7 Greeks Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  ARCHILOCHOS (7th century BC)

  SAPPHO (7th century BC)

  ALKMAN (7th century BC)

  ANAKREON (6th century BC)

  HERAKLEITOS (5th century BC)

  DIOGENES (5th century BC)

  HERONDAS (3rd century BC)

  Notes

  Introduction

  Of the Greek poets of the seventh century BC we know almost nothing and none of their poems has come down to us entire. Archilochos was a professional soldier from the Aegean island of Paros; Sappho a member of a distinguished family on Lesbos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor; and AIkman was a slave and choirmaster in the Lydian city Sardis before he emigrated, or was sold to, Sparta, where he wrote the two hymns, to Artemis and Hera, which assure him a place all his own in literature.

  Archilochos is the second poet of the West. Before him the archpoet Homer had written the two poems of Europe; never again would one imagination find the power to move two epics to completion and perfection. The clear minds of these archaic, island-dwelling Greeks survive in a few details only, fragment by fragment, a temple, a statue of Apollo with a poem engraved down the thighs, generous vases with designs abstract and geometric.

  They decorated their houses and ships like Florentines and Japanese; they wrote poems like Englishmen of the court of Henry, Elizabeth, and James. They dressed like Samurai; all was bronze, terra cotta, painted marble, dyed wool, and banquets. Of the Arcadian Greece of Winckelmann and Walter Pater they were as ignorant as we of the ebony cities of Yoruba and Benin. The scholar poets of the Renaissance, Ambrogio Poliziano and Christopher Marlowe, whose vision of antiquity we have inherited, would have rejected as indecorous this seventh-century world half oriental, half Viking. Archilochos was both poet and mercenary. As a poet he was both satirist and lyricist. Iambic verse is his invention. He wrote the first beast fable known to us. He wrote marching songs, love lyrics of frail tenderness, elegies. But most of all he was what Meleager calls him, “a thistle with graceful leaves.” There is a tradition that wasps hover around his grave. To the ancients, both Greek and Roman, he was The Satirist.

  We have what grammarians quote to illustrate a point of dialect or interesting use of the subjunctive; we have brief quotations by admiring critics; and we have papyrus fragments, scrap paper from the households of Alexandria, with which third-class mummies were wrapped and stuffed. All else is lost. Horace and Catullus, like all cultivated readers, had Archilochos complete in their libraries.

  Even in the tattered version we have of Archilochos, some three hundred fragments and about forty paraphrases and indirect quotations in the Budé edition (1958, revised 1968) of Professors Lasserre and Bonnard,* a good half of them beyond conjecture as to context, so ragged the papyrus, or brief (“grape,” “curled wool,” “short sword”) the extraordinary form of his mind is discernible. Not all poets can be so broken and still compel attention.

  Like the brutal but gallant Landsknecht Urs Graf, both artist and soldier, or the condottiere, poet, military engineer, and courtly amorist Sigismondo Malatesto of Rimini, Archilochos )(Kept his “two services” in an unlikely harmony. Ares did not complain that this ashspear fighter wrote poems, and the Muses have heard everything and did not mind that their horsetail-helmeted servant sometimes spoke with the vocabulary of a paratrooper sergeant, though the high-minded Spartans banned Archilochos’s poems for their mockery of uncritical bravery. And the people of his native Paros made it clear, when they honored him with a monument, that they thought him a great poet in spite of his nettle tongue.

  Apollo in an ancient conceit read Archilochos with delight and was of the opinion that his poems would last as long as mankind. “Hasten on, Wayfarer,” Archilochos’s tomb bore for inscription, “lest you stir up the hornets.” Leonidas the epigrammatist imagined the Muses hopelessly in love with Archilochos, and Delian Apollo to boot, for how else account for such melody, such verve? Quintilian admired his richness of blood, meaning liveliness, we suppose, and his abundance of muscle. Plutarch in his essay on music places Archilochos among the innovators of metric, and Horace, imitating Archilochos, congratulated himself on bringing Greek numbers into Italy. Pindar called him Archilochos the Scold. Writers as different as Milton, who mentions him in the Areopagitica as trying the patience of the defenders of the freedom of speech, and Wyndham Lewis, who spits like a cat at his reputation, took his satiric talent for granted without really knowing what he wrote. Hipponax alone among the archaic poets, we are told, has as sharpened a stylus as Archilochos, and Hipponax is remembered for a grim little couplet:

  Woman is twice a pleasure to man,

  The wedding night and her funeral.

