CHAPTER 27
A. D. Morrison
In Apollonius’ Argonautica, when the Argonauts have passed through the Clashing Rocks and reached the island of Thynias in the Black Sea, they see Apollo traveling to the Hyperboreans. In thanks for this vision they sing a song accompanied by Orpheus’ lyre:
Around the burning meat they set up a broad dance, singing Iepaieon, Iepaieon, Phoebus, and with them the noble son of Oeagrus began a clear song on his Bistonian lyre: how once below the rocky ridge of Parnassus he killed the monster Delphynes with his bow, though he was still a naked boy, still rejoicing in his locks. (Be gracious! Always, lord, is your hair uncut, always unharmed. For this is right, and alone does Leto, daughter of Coeus, touch it with her hands.) And much did the Corycian nymphs, daughters of Pleistus, encourage him with their words, crying Ie, Ie. Hence in fact came the beautiful refrain of Phoebus.
(A. R. 2.701–13)
The song Orpheus and the Argonauts sing is a choral paean, accompanied by music and dancing (“they set up a broad dance [εὐρὺν χορόν],” 701; “Bistonian lyre,” 704; “in song and dance” (χορείηι … ἀοιδῆι), 714).1 As such, it encapsulates some of the most important aspects of the Hellenistic reception and transformation of lyric poetry. A cultic lyric song is absorbed into a hexameter poem and its performance evoked in text, marking both a sense of the distance from the performances of the lyric poetry of the past but also an awareness of the continuing traditions and contexts for the performance of some song-types, such as the paean. The song contains an aetiology for the ie-paian cry which the Argonauts give (711–713), which itself underlines the blending here of the voice of Orpheus with the Argonautic narrator’s, so that it is not clear which voice corrects the detail of Apollo’s hair (708–710) or explains the ie-paian refrain’s origin. The inclusion of the aetiology also gestures toward the refrain’s use as marker of the paean by Hellenistic scholars classifying the lyric poems of the Archaic and Classical periods.2 This in turn is a further indication of the distance of those scholars from the performances of those poems (which would have been embedded in wider contexts in which their situation and function would have been clear to their audiences) and their need instead to rely on formal features of the poems to identify their genres.
The relationship of the Hellenistic period to the lyric poetry of the past is thus complex and varied, as are Hellenistic responses to and adaptations of earlier lyric. Broadly speaking, the loss of the performance-contexts for many types of lyric poetry meant not only that in the Hellenistic period poems by Sappho, Pindar or Simonides were encountered as texts,3 which had been classified into genres and arranged in books and were commented on and interpreted,4 but that emulating their work had to take into account that the reception of Hellenistic imitations would itself take place in very different circumstances. Hence we find the translation of lyric song-types into hexameters or elegiacs, the use of stichic lyric meters (as opposed to complex triads), the evocation of performance in text, and so forth. There was also a flourishing tradition of (popular) performance in the Hellenistic period,5 brought about in part by the wealth of opportunities provided by festivals and poetic competitions in cities and communities across the Greek world keen to establish and promote their place amid the new political realities of the Hellenistic kingdoms.6 Alongside such opportunities there had developed from the later fifth century onwards a specialization of musical expertise on the part of professionals,7 who were thus well-placed to take advantage of international poetic and musical competitions,8 but which also promoted a separation between literary poetry and musical performance:9 such living performance-traditions also need to be borne in mind when analysing the place of lyric in the Hellenistic period.10 The difference between such performances and the reception of lyric poetry in text (or in the recitation of text) will have served to highlight the distance between the Hellenistic period and the archaic and classical masters of the different types of lyric: it is in such a context that we should see the different sorts of commemoration of archaic and classical lyric poets which we see in this period, from the construction of monuments such as the Archilocheion on Paros to the representation of poets in literary epitaphs. In this chapter, I concentrate on the place in literary Hellenistic poetry of what we can term for convenience the monodic and choral lyric poets of the archaic and classical period,11 but also touch on archaic iambus and iambic poets such as Hipponax;12 there has been no space for an examination of the place of earlier elegiac poets in the Hellenistic period.
Performance and Text
Paeans in the Hellenistic period were not confined, however, to the distant mythological past depicted in the Argonautica: the evidence of inscribed paeans shows that there was a continuing tradition of the performance of such cult hymns.13 The so-called Erythraean paean to Asclepius (PMG 934) illustrates the tradition nicely. This was a monostrophic paean in dactylic meter which was inscribed at Erythrae in Asia Minor in the early fourth century BC,14 but the performance of which evidently continued through the Hellenistic period, since later versions of the same paean (with some alterations or additions) are known from inscriptions at Ptolemais in Egypt, Dion in Macedonia and Athens (all from the Roman period).15 The differences between these later versions and the Erythraean paean point to a living tradition of cultic performance in which an existing paean could be altered for a specific location or occasion.16 The version found at Ptolemais, for example, adds a strophe in which Asclepius is asked to ensure the flowing of the Nile and the glorification of Egypt (28–32), while the prescript to the same version reveals the paean was performed and inscribed to mark the renovation of the temple of Asclepius and Hygieia during a tour of Egypt by Pompeius Planta and Calpurnius Sabinus (ad 98–100).17 The Erythraean version itself reflects the continuity of performance of paeans in the Hellenistic period, since an addition to the inscription preserves the start of a paean in dactylo-epitrites to Seleucus (dating to 281 BC), an occasion on which the paean to Ascelpius was also presumably performed. In any case, the development of the genre represented by the performance of lyric paeans such as the Erythraean paean and its local versions needs not only to be set against different Hellenistic responses to the paean, such as its transformation into hexameters and its combination with the model of the Homeric Hymns in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (on which see below),18 but also to be acknowledged as an element likely to have contributed to the experience of Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus and Theocritus as well as their readers in the Hellenistic period.
A further sense of the kinds of popular lyric poetry continuing to be performed in the Hellenistic period (and the reflections of these in literary poetry of the period) can be gained from a text such as the famous “Fragmentum Grenfellianum” (P.Grenf. 1/P.Dryton 50). This text is a lyric lament of a complex metrical structure combining lines of different metrical forms and lengths, spoken by a woman who has been abandoned by her lover:19
ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων γέγον’ αἵρεσις·
ἐζευγνίσμεθα· τῆς φιλίης Κύπρις
ἔστ’ ἀνάδοχος. ὀδύνη μ’ ἔχει,
ὅταν ἀναμνησθῶ
ὥς με κατεφίλει’ πιβούλως μέλλων
με καταλιμπάν[ει]ν
ἀκαταστασίης εὑρετὴς
καὶ ὁ τὴν φιλίην ἐκτικώς. (1–8)
Of both parties was the choice. We were yoked together: Cypris is the guarantor of our love. Pain has hold of me when I recall how he kissed me though treacherously meaning to abandon me, that inventor of instability and founder of love.
This opening section, which mixes dactylic (1, 2), iambic (3), dochmiac (4, 5, 6), and anapaestic (7–8) lines,20 focuses on the emotions felt by the speaker described in a language which is strikingly full of prosy words (e.g., ἀνάδοχος (“guarantor”), ἐπιβούλως (“treacherously”), ἀκαταστασία (“instability”)). The complaints lead to a paraklausithyron (the song of a locked-out lover) outside the beloved’s house, again concentrating on the woman’s emotional state. This focus, along with the form of the fragment, has suggested to many that this is an example of the μαγωιδία,21 a variety of mime in which the performer would, according to Athenaeus, dress as a woman, make rude gestures and play adulterous women, brothel-keepers or men going in drunken revels to their beloveds (Ath. 14.621c-d). The situation and content of such a piece of performance poetry (and the tradition of popular mime more broadly) is reflected in poems such a Theocritus’ second Idyll, in which the witch Simaetha enacts her magical retribution for her abandonment by her lover. The differences, however, are key: Theocritus’ poem is in hexameters, in literary Doric, and interacts with its literary antecedents in a way the Fragmentum Grenfellianum does not:22 as Richard Hunter has put it “Idyll 2 is actively engaged with its own literary history; the Fragmentum is concerned only with the considerable power of its immediate performance.”23 Mimes such as the Fragmentum are thus (of course) not the only reference-point we have to bear in mind when reading poems such as Idyll 2, not least because of the existence of a tradition of “literary” mime (visible to us in the fragments of Sophron, as well as its Hellenistic reception in (e.g.) the Mimiambi of Herodas); nevertheless, the existence of such a living performance-tradition is an important reminder that Hellenistic poets such as Theocritus, and the readers of such poets, were not only encountering lyric forms and song-types as texts on papyrus. The gap, however, between hearing a paean or a mime in performance and encountering a lyric poem as a text must have been particularly striking, especially when the transformative effects of reading poems classified into genres, collected into books, and elucidated by commentaries is taken into account.24
Translation and Imitation
The stark differences between (reading) texts and (experiencing) performances are dealt with in several different ways in Hellenistic poetry. The occasions on which lyric poems would have been performed (both in the archaic or classical periods and in the continuing performance-traditions we have identified in the Hellenistic period) can be evoked or imitated, as in the case of Callimachus’ hexameter Hymn to Apollo. This is one of Callimachus so-called “mimetic” hymns (along with the fifth and sixth hymns in the collection, to Athena and Demeter respectively),25 in which the narrator is a participant at a ritual and gives the reader a sense of watching a festival develop (cf. e.g., “And now Phoebus must be striking the door with his lovely foot! Do you not see?,” H. 2.3–4). It later emerges that the festival concerned is the Carneia celebrated at Cyrene (65–83), and the hymn inscribes within itself a paean sung by a chorus of young men, as one might expect to hear at such an Apollo-festival. The narrator first bids a chorus dance and sing (“Ready yourselves for singing and dancing, young men,” 8), before reacting to the beginning of the song (“The boys please me, since the lyre is now not idle,” 16). But the song is not simply quoted, since the hymn maintains an ambiguity about who the speaker of the rest of the hymn is. It includes passages which suggest a scholar-poet rather like the Cyrenean Callimachus (such as the exemplum of Niobe in lines 20–24 and the mention of “my king” in 26–27) alongside others which focus on the chorus (28–31),26 while it remains difficult to pinpoint precisely when the paean itself begins.27 Callimachus is developing here effects visible in earlier lyric, such as Pindar, in which we find the beginning of the song depicted some way into the song itself. Particularly revealing is the beginning of Nemean 3, where a voice appeals to the Muse to begin a song for Zeus, which the voice will share with a waiting chorus:
ἄρχε δ’ οὐρανοῦ πολυνεφέλα κρέοντι, θύγατερ,
δόκιμον ὕμνον· ἐγὼ δὲ κείνων τέ νιν ὀάροις
λύραι τε κοινάσομαι. (Nem. 3.10–12)
Begin, daughter, an excellent hymn for the ruler of the many-clouded sky. I, for my part, shall share it with the voices of those men as well as the lyre.
This song, however, is the epinician itself, which is already under way, and being sung (at its first performance at least), by a chorus.28 When read as a text, in contrast, such statements are in effect “mimetic,” evoking for the reader a performance to which the speaker has access and which the reader is in a sense “overhearing.”29 A similar effect will have been produced by reading passages such as the following one from Pindar’s Pythian 5, another poem which evokes the Carneia and which forms a particularly important reference-point for the Hymn to Apollo:30
πολύθυτον ἔρανον
ἔνθεν ἀναδεξάμενοι,
Ἄπολλον, τεᾶι,
Καρνήϊ’, ἐν δαιτὶ σεβίζομεν
Κυράνας ἀγακτιμέναν πόλιν· (Pyth. 5.77–81)
From there receiving the meal rich in sacrifices, o Apollo Carneius we revere the well-built city of Cyrene at your feast.
ἐν δὲ πόληι
θῆκε τελεσφορίην ἐπετήσιον, ἧι ἐνὶ πολλοί
ὑστάτιον πίπτουσιν ἐπ’ ἰσχίον, ὦ ἄνα, ταῦροι.
ἱὴ ἱὴ Καρνεῖε πολύλλιτε … (H. 2.77–80)
in the city he founded a yearly rite in which many bulls fall for the final time on their haunches, o lord. Hie, Hie much-prayed to Carneius …
Callimachus can be seen in this way not only to be imitating the effects of reading archaic or classical lyric in the Hellenistic period such as the highlighting of the gap between experiencing a song in performance and receiving it as text, but also to be developing particular instances of those effects: this employment of a particular model among earlier lyric is another pattern visible in the use of lyric poetry in the Hellenistic period (see below).
