14. Anacreon

As we have seen, on one hand Xenophanes and Solon, and on the other Heraclitus, invidiously opposed the ethical and metaphysical disunity of Homeric poetry to symposiastic values. Anacreon of Teos, in contrast, suggests that he is willing to incorporate Homeric poetry into his own sympotic poetry, provided that Homeric themes are adjusted to suit the occasion of conviviality. Again we focus not on all of Anacreon’s poetry, only on the expression of thoughts that may be taken to attack the tradition of rhapsodic performance. I begin with the so-called royal (βασιλικόν) poem of the Anacreontea (2 West), which although probably late Hellenistic at the earliest, nevertheless furnishes us with a convenient point of departure because it appears intended for a symposiarch, the ad hoc “king of the symposium” whose job it was to moderate the guests’ intake ot wine. [1] Thus its appeal to modify Homer is particularly relevant:

At one level, the contrast that is highlighted in this poem is between the violence that could be expressed through Homer’s verses and the desire to maintain order within the symposium. Yet the author of this poem, unlike Xenophanes and Heraclitus, does not desire to exclude Homer from sympotic performance; rather, he only desires to have performed those parts of his poetry that encourage communal order. Hence the emphasis on θεσμοί ‘ordinances’ and especially νόμοι ‘laws’, which admits the pun on νόμος as a ‘strain of song’. [2] Provided this kind of order is maintained during the drinking, the poet says, he will be able to play the lyre and sing a drinking song (παροίνιον), which could refer to skolia as well as to other typical forms of sympotic song. These points are straightforward.

On another level, however, the poet touches upon the distinctly social and political ramifications of the symposium: thesmoi and nomoi also apply to the polis at large—both in terms of traditional custom and civil law—of which the symposium is a traditional microcosm. Order in the symposium is ideologically assimilated to order within the larger polis. But the conceit here, and it is a serious one, is that disorder within the symposium then can ignite disorder within the polis. By saying in effect that Homer with the murderous chord is dangerous, the poet is targeting Homeric performance, which means predominantly rhapsodic performance. Despite the late date of this poem and the possibility that its context is Roman or early Byzantine, [3] the sentiment can be applied equally well to the archaic and especially the classical period. Rhapsodic performance can be attacked because the effects of the emotions it stirs cannot be controlled; yet the fiction that sympotic behavior was somehow more orderly, was only that—a fiction. As we have already had occasion to observe, experience showed in rather dramatic ways How symposia could go awry and threaten the maintenance of order within the polis.

The desire for accommodation with Homeric material in the symposium in Anacreontea 2 above is more directly expressed there than it is in the more commonly cited elegy of Anacreon in this context, which seems to reject the performance of Homer outright:

But let us not be too quick to assume that Anacreon altogether rejects Homer in these lines either. At the metrical level of this elegy, there appears to be articulated a similar accommodation between the performance of epic and elegy comparable to what the anacreontic poet had called for in Anacreontea 2. In the first distich, the hexameter is devoted to drinking while the pentameter is devoted to conflict and warfare, which exactly reverses the relationship between meter and theme that we might expect. The second distich may then be said to compliment or possibly cap the first inasmuch as both of its verses are now properly reserved for the Muses, Aphrodite, and the mirth of the symposium. Without putting too fine a point on it, we might say that the movement in this elegy from the first to the second distich enacts the very kind of incorporation of Homer into the symposium that Anacreon would allow. Still, Anacreon occupies a middle ground with respect to the diametrically antithetical positions of Xenophanes, Heraclitus, or Solon toward the rhapsodic performance of Homer. This could in part be explained by his support and patronage by Hipparchus, [5] especially in the wake of the latter’s rewriting of the rules for rhapsodic performance at the Panathenaia, but only if we could verify that Anacreon’s audience in this poem was in fact the Athenians under the Peisistratids and not instead the Samians under the tyranny of Polycrates. [6] Nevertheless, Anacreon moderates his critique of rhapsodic performance while situating himself squarely within the tradition of denigrating the potentially socially disruptive effects of epic performance.