CHAPTER 24

Bacchylides

David Fearn

Together with Pindar and Simonides, Bacchylides forms the triad of early classical choral lyric poets, celebrated for their commemorations of individuals, groups, festivals, and myths in a range of lyric forms including, in Bacchylides’ case, particularly victory odes and dithyrambs. The majority of his extant work only survives through late nineteenth-century Egyptian papyrus-finds, including most notably the celebrated “London Bacchylides” papyrus discovered in 1896 and published the following year.1

Throughout the years following this discovery, comparison with the better-known works of Pindar was in general not favorable.2 In important respects this comparison follows on from ancient polemics found in scholia and ancient literary criticism.3 Bacchylides should not, however, be dismissed out of hand as an inferior rival, though we can acknowledge the complex distinctiveness of Pindar’s handling of lyric form and expression (see Brown (Chapter 23) in this volume). In a number of important respects Bacchylides pursues opportunities opened up by the earlier relation between the Greek epic and lyric traditions that Pindar does not exploit to the same degree (see Kelly (Chapter 3) in this volume). Distinctive features of Bacchylidean lyric style include: the presence of extended vivid narrative; extensive intertextuality; prominent use of simile. This chapter will elaborate on the significance of these formal features as a contribution to ancient Greek lyric poetics. Discussion will begin with the issue of Bacchylides’ contexts before moving on to some case studies from across the range of genres prominent in his extant work.

Individuals and Cities, Gods and Celebration: Subjects and Contexts

Bacchylides is associated with a range of highly prominent individuals and communities across the Greek world throughout the first half of the fifth century BC. Commissions relating to his island-home of Ceos, lying a short distance off the south coast of Attica, feature strongly (Bacch. 1, 2, 6 and 7; cf. Bacch. 17). Among his earliest commissions may be fr. 20B, a sympotic encomium for Alexander I of Macedon, a figure who also features in Herodotus,4 and Bacch. 13, a victory ode for a patron from the island of Aegina, a commission that forms a pair with Pindar’s Nemean 5 and datable within the mid-late 480s BC; Bacchylides’ latest victory odes stretch down to the 450s.5 His most prominent commission was for Hieron of Syracuse, commemorating his Olympic chariot-race victory of 468: Bacch. 3.

A diverse range of commissions is represented in the book of victory odes. Along with commissions celebrating major achievements in the crown games6 (including three compositions for Hieron of Syracuse out of the fifteen poems collected in the book of victory odes, in addition to one further fragmentary encomium for him, fr. 20C, celebrating victories at Delphi and Olympia), Bacchylides also commemorated, in addition to Ceos, other less well-known localities such as Phlius (Bacch. 9) and Metapontum (Bacch. 11).

Bacchylides’ book of dithyrambs contains poems that provide precious evidence to support the idea that dithyramb as a form was particularly associated with narrative, as claimed by Plato (Rep. 3.394b–c), even if this takes us only as far back as Hellenistic editorial practice and its implicit indebtedness to Platonic genre-theory. Bacchylides’ dithyrambs also provide important poetic comparanda to set against the stylistic features of the victory odes, in addition to the information they may provide to shed much-needed light on the murky world of this ancient poetic form.7 It is difficult to assess fully the distinctiveness of Bacchylides’ lyric output through treatment of individual genres in isolation, especially given the preponderance toward narrative vividness and myth-making across the lyric forms represented in his extant works. Across genres, Bacchylides’ manipulations of narrative technique seemingly build on a number of significant interventions made by previous lyric poets, and may owe much to Stesichorus and Simonides in particular, though given the fragmentary nature of the evidence available this is difficult to assess with any great confidence.

The fragmentary nature of the collection of dithyrambs, likewise, makes for easier identification of poems’ myths than it does for their contexualization within specific festivals, though we should also be wary of assuming that poetic form or genre can be neatly equated with performance context.

In some cases, the poems do readily specify an association with Dionysiac festivity. Bacch. 19, “Io, for the Athenians,” is a case in point. It offers praise of Athens in line 10 and refers to Dionysus, in its culminating aetiological-come-teleological end-point, as “lord of wreath-bearing choruses” in line 51. Yet no specific festival is mentioned, and the poem’s aetiological drive would allow the poem to be suitable for repeat performance across the range of Athenian festivals in honor of this god.

In other cases, though, Bacchylides’ dithyrambs refer to their own performance conditions in even more roundabout, oblique, or complex ways. Bacch. 16, given the title “Heracles, for Delphi” in modern editions, has a fragmentary opening that speaks of “hymns” and “paeans” before segueing into its myth of the downfall of Heracles, without using any generic terminology to specify any degree of explicit “dithyrambic” identity for the present song, or its associations with the Dionysiac. Similarly, it refers in general terms and in the past tense to the number of choruses of Delphians (line 11) that sang (or sing: it is possible but not certain that κελάδησαν, line 12, is gnomic8) around Apollo’s temple, without specifying the nature of its own performance conditions. Indeed, the segue between performances honoring Apollo and the present song is extremely terse, marked simply by πρίν γε κλέομεν, “before such time, we celebrate,” line 13. This appears to indicate both the separation and complementarity between Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi, though without even mentioning the latter, and using a narrative of disaster as a potential symbolic stand-in. We may read in a Dionysiac Delphic performance-context for the poem on this basis if we wish, but we should also note how the poem’s complex performative temporalities and abrupt switch to mythological narrative precisely preclude our ability to pin down original performance conditions. This is one significant marker of the way in which mythological narrative is used in Bacchylides to open out meaning, rather than to circumscribe it around a discrete contextual specification. The extent to which the narrative of Heracles’ downfall can itself symbolically stand in for the Dionysiac in the absence of any other reference is difficult to assess. It may be that πρίν γε κλέομεν, “before such time,” line 13, is sufficient to suggest this shift to Dionysus, but we may also consider the possibility of audience associations of negative or disastrous mythology with Dionysiac festivity through their awareness of at least the association between such mythology and the institution of tragedy at the Athenian City Dionysia, whatever we think about the initial performance conditions of this poem.

