The First Poets

O ye, who patiently explore

The wreck of Herculanean lore,

What rapture! could ye seize

Some Theban fragment, or unroll

One precious, tender-hearted, scroll

Of pure Simonides.

That were, indeed, a genuine birth

Of poesy; a bursting forth

Of genius from the dust:

What Horace gloried to behold,

What Maro ¹ loved, shall we enfold?

Can haughty Time be just!

WORDSWORTH,

“September, 1819”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, when most readers of poetry—when most readers tout court—had a grounding in the classics, the steady tease of archaeology, turning up ancient papyruses in the Egyptian desert, became tedious. Who cared about tracts on dike building, lists of punishments, accounts, contracts, the débris of the Ptolomaic world? Readers craved a great lost literary work. Classical philologists had run through the store of existing texts. Surely beneath the lone and level sands and crumpled, sneering statuary lurked song, drama, history, oratory. Wordsworth in his 1819 poem expressed a general hunger.

The German historian Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen—it is just to grant him his full complement of names, so neglected is the Nobel Literature laureate of 1902—Mommsen, who lived for the better part of a century (1817–1903), believed in the historical value of material culture. A History of Rome drew much of its original force from Mommsen’s use of inscriptions and the “new” evidence of non-literary ancient writing. He studied Roman law in a wide cultural context. The nineteenth century, he said, had been the age of epigraphy, reading and interpreting the records held in stone; the twentieth would belong to papyrology.

Beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century, papyruses began to find their way into the libraries and museums of Europe, and as the next century proceeded the trickle increased. A problem with papyruses is the skill required to decipher them. Early editors could be fanciful, or they were simply flummoxed by the tiny, deteriorating script. During the nineteenth century expertise developed, and by the century’s end the time between accessing new papyrus acquisitions and their deciphering, transcription and publication had shortened considerably.

Wordsworth’s prayer began to be answered, but too late for the poet to enjoy it. And it was not Simonides’ poetry but his nephew Bacchylides’ which materialised out of the duny sepulchre. Poems and other important texts came to light and were published, including six speeches of the Greek orator Hyperides, one of them complete. And then, in 1891, the Mimes of Herodas were dusted down, and what remains one of the most astonishing historical finds, Aristotle’s, or rather the Aristotelian, text on the Constitution of the Athenians was published from the British Museum. The study of papyruses became an important exercise for philologists. A valuable papyrus mine was found at Tebtunis, in the Faytum, one of the chief sources being the crocodile graveyard. Sacred crocodiles were mummified and wrapped in papyrus as if parcelled up in tinfoil for the oven. In 1902 at Hibeh important manuscripts from the period of the Ptolemies were discovered, followed by other major finds at Oxyrhynchus a year later, a period of unparalleled surprise and enrichment. Then in 1908 in Abusir a large body of Alexandrian papyruses was discovered, saved from the unfriendly climate of Alexandria, in which texts readily perished, because they were regarded as rubbish and carted off into the desert.

More than 650 literary papyruses from Egypt have now been published. Roughly a third are passages of Homer, just under a third are versions of works which survive in other forms, in later copies and include philosophy, oratory, history and drama. What remains consists of fragments and longer portions of work regarded as lost forever: passages of Sappho, Alcman, chunks of Menander’s comedies, of the Iambi of Callimachus, passages of Antiope, Euripides, Hypsipyle, the Paeans of Pindar and (for our purposes here) most important of all, the odes of Pindar’s rival, or competitor, Bacchylides.

The papyrus with the odes was found in Egypt by local diggers. It arrived at the British Museum in 1896, in the autumn. What had been a roll was now a jigsaw of about 200 friable pieces. The skilful and patient scholarship of F. G. Kenyon bore fruit, and in 1897 he published the editio princeps, the “first edition,” of the poems, increasing the amount of Bacchylides from around a hundred disconnected lines and phrases to more than a thousand lines of relatively continuous verse. In Kenyon’s painstaking reconstruction, the papyrus is in three parts. The first includes twenty-two columns of writing and ends abruptly just after the start of Ode XII. Column 23 has more or less vanished: the second section of the papyrus runs from the vestiges of column 23 to column 29 and contains what is left of Odes XIII and XIV. The last section includes nine further columns, the first again damaged, and includes Dithyramb XV, breaking off suddenly. Each column has between thirty-two and thirty-six lines.

