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Ancient Greek literature
THE FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN
LITERATURE
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We can be certain
that people told stories almost as soon as they learned how
to speak, but stories could not be recorded until they could
be written down. Pictures came before writing - the cave
paintings at Altamira are nearly 20,000 years old — and
pictures, like words, are a form of communication. Marks
that identified objects are at least as old, although a full
system of writing did not develop until about 5,000 years
ago.
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 Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres (1780-1867)
The Apotheosis of Homer |
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Ancient literature
The stark fact about ancient Western
literature is that the greater part of it has perished. Some
of it had been forgotten before it was possible to commit it
to writing; fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed
posterity of most of the rest; and the restitutions that
archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time
are small. Yet surviving writings in Greek and far more in
Latin have included those that on ancient testimony marked
the heightsreached by the creative imagination and intellect
of the ancient world.
Five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt,
Greece, Rome, and the culture of the Israelites in
Palestine—each came into contact with one or more of the
others. The two most ancient, Assyro-Babylonia, with its
broken clay tablets, and Egypt, with its rotted papyrus
rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age; yet
Babylon produced the first full code of laws and two epics
of archetypal myth, which came to be echoed and re-echoed in
distant lands, and Egypt's mystical intuition of a
supernatural world caught the imagination of the Greeks and
Romans. Hebrew culture exerted its greatest literary
influence on the West because of the place held by its early
writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and
thisliterature profoundly influenced Western consciousness
through translation from about the time of St. Augustine
onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin.
Until then, Judaism's concentrated spirituality set it apart
from the Greek and Roman world.
Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia,
Asia Minor, and Egypt, Greek literature has no direct
literary ancestry and appears self-originated. Roman writers
looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of
verse and metre. Rome eventually passed the torch on to the
early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been subsumed
under a wholly Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in
its own right at the Renaissance—the “classical” tradition
afterward becoming a threat to natural literary development,
particularly when certain critics of the 17th century began
to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary
writing should conform with those employed by Greece and
Rome.
All of the chief kinds of literature—epic, tragedy, comedy,
lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrative—were
established by the Greeks and Romans, and later developments
have for the most part been secondary extensions. The Greek
epic of
Homer was the model for the Latin of
Virgil; the lyric
fragments of Alcaeus and
Sappho
were echoed in the work of
Catullus and
Ovid; the history of
Thucydides was succeeded by
that of
Livy and Tacitus; but the tragedy of the great
Athenians of the 5th century BC had no worthy counterpart in
Roman Seneca nor had the philosophical writings of
Plato and
Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman, for the practical
Romans were not philosophers. Whereas Greek writers excelled
in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision
and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely
interested in human individuality.
In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps
especially that of Greek authors expresses the imaginative and
moral temper of Western man. It has helped to create his
values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations.
Homer's epics extend their concern from the right treatment of
strangers to behaviour in situations of deep involvement among
rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods; the
tragedies of
Aeschylus and
Sophocles are a sublime expression
of man's breakthrough into moral awareness of his situation.
Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the sense
of duty is common to many, from Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to
Virgil,
Horace, and
Seneca. A human ideal is to be seen in the
savage satire of
Juvenal and in Anacreon's songs of love and
wine, as it is in the philosophical thought of
Plato and
Aristotle. It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles,
“Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, the
power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal held
up in Greek and Latin literature, formed after civilization
had emerged from earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be
transformed, before the ancient world came to its close, into
the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers
foreshadowed medieval literature.
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Greek literature
Ancient Greek literature
Of the literature of ancient Greece only a
relatively small proportion survives. Yet it remains
important, not only because much of it is of supreme
quality but also because until the mid-19th century
the greater part of the literature of the Western
world was produced by writers who were familiar with
the Greek tradition, either directly or through the
medium of Latin, who were conscious that the forms
they used were mostly of Greek invention, and who
took for granted in their readers some familiarity
with Classical literature.
The periods
The history of ancient Greek
literature may be divided into three periods:
Archaic (to the end of the 6th century bc);
Classical (5th and 4th centuries bc);
Hellenistic and Greco-Roman (3rd century bc onward).
Archaic period
(to the end of the 6th century bc)
The Greeks created poetry before they made use of
writing for literary purposes, and from the
beginning their poetry was intended to be sung or
recited. (The art of writing was little known before
the 7th century bc. The script used in Crete and
Mycenae during the 2nd millennium bc [Linear B] is
not known to have been employed for other than
administrative purposes, and after the destruction
of the Mycenaean cities it was forgotten.)
Its subject was myth—part legend, based sometimes
on the dim memory of historical events; part
folktale; and part religious speculation. But since
the myths were not associated with any religious
dogma, even though they often treated of gods and
heroic mortals, they were not authoritative and
could be varied by a poet to express new concepts.
Thus, at an early stage Greek thought was
advanced as poets refashioned their materials; and
to this stage of Archaic poetry belonged the epics
ascribed to
Homer, the
Iliad and the
Odyssey,
retelling intermingled history and myth of the
Mycenaean Age. These two great poems, standing at
the beginning of Greek literature, established most
of the literary conventions of the epic poem. The
didactic poetry of
Hesiod
"Works And Days"(c. 700 bc) was probably
later in composition than
Homer’s epics and, though
different in theme and treatment, continued the epic
tradition.
The several types of Greek lyric poetry
originated in the Archaic period among the poets of
the Aegean Islands and of Ionia on the coast of Asia
Minor. Archilochus of Paros, of the 7th century bc,
was the earliest Greek poet to employ the forms of
elegy (in which the epic verse line alternated with
a shorter line) and of personal lyric poetry. His
work was very highly rated by the ancient Greeks but
survives only in fragments; its forms and metrical
patterns—the elegiac couplet and a variety of lyric
metres—were taken up by a succession of Ionian
poets. At the beginning of the 6th century Alcaeus
and
Sappho, composing in the Aeolic dialect of
Lesbos, produced lyric poetry mostly in the metres
named after them (the alcaic and the sapphic), which
Horace was later to adapt to Latin poetry. No other
poets of ancient Greece entered into so close a
personal relationship with the reader as Alcaeus,
Sappho, and
Archilochus do. They were succeeded by
Anacreon of Teos, in Ionia, who, like Archilochus,
composed his lyrics in the Ionic dialect. Choral
lyric, with musical accompaniment, belonged to the
Dorian tradition and its dialect, and its
representative poets in the period were Alcman in
Sparta and Stesichorus in Sicily.
Both tragedy and comedy had their origins in
Greece. “Tragic” choruses are said to have existed
in Dorian Greece around 600 bc, and in a rudimentary
dramatic form tragedy became part of the most famous
of the Dionysian festivals, the Great, or City,
Dionysia at Athens, about 534. Comedy, too,
originated partly in Dorian Greece and developed in
Attica, where it was officially recognized rather
later than tragedy. Both were connected with the
worship of Dionysus, god of fruitfulness and of wine
and ecstasy.
Written codes of law were the earliest form of
prose and were appearing by the end of the 7th
century, when knowledge of reading and writing was
becoming more widespread. No prose writer is known
earlier than Pherecydes of Syros (c. 550 bc), who
wrote about the beginnings of the world; but the
earliest considerable author was Hecataeus of
Miletus, who wrote about both the mythical past and
the geography of the Mediterranean and surrounding
lands.
To
Aesop, a semi-historical,
semi-mythological character of the mid-6th century,
have been attributed the moralizing beast fables
inherited by later writers.
Archilochus of Paros
flourished c. 650 bc, Paros [Cyclades,
Greece]
poet and soldier, the earliest Greek
writer of iambic, elegiac, and personal
lyric poetry whose works have survived
to any considerable extent. The
surviving fragments of his work show him
to have been a metrical innovator of the
highest ability.
Archilochus’s father was Telesicles,
a wealthy Parian who founded a colony on
the island of Thasos. Archilochus lived
on both Paros and Thasos. Fragments of
his poetry mention the solar eclipse of
April 6, 648 bc, and the wealth of the
Lydian king Gyges (c. 680–645 bc). The
details of Archilochus’s life, in the
ancient biographical tradition, are
derived for the most part from his
poems—an unreliable source because the
events he described may have been
fictitious, or they may have involved
imaginary personae or ritual situations.
Modern discoveries, however, have
supported the picture given in the
poetry. Two inscriptions dedicated to
Archilochus were discovered in a sacred
area on Paros; they are named, after the
men who dedicated them, the Mnesiepes
inscription (3rd century bc) and the
Sosthenes inscription (1st century bc).
