13. The Genesis of Athenian State Theater and the Survival of Pindar’s Poetry

§1. In the roughly defined chronological span of 650 to 450 B.C. covering the era of the nine canonical lyric poets, [1] Pindar is not only the latest but also the best known for what we have been calling occasional poetry and song. Close behind him are his near contemporaries, Simonides and Bacchylides, the two other poets whose lyric poetry is most easily identifiable with historically verified times and places. These three figures are prominently linked with the patronage of individuals whose political power transcends that of the polis. [2] As we move further back in time, by contrast, we find increasingly fewer instances of lyric poetry suited for single occasions. This pattem corresponds to increasingly fewer instances of individual patronage. In earlier lyric, details that may at first strike us as traces of a single occasion usually turn out to be, upon further scrutiny, more generic than historical. Even self-references tend to say more about a generic composer than about a historically situated poet, as we have seen in the case of a figure like Alcman. [3]

§2. Having noted that the lyric compositions of Pindar were occasional in the strict sense that they were grounded in the historical circumstances of their performance, we now come to the basic question: how then did they ever even survive in the first place? Throughout this book I have resisted the option of seeking a be-all and end-all explanation in the actual writing down of Pindaric song. True, it seems at first an attractive solution to attribute the survival of occasional lyric poetry by Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides to {382|383} the factor of literacy. After all, Pindar and these two near-contemporaries come closest of all the nine canonical lyric poets to what we conceive as the historical period, where the continuous re-creation of knowledge through oral tradition was being replaced by the episodic recording of knowledge through writing. As the closest to the historical period, Pindar could be expected to be the poet whose compositions are most likely to have been affected by the medium of writing. Even in this instance, however, there is no evidence that writing was a factor in the actual composition of Pindaric song; I have already argued that writing need not be posited as an indispensable factor in at least the earlier phases of transmission. [4] If writing had been the sole original means of transmission for compositions by the likes of Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, why is it that while these “old lyric” poets ultimately became canonical, the later “new lyric” poets of the second half of the fifth century, in a period when literacy was becoming ever more pronounced, did not? Granted, there is no doubt that occasional “old lyric” would need to be recorded ultimately in writing if it were to survive, but there remains the more fundamental question: how did the occasional as well as nonoccasional compositions of “old lyric” actually become Panhellenic in prestige, and thereby canonical?

§3. As long as Pindar’s medium of song making depended on the prestige of public performance, we cannot assume that a written record could have maintained, of and by itself, such prestige. Rather we should be asking the question the other way around: what was it about the public prestige of Pindar’s lyric poetry, as it was once performed, that made it possible in the first place for a written record to evolve and to be preserved for later generations?

§4. This question takes us back to the problem inherent in the occasional nature of Pindar’s lyric poetry. It is to be expected that occasional poetry is the least likely kind of oral tradition to become a synthetic canonical tradition, in that the Panhellenization of Greek oral traditions in song and poetry entails the gradual elimination of features and details that would tie down a composition to any specific time and place. How, then, did the occasional compositions of Pindar survive?

§5. Part of the answer has to do with the realities of political power in the time of Pindar, which allowed occasional poetry and song to assert the interests of the individual, both patron and poet, in a grand Classical manner characteristic of the older kind of seasonally reperformed poetry and song serving the interests of the polis. [5] Another part of the answer, yet to be formulated, has to do with concepts of Classicism in the time after Pindar, especially at Athens, when the various distinctions between a poet like Pindar {383|384} and, say, a poet of the polis like Alcman were already becoming blurred. To appreciate these concepts, we have to consider at some length the role of the State Theater at Athens. In examining the traditions of Athenian Theater, it is crucial to keep in mind at all times that the medium of drama in general and tragedy in particular was the central context for the evolution of traditions in song and poetry at Athens.

§6. The primary setting of Athenian State Theater, and by extension of Athenian traditions in song and poetry, was a synthetic festival known as the City Dionysia (or Great Dionysia), the significance of which is captured in the following brief description: [6] From the text of Aristophanes Birds 786–789, we witness the central program of the City Dionysia in a given year, 414 B.C.: three days, each taken up with three tragedies, one satyric drama, and one comedy. [7]

§7. Athenian tradition has it that the Feast of the City Dionysia was the occasion for the “first” contest in tragedy, won by Thespis, at around 534 B.C., under the tyrant Peisistratos (Parian Marble FGH 239 A 43). [8] The institution of contests in comedy at the City Dionysia was formalized by the State at a much later date, around 486 B.C. [9] Athenian tradition also has it that satyric drama was established at the City Dionysia in order to compensate for the loss of Dionysiac elements in the development of tragedy (Chamaeleon F 38 Wehrli, On Thespis; Zenobius 5.40); the introduction of satyric drama at the City Dionysia is particularly associated with Pratinas of Phleious, a city close to Corinth, [10] who is said to have competed in Athens during the seventieth Olympiad, 499–496 B.C. (Suda s.v. Pratinas; Palatine Anthology 7.707).

§8. It can be argued that satyric drama amounts to a compensation for the elements lost by tragedy in a process whereby comedy became differentiated from tragedy in the context of the City Dionysia. [11] There are noteworthy {384|385} typological parallels, such as the Japanese Kyogen, farcical interludes performed between the serious Nō plays and preserving aspects of an earlier and less differentiated form, Sarugaku, from which the serious Nō evolved; [12] a similar point can be made about the English Court Masque and Antimasque. [13] This argument helps explain Aristotle’s derivation of tragedy from the satyric medium (saturikon, Poetics 1449a20–21). We could say that this satyric medium represents an undifferentiated form of tragedy/comedy; then comedy and the satyric drama become differentiated from tragedy, with comedy becoming detached from tragedy while the satyric drama stays attached as an ongoing compensation for the non-serious Dionysiac elements that tragedy gives up in its gradual evolution toward seriousness (cf. ἀπεσεμνύνθη, Poetics 1449a20–21). [14]

§9. In trying to envisage an undifferentiated form of tragedy/comedy, we may look for important reflexes in the functioning parts of attested comedy, most notably the two aspects of “entrance” known as parodos and parabasis and the central aspect of a major contest or agōn. [15] Other functioning parts of comedy that reveal features of undifferentiated drama include “the size of the chorus (twice that of tragedy), the persistence of their hostility from parodos to agōn, the antikhoria [= rival choral groups] implied by the epirrhematic structure of the agōn, [16] [and] the extant examples of antagonistic antikhoria.” [17]

§10. Given that the Theater of Dionysus at Athens is the primary context for the evolution of drama, specifically for the eventual differentiation of choral dramatic contests into the separate categories of tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, and satyr drama, we may look for references to such evolution within drama itself. The ritual essence of Greek drama as a choral performance that takes place at a seasonally recurring festival is highlighted by the Bacchae of Euripides, a tragedy performed some time shortly after the death of the poet in 406 B.C., which represents the actions concerning the god Dionysus and the hero Pentheus as a sort of protofestival, a primitive version of the Feast of the City Dionysia in Athens. [18] “If,” it has been argued, “the tradition that Thespis {385|386} produced a Pentheus as one of the earliest Greek dramas was current in Euripides’ time, the choice of subject of Dionysus’ introduction of a primitive drama into Thebes would be particularly appropriate.” [19]

