Complete Poems 9780300159660

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BACCHYLIDES

BACCHYLIDES COMPLETE POEMS

Translated, with a Note to the New Edition, by Robert Fagles With a Foreword by Sir Maurice Bowra Introduction and Notes by Adam M. Parry

Yale University Press

New Haven & London

Copyright .tm•v is

deliberately unfixed to en-

loneliness and loss when the gods are not our companions. It is because the whole poem has been about Pindar and Pindar' s vision that the famous lines at the end have so peculiarly strong an effect: Our life is a day. What is itl what is it notl Man is a shadow, and the dream of a shadow. But when the godsent brightness comes, glory of shining lies all about us, and our time is sweet. This is the sort of thing Bacchylides does not do. But it is important to observe that he does not try to do it either. He is an Ionian poet, much closer to Homer than Pindar is, and very close to his own uncle Simonides. He is neither cold nor perfunctory, and these translations and notes will demonstrate that his moral reflections are neither shallow nor extrinsic to the structure ofhis poems. But he stands back from his work, and prefers to consider himself a craftsman rather than a prophet. When he speaks of himself, it is within the clear limits of convention: By the earth I press Not once has a rival ... or ... resound too the rolling finesse Of the nightingale of Ceos. The relevance of poetic statement and story to the experience of his audience is important to Bacchylides. There is not one of his longer poems that does not have some central didactic focus to which the myth, the images, and the reflections refer. But he is more likely to tell us about the laws of the gods than to become the gods' spokesman. Hence the element of narrative, the Homeric art, is more central in Bacchylides than in Pindar. What the heroes ofhis poems say and do is more vital to his statement than what he is and says. XlX

When a god speaks in Bacchylides, he speaks not to the poet, but to a hero: So Lord Apollo, true to his mark, Gave warning to Admetus ... Bacchylides lacks the inwardness of Pindar, and his poetry is never so personally compelling. He is cooler, brighter, more objective. In narrative grace and crisp elegance he is his superior; and, less overwhelming, he is more immediately accessible to readers from whom the Greek gods are far. Both Pindar and Bacchylides wrote poetry of a kind which has no close parallel in the modem world: it can be described by the generic term choral lyric, or simply choral poetry. It consists of songs varying in length from about 20 to about soo lines,2 sung to music by a trained chorus which danced as it sang. Poetry of this kind is best known to us from the choruses of Greek drama. The only immediate parallel is the modem opera, and Monteverdi, the chief inventor of the opera, in fact derived the new form in an attempt to reproduce the choral song of ancient Greece. The opera, however, is a misleading parallel. Despite the innovations ofWagner, it is clear that everything in an opera is subordinate to the music. Few libretti, if any, make interesting reading in themselves. Greek choral poems are written in exact and intricate meters, in rich and self-sufficient poetic language. We have lost both the music and choreography for these works. But it is certain that the poetry was always, in the great period of choral song, the dominant element. The form of these songs was usually triadic. There is a strophe of from about 3 to a dozen lines, comprising a complete metrical pattern based, as is all ancient Greek poetry, on z. It might be more accurate, since these "lines" themselves vary in length, to say that the choral poems of Pindar and Bacchylides take from about two to about forty-five minutes to read aloud, and the rime of ancient performance would not have been much greater. XX

an alternation of long and short syllables. The meter, and probably the dance steps and the music, of the strophe, were matched in the antistrophe. The triad is then completed by an epode, in meter, dance, and music similar to, but not identical with, strophe and antistrophe. A song may consist of one triad, or of several, each repeating the other almost exactly. A few shorter poems have no epodes, but only matching strophes and antistrophes. The subjects of these poems were both occasional and eternal. They were occasional in that they were written for particular festivals or celebrations, sometimes as entries for poetic competitions {like Attic drama), sometimes on commission from individuals. And they celebrated the particular. They were eternal in subject matter because they dealt always with relations between gods, heroes, and living men. They present, we could almost say create, a world in which the gods of Olympus, the heroes of myth and their descendants and analogues, the cities and men the poets knew, all exist together. The actions of a hero like Heracles or Achilles are like those of a victor in the great athletic games. The contemporary victor had a hero for his ancestor; or ifhe did not, his city did, and a city is like a large family. The heroes are like Plato's Demon of Love, more than man, less than god. They make the essential unity of the world of choral song; and hence myth, and the lasting moral and philosophic truths associated with myth, are the essence of choral poetry. Almost all the extant works ofPindar, and the greater part of those of Bacchylides, are epinician odes. These are songs commissioned by men who have won victories in the games, or by their kinsmen. Most celebrate great victories, that is, those won at the Panhellenic games at Olympia, Delphi (the Pythian Games), Nemea, or the Isthmus of Corinth. But there were innumerable lesser and more local games as well, and we have a few examples of songs written for these by both Bacchylides and Pindar. XXI

The most sumptuous epinician odes are those written for victories in the chariot or horse race, and the reason for this is simple: a victor in these games had to be a rich and powerful man in order to provide so dear an entry in the contest. He himself would not ride in the race: it was a detached exhibition of glory. To win the prize for boxing, wrestling, or running, a man had himself to be an athlete. We can see in this collection the differences between the songs written for the two kinds of victory. Choral poetry was in origin a Dorian art. The earliest example we have is the maiden-song of Aleman, a poet of Sparta who lived in the seventh century B.C. Hence the language of the choral ode was always a modified form of the Dorian dialect, which was chiefly distinguished from the Ionian dialect of Asia Minor, the Greek islands, and Athens by a predominance of long a sounds as opposed to the Ionian long e' s. We can see at once how much this was conventional literary language when we observe that two of three great choral poets of antiquity, Simonides and Bacchylides, were themselves Ionian Greeks. The inescapable stage pronunciation of Shakespeare, in America as well as England, with its clipped vowels and frontal consonants, is some kind of analogy to the assumption of an artificial language. But in choral poetry the difference was not merely in performance: it was written into the very form of the words. Along with Dorian words and forms, the other great element in the language of choral poetry was Homer. The stories of Homer, his color and heroic gesture, his elaborate epithets and the movement of his syntax, persist in the works of the choral poets, and in a more evident and less transmuted fashion in Bacchylides than in Pindar. For Homer was himself an Ionian poet, and the tradition from which he derived ignored those late-comers, the Dorian Greeks, entirely. The choral song in its origin was expressive of stability and locality. It was sung at a city festival by a chorus of singers XXll

from the city; it celebrated local gods, and heroes who were buried nearby, and local religious practice. Homer, on the other hand, is the poet of Greeks who, forced from their homes by the invading Dorians, had gathered in Attica, and migrated to the Aegean islands and the Asian coast. His heroes are not boWld by time and place. They are men of the vanished kingdoms of the Mycenean Age, and his long epic narratives of their lives and deaths, and of the Wliversal gods who move in their midst, were sWlg by bards scattered all over Ionian lands. The fully developed choral poetry of Simonides, his nephew Bacchylides, and Pindar is an artistic merging of two lines of Greek tradition. It is through Homer that we can best Wlderstand the achievement of the great choral poets. They took his stories, and stories like his, and attached them to local and contemporary scenes. Ajax and Achilles in the Iliad are great heroes who have left their homes to fight-and die-at Troy. In Bacchylides I 3, we see them again at Troy; the occasion of our seeing them is their grandfather, Aeacus, who had been the great king of Aegina; and the thirteenth ode is written to an Aeginetan victor in the pancratium at Nemea. The mythical narrative, which Homer presents in detailed and linear sequence, is condensed in Bacchylides and presented as separate moments of glory. The dramatically ordered world of the Iliad and Odyssey, where gods and men and meanings of actions are connected by events, is resolved in choral poetry into a more purely poetic (in our sense) nexus of associations and correspondences. The later choral poets also reflect the growth of abstract language in Greek. Homer is didactic, in his way, more so than might at first appear. But the general significance of what happens in the Iliad and Odyssey is always boWld up with particular actions or speeches. Bacchylides and Pindar have a natural tendency to draw from myth and situations reflections of a general character, and their store of language xxiii

