Popularity and transmission of Classical Greek poetry
Apr 24, 2019 14:23:02 GMT
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Post by Silver on Apr 24, 2019 14:23:02 GMT
Popularity and transmission of Classical Greek poetry
“The ancient literature which has survived until today was invariably the most famous and well liked in its time.”
At first glance this might appear to be an uncontroversial statement. Texts in classical antiquity were copied by hand onto scrolls, which by its laborious nature required a certain amount of interest for the text to be reproduced in the first place. Oral tradition rather than written was predominant in the Greek cultural sphere well into the 5th century BCE, and it is held that the tyrant Peisistratos was the first to order the writing down of the Homeric epics. At least one of the reasons for this was because of the popularity of Homer’s tales, and later in the same period poems and philosophical texts were copied for educational purposes in schools. This connects to the discussion of how and/or if it is the most popular of texts that were reproduced and ended up surviving into our own period. Thusly, upon closer inspection, there are a number of problems with the above statement that become apparent. Roughly, these can be divided into chronology, technology, and ideology. However, the focus of this paper will be the change of attitudes towards the written arts, and role of the artists themselves, from the Classical to the Hellenistic antiquity, and the implication this had on transmission.
The recipients of ancient literature, in particular poetry, but also dramas and historical works, changed over the course of the centuries. For instance, in Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, poetry was produced and performed in a myriad of contexts; as political satire, competitions, or for symposiums for affluent citizens, but the common nominator was a live audience. In addition, which was common across the Greek sphere, there was a tradition for personal lyrical poetry, such as the works of Sappho, Archilochos, and Alkaios, not intended for festivals or competitions. But during the Hellenistic period, following the Macedonian conquest of Greece and the establishment of a number of Hellenic monarchies across the Near East, the poets (along with philosophers and visual artists) became more and more connected with the royal courts of the Hellenistic kings and queens. A culture of artistic mäzenat developed as part of the process of royal legitimization and its production. The poet Timon called the Ptolemaic court “the Birdcages of the Muses”, referring to the large number of artists in royal employ, but also mocking the proprietary element to their presence at court, saying “There are many who are feeding, many scribblers on papyrus, ever ceaselessly contending.” This is more than a little hypocritical, seeing that Timon himself was in the employ of the Antigonid king Antigonos II Gonatas.
While Athens remained a cultural lodestar, increasingly the production of Greek-language written works was undertaken in the courts in Antiocheia, Alexandreia, and Pergamon. And since the audiences changed from mainly large public gatherings to the intimacy of the Hellenistic basileus and his aulikoi, “courtiers”, or at the very least produced on their sponsorship, meant that the fundamental message in the produced artistry changed. It was supposed, if not explicitly then at least tacitly, to please a patron rather than a fickle crowd, though Hellenistic court poetry is a far cry from the later panegyric genre. A result of this was the need for texts to be written down, which was partly a development caused by the court society, as well as the development of state-financed libraries (again a part of the Hellenistic projection of legitimacy and soft power). Any monarch with dynastic ambitions wanted to be portrayed as a patron of the arts, an enlightened ruler in addition to the all-important military aspect of Hellenistic basileia, and this included the physical evidence that books provided, like poetry, drama, and prose. This became even more apparent in the age of the Roman emperors, with numerous examples of poets and authors providing the imperial court with works either dedicated to the incumbent emperor, or as a panegyric to the imperial dynasty as a whole. A famous example of this is the epic Aeneid, produced as a tribute to the princeps Augustus, famously connecting the mythical primogenitors Romulus and Remus with the Greek tradition of Ilion and the Trojan Wars, and was even in antiquity claimed to be a “fluff piece” for Augustus.
This development of the expanded artistic courts, meant that the previously very nomadic poets, were more and more attached to a particular location (such as the Museion and Library in Alexandreia), or at the very least spent much more time at each court than was previously the case, such as the famous flitting around of Pindar. Yet there was still an incentive to acquire works from Greece proper, for instance when the Museion asked for an accurate text of Attic tragedy, and after the Athenians asked for a deposit of fifteen talents, the head of the Museion deemed the texts worth enough to forfeit the deposit and keep the texts for the Alexandrian library. And the Hellenistic courts, despite their quite expansive collection of artists and scientists, did of course not have a monopoly on artistic and scientific production in the Hellenic world; the Greek city-states continued as they had done for centuries to produce poetry, comedies, tragedies, and other works of art, aimed towards the same audience as they always had done. But the vast majority of the artists active in the Hellenistic period, were the ones in royal employ, and the same holds true of the extant texts which have been transmitted from that time period.
