This is implied, e.g., in the Adesp. eleg. fr. 27 W2. Cf. Plut. Quaest. conv. 620 A–622 A.15 15 Cf. Fehr 1990. An early allusion to humiliations awaiting a déclassé aristocrat may be Archilochus, fr. 124b W2.
16 16 In general, cf. Glazebrook and Henry 2011.
17 17 For sources and earlier scholarship, cf. Jacquet-Rimassa 1995.
18 18 As in the case of the year-long testing of the suitors of Agariste in Sikyon (see above).
19 19 See, e.g., the idealizing elegy by Xenophanes, fr. 1 W2 and Adesp. eleg. fr. 27 W2.
20 20 See Węcowski 2014: 171–174 and 183–187, for archaic sanctuaries, such as Eretria, Isthmia, or the Samian Heraion, where such social dynamics of public feasting can be postulated in some cases already for the Late Geometric period.
21 21 See the essays of Lucia Athanassaki and Adrian Kelly as well as the essays in Section 1 of this volume.
22 22 The very fact that Solon used his poetry to promote and later to defend his reforms bespeaks his ambition to target his non-aristocratic fellow-citizens at least indirectly. Additionally, the folkloristic element of the utterances of the Seven Sages, often set in a sympotic context and in elegiac verse, seems to suggest a rather wide social circulation of such traditions. I take it as one more argument for the social “permeability” of the ideological divide between the agathoi and the kakoi I advocate in this chapter.
23 23 In a way, this study deals with a set of social and cultural phenomena that foreshadowed the situation remarkably analyzed, for classical Athens, by Mirko Canevaro, in that already in the archaic period and long before the first Greek democracies saw the light of the day, the “official culture” (my “aristocratic culture,” in the event) was largely “geared toward the vast majority of the people” (Canevaro 2017: 40), although in a very different manner.
CHAPTER 6 Politics
Jonathan M. Hall
The Lyric Author
For as long as the study of the Greek past rested on almost exclusively literary authorities, the world evoked by the early lyric poets constituted the first fully historical chapter in accounts of Greek antiquity. True, following Schliemann’s excavations of Hisarlik, Mycenae, and Tiryns in the 1870s and 1880s and prior to Milman Parry’s work on oral epic poetry in the 1920s, many scholars accepted the Homeric epics as a reasonably faithful representation of the Late Bronze Age world (for discussion, see Morris 2000: 77–78). But not everybody was convinced that there was any lineal connection between the Mycenaeans and the Greeks of the archaic age and, in any case, the seemingly radical disjuncture between the detached and anonymous authorial voice of the epics and the more subjective individuality of archaic Greek poets rendered the latter the more vivid testimony for historians to mine. As Karl Julius Beloch (1912: 314) put it, Archilochus “is the first Greek who stands before us in his full individuality as a person of flesh and bone.” Furthermore, it was commonly believed that this more “autobiographical” stance might inform us better as to local or regional differences in the politics of the archaic Greek poleis. So, Werner Jaeger, while conceding that the poets “spoke in their own persons, and expressed their own opinions and emotions, while the life of their community was relegated to the background of their thought,” nevertheless argued that “when they mentioned politics—as often—their theme was not a standard with a claim to universal acceptance (as in Hesiod, Callinus, Tyrtaeus, and Solon) but a frank partisanship, as in Alcaeus, or the individual’s pride in his rights, as in Archilochus” (1945: 116).
Today, the picture looks rather different. First, “what we know of the exigencies of performance radically challenges the reading of the lyric “I” as the spontaneous and unmediated expression of a biographical individual” (Kurke 2007a: 143). Since archaic poetry was typically composed for performance—be it at a festival or in the context of the symposium—the recitalist could very well be adopting a persona, distinct from the voice of the author (Lefkowitz 2012: 31). Pertinent here is the oft-cited fragment 19W of Archilochus (“I care nothing for the possessions of Gyges, rich in gold”), which, according to Aristotle (Rh. 1418b28), was uttered by a character named Charon the carpenter.
Second, it is clear that not all the verses ascribed to a named individual can be the work of a single poet. The cautionary example here is the body of work attributed to Theognis of Megara. According to the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (s.v. “Theognis”), Theognis flourished at the time of the 59th Olympiad of 544–541, but the reference in verses 39–40 to “a man who will correct our wicked violence” has often been taken as anticipating the tyrannical rule of Theagenes, whose daughter’s marriage to the failed Athenian tyrant Cylon (Thuc. 1.126.3) would date him about a century earlier. Later, verses 773–6 call upon Apollo to “ward off the violent army of the Medes from this city,” which seems to refer to the Persian invasion of the Megarid in 480–479 BC.1 Worse still, ancient authors disagreed as to which Megara was Theognis’ home city: Stephanus of Byzantium (s.v. “Megara”) and Harpocration (s.v. “Theognis”) identified his homeland as Nisaean Megara, north of the Corinthian isthmus, and this is generally accepted by scholars today, but Plato (Laws 630a) and the Suda (s.v. “Theognis”) derive him from Megara Hyblaea on Sicily (Figueira 1985: 123–124). It is partly for these reasons that “autobiographical” readings of archaic poetry have come under sustained critique in recent decades (Dover 1964: 209; West 1974: 27; Seidensticker 1978). Gregory Nagy (1985: 33), for example, has argued that “the figure of Theognis represents a cumulative synthesis of Megarian poetic traditions.” Indeed, Nagy has made similar claims for both Hesiod and Archilochus. In the case of the latter, he suggests that the verses ascribed to the poet were continuously recreated in the context of rhapsodic performances centered on the “Archilocheion”—a hero shrine established on the island of Paros, perhaps as early as the late sixth century.2 Presumably, the “cumulative tradition” hypothesis could also be extended to many other Archaic poets. As Nagy admits:
The major advantage to this theory is that the poetry of a given poet like Archilochus or Theognis may then be appreciated as a skillful and effective—maybe even beautiful—dramatization of the polis through the ages. The major disadvantage on the other hand is that the notion of a historical figure called, say, Archilochus or Theognis, may have to be abandoned.
(1990a: 436)
Third, even the notion that archaic poetry preserves local traditions may stand in need of some revision. Nagy (1985: 34), for example, has argued that, through continuous performance, much of it “evolved into a form suitable for pan-Hellenic audiences.” This is revealed not only by shared topoi that are as common to the verses ascribed to Theognis and Solon as they are to Hesiod but also by the dialect in which they are composed. Thus, although the poems attributed to Sappho and Alcaeus are close to the Aeolic dialect spoken on their native island of Lesbos, the verses of the presumably Dorian poets Theognis and Tyrtaeus are in a stylized form of the Ionic dialect (see de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume).3
In light of these sobering reassessments, Ian Morris (2000: 159) has argued that, while the works attributed to archaic poets can be viewed as discourses that convey coherent ideologies, we can only approach the body of texts from ca. 700 to ca. 520 BC synchronically and should refrain from reconstructing specific events from the poems. That verdict would deliver a crushing blow to our understanding of the archaic period because the historical value of lyric poetry resides in its approximate contemporaneity to the world it describes—a stark contrast to the dubious evidence for the period that is presented by authors writing much later, such as
