CHAPTER 3
Adrian Kelly
Introduction
There are several points of contact between epic and lyric poetry of the archaic period, although all of them, in their capacity to articulate the differences between these modes of composition, require some kind of nuance and offer interesting exceptions.1 First of all, Meter and Language: epic poets composed in a stichic (“line-by-line”) pattern called the dactylic hexameter, and their Kunstsprache (roughly, “poetic language”) combined the Aeolic and Ionic dialects from different periods. The elegists use the same language and basic dactylic rhythm (that is, one heavy followed by two light syllables, represented as ), but the lines are arranged in couplets (a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter), while the other lyric meters are much more varied, ranging from stichic patterns to stanzaic groupings of verses. Their language is just as traditional as that of epic, if drawing more freely on Aeolic and Doric forms (corresponding to the geographical and cultural centers of these traditions), as well as on the epic language itself.2 Secondly, Scale: most lyric compositions were relatively short and tied to an immediate, if not necessarily real, performance setting, but this is not inevitable: many lyric poems lack a specific link with the external audience, and elegies could be very long, even if we leave out of consideration the extensive melic heroic narratives of Stesichorus and his Western Greek forebears. Moreover, standard epic performances weren’t as lengthy, presumably, as the Iliad and Odyssey; Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (roughly 1,000 and 800 lines long, respectively) and the larger Homeric Hymns fit much more neatly into the scale usually imagined, and some of these epic hymns are very short. Thirdly, Self-presentation and Perspective: epic poets—at least those concerned largely with narrative—seem usually to have self-anonymized, standing at a distance from the mythical content of their works, while lyric poets were more inclined to refer to the external audience’s contemporary world and to foreground their own and their audience’s role in it. Again, we have exceptions: Stesichorus doesn’t seem generally to have followed his lyric brethren, while Hesiod (and possibly other epic poets) freely deployed “autobiographical” statements within their songs. Fourthly, Delivery: while both modes were accompanied by a stringed instrument, the kithara, phorminx, or lyra, the epic poet’s style is sometimes held to have been closer to recitative, rather than the singing of the elegist (to the accompaniment of the aulos or reed-pipe) and the rest of the lyric poets, much of whose work, moreover, could be performed either by a soloist or a chorus. Again, however, Homeric language reveals a strong conception of epic poetry as song, and Hesiod’s famous story of the Muses giving him a staff (Theog. 30) probably represents a sign of poetic authority rather than revealing a change in delivery style, viz. from sung to spoken. Fifth, Performance context: lyric poetry is often associated with smaller, more private occasions, such as the symposium (drinking-club), while epic poetry is frequently linked with larger, more public events, such as the festival depicted in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (146–176), or the funeral competition mentioned by Hesiod in the Works and Days (654–669). But this differential has even less value than the others: choral lyric poetry, like Alcman’s Partheneia (“Maiden [songs]”), obviously found a natural home in public performances, and some of the most famous depictions of epic performances in the Odyssey (1.325–327, 8.62–107) render a smaller-scale performance in a patron’s household more than conceivable.
The reader may be relieved to know at this stage that, despite the nuances just suggested, there is no practical difficulty in distinguishing an epic poem from a lyric poem. The relationship between these modes of composition, nonetheless, has long been a matter for discussion. Scholarship once divided early Greek literary history into temporally discrete periods, with epic preceding lyric, so that the latter was seen as solely derivative and reactive. Not only did this tend to reduce our conception of epic to the dominant extant examples (sometimes not even that) in order to make comparisons seem more stark,3 but now we recognize the continuities and evolution of both “types” before and after the archaic period: the poems of the “Epic Cycle,” for instance, were being composed and performed well after the Iliad and the Odyssey, and found a lively reception in visual and poetic discourse,4 while, for example, the elegiac couplet is clearly already of some antiquity before we first encounter it in the poetry of Archilochus in the seventh century. Both genres are thereby freed from a teleological straitjacket: lyric poets need not simply be reacting to an epic model, epic poets other than Homer (and Hesiod) become more visible to the literary historian even as they encapsulate and modify elements within the lyric traditions, and we become alive to a mutually enriching process at the heart of literary history in the Archaic period.