In the notorious case of Bacch. 17, similarly the poem provides no explicit reference to Dionysus, and in fact ends with a coda celebrating Ceian choral culture in honor of Apollo on Delos. This does not mean that Dionysiac elements within the poem’s myth-making may not have been felt, or that, in some sense, it is “wrong” to think of this poem as dithyrambic. This is especially so given the poem’s likely Athenocentric coloring since the poem recounts “the glorious deeds of Theseus” and contrasts them to what appears to be the rapaciousness of Minos—a figure elsewhere treated in Bacchylides’ victory odes as culture-hero for the islanders of his own home of Ceos9—, together with what we know of the prominence of the mythology of Theseus in significant aspects of Athens’ later archaic and classical festivity, most notably the Thargelia.10 But we should be prepared to think more creatively and flexibly about how the formal and stylistic features of, and indeed interpretative difficulties associated with, Bacchylidean lyric expression shape what we necessarily go on to consider to be the poems’ cultural impact.

Elsewhere, the poems simply refuse to provide framing details specifying their conditions of performance or reception. Bacch. 15, “The Sons of Antenor, or the Request for the Return of Helen,” is purely mythological, with a pointed lack of framing, even at the end, where Menelaus’ message is left hanging in mythological space. Bacch. 18, “Theseus, for the Athenians,” is an idiosyncratic and as yet unique kind of hybrid between choral lyric and what is generally but rather unhelpfully called a kind of “dramatic” exchange, but, again, with no contextualizing frame.11

That these poems are not so obliging as some might like in this regard is, in fact, rather liberating. It may indeed be recognized that a lack of precise contextual specifiability makes these texts’ cultural power and resonance more easy to argue for, rather than less, especially if this means that we think more directly about form and poetic style, affect, and aesthetics.12

There may be a much looser connection than is often assumed between poetic form or generic identity and specificity of performance contextualization, across the wide range of lyric forms,13 especially if ancient and modern scholarly debates reveal a basic lack of precise tessellation between lyric genres, poetic form, and performance contexts. Even in the case of victory odes, it is not at all clear that limiting the reception or contexualization of these poem’s “messages” to the specific conditions of their patrons can provide a recipe for success for the broader assessment of the cultural significance of these lyric modes of expression.14 We will see later the subtle ways that Bacchylides’ texts manage to negotiate, and thus open up to scrutiny, the very question of our access to the settings, contexts, or events his poems seem so simply to present to us. Returning again, though, to his dithyrambs, the sense we get of how complex they are to contextualize is an important fact the consequences of which we should strive to factor in more widely, in order to do full justice to the literary qualities and cultural value of Bacchylides and Greek lyric more widely. Let us now move on to consider some distinctive features of Bacchylides’ work across a representative sample of his output.

Victory Odes

At their simplest, Bacchylides’ victory odes can be very simple indeed, containing the bare minimum of features required to identify and celebrate a victor and his homeland. Here, in full, is Bacchylides 2, for Argeios of Keos, victor in the boys’ boxing(?) at the Isthmian Games:

Make haste, giver of majesty, Report, to holy Ceos, and carry the message of gracious name, that in the bold-fisted fighting Argeios won the victory, and reminded us of all the fine achievements we displayed at the famous neck of Isthmus when we left the sacred island of Euxantios and won 70 garlands. The local Muse calls for the sweet sound of pipes, glorifying with victory-songs Pantheides’ dear son.

The poem achieves in short compass everything a victory ode needs to celebrate its subject successfully. It mentions the victor, his victory, his homeland, and, through his father, his family. It also alludes to the mythology of his home, and Ceos’ previous successes, thus succinctly placing Argeios’ achievement within a range of other traditions.15

The poem’s brevity may be associated with two possibilities. First, this is a likely representative of the smaller-scale compositions created more spontaneously in the immediate aftermath of the victory and performed—in this case—at the Isthmian Games, building on and reinforcing the structural ways in which the sanctuary itself proclaimed and maintained records of its victors.16 Second, this is a companion-piece to the much lengthier composition commemorating the same victory, Bacch. 1, chosen by the Alexandrian editors to begin the collection of Bacchylides’ victory odes. That poem narrates in detail (though now fragmentarily) the mythical foundation of Ceos by Euxantios son of Minos, an aspect alluded to in passing here in Bacch. 2 in the periphrasis for Ceos as “the sacred island of Euxantios.”

I begin with this example not only because it provides a simple illustration of the formal features of an epinician poem in Bacchylides’ hands, but because it also illustrates the pleasant stylistic simplicity of this poet, an aspect that has become something of an albatross around his neck from antiquity onward, famously articulated by “Longinus”:

Take lyric poetry: would you rather be Bacchylides or Pindar? Take tragedy: would you rather be Ion of Chios or Sophocles? Ion and Bacchylides are impeccable, uniformly beautiful writers in the polished manner; but it is Pindar and Sophocles who sometimes set the world on fire with their vehemence, for all that their flame often goes out without reason and they collapse dismally.

([Longinus], De subl. 33.4–5, trans. Russell)

However, while Bacchylides’ lyric style may appear at times very simple—perhaps especially by contrast with Pindar’s famed complexity and density of expression—Bacchylides’ virtues, and his interpretability, may yet be subtle. Pindar may hit us between the eyes, as it were, with shocking paradoxes or challenging metaphors (Longinus writes in terms of “vehemence” or “intensity,” φορά, and “greatness of spirit,” μεγαλοφροσύνη). But Bacchylides frequently uses the allusive power of narrative not only to charm but also to challenge us.17

One of the best-known features of victory odes is the general tendency of the form to zone out from actual moments of success, in fact generally eschewing descriptions of them, to focus instead on what success might feel like, or how such success might be more broadly framed or assessed. Pindar exemplifies this in perhaps the most famous burst of authoritative assertion anywhere in the corpus, as follows:

Creatures of a day: What is someone? What is no one? A shadow’s dream, man (σκιᾶς ὄναρ ἄνθρωπος). But whenever the god-given glitter of success does arrive, a bright light falls on men and life is sweet.

