transitional formula in hymnic address (19–20):
[ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲ]ν νῦν χαῖρε, θεᾶς ἐρικύ[δεος υἱὲ]
[κούρης εἰν]αλίου Νηρέος· αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ̣ κτλ.
“But now I take my leave of you, son of a famous goddess, daughter of the sea-god Nereus. But I [call now on the Muse…]”
The proemium, then, to Simonides elegy on the Battle of Plataia began with an encomium of Achilles. He is called “son of a goddess” and it is said explicitly that no mortal killed him but rather the hand of Apollo (8). The divine elevation of the epic battle is maintained by saying that Athena and Hera took Troy because of divine anger at the children of Priam (10). Achilles has the status of a half-god, but he was worshipped after his death as divine. He was not actually a Spartan, but nevertheless Simonides has chosen him to head his elegy. We see that the praise of Achilles took narrative form, as in lines 1–6 there is an account of his death. Apollo, presumably, struck him; he fell like a great tree in the wilderness; in their grief his people buried him together with his friend. The “point” of the encomium was no doubt to set the tone of the Spartans’ heroism at Plataia. The greatest warrior of the Greeks at Troy was a suitable figurehead for the great valor of the Greeks fighting a much larger force of Persians at Plataia.55 And, by then, the barbarian hordes of the Persians were assimilated to the Trojans (living in what is now Persia), an ethnicity not emphasized by Homer.56 We see, then, in this fragmentary poem that the religiosity has two levels. There is the level of epic saga in which half-gods fought alongside deities, and there is the day-to-day level represented by the favorable omens at the Isthmos, and also by the Dioskoroi, as these were Spartan gods who regularly received cult there.57 Strengthened both by thoughts of their epic forebears and by their tutelary deities, the Spartans marched forth. Simonides realized that the victory was unthinkable without these fortifying religious elements.
Archilochus’ Telephos Elegy
It was a great surprise when a fragment of Archilochus was revealed on a bedraggled Oxyrhynchus papyrus which was neither iambic nor (overtly) parodistic but was, in fact, a fragment from a poem very much in the manner of the last we have been discussing by Simonides: a long narrative poem in elegiac meter.58 The fragment has come to be known as the “Telephos Poem,” as its main feature is a battle between Telephos, son of Herakles, and the Greek force against Troy, which has landed in Mysia by mistake: Telephos routs the unfortunate Danaoi more or less single-handed, it seems. But this basic narrative has, again, very clear religious import. In the first place there is the same quasi-sacred status of heroic epic:59 here the routing of the half-gods who fought before Troy is used as a paradigm to comfort some person(s) who have obviously fled in battle. There is no shame when greater men than you fled before one man! is the basic paraenetic message. This is reinforced by saying that one cannot withstand “divine necessity”; the text is incomplete but it seems to be saying “When [the opponent] is driven by the strong compulsion of a god, one should not speak of weakness and cowardice.”60 The poet repeats this point in line 7: “to such an extent the fate of the gods cast fear [sc. on them], although they were brave spearmen.”61 We note other touches which emphasize the elevated sacred nature of the epic paradigm: the fleeing Greeks are themselves “sons and brothers of gods” (14); their proper destiny, Troy, is a “holy city” (15); and the ground they have mistakenly trodden, Mysia, by bad navigation, is the “lovely city of Teuthras” (17).62 We see that such a paraenetic appeal to epic includes the divine apparatus familiar from Homer: the gods decide the humans’ destiny, they fight in person, in this case the son of Herakles, Telephos. What they fight for has a sacred quality: the citadel of Troy, or, here, Mysia. Probably the context is a battle in which Archilochus and his comrades fled ignominiously. “Don’t worry,” says the poet, “braver men than you have fled before just one opponent, Telephos.”63 But the human message which today we would communicate by psychology—for example, “it was the shock element which demoralized you”—is here explained in the abstract by gnomic wisdom “one can’t fight against the compelling fate of god” and by the half-god status of Herakles’ son, Telephos, and his father Herakles, who eggs him on.64
