Playing with the Sacred at the Symposion

Vanessa Casato

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Chapter 12 Playing with the Sacred at the Symposion

in Greek Lyric and the Sacred

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Vanessa Casato

Vanessa Casato
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Art:: Kapitel

Seiten:: 249–267

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004750388_014

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Dar Hadith al Hassania

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Abstract

This chapter makes the case for seeing sympotic poetry as often playing, imaginatively, with religious features of the symposion, rather than (as others have suggested) reinforcing them. It argues that Pindar’s Isthmian 6 plays with what might have been the standard sequence of libations, suggests that Archilochus fr. 120 riffs on a baseline of Dionysiac sacredness without itself being a sacred song (or a dithyramb), and points to the irony in Anacreon 356a and the subversion of the formal conventions of prayer in Anacreon 357. The chapter closes with an extended interpretation of Pindar’s fr. 122 that emphasizes its playfulness.

It is a commonly held understanding of the symposion that it is a space that has a significant sacred dimension. Symposia would open with libations and prayers to the gods, and there is a more general sense in which the symposion is a space that is sacred to Dionysus. But how should this affect our understanding of sympotic poetry? One way of answering this question—one that is, I think, often tacitly assumed—is to say that sympotic poetry could reinforce religious experience at the symposion. Thus, Fiona Hobden has argued that sympotic poetry would ‘construct a discourse on the symposion as a religious space … define the sympotic space as a venue for prayers, libations, hymns, and attention to the gods … communion with the divine’.¹ Xenophanes’ oft-quoted fr. 1 West is held up as an example:²

νῦν γὰρ δὴ ζάπεδον καθαρὸν καὶ χεῖρες ἁπάντων

καὶ κύλικες· πλεκτοὺς δ᾽ ἀμφιτιθεῖ στεφάνους,

ἄλλος δ᾽ εὐῶδες μύρον ἐν φιάληι παρατείνει·

κρητὴρ δ᾽ ἕστηκεν μεστὸς ἐυφροσύνης·

5ἄλλος δ᾽ οἶνος ἑτοῖμος, ὃς οὔποτέ φησι προδώσειν,

μείλιχος ἐν κεράμοις, ἄνθεος ὀζόμενος·

ἐν δὲ μέσοις ἁγνὴν ὀδμὴν λιβανωτὸς ἵησιν,

ψυχρὸν δ᾽ ἐστὶν ὕδωρ καὶ γλυκὺ καὶ καθαρόν·

παρκέαται δ᾽ ἄρτοι ξανθοὶ γεραρή τε τράπεζα

10τυροῦ καὶ μέλιτος πίονος ἀχθομένη·

βωμὸς δ᾽ ἄνθεσιν ἂν τὸ μέσον πάντηι πεπύκασται,

μολπὴ δ᾽ ἀμφὶς ἔχει δώματα καὶ θαλίη.

χρὴ δὲ πρῶτον μὲν θεὸν ὑμνεῖν εὔφρονας ἄνδρας

εὐφήμοις μύθοις καὶ καθαροῖσι λόγοις,

15σπείσαντάς τε καὶ εὐξαμένους τὰ δίκαια δύνασθαι

πρήσσειν· ταῦτα γὰρ ὦν ἐστι προχειρότερον,

οὐχ ὕβρεις· πίνειν δ᾽ ὁπόσον κεν ἔχων ἀφίκοιο

οἴκαδ᾽ ἄνευ προπόλου μὴ πάνυ γηραλέος.

ἀνδρῶν δ᾽ αἰνεῖν τοῦτον ὃς ἐσθλὰ πιὼν ἀναφαίνει,

20ὡς ἦι μνημοσύνη καὶ τόνος ἀμφ᾽ ἀρετῆς,

οὔ τι μάχας διέπειν Τιτήνων οὐδὲ Γιγάντων

οὐδὲ ⟨ ⟩ Κενταύρων, πλάσμα⟨τα⟩ τῶν προτέρων,

ἢ στάσιας σφεδανάς· τοῖς οὐδὲν χρηστὸν ἔνεστιν·

θεῶν ⟨δὲ⟩ προμηθείην αἰὲν ἔχειν ἀγαθήν.

For now the floor is clean and clean the hands of everyone and the cups; [one servant] places woven garlands round [the heads of the guests], and another offers sweet-smelling perfume in a saucer; the mixing-bowl stands filled with good cheer; on hand is additional wine, which promises never to run out, mellow in its jars and fragrant with its bouquet; in the middle incense sends forth its pure and holy aroma and there is water, cool, sweet, and clear; nearby are set golden-brown loaves and a magnificent table laden with cheese and thick honey; in the center an altar is covered all over with flowers, and song and festivity pervade the room.

For men of good cheer it is meet first to hymn the god with reverent tales and pure words, after pouring libations and praying for the ability to do what is right—for in truth this is a more obvious thing to do, not deeds of violence; it is meet to drink as much as you can hold and come home without an attendant unless you are very old, and to praise that man who after drinking reveals noble thoughts, so that there is a recollection of and striving for excellence; it is not meet to make an array of the wars of the Titans or Giants or Centaurs, creations of our predecessors, or violent factions—there is nothing useful in them; and it is meet always to have a good regard for the gods.

