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The use of abuse: Semonides 7

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Robin Osborne
Robin Osborne
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge
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Extract

Semonides 7 is a remarkable poem. At 118 lines it is by far the longest example of early Greek iambus. It is indeed by far the longest non-hexameter poem to survive from before the classical period. What is more this is a poem of whose seventh-century date we can be reasonably confident, and it is not a poem concerned with the mythical world but a poem directly related to everyday life. It has a strong a priori claim therefore to the attention of both literary scholars and historians. Yet it is a poem hardly discussed by either. In this paper I shall argue that if we take this poem seriously it can not merely shed light on one specific place and moment in Greek history, and on one particular writer, but should affect the whole way in which we think about relations between men and women in seventh-century Greece and about archaic Greek literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 47 , 2001 , pp. 47 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

1 Pellizer, E. and Tedeschi, G., eds., Semonide: introduzione, testimonialize, testo critico, traduzione e commento (Rome, 1990) xviiGoogle Scholar conclude ‘non vi siano ragione valide per dubitare che Semonide sia vissuto nella prima metà del VII secolo a.C.’

2 As Pellizer and Tedeschi (n. 1) xxxiii ‘una preziosa testimonianza della considerazione in cui veniva tenuta la donna nella Ionia del'eta arcaica’.

3 I began to think about the matters in this paper, as well as about the length of my sentences, on reading Lynn Roller's BMCR review of my Greece in the Making; (n. 39) I developed my thoughts in response to Brian Lavelle's kind invitation to take part in a conference at Loyola University, Chicago. The form in which these thoughts appear has been much influenced by responses then and particularly by the comments of Simon Goldhill, Esther Eidinow, Elizabeth Irwin, Froma Zeitlin, audiences in Oxford and Kyoto, and PCPS's anonymous referee. I am grateful to them all.

4 So Snodgrass, A. M.. Archaic Greece. The Age of Experiment (London, 1980)Google Scholar, devotes a five-page section (169-74) to Archilochos and refers to Tyrtaios, Alkman, Alkaios and Phocylides, but makes no mention of Semonides (or indeed Sappho). Murray, O., Early Greece (2nd ed. London, 1993)Google Scholar, has references to Tyrtaios on at least fifteen pages, to Archilochos and to Alkaios on eight pages, to Alkman on six pages, and to Sappho on five pages but finds no occasion to mention Semonides. Jeffery, L. H., Archaic Greece. The City-States cc.700-500 B.C. (London, 1976)Google Scholar, similarly mentions Alkaios, Alkman, Sappho and Tyrtaios, but not Semonides.

5 Podlecki, A. J., The Early Greek Poets and their Times (Vancouver, 1984)Google Scholar, limits his reference to Semonides to noting, in discussing Archilochos, that ‘A reputation for versified vitriol is far more justified, in fact, by what survives of the poetry of Hipponax or Semonides of Amorgos’ (50).

6 Burn, A. R., The Lyric Age of Greece (London, 1960), 171Google Scholar introduces the poem by saying that it takes ‘the same generally low view of the sex as Hesiod … or as many speakers in Aristophanes and Euripides’ and then gives a two-sentence paraphrase of the poem. Campbell, D. A., in a chapter of The Golden Lyre (London, 1983)Google Scholar entitled ‘Friends and Enemies’, signals Semonides' misogyny as ‘nothing new’ but his creation of an iambic catalogue as original, and after noting the debt to animal fables proceeds to translate the poem in long chunks with minimal commentary. After a comment that ‘In 110 Semonides apparently resorts to aposiopesis, the figure in which a sentence is left uncompleted: the details of the wife's outrageous behaviour are left to the imagination’, Campbell himself simply breaks off and ends his chapter (147). The authors of the collection Women in the Classical World (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar take a similar approach. They introduce the poem as similar to Hesiod's treatment of Pandora (just quoted), draw attention to the possibility that Semonides intends readers to realise that his one virtuous woman is imaginary, and then quote selected parts of the poem and leave it at that.

7 Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997) 237Google Scholar.

8 Stehle (n. 7) 237 n. 96: compare West, M. L. (in Dover, K. J. and others, Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford, 1980) 34)Google Scholar: ‘This boorish and unwitty poem, in which each woman is mechanically constructed from the features of her animal, was meant to entertain a male audience that in general shared the poet's depreciatory attitude towards the female sex.’ For earlier scholarly views of a similarly dismissive kind see Lloyd-Jones, H., Females of the Species. Semonides on Women (London. 1975) 22Google Scholar.

9 (n. 8). Since Lloyd-Jones there has been an Italian edition of the poem as part of an edition of all the fragments of Semonides: Pellizer and Tedeschi (n. 1).

10 Similarly Loraux, N., Les Enfants d'Athéna (Paris, 1981) 115Google Scholar, ‘entre le monde de référence interne à une oeuvre littéraire et la position de discours effectivement occupé par le poète, le rapport est plus souvent d'écart que d'homologie’. Contrast E. Fantham et al., Women in the Classical World (1994) 44, ‘Scholars have speculated whether the different attitude that Hesiod (or Semonides) develop toward women is the product of his being less than an aristocrat …’

11 Arethusa 11 (1978) 43–87Google Scholar, reprinted in Les Enfants d'Athena (n. 10) 75-117.

12 Clay, J. S., The Politics of Olxmpus. Form and Meaning in the major Homeric Hymns (Princeton, 1989) 6–7Google Scholar, summarises recent scholarship on the issue. Her own suggestion is that Demodokos on Ares and Aphrodite provides a parallel, indicating performance of such hexameter poetry after a feast, but it is questionable whether stressing ‘after a feast’ is appropriate: Demodokos sings in the market-place with boys ‘good at dancing’ around him beating the holy choros with their feet (compare Homeric Hymn to Apollo 165-78). See A. Dalby ‘Homer's Enemies: Lyric and Epic in the Seventh Century’ in Fisher, N. and van Wees, H., eds.. Archaic Greece. New Approaches and New Evidence (London, 1998) 195–211Google Scholar at 202.

