- It was a regular thing for early Greek poets to adopt personas for their poetry. Ancient poems could have a constructed character as their ‘author’. In this way, poets could act the part of Homer or Hesiod or Orpheus. Some concrete examples:
- Cynaethus, the author of the final form of the Hymn to Apollo in the late 500s BCE, casts ‘himself’ as a blind poet from Chios, adopting the persona of Homer (hence making it a ‘Homeric’ hymn);
- an anecdote in Herodotus that reports how the oracle-collector Onomacritus (probably historical) wrote poetry which he passed off as the work of another oracle-collector, Musaeus (fictional);
- real poems attributed to wholly fictional personas, like Orpheus, Olympus, Abaris, and Linus: these figures are definitely not historical, but there definitely were real poems ‘by’ them;
- ‘Hesiod’ had a rich backstory that involved being given the gift of poetry by the Muses (Theogony), and a poetic contest with Homer (Contest of Homer and Hesiod; a little bit like a battle rap): both transparently fictional, and yet also concrete enough that the Works and Days could allude to the poetic contest in passing without needing to give any details.
- The backstories for each persona could be very rich. Abaris was a Hyperborean priest who supposedly rode around the countryside on the giant arrow with which Apollo had slain the Cyclopes, and which later became the constellation Sagitta. (On the basis of this, later traditions continued to develop more stories around this persona, like a meeting between Abaris and Pythagoras.) For Homer, we have several biographies that go into enormous detail about his life story: they’re pure fiction, but they didn’t appear out of thin air. We can trace some of the material in them back to the 5th century BCE: it’s likely that the material goes back further (including the poetic contest with Hesiod).
- There are also some more subtle cases. Real poets could act an artificial backstory for themselves. We can’t normally tell how much of it is real: and really, for the purposes of the poetry, questioning whether it’s real or not would miss the point.
- Some examples of this:
- Sappho was almost certainly real, but there were poems by her (or attributed to her) that made a big thing of a biography, and at least parts of that biography are an act. I won’t address the ‘brothers’ poem here, as its provenance is doubtful and it was published by a fraudster, but another example is her love affair with Phaon and her suicide. This appears in later biographical material about Sappho, and it’s transparently pure romantic fiction, yet we have sources that tell us the love affair was there in ‘Sappho’s’ own poems. This looks like poetic persona as act.
- Solon: his poems often seem to have been very emphatic about saying things like ‘I am Solon’, ‘I, Solon, have come here to advise you on such-and-such’, things like that.
- Some Archilochus poems have a conspicuous load of ‘biographical’ material, like the story of him fleeing a battle and throwing his shield behind (the ‘Saian’ poem), or seducing an under-age girl to take revenge on the girl’s father (in the Cologne epode), which makes it sound like we’re looking at backstory rather than biography.
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