(Pindar, Pythian 8.95–7)

Pindar’s stark simplicity of assertion, “a shadow’s dream: man,” projects a shocking and hyperbolical paradox to articulate the universal profundity of truth about the human condition and the evanescence of success. Pindar’s rarefied genius for poetic terseness expresses, and indeed even exemplifies, a sense of the rarefied remoteness and potential evanescence of true achievement.

Bacchylides is, by contrast, able to articulate a similar idea in an entirely different manner. He chooses, quite unlike Pindar, to offer a description of a moment of success, and, through an intertextual compression that grants the moment a highly evocative character, to offer a more subtle, understated articulation of the same basic thought as Pindar. The result is an evocation of the evanescence and remoteness of success delivered in a perhaps more typically lyrical way.18

Here is an excerpt from Bacchylides 9:

Αὐτομήδει νῦν γε νικά-

σαντί νιν δαίμων ἔ[δ]ωκεν,

πενταέθλοισιν γὰρ ἐνέπρεπεν ὡς

ἄστρων διακρίνει φάη

νυκτὸς διχομήνιδο[ς] εὐφεγγὴς σελάνα·

τοῖος Ἑλλάνων δι’ ἀπ̣[εί]ρονα κύκλον

φαῖνε̣ θαυμ̣[α]στὸν δέμ̣ας

δίσκον τροχοειδέα ῥίπτων,

καὶ μελαμφύλλου κλάδον

ἀκτέας ἐς αἰπεινὰν προπέμπων

αἰθέρ’ ἐκ χειρὸς βοὰν ὤτρυνε λαῶν·

ἦ τε[λε]υτάσας ἀμάρυγμα πάλας

τοίω[ι θ’ ὑπερθ]ύ̣μωι σ[θένε]ι

γυια[λκέα σώ]ματα [πρὸς γ]αίαι πελάσσα[ς

ἵκετ’ [Ἀσωπὸ]ν πάρα πορφυροδίναν̣·

τοῦ κ[λέος π]ᾶσαν χθόνα

ἦλθε[ν καὶ] ἐπ’ ἐσχάτα Νείλου...

And now to Automedes, in victory, fate has granted this honour. He shone out among his fellow pentathletes as the beautiful moon on a mid-month night outshines the light of stars. Even so in the boundless circle of Greeks he demonstrated his wonderful physique, throwing the wheel-shaped discus, and hurling forth the branch of the black-leaved elder from his hand into the sheer sky he roused the shout of acclaim from those watching. Yes, in finishing with the flashing of his wrestling with such overwhelming strength did he bring strong-limbed bodies to the ground before returning to the red-eddying Asopus, whose fame has traversed over all the earth even to the ends of the Nile.

(Bacchylides 9.21–41)

Bacchylides presents a vivid description of the moments of success achieved by Automedes of Phlius at the Nemean Games, a dynamic act of persuasion and authentication to relay the victor’s achievement.19 The vividness of the description has indeed led a prominent art-historian to offer it up as a point of comparison for the sculptural allure of Myron’s celebrated Diskobolos statue.20 Yet the vividness of the scene provides the entry point to the deeper issue. For there is a fundamentally lyric literarity in Bacchylides’ mode of expression here: not simply vivid narration, but evocative use of simile and allusive language. The comparison of Automedes to the full moon evokes and appropriates an important earlier moment in the Greek lyric tradition, when Sappho expresses loss and longing, consolation to Atthis for separation from a lost beloved now absent in Lydia:

νῦν δὲ Λύδαισιν ἐμπρέπεται γυναί-

κεσσιν ὤς ποτ’ ἀελίω

δύντος ἀ βροδοδάκτυλος σελάννα

πάντα περρέχοισ’ ἄστρα · φάος δ’ ἐπί-

σχει θάλασσαν ἐπ’ ἀλμύραν

ἴσως καὶ πολυανθέμοις ἀρούραις·

ἀ δ’ ἐέρσα κάλα κέχυται, τεθά-

λαισι δὲ βρόδα κἄπαλ’ ἄν-

θρυσκα καὶ μελίλωτος ἀνθεμώδης·

πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ’, ἀγάνας ἐπι-

μνάσθεισ’ Ἄτθιδος ἰμέρωι

λέπταν ποι φρένα κ[ᾶ]ρ̣[ι σᾶι] βόρηται·

Now she stands out among Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon after sunset, surpassing all stars, and its light spreads alike over the salt sea and the flowery fields; the dew is shed in beauty, and roses bloom and tender chervil and flowery melilot. Often as she goes to and fro she remembers gentle Atthis and doubtless her tender heart is consumed because of your fate.

(Sappho fr. 96.6–17 Campbell)

Allusion to Sappho is not simply a way of subtly praising the erotic allure of Automedes’ physicality. It is another way of articulating the evanescence of success: moments of victory are vivid, and make people and the places that are their homes famous; but is the very essence of kleos (renown) that it enforces a separation between us and the people, and places, we want to access through it. Lyric kleos articulates for us the paradoxical nature of our desire to be there, be like that, or feel like that, in the full knowledge that access to those things is endlessly deferred, however desired. As the Homeric Iliad put it so well, “fame is all that we hear, and we know nothing” (Iliad 2.486).

In Sappho 96 the light of the moon traversing and lighting up a beautiful landscape provides an evocative figure for the fame of the absent beloved, as well as for the fame of Sappho’s own poetics.21 In Sappho, the transference of the sun’s characteristic epic epithet (βροδοδάκτυλος, “rosy-fingered,” of the dawn) to the moon lends to the moon “the quality of sunrise only because the sun is not there.”22 In Bacchylides the specification of the time of the moonlight as “midmonth” subtly marks the transience of the victor’s success: the victor, like the moon, will wane.23

In Bacchylides, the motif is transmuted into the hyperbolic voyaging fame of the river Asopos and of Phlius itself, but the flipside is that the further the fame extends—in time as well as space—the more remote that original place, that original moment of success, becomes. The spatial metaphor maps difference and distance. In reception terms, that instantiates our interpretative remoteness from the people, places, and events being celebrated, set in tension against the desire for Automedes and Phlius to become the center of our attention, the desire, set up by that vividness, for the events to be made real for us.24

The language of “flashing” (ἀμάρυγμα, line 36) in the alluring physicality of Automedes’ wrestling throws has a similar effect, too. Again, this picks up a distinctive moment in Sappho, in fr. 16, where something in that poem’s myth of Helen reminds Sappho of Anactoria. There the same word, ἀμάρυχμα, is used of the glitter of Anactoria’s face, a fleeting moment, a movement, a recollection: an absence.25 See the following lines:

I would rather see her lovely walk and the flashing gleam (κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον) of her face than the chariots of Lydia and their armed infantry.

