Apollo’s Kithara and
Poseidon’s Crash Test: Ritual and Contest in the Evolution of Greek
Aesthetics
The title of our session unites two concepts of overwhelming
importance in the history of Western culture:
logos and
tekhnê . As with so
many other notions in the history of ideas, these owe their fundamental
formulation to the work of ancient Greeks—not just to a few high-profile
thinkers (although Heraclitus and Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle immediately come
to mind), but to generations of anonymous men and women who practiced verbal and
material crafts, from the humble arts of cloth-weaving to the intricate skills
of rhetoric and poetry.
But even my choice of adjectives just now fails to do justice to the real
situation, in a misapplication that may be instructive. “Humble” and “intricate”
apply to weaving and wordcraft, respectively, only if we are adopting a modern
perspective. To use them in this way is a post-Enlightenment distortion. Our
perspective has to be adjusted if we are to see more clearly how the concepts of
logos and
tekhnê are related in the ancient Greek world, and how that
relationship played a major role in subsequent history. It has, among other
things, shaped the way in which we understand aesthetics and performance, as
well as the aesthetics of performances. Some important features in the early
Greek development of this intellectual matrix form the core of my paper.
In what follows I examine two specific examples in order to highlight the close
relationship that binds together craft, art, ritual, and performances (verbal as
well as other) in the ancient Greek imagination.What in turn unites the
mythopoetic examples is the presence of the contest (
agôn ) and the crucial notion, arising from this quintessential
Greek idea, of
krisis , which we can translate
“judgment under pressure.”
[1] As an indication of their enduring importance as well as the high stakes
involved in these concepts, we should take note of the semantic shading of their
English derivatives: agony and crisis. It seems, in other words, that making an
impact through
logos and
tekhnê is potentially fraught with dangers,
rendering the outcomes—expressions and arts of all types—all the more precious. This attitude toward verbal and material craft, arising from a specific context
of rituals and festivals, may be said to mark the classical tradition in
literature and art for all of subsequent Western culture.
Starting from the modern prejudice—encapsulated in our ordinary usage of “humble”
craft versus “intricate” art—how can we get around an attitude fostered by
industrialization, technology (a word I will return to), elitist education,
post-Enlightenment privileging of the “rational,” and the closely related
Romantic equating of “traditional” with “primitive”? The philologist’s instinct
is to delve into the earliest texts and pay attention to the nuances of usage
and diction regarding
logos and
tekhnê . This is not the place for a full-scale
book-length analysis.
[2] Instead, let me observe that the most striking result of such investigations, in
terms of the cultural attitudes they indicate, is that in the Greek tradition,
material and verbal skills (those which we can tentatively assign, respectively,
to
tekhnê and
logos ) are not in a relationship of subordination (one low and
the other higher). Weaving, carpentry, metalworking, painting, sculpture,
embroidery—all of these
tekhnai (plural of
tekhnê ) are by no means humble. They are
quite literally divine.
From our earliest sources, in the archaic Greek of Mycenaean times, it is obvious
that such crafts and their practitioners are not only of the highest value to
the palace economies of Pylos, Knossos, Thebes, and Chania. They are also
intimately tied to the religious rituals of the Mycenaea n kings. Weaving women
and shining cloth; well-shaped chariots; their wheels, poles, and chassis,
subject to collection and redistribution by the central palaces, are not only
the prerogatives of the elite but are integral to the display of power and
control. And that display, in turn, is crucial for the mediating role of
Mycenaean kings between the gods and their subjects.
[3] Of course, the bureaucratic texts
written in Mycenaean Greek, such as we have them preserved on thousands of
accidentally baked clay tablets in “Linear B” script, narrowly represent an
entire culture that flourished between 1600 and 1200 BC. They offer evidence for
the organization and transfer of people and objects, but can tell us nothing of
what the elite and their subjects
thought about crafts. For the
latter, the historian of ideas must rely on the testimony of a later era: the
hexameter poetry of the archaic period (c. 750–500 BC) which is attributed to
Hesiod, along with the epics attributed to Homer (whom later ages supposed
contemporary with Hesiod), and the “Homeric” hymns to various divinities. Once
one focuses on notions of craft in this body of verse (something we tend to
gloss over while reading for character and plot), an abundance of scenes and
connections emerges. Let me mention just a few that can underscore the
importance of craftwork to religion, and its “religious” status.
We can start with the most obvious, the employment of craftworkers to decorate
and amplify the specific performances of worship. A bull to be sacrificed, for
instance, could have its horns gilded. The
Odyssey ,
describing how Telemachus is welcomed to a magnificent feast in Nestor’s city of
Pylos, takes care to include mention of a
khalkeus, or bronze-worker, named Laerkês, who also handles gold
(
Odyssey 3.432–438):
...ἦλθε δὲ χαλκεὺς
ὅπλ’ ἐν χερσὶν ἔχων χαλκήϊα, πείρατα
τέχνης,
ἄκμονά τε σφῦράν τ’εὐποίητόν τε πυράγρην,
435 οἷσίν τε χρυσὸν
ἐργάζετο· ἦλθε δ’ Ἀθήνη
ἱρῶν ἀντιόωσα. γέρων δ’ἱππηλάτα Νέστωρ
χρυσὸν ἔδωχ’· ὁ
δ’ ἔπειτα βοὸς κέρασιν περίχευεν
ἀσκήσας, ἵν’
ἄγαλμα θεὰ κεχάροιτο ἰδοῦσα.
There came the bronze-worker, with bronze tools in his hands, the
essentials of his craft (
tekhnê ),
[4] anvil and hammer and
well-made tongs, with which he worked gold. Athena came also to participate
in the rites. The old horseman Nestor gave the gold. And the smith then
working it, sheathed the bull’s horns, so that the goddess might take
delight seeing the dedication.
As the language makes clear, the
mediation of a craftsman transforms the natural object into an art-object, an
attractive, pleasing dedication (like a cult statue:
agalma can also mean this).
[5] At the same time, the explicit transfer
of the precious gold from the king’s palace to the craftsman makes clear that
the success of a pleasing, beneficial ritual for the community depends on the
intervention of the royal house.
The same passage, with its mention of Athena (who is disguised as Mentor, an
older man guiding Telemachus on his journey), should remind us that crafts have
divine patronage as well. Athena Erganê, the “worker,” is connected with the
arts of cloth-production, especially as they relate to the making of fabrics
that are dedicated to gods—like herself.
[6] At the Panathenaia (depicted on the
Parthenon frieze), one such woven article, the
peplos for Athena’s great statue on the Acropolis, is carried in
dedicatory procession.
[7] Hephaistos, on the other hand, is connected with the working of metal. It is
Athena who is linked further, by her very genealogy, with the kind of thinking
characteristic of “craft”: her mother
Mêtis,
or ‘cunning intelligence’, was a goddess swallowed by Zeus to enable the chief
god to control this potentially dangerous and deeply female “way of knowing.”
Mêtis as a common noun denotes as well
nonlinear, intuitive, on-the-spot, in-a-pinch capacities; the kind of peripheral
mental vision and know-how that characterizes the helmsman of a ship and the
driver of a chariot.
[8] The
latter is especially relevant to the scenario I shall examine shortly.
In all the employments of
mêtis , what we
discover is that “craft” is a totalizing and honorific concept, inclusive of
“art” in the senses that the West has tended to use since the eighteenth century
(as in “the fine arts”). “Craft” is at times closer to “craftiness,” at other
times to “artfulness.” The key point is that
tekhnê —one of our leading terms for this session—does not
distinguish those ways of acting that will later be sorted out, contested, at
times opposed to one another, as varied and divergent skills.
This is a good point at which to remind ourselves that the other term naming our
session,
logos , is equally rich and broad in
ancient usage. Sometimes interpreted as an overarching concept that covers the
range represented by the Latin pair of terms
ratio and
oratio ,
logos is both mental skill (reason,
intelligence—even
cunning intelligence ) and the product thereof (an
account, verbal art). In the latter sense, as becomes clear, it will tend to
overlap with
tekhnê , rather than be its polar
opposite. For the making of well-shaped, appropriate, reasonable speech is as
much a craft (or art) as is the weaving of cloth or the fashioning of useful
objects in wood. It is emblematic of this association that the art/craft of
poetry is presented within Greek poetry metaphorically in terms of weaving
(
huphanas humnon ‘having woven a song’
[Bacchylides 5.9–10] ) and carpentry (
tektones
kômôn ‘shapers of celebration songs’ [Pindar
Nemean Ode 3.4–5]).
[9] In Modern Greek, the word for literature—
logotekhnia ‘wordcraft’—perfectly encapsulates a
point of view that can already be detected in Greek texts from two and a half
millennia earlier.
[10]
Time now to turn to the first of my case studies.
