Palmer L.R. The Greek Language

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will have delight in feasting nor the city either, for such are those whom surge of the roaring sea has whelmed.'

is taken from i 12; for compare l 603; and

is a familiar Epic formula.

More original in sentiment and vernacular in expression is Fr. 5 A D. with the theme 'We may be on guard, but

that is no reason for staying sober'.

'Come now, with your cup stride through the benches of the swift ship and wrench the lids from the hollow jars

and take red wine down to the lees; for neither shall we be able to stay sober on this watch.'

We must first single out the technical vocabulary:

is a cup used by men on campaign; , of which this

is the first occurrence, is a wine jar but here provided with a formulaic epithet

'hollow', just as the ship is

'swift'. The phrase 'off the lees' must surely mean' down to the dregs'. The imperatives raise a

problem: normally has a frequentative meaning 'go often, habitually, etc.'; 'drag off' is seemingly a

violent word in this context, but Linear B provides a more humdrum derivative from this root in poroeketerija =

prohelkteria, which appears to mean 'ladle';

in Homer is merely exclamatory, serving to introduce another

imperative, but is simply the ordinary Aeolic word equivalent to Attic 'take'. There may be one simple

explanation of all these phenomena: violence of expression is everywhere a mark of colloquial and vulgar speech,

so perhaps in

'go', 'prise off', 'take' Archilochus is consciously turning his back on traditional

vocabulary and drawing on Kraftausdrücke from contemporary vocabulary.

With the

(comprising iambic and trochaic metres) we should expect to encounter not merely a different

metre but also a different genre. Iambic verse is certainly of venerable antiquity. It was associated with, and

possibly originated in, the ritual of the cults of Dionysos and Demeter, ingredients of which

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were mockery and insult. Proverbs and maxims, too, universal expressions of folk-wisdom, were couched in

iambic trimeters. Finally, one of the earliest Greek inscriptions, on the Ischia vase (c. 700 B.C.), has a rough

iambic trimeter preceding two hexameters. Contrary to what we should expect from the popular associations and

the later. development of iambic verse, it has been observed as regards the ethos of Archilochus's iamboi that

'every note which is struck in the elegiac fragments is struck also in the

' (K. J. Dover). The same scholar

observes that there is little or no linguistic differentiation either. Both alike' give an epic colouring to a

predominantly vernacular phonology and morphology'.1 D. L. Page concurs that the style and tone do not vary

with subject matter: 'it is always a blend of Homeric phrase with modern vocabulary'.2

That the older elegists, for all their dependence on Homer, felt that Ionic was the dialect appropriate to their genre,

is revealed by a curious fact. They tend to exclude the Aeolic elements detected in the epic dialect although these

were admitted by later practitioners. Thus phonological developments exemplified in

are

absent from Archilochus; he uses

and not (with one exception), genitive plurals in not , dative

plurals in and not (e.g 61 Diehl contrasted with its source F 564

); he avoids infinitives in- , though the papyrus reads in 5 AD. and unaugmented

preterites (except in 117 D. where there is a special effect).

One feature, which is a symptom of great modernity, distinguishes the iamboi from the elegiacs. This is crasis:

, , etc. In one detail Archilochus perhaps shows an aversion to local Ionic peculiarities.

Whereas his contemporary Callinus of Ephesus uses

, Archilochus has . However,

since he also uses

and (68 Diehl), it may be that his usage reflects the original confinement of the

forms with kappa to the words beginning with

Remarkable are a certain number of Atticisms, the presence of which is difficult to explain. One is the phrase

used

1 See Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique (Fondation Hardt), 10 (1964), 183-222, at pp. 185 and 183.

2Ibid. 117-79, at p. 160.

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three times in 2 D. (the Ionic form being ), the Attic echo being reinforced in the phrase

'in the spear is my bread kneaded', for is included in the Attic Words of Moiris.

The feminine (15 Diehl) is likewise Attic, contrasting with the epic formations in and the Ionic in

; but it is combined with , exhibiting the characteristic Ionic phonology. In the Hymn to Demeter (119

Diehl) the Attic form

is simply taken over from cult, but the verse also presents the active , an Attic

feature instead of the middle . More striking and inexplicable is the occurrence of three examples of in

the sense of , a usage which is virtually confined to Attic. Yet in 81 Diehl the previous verse contains the Ionic

form .

That elegiac poetry in Mainland Greece is an importation from Ionic is shown by the example of Tyrtaeus, a poet

of the seventh century B.C., who made a speciality of hortatory themes in a military context, their ostensible aim

being to fire and enhearten the Spartans during the stresses of the Messenian Wars. His birthplace is disputed and

claims are made for Laconia, Miletus, and Athens. The essential fact is that, whatever his origins, he was active in

Sparta, and his poems are addressed to a Spartan audience. Despite this his chosen dialect is Ionian, and his

practice has been neatly demonstrated by his adaptation of a passage of Homer (

71ff., where Priam foresees

what awaits him if Hector is killed) to elegiac verse.

Fr. 7 D. 21 ff.

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'A foul thing is this, that an older man should fall in the van and lie before the younger, his hairs already white and

beard grey, breathing forth his valiant soul in the dust, holding his bloodied parts in his handsa foul thing to the

eyes and an affront to the beholderand his naked flesh. But all is seemly with a young man so long as he has the

bright bloom of lovely youth.'

In his adaptation of

Tyrtaeus is inhibited by the elegist's avoidance of the peculiarly

Homeric use of te in combination with other particles (

, and ); the omission leaves him

with a missing short syllable, which he supplies by substituting the plural

; but this plural chimes

awkwardly with the singular subject of in the following line. A similar inconsistency occurs in the parenthetic

... , an expression which has a strange origin. Homer always uses except in L 649

'awesome and prone to anger is he who sent me forth to inquire'. It looks as

though the word

in 75, which was Tyrtaeus's direct model, has also activated in his mind the collocation

. But why did he not say with Homeric observance of the digamma, a licence all the

easier because his audience was Laconian and still possessed this sound in their everyday speech? This brings out

the tyranny of the genre: he conforms to the practice of the Ionian elegists who were his model. As a consequence

he is forced to use the awkward singular

to avoid the hiatus.

Little more need be said about Tyrtaeus's language than that he wrote elegiacs in the Ionian manner. One detail

deserves mention: his verses contain examples of short-vowel accusative plurals, which also appear in Hesiod (see

above):

3a, 5, 5, 4 and 8, 19 (with Homeric apocope of to and assimilation

The same general statement is true of the elegiacs of Solon, the Athenian statesman and poet (c. 640/635-c.

561/560 B.C.), whose verses served political purposes. Like the inventor of the genre he avoids the non-Ionic

constituents of the epic language such as

and ke. In the sole example of the dative plural

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(5, 7), 'so best would the people follow their leader', he

follows closely

87. Genitives in are embedded in the formulaic flosculi

1, 19, 1, 23, both in a simile of distinctly Homeric flavour. There are

some striking Attic features: while the MSS waver, the verses quoted in the papyrus containing Aristotle's

Constitution of the Athenians make it likely that Solon used the characteristic

and instead of the Ionic

forms with h, except in words confined to Epic,

3, 1, etc. (but Homeric three lines later in the

cultic description of Pallas Athena containing , etc.). On the other hand he opts for the

traditional case forms like

, etc., even where the Attic equivalents offered no

metrical difficulties. It is, however, possible that the poems have undergone processes of Ionicization. The forms

for appear first in Ionic inscriptions from the fourth century B.C. on. Yet 1, 33 and 1,

45 figure in our texts, as against the Attic forms like

3, 22 and 20.

