Introduction: the late classical gap

Transcription

1 Introduction: the late classical gap This book examines the lyric poetry of the late classical period, roughly defined as bc. Late classical lyric? Is there any?, a prospective reader might ask. The lyric poetry of the late fifth and fourth centuries has been, for the most part, ignored and left out of standard histories of Greek literature. 1 Or, worse perhaps, it has been obscured by statements such as, By the middle of the fifth century the creative force vivifying early elegy and lyric had largely spent itself, 2 The last twenty years of the fifth century is a period of disintegration and disillusion, in which mannerism and realism live side by side, 3 or even, If this turgidity [of the style of one late classical poet] is a fair sample of what was being produced, it is little wonder that poetry went into retirement. 4 Yet as archaeological, epigraphic, and literary evidence suggests, songs were still composed and performed between the time of the death of Pindar, the last great lyric poet of the classical period, and the lyric corpora of Theocritus and Callimachus in the third century bc. About 800 lines of verse have been preserved from the immense corpus of solo and choral songs that were composed and performed between the 430s and the 320s bc, that is, about a hundred fragments, ranging from one mangled word to 240 continuous lines of text, coming from dithyrambs, nomes, paeans, hymns, encomia, and other sung forms accompanied by instrumental music. This evidence is, to be sure, limited the equivalent of alongbookoftheiliad and a frustratingly minuscule part of the whole lyric production of that period. But it is certainly not limited enough to justify the neglect that literary studies showed for this corpus until the past two decades or so. The first goal of this book is thus to present and discuss a varied body of texts that has never been analyzed as a whole. 5 In fact, it is precisely the diversity of the material available that is daunting. Questions raised, for example, by a hymn inscribed on a stone in a sanctuary 1 It does not appear at all in the histories of Greek literature by Norwood (1925), Murray (1935), Bowra (1967),Campbell (1983),de Romilly (1985),Trédéand Saïd (1997), or Whitmarsh (2004). 2 Podlecki 1984: Webster 1939: Hadas 1950: It is telling that the texts considered in this book are gathered in not one, but two editions: the New School of Music in Campbell 1993, translating and complementing PMG,andthe epigraphic material, which is edited in CA. 1

2 2 Introduction: the late classical gap in the Peloponnese at the end of the fourth century are different from questions raised by a famous dithyramb performed in Athens at the end of the fifth century. Often these questions are answered by a range of people with different academic specialties, skills, and critical leanings (epigraphy, philology, cultural history, religion, literary criticism, papyrology, history of music, etc.), and they are treated in different volumes. However, the songs cultic or meant for private celebrations, of lasting fame or barely recalled, judged revolutionary or apparently conservative, Panhellenic and epichoric, preserved in quotations or in epigraphic or papyrus form are all products of the same era, and they ought to be read together, although there is no need to reconcile one with the other in order to provide, as is all too often attempted, an overall unified narrative. With this diversity in mind, the second goal of this book is to analyze the characteristics of the late classical lyric production in order to locate it within its original socio-cultural context, or rather to treat singing and song production as activities embedded in a larger network of socio-cultural practices. Not only does the archaeological and epigraphic evidence, from lists of victors in poetic competitions and choregic monuments to inscriptions of songs to the gods, suggest that song-and-dance performance was still widespread in the late fifth century and through the fourth century, 6 but references to song composition and performance and to lyric quotations that occur in the work of contemporary prose writers such as Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and the Attic orators suggest uninterrupted interest and use. This is what Richard Martin notes in connection with dramatic performance, finding a fitting parallel with modern Los Angeles: This hum of voices songs in memory, speaking stones amplified the buzz about performance that must have permeated ancient Athens as it does large swathes of modern Los Angeles. An inventory of just the verbal offshoots of dramatic competitionsin the fifth throughfourth centuries bce would have to include (apart from the actual dramatic texts), casual compliments, abuse, or anecdotes about poets and actors; oratory and history in which they are mentioned; reminiscences of performances; official didascalic records of the winners; choregic inscriptions; sepulchral inscriptions of those who had once been involved in performance; talk at symposia; and songs, poems, and prose works (such as Plato s Symposium and the Epidêmiai of Ion of Chios) that are based wholly or in part on performers and their art. And of course the visual inventory, from vases to portrait busts, extended the impact of the stage even further in space and time. 7 6 Wilson 2000: Martin 2006: 36.

