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J L.? LI.I O ~ Which Sung and Recited Verse Were an Integral Part of Daily Life Q) .c +-' c: :g ~ ·-Q) .5 0 'E. ~$ {2. QJ +-' ~ .~- 0 § ~ ~ Q) £' O t: Q) a; i::s QJ +-' ~ ;!:: ~ ~ i::s :J l.? LI.I o ~ which sung and recited verse were an integral part of daily life. In this world, song was only imaginable as part of live performance in a particular context, 2 I The strangeness of 'song where it forged a powerful bond between singer/speaker and listening audi­ !111 1 ence. Many of the elements of this living song culture (which endured at least I culture': Archaic Greek poetry until the end of the fifth century) had already been lost or forgotten by the LESLIE KURKE time Greek scholars of the Hellenistic Period organized definitive editions of the early poets, so that we cannot entirely rely on their categorizations and genre distinctions. Instead, we must attempt to reconstruct an older system from what we know of the social context, scattered reports about perform­ ance, and the internal evidence of the poems themselves. Modern scholars 111 have been aided in this endeavour by the discovery and publication of sub­ stantial papyrus finds in this century: perhaps for more than any other ... As I know how to lead off the lovely choral strain of Lord Dionysos, domain of Greek literature, the understanding of early Greek poetry has The dithyramb, when my brains are blitzed with wine. undergone a revolution as a result of such papyrus finds. From the publication (Archilochos) of substantial texts around the turn of the last century (e.g. Alkman's Parthe­ Let the lyre sound its holy strain, and the reed pipe (autos), neia and Bakchylides) to the appearance of fragments of Simonides' Elegy on And let us drink, when we have gratified the gods with libations, the Battle of Plataia in 1992, papyri have vastly increased our corpus of lyric Saying things full of grace to each other, texts and thereby allowed us to piece together an alien system of poetry in And fearing not at all the war of the Medes. performance. Given the scanty and fragmentary nature of the remains, any (Theognis) reconstruction must be tentative and hypothetical; yet it seems worth the I breakfasted, having broken off a bit of slender honey cake, effort of historical imagination to try to hear again the distant strains of early And drained my cup of wine. And now I delicately pluck the lovely Eastern lyre, Greek song culture (what is conventionally-and loosely-designated 'Greek Celebrating the festivity (komos) with a dear and dainty girl. lyric poetry'). In this effort, we must avoid two misconceptions. First, that the - (Anakreon) 'age of lyric' succeeded the 'age of epic' as an organic devel~ment of the f) Greek spirit (to be succeeded in turn by the Hegelian 'synthesis' of tragedy). 0 Mistress Muse, our mother, 1 pray you, Second, a more serious misconception: we cannot expect ancient Greek lyric In the holy month of Nemea Come to the hospitable Dorian island of Aigina, for beside the water of to conform to our modern assumptions of what lyric should be. In the mod­ ~ Asopos wait young men, craftsmen of honey-sounding celebrations (komoi), ern era, lyric has become the form of poetry par excellence, the most private longing for your voice. And different achievements thirst for different things, and intense expression of emotion by a speaking subject, often linked to the but athletic victory most loves song ... confessional 'I' and valued for the authenticity of feeling expressed. ~ecause (Pindar, Nemean 3. 1-7) Greek lyric poets are found 'speaking' for the first time (almost) in the first \r [)t person in their texts, there is a great temptation to assimilate them to modern These diverse snippets of poetry (ranging from the mid-seventh to the early notions of lyric subjectivity. Thus, it is often said that with archaic Greek fifth century BCE) evoke for us the strange world of early Greek 'song culture', in ) poetry, the individual '!' first emerges onto the stage "of history, with lyric subjectivity inexorably succeeding the objective form of epic as the Greek /()!V6L~~ The following standard abbreviations are used in this chapter: PLF = E. Lobel and D. L. Page spirit develops. Both of these claims (lyric as the invention of the self, and the (eds.), Poetarum lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955); PMG = D. L. Page (ed.), Poetae Melici Graeci organic development from epic to lyric) are romanticizing modern projections (Oxford, 1962); SLG =D. L. Page (ed.), S11pplement11m lyricis Graecis (Oxford, 1974); W, W' = that fail to take account of the cultural ~ecificity and difference of ancient M. L. West (ed.), Iambi et Elegi Graeci, 2 vols. (2nd edn. Oxford, 1989-92; W' = 2nd edn. Greek poetry. specifically). The arathronic development from epic to lyric is, in a sense, a mirage 40 I THE STRANGENESS OF 'SONG CULTURE' ARCHAIC GREEK POETRY I 41 produced by certain technological developments in ancient Greek culture. For poetry in context, that the particular formation of the Greek poetic system was the study of comparative metrics reveals certain lyric metres to beOt linked to and partli'conditioned by the rise and development of the polis in immemorial antiquity (songs the Greeks were singing before they were Greeks), fhis same period. The polis, or city-state, emerged as the characteristic structure while the Homeric poems also provide representations of embedded lyric per­ OfGi:eek community some time in the eighth or seventh centuries (cf. Ch 1, pp. formances (harvest song, wedding song, paian to Apollo, threnos or mourning 29-'3"1). The polis was not just a built town, but the indissoluble union of city song). Thus, epic and lyric must have coexisted throughout the entire prehis­ and territory Tclwra), in which the inhabitants felt themselves to be fellow tory of Greek literature. What suddenly enabled the long-term survival of lyric 'citizens'. The constitution of the polis depended crucially on the abstraction of in the period under discussion was, paradoxically, the same technological law and office from individuals and the notion that all citizens (however the development that ultimately ended the living oral tradition of epic citizen franchise might be defined) should participate in communal decision­ composition-in-performance: the invention of writing. It was, then, an acci­ mal<ing. In these terms, the polis is more properly understood as 'state' than dent of technology and not the necessary development of the Greek spirit that 'city', and the eighth to sixth centuries as the critical period of Greek state caused lyric to 'succeed' epic in the literary remains. formation. B~if lyric poetry depended on the advent of writing to survive, it was very In this same period, we find a proliferation of what appear to be n~w poetic much an oral medium for the whole period under discussion (and this brings us genres and occasions. Thus, for example, in addition to paian, wedding song, td our second misconception). Greece down through the fifth century has apti}- and threnos (already evident in the Homeric poems), such genres as parthe­ . ~1· been described as a 'song culture', in which everyone sang and knew songs, a~d neion ('maiden song'), dithyramb (a cult song for Dionysos), and epinikion (a fJ Y there was a highly elaborated system of songs for different occasions. Tn -such a song celebrating athletic victory) developed, and all three in different ways 0 culture, all song-making and performance are 'embedded'-that is, intended served the interests of the civic community (as we shall see). Other genres of V\ .. .J for perform'ance in particular public (often ritualized) contexts. Such 'embed- poetry seem to have taken their distinctive form in this period, if not in the 1 ·\ ding' makes an~ient lyric radically different from our modern notion of lyric as service of the polis community, then in reaction to it. Because of this mutually 1oV the personal outpourings of a poet, written in private to be read in private by informing relation of polis structure and poetic system, the remains of archaic \ individual consumers. According to John Stuart Mill's familiar dictum, in the lyric (scanty though they are) provide us with a precious view of C,£_mpeting modern era eloquence is meant to be heard; poetry overheard. Greek lyric, in va]ues. and ideologies in the period of Greek state formation (on which more c~ntrast, was always intended to be heard, not overheard. below). " ,, What then was the purpose of such poetry in performance? Beyond whatever These two facets of early Greek poetry-its performed and performative 81 ...., particular purpose it performed (for example, prayer to a god, celebration of natu'7e within a living 'song culture'-have an important corollary: that we marriage, mourning at a funeral), embedded song served in general as a means cannot take the 'I' of Greek lyric to be the biographical poet. There is, first, the of socialization and cultural education in the broadest sense. In....._ a largely oral evidence of other 'song cultures' around the world, in which the singer often ~)t __ _ culture, with no institutionalized schools and only minimal state structure and adopts a persona well known to other members of the community, though he intervention, poetry in performance was a vital way of transmitting to each or she sings in the first person. We encounter precisely this phenomenon in individual their store of cultural knowledge, the values to be espoused, their Greek poetry when Aristotle mentions offhand that two first-person poems of proper level of expectations and aspirations, and their social roles. That is to Archilochos of which we have fragments were in fact spoken in the persona of say, embedded poetry was one medium (along with, for example, family, mili­ 'Charon the carpenter' and 'a father speaking to his daughter' respectively tary service, and forms of commensality) for constructing individuals as social (Archilochos, W2 frr.
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