  Though he is said to have written with venom and, according to Gaitylikos, splashed Helicon with gore, we have no evidence of anything so caustic. We have to take antiquity’s word for it, or assume that the Panhellenes were far touchier than we about satire. Certainly their sense of honor was of an iron strictness. To mock, a Greek proverb goes, is to thumb through Archilochos. “The longer your letters, the better,” Aristophanes complimented a friend, “like the poems of Archilochos.”

  It is precisely the tone of Archilochos that gives us a problem with no solution. In 1974 a new poem of Archilochos’s was published in R. Merkelbach’s and M.L. West’s Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. It was discovered on a papyrus mummy wrapping, identified and edited (ten years’ work it was) by Anton Fackelmann, translated here as Fragment 18. Its tone would be aesthetically difficult even if we were surer of its meaning. Our fortune in having it at all is immense and vies in importance with the utterly new dimension of lyric poetry which it gives to our tentative and sketchy knowledge of the dawn of European literature. Is it a comic poem, a raucous anecdote with a hilarious punch line? Is it frankly an erotic poem (Peter Green has waggishly titled it “The Last Tango in Paros”).* There is nothing in Greek literature like its last three stanzas. We can understand the robust bawdy of Aristophanes and Herondas, the vivid eroticism of Sappho and Anakreon, but these lines of Archilochos–sung in barracks, on the march, in village squares, at singing contests?–are they satire or salacity, private or public? I would like to believe that it is a satiric collision of a love song and a biological fact, the kind of comedy you get if Juliet on her balcony had dislodged a flowerpot in her ecstasy and beaned Romeo below.

  Of the man himself we know that he was born on Paros in the Cyclades in the first half of the seventh century BC. Pausanias knew a tradition that makes him the descendant of one Tellis, or Telesikles, who was distinguished enough to have figured in Polygnotos’s frescoes at Delphi, where he was shown with Kleoboia, who introduced the Eleusinian mysteries into Thasos, an island that owes much to Archilochos’s family. A Byzantine encyclopedia credits his father with founding a town on Thasos, “an island crowned with forests and lying in the sea like the backbone of an ass,” as Archilochos describes it in a poem.

  As his name means First Sergeant (leader of a company of ashspearmen or hoplites), he may have given it to himself, or used it as a nom de guerre et de plume. Some scholars say that he was a bastard, accepted by his father, but the son of a slave woman named Enipo. The poems reveal a man who took pride in his hard profession of mercenary, who cultivated a studied lyric eroticism, and had a tender eye for landscape. His companion was one Glaukos, Gray Eyes, and several fragments address him in a brotherly manner. At one time he contracted marriage with a daughter of Lykambes, Neobulé, probably a settlement that would have retired him from campaigning. “O to touch Neobule’s hand!” is the oldest surviving fragment of a love lyric in Greek.

  But Lykambes took back his word and the wedding was canceled. All Greece soon knew, and later Rome, Archilocho
s’s bitter poem in which he wished that Lykambes might freeze, starve, and be frightened to death simultaneously. And all schoolboys, before Greek was expelled from classrooms, knew Lykambes to be synonymous with a broken word of honor.

  Archilochos was killed by a man named Crow. The death was either in battle or a fight; nevertheless, Apollo in grief and anger excommunicated Crow from all the temples; so spoke the entranced oracle at Delphi.

  Sappho’s “I loved you once, Atthis, and long ago,” Swift’s “Only a woman’s hair,” are sharp in brevity. The rest of Sappho’s poem is papyrus dust. Swift could write no more. Fragments, when they are but motes (the unfinished works of a Spenser or Michelangelo are a different matter), touch us as the baby glove of a pharaoh which moved William Carlos Williams to tears, or the lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair which drew Byron back day after day to gaze (and to steal one strand for Landor); they “brave time” with a mite’s grip, missing by a rotten piece of linen or a grammarian’s inadvertent immortality the empty fame of the sirens’ song. To exist in fragments and in Greek is a doubly perilous claim on the attention of our time.

  The art that we are seeing for the first time in Archilochos has been a skill of the Western imagination for 2,600 years and shows no sign of fatigue or obsolescence. We can see the cut of Greek satire in Cummings, Brecht, Mandelshtam, Jonathan Williams, Myles na gCopaleen. For vigor of continuity it is a tradition without a rival.

  Sappho’s art, however, is much rarer: it belongs to cultural springtimes and renaissances. Something of its sweetness can be seen in Hilda Doolittle’s conscious imitation:

  delicate the weave,

  fair the thread:

  clear the colours,

  apple-leaf-green,

  ax-heart blood-red:

  rare the texture,

  woven from wild ram,

  sea-bred borned sheep:

  the Stallion and his mare,

  unbridled, with arrow-pattern,

  are worked on

  the blue cloth

  Sappho spoke with Euclidean terseness and authority of the encounters of the loving heart, the infatuated eye’s engagement with flowing hair, suave bodies, moonlight on flowers. “Mere air, these words,” she is made to say on a fifth-century kylix, “but delicious to hear.” Her imagery is as stark and patterned as the vase painting of her time: long-legged horses with dressed manes, marching men, ships, women in procession to a god’s altar. Her words are simple and piercing in their sincerity, her lines melodically keen, a music for girls’ voices. and dancing. Never has poetry been this clear and bright. “Beautiful Sappho,” said Socrates.

  Somewhere, in the white ruins of Sardis or even on an unexamined shelf or a jar still intact in a midden, there is perhaps a copy of Sappho’s poems complete. Around the mummy of an Alexandrian landlord or Antinoopolitan pastry cook there are, we can guess, for we have found them there before, shrouds of papyrus that were once pages of books on which are written Sappho’s smiling conversations with Aphrodite, songs for girls to sing at the moon’s altar, and clear evocations of the most graceful young women in ancient literature, their laughter, their bright clothes, their prayers, their girlish loves for men “who looked like gods,” for each other, and for older women, their marriages into Lydian families or with the boy down the street—“tall as Ares,” as the gracious epithalamies describe him. In Chaucer’s girls of the Daisy Cult,

  As she is of alle flowers flour

  Fulfilled of al vertu and honour,

  And evere like faire, and fressh of hewe

  And I love it, and ever, ylike newe,

  And evere shal, til that myn herte dye,

  in Francis Jammes’s connoisseurship of Jeunes filles en fleur, in Whistler’s and Henry James’s white-frocked American girls, we can taste something of Sappho’s charm and of her vision of adolescent beauty. But Sappho’s sure hand at finding the peculiarly feminine flounce that sets her wide-eyed “love of all delicate things” within a sensibility all to itself is so rare that perhaps Gertrude Stein alone among the moderns has got anywhere near it, as in “A Sonatina Followed by Another”:

  I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me. In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I. In looking at the sun she read a map and so did I…. In loving the blue sea she had a pain. And so did I. In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I. How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love. How often do we need trees and hills. Not often. And how often do we need mountains. Not very often.

  Even this is protected by a deliberate jauntiness, for all its power to convey. Sappho was infinitely freer, and her gods, a passionate family of high inventiveness, urged her on.

  It has been many centuries since the last-known copy of her poems was worn to shreds by human hands. By the tenth century of our era one could read in an encyclopedia: “Sappho, a harp player from Mytilene in Lesbos…. Some write that she was also a lyric poet.”

  An older world that, ironically, we know more about than Sappho’s, was gone by the time she was born: golden Mycenae, Crete with its labyrinth and bull-leapers, Pylos, and all the kingdoms of Homer’s epics. That civilization had drifted away from the west, away from a trouble we do not yet understand (the explosion of Santorini perhaps, waves of Dorian invaders perhaps) but which did not touch Attica or the Ionian islands, where the high spirit of the old culture lived on for a while beyond its burned citadels.

