Palmer L.R. The Greek Language
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The chronological point is of importance for orthographical reasons. The Boeotian vowel system underwent
important changes which are reflected in inscriptions from the fourth and third centuries B.C. on. The change will
be discussed systematically below (pp. 176f.). Two processes are involved. Certain vowels are raised: e > i before
vowels (already fifth century), h >
(c. 400 B.C.). Some diphthongs become monophthongs: > h, > i (both c.
400 B.C.),
> , presumably pronounced [ö] (c. 250 B.C.). Boeotian retained the unfronted pronunciation of [u]
unlike Attic [y] and this came to be represented as : = , for , for ,
for . From about the mid third century B.C. a front glide developed after dental stops and l and
n, and this was written
. The effect of these changes appears in such spellings as for for
for , for and for and , and for and
and for and . If the earlier date for Corinna is accepted, it follows that the text
as we know it must have had its Boeotian orthography modernized. The following specimen (1 Page = 4 + 5
Diehl) comes from a poem in which the seer Akraiphes gives the Boeotian river god, Asopus, news of his
daughters:
'Of the daughters Father Zeus, the King of all, has three
And three were wed by Poseidon, ruler of the sea,
Of two Phoebus has mastery of their bed,
One, Hermes, goodly son of Maia (possesses).
For thus did Eros and the Cyprian persuade them,
Going secretly into your house, to take the nine girls.'
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5. Choral Poetry
Alcman
Sparta in the seventh century B.C. was not the grim, xenophobic, military state of later times, but an aristocratic
society of liberal culture, open and receptive to art, music and poetry from abroad. A school of music was founded
by Terpander of Lesbos, and we hear of other musicians and poets from Crete, Magna Graecia, Argos and
Colophon who were active in Sparