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The Force of Description in Alcaeus Fr. 140 V

Le pouvoir de la description dans le fragment d’Alcée 140 V

Dylan Kenny

Résumé

Le fragment d’Alcée 140 V, avec son minutieux inventaire d’armement, atteste deux modes de description distincts: un registre élevé, épique au début et un autre plus humble, plus ambigu à la fin. Par ce double mouvement de mystification et de démystification, le poète révèle le contexte poétique et politique dans lequel des critères proprement humains, comme l’agentivité et la noblesse, peuvent paraître transférables aux objets.

Texte intégral

  • 1 For the fragments of Alcaeus, I have followed the text of Voigt 1971 throughout, unless otherwise (...)

       [….]
       [….]
3     μαρμαίρει δὲ μέγας δόμος
       χάλκωι, παῖσα δ᾿ Ἄρηι κεκόσμηται στέγα
5     λάμπραισιν κυνίαισι, κὰτ
       τᾶν λεῦκοι κατέπερθεν ἴππιοι λόφοι
       νεύοισιν, κεφάλαισιν ἄν-
       δρων ἀγάλματα· χάλκιαι δὲ πασσάλοις
       κρύπτοισιν περικείμεναι
10     λάμπραι κνάμιδες, ἔρκος ἰσχύρω βέλεος
       θόρρακές τε νέω λίνω
       κόϊλαί τε κὰτ ἄσπιδες βεβλήμεναι·
       πὰρ δὲ Χαλκίδικαι σπάθαι,
       πὰρ δὲ ζώματα πόλλα καὶ κυπάσσιδες.
15     τῶν οὐκ ἔστι λάθεσθ᾿, ἐπεὶ
       δὴ πρώτιστ᾿ ὐπὰ τὦργον ἔσταμεν τόδε.1

The great house gleams with bronze; the whole ceiling is adorned for war with bright helmets, down from which horsehair crests nod, ornaments for the heads of men. Bright bronze greaves conceal the pegs they hang around, a fence against the strong missile. New linen corselets and hollow shields are cast down; beside them are Chalcidian swords; beside them are a bunch of girdles and tunics. These it is impossible to forget, since we first promised this deed.

  • 2 In accordance with Voigt 1971 and most recent scholars, I assume a gap of at least two lines at th (...)
  • 3 He goes on to suggest that jewels and unguents occupied a similar role in the feminine sphere; see (...)
  • 4 Purves 2015; Mueller 2016, p. 134-140. On the same motif in visual art, see Hölscher 2014, p. 168- (...)

1A striking feature of Alcaeus fr. 140 V is the near-total absence of human actors from the poem as we know it.2 This absence emerges in especially high relief because the poem is densely populated with arms and armor, which imply men by a vivid metonymy and iconically suggest the male body by their very form. Uncanny objects, arms can seem to conjure up men where there are none, or transform inanimate things into human bodies by analogy. In Homer, weapons are sometimes so closely identified with their bearers that they seem to attract to themselves the property of life. Jean-Pierre Vernant read this assimilation as an indication that for archaic Greeks, armor was actually coextensive with the heroic body, magically charged with its animating forces.3 More recently, Melissa Mueller and Alex Purves have found in Homeric descriptions of warfare an ancient precedent for the “new materialist” position that even apparently inanimate matter can take on a kind of agency of its own.4 For these scholars, it is important that the animation of things is not simply a literary effect, but actually expresses the fact that objects possess some power prior to the framing systems of, e.g., economy, society, and art. Things are more like people, they argue, and people more like things, than we tend to acknowledge.

  • 5 Aristides, Orationes 46.207. The same idea is taken up by Herodotus’ Themistocles, as a rebuttal a (...)
  • 6 Scholia Aeschylus, Persae 352 (ed. O. Dähnhardt, Leipzig, Teubner, 1894); Scholia Sophocles, Oedip (...)
  • 7 ταῦτα παρὰ Ἀλκαίου· οὐ τιτρώσκει τὰ ἐπίσημα ὅπλα οὐδὲ αὐτὰ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὰ δύναμιν ἔχει, εἰ μὴ ἄρα ὁ φέ (...)

2We can infer that a version of this idea may have had some traction in antiquity because it attracted critics, who opposed the idea that power lies latent in things, independent of their human manipulators. As we know from several sources, Alcaeus seems to have been one of the earliest of these antagonists. Aelius Aristides cites him as the source of the famous dictum that cities are not composed of stones, wood, or walls, but men who know how to protect themselves: ἄνδρες αὑτοὺς σῴζειν εἰδότες.5 A line preserved by scholiasts on Aeschylus and Sophocles, now assigned to our fr. 112, expresses a similar sentiment: “for men are the war-tower of a city” [ἄνδρες γὰρ πόλιος πύργος ἀρεύιοι].6 Ironically, these statements actually seem to endorse the analogy between people and things, even as Alcaeus aims to establish a strict hierarchy dividing them. Nevertheless, Alcaeus seems to have opposed the idea that matter contains any agentive force not supplied by humans. In Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Eteocles boasts that he is unafraid of any ornament, shield-device, or crest, a sentiment which the scholiasts attribute to Alcaeus: “This is from Alcaeus: embossed shields don’t wound, nor do they have any power on their own, if the man bearing them is not noble.”7 Without more context we cannot know if this critique was restricted to weapons bearing images. But it fits the pattern of the other citations, insisting that any agency objects may seem to possess depends ultimately upon the men who put them to use. The signs associated with power should not be identified with power itself. Weapons don’t kill people, warlike men kill people.

