This is probably my oldest essay - written when I was studying Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford. In those days, we wrote our essays by hand, and I think all of my college work (even the little that was worth keeping) is long gone. For some reason this essay about the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus got typed up before everything was thrown away! It may be of interest to those interested in Greek lyric poetry and the history of the Bardic tradition.
Apologies for the lack of Greek characters, which I've rendered through loose transliterations. Apologies also for the pompous undergraduate style!
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‘Time has dealt more harshly with Stesichorus than with any other major lyric poet (Campbell)’: this apologetic tone was been the standard, indeed the only possible introduction to modern studies of Stesichorus. His reputation and influence were quite obviously vast, yet until the discovery of the ‘Lille’ fragment, the greatest number of continuous lines of this famous poet that we possessed was six. This has been a major embarrassment to scholars, and they have frequently developed monstrous theories to fill the void; firm evidence has been hard to come by, and ancient testimonies are becoming increasingly hard to trust, as they frequently contradict each other and common sense.
By the time that the Alexandrian scholars began their great work of preservation and collation, much old knowledge was lost and many customs forgotten or significantly altered. Anyway, if the Suda is to be trusted, there existed an astonishing twenty-six ‘books’ of Stesichorus’ poetry; this has been doubted, and it has sometimes been supposed that each book contained a possibly quite short poetm, especially in view of the fact that we have (uniquely) a plethora of individual titles for the poems: Eriphyle, Geryoneis, Helen, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, Oresteia, Syotherai and so on. Such titles have any immediate ring of weighty epic treatment, and it is said that the Oresteia and Helen each took up two books; we also find Stesichorus associated most often with epic: to take just two examples from many, ‘Longinus’ calls him Homerikotatos and the famous evaluation by Quintillian states ‘videtur aemulari proximus Homerum potuisse’, before going on (in typically pompous Quntillian fashion) to say ‘sed redundat atque effunditur, quod ut est reprehendum, ita copiae vitium est. Nor does this pedigree just involve Homer; he is known to legend sometimes as the son, and sometimes the grandson, of Hesiod. Thus, as all commentators have sensed, in Stesichorus we have a poet working on a completely different scale to (say) Anacreon, Sappho, Alcaeus or even Pindar. Such intuitive considerations always made it unclear how rigid a genre lyric actually was, but the situation has been radically altered by recent papyrus finds: fragments of the ‘Geryoneis’ make it almost certain that the poem was at least sixteen hundred lines long – quite possibly longer – which is comparable in length to normal Attic tragedy. Also, the Lille fragment shows an elaboration and slowness of tempo which argues a poem of considerable length.
So Stesichorus’ poems, with their epic themes and length, are far more reminiscent of Homer than of our normal conception of lyric. But the similarities are even closer than that. Firstly, the metre is what is known to modern analysis as dactylo-epitrite; it is made up of various cola, with an anceps link-syllable, and its predominantly dactylic rhythm gives it a similar movement to hexametric verse (epe). Of course, there is not only an underlying similarity in the word-music; there is the possibility of the use of actual ‘Homeric formulae’, and indeed we do find strong verbal echoes. Take P.Oxy 2617, line 8:dia d' eschise sarka [kai] o[st]ea daimonos aisai; we find sarkos te kai ostea in Od.9.293, and daimonos aisa in Od.11.61 and so we can go on.
