… You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.
WILLIAM JOHNSON CORY (1823–1891)
“Mimnermus in Church”
The salt market of Dardania was called Stoboe or Stobi, says William Hazlitt in his Classical Gazetteer. It was a town of Pelagonia, in Paeonia, on the Erigonus River, near where it joins the Axius, between Gurbita and Antigonea. Despite this abundance of clues, it is still hard to find on a map. It became a Macedonian administrative centre. In the fifth century ad, a wealthy man of Stobi called John, known today (if known at all) as Johannes Stobaeus, had a son. Attentive to the boy’s education, he compiled for him an anthology of extracts from poets and prose writers. It served as an aide-mémoire, giving the boy useful off-the-peg phrases and stanzas to enrich his conversation. It was also intended to edify him.
Stobaeus garnered the extracts for his anthology (much of the poetry is fragmentary) from earlier anthologies. For centuries anthologies had been popular. They were enhanced, revised and copied, generation after generation. Meleager of Gadara in the first century AD compiled a famous, now-lost anthology, mainly of epigrams (in the extended sense of the term). It may have been a source for the tenth-century Palatine Anthology of Constantinus Cephalas, discovered seven hundred years later in the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. It contains work by 340 authors. Most famous of all is the Greek Anthology with material drawn from seventeen centuries of Greek poetry, starting in 700 BC and consisting of verse from earlier anthologies, inscriptions and other texts. It contains over six thousand epigrams.
It is fortunate that Stobaeus’ anthology of elegies, our chief textual source for certain poets, survived. It was arranged in four books: a theme was stated, then the verse extracts, followed by passages from the prose writers, were assembled to illustrate it. Fragment 25 of Archilochus, who survives in part thanks to this collection, begins with the line “I lie tortured by desire,” which Stobaeus files under the heading, “Concerning the Vulgar Aphrodite Who Is the Reason for Procreation and About Desire for the Pleasures of the Flesh.” Stobaeus Junior must often have turned for solace and arousal to the cautionary poems in this section. There are other chapters: “That Marrying Is Not Good,” contrasted with “That Marriage is Most Fair.” Good husbandry and metaphysics also feature in this book of counsel and consolation.1 Stobaeus is the source of eight pieces of Archilochus, six of Simonides of Cos, five of Semonides of Amorgos, four of Phocylides, two each of Tyrtaeus, Solon and Sappho, one of Hipponax, Xenophanes, Callinus and Anacreon, and seven of Mimnermus.
In the Middle Ages, Stobaeus’ anthology “was transmitted in two separate parts of two books each (Eclogae and Florilegium).”2 The texts are much corrupted, copied from centuries of copying, and then recopied for centuries. The distortions are not quite so rapid as Chinese Whispers, but they may be as extreme, especially in terms of the original forms. In the absence of authoritative manuscripts, educated conjecture is the only judge. All the same, Stobaeus’ book is a necropolis in which we can glimpse some very important, very faded ghosts, including that of Mimnermus of Colophon, from the second half of the seventh century BC.3
He was not, it is believed, a prolific poet. His entire oeuvre may have been accommodated on a single papyrus scroll at the great library in Alexandria. The title Nanno may have covered the elegies, both erotic and those intended for the soberer moments of the symposium, and the Smyrneis was a long, historical elegy. He was perhaps an auletes, or oboe-player, himself.4
For Callimachus, Mimnermus was an innovator, one of the first to compose love elegies. The Alexandrian poet-librarian celebrates his Ionian forebear in the prologue to Aetia, passages of which survive, including the mysterious broken lines which Trypanis translates, “… and not the Large Woman taught that Mimnermus is a delightful poet …” Mimnermus and the much later poet Philetas of Cos seemed to license Callimachus to concentrate upon the shorter poem, to dignify it in such a way as to make it possible for a poet not to feel compelled to embark upon the extended work, the epic or historical narrative. It may be, too, that Callimachus found in Mimnermus an instance of that allusiveness to earlier poems that appeals to settled and to colonial literary cultures; the act of reading one text is enhanced if that text is itself reading and redeploying recognisable elements from a dozen earlier texts. This seems to be the spirit in which Mimnermus is glancingly mentioned in the shards of Callimachus’ Iambus 203 that survive.