  • 8 Kurke 1994, p. 83, suggests that Alcaeus’ belief in genetic nobility is “perhaps the most importan (...)
  • 9 For alternative supplements, see the apparatus in Voigt 1971.

3Why was Alcaeus concerned to distinguish between inert objects and their human users? Part of the answer might depend on a commitment to aristocratic essentialism.8 Though our evidence is sparse, it seems that the demystifications of objects listed above are closely connected to the language of aristocratic nobility. We are told by the Aeschylus scholiast that Alcaeus said the shield-bearer must be well-born [γενναῖος] in order to wield his weapon effectively. Similarly, though highly fragmentary, the context of the line in fr. 112 V seems to have something to do with the opposition between the best men, set apart (following the supplements of Schubart and Diels, ἀρ]ίστηας ἀπυκρ[ίτοις) and a shadowy “that man” [κῆνος], perhaps Pittacus or one of Alcaeus’ other enemies.9 Alcaeus was concerned not only to demonstrate that arms without men were simply inert, but also to stress that only the nobly-born possessed true military force, and by extension, political virtue. If nobility really inhered in objects, then anyone with the right equipment could become noble. Aristocratic accoutrements could be manipulated to generate a false impression of legitimacy. Even Alcaeus’ base enemies could store up shining arms, as might be the case in fr. 383 V:

Do the shining arms of Dinnomenes the Hyrradian
still lie in the Myrsileion?

  • 10 I adopt here the text proposed by Dale 2011, who takes the poem as a reference to a certain Dinnom (...)

Ἦρ᾽ ἔτι Διννομένηι τὼι τ᾽ Ὑρραδήωι
τἄρμενα λάμπρα κέοντ᾽ ἐν Μυρσιλήωι;10

4Conversely, Alcaeus’ loss of his shield to the Athenians (fr. 428a V) would entail something like a loss of virtue, impossible under a strict essentialist framework. The idea of power or agency latent in objects threatens to undermine the logic of blood governing Alcaeus’ aristocratic worldview.

  • 11 A notable exception is Burnett 1983, p. 124-125.
  • 12 Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 52.
  • 13 Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 82. Maurach 1968 critiqued Fränkel’s reading while accepting its observati (...)

5It is against this background that we must consider the armor in fr. 140 V, for here, in the apparent absence of human subjects, objects seem to take on characteristic properties of human beings. The weapons oscillate between the concrete and the noetic, between inertness and animation, between opaque objecthood and being more than mere stuff. Scholars have tended to assume that Alcaeus’ descriptions of arms are primarily intended to deliver an image of reality, which has led them to misrecognize the play of thing and idea in fr. 140 V.11 Already in 1924, Hermann Fränkel took up fr. 140 as representative of what he called the “schildernde Stil” in archaic poetry, characterized by an impulse to inventory shards of the world [Wirklichkeitsstäubchen].12 Fr. 140 dramatized this reality-hunger, gradually abandoning the coordinated syntax of its beginning and ultimately collapsing into a paratactic heaping of nouns in lines 11-14: “Die Schilderung löst sich erst aus der Unterordnung, in die sich ihr Anfang um des engeren Anschlusses willen begeben hatte, und befreit sich schließlich sogar von dem Zwang zur Satzbildung.”13 Fränkel was invested in the reality of the armor because he wanted to trace in Alcaeus the features of the archaic Greek mind, so fascinated by material things that it could sometimes barely maintain coordinated syntax against its urge to capture objects.

  • 14 Page 1955 is among the most tonally sensitive readers of fr. 140, and I am indebted to his observa (...)
  • 15 Rösler 1980, p. 148 ff., provides the argument that fr. 140 describes a “Männersaal”, in agreement (...)
  • 16 On speculations concerning the timeline of the battle, see Spelman 2015, p. 358, who rightly point (...)

6Much subsequent discussion of the poem has been guided by scholars’ own reality-hunger, in an attempt to answer the questions: just what is the “great house” [μέγας δόμος]? whose arms are these? how and when will they be used?14 The majority of scholars fix the place described as an andreion in a private house.15 Often this narrative setting is identified with a notional performance context: Alcaeus imagines the very room in which he sings, exhorting his companions to battle.16 But it may be useful to provisionally disengage narrative setting and performance context, in order to more closely track Alcaeus’ poetic strategies in fr. 140 V.

