CHAPTER 16
P. J. Finglass
Life
More than any other Greek lyric poet, Stesichorus bridges the gap between the great epics of Homer and fifth-century tragedy, profoundly influenced by the former, exerting a profound influence on the latter, and a profoundly significant talent in his own right. His very name is strikingly appropriate: “He who sets up the chorus.” Originally, we are told, he was called Teisias; adopting the name Stesichorus will have provided a fine advertisement for his poetry, and helpfully indicates its chief mode of performance, via a singing and dancing chorus; an alternative view, that his poems were intended for delivery by a soloist, has nothing positive to recommend it, and contradicts the poet’s very name. Born in Metaurus in Calabria (today’s Gioia Tauro), he is most often associated with Himera, a town founded in the mid-seventh century roughly half-way along the north coast of Sicily. His homeland thus lay in the lands of south Italy and Sicily where Greeks had been settling since the eighth century, lands of wealth and opportunity, with close ties to the old cities of mainland Greece. The dates of his birth and death cannot be determined for sure, but he was active for some of the period between 610 and 540, at a time when Iliad and Odyssey were already established classics; and as we will see, his poetry responds to those great epics with originality and sophistication.
We have no reliable, specific details of his life. According to Aristotle, he warned the citizens of Himera against giving the tyrant Phalaris a bodyguard (Rh. 1393b8–22), but this looks like an apocryphal story, since the same is also said with reference to the fifth-century tyrant Gelon. Such tales were invented to provide a biography for great poetic figures of the past about whom virtually nothing was known beyond their poetry; Aristotle’s story may have been inferred, illegitimately, from some statement by a character in Stesichorus’ poetry attacking tyranny. So we must treat with complete scepticism other statements about Stesichorus’ career found in ancient authors: that he advised the Locrians (i.e., the inhabitants of Western Locri, in Calabria) not to provoke their enemies (Arist. Rh. 1394b34–1395a2); that he calmed the participants in a street battle (ibid.); that he went blind after composing a poem criticizing Helen, and recovered it after delivering a palinode in her honor (Pl. Phaedr. 243a); that this recovery from blindness was associated with the battle of the Sagra between Croton and Locri (Paus. 3.19.11–13); that his real father was Hesiod (Arist. fr. 579 Gigon, Philoch. FGrHist 328 F 213); and that he fled from Pallantium in Arcadia to Catane in Sicily, where he died, and was buried near a gate that was named after him (Suda σ 1095 Adler; Catania’s “Piazza Stesicoro” is named in his honor). Despite all this information, Stesichorus’ life remains in darkness.
Works
Twelve titles of poems by Stesichorus survive: Geryoneis, Helen, Palinode or Palinodes, Eriphyle, Europeia, Sack of Troy, Cerberus, Cycnus, The Returns, Oresteia, Scylla, Boarhunters. According to the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda, Stesichorus’ works occupied 26 books in the edition crafted by scholars at Alexandria in Egypt, probably during the great age of Hellenistic scholarship in the third or second centuries BC. The Oresteia and Helen occupied at least two books each in this edition. Thanks to papyrus discoveries, we also have fragments of at least two, possibly three, other poems which do not correspond to any of the titles perserved above. In all, then, we can provisionally account for sixteen of the twenty-four books of the Alexandrian edition; the number will be higher than that if any poems beyond Oresteia and Helen took up more than one book. Two other poems attributed to Stesichorus, Rhadine, and Calyce, are probably not by him. They deal with erotic themes in a romantic, novelistic manner far removed from the safely attributed poems, and indeed from archaic poetry more generally; and the sole surviving quotation from one of these poems (Rhadine) is in a meter typical of post-classical poetry, quite different from what we find elsewhere in Stesichorus.