I Epic and Elegy on War 1: Tyrtaeus
So we should not deny a constant interplay between the forms throughout the archaic period, especially but not only in places like Lesbos, which enjoyed strong local traditions of both epic and lyric poetry,5 though this chapter inevitably focuses more on the latter material. Such an interplay is particularly evident when epic and lyric poets treat the same theme, especially with the elegists, whose formal similarities with the epic tradition permit us to see them manipulating common themes, but in a more self-contained, contemporary direction.6 Take the contrast between old age and youth, in the context of violent death in battle, as found in the Iliad and the seventh-century Spartan elegist Tyrtaeus.7 In Homer (Il. 22.71– 76), Priam says that it is a fine thing for the young to die in battle, but shameful for the old to lie dead, so as to exhort Hector not to risk death by fighting Achilles: instead, he is to save himself for the good of the city. The comparison at first sight militates against his point; perhaps Priam is really contrasting the desire (or normative expectation) that the young should die in battle with the need to protect the old from the kind of violent end which the sack of Troy would—indeed will—entail. Nonetheless, a niggling impression of inconsistency remains, especially given that Tyrtaeus uses the same theme in a hortatory elegy (fr. 10.21–30 W): the poet here makes it clear that the death of an old man in battle is a shameful thing, following on from his call to the young specifically not to abandon their elders (15–20), while it is both laudable and beautiful for a youth to die there. The same theme as that in the Iliad is woven more directly into its surroundings, since its message is addressed to the young when exhorting them to fight in such a way that they not “love their lives” (18). Though important, the question of epic or elegiac priority is less crucial here than observing the greater specificity and self-contention of the lyric poem: it cannot rely on a wider narrative context, and must instead fill out its claim on the audience in a more direct, self-sufficient way.8
II Hesiod and Alcaeus on Drinking
Approximation between epic and lyric modalities can proceed even without the aid of shared dialect and meter. Consider the pictures of high summer in Hesiod’s Works and Days (582–596) and the sixth-century Lesbian poet Alcaeus (fr. 347).9 Hesiod sets out a series of seasonal signs (582–588) before suggesting a somewhat restrained drink (mixed three parts of pure water and one of wine: 588–589, 595–596) for the farmer, resting from the cool of the sun after enjoying the best food the season has to offer (590–594). Alcaeus’ much shorter treatment uses a stichic meter (called the “Asclepiad”) like the hexameter, and allows several correspondences with Hesiod’s language and style, since its rhythm allows dactylic segments.10 Thus, Alcaeus can treat his verses, as epic poets do, as largely contained (sub)units of meaning with considerable degrees of end-stopping: the only—and thus emphatic—noticeable run-over comes in the poem’s final word ἄσδει “dries up.”11 There may well be something missing at the end of this fragment, but even so it is a self-contained and (con)dense(d) vignette, seemingly designed to make itself as quotable and popular as it became.12
Connection between summer and wine drinking is traditional in early poetry,13 and Hesiod’s consumption is in keeping with his poem’s moderation and restraint (592–596), while the Alcaean refraction isolates and puts the drinking first, and in exuberant terms somewhat removed from the well-instructed farmer seasonally resting from his toils. This contrast, between the repeated rhythms of Hesiod and the definitely hic et nunc nature of Alcaeus’ song, recalls the directness we saw in Tyrtaeus.14
But direct comparisons between lyric and epic modalities are most evident in the case of mythical narratives and exempla, since the lyricists were almost as interested as their epic kin in using the past as a paradigm for the present.15 The narration of myth is, of course, the natural province of epic poetry and dominates our record of the form (and so the rest of this chapter): whether we think of the poems themselves, like the Iliad and Odyssey, which set out large-scale heroic narratives, and the Theogony (and its ilk) and Homeric Hymns which tell the stories of the gods; or of the many characters in those poems who deployed these exempla in their own speeches, as e.g., Phoenix recounting the story of Meleager to Achilles (Il. 9.524– 599), or any of Nestor’s several self-narratives (Il. 1.260–273, etc.). Even epic poets who adopted a more involved self-presentational stance may be grouped here, such as Hesiod in his Works and Days with the myths of Pandora’s creation (47–105) and the Ages of Man (106–201) as direct lessons to his contemporary addressee, Perses, about the power of Zeus.16 This is, in other words, a strategy found everywhere in early epic. So it is in lyric, right across genres and the span of the Archaic period, where we can observe the growth of a specifically lyric or—more accurately perhaps—an openly mixed tradition of mythological exemplarity.
III Eos and Tithonos across the Modes
Most of the time, we don’t have directly comparable treatments of the same tale, which makes particularly valuable the widespread story of the goddess Eos and her Trojan husband Tithonos. In this tale, Eos falls in love with the handsome mortal Tithonos and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Known from several early sources (and assumed in Homer’s formular expressions for daybreak, where Eos simply rises from Tithonos’ side: Il. 11.1–2, Od. 5.1–2), here we can compare three lyric treatments (Tyrtaeus fr. 12.5 W, Mimnermus fr. 4 W, Sappho fr. 58) with an epic one (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–240). For Tyrtaeus, Tithonos is a one-line, almost throwaway, paradigm of beauty (“not even if he were more fair than Tithonos”);17 for Mimnermus, in an isolated and lacunose couplet from his longer elegiac poem Nanno (“to Tithonos [Zeus] gave an everlasting evil/old age, which is more dreadful than terrible death”), aging immortality is even worse than death. Similarly brief, but at least with some contextual detail as to its point, Sappho’s fr. 58 adduces Tithonos’ example, as mortal lover of Eos, to parallel her own aged situation and relationship to Music (vv. 2–7), in contrast to an opening exhortation to unspecified “children” to cultivate the Muses (1–2): she cannot escape old age (6–7), illustrating her point by reference to the state which takes him despite his divine consort (8–12). Her selectivity and allusivity is clear (nb. the reference to tradition in the form ἔφαντο “they said” 9),18 as is the deployment of several apparently epic features, such as the expression for Dawn (βροδόπαχυν Αὔων “rosy-armed Dawn” 9) which looks like a Lesbian recreation of the (later attested) epic phrase of the same meaning Ἠῶ τε ῥοδόπηχυν (HH 31.7), but must be a “new” coinage, given that this epithet is never applied in early epic to Dawn (see Hes. Th. 246, 251, fr. 35.14 M–W, etc.).19
Tithonos as a negative example is found once more in the epic hymn, where Aphrodite explains to Anchises why their liaison cannot be permanent:20 as in Sappho, the relationship between Eos and Tithonos has an exemplary purpose, but the story proceeds in a more leisurely way and sequentially, each activity being fully told before the next: from the first snatching (218–219) all the way to Dawn’s final abandonment of him in the closed bedroom (233–238). Aphrodite then goes on to draw lessons from the story as reasons for them not to be together, in somewhat the way Sappho had tried to link the story with her circumstance (though here at the end rather than the start of the myth), but the differences in scale and process between epic and lyric modalities are clear: the epic speaker/narrator proceeds step-by-step and gives the whole story, in this case within a broader, embedding narrative encounter between goddess and heroic mortal, while the lyricist’s smaller composition selects and alludes only to the desired parts of that story—an excellent example of the general lyric approach to the “epic” material in the Archaic period.
