CHAPTER III

Epitaphs

SIMONIDES

No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph. An epitaph is something placed upon a grave—a σῶμα that becomes a σῆμα, a body that is made into a sign. Already in Homer there is mention of a σῆμα or tomb heaped up high over a dead warrior so that some passerby in later time will stop and remark on it.1 The purpose of the monument is to insert a dead and vanished past into the living present. Not until the seventh century B. C. did this insertion become an inscribed event; not until the lifetime of Simonides of Keos did the inscription fall into the hands of a master poet and become a major art form.

Simonides was the most prolific composer of epitaphs in the ancient world and set the conventions of the genre. The formal sale of pity contributed substantially to his fortune and became inseparable from his name. We find “tears of Simonides” (lacrimis Simonideis) used as a byword for poetry of lament by the Roman poet Catullus. We hear ancient scholiasts commending the special qualities of “sympathy” and “pathos” that distinguish Simonidean verse.² What did they get for their money, the mourners who bought tears from Simonides?

EXCHANGE

A salesman of memorial verse has to think very closely about the relation, measurable in cash, between letter shapes cut on a stone and the condition of timeless attention that the Greeks call memory. Simonides was struck by the implications of this task, as various anecdotes from his traditional biography attest. Remember his adventure with a corpse on a beach. This story instantiates the epitaphic contract: a poet is someone who saves and is saved by the dead. And although the anecdote is likely apocryphal, its metaphysic can be felt throughout his poetry (and in graveside rhetoric down to the present day).3 What Simonides contributed to our style of thinking and talking about death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor of exchange. Here is an example of his epitaphic work:

ἡγεμόνεσσι δὲ μισθὸν Ἀθηναῖοι τάδ᾿ ἔδωκαν

ἀντ᾿ εὐεργεσίης καὶ μεγάλων ἀγαθῶν·

μᾶλλόν τις τάδ᾿ ἰδὼν καὶ ἐπεσσομένων ἐθελήσει

ἀμϕὶ περὶ ξυνοῖς πράγμασι δῆριν ἔχειν.⁴

[And to the leaders as a wage the Athenians gave this

in exchange for service and great goods.

All the more will a man of the future (seeing this) choose

to enter battle for the common benefit.]

This inscription was probably carved on a herm c. 475 B.C. to commemorate an Athenian victory against the Persians in Thrace.⁵ Notice the figurative language Simonides has chosen here to represent the relation between death on the battlefield and life on a monument, between soldiers whose lives are past and citizens whose lives are still before them. It is a transactional relationship, as the noun μισθός (“wage”) and the preposition ἀντί (“in exchange for”) and the noun εὐεργεσία (“benefaction”) imply. Money is not mentioned but we feel the presence of a metaphysical question of value. It is a question at least as old as Achilles, a question whose contours have been sharpened (I think) for Simonides and for his audience by personal experience of money transactions. “Money can exchange any quality or object for any other, even contradictory qualities and objects,” says Marx.6 Achilles would not have agreed. Achilles’ answer to the question of value was simple: no object or quality in the world (he decided) was worth as much as his own breath of life.⁷ Achilles put a veto on the heroic exchange of death for glory. But this exchange is absolutely fundamental to the politics of the public epitaph, as Simonides says bluntly in the last couplet of this poem:

All the more will a man of the future (seeing this) choose

to enter battle for the common benefit.

A poet’s task is to carry the transaction forward, from those who can no longer speak to those who may yet read (and must yet die).

The political terms of epitaphic transaction are set out also in Simonides’ epitaph for men fallen in the battle of Euboea:

Δίρϕυος ἐδμήθημεν ὑπὸ πτυχί, σῆμα δ᾿ ἐϕ᾿ ἡμῖν

ἐγγύθεν Εὐρίπου δημοσίαι κέχυται·

οὐκ ἀδίκως, ἐρατὴν γὰρ ἀπωλέσαμεν νεότητα

τρηχεῖαν πολέμου δεξάμενοι νεϕέλην.⁸

[Underneath the fold of Dirphys we were broken, but a sign on top of us

near Euripos at public expense has been heaped up—

not unjustly: for we lost lovely youth

and took in exchange the jagged cloud of war.]

This poem measures out a system of exchanges, syntactic, spatial and moral. Dirphys (the mountain site of the battle) is set over against Euripos (the river site of the grave) as “underneath” is balanced by “on top of” and men laid low in the ground by a tomb rising above them. The men have made an explicit exchange of “lovely youth” for the “jagged cloud of war” and in this exchange is implied the contrast of “public expense” (which is named) with private cost (which is not), of visible “sign” (which we see) with buried signifier (which we do not).

If Page is correct that this epigram commemorates the Euboeans (not the Athenians) who fell in the battle of Euboea,9 it is a poem of uncommon candor. The Euboeans lost the battle of Euboea. Simonides states the fact baldly: “We were broken.” Then adds an economic detail: “At public expense” a stone was raised. Why mention this? Certainly public payment indicates public honor. But it also raises the question of value, an awkward question for men who have lost a war. Simonides meets this question at the beginning of the third verse, with a blunt double-negative construction that confronts and denies all possibility of a bad exchange: “not unjustly.” The dead men rather jarringly assert that they were worth the price of their own tomb.

“To be exchanged, commodities must be somehow comparable,” says Aristotle. “That is why money was invented. It provides a sort of mediator. For it measures all things, their relative value—for example, how many shoes are equal to a house, etc.”¹⁰ Or how many lines of elegiac verse are equal to an army of dead Euboeans. Emphasized by enjambement before and strong punctuation after, the phrase “not unjustly” could easily have been placed for irony or left open like a bad bargain. Instead these two words form the exact center of a moral and verbal equilibrium that imitates the process of exchange and justifies its own expenditure, like two beads of an abacus drawn together to mark the equity of profit and loss.

