CHAPTER 19
Henry Spelman
Both scholars and the general public tend to talk about “Sappho and Alcaeus” far more often than they talk about “Alcaeus and Sappho.” This distinct preference in quotidian usage, whatever might explain it, aligns with a certain disparity in interest. This chapter tries to set out a few reasons—some historical, some literary, but most fully both—why Alcaeus is worth concerted attention in his own right.
Alcaeus’ Poetry and Its Traditional Backgrounds
Alcaeus was born to a wealthy family in Mytilene, the largest city on Lesbos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor. From surviving fragments and external evidence scholars deduce that he was active around 600 BC. At least most of Alcaeus’ poems seem to have been composed for solo performance at private sympotic gatherings of his aristocratic hetaireia, a sort of political club. His work is intimately related to the concerns of this group, which was much involved in struggles for political power. Throughout his life Alcaeus and his faction opposed a series of ruling figures, including Pittacus, whom Alcaean invective branded as “baseborn” (348) and a “foot-dragger” (429). Before Pittacus there was also Myrsilus, whose demise was met with joy: “now one must get drunk and drink with force, since Myrsilus has died” (332). Alcaeus’ songs embody the ideology of his faction and probably promoted its social cohesion. One fragment describes an impressive array of weapons and affirms unwavering mutual dedication to a violent cause: “and the great hall gleams with bronze: the whole ceiling is dressed for Ares with bright helmets, down from which nod white horse-hair plumes … There are swords from Chalcis and many belts and tunics. These we have been unable to forget, ever since we first undertook this task” (140 with Spelman 2015).
Alcaeus’ ancient and modern reputation has understandably tended to center around his involvement in the tumult of political life, but stereotyping can obscure the diversity of his corpus. An invitation to drink opens up onto broader ethical concerns: “drink with me [and get drunk], o Melanippus. [Do you think that once] you’ve crossed the great stream of Acheron you will again see the pure light of the sun? Come now, do not [aim] for great things” (38a.1–4). Eros is at home in the symposium, and we find traces of erotic themes in Alcaeus’ fragments and testimonia. He also narrated a range of traditional tales about gods and heroes as analogues for present concerns, as object lessons from the past, and also as stories more or less for their own sake. Other fragments assume the voice of a woman (10b), reflect on the importance of wealth (360), and hymn the Hebrus river in Thrace (45).1
The 10 books (or more) of Alcaeus’ Alexandrian edition encompassed a diversity of variously interrelated topics. An overarching life-narrative framed them all. Alcaeus’ poems depict his childhood (75), old age (50), and many experiences in between, from the springtime worship of Aphrodite (296b) to his own exile in a Lesbian sanctuary (129), from his brother’s return from fighting in the Near East (350 with Fantalkin and Lytle 2016) to his own fighting against the Athenians on the nearby Troad (428 with Tenger 1999: 121–126). He summons courage by looking backward to previous struggles (6.11–12) and looks forward hopefully to when “Ares may wish to turn us to arms” (70.8–9). Much learned inquiry, both ancient and modern, has addressed difficult fine-grained questions about Alcaeus’ biography, but it is clear that one of the chief attractions that these poems held for ancient audiences was the access which they seem to provide to an individualized voice speaking to its own immediate concerns.2 The Peripatetic Aristoxenus quipped that Alcaeus regarded his books as if they were his companions (71a-b Wehrli). The appearance of Sappho and Alcaeus on late-sixth and early fifth-century Athenian vases attests to much earlier interest in these poets as biographical personalities (Yatromanolakis 2007: 69, 74, and see Lardinois (Chapter 18) in this volume fig. 18.2). Secondary audiences could imaginatively assume the position of Alcaeus’ actual companions who first experienced his work and also appropriate his voice as they themselves re-performed the works. Thus in the symposium imaged in Aristophanes’ Wasps, Philocleon adopts and adapts Alcaeus’ warning about the threat that Pittacus posed to the Mytilene to describe the threat that Cleon poses to Athens (1232–1235 and Alc. 141 with Biles and Olson 2015: 442–443).
Alcaeus’ highly individualized poetry did not come from nowhere. When the fourth-century poet Phanocles told how the severed head of the mythical singer Orpheus once washed up on Lesbos, he was expressing and explaining a historical truth: “from that time dance and lovely cithara-playing possess the island, and it is most musical of all” (1.21–2 CA; cf. Myrsilus of Methymna 477F 2 FGrH). Alcaeus’ meter and dialect hint at a substantial tradition preceding him.3 Traces of Aeolic dialect in poetry produced outside Lesbos point toward the early importance of the island. Several prominent but (for us) shadowy figures—Lesches, Terpander, Arion—were held to have predated Alcaeus on Lesbos. “All agree,” wrote Isocrates to Mytilenean leaders around 350 BC, “that your city is most musical and people most famous in music were born among you” (Epist. 8.4). Already Sappho had expressed parochial pride within a wider frame of reference: “pre-eminent, like the Lesbian singer to those from other lands” (Sapph. 106; cf. Archil. 121, Gostoli 1990: 122–123).
Some of Alcaeus’ poems embody, if not allusions to older lyric poems, then at least an awareness of tropes specific to lyric.4 His enemies perform their own sympotic songs (70.3–5), but presumably not Alcaeus’ sympotic songs in which they are attacked. Sappho reflects still another related facet of a highly sophisticated Lesbian lyric culture around 600, and Sappho is not the only woman singing in the poems of Sappho (21.11–12, 22.9–11, 96.5).5 Understanding Alcaeus entails situating him not only within social and political life but also within a poetic landscape.
Did that landscape include not just various traditions but fixed texts which had been preserved and disseminated so as to become, in some sense, canonical? The stakes are potentially high here. Alcaeus 44 has been thought to constitute the earliest surviving allusion to the Iliad.6 This scrappy papyrus fragment evidently intersects with the plot of our Iliad, but it is not certain that the Iliad-poet was the only one to treat this material, and it is not clear that Alcaeus refers to substantially the same version as is now so familiar to us. Several other fragments cover mythical material also narrated in Homeric hymns and lost Trojan epics, but it is still more difficult to decide confidently whether these look to fixed texts or traditional stories.
