First fragment, by Archilochus, in Cambell’s Greek Lyric Poetry:
Εἰμὶ δ’ ἐγὼ θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο ἄνακτος,
καὶ Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος.
Am I right in assuming King Enualios/ Enyalius is the god of war Ares? I think I came across this name in the Iliad. However I’m a bit confused by reading on wikipedia (yes, I know) that it can also refer to his son, apparently the god of soldiers.
Secondly, any translations that can be recommended to use together with Cambell?
http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-greek-lyrists-are-thing.html
…But the Greek lyrists are the thing. Archilochus—Sappho—Alcaeus—so the good pedants have handed us down just a few miserable patches of their old magnificence. A pedant or grammarian, I think, is the worst possible judge of literature—except the general public.
The Archilochus fragment is short, but beautiful. I notice that the Muse’s lovely gift is something that he knows (ie., a skill) rather than received (ie., inspiration).
Mwh: West, of course, Who else?
Isn’t it? The next entry is also great: evocative and very down to earth
ἐν δορὶ μέν μοι μᾶζα μεμαγμένη, ἐν δορὶ δ’ οἶνος
Ἰσμαρικός· πίνω δ’ ἐν δορὶ κεκλιμένος.
After two fragments I’m a big fan of Archilochus 
Cambell tells me he had quite a bad reputation in antiquity. Pindar and Quintillianus apparently didn’t like him and the Alexandrinians thought he used inappropriate meters. Well, boo to them!
ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται, ἣν παρὰ θάμνῳ
ἔντος ἀμώμητον κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων.
αὐτὸν δ᾽ ἐξεσάωσα. τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκεινη;
ἐρρέτω. ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω.
My shield–is some enemy soldier’s pride. Beside a bush
I unwillingly left behind that blameless weapon.
Myself–I saved. What do I care about that shield?
To hell with it. I’ll get another one just as good.
ἔντος ἀμώμητον – epic parody.
αὐτὸν – variant reading ψυχήν, “my life”.
ἐξεσάωσα – Homeric, Il. 4.12, Od. 4.501. In both places used of saving someone else.
You can also punctuate τί μοι μέλει; ἀσπὶς ἐκεινη ἐρρέτω if you prefer.
This is the famous “rhipsaspidic” poem. After Archilochus, poets (e.g., Horace) were expected to boast about abandoning their shield on the battlefield and running.
If you think you like Archilochus, wait 'til you get to the Cologne papyrus. He’s as nasty as Hipponax (as appropriate for an iambic poet).
The alternate reading of ψυχὴν δ᾿ ἐξεσάωσα is from Aristophanes.
There’s some discussion here (in German).
If it were αὐτὴν there instead of αὐτὸν, would that become “I wasn’t willing to save it [the shield]?” Assuming that word order can be shifted a bit for verse? I don’t know about the indicative aorist there.
Is ἔντος ἀμώμητον really epic parody? ἔντος doesn’t even occur in singular in Homer. The moment I started to read Archilochus and other early Lyric poetry, not so long ago, the idiom immediately struck me as extremely similar to Homer. The way it seems to me, it’s too similar to be just imitation. I don’t claim to be an expert in Greek dialects; my point is rather that Homer is by far the most familiar sort of Greek to me, and I could immediately read Lyric with the same ease as Homer, unlike with any other new genre I’ve started. From my “Homeric perspective”, everything just “feels right” in Archilochus, Tyrtaios, Callinus etc., while almost any construction that is not Homeric would appear as deviant to me. Could it rather be said that they share a common poetic idiom? M.L. West at least dates Homer to the 7th century, which would make him about contemporary with Archilochus, I think.
@Jeidsath: Nice find. I’ve read that play, probably just a year ago, but I don’t even remember that bit!
I can’t make any sense with αὐτὴν, even by changing the punctuation…
If it were αὐτὴν there instead of αὐτὸν, would that become “I wasn’t willing to save it [the shield]?”