§11. In Bacchae 714–716 and thereabouts, the herdsman is telling how he and his companions, boukoloi ‘cowherds’ and poimenes ‘shepherds’, had come together for a contest of words in describing the wondrous things being performed by the devotees of Bacchus. Concerning later traditions of dancing by boukoloi ‘cowherds’ in worship of Dionysus, it has been observed that such dances “may well have had their aition in such stories as the herdsman tells here.” [20] In other words the myth of Dionysus and Pentheus is referring to itself as the motivation or, to put it in Greek, the aition ‘cause’, of the ritual complex known as the Feast of the City Dionysia, as represented by the Bacchae. [21] Moreover, this aition, telling of boukoloi ‘cowherds’ and poimenes ‘shepherds’ who come together (Bacchae 714) to compete in describing the wonders of Bacchus, reenacts the very etymology of the crucial word agōn, apparently derived from the root ag- of agō as in sun-agō ‘bring together, assemble, gather’. [22] The notion of ‘assemble’, as we have seen, is intrinsic to the general sense of agōn, that is, ‘assembly’ (e.g., Pindar Pythian 10.30). [23] But the word can also specifically mean ‘contest’ (e.g., Pindar Olympian 9.90). Thus agōn conveys not only the social setting for an activity, namely, an assembly of people, but also the activity itself, namely, a contest. [24] Moreover, agōn can designate a festival of contests in poetry, as in Homeric Hymn 6.19–20. [25] The ritual aspect of these activities is suggested by attestations of the derivative word agōniā in the sense of ‘agony’ (e.g., Demosthenes On the Crown 33). A semantic parallel is the English usage of trial in the sense of ordeal, and we may also note that the cognate of English ordeal in German is Urteil, meaning ‘trial’. In the Bacchae of Euripides, Dionysus himself describes the upcoming ordeal of Pentheus, where he will be dismembered by the god’s devotees, as a great agōn (975). At the moment Pentheus may interpret agōn on the surface, in the mere sense of a “contest” with adversaries against whom he expects to win (cf. 964, 975), but the real winner will be Dionysus, while Pentheus will undergo an agōn in the deeper sense of the ultimate “agony” of an ultimate “ordeal” (again 964, 975). To that extent the {386|387} competition of the herdsmen who come together to tell of the wonders of Dionysus is the ordeal of Pentheus.

§12. The name of Pentheus is apt in this regard: it is derived from the noun penthos ‘sorrow, lamentation’ (as at Bacchae 1244), a word that expresses, in the diction of epic poetry, the actual expression or performance of lamentation in the form of song. [26] The noun penthos is in turn derived from the verb paskhō ‘suffer, experience’. Another derivative of paskhō is pathos ‘suffering, experience’, which is applied specifically, in the plural pathea, to the ultimate agony that awaits Pentheus (Bacchae 971). The theme of the pathos of Pentheus, as dramatized by the verb paskhō, pervades the Bacchae (786, 788), [27] and it should be compared with the context of pathos at Herodotus 5.67.5, describing the dancing by tragikoi khoroi ‘tragic choruses’, at Sikyon in the time of the tyrant Kleisthenes, in reenactment of the pathea ‘sufferings’ of the hero Adrastos. [28]

§13. The sufferings of Pentheus, as expressed by way of paskhō ‘suffer, experience’, can be juxtaposed with the activities of the god Dionysus: at that primordial festival conjured up by the Bacchae of Euripides as a préfiguration of the City Dionysia, these activities are described by cowherds and shepherds who have come together to compete in retelling the wondrous things performed by the devotees of the god (Bacchae 714–716). [29] In this context the performance of Dionysiac wonders is designated by the verb draō (716), which means ‘do, perform’ within the world of tragedy but also ‘sacrifice, perform ritual’ within the “real world,” the outer world that frames the world of tragedy. [30] There is a grammatical logic built into the antithesis of paskhō and draō: the verb paskhō in the sense of ‘experience things done to oneself’ is the functional passive of the verb draō, synonym of poieō in the sense of ‘do things to someone’. This antithesis of paskhō and draō, which is played out in other tragedies as well (e.g., Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 538–539, 1644), is also reflected in the nouns that are derived from these verbs: whereas the derivative of passive paskhō is pathos, the {387|388} derivative of active draō is drāma, which survives as the English word drama. What is pathos or action experienced by the hero within the world of tragedy is drāma, that is, sacrifice and the performance of ritual, from the standpoint of the outer world that frames it. This outer world is constituted by the audience of the theater, who become engaged in the drāma and who thereby participate in the inner world that is the pathos of the hero.

§14. It is symptomatic of structures that have lost their elasticity, becoming too rigid to accommodate further development, to intensify the semantics of self-reference as a sort of final act of self-reassurance. The patterns of self-reference by drama to drama as we see them in the Bacchae of Euripides reflect a crisis in the very genre of tragedy, in the context of drastic changes in Athenian society toward the end of the fifth century; the prospect is one of abrupt confrontation and loss. [31]

§15. This is not the place to search for a formula that accounts for all the differentiations of poetic forms evolving out of the vast and complex institution of the City Dionysia. Still, a general outline has emerged from what precedes. In brief the City Dionysia is the context for the eventual differentiation of choral dramatic contests into the separate categories of tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, and satyr drama. We must add that the earlier phase of differentiation is followed by a later phase of mutual assimilation. [32]

§16. Besides deriving the form of tragedy from the satyric medium (Poetics 1449a20–21), Aristotle derives the performers of tragedy from the exarkhontes ‘choral leaders’ of the dithurambos ‘dithyramb’ (1449a10–11). [33] This formulation is useful to the extent that the evolution of tragedy at Athens does become assimilated with the evolution of the dithyramb, an alternative Dionysiac form of Peloponnesian provenience. A key figure in this process of assimilation is Lasus of Hermione, whom tradition credits with the original institution of dithyrambic contests at the City Dionysia (Suda s.v. Lasos). [34] From Herodotus (7.6.3–4), we learn that Lasus was {388|389} associated with the dynasty of tyrants at Athens, the Peisistratidai. The definitive formalization, however, by the State, of contests in dithyrambs at the Feast of the City Dionysia can be dated at ca. 509/8 B.C., after the expulsion of the Peisistratidai (Parian Marble FGH 239 A 46). It seems reasonable to infer that this tradition “refers to the first victory at the Dionysia as organized under the democracy, and as distinct from such contests as may have been arranged by the tyrants with the assistance of Lasos.” [35] This is not to say that the stature of figures like Lasus did not survive the transition from the era of tyranny to that of democracy. In fact Lasus may well have been involved in the reformalization of the dithyramb in the era of democracy. Another such figure, compatible with both eras, is Simonides of Keos, rival of Lasus (Aristophanes Wasps 1410–1411), and a contemporary of Pindar. [36]

§17. The Peloponnesian provenience of the dithyramb is made explicit in Herodotus 1.23, where the kitharōidos ‘citharode’ Arion of Methymna in Lesbos is credited with being the first to institute choral performances of the dithyramb in the city of Corinth during the reign of the tyrant Periandros (cf. Suda s.v. Arion). [37] In Solon (F 30a W) this same Arion is credited with introducing the first performance of tragedy in Athens, in contrast with the alternative tradition that credits Thespis (again Parian Marble FGH 239 A 43; Suda s.v. Thespis). [38] The Solonian version seems older in that Arion is represented as an introducer of tragedy, as if it were not yet differentiated from dithyramb. Thespis in contrast represents the differentiated form of tragedy.