In Idyll 18 of Theocritus, in contrast, we find a version of another lyric song-type, the epithalamium, again in hexameters,31 but prefaced by a different sort of encounter with an archaic text. The poem appears to depict the discovery of a song on the part of a Hellenistic reader or scholar.
Ἔν ποκ’ ἄρα Σπάρται ξανθότριχι πὰρ Μενελάωι
παρθενικαὶ θάλλοντα κόμαις ὑάκινθον ἔχοισαι
πρόσθε νεογράπτω θαλάμω χορὸν ἐστάσαντο,
δώδεκα ταὶ πρᾶται πόλιος, μέγα χρῆμα Λακαινᾶν,
ἁνίκα Τυνδαριδᾶν κατεκλάιξατο τὰν ἀγαπατάν
μναστεύσας Ελέναν ὁ νεώτερος Ατρέος υἱός.
ἄειδον δ’ ἄρα πᾶσαι ἐς ἓν μέλος ἐγκροτέοισαι
ποσσὶ περιπλέκτοις, ὑπὸ δ’ ἴαχε δῶμ’ ὑμεναίωι. (Theoc. 18.1–8)
So once, then, in Sparta at tawny-haired Menelaus’ palace, girls with blooming hyacinth in their hair set up the dance in front of the newly-painted bedroom, the leading twelve of the city, the wonder of Laconian women, when the younger son of Atreus had closed the door on his beloved Helen. They sang, then, all to one song, keeping time with their weaving steps, and the house rang with the bridal-song.
The inferential particle ἄρα (“so,” “then”) twice (1, 7) implies that it was thus that the Spartan maidens hymned Menelaus and Helen on their wedding night, as if the song had been discovered by the speaker of the beginning of the poem. The epithalamium itself (marked as a choral song accompanied by dancing, 3, 7–8) is then quoted in the remainder of the poem (9–58). There is therefore a different kind of development of the fiction of the song beginning which we observed above, one which may develop in particular (given the Spartan setting of Idyll 18) the Spartan maiden-songs of Alcman, where we find similar effects, as at the beginning of PMGF 3, where a speaker is awaiting the song of the chorus (“I want] to hear [maiden] voice singing a lovely song [to heaven],” 3–5). This maiden voice is then found in the rest of the poem, in which the first-person statements are very similar to those found in Alcman PMGF 1 (including descriptions of female members of the chorus).32 In Theocritus, however, the gap between the opening speaker and the choral song “proper” is much greater. The speaker of the introductory section is a Hellenistic voice encountering an apparently archaic chorus presenting a very Spartan perspective on Helen (which assures Menelaus that she will be his bride for all the years to come, lines 14–15), very different from Helen’s conventional future in Greek literature,33 and the poem exploits this difference in perspectives on the part of internal chorus and Hellenistic readership. It is tempting to see Idyll 18 as capturing something of the experience not only of reading earlier lyric, but also of cataloging and editing it, with the differences between its original contexts and the Hellenistic present therefore underlined.
Both Idyll 18 and the Hymn to Apollo form instances of the widespread Hellenistic translation of lyric forms into the “recitative” meters of the hexameter or elegiac couplet.34 A different response to earlier lyric, however, is represented by the use of lyric meters themselves, employed not in complex triads but rather in stichic or epodic form.35 A good example are the four so-called “lyric” poems of Callimachus (frr. 226–229 Pf.), which Pfeiffer separated off from the thirteen Iambi on the basis that the Suda mentions that Callimachus composed “melic songs” (μέλη).36 Three are stichic: frr. 226 (phalaecean hendecasyllables), 228 (archebuleans), 229 (catalectic choriambic pentameters); one epodic: 227 (the so-called “fourteen syllable Euripidean,” combining iambic dimeters with ithyphallics). Some (perhaps all) of these meters were found among the archaic and classical lyric poets: the first-century ad Roman poet and metrician Caesius Bassus attributes the phalaecean to Sappho (6.258.15 Keil), while the archebulean is found in Stesichorus (301 Finglass = PMGF 244) and Ibycus (PMGF 283). The latter two fragments are too brief to confirm strophic use, but this is very likely: the archebulean is used in this way when it appears in choral lyric odes in tragedy (e.g., Eur. Heracl. 356) or comedy (e.g., Aristoph. Thesm. 1158). Its stichic use in Callimachus will therefore have been a departure from these earlier lyric models.37 Whatever the precise relationship between Callimachus’ “lyrics” and his Iambi,38 the employment of stichic or epodic meters is an assimilation of lyric poetry with iambus, since there we do find stichic meters, such as the stichic choliamb or scazon employed by Hipponax in the Archaic period and also taken up by Callimachus (Iambi 1–4, 13), Herodas and Phoenix of Colophon.39
In the poems themselves we find similar effects to those we have observed in the poems above. Fr. 227, for example, is “mimetic” in a manner reminiscent of the Hymn to Apollo:40 the opening (Ἔνεστ’ Ἀπόλλων τῶι χορῶι· τῆς λύρης ἀκούω, “Apollo is one of the chorus: I hear the lyre,” 1) puts the speaker at a festival, at which he reports the gods whose presence he feels (not only Apollo but also the Erotes and Aphrodite in the next line). This poem is (according to the Diegesis) a drinking song for the Dioscuri and Helen (the former are addressed in the remains of line 8). Fr. 228, which laments the death of Arsinoe, the wife and sister of Ptolemy Philadelphus, also begins with an evocation of divine performance, on which the speaking voice depends to be able to sing: Ἀγέτω θεός – οὐ γὰρ ἐγὼ δίχα τῶνδ’ ἀείδειν | … π]ροποδεῖν Ἀπόλλων | …]κε.ν δυναίμαν (“Let the god lead: without them to sing [I am unable] … Apollo to go in front … I could”). The assimilation of the performance of the song to a divine one recalls the description of the lyre of Apollo and the Muses leading the song and dance at the beginning of Pindar’s first Pythian, in which the choral performance of the epinician itself echoes the divine performance it describes, an effect which becomes doubly “mimetic” (of both the divine performance described and the ode’s original choral performance) when the poem is reperformed by a soloist (or when it is is read).41 More generally fr. 228 reproduces a lyric song-type and situation, the threnos (mourning song), using a dialect with a distinct Doric coloring, reminiscent of the choral lyrics of tragedy,42 but in a stichic meter. It may be nonetheless that it was designed for a type of performance, as Acosta-Hughes and Stephens have recently suggested,43 but this performance is likely to have been strikingly different both from its lyric forebears and the performance it itself evokes. Alongside the engagement with lyric we can observe an interaction with Homer, since the poem clearly develops the scene in Iliad 22 in which Andromache learns about the death of Hector in its description of Philotera, Arsinoe’s already deified sister, discovering her sibling’s death.44
