7 Greeks

by Guy Davenport

  Athens in Diogenes’ long life changed from the brilliant epoch of Euripides and Sophokles, to a city in Alexander’s empire, soon to be replaced as the intellectual center by Alexandria. Sokrates drank the hemlock when Diogenes was five. Plato, aged 80, died when Diogenes was 57. He was 48 when Alexander was born, 68 when Alexander came to the throne. He invented the word cosmopolitan, to designate himself a citizen of the world.

  Though we knew that in ancient Greek culture there was such a thing as a mimos, or mime played by a single maskless actor taking all the parts, probably in city squares of an afternoon or on small stages in wine shops, it was not until 1890 that archaeology recovered a script of any of them–seven scripts, in fact, with titles native to and characteristic of the long tradition of European comedy from Aristophanes to Samuel Beckett, The Matchmaker, The Whorehouse Manager, The Schoolmaster, Women at the Temple, The Jealous Woman, A Private Talk Between Friends, The Shoemaker, all miraculously intact in column after column, on a papyrus scroll. There are fragments of six more mimes on the same scroll, but they are too botched and torn to be made anything of. Another text for one of them (The Dream) was found later at Oxyrhynchos, in almost as bad a condition as the text on the scroll. The author of these playlets was a poet named Herondas, or Herodas, about whom we know nothing at all, neither his city (Kos or Alexandria, perhaps) nor when he lived (the evidence points to the third century BC). As for his name, its scant occurrence favors Herondas. I’ve chosen Herondas as having a more decisive pronunciation in English.

  The papyrus scroll with Herondas’ mimes on it was bought in Egypt by the British Museum’s diligent scout E. Wallis Budge, one of the crack buccaneers of archaeological discovery when the rules of the game were to bring home the bacon by hook or by crook. Budge bought the scroll from Coptic tomb robbers, who had filched it from the grave of some important Egyptian of the early Roman period. It was customary to await resurrection with one’s library to hand. Alkman’s great odes, for instance, were found in a funerary collection of this sort, as well as the text of the Egyptian Book of the Dead for which Wallis Budge is best mown.

  The scroll is actually the account sheets of one Didymus, a bailiff in the Roman colonial administration. Its style of handwriting, thought by Herondas’ first editor to be of the first century AD, is now considered by his most recent editor, I. C. Cunningham, who describes it as “a small, plain bookhand, with corrections by the first hand and by at least one other hand,” to belong to the second century AD. On the back of the scroll, in an economic use of good papyrus, Didymus had copied out a kind of personal anthology of choice texts: Aristotle’s treatise on the Athenian constitution, the odes of Bacchylides, some orations of Hyperides, and thirteen mimes by Herondas.

  It was the Aristotle that most excited the curators at the British Museum: a unique text known previously only by quotations from it by classical writers. Frederick Kenyon, the great papyrologist, transcribed and published all these texts in 1891. The classicist Walter Headlam brought out a scholarly edition of Herondas, with translation, in 1922, and this remained, until Cunningham’s edition in 1971, the authoritative text. Because of his richness of diction and vividness of realism, Herondas has been the subject of much scholarship. He has not, however, enjoyed much of a reputation beyond the classicist’s lamp. If, as in Cunningham’s judgment he is “not an author of outstanding importance or a poet of the first rank,” and if, in Frederic Will’s assessment he is “the least edifying of the Hellenistic poets,” he is nevertheless an abundantly interesting, superbly vigorous poet.

  The first step toward seeing him as he must be seen is to imagine a performance. We live in the age of Picasso, who has given us a new vision of the classical world’s acrobats, mimes, street actors and singers as they have survived through the unbrolren lineage of festival, Italian comedy, the circus. The same figures who cavort at Mardi Gras throughout civilization today could be seen before Aristophanes was born–we have the evidence of painted vases to guide us here–wearing the same carnival costumes, hilarious mash, impersonating the same kind of comic types. We live in the age of Fellini, of Beckett, of Marcel Marceau. The ghost of Herondas cannot find us wholly unfamiliar. Just beyond the strangeness of his surface we can easily locate human nature as we know it all too well.