§18. The very name of tragedy, however, implies an earlier, undifferentiated phase of drama, compatible with the attested forms of tragedy, comedy, and satyr drama, all three. It appears that the form tragōidoi means ‘goat singers’ in the sense of ‘singers who compete for the prize of a sacrificial goat’. [39] This meaning is not incompatible with the conventional theme of associating rustic folk with the wearing of goatskin, if we assume that the goatskin worn in performance of song represents the prize won in a continuum of earlier performances, each with its own sacrifice of goats. A key passage illustrating this theme of rustics wearing goatskin is Theognis 53–58, where a crisis within the polis is being described: values are being turned {389|390} upside-down because the ‘base’ are now on the top of the social order while the ‘noble’ are at the bottom, and all this because the ‘base’ population, explicitly described as wearing goatskins (55), moved inside the city from the outside, where they had lived previously, aware of neither ‘justice’ (dikai) nor ‘customary laws’ (nomoi). This description is making an ethical point about social degeneration, [40] but its central image corresponds to an aetiology for an undifferentiated form of drama, functioning as a ritual inversion of social values. [41] We may note that the chorus of satyrs in the Cyclops, a satyr-drama of Euripides, are wearing goatskin (80). [42] The theme of formerly excluded rustic outsiders is suggestive of a fundamental aetiology of comedy: Aristotle pictures the primordial performers of comedy as wandering through the kōmai ‘countryside districts’, deprived of rights and honor within the polis (Poetics 1448a36-b1) [43] This aetiology accepts as a given that comedy, in the present, is a thing of the polis. [44] In contrast the very concept of satyr is a thing of the countryside (e.g., Horace Ars Poetica 236–247; agrestes satyros at 221). [45]

§19. The key transformation for the history of drama at Athens is the urbanization of the Feast of Dionysus by the tyrant Peisistratos, as we can observe most clearly from the contrast between the Anthesteria, the oldest of the festivals of Dionysus at Athens (Thucydides 2.15.4 calls it the ἀρχαιότερα Διονύσια ‘older Dionysia’), [46] and the City Dionysia (Thucydides 5.20: Διονύσια τὰ ἀστικά), which took shape under the rule of the Peisistratidai. [47] {390|391} Whereas satyrs were apparently a traditional feature of the Anthesteria, [48] the satyric element was reduced to a subordinated attachment of tragedy in the City Dionysia.

§20. A central point, then, can be made about all the dramatic competitions originating in the context of the City Dionysia: the differentiations into the distinct forms of tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, and satyric drama must have started in the era of the tyrants, the Peisistratidai, who played a major role in the shaping of the City Dionysia. [49] The dynasty of the Peisistratidai also played a major role in the shaping of the Panathenaia, the context for performance of epic (scholia to Aristides Panathenaicus 3.123; “Plato” Hipparchus 228b). [50] The close association of the Peisistratidai of Athens with the City Dionysia, context for performance of drama, and with the Panathenaia, context for performance of epic, is analogous to the association of the tyrant Kleisthenes of Sikyon with innovations in the performance of both epic (Herodotus 5.67.1) [51] and drama (5.67.5). [52] In sum, I stress the role of the tyrants in the shaping of urbanized festivals of Panhellenic repute, which provided the actual context for the differentiation of major poetic genres, attracting masters of song from all over the Hellenic world. Moreover, even after the democracy replaced the tyrants in Athens, the leading citizens of the democracy, aristocrats that they were, continued to play a major role in the shaping of the dramatic festivals: thus, for example, the man who financed in 472 B.C. the production of a dramatic trilogy of Aeschylus that included the Persians, celebrating the great naval victory at Salamis in 480 B.C., was none other than Pericles of Athens, [53] serving in the official capacity of khorēgos ‘chorus leader’ (IG II² 2318 i.4). [54] We may note in this connection the report that Hieron, Tyrant of Syracuse, commissioned Aeschylus to train a chorus for a reperformance of the Persians when Aeschylus was summoned to his realm in Sicily (Life of Aeschylus, p. 333.24–25). [55]

§21. This survey of the Athenian heritage in song making, as shaped by the City Dionysia, can serve as a foundation for the task at hand, which is to define Athenian notions of the Classical forms of song and to correlate these notions with the survival of Pindaric song. It is best to start with a reconsideration of the fundamental nature of Pindar’s song-making tradition, and {391|392} how it may be related to the form of drama at a stage preceding the differentiations that took place in the context of the City Dionysia. An ideal point of comparison is Archilochus, who represents an undifferentiated tradition that is not only cognate with the differentiated and more specialized tradition of Pindar but also parallels in some striking ways the undifferentiated stages of Athenian drama.

§22. We may begin to explore the undifferentiated nature of Archilochean tradition by considering two instances of fable telling in the poetry of Archilochus, where the fable refers to itself as ainos (F 174 and 185 W). This same word is used in the epinician lyric poetry of Pindar and Bacchylides in referring to the function of this medium. [56] What then does fable telling have in common with epinician lyric poetry? We find a clue in the fables of Aesop, as dramatized in the Life of Aesop tradition. The Life represents various contexts in which the fables of Aesop, traditionally recognized as ainoi, are being told to various audiences. In these contexts we see that the social function of the Aesopic ainos is either praise or blame. [57]

§23. Thus one form, the ainos, has two potential social functions, praise or blame, as attested in the praise of epinician and the blame of Archilochean poetics. These two functions of praise and blame are an inherited feature of Archaic Greek poetry and song, as we see from the evidence collected by Marcel Detienne. [58] Among other sources Detienne cites Plutarch’s Lycurgus (8.2, 21.1, 25.2; also 14.3, 26.3), where the essence of social regulation in Sparta is described as a matter of counterbalancing praise and blame, primarily through poetry and song. There is much to be said about the way in which these functions of praise and blame are described by poetry or song in general. [59] Also we have seen that there is a heritage of one form for both. [60] Perhaps the clearest testimony about the two-sidedness of the ainos is in Homeric poetry. The poet is represented as respectively praising and blaming what is right and wrong; in this capacity he is the watchdog of ritual and ethical correctness, as we see in the example of the poet whom Agamemnon had left behind to watch over Clytemnestra (Odyssey iii 267–271). [61] {392|393}

§24. But Pindaric song, and Archilochean poetry as represented by Pindar’s tradition, reveal specialization. Pindaric song tends to praise more than blame. [62] Archilochus in contrast has at first blush the reputation of blaming only. This is the impression that we get from, say, the ainos in Archilochus F 174 W: this fable about the fox and the eagle is apparently being narrated within a poem of blame against Lykambes. [63] Our impression is reinforced by Horace: Archilochus is seen one-sidedly as a composer of diatribes against the family of Lykambes (e.g., Epodes 6.11–13; Epistles 1.19.23–25, 28–31). There is further reinforcement from one of the two direct references to Archilochus in Pindar Pythian 2.52–56, where Archilochus is described as the exponent of blame and therefore the enemy of praise. [64]

§25. Yet, in the other Pindaric passage, Olympian 9.1–5, Archilochus is presented not only as a poet of praise but even as the primordial poet of praise. [65] He is being represented as a protopoet of epinician lyric poetry, as if he were some primitive forerunner of Pindar himself. Moreover, as a protolaudator of the Olympics, Archilochus has as his proto-laudandus none other than a hero who figures as a founder of the Olympics, Herakles (the testimonia are collected in Archilochus F 324 W; the clearest account is in the scholia to Aristophanes Birds 1762). [66]

§26. The tradition behind Olympian 9.1–4 stresses that Archilochus has no musical instrument (again I refer to the testimonia collected in Archilochus F 324 W, especially the scholia to Aristophanes Birds 1762). By implication then this primordial mode of epinician composition is not lyric in the strict sense. Such a characterization corresponds to the formal status of Archilochus’ poetry, which is composed in meters that are asynartetic, that is, roughly half-way between strophic and stichic. [67] {393|394}

§27. To be more precise about the metrical form of Archilochean poetry: Bruno Snell, in the metrical appendix to his edition of Pindar, offers the view that asynartetic meters of Archilochus are a metrical prototype of one of the two major metrical systems, which are both synartetic, used by Pindar (and Bacchylides), namely, the so-called dactylo-epitrite meters. [68] According to this view the nonlyric asynartetic meters that characterize Archilochus developed into lyric synartetic meters that characterize, say, Pindar. We have, however, already had reason to formulate the progression differently: the nonlyric asynartetic meters are in fact derived from the lyric asynartetic, while there is another line of progression from lyric asynartetic to lyric synartetic. [69]