Poseidon’s Crash Test
In the ancient
Hymn to Apollo (c. 500 BC?), which Thucydides, at least, attributed to Homer (3.104), the god
is celebrated as the divine patron of two supremely important cult sites in
Greece: the island of Delos and the mountain shrine at Delphi. The hymn
narrates his birth in Delos, and then, in a very compressed
Bildungsroman , his voyage to Delphi to establish the
Pythian cult center there. I will concentrate in the second part of this
paper on the “crafts” united in Apollo’s divine repertoire—specifically
music and poetry (taken as a unitary pair) and archery. These he possesses
from his birth onward. But there is a mysterious episode, on his
foundational journey, that involves another god and another craft. While
journeying through Boeotia in his progress toward Parnassus, the young god
Apollo stops at Onchestos, about twenty-five kilometers northwest of Thebes
(which, the hymn stresses, is not yet a city.) The grove of Poseidon appears
to have occupied the narrow pass (at modern Stení) on the road overlooking
the Teneric Plain to the east and the Kopaic basin to the west.
[11] The poet of the
hymn provides a brief and intriguing digression about the place:
230 Ὀγχηστὸν δ’
ἷξες Ποσιδήϊον ἀγλαὸν ἄλσος
ἔνθα
νεοδμὴς πῶλος ἀναπνέει ἀχθόμενός περ
ἕλκων
ἅρματα καλά, χαμαὶ δ’ ἐλατὴρ ἀγαθός περ
ἐκ δίφροιο
θορὼν ὁδὸν ἔρχεται· οἱ δὲ τέως μὲν
κείν’ ὄχεα
κροτ έ ουσιν ἀνακτορίην ἀφιέντες.
235 εἰ δέ κεν
ἅρματ’ ἀγῇσιν ἐν ἄλσεϊ δενδρήεντι,
ἵππους μὲν
κομέουσι, τὰ δὲ κλίναντες ἐῶσιν·
ὣς γὰρ τὰ
πρώτισθ’ ὁσίη γένεθ’· οἱ δὲ ἄνακτι
εὔχονται,
δίφρον δὲ θεοῦ τότε μοῖρα φυλάσσει.
You reached Poseidon’s glorious grove, Onchestos,
Where the
new-tamed colt takes a breather, burdened as it is
Pulling
the beautiful chariot, and on the ground goes the driver, even a
good one,
Having leapt from the chariot. Meanwhile, the
horses
Casting off his lordship rattle the empty
vehicle.
If the chariot breaks in the wooded
grove,
They take care of the horses, but they leave the
chariot tilted up.
For thus first of all was the sacred
rite. And they pray to the lord,
But the god’s
dispensation then guards the chariot.
What does
this strange ritual mean?
[12] Why is it even mentioned in the hymn? With religious
rites, a linear interpretation is less persuasive—I would say, less
possible—than an attempt to appreciate the multiple meanings, latent and
overt, generated by a series of actions in the sacred sphere. The rite
reaffirms and celebrates, surely, the commanding role of Poseidon when it
comes to horses and horsemanship. Why the sea-god who is also the earthquake
god (a scientific accuracy, tsunamis being no doubt known to the ancients)
should be “Hippios”—Poseidon of Horses—has always been a matter for
speculation. At an abstract level, the mystical association of sea-god with
horse-god might well depend on the uncontrollable nature of both elements:
in other words, horses are like the sea, and he who rules one can control
the other. By extension chariots are like boats—and there is ancient
evidence for this association.
[13] A wonderful image bringing the two together is that of
Poseidon guiding his gold chariot from his sea-cave at Aigai across the sea
on his way to aid the Greeks in their battle at Troy (
Iliad
13.25–30):
…
γέντο δ’ ἱμάσθλην
χρυσείην εὔτυκτον, ἑοῦ δ’ ἐπεβήσετο δίφρου,
βῆ δ’ ἐλάαν ἐπὶ
κύματ’· ἄταλλε δὲ κήτε’ ὑπ’ αὐτοῦ
πάντοθεν ἐκ κευθμῶν, οὐδ’ ἠγνοίησεν ἄνακτα·
γηθοσύνῃ δὲ θάλασσα
διίστατο· τοὶ δὲ πέτοντο
ῥίμφα μάλ’, οὐδ’ ὑπένερθε διαίνετο χάλκεος
ἄξων·
… he took his
golden whip, well-made, and mounted the platform of his chariot, and
drove over the waves, and sea creatures played about beneath emerging
from their lairs, nor did they fail to recognize their lord (
anakta ). In gladness the sea parted and
the horses flew fast and beneath the chariot the bronze axle did not
moisten.
[14]
Compare the associations of this scene of godly ease and control with the
ritual of Poseidon at Onchestos, in which a
failure , a chariot
crash, is commemorated. In the logic of divine-human relations that applies
as well to the celebration of heroes in ancient Greece, the human element,
even in failure, can stand as a signal token of the god’s superhuman power
and success. There is a power, a
mysterium
tremendum in Poseidon’s grove. The ritual calls for a human to
surrender contol: even one who is a good driver (
elatêr agathos , line 232) must leave his comfort zone, his
place of special power and control. (Those with a West Coast, New-Age
religious bent will see precisely this gesture as spiritual wisdom,
abandonment to the divine—but that is probably not exactly what the Greek
action signified.) The charioteer then goes on the ground like his opposite,
the foot soldier, while his horses and chariot continue without him. It is
important that he is said to “leap” out of the chariot (233) in what must
itself be a conspicuous display of courage and skill, as well as a useful
maneuver for battle. (To strike another Californian note, I would compare
the similar, highly illegal display of manhood known in some Oakland
neighborhoods as “ghost-riding,” in which souped-up street racers replace
horse-drawn chariots, and drivers jump out of their moving cars.)
The loss of control by the charioteer who jumps from his moving vehicle has a
different meaning for a second category of participants in the rite, the
horses (or perhaps at least one horse, the newly trained colt).
[15] This horse, no
longer driven, gets to draw a breath (
anapneei ). The diction is that which is used in the
Iliad to describe the rare moment of refreshment that
occurs for fighters in the heat of battle (eg.
Iliad
16.42, 18.200). Signficantly, such moments in the
Iliad are provided by the heroic fighting of others or by the
intervention of a god (like Poseidon himself in book 13). We could imagine
this refreshing pause for the horse as a gift from its heroic human
charioteer, as if from a fellow fighter. Or, in a more competitive spirit,
we can think of this as something the horses wrest from their controlling
human master. Slightly in favor of the latter interpretation is the language
of release: the horses proceed into the grove “casting off their lordship”
(
anaktoriên aphientes ). The moment is
one of liberation. One of the interesting further features of the ritual,
whether we think collaboration or competition, is what happens with the now
driverless chariot. As the poem says, “they rattle the empty chariot along.”
The verb
kroteousin has the sense of
hitting (cf. the derived noun
krotala
‘cymbals’), as if the horses are aggressively trying to lose the last
vestige of the human culture that has been attached to them. On the one
hand, to wax more abstract for a moment (but still in a Greek mode, I hope):
we have the
phusis of the horses, as it
were on cruise control, without a human at the reins, but under the
superhuman observation (or even control) of Poseidon. The god, I would
argue, like the horses, is both symbol and embodiment of
phusis ‘nature’ as contrasted with human
nomos ‘law, custom, habit’—that is to
say, all the arts, crafts, and technology that make culture possible. The
artifice of humans is here abandoned almost on an experimental basis, or as
a gamble, an odd sort of horse race.
[16] And the experiment, like the
athletic event of leaping from the moving chariot, is in itself very
modern-sounding. It is, in brief, the ultimate crash test (without dummies). That is to say, the rattling, jostled, driverless car is subjected, through
this yielding of
nomos to
phusis , to all of the unpredictable shocks and
bumps that a new Volvo is given in its Swedish torture chamber. As the poem
continues “if the chariot breaks in the wooded grove, on the one hand they
take care of the horses, but on the other hand they leave it (the chariot)
having tilted it up. For this was the holy rite at the very first. And they
pray to the lord and then the portion/lot of the god (
moira ) guards the chariot.” There is no doubt
that what we witness in the
Hymn to Apollo is a
long-standing ritual practice, within the very terms of the poem. While we
do not know about the relationship, in absolute terms, of the establishment
of Poseidon’s cult versus that of Apollo, in narrative terms the brief
digression places the one prominently before the other, just as Poseidon is
older than his nephew Apollo. It is proper to note in this connection that
chariot-rituals are crucial components of kingship inaugurations in both
ancient India and medieval Ireland, a commonality that argues for an
Indo-European cultural practice underlying the whole complex.
[17] So the
presentation (at least in poetic narrative) of the chariot-ritual along the
young Apollo’s way to his new seat of power may have significance as a
marker of his own inaugural moment. In the immediate context of the
Onchestos ritual there is no explicit mention of kingship, it is true. And
yet, as we noted, the poem’s language recalls something not far from it. “Lordship” (
anaktoriê ) is the quality of
being an
anax . From Mycenaean texts, it
appears that this term (in the older form
wanax ) in fact indicates a status higher than that of the
“king” or
basileus (appearing in Linear B
as
qa-si-re-u ).
[18] Dictionally, the charioteer is a
(w)anax ‘lord’ but so is the
god—indicated, it appears, by
(w)anakti
(‘to the lord’) at line 237 (cf. Iliad 11.28 above, where
anakta , also in line-final position, refers to
Poseidon). The now abandoned chariot is in the god’s field of control
(
moira ‘lot’ or ‘apportionment’). From the point of view of human culture, it has lost its usefulness and is
left behind, but from the god’s point of view it is an acquisition, in the
form of a dedication. The logic of sacrifice works the same way.