Stichic or epodic use of lyric meters in the Hellenistic period is by no means confined to fr. 226–229 of Callimachus: as well as (for example) the stichic cretic paeans of Limenius and Athenaeus,45 there are several epigrams in the Palatine Anthology attributed to a number of poets (including Callimachus and Theocritus) in a variety of such meters,46 while Theocritus develops the Aeolic poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus in four poems using stichic lyric meters, Idylls 28–31.47 Three of these four poems employ the “greater asclepiad,” 28, 30, and 31 (though the last is very mutilated). This meter is known from “book 3” of Sappho (that is, in the Hellenistic edition of her poems) and from Alcaeus, e.g., fr. 346 Campbell. Idyll 29 is in the “Sapphic fourteen-syllable” found in Sappho “book 2” (so Hephaestion 23.15 Consbruch) and exemplified by poems such as Sappho fr. 44 Campbell.48 It is also attested in Alcaeus, e.g., fr. 141 Campbell. All are in Aeolic dialect.49 Their interaction with the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus is complex: Idyll 29 begins, for example with a quotation from an Alcaic poem (οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παῖ, καὶ ἀλάθεα, “wine, dear boy, and truth,” fr. 366 Campbell):
Οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παῖ, λέγεται, καὶ ἀλάθεα (Theoc. 29.1)
“Wine, dear boy, and truth,” so the saying goes.
This quotation of a piece of lyric proverbial wisdom is, in common with several other similar sentiments contained in the poem (23–24, 27–28, 28–29, 29–30), directed to an erotic purpose in attempting to persuade his beloved to yield to him (κὤταν μὲν σὺ θέληις, μακάρεσσιν ἴσαν ἄγω | ἁμέραν, “and when you’re willing, I spend a day like the gods,” 7–8),50 which may be a transformation of the original Alcaic quotation, though its lack of context makes certainty impossible.51 Alongside this imitation (and possible transformation) of the content of Theocritus’ Aeolic predecessors we also find an echo of their form. In a careful study of the use of enjambement in Idyll 29, Lucia Prauscello has demonstrated that all such enjambements take place at the end of the odd-numbered lines, never the even-numbered ones, so that there seems to be a clear observation of pairs of lines as self-contained stanzas.52 Prauscello argues that this extends the existing pattern of distichic arrangement found in Sappho and Alcaeus when employing meters such as the greater asclepiad or Sapphic fourteen-syllable (cf. Hephaestion 59.7–10 Consbruch),53 by avoiding enjambements across stanza boundaries, even those these were clearly employed in poems such as fr. 44. In Sappho and Alcaeus, however, the basic distichic pattern would have been clear in performance and underlined by the poem’s accompanying music: Prauscello persuasively suggests that Theocritus avoids enjambement between distichs in order to recreate the distichic pattern in his Aeolic models without music.54
Other stanzaic “effects” can be discerned in literary Hellenistic poetry, as in the arrangement of the bridal song within Idyll 18 (9–58) into five groups of ten lines each suggested by Richard Hunter.55 Here too the imitation of earlier stanzaic lyric in a stichic poem underlines the distance between the poems and performance contexts of earlier lyric and the Hellenistic poets, as well as their particular responses to that distance. A similar effect is achieved through the dramatization of an encounter with an ancient poem and the juxtaposition of Hellenistic and Archaic Spartan view of Helen which we have examined above.
Scholarship and Commemoration
The different conditions between the lyric poetry of the past and that of the Hellenistic present would have been particularly clear for Hellenistic scholars working on the earlier poems. Some of these scholars, such as Callimachus, were poets in their own right and their poetry reflects their scholarship on earlier poets, but it is also important to emphasize that their work in classifying, editing, and commenting on earlier lyric itself transformed the experience of reading the lyric poets of archaic and classical Greece for readers at large. The scholarship on earlier lyric included the classification and organization of the poems of poets into genres or groups, often called “eidography.”56 In the case of Pindar, for example, the groups into which the standard Alexandrian edition was organized were genres (such as paeans or epinicians), though those groups might take up more than one book (as in the case of the epinicians, whose four books have survived). The books of epinicians are grouped of course by the place where the victory was won, but within the books of epinicians there are further ordering principles to be observed: equestrian events take precedence over other types (so that Olympians 1–6 all celebrate victories in the horse race, chariot race or mule race), as do victors with more than one ode over those with only one, while the more important the victor the earlier he will be placed.57 The division of Pindar into different books is attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (mid-third into second century BC) by two Lives of Pindar,58 but there is evidence of eidographic work by earlier scholars, notably Callimachus, who is said to have classified Pythian 2 as a “Nemean,”59 probably expressing the view that it celebrated a victory outside the crown games and as such should be placed at the end of the Nemeans among the “miscellaneous” odes such as Nemeans 9 (for a victory at Sicyon) and 10 (for a victory at Argos).60 Callimachus’ classificatory work probably took place in the context of his Pinakes (described by the Suda as “Registers (Πίνακες) of those outstanding in every field of learning, and what they wrote, in 120 books”), rather than in the form of an edition of Pindar, but it seems likely that his work made a substantial contribution to the arrangement of the Alexandrian texts of the lyric poets.61
The patterns of arrangement for other lyric poets varied, probably driven in large part by practical considerations such as the number of surviving poems of a particular type and the space afforded by the standard papyrus-roll. We can see generic division in the nine books of Bacchylides, for example, for whom there was only one book of epinicians, though the principles of ordering and organization within that book appears to be different from those employed in Pindar.62 Generic grouping could be combined with other principles, as in the books of Sappho, where the eighth (epithalamia) is a generic group, but the others appear to have been divided according to meter (and perhaps arranged alphabetically within these books).63