Archilochus’s self-presentation was
taken seriously as early as the late 5th
century bc by the Athenian politician
and intellectual Critias, who denounced
him for presenting himself as an
impoverished, quarrelsome, foul-mouthed,
lascivious lower-class bastard. Some
scholars feel that the Archilochus
portrayed in his poems is too scurrilous
to be real.
Archilochus probably served as a
soldier. According to ancient tradition,
he fought against Thracians on the
mainland near Thasos and died when the
Thasians were fighting against soldiers
from the island of Naxos. In one famous
poem, Archilochus tells, without
embarrassment or regret, of throwing his
shield away in battle. (“I saved my
life. What do I care about my shield?
The hell with it! I’ll buy another just
as good.”) The motif of the abandoned
shield appears again in the lyric poems
of Alcaeus and Anacreon, in a parody by
Aristophanes (Peace), and in a learned
variation by the Latin poet Horace (Carmina).
Although the truth is difficult to
discern with certainty from the poems
and other evidence, Archilochus may have
been disreputable. He was particularly
famous in antiquity for his sharp satire
and ferocious invective. It was said
that a man named Lycambes betrothed his
daughter Neobule to the poet and then
later withdrew the plan. In a papyrus
fragment published in 1974 (the “Cologne
Epode”)—the longest surviving piece of
Archilochus’s poetry—a man, who is
apparently the poet himself, tells in
alternately explicit and hinting
language how he seduced the sister of
Neobule after having crudely rejected
Neobule herself. According to the
ancient accounts, Lycambes and his
daughters committed suicide, shamed by
the poet’s fierce mocking.
Archilochus was the first known Greek
poet to employ the elegiac couplet and
various iambic and trochaic metres,
ranging from dimeter to tetrameter, as
well as epodes, lyric metres, and
asinarteta (a mixture of different
metres). He was a master of the Greek
language, moving from Homeric formulas
to the language of daily life in a few
lines. He was the first European author
to make personal experiences and
feelings the main subject of his poems:
the controlled use of the personal voice
in his verse marks a distinct departure
from other surviving Greek verse, which
is typically more formulaic and heroic.
For his technical accomplishments
Archilochus was much admired by later
poets, such as Horace, but there was
also severe criticism, especially of a
moralistic character, by writers such as
the poets Pindar and Critias (both 5th
century bc).
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Alcaeus
Lawrence
Alma-Tadema
Sappho and
Alcaeus
born c. 620 bce, Mytilene, Lesbos
[Greece]
died c. 580 bce
Greek lyric poet whose work was
highly esteemed in the ancient world. He
lived at the same time and in the same
city as the poet Sappho. A collection of
Alcaeus’s surviving poems in 10 books
(now lost) was made by scholars in
Alexandria, Egypt, in the 2nd century
bce, and he was a favourite model of the
Roman lyric poet Horace (1st century bce),
who borrowed the alcaic stanza. Only
fragments and quotations from Alcaeus’s
work survived into the Byzantine Middle
Ages and into the modern world, but
papyrus texts discovered and published
in the 20th century considerably
expanded knowledge of his poetry,
enabling scholars to evaluate his major
themes and his quality as a poet.
Alcaeus’s poems may be classed in
four groups: hymns in honour of gods and
heroes, love poetry, drinking songs, and
political poems. Many of the fragments
reflect the vigour of the poet’s
involvement in the social and political
life of Mytilene. They express a closed
world of aristocratic values and
conservatism, in which realism and
idealism coexist—although the idealism
is limited by the norms and goals of the
poet’s political faction.
At the end of the 7th century bce and
the beginning of the 6th century,
aristocratic families on Lesbos
contended for power, among them the
family of Alcaeus and his brothers,
Antimenidas and Cicis. These families
enrolled in hetaireiai (“factions”),
societies of nobles united by an oath of
loyalty and a community of ethical and
political views. In the years 612–609 a
conspiracy organized by Alcaeus’s
brothers and their ally Pittacus
overthrew the tyrant Melanchrus. Alcaeus
was probably too young to participate in
the overthrow, but later he fought next
to Pittacus in a war between Mytilene
and Athens over the control of Sigeum, a
promontory on the Troad near the
Hellespont. He reportedly told his
friend Melanippus how he had to abandon
his shield to the enemy to save his own
life.
A new tyrant, Myrsilus, came to power
in Lesbos, and Alcaeus became his fierce
opponent. After the failure of a
conspiracy, Alcaeus went into exile in
Pyrrha, a small town near Mytilene.
During his exile Alcaeus wrote bitter
polemics against Pittacus, who had
joined another faction. The poet greeted
Myrsilus’s death with fierce joy: “Now
we must get drunk and drink whether we
want to or not, because Myrsilus is
dead!” With this death, Alcaeus was able
to return to his home.
To replace Myrsilus, the city
appointed Pittacus as aisymnētēs
(“organizer”); he held power for a
decade (590–580 bce). Pittacus enjoyed a
reputation for benevolence and was later
included among the Seven Sages (the
6th-century grouping of representative
wise and clever men from all parts of
Greece). For Alcaeus, however,
Pittacus’s rise to power meant a return
to exile. (An ancient critic reported
that he was exiled three times.)
Alcaeus’s poetry in this period dwells
on his misfortunes, battles, and
tireless rancour against Pittacus, whom
he mocks for disloyalty, physical
defects (including flat feet and a big
stomach), rudeness, and low origins.
There is little evidence regarding the
poet’s exile; he may have visited Egypt
and perhaps Thrace and Boeotia. Pittacus
may have recalled him from his second
exile. His death is likewise a mystery,
although he implied in his poetry that
he was old, and some believe that he
died in battle.
Alcaeus’s most influential image is
his allegory of the ship of state, found
in a number of fragments. Another common
topic is wine, the gift of Dionysus,
“the mirror of a man,” which in every
season offers the poet a remedy against
his woes. This theme supports the theory
that much of his verse was composed for
symposia, a context that would explain
his allusive language, full of
references that presuppose the shared
experiences, values, and aspirations of
political partisans (hetairoi) gathered
together for drink and song. Horace
reported that Alcaeus also wrote hymns
and erotic verse for handsome young men.
Other fragments of Alcaeus’s work
convey the atmosphere of everyday life
in 6th-century Mytilene. He wrote of
ships and rivers, of a girls’ beauty
contest, of a flock of wigeon in flight,
and of the flowers that herald the
spring. He managed to convey the spirit
and the values of the city-states of the
Aegean, as, for example, when he
declares that true greatness lies “not
in well-fashioned houses, nor in walls,
canals, and dockyards, but in men who
use whatever Fortune sends them.”
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Anacreon of Teos
born c. 582 bc, Teos, Ionia [now
Siğacık, Tur.]
died c. 485
ancient Greek lyric poet who wrote in
the Ionic dialect. Only fragments of his
verse have survived. The edition of
Anacreon’s poetry known to later
generations was probably prepared in
Alexandria by Aristarchus in the 2nd
century bc and divided into 9 or 10
books on the basis of metrical criteria.
Anacreon immigrated to the newly founded
city of Abdera, on the coast of Thrace,
after Teos was conquered by the Persians
in 546 bc. His working life was spent
largely at the courts of tyrants, who
were important patrons of art and
literature in the 6th century. The first
was Polycrates of Samos. After
Polycrates was murdered by the Persians,
Anacreon moved to Athens, writing under
the patronage of Hipparchus. Even after
Hipparchus’s assassination in 514 bc,
the poet continued to enjoy popularity
in Athens, as is shown by his
appearances in works of art of the
period. After Hipparchus’s death
Anacreon may have moved to Thessaly; he
may have died at Teos, where his tomb
was said to have been found.
Anacreon wrote both serious and light
poetry. A serious fragment on politics,
for example, names the opponents of
Polycrates. The poems quoted by later
sources, however, are in praise of love,
wine, and revelry. Anacreon’s treatment
of these subjects is formal and elegant,
since he disliked excess and vulgarity.
His tone conveys ironic enjoyment, and
his language and use of metre are smooth
and simple but creative.