  Were we Alexandrians of the third century BC, citizens of a center of commerce and learning, a polyglot city on the Mediterranean, we would know the public mime as a matter of course. Imagine a broad, level area between buildings, with steps at each end, paved and with a chinaberry tree for shade, where a dog can have a nap, nursemaids can gossip while their charges romp, delivery boys can have a quick game of Knucklebones, the kind of congenial little space that still keeps its Greek name, plateia, in Mediterranean languages (place, plaza, piazza). Here the mime would set up his business, perhaps with drum, fife, or lyre to collect an audience. He must depend on everybody’s imagination to transform the air around him into a school, a room, a law court. He acts without a mask, but certainly with make-up. Some basic props serve him as he changes from character to character–hats, shawls, wigs, a walking stick. Mimicry is his art. The pleasure he gives is that of recognition of type. Once a human being has become fixed in his reactions and is predictable, he has become the matter of comedy.

  Herondas is thus working in the tradition of Theophrastos and Menander. He has no political ground, like Aristophanes; no history or ideologies mingle with his art. New Comedy was portable anywhere, and proved to be as native to Rome as Athens, to London and Madrid. It is the art of Jonson and Molière, of Waugh and Wodehouse. Herondas (as he seems to say in The Dream) considered himself to be reviving the satiric art of the poet Hipponax, who lived three centuries before him, and who can be bracketed with the master satirist Archilochos. It was the spirit of Hellenism to be retrospective, to restore and polish more vigorous art from previous times. Theokritos his contemporary, whose eclogues can be thought of as mimes (and may have been so performed in aristocratic households and at literary gatherings), and Kallimakhos, also his contemporary, were imitators of what they imagined to be a classical period, a golden age which they were reproducing in silver.

  A play comes alive in performance only. Herondas would seem to admit of a wide range of interpretation by an actor. The stage directions which I have made up for this translation assume that these mimes were close to the art of Peter Sellers, of Zero Mostel, and Lily Tomlin–farces deliciously rendered by a master impersonator of types. It may well be, of course, that the acting was more savagely satiric–something close to the acid wit of the Goya of the Caprichos, one of which might illustrate The Matchmaker. Most of Herondas’ interpreters, especially Will and Cunningham, see Herondas as a much darker figure than I do. I see no morbid overtones of sadism in The Schoolmaster, only an irate mother with a lout of a son to be disciplined. I can see nothing bawdy in The Shoemaker, only women trying on every shoe in a shop without buying any. I see nothing vilely obscene in The Whorehouse Manager, only a gloriously absurd plea by a half-literate businessman whose rhetoric is giving the judges a headache.

  The very successful skits of the Roman actor Luigi Proietti, called “A Megli Occhi, Please,” is probably a fairly close approximation of what Herondas’ theatre was in Alexandria in the third century BC. Proietti assumes one part after another. His props are all in a box–wigs, hats, coats–and his transformation from Calabrian farmer to blowhard politician to American Country Music Singer are made before the audience. Playing without a mask, and without the traditional cloth phallos of the comic actor, Herondas’ actor would have approached the realism of our time more closely than any other kind of theatre in antiquity. The recovery of his texts happened in the heyday of British pantomime, of the music halls with their turns and comic skits, of Marie Lloyd, practitioners of his very art. And when he was first published in 1922, the mime was having a renaissance: the silent movies. Now, while the silent mime has masters like Marcel Marceau, and amateur mimes can be seen per
forming around the Beaubourg in Paris (the old stamping grounds of the Commedia dell’ Arte in its day), and mimes are popular with theatrical groups everywhere, it is worthwhile attempting to make the first mimes to have survived from antiquity better known.

