The Experience Of Poetry From Homers Listeners To Shakespeares Readers Derek Attridge full chapter pdf docx

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/01/19, SPi
T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F P O ET RY
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For Suzanne, Laura, and Eva

Preface
Twenty years ago, struck by the flowering of poetry in live performances, I began a
project for which the Leverhulme Trust—to which I remain deeply indebted—
granted me a Research Professorship. In spite of frequent pronouncements that
poetry was a dying art, I felt, as I still do, that in some ways it has never been so visibly
present in Western culture; what has been lost, perhaps, is a widely shared awareness
of its historical achievements. An examination of the continuities and changes in the
modes of performing and experiencing poetry, and the forerunners of poetry, from
the Homeric epics to the English Renaissance presented itself as one way to highlight
the richness and longevity of the tradition we have inherited.
I didn’t foresee that my work on this project would repeatedly be interrupted by
the desire to write what seemed like more pressing books, and that it would be two
decades before I could submit the finished manuscript. This milestone would prob-
ably never have been reached at all had it not been for several spells of uninterrupted
research with access to outstanding library resources: a Visiting Fellowship at All
Souls College, Oxford; a Christensen Visiting Fellowship at St Catherine’s College,
Oxford; and two Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina.
My warm thanks go to all the individuals in these institutions who made my stays so
productive and enjoyable.
The debts one incurs to colleagues and students over a period this long are far too
many and varied to be fully recorded here, especially as the larger part of the book
involved straying into territory in which I was far from expert. The following are
some of the people who freely shared their deep knowledge of the different periods
covered by this book, many of whom kindly read portions of the draft: for Ancient
Greece: Lowell Edmunds, Robert Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Simon Hornblower,
Stephen Minta, Peter Parsons, and Martin West; for Ancient Rome: Stephen
Harrison, Llewellyn Morgan, and Hannah Sullivan; for Late Antiquity: George
Woudhuysen; for the Middle Ages: Thomas Cable, Michele Campopiano, Kathleen
Davis, Nick Havely, Nicola McDonald, and Matthew Townend; for the Renaissance:
Colin Burrow, Jane Everson, Jane Griffiths, Richard Rowland, Jason Scott-Warren,
Bill Sherman, Helen Smith, Adam Smyth, Bart van Es, and Blake Wilson. More gen-
erally, I have had many instructive discussions about the experience of poetry with,
among others, Thomas Carper, Jonathan Culler, Martin Duffell, Tom Furniss,
Francesco Giusti, Adam Kelly, Don Paterson, Yopie Prins, Henry Staten, and (again)
Hannah Sullivan. Michael Springer’s help in checking quotations and references was
invaluable. The five anonymous readers for Oxford University Press read the entire
manuscript with exemplary care and provided extraordinarily helpful reports, and
my editor, Jacqueline Norton, was a wise and enthusiastic backer of the project
from the beginning. To all these, and the many more whose insights and support
I benefited from but don’t have space to name, my warmest thanks.
viii Preface
The writing of this book has coincided with my time in the Department of English
and Related Literature at the University of York, which afforded as stimulating and
supportive a human and institutional environment as I could have wished for. The
Department’s Leavis Fund made a generous contribution to the cost of the illustrations.
My family, as always, have good-humouredly put up with the never-ending demands
my work has made on their lives; for providing twenty years of companionship,
encouragement, and entertainment during its making, this book is dedicated to them.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Note xv
Introduction 1
PA RT I . A N C I E N T G R E E C E
1. Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 11
2. Archaic to Classical Greece: Festivals and Rhapsodes 35
3. Classical Greece to Ptolemaic Alexandria: Writers and Readers 55
PA RT I I . A N C I E N T R O M E A N D L AT E A N T I Q U I T Y
4. Ancient Rome: The Republic and the Augustan Age 85
5. Ancient Rome: The Empire after Augustus 106
6. Late Antiquity: Latin and Greek, Private, Public, Popular 122
PA RT I I I . T H E M I D D L E A G E S
7. Early Medieval Poetry: Vernacular Versifying 147
8. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Performing Genres 177
9. Lyric, Romance, and Alliterative Verse in Fourteenth-Century England 206
10. Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English 228
PA RT I V. T H E E N G L I S H R E NA I S S A N C E
11. Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print 257
12. Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Circulation of Verse 285
13. Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Idea of the Poet 311
Notes 337
Bibliography 395
Index 431
List of Illustrations
1.1 Nestor’s Cup, 750–700 bc. Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae, Lacco Ameno,
Ischia. Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo. 15
1.2 Cretan Geometric bronze figure of a lyre-player, 900–800 bc. Heraklion
Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the Archaeological Museum
of Heraklion, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports-Archaeological
Receipts Fund. 27
2.1 Rhapsode (?) and auditors; black-figure Panathenaic prize-amphora, c.540 bc.
National Museums Liverpool, 56.19.18. Reproduced by kind permission of the
National Museums Liverpool. 42
2. 2 Rhapsode and auditors; black-figure Panathenaic prize-amphora, 520–500 bc.
Oldenburg Stadtmuseum, ad-13.B. Reproduced by kind permission of
Stadtmuseum Oldenburg/A. Gradetchliev. 43
2.3 Rhapsode reciting a poem; red-figure neck-amphora, the Kleophrades Painter,
Athens, 490–480 bc. British Museum, ID 00221978001. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. 44
3.1 Writer using folding tablet; red-figure Attic vase, c.500 bc. Berlin
Antikenmuseen ARV2, 431.48, 1653; Beazley Addenda 2, 237. bpk/
Antikensammlung, SMB/Johannes Laurentius. 57
3.2 Boy preparing for recitation; red-figure Attic cup fragment, Akestorides Painter,
470–450 bc. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Object no. 86.AE.324.
Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 59
3.3 Man reading from a roll; red-figure Attic vase, c.500 bc. Berlin Antikenmuseen
ARV2, 431.48, 1653; Beazley Addenda 2, 237. bpk/Antikensammlung, SMB/
Johannes Laurentius. 61
3.4 Woman reading from a roll; red-figure Attic hydria, Kimissalla, c.450 bc. British
Museum, ID 00400574001. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of
the British Museum. All Rights Reserved. 62
3.5 Timotheus of Miletus, The Persians, verses 193–247, 350–300 bc. Berlin,
Ägyptisches Museum, Papyrus 9875. 63
3.6 Young girl reading, Roman bronze statuette after a Hellenistic model,
ad 50–100. Cabinet des Médailles, Paris. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ID/Cote: Bronze-1046. 67
4.1 Fresco from Pompeii, woman holding writing implements, ad 55–79.
National Archaeological Museum of Naples, 14842101892. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del
Turismo—Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. 90
4.2 Part of P. Herc 817, unknown author, Carmen de Bello Actiaco, 50 bc–ad 10.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Biblioteca Nazionale ‘Vittorio
Emanuele III’, Napoli. Foto di Giorgio Di Dato. 95
xii List of Illustrations

5.1 Fragment of tombstone, ad 43–410. Yorkshire Museum, York, object no.
YORYM: 2007.6171. Reproduced by kind permission of the
York Museums Trust. 121
6.1 Codex Sinaiticus, written in the mid-fourth century. British Library Add.
43725. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 124
6.2 Optatian, poem 18, ad 300–350. Reproduced by kind permission of Michael
Squire and Johannes Wienand from their book Morphogrammata/The Lettered
Art of Optatian: (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017). 127
7.1 Gallehus horn, ad 400–430. Moesgaard Museum. Replica based on
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drawings. Reproduced by kind
permission of Rógvi N. Johansen, Foto/medie Moesgaard. 150
7.2 St Jerome, Epistola ad Ctesiphontem, 850–900. Abbey Library of Saint Gall,
Cod. Sang. 132, p. 1. Reproduced by kind permission of the St. Gallen
Stiftsbibliothek.152
7.3 Caedmon’s Hymn in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, early to mid-eighth century.
Cambridge University Library Kk.5.16, fol. 128v. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library. 156
7.4 St Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, containing Bede’s ‘Death song’, c.860. Abbey
Library of Saint Gall, Cod. Sang. 254, p. 253. Reproduced by kind permission of
the St. Gallen Stiftsbibliothek. 157
7.5 Genesis B, c.ad 1000. Bodleian MS. Junius 11, p. 21. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 161
7.6 Alfred the Great, Pastoral Care, metrical epilogue, ad 890–97. Bodleian
Hatton 20, fol. 98v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford. 164
8.1 An opening of the Oxford Manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, c.1150.
Bodleian MS. Digby 23 pt. 2, fol. 044v. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 179
8.2 The Owl and the Nightingale, 1250–1300. British Library, MS Cotton
Caligula A.ix., fol. 233r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library
Board.204
9.1 First page of Sir Orfeo, c.1330. National Library of Scotland, Auchinleck
Manuscript, fol. 300ra. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library
of Scotland. 210
9.2 Sir Bevis of Hampton in graphic tail-rhyme, c.1400. British Library, MS Egerton
2862, fol. 45r. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 217
9.3 A wayle whyt as whalles bon (with the ending of Most I ryden by Rybbesdale),
c.1300–1350. British Library Harley MS 2253, f. 67r. Reproduced by kind
permission of the British Library Board. 219
10.1 Chaucer, frontispiece of Troilus and Criseyde, 1385–1413. Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge MS 61, fol. 1v. Reproduced by kind permission of The
Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. 230
10.2 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, c.1410. British Library MS Lansdowne 851, fol.
2, detail. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 231
List of Illustrations xiii

10.3 Chaucer, Sir Thopas and Melibee, 1450–1460. Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 223,
fol. 183r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University
of Oxford. 247
10.4 Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, 1460–1483. British Library MS Harley 2251, fol.
142. Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library Board. 248
11.1 Chaucer’s Knight in Caxton’s second edition of The Canterbury Tales, 1483.
British Library G.11586, fol. 3v. Reproduced by kind permission of the British
Library Board. 261
11.2 Skelton, ‘A Lawd and Praise’, c.1509. National Archives E 36/228 (7).
Reproduced by kind permission of The National Archives. 266
11.3 ‘Suffrying in sorow’, in the Devonshire Manuscript (mostly 1530s). British
Library Add MS 17492, fol. 6v–7r. Reproduced by kind permission of the
British Library Board. 272
12.1 The Great Picture Triptych, attributed to Jan van Belcamp, 1646. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Lakeland Arts, Kendal,
Cumbria.292
12.2 Frontispiece and title-page of Ben Jonson’s Works, 1616. Bodleian Douce I 302.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 302
12.3 John Bodenham, Bel-vedére, 1600, p. 223. Bodleian Douce B 51. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 305
12.4 Title-page of Speght’s Chaucer, 1598. Bodleian Vet A1c.13. Reproduced by
kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 307
13.1 Title page of George Wilkins, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of
Tyre, 1608. British Library C.34.I.8. Reproduced by kind permission of the
British Library Board. 334
Note
Except where otherwise indicated, classical texts are taken from the invaluable Loeb
editions; I have also used their English translations of prose texts with minimal alter-
ation. Translations of Greek and Latin poetry are my own, though I have drawn heav-
ily (in the case of Greek, almost entirely) on published versions. I have not cited
the original Greek, and the original Latin except when to do so seemed essential for the
discussion. My apologies to those readers who know these languages and regret these
omissions.
Medieval and Renaissance texts are given in the original language and, except
for most Middle and Early Modern English examples, in English translation. Again,
I have drawn freely on published translations.
I have lightly modernized medieval and Renaissance English spelling, especially
the use of thorn, the u/v and i/j distinctions, and abbreviations. Many of the original
printed texts cited are to be found in Early English Books Online, another invaluable
resource.
I have preferred the abbreviations bc and ad because of their greater familiarity,
although I am sympathetic to the use of bce and ce as more neutral alternatives.
Introduction
•
P O ET RY A S E X P E R I E N C E
What is a poem’s mode of existence? Take one of Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems, for
example:
A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:
She seem’d a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Does this poem exist as the printed block of words on the page above? Is it the vocal
realization of those words, whether by human or machine? Does it enjoy some ideal
existence that every visible or audible manifestation of these words alludes to—a type
of which this is a token, to use philosophical language?
Our habitual use of the word ‘poem’ has elements of all these conceptions. But if
I say, ‘I enjoy Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems’, I’m referring to my experience of the
works, and not just their words; if I comment that ‘Tennyson’s poetry leaves me cold’
(although I wouldn’t), I’m probably summing up several such experiences. These
experiences are temporal, affective, and bodily. Words on the page or the screen—let’s
call them, as material objects, texts—need to be experienced as a particular kind of
event before they become, in the fullest sense of the term, poems. Even sound-waves
travelling through the air remain purely physical phenomena if they are not received
by a human ear and brain. (A computer could presumably be programmed to distin-
guish spoken poems from other utterances and perhaps to register in some way their
emotional content, but the day has not yet arrived when it can experience poems as
poems.) The poem is a human event, repeatable though never exactly the same in its
repetitions, rather than a fixed material object, or even an ideal one.
2 The Experience of Poetry
But is there anything, it might be asked, that distinguishes the particular category
of the poem from the more general category of literature? Isn’t any literary work an
event that occurs when a suitable text, inert on the page, is read in a certain way?1
Poetry, like prose fiction and drama, can exploit any of the powers of which lan-
guage is capable, whether to appal, to hearten, to intrigue, to browbeat, to stir, to
excite, to disappoint—the list is endless. What poetry uniquely does, however, is to
achieve this emotional and intellectual intensity by harnessing the particular
effectiveness that language possesses by virtue of its physical properties: its sounds, its
silences, its rhythms, its syntactic sequencing, its movement through time. Meaning
in a poem is something that happens, it’s not a conceptual system or entity. Language’s
manifold powers are made even stronger in this way, and the staging of linguistic acts
are given even greater emotional resonance. A poem, therefore, is a real-time event,
and if one does not read it in real time—aloud or in a mental representation of
speech—one may be reading it as a literary work of some kind but not as a poem. To
experience a poem as a poem, therefore, is not to treat it only as an event of meaning,
but as an event of and in language, with language understood as a material medium as
well as a semantic resource. And because this experience is a response to the material-
ity of language, the physical body is necessarily involved; even a silent reading in
which the words are articulated will make use of slight muscular movements.2
The conditions under which poetry can be experienced are highly varied. I can attend
a public reading, hear a poem on the radio, read silently or aloud from the printed
page, or recite some lines of verse from memory. And what I derive from the experience
can include knowledge of the past, moral advice, insight into a writer’s life, psycho-
logical truths, and much more. But when a poem is enjoyed purely for the information
or wisdom it contains—and there is no lack of evidence that this frequently happened
in medieval and Renaissance times, as it no doubt did in earlier periods as well—it is
not being experienced as a poem.3 Poetry has been read for many other purposes too:
it has, for instance, consoled mourners, injured opponents, contributed to social
cohesion, reinforced the authority of rulers, and stiffened hearts before battle.
The question that this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles,
poetry—or a cultural practice we would now call poetry—has, across the times and
places here examined, continuously afforded the peculiarly pleasurable experience
I have described. Was the enjoyment of language’s powers to move and delight part of
the pleasure felt by those who listened to the Homeric epics in archaic Greece, or
attended performances by Roman poets, or sang early Christian hymns, or heard tales
in verse during medieval pilgrimages, or read silently from Renaissance anthologies?
The choice of verse as the vehicle for so many social and political functions suggests
that it works on its hearers and readers with peculiar force: has this force always
stemmed from the pleasure to be gained from an exploitation of language’s properties
as a material, temporal medium? And how does the experience of the writer relate to
the experience of the performer, the hearer, or the reader? It has become something of
a dogma that our modern understanding of the purpose and power of poetry, the man-
ner in which we enjoy and value it today, is a product of the cultural revolution we call
Romanticism, and that it is an anachronism to apply the same terms to the verse of the
eighteenth century and before. The chapters that follow test this assumption.
Introduction 3
This understanding of a poem as the experience of a real-time event in which the