That’s impossible; it would contradict what he says in the first two lines–he left the shield behind. It would also ruin the joke.
He threw away his shield but saved his hide.
It would make the men de contrast pointless.
ἀσπίδι μὲν . . . αὐτὸν δ᾽
Is ἔντος ἀμώμητον really epic parody? . . . So could it rather be said that they share a common poetic idiom?
ἀμώμητον is an epic, heroic epithet deliberately (I think) used in an anti-heroic context. It contributes to this poem’s impact. The fact that ἔντεα occurs only in the plural in Homer strongly suggests to me that this is a deliberately ironic adaptation of a formular phrase. Otherwise ἔντος ἀμώμητον here would be merely ornamental.
Speaking about the Cologne papyrus… My single complaint with Campbell’s excellent book is that he left out all the juicy bits. There’s an edition of the Lyrics by West, which I believe includes these, but it’s not easy to get. Where else could these be read?
Well, who knows, really… The way I felt about it is that it’s just a bit pathetic, like “that trusty old piece of gear”. It’s not a generic decorating epithet like ἀμύμων, or that’s how it looks like to me.
I don’t think pathos enters into this. The poem is deliberately, defiantly anti-heroic. ἐρρέτω is a strong word – something like f. . . it! Regret for the shield is out of place in this poem: the point is precisely that he has no regrets about the shield–or about saving his skin in an unheroic act of turning tail and running from the field: τί μοι μέλει; The shield, he says, is just an object that can be replaced.
I agree that the poem is anti-heroic, but the way I see it, ἔντος ἀμώμητον being a bit pathetic is by no means in contraction with that. Quite the opposite. The poets starts by nostalgizing about the the shield he lost, but then he sort of gets a grip of himself midway: “But hey, I saved myself! What do I whine about that shield? To hell with it, I’ll get a new one!”.
I prefer the punctuation τί μοι μέλει; by the way…
The poem starts by nostalgizing about the the shield he lost,
The poem starts by telling us an enemy soldier is boasting about a shield. You learn that something about a bush, then the heroic epithet, then at the end of the second line you learning that it was the poet’s shield that he abandoned in battle. To me, this is hardly nostalgic, and to read it as nostalgic would make the poem less effective, in my view–it would take the punch out of the poem (assuming its a complete poem, which I think it is).
This is constructed to leave the reader/audience wondering what’s going on and to delay the information that the poet deserted his battle station until the end of the second line, so that the anti-heroic act comes as a shocking surprise. Where this poem is going doesn’t become evident until the second half of the pentameter–the reader/audience is left wondering what’s happening until then, and doesn’t know that the shield was the poet’s shield or even that the poet is involved in the poem at all. The heroic epithet lulls the reader/audience into a sense that this is going to be a conventional heroic narrative of some sort, and then the poet hits him/her with a surprise. “It was my shield, and I turned tail and ran.”
The quotation from Aristophanes shows that this poem was on everyone’s lips and, I think, renders the αὐτὸν/ψυχὴν discussion pointless (though I haven’t made my way through the German yet). The poem must have been circulating primarily orally, and who knows when or how this poem became “textualized”? Still less known and less knowable is what word was used in the original “textualization” – both work more or less equally well, and there’s no evidence that Aristophanes was working from a written text or from memory. Personally, I think αὐτὸν is more effective, but I’m sure good reasons can be advanced for the alternative reading.
I don’t think we really disagree, except about whether ἔντος ἀμώμητον, as an expression, is epic parody or not. There’s no question in my opinion that the poem as a whole is heroic parody. Perhaps ἔντος ἀμώμητον is not pathetic per se, but the addition of κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων makes it so, as it also makes clear the meaning of the first line (an enemy has my shield…). Perhaps also “nostalgizing” wasn’t quite the right word, but that’s the one I used because my command of English usage didn’t allow me to find a better one… With the third line, of course, comes a complete reversal of the heroic pathos of the first half of the poem.
