Monthly Archives: October 2011
Reading and Performance of Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo
| October 31, 2011 | Posted by ahowie under Student Chronicle |
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In this semester’s Sunoikisis Greek course, we have covered a substantial selection of the poetry of Callimachus. Our knowledge of classical cultures has been rigorously challenged by its frequent use of allusion, and our imaginations have been piqued by its creative adaptation of Archaic genres and unique poetic outlook. For those of us who have studied the later Latin poet Catullus, Callimachus’ famous maxim “μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν”–that is, mega biblion, mega kakon, translated ”a big book is a big evil”–is all too familiar. Callimachus started a poetic tradition that both looked back toward the oral-epic traditions of old Greece and pushed forward with a bold new aesthetic that prized erudition and conciseness.
The poems of Archaic Greece existed for a long time without being written down. They were part of a fluid, living tradition that was later distilled in a very limited form into the two major written Greek epics titled Iliad and Odyssey and a few other texts including hymns. The texts as we have them now are not the tradition itself; they are merely static, two-dimensional reflections of it. The Greek oral tradition was a phenomenon that was far greater than any single version of a tale or collection of tales. It was a memetic network of plots and heroic archetypes familiar to all members of society that any individual bard could draw from to craft a performance. They are a fragment of a script of an ancient performance the precise details of whose players, settings, and patrons we will never know.
As the technology of writing became commonplace in Greek city-states, standard versions of these great cultural documents were preserved in writing. Not only were ancient traditions recorded, but also novel works of literature–most significantly plays–philosophy, literary theory, and science were composed in written form. By the Classical period, Greece had adopted an entirely new form of cultural expression.
By the Hellenistic period, the impact of literacy upon poetry becomes particularly conspicuous. Hellenistic poets generally wrote neither to entertain live audiences nor for theatrical competitions–they wrote to be read. This brings us back to Callimachus. During the fourth week of our course, Professor Ben Acosta-Hughes from Ohio State University gave a lecture on Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo, which all of the students in the Hellenistic Literature course had read in Greek that week. Acosta-Hughes began by establishing the geographic and cultural background of Callimachus’ life and summarizing the known contents of his oeuvres. During his discussion of the actual text, I was taken aback by the notion that Callimachus’ hymn was written straightforwardly as such–i.e., that Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo was just as much a performative religious text as the Homeric original that inspired it. That it was probably written for a particular temple–the one in Cyrene–and that it would have formed the basis of some ritual in honor of the god Apollo. The extent of my surprise at this assertion owed to the fact that my initial reaction to the text starkly contrasted the perspective Acosta-Hughes was offering. I had read the hymn as a purely artificial literary creation that took the hymnic genre as its inspiration, but adapted the Homeric model to its own aesthetic purposes. When I heard Acosta-Hughes’s lecture, I began to question whether I had inappropriately applied very postmodern-inflected generalities about literacy and textuality to the Hellenistic period. Our widely divergent perspectives on this text serve to demonstrate that there is often more to Callimachus than meets the eye, and that even the most defensible generalizations about literary periods should be applied with caution.
The Hexameter of Theocritus’ Idyll 11
| October 28, 2011 | Posted by ahowie under Student Chronicle |
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Theocritus is widely regarded as the poet who invented bucolic, a genre of literature which focuses on the activities of simple country folk such as shepherds and shepherdesses. Typically produced for urban audiences, bucolic literature presents an idealized portrait of the simple virtues of outdoorsmen. Romanticism in 19th-century literature, seen as a reaction to the rapid industrialization throughout Europe during that century, mirrors the work of Theocritus and his contemporaries during an earlier period of rapid urban development.
Theocritus is most famous for his collection of Idylls, short pastoral poems usually on the topic of love. Stylistically, Theocritus’ Idylls do not veer far from the metrical trends introduced by Callimachus, an earlier Hellenistic poet. In dactylic hexameter, the form employed by Theocritus in the Idylls, lines consist of six feet, each of which is either a dactyl (one long syllable followed by two short syllables) or a spondee (two long syllables). Callimachus’ hexameter lines were long and elegant, largely eschewing spondees in every place other than the second foot. Dactyls were preferred to spondees in Ancient Greek verse because an overuse of the latter was seen as lazy or amateurish.
