STESICHORUS AND IBYCUS: PLAIN
TALES FROM THE WESTERN FRONT
The conceptions and perceptions of their past found in both individuals and communities are very frequently related to place.1 That this was so in many places in the Greek world of the Roman empire is clear from (e.g.) Plutarch’s life of Theseus, which is replete with references to archaic and classical Athenian topography, and on a much larger scale Pausanias’ Guide to Hellas. This sort of writing did not even yet exist, far less survive, for mainland Greece of the archaic period, though the evocative power of place names is extensively exploited in the Homeric poems, and by such references as that of the Spartan elegiac poet Tyrtaeus to Ithome,2 or by an unknown elegiac poet from Laconia to Taygetus and Platanistous.3 There can be little doubt that in Greek communities throughout mainland Greece, the islands and Asia Minor, oral traditions about the pasts of these communities would often be attached to places or monuments. For example, the monument to ‘The Seven’, now known to have existed in Argos, probably as early as the sixth century, would have been a catalyst for stories about the expedition against Thebes by Argive warriors of the heroic age.4
It is a corollary that when sections of communities went to settle on new and often very distant sites some local traditions concerning their metropolis would be likely to fade and even perish, while others relating to the process and location of resettlement would grow up. Within a few generations the storied past of an ἀποικία might acquire a quite different profile from that of its metropolis. Such has certainly been my experience in both the United States and Australia; Lewis and Clark are heroised in St Louis and in Washington State, Ned Kelly has pride of place in art galleries in Canberra.
I had hoped, therefore, in setting out to comb, not for the first time, the surviving fragments of some archaic Greek poets, that something would emerge that chimed with this pattern. I must admit at this point that I found much less than I hoped. This in itself perhaps invites an explanation, which I shall attempt when concluding.
I was encouraged in my exploration, however, by the case of early narrative elegy. As I have discussed more than once,5 several early elegiac poets seem to have narrated at some length both the early and the more recent history of their cities: some – Mimnermus, Xenophanes, Ion of Chios – touched on migration eastwards from mainland Greece to the islands and Asia Minor; another, Semonides of Amorgos, on westward movement back from the eastern Aegean, Samos, to the western Aegean, Amorgos. Tyrtaeus’ Eunomia presented a different sort of colonisation, that of conquered Messenia by expansionist Sparta.6 Might something similar be discovered for the west? Here we have no such elegiac poetry – the possible reason for this is something I shall discuss elsewhere – and for traces of protohistorical narrative we must turn to melic poetry. There my two test cases are Stesichorus of Himera and Ibycus of Rhegion.
I start with Stesichorus, a melic poet composing long poems, seemingly for public performance, and in my view performance by a χορός, around 570 BCE.7 The first performances of these choral works were probably in his own city, Himera, the Greek settlement that lay furthest west on the north coast of Sicily, or in other Greek cities of Sicily or South Italy, though one papyrus fragment variously ascribed to Stesichorus (by Lobel and West) and Ibycus (by Page and Davies) has been argued to be designed for performance in a Spartan context.8 To whichever of these two poets that fragment is ascribed, it does not alter the general picture. Stesichorus’ narrative material is overwhelmingly drawn from the same range of Greek mythology that circulated in the cities of old Greece and that was in many cases developed to enhance the past of one of these cities. The Trojan War provides Stesichorus with his largest group of poems. The Argonauts, Thebes, the Calydonian boar are likewise traditional themes. Perhaps the Geryoneis, the melic epyllion in which Heracles steals the cattle of the three-headed Geryon, resident of the Hesperid island Erytheia in the ocean beyond Tartessus/Cadiz, had especial interest for an audience living in Himera on a trade route from the eastern and central Mediterranean to Spain. But there is no hint in the poem’s surviving fragments (admittedly only a small proportion of what was originally probably more than 1,800 lines) that its poet brought Sicily into his story:9 contrast the Cacus story in Vergil’s Aeneid Book 8. During the song-dance performance of this poem and the others that handled traditional Greek myth, neither performers nor audiences in Sicily – unlike, for example, those of Alcman’s first Partheneion – were confronted with elements of their community’s past, at least as far as we can tell. But of course we have to work with very small samples of what there once was. Admittedly Stesichorus was notorious in Hellenistic scholarship for his innovation in mythical detail:10 but there is no sign that this tweaking was done to accommodate his stories to the perspectives of a west Greek audience. Indeed it might rather be argued that he chooses some central, traditional Greek myths in order to emphasise the Greekness that the settlers in Sicily and South Italy shared with their metropoleis in mainland Greece and the islands.