Stesichorus’ poems were long. A work such as Orestes or Helen that filled two ancient books will have lasted at least 2,500 lines, and possibly as many as 4,000. Thanks to a stichometric mark in the Geryoneis papyrus indicating the line number, we know that this poem contained at least 1,300 lines. Just as Stesichorus was far more prolific than other Greek lyric poets (Alcman’s works filled six books, Sappho’s perhaps nine, Alcaeus’ ten; even the poems of Pindar, whose career lasted a full half century and whose mastery of his craft was acknowledged across the Greek world, took up only seventeen), so too his individual poems were conceived on a far greater scale than theirs. This is a truly monumental poet. The comparison with epic is inescapable, since although the Homeric poems were many times longer even than Stesichorus’, the epics of the Cycle and other epic poems composed in this period will have been closer to his in size.
Performance
The magnitude of Stesichorus’ poetic achievement has implications for the performance context of his poetry. Works on such a massive scale will not have been intended for a solitary performance only, before a single group of particularly lucky spectators. It is inconceivable that so much labor would be devoted to poems that would end up appreciated for one night only. Just as unlikely is the idea that Stesichorus performed his works only in his home town of Himera, repeatedly delighting the same fortunate city with his poetry, but disclaiming the opportunity to display his talents elsewhere. After all, although Stesichorus’ output was huge, the number of his poems was small—not much more than 20 at most. Especially at the start of his career, when the number of his available works could have been counted on one hand, it is hard to imagine the Himerans patiently sitting through exactly the same work time and again; the poet who chose to entertain a single city would have needed a more varied and flexible repertoire.
Rather, the monumental scale of these poems points in the direction of repeated reperformances in multiple venues. The city of Himera was closely integrated with the rest of the Greek world—take for instance an inscription from Samos dating to the first half of the sixth century (IG xii/6 §575), where certain Samians commemorate their involvement in Himera’s defeat of the Sicanians, thereby implying their involvement as mercenaries in a far-away conflict; or the career of the fifth-century athlete Ergoteles, a native of Crete who became a Himeran citizen before winning the dolichos foot-race in each one of the great pan-Hellenic games back in mainland Greece (Pindar, Olympian 12). Stesichorus of Himera will have exploited, and indeed furthered, that integration in his poetic career, which will have seen him traveling throughout the Greek world to display his poetic gifts. It is a pleasant coincidence that Gioia Tauro is today Italy’s largest container port, and thus a town with pan-Mediterranean connexions, like its most famous son from centuries ago.
Myth
Stesichorus’ chief claim on our attention today lies in the range and the extraordinary innovation of his portrayal of myth. Those myths are fundamentally pan-Hellenic, involving figures like Heracles, Helen, and Orestes, whose stories would have been familiar to all Greeks; not for Stesichorus the focus on local, epichoric myth found in, say, Ibycus’ retelling of obscure, specifically Sicyonian myth (cf. frr. S151.36–41, 308, 322 PMGF), in which non-Sicyonians are unlikely to have taken much interest. The pan-Hellenic nature of his poetry provides useful independent confirmation of the breadth of its intended audience, something argued for above on quite separate grounds. The retelling of largely familiar myth presented Stesichorus with a particular challenge—how could he captivate audiences already familiar, chiefly via epic poetry, with these pan-Hellenic myths? In part his original contribution will have lay in the performance: the musical accompaniment, the dancing, the singing by a chorus, all of which are irrecoverable (although the often sophisticated patterning evident in his meters leaves a faint echo of how engaging the overall performance might have been). More fundamentally, however, Stesichorus’ offer to his audiences lay in the originality that he displayed in his shaping of myth, which ensured that however well his listeners knew the stories that provided his basic material, the novelty of his treatment would ensure their appreciation and admiration; for as Telemachus says in the Odyssey (1.351–352), it is always the newest song in which an audience takes most delight.