[19]
The odd rite at Onchestos demands further unpacking, since we have not yet
tackled the distinctive feature of this action sequence, the crash. What is
signified in the dedication of the unsuccessful vehicle to the god? One
might think of dedications as usually indicative of successful outcomes. For
example, the small silver votive plaques clustered around almost every icon
in a Greek Orthodox church are meant to show thanks to God, the Virgin, and
the saints for timely intervention in cases of illness, trouble, or want. Exactly the same dedicatory habit was ubiquitous in ancient Greek and Roman
temples. We can still see the amazing array of models of human body parts
dedicated at Corinth, and read the testimonies of Epidaurian healings. In
these cases, the dedication objects are visible expressions of needs met, or
in some instances of wants to be addressed in the future. But the broken
chariot (basket, pole, and other gear: I take
diphron as metonymic for the whole vehicle) is
not like that. Rather than comparing it to the wheelchairs
and crutches that festoon the walls of Christian healing shrines from
Lourdes to Knock, we can compare the chariot, leaning against the shrine
wall, to notches on a gunslinger’s belt or crosses on a fighter pilot’s
fuselage. They are victor’s trophies, commemorations of power. Here the
commemoration would be of Poseidon’s power in contrast to human weakness. The logic of hero-cult applies, however. At the same time as the failure (in
this case, of the driverless car) is displayed, the heroic leap may have
been recalled (perhaps even in oral-traditional praises). A
three-dimensional, dramatic rendition of a similar scene is available to us
in the story of Hippolytos, the “horse-loosened,” a grandson of Poseidon,
staged most memorably by Euripides. He dies, tangled in the reins of his
chariot that Poseidon caused to crash (in obedience to the wish of his son
Theseus, father of Hippolytos). He did not leap in time, if you will. Yet
his death shows the power of the god, and his devotion to at least one
human, his son. And so, in the Onchestos ritual as presented in the
Hymn to Apollo , Poseidon is granted the ultimate
visible recognition of his superior skills at chariot control, through the
dedication of uncontrolled and broken human vehicles.
Do these vehicles, however, really signify an oppositional stance? Is it a
case of Poseidon Hippios, master of driving, showing up the would-be human
masters of his art who fail to control their chariots? Clearly not. Nor is
it a story, like that of the young Pelops, of Poseidon protecting a driver
and bringing him success in a race.
[20] There
are no drivers
when it comes to the heart of this test. The
Hymn to
Apollo , I suggest, gives us a quite different scenario,
involving a four-way multifaceted
krisis
or “judgment under pressure.” To recap the elements: we have first the
presiding god to whom broken chariots will be dedicated (while presumably
the unbroken vehicles escape being frozen in time as ritual objects in a
shrine, instead continuing in human use). Second, we have a human driver who
bails out leaving his horses (element #3) to rattle and jostle his chariot,
dragging it along uncontrolled. The fourth element now deserves mention: the
chariot itself. The Greek
plurale tantum
noun
harmata means literally “joinings.”
The very notion focuses on construction (as if one were to call a car
“car-parts”). If the crash test of the ritual does not invoke successful
driving, then what exactly is being tested, what is subject to the
krisis ? My answer: craft. Put simply, on
display when the chariot enters the wooded grove of he god, to crash or
survive intact, is the skill of whatever “joiner” (for which the Greek is
tektôn , sharing a root with
tekhnê ) made the chariot, crafting its careful
harmata . It is not impossible that
the driver himself was that “joiner” (though he need not have been). He
would thus not only race his own car, but show how good a car-maker he could
be. Craftsmen—like the goldworker in Nestor’s Pylos—are perfectly able to
achieve independent epic commemoration.
[21]
The scenario I have sketched is not overt in the
Hymn , which, we must admit, treats the whole rite in passing,
as a sort of religiously inclined traveller’s tale based on learned local
lore, like those found centuries later in Pausanias.
[22] But it must have been obvious in
the rite itself: the better-made chariot would not rattle into pieces. Preserved in the highly visible line of broken chariots is a sort of
anti -victor list. One would like to know whether the
dedications were anonymous or inscribed.
[23] In any event, the string of
damaged vehicles says silently to the god “you won,” even if it does not say
overtly to the viewers “so-and-so lost.” Despite the somewhat unusual nature
of the ritual, we must recognize in it a format that characterized Greek art
and craft for centuries. The “performance” of the highly crafted chariot (in
our own sense of vehicle “performance”) is done:
- in a religious setting;
- involving an explicit or implicit contrast and contest with other
performers (here, other chariots, driver-leapers, and carpenters);
- for the ultimate purpose of glorifying a divinity; and
- in the process providing implicit or explicit criteria
(kritêrion, that which enables
the krisis) whereby one can judge
further performances.
This four-part definition of a craft-contest, based on an archaic poetic
description of an obscure Boeotian ritual, will easily be seen to apply to
the best-known aesthetic events from classical Athens: the musical,
dramatic, and rhapsodic contests of the Panathenaia and Dionysia festivals,
the soil from which our texts of Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and
hundreds of other (fragmentary) poets grew. Recitations of epic; the playing
of pipe (
aulos ) and concert lyre
(
kithara ); singing to these
instruments; the staging of tragedy, comedy satyr-play, and dithyramb—all
fit into this format of “craft-contest.” (We even hear of “art” contests—in
painting for example—to which the format equally applies.) It may not be
irrelevant, given this context, that the very medium of the Homeric hymn is
known to be a contest-performance medium. The
Hymn to
Apollo , which preserves the fascinating Onchestos episode, may
itself have been the result of a contest in rhapsodic hymn
composition-in-performance. At the very least, as I have argued elsewhere,
it can be interpreted as representing such a contest in a stylized way.
[24] Ancient traditions
about the life of Homer have him competing at Delos in the composition of a
hymn to Apollo; some evidence even names Hesiod as his rival, or
collaborator, in such a contest.
Now that we have uncovered in one small passage of the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo the parameters and ideology of a
small-scale, highly archaic contestation of aesthetic craft, it is time to
turn to my second case study, which examines, as it were, the ideology
surrounding the other end of the process: the
criteria and
attitudes arising from an event dedicated to Poseidon’s sometime rival,
Athena—the festival of the Panathenaia.
Apollo’s Kithara
The field of their rivalry, their contestation-by-craft, is the art of the
Muses,
mousikê . A key component of the
mythology surrounding Apollo is his involvement with singing, dancing, and
playing stringed instruments. The lattermost, an extremely important aspect
of Apolline musical culture, has most recently been meticulously explored
and presented in the magnificent work of Timothy Power,
The
Culture of Kitharôidia , which covers just about everything
connected to the art of singing to the
kithara (forerunner in word and artifact of our
“guitar”).
[26] I
want to examine just two moments in the ancient depiction of Apollo as a
singer to this large stringed instrument.
Apollo the Citharode is more than just an incidental portrayal of the god
with a proto-guitar. He is instead a mythic construction that benefited
certain groups within archaic Greek culture. I consciously use these words,
myth and mythic, with an awareness of their usage in the earliest surviving
Greek poetic texts. Both derive from the Greek word
muthos . As I discovered some years ago, the word
muthos in Homer actually does not immediately
refer to what we might call myths—that is stories about gods and heroes—but
rather to a particular kind of speech-act. It signals the use of speech when
making a command, or a rebuke, or a long act of remembrance. Put another
way, a
muthos is, in the earliest usage,
an utterance seeking authority, an assertion of identity, and a strategic
positioning.
[27] I
believe that these same characteristics actually do continue into later
usages of the word to mean something more like our modern word “myth.” We
should not be misled by the apparent anonymity of myths in this later
meaning. Every myth started as a
muthos
by some person or persons—as a way to represent and manipulate the world. Today I would like to suggest that the
muthos of Apollo the Player (and Singer) turns out to be a
method of self-presentation by the very performers who themselves
transmitted myths—that is to say, real human players. This mythic
self-presentation, in turn, can be seen as regionally determined within
Greek culture. That is to say the stories of Apollo the Citharode represent
in large part a stylization of the type that is called “epichoric”—existing
in a particular land. But the particular localization, as I shall argue, is
that of a very specific
festival , as opposed to the rites of
other cult-centers. We shall see that the “criteria” for performance—the
aesthetic notions that we might think universal—are in fact determined (and
over-determined) by highly local conditions. Any genealogy of modern
aesthetics has to start with the
realia
of such rites.