One group of Stesichorus’ poems constitutes an exception. Three poems attributed to him in antiquity had as their themes unhappy love-stories that have no relation to the main body of Greek mythology. All three have been declared spurious, initially by H. J. Rose,11 followed by Page and Davies in their editions (1962 and 1991). But their ascription to Stesichorus has been convincingly defended by Luigi Lehnus.12 The poems are as follows.
(1) The Calyce (fr. 277 PMGF, quoted by Athenaeus 14.619D). This poem is about a girl, Calyce, who prayed to Aphrodite to be able to marry a young man, Euathlus, and who threw herself off the Leucadian rock when he turned her down. The Leucadian rock, in the Ionian sea, gives the story a western but still mainland Greek setting. Athenaeus cites the fourth book of Aristoxenus περὶ μουσικῆς for its content, and for its sung performance by women: ἦιδόν, φησι, αἱ ἀρχαῖαι γυναῖκες Καλύκην τινα ὠιδήν.13
(2) The Rhadine (fr. 278 PMGF, quoted by Strabo 8.3.20) concerns a girl who was sent off to be bride to a tyrant of Corinth and was pursued to Corinth by a cousin who had fallen in love with her. The tyrant killed them both and sent their bodies back on a chariot, but later repented and buried them. Strabo cites the first two lines, specifying helpfully that they are the poem’s ἀρχή:
ἄγε Mοῦσα λίγει’ ἄρξον ἀοιδᾶς †ἐρατῶν ὕμνους†
Σαμίων περὶ παίδων ἐρατᾶι φθεγγομένα λύραι
Strabo goes on to associate the story with a place called Samos in Elis, noting that it was the west wind, Zephyros, that had carried Rhadine’s ship, and hence she was not on a voyage from Aegean Samos. Pausanias, however, notes a tomb of Rhadine and her lover Leontichus precisely on the island of Samos, on the road leading to the temple of Hera.14 Perhaps Stesichorus took an East Aegean story and relocated it nearer Sicily. But it still has little to do with the past of Himera. It may just be relevant, however, that the bad guy in the story is a tyrant of Corinth. It had been colonists from Corinth who founded Syracuse; and when Himera was founded by Ionian Zancle (c. 648 BCE) the settlers were joined by some exiles from Syracuse.15 Some citizens of Himera might have had access to oral traditions about a tomb of Rhadine and Leontichus at Corinth.
(3) The Daphnis. I offer both the text and a translation of Aelian, Varia Historia 10.18:
Δάφνιν τὸν βουκόλον λέγουσιν οἱ μὲν ἐρώμενον Ἑρμοῦ, ἄλλοι δὲ υἱόν· τὸ δὲ ὄνομα ἐκ τοῦ συμβάντος σχεῖν. γενέσθαι μὲν αὐτὸν ἐκ Νύμφης, τεχθέντα δὲ ἐκτεθῆναι ἐν δάφνῃ. τὰς δ’ ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ βουκολουμένας βοῦς φασιν ἀδελφὰς γεγονέναι τῶν Ἡλίου, ὧν Ὅμηρος ἐν Ὀδυσσείᾳ μέμνηται. βουκολῶν δέ κατὰ τὴν Σικελίαν ὁ Δάφνις, ἠράσθη αὐτοῦ νύμφη μία, καὶ ὡμίλησε καλῷ ὄντι καὶ νέῳ καὶ πρῶτον ὑπηνήτῃ, ἔνθα τοῦ χρόνου ἡ χαριεστάτη ἐστὶν ἥβη τῶν καλῶν μειρακίων, ὥς πού φησι καὶ Ὅμηρος. συνθήκας δὲ ἐποίησε μηδεμιᾷ ἄλλῃ πλησιάσαι αὐτόν, καὶ ἐπηπείλησεν ὅτι πεπρωμίνον ἐστὶν αὐτὶν στερηθῆναι τῆς ὄψεως, ἐὰν παραβῇ· καὶ εἶχον ὑπὲρ τούτων ῥήτραν πρὸς ἀλλήλους. χρόνῳ δὲ ὕστερον βασιλέως θυγατρὸς ἐρασθείσης αὐτοῦ οἰνωθεὶς ἔλυσε τὴν ὁμολογίαν καὶ ἐπλησίασε τῇ κόρῃ. ἐκ δὲ τούτου τὰ βουκολικὰ μέλη πρῶτον ᾔσθη, καὶ εἶχεν ὑπόθεσιν τὸ πάθος τὸ κατὰ τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ. καὶ Στησίχορόν γε τὸν Ἱμεραῖον τῆς τοιαύτης μελοποιίας ὑπάρξασθαι.
