Archilochos is the first lyric poet whose transmission to us benefited from the literate revolution. Although evidence for the chronology of both poet and alphabet is uncertain, it is most plausible that, educated in the oral tradition, he encountered the new technology of writing at some point in his career and adapted himself to it. At any rate someone, perhaps Archilochos himself, wrote down these early facts of what it feels like to be violated by Eros:
τυῖος γὰρ φιλόπητος ἔρως ὑπὸ καρδίην ἐλνσθεὶς
πολλὴν κατ᾽ ἀχλὺν ὸμμάτων ἔχευεν,
κλέψας ἐκ στηθέων ἁπαλὰς ϕρένας.
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under
my heart,
poured down much mist over my eyes,
filching out of my chest the soft lungs—
(West, IEG 191)
The first word of the poem initiates a correlation. The word toios is a demonstrative pronoun meaning ‘such,’ which properly corresponds to the relative pronoun hoios meaning ‘as,’ so that a sentence beginning toios expects an answering clause with hoios to complete the thought. The poem sets out one half of this thought, then stops. Nonetheless, it has a perfect economy, as far as it goes. Every word, sound and stress is placed for a purpose. The first verse describes eros rolled up in a ball beneath the lover’s heart. The words are ordered to reflect the physiology of the moment, with erōs coiled dead center. A sequence of round o sounds (one long and five short) and bunched consonants (four pairs) gather the tension of the lover’s desire into an audible pressure within him. Consonants seem to be chosen for their insinuating quality (liquids, sibilants and voiceless stops). The metrical pattern is an original mixture of dactylic and iambic units, combined in a way that imitates the action of desire: launched in an epic burst of dactyls and spondees as eros asserts its presence, the verse then dissolves into a spatter of iambs precisely at the point where desire reaches the lover’s heart (kardiēn). The last word of the verse is a participle (elustheis) that has an epic past. “Rolled up in a ball under the belly of a ram” is the mode in which Odysseus escapes the Cyclops’ cave (Od. 9.433). “Rolled up in a ball at the feet of Achilles” is the position from which Priam makes supplication for the body of his son (Il. 24.510). In both of these epic contexts, a posture of abject vulnerability is assumed by a genuinely powerful person, who then proceeds to work his will on the enemy confronting him. Hidden power is a traditional feature of Eros too, in poetry and art, as the innocuous pais whose arrows prove deadly. Archilochos places the overtone of menace quietly, setting his participle at verse-end just as it occurs in both Homeric passages.
Line 2 encloses the lover’s eyes in mist from both sides. The poet’s consonants soften and thicken with the fog to l, m, n, and chi sounds. These sounds are doubled and combined in a repeated pattern that comes down four times upon word-end in n, as if emphasizing the descent of the fog in four liquid streaks (-lēn, -lun,- tōn, -en). Fog is fused around the lover’s eyes by the iambic rhythm of the verse, especially in the second metron (-lun ommatōn) where a caesura is dropped between eyes and mist. Epic overtones of danger are again to be felt in the imagery for, in Homer, mist darkens a man’s eyes at the moment of death (cf. Il. 20.321; 421).
With line 3 Eros completes his violation. One quick theft whistles the lungs straight out of the lover’s chest. Naturally, this ends the poem: with the organ of breath gone, speech is impossible. The robbery is staged in a run of s sounds (five) and the verse breaks off without completing its metrical scheme (the dactylic tetrameter should be followed by an iambic metron, as in line 1). Most likely the break is a fault of transmission, rather than a factor of the poet’s intention. Obviously the same explanation, namely the fragmentary condition of Archilochos’ text, would account for the unfulfilled syntactical expectation set up by the correlative pronoun with which the poem begins (toios). On the other hand, it is a very careful poem, as far as it goes.
The phrenes of the lover are as far as it goes. I have translated this word ‘lungs’ and referred to it as ‘the organ of breath.’ What is breath? For the ancient Greeks, breath is consciousness, breath is perception, breath is emotion. The phrenes seem to be roughly identifiable with the lungs in ancient physiological theory and to contain the spirit of breath as it comes and goes (Onians 951, 66ff). The chest is regarded by the Greeks as a receptacle of sense impressions and a vehicle for each of the five senses; even vision for, in seeing, something may be breathed from the object seen and received through the eyes of the seer (e.g., Hesiod, Scutum 7; cf. Arist., Sens. 4.437b23ff). Words, thoughts, and understanding are both received and produced by the phrenes. So words are “winged” in Homer when they issue from the speaker and “unwinged” when they are kept in the phrenes unspoken (cf. Od. 17.57). Phrenes are organs of mind. As Theognis says:
Ὀϕθαλμοὶ καὶ γλῶσσα καὶ οὔατα καὶ νόος ἀνδρῶν
ἐν μέσσω̨ στηθέων ἐν συνετοῖς ϕύεται.
The eyes and tongue and ears and intelligence of a
quick-witted man
grow in the middle of his chest.