He may have taken pleasure in some of the Mimnermean conceits, which are themselves rooted in myth and legend. For example, he knew that the sun travelled back in a cup of sorts from when it set in the west to when it rose again in the east, and alluded to this in fragment 12, “telling how he is borne over the water in a winged, golden vessel, made by Hephaistus, from the Hesperides to the land of the Aethiopians, where his horses and chariot await him.”5 The conceit taken up by Stesichorus is that Heracles could travel back in the cup or on the couch when it returned empty to its starting point.
It is tempting to draw analogies between Callimachus’ take on Mimnermus and Modernist practice. Pindar, too, may have found suggestions in Mimnermus’ shorter narratives, and among the Latin poets Propertius declared that in love Mimnermus is of greater worth than Homer.6 He is one of those poets whose reputations we must take on trust because so little of his work remains in textual form, though it helped to shape the imaginations of others. Trypanis dubs him “the first hedonist in Western literature.” In his verse he explored both sexual and intertextual pleasures, and like no other poet reflected on the horror of growing old, the horror consisting not in the death of sexual desire but in the end of sexual desirability:
… Old age then arrives and with it
Pain, and transformation to repulsive, foul,
And the heart galled by malignancies:
He takes no joy in the brightness of the sun
Now, and boys revile him, women loathe:
This is what God devised for long survivors.7
How short are the days of youth, how long the years of unfulfilment. The fruit ripens and as suddenly is rotten. There are two ends in view, a long and horrible old age, or death, and death is preferable. Yet to die poor, to die childless, to die sick … One is not far from the anxieties and regrets of Hesiod in some of the verse, though there is a noble elevation in Mimnermus which the callused Boeotian poet does not possess.
Much of the sensual particularity is gone from the fragments that remain, as though they have been washed and tidied. But he is not entirely bleached out: “One might object that there is a grotesqueness in the description of erotic sweat which is out of place in a reflective elegy of the seventh century.”8 For a poet steeped in Homer, as his excellent modern editor Archibald Allen knows Mimnermus to be, this seems a censorious view to take. Lovers do sweat, it is part of the experience and even of the pleasure of love, and until poetry moves off from the body into the language of amorous conceit, it is not unwholesome that the literal smell and texture of love should find its way into the verbal celebration of the act. David Mulroy translates fragment 5,
Sweat drenches my skin and I start to tremble
when I see adolescence in bloom,
pleasant and fair as it is, since I wish it were more,
but precious youth is like
a fleeting dream and hideous age, its destroyer,
hovers overhead from the first;
hateful, worthless, it stupefies the man it envelops,
blurring his eyes and mind.9
There is a textual problem here. The first six lines of this poem appear as a poem in themselves in the Theognidean Anthology (poems gathered under Theognis’ name as a flag of convenience for transmission). Lines four to eight are preserved in Stobaeus with Mimnermus’ name attached. Editors bring the two texts together into one satisfactory poem, arguably greater than the sum of its parts and either a restoration or a suggestive fabrication.
Allen’s take on Mimnermus’ Eros may have something to do with Stobaeus. He preserved most of the fragments that survive,10 and it is he, after all, who got rid of the sweat and left us lamenting harsh old age without the occasion of lovely youth. This may be why we are inclined to see Mimnermus as rather deodorised, like Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra passed through the filter of Dryden’s couplets and turned into the marmoreal attitudes of All for Love: on a different scale, of course, but the effect may be similar. There are no remaining fragments where we see or touch the delectable auletes Nanno (was she delectable?), and the homosexual overtones are unspecific, unsweaty.
We must remember that Stobaeus made his selection according to certain educational and generic criteria. Our very sense of early elegy is conditioned by the works that survive, and the works that survive did so largely through anthologies with a pedagogic mission. We have a selective sense of elegy for this reason: we cannot know what the anthologists left out, where what seems a poem is actually a fragment, where what seems fragmentary is actually a poem, or where the attributions are wilful or suspect. In short, the anthology is a treacherous fossil ground because in the end the vertebrae that survive do not necessarily fit together into a credible skeleton. If all we had of the English eighteenth century was Palgrave’s saccharine selection, or the sole record of Tudor verse was Tottel’s amazing but narrowly based Miscellany, published in 1557 and the most popular book of its day, our take on our own past would be quite different and partial.
Strabo and Athenaeus preserve a few more fragments of Mimnermus, lines and phrases from what must have been complex narrative verse, quite different from the material in Stobaeus. Had the sources he drew on discarded Mimnermus the narrative poet and mythographer, or did he regard that kind of poetry as inappropriate for his son’s education? Anthologies neglected occasional verse, too, whenever the occasion had vanished from view. Archilochus is said to have composed elegies on men who died at sea, but Stobaeus chiefly preserved the moralising passages. He also sometimes altered verses to make the sense more general.
What we would give to see even an ankle or wrist of Nanno, or her lips on the aulos accompanying the poet. She is erased. The love poems and elegies on short-lived pleasures were collected under the title, possibly an Alexandrian addition, of Nanno. The Hellenistic poets Hermesianax and Posidippus allude to it, but they are not dependable witnesses, being fanciful in their readings of other work. All the same, Allen plausibly declares: “It is hardly likely … that she is wholly fictional, a late classical or Alexandrian invention.”11 Stobaeus omitted her among other specifics and made Mimnermus’ celebration of “the urgent, insurgent now” airy and abstract-feeling, merely poetic. There was a real flesh-and-blood woman, graceful and talented, at the end of his expressed desire, the Alexandrian editors insist. He had a complementary affection, as Solon did, for lads.
Apart from Nanno, his other book was called Smyrneis, a narrative about the founding of Colophon, Smyrna’s mother city. There were also poems that told of the war between the people of Smyrna and the Lydians. Smyrna was built on a gulf that bore its name, at the end of a deep harbour. The Hermus River, with its long valley, ran to the north and east of Smyrna, and fifty miles east along the Hermus was the strong Lydian city of Sardis. Smyrna stood between Sardis and its nearest exit to the sea. The usurping Lydian shepherd-king Gyges attacked Smyrna around 680 BC, in the early years of his reign. His grandson Alyattes finally captured and razed it to the ground around 600 BC. Mimnermus was dead by then.
Given Mimnermus’ debt to Homer, it is hard to think of him as an abstracting poet. The impact of Homer on those his work touched is, first of all, prosodic; second, it affects the way detail is perceived and recorded in language and determines elements of diction and description. Forms and phrases in Mimnermus grow out of Homer; there are echoes of a very close and direct nature.
Alexandrian tradition assigns Mimnermus to Colophon, one of the twelve cities of lonia (the Dodecapolis), where many other poets, including Polymnestos, Phoenix, Antimachus, Hermesianax (who tells of Nanno), Nicandor and Xenophanes, the sage and poet, were born, as well as some great early musicians. It even laid claim to Homer, but then much of Ionia did. In political and social terms, early Colophon was an unusually attractive city. It was said to have been founded by Andraimon, from Pylos, the city which Neleus, son of Tyro and the sea god Poseidon, founded. Heracles killed Neleus when he refused to offer the sullied hero purification. He killed, too, all of Neleus’ sons except for Nestor. After Andraimon’s time there was a further influx of Ionian Greeks. Though the Pyleans arrived by sea, the archaic city was built eight miles inland on a gradient, with an emphatic citadel. Colophon ruled the fertile, broad plain to the east and southeast, embraced by a river called the Caystros. The families of Colophon possessed wide estates where they bred horses. Aristotle declares that the oligarchy that ruled Colophon was unusual in that the ruling class outnumbered the poorer folk. They were a vigorous people, more free-spirited than their contemporaries at nearby Ephesus.