I must have a basic grammar problem. Why is it αὐτὸν instead of αὑτὸν? Also, there’s a longer version of the fragment on TLG.
δεσπόται Εὐβοίης δουρικλυτοί. (5)
(4) ⸏·(.)].(.)[
⊗ φρα[
ξεινοι̣.[ @1
δεῖπνον δ’ ου[
οὔτ’ ἐμοὶ ωσαῖ̣[ (5)
ἀλλ’ ἄγε σὺν κώ⸤θωνι θοῆς διὰ σέλματα νηὸς
φοίτα καὶ κοίλ⸤ων πώματ’ ἄφελκε κάδων,
ἄγρει δ’ οἶνον ⸤ἐρυθρὸν ἀπὸ τρυγός· οὐδὲ γὰρ ἡμεῖς
νηφέμεν ⸤ἐν φυλακῆι τῆιδε δυνησόμεθα.
(5) ἀσπίδι μὲν Σαΐων τις ἀγάλλεται, ἣν παρὰ θάμνωι,
ἔντος ἀμώμητον, κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων·
αὐτὸν δ’ ἐξεσάωσα. τί μοι μέλει ἀσπὶς ἐκείνη;
ἐρρέτω· ἐξαῦτις κτήσομαι οὐ κακίω. @1
(6) ξείνια δυσμενέσιν λυγρὰ χαριζόμενοι,
(8) πολλὰ δ’ ἐυπλοκάμου πολιῆς ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσι
θεσσάμενοι γλυκερὸν νόστον ⏑–⏑⏑–
(9) ν..ετ̣ο̣π̣[
ε̣λιπε̣ν [ @1
ώ̣λεσενα.[
μ̣ένους [
These are different, unrelated fragments, marked off by the numbers in brackets. (6), for example, is a pentameter, so it can’t follow the final pentameter of (5).
I can’t quite make out the diacriticals, but it should be auton, not hauton, which is 3rd, not 1st, person and wouldn’t fit with a first-person verb.
More Homeric parody in fragment 60?
οὐ φιλέω μέγαν στρατηγὸν οὐδὲ διαπεπλιγμένον
οὐδὲ βοστρύχοισι γαῦρον οὐδ΄ ὑπεξυρημένον͵
ἀλλά μοι σμικρός τις εἴη καὶ περὶ κνήμας ἰδεῖν
ῥοικός͵ ἀσφαλέως βεβηκὼς ποσσί͵ καρδίης πλέως.
Maybe parody isn’t the word, but surely he breaks with certain conventions of the heroic/ homeric world.
Again there is a certain down-to-earthness about the poem. He makes me think of Hemmingway somehow: poet, tough hombre, man of the world, very confident (or posturing to be all these things).
κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων doesn’t make this pathetic or nostalgic–the poet is making light of, in fact boasting of, an act that flies in the face of heroic values. He doesn’t tell us this directly, but rather implicitly, by letting us know that he left his shield behind–the supreme disgrace for a heroic warrior. (“Come back with your shield or on it.”) Interpreting κάλλιπον οὐκ ἐθέλων as nostalgic or pathetic would sentimentalize a pungent poem.
These pieces are not really “lyric” in the accepted sense of the term. Bart, the reason the Alexandrians didn’t count him as a lyric poet was because he didn’t use “lyric” meters—they didn’t think his meters were inappropriate in themselves, far from it. He’s shoehorned into Campbell’s collection of “lyric” poets, but really he has no proper place there—and nor do Tyrtaeus and Callinus, or Mimnermus, or Solon. They’re elegiac poets, quite a different kettle of fish. (Not that there’s anything elegiac about them in the modern sense: the term refers to the meter, the elegiac couplet.) In scholarly editions lyric (aka melic) poets are edited separately from elegiac and iambic ones. There’s more to it than meter, there’s performance factors too, problematic though these often are. In elegiac couplets the first line is a dactylic hexameter—the meter of Homer—and the second is also dactylic but a so-called pentameter (a misnomer). Meter and ethos are closely related.
