Bacchylides
Bacchylides (
Life
One canon is there, one sure way of happiness for mortals – if one can keep a cheerful spirit throughout life.[9]
This precept, from one of Bacchylides' extant fragments, was considered by his modern editor, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, to be typical of the poet's temperament: "If the utterances scattered throughout the poems warrant a conjecture, Bacchylides was of placid temper; amiably tolerant; satisfied with a modest lot; not free from some tinge of that pensive melancholy which was peculiarly Ionian; but with good sense..."[10]
Bacchylides' lyrics do not seem to have been popular in his own lifetime. Lyrics by his uncle, Simonides, and his rival, Pindar, were known in Athens and were sung at parties, they were parodied by Aristophanes and quoted by Plato, but no trace of Bacchylides' work can be found until the Hellenistic age, when Callimachus began writing some commentaries on them.[11] Like Simonides and Pindar, however, Bacchylides composed lyrics to appeal to the sophisticated tastes of a social elite[12] and his patrons, though relatively few in number, covered a wide geographical area around the Mediterranean, including for example Delos in the Aegean Sea, Thessaly in the north of the Greek mainland, and Sicily or Magna Graecia in the west.[13] It has been inferred from the elegance and quiet charm of his lyrics that he only gradually acquired fame towards the end of his life.[14]
Being drawn from sources compiled long after his death, the details of Bacchylides's life are sketchy and sometimes contradictory. According to
Bacchylides's career as a poet probably benefited from the high reputation of his uncle, Simonides, whose patrons, when Bacchylides was born, already included
As a composer of choral lyrics, Bacchylides was probably responsible also for the performance, involving him in frequent travel to venues where musicians and choirs awaited instruction. Ancient authorities testify to his visit to the court of Hieron (478–467)
Work
History
The poems were collected into critical editions sometime in the late 3rd century BC by the Alexandrian scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who probably restored them to their appropriate metres after finding them written in prose form.[32] They were arranged in nine 'books', exemplifying the following genres[7] (Bacchylides in fact composed in a greater variety of genres than any of the other lyric poets who comprise the canonic nine, with the exception of Pindar, who composed in ten):[33]
- hymnoi – "hymns"
- paianes – "paeans"
- dithyramboi – "dithyrambs"
- prosodia – "processionals"
- partheneia – "songs for maidens"
- hyporchemata – "songs for light dances"
- enkomia – "songs of praise"
- epinikia – "victory odes"
- erotica – "songs of love"
The Alexandrian grammarian
- Dionysius of Halicarnassus – frag. 11
- Strabo – notice 57
- Plutarch – frag. 29
- Apollonius Dyscolus – frag. 31
- Zenobius – frag.s 5, 24
- Hephaestion – frag.s 12, 13, 15
- Athenaeus – frag.s 13, 16, 17, 18, 22
- Clement of Alexandria – frag.s 19, 20, 21, 32
- Stobaeus – frag.s 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 28
- Priscian – frag. 27
- Johannes Siceliota – frag. 26
- Etymologicum Magnum – frag.s 25, 30
- Palatine Anthology – frag.s 33, 34.