From his erotic verse there survive
striking images of beloved young men:
the peaceful character of Megistes, the
eyes of Cleobulus, the blond locks of
the Thracian Smerdies. Girls also
appear, such as the girl from Lesbos and
a shy and subdued Thracian girl. (Both
are probably hetairai, or courtesans,
attending a symposium.) For Anacreon
love is light, fantastic, and
bizarre—but never dramatic—as shown in
his various images of Eros. The poet
recommends the same approach, joyous and
carefree rather than licentious and
violent, for the dinner party. As
ancient critics had already observed,
Anacreon’s poetry finds room for the
same human types that would populate
Greek mime and New Comedy, such as the
nouveau riche rascal Artemon and the
bald and tiresomely pretentious Alexis.
Anacreon’s poetic sentiments and
style were widely imitated by
Hellenistic and Byzantine Greek writers,
though they tended to exaggerate the
strain of drunken eroticism and
frivolity present in his work. There
thus arose the Anacreontea, a collection
of about 60 short poems composed by
post-Classical Greek writers at various
dates and first published by Henri
Estienne as the work of Anacreon in
1554. These had a great influence on
Renaissance French poetry. The word
Anacreontics was first used in England
in 1656 by Abraham Cowley to denote a
verse metre supposedly used by the
ancient Greek poet and consisting of
seven or eight syllables with three or
four main stresses. Anacreon himself, it
should be noted, composed verse in a
variety of Greek lyric metres. Robert
Herrick, William Oldys, and William
Shenstone wrote original Anacreontics in
English, and Thomas Moore provided
perhaps the finest translation of the
Anacreontea in 1800, under the title
Odes of Anacreon. The Anacreontea also
influenced Italian and German
literature.
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Alcman in
Sparta
flourished 7th century bc, Sparta
[Greece]
Greek poet who wrote choral lyrics in
a type of Doric related to the Laconian
vernacular, used in the region that
included Sparta.
Alcman’s work was divided by the
editors of Hellenistic Alexandria (3rd
and 2nd centuries bc) into six books, or
papyrus rolls, but the poems survived
into modern times only in fragments. The
longest is a partheneion (a choral song
for girls) discovered on a 1st-century
papyrus in Egypt in 1855. This ode was
probably written to celebrate a rite of
passage, and the poem is characterized
by sensuous imagery and erotic
implications. The Women Divers, the plot
of which is unknown, may have taken up
an entire papyrus roll.
The Suda, a Byzantine lexicon (late
10th century ad), describes Alcman as a
man “of an extremely amorous disposition
and the inventor of love poems.” His
learned verse is full of geographic
detail. One fragment, telling of the
sleeping world at the end of the day,
was imitated by Virgil, Ludovico
Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (in his Wanderers
Nachtlied, 1776–80). The fragment’s
sympathy with nature is unusual in Greek
poetry. In two other fragments the poet
attributes his poetic creativity to his
imitation of nature; he says that he
knows how all birds sing and that he
composed his song by using human
language to reproduce the voice of the
partridge.
Alcman’s lighthearted manner, so
different from the later Spartan style,
gave rise to the traditional notion that
he was not a Spartan but a native of
Sardis in Lydia. In fact, contemporary
scholars know that Sparta in the 7th
century bc had a brilliant cultural
life, a context into which Alcman fit
perfectly.
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Stesichorus in Sicily
born 632/629 bc, Mataurus, Bruttium,
Magna Graecia [now in southern Italy]
died 556/553 bc, Catania [or Himera],
Sicily
Greek poet known for his distinctive
choral lyric verse on epic themes. His
name was originally Teisias, according
to the Byzantine lexicon Suda (10th
century ad). Stesichorus, which in Greek
means “instructor of choruses,” was a
byname derived from his professional
activity, which he practiced especially
in Himera, a town on the northern coast
of Sicily.
Scholars at Alexandria in the 3rd or
2nd century bc divided Stesichorus’s
work into 26 books, or papyrus rolls;
although many titles survive, there
exist only a few fragments of the actual
poetry. Late 20th-century publications
of papyrus finds have furthered the
study of his work. The titles suggest
that he took the themes of his poems
from the traditional epic heritage found
in mainland Greece and Asia Minor as
well as in Italy and Sicily. Helen,
Wooden Horse, Sack of Troy, Homecomings
of the Heroes, and Oresteia are based on
stories about the Trojan War. Cerberus,
Geryoneis, and Cycnus are about
Heracles. Funeral Games for Pelias is
part of the legend of the Argonauts. Yet
the poetry broke with the epic
tradition, in which a single performer
declaimed verse in dactylic hexameters,
as Stesichorus’s lyric verses in the
Doric dialect were accompanied by a
stringed instrument. The Roman educator
Quintilian (1st century ad) wrote that
Stesichorus supported the weight of the
epic with his lyre. Some ancient sources
placed Stesichorus in a line of solo
kithara (lyre) performers.
Stesichorus was credited with the
three-part articulation of choral
lyric—strophic lines followed by
antistrophic lines in the same metre,
concluding with a summary line, called
an epode, in a different metre—that
became canonical. The apparent length of
some of his poems (Geryoneis seems to
have reached more than 1,300 verses, and
the Oresteia is in two books) has caused
some scholars to doubt that a chorus
could have performed them. The ancient
testimony, however, is unanimous in
classifying his poetry as choral lyric;
it is possible that the choruses
performed appropriate movements while
the solo performer (perhaps the poet)
sang the words.
According to a story that was famous
in the ancient world, Stesichorus was
blinded by Helen after he blamed her in
a poem for causing the Trojan War. He
regained his sight by composing a double
retraction, the Palinode. Scholars have
doubted the poet’s authorship of works
such as Calyce, Rhadine, and Daphne,
which seem to anticipate themes popular
in the romantic poetry of the
Hellenistic age (323–30 bc).
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Pherecydes of Syros
flourished c. 550 bc
Greek mythographer and cosmogonist
traditionally associated with the Seven
Wise Men of Greece (especially Thales).
Pherecydes is credited with
originating metempsychosis, a doctrine
that holds the human soul to be
immortal, passing into another body,
either human or animal, after death. He
is also known as the author of
Heptamychos, a work, extant in fragments
only, describing the origin of the world
from a divine trinity: Zas (Zeus),
Chronos or Kronos, and Chthonie or Ge
(Mother Earth). Pherecydes was
characterized by Aristotle in
Metaphysics, Book XIV, as a theologian
who mixed philosophy and myth. Tradition
says that he was the teacher of
Pythagoras. He is not to be confused
with Pherecydes of Athens, a genealogist
who lived about a century later.
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Hecataeus of
Miletus
flourished early 5th century bc,
Ionia [now in Turkey]
groundbreaking Greek author of an
early history and geography. When the
Persian Empire ruled Asia Minor,
Hecataeus tried to dissuade the Ionians
from revolt against Persia (500 bc), and
in 494, when they were obliged to sue
for terms, he was one of the ambassadors
to the Persian satrap, whom he persuaded
to restore the constitution of the Ionic
cities. He was presumably mature by this
time; such tasks were not entrusted to
young men.
One of Hecataeus’s two known works,
the Genealogia (also known as Historiai
or Heroologia), seems to have been a
systematic account in four books of the
traditions and mythology of the Greeks,
but comparatively few fragments of it
survive. More than 300 fragments (most
of them place names), however, remain of
the Periodos gēs or Periēgēsis (“Tour
Round the World”); it was written in two
parts—one covering Europe, the other
“Asia” (which included Egypt and North
Africa). The work describes the peoples
who would be met in voyages around the
Mediterranean and Black seas, in a
clockwise direction, beginning with the
Strait of Gibraltar and ending at
Morocco. In diversions he also mentions
Scythia, Persia, India, Egypt, and Nubia.
Hecataeus was in general the pioneer
in those geographic and ethnographic
fields that remained attractive to the
Greek historians. His work was used
freely by the 5th-century-bc historian
Herodotus, who acknowledged it only when
he found occasion to complain. That
Hecataeus’s literary style was good,
though simple, was allowed by the
1st-century-bc rhetorician Dionysius of
Halicarnassus and other critics.
|
By the end of the
Archaic period, there were signs that literary traditions
were becoming
centred on Athens. Athens's leading role in the Persian
Wars, in which the Greek city states
successfully defended their independence against the Persian
empire, opened a glorious period of
expansion and prosperity, with such a flowering of
literature and the arts as has perhaps never
since been equalled. Although defeat in the Peloponnesian
War (431-04 B.C.) ended
Athenian dominance, its literary creativity continued until
the end of the Classical era,
conveniently marked by the Macedonian conquest of 338 B.C.
|
Classical
period
5th and 4th
centuries bc
True tragedy was created by
Aeschylus and
continued with Sophocles and Euripides in the second
half of the 5th century.
