196, “he divided the lyrical text into cola” (i.e., marked line and stanza breaks, hence strophe, antistrophe, epode) “and edited all that then survived into seventeen books.”
58. Fragments of ten survive, from Oxyrhynchus, first published 1908; more fragments added in 1961.
59. Lesky, op. cit., p. 186.
60. Lattimore, Odes of Pindar, p. xi.
61. Ibid.
62. See p. 245.
63. fr 54.
64. Jay, op. cit., p. 298.
65. Michael Grant, “Pindar: The Old Values,” The Classical Greeks (New York, 1997), pp. 34–9.
66. Lattimore, Odes of Pindar, p. xi.
67. A character called Phrikias is named, either the boy’s father or, some conjecture, his horse, in which case his triumph was in a horse-, not a foot-race.
68. Apollo delights to see the “braying insolence” of the quadrupeds. Scholars nowadays say that he laughs at their erect phalluses.
69. Lesky, op. cit., pp. 190f.
70. Bowra, Odes of Pindar, p. xiii.
71. fr 110.
72. fr 105a, Vol. II, p. 337.
73. fr 191.
74. Mulroy, op. cit., p. 159.
75. Isthmian IV, 37ff.
76. Lattimore, op. cit., p. viii.
77. fr 52h.
78. De Compositione 22.
79. C. A. M. Fennell, Pindar: The Olympian and Pythian Odes (Cambridge, 1893).
80. Goddesses of the seasons.
81. Race, op. cit., fr 75.
82. fr 152.
83. fr 194.
84. frs, p. 301.
85. B. L. Gildersleeve, Pindar: The Olympian and Pythian Odes (New York, 1890).
86. Lesky, op. cit., p. 195.
87. In 480 Gelen of Syracuse, elder brother of Hieron, joined with Theron of Acragas to defeat a huge Carthaginian force numbering 100,000 at the battle of Himera.
88. I, II, III, X, XI and perhaps XIV.
89. Lesky, op. cit., pp. 194f.
90. fr 122, 17–20.
91. fr 201.
92. fr 140d.
93. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 65 (fr 52b).
94. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 66.
95. Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (London, 1999), translation, p. 125.
XXII BACCHYLIDES OF COS
1. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro).
2. Blass believes that Odes VI and VII, as numbered by Kenyon, are parts of a single ode.
3. Lesky, op. cit., p. 202.
4. Ibid.
5. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry IV, p. 173.
6. Lesky, op. cit., p. 203.
7. fr XXX.
8. On the Sources of Elevation in Style would be a more appropriate translation.
&nb
sp; 9. test 13.
10. Plutarch (test 6) says Bacchylides was exiled from Cos, and reflects that exile is a collaborator with many writers. Bacchylides went to the Peloponnese. We are not sure why he was exiled.
11. As Lesky, op. cit., points out, there is no evidence that Bacchylides actually went to Syracuse; on the other hand, there is no evidence that he did not. In the circumstances we do well to give the benefit of the doubt to tradition.
12. test 1, 1, 3.
13. fr 10b.
14. fr 13.
15. Lines 86ff.
16. test 8. The passage, in Mulroy’s prose translation, reads: “A true poet knows many things by nature; learners chatter in vain, furious in their verbosity, like a pair of crows cawing at the godlike bird of Zeus” (op. cit., p. 148).
17. test 10.
18. test 9.
19. For example, in Olympian I.
20. Pindar’s Pythian II, too, may possibly belong to the same occasion, and if so the tradition of Pindar’s having fallen out with Hiero as patron may be contradicted, but its dating remains controversial.
21. Ode V, ll. 65f.
22. Aeneid VI, 11.
23. XXVI.
24. Ephebes were youths of eighteen to twenty years who spent their time on garrison duty.
25. fr 5.
26. fr 14.
27. The others, we recall, were Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, 28. Simonides and Pindar.
28. Ammianus Marcellinus, xxv, 4.
XXIII CALLIMACHUS OF CYRENE
1. Diringer, op. cit., p. 115.
2. Ibid.
3. sikcaíno panta ta dehmósia.
4. Constantine A. Trypanis, Callimachus: Aetia, Iambi, Hecale, and Other Fragments (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), introduction.