contains a far greater number of abstract nouns to do this. Homer will speak of gold, and describe the delight men take in it. Bacchylides will say simply that gold is joyousness. The fixed epithets of Homer are perhaps the most distinctive feature of his style. We are all familiar with them: the "wine-dark sea," the "glancing-eyed" Achaeans, the "swift" or "hollow" or "black" ships. We know now that these epithets were an indispensable element of the formulae which made it possible for an epic minstrel to improvise his song as he performed it. But we do not need this knowledge to be aware that Homeric epithets rarely have a specific meaning in the contexts in which they occur. "For Agamemnon king of men, the son of Atreus had himself given the Arcadians well-benched ships to cross the wine-dark sea" is no more than the normal epic expression of" Agamemnon had provided the Arcadians with ships." The value of Homeric epithets is not specific but generic. As they fall on the ear over and again in almost every line of the Iliad and Odyssey, they tell us nothing special about what is happening at the moment; they rather evoke the whole heroic world of the epic. Bacchylides adopts many of the epithets of Homer, and fashions others after their model. A profusion of individually selected epithets is as characteristic of his style as the fixed epithets are of Homer's. But Bacchylides' epithets are more than either ritual expressions or deliberate adornments, for they are images. The epithets of Homer function as kennings. The first word of the seventeenth ode is Kuav61rpc.l•pa, dark{literally dark-blue-) prowed. This word occurs frequently in Homer as a fixed epithet of ships, and always in the same phrase, vEoc; KuavoTrpc.:l•po•o, in the unstressed position at the end of a line. The word in Bacchylides stands emphatically at the prow of his poem, and is used deliberately to give the right sinister tone of the voyage to Crete. 3 Or again, consider the 3· The adjective Kucivtov modifies Simonides and in Bacchylides I 3· XXIV

vt•oc;

to mean the dark cloud of death in

words with which Mdeager describes his sister in 5: she is x"(A)f)CX~ixtva {"her neck glows with the gloss of youth"); and Aphrodite is e~~·""Pp6Tou {"Cypris the gold whose magic strikes"). Neither of these adventurous epithets are in Homer. The first Bacchylides took &om Simonides, the second he probably made himsel£ But they are formed exactly like Homeric epithets. The striking difference is in their use: Bacchylides' epithets tell a story. The innocence and beauty of Deianeira is the deadly lure with which Aphrodite will strike unsuspecting Heracles. By his constant use of epithets of Homeric form, sometimes as many as three different epithets gracing a single noun, Bacchylides wants to recall the voice and vision of Homer. But Bacchylides' epithets are new-fashioned in great part, and meant to be fdt as such. More important, in his use of them he, like the other choral poets, goes totally against the Homeric tradition. He sets the epithets flee &om the fixed formulary pattern of Homeric tradition, gives them independent life, and makes them carry much of the bright meaning of his poetry. This deliberateness of glorification and artful distance from direct experience of life may surprise the modem reader, though he may reflect too that it is a mode of expression in some respects not far from Mallarme or Lorca. W. H. Auden, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, lays down several "touchstones for critics." The critic who really enjoys poetry will like "long lists of proper names, such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad; riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade; complicated verse-forms of great technical difficulty . . . ; conscious theatrical exaggeration; [and] pieces of baroque flattery, like Dryden's wdcome to the Duchess of Ormond." The standards Mr. Auden so ingeniously sets up to distinguish the lover of poetry &om the Philistine are standards of pure enjoyment of words, of love of poetic brilliance and XXV

artfulness as such, apart from any prosaic value, or meaning that might be valid in other contexts of speech and action. The choral lyric of Bacchylides and Pindar is at first sight a perfect illustration of poetry that could be used for such a test; and Mr. Auden might well trust the critic who likes a Greek epinician ode. Nonetheless, this category of pure poetry which he establishes would not fmally be the one to contain the odes ofBacchylides. His poems are not something peculiar and artificial on the fringes of literary expression, to be enjoyed for their very difference from plain statement of dramatic story and moral reflection. The early fifth century was still an age in which poetry was the fundamental mode of public utterance. Bacchylides uses a traditional and artificial poetic language, and his poems were commissioned by rich men and potentates. But within this form, which was to him the natural and traditional means of expression, he says what he thinks. Like the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Bacchylides' poems are the proper voice of Greek civilization. There is a straightforward, positive, confident quality in them. They are meant to exalt and to adorn, but at the same time they deal without embarrassment or subterfuge with what the poet knows to be the right laws ofhuman society and the natural structure of our lives. Wit, irony, word-play, and the oblique insight may occasionally be present in these works, but they are peripheral to their purpose. To borrow from Mr. Auden in another vein, Bacchylides speaks what we have almost come to consider poetry no longer capable of expressing, All words like peace and love, All sane aff1rmative speech.

XXVI

EPINICIAN ODES

I Isthmian Ode for Argeius of Ceos (Boys' Boxing Match) ( & nO.OTroc; ).lnapac; ... )

0 gates fiWlg up by the gods On Pdops' shining island ... Girls at the looms .. . Delicious sleep .. . A fine old city .. . And dWles where the combers Crash Wlder searing SWl.... Two days after the gods put forth, Minos, ready at combat, arrived With his bands from Crete, Benched on fifiy sterns That shimmered at anchor. But afier the Lord of Glory Had led him to bed Dexithea, Girl of the slender waist, The liege from Europa's loins Left half his cortege to serve her, Handed them plots of the cliffy land, And hoisted sail for Cnossus' painted town. Nine moons passed, And his braided bride Gave birth to Euxantius, Lord of an island Thronged with honor....

3

The daughters of Damon Fled to an untried city Flooded in sunlight, Source of the man Whose hands clench hard, Argeius with heart of a killer lion Joining fight, with feet of a stag, And a full part of his father's gifts, All Apollo the Famous Archer Sent Pantheides: skills that heal, And hosting guests in the grand way. Having won much good of the Graces And walked a wonder to men, Life lapsed, But he left behind five blameless sons. And now, one among all On his father's strength Receives from Zeus Of the rising throne An Isthmian win And fates of vital wreaths. Now I say and always, Valor is the greatest glory. Quick to bloat the mind, Wealth becomes the worst; But nobler styles of hope Caress our pious hearts. For all his limits, Give man health And self-sufficiency: He is a match For the first in luck.

4

Bar staggering disease and need, Delight keeps pace with life. The rich burn for enormous hoards As a pittance warms the poor; Irresistible wealth goes stale For men who strain to trap what flies. Souls that shake On a wish of wind Will hold down honor No longer than breath lasts. Though Virtue is difficult, Once trued to the line, Even if life slips, The marvdous emblem of fame stands.

s

2 Isthmian Ode for Argeius of Ceos (Boys' Boxing Match)

Quick on the wing, 0 Fame, Giver of Grandness, Quick to my hallowed Ceos To carry the words That exalt Argeius Whose tough fists Took off first prize;

He brings to my mind Those rounds of achievement We, who sailed from the arc Of Euxantius' island, Brought to light At the neck of land Where glory waits: So the Muse of our earth calls up A clamor and lull of flutes, While paeans of victory praise Pantheides' precious son.

6

3 Olympian Ode for Hiero of Syracuse (Four-Horse Chariot Race} ('Ap10'TOKcXp1TOU I1KU.iac; Kp£ouaav •.. )

Clio showering gifts that charm, Sing Demeter Queen Over Sicily's fullest fruits, Sing her Daughter Who dons a violet crown, And sing the Olympian mares of Hiero: Spurred by arching Triumph and Splendor They streaked where the Alpheus runs, Winning wreaths for Deinomenes' happy son, And a numberless crush of men cried out: "Hail a man incredibly blessed, Who reaps from the hands of Zeus The honor of first command in Greece, Then strips the scarf of darkness Down from his towering wealth!" Shrines teem with sacred oxen, Welcome swarms the streets, And fire strikes off the beaten gold Of tripods set at the temple stoop; Here the Castalia and Delphic rites Inspire Apollo's gorgeous grove. Glad and gild the god, the god: Man's wealth rides on that glory!

7

Remember the lord of Lydian land Where horses bend to the bit: When Sardis, demolished by Persians, Bore to its end the doom of Zeus, Croesus' shield was Apollo The god who buckles a golden blade. No giving in to the baffiing day That brought on grim enslavement; He bucked delay, Pitched a pyre To front his courtyard Walled in bronze, And scaling up With his loyal wife And the braided daughters Choked by sobs, He flung hands At the sheer sky and cried: ''Overwhelming spirit, Where are the gods' thanks And the lordly son of Leto! Alyattes' house goes down to wrackAnd what do I get for all I gave! Lydus' old walls burn, The Pactolus' swells That streamed gold Go roiling red with blood, And out of the cleanhewn hallsWomen shamefully dragged. Whatever I loved goes bad: Death is best."

8

With that, He signaled A nimble boy To light the piling wood; Shrieks broke from the daughters, They clasped their motherAlways, death seen coming is worstBut as the crackling rage Of the blaze seethed up, Zeus wrapped it black in a burst of clouds, And sputtered out the yellow flame. Down with doubts where the will Of gods performs! Apollo the Delian Whisked old Croesus away to Hyperborea, And nestled him down with his dainty girlsFor piety: he sent up most to holy Pytho. Yet of all that Hellas holds, None, Hiero vivid in praise, Could claim that a man Outgave you in gold to Apollo. All but the men fed fat with envy Hail you high, you the commander Loved by gods, adept horseman Sceptred under the Lord ofLaws; You share in the verve of the violet Muse, And brandished once a warrior's fist; Though now you look on the luck Of a moment calmly, Knowing the life Of man is brie£

9

Still, wily hope Will burrow through hearts That are born for a day. So Lord Apollo, true to his mark, Gave warning to Admetus: "Men must breed twin minds; Consider tomorrow's sun your lastAnd think you'll live out fifty years, Each one steeped in wealth. But strike your stand in piety: There all the gain and gladness lies." Men of mind will grasp my meaning. Pouring air flows pure. The briny sea rots not. Gold delights in luster. Not so the law of man: Once time has snapped his roots, The flower of young resilience goes. Yet flesh fails and the blaze remains; Virtue lives on the Muses' breath. Hiero, form of fortune Blooming out to men, Your clear achievement Wears no seal of silence: They will resound your splendor of truth, And resound too the rolling finesse Of the nightingale of Ceos.