Let us start with verbal art. The
Homeric Hymn to
Apollo , which gave us our first example, the rite of Poseidon at
Onchestos, spends much more of its narrative time and power in loudly
proclaiming Apollo as the Citharode. After his mother, Leto, has convinced
the island of Delos that acting as a divine maternity ward will be a good
economic arrangement for it later on, Delos makes the pregnant Leto swear an
oath that Apollo will indeed build a glorious temple on the small rocky
island. Then, Leto goes into labor for nine days and nine nights. She grasps
a palm tree, kneels on the ground, and surrounded by nymphs and goddesses
produces the twins Apollo and Artemis. The young god is so powerful he
bursts his swaddling bands. His first words in the poem proclaim his future
areas of interest. “May the kithara be dear to me and the bent bow, and I
will utter to mortals the unerring will of Zeus” (lines 131–132). He
presents himself as one who can play a stringed instrument, called in the
Greek of the poem the
kitharis (a by-form
of the more common noun
kithara ). He will
also be an archer and a prophet. I cannot enter here into the connection
between the first two skills, music-making and archery, but I suspect it is
very old. Philippe Montbrun has recently shown in detail that the hunting
bow and one-stringed musical instrument are indeed one and the same physical
object among many peoples of Africa, South America, and Oceania.
[28] As for the
connections between musical performance and prophecy, the work of Lisa
Maurizio and others has demonstrated that oral poetics has a key role in the
production of prophetic hexameters at the Delphic oracle. It may even be the
case that the Pythia, the prophetess of Apollo, spoke in verse.
[29] In short, the
three skills Apollo proclaims might be thought of simply as three aspects of
one powerful super-craft, a skill that boils down to unerringness—whether of
getting the right note in musical performance, the right target in athletic
and martial performance, or the right prediction in talk of the future. Such
an abstract but unifying concept should right away make us withhold judgment
about the exact criteria for any one of those performances. It opens a world
of strange possibility (from an aesthetic view): is a string-player better
when he is more athletic, “bowing” with a vengeance, “hitting” the right
notes precisely? Or when the music seems to us sweeter, more expressive,
more moving and sensitive? We cannot assume that there is one culturally
transcendent right answer.
The instrumental aspect is just one part of this craft of citharody—that is,
singing to the accompaniment of the
kithara . We have to keep clear the distinction between
kithara (or
kitharis ), and on the other hand “lyre” (Greek
lura ), which is often sloppily misapplied to
the stringed instrument of Apollo. As a matter of fact, most translations of
the passage I just read from the
Hymn to Apollo
write “lyre” for the Greek word
kitharis . For a quick reminder on types of Greek stringed instruments, three images
(figures 1 through 3) will suffice:
We shall return to these distinctions in a while. For now, it is enough to
keep in mind that the
kithara is both big
and loud. It is a large seven-stringed instrument with a sizable wooden
sound-box, providing great resonance, and making it difficult to play—even
in terms of requiring physical strength to hold it up.
[30] In classical times it was played
by professional musicians, often in the competitive environment of musical
contests, at major festivals. Those festivals included, most conspicuously,
the Pythian games held at Apollo’s shrine at Delphi.
Let me first make some further observations on vocabulary, lest it be thought
I am taking diction at face value in arguing that Apollo is, in the strictly
technical sense, a citharode. Within the Homeric hymns, it must be conceded,
the terms used for instrumental playing are a little ambiguous. That is, one
could argue that the noun
kitharis , just
cited at line 131, might be used in an unmarked way to mean
any
stringed instrument. It might even be used, as it is in most of the few
occurrences in Homeric poetry, as a
nomen
actionis to mean “instrument-playing” rather than an
instrument. The noun
kithara (rather than
kitharis ) is not attested until the
fifth century. The default noun for the instrument that is played by singers
in the Homeric epics is yet another term:
phorminx . In the
Hymn to Apollo ,
this noun alternates with
kitharis . Furthermore, the verbs derived from either noun,
phormizein and
kitharizein, appear to be interchangeable. All this means
that the diction of hexameter poetry has a good deal of flexibility in
describing instrumental performance. The words “to play the
phorminx ” and “to play the
kithara ” can be taken in their semantically
broad, unmarked sense—and in this way even applied to the playing of the
small tortoise-shell lyre—a completely different instrument. Or, the words
can be taken in a semantically
narrow , marked sense to mean
precisely playing the larger, wooden-box instruments, the
kithara and its forerunner, the
phorminx . Such flexibility proves useful as
poets engage in mythologizing their own art-forms.
Let me also suggest that we may be seeing in this flexible system of
descriptive terms the strata of generations of actual performance practices. In this connection I am reminded of something once told to me by a man who
had trained to be an Egyptian oral epic poet. The folklorist Dwight Reynolds
observes that even when a bard of the contemporary Hilali oral epic is
obviously playing on a twentieth-century fiddle, with several strings, he
will say to his audience, in his verses “I sing to you as I play on my
rabab ”—although the
rabab is a
much older, one-stringed instrument, clearly
not what he is
using in his act of performance. The text and the context, thus apparently
dissonant, are seamlessly joined through the willing suspension of
disbelief.
[31] And
in fact, the fiddle does function, for poet and audience, as the spiritual
and practical descendant of the
rabab . The ideology of
performance remains the same despite the practical upgrade and shift in the
form of accompanying instrumentation.
As we return to the
Hymn to Apollo , therefore, we
should keep in mind that the poem might be describing Apollo using a lyre,
or Apollo using the professional contest instrument, the
kithara . I shall contend that the
Hymn to Apollo points to the latter scenario—in fact,
the
kithara, the big-box instrument—is
for Apollo the
default instrument. Another Homeric hymn, the
Hymn to Hermes , as we shall see, insists on the
latter scenario, his use of the
lura . It
is this primeval contrast that will lead us to some conclusions about the
mythic meanings of
kithara vs. lyre in
terms of performance practices, social semiotics, and aesthetics.
In order to explore the further implications of Apollo as a player and
singer, a citharode, let us start with the following lines (
Homeric Hymn to Apollo 156–164):
[32] And there is this great
wonder besides—and its renown shall never perish—the girls of Delos,
hand-maidens of the Far-shooter; for when they have praised Apollo
first, and also Leto and Artemis who delights in arrows, they sing a
strain-telling of men and women of past days, and charm the tribes of
men. Also they can imitate the tongues of all men and their clattering
speech: each would say that he himself were singing, so close to truth
is their sweet song.
The immediate context is a description of the Ionian festival at Delos in
honor of Apollo. Along with other events, it includes, in the poet’s
rendition, a chorus of maidens of Delos who charm the assembled festival
crowd on the sacred island with their astounding vocal performance. The
speaker of the Homeric hymn at this point appears to introduce himself, as
well as a second man, a foil figure. Bidding the Delian maidens farewell,
just after these lines, the speaker says: “If a stranger should ask ‘Who for
you is the sweetest of singers frequenting this place, in whom do you take
most delight,’ tell him this: ‘A blind man, he lives in rocky Chios. That
man’s songs, all of them, are best ever after’” (lines 168–173). This
scripted response seems to be an artful if rather indirect
self-advertisement on the part of the performing poet. In the form in which
it is scripted for the Delian maidens, it resembles a contract: the parties
are marked out by the contrasting line intial
humeis and
hemeis (‘you’
plural and ‘we’).
You give this answer, says the anonymous
speaker, and we in turn will spread your poetic fame (
kleos ) as far as we wander on earth to the
well-peopled cities of men. “And I will never cease to praise far-shooting
Apollo, god of the silver bow, whom rich-haired Leto bare” (lines
177–178).
Since the time of Thucydides, this passage from the
Hymn to
Apollo has been taken as evidence for the history of performance
practices. Most often, the mysterious blind man of Chios has been
interpreted as a reference to the figure of Homer. What is not always
stressed is the open-ended wording of these lines: there is no direct
assertion that the speaker of the
Hymn to Apollo is
in fact the same as the
tuphlos anêr , the
blind man. The identity of the hymn’s performer is instead elided—we are
meant to
associate him with Homeric traditions, with all who
have ever wandered around performing songs of Homer, but it may or may not
be “Homer” who speaks to the Delians.
I would add that the Homer figure here most closely resembles that of the
wandering poet found in the
Lives of Homer and in
the
Contest of Homer and Hesiod . These traditional
stories appear to go back to the sixth century BC, a time when the texts of
the poems of Homer and Hesiod were probably being crystallized and set down
in some form or other. As we see Homer mythologized in those traditions, he
represents a much more expansive repertoire than the composer of our
Iliad and
Odyssey . The Homer
of the
Lives of Homer stories composes curses,
magical spells, epigrams, and hymns, as well as what we might call epic. He
comes into town and gets himself advertised, stays at cobblers’ shops or
men’s gathering spots, even makes up small-scale epics about the history of
the city in which he finds himself. The Homer of the
Lives traditions is an ornery character as well, who will curse
a town if he feels that he has been disrespected—in good poetic fashion of
course.
[33] Now,
if we acknowledge that the speaker of the ancient
Hymn to
Apollo associates himself with such an expansive, multigeneric
repertory for the poetry of Homer—from curses, to praise poems, to epigrams
and spells—the next claim in my argument becomes a bit more likely: namely,
that the performer of the very
Hymn to Apollo
himself wants to pose as a citharode—or at least, to strongly suggest the
possibility that he is one. This might be surprising since it is clear that
the Homeric hymns as a group must have been
rhapsodic
compositions meant for competitive recitation, like the
Iliad and
Odyssey in their
sixth-century formats. By rhapsodic, I mean recited, without musical
accompaniment or melody. We have a picture of such recitation in the
dialogue of Plato named
Ion —after the wandering
rhapsode or “song-stitcher” of that name. Ion the rhapsode goes from place
to place competing as a reciter of the
Iliad and
Odyssey . Let me stress the difference once
more. Our evidence for actual performance of Homeric poetry, and by
extension Homeric hymns, tell us that they were
recited in
competitions, not
sung . Yet the internal picture given us by
the
Hymn to Apollo suggests that the composer of
such poetry is a singer, specifically a citharode
, or singer to the
kithara .
What are the signs of this hymnist’s imagined citharody? Most clearly, it
comes in what I shall call “emblematic melding.” To explain this, I refer
you to another passage. Several critics have noted that the transition in
lines 177 and following is abrupt.
[34] Most attribute this to an alleged gap or seam between
the so-called Delian and Pythian parts of the
Hymn . It is true that the first part of the
Hymn to
Apollo dwells on the career of the young god near the time of
his birth on Delos, while the second highlights his acquisition of Delphi as
a place for a temple from which to issue oracles. Since the eighteenth
century, critics have insisted that the
Hymn to
Apollo is in fact two poems clumsily stuck together, one
originally designed for performance on Delos, the other for performance at
Delphi. I do not personally believe in this explanation.
[35] At any rate, in the passage at
hand, after promising to spread the fame of the Delian maidens, the
speaker—who previously referred to himself with a plural pronoun
hêmeis —says at line 177 “but I
(
singular pronoun) I will not cease making a
humnos about far-shooting Apollo.” He then
makes good on his claim, breaking into what we can identify as high-style
hymnic rhetoric in the Greek poetic tradition (
Homeric Hymn
to Apollo 179–193):
O Lord, Lycia is yours and lovely
Maeonia and Miletus, charming city by the sea, but over wave-girt Delos
you greatly reign your own self. Leto’s all-glorious son goes to rocky
Pytho, playing upon his hollow lyre, clad in divine, perfumed garments;
and at the touch of the golden key his lyre sings sweet. Thence, swift
as thought, he speeds from earth to Olympus, to the house of Zeus, to
join the gathering of the other gods: then straightway the undying gods
think only of the lyre and song, and all the Muses together, voice
sweetly answering voice, hymn the unending gifts the gods enjoy and the
sufferings of men, all that they endure at the hands of the deathless
gods, and how they live witless and helpless and cannot find healing for
death or defence against old age.
In this miniature praise section, the very first image the poet offers us is,
significantly, of Apollo, seen in all his glory as citharode. Not only are
both the mortal and divine hymnists juxtaposed in this manner. The
description interconnects details as well. We see Apollo as he strides
toward an assembly of the gods (
homêgurin ), surely a match for the picture we have just seen of
the Homeric poet, the blind man of Chios, as travelling around. Both man and
god are hymnists on the move. The epiphany of Apollo on Olympos prompts
divine delight in
kitharis and
aoidê , instrumental playing and singing, and
leads to further song and dance among the gods. That comes in a description
that, as many have observed, closely replicates the features of the human
musical events on Delos mentioned earlier in the poem.
[36] In the earlier passage, the poem
refers to the gathering of Greeks from all over the islands and adjacent
coast, and speaks of how they are transfixed by the virtuoso performance of
a set of human girls who can imitate the voices and movements of all.
[37] Schematically, we
have a chiasmus, that X-shape rhetorical figure that moves from A to B,
B-prime to A-prime (Figure 4).
The emblematic melding here accomplishes in almost tactile fashion the sort
of analogizing through which myth as a whole functions. The assertion
embedded in this juxtaposition is: just as Apollo is
musagetês , leader of the
Muses ,
so the blind man of Chios—or his representative—is choral leader of the
Delian chorus, the one who provides them with songs. This
matching detail is further underlined by the line-final occurrence of the
word for song,
aoidê at 173 (referring to
“Homer”) and at 188 (referring to Apollo). To repeat, no matter what its
actual performance conditions were over the years—including recitation in
performance, without music of any kind—the text itself insinuates that the
Hymn to Apollo is exactly like Apollo’s
own song. Let me put it more pointedly: the human singer
worships the god by modeling himself on this divine patron of song.
[38]
There is one further emblematic melding to examine in the Apollo hymn. As the
poem proceeds, Apollo, realizing the need for priests for his newly founded
temple in Delphi, goes out and hijacks a boat. Specifically, he takes the
form of a dolphin, leaps into a ship manned by Cretan sailors, and proceeds
to flop around and rock it. While Apollo the Dolphin lies there, the boat
starts steering itself toward the place he desires. When it reaches his
goal, Apollo resumes his divine form and tells the Cretans they will be his
servants. He then leads them in a high-spirited but formal procession up the
mountain to his shrine, playing his
phorminx as he goes. The Cretans follow, singing a victory
song or
paian “just like the
paians of the Cretans, for whom the Muse has
placed in the heart honey-voiced song.” If the hymnist of this poem is being
likened to Apollo, so the Cretan sailors—his newly found priests—are likened
to Cretan
paian singers. The victory song
or thanksgiving song to Apollo called the
paian was normally sung to the
kithara . By mythic calculation, the hymnist of the
Hymn to Apollo is like Apollo who in turn is like the
leader of Cretan citharode singers. Hence once again, the
Hymn performer comes out looking like a citharode. I shall
return to the Cretans in a moment, in formulating my final thoughts about
the role of ritual and contest in developing the aesthetics of
performances.
For now, we should note that this very artful and careful merging of
performers within the
Hymn to Apollo gains even
more resonance when placed next to the evidence from iconography and
literary-historical traditions. A key to this broader complex is the lore
passed down to us by the second-century (ad) travel writer Pausanias. In
Pausanias’ section on the Pythian games, we must note several key points. Before the reorganization of the Pythian games in the sixth century BC, as
we learn from other sources, the only contest was in citharody. Pausanias
says this took the form of singing a hymn to Apollo. The first winner was
Chrysothemis of Crete.The passage is worth quoting in full:
[39] The oldest
contest and the one for which they first offered prizes was, according
to tradition, the singing of a hymn to the god. The man who sang and won
the prize was Chrysothemis of Crete, whose father Carmanor is said to
have cleansed Apollo. After Chrysothemis, says tradition, Philammon won
with a song, and after him his son Thamyris. But they say that Orpheus,
a proud man and conceited about his mysteries, and Musaeus, who copied
Orpheus in everything, refused to submit to the competition in musical
skill.
They say too that Eleuther won a Pythian victory
for his loud and sweet voice, for the song that he sang was not of his
own composition. The story is that Hesiod too was debarred from
competing because he had not learned to accompany his own singing on the
harp. Homer too came to Delphi to inquire about his needs, but even
though he had learned to play the harp, he would have found the skill
useless owing to the loss of his eye-sight.
There are a number of fascinating and relevant aspects to Pausanias’
collection of observations on Delphic performance history. We can note,
first, how the character and biography of various “authors” are obviously
tied to the local traditions about whether or not they were fit to
participate in a particular event. Thus Orpheus and Musaeus are too proud,
Hesiod too unskilled in music, and Homer, paradoxically, skilled but unable
to make use of his skill due to blindness—which sounds like a crudely
manufactured excuse.
We should note further that Chrysothemis, the first victor, had a living
connection with Apollo, since his father had performed
katharsis for the god. The ritual context,
therefore, is doubled—the citharode sings a hymn
and is the son
of one who provided ritual cleansing. By the way, the very name Chrysothemis
or “Golden Rule” would make an appropriate epithet for the god himself. In
the
Hymn to Apollo , the baby god is resplendently
dressed in gold, with gold belt and gold dagger. The very first divinity to
feed the baby Apollo is not his mother Leto, but instead the goddess
Themis —‘proper Rule’, or ‘Custom’. She gives him
nektar and ambrosia—the perfect pablum for an
immortal (lines 123–124). What I am suggesting is that calling oneself
“Chrysothemis” in the context of Apolline cult and festival evokes images of
the very origin of the god Apollo. I add to Pausanias’ information at this
point a further piece of lore. According to a tradition passed down by the
Byzantine scholar Photius (
Bibliotheca 320b), this
mortal singer Chrysothemis was the first to wear expensive clothing and to
take up the
kithara to sing a solo
nomos, or traditional song-pattern in
imitation of Apollo (
eis mimêsin
Apollōnos ). This anecdote is nothing less than an etiological
story to explain the customary dress of both competitive citharists and
their instruments (also by the way, elaborately clothed, as we shall
see).
[40]
The other points in Pausanias’ passage are all worth absorbing, but I have to
pass quickly over them. Essentially, this lore retrojects a division of
repertoires, perhaps stemming from the sixth century BC. The Pythian games
tradition of competitive singing to the accompaniment of the
kithara , interestingly, includes in its list
of victors (and thus, in the contemporary repertoire) Philammon, Eleuther,
and best of all the mythic performer Thamyris, who the
Iliad tells us was once defeated by the Muses in a contest. But
it
excludes Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod. These latter,
it can be argued, are all to be associated with
rhapsodic
performance, although the passage does not state this. In stressing Homer’s
skill at playing an instrument, and then veering away from this by excluding
him, the Pythian lore seems to mirror inversely what the
Hymn to Apollo presents: a citharodic, singing-and-playing
Homer, in the actual context of a
rhapsodic Hymn. It is as if
the keepers of Pythian lore, perhaps the priests and operators of the games,
acknowledged a tradition of Homeric citharody, but take pains to reject it. Within the terms of the Pythian lore reported by Pausanias, such a rejection
would make most sense if citharodic ideology—collaborating with the rules of
the games, as set by Apollo’s proponents—
requires from its
performers the ability to see the god in order to proclaim his glory—you do
not acquire such details from what other people tell you. You must see for
yourself.