Poems
Sack of Troy
That novelty can best be appreciated by looking at some of his poems in depth. One of the most remarkable of Stesichorus’ fragments occurs at the start of his Sack of Troy (also known by its Greek title, Iliu Persis). The first five lines of the poem are lost, but will have contained an address to a Muse; this will be the goddess asked to furnish the poet with song at the start of the passage below, which begins in line six of the work (brackets indicate words restored in gaps in the papyrus, many of which are fairly certain):
Goddess, give me a [lovely prelude], golden-[haired] maiden, [for my heart leaps] and desires to sing. Come now, tell me how by the eddies of the [fair-flowing] Simoeis a man learned measurements and wisdom by the will of the revered goddess [Athena], and, [trusting] in these instead of battle that [breaks men] and conflict, won glory because he brought to pass spacious Troy’s [day] of capture [without the use of armies]. [On him Pallas in her generosity bestowed a kindness] that put an end to his labours. For the daughter of Zeus pitied him as he continuously carried water for the lordly [sons of Atreus].
Stes. fr. 100 F
The Iliad opened with the anger of the hero Achilles, and the countless deaths which this caused the Greeks during his withdrawal from the fighting, all of which were apparently part of Zeus’s plan. The Odyssey begins with another hero, Odysseus, whose long travels after the fall of Troy kept him from the homeland for which he continually strived. Stesichorus’ Sack of Troy, by contrast, begins not with a great warrior, not with a hero, but with an ordinary man utterly lacking the status expected of someone placed so prominently in a poem narrating Greek myth.
Epeius himself was no invention by Stesichorus. Mentioned in the Iliad as a champion boxer, he himself admits, even while boasting of his prowess in the ring, that he falls short of excellence as a fighter (23.670–1). The Odyssey refers to him, too, as the builder of the Wooden Horse which ensured the end of the Trojan War (8.492–5, 11.523–5). This is the achievement for which he was famous; but usually the credit which he takes for it is small. Odysseus typically features as the originator of the stratagem, Athena as its ultimate inspiration; Epeius, by contrast, is merely the workman who fashions a tool conceived by others, and references to his involvement often restrict him to a subordinate clause as if to emphasise his insignificance. Other traditions give him a subheroic function: so a late sixth-century marble relief from Samothrace (now in the Louvre) shows him, together with the herald Talthybius, attending on a seated Agamemnon (Robertson LIMC iii/1: 798–9 §7; all the figures are named); and Plato (Ion 533b) and Callimachus (Ia. 7 = fr. 197 Pfeiffer) make him a sculptor, Dictys a ship-repairer (2.44), Plautus an army cook (fr. incert. 1 Leo).
Stesichorus’ originality lies in his unexpected decision to set Epeius at very opening of his poem. “Low” characters could find a place in archaic epic: we may think of Thersites in Iliad 2, or Eumaeus and Philoetius in the second half of the Odyssey. But we do not expect to find Thersites or Eumaeus at the start of an epic, introduced for all the world as if they were the true hero of the piece. There may even be some teasing of the listener on Stesichorus’ part, since it is not immediately apparent that Epeius is meant and not Odysseus. The description of “a man learned measurements and wisdom by the will of the revered goddess [Athena]” could refer to the latter; the subsequent statement that he “[trust ] in these instead of battle that [breaks men] and conflict” makes Odysseus less likely, however, since in the archaic period there is no suggestion that Odysseus was anything other than a first-rate fighter. Only when we reach the reference to Athena and her pity for the man perpetually carrying water can we tell for sure that Epeius, not Odysseus, is being described; the goddess elevates the lowly man through her concern for him, and we can only imagine what words she may have gone on to speak, telling him, like an ancient Fairy Godmother to Cinderella, that he would have the opportunity for fame of which he could not previously have dreamed. Audiences whose tastes had been shaped so profoundly by epic will have wondered at Stesichorus’ boldness in opening his poem in such a manner. It is a cause for regret that we will probably never know the extent to which this striking opening set the tone for the poem that followed; but when so much has been lost, we should be grateful for the little that we have.
Palinode
Stesichorus’ Sack of Troy is by no means the only poem by him that takes a radically new approach to inherited myth. We see the same process at work in Stesichorus’ Palinode or Retraction Song, the alleged circumstances of which are given by Plato:
There is for those who commit an offence in the telling of myth an ancient purification, which Homer did not perceive, but Stesichorus did. For on being deprived of his eyes because of his abuse of Helen, he did not fail to discern the cause, as Homer had, but since he was inspired by the Muses, he recognised his error and immediately composed
This story is not true. you did not embark on the well-benched ships. nor did you come to the towers of Troy.
and after composing the entire Palinode, as it is called, he straightaway recovered his sight.
Pl. Phaedr. 243a = Stes. fr. 91a F
We need not accept Plato’s charming biographical fantasy to see that Stesichorus is producing something highly original here. Helen was archetypally one of the causes of the Trojan War; the men who died there did so, from one perspective, because of what she had done. Homer’s portrayal of Helen is nuanced, with neither of the great epics portraying her simply as a monster—in the Iliad she is overcome by grief at the suffering that she has caused (e.g., 6.344– 358), and in the Odyssey (Books 4, 15) she graciously hosts Telemachus during his stay at Sparta. Yet Stesichorus goes further in Helen’s rehabilitation than ever Homer had, by disclaiming on her behalf any responsibility whatsoever for the Trojan war. The woman who would be known as Helen of Troy never made it (according to Stesichorus) to the city from which she would take that name; the ten years of fighting took place (as we learn from a papyrus, fr. 90.11–15 F, that gives us more details than Plato does) over a mere image of Helen, while the real woman was safely ensconced in Egypt. This idea would later be taken up by Herodotus, who retells a version of it, without mentioning Stesichorus, in his account of Egypt (Histories 2.112– 120); it is also a favorite of Euripides, appearing as it does at the end of his Electra (1280–1283) and as the main plot element of his Helen. If Euripides’ plays had survived, and not Herodotus or Stesichorus, we would no doubt be calling this a striking innovation on the part of the tragic poet; yet there it is already in Stesichorus. What other mythological innovations that we today think of as tragic in fact owe their origins to the tragedians’ great lyric predecessor?
The loss of the Palinode is particularly grievous. Had it survived, we would have the chance to observe Stesichorus’ interaction with his own work, since another poem by him, his Helen, also dealt with this myth, albeit from (at least on the point of Helen’s responsibility for the war) a more conventional perspective. Stesichorus’ presentation of the same myth in different ways is testimony to what seems to have been a ceaseless striving for innovation on his part. We may imagine audiences who had heard the Helen being particularly intrigued by Stesichorus’ self-conscious retraction of his early work, by his advertising rather than concealing his mythological flexibility and drawing attention to his love of innovation.
Geryoneis
Much more survives of Stesichorus’ Geryoneis than of either the Helen or the Palinode. Indeed, it is probably the best-attested of his works today; thanks to an extensive papyrus published in 1967, together with some assistance from the secondary tradition, we have a good idea of what this poem was about, and, just as importantly, its overall tone and effect. Its topic concerns what is usually listed as one of the last of Heracles’ labors—his journey to the far west to bring to Eurystheus, king of Argos, the cattle guarded by the three-headed, three-bodied monster Geryon. The human interest angle to this story (first found in Hesiod, Theogony 287–294, and popular in sixth-century vase painting) might at first seem slim—a mighty warrior single-handedly kills a monster and appropriates his property. But Stesichorus, as we learn from the papyrus, turns his Geryon into a figure who compels the audience’s sympathy. In the following passage, Geryon has evidently just been warned by a friend to make peace with Heracles, perhaps by retreating and/or surrendering his cattle; but the monster is not so easily deterred:
he addressed him in reply
the offspring of mighty Chrysaor and immortal Callirhoe
Do not try to frighten … by [mentioning …] death
For if … I [will be] immortal and ageless … on Olympus
better … contemptible
but if, my friend, … to reach old age
and to live among creatures of a day, apart from the blessed gods
it is now much more noble for me … what is fated … and insults …
and for all my race … in the future, the son of Chrysaor
May that not be the will of the blessed gods
concerning my cattle …
immortal life …
Stes. fr. 15 F
The passage is based on a famous passage from the Iliad, in which Sarpedon tells his friend Glaucus that if he could guarantee that by leaving the fighting, they would remain immortal and ageless, he would urge that course; but since death is all around them whatever choice they make, they should fight and win glory in the front line (12.322–328). The exact sense of Stesichorus’ passage is not recoverable for sure, and is complicated by Geryon’s parentage; since he had an immortal mother (Callirhoe) and mortal father (Chrysaor), whether or not he was immortal might have been a point of genuine uncertainty. Perhaps it has been suggested to him that he will be immortal if only he can avoid being killed by Heracles. Whatever the precise meaning, the audience is evidently confronted with Geryon’s reasoning as he stands on the brink of a conflict that will bring his existence to an end; as they observe Geryon’s internal struggle at this cardinal point in his life, spectators cannot fail to feel sympathy for him and, probably, to admire the courage with which he resolves to face his mighty foe.
