Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry

by Marco Fantuzzi, Richard Hunter

Overview

Hellenistic poets of the third and second centuries BC sought to mark their continuity with the classical past as well as demonstrate their independence from it. This major study explores Greek poetry of the period and its reception and influence in Rome. The volume covers some of the most familiar poetry of the age, such as Callimachus' Aitia, alongside detailed consideration of newly published texts like the epigrams of Posidippus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521835114
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2005
Edition description:	REV ed.
Pages:	522
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marco Fantuzzi is Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Macerata and at the Graduate School of Greek and Latin Philology of the University of Florence. His published works include Bionis Smyrnaei Adonis Epitaphium (Francis Cairns, 1985) and Ricerche Su Apollonio Rodio: Diacronie della Dizione Epica (Rome, 1988).

Richard Hunter is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. He has published extensively on Hellenistic poetry and previous works include The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (0521316529), The Argonautica of Apollonius: literary studies (0521604389), and Theocritus, Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus (Berkeley, 2003).

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0521835119 - Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry - by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter
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CHAPTER I

Performance and genre

1 INVOKING THE MUSES, EVOKING MODELS

For the Greeks, from the age of Homer to the late imperial period, the poet received his inspiration from the Muses or from some other god (e.g. Apollo or Dionysus), to whom he attributed the responsibility for the enthousiasmos which allowed him to sing as he wished to sing; consequently, it was a widespread practice for poets to apostrophise these divine sources of inspiration at the beginning of their works, or even to claim that they had been invested as poets by them (as in the case of Hesiod). Particularly in the Hellenistic age, however, we find that another figure takes his place beside the divine inspirer, or at times substitutes for him in the rôle of 'guarantor' of the origin of the work. The conventional rôle of acting as a source of inspiration may well be left to the Muses, but now an illustrious predecessor often steps in to teach the new poet the ropes, and how to proceed to construct the work he has undertaken, or else he verifies and ratifies the correctness of the method that the new poet has followed. In practice, in their combination of these two series of figures - the Muses and the poetic masters or models - it is as if Hellenistic poets turned to their advantage the distinction between inspiration by the poetic divinities, on the one hand, and the primacy of 'craft', technē, on the other; the two now formed a powerful unit, no longer a pair of opposed possibilities.

These two competing origins of poetry go back to a familiar cultural model of the fifth century, best represented for us by, on the one hand, Democritus and, on the other, by Plato's Ion and Phaedrus.¹ Socrates' words in the Ion are perhaps the most famous ancient assertion of the 'inspiration view' of poetry:

The poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, unable to create poetry unless he is first inspired by the god and out of his wits, with no reason in him any longer (πρὶν ἂν ἔνθεός τε γένηται καὶ ἔκφρων καὶ ὁ νοῦς μηκέτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐνῇ); . . . seeing that it is not by any art that they create poetry and say many fine things about their subjects . . . but by divine destiny (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ); a poet can only succeed in the type of poetry towards which the Muse inspires him - one man in dithyrambs, another in encomia, another in hyporchemes, another in epic poems, and another in iambics - while in all the other kinds of poetry he is unsuccessful. In reality, it is not by virtue of techne that they speak, but thanks to a divine force: if technē made them capable of composing fine expressions on a single subject, they would be able to do the same on all the other subjects, too (οὐ γὰρ τέχν ταῦτα λέγουσιν ἀλλὰ θείᾳ δυνάμει ἐπεί εἰ περὶ ἑνὸς τέχν καλῶς ἠπίσταντο λέγειν κἂν περὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων). (Plato, Ion 534b-c)

In the Phaedrus, Plato does not completely deny the existence of poetry created only by virtue of technē, but he establishes a clear hierarchy between this inferior level and the kind created by divine inspiration:

He who arrives at the doors of poetry without the madness of the Muses (ἄνευ μανίας Μουσῶν), thinking that he can be a good poet thanks solely to technē, remains incomplete, and the poetry of the sane poet is eclipsed by that of the mad (ἡ ποίησις ὑπὸ τῆς τῶν μαινομένων ἡ τοῦ σωφρονοῦντος ἡφανίσθη).² (Plato, Phaedrus 245a)

So too in the Laws, Plato states that the poet's technē lies in the mimēsis of the characters, and again presents this 'craft' as a sort of low-level, dangerous instrument, even if he admits that the inspired poet too makes use of it to express himself:

When a poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot control his thoughts. He's like a fountain where the water is allowed to gush forth unchecked. His art is the art of representation (τῆς τέχνης οὔσης μιμήσεως), and when he represents men with contrasting characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he doesn't know which of the opposing speeches contains the truth. (Plato, Laws 4.719c (trans. Saunders))

Only here in fact in Plato do enthousiasmos and mimetic technē coexist.³

Plato's low valuation of mimēsis as the technē of poetry, together with the idea that the only really inspired, 'philosophical' poetry was the non-mimetic kind (with its extremely limited possibilities - the dithyramb, and hymns to gods or to men), led the philosopher, both in the Laws (817b-c) and in the tenth book of the Republic, to banish poetry virtually entirely from the ideal State; there was, after all, no getting away from mimēsis, whether by that is meant a continuous representation of characters by the author (for example, in drama), or an intermittent representation, as in the case of direct speech in epic poetry, alternating with non-mimetic episodes of narration. Aristotle started from the same presuppositions (poetry as an activity that is always predominantly mimetic, that is to say, a more or less continual representation of characters), but without Plato's metaphysical agenda he was able to consider mimēsis in thoroughly positive terms, as the technē which allows the representation of the universal, purified from accidental empirical reality. At the climax of a process which had started with the Sophists, then, the conception of poetry as deriving from divine inspiration, based on a poetics of truth (a truth of which the poet is merely a spokesman for the divine inspirer), is largely rejected, and for it is substituted a 'secular' conception of poetry as deriving from technē, and consequently based on a poetics of 'fiction', elaborated by means of the technē that the poet himself possesses.⁴

As regards the poetry of the third century, it is obvious that the intellectual climate was closer to that of Aristotle than to that of Plato; in particular, poets now cultivated a variety of genres during their careers, and the idea, most familiar from Plato's Ion (above pp. ), that a poet could only be inspired by the god in a single literary genre must have seemed rather dated. Nevertheless, Hellenistic poets preferred not to forgo the positive advantages of the idea of divine inspiration, which guaranteed for them a sort of privileged sacrality compared with other τεχνῖται, or 'professionals'; indeed, even those who stressed the specifically professional element of their activity, stating that they had learnt how to compose poetry from this or that previous poet, transformed this idea of learning from a text-model into various forms of 'investiture' by a poet-model, which conferred on them an image almost as honourable as divine inspiration.

The introduction of the figure of the 'guarantor' of a specific technē is not universal to all the poets or all the compositions of the Hellenistic age; in particular, it is not found with any form of narrative epic, such as Callimachus' Hymns, Theocritus' epic-mythological poems, or the Argonautica of Apollonius.⁵ Rather, this new authorising strategy is most common where the precedent of a tradition either is not immediately apparent, or does not exist, and therefore must be invented. We see a clear case of this in Theocritus' bucolic hexameters.⁶ In the programmatic Idyll 7, the first-person narrator, Simichidas, a poet from the town, meets a goatherd-singer, Lycidas, in the Coan countryside one sunny afternoon. Lycidas, the model-predecessor/guarantor, was already a famous bucolic poet, though whether he is purely fictional or an allegorical version of an author who really existed, it is impossible to say; Simichidas and Lycidas then hold a competition of 'bucolic singing' together. As a result, by virtue of both the influence of the 'master', and the inspiration of the bucolic landscape (and its Nymphs), Simichidas' song assumes a bucolic colouring and, at the end of it, he gives a sublime description of a locus amoenus, the aim of which appears to be to demonstrate that he is now fully mature in his bucolic sensibility.⁷

Herondas too, the author of mimes written in choliambs ('limping iambics'), a metre typical of the archaic iambist Hipponax, dedicates an apologetic-programmatic poem, Mimiambus 8, to the defence of his poetics. Following a familiar third-century mode, the form of this poem is not directly polemical, but rather allusive and allegorical;⁸ that is to say, he attacks his critics and/or rival poets without mentioning them by name, as in Callimachus' 'Prologue' to the Aitia (below pp. ) and Iambus 13. The narrator, who is probably the poet himself, relates a dream: he was in the countryside, and he was pulling a goat (a symbol of Dionysus?) behind him in a valley,⁹ where there were some goatherds gathered (a symbol of rival poets: Theocritus, or Callimachus, or other mimographers?)¹⁰. The goat escaped, and started eating the leaves of plants in a sacred place; consequently, it was slaughtered by the goatherds. At this point, a new figure appears, whose dress is described in great detail: a fawnskin, buskins, and ivy on the head all point clearly to Dionysus, and in all probability allude to the theatre. The goatherds inflate a goat skin, and start playing a game of askōliasmos, in which men tried to stand on a greasy and inflated skin. This is undoubtedly a symbol of a dramatic contest¹¹ (cf. the author's comment 'as we do in the choruses for Dionysus', v. 40),¹² but the others do not succeed in maintaining their balance, whereas the protagonist is twice successful.