Aristophanes of Byzantium is also associated, especially for Pindar,64 with another important scholarly development, one which will in turn have had a profound effect on the experience of reading lyric poetry: the arrangement of lyric texts into cola or short metrical units, replacing the earlier presentation of such texts as prose (a good example of the latter presentation is the papyrus of Timotheus, P.Berol. 9875: see Sampson (Chapter 7) in this volume fig. 17). The consequences of this for readers are in one sense obvious, since such texts will have made clear the metrical structures and patterns in a way obscured by those presenting poems as prose, underlining the difference between prose and verse, but also highlighting those poems in the same or similar meters or metrical schemes. The colometry of such texts is one part of a wider editorial machinery affecting the presentation of texts to readers, including critical signs marking the ends of poems or the ends of stanzas within those poems, which lines were athetized by the editor, and so forth.65 As Tom Phillips has convincingly shown with reference to Pindar, reading texts with such critical annotations, and alongside explanatory comments or glosses and information on the date of the ode or the individuals mentioned, collected into rolls with other texts judged importantly similar in some respect, would have been very different from listening to a performance of a poem or reading it without such contextual information.66 For the Hellenistic poets, one result of Hellenistic scholarship on archaic and classical poetry was the realization of the possibilities of books as significant units themselves affecting how the poems they contained were read and understood: the classification and organization of lyric (and other) texts in the Hellenistic period must be related to the experiments in the use of the poetry-book as a meaningful entity by Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus.67 More broadly, the process of classification must also have led to a greater awareness of varieties and types of poem (“genres”), and the differences between these different genres, since differences of form and content (rather than principally occasion) now largely determined the classification of individual poems into particular genres.68
Nevertheless, it would be too simplistic to conclude that such heightened awareness of genres and generic differences through contact with the poetry of the past as readers and scholars leads straightforwardly to what is often characterized as a typically Hellenistic “crossing of genres” (Kreuzung der Gattungen),69 since the possibilities for generic combination and innovation are already being explored before the Hellenistic period, as can be seen, for example, in the fourth-century hexameter Distaff of Erinna, which has clear affinities with the lyric threnos and with elegy,70 and Simonides’ fifth-century Plataea elegy which encompasses both rhapsodic hymns such as the Homeric Hymns and martial epic in an elegiac poem.71 These precedents are important since they are a reminder that genres before the Hellenistic period were not separate, “pure” species to be bred together at random:72 we need to avoid too simplistic a notion of generic “experimentation” in which Hellenistic poets combine previously distant genres willy-nilly in a feast of disruptive and chaotic generic hybridization. Rather, as we have already observed above, we can discern some significant patterns in the generic “combination” of the Hellenistic poets, such as the “translation” of lyric song-types into the recitative meters of the hexameter and the elegiac couplet. In some cases there is a clear existing precedent for such translation, as in the case of Callimachus’ elegiac epinicians (the Victoria Berenices, frr. 54–60j Harder and the Victoria Sosibii, fr. 384 Pf.),73 where victory-epigrams in elegiac couplets were an alternative mode of celebration to the lyric epinician ode as early as the sixth century BC.74 Such epigrams do not simply provide the form of the Callimachean epinician, since Callimachus can be seen to be employing some striking features of such epigrams, as when he transfers in the Victoria Sosibii the catalog of earlier victories, well-known from Pindar, to the voice of the victor himself.75 This never occurs in Pindar or Bacchylides, but in victory epigrams the speakers regularly include the victor or his statue (e.g., Epigr. 34, 35, 36, 50, 68, 70 Ebert).76 Pindar, nevertheless, also provides a strong model in the poem.77 Sosibius echoes in particular Nemean 10.35–6 in referring to Athenian victories by means of the jars awarded (fr. 384.35–6 Pf.), which is combined with a reference to the victory-song of Archilochus: “for the chorus leading a revel-band to Glauce’s temple to sing sweetly the victory-refrain of Archilochus” (37–39), which echoes the opening of Olympian 9: “The song of Archilochus sounding out at Olympus, swelling three times” (1–2).78 Pindar is likewise prominent as a primary reference-point in the Victoria Berenices, which begins with a focus on the laudator, as often in Pindar, and with the notion of his “owing” a song, which is also familiar from Pindar:79 (“To Zeus and to Nemea I owe a gift of thanks,” fr. 54.1 Harder).
This use of a clear archaic or classical figurehead as a primary reference-point (alongside the shifts also taking place) is clearer still in Callimachus’ Iambi, where the model is explicitly Hipponax, in whose voice the Iambi begin (“Listen to Hipponax!,” fr. 191.1 Pf.), and which takes up in the first four poems the stichic scazon employed by Hipponax. Nevertheless, as with Callimachus’ epinicians, the existence of such a figurehead does not determine the character of the Hellenistic collection: the difference from the archaic Hipponax is advertised immediately: famously, Callimachus’ Hipponax no longer sings “the battle with Bupalus” (fr. 191.3–4 Pf.), and the collection makes a marked move away from iambic abuse (e.g., in the celebratory poems Iamb. 8 and 12): see further Lennartz (Chapter 14) in this volume.80 All the same, the pattern of using such important forerunners as reference-points (implicit or explicit) in defining the character of one’s poems is a widespread one in Hellenistic poetry. Hipponax is apparently employed in this way by Herodas (see especially Mimiamb. 8),81 while Pindar is key to Theocritus’ re-writing (and expansion) of his Nemean 1 in Idyll 24;82 we have examined above the relationship of Sappho and Alcaeus to Idylls 28–31. This is not to suggest, of course, that this kind of interaction is the only possible mode in Hellenistic engagement with the lyric poets of the archaic and classical periods: the presence of such figures as Sappho or Simonides in a range of texts,83 including the Argonautica, is sometimes hard to detect because of the paucity of their surviving fragments, but it is nevertheless pervasive, albeit in a more diffuse manner than the employment of clear figureheads.