Aristophanes, the
greatest of the comedic poets, lived on into the 4th
century, but the Old Comedy did not survive the fall
of Athens in 404.
The sublime themes
of Aeschylean tragedy, in which human beings stand
answerable to the gods and receive awe-inspiring
insight into divine purposes, are exemplified in the
three plays of the Oresteia. The tragedy of
Sophocles made progress toward both dramatic
complexity and naturalness while remaining orthodox
in its treatment of religious and moral issues.
Euripides handled his themes on the plane of
skeptical enlightenment and doubted the traditional
picture of the gods. Corresponding development of
dramatic realization accompanied the shift of
vision: the number of individual actors was raised
to three, each capable of taking several parts.
The Old Comedy of
Aristophanes was established later than tragedy
but preserved more obvious traces of its origin in
ritual; for the vigour, wit, and indecency with
which it keenly satirized public issues and
prominent persons clearly derived from the ribaldry
of the Dionysian festival.
Aristophanes’ last
comedies show a transition, indicated by the
dwindling importance of the chorus, toward the
Middle Comedy, of which no plays are extant. This
phase was followed toward the beginning of the 3rd
century by the New Comedy, introduced by
Menander,
which turned for its subjects to the private
fictional world of ordinary people. Later
adaptations of New Comedy in Latin by Plautus and
Terence carried the influence of his work on to
medieval and modern times.
In the 5th century,
Pindar, the greatest of the Greek choral
lyrists, stood outside the main Ionic-Attic stream
and embodied in his splendid odes a vision of the
world seen in terms of aristocratic values that were
already growing obsolete. Greek prose came to
maturity in this period. Earlier writers such as
Anaxagoras the philosopher and
Protagoras the
Sophist used the traditional Ionic dialect, as did
Herodotus the historian. His successors in history,
Thucydides and
Xenophon, wrote in Attic.
The works of
Plato and
Aristotle, of the 4th century,
are the most important of all the products of Greek
culture in the intellectual history of the West.
They were preoccupied with ethics, metaphysics, and
politics as humankind’s highest study and, in the
case of
Aristotle, extended the range to include
physics, natural history, psychology, and literary
criticism. They have formed the basis of Western
philosophy and, indeed, they determined, for
centuries to come, the development of European
thought.
This was also a
golden age for rhetoric and oratory, first taught by
Corax of Syracuse in the 5th century. The study
of rhetoric and oratory raised questions of truth
and morality in argument, and thus it was of concern
to the philosopher as well as to the advocate and
the politician and was expounded by teachers, among
whom Isocrates was outstanding. The orations of
Demosthenes, a statesman of 4th-century Athens
and the most famous of Greek orators, are preeminent
for force and power.
Hellenistic
and Greco-Roman periods
3rd century
bc onward
In the huge empire of Alexander the Great,
Macedonians and Greeks composed the new governing
class; and Greek became the language of
administration and culture, a new composite dialect
based to some extent on Attic and called the Koine,
or common language. Everywhere the traditional
city-state was in decline, and individuals were
becoming aware of their isolation and were seeking
consolidation and satisfaction outside corporate
society. Artistic creation now came under private
patronage, and, except for Athenian comedy,
compositions were intended for a small, select
audience that admired polish, erudition, and
subtlety.
An event of great
importance for the development of new tendencies was
the founding of the Museum, the shrine of the Muses
with its enormous library, at Alexandria. The chief
librarian was sometimes a poet as well as tutor of
the heir apparent. The task of accumulating and
preserving knowledge begun by the Sophists and
continued by Aristotle and his adherents was for the
first time properly endowed. Through the researches
of the Alexandrian scholars, texts of ancient
authors were preserved.
The Hellenistic
period lasted from the end of the 4th to the end of
the 1st century bc. For the next three centuries,
until Constantinople became the capital of the
Byzantine Empire, Greek writers were conscious of
belonging to a world of which Rome was the centre.
The genres
Epic narrative
see also:
Greek and Roman mythology
Bulfinch Thomas.
"THE AGE OF
FABLE OR STORIES OF GODS AND HEROES"
(CHAPTER I-CHAPTER XLII)
Berens E.M.
"Myths and Legends of
Ancient Greece and Rome"
(PART
I-VIII)
Hamilton Edith.
"Timeless
Tales of Gods and Heroes"
HOMER
Homer ("Iliad",
"Odyssey")
In the late 8th century B.C., Greek
literature began to be written down. As in other ancient
literatures, the subjects concerned gods and heroes: the
religious myths that people invent to explain phenomena for
which they have no scientific explanation, and the exploits
of famous men. They too are largely mythical though perhaps
based more closely on real events than we can be sure of
now. Archaeology has shown, for example, that the story of
the siege of Troy was almost certainly based on an actual
war between the Mycaeneans, forerunners of the Greeks, and
their neighbours. These were stories that were, in one form
or another, well known, having been repeated orally for many
generations. They were brought together in two magnificent
works of epic poetry,
Homer's
Iliad and
Odyssey.
These works formed the basis, almost the 'Bible', of Greek
culture, and if any one person can be called the founder of
Western literature, it is
Homer. But was Homer one person? Tradition says he
was a blind bard, who recited his epic verse at social
gatherings, but there are no facts about him and most
scholars believe that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were written or reworked to varying degrees by different
people. The structure changes, and there are signs of
additions, and odd discrepancies: the author of the Odyssey
seemed to like dogs, but the author of the Iliad did not.
The Iliad relates events during the ten-year siege of Troy,
originally provoked by the abduction of the beautiful Helen
by the Trojan prince Paris, and in particular the incidents
arising from the wrath of Achilles, the premier Greek hero
who was antagonized by the commander, Agamemnon. It ends
with the capture of the city by Greek warriors smuggled into
Troy in a wooden horse. The deviser of the wooden horse was
Odysseus, a hero with brains as well as brawn, and the
Odyssey is the story of his return home, a journey that
lasted even longer than the siege and included encounters
with the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the enchantress Circe,
the Lotus eaters, the Sirens, the monsters Scylla and
Charybdis and others whose names are part of our culture.
Every educated person in ancient Greece grew up with
Homer, regarded as the
greatest of all poets. Being in Greek, his tales were not
read in medieval Europe, but regained immense popularity in
the 19th century. The British statesman W. E. Gladstone,
among others, wrote several books on him.
"Zeus had spoken.
His Messenger (Hermes) obeyed at
once and bound under his feet the
lovely sandals of untarnishable gold
that carried him with the speed of
the wind over the water or the
boundless earth; and he picked up
the wand which he can use at will to
cast a spell upon our eyes or wake
us from the soundest sleep. With
this wand in his hand ... he swooped
down on the sea, and skimmed the
waves like a sea-mew [gull]
drenching the feathers of its wings
with spray as it pursues the fish
down desolate gulfs of the unhar-vested
deep. So Hermes rode the unending
waves . . ."
Homer
Odyssey
(prose translation
by E.V. Rieu).
|
Lawrence
Alma-Tadema
A Reading from Homer
THE ARCHAIC PERIOD
Homer
was not of course the only writer in Archaic Greece (roughly
8th-6th centuries B.C.). Ionia produced the first Greek
philosophers and scientists (as well as, possibly,
Homer himself). On the
island of Lesbos, the mysterious Sappho wrote her poems
about love. The beginnings of Greek drama appeared in
Attica, and distinctive forms of verse, notably lyric
poetry, established their identities. Excluding
Homer, the best-known
writer of the period is
Hesiod, who seems to have lived soon after him. He
was the first Greek poet to find his subject matter in
sources other than mythology. His
'Works and Days'
reflected his knowledge of farming and provided practical
advice for peasants, as well fascinating information on
rural life of the time.
Hesiod ("Works
And Days")
|
At the beginning of Greek literature stand the two
great epics, the
Iliad and
the
Odyssey.
Some features of the poems reach far into the
Mycenaean age, perhaps to 1500 bc, but the written
works are traditionally ascribed to Homer; in
something like their present form they probably date
to the 8th century.