Fortunately for Bacchylidean scholarship, a papyrus came to light in Egypt at the end of the 19th century with a text of Greek uncials, which a local claimed to have found in a ransacked tomb, between the feet of a mummy. It was snapped up for a "preposterous" price by the Egyptologist
As noted by Frederic Kenyon,[45] the papyrus was originally a roll probably about seventeen feet long and about ten inches high, written in the Ptolemaic period, with some Roman characteristics that indicate a transition between styles, somewhere around 50 BC. It reached England in about two hundred torn fragments, the largest about twenty inches in length and containing four and a half columns of writing, the smallest being scraps with barely enough space for one or two letters. The beginning and end sections were missing and the damage done to the roll was not entirely the result of its recent discovery. Kenyon gradually pieced the fragments together, making three independent sections: the first, nine feet long with twenty-two columns of writing; the next section, a little over two feet long with six columns; the third, three and a half feet long with ten columns – a total length of almost fifteen feet and thirty-nine columns, in which form the papyrus remains in the British Library.[46] Friedrich Blass later pieced together some of the still detached fragments and concluded that two of the poems on the restored roll (Odes vi. and vii., as numbered by Kenyon in the editio princeps) must be parts of a single ode (for Lachon of Keos) – hence even today the poems can be found numbered differently, with Jebb for example one of those following Blass's lead and numbering the poems differently from Kenyon from poem 8 onwards (Kenyon 9 = Jebb 8 and so on).[35]
Bacchylides had become, almost overnight, among the best represented poets of the canonic nine, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar, adding about a hundred new words to Greek lexicons.[47] Ironically, his newly discovered poems sparked a renewed interest in Pindar's work,[48] with whom he was compared so unfavourably that "the students of Pindaric poetry almost succeeded in burying Bacchylides all over again."[3]
Style
Together with true glories, men will praise also the charm of the melodious Cean nightingale. – Bacchylides, Ode 3[49]
Much of Bacchylides's poetry was commissioned by proud and ambitious aristocrats, a dominant force in Greek political and cultural life in the 6th and early part of the 5th centuries, yet such patrons were gradually losing influence in an increasingly democratic Greek world.[50] The kind of lofty and stately poetry that celebrated the achievements of these archaic aristocrats was within the reach of 'The Cean nightingale',[51][52] yet he seems to have been more at home in verses of a humbler and lighter strain, even venturing on folksiness and humour.[51][52]
The distinctive merits of Bacchylides, his transparent clearness, his gift of narrative, his felicity in detail, the easy flow of his elegant verse, rather fitted him to become a favourite with readers... he was a poet who gave pleasure without demanding effort, a poet with whom the reader could at once feel at home. – Richard Claverhouse Jebb[53]
Lyric poetry was still a vigorous art-form and its genres were already fully developed when Bacchylides started out on his career. From the time of the
Simonides, the uncle of Bacchylides, was another strong influence on his poetry,[58] as for example in his metrical range, mostly dactylo-epitrite in form, with some Aeolic rhythms and a few iambics. The surviving poems in fact are not metrically difficult, with the exception of two odes (Odes XV and XVI, Jebb).[59] He shared Simonides's approach to vocabulary, employing a very mild form of the traditional, literary Doric dialect, with some Aeolic words and some traditional epithets borrowed from epic. Like Simonides, he followed the lyric tradition of coining compound adjectives – a tradition in which the poet was expected to be both innovative and tasteful – but the results are thought by some modern scholars to be uneven.[7][60] Many of his epithets however serve a thematic and not just a decorative function, as for instance in Ode 3, where the "bronze-walled court" and "well-built halls" of Croesus (Ode 3.30–31 and 3.46) contrast architecturally with the "wooden house" of his funeral pyre (Ode 3.49), in an effect that aims at pathos and which underscores the moral of the ode.[61]
Bacchylides is renowned for his use of picturesque detail, giving life and colour to descriptions with small but skilful touches, often demonstrating a keen sense of beauty or splendour in external nature: a radiance, "as of fire," streams from the forms of the Nereids (XVI. 103 if. Jebb); an athlete shines out among his fellows like "the bright moon of the mid-month night" among the stars (VIII. 27 if.); the sudden gleam of hope which comes to the Trojans by the withdrawal of Achilles is like a ray of sunshine "from beneath the edge of a storm-cloud" (XII – 105 if.); the shades of the departed, as seen by Heracles on the banks of the Cocytus, resemble countless leaves fluttering in the wind on "the gleaming headlands of Ida" (V. 65 if ).[62] Imagery is employed sparingly but often with impressive and beautiful results,[63] such as in the simile of the eagle in Ode 5 below.
Ode 5
Bacchylides has often been compared unflatteringly with Pindar, as for example by the French critic, Henri Weil: "There is no doubt that he fails of the elevation, and also of the depth, of Pindar. The soaring wing was refused him, and he should never have compared himself, as he does somewhere, to an eagle."[64]
The image of the eagle occurs in Ode 5, which was composed for
The myths are introduced mechanically, with little attempt to connect them with the subject of the ode. In some cases they appear to have no special appropriateness but to be introduced merely at the poet's pleasure. There is no originality of structure; the poet's art is shown in craftsmanship rather than in invention. – Frederic G. Kenyon[45]
Bacchylides however might be better understood as an heir to Stesichorus, being more concerned with story-telling per se, than as a rival of Pindar.[68] But irrespective of any scruples about his treatment of myth, Bacchylides is thought to demonstrate in Ode 5 some of his finest work and the description of the eagle's flight, near the beginning of the poem, has been called by one modern scholar "the most impressive passage in his extant poetry."[69]
- ...Quickly
- cutting the depth of air
- on high with tawny wings
- the eagle, messenger of Zeus
- who thunders in wide lordship,
- is bold, relying on his mighty
- strength, while other birds
- cower, shrill-voiced, in fear.