Consider now a slightly different example, where the facts of exchange touch Simonides personally. Of the three stones erected at Thermopylai to honor the men who fell with Leonidas, Simonides composed (probably all three but certainly) this one:

μνῆμα τόδε κλεινοῖο Μεγιστία, ὅν ποτε Μῆδοι

Σπερχειὸν ποταμὸν κτεῖναν ἀμειψάμενοι,

μάντιος, ὅς ποτε Κῆρας ἐπερχομένας σάϕα εἰδώς

οὐκ ἔτλη Σπάρτης ἡγεμόνας προλιπεῖν.¹¹

[Here is the tomb of glorious Megistias whom once on a day

the Medes killed when they crossed Spercheios River.

Once on a day he saw Deaths coming at him

but the leaders of Sparta he would not forsake.]

Megistias was a prophet, traveling with the Spartan army, who was present at Thermopylai on the eve of the battle and foretold his own death on the field. Although urged by the Spartan commander to depart, he stayed and was killed the next day. We learn from Herodotos that the erection of his tomb took place in somewhat unusual economic circumstances. For the other two monuments at Thermopylai were set up at public expense by the Amphictyonic League, but the stone for Megistias was inscribed (that is, paid for) by Simonides himself “because of a bond of guest-friendship between the two of them” (κατὰ ξεινίην).12 It is interesting, then, that this poem, for which Simonides unusually received no remuneration, makes use of the standard metaphors of exchange in an unusual way.

Simonides highlights the concept of exchange by placing at the center of the poem (at the end of v. 2) the resonant participle ἀμειψάμενοι. This participle is from the verb ἀμείβομαι, which means “to change” and can refer to change of position in space, as when the Medes cross the Spercheios River, or to interchange of question and answer, as when a prophet responds to inquiry, or to exchange of goods or money in a commercial transaction. It is a verb that can be active or passive, that can represent either or both sides of an exchange. A particularly appropriate verb, then, in a poem about a man who can see both sides of a river, a prophet who can see both sides of a moment in time. This fatally two-sided moment is isolated twice by Simonides with repetition of the adverb ποτε (“once on a day”). Megistias is a prophet who must both ask and answer the question of his own death, as Simonides must both buy and sell the poem that remembers him. For a gravestone is a coin with more than two sides. Inscribed on its surface are words that transform its commodity into communication and project its usefulness across time. Aristotle defines money as “a guarantee of exchange in the future for something not given in the present.”13 So does the gravestone of Megistias guarantee a future exchange of oblivion for memory and purchase a moment of life for him each time its inscription is read.

SURFACE

Which brings us to reading and writing, and to a set of historical factors that may very concretely underlie Simonides’ insight into the exchange of life and death that happens on a gravestone. Simonides’ inscriptional verse is the first poetry in the ancient Greek tradition about which we can certainly say, these are texts written to be read: literature. Now it is true Simonidean diction contains frequent epicisms and his metrics depend upon Homer’s; it is also likely that most people who read a Simonidean epitaph did so by sounding the words out loud.¹⁴ Nonetheless, this is not oral verse in its composition nor in its aesthetic. The difference is physical: Simonides’ poem has to fit on the stone bought for it. An oral poet may labor under restrictions of time or personal stamina or social decorum but only an inscriptional poet has to measure his inspiration against the size of his writing surface. Out of this material fact—which is also an economic fact because stones and stonecutting cost money—evolved an aesthetic of exactitude or verbal economy that became the hallmark of Simonidean style. The Greek term for this aesthetic is ἀκρίβεια,¹⁵ a word of double reference: the Greek lexicon defines ἀκρίβεια as “minute care about details of language, exact expression” or “minute care about financial expense, miserliness.” Practices of life and practices of language overlap on an epitaphic stone.

We have no certain information on how Simonides arrived at the price for a poem. Did he calculate number of verses? Number of words? Number of letters? Or perhaps allusions to Homer, metrical nicety, original figures of speech? Historians do not have answers to such questions; there are no literary contracts extant from the fifth century B.C. But Simonides composed a great many of his poems for inscription on stone and we do know something about the art of epigraphy in this period. In fact it was the period of highest development in ancient engraving techniques. As local Greek alphabets found their way to regularization, letter shapes became more precise and engravers began to develop a care for the aesthetics of inscription. They were thinking about details like the proportions of the stone, how to place the text on the stone at a height convenient for the reader to read, how to use lettering of a different size in the heading for increased legibility and liveliness.16 Some engravers liked to enhance the effect of an inscription by painting the letters after they were cut, using red paint or sometimes alternating lines of red and black. Moreover, a new precisionist style of inscriptional writing had developed in the time of the Persian Wars—perhaps as a consequence of the high demand for gravestones during these years—a style called στοιχῆδον (stoichēdon). In stoichēdon style, letters are aligned vertically as well as horizontally and placed at equal intervals along their respective alignments like ranks of men in military formation.¹⁷ This style came to perfection during Simonides’ lifetime due to the introduction of an important technical advance, the chequer.

The chequer was a grid of horizontal and vertical lines marked on the stone before cutting so as to divide its surface into equal rectangles. The text could then be engraved in perfect stoichēdon sequence by placing one letter in each rectangular space. Using the chequer, the engraver could fix precisely the point to which his text would run on the stone. Historians tells us that fifth-century engravers ruled out their stones beforehand with remarkable exactitude: they find that the margin of error on well-cut stones due to variation in size of the chequer unit is not more than half a millimeter.18

Physical facts do influence artistic and cognitive design. Whether or not he was a miser, imagine how much time Simonides must have spent in his studio, drawing mental lines and positioning data, measuring off rectangles in his mind’s eye, counting out letters and cutting away space, reckoning prices. Paul Celan once described the task of the poet as “measuring off the area of the given and the possible” (den Bereich des Gegebenen und des Möglichen auszumessen).¹⁹ For Simonides, this measuring had a concrete professional and technical dimension. Surely there is a kinship between the physical facts of the stone and the stylistic facts of the language. Reasoning with stone will have trained ἀκρίβεια into all his practices of hand, eye and mind. Reasoning with the demands of the market will have channeled this precision along certain lines. Money offers a design for thought. To the extent that the language of his verse is filled with counting, numbers and quantification, with references to limit and loss, with metaphors of debit, credit and gratuity, you could say he conceives of human life in terms of economic relation. One of his best-known epitaphs summarizes the relation in a single sentence: “We are all debts owed to Death.”²⁰

This sentence is an important one for Simonides himself and for the whole epitaphic tradition. The idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides. It became a cliché on gravestones throughout Hellenistic and Roman times; numerous examples are extant.²¹ But in Simonides’ phrasing the idea has a bleakness that sets it apart. Facts of stone and money alone cannot account for this sentence. I think we must trace it back to a hard early decision.