10

4 Pythian Ode for Hiero of Syracuse (Four-Horse Chariot Race)

Always Apollo the blond Will cherish Syracuse city, Prizing Hiero, righteous lord, Three times sung for the Pythian win Of his mares that rushed At the core of the ridgy earth. . . . when he raised the scales ofjustice, We would hymn Deinomenes' son. Give him our wreaths for crowns; Only one among men who walk the earth Brought off such feats by the fane Where ocean licks at the coves of Cirrha. And sing his double Olympic triumph: What can be finer than love from gods And a heaping share of the best partsr

II

5 Olympian Ode for Hiero of Syracuse (Horse Race) ( Eu!Jo•pt IupaKoaiwv ... )

Splendid in destiny, Marshal of men Where chariots Whirl through Syracuse, You will know my masterwork From the Muse with violet wreath, You of any who tread the earth Will judge it rightly. Grant your unswerving mind A constant rest from cares; Tum your insight on my craft, See if the delicate Graces Inspired your champion, Gold Urania's famous squire, To weave this song on his sacred isle, And sweep it off to your noble town. May voice pour out My heart in Hiero's praise.

12

Steep air splits On the eagle's wings That flare out bronze; The herald of Zeus, Lord of the Thunder, Towers tense On his vaulting thrust, And twittering birds Crouch down in fear: No check to him The great earth's juts, And the rough cliffs Of the cuffmg sea; He cuts wild sky With his flashing crests, Backed by a westwind's blast, Bright in the eyes of men. So broad the range of my roads To hymn your achievement, Thanks to Victory darkly tressed And the Wargod armed in bronzeYou high sons of Deinomenes: No tiring come to the gods' returns! Dawn with her golden arms Looked down as the bay Pherenicus, Stormpace stallion, Won by Alpheus wide in rills, And again at Pytho's shrine.

13

By the earth I press, Not once has a rival Kicked back dirt When he rushed a goal; Ripped like wind But reined by his lord He gains a fire-new triumph For Hiero lover of guests. Happy that man The gods provide With shares of praise And a fate admired For great success. None walk earth Born blessed in all. Yes, legend tells How the wrecker of gates, That unbeaten scion Of Zeus with the flaming bolt, Went down to the halls Of Persephone trim at heel, To drag to day The cragtooth hound of Hell, Forbidding Echidna's spawn. There by the stream Where sadness swirls He glimpsed the shades Of the sorry menFlitting like leaves That rustle to breezes On Ida, grazer of sheep, And her headlands flashed in sunAnd glowing distinct among them, The soul of Porthaon's son, That hardy Binger of spears. 14

When the son of Alcmena, The marvdous hero Saw him gleaming in armor, He notched a cord on his bow Till it plucked sharp, Flicked open his quiver, And snatched up an arrow Tipped in bronze. But knowing his man, Mdeager's shadow Glided up to his face, And spoke: "Son of Omnipotent Zeus, Stand where you are and calm your heart: It's futile to shoot barbed shafts At the womout dead-fear not." And his words hit home With Amphitryon's lordly son: "What god or man Could grow such a stalk, And in what land!" he asked, "Yet who has scythed him lowr Surdy Hera, girded in glory, Speeds your killer against my life; But let that be blond Pallas' charge."

IS

Then Meleager weeping: "It's hard for a mere man To tum the mind of a god: Look, did the prayers Of even my father, Oeneus handler of mares, And smoke from his racks Of goats and rustback bulls Constrain the goddess, Whose arms are white Under wreaths of buds, To halt her wrathl No, she held it fast; Spurred a massive boar, Breakneck, charging Calydon's dancing rings, And there with his riptide tusks He hacked at the grape-rows,

Butchered the flocks, And gashed the men who crossed him. "The prime of the Greeks Put up a relendess fightAll-out, six grueling days: When a god let Aetolia Hew to the head of strife, We buried the bodies raked By the shrieking, splintering Drive of the beast: Ancaeus, and yes, Agelaus, The best of my brave brothers Althaea bore in Oeneus' brilliant courts-

16

"But a hideous fate took still more: Not yet did Latona's Daughter, The Slashing Huntress quit her rageWe locked at the boar's fresh pdt, And made for the ranks of Curetes Fixed in warshock. I accounted for plenty: To name only two, Fine Aphares and Iphiclus, Plucky kin of my mother. Strict Ares picks No ally in onset; Blindly the javelin flies From fist at the foes' lives, And packs death for whom god will. "But this never crossed her mindThestius' daughter, my cunning mother, Stopping at nothing, demon-driven Contrived my end. With a high wail she drew From its intricate chest And burned that brand The Fates had spun At my birth As the mark Of a short life. So, poised For the kill Of Daipylus' son, Dashing Clymenus-

17

No mark on that splendid hulk, Overtook him Wider the towering walls, As his troop turned heel For Pleuron's ancient, rockbuilt scarpWhen sweet life sank, I could feel the force Go slack, my god, Sobbed a last breath out, wretchAnd my yom1g and shining strength slipped far away." They say that Amphitryon's son, Who could stand the din of war, Then-only then felt tears, Overcome by the tragic man's demise, And his words ran like this: "Best for men not to be born Or look at the fiery sun. But what do we get from tearsr Let's talk of things We can surely achieve. Could there walk In warrior Oeneus' halls An Wlbroken girl Who matches you in beautyf She's my radiant bride." And staWlch Meleager's Shade replied: "Deianeira I left Behind at courtHer neck glows With the gloss of youth; She's still Wltouched By Cypris the Gold Whose magic strikes." 18

Goddess of soothing arms, Calliope, Stop your tight chariot here: Sing Cronian Zeus, Olympian leader of gods, The tireless reeler Alpheus, Pelops' power and PisaWhere triumph went To the poWlding hoofs Of famed Pherenicus, Sped to spiring Syracuse, Carrying Hiero' s Leaf of bliss. If Truth shall go In the ways of glory, We must praiseStave off envy with both handsEvery excellence that man perfects. So sang the bard of Boeotia, Hesiod who serves the charming Muses: "Our acclaim must follow Men the gods have honored." So I am won to send at once, Not veered wide from Right, These strains of Hiero' s fame That breed our finest stocks: Plant and stake them, Grand Gardener Zeus, Unrocked in realms of peace.

19

6 Olympian Ode for Lachon of Ceos (Boys' Foot Race) (Aaxr.>v Au)c; V.Eyicrrou ••• )

Lauds to Lachon From Zeus Great Lord For his sprint Where the Alpheus Spills to sea! Glory he grafts On the branch of Ceos Crowded with arbors, Island tall With Olympic champions Hymned for their wins In the ring and race By choiring boys Whose locks have worn The wreaths that burst. 0 Aristomenes' son With limbs like a wind in wing, Now Urania, Queen of Choirs, Trims you a victory ode To resound your gates with song, And sing your runner's dash That feeds the fame of Ceos.

7 Olympian Ode for Lachon of Ceos (Boys' Foot Race) ('Q Al'lt'QpcX euycrrEp Xp6vou TE Kai ... )

Brilliant Daughter of Time and Night, Sixteenth Day at Olympus, Led by Zeus of the rumbling thunder Fifty moons command you To choose the first of Hellenes In heats of springing feet, And the first for strength of lithe limbs. Whomever you grant the prize Of triumph past all ranks, Goes among men with a name Of praise and admiration. When you wreathed Aristomenes' son, An invincible cure,

Proof against death That muffles the lips, Pierced through Chaerolas' harrowing tomb....

21

8 Olympian Ode for Liparion of Ceos (nue&>va TE ~'1Ao6UTCX\I ••• )

I sing of Pytho And altars piled with sheep, Nemea, the Isthmus as well; I lean my hand on the groWld And soWld out strongTruth alone can fire my themeThat none of the Hellenes, boy or man, Has won more triumphs in equal time. 0 Zeus of the lightning spear, By the banks of Alpheus LWlging into the sun You've filled his prayers With enormous glory From your hands: His temples gleam With the wreaths Of Aetolian olive Won in Phrygian Pelops' famous games.

9 Nemean Ode for Automedes of Phlius (Pentathlon) (A6~av,

c:, xpuaW.aKa>.AupiOcxc; ••• )

Prophetic Chiron, The son of Philyra, Laying hands On the blond curls Of Achilles, Often declared Fate: "Scamander chokes On the Trojan marauders' Blood he lets. . . ."

FRAGME NTS

I Victory Ode

This for the last time: Profit can crush Profoundest minds.

IB Hymn to Hecate

Hecate who holds her torch on high, Daughter of Night with the deep breasts....

2Hymn

Now my child, Climbing sorrowUnspeakable. 7I

4 Paean

They were just decking out the food, When Heracles squared himself At the marble stoop and spoke: "The decent come on their own To a good man's spread feast." ... Pytho ... Phoebus commanded Alcmena's son, Burning at warcraft, ... To remove the Dryopes from Delphi, . . . and settle them down in Asine, ... their border, twisted olives With curling leaves ... Amythaon' s heir, Mantic Melampus New to Asine from Argos, Founded a Pythian shrine And sacred precinct . . . And high above all The altar won honor From blond Apollo ...

72

Not only that, But Peace regenerates man As her wealth refines, And her blooms of song unfurl; Fires fed by thighs of bulls And the woolly sheep Flicker on crafted shrines And leap to Olympus; Young ones tumble to games And the rounds of reeds and rites. Through shield-grips cased in iron The glistening spiders lash their warps; Barbed spears, double-edge swordsSacked by the bite of rust; . . . No horns blast their brass bells, No eyes are looted of genial sleep That warms hearts ripe An hour before the sun streams highBut roads reel with our revels of love And exuberant ballads of boys flare up.

73

5 Paean One writer picks another's brainsCall it tradition: Taking the gates of a new song Is no small job.

6 Paean

Why beat aroWld the bear!

74

I I , I2

Processional

One criterion, one approach Leads on to man's success: The soul that sees out Life in self-delight. Who hounds his wits At the heels of crowding cares And pummels his mind with what's to come, Drives dead work through the days and nights.... Throttle your heart with sorrow, All the gladness dies.

7S

I

3 Processional

God heaps on An especial grief For each.

I

4 Dance-Song

Clear as a Lydian touchstone Streaks with the shine of gold, My skill and invincible truth Brings out the blaze of man. . . .

77

I

5 Dance-Song

No lolling on couches now, No plans for work thrown overOff to the inlaid shrine Of Itonian Pallas cloaked in gold, And bring into light some exquisite song....

I

6 Dance-Song

0 Periclitus, I expect you To appreciate what's plain.

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17 Love Song

. . . when she curves that smooth arm, And flicks some wine at the saucersJust with a neat turn of her wristOur flute-girl serves her bachelors.

So

18 Love Song

Strapping TheocritusYou're not the only one who loves him.

19 Love Song

Back to the wife You runAnd you've only kept Your shirt on.

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20B Encomium to Alexander Son of Amyntas

Down from the peg, my lyre! Under deft and adapting hands Throb out your corded throat: I bum to wing Alexander His golden plume from the Muse, A prize for his fortnight feast Where the cups go circling Uncontrollably sweet, and supple The tender souls of boys; Where a mind thrills warm To allures ofLove that mix With the gifts of Bacchus And spark dreams from a man: Right offhe could strip The frieze from a town, Muster the world beneath him; Gold and ivory glint through his halls, And bulked with wheat on a gleam Of sea his fleets haul home Fat hoards of Egyptian wealthAll of it, Spumed from the wine and a drinker's glow.

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20C Encomium for Hiero of Syracuse

No rest for the clean cut Of the lyre's sound! The Muse is with me, Her breath runs honey, And here's her Hower Opening charm for Hiero Famous in tawny mares, And friends who cup At his drinking bouts. I'm sending it on to rocky Etna, Even if earlier songs of Pherenicus, Great among horses for lightning hoofs That triumphed along the Alpheus, [Slyly blocked my way to the feast, And I cooked my food alone. Then, schooled by a corps of youth Who gentle the golden grove of Zeus With softening songs of praise, I learned that whoever would root out Hate must celebrate the brave. Let the fanatics keep their wiles;] I can swear by gods that the Dawn, On stallions stamping into the sun, Never looked down on a man Who shed such blazing light on men....

20D Encomium

Neither Oenone, Paris' engaging wife Who dropped from the walls On her fmal course, Could match that grief; Nor Niobe long in the toils, Once Latona had stuck her offspring, Ten daughters and ten sons With cutting shafts; Zeus, looking down From the high benches, Pitied her desperate case, And firmed her in spurred rock: Her agony ended....

2I Encomium

No, no carcass of beef is here, no gold, No rugs dyed blue in the sea; Just a warm heart, A willing Muse, And splendid wine in Boeotian cups.

ss

DOUBTFUL PIECES

53 a Crown that flames In opening roses.

54 None holds joy Through his length of time.

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55 The gifts of the Muses, Goals of a hard campaign, Do not surrender To all who handle arms.

Excellence showered with praise Branches high like a tree.

57 Only Truth and the gods Inhabit one city, One hearth, one state of mind.

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6I

Leucippides

Crafting a chorus, Candid in handsome rhythm, For Cypris' violet glance....

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Epigram:

1

Daughter of Pallas, Lady of Victory famous in lauded names, Now and forever bless with your eyes a Crannaean chorus Built to beauty; where songs compete for the Muses' joy, Wrap Cean Bacchylides round with opening wreaths.

IOI

Epigram:

2

Eudemus planted this shrine on his fields For Zephyrus, ripest of all the winds, Who bore down hard at the sound ofhis prayer, And they flayed chaff from his swelling stalks.

102.

Edmonds: 53

Kings oflonia revel in luxury....

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NOTES

I:

When Bacchylides' poems were put together, this poem was given pride of first place, dearly because it tells a story of the poet's home, the island of Ceos. The provinciality of the legend, which gives it a special importance, also makes it obscure for us. But it reminds us of the dense undergrowth of local legend in ancient Greece, stories of which the inhabitants of the smallest towns were proud. Such stories gave them a sense of who they were, and how they too were descended from the gods. The first part of the poem is fragmentary; gaps have been filled by the conjectures of other hands. Things become clearer as we move to the later part of the myth, then quite clear as we move on from Dexithea and Euxantius to the present. The transition is both smooth and swift, in the manner of accomplished choral lyric: " ... an untried city ..• source of the man ..." The man is tough young Argeius, who has won a boxing match at the Isthmian Games. His father was a doctor, good and affluent. He knew that money was for use. He was hospitable and the Graces loved him. For his reward he got five sons, and one of these (an ample present from Zeus) won arete, the shining excellence that all men can see. Pantheides knew how to handle wealth with grace. That brings forth the right reflection on money and ambition at the end. Life slips, but Pantheides and his son live in eternity's sunrise. The myth then does more than tell the founding of Argeius' home town by a son of Dexithea by Minos, son of Zeus and king of Crete. Dexithea is She Who Receives a God. Her father Damon was a monster destroyed by Zeus; but Dexithea and her sisters had given hospitality to Zeus and Apollo, who appeared to them as wanderers. Their reward was the founding of the new city and the visit from Minos that resulted in the birth of Euxantius the Founder. The fragments of the beginning, of which it was convenient to translate only a few, said something about Corinth in Pelops' Island-the Peloponnese-where the Isthmian Games were held, and then told how the daughters were warned (like Nausicaa) in a dream to go to the new city of Iulis by the sea. Their reward was a sovereign line and the fame of a city. Argeius, from that city, wins a victory which, it is suggested, was for his fatnily a like reward and visit from the gods.

2:

A shorter poem for the same victory. This one, it would seem, was sung to the accompaniment of tlutes (they were actUally reed instruments, like oboes) to greet Argeius as he returned home.

3: This is one of Bacchylides' masterpieces. It is a poem of consolation to Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, most powerful and richest ruler in the Greek world, who is dying of a fatal disease. He had finally (in 468) won the most 107

glorious of victories, the chariot race at Olympia. It is high testimony to Hiero's admiration for Bacchylides that he, and not Pindar, was selected to write this poem. Bacchylides' manner of consolation is characteristically simple and direct. He speaks of the immediate splendor of gold, and, by connecting that splendor with gifts to Apollo, human wisdom, and miraculous divine favor, he makes it into a metaphysical light: "flesh fails and the blaze re-

. " mams.