IV Elegy and Epic on War 2: Simonides and Archilochus
A more straightforwardly heroic example can be seen in the famous “Plataea elegy” of the late sixth- and early fifth-century author Simonides of Ceos (frr. 10–17 [+18?] W2), which deploys the story of Greek victory in Troy as a direct comparison for the recent triumph over the Persians in the eponymous battle (479 BC).21 The first extant portion seems to be addressed to Achilles (see esp. fr. 10.5), introducing this poem with an elegiac version of the epic proem-hymn which opens the Theogony (1–104) and Works and Days (1–10), here directed at Achilles; this is closed with the standard hymnic transitional farewell to the god and introduction of the current or next poem, viz. the battle of Plataea itself (fr. 11.19–21). Between those points, the poet summarizes Achilles’ involvement in the Trojan War, but the text is insecure and its story selective: Simonides mentions the hero’s death at the hands of Apollo (lines 7–8), the responsibility of Paris (9–11) and the “chariot of justice” which destroyed the city (12), and the journey home of the Greeks from Troy (13–14), before a transition to talking about the “undying … glory” (15) which they earned through Homer’s poetry (15–18).
Simonides naturally uses epic vocabulary, such as ἀοίδιμον (“worthy of song” fr. 11.13) and ἡμ]ιθέων (“demi-gods” 18), but he also sprinkles in some decidedly non-epic words (ἁγέμαχοι “leaders of battle” 11.14) and phrases (θείης ἅρμα … δίκ̣[ης “chariot of swift justice” 11.12). The poet also creates what looks like an epic formula (ἀθά]νατον … κλέος 11.15), using it again in the Persian narrative section (11.28), but it is in fact not evidenced before him nor again until Bacchylides (13.32); when Simonides uses the epic collocation of “trusting in the gods’ signs,” the precise form (θσῶν τεράε]σ̣σ̣ π̣εποιθότε̣ς 11.39) is not found in extant epic (Il. 4.398, 4.408, 6.183); similarly innovative is his call on the Muse to be an “ally” (ἐπίκουρον fr. 11.21), a subordination of the god and foregrounding of human which will be resumed by Ibycus (see below), while Simonides’ epic recreations continue in describing the setting out of the Greek forces in what looks like a reformed catalog style (fr. 11.29–34; cf. fr. 15 of the battle order).
This desire simultaneously to compete with, as well as pay homage to, the tradition, helps the elegist construct the hoped-for parallelism of Homer’s effect on the Trojan War with his own efforts for the Persian War. The epic world—its themes, concepts, and language—is refashioned for a different kind of mode: Simonides is not just advertising an affiliation or passively following epic norms, but actively participating in an ongoing dialogue with a mixed poetic heritage.
Much the same type of aim, though perhaps generically less self-confident, can be seen at the other end of the period in Archilochus’ “Telephus elegy,” in which the poet apparently excuses a recent military defeat suffered by Parian colonists on Thasos by comparing it to the first Argive reverse, at the hands of Heracles’ son Telephus, when they landed by mistake on the Mysian, rather than Trojan, plain (P.Oxy 4708 fr. 1.1–28).22 This is not a story told by or perhaps even known to Homer; its events were covered by a later epic, the Cypria, which contained the events in the Trojan War before the Iliad.23 Archilochus here shows some deviation from epic language in this elegiac battle narrative, but he also uses many of its phrases directly: for instance, μοῖρα θεῶν “fate of the gods” (7 ~ Od. 3.369), ἐπὶ θῖ̣ν̣α̣ πολυφλοίσβοι[ο θαλάσσης “on the shore of the much-sounding sea” (10 ~ Il. 1.34, 9.182, Od. 13.220 [παρά], Il. 23.59 [ἐπὶ θῖνι]), ἐϋκν̣ήμ̣[ιδες,Αχαιοί “well-greaved Achaeans” (12 ~ found 36x in Homer in the nominative and accusative, Hes. fr. 23a.17 M–W, Little Iliad fr. dub. 32.5 Bernabé), etc.24
The story is told in two parts: first Archilochus adduces the necessary point of comparison (4–5), but not straightforwardly, since the introduction of Telephus makes it seem as though this will focus on his victory; then the Greeks re-embark gladly (15) before Archilochus recommences the story of the Greeks’ first arrival and attack upon Mysia, and runs sequentially to the intervention of Heracles (16–25). Having excerpted the story to illumine recent history, the poet tries to give that narrative a temporally progressive sequence in a broadly, if reduced, epic manner.
V Alcaeus’ Epic Lesson: Damning Pittacus
A less exculpatory purpose can be seen in Alcaeus’ “Cologne fragment” (fr. 298), which compares his contemporary Mytilenaean Pittacus to the lesser Aias and his sacrilegious behavior—specifically the rape of Priam’s daughter Cassandra at the altar of Athene herself—during the sack of Troy.25 Here Alcaeus still copies some epic phraseology (16 λ]ύ̣σσαν … ὀλόαν ἔχων ~ λύσσαν]ν ἔχων ὀλοήν “with destructive madness” Il. 9.305; lines 25–6 κὰ̣τ οἴνοπα / … πόν]τ̣ο̣[ν] ~ ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον “over the wine-faced sea” found 17x in Homer in several cases),26 though it is more noticeable that he uses competing “lyric” coinages (8 πολυλάιδος and 24 γόργωπι]ν) while avoiding any of the many standard epic epithets for the ever-present Athena. The meter, too, signals its lyric distinctiveness: the Alcaic stanza, composed of four identical verses, is somewhat like the dactylic hexameter in each of its verses admitting degrees of end-stopping (note, e.g., 4 and 5), while as a whole it is, once more, a semantic unit with, for example, the run-over between stanzas 3 and 4 underlining the destruction of Troy therein denoted.