Simonides was born on the island of Keos: a barren, rocky, impoverished place where the calculus of sheer survival demanded of its inhabitants an economy both radical and obvious. It was the custom on Keos for every male citizen who reached the age of sixty to voluntarily drink the hemlock, in order that there be enough supplies of life to go round. The historian Strabo records the rationale for this custom in a sentence as cold and clear as an epitaph:

The man who cannot live well shall not live poorly.22

Simonides chose to live elsewhere. Emigrating early from his homeland, the poet spent his life traveling about the Greek world to the houses of various aristocratic patrons and survived until well into his nineties on what we might call borrowed time. I cannot help but wonder how these actuarial matters affected his poetic style, as the years passed over him and Death failed to call in its debt. I suppose a poet writes on the world according as the world writes on a poet. You may know the story told of Paul Celan, that he returned after a weekend away from home one Monday morning of 1942 to find his house sealed and his parents removed.²³ They had been deported to a death camp in the Ukraine. He never saw them again. Arguably, this sudden excision remained the subject of his verse to the end of his life. In a postwar poem (called “Deathshroud”)²⁴ addressed to his mother, he says,

Was du aus Leichtem wobst,

trag ich dem Stein zu Ehren.

[That which you wove out of light stuff

I wear in honor of stone.]

The stone that the poet honors here is his mother’s grave marker, but also the plane surface of life from which she was carved away. The garment of light stuff that she wove into a shroud for herself has become the texture of his own memory.

For a poet like Simonides, who made his living by honoring stones in this way, excision is a physical process that becomes a mode of meaning. It involves the carving of stone and voice and remembrance. Let us consider how:

ΣΑΜΑ	TOMB
ΤΟΔΕ	THIS
ΣПΙΝΘΗΡ	SPINTHER
ΣПΙΝΘΗΡ᾿	UPON SPINTHER
ΕПΕΘΗΚΕ	SET
ΘΑΝΟΝΤΙ	DEAD

Simonides composed this single sentence for the gravestone of a certain Spinther.25 Nothing is known about Spinther, neither his provenance, date, ancestry, nor what compunction moved him to commission his own epitaph. His nonentity is an important factor in assessing his epitaphic investment; Spinther would have vanished utterly save for a single Simonidean line of verse. But note that Simonides has not just saved Spinther’s life, he has doubled it.

First, look at the stone. The verse was probably inscribed on the stone as a block of words vertically aligned in stoichēdon sequence. The inscription may have been painted in alternating lines of red and black. If so, an ancient Greek reader will notice an economical fact. The single verse contains two epitaphs. The red letters (TOMB SPINTHER SET) make one sentence and the black letters (THIS UPON SPINTHER DEAD) make another.

Now let us take the measure of letters a little deeper. Look at the syntax. On the epitaph the word Σπίνθηρ is a noun in the nominative case that stands as subject of the sentence directly on top of Σπίνθηρ᾿, a noun in the dative case that is indirect object of the sentence. Spinther’s action as agent of the verb ἐπέθηκε (“set”) is to confer a “tomb” (σῆμα) upon his own dead self. The Greek word σῆμα can also mean “sign”: Spinther’s epitaph signifies that in some sense he is not after all a dead object, for the syntax of his relationship to mortality is changed by the action of the verse. Notice the difference between Σπίνθηρ and Σπίνθηρ᾿. Metrics require Spinther’s name in the dative case (properly Σπίνθηρι) to be elided of its final vowel before conjunction with the initial vowel of the following verb ἐπέθηκε. This produces Σπίνθηρ᾿, which sounds just like Σπίνθηρ: as if the poem could reinflect Spinther from dative dependence on death to double subjectivity in his own sentence—just for an instant Spinther’ Spinther imitates himself in a semantic friction that generates two lives from one death and two men from one name. Loss and profit change places in Simonides’ economy of grace.26

Grace makes an epitaph brilliant to read, grace makes it memorable. Imagine how it would happen, if you were a wandering passerby who stopped to read Spinther’s last words one day in the fifth century B.C.

Ancient inscriptions were truly “talking stones,” in the sense that silent reading was not a usual nor a practical mode of deciphering them.²⁷ Generally inscribed in scriptio continua with no spaces between the words, stones demanded to be read aloud so that the reader could “recognize” (ἀναγιγνώσκειν) the words. What is recognized in such reading is not individual letters or visual facts so much as a sequence of sounds ordered in viva voce as the reader hears himself pronounce them. Words and word groups obscure to the eye will shape themselves upon the ear and unlock the codes of memory. So the verbs for “to read” in Greek typically begin with a prefix like ἀνα- (“again”) or ἐπι- (“on top of”) as if reading were essentially regarded as a sort of sympathetic vibration between letters composed by a writer and the voice in which a reader pulls them out of silence.28 It is interesting that the second most conspicuous feature of Simonides’ style (after exactitude) in the opinion of ancient critics is a quality they call τὸ συμπαθές.²⁹ Generally translated into English as “sympathy” or “pathos,” the term implies some shared movement of soul between writer and reader, as if words could have a power to enter the reader and design an emotion there from inside his own voice.³⁰

It is your voice you hear performing an act of elision upon Spinther. It is you who realize, even as you vocalize the name a second time, that you have to excise the vowel relating Spinther-subject to Spinther-object, Spinther present to Spinther past. It is you who pronounce him “dead” (thanonti) and fall silent. Then turn and walk away.