Alcaeus 347a offers more fertile ground for more definite conclusions:
τέγγε πλεύμονας οἴνωι, τὸ γὰρ ἄστρον περιτέλλεται,
ἀ δ’ ὤρα χαλέπα, πάντα δὲ δίψαισ’ ὐπὰ καύματος,
ἄχει δ’ ἐκ πετάλων ἄδεα τέττιξ …
ἄνθει δὲ σκόλυμος, νῦν δὲ γύναικες μιαρώταται
λέπτοι δ’ ἄνδρες, ἐπεὶ < δὴ > κεφάλαν καὶ γόνα
Σείριος
ἄσδει.
Wet your lungs with wine, for the star is coming around, and the time of year is hard, and everything thirsts from the burning heat. The cicada sings sweetly from the leaves … the golden thistle blooms. Now women are most foul and men are lean, since the Dog Star parches their head and knees.
Compare Hesiod’s Works and Days (582–589):
ἦμος δὲ σκόλυμός τ’ ἀνθεῖ καὶ ἠχέτα τέττιξ
δενδρέωι ἐφεζόμενος λιγυρὴν καταχεύετ’ ἀοιδὴν
πυκνὸν ὑπὸ πτερύγων, θέρεος καματώδεος ὥρηι,
τῆμος πιόταταί τ’ αἶγες, καὶ οἶνος ἄριστος,
μαχλόταται δὲ γυναῖκες, ἀφαυρότατοι δέ τοι ἄνδρες
εἰσίν, ἐπεὶ κεφαλὴν καὶ γούνατα Σείριος ἄζει,
αὐαλέος δέ τε χρὼς ὑπὸ καύματος · ἀλλὰ τότ’ ἤδη
εἴη πετραίη τε σκιὴ καὶ βίβλινος οἶνος …
When the golden thistle blooms and the chirping cicada, sitting in a tree, continually pours forth its clear song from beneath its wings in the season of wearying summer, then it is that goats are fattest, wine best, women most lascivious, and men weakest, for the Dog Star parches their head and knees, and their skin is dry from the heat. But then let there be shade from a rock and Bibline wine…
A relationship between these passages cannot be earnestly doubted, but the nature of the relationship demands discussion. Some hypothesize that Alcaeus does not refer to Hesiod but rather that both draw on a shared source text or on a common store of traditional language.7 The sheer degree of concentrated verbal agreement, which is hard to parallel within the rest of early Greek hexametric and non-hexametric poetry, militates against the last option (cf. Il. 22.66–76 and Tyrt. 10.21–30). We have no solid evidence for a shared source text, and economy warns against postulating one. The case for an allusion is stronger still if, as Stamatopoulou (2013: 283–284) argues, the Shield of Heracles (393–401) alludes to the same lines from the Works and Days around the same time.
Page (1955: 306) writes of Alcaeus 347a that “nowhere else in Greek poetry, except in deliberate parodies, is so extensive and close a copy of one poet by another to be found.” Pindar, by contrast, makes some detailed references to passages in older poets, but he avoids such extensive overlaps and instead tends to rely on his audiences’ knowledge of the other works to which he alludes and from which he departs in meaningful ways (Spelman 2018: 102–103). If the history of texts should be important to our understanding of early Greek poetry, then perhaps so too should be the history of intertextuality. Rather than springing fully formed from the mind of some ur-singer, the poetics of allusivity may have developed over time with tectonic changes in literary culture. Alcaeus may belong to one particular stage in this process.
If Alcaeus refers to Hesiod in a manner partially foreign to later allusive poetics, that does not entail that he is up to something “primitive” or unsophisticated. Here Alcaeus sounds his most Hesiodic, but he draws on a passage in which Hesiod sounds his most Alcaean. Seasonal invitations to drink were much at home in Alcaeus’ sympotic works (Ath. 10.430a-b Kaibel, quoting Alc. fr. 338, 347a, 367); Hesiod praises the pleasures of drinking only here, in a brief encomium of leisure set inside a poem about labor. The cicada’s seasonally recurring song, carried onward from Hesiod into Alcaeus, summons to mind the aesthetics of repetition with variation.8
The culture of Alcaeus’ day evidently included fixed texts transmitted across time and space. It would be most surprising if this passage from Hesiod’s Works and Days was the only such text in circulation. We are not justified, however, in assuming that Alcaeus’ poetry related to canonical texts in the same way as did later poetry or in assuming that the corpus of works known to his contemporaries was co-extensive with the works from around this period which happen to be known to us.
The Alcaean Question
How did we get Alcaeus’ poems? Phillips (Chapter 8) in this volume is dedicated to transmission; the next two sections consider only the earliest, murkiest stages. This topic is seldom discussed at length, and with reason: our evidence is neither very plentiful nor very direct. Nonetheless, the importance of the underlying issues encourages us to plot out what evidence we do have and extrapolate a plausible story from it.
Here are three competing ideas, each with its learned proponents:9
Espousing one of these three ideas will affect the questions which we pose to the texts and the arguments that we can use them to construct.