13 Zeitlin, F. I., ‘Signifying Difference: The Case of Hesiod's Pandora’ in Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996) 53–86Google Scholar (of part of which another version is to be found as ‘The Economics of Hesiod's Pandora’ in Reeder, E., ed.. Pandora (Princeton, 1995) 49–55Google Scholar).

14 ‘The final upshot of Zeus's intervention is to make Aphrodite cease and desist from bringing about these inappropriate unions between gods and mortals, which, in turn, will mean the end of the age of heroes’. Clay (n. 12) 166. who goes on to make the comparison with Theogonx.

15 Day, J. W., ‘Interactive Offerings: Early Greek Dedicatory Epigram and Ritual’, HSCP 96 (1994) 37–74Google Scholar, Depew, M., ‘Enacted and Represented Dedications: Genre and Greek Hymn’ in Depew, M. and Obbink, D., eds., Matrices of Genre. Authors, Canons and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) 59–79Google Scholar.

16 More on this in Osborae, R., ‘Looking on – Greek style. Does the Sculpted Girl speak to Women too?’ in Morris, I., ed., Classical Greece. Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies (Cambridge, 1994) 88–95Google Scholar.

17 This seems to me to be the down side of Loraux's analysis of Semonides' poem. Similarly the bold attempt by Sissa, Giulia in ‘The Sexual Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle’ in Schmitt-Pantel, P., ed., A History of Women: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints (Harvard, 1992) 46–81Google Scholar, to treat Semonides' classification of women alongside classification in Plato and Aristotle seems to me to treat Semonides poem in a quite inappropriate context.

18 Compare Pellizer and Tedeschi. (n. 1) xxix-xxx ‘Non può trattarsi dunque che della riunione degli amici nel simposio, momento festivo di carattere “privato” che poteva essere preceduto da un banchetto (δαῖς) e seguito da un ϰῶμος?.’ One might imagine a single singer turning from one companion to another as he talks about the different wives, or divide the poem up between symposiasts around the room, each capping the others’ descriptions, but the precise details of performance cannot be recovered.

19 On riddles (griphoi) see M. L. West in OCD 3 1317 s.v. and Athenaios 448b-459b, who quotes, at 457b, an early and very relevant example from Theognis 257-60.

20 Of which Lissarrague, F., The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (Princeton, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides the classic exposition.

21 Schmitt-Pantel, P., ‘Sacrificial Meal and Symposion: Two Models of Civic Institutions in the Archaic City?’ in Murray, O., ed., Sympotica. A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford, 1990) 17Google Scholar.

22 Both Lloyd-Jones (n. 8) and Gerber, D. E., Greek Iambic Poetry (Harvard, 1999) 304Google Scholar. offer ‘the female mind’ as a translation.

23 Stehle (n. 7) 239.

24 Even more so if Addison was right to think that unlike women of his day, women in Semonides really were like that: ‘[I] must further premise that the following satyr affects only some of the lower part of the sex, and not those who have been refined by a polite education, which was not so common in the age of this poet’, The Spectator 209 (30th October 1711) 185Google Scholar, reproduced at Lloyd-Jones (n. 8) 107.

25 Translated by Roudiez, L. as Powers of Horror. An Essax on Abjection (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

26 As L. Mulvey summarises ‘the Kristevan concept of the abject’ in ‘The Myth of Pandora. A Psychoanalytical Approach’ in Pietropaolo, L. and Testaferri, A., eds., Feminisms in the Cinema (Bloomington, 1995) 17Google Scholar.

27 Kristeva (n. 25) 4.

28 Kristeva (n. 25) 1.

29 See Butler, J., Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1990) 133Google Scholar, using the work of Iris Young.

30 Kristeva (n. 25) 167-8.

31 Bronfen, E., Over her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, 1992) 184–90Google Scholar (invoking Kristeva at 201 n. 7).

32 Pellizer and Tedeschi (n. 1) comment on line 86: ‘l'aggetivo ha qui significato attivo, “amorosa, affettuosa”’.

33 So, in strong language, Mackinnon, Catherine writes ‘Pressure, gender socialization, withholding benefits, extending indulgences, the how-to books, the sex therapy are the soft end; the fuck, the fist, the street, the chains, the poverty are the hard end’. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard, 1989)Google Scholar. quoted in Kemp, S. and Squires, J., eds.. Feminisms (Oxford, 1997) 354Google Scholar.

34 On this see Zeitlin (n. 9) 85.

35 Richardson, N. J., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford, 1974) 81, 174Google Scholar; Foley, H., ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Princeton, 1994) 100Google Scholar.

36 See especially Foley (n. 35) 118-37.

37 In a similar way we can see the defiant images of male beauty in archaic cemeteries and the way in which they may surmount images of gorgons as asserting human power through male sexuality even in death.

38 Murray (n. 4) 41.

39 Osborne, R., Greece in the Making 1200-479 B. C. (London, 1996) 230Google Scholar.

40 Stehle (n. 7), 88.

41 ‘Eroticism suffuses the earlier lines’, Stehle (n. 7) 92 n. 68.