This is not the only attempt made to prevent Geryon from confronting Heracles. A further papyrus scrap yields the text:
I, unhappy woman, miserable in the child I bore, miserable in my sufferings
I supplicate […], Geryon
if ever I held out my breast to you …
Stes. fr. 17 F
These words must be spoken by Geryon’s mother Callirhoe. She refers to her past suckling of Geryon as an infant, and may even (as we may cautiously infer from the word “robe,” πέπλ[ον, preserved a few lines after the mention of her breast) partially expose herself at this point to reveal the breast which nourished him. Exactly this form of appeal is made by Hecuba in the Iliad, when she begs her son Hector to retreat within the walls and not face the implacable Achilles; she exposes her breast and appeals to him by the suckling that he received from her (22.79–89). As in the case of Hector, Geryon’s refusal to yield to his mother’s entreaties enhances his heroic stature; that stature is enhanced further by the allusion to the Homeric passage, which encourages an audience to assimilate the monster to the Trojan hero, just as the earlier passage had implicitly set Geryon alongside Sarpedon. Indeed, the mention of breastfeeding makes Geryon seem not just more heroic, but more human; the expression evokes his infancy, giving him a life story beyond the bare mythical datum that he was killed by Heracles, and temporarily minimizing his physical monstrosity.
Since Geryon cannot be dissuaded from fighting Heracles, the conflict between them takes place, with inevitable results:
it was much more advantageous …
to make war covertly …
mighty …
to one side … devised bitter destruction for him
he held his shield in front of …
From his head …
horse-plumed helmet …
on the ground …
the end that is frightful death …
having … around its head, stained with … blood and gall
with the agonies of the man-destroying, speckle-necked Hydra
In silence it stealthily thrust its way into his forehead.
It split through the flesh and bones by a god’s dispensation.
The arrow went right through to the very top of the head
and befouled with crimson blood his breastplate and gory limbs
Then Geryon leaned his neck to the side, like a poppy, which, defiling its
tender form, immediately casting away its leaves …
Stes. fr. 19 F
The poppy simile that describes the fatal wounding of one of Geryon’s heads recalls a passage from the Iliad, where the archer Teucer hits the Trojan warrior Gorgythion: “just as a poppy casts his head to one side, which in a garden is heavy with fruit and the spring rain; just so did he cast his head, burdened by his helmet, to one side” (8.306–308). The Iliadic simile juxtaposes the tender poppy with the harsh world of the battlefield, yoking together the flower and fallen warrior with a comparison which implicitly highlights the differences between their respective worlds even as it points to a similarity. Stesichorus reapplies the simile to the destruction of one of the heads of a multiple-headed monster, who still has two more lives to go. The incongruity of the worlds of the poppy and the warrior, so essential to the force of the Iliadic passage yields to an even more startling incongruity, the association between a monster and a flower; in other contexts this might even have seemed comic, yet the effect of the Stesichorean passage is one of high seriousness. The epic-style simile again assimilates Geryon to the great fighters at Troy, in that he is judged worthy of the type of simile which ennobled their deaths; again we observe Stesichorus taking something from epic and pushing it further, in a startlingly unexpected direction. Presumably the pathos of the situation was brought out still more during the remainder of the fight.