  The Cretan love of flowers, cunning craftsmanship, and rich needlework, and the Mycenaean splendor of chariots, soldiery, gold, and ships are part of Sappho’s heritage. Athens, when she wrote, was a country town with old-fashioned cyclopean battlements. Sparta, not yet rigid with discipline nor fanatically tough and frugal, was what Athens was to become, a city of music and poetry, of games in which boys and girls alike played naked, for modesty’s sake. Greek education began there, and thus our own. But Sappho’s island, for all the awakening of a new world, dreamed on in antiquity, in touch with the rest of Hellas yet facing the rich and gaudy Lydian empire on the mainland nearby. From here came Sappho’s seven-stringed lyre, and the sweetly melancholy mixolydian mode that by one account she introduced into Greek music, and her friend the tall Anaktoria.

  The seventh century is becoming visible to us. It interests us as the age of Pericles and Plato engaged the Victorians, as Rome of the Republic held the gaze of the eighteenth century. The seventh century’s perilous interchange of chaos for order, order for chaos, reminds us of our own. Much was dying, much was being born. Isaiah and Jeremiah, moving in a world much larger than Sappho’s, roared at the confusion with fire and vision that we understand all too well. The strenuous flexibility of the rhythms of the next three centuries was beginning. Statues were unfreezing from their Egyptiac stiffness; drawing became graceful, calligraphic, paced like the geometric patterns of weaving and ceramics. Iron was pulling out ahead of bronze. Whole armies, not just the captains, could wield swords.

  Even deep in the oak forests of Europe where the Kings rode on reindeer and lived in houses on stilts with dogs half wolf at their feet, drawing—as the rocks of the Camonica Valley show—was returning in the seventh century to a grace and formality it had not had for a thousand years. This order of the century as it informed its art has become congenial to us through our learning to see Giotto and Altamira, Lascaux and Bulawayo. Within this aesthetic we can place the psychological nakedness of Sappho and her articulation in sunlit space of emotions that we relegate to velleity and aporia.

  Spirit, for Sappho, shines from matter; one embraces the two together, inseparable. The world is to be loved. It attracts, we pursue and possess. Its structure contains the goddess Aphrodite, who inspires love, and her children Eros and Peitho, who tend to their appointed duties, the lighting of the fire of love in the heart and the seduction of the beloved. These bright framings of animal lust, of loyalty and mutual trust in
the breeding season, have taken more dread forms in the history of man. Here the animal is wholly tamed, resplendent in a civilized gentleness.

  The ancient Greeks recognized the ambiguous allegiances of adolescence and accommodated them in tensely idealistic and erotic affairs all the more poignant for being brief. Barracks life and athletic training had long before created in the military caste tight friendships among men like Sappho’s among women. Maximus of Tyre saw in Sappho’s Comitatus the beginning of the cohering spirit that Socrates refined into philosophical clarity. “’they both appear to me to have practised the same sort of friendship, he of males, she of females, both declaring that they loved many, for they were captivated by all who were beautiful. What Alcibiades, Charmides, and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinnó, Anhis, and Anaktoria were to her.”

  These loves were in all probability an affair of the aristocracy; they did not interfere with marriage. They seem to have sprung up among comrades closely engaged in common activity, the army, schools or, as with Sappho, a cultivated society of high sensitivity. The Greeks were in fact inventing sensibilities that Europe would, in time, transpose wholly to courtship, as when Arnaut Daniel, Sordello, Bertran de Born, and Dante seemed to rediscover romantic love and to incarnate its radiance in a second age of lyric poetry as brilliant, and as far removed from biological process, as Sappho’s. Amabit sapiens, Lucius Apuleius says in his Apologia cupient Caetri. The educated love; others breed. Apuleius is one of the last authors to understand clearly the old love of adult and adolescent, soldier and recruit, teacher and pupil. “It is not lust but the beauty of innocence that captures lovers,” though Sappho knew nothing of the Platonism that colors Apuleius. In fact Sappho puzzled him a little: her archaic robustness had already begun to look gauche and a bit outrageous. “Her graceful voluptuousness,” says this Hellenized Roman, “makes up for the strangeness of her songs.” The world could no longer appreciate the impact of a walking, smiling girl upon the heart, as if she were the charioteers of Lydia in full armor charging.