The
Iliad
and
the
Odyssey
are primary examples of the epic narrative, which in
antiquity was a long narrative poem, in an elevated
style, celebrating heroic achievement. The Iliad is
the tragic story of the wrath of Achilles, son of a
goddess and richly endowed with all the qualities
that make men admirable. With his readiness to
sacrifice all to honour, Achilles embodies the Greek
heroic ideal; and the contrast between his superb
qualities and his short and troubled life reflects
the sense of tragedy always prevalent in Greek
thought. Whereas the Iliad is tragedy, the Odyssey
is tragicomedy. It is an enriched version of the old
folktale of the wanderer’s return and of his triumph
over those who were usurping his rights and
importuning his wife at home. Odysseus too
represents a Greek ideal. Though by no means
inadequate in battle, he works mainly by craft and
guile; and it is by mental superiority that he
survives and prevails.
Both poems were
based on plots that grip the reader, and the story
is told in language that is simple and direct, yet
eloquent. The Iliad and the Odyssey, though they are
the oldest European poetry, are by no means
primitive. They marked the fulfillment rather than
the beginning of the poetic form to which they
belong. They were essentially oral poems, handed
down, developed, and added to over a vast period of
time, a theme upon which successive nameless poets
freely improvised. The world they reflect is full of
inconsistencies; weapons belong to both the Bronze
and Iron Ages, and objects of the Mycenaean period
jostle others from a time five centuries later.
Certain mysteries remain: the date of the great poet
or poets who gave structure and shape to the two
epics; the social function of poems that take
several days to recite; and the manner in which
these poems came to be recorded in writing probably
in the course of the 6th century bc.
In the ancient
world the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
stood in a class apart among Archaic epic poems. Of
these, there were a large number known later as the
epic cycle. They covered the whole story of the wars
of Thebes and Troy as well as other famous myths. A
number of shorter poems in epic style, the Homeric
Hymns, are of considerable beauty.
A subgenre was
represented by epics that recounted not ancient
mythical events but recent historical episodes,
especially colonization and the foundation of
cities. Examples include Archaeology of the Samians
by Semonides of Amorgos (7th century bc; in elegiac
couplets), Smyrneis by Mimnermus of Colophon (7th
century bc; in elegiac couplets), Foundation of
Colophon and Migration to Elea in Italy by
Xenophanes of Colophon (6th century bc; metre
unknown), none of which are extant.
Epic narrative
continued and developed in new forms during the
Classical, Hellenistic, and Greco-Roman periods;
works represented both subgenres. Notable mythical
epics included the lost Thebais of Antimachus of
Colophon (4th century bc), the surviving Argonautica
in 4 books by Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century bc),
and the surviving Dionysiaca in 48 books by Nonnus
of Panopolis (5th century ad). The historical epics
do not survive, but among them were Persica, on the
Persian Wars, by Choerilus of Samos (5th century bc);
an epic on the deeds of Alexander the Great by
Choerilus of Iasus (4th century bc); an epic on the
deeds of Antiochus Soter (3rd century bc) by
Simonides of Magnesia; and Thessalic History,
Achaean History, and Messenian History by Rhianus of
Crete (3rd century bc). As the greatest epic poet,
however, Homer continued to be performed in
rhapsodic contexts and was read in schools through
the Classical, Hellenistic, and Greco-Roman periods.
Didactic poetry was
not regarded by the Greeks as a form distinct from
epic. Yet the poet Hesiod belonged to an altogether
different world from Homer. He lived in Boeotia in
central Greece about 700 bc. In his Works and Days
he described the ways of peasant life and
incidentally described the dreary Boeotian plain
afflicted by heat, cold, and the oppression of a
“gift-devouring” aristocracy. He believed
passionately in a Zeus who cared about right and
wrong and in Justice as Zeus’s daughter. Hesiod’s
other surviving poem, the Theogony, attempts a
systematic genealogy of the gods and recounts many
myths associated with their part in the creation of
the universe.
Lyric poetry
THE POETS
Besides
Homer, only fragments of
epic poetry survive from before the 6th
century B.C. Lyric poetry, originally
poetry sung to the lyre and written in a
variety of metres, was then coming into
its own, in drinking songs and songs of
love and personal feeling.
Godward John
William
In the Days of Sappho
Lesbos, the island of
Sappho,
seems to have been its place of birth.
Sappho
("Poems")
The greatest lyric poet was Pindar,
unusually not an Athenian, but a native
of Boeotia. After Pindar's death
(c.440 B.C.), the finest lyric poetry
was to be found in the works of
dramatists. As in so many subjects, the
great expert on poetry was
Aristotle,
whose Poetics is the origin of the
dramatic unities, a particular influence
on French Classical drama of the 17th
century.
Pindar
born probably 518 bc, Cynoscephalae,
Boeotia, Greece
died after 446, probably c. 438, Argos
the greatest lyric poet of ancient
Greece and the master of epinicia,
choral odes celebrating victories
achieved in the Pythian, Olympic,
Isthmian, and Nemean games.
Early training
Pindar was of noble birth, possibly
belonging to a Spartan family, the
Aegeids, though the evidence for this is
inconclusive. His parents, Daiphantus
and Cleodice, survive only as names; his
uncle Scopelinus, a skilled aulos
player, doubtless helped with Pindar’s
early musical training. The family
possessed a town house in Thebes (to be
spared by express command of Alexander
the Great in the general destruction of
that city by the Macedonians in 335 bc).
Such a background would have given
Pindar a ready entrée into aristocratic
circles in other Greek cities.
Pindar’s poetry borrowed certain
fundamental characteristics from the
cultural traditions of his native
Boeotia, a region that remained rather
at the margins of political and economic
trends of the Archaic (c. 650–480) and
Classical (c. 450–323) periods. His
poetry evinces a conservative attitude
of absolute adherence to aristocratic
values, a rigorous sense of piety, and a
familiarity with the great mythological
heritage that descended from the
Mycenaean period (c. 16th–12th century
bc) and achieved a first systematic
presentation, significantly, in the work
of Pindar’s Boeotian predecessor Hesiod
at the end of the 8th century. Ancient
authorities make Pindar the contemporary
of the Boeotian poet Corinna, who was
supposed to have beaten him in poetic
competitions and to have advised him, in
reference to his tendency to overuse
myth, “to sow with the hand and not with
the whole sack.” Pindar was said to have
insulted Corinna by calling her a pig.
The ancient biographical tradition
reports that as a young man Pindar went
to Athens to complete and refine his
poetic education. It is unclear whether
he studied there with Lasus of Hermione,
who had introduced important innovations
into the dithyramb, or whether he
learned from him at second hand. At any
rate, in 497 or 496 Pindar, scarcely
more than 20 years of age, won first
place in the dithyrambic competition at
the Great Dionysia, an event that had
been introduced in 508.
Professional career
Seventeen volumes of Pindar’s
poetry, comprising almost every genre of
choral lyric, were known in antiquity.
Only four books of epinicia have
survived complete, doubtless because
they were chosen by a teacher as a
schoolbook in the 2nd century ad. They
are supplemented by numerous fragments,
and 20th-century finds of papyri have
contributed to a deeper understanding of
Pindar’s achievement, especially in
paeans and dithyrambs.
All the evidence, however, suggests
that the epinicia were Pindar’s
masterpieces. These are divided as
Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, or Nemean—the
games in which the victories he
celebrated were held; the epinicia
number 44 odes in all. The earliest
surviving epinicion (Pythian ode 10)
dates from 498, and Pindar already had
an assured mastery of his medium when he
wrote it. It would have been quite
possible for him to evolve into a
cosmopolitan artist like Simonides,
welcome all over the Greek world and
moving easily from city to city. No
doubt Pindar visited the Panhellenic
festivals, at Delphi (where the Pythian
games were held) and Olympia in
particular, to absorb the atmosphere of
the games and celebrate his victories.
He would also have seen in person the
homes of the aristocrats and the courts
of the tyrants whose triumphs he sang.
But in general he preferred to remain
loyal to his native land and reside in
Thebes; characteristically, Pindar’s
standards and values, like his poetry,
changed little if at all over the years.
Such patriotism meant sacrifices.
Thebes, like Delphi, collaborated with
the enemy in the Persian War—though
admittedly Thebes had little
alternative. But whereas Delphi’s
prestige was quickly restored after the
retreat of the Persians, Thebes’s
defection was not lightly forgiven or
forgotten. Athens was to dominate the
history of the 5th century, and, for the
first two-thirds of it, Athens had very
much the better of its long drawn-out
quarrel with Thebes. From 457 to 447 bc,
Boeotia was virtually an Athenian
dependency, and almost everywhere in the
region the aristocratic way of
life—integral to Pindar’s personality
and art alike—was threatened.
