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Stesichorus (Ancient Greek: Στησίχορος, circa 640 – 555 BC) was the first great poet of the Greek West. He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric meters but he is also famous for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing verses first insulting and then flattering to Helen of Troy. He was ranked among the nine lyric poets esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria and yet his work attracted relatively little interest among ancient commentators, so that remarkably few fragments of his poetry now survive. As one scholar observed in 1967: "Time has dealt more harshly with Stesichorus than with any other major lyric poet." Recent discoveries, recorded on Egyptian papyrus (notably and controversially, the Lille Stesichorus), have led to some improvements in our understanding of his work, confirming his role as a link between Homer's epic narrative and the lyric narrative of poets like Pindar. The following description of the birthplace of the monster Geryon, preserved as a quote by the geographer Strabo, is characteristic of the "descriptive fulness" of his style:
A nineteenth century translation imaginatively fills in the gaps while communicating something of the richness of the language:
Stesichorus exercised an important influence on the representation of myth in 6th century art and on the development of Athenian dramatic poetry. Details of Stesichorus's life are as fragmentary as his verse and the historical sources are often contradictory. A useful example is provided by the Suda, a 10th century Byzantine encyclopaedia, here reproduced in an English translation from a Loeb edition. ``Stesichorus: Son of Euphorbus or Euphemus or according to others of Euclides or Euetes or Hesiod. From the city of Himera in Sicily; at any rate he is called the Himeraean; but some say he is from Metauria in Italy. Others say that when exiled from Pallantium in Arcadia he came to Catana and that he died there and was buried in front of the gate which is called Stesichorean after him. In date he was later than the lyric poet Alcman, since he was born in the 37th Olympiad (632 / 28 BC). He died in the 56th Olympiad (556/2 BC). He had a brother Mamertinus who was an expert in geometry and a second brother Helianax, a law giver. He was a lyric poet. His poems are in the Doric dialect and in 26 books. They say that he was blinded for writing abuse of Helen and recovered his sight after writing an encomium of Helen, the Palinode, as the result of a dream. He was called Stesichorus because he was the first to establish (stesai) a chorus of singers to the cithara; his name was originally Tisias.'' – Suda The main points addressed by the Suda are expanded and analyzed under the following headings: The specific dates given by the Suda for Stesichorus have been dismissed by one modern scholar as "specious precision" — its dates for the floruit of Alcman (the 27th Olympiad), the life of Stesichorus (37th – 56th Olympiads) and the birth of Simonides (the 56th Olympiad) virtually lay these three poets end-to-end, a coincidence that seems to underscore a convenient division between old and new styles of poetry. Nevertheless, the Suda's dates "fit reasonably well" with other indications of Stesichorus's life span — for example, they are consistent with a claim elsewhere in Suda that the poetess Sappho was his contemporary, along with Alcaeus and Pittacus, and also with the claim, attested by other sources, that Phalaris was his contemporary. Aristotle quoted a speech the poet is supposed to have made to the people of Himera warning them against the tyrannical ambitions of Phalaris. The Byzantine grammarian Tzetzes also listed him as a contemporary of the tyrant and yet made him a contemporary of the philosopher Pythagoras as well. According to Lucian, the poet lived to 85 years of age. Hieronymus declared that his poems became sweeter and more swan - like as he approached death, and Cicero knew of a bronzed statue representing him as a bent old man holding a book. Eusebius dated his floruit in Olympiad 42.2 (611 / 10 BC) and his death in Olympiad 55.1 (560 / 59 BC). The Suda's claim that Hesiod was the father of Stesichorus can be dismissed as "fantasy" yet it is also mentioned by Tzetzes and the Hesiodic scholiast Proclus (one of them however named the mother of Stesichorus via Hesiod as Ctimene and the other as Clymene). According to another tradition known to Cicero, Stesichorus was the grandson of Hesiod yet even this verges on anachronism since Hesiod was composing verses around 700 BC. Stesichorus might be regarded as Hesiod's literary "heir" (his treatment of Helen in the Palinode, for example, may have owed much to Hesiod's Catalogue of Women) and maybe this was the source of confusion about a family relationship. According to Stephanus of Byzantium and the philosopher Plato the poet's father was named Euphemus, but an inscription on a herm from Tivoli listed him as Euclides. The poet's mathematically inclined brother was named Mamertinus by the Suda but a scholiast in a commentary on Euclid named him Mamercus.
Stesichorus's lyrical treatment of epic themes was well suited to a
western Greek audience, owing to the popularity of hero cults in
southern Italy and Magna Graeca, as for example the cult of Philoctetes at Sybaris, Diomedes at Thurii and the Atreidae at Tarentum.
It was also a sympathetic environment for his most famous poem, The
Palinode, composed in praise of Helen, an important cult figure in the
Doric diaspora.
On the other hand, the western Greeks were not very different to their
eastern counterparts and his poetry cannot be regarded exclusively as a
product of the Greek West. His poetry reveals both Doric and Ionian influences and this is consistent with the Suda's
claim that his birthplace was either Metauria or Himera, both of which
were founded by colonists of mixed Ionian / Doric descent.
On the other hand, a Doric / Ionian flavor was fashionable among later
poets — it is found in the 'choral' lyrics of the Ionian poets Simonides and Bacchylides — and it might have been fashionable even in Stesichorus's own day. His poetry included a description of the river Himera as well as praise for the town named after it, and his poem Geryoneis included a description of Pallantium in Arcadia. His possible exile from Arcadia is attributed by one modern scholar to rivalry between Tegea and Sparta.