This all ties back into the problem of popularity. If the original statement in the introduction holds true, then the extant texts should be both popular and royally approved titles, but the fact remains that of the roughly four-hundred dramas (to use that as an example) that contemporary scholars know the title of, only a small number is available to us in what can be called its entirety, and the works produced in the Hellenistic kingdoms, such as the Seleukid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, were made for a Greek-speaking public, a superimposed elite, disregarding the autochthonic citizens. In the case of the Ptolemies and the Greco-Macedonians in Alexandreia there was clearly a sense of alienation, as the Greek-speaking population lived in enclaves in a few cities in a country largely culturally Egyptian. The result was a desire to reinforce their Greek-ness and create a cultural attachment. This was in contrast to the peripatetic Seleukid and Antigonid kings, who did not have a principal royal capital, but spent time in a number of cities, and as a rule had a much larger population of Greek-speakers than Ptolemaic Egypt. Despite some exceptions, such as Kallimachos of Kyrene who might have performed his poetry publically (controversially argued by Alan Cameron), the majority of Hellenistic drama and poetry was never performed outside the confines of the aulē, “court”, which in turn means that many of the works preserved from Hellenistic times were popular with the inner circle of the kings, but cannot be deemed as “famous” or “well-liked” in a broad sense. There are a number of arguments in favour of this, the principal of them being the complex and advanced language and style of the poetry of for instance Kallimachos and Apollonios of Rhodes. Thus the claim of most well-liked and famous of the works inherited from the Hellenistic and Classical periods is a porous one at best. The scholars of the Hellenistic libraries did copy the older texts from the heyday of Greek literature and poetry, and in that case the popularity argument holds true; the Alexandrian scholars created a canon of nine Classical and Hellenistic lyrical poets, including names such as Sappho, Alkaios, Pindar, and Bacchylides, poets who had enjoyed tremendous success and popularity in their own time. The same is impossible to say for the extant literature from the Hellenistic poets and authors. While there is an argument to be made that their works were popular with their rather limited audience, but the fact that the audience is small should not take away from their popularity within that context. However, we cannot be sure even of this, and it might be a case of a small clique of royally patronized artists who produced and reproduced works with little dissemination. In any case, the works made by artists in Athens and mainland Greece in the Hellenistic period, the bastion of poetry and drama, have all but been lost to posterity, and it is unlikely that the reason for this was poor quality and reception among their audiences.
Jumping ahead in time, up until the 2nd century CE, books had been scrolls of either papyrus or parchment, but the development of the codex, the precursor to the hardcover book, led to a period of reproduction of works into the new medium. Despite the fact that parchment notebooks had existed since the time of the Roman Republic, it took a long time for them to acquire the status as “books”. However, despite the shelf life of properly maintained papyri scrolls, parchment books were sturdier, more capacious, conveniently sized for carrying, and cheaper to produce. This created a reproduction “bottle-neck” as it were, as scholars had to determine what was worth transcribing into the new format, and there can be no doubt there was considerable loss of texts that once had been popular and frequently read, but which had after hundreds of years fallen into obscurity. The aforementioned advantages of the parchment codices connect neatly to the advent of Christianity, where Christian preachers and converts required a practicable way to carry the scriptures with them. Yet the Christian conversion of the Roman Empire led to a change in relation to “pagan” literature. Already during the reign of Julian the Apostate (r. 355-363 CE), the by now largely Christian empire had turned against the traditional paganism and destroyed most of the empire’s old temples to the Hellenic gods, and there is little reason to believe this was also not the case with old “pagan” literature. The early Christian bishops, especially after the decree by the emperor Theodosius I to officially convert the Empire to Nicene Christianity, had a hard time determining what pagan texts to retain and which to consign to the historical dustbin. In short, only texts which either conformed to doctrinal Christian teachings or did not directly contradict them were deemed fit for reproduction, leading to the loss of a number of texts, and the careful retention of others. Yet there has clearly not been a full scale purge of pagan literature, despite the very aggressive stance towards practicing pagans and pagan places of worship. Furthermore, despite the rise of Christianity, there was for the longest time no realistic alternative to the classical education of old Athens and Rome; the sons of the elite were still taught rhetoric and philosophy, using the texts of Cicero and Aristotle, and the poetry of Sappho and Vergil was still read at feasts.