Nevertheless, from the same papyrus-fragment, we find much that is clearly unhomeric, e.g. five unepic compound adjectives (Stesichorus was famous for his inventiveness concerning epithets), an abstract for concrete (odunaisin), and a unique adverb(epiklopadon). Immediately, we must wonder whether Stesichorus was consciously alluding to Homer or merely drawing from the stock of epic phraseology. And here we are very close to trouble. We have beeb wondering how, and why, Stesichorus is so ‘Homeric’; to a large extent the mystery ot Stesichorus today is in fact the mystery of Homer. Unfortunately, the ‘Homeric Question’ is still far from satisfactorily solved. The classic treatment of these issues comes from Burkert’s article in the ‘Amasis Painter’ collection, to which we will return in greater detail later. To summarize briefly the article’s line of attack: we must bear in mind that at some point, Homer became a frozen classic, and the formerly semi-improvised musical folk-poetry took on the nature of a set text. It is vital that we attempt to rid ourselves of pre-conceptions and stop using scholarly hindsight so much: in Stesichorus’ time, there were many myths and many singers, and as much myth about Troy was non-Homeric as it was Homeric. Sappho and Alcaues relate much that is not in the Iliad and Odyssey, and even Pindar draws on cyclic epic like the Kypris. Above all, we should lose the glib assurance of scholarship, which says that the Iliad and the Odyssey are ‘Homer’, and the rest of the epic cycle somehow invalid or spurious. To understand Stesichorus, we will have to think ourselves back into a time when writing was both a cause and a symptom of great change, and artistic traditions were being drawn on and remodelled according to the needs of people and the talents of the poets. Dangerous though this method may be, on account of the tendency to sociological and anthropological theorizing, it is essential – we will never get anywhere unless we attempt to put Stesichorus’ poetry in context, both in terms of environment and artistic tradition.
What sorts of poetry existed during and after Stesichorus’ time? The subject-matter ranged from the most ephemeral of songs to the most impersonal. Homer mentions dirges, hyporchemata, maiden-songs and wedding-songs; we know also that procession songs were very ancient. Music is the gift of the Muses’ inspiration, and is, therefore, always associated with situations where heightened emotion, added intensity is required. Naturally, there will have been sacred music of various types, such as ritual blaming in iambs.
All of these genres use poetry out of group-necessity, but the personal note was by no means alien to the Greeks, especially (we can assume) among the rich, those with a certain amount of leisure. Archilochus, Sappho and Alcaeus are all of this nature; as A.P.Burnett says, Archilochus’ famous aspidi… can only have survived because someone thought it too good to be lost. There was also, as we can tell from fragments, a goodly amount of folk-poetry which could strike a timelessly bawdy note. But then, as now, there seems to have been a consciousness that some poetry is more ‘important’, more serious. Entertaining, epic may be, but its entertainment has deep causes; the figures are archetypal – human beings at their maximum potential. A wealthy landowner, for centuries around the turn of the 1st millennium B.C., will have heard an inspired bard telling of the great figures that shaped their lives, risking death in the quest for honour, taking life to extremes not dared by the ordinary man. When the bards sung these stories, listeners must have felt themselves confronted (safely) with the very essence of what it is to be human.
Before about 800 B.C. we can be fairly sure that these epic themes were sung by bards, accompanied by the lyre; group singing would have been a more functional affair, and although a good poet might compose a hymn worth preserving, this will be poetry ‘for the moment’ (as indeed would love-poetry). Indeed, whenever poetry of this kind survives, it is because the poet manages to find, in the midst of the temporal, the eternal.
From times already ancient in Stesichorus’ day, certain styles of poetry were associated with certain peoples, dialects and metres. Homer uses an artificial dialect which probably indicates use by a people who initially spoke Aolic, but moved to an Ionic speaking region; thus when Hesiod writes hexametric verse (epe) he uses something like this artificial dialect, although he was actually a Boeotian. Likewise scientific prose developed in Ionic-speaking parts so that Thucydides, an Attic speaker, feels compelled to ‘Ionicize’ his language. Similarly, we are told that there was a genre called ‘choral lyric’ and that its originators were Doric speakers. In this way originated Dithyrambs, nomes, encomia and epinikia. These forms are peculiar in that they apparently mix myth with group-singing; and this is where Stesichorus is traditionally given his place: he writes lyric epic for choral performance, and is clearly a member of the genre named ‘choral lyric’.
The encomium and epinikion are functional to some degree, but let us take the dithyramb and the nome. The former seems originally to have been an unruly song to Dionysus; under Arion of Corinth it was transformed into a respectable artistic form, perhaps in the last quarter of the 7th century B.C. Dithyrambs were sung in unison bya dancing chorus, in cyclic formation around an aulos player. The nome was the invention of the famous Terpander, who was a lyre-player and certainly a monode.
