Archilochus First Poet after Homer ARCILOCOU TA APOSPASMATA William Harris Prof. Emeritus Classics Middlebury College 1 Archilochus was known in ancient Greece, to everyone who knew anything about literature, as the first poet after Homer and Hesiod. To an educated Greek in the Fourth Century A.D. it would have seemed inexplicable to have to explain in a preface to the poems of Archilochus, who this famous poet was, when and where he lived and what kind of verse he wrote. Although no more precise about exact dates than we are, he would have placed Homer about four hundred years after the Trojan War, Hesiod somewhat later, and Archilochus in the time of Gyges, about or after 480 B.C., as we know from the Parian Marble. Archilochus' volumes were cur- rently available to him, and he would hardly have thought that this author and Hipponax and Sappho, let alone a hundred others, would have virtually disappeared in the next seven hundred years. But the course of centuries has changed all that, we have only a residual fraction of Hellenic literature, and in the case of the early poets other than the Epic writers we have mere table scraps from later writers, shredded papyri in pieces at best, and hardly enough from which to write a decent literary preface. Almost everything we know about Archilochus comes from his poems, but the surprising thing is how much quality information we have been able to glean from this scrappy source. Perhaps just because there is so little solid information, the scholarly world has devoted a great deal of detailed study to what remains of his work, much ensconced in recondite professional journal-writing, inaccessible to the reader in English translation and largely unattractive to the enthusiast learning Greek from the bottom up. It was in l963 that Guy Davenport surprised the world with his English "Archilochus", translating the Greek closely but with the sensitivity of a natural poet. In fact it was such a good little book that everyone thought for a while that it was new poetry from Davenport, in the guise of a translation from an ancient text. But for the literary world, Davenport became the standard readable text of this ancient author, while the discovery of the Cologne fragment and others materials pursued an independent track in the professional classical Journals. So what we have is a split view of 2 Archilochus, on the one hand a readable translation in English, as against a network of scholarly treatments and discussion in places where the light of day rarely shines. Using Archilochus in classes in English translation, I have always presented the material to my class with the Greek text in my hand, reading and com- menting on what I found in the Greek, and what I thought about it in terms of both Greek thought and my own observations from this end of a long string of centuries. I know there is no way of thinking like an ancient Greek, the learned Richard Bentley told us almost three centuries ago that he knew about as much Greek as an Athenian blacksmith, and I am no Bentley. But there are things in Archilochus which seem to leap off the page and talk to us as if he were here. I have never thought that the Classics represented "generic thought" good for the ages, and many classical notions are clearly foreign to our new post-Enlightenment world. But clarity of mind and sheer wit do have a way of transcending time, and the sharp edge of this poet's mind is as pointed and trenchant as the tip of his spear or the edge of his ire. The Internet has brought a great deal to light which the public eye would never have found hidden away in the university libraries, but even now it still has to be in Roman ASCII font, which precludes good access to the Greek. It is just at this juncture that I felt it opportune to write a new ver- sion of Archilochus, in order to bring out the Greek text (which I can do conveniently with the Adobe Acrobat .pdf you are reading) and add to it the commentary which I have used in decades of teaching experience with lively student minds. I insist on treating this poet as a poet, and have little patience with the attempt to put together a 'biography' where there is noth- ing much to record. Many of my comments will seem personal and subjec- tive, probably anathema to some scholars but a natural result from literary reading of interesting writing. I have no copy of Davenport in my study, my translations are my own and if they coincide with his, that can be seen as unfortunate accident, or as witness to the fact that we are both good translators. 3 For many years I have worked with a method of interpretation that I call Form Analysis, which is the study of highly developed poetic writing in terms of the sounds used, their configuration into words, phrases and verses, with the import and impact of Form qua form as a complement to study of Meaning or signification. Teaching in this country has hardly ventured out- side the narrow restrictions of Meaning, possibly out of fear that students do not read well and don't really comprehend, possibly because of a lack of understanding of what the art of poetry is really about. I won't discuss this crux of literary interpretation here, since I will come back to it in the commentary for discussion in relation to specific patches of the Greek text. But I thought I could give a little advance notice of this approach by referring to a paper I wrote on Form vs. Meaning and another The Poet and the Spectrograph with a more detailed analysis of the sounds, as well as the excellent approach to form by Harvard's Prof. Calvert Watkins in "How to Kill a Dragon" Oxford l995 especially in the early chapters. I am sure that this is going to be the new way into reading highly- textured literature which has the density of serious poetry. Without a form- based approach to writing, we are stuck on the level of thematic- identification, topic sentences and a superficial impressions of the complex literary art. Reading a poem for meaning only without some sort of form analysis is like doing a course in Renaissance painting based on black and white slides. The best Preface is no preface at all, with which profound statement I leave you to peruse the incomparable skeleton of the first author to follow in the wake of Homer and Hesiod, the great Greek poet Archilochus. 