This extended conjuring up of the symposion as a space for the performance of libations, hymns to the gods, and prayers for justice, with all the sacred accoutrements of incense, garlands, and an altar, seems to construct for the symposiasts a context for a shared religious experience. The speaker, positioning himself as symposiarchos, reminds the company of their duty to hymn the gods before all else (l. 13), and reminds them that this should be done with euphemia (a religious technical term) in order to preserve ritual purity (εὐφήμοις μύθοις καὶ καθαροῖσι λόγοις, l. 14). This is a pretty straightforward view of the poetry, which takes much of it at face value. It works well for this particular poem—though even here it tends to obscure possible ironies in the ending of the poem, which from ll. 17 onwards seems to shift in tone to become somewhat polemical, a striking maneuver in the context of the earlier emphasis on harmony and restraint—but it seems to me on the whole to fail to do justice to the range of extant sympotic poetry. The aim of this chapter is to complicate that picture of how ‘the sacred’ operates in sympotic poetry, shifting the emphasis away from solemnity and towards playfulness. Such a move is appropriate to the symposion, with ITS imaginativeness and aptness for conjuring up fictional worlds, and its character as a place for showing off poetic sophistication and elegant humor.

1 Pindar

Let us borrow a well-worn trope of sympotic poetry and begin with the opening prayers of the symposion. Modern handbooks are fond of describing a standard sympotic procedure:³ there would be an opening toast to the agathos daimon,⁴ and then, with the mixing of each krater, libations would be poured to Olympian Zeus, heroes and chthonic deities, and Zeus Soter, in that order, and these would be followed by paeans or prayers to the gods.⁵ But it is hard to imagine that in reality all symposia followed such a standardized format. The way in which the standard order for libations, for example, could be a theme for variation is most clearly exemplified by Pindar’s Isthmian 6.1–9.

Θάλλοντος ἀνδρῶν ὡς ὅτε συμποσίου

δεύτερον κρατῆρα Μοισαίων μελέων

κίρναμεν Λάμπωνος εὐαέθλου γενεᾶς ὕπερ, ἐν

3Νεμέᾳ μὲν πρῶτον, ὦ Ζεῦ,

τὶν ἄωτον δεξάμενοι στεφάνων,

5νῦν αὖτε Ἰσθμοῦ δεσπότᾳ

Νηρεΐδεσσί τε πεντήκοντα παίδων ὁπλοτάτου

Φυλακίδα νικῶντος. εἴη δὲ τρίτον

σωτῆρι πορσαίνοντας Ὀ-

8λυμπίῳ Αἴγιναν κάτα

σπένδειν μελιφθόγγοις ἀοιδαῖς.

As when a symposion of men burgeons

and we mix the second krater of the Muses’ song

for the victorious offspring of Lampon,

first at Nemea, o Zeus, having taken

from you the flower of garlands,

and now from the Lord of the Isthmus

and the fifty Nereids with the victory of

Phylacidas the youngest of the sons.

May it be possible for us to prepare a third

one for the Olympian Saviour and pour

upon Aegina libations of honey-voiced songs.

Isthmian 6.1–9

Here, in singing the praises of the Aeginetan victor Phylacidas, Pindar sets up an elaborate comparison with a celebratory symposion: he invokes a first krater for Zeus responding to an earlier victory at Nemea (sacred to Zeus), a second krater to Poseidon for the present victory at the Isthmus (sacred to Poseidon), before finally calling for a third krater to Zeus the Olympian Soter in auspicious anticipation of a victory in the upcoming games at Olympia. In so doing, Pindar is flattering his dedicatee and at the same time charming his audience by making a show of adapting for the symposion of his simile (with perhaps an implicit reference to the symposion that is the context of (re)performance of the ode) the convention of the triple dedication, while the apt recasting of conventional forms is itself, of course, a sympotic convention.

The point of the standard opening prayers or paeans at the symposion was to seek the gods’ benevolence before each new sympotic endeavor: partaking of wine in the symposion was to the Greek mind in some sense a risky and momentous business. It is no accident that these religious actions mirror those that preceded putting a ship to sea: the sympotic libations and paean-singing correspond to the libations and paean singing at the beginning of sea voyages. Intriguingly, ships too could be garlanded, just as, at the symposion, it was not only the symposiasts themselves who were garlanded but also the krater.⁶ This chimes nicely with the well-studied metaphor of the symposion at sea.⁷ Propitiatory prayers, then, were a key sacred component at liminal stages in the symposion.

However, the primary evidence shows that there was considerable freedom of choice over which deities to address: in this at least there was no standard procedure, so that we cannot reconstruct a precise ‘morphology’ of the opening of a symposion, as some of the literature tends to suggest. The four prayers or paeans that open the collection of the carmina convivalia (a practical handbook for sympotic performance) clearly were the kind of songs that were sung at the beginning of the symposion. In them, we find an assortment of gods. First, unsurprisingly in an Attic collection, the polyad goddess Athena, then Demeter and Persephone, Leto and Apollo and Artemis, and finally Pan. The Theognidean corpus also opens with a series of poems eis theous—here again editorial practice mirrors the performance practice of the symposion: first a prayer and a hymn to Apollo, then one to Artemis, and then one to the Muses and the Graces, which leads nicely into the sphragis poem, with its metapoetic concerns. In the Elephantina papyrus now in Berlin (P. Berol. inv. 13270), this, too, most probably a manual for performance at the symposion, we have a first poem, very fragmentary but with a title ‘Muses’ and an invocation to a ‘daughter’; this is followed by a second poem that refers to the mixing of a garlanded or brimming krater of the Graces and to a toast, so that we are clearly still at the opening of a sympotic phase; the sequence continues with a prayer to Mnemosyne, the mother Muse, and this completes the slide from sacred prayer to self-referential poetic invocation. Following the same principle of mirroring performance practice in editorial practice, the first book of the Alexandrian edition of Anacreon also opened with an invocation to a god (fr. 348, to Artemis),⁸ as did the editions of Alcaeus (fr. 307, to Apollo) and, of course Sappho (fr. 1, to Aphrodite). This last fact perhaps tells us something about her reception and the degree to which it was tied to the symposion.

So while the beginning of the symposion or the beginning of a new krater called for an invocation to the deity, it seems likely that there was scope for choice about which deity to address, and these addresses could also be light-hearted or decorative or self-referential; in short, they could place less of an emphasis on ‘the sacred’ and more of an emphasis on the poetic and on the assertion and display of sympotic sophistication. Let us for example take a closer look at the fourth carmen convivale:

Ὦ Πάν, Ἀρκαδίαϲ μεδέων κλεεννᾶϲ,

ὀρχηϲτά, βρομίαιϲ ὀπαδὲ Νύμφαιϲ,

γελάϲειαϲ, ὦ Πάν, ἐπ᾽ ἐμαῖϲ

εὔφροϲι ταῖϲδ᾽ ἀοιδαῖϲ κεχαρημένοϲ.

O Pan, lord of famous Arcadia,

dancer, attendant of the boisterous [or Bromian] Nymphs,

may you laugh, o Pan, delighting in

these cheerful songs of mine.

Carm. conv. fr. 887

According to one reading, advanced by several scholars since Reitzenstein, this is a reworking of the opening of Pindar’s hymn to Pan:⁹

Ὦ Πάν, Ἀρκαδίαϲ μεδέων

καὶ ϲεμνῶν ἀδύτων φύλαξ,

***

Ματρὸϲ μεγάλαϲ ὀπαδέ,

ϲεμνᾶν Χαρίτων μέλημα

5τερπνόν

O Pan, lord of Arcadia

and guardian of sacred precincts

***

attendant of the Sacred mother,

delightful protegee of the holy

5Graces

Pindar fr. 95

It is uncertain in what sort of context Pindar originally intended his poem to be performed, but it is easy to see how it could playfully be appropriated to the symposion. In both poems, the opening invocation to the god chimes with the ritual practice of the symposion that I have sketched above, but its adaptation for the carmen convivale has the effect of highlighting the singer’s allusive skill, and the particular way in which the original has been modified—the emphasis on booziness and abandon over sacredness—suggests that the invocation serves here a more idiosyncratic purpose in setting the tone for a racy symposion.

What I am driving at is that already in relation to these more formalized, opening stages of the symposion—the part of the symposion that we tend to think of as the more structured and “sacred”—there is considerable scope for poetic playfulness: it is not all about correct religious procedure. A keen awareness of this playfulness is a healthy way to approach the extant body of sympotic poetry, and it is a good antidote against taking much of it too literally. Let me be clear, I do not by any means want to suggest that the category of ‘the sacred’ is irrelevant to the symposion, but simply that we should take care not to take the poetry at face value.

2 Archilochus

Let us experiment with keeping in mind this idea of playfulness in relation to the sacred at the symposion and start with two fragments of Archilochus: fr. 120 and fr. 121, taken with their context of citation.¹⁰

120 (Ath. 14.628a)

Φιλόχορος δέ [FGrHist 328 F 172] φησιν ὡς οἱ παλαιοὶ σπένδοντεςοὐκ αἰεὶ διθυραμβοῦσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν σπένδωσι, τὸν μὲν Διόνυσον ἐν οἴνωι καὶ μέθηι, τὸν δ᾽ Ἀπόλλωνα μεθ᾽ ἡσυχίας καὶ τάξεως μέλποντες. Ἀρχίλοχος γοῦν φησιν·

ὡς Διωνύσοι᾽ ἄνακτος καλὸν ἐξάρξαι μέλος

οἶδα διθύραμβον οἴνωι συγκεραυνωθεὶς φρένας.

And Philochorus says that when it comes to libations the ancients do not always sing dithyrambs; it is rather the case that when they pour libations on a wine-filled and drunken occasion they do so singing to Dionysus, while on a quiet and orderly occasion they sing to Apollo. Archilochus at any rate says:

for I know how to take the lead in the dithyramb, the lovely song of lord Dionysus, my wits thunderstruck with wine

121 (Ath. 5.180d–e)

οὐ γὰρ ἐξάρχοντες οἱ κυβιστητῆρες [Il. 18.606 = Od. 4.19], ἀλλ᾽ ἐξάρχοντος τοῦ ὠιδοῦ πάντες ὠρχοῦντο. τὸ γὰρ ἐξάρχειν τῆς φόρμιγγος ἴδιον. διόπερ ὁ μὲν Ἡσίοδός φησιν ἐν τῇ Ἀσπίδι (205) ‘θεαὶ δ᾽ ἐξῆρχον ἀοιδῆς Μοῦσαι Πιερίδες’, καὶ ὁ Ἀρχίλοχος·

αὐτὸς ἐξάρχων πρὸς αὐλὸν Λέσβιον παιήονα.

For it was not the tumblers who took the lead, but they all danced while the singer led, since taking the lead is the lyre’s proper function. That is why Hesiod says in the Shield, ‘and the divine Muses of Pieria were taking the lead in the song’, and Archilochus says:

I myself taking the lead in the Lesbian paean to the pipe’s accompaniment

In these fragments, Archilochus speaks of himself as intoning a dithyramb and a paean respectively. It is not certain that these are fragments from sympotic poems—the nature of the evidence on fragmentary lyric poetry rarely allows scope for certainty—but it is at least likely. Fr. 120 in particular, with its mention of wine and drunkenness in trochaic tetrameters, is perfectly suited to the symposion. Both fragments seem to reflect the sympotic group dynamics whereby one participant intones a song to the god and the others follow suit; the verb ἐξάρχειν in both fragments appears to be a technical term for giving a lead (in key or content) for the benefit of a group of singers.¹¹ We might compare the similar usage in Alcman:

θοίναις δὲ καὶ ἐν θιάσοισιν

ἀνδρείων παρὰ δαιτυμόνεσσι

πρέπει παιᾶνα κατάρχην.

in banquets and thiasoi

of messes it is fitting

to intone the paean among the feasters

fr. 98 [= 129 Calame]

Being the earliest extant mention of the controversial genre of dithyramb, Archilochus fr. 120 has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, and most scholars have wished to see in it the remains of an actual dithyramb.¹² But while the fragment references the subject’s ability to intone the dithyramb, there is nothing to suggest that it is itself a dithyramb. It is more likely that what Archilochus is saying here is something along the lines of ‘when I am very drunk, I like to sing loudly and wildly’ (a behavior that is commonly depicted on sympotic pottery).¹³ Moreover, the context of citation of this fragment makes it irresistible to speculate that frs. 120 and 121 are in some sense a pair of opposites. As we have seen, fr. 120 is cited by Athenaeus as proof of a symposiastic custom reported by Philochorus, according to which symposiasts could choose between songs to Apollo or Dionysus according to the tenor of the occasion. If the paean was the norm at the beginning of the symposion, the dithyramb may be a witty sort of answer to that—not itself sacred, but a sympotic play on a sacred song from the other end of the spectrum that spanned from sober restraint to drunken chaos. Like much other self-referential sympotic literature, then, this poem characterizes the degree of order vs abandon in this particular symposion of Archilochus. So here, the sacred is not entirely cast aside, but it is more a case of employing poetic generic play to riff on a baseline of Dionysiac sacredness at the symposion rather than any straightforward religious utterance. There is a difference between this and taking the songs at face value as sacred songs that facilitate religious experience at the symposion.

3 Anacreon

One of the things the poems can sometimes be seen to do is import a form of sacred discourse from some other cultic context outside the symposion in order to project it within the andron. Such projection from the world at large to the world of the symposion is something we see in relation to all sorts of spheres besides the sacred; there is a good reason why the symposion is so often termed a ‘microcosm’ of the Greek world.¹⁴ Take Anacreon fr. 410:

ἐπὶ δ᾽ ὀφρύσιν σελίνων στεφανίσκους

θέμενοι θάλειαν ἑορτὴν ἀγάγωμεν

Διονύσωι

let us place ‘crownlets’ of celery on our brow

and celebrate the rich feast for Dionysus

This is a textbook sympotic exhortation, firmly rooted in the here and now: there is mention of the wearing of garlands, and there is the inclusive invitation to enjoy the present festivities. But these present festivities are characterized in a way that imports elements from sacred activity that is not strictly speaking sympotic by mention of a θάλεια ἑορτή, a rich feast, that is to say a much larger-scale religious celebration. Perhaps the sorts of connotation that this noun is meant to import are indicated by the secondary meaning of the word according to LSJ, which is, by derivation, ‘something that is enjoyed’ and, from there, ‘amusement’ or ‘fun’.¹⁵ I wonder too if there is something pointed about the celery crowns, which draw attention to themselves by the highly unusual diminutive στεφανίσκους. Celery crowns do occasionally appear in sympotic contexts,¹⁶ but in our fragment, where the symposion of the performance is modified by the notion of a larger scale festival, the other associations of celery crowns might come to the fore. As we know, celery crowns were the prize at the Isthmian and Nemean games; both games have aetiologies as funeral games, and often when celery crowns are mentioned in the ancient record it is in some kind of association to mourning.¹⁷ If more than this snippet had survived of Anacreon’s poem it might have been possible to comment on the point of this possible mournful allusion; as things stand we must confine ourselves to remarking that this is a case of a civic religious festival being projected onto the symposion.¹⁸

A similar effect recurs in another well-known fragment of Anacreon, PMG 356a, another classic sympotic exhortation:

ἄγε δὴ φέρ᾽ ἡμὶν ὦ παῖ

κελέβην, ὅκως ἄμυστιν

προπίω, τὰ μὲν δέκ᾽ ἐγχέας

ὕδατος, τὰ πέντε δ᾽ οἴνου

5κυάθους, ὡς ἂν †ὑβριστιῶς†

ἀνὰ δηὖτε βασσαρήσω.

Come then boy and bring me

a cup, so that I may drink it

in one breath, first pour ten ladles

of water, then five of wine, so that I

5might, once again, anabassarize

?without/with? hybris.

Again, what is interesting here is the way in which the final line departs from the sympotic ‘here and now’ to import something from sacred practice that does not of itself belong to the symposion. The verb anabassarizein refers to cultic activities involving ekstasis and projects them onto the symposion. Unfortunately, here again textual corruption hinders interpretation. The Bassarids were female devotees of Dionysus whose divinely inspired mania was similar to that of the bacchants. The implication, then, would be that Anacreon proposes to get very drunk. But the preceding lines appear to confuse the issue: the ratio of one part wine to two parts water seems weak, though this is probably compensated by the drinking of the contents of a kelebe (five kyathoi, we are told) in one breath. Ancient sources suggest that ἄμυστιν, ‘in one breath’, is a technical term of sorts; it is used in descriptions of sympotic games which involved draining a cup as a kind of dare (a little like the old-fashioned Oxford practice of ‘sconcing’).¹⁹ The dilemma is perhaps insoluble given the corruption in the penultimate line: we do not know whether Anacreon proposes to sing with hybris or without hybris. In any case, would it be justified to argue, with Fiona Hobden, that Anacreon is here ‘urg[ing] his companions into a communion with the divine’? I am unconvinced. I am inclined rather to the view that there is a large measure of irony here, an irony which would be entirely in keeping with Anacreon’s tone elsewhere. The use of the adverb δηὖτε in the final line reinforces this impression: it is a well-recognized topos of pointed self-irony—‘here we go again’ is something that Anacreon says, well … again and again.²⁰

A slightly different sort of example of play with the sacred can be seen in Anacreon PMG 357. Here the poet seems to take things one step further. What this poem does—I would argue—is “pose” as a sacred utterance, while being something quite different, and it is not surprising that the fragment is preserved by Dio Chrysostom, who cites it precisely because it is a decidedly iffy sort of prayer:

τούτοις γε μὴν ξυνέπεται μηδὲ εὐχὰς εὔχεσθαι τὸν βασιλέα τοῖς ἄλλοις ὁμοίας μηδὲ αὖ τοὺς θεοὺς καλεῖν οὕτως εὐχόμενον ὥσπερ ὁ Ἰώνων ποιητὴς Ἀνακρέων·

It follows that the king should not offer prayers like those of other men nor call on the gods in prayer after the manner of the Ionian poet Anacreon:
Orationes 2.62 [i 29 von Arnim]

ὦναξ, ὧι δαμάλης Ἔρως

καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες

πορφυρῆ τ᾽ Ἀφροδίτη

συμπαίζουσιν, ἐπιστρέφεαι δ᾽

5ὑψηλὰς ὀρέων κορυφάς·

γουνοῦμαί σε, σὺ δ᾽ εὐμενὴς

ἔλθ᾽ ἡμίν, κεχαρισμένης δ᾽

εὐχωλῆς ἐπακούειν·

Κλεοβούλωι δ᾽ ἀγαθὸς γένεο

10σύμβουλος, τὸν ἐμὸν δ᾽ Ἔρωτ᾽,

ὦ Δεόνυσε, δέχεσθαι.

O lord with whom Eros the subduer

and the blue-eyed nymphs

and flushing Aphrodite

play, you frequent

5the high peaks of the mountains,

I entreat you: come to me

kindly and pay heed

to my gracious prayer:

be a good adviser

10to Cleobulus to accept

my love, O Dionysus.

PMG 357

Ostensibly—formally—this is a prayer: it has an opening invocation and a list of attributes (here the divine companions); γουνοῦμαί σε (l. 6) signals Anacreon’s explicitly prayerful attitude; the request for benevolence is also formulaic, and the poem ends with an entreaty and possibly a dedication. But I would suggest that this is in fact no more than the shell of a prayer, a prayer with the sacred taken out of it, as it were, for the purposes of producing a fancy witticism for the symposiasts’ amusement.

Ewen Bowie has already argued that this is a sympotic riddle, and that the reference to Dionysus, the Nymphs, and Aphrodite and Eros are metaphorical or allegorical references to wine, water, and love respectively.²¹ I find this reading entirely plausible. The riddle then works by subverting the formal conventions of prayer. Normally, a prayer begins by ritually naming and identifying the deity, but here the deity is invoked yet left unnamed, and we are required to figure out who it is as we go along. By the time we reach the end we realize the full humor of this pretend-prayer: Anacreon is actually talking to his wine cup (or to the wine within it) and asking that it do its inebriatory job as he passes it epi dexia to his eromenos: ‘make him drunk so that he may be more inclined to accept my advances’. An odd prayer indeed! It is worth clarifying once again that such a reading does not dispense entirely with the idea of the divine—of course there is some play with the divine (even beyond formal structures)—but it is more along the lines of what I have called ‘riffing on a Dionysiac baseline’: it is a long way from conventional attitudes to ‘the sacred’.

4 Pindar Again

I come to my final and most elaborate example: Pindar’s fr. 122. The fragment is transmitted by Athenaeus (13.573c–574b) who cites it from Chamaeleon of Heracleia’s treatise On Pindar, together with the surrounding context.²²

νόμιμόν ἐστιν ἀρχαῖον ἐν Κορίνθῳ, ὡς καὶ Χαμαιλέων ὁ Ἡρακλεώτης ἱστορεῖ ἐν τῷ περὶ Πινδάρου, ὅταν ἡ πόλις εὔχηται περὶ μεγάλων τῇ Ἀφροδίτῃ, συμπαραλαμβάνεσθαι πρὸς τὴν ἱκετείαν τὰς ἑταίρας ὡς πλείστας, καὶ ταύτας προσεύχεσθαι τῇ θεῷ καὶ ὕστερον ἐπὶ τοῖς ἱεροῖς παρεῖναι … . καὶ οἱ ἰδιῶται δὲ κατεύχονται τῇ θεῷ τελεσθέντων περὶ ὧν ἂν ποιῶνται τὴν δέησιν ἀπάξειν αὐτῇ καὶ τὰς ἑταίρας. ὑπάρχοντος οὖν τοῦ τοιούτου νομίμου περὶ τὴν θεὸν Ξενοφῶν ὁ Κορίνθιος ἐξιὼν εἰς Ὀλυμπίαν ἐπὶ τὸν ἀγῶνα καὶ αὐτὸς ἀπάξειν ἑταίρας εὔξατο τῇ θεῷ νικήσας. Πίνδαρός τε τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἔγραψεν εἰς αὐτὸν ἐγκώμιον, οὗ ἡ ἀρχή· τρισολυμπιονίκαν ἐπαινέων οἶκον [Ol. 13], ὕστερον δὲ καὶ σκόλιον τὸ παρὰ τὴν θυσίαν ᾀσθέν, ἐν ᾧ τὴν ἀρχὴν εὐθέως πεποίηται πρὸς τὰς ἑταίρας, αἳ παραγενομένου τοῦ Ξενοφῶντος καὶ θύοντος τῇ Ἀφροδίτῃ συνέθυσαν. διόπερ ἔφη· [18–20]. ἤρξατο δ᾽ οὕτως τοῦ μέλους· [1–9]. ἀρξάμενος δ᾽ οὕτως ἑξῆς φησιν· [13–15]. δῆλον γὰρ ὅτι πρὸς τὰς ἑταίρας διαλεγόμενος ἠγωνία ποῖόν τι φανήσεται τοῖς Κορινθίοις τὸ πρᾶγμα. πιστεύων δέ, ὡς ἔοικεν, αὐτὸς αὑτῷ πεποίηκεν εὐθέως· [16].