3 Introduction: the late classical gap 3 All of these venues for listening to after-sounds of drama could be explored for lyric too, but to date such careful and well-merited investigation of lyric has not been undertaken. By analyzing not only the texts but also the discourse about mousikē in the late classical period, this book examines the interaction of lyric with contemporary social, cultural, religious, and political contexts and the presentation of lyric as an integral part of late classical civic, religious, and private life, through, for example, symposiastic singing and choral performance. 8 Finally, the third goal of this project is to study forms of reception of the late classical lyric corpus and to understand why this material has been the object of neglect or condemnation. Three explanations have traditionally been sought for the alleged demise of lyric after the death of Pindar: the Romantic notion that genres have to die, allowing one to succeed the other; the idea that, after the end of the fifth century, talent and public interest turned to genres other than lyric, to philosophical prose and rhetoric in particular; 9 and the argument that, with the end of the early classical period, good taste disappeared when some composers (called by modern critics the New Musicians ) introduced a series of radical tonal, formal, and stylistic transformations in theater music (that is, in the choral parts of drama, in the dithyramb, and in the citharodic nome, all performed in theaters, for musical competitions), which ultimately led to the demise of mousikē. As Oliver Taplin explains in the case of late classical vase painting: I have heard fourth-century Western Greek vase-painting dismissed as spät und schlecht (late and lousy). This is clearly a judgment that takes Athenian painting, especially that of the early fifth century, as its ideal of Classical Art. This yearning for noble simplicity can be taken back to the eighteenth-century intellectual Johann Winckelmann; but in the appreciation of vase-painting, it was (Sir) John Beazley, the great connoisseur art historian, who did the most to canonize the Attic ideal This book is necessarily selective and does not consider aspects of the lyric culture of the late classical period such as quotations of, allusions to, or silences about lyric poetry in Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Attic orators and historiographers. Studies of aspects of this topic include, on the orators, North 1952, Perlman 1964, Ober 1989, Ober and Strauss 1989, Too 1995, and Ford 1999, and, on Plato, especially the Laws, Prauscello 2011a, Peponi 2013, and Folch forthcoming. 9 Mahaffy 1891: i 254: The student must be reminded that in studying Greek Literature chronologically, he must now turn, before approaching the Attic drama, to the history of prose writing, which was growing silently, and almost secretly, all through the sixth century bc, though its bloom did not come till after the completion of Greek poetry by Aeschylus and Sophocles (my emphasis). On the invention of prose and the contest of authority between the voice of the poet and the voice of the prose writer, see Goldhill 2002, especially pp Taplin 2007: 16.

4 4 Introduction: the late classical gap The same classicizing vision can be observed in literary criticism. Of Timotheus, author of the Persians, the longest surviving piece of lyric of the late fifth century and representative of the so-called revolutionary New Music, it has been said that he contradicts in every respect the ideals of Hellenic art and taste. He is a curiosity, a monstrosity and that he is the sort of writer who makes baroque an insulting word, and it has been suggested that his pomposity and bombast,... a far cry from the grandeur of Pindar or the grace of Bacchylides,... look forward to the worst traits of Hellenistic poetry. 11 This book takes another stance: without wanting to forcibly impute to these lyric poems a genius generally denied them by critics for twenty-five centuries, I question the idea of aesthetic decline at the end of the fifth century and offer literary interpretations that do not judge texts only according to classical standards but examine them according to their own aesthetic. In recognizing the integrity of the late classical corpus, we must not forget its connections to its archaic and early classical predecessors: there are many ways (thematic, linguistic, and rhetorical, inter alia) in which late classical lyric emulates, challenges, and engages with archaic and early classical models. While this type of relationship has been explored in the case of the Hellenistic corpus, much remains to be done in the case of the late classical poets. 12 In particular, careful examination of the aesthetic of the period of lyric history that constitutes the missing link between the early classical and Hellenistic periods can reveal much about the roots of Alexandrian art. Some Hellenistic features can already be observed in the late classical period, to which the Hellenistic poets might have been indebted more significantly than to the archaic or early classical periods. At the same time, the need to avoid the looming danger of a teleological interpretation in which late classical poetry is read as announcing a later aesthetic and intellectual development should not prevent us from perceiving the late classical period as important in its own right rather than only for what was to come, or what came before Kenyon 1919: 5, Levi 1985: 382, and Segal 1985: 243 respectively. There are exceptions to these judgments, most notably perhaps Herington (1985: ), who concluded his series of Sather lectures thus, the outcome of the experiment [of restoring the silent printed letters of Timotheus Persians to a performing context] has been, for me, not necessarily a finer work of art than that which appears in our literary handbooks, but certainly a different and more interesting one (160). 12 On the Hellenistic poets use of the archaic and early classical past, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2004, Morrison 2007a, Acosta-Hughes 2010a, and Prauscello 2011b (for Callimachus use of the New Music). 13 For teleological reading, Pickard-Cambridge 1962: 69, Segal 1985: 243. As a reaction, note Acosta-Hughes (2010b), who sees Hellenistic hallmarks in archaic poetry.