  Headlam’s translation of 1922 is into Edwardian diction and prose; the Knox translation of 1929 (Loeb Classics) is, in Cunningham’s laconic judgment, “unhelpful.” Louis Laloy’s translation into French (Budé) lacks color and verve. I have translated the mimes–the Greek is mimiamboi–into decasyllabic lines in rough imitation of Herondas’ “limping iambs,” trying for phrasing that an actor might say. Herondas’ style is either antiqued (presumably to sound like his master Hipponax) or, as I would liIce to believe, solely on a hunch, in a particular Ionic vernacular, perhaps that of Kos. His words are tighdy elided, his phrasing economic, always expressive, idiomatic, and frequently vulgar.

  In his version of humanity in all its weakness we can recognize practically everything. It was a world that thought slaves comic in what it supposed to be their shiftlessness, a world that delighted to detect pretension, that charted every minim of movement outside one’s social bounds. Battaros the whorehouse manager is comic because he is too stingy to hire a lawyer; it is also clear that he imagines himself to be as eloquent as any lawyer he could have hired. In all the mimes we see the characters as they cannot see themselves, and yet we understand very well how they think of themselves. Bitinna in The Jealous Woman sees herself as a generous woman sorely wronged; we see her as an indulgent woman who has spoiled her lover and has only herself to blame if he has an exaggerated notion of his charms. All of Herondas’ characters are, in an old-fashioned and basic sense, fools. They stew in juices of their own brewing, and Herondas always leaves them there. These are not comedies but comic moments. They last just long enough to draw a character deftly but consummately.

  * Archiloque, Fragments, texte établi par François Lasserre, traduit et commenté par André Bonnard, Collection des Universités de France, publié sous le patronage de l’Association Guillaume Budé (paris, 1958; 2d ed. rev., 1968).

  * Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 1975. p. 272.

  ARCHILOCHOS

  1 Sergeant to Enyalios,

  The great god War,

  I practice double labor.

  With poetry, that lover’s gift,

  I serve the lady Muses.

  2 My ash spear is my barley bread,

  My ash spear is my Ismarian wine.

  I lean on my spear and drink.

  3 Let him go ahead.

  Ares is a democrat.

  There are no privileged people

  On a battlefield.

  4 This island,

  garlanded with wild woods,

  Lies in the sea

  like the backbone of an ass.

  5 Listen to me cuss.

  6 Pallas Athena and our strong arms,

  That victory. From hill to hill in retreat

  We walked backward under their javelins

  Until we reached the rampart of stones

  She, Zeus’s daughter, led us toward.

  We attacked later, chanting hymns

  Of Mytilenian Apollo, while they,

  Keeping their courage with harp and song

  Fell back to their hill, withered by arrows

  We crossed a harvest of our dead.

  7 [A rag of paper,

  but]

  Bright clean air.

  For you are

  A brave man

  And honorable.

  Wandering

  Aimlessness

  Of evil.

  8 What hair styles among

  All this jackass backsided

  Sabazian pederasty.

  9 With ankles that fat

  It must be a girl.

  10 When the fight’s with those hard Euboians,

  No bow-strings’ whine or snap of bow-notch

  Or whip of sling do you hear, but a delirium

  Of Ares, sword work and spear sticking,

  The tall Euboians famous for their knives.

  11 Like Odysseus under the ram

  You have clung under your lovers

  And under your love of lust,

  Seeing nothing else for this mist,

  Dark of heart, dark of mind.

  12 As a dove to a sheaf of wheat,

  So friends to you.

  13 His mane the infantry

  Cropped down to stubble.

  14 These golden matters

  Of Gyges and his treasuries

  Are no concern of mine.

  Jealousy has no power over me,

  Nor do I envy a god his work,

  And I don’t burn to rule.

  Such things have no

  Fascination for my eyes.

  15 [Shredded paper, but]

  Whittles

  to carry

  [here teething moths

  have passed]

  I repulse

  Your great kindness

  [holes]

  Kindness.