At this point, an 'old man' intervenes (v. 59), threatening to thrash the narrator. This figure has sometimes been identified as Callimachus or Philetas, but he is now generally held to be Hipponax, who is presented as a model that Herondas had modified; irritated by these modifications, he reacts with the harshness and truculence that he had always shown in his poetry. The fact that the old man concludes his speech with the literal quotation of a fragment of Hipponax (τῇ βατηρί κόψω, v. 60, ∼ Hipp. fr. 8 Degani = IEG 20)¹³ leaves little doubt about this identification. At this point, the protagonist calls a 'young man' as a witness: this figure is probably a symbol of (again) Dionysus, who appears to assign the same punishment, or more probably, the same prize, to both the protagonist and the old man (v. 64).¹⁴ On awakening, the protagonist interprets his dream (vv. 66ff.): the goat that he was leading represented a 'fine gift from Dionysus'; the fact that 'the goatherds violently slaughtered it in the performance of their sacred rites, and feasted on its meat' meant that 'many men will tear apart my songs [μέλεα, with a pun on 'limbs'], the product of my labours (μόχθοι) among the Muses';¹⁵ his victory in the game of askōliasmos, in which he alone was successful (vv. 73-4), and his 'achievement of the same result as the churlish old man' (v. 75) meant that his poetry would bring him glory, and consequently the chance, expressed with all the emphasis of a closing sphragis, to 'sing, after Hipponax, the one of long ago (?) . . . limping verses to the descendants of Xouthos', i.e. the Ionians. Here, Herondas clearly seems to wish to advertise the synthesis that he has created between the comic tradition, represented by Dionysus, and the archaic iambic tradition, represented by Hipponax, who is irritated at this 'spoiling' of his genre.¹⁶

In the polemical and programmatic 'Reply to the Telchines' (below, pp.), Callimachus defines his poetics both negatively, in comparison with the rejected works of certain previous or contemporary poets (fr. 1.9-16 Massimilla = Pfeiffer), and positively through praise of certain works by Philetas and Mimnermus, which thus rise to the level of real models, even if they are never expressly declared to be such. Callimachus then states that he is assisted and directed in these choices by Apollo and the Muses:¹⁷ indeed, his choice of poetry is introduced as an implementation of Apollo's advice. Homer's Phemius had been proud of being αὐτοδίδακτος, in the sense that 'the god had inspired every kind of song in his heart' (Od. 22.347-8); Callimachus, too, affirms that he has learnt from Apollo, but unlike Phemius, who is instructed in 'every kind of song', Callimachus receives from Apollo precepts which are very similar to the principles of his own poetics: he is to nurture a Muse who is λεπταλέη, 'delicate', not overweight, and walk where no heavy carts travel, but rather along narrow, unbeaten pathways, with the result that he will sing with the voice of the cicada and abhor the braying of asses (fr. 1.22-30). Callimachus introduces his way of composing poetry, and offers his motivation for it, as a parallel to the inspiration received from the Muses by his model, Hesiod,¹⁸ thus elaborating a sort of technical specialisation of the traditional idea of inspiration by the Muses in general (frs. 3 and 4 M.). He imagines himself transported by the Muses in a dream from Libya to Mount Helicon, where the goddesses inform him about the 'origins' of rituals, or uses and customs. This is an explicit assimilation, marked as such both by the localisation on Mount Helicon and also by allusion to Hesiod, W D 265 in line 5 of fr. 4, of his own experience to that of the Hesiod of the Theogony, who had previously been taught by the Muses on Helicon to sing of divine genealogy (cf. Call. fr. 4.1-4 M.).

Callimachus seems, however, to have adapted Hesiod's scenario to the re- quirements of his own poetics: in particular, the setting of his meeting with the Muses is not the foot of Mount Helicon (as in Hesiod, Theogony 23), but close to Hippocrene, and therefore at a higher point on the mountain;¹⁹ furthermore, to judge from the Latin echoes at least, it would appear that Hesiod's initiation, as presented by Callimachus, involved drinking from Hippocrene itself, or rather from the stream Aganippe,²⁰ and thus it included the poetological image of the stream of pure water, familiar elsewhere from Callimachus' poetry.²¹ In this case, then, the model/guarantor is shaped to look very like the poet who invokes him.²² At the same time - by adopting the dream form - it is likely that Callimachus was implicitly establishing a parallel also with the experience of another theogonic poet, Epimenides (VS 3B1), who had analogously imagined receiving the contents of his work from the gods in a 'didactic dream' (ὄνειρον διδάσκαλον) during a sleep lasting several years.²³ Finally, Callimachus returns to Hesiod, and specifically to his inspiration from the Muses, in the epilogue to the Aitia; verbatim repetition of the opening of the 'Dream' (fr. 4.1-4 M. ∼ fr. 112.5-6 Pf.) underlines the Hesiodic origin, the aition, of the poetry of the Aitia.²⁴ Callimachus (AP 9.507 = HE 1297-1300) also made Hesiod the model from whom Aratus derived his refined style (λεπταὶ ῥήσιες) - in spite of the fact that the didactic-astronomical epos was, like the Aitia, substantially a new genre (below, pp. ).

In an analogous but probably far more explicit manner, Timon of Phlius presents his relationship with his main model: in his synthesis of polemical derision of philosophical ideas à la Xenophanes and the parodic-gastronomic poetry which largely developed after Xenophanes, Timon clearly acknowledges his debt to the latter and quotes, perhaps at the beginning of his poem (undoubtedly in the first book), one of the leading exponents of such satire, Euboeus of Paros (fr. 2 Di Marco = SH 776). On the other hand, however, he also constructs his second and third books in dialogue form, as an exchange of question and answer between himself and Xenophanes (cf. Diogenes Laertius 9.111-12). Very likely, he placed this conversation during a katabasis in Hades, thus allowing him contact with the philosopher who had died some time before, as Callimachus' sleep allowed him contact with the Muses.²⁵ Here, then, Xenophanes seems to have acted at the same time as a guarantor of the truth of the contents and as a signal identifying the literary genre: he plays substantially the same rôle as the Muses for Hesiod and, in particular, for the 'Hesiodic' Callimachus of the first two books of the Aitia.²⁶

In the Iambi, Callimachus both evokes the model and 'specialises' it, i.e. he declares (or rather, he lets the model itself declare) in what terms he intends to adapt it. In the first Iambus, which is clearly programmatic in character, Callimachus does not appear to have involved the Muses, but he introduces his poems as a sort of answer to the provocation/invitation of the iambic poet par excellence: he imagines that Hipponax comes back from the dead to Alexandria, in order to hold lessons on good manners for the philologists of the Museum. In this rôle of critic and corrector of morals, which a powerful Hellenistic-Roman tradition actually attributed to him,²⁷ Callimachus' Hipponax clearly maintains his customary critical and polemical spirit; thus, in addressing the philologists of the Museum, he uses expressions that verge on contempt for the abusive psogos of the archaic iambic (vv. 26-31),²⁸ but at the same time he states that he is 'bringing' to his new place of performance, the Alexandria of the third century, iambics which are 'singing not the warfare against Bupalus' (vv. 3-4). In other words, the new iambi are purified from the biting personal aggressiveness with which, according to the biographical tradition, the archaic Hipponax drove his enemies, Bupalus and Athenis, to commit suicide (just as the other principal archaic iambic poet, Archilochus, was believed to have done to his beloved, Neobule, and/or her father). In so doing, Callimachus' Hipponax not only reveals, with a keen sense of history, that he knows that invective poetry was closely linked to the specific context where it was produced (the culture of archaic Ionia), but he also reflects, within the scope of his new poetic programme (and that of Callimachus), a sense of the progressive elimination of personal polemic, which had marked the evolution of comic and satirical literature from iambic poetry to Middle and New Comedy.²⁹

It is not only this clear statement that demonstrates that the Iambi of the resurrected Hipponax have been carefully adapted to the reality of third-century Alexandria. Hipponax's rhēsis, 'discourse', is very similar in its formal organisation to the typical discourse of an orator or philosopher of third-century Alexandria.³⁰ His words abound with images connected with reading and writing (cf. vv. 11, 31, 88), appropriate to the everyday life of a Museum scholar,³¹ but obviously not to the real Hipponax (early sixth century).³² Even the movement of the Callimachean Hipponax from the Underworld to the world of the living underlines the idea that he is a model adapted to the new reality, one brought 'up to date'; Hipponax, moreover, agrees to be resurrected to third-century Alexandria, whereas the judgement and/or the special knowledge of the great figures of the past had regularly been obtained by means of katabaseis, descents to the Underworld, in which it was the living who took the initiative and the dead whose spirits and knowledge remained unaltered, fossilised by death (cf. Aristophanes' Frogs and Gerytades,³³ and the Silloi of Timon (above p. )).