The central image is the golden tripods which Hiero gave to Apollo's temple at Delphi. The fire of their beaten gold goes back to the magnifi~nce of the gifis which Croesus once gave to that same temple (he earned the god's protection by doing so), and forward to the immortal light that Hiero will have from his intelligent lavishness and Bacchylides' song. The tale of Croesus, king of Lydia, that land ofluxury, is told by Herodotus. There the pious but spoiled king thought himself the happiest of men, and did not believe Solon, who warned him of the changes that can overtake a man before he dies. Croesus had occasion to remember Solon's words on the mutability of human fortune when his kingdom was conquered by the Persian Cyrus, and he himself was being burned at the stake by the conqueror. But he was saved by the wealth that had misguided him. When Cyrus relented and wanted to save Croesus from the flames, but could not, Apollo sent a rainstorm which quenched the blaze, and afterward a wiser Croesus became a trusted advisor of Cyrus. Bacchylides' version leaves out the hint that Croesus had made his own punishment appropriate. Then he has Croesus immolating himself and his whole family with oriental extremity, the rainstorm from Zeus, and Apollo saving his favorite by carrying him off to the Earthly Paradise, the Land Beyond the North Wind (Boreas). It is a more miraculous, a more extravagant version; and extravagance is the note of the entire poem. There is an almost sensational insistence on Hiero's opulence and an exorbitance of tone that goes with it. The very first line is evocative of bonanza, and then we rush into the poem where Triumph and Splendor are "overarching," Hiero's mares "streak" along the river Alpheus, and shouts of congratulation break from the "numberless crush of men." The toweringness of wealth raises it above itself and mortality. What Hiero knows (or should know) and Croesus did not is the sureness of mortal failure. That calm knowledge balances the "delight of gold in luster." The balance is expressed in the subtle advice Apollo once gave to Admetus, and it is because he has the mind to grasp its meaning that Hiero's achievement will wear no seal of silence.

108

4: This brief poem (a few lines are now missing) was sung for Hiero's victory in 470, the same victory for which Pindar composed a sumptuous ode,

the First Pythian. The bright mood is unqualified. Bacchylides seems to recall happy festive days at Hiero's court. Deinomenes was Hiero's father, and Cirrha was the old port of Delphi.

s:

This is Bacchylides' most impressive work. It was for Hiero's victory in the horse race-the next best thing to the chariot race-at Olympia in 476. The grandest poem of Pindar, the First Olympian, was sung for the same victory. Bacchylides here deploys all the resources of his art with conspicuous success. What gives the poem its particular power is the fme handling of the myth. It is not possible in choral poetry, we must remember, to tell an entire story in order and in detail, as Homer did. Instead, the choral poet isolates the vital moments, the telling images, of the story. But there can be more or less of narrative in a choral ode. Pindar shows us the lyric extreme, we might say. Even in his long "epic" Fourth Pythian, what he gives us is a succession of discrete visions, each pregnant with the whole meaning ofJason's life and the founding ofCyrene. He has distilled these essential scenes of the tale so thoroughly that the chronology of the story is not inunediately clear; for he moves backward and forward in time in order to establish the deeper connections between the events he recounts. A true choral poet, Bacchylides at the same time has much more of the old Ionic narrative art. We have in this poem a beautiful midway point between Homer and Pindar. The tale ofHeracles' meeting with Meleager is told in linear dramatic sequence. But this meeting occupies little time: it is itself an extended lyric image. We see Meleager as he is eternally, the great hero whose life was suddenly burned out in the exultation of his manhood. His words to Heracles tell us of past events; Heracles' words to him sketch out the future. But this is all caught in the moment of their meeting. It is and is not a narrative. It tells a story, but has the fixed quality of death, of a man's image after he has lived his life through and there are no more changes for him. This quality of long narrative reduced to poignant inunediacy-the quick strokes in which Meleager sums up his life-is unique in ancient poetry. We find no scene like this before Dante. Bacchylides expects us to know that Heracles, the son of Zeus by Alcmena, was vindictively pursued by Hera, Zeus' wife, and protected by Pallas Athena. Hera had every sort of monster confront him; so when he sees Meleager, his mind quickly infers some living man who is powerful enough to have slain such a hero, and whom he will surely one day have to challenge. Heracles' notion that srrength can be overcome only by

109

greater strength is obviously a little simple. The essential moral of the poem, and what gives the peculiar twist to the reflections that precede and follow the myth, is that the hero's weakness is something much more subtle. His mother's anger Wtdoes Meleager; and Heracles' love for Deianeira, as the poet also expects us to know, will Wldo him. The hero's weakness is finally his humanity, and that can remind us of Hiero's vast power, and that he was already a sick man. We learn the limits of what "Splendid in destiny, Marshal of men" can mean. When Meleager was born, the Fates told his mother Althaea that he would live only until a brand then on the fire should be burned away. Althaea put the brand into a coffer. But when Artemis sent the wild boar of Calydon to punish Meleager's father Oeneus, and when the boar had been killed by the Aetolian heroes, and when strife broke out over the boar's hide-implacable Artemis!-between the men of Oeneus' city Calydon and the Curetes ofPleuron, and when Meleager killed his mother's brothers in that fighting, then Althaea threw the brand on the fire, distraught with grief; and Meleager's life slipped away. The meeting of the two heroes in the nether world was surely Bacchylides' invention, his greatest single stroke of genius. We are to see Mdeager as the brilliant young warrior who takes joy in battle and a detached professional view of death. There is a sense of continual recrudescence of destruction in his story ("fate took still more"), so that we feel his death to be almost inevitable. But the hero who takes a hard delight in the physical perfection of Clymenus, the man he is about to cut down, can still find his own death a ghastly surprise. This sudden tragic knowledge, which can make Heracles weep-for a moment, establishes his dolorous image in the poem. Bacchylides, in a fashion we know from Pindar, goes from invocation to assertion to image to myth. The movement of the poem is first upward, then downward. The poet addresses his patron as one chosen by Fate to rule with power, and as one who knows and loves poetry. Hiero's sound judgment is artistic as well as military, and it is art that will lift him from the cares of his mortal state. The grace of art reflects on both poet and patron, on Ceos as well as Syracuse; the eagle that appears so rapidly and so Wlheralded is the supremacy at once of imperial and poetic genius. The eagle lifts us to the upper air; the range of Hiero and his brother sovereigns is limitless, as the great horse Pherenicus is invincible. But the art that can represent such transcendence must reckon with man's infirmity. The gods give man this fate, and it is not perfect. The moral reflection is the modulation that brings us down to the world below and the shadow of Meleager. 110

6: Images of swifmess and things richly growing set the mood of this quick

song. 7: The poet brings the calendar to life here. The fifty months are the four

years between Olympic festivals. The festival began on the eleventh day of the month, and on the sixteenth the prizes were awarded to the victors. The months revolve by command of Zeus and this sixteenth day has special orders. Chaerolas (we can guess) was Lachon's grandfather. We have lost a few lines at the end. 8: In this song we have lost most of the first half. Where we come in, the poet

is using a favorite device of attesting his admiration of the victor by swearing an oath; he calls the earth itself to wimess. The name of the victor is lost, and we know only that it was an Olympic victory. 9: This substantial ode shows us a different mode of composition from

3 and

5· There, writing for the lord of Syracuse, a new city (colonized in the eighth century) without much tradition, the poet elaborated single stories from Panhellenic legend. Here the victor is from a city in northern Peloponnese, a little west of the valley of Nemea where the games were held; and the poet gives us a wreath of local myths, each evoked by a touch only. The river Asopus, flowing by Phlius, keeps these together somewhat. The fame of Asopus is known to rivers at the ends of the earth: the Thermodon in Asia, where the Amazons live, who at Troy fought against Greek heroes descended from Asopus; the Nile at the other end of the world. The daughters of a river are nymphs, and nymphs are the cities and places where they dwell. All this gives the poem its distinctive far-flung geographical luxuriance. The slaying of the Nemean lion was the first of Heracles' Labors, and the most famous of the local myths adumbrated here. Then the poet speaks of Archemorus, infant son of a king of Nemea. His name means the Beginning of Doom. He was killed by a dragon which was itselfkilled by the Seven who were marching against Thebes. Polyneices, the banished son of Oedipus, Adrastus king of Argos, and the prophet Amphiaraus were among those Seven. The expedition was ill-fated. Archemorus' death was the harbinger of what was to come. But the moira (the Greek word means fate, doom, or lot) was a happy one too, because the Nemean Games were founded by the Seven in Archemorus' honor. This ambiguity determines the reflections that follow later. You cannot know the value of an action till it is done, and the gods decide the outcome. For Automedes the outcome was good; so let no one offend Zeus by stinting him praise. III

10:

The games of Poseidon are the Isthmian Games. Aglaus' string of victories includes some at smaller games, at Thebes, Argos, Sicyon and Pellene in northern Peloponnese, on the islands of Euboea and Aegina. Aglaus we can guess was not rich. His brother-in-law (stolidly in the picture, like the donor in a Flemish painting) commissioned the poem; and instead of naming the victor's father, Bacchylides mentions his Athenian tribe, the descendants, mythically, of Oeneus. Athletic triumphs were clearly Aglaus' claim to glory. The joy their celebration brings, the poet argues at the end, is a goal in life as good as any.

11:

Arrogance and madness contrast with reconciliation, and the sweetness of victory with the favor of the gods in this ode. Artemis, sister of Apollo, Latona's daughter, goddess of the hunt and of fields and Bocks, is the central figure that unites the disparate elements of the song. Metapontion (in Latin, Metapontum), the victor's home, was a rich agricultural town in southern Italy. On its handsome coins of the fifth century, a sheaf of barley is stamped on the reverse. A detail shows us how the poet makes his poem conform in spirit to the background of the victor he celebrates: when the brothers Acrisius and Proetus quarreled over the kingdom of Argos, he tells us in the myth, the distressed people urged them to divide the lands "swaying in barley" (polykrithon). Besides its productive fields, Metapontion was famed for its temple and cult of the goddess Artemis, herself associated with the earth. Around Artemis the poet weaves his story of strife and reconciliation. The theme of strife is suggested by an incident in Alexidamus' own career: he would have won at Olympia, we are told, if Justice had held her course. But Bacchylides wants to still the victor's resentment: if he was cheated, it was a human error of the judges, or an inscrutable decree of the gods. More important, Apollo, the Pythian god, has now welcomed his win at Delphi, and for this he can thank Apollo's sister too, Artemis Huntress. Artemis has become a goddess of reconciliation; and the poet naturally turns to a story which presents her in this light and is happily also connected with her worship in Metapontion. Her title there was Artemis Hemera, the Gentle Goddess, the Healer. The story goes back to heroes before the Trojan War. Proetus and Accrisius, sons to Abas, king of Argos, and forebears of Perseus, quarreled over a cause too slight to mention. Division of the kingdom settled the quarrel, Proetus going to neighboring Tiryns. Thereupon (the first act of healing) Zeus, who loved the family, had the Cyclopes build round Tiryns the great walls that archaeologists still describe as Cyclopean. True madness came when Proetus' daughters boasted that their father's

112

palace was richer than Hera's own temple. She drove them raving to the hills of Arcadia (a memory of some newly introduced ecstatic religious cult!), and Proems was hardly kept from stabbing himself to death in his grie£ But in the course of time (thirteen months means after one year), Proems visited the healing waters of Artemis' spring at Lusus (the Washing Place). The daughters were cured, and the worship of Artemis Hemera established; in after time it was brought to Metapontion, founded by Achaean heroes of the Trojan War. The poet's order of narrative is a fine example of what scholars call ring composition: you start at a given point, usually the actual or dramatic present, and relate an event; then you go backwards giving all the antecedents of the event, as far as you wish; then forward again to the beginning-point, which is now endowed with mythical depth. Artemis Hemera favoring Alexidamus with shining triumph after his earlier defeat is the starting point; then the founding of her worship in Arcadia by Proetus and his daughters, who had been "strewn, shrieking" over the hills from Tiryns. "This was the site"-and we go back to the earlier quarrel between the brothers. Then the founding ofTiryns; now, as we round the loop in time, "straight from this spot" the daughters were scattered. Proetus finds "Lusus' lovely rills," Artemis persuades Hera to relent, and that is her "point of departure." "Rippling Casas," the river by Metapontion, is the Lusus fountain of the western city, whose citizen Alexidamus has maintained the series of Achaean acts of strength. 12:

More of this poem is lost than what we have. Aegina is an island near Athens, famed in myth as the home of Aeacus, grandfather ofboth Achilles and the great Ajax. As Pindar does in a much more elaborate poem (the Fifth Nemean), Bacchylides here makes a controlling image of his ode's passage over the sea. The thirty triumphs must have been won by Teisias and his family or kinsmen. They include the four great games, and the poet alludes to them in elegant paraphrase. Pelops' spur is the Isthmus of Corinth.

13: This is the most Homeric of all Greek lyric poems. Bacchylides follows

Homer closely and catches more of the spirit of the Iliad-the ominousness of dramatic event, the overwhelming shock of war-than Pindar would or could. Bacchylides takes more than the story, which we all know, from the Iliad: his choice of words, his images, and the mood he evokes are a subtle blend of Homeric elements. Aeacus, grandfather of Achilles and Ajax, was the great mythical ruler of Aegina. Pindar, like Bacchylides, sees in him a symbol of justice and order. Here the poet begins not with Aegina, but with Nemea, where

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Heracles slew the lion, a deed which was commemorated in the Games in which Pytheas has now won the pancrati11m, an event combining wrestling and boxing. The poem, incidentally, contains an unusual reference to Pytheas' athletic trainer, Menander. He was an Athenian, and clearly the best trainer about. Pindar goes out of his way, too, to mention him, in the Fifih Nemean, written for this same victory, and adds, "Athens is the place to get a trainer from!" The reference reminds us that the ode is addressed to an athlete who took his craft seriously. Heracles' action in making an end of the monstrous lion is presented as an establishment of that rule of justice for which Aeacus stood. The first few lines of the ode are lost, but the speaker at the beginning of what we have is apparently Athena, prophesying Heracles' conquest to the nymph Nemea. Heracles' victory makes the Games possible where "shoots of victory ... break into brilliant esteem" (doxan polyphanton). Pytheas' win at the pancrarium is "a sign that shines" (anaphainon). Aegina is a beacon-light for Greece (pyrson phainon). These manifestations of light are clearly connected; they are what overcomes the "shrouding cloud of death." The poet speaks of Pytheas returning in glory to Aegina, and the song returns with him. The joy and brighmess are condensed in the figure of the dancer, the young girl graceful as a fawn who sings of Endeis, Aeacw' wife and mother by him ofPeleus and Telamon, the fathers of Achilles and Ajax. This leads the poet into the Homeric myth. But he maintains the images of light which appeared earlier. When Achilles withdrew from battle it was for the Trojans a clear morning after a night of storm. The Trojans glimpse a light that dazzles them. But this light is false. They think they will burn the dark-eyed ships, but it is thell" dark blood that will swirl in Scamander's waters. The Greek heroes who overcame the Trojans have died but "excellence flaming to all" (pasiphanes areti) is bright even in that darkness. It is the same excellence that "honors Aeacus' island, harbor offame." Bacchylides' song which he "brings into light" (phaino), is his guarantee that true brighmess will survive both envy and time. A glance at Bacchylides' ~ources for this poem will tell us something of how he composed it. The dark-blue cloud of death is not in Homer, but there is (Iliad r6.66) a dark-blue cloud of Trojans, as their ranks approach the Greeks. Dacchylides' uncle, however, the great Simonides, had written of the Spartans who fell at Plataea: "They gave their native land a crown of lasting fame, when they put on the dark-blue cloud of death. They died, but are not dead: Excellence leads them forth, glorifying them, from Hades' house." Personified Excellence (often transliterated arete) is

post-Homeric. Simonides here rang the changes on Homer, and Bacchylides took from him the theme of his thirteenth ode. Among others, these phrases are directly from Homer: "stunned," of those perplexed in battle; Achilles "ramping" in the fight; "black earth" and "reddening the earth with blood." Bacchylides puts the last two together for a more violent image. The "poor fools" is a paraphrase from Homer, and so is the ironic auxiliary verb "would" (mellon) in "but first Scamander would swirl their blood." A larger unit is the image of the storm. There are many storms in the Iliad, e.g., at the end of Book 13 where Zeus sends a violent wind that stirs the sea into endless ranks of waves, like the Trojans advancing at the high point of their hopes in the absence of Achilles, the very moment Bacchylides describes in this poem. Winds from Thrace, however, come briefly at the beginning of Book 9. Here they are a simile for Agamemnon's disturbed state of mind. But just before, at the end of Book 8, Homer has an elaborate simile describing the watch-fires of the Trojans encamped on the plain. These fires are like the stars appearing when the air becomes perfectly clear. The clarity and brighrness there are partly a way of describing the jubilant mood of the Trojans. Then Homer uses the same simile in Book 16, but this time it is the vanishing of a cloud that clarifies the sky, for he prefaces the simile with these two lines: "As when from the highest peak of a great mountain Zeus Master of Lighrning moves a dense cloud ... " Bacchylides has adapted both the image and its dramatic situation from several parts of the Iliad. He has even taken from Homer the manner of introducing the simile: "As Boreas whips ... So when they heard ... " The point of the poem is the contrast between the deceptive hope that dazzles the Trojans and the permanent brighmess of the Aeacids' fame. Homer gave Bacchylides similes of storm and scenes of fire, images of light as salvation and darkness as death. Bacchylides has concentrated all these elements into a parable and picture relevant to his glorification of victory. 14: This ode, of which we have lost about the second half, was placed toward the end of the ancient collection because it sings a victory won at the obscure local games of Petra (the Rock) in Thessaly. These games were in honor of Poseidon Petraeus, who was said to have cloven a great rock here to make way for the river Peneius and the Vale ofTempe. Bacchylides begi.TtS by juxtaposing the intelligent guidance of the gods with the blind movements of chance. He has a prescription for human action in a world controlled by these forces: do wisely and justly each

IIS

several task that comes before you. This means having a sense of what is appropriate to the moment: there is a time for feasting, and a time for war. It is proper discrimination that sanctions the song and celebration of Cleoptolemus' triumph.