  16 Shield against shield,

  Keep the shield-wall tight.

  And the gift of death

  They bring, let no man take.

  17 She held

  a sprig of myrtle she’d picked

  And a rose

  That pleased her most

  Of those on the bush

  And her long hair shaded

  her shoulders and back.

  18

  Back away from that, [she said]

  and steady on

  Wayward and wildly pounding heart,

  There is a girl who lives among us

  Who watches you with foolish eyes,

  A slender, lovely, graceful girl,

  Just budding into supple line,

  And you scare her and make her shy.

  O daughter of the highborn Amphimedo,

  I replied, of the widely remembered

  Amphimedo now in the rich earth dead,

  There are, do you know, so many pleasures

  For young men to choose from

  Among the skills of the delicious goddess

  It’s green to think the holy one’s the only.

  When the shadows go black and quiet,

  Let us, you and I alone, and the gods,

  Sort these matters out. Fear nothing:

  I shall be tame, I shall behave

  And reach, if I reach, with a civil hand.

  I shall climb the wall and come to the gate.

  You’ll not say no, Sweetheart, to this?

  I shall come no farther than the garden grass.

  Neobulé I have forgotten, believe me, do.

  Any man who wants her may have her.

  Aiai! She’s past her day, ripening rotten.

  The petals of her flower are all brown.

  The grace that first she had is shot.

  Don’t you agree that she looks like a boy?

  A woman like that would drive a man crazy.

  She should get herself a job as a scarecrow.

  I’d as soon hump her as [kiss a goat’s butt].

  A source of joy I’d be to the neighbors

  With such a woman as her for a wife!

  How could I ever prefer her to you?

  You, O innocent, true heart and bold.

  Each of her faces is as sharp as the other,

  Which way she’s turning you never can guess.

  She’d whelp like the proverb’s luckless bitch

  Were I to foster get upon her, throwing

  Them blind, and all on the wrongest day.

  I said no more, but took her hand,

  Laid her down in a thousand flowers,

  And put my soft wool cloak around her.

  I slid my arm under her neck

  To still the fear in her eyes,

  For she was trembling like a fawn,

  Touched her hot breasts with light fingers,

  Spraddled her neatly and pressed

&n
bsp; Against her fine, hard, bared crotch.

  I caressed the beauty of all her body

  And came in a sudden white spurt

  While I was stroking her hair.

  19 Poseidon rider of horses

  Has spared the captain

  Of our fifty men.

  20 Decks awash,

  Mast-top dipping,

  And all

  Balanced on the keen edge

  Now of the wind. sword,

  Now of the wave’s blade.

  21 Dazzling radiance.

  22 Pass by,

  Highborn sir.

  23 Attribute all to the gods.

  They pick a man up,

  Stretched on the black loam,

  And set him on his two feet,

  Firm, and then again

  Shake solid men until

  They fall backward

  Into the worst of luck,

  Wandering hungry,

  Wild of mind.

  24 The oxherd picks tarantulas from his oxen,

  The cocksman keeps his prick dainty and clean:

  The nature of man is diverse and surprising,

  Each finding his pleasure where the heart wills,

  And each can say, I alone among mankind

  Have what’s best, what’s fine and good

  From Zeus, God, Father of men and gods.

  Yet Eurymas finds fault with everybody.

  25

  26 [The left silk

  Of a poem:]

  Nasty

  Which thinks

  Woman

  Hatefullest

  And father

  Dear

  Not o

  Upon

  27 Remember us, remember this earth,

  When with hearts against despair

  Our javelins held Thasos from her enemy.

  28 Dripping blood.

  29 Miserable with desire

  I lie lifeless,

  My bones shot through

  With a godsend of anguish

  As sharp as thorns.

  30 She’s as timid

  As a partridge.

  31 Hear me here,

  Hugging your knees,

  Hephaistos Lord.

  My battle mate,

  My good luck be;