The poems attributed to Theognis of Dorian Megara, whose floruit was the middle of the sixth century B.C., are in

fact a collection of elegiac verses and sympotic songs from various hands, and there appears to be no way of

sifting out what is authentic. The language conforms to the conventions of Ionian elegy but with greater receptivity

to non-Ionic Homerisms. A few Doricisms have been detected: genitive

779, the infinitives

260 and 960. Doric words are , 'wishes', 'wants' 299 and 'covet' 771.

Above it was noted that linguistically little or nothing distinguishes the elegiacs of Archilochus from the 'iamboi'.

More clearly separated are the two genres in Semonides of Amorgos (second half of the seventh century B.C.) if it

is correct to attribute to him the elegiacs Fr. 29 Diehl (ascribed by Stobaeus to Simonides) which offer the Aeolic

Homerisms

, and His iambics adhere closely to the Ionic dialect (there are no genitives in ,

datives in , etc.) and, unlike Archilochus, he uses , and .

Archilochus and Semonides are linked by Lucian (Pseudol. 2) with Hipponax of Ephesus (sixth century B.C.),

another writer

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of 'iamboi', who gave the iambic trimeter a twist by making the last foot into a spondee, thus inventing the

('lame iambos'), also called ('limping'). His language comes closer to the everyday speech of the

Ionians who had imposed themselves on a mixed native population with various ethnic elements such as Lydians,

Carians, and Maeonians. Hipponax betrays some knowledge of Maeonian in Fr. 3:

'He called upon ( , with Ionic contraction of ) the son of Maia, the Lord of Cyllene, ''O dog-strangling

Hermes, called Kandaulas in Maeonian, Companion of Thieves, come back me up''.'

Here

is evidently a native word having some such meaning. The Greek epithet ('dog-

strangler') appears to be a translation of Kandaulas, which is open to etymological interpretation as a compound of

kan- 'dog' and an l-derivative from the root *dhau- 'strangle' that is reflected in O. Sl. daviti 'strangle'. Another

foreign intruder is

'king', this time from Lydian, as is 'priest', 'soothsayer' (cf. kaves on a Lydian

inscription from Sardis). The last occurs in Fr. 4 Masson in a verse which gives an idea of the tang of this

linguistic hotchpotch:

, 'Kikon the brokendown, luckless priest'. is a

Thracian ethnic, and two epithets in the grand manner qualify the Lydian

: links up with

(cf. Aesch. Eum. 330), while is taken straight from Homer.

Little survives of Hipponax, but indirect light on his language is thrown by a later imitator, Herondas (of Cos?,

third century B.C.), who wrote mimes

in the same metre depicting scenes from everyday life.

4. Melic Poetry

Sappho and Alcaeus

The

was a monodic song accompanied by the flute or lyre. As a literary genre it came into existence on the

island of Lesbos and so became linked with the local dialect, which has,

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on the evidence of extensive papyrus material, been surprisingly well preserved in the manuscript tradition. Sappho

uses the vernacular in most of the surviving fragments but certain features of the Epic language appear in some

genres. What has been called the 'abnormal' dialect of Sappho appears in pieces which have a celebratory or

ceremonial character, such as the epithalamia ('nuptial chamber songs') and wedding songs, the so-called hymeneal

poems, in which Sappho's dactylic hexameters of the Epic type occur almost exclusively. The Epic elements are

more evenly scattered in the surviving verses of Alcaeus.

We list the chief features of the Lesbian dialect (pp. 60f.) which appear in the poets. Initial aspirates are lost: the

accent recedes as far as possible ('barytonesis'); e + e > h

, o + o > w; or/or appears for ar/ra

; o for a also in for ; o is raised to , especially before labials ( =

= = ; er appears for ri and ir ( for for ).

Before the cluster ns the preceding vowel was diphthongized > > >

> ); note that before vowels has a real diphthong, which contrasts with before

consonants. The clusters sn and sm > nn and mm (

, etc.) and rs > rr . Zeta appears initially

, but internally the sound is written sd ( ; note / ). Initial > in

= , = . In = we appear to have an assimilation *-qwm- * > *

. The Aeolic = *qwe-* > = appears rarely: (genitive), , and the epic forms and

. Initial digamma is nowhere written and is also metrically neglected except in the pronouns

and . The sound was preserved in the dialect before r, and the poems present

, (attested for Alcaeus by the grammarian Tryphon, first century B.C.). Internally > as

. In the clusters with liquids and nasals digamma was lost without compensatory lengthening ( >

> ). Note Lesbian contrasting with Epic-Ionic .