Politically and economically, the
monopolies of power by the noble
families were broken. The aristocratic
code (summed up in a famous line of
Homer, “ever to excel and to surpass
other men”) was undermined by the
radical rationalism of a new age. Choral
lyric itself had little future as a
separate art form, and tragedy absorbed
into itself what was most vital in the
tradition; Pindar had no worthy
successors. It is a tribute to the
quality of Pindar’s poetry that,
although he must have regarded these
contemporary cultural and political
developments with disdain, or at best
with indifference (apart perhaps from
his reinterpretation of some of the
traditional stories concerning the
gods), he was universally respected and
accepted as a major creative artist.
Pindar’s early poems have almost all
been lost; it is probable, however, that
what gave him a growing reputation
beyond the borders of Boeotia were hymns
in honour of the gods. Pindar was born
at the time of the Pythian festival, and
from his youth he had a close connection
with the Pythian priesthood, which
served the oracular shrine of Apollo at
Delphi. Pindar and his descendants,
indeed, enjoyed special privileges at
Delphi, where his memory was cherished
in later times and where an iron chair,
in which it was said he had sat to sing,
was exhibited. The first commissions for
epinicia came mostly from aristocratic
connections: the Aleuads in Thessaly (Pythian
ode 10; 498 bc), the Alcmaeonids in
Athens (Pythian ode 7; 486), and, above
all, the Aeacids of the island of Aegina
(the series begins with paean 6, dating
from 490, and continues with Nemean ode
7). Progress in winning recognition
seems to have been steady, if slow.
A significant breakthrough came when
Pindar established a link with the court
of Theron of Acragas through the
tyrant’s brother Xenocrates, whose
chariot won the Pythian contest (Pythian
odes 6 and 12, composed for the victory
of the aulete Midas in musical
competitions; 490). But the Persian
invasion of Greece came before the
promise of this new connection could be
fulfilled. Pindar faced a crisis of
divided loyalties, torn between a sense
of solidarity with the aristocracy of
Boeotia, who followed a pro-Persian
policy, and a growing appreciation of
Spartan and Athenian heroic resistance.
Pindar was first and foremost a Theban,
and he stood by his friends, many of
whom paid for their policy with their
lives. But it was Simonides, not Pindar,
who wrote the poems of rejoicing at
Greece’s victories and of mourning for
its glorious dead.
It took Pindar some years to
reestablish himself; fortunately, his
friends in Aegina were staunch (Isthmian
ode 8; 478). It is virtually certain
that he visited Sicily in 476–474 and
was made welcome at the courts of Theron
of Acragas and Hieron I of Syracuse.
They were to elicit much of his greatest
poetry, and it was through these
connections that Pindar’s reputation
spread throughout the Greek world and
commissions flowed in from the mainland,
the islands, and also from the remoter
outposts of Hellenism. Promising new
contacts were made with the royal houses
of Macedon and Cyrene (Alexander of
Macedon, fragment 120; Arcesilas of
Cyrene, Pythian odes 4 and 5; 462 bc).
Theron and Hieron respected and
admired Pindar, but his aristocratic
temper made him dangerously outspoken.
Diplomatic tact and finesse were not
among his qualities, and his adroit
rivals, Simonides and Bacchylides, were
more pliant and adaptable (Bacchylides,
not Pindar, celebrated Hieron’s Olympic
victory in the chariot race in 468).
Echoes of Pindar’s bitter resentment
sound in his poetry. So too Pindar’s
intervention on behalf of Damophilus, a
noble exile from Cyrene (Pythian ode 4),
seems to have been taken amiss, and he
was not invited to commemorate
Arcesilas’s triumph at Olympia in 460.
Nevertheless, these were the years of
supreme achievement, and Pindar found a
growing demand for his poetry and a
growing appreciation of his skill. His
debt to Athens was amply paid in a
famous tribute (fragment 76) that the
Athenians never tired of citing, one
that earned the poet special honours in
that city (and, according to ancient
tradition, a fine at Thebes). It was
probably in this period that Pindar
married.
The subsequent decade of Athenian
domination in central Greece coincided
with a period when Delphi was controlled
by Phocis in northern Greece. These were
dark years for Pindar, and his poetic
output dwindled. But he continued to
celebrate Theban victories (Isthmian
odes 1 and 7), and he found inspiration
in the achievements of his Aeacid
friends of Aegina, though their days of
nominal independence were clearly
numbered (Isthmian odes 5 and 6 and
Nemean odes 3–8; all celebrate Aeginetan
successes). Pindar’s last extant poem (Pythian
ode 8) appropriately commemorates an
Aeacid victory. The last datable
epinicion is from 446 bc. According to
the ancient biographical tradition,
Pindar died in Argos at age 80, in the
arms of a handsome boy, Theoxenus, whose
name appears in a fragment of an
encomium the poet dedicated to him.
Poetry
The figure of the poet assumed a new
role in the 6th and 5th centuries bc
under the influence of the city-based
economy, which was encouraged by
colonial expansion and by the
possibilities of trade opened up with
the circulation of money. The poet
achieved a higher social position in
connection with his role as praiser of
rulers and communities; the poet and the
subject of the poem became connected by
a precise relationship of commission and
remuneration. Money could buy a place in
posterity, and the notion that poetry
mediated between the memorable
achievement and the deserved glory is a
recurrent motif in epinician
poetry—especially in Pindar’s epinicia,
where the consciousness of his own
poetic talent assumes an attitude of
vigorous pride. The poet’s songs spread
their legacy ever further through the
community and into the future; in that
way, Pindar argued, poems were superior
to the other popular medium of praise,
the statue, which transmitted its
message only to those who could see it.
The epinicion form, which in
Simonides’ hands seems to have evolved
into a relatively simple poem of
rejoicing enhanced by touches of realism
and humour, was assimilated by Pindar to
the religious hymn. The praise and
worship of the god whose festival is
being celebrated set the tone, and
thanksgiving is an integral part of the
structure. A second constituent element
is the myth, impressionistically treated
in a series of short sharply visualized
scenes and meant to link the glorious
present to the yet more glorious past
and to give a new dimension to the
transient moment of victory. Pindar used
stories from the epic tradition or the
local oral tradition, choosing the
episode most appropriate to the ceremony
for which he was composing and then
explicitly connecting the person, the
family, and the city or divinity to be
celebrated. He emphasized the heroic
achievement most relevant to the
occasion while omitting other aspects
and episodes of the story. A third
element is the aphoristic moralizing,
often in Pindar resulting in passages of
extreme beauty, even sublimity.
Aphorisms link the present reality with
the mythic narrative and repeatedly
stress the dangers of excessive pride in
achievement. The emotional impulse stems
from the aristocratic ideal of
self-assertion, competition, and
leadership—an ideal expressing itself
most finely in battle but also finding
fulfillment in athletic contests, in
which the palm goes to superior physique
and morale, believed to derive from
superior birth and the favour of the
gods.
Pindar’s metrical range is
exceptionally wide, with no two poems
being identical in metre, and he
controls difficult and involuted
techniques with consummate professional
mastery. His dialect is literary and
eclectic, with Boeotian elements; the
vocabulary is enriched, poetic, and
highly personal. Each poem is fused into
a unity by the fire of Pindar’s poetic
inspiration, by a sweep and soar of
imagination that give his poetry power
and magnificence, and by the shaping and
controlling discipline of a fastidious
art expressed in an intensely personal
style.
One distinctive trait in Pindar’s
poetry is the piling up of disparate
topics, with unexpected and sudden
transitions; these at first seem to be
unmotivated digressions, apparently
unconnected. Such episodes, which came
to be known misleadingly as “Pindaric
flights,” are rapid associations of
ideas, sometimes expressed very
concisely, which when carefully examined
are shown to be intelligible. The more
enduring difficulty of interpreting
Pindar derives from the fact that his
poetry was composed for special
occasions and is rich with references to
persons, places, mythical figures, and
historical events that were known to the
original audience but are obscure for
modern readers. Nonetheless, careful
evaluation of the ancient testimonies
can provide useful indications.
Delphic religious teaching found in
Pindar a ready pupil, and he constantly
spiritualized his material, turning away
from the cruder traditional stories of
the gods, avoiding the mundane details
of the contest, and striving to catch
the fleeting radiance that plays about
the moment of supreme endeavour when a
man transcends his own limitations of
physique and character and so proves
worthy of his birth and ancestry. Delphi
also profoundly influenced his style,
which is frequently cryptic and
oracular. He regarded himself as the
Muse’s prophet.
Pindar’s fellow Boeotian Hesiod,
although very different from Pindar in
background and temperament, shared with
him a deep religiosity, a groping toward
something more profound and satisfying
than contemporary cults could offer, a
fondness for abrupt and violent
transitions in thought and mood, and a
forthright pungency of speech. A
somewhat muted epitaph preserved in the
Greek Anthology (7, 35) describes Pindar
as the servant of the Muses, welcomed by
strangers and beloved by his fellow
citizens.
Pindar’s odes make great demands on
the modern reader, and it is only in
recent times that his art has begun to
be appreciated for what it is. (The
so-called Pindaric ode has had a long
and distinguished history in English
literature, but it derives from an
almost total misunderstanding and
misapprehension of Pindar’s own style
and technique.) Even so, much essential
evidence is missing. The musical
settings that he composed to accompany
his words are lost forever, though in
view of the quality of the poetry it is
probable that the words dominated the
setting (as must have been the case in
most Greek lyric). It is therefore
impossible to re-create even in the
imagination the approximate sound of a
Pindaric ode or indeed to reconstruct
visually the appearance and constitution
of the choir: how many participated,
what range of voices was employed,
whether the singers were static, moved
in procession, or danced—these are
questions that cannot now be answered.
Nor is it possible to picture at all
clearly the festive occasion that was
the background for the poetry. Yet
efforts to understand the odes are
rewarded by at least a glimpse of the
poet behind them. The aristocratic
society and standards, which meant
everything to Pindar, were dead or
dying. But in his art he re-created
them, giving them new and permanent
existence and value.
The tradition of Greek choral lyric
culminated with the odes of Pindar.
These are not easy to evaluate and
appreciate, but it is still more
difficult to comprehend and assess the
poet who composed them. Even to his
contemporaries, Pindar must have seemed
an aloof and somewhat enigmatic figure.
A modern reader needs a sympathetic
insight into the nature and traditions
of Greek aristocratic society to begin
to understand how Pindar’s subject
matter—victory in an athletic contest or
in a chariot race—could inspire poetry
characterized by high seriousness and
deep feeling. Pindar cannot, indeed,
speak across the centuries with the
directness of Homeric epic poetry or
Sophoclean tragedy, but he does create,
with disciplined mastery of a
sophisticated and complex art form, a
choral lyric of unsurpassed splendour
and sustained nobility.
Donald Ernest Wilson Wormell
Ed.
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Hesiod, unlike
Homer, told something of himself, and
the same is true of the lyric poets. Except for
Pindar and Bacchylides at the end of the Classical
period, only fragments of the works of these poets
survive. There had always been lyric poetry in
Greece. All the great events of life as well as many
occupations had their proper songs, and here too the
way was open to advance from the anonymous to the
individual poet.
The word lyric covers many sorts of poems. On the
one hand, poems sung by individuals or chorus to the
lyre, or sometimes to the aulos (double-reed pipe),
were called melic; elegiacs, in which the epic
hexameter, or verse line of six metrical feet,
alternated with a shorter line, were traditionally
associated with lamentation and an aulos
accompaniment; but they were also used for personal
poetry, spoken as well as sung at the table. Iambics
(verse of iambs, or metrical units, basically of
four alternately short and long syllables) were the
verse form of the lampoon. Usually of an abusive or
satirical—burlesque and parodying—character, they
were not normally sung.
If Archilochus of Paros in fact was writing as
early as 700 bc, he was the first of the post-epic
poets. The fragments reflect the turbulent life of
an embittered adventurer. Scorn both of men and of
convention is the emotion that seems uppermost, and
Archilochus was possessed of tremendous powers of
invective. Of lesser stature than Archilochus were
his successors, Semonides (often mistakenly
identified with Simonides) of Amorgos and Hipponax
of Ephesus.
Like the iambic writers, the elegiac poets came
mostly from the islands and the Ionian regions of
Asia Minor. Chief among them were Callinus of
Ephesus and Mimnermus of Colophon. On the mainland
of Greece, Tyrtaeus roused the spirit of the
Spartans in their desperate struggle with the
Messenian rebels in the years after 650. His martial
poems are perhaps of more historical than literary
interest. The same is to some extent true of the
poems in elegiac, iambic, and trochaic (the latter a
metre basically of four alternately long and short
syllables) metres by Solon, an Athenian statesman,
who used his poetry as a vehicle for propaganda.
Xenophanes (born about 560 bc) rather in the same
way used his poems to propagate his revolutionary
religious and ethical ideas. The elegiacs attributed
to Theognis seem to be poems of various dates
suitable for use at drinking parties. Many of them
were actually by Theognis himself (about 540 bc).
Some give uninhibited expression to his hatred of
the lower class rulers who had ousted the
aristocracy of Megara; others are love poems to the
boy Cyrnus; still others are gnomic commonplaces of
Greek wisdom and morality.
About the beginning of the 6th century a new kind
of poetry made its appearance in the island of
Lesbos. It was composed in the local Aeolic dialect
by members of the turbulent and factious
aristocracy. Alcaeus (born about 620 bc), absorbed
in political feuds and in civil war, expressed with
striking directness searing hate and blind
exultation. With the same directness and stunning
grace,
Sappho, a contemporary who seems to have
enjoyed a freedom unknown to the women of mainland
Greece, told of her love for girls named in her
poems. The surviving works by their successor in
personal lyric, Anacreon of Teos, suggest a more
convivial amorousness.
Choral lyric was associated with the Dorian parts
of the Greek mainland and the settlements in Sicily
and south Italy, whereas poetry for solo performance
was a product of the Ionian coast and the Aegean
Islands. Thus choral song came to be conventionally
written in a Doric dialect.
Choral lyric, which had lyre and aulos
accompaniments, was highly complicated in structure.
It did not use traditional lines or stanzas; but the
metre was formed afresh for each poem and never used
again in exactly the same form, though the metrical
units from which the stanzas, or strophes, were
built up were drawn from a common stock and the form
of the strophe was usually related to the
accompanying dance. This elaborate art form was
connected mainly with the cult of the gods or, as in
the case of Pindar, the celebration of the victors
in the great Hellenic games.
The earliest poet of choral lyrics of whose work
anything has survived was Alcman of Sparta (about
620 bc). Somewhat later Stesichorus worked in
Sicily, and his lyric versions of the great myths
marked an important stage in the development of
these stories. Simonides of Ceos, in Ionia, was
among the most versatile of Greek poets. He was
famed for his pathos, but today he is best known for
his elegiac epitaphs, especially those on the Greek
soldiers who fell in the struggle against Persia.
The supreme poet of choral lyric was Pindar from
Thebes in Boeotia (born 518 or possibly 522–died
after 446 bc), who is known mainly by his odes in
honour of the victors at the great games held at
Olympia, Delphi, the Isthmus of Corinth, and Nemea.
The last of the lyric poets was Bacchylides
(flourished 5th century bc), whose works too were
largely victory odes, characterized by an exquisite
taste for mythical digression.
Bacchylides
born c. 510 bc, Ceos [Cyclades,
Greece]
Greek lyric poet, nephew of the poet
Simonides and a younger contemporary of
the Boeotian poet Pindar, with whom he
competed in the composition of epinician
poems (odes commissioned by victors at
the major athletic festivals).
The 3rd-century-bc scholars at the
great library at Alexandria, Egypt,
listed Bacchylides among the canonical
nine lyric poets, and they produced an
edition of his poems. The poems remained
popular until at least the 4th century
ad, when the emperor Julian was said by
the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus
to have enjoyed them. The works were
lost (except as they were quoted by
others) until the discovery of papyrus
texts that reached the British Museum in
1896 and were published in 1897. The
papyri contained the texts of 21 poems
in whole or in part; 14 are epinicia,
and the remainder are dithyrambs (choral
songs in honour of Dionysus). Fragments
derived from quotations by ancient
authors and later papyrus finds include
passages from paeans (hymns in honour of
Apollo and other gods) and encomiums
(songs in honour of distinguished men).
Hieron I, ruler of Syracuse,
commissioned several epinician odes to
celebrate his victories in horse and
chariot races in 476, 470, and 468 bc.