(Sappho fr. 16.17–20 Campbell)

That the vivid description of the success of the victor Automedes here in Bacchylides is imbued with a dense Sapphic intertextuality further emphasizes, and projects, and continues to replay and recall, the impossibility of reaching across the divide mapped by lyric kleos. And yet, paradoxically, the lyric traditionality of the assertion continues to authorize the validity of the exercise of lyric commemoration, in the full awareness of its own basic futility. The depth and specificity of this intertextuality within vivid description is a characteristically Bacchylidean contribution to epinician and more broadly lyric poetics.

Another example of Bacchylides’ characteristic use of simile, this time within myth, comes in his best-known poem, Bacch. 5, composed for Hieron of Syracuse, and containing an extended narrative of Heracles’ encounter with the soul of Meleager in the underworld. Lines 63–67 provide a simile, the epic intertextuality of which marks not only the simile’s appropriateness for the new setting but also its transformation of the original:

ἔνθα δυστάνων βροτῶν

ψυχὰς ἐδάη παρὰ Κωκυτοῦ ῥεέθροις,

οἷά τε φύλλ’ ἄνεμος

Ἴδας ἀνὰ μηλοβότους

πρῶνας ἀργηστὰς δονεῖ.

There he recognized the souls of wretched mortals by the waters of the river Cocytus, like leaves which the wind over Ida’s sheep-grazed bright peaks buffets …

The vehicle’s combination of Trojan geography (in the mention of mount Ida) with implicit reference to the meeting between Glaucus and Diomedes and specifically to Glaucus’ simile comparing human life to the leaves at Iliad 6.146–9 parades the relation between lyric narration and specifically Homeric mortality. Bacchylides’ version modifies the Homeric original into a pictorially more impressive image, and while Homer’s simile deals with the cyclical aspect of birth and death, Bacchylides’ elaborates upon only one feature of Homer’s, the moment when the wind blows the leaves to the ground: the moment when lives are lost.26 The souls appear to Heracles in a way that lyrically reanimates the original moment of their separation from mortal bodies, via the beautiful description of a literary landscape.

This focus also subtly anticipates Meleager’s recollection of the exact moment when he went from being a living hero to a soul in Hades, in lines 151–158. His mournful cry evokes the wailing lamentation of some of those notable departing Iliadic souls:27

μίνυθεν δέ μοι ψυχὰ γλυκεῖα·

γνῶν δ’ ὀλιγοσθενέων,

αἰαῖ· πύματον δὲ πνέων δάκρυσα τλά[μων,

ἀγλαὰν ἥβαν προλείπων.”

φασὶν ἀδεισιβόαν

Ἀμφιτρύωνος παῖδα μοῦνον δὴ τότε

τέγξαι βλέφαρον, ταλαπενθέος

πότμον οἰκτίροντα φωτός·

“… The sweetness of my spirit grew weak. I knew that my strength was ebbing away, alas! Breathing my last I wept, wretch, leaving my glorious youth behind.” They say that the battle-hardened son of Amphitryon only then wet his eyes with tears, pitying the fate of the unfortunate hero.

Here Meleager’s vocalization αἰαῖ, “alas,” provides an emotive transformation of the original Iliadic formulaic motif particularizing the deaths of Patroclus and Hector into something paradoxically more animated, more affecting, more close to us: more alive, even. The nature of Bacchylides’ lyric transformation of this original Homeric material specifies again an important characteristic of lyric’s communicational powers, and Bacchylides’ handling of it. That is, lyric’s special ability, through the power and insistency of the re-vocalizability of its assertions and points of view, to negotiate, and invite us implicitly to assess, the tension between distance and immediacy. The immediacy of Meleager’s affect on us and on Heracles is in direct opposition to his remoteness, even from Heracles, in death.

The question of the extent to which the Sicilian tyrant Hieron will himself feel an emotional connection with what is being narrated is an issue that is implicated in the poem’s myth of the encounter between Heracles and Meleager as well as in the poem’s opening—notably in lines 3–6, where the poet’s voice proclaims Hieron’s alleged pre-eminence in assessing rightly the work of the Muses.28 And it becomes part of the poem’s own claims on all subsequent interpreters and revocalizers of its structures of myth, thought, and emotional response. One of Bacchylides’ most distinctive contributions to lyric form in epinician poetry is his use of the various formal features of narrative subtly to reinforce the wider distinctiveness of lyric’s communicative powers. Bacchylides’ use of katabatic narrative here, including the use of direct speech, is a specific demonstration of lyric’s broader ability to reach across otherwise unbreachable boundaries of time and space and to speak to, and indeed be revoiced by, us, however paradoxically remote elements of that voicing inevitably become. The lyric “now” provides a continuing enunciative marker, rather than simply, if at all, a representation of an event in the past.29 Bacchylides’ appeal to his patron Hieron in lines 4–5 is made both in universalizing terms and via the ongoing ability for that sense of present time to be reconfigured to signify any subsequent point in the poem’s reception, with Hieron’s name carried along with it: τῶν γε νῦν αἴ τις ἐπιχθονίων, “[you, Hieron], of any mortals now.”

Dithyrambs

Further characteristic lyric uses of a vivid narrative style can be demonstrated from Bacchylides’ dithyrambs. Let us first consider the closing section of Bacchylides’ first dithyramb, Bacch. 15. In what is ostensibly exclusively mythological narrative, the Greek ambassador Menelaus gives a Trojan audience a moral warning, during the embassy seeking Helen’s return, within a poem whose detailed Homeric intertextuality weaves into the fabric of the pre-Iliadic events being described the potential prospect of their doomed Homeric outcomes.30 Here are lines 47–63, the last lines of the poem:

Μοῦσα, τίς πρῶτος λόγων ἆρχεν δικαίων;

Πλεισθενίδας Μενέλαος γάρυϊ θελξιεπεῖ

φθέγξατ’, εὐπέπλοισι κοινώσας Χάρισσιν·

“ὦ Τρῶες ἀρηΐφιλοι,

Ζεὺς ὑψιμέδων ὃς ἅπαντα δέρκεται

οὐκ αἴτιος θνατοῖς μεγάλων ἀχέων,

ἀλλ’ ἐν μέσωι κεῖται κιχεῖν

πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις Δίκαν ἰθεῖαν, ἁγνᾶς

Εὐνομίας ἀκόλουθον καὶ πινυτᾶς Θέμιτος·

ὀλβίων παῖδές νιν αἱρεῦνται σύνοικον.

ἁ δ’ αἰόλοις κ̣έ̣ρδεσσι καὶ ἀφροσύναις

ἐξαισίοις θάλλουσ’ ἀθαμβὴς

Ὕβρις, ἃ πλοῦ̣τ̣[ο]ν̣ δύναμίν τε θοῶς

ἀλλότριον ὤπασεν, αὖτις

δ̣’ ἐς βαθὺν πέμπει φθόρον·

[κε]ί̣να καὶ ὑπερφιάλους

[Γᾶς] παῖδας ὤλεσσεν Γίγαντας.”

Muse, who was the first to begin the words of righteousness? Pleisthenid Menelaos spoke with spell-binding words; the fair-robed Graces informed his speech: “Trojans, lovers of war, Zeus on high who sees all things is not accountable to mortals for their great woes. It lies open for all men to attain upright Justice, companion to pure Order and provident Law. Blessed are they whose sons choose her to share their homes. But, luxuriating in shifty cunning and outright folly, brazen Hybris, who swiftly hands a man another’s wealth and power, only to send him into deep ruin: she it was who destroyed those arrogant sons of Earth, the Giants.”

A particular characteristic of Bacchylides’ use of mythological narrative is a seeming closural abruptness. The consequences of this are felt in different ways according to individual manifestations. The closure of the myth of Bacch. 15, and similarly the myth of Heracles and Deianeira in Bacch. 16, promotes, it has been suggested, a certain ironic quality or outlook that Bacchylides is said to share with Homer and tragedy: “a cognitive divide between audience and character”; a “gulf between two levels of knowledge.”31 The sense of a divide is an important and distinctive characteristic. But so too is the penetration of the lyric voice from myth into our worlds, and its concomitant ability to open up to scrutiny, rather than to sanction the stability of the divide between, the relation between the past or the mythical and our presents and subjectivities as poetic consumers and as enacters of the lyric voices offered up.

With Bacch. 15, we may want to feel a sense of superiority over the Trojans who are unable, and not allowed by the poem’s lyric structure, to respond to Menelaus’ warnings: we may want to become moralizing enacters of Menelaus’ warnings. But at the same time we can also become the addressees of Menelaus’ words, as surrogates for the Trojans: as not only revocalizers of, but also as audiences for, Menelaus’ warnings. Lyric narrative thus contains the possibility of breaking down, rather than enforcing, the opposition between intra-mythical precarity and the security of performance and reception.32

With Bacch. 16, any intertextual relation of the poem’s doom-laden myth to tragedy is difficult to specify, given the problems of contextualization and conditions of initial and subsequent reception that the poem throws up. While we may agree that in Bacchylides there is often “simultaneous empathy and distance between participant and onlooker,”33 evoked, for instance, in the poem’s touching pity for Deianeira (especially line 30: ἆ δύσμορος, ἆ τάλ[αι]ν,’ οἷον ἐμήσατ[ο ·, “Ah, ill-starred woman, ah wretched woman, what a plan she devised!”), it is not clear that the equation of Bacchylidean lyric narrative with tragedy and Homeric epic will suffice. What is distinctively lyrical about Bacchylides’ mythological intervention in this case is not simply any strategic intertextuality or cross-genre symbolic association, but rather the ability of the lyric voice itself to emerge from narrative to provide the force for the ongoing negotiations between proximity (becoming, on Carey’s terms, empathy) and distance. The affecting directness of lyric’s ability to permit these mythological vignettes to be continuously revoiced by us is what distinguishes lyric from either Homeric epic or fifth-century tragedy, however affecting in other ways those literary forms most obviously are.

There are other ways of interpreting the relation between dithyrambic myths and their contexts of performance and reception, of course. The myth, and its framing, in Bacch. 17 is a case in point. Minos is conveying Theseus and the chosen young Athenians to Crete as an offering to the Minotaur. During the narrative, the abrupt vividness of which is marked by the ship’s “cleaving” of the Aegean sea (τάμνε, line 4) in the opening,34 the heroic Theseus steps in to avert the potential rape of Eriboia. Minos challenges Theseus to provide his divine ancestry by retrieving a ring from the sea. Theseus, to Minos’ amazement, reappears after an encounter with Amphitrite and the Nereids. The Athenians’ celebration then segues into the poem’s closing praise of Apollo and Delos by choruses, not of Athenians, but of Ceians:

μόλ’ ἀδίαντος ἐξ ἁλός

θαῦμα πάντεσσι, λάμ-

πε δ’ ἀμφὶ γυίοις θεῶν δῶρ’, ἀγλαό-

θρονοί τε κοῦραι σὺν εὐ-

θυμίαι νεοκτίτωι

ὠλόλυξαν, ἔ-

κλαγεν δὲ πόντος· ἠΐθεοι δ’ ἐγγύθεν

νέοι παιάνιξαν ἐρατᾶι ὀπί.

Δάλιε, χοροῖσι Κηΐων

φρένα ἰανθείς

ὄπαζε θεόπομπον ἐσθλῶν τύχαν.

He came back, not even wet, from the sea, a wonder for all to behold, and around his limbs the shone the gifts from the gods, and the shining-throned girls cried out in celebration with fresh enthusiasm, and the ocean clashed aloud also. And near him the young boys sang out a paean with delightful voice. Delian god, with your mind warmed by choruses of Keians, grant a fortune of blessings conveyed by god.

(Bacchylides 17.122–132)

The slippage between the Athenians of the myth and the choruses of Ceians connects the paeans of the myth with the Delian performance-culture in the frame, with a generic and geo-political twist. The mention of choruses, rather than a single performance, opens out the poem onto the prospect of ongoing re-performance on Delos, or, in addition or alternatively, further recontexualization of the centrally Athenian myth within the structures of Athenian choral culture, via the use of circular choruses across the Athenian festival spectrum.35

The poem’s close also projects the ongoing importance of Ceian choral culture to Athenian ideology through myth-making, in specific relation to Aegean sea-power. The Nereids, the vision of whom initially terrifies Theseus, perform a choral dance under the waves, according to which the narrator’s alluring description undermines Theseus’ anxiety:

τόθι κλυτὰς ἰδὼν

ἔδεισε⟨ν⟩ Νηρέος ὀλ-

βίου κόρας· ἀπὸ γὰρ ἀγλα-

ῶν λάμπε γυίων σέλας

ὧτε πυρός, ἀμφὶ χαίταις

δὲ χρυσεόπλοκοι

δίνηντο ταινίαι· χορῶι δ’ ἔτερ-

πον κέαρ ὑγροῖσι ποσσίν.

There he was afraid at the sight of the glorious daughters of blessed Nereus. For from their splendid limbs there shone a light like fire, and in their hair there twirled ribbons banded with gold. And they were delighting their hearts in a chorus with liquid feet.

(Bacchylides 17.101–108)

In turn, this divine dancing becomes, as an anticipation of the poem’s close, a further authenticating paradigm for Athenian ideological preeminence via myth, religion, and performance culture.

The success of Bacch. 17 as an instantiation of the Ceians’ cultural subjection to the forces of Athenian myth-making is uncertain. The fact that the choral lyric texts of not only Bacchylides, in his epinicians as we have already seen, but also Pindar (Paean 4) continue to project alternative and seemingly independent visions of Ceian epichoric myth-making, and were successfully transmitted as such, suggests that alternative accounts were always in play, however dominant the Athenian cultural imposition was felt, from the Athenian perspective at least, to have been. Indeed, even within Athenian choral culture there is a sense self-critique, as comedy subsequently found itself able to hold up for ridicule the metaphorical objectification of subject-states through sexual metaphor. It was easy for the kinds of myths of benevolent control represented by Theseus’ successful protection of Eriboia to become subject to cultural and political critique, given the centrality of chorality to Athenian fifth-century self-definition.36

Other Genres

The full range of ancient lyric genres are represented in Bacchylides’ works. In addition to victory odes and dithyrambs, these included hymns, paeans, prosodia (“processional songs”), partheneia (“maiden songs”), hyporchemata (loosely termed “dance-songs”), and “erotika” (“love songs”), and fragments and excerpts of a number of these survive. I end this survey with a short discussion of a passage from a fragmentary paean for Apollo Pythaieus at Asine, one of the most original in Bacchylides.37

Within the remains of this poem is a particularly brilliant articulation of peace and what peace means: a distinctively new expression of peace as a universal blessing, a desired state rather than an expression of internal harmony potentially predicated upon external conflicts.38 Peace, the poem claims, brings wealth, song, religious festivity, sport, and of course music. Bacchylides makes particularly evocative assertions in the following lines:

ἐν δὲ σιδαροδέτοις πόρπαξιν αἰθᾶν

ἀραχνᾶν ἱστοὶ πέλονται,

ἔγχεα τε λογχωτὰ ξίφεα

τ’ ἀμφάκεα δάμναται εὐρώς.

⟨ ⟩

χαλκεᾶν δ’ οὐκ ἔστι σαλπίγγων κτύπος,

οὐδὲ συλᾶται μελίφρων

ὕπνος ἀπὸ βλεφάρων

ἀῶιος ὃς θάλπει κέαρ.

συμποσίων δ’ ἐρατῶν βρίθοντ’ ἀγυιαί,

παιδικοί θ’ ὕμνοι φλέγονται.

On iron-pinned shield-grips brown spiders’ webs are found, and sharp spears and double-edged swords are overcome by rust. There is no din of bronze trumpets, and there is no looting of sleep, honey for the mind, from eyelids—sleep which soothes the heart at daybreak. Cities burgeon with pleasant symposia, and the songs of boys blaze forth.

(Bacchylides frr. 22 + 4.69–80)

The power of these lines lies in their detailed and subtle reversal, through lyric language, metaphor, and syntax, of earlier articulations of the effects and consequences of the opposite of peace, that is, war.

First, the detail of the spiders’ webs reverses some distinctive aspects of the militaristic language and tropes of earlier epic. In lines 69–70, the description of the red spiders’ webs on the shield-grips sets up only to deny an epic-style ecphrastic description of decorative weaponry. Most notably, in the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18, and in other archaic ecphrases, the repetition of ἐν δὲ…, “and upon it,” provides an ecphrastic marker.39 Bacchylides sets up the prospects of an epic-style ecphrasis of weapons, but transfers the color-term from the materiality being described onto the creature that symbolizes the reversal and redundancy of that weaponry. The spiders are colored, not the metals whose decoration militaristic epic found itself able to celebrate. Moreover, sense dictates that the spiders themselves are “real” lyric spiders, not ecphrastic epic spiders, as it were, artistically depicted on functional weapons ready for use (spiders are not, of course, the kinds of creatures naturally depicted on such weapons).40 Bacchylides has allowed these small creatures to escape, as it were, an ecphrastic domain and inhabit a lyric world able to fundamentally control and pacify the warlike through a playful subversion of the epic tradition of describing motifs on weapons.

Bacchylides goes on to achieve a similar effect through the combination of traditional vocabulary of violence with a reversal of syntax and word-order that transforms literal violence into metaphorical pacification. The word-order of the following clause initially suggests that the spears and swords (neuter-plurals) may be the subjects of the warlike singular verb (δάμναται: “subdue,” “overcome,” “kill”), before the intervention of the nominative εὐρώς, “rust,” conspicuously positioned at sentence-end, transforms both syntax and sense.