The West
It is especially surprising to find an audience encouraged to sympathize with Geryon given the wider historical context in which this poem was performed. Greeks had been traveling west in search of economic opportunity for decades before Stesichorus’ lifetime; we might have expected that his poem, on the greatest Greek hero performing a mighty deed in the distant west, would have directed the audience’s sympathies toward Heracles as the figure most obviously parallel to those adventurous Greeks. Indeed, one scholar writing before the publication of the Geryoneis papyrus asserted precisely that, writing (far from implausibly, given the state of our knowledge at the time) “one purpose of the Geryoneis was the glorification of the brave Greeks who were winning new lands for Greek settlement” (Dunbabin (1948): 330). It turns out, however, that the victim of Heracles’ exploit is treated with considerable sympathy by the Greek poet, whose narrative must have been far from an uncomplicated glorification of Heracles’ actions, if indeed he glorified them at all. We can only wonder how Stesichorus’ audiences may have reacted to this, and to what extent they saw the interaction between Greeks and indigenous peoples during the ongoing colonizing movement as being somehow reflected in his poetry; just enough has survived to suggest that there was much to ponder here.
As already noted, Stesichorus’ myths are essentially pan-Hellenic; the Geryoneis may have been set in the far west, but as a labour of Heracles it was a bona fide part of the cultural patrimony of all Greeks. Still, it is not quite the only evidence that we have for the poet’s interest in the western Mediterranean. A calcite tablet dating to the late first century BC, the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina, depicts the events of the Sack of Troy, accompanied by the legend “The Sack of Troy according to Stesichorus,” an assertion which there is no reason to disbelieve. Of the many incidents from the Sack found on the tablet, one shows Aeneas and his men preparing to set sail from the annihilated city; his destination, according to an inscription on the Tablet, is “Hesperia.” We may infer that Stesichorus in his poem mentioned Aeneas’ journey westward; he thus becomes our earliest evidence for his flight from Troy to the west, even if we cannot tell exactly where in the west—Sicily? Italy?—he brought him. What impact did Stesichorus’ poem have on Virgil, we may wonder; the surviving evidence may not give an answer, but at least it allows the framing of the question.
Ancient Reception and Influence
The reperformances of Stesichorus’ poems inferred above will have been crucial in ensuring their survival; without such reperformances, there would have been no incentive to preserve and copy texts of his lengthy poetry. Such texts were evidently in circulation in fifth-century Athens, as we learn from the comedies of Eupolis. A character in his Helots declares “The works of Stesichorus and Alcman and Simonides it is old-fashioned to sing. It’s Gnesippus one can hear”; whereas elsewhere in his drama a character remarks “And when Socrates received the wine-cup as it came from left to right, he stole it a piece of Stesichorus accompanied on the lyre” (frr. 148.1–2, 395 PCG). The implication of both passages is that Stesichorus’ poetry was available to be sung at Athens toward the end of the fifth century, even if it could be represented (at least by then) as somewhat old-fashioned.
Old-fashioned or not, it was considered worthy of imitation by Aristophanes, who included in his Peace (421) a lyric that alluded to the opening of Stesichorus’ Oresteia, in which the chorus urge the Muse to push wars aside and celebrate at the approach of spring (frr. 172– 174 F). Not all of Aristophanes’ audience would have grasped the allusion; but some presumably would have done, while others recognized the gesture toward early lyric poetry without necessarily identifying the poem or poet in question. Certainly, such an allusion would have made no sense if no-one, or virtually no-one, in the audience was going to feel it. We know about the allusion because an ancient commentator pointed it out; how many other allusions to Stesichorus might there be in Aristophanes’ surviving works, now unrecognisable by us because no ancient scholarship survives to draw our attention to it?