The comparison with Pittacus is made later in the poem (addressed as “son of Hyrrhas” at line 47), and the myth itself is a refraction of a tale probably already in epic form: the story is known to the Odyssey poet (3.145–146, 4.502), as is the consequently difficult nostos facing the Greek heroes from Troy (Od. 1.325–7). Later ages knew an actual narrative from a cyclic poem, the Iliou Persis (“Destruction of Troy”) though there is no way to tell how it must have been narrated in an epic mode, beyond the obvious differences in meter and dialect, except that its progress would have been likely more sequential and leisurely.27 Direct influence may be suspected, but impossible to pinpoint: interestingly, both Homer and Alcaeus give the story in a somewhat allusive manner, the former poem perhaps to avoid the picture of a too-hostile Athene the Lesbian because of the point he wishes the story to make—that divine revenge for individual wrongdoing must be avoided before it affects the entire community.
The extant portion of fr. 298 seems itself to be a miniature epic, with stanzas 1 and 2 drawing the mythical lesson in a proemic manner (the Greeks would have found a calmer sea had they killed the “man who harmed the god” 5), before the poet embarks on the narrative portion of the poem telling the story of that wrongdoing (stanza 3 ff.). The myth may have continued to the general debate over what to do about Aias (see esp. 30), but the rest of the poem cannot be reconstructed after v. 27. Again, we find density, complexity, and allusivity: after an abrupt introduction, Aias is first merely “the one who harmed the god” (5), Cassandra is not named (8) or rather denoted in such a way as to connect her with the “cries of the children” in the city (14); and without further ado, Deiphobus stands for the Trojans’ original, disastrous error. The parallel of Cassandra and Aias in the third and fifth stanzas, with the latter named and the former’s name merely alluded to, places great emphasis on the depiction of what is happening in Troy in the intervening stanza (11, 12–15), underlining the example of the people’s suffering for one man’s transgression (Deiphobus, though τ, ἄμα in 12 suggests another name at the start of the verse). Thus the inner story of (Trojan) popular suffering is made to bolster the outer (Greek) one as well.
VI Love and War 1: Helen in Sappho and Alcaeus
Given the general lyric tendency toward selectivity, myths may merely be summarized, as in the story of Eos and Tithonos examined earlier. Consider, too, the famous deployment of Helen’s story in Sappho fr. 16.1–20, where Sappho has little interest in retelling several episodes from the war, rather than boiling down one central event, Helen’s abandonment of her family.28 She uses for this poem her characteristic “Sapphic” stanza, in which the first three verses are always eleven syllables long (unlike the epic verse, whose syllable count can vary29) but which, like the hexameter, can form potentially self-contained lines, while the final verse (the so-called “adonean” clausula) is treated as a continuous element of the previous verse. The stanza, once more, is a semantic unit: e.g., the delayed main verb “she went” (ἔβα 9) at the start of the third stanza—the only such run-over example in the preserved portion of the poem—underlines the obvious importance of that act to the eventual fate of her husband, to Troy, and indeed to Sappho’s own situation. One may even suspect an intentional play on the promised ease of demonstration at the start of the second stanza (“it is very easy to make this [viz, the substance of lines 3–4, below] well understood” 5–6), which proves unable to be completed until the third.
The rhythmic difference with the dactylic hexameter is noticeable (the first three verses have the invariable pattern ‒ ˘ ‒ × ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ‒ ‒), but the fourth verse (‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒) exactly matches a common line-end pattern in the hexameter, and therefore frequently contains epic forms.30 Indeed, scholars have detected several more or less direct adaptations, with, e.g., [ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων (1) and ἐπ[ὶ] γᾶν μέλαι[ν]αν (2) perhaps copying the Homeric formulae πέζοι θ’ ἱππῆές τε (3x) and γαῖα μέλαινα (8x). But the second of these is also a topos in lyric poetry (e.g., Sappho frr. 1.10, 20.6, Alcaeus fr. 283.13–14 [below]), so that we have to reckon also with the shaping of a lyric tradition.
Sappho’s invocation of Helen’s story here is introduced (once again) swiftly, though this time to justify the primacy of “whatever one loves” (3–4) over the material of war (1–3), and this opposition has been held by some scholars, too readily, as straightforwardly programmatic of a lyric versus an epic sensibility.31 As Helen becomes the model for the principle, however, the poem begins to cast doubt on whether love is so separate from the military items in the priamel, and when Sappho relates the absence of Helen to that of her beloved Anactoria (15–16), the reader realizes with a shock that she is now comparing herself to Menelaus, a man prepared to bring war to the entire Greek world to recover his lost wife. The clever play on our expectations puts the surface aim of the poem in a discernible tension with its paradigmatic myth: love and war—perhaps lyric and epic as well—are not so mutually exclusive or antagonistic, after all.32 Thus, the poem meditates on the nature of modal relationships, or rather their interrelationship.