On the shield-chucking piece (another misnomer?—he didn’t necessarily throw it away), I’m with Paul in that we shouldn’t automatically go assuming familiarity with Homer, but not as regards nostalgia for the shield or getting a grip on himself midway through. The μεν sets up the upcoming contrast between the replaceable shield and his own irreplaceable self right at the outset. And perhaps I’m too familiar with the piece, but I doubt his audience would be at all surprised by the second couplet. It’s designed to be shocking in its insouciance, of course, but the first couplet is not much less so. ουκ εθελων (“oh, I didn’t mean to”) doesn’t make it heroic: what hero ever abandoned his shield under any circumstances? He’s brazenly advertizing the fact that he ran away in the face of the enemy. In anyone else that would be cause for ignominy. (Similarly Qimmik in his latest, I see. I can’t keep up.) Archilochus assumes a certain stance, and his cavalier unheroic attitude is only what would be expected from his persona. (For insouciance I think the Iliad’s Paris would make an worthwhile comparison, but of course he is not altogether immune to shaming, while Archilochus defiantly places himself quite outside of the shame culture.) It’s more “realistic” (and the real-life Archilochus did fight in real-life battles), but it’s also an in-character pose. Archilochus’ “I” has an identity all of its own.
Punctuation. τι μοι μελει; doesn’t go at all well after αυτον δ’ εξεσαωσα, we need the reversion to the shield to be signalled (and enjambment of ασπις εκεινη | ερρετω would spoil the balance). The sequence has to be “… || but I did manage to rescue myself. What do I care for that shield? | Let it go hang, I’ll get another one, just as good.||”
Text. αυτον clearly better than ψυχην, I’d say. It’s stronger and less ordinary.
Pace Qimmik, Archilochus is nothing like as nasty as Hipponax. The Cologne epode is comparatively decorous, in keeping with its meter. No-one does nasty like Hipponax—not that you’d know it from Campbell’s selection. If you like obscene, you’ll love Hipponax.
@Bart. Pindar is a praise poet, Archilochus is a blame poet (cf. Pindar’s ψογερόν). They perform opposite cultural functions. Pindar exalts his patrons (and himself), Archilochus tears everyone down. It goes with the iambos genre. Naturally an establishment figure like Quintilian didn’t approve, bless his little cotton socks. Interestingly enough, though, Archilochus’ reputation in later times (from Pindar on) is rather distortive, much narrower than the actual range of Archilochus’ output. Newly discovered fragments shows that he also wrote lengthy narrative elegiac poems quite different in nature from the invective for which he was best known.
@jeidsath. These are different fragments, no connexion between them.
As to αὐτον, it gives perfect sense (sc. ἐμέ). αὑτον (contraction of ἑαυτόν) didn’t exist in Archilochus’ time, and if it had it would be 3rd person.
Whew, that’s more than enough from me.
What I had been looking at was the LSJ entry for ἑαυτοῦ:
in Att., Trag., and later, αὑτοῦ, etc., is used for the 1st or 2nd pers., as for “ἐμαυτοῦ, αὐτὸς καθ᾽ αὑτοῦ τἄρα μηχανορραφῶ” A.Ch.221, cf. S.OT138, etc.; for “σεαυτοῦ, μόρον τὸν αὑτῆς οἶσθα” A.Ag.1297, cf.1141, Pl.Phd.101c (v.l.), Ph.Bel.59.16, etc.
But whether or not that is the case here, can oblique cases of αὐτός really be used as reflexive? That’s what I hadn’t seen before. Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding something about the sentence.
Plutarch quotes it as αὐτὸς δ᾽ ἐξέφυγον θανάτου τέλος, which makes perfect sense to me, but is a later gloss, I’m sure.