Читать книгу A Companion to Greek Lyric - Группа авторов - Страница 32

Approximation between epic and lyric modalities can proceed even without the aid of shared dialect and meter. Consider the pictures of high summer in Hesiod’s Works and Days (582–596) and the sixth-century Lesbian poet Alcaeus (fr. 347).⁹ Hesiod sets out a series of seasonal signs (582–588) before suggesting a somewhat restrained drink (mixed three parts of pure water and one of wine: 588–589, 595–596) for the farmer, resting from the cool of the sun after enjoying the best food the season has to offer (590–594). Alcaeus’ much shorter treatment uses a stichic meter (called the “Asclepiad”) like the hexameter, and allows several correspondences with Hesiod’s language and style, since its rhythm allows dactylic segments.¹⁰ Thus, Alcaeus can treat his verses, as epic poets do, as largely contained (sub)units of meaning with considerable degrees of end-stopping: the only—and thus emphatic—noticeable run-over comes in the poem’s final word ἄσδει “dries up.”¹¹ There may well be something missing at the end of this fragment, but even so it is a self-contained and (con)dense(d) vignette, seemingly designed to make itself as quotable and popular as it became.¹²

Connection between summer and wine drinking is traditional in early poetry,¹³ and Hesiod’s consumption is in keeping with his poem’s moderation and restraint (592–596), while the Alcaean refraction isolates and puts the drinking first, and in exuberant terms somewhat removed from the well-instructed farmer seasonally resting from his toils. This contrast, between the repeated rhythms of Hesiod and the definitely hic et nunc nature of Alcaeus’ song, recalls the directness we saw in Tyrtaeus.¹⁴

But direct comparisons between lyric and epic modalities are most evident in the case of mythical narratives and exempla, since the lyricists were almost as interested as their epic kin in using the past as a paradigm for the present.¹⁵ The narration of myth is, of course, the natural province of epic poetry and dominates our record of the form (and so the rest of this chapter): whether we think of the poems themselves, like the Iliad and Odyssey, which set out large-scale heroic narratives, and the Theogony (and its ilk) and Homeric Hymns which tell the stories of the gods; or of the many characters in those poems who deployed these exempla in their own speeches, as e.g., Phoenix recounting the story of Meleager to Achilles (Il. 9.524– 599), or any of Nestor’s several self-narratives (Il. 1.260–273, etc.). Even epic poets who adopted a more involved self-presentational stance may be grouped here, such as Hesiod in his Works and Days with the myths of Pandora’s creation (47–105) and the Ages of Man (106–201) as direct lessons to his contemporary addressee, Perses, about the power of Zeus.¹⁶ This is, in other words, a strategy found everywhere in early epic. So it is in lyric, right across genres and the span of the Archaic period, where we can observe the growth of a specifically lyric or—more accurately perhaps—an openly mixed tradition of mythological exemplarity.