For classicists, still riding in the wake of the game-changing research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the words “oral poetry” may conjure visions of the Slavic bard Avdo Međedović or the Greek bard Homer composing in performance as they spin out their long traditional tales. There are also other sorts of oral poetry, including short “lyric” songs. One might suppose that, while large-scale oral epic always belongs to a fluid tradition, small-scale oral lyric would generally be memorized and transmitted with (near) verbatim accuracy. This intuition does not square well with empirical evidence. Albert Lord (1995) 23 found variations in oral “lyric” songs as short as eight lines and in songs whose ritual function would prescribe supposedly word-for-word repetition.10
It is hard to imagine a cultic setting which would have prescribed the even ostensibly precise oral re-performance of Alcaeus 298, a poem of at least 52 lines which recommends stoning Pittacus to death (see below). Leafing through the anonymous Carmina Popularia and Carmina Convivialia (847–917 PMG), for which primarily oral transmission is routinely supposed, one finds poems of related meter but little evidence for anything that approaches Alcaeus 298 in length, complexity, or specificity. Some later minor authors, for whom written composition and transmission is an unproblematic hypothesis, wrote poetry much more similar to Alcaeus’.11
The fragments of the Lesbian poets exhibit some repeated phrases but not a degree of verbal repetition generally characteristic of oral poetry.12 “The content of a given song in an oral tradition will change with each composition-in-performance” (Nagy 2004: 29); the content of Alcaeus’ poems seems to reflect, with robust specificity and coherence, one overarching context. An oral poem tends to become “better or worse” depending on the skill of each performer (Nagy 2004: 29); what we can read of Alcaeus’ poetry seems to hang together in some of the same relevant ways as do the four books of Horace’s Odes. Alexandrian scholars (and Horace) certainly thought that it did.
Alcaeus’ Alexandrian edition “reflected accurately, from the standpoint of historical linguistics, the authentic Dichtersprache [poetic language] of Lesbos” (Nagy 2004: 39). If his poetry was transmitted through an oral tradition reaching across time and space, then we would not expect to find, as we do, much fine-grained linguistic detail linking his poetry to one particular time and place (cf. Carm. Conv. 891 PMG, discussed below). Alexandrian editors had their own fallible doctrines about Alcaeus’ language, but these will not fully explain the character of our texts. Consider, for example, καταήσσατο, a very rare but valid early form from the Indo-European *sed root, which we read in an papyrus fragment of Alcaeus (296b.2).13 It is hard to envision someone at some point constructing an accurate, uniform, and authoritative corpus of (at least) 10 books of Alcaean lyric from a fluid, multiform oral tradition (compare and contrast Nagy 2004: 39–40).
The shorter one posits a purely oral stage of transmission in order to account more plausibly for the nature of Alcaeus’ surviving texts, the more attractive it becomes to cut out this phase, which does suspiciously little explanatory work in any framework and raises at least as many questions as it answers. If Alcaeus’ poetry could not have been transmitted in the form in which we know it through a purely oral tradition, then where can we more plausibly locate the impetus for its written preservation than with the poet and his contemporaries? Who would be equally invested in a lengthy poem advocating the execution of Pittacus, a man widely remembered as a wise sage in the fifth century if not before (Simon. 542.11–12 PMG, Hdt. 1.27)? Writing had a distinguished career in the Greek world as “the safest means of circulating minority opinions” (Vatri 2017: 52).
In Alcaeus’ day the Greek alphabet had been around for quite a while. His poetry was closely connected to the symposium, a social institution which played a key role in the development of literacy.14 In 590 mercenaries of Ionian heritage serving abroad, people not too much unlike Alcaeus’ brother (Alc. 350), recorded for posterity their names and an inscription on a statue in Egypt. Their writing has been plausibly thought to reflect the informal script known to them from papyri (or parchment: Hdt. 5.58).15
It is rather more than a hop, skip, and a jump from some words “hacked out with some military weapon” (Jeffery 1990: 48) onto an Egyptian statue to 10 books of Lesbian lyric. Expert literacy (one type among many) was not common in Alcaeus’ day, but aristocrats like Alcaeus were proudly not of the common sort (Alc. 6.13–14, 72.12–13, 130b.5–9). Poetry seems to have been uncommonly important to the Lesbian poets (Sapph. 55, 150, P. Köln XI.429.1.3–8). Generalizations about “predominantly oral cultures” will only get us so far in thinking about such people. If the arguments of the last section are sound, then (somehow) Alcaeus knew (some lines from) Hesiod’s Work and Days. The idea of fixed texts was out there, to use a helpfully vague phrase.
The title of this section is a light-hearted allusion to “the Homeric question,” which is really a bundle of related questions about how we got our Iliad and Odyssey and what these texts represent. I mean to suggest a serious connection between these two topics, although they must first be discussed on their own terms and in their own right. Ultimately, the best evidence for a written Alcaean corpus comes from within the Greek poetic tradition. On one view of literary history, Alcaeus was preceded by, or in the same chronological neighborhood as, quite a lot of written poetry, including about 27,000 hexameters of the Iliad and the Odyssey—and also an unknowable quantity of poetry which vanished more or less without a trace. The cases for various early written texts hang together and support one another. Alcaeus is one link in a chain.
It is reasonable to suppose that our earliest Greek texts have especially complex histories. Presumably the Alcaean corpus included inauthentic material—as do the corpora of Euripides and Juvenal. Perhaps the Alcaean textual tradition has been influenced to some degree by faulty ancient quotation from memory and a long-lasting performance tradition.16 But what is most significant and interesting, from both a historical and a literary perspective, is that there evidently was a written tradition from around 600 onward.
Transmission and Reception
On the view adopted in the last section, the re-performance of Alcaeus’ poems presumably began already during his lifetime. What was the point of a written text if not in order to provide a basis for re-performance? Several Sapphic fragments apparently look forward to their own future reception, and one corrupt Alcaean fragment might do the same implicitly.17 Texts and performances existed alongside each other for a long time. We need to come to grips with this.
Athenaeus provides fascinating evidence for one strain in the reception of Alcaeus. Discussing Attic drinking songs (scolia), he quotes a sentence which we happen to know in a somewhat different form from a papyrus of Alcaeus:
Athenaeus 15.695a Kaibel = Carm. Conv. 891 PMG:
< > ἐκ γῆς χρὴ κατίδην πλόον
εἴ τις δύναιτο καὶ παλάμην ἔχοι
ἐπεὶ δέ κ’ ἐν πόντωι γένηται
τῶι παρεόντι τρέχειν ἀνάγκη.
One should look out from the land to discern a voyage, if one is able and has the ability, but when on the sea one must run with the present conditions.