Sappho’s treatment of Helen is certainly more subtle, even sympathetic, than Alcaeus’ ringing damnation of the same figure in fr. 42, which seems to lack any explicit connection to the poet’s world, and simply to compare her (1–4, 15–16) to the goddess Thetis, whose love with Peleus brought into the world something great and good in the form of Achilles (5–13).33 Alcaeus mentions Thetis also in fr. 44, where he may invoke and crystallize the same story as the Iliad, though the poem’s fragmentary state makes it very hard to say anything at all about the way in which this epic treatment is invoked and recreated—beyond the fact that it is very short indeed.34 At slightly more length, Alcaeus returns to Helen again in fr. 283.3–18 (1–2 cannot be reconstructed), where the evaluative coloring of the myth is clear throughout:35 Helen’s heart has been made to flutter (3), the liaison’s inappropriateness is made clear by the juxtaposition of Ἀργείας, Τροΐ̣ω (4), she is maddened (5), she abandons her child (7) under the influence of Zeus’ child (10, possibly Aphrodite), she remains responsible in the adonean (ἔν]νεκα κήνας 14), and the anaphora of πολλ- (15, 16), together with the shift into past tenses and the application to the chariots of the usually personal epic verb ἤριπεν (16), underlines the disastrous results of her action. We have no way of knowing how long this poem was, but Alcaeus’ negative judgment of Helen dominates the selection and sequencing of the story, i.e., from her following Paris (3–6), abandoning her home (7–10), and then causing destruction (11–16f.). Similarly evaluative coloring is of course found in epic poetry, but the narrative in the latter is typically more full, more clearly progressive and sequential. Consider, for example, Agamemnon in the Underworld when relating (through Odysseus) his death (Od. 11.409–26), which is told both to answer Odysseus’ query about what had happened (397–403) and, more explicitly, to illustrate the treachery of womankind (427–434): though the behavior of Clytemnestra is clearly negatively formed, the story is given in full, and includes Aigisthos’ behavior, the death of his comrades, of Cassandra, and Clytemnestra’s poor treatment of her husband. The wider narrative context, once more, sits together with epic’s ability or tendency toward more capacious and progressive storytelling.
VII Ibycus’ Epic Lesson: Flattering Polycrates
So far we have seen a variety of lengths, details, and approaches to heroic myth, but the longest extant example of a mythical narrative before Stesichorus (see below) comes in the so-called “Polycrates Ode” by the mid-sixth-century BC poet Ibycus of Rhegium (in Italy) (fr. S 151 PMGF).36 This composition was written to praise Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, and did so by associating him with the great heroes of the Trojan War. Here the assertion of lyric dialect and language combines a clear appropriation and recreation of epic norms: for instance, the expression Δαρδανίδα Πριάμοιο (“of Dardanus’ son Priam” 1) combines the standard epic form of Priam’s name with a patronymic showing a non-epic, Doric inflection (Δαρδανίδα ~ Δαρδανιδάο).37 Moreover, lines 20–22 (τῶν] μὲν κρείων Ἀγαμέ̣[μνων / ἆ̣ρ̣χε Πλεισθ[ενί]δας βασιλ̣[εὺ]ς̣ ἀγὸς ἀνδρῶν / Ἀτρέος ἐσ[θλὸς π]άις ἔκγ̣[ο]νος “their leader was powerful Agamemnon/the Pleisthenid, king, leader of men/noble trueborn son of Atreus”) obviously allude to an entry in the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships with the typical epic formula κρείων Ἀγαμέμνων “powerful Agamemnon” (41x Il., 1x Od., 1x Little Iliad), though the entry is also “lyricized” by the non-epic vocalism for the patronymic Πλεισθ[ενί]δας (~ Πλεισθενίδης). Incidentally, the genealogy given here combines the Homeric tradition that Agamemnon was the son of Atreus with the Hesiodic conception that he was Pleisthenes’ son (Hes. frr. 194–195 M–W): Ibycus sides with Homer,38 but includes Hesiod’s tale. Finally, the expression κλέος ἄφθιτον “glory imperishable” reiterates the creation of a mixed lyric/epic tradition, since this epic phrase (Il. 9.413, Hes. fr. 70.5 M–W) had already been appropriated by Sappho (fr. 44.4 [below]).39
This reproduction and reworking of epic language is obviously aided by the dactylic rhythm of the triad (i.e., strophe/antistrophe/epode) which, as with the stanzaic constructions examined earlier, affords the poet semantic opportunities of a sort denied to epic: note, e.g., the considerable syntactical continuity within the units of each triad (e.g., 4–5, 13–14, etc.), but the strong pause between them (9–10, 22–23, etc.). Moreover, the enclosed two triads have the same structure—refusal to sing about the Trojan War in the usual way (10–12 f., 23–6 f.), then the Greek ships coming to Troy (14–19, 27–31), followed by entries which allude to the Catalogue of Ships (20–22, 32–35)—which helps to underline the self-consciously novel nature of the final comparison (see below), but which also focuses on Ibycus’ advertisement of his decision not to give a standard treatment of the material, most notably perhaps in his refusal to invoke the Muses, that standard source of epic inspiration and authority, rather than merely noting where their narrative preference would otherwise take him (23–24).
Indeed, the poem self-consciously manipulates, recreates, and refuses epic norms throughout. Ibycus reframes the war and its epic treatment through the decidedly un-epic erotic theme with which the text closes, as Polycrates is praised by being set among a series of impressive male figures specifically for his looks (“for these men there will always be a share of beauty;/so you too, Polycrates, will have glory imperishable/as can be in song and my fame” 46–48).40 The very structure of the myth seems to highlight this eroticism in moving from female to male beauty: the war is thematized in the first triad in terms of the female, as a contest for Helen’s physical form (5) and a result of Aphrodite’s deceptive doom (9).41
VIII Love and War 2: Sappho fr. 44
But perhaps the most well-known reframing of an apparently epic story in lyric modality comes in Sappho fr. 44, which tells the story of the wedding of Hector and Andromache. The extant portion of the text opens with Idaios apparently announcing the imminent arrival of Andromache, and is then concerned with the preparations to receive her and the following celebrations in Troy.42 Once typically classed as one of Sappho’s epithalamia (“wedding-songs”) though it refers to no contemporary wedding, this poem exploits both that convention and its dactylic rhythm to produce the most recognizably “epic” of archaic lyric poems before Stesichorus. A stichic poem adding to the epic resonance, each of its verses contains an invariable number of syllables (fourteen) with a strong dactylic rhythm (× × ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ‒). This allows many epic features, on the level of meter (e.g., line 5, where -[ο]ι is shortened before ἄ- in an instance of “epic” correption, a prosodic feature not usually found in Aeolic lyric), language (κλέος ἄφθιτον 4),43 and narrative convention: the story proceeds in a strictly sequential manner, there is an unparalleled (at least from our examples above) use of character speech with a closing “formula” (4–11; for ὢς εἶπ’ cf. Homeric ὣς φάτο etc.), a catalog of Andromache’s dowry (7–10) and even a refraction of the typical epic departure scene (13–20).