Daphnis the cow-herd is said by some to have been the eromenos of Hermes, and by others to have been his son, and to have got his name from the circumstances of his birth – he was the child of a nymph, and on his birth he was exposed in a laurel bush (daphne). And they say that the cattle tended by him were sisters of those of the Sun, which Homer mentions in the Odyssey. While Daphnis was tending his cattle in Sicily, a nymph fell in love with him and had intercourse with him, since he was handsome and young and growing his first beard, at which point the prime of beautiful young boys is at its most attractive, as indeed Homer also says. She made a compact with him that he would not have sex with any other woman, and threatened that it was fated that he would be deprived of his sight if he broke the agreement. And they had a contract with each other about this. But later a princess fell in love with him, got him drunk, so that he broke the agreement and had sex with her. And it was on the basis of this that bucolic [cattle-tending] songs were first sung and had as their theme what happened to his sight. And (they say?) Stesichorus of Himera initiated this sort of sung poetry.
Here we are firmly on Sicilian territory. The story of Daphnis was picked up several times by the Syracusan poet Theocritus in his bucolic hexameter poems. In his most extended treatment, Idyll 1.64–9, Theocritus seems to locate the story on the slopes of Etna: Daphnis’ woes, ἄλγεα, are sung by a shepherd, Thyrsis of Etna, and Thyrsis complains that, when Daphnis was dying, the nymphs who might have saved him were not by the rivers of eastern Sicily, the Anapus and the Acis:
Θύρσις ὅδ’ ὡξ Αἲτνας, καὶ Θύρσιδος ἁδέα φωνά.
πᾷ ποκ’ ἄρ’ ἦσθ’, ὅκα Δάφνις ἐτάκετο, πᾷ ποκα, Νύμφαι;
ἦ κατὰ Πηνειῶ καλὰ τέμπεα, ἢ κατὰ Πίνδω;
οὐ γὰρ δὴ ποταμοῖο μέγαν ῥόον εἲχετ’ Ἀνάπω,
οὐδ’ Αἲτνας σκοπιάν, οὐδ’ Ἄκιδος ἱερὸν ὕδωρ.
ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς, Μοῖσαι φίλαι, ἄρχετ’ ἀοιδᾶς
This is Thyrsis from Etna, and sweet is Thyrsis’ voice.
‘Wherever were you, tell me, when Daphnis was wasting, wherever, nymphs?
Were you in the fair glens of the Peneus, or were you in those of Pindus?
For you were not dwelling in the mighty stream of the river Anapus,
nor on Etna’s peak, nor in the sacred water of the Acis.
Begin the cowherd’s . . . begin, dear Muses, the song.
In Theocritus Idyll 7.72–5, however, the Daphnis story is set near Himera:
ὁ δὲ Τίτυρος ἐγγύθεν ᾀσεῖ
ὥς ποκα τᾶς Ξενέας ἠράσσατο Δάφνις ὁ βούτας,
χὠς ὄρος ἀμφεπονεῖτο καὶ ὡς δρύες αὐτὸν ἐθρήνευν
Ἱμέρα αἵτε φύοντι παρ’ ὄχθαισιν ποταμοῖο
And Tityrus will sing nearby
how once Xenea kindled the desire of Daphnis the cowherd,
and how the mountain voiced distress all around, and how oaks lamented him,
oaks which grow by the banks of the river Himeras.
We cannot tell whether Theocritus knew the Daphnis story in two versions, one linked to Himera and the other to Etna, or only in one Himeran version that he consciously relocated in Idyll 1, just as he seems consciously (if enigmatically) to have changed the nature of Daphnis’ fatal affliction. That the Syracusan poet relocated an Etna version in Himera is the least likely explanation; so Idyll 7 offers some support for the hypothesis that a story about Daphnis was linked to Himera before Theocritus.