People who knew Paul Celan say he never put aside the guilt of having survived his parents in 1942.³¹ There are no data on how Simonides felt about “jumping the line” to get out of Keos before his hour of hemlock arrived. The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here—deny them their nothingness—by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs.

MOTION

Epitaphs create a space of exchange between present and past by gaining a purchase on memory. Simonides, whose expertise in the mnemonic art was examined in the previous chapter, seems to have given considerable thought to the space of memory and to how words furnish it. He understands that to make a mental space memorable, you put into it movement, light and unexpectedness. In Spinther’s case the movement is very bright indeed: his name is also the Greek word for “spark.” Like a spark struck by rubbing two coins together, Spinther is sent flying forward to perpetuate his own significance beyond the grave. Let us look now at another example where Simonides shows us memory as an event pulled out of darkness by language: exchange of blue death for fireproof fame.

῎ασβεστον κλέος οἵδε ϕίληι περὶ πατρίδι θέντες

κυάνεον θανάτου ἀμϕεβάλοντο νέϕος·

οὐδὲ τεθνᾶσι θανόντες, ἐπεί σϕ᾿ ἀρετὴ καθύπερθε

κυδαίνουσ᾿ ἀνάγει δώματος ἐξ Ἀίδεω.32

[Asbestos glory these men set around their dear fatherland

and in a dark blue death cloud they wrapped themselves.

Not dead having died. Because virtue down from above

keeps pulling them up glorying out of Hades’ house.]

“Glory” here is an asbestos energy that works itself out through the surfaces of the words, like the glow from a funeral pyre. There are different surfaces, which open and shift as unexpectedly as smoke. There are questions and answers, mysteriously disoriented from one another. What is burning? Apparently not that which has been set on fire. Who is dead? Apparently not those who have died. Out of these mysteries the poet creates a general mood of disorientation, which is spatial, aural and temporal as well as cognitive. The reader has the sense that he is staring down into a tomb. He is listening hard, he is expecting to hear a door slam shut. Instead he hears his own voice open and stall on the unusually33 awkward hiatus of vowels between “death” (θανάτου) and “wrapped themselves” (ἀμϕιβάλοντο) at the middle of the poem. As he looks down from above at the doorway of death, he is expecting to see darkness. Instead there is a passageway out of which very bright living beings are rising and keep rising up into the moment of his own reading. The verb tenses control this action, moving from the aorist instant of death described in the first couplet (“set,” “wrapped”), to a verb in the perfect tense denying the closure of death at the center (“not dead having died”), to end in the present progressive (“keeps pulling”) like a slow leak of immortality. A final gaping vowel (Ἀίδεο) at the very end of the poem leaves Hades’ house standing open. Losing life upward.

Paul Celan wrote only one explicit epitaph, for the death of his infant son in 1953 (“Epitaph for François”).³⁴ Like Simonides’ poem, it is located in a space between two worlds. But for Celan this is a space to be crossed in only one direction. He makes us hear the doors slam shut:

GRABSCHRIFT FÜR FRANÇOIS

Die beiden Türen der Welt

stehen offen:

geöffnet von dir

in der Zwienacht.

Wir hören sie schlagen und schlagen

und tragen das ungewisse,

und tragen das Grün in dein Immer.

Oktober 1953

[EPITAPH FOR FRANÇOIS

The two doors of the world

stand open:

opened by you

in the twinight.

We hear them slam and slam

and carry the thing that’s uncertain

and carry the green thing into your Ever.

October 1953]

This is the only poem Celan ever published with its date underneath. Its premise is precision. The poet’s neologism Zwienacht (“twinight”), made out of the number two and the noun for night, counts out the moment of death. There is no question, these doors close. We hear them slam and slam (schlagen und schlagen). The sound echoes through the final verse (und tragen … und tragen) into eternity. Like Simonides, Celan uses syntactical choices as well as sound effects to draw the reader into the mood of the epitaphic situation: we watch helplessly as the green adjective of life (das Grün) disappears into an everlasting adverb (dein Immer) once and for all. Like Simonides, Celan constructs his epitaph as an act of attention shared between poet and reader, which moves out from the reader’s voice through all the surfaces of the poet’s language. But the mood is simpler and the direction is down.

Simonides prefers to treat time as a two-way corridor. He seems confident in the power of “virtue” to pull open the door at this end and reverse the natural direction of mortal traffic. Such confidence is a typical feature of the epitaphic rhetoric of his numerous public monuments. Also ascribed to his name are memorials for dead men at the battles of Plataia, Thermopylai, Dirphys, Artemision, Salamis, Marathon, Eurymedon, Tanagra, as well as other monuments to classical violence, like the cenotaph honoring Leonidas at Sparta and the statue commemorating Harmodios and Aristogeiton at Athens. The language of these civic commissions makes clear what kind of ideological negotiation was going on in the mid-fifth century between the city and its own acts of blood. Public epitaphic rhetoric by and large avoids the register of pity in order to emphasize an activity of praise.35 We can call this emphasis deliberate in virtue of its contrast with the epitaphic verse that Simonides wrote for private persons, which is suffused with pity. Tears do not figure in the public epitaphs. These poems are encomia, not laments. They posit an active choice, not a passive suffering, of death and express transcendent faith in the value of the choice: glory (kleos) is the measure of value. No door slams shut on it.

Rules change when Simonides turns his attention to the smaller, sadder ghostliness of a private tomb. The epitaph inscribed to Megakles gives a sense of constriction rather than openness, of grief kept secret. Tears, no glory:

σῆμα καταϕθιμένοιο Μεγακλέος εὖτ᾿ ἄν ἴδωμαι,

οἰκτίρω σε, τάλαν Καλλία, οἷ᾿ ἔπαθες.36

[Whenever I see the tomb of dead Megakles

I pity you, sad Kallias, what you suffered.]