For the first two, Hieron obtained odes
from both Bacchylides and Pindar; but
for his most prestigious victory, the
four-horse chariot race at Olympia in
468, Hieron commissioned an epinicion
only from Bacchylides. The victory of
Pitheas of Aegina in the pancratium at
the Nemean Games was also celebrated by
both Pindar (Nemean ode 5) and
Bacchylides (ode 13). Ancient scholars
took seriously Pindar’s remarks about
rival poets in the first Pythian ode,
concluding that Pindar actively disliked
Simonides and Bacchylides; later
scholars, however, viewed such remarks
as poetic convention more than personal
truth.
Bacchylides, who described himself as
“the Caen nightingale,” wrote in a style
that was simpler and less sublime than
Pindar’s. He excelled in narrative,
pathos, and clarity of expression. A
good example of all three is the
encounter of Heracles with the ghost of
Meleager in the underworld (ode 5), an
episode treated also by Pindar (fragment
249a). Another memorable narrative is
the story of the miraculous rescue of
Croesus from the burning pyre (ode 3).
Like his uncle Simonides, Bacchylides
wrote dithyrambs for the Dionysian
festival at Athens—notably the unique
semidramatic ode 18, which takes the
form of a dialogue between Theseus’s
father, Aegeus, and an answering chorus
of Athenians. Literary historians differ
about the relationship of ode 18 to the
development of Attic drama. Older
scholars, following statements in
Aristotle’s Poetics, saw in the
dithyramb the foundations of Attic
tragedy. Present-day scholars, however,
believe that ode 18 was influenced by
contemporary Attic drama and that ode
16, “Heracles” or “Deianeira,” was
influenced by Sophocles’ tragedy
Trachinian Women. In another dithyramb
(ode 17), Bacchylides gives a spirited
account of a contest between Minos and
Theseus: Theseus dives into the sea to
recover a ring that Minos has thrown
there as a challenge; Theseus emerges
from the water with the ring, dry-haired
and surrounded by enthusiastic Naiads.
Bacchylides’ poetic activity led him to
Sicily, Aegina, Thessaly, Macedonia, the
Peloponnesus, Athens, and Metapontum.
His last dated poems (odes 6 and 7) were
composed in 452 bc.
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Xenophanes
Greek poet and philosopher
born c. 560 bc, Colophon, Ionia
died c. 478
Main
Greek poet and rhapsode, religious thinker, and reputed
precursor of the Eleatic school of philosophy, which
stressed unity rather than diversity and viewed the separate
existences of material things as apparent rather than real.
Xenophanes was probably exiled from Greece by the
Persians who conquered Colophon about 546. After living in
Sicily for a time and wandering elsewhere in the
Mediterranean, he evidently settled at Elea in southern
Italy. In one of his poems, which survive only in fragments,
he declared that his travels began 67 years earlier, when he
was 25; if this is so, he would have been at least 92 at his
death.
Xenophanes’ philosophy found expression primarily in the
poetry that he recited in the course of his travels.
Fragments of his epics reflect his contempt for contemporary
anthropomorphism and for popular acceptance of Homeric
mythology. Most celebrated are his trenchant attacks on the
immorality of the Olympian gods and goddesses. In his
elegiac fragments he ridicules the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls, condemns the luxuries introduced
from the nearby colony of Lydia into Colophon, and advocates
wisdom and the reasonable enjoyment of social pleasure in
the face of prevalent excess.
Some critics consider Parmenides (fl. c. 450 bc) as the
founder of the Eleatic school, but Xenophanes’ philosophy
probably anticipated his views. The tradition that
Xenophanes founded the school is based primarily on the
testimony of Aristotle, whose views Xenophanes also
anticipated. Among the few other Greek writers who
subsequently mentioned Xenophanes are Plato, who said that
“The Eleatic school, beginning with Xenophanes and even
earlier, starts from the principle of the unity of all
things,” and Theophrastus, who summed up Xenophanes’
teaching in the formula “The all is one and the one is God.”
Xenophanes was less a philosopher of nature in the manner
of Parmenides, who looked for abstract principles underlying
natural change, than a poet and religious reformer who
applied generally philosophical and scientific notions to
popular conceptions. His system and critiques of the works
of other thinkers appear primitive in comparison with later
Eleaticism, which developed its philosophy of appearance and
reality into a sophisticated system.
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Simonides of Ceos
born c. 556 bc, Iulis, Ceos [now Kéa,
Greece]
died c. 468 bc, Acragas [now Agrigento,
Sicily, Italy]
Greek poet, noted for his lyric
poetry, elegiacs, and epigrams; he was
an uncle of the Greek lyric poet
Bacchylides.
Simonides began writing poetry on
Ceos, but he was soon called to the
court of the Peisistratids (the tyrants
of Athens), which was a lively cultural
and artistic centre in the 6th century
bc. (See ancient Greek civilization: The
later Archaic periods.) He later visited
other powerful figures in Thessaly, in
northern Greece, such as Scopas, ruler
of Crannon.
Simonides lived in Athens after the
fall of the Peisistratid tyranny and the
founding of the democracy. He was close
to important people there, including the
politician and naval strategist
Themistocles, and he achieved numerous
successes in dithyrambic competitions.
(A later poet credited Simonides with 57
victories.) In the competition,
Simonides was selected (above such
celebrated poets as Aeschylus) to
compose the elegiac verses commemorating
those who fell in the battle of
Marathon. He celebrated the Greek
victories of the Persian Wars, including
a famous encomium for the Spartan dead
at Thermopylae. Simonides maintained
close ties with the Spartan general and
regent Pausanias. He traveled to Sicily
as a guest of the courts of Hieron I,
tyrant of Syracuse, and Theron, tyrant
of Acragas; tradition there made him and
Bacchylides the rivals of Pindar. He is
said to have reconciled the two tyrants
when they quarreled.
Of Simonides’ extensive literary
corpus, only fragments remain, most of
them short. There are many epigrams
written in elegiac couplets intended to
be carved on monuments to celebrate a
death, a victory, or other deeds worthy
of memory. (However, scholars suspect
that many of the epigrams attributed to
Simonides were not composed by him.)
Simonides’ threnoi, songs of lamentation
used for funerals, were particularly
famous in antiquity—as the praise of the
poets Catullus and Horace and the
educator Quintilian demonstrates—because
they showed genius in combining
affecting poetry with praise of the
deceased. Simonides played an important
role in the development of the epinicion,
a song in honour of an athletic victory.
He is the author of the earliest
epinicion for which the date (520 bc)
and the victor (Glaucus of Carystus, for
boy’s boxing) are certain. The fragments
display an epinician tone that contrasts
with Pindar’s high seriousness, as
Simonides praises the victor with ironic
and humorous references. Simonides was
known for his tendency toward concision
and his rejection of prolixity. He
defined poetry as a speaking picture and
painting as mute poetry.
There emerges from his longer
fragments, such as the encomium of
Scopas, an original and nonconformist
personality that questions the innate
and absolute values of the aristocratic
ethic, which are the basis of Pindar’s
worldview. Simonides’ worldview, in
contrast, is in sympathy with the social
setting determined by the rise of the
new mercantile classes. His moral
outlook is pragmatic, realistic, and
relativistic; he is conscious of the
imperfection and frailty of human
accomplishments.
Simonides changed the conception and
practice of poetic activity by insisting
that a patron who commissioned a poem
owed the poet fair remuneration.
Simonides’ professional policy gave rise
to many anecdotes about his greed. The
most famous in antiquity concerned a
poem he was commissioned to write for
Scopas of Thessaly. When Simonides
delivered the poem, Scopas paid him only
half the sum they had agreed on, telling
him to get the rest from the Dioscuri,
to whose praise the poet had devoted
much of the poem. During the banquet at
the palace to celebrate Scopas’s
victory, Simonides was summoned outside
at the request of two young men; when he
went outside, the young men were gone.
When the palace then collapsed and he
alone survived, he realized that the
young men had been the Dioscuri. Having
insisted on being paid and having been
credited with the invention of a (lost)
method of memorization, Simonides can be
seen as a precursor of the 5th-century
Sophists.
In 1992 new papyrus fragments of his
elegies were published; among them are
parts of a long composition on the
battle of Plataea (479 bc), in which the
decisive role of the Spartans is
emphasized. The fragments also include
pederastic works and poems that were of
the type meant for symposia (dinner
parties).
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