In the morphology accusative plurals of the first and second declensions appear as and < and ,

while the

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datives are regularly

(except for the article , ). The third declension has the expected (

, etc.). The personal pronouns are typically Aeolic, / , , etc., while the double inflexion of

is to be compared with Homeric and the Thessalian . The interrogative is

declined like an o-stem: = = . Noteworthy are the adverbs in for Attic (

= = ), the form (for the Linear B evidence, see p. 45), and those in

In the verb the contracted stems are treated as athematic:

(third plural of ). The

infinitive of

perfects ends in , while the perfect participles have the suffixes / ,

In two instances sigmatic aorists have short-vowel subjunctives: (but

). The verb 'to be' has third singular imperfect .

Characteristic are the prepositions

and , the apocope in = and , and the modal particle

The Homeric elements of Sappho's abnormal 'formal' dialect are the lengthening of the first vowel of

genitives in

, in , the characteristic Old Ionian genitive , the inflexion

of certain names in , and the dative plural for . In the verb we have

unaugmented preterites (Aeolicized from Homeric ), , and ( = ), and the

third plural

. These are the purely grammatical indicators of the formal style which appear only in Sappho.

For their vocabulary both poets draw largely on the rich resources of the Epic language.

The text in its history has evidently been 'Aeolicized' at some stage. This emerges from 'hyperforms' like

and , which are due to the analogical extension of the relationship : . ( < * < *

Other examples of the wrong application of : are and ; in 'having smiled' the

second at is authentic but the first is not. Conceivably the consonant gemination in come under

this heading; forms with single consonant also occur:

, etc.

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Sappho, Fr. 1 Lobel-Page

'Immortal Aphrodite of the ornate thrones

Daughter of Zeus, wile-weaving, I beseech you

Do not subdue with anguish and love-pangs,

Lady, my spirit.

But come here if ever in the past

Hearing my cries from afar

You gave ear and, leaving your father's house,

You came, your golden

Chariot having yoked.'

Alcaeus, Fr. Z2 Lobel-Page

'I understand not the strife of the winds;

One wave rolls from this side,

Another from that, and we in their midst

Are borne along with the black ship

Toiling in the violent storm.

The bilge covers the masthold,

The whole sail now lets the light through

And there are great rents along it.'

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Anacreon

Personal poetry was written in other dialects than Lesbian. Anacreon of Teos (mid sixth century B.C.) took service

with Polycrates of Samos and was later invited to Athens by Hipparchus. In addition to 'iamboi' and elegies he

wrote lyrics

including hymns, love-songs and convivial poetry. Grammatically the language is basically Ionic

with a few standard Homerisms (

, etc.), but the vocabulary has the unmistakable

stamp of the Epic school with its rich store of compound epithets, e.g.

the following poem, allegedly addressed to Sappho (5 D.):

'Once again with a purple ball striking me

Golden-haired Eros invites me to play

With the girl of the embroidered slipper.

But she, being from well-ordered Lesbos,

Scorns my hair, for it is white,

And gapes after anothera girl.'

Note the contracted

< ; cf. Attic

Corinna

The lyric poetess Corinna of Tanagra wrote in her native Boeotian dialect on themes of local interest and so was

not known to the wider Greek literary world. Our first knowledge of her poems comes in the shape of citations

used by writers of Imperial times in illustration of metrical or linguistic points. However, thanks to a Berlin

Papyrus found in 1906 we have substantial parts of two of her poems. Her date is disputed: she may have been a

contemporary of her more famous fellow-countryman Pindar of Cynoscephalae (see below), but another possibility

is the third century B.C.

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