A version related to Himera is also attested by Servius, giving Cefalù as the location of Daphnis’ sad end: ab irata nympha (in this version called Nomia) amatrice luminibus orbatus est deinde <in> lapidem versus. nam apud Cephaloeditanum oppidum saxum dicitur esse, quod formam hominis ostendit (‘he was deprived of his sight by the nymph who loved him, and whom he angered, and then turned to stone. For in the town of Cephalù there is said to be a rock which has the shape of a man’).16 One can compare a version ascribed to unnamed writers by the scholiast on Theocritus who distinguishes the version of a (probably) third-century tragedian Sositheus, apparently from Syracuse, who calls the nymph Thaleia and has Daphnis pining to death, from a variant according to which Daphnis, blinded, wandered over a cliff to his death: οἱ δὲ λοιποί φασι τυφλωθῆναι αὐτὸν καὶ ἀλώμενον κατακρημνισθῆναι.17 But there was also a version locating the tale of Daphnis in the Heraean hills of central Sicily, told by Diodorus of Sicilian Agyrrhium.18
Admittedly there remains some ground for doubting whether Stesichorus told the Daphnis story at all. The version in Aelian is almost identical with that of Parthenius, ἐρωτικὰ παθήματα 29, which the manchette attributes to the Sicilian historian Timaeus.19 Lightfoot justly observes that the last sentence of the Aelian passage, usually taken to mean the story was sung by Stesichorus, says simply that he initiated ‘singing like this’, and that ‘this’ arguably refers to ‘bucolic songs’. Neither she nor Nigel Wilson in his Loeb Aelian, Varia Historia, raises the problem of the last sentence having an infinitive, ὑπάρξασθαι, as its only visible verb.20 I remain uncertain as to what ‘this sort of sung poetry’ refers, but I retain a shred of credence in a Stesichorean Daphnis because of the Himeran connections attested by Theoc. 7.72–5 and Servius. This is partly because there is also other evidence that Himera figured in at least some context in Stesichorus’ poetry. Vibius Sequester says of the river Himeras that gave its name to the city: hoc flumen in duas partes findi ait Stesichorus, unam in Tyrrhenum mare, aliam in Libycum decurrere (‘Stesichorus says that this river splits into two parts, and that one flows into the Tyrrhenian sea, the other into the Libyan’).21
That the Daphnis story was told by Stesichorus in some relation to Himera seems, then, very probable. Whether he presented it as a part of Himera’s past we cannot be sure. The ποκα of Theocritus 7.73 is not there in Aelian’s faux-naïf version of the story, and even if it were it would not be unambiguously diagnostic – though compare the use of ποτε in Stesichorus fr. 223 PMGF, concerning Tyndareus’ fateful omission of Aphrodite in a sacrifice. If the tale of Daphnis has any bearing on Himera’s construction of its identity, it may be more to do with issues arising from the relations of the settlers with earlier inhabitants of the quite small Himeran plain, or with current inhabitants of its hilly back-country, than with the past of the immigrants themselves.