In the remainder, Bacchylides appropriates and redirects epic diction denoting destruction, transforming it into metaphor connoting peace. συλᾶται, 76, which means “is looted,” most directly “steals,” as it were, the martial vocabulary of robbery and destruction, as a sign of its metaphorical negation, within a subtle progression in carefully combined diction.41 The final word of this passage, φλέγονται, “blaze forth,” picks up typically hyperbolic metaphorical and synaesthetic lyric usage connoting celebration,42 but in this context also recalls real conflagrations that can destroy cities in war, and indeed how the literary tradition going back to Homer’s Iliad had used figuration to implicate and anticipate the destruction of Troy in the actions of its protagonists, while implying that lyric can use literary tropes to make opposing points.43

The effects are powerful partly because Bacchylides’ ability to highlight through lyric structure these very acts of appropriation constantly recalls their epic and militaristic origins and associations. We are thus reminded of the fragility of peace at the moment of its most distinctive articulation in Greek lyric. Here, we might say, Bacchylides is at his most Simonidean, intensifying things that are absent through the articulation of their very negation.44

Conclusions

The passages discussed here are, I hope, illustrative of a range of ways in which Bacchylides contributed substantively to Greek lyric poetics, understood within but also beyond initial contexts of performance and reception. In particular, Bacchylides’ use of narrative, simile, and the subtle power of lyric speech help to emphasize the diversity of ways in which meaning can be generated across lyric genres. Bacchylides’ engagement with specific contexts further reveals the complexities of the interactions between lyric form and the broader cultural, social, religious, and political frames in which it operated. Moreover, Bacchylides’ use of the specific tropes identified and discussed here may not only contribute to an assessment of the distinctive ways in which lyric communicated in antiquity and continues to communicate to us now. It may indeed continue to help us appreciate that it is lyric’s uncanny temporality of voicing that allows for the very gap between context and the moments of lyric vocalization to be constantly renegotiated.

In a fragmentary hyporcheme (fr. 5), Bacchylides’ lyric voice asserted most explicitly the sense that creativity is generated out of an indebtedness to what has gone before:

ἕτερος ἐξ ἑτέρου σοφός

τό τε πάλαι τό τε νῦν

One man learns his skill from another, both in former times and now.

(Bacchylides fr. 5.1–2)

This captures succinctly the intertextuality of Bacchylidean lyric. Yet, in the continuing projection of this idea into the future as we assess and consume lyric poetics, we may also use this assertion to authenticate lyric itself as a creative resource for shaping our own ongoing cultural understandings and creativities. There is an important sense in which Bacchylides’ lyric “now” is also, always, our “now.”

FURTHER READING

Recent treatments of Bacchylides include the commentaries by Maehler, in two original volumes (Maehler 1982 and 1997) covering victory odes and dithyrambs and fragments, now conveniently available in shorter compass in Maehler 2004; also now Cairns 2010. Pfeijffer and Slings 1999b and Bagordo and Zimmermann 2000 contain some important discussions, especially that of Carey 1999. Earlier treatments include Burnett 1985, Lefkowitz 1976, and of course Jebb 1905. I have covered Bacchylides in a number of books and articles since 2003 including in the broader context of Greek lyric scholarship in Fearn 2020. For comparison of Bacchylides and Pindar in a variety of ways, see most recently Most 2012, and Fearn 2017: chapter 4, also including Simonides. For important critical-theoretical work on Greek lyric from comparativist angles, I strongly recommend Payne 2006 and 2007, and more recently Culler 2015. For important earlier treatments of Bacchylidean lyric structure, narrative, and intertextuality, see Lefkowitz 1969 and Goldhill 1983. The best concise treatment of significant aspects of Bacchylidean style remains Segal 1976. The most accessible text and translation is by Campbell Vol IV; the most recent critical edition is Maehler 2003. I can also strongly recommend the poetic translation by Fagles, with notes—often highly suggestive—by Adam Parry.

Notes

1 Kenyon 1897, cf. Budge 1920: ii.345–355, Fearn 2010.

2 See Stern 1970 and Pfeijffer and Slings 1999a.

3 E.g., ΣΣ Pind. Ol. 2.154b, Nem. 3.143; Pyth. 2.163b, 166d, 171bcd (i.98–99, iii.62; ii.58, 60 Dr); cf. Lefkowitz (1981) 57; [Long.] De subl. 33.5.

4 Esp. Hdt. 5.17–22, 8.136–143, and 9.44–45.

5 See further Cairns 2010: 3–4.

6 On these contests see Nicholson (Chapter 4) in this volume.

7 See further in detail Fearn 2007 ch. 3 and Fearn 2013, D’Alessio 2013: esp. 119–122.

8 Cf. Maehler II.160 ad loc.

9 See Fearn 2011c.

10 Cf. Fearn 2007: 242–256 and 2013, Rutherford 2004, Wilson 2007 on the Thargelia.

11 Cf. D’Angour 2013: 206, Calame 2013: 346–349 esp. 349, Fearn 2007: 193, Maehler 2004: 193, Zimmermann 1992: 95–98.

12 Cf. Felski 2015: 191: “Talking about the force and the lure of art works need not commit us to breathless effusions or antipolitical sentiments. It can open the way to a renewed engagement with art and its entanglement with social life—in such a way that texts are no longer typecast as either heroic dissidents or slavish sycophants of power.”

13 Cf. Fearn 2007: 220 with Kurke 1991: 1.

14 Cf. Payne 2006: 182: “The idea that the poem’s meaning is exhausted in its immediate historical context is alien to the atemporal rhetoric of the poem itself. A reading that is faithful to this rhetoric will be one that endeavors to respond as the “you” the poem addresses, rather than one that attempts to imagine the response of someone else. The poems are not founded upon a “single-use” aesthetic but look toward their future reception.” See also Culler 2015.

