Bacchylides

• 1. Introduction

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  Bacchylides was a Greek lyric poet born around 518 BC on the small island of Keos, and for most of history almost no one could read a single complete poem he wrote. By 1896, just sixty-nine fragments of his work survived, totalling a mere 107 lines. Then a papyrus turned up in Egypt, smuggled out in a crate of oranges after a midnight rendezvous with a steamship, and everything changed. What kind of poet lay hidden inside those torn scraps of papyrus? What did his work reveal about the fierce rivalry at the heart of Greek lyric poetry? And why, even after his rediscovery, did scholars seem almost determined to bury him again?

• 2. The Island and the Uncle

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  Keos, thirteen miles from the Athenian cape Sunium, was not a large island, but it punched above its weight in poetical and musical culture. Its people sent choirs each year to Delos, the principal sanctuary of the Ionian race, to celebrate festivals of Apollo. A temple to Apollo stood at Carthaea on Keos itself, where a training ground for choruses had once been run by Simonides, the poet who would become Bacchylides's uncle and most formative influence.

  Simonides was already a major figure when Bacchylides was born. His patrons included Hipparchus, brother of Hippias the tyrant of Athens, who held power from 527 to 510 BC. An elegy by Simonides was chosen by Athens to commemorate the Athenians who fell at the Battle of Marathon. Ceans had fought in the defeat of the Persians at the Battle of Salamis, and their national identity was bound up in athletic competition, with victories at panhellenic festivals recorded on stone slabs at Ioulis.

  For a boy of quick imagination growing up amid those traditions, the career path was clear. Simonides later introduced his nephew to ruling families in Thessaly and to Hieron of Syracuse, the Sicilian tyrant whose court also attracted Pindar and Aeschylus. Bacchylides's first notable successes came after 500 BC, with commissions from Athens for the great Delian festival and from Macedonia for a song performed at a symposium for the young prince Alexander I.

• 3. The Rivalry with Pindar

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  In 476 BC the competition between Bacchylides and Pindar reached one of its sharpest points. Both poets composed odes celebrating Hieron's first victory at the Olympian Games, won by his racehorse Pherenicus. Pindar used the occasion to counsel the tyrant on the need for moderation in personal conduct. Bacchylides, by contrast, probably offered his ode as a free demonstration of skill, hoping for future work.

  The two men differed not just in strategy but in temperament. Pindar composed in ten genres, Bacchylides in nine, yet Bacchylides had a wider range than any of the other seven poets in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets. Where Pindar soared into stern moral instruction, Bacchylides favoured clarity, simplicity, and at times a folksiness his rival would never have attempted. Translator Robert Fagles put it directly: to blame Bacchylides for not being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn Marvell for missing the grandeur of Milton.

  The rivalry grew personal enough that Alexandrian scholars identified passages in Pindar as hostile allusions to Bacchylides and his uncle Simonides. In the same year both poets celebrated Pherenicus's Olympic victory, Pindar composed an ode for Theron of Acragas in which he compares himself to an eagle confronted with chattering ravens. Many readers took this as a pointed reference to the Cean pair. Hieron eventually gave Bacchylides the most prestigious commission: celebrating the tyrant's chariot-race victory at the Olympic Games in 468 BC, a contest Pindar was not asked to mark.

• 4. The Papyrus Smuggled in Oranges

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  By the late 19th century, all that remained of Bacchylides in print were sixty-nine fragments totalling 107 lines. Then a local in Egypt claimed to have found a papyrus in a ransacked tomb, between the feet of a mummy. The Egyptologist Wallis Budge, of the British Museum, bought it at what he described as a "preposterous" price.

  Getting the papyrus out of Egypt proved harder than buying it. The British Consul and the Egyptian Service of Antiquities both refused to let Budge leave with it. His solution involved a crate of oranges, switched trains, covert embarkations, and a midnight rendezvous with a P and O steamship. He eventually sailed from Suez with the papyrus dismembered and disguised as a packet of photographs.

  In 1896, Budge presented the find to Frederic Kenyon in the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts. Kenyon reassembled 1,382 lines of Greek uncials, 1,070 of which were perfect or easily restored. The following year he published an edition of twenty poems, six of them nearly complete. Friedrich Blass in Germany fitted additional fragments together, and then Richard Claverhouse Jebb produced the authoritative edition. One scholar said the combined effort made it feel as though the Renaissance had almost returned. The papyrus, originally a roll about seventeen feet long and ten inches high written in the Ptolemaic period, arrived in England in roughly two hundred torn fragments. Kenyon pieced it into three sections totalling almost fifteen feet and thirty-nine columns; in that form it remains in the British Library.

• 5. Style and the Eagle

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  Bacchylides drew on multiple predecessors. His metrical range was mostly dactylo-epitrite, with some Aeolic rhythms and a few iambics, following the approach of his uncle Simonides. He used a mild form of the traditional literary Doric dialect, borrowing some Aeolic words and traditional epithets from epic. His vocabulary shows the influence of Aeschylus, with several words common to both poets and found nowhere else.

  His narrative techniques were modelled largely on Stesichorus, whose lyrical treatment of heroic myth shaped, among other things, Ode 5. Bacchylides also borrowed from tragedy: Ode 16, with its myth of Deianeira, seems to assume audience knowledge of Sophocles's Women of Trachis, and Ode 18 echoes three plays, among them Aeschylus's Persians and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. His influence ran forward too: the Roman poet Horace imitated him, according to Pomponius Porphyrion, in Carmen I.15, where Nereus predicts the destruction of Troy.

  Modern scholars point to the description of the eagle near the opening of Ode 5 as the most impressive passage in his surviving poetry. The bird cuts the air on tawny wings, unbothered by mountain peaks or rough seas, guiding its plumage along the West Wind's breezes. The image then pivots to the poet's own art: "So now for me too countless paths extend in all directions / by which to praise your prowess." Henri Weil, the French critic, thought Bacchylides should never have compared himself to an eagle, arguing that the soaring wing had been refused him. Yet one modern scholar described the passage itself as the finest moment in his extant work, suggesting Weil's judgement says more about the rivalry with Pindar than about the poem. The discovery of the papyrus in 1896 added roughly a hundred new words to Greek lexicons and made Bacchylides, almost overnight, among the best represented of the nine canonical lyric poets, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar.

• 6. Survival and Rediscovery

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  The poems were collected into critical editions in the late 3rd century BC by the Alexandrian scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, who probably restored them to their proper metres after finding them written in prose form. They were arranged in nine books covering every genre Bacchylides practised, from hymns and paeans to dithyrambs, processionals, songs for maidens, songs of praise, victory odes, and songs of love.

  The Alexandrian grammarian Didymus, writing around 30 BC, composed commentaries on the work, and papyri fragments show the poems were popular reading in the first three centuries AD. Ammianus Marcellinus noted that the emperor Julian enjoyed reading Bacchylides. The largest collection of quotations that survived into the modern era was assembled by Stobaeus in the early 5th century. From that point, however, the trail went cold until the Egyptian papyrus surfaced at the end of the 19th century.

  Ironically, the newly discovered poems triggered a rush of comparative scholarship that used them primarily to elevate Pindar. Scholars found Bacchylides wanting in elevation and depth by Pindaric standards, and one observer noted that the students of Pindaric poetry almost succeeded in burying Bacchylides all over again. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, his modern editor, offered a more generous reading of the poet's temperament, finding in the scattered fragments evidence of a placid, amiably tolerant nature, satisfied with modest circumstances. That reading rests partly on a fragment in which Bacchylides wrote: "One canon is there, one sure way of happiness for mortals, if one can keep a cheerful spirit throughout life." Whether that precept describes the poet or merely the poem, it is the closest thing to a self-portrait he left behind.