BICS 31 (1984) 13 IBYCUS: GORGZAS AND OTHER POEMS John P. Barron For R.P. W.-I. Those of us who have had the delight of working with Professor R.P. Winnington-Ingram at the Institute of Classical Studies and elsewhere know him not only as one of the most acute and sensitive critics of Greek poetry now writing in the English language, but as an extraordinarily helpful and generous friend to our own studies. Now, as the Institute celebrates his entry into his ninth decade, it is a great pleasure to offer him a small return for all that he has meant to US:^ eEoiti& ool toOhGv apogac hvri6wprpJaiaro. Ibycus is particularly suitable for the occasion, because the beginning of the modern phase of critical work on his poetry exactly coincided with the beginning of Professor Winnington-Ingram’s academic career, when he came up to Trinity from Clifton in 1922. Until then there was little basis for an appreciation of Ibycus, whose seven lost books had earned him a place in the ancient canon of nine pre-eminent lyric poets. Citations by other writers preserved a fragment of thirteen lines and another of seven; but a thorough combing of ancient literature and of the scribblings of scholiasts could not amass as many as fifty lines more, of short and miscellaneous quotations, of imponderable quality. True, the fates had been even less kind to Ibycus’ fellow-Westerner Stesichorus, of whose “graves Camenae” the short and pedestrian snatches which survived gave no idea at all - or so, in charity, one hoped. At least the two substantial fragments of Ibycus were filled with unforgettable imagery, whose haunting power in no way fell short of the finest similes of Homer: the poet’s burning stormy love which knows no rest nor season, contrasted with the quinces and vines disturbed by growth only in spring; the anxieties of love in middle age compared to the feelings of a prize-winning race-horse, now well past his prime, as he waits uncertainly for the starter’s signal (Frr. 286, 287).2 The apparently unending stream of new texts from Oxyrhynchus has transformed the situation for both the western poets, and in making an assessment of either Stesichorus or Ibycus we are in a quite different position from our predecessors of sixty, or even of twenty, years ago. The rediscovery of Ibycus began with Hunt’s publication of forty-eight continuous lines of a poem addressed to one Polycrates, from the end of a roll of papyrus written as early as the second century B.C. (Fr. 282 = S 151). To have survived into the Alexandrian period at all, it was likely that the poem was in antiquity attributed to a famous author; and considerations of metre, language, dialect, and style ruled out all but Stesichorus and Ibycus. The biographical tradition connected Ibycus, but not Stesichorus, with Polycrates tyrant of Samos; and for most people, though not for so great a scholar as Paul Maas, that was enough to turn the scale.3 In an earlier article of my own I advanced a further argument in confirmation.4 It can be shown that in the desperately mutilated lines 37-40 of the poem the author introduces two obscure princes of Sicyon, and deliberately contradicts the Homeric tradition to assert that one of them, Zeuxippus, was the most handsome of the Greeks before Troy. Ibycus, it had already been noticed, showed a special interest in Sicyon, including knowledge of its local traditions: he spoke of the genealogy of its eponymous hero, and related the local tale that its River Asopus flowed under-sea to the Peloponnese from Phrygia. This new Sicyonian reference in the poem to Polycrates seemed to me to support the identification of Ibycus as its auth~r.~ 14 BZCS 31 (1984) Even if most people concurred in this attribution, they made no secret of their disappointment at the quality of the new poem. A perfunctory summary of the siege of Troy, it was an extraordinary patchwork of Homeric tags; and Page summed up the general view of it - “Some phrases are ungainly, others border on the inarticulate”.6 But the patchwork of tags, I suggested, discloses the nature of the poem. It is addressed to Polycrates as prospective patron, to whom it promises that immortality which only poetry confers. To illustrate this power of poetry Ibycus is concerned to point out that it is in epic alone that Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles are immortal; and the point is made effectively by a recital of the epic phrases - formulae, we say - which came most readily to mind: nodac chdc ‘A~iXXijc,pdyac Tehapdvloc ah~ycocAhc, ’Aywdpvov. paaiXdc ayoc ELvdpov (lines 20 f., 33 f.). The theme was commonplace - we know it in