Πολύξεναι νεάνιδες, ἀμφίπολοι

Πειθοῦς ἐν ἀφνειῷ Κορίνθῳ,

αἵ τε τᾶς χλωρᾶς λιβάνου ξανθὰ δάκρη

θυμιᾶτε, πολλάκι ματέρ᾽ ἐρώτων

οὐρανίαν πτάμεναι

5νοήματι πρὸς Ἀφροδίταν,

ὑμῖν ἄνευθ᾽ ἀπαγορίας ἔπορεν,

ὦ παῖδες, ἐρατεινᾶις ‘ἐν’ εὐναῖς

μαλθακᾶς ὥρας ἀπὸ καρπὸν δρέπεσθαι.

σὺν δ᾽ ανάγκᾳι πὰν καλόν …

(desunt vv. 10–12)

ἀλλὰ θαυμάζω, τί με λέξοντι Ἰσθμοῦ

δεσπόται τοιάνδε μελίφρονος ἀρχὰν

εὑρόμενον σκολίου

15ξυνάορον ξυναῖς γυναιξίν.

διδάξαμεν χρυσὸν καθαρᾷ βασάνῳ …

ὦ Κύπρου δέσποινα, τεὸν δεῦτ᾽ ἐς ἄλσος

φορβάδων κορᾶν ἀγέλαν ἑκατόγγυι-

ον Ξενοφῶν τελέαις

20ἐπάγαγ᾽ εὐχωλαῖς ἰανθείς.

7 ἀπαγορίας: ἐπαγορίας Meineke²³

It is an old custom at Corinth, as Chamaeleon the Heracleot reports in his book On Pindar, that whenever the city prays to Aphrodite about important matters, they include as many prostitutes as possible in their supplication, and the prostitutes pray to the goddess and later are present at the sacrifices … . Private citizens also pray to the goddess that if what they make their request about is accomplished they will bring prostitutes to her. Since this was the sort of custom there was concerning the goddess, Xenophon of Corinth, when he went to Olympia to the contest prayed that he would also bring prostitutes to the goddess if he won. And Pindar at first wrote an encomium for him, the beginning of which was, ‘I praise a house thrice victorious at Olympia.’ Later he wrote a song [skolion] for a sacrifice, in which he composed a beginning for the prostitutes who joined the sacrifice when Xenophon was on hand and sacrificing to Aphrodite. Therefore he said, [18–20]. But he began the song in this way: [1–9]. Having begun in this way, he continues, [13–15]. For it is clear that in directing his speech to the prostitutes he is expressing concern about what sort of action it will appear to be to the Corinthians. But with confidence in himself, it seems, he thereafter wrote. [16].

Girls who are hosts to many, attendants

of Persuasion in wealthy Corinth,

you who burn the fair tears of pale incense

again and again flying in mind

5to the heavenly mother of loves, Aphrodite.

To you she has granted without the option to decline,

girls, in beds of love

to have the fruit of your soft prime plucked.

What is done by necessity is always good …

[3 verses missing]

But I wonder what the lords of the Isthmus

will say to me for devising such a beginning

of a sweet-minded skolion

15joined with communal women.

We discover gold by testing it on a pure touchstone …

O mistress of Cyprus, here to your alsos

Xenophon brought a hundred-limbed herd

of grazing girls,

20gladdened at the fulfillment of his prayers.

Chamaeleon fr. 31 Wehrli = 35 Martano

It is commonly acknowledged that Chamaeleon generally made up biographical details about poets and poems on the basis of his interpretations. According to his account, fr. 122 is from a companion poem to Olympian 13, which celebrates Xenophon of Corinth’s double victory in stadion and pentathlon in 464. Xenophon had vowed that he would bring (ἀπάξειν) hetairai to Aphrodite in accordance with a supposed Corinthian custom in the event of victory at the games. According to Chamaeleon, this poem was performed at the sacrifice in which the prostitutes were brought to Aphrodite.

In modern editions, the fragment is grouped with the Encomia, which is the book in which sympotic poems would naturally fit. Indeed, it is the only extant poem of Pindar that expressly declares itself to be a skolion, a sympotic song.²⁴ There has been a huge amount of controversy on the kind of performance that this poem implies. On most readings, this is a sacred song performed in a cultic context; classic theories for the performance scenario of this poem involve performance at a sanctuary of Aphrodite on Acrocorinth, whether a choral performance (one suggestion has Xenophon leading a chorus of prostitutes) or a solo performance by the poet, either on the occasion itself of the dedication of the hetairai or at a banquet immediately following.²⁵ I wish to argue instead that this is a sympotic song, as the term skolion suggests, and that it is coherent with the kind of sympotic play with the sacred that I have tried to characterize thus far.

The interpretation of this fragment as belonging to a cultic song seems to me to rely on a literal interpretation of some aspects of Pindar’s description and on a somewhat naive trust in the sources that preserve it for us. As we have seen, our text goes back to Chamaeleon, who bears the chief responsibility for the cultic interpretation of the fragment. Chamaeleon tells us that this skolion (as he, too, calls it) was performed para ten thysian, whatever exactly that means. This is clearly an inference from the text: on the face of it—on a literal reading—there is no straightforward way to make sense of a dedication of hetairai in an alsos of Aphrodite; given this and the hetairai’s burning of incense in the first stanza, it is easy to see why Chamaeleon would have come to this reconstruction of the poem’s performance. Note that, in addition to calling the poem a skolion, Chamaeleon uses throughout the unmarked term hetairai, which is fully compatible with the sympotic sphere, and rather less compatible with the cultic sphere (not because hetairai could not take part in religious cult, but rather there is no framework for a ritual involving the dedication of hetairai by a third party).

