REFRAINS IN ANCIENT GREEK POETRY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Simon Peter Burris May 2004 © 2004 Simon Peter Burris REFRAINS IN ANCIENT GREEK POETRY Simon Peter Burris, Ph.D. Cornell University 2004 What do refrains contribute to ancient Greek poetry? Modern scholarship has usually limited its treatment of ancient Greek refrains to considerations of their external associations. The tendency has been to explain refrains, both individually and as a formal type, by reference to assumed origins for the refrain form and its use in primitive song, for which we have little or no evidence. By contrast, I have attempted to explain the refrain form as an established feature within the ancient Greek poetic tradition. I am interested in two questions. First, what do individual refrains contribute to the individual poems in which they appear? Second, what literary refrain tradition is indicated by the surviving examples? Obviously the answering of one question involves the answering of the other. Before an examination can be made of individual refrains in context, there are some general questions that must be asked. In CHAPTER 2, I examine the treatment of refrains by ancient Greek scholarship. This involves examining the scholarly terminology associated with refrains, especially the term †c·jkflk. In CHAPTER 3 I test the commonly held hypothesis that refrains are sung by a chorus in response to stanzas provided by a soloist. In CHAPTER 4 I address the question of the often assumed relationship between sub-literary song and the refrains in surviving Greek poetry. I do this by investigating ritual cries and their use both within and outside the context of formal refrains. Once these general questions have been addressed, we may consider individual refrains in context. Since, as I shall argue, refrains find their most natural “home” in the monostrophic and triadic structures of non-dramatic lyric, I begin there in CHAPTER 5. Then I examine refrains in the antistrophic context of dramatic lyric in CHAPTER 6. I conclude my examination with the refrains of bucolic hexameters in CHAPTER 7. As it happens, this order coincides (very broadly speaking) with chronological order and thus reflects what I shall argue is the development of a continuous refrain tradition in ancient Greek poetry. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Simon Peter Burris was born in Nacogdoches, Texas on March 4, 1970. He entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 and was awarded a B.A. in Classics in 1992. In 1993 Mr. Burris married Miss Lori Ann Dutschmann of Waco and moved to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1995 he was admitted as a graduate student in Classics at Cornell University, and began work on his dissertation in 1999. In 2001, Mr. Burris accepted a temporary teaching position at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where a son, Owen Hugh, was born in 2002. iii To Lori. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many others contributed to the success of this dissertation. First I must express my gratitude to Hayden Pelliccia for his help throughout my association with Cornell University’s Department of Classics. His careful criticism of my work has led me to make many improvements and to avoid many pitfalls. Many thanks to the other members of my committee: Kevin Clinton, Judith Ginsburg and Jeffrey Rusten. Without their help this dissertation would not have been possible. Thanks also to Joseph Reed, in whose class the earliest incarnation of this dissertation made its appearance; to Alan Nussbaum; to Pietro Pucci; to Danuta Shanzer; to Frederick Ahl; to David Mankin; and to the Lane Cooper Foundation for its support in the form of a fellowship for the year 1999-2000. Special thanks to Charles Britain for his generous comments and encouragement; to Nancy Sokol and the other administrative staff for their invaluable help; and to my colleagues and students at Luther College for their friendship and support. Finally, I thank my wife, Lori, for her constant patience. All mistakes are my own. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch page iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 ANCIENT SCHOLARLY TREATMENT OF REFRAINS 14 3 PERFORMANCE OF REFRAINS 43 4 EXTERNAL ASSOCIATIONS 54 5 REFRAINS IN NON-DRAMATIC LYRIC 63 6 REFRAINS IN DRAMATIC LYRIC 124 7 REFRAINS IN BUCOLIC 165 Appendix: Refrain in Dithyramb 183 Bibliography 192 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In his book on repetitive forms in modern poetry, Laury Magnus almost despairs at offering a definition for the term “refrain”: So self-evident a device as the refrain turns out to be difficult to define... The obvious definition that might describe the refrain simply as the set of a poem’s repeated lines or parts of lines neglects important semantic characteristics of the device. The most compelling of these