7Description does not necessarily imply the actual presence of the objects described. Among the other fragments of Alcaeus in which Fränkel detected the “schildernde Stil” are the famous “ship of state” poems, fr. 6 and 208 V. These poems are our clearest indication that Alcaeus was interested in applying the technique of detailed, concrete description as a method of conceptualizing political and social relationships. Nothing in these fragments as they survive definitively announces the allegorical character of the bilge-water and the mast-hold; by the same token, nothing in fr. 140 declares the reality or presence of the armor. Indeed, as Fränkel realized, the “ship of state” poems share certain formal characteristics with fr. 140 V, combining detailed description of material surroundings in the present tense with references to a first person plural subject. Fr. 6 V even seems to embed a quasi-gnomic imperative similar to the end of fr. 140 V:

Remember the ones who came before—
now may someone become a reputable man!

μνάσθητε τὼν πάροιθε ν̣[
νῦν τις ἄνηρ δόκιμος γε[νέσθω

8By evincing these parallels, I do not mean to argue that fr. 140 V is actually an allegory. It is possible to accept, as seems likely, that our poem offers an image of an aristocratic house in Mytilene, perhaps even an andreion used for sympotic gatherings, without thereby flattening the poem into a collection of Wirklichkeitsstäubchen. Even if the armor was present at the poem’s performance, it would not thereby limit Alcaeus’ descriptions to a simple indication of its existence. We should be open to the possibility that even highly detailed description can address conceptual problems.

9This essay proceeds from the assumption that in fact description never simply delivers reality, but is always encoded with social values. Such slantedness makes it available for deliberate use as a means of thematizing those values. In what follows, I will read fr. 140 V as a study in two modes of description, one of which (lines 3-10) invests things with the semblance of agency, while the other (lines 11-14) reduces the poem almost to a bare listing of stuff. Both of these are literary effects: the first generates an epic atmosphere teeming with heroic virtues, while the second operates in a lower register, and produces the impression of opaque materiality. Part of the content of the poem is the difference between these two modes. Fr. 140 V does not simply inventory objects, nor does it communicate values already latent in the things described; instead, it thematizes the power of poetic description to invest objects with ideas – epic or otherwise. As the very last line of the poem indicates, this process always takes place within the context of a political community.

  • 17 Page 1955, p. 211.
  • 18 This directionality was already noted by Bonanno 1990, p. 137.

10Lines 3-10, shot through with Homeric coloring, position fr. 140 V from the very beginning against an epic background. Nevertheless, Alcaeus almost nowhere adopts Homeric tropes without some modification (or correction); much of the work of reading the poem is drawing out his deviations from epic models. Page saw in the inventory of arms a reference to Iliadic formulae for arming-scenes, which consistently list the same six items in the same order: greaves, corselet, sword, shield, helmet, and spear.17 Fr. 140 V changes the sequence, and replaces the spears with girdles and tunics, as the poem shifts its gaze from ceiling to floor.18 Architecture replaces the scaffolding of the body, as though the house itself is taking up arms (this is the implication of Ἄρηι κεκόσμηται). Also significant is the insistent plurality of these weapons; the house adorned for war does not appear to be one body so much as many bodies, perhaps even a whole army. Alcaeus thus literalizes and reverses a Homeric simile comparing the tight formation of the Myrmidon troops to the wall of a great house:

So he spoke, and stirred the spirit and strength in each man,
and their ranks, as they listened to the king, pulled closer together.
And as a man builds solid a wall with stones set close together
for the rampart of a high house keeping out the force of the winds, so close together were the helms and shields massive in the middle.
For shield leaned on shield, helmet on helmet, man against man,
and the horse-hair crests along the horns of the shining helmets
touched as they bent their heads, so dense were they formed on each other.

  • 19 Homerus, Ilias 16.212-217. Trans. Lattimore. Tyrtaeus fr. 11 West represents another clear recepti (...)

Ὣς εἰπὼν ὄτρυνε μένος καὶ θυμὸν ἑκάστου.
μᾶλλον δὲ στίχες ἄρθεν, ἐπεὶ βασιλῆος ἄκουσαν.
ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε τοῖχον ἀνὴρ ἀράρῃ πυκινοῖσι λίθοισι
δώματος ὑψηλοῖο βίας ἀνέμων ἀλεείνων,
ὣς ἄραρον κόρυθές τε καὶ ἀσπίδες ὀμφαλόεσσαι.
ἀσπὶς ἄρ᾽ ἀσπίδ᾽ ἔρειδε, κόρυς κόρυν, ἀνέρα δ᾽ ἀνήρ·
ψαῦον δ᾽ ἱππόκομοι κόρυθες λαμπροῖσι φάλοισι
νευόντων, ὡς πυκνοὶ ἐφέστασαν ἀλλήλοισι.19

11All of the terms of this simile are present in fr. 140 V, but they have swapped positions. The arms are still present in the narrative scene, but the house has become actual, while the men are now virtual (that is, until the last line of the poem.) In the coordination of the house and the armor in lines 3-10, we seem to see the effects of the μένος and θυμός that had enacted the Myrmidons’ formation, but without any human subjects in evidence. The objects themselves appear to take up those powers.

  • 20 On Homeric apposition, see Chantraine 1953, p. 12-21.

12Alcaeus’ description of the crested helmets and the greaves in lines 3-10 contributes to the impression of animation. These items are set apart from their counterparts in lines 11-14, enclosed in a descriptive unit bookended by the repetition of the adjective λαμπρός, and structured by close syntactical patterning. Each item is capped by an appositional phrase (a characteristically epic syntax) specifying the function of the equipment.20 Moreover, the main verbs in each clause (νεύοισιν, κρύπτοισιν) occupy the same metrical position.

  • 21 Homer, Ilias 3.37, 11.42, 15.481, 16.138; Odyssea 22.124.
  • 22 This is certainly one reason for the terror of Astyanax at Ilias 6.467-471, who sees the nodding c (...)

13It is worth lingering for a moment on these verbs, each of which deviates subtly but significantly from epic usage. The verb νεύω for the movement of the crests is perfectly in line with Homeric formulae for their description in arming-scenes.21 Alcaeus uses νεύω here (instead of, say, σείω, as in fr. 388 V) for epic coloring, but it also serves to imply mens’ heads that are not there, a suggestion brought to light in the subsequent appositional phrase. That these crests nod on their own, adorning the ceiling, is strange; nowhere else do crests nod unattached to any head. What supplies the motion? In Homer, νεύω primarily describes a gesture to signal assent or mark a promise; the motion of the horsehair crests uncannily repeats that gesture.22 The nod is a minimal, but powerfully binding, expression of intention. Alcaeus exploits this ambiguity in the verb so that the helmets’ motion seems to express a kind of deliberate agency.

  • 23 Homer, Ilias 8.272, 13.405, 14.373.
  • 24 Though almost hopelessly obscure, fr. 396 V may suggest that the noun ἕρκος, used in apposition to (...)

14Such ambiguity continues in the action of the greaves, which hide (κρύπτω) the pegs from which they hang, introducing hidden depth to imagery hitherto dominated by the play of surfaces. This is another usage paralleled in Homer, but transformed by Alcaeus. In Homer κρύπτω appears a handful of times to describe the protection afforded by shields and helmets, but these implements are never themselves the subjects of the verb.23 Like νεύω, κρύπτω has a perfectly physical sense, but it could also imply some kind of interior life latent in the objects.24 Already in Homer the sense « to deceive, to mask intention » is well-established. Between the nodding crests and the hiding greaves, the objects appear to perform two basic and directly opposed communicative actions. They take on human gestures and perhaps even seem to possess intentionality. These are things that look like more than just things.

15But if the first half of the poem is characterized by description that seems to animate objects, the same cannot be said of lines 11-14. Beginning at line 11, as Fränkel already noted, the coordinated appositional syntax of the first part of the poem rapidly deteriorates into a paratactic heap of objects. The only verbal element in lines 11-14 is the perfect participle βεβλήμεναι. Alcaeus coordinates this syntactical shift with a change in the material quality of the objects listed. We move from a world of bronze to a mess of linen, iron, and skin, from characteristically epic equipment to objects at the margins of, even excluded from, the epic world.

  • 25 Alcman fr. 155 Calame, οἶκας μὲν ὡραίῳ λίνῳ, may furnish an example of “young linen” being compare (...)

16This shift is underscored by the fact that the linen is marked as νέον, which most scholars translate as “new” or “fresh”, i.e. freshly woven. Even in the absence of an archaeologically sound explanation for the novelty of the linen, the appearance of the adjective νέος at this crucial moment in the poem indicates a shift in the temporal coding of the objects described. Where the bronze armor had been richly decorated in the tropes of epic and the age of the Homeric heroes, the linen is emphatically contemporary. It is as though the armor is divided by a generational gap.25 The linen corselets announce the irruption of the present world into the tableau of timeless bronze, marking a shift in the material and poetic quality of the equipment described.

  • 26 Page 1955, p. 215.
  • 27 Scholia Homer, Ilias 2.532. It is perhaps relevant that one of the two Homeric characters given a (...)
  • 28 Page 1955, p. 215; Snodgrass 1964, p. 183. Page was less sure, citing a fragment of Mimnermus’ Σμυ (...)