15 Gelzer 1985, Fearn 2011c: 220–221.

16 Cf. interdisciplinary studies of victory odes and epigraphic commemoration: e.g., Fenno 2003, Day 2010: ch. 2, Day 2013.

17 See Most 2012 for a different articulation of the relation between Pindar and Bacchylides. Also important discussion in Carey 1999, esp. 18–19.

18 That is, if we consider Pindar’s gnomic provocations as both radical and sustained, yet, in terms of both intensity and frequency, unlike what we find elsewhere in Greek lyric.

19 This is one of three detailed descriptions of athletic success in Bacchylides, the others being Bacch. 5.37–55 (Hieron’s thoroughbred Pherenikos at Olympia) and Bacch. 10.21–32 (an Isthmian victor’s collapse into the arms of the spectators at the end of the sprint); see further Hadjimichael 2015.

20 Neer 2010: 91.

21 Cf. fr. 55.1–3 Campbell, “in death you will lie there and afterwards there will be no memory of you, nor any longing for you: for you will have no share in the roses, those from Pieria [the home of the Muses]”.

22 Macleod 1974: 220 = Macleod 1983: 19.

23 Fearn 2003: 364.

24 For broader points about Sapphic lyric as a vehicle for understanding Classics as a process of longing, a desiring negotiation with the past, see duBois 1995: ch. 1 esp. 27–30. On literary enchantment and fascination, see Felski 2008: ch. 2 and Baumbach 2015.

25 So Phillips 2017: “Sappho gives us a snapshot as evanescent as it is arresting. What is recalled is not the precise contours of a specific face, but a visual impression the motility of which carries over into recollection. Her ‘lovely walk’ similarly blends immediacy and fleetingness. The phrase flickers with Anactoria’s physical allure, but the particular qualities that made her beauty distinctively hers, as well as the wider context in which it occurs elude us (is she walking toward or away from Sappho? Is Sappho remembering a ‘walk’ that she saw often, or just once?). As we try to imagine Anactoria and realize how little we have to go on, we replay Sappho’s longing for her past.”

26 Bacchylides reworks Homer’s φύλλα τὰ μέν τ’ ἄνεμο? χαμάδι? χέει‚ “leaves which the wind pours to the ground.”

27 Cf. Fearn (2010): 327–328 for further discussion of the specific Iliadic intertextuality within this scene, with Stern 1967: 41, Lefkowitz 1969, Goldhill 1983, Hom. Il. 16.856–857 = 22.362–363: ψυχὴ δ’ ἐκ ῥεθέων πταμένη Ἄιδόσδε βεβήκει, | ὃν πότμον γοόωσα, λιποῦσ’ ἀνδροτῆτα καὶ ἥβην, “and his soul, flying from his limbs, made its way to Hades, bewailing its fate, forsaking youth and manhood.”

28 Cf. Maehler I.2 118 ad loc. 162–164, with the emphasis on correctness of assessment or recognition: γνωσηι … ὄρθως.

29 For further discussion of lyric temporalities in Pindar, see Fearn 2017 ch. 3; more widely, Culler 2015, esp. 294–295: “the vivid yet indeterminate now of an undetermined time of articulation”; a “‘floating now,’ repeated each time the poem is read.”

30 See esp. Fearn 2007: 267–294 for the details of Homeric, Hesiodic, and Solonian intertextuality.

31 Carey 1999: 26, an important discussion.

32 Cf. Fearn 2007: 288–294.

33 Carey 1999: 26.

34 Cf. Fearn 2017: 255–256 for this kind of “cutting” as a marker of the vividness of Bacchylidean narrative, with Bacch. 5.16–5.17.

35 Factoring in circular choruses as a more broadly applicable performance-mode for narrative choral lyric across a range of festival contexts including both Apolline and Dionysiac ones renders the question of the poem’s classification as either dithyramb or paean, an issue which has bothered both ancient and modern scholars and editors, somewhat moot; cf. n. 9. Earlier scholarship: Maehler 2004: 173 with POxy. 2368 col. i for evidence of the ancient debate; Käppel 2000, García Romero 2000, Schröder 1999, Ieranò 1997, D’Alessio 1997, Zimmermann 1992 and 2000, Käppel and Kannicht 1988, ultimately Pickard-Cambridge 1927/1962.

36 See in particular Eupolis, Cities fr. 246. Chorality and Athenian identity: now classically Wilson 2000.

37 Cf. Maehler 2004: 232 ad loc. 69–70 and 233 ad loc. 71–72.

38 So Maehler 2004: 226.

39 Cf. the frequency of ἐν in the shield of Achilles between Hom. Il. 18.481 and 607; similar usage of ἐν in Hes. Scut., sixteen times between lines 144 and 216.

40 Cf., by way of contrast, Hom. Il. 11.38–40 (blue snake on Agamemnon’s belt); Becker 1995 67–77. For more detailed discussion of Greek lyric and ecphrasis, see Fearn 2017 chs. 3 and 4 on Pindar, Bacchylides, and Simonides, and Fearn 2018 on Alcaeus.

41 See further Silk 1974: 204 on the position of συλᾶται as a link in the assonantal sequence χαλκεᾶν … σαλπίγγων … συλᾶται μελίφρων … βλεφάρων: “The effect is a peculiar energizing. The sweetly inexorable progression bodies forth the spirit not of συλᾶται and war, but of peace, thereby counterpointing the effect of συλᾶται itself: sleep is ‘despoiled,’ but spoliation in turn flows easily, mellifluously, away, negated overtly by the οὐδέ, but effectively by the subtle interactive manoeuvre.”

42 Cf. e.g., Pind. Nem. 10.2, Isthm. 7.23; Steiner 1986: 46–48 on metaphors of light in Pindar. Maehler 2004, with parallels, suggests that παιδικοί ὕμνοι should mean “love songs in praise of boys,” and that thus φλέγονται suggests the “burning” of passion. This is possible, but does not draw out the likely connection of fire to the broader thematic of this section of the poem.

43 Most notably the climatic use of simile in the closing cadences of the Iliad: Hom. Il. 17.736–741; 21.522–524; 22.410–411.

44 See in particular Carson 1988, 1992b, and 1999 on Simonides.