P. Oxy. 2298 fr. 1 = Alc. 249.3–10:
] . νᾶα φ[ερ]έσδυγον
]ην γὰρ ο[ὐ]κ ἄρηον
]ω κατέχην ἀήταις
ἐ┘κ̣ γᾶς χρῆ προΐδην πλό└ον
αἰ τις δύνατα┘ι καὶ π└αλ┘ά̣μαν ἔ└χ┘η,
ἐπεὶ δέ κ’ ἐν π┘όν̣└τωι γ┘ένηται
τὼι παρέοντι †τρέχειν† ἀνά┘γκα.
μ]αχάνα
… benched ship … for it is not better … to control the winds … one should look ahead for a sailing from the land, if one can and has the ability, but when one is on the sea one must … means …
Scholars commonly suppose that Athenaeus drew on a sympotic songbook going back to fifth-century Athens, and that hypothesis will be pursued here.18 In that text, Alcaeus’ words, a generality suitable for any time and every place, had sprung free from their original social and poetic context. The adaptation (if that is even the right word) does not achieve strict fidelity to Alcaeus’ Lesbian dialect. It is not obviously aiming for strict fidelity to his exact meaning.
If Alcaeus’ poems had survived only in texts like this and performances deriving from them, then that hypothetical process of transmission would have produced something radically different from the complex, individualized poems that mattered much to Horace around 25 BC (Carm. 1.32.3–12). In a fifth-century symposium, would a performance of the four lines quoted by Athenaeus have even counted as an acceptable response to a request to “sing me a scolion of Alcaeus” (Aristophanes 235 PCG; cf. Aristotle Politics 1285a.35–40)? For Athenaeus, and so perhaps for the original users of the songbook, the authorship of Carm. Conv. 891 PMG does not seem to have been any more important than the authorship of the anonymous scolia quoted alongside it (cf. Maltomini and Pernigotti 2002: 63–65). We need not make the facile assumption that in antiquity literary taste squared neatly with political identity, but the solidly democratic sentiments of the scholia (893–896 PMG) recorded alongside this Alcaean one suggest that Athenaeus’ songbook originated from a context not in natural and complete sympathy with the ideology of Alcaeus’ poetic corpus (cf. Jones 2014: 245–246, 249 but note Ar. Wasps 1232–1235).
There must have been other sorts of Alcaean texts and so presumably other sorts of performances relying on them. Various pieces of evidence help us to imagine what these might have looked like. One of Pindar’s victory odes describes how the victor’s father Timocritus, if he were alive, would have re-performed Pindar’s poem time and again (N. 4.13–16). Timocritus would hold a lyre, not a scroll, but he would try to reproduce the 96 lines of this poem, which are good enough to endure (6–8). Plato’s Protagoras depicts leading intellectuals engaged in the close analysis of a long and complex work by Simonides (542 PMG), a famous and authoritative figure. The existence of even slightly variant texts of this substantial piece would vitiate the basis of the entire discussion, but nobody has to hand or feels the need for a physical text (Pl. Prt. 338e–339e).
A physical text may not have been an absolutely necessary tool for sophisticated performances of Alcaeus,19 but it will have often served as their basis. Athenaeus, as we have posited, relies on a text which “probably came into being as a performance handbook for the would-be symposiast” (Prodi and Cazzatto 2016: 10). If a written text of the four lines of Carm. Conv. 891 PMG was a useful tool for its performance, more complex performances of Alcaeus must then have made use of written texts all the more.
Texts of Alcaeus certainly circulated long before Alexandrian scholars produced their authoritative editions of the canonical lyric poets. A vase from around 440 depicts Sappho with a lyre and a scroll, perhaps of her own poetry.20 Herodotus, writing around 430, conceives of one Alcaean poem as a written letter, and the natural inference is that he knew this poem as a written text: “Alcaeus composed these things in a song and sent it off (ἐπιτιθεῖ) to Mytilene announcing his own experience to his companion Melanippus” (5.95 compare and contrast Ceccarelli 2013: 32). Aristophanes’ allusions to Alcaeus might capitalize on his audiences’ knowledge of the most popular snippets which, like the lines quoted by Athenaeus, had entered the repertoire of oral sympotic performance, but the comedian’s own reading may have included the Lesbian poets.21 Aristophanes’ Agathon cites Alcaeus as a well-known ancestor in literary history—and as a validating precedent for his own outlandish appearance (Ar. Thesm. 160–163 with Austin and Olson 2004: 109–112). The comically erudite tragedian helps us to imagine an early branch of the text-based reception of Alcaeus concentrated among those with social and intellectual pretensions.
Rather than supposing that the oral reception of Alcaeus was at some point replaced by a text-based reception, we might do better to envision a shifting array of interactions between texts and performances from early on. The first texts of Alcaeus to travel beyond Lesbos perhaps served as basis for recitation and performance in educational and sympotic contexts.22 The formal book trade, when it developed to meet rising demand, presumably trafficked not just in relatively countercultural intellectuals like Anaxagoras (Pl. Ap. 26d-e) but also in major lyric poets like Alcaeus. Pre-Alexandrian quotations of the two major Lesbian poets point to texts not radically different in content or language from the Alexandrian editions (Nicosia (1976): 247–250). Theocritus drew on extensive texts for his densely allusive poems evoking the language and substance of Alcaeus and Sappho (Theoc. 28–31). A Cologne papyrus published in 2004 offers fascinating new evidence for what such texts might have looked like. This papyrus predates Alexandrian editorial work of Sappho and contains metrically and thematically related poems in a different order. The Cologne papyrus overlaps with a post-Alexandrian papyrus for parts of 12 lines and therein agrees in all but orthographic minutiae.23
We should acknowledge that pre-Alexandrian texts were crucial to the transmission and reception of Alcaeus and admit that we know very little about what these looked like. Our own experience of the modern book trade may not put us in the best position to appreciate the diversity of forms which ancient texts could assume.24 Both isolated individual poems and a gargantuan corpus of 10 whole books might strike us as equally implausible candidates for the normal mode of the pre-Alexandrian dissemination of Alcaeus. In fact, it is far from clear that one is justified in speaking of a “normal mode” for a phenomenon which covered centuries of cultural change.