17For Page, the linen corselets are “the most remarkable objects in Alcaeus’ armour”, because they seem to be typically barbarian attire.26 A scholiast on one of the two Homeric occurrences of the adjective λινοθώρηξ, confirms the garment’s unexpected appearance on a Greek hero: οἱ γὰρ Ἕλληνες οὐκ ἐχρῶντο λινοῖς θώραξι· διὰ παντὸς γὰρ χαλκοχίτωνας αὐτοὺς λέγει.27 As the scholiast suggests, Homeric warriors are much more closely identified with the bronze that populated the first part of fr. 140 V. The hollow shields that follow immediately upon the corselets mark a further departure from the world of epic. As Page points out, shields are never described as hollow (or anything like it) in Homer, and Snodgrass confidently states that “the shields are surely hoplite”, citing a parallel in Tyrtaeus (fr. 19 West)28 Alcaeus’ contemporary equipment attracts the qualities of the epic armor to itself.

  • 29 Page 1955, p. 220, n. 2.
  • 30 Thus Bakhuizen 1976, p. 43: “These blades must have been made of iron (steel).”
  • 31 Page 1955, p. 218.
  • 32 Page 1955, p. 219.
  • 33 Thus we cannot follow Burnett 1983, p. 125, in calling this “the everyday term”.
  • 34 Aeschylus, Choephori 232.

18If the corselets and the shields are objects at the margins of the heroic world, or perhaps updatings of older equipment, the Χαλκίδικαι σπάθαι are firmly non-epic. The epithet Χαλκίδικαι draws out the contemporary quality of these blades, echoing the χαλκός that populated the first half of the poem. As Page notes, ancient folk-etymologies connected Chalcis with the invention of bronze.29 In Alcaeus’ time, though, Chalcidian metal would not have meant bronze, but iron.30 Alcaeus uses the toponym as a kind of euphemism for iron to punningly underscore the shift from the epic bronze of the first half of the poem. This implication is further drawn out by the most surprising word in the poem, σπάθη, which as Page already noted describes a sword only in “comic or colloquial writing.”31 Why does it appear here, instead of the far more common ξίφος, which could also fit the meter? Page suggests that it underscores their breadth, suggesting that this may be a quality characteristic of Chalcidian weaponry, but this is total speculation.32 Because this is the only appearance of the term in archaic poetry, we cannot know precisely what associations σπάθη had in Alcaeus’ time.33 Already in Aeschylus, however, it names a weaver’s batten (a flat wooden blade to strike the woof theads home.)34 Thus the verb σπαθάω came to mean “ to weave densely ”, and later, “to spend profligately”. Between the ambiguous gendering of the noun and the figurative uses of its cognate verb, we can begin to get some idea of why comic writers preferred σπάθη to ξίφος. Certainly in Aristophanes and Menander (perhaps already in Aeschylus) these ambiguities were exploited for literary effect. Alcaeus may be up to something similar.

  • 35 Harpocration, s.v. κύπασσιϚ, p. 187 (ed. W. Dindorf, Oxford, 1853).
  • 36 Leonidas, Anthologia Palatina 6.202; Perses, Anthologia Palatina 6.272.

19Even more ambiguous are the ζώματα and κυπάσσιδες correlated with the σπάθαι by another colorless πὰρ δέ. The only other extant instance of the term ζῶμα in Alcaeus describes the girdle of Thetis, unbound by Peleus on their wedding night. In antiquity, the nature of the rare word κύπασσις required scholarly explanation. The grammarian Harpocration was resigned to the term’s hesitation between male and female dress: οἱ γλωσσογράφοι χιτῶνος εἶδός φασιν αὐτὸν εἶναι, οἱ μὲν γυναικείου οἱ δὲ ἀνδρείου.35 Like σπάθη, its tone elsewhere in Greek literature seems consistently comic: after Alcaeus, who provides its first extant appearance, the word circulates through iambic poetry (Hipponax fr. 32 West, in the diminutive κυπασσίσκος), old comedy (Harpocration cites an instance in a lost work of Aristophanes), and mime (Herondas 8.31). Most striking of all is the later career of the paired ζώματα and κυπάσσιδες in Hellenistic epigram – as womens’ votive offerings to Artemis after difficult childbirth.36

20The shift from epic, apparently animated things to a lower register of inert matter involves a corresponding shift from decidedly manly objects to equipment that cuts across gender boundaries. We cannot, of course, be certain that all the ambiguities I have noted were intended by or even necessarily available to Alcaeus, given that most of our evidence for usage postdates him. But it is striking that in later literature all three of these terms – σπάθη, ζῶμα, κύπασσις – shift between genders, and often appear in comic contexts (these two facts are almost certainly related.) Alcaeus is probably not describing women’s garments heaped on the floor under the helmets and the greaves. But the ambiguous gendering of the objects may contribute to the impression that these objects seem to be more insistently material, less animated than their counterparts in lines 3-10. This is a deliberate choice; nothing in the objects described in lines 11-14 demands a shift to a lower register. We can imagine a version of fr. 140 that maintains a high, quasi-Homeric tone throughout.