text’s utilization of the resources of the language comes to life means that the modes
of poetic performance that occurred at various times in cultural history—public reci-
tation, silent reading, reading aloud, and so on—are important in gauging the role
and function of poetry at successive stages in European history. (Even the solitary
reader sitting with a book of poems is, I have argued elsewhere, performing them.)
One feature of verse that is central to its hearers’ and readers’ experience throughout
this period is its metrical form, and we can gain valuable insights from a study of the
changing ways in which the rhythms of language—often a reflection of changes in
the language itself—are handled by writers.
Although what these pages offer is largely a historical account of cultural practices,
using whatever evidence is available to chart the behaviour of those engaged in the
transmission and reception of poetry, it has at its heart this understanding of poetry,
and is intended to clarify and deepen what we might mean by speaking of ‘the experi-
ence of a poem’. In using the term ‘experience’, however, I am not implying a focus on
psychological interiority: what actually went on in the minds and bodies of those who
heard or read poetry remains inaccessible, and comments on inner feelings in response
to poems are few and far between in these periods—and likely to be governed by pre-
vailing conventions of what it is appropriate to say as much as by accurate reflection.
My interest, rather, is in the material practices whereby poetry was communicated to
an audience or a readership. Under what conditions was poetry performed to audi-
ences? What did it sound like? How did it appear on the papyrus roll or the parch-
ment codex? Who had access to poetry on the page? How did the invention of printing
affect its reception? In looking for answers to these and similar questions, we will be
tracing a history of change but also of continuity across two-and-a-half millennia.
T H E H I S TO RY O F P O ET I C E X P E R I E N C E
The account I have just given, to be strictly accurate, is an account of what we might
call poeticity: that dimension of the experience of literary works that is most obvious
in poetry but that can occur in all genres—not necessarily even formal literary
genres—when called forth by the reader or listener. My interest in this book is in the
creation and reception of linguistic compositions with a high degree of poeticity;
I focus, that is, on works whose cultural function and capacity to please and move a
reader or hearer depend on their finding in the sounds, rhythms, and temporal order-
ing of a language a resource to be exploited. These works have gone by different names
at different times, though the word we use today goes back at least to Ancient Greece
in the fourth century bc; in its most literal sense, Greek poēma or poiēma meant
‘a thing made’, and the Latin poema was applied, the OED tells us, not only to poetical
works in the modern sense but to ‘prose of poetic quality’—to texts displaying poet
icity, in short. My concern, however, is not with the use of the specific word, but with
the existence in Western culture of the practices we identify by means of it.
‘Western culture’ is admittedly a problematic concept, but one that relies on a
widely accepted story I am not about to challenge. Its foundations were laid in
Ancient Greece, whose culture was of course in part an inheritance from such older
civilizations as the Phoenician, the Mycenaean, and the Egyptian; Ancient Rome
built on these foundations; Graeco-Roman culture was then both tested and renewed
by migrations from the north, resulting in a number of national cultures all still bear-
ing traces of their ancient origins. My traversal of this terrain is necessarily selective;
for instance, I focus on Alexandria rather than on any of the other Greek-speaking
cultural centres of the Macedonian Empire because of its centrality in the transmis-
sion of archaic Greek poetry to post-classical Europe, and I devote only a few pages
to Byzantine culture since it was less central to this process, even though its poetic
heritage is a rich and complex one. Part of the narrative is the rise of Christianity,
which will feature in my study to the extent that it had an impact on the experience
of poetry; another part is the preservation of ancient European culture in the Arab
world, a hugely important episode which will be acknowledged only by implication.
And within this selective account, I focus on those poets or other writers whose work
is most useful in revealing performance practices and their reception.
The trajectory I trace, in bare outline, moves from the poem as oral, composed in
performance, and inseparable from song to the poem as printed, encountered in a
book, and read silently—that is, to the experience of poetry that is most familiar today
(though with the increasing use of electronic media this state of affairs may be chan-
ging). I take as emblematic of the modern condition of poetry the 1616 publication by
Ben Jonson of his Works in a handsome folio edition—an event that, in the view of one
commentator, marks the beginning of the dominance of print over manuscript and in
doing so ushers in a new era in literary history.4 I thus adopt as an end-point from
which the book looks back across twenty-four centuries the remarkable poetic
achievement of Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. While the narrative travels
from Greece and Alexandria to the Roman Empire and thence to works produced in
several European vernaculars, the focus narrows in the fourteenth century to poetry
in English, a body of work heavily dependent on the rich inheritance of these earlier
cultures. The English Renaissance, the subject of the final chapters, also draws heavily
on the European cultural past, and, in its fascination with Ancient Greece and Rome,
closes the circle. A different study could have taken a different European language, or
a different period, as the culmination of an account of Western poetry; all I claim is
that the poems of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and their contempor-
aries mark a high point in the long story of the transformation of language itself into a
richly rewarding art-form and that their achievement coincides with a decisive shift in
the experience of poetry of which we are still the beneficiaries.
The English cultural scene also provides a vivid instance of the changing relations
between poetry, understood as an independent art-form, and verse drama. The inter-
est in the final chapters lies as much in what is missing as in what is attested: in spite
of frequent claims that in Elizabethan England it would have been common to hear
poetry being performed in the hall or the tavern, there is little evidence of any prac-
tices of this sort. In contrast to earlier periods, the major medium for the experience
of poetry in this period in England was the written or printed page, while the public
performance of verse became the province of the theatre. Shakespeare’s fame as a poet
has long been eclipsed, at least in the popular imagination, by his fame as a dramatist,
Introduction 5
but for the Elizabethan literary elite, it was the printed books they could buy or borrow
to read at home—Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—that marked him as a great writer.5
(The publication of his Sonnets in 1609, whether or not authorized by the poet
himself, brought a different kind of fame.) The fact that Shakespeare, who can stand
for the remarkable achievement of English Renaissance poetry, died in 1616 gives my
terminal date a second appropriateness.6
P O ET RY, D R A M A , MU S I C
An even longer book than this could expand its subject matter to include theatre
audiences’ experience of the poetry they heard during performances of verse drama.
There is no doubt part of the pleasure generated by Euripides’ sophisticated handling
of iambic trimeter or Marlowe’s sonorous employment of blank verse was of the same
kind as that felt by audiences listening to Virgil read from the Aeneid or Chaucer
recite one of the Canterbury Tales (if he ever did): that is to say, an enjoyment of the
power of language itself as shaped by an inventive writer. One of the borders of our
topic that we shall constantly be aware of is the line between poetic and dramatic
genres. It’s a line that is not easy to draw, especially in eras during which plays make
extensive use of verse. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible—and for the sake of this
study’s length and focus, necessary—to distinguish between a form which relies on
the fictional representation of characters interacting with one another in an imagined
space and a form which invites a reader to enjoy a sequence of words for their own
patterns and potency. One can envisage a culture in which the latter existed but not
the former (Plato was drawn to this model), and vice versa.
The history of audiences’ and readers’ experience of drama raises a number of
issues that are of no relevance to poetry outside dramatic literature, and the history of
the experience of such poetry raises issues that are peculiar to non-dramatic verse.
Borderline cases will occasionally occur, certainly, such as the practice of reading out
a text presented on the page in dramatic form but never intended to be performed
as an actual play—modern examples would include Flaubert’s The Temptation of
St Anthony and Hardy’s The Dynasts—and there is a long tradition of pastoral poems
with alternating speakers. The status of such texts as hard to categorize helps us to see
the clear instances on either side. It will also be worth considering whether the exist-
ence of successful poetic drama in a particular culture enhanced or inhibited the
writing and enjoyment of non-dramatic poetry.
The other type of performance which borders on poetry, and which is sometimes
difficult to differentiate from it, is song. The origins of poetry lie in some form of
musical performance, and the vocabulary of song continued to be employed through-
out the period we are investigating in a way that is sometimes literal but very often
purely metaphorical. The word ‘lyric’ reveals these origins, but with the spread of
writing, the term shook off its association with music; once this had happened, the
frequent self-referential uses of ‘sing’ in poems came to mean ‘I speak as a poet’. Here
too, there are borderline cases, and these are more significant for this history than in
the case of poetry’s relationship with drama. For example, modes of reciting poetry
that utilize fixed tonal patterns, as may have been the case with the first performances
of Homeric epic and with the chansons de geste in the twelfth century, to some degree
sacrifice the potential of language’s own music in their obedience to an externally
imposed configuration of sound. Given our uncertainty about the nature and degree
of the musical contribution to the performance of such works—and the fact that they
have survived without any musical notation—I have considered them as legitimate
subjects for analysis. Poems that were more strictly composed as songs, such as archaic
Greek lyrics, Christian hymns, and troubadour verse, I have paid less attention to,
assuming that the musical dimension largely overrode the sounds of the language for
their original hearers—although since they too have survived without their music
and thus have become, for us, poems, they deserve a small place in this history.
The subject of this book, then, is a cultural practice that involves the performance
of linguistic works that are neither dramatic representations nor songs (nor their
combination in sung theatrical forms). Throughout this history, however, drama and
song will be our constant companions.
PLEASURE
It would be possible to define poetry in strictly formal terms, so that it would include,
for instance, recipes or spells in oral cultures given strongly mnemonic force by being
regularly metrical and rhymed, even if these produced no pleasure for hearers other
than that of being given the information they needed.7 By including the production
of pleasure in my characterization of poetry I am limiting it to a somewhat smaller
category, although I am in no way suggesting that such works cannot at the same time
be conveyors of information; Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (to be discussed in
Chapter 4) was indisputably written to convey ideas about life and the world, but if
it provides enjoyment to the reader in its handling of language and rhythm, it is also
indisputably a poem—and that it is a poem makes its inculcation of knowledge all
the more effective and memorable. Of course, the uses to which texts are put vary
from period to period and perhaps national culture to national culture; one can
imagine a context in which Lucretius would be read in a wholly non-literary manner,
though to undertake such a reading would be to overlook a dimension of the work
that is part of its greatness.
Another way of raising the question of pleasure would be to invoke the idea of the
aesthetic: my exclusion of purely informative linguistic sequences could be rephrased
as a focus on texts with an ‘aesthetic’ purpose or effect. I hesitate to appeal to this
term, however; the historical specificity of the discourse of the aesthetic, as a philo-
sophical concept dating from the eighteenth century, together with the present con-
notations of the word (and even more, the connotations of ‘aestheticism’), would
bring an unwanted complication into the discussion. Pleasure, on the other hand,
however subject in its particular forms to historical change, is a topic discussed through-
out the period being considered and can be assumed to be a constant element in the
response to language given poetic form. I find it much easier to say that Callimachus’s
Introduction 7
Hymns or Langland’s Piers Plowman were intended to provide pleasure, whatever else
they were intended for, than to say that they had an aesthetic dimension.
It is not always easy to demonstrate the role of pleasure in the reception of poetic
texts of the distant past, but it would be hard to deny that the use of techniques such
as metre and rhyme gave pleasure to their audiences and readers. In oral cultures,
these techniques were an important resource in enhancing memorability, and when
knowledge had to be passed on from generation to generation without writing, mem-
orability was a crucial factor in the transmission of cultural history and identity. But,
as we shall see, even the earliest descriptions of the effect of poetry on its audience,
the accounts of epic performance in the Odyssey, imply that far more is at stake than
the conveying of information; to be a good performer is to be able to move and
delight—and perhaps momentarily terrify or sadden—your hearers through your
skill in handling metred language. This is not to claim that our current modes of
experiencing poetry, and the enjoyment we derive from it, are identical to those
prevalent in Ancient Greece and Rome or medieval and Renaissance Europe; just
that all of these modes involve pleasure in the enhancement of language’s powers
through the skilful handling of sound, rhythm, and the events of meaning, brought
out in real-time performance.
EV I D E N C E
When beginning this project, I confidently expected that in the periods for which I had
relatively little prior knowledge I would be able to make use of secondary materials to
summarize already settled arguments about the experience of poetry and the related
question of its modes of performance. Instead, I found that in almost every period, the
issue of performance was the subject of heated and ongoing debate, usually as part of
a wider debate about literacy and orality. Are the Homeric poems as we have them
the product of an oral or a literate culture? Was the cultural and political life of
ancient Rome predominantly based on the spoken or the written word? Were medi-
eval romances composed for public oral performance or private reading? Did the
coming of print fundamentally alter the relation of reader and text? And so on—
wherever I looked, there were questions, and few agreed answers.
A major reason for this, of course, is that the evidence is so scanty. The figures per-
taining to drama give some indication of the scale of the losses of Ancient Greek liter-
ary works: where the Athenians were able to enjoy something like sixty plays by
Aeschylus, seventy by Euripides, and over a hundred by Sophocles, we can read seven,
eighteen or nineteen, and seven, respectively.8 A similar attenuation no doubt holds
for other genres; for example, it is estimated that Sappho wrote some 10,000 lines of
poetry, but only 650 of these survive.9 Only the smallest fragments of papyrus survive
from Ancient Greece and Rome; the classical works that we read in modern editions
are medieval copies of who knows how many earlier copies in a centuries-long chain
of transcription. There are many stories of works that exist today thanks only to the
near-miraculous survival of a single copy—perhaps the most famous of these is the
aforementioned De Rerum Natura10—and it’s impossible to tell what other treasures

