LITMIR.BIZ

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we are ill, we call on all the vast repertoire of modern medicine, confident that science and technology will have the answer to our malady. Today, when we enter an athletic competition, we rely on dietetics, training, and good equipment instead of prayers to Hermes or Iris. Today, when a state deliberates on an international crisis, it does not ask Delphi or Dodona or another oracle for advice, but rather it calls on all possible experts and, in a democracy, it debates in the relevant houses, before it, for example, imposes sanctions or declares war on another country. No need to labor the point. The old gods are dead, science and technology rule. Since most classicists—I mean teachers and students—at modern universities pursue the scientific way of thinking, it is hard for us to make the imaginative leap necessary to understand what an ancient prayer, hymn, or ritual really meant to the individual praying or the group singing.¹ They certainly would not have done it if they thought it was wasted breath. So our approach can be either that of the interested observer or we can attempt somehow to step inside the ancient mindset. It is in fact the old dichotomy of the anthropologist: emic (the perspective from within the social group) or etic (the perspective of the observer). The external observer of a rite from a different culture can interpret the rite from his point of view, while the person performing the rite may have a quite different “reason.”² We do not need to go too far down this road. Suffice it to remind readers that in the religious lyric we will be discussing there is very much an emic and an etic standpoint.

But what is this religion which we wish to discuss in conjunction with archaic and classical lyric poetry? The only earlier sources to survive are the epics of Homer and Hesiod, together with fragments of the so-called epic cycle. It is probable that lyric poetry coexisted with epic, but as we map existing texts, lyric comes “after” epic. And before the two epic giants there existed a society in Greece which we can only investigate through archaeology, including inscribed clay tablets which speak to us to a very limited degree. Philology on the other hand has shown how Homeric epic developed over the centuries as an oral form of poetry with its roots in Mycenaean Greece.³ Many of the gods we encounter in literature recur in the Mycenaean linear B tablets.⁴ So the first datum is the age of many of the gods and their cults which form the background to literary religion. In Homer we see the gods assembled and conversing;⁵ we see individual gods taking individual action on earth, and humans conversely engaged in a number of actions directed toward winning divine attention and favor: praying, sacrificing, consulting oracles, singing hymns (on Achilles’ Shield), burying the dead with elaborate rituals, and so on. When the lyric poets begin their work the whole apparatus exists. They draw on tradition, personalize it, select from it.⁶ Did the poets—and their audiences— “believe” in the gods which appear in their poems, or were they already mere literary abstractions as in English classical verse? The question of belief is often brushed aside by modern scholars who maintain that Greek religion up to and including the Classical period was a question of doing, saying, but not believing. Personally I side with scholars who take the opposing view that there is no point going to great lengths to worship a god if one does not believe in his (or her) power. Is it possible to imagine that Sappho’s heart-rending appeals to Aphrodite were directed at a literary abstraction? I think not.⁷

Another important point to make at the outset is the communality of Greek lyric. Choral lyric obviously involved a number of interested parties, as we shall see: the poet, chorus, listeners, and divine “audience,” to whom the performance was addressed. But monodic lyric no doubt involved a group experience as well: apart from the singer (aoidos) there was often, we imagine, a group of male or female companions (hetairoi or hetairai) who may have joined in, too, if they knew the tune. This means that the poet was always composing for this performative context, and was not merely expressing feelings in private.⁸ This is a very important principle for Aeolic lyric (Sappho and Alcaeus) because sometimes scholars have tried to read their works as if they were private diary entries. So Greek lyric is much more public than modern poetry for the reason that it had to make itself understood to its listeners, that it had to be memorable both for performer and listener, and, above all in our case, it had to deliver an unequivocal message to the gods. There was not only a “song culture” in Greece at this time, there was also a hymn and prayer culture.⁹ The vast majority of lyric compositions, whether cult hymns or less overtly hieratic compositions, from this period are lost.¹⁰ We should beware of generalizing from the scant remains, but this “congregational” aspect of the poetry should be kept in mind.¹¹

      Religion itself as a thing in its own right did not exist either in the archaic or the classical period. The Greeks had no one word for it, as scholars never tire of pointing out.¹² No need to rehearse that argument. The converse of this truism, however, is that religion was everywhere and intertwined with everything, as we shall see. The Greeks did not separate religion from other activities, but included it in the sense that the gods and their entourage made themselves felt, and demanded recognition, in all walks of life. It might be true to say that the gods then were as omnipresent and omnipotent as the Internet today. As this spreads its tentacles into almost all our activities nowadays, and watches over our shoulder, so then the Greeks believed they lived and prospered by the grace of the gods and suffered, and died, by the will of the gods. Nevertheless it is important to remember that at this time “religion” was organized only in the sense that the early polis began to choose its priests, that is, the functionaries who would supervise sacrifice on the various civic altars, and the times that was appropriate. Otherwise there were many freelancers: prophets, seers, purveyors of the Mysteries, healers, and so on.¹³ They were a motley crew, as Aristophanes liked to point out later.¹⁴ Their reputation was, no doubt, predicated on their apparent success. The Greek army attacking Troy had its Chalcas; the Spartans at Plataea their Teisamenos; the Ten Thousand in Xenophon’s Anabasis their Silanos (1.7.18), or generally “prophets” (4.3.17 μάντεις).¹⁵ Likewise, holy scripture had never been organized into a unity like the books of the Bible; there were sacred texts such as those composed by hexameter poets such as Orpheus, Musaios, Olen, but these did not form a coherent unity, and nobody tried to force them into such. Thus “religion” did not exist as a recognized body of sacred scripture. All these people and entities vied with each other for the truth,¹⁶ as, indeed, did the gods. There was competition and rivalry among the gods, as there was among holy men on earth. True, as Herodotus says, Homer and Hesiod did their best to give the Greeks a theogony, and organize their worship into something like a coherent system (2.52), but their works were still poetry and nothing like holy law, or catechism.

So when the gods and ritual are invoked in lyric poetry we should bear this in mind. The poets were calling on a vast conglomerate of traditional hiera (lit. “sacred things”), by no means to be scorned in its numen (lit. “holy power”), but not part of what might be called a system politic. The famous case of Sappho fr. 1 Campbell takes the form of a genuine private prayer to Aphrodite with many features of the ancient prayer-hymn;¹⁷ we would, I think, certainly admit this piece to the category “private religion,” but it is equally certainly not a cult hymn in the sense of a song repeatedly sung by a congregation engaged in cult worship. Or we might take several of Alcaeus’ fragments in which recognized gods are called upon, again, with many features of the traditional hymn, but with a recognizable purpose of calling the gods’ support for Alcaeus’ faction (his stasis) on Lesbos.¹⁸ Again, definitely religion, but hardly “official” worship. Later on, some genuine cult hymns do indeed come to light. One of the most interesting is the Cretan Hymn for the Great Kouros.¹⁹ Its precise dating is a matter of debate but it may be very old. The inscription which transmits it to us is, admittedly, much later. But this indeed is genuine cult lyric, with a recognizable lyric meter (ionics) and a refrain (ephymnion) which no doubt rang out when the congregation sang it. Some other “authentic” cult hymns are equally late: the inscriptions on the Athenian Treasure-House at Delphi recording hymnic compositions by Limenaios and Athenaios are hymns to Apollo in ionic meter for the ritual known as Pythais (a procession from Athens to Delphi).²⁰ Again, clear cases of cult hymns, but originating in the second century BC. In this essay the texts we collected in Furley and Bremer 2001 will be largely taken as read; it will perhaps be of greater interest

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