In the eighth century a number of political exiles from Colophon took over and settled in Smyrna, an Aeolic town. M. L. West is keen to adjust the record. He calls the poet “Mimnermus of Smyrna.” “His name may commemorate the Smyrnaeans’ famous resistance to … Gyges at the river Hermus sometime before 660 BC, which would imply his birth at that time.” (It certainly would.) Archibald Allen agrees with West that Smyrna has a claim to the poet. It is an issue that can never be resolved.
Allen says the poet was born around 670 BC. From the evidence of fragment 9 he deduces the Smyrna connection, but the fragment can be taken to belong to a narrative, perhaps part of a missing Jason story. Like some of Mimnermus’ poetry, this passage has a Homeric, not a confessional, ring to it. This is West’s translation:
Aipy we left, and Neleus’ city, Pylos,
and came by ship to Asia’s lovely coast.
We settled at fair Colophon with rude
aggression, bringers of harsh insolence;
and there we crossed the river Asteïs
and took Aeolian Smyrna by God’s will.
Mimnermus used elegy with energy and when necessary he used it instrumentally, writing polemic which must have been of use against the Lydian foe. He rallies his fellow citizens by invoking the heroism of an earlier Smyrnaean against the Lydians. A formal hymn, perhaps to Achilles, may have preceded the poem about the battle of the Smyrnaean army against the Lydians. If we are to believe Pausanias, the poet mentioned two generations of Muses, the first the children of Uranus and the second of Zeus, the older arts having, as it were, older tutelary spirits, the younger ones younger.
The origin of the word “elegy” is obscure: it may have meant, Trypanis suggests, “dirge metre,” and yet it is first found in war songs, the ancient war songs of Callinus of Ephesus (with his invocation of Smyrna) and Tyrtaeus of Aphidna, both near contemporaries of Mimnermus. Their writing was direct and emphatic. Elegiacs diversified: in time they became associated particularly with love poetry. It is important to read Mimnermus not only in the light of his contemporaries but also alongside the elegists he affected, Theognis, Xenophanes and Simonides, for example. His more amorous poetry, like theirs, was composed for recitation in the private symposium.12 Unlike open-air Homer and storm-tossed Archilochus, Mimnermus writes poetry with a roof over its head.
The statesman and poet Solon of Athens, that city’s first recorded author and one of the Seven Sages, valued Mimnermus as a near contemporary and a celebrator of pleasures. In one poem he took issue with him about how far old age can be tolerated, rebuking him as an editor might, and making an adjustment to an errored line. He quotes Mimnermus’ line first.
“O let death catch me up when I am sixty.”
If you take my advice, you’ll scrap that line.
Allow me this time to be wiser than you:
Alter it, Ligyastades. Instead
Sing, “O let death catch me up when I’m eighty.”
Solon’s fragment 20 belongs to a rare genre, one in which dialogue takes place between poets, places and periods. Solon virtually names the earlier poet when he quotes him. West says that “Ligyastades” could mean “melodious singer.” He also comments that the poem appears to have been written to a living man. If so, Mimnermus was well advanced in years and Solon a little peremptory, unless he was adjusting the poem in order to allow the old poet twenty further years of life and—as Mimnermus would see it—decrepitude.
For Alcaeus, it is wine and love, for Mimnermus it is love first and foremost that we live for and praise.13 Wine lets us briefly off the hook of old age, and while Solon urges Mimnermus to be lenient with himself, the old man has only to regard his paunch and wrinkles to know the game is up. We read Mimnermus if we read him at all, the phrases that remain, as an elegist of pleasure, celebrating and lamenting in equal degrees. But, as Bowra says, there was more to him than that: “Despite his professed cult of youth and pleasure, Mimnermus has a wide concept of human worth. It is the balance between action and relaxation, between effort and pleasure, which is central to his outlook, and this is why he is truly representative of the Ionian Greeks, who had dangerous enemies on their frontiers …”14 Though we live for pleasure, being young, we fight for it as well, and we celebrate the warrior who moves in the sudden light of the sun, wielding his spear and with a heart intact, unharmed by the missiles of his foes.15 When he has made a free space for himself and his kind, he can take pleasure there.