In summary, the transmission of texts, notably poetry and dramas in this context, was highly conditional, not simply popularity. The sheer length of time between antiquity and modern times means there are a myriad of different reasons why some texts survived and others did not. The Hellenistic practice of creating large libraries containing as much written material as possible certainly preserved the most popular of Classical literature. However, the various conditions the Hellenistic poets operated under, primarily their royal patronage as main source of income, and the limited dissemination of their works to audiences larger than the courts or at best the Greek-speaking parts of the Hellenistic kingdoms, meant that it is very hard to consign these texts the label of “famous” or “well-liked” in a grander scale. Certainly could be popular with their limited audiences, but even that is called into question when considering the changeover from papyri scrolls to parchment codices in the time of the Roman Empire, which created headaches for the scholars of the time regarding what texts to transcribe and what to throw away. In short, which covers the entire time period touched upon, the works that were transcribed would be the most popular at that time, not necessarily the most popular when they were originally produced.
Literature
Athenaios, Deiphnosophistai. Trans. Charles Burton Gulick. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA.
Cameron, Alan. Callimachus and his Critics. Princeton NJ, 1995.
De Romilly J. A Short History of Greek Literature. Chicago IL, 1985.
Hunter, R. L., “Literature and its Contexts”, in Erskine, A. (ed.) A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford, 2003b.
Reynolds L. D., Wilson N. G. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford, 1991.
Ricquier, K. “The early modern transmission of the ancient Greek romances : a bibliographic survey” (R. Barkhuis, Ed.) Ancient Narrative 15, (2018) pp. 1-34.
Saïd S., Trede M. A Short History of Greek Literature. Abingdon, 2003.
Strootman, Rolf. The Hellenistic Royal Court: Court Culture, Ceremonial and Ideology in Greece, Egypt and the Near East 336-30 BCE. Utrecht, 2007.
Teitler H. C. The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity. Oxford, 2017.
Williams R. “The Purpose of the Aeneid”. Antichthon 1, (1967) pp. 29-41.
“The ancient literature which has survived until today was invariably the most famous and well liked in its time.”
At first glance this might appear to be an uncontroversial statement. Texts in classical antiquity were copied by hand onto scrolls, which by its laborious nature required a certain amount of interest for the text to be reproduced in the first place. Oral tradition rather than written was predominant in the Greek cultural sphere well into the 5th century BCE, and it is held that the tyrant Peisistratos was the first to order the writing down of the Homeric epics. At least one of the reasons for this was because of the popularity of Homer’s tales, and later in the same period poems and philosophical texts were copied for educational purposes in schools. This connects to the discussion of how and/or if it is the most popular of texts that were reproduced and ended up surviving into our own period. Thusly, upon closer inspection, there are a number of problems with the above statement that become apparent. Roughly, these can be divided into chronology, technology, and ideology. However, the focus of this paper will be the change of attitudes towards the written arts, and role of the artists themselves, from the Classical to the Hellenistic antiquity, and the implication this had on transmission.
The recipients of ancient literature, in particular poetry, but also dramas and historical works, changed over the course of the centuries. For instance, in Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, poetry was produced and performed in a myriad of contexts; as political satire, competitions, or for symposiums for affluent citizens, but the common nominator was a live audience. In addition, which was common across the Greek sphere, there was a tradition for personal lyrical poetry, such as the works of Sappho, Archilochos, and Alkaios, not intended for festivals or competitions. But during the Hellenistic period, following the Macedonian conquest of Greece and the establishment of a number of Hellenic monarchies across the Near East, the poets (along with philosophers and visual artists) became more and more connected with the royal courts of the Hellenistic kings and queens. A culture of artistic mäzenat developed as part of the process of royal legitimization and its production. The poet Timon called the Ptolemaic court “the Birdcages of the Muses”, referring to the large number of artists in royal employ, but also mocking the proprietary element to their presence at court, saying “There are many who are feeding, many scribblers on papyrus, ever ceaselessly contending.” This is more than a little hypocritical, seeing that Timon himself was in the employ of the Antigonid king Antigonos II Gonatas.