Stesichorus is reckoned to have been active between about 600 and 500 B.C., so it is clear that he would have been influenced by these poetical innovations. What tradition, if any, did his poetry lie in? In the past it was most often thought that he wrote for choral performance, but with the peculiarity that he was always believed to be a lyre-player, which may or may not be a problem genre-wise. The argument for ‘choral lyric’ runs something like this: firstly, Stesichorus’ real name was Teisias – he acquired his name because he was a chorus director; secondly, all his poetry is written in the triadic form of strophe, antistrophe and epode, which strongly argues an intimate link with dancing; lastly, the doricizing dialect implies assimilation with the choral-lyric genre. But these arguments have caused dissatisfaction. Name etymology is notoriously obscure. Triadic structure does not necessarily imply dancing, and although strophe and antistrophe were said to accompany a chorus’ set of dance steps, followed by a reversal of sequence, it appears that Stesichorus invented the triadic form; anyway, it seems just as likely that the dancing was adapted to the music as vice versa. Also, the ‘doricizing’ argument is circular, as we have not even established the existence of ‘choral lyric’ in the sense we intend, and Stesichorus would naturally use Doric forms, because he was a native of Sicily.
All this gives us reason to doubt ‘choral performabce’ but surely most significant is the argument from sheer length: if the ‘Geryoneis’ was at least the length of a normal Attic tragedy, it is surely hard to imagine a whole chorus singing, let alone dancing, for that long, just to the accompaniment of a lyre. For, Dithyrambs, encomia and epinikia, supposedly of the same genre as Stesichorus, were written on a much smaller scale, and as M. Heath has argued, there is rather good reason to suppose that encomia and epinikia were performed by just one singer. I believe that, given our present state of knowledge, it is possible to argue convincingly for solo performance, choral performance or any number of ingenious compromises (perhaps that chorus danced without singing; perhaps the singing was split up between different people etc). Ultimately, we have to admit our lack of final knowledge and select a worthy hypothesis.
For this reason, we should concentrate on what we can actually know about Stesichorus. Firstly, he almost certainly did play the lyre. This is tradition’s viewpoint, although we are justifiably suspicious of tradition; but take this quote from pseudo-Plutarch: (saying Stesichorus used the ‘chariot nome’) out’ Orphea oute Terpandron out Archilochon out Thaleton emimhsato all Olympon. The point here is that Olympos was an aulos player; the rest are all lyrists, and apart from the question Thaletos, definitely monodes. Therefore the obvious identification of Stesichorus is in the monodic lyre tradition. (This argument is presented in West 1971). Not only is he a lyre-player, but he is also a composer of large-scale works on epic themes. It is patently obvious that he is doing something Homeric; unfortunately the question of exactly what is partly contained within the choral lyric vs monody problem.
Thus Burkert, who believes in the ‘choral’ option, paints a picture of Stesichorus as roving Chorus-master, ready with his band for an Agwn at any festival; in my opinion he makes some rather ambitious assumptions about the Agwn and underestimates the problem of ‘choral lyric’. To my mind there is a simpler picture: Stesichorus seems most in the tradition of Terpander, another myth-singing lyre player, in the doric dialect. Apart from regional differences in metre and dialect, Terpander seems a final example of the dying breed of old bards, shown to us in the Odyssey by the pictures of Phemius and Demodocus. We know that, by the time of Xenophanes, Homeric rhapsodes were standardising the text and reciting it rather than singing. Is not Stesichorus something much more archaic – a Homeric bard? He uses epic phrases and stories, but in his own traditional dialect and metre. We must bear in mind that Homer’s version had not acquired inevitability; moreover, where tragedy disagrees with Homer, the former most frequently agrees with Stesichorus, leading to Stesichorus being called, in professor Parsons’ memorable phrase, ‘the Clapham Junction’ of myth’.
It would be foolish to claim this model of Stesichorus as equivalent to an old Homeric bard, sicilianized, as provable. Nevertheless, it makes sense of the contemporary genres and traditions and spares us from having to make such creative speculations about choral productions. Stesichorus was certainly rivaling Homer, but whether by drinking from the epic cycle’s ancient stream or by founding an impressive, spectacular choral display, is still an open question. And neither hypothesis is wholly convincing. But we do know that the Homeric rhapsodes gained more and more popularity and Homer became a classic whilst Stesichorus was all but lost, Could it conceivably be because Stesichorus’ art was in some way more ephemeral, more blatantly an entertainment than Homer? Whatever, the problem of our ignorance, and Stesichorus’ great ancient reputation, still remains.