This use of figureheads should also be seen in the light of other Hellenistic responses to the lyric poets of the past. These may take the form of physical monuments (e.g., the Archilocheion on Paros, a temple built or renovated in the third century BC on the island of the poet’s birth and focused on the cult of Archilochus).84 We also find poetic analogues for this kind of memorializing, such as the “Tomb of Simonides” in Aetia fr. 64 Pf., where Simonides himself describes the destruction of his tomb at Acragas on Sicily (lines 1–2), developing his own poetic condemnation of the impermanence of monuments (cf. PMG 581 to Cleobulus), and simultaneously replacing and outdoing his vanished tomb.85 Related to the same impulse are Hellenistic literary epitaphs for Archaic and Classical poets, which in turn reflect the processes of classification, organization, and editing we examined above, since they reflect the process of canon-formation, that is the selection of those poets outstanding in their particular domain of poetry and therefore selected for particular scholarly attention.86 The lyric poets of the Greek past become nine, a number matching the Muses (cf. the reference to Alcman as “one included in the nine, the Muses’ number” at AP 7.18.4, by Antipater of Thessalonica), as can be seen most explicitly at AP 9.184 and 9.571, where the nine are named, with both lists headed by Pindar (a position he retained: cf. Quint. Inst. 10.1.61).87 The characterizations of the nine in those canon-epigrams (e.g., the description of Stesichorus as “having drawn off in your labours the Homeric stream (Ὁμηρικὸν … ῥεῦμα),” AP 9.184.3–4) reflect a wider pattern of attempting to “encapsulate” a particular poet visible in Hellenistic literary epitaphs, where a concise description endeavors to capture the essence of a poet’s work.88 Stesichorus, as in AP 9.184, is particularly associated with Homer, as at AP 7.75 (Antipater of Thessalonica), as the place “where the spirit that before was Homer’s made its home a second time” (3–4),89 while in AP 7.27 (Antipater of Sidon) Anacreon is imagined as singing while gazing at figures from his poems, such as Smerdies (cf. e.g., PMG 366, 402). Such epitaphs are designed, of course, to commemorate and preserve, but they are also one strategy for controlling and limiting the inheritance from the lyric poets of archaic and classical Greece,90 because the brief characterizations of the poets and their work which are found in the epitaphs inevitably simplify and distort. Nevertheless, they remain a valuable indication of the kind of assumptions and expectations about the content and character of earlier lyric which some Hellenistic readers at least will have brought to the lyric texts curated by the Hellenistic scholars, and therefore also provide an insight into the readerly perspectives on the lyric poets with which the Hellenistic poets will have had to negotiate when engaging with their own reception of Pindar, Sappho, and the rest.91
The Hellenistic period also produced epitaphs for Orpheus, the lyric poet of myth with whom we began. One such is AP 7.9 by Damagetus (third century BC):92
A tomb on the Thracian approaches of Olympus holds Orpheus, son of the Muse Calliope, whom the oaks did not disobey, with whom the soul-less rocks followed, and the tribes of beasts which live in the woods. Once he discovered the mystery-rites of Bacchus, and made the line which fits with the heroic foot, and he bewitched with his lyre the grievous thought and the unenchantable heart of cruel Clymenus.
This too is an act of commemoration, but also points to the multifaceted engagement with lyric poetry in the Hellenistic period. Orpheus is a lyric poet able to charm even Hades with his song (7–8), but his description here clearly echoes his characterization in an epic poem, Apollonius’ Argonautica, where his birth from Calliope and his charming of rocks and trees are both detailed in the Catalogue of Argonauts (A. R. 1.26–31). In a move which serves to remind us of the importance of the Hellenistic transformation of earlier lyric through its reception in different meters, Orpheus also made into the originator of the elegiac couplet, the meter of the epitaph itself. This turns Orpheus into the forerunner of Damagetus, but also associates the elegiac couplet strongly with lyric: lyric’s mythical representative is the inventor of the form which enables his own commemoration (and the commemoration of many other aspects of earlier lyric poetry in the Hellenistic period). It is tempting to see here an analogy both with the creation of lyric poetry-books preserving the poets of the past and also with the multiple and multi-layered Hellenistic responses to this poetry.
FURTHER READING
In general on the presence of archaic lyric in literary Hellenistic poetry, see Barbantani 2009, Acosta-Hughes 2010 and the various articles in the 2017 Trends in Classics volume (9.2) on “Hellenistic Lyricism.” On the shifts in reception-conditions for lyric between the archaic and Hellenistic periods and their consequences, see Bing 1988b: 10–49, 1993a: 190–194, 2000, Phillips 2016; Cameron 1995 (e.g., 47–53) argues forcefully for the continuing importance of performance for Hellenistic poetry. For the classification and editing of earlier lyric in the Hellenistic period see Rutherford 2001: 152–162, Lowe 2007, Phillips 2016: ch. 1.
For an analysis of the presence of archaic and classical narrative in the Hellenistic poets, see Morrison 2007a. On Callimachus’ elegiac epicians see Fuhrer 1992, 1993, Barbantani 2012, on Theocritus’ reception of lyric Hunter 1996, Prauscello 2006: ch. 3. For the Fragmentum Grenfellianum see Esposito 2005, Höschele 2017a; for Hellenistic inscribed paeans Fantuzzi 2010, LeVen 2014: ch. 7. On the “canon” of lyric poets see Barbantani 1993, Gutzwiller 2017, Hadjimichael 2019.
Notes
1 Cf. εὐρύχορον, PMG 934.20, a poem discussed below. On the definition of the genre of the paean in the Classical and Hellenistic periods see Rutherford 2001: 1–10, on the performance-situation of classical paeans involving male unison singing and dancing, see Rutherford 2001: 61–67.
2 Cf. e.g., the difference of opinion about the classification of a song preserved in P.Oxy. 2368, with Callimachus favoring the paean on the basis of the presence of the paeanic refrain, Aristarchus the dithyramb, on which see Käppel 1992: 34–43, Rutherford 2001: 90–108.
