Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  GREEK LITERATURE begins with Homer and soon finds its way to every corner of the Greek mainland, the peninsulas, the islands, and the far-flung settlements and colonies. Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. To begin with, literary works were scratched onto sheets of lead or, in the case of especially valued monumental inscriptions, impressed in gold or bronze or carved in stone. Wooden tablets coated with wax and prepared animal skins also provided writing surfaces, but none of these methods encouraged the broadcast sale of “books” or the establishment of libraries, such as would become possible in later centuries. Carting home what would have been, in Homer’s case, pounds of poetry was hardly feasible; and it would be a long time before imported sheets of lightweight Egyptian papyrus would be available in sufficient quantities to allow longer literary works to become readily transportable. There was, instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.

  The rhapsodes (or “stitchers of song”), whom we have already met, were wandering performers who traveled from occasion to occasion, hoping for payments in kind and, once coinage became general in the sixth century, monetary rewards. As the courts of the old aristocracy, which could lavish hospitality on bards and rhapsodes, gradually sank beneath the waves of societal change, their role as patrons of poets was assumed by large assemblies, gathered for religious occasions. These festivals—some local, others, like the Olympics, Panhellenic1—though originating as religious holidays, were held on vast, circus-like fairgrounds near sanctuaries dedicated to particular gods throughout Greece and drew the devout and the curious, the sharp-eyed and the mercenary, the raucous and the rascally.

  At these events, there were, of course, religious ceremonies to honor the god—usually featuring a chorus of maidens or boys or men—as well as contests of athletes and poets. There were also merchants’ booths, fluttering their brightly colored canvas awnings, their proprietors hawking small statues of patronal gods and goddesses, religious amulets, food and drink, and other goods and services. As late as the first century A.D., we find New Testament references to merchants like Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila, who traveled from one Greek festival to another, setting up shop to sell their skills at making and mending tents and similar shelters that shaded fairgoers from the Greek sun, brighter, fiercer than in any other European sky. Competition was in the blood of the Greeks, and everywhere at these festivals contestants vied for the attention of the crowds. Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects of the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with “potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter … poet against poet.”

  The liturgical choruses needed poets to write the verses they sang; top athletes paid for poems in their own praise; and funerals of great men were additional occasions that required the presence of poets who, like the athletes, competed in funeral games. Both the rhapsodes, who performed the poems of others, and original poets showed up at all these—and many smaller, more intimate—occasions to sell their wares of words. Nor were words all they had to sell. Performers sang their poetry while accompanying themselves on stringed lyres or were accompanied by pipers, who blew into reeds called auloi, instruments pierced by holes along their length, enabling a musician to change the pitch of a note by stopping one or more holes with his fingers. Though aulos2 is usually translated as “flute,” the instrument’s timbre was closer to an oboe and sounded, according to the Greeks, like the buzzing of wasps and, at its high end, like the honking of geese.

  But what, on the whole, did Greek music sound like? We would love to know for sure, though the few scraps we still possess of ancient musical notation belong to later periods and are of uncertain interpretation. From fragments of evidence, however, we can approach an answer. There is no suggestion in the evidence that the singers, even when singing in chorus, sang in harmony. Though lyres and sets of pipes must have been capable of simple harmonies, the music seems to have been centered on melody, rhythm, and—something less familiar to us—mode. In our Western music we still know the modes “major” and “minor.” The Greeks had five modes, known to us by their names—Ionian, Aeolian, Lydian, Dorian, and Phrygian—which referred also to ethnic groupings within Greece. Each of these modes, each of which had submodes, was easily recognized by listeners, and each created a characteristic mood, just as we might say, “That sounded like a Scottish ballad. This sounds like a Spanish dance.” Each Greek mode was constructed from an invariable sequence of relationships between the notes that no other mode possessed, more distinct than E flat major is from C minor, perhaps at times more akin to Asian music with its larger intervals and quarter tones. The Dorian was martial, the Phrygian engendered contentment, the Mixolydian (one of the submodes) was plaintive, the Ionian softly alluring, apparently making seduction easier. In all, Greek music probably sounded something like the late medieval music of Europe with its emphases on catchy, easily singable melodies, exaggerated rhythms, and humble instrumental accompaniment—Gregorian chant gone wild in the streets.

  Greece has been, in fact, through all of its history a land of music and dance. “Let me not live without music,” sings the dancing chorus in Euripides’s play Heracles. To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead, as Sophocles describes it in Oedipus at Colonnus, his meditation on death: “without wedding song, lyreless, chorusless, death at the end.” Though there were, as we have seen, professional performers, there is evidence that every Greek, whether king or serf, looked forward to the many opportunities for singing and dancing. Even our tattered and incomplete records yield at least two hundred terms for different kinds of dance. The most hard-assed soldier was expected to strum the lyre to regain his composure, as Homer shows Achilles doing in his tent in Book 9 of the Iliad. Women of substantial estate, like Penelope, arranged musical evenings in their private quarters. Shepherds piped to their flocks, sailors used their oars to beat time to their sea chanties, teachers, as a bounden duty, taught musical skills to their charges. Though professional entertainers regaled well-heeled revelers at banquets, each of the revelers was expected to contribute his own party piece to the evening’s festivities—and it seldom took long before the revelers rose from their couches to dance through the night, locking their arms together and pounding the earth, for all the world like Kazantzakis’s Zorba, who danced as if “there was a soul struggling to carry away [his] flesh and cast itself like a meteor into the darkness.”