Fourteen or thirteen epinicean odes ² and six dithyrambs survive in this one papyrus. The odes were arranged like Simonides’, by the type of athletic event celebrated, rather than like Pindar’s, by the place in which the games occurred. To this material were added further fragments, in 1956, from the Oxyrhynchus trove.³ Like Simonides and Pindar, Bacchylides had received commissions from all over the Greek world, from Aegina, Athens, Cos, Macedonia, Metapontion, Philus, Sparta, Syracuse and Thessaly, and these are the remains of his labours. Albin Lesky values Bacchylides principally for the light his poems cast, given the substantial nature of the remains, on Pindar; also because in a quite unique way Bacchylides is “ours,” almost a twentieth-century ancient Greek.⁴

Readers of the new Bacchylides were initially disappointed: Simonides’ nephew was not Pindar. Once this factwas accepted, readers began to puzzle out who he was, a writer whose narratives were less allusive, more continuous than Pindar’s, who was on occasion a brilliant describer and evoker of specific details and specific emotional moments; who was, in short, a dramatist avant la lettre, a lucid teller of stories. In the underworld Meleager recalls the moment of his death, and Heracles responds; Croesus, despairing, is saved from his pyre; best of all is the confrontation of Minos and Theseus, and Theseus’ plunge into his father’s, Poseidon’s, churning realm. In the eighteenth ode, Aegeus and a chorus conduct a dramatic dialogue. Or take this brief passage from Ode X, in Campbell’s prose translation: “For when he had come to a halt at the finishing-line of the sprint, panting out a hot storm of breath, and again when he had wet with his oil the cloaks of the spectators as he tumbled into the packed crowd after rounding the course with its four turns …”⁵ We could hardly get closer to the action.

In Ode XIII, by contrast, his inadequacy is clear: the truisms and truths he tells are morally and poetically undistinguished. They lack focus and pith; they ramble, they are merely ceremonious. “Nowhere,” says Lesky, “do we find the profundity of Pindar’s perception of values.”⁶ His morals are very like his uncle’s: Ode XIV might have been written by Simonides: “… To be granted a good lot by God [singular] is best for men; but if luck comes with a burden of suffering, she wrecks an admirable man, while even a low-born fellow, set on a happy highroad, can shine.”⁷

The myth story in each ode attaches to the victor celebrated, to his city or to his sport, and its purpose is to connect his mortal deeds with the timeless deeds of the gods and heroes, as it were to deposit his achievement in a timeless realm. In his first epinicean ode, for Argeius of Cos, Bacchylides distinguished between mere “lightweight” ambition, which wins honour only for a lifetime, and true excellence, which is hard-won, yet when concluded correctly leads to a man’s fame becoming part of a durable glory. It is as if there is a kind of entity called “gloryness” into which true excellence, at its demise, spills its qualities, the way a soul might rise to merge into an oversoul.

Pindar and Bacchylides both set out to make such connections, but Bac-chylides is more limpid, less complex and hermetic. This difference between them was noted by a first- (or third-) century critic, possibly Cassius Longinus, or whoever was the author of On the Sublime, which is generally attributed to him.⁸ He wonders whether faulty greatness in writing is preferable to the smooth and undisrupted work of the great technician. He concludes that greatness is to be preferred. In the area of poetry, we prefer Pindar to Bacchylides even though in the latter we find elegance and polish (the style is glaphuros): he may produce unblemished verse, but he falls short of the higher beauty. In the end, Bacchylides’ art is simpler in conception and easier in execution than Pindar’s. You can imagine buying Bacchylides by the yard: he is, after all, his uncle’s nephew. Pindar delivers his verse in less standard measures.

Bacchylides is not Pindar, and yet critics and readers keep wanting him to be. Even the textual scholars approach him with Pindaric expectations, and their editorial work—especially in proposing emendations on bridge-passages where text is missing—can be coloured by this predisposition. It is as though we were to edit Christopher Marlowe entirely in the light of Shakespeare’s practice. We distort the structure and the language of both poets in the process.

Meleager spoke of the “ripe ears from the harvest of Bacchylides.”⁹ In old age Simonides left Athens and went to Sicily, to the court of Hiero of Syracuse, and seeing there was work to be had, summoned his nephew Bacchylides of Cos, who was then living in Athens or Thessaly or perhaps was exiled ¹⁰ in the Peloponnese.¹¹ Poetry was a family business and, in the absence of a son, a nephew would have to do. There was demand for epinicean odes. Pindar was making a good living, and so was Simonides. Some traditions say that Pindar and Simonides were in competition; the latter, being old, needed reinforcements and Bacchylides, already well known, came to the rescue. Other (late) traditions suggest that Pindar studied under Simonides. In any event, Bacchylides may have settled in Syracuse for a serious spell (478–467 BC).

Bacchylides’ mother was Simonides’ sister, probably a younger one. His father was Meidon, the name deriving, the ninth-century Etymologicum Ge-nuinum tells us, from meidin, “smile.” His grandfather was “Bacchylides the athlete,” so from boyhood he knew about the great sporting fixtures and may have heard some of the poems composed to celebrate the victors, his grandfather included.¹²

He was probably some forty-nine years younger than his uncle, and perhaps fifteen years younger than Pindar, though Campbell believes they were more or less exact contemporaries. His first surviving poem may be a drinking song for Alexander, son of Amyntas, king of Macedonia, composed before 490 BC.¹³ The poet takes up his lyre and plays loudly, “with its seven notes silencing your clear voice.” He longs to send a gift of value and beauty. Drink leads on to amorous thoughts, and then to thoughts of bravery and opulence. He imagines the company of Alexander. The poem celebrates imagination (lubricated and stimulated) and the power of poetry to bring into the open what is imagined, in order to share it.

The earliest datable epinicean ode is XIV, from 485–83 BC, and the last is from 452 BC, which Campbell believes was the year of his death. Severyns divides his work, and his life, into three phases and geographies, the first concentrated in the east (498–486, Thessaly, Macedonia, Aegina), the second in mainland Greece and points west in Magna Graecia (486–466, Athens, Syracuse), and the last in the Peloponnese and back to points east, including a return to Cos (466–452 BC, Cos, Sparta, Phlius, Asine). At Alexandria his work was edited into nine books, Campbell says, the divisions apparently generic: the epinicean odes, for which he was best known and best paid; paeans; dithyrambs; hymns; prosodia, or processional poems; maiden songs; hyporchemata, or dance songs; erotica; and encomia. There were a few epigrams, of which two survive, and yet Bacchylides is mentioned in the first poem in Meleager’s Garland.¹⁴

On the face of it, there would seem to be no expressed animosity between Pindar and Bacchylides. Pindar celebrated the island of Cos as a provider of poets, and he must have been referring to Simonides and his nephew. But the scholiast, considering Pindar’s Olympian II,¹⁵ declares that it targets the garrulity of uncle and nephew, comparing them to crows “stuttering out pointless words against Zeus’ holy bird,” the eagle, namely himself.¹⁶ Carrying forward the bird analogy, elsewhere he appears to refer to Bacchylides as a jackdaw, to himself again as the eagle.¹⁷ And is Bacchylides the monkey, entertaining to children but ridiculous to a man of mature judgement like Hiero? Perhaps. Some say that Bacchylides, in his turn, slandered Pindar privately to Hiero, stressing his obscurity, his bookishness, the cold artifice of his compositions.¹⁸

The rivalry, if it existed, was probably due to the fact that both poets were trying to beguile a single patron, their customer and tyrant. Tradition says that Hiero preferred Bacchylides, the easy-going Ionian, to the severe, courtly manner of the Boeotian who kept reminding his listeners of ancestry and seemed to praise his patrons for their wisdom in associating with him.¹⁹ He could understand Bacchylides’ poems more easily, and Bacchylides was less prone than the sometimes arrogant Pindar to insert himself into the poem as a dominant “I.” It may not be mere chance that, whereas in 476 and 470 BC both Pindar and Bacchylides wrote Hiero epinicean odes, in 468, the most important of Hiero’s victories, only Bacchylides would appear to have been asked, though Pindar composed an ode for another victor from Syracuse (Olympian VI).

Bacchylides’ three odes celebrating Hiero’s victories can be dated with some certainty. Ode V commemorates Hiero’s single-horse-race victory—the most augustly sung of Greek horses, Pherenicus, is stabled here—at Olympia in 476, as does Pindar’s Olympian I. The brief Ode IV celebrates the 470 Pythian chariot race, and Pindar’s Pythian I does the same. In 468 BC Hiero won the Olympic four-horse chariot race, and Bacchylides composed Ode III.²⁰ Here he pays the highest praise to Hiero’s taste and judgement in poetry.