Unsurprisingly, scholars have tried to link this poem with the Iliad, casting it as a foreboding pastiche-prediction of the couple’s future within, and predicted by, the epic.44 Certainly Homer knew the story but other epics, such as the cyclic Cypria and whatever preceded it,45 might have told it, alongside the wedding of Helen and Paris (already encountered in Sa. fr. 16 and Alc. fr. 283). Equally, some scholars have viewed the poem in positive terms, as a joyous celebration of the couple’s limited but still glorious future.46 Yet epic weddings are not generally happy affairs,47 and the marriage inevitably invokes the fall of Troy and the death of their son Astyanax, both popular themes in early epic,48 which sits ill with the apparent purpose of an epithalamium, even one which is something of a generic oddity.
Aside from the question of sources, fr. 44 is typically Sapphic in its emphasis on the experience and perspective of women: Andromache’s praise (8–10) looks forward to the joyful Trojan women participating in the ceremonies (14–16, 23–31), the couple’s “imperishable glory” (4) is equally hers as it is Hector’s, while the promise and value of her person, augmented by the dowry-catalog but also the detailed, itemized description of the whole city’s welcome, contrast powerfully with Troy’s unstated future. As Sappho reframes the epic world, the female presence within it becomes as prominent and visible as the male.
So the lyric experiment and interaction with epic in the Archaic period consisted of several strategies of engagement, and several opportunities for poetic choice: appropriation and alteration of language, form, rhythm and prosody, theme and material, immediate or self-sufficient directionality in orientation, in sum the—at times, deliberately and openly agonistic—subordination of epic poetry and its modality to the needs of the lyric poet.
IX Lyric into Epic, Epic into Lyric: Stesichorus
If we are right to see a creative agonism at the heart of this interaction, then it reaches something of a paradoxical climax in the works of the mid-sixth-century Western Greek lyric poet, Stesichorus of Himera, whose songs almost entirely comprised mythological narratives, composed in a variety of dactylic rhythms.49 Their length was extraordinary, next to those of the other lyric poets, with works ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 verses. These facts make him exceptional enough, but he was also unlike other lyricists in not saying much of himself or his contemporary audiences and performance settings in these compositions, and in digging out the less conventional parts of those stories. For example, his treatment of the conflict between Heracles and the monster Geryon focused much more on humanizing the latter than on heroizing his slayer (as, e.g., Hesiod’s story does: Theogony 287–294, 979–983), a choice perhaps unsurprisingly given the poem’s title: Geryoneis or “song of Geryon.”
That is not to say that he did not treat famous, panhellenic myths: his oeuvre included poems with the titles Sack of Troy, Oresteia, and the Returns (of the heroes from Troy), and his interaction especially with Homer was of an extraordinarily sophisticated sort; he took not only formulaic phrases and epic type-scenes such as those we found throughout the lyric tradition, but even unique expressions become the subject of his recreative poetry, such as the simile of the poppy applied to Geryon’s death (fr. 19.44–7 F) drawn from the same, unique, simile image in the Homeric description of the minor warrior Gorgythion’s death (Il. 8.302–308).50 Nonetheless, we can get the clearest picture of his unique stance vis-à-vis the other lyric poets, by turning to his deployment of the Helen myth—a popular theme, as we have seen. Whether his poem Helen was the same as his Palinode (or Palinodes),51 Stesichorus’ treatment represented a broad-spectrum rehabilitation, a response to the critical coverage Helen received in epic poetry—but also to the denunciations in Alcaeus, and the more qualified picture in Sappho. Stesichorus went much further in his exculpation than any previous author: he denied that she had gone to Troy, her place there being taken by a phantom (this, too, is an epic theme, but taken to an extreme conclusion: see, e.g., Il. 5.449–453), and this version would perhaps unsurprisingly leave its mark on later literature, both in Herodotus (2.112–120) and Euripides’ Helen. But unlike his lyric predecessors when they turned their attention to Helen, Stesichorus doesn’t select or allude or compose on a small scale—he massively retells and revises her entire story (perhaps more than once!), and in doing so he shows himself a true modal hybrid, with the scale, self-presentation, and ambition of an epic poet, the delivery and performance contexts of a lyric poet, and the languages and rhythms of both.
* * *
The lyric poets of the Archaic period interacted with epos as well as their own lyric past, and bequeathed to later ages a rich, inter-modal inheritance, opening the way for future experimentation and cross-fertilization between epic and lyric modes of poetic composition. Without this extraordinary, path-breaking period, the next great efflorescence of Greek poetic creativity, the works of Athenian tragedy, would have been impossible.