  The fishmonger sang of his fish, the militia marched to martial rhythms, the laundress sang the blues, while others sang songs of different colors. It was said that after the disastrous Sicilian Expedition in 413 B.C. Athenian soldiers, held captive in the horrible quarries outside Syracuse, won their freedom by singing and dancing choruses from the plays of Euripides, whose songs the Sicilians were mad about. Daily life could sometimes seem a sort of amateur contest, an eternal audition with a host of hopeful voices—primeval Paul Simons and Judy Collinses, Tom Waitses and Ani diFrancos—competing for attention. Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

  To be unmusical, as sly Sappho informs us in a short poem to a deceased woman who had shown talent neither for performance nor for appreciation, was a fate worse than death. You might as well never have lived:

  When you were living, never did you smell

  the roses by Olympus, where the Muses dwell.

  Now that you’re dead, your faded ghost in hell

  is unremembered here on earth. You ring no bell.

  This poem, constructed like a well-aimed body blow, is the work of a woman the Greeks called “the tenth Muse,” the greatest poet after Homer, born in the late seventh century on the large Greek island of Lesbos, celebrated for the sweetness of its wine and the tartness of its verse. Unfortunately, much of post-Homeric poetry—called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre—was lost in t
he upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A.D. In Sappho we have been particularly unlucky, for her work survives mostly in small clusters of words, though sometimes in longer fragments, like exotic petals and branches cut from a mysterious tree whose fullness we can never know.

  These fragments suggest that Sappho ran a sort of finishing school for wellborn young ladies, a school at which they were trained (no doubt among other refinements) to sing in choruses at festivals, especially at weddings. These choral performances, which featured individual students as soloists, may have served the girls as their social debut, the hope being that they would attract a suitable suitor and, soon thereafter, make an advantageous marriage. Several of Sappho’s most (seemingly) characteristic poems are epithalamia, bridal songs.3 Others have been interpreted as laments for girls who are gone, perhaps to marriage, and whose absence is a suffering to Sappho. Here is one of the more complete examples:

  Some say cavalry, others infantry,

  still others say a navy is

  black earth’s most beautiful thing.

  But I say it’s whatever,

  whatever you may love.

  An easy thing to understand.

  For Helen, whose beauty surpassed us all,

  walked out on him one day,

  her high-class husband,

  sailed for Troy,

  and not to child nor doting parents

  did she give a thought,

  led to earth’s end [by longing].

  So does [my soul] fly up,

  remembering Anaktoria,

  [gliding] lightly, [lightly,]

  now she’s gone.

  I’d rather study her graceful step

  and the way light moved across her face

  than look on Lydian chariots

  or ranks of bristling hoplites.

  [ ] what cannot happen.

  [ ] human [ ] to pray for part

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ] toward [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ]

  [ ] surprise.

  Is Anaktoria on her honeymoon or is she dead? Was she real or just a literary fiction? Is this a solo number or a memorial chorus for a dead student? What might be the surprise with which the poem ends? How we are tempted to fill those empty brackets with words. (The lines that fall within the empty brackets are completely unreadable in the manuscript fragments we still possess; the words within brackets are educated guesses based on partly damaged text.)

  The consensus of current scholarship is that the Greek lyric poets, though formerly presumed to be writing personal poetry such as we might read in a volume from a contemporary poet, were all writing for performance—their own or that of another performer or chorus—and that the “I” of Greek lyric poetry is no more personal than the “I” of modern popular songs, as in “I got a right to sing the blues.” When a singer delivers such words to us in a darkened nightclub, we take them as representative of a particular human feeling, understood by all and shared by all at one time or another, but we do not mistake them for an expression of what the singer herself may be feeling at this particular moment, nor do we feel any obligation to commiserate with her personally. We understand she is acting a part, as are we, vicariously sympathizing but—at some level—savoring her pretended misery.

  The Anaktoria fragment could certainly fit such a pattern. But there are other Sapphic fragments that are harder to wedge into this thesis:

  If you still love me, you will take

  a younger bedmate. I’m not up to sleeping with you

  now that I am old.

  Could this ever have been just another song? And, finally, there is a complementary fragment—or, as I suspect, a complete poem:

  The moon has set

  and the Pleiades:

  it is the middle of the night,

  and time passes, time passes—

  and I lie alone.