we have lost.
In the face of so much disagreement, I have had to reach my own conclusions after
examining the evidence. This evidence has come from poems themselves, from para-
texts and marginalia in manuscript and print, from grammars, treatises, and manuals,
from references to poetry in letters, diaries, and other genres of text, from the appear-
ance of poets on the stage, from the history of textual transmission, and from a num-
ber of other historical documents. As Roger Chartier, someone else with an abiding
interest in this subject, has said, ‘The history of practices must be based on their
manifold representations—in literature and iconography, in statements of norms, in
autobiographical accounts, and so forth.’11 The traces of this history are sparse and
scattered; we have much more information about how earlier ages regarded the con-
tent of poetry than we do about how it was performed and received. And we can
never know what poetry actually sounded like in the mouths of performers of all the
ages before the invention of recording technology; one only has to listen to the
recordings of Tennyson or Browning to know how radically performance styles can
change over quite a short period. We have a better sense of what poetry looked like
once it became a matter of the visual surface as well as the voice; this becomes espe-
cially true in the later part of the Middle Ages (from which most of our copies of
earlier, lost, writings come), and the invention of print gives the visual dimension a
new and lasting importance.
There is much guesswork in these pages, then, by the commentators I cite and by
me (though I hope my guesses are always informed and reasonable), but there is
enough concrete evidence to limn at least an outline of the story of poetic experience
in its varied manifestations over these twenty-four centuries.
PA RT I
ANCIENT GREECE
1
Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers
•
P O ET RY ’S B E G I N N I N G S , A N D B E F O R E
Anyone seeking the origins of the modern Western cultural practice named in
various European languages as ‘poetry’, ‘la poésie’, ‘la poesia’, ‘die Poesie’, or ‘poezia’ has
to go back at least as far as those now dimly discernible centuries of vigorous cultural
activity that we know as the Mycenaean civilization, a period when the territories
encircling the Aegean Sea witnessed a high level of craftsmanship in the visual and
plastic arts as well as, we may reasonably assume, in the sung or recited word.1
Scattered archaeological remains give us some sense of the achievements of this
Bronze Age culture, at its height from about 1400 to about 1200 bc, and its cultural
accomplishments are also fitfully reflected in what have come down to us through
centuries-long traditions of oral transmission and textual copying as the two Homeric
epics. Although they belong primarily to the Greek culture that eventually arose
out of the ruins of the Mycenaean civilization, these two great works constitute the
main body of evidence, skimpy as it is, for the Bronze Age beginnings of a linguistic
tradition that around a thousand years later, in the fourth or third century bc,
reached a form that is recognizable as the direct forebear of poetry—poetry as we
find it today printed in books and magazines, recorded on tapes and discs, dissem-
inated on the Internet, and performed in halls and classrooms. This chapter and
Chapters 2 and 3 tell the story of that first millennium of poetry’s pre-history.
The Iliad and the Odyssey cannot be taken as reliable guides to the Aegean world
in the Mycenaean era;2 nevertheless, the historical origins of the heroic events they
relate—in particular, the fall of a great city in Asia Minor—are datable with a reasonable
degree of certainty to that era, and more specifically to the thirteenth century bc.
However slight the historical core of the Homeric epics, the existence of corres-
pondences between what can be proved to have occurred and what is related in the
works themselves means that a continuous oral tradition of some kind must have
linked the two periods.3 The historical reality which they reflect is complicated, how-
ever, by the influence of both the Mycenaean period and the centuries that lay
between it and the time at which the two epics achieved something like their final
form—usually thought to have been late in the eighth or early in the seventh century
bc, the period which seems to be most fully mirrored in their contents (though some
scholars argue for a date as late as the sixth century).4 The language of the epics is also
an amalgam reflecting different periods and localities, suggestive of accretions as the
epics were passed on from performer to performer, age to age.
Doubtless, this much-chronicled cultural beginning in the Mycenaean palaces was
in fact a continuation of an even more ancient heritage, deriving perhaps from older
Phoenician and Egyptian traditions,5 but we can do no more than make guesses
about the centuries, if not millennia, of verbal performances that lie behind the writ-
ten texts we are able to read today, and which, faute de mieux, we have to take as the
starting-point of our investigations. Thus, in focusing in this chapter on the evidence
for modes of performance provided by the Homeric epics (the reason for avoiding
the term ‘poems’ will be made clear shortly), we shall be attempting to reconstruct a
cultural practice that by the eighth century may have existed relatively unchanged for
hundreds of years, and may have been as characteristic of Mycenaean palace culture
as of the Aegean courts five centuries later. On the other hand, this practice may have
ceased entirely by the eighth century bc—though the epics suggest that if this were
the case, it remained a vivid presence in shared memories.
• • •
In setting out to examine these ancient origins of our modern poetic practices,
one likely place to begin might seem to be the words ‘poem’, ‘poet’, and ‘poetry’
themselves, and their cognates in the other modern European languages. Many
English treatises on poetry have set out in this way, often finding a happy match with
what was once an alternative term for the writer of verse: ‘maker’—a word that nicely
translates the Greek poiētēs. Thus, George Puttenham begins The Arte of English Poesie,
published in 1589, as follows: ‘A Poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English
name well conformes with the Greeke word: for of ποιεῖν [poiein] to make, they call
a maker Poeta.’6 Sir Philip Sidney says of the poet, ‘I know not, whether by lucke or
wisedome, wee Englishmen have mette with the Greekes in calling him a maker.’7
Although the term ‘maker’ has not been used since the eighteenth century to mean
‘poet’ except as a deliberate archaism, it was not uncommon in this earlier period
(and was a familiar usage in Scots). This etymological derivation satisfied the need
felt by Renaissance theorists like Puttenham and Sidney to present poets as skilled
artisans, crafting the language into the forms of elaborate artifice8—though to bal-
ance this emphasis on the willed exercise of expertise with an acknowledgment of the
unpredictable and uncontrollable element in poetic composition, Renaissance com-
mentators often added that the Romans called the poet vates, ‘seer’.
Etymology will not, however, take us as far back as we want to go. In the Homeric
epics, probably the earliest body of Greek verse to have survived, there is not a single
occurrence of the word poiētēs, nor of poiēma, ‘poem’; and when the verb poieō is used,
as it often is, it means ‘make’ or ‘do’ without any reference to the craft of poetry.
Poiētēs and poiēma are not, in fact, clearly attested until the fifth century bc (along
with melopoios, ‘maker of songs’), by which time Greek cultural habits, and the nature
Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 13
of verbal performance, had, as we shall see, changed enormously from the practices
we find represented in the early epics.9 And when these words finally do appear, they
have a very wide application, retaining some of the general force of ‘maker’ and ‘thing
made’: they take in drama as well as what we would now call song and recited verse,
so that the forerunner of modern poetry, in its emergence as a separate art-form, lacks
a distinct label. (Aristotle, for instance, complains that there is no word for the
mimetic art that uses verse.)10 The word mousikē, from which our ‘music’ is derived, is
also a later arrival in Greek, developing out of the idea that artistic capacity has its
source in the Muses and including in its range of reference other arts besides music.
The reason why etymological tracings cannot help us in this period is not simply a
matter of historical contingency: it has a substantial cause. As far as we can tell, there
was no practice in Ancient Greek culture—at least before papyrus rolls began to cir-
culate widely in the fourth century bc and perhaps not even then—corresponding
exactly to the activity that the term ‘poetry’ now conjures up. Even the term ‘music’ is
misleading when we apply it to the centuries before about 500 bc. What this means
is that our discussion of the origins of Western poetry has to grapple not just with the
difficulty of reconstructing a distant and—to us—strange way of doing things but
also with the inappropriate connotations of a long-entrenched terminology that we
find it very hard to do without. Commentators still employ the misleading terms
‘poetry’ and ‘poet’ to refer to the Homeric period, and we need not be surprised that
this is so, given the inadequacy of the vocabulary at our disposal. Terms like ‘litera-
ture’, ‘art’ (in the sense of ‘art-work’), and ‘aesthetic’, too, suggest modern concepts, or
conceptual clusters, that are inappropriate to this period and have to be handled with
great care.
The least misleading way to label the cultural activity which preceded the develop-
ment of forms more akin to modern poetry and music is as ‘song’, and this is the term
I shall employ here. It’s a well-known fact that the citizens of archaic and classical11
Greek communities produced and experienced both verbal and musical art primarily
as song, often with dance as an integral component as well, and for two more c enturies
at least it is probable that most verse was associated with song or a song-like mode of
performance.12 In the Homeric works the usual term for the performer of epics is
aoidos, for which the simplest translation is ‘singer’ (though this figure is much more
than that); terms like ‘minstrel’ or ‘bard’, despite their appropriateness to some aspects
of the profession being represented, have the unfortunate effect of conjuring up all
the trappings of a medieval court.
However, our modern conception of song, though certainly closer to archaic
Greek practices than our modern conceptions of poetry and of music, can also lead
us astray. We tend to think of song as words—usually in verse of some kind—set to
music. Such an attitude depends on our taking for granted the separateness of verse
and music, on the assumption that they each have their own independent existence
on the basis of which they are able to participate in the happy marriage that is song.
It’s difficult to avoid carrying this assumption back with us to Homeric Greece. But
all the evidence we have suggests that to these early Greeks, there was no such thing as
non-musical poetry and perhaps, even, no such thing as non-verbal music, at least
within the higher social strata. (Rustic instrumental performances might well have
been a familiar phenomenon.)13 What we rather too easily call ‘Greek song’ in this
period was not the coming together of two separate modes of expression, but a single
medium: the composer (always a creator of both words and melodies and usually a
performer as well) heightened the language of daily speech by transforming it into a
metrical form which was at the same time a musical form. Even with the rise, on the
one hand, of purely instrumental music—by the classical period competitions for
performance on the lyre and the aulos were common14—and, on the other, of the
practice of reciting or declaiming verse (chiefly epic and iambic, as will be seen in
Chapter 2), the lyric, whether monodic or choral, continued to be regarded as a
single entity, not the combination of two (or in the case of danced songs, three)
distinct elements.
In trying to think ourselves back to Homeric Greece, we also have to imagine the
composition of what we are calling ‘song’ taking place in the course of, and as part of,
a performance within a predominantly oral culture, no simple task when our concep-
tion of language as a system which co-exists in speech and writing is so ingrained.
Although there had been writing on the Greek mainland before 1200 bc—the
syllabic script known as Linear B was used to represent an early form of Greek used
by the Mycenaeans—this script had died out, apparently with the Mycenaean civil-
ization itself. In any case, from the little that has survived, Linear B appears to have
been used only for record-keeping purposes, whatever song-culture existed probably
being purely oral. In contrast to Mesopotamia and Egypt, which had had sophisti-
cated writing systems—cuneiform and hieroglyphs respectively—since the third mil-
lennium bc, and had used them, among many other purposes, for recording poetic
or song texts, Greek culture was slow to adopt a writing system that was suited to this
purpose.15 This absence may in fact have helped to produce a peculiarly rich oral
tradition, of which the Homeric epics are the most notable survivals. (There is no
mention of writing in the Iliad or the Odyssey, the only possible exception being the
‘murderous symbols . . . inscribed on a folding tablet’ which Bellerophon fails to real-
ize are an instruction that he, the bearer, be put to death16—possibly a faint memory
of the lost art of writing preserved in the amber of the oral tradition.)
Even when the Semitic alphabet began to be used in a modified form in Greece,
perhaps in the eighth century, perhaps earlier,17 it spread very slowly, and does not
appear to have been widely employed for the transcription of poetry until the sixth
century bc, which was when Egyptian papyrus became available in reasonable quan-
tities.18 There was, however, one early manifestation of what looks very like written
poetry: the inscription on stone or pottery of very short verse texts, at first in hexam-
eters and later more usually in elegiac couplets. These came to be called ‘epigrams’,
literally writing on an object, most often a votive offering or a grave monument. One
of the earliest such objects to survive is a pot dating from 750–700 bc upon which is
written the words, ‘I am the delicious cup of Nestor. Whoever drinks from this cup
shall be seized by the desire of beautifully crowned Aphrodite19 (see Fig. 1.1).
These early brief inscriptions do not function as poems do, inviting the reader to
respond to the verbal representation of an imagined scene or event. Rather, they
make the object on which they are inscribed give voice, as if language could not be
imagined apart from a speaker; the reader’s task is to lend his or her voice to the
Fig. 1.1. Nestor’s Cup, 750–700 bc. Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae, Lacco Ameno, Ischia.
Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo.
object in chanting or singing the words inscribed upon it. Not until the Hellenistic
period, as we shall see in Chapter 3, was the potential of the epigram as a written form
fully exploited to produce something close to our modern idea of poetry.
HOMERIC SONG
The predominantly oral culture of Homeric Greece generated a conception of sing-