5 Introduction: the late classical gap 5 To achieve its goals, this project as a whole takes the specific form of an investigation of tradition and innovation in late classical lyric. Most studies of the period tend either to emphasize exclusively the supposedly scandalous and disruptive innovations introduced by a group of later fifthand early fourth-century musicians who are deemed representative of the New Music or to describe the continued tradition of hymn composition; this book examines how in the late classical period, forms of tradition and innovation of all sorts combined, to various degrees, in various places and contexts, and for various purposes. It is possible to examine any musical, visual, or intellectual development in terms of tradition and innovation, 14 but there are two reasons why this approach is particularly useful for the late classical period. First, as Robin Osborne has recently stated in a multipart project focusing on revolutions, if change is a historical constant, the nature of change in any particular cultural manifestation is not for that reason uninteresting, nor are all changes equal. 15 Evenifchangesinmusicare a constant, the musical changes of the late classical period have particular import because of the controversies they caused and the rhetoric of change with which they are associated. For a second reason too the problématique of tradition and innovation is particularly appropriate for the study of late classical lyric: at the end of the fifth century, especially in Athens, changes in many forms took shape, feeding off each other and constituting the background of intellectual culture. 16 Whether they introduced a revolution in lyric poetry and music performance or a series of developments that can be understood as translations or adaptations, the new musicians lived in a cultural context in which they would have rubbed shoulders not only with new architects, new vase painters, new scientists, and new rhetoricians/educators, but also with new banker-financiers, new military strategists, new politicians, and a whole class of nouveaux riches. 17 Only when we take into account the general setting at the end of the 14 On the concept of tradition and innovation as useful for a study of Greek poetry, Pretagostini 1993, Fantuzzi and Hunter 2002 and 2004, and Whitmarsh 2004: 18 31; on classical traditions, J. I. Porter 2006; on innovations in music, D Angour 2006b and 2007; on novelty in ancient Greek imagination and experience, D Angour Osborne 2007: Akrigg 2007, whose main claim is that looking at the economic history of Athens can suggest reasons for supposing that a cultural revolution really did take place over this period (p. 27 for quotation). For the effects of the Peloponnesian War on economy, culture, and society, see Hornblower (1983: ), who defines the fourth century as an age of professionalism in general (156). 17 On late classical art, see Webster 1956, Schultz 2007, Taplin 2007, and Neer 2012: On new scientists, Lloyd 1987: On sophists and new rhetoricians, Taylor On new military strategists, D Angour 2011: On new politicians, Connor 1971.

6 6 Introduction: the late classical gap fifth century, which was characterized by an intellectual innovation hype and socio-economic mobility, from the professionalization of several fields of activity to new constructions of subjectivity, does the full significance of an approach to the lyric corpus from the specific angle of tradition and innovation become evident. An archaeology of late classical lyric Late classical poetry is not easily accessed by modern readers. This period of literary history has been ignored, or even hidden from view, primarily because most modern scholars have inherited a series of selection filters from ancient authors and critics. Although none of these screens is specific to the period under consideration, five factors, at times overlapping, have helped make the late classical era the missing generation of lyric poetry. The first filter that has restricted our access to the lyric output of the classical period relates to material. As with most ancient literature, only a fraction of the overall production of late classical lyric has survived, the result of both passive selection the material accidents that have preserved a particular papyrus or inscribed stone and active selection, by communities who chose, for example, to inscribe a certain text, and not another, on a stone, by scholars who made editions of particular poets, and not others, or by literary authors who quoted poetic passages and determined what belonged to their canon. Two socio-cultural processes are at stake here: one is linked to technologies of communication, especially writing, as means of preservation, transmission, and diffusion; the other is a cultural and institutional process akin to canon formation and the making of a tradition. The combination of accidents and active choices, the two determining processes, has shaped the corpus as received and accessed today. A second filter was imposed by ancient authors, including Plato, Aristotle, and Peripatetic scholars as well as pseudo-plutarch and Athenaeus, their followers in the Imperial period, who wrote diachronic accounts of poetic and musical history. Most ancient literary historians describe a watershed in the history of mousikē in the mid fifth century and associate the New Music with lyric decline after the golden age of archaic and early classical poetry. They created an opposition between traditional lyric as politically engaged, public, and full of true religious fervor, and New Music as a domestic, formalist l art pour l art phenomenon, devoid of true inspiration. 18 Modern 18 Pickard-Cambridge 1962: 38 59, Zimmermann 1992:

7 An archaeology of late classical lyric 7 studies have until recently taken these statements at face value, tracing the story offered by Plato, Aristotle, and their followers. This approach is, however, problematic, since ancient political theorists were not so much faithful reporters of musical culture as intellectuals with conservative views who followed their own ideological agenda and wrote their self-interested version of literary and musical history. 19 It is their hostile view of the New Music that we have inherited and their critical categories that for the longest time have been reproduced in diachronic accounts of musical history. These ancient authors, especially those who wrote several centuries after the fact, have also imposed a third reading screen onto the late classical period that is still strikingly present in modern accounts: they purport to offer a synchronic analysis of the New Music and comment on its sociocultural context and the cultural transformations of the late fifth and fourth centuries. At least until the critical turn marked in the last thirty years or so by performance studies and studies in the material culture of the theater, most modern scholars adopted passages that appear to provide historical context with little critical distance. A careful reading of the source authors often reveals, however, that rather than presenting a faithful and informed synchronic analysis of the period, ancient authors perform a historicist reading of the ancient texts, working with no knowledge beyond what we ourselves possess about the context in which the poems were composed. 20 A fourth screen is ideological and related to the third. Ancient authors and anecdotists often projected onto the life of the poet elements they read in his poetry. Although the work of Janet Fairweather, Mary Lefkowitz, and, more recently, Barbara Graziosi and Elizabeth Irwin has done much to emphasize the element of fiction in poetic lives, 21 scholars of late classical lyric have done remarkably little with their conclusions when considering material related to the New Musicians. Even a canonical book such as Martin West s 1992 Ancient Greek Music presents biographies of the poets that tend to veer to a positivist presentation and takes as historical truth ancient anecdotes that describe the excesses of the poets and their lack of poetic discrimination, much as Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge did in his Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy in It is high time to reconsider these anecdotes and biographical elements to see how they themselves are part of the reception and construction of New Music and its practitioners that we have inherited. 19 Csapo and Wilson 2009a. 20 LeVen Fairweather 1974, Lefkowitz 1981, Graziosi 2002, Irwin West 1992: ; Pickard-Cambridge 1927: and 1962:

8 8 Introduction: the late classical gap Finally, the last screen imposed on reading late classical poetry is that of ancient literary criticism. The comic poets, followed by literary critics and theorists, were especially hostile to the style of the New Dithyramb, which they describe as vacuous, ridiculously convoluted, and obscure. Many modern studies devoted to analyzing ancient comedy s critical discourse on lyric poems take for granted what the comic poets say. 23 After the explosion of literary critical studies following the publication of the Timotheus papyrus in 1903, hardly any work has been devoted to reading the extant, if fragmentary, texts and analyzing the characteristics and logic of their poetic language or the vividness of their narrative. 24 While Hellenistic poetry, once denigrated, has seen an explosion of sophisticated readings in the last half century, the corpus of late classical, or pre-hellenistic, lyric poetry still awaits sustained examination by literary critics. Late classical lyric Two terms in the title of this work are deserving of particular note. Lyric can be both too specific and too vague an expression. 25 Etymologically, it suggests an association with the lyre, yet not all lyric songs were accompanied by a lyre-type instrument; most, indeed, were accompanied by a wind instrument, the aulos. The term lyric therefore does not capture all the forms of lyric practice. At the same time, lyric has been used to describe not only melic poetry, that is, songs performed to the accompaniment of strings and wind, but also two other forms of poetry, elegy and iambos. While performance contexts for elegy and iambos are comparable to those for melic poetry, which included the symposium and public festivals, the meter and mode of performance of these compositions were very different: elegy and iambos were probably chanted and accompanied by aulos music and were composed in stichic meters rather than melic 23 Zimmermann 1988 and The only recent detailed studies of the style of Timotheus are Brussich 1970 and Csapo and Wilson 2009a; on the poetics of the New Music in general, with few textual readings, Csapo 2004 and a revised and augmented version in Csapo Older studies are fascinating for the nationalideologicalprejudices theyoften betray: Wilamowitz editio princeps of Timotheus Persians in 1903 was followed by articles by Croiset (1903), Mazon (1903), Reinach (1903) (now all conveniently collected in Calvié 2010), Gildersleeve (1903), Kenyon (1903), Danielsson (1903), Ellingham (1921), Ebeling (1925). For works devoted more specifically to the lexis dithyrambica, see Chapter 4, n On the definition of lyric, Färber 1936: 7 16, Pfeiffer 1968: 182 8, West 1993: vii viii, and Calame 1998, who disapproves of the term lyric in the narrow sense and prefers melic, Budelmann 2009b.

