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The Myth of Bacchylides 17: Iz' I Heroic Quest and Heroic Identity

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The Myth of Bacchylides 17: Iz' I Heroic Quest and Heroic Identity Eranos 77, 1979, 23-37 li' The Myth of Bacchylides 17: iZ' I Heroic Quest and Heroic Identity For Bruno Gentili By Charles Segal ., Brown University, USA j Bacchylides' Seventeenth Ode has been justly celebrated for its richness of language, its vividness of narrative, its combination of artfully symmetrical structure and limpidity of narrative. One aspect of the poem, however, has been insufficiently understood and has led to misapprehensions about a supposed lack of unity or inconsistency. Bacchylides' art and the genre to which it belongs use conventions, themes, and symbols whose meaning, obvious to his contemporaries, may not be immediately clear to us.' Ode 17 draws upon a vocabulary of mythic archetypes which the poet could assume his audience to command. His narrative exploits an ancient mythical pattern familiar to us from the Tele­ macheia of the Odyssey and his contemporary's myths of Pelops and Iamos (Pindar, 01. I.65-100; 01. 6.57-73), namely the young hero's quest for his father by a journey on or under water.2 In this quest the hero proves his manhood in the double and obviously related realms of war and Jove. His journey both tests his martial prowess and symbolically initiates him into mature sexuality. Force in arms and sexual knowledge together constitute the hero's trial in his passage from youth to man. We cannot say for certain whether or not Bacchylides found the myth ·of Theseus' underwater adventure with Minos already defined by this com­ plementation of its two parts, Minos' ring and a female divinity's gift of a 3 crown (the gift of a robe, however, seems to occur only in Bacchylides). 1 For Bacchylides' "creative use of imitation" and convention, see Mary R. Lefkowitz, ''Bacchylides' Ode S: Imitation and Originality", HSCP 73 (1968) 45-96, especially 45-48 and 94-96. 2 For the initiatory motifs in 01. 1 and 6 see Jacqueline Duchemin, Pindare, poete et prophete (Paris 1955) 160ff. and also 187ff.; C. P. Segal, "God and Man in Pindar's First and Third Olympian Odes", HSCP 68 (1964) 214ff. and 226-228; see also J. Th. Kakridis, "Des Pelops und lamos Gebet bei Pindar". Hermes 63 (1928) 424-429. For the Telemacheia see C. W. Eckert, "Initiatory Motifs in the Story of Telemachus", CJ 59 (1963) 49-57. 3 See the introductory notes to Ode 17 in F. G. Kenyon, ed,, The Poems of Bacchylides (London 1897) and R. C. Jebb, Bacchylides, the Poems and Fragments (Cambridge 1905); also A. H. Smith, .. Illustrations to Bacchylides", JHS 18 (1898) 276-280; Carl Robert, "Theseus Eranos 77 ~~-------------------·..... The myth of Bacchylides 17 25 24 Charles Segal .. U"tEQ0' EQCt"tUEV, 0(yEV Even ifBacchylides is the innovator, his contribution consisted in recombin­ or ).ruxav :riaQlltOwv · ing themes, motifs, and symbols which were already deeply rooted in the ~OOOE "t' 'EQ(~ma ;(MX0- mythic tradition and in one of the social functions of myth. He need only put 0ciJQa[xa Il]avb(OVO£ together into a new framework elements which lay to hand in the mythic exy[o)vov · (OEV Oe Elt)OEU£ ...s vocabulary, probably in the preexisting legends of Theseus. The specific design or groundplan may be new, but the building blocks were already This passage interweaves at once the two aspects o~ Th".s~u~· q~est for there for the poet to assemble. heroic maturity, for it involves the martial prowess 1mphc1t m his male If Bacchylides was indeed the first to link Theseus' visit to Poseidon lineage ("bronze-armored descenda;it of Pandion", 14-16) and the force of and/or Amphitrite with the confrontation with Minos over the ring, then he the sexual instinct which however must be .made to conform to the is responsible for interweaving the initiatory motifs of the youth's proof of appropriate social norms in order to be a vahd part of our full .human paternity and test of martial prowess with the sexual initiation which com­ identity. In this latter respect Minos and Theseus contrast as negative and pletes this symbolical "rite de passage". Both elements in the hero's transi­ positive paradigms. Theseus' use of his martial streng~h .a~d c.our~ge to tion from youth to maturity, the martial and the sexual, are also combined defend Eriboea in the fii"st part of the ode parallels his m1!1a!lon mto a in the myth of Pelops in Pindar's First Olympian, although the mode of the legitimate, tempered, and sanctioned sexuality in. the second. P.a~. ~oth trial and initiatiqn is different.