View source

==Introduction==
<p>It is often the case that writers are appreciated as much for who they are as for what they wrote. Such “vulgarity of ‘human interest’,” as Nabokov once referred to it<ref>Lecture on Anna Karenina, in ''Lectures on Russian Literature''. Harcourt, Inc, 1981. p. 138</ref> , can sometimes lead to even cult like worship of a writer, occasionally growing so fierce that it is their character and biography– or at least such as they are imagined– which become more prominent than their actual work.  As Mary Lefkowitz has noted, "Criticism of creative art seems curiously dependent on biography."<ref>''Heroines and Hysterics''. Duckworth Press, 1981.  p. 59</ref>   Classics has a bizarre relationship with this dependence: the abundance of biographical writing and character study about ancient writers belies the extreme paucity of biographical information for these people.  Often we lack anything verifiable proving that these “writers” ever existed, an issue most obvious with Homer.  Lefkowitz has masterfully laid out the case for the extent of speculation and out and out fiction in such “biographies” in her seminal work, ''The Lives of the Greek Poets''.<ref>John Hopkins, 1981</ref>   The effusive stream of biographical information, private papers, and more reliable anecdotal evidence of modern authors, particularly from the nineteenth century on, has fueled a sort of retroactive need to implant biographies of ancient authors in a way which can only be artificial and unfounded, Lefkowitz has shown.</p>

<p>This need for biographies also stimulates the need to consolidate, clarify and expand these writers’ corpuses.  The more poems attributed to an author, the better, particularly for those who still wish, in spite of Lefkowitz’s ''Lives'', to draw biographical information from the poetry itself.  But how do we attribute works to a particular person?  What guarantees their authenticity?  Of course we have a number of poems whose authorship can be verified with at least some relative certainty when their lines are quoted by another ancient writer, but this is no sure guarantee, as proved my misquotes.  For many other poems we have to rely on the, at best, far more imperfect science/art of philology.  The relatively recent discoveries from [http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/ Oxyrhynchus] have yielded what appear to be newly discovered works from famous writers and has birthed in the last century or so a whole new round of textual analysis, and so classical philology continues to have a role to play in dribs and drabs as the good classicists at Oxford sort through all those papyri.</p>

<p>There is one fundamental flaw with the such textual analysis in philology, particularly with the archaic lyric poets.  Philology often works on the assumption that we can trust that those specific people, whom we call "Archilochus," "Sappho," "Anacreon," or "Theognis," existed just as for so long, we trusted that there was a blind bard called Homer.  There are real problems with this assumption.  Professor Percy, a dedicated attendee of the humanities seminars in the classics run by Greg Nagy at Harvard more than a decade ago, open to all outside professors, though rarely attended by any except those invited to speak, learned in these meetings, as well as elsewhere in Nagy’s writing, his assertion that before Pindar and his contemporaries Simonides and Bacchylides, poetry was transmitted orally.  It was not the case that there was no writing at all – take the Peisistratid edition of Homer for example – but simply that poets did not live in a culture where literary work was saved on papyrus, which did not happen routinely until the early part of the fifth century BC.  The first recorded mention of any book comes from Plato’s Apology, in which Socrates mentioned that one could buy Anaxagoras’ work for a drachma.  Before being written down, poems would have most frequently been transmitted at symposia and less frequently at professional performances.  After one particular seminar Percy asked Nagy whether it was the case then that there was no possible way to prove that any line now attributed to Sappho was actually hers.  Nagy unequivocally stated that such was the case.  By extension, we can see why the same argument applies to all the poets antedating Pindar.  Knowing most of archaic Greek poetry as we do, only as it has come down to us in scraps and shards, and knowing that those scraps and shards began their lives as unwritten poems passed around the Greek world from mouth to mouth, then how can we feel comfortable ever stating that a particular poem truly belongs to a particular author, especially when we can’t even say with any real certainty that such a person ever existed! </p>

<p>As with many branches of humanism, literature and history seem to require iconic characters on whom great works and deeds can be hung.  In history, people have a hard time examining great battles, constitutions, treaties, or other events without great figures to drive the action.  What is Salamis without Themistocles? Sparta without Lycurgus?  In literature, it is hard to believe that people would enjoy reading a large collection of anonymous poetry.  Not knowing who wrote what, whether they came from one person or many, what time periods they were composed in and what circumstances inspired the content can be a real preventative for many people to unlocking the beauty and grandeur in a work.  Therefore we have these so-called “authors,” whom we suppose sang particular poems, and using that claim as a basis, philologists “prove” authorship by comparisons in diction, meter, content, and other compositional elements to create their so-called corpuses.  </p>

<p>Of course, the need for great authors and their corpuses is not merely a modern affliction.  We know of the great efforts at Alexandria to collect the poems of the nine lyric poets, including our authors in question.  However, even then those poems were at least two centuries old and often closer to four or five centuries old, depending on the author.  The works of Shakespeare today are all around four hundred years old, yet the provenance of many of his works have long been debated, and they were all written down and collected in folios during his life!  The Alexandrians, with their fragments, quotations, copies and versions, had no such reliable material, and yet we trust them well enough!</p>

==Sappho==
<p>For us as well as our ancient counterparts, it all comes back to Nabokov’s vulgarity of human interest and the obsession with creating a name, a face and a life for the works that we love. Because of her unique position in the history of literature, a prime example of this sort of obsession is Sappho.  Emerging from a culture that essentially barred women from the public eye of art, scholarship or statecraft, her work appears as a rare gem in a male dominated chorus of early Western culture.</p>

<p>	Amongst a number of Greek female poets you can count on one hand, the poetry of Sappho – or, at least, the poetry attributed to her – is the largest extant corpus of writing thought to have come from a woman, not only in her own archaic period, but in the ancient world for centuries to come.  In addition to this, because some of it deals with the love between two women, it stands out as the earliest literary example of lesbian poetry.  Her name is adjectivalized to mean lesbian, and of course the word lesbian itself exists because of her native island.  Mix such socio-political significance with poetry that can be exceptionally beautiful, and it is not hard to see why the work claimed to be Sappho’s and moreover the  multitudes of imagined biographies and character descriptions of Sappho, originating in antiquity but multiplying in modernity have attained such cult-like obsessions in the minds of many.</p>

<p>	However, as Albert Einstein once warned, “The cult of individuals is always, in my view, unjustified.”<ref>''Ideas and Opinions.'' New York: Wing Books, 1954. p 4</ref>   Not only unjustified, but misleading.  Because of her unique place in the world, the biographies constructed about her, as well as her socio-political symbolism, are often more well known than any of her actual work.  Like all of the archaic Greek lyric poets – except more so – Sappho is a figure about whom an astonishing amount has been written and assumed from a staggeringly small extant body of writing and the most contradictory biographical testimonia, any piece of which is suspect to begin with.  We have not one verifiably complete poem, few complete stanzas even, and scraps of lines or phrases left to us which philological scholarship has deemed hers.  We have two misleading biographical entries in the Suda, which give no clear or coherent picture of her life.  We have miscellaneous ancient references to some of her words or lines, or certain – even in the ancient world – apocryphal elements of her biography, such as the famous story of how she threw herself off a rock for love of a handsome young ferryman, a story which is most likely tied to a myth.  From this paltry aggregate of documentation, not only have many agreed on a general biography, but we have the ever suspicious and relatively uniform agreement about what poetry is hers. Regarding such conclusions made about Sappho’s biography, John Addington Symonds warned, "We know so very little, and that little is so confused with mythology and turbid with the scandal of the comic poets, that it is not worth while to rake up once again the old materials for hypothetical conclusions.”<ref>''Studies of the Greek Poets'', 1873.  Quoted in Page, Denys.  ''Sappho and Alcaeus:  An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry''.  Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955.</ref></p>

<p>	The same sentiment can be applied to conclusions made about what should and shouldn’t be credited to Sappho.  As pointed out above, logic and historical evidence suggest that what we attribute to Sappho is not definitely hers.  But because this created character – lesbian lover (now not only of girls but of silver age women), matronly schoolmistress, tragic-romantic, secretly pining, erotically burning wife and mother who wrote exceptional verse, pleaded daily with Aphrodite and lusted for the affections of women, all the while managing to kill herself over love for a young man  – is almost an institution in which her poetry is inextricably bound, this sort of inquiry is neglected in order to maintain the cult surrounding her.</p>

<p>It is improbable that any major Greek poet before Pindar and his contemporaries Simonides and Bacchylides wrote their verses down.  Following in the footsteps of his forebears Milman Perry and Alfred Lord, who asserted the orality of the Homeric epics before the Peisistratid edition, Nagy has explored this thoroughly, (see [http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/features/artsstatements/arts.nagy.htm “Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: from Lesbos to Alexandria”] as a good example ), and was the first to figure out that oral transmission was the first vehicle of preservation for the Greek lyric poets, rather than written, as had usually been mistakenly assumed previously. The poetry now attributed to Sappho would not have been committed to writing until she had long been dead, possibly in the late 5th century and perhaps first at Athens, where the “sacred” texts attributed to Homer were first codified in writing under the Peisistratids, and where Socrates could buy a philosophical treatise.  One can easily adduce, since consigning Homer down correctly to the written word would have taken precedence over all other works, the writing down of the early lyricists occurred even later, possibly even after the Persian Wars.  After that, the great codification of the poetry, parts of which may have been committed to writing in various other places, would have been under the editorship of the great scholars at Alexandria, at which point anything created by Sappho would have been more than three hundred years old.</p>

<p>Presumably there were debates in Athens and later at Alexandria about what was and wasn’t Sappho’s, as there had been about Homer. Yet, roughly '''<u>2600</u>''' years after Sappho would have sung what we call hers, based on debated Alexandrian books, which have long been nothing more than shredded remnants of disjointed fragments, there is certainly no similar debate over questions of her authorship.  We are happy, without good evidence or scholarship based on anything more than highly educated guesswork, or on such finely tuned "ears" like those of Frankel, to accept the conclusions fed to us.</p>

<p>	Some poetry relatively contemporary to Sappho, such as the songs attributed to Alcman and Tyrtaeus may have been more faithfully preserved in conservative Sparta, untroubled as it was by foreign wars and only rarely by social upheavals.  However,  the exact opposite was true in Sappho’s Mytilene, where there was constant stasis and frequent invasions by foreigners. One has only to think of the horrific events between Athens and Mytilene in the Peloponnesian Wars, recounted by Thucydides.  There was no social or political continuity Mytilene, and therefore Sappho’s poems would have had to migrate beyond her city and be preserved by repetition elsewhere, presumably preserved by repetition in male symposia.  However, as Nagy has noted, “…the contents of a given song in an oral tradition will change with each composition-in-performance, even in circumstances where the song proclaims that its own unchangeability is a prerequisite for its own perpetuation.”<ref>“Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria.”  Critical Inquiry:  The Arts of Transmission. 2004.  University of Chicago. 9 April 2008. http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/features/artsstatements/arts.nagy.htm.</ref>   There is no way we can count on accuracy in this mode of transmission.  In discussing the transmission of the poetry of Sappho’s contemporary and countryman, Alcaeus’, Nagy notes that even his friends and admirers would have altered it at least slightly.  How then, can we expect Sappho’s poetry to have remained unchanged in her own city, performed by drunken men at symposia, let alone once it traveled to a place like Athens, where the distance was great, the gender still opposite, and the dialect radically different? The appendix to Page’s collection of Sappho and Alcaeus indicates that even he could not always say which poems to faithfully assign to Sappho or to Alcaeus.  It seems indubitable that many of those works assigned to Sappho by the Alexandrians and by modern editors were at the very least added to or altered by male symposiasts, who, as Dmitrios Yatromanolakis noted<ref>''Sappho in The Making''. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007.</ref>, would have at least lowered the register in which the poems were sung.</p>


==Theognis & Anacreon==
<p>	Even when there is not a cult like fascination surrounding an author, as there is with Sappho, claims of authorship are still taken too easily.  An example inverse from the Sappho question is Anacreon and the Anacreontea, or to a slightly less debatable degree, Theognis and the Theognidea.</p>

<p>From those centuries before Pindar only one corpus comes down to us, the elegies of the old curmudgeon Theognis.  We don’t even know for sure whether he hailed from Megara in Greece or its namesake in Sicily.  The corpus was coalesced into two “books” by Byzantines scholars between the tenth and fifteenth centuries<ref>T. W. Allen, “Theognis,” ''The Classical Review'' 19, no. 8 (November 1905): 386-395.</ref>, who tried somewhat unsuccessfully to separate the boy-love poems from the rest, and it contains verses that most date as early as the 7<sup>th</sup> century and as late as the 5<sup>th</sup>, including some thought to be by Solon, Tyrtaeus or Mimnermus!  Whatever its origin, it must have suffered alterations during oral transmission before being written down, perhaps like the other corpuses, in bits and pieces in different places and times, before it was finally edited and reordered by the Alexandrians and then reordered again during the later Byzantine period.  What we have is clearly a divan – something compiled from diverse sources, altered and reorganized over time.  It is a composite, not unlike the fragment attributed to the “The Leader of the Chorus,” the supposedly prolific, traveling Sicilian Stesichorus.</p>

<p>	Aside from a few papyrus scraps from Oxyrhyncus, Anacreon’s work comes to us strictly through quotes, largely from Athenaeus’ ''Scholars at Dinner'', which probably made use of the edition most likely assembled by Aristophanes of Byzantium at Alexandra, circa 200 BC.<ref>Campbell, David A.  Introduction to ''Greek Lyric II:  Anacreon, Anacreontea & Early Choral Lyric''.  Cambridge, Mass & London, England:  Harvard University Press., 1988. p.4</ref>   Campbell claims that scholarly work had begun on Anacreon in the 4th century with Heraclides Pontius, though even this was well after Anacreon died, which was most likely some time early in the 5th century.  There are some epigrams attributed to him that come through the ''Palatine Anthology'', a work even later than Athenaeus’.  By the time the Anthology’s first edition, collected by Meleager of Gadara first collection, which we no longer have, Anacreon’s work had probably been edited again by Aristarchus in Alexandria, according to Campbell.</p>