We are mostly in the dark about the fine-grained mechanics of Alcaeus’ pre-Alexandrian reception, but on a larger scale it is clear that his reception was a fundamentally continuous phenomenon. The Lesbian poets, as we have noted, had already attained sufficient prominence abroad to be depicted on Athenian vases from the late sixth and early fifth century. The robust overlap in the prosopography of early lyric poets cited in Herodotus and Old Comedy suggests that a lyric canon of sorts had started to crystalize remarkably early.25 Peripatetic and Alexandrian scholars, who all pursued a basically conservative overarching program of literary research and presumed an audience who knew of and cared about the poetic texts that they wrote about and edited, paid careful attention to Alcaeus in part because he had already been regarded as an important figure.26 His inclusion in the Alexandrian canon was the formal culmination of a lengthy, decentralized process which we can only sketch in broad outline.
Alcaean Poetics
Why do we have Alcaeus’ poems? In other words, if these texts were written around 600, why are they, unlike the vast majority of verse that must have been sung in that period, still around for us to read some 2,600 years later—even if only in papyrus scraps and isolated quotations? Alcaeus’ songs were obviously related to the circumstances of his contemporary Lesbos; just as obviously, they were also capable of interesting people far removed from that particular time and place. This section takes a closer look at two very different fragments in order to provide a better sense of the character of Alcaeus’ poetry.
Fr. 298.1–23
δρά]σαντας αἰσχύν[νον]τα τὰ μἤνδικα,
]ην δὲ περβάλοντ̣’ [ἀ]ν̣άγκα<ν>
ἄμ]φ̣ενι λαβ̣ολίωι πά̣[χη]α̣ν·
] . Ἀχαίοισ’ ἦς πό̣λ̣υ βέλτερον
θεοσ]ύ̣λ̣ην̣τ̣α̣ κατέκτανον·
π]α̣ρ̣π̣λ̣έοντες Αἴγαις
]. ἔτυχον θαλάσσας·
] ἐν ναύωι Πρ̣ι̣ά̣μω πάϊς
Ἀ]θ̣ανάας πολυλάϊδος
] ἐπαππένα γενήω,
δυσμέ]νεες δὲ πόλιν ἔπηπον
]…[..]ρ̣ας Δαΐφοβόν τ’ ἄμα
].ν, οἰμώγα δ’ ἀ̣[π]ὺ τε̣ί̣χεος
κα]ὶ παίδων ἀΰτα
Δαρδάνι]ο̣ν πέδιον κάτηχε·
λ]ύσσαν ἦλθ’ ὀλόαν ἔχων
]. ἄ̣γ̣νας Πάλλαδος, ἀ θέων
θνάτ]ο̣ι̣σι θεοσύλαισι πάντων
]τάτα μ̣ακάρων πέφυκε·
χέρρεσ]σ̣ι δ’ ἄμ̣̣φοιν παρθενίκαν ἔλων
] π̣α̣ρε̣στάκοισαν ἀγάλματι
] ὀ Λό̣κ̣ρος, οὐδ’ ἔδεισε
παῖδα Δ]ί̣ος πολέμω δοτέ̣<ρ>ρ̣αν …
… shaming those who have done unjust things … put a thick noose around the neck … stoning. [For truly it would have been] better by far for the Greeks [if] they had killed [a man who] did sacrilege to the gods; [for in that case] as they sailed past Aigae they would have met with a sea that was [rather gentler. But] in the temple the daughter of Priam [was embracing the statue] of Athena, the giver of booty, and clasped onto its chin. Enemies were moving through the city … [they killed] … and Daiphobus as well, and wailing [came] from the wall, and the cry of children filled the Dardanian plain. [Ajax] came with his destructive madness [into the temple] of holy Pallas, who is [most dread] of all gods to sacrilegious [mortals]. The Locrian seized the maiden with both hands as she stood by the … statue … and he did not fear the daughter of Zeus, giver of war …
Lost Trojan epics also recounted Ajax’s crime and Athena’s retribution. We cannot assume that Alcaeus drew directly on these poems but we can assume that he retells a story already familiar to his audience and suppose with some probability that this story was, for them, associated with the epic genre.27
Alcaeus mobilizes the resources of tradition for a specific purpose in the here and now. An architecture of three mutually illuminating parts, which fit together in both obvious and unobvious ways, structures this piece and much Greek lyric: a situation in the present, a story from the past, and a trans-historical lesson binding them together.28 As the Greeks ought to have destroyed Ajax and thereby saved themselves from divine anger, so the community ought to kill Pittacus, who is now apparently very much alive and directly addressed in line 47. “The collective danger of sacrilege is the main theme” (Gagné 2013: 222).
Combining abstract ethical vocabulary with gruesome physical detail, the first preserved lines of the fragment evidently involve death by stoning, a symbolically rich form of public violence.29 The notional addressee does not seem to be just Alcaeus’ faction. Elsewhere he recounts how the Mytileneans together heaped praise on Pittacus and installed him as “tyrant” (348); here he urges them to execute Pittacus together. Exhorting his fellow citizens to do away with a member of the community, the poet tells a story in which the categories of friend and enemy are dangerously fluid. Athena, “giver of much spoils” (9) and “giver of war” (23), helped the Greeks to take Troy, but she now becomes their deadly foe (cf. Eur. Tro. 65–70). The Greeks slaughter the Trojans but would have done better to have dispatched one of their own.
This is a poem in part about legitimate and illegitimate violence. Physical space helps to articulate the line between them as Ajax’s crime is cast against a wider background of destruction. The cries of doomed and dying Trojans spill out from their city to fill up the surrounding landscape (15). Alcaeus sets his audience outside Troy as the whole city is taken (ἀ̣[π]ὺ τε̣ί̣χεος, 13, “from the wall,” focalized from outside). The Greeks sweep through the town slaying their enemies, but Ajax oversteps the limit by bringing violence into Athena’s sacred temple. In another poem Alcaeus relates how he himself fled from fighting and, like Cassandra, sought refuge in sacred space (130b).
While other accounts of the fall of Troy portray various misdeeds perpetrated by various Greeks, Alcaeus’ version spotlights Ajax alone as the sole reason for their disastrous journey homeward. Like several other Lesbian poems, this one uses Trojan myth to reflect on individual responsibility and communal life. Ajax’s “destructive madness” (16) turns out to be destructive to many others besides himself as Athena wreaks havoc on the Greek fleet because of one man’s impiety (24–27, 38–39). Less obviously, individual malfeasance also lies behind the destruction of Troy. The transgression of Paris, whom Alcaeus elsewhere labels a “host-deceiving man” (283.4–5), eventually leads to the downfall of his community—men (298.12), women (8), and children (14). Two other Alcaean fragments identify Helen as the cause of collective destruction for the Trojans (42, 283). Here the death of Deiphobus (298.12), her second husband after Paris, marks her recovery, the goal of the Greeks’ whole 10-year campaign.30 Alcaeus’ account of the end of the Trojan war glances all the way back to its start.
In another poem Alcaeus calls for the divine punishment of Pittacus, who broke an oath (129.9–24; cf. 67, 130b.21–2, 167.1); in this poem he urges his fellow citizens to punish Pittacus themselves in order to prevent divine punishment from falling on them. Elsewhere Alcaeus attributes heart-rending civil strife to the malevolent will of some one of the Olympian gods who “leads the people into delusion and grants lovely glory to Pittacus” (70.11–13); in this fragment, by contrast, Athena underwrites a particular form of divine justice.31 A grim theology links the story of Ajax to Alcaeus’ present. Cassandra grasps Athena’s statue as if supplicating a body of flesh and blood,32 but the goddess herself does not respond, as a human bystander might, by providing immediate help. Her statue stands by as her suppliant is dragged away and her temple is violated. Only later does she spring into action and take revenge by stirring up a storm. For both the Trojans and the Greeks, divine retribution for injustice does not come immediately or in a readily predictable way. For both the Trojans and the Greeks, and potentially also for the Mytileneans, suffering eventually lands on many more besides the principal wrongdoer.33 Athena once long ago showed herself to be “[most dread] of all gods to sacrilegious [mortals]” (18–19), and she remained so on Lesbos around 600 and long after.
Fr. 119.1–16
τίς τ’ ὦ πον[
εἴπη̣[….].[
παρέσκεθ’ ὠ̣[
δαίμον’ ἀναίτιο̣[
δεύοντος οὐδέν · καὶ̣ [γὰ]ρ̣ ἀνοιΐ[ας
τὰς σᾶς ἐ.[.]υ.[´̣]σ’ ἀλλ’ ἔμ̣[ε]θεν συ[
παυσαι, κάκων δε[…. .]όντω[ν
αἴ τι δύναι κατ̣εχ[…. .]ο̣·
σοὶ μὲν [γ]ὰ̣ρ̣ ἤ[δ]η̣ περβέβα̣[τ]αι χρό[νος
κ]αὶ κάρπος ὄσσ[ο]ς ἦς συνα[γ]άγ̣ρ̣ετ[αι
τὸ κλᾶμμα δ’ ἐλπώρα, κάλον γά[ρ,
ο]ὐ̣κ ὀλ[ί]γαις σταφύλαις ἐνείκη[ν
….]ψ[.], τοιαύτας γὰρ ἀπ’ ἀμπέ[λω
….]υς γ̣……ι σκ̣ο̣πιάμ[
τά]ρ̣β̣ημι μ̣ὴ δρόπ̣[ω]σιν αὔταις
ὄμφ]ακας ὠμοτέραις ἐοίσαις.
Who … says … would provide, o … blameless god … in no way lacking. For your folly … but [pay attention] to me and stop, evil … if you can … restrain. For your time has already gone by, and all the fruit that there was has been gathered, but there is hope that the shoot, for it is beautiful, will bear larger clusters indeed … from such a vine… I am afraid lest they harvest grapes that are unripe.
This poem invites its audience to decode a sustained metaphor—and the state of our text makes that task especially difficult for us. These lines have attracted less attention than similarly well-preserved pieces of Aeolic lyric, no doubt in large because we are sure neither whether this fragment is the work of Alcaeus or Sappho nor what it is even about. The case for Alcaean authorship is more often taken to be the stronger, and with good reason.34 Comparing other poems of Alcaeus (6, 73), some scholars posit that here too we have an elaborate political allegory, but such interpretations are simply too complicated to carry robust conviction (e.g., Page 1955: 242n3). The concerns of this fragment are more probably erotic rather than civic. The conceit of women as nature to be cultivated and harvested is well attested in earlier texts (Swift 2016a) and also in later ones, including a few which may well allude to this very fragment.35
The remnants of other poems preserved on the same papyrus support an erotic interpretation. Fr. 120 apparently addresses a man who has married before he reached the appropriate age. Fr. 117 also concerns sexual ethics: “one might as well toss into the swell of the grey sea whatever one gives to a prostitute” (26–27; cf. Archil. dub. 302). Like some other Alcaean papyri, this one seems to contain poems of related content.