[41]
Let me return to the essential conclusion we can draw from the passages we
have just seen. The origin myths and ideology of citharodic performance at
the games in Delphi, the Pythian games, pivot around imitating the god
in his role as citharode . The
Homeric Hymn
to Apollo , as I am suggesting, promotes that very ideology,
although it seems the Pythian contests excluded Homeric epic from
competition—yet another indication of how ritual events shaped the very
canon of Greek literature. At this point, we could expatiate on the function
of such divine mimesis. It seems to have a specific role within the broader
area of male initiation. In this connection, we need to recall that Apollo
is the god of clan membership, as attested especially in Dorian lands (like
Crete), but also in Athens. As a young god, with characteristic long hair,
he is the embodiment of that stage in a young man’s life when he is called
ephebe—“on the verge of full youth.” Apollo does not get old—he is the
eternal ephebe. To be a full man, the mortal Greek passes through the
ephebic stage, learning the craft of the warrior, but also learning the
other relevant skills of being an aristocratic male. These skills include
the production of music and song—embodied in Apollo the citharode. This
whole ancient Greek social-mythic complex can be characterized, in the
anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s phrase, as the “Poetics of Manhood”—the
title of his wonderful book about late twentieth-century inhabitants of an
upland village in Crete.
And now it’s time for us to talk further of Cretans. It is hardly an
accident, I believe, that the first citharodic winner, a generation after
the god himself, according to the ancient lore, was from Crete. I submit
that the reason Apollo, in the mythic narrative preserved in the
Hymn to Apollo, has to choose
Cretan
merchant pirates to be his priests is simply because the traditions of
actual citharodic performance at Delphi have predetermined
the ethnicity. The stories and practices of real performers, in other words,
have moved quietly into the mythic representations, retrojecting a number of
details from the present age of what singers really do (or their own stories
about what they do) into a distant Golden Age. Nor should we be disturbed by
the odd combination of priests and singers in this picture—the mythic Cretan
sailors becoming sacrificial officiants at Apollo’s temple, while the Cretan
performers are good at singing. At Delphi as at Athens, where the Eumolpidae
or “good-singer” family had ritual functions, and further afield, in the
cults and poetic traditions of Vedic India, priests and singers are quite
often one and the same persons.
[42]
Two semihistorical figures can help fill in the picture I have been drawing
of the ideology of “emblematic melding.” Terpander, a citharode from Lesbos,
who flourished around 680 BC, established the first citharodic contest at
the Carneia in Sparta—and proceeded to win the contest.
[43] Since the Carneia was a
long-standing Apollo festival, we see once again the close relation between
citharody and the god. But in the stories that tell us how Terpander
invented the seven-stringed lyre, and the set of tunes to be sung to the
kithara , we see also the melding of
human musician with divine. For Apollo, too, is a first-founder, discoverer
of institutions, and inventor of
nomoi in
several senses. (The word
nomoi can mean
both ‘tunes’ and ‘laws’.
[44] ) The second figure is a sort of shamanic alternative to
Terpander; the traditional dating puts him, too, in the seventh century BC. His name is Thaletas or Thales, and he is credited with founding another
Spartan institution, the Gymnopaidia. (The name of the festival, if nothing
else, is at least is familiar to the modern world in the music composition
of Eric Satie, Les Gymnopédies). Thaletas or Thales is also said to have
prevented war or cured plague with his songs, which included paians and a
kind of processional song called
huporkhêma .
[45] If Terpander imitates the divine model Apollo in his
innovations, Thaletas does so by his healing and harmonizing activities. Looked at another way, both of these historical citharodic biographies
reflect the emblematic melding of performer and patron. And by the way,
Thaletas comes from an interesting town, one that we associate with one of
the earliest surviving Greek law codes on stone: Gortyn—in, of all places,
southern Crete.
The literary evidence on Apollo as citharode is dwarfed by the visual, which
would require a long book and more art-historical expertise than I can
muster to analyze in full.
[46] Let me summarize for the sake of brevity: from a sample
data set comprising the 536 vases for which the online Beazely archive at
Oxford provided images in a keyword search, as well as the
Lexicon Iconographicum section on Apollo with
kithara , I find that the
kithara accompanies Apollo in a fairly
restricted set of scenes—ones that are ritual, public, and celebratory. The
god plays in processions, especially divine weddings, like that depicted on
a well-known sixth-century
dinos by
Sophilos (figure 5).
Apollo also plays at altars flaming for sacrifice, or for libations; and
Apollo leads the Muses in song. Such type-scene attestations capture the
marked nature of public performance on this instrument, the very same marked
and ritually grounded performance that one sees in the human citharodic
contests at the Carneia and the Pythia. A related point is that Apollo
himself in vase depictions looks like a human citharode contestant, and vice
versa. Compare the views in figure 6 (on the left, red-figure pelike
[Beazley
ARV 2 250,
LIMC Apollon 84]; on the right, Attic
black-figure pelike [Kassel T 675]).
We have established the close “emblematic melding” of human citharodes and
divine player. I have argued that this goes back to the actual practices and
ideology of the citharodes, specifically in the contest situation at Delphi,
in the Pythian Games. Now is the time to turn at last to a third place,
triangulating as it were between Apollo’s sites of Delphi and Delos; and to
the aesthetics of its contests, those honoring another divinity, Athena, in
the Panathenaia. I will take a slight detour, however, reaching Athens
through Arcadia, at least in mythic terms.
A companion poem to the
Hymn to Apollo is the hymnic
composition that celebrates the birth and adventures of his half-brother,
the god Hermes. I cannot dwell on the
Hymn to
Hermes at the same length as Apollo’s hymn, but will mention it
just long enough to sketch how it embodies a suggestive transgression into
Apolline harmonies. This hymn is a comic masterpiece. It tells how Hermes’
mother Maia gives birth to him in a cave far distant from the house of his
father Zeus. It’s a kind of rags-to-riches tale. Soon after being born,
Hermes decides to go and steal the cattle of his brother Apollo. Cattle-raiding—like the skill at chariot-driving (and in Nestor’s case, as
Iliad 11 shows, combined with that skill)—is a
very ancient form of proving manhood, connected with initiation stories in
Greek, Indic, and Irish traditions.
[47] In the world of modern Crete—as
Michael Herzfeld’s book shows in detail—it has been replaced as an
initiatory experience by the stealing of sheep from one’s older male
neighbors. But it still functions in the Poetics of Manhood.
[48]
So the
Hymn to Hermes , in its basic plot, enacts a
transgression, with a baby doing the deed of a young man—not unlike the way
Apollo himself is instantly matured in the hymn dedicated to him. But the
Hymn to Hermes goes a step further. Not only is
it about a legal, ritual transgression (Hermes in fact invents a new kind of
sacrifice). It also encapsulates a musical transgression. After being caught
and threatened with punishment by his older brother, Hermes charms Apollo
with singing to his own invention, the tortoise-shell lyre (
Homeric Hymn to Hermes 418–447):
He took [the lyre] upon
his left arm and tried each string in turn with the key, so that it
sounded awesomely at his touch. And Phoebus Apollo laughed for joy; for
the sweet throb of the marvellous music went to his heart, and a soft
longing took hold on his soul as he listened. Then the son of Maia,
harping sweetly [ kitharizōn ] upon his
lyre , took courage and stood at the left hand of
Phoebus Apollo; and soon, while he played shrilly on his lyre, he lifted
up his voice and sang, and lovely was the sound of his voice that
followed. He sang the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth,
how at the first they came to be, and how each one received his
portion.…
But Apollo was seized with a longing not to be
allayed, and he opened his mouth and spoke winged words to Hermes:
“Slayer of oxen, trickster, busy one, comrade of the feast, this song of
yours is worth fifty cows, and I believe that presently we shall settle
our quarrel peacefully. But come now, tell me this, resourceful son of
Maia: has this marvellous thing been with you from your birth, or did
some god or mortal man give it you—a noble gift—and teach you heavenly
song? For wonderful is this new-uttered sound I hear, the like of which
I vow that no man nor god dwelling on Olympus ever yet has known but
you, O thievish son of Maia. What skill is this? What song for desperate
cares? What way of song?”
In the
Hymn to Apollo , the god was clearly a
citharode. The large concert instrument is his from birth. Yet the
Hymn to Hermes conspicuously represents him as
completely taken with the
lyre and how one sings to it. It even
seems as though Apollo has never heard stringed instrumental playing before,
of any kind. Why does the Hymn to Hermes show Apollo getting from his
thievish younger brother not a
kithara —but a
lyre ? Well, part of the story of the
Hymn to Hermes is that the new baby god
actually invented the lyre. He lures a tortoise into his baby cave, kills
it, and makes its shell into a sound box. This myth, in other words, is an
origin tale for an actual instrument that was in fact used in certain
situations in ancient Greek life. But the images above, of lyre vs.
kithara , should remind us once more:
kithara s are to lyres as concert harps are to
banjos. There is a big difference.