§28. Still we must account for the fact that Archilochean poetry refers to itself as a lyric medium: the persona of Archilochus describes himself as capable of being an exarkhōn ‘choral leader’ (F 120 and 121 W), that is, the leader of a chorus, a group of singers/dancers; in this description, he is accompanied by the aulos (F 121 W). Such self-reference seems to be an example of what I have called diachronic skewing, that is, where the medium refers to itself in terms of earlier stages of its own existence. [70] As I have argued, the medium of Archilochus was originally undifferentiated lyric, that is, sung and danced, and it developed eventually into differentiated nonlyric recitative in a complex and lengthy process of Panhellenization. [71] It appears that Pindar’s medium, which remains lyric all along, takes note of the eventual nonlyric medium of Archilochus aetiologically, by implying a nonlyric origin for epinician (Olympian 9.1–5). [72]

§29. More pertinent and important for us at this point, Pindar’s medium also takes note of an aspect of the original function of Archilochean poetry that seems to have eluded Aristotle: the poetic tradition of Archilochus is suitable for epinician praise. Pindar’s Olympian 9 is asserting that Archilochus is a protopoet of praise. We see here what amounts to the other side of the coin, matching the testimony of Aristotle Poetics 1449a and 1448b23, who evidently considered Archilochus exclusively as a protopoet of blame.

§30. In the Poetics 1449a9ff, Aristotle says that both tragedy and comedy had a beginning that is autoskhediastikē ‘improvisational’ (ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς αὐτοσχεδιαστικῆς), [73] and that tragedy was derived from the exarkhontes ‘choral {394|395} leaders’ of the dithurambos ‘dithyramb’ (ἀπὸ τῶν ἐξαρχόντων τὸν διθύραμβον). [74] Aristotle may have had Archilochus’ passage in mind. [75] In Archilochus F 120 W, the persona of the composer declares that he knows how to be the exarkhōn ‘choral leader’ of the dithyramb, while his mind is thunderstruck with wine. [76] Else remarks: “Archilochus’ impromptu, drunken dithyramb is closer than any other dithyramb we know of to being autoskhediastikē [improvisational].” [77] Else notes that Archilochus’ meter in F 120 W is indeed trochaic tetrameter catalectic. [78] According to Aristotle the meter of dialogue in early tragedy, before it was replaced by iambic trimeter, was trochaic tetrameter catalectic (Poetics 1449a22ff). In short what Aristotle says about the evolution of comedy and tragedy implies that he thought that Archilochus was a typical exarkhōn of dithyramb, which he understood as characterized by trochaic tetrameter catalectic, typical of both comedy and tragedy.

§31. What Aristotle might not have seen is that the “blaming” side of Archilochus was part of this poet’s overall function as a socially redeeming exponent of ainos, one who blames what is ostensibly bad while he praises what is good. This socially redeeming function is a traditional civic function, viewed as integrating the community.

§32. From the testimony of the Mnesiepes Inscription (Archilochus T 4 Tarditi), [79] we learn of a traditional myth, native to the island of Paros, that represented Archilochus as a chorus teacher of his community (T4 III 16–57). I propose to consider in some detail how this myth, preserved in the context of the poet’s hero cult in Paros, dramatizes the social function of Archilochean poetry in the civic life of the polis.

§33. In the wording of the Mnesiepes Inscription, it can be argued, we are witnessing a cognate of the source of Aristotle Poetics 1449a and 1448b23, who considered Archilochus an exponent of primitive blame poetry. Let us examine the pertinent passage from the Mnesiepes Inscription, Archilochus T4 III 16–57 Tarditi. [80] The story has it that Archilochus improvises ([αὐτο]| σχεδιασ[ 19–20) a composition, which he teaches (διδάξαντα 22) to some of the citizens of Paros. [81] From the standpoint of the narrative, {395|396} Archilochus seems to be represented here as a “chorus teacher.” [82] The Mnesiepes Inscription then proceeds to quote the words of the composition (F 251 W = 219 Tarditi): the text is fragmentary, but we can see clearly that Dionysus figures prominently (251.1), in the context of the epithet Oipholios (251.5), a derivative of the obscene verb oiphō ‘have intercourse [male subject]’. The polis finds this composition ‘too iambic’ (ἰαμβικώτερο[ Mnesiepes Inscription T4 III 38). [83] Archilochus is put on trial (ἐν τεῖ κρίσει T4 III 42) and apparently condemned. But then the polis is afflicted with a plague that affects the genitalia (42–44). Emissaries of the polis consult Delphi (45–46), and the Oracle tells them that the plague will not abate until the polis honors Archilochus (47–50). The connection here of Archilochus with Dionysus and the notion of Oipholios institutionalizes the ‘iambic’ composition of Archilochus. I should stress the explicit testimony of the Mnesiepes Inscription concerning the practice of worshipping various gods, along with the cult hero Archilochus, in the sacred precinct of Archilochus, the Arkhilokheion (T 4 II 14–19 Tarditi): among the gods listed (1–13), Dionysus is accorded a position of particular prominence (10).

§34. The narrative pattern of the story of Archilochus and the punishment of the Parians is typical of aetiologies concerning the founding of a hero cult: (1) some hero is dishonored, sometimes even killed, by a community; (2) the community is then beset by some plague; and (3) the Oracle is consulted and prescribes the hero cult of the given hero as the remedy. [84] In such aetiologies the well-being of the community, as threatened by the plague, is visualized as fertility of crops and inhabitants alike—a fertility that is then restored and guaranteed to continue through the proper maintenance of the hero cult. [85] In the Archilochus story as well, the fertility of the polis is connected in general with the hero cult of Archilochus, which is after all the context for the telling of the story, and in particular with the institutionalization of Archilochus as {396|397} ‘chorus teacher’. Here we have the nucleus of the civic function of Archilochean poetry in that the chorus is the traditional medium for the self-expression of the polis. [86]

§35. The theme of fertility is explicit in the story of Archilochus in his stylized role as chorus teacher, which is connected with the cult of Dionysus (cf. T 4 II 10 Tarditi and F 251 W; also F 120 W). The same theme of fertility is implicit in the connection of Archilochus with the cult of Demeter, in his stylized role as a participant in the panēguris ‘festival’ of the goddess and her daughter, Korē (F 322 W). [87] The given festival is that of the Iobakkhoi; the name expresses the complementarity, in terms of the festival, of Demeter with Bacchus, that is, Dionysus (Hephaestion Encheiridion 15.16). [88] Moreover, the fertility of the polis is connected with the ‘iambic’ nature of what Archilochus teaches to the community (again Archilochus T 4 II 38 Tarditi). [89] We are reminded that the notion of iambic is associated with the cults of both Dionysus and Demeter. [90] Moreover, according to Aristotle Poetics 1449b8, the notion of iambic is inherited by the synthetic genre of Athenian comedy.

§36. The ‘iambic’ nature of comedy, and Aristotle’s claims about the evolution of tragedy from the medium of exarkhontes ‘chorus leaders’ ostensibly like Archilochus, whose message was too ‘iambic’ for the people of his own time, reinforce the general notion that comedy and tragedy were once undifferentiated, becoming distinct in the specific context of the City Dionysia. Which brings us to the aition that motivates the City Dionysia, closely parallel to the aition that motivates Archilochean poetry. According to Athenian tradition the Feast of the City Dionysia was instituted in honor of Dionysus Eleuthereus, whose image had been brought over from Eleutherai in Boeotia to the theater precinct of Athens; there the god was not given his due honors, and the men of Athens were accordingly punished with some sexual affliction, from which they were freed only on the condition that they make ritual phalloi for Dionysus (scholia to Aristophanes Acharnians 243). Just as the Archilochean ‘iambic’ tradition participates in a symbiotic relationship with a cult of Dionysus, so does the undifferentiated tradition represented by the entire complex of dramatic contests at the City Dionysia.