ing that was quite distinct from that which prevails in literate contexts, and adds a
further hurdle for us to negotiate in using the term ‘song’. To write down the words of
a song conceived in performance is to drive a visual wedge between them and the
music to which they are sung and by means of which they were composed. It is to
introduce the idea that versified language can exist without song, or more accurately,
without singing, and that melody too can have an independent existence. Even to
write words down with some graphic indication of melody—something for which
there is no evidence before the third century bc—is visually to suggest a split entity.
A song was composed as a performance and by means of a performance (whether in
private or public), and it was enjoyed as a performance—but not the performance of
an object or an ideal entity that had some other existence outside the event in which
performer and audience participated. (To the extent that the word ‘performance’
suggests some pre-existing entity to be performed, it is of course itself misleading.)
The song you were hearing was the song you were hearing; it might repeat, exactly or
with variations, a song you had heard before, but these performances were its only
mode of its being. In fact, it did not, to be accurate, ‘exist’; it happened, as an event,
even more obviously than I have argued is the case with all poetry. If it was a long and
complex song—say, part of one of the epic cycles sung by a professional performer in
the courts represented in the Odyssey—it would probably be significantly different
from any earlier version you might have listened to, since the singer would be recom-
posing as he sang.20 In using the term ‘singer’, then, we have to keep in mind the mul-
tiple functions it fuses together: not only performer of verbal music but at the same
time inventor of words, composer of melodies, and probably player of an instrument.
And we have to remember that the compositions these singers performed had a qual-
ity of singularity and ephemerality; they lacked the sense of permanence and fixity
that are part-and-parcel of our understanding of the term ‘poem’ today.
Virtually the only evidence we have of this pre-literate mode of performance lies in
a number of passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey as we now possess them, two vast
epics which appear to be written-down descendants of songs, or series of songs, that
once had only an oral existence.21 We cannot say how they changed before they received
something like the shape in which we have inherited them, nor when it was that they
settled into a fairly stable form, nor when they were first put down on papyrus,
though many competing claims have been made, and continue to be made, about
these matters.22 The complex and long-standing controversy about the authorship
of the Homeric epics—whether, for instance, ‘Homer’ was a legendary name attached
retrospectively to the finest of the songs circulating in Greece, or whether there once
existed an individual named Homer who gave definitive form to groups of those
songs—is one in which, fortunately for the length of this book, we need not get
involved.23 For our purposes, what matters is that the Iliad and the Odyssey, as we read
them today, are, as far as we can tell, descendants of works that were being performed
in parts of Greece in the eighth century, and that, in all likelihood, they have not been
altered very significantly for more than two millennia.
We can be fairly sure that by the sixth century bc the Homeric epics were written
down,24 but these transcribed versions may have reflected works that had been rela-
tively unchanging in performance for some time—perhaps, as we have noted, since
the late eighth or early seventh century, a period when they also seem to have begun
to be disseminated across the city-states of Greece.25 At the same time, being written
down, whenever it occurred (perhaps as a gradual process as discrete stories were
combined rather than a one-off event), did not mean being fixed; oral transmission
remained the predominant means of communication until at least the fifth century
bc, and we cannot assume that writing possessed the kind of authority that it later
acquired.26 Not until the patient editorial work of the scholars in the Egyptian city
of Alexandria in the third and second centuries bc was there any attempt to estab-
lish an ‘authoritative’ text of the Homeric epics. Gregory Nagy proposes a set of
terms that usefully distinguish among the various types of written poem: inscrip-
tion, a text that is itself a performance, as in the case of Nestor’s cup; transcript, the
record of a performance, possibly as an aid to further performance; script: a text
that is a prerequisite for performance; and scripture, a text that need not presup-
pose p erformance at all.27
It is worth remembering, too, that we possess no actual papyrus manuscripts
bearing traces of the Homeric epics earlier than the third century bc, long after they
were first written out in full, and that these early papyri preserve only tiny fragments.
(In fact, we possess no fragment of any Greek papyrus earlier than the late fourth
century bc, and no Greek poetry in its author’s hand.) The earliest complete manu-
scripts of the epics are medieval copies, dating from the tenth or eleventh century ad,
the product of a long chain of transcription. In trying to reconstruct the experience
of poetry in Ancient Greece, as with most aspects of that culture, we have to work
with evidence of the most exiguous and problematic kind, and almost all our ‘conclu-
sions’ are guesses—any of which could be overturned by the discovery of a single
scrap of papyrus.
• • •
As we have seen, the stories narrated in the Homeric epics may have been continu-
ously retold since the events which they claim to record, the events surrounding the
fall of the city of Troy in Asia Minor in the thirteenth century bc. (The story of the
besieged city goes back much further than this, and it is likely that in the aftermath of
the historical event an existing legend incorporated the name ‘Troy’ in place of an
earlier name.)28 We have noted, too, that the world the epics represent bears some
traces of the Mycenaean civilization of that period, although the culture they most
fully reflect is that of the eighth century. This culture is also geographically locatable
in the region known as Ionia—the central west coast of Asia Minor.29 The two epics
contain numerous references to song of various kinds, which constitute our most
important clues to the social role of this predecessor of poetry, the manner in which
it was performed, and the way it was perceived, during this long period.
The type of song for which the fullest contextual information is provided is that of
which the Homeric epics themselves are examples; within the narratives, that is to
say, there are singers and performances whose texts—had they been written—would
have been something like much shorter versions of, or episodes from, the Iliad and
the Odyssey.30 As we have seen, the representations of poetic performance in the
Homeric epics may well reflect a practice that flourished earlier than the eighth cen-
tury, perhaps in some of its aspects even going back to Mycenaean palace culture, and
this practice may have in fact ceased by the time the text of the epics was stabilized.
That professional singing of heroic and mythic narrative was the earliest mode of
verbal-musical performance in the Aegean region seems unlikely, however; we can
speculate that it grew out of, and eventually separated itself from, singing as a com-
munal and perhaps originally ritual activity, which may well have been accompanied
by dance in its earliest manifestations.31 (Later we shall look at some of the indica-
tions in the Homeric epics of communal song.) This practice of singing and dancing,
from which the Greek tradition of lyric certainly developed, marked special occa-
sions in the life of the community—including, perhaps, earlier forms of the more
private celebration known as the symposion32—and continued side by side with epic
performances. While the proto-lyric probably took many forms, rhythmically
(and musically) speaking, the epic settled into a continuous long-lined metrical form
highly suitable for narrative, the dactylic hexameter—the line used for the Iliad and
the Odyssey themselves and innumerable later works in both Greek and Latin.
We cannot tell if there was a historical break in the tradition of epic performance
between the singing recorded in the works themselves and the fifth-century recita-
tions which are the subject of Chapter 2 and which can be seen as the forerunner of
the written and spoken poetry of modern Europe. Even if there was such a break, the
sung epic represents, for reasons to be elaborated, a closer relative of these later devel-
opments than other types of song in this pre-classical period. What, then, does the
Homeric epic tell us of its own performance history?33
T H E S I N G E R S O F T H E O DY S S EY
The most detailed representation in the Homeric epics of the performance of song—
undoubtedly idealized—occurs in Book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus, washed
ashore on the island of the Phaeacians as he attempts to make his way back to Ithaca
after the fall of Troy, is entertained as a guest and suppliant by their king, Alcinous.
Alcinous willingly agrees to provide a ship to convey the stranger home (Odysseus
has not yet identified himself ), but first commands a feast—which, for the delight
and pleasure of the guest and of his hosts, is to include a performance:
Summon also the divine singer

Demodocus, for a god has granted him above all others the gift of song,
to delight us with whatever his heart prompts him to sing. (8.435)34
Alcinous’s command contains references to the performer, what he performs, and the
act of performing; the Greek words used in these lines—aoidon, aoidēn, and aeidein—
are all related and all convey the idea of song (to the extent that the English word can
be regarded as a satisfactory equivalent). As we have noted, the word aoidos is the
primary term in the Homeric epics for the verbal performer, but it must not be for-
gotten that to ‘sing’ in this context normally means to compose in singing, not just to
perform an artefact created by someone else. It’s worth noting another difference
between the archaic Greek concept and our modern one: the verb aeidō may be fol-
lowed, in the accusative, by the content: events are sung, or narrated, not sung about.
Although his name suggests that he is esteemed by the people, the singer
Demodocus is twice associated with the gods in a way that is entirely typical of the
epics: he is referred to by the formulaic phrase theios aoidos, ‘divine singer’, and this
encomium is immediately repeated in an explanatory clause—‘for a god has granted
him above all others the gift of song’. The ability to sing—that is to compose and per-
form—with a high degree of excellence clearly seemed to the people of early Greece
something that could not be explained in terms of merely human capacities, a fact
that reflects the extraordinarily powerful effect on its auditors of the kind of perform-
ance Homer describes. (We still use the term ‘gifted’ to refer to someone with a high
degree of skill in a particular creative or performative art, preserving at least uncon-
sciously the notion that such capabilities are afforded by an external donor.) As we
shall see, the power of song resides most importantly in two of its attributes: its
emotional force and its detailed and accurate content.
In the final line of Alcinous’s command, however, an apparently opposed view of

the art of song emerges: the choice of what to sing, it seems, is made spontaneously by
Demodocus, or more strictly, by his ‘heart’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ (thumos: the word sug-
gests an inner activating principle). To credit the entirety of the singer’s skill to a
higher power would be to take from him any particular merit other than the capacity,
or good fortune, to attract the gods’ benevolence. The result is an irresolvable contra-
diction: the origin of performative activity is situated at once ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ the
performer, both a gift from the gods and the product of his own will. This contradictory
picture will remain a characteristic of Western representations of artistic performance
throughout their history; we have already noted the Renaissance dual emphasis on
poet as maker and as seer. Indeed, the very notion of spontaneous behaviour implies
something like this duality: to act in a manner not determined by a prior psychic or
physiological mechanism, to perform by means of a wholly free motion of the will, is
to yield to some otherness of which we cannot say whether it lies outside or inside the
individual. And the creativity involved in the composing and performing of a song
that brings great pleasure35 and moves deep emotions is felt to be a peculiarly free
activity, wholly the opposite of the predetermined and mechanical—even though it
requires mastery of a highly complex technical art.36
A few lines later, Demodocus himself is introduced:
The herald came in, bringing the honoured singer

whom the Muse loved greatly, though she gave him both good and evil:
she deprived him of his sight, but gave him sweet song. (8.62–4)
Again, the art of song is represented as a divine gift, a power that comes unbidden and
unexplained, just as blindness may—except that the co-presence of the two suggests
a kind of balancing justice, and suggests also that to possess Demodocus’s ability to
sing is such an exceptional asset that fairness requires some compensatory, and equally
extreme, deficiency. This logic is also operative in the myth of a blind Homer, which
presumably derives at least in part from this passage. (In a wholly oral culture, of
course, blindness is not an impediment to the art of the singer, whatever other disad-
vantages it produces.) We learn in the Iliad of Thamyris’s boast that he could sing
better than the Muses, who promptly struck him blind and took away his ‘divine gift
of song’ (2.594–600): what the gods grant, they can take away, and the mechanism of
compensation cannot always be relied upon by mortals.
In the passage just quoted, the divine donor is named as the Muse (or the Muses—
elsewhere Homer mentions the traditional number of nine), the goddess of song
and the other arts whose name, in the form mousikē, later came to designate the arts
themselves. E. R. Dodds, in an influential study, argues that the gift given by the
Muses in such accounts of the origin of song is not inspiration, in the sense of divine
possession—an idea which he does not find earlier than the fifth century bc—but
veridical knowledge of the heroic stories;37 and there is certainly much emphasis on
the power of the Muses to impart true awareness of what really happened, an emphasis
also present on the many occasions when the Homeric narrator appeals to the Muse
for assistance in relating his story. However, passages like this one (where song is
described as ‘sweet’) suggest that the need to appeal to a divine origin may have
stemmed from a fuller sense of the extraordinariness of the singer’s abilities—
including the ability to compose freshly in the act of performing—and of the pleasing
power of the event itself than this argument allows.38
We can compare the emphasis on sweetness in this passage, if a switch to a differ-
ent art-form may be permitted, with the simile in Book 6 in which the grace (charis)
given to the naked figure of Odysseus by Athene before he encounters Nausicaa and
her troupe is compared to the grace possessed by a gold and silver piece fashioned by
a craftsman taught by Hephaestus and Athene.39 In Book 17, as we shall see, the poet’s
divinely granted skill is described in terms of its enchanting power over an audience.40
Although the notion of the ‘sublime’—the response called forth by powerful depic-
tions of unimaginable magnitude—only became a key word in literary discourse after
Longinus’s On the Sublime, the experience it names is both elicited by and depicted in
the Homeric epics.41 There can be no doubt that beauty and emotional power were a
highly valued aspect of cultural products, and this was probably part of the sense of
the divine origin of compelling song.42
The frequent appeals to the Muse for assistance in these epics are clearly manifest-
ations of the performer-composer’s needs as he combines memorization and impro-
visation in his song, but they no doubt also functioned very effectively as devices to
convince the audience of his own god-given powers and of the veracity and complete-
ness of what he tells them. Here is a typical example from the Iliad:
Now tell me, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus,
for you are goddesses there and know all things,
and we have heard only rumours and know nothing:
who were the chief men and the lords of the Danaans? (2.484–7)
As usual, the emphasis is on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of what is about to

be sung—there is less need, after all, to claim the aid of the Muses for the p erformance
itself when the audience is capable of making their own judgements of this aspect of
what they are hearing. We can be sure that the shorter songs presented at feasts
included such appeals, which remained a conventional feature of Western poetry
long after oral composition and belief in the gods had disappeared. Less typically,
the passage continues with vivid testimony to the feats of memory required by the
heroic singer:
I could not tally or name the multitude of them,

not if I possessed ten tongues and ten mouths,
a voice never wearied, and within me a heart of bronze—
not unless the Muses of Olympus, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus,
call to my mind all those who gathered beneath Ilion. (2.488–92)
Here the singer gives a sense of the sheer scale of the endeavour on which he is engaged,
and of the strong need this produces for some external aid—which he no doubt felt
he was receiving as the hexameters continued to flow.43
Demodocus, then, is seated with great care at the Phaeacians’ feast:
Pontonous the herald placed a silver-studded chair for him

in the midst of the banqueters, against a tall pillar,
and hung the clear-toned lyre above his head,
showing him how to reach up to it with his hands.
He set beside him a fine table with a bread-basket
and a cup of wine to drink whenever he so desired. (8.65–70)
After all have eaten and drunk their fill, Demodocus takes his lyre, and, still sitting,
begins his performance:
The Muse roused the singer to sing of the glorious deeds of men,
from a tale whose fame had reached broad heaven:
the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus. (8.73–5)
Once again, the excellence of the singer’s performance is presented as the work of the
Muse, suggesting a spontaneous inventiveness that, to his auditors, seems superhuman;
no mention is made of the transmission from teacher to pupil, and singer to singer,
that must have been a signal feature of the oral tradition.44 As Alcinous has decreed,
the choice of story is not made by someone else, but is Demodocus’s own; he sings of
quite recent events which are already well known in Phaeacia. (The word I have trans-
lated as ‘tale’ is oimē, denoting a course or path, and by extension the course of a
tale or song—here the epic narrative of the Fall of Troy.) From this narrative he
chooses an episode which, by chance, features the very man who is being honoured by
the feast. It is not an episode which is mentioned in the Iliad (or anywhere else in
surviving Greek texts) but it does convey an idea of how portions of the Iliad, and its
predecessors and variants in the oral traditions around the Aegean, might have been
performed: as moving accounts of the doings of gods and heroic men, and at the same
time as informative reports on the significant events of the recent history of the region.
Odysseus, listening in anonymity to this account of his painful past, enhanced by
metre and melody and performed with superb skill, is obliged to pull a cloth over his
face to prevent the Phaeacians from seeing his tears. The song is clearly designed to be
heard as a composition in words, and whatever the nature of the melody and of the
singer’s self-accompaniment on the lyre, we can assume that there were few problems
of comprehension for the audience. This raises another difficulty in using the term
‘song’ to refer to early Greek performances: though it is preferable to ‘poem’, it goes
too far in the other direction in bringing to mind modern kinds of performance in
which words may well take second place to music. Many great songs of our own era
have lyrics that, printed without the music, seem tepid or contrived. Homeric song
involved the enhancement of the verbal by the melodic, and no listener who failed to
grasp the words would have remained content to listen to the music for its own sake.
A little later in this passage, Demodocus’s songs are referred to by the term epeessin
[8.77], the dative plural of epos, which literally meant ‘word’ but which came to mean
a particular kind of song, the kind we call epic.
Only Alcinous notices their guest’s surprising reaction: instead of registering

p leasure, Odysseus is weeping and groaning. Although the Phaeacians are urging
the singer to continue, ‘since they delighted in his singing’ (8.91), the king cuts the
entertainment short:
Hear me, leaders and counsellors of the Phaeacians:

we have now satisfied our hearts both with the feast
and with the lyre, the rich feast’s companion. (8.97–9)
Alcinous uses the same word, thumos, to designate what the song satisfies in its audi-
tors as he did for its origin in the singer: the banqueters’ inner being is satisfied both
by their sociable eating and drinking and by the song they have heard; and the two
modes of satisfaction habitually go together—the word translated by ‘companion’,
sunēoros, suggests a close bond, as in a marital relation. (It’s worth noting, however,
that the singing takes place after the eating and drinking; no possibility of distraction
or disturbance is allowed.) The emphasis is on the powerfully pleasurable experience
of hearing a well-performed and well-composed song giving fresh vivacity to familiar
tales; only Odysseus, for whom these are more than entertaining and instructive tales,
finds the painfulness of the events overcoming the pleasure of their retelling. And we
are left in no doubt that whatever emotional power the stories might have as collec-
tions of incidents, it is the inspired singing (which, to say it again, is also the inspired
composing-in-singing) of Demodocus that produces such extremes of pleasure
(for the Phaeacians) and pain (for Odysseus).
The singer’s duties for the day are not over, however. Alcinous leads the way outside—
the feast we have been hearing about is a daytime one—and initiates, first, sports and then
dancing. For the latter, Demodocus and his lyre are once more required: summoned
again by the herald, he stands in the middle of the dancers to perform. The narrative is
not clear about the relation between the singing and the dancing: we have first a refer-
ence to the flashing feet of a group of young dancers, then a song by Demodocus given in
full, then the description of a dance for two with a ball. Since there is no evidence that a
singer like Demodocus would have played his lyre as a solo instrument without using his
voice at the same time, we must either assume that the song he sings for the first dance is
not mentioned, or that the events of dancing and singing (separately praised by Odysseus)
are, as is the case elsewhere in the epics, to be understood as simultaneous. In the latter
case, we perhaps should imagine the story told in the narrative in hexameters—the
adulterous love of Ares and Aphrodite—actually being sung in older lyric metres
more appropriate for dancing, or that the ‘dance’ consisted of a miming-out of the
actions depicted in the song.45 It is also possible that changes in the modes of perform-
ance of the Homeric epics (which we shall examine later) together with the development
of solo instrumental music made it difficult in later centuries to imagine a troupe
dancing to a sung narrative, and that the text was altered by its later performers to separ-
ate the dance and the song. The ball-dance after the song is accompanied by the rhythmic
clapping or stamping of the young men, so that ‘a great sound went up’; at this point,
Demodocus seems not to be required, just as earlier Nausicaa and her handmaidens, per-
forming a ball-dance by themselves on the beach, had had no need of a singer.
The long day continues with a bath for Odysseus, and dinner. The episode that
follows repeats, at greater length, the events of the earlier banquet, in a pattern of
augmented recapitulation that is characteristic of oral epic. When the eating and
drinking are over and it is time for the singing to begin, Odysseus makes a request;
and in so doing, he stresses a different aspect of the singer’s skill:
Demodocus, among all men I praise you most highly.