The tortoise-shell lyre represents a set of associations that is very much on
the surface in the
Hymn to Hermes , and these
associations are the opposite of the
kithara ’s. Take for example the passages that describe the
first song of baby Hermes. He strikes up the instrument and then sings to it
in accompaniment “trying things out on the basis of improvisation (
ex autoskhediês ).” We know that singing to the
kithara in actual contests required
the playing of set patterns or
nomoi . You
do not just pick up a
kithara and
improvise, not when praising the god or competing in contests or
accompanying sacrifice. Furthermore, whereas Apollo’s followers sing
paians in his hymn—the kind that
Cretans are famous for—Hermes’ song resembles the improvised off-hand insult
contests of young men at feasts. (I think of a modern Cretan parallel, the
rhyming-couplet
mandinadha duels that can
erupt in any number of situations). Finally, the content of Hermes’ song is
nothing less than autobiographical. The baby gives us a first-person view of
his environment, including maids and pots (
Homeric Hymn to
Hermes: 60–61). It makes us think of another sort of ancient
Greek poetry, the sometimes obscene, always personal verse attributed to
Archilochus, the soldier-poet from the island of Paros. Perhaps it is not
accidental that Archilochus was said to have been initiated into poetry as a
young man by some sarcastic Muses whom he met, and who gave him, in return
for his cow, the gift of a lyre (note—
not a
kithara ).
[49]
The lyre of Hermes, clearly described as the tortoise-shell instrument, is
called a
phorminx , for which I refer back
to my earlier remarks on the flexibility of epic diction. More telling, it
is also called a
lura (line 423). At line
418, even more telling, the object noun is omitted altogether: some editors
replace the transmitted reading
labôn
(“having taken”) with the name of an instrument, either
lurēn or
kitharin , but I think the text, as it stands with its direct
object unexpressed and elided, is exactly right.
[50] The poet of this hymn plays the
same game; the instrument in question
may be a lyre, but the
audience knows that in order to be the appropriate accessory for the mature
god Apollo it has to be a
kithara . Therefore, the poet helps one suspend disbelief by refusing to foreground
either in its marked form. From the long description of how
it is made (
Homeric Hymn to Hermes 40–51), this is
clearly a tortoise-shell lyre, no doubt about it. But the suggestive
transgression has to copy reality to some extent. Hermes, for example,
imitates real
kithara -style situations. He plays his homemade lyre, in an agonistic legalistic,
contest
setting. He sings a theogony, a ritual style composition of the sort
attributed to the primeval mortal singer Orpheus. And he thoroughly enchants
his audience—the god Apollo, who has finally caught the little baby and
wants to drag him before their father Zeus. The poet is subtle: Apollo does
not say he never heard stringed music before. “What art,
what music for cares hard to deal with is this?” he says—language again
reminding us of themes in Archilochus’ verses. It relates, he goes on to
say, to sympotic festivity (
euphrosunê ),
love, and sleep. In other words, this music is private, nonritual, and
consolatory—the opposite of
kithara music
on all three counts. Song, dance, and
aulos (pipe) music are already around, says Apollo, and the
Muses practice them. He does
not mention whether
kithara s already exist. He does allude once
more to the way lyre-singing befits feasts of youths (line 454).
[51] In sum, Apollo is
like the producer who has stumbled on a new—perhaps dangerous but
exciting—way of playing. He immediately sees the potential for it—from being
the rival brother, he becomes the Colonel Parker to this new-found Elvis,
the Dr. Dre to Snoop Dog.
The lines here encapsulate Hermes’ gift to Apollo of this music which he
refers to as
kitharizein —though we know
it is technically not the playing of an actual
kithara ; it is a lyre. The trade is expressed in reverse form
if we compare it with the contract made by the
Hymn to
Apollo poet’s deal with the Delian maidens. “
I will
give you this instrument;
you give me glory,” says Hermes,
whereas the Homer-figure, the blind man of Chios, said “
you use
my words,
I’ll give you fame.” And so Apollo ends up having a
lyre—something like trading in a Stradivarius for a ukulele.
Mythologists must always ask:
cui bono ? For whose good? That is to say, which tellers of tales would benefit from
suggesting transgressively that Apollo’s instrumental art was in fact (a)
the product of a plea-bargain, (b) the music of drinking parties, and (c)
the result of playing on a loosely strung, lightly resonant instrument that
probably could not be heard farther than the end of the table in someone’s
house, let alone in a huge crowd at a concert competition? The answer is
quite clear. This is the depiction desired by the
non -musical,
non -players—the rhapsodes.
[52] In the social world of ancient
performer culture, just as in the contemporary world of celebrity musicians
(especially rappers), various groups must have characterized one another in
an effort to distinguish themselves. Some might claim an affiliation with
the genre of citharody: such a claim makes itself visible in the
Hymn to Apollo . Others, however, belittle that very
assertion, claiming (as does the
Hymn to Hermes )
that Apollo prefers the sort of privatized, aristocratic, nonritualized,
and—most important—
non-agonistic music associated with the
younger boys’ instrument, the lyre.
The undercutting of citharodic performance, by way of the assertion of the
primacy of Hermes’ lyre over Apollo’s
kithara , is on one level a kind of inversion joke, the
younger initiate (Hermes) making fun of the older initiate model (Apollo). Just as Apollo is the eternal ephebe, Hermes is the eternal trickster, a
figure of parody and adolescent play. But these are mythopoetic universals. At the actual historical level, I suggest that the context for this
ideological musical competition is in fact that of the Panathenaiac games at
Athens. One key fact distinguishes the Delphic Pythian (and probably the
Spartan Carneia) musical contests from the Athenian, as the latter games
were organized by the Peisistratid tyrants in the sixth century BC: the
Panathenaia featured
rhapsodic competitions. The Pythian
festival did
not . Even after their reorganization in 582 BC,
the Pythian musical contests featured only citharody (the originating
event), playing the
kithara without
singing, playing the
aulos, and singing
to the accompaniment of the
aulos . That
is to say there was no rhapsodic recitation. Gregory Nagy has shown in a
magisterial series of works how the Panathenaic complex and its ideology
shaped the rhapsodic treatment of Homer.
[53] As he points out in his book,
Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music , even in the
fourth century rhapsodic competition, in terms of prize money, took second
place in comparison to citharody, for which one could win, at least in 380
BC, 1000 drachmas.
[54] What the prize scale was in the sixth century is hard to tell. At any rate,
at some point the Homeric hymns, too, must have been in the orbit of the
rhapsodic competitions, probably at Athens, and most likely at other cities
as well. At the same time, singers would be competing, perhaps with similar
material, in singing to the
kithara . The
testimonia about the citharode Terpander indicate that he sang his own
material, but also set Homeric verse to music.
[55] From the point of view of the
evolution of poetic forms this is interesting; from the point of view of a
rhapsode, it is downright
dangerous . Walter Burkert suggested
some years ago that the rhapsodic format was itself in a sort of competition
with emerging poetry of the type we see in the choral poet Stesichorus.
[56] For choral lyric,
I would now substitute as the nemesis of the rhapsodes, at least in mythic
terms and the manipulation of myth, the art of citharody. The
Hymn to Hermes asserts that
Apollo is no
citharode . If this strategic move means the god is safely
marginalized as a lyre-player, Apollo remains a musician, but the citharodes
lose a patron—to the conspicuous public benefit of their rivals or
descendants, the rhapsodes, reciters in public of hexameter verses without
music. Since there is no standard contest in singing of
lyric
verse, elevating Hermes and his instrument does not pose a risk to the
rhapsodes. They have simply, through compositions like the
Hymn to Hermes , mythologized away the threat.
What is the more general point which we might take away for this study of the
interrelations of craft and the rhetoric about it, as well as the craft of
talk, the
logos of
tekhnê ? It is the pressure of Greek agonism,
of contests, of judgment (
krisis ) within
a ritual situation—the Pythian Games on the one hand, and the Panathenaia on
the other—that have encouraged the growth of an entire body of myth, lore,
and explanation to undergird a set of rules and regulations.
Out of
crisis come criteria . The aesthetics we innocently associate with
both lyre- and
kithara- playing, and
naively, perhaps, fail to disambiguate when looking at representations of
Apollo, are an expression of contestation, social and artistic clashes
reaching back at least to the sixth century BC. But, by the same token,
all aesthetic values in the classical tradition, I would
assert, emerge from specific settings of parameters in taste, bound up with
the realities of social practice, religious affiliations, class, and ethnic
ties. Let us not be lured back into neoclassical assumptions that Greek
aesthetics was the pure product of unfettered disinterested thought. In the
same spirit, I would suggest that we should recognize and make use of such
parallels or potential continuities as the modern Greek poetic and musical
scene can offer, especially but not only in more traditional areas, in order
to discover, in precise ethnographic terms, how the pressure of competition
shapes authors and authority, contexts and content.