- The great earth's mountain peaks do not hold him back,
- nor the tireless sea's
- rough-tossing waves, but in
- the limitless expanse
- he guides his fine sleek plumage
- along the West Wind's breezes,
- manifest to men's sight.
- So now for me too countless paths extend in all directions
- by which to praise your [i.e. Hieron's] prowess...(Ode 5.16–33)[70]
- So now for me too countless paths extend in all directions
Bacchylides's image of the poet as an eagle winging across the sea was not original – Pindar had already used it earlier (Nemean Odes 5.20–21). In fact, in the same year that both poets celebrated Pherenicus's Olympic victory, Pindar also composed an ode for Theron of Acragas (Olympian 2), in which he likens himself to an eagle confronted with chattering ravens – possibly a reference to Bacchylides and his uncle.[71] It is possible in that case that Bacchylides's image of himself as an eagle in Ode 5 was a retort to Pindar.[72] Moreover, Bacchylides's line "So now for me too countless paths extend in all directions" has a close resemblance to lines in one of Pindar's Isthmian Odes (1.1–2), "A thousand ways ... open on every side widespread before me"[73] but, as the date of Pindar's Isthmian Ode is uncertain, it is not clear in this case who was imitating whom.[74] According to Kenyon, Pindar's idiosyncratic genius entitles him to the benefit of a doubt in all such cases: "... if there be actual imitation at all, it is fairly safe to conclude that it is on the part of Bacchylides."[45] In fact one modern scholar[75] has observed in Bacchylides a general tendency towards imitation, sometimes approaching the level of quotation: in this case, the eagle simile in Ode 5 may be thought to imitate a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (375–83), and the countless leaves fluttering in the wind on "the gleaming headlands of Ida", mentioned later in the ode, recall a passage in Iliad (6.146–9). A tendency to imitate other poets is not peculiar to Bacchylides, however – it was common in ancient poetry,[76] as for example in a poem by Alcaeus (fragment 347), which virtually quotes a passage from Hesiod (Works and Days 582–8).
Pindar's Olympian Ode 1 and Bacchylides's Ode 5 differ also in their description of the race – while Pindar's reference to Pherenicus is slight and general ("...speeding / by Alpheus' bank, / His lovely limbs ungoaded on the course...": Olympian I.20–21),[77] Bacchylides describes the running of the winner more vividly and in rather more detail – a difference that is characteristic of the two poets:[78][n 2]
- When Pherenicos with his auburn mane
- ran like the wind
- beside the eddies of broad Alpheios,
- Eos, with her arms all golden, saw his victory,
- and so too at most holy Pytho.
- Calling the earth to witness, I declare
- that never yet has any horse outstripped him
- in competition, sprinkling him with dust
- as he rushed forward to the goal.
- For like the North Wind's blast,
- keeping the man who steers him safe,
- he hurtles onward, bringing to Hieron,
- that generous host, victory with its fresh applause.(Ode 5.37–49)[70]
- When Pherenicos with his auburn mane
Ultimately, however, Bacchylides and Pindar share many of the same goals and techniques – the difference is largely one of temperament:
They share a common repertory of motifs, images, conventions, diction; and they affirm and celebrate the heroic values of an ancient aristocracy. Both seek to bridge the gap between the fleeting present in its glorious display of beauty and energy and the eternal world of the gods. Pindar however grasps the contrasts between the extremes of mortality and divinity with greater intensity than Bacchylides and for this reason seems the more philosophical and meditative, more concerned with ultimate questions of life and death, transience and permanence. Bacchylides prefers to observe the gentler play of shadow and sadness over the sensuous surface of his brilliant world. – Charles Segal[80]
You, Pindar, holy mouth of the Muses, and you, talkative Siren, Bacchylides ...-anon. in Palatine Anthology[81]
Ode 13
Ode 13 of the Bacchylides is a Nemean ode performed to honor the athlete Pytheas of
Ode 15
The Sons of Antenor, or Helen Demanded Back, is the first of Bacchylides’s dithyrambs in the text restored in 1896. The opening is incomplete, as part of the papyrus was damaged.[84] The dithyramb treats a moment in myth before the Trojan war, when Menelaus, Antenor, and Antenor’s sons go to King Priam to demand the return of Helen. As is often the case with ancient Greek literature, Bacchylides plays of the audience’s knowledge of Homer without repeating a scene told by Homer. He instead describes a scene which is new to the audience, but which is given context by knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey. The story of this embassy was known to Homer, who merely alludes to it at Iliad 3.205ff., but it was fully related in the cyclic epic poem Cypria, according to the Chrestomathy of Proclus.