  This, it seems to me, is personal poetry, an authentic “I” that somehow slipped through the impersonal masks of Greek song culture. In recent years, scholars have questioned whether these last lines should even be attributed to Sappho. Well, they have been so attributed since ancient times, and they sound like Sappho, an elegant beauty who taught feminine graces to so many girls, now observing the irreversible process of aging, resolved to be honest with herself without large helpings of self-pity, Sappho at her most nakedly personal. Such forthrightness is exceedingly rare—and not only in Greek lyric poetry.

  By and large, Greek lyric poets present themselves in disguise, personae for the moment; and not a few write, as did W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, poems in the voices of the decrepit elderly though they themselves are still young. But these efforts can have a conventional ring, even when, like Sappho, the poet relies on the metaphorical storehouse of nature. Sappho’s moon and stars and her “black earth” are staples of Greek lyric poetry, as are kingfishers, halcyons, and waves of the wine-dark sea. Alcman, active in Sparta in the second half of the seventh century, composed a responsorial poem during which—in this fragment—a solo singer, masked as an old man, engages a girls’ chorus:

  O honey-voiced maidens singing divinely,

  my limbs can carry me no more.

  Would a kingfisher I could be,

  who flies with halcyons over the wave bloom,

  fearless, sea-purple springtime bird.

  Alcman lacks Sappho’s spare honesty; he seems to beg our pity. This is no spontaneous folk idiom but self-consciously constructed poetry. It has been said that Greek lyricism celebrates the literary springtime of the ancient world. When a poet like Alcman speaks, it can seem a somewhat manufactured spring, a bit predictable. When Sappho sings with Dickinsonian frugality, we can almost feel the warmth of the ancient sun, even if we are aware, as in the myth of Demeter, that the spring breeze always carries a slight scent of decay:

  I love what is delicate,

  luminous, brave—

  what belongs to the sunlight.

  That’s what I crave.

  About Sappho’s craving: the word she uses is eros, sexual desire. Like the standard nature metaphors, eros returns repeatedly in the lyric poets, whether as erotic craving or as Eros himself, the divine personification of Love. By Sappho’s day the segregation of women had become more definite than it is in Homer’s poems, where women, though hardly prominent, show no sign of being forbidden social intercourse with men. Sappho might almost be running a seraglio, so indistinct are men in her poems, none of them having the physical nearness of a girl like Anaktoria, whose perfume we can almost smell. Such division of the sexes—whether in harems, brothels, convents and other sexually segregated religious residences, single-sex boarding schools, prisons, mercenary armies, or ships long at sea—inevitably triggers a rise in homoerotic relationships.4 Though there are no references in Homer to homosexuality, such references are notable in lyric poetry from the late seventh century onward; and by the sixth century these are commonplace—so much so that Greeks of a later day read the relationship of Achilles and Patroclus as homoerotic, even though Homer offers no evidence for such an interpretation, all of his heroes appearing to be aggressively heterosexual.

  There were other female lyric poets, but Sappho is the only one whose fragments are extensive enough for us to sketch a provisional picture of her and her circumstances. The fragments of the male lyric poets, however, provide abundant evidence of homoerotic attraction, especially of adult men for pubescent boys. Some of this evidence is ambiguous, as when Sappho’s Lesbian contemporary Alcaeus urges:

  Drink, get drunk and drunker, even tread

  The path of rage. For Myrsilus is dead.

  But there can be no mistaking the meaning of Anacreon, a poet of the sixth century who because of political upheavals lived in many different parts of Greece (a
nd whose bitchy allusion to goings-on in Sappho’s Lesbos gave us the present meaning of lesbian):

  O boy of the virginal eyes,

  I crave you, though you stand apart,

  so heedless and so unaware,

  thou charioteer of my heart.

  Nor can we mistake what Anacreon has in mind in this address:

  Bring water, boy, and bring us wine,

  bring each of us a flowering crown.

  Sit next to me upon this couch—

  where I will wrestle Eros down.

  Perhaps the boy with the virginal eyes has finally taken notice of Anacreon and is about to allow himself to be seduced. But, more likely, these entreaties are addressed to different boys, the first a noble of Anacreon’s own class who must be wooed with great care and significant gifts, the second a well-regarded servant in Anacreon’s home, who is allowed to mix the wine with water and then to serve his master’s pleasure in the course of a banquet for intimate friends.

  The banquets of the Homeric age seemed to grow out of dim religious obligations, such as the need to appease a god by blood sacrifice or the need to hold an elaborate, weeklong funeral observance to ensure that the shade of the deceased may cross the River Styx to reach Hades and not be condemned to eternal wandering. In such cases, generously carved portions of sacrificial meat—of beef cattle, sheep, goat, or pig—were distributed among the participants for their consumption. We might get the impression from Homer’s descriptions that this was how the Greeks always ate. Far from it: their usual dishes were endless variations on bread and fish5—the secular food of everyday life, the medium of friendship and conviviality, unconnected to propitiation of the gods. Besides bread and fish, there might be mouth-watering artichokes deep-fried in olive oil, the occasional spitted fowl, fresh greens, fat Sicilian cheeses (if you were very lucky), fruit, nuts, and of course considerable cups of wine—which the Greeks mixed with water, the better to swill it: