θεῶν “fate of the gods” (7 ~ Od. 3.369), ἐπὶ θῖ̣ν̣α̣ πολυφλοίσβοι[ο θαλάσσης “on the shore of the much-sounding sea” (10 ~ Il. 1.34, 9.182, Od. 13.220 [παρά], Il. 23.59 [ἐπὶ θῖνι]), ἐϋκν̣ήμ̣[ιδες,Αχαιοί “well-greaved Achaeans” (12 ~ found 36x in Homer in the nominative and accusative, Hes. fr. 23a.17 M–W, Little Iliad fr. dub. 32.5 Bernabé), etc.24
The story is told in two parts: first Archilochus adduces the necessary point of comparison (4–5), but not straightforwardly, since the introduction of Telephus makes it seem as though this will focus on his victory; then the Greeks re-embark gladly (15) before Archilochus recommences the story of the Greeks’ first arrival and attack upon Mysia, and runs sequentially to the intervention of Heracles (16–25). Having excerpted the story to illumine recent history, the poet tries to give that narrative a temporally progressive sequence in a broadly, if reduced, epic manner.
V Alcaeus’ Epic Lesson: Damning Pittacus
A less exculpatory purpose can be seen in Alcaeus’ “Cologne fragment” (fr. 298), which compares his contemporary Mytilenaean Pittacus to the lesser Aias and his sacrilegious behavior—specifically the rape of Priam’s daughter Cassandra at the altar of Athene herself—during the sack of Troy.25 Here Alcaeus still copies some epic phraseology (16 λ]ύ̣σσαν … ὀλόαν ἔχων ~ λύσσαν]ν ἔχων ὀλοήν “with destructive madness” Il. 9.305; lines 25–6 κὰ̣τ οἴνοπα / … πόν]τ̣ο̣[ν] ~ ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον “over the wine-faced sea” found 17x in Homer in several cases),26 though it is more noticeable that he uses competing “lyric” coinages (8 πολυλάιδος and 24 γόργωπι]ν) while avoiding any of the many standard epic epithets for the ever-present Athena. The meter, too, signals its lyric distinctiveness: the Alcaic stanza, composed of four identical verses, is somewhat like the dactylic hexameter in each of its verses admitting degrees of end-stopping (note, e.g., 4 and 5), while as a whole it is, once more, a semantic unit with, for example, the run-over between stanzas 3 and 4 underlining the destruction of Troy therein denoted.
The comparison with Pittacus is made later in the poem (addressed as “son of Hyrrhas” at line 47), and the myth itself is a refraction of a tale probably already in epic form: the story is known to the Odyssey poet (3.145–146, 4.502), as is the consequently difficult nostos facing the Greek heroes from Troy (Od. 1.325–7). Later ages knew an actual narrative from a cyclic poem, the Iliou Persis (“Destruction of Troy”) though there is no way to tell how it must have been narrated in an epic mode, beyond the obvious differences in meter and dialect, except that its progress would have been likely more sequential and leisurely.27 Direct influence may be suspected, but impossible to pinpoint: interestingly, both Homer and Alcaeus give the story in a somewhat allusive manner, the former poem perhaps to avoid the picture of a too-hostile Athene the Lesbian because of the point he wishes the story to make—that divine revenge for individual wrongdoing must be avoided before it affects the entire community.
The extant portion of fr. 298 seems itself to be a miniature epic, with stanzas 1 and 2 drawing the mythical lesson in a proemic manner (the Greeks would have found a calmer sea had they killed the “man who harmed the god” 5), before the poet embarks on the narrative portion of the poem telling the story of that wrongdoing (stanza 3 ff.). The myth may have continued to the general debate over what to do about Aias (see esp. 30), but the rest of the poem cannot be reconstructed after v. 27. Again, we find density, complexity, and allusivity: after an abrupt introduction, Aias is first merely “the one who harmed the god” (5), Cassandra is not named (8) or rather denoted in such a way as to connect her with the “cries of the children” in the city (14); and without further ado, Deiphobus stands for the Trojans’ original, disastrous error. The parallel of Cassandra and Aias in the third and fifth stanzas, with the latter named and the former’s name merely alluded to, places great emphasis on the depiction of what is happening in Troy in the intervening stanza (11, 12–15), underlining the example of the people’s suffering for one man’s transgression (Deiphobus, though τ, ἄμα in 12 suggests another name at the start of the verse). Thus the inner story of (Trojan) popular suffering is made to bolster the outer (Greek) one as well.
VI Love and War 1: Helen in Sappho and Alcaeus
Given the general lyric tendency toward selectivity, myths may merely be summarized, as in the story of Eos and Tithonos examined earlier. Consider, too, the famous deployment of Helen’s story in Sappho fr. 16.1–20, where Sappho has little interest in retelling several episodes from the war, rather than boiling down one central event, Helen’s abandonment of her family.28 She uses for this poem her characteristic “Sapphic” stanza, in which the first three verses are always eleven syllables long (unlike the epic verse, whose syllable count can vary29) but which, like the hexameter, can form potentially self-contained lines, while the final verse (the so-called “adonean” clausula) is treated as a continuous element of the previous verse. The stanza, once more, is a semantic unit: e.g., the delayed main verb “she went” (ἔβα 9) at the start of the third stanza—the only such run-over example in the preserved portion of the poem—underlines the obvious importance of that act to the eventual fate of her husband, to Troy, and indeed to Sappho’s own situation. One may even suspect an intentional play on the promised ease of demonstration at the start of the second stanza (“it is very easy to make this [viz, the substance of lines 3–4, below] well understood” 5–6), which proves unable to be completed until the third.
The rhythmic difference with the dactylic hexameter is noticeable (the first three verses have the invariable pattern ‒ ˘ ‒ × ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ‒ ‒), but the fourth verse (‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒) exactly matches a common line-end pattern in the hexameter, and therefore frequently contains epic forms.30 Indeed, scholars have detected several more or less direct adaptations, with, e.g., [ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων (1) and ἐπ[ὶ] γᾶν μέλαι[ν]αν (2) perhaps copying the Homeric formulae πέζοι θ’ ἱππῆές τε (3x) and γαῖα μέλαινα (8x). But the second of these is also a topos in lyric poetry (e.g., Sappho frr. 1.10, 20.6, Alcaeus fr. 283.13–14 [below]), so that we have to reckon also with the shaping of a lyric tradition.
Sappho’s invocation of Helen’s story here is introduced (once again) swiftly, though this time to justify the primacy of “whatever one loves” (3–4) over the material of war (1–3), and this opposition has been held by some scholars, too readily, as straightforwardly programmatic of a lyric versus an epic sensibility.31 As Helen becomes the model for the principle, however, the poem begins to cast doubt on whether love is so separate from the military items in the priamel, and when Sappho relates the absence of Helen to that of her beloved Anactoria (15–16), the reader realizes with a shock that she is now comparing herself to Menelaus, a man prepared to bring war to the entire Greek world to recover his lost wife. The clever play on our expectations puts the surface aim of the poem in a discernible tension with its paradigmatic myth: love and war—perhaps lyric and epic as well—are not so mutually exclusive or antagonistic, after all.32 Thus, the poem meditates on the nature of modal relationships, or rather their interrelationship.
Sappho’s treatment of Helen is certainly more subtle, even sympathetic, than Alcaeus’ ringing damnation of the same figure in fr. 42, which seems to lack any explicit connection to the poet’s world, and simply to compare her (1–4, 15–16) to the goddess Thetis, whose love with Peleus brought into the world something great and good in the form of Achilles (5–13).33 Alcaeus mentions Thetis also in fr. 44, where he may invoke and crystallize the same story as the Iliad, though the poem’s fragmentary state makes it very
