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Performance and Genre Cambridge University Press 0521835119 - Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter Excerpt More information chapter 1 Performance and genre 1 invoking the muses, evoking models For the Greeks, from the age of Homer to the late imperial period, the poet received his inspiration from the Muses or from some other god (e.g. Apollo or Dionysus), to whom he attributed the responsibility for the enthousiasmos which allowed him to sing as he wished to sing; consequently, it was a widespread practice for poets to apostrophise these divine sources of inspiration at the beginning of their works, or even to claim that they had been invested as poets by them (as in the case of Hesiod). Particularly in the Hellenistic age, however, we find that another figure takes his place beside the divine inspirer, or at times substitutes for him in the roleˆ of ‘guarantor’ of the origin of the work. The conventional roleˆ of acting as a source of inspiration may well be left to the Muses, but now an illustrious predecessor often steps in to teach the new poet the ropes, and how to proceed to construct the work he has undertaken, or else he verifies and ratifies the correctness of the method that the new poet has followed. In practice, in their combination of these two series of figures – the Muses and the poetic masters or models – it is as if Hellenistic poets turned to their advantage the distinction between inspiration by the poetic divinities, on the one hand, and the primacy of ‘craft’, techn¯e, on the other; the two now formed a powerful unit, no longer a pair of opposed possibilities. These two competing origins of poetry go back to a familiar cultural model of the fifth century, best represented for us by, on the one hand, Democritus and, on the other, by Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus.1 Socrates’ words in the Ion are perhaps the most famous ancient assertion of the ‘inspiration view’ of poetry: 1 Although poetry was considered the fruit of inspiration by the Muses throughout the archaic and classical periods, the idea of ‘poetic ecstasy’ and the concomitant downgrading of poetic techne are very Platonic, cf. P. Murray, Plato on Poetry (Cambridge 1996) 6–12; it is, of course, far from easy always to distinguish between poetic inspiration and ecstatic possession, cf. Finkelberg (1998) 19–20. 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521835119 - Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter Excerpt More information 2 Performance and genre The poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, unable to create poetry unless he is first inspired by the god and out of his wits, with no reason in him any longer (prªn n nqe»v te gnhtai kaª kjrwn kaª ¾ noÓv mhkti n aÉtän ¦ ); . seeing that it is not by any art that they create poetry and say many fine things about their subjects...butbydivine destiny (qe©a mo©ra); a poet can only succeed in the type of poetry towards which the Muse inspires him – one man in dithyrambs, another in encomia, another in hyporchemes, another in epic poems, and another in iambics – while in all the other kinds of poetry he is unsuccessful. In reality, it is not by virtue of techne that they speak, but thanks to a divine force: if techn¯e made them capable of composing fine expressions on a single subject, they would be able to do the same on all the other subjects, too (oÉ gr tcnh taÓta lgousin ll qe©a dunmei, pe©, e« perª n¼v tcnh kaläv p©stanto lgein, kn perª tän llwn pntwn). (Plato, Ion 534b–c) In the Phaedrus, Plato does not completely deny the existence of poetry created only by virtue of techn¯e, but he establishes a clear hierarchy between this inferior level and the kind created by divine inspiration: He who arrives at the doors of poetry without the madness of the Muses (neu man©av Mousän), thinking that he can be a good poet thanks solely to techn¯e, remains incomplete, and the poetry of the sane poet is eclipsed by that of the mad (¡ po©hsiv Ëp¼ t¦v tän mainomnwn ¡ toÓ swjronoÓntov ¡jan©sqh).2 (Plato, Phaedrus 245a) So too in the Laws, Plato states that the poet’s techn¯e lies in the mim¯esis of the characters, and again presents this ‘craft’ as a sort of low-level, dangerous instrument, even if he admits that the inspired poet too makes use of it to express himself: When a poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control his thoughts. He’s like a fountain where the water is allowed to gush forth unchecked. His art is the art of representation (t¦v tcnhv oÎshv mimsewv), and when he represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he doesn’t know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth. (Plato, Laws 4.719c (trans. Saunders)) Only here in fact in Plato do enthousiasmos and mimetic techn¯e coexist.3 Plato’s low valuation of mim¯esis as the techn¯e of poetry, together with the idea that the only really inspired, ‘philosophical’ poetry was the non- mimetic kind (with its extremely limited possibilities – the dithyramb, and 2 In the light of the subsequent comparison between inspired prophecy and simple divination by means of birds, it may be deduced that ‘the inspired poet stands to the mere technician as the inspired prophet stands to the mere augur’, cf. D. A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity (London 1981) 76. 