The remains of Ibycus of Rhegion are only a little more illuminating, but that little is a large little. Most, if not all, of Ibycus’ handling of myth seems not to have been in long, self-standing treatments like those of Stesichorus but in comparisons or praeteritiones in praisepoems, of which that for Polycrates is the best and most famous example.22 Here on Samos, as in the fragment of a poem argued to be designed for a Spartan context,23 the range of myth is ‘standard’: in the Polycrates poem, Troy; in the other, Castor and Polydeuces, Heracles, Iolaus, Peleus and (perhaps the single whiff of the West) Geryon.24 As I have argued elsewhere, the emphasis that Ajax and Achilles were the greatest warriors at Troy (S151.32–4) may be an endorsement of a claim by Ibycus’ host Polycrates, son of Aeaces, to have an Aeacid past going back to Aeacus and his grandsons.25 Oedipus and Ino also figure in some erotic poems known from a papyrus commentary.26
The Polycrates poem reminds us that some of Ibycus’s poems were first composed for audiences in the Aegean. It is only rarely possible to judge when a poem belongs there, and when back in his native Rhegion or other cities of the western Greeks. But a papyrus commentary on Ibycus and other lyric poets has provided some tantalising detail. S220 Davies = 282B Campbell begins as follows:
[ ν].ύ̣μφα· οἷον χω̣ρ̣[ |
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There is not space in this chapter to explore all the many problems of this fragment.27 The papyrus commentator seems to be sure that the ‘glens of Kronios’ (Κρονίου πτυχαί) are in the territory of Leontini, which of course extends towards the undulating slopes of Etna These could simply be a backdrop for hunting (6, ποτὲ μὲν κυνηγε-) by a young laudandus from Ibycus’ contemporary world, and the poem could be, as Barron suggested, a proto-epinician. But the presence of a nymph might give us pause. The poem was composed for performance in sixth-century Sicily, but the nymph suggests mythical time. A phrase a little later in the commentary has been thought by some to describe the eagle that carried off Ganymede,28 a story we know that Ibycus told in a poem addressed to a Gorgias.29 The commentator here is discussing a poem to Callias,30 but cross-refers to another phrase of Ibycus (S223(a) col. ii 6–7 Davies = 282B (iv) fr.5, col. ii 6–7 Campbell):
Ἴ]βυκος ἑτέρω
]αν.[ ].ο χθονὸς ἐς
..].[..]· ν βαθ[ὺν ἀ]έρα τάμνων
If the reference of βαθ[ὺν ἀ]έρα τάμνων to Ganymede’s eagle is correct, then it is likely that the phrase comes from that poem to Gorgias. As I have already suggested elsewhere,31 the name Gorgias is unusual enough for an ancestor of the later fifth-century Gorgias to have some claim to be its bearer in this poem of Ibycus. The family of that Gorgias came from Leontini. Might the first surviving part of the commentary, asserting Leontini as the location of the ‘glens of Zeus’, be a commentary on Ibycus’ poem to Gorgias? If so, it may have been discussing a variant of the abduction of Ganymede, relocated on the slopes of Etna to offer a paradigm for Ibycus’ fantasies about abducting the (presumably) ephebic Gorgias.32
Whether any of this speculation, if correct, would give us an Ibycus singing of Leontini’s past is an unanswerable question. The mythos could have been so told that it validated the idea that Greek youths and Greek gods could have been found in eastern Sicily in the period of the Trojan War, a notion that would chime with traditions of Greeks and Trojans reaching the west in the war’s aftermath. For the possible appearance of such traditions in Stesichorus and Ibycus, we might compare the scene on the admittedly much later Tabula Iliaca labelled Μισῆνος. Αἰνήας ἀπαίρων εἰς τὴν Ἑσπερίαν.33
One other fragment of Ibycus attested by the same papyrus refers to Chalcidians, a colony and oaths (S227 PMGF = 282B (viii) fr. 7 Campbell):34
].συ.[ |
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Like the other poems that are commented upon in the papyrus this too seem to involve desire (cf. line 10, πóθος): but it is hard not to take the first five lines as referring to the foundation of some Chalcidian colony, with Ibycus’ Rhegium the prime candidate. So thought Mosino in 1975.35 To me he seems likely to be right in his suggestion that this part of this poem is about Rhegium’s colonisation.
Here at last, then, we have a tiny scrap of evidence of melic poetry by one of the two great western poets, Stesichorus and Ibycus, that touches on themes that seem to have been treated in the Aegean by several elegiac poets – Mimnermus, Xenophanes, Ion of Chios – and by Archilochus in trochaic tetrameters as well as in elegy.36 What I have found has been so little as to constitute a negative result.
Why has this result been negative?
Genre is, I suppose, the most important factor. Ibycus’ love poems bring in mythical or historical figures as paradigms or comparandi, and no extended account of foundation or early settlement would be appropriate. Stesichorus’ poems require a different sort of explanation. They are perhaps of the same sort of length as Mimnermus’ Smyrneis, and very probably performed for the same sort of civic audience. But they are, I suggest, aiming consciously to be panhellenic in a way that Ionian elegy of the seventh century did not. As Burkert argued, Stesichorus saw himself in competition with performers of Homeric hexameter poetry. His poems could be performed anywhere, and perhaps they were. They were certainly known to Aeschylus in Attica around 458 BCE and to audiences of Aristophanes’ Peace around 421 BCE.37 From my point of view, today, it is a great pity that he was not more parochial, like Alcman or Corinna: if he had been he would have been rather more help in reconstructing how early sixthcentury Himera perceived its past.
