Episode 25: Lyrical Ballistics

Sappho, Pindar, and Archaic Greek Poetry

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 25: Lyrical Ballistics. This is the first program in our season on Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature, and today we’re going to talk about a genre called Greek lyric poetry. Greek lyric poetry is most often associated with the years from about 700-500 BCE, a period which historians call Greece’s “Archaic period.” Lyric poetry’s name comes from the lyre, a simple harp over which poetry was sung and recited in antiquity. Lyric poetry, or poetry more generally set to music, needless to say, didn’t begin in Ancient Greece, but it is from the Greek Archaic period that we begin to have enough surviving lyric poetry, written by specific authors, that it begins to feel like a genre – one with conventions, common themes, and standard meters. Lyric poetry is distinguished by being shorter in duration than the epic poetry of Homer, and lyric poetry’s themes tend toward the personal, local, and occasional rather than chronicling sweeping stories of gods and men. Homeric epics, as you’ll remember from prior episodes, are not professions of love to a mistress, nor confessions of private anxiety, but instead sweeping sagas, told in the third person, involving many characters and scene changes. Greek lyric poetry, on the other hand, is more like what we think of today when we think of a poem – something personal, associated with one speaker, and often just one occasion. The most famous Greek lyric poet is likely Sappho, a native of the island of Lesbos, who lived from the late 600s to the early 500s – roughly 630-570 BCE. The runner up is probably Pindar, who lived from roughly 518-443 BCE, about a century after Sappho.

We’re going to read a lot of ancient Greek literature in our podcast. We started with Homer and Hesiod back around 700 BCE. After Classical Greek literature, Hellenistic literature, the New Testament, the church fathers, and Second Sophistic, we’ll end our journey through ancient Greek literature over a thousand years later in about 300 CE with the first known novels, also part of ancient Greece’s literary history, though not many people know about them. So this episode, again on Greek lyric poetry, is the first program in this season on classical Greek literature. And before we get into the world of Sappho and Pindar and the others, let’s take a few minutes here upfront to learn about ancient Greek literature as a whole.

Ancient Greek Literature from the Archaic to the Classical Period

When we first learn about ancient Greek literature, as kids, it’s often presented to us as a series of heroic journeys. There’s Hercules or Heracles, fighting the hydra. And here’s Theseus, using that string to get through the labyrinth. And there’s Perseus, making Medusa look at her own reflection in his shiny shield. And here’s Odysseus, sailing past the sirens. The way that we hear about ancient Greek literature when we’re young makes it sound a bit like the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – like ancient Greek literature was a bunch of adventure stories about heroes and a great big bunch of gods and maybe some nymphs, and that’s what it’s all about. From what we’ve heard so far in this podcast – the Homeric epics, and Hesiod’s Theogony, ancient Greek literature really does seem to involve a lot of adventure and war and action and monsters. And this is what most of us think of when we think of ancient Greek literature – biceps and spears, ships and evil creatures, demigods and battles, and that kind of thing. Let’s go a little deeper, though, and begin our journey into ancient Greek literature proper by getting some dates into our heads.

You may have heard of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods of ancient Greek history before, but it’s worth getting these three timeframes fresh in our minds right now. First, we spent eight episodes learning about Hesiod and Homer, usually dated to around 700 BCE, the early part of the Archaic period. The next period of ancient Greek history gets called the Classical period. The Classical Period lasted from 508-323, or the foundation of Athenian democracy in 508 BCE down to the death of Alexander of Macedon in 323 BCE. The final period of ancient Greek history is generally called the Hellenistic period, from 323 down to 31 BCE, during which Greek culture and civilization spread all over Eurasia and North Africa due to the conquests of Alexander of Macedon. Of these three periods that I just described, the Classical Period – again 508-323 BCE – is easily the most important in terms of literary history. When people say, “ancient Greece,” often times whether they know it or not, they are thinking of Classical Greece, and that golden timeframe of 508-323 BCE.

By the time you finish listening to this episode, you’ll have a decent command of ancient Greek literary history up to the Classical period – in other words ancient Greek literary history before 508 BCE. After 508 BCE, after Homer, and after the Greek lyric poets that we’ll cover today, it was during the 400s and a little ways into the 300s BCE that most of what we think of when we think of ancient Greek literature was produced. What we might expect to find in the actual primary works of surviving literature from Classical Greece,– the Heracleses, the Theseuses, the Perseuses – all those heroic adventure sagas – frequently isn’t there. But that doesn’t mean the Classical Greek literature that has made it down to us is sparse. An astonishing 44 plays have survived from the Classical period, first staged between 480 and 380 BCE, written by ancient Greece’s four most famous playwrights – Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. These plays, not epics, not short poetry, and certainly not novels or short stories – these plays offer us the largest body of ancient Greek literature that survives today, and they were a product of one of the most spectacular cultural renaissances in history. The 44 plays from Classical Athens that have survived down to the present day are not representative of the full breadth of stories that were being told in the agoras and stages of ancient Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Magna Graecia. What they do show us, however, to put it very briefly, is a vast and interconnected narrative tradition, often rooted in the Homeric epic cycle, in which secondary and tertiary characters and events related to the Trojan War were given extended theatrical treatment in full length stage plays. The single surviving complete of Classical Greece is Aeschylus’ Oresteian Trilogy, premiered in Athens in 458 BCE, a series of plays about the homecoming of the Greek King Agamemnon, and its aftermath, following the Trojan War. Like the Oresteian Trilogy, dozens of surviving plays from Classical Greece take events from the Homeric poems and greater epic cycle and delve more deeply into the people and events chronicled in this immense story.

However, not every Classical Greek play is rooted in the epic cycle. The Theban plays of Sophocles that we will read – these are the ones about Oedipus – are centered on a different sequence of events, just as the two plays of Euripides that we’ll go through chronicle occurrences some time before the Trojan War. The plays of Aristophanes, written in a genre literary historians call Old Comedy, are set in the contemporary Greek world of the late 400s BCE, and often peopled with a mixture of real-life men and women who were the playwright’s satirical targets. Thus, while quite a few of Classical Athens’ surviving 44 plays are not rooted in the actual epic cycle, outside of the context of Aristophanic comedy, the Classical Greek tragedies still extant are almost across the board grounded in one of several long story cycles – most of all the Trojan War, but also a series of crises and then war in Thebes. From these central trunks, later writers grafted more and more stories to be told onstage.

Within the world of Classical Greek theater, which we’ll soon get into in this season, there are what we can think of as paradigmatic tragic and comedic plots. In Classical Greece’s archetypal tragic plot, a character displays overweening hubris, makes a mistake, and is punished, sometimes by gods, and sometimes by members of a community. In Classical Greece’s characteristic comedic plot, a public personality, or historical event, or ideology is pummeled and mocked to such an extent that it seems utterly absurd by the play’s end. But between tragedy and comedy, late in the 400s BCE, a new style began to emerge. Some of Euripides’ later plays, especially Iphigenia in Tauris, Ion, and Helen, have longer, almost novelistic plots. These plays involve separations of family members, and reunions at far later dates. They involve long journeys and sequences of adventures, being akin to Shakespeare’s romance plays like Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. These late Euripides plays, and Euripides the tragedian more generally, had an outsized effect on the ancient Greek literature over the next few centuries.

Ancient Greek Literature from the Hellenistic Period to Late Antiquity

Once our podcast moves through the main course of Classical Greek tragedy and comedy, we’ll explore what happened next in other words, how the stuff in the 400s led to the stuff in the 300s. What happened next, after all, often gets ignored. A century after Euripides staged the aforementioned plays – those in-between-tragedy-and-comedy plays, we have a single example of a genre historians call New Comedy – the play Dyskolos, by Menander, staged in 316 BCE. And with this play, this single full surviving work of Greek New Comedy, we see an astonishing amount of what was later to come in later literary history. The main breadth of Classical Greek drama, as I mentioned a moment ago, springs from a gigantic story cycle. This story cycle assumes a broadly shared cultural history. Archaic and Classical Greek literature presumes that you’re part of an in-group who knows who characters like Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Medea are. The problem with this assumption, as history sped up over the course of the 300s, as wars and migrations scattered populations all over the Mediterranean, as Alexander of Macedon killed and enslaved tens of thousands and behind a mess after his death in 323, was that the indigenous cultures of Greek-speaking city states were disintegrating. Coalitions and then empires began to replace these old city states, and then to replace one another. From the Peloponnesian War at the end of the 400s down to the wars of Alexander and his successors at the end of the 300s, the median Greek speaking citizen of the central and eastern Mediterranean would have found herself in a much more unstable and culturally heterogeneous world than those of her grandparents and great-grandparents.

The deracination and migration that followed the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, needless to say, had an effect on the literature of subsequent centuries. Specifically, with what has survived from the ancient Greek playwright Menander, active at the end of the 300s, we begin to see more generic, stock characters – the castaway orphan, the clever slave, the grumpy old man, the buffoon, the drunk, the dapper bachelor, and so on. You didn’t need to know any sprawling backstory in order to understand these characters, and their stories. Their plots were not collective civic explorations of great philosophical questions, but instead, appealing narratives about people falling in love, finding home, and discovering who they were, like the romantic comedies we still watch onscreen today. The surviving works of Roman comedy– those of Plautus and Terence – show that Roman stage shows followed suit, with the earliest Latin plays generally also casting aside the operatic traditions of epic, and instead being self-contained narratives about appealing and generic protagonists.

The period between 323 and 31 BCE, again, is generally called the Hellenistic Period by historians, so named because it was the epoch during which Hellenic, or Greek culture, spread by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, took root widely in the Mediterranean and the former Achaemenid Persian Empire, which Alexander had destroyed. The most famous era within the Hellenistic period, in terms of ancient Greek literature, was probably the 200s BCE, and not in the Greek mainland, but instead Alexandria, Egypt. There, two figures in particular are of interest to literary historians. The first, Apollonius of Rhodes, wrote an epic that survives in full – the Argonautica, more widely known to us today as Jason and the Argonauts, and we’ll read that in its entirety in our podcast. The second, Callimachus, was a scholar poet associated with the famous Library of Alexandria. Callimachus left behind both scholarly works as well as dense and allusive short poetry – poetry that was influential in the final century BCE, for Roman poets like Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid.

And as we come to the story of Latin literature, and the birth of the Roman empire, during the first century BCE, oftentimes, the continued output of Greek authors gets sidelined and forgotten. It should not be. Most obviously, the New Testament was written by Greek speakers between about 50 and 100 CE, and its theology demonstrates probable influences from Greek philosophical traditions like stoicism and cynicism. But beyond the New Testament, something that was, in the long run, equally influential was happening in the Greek language between the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity. Let me tell you about the end of Ancient Greek literature, then, before I tell you about the beginning of it in the remainder of this show.

Every single thing that we will read in this 15-episode sequence on Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature will be written in verse. The archaic Greek poetry we’ll read in this program, and the plays of Classical Athens – all of it was written in verse, and not prose. However, in the ancient Greek language, other genres were also being set down in prose, and these were works of philosophy, history, and geography. In one sense, then, literature, in prose, did not exist in the Greek language in antiquity. Only, it did.

Plato’s dialogues are full of fairytales and fables. Herodotus’ histories and works of geography are seasoned with myths and legends. Other philosophers, historians, and geographers continued to pepper their otherwise factual works with colorful fictions. From the 400s BCE, then, there was a tradition of telling tall tales in prose. At some point, this tradition began to evolve into long form prose fiction. Subsequently, roughly contemporary with the New Testament, or the second half of the first century CE, we have what’s often called the earliest surviving novel – a romantic adventure story called Callirhoe, by an author named Chariton. Other novels followed over the next few centuries, and in total, we have five complete Ancient Greek novels, along with fragments of many others. The tradition of novel writing may have begun during the Hellenistic period, and we have no idea how old novel writing actually was as a craft. But the fact remains that Ancient Greek speakers, in addition to having contributed so much to the world’s cultural history already, also get the credit for leaving behind the first known novels.

So that is the story of Ancient Greek literature proper – a bit more complex, as you can see, than a small handful of tales about muscular adventurers slaying monsters. There are more ancient Greek writers whom we’ll meet during Late Antiquity, such as my favorite satirist of the ancient world, Lucian of Samosata, who lived during the 100s CE and was the author of one of the aforementioned novels, and also the poet Nonnus, who likely lived during the 400s CE, and left behind the longest epic that survives from Greco-Roman antiquity. However, the subject of novels, in general, offer us a useful segue to the topic of our present episode, once again, Greek lyric poetry, or Greek poetry written, generally speaking, between the late 700s – the age of Homer and Hesiod, and then the late 500s – the time when Athenian Democracy was established.

On the subject of novels, today, we think of literature as essentially a private activity. We read novels. We read poetry. We even read plays. But this was not how literature existed in antiquity. Before the printing press, and before widespread literacy, literature was once a public affair, performed by bards, commissioned by patrons, and appreciated by audiences with large appetites for listening to literature and music together. So let’s begin our journey into Greek lyric poetry by learning about how it functioned on a social level. In order to do that, I want to set our clock back to the early spring of 582 BCE. Because you and I, and everyone listening – we’re all going to a party. [music]

A Trip to Boeotian Thebes in 582 BCE

It is a sunny evening in the year 582 BCE. We’re standing on top of a stone wall in a place called Boeotia. To the east and west of us rises green hill country, and to the north, a plain that ends in more pale green hills, with the dark blue of a freshwater lake between them. The hills are covered with perennial grasses, plane trees, oaks, and an occasional poplar. Orchards and vineyards quilt the lowlands, and on rocky ridges and peaks in the distance, you can see the wind-bent shapes of cypress trees, curved into crooks and coifs by the press of the inland breeze.

Close by where we’re standing, the oak trees touch the ends of their boughs to the earth, and beneath them, small creatures forage for acorns. Where there are no oaks, there are bushes, and the shrub lands near the walls are filled with woodpeckers, quail and pheasants. As far as the eye can see, everywhere the grass has come up, bursts of yellow flowers catch the light of the fading afternoon. Later, when the moon rises, the flowers will turn a paler yellow, and all around us, the taupe rocks on mountains, the distant lakes, and the neatly cut stonework beneath our feet will brighten, and glow, and shimmer in the starlight. Also, we’re going to get really drunk. Or, I should say, even drunker.

It’s the twelfth day of the month of Anthesterion – a stretch roughly between February and March in a modern calendar, and we’re in the middle of a three-day party called the Anthesteria, a festival in honor of our city’s patron god, Dionysus. This party is a ritual celebration of the opening of last year’s wine. It marks the very beginning of spring, and during one of its key ceremonies, some of last year’s vintage, stored in large containers called pithoi, will be opened and enjoyed, and our whole city is going to party. The city in question is Boeotian Thebes, a place about forty miles northwest of Athens, not to be confused with the more famous Egyptian Thebes. The year, again, is 582, and Boeotian Thebes, like many other cities in the Aegean world, is up and coming. Thebes is trading with its neighbors, Eretria, Platea, Corinth and Athens, and at this particular period of history, Athens is no more prominent than a dozen other advantageously located cities in Archaic Greece. At this juncture, actually, Thebes seems like it might end up outstripping the other city states in its vicinity. Let’s – just for a moment – let’s pretend that we’re Thebans. It’s a good thing to be a Theban in 582 BCE. Our city is the legendary birthplace of Dionysus, and Heracles. It is the city of Oedipus, Jocasta, Antigone, and Creon, and was once the site of a great war between Polynices and Eteocles, a war later chronicled in Aeschylus’ play, the Seven Against Thebes, and the Roman poet Statius’ epic, the Thebaid. Thebes is close to Delphi, and Mount Parnassus. We have expansive freshwater lakes to the north. Our legendary founder, Cadmus, was a monster slayer in league with Perseus – Cadmus supposedly brought the Greeks the phonetic alphabet and slayed a legendary dragon. And much more recently, our most famous poet, Hesiod of Thebes, has written poetry that’s already popular in certain literate circles throughout the Aegean world. In short, as Thebans, we have a lot going for us.

And, as Thebans, we’re well aware that something momentous has happened recently in Ancient Greece. Now, granted, in the 580s, in the ancient world, all kinds of stuff is going down. Way over in what’s today southwestern Iran, a king named Astyages has come to power over the Medes, a legendary king whose complex dynasty would eventually change the balance of power in Mesopotamia forever. In Canaan, in the 580s, Babylon has just besieged and crushed the city of Jerusalem, taking many of its moneyed citizens captive, including the Prophet Ezekiel. The prophet Jeremiah, who has written and will continue to write a vast swath of the Bible, has in the 580s gone down to Egypt, where a pharaoh called Apries is reeling under a military mutiny and the rise of a rival pharaoh. Against this rival pharaoh, Apries will unsuccessfully send an army of Greek soldiers who have established a settlement called Naucratis in the western Nile Delta. In the 580s, in short, the civilizations we’ve met in this podcast so far were coming into increasingly close, and increasingly tumultuous contact with one another.

So as we stand on that stone wall in peaceful Boeotia in the year 582 BCE, looking out over the oak trees, with the fading afternoon light spilling into our wine cups, what do we talk about? The rise of a new power in the Mesopotamian east? The Babylonian conquest of Judah, maybe? What about the Greek mercenaries down in Egypt, working on behalf of the pharaoh? That seems exciting and culturally relevant to us. But no. How about ancient Greek philosophy? Definitely not. We’re at a party. We don’t talk about any of that stuff. We want to keep things light. And so we talk about sports. [music]

Entertainments and Diversions in Archaic Greek Culture

Every four years, for generations, we Thebans have sent our athletes far to the southwest, region of Elis, in the central west of the Peloponnese, where they compete with other city states in the Panhellenic Olympic Games. But at our party tonight, everyone is talking about something new – something exciting. Just recently, a new set of games, the Pythian Games, have been established at Delphi in honor of Apollo. These new games – and we’re all very excited about this – involve musical competitions as well as athletic competitions. But, even more excitingly, these new Pythian games are, again, at Delphi, are only fifty miles to the west of us, and not a hundred fifty miles away, like the big Olympic Games held way over in the Peloponnese. As if that’s not thrilling enough, this year – just this year, in 582 BCE – yet another set of recurrent games has been set up, games called the Isthmian Games, named after the Isthmus between mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, which is also much closer to us than the Panhellenic Olympics in Elis. This means, quite simply, that there will be far more sporting competitions, that we can go to more of them, and that you and I, as Thebans, will be able to watch our city’s athletes compete more often and show them our support. And that’s something to celebrate.

Something additional to celebrate, I mean. Because it’s already the second day of Anthesteria, and we’ve already made a dent in the pithoi. All around us, people are dressed up like satyrs and fauns and nymphs. Inside the Theban palace, partygoers are having drinking competitions to see who can drain cups most quickly. One of the many fun things about Anthesteria is that slaves are encouraged to participate, and so, whoever we are, lowborn or high, we can stand together, look out over the olive orchards, and talk about the electrifying changes in sports going on all over Greece. In upcoming games, there will be chariot races, discus throwing, wrestling, foot races, and hurls of the javelin. Everyone is talking about whom Thebes will send to the new games – how we’ll distinguish our city during this round. A middle-aged man, a bit red in the face, who fancies himself a runner, sprints through the courtyard and stumbles into a fountain, and everyone laughs. Oops! Sober up, someone says, and lose that paunch. But another man, a slave, is taken a bit more seriously. He says he can hurl a discus as far as anyone, and to prove it, finds a disc shaped stone and flings it far out over the olive orchard. Onlookers eye the powerful throw appreciatively, a man recollects a throw of Odysseus in the Odyssey, and an influential aristocrat puts into words what everyone is thinking. That guy, he says, needs to go to the Pythian Games to represent us, the Thebans. Everyone agrees, and toasts are made in order to celebrate.

So there we are, mostly Thebans, the Mediterranean sun setting to the southwest, the long dormant wine and green shoots and leaves all coming back to life around us in the early spring. As dusk settles in, and the braziers roar to life, the party gets a second life. Proclamations and predictions seem to have a special heft as the moon and stars replace the glow of dusk. Thebes’ fortunes, to all, appear to be as limitless as the broad hills and sparkling lake to the north of us, and Parnassus, still snowcapped, to the northwest. We enjoy more mixed wine, and we talk more about sports. So, what’s next? Foosball? Darts? Cards? No, actually. Poetry.

[/music] Wait, wait, no, don’t leave. This poetry has music. It has some singing. It has extremely graphic sex. [music] Yeah. It does. Yeah, the music started again. Side note, by the way, I’m not kidding about that – some of literature’s first pornography is definitely within the archives of the lyrical poetry of Ancient Greece.

So, in the middle of our Theban party, as the heady second day of Anthesteria comes to a climax, we turn to the main course of our entertainment for the evening. The moon is up, now, and bats are snatching bugs out of the air, and everywhere is the scent of the Boeotian meadows in early spring – long grass and thick loamy soil. You and I hear some commotion inside and grin at one another, because we know what’s afoot. Arm in arm, maybe pausing to fill another cup of wine, if you’d like, we sidle through the crowd that’s gathering in the palace courtyard. There, five people are standing on the stage of a small amphitheater, an amphitheater built for just this sort of thing – festivals of wine and conviviality and starlight, of well-crafted lines and beautiful music. Who are these people? What do they look like?

The Personnel of an Ancient Greek Performance

There are two girls – maybe slaves, maybe noblewomen, maybe in between. We know what they’ll do. They’ll sing and dance. After all, the word chorus, from which we get the word choreography, meant a group recitation set to music, with added dancing.¹ There is also a man with a strung musical instrument called a lyre, a medium sized affair maybe two feet long and a foot across, with anywhere from eight to twenty or so strings. [lyre] He plucks a few notes on it and smiles at the audience. As one might guess, Greek lyric poetry is often accompanied by a lyre. Additionally, there is a man who will play the aulos – a double reed instrument common to Greek, and later Roman music, in which one instrument holds a pedal tone or countermelody, and the other plays the principal melody. [music] He, too plays a little ditty and then, woodwinds still in his mouth so that he looks like a walrus, grins at a man sitting across from him. Naturally, the lyre player, and the aulos player will play together. [music] And finally, in the center of the group, a dignified looking old man with a pointy beard. This gentleman is the poet and the emcee of the production, and he seems, as much as anyone in the courtyard, in his element. The semicircular throng tightens around the stage. Around us are the smells of fermentation in cups, olives and cheese, sweat and perfume, oil and incense, and light from the braziers glints on wall paintings and black figure pottery. As European villagers will be in fifteen hundred years when they sit on the greensward and watch mystery plays, as Elizabethans will be in two thousand years in London’s Globe Theater, as spellbound audiences will be twenty-four hundred years later in Harlem’s early jazz clubs, we are in a place where human creativity is invited, unleashed, and appreciated. The archaic Greek stage was a place of alchemy, where a few simple instruments brought lyrics to life, and whatever was spoken, epic recitations or newfangled satire, bawdy ballads or pious hymns – whatever was spoken was graced with the special magic of any given occasion.

So there we are, many of us having partaken liberally of the newly opened wine, and thank goodness an evening breeze spins through the open courtyard roof and offers some fresh air. As if suddenly brought to life by the wind, up onstage, the emcee makes it clear that he’s ready to begin, and a frisson of even greater excitement washes over the audience. The emcee proposes something universally appealing – a toast to the wine god, Dionysus, whose festival we are celebrating, and in whose city we are residing. We clack our wine cups together, thinking of the god watching over us and wholeheartedly approving. The middle-aged guy who tried to run earlier is finally put over the edge, and he flops over into a bush and begins snoring, and everyone laughs. He’s going to miss the best part, someone says. And then, the performers begin their set. And how do they begin their set? Why, with a classic, of course.

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder –
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war.²

Did that sound familiar? That’s Penguin Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad, in a scene midway through Book 5 in which the Greeks and Trojans begin the first of a great many battles, and it’s quite safe to assume that excerpts from the Iliad and Odyssey, other works of the epic cycle, and Hesiod’s Theogony found their way into thousands of public celebrations during Ancient Greece’s Archaic period.

One of the most basic things we always need to keep in mind when studying ancient literature is that most people experienced it in a public setting, accompanied by music, and that they experienced longer works in excerpts. This same subject – poetry being part of a performance context, rather than a privately consumed medium – has come up in past episodes about ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, Hesiod and Homer, and the Psalms and Song of Songs. As of 582 BCE, while we watch our performance in Boeotian Thebes, we’re five centuries away from the earliest mentions of the Latin codex, or bound book, and over 2,000 years away from the invention of the printing press. We are even further away from widespread literacy and the private consumption of poetry and religious scriptures. And so, whether we’re talking about secular poetry or religious scriptures, as Thebans during the Archaic Age in Greece, our poems, and our sacred legends, are all performed and experienced publicly, with music. So what’s next? That excerpt from the Iliad was pretty good. What will they perform now? [music]

The Greek Lyric Poets

Of course you and I wouldn’t know that. We’re talking about literary and performance traditions that have been out of use for thousands of years. But if we really were Thebans in 582 BCE, we’d have a pretty good idea of the range of content we could expect. Next to Homer, a renegade poet named Archilochus of Paros is likely to come up, a figure famous for poems about military conflicts and political feuds, but perhaps even more so for his graphic stories about sexual exploits. Archilochus will almost certainly be performed. He was active during the previous century – the 600s BCE, but his work is still appreciated as nearly on par with the Homeric epics. Standing in the thick crowd in Thebes in 582 BCE, we might also expect to hear the work of Archilochus’ contemporary, Mimnermus of Smyrna, a writer known for his rousing poems about land wars in western Anatolia.

A bit closer to our own times, the great Ionian poet Anacreon is active, and is well known for his meticulously crafted, carefully measured lyrics about living the good life and loving women and boys, topics which, as far as we Thebans are concerned, are agreeable across the board. One rising star in the world of archaic Greek poetry is a man named Stesichorus, a writer who, as of 582, is our contemporary. Stesichorus is likely to come up, because of his epic poems about Heracles, the most famous citizen of our city, Thebes. Everyone within a day’s march is down for a well spun yarn about Heracles.

So all sorts of poems, and all sorts of poets are likely to be performed as the moon rises. And one of them, I am excited to say, is a very distinctive poet from a town called Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. A great deal of poetry was coming out of this town during the Archaic Age in Greece, not the least of which was a major figure named Alcaeus, whose fiercely critical political poetry cost him his prosperity and social position. But while Alcaeus is known mostly to specialists of Greek literature, his contemporary in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos is, even today, a household name. As of 582 BCE, during our Anthesteria celebration, she is alive and well, less than 200 miles to the northeast of us across the central Aegean Sea. She is a respected figure with a large body of work, some in public circulation, and some reserved for private performances. Her name is Sappho.

Along with Sappho, another lyric poet will eventually emerge with distinction from the very end of the Archaic Age. Standing in the mass of partygoers in the palace courtyard of Thebes in 582 as we still are, a little girl with garlands tumbling down from her hair might be this poet’s grandmother. He will be born in 518 BCE, right here in Thebes.³ The classical Greeks of Athens will rank him as the greatest lyric poet ever to have lived. When he’s born, his name will be Pindar, and as Athens begins its experiments with democracy and the Persian Empire rumbles westward into the Aegean, this later poet Pindar will help usher Athens into a literary renaissance that has been famous, ever since.

So that’s a quick introduction to some of the main figures of Greek lyric poetry. Now that we’re standing shoulder to shoulder with other Thebans, and the band has warmed up, and the show is just about to begin in earnest, I think we’re ready for the main idea of this episode. [music]

Lyrical Ballads and Lyrical Ballistics

The main idea of this episode is in its title: Episode 25: Lyrical Ballistics. In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the most famous proponents of English romanticism alongside William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Shelly – anyway, in 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published a book. It is a book that all English majors have encountered, and it’s called Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads is probably the most famous product of English romanticism, and Wordsworth its most prominent practitioner. Wordsworth is, along with Novalis, Goethe, Thoreau and maybe Chopin, the archetype of the tortured and reclusive artist, an archetype that is still alive and with us today in the twenty-first century.

When we think of a poet in the early 21st century, I think we have a Wordsworthian figure in mind, rather than an ancient Greek figure. We think of poets as people who live at a bit of a remove from the main thoroughfares of modern life, like the speaker of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Introverts, maybe. Figures sitting in isolation and penning incisive criticisms of the course of modern society. The kinds of people who’d take a walk at twilight in November and pause underneath a leafless tree to pen a solitary meditation on solitude and other poetic stuff. We think of poets as specialized writers who in some cases are initiated into a difficult and esoteric world of language, language that’s difficult to understand for normal people like us. Even if we don’t think of the poet as an intellectual, and removed figure, we’re these days likely to think of poetry itself as something inaccessible, or refined, or private.

There’s a long history as to why we have this modern conception of poetry. Certain echelons of poetry have always been for an in-crowd, an in-crowd who knows a special network of allusions, who has a particular poetic vocabulary, and the kind of conditioning necessary to understand the special language of poetry and to appreciate its meters. But during the 20th-century, as modernism rose, and confessional poetry, and then postmodernism, the critical mass of poetry that was dense, and allusive, and self-referential began to grow. It grew, I think, into something splendid, but also something that never managed to find a wide readership. And so where we’re perched, in the early twenty-first century, we have this conception of poetry as something rarefied and special, and the poet as a figure removed from commercial and popular society. While Wordsworth himself, as those of us who know him understand, championed a poetry that was plainer and earthier than the carefully burnished couplets of the eighteenth century – while Wordsworth’s own poetry is fairly accessible, Wordsworth himself cultivated the reputation of a recluse, a removed wanderer, tucked into hills and dales, a philosophical contemplator concerned, primarily, with the greatest truths.

Wordsworth’s book, that hallmark work of romanticism published in 1798 called Lyrical Ballads, is in some ways the beginning of our thinking about the poet as a faraway figure whose elusive lines are to be contemplated by a more mundane public. Poetry, however, was not always like this. Let’s bring things back to Ancient Greece. Lyrical Ballistics, again the title of this episode, is a pretty good way to think of the poet’s role in Archaic Greece, between 750 and 500. During this period the poet was not, generally speaking, a musing hermit. The Archaic Greek poet was a performer. He or she was part emcee, part singer, part instrumentalist, part rapper, part jukebox – even in some cases part dancer. In all ways, the Archaic Greek poet was an entertainer, a sort of band leader who took the stage on occasions like our boozy, torchlit Theban celebration. Wordsworth, especially in later poems like The Prelude, can be a retiring, misanthropic wanderer, not wanting to dip his toes into the crowd – this side of him is even evident in Lyrical Ballads. But in Lyrical Ballistics – in the poets whom we’re going to hear today – these writers were generally not Wordsworthian recluses. They were more commonly neck deep in the crowd, and well apprised of public affairs. They were not, for the most part, detached from the rough and tumble of politics, wars, and regional feuds. Because of their public stature, Archaic Greek poets had often had local allegiances. They had patrons for whom they worked – undoubtedly, the pointy bearded guy whom we’re watching in this episode, along with his entourage, have been commissioned by the leadership of Thebes. Overall, in differentiating the romantic poet of Lyrical Ballads with the Archaic poet of Lyrical Ballistics, we’re going to need to suspend all of our modern expectations of what poets are and what they do. Because in 582 BCE, they were, without a doubt, the life of the party.

The rest of this show is going to be divided into two parts. As with most things we cover in Literature and History, I think a good way to move forward will be to hear some of this poetry first – pressed against the other Thebans in our imaginary party – and then, after that, talk a little about the general history of Greek lyric poetry – its genres, how much of it has survived, and its practitioners. In my experience it’s always best to read the work first and then read the secondary scholarship afterward – I always think it’s odd that those otherwise faultless Oxford and Penguin and Cambridge University editions put huge scholarly introductions up front. As though you’re going to want to hear someone scrutinizing the motives of the Earnshaws and Lintons when you haven’t yet read Wuthering Heights. So we’ll hear some of the poetry, first, and then talk about it.

Just two things before we get back to that party and start sipping wine again. The first is that the Greek lyric poetry that survives is extremely fragmented. Much of it has come down to us in papyrus scraps, or attributed quotations, or has lines and words missing. We are still deep in the ancient world, and so just as the Flood Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh has break points, and missing cuneiform symbols, the tattered manuscripts of Archaic Greek poetry are marred with gaps and puzzling interstices. As much as is possible, as I read you some of this poetry, I’m going to assemble groups of these fragments together to create a sense of unity to some of the poems. In doing so I will doubtless Frankenstein pieces of poems together that weren’t that way to begin with. But the alternative is to say, “Okay, so, the gap between Sappho’s Fragment 5 and 16 may indicate some elapse of time, although some scholars place Fragment 17b before Fragment 16 which helps explain the puzzling lacunae in Fragment 17b, and others still see Fragment 31 as the beginning of the sequence.” That, obviously, just wouldn’t work in a podcast. The best I can do will be to sew some Sappho together to give you a sense of what she and her contemporaries may have sounded like at length. If anyone happens to be interested in these rearrangements, bless your academically diligent hearts, all the details of my reassembly work are available in this episode’s transcription – there’s a link to it in the Details section of your podcasting app.

Now, that said, I’ll also say I’m using three different translations in today’s show. The popular one is the M.L. West anthology called Greek Lyric Poetry, published by Oxford World’s Classics in 1993. I’m also using Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets, translated by Willis Barnstone and first published by Schocken Books in 1962, and Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation, a translation by Andrew Miller, issued by Hackett Publishing Company in 1996. [music]

Two Poems by Archilochus

The first two pieces of lyric poetry we’ll hear will come from the poet Archilochus of Paros, who was likely active during the first half of the 600s BCE – the earliest named Greek poet after Hesiod and Homer. Paros is an island in the south-central Aegean, the western neighbor of larger Naxos in the central Cyclades. And on the subject of islands, Archilochus’ place of origin invites us to remember that during the Archaic period and long after, a lot of the cultural output from the Greek speaking world was taking place away from the mainland – in the Cyclades, the North Aegean islands of Lesbos and Chios, and the west coast of Anatolia. Like so many ancient authors, what we know about Archilochus of Paros largely comes from his poetry. He appears to have been a soldier, and may have participated in battles up in the northern Aegean territory of Thrace.⁴ And Archilochus left behind a wide range of poems. We’ll look at two sets of fragments from this very early lyric poet. The first, Archilochus Fragments 6, 26, and 27, are a series of lines on the subject of enduring the pangs of misfortune. They were likely originally parts of longer compositions, but even though they’re incomplete, I think that these three fragments have some very eloquent lines. So here is the earliest named Greek poet, other than Hesiod and Homer, whose works have made it down to us, in the Hackett Andrew Miller translation.

Repining at painful sorrows. . .no one among our citizens,
  no, nor the city itself, will find pleasure in festivities:
such were the men whom the waves of the loud-roaring sea

  washed over, and we struggle in our distress
with swollen lungs. But for evils that have no cure,
  my friend, the gods have ordained stern endurance
as remedy. These things go by turns: now it is to us
  that they have shifted, and we groan at the bloody wound,
but soon they will pass to others. . .
O heart, my heart, churning with unmanageable sorrows,
rouse yourself and fiercely drive off your foes
with a frontal attack, standing hard by them
steadfastly; and neither exult openly if you win,
nor, if you are beaten, fling yourself down at home in lamentation.
Instead, rejoice in what is joyful, grieve at troubles,
but not too much: be aware what sort of rhythm rules man’s life. . .
All things are easy for the gods. Often out of misfortunes
they set men upright who have been laid low on the black earth;
often they trip even those who are standing firm and roll them
onto their backs, and then many troubles come to them,
and a man wanders in want of livelihood, unhinged in mind.⁵

The sentiments there are not uncommon in Homeric poetry, nor in later works of Classical Greek tragedy. Endure privations, Archilochus writes, celebrate joys and do not overindulge in sorrows. Ancient Greek poetry of this epoch, written before salvific ideologies had become popular in the Mediterranean, did not emphasize that the miseries of mortality would be exchanged for heavenly pleasure for a chosen few. Instead, Archilochus and his contemporaries wrote that the human condition was challenging and changeable, that fortune followed misfortune and the other way around, and that this was the way things were. It is neither a grim, nor an especially sanguine view of human life on earth – this view, like that in Ecclesiastes, that life has its ups and downs, and in the end, everyone goes to the same underworld.

So those three fragments of Archilochus represent a serious, meditative side of Greek lyric poetry. If we were standing together at a party in Boeotia in early March of 582 BCE, we might expect a more serious philosophical poem to be a part of the program of entertainment, as a poet sung the above lines, perhaps to a minor or more solemn tuning and the aulos player offered an appropriate accompaniment; as the dancers offered a visual representation of the lines being sung, so that even younger or uninitiated listeners could still gather some sense of the eloquence of the production.

And now, for something utterly different. While Archilochus’ fragments, again set down between very roughly 700 and 650 BCE, explore the ups and downs of human life on earth, they also do other things. He was famous, in his own time, as a writer of invectives, or social slander. A story exists, perhaps apocryphal, that a prominent nobleman offered his daughter to Archilochus in marriage, and then retracted the offer. Archilochus responded by writing poetry about them that was so scathing that the father and daughter were driven to suicide as a result.⁶ And while this second dimension of Archilochus’ poetry – the invective, or censure, was known in antiquity, a third dimension of his poetry is also visible in the fragments of his poems that have made it down to us. This third dimension is what literary scholars might call “coarse,” or “prurient,” or “scabrous,” but we might today, in less lofty circles, simply call hardcore pornography.

Ancient literature has its fair share of sex. It likely had a lot more sex at one point, but the texts that have come down to us today had to get through the proving grounds of Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic scriptoriums and libraries over the course of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and as that happened, certain especially salacious passages were doubtless not selected for preservation. Still, today, from the Sumerian Epic of Inanna and Dumuzi in the Middle Bronze Age, to steamy scenes in the Classical Greek playwright Aristophanes, to the racy annals of Latin authors like Catullus, Petronius, and Juvenal, we do have a fair number of ancient texts that deal with sex in great detail. One of these texts is a series of fragments by Archilochus.

Archilochus’ home island – again Paros – was associated with the worship of the Goddess Demeter – the goddess of agriculture and fertility. Part of her festivals seemed to have been the performance of what our translator M.L. West calls “scurrilous and erotic recitations and songs performed. . .originally, no doubt, with the idea of promoting fertility by means of explicit sexuality.”⁷ And while libertine lines recited at a fertility festival to encourage people to get frisky is a fairly benign social context for erotic poetry, there was another, less benign context in which erotic poetry existed in the Archaic Period. This was the context of sexual self-aggrandizement, and slander. To quote M.L. West again, with the staging of certain erotic poems, “The speaker or singer (possibly costumed in the role of a stock figure) regaled the audience with accounts of extravagant orgies or other escapades in which he claimed to have taken part. He named women whom he had seduced or who had eagerly given themselves to him. If these were real women, the allegations must have been exceedingly embarrassing and shaming to them and their families.”⁸ Pornographic poetry, then, had several different applications in Archaic Greek performance settings – sometimes to get listeners in the mood, and other times to slander and degrade specific audience members and their families.

I debated whether or not I should include the fragments you are about to hear. This podcast is generally PG-13, and what you are about to hear is absolutely rated X. With sincere respect to your listening preferences, if you are with kids, or are understandably indisposed to hearing hardcore pornography, just jump two minutes forward or skip to another episode. I will quote what you’re about to hear because it’s part of literary history, and not because I want to be shocking, so please don’t give our podcast a bad rating because of what Archilochus of Paros and his contemporaries were writing back in the seventh century BCE. With all that said, here are some of Archilochus’ erotic fragments – a very disjointed set of lines at that, with lots of gaps between them, which I will indicate by saying the word “ellipsis.” This is from the M.L. West translation, published by Oxford in 1994.

She had a myrtle-sprig and a beautiful rose
that she was playing with; her hair hung down
shading her shoulders and her upper back. . .
Every man rolled back his skin. . .
. . .his tender horn. . .
. . .wet mound of Venus. . .
  Up and down she bounced
like a kingfisher flapping on a jutting rock.
Like a Thracian or a Phrygian drinking beer through a tube
she sucked, stopped down, engaged too from behind
  And his dong
. . .flooded over like a Prienian
stall-fed donkey’s. . .
. . .foam all around her mouth. . .
They stooped and spurted off
all their accumulated wantonness
. . .through the tube into the vessel.⁹

That’s a sampling of Archilochus’ erotic fragments, which likely would have perhaps been a hundred years old by the time of our Boeotian party in the spring of 582 BCE, maybe as a generic prurient story, and maybe, much more perniciously, deployed as a piece of satire against a person in the audience. While lines like those are grotesque and offensive to many of us, they also demonstrate that bawdiness and smut have been around for a long time, and are not some newfangled invention of modernity. And if references to donkey semen sound especially scabrous, let’s recollect a couple of Bible verses we learned about in our previous episode, in which the Prophet Ezekiel, a slightly older contemporary of Archilochus, growls that the kingdom of Judah, “played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions” (Ez 23:19-20).¹⁰ It’s revolting stuff, but this sort of sexual slander also seems to have been part of how the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East, who lived alongside livestock, satirized one another. [music]

Mimnermus and Stesichorus

So, imagining that we had all heard those erotic lines of Archilochus at our Boeotian party in 582 BCE, and some of us applauded uproariously and some scrunched up our lips in disgust, the performers onstage would likely read the room and move onto something else. The bard might move onto some lines of the poet Mimnermus, a writer a generation or two younger than Archilochus. Mimnermus was from the west coast of Anatolia – either the city of Smyrna or Colophon¹¹. Much of the Greek speaking populace of the ancient world, as we’ve already learned in this episode, lived off of the mainland, and many, like Mimnermus, lived along the west coast of what is today Turkey. Mimnermus wrote love elegies, and poems about the transient beauty of life, and verses on other themes. Let’s hear some lines of Mimnermus – a meditation on the shortness of life, using a common literary metaphor that we also find in Homer in which we mortals are compared to spring leaves, only green for a short time. This is Mimnermus’ second fragment, in the Hackett Miller translation.

We, like the leaves which come forth in the flowery season
  of spring, when they grow quickly under the radiance of the sun,
like them we enjoy the blossoms of youth for a short time only,
  merely an arm’s span in length, having no knowledge from the gods
either of evil or of good; beside us stand. . .Spirits of Doom,
  both the one that decrees for us grievous Old Age
and the other that brings Death. The harvest-time of youth
  comes as quickly as the sun at dawn spreads its light over the earth.¹²

That poem – again a meditation on mortality by the poet Mimnermus, takes the characteristically Archaic Greek attitude toward human life as something precious, but ephemeral, like the bloom of a single spring. Its frank perspective toward death is consonant with those of the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Homeric poems.

However profound such lines might be for some listeners, I imagine that if they went on too long at a party, in 582 BCE as well as today, the mood of the festivities might be brought down. And so, we can imagine that our party’s bard, following that recitation, would move onto something a bit more exciting. Perhaps the bard might take requests from the crowd. Some would ask for more Homer. Others, for some Hesiod. Some, for more salacious poetry. Others, for Theban city heroes. How about Cadmus? How about Dionysus? How about Hercules? And with this last word, the mood of the group might focus on the musclebound legend. Hercules or Heracles seems universally appealing – his narrative saga has a bit of everything – a captivating birth story, monster-slaying, triumphant victories, a fraught marriage, tragic death – how about some Heracles? the group at our party might ask.

And our bard would scratch his chin for a moment and then recall some lines from a poet who is our contemporary, though he lives a long way away. Stesichorus was from Magna Graecia, or “Greater Greece,” the cities and towns of Greek speakers that, even back in the 600s BCE, were way over to the west, in Italy and Sicily. If you picture the Italian boot, and Sicily, and imagine them both stomping in some water, the water that splashed up onto the sole, and toe, and shin, and all over southern and eastern Sicily – that’s where Magna Graecians lived, like the poet Stesichorus. Stesichorus’ lyrical poems were composed on epic themes – the narrative cycles that focused on the Trojan War, on Heracles, and on the city of Thebes. His reformulations of Homeric verse and older sagas may have breathed some fresh life into such stories, and so our bard, being a consummate professional familiar with both old and new poetry, might select the lines of his contemporary Stesichorus in order to fulfill our request, and bring us some Heracles. In these lines from Stesichorus, the poet recounts Heracles’ famous battle with the monster Geryon, a three-headed humanoid monster from whom Heracles has to steal cattle as one of his later labors. So here’s Stesichorus’ account of Heracles’ fight with the monster Geryon, in the Hacket Miller translation.

[Late in Heracles’ fight with Geryon, the time had come to bring] loathsome death to pass,
[And so Geryon struggled] with. . .doom about its head, defiled
By blood. . .and gall,

[Heracles brought to Geryon] the torments of the man-destroying
Hydra with its shifting necks; and in silence and with
  cunning [Heracles] thrust [his weapon, coated with the Hydra’s poison] into [Geryon’s] brow,
and it split the flesh and bones by dispensation of divinity;
  and the arrow held its course straight through
to the top of [Geryon’s] head
and stained with crimson blood
  his breastplate and his gory limbs.

Then Geryon’s neck drooped
  to one side, like a poppy
which, disfiguring its tender beauty,
  suddenly sheds its petals. [Thereafter]
Zeus’s son. . .went into [a] grove that laurels shaded. . .
[amidst] many myrtle leaves
And crowns of roses and garlands twined from violets.¹³

That’s just one tiny fragment of Heracles’ life story. In Greek lyric poetry, as performers plumbed their memories for crowd pleasers, both ancient and modern renditions of classic narratives would have been part of onstage sets. As we learned in our programs on Homer, ancient Greek bards had prodigious memories for lines, and sophisticated techniques, related to meter and epithets, that helped aid those memories. While no party would involve a full recitation of, say, the Odyssey, we might hear, at our Boeotian party in 582 BCE, important or pivotal scenes from the Odyssey – perhaps Odysseus winning the discus contest at the Phaeacian palace, or Circe seducing the hero, or the epic’s final battle in the feasting hall at Ithaca. And we might hear these scenes performed in the original Homeric Greek, or in a more modern version, as, by the early 500s BCE, poets like Stesichorus were refashioning epic into more digestible pieces in newer dialects.

We might also hear original work by our bard and his ensemble. Occasional poetry, or poetry written for a specific occasion, would have likely been part of an Anthesteria celebration, in which our bard played a few numbers in honor of those who sponsored the party, or out of respect for the recently departed, or betrothed, or in honor of the dedication of a new building, or garden, or gateway. The role of the performers onstage would be, above all things, though, to entertain – to entertain with both covers, and originals, so to speak, to read the room, take requests, respond to audience interaction, improvise, and generally, to get a paycheck with tips at the evening’s end. This imaginary celebration we have shared in Thebes was Greek lyric poetry’s ancient context, a miscellany of musical and verbal entertainments with dancing, in which literature, for an hour or two, soared in to become the life of the party. [music]

The Life and Poetry of Sappho

Now that we’ve become acquainted with the performance context of Greek lyric poetry, and met some of its far-flung practitioners, I want to leave our imaginary party, and go back to my similarly imaginary podium, and tell you about two Greek lyric poets a bit more extensively. These last two poets, unlike Archilochus, Mimnermus, and Stesichorus, from whom we have very little that survives – these last two poets we’ll cover are major figures in world literature. So let’s spend some time, now, getting acquainted with Sappho and Pindar.

Sappho was by almost all sources alive and well in 582 BCE, though she was likely living in Sicily by this time, following the blowback from political squabbles on the island of Lesbos, and general heightening tensions between Lesbos and Lydia on the Anatolian mainland. So, Sappho actually could have showed up in Thebes in 582 BCE, if she’d been inclined to visit some of the lake country on the mainland north of Athens.

Sappho, today, is most famous for her lyrical poetry expressing love and longing for women. As many of us know, Sappho’s home island, Lesbos, is where we get the name “lesbianism.” She is a powerful emblem for many today, not only being one of a tiny minority of female writers whose works have survived from antiquity, but also perhaps having been a homosexual or bisexual woman who led a colorful life in different parts of the eastern and central Mediterranean. We will look at some of Sappho’s love poems in a moment – they are, even in translation, gorgeous pieces that sound rather modern in comparison to what we’ve heard in this program so far. And on that subject, we come to a slight complexity that we need to consider carefully before moving forward. The general theme of this episode has been “Lyrical Ballistics,” and our main adventure has been to visit a rollicking Theban party where early spring wine and poetry have been the main courses of entertainment. We heard deep philosophical poetry on how to live your life. We heard graphic erotica. We heard a narrative about a hero. And in all cases, so far, we have seen the poet as a public figure, a person who faces the crowd and delivers entertainment, someone not inclined to privately composed lyrical ballads, but instead publicly performed lyrical ballistics.

The complexity that I want you to consider is this. The idea of the Greek Archaic poet as a public entertainer is a useful way to differentiate the main line of Archaic Greek poetry that’s survived from what we now consider to be a poet – a private individual, confessing intimate, personal thoughts on paper, etc. Archilochus, Mimnermus, and Stesichorus, whom we’ve already heard – these were not Elizabeth Bishops, Robert Lowells, nor Sylvia Plaths. The average Archaic Greek poet was facing crowds and often composing on public themes – wars, myths, politics, sporting events, and the occasional odds and ends of the social gathering at hand. Now for the slight complexity. Sappho doesn’t quite fit this bill. Many of her poems may have been composed for small audiences – coteries of friends and family who knew the situations and people Sappho did. So while it’s important to remember that the main line of Archaic Greek poetry, as far as we can tell, was indeed most often encountered in a performance setting, and that it did engage with sex, politics, and contemporary history in a way that pitched to the center of the bell curve and tried to entertain everyone, some Archaic Greek poetry doesn’t quite fit this bill. It’s virtually certain that plenty of private poetry was composed, as well. It’s just that when you have someone like Mimnermus, who had patrons in the eastern city of Smyrna, and this writer was composing nationalistic poems about military conflicts, these poems were more likely to be copied in civic records or etched into stone monuments in town squares, and these public poems were going to survive the ravages of history more successfully than, say, a little poem in which an aristocrat confesses his love to peasant boy, written on a single piece of papyrus and then stuck in a boxwood chest to be forgotten by time. Put plainly, the plentitude of public themed poetry we have from Archaic Greece may be more of a symptom of what’s survived and been copied than the full gamut of what people were actually writing. To return to Sappho, one of the many things that make Sappho remarkable is that some of her work sounds hauntingly like the late modernist and confessional poetry that wouldn’t be popular until two and a half thousand years after she died.

Sadly for all of us, though, only a tiny fraction of Sappho’s writings has survived. Plato honored her by giving her the unique status of being the tenth muse (traditionally there were nine), and of her poetry, only one work survives in a complete form. While ancient biographical fragments about her are generally regarded as dubious, the portions of her poems that survive indicate that Sappho likely had a brother, that this brother may have had a fraught relationship with an Egyptian courtesan, and that Sappho herself might have had a daughter, as well. So let’s hear Sappho’s only extant poem that survives in full, shall we? It’s a hymn to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. And in it, Sappho recalls asking Aphrodite to come to her. She recalls the arrival and advice of Aphrodite. And then, following Aphrodite’s comforting advice, Sappho addresses her lover directly in the poem’s final lines. Here’s the poem, Sappho 1, in the Hackett Miller translation.

Immortal Aphrodite on your richly crafted throne,
daughter of Zeus, weaver of snares, I beg you,
do not with sorrows and with pains subdue
  my heart, O Lady,

but come to me, if ever at another time as well,
hearing my voice from far away,
you heeded it, and leaving your father’s house
  of gold, you came,

yoking your chariot. Graceful sparrows
brought you swiftly over the black earth,
with a thick whirring of wings, from heaven down
  through the middle air.

Suddenly they were here, and you, O Blessed,
with a smile on your immortal face
asked me what was wrong this time, and why
  I called you this time,

and what in my maddened heart I wanted most
to happen. “Whom shall I persuade this time
to welcome you in friendship? Who is it,
  Sappho, that wrongs you?

For if she flees now, soon she shall pursue;
if she refuses presents, she shall give them;
if she does not love, soon she shall love
even against her will.”

[Now you] Come to me now as well; release me from
this agony; all that my heart yearns
to be achieved, achieve, and be yourself
  my ally in arms.¹⁴

So that was the only surviving full poem of Sappho. Several aspects of it bear a second look. The description of Aphrodite’s chariot, pulled by sparrows with “whirring wings,” has often been noted for its vivid details. The assurance of Aphrodite is often also commented on for the neat parallelism of its promises: “For if she flees now, soon she shall pursue; / if she refuses presents, she shall give them.” And also, it needs to be said, the speaker, the goddess, and the nameless addressee are all women. Sappho’s full surviving poem isn’t like so many Renaissance sonnets, in which a garrulous male speaker waxes on and on about a mute female paramour. In Sappho, the lover, the loved, and the deity of love are all of the same gender. We don’t really see such a unique cast of characters in ancient literature, and that’s one of the many things that makes Sappho’s surviving full poem a very special occurrence in the poetry of antiquity.

There’s another remarkable aspect to consider in Sappho’s only complete surviving poem, and that is a word at the end of the fifth stanza. That word is “Sappho” – in other words, the poet mentions herself, and seems to be talking about a genuinely autobiographical experience. Autobiography was one of the many novel features of Greek lyric poetry. As historian Walter Burkert writes, “Personalities such as Archilochus, Alcaeus and Sappho are the first to exhibit their self-conscious ego in literature.”¹⁵ Sappho is, in her poetry, an individual, with a voice. She is not, like Homer, or the Deuteronomist, an impersonal chronicler of events, but instead an intimate and vulnerable speaker, writing about experiences she’s had. Sapphics, or four-line stanzas with specific metrical architecture, were named after her, and this poetic structure, together with the intimacy, and seeming candor of Sappho’s poetic voice, were greatly influential in antiquity. The first century Roman poet Catullus imitated them both, and after Catullus, Rome’s famous love elegists Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, and later, when Petrarch imitated these Latin love elegists with his own sonnets in the late 1300s, he in turn influenced a gigantic amount of Renaissance love poetry, written in and outside of the sonnet form. Sappho, then, considering the lineage that I just described, and as little of her work still survives today, might be the most impactful love poet who ever lived, period.

So, let’s look at two more from Sappho. These are two of the longer fragments that survive from Greece’s Archaic Age. The first is a famous description of Sappho admiring someone – perhaps from afar, and maybe someone out of reach. In the opening lines, Sappho lays out the situation – a handsome man is talking to a person (a woman, it’s generally assumed) that Sappho has feelings for. The “you” in the second line of the poem, the addressee, is likely this woman. Here’s our second poem from Sappho – it’s pretty simple, actually. This is the Willis Barnstone translation of Sappho 31, published by Schoken Books in 1988.

To me he seems like a god
as he sits facing you and
hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh

in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. For now
as I look at you my voice
is empty and

can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire is quick
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass,
and feel my mind slip as I
go close to death.¹⁶

In these lines, the speaker, presumably Sappho, is obviously expressing love, adoration, and lust for the addressee. The exact situation of the poem isn’t clear, and various specialists have weighed in on the subject. What we can say with some confidence, though, is that within the triangle of characters in the poem, Sappho is hidden, and observing. A conversation between a man and a woman is taking place, and Sappho is recording her private reactions to it – her heartbeat, her feeling of speechlessness, the numbness of her tongue, the pallor and prickly feeling over the surface of her skin, the sweat, and the fading of her vision and hearing. It’s long been recognized as a powerful description of feeling hopelessly in love with someone. The first or second century treatise On the Sublime, reading this poem of Sappho, remarks, “Observe. . .how her sensations contradict one another – she freezes, she burns, she raves, she reasons, and all at the same instant. And this description is designed to show that she is assailed, not by any particular emotion, but by a tumult of different emotions.”¹⁷ Since antiquity, then, readers have appreciated the complexity and rawness of emotion displayed in the poem we just read. It’s also, in its portrayal of a hidden and unrequited love, an admission of vulnerability. In comparison the main body of Greek lyric poetry – to abstract philosophical musing, or recitations of military campaigns, or mythical tales, or political defamations, or hyperbolized erotica, or praises of great athletes – Sappho’s confession seems intensely personal and confidential. So that’s the second poem from Sappho. The final poem by Sappho that we’ll look at is Sappho 16. And as with the previous one, it is a confessional piece, in which love is a private thing that, although sometimes secret, is nonetheless more powerful than armies and fleets of ships.

At the core of our final poem by Sappho, the poet imagines Helen of Troy leaving her reputable husband and forsaking all of Helen’s civic obligations, all because Helen was desperately overtaken by the asocial powers of love and passion. Here’s Fragment 16, in the Oxford M.L. West translation.

Some think a fleet, a troop of horse
  or soldiery the finest sight
in all the world; but I say, what one loves.

  Easy it is to make this plain
  to anyone. She the most fair
of mortals, Helen, having a man of the best,

  deserted him, and sailed to Troy
  without a thought for her dear child
or parents, led astray by [love’s power.]

  [For though the heart be pr]oud [and strong,]
  [Love] quickly [bends it to his will. -]
That makes me think of Anactoria

  I’d sooner see her lovely walk
  and the bright sparkling of her face
than all the horse and arms of Lydia.¹⁸

In Sappho’s lines, there, the face of a loved one, and the gracefulness of her step are more beautiful than an armada at sea, or warriors gleaming in armor. It’s a gorgeous poem, and like some of the Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Hebrew love poetry we’ve recently read in our program, still feels fresh and relatable after thousands of years. But there are two more specific ways we can read Sappho 16.

When Sappho says that her beloved Anactoria is lovelier than soldiers, or ships, or chariots, or the gleaming armor of an infantry formation, it’s easy to see this comparison as prizing the feminine over the masculine. Anactoria is lovelier than all those men with their ships and swords. They can all go take a hike, because none of them have anything to do with Sappho, or her lover. A straightforward interpretation of this famous poem is that it imagines the realm of love between women as more vibrant and alive than the male world of fleets and soldiering and shiny breastplates.

But let’s also read Sappho’s poem in the context of Archaic Greece. This was a time of heavy personal association with one’s city, or polis. You remember how much pride those Thebans had in their city, and their athletes competing in athletic games – their local myths and their place in the Aegean world. The world of the city-state, which will dominate the next major section of this podcast, is tough for us to understand today. Most of us in the twenty-first century live in large, cosmopolitan nations. We don’t see our leaders in person. The mechanisms of our governments are sufficiently complex that we can’t even imagine the bureaucracies required to maintain them. Even our states, counties, and provinces are large, and often decentered. Our consciousness of being citizens of a specific place is far different than that of the average citizen of an Iron Age city state. During Sappho’s lifetime, and especially afterward, as the Persian and later Peloponnesian wars made allegiance to one’s city state a daily concern, the average Greek’s identity was much, much more rooted in her city, her government, and her military than most of ours are today. As an Athenian, or Miletian, or Ephesian, or Theban looked out at ships in her harbor, or soldiers performing drills beyond her city walls, she knew that these forces were the thing that stood between her and the very viable possibility of death and destruction.

So when Sappho dismisses horsemen, ships, chariots, and soldiers, and when she recollects how Helen abandoned her Greek husband for a Trojan lover at the cost of a cataclysmic ten-year war, Sappho is doing more than simply prizing a world of private love over everything else. Sappho is praising love over and above duty to polis and nation. She is also saying that over and above the obligations that she might have to her city-state and its military apparatus, she chooses the private world of personal relationship. This was not a choice that any ancient Greek person would have made lightly.

To many scholars, among them Walter Burkert, whom we heard quoted before, the birth of what are called “monodies,” or songs for single singers, and the fact that these monodies began to share the stage with “choruses,” or songs for group singers with dancers, signifies a great cultural transition in Ancient Greece. For scholar William McCulloh, the difference between the age of Homer and the age of Sappho demonstrates that “The conflict between monarchy and aristocracy had begun. . .[M]ost importantly for poetry, the poet had begun to emerge as an individual speaking for himself, not an impersonal celebrant of glory and doom.”¹⁹ In fact, to McCulloh and others, the asymmetrical development of poetry in Archaic Greece was a result of the wider and richer cultural influences in the Eastern Aegean than existed on the mainland or Magna Graecia. William McCulloh observes,

It seems to have been the regions of the Eastern Greeks, the Aeolians and Ionians of Asia Minor and the islands, which proved most receptive to the new spirit. Meanwhile at Sparta, the heart of the younger Western, or Dorian branch of Greek culture. . .the Spartans were the nearest approximation among the Greeks to the collectivistic mentality. It is therefore fitting that their gift to the Lyric Age should have been the most collective of form, the choral ode. . .Significantly, most of the earlier of these [Lyrical] poets were from the East, the older and subtler culture.²⁰

So if we follow this cultural analysis, then the existence of Sappho’s more personal, more individualistic poems is of course evidence of great personal creativity. But in general, the turn to more autobiographical, personally reflective poems may have been the result of a widespread cultural transition from politically autocratic groups like monarchies and tyrannies to capitalist city states with broader mercantile classes and aristocracies. The polis of the city state still commanded the collaboration of the citizenry, but as commerce and trade made aristocrats get wealthy through luck and innovation, all of a sudden individuality, and the importance of individual experience and enterprise must have seemed newly valuable during the 600s and 500s BCE in the Aegean world. So Sappho’s love lyrics, timeless as they seem to us, may have partly been the outcome of economic and cultural events taking place in the eastern Aegean and in the western Persian Empire during the decades that she lived.

The Poetry of Pindar

Now, we have one more thing to do in this episode. We’re going to bring in one more figure – a man who will both help round out our picture of Archaic Greek poetry, and at the same time introduce the course of the next group of episodes on Classical Greek literature. His name is Pindar.

If Sappho is one of the more private and personal figures in Archaic Greek poetry, the final person we’re going to talk about in this show is possibly the opposite. Pindar, who was born in our very own Boeotian city of Thebes, lived from about 518-443 BCE – roughly a century after Sappho. And while Sappho is most famous for personal love lyrics, Pindar is most famous for something else.

Remember earlier in this episode, when you and I were gulping down that Anthesteria wine? Do you remember what we were talking about as we stood there, looking out over the Boeotian countryside, before the poetry started? We were discussing the two new Olympic Games that proliferated in the 580s – the Pythian Games recently established over in Delphi, and the brand new Isthmian Games, which just this year, in 582 got started. We were talking about sports.

Pindar, the final figure in our pantheon of Archaic Greek poets, made his living from sports. Imagine if Shakespeare worked for a sports broadcasting company – or, more appropriately, if Shakespeare bounced around from country to country that won the World Cup, writing victory pieces for the greatest teams and players, and you have Pindar, the widely successful sports poet of the ancient world. Now, if we wanted Pindar to show up at our Theban shin dig of 582 BCE, we would need to wait another century or so. And when he did show up, he would have most definitely delivered a piece from a genre of poetry we now call “victory odes.”

Giuseppe Sciuti’s Pindar Exalts a Winner at the Olympic Games (1872). The color, the light, animation, social posturing and overall activity of this scene are what I imagine to be the backdrop of Greek lyric poetry, far from the solemn, solitary atmosphere in which we read and write poetry today.

These odes frequently have the same structure. They first extol the athlete and his hometown. A subsequent section often includes moral philosophizing. A third section – often the longest, is a myth concerning gods and heroes, a myth adapted to the victorious athlete and his hometown. And the last section of a typical Pindaric ode includes a brief selection about the poet, performance, and occasion at hand.

Pindar’s odes are traditionally thought of as very difficult reading material. The main reason for this is that, like Classical Greek drama, or later Latin Neoteric poetry, or the work of, say, Milton or Dante, Pindar’s odes assume that you are familiar with a large pantheon of deities, geographical locations, people, and political and historical events that, as of the present century, you are not. But beyond the often unfamiliar names and places in Pindar’s odes, there’s another reason they’re difficult. These odes were a form of Greek poetry called “choral lyrics.” This means that a chorus of singers performed them to musical accompaniment. So while a victory ode by Pindar comes to us as dry black words printed on a white page, filled with esoteric references, if you had encountered them in, say, Thebes, in the early 400s BCE, I think you’d have been just as moved as Pindar’s audiences must have been.

Imagine having a great civic pride in your athletes, and their performance. Imagine that one of these athletes won a trouncing victory over your city’s rival athletes. And then, to top it off, imagine that your city’s leadership paid the most famous and talented writer of victory odes to come to the city for a musical performance celebrating the occasion. That would be a bit more exciting than reading ancient poetry in translation, studded with footnotes, in a book or course reader today.

So let’s hear one – a last work of the Greek lyric poets for this show, set to musical accompaniment. We’ll imagine that we’re standing again on that wall of Thebes. Only, it’s about a hundred years later. And as with the previous Anthesteria, we’re probably a few cups of wine into the night. We’re celebrating. Thebans are exceptionally proud, because our star athlete, a man named Herodotus (not to be confused with the more famous historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus) – anyway, we’re quite excited, because our star athlete Herodotus has won a great victory in chariot races. He’s won this victory at the Isthmian Games down near Corinth. And everybody loves the chariot races.

So we’re all standing around talking about this triumphant chariot racer named Herodotus, and then, as before, we hear the lyre warming up, the singers all getting together, and the nervous excitement of the gathering crowd. And then someone breaks the news. Herodotus is actually in the city! He’s in the courtyard! Holy Zeus and Apollo, let’s go see him! And so we hurry through the throng, and there, standing in the middle of the courtyard, is our star athlete, surrounded by fans and singers. As if this isn’t exciting enough, the emcee with a pointy beard – or, well, his grandson or great-grandson, says that the great Theban poet Pindar is there, and that he’s written a special song for the occasion. A gentleman in the back – many of us Thebans recognize our native son Pindar – a man in the back raises a wine cup and offers the audience a general nod of greeting. The singers hum a note. The great grandson of the lyre player from before plucks a chord. Then you and I clack our wine cups together, take a drink, and prepare ourselves for something special. It’s going to be a song about a heroic athlete. And it’s going to be a song about us – Thebans, and our city.

So I’m going to sing you a version of Pindar’s First Isthmian Ode, with some ellipses thrown in for the sake of meter and trimming the poem down to a manageable length. I usually leave my songs until the end, and so if you really don’t like them, I apologize for this one-time breaking of the rules – I include this tune here as part of the actual pedagogical content of the present program, and have no illusions that I’m a great singer or performer myself. This text of this Pindaric Ode that I will sing is taken from the book Pindar: The Complete Odes, translated by Anthony Verity and published by Oxford University Press in 2007. And here again is Pindar’s famous first Isthmian Ode, to the great chariot racer Herodotus.

[I]t is for Herodotus. . .I fashion a gift of honor,
for his four-horsed chariot, and. . .his handling of its reins. . .
with his own hands; and I wish to associate him
with. . .the mightiest charioteers of [Sparta] and Thebes [, who]
put their hands to the greatest number of contests,
and graced their [cities] with. . . [trophies] and golden bowls. (14-20)

[cheers]

[The] excellence [of great athletes] shines out with brightness
in both naked races and in. . .contests where armed men run,
their shields clattering; and also when they threw javelins
from their hands, and when they flung discuses of stone
and appeared in glory beside [the spring of Thebes]. (22-9)

[cheers]

Different rewards bring pleasure to [different] men,
the shepherd, the ploughman, the bird-trapper, [the sailor]. . .
for all men strain to keep. . .hunger from their bellies.
But the greatest profit [of all] is earned by the man
who wins splendid glory in war or in the games[!]. . . (45-50)

[cheers]

But to give a full account of. . . [Herodotus’] successes
is precluded by the brief measure of [this] song.
May [Herodotus], lifted up on [the Muses’] bright wings,
[Always] wreathe his hand with prized garlands. . .
from [the lowest to the highest point in all of Greece]
[always] bringing honor to seven-gated Thebes[!] (60-7)²¹

[cheers]

That again was Pindar’s first Isthmian ode, an ode to the great Theban charioteer Herodotus, set to music and ambiance. Now, I didn’t quote it in full, and took some liberties with arranging meter and the verses of the ode, so you can bet that what you just heard is quite a bit different than what you would have actually heard in Thebes, between, say, 500 and 480 BCE. But still, I think you get the idea. A Pindaric Ode was not a poetic composition encountered in solemn solitude on the printed page. It was a public event, and likely quite an exciting one, with all the ballistics of singing, musical instruments, and dancing that could be mustered up for the occasion. [music]

Moving on to Ancient Greek Theater

The ancient Greek theater of Epidaurus is in the northeast Peloponnese, across the Saronic Gulf from Athens. With seating for about 13,000 spectators, and built during the late 300s BCE, it’s considered best preserved ancient theater in Greece today. Fifty-five rows of seats extend upward in a marvelously symmetrical semicircle, punctuated with neat channels of aisles, framing a spectacle of not only the stage, but also the shrubby hills of the Peloponnesian countryside and bright blue Aegean sky. I had a chance to go there recently, and to stand down in the orchestra and recite some lines in my most stentorian voice so that I and my companions could all test out the acoustics of this miraculous remnant of antiquity. The acoustics were marvelous, such that even an untrained nobody like me could be heard all the way in the back, but standing there on the bare earth, my biggest impression of the Theater of Epidaurus was quite simply how massive it was, and what a powerful force theatrical productions must have actually been in the ancient world. It’s one thing to imagine a small-scale party in Boeotia in 582 BCE – perhaps a couple of hundred people, like we’ve done in this program. It’s quite another thing to imagine a full theatrical production a few centuries later, with a singing and dancing chorus, a long script, carefully painted masks and sets, and thousands and thousands of audience members. For the next twelve episodes, our goal is to understand ancient Greek theater. As city states like Thebes grew in power and notoriety, so too, did patronage toward literature, and in turn, the scale of public literary productions in the ancient Aegean world grew, and grew and grew.

As a result, a massive amount of the literature that ancient Greece left behind consists of plays. And over the next twelve episodes, we’re going to learn about these plays – the theatrical works of the playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. If you’re listening to this show, you probably know a bit about these four. It’s not uncommon for Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone, or Euripides’ Medea to get assigned to an introduction to literature class or book club, and a lot of us likely know that Oedipus was the guy who killed his blank and married his blank, that Antigone was kind of heroic – or was she? – and that Medea was – definitely – a person – probably. Well, I have no idea how familiar you are with ancient Greek theater, and I’m trying to pitch this show to a relatively broad audience, so let me just plainly tell you about our strategy over these next twelve shows.

Most of the Greek language theatrical productions that have come down to us from antiquity have come from Athens, and most of them from between 460 and 390 BCE, are some of the most important and influential works of literature out there. They can be devastatingly powerful, cuttingly tragic, shockingly funny. They can also be pretty challenging to read. You and I are not citizens of the bygone Aegean world, with its dense cobweb of myths and stories. Most of us can’t readily understand ancient Greek. Most of us have trouble when we open a Greek tragedy and plow through a chorus or two studded with multisyllabic Greek names that refer to goodness knows what. That’s why in the next episode, we’re going to start very simply. I’m going to spend about ninety minutes telling you all about the ancient Greek world’s most prominent theater festival – where it was held, when, how plays were produced, who attended, and the structure and logistics of ancient Greek plays more generally. Some ancient Greek plays do have a sort of universal moral to them, but more often, they were written to respond to very specific historical events with which their original audiences would have been familiar, just as Pindar’s odes honored distinct and precious moments in time.

Learning about the history of Athens in the 400s BCE is really useful if you want a real understanding of ancient Greek theater, so much of which was produced in Athens in the second half of the 400s BCE. I had a blast going to a Theban party in 582 BCE with you in this show. And in fact, we’re going to do something similar in the next show. While this episode covered a sprawling period between 700 and 500 BCE, in the next episode, we will cover just twenty minutes of time. We will go back to exactly 8:45 AM on April 2nd, 458 BCE. And we will take a twenty-minute walk through Classical Athens over to the southeast side of the Acropolis, to the theater of Dionysus, where one of the most famous theatrical trilogies in world literature is about to premiere. We’re going to learn about what’s going on in Athens, now that the Persian Wars are over. We’re going to walk by key landmarks in Classical Athens – the Agora, Areopagus, and Acropolis, and learn about them. And then, we’re going to make our way into the Theater of Dionysus, look around, and learn about the history and conventions of ancient Greek theater. As always, there’s a quiz on this program at literatureandhistory.com, along with some links to ways you can support the podcast. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.


References

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