The archaic Hipponax, however 'Alexandrianised', is still clearly recognisable in the first five poems, not only in the choliambic metre and the Ionic dialect, but also in the technique of first-person speech and assumed personality, which looks to a specific mode of archaic poetry:

As regards the presentation of moral character (τὸ ἦθος), there are certain things which, if said about oneself, may be the cause of envy or prolixity or contradiction, or if said about another, leave us open to the charge of being abusive or rude; it is therefore advisable to have these things said by another person (ἕτερον χρὴ λέγοντα ποιεῖν), as Isocrates does in the Philip and in the Antidosis, and as Archilochus does when he expresses criticism (ὡς ᾿ρχίλοχος ψέγει). Archilochus makes a father speak about his daughter in the iambic poem, 'There is nothing that cannot be expected or that we can swear to be impossible' (IEG 122.1), and he makes the carpenter Charon speak in the iambic poem that begins 'Not for me the estate of Gyges' (IEG 19.1); so too Sophocles presents Haemon speaking about Antigone to his father, as though quoting what others have been saying (cf. Antigone 688-700). (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.1418b23-33)

In archaic iambic poetry, then, a speaking 'I', who was not the same as the author, seems to have been not infrequent, and this could give rise to misunderstandings about the identity of the persona loquens for anybody not present at the first performance of the work.³⁴ Aristotle, as we have just seen, identifies certain cases where Archilochus places criticism in the mouth of a 'third party',³⁵ and Simonides too presented a cook speaking in the first person (fr. 24) and possibly also a hetaera (fr. 16). As for Hipponax, the use of different personae is not as easy to ascertain as it is for Archilochus (thanks to Aristotle)³⁶, but it is likely that the adoption of the iambic 'mask' of the petulant miser was a common feature of his poetry;³⁷ be that as it may, Callimachus' use of Hipponax as his spokesman clearly adopts a familiar technique of archaic iambic. Moreover, Hipponax or his characters regularly speak of Hipponax himself in the third person,³⁸ and this too is a mode aped by Callimachus' Hipponax, who from the very beginning speaks of himself in the third person.³⁹

It is in Iambi 1-5 and 13 that the clearest elements of continuity with Hipponax are seen: here is the true ἰαμβικός character - aggressive, bantering, admonitory - expressed in the Ionic dialect; Iambi 1-4 are in choliambs, the metre expressly connected with Hipponax in Iambus 13,⁴⁰ while in Iambus 5, the epodic pattern of iambic trimeter plus iambic dimeter, actually found in Hipponax (fr. 129 Deg. = IEG 118) and Archilochus, is modified to admit choliambs.⁴¹ In these poems, moreover, Callimachus plays some very iambic variations on the game of masking the persona loquens, thus concealing, as Aristotle thought iambic authors did, his own identity when impersonating a series of more or less embarrassing roles.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

1. Performance and genre; 2. The aetiology of Callimachus' Aitia; 3. The Argonautica of Apollonius and epic tradition; 4. Theocritus and the bucolic genre; 5. Epic in a minor key; 6. The style of Hellenistic epic; 7. The epigram; 8. The languages of praise; 9. Hellenistic drama; 10. Roman epilogue.

Editorial Reviews

Review of the hardback: '… this invaluable and endlessly engaging book splendidly reflects their scholarly priorities and pleasures.' Journal of Classics Teaching

Review of the hardback: '… a book so full that it defies summary. … will undoubtedly become an indispensable starting-point for many generations of students and scholars, presenting as it does the culmination of many years' thinking and writing on the part of both of its distinguished authors.' Hermathena

'Wary of generalization that only simplify or obscure, Fantuzzi and Hunter are right to have invested most of their energy in the scrutiny of details; it has enable them to produce the most formidable synthesis of Hellenistic poetic developments yet written.' The Times Literary Supplement

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