is that of intrusion: the refrain disrupts or retards the development of the poem. Such intrusion results from the refrain’s segmentation of the poem, from the way in which it “slices through” poetic utterance while maintaining its own distinct identity — a consistency of personality which renders it distinct from the stanza or strophe and which, despite possible material alterations, does not essentially change.1 Magnus’ point is that refrains are identified and classified as such because of the impression made upon the sense of the audience, rather than because of any particular formal characteristic. The refrain is “self-evident”; it “[maintains] its own distinct identity”; it has a “consistency of personality”. True, this effect is brought about by means of repetition, but the repetition may not be strictly verbatim: there may be “material alterations” from one instance to the next. The unit of verse to which the refrain is attached is not necessarily fixed: it may be either “stanza or strophe”. To what degree do these units of non-refrain verse have an independent existence? “Strophe” would imply (at least in the context of Greek lyric poetry) a unit of verse with a life of its own, one to which any refrain could justly be considered additive; “stanza” has no such connotation, and conceivably could apply to any group of lines “[resulting] from the refrain’s segmentation of the poem”. We have, then, two obstacles to any attempt to define the term “refrain”: the apparent ability for refrains to depart from strictly 1 Magnus (1989) 46. 1 2 verbatim repetition, and the variety of metrical contexts in which they may be found. Magnus is interested, of course, in the refrains of modern poetry, which are often much more variable in content and more sophisticated in formal and thematic functionality than the refrains of ancient Greek poetry. But his basic complaint is applicable to our subject. Greek refrains tend not to exhibit variation within individual poems, but there are several such cases with which we shall have to deal. More important is the difficulty of metrical context. One cannot, for example, offer a definition for Greek refrains such as “lines or parts of lines repeated within each strophe”. What would be done with the refrains of Pindar Paean 2 and 4, both of which are repeated with each triad? What of the refrains of antistrophic lyric in drama? And what of the refrains of astrophic and stichic verse, such as we find in the continuous hexameters of bucolic?2 That these are refrains is, as Magnus says of refrains in general, self-evident, and any definition of “refrain” for the purposes of this study must include them. §1 Definition and corpus I propose the following as a working definition of “refrain” for ancient Greek poetry. “Refrains” are lines or portions of lines that are repeated regularly in a poem, and which are separated by and distinct from intervening material. At this point it is desirable to distinguish what we are calling “refrains” from two other formal types: Homeric repetitions and what I shall call “appended 2 Wilamowitz (1925) 265 denies the name “refrain” for Thyrsis’ song in Theocritus 1, but his reasons for so doing seem to be (1) the dissimilarity between Thyrsis’ refrain and those of German and Roman folk song, and (2) the lack of a strophic structure for the song. This second reason stems, no doubt, from Wilamowitz’ earlier efforts to correct a 19th century fad of looking for “strophic responsion” in Greek bucolic and using this as a basis for textual criticism. Cf. Wilamowitz (1906) 137. 3 cries”. Besides limiting the corpus to be examined for this study, the distinction will occasion some useful discussion concerning the qualities of the refrain form. Repeated phrases and lines are common enough in Homer that they may be regarded as a distinctive aspect of his style.3 Indeed, if we are correct in taking the Iliad and Odyssey as products (ultimately) of an oral poetic tradition, repetition would seem to have been indispensable to their composition and performance.4 The evident adaptation of inherited oral compositional methods, including formulaic repetition, to what would otherwise be called high literary ends, stands as a singular achievement of the Homeric poems.5 Thus we may say with confidence that repetitions of phrase and line are essential to Homeric poetry. This is not the case with the refrains of lyric and bucolic, in whose composition formulaic methods do not seem to have played a part. Whereas we cannot imagine an Iliad or an Odyssey without frequent repetitions of whole lines, we can point to the overwhelming majority of lyric and bucolic poems that do not feature refrains.6 All this does not of itself prove that Homeric repetitions — no matter their determination by the requirements of composition — are never meant to produce an effect similar to that produced by the refrains of lyric and bucolic.