The style also plays off of Homer. Characters are almost always named with their fathers, i.e. Odysseus, son of Laertes (as reconstructed). They are also given epithets, though these are not the traditional Homeric epithets: godly Antenor, upright Justice, reckless Outrage.[85]
Notes
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.[43]
- ^ A better example of his descriptive reporting of a victory can be found in fr. 10, honouring a runner who won two events at the Isthmian games: "For when he had come to a halt at the finishing line of the sprint, panting out a hot storm of breath, and again when he had wet with his oil the cloaks of the spectators as he tumbled into the packed crowd after rounding the course with its four turns, the spokesmen of the wise judges twice proclaimed him Isthmian victor..."[79]
- Longinus, De Sublimitate, 33, 5. (in Latin)
- JSTOR 4475767.
- ^ a b Burnettn 1985, p. 3
- ^ Slavitt (1998), p. 1
- ^ Fagles 1961, p. [page needed] quoted by Slavitt 1998, p. 1.
- ^ a b Jebb 1905, p. 27
- ^ a b c d e Campbell (1982), p. 415
- ^ Jebb 1905, Intro. vi
- ^ Frag. 7 Jebb 1905
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 60
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 25
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 3
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 25–26
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 3
- ^ Strabo x p.486, cited by Jebb 1905, p. 1
- ^ cited by Jebb 1905, p. 1
- ^ Et. Mag. 582.20, cited by Campbell 1982, p. 413
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 2–4
- ^ a b Gerber 1997, p. 278
- ^ Plutarch de exil. 14.605c
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 10
- ^ a b c Campbell 1982, p. 414
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 4
- ^ Athenaeus 10 p. 456 F, cited by Jebb 1905, p. 5
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 7
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 9
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 11–12
- ^ Schmidt 1987, pp. 20–23.
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 13–20
- ^ Claudius Aelianus Varia historia iv.15.
- ^ Campbell 1982, p. 418
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 27
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 43
- ^ a b Jebb 1905, p. 73
- ^ a b Campbell (1982), p. 416
- ^ Kenyon (1897): Introduction: xiv.
- ^ a b c Slavitt (1998), p. 3
- ^ Bergk 1853, (in Latin) & (in Greek).
- ^ Neue 1823, (in Latin) & (in Greek).
- ^ Baynes 1878.
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 74–76
- ^ Burnett 1985, pp. 1–2
- ^ Jebb 1911.
- JSTOR 30107807.
- ^ a b c Frederic G. Kenyon, The Poems of Bacchylides; from a Papyrus in the British Museum, Longmans and Co. (1897), Introduction: ix.
- ^ London, BL, Papyrus 733
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 68–69
- JSTOR 27533621.
- ^ a b Campbell 1982, p. 423
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 4
- ^ a b Slavitt 1998, p. 6
- ^ a b Jebb 1905, p. 78
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 74
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 18
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 67–68
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 77
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 32–33
- ISBN 0-19-926582-8
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 92
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 63
- ^ Segal 1985, p. 238
- ^ Jebb 1911, p. 123.
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 60–61
- ^ Henri Weil, Journal des Savants (Jan. 1898), quoted in translation by Burnett 1985, p. 3
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 34–38
- ^ Pindar, p. 1
- ^ Jebb 1905, p. 59
- ^ Segal 1985, p. 235
- ^ Campbell 1982, p. 424
- ^ ISBN 0-87220-721-8
- ^ Pindar, p. 16
- ^ Campbell 1982, p. 426
- ^ Pindar, p. 246
- ^ Campbell 1982, p. 427
- ^ Maehler 2004, p. 22
- ^ Segal 1985, p. 236
- ^ Pindar, p. 3
- ^ Jebb 1905, pp. 56–57
- ^ Campbell 1992, p. 172
- ^ Segal 1985, p. 239
- ^ Anth.Pal 9.571.4, cited by Campbell 1982, p. 113
- ^ a b Bacchylides. "Ode 13". Translated by Robert Fagles. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961
- ^ Bacchylides. "Ode 13". Translated by David R. Slavitt. Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, n.d.