3 Cf. Finkelberg (1998) 6 n. 19. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521835119 - Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter Excerpt More information 1 Invoking the Muses, evoking models 3 hymns to gods or to men), led the philosopher, both in the Laws (817b–c) and in the tenth book of the Republic, to banish poetry virtually entirely from the ideal State; there was, after all, no getting away from mim¯esis, whether by that is meant a continuous representation of characters by the author (for example, in drama), or an intermittent representation, as in the case of direct speech in epic poetry, alternating with non-mimetic episodes of narration. Aristotle started from the same presuppositions (poetry as an activity that is always predominantly mimetic, that is to say, a more or less continual representation of characters), but without Plato’s metaphysical agenda he was able to consider mim¯esis in thoroughly positive terms, as the techn¯e which allows the representation of the universal, purified from accidental empirical reality. At the climax of a process which had started with the Sophists, then, the conception of poetry as deriving from divine inspiration, based on a poetics of truth (a truth of which the poet is merely a spokesman for the divine inspirer), is largely rejected, and for it is substituted a ‘secular’ conception of poetry as deriving from techn¯e, and consequently based on a poetics of ‘fiction’, elaborated by means of the techn¯e that the poet himself possesses.4 As regards the poetry of the third century,it is obvious that the intellectual climate was closer to that of Aristotle than to that of Plato; in particular, poets now cultivated a variety of genres during their careers, and the idea, most familiar from Plato’s Ion (above pp. 1–2), that a poet could only be inspired by the god in a single literary genre must have seemed rather dated. Nevertheless, Hellenistic poets preferred not to forgo the positive advantages of the idea of divine inspiration, which guaranteed for them a sort of privileged sacrality compared with other tecn±tai, or ‘professionals’; indeed, even those who stressed the specifically professional element of their activity, stating that they had learnt how to compose poetry from this or that previous poet, transformed this idea of learning from a text-model into various forms of ‘investiture’ by a poet-model, which conferred on them an image almost as honourable as divine inspiration. The introduction of the figure of the ‘guarantor’ of a specific techn¯e is not universal to all the poets or all the compositions of the Hellenistic age; in particular, it is not found with any form of narrative epic, such as Callimachus’ Hymns, Theocritus’ epic-mythological poems, or the Argonau- tica of Apollonius.5 Rather, this new authorising strategy is most common 4 Cf. in general, Finkelberg (1998). On the rarity of references to the Muses in tragedy, cf. D. I. Jakob, ëH poihtik t¦v rca©av llhnik¦v tragwd©av (Athens 1998) chapter 1. 5 Cf. Albis (1996) chapters 1 and 2 on how Apollonius presents himself as a sort of ‘modern Demodocus’. See also below, pp. 96–7, 193–4. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521835119 - Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter Excerpt More information 4 Performance and genre where the precedent of a tradition either is not immediately apparent, or does not exist, and therefore must be invented. We see a clear case of this in Theocritus’ bucolic hexameters.6 In the programmatic Idyll 7, the first-person narrator, Simichidas, a poet from the town, meets a goatherd- singer, Lycidas, in the Coan countryside one sunny afternoon. Lycidas, the model-predecessor/guarantor, was already a famous bucolic poet, though whether he is purely fictional or an allegorical version of an author who really existed, it is impossible to say; Simichidas and Lycidas then hold a competition of ‘bucolic singing’ together.
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