Still better attested is Stesichorus’ influence on Greek tragedy, a genre which in effect supplanted lyric and epic poetry as the main medium for the creative, poetic retelling of myth. Aeschylus’ Oresteia owes a great deal to Stesichorus, as an anonymous ancient commentator noted, pointing to the recognition of Orestes by means of a lock of hair (fr. 181a.7–13 F); this recognition implies the prominence of Electra in Stesichorus’ poem, too. Stesichorus’ Oresteia also featured Orestes’ Nurse (fr. 179 F) and Clytemnestra’s dream (fr. 180 F), which are both important aspects of the story in Aeschylus and in Sophocles; we also know that Stesichorus’ poem referred to the sacrifice of Iphigenia (fr. 178 F), which must have featured, as in Pindar’s Pythian Eleven and the tragedians, as (at least to some extent) exculpatory of Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband. The same ancient commentator who refers to the lock points to Orestes’ dream in Euripides’ Orestes, in which the title character thinks that he is firing arrows at the Erinyes; Stesichorus, the commentator tells us, had Apollo give Orestes his bow to achieve precisely this effect (fr. 181a.14–24 F). As we have seen, Euripides’ Helen owes its basic conception to an innovation by Stesichorus. And as with comedy, there will have been other occasions where the tragedians engaged with Stesichorus’ poetry but where that engagement cannot now be discerned; given the paltry remains of both genres, it is lucky that we can now see as much as we can.
Stesichorus’ influence on later poetry is still harder to identify, but can occasionally be identified. The picture-poem Axe by Simias describes the dedication of the tool used to fashion the Wooden Horse by Epeius, who is described as “a man of no account among the champions of the Achaeans, but rather one who used to bring water from pure springs, inglorious”; the poem goes on to say that “as it is, he has trodden a Homeric path thanks to you, holy Pallas of many counsels,” to whom the axe is dedicated. The glorification of the ordinary worker might have seemed typically Hellenistic if we did not now know that Stesichorus got there first; the prominence of Epeius in Simias makes it likely that he hoped that his readers would see the influence of that other poem that glorified this unlikely hero, Stesichorus’ Sack of Troy.
Occasional comments on Stesichorus in ancient literary criticism can be stimulating. Hermogenes calls him “very sweet because he uses many epithets” (On Ideas pp. 338.19–339.1 Rabe); indeed the surviving fragments have a fullness of style where descriptive words are not in short supply, although whether or not modern readers take that as a sign of sweetness is as a matter of personal taste. Quintilian’s judgment is better known (An Orator’s Education 10.1.61–2; translated by Russell (2001): 283): “Stesichorus’ powerful genius is shown by his subject, for he sings of great wars and famous leaders and makes his lyre bear the weight of epic. He gives his characters due dignity of action and word, and, if he had exercised restraint, he might have been Homer’s nearest rival; as it is, he is redundant and diffuse, a fault indeed, but a fault of richness.” The comparison with Homer is something that continues to exercise modern scholars. Quintilian had more Stesichorus to evaluate than we do, yet the little that has survived suggests that we should not take his brief judgment on the two poets as the final word.
Quintilian is evidently reacting to Stesichorus’ oeuvre at first hand. The last person who can certainly be said to have been able to do this is Athenaeus, in the late second or early third century; this is also roughly the date of the last Stesichorean papyrus. After this time, it will have become harder to access his work, which eventually stopped being copied altogether; existing copies of his work were in time destroyed or discarded. (The same can be seen in the papyri of tragedy, for example, where the range of plays represented drops off considerably after the third century.) For hundreds of years, the only bits of Stesichorus that anyone could read were those passages quoted by authors, such as Athenaeus and Strabo, whose works did survive antiquity. The most famous of these, by some distance, was the account in Plato about the Palinode, a passage that had a considerable influence on poets from the Renaissance onward.
Modern Editions
The first collection of Stesichorus’ fragments was made in 1568 by Fulvius Ursinus. The centuries that followed saw few expansions in his corpus—the most notable of which was the publication of the Tabula Iliaca Capitolina in 1683—before the revolution in Stesichorean studies in the second half of the twentieth century thanks to the new discipline of papyrology. The first two papyri were published in 1956 (from Boarhunters and, probably, The Returns); three more followed in 1967 (Geryoneis, Sack of Troy, Eriphyle), and then one more in 1971 (Sack of Troy), 1976 (Thebais?), and 1990 (from an unknown poem or poems). A papyrus of 1962 is also valuable, despite not being from a text of Stesichorus, since it contains extensive extracts from an ancient scholar discussing his poetry. No new papyrus has appeared for almost three decades now, but we still live in hope of more; perhaps one is overdue?
