do not destroy my soul with pains and torments, but come here…” (lines 1–5) …and influence the course of my love affair, the poem goes on. Aphrodite is addressed in a one-to-one manner; although almighty, she is imagined as caring about the speaker’s torment; as in the past she will fly in her winged chariot from Olympus down to earth specially to relieve the speaker’s (singer’s) torment (9–12). “Come to me now,” the speaker prays, “as you have previously” (5–7 paraphrase). The depiction of Aphrodite and her engagement with the singer could not be more personal. This in itself is no major departure in Greek religion. In epic, too, individuals have their patron gods or goddesses; Odysseus his Athena; Paris his Aphrodite; Sarpedon no less than Zeus. Nor is the form of the prayer new: “Da ut dedisti.”46 What is new is Sappho’s dramatization of her personal relations with Aphrodite in the form of a traditional prayer. She depicts her life as repeated engagement with the goddess; in a previous affair Aphrodite managed to swing things the singer’s way; now she needs her good offices again.47
Alcaeus has not been served so well by recent discoveries. Boychenko makes the point that Sappho’s hymns, or prayers, tend to be cletic, that is, they appeal to the god(s) to come, while Alkaios shows a preference for narrative hymns to gods.48 This leads her to a reconsideration of fr. 304 V (=Sappho fr. 44a Campbell), a fragment from a hymn to Artemis, it seems, which had previously been attributed variously to Sappho or Alcaeus. The narrative quality of the fragment points, she says, to authorship of Alcaeus. Although the article makes a case for a categorization of Aeolic hymns as tendentially Celtic or narrative, the distinction does not map cleanly onto the two chief authors of Aeolic hymns known to us.49
Simonides’ Elegy for Plataia
Poets were generally obliged to make a bow to the gods at the beginning of their compositions.50 Thus we have near-complete hymns and prayers at the beginning of a number of melic works. Pindar Ol. 4 is a good example, which gets under way with a magnificent prayer to Zeus. Elegy, too, was often launched by a show of piety, as the Theognidea 51 shows us; here a miniature hymn to Apollo and Artemis stands at the beginning of the work.52 Of particular interest, then, is the newly (partly) reassembled beginning of a long elegaic poem by Simonides on the Battle of Plataea, one of the two major Greek victories of the Persian Wars.53 The poem itself celebrates the heroism of the Spartans marching out from the Peloponnese, over the Isthmus, in pursuit of the Persians to save Greece from the “day of slavery” (25). The poet says they drew strength and courage from their epic forebears, in particular Menelaus (36), and from the twin Spartan “horsemaster sons” of Zeus, the Dioskoroi. At the Isthmus they sacrificed the diabateria, transition sacrifices, as we can extrapolate from the Greek [θεῶν τεράε]σ̣σι πεποιθότε̣ς, “trusting the divine signs” (39). But what interests us here particularly is the beginning of the poem, a hymnic encomium of Achilles, it seems, called the “son of the glorious goddess (Thetis), daughter of Nereus” (19–20). The text is unfortunately not complete. When it begins, Achilles is struck and he falls like a pine felled by foresters in the highlands (1–3). Grief overcomes his people; he himself is much honored and buried in the same urn as his friend Patroklos (4–6).54 Despite his death the goddesses Athena and Hera see to it that Troy falls, as they are angry at Paris’ wickedness (9–10). A gnōmē seals the fate of Paris’ city: “the chariot of divine justice catches the sinner in time.” There follows a brief praise of Homer who “made the heroes’ short-lived race a theme familiar to younger men” (15–18), then the poet takes his leave of Achilles in a conventional transitional formula in hymnic address (19–20):
[ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲ]ν νῦν χαῖρε, θεᾶς ἐρικύ[δεος υἱὲ]
[κούρης εἰν]αλίου Νηρέος· αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ̣ κτλ.
“But now I take my leave of you, son of a famous goddess, daughter of the sea-god Nereus. But I [call now on the Muse…]”
The proemium, then, to Simonides elegy on the Battle of Plataia began with an encomium of Achilles. He is called “son of a goddess” and it is said explicitly that no mortal killed him but rather the hand of Apollo (8). The divine elevation of the epic battle is maintained by saying that Athena and Hera took Troy because of divine anger at the children of Priam (10). Achilles has the status of a half-god, but he was worshipped after his death as divine. He was not actually a Spartan, but nevertheless Simonides has chosen him to head his elegy. We see that the praise of Achilles took narrative form, as in lines 1–6 there is an account of his death. Apollo, presumably, struck him; he fell like a great tree in the wilderness; in their grief his people buried him together with his friend. The “point” of the encomium was no doubt to set the tone of the Spartans’ heroism at Plataia. The greatest warrior of the Greeks at Troy was a suitable figurehead for the great valor of the Greeks fighting a much larger force of Persians at Plataia.55 And, by then, the barbarian hordes of the Persians were assimilated to the Trojans (living in what is now Persia), an ethnicity not emphasized by Homer.56 We see, then, in this fragmentary poem that the religiosity has two levels. There is the level of epic saga in which half-gods fought alongside deities, and there is the day-to-day level represented by the favorable omens at the Isthmos, and also by the Dioskoroi, as these were Spartan gods who regularly received cult there.57 Strengthened both by thoughts of their epic forebears and by their tutelary deities, the Spartans marched forth. Simonides realized that the victory was unthinkable without these fortifying religious elements.
Archilochus’ Telephos Elegy
It was a great surprise when a fragment of Archilochus was revealed on a bedraggled Oxyrhynchus papyrus which was neither iambic nor (overtly) parodistic but was, in fact, a fragment from a poem very much in the manner of the last we have been discussing by Simonides: a long narrative poem in elegiac meter.58 The fragment has come to be known as the “Telephos Poem,” as its main feature is a battle between Telephos, son of Herakles, and the Greek force against Troy, which has landed in Mysia by mistake: Telephos routs the unfortunate Danaoi more or less single-handed, it seems. But this basic narrative has, again, very clear religious import. In the first place there is the same quasi-sacred status of heroic epic:59 here the routing of the half-gods who fought before Troy is used as a paradigm to comfort some person(s) who have obviously fled in battle. There is no shame when greater men than you fled before one man! is the basic paraenetic message. This is reinforced by saying that one cannot withstand “divine necessity”; the text is incomplete but it seems to be saying “When [the opponent] is driven by the strong compulsion of a god, one should not speak of weakness and cowardice.”60 The poet repeats this point in line 7: “to such an extent the fate of the gods cast fear [sc. on them], although they were brave spearmen.”61 We note other touches which emphasize the elevated sacred nature of the epic paradigm: the fleeing Greeks are themselves “sons and brothers of gods” (14); their proper destiny, Troy, is a “holy city” (15); and the ground they have mistakenly trodden, Mysia, by bad navigation, is the “lovely city of Teuthras” (17).62 We see that such a paraenetic appeal to epic includes the divine apparatus familiar from Homer: the gods decide the humans’ destiny, they fight in person, in this case the son of Herakles, Telephos. What they fight for has a sacred quality: the citadel of Troy, or, here, Mysia. Probably the context is a battle in which Archilochus and his comrades fled ignominiously. “Don’t worry,” says the poet, “braver men than you have fled before just one opponent, Telephos.”63 But the human message which today we would communicate by psychology—for example, “it was the shock element which demoralized you”—is here explained in the abstract by gnomic wisdom “one can’t fight against the compelling fate of god” and by the half-god status of Herakles’ son, Telephos, and his father Herakles, who eggs him on.64
The