The emotion of the poem is eerily three-cornered and works by deflection. It moves out from the reader to touch Megakles’ tomb but is then bounced off Megakles onto a third, unanticipated presence. Kallias materializes silently by the reader’s side, more mysterious and more pitiable than the dead man. It is as if you were standing alone (you thought) in a room and suddenly heard someone breathing. The painting of Giotto called Joachim Retiring to His Sheepfold shows Joachim, after his expulsion from the temple in Jerusalem, arriving back at his sheepfold into the presence of two shepherds with their sheep and a small jumping dog. Joachim is in deep dejection and fixes his eyes on the ground, evidently unconscious of his surroundings. It is a moment of profound emotion, which Giotto has painted in such a way as to deliberately disorient the viewer’s perception of it. For as we contemplate Joachim, our sympathy for him is intercepted by the shepherd, who is staring straight out of the painting “towards us, sympathetically, as though we had all witnessed a disaster together.”³⁷ The shepherd’s stare has a strange tension—at once gathering us into the suffering of Joachim and setting up a barrier that keeps it private. The shepherd’s eye makes contact with our sympathy but also marks the place where sympathy stops short. Joachim’s grief is and remains beyond us. In somewhat the same way, Simonides’ three-cornered epigram makes one spare fact explicit: the privacy of grief. No one else can really know what Kallias suffered when he lost Megakles.

MEASURE

All Simonides’ epitaphic poems take the form of elegiac couplets. It will be worthwhile to reflect on why this is so. First let us consider how elegiacs work.

Elegiac meter is a distich form, that is, made of two verses of different types in regular alternation. Each verse is followed by a pause and the distich may be repeated any number of times. The elegiac distich consists of a hexameter (six-beat) verse followed by a type of pentameter (five-beat) verse that is made by duplication of the hemiepes or first half of a hexameter. Note that the two halves of the pentameter are interchangeable, both ending in a disyllable. In other words, every elegiac couplet has a unit of hexameter followed by this same unit broken into two equal halves balanced against one another—the acoustic shape of a perfect exchange. Nice to think of these exchanges also marked visually (as suggested above) by painting them in alternating lines of red and black. Rhythmically, the elegiac couplet resembles a pendulum: it moves out, moves back, by its own momentum, wasting nothing. Economy of breath in motion.

When verse began to be seen on Greek monuments in the seventh century B.C., various meters were used (with hexameter predominating) but a trend began at Athens under the Peisistratids to emphasize the elegiac couplet. From the early sixth century, elegiac became the canonical meter for inscribed verses of any literary or social pretension.38 I would guess that Simonides, who flourished in Peisistratid Athens, was instrumental in this canonization. Let me solidify this conjecture with two further examples of his mastery of elegiac form. His ability to manipulate form in the service of fact suggests to me a special affinity between the poet and this very distinctive metrical idea, the elegiac.

We still do not know quite how to read the inscription he wrote for the sensational statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton in Athens. Although it is not an epitaph, this monument commemorates the deaths of three people: Harmodios, Aristogeiton and Hipparchos.39 It was erected probably soon after 510 B.C., on the occasion of the expulsion of Hippias, brother of Hipparchos and so-called last tyrant of Athens. Hippias was driven out of the city in 510 in a complicated coup engineered by the Alkmaionid family. But political rivals of the Alkmaionids were soon scheming to defraud them of credit for this action and a myth began to be generated ascribing the “liberation of Athens” to two young men named Harmodios and Aristogeiton.

These two men had in fact murdered Hippias’ brother, Hipparchos, three years before.⁴⁰ The real motive for this murder, as historians since Thucydides attest, was homosexual jealousy.⁴¹ According to Thucydides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton were lovers. When Hipparchos, the brother of the tyrant, became enamored of the young Harmodios and made overtures to him, Harmodios reported the matter to his lover, who took immediate action. Aristogeiton organized a conspiracy to assassinate Hipparchos along with his powerful brother amid the crowds and confusion on the city streets of Athens during the annual Panathenaic procession. The conspirators did in fact succeed in dispatching Hipparchos according to plan, but then the bodyguards of Hippias appeared and cut Harmodios down. Aristogeiton was captured alive, imprisoned, tortured and later executed.

Neither the events of this romantic tragedy nor its confused aftermath can be shown to have provoked the political action that ousted Hippias three years later. Yet soon after the expulsion,42 a statue of Harmodios and Aristogeiton as “liberators of Athens” was set up in the Athenian agora, inscribed with a couplet allegedly by Simonides:

ἦ μέγ᾿ Ἀθηναίοισι ϕόως γένεθ᾿ ἡνίκ᾿ Ἀριστο-

γείτων Ἵππαρχον κτεῖνε καὶ Ἁρμόδιος.⁴³

[Surely a great light for the Athenians came into being when

Aristogeiton and Harmodios killed Hipparchos.]

Translation cannot convey the verbal tensions of the Greek original. The first verse sets up “a great light” surrounding “the Athenians” on both sides. The second verse shows us Hipparchos stranded between Aristogeiton and Harmodios as the direct object of their verb “killed”; the verb is singular, despite its compound subject, to emphasize this unit of murderous enclosure. Simonides renders the impassioned facts of the story as structure rather than surface rhetoric. We may presume that his commission was to glorify the murder as disinterested democratic action. Yet he has managed to suggest the darker pressure of a private erotic agenda behind political myth.

It is a story of close cuts and deadly contiguities. It is an epigram that begins with “a remarkable breach of one of the most fundamental rules of elegiac verse.”⁴⁴ The rule that a word boundary should invariably occur at verse end is first stated by Hephaistion, the lexicographer to whom we owe preservation of this poem. “Every metrical line ends in a complete word, hence such verses as these from the epigrams of Simonides are incorrect,” says Hephaistion.45 This incorrect prosodic impulse permits Aristogeiton to overstep his place in the hexameter verse and join his beloved in the next line as they close in upon the intrusive Hipparchos. But every license has a price. The structure of the elegiac couplet divides Aristogeiton’s name in half as violently as jealousy did cut through his life.