FURTHER READING
For general introductions to this material, see Herington 1985; Graziosi and Haubold 2009; Budelmann 2018b: 16–18; Kelly 2015; Rawles 2018 (all with further bibliography). For an excellent overview of the varieties of epic poetry in this period, see Gainsford 2016. Pallantza 2005 and Bowie 2010b discuss the lyric refractions especially of Trojan War material in the poetry after Homer. For recent developments in elegy’s relationship with epic, which tend to see the two forms as both independent and interdependent, see Lulli 2016, and the controversial arguments of Faraone 2006 and 2008 that the elegists used basic ten-verse stanzaic structure (viz. five couplets). The opposite tendency in iambos, i.e., to read it as all parasitic directly on Homer, is visible in recent studies in iambos, e.g., the essays by Alexandrou and Hawkins in Swift and Carey 2016, with very skeptical response in Kelly forthcoming.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Laura Swift for her invitation and scrutiny of this chapter, and to Bill Allan and Felix Budelmann for reading drafts and assisting me with its material. For Sappho and Alcaeus, I use the numeration of Campbell; for the elegists, that of West. This chapter uses the term “mode” to describe “epic” and “lyric” as distinct poetic forms, since current terminology (e.g., “genre,” “sub-genre,” even “super-genre”) can be deployed, confusingly, for both these broadest groupings and also their most specific several sub-types. Under the “lyric” mode I include (a) sung poetry (sometimes labeled “melic”) of the sort practiced by Sappho, Alcaeus, Alcman, and Ibycus, and (b) recitative poetry of the elegiac tradition, as practiced by Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus, Theognis, etc. Many poets were productive in more than one group (e.g., Archilochus, Simonides) and even modes (e.g., Sappho frr. 105–109, 142, 143: see Kelly 2021: 56–57), and so the possibility of experimentation beyond and within these boundaries needs always to be remembered. The basic differentiation in this chapter is, therefore, “epic” and “non-epic” (in all their varieties). The current survey is limited to the Archaic period down to Simonides. Iambic poetry receives no mention in this chapter, as its interaction with epic is uncertain: see Kelly forthcoming and, specifically on Hipponax’s so-called “mini-Odyssey” (frr. 74–77 W), Prodi 2017a.
2 See esp. Hooker 1977 and Bowie 1981 on the traditionality of the Lesbian poetic language; and de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume.
3 For the variety of epic poems, forms, and approaches to be found in early Greek epos, see Gainsford 2016.
4 See now Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, with much further bibliography.
5 See West 2002: 218 = 2011–2013: i 406–407; for Lesbos in the Homeric epic tradition, see Il. 9.129, 664, 24.544, Od.3.169.
6 For the need to see elegy as not simply a reactive offshoot from epic, see Faraone 2006: 19–21; Lulli 2016: esp. 193–195 (though much of her following treatment seems to do precisely this).
7 See de Jong 2012: 75–76 for recent summary, and further bibliography.
8 For another example of epic/elegiac interaction, see the famous “men as leaves” topos, found in Iliad 6.145–50 (but also 2.467–468, 2.800–801, 21.462–467, Od. 7.105–106, Od. 9.47–50), and in Mimnermus fr. 2.1–5 W, and Simonides frr. 19–20 W; see Griffith 1975; Sider 1996: 273–275; Burgess 2001: 117–126; Kelly 2015: 22–24; Rawles 2018: 106–129. Once more, whatever judgment we make as to priority, the elegiac refraction cannot rely on the narrative context to smooth out its interpretation.
9 For readings of Alcaeus’ poem, see e.g., Page 1955: 303–306; Rösler 1980: 256–264; Petropoulos 1994 passim; MacLachlan 1997: 142–143; Hunter 2014: 123–126.
10 The pattern is ‒ × ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ‒ (“dactylic” portions underlined).
11 The poem may have continued; nonetheless, aside from Sirius forming a ring with ἄστρον (1: Budelmann 2018b: on lines 5–6, 113), ἄσδει also reverses the opening verb τέγγει “drench.”
12 See Budelmann 2018b: 111.
13 See esp. Petropoulos 1994. The image is found also in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, a mid-sixth-century epic tale (393–400) roughly contemporaneous with Alcaeus, but the points of arguably direct contact with Hesiod are fewer.
14 This remains true even if Alcaeus is, as many scholars think, drawing directly on Hesiod. For another example of his use of epic themes, see fr. 140.3–5 and Il. 3.336–7 (= 11.41–42 = 16.137–138 = 15.480–481), though it is unclear to which particular scene from the Iliad, if any, Alcaeus is referring us: see Page 1955: 209–223; Rösler 198: 153–154; Kelly 2015: 27–28. For more general studies of his poem, see recently Spelman 2015; Budelmann 2018b: 106–110.
15 This is a much-studied part of the field: the basic material is collected by Oehler (1926), but see also Meyerhoff 1984; Edmunds 2009.
16 Hesiod does not have to maintain this involved stance or perspective, since the Theogony, after its opening proem hymn to the Muses (1–103) where he details his encounter with them, is very much a distanced narrative of the “glorious deeds of gods (and heroes).”
17 Tyrtaeus cites him here as the dispreferred object of song and memorialization, like several other figures (3–4, 6–8), next to the “good man” who proves himself in war (10ff.).
18 This technique is the so-called “Alexandrian footnote,” where the poet explicitly references previous versions of the tale s/he is about to retell: see Edmunds 2006.
19 On this poem, see recently Rawles 2006, the essays in Greene and Skinner 2009; Budelmann 2018b: 146–152.
20 See Faulkner 2008: 45–47, 270–271; Richardson 2010: 247–248.
21 On this poem, see especially the essays in Boedeker and Sider 2001; Kowerski 2005; Rawles 2018: 77–106.
22 For text and commentary, see Swift 2019: ad loc. Archilochus was particularly interested in Heracles myths: see frr. 286–288, 304 W with Swift 2014: 441 n. 28. For recent discussions, see Swift 2012, 2014; Bowie 2016a; Lulli 2016: 197–199.
23 On this poem generally, see Currie 2015. On the Cypria and Telephus, see Cingano 2004: 71–73.
24 See Swift 2019 ad loc.
25 For discussions, see Lloyd-Jones 1968; Bremer, Rösler 1980: 204–221; Bremer, van Erp Taalman Kip, and Slings 1987: 95–127; Liberman 1999: ii 99 (with much further bibliography); Pallantza 2005: 47–56; Bowie 2010b: 69; Boedeker 2012: 72–73.