§37. This notion of iambic, with its emphasis on fertility, is analogous to the concept of carnival as applied by M. M. Bakhtin to the traditions inherited by {397|398} François Rabelais in the sixteenth century. [91] For Bakhtin, carnival is a synthetic description that accommodates a wide range of actually attested European carnivals celebrated on a seasonally recurring basis at various times of the year at various places. The synthetic description is particularly apt in view of the synthetic nature of carnivals: “This word combined in a single concept a number of local feasts of different origin and scheduled at different dates but bearing the common traits of popular merriment.” [92] It is not inaccurate to say that the very concept of carnival is a synthesis: “These celebrations became a reservoir into which obsolete genres were emptied.” [93] For Bakhtin, carnival is not a safety valve that helps prevent revolution, as was held to be political dogma at the time that his work on Rabelais was taking shape; rather carnival is revolution itself. [94] Its target is whatever happens to be current, the here and now, the differentiated, and it professes nostalgia for the past, the Golden Age, the undifferentiated. The very themes of carnival recapitulate the undifferentiated structures of the past and temporarily overthrow the differentiated structures of the present. [95] The feast of Saturnalia yearns for the ancien régime of Saturn and resists whatever régime is current. [96] Bakhtin argues that carnival attacks the differentiated present by {398|399} recapitulating the undifferentiated past, with an emphasis on the grotesque, and thus celebrating the renewal of fertility. [97] To this extent I find the notion of carnival useful for the present purposes. Carnival, however, cannot be viewed as independent of the society that frames it. It is not apolitical but just the opposite: a highly political and politicized celebration of the community as a whole. With this proviso in mind, we may return to the subject of the iambic tradition: like the carnival, it attacks whatever happens to be current, the here and now, while all along celebrating the theme of fertility.

§38. The theme of fertility in the story of Archilochus and the punishment of the Parians is pertinent to the implicit relationship between him and Hera. To make this point, I begin with the so-called Cologne Epode of Archilochus (F 196A W), where boy meets girl and boy seduces girl in a beautiful setting, a locus amoenus. There are suggestive points of comparison to be found in the Provençal genre of the pastorela and its Old French equivalent, the pastourelle, [98] In connection with the typical setting of the pastourelle, that is, a locus amoenus of a garden or of the countryside, I draw attention to scraps of evidence, some dating to as early as the eighth century A.D., for countryside rituals that dramatize themes that are analogous to some of the central themes found in the pastourelle, in the form of dances miming chthonic powers of fertility. [99] I would compare the locus amoenus of the Cologne Epode of Archilochus: the setting for the seduction described in this composition is a garden that happens to be a sacred precinct of Hera (Dioscorides Palatine Anthology 7.351), [100] who is the goddess of seasonality, equilibrium, and completion in both nature and society (puberty, marriage, and so on). [101] Yet the Epode is preoccupied with the themes of unseasonality, disequilibrium, and incompleteness. For example, one girl is presented as sexually unripe, and the other, as overripe; also the sex act, with the unripe girl as participant, {399|400} is itself incomplete. I suggest that the unseasonality dramatized within the precinct of Hera serves to define the seasonality that is encompassed by the potency of Hera, just as the unseasonality of the hero Herakles, caused by Hera, serves to define the goddess’s power of seasonality: the disequilibrium of the hero leads to his famed Labors, earning him the name Hēra-kleēs ‘he who has the glory [kleos] of Hera’. [102] Thus a sacred framework, the precinct of Hera, encompasses the deviant behavior within the narrative; likewise there is a proper ideology, presumably integrated into rituals sacred to Hera, that encompasses the improper self-characterization of Archilochus. In this connection I draw attention to certain similarities between Archilochus and what folklorists describe as trickster figures: [103] within the narrative the trickster consistently deviates from the norms of society, but outside the narrative and within the society that serves as context for the narrative, the trickster figure’s pattern of deviation from social norms reaffirms the pattern of these norms. [104]

§39. In the case of Archilochus, the ‘iambic’ function is manifested in his dramatized alienation from his own here and now. This fact of alienation can be accepted as part of the undifferentiated past by the community that embraces Archilochus as the present guarantor of its fertility. In the case of comedy, especially the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, there is an analogous stance of dramatized alienation from everything that happens to be current. That includes the conventions in the craft of poetry and song as it was current in the time of Aristophanes.

§40. The criticism of current poetry and song in Aristophanes operates on a solid foundation: a thorough education in the Classics of poetry is presupposed, as we can see from the parodic references to such canonical masters as Alcman (Lysistrata 1248–1320), Stesichorus (Peace 796–816), and Anacreon (Birds 1373–1374). [105] But the critical area for criticizing what is current in terms of the Classical is the theater itself, the medium par excellence for the composition and performance of poetry and song in the time of Aristophanes. The theater, as it developed within the City Dionysia, had absorbed the repertoire of epic, as we can readily see from such individual tragedies as the Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus and more generally from the overwhelmingly epic themes of most of the tragedies composed by Aeschylus and other early dramatists who followed in his wake. [106] As with epic, so also with lyric: the evolving predominance of Athenian theater as the primary poetic medium played a major role in the obsolescence of lyric poetry in other media and, by extension, in other genres. We have already had {400|401} occasion to note the complaints about theatrokratiā in Plato’s writings (Laws 701a) and about the intoxication of pleasure in the poetry of theater (700d), leading to ‘transgressions’ of genre (700e). [107] To be contrasted are the good old days, as in the earlier era that followed the Persian Wars (Laws 698b), when there were still distinct genres (700a), five of which are specified as examples: humnos ‘hymn’, thrēnos ‘lament’, paiān ‘paean’, dithurambos ‘dithyramb’, and kitharōidikos nomos ‘citharodic nome’ (700b). [108] These genres, as well as other genres left unspecified (ibid.), are the structurally distinct aspects of lyric poetry, parallel to the structurally distinct aspects of aristokratiā in Plato’s good old Athenian society (701a). In contrast, as we have seen, the progressive leveling by Athenian theater of generic distinctions in lyric poetry is for Plato parallel to the leveling by Athenian democracy of class distinctions in society. [109] Precisely such generic distinctions characterize the lyric poetry of Pindar, composer of such genres as the humnos, the thrēnos, the paiān, the dithurambos, and so on. [110]

§41. Given that the Theater of Dionysus at Athens is the predominant context of poetry as current poetry, it follows that contemporary comedy singles out the current poetics of the theater as the main target of its criticism of poetry. Specifically the current comedy of theater attacks the poetics of current tragedy. One of the clearest examples is the great agōn ‘contest’ between Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, as dramatized by Aristophanes in the Frogs (905–1098). [111] That tragedy is the tekhnē ‘craft’ of poetry par excellence—and this concept recurs frequently— [112] is the one given that is held in respect by both sides in the contest. [113] What is at issue is the superiority or inferiority of the old and current ways of practicing that craft, as represented by Aeschylus and Euripides respectively: The old-fashioned Aeschylus wins over the innovative Euripides in the judgment of the god Dionysus himself (1467 and following), who is after all the raison d’être of the City Dionysia.

§42. In short the fundamental reason for the loss of Euripides to Aeschylus in the Frogs, and in general for his being singled out as a special target for the comedy of Aristophanes, is that his poetics are current. The definitive statement on what is current in the poetics of tragedy is treated as a foil by the poetics of comedy. Thus Euripides cannot even be a runner-up to Aeschylus: that honor is reserved for Sophocles (Aristophanes Frogs 787–794, 1515–1519). That it is Aeschylus who wins the contest in the Frogs, thus winning the chance to be brought back to the contemporary world of the living by the god of theater himself, is the wish fulfillment of a nostalgia for the undifferentiated Dionysiac essence of Drama.