The physical facts of the monument on which this epigram was inscribed may have emphasized some of these tensions, by an interplay between text and figures. Neither the statue itself nor any detailed ancient description is extant but a number of copies have been identified. It seems clear that the two figures stood side by side, forming a vigorous composition with Simonides’ epigram inscribed below.⁴⁶ We are in fact able to visualize how the epigram looked due to the discovery, in the Athenian agora in 1936, of a base of Pentelic marble containing the end of the pentameter verse of this couplet.⁴⁷ Simonides’ text will then have run continuously across the base from left to right beneath the two statues. The first half of Aristogeiton’s name would be cut directly under his own figure, surging forward on the left with sword raised in the direction of Harmodios. And the latter half of the name thrusts itself across the gap between the two figures, with the gestural energy appropriate to a lover ousting a rival from his beloved’s side. Now it is true (and no Greek reader of the epigram would be unaware) that the name Aristogeiton, with its opening iambic rhythm, scans awkwardly no matter where you put it in a dactylic hexameter. But I would suggest that the way Simonides plays this acoustic fact into his design is meant to tell us less about metrical recalcitrance than about emotions of murder in a paederastic police state. His exactitude has a sculptural power to carry the reader’s eye around the back of the forms into human causes. Here again we see the “sympathy” for which Simonides was celebrated arising directly from the physical facts of his ἀκρίβεια.

And surely this is one function of great poetry, to remind us that human meaning does not stop with the physical facts. Facts live in their relation to one another; and language is able to objectify facts insofar as it can name (or as the Greeks say, imitate) these relations. When we speak of the Simonidean quality of sympathy as a function of this poet’s exactitude, we are at the root of his notion that “the word is a picture of things.” We are recognizing his ability to make the same relations occur among a set of words in a poem as obtain among a set of facts in the world. “To chew this bread with writing teeth,” as Paul Celan calls it.48 Let us consider another example of such imitative action in an epitaph composed by Simonides for a woman named Archedike:

ἀνδρὸς ἀριστεύσαντος ἐν Ἑλλάδι τῶν ἐϕ᾿ ἑαυτοῦ

Ἱππίου Ἀρχεδίκην ἥδε κέκευθε κόνις,

ἣ πατρός τε καὶ ἀνδρὸς ἀδελϕῶν τ᾿ οὖσα τυράννων

παίδων τ᾿ οὐκ ἤρθη νοῦν ἐς ἀτασθαλίην.⁴⁹

[Of a man who himself was best in Greece of the men of his day:

Hippias’ daughter Archedike this dust hides,

She of a father, of a husband, of brothers, of children all tyrants being.

Nor did she push her mind up into presumption.]

Archedike was the daughter of Hippias (last tyrant of Athens, as above), a man whose presence and power, accompanied by all the rest of the men of his day in the first verse of the poem, effectively buries Archedike in the middle of the second verse, boxed in between her father’s name and the dust of her own grave. The third verse locates her total claim to fame in a participle—“being”—and specifies the mode of her being in virtue of its fourfold relation to men. It is noteworthy that this claim, which informs us Archedike played the roles of daughter, wife, sister and mother, does not use any of these nouns to designate her. Archedike’s functions are indicated exclusively by her grammatical dependence on the nouns father, husband, brother, children. The fourth verse does at last ascribe a quality to Archedike but it is a quality named for its absence. This woman’s lack of presumption comes as little surprise at the end of an epitaph that refers every aspect of her being to male derivation. True to its word, the poem hides all but Archedike’s “dust.”

There are a number of (by now familiar) things one could say at this point about masculine discourse and patriarchal codes and the suppression of female voice. Simonides, I suspect, had none of them in mind when he composed this poem but was in fact entertaining quite other, honorific purposes with a measurable success. And therefore the epitaph to Archedike may stand as an all the more heartening evidence that a poet who forms his attention in exactitude can end up telling more truth than he means to. For he is drawn ever more deeply to the inside of the physical facts. As Rilke says, “Like a drink through thirst, gravity plunges through him.”50 The act of poetic attention gathers to itself a directional force as mysterious as gravity from the poet’s instinct for true relationships.

The Greeks of the generation into which Simonides was born had a name for this instinct and a profound faith in its truth-claim. They called the instinct that makes a poet a poet simply σοϕία (“wisdom”). They believed the exercise of poetic wisdom to be the clearest place where truth can obtain existence for itself. You and I, on the other hand, belong to a generation that is no longer able to use such a word nor command such a belief. To cite a phrase used by Paul Celan in his Bremen speech, we are people “wounded by and seeking reality” (wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend).⁵¹ He does not speak of poetic wisdom and seems uncertain of his readers’ tolerance for truth. “We live under dark skies and there are few human beings. Hence … few poems. The hopes I have left are small.”52 Nonetheless, with his small hopes, Celan addressed himself to issues of sympathy, exactitude and memory, as Simonides did. He wrote no further epitaphs (after François’) but he does seem at times to have entertained the notion that the dead can save the living.

CELAN

An epitaph is a way of thinking about death and gives consolation. Our minds seek shelter from a world of barely controlled flux in such forms of order. The ancient epitaphic order, brought to perfection by Simonides, sets up a mimesis of exchange whose consolations are not only rhythmic and conceptual but something more. Salvation occurs, through the act of attention that forms stone into memory, leaving a residue of greater life. I am speaking subjectively. There is no evidence of salvation except a gold trace in the mind. But this trace convinces me that the beautiful economic motions of Simonides’ epitaphic verse capture something essential to human language, to the give and take of being, to what saves us.