<p>	However, the earliest surviving copy of the ''Palatine Anthology'' comes from the 10th century, and is culled from a variety of ancient collections beginning with Meleager’s.  Compiled by a monk named Constantine Cephalas, it is not only the key source for the Greek epigram, it is an important piece of the Ancareon/Anacreontea puzzle.  An appendix to this tenth century work contains the ''Anacreontea'', now considered to be a completely spurious collection of poems in the style of Anacreon, not one composed by Anacreon himself.  When this appendix was first edited and translated by Henri Estienne (aka Henricus Stephanus) in the 16th century and attributed to Anacreon, there was nearly immediate debate about claims of authorship, ranging from the assertion that Stephanus invented the whole thing, to paeans of relief that works of Anacreon – who had been consigned by many as nothing more than a name left to history – had been unearthed.<ref>See Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. ''The Poetics of Imitation:  Anacreon and the anacreontic tradition''.  Camridge, New York, Sydney:  Cambridge University Press, 1992.</ref>   Since then, perhaps no other ancient poet inspired more imitators in most of the great European languages!  Over the intervening centuries, this debate has cooled off, with the appendix in the ''Palatine Anthology'' left to flounder as a body of cheap imitations, while the quotes of Anacreon’s line from Athenaeus in the main section of the ''Anthology'', and the other ancient bits and pieces are generally agreed upon as genuine articles.</p>

<p>	As with the rocky steps in the transmission of Sappho, the transmission of Anacreon’s poetry has been no less bumpy.  Because of this, claims of authorship and non-authorship are equally as dubious.  How can we authenticate his lyrics by relying on quotes written down centuries after his death, pulled from editions made just as posthumously at Alexandria, which had to rely on a tradition that began orally?  It is clearly problematic.  The epigrams from the ''Palatine Anthology'' are even worse.  Coming from an anthology compiled 1500 years after Anacreon’s death, which itself was based on a series of other anthologies, the earliest of which was made about 400 years after Anacreon’s death, and itself would have been based on the same problematic Alexandrian editions as the lyrics, how can one ignore the difficulties in accepting their authenticity?  The papyri are also problematic for the same basic reason, that they too date much later than Anacreon’s life and must be based on an oral tradition, followed by a series of copied editions, not to mention that they have come to us in generally awful condition. Just as difficult as it is to feel comfortable with the poetry regarded as authentic Anacreon, how can we feel comfortable with the conclusions drawn about the inauthenticity of the Anacreontea?  Rosenmeyer’s work, for instance, uses a great deal of comparison to show where the inauthentic lines imitate the originals.  And outside of an attempt to date certain word choices to periods after Anacreon’s life (which is at best a flimsy method), the best way to judge inauthenticity is to make such comparisons.  But if the authenticity of the “real” ones can in no way be reasonably verified, what good is any comparison?  It would necessarily begin on, if not a false premise, an undependable one at least.</p>

<p>	Surely if we had the varying complete texts that the Alexandrians attributed to the poets before Pindar and his rivals, we could find, even before  alterations made by later transcribers, many words and lines that had been borrowed by the singers to which they were ascribed or many others which were altered and cut or added by the Alexandrians.  The transmission of early lyric poets is too problematic at too many junctures to feel any sort of assurance about who wrote what, or that the poems we have now are as they were first uttered by the poets we claim created them.  Some of the lines now attributed to Sappho may have been uttered or inserted by males, and some, if not many, of those in the ''Anacreontea'' may have originated with Anacreon.  Yet there is little debate about claims of authorship, the classical community content to rest on the laurels of their scholarship, which too often relies on flawed premises, and highly educated speculation.</p>

==Conclusion==
	A reasonably educated person reading this paper might say that this argument is otiose, that nothing in this world is certain, so why bother to argue it?  This is a fair enough point; however, the reason for arguing it is that, while many are ready to acknowledge the general uncertainty of most things, particularly of ancient history, words and deeds – as most Greeks would have told you – are two vastly different things.  Look up books and articles on Sappho and her poetry and see how much has been made of a woman we are hard pressed to verify even existed.  Intelligent and well-educated people write about her, speculate about her life, examine the hidden meanings of her work, study her significance as feminist or as a lesbian.  She is a figurehead for all types of imagery, symbolism, and socio-political import.  It almost doesn’t even matter what her poems are, and as suggested above, there are certainly more people who know what her name stands for than anything that she ever wrote.  Because these myths created around her and now surrounding her has taken the reins of directing her place in history, the near irrelevance of what she wrote leaves the a potential inquiry into whether or not the poetry attributed to her should be dead before it can even get off the ground.  Whether it’s all hers or none of it is hers, or through the centuries in which the poetry was transmitted down an unreliable and unverifiable path some of it is hers but has been modified here and there will forever remain unknown, despite the forceful assertions of many.

==Notes==
<div class="references-small"><references /></div>