It was either the Muse, daughter of Zeus, who taught you, or Apollo,
for you sing of the Achaeans’ fate in just order,
all that they did and suffered and laboured,
as if you had been present, or heard it from one who was. (8.487–91)
Again, the singer’s ability is praised in terms that suggest he owes the gift to a power
beyond him, the Muse or Apollo himself, who knows all things. Since Odysseus has
not revealed his identity, his comment would be taken by his auditors to refer to the
vividness of Demodocus’s earlier recounting of one of the events of the Trojan War,
but in fact it is also the accuracy of the account that has impressed him. He does not
mention the most recent song he has heard from Demodocus’s mouth, which was in
a rather different vein.
Odysseus makes a request for another song from the Trojan material, the story of
the Wooden Horse (in which he himself, of course, played the central role), clearly
expecting that it should be well within Demodocus’s power either to remember a
song he has sung before or to create a new work of art on the spot from his knowledge
of the events. If he succeeds in telling the tale ‘according to the way it happened’
(kata moiran), says Odysseus, he will ‘say to all men that the god has generously
granted you the gift of divine song’ (8.496–9). Once more Demodocus is moved by
the Muse (or, in an alternative interpretation of the line, begins with an invocation to the
Muse), and sings the requested story, and once more Odysseus is reduced to tears.
Alcinous, again the only one to notice their guest’s odd behaviour, has Demodocus stop
singing, ‘for it cannot be that he gives pleasure to all alike with this song’ (8.538).
Evidently, Odysseus’s tears and groans are not the appropriate response to a performance
of this kind, at least in the Phaeacians’ eyes; ‘Let him cease now,’ commands Alcinous, ‘so
that all of us may enjoy ourselves, hosts and guests alike’ (8.542–3). In response to
Alcinous’s questions, Odysseus reveals himself at last, unmasked by the power of song.
Why, we might ask, does Odysseus ask for this particular event to be revisited in
the form of a song? Obviously not to learn the facts, which, unlike the rest of the
audience, he knows only too well. He wants, it seems, to relive the experience of his
triumph through the medium of the singer’s art, which paradoxically both distances
it—since it is given the controlled form of musical verse and performed by someone
for whom it has no personal significance—and makes it more powerfully immediate,
as the gracefully ordered words and music produce a strong emotional effect, regis-
tered so strikingly by Odysseus’s tears. Although in his praise of the singer’s art
Odysseus emphasizes the importance of the retelling’s accuracy, he is clearly drawn
to and held by the transformative power of song as much as by its capacity to con-
vey historical information.46 This displacement in his judgement is not unusual in
Western culture: narrative texts are frequently praised for their realism and accuracy
when what in fact distinguishes them from other, less-praised, accounts is their h
andling
of the aesthetic resources of language. What is being responded to is not exactness as
such but the experience of verisimilitude on the part of the auditor or reader, the sense
of vividness, of authenticity, of actuality produced by the skilful deployment of words
and music.
When Alcinous wants to praise Odysseus, now revealed, for the skill of his own
narration of his adventures—relayed to us in verse but told by Odysseus in plain
prose—he makes the obvious comparison:
There is grace upon your words, and you have a wise heart;
and you have told with skill, as a singer would do, the story
of the grievous woes of the Argives and of yourself. (11.367–9)
Undoubtedly, both the extraordinary content of Odysseus’s narration and the fact
that its central character is himself play a major part in its spellbinding power over his
audience; but Alcinous insists on the artistic form of his storytelling as worthy of
particular praise. Similarly, when later in the work the swineherd Eumaeus tells
Penelope of the mysterious stranger’s compelling tales, he compares the disguised
Odysseus to a singer (giving the credit, as usual, to divine powers):47
Just as when a man gazes on a singer who has been given

by the gods the skill to delight mortals with song,
and their desire to hear him is endless whenever he sings,
so he enchanted me as he sat beside me in my home. (17.518–21)
• • •
Other passages in the Homeric epics confirm what we have gleaned from the descrip-
tion of the Phaeacian court—or, at any rate, they repeat it, which may be less a con-
firmation of its accuracy than a reflection of the fact that there existed a conventional
epic characterization of the professional singer. In particular, the accounts of Phemius,
the singer who is obliged by the suitors on Ithaca to provide entertainment for their
feasting and dancing while they await Penelope’s decision, offer a very similar set of
images. In Book 1 we hear of Phemius singing ‘the terrible homecoming of the
Achaeans from Troy’, while the suitors sit listening in silence, their eating and drink-
ing done. (Telemachus and Athene, however, hold a long conversation during the
performance, no doubt capitalizing on the audience’s concentration.) Penelope,
like her husband in the later book, has reason to find the song peculiarly painful,
and, like him, she cannot help weeping when she listens to it. She asks Phemius to
sing of some different deeds of gods or men, but Telemachus reproaches her:
Mother, why do you begrudge the honoured singer’s

producing pleasure in whatever way his mind urges him?
Singers are not to blame: the cause is Zeus,
who gives out to eaters of bread whatever he wills. (1.346–9)
Again we see an emphasis on the singer’s spontaneous choice of song; this time the
originating principle is not thumos, as it will be later in the work for Demodocus, but
noos, ‘mind’ or ‘thought’. (Interestingly, the lines that follow stress that the father of
the gods has an equivalent freedom in the good and evil he dispenses to humans.)
In this exchange, we learn that the song Phemius is singing is both already well
known—Penelope says that it ‘always’ causes her pain—and yet new—Telemachus
makes the point that ‘people always praise more highly the song / that has come more
recently to their ears’ (1.341, 351–2). Songs of heroic deeds, like popular songs today,
could evidently gain rapid popularity, so that for a while it would be no contradiction
to say of an example that it was both new and widely heard. The idea that oral poets
sang generations-old material, passed down and memorized and performed with
only slight variations, is clearly not appropriate to the world mirrored in the Homeric
epics. Reality may have moved closer to this conception of the oral poet as the epics
themselves became stabilized and a tradition of public oral recitation grew up—a
development we shall discuss in Chapter 2.
Phemius appears again after Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors, now as a suppli-
cant clasping his master’s knees. In doing so, he brings into extraordinarily sharp
focus the contradictory origin of the singer’s ability that we have already noted:
I am at your knees, Odysseus; respect me and have mercy.

Sorrow will fall upon you later if you should kill
a singer, one who sings for both gods and men.
I am self-taught, and a god has breathed into my mind
tales of all kinds. (22.344–8)
Translators sometimes try to find a way around the apparent contradiction in these
lines: Fitzgerald avoids the implication of willed activity in autodidaktos by translat-
ing it as ‘No one taught me’, and Rieu goes to the other extreme in leaving the god out
altogether: ‘I had no teacher but myself. All kinds of song spring unpremeditated to
my lips.’ But Phemius, like Demodocus, is both spontaneous originator of his songs
and beneficiary of a mysterious external power; to be either without the other would
be to lack an essential element of creativity, to be either mere receptacle or mere
craftsman.48 Odysseus, mindful of the singer’s power to secure his fame for the future,
spares him.
From all these passages, we gain a strong sense of the role of the professional singer
in the courts of early Greece. He was an entertainer, a historian, a journalist, an inter-
preter of religion, a conveyer of moral norms, a cementer of social bonds through the
representation of a shared past and the values it embodied. The two Homeric epics
preserve to some degree—we cannot tell to what degree—the kind of verbal text he
would have sung, though of course his performances were not nearly as long as these
immense creations. As we have noted, the Iliad and the Odyssey are probably the
result of the binding together of a great many shorter songs; and the same would be
true, no doubt, of the many other epic songs that are now lost—such as the so-called
‘cyclic epics’ which constituted a sequence beginning with a Theogony and a Battle of
the Titans and went on to a Theban series and the whole story of the Trojan War.49
Although the singers responsible for shaping and reshaping the Homeric epics would
have been highly likely to promote their own art within it—the singers are accorded
great respect by royal figures in the Odyssey50—we may reasonably assume that some
historical reality lay behind the importance given to song in these stories, even if by
the eighth century it belonged to the past. Words performed musically, whether nar-
ratives in hexameters or lyrics associated with special occasions, had a frequently-noted
capacity to stir the emotions (whether positively or negatively), set the feet tapping,
and—in the case of the epics—to convey graphic yet precise information about news-
worthy doings.
The foremost tellers of tales are the singers, because the power of song enchants
and moves, and seems to bring the events recounted close to the hearers in all their
vividness and detail.51 Those commentators—and there are many—who regard oral
epics as primarily a type of information technology overlook both the Homeric
accounts, with their emphasis on the moving power of the singers’ grace and skill, and
the history of aesthetic commentary, with its perennial bias towards praise of referen-
tial accuracy and its difficulty in finding words for the features that produce the
experience (which is sometimes the illusion) of such accuracy.
A PERFORMANCE OF EPIC SONG
What can we learn about the performance and reception of poetry’s predecessor,
pre-classical Greek song, from these representations? Whether the images in the
Odyssey reflect practices contemporaneous with the work’s stabilization in the eighth
century or thereabouts, or are a handed-down memory of a much earlier practice,
they are unlikely to be sheer inventions. Let us try to imagine the performance of an
epic or mythological narrative by a composer-singer such as Demodocus, a profes-
sional entertainer employed in a royal household, perhaps on a permanent basis. His
job requires, first, that he have a memorized store of historical incidents and narra-
tives (including both recent events about which his audiences will be eager to hear
and familiar favourites which they enjoy hearing over and over) and legends about
the gods and their dealings with humans. He also has to have memorized stretches of
song, from brief formulae to longer set-pieces, that can be drawn upon as necessary in
the development of his story. He must be skilled in adapting and developing this
memorized material in spontaneous performance, either responding to the requests
of his employer or his audience, or following his own inclination.52 In between public
appearances he no doubt works on his songs and rehearses their ingredients in
private, but it is in performance before an audience that the work comes together.53
He must have a good singing voice and good control over it, and be a skilled
performer on the four-stringed lyre, referred to in the epics as the phorminx or
kitharis.54 All these abilities working together in a brilliantly crafted performance
would seem to an enraptured audience to bespeak superhuman capacities, and
even the performer himself at his most effective may well feel that the song, as it
sweeps on, and sweeps him and his hearers on with it, is proceeding from some
divine origin.
For the public performance, he is seated in the midst of the banqueters, plucking
the four strings of his lyre in a monodic melody while he sings the hexameters of his
narrative to the same melody, in unison or at the octave (see Fig. 1.2.). As far as we can
tell, early Greek music did not involve harmony or counterpoint, and early song was
probably less a matter of devising self-sufficient tunes than enhancing the language’s
own melodic tendencies. The words of Ancient Greek were pronounced with pitch
accents, not the stress accents of a language like English, and ordinary speech there-
fore possessed an inherent organization as a series of tones, moving up and down
relative to one another.55
Furthermore, the pronunciation of syllables—and hence of words and sentences—
had a rhythmic character in itself, each syllable being either ‘long’ or ‘short’. (Inverted
commas are necessary here because the distinction between these two types of syllable
was not purely one of duration, as is often assumed, but was based on the structure of
the syllable; a better terminology that is often used is ‘heavy’ and ‘light’.)56 It was this
syllabic quantity—perhaps together with a stress accent that coincided with the ictus,
or main beat, of the rhythm57—that formed the basis of Greek metre, and—as with
English—the metrical patterns that were thus produced lent themselves directly to
musical rhythms. Lines of hexameter poetry, therefore, had they been pronounced as
normal speech without any musical enhancement, would still have had a musical
character, being tonally and rhythmically shaped by the pitch accents and the
Fig. 1.2. Cretan Geometric bronze figure of a lyre-player, 900–800 bc. Heraklion Museum.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Hellenic
Ministry of Culture and Sports-Archaeological Receipts Fund.
s yllable-quantities arranged by the composer into patterned ‘feet’—a term that

probably reflects the origin of Greek metrical verse in dance. It seems likely that early
singers evolved a technique of exaggerating this inherent musical quality, singing the
high (or ‘acute’) accents on higher notes and finding appropriate lower notes for the
other syllables, and making the shifts in pitch discrete rather than, as was presumably
the case in speech, continuous.58 In the few fragments of musical notation that have
survived from the third century bc and later, there is evidence both of this kind of
musical enhancement of natural characteristics and of music that goes against inher-
ent melodic qualities—perhaps because by this time the tonal accentuation of Greek
was beginning to give way to the purely stress-based system that eventually prevailed.59
What this means is that the art of epic singing included the ability to ‘melodize’
speech, and that there was no separate ‘tune’ to memorize and fit words to. Once the
singer had begun, the melody, with its rhythmic base in the hexameter, would be a
help both to the recall of memorized material and to fresh composition, as appropri-
ate words and formulae (each of which would have had its own tune as well as its
rhythmic pattern) came to mind. We tend to think of a complex metrical scheme and
a melody as the end-product of a process of composition; but in imagining Greek
heroic song we need to think of them rather as vehicles for composition, providing
familiar frameworks that would aid in the conjuring up of words and phrases.60
Whereas we are accustomed to finding sung language more difficult to grasp than
spoken language, the singing of Greek according to this system was probably a means
of increasing comprehensibility in front of (or in the middle of ) large audiences,
exaggerating as it did the normal pronunciation of the words. What the melody
would not do, of course, is provide an interpretation of the words; the singer would
no doubt find ways of bringing out their emotional qualities by means of vocal qual-
ity, speed, and dynamics, but the tune itself was locked into the phonetic features of
the text.
There have been many attempts to reconstruct the sound of the Homeric hexam-
eter.61 One such attempt, by Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel, has been made available
on the Internet.62 Danek and Hagel state that their theory, which is based on the
phonological study of Ancient Greek by Devine and Stephens,
is not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach

to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the
demands of the individual verse, guided by the accentual structure and sentence-intona-
tion of the ancient Greek language as well as by metrical structures. (Paragraph 2)
What is valuable is their demonstration of the possibility of an improvisational singing

style, largely dictated by the accentual contours of the language. In their reconstructed
specimens we hear the performance of a solo male voice and a lyre, always one note at
a time, usually in strict unison. (The exceptions are occasional unaccompanied syl-
lables, and a short melodic coda to each hexameter.) Listening to such attempts at
recovery is, of course, of limited value if our aim is to recreate the experience of the
audience in the ancient banqueting hall; clearly, our ears are attuned to such distinct
musical traditions that if by some magical circumvention of temporal distance we
were able to hear the sound of a Homeric singer in performance we would perceive
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terve epäluulo ovat sopivammassa suhteessa toisiinsa. Siellä
vierähtää sinulta hupaisasti vuosi, seurustellessasi luvallisesti tai
hiukan luvattomastikin omien ja muukalaisten naisten kanssa» —
munkki rypisti otsaansa — »otat osaa sotaretkeen, antautumatta
kuitenkaan ajattelemattomasti vaaralle alttiiksi — sinä muistat
kutsumustasi — vain sen verran ett’et unhota, miten hevosta ja
miekkaa hoidetaan — poikana sen kyllä osasit — säilytät iloisina
ruskeat silmäsi, jotka — niin totta kuin aamunrusotar kultaa maan —
loistavat ja säihkyvät kaikkialla avoimesti senjälkeen kuin jätit
luostarin, ja sinä palaat luoksemme miehenä, joka hallitsee itseänsä
ja muita.»
»Keisarin luona hänen täytyy naida schwaabitar», ehdotti

panssaroitu soturi hyväntahtoisesti. »He ovat lempeämmät ja
luotettavammat kuin meidän naisemme.»
»Vielä mitä», sanoi Ascanio varoittaen sormellaan. »Älä

tympäisytä minua puhumalla liinapalmikoista.» Mutta munkki puristi
Germanon kättä, jota hän ei vielä ollut päästänyt irti.
»Sano suoraan Germano», uteli hän, »mikä on sinun mielipiteesi

tästä?»
»Mistä», kysyi tämä jurosti.
»Uudesta säädystäni?»
»Astorre, ystäväni», vastasi pitkäviiksinen nuorukainen hiukan

hämillään, »kun jotain on tapahtunut, ei tavallisesti enää pyydetä
neuvoja tai arvosteluja. Mihin kerran on ryhtynyt, siinä on pysyttävä.
Mutta jos ehdottomasti tahdot tietää, mitä ajattelen, täytyy minun
sanoa, että Saksassa annetaan pahoja nimiä lupauksien
rikkomiselle, sotapalveluksesta karkaamiselle ja muulle
senkaltaiselle. Mitä sinuun tulee, on asian laita aivan toinen, eikä
tätä saa siihen verratakaan, — ja kuoleva isäsi sitäpaitsi… Astorre,
rakas ystäväni, olet menetellyt hyvin kauniisti, mutta päinvastainen
olisi ollut vielä kauniimpaa. Se on minun mielipiteeni», päätti hän
koruttomasti.
»Jos olisit ollut täällä, Germano, et siis olisi suonut minulle sisaresi
kättä?»
Nuori soturi oli kuin puusta pudonnut. »Sisareni kättä! Dianan,

hänenkö, joka suree veljeäsi?»
»Juuri hänen. Hän on minun morsiameni.»
»Mainiota», huudahti tähän elämäntuntija Ascanio, johon

Germano yhtyi ihastuneena: »miten hauskaa! Minun täytyy syleillä
sinua, lanko!» Germano tunsi vilpittömyydestään huolimatta hyvin
käyttäytymistaidon. Ja nyt hänen täytyi tukahduttaa huokauksensa.
Niin sydämestään kuin hän kunnioittikin karheaa sisartaan, olisi
hänen luontainen vaistonsa suonut munkille aivan toisenlaisen
vaimon.
Hän väänsi viiksiään, ja Ascanio käänsi keskustelun peräsintä.

»Astorre, oikeastaan täytyy meidän taas oppia tuntemaan
toisemme», jutteli iloinen Ascanio. »Lapsuutemme ja nykyhetken
välillä ovat sinun viisitoista mietiskelyssä kulunutta luostarivuottasi.
Sisin olemuksemme ei ole muuttunut — kukapa olisi sen muuttanut
— mutta me olemme tulleet aikaihmisiksi. Tuo esimerkiksi», hän
osoitti Germanoa, »voi ylpeillä hyvästä sotilasmaineesta; mutta
minun täytyy valittaa, että hän on puoleksi saksalaistunut. Ja hän»,
Ascanio koukisti kätensä kuin pikaria tyhjentääkseen, »ja sitten hän
tulee syvämietteiseksi tai riitaisaksi. Halveksiipa hän vienoa
italiaammekin. 'Minä puhun teille saksaa', kerskailee hän ja puhua
mörisee epäinhimillistä karhun murinaa. Silloin hänen palvelijansa
kalpenevat, velkojat pakenevat ja paduattaremme kääntävät hänelle
komeat selkänsä. Siten hän on jäänyt ehkä yhtä neitseelliseksi kuin
sinäkin, Astorre», ja Ascanio laski tuttavallisesti kätensä munkin
olkapäälle.
Germano nauroi makeasti ja vastasi osoittaen Ascaniota: »ja tämä

mies on löytänyt kutsumuksensa täydellisenä hoviliehakkona.»
»Siinäpä vasta erehdyt», vastusti Ezzelinon suosikki. »Minun

kutsumukseni on nauttia elämästä huolettomasti ja iloisesti.» Tätä
todistaakseen hän huusi ystävällisesti luokseen puutarhurin tyttären,
jonka hän näki koettavan huomaamatta hiipiä heidän ohitseen vähän
matkan päässä ja vilkuilevan uuteen isäntäänsä. Sievä lapsonen
kantoi kirkkaasti hymyillen päänsä päällä viinirypäleitä ja viikunoita
kukkurallaan olevaa koria ja katseli heitä pikemmin veitikkamaisesti
kuin arasti. Ascanio hypähti pystyyn. Hän kietoi vasemman kätensä
hennon tytön vyötäisiin ja otti oikealla korista rypäleen. »Minua
janottaa», sanoi hän ja suuteli samalla tytön marjahuulia. Tyttönen oli
ujostelevinaan, mutta ei kuitenkaan tehnyt vastarintaa, ett’ei
pudottaisi hedelmiään. Tyytymättömänä kääntyi munkki pois tästä
kevytmielisestä parista. Kun tyttö näki munkin tylyn liikkeen, juoksi
hän pelästyneenä tiehensä ripotellen hedelmiä pitkin puutarhan
käytävää. Kädessään korista ottamansa rypäleet, poimi Ascanio
paenneen tytön jälestä vielä pari terttua. Toisen hän tarjosi
Germanolle, joka kuitenkin heitti sen ruohikkoon, hän kun halveksi
pusertamattomia rypäleitä, ja toisen veitikka tarjosi munkille, joka
myös ensiksi oli siihen koskematta, mutta pisti pian huomaamatta
suuhunsa mehevän marjan toisensa jälkeen.
»Minäkö hoviliehakko», jatkoi Ascanio, jota oli huvittanut
kolmekymmenvuotiaan munkin turha kainous, ja rupesi taas hänen
viereensä nurmelle pitkälleen. »Älä usko sitä, Astorre. Aivan
päinvastoin, minä olen ainoa, joka hiljaa mutta selvästi varoitan
setääni tulemasta säälimättömäksi ja epäinhimilliseksi.»
»Ezzelino on vain oikeudenmukainen ja rehellinen», arveli

Germano.
»Hänen oikeudenmukaisuudestaan ja logikastaan kannattaa

puhua», valitti Ascanio. »Padua on läänitys ja Ezzelino on siinä
voutina. Joka ei ole hänelle mieleen, kapinoitsee Saksaa vastaan. Ja
maankavaltajaa kohtaa» hän jätti sen sanomatta. »Inhottavaa»,
mumisi hän. »Miksi me italialaiset emme ylipäänsä saa elää mitään
omaa elämää lämpöisen aurinkomme alla? Miksi meidän pitää
sietää tuon vieraan vallan painajaista, joka ahdistaa hengitystämme.
En katso omaa etuani, minä olen sidottu setääni. Jos keisari kuolisi,
josta Jumala häntä varjelkoon, hyökkäisi koko Italia kiroten ja
sadatellen Ezzelino-tyrannin kimppuun ja nujertaisi siinä ohimennen
veljenpojankin.» Ascanio katseli rehevän maan yllä kaartuvaa
kirkasta taivasta ja huokasi.
»Meidät molemmat», lisäsi Germano kylmäverisesti. »Mutta siihen

on vielä aikaa. Ezzelino on varman ennustuksen turvissa. Oppinut
Guido Bonatti ja Paul Bagdadilainen, joka pitkällä parrallaan lakaisee
pölyä kadulta, ovat — niin erimielisiä kuin nämä toisiaan kadehtivat
viisaat tavallisesti ovatkin — selittäneet yksimielisesti hänelle uuden,
oudon tähtisikermän seuraavalla tavalla: eräs niemimaan poika
saavuttaa ennen pitkää koko Italian kruunun Saksan keisarin avulla,
joka vuoriston toisella puolen taas yhdistää kaiken saksalaisen
yhdeksi lujaksi valtio-omenaksi. Onko Fredrik tuo keisari? Ja
Ezzelinoko kuningas? Sen tietää yksin Jumala, joka tuntee ajan ja
määrän, mutta Ezzelino on antanut siitä oman kunniansa ja meidän
päämme pantiksi.»
»Mikä järjen ja järjettömyyden sekasotku», huudahti Ascanio

nyrpeänä, ja munkki ihmetteli tähtien valtaa, hallitsijain suunnatonta
kunnianhimoa ja elämän kaikki mukaansatempaavaa virtaa.
Peloittavalta kummitukselta näyttivät hänestä Ezzelinon julmuuden
enteet, jossa viaton Germano luuli näkevänsä oikeudenmukaisuuden
ruumiillistuneena.
Ascanio jatkoi ikäänkuin vastaten Astorren sanattomaan

epäilykseen: »periköön paha heidät kummankin, sekä
otsaansarypistävän Guidon että parrakkaan pakanan. He
viekoittelevat setääni seuraamaan oikkujaan ja himojaan, ja tämä
luulee tekojaan välttämättömyydeksi. Oletko nähnyt, Germano, miten
hän niukkaa ateriaa syödessään tiputtaa läpikuultavaan
kristallipikariinsa kolme tai neljä pisaraa sisilialaisen verta — sitä hän
ei unhota — ja miten tarkasti hänen katseensa seuraa niiden hidasta
leviämistä ja sekoittumista veteen? Ja oletko huomannut, miten
mielellään hän painaa kiinni kuolleitten silmäluomia, niin että on tullut
kohteliaaksi tavaksi kutsua vouti kuolinvuoteelle kuin juhlaan ja
antaa hänelle tämä surullinen tehtävä? Ezzelino, ruhtinaani, älä tule
julmaksi», huudahti nuorukainen tunteittensa vallassa.
»En ole sitä aikonutkaan, poikani», sanottiin hänen takanaan.

Ezzelino oli huomaamatta tullut heidän luokseen ja vaikka hän ei
ollutkaan mikään salassa kuuntelija, oli hän kuitenkin kuullut
Ascanion tuskaisan huudahduksen.
Kaikki kolme hypähtivät äkkiä pystyyn ja tervehtivät hallitsijaa, joka

istuutui penkille. Hänen kasvonsa olivat yhtä liikkumattomat kuin
suihkukaivon kivinaamio.
»Lähettilääni», vaati hän heidät tilille, »mikä sai teidät tulemaan

tänne ennenkuin minun luokseni?»
»Lapsuudentoverillemme Astorre Vicedominille on tapahtunut niin

ihmeellistä», puolustelihe Ascanio, ja Ezzelino tyytyi selitykseen.
Hän otti vastaan asiakirjat, jotka Ascanio ojensi hänelle polvistuen
hänen eteensä, ja pisti poveensa kaikki muut paitsi paavin kirjeen.
»Kas, tässä viimeinen uutinen! Lueppas Ascanio, sinun silmäsi ovat
nuoremmat kuin minun!»
Ascanion lukiessa ulkomuistista apostolista kirjettä upotti Ezzelino

kätensä tuuheaan partaansa ja kuunteli pirullisesti nauttien.
Kolmasti kruunattu kirjailija antoi nerokkaalle keisarille ensiksi

erään ilmestyskirjassa mainitun hirviön nimen. »Tiedän, se on
järjetöntä», sanoi tyranni. »Minuakin on Pontifex nimittänyt
kirjeissään sopimattomin nimin, kunnes annoin hänelle kehoituksen
käyttämään vastedes minua herjatessaan klassillista kieltä, koska
nimeni on Ezzelino roomalainen. Miksi kutsuu hän minua tällä
kertaa? Olen utelias. Etsi vain se paikka, Ascanio, — ihan varmasti
siellä on — se missä hän nuhtelee appeani hänen seuransa vuoksi.
Annappas!» Ezzelino otti kirjoituksen ja löysi pian kohdan, jossa
paavi moitti keisaria siitä, että tämä suosi liiaksi tyttärensä puolisoa,
Ezzelino roomalaista, maanpiirin suurinta pahantekijää.
»Aivan niin», sanoi Ezzelino mielissään ja antoi Ascaniolle takaisin

kirjoituksen. »Lue minulle keisarin jumalattomuudesta, poikani»,
kehoitti hän hymyillen.
Ascanio luki, että Fredrik oli sanonut maailmassa olevan paljon
harhaluuloja, mutta vain kaksi todellista jumalaa, luonnon ja järjen.
Tyranni kohautti olkapäitään.
Tyrannin suosikki luki vielä, että Fredrik oli puhunut kolmesta

silmänkääntäjästä, Mooseksesta, Muhamedista ja — Ascanio
takertui sanoissaan — jotka muka ovat puijanneet maailmaa.
»Pintapuolista», moitti Ezzelino, »heilläkin oli onnentähtensä; mutta
oli miten oli, lause painuu mieliin ja tuottaa hiippaniekalle valtaa yhtä
paljon kuin sotajoukko ja laivasto. Jatka!»
Nyt tuli omituisen tarun vuoro: Fredrik oli muka ratsastaessaan

lainehtivan viljapellon läpi seuralaistensa kanssa laskenut leikkiä ja
lausunut seuraavat kolme säettä, syntisesti viitaten pyhään ateriaan:
On jumaloita kuin tähkiä näitä, ne versoo kun kestävi

kauniita säitä, vaan tuuli se nuokuttaa niiden päitä.
Ezzelino tuli miettiväiseksi. »Ihmeellistä», kuiskasi hän, »muistan

tämän säkeen. Olen sen itse kuullut. Keisari huusi sen minulle
iloisesti nauraen, kun ratsastimme Ennan temppeliraunioitten
kohdalla viljavien vainioiden läpi, joilla Ceres-jumalatar on siunannut
Sisilian turpeen. Muistossani se on säilynyt yhtä kirkkaana, kuin
päivä paistoi silloin yli saaren. Mutta minä en ole kertonut tästä
hauskasta pilasta Pontifex’ille, siihen olen liian vakava. Kuka on sen
tehnyt? Nuorukaiset, saatte ratkaista. Meitä oli kolme ratsastajaa ja
kolmas — olen hänestäkin yhtä varma kuin tästä loistavasta
auringosta», — auringon säde lankesi juuri läpi lehdistön — »oli
Pietari Vinealainen, keisarin eroamaton uskottu. Olisikohan hurskas
kansleri sielunsa hädässä keventänyt omaatuntoaan kirjoittamalla
Roomaan?… Ratsastaako saraseeni tänään? Niinkö! Kiireesti,
Ascanio! Minä sanelen sinulle pari riviä.»
Ascanio veti esiin pienen taulun ja kynän, laskeutui maahan
toiselle polvelleen ja kirjoitti käyttäen taivutettua vasenta polveaan
alustana: »Korkea Valtias, rakas Appeni. Kaikessa kiireessä.
Ainoastaan kaksi henkeä on kuullut paavin kirjelmässä mainitun
runon — sillä Te olette liian nerokas toistaaksenne samaa — minä ja
Pietarinne, matkalla Ennan viljavainioiden läpi, kun vuosi sitten
kutsuitte minut hoviinne ja me ratsastimme saaren poikki. Siitä ei
ainoakaan kukko muistuta, ellei evankeliumin kukko, joka todisti
Pietarin petoksen. Herra, jos annatte arvoa minulle ja itsellenne, niin
tehkää kanslerillenne ankara kysymys.»
»Veristä sanaleikkiä! Sitä en kirjoita, käteni vapisee», huudahti

kalpeneva Ascanio. »En tahdo toimittaa kansleria kidutuspenkkiin»,
ja hän heitti kynän menemään.
»Virkavelvollisuus», huomautti Germano kuivasti, otti maasta

kynän ja lopetti kirjoituksen, jonka hän työnsi rautakypärinsä alle.
»Se lähtee jo tänään», sanoi hän. »Mitä minun halpaan personaani
tulee, en ole milloinkaan pitänyt tuosta capualaisesta. Hänen
katseensa ei ole suora.»
Astorrea värisytti keskipäivän auringosta huolimatta.

Luostarinrauhan jättäneestä munkista tuntui maailman vilppi ja
epäluulo kyykäärmeen liukkaalta luikertelulta. Ezzelinon ankarat
sanat, jotka hän lausui noustessaan kivipenkiltä, herättivät Astorren
syvistä mietteistä.
»Vastaa, munkki, miksi hautaudut kotiisi. Sen jälkeen kuin otit

maallikon puvun yllesi, et ole liikahtanut kodistasi minnekään.
Pelkäätkö yleistä mielipidettä? Asetu sitä vastaan, niin se vaikenee.
Jos osoitat pienintäkään peräytymisen halua, on se heti kintereilläsi
kuin ulvova susilauma. Oletko käynyt morsiamesi Dianan luona?
Suruviikko on päättynyt. Kehoittaisin sinua jo tänään kutsumaan
luoksesi sukulaisesi ja toimittamaan julkiset kihlajaiset Dianan
kanssa!»
»Ja sitten paikalla perimmäiseen linnaasi», lisäsi Ascanio.
»En neuvo sinua sitä tekemään», varoitti tyranni. »Ei mitään

pelkoa eikä peräytymistä. Tänään kihlaat Dianan ja huomenna vietät
naamiohäät. Jääkää hyvästi!» Hän lähti ja viittasi Germanoa
seuraamaan.’
*****
»Saanko keskeyttää», kysyi Cangrande, joka kohteliaasti oli

odottanut luonnollista pysähdyskohtaa kertomuksessa.
»Sinun on valta», vastasi firenzeläinen lyhyesti.
»Uskotko kuolemattoman keisarin käyttäneen sanoja: kolme

suurta silmänkääntäjää?»
»Non liquet.»
»Tarkoitan, uskotko sisimmässäsi.»
Dante pudisti päätään kieltäen selvästi.
»Ja kuitenkin olet tuominnut hänet jumalattomana helvettisi

kuudenteen piiriin. Kuinka olet uskaltanut sen tehdä? Puolusta
itseäsi!»
»Ruhtinaani», vastasi firenzeläinen, »komediani on aikamme

käsityksen mukainen, joka syyttää Fredrik suuren ylevää henkeä
mitä pahimmasta pyhän herjaamisesta, olkoon käsitys sitten oikea
tai väärä. Mitä minä voin tälle hurskaalle mielipiteelle. Ehkä tulevat
sukupolvet arvostelevat toisin.»
»Ystäväni Dante», kysyi Cangrande taaskin, »uskotko Pietari

Vinealaisen syyttömäksi petokseen keisaria ja valtiota kohtaan?»
»Non liquet.»
»Tarkoitan: sisimmässäsi?»
Dante kielsi samoin kuin äskenkin. »Ja komediassasi annat

petturin kuitenkin vakuuttaa viattomuuttaan?»
»Herra», sanoi firenzeläinen puolustaen itseään, »pitäisikö minun,

vaikkei selviä todisteita ole, tuomita eräs niemimaan pojista
syypääksi petokseen, kun joukossamme muutenkin on niin paljon
viekkaita ja petollisia.»
»Dante, ystäväni», sanoi ruhtinas, »sinä tuomitset syylliseksi

uskomattasi syyllisyyteen ja vapautat, vaikka olet syyllisyydestä
varma.» Sitten hän jatkoi leikillisesti kertomusta.
»Munkki ja Ascanio läksivät nyt myöskin puutarhasta ja astuivat

pylvässaliin.» Mutta Dante keskeytti hänet.
*****
»Ei ollenkaan, vaan he nousivat tornikamariin, jossa Astorre oli

leikkinyt poikana, leikkaamattomin kiharoin. Munkki väitteli palatsinsa
avaria ja loistavia saleja, sillä hänen täytyi ensin tottua pitämään niitä
ominaan. Samasta syystä hän ei myöskään ollut vielä
sormellaankaan kajonnut perimäänsä kulta-aarteeseen. Ascanion
antamasta viittauksesta seurasi heitä kunnioittavan välimatkan
päässä hovimestari Burcardo jäykkänä ja suuttuneen näköisenä.»
*****
Cangranden samanniminen hovimestari oli toimittanut asiansa ja

palannut takaisin saliin uteliaasti kuuntelemaan, sillä hän oli
huomannut täällä puhuttavan tunnetuista henkilöistä. Kun hän nyt
kuuli nimensä ja näki itsensä kertomuksessa ilmielävänä kuin
peilissä, tuntui hänestä mitä sopimattomimmalta ja julkeimmalta, että
koditon oppinut ja armosta elävä pakolainen, jolle hän, huomioon
ottaen olosuhteet ja punniten tunnollisesti arvoeroavaisuudet, oli
järjestänyt mahdollisimman yksinkertaisen huoneen ruhtinaallisen
talon yläkertaan, käytti näin väärin hänen arvoisaa personaansa.
Hän rypisteli otsaansa ja pyöritteli silmiään. Pikkumaisen
elsassilaisen julmistuminen huvitti, vaan ei häirinnyt firenzeläistä,
joka jatkoi vakavan näköisenä:
»Arvoisa herra, miten naidaan Paduassa», kysyi Ascanio

hovimestarilta — tulinko jo sanoneeksi, että tämä oli syntyperältään
elsassilainen. »Me olemme kumpikin, Astorre ja minä, tässä
tieteessä kokemattomia lapsia.»
Hovimestari syöksyi juhlalliseen asentoon ja tuijotti tuikeasti,

herraansa vilkaisemattakaan Ascanioon, jolla hänen ymmärtääkseen
ei ollut oikeutta vaatia häneltä mitään.
»Distingendum est!», sanoi Burcardo arvokkaasti. »On eroitettava

toisistaan kosinta, kihlaus ja häät.»
»Missä se on kirjoitettuna», kysyi Ascanio leikillisesti.

»Ecce», vastasi hovimestari avaten suuren kirjan, jota hän aina
kuljetti mukanaan, »tässä», ja hän osoitti jäykästi ojennetulla
sormellaan kirjan nimeä: »Paduan juhlamenot, kaikille kunniallisille ja
säädyllisille kansalaisille opiksi ja hyödyksi, toimittanut mestari
Godoscalco Burcardo.» Selailtuaan sitä hän luki: »Ensimäinen osa:
kosinta. Ensimäinen pykälä: vakavissa aikeissa oleva kosija tuo
mukanaan päteväksi todistajaksi samaa säätyä olevan ystävän —»
»Kaikkien suojeluspyhäin liikojen hyveiden nimessä», keskeytti

Ascanio hänet kärsimättömänä, »jääkööt ante ja post, kosinta ja
häät, meidän puolestamme rauhaan. Tarjoa meille keskimäistä,
miten Paduassa kihlataan.»
»Paduassa», kiekui elsassilainen ärtyneenä, ja hänen korvia

viiltävä, vieras italian-ääntämisensä tuntui nyt räikeämmältä kuin
koskaan. »Paduassa sulhasen hovimestari kutsuu kuuden palvelijan
seuraamana kymmenen päivää ennen kihlajaisia, ei ennemmin eikä
myöhemmin, kaksitoista ylhäisintä sukua — hän luetteli ne ulkoa —
sulhasmiehen luokse. Tämän arvoisan seuran läsnäollessa
vaihdetaan sormukset. Juodaan kypronviiniä ja syödään
hääleivoksia, amarelleja —»
»Herra varjelkoon meitä nielemästä niissä hampaitamme», sanoi

Ascanio nauraen, tempasi hovimestarilta kirjan ja silmäili nimiä,
joista kuusi perheenpäätä — kuusi kahdestatoista — ja muutamia
nuorukaisia oli pyyhitty pois; niiden yli oli vedetty paksuja viivoja. He
olivat kaiketi sekoittuneet johonkin salaliittoon tyrannia vastaan ja
sen johdosta saaneet surmansa.
»Kuuleppas, ukko», komensi Ascanio toimien munkin puolesta,

joka tuolille vaipuneena oli unohtunut syviin mietteisiin ja täydellisesti
alistui Ascanion ystävälliseen holhontaan. »Sinä otat hetipaikalla,
vähääkään vitkastelematta, mukaasi kuusi kunnon laiskuria ja lähdet
kutsumaan vieraita tänne täksi illaksi iltamessun aikaan.»
»Kymmenen päivää ennen kihlajaisia», toisti herra Burcardo

juhlallisesti, kuin olisi hän julistanut valtakunnallista lakia.
»Tänään ja täksi päiväksi, pölkkypää!»
»Mahdotonta», sanoi hovimestari levollisesti. »Voitteko muuttaa

tähtien kulkua tai vuodenaikain tuloa?»
»Sinä kapinoitset? Syyhyykö kaulasi, ukko», varoitti Ascanio

merkitsevästi hymyillen.
Muuta ei tarvittu. Herra Burcardo ymmärsi. Ezzelino oli käskenyt ja

pikkumaisista pikkumaisin ja itsepintaisista itsepintaisin alistui
murisematta, niin rautainen oli tyrannin ruoska.
»Canossan ruhtinattaria, Olympiaa ja Antiopea et kutsu.»
»Miksei», kysyi munkki äkkiä kuin taikasauvan kosketuksesta

heräten. Oli kuin ilma hänen ympärillään olisi saanut eloa ja väriä, ja
hänen sieluunsa tuli kuva, jonka pelkät ääriviivat valtasivat koko
hänen olemuksensa.
»Siksi että Olympia-kreivitär on mielipuoli, Astorre. Etkö ole kuullut

tämän naisparan elämäntarinaa? Mutta sinähän olit vielä silloin
munkkikaapusi kapalossa. Se tapahtui kolme vuotta sitten, lehtien
kellastuessa.»
»Kesällä, Ascanio. Siitä on nyt juuri kolme vuotta», vastusti

munkki.
»Olet oikeassa. Oletko siitä kuullut? Mutta miten se olisi tullut
sinun korviisi! Canossan kreivi vehkeili siihen aikaan lähettilään
kanssa, häntä vakoiltiin, hänet vangittiin ja tuomittiin. Kreivitär rukoili
polvillaan armoa sedältäni, joka ei suvainnut puhua hänelle
sanaakaan. Kreivittären petti sitten mitä törkeimmällä tavalla hänen
rahastonhoitajansa, joka omaa etuaan katsoen uskotteli hänelle
kreivin saavan mestauslavalla armahduksen. Niin ei kuitenkaan
käynyt, ja kun mies tuotiin surmattuna kotiin, heittäytyi toivosta
suinpäin epätoivoon syösty kreivitär ikkunasta miestään vastaan,
loukkaamatta itseään, ihmeellistä kyllä, muuten kuin nyrjähyttämällä
jalkansa. Siitä päivästä lähtien hän on ollut mielenvikainen. Samoin
kuin päivä sammuu riutuvaan hämärään vaihtuvat terveen ihmisen
luonnolliset mielialat huomaamatta toisiksi, mutta hänessä
vaihtelevat kirkkain valo ja synkin pimeys alituisissa
odottamattomissa keikahduksissa. Ainaisen rauhattomuuden
ahdistamana rientää naisparka autiosta palatsistaan maatilalleen ja
sieltä takaisin kaupunkiin ikuisena harhaajana. Milloin hän tahtoo
naittaa lapsensa jollekin maanvuokraajan pojalle, koska muka
ainoastaan alhaison keskuudessa on turvallista ja rauhallista, milloin
taas jalosukuisinkaan kosija, joita kyllä ei ilmaannukaan kammosta
äitiä kohtaan, ei ole hänen mielestään tarpeeksi ylhäinen —»
Jos Ascanio edes ohimennen olisi sanatulvansa kestäessä

sattunut vilkaisemaan munkkiin, olisi hän hämmästyksestä vaiennut:
niin kirkastuneet olivat munkin kasvot säälistä ja myötätunnosta.
Mutta hän jatkoi mitään huomaamatta: »Kun tyranni sattuu

ratsastamaan hänen asuntonsa ohitse, syöksyy kreivitär ikkunaan ja
luulee Ezzelinon nousevan satulasta hänen porttinsa kohdalla ja
vievän hänet, epäsuosioon joutuneen mutta jo tarpeeksi koetellun
naisen, armoa ja suosiota osoittaen palatsiinsa. Siihen ei Ezzelinolla
tietenkään ole mitään halua. Seuraavana päivänä, taikka vielä
samanakin, luulottelee onneton raukka, että tyranni, joka häntä
tuskin ollenkaan muistaakaan, vainoo häntä ja ajaa maanpakoon.
Hän kuvittelee köyhtyneensä putipuhtaaksi ja Ezzelinon ottaneen
valtiolle hänen omaisuutensa, johon Ezzelino ei ole kajonnut. Niin
vaihtuvat hänen mielessään jyrkimmät vastakohdat kuin kuume ja
vilu ankarassa vilutaudissa, eikä siinä kyllin, että hänen oma
järkensä on sekaisin, hän saattaa järjiltä kaikki muutkin, jotka
joutuvat hänen mielialojensa pyörteeseen, ja tuo onnettomuutta
kaikkialle, missä häneen uskotaan, sillä hän on vain puoleksi
sekaisin. Toisinaan hän puhuu sattuvasti ja sukkelastikin. Tytärtään,
Antiopea, hän jumaloi ja Antiopen naittaminen on keskipiste, jonka
ympärillä kaikki muu pyörii. On hyvin ihmeellistä, että Antiope on
säilyttänyt järkensä tällä hyllyvällä pohjalla. Mutta tytöllä, joka on
keväimensä kukassa ja kauniinpuoleinen, on erinomainen luonne.»
Näin jatkoi Ascanio vielä jonkun aikaa.
Mutta Astorre oli vaipunut unelmiin. Sanon unelmiin, sillä