In the Meridian speech, Celan talks about the motions of poetic language as if they were pendular: “The poem holds its own on its own margin. In order to endure it constantly calls out and pulls itself back from an ‘already no more’ into a ‘still here.’ ”⁵³ These motions of exchange, which allow the poem to endure, are set out on facing pages of Celan’s 1967 collection Atemwende as two opposing phases of the alchemical process. The poems “Solve” and “Coagula” treat several different topics, including the uses of language and the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, under the figure of alchemy:⁵⁴

SOLVE

Entosteter, zu

Brandscheiten zer-

spaltener Grabbaum:

an den Gift-

pfalzen vorbei, an den Domen,

stromaufwärts, strom-

abwärts geflößt

vom winzig-lodernden, vom

freien

Satzzeichen der

zu den unzähligen zu

nennenden un-

aussprechlichen

Namen aus-

einandergeflohenen, ge-

borgenen

Schrift.

COAGULA

Auch deine

Wunde, Rosa.

Und das Hörnerlicht deiner

rumänischen Büffel

an Sternes Statt überm

Sandbett, im

redenden, rot-

aschengewaltigen

Kolben.

[SOLVE

DisEastered

gravetree split

up for logburning:

past the poison-

palatinates, past the cathedrals,

streamupwards, stream-

downwards rafted

by tiny-blazing, by

free

punctuation marks of the

saved writing

that has flowed asunder

into the uncountable

unsayable

to be said

names.]

[COAGULA

Also your

wound, Rosa.

And the hornlight of your

Romanian buffaloes

instead of stars above the

sandbed, in the

talking red-

ash powerful

butt.]

Solve and coagula are Latin imperative verbs that refer to two stages of the alchemical process: “Separate!” and “Recombine!” In alchemical recipes these verbs are usually in the plural. Solvite corpora et coagulate spiritum, says Nicholas Valois.55 Celan has singularized the command perhaps because, to judge from the first verse of the second poem, he is addressing Rosa herself—one philosopher of the saving of matter to another. Within alchemical practice, “solution” is an initial separation of the elements of the prima materia. This stage, in which the elements turn black and undergo a “death,” was called nigredo by alchemists. “Coagulation” is a final stage of solidification and the goal of the process. It occurs after “resurrection” of the elements and is signaled by the color red, thus called rubedo. Calling out and pulling back, the movement of the poems is from black to red, from logs to ash, from written marks to Rosa’s wound. Elements of prime matter that suffer solution in the first poem include Christianity, for the tree of Easter is cut up into logs and floats away; and naming, for the punctuation marks that separate writing into nameable names are on fire: it all flows asunder.

In the second poem all this dissolution stops and goes solid. Christ’s disavowed Easter pain congeals in Rosa’s wound. Moving fires steady down as ash. Dispersed script takes the deadly form of a talking rifle butt. These features of “Coagula” may be analyzed in their double reference to the alchemical code and to the history of Rosa Luxemburg.56 A mysticism of roses and suffering is found in the earliest Greek alchemical texts, but also evokes the head wound dealt to Rosa Luxemburg in her last hour. “Stars above the sandbed” may allude to a sign in the sky traditionally sought by alchemists at the end of the nigredo phase. Celan replaces this sign with “hornlight of your Romanian buffaloes.” One critic finds here a reference to a letter of Rosa Luxemburg with which Celan was familiar. In the letter she describes a sight glimpsed from the window of her prison cell: wild water buffaloes, captured in Romania to be used instead of oxen as draught animals, were pulling an army cart into the prison yard and got stuck in the gate. A soldier in charge was using the heavy end of his whip to beat the animals until “the blood ran from their wounds.” With deepest pity she remarks on how hard it is to lacerate buffalo hide, “proverbial for its toughness.”⁵⁷

Blood shows, in Rosa’s last hour. Her captors struck her on the head with the end of a rifle and threw her in the Landwehr Canal. The final verses of the poem bring us to rubedo, to a terrible transmutation that does not have much in common with the noble process of alchemists who “healed” base metals into gold. Alchemical changes seem always to have been positive, never involving degradation except as an intermediate stage in a happier process. Celan is a man whose “hopes are small.”58 His poems do not pretend to partake of happier process or positive change. Yet he does set up an act of attention—pulled out of oblivion—that moves there and back and leaves some residue of greater life. So might the measures of Spinther’s epitaph once have been set pulsing at the world in alternative verses of red and black. “Solve” and “Coagula” do not constitute an epitaph, yet they do measure out a motion of exchange, pulling and calling. Neither Rosa Luxemburg nor the uncountable names are saved by this motion. Except as writing. But that is not nothing.

¹ Homer Iliad 7.81–91; Raubitschek (1968), 5–7.

² Catullus 38.7; τὸ συμπαθές: Vita Aeschyli 119, cf. Dionysios of Halikarnassos De imitatione 2.420; Horace Carmina 2.1.37–40; Quintilian Institutio oratoria 10.1.64.

³ Lattimore, (1962), 168–73.

⁴ Simonides fr. 40[c] FGE.

⁵ Jacoby (1945), 185ff.; Page (1981), 255–58; Wade-Gery (1933), 82ff.

⁶ McLellan (1977), 111.

⁷ Homer Iliad 9.401–11.

⁸ Simonides fr. 2 FGE.

⁹ Page (1981), 189–92.

¹⁰ Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1133a19–23.

¹¹ Simonides fr. 6 FGE.

¹² Herodotos 7.228.

¹³ Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1133b11–13.

¹⁴ Bourdieu (1985), 55–61; Chantraine (1950), 112; Day (1989), 21, 24–28; Knox (1968); Nagy (1983), 46–48; Raubitschek (1968), 23–25; Svenbro (1988), 13–19; cf. also Letoublon (1995), 12.

¹⁵ Dionysios of Halikarnassos De imitatione 2.420. The Aristophanic scholiast (on Peace 695ff.) uses a parallel term, σμικρολογία, whose referents similarly include “verbal precision” and “stinginess with money.”

¹⁶ Woodhead (1959), 89–90.

¹⁷ Austin (1938), 1.

¹⁸ Ibid., 31.

¹⁹ Reply to a questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris, 1958: Celan (1990), 22; Waldrop (1986), 16.

²⁰ Simonides fr. 79 FGE; Palatine Anthology 10.105.2.

²¹ Lattimore (1962), 15–18.

²² Strabo 10.486.

