In a number of the commentaries I’ve looked at on this famous ode, scholars have noted that in Greek literature there is an association between ship-building, sailing, and transgression of some kind. I have looked everywhere for instances of this in the extant corpus and haven’t been able to come up with anything. The only reference Griffith provides in his otherwise excellent commentary (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics) is to Horace’s Odes, which doesn’t really seem to me to be entirely germane to Sophocles. Thoughts and suggestions?
Sailing could be dangerous, as the ode itself makes clear, but it wasn’t normally thought of as transgressive, as a violation of Poseidon’s prerogatives or anything like that. A potential exception might be the first ship ever built, the Argo (main sources Stesichorus and Apollonius of Rhodes). There’s a hint of transgressivity in Catullus 64 (a characteristically Hellenistic poem), but no more than that. After all, the ship was built with the help of Athena.
And Sophocles’ ode celebrates (if that’s the word) man’s activities on land as well as sea, plowing both elements.
I want to say “this is what I thought,” except my knowledge isn’t quite that deep on this topic (yet). The two sections that get a lot of discussion on this issues are
1)the beginning: πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει. A number of scholars point out the ambiguity of δεινότερον, a word that, if I remember correctly, is really only applied to man in Sophocles (I can’t remember if I read that right somewhere), as illustrating the problems of man’s achievemenets.
And the later remark: σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων / τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει. The second in particular seems to make it clear that such “skill” can indeed lead to evil, especially when you consider the idea of beyond in
ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽. Usually that’s translated as “beyond expectation” or something like that, but does it seem to point to a beyond that transgresses mortal limits? I don’t know.
Griffith’s exact note: "What is emphasized is…the daring and perseverance that continue to drive people to defy natural limits…sea-faring is esp. appropriate to set the tone for the whole ode, given its notoriously ambiguous status, as a positive symbol of adventure and technical mastery, but also a negative one of temerity, violation of boundaries, and unnatural greed [here follows the reference to Horace 1.3.9 ff and direction to Nisbet and Hubbard’s notes]
As always, I am in awe of the knowledge on display. Sublime. No hyperbole intended at all.
All sorts of things can described as δεινα (as it says, πολλα τα δεινα). It’s a word usually applied to terrible things, but it’s tailor-made for the kind of portentous utterance we have here. It’s not a word that would ordinarily be applied to man (or a person in the abstract). It makes a striking and somewhat ominous opening to the ode, certainly an attention-grabber. And what is its relevance to the stage action, we may wonder? (For the ode is not an independent poem, let’s remember, but part of the drama that’s already well under way.)
Well yes υπερ ελπιδας is interesting, and again can’t/shouldn’t be tied down very precisely. But clearly human ingenuity and cleverness is a two-edged sword. And when you bring greed into it, as Griffith does, with the obligatory nod to Horace, you trigger another motif: merchant seamen and other traders will run all sort of risks for profit. There’s a recently discovered poem of Sappho’s in which she tells her mother she ought to be praying for her (Sappho’s) brother’s safe return from a maritime commercial expedition. The Catullus poem I mentioned uses the word ausi (“they dared”) of the Argonautic expedition (launched to gain the golden fleece): audacia, like so much in this ode of Sophocles, can have both good and bad connotations.
I thought of the beginning of Euripides’ Medea where the nurse bewails the fact that the Argo made the trip to Colchis (cutting through the Sea) or that the trees were felled on Pelion to provide the materials for the boat necessary for the voyage. Obviously one meaning is that this was the proximate cause of Jason meeting Medea and her current situation. But I have thought that this first voyage was emblematic of the transgressive nature of Jason’s relationship with Medea, he a Greek she a barbarian princess. The preoccupation that the Greeks had with the other as a means of identifying themselves and the anxieties this reveals ( Theseus and Hippolyta, Hercules and Omphale etc) seem to me to underly this passage.
I seem to remember something from Hesiod about how coastal sailing (I forget the word for this) is ok but longer journeys are perilous. I wonder if this anxiety was rooted in religious considerations rather than being a simple matter of the practical dangers of long distance sailing. These considerations seem to me clearly implicated with each other.
Don’t the Phaeacian ships stop sailing to human waters after the Poseidon threat? I would have thought there was some background transgression myth here.
As far as religious worries, I’m not sure that they’re necessary to invoke for actual sailing practice. Look up “losing sight of shore”, or variations of the same in sailing journals. It’s a favorite topic. As someone who only sails in a protected lake, just the idea is terrifying to me. I assume that it was usually foolhardy before modern navigation.
Actual taboos and so on strike me as something that would belong to a much more primitive level of civilization than the Greek.
It had to happen.
In a speech to a meeting of the United Nations, just after remarking the Kermit the Frog had been ‘uneccessarily rude to Miss Piggy,’ Boris Johnson quoted (in Greek) a line from this chorus, about the ‘awesome power of man to change things for the better.’
Well well so it’s not just the beginning of the Iliad that Boris alias Boreas (too too clever) can quote, though I doubt he could have continued beyond the opening. And now thanks to him we can say what Sophocles “really means.”