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Alcmanica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

M. L. West
M. L. West
Affiliation:
University College, Oxford
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Extract

‘Alcman lived sometime in the seventh century.’

‘At some period in the seventh century Sparta was occupied with the Second Messenian War, but we do not know its date or whether Alcman lived before or during or after it.’

Between these two utterances, part of a papyrus commentary on Alcman was published,3 from which it appeared that the poet mentioned names known to us from the Spartan king-lists. It might have been expected that this discovery would lead to a more precise dating for Alcman. Some people think, that in fact it does, and I am one of them.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , December 1965 , pp. 188 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1965

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References

I am indebted to Mr. W. G. G. Forrest for reading this section and saving me from several errors.

1 Page, D. L., Alcman, The Partheneion, 1951. P. 166.Google Scholar

2 Bowra, C. M., Greek Lyric Poetry, 2nd edition, 1961, p. 19.Google Scholar

3 By Lobel, E. in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri xxiv, 1957, no. 2390 fr. 2.Google Scholar

4 A similar conclusion has been reached by Janni, P., Studi Urbinati xxxiii (1959), 162–72Google Scholar, but his argumentation is slack. Cf. Huxley, G. L., Early Sparta, 1962, pp. 61–62. As I was working on this article in the Ashmolean Library, I discovered that at the next desk Mr. F. D. Harvey was writing one on the same subject. We found on comparing notes that we had independently reached the same conclusions on some points, but that there was sufficient divergence to justify our each proceeding to publication.Google Scholar

5 As might be suggested by the name , mother of a herdsman from Sybaris in Theocr. 5. 15 (codd.).

1 It is remotely possible that she was not named in the text, but known to the commentator from some other source as a daughter of Leotychidas. On this hypothesis, the text would have referred to ‘the daughter of Leotychidas’, and the commentator would be saying, ‘it is not clear whether the daughter referred to is Timasimbrota’. But this would be an odd comment, oddly expressed; and the fully Doric form in which the name appears (contrast ) suggests mat it is quoted directly from the text, not taken from history books.

2 I have inquired of Mr. Lobel whether the traces are compatible with and gather from his reply that they are.

3 Davison, J. A., Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Papyrology, 1961, p. 33Google Scholar; Xen, . Resp. Lac. 15. 9.Google Scholar

4 Presumably not more than a couple of words; in a lemma abbreviated by means of there would have been no need to quote more than and by itself would not fill the space.

1 The normal meaning of before Pindar is ‘height’, ‘build’; resembles Homeric expressions like Occasionally the word seems to have a more general meaning in connexion with female beauty, ‘form’: Hes. Th. 259 similarly 355; Ale. 130. 32 But if Timasimbrota is compared to a man, only the more usual meaning comes into question.

2 On this reputation see Forrest, W. G. G., Phoenix xvii (1963), 170–1.Google Scholar

3 I know of no evidence that a Eurypontid would be likely to be offended at being compared with an Agiad.

1 cannot mean ‘best of his female children’.

2 One might have expected the commentator to say rather But perhaps we are dealing with a boiled-down version of this.

3 That belongs to this note and not to the following lemma, as or the like, is shown by the position of the coronis and diple below the line, indicating that die new poem began in the middle of the line.

1 Provided that Tyrtaeus' (fr. 4. 6) is to be taken literally, as I am sure it is.

2 These arguments have not been universally accepted, but they seem to me cogent. See Kiechle, F., Messenische Studien, 1959, pp. 90 ff.Google Scholar

3 Jacoby, , Apollodors Chronik, pp. 130 ff.Google Scholar

4 So Huxley, , op. cit., p. 57.Google Scholar

1 Sappho's mother is said to have had the same name as the daughter whom Sappho addresses in this poem. The assumption that she was named here, ‘the other Kleis, the one who bore me’, will explain why Sappho says ‘she who bore me’ instead of ‘my mother’. The division is doubtful; Alcaeus has thrice without augment (43. 13, 308. 327. 2), but all in mythical genealogies.