21Having traced the difference between the two modes of description in fr. 140, we are now in a better position to understand what their juxtaposition accomplishes. The contemporary tackle heaped up in lines 11-14 unmasks the epically troped weapons of lines 3-10 as inert objects. If we began with armor that seemed itself charged with heroic force, the corselets, girdles, and tunics suggest that arms are mere matter. Alcaeus’ movement between the two modes of description demystifies the apparently animated objects. It reveals the apparent power of the helmets and the greaves as a literary effect. We could describe the overall movement of the description of the armor as a gradual movement from weaponry cloaked in the trappings of ἁβροσύνη, precious bronze adorned with words like κεκόσμηται and ἄγαλμα, to iron and cloth almost bereft of elaboration. And yet this is not necessarily a critique of ἁβροσύνη so much as an assimilation of its attractive power to Alcaeus’ poetic technique, which made the objects so charming in the first place. The same is true of the epic troping, which is revealed as a device but not thereby discarded as false or pointless. The lower mode of description shows by contrast the power of the higher, epic mode to invest material things with value. In saying of the lowly tunics “these are mere objects”, the poem looks back upon its beginning and says: “look what I can do to mere objects.” Description can charge objects with force, or it can reduce them to mere stuff.

  • 37 Burnett 1983, p. 125.

22In fact, Alcaeus seems to say, these were never simply concrete objects, but always objects of thought. This is the surprising turn of the last two lines of the poem, which reframe all of what came before in the collective mental space of Alcaeus’ companions. Alcaeus dramatizes this transformation with the two demonstratives that frame the final distich: τῶν, which collects the whole preceding inventory of objects, and τόδε, which refers only to the vague ἔργον. By their common grammatical function, the concrete armor and the abstract task are assimilated to one another. In light of the detailed description of things that made up the bulk of the poem, the shift to a single abstract τῶν comes as a striking tonal shift. As Anne Pippin Burnett puts it, “arms that begin as externalised objects end as a common obsession.”37 The arms are no longer powerful objects, surrogate men, nor are they brute matter: they are what “it is impossible to forget.”

  • 38 For a detailed account of this phrase in Homer, see Collins 1998, p. 78-125.
  • 39 This is the reading of Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 82; followed by Rösler 1980, p. 153, n. 105.
  • 40 The closest Homeric parallel I have found for λανθάνεσθαι used of concrete objects is the use of ἐ (...)

23Alcaeus’ use of λανθάνεσθαι in this context clearly echoes the familiar Homeric phrase (οὐ) λανθάνεσθαι ἀλκῆς.38 Notably, however, Alcaeus does not say that warfare is impossible to forget, but that these things, i.e., all the objects that came before, are impossible to forget. Alcaeus, following epic models, sometimes metonymically related weapons and abstract warcraft; indeed, in some readings of fr. 140 V, the dative Ἄρηι in line 3 is instrumental, meaning “with weapons.”39 Here, however, we are asked to make concrete weapons stand for warcraft. This is hardly impossible, but it nevertheless marks another deviation from epic. Homeric characters can forget their war-strength, skills, homelands, anger, their pains, the gods – but they rarely forget discrete material objects, and never do so with λανθάνεσθαι.40 Alcaeus re-routes the abstract Homeric vocabulary of “remembering ἀλκή” through the detailed description of the armor, simultaneously materializing the concept and freighting the objects with a numinous burden.

  • 41 Spelman 2015, p. 356.
  • 42 Spelman 2015, p. 357 aligns this with other descriptions of factional resolution in Alcaeus, notab (...)

24The final lines of the poem reveal the engine of this play between object and idea. Henry Spelman has recently corrected the tradition of scholarship on fr. 140 V that read this final distich as the cap on a standard exhortation to imminent courageous military action. By Spelman’s account, the οὐκ ἔστιν construction signals an ethical position resigned to the necessity of following through the task of defending Mytilene: “to say that one cannot forget warfare is to imply that thinking of warfare is an unavoidable responsibility.”41 Once a deed has been promised (a plausible translation of ὑφίστημι), it must be followed through.42 What has made the armor impossible to forget is a binding political commitment; the poem rehearses the investiture of these objects with symbolic charge. The arms are called in to represent the initial promise and guarantee its effectiveness. (In this way they resemble the objects of an oath.) Fr. 140 V does not discover force already latent in the arms themselves, but transfers the force of political bonds onto them; if the objects attract power, it is ultimately against the horizon of the political community. Alcaeus’ poem, rehearsing the moment in which the hetaireia took up its common task, reveals itself as a medium through which force is transferred to things.

Bibliographie

Bakhuizen 1976: Simon C. Bakhuizen, Chalcis-in-Euboea, Iron and Chalcidians Abroad, Leiden.

