Notes on a Greek poem

To the Dioskouroi
Alkæos 109 LGS

leave starry Olympus and come,
powerful children of Leda and Zeus -
appear with propitious might, Kastor
and Polydeukes,

you who ride across the entire land
and sea on your quick steeds,
save us from the cold
of death,

for when you jump to the height of the ships,
and shine on the mast from afar,
to the dark ship you bring forth a light
in dangerous night

(My translation)

Above we have a poem attributed with much certainty to the Greek poet Alcæus of Mytilene, contemporary and possibly friend of Sappho, the greatest of Greek lyric poets. This poem has survived until our times not through the usual venues of copying and scribal transmission; like many of Sappho's fragments it was found in the Egyptian waste-deposit centre of Oxyrhynchus, from which large amounts of papyrus fragments have been selectively gathered and published since the end of the nineteenth century until now. Among other problems, this means that what we have before us is a fragment of what in all likelihood was a larger text — though just how large we will never know.

We will not be discouraged. Just like Gombrich comments at one point* apropos the notion of organic whole, criticizing its validity and urging us to recompose works by prescinding from globalizing tendencies, so too the rhetorical function of poetry may oft be better ascertained when it the poem is broken apart and when from its broken unity we extract the crackled light that shines through the fragments. At any rate that is the compromise conviction which I will somewhat cynically espouse, given how unlikely it is that we will ever find the remaining poem.

The poem addresses the Sons of God — the Dios Kouroi — the Zeus- and Leda- born twins Castor and Polydeuces, winners of battles and saviours of humankind in its hours of hardship. Since they are the true addressees of the poem, we could be tempted to call this poem a hymn. However, hymns tend to praise a god, and Greek hymns tend to narrate the god's powers, usually in connection with his or her deeds. Here we'll have none of that. Instead we read “leave starred Olympus and come here!” [δεῦτ' Όλυμπον αστέροπον λίποντες] and “appear!” [προφάνητε] even with “propitious courage” [ιλλάῳ θύμῳ]. It seems therefore more likely that we would better be entitled to call this a prayer — a request.

But what sort of a request? Straight after asking for the theophany, the speaker seems to proceed to a not very subtle sort of captatio benevolentiæ in which the gods’ potency is seen to be so inextricably bound to their character that they are presented as a simple relative clause (“you who” [οὶ]). Their domain is seen to be both “the wide earth” [εύρηαν χθόνα] and the “all the sea” [θάλασσαν παῖσαν] — in the last surviving strophe we will go back to how important it is that they hold domain over the waters. Right afterwards we read that it is up to the gods to keep death away from mortals, more specifically that sort of death which would require “swift” [ρῆα] action on their part — and so we’re speaking about death by catastrophes or combat, as opposed to illness and old age. Even further, we could say that “be ready to save us” — ρυέσθε, which syntatically* as well as semantically* can only be an imperative, and never a middle-voice indicative — turns the captatio benevolentiæ of the two previous lines on its head; description turns into indictment, praise and poetry turn into prayer that the gods will once again fulfill their duty and the task that beseems them.

The haunting image that follows of the “light in dangerous night” refers to the physical phenomenon that is known to be observed whenever a ship with a tall mast sails at high sea and an approaching storm fills the air with electricity. The tall mast becomes a focus point for static energy and produces what have been called orbs of light. Far from ominous, however, it has traditionally been interpreted as a benign portent: Ancient Greek nautical terminology refers to these events simply as Dioskuroi — Kastor and Polydeuces —, and even the survival of Antiquity into Christian thought has consisted of nothing more but a rebranding of the divinities encharged with the safety of sailors with the name of their new Christian patron saint, St. Elmo, whence St. Elmo’s Fire.

Why is it being mentioned, though? We have already seen how these deities are particularly apt to be invoked in moments of dire need. We have also seen that the poem opens in a suppliant tone, with the calling forth of nothing short of an epiphany. Does one hold such a faith in the salvific power of poetry as to consider the writing of a poem the appropriate course of action when a ship is about to sink? Not very probable. What, then, is the function of of a poem like this? When could it have been written? This is no rite of spring, no request of fertility for the fields in the seasons to come. Though in a grand scale not more important than those, it is nonetheless much more urgent. Its metrical and stylistic perfection clashes with the demands that are made during the extreme and perilous situations which alone would give the poem a ground and reason for existing in the first place.

Even if we go back to our first tentative answer, that it could be an hymn and not a prayer, we realize that we are also very distant from the hymn-form that we find, for example, in the Homeric Hymns (of which the 33rd is to the Dioskuroi) and elsewhere; and it says nothing hymnlike apart from verses 5-6 (though more could have perished).

No, all indicates that it must be a prayer. Unfortunately, what this means is that the poem will continue to elude us: we still don't know what could ever have grounded its writing. More interestingly, its impalpabability doesn’t seem to spring, as in the beginning we thought it could, from its fragmented state of transmission: it would be very difficult to give an appropriate answer to the enigmas herein raised even should the poem have survived intact; in reality it is its fragmented state that allows us to pose these questions, for by truncating the poem we are forced to guess, to formulate conjectures, ultimately even to prophesy the poem's range by taking its cultic and mystical dimension as an irresoluble issue and therefore not as a puzzle but as an existential riddle. 

This of course unless we prefer to turn to the dead end of considering that its issues are to be disposed of by describing them as the lack of internal construction proper to a failed poem (which ultimately it may very well be, but that’s simply dodging the issue: our task as a readers and hearers compels us to go further and be both more responsible and cautious).

Instead, I am ready to propose that the difficulty, instead of lying in an absence of poetic skill, is rather to be found in its very rhetorical core, and that the difficulties and failings upon which we stumble are those that accrue to her or him who would would use the conventions of human art to address not humans but the gods. Rhetoric is a human device and instrument. To speak with gods one uses other means. Mixing them seldom brings success.

δεῦτ' Όλυμπον αστέροπον λίποντες
παῖδες ίφθιμοι Δίος ηδὲ Λήδας
ιλλάῳ θύμῳ προφάνητε Κάστορ
καὶ Πολύδευκες

οὶ κὰτ εύρηαν χθόνα καὶ θάλασσαν
παῖσαν έρχεσθ' ωκυπόδων επ' ίππων
ρῆα δ' ανθρώποις θανάτω ρύεσθε
ζακρυόεντος

ευεδρῶν θρῴσκοντες ὸν' άκρα νάων
τήλοθεν λάμπροι πρότον' αμφιβάντες
αργαλέᾳ δ' εν νύκτι φάος φέροντες
νᾶῑ μελαίνᾳ