See above all P. Nora, Les lieux de mémoire I–III (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–92). For the Scottish ambience of the conference on which this volume is based one could adduce the associations of the Agricolan two-legion camp at Inchtuthill and the associated fortification of Cleaven Dyke; Macbeth’s fortress on the top of Dunsinan(e); the Cistercian Abbey at Coupar Angus; Bannockburn; Mary Queen of Scots and the palace of Holyrood; Greyfriars Bobby. |
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ἡμετέρωι βασιλῆϊ, θεοῖσι φίλωι Θεοπόμπωι, | ὃν διὰ Μεσσήνην εἵλομεν εὐρύχορον,| Μεσσήνην ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀροῦν, ἀγαθὸν δὲ φυτεύειν·| ἀμφ’ αὐτὴν δ’ ἐμάχοντ’ ἐννέα καὶ δέκ’ ἔτη | νωλεμέως αἰεὶ ταλασίφρονα θυμὸν ἔχοντες | αἰχμηταὶ πατέρων ἡμετέρων πατέρες·| εἰκοστῶι δ’ οἱ μὲν κατὰ πίονα ἔργα λιπόντες | φεῦγον Ἰθωμαίων ἐκ μεγάλων ὀρέων, Tyrtaeus fr. 5 West. |
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πῖν’ οἶνον, τὸν ἐμοὶ κορυφῆς ἄπο Τηϋγέτοιο | ἄμπελοι ἤνεγκαν, τὰς ἐφύτευσ’ ὁγέρων | οὕρεος ἐν βήσσηισι θεοῖσι φίλος Θεότιμος, | ἐκ Πλατανιστοῦντος ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ ἐπάγων.| τοῦ πίνων ἀπὸ μὲν χαλεπὰς σκεδάσεις μελεδῶνας,| θωρηχθεὶς δ’ ἔσεαι πολλὸν ἐλαφρότερος, Theognidea 879–84; cf. E. L. Bowie, ‘Wandering poets, archaic style’ in R. L. Hunter and I. C. Rutherford (eds), Wandering Poets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 105–36, at p. 117. |
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For the early (? sixth century BCE) commemoration of the Seven at Argos cf. A. Pariente, ‘Le monument argien des “Sept contre Thèbes”’, in M. Piérart (ed.), Polydipsion Argos: Argos de la fin des palais mycéniens à la construction de l’état classique (BCH Supplément 22; Paris: de Boccard, 1992), pp. 195–225. Note also the later Argive statues of the Seven at Delphi, Pausanias 10.10.3; on Argos’ sixthcentury presentation of its role in the Trojan War see E. L. Bowie, ‘Sacadas of Argos’, in A. Moreno and R. Thomas (eds), Epitedeumata: Essays in Honour of Oswyn Murray (forthcoming). |
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E. L. Bowie, ‘Early Greek elegy, symposium and public festival’, JHS 106 (1986), pp. 13–35; E. L. Bowie, ‘Ancestors of Herodotus in early Greek elegiac and iambic poetry’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 45–66; E. L. Bowie, ‘Historical narrative in archaic and early classical Greek elegy’, in D. Konstan and K. A. Raaflaub (eds), Epic and History (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 145–66. |
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My reconstruction of the form of such early elegiac narratives has recently been challenged by J. Grethlein, The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), but whatever the form of the poems, it is indisputable that their content included some narrative of ‘colonisation’. |
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My arguments are very briefly stated in E. L. Bowie, ‘Performing and re-performing Helen: Stesichorus’ Palinode’, in A. M. González de Tobia (ed.), Mito y performance: De Grecia a la modernidad (La Plata: Centro de Estudios de Lenguas Clásicas, 2010), pp. 385–408. Among other scholars who still accept the traditional classification of Stesichorus’ melic poetry as entirely or predominantly for choral first performance is E. Cingano, ‘L’opera di Ibico e Stesicoro nella classificazione degli antichi e dei moderni’, A.I.O.N. 12 (1990), pp. 189–224. |
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P.Oxy. 2735 fr. 1 = SLG and Davies Ibycus S166, Campbell Ibycus 282A. |
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For a good study of the presentation of Geryon in the poem of Stesichorus see M. Lazzeri, Studi sulla Gerioneide di Stesicoro (Naples: Arte tipografica, 2008). I have not been persuaded by the arguments of C. Franzen, ‘Sympathizing with the monster: Making sense of colonization in Stesichorus’ Geryoneis’, QUCC 121 (2009), pp. 55–72, that Stesichorus’ sympathetic representation of the western monster Geryon was intended to appeal to indigenous elements in his Sicilian audiences, but that there will have been some such elements seems likely. For the complexity of the cultural situation in Sicily see A. Willi, Sikelismos: Sprache, Literatur und Gesellschaft im griechischen Sizilien 8.–5. Jh. v. Chr. (Basel: Schwabe, 2008). |
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See P.Oxy. 2506 (= Stesichorus fr. 193 PMGF = Chamaeleon fr. 29 Wehrli) citing Chamaeleon for the form of the Palinode, but registering other innovations of content too. |
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H. J. Rose, ‘Stesichoros and the Rhadine-fragment’, CQ 26 (1932), pp. 88–92. |
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L. Lehnus, ‘Note Stesicoree: I poemetti “minori”’, SCO 24 (1975), pp. 191–6. |
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Aristoxenus’ use of the word γυναῖκες suggests that the poem was not a partheneion but for singing by a group of married women, but perhaps the term should not be pressed. We might also wonder whether the unhelpful adjective ἀρχαῖαι conceals an ethnic: Ἀκραγαντῖναι? Ἀμβρακιωτικαί? |
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Paus. 7.5.13. |
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Thuc. 6.5. |
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Servius on Verg. Ecl. 8.68. |
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Σ Theoc. 8.93, citing Sositheus TrGrF, p. 821 N2. |
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D.S. 4.84. |
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Timaeus FGrHist 566 F83. |
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J. L. Lightfoot, Parthenius of Nicaea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 526–30. |
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Vibius Sequester, De fluminibus fontibus etc., p. 15 Gelsonino; cf. Himerius, Or. 27.27: τὴν Ἱμέραν . . . λόγοις κοσμεῖ Στησίχορος. |
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S151 SLG and PMGF, = 282(a) Campbell, to which G. O. Hutchinson, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), is an excellent introduction. |
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P.Oxy. 2735 fr. 1 = Ibycus S166–S219 SLG and PMGF, Ibycus 282A Campbell. |
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S176.18 SLG and PMGF = 282A viii 18 Campbell. |
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Bowie, ‘Wandering poets’. |
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S222 SLG and PMGF = 282B (iii) Campbell. |
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In the papyrus text (http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/index/assoc/HASH013e/bd7 |
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S223(a) 6–7 SLG and PMGF = 282B (iv) Campbell. |
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Fr. 289 (a) PMGF = scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius 3.114–17. |
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For the name see the papyrus, S221 PMGF = 282B (ii) fr.1(a) 32–42 Campbell. |
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Bowie, ‘Wandering poets’. |
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It is also possible, but in my view less likely, that the presence of a nymph indicates that here Ibycus is offering a Leontini version of the Daphnis story: the Acis is very much a Leontini river. |
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Cf. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935, revised 1961), pp. 104–6; N. M. Horsfall, ‘Stesichorus at Bovillae’, JHS 99 (1979), pp. 26–48. |
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S227 PMGF = 282B (viii) fr. 7 Campbell. |
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F. Mosino, ‘La fondazione di Reggio in un frammento di Ibico?’, Calabria Turismo 25/6 (1975), pp. 23ff. |
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For an attractive argument that Archilochus’ Telephus poem appealed to a mixed population of Parian settlers on Thasos and an earlier population involved in a cult of a Phoenician Heracles, see C. Nobili, ‘Tra epos ed elegia: Il nuovo Archiloco’, Maia 61 (2009), pp. 229–49. |
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For knowledge of Stesichorus in Athens in the fifth century see now C. Carey, ‘Alcman from Laconia to Alexandria’, in L. Athanassaki and E. L. Bowie (eds), Archaic and Classical Choral Song (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), pp. 437–60, at pp. 457, 459. |