The gradual expansion of the corpus repeatedly frustrated efforts to provide a complete edition of Stesichorus’ poetry, or a complete commentary to succeed those by Suchfort (1771) and Vürtheim (1919), which were written before the discovery of any papyri. Page’s fundamental edition of 1962 was followed by a supplementary volume in 1974 containing the papyri that had appeared in the previous 12 years, but that supplement, thanks to further papyrus discoveries, itself became out of date almost immediately. Editions by Campbell and Davies in 1991 contained virtually all the fragments published before that date, but the latter in particular often simply reprinted the text found in Page’s editions without taking account of subsequent advances in our understanding of the text, and neither volume came equipped with a commentary. A modern edition of the complete fragments, based not on any previous edition, but on a fresh reassessment of the evidence, is offered by Finglass (2014b); that edition is accompanied by an introduction, Finglass (2014a), and a commentary, Davies and Finglass (2014). The book that contains this introduction, edition, and commentary is intended as a summation of past work on Stesichorus, a contribution to furthering our understanding of this poet, and as a resource and stimulus for future scholarship.
So thanks to the labors of many scholars from across the world deciphering and interpreting his papyri since the 1950s, we are today in a position to appreciate Stesichorus’ poetry as never before, and thus to appreciate the work of the vital “missing link” between the great age of epic and the great age of tragedy, whom no-one with an interest in archaic or classical Greek poetry can afford to ignore.
FURTHER READING
The fragments of Stesichorus receive a detailed commentary in Davies and Finglass 2014, a book that contains a full introduction to Stesichorus and his poetry, Finglass 2014a, and a new edition of the complete fragments, Finglass 2014b; the numeration of the fragments in this chapter comes from this edition. For an account of the edition see Finglass 2017b ≈ 2021a; for a sympathatic account of the poems here considered spurious see Rutherford 2015a. Finglass 2018c offers an annotated bibliography to Stesichorus. The essays by several scholars contained within the edited volume Finglass and Kelly 2015a offer new perspectives on Stesichorus, including his relationship to Homer, his poetical style, and his reception in ancient and modern literature. The testimonia to Stesichorus are edited with a full commentary by Ercoles 2013.
For the performance of Stesichorus’ poetry see Finglass 2017a; for his meters see Finglass (forthcoming). For the relationship of his poetry to Homer and epic more generally see Kelly 2015, Carey 2015, West 2015; for his relationship to early mythological traditions see Finglass 2012. For the start of Stesichorus’ Sack of Troy see Finglass 2013a, 2014d, 2017d, 2020a. For the Palinode see further Finglass 2013b; for different accounts of the Helen and Palinode from the one given above see Kelly 2007 and Ormand 2017; for the Helen and Stesichorus’ narrative technique more generally see Finglass 2015b, and for the presentation of Helen throughout Stesichorus, especially in terms of sight and vision, see Finglass 2018b. For Stesichorus’ Geryoneis and its use of the Geryon myth see Finglass 2021c. For Stesichorus and the west see Finglass 2014c; for Stesichorus and his fellow-western lyric poet Ibycus see Finglass 2017c. For Stesichorus and Athens see Bowie 2015, from whom the translation of Eupolis cited above are taken, and for his engagement with Athenian myth, Finglass 2020b. For Stesichorus’ influence on Greek tragedy see Swift 2015a, Finglass 2018a; for Stesichorus and Simias see Finglass 2015a; for Stesichorean connections with Latin poetry see Finglass 2018d. For ancient literary criticism of Stesichorus see Hunter 2015; for the impact of his Palinode on Renaissance and later poetry see Schade 2015; for the engagement of the modern poet Anne Carson with Stesichorus see Schade 2015, Finglass 2021b, and Silverblank in this volume. For Stesichorean scholarship from the Renaissance to the present see Finglass and Kelly 2015b.