The Lille Stesichorus
The religion of heroic epic emerges in another relatively recent find. Stesichorus had been hardly more than a name known for composing lyric narratives65 when, in Lille in the seventies of last century, Egyptian mummy cartonnage was unwrapped to reveal nearly a hundred lines of continuous verse in dactylo-epitrite meter on the subject of Theban myth (fr. 97 F).66 Scholars are nearly agreed, by now, that the author must be Stesichorus. The poem is hundreds of lines long, and written in lyric triads in marked Doric dialect. Of interest to us here is the interplay of religion and cult with the narrative. This concerns the Labdacid family, and in the recovered section, the strife prophesied for Oedipus’ children, Eteokles and Polyneikes. The intact section contains a dramatic dialogue between Jocasta (probably) and Teiresias, the famous Theban seer.67 First Jocasta speaks, mulling over the prospect of strife between her children: gods do not always give continuous strife to mortals on the “holy earth,” she says, but they alternate this daily with friendship (204–208 paraphrases). “Let us hope Lord Apollo the far-shooter does not bring all your prophesies to fulfillment” (209–210). She continues with another Homeric concept: the fate which men cannot escape. If, she says, it is my fate to witness my children killing each other68 let the end of death take me immediately before I see such misery in the home, or the city sacked (210–217 paraphrases). She concludes with a prayer that Zeus (228) may protect Thebes and put off the evil day predicted by Teiresias’ prophecy for as long as possible (230). All the Homeric concepts are there: Zeus himself, chief among many; fate in her various guises; Teiresias uttering prophecies as Chalkas did about Troy; Apollo as the mantic god deciding issues on earth by his arrows. In this poem the human level is represented by the heroic age; Iokaste’s fate is not paradigmatic of a contemporary situation, as it is in Archilochus’ Telephos poem, or Simonides’ ode on Plataia. In this sense, Stesichorus is “pure” Homer in a different metrical garb.69 Such heroic lyric narratives were, we are told, sung by choruses. We should imagine them performed, like Pindar’s choral lyric, at great occasions such as religious festivals, the marriage, or funeral, perhaps, of a Syracusan grandee. Culturally, they convey and propagate Homeric ideology, showing an heroic age in close contact with gods and goddesses, among other things through their prophets. Even Iokaste’s opinion that gods send mixed blessings and troubles to men has an Homeric model in Zeus’ jars of good and evil, which he variously doles out to mankind.
Pindar’s Second Paian
We have raced through the genres—Aeolic monody, elegy, lyric dactyls—and yet, as Herodotus remarked, it is Homer and Hesiod who prevail when it comes to religion. The same gods receive worship, in the same forms, even if poets show preferences: Sappho for Aphrodite, Archilochus for Heracles, Stesichorus for Apollo, and the list could be extended. The most significant finds in the last century of cult poetry are the remnants of Pindar’s paians,70 dithyrambs,71 prosodia,72 daphnephorika, nomoi, and others.73 And here, if anywhere, we have a poet who took his art beyond the Homeric model, although there is much of Homer in Pindar, too.74 Again from Oxyrhynchus a tattered papyrus roll was recovered by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in their Victorian-age exploration of Egypt.75 We imagine Pindar’s paians to have been sung and performed by choruses of young men and women, at cult centers such as Delphi and Delos primarily in honor of Apollo and his sister Artemis. Although one might think paians were composed for a particular crisis of the state, as in Iliad 1.472–474, where the Achaeans seek to propitiate Apollo’s wrath at the mistreatment of his priest, that seems not to be true for the majority of the paians written by Pindar, which were composed for calendrical cult. The exception is the ninth, composed on the occasion of a solar eclipse at Thebes, and suitably urgent in tone: here there is lament, and appeal