5. Casson, op. cit., p. 39.
6. Cited by Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possesion of an Epic Past (Johns Hopkins, 1980, 1997), §3.
7. Diringer, op. cit., p. 155.
8. Edmonds, op. cit., p. 500.
9. Lesky, op. cit., p. 717.
10. Diringer, op. cit., pp. 129–30.
11. Said to have been an expert on accents.
12. A. W. Mair (ed.), Callimachus and Lycophron (London, 1922).
13. fr 398.
14. Apollonius, op. cit., p. 13.
15. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 122.
16. fr 110; see Catullus, lxvi.
17. Or as The Changes.
18. fr 66.
19. See p. 365.
20. Mair, op. cit., Epigram I.
21. Ibid., Epigram VIII.
22. Ibid., Epigram XVI, passim.
23. Ibid., Epigram XLVIII.
24. Ibid., Epigram XV.
25. Ibid., Epigram XXX.
26. Ibid., Epigram XXXIII.
27. M. A. Harder, R. F. Regtuit and G. C. Wakker (eds.), “Die Einbeziehung des Lesers in den Epigrammen des Kallimachos,” Callimachus: Hellenistica Groningana I (Groningen, 1993).
28. The area before the pedestal upon which the statue of the god would have been placed.
29. “Hymn to Zeus,” l. 64.
30. Mair (op. cit.) favours 247 BC.
31. Harder et al., op. cit.
XXIV APOLLONIUS OF RHODES
1. Calasso, op. cit., p. 44.
2. Mair, op. cit., p. 4.
3. Trypanis, op. cit., introduction.
4. Apollonius, op. cit., Book III, 401.
5. Lefkowitz, op. cit., pp. 128ff.
6. Hazlitt.
7. Lefkowitz, op. cit., pp. 128ff.
8. Richard Stoneman (ed.), A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece (Malibu, 1994), p. 275.
9. Apollonius, op. cit., ll. 556–558.
10. Ibid., Book I, ll. 574f.
11. One Vita says that he published the original Argonautica via an “epideixis” (display), or reading, but it failed.
12. See p. 310, this volume. He was found worthy as a librarian, not as an author—a common misreading of the passage.
13. Nonnus’ poem is poetically uninteresting but prosodically it shows a stage on the transition from quantitative to accentual versification.
14. Taplin, Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds, p. 57.
15. Lesky, op. cit., p. 735.
16. Apollonius, op. cit., p. 16.
17. Ibid., p. xi.
18. Ibid., p. 17.
19. Ibid., Book III, ll. 66f.
20. Ibid., Book I, ll. 18–19, 111–113, for example.
21. See p. 313, this volume.
22. Ibid., Book II, ll. 1277f.
23. Ibid., Book III, 558ff.
24. Ibid., Book IV, ll. 167f.
25. Ibid., Book I, ll. 1273–1283.
26. Ibid., Book II, ll. 408, 410.
27. Ibid., Book II, ll. 627ff.
XXV THEOCRITUS OF SYRACUSE
1. Some sources say c. 300—c. 260 BC or 316–160 BC.
2. Graves, op. cit., pp. 170f.
3. Bowra, Landmarks in Greek Literature, pp. 262f.
4. Idyll XII, “The Touchstones,” is, for example, about boy love and its attendant ceremonial, incorporating a prayer for real amorous reciprocity. Wells sees Idyll XII as “a medley,” a mind “confused by gladness,” rushing from thought to thought.
5. 4.14.9, see Lesky, op. cit., p. 720.
6. Richard Hunter, Theocritus and the Archaeology of Greek Poetry (Cambridge, 1996).
7. Simpler, lighter, and with debts to the Homeric Hymns (Hymn XVIII, “To Hermes” in particular), is Idyll XXIV, “The Childhood of Heracles.” The hero is ten months old. It is bed time and he and his younger twin are about to drift off. Hera, who implacably hates the infants, sends serpents to slay them, but Heracles turns the tables and strangles them. Alcmene, the twins’ mother, calls Teiresias to interpret the event. He tells the future and gives instructions on how to exorcise the bad spirits and purify the house. There follows an account of the education and training of Heracles. Thirty lines are missing at the end, the text dies in mid-flow. Those lines, Wells says, may have been a prayer for victory: Was the poem an entry in a competition celebrating Heracles, Ptolemy’s “ancestor”? (See Wells, op. cit., p. 154.)
8. Bowra, op. cit., p. 263.
9. Wells, op. cit., p. 23.
10. Ibid., p. 28.
11. Bowra, op. cit., p. 263.
12. Wells; Bowra.
13. Jane L. Lightfoot, “Sophisticates and Solecisms: Greek Literature After the Classical Period,” pp. 131–3, in Taplin, op. cit.
14. See p. 206, this volume.
15. Sir Kenneth J. Dover, Theocritus (London, 1971).
16. Wells, op. cit., p. 47.
17. Ibid., p. 49.
18. Richard Hunter, Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge, 1999).
19. Lefkowitz, op. cit. The Vita proposes Praxagoras and Simichidas as candidates for the poet’s paternity (citing Idyll VII, 28, the second name a fiction).
20. Hunter, op. cit.
21. Agathocles, the son of a potter of Himera, after time in the army, marriage to his patron’s widow, and much battle in Italy and Africa (he nearly took Carthage at one point), settled down as king and ruled in peace, but the aftermath was anarchic.
22. Hiero II was elected to lead the expedition against Carthage (175–4); maybe Theocritus was in Syracuse at the time, says Lesky, op. cit., pp. 718ff.
23. See Idyll XVI, ll. 18ff.
24. Lefkowitz, op. cit., p. 131.
25. The Vita calls him “his father’s namesake.”
26. Or Cos: The distaff is from Sicily, but there is no reason to imagine that the journey is from Sicily. As a Sicilian, the poet would have had in his possession objects from his native land.
27. Wells, op. cit., p. 46.
28. Hunter, op. cit., “The Languages of Theocritus.”
29. Lesky, op. cit., p. 721.
30. Idylls XIX, XX, XI, XXIII, XXV and XXVII are probably by other hands. Of the twenty-four surviving epigrams, two or three are probably spurious.
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31. Robert Wells, op. cit., divides them as follows, with some inevitable overlapping:.
Bucolic: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 16, 28, 29, 30
Mimes: 2, 14, 15
Mythological: 13, 21, 26, 24
Personal Poems: 12, 28, 29, 30
Addresses to kings: 16, 17 (“The Graces” and “Encomium”)
Epigrams
32. See Athenaeus, vii. 284.a.
33. fr 366; see translated verse on p. 167.
34. VII, 47–8.
Glossary
AGLAIA one of the Graces, who “graces” success with its magnificence
AIDOS sense of shame, or moral restraint; in peacetime it entails reverence for the laws and respect for fellow citizens; in war it entails courage
AINOS a story, a tale, a proverb (tending towards praise), praise poetry
AKMAZON nicer way of saying
ANER: someone in the prime of his life ANER (PAIS: young boy; MEIRAKION: young person; NEANISKOS: youth; ANER: man; PRESBYTES: older man; GERON: old man)
ANTISTROPHE in the ode, the counter-turn following the STROPHE (turn) and followed by the EPODOS (after-song)
AOIDOS poet-singer (used by Hesiod and Homer)
APENE mule-car race
APOIKIAI colonies
ARCHON one of the nine magistrates of Athens
ARETÉ (ARETA) “the realisation of human excellence in achievements”
AULOS a musical instrument, generally taken to mean “flute” but actually denoting an oboe-like instrument
BARBARIAN someone who is not Greek. In its original use the word was not negative in implication, though eventually a sense of Greek cultural superiority coloured it.
BARBITOS a many-stringed musical instrument, lute- or lyre-like
BASILEUS noble proprietor, master, lord, leader of the people, king
BASSARID female worshipper of Dionysus
CHORIZONTES those who maintain that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by different poets
CITHARIS rudimentary lyre
DEME an Attic village
DIASCEUAST reviser, interpolator
DIAULOS double foot-race
DIKE justice
DITHYRAMB a Greek choral lyric, usually with a narrative, originally connected with Dionysus’ worship, sung by a kuklios coros, or circular chorus, of about fifty singers, sometimes dressed as satyrs. The etymology is uncertain: probably a revel song started by the leader (exarcos) of a band of revellers using traditional or improvised language, answered by a refrain. Its origins may have been in Phrygia; it came to Greece with Dionysus. Arion in Corinth made it a literary form.