• One of the striking qualities of Bacchylides' episodes, the confrontation with Minos and the receipt of Amph1tnte s gifts, treatment of the myth is the way in which he has sel?arated out the two parts imply the ethical side of the heroic identity. , of the hero's quest and thereby called attention to their complementary The most recent interpreter of the ode has suggested th.at Enb~ea s relation. In so doing, he could count on the coherence of the mythic reaction to Minos is exaggerated and hence the scene is not entirely senous. archetype, with the complementation of its two elements, to provide the On this view, the supposedly exaggerated tone her~ wou~d be ans':"e~ed by unifying frame for his narrative. the lightness of the second half of the ode, the meetmg with Amph1tnte. To Bacchylides plunges swiftly in medias res with the crisis which confronts quote Stern: the young Theseus. King Minos feels the sting of desire and approaches the The first part of this ode offers us, then, a pastiche o~ Homeric language and maiden Eriboea (8-16): motifs· but the presentation appears excessive, consct?usly de~elo~ed on a h perbolic level. That we are not to take it with complete seno~sness 1~ ev~dent from XVLOEV "tE MLVWL XEaQ t~e triviality of the immediate situation, and even more parttcularly 1n hght of ~he iµEQ<'tµ;n;uxo£ 0Ea£ second half of the ode, wherein we have found consi~te?t verbal con.trasts which Ku:riQ16o£ [a)yva o&Qa· present us with the lyrical,. feminine world of ~cpphttnte, her dancing nymphs, XELQO o' ou[xE-t1] :rtaQ0EVlXCt£ wreaths, and fillets. 6 und Meleagros bei Bakchylides" ,Hermes 33 (1898) 132-147;.Th. Zielinski, "Bacchylidea" ,Eos But· in fact there is no reason to think that there is anything "trivi~" ab?ut 5 (1898) 32-38; Hans Herter, "Theseus der Athener", RhM 88 (1939) 270-274; idem, Minos' attack. The language of 8-10 conveys the violence of ero!lc desire. .. Theseus'', RE. Suppl. 13 (1973) 1106-1109; Ellen Wi.ist, "Der Ring des Minos. Zur My­ Kv[~ElV (8) is a strong verb (cf. Pindar, Pyth. 8.32 and Pyth ...10.60;. Hdt. thenbehandlung bei Bakchylides", Hermes% (1968) 527-538. The evidence of'ihe Franr;ois 6.62.1). The litotes in tl-12, "no longer held his hand from , depicts a vase, the only version which certainly predates Bacchylides' ode, suggests that the main scarcely contained lust, explicitly identified as just that by T~eseus. ~oo~ outlines of the story were already established in the tradition long before our poem, but gives no clear indication about the motif of the garland or the ring, though the latter would seem to be after (21-23). Minos frequently has a bad character in the mythic trad1Uon, impli~it in Theseus' underwater journey. Where garland and ring do occur together, namely in the versions described by Pausanias 1.17.2-3 and Hyginus, Poet. Astron. 2.5, we cannot be s Citations are from B. Snell and H. Maehler, Bacchylides 10 (Leipzig 1970). sure that they are earlier than Bacchylides. Wilst 533 f. suggests that both the ring and a Jacob Stern, "The Structure ofBacchylides' Ode 17", RBPh 45 (1967) 4:4-4~· . Amphitrite's gifts of robe and garland were Bacchylides' innovations, the ring-motif enabling 1 E.g. Plato, Minos, 312 D; see also Helbig, s. v. "Mino" in Roscher,Ausfuhrl1ches Lex~con.~er the poet to unite the pre-existing two versions of Theseus' watery descent, one to Poseidon and griechischen und riimischen Mythologie, II.2 (Leipzig 1894-97) 2994-5; Albert M~n1et, Le one to Amphitrite, in a single myth. These suggestions, however, are conjectural, and the caractere de Minos dans l'Ode XVII de Bacchylide", LEC IO (1941) 35-54,. especially 40ff., conventional nature of these motifs, which I try to establish later, militates against her thesis. h ncludes that Minos though made to seem not entirely unworthy of being a son of Zeus, We should also recall that in other cases where a version of the myth exists in vase-painting :d:itc~tre reprCsentC dans i·ode entiCre comme un homme cruel et grossie~" (52-3~. See also D. (e.g. the story of Croesus in Ode 3 or the daughters of Antenor in Ode 15), Bacchylides is not Comparetti "Les D_ithyrambes de Bacchylide'', Melanges H. Weil (Pans 1898) tn W. Calder the innovator; and we should expect the same relation between poet and painter to apply here and J. Ste~. eds., Pindaros und Bacchylides, Wege der Forschung 134 (Darmstadt 1970) 399; with respect to the Euphronios cylix in the Louvre. For illustrations see Smith (above). Gail w. Pieper, "Conflict of Character in Bacchylides' Qde IT', TAPA 103 (1972) 3%ff. For 4 See above, note 2. Eranos 77 Eranos 77 ,,,.,.. 26 Charles Segal The myth of Bacchylides 17 27 and especially in the At.henian sphere of influence to whieh this ode, by end will be initiated in a symbolism whose allusive delicacy stands at the virtue of its performance at Delos, probably belonged.
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