1411: The river Peneius that runs through the Vale ofTempe flows by Larisa, the town ofThessaly where Aristoteles lives. Thessalians, like Admetus in Euripides' Alcestis, were likely to have great estates and raise cattle and horses. Hestia, the Hearth, cognate with the Roman Vesta, was the goddess of the household.

rs: The dithyramb was an ancient form of song originally sung in honor of Dionysus. But by the time of Bacchylides it had become a more flexible genre in which the poet tells a mythical story. Like the epinician ode, it was composed in triadic form-strophe, antistrophe, and epode. To us these songs seem simply like the mythical parts of epinician odes. At the festivals of Dionysus there were contests, not unlike athletic games, for the composition and performance of dithyrambs. As we can see from these poems, Bacchylides' dithyrambs have nothing in common with the later wild productions that have given us our adjective "dithyrambic." A peculiar feature of Bacchylides' dithyrambs can be seen in this song: his fondness for breaking off the story abruptly at a significant point. The myth in the great fifth ode ends in much the same fashion; but there the myth is set in the larger framework of the victory song. The poet continues the song, but stresses the sharp end of the story by suddenly appealing to the Muse: "Calliope, stop your tight chariot here." In this dithyramb, Menelaus' speech and the song end all ominously at once with an allusion to the crushing victory of the gods, agents of justice and order, over the Giants, agents of violence and outrage. There is a pleasure in the poet's economy. After Menelaus speaks this fateful admonition, there is really nothing more to say. The beginning of our poem is fragmentary and has been restored somewhat. The story is the one Antenor, the old Trojan counselor, alludes to in the third book of the Iliad, in the scene on the Trojan city walls. There Antenor, when he hears Helen speak of Odysseus, remembers how Menelaus and Odysseus once came peaceably to Troy to ask Helen back and avert the fatal strife that was to follow the Trojans' refusal. On that occasion, he "came to know the shape and the mind of both men," and he recalls Menelaus' style of speech on that occasion, mostly in order to contrast it to the flow of Odysseus' words "like the falling winter snow." "Menelaus," Antenor says, "spoke briefly, but he spoke with point. He was not a man of many words."

II6

Bacchylides begins by describing the welcome Antenor's wife gives to the Greek heroes. Then with an epic formula he has Menelaus begin the plea. It is indeed brief and spoken with point. The advice not to blame Zeus is a reference to Zeus' speech in the first Odyssey. "Men blame us for their troubles," says the Father of Gods and Men, "but it is their own outrages that undo them. Consider Aegisthus, the murderer of Agamemnon: we warned him, but he despised our warning. Now he has paid the price for all his crimes." 16: The story of Deianeira in this song was later told by Sophocles in The

Women of Trachis. It is the sequel to the sinister ending of the myth in the Fifth Epinician. A famous scene, Heracles shooting the centaur Nessus who is carrying Deianeira across the river, is the subject of a great painting by Pollaiuolo recendy restored at the Yale University Art Gallery. Nessus tried to violate Heracles' newly won bride, and Heracles straightway shot him down with an arrow poisoned with the blood of the Hydra. As his life slipped away, Nessus gave Deianeira what he said was a lovephiltre from the blood pouring from his own envenomed wound or, according to some, from his sperm. Years later, Heracles fell in love with Iole, daughter of Eurytus, king of Oechalia in Euboea. To get the girl, he sacked the town; and brought Iole back with him to Trachis, where his wife had been long waiting for him. The Cenean Promontory where Cenean Zeus was worshipped was on the northwest tip of the island of Euboea. There, on his way home, having sent Iole on ahead, Heracles stopped to sacrifice to Zeus, Poseidon, and Pallas Athena. Deianeira learned of the new bride, and vanquished by jealousy, remembered the love-charm the centaur had given her long ago. She smeared it on a shirt which she sent as a homecoming gift to Heracles, to win back his love, little reeking where her plan would lead. The grace with which the poet weaves round the order of events and the tact with which he leaves Heracles' fiery death from the poisoned shirt to the imagination of his audience, are especially remarkable. The beginning is, in the original, fragmentary, and the way the poet moves into his praise of Apollo is only a conjecture. If it is right, the explanation is that Apollo was believed to leave his temple in Delphi for the three winter months; and then dithyrambs were sung in his honor rather than paeans direcdy addressed to him. The poet imagines Apollo on holiday, on .the banks of the river Hebrus in Thrace, and makes that a reason for devoting the story of his song to the fated hero son of Amphitryon. 17: The closing lines of this song give us an unusual hint ofits occasion. It was

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sung by a chorus from Bacchylides' own island of Ceos to Delian Apollo, and presumably sung on the island of Delos. The song ofjoy the Athenians raise as Theseus emerges from the sea Bacchylides calls a paean (paianixan ). For this reason, and because paeans were especially connected with Apollo, the whole song has been called a paean. But the ancients knew it as a dithyramb; and we do not know enough about these genres to be certain that it was not. The song is full of gods and heroes. Minos, son of Zeus by Europa and king of Crete, demands each year a tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to feed to the monster child of Minos' wife, the Minotaur, who lives in the Labyrinth. The story ofhow Theseus accompanied the doomed young men and women, slew the Minotaur with the aid of Ariadne, and "saved them and was himself saved," as Plato says in the Phaedo, is well known. Bacchylides chooses an early moment in the story. The ship is skimming the waves to Crete. Minos himself is on board as well as Theseus. The young men and women are called Ionian rather than Athenian: the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor and the islands came originally from Athens, and Bacchylides wants to make this an Ionian song, enlisting the sympathies of Delians and Ceans. Ionian, with its connotations of delicacy, buoyancy, and craftsmanship is the right word for this song. There is no more than the necessary frail sense of the tragic mission of the voyage. There is a serious moral undertone too: Minos is the overbearing hero, steering the wild course of his passions; and Theseus keeps the ship in the sea paths ofjustice. But the moral and tragic elements alike are subordinate to a mood of patterned gaiety and intricate delight. It is a happy voyage. When the young Athenians think they have lost their champion in the depths of the sea, they cry aloud in grief; but the tears they shed fall from their "exquisite eyes." In no other of Bacchylides' poems do we feel so strongly the stylized grace of his lyric narrative. Only the suppleness and quickness of the story, and the ring of heroic speech that comes through the formal pictorial gestures of the characters, save it from theatricality. Athene, sending a fair wind, stands at the beginning of the song; and at the end the poet prays to Delian Apollo. Just within these limits Aphrodite (Lady of Love) appears twice: she arouses passion for Eriboea in Minos' heart near the beginning; and the wreath with which Amphitrite crowns Theseus near the end of the poem was a wedding gift to her and Poseidon from Aphrodite. Between these two manifestations of the goddess of love are the fathers of the two heroes aboard the ship, Zeus father of Minos, Poseidon father of Theseus. Theseus, we note, is introduced as "Aegeus' son." Aegeus, king of

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Athens, was his mortal father, or if you will, husband of his mother, Aethra, daughter ofPittheus, king ofTroezen. But Greek myth often did not see this matter in terms of exclusive alternatives. Heracles was son both of Amphitryon and of Zeus, Theseus both of Aegeus and Poseidon. We may guess that he is first called Aegeus' son in this poem because the poet wants us to be dramatically less prepared for the miraculous proof that Cronian Poseidon is his father; and because it tells us more of Minos' state of mind: he knows he is a son of Zeus, and does not believe his antagonist to be a son of Zeus' own brother. Theseus addresses Minos as "Son of Zeus," and straightway describes his own and Minos' paternity, as if he knew his role in the poem from the start. Minos matches both descriptions, though he doubts the truth of Theseus' claim. The two heroes' boasts are antiphonal, and the pair of miracles at the center of the poem bears out the nested pattern of the song. The moral condemnation of the sinister Minos is balanced by an immersion in the glory of heroes of divine parentage. Minos is "out of hand" and his ways are "headlong," but the magnificence of his line is real. The glory of both heroes is essential to the poem, and does something to solve an interesting textual problem. Minos' prayer to Zeus is either ametron, 'unmeasured,' or amempton, 'blameless.' The latter reading must be right. Minos' ways are unchivalrous and his cause unjust, but the "overbearing honor" Zeus grants him is his due. And amempton is a variant form of the word amemphea (flawless), with which the poet qualWes the wreath Amphitrite places on Theseus' head in her magical palace at the bottom of the sea. The matching of the two words enhances the mood of nobility and transfiguration, and adds to the fmely wrought pattern of the song. I

8: The great Athenian hero, their ideal king Theseus, was imagined, after the manner of the Dorian hero Heracles, as one who cleared the land of monsters and brigands and established a rule of law. There are further analogies between him and certain mediaeval knights and kings. His grandfather, Pandion, had been ousted from his kingship of Athens to Megara, and it was there his sons were born, among whom was Aegeus, Theseus' father. After Pandion's death, Aegeus and his brothers won the land of Attica back by force, and Aegeus became king of Athens. He had no children, and receiving an obscure oracle from Delphi, went to consult with Pittheus, the sage king of Troezen. Pittheus recommended marriage with his own daughter Aethra; but she had already given a lover's welcome to the Earthshaker Poseidon. Now Aethra remained in Troezen, and Aegeus arranged a test for her son: he bade her hide his sandals and sword under a rock near Troezen.