Traditional accounts indicate that he was politically active in Magna
Graeca. Aristotle mentions two public speeches by Stesichorus: one to
the people of Himera, warning them against Phalaris, and another to the
people of Locri, warning them against presumption (possibly referring to their war against Rhegium). Philodemus
believed that the poet once stood between two armies (which two, he
doesn't say) and reconciled them with a song — but there is a similar
story about Terpander. According to the 9th century scholar Photius, the term eight all
(used by gamblers at dice) derives from an expensive burial the poet
received outside Catana, including a monument with eight pillars, eight
steps and eight corners, but the 3rd century grammarian Julius Pollux
attributed the same term to an 'eight all ways' tomb given to the poet
outside Himera. Many modern scholars don't accept the Suda's claim that Stesichorus was named for his innovations in choral poetry — there are good reasons to believe that his lyrical narratives were composed for solo performance. Moreover the name wasn't unique — there seems to have been more than one poet of this name. The Suda in yet another entry refers to the fact, now verified by Papyrus fragments, that Stesichorus composed verses in units of three stanzas (strophe, antistrophe and epode), a format later followed by poets such as Bacchylides and Pindar. Suda claims this three stanza format was popularly referred to as the three of Stesichorus in a proverbial saying rebuking cultural buffoons ("You don't even know the three of Stesichorus!"). According to one modern scholar, however, this saying could instead refer to the following three lines of his poem The Palinode, addressed to Helen of Troy:
Helen of Troy's bad character was a common theme among poets such as Sappho and Alcaeus
and, according to various ancient accounts, Stesichorus viewed her in
the same light until she magically punished him with blindness for
blaspheming her in one of his poems. According to a colorful account recorded by Pausanias, she later sent an explanation to Stesichorus via a man from Croton,
who was on a pilgrimage to White Island in the Black Sea (near the
mouth of the Blue Danube), and it was in response to this that
Stesichorus composed the Palinode, absolving her of all blame for the Trojan War and thus restoring himself to full sight. The ancients associated the lyrical qualities of Stesichorus with the voice of the nightingale, as in this quote from the Palatine Anthology: "... at his birth, when he had just reached the light of day, a nightingale, traveling through the air from somewhere or other, perched unnoticed on his lips and struck up her clear song." The account is repeated by Pliny the Elder but it was the epic qualities of his work that most impressed ancient commentators, though with some reservations on the part of Quintillian:
In a similar vein, Dionysius of Halicarnassus commends Stesichorus for "... the magnificence of the settings of his subject matter; in them he has preserved the traits and reputations of his characters", and Longinus puts him in select company with Herodotus, Archilochus and Plato as the 'most Homeric' of authors. Modern scholars tend to accept the general thrust of the ancient comments – even the 'fault' noted by Quintillian gets endorsement: 'longwindedness', as one modern scholar calls it, citing, as proof of it, the interval of 400 lines separating Geryon's death from his eloquent anticipation of it. Similarly, "the repetitiveness and slackness of the style" of the recently discovered Lille papyrus has even been interpreted by one modern scholar as proof of Stesichorean authorship – though others originally used it as an argument against. Possibly Stesichorus was even more Homeric than ancient commentators realized – they had assumed that he composed verses for performance by choirs (the triadic structure of the stanzas, comprising strophe, antistrophe and epode, is consistent with choreographed movement) but a poem such as the Geryoneis included some 1500 lines and it probably required about four hours to perform – longer than a chorus might reasonably be expected to dance. Moreover, the versatility of lyric meter is suited to solo performance with self accompaniment on the lyre – which is how Homer himself delivered poetry. Whether or not it was a choral technique, the triadic structure of Stesichorean lyrics allowed for novel arrangements of dactylic meter – the dominant meter in his poems and also the defining meter of Homeric epic – thus allowing for Homeric phrasing to be adapted to new settings. However, Stesichorus did more than recast the form of epic poetry – works such as the Palinode were also a recasting of epic material: in that version of the Trojan War, the combatants fought over a phantom Helen while the real Helen either stayed home or went to Egypt. The 'Lyric Age' of Greece was in part self discovery and self expression – as in the works of Alcaeus and Sappho – but a concern for heroic values and epic themes still endured:
The Homeric qualities of Stesichorus' poetry are demonstrated in a fragment of his poem Geryoneis describing the death of the monster Geryon. A scholiast writing in a margin on Hesiod's Theogony noted that Stesichorus gave the monster wings, six hands and six feet, whereas Hesiod himself had only described it as 'three - headed'. yet Stesichorus adapted Homeric motifs to create a humanized portrait of the monster, whose death in battle mirrors the death of Gorgythion in Homer's Iliad, translated here by Richard Lattimore:
Homer here transforms Gorgythion's death in battle into a thing of beauty — the poppy hasn't wilted or died. Stesichorus adapted the simile to restore Death's ugliness while still retaining the poignancy of the moment:
The mutual self reflection of the two passages is part of the novel aesthetic experience that Stesichorus here puts into play. The enduring freshness of his art, in spite of its epic traditions, is borne out by Ammianus Marcellinus in an anecdote about Socrates: happening to overhear, on the eve of his own execution, the rendition of a song of Stesichorus, the old philosopher asked to be taught it: "So that I may know something more when I depart from life." His works, according to the Suda, were collected in 26 books but each of these was probably a long, narrative poem. The titles of more than half of them are recorded by ancient sources:
Bovillae, about twelve miles outside Rome, was the original site of a monument dating from the Augustan period and now located in the Capitoline Museum. The stone monument features scenes from the fall of Troy, depicted in low relief, and an inscription: Ιλίου Πέρσις κατα Στησίχορον ('Sack of Troy according to Stesichorus'). Scholars are divided as to whether or not it accurately depicts incidents described by Stesichorus in his poem Sack of Troy. There is, for example, a scene showing Aeneas and his father Anchises departing 'for Hesperia' with 'sacred objects', which might have more to do with the poetry of Virgil than with that of Stesichorus. |