(1163-64)
Such a conception is natural among people in an oral environment (see Onians, 1951, 68). Breath is primary insofar as the spoken word is. The conception has a solid psychological and sensual basis in the daily experience of these people. For the inhabitants of an oral society live much more intimately blended with their surroundings than we do. Space and the distances between things are not of first importance; these are aspects emphasized by the visual sense. What is vital, in a world of sound, is to maintain continuity. This attitude pervades archaic poetry and is strikingly present as well in the perceptual theories of the ancient physiologoi. Empedokles’ celebrated doctrine of emanations, for example, maintains that everything in the universe is perpetually inhaling and exhaling small particles called aporrhoai in a constant stream (Diels, VS, B89). All sensations are caused by these emanations as they are breathed in and out through the whole skin surface of living beings (B 100.1). The aporrhoai are mediators of perception which allow everything in the universe to be potentially ‘in touch’ with everything else (cf. Arist., Sens. 4.442a29). Empedokles and his contemporaries posit a universe where the spaces between things are ignored and the interactions constant. Breath is everywhere. There are no edges.
The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual’s total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment. Wings and breath transport Eros as wings and breath convey words: an ancient analogy between language and love is here apparent. The same irresistible sensual charm, called peithō in Greek, is the mechanism of seduction in love and of persuasion in words; the same goddess (Peitho) attends upon seducer and poet. It is an analogy that makes perfect sense in the context of oral poetics, where Eros and the Muses clearly share an apparatus of sensual assault. A listener listening to an oral recitation is, as Herman Fränkel puts it, “an open force-field” (1973, 524) into whom sounds are being breathed in a continuous stream from the poet’s mouth. Written words, on the other hand, do not present such an all-persuasive sensual phenomenon. Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment. Separation is painful. The evidence of epigraphy shows how long it takes people to systematize word-division in writing, indicating the novelty and difficulty of this concept.7 As separable, controllable units of meaning, each with its own visible boundary, each with its own fixed and independent use, written words project their user into isolation.
That words have edges is an insight most vivid, then, for the reader or writer of them. Heard words may have no edges, or varying edges; oral traditions may have no concept of ‘word’ as a fixed and bounded vocable, or may employ a flexible concept. Homer’s word for ‘word’ (epos) includes the meanings ‘speech,’ ‘tale,’ ‘song,’ ‘line of verse’ or ‘epic poetry as a whole.’ All are breathable. The edges are irrelevant.
But edge has a clear relevance for Archilochos. His words stop in mid-breath. “A poet like Archilochos,” says the historian Werner Jaeger, “has learnt how to express in his own personality the whole objective world and its laws, to represent them in himself” (1934-1947, 1:114). From the flesh out, it seems, Archilochos understands the law differentiating self from not-self, for Eros cuts into him just at the point where that difference lies. To know desire, to know words, is for Archilochos a matter of perceiving the edge between one entity and another. It is fashionable to say that this is true of any utterance. “In language there are only differences” Saussure (1971, 120) tells us, meaning that phonemes are characterized not by their positive qualities but by the fact that they are distinct. Yet the individuality of words must be especially felt by someone for whom written phonemes are a novelty and the edges of words newly precise.
In the next section we will observe the Greek alphabet at very close range and consider how its special genius is linked to a special sensibility about edges. But, for the moment, let us view the phenomenon of the archaic writer from a wider angle. In Archilochos and the other archaic poets we see people struck by new ways of thinking about edges—the edges of sounds, letters, words, emotions, events in time, selves. This is apparent in the way they use the materials of poetry, as well as in the things they say. Contraction and focus are the mechanism of lyric procedure. The sweep of epic narrative contracts upon a moment of emotion; the cast of characters is pared down to one ego; the poetic eye enters its subject in a single beam. The diction and meter of these poets seem to represent a systematic breakup of the huge floes of Homer’s poetic system. Epic formulas of phrase and rhythm pervade lyric poetry, but they are broken apart and differently assembled in irregular shapes and joins. A poet like Archilochos shows himself master of such combinations, sharply aware of the boundary between his own and epic procedure: we saw how deftly he fastens dactylic to iambic units in the first verse of fragment 191, so that Eros hits the lover’s heart just where the epic tetrameter breaks down in iambic dismay.
Breaks interrupt time and change its data. Archilochos’ written texts break pieces of passing sound off from time and hold them as his own. Breaks make a person think. When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters ‘I love you’ in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between ‘you’ in the text and you in my life. Both of these kinds of space come into being by an act of symbolization. Both require the mind to reach out from what is present and actual to something else, something glimpsed in the imagination. In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. To write words I put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write the words I love you’ requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication. Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words. And it is the single fact that makes a difference to the lover, the fact that you and I are not one. Archilochos steps off the edge of that fact into extreme solitude.
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7 On word-division and related problems, see Jeffrey 1961, 43-65; Jensen 1969, 440-60; Kenyon 1899, 26-32.