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Theseus was to be given them when he grew strong enough to move the rock, and then he was to come to Athens. When he was sixteen he was brought to the Rock of Theseus, as it was later called, and like Sigurd and his sword, he moved the rock with ease, and went on his way to Athens by land-against the advice of his mother and grandfather, who wanted him to take the safe route by sea, where no grotesque highwaymen would bar his path. Such is the situation when this dithyramb begins. It is a dramatic poem in form, and enlivened with dramatic irony. Although the chorus conjecture a god is with him, and see that his heroic deeds are beneficial, yet they and the king dread his approach: what if he is a monster worse than those he has vanquished! Of course it does not occur to Aegeus that the magnificently heralded youth is his own son and the savior of Athens. Little need be said of the extinguished thugs and of the wit with which the demise of each one is formulated. The Butcher {Procoptas) is the character better known as Procrustes, impounded in his own bed by the modem cliche. The apprehension felt at the hero's approach is no more intense than it should be. The herald's blast at the beginning is more a Purcellian trumpet than an alarum of fear, and Aegeus, provided with remarkably observant scouts, displays great interest in the mighty man's style of dress. The "grim delights of war" Theseus is "bent on" are literally playthings (athyrmata). He is a boy, full of charm and elegance, as is Bacchylides' poem. The form of the poem, a lyric in dialogue, is rare. Instead of triads, there are merely strophes and antistrophes, two each for Aegeus and the chorus, and the whole poem is conversation. This arrangement may foreshadow operatic dithyrambs of a date later than Bacchylides, but the only poem of antiquity we have like it is Horace's ode Donee gratus eram tibi.

19: The ever-jealous Hera played an elaborate game with her philandering

husband Zeus over the maiden Io, daughter of the king of Argos, Inachus. Zeus fell in love with the girl and urged her in dreams to go to a lonely plain nearby that he might meet her. Her father, by order of Apollo's oracle, turned her out of the house. But Hera entered the scene and changed her into a cow, setting the monster child of Earth, Argus {no connection with the city), the creature of a hundred eyes which never closed all together, to watch her. Zeus {"the Master") sent Hermes to get rid of Io's guard. The usual story was that Hermes assumed the form of a shepherd and piped sweet music which lulled Argus into shutting all his hundred eyes in sleep, and then dispatched him. Bacchylides envisages several pos120

sibilities, but ends with something like that: was it the power of song, that is poetry, that overcame the monster! Hera's next play was to send the gadfly that drove the girl-still at least half cow-maddened over the countryside from land to land. So in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound we see her arrive in furthest Caucasus, where she tells her story to the chained Titan. But Zeus, destiny, and something like justice were to win out at the last. Io arrives in Egypt, gets back her natural form, and is Wlited with Zeus. Her son Epaphus was king of Egypt, "land of linen stoles," and among her descendants were Cadmus, foWlder ofThebes, and the ecstatic god Dionysus himself, son of Zeus and Semele. There is a curiously scattered quality to this poem: the poet delights in swift jumps from possibility to possibility, place to place, mythical figure to mythical figure. Song, or the "genius of Ceos"-Bacchylides' merim11a is like Dante's ingegno-has the power to hold together these diverse flashes of story. Song has innumerable roads; the poet enjoys the process of selection, as he plays all about a single myth; then he chooses one that ends in Thebes with the birth of Dionysus, the lord of choral song. Small touches enhance the sense of the ranging power of song that at last returns to itsel£ The road of poetry is myriad. Zeus is "limitless" (eurystheneos, literally 'of wide strength'). The cares that may have put Argus to sleep are immense or ineffible (aspetoi). The "road that leaps rime" is a guess-the papyrus is damaged here; but it is a single road going somewhere out of many; and the poet swifily follows Io to farthest Egypt and then her descendants back to Thebes. Those who are acquainted with A. E. Housman's parody of a Greek tragedy may be interested to note that this poem was his source for the choral ode: "Why should I mention the Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus! Her whom of old the gods, more provident than kind, provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail, a gift not asked for.... Why indeed! I have no notion why." Housman worked on the papyrus ms. shortly after its discovery, and contributed several of the best emendations of the text.

20:

Idas was a Spartan hero, for he came from Messenia, land to the west of Sparta Wlder Spartan rule. The song, of which we have only the beginning, describes Idas' success in winning Marpessa, daughter of Evenus, king of Pleuron in Aetolia. Evenus forced his daughter's suitors to compete with him in a chariot race, and when they failed he decorated a temple with their skulls. But Poseidon provided Idas with equipage that outsped Evenus and got the bride safe home. 121

21: This may have been part of a vision by Cassandra of the Trojan War. The soldiers of Mantinea, city famed for its worship of Poseidon, are one of the contingents she sees marching against Troy.

26:

hie crudelis amor tauri suppostaque Jurto Pasiphae The famous lines of Virgil sum up what we have of the story begun here, Minos' wife's passion for a bull, and her way of satisfying her lust. Much of the translation here is from a conjectural text, but the essential words and the violence of tone are certainly genuine. 27: Chiron was the good centaur, the schoolmaster of heroes, who instructed young Achilles. FRAGMENTS

The Alexandrian editors of Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides divided their works into distinct genres, which may or may not be identical with forms recognized by the poets themselves. We have already commented on the dithyramb. The paean was originally a song in honor of Apollo, but like the dithyramb, it had apparently become a flexible form by the rime of Bacchylides, and it is impossible for us to disringuish it intrinsically from the dithyramb. The prosodion or processional was presumably distinguished by its mode of dance; again it is to us much like the dithyramb and paean. The hymn too seems to have been in some way a separate form, although the word is used constantly in choral poetry to mean simply song, and it sounds rather like a generic term. The partheneion or maiden-song was sung by young girls. An early example of it by the Spartan poet Aleman is all about the singers (c£ Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, pp. 21-6o), but by the time of Bacchylides it may have been treated like the other forms of choral ode. A hyporcheme or dance-song was a short ode with a dance expressive of elation. Then there were love songs, and encomia, odes written in praise of living men. 4:

122.

We have three pieces of this song. The first and last are quotations from ancient writers. The second is a very fragmentary bit of papyrus. The first piece is apropos of Heracles, at loose in northern Greece and short of food, inviting himself to eat at the palace of Ceyx, king of Trachis. The last two lines are a version of a proverb: "To the feasts of good men, good men come uninvited." The second relates an obscure story of the people of Asine, originally the Dryopes ofThessaly, who settled for a time in Delphi. By order of

Apollo, Heracles led them to a new home in Asine, near Argos. The prophet Melampus, Amythaon's son, apparently came to them from Argos to found in their city the worship of Pythian Apollo. The last fragment, expanding on the delights of peace, we can best enjoy if we think of it as a poem by itsel£ IS:

Itonian Athena was a manifestation of Athena as goddess of war. She was worshipped with this title in Thessaly and Boeotia.

I7:

There was a popular game at ancient drinking parties called the cottabus. The drinkers tossed wine from their cups at saucers floating in a vessel of water. With the proper flick of the arm, an accomplished player could sink the saucer.

I9:

A discomfited loverr

lOB:

The Alexander praised in this poem was an ancestor of Alexander the Great. The brilliant and barbarian tone that Bacchylides catches in it is worthy of the later world conqueror.

zoe: This is the Hiero of the epinician odes. We meet again the great horse Pherenicus, celebrated by Pindar in the First Olympian and by our poet in the Fifth Epinician. The portion in brackets is largely conjecture. zoD: Oenone, the wife of Paris, threw herself from the walls of Troy after her husband's death. She is one analogy of a grief that figured in this encomium. Another is Niobe, the very prototype of grie£ She boasted that Leto had but two children, she herself many. "But those children of Latona [Apollo and Artemis), two though they were, destroyed all the children of Niobe," as Achilles tells the story in Book 24 of the Iliad. She mourned continuously, until Zeus changed her to a stone face of grief on the side of Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor. 27:

A proverb: many interpretations are possible.

6I:

The Leucippides were a guild of priestesses in Sparta.

EPIGRAMS

These poems, which are only probably works of Bacchylides, are not songs, but epigrams in elegiac couplets. The first is a dedicatory poem praying for victory in a choral contest. The second is for a temple dedicated to the West Wind by a farmer named Eudemus. Edmonds: S3 A fragment declared not genuine by Wilamowitz, but included by Edmonds in his Lyra Graeca. 1.2.3

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