3 On the loss of the social and performative contexts for some Archaic and Classical songs in the Hellenistic period and the increased important of reading, see Herington 1985: 3–4, Bing 1988b: 10–49, Hunter 1996: 3–5, Fantuzzi-Hunter 2004: 22–3, Barbantani 2009: 297–299, Phillips 2016: 49–52.
4 On the transformative experience in the Hellenistic period of reading Archaic and Classical lyric in poetry-books (with associated aids, such as commentaries), see Bing 1993a: 190–194, Phillips 2016: esp. 49–60.
5 This included, but was not limited to, drama. See Cameron 1995: 44–46, Lightfoot 2002: 209–211, Dale 2009: 23–34.
6 Festivals were established by the major monarchical powers, such as the Ptolemaea by Ptolemy Philadelphus (279/8 BC; Syll.3 391), but also by individual cities, such as the festival for Artemis Leucophryene established at Magnesia on the Maeander (208 BC; Rigsby 1997: no. 66): see Parker 2004. Such festivals continued to be important during the rise of Rome and the imperial period: see e.g., van Nijf 1999, van Nijf-Williamson 2016.
7 See Hunter 1996: 3–4.
8 On the professional guilds of “artists” (technitai) which dominated the proliferation of festivals and competitions see esp. Lightfoot 2002, Aneziri 2009 and the detailed studies of Le Guen 2001, Aneziri 2003.
9 The processes which led to this separation were already under way in Plato’s day, as the characterization of contemporary poetic and musical developments in the Laws (700a–701a) makes clear. See further Fantuzzi 1980: 436–439, 1993b: 36–38.
10 Some scholars have suggested greater continuity in performance conditions and traditions for the literary poetry of the Hellenistic period (and a greater overlap between those writing for such contexts and literary poets such as Callimachus): see e.g., Cameron 1995: 47–53, Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2012: 84–90, 2017. For telling arguments in favor of the primacy of reading as the mode of reception for poets such as Callimachus see Bing 2000.
11 On the development of a canonical group of nine such poets, see Scholarship and Commemoration below.
12 See also Lennartz in this volume.
13 In general on such inscribed paeans see Fantuzzi 2010, LeVen 2014: 283–329.
14 The paean may be earlier still: Rutherford 2001: 40–41 raises the possibility that it may date from the fifth century and that it may be by Sophocles.
15 On the possible non-strophic arrangement of the later versions, see Faraone 2011.
16 For the debate about the extent to which the Erythraean paean shows the “automatizing” of the genre of the paean from the classical period onwards, see Käppel 1992: 193–196, Fantuzzi 2010: 188–189, LeVen 2014: 288–294.
17 Furley and Bremer 2001: 164, LeVen 2014: 293.
18 A different response again to the tradition of the paean is represented by Isyllus’ paean, which is embedded in a long inscription explaining (inter alia) the paean’s genesis and its author’s political standpoint (CA, pp. 132–136). See further Fantuzzi 2010: 183–189, LeVen 2014: 317–328.
19 See now the useful commentary by Höschele in Sider 2017, to add to Esposito 2005.
20 The poem is astrophic and the subsequent sections vary the meter further: see Höschele 2017a: 24.
21 See e.g., Hunter 1996: 8–9, Höschele 2017a: 24.
22 Cf. e.g., the engagement with Sappho: see (e.g.) Acosta-Hughes 2010: 17–29.
23 Hunter 1996: 10.
24 See Bing 1993a: 190, Phillips 2016: 49–53 and also Scholarship and Commemoration below.
25 On the “mimetic” hymns, see Falivene 1990, Pretagostini 1991, Fantuzzi 1993a, Morrison 2007a: 109–115.
26 See further Morrison 2007a: 126–128.
27 See Bing 1993a: 186–188.
28 For the (long) debate about the mode of the first performance of Pindar’s victory odes, see Carey 1989, 1991, Currie 2004: 49, Morrison 2007b: 7–8.
29 See Morrison 2007a: 111–113 on the mimetic effect of devices such as the inserted beginning.
30 See Giannini 1990: 90, Kofler 1996, Morrison 2007a: 130–133.
31 There is evidence for some Archaic epithalamia (by Sappho) in dactylic hexapodies (see Hunter 1996: 151, Morrison 2007a: 239), which would provide another type of precedent for Theocritus; the situation evoked in Theocritus 18 remains one of choral song.
32 See further Morrison 2007a: 239–40. On Alcman PMGF 1 see now Budelmann 2018b: 58–83.
33 On the “faithful” Helen of the Spartans, see (e.g.) Griffiths 1972: 25, Hunter 1996: 157–163.
34 See Fantuzzi 1993b: 50–54, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 30–32, Morrison 2007a: 18–19. We should view Callimachus’ elegiac epinicians (on which see below) in this context, as also the reception of (esp.) Anacreon, Sappho, Alcaeus and their poem-types in elegiac epigram. See Acosta-Hughes and Barbantani 2007, Acosta-Hughes 2010: 82–104.
35 A different response again is the invention of a new lyric form, the stichic “meliamb,” by Cercidas: see Scodel 2010: 259–261, Rosen 2017.
36 Suda κ 227 Adler.
37 See Cameron 1995: 166.
38 The debate is an old one and the bibliography extensive: for orientation, see Kerkhecker 1999: 271–282, Acosta-Hughes 2002: 4, 9–13.
39 On Phoenix, see Scodel 2010: 252–255.
40 See D’Alessio 1996: ii.657 n.5, Acosta-Hughes 2003: 480. In this section I develop (unpublished) parts of Morrison 2002: 206–210.
41 See Morrison 2007b: 99–100.
42 See Lelli 2005: 154.
43 Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2017: 234–237, 246.
44 See Di Benedetto 1994. Both the Homeric and the Callimachean passages are about the death of a character and the laments thus prompted (Il. 22.361–437 ~ fr. 228.5–39), then concentrate on the situation of a close female relative of the dead person (Andromache, Il. 22.437ff.~Philotera, fr. 228.40ff.). In neither case does she witness the death, but perceives a sign (Il. 22.447~cf. 228.40), and in both cases the woman feels faint (Il. 22.466~fr. 228.55).
