The world of the seventh century was a fluid one, a frontier society in which the Greeks were expanding among new peoples and influences but one in which they survived with an increased sense of confidence. It is lucky that, as a complement to the mounds of pottery and the bronze luxury goods, a few voices of the period survive to breath life into this distant age. The poet Archilochus, for instance, gives a vivid picture of life in a new colony. He was illegitimate, from the relatively barren island of Paros (its famous marble was not yet being exploited), and set out with his father and a band of settlers in the early seventh century to colonize the north Aegean island of Thasos.
It was a primitive and harsh world he found there. The colony was under threat from both native Thracians and rival settlers. It was not a world of heroic values but
One in which the struggle for survival was paramount. Archilochus mentions how he once threw away his shield when in flight, an unheard-of humiliation for a Homeric hero, and he talks of his distaste for the strutting commanders with their neatly shaven chins. A tough down-to-earth soldier was worth much more in the kind of everyday crisis the settlers faced.
Archilochus was direct and earthy in his passions. He conceived a love for the daughter of one of his fellow settlers but her father refused him. His invective was immediate:
May he lose his way on the cold sea And swim to the heathen Salmydessos,
May the ungodly Thracians with their hair Done up in a fright on the top of their heads Grab him, that he knows what it is to be alone Without friend and family. May he eat slaves’ bread And suffer the plague and freeze naked,
Laced about with the nasty trash of the sea.
May his teeth knock the top on the bottom As he lies on his face, spitting brine,
At the edge of the cold sea, like a dog.
And all this it would be a privilege to watch,
Giving me great satisfaction as it would For he took back the word he gave in honour,
Over the salt and table at a friendly meal.
(Translation: Guy Davenport)
He even spread the tale that Lycambes, the father, and his daughter committed suicide as a result of the hatred and humiliation he threw at them.
The eighth and seventh centuries were a period of rapid change. The old aristocratic Greek values were now under siege from a world where initiative and good luck were valued. The expansion of the Greek world offered new opportunities for those whose lives had been frustrated by poverty back home. The opportunities were keenly exploited. From being culturally open to the east Greece had now absorbed its example and was spreading its own culture throughout the Mediterranean world. With it came exciting opportunities for new trade. The feeling of success flowed back into mainland Greece and the citizens of its cities. Gradually they were emerging as political communities.
INTERLUDE 2
Archilochus introduces a new world of poetry, that of the lyric. At its simplest the term means no more than a song accompanied by the lyre. The lyric must have originated in the songs, now vanished, of everyday life in Dark Age Greece— wedding songs, harvest songs, work songs. It is tied in with the world of the present, in contrast to the epic, which is set in the world of the past, a world where gods and supermen act out their heroic exploits. Lyrics also bring out the personal voice of the poet. In the words of Peter Conrad, ‘The lyric protagonist is not a man who does things but to whom things happen. . . if the epic is a social act, the lyric is a personal testimony, the lyric is the interior of epic, it testifies to the vulnerability of the character inside the armour.’ Archilochus and his abandoned shield comes to mind. Perhaps one can see here the birth of the individual voice in western literature.
There is probably no one reason why the seventh century is an age of lyric poetry. It may reflect a period of confusion in which the collective memories exploited by the traditional singer as he moved from hearth to hearth have been shattered. The poet without a common culture to draw on is thrown back as an individual on to his own resources. Certainly Archilochus speaks straight from his heart and has no time for conventions of behaviour and courteous living. His is the voice of one man against a hostile world.
A more penetrating analysis, by the classics professor Leslie Kurke and others, tries to pinpoint the arenas in which lyric poetry was performed as, whatever the personal frustrations of Archilochus, the lyrics must have been sung to a receptive audience. One arena was the symposium, the cultivated dinner party, where perhaps fifteen members, hetairoi, ‘intimate companions’, celebrated a culture which was unashamedly aristocratic, attracted to sensuality, the luxury of the east, and the refinements of civilized living. Some vases from the late sixth and early fifth centuries show dinner guests dressed up as if they were Lydians, by tradition the most flamboyant of the eastern peoples. Yet this class feels that its treasured way of life is under attack from the rising ‘middle classes’ of the cities. Poets such as Alcaeus, an early sixth-century lyricist from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, ridicule the upstarts who have taken over the city with their insincere promises and willingness to drive Alcaeus’ class into exile. The sixth-century Megaran Theognis bemoans how the uncouth outsiders have now replaced the aristocracy as ‘the good’. The ‘retreat’ into the private world of the symposium is telling—in the past the aristocracy would have maintained its status by throwing public feasts.