§43. The contest of Aeschylus and Euripides in Frogs 905–1098 takes the form of an agōn, and this word is actually used in self-references at lines 785, 867, 873, and 882. The very format of the agōn is indicative of an undifferentiated phase of drama as it must have existed before the differentiation of the City Dionysia. It has been argued that the functional part of comedy known as the agōn resulted from an undifferentiated choral agōn consisting of two antagonistic antikhoria, “each combining the aggressive entrance of the parodos with the primitive features of the parabasis: self-presentation and self-praise, invocation and invective, ‘literary’ polemics.” [115] Ironically, however, the very notion of agōn as ‘contest’ is the basis for the ongoing differentiation of poetics in the theater. The agōn of a poetic contest requires a judgment, the word for which is krisis, and the two words actually occur together at Frogs 785 (krisis and its verb krīnō also at 779, 805, 873, 1467, 1473).

§44. At an earlier stage we had observed that the Alexandrian concept of krisis, in the sense of separating, discriminating, judging (verb krīnō) those works and those authors that are to be preserved and those that are not, is crucial to the concept of canon in the Classical world. [116] The Alexandrian scholars who were in charge of this process of separation, discrimination, judgment, were the kritikoi ‘critics’, while the Classical authors who were meant to survive the krisis were called the enkrithentes. [117] We also observed that the krisis of the enkrithentes starts not with the Alexandrian scholars, nor even with the likes of Aristotle: the crisis of this krisis is already under way in the Archaic and Classical periods of Greece, where songs and poetry were traditionally performed in a context of competition. The premier example of {402|403} such competition is the tradition of dramatic festivals at Athens, with the krisis ‘judgment’ of winners by kritai ‘judges’. [118] What we see in the agōn of the Frogs of Aristophanes is a dramatization of that competition between drama and drama, and this time the competition is happening within drama. This way the ontogeny of drama is recapitulating its own phylogeny as a competitive medium, an agōn calling for the krisis of selection.

§45. The craft of theater is one of continual crisis, of innovation. Even the older features of the craft, perceived by Comedy as old-fashioned, reveal earlier stages of poetic innovation in the theater. The stage-Aeschylus may be ridiculed by the stage-Euripides for his old-fashioned and monotonous lyric rhythms, as parodied by the lyre-strumming onomatopoeia tophlattothrat tophlattothrat (Frogs 1286, 1288, 1290, 1292, 1294), and yet the form of these rhythms, from an earlier perspective, represents an innovative appropriation, by the poetics of theater, of the distinct genre of the kitharōidikos nomos ‘citharodic nome’. The stage-Euripides says that these old-fashioned Aeschylean rhythms are taken from kitharōidikoi nomoi ‘citharodic nomes’ (Frogs 1282). It is precisely the appropriation and hence domination of such genres by the poetics of theater that led Plato to condemn the poetic innovations of the theater as a degeneration of genres: for Plato, the usurpation of the kitharōidikos nomos (Laws 700b) by theater is an example of theatrokratiā (701a). Thus the Aeschylean use of the kitharōidikos nomos may be old-fashioned synchronically, but it is an innovation diachronically. It represents an earlier stage of the same sort of innovations practiced by Euripides, who is accused by the stage-Aeschylus of freely appropriating to drama such nondramatic forms as skolia and thrēnoi (Frogs 1301–1303). Such theatrokratiā, it seems, goes back to the early days of the City Dionysia, and there is no reason not to take it all the way back to the era of the Peisistratidai, tyrants of Athens. In sum the Theater of Dionysus at Athens, with its theatrocracy of genres, has been appropriating and assimilating, ever since its inception, the traditions of song making that we can still see as independent and unassimilated forms in the repertoire of a figure like Pindar.

§46. Ironically this innovative process of appropriation and assimilation induces a sense of nostalgia, as articulated by Old Comedy, for the older phases of song making. In Aristophanes’ Wasps, for example, the old Philokleon is described as spending all night singing and dancing the choral parts of old-fashioned tragedies that Thespis himself had once upon a time composed when he had entered the competition or agōn (ἠγωνίζετο 1479). Turning time upside down, the old man claims that his choral singing and dancing can make contemporary tragōidoi ‘players of tragedy’ seem old-fashioned by comparison, as if the modem were ancient, and the ancient, {403|404} modern (1480); in this context the notion of old-fashioned is described as kronoi, that is, ‘Kronos’ in the plural (κρόνους 1480). The era of Thespis is the era of the Peisistratidai, the dynasty of tyrants that founded the City Dionysia. That the notion of old-fashioned tragōidoi should be represented as the incarnation of Kronos shows that the ideological attitude toward the old tyranny on the part of the newer democracy combines feelings of revulsion and nostalgia. Shaped by the tyrants, the institution of Athenian Theater as later reshaped by democracy teaches against the internal threat of tyranny. [119] So much for the aspect of revulsion. It is true that Kronos, with his horrors of violence and guile, is a suitable negative model for the state’s older phase of existence, under the reign of the tyrants. But Kronos is also a figure of nostalgia, as ruler of the Golden Age. Thus the comic description of primordial players of tragedy as the incarnation of Kronos amounts to an Athenian version of nostalgia for the Golden Age of the Saturnalia. [120]

§47. Such nostalgia for the old forms of poetry and song, which reaches the level of ideology in the Old Comedy of Athenian Theater, helps explain the survival of Pindar’s compositions as Classical examples of independent and unassimilated traditions in song making.

§48. These considerations bring us back to my argument that the very evolution of what we know as the Classics—as both a concept and a reality—was but an extension of the organic Panhellenization of oral traditions. The evolution of ancient Greek canons in both poetry and song need not be attributed primarily to the factor of writing. [121] Writing would have been essential for the ultimate preservation of these canons once the traditions of performance were becoming obsolete, but the key to the actual evolution of canons must be sought in the social context of performance itself. I argue that the performance traditions of the Classics, as an extension of the Panhellenization of oral traditions in poetry and song, were preserved in the social context of private education for the élite, including the institution of private schools.

§49. For the Greek city-states, the primary mode of education was public, through the performance of song and poetry at festivals. In the case of poetry, performance at festivals tended to be left to professionals such as the rhapsodes at the festival of the Panathenaia at Athens. [122] In the case of song, the situation was more complex, as we have seen in the case of a festival like {404|405} the City Dionysia at Athens, where poetry was performed by professional actors while song was performed by the nonprofessional chorus. [123] Here the performance by the chorus was a central form of civic education, not only for the audience at large but also for the members of the chorus. The numbers of chorus members selected each year for the annual production of the City Dionysia convey the pervasiveness of the institution: for example, the three competing choruses of the tragedies required a total of not less than thirty-six new chorus members each year, while the ten competing choruses of the dithyrambs, with separate men’s and boys’ divisions, added up to a yearly total of 500 men and 500 boys. [124] Wherever the traditions of making song and poetry are still alive, as in the documented cases of the City Dionysia and the Panathenaia, [125] we have reason to think that the process of civic education through song and poetry is also alive. But we have also seen that the traditions of public education in song making and poetry at the City Dionysia tended to absorb or displace older traditions of aristocratic education in song making and poetry, such as those represented by Pindar. [126] Here we see a fundamental impetus for the very institution of private schools: if aristocratic education in the public performance of songs was becoming less and less available by way of the chorus, since the State was transforming the old aristocratic poetics into the new popular poetics of the City Dionysia, then the older ways of choral education in the older traditions of song making had to be compensated by way of increased private schooling for the élite. Once State Theater, the creation of tyrants, becomes transformed into the democratic self-expression of the polis, the concept of the private school can become the nondemocratic self-expression of aristocrats, the new breeding ground of tyrants.

