Bacchylides


Bacchylides was a Greek lyric poet. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets, which included his uncle Simonides. The elegance and polished style of his lyrics have been noted in Bacchylidean scholarship since at least Longinus. Some scholars have characterized these qualities as superficial charm. He has often been compared unfavourably with his contemporary, Pindar, as "a kind of Boccherini to Pindar's Haydn". However, the differences in their styles do not allow for easy comparison, and translator Robert Fagles has written that "to blame Bacchylides for not being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn... Marvell for missing the grandeur of Milton". His career coincided with the ascendency of dramatic styles of poetry, as embodied in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and he is in fact considered one of the last poets of major significance within the more ancient tradition of purely lyric poetry. The most notable features of his lyrics are their clarity in expression and simplicity of thought, making them an ideal introduction to the study of Greek lyric poetry in general and to Pindar's verse in particular.

Life

This precept, from one of Bacchylides' extant fragments, was considered by his modern editor, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, to be typical of the poet's temperament: "If the utterances scattered throughout the poems warrant a conjecture, Bacchylides was of placid temper; amiably tolerant; satisfied with a modest lot; not free from some tinge of that pensive melancholy which was peculiarly Ionian; but with good sense..."
Bacchylides' lyrics do not seem to have been popular in his own lifetime. Lyrics by his uncle, Simonides, and his rival, Pindar, were known in Athens and were sung at parties, they were parodied by Aristophanes and quoted by Plato, but no trace of Bacchylides' work can be found until the Hellenistic age, when Callimachus began writing some commentaries on them. Like Simonides and Pindar, however, Bacchylides composed lyrics to appeal to the sophisticated tastes of a social elite and his patrons, though relatively few in number, covered a wide geographical area around the Mediterranean, including for example Delos in the Aegean Sea, Thessaly in the north of the Greek mainland, and Sicily or Magna Graecia in the west. It has been inferred from the elegance and quiet charm of his lyrics that he only gradually acquired fame towards the end of his life.
Being drawn from sources compiled long after his death, the details of Bacchylides's life are sketchy and sometimes contradictory. According to Strabo, he was born in Ioulis, on the island of Keos, and his mother was the sister of Simonides. According to Suda, his father's name was Meidon and his grandfather, also named Bacchylides, was a famous athlete, yet according to Etymologicum Magnum his father's name was Meidylus. There is an ancient tradition, upheld for example by Eustathius and Thomas Magister, that he was younger than Pindar and some modern scholars have endorsed it, such as Jebb, who assigns his birth to around 507 BC, whereas Bowra, for example, opted for a much earlier date, around 524–1 BC. Most modern scholars however treat Bacchylides as an exact contemporary of Pindar, placing his birth around 518 BC. According to one account, Bacchylides was banished for a time from his native Keos and spent this period as an exile in Peloponnesus, where his genius ripened and he did the work which established his fame. Plutarch is the only ancient source for this account and yet it is considered credible on the basis of some literary evidence Observations by Eusebius and Georgius Syncellus can be taken to indicate that Bacchylides might have been still alive at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, but modern scholars have differed widely in estimates of the year of his death – Jebb, for example sets it at 428 BC and yet a date around 451 BC is more favoured.
Keos, where Bacchylides was born and raised, had long had a history of poetical and musical culture, especially in its association with Delos, the focal point of the Cyclades and the principal sanctuary of the Ionian race, where the people of Keos annually sent choirs to celebrate festivals of Apollo. There was a thriving cult of Apollo on Keos too, including a temple at Carthaea, a training ground for choruses where, according to Athenaeus, Bacchylides's uncle, Simonides, had been a teacher in his early years. Ceans had a strong sense of their national identity, characterized by their own exotic legends, national folklore and a successful tradition of athletic competition, especially in running and boxing – making the island a congenial home for a boy of quick imagination. Athletic victories achieved by Ceans in panhellenic festivals were recorded at Ioulis on slabs of stone and thus Bacchylides could readily announce, in an ode celebrating one such victory, a total of twenty-seven victories won by his countrymen at the Isthmian Games. Ceans had participated in the defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Salamis and they could take pride in the fact that an elegy composed by Bacchylides's uncle was chosen by Athens to commemorate the Athenians who fell at the Battle of Marathon. Being only thirteen miles from the Athenian cape Sunium, Keos was in fact necessarily responsive to Athenian influences.
Bacchylides's career as a poet probably benefited from the high reputation of his uncle, Simonides, whose patrons, when Bacchylides was born, already included Hipparchus, brother of Hippias the tyrant of Athens and cultural coordinator of the city at that time. Simonides later introduced his nephew to ruling families in Thessaly and to the Sicilian tyrant, Hieron of Syracuse, whose glittering court attracted artists of the calibre of Pindar and Aeschylus. Bacchylides's first notable success came sometime after 500 BC with commissions from Athens for the great Delian festival and from Macedonia for a song to be sung at a symposium for the young prince, Alexander I. Soon he was competing with Pindar for commissions from the leading families of Aegina and, in 476 BC, their rivalry seems to have reached the highest levels when Bacchylides composed an ode celebrating Hieron's first victory at the Olympian Games. Pindar celebrated the same victory but used the occasion to advise the tyrant of the need for moderation in one's personal conduct, whereas Bacchylides probably offered his own ode as a free sample of his skill in the hope of attracting future commissions. Bacchylides was commissioned by Hieron in 470 BC, this time to celebrate his triumph in the chariot race at the Pythian Games. Pindar also composed a celebratory ode for this victory, including however stern, moral advice for the tyrant to rule wisely. Pindar was not commissioned to celebrate Hieron's subsequent victory in the chariot race at the Olympic Games in 468 BC – this, the most prestigious of Hieron's victories, was however celebrated by Bacchylides. The tyrant's apparent preference for Bacchylides over Pindar on this occasion might have been partly due to the Cean poet's simpler language and not just to his less moralizing posture, and yet it is also possible that Bacchylides and his uncle were simply better suited to palace politics than was their more high-minded rival. Alexandrian scholars in fact interpreted a number of passages in Pindar as hostile allusions to Bacchylides and Simonides and this interpretation has been endorsed by modern scholars also.
As a composer of choral lyrics, Bacchylides was probably responsible also for the performance, involving him in frequent travel to venues where musicians and choirs awaited instruction. Ancient authorities testify to his visit to the court of Hieron and this is indeed indicated by his fifth Ode, where the word xenos implies that he had already been Hieron's guest,. Verses 15 and 16 of his third ode, also for Hieron, indicate that he might have composed that work at Syracuse.

Work

History

The poems were collected into critical editions sometime in the late 3rd century BC by the Alexandrian scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who probably restored them to their appropriate metres after finding them written in prose form. They were arranged in nine 'books', exemplifying the following genres :
File:Theseus Athena Amphitrite Louvre G104.jpg|thumb|right|"The relation of Bacchylides to Greek art is a subject that no student of his poetry can ignore" – Richard Claverhouse Jebb.
Theseus, visiting the underwater palace of his father, Poseidon, meets with Amphitrite, as witnessed by the goddess Athena and by some of the neighbourhood dolphins – here presented by the artist Euphronios. The underwater encounter is also the subject of a Bacchylides dithyramb.
  • hymnoi – "hymns"
  • paianes – "paeans"
  • dithyramboi – "dithyrambs"
  • prosodia – "processionals"
  • partheneia – "songs for maidens"
  • hyporchemata – "songs for light dances"
  • enkomia – "songs of praise"
  • epinikia – "victory odes"
  • erotica – "songs of love"
The Alexandrian grammarian Didymus wrote commentaries on the work of Bacchylides and the poems appear, from the finding of papyri fragments, to have been popular reading in the first three centuries AD. Their popularity seems to have continued into the 4th century also: Ammianus Marcellinus observed that the emperor Julian enjoyed reading Bacchylides, and the largest collection of quotations that survived up until the modern era was assembled by Stobaeus. All that remained of Bacchylides's poetry by 1896, however, were sixty-nine fragments, totalling 107 lines. These few remains of his writings were collected by Brunck, Bergk, Bland, Hartung, and Neue. The oldest sources on Bacchylides and his work are scholia on Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Aristophanes, Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus. Other fragments and 'notices' are sprinkled through the surviving works of ancient authors, which they used to illustrate various points they were making, as for example:
image:P.Oxy. XI 1361 fr. 4.jpg|thumb|Bacchylides, Encomia fr. 5, preserved by a 1st-century BC or AD papyrus form Oxyrhynchus.
  • Dionysius of Halicarnassus – frag. 11
  • Strabo – notice 57
  • Plutarch – frag. 29
  • Apollonius Dyscolus – frag. 31
  • Zenobius – frag.s 5, 24
  • Hephaestion – frag.s 12, 13, 15
  • Athenaeus – frag.s 13, 16, 17, 18, 22
  • Clement of Alexandria – frag.s 19, 20, 21, 32
  • Stobaeus – frag.s 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 28
  • Priscian – frag. 27
  • Johannes Siceliota – frag. 26
  • Etymologicum Magnum – frag.s 25, 30
  • Palatine Anthology – frag.s 33, 34.
Fortunately for Bacchylidean scholarship, a papyrus came to light in Egypt at the end of the 19th century with a text of Greek uncials, which a local claimed to have found in a ransacked tomb, between the feet of a mummy. It was snapped up for a "preposterous" price by the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, of the British Museum. Budge's plan to return to the museum with the papyrus was unacceptable to the British Consul and to the Egyptian Service of Antiquities so he resorted to desperate measures. In an elaborate plan involving a crate of oranges, switched trains and covert embarkations including a midnight rendezvous with a P&O steamship, he eventually sailed from the Suez with the papyrus dismembered and disguised as a packet of photographs. He presented his find in 1896 to Frederic Kenyon in the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts. Kenyon reassembled 1382 lines, of which 1070 were perfect or easily restored and, the following year, he published an edition of twenty poems, six of them nearly complete. Some more pieces of the Egyptian fragments were fitted together by Friedrich Blass in Germany and then followed the authoritative edition of Bacchylides' poetry by Richard Claverhouse Jebb – a combination of scholars that inspired one academic to comment: "we almost had the Renaissance back again".
As noted by Frederic Kenyon, the papyrus was originally a roll probably about seventeen feet long and about ten inches high, written in the Ptolemaic period, with some Roman characteristics that indicate a transition between styles, somewhere around 50 BC. It reached England in about two hundred torn fragments, the largest about twenty inches in length and containing four and a half columns of writing, the smallest being scraps with barely enough space for one or two letters. The beginning and end sections were missing and the damage done to the roll was not entirely the result of its recent discovery. Kenyon gradually pieced the fragments together, making three independent sections: the first, nine feet long with twenty-two columns of writing; the next section, a little over two feet long with six columns; the third, three and a half feet long with ten columns – a total length of almost fifteen feet and thirty-nine columns, in which form the papyrus remains in the British Library. Friedrich Blass later pieced together some of the still detached fragments and concluded that two of the poems on the restored roll must be parts of a single ode – hence even today the poems can be found numbered differently, with Jebb for example one of those following Blass's lead and numbering the poems differently from Kenyon from poem 8 onwards.
Bacchylides had become, almost overnight, among the best represented poets of the canonic nine, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar, adding about a hundred new words to Greek lexicons. Ironically, his newly discovered poems sparked a renewed interest in Pindar's work, with whom he was compared so unfavourably that "the students of Pindaric poetry almost succeeded in burying Bacchylides all over again."