²³ Chalfen (1991), 146–48, and see below, Chapter IV.

²⁴ Celan (1983), 1:53; (1988), 68–69.

²⁵ Although the Palatine Anthology regards the poem as incomplete and leaves a space for a missing pentameter, Page believes it is an early single-hexameter epigram of the type illustrated by Friedländer and Hoffleit (1948), 9ff.: Simonides fr. 86 FGE; Palatine Anthology 7.177.

Page prints a slightly duller text (reading Σπίνθηρι πατὴρ for Σπίνθηρ Σπίνθηρ᾿), which he judges “primitive and artless.” Edmonds (1927) suggests the text I have printed above: Simonides fr. 155; it may be wrong (Edmonds is a maverick editor), but it seems closer in spirit to the otherwise rarely artless Simonides.

²⁶ I have used an apostrophe to make Spinther’s elision clear in my text; however, it is not certain whether, or how, ancient stonecutters would have indicated such a thing on a stone. It is possible the iota was carved on the stone and elided only in voice, but this messes up an otherwise perfect stoichēdon pattern. On the question of iota in general, and why stonecutters disliked cutting this letter especially at the end of a line, see Austin (1938), 104, 111.

²⁷ Bourdieu (1985); Chantraine (1950); Knox (1968); Nagy (1983); Svenbro (1988).

²⁸ It is fashionable to interpret this relationship between written text and reader’s voice as a “question of power” (Bourdieu in Chartier [1985], 235; Svenbro [1988], 53), wherein the reader is dispossessed of his own voice in order to facilitate realization of the inscription, or even as a “point neuralgique” (Svenbro [1988], 207), whose structure replicates the paederastic model of dominance and submission that is presently seen to inform so many aspects of the ancient Greek cultural experiment. “La voix se soumettre à la trace écrite,” says Svenbro, who characterizes the reader’s “service” to the writer by direct analogy with the homosexual act of love and its dark emotions of use. “Lire, c’est prêter son corps à un scripteur peut-être inconnu, pour faire resonner des paroles ‘étrangères,’ ‘d’autrui,’ allotrioi” (213). The remarkable humorlessness of this line of interpretation seems to belie not only the terms in which the ancients themselves speak of written works of art (e.g., poiema, kosmos, charis), but also the spirit of freedom in which artists like Simonides play through the possibilities of meaning available conjointly to writer and reader within a piece of language. Perhaps exchange of power need not always mean abuse of power. Meaning, after all, exists to be exchanged.

²⁹ Vita Aeschyli 119.

³⁰ Cf. Quintilian’s miseratio commovenda (“Pity moving together with pity”): Institutio oratoria 10.1.64.

³¹ Felstiner (1995), 14–15; Washburn and Guillemin (1986), vii.

³² Simonides fr. 9 FGE; Palatine Anthology 7.251

³³ See Page (1981), 200.

³⁴ Celan (1983), 1:105; (1988), 78–79.

³⁵ Loraux (1986), 47–56; but cf. Day (1989), who would deemphasize claims to pity on the private epitaphs.

³⁶ Simonides fr. 75 FGE; Palatine Anthology 7.511. But the poem is so strange that completeness, authenticity and genre remain in dispute. “Manifesto mutilatum” (Bergk); “of course not a fragment” (Wilamowitz); Page (1981), 295.

³⁷ Meiss (1960), 6; see also Barasch (1987), 42–44; Trost (1964), 26 and pl.

³⁸ Wallace (1984), 315.

³⁹ An overview of the archaeological evidence for the statues of Harmodios and Aristogeiton as well as further bibliography may be found in Thompson and Wycherly (1972). For more detailed studies, see Brunnsåker (1955); Taylor (1981). Ancient testimonia for the statue group is collected in Thompson (1957), 93–98.

⁴⁰ See [Plato] Hipparchus 228a; the Parian Marble A 45; Attic skolia 893–96 PMG.

⁴¹ Thucydides 6.54–60; Page (1981), 186–88.

⁴² If Page is correct that the monument was erected during the period when the Alkmaionid Kleisthenes had been driven out of Athens by his rival Isagoras (508/7): see Page (1981), 187.

⁴³ Simonides fr. 1 FGE. The monument was removed from Athens to Persia in 480, then replaced with a new monument and reinscribed in 477/6: Pausanias 1.8.5; Pliny Natural History 34.70. It is not known whether the present epigram, ascribed to Simonides by Hephaistion, was composed for the first or the second monument.

⁴⁴ Page (1981), 188. See also Van Raalte (1986), 64; Kassel (1975), 211–18.

⁴⁵ Hephaistion Encheiridion 28.

⁴⁶ Richter (1929), 200–201.

⁴⁷ Meritt (1936), 355–56 believes this stone to be from the base of the second monument (477 B.C.) with an inscription copied from the original (510 B.C.) base.

⁴⁸ In the poem “Mit den Sackgassen”: Celan (1983), 2:358.

⁴⁹ Simonides fr. 26 FGE; Thucydides 6.59.3.

⁵⁰ “Schwerkraft,” in Rilke (1963), 2:179.

⁵¹ Celan (1990), 39; Waldrop (1986), 35.

⁵² Celan (1990), 32; Waldrop (1986), 26.

⁵³ Das Gedicht behauptet sich am Rande seiner selbst; es ruft und holt sich, um bestehen zu können, unausgesetzt aus seinem Schon-nicht-mehr in sein Immer-noch zurück: Celan (1990), 54; (1986), 48.

⁵⁴ Celan (1983), 2:82 and 83.

⁵⁵ Olsson (1994), 269; on alchemical terms and practice, see also Jung (1953), 228–32; Taylor (1930), 109–40.

⁵⁶ Olsson suggests also a reference to Rosa Leibovici, a friend of Celan’s at Czernowitz: (1994), 274; Chalfen points out that Leibovici “came from Moldavia, home of the Romanian buffalo mentioned in the poem”: (1979), 151.

⁵⁷ Olsson (1994), 270–71.

⁵⁸ Above, note 49.