26 Note, however, that the epic formula is never used in epic after κατά, only ἐπί, ἐνί, and εἰς: Alcaeus makes the epic phrase his own. See below, n. 43, for Sappho’s engagement with this same phrase.
27 See Finglass 2015c.
28 For readings of this poem, see Pfeijffer 2000; Hutchinson 2001: 160–168; Pallantza 2005: 45–57; Bowie 2010b: 67–69; Blondell 2010: 377–387 (~ 2013: 111–116); Swift 2015: 105–106.
29 On the basis that the double light in the second half of each of the first five metra (also known as “feet”) can be replaced by a single heavy syllable: i.e., ‒ ˘ ˘ can be rendered as ‒ ‒ . Thus the minimum syllable count for the dactylic hexameter is twelve, and the maximum seventeen.
30 See, e.g., fr. 1.24 (κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα “even unwilling”), which deploys the epic form ἐθελ- rather than Lesbian θελ-, though with Lesbian vocalism -οισα for epic-Ionic -ουσα.
31 See, e.g., Whitmarsh 2018: 139–145.
32 A generally “subversive” effect of myth is not foreign to epic poetry, either, when characters use myths to justify or illustrate something in their immediate circumstance, but end up implying something else entirely. Consider Agamemnon’s evocation of Heracles’ birth story as an illustration of the fact that even Zeus, like Agamemnon himself, could be misled by Ate (Il. 19.90–136). On the surface, it is a powerful exculpation, until we remember that the myth places considerable emphasis on the servitude of a physically greater man (Heracles) to a more powerful but physically inferior man (Eurystheus)—a circumstance not far from Agamemnon’s own situation with regard to Achilles.
33 See Boedeker 2012: 69–72; Caprioli 2012; Spelman 2018. Both Race 1989–1990: 23 and Budelmann 2018b: 89–90 make the point that neither Thetis nor Achilles are clearly or unambivalently positive figures in this context, which allows for much the same type of subtle self-questioning we saw in Sappho fr. 16.
34 See Fowler 1987: 37; also Meyerhoff 1984: 46–53; West 2002: 208–209 (= 2011–13: 394–395); Liberman 1999: i ad loc., 38; contra Burgess 2001: 115; Kelly 2015: 25–27.
35 See Caprioli 2012; Whitmarsh 2018: 146–148.
36 See the discussions of Barron 1969; Goldhill 1991: 116–119; Bowie 2010b: 74–78; Boedeker 2012: 75–81; Wilkinson 2013: 50–87; Budelmann 2018b: 172–181.
37 -ιδης patronymics in epic show both the older –αο form in the genitive case, as well as the later Ionic –εω.
38 Not his invariable practice in this poem: by calling Cyanippus the “most handsome” man to come to Troy, Ibcyus sets himself against the Homeric judgment that it was Nireus who bore this crown (Il. 2.673–675).
39 cf. CEG I 344.2 (Phocis, 600–550?).
40 Erotic themes are of course found in epos; given the typological nature of the “seduction scene,” one of whose most extensive examples occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, one might well consider these themes sewn into the very fabric of the epic world: see Forsyth 1979. However, Ibycus’ final point of comparison as one of physical beauty displaces the epic primacy of martial achievement for its male addressee.
41 Note too the mention of Cassandra and Paris (10–12), both renowned for their physical attractiveness, the latter frequently feminized in the Homeric epic tradition because of it.
42 For readings of this poem, see Rissman 1983: 119–141; Meyerhoff 1984: 118–139; Schrenk 1994; Bowie 2010b: 71–74; Kelly 2015: 28–29; Spelman 2017; Kelly 2021.
43 For a complete list, cf. Page 1955: 66–70; Ferrari 1986. Sappho doesn’t only or simply copy epic phrases, but recreates them: e.g., ἐπ’ ἄλμυρον / πόντον (7–8) combines two epic formulae (ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ and ἐπ’ οἴνοπα πόντον), altering both the position of the epithet, and the usual (line-ending) position of the formular noun; see above, n. 26, for Alcaeus’ engagement with this epic formula. Like him, Sappho is recreating the epic world in lyric form.
44 See, e.g., Schrenk 1994; for a survey, Kelly 2021.
45 See esp. Il. 22.470–472, but also 1.366–369, 2.691, 6.394–397, 413–428, etc., with Spelman 2016; contra West 2002: 213 = 2011–13: i 400.
46 Cf., e.g., Pallantza 2005: 79–88. Scodel 2021: 198 and n. 21 suggests that Sappho knew stories of a separate figure Scamandrius (i.e., not just Astyanax’s original name: Il. 6.402–403) who survives to refound Troy.
47 See Cingano 2005: 124–127. Wedding disasters include the quarrel of the Lapiths and Centaurs (Il. 1.260–73), the Trojan War—at least three times! first with Menelaos (Hes. frr. 196–204 M–W), then Paris (Cypria arg. 19–20 B), and then Deiphobos (Little Iliad arg. 10, fr. 4 B; cf. Alcaeus fr. 289.12)— and the slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey.
48 Cf. Burgess 2012: 176–182; Anderson 1997: 54–56.
49 For detailed treatment, see especially Finglass (Chapter 16 in this volume); Finglass and Kelly 2015a; Davies and Finglass 2014: 40–46 (and 47–52 on his meters, which they group into dactylo-anapaestic and dactylo-epitrite). He seems to have had forebears in his hybridity (see West 2015), but we cannot say much about their experiments.
50 See Kelly 2015: 35–37; Finglass and Davies 2014: ad loc.; also Finglass (Chapter 16) in this volume.
51 For this view, see Kelly 2007; for its opposite, see Finglass and Davies 2014: 308–312.