Lines 9–10 offer the best clue for identifying the addressee of our fragment. Like the woman addressed in Archilochus 188, this seems to be a woman past her prime who has already been “used up” by men (cf. Archilochus 189, probably from the same poem as 188). Her “folly” (5) will then be an inability to control herself (8) and an attempt to extend her erotic career beyond its proper limit (cf. Hor. Odes 3.15). The “fruit” (10) in question seems to be not, as elsewhere, the children that sex produces but rather sex itself.36
In lines 11 focus shifts from a woman past her prime to a woman before her prime. What was the connection between them? τὸ κλᾶμμα (11) here might refer to a “cutting” taken from one plant and used to propagate a new vine (cf. Pomeroy 1994: 335). The attractive younger woman who promises to produce an abundance of fruit would then be the daughter of the older woman previously addressed. Whereas one of Sappho’s marriage songs compares a young bride to a ripening apple which men wanted to, but could not, harvest (105a), Alcaeus fears lest men pluck this young woman’s fruits before they are ripe. The plural subject of the verb looks significant (δρόπ̣[ω]σιν, 15, “they harvest”). Alcaeus’ intra-familial comparison of expired and premature beauty would recall Archilochus’ “Cologne Epode” (196a), in which the speaker spurns the “overripe” (26) Neoboule, whose charms have withered (27–28), as he successfully seduces her younger sister.
Like Archilochus’ poem, ours has a cutting invective edge. The speaker affects to be offering advice, but his message is not friendly (cf. Odes 3.15). Whereas Alcaeus 298 elevates contemporary Mytilenean politics to the level of heroic myth and situates it within a timeless theological framework, this fragment deploys an earthy metaphor to discuss ephemeral erotic appeal with brutal levity. Both very different poems draw on the narrative and metaphorical stock of tradition to address a situation in the present and probably invited Alcaeus’ first audiences to unite in defining themselves against an outsider. Both eventually traveled far beyond Alcaeus’ circle to stand together within a diverse poetic corpus.
***
This chapter has tried to come to grips with two issues which are perhaps, in the broadest possible context, the two strangest things about Alcaeus: firstly, that someone so early in Greek history was responsible for so much written poetry; secondly, that such topical poetry went on to achieve such a widespread and lasting reception. Investigating these puzzles might in the end allow us not only to understand better Alcaeus’ work but also win a measure of new understanding into the cultures which produced and valued it.
FURTHER READING
Page (1955) remains fundamental. Rösler (1980) is the best monograph on Alcaeus and among the most influential books on early Greek lyric generally. Burnett (1983) provides a reading of many of the most extensive fragments. The text with commentary of Liberman (1999) is excellent but necessarily somewhat circumscribed by its format. A full-scale commentary, based on a firsthand re-inspection of the papyri, would be a monumental undertaking serving a real need. On the early transmission and canonization of lyric see now Hadjimichael (2019).
Notes
1 For Alcaeus’ political and social context see Caciagli 2011 as well as Hall (Chapter 6) in this volume. For mythical and erotic themes see Meyerhoff 1984 and Vetta 1982, respectively. In this chapter Sappho and Alcaeus are cited by the numeration in Campbell’s Loeb unless noted. Iambic and elegiac poets are cited from West’s second edition.
2 Liberman 1999: xiv–xxiii and Hutchinson 2001: 187–188 offer concise discussions of Alcaeus’ date; cf. P. Oxy. 2506 fr. 98a (= Alc. 306Ae Voigt), an ancient discussion of Alcaean chronology, apparently both biographical and historical, taking its lead from his poetry (Porro 2004: 208–210). On lyric narrators and personalities see Morrison 2007a ch. 2 and Budelmann 2018a.
3 See Bowie 1981, West 1982: 29–34, and Tribulato 2008a as well as D’Angour and de Kreij (Chapters 9 and 10) in this volume.
4 Cf. Archil. 105–106 and Alc. 6, Archil. 5 and Alc. 428 with Smith 2015: 252–255. Note Solon 20 and Mimnermus 6.
5 The two most promising pieces of evidence for direct interaction between Sappho and Alcaeus are both problematic: see Sapph. 137 with Ferrari 2010: 75–80 and Alc. 384 with Yatromanolakis 2007: 169–171.
6 West 1995: 206–207; compare and contrast West 2002, Kelly 2015: 25–26, and Chapter 3 in this volume. Spelman 2017 discusses related questions.
7 Hooker 1977: 80–81, Martin 1992: 22–23, Petropoulos 1994: 80–82; contrast e.g., Tsomis 2001: 151–154, Hunter 2014: 123–126.
8 The image of the poet as a cicada is at least as old as Archilochus (223). It may well be implicit in Sappho’s “Tithonus Poem” (so Rawles 2006: 6–7 and Janko 2017b: 280–289). In a hymn to Apollo cicadas sing for the god, as does Alcaeus (307c).
9 Compare and contrast Wilamowitz 1900: 51–53, Herington 1985: 41–50, Fowler 1987: 11–20, Pöhlmann 1994: 13–17, MacLachlan 1997: 139–140, Powell 2002: 188–196, Nagy 2004, Yatromanolakis 2007: 197–211, Lardinois 2008, Garner 2011, 415–417.
10 See Lord 1995: ch. 2 and 7; cf. Finnegan 1977: 73–87, 135–153, Rubin 1995 ch. 6 and 11.
11 Timocreon 727–728 PMG, Ion of Chios 27 W, Critias B 5–6 D-K, Evenus *8b (= [Thgn.] 667–682).
12 E.g., ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν (Sapph. 31.6); ἐν στήθ[ε]σιν [ἐ]πτ[όαισε (Alc. 283.3); cf. Bowie 1981: 41–46.
13 Spelman (2014). I would abandon my conjecture, which now seems unworthy of consideration, and double down on this explanation of the text. W. S. Barrett, in the margin of his copy of Page 1955: 298, explains it similarly: “ἤσσατο … the Lesb[ian] equiv[alent] of Att[ic] εἵσατο (esedsato).” Barrett also writes: “? παρ’ ἐλάαισ’ ἐροέσσα[ισ] < ι > κατ{α}ήσσατο.” But the transmitted text is supported by ἐέσσατο (Od. 14.295), now correctly printed by West (2017) 302. The position of σε (Alc. 296b.1) and “Wackernagel’s law” further supports, but does not guarantee, the idea that Aphrodite is directly addressed in the vocative in the opening words of the poem.