Marking Hiero’s Olympic victory, the poet invokes Clio, the Muse of history. He goes on to celebrate the tyrant’s wealth, power and open-handedness. The myth he explores is that of Croesus and his dreadful plight when the Persians were over-running his city, Sardis. He built his pyre and mounted it, lamenting, his dear wife and daughter with him. It is a brilliant evocation, with something like a Homeric pathos about it. “The death that can be seen advancing from far off is most dreaded by mortals.” At the last moment Zeus quenches the pyre with a downpour and Apollo bears the old king, his wife and daughter off to the Hyperboreans, where he settles them, in recompense for their pieties (Croesus’ people, meanwhile, fall under the dreadful yoke). What point could such a story have in the Olympic context? Is it that Hiero has sent even more gold to Delphi than Croesus did? Or is the poet aware that Hiero is dying, and is this a delicate acknowledgement and consolation? If so, the connection is less tenuous; the story moves us. Bacchylides then adds the myth of Apollo, compelled by Zeus to be servant to Admetus because Admetus killed the Cyclops. Apollo speaks to Admetus, but as we listen, the voice modulates into the voice of Bacchylides himself, counselling Hiero and including himself, Pindarically as it were, in the kite-tail of the offered praise. Here is how it goes:

“You are mortal, Admetus, remember,

And hold these two opposing thoughts in mind:

Tomorrow is your final day of sunlight;

You’ll live for fifty years in utter wealth.

Do right things and be glad at heart, that’s best.”

I speak the words that a wise man will hear:

The deep skies are stainless, the ocean depths

Do not decay, gold pleases, but no man

No matter who he is, can cast aside

Ashen age and get back budding boyhood.

The flame of good deeds does not flicker with

The body, but the Muse will fan and fuel it.

You, Hiero, have shown to men wealth’s fairest blossoms.

When a man has prospered, silence does not grace him:

As well as celebrating what you’ve done, for ever men

Will speak too of the honey-tongued, the Cean nightingale.

In Ode IV he refers to himself as lyre-mastering Urania’s “sweet-crowing cock.” No wonder Pindar likened his foes to coarse-voiced, rough-plumed birds: he found the birds in their own poems. And then, in his Ode X, Bacchylides becomes “the clear-voiced island bee.”

What is cloying about Bacchylides’ verse, and what puts us in mind of the weaker of the Homeric Hymns, which they sometimes resemble, is the profusion of adjectives, praised by some ancient critics as “epithets.” Clearly their intention is Homeric and conventional, but in Ode IV, when Heracles goes into Hades to bring back Cerberus, for example, not a single noun escapes without having to carry an adjective or two on its shoulders. These words are not “uniquely chosen.” Copious ornament stiffens the work. Many of the epithets are compound words used nowhere else in Greek poetry, perhaps Bacchylides’ own effusive coinings.

His similes, too, while sometimes effective, can be over-elaborate: too much gold in the brocade, so that the poem cannot dance, can hardly move. He is paying a tribute to Homer, but his similes work to quite different ends, not (as Homer’s do) to produce sudden clarification, but rather to add a frill, a decoration, to what is already clear. His satisfaction as a poet would have derived from the sense that he had produced something expected and acceptable to his patron or his audience, rather than something that touched deeply upon his subject. At times the flash of metaphor does illuminate in both directions, the audience and the subject, as when he sees the afterlives of men lining the river Cocytus like wind-shuddered leaves on “Ida’s shimmering promontories.”²¹

What redeems the over-wrought passage in Ode IV is not a suddenly successful simile but the power of narrative realisation. Heracles meets the afterlife of Meleager and seeks to re-slay him. Instead they have a conversation. Meleager tells of his father’s failure to appease Artemis, and how the goddess sent the Calydonian boar to hunt him down. Meleager’s speech is wonderful, recounting pell-mell what the boar hunt and battle were like, the victims, the blind rage and the sad consequences. Heracles weeps only once in his life, and this is the occasion.