Sappho (Fr. 55LP) and Theognis (237-52) - and Ibycus’ expression of it rhetorically effective even if deficient in poetic charm. But in addition to the level of general reminiscence, I argued that the poet had in mind, and intended the reader to have in mind, two specific contexts in earlier verse, the one Homeric, the other Hesiodic. Lines 23-31 of the poem to Polycrates correspond closely to the invocation to the Muses at the beginning of the Cztalogue of Ships, Iliad ii 484-93, affirming their power to assist a task which no mortal man could achieve unaided.7 The correspondence of the two passages is close, and needs no further argument. The Hesiodic passage is lines 646-662 of the Works and Days, in which the poet undertakes to speak of navigation, and in which he alludes to the departure of the Greek fleet from Aulis for Troy (65 1-3). Hesiod himself is embarrassed at the outset. He is not aeaocpiopkvoc, and knows little of qWv nohuydpcpov (649,660-2). But the Muses know, and they have taught him. The point is the same as in Homer. Ibycus signals his allusion to the passage in 1.24 by calling his Muses ‘Ehi~~vid~c,for the Muses of Helicon are Hesiod’s, not Homer’s Muses, the poet’s guides to the Theogony (1-8, 22-34) as well as to the Works and Days (658-9). And the allusion is placed beyond doubt by the conjunction of the departure from Aulis - 27 ff., compare 65 1-3 - with two rare words, oeoocpiupkvai - 23, compare 649 - and nohuyoppi - 18, compare 660.8 Ibycus’ motive is very clear. Hesiod’s purpose was to boast of his own skill: he only crossed the sea once, from Aulis to Euboea, and there he won first prize for his hymnos. Ibycus wishes tactfully to remind Polycrates that he too is a champion poet and worthy of employment. Allusions of this kind presuppose a high degree of familiarity with earlier literature - a higher degree than we find easily credible. But sixth-century Greece must have been in terms of literature still a society of predominantly oral culture.9 It is only with the availability of books that the memory atrophies; and the dominance of Homer and Hesiod in the educational curriculum assured Ibycus of an audience who would catch allusions such as these. Still, as I have been told by some who have objected to my interpretation of the poem, repetition of clichds is one thing, their use as catch-words to identify particular contexts is quite another, and the intention that the recipient of the poem should read into it the implications of the context so identified is yet another still. The second of these, let alone the third, has seemed to some to assume a degree of subtlety and literary sophistication unthinkable in the bluff plain-spoken age of the tyrants. It is well-known, and the rich new fragments of Ibycus’ forerunner Stesichorus serve to emphasize the fact, that the use of epic clichds is as much a feature of early lyric as it is of the epics themselves. The sophisticated use of clichds which I have credited to Ibycus adds a further dimension, and my interpretation plainly requires further defence. Here, of course, I find myself embarrassed by the fragmentary nature of the evidence. But it seems clear that something of the kind had already been attempted a century before Ibycus by Tyrtaeus, whose unforgettable picture of an old man’s death gains by association with the Homeric passage from which it is adapted, in which Prim foresees his own death.10 Such creative imitation in Ibycus would therefore be nothing new. In the poem to Polycrates, of which we have almost fifty lines, not only can the tenor of the whole poem be judged, but its point is even made explicit at the end. Most of our other fragments are shy of disclosing their point, and one half of my equation is necessarily missing. What I can show is that the use of multiple catch-words which recall whole contexts is not peculiar to the poem addressed to Polycrates, but is a feature of Ibycus’ work to be identified in at least three other poems attributed to him by name and in another almost certainly his. EZCS 31 (1984) 15 First the magical picture of the birds in Fr. 317 (a), attributed by Athenaeus (388E): TOi) p€V 7T€‘TUhOlUlV in’ hKPOTU701C itavoiui nowi hat aiohO6eLpoi navihonec haBioppvpidec <re>KU‘ ah~vovecravvoinrepoi. Seeing the phrase noutihai aiohddeipoi navkhonec closely followed by ravvuinrepoi of the halcyones, it is hard not to recall Alcaeus, Fr. 345, opvi8ec rivet oi’d ’ ‘C~KE~VW-yCc and nepparwv $dov navihonec nowihodeppoi ravvoinrepoi; But without more of the context of either author, it is impossible to say what, if any, was the point of the insistent echo.