In one of the assigned discussion questions for the seventh week of class in the Sunoikesis Hellenistic Literature course, students were asked to compare the meter of Theocritus Idyll 11 with several selections from Homer. Having read Idyll 1 and Idyll 3 the previous week, we expected to find the same metrical rigor and expertise in this poem. Idyll 11, however departs in many ways from the norms of Theocritus’ more “serious” poems.
In their book Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, Fantuzzi and Hunter observe the following:
Theocritus is a particularly important witness to this Hellenistic metrical project, for on the one hand he pursues an almost ‘Callimachean’ rigour in the ‘serious’ bucolic idylls (I, 3-7), and, on the other, he can be radically anti-Callimachean in Idyll 11, when he clearly wishes to mark metrically the clumsiness of the Cyclops song, and again in Idyll 10, which is no longer ‘bucolic’ but rather agricultural and Hesiodic in content, and also in the epic-mythological poems, which return to the technique of the Homeric and Hesiodic hexameter.
Idyll 11 comically presents the Cyclops Polyphemus as a smitten lover singing to his beloved. It is tempting to read Theocritus’ Polyphemus as merely a sympathetic, bucolic idealization of a character who appears in most other sources as a monster. The epic Polyphemus is distinct from Theocritus’ Polyphemus in important ways, and the latter does indeed reflect an overall Bucolic theme and setting. Idyll 11, which focuses on the Cyclops’ unrequited love, is not, however, a serious, straightforward Bucolic–it is a satirical one.
Not only is the content of Idyll 11 intended to be hilarious–take, for example, the idea of an ugly giant asking a sea nymph to abandon her watery abode and come to live with him in a cave–but the hexameter itself also reflects Polyphemus’ bumbling, clumsy personality. One factor in particular is the excessive use of spondees:
“φοιτῇς δ᾽ αὖθ᾽ οὑτῶς, ὅκκα γλυκὺςὕπνος ἔχῃ με, ” (23)
“Would you come near when sweet sleep holds me?”
“αἴκά τις σὺν ναῒ πλέων ξένος ὧδ᾽ἀφίκηται” (62)
“If only some foreigner would arrive sailing in a ship”
“πολλαὶ συμπαίσδέν με κόραι τὰν νύκτα κέλονται” (78)
“Many girls call out to me in the night ‘play with me!’”
These lines produce a droning effect that completely skews the epic cadence of proper hexameter. Lines with spondees in both the first two feet appear also very often: 38, 39, 46, 52, 60, 61, 67, 73.
Other features that occur frequently in Idyll 11 are repetitive and amateurish diction and trite metaphors and descriptions. Theocritus artfully employs these poetical faux pas to craft a very strong and unique voice for his character.
This week’s assignment provoked a lively discussion about the peculiarities of this particular Idyll of Theocritus against the backdrop of other pastoral works from both antiquity and modernity, which led to a deeper and richer understanding of what constitutes the “bucolic genre.”
J-Term Update
| October 24, 2011 | Posted by Allie under News |
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The November 1 deadline for the J-Term deposit is fast approaching! If you would like to join us on our January excursion to Greece, visit our January Term Program Page.
Update on Elementary Greek Sequence
| October 18, 2011 | Posted by Lanah Koelle under News |
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The eleven faculty members who gathered at the Center for Hellenic Studies on October 1 to discuss plans for an inter-institutional elementary Greek sequence had a productive, energetic meeting. Recordings of the meeting are available as podcasts.
At a follow-up session on Saturday, February 4, the group will design course materials, including an open, online textbook. The faculty will also continue to develop models of collaboration based on their institutional needs. For example, some institutions may pair together and alternate as the “home institution” offering the course, while others may bring their students together for online language labs. Some faculty may also encourage their students to use the new course materials for self-directed learning. Check back for continuing news about this exciting initiative, which serves to strengthen and support small Classics programs.