One can imagine how the object of the epinicean ode, the patron who commissioned it, would hearken as the poet and the chorus recited, waiting to see how the long mythical narrative might relate to his life and achievement. It is not easy to say exactly how the exchange between Heracles and Meleager relates to Hiero’s achievement. It may have to do with the ephemerality of even the greatest heroic achievements, which survive as narrative alone. The poem ends with Heracles asking Meleager if he left any suitable maiden sisters in the mortal world, and Meleager saying, yes. His sister was in fact Deianira, who, an audience would have realised, was to be Heracles’ wife and, when he proved unfaithful to her, was inadvertently to cause his death, having presented him with a shirt impregnated with the blood of Nessus, his centaur victim. What interests the poet is not the later, but the present story, so he leaves the future unspoken. This narrowing of narrative focus can be highly effective.

Whatever the connection of the poem with the occasion of victory, Ode IV is dramatic. Dithyramb XV is also a play of voices. The sons of Antenor request the return of Helen. Odysseus and Menelaus attend the court of Priam, arguing the toss for giving Helen back on the grounds of justice. Very near at hand, the forces of the drama are gathering. Indeed, Aeschylus is less than ten years Bacchylides’ junior and will predecease him. Dithyramb XVI, with the (poetically postponed, as it were) cloak of Nessus and the death of Heracles, also verges on dramatic form.

The most beguiling Bacchylidean poem is Dithyramb XVII, which had a direct impact on Virgil.²² A ship is conveying the seven young boys and the seven young girls to Crete, the annual tribute of protein for the Minotaur (the story of whose mother Pasiphae, Minos’ wife, with her bestial appetites, Bacchylides tells).²³ Minos, who is accompanying the sacrificial victims along with Theseus, finds one of the seven girls, Eriboia, sexually irresistible. Theseus tells him to behave, a chivalry dictated as much by necessity (the fourteen victims were supposed to be virgin) as out of humane concern. Then both Minos, son of Zeus, and Theseus, son of Poseidon, boast of their parentage. Minos asks Zeus to send a thunderbolt to prove his lineage, and Zeus obliges. Then Minos throws a jewel into the sea and challenges Theseus to retrieve it with Poseidon’s help. Theseus dives off the stern and Minos maliciously orders that the ship keep course and speed on. The Athenian crew are worried and weepy. But the dolphins do their trick, carrying Theseus to his father’s deep mansion, which is evoked in sumptuous and erotic images. He returns “unwet” from the sea depths to great rejoicing; Minos is compelled to control his lust.

Dithyramb XVIII is stageably dramatic. Aegeus and a chorus of Athenians conduct a dialogue which may have been composed for an ephebic festival.²⁴ The chorus questions Aegeus: What’s happening? Why is there this terrifying trumpeting? Aegeus replies: a herald has come from the Isthmus bringing news that a stranger (Theseus, Aegeus’ son, though Aegeus does not yet know it) is on his way along the (widely familiar) road from Epidaurus to Athens. He has destroyed a sequence of legendary malefactors:

The herald, Aegeus says, reports that the stranger is accompanied by two lesser men, that his eyes are fiery, his sword heroic … Bacchylides creates dramatic tension of a real if rather dogged kind.

There are other Bacchylidean fragments, two—reported by Clement of Alexandria—with the force of Simonides’ apophthegms. “One gets his skill from another, now as in days of old,” the poet says, in a definition of tradition which few pre-Modernists would gainsay. He adds that it is hard “to discover the gates of verse unspoken before.”²⁵ The quest for originality, within the strict confines of conventions of form and diction, is a serious challenge for a poet, and Bacchylides does not consistently rise to that challenge. Yet sometimes he does, occasionally in a long run, occasionally in brief:

… Fate that metes out all things moves

A cloud; it hangs now here above this

Country, then there hanging above that.²⁶

He is certainly impersonal, sharing with his uncle a degree of reticence, including himself in the frame of a poem only when convention would seem to dictate it.

The Alexandrian critics set Bacchylides ungrudgingly among the nine canonical lyric poets.²⁷ Didymus, the Alexandrian grammarian, composed a commentary on the Odes. Horace studied and imitated him, Virgil took bearings from him, and the historians and anthologists went to him as a dependable and authoritative source. The benign and maligned emperor Julian the Apostate, a lover of Greek culture who was compelled to serve an empire against his will, loved Bacchylides.²⁸ And then, between the fourth and twentieth centuries, the poet virtually disappeared.

XXII

Bacchylides of Cos (c. 518–452 BC)