2 Fr. 1. 51, 59. Venetian horses were celebrated at least as early as the fifth cen- tury, and Euripides has no qualms about giving them to Hippolytus, though perhaps he is not the poet most likely to be worried by an anachronism. It is not very probable that in this one passage of Alcman the reference is to the Paphlagonian Eneti, who are not known as horse-breeders to us and were apparently not known to Strabo (212) either. Cf. Beaumont, , J.H.S. lvi (1936), 191Google Scholar. Another Adriatic tribe appeared in Alcman, fr. 151. On Greek penetration of the Adriatic see in general Boardman, J., The Greeks Overseas, 1964, pp. 232–5.Google Scholar

3 Boardman, , op. cit., p. 219.Google Scholar

4 The manuscripts of Stephanus of Byzantium are at variance between and The η in the second syllable is guaranteed by the following words In the first syllable, the vowel is elsewhere ’I- in Greek, except for an alternative in ‘A- recorded in P. Oxy. 1611 fr. 11. 7, but E- in Latin. If Alcman wrote 'A-, he may have associated the name with the Mysian town of Assos, which he also may have mentioned (fr. 153).

5 Cf. Bolton, J. D. P., Aristeas of Proconnesus, 1962, pp. 5 and 40Google Scholar; on the other side, Schmid-Stahlin, , Gr. Lit. i. 1. 303 n. 7Google Scholar, Meuli, K., Hermes lxx (1935), 154 n. 2Google Scholar, and Burkert, W., Gnomon xxxv (1963), 235 f., arguing from the different form used by Alcman.Google Scholar

6 Blakeway, A. A. ap. Bowra, op. cit., 1st ed., p. 66Google Scholar; Bolton, , op. cit., pp. 40, 43, 187 n. 4, 188 n. 9. Bolton suggests that was coined by Alcman from (Colaxes Val. Fl. 6. 48), the Scythian king known to Herodotus as , and meant no more than . It is perhaps more likely that he had heard (from Aristeas or elsewhere) of a tribe whose eponymous ancestor the king was, and formed his adjective from that. The scholia to die Pardieneion in P. Oxy. 2389 fr. 6. i do not give the impression that Colaxaean horses were known from any other source.Google Scholar

1 Pace Bolton, pp. 7–19.Google Scholar Cf. Russell, D. A., ‘Longinus’ On The Sublime, 1964, p. 103.Google Scholar ‘Longinus’ 's fragment is surely not ‘the surprised comment of innocent continentals on the first ship they have heard of (Russell)— they seem to know all about navigation by the stars, seasickness, and the danger of drowning —but the comment of a man who only sails from necessity, probably Aristeas himself, upon men who go to sea for weeks at a time: perhaps long-range Greek traders who conveyed Aristeas as far as the north shore of the Black Sea, and whose way of life was not generally known in Aegean Greece. Hesiod's comments would have been similar in tone.

2 He represents himself as an old man in fr. 26.

3 Page calls archaeology to witness that the bright Sparta of Alcman is that of the seventh century, and does not correspond to conditions in the sixth. The argument is weakly grounded: see Wade-Gery, H. T., J.H.S. lxxvii (1957), 324.Google Scholar

4 Death is ‘night’ as early as Homer. Pind. N. 7. 98 and other parallels quoted by Page (op. cit., p. 84) support the equation Cf. Antiphon the sophist, B 50.Google Scholar

1 Elision of is found in Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar; in Laconian inscriptions the short form is attested before consonants, in several other dialects before vowels too.

2 So Wilamowitz, , Hermes xxxii (1897), 255. The idea that the proceedings take place by moonlight becomes absurd. The idea that the sun is about to rise seems to me no more tenable. The Greeks were long past the stage of praying for the sun to rise. They knew he could be relied on to do that, and they would certainly wait till he did so before attempting to communicate with him. This is another argument against .Google Scholar

3 The dream is, as always, thought of as coming from outside. When Epimenides took his historic siesta in a Cretan cave, he en-joyed an instructive dream in which he conversed with and (Max. Tyr. 10. 1 p. in H.): not because he was specially favoured of the gods, but because of where he was sleeping, in a holy cave.

I suppose Alcman suggests that you might dream of your horse on a hot day, rather than at night, because it is a hot day. There is nothing to indicate that the of Od. 24. 11 has anything to do with the dreams in the following line.