§50. Even private schools, however, serve as a setting for changes in the old traditions of song making. In the older poetics we would naturally expect the traditions of composition in performance to survive from one generation to the next through the factor of performance. Yet if the traditions of composition in performance were breaking down, then the need for sample performances would become greater and greater. Which means that education itself would become gradually transformed: the learning of techniques in composition through performance could shift to the learning of sample compositions through reading. Once the performance tradition becomes obsolete, the text is no longer a demonstration of ability to perform, rather the text {405|406} becomes simply a sample piece of writing, potentially there to be imitated by other sample pieces of writing.

§51. Still the written text can present itself as not just a sample composition but a sample composition as potential performance. It is a privately teachable demonstration of what could be publicly performed, and its accessibility depends on power, political power. To gain access to such a sample composition is to gain knowledge, from a privileged vantage point. The composition, as a mimesis of recomposition in public performance, is a paradigm of authority that is as hard to come by as some treasure in a treasure box, accessible to the rich and powerful. [127] The silent reading of such a sample composition, such a script, is symptomatic of the tyrant’s power to control the performance of a composition. [128] The reading out loud of such a script, in contrast, is the metaphor for performance, and in fact the very act of reading out loud is the ultimate metaphor of State Theater. [129]

§52. In order to illustrate the effects of private education on the transmission of the Classics, I now turn to two passages in particular, one from the Clouds of Aristophanes and another from the Protagoras of Plato. Let us begin with the Clouds of Aristophanes, with its informative description of old-fashioned Athenian paideiā ‘education’ (τὴν ἀρχαίαν παιδείαν: 961), the kind that purportedly produced the men who fought at the Battle of Marathon (985–986), [130] where boys learn selected compositions of old lyric masters [131] in the house of the kitharistēs ‘master of the kitharis’ (964), who teaches them to learn by heart (promathein: 966) the performance of famous lyric compositions (967) and who insists on their adherence to performing these compositions in the proper harmoniā ‘mode’ that had been ‘inherited from their fathers’ (968; cf. 969–972). [132] This precious glimpse of old-fashioned paideiā ‘education’ in Athens provides us with a model for understanding the gradual metamorphosis of oral traditions into the institutions of private schooling in the “Classics.” [133] The oral traditions of the boys’ chorus are giving way to the written traditions of the boys’ school. Further, if the chorus becomes dispensable in a school for performing choral lyric, then the idea of the chorus as the primary medium of education will also have become dispensable. In which case, it is only a matter of time before the performance itself of choral lyric becomes dispensable. With the passage of time, the {406|407} performance of choral lyric need no longer be the primary curriculum of boys’ schools. Thus the progression from an old-fashioned education in the chorus toward an innovative education in the school inexorably leads to still newer patterns of education in a school that may no longer have anything to do with the chorus. The differentiated new concept of “schools” becomes further differentiated into “old schools,” which had taught the performance of choral lyric, and “new schools,” with a curriculum emancipated from the medium of chorus altogether. By the time of the late fifth century, in a rapidly changing polis like Athens, schools were in fact becoming divorced from the traditions of performance in choral lyric. A prime example is the school of Socrates and his disciples, as ridiculed in the Clouds of Aristophanes. [134]

§53. With the increasing complexity of society in the context of the polis comes a pattern of differentiation in the passing on of traditions from generation to generation, and the institution of private schools, as we have just seen described in the Aristophanic passage about the good old days of paideiā ‘education’ in the era of the Battle of Marathon, may be considered an early reflex of this pattern. Already in this era, schools are not a phenomenon merely confined to Athens but seem to appear throughout Archaic Greece. The earliest attested mention of schools is in Herodotus 6.27.2, alluding to an incident that occurred in Chios around 496 B.C., where a roof collapsed on a group of 120 children as they were being taught grammata ‘letters’; only one boy survived. [135] This disaster is explicitly cited by Herodotus as an omen presaging the overall political disaster that was about to befall the whole community of Chios in the wake of the Ionian Revolt against the Persians (6.27.1), namely, the attack by Histiaios (6.26.1–2) and then the atrocities resulting from the occupation of the island by the Persians (6.31–32). Moreover, the disaster that befell the school at Chios is explicitly coupled by the narrative of Herodotus with another disaster, likewise presaging the overall political disaster about to befall Chios: at about the same time that the roof fell in on the children studying their grammata ‘letters’ in school (again 6.27.2), a choral ensemble of one hundred young men from Chios, officially sent to Delphi for a performance at a festival there, fell victim to a plague that killed ninety-eight of them, so that only two returned alive to Chios (ibid.). We have already noted that the oral traditions of the chorus, throughout Archaic Greece, were giving way to the written traditions of the school. In this narrative of Herodotus, then, we see two symmetrical disasters befalling the song-making traditions of a community, presaging a general political disaster befalling the community as a whole: first to be mentioned are the old-fashioned and élitist oral traditions of the chorus, to be followed {407|408} by the newer and even more élitist written traditions of the school. [136]

§54. That the grammata ‘letters’ that are being taught to these select children of Chios as the roof caves in on them are the belles-lettres or liberal education of song and poetry is made clear if we compare the portrait of old-fashioned education in the Protagoras of Plato. Here again, however, as in the Clouds of Aristophanes, this kind of education is in fact considered no longer new but already old-fashioned. In the Protagoras, with its dramatization of the way things supposedly were in the second half of the fifth century, we can see how schooling is a matter of differentiations in the passing on of traditions from generation to generation. The subject is introduced as we find an old Protagoras debating with Socrates in a company of young Athenian intellectuals that pointedly includes two sons of Pericles himself (314e). In his description of paideiā, the figure of Protagoras specifically says that the wealthy can afford more of it: they extend the education of their children by starting it earlier and continuing it longer (326c). [137] There are at least three stages to what Protagoras describes. First, there is a period of education at home, where father, mother, trophos ‘nurse’, and paidagōgos ‘tutor’ all play a role in one’s early ethical formation (325cd). Second, the child is sent to school, where he is taught letters for the explicit purpose of memorizing poetry (325e–326a); that this memorization is for the explicit purpose of performing and interpreting this poetry is made clear in Protagoras’ description of the third stage of schooling, where the child is taught to sing compositions of lyric poets while accompanying himself to the lyre (326ab). [138] Whereas the poetry that is taught in the earlier stage when the child is still learning his letters is described only generally as diexodoi ‘descriptions’, epainoi ‘praises’, and enkōmia ‘encomia’ concerning ‘noble men of the past’ (326a), it is clear that the poetry taught at the later stage is specifically lyric poetry (the compositions of melopoioi ‘lyric poets’: ibid.). From the standpoint of Protagoras, the most important aspect of paideiā (his word) is to acquire skill in the performance and interpretation of poetry (339a), and it is clear that he is thinking in particular of song, that is, lyric poetry: illustrating his point about the primacy of poetry in education, he begins his debate with {408|409} Socrates by citing and then interpreting a lyric composition of Simonides (339b and following: Simonides PMG 542), [139] having just made an earlier reference to a famous lyric passage from Pindar (337d: Pindar F 169a.1–5 SM). [140]

§55. After Protagoras and Socrates have a contest of wits in interpreting the meaning of the composition by Simonides (and Socrates comes off with the seemingly superior interpretation), Alcibiades challenges Protagoras to continue his debate with Socrates by abandoning the use of poetry as the framework for the discussion (347b and 348b), in the context of a particularly significant remark of Socrates: to use poetry as a framework for the debate between Protagoras and himself is analogous, says Socrates, to the hiring of girl musicians, either string or wind, or girl dancers to entertain at symposia (347cd). Such participants in the symposium reveal their lack of paideiā ‘education’ (apaideusiā: 347c), whereas those who are noble and ‘educated’ (pepaideumenoi) can entertain themselves with their own conversations (347d). Plato could have had Socrates say, as does the poetry of Aristophanes, that the educated participants in the symposium can also entertain themselves by performing and interpreting lyric compositions, as opposed to the ill-educated participants who hire girl musicians to play for them. But Plato is the champion of a new education where dialogue supplants the primacy of poetry, and Socrates in fact goes on to set up “the poets” as a bad thing that is parallel to the girl musicians (347e). In other words, instead of having girl musicians as a foil for “the poets,” Plato has both the girl musicians and “the poets” serving together as a foil for the medium of the dialogue that Socrates and Alcibiades are advocating. The stance of Alcibiades here is particularly suggestive: his generation is ridiculed in the Clouds of Aristophanes for abandoning the ideals of old-fashioned paideiā. According to these ideals, a sign of the highest achievement was the performance, at a symposium, of a lyric composition by one of the old masters. There is a vivid contrast to these ideals in the Alcibiades of Plutarch (2.6), where the young Alcibiades refuses to learn how to play the reed: let the Thebans, says he, play the reed, since they do not know how to have a conversation at a symposium.