Bonanno 1990: Maria Bonanno, L’allusione necessaria: ricerche intertestuali sulla poesia greca e latina, Roma.

Burnett 1983 : Anne P. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, London.

Chantraine 1953: Pierre Chantraine, Grammaire homérique. Tome II, Syntaxe, Paris.

Clay 2013: Diskin Clay, “Lesbian Armour: Alcaeus fr. 140 Voigt”, Prometheus. Rivista di studi classici 39-1, p. 18-24.

Collins 1998: Derek Collins, Immortal Armor: The Concept of Alkē in Archaic Greek Poetry, Lanham.

Dale 2011: Alexander Dale, “Alcaeus on the Career of Myrsilos: Greeks, Lydians and Luwians at the East Aegean-West Anatolian Interface”, JHS 131, p. 15-24.

Fränkel [1924] 1960: Hermann Fränkel, “Eine Stileigenheit der frühgriechischen Literatur”, in Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens, München, p. 40-96.

Hölscher 2014: Tonio Hölscher, “Im Bild noch lebendiger als in Wirklichkeit: Bildwerke, Lebewesen und Dinge im antiken Griechenland”, in Ruth Bielfeldt (ed.), Ding und Mensch in der Antike, Heidelberg, p. 163-93.

Jurenka 1898: Hugo Jurenka, “Alcaica”, Wiener Studien 20, p. 119-134.

Kurke 1994: Leslie Kurke, “Crisis and Decorum in Sixth-century Lesbos: Reading Alkaios Otherwise”, QUCC 47-2, p. 67-92.

Maurach 1968: Gregor Maurach, “Schilderungen in der Archaischen Lyrik: zu Alkaios fr. Z 34”, Hermes 96-1, p. 15-20.

Mueller 2016: Melissa Mueller, Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy, Chicago.

Page 1955: Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus, Oxford.

Purves 2015: Alex Purves, “Ajax and Other Objects: Homer’s Vibrant Materialism”, Ramus 44, 1-2, p. 75-94.

Rösler 1980: Wolfgang Rösler, Dichter und Gruppe : eine Untersuchung zu den Bedingungen und zur historischen Funktion früher griechischer Lyrik am Beispiel Alkaios, Munich.

Snodgrass 1964: Anthony Snodgrass, Early Greek Armour and Weapons, Edinburgh.

Spelman 2015: Henry Spelman, “Alcaeus 140”, Classical Philology 110-4, p. 353-360.

Vernant 1986: Jean-Pierre Vernant, « Corps obscur, corps éclatant », in Charles Malamoud, Jean-Pierre Vernant (éd.), Corps des dieux, Paris, p. 21-45.

Voigt 1971: Eva-Maria Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus: fragmenta, Amsterdam.

Notes

1 For the fragments of Alcaeus, I have followed the text of Voigt 1971 throughout, unless otherwise noted.

2 In accordance with Voigt 1971 and most recent scholars, I assume a gap of at least two lines at the beginning of the poem, because of the lonely δέ in our first line. Jurenka 1898, p. 127, argued that fr. 140 represented a complete poem, but his argument for δέ as a reference to other poems on related topics (based on parallels from Xenophon’s Socratic writings) is unconvincing. Nevertheless, the obstacles to considering this fragment a complete poem are minimal. We only need to assume a lacuna of two lines. Pace Clay 2013, p. 18, those lines need not have contained “an address to Alcaeus’ allies”.

3 He goes on to suggest that jewels and unguents occupied a similar role in the feminine sphere; see Vernant 1986, p. 31.

4 Purves 2015; Mueller 2016, p. 134-140. On the same motif in visual art, see Hölscher 2014, p. 168-174.

5 Aristides, Orationes 46.207. The same idea is taken up by Herodotus’ Themistocles, as a rebuttal against the charge that he is ἄπολις (Herodotus, 8.161), and Thucydides’ Demosthenes (Thucydides, 7.77)

6 Scholia Aeschylus, Persae 352 (ed. O. Dähnhardt, Leipzig, Teubner, 1894); Scholia Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 56 (ed. P. Papageorgius, Leipzig, Teubner, 1888). There is a textual problem with this line: the Persae scholion has ἀρεύιος instead of ἀρεύιοι; the former is the reading adopted by Page 1955, p. 234. I have tentatively followed the reading of Voigt 1971, in part because I think that for Alcaeus the quality of the men is at issue.

7 ταῦτα παρὰ Ἀλκαίου· οὐ τιτρώσκει τὰ ἐπίσημα ὅπλα οὐδὲ αὐτὰ καθ᾽ ἑαυτὰ δύναμιν ἔχει, εἰ μὴ ἄρα ὁ φέρων αὐτά, ἐὰν ᾖ γενναῖος. Scholia Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas, 398a,b (ed. O.L. Smith, Leipzig, Teubner, 1982).

8 Kurke 1994, p. 83, suggests that Alcaeus’ belief in genetic nobility is “perhaps the most important element” of his ideology.