However, the lyricists can also abuse these overdressed and arrogant individuals. In contrast to the closed world of the symposia is the agora, the market-place, where citizen assemblies and public debates take place. Another lyricist, Xenophanes, ridicules the sauntering aristocrats who arrive in the agora, in purple cloaks, reeking of unguents and flaunting their luxuriant hair. The implication is that they contribute nothing to society. Archilochus with his contempt for the strutting commanders echoes the disdain. In one of his elegies, the seventh-century Spartan Tyrtaeus proclaims that wealth, success in the games, noble birth, or a melodious voice, all the qualities lauded by the aristocrats, mean nothing if a man cannot stand firm amidst the slaughter of war.
In short, lyrics become a medium through which cultural conflicts are fought out and provide a vivid if fragmented (so many of the lyrics are incomplete) picture of what was clearly an important moment of transition from an aristocracy who seemed to have lost the respect of the citizenry by their boorish and effete behaviour to a citizen-run community where commitment and steadfastness count.
If sensuality is the attribute that helps define the lyrics of the elite, then there is a secure place for Sappho, the most memorable of the lyric poets. Sappho was born about 620 bc into an aristocratic family of Lesbos: Alcaeus, her fellow Mytilenean, was a contemporary. At one point her family was driven into exile—to Sicily. On her return Sappho appears to have become the mentor or teacher of a band of young women dedicated to the worship of Aphrodite. They were enjoying a transitional period in their lives before going on to marry. It is understandable that the feelings within the group would have become intense and perhaps sexual, but there is also a story that Sappho married and had a daughter. A legend says that she committed suicide by throwing herself off a cliff when rejected by a man she loved. She died about 570 bc.
Sappho has intrigued later generations as much because of her sexual feelings as her poetry. The nineteenth-century prejudices against eastern influence on the Greeks have already been mentioned. These prejudices went deeper. The Greeks were expected to be not only culturally pure but also sexually pure. Scholars, for instance, found it difficult to imagine that Greeks may have enjoyed a wide variety of bisexual experiences without guilt and they misread or ignored the evidence that suggested otherwise. Speaking of Sappho, the Oxford classicist Richard Jenkyns quotes some of the reactions of nineteenth-century scholars to the suggestion that the poetess may have been a practising lesbian. ‘It is clear that Sappho was a respectable person in Lesbos,’ one puts it rather primly, while another talks assuredly of her virgin purity: ‘although imbued with a fine perception of the beautiful and brilliant she preferred conscious rectitude to every other source of human enjoyment.’
Only one complete poem of Sappho’s survives. It is a hymn to the goddess Aphrodite in which the poet calls on the goddess in terms of easy intimacy to help soothe her love for another woman. Once again, she tells the goddess, she has got into an emotional mess and needs help. This is typical of Sappho. She comes across as a person of intense and unguarded emotions. It is her vulnerability that is one of her main attractions (‘Love, looser of limbs, shakes me again, a sweet-bitter resistless
Creature, as one fragment runs). In the best known of her poems she describes her feelings when a woman she is attracted to is wooed by a young man:
Peer of immortal gods he seems to me, that Man who sits beside you, who now can listen Private and close, so close, to your sweet-sounding Voice and your lovely
Passionate laughter—ah, how that, as ever,
Sets the heart pounding in my breast; one glance and I am undone, speech fails me, I can no longer Utter a word, my
Tongue cleaves to my mouth, while sharp and sudden Flames lick through me, burning the inward flesh, and Sight’s eclipsed in my eyes, a clamorous humming Rings through my eardrums;
Cold sweat drenches down me, shuddering spasms Rack my whole flame, a greener-than-grassy pallor Holds me, till I seem a hair’s breath only This side of dying.
Yet all must be ventured, all endured, since. . .
(Translation: Peter Green)
Sappho’s feelings for the natural world are as sensual as her feelings for people. In the poem known as Fragment II, Sappho calls Aphrodite to an orchard where cool water runs through the apple trees, alongside a meadow of spring flowers and gracious breezes. As Richard Jenkyns suggests, the sounds of many of the words she uses, keladei, for running water, tethumiamamenoi, for the perfumed smoke rising from a sacrifice, aithussomenon, for the sparkling of light on moving leaves, combine with their meaning to create the mood of sensuous languor.
Sappho is important as the rare and unrestrained voice of a woman in this period. While, as has been seen in Homer’s epics, aristocratic women are given some status, she is still marginal, occupied solely with other women, here young girls. Ultimately it is the demands of marriage that take them away from their secluded world and so they must pass away from the intimate relationships they have enjoyed with each other. Sappho is the supreme recorder of loss and unfulfilled desire in this bittersweet moment of youthful freedom.
World History