45 On which see Rutherford 2001: 76–9, Fantuzzi 2010.
46 See Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 39 n. 155 for a very useful list.
47 See the useful survey at Hunter 1996: 172–173.
48 On Sappho fr. 44, see now Budelmann 2018b: 137–146.
49 See Dover 1971: 268–269 for a survey of their main Aeolic features.
50 See Hunter 1996: 176, Morrison 2007a: 250–251.
51 Hunter 1996: 172, Acosta-Hughes 2010: 110–113.
52 Prauscello 2006: 209–211.
53 Prauscello 2006: 190–196.
54 Prauscello 2006: 212–213.
55 Hunter 1996: 155–156.
56 Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 25–26.
57 See in general Lowe 2007: 172– 174 on the ordering principles and their relative importance in the epinicians of Pindar.
58 P. Oxy. 2438.35 = fr. 381 Slater, Vita Thomana = 1903–1927 Dr: 1.7.14–15. See Rutherford 2001: 146–147, Negri 2004: 16–18.
59 1903–1927 Dr.: 2.10–14 = Call. fr. 450 Pf.
60 See Irigoin 1952: 33, Negri 2004: 13–14, Lowe 2007: 171–172.
61 Negri 2004: 14–15, Lowe 2007: 172. There is also some evidence of work on the text of Pindar by Zenodotus, the first of the great Alexandrian scholars based at the Alexandrian Library and older contemporary of Callimachus: see schol. Ol. 2.7a, Ol. 6.92b. It is not clear whether this took the form of an edition, however. See Negri 2004: 11–13, Phillips 2016: 54–55.
62 See Lowe 2007: 170–171.
63 Rutherford 2001: 158–159, Lowe 2007: 170, Phillips 2016: 55. On the possible arrangement of Simonides, which is difficult to reconstruct, see Lowe 2007: 174–175. Callimachus played a role in the arrangement of Simonides, giving the name of “epinicians for runners” to one book of Simonides (fr. 441 Pf.): see further Negri 2004: 14. Again, the Pinakes seems the most likely context for such a classification. On the criteria used for the classification of the paean see Rutherford 2001: 152–158.
64 See esp. the testimony of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De compositione verborum chs. 22, 26), who clearly regards Aristophanes as responsible for the division into cola of Pindar (he cites him in his discussion of a Pindaric dithyramb, fr. 75 S.-M. at Comp.22) and Simonides (he states that a quotation of him has been written out as prose, not according to the cola of Aristophanes, Comp. 26). Cf. the comment preserved in the Pindar scholia that τὸ κῶλον τοῦτο ἀθετεῖ Ἀριστοφάνης, “Aristophanes athetised this colon” (schol. Ol.2.48c): the athetization was on metrical grounds. See Phillips 2016: 56–57 who persuasively argues that the qualification “or some other” which Dionysius adds to both mentions of Aristophanes should be seen as derogatory, rather than indicating any doubt on his part about Aristophanes being the originator of the colometry of the lyric poets.
65 Phillips 2016: 59.
66 Phillips 2016, esp. 60–84.
67 For Callimachus’ Hymns as a poetry-book see (e.g.) Pfeiffer 1949–1953: 2.liii, Cameron 1995: 255, 438–439, Morrison 2007a: 105–106; for the Iambi as a poetry-book, see Kerkhecker 1999: esp. 282–290.
68 See e.g., Fantuzzi 1993b: 42–46, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 25–26, Phillips 2016: 49–53. On the classification of the paean see n. 2 above.
69 See Kroll 1924: 202–224 for the coining of the term.
70 Fantuzzi 1993b: 31–36, Hunter 1996: 14–17.
71 Parsons 1994: 122. For different types of response to the fourth-century innovations of Timotheus see Dale 2012, who argues for a sharp differentiation from such poetry in Callimachus, and Prauscello 2009, who examines different reinterpretations of Timotheus from different parts of the Greek world.
72 On the biological model underlying the notion of “crossing genres” see Fantuzzi 1993b: 50, Barchiesi 2001, Farrell 2003: 392–393, Morrison 2007a: 18–21, Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2017: 226–228.
73 On these poems, see Fuhrer 1992, 1993, Barbantani 2012, Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2017: 229–234.
74 Fuhrer 1993: 90–97, Cameron 1995: 150.
75 See Fuhrer 1993: 87.
76 Fuhrer 1993: 95. In this section, I adapt Morrison 2002: 185–187.
77 Newman 1985: 183–184, Fuhrer 1993: 87–88.
78 Fuhrer 1993: 87–89.
79 Cf. e.g., Ol. 10.3 and see further Pfeiffer 1949–1953: 2.308, Gerber 1982: 17, Morrison 2007a: 189–190, Harder 2012: 2.395–396.
80 On the character of the Iambi and the depiction of an ethical development on the part of the narrator, see Kerkhecker 1999: 291–294, Morrison 2006: 31–32.
81 See Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004: 4–5.
82 Hunter 1996: 12–13, Morrison 2007a: 223–229.
83 See esp. Acosta-Hughes 2010: e.g., 40–61.
84 Its role is detailed in a long inscription by one Mnesiepes, which also gives a poetic biography of Archilochus reflecting various elements of his poems. See Bing 1993b: 619–620, Acosta-Hughes 2002: 282–283 and T3 Gerber (SEG 15.517) for the inscription.
85 See on fr. 64 Bing 1988b: 67–70, Acosta-Hughes 2010: 171–179, Barbantani 2010, Morrison 2013.
86 See Barbantani 1993, Acosta-Hughes and Barbantani 2007.
87 On these canon-epigrams see Barbantani 1993: 10–11, Acosta-Hughes and Barbantani 2007: 429–431, Barbantani 2010: 1–4, 57, Acosta-Hughes 2010: 214–219. Hadjimichael 2019 argues that the process of canon-formation begins as early as the fifth century BC.
88 See Fantuzzi 2007: 477 on this pattern of “pithy appraisal” in literary epitaphs.
89 Cf. the characterization of Stesichorus as “most Homeric” in ps.-Longinus, de subl. 13.3.
90 Bing 1988a: 123, Acosta-Hughes and Barbantani 2007, Morrison 2013: 294–295.
91 See Phillips 2016: 92–96 on images of poets, esp. Pindar, in Hellenistic epigram.
92 Cf. also AP 7.8 (Antipater of Sidon). On these poems, see Gutzwiller 2017: 323–326.