9 For alternative supplements, see the apparatus in Voigt 1971.

10 I adopt here the text proposed by Dale 2011, who takes the poem as a reference to a certain Dinnomenes in Pittacus’ faction (cf. fr. 376 V), understanding the Μυρσιλήον as a palace in Mytilene.

11 A notable exception is Burnett 1983, p. 124-125.

12 Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 52.

13 Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 82. Maurach 1968 critiqued Fränkel’s reading while accepting its observations, arguing that the deterioration of syntactic complexity was actually a rhetorical device, a way of quickening the tempo toward the climactic exhortation.

14 Page 1955 is among the most tonally sensitive readers of fr. 140, and I am indebted to his observations on epic and non-epic vocabulary. Ironically, though, because his reading of fr. 140 is almost entirely devoted to the hunt for realia, he attributes very little literary significance to the diction he so carefully charts.

15 Rösler 1980, p. 148 ff., provides the argument that fr. 140 describes a “Männersaal”, in agreement with Burnett 1983, p. 123 ff., Clay 2013 and Spelman 2015. Bonnano 1990, p. 137, notably dissents, arguing that the setting is in fact some kind of temple to Ares.

16 On speculations concerning the timeline of the battle, see Spelman 2015, p. 358, who rightly points out that we have no need to assume any imminent fighting.

17 Page 1955, p. 211.

18 This directionality was already noted by Bonanno 1990, p. 137.

19 Homerus, Ilias 16.212-217. Trans. Lattimore. Tyrtaeus fr. 11 West represents another clear reception of this passage.

20 On Homeric apposition, see Chantraine 1953, p. 12-21.

21 Homer, Ilias 3.37, 11.42, 15.481, 16.138; Odyssea 22.124.

22 This is certainly one reason for the terror of Astyanax at Ilias 6.467-471, who sees the nodding crest but does not understand that his father is behind the helmet, animating the bronze and the horsehair. On the multivalence of the verb, see the Lexicon des frühgriechischen Epos, s.v. νεύω.

23 Homer, Ilias 8.272, 13.405, 14.373.

24 Though almost hopelessly obscure, fr. 396 V may suggest that the noun ἕρκος, used in apposition to the greaves, could also toggle in Alcaeus’ poems between inanimate objects and people. This is already true in Homer; at Ilias 6.5, Ajax is the ἕρκος Ἀχαιῶν. On this imagery see Purves 2015, p. 75.

25 Alcman fr. 155 Calame, οἶκας μὲν ὡραίῳ λίνῳ, may furnish an example of “young linen” being compared to a young man – perhaps along the lines of Sappho fr. 115 V?

26 Page 1955, p. 215.

27 Scholia Homer, Ilias 2.532. It is perhaps relevant that one of the two Homeric characters given a linen corselet is Locrian Ajax, who appears in Alcaeus’ politically charged fr. 298 as a mythical exemplum of a wrongdoer whom his countrymen should have put to death. Whether or not Alcaeus intended to evoke the lesser Ajax in particular, the introduction of the linen corselets modulates the poem out of a typically epic register.

28 Page 1955, p. 215; Snodgrass 1964, p. 183. Page was less sure, citing a fragment of Mimnermus’ Σμυρνηΐϛ (fr. 13a West) apparently describing Lydian troops under Gyges with κοῖλαι ἀσπίδες. Either way, they seem to be either modern or barbarian (or both), and markedly non-epic.

29 Page 1955, p. 220, n. 2.

30 Thus Bakhuizen 1976, p. 43: “These blades must have been made of iron (steel).”

31 Page 1955, p. 218.

32 Page 1955, p. 219.

33 Thus we cannot follow Burnett 1983, p. 125, in calling this “the everyday term”.

34 Aeschylus, Choephori 232.

35 Harpocration, s.v. κύπασσιϚ, p. 187 (ed. W. Dindorf, Oxford, 1853).

36 Leonidas, Anthologia Palatina 6.202; Perses, Anthologia Palatina 6.272.

37 Burnett 1983, p. 125.

38 For a detailed account of this phrase in Homer, see Collins 1998, p. 78-125.

39 This is the reading of Fränkel [1924] 1960, p. 82; followed by Rösler 1980, p. 153, n. 105.

40 The closest Homeric parallel I have found for λανθάνεσθαι used of concrete objects is the use of ἐπιλανθάνομαι at Odyssea 5.324, where Odysseus remembers his raft: ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς σχεδίης ἐπελήθετο. Beyond Homer, though, Sappho fr. 105 V (itself a study in varieties of forgetting) uses the verb of apple-pickers neglecting the fruit of the highest bough.

41 Spelman 2015, p. 356.

42 Spelman 2015, p. 357 aligns this with other descriptions of factional resolution in Alcaeus, notably fr. 129 V.

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University of California, Berkeley

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