The fate of Apollo’s craft, then, is like the result of Poseidon’s crash
test, writ large. Compared to the meager fragments of citharodic verse that
we still possess, the rhapsodic epics attributed to Homer are massive
monuments. They are the vehicles that got through the grove. Yet Apollo’s
kithara , like the losers’ chariots,
survives and is celebrated even when silent, suspended in dedication.
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Footnotes
Note 1
Fundamental for the discussion of agôn is Nagy 1990:385–387, also 118–122; for krisis 61–63; in relation to agôn 402–403.
Note 2
For debates concerning the developing notions of logos , see the essays in Buxton 1999.
Note 3
On Mycenaean palace economies and religious functions, see Lupack 2008.
On the redistribution of luxury and other goods, see Killen 2008.
Note 4
Note that peirata tekhnês can also be
honorific: the “ultimate limits” of craft—as if the tools
embody his tekhnê .
On the complex semantics of peirar
see Bergren 1975.
Note 5
For agalma as cult statue see Nagy
1990:364.
Note 6
On the goddess under her Athenian cult title see Pausanias 1.24.3.
Note 7
For a full description of this event and perspectives thereon, see Neils
1992.
Note 8
On “cunning intelligence,” see Detienne and Vernant 1978.
Note 9
The metaphors are both of Indo-European date: see Durante 1976 and Nagy
1996:74–76.
Note 10
It is worth noting that another compound noun— tekhnologia —containing the same lexical elements, in
reverse order, points to the importance of verbal expression in relation
to material skill: successful “technology” requires giving a reasoned
account of craft; the ability to persuade (through diagram, theory, and
proof) is central even to fields that seem at the furthest remove from
verbal art; or, to speak gnomically: tekhnologia needs logotekhnia .
Note 11
Schachter (1986:207-220) provides details of archaeological and
inscriptional finds at the site, indicating a Bronze Age occupation and
later cult activity dating to at least the sixth century BC. The age of
the cult is uncertain; it may continue practices of the second
millennium. Teffeteller points to similar Near Eastern chariot rites of
that era.
Note 12
The latest assessment, with a good summary of previous scholarly
attempts, is Teffeteller 2001. Opinions range from seeing it as
soliciting an augury to considering it a test for horses and
chariot-driving warriors.
Note 13
See Nestor’s “hymn” to mêtis in
Iliad 23.313–318, which associates
woodcutters, helmsmen, and charioteers as those who use this
intelligence.
Note 14
On this scene and its congeners in epic, see Nagy 2009:1, §148.
Note 15
For the debate over the number of horses involved, see Teffeteller 2001.
I assume that the colt can be metonymic for the paired horses
involved.
Note 16
Pindar Isthmian Ode 1.32–33, 52–54 and Isthmian Ode 4.19–23 imply that real horse-races
were conducted at the shrine of Poseidon in Onchestos.
Note 17
Teffeteller 2001 notes in addition Hittite and Babylonian analogues, one
of which is quite specific in reference to an empty chariot
in a god’s precinct.
Note 18
On the relative status of the two, see Shelmerdine 2008:127–129 and 135.
It is of interest that the lower-ranked qa-si-re-u , as she notes, is several times associated
with work-groups of craftsmen, such as bronze-workers at Pylos. Could
the later basileus have evolved from
the “master” of a guild? Further bibliography at Salis 1996:115–116.
Note 19
A more radical possibility here, that at least deserves consideration,
is that we should interpret (w)anakti
to mean the human charioteer, whose anaktoriê has been mentioned a few lines
before. From the perspective of lat er worshippers at Onchestos, he would
be prayed to in his role as heroic warrior or celebrated king of the
past, who had once subjected himself and his vehicle to Poseidon’s rite.
To say that “they pray” at the moment of dedication to a human would
then blend the perspective of the heroic age with that of the later
worshippers in hero-cult. For a similar pairing of god and human hero in
worship, see Iliad 11.761 (the conclusion of
Nestor’s initiatory raid): πάντες δ’ εὐχετόωντο
θεῶν Διὶ Νέστορί τ’ ἀνδρῶν ‘They all prayed to Zeus, among
gods, and Nestor among men’. Note that Nestor at the time is very much
alive, having just completed a successful and spectacular feat in a
chariot (jumping onto a vehicle and then taking fifty chariots of the
enemy: Iliad 11.743–750). On Nestor’s tale see
Martin 2000a. In regard to initiatory chariot events, we should also
keep in mind the elaborate race in Iliad 23, at
Patroclus’ funeral games, in which Antilokhos the son of Nestor is a
featured driver. Klymenos, a mythical hero, is said to have died in a
race at the grove (Pausanias 9.37.1); his heroic exemplum could be part
of an unattested aition of the
myth.
Note 20
The story is told in an explicit hero-cult context in the epincian ode
Olympian 1 of Pindar, for Hieron’s chariot
victory of 476 BC.
Note 21
This construction skill may itself be a part of the expected heroic
repertoire: see the Iliad in its several
mentions of heroes (like Lykaon: 21.35–38) who are captured while
cutting wood for their vehicles. In Irish saga as well, the hero Cú
Chulainn is thus represented, as are some of his enemies. We should also
remember that Epeios, maker of the Wooden Horse, is an Iliadic hero, not
just a carpenter.
Note 22
On Pausanias’ religious narratives see Pirenne-Delforge 2008.
Note 23
Worth closer attention in this connection is the dedication by Arkesilas
of his winning chariot at Delphi (in a cypress-grove), as
commemorated by Pindar, Pythian Ode 5.34–42,
who stresses how the victor did not break the “daidalic”
work of the craftsmen who made his vehicle. I intend to take up this
point in a separate article.
Note 24
See Martin 2000b.
Note 26
Power 2010. The germ of this second portion of my paper originated in a
talk at Delphi in the conference on Apolline Politics and Poetics in
2003. This was later expanded and modified in a talk at the
International Symposium on Myth and Poetics in La Plata, Argentina in
June 2009. My continued reflections on the problem, with significant
changes from earlier versions, are reflected here.
Note 27
Martin 1989:10–88.
Note 28
Montbrun 2001.
Note 29
Maurizio 2001.
Note 30
On the instrument, see Comotti 1989:63 and Maas and Snyder 1989:53–78.
On the endurance involved see Power 2010:52, 107, 121.
Note 31
On the Hilali performance tradition see Reynolds 1995.
Note 32
See most recently on the interpretation of these lines Peponi (2009),
with further bibliography.
Note 33
On the Lives see Martin 2009 and Nagy 2008.
Note 34
Opinions given in Càssola 1975:498.
Note 35
For my alternative view, see Martin 2000b.
Note 36
Clay 1989:53–56. Cf. Power 2010:442–443.
Note 37
On the meaning of the “imitation” see now Peponi 2009.
Note 38
The late-antique lexicon of Hesychius yields some surprising and
remarkably detailed information about what appear to be actual
performance habits from an earlier period. The lexicon tells us that the
phrase “But, lord …” ( all’anax ) was
known to be a conventional closing phrase, or exodion , within the performances of actual citharodes . By contrast, the phrase “but
now the gods” functioned as an exodion or signoff phrase for rhapsodes . I submit that we see exactly this closing
strategy but in a split-up and expanded version at lines 177–179 of the
Hymn to Apoll o. Here the poet says autar
egō —(compare alla of the exodion )
and then says “O ana ” (compare
anax of the exodion ). See Hesychius A 3113 (Latte),
and cf. Gostoli 1990:54, 146–148. On the usage cf. Power 2010.
Note 39
Pausanias 10.7.3.
Note 40
See further Power 2010:28–29.
Note 41
An analogy might be made with the powerful force of
darśan —pious religious viewing of the sites and
images of gods—in Hinduism, on which see Eck 1981.
Note 42
Eumolpidae: Graf 1974:59–65, 93–100. Vedic India: Winternitz
1981:150–155.
Note 43
“Plutarch” On Music 1131a-1132e ; Gostoli
1990:84–85.
Note 44
Power 2010:215–223 has an extended discussion of the multiple meanings
of nomos .
Note 45
Barker 1984:214–223.
Note 46
On statues of Apollo Citharode see Flashar 1992. On vase depictions, see
now Power 2010:249, 286–287, 425–430. A slightly fuller version of the
visual evidence is in Martin 2010, from which I have borrowed some
material for this portion of the current essay.
Note 47
See Walcot 1979 and Melia 1979.
Note 48
Haft (1996) makes use of Herzfeld 1985 to illuminate the Hymn to Hermes .
Note 49
On the tale, see Clay 2004.
Note 50
Pace Càssola 1975:536 and others.
Note 51
Perhaps youths singing casual table-songs or skolia , if that is what endexia refers to—the habit of making songs go round the
table in a certain direction, to the right. Cf. Càssola 1975:537 and
Bowie and Pernot 1993:360–361.
Note 53
On the key importance of the Panathenaic context for Homeric recitation,
see Nagy 2002 and Nagy 2010.
Note 54
Nagy 2002:38–40.
Note 55
Gostoli 1990:18–22. See Power 2010 passim for the most complete analysis
of Terpander.
Note 56
Burkert 1987.