4 Of course not only Venetian horses were chestnuts: Il. 9. 407, 11. 680 . Horses called belonged to Achilles and Hector in the Iliad (Achilles is in Ale. 42. 14), and to the Dioscuri in Alcm. 25, Stes. 1. Hiero's famous horse Pherenicus, which won at the Olympic Games in 476, is described as by Bacchylides (5. 37), and cannot have been a Venetian if sch. E. Hipp. 231 is right in saying that the first Olympic victory with Venetians was that of the Spartan Leon in 440. As far as I can discover, nothing is recorded about the appearance of Venetic horses; they were no longer bred in Strabo's time (212), and our information about ancient horses comes mainly from later writers.Google Scholar

1 Anacr. 72 .

2 So her friends called her, not Philylla.

3 On the adjective cf. above, P. 193.

4 Davison, , Hermes lxxiii (1938), 446.Google Scholar

1 Hp. Aër. Cf. 558; Eur. Ale. 450. means ‘rise’ in the sense of ‘appear about the horizon’, means ‘climb up the sky’.

2 For comparison of a thing seen by daylight to something else seen at night, cf., e.g., Il. 22. 317 ff. Pind. .Google Scholar

3 There are of course fainter stars and constellations; but it is uncertain to what extent they had been named by Alcman's time, and even when they had they were too obscure for a lyric poet and his public.

1 Like the Pleiad of Alexandrian tragedians.

2 Rather similar is Hes. Th. 154 (after description of the fearsome Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers): .

3 As in 63, a late Laconian spelling. The Alexandrian text of Alcman seem to have been based on a copy written in Sparta (Wilamowitz, , art. cit., p. 255 n. 1Google Scholar; differently in his Textgeschichte der griechischen Lyriker, p. 56), though he was certainly famous throughout Greece by the fifth century: Eupolis fr. 139, Pindar (?) P. Oxy. 2389 fr. 9. i. 9.Google Scholar

4 Fr. 147; cj. Garzya, , Alcmane: I Frammenti, 1954, p. 165.Google Scholar

1 Presumably they were not barefoot.

2 e.g. 3. 62 , Theocr. 3. 39 .

3 [Hes.] fr. 105 Rz. (cf. Ar, . Pax 987); 10 15Google Scholar The reading is confirmed by P. Oxy. 2389 fr. 7. i (b) 11.Google Scholar

4 Page, p. 46 n. 1, cf. p. 65.

1 [Hes.] P. Oxy. 2481 fr. 5. ii. 14 (Deia-neira), pind. P. 4. 213, E. Hipp. 509 ff., etc.Google Scholar

2 Fr. 39 , might suggest diat Alcman somewhere spoke of himself as a swan, as the choir does here.

3 Cf. Bowra, , op. cit., ed. 2, p. 56.Google Scholar

4 The Samian (Hom. epigr. 15), the Attic (Plu. Tbes. 22), Phoenix' (Ath. 359 e). The custom has a striking modern parallel in Ireland, where boys go begging from house to house on Boxing Day, with blackened faces, carrying a holly bush decorated with ribbon and singing or reciting the following verse or a variant:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's Day got caught in the furze. Though he is small, his family is great, So rise up, your honours, and give us a treat. I have an old canister under my arm. Three or four pence would do no harm.

(The Guardian, 27 December 1963, 6 January 1964. Cf. Frazer, , The Golden Bough, ed. 3, viii. 317 ff.Google Scholar; Nilsson, Google Scholar, Gesch. d. gr. Religion i2. 124, with literature.) The custom is said to have started in the famine of 1846–8; the Athenians believed that their wool-branch song was instituted in a famine in the time of Theseus (Plu., loc. cit., sch. Ar. Eq. 720, etc.). Every Englishman is familiar widi another children's chant of similar nature: ‘Please to remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot.’Google Scholar

1 Davison, , Hermes lxxiii (1938), 453.Google Scholar

2 Exceptions in Tragedy, e.g. A. Pcrs. 568Google Scholar, S. Tr. 962Google Scholar, E. Ba. 166.Google Scholar

3 seems an inappropriate idea here: I prefer to take as the opposite of .