14 See Janko 2017a: 160–164, Węcowski 2017, and Chapter 5 in this volume.
15 Meiggs and Lewis 1969: 12–13, Harris 1989: 60, Jeffery 1990: 48. Sappho’s “Brothers Poem” may now fuel daydreams of Charaxus importing papyrus from Egypt. For the historical basis of such fantasies see Lewis 1974: 85–88 and Möller 2010: 33–36, 54–60.
16 Cf. Graziosi and Haubold 2015 on Homer and de Kreij 2016 on Sappho. Obeloi (markings used to designate text which has been added) on P. Köln II.59 may indicate that Alc. 298.25–31 were considered spurious in antiquity (Hutchinson 2001: 224–226).
17 Sapph. 55, 65, 147, 193; cf. Alc. 309 with Liberman 1999: 231.
18 Wilamowitz 1900: 37, Van Der Valk 1974: 1, Fabbro 1995: xxiv–v, Maltomini and Pernigotti 2002. Note generalizing lines elsewhere ascribed to other poets and also included (with variations) in the Theognidea (Selle 2008: 212–226). Is Carm. Conv. 891 PMG the result of an oral tradition stemming from Alcaeus’ Lesbos or is it (somehow) related to a text of Alcaeus? Compare the differences between Carm. Conv. 891 PMG and Alc. 249 with more substantial differences in versions of anonymous scolia which must have arisen closer together in time and space (893, 895, 898, 899 PMG). For interactions between written and oral versions, a common phenomenon, see Finnegan (1977): 160–168.
19 Cf. Aelian fr. 187 with Ford 2003: 22–23. For memorization see the material collected in Pelliccia 2003. One may add the story of how the forgetful Calvisius Sabinus owned a slave dedicated to the memorization of (all of) Alcaeus (Sen. Ep. 27.5–6).
20 Yatromanolakis 2007: 146–160. Various theories have been advanced, but the words on her scroll remain puzzling.
21 Wasps 1232–5 with Alc. 141, Birds 1410–1411 with Alc. 345. For Aristophanes as a reader see now Zogg 2017.
22 Cf. Thgn. 237–254, Pind. Pyth. 6.47–9, Ar. Nub. 961–972, 1354–1362, 235 PCG, Pl. Prt. 325e–327b, Novokhatko 2015: 5–6, 16–18.
23 See Liberman 2007: 50–52, Hammerstaedt (2009). Like these scholars, I am not convinced by those who argue that the papyri preserve different versions of the “Tithonus Poem.” See further Benelli 2017: 269–278, Budelmann (2018b): 146–148.
24 See e.g., P. Mich. inv. 3498 + 3250b recto, 3250c recto, 3250a and c recto a list of poetic incipits, including some from Alcaeus (Borges and Sampson 2012: 12–18).
25 Herodotus: Donelli 2016: 11–12; comedy: Carey 2011: 457–60.
26 Peripatetic: Alc. T 14, 16, 28 Liberman; Alexandrian: Acosta-Hughes 2010: 134–40.
27 Od. 4.502, Sack of Ilion arg. 3, Returns arg. 3 GEF, van Erp Taalman Kip 1984: 125–127, Davies 1988b, Pallantza 2005: 47–56, Danek 2015: 357–359. In the Sack of Ilion, Ajax avoided lapidation by fleeing to Athena’s altar (cf. Alc. 298.3, 306Ah Voigt).
28 Cf. Archilochus’ “Telephus Poem,” Alcm. 1.34-40 PMGF, Sapph. 16, Pind. Ol. 2.15–24, Fowler 1987: 58–63.
29 Cf. Il. 3.57 (potential stoning of Paris), Hdt. 5.37–8 (the Mytileneans stone a tyrant), Gras (1984). Another Alcaean fragment apparently addresses the Mytileneans as a group and urges them to nip tyranny in the bud (74 with the scholia; cf. Solon 3). Perhaps Alcaeus’ poems reached those on Lesbos less predisposed to his political agenda.
30 Little Iliad arg. 2, Sack of Troy arg. 2 GEF; cf. Od. 8.516-520. As far as we can tell, Deiphobus was the only Trojan male singled out by name in Alcaeus’ poem (298.12). [Thgn.] 1231–1234 pairs the Trojans and Locrian Ajax as victims of destructive Eros.
31 Parker 1983: 255: “deity in different Greek authors, sometimes in the same author, seems to operate at different levels: it guards the moral order, rewarding the good and punishing the bad; it upholds the formal rights of gods against men; as fate or the inscrutable divine will it makes occurrences inevitable; and it represents the random malicious element in the universe that causes the good to suffer and the bad to prosper.” Similarly, at length, Versnel 2011.
32 Cf. Naiden 2006: 47–50. Athena was worshiped in Homeric and historical Troy: Il. 6.297–311, Hdt. 7.43, Xen. Hel. 1.1.4. Rose 2014: 54–59 supposes that a temple for her was standing in Alcaeus’ day.
33 Delayed divine punishment: Garvie 1986: 61; the dangers of sailing with even one impious man: Parker 1983: 9, who generalizes that “there was, in Greek belief, no such thing as non-contagious religious danger” (257).
34 See especially Lentini 1999, 2001. Liberman 1999: lxxxvii–xci, 2007: 55–56 advanced and then retracted the most developed arguments for Sapphic authorship.
35 ὄμφακος ὠμᾶς, “unripe grape” (Theoc. 11.21; cf. Alc. 119.16); tolle cupidinem | immitis uvae, “renounce the desire for the unripe grape” (Hor. Odes 2.5.9–10; cf. Alc. 119.15–16); tandem nequitiae fige modum tuae, “at last put an end to your wantonness” (Hor. Odes 3.15.2; cf. Alc. 119.5–7), addressed to an old woman whose daughter is more suited for erotic and sympotic pursuits. If the interpretation adopted above is correct, Alcaeus fr. 119 emerges as a primary intertext for this Horatian ode.
36 Contrast Men. Pk. 1013–1014, reflecting the formulaic language of betrothal: “I give her to you for the harvesting of legitimate children.”