§56. Given the obsolescence, lamented already in the days of Aristophanes, of the old-fashioned paideiā at Athens, it follows that the survival of the Classics in old lyric poetry, with their antiquated traditions of composition and even performance, was severely threatened. [141] Other cities, such as Thebes in the anecdote that precedes, would doubtless have held on to the {409|410} antiquated traditions for a longer period, what with their more conservative traditions of paideiā. Such traditions, it seems, were not so much a matter of composition any longer, and more a matter of performance only. [142] In Athens, by contrast, where traditions in actual composition seem to have survived for a longer time, these traditions could have contributed to the relative sparseness of the Archaic lyric traditions that have survived, in that the Classics of Archaic lyric were being replaced in Athens by the new Classics, as it were, of State Theater. Such trends in Athens, what with the overarching cultural prestige of this polis, surely had a profound effect on other cities as well, as we can see from occasional traces of a given city’s educational repertoire in the performance of song. [143]

§57. As we have seen, the occasional lyric poetry of Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, unlike other types of old lyric poetry, does not lend itself to an ongoing process of recomposition in performance, so that its references to a given composition’s setting—as also the self-references of the composer—retain a higher degree of historicity than we find elsewhere. Such occasionally is at least partly incompatible with the institutions of public performance in song and poetry as fostered by the polis. The polis, as we have seen, tends to promote its own Panhellenic prestige by fostering a Panhellenic perspective in the public performing of song and poetry, and such a perspective discourages ad hoc references that would become politically obsolete with the passage of time. [144] Only with the rise of the individual above the polis, in the first instance through the advent of tyrants, can ad hoc references to special individual interests in the song and poetry of the polis at last become compatible with the Panhellenization of this song and poetry. [145] Moreover, it is the institution of tyranny that provides an impetus, in the Archaic era, for the Panhellenization of compositions that are linked with specific occasions or persons. [146]

§58. To overreach the polis, then, is to become an individual, from the hindsight of recorded history. [147] But the model of the individual, in order to assert itself in the first place, must still conform to the ideals of the polis, as encoded in the traditions of the chorus; in fact the prime metaphor for the individual and the polis is the chorus itself, in its articulation of a complementarity between the khorēgos ‘chorus leader’ and the rest of the chorus, the aggregate. [148] {410|411}

§59. As a self-expression of the polis, the chorus tends to accentuate the least occasional and most catholic aspects of its seasonally recomposed choral self-presentation, in order to live up to the proper degree of admiration from outside and consequently from within. [149] In the eyes of the polis, the content of a choral composition must look beyond local interests in order to achieve a Panhellenic prestige in the eyes of whatever Hellenes from the outside may be looking in. [150]

§60. Like the polis, the chorus is a mechanism of rotating deindividualization and individualization, where the member of the chorus can move up from the status of egalitarianism in the aggregate, the chorus, into the status of leadership in the hierarchy, the status of the khorēgos ‘chorus leader’, thereafter potentially rotating back down into the status of membership in the aggregate. The necessity of being part of a group is balanced by the desire to have one’s day in the sun: in an aristocratic choral model of society, everyone wants a chance to be at the head of the chorus, to become a koruphaios (cf. Herodotus 3.82.3). [151]

§61. This choral model is important for understanding not only a new kind of authority sought by tyrants but also a new kind of authority for poets, which approaches the notion of historically verifiable authorship. As we have seen, there is a relationship between the authority of the role model who is represented as leading the choral group and the authority of the composer who is credited with the representation. [152] This relationship is visualized as the authority of Apollo over song in his function as khorēgos ‘chorus leader’, which is the fundamental model for the authority of the composer in choral lyric. The key to choral performance is the ‘public presentation’, the apodeixis, of the khorēgos. [153] The authority of the khorēgos is presented through the performance of the chorus. What is presented, through apodeixis, and represented, through mīmēsis, is authority. From this authority a newer and more specialized notion, that of authorship, can develop in the so-called age of tyrants and thereafter. The institution of tyranny, then, was for ancient Greece a watershed in the evolution of authorship as we know it. [154]

§62. As we shift our attention from the Archaic to the Classical period, with its realities of historically attested authorship, we must ask ourselves where to draw the line between the generic composer and the real author. From the standpoint of Archaic Greek traditions, what has to happen, for a composer to preserve his historicity, is either (1) the arresting of the process of recomposition in performance—wherein any self-reference by the composer is itself {411|412} vulnerable to recomposition—or (2) the commissioning of occasional poetry by an authority that goes beyond the polis. As long as the polis is the sole authority presiding over the performance of song and poetry, (1) the factor of recomposition is not likely to be arrested and (2) occasional compositions have little chance of transmission beyond their original occasion. Only with the rise of tyrants can the individuality of a composition and of a composer begin to be protected from being recomposed in the context of performance in the polis. [155] Granted, those who publicly championed the polis against the tyrant held that the truth of poetry must be protected from private possession, since such possession leads to tampering by tyrants. [156] The opposite standpoint of the tyrant, however, held that the truth of poetry must be protected from public recomposition. [157]

§63. These two conflicting standpoints are indirectly reflected in the symmetrical account in Herodotus of the twin disasters befalling the community of Chios, the death of the chorus boys and the death of the schoolboys (6.27.2). [158] One particular detail in the story of the schoolboys, that the roof caved in on them as they were being taught grammata ‘letters’ (ibid.), can be connected with a general attitude that we have found in the Histories of Herodotus, namely, that the medium of writing encourages the private possession of the public media of singing or making speeches, and that such private possession is a characteristic of tyrants. [159]

§64. It is the institution of tyranny, I argue, that makes the difference between such figures of Archaic lyric poetry as Stesichorus and Ibycus. If the vita tradition of Stesichorus, both extrinsic and intrinsic to the compositions attributed to him, strikes us as generic [160] while the corresponding vita tradition of Ibycus strikes us as at least in part historical, it is due, I submit, to the historical fact that Ibycus became a protégé of the tyrant Polykrates of Samos. [161] Just as the tyrant fixes his individuality in the collective memory, so too does the poet as the tyrant’s protégé. [162]

§65. Throughout this presentation I have been developing the argument that the Panhellenic diffusion of occasional compositions like Pindar’s victory odes cannot be attributed to the medium of writing alone. Even though they were originally occasional poems, they kept on being performed as {412|413} masterpieces in the canon of old lyric poets. [163] True, the medium of writing was on hand to record the ultimate phases of performance tradition in the evolving canons of song and poetry. Still, in the case of occasional song and poetry, what was needed in addition was an authority that went beyond the polis—an authority that could make even an occasional composition definitive enough to be performed as if it were already Panhellenic in stature, so that it could be reperformed from then on as a Classic, beyond its original occasion. Such authority was pioneered by the tyrants, and this authority in turn conferred the first traces of authorship. [164] {413|414}