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The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext

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The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, Vol. 5 Edited by Bruno Currie Ian Rutherford LEIDEN | BOSTON chapter 1 The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization, and Paratext Bruno Currie and Ian Rutherford 1 Introduction To approach a fuller understanding of any work of ancient Greek literature we need to pay attention to reception, not only its immediate reception by con- temporary and near-contemporary audiences (insofar as there is any direct evidence for that), but also its longer-term reception in later Greek and Roman culture. There are two main parts to this inquiry. One is transmission: the pro- cess by which literary works were passed on to later generations and made available to listeners and readers. The other is the broader impact on Greco- Roman intellectual culture: the ways in which the texts are used by writers, critics, or visual artists. Their views are bound to be shaped to some extent by the tastes of the particular historical period in which they lived, but they may also draw on established interpretative traditions, which in some cases go back to the period when the works were first composed. These two issues of tradi- tion and broader impact are closely linked, both because a citation or allusion may provide at least indirect evidence for transmission, and because the atti- tudes of later writers and intellectuals can help to explain why it was believed to be necessary to transmit the texts in the first place. For the study of Greek song—melic, iambic, and elegiac poetry—of the sev- enth to fifth centuries BCE, understanding ancient reception is particularly important. In this case the process of transmission had an exceptionally trans- formative effect, seeing the conversion of musical performances into written texts lacking any form of musical (or choreographical) notation. With the cre- ation of a literary “canon”, the Greek lyric tradition underwent what Jan Ass- mann has called “excarnation”: a process of becoming disembedded from its original context.1 The creation of a canon in this context entails not only the creation of canonical poets (an exclusive list of specially favoured authors), but also of canonical texts (texts fixed in their precise wording and maybe even in 1 Assmann (2006) 65–70; he credits Aleida Assmann with the invention of the term. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004414525_002 2 currie and rutherford their colometry); both aspects are relevant to this volume.2 A second reason for the importance of reception to early Greek song specifically is that com- paratively few texts from these genres survive complete, and much of what comes down to us takes the form of short excerpts (“fragments”) scattered in the texts of other writers. Many of these are presumably faithful citations (dir- ect or indirect) of some version of a text that was in circulation, but others could be distorted or even invented.Thus it is crucial to be aware of the agendas of the embedding authors. Finally, the surviving texts of lyric poetry, even the nearly complete, are often not entirely comprehensible in themselves; many of them require that we grasp topical allusions or know something about the circumstances of performance, and some, such as Pindar’s Epinicia, contain language that is, at least prima facie, obscure. For all these reasons, lyric poetry in antiquity was bound up with commentary and we for our part are more than usually dependent on the opinions of ancient writers and scholars who, whatever their limitations and idiosyncrasies, at least had access to much more primary material than we do.3 The aim of the chapters collected in the present volume is to examine aspects of the reception and transmission of ancient Greek song in the ancient world. It had its origins in an international conference, ‘The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry 600BCE–400CE: Transmission, Canonization, and Paratext’ held at the University of Reading in September 2013, under the auspices of the Net- work for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song. Neither the volume nor this introduction claims to give comprehensive coverage of the subject, and although all of the chapters here are self-contained, it may be helpful to attempt a sort of overview of the subject they address in their different ways. A useful way of approaching the ancient reception of Greek lyric chronolo- gically is to break it down into a number of stages, none of them entirely clear, but some clearer than others. Probably the best understood is the Hellenistic period, when scholars in Alexandria are believed to have produced editions of the texts (Stage 4 below). Before that, we find traces of Peripatetic interest in the fourth century BCE (Stage 3) and signs of an early canon forming in Athens (Stage 2). The hardest to make out is the period before the fifth century (Stage 1), with which our chronological survey, necessarily very partial and selective, begins. 2 On the interconnection of these two aspects of “canonization”, see Lardinois’ contribution to this volume, p. 49. 3 Hutchinson (2007) 36. the reception of greek lyric poetry in the ancient world 3 1.1 Stage 1: The Seventh and Sixth Centuries bce Most of the melic, elegiac and iambic poets who later became canonical date from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, and they practised their art in dif- ferent parts of Greece: Sparta, Ionia, and the West. How did their songs come through to the fifth century BCE? While a complete answer to this question is beyond our grasp, we can sketch out three aspects that may have played a role. The first could be described as selection and Panhellenization. Although there must have been hundreds of singers in Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, only a small number achieved the status of classics. Many of them must have been forgotten quickly or were remembered for a single com- position, such as the one-hit-wonder Tynnichus (Plato, Ion 534d). The success- ful ones must have owed much of their success to their ability to reach beyond their local communities, and to secure recognition at the Panhellenic level. In some cases Panhellenic recognition may have come after the poet’s death, but in others it may have been achieved in his lifetime through travelling and per- forming at festivals or by constructing poems in such a way as to appeal to a general audience.4 The poet’s Panhellenic ambition is sometimes made expli- cit in the poetic texts (e.g. Pindar, Olympian 1.115b–116). The second aspect is the role played by oral and written transmission. Some see transmission as largely oral right down to the fifth century BCE, and possibly later, with writing playing only a supporting role. Gregory Nagy,5 for example, has seen the transmission of the poems in terms of generations of singers who, by performing the songs associated with a given poet, take on his or her persona. Thus what is passed down is not the song but the performance tra- dition and the associated persona, with writing playing at most a secondary role. Others see even the earliest melic poems as being written down from the start, a position that need not presuppose the existence of a significant read- ing public, as the main purpose of written texts may have been to ensure the continued performance of lyric compositions in a form faithful to the original.6 This debate replicates one concerning early Greek epic, and equally eludes con- sensus.7 Intermediate positions are also possible, such that writing was intro- duced in, say, the mid-sixth century BCE, an early sign of this potentially being Theognis’ “Seal” elegy, if that implies a literal seal on a written document (which 4 For poets travelling and performing at festivals, see Hunter and Rutherford (2009). For poems as constructed so as to appeal to a wider audience, see Carey (2011) 442–445, but see also Cur- rie (2017) 202–208. 5 Nagy (1990) 36–82. 6 Stehle (1997) 262–318, on Sappho. 7 Nagy (1990) 38–82, (1996) 29–63; Fowler (2004). 4 currie and rutherford is uncertain).8 Possibly there was a correlation between the increasing Panhel- lenization of song and the need for writing to stabilize the text when performed beyond the local communities. But even that is unclear; frequent performance even within local communities could give rise to a desire to standardize the text that was to be performed (as with Lycurgus’ establishment of “official” texts of the three great tragedians in fourth-century BCE Athens). The third aspect is control of the tradition. Was it simply left to itself or did some parties have a special role in shaping it? One interested party might be the lyric poets themselves, who could have helped to shape the emerging tradition. We know at least that poets cite their predecessors: Solon cites Mimnermus, Simonides cites Stesichorus, and Pindar refers to Archilochus and to the (to us) uncanonical Sacadas of Argos and Xenocritus of Locri. In other words, the question of how poets themselves viewed the lyric tradition arises already for the archaic and early classical periods, as well as for the later fifth century.9 This all pertains to the creation of a “canon” of elite poets. The other aspect of the control of the tradition is the creation of “canonical”, or authorised, fixed, texts. It is natural to think of the poets themselves as taking an interest in the textual preservation of their own work (consider Theognis’ “Seal” again).
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