4 A Note about the "Accents" Briefly stated, we have a problem with the pronunciation of ancient Greek, which makes it difficult to read metrical poetry easily and intelligently. The diacritic "accents" which we find in all printed Greek texts, are musical pitch indications and NOT stresses, although when learning Greek we always use them as loud and emphatic 'stresses". On the other hand the Greek vowels can be long or short, where the 'duration' of the vowels is the basis of the metrical reading of poetry. So the first step in learning to read Greek poetry intelligently, will be to forcibly divest one's memory of the diacritic "Accents" as Stresses and start to pay close attention to vowel-length. This is a matter of Duration, with a double duration for Longs compared to shorts or unmarked syllables, and a triple duration for circumflexed vowels.. This takes work and much acoustic practice to become a smooth and usable way of reading Greek aloud by syllable lengths, but it is the only way Greek poetry can be read. Only after the Durations are well in hand, and the lines of dactylic epic are flowing along easily, can we pay attention to the raised intonations of the Acute accent and the over-swinging warbling melismata of the Circumflex. These add another dimension to Greek verse, and will serve to augment the metrics of the durative reading. But hearing a good reader will be the best introduction, after which the parts of the length and pitch systems incorrectly described in the grammars will fall better into place. For the sake of clarity in reading the meters, I am omitting in this edition the Smooth Breathing which has no meaning whatsoever, and the Grave accent which only means that a raised pitch has been changed to a low base- level, so there is no musical pitch there. Papyri for learners often used the grave for all unmarked syllable in an effort to keep the voice down when no pitch it called for. More explanation for this will be found in the following discussions. 5 I mention this as a special caution for those schooled in traditional Attic prose pronunciation who have learned their pronunciation by stressing the 'accents', and putting a loud 'stress' wherever any diacritic accent stands. This must be abandoned at this point before going on, because it makes the reading of Greek verse, which is based on length or "vowel duration", quite impossible. Since all Greek texts are printed with diacritic accents as agreed upon by a convention of modern text editors. There is little reason to memorize them as one learns new words, even less to follow the practice of older German professors who once required from their students hand gestures, in the manner of signing for the deaf, when reading Greek aloud. Everything that does not pertain to the intelligent reading of ancient Greek literature can be considered unnecessary load, and jettisoned from the ship in the interest of better sailing into port. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I: The Poet and Poetry Chapter II: Warfare and the Poet Chapter III: Places and Persons Chapter IV: Love and Sex Chapter V: Wine and Festivity Any CORRECTIONS noted with page and line will be appreciated. 7 Chapter I: Poetry and the Poet I Athenaeus writing near 300 AD in his voluminous and curious book "The Philologists' Banquet" in which twenty-three doctoral types come together to discuss literature and learned literary matters, is the source of many of our quotations from lost Greek writers, and especially from Archilochus, whose books were the current and entire. He remarks at one point that the ancients considered political life most important, and mentions the fact that Archilochus puts his civic role before his well known poetic achievements, writing: eimi d j egw qeravpwn men Enualivoio avnakto~ kai Mousevw˙n eraton dw`ron epistavmeno~ "I am comrade henchman of the Ares the Enyalian King Also understanding the lovely gift of the Muses" The name Enyalios was specifically used as an epithet joined with the war god Ares, as in Iliad 17.211, and was so often used that Ares can be omitted as understood. The word 'therapon' is used here in the wake of the Homeric usage, as "communion at arms, henchman", and clearly not "servant" as we might at first imagine. The trail of this word is long, first "military companion", then in the Hippocratic medical writers it becomes the Attendant on a disease under the rubric of Doctor as following the course of a sickness rather than dramatically curing it, as in our medical practice. This medical usage became the dominant meaning of the word, which survived in English 8 "therapy" and its many derivatives. Here we must unravel the course of time and return to the Homeric sense of the term: "I am companion in arms to Ares the King...." Since the verse is elegiac couplet, we start off with a new breath, indicated in our modern format by indentation, but with a different turn of meter. We are to expect a strong break of Caesura in the middle of the line where foot and word end together causing what we call in music a "rest", then resuming the line. "Skilled in the lovely | gift of the Goddesses" Notice this delicate pause splitting the lovely gift in two with a pause, just as he states his skill in poetic expression, a nice and restrained touch. Here Archilochus, whose very name has been thought by some scholars to be a pen-name "Captain of Squad", states his dual role as soldier and also as poet. Since we are speaking of him as Poet, which to us means one who composes a certain kind of imaginative writing in a verse-format, we should note that Archilochus does not, and could not, refer to himself as a Poet. That word comes from the verb 'poieo' meaning "make, fashion, craft", and it is so used in Homer regularly. But there is no "poetes" in the epic world, the nearest word is the adjective 'poietos' or "well crafted, well fashioned", while the Homeric poet is 'aoidos' which connects with his chanting, bardic role as weaver of the fabric of history into a fabric of words. It wasn't until well into the literary flowering of the later Hellenism that 'poietes' came to be the word for what we call Poet, replacing the old Aoidos completely. Demodocus in the Odyssey is "Instructor of the People" etymologically, and a far cry from what Archilochus, that proverbial castigator of the people, intends to be. So the couplet really means to note the author's dual role, both as soldier and also as poet in our sense. 9 A classic Samurai warrior would find no difficulty in seeing these as conjoint occupations, and Miyamoto Mushashi was not unusual in writing, fighting and sculpting as expected crafts from a highly skilled and trained samurai. In the modern West we seem to have broken this mold apart, and I can hardly think of any soldier or even political person who writes or wrote poetry in any form other than a casual limerick. Perhaps more poetry might have sensitized our generals and politicians to the seamy side of combat, and reduced some of their eagerness for warfare. II We often think of Poet putting pen or quill to paper as he begins a composition, but for the Greeks the words were always associated with song, which means words with musical accompaniment, as here: auto~ exavrcwn pro~ aulon Levsbion paihvona "I myself the lead singer of the lesbian paean, to the sound of the flute" Again Athenaeus gives us a valuable word clue: "The word 'ex-arkhon' is a special term for lyre music", so Archilochus is proceeding in singing his poetry in the classic Lyre Manner. But he makes a point of mentioning the Aulos or flute, probably as a new accompaniment to the recitation. This might seem a mere substitution of one instrument for another. But the flute with its strangely lacking even harmonics, has a special sound of its own, which would contrast strongly with the much richer harmonics of the plucked reverberative string. Since he mentions the Lesbian song, which means lyre-accompanied, the flute seems to be mentioned intentionally, perhaps as new to that century or even a preference offered by Archilochus himself. Otherwise why mention it so specifically? 10