9 Late classical lyric 9 cola. 26 Finally, lyric understood in the narrower sense of melic ought also to encompass the choral odes of drama, which shared many of the characteristics of choral lyric. 27 This book focuses on the narrow sense of melic sung and not chanted words, melic and not stichic meters and does not include elegy and iambos. But neither does it include dramatic melic songs, even though in terms of performance scenario and context these songs had strong affinities with some of the lyric examined in this book. This latter choice was dictated in part by the primary material and the available scholarship: the past fifteen years have seen an explosion of scholarly interest in the dramatic lyric of the late fifth century, especially late Euripides, while much less has been done on the fragmentary corpus of dithyrambs and nomes. 28 The project is thus in dialogue with studies on late fifth-century dramatic lyric but focuses on material that has drawn less attention. A second term from the title of this work, late classical, brings us to consider the time frame addressed by this study, which is roughly the period between the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (430s bc) and the end of the reign of Alexander the Great (323 bc). Although, as just indicated, these dates have particular resonance within political history, their selection was determined by cultural considerations. 29 As I explain in Chapter 1, historians of the theater have shown that the 430s saw the beginning of a new era in which the construction of larger theaters began and a real star-system was established. 30 This era has been presented as ending when the chorēgia (the community-based sponsoring of theater music and popular participation in choral music) is replaced by agōnothesia (a system where the tasks of the multiple chorēgoi under the democracy are concentrated into a single office), a change most often ascribed to Demetrius of Phalerum. 31 As the uncertainty associated with the exact end of the chorēgia shows, those chronological boundaries (430s bc and 323 bc) should not be seen as rigid markers of sudden change or clean-cut watersheds, yet the periodization they denote is the most helpful as we seek 26 On elegy and iambos, Campbell 1964, E. Bowie 1986, Gentili 1988: Herington On fourth-century tragedy, Webster 1956, Xanthakis-Karamanos 1980, Easterling 1993 and 1997, Hall On late Euripides, Csapo , 2008, 2009, Battezzatto 2005, Sansone 2009, Steiner There are two major exceptions: Hordern (1998, 1999, 2000, 2004) and Power (2010), who deal with the fragmentary corpus. 29 On the difficulty of periodization, Farell 2001: 85 90, Feeney 2007: 7 11, Hunter 2008: Csapo 2004: , for the expression see p On the issue of passage from chorēgia to agōnothesia, see Wilson 2000: 270 6, Csapo and Wilson 2009b, who note the tumultuous and complex process too readily obscured by institutional histories (68), and Csapo and Wilson 2010.

10 10 Introduction: the late classical gap to understand important changes in theater culture, including the advent of the New Music in the last third of the fifth century and the first quarter of the fourth, and in forms of musical practice. Chapter layout Chapter 1 ( A collection of unrecollected authors? ) provides a survey of the surviving material and the problems raised by the shape of that corpus. Much more evidence about late classical lyric activity has survived than is often assumed, for its presentation is usually split among genres (dithyrambs and nomes vs. hymns), between media (literary vs. epigraphic evidence), between periods (addenda to the early classical vs. introductions to the Hellenistic period), or, most importantly, among literary criticism, cultural studies, and cultural history. Older studies, often strongly influenced by structuralism, concentrate on stylistic and formal features of the corpus with little regard for the cultural context to which songs belong, while more recent studies focus on the culture of mousikē in the classical period, with less attention to the surviving poetic material and its relationship to the poetic tradition. The chapter exposes the evidence in its diversity. It also introduces two important topics that will recur over the course of the book: first, the status, role, and significance of writing in the production, transmission, and dissemination of a sung corpus; and second, the relationship between surviving evidence and our understanding of the evolution of poetic genres over the course of the late classical period. The next three chapters focus on reception filters, with the aim of exposing the readings that have often been imposed on the surviving corpus and have hindered access to the texts. All these chapters endeavor to explain what later authors might have obscured as they wrote about late classical lyric. Chapter 2 ( New Music and its myths ) is devoted to one of the most controversial features of the late classical period: the discourse on the phenomenon that modern critics call the New Music. The New Music or the New Music revolution has been associated with the introduction of a series of stylistic, tonal, and formal innovations in theater music, in dithyrambs, nomes, and sung parts of drama. The chapter first outlines three different frameworks used to describe and understand New Music as a phenomenon and its place in literary history. Having examined the phenomenon looking in from the outside, I turn to a description from within, looking out. While any musician or artist might emphasize the novelty of his or her production, no matter how traditional that production