- ^ “Bacchylides.” The 1911 Classic Encyclopedia. 6 Oct 2006, accessed 12 March 2012.
- ^ Fagles 1961, p. [page needed].
References
- Baynes, T. S., ed. (1878), Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 3 (9th ed.), New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 194 ,
- Bergk, Wilhelm Theodor (1853), Poetae Lyrici Graeci. (in Latin) & (in Greek)
- Campbell, David A. (1982), Greek Lyric Poetry, Bristol Classical Press
- Campbell, David (1992), Greek Lyric, vol. IV, Loeb, p. 172
- Fagles, Robert (1961), Bacchylides: Complete Poems, Yale University Press
- Gerber, Douglas E. (1997), A Companion to the Greek lyric poets, Brill, p. 278, ISBN 90-04-09944-1
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Maehler, Herwig (2004), Bacchylides: a selection, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59977-6
- Neue, Christian Friedrich (1823), Bacchylidis Cei Fragmenta, Berlin. (in Latin) & (in Greek)
- Pindar; Conway, Geoffrey Seymour (1972), The odes of Pindar, Dent, ISBN 978-0-460-01017-7, retrieved 2 January 2012
- Segal, Charles (1985), "Bacchylides", The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature, Cambridge University Press
- ISBN 0-8122-3447-2
- Schmidt, D.A. (1987), "The Performance of Bacchylides ODE 5", The Classical Quarterly, 37 (1): 20–23, S2CID 170410616
Attribution:
- Jebb, Richard Claverhouse (1911), , in Chisholm, Hugh (ed.), Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 3 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–124
Further reading
- Barrett, William Spencer. 2007. Bacchylides 10. 11–35. In Greek Lyric, Tragedy, and Textual Criticism. Edited by M. L. West, 214–231. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press
- Burnett, Anne Pippin. 1985. The Art of Bacchylides. Martin Classical Lectures 29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
- Calame, Claude. 2011. "Enunciative Fiction and Poetic Performance: Choral Voices in Bacchylides’ Epinicians." In Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination. Edited by L. Athanassaki and E. Bowie, 115–138. Berlin: De Gruyter.
- Calame, Claude. 2009. "Gender and Heroic Identity between Legend and Cult: The Political Creation of Theseus by Bacchylides." In Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece: Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space. By Claude Calame, 105–148. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
- Crane, Gregory. 1996. "The Prosperity of Tyrants: Bacchylides, Herodotus, and the Contest for Legitimacy." Arethusa 29.1: 57- 85
- D’Alessio, Giambattista. 2013. "The Name of the Dithyramb: Diachronic and Diatopic Variations." In Dithyramb in Context. Edited by Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson, 113–132. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
- Fearn, David. 2007. Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
- Goldhill, Simon. 1983. "Narrative Structure in Bacchylides 5." Eranos 81: 65–81.
- Hadjimichael, Theodora A. 2015. Sports-Writing: Bacchylides’s Athletic Descriptions. Mnemosyne. 68.3: 363-392.
- Kyriakou, Poulheria. 2001. "Poet, Victor, and Justice in Bacchylides." Philologus 145.1: 16-33.
- McDevitt, Arthur. 2009. Bacchylides: The Victory Poems. London: Bristol.
- Nagy, Gregory. 2000. "Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Reconstruction from the Bacchylides Papyri." Quaderni urbinati di cultural classica, new series 64.1: 7–28.
- Segal, Charles. 1997. Aglaia: The Poetry of Alcman, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Segal, Charles. 1976. "Bacchylides Reconsidered: The Epithets and the Dynamics of Lyric Narrative." Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica 22:99–130.
External links
- Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Βακχυλίδης (in Modern Greek translations)
- Media related to Bacchylides at Wikimedia Commons
- Works by or about Bacchylides at Internet Archive
- Works by Bacchylides at Perseus Digital Library
- Poems by Bacchylides English translations
- Bacchylides Poems - Dithyrambs and Epinicians