While Athens remained a cultural lodestar, increasingly the production of Greek-language written works was undertaken in the courts in Antiocheia, Alexandreia, and Pergamon. And since the audiences changed from mainly large public gatherings to the intimacy of the Hellenistic basileus and his aulikoi, “courtiers”, or at the very least produced on their sponsorship, meant that the fundamental message in the produced artistry changed. It was supposed, if not explicitly then at least tacitly, to please a patron rather than a fickle crowd, though Hellenistic court poetry is a far cry from the later panegyric genre. A result of this was the need for texts to be written down, which was partly a development caused by the court society, as well as the development of state-financed libraries (again a part of the Hellenistic projection of legitimacy and soft power). Any monarch with dynastic ambitions wanted to be portrayed as a patron of the arts, an enlightened ruler in addition to the all-important military aspect of Hellenistic basileia, and this included the physical evidence that books provided, like poetry, drama, and prose. This became even more apparent in the age of the Roman emperors, with numerous examples of poets and authors providing the imperial court with works either dedicated to the incumbent emperor, or as a panegyric to the imperial dynasty as a whole. A famous example of this is the epic Aeneid, produced as a tribute to the princeps Augustus, famously connecting the mythical primogenitors Romulus and Remus with the Greek tradition of Ilion and the Trojan Wars, and was even in antiquity claimed to be a “fluff piece” for Augustus.
This development of the expanded artistic courts, meant that the previously very nomadic poets, were more and more attached to a particular location (such as the Museion and Library in Alexandreia), or at the very least spent much more time at each court than was previously the case, such as the famous flitting around of Pindar. Yet there was still an incentive to acquire works from Greece proper, for instance when the Museion asked for an accurate text of Attic tragedy, and after the Athenians asked for a deposit of fifteen talents, the head of the Museion deemed the texts worth enough to forfeit the deposit and keep the texts for the Alexandrian library. And the Hellenistic courts, despite their quite expansive collection of artists and scientists, did of course not have a monopoly on artistic and scientific production in the Hellenic world; the Greek city-states continued as they had done for centuries to produce poetry, comedies, tragedies, and other works of art, aimed towards the same audience as they always had done. But the vast majority of the artists active in the Hellenistic period, were the ones in royal employ, and the same holds true of the extant texts which have been transmitted from that time period.
This all ties back into the problem of popularity. If the original statement in the introduction holds true, then the extant texts should be both popular and royally approved titles, but the fact remains that of the roughly four-hundred dramas (to use that as an example) that contemporary scholars know the title of, only a small number is available to us in what can be called its entirety, and the works produced in the Hellenistic kingdoms, such as the Seleukid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, were made for a Greek-speaking public, a superimposed elite, disregarding the autochthonic citizens. In the case of the Ptolemies and the Greco-Macedonians in Alexandreia there was clearly a sense of alienation, as the Greek-speaking population lived in enclaves in a few cities in a country largely culturally Egyptian. The result was a desire to reinforce their Greek-ness and create a cultural attachment. This was in contrast to the peripatetic Seleukid and Antigonid kings, who did not have a principal royal capital, but spent time in a number of cities, and as a rule had a much larger population of Greek-speakers than Ptolemaic Egypt. Despite some exceptions, such as Kallimachos of Kyrene who might have performed his poetry publically (controversially argued by Alan Cameron), the majority of Hellenistic drama and poetry was never performed outside the confines of the aulē, “court”, which in turn means that many of the works preserved from Hellenistic times were popular with the inner circle of the kings, but cannot be deemed as “famous” or “well-liked” in a broad sense. There are a number of arguments in favour of this, the principal of them being the complex and advanced language and style of the poetry of for instance Kallimachos and Apollonios of Rhodes. Thus the claim of most well-liked and famous of the works inherited from the Hellenistic and Classical periods is a porous one at best. The scholars of the Hellenistic libraries did copy the older texts from the heyday of Greek literature and poetry, and in that case the popularity argument holds true; the Alexandrian scholars created a canon of nine Classical and Hellenistic lyrical poets, including names such as Sappho, Alkaios, Pindar, and Bacchylides, poets who had enjoyed tremendous success and popularity in their own time. The same is impossible to say for the extant literature from the Hellenistic poets and authors. While there is an argument to be made that their works were popular with their rather limited audience, but the fact that the audience is small should not take away from their popularity within that context. However, we cannot be sure even of this, and it might be a case of a small clique of royally patronized artists who produced and reproduced works with little dissemination. In any case, the works made by artists in Athens and mainland Greece in the Hellenistic period, the bastion of poetry and drama, have all but been lost to posterity, and it is unlikely that the reason for this was poor quality and reception among their audiences.
Jumping ahead in time, up until the 2nd century CE, books had been scrolls of either papyrus or parchment, but the development of the codex, the precursor to the hardcover book, led to a period of reproduction of works into the new medium. Despite the fact that parchment notebooks had existed since the time of the Roman Republic, it took a long time for them to acquire the status as “books”. However, despite the shelf life of properly maintained papyri scrolls, parchment books were sturdier, more capacious, conveniently sized for carrying, and cheaper to produce. This created a reproduction “bottle-neck” as it were, as scholars had to determine what was worth transcribing into the new format, and there can be no doubt there was considerable loss of texts that once had been popular and frequently read, but which had after hundreds of years fallen into obscurity. The aforementioned advantages of the parchment codices connect neatly to the advent of Christianity, where Christian preachers and converts required a practicable way to carry the scriptures with them. Yet the Christian conversion of the Roman Empire led to a change in relation to “pagan” literature. Already during the reign of Julian the Apostate (r. 355-363 CE), the by now largely Christian empire had turned against the traditional paganism and destroyed most of the empire’s old temples to the Hellenic gods, and there is little reason to believe this was also not the case with old “pagan” literature. The early Christian bishops, especially after the decree by the emperor Theodosius I to officially convert the Empire to Nicene Christianity, had a hard time determining what pagan texts to retain and which to consign to the historical dustbin. In short, only texts which either conformed to doctrinal Christian teachings or did not directly contradict them were deemed fit for reproduction, leading to the loss of a number of texts, and the careful retention of others. Yet there has clearly not been a full scale purge of pagan literature, despite the very aggressive stance towards practicing pagans and pagan places of worship. Furthermore, despite the rise of Christianity, there was for the longest time no realistic alternative to the classical education of old Athens and Rome; the sons of the elite were still taught rhetoric and philosophy, using the texts of Cicero and Aristotle, and the poetry of Sappho and Vergil was still read at feasts.
In summary, the transmission of texts, notably poetry and dramas in this context, was highly conditional, not simply popularity. The sheer length of time between antiquity and modern times means there are a myriad of different reasons why some texts survived and others did not. The Hellenistic practice of creating large libraries containing as much written material as possible certainly preserved the most popular of Classical literature. However, the various conditions the Hellenistic poets operated under, primarily their royal patronage as main source of income, and the limited dissemination of their works to audiences larger than the courts or at best the Greek-speaking parts of the Hellenistic kingdoms, meant that it is very hard to consign these texts the label of “famous” or “well-liked” in a grander scale. Certainly could be popular with their limited audiences, but even that is called into question when considering the changeover from papyri scrolls to parchment codices in the time of the Roman Empire, which created headaches for the scholars of the time regarding what texts to transcribe and what to throw away. In short, which covers the entire time period touched upon, the works that were transcribed would be the most popular at that time, not necessarily the most popular when they were originally produced.
Literature
Athenaios, Deiphnosophistai. Trans. Charles Burton Gulick. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge MA.
Cameron, Alan. Callimachus and his Critics. Princeton NJ, 1995.
De Romilly J. A Short History of Greek Literature. Chicago IL, 1985.
Hunter, R. L., “Literature and its Contexts”, in Erskine, A. (ed.) A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford, 2003b.
Reynolds L. D., Wilson N. G. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford, 1991.
Ricquier, K. “The early modern transmission of the ancient Greek romances : a bibliographic survey” (R. Barkhuis, Ed.) Ancient Narrative 15, (2018) pp. 1-34.
Saïd S., Trede M. A Short History of Greek Literature. Abingdon, 2003.
Strootman, Rolf. The Hellenistic Royal Court: Court Culture, Ceremonial and Ideology in Greece, Egypt and the Near East 336-30 BCE. Utrecht, 2007.
Teitler H. C. The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity. Oxford, 2017.
Williams R. “The Purpose of the Aeneid”. Antichthon 1, (1967) pp. 29-41.