The difficulty over the dedication of hetairai to Aphrodite is usually surmounted by assuming that the hetairai are in fact hierodouloi, sacred prostitutes, though nowhere in the poem or in the source that preserves it is anything said to this effect. It follows that the cultic interpretation of this fragment relies on the assumption that sacred prostitution was practiced in ancient Greece, an assumption for which the evidence is questionable to say the least. Stephanie Budin has made a thorough study of the question, coming at it from the Near Eastern perspective, and this is important because Greek sacred prostitution is thought to have been borrowed from the Near East, so that, if, as Budin argues, it did not exist in the Near East then it cannot have been borrowed by the Greeks.²⁶ There are only two mentions of sacred prostitution in the whole of Greek literature, both in Strabo, and they are effectively dispatched by Budin in her study. The upshot is that there is no reliable evidence for the existence of sacred prostitution in ancient Greece. It is uneconomical to persist in positing the existence of sacred prostitution solely for the sake of Chamaeleon, especially when a more natural interpretation of the fragment suggests itself, as I argue presently.

Budin discusses our Pindaric fragment at length and though I find a lot of what she says unconvincing (various misconceptions are well pointed out by Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge in her review of Budin’s volume), there is one detail on which I think Budin must be right: that is to say that the alsos is not a literal sacred setting but a metaphorical reference to the andron as the setting of the symposion.²⁷ The ‘grove of Aphrodite’ has usually been taken literally to indicate the sacred precinct of the goddess, but given what we know of the activities of the symposion, it is not a big leap to think of it a sacred place of Aphrodite. I have argued elsewhere that the symposion lent itself to being metamorphosed into a kind of imaginative backdrop, whether a ship at sea or a gathering in a garden.²⁸ Other chapters in this volume discuss Sappho’s fr. 2 Neri, where too we have an alsos of Aphrodite. It is not controversial to argue that the alsos there is a symbolic scenario rather than a literal sanctuary. Specific elements of the text of fr. 2 that point against a literal interpretation are the metaphor of ‘deep sleep dripping from shimmering branches’ (7–8) placed in coordination with the other descriptors and without anything to distinguish it from them; the mention of νέκταρ; and the mention of the cups (kylikes, line 14) in the return to the ‘here and now’ of the prayer, which are specifically sympotic rather than cultic, while the fact that they are made of gold suggests their extraordinariness.²⁹ The same conceit seems to be at play in our Pindaric fragment. If the alsos here is indeed an andron, if the setting is a symposion, then we can start to read this poem in the playful vein in which I contend it was composed.

The first two stanzas might be read as a generic twist on the genre partheneion, for which Pindar was, of course, renowned. As Oswyn Murray points out, the opening lines ‘purport to be the address of a chorus master to his chorus in the style of Alcman’s maiden-songs’.³⁰ I wonder if we can press this idea of parthenaic self-parody further. In these first two stanzas there is a remarkable focus on the identity and activities of the women. The present tense verb θυμιᾶτε in l. 4, if indeed with Maehler we understand that comma to belong before πολλάκι rather than after it, might be read as a particularizing present and as such as gesturing to the way in which partheneion as a genre has a sort ecphrastic obsession with what the young girls are doing—and indeed with what they are thinking: the striking image here in our Xenophon fragment of the girls ‘repeatedly flying in their thoughts to Aphrodite’ (πτάμεναι νοήματι) reminds me at least of the peculiar way in which partheneion seems to track in real time the inner life of the girls.³¹ Be that as it may with regard to parthenaic self-parody, certainly the highfalutin opening address to a bunch of hetairai has something of the parodic to it.

So too the poem continues. Notwithstanding the gaps in the text, there seems to be a coherent humorous trajectory in what we have. The opening, posing as all-solemn and sacred, evokes a cultic action—θυμιᾶτε, l. 4—which seems to set up a sacred backdrop more than it points to a sympotic here and now. But then, in the middle section, there is an abrupt turn—ἀλλὰ θαυμάζω, l. 13—and all the pretense of the preceding lines is deflated: here we are firmly back with our feet in the symposion, and it is here that we have the mention of skolion. The women who in the preceding section had been addressed as Πολύξεναι νεάνιδες, ἀμφίπολοι Πειθοῦς ἐν ἀφνειῷ Κορίνθῳ (1–2) and ὦ παῖδες (8) are here rather more prosaically or bathetically termed ξυναί γυναῖκες, ‘communal women’, and the “punchline” is underlined by the sound-play in that line: xynaoron xynais gynaixin. In retrospect, we can begin to appreciate the irony of the opening word of the poem.³² Πολύξεναι, l. 1, which I have translated as ‘girls who are hosts to many’ is a double-entendre, alluding to the language of hetairoi and the world of Pindar’s patrons as well as to the hetairai’s profession, a wordplay that mirrors the one implicit in the words hetairoi ‘companions’ and hetairai ‘female companions’, hence ‘courtesans’.³³ Once the game has thus been given away, in the third section, which opens with an address to the deity, the tone returns to a parody of the sacred, in lines which have been said to resemble the formulaic language of dedicatory inscriptions, including the reference to the deity, the name of the dedicator, the object being dedicated, the act of dedication, and the fulfilment of the vow.³⁴ There is a further dose of humor in this closing part: the women who had been the object of such keen focus in the opening have become a ‘hundred-limbed herd’: this is a riddle of sorts, not unlike that we have seen in Anacreon above, and of a kind which we know to have been characteristic of the discourse of the symposion.

On this reading, Pindar’s Xenophon poem makes extended use of elements of sacred practice and speech in a way that is perhaps not ‘secular’—if there is one thing that emerged clearly from the conference that gave rise to the present volume, it is that it is not useful simply to contrast the sacred with the secular—but certainly not literal, not straightforward, and in ways which place an emphasis on poetic playfulness. In the case of this poem as with our earlier examples, an openness to this kind of poetic playfulness in relation to ‘the sacred’ reveals itself to be a productive strategy.

Hobden (2011) 48.

Translation from Gerber (1999); all other translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

Węcowski (2014) 38–39 with references.

The standard sources cited are Ar. Eq. 106; Vesp. 525, Pax 300, Athen. 15.675b, Nicostr. fr. 19 K.-A., Xenarch. fr. 2 K.-A., Theophr. fr. 123 Wimmer, etc. cited by Athen. 16.692f–693e.

Sch. Pi. Isthm. 6.4, 10a Drachmann (citing Soph. fr. 425 Radt, Aesch. fr. 55 Radt); Hesych. τ 1450 Hansen-Cunningham; Phot. τ 477 Theodoridis.

Paean and libations before setting sail: e.g. Thuc. 6.32. Garlands on ships: e.g. Pl. Phd. 58a (for a theoria).

Slater (1976); Davies (1978); Lissarrague (1990) 107–122; Corner (2010); Cazzato (2016); Gagné (2016).

According to Hephaestion’s On Poems 4.8 (p. 68 Consbruch).

Reitzenstein (1893) 16; see further Lehnus (1979) 94–95; skeptical, Fabbro (1995) 98–99.

The text deviates from Swift’s only in removing the confusing curly brackets around σπένδοντες in the first line: her translation implies she accepts the word. Cf. Pindar fr. 128c.1–4.

Rutherford (2001) 52; cf. 66.

See e.g. Ieranò (2013) 369–370; D’Angour (2013) 200–201; Lavecchia (2013) 60–61; Zimmermann (1992) 19–23.

Instone makes this suggestion in his review of Zimmerman’s monograph on the dithyrambic genre: Instone (1994) 14.

See e.g. Gagné (2016) 207–208, with refs.

Cf. Thuc. 1.70.8, Antiphon Soph. fr. 10 Gernet, Pl. Phdr. 276b (cited by LSJ).

Bernsdorff (2020) ad loc.

Mentions other than in connection with the Isthmian games: Duris of Samos FGrHist 76 F 33 in Photius σ 136 Theodoridis: Σελίνου στέφανος· πένθιμος· τὸ γὰρ σέλινον πένθεσι προσήκει, ὡς ἔφη καὶ Δοῦρις ἐν τῷ Περὶ ἀγώνων ‘celery crown: mournful; for celery befits grief, as Douris also says in his On the Games’; Diogenianus τ 57 von Leutsch–Schneidewin: Τοῦ σελίνου δεῖται: ἐπὶ τῶν ἐπισφαλῶς νοσούντων. Καὶ γὰρ εἰώθαμεν στεφανοῦν σελίνοις τὰ μνήματα ‘all that is missing is the celery: used of people who are at death’s door. For we also use celery crowns on tombs’; Polyaenus, Strat. 5.12.1: οἱ στρατιῶται τὸ σημεῖον ἐφοβήθησαν, ὅτι ἄρα παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς τὰ μνημεῖα τῶν ἀποθανόντων στεφανοῦται σελίνοις ‘the soldiers were intimidated by the sign, for in their country the monuments of the dead are wreathed with celery’ (the remainder of this passage illustrates the multiplicity of meanings that celery crowns can take on, here shifting from denoting mourning to denoting victory). I am indebted to Dennis Alley and Enrico Emanuele Prodi for helpful suggestions on this matter.

An anonymous reader speculates that it is not impossible that ‘the symposium for which Anacr. composed 410 PMG happened at the Isthmia’.

For drinking ἄμυστιν, see Węcowski (2014) 44–47; for ‘sconcing’, see Murray (2018) 137 n. 12.

Mace (1993); cf. LeVen (2018) 225–232.

Bowie (2013) 36.

The translation of Pindar is my own, that of Chamaeleon is taken from Martano, Matelli and Mirhady (2012).

I accept Leslie Kurke’s arguments for this Pindaric hapax: Kurke (1996).

I am not persuaded by Hubbard’s distinction between a skolion, and an archa skoliou, l. 14, but even his reading explicitly anticipates sympotic reperformance: Hubbard (2011) 354.

See e.g. Hubbard (2011) 353–355; Currie (2011) 289–293; Cingano (2003) 42–44; Van Groningen (1960) 19–21.

Budin (2008); Pirenne-Delforge (2009).

Budin (2008) 115–140 and Budin (2006) 86.

Cazzato (2016).

Cazzato (2021), acknowledging Felix Budelmann’s commentary (Budelmann 2018). On the association of gold with the divine, see the contribution of Martin to this volume.

Murray (2018) 205–206.

E.g. Pindar fr. 94b.33–34: ἐμὲ δὲ πρέπει παρθενήια μὲν φρονεῖν ‘it befits me to think maidenly thoughts’, and esp., at great length and complexity, Alcman fr. 1.39–91.

We are told explicitly by Chamaeleon that this is the beginning of the poem.

Cf. Kurke (1996) 59.

Schmitz (1970) 71 n. 50; Prodi (2018) 301–302.

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Greek Lyric and the Sacred

Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 6

Reihe: Mnemosyne, Supplements, Band: 503

ISBN:: 9789004750388

Verleger:: Brill

Print-Publikationsdatum:: 27 Mar 2025

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Front Matter

Part 1 Sacred Contexts

Part 2 The Fabric and Texture of the Sacred

Part 3 Representations of Human Communication with the Divine

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Chapter 12 Playing with the Sacred at the Symposion

Abstract

1 Pindar

2 Archilochus

3 Anacreon

4 Pindar Again

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Greek Lyric and the Sacred

Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 6

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