menneisyys on unelma. Hän näki tapauksen, josta oli kulunut kolme
vuotta: mestauslavan, sen vieressä pyövelin ja itsensä odottamassa
syntistä raukkaa, jolle hänen piti antaa hengellistä lohdutusta.
Rikoksellinen, Canossan kreivi, saapui paikalle kahleissa, mutta ei
tahtonut kurottaa kaulaansa, ehkä siksi, että hän otaksui viime
hetkenä saavansa armahduksen tai ehkä yksinkertaisesti siksi, että
hän rakasti aurinkoa ja kammoksui hautaa. Hän sätti munkkia
pahanpäiväisesti eikä huolinut hänen rukouksistaan. Kauhistava
ottelu oli tulossa, kun kreivi uppiniskaisena yhä vain teki vastarintaa
ja vielä lisäksi piti kädestä pientä tytärtään, joka vartioitten
huomaamatta oli pujahtanut hänen luoksensa ja syleili häntä lujasti,
luoden munkkiin ilmehikkään ja hartaasti rukoilevan katseensa. Isä
painoi tyttöään rintaansa vasten ikäänkuin ottaen tämän nuoren
ihmislapsen suojaksi kuolemaa vastaan, mutta pyöveli painoi hänet
maahan ja asetti hänen päänsä pölkylle. Silloin laski myös tyttönen
päänsä isänsä pään viereen. Tahtoiko hän herättää pyövelissä sääliä
vaiko rohkaista isäänsä kestämään torjumatonta kohtaloa? Tahtoiko
hän kuiskata paatuneen isänsä korvaan jonkun pyhimyksen nimen?
Tekikö hän ihmeellisen tekonsa vain tulvehtivasta
lapsenrakkaudesta, mitään harkitsematta? Tahtoiko hän kuolla
isänsä kanssa?
Värien hehku tuli nyt mielikuvituksessa niin voimakkaaksi, että

munkista tuntui kuin hän uudelleen olisi nähnyt muutaman askeleen
päässä vierekkäin olevat kaulat, kreivin tiilenpunaisen ja lapsen
lumivalkean kullankeltaisine, kiharine hiusuntuvineen. Pieni kaula oli
harvinaisen siromuotoinen ja hento. Astorre vapisi pelosta, että
pyövelin ase sattuisi harhaan, ja oli sielunsa syvimpään saakka
tuskissaan aivan kuin silloinkin. Nyt hän ei kuitenkaan pyörtynyt
kuten oli tehnyt nähdessään todellisena tuon pöyristyttävän
tapauksen. Hän oli silloin tullut tajuihinsa vasta kun kaikki oli ohi.
»Onko herrallani mitään käskettävää», kysyi hovimestari, jonka oli

vaikea sietää Ascanion mestaroimista, häiriten narisevalla äänellään
munkin haltioinutta muisteloa.
»Burcardo», vastasi Astorre heltynein äänin, »muista kutsua

Canossan ruhtinattaret, äiti ja tytär. Älköön sanottako, että munkki
torjuu luotaan maailman hylkäämiä ja halveksimia. Onnettomilla
raukoillakin on oikeus päästä luokseni» — hovimestari yhtyi tähän
innokkaasti nyökäyttämällä päätään — »ja tämän heidän oikeutensa
tulen aina tunnustamaan. Kreivittären kaltainen loukkautuisi syvästi,
jos hänet sivuutettaisi.»
»Ei mistään hinnasta», varoitti Ascanio. »Älä hanki itsellesi
ikävyyksiä. Munkkilupauksesi rikkominen on jo tarpeeksi, ja kaikki
outo viehättää hourupäisiä. Tapansa mukaan kreivitär tekee jotain
ihan odottamatonta ja häiritsee mielettömällä hapatuksellaan juhlaa,
josta paduattarien mielet muutenkin ovat hyvin kiihtyneet.»
Mutta herra Burcardo kumarsi syvään isännälleen. Hän tahtoi

kynsin hampain puolustaa Canossa-suvun oikeutta saada kuulua
kahdentoista valitun joukkoon, olivatpa sen jäsenet viisaita tai
mielenvikaisia, eikä hän pitänyt velvollisuutenaan kuunnella ketään
muuta kuin Vicedominia.
»Yksin sinun tahtosi, jalosukuinen herra, tulee täytetyksi», sanoi

hän ja poistui.
»Oi, sinä munkki, munkki», huudahti Ascanio, »sinä tuot

armeliaisuutta mukanasi maailmaan, jossa hyvyys tuskin jää
rankaisematta.»
*****
»Me ihmiset olemme kerta kaikkiaan sellaisia», lisäsi Dante, »että

me koetamme sukkeluuksilla, verukkeilla ja viisasteluilla päästä
vaaraa näkemästä, vaikka profetallinen välähdys on näyttänyt meille
onnettomuuden kuilun.»
*****
Samoin koetti kevytmielinen Ascaniokin rauhoittaa itseään: »mitä

yhteistä voisi olla munkin ja mielipuolen naisen välillä, jonka kanssa
munkilla ei ole ollut mitään tekemistä. Ja entä sitten, vaikka kreivitär
antaisikin aihetta nauruun, sitenhän hän vain höystää meidän
amarellejamme». Ascanio ei aavistanut, mitä Astorren sielussa
liikkui, ja hän olisikin turhaan arvaillut ja tutkistellut, munkki ei
kuitenkaan olisi maailmanlapselle ilmaissut vienoa salaisuuttaan.
Asiat saivat siis olla semmoisinaan, ja Ascanio sai tyytyä.

Muistaen tyrannin toisen vaatimuksen, että munkki oli saatava
ihmisten ilmoille, hän kysyi iloisesti: »oletko hankkinut
kihlasormuksen? 'Juhlamenoissa' sanotaan toisen osan siinä ja siinä
pykälässä: 'sitten vaihdetaan sormuksia.' Munkki arveli talon
aarteistosta löytyvän.
»Älä ota sieltä, Astorre», sanoi Ascanio. »Jos tahdot kuulla minun
neuvoani, niin ostat Dianalle uuden. Kuka tietää, millaisia juttuja
liittyy noihin käytettyihin sormuksiin. Osta uusi sillalta, firenzeläiseltä.
Tunnetko sen miehen? Mitenpä tuntisitkaan. Kuules kun kerron.
Palatessani varhain tänä aamuna Germanon kanssa kaupunkiin ja
ratsastaessamme yli ainoan siltamme täytyi meidän nousta satulasta
ja taluttaa hevosiamme. Oli niin suuri ihmistungos, sillä eräs
kultaseppä oli kuin olikin avannut puodin rappeutuneen siltapylvään
päässä, ja koko Padua temmelsi sen luona kauppaa tehden.
Minkätähden juuri ahtaalla sillalla, kun meillä on niin monta toria?
Siksi että Firenzen kultaseppien kaupat ovat Arnon sillalla. Ihailtavaa
muodin logikkaa: ainoastaan firenzeläiseltä voidaan saada hienoja
koristeita ja firenzeläinen myy aina sillalla. Hän aivan yksinkertaisesti
ei suostu tekemään toisin, muuten hänen tavaransa olisi arvotonta
rihkamaa eikä hän itse olisi mikään firenzeläinen, kuten tämä minun
luullakseni on. Jättiläiskirjaimilla on hänen myymälänsä päällä
kirjoitus: Niccolo Lippo dei Lippi, kultaseppä, jonka Arnon tienoilla
niin tavalliseksi tullut lahjottu, väärä tuomio on karkoittanut
kotiseudultaan. Nyt liikkeelle, Astorre! Nyt lähdetään sillalle!»
Astorre ei vastustanut. Hän tunsi varmaankin itse halua irtautua
kotinsa taikavoimasta, jonka vallassa hän oli ollut siitä saakka, kuin
riisui kaapunsa.
»Oletko muistanut pistää rahaa taskuihisi, ystäväni?» kysyi

Ascanio leikillisesti. »Köyhyydenlupauksesi on hauras ja
firenzeläinen koettaa sinua nylkeä.» Ascanio koputti alakerrassa
olevaan pieneen ikkunaluukkuun, minkä ohi nuorukaiset juuri
sattuivat kulkemaan. Näkyviin tuli ovelat kasvot, joissa jokainen
ryppy ilmaisi petosta, ja Vicedominien isännöitsijä — genualainen,
jos minulle on oikein kerrottu — ojensi matelevasti kumartaen
herralleen kultabysantiinejä täynnä olevan kukkaron. Eräs
palvelijoista auttoi munkin ylle mukavan padualaisen, hilkalla
varustetun kesäviitan.
Tultuaan kadulle veti Astorre hilkan syvään silmilleen, enemmän

vanhasta tavasta kuin suojellakseen itseään auringon polttavilta
säteiltä, ja kääntyi ystävällisesti toverinsa puoleen sanoen: »tämän
matkan teen yksin, eikö niin, Ascanio? Yksinkertaisen sormuksen
ostaminen ei mene yli minun munkkiymmärrykseni. Voit uskoa
tämän minulle. Jää hyvästi, kunnes tapaamme kihlajaisissani
iltakellojen soidessa!» Ascanio lähti, huutaen vielä olkansa yli: »yksi
sormus, ei kahta! Muista että Diana antaa puolestaan sinulle!» Tämä
oli niitä kirjavia saippuakuplia, joita hilpeä nuorukainen puhalteli
huuliltaan monta päivässä.
*****
Ehkä ihmettelette, arvoisat ystäväni, minkä tähden munkki tahtoi

olla yksin. Saatte kuulla syyn: hän tahtoi antaa taivaallisen äänen
puhtaasti kaikua loppuun, minkä nuori marttyritar
lapsenrakkaudellaan oli herättänyt hänen sydämessään.
*****
Astorre oli saapunut sillalle, joka päivänhelteestä huolimatta oli

täpö täynnä ihmisiä. Molemmilta rannoilta tulvi väkeä firenzeläisen
kaupalle. Munkki pysyi viittansa suojassa tuntemattomana, joskin
joku ohimenevä silloin tällöin katseli kysyvästi hänen kasvojaan,
joista näkyi vain alaosa hilkan alta. Kaikki koettivat päästä edelle
toisistaan, niin aateliset kuin porvarit. Kantotuoleista nousi ylhäisiä
naisia, jotka eivät välittäneet tungoksesta eikä sysäyksistä, kunhan
saivat pari rannerengasta tai uusimman kuosin mukaisen
otsanauhan. Firenzeläinen oli kelloja soittaen kuuluttanut toreilla,
että hänen puotinsa sinä päivänä suljetaan jo Ave Marian jälkeen,
vaikkei hän sitä aikonutkaan tehdä. Mutta mitäpä merkitsee valhe
firenzeläiselle.
Munkki seisoi vihdoin väkijoukon likistämättä puodin edessä. Joka

puolelta ahdistettu kauppias koetti monistaa itsensä voidakseen
palvella kaikkia. Hän hipaisi munkkia kokeneella syrjäkatseella ja
arvasi heti hänet tottumattomaksi. »Miten voin palvella teidän
jalosukuisuutenne kehittynyttä makua», kysyi hän. »Anna minulle
yksinkertainen kultasormus», vastasi munkki. Kultaseppä otti pikarin,
jota koristi firenzeläistyyliset, jotain hekumallista aihetta esittävät
korkokuvat. Hän helisti maljaa, jonka kuvussa väikkyi sadoittain
sormuksia, ja tarjosi sen Astorrelle.
Munkki joutui kiusallisesti hämilleen. Hän ei tiennyt sormen

suuruutta, jota sormus tulisi koristamaan, ja katseltuaan useampia
sormuksia hän jäi ilmeisesti epäröimään valitsisiko suuremman vai
pienemmän. Firenzeläinen ei voinut pidättyä pienestä ivasta, joka
salaisena hymynä aina pilkistää Arnon rantalaisten puheesta:
»ettekö, jalo herra, tunnekaan sormen omistajatarta, jonka kättä

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The Experience of Poetry: From

Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s

80+ Python Coding Challenges for Beginners: Python

Introduction to 80×86 Assembly Language and Computer

Petit manuel de survie en médecine intensive-

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

„■■■■ ■■■■ ■ ■■■■■■■■■...“ : ■■■■■■■ ■ ■■■■■ 80-■■■■

Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity

Transformational Piano Teaching: Mentoring Students

Homer and the poetics of Hades First Edition Gazis

For Suzanne, Laura, and Eva

xii List of Illustrations

List of Illustrations xiii

A slumber did my spirit seal;

2 The Experience of Poetry

This understanding of a poem as the experience of a real-time event in which the

4 The Experience of Poetry

6 The Experience of Poetry

8 The Experience of Poetry

aforementioned De Rerum Natura10—and it’s impossible to tell what other treasures

12 The Experience of Poetry

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 13

14 The Experience of Poetry

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 15

The predominantly oral culture of Homeric Greece generated a conception of sing-

16 The Experience of Poetry

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 17

18 The Experience of Poetry

Summon also the divine singer

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 19

In the final line of Alcinous’s command, however, an apparently opposed view of

The herald came in, bringing the honoured singer

20 The Experience of Poetry

As usual, the emphasis is on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of what is about to

I could not tally or name the multitude of them,

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 21

Demodocus, then, is seated with great care at the Phaeacians’ feast:

Pontonous the herald placed a silver-studded chair for him

22 The Experience of Poetry

Only Alcinous notices their guest’s surprising reaction: instead of registering

Hear me, leaders and counsellors of the Phaeacians:

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 23

Demodocus, among all men I praise you most highly.

24 The Experience of Poetry

Just as when a man gazes on a singer who has been given

Mother, why do you begrudge the honoured singer’s

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 25

I am at your knees, Odysseus; respect me and have mercy.

26 The Experience of Poetry

A PERFORMANCE OF EPIC SONG

Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 27

28 The Experience of Poetry

s­ yllable-quantities arranged by the composer into patterned ‘feet’—a term that

is not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach

What is valuable is their demonstration of the possibility of an improvisational singing

»Keisarin luona hänen täytyy naida schwaabitar», ehdotti

»Vielä mitä», sanoi Ascanio varoittaen sormellaan. »Älä

»Sano suoraan Germano», uteli hän, »mikä on sinun mielipiteesi

»Mistä», kysyi tämä jurosti.

»Astorre, ystäväni», vastasi pitkäviiksinen nuorukainen hiukan

Nuori soturi oli kuin puusta pudonnut. »Sisareni kättä! Dianan,

»Juuri hänen. Hän on minun morsiameni.»

»Mainiota», huudahti tähän elämäntuntija Ascanio, johon

Hän väänsi viiksiään, ja Ascanio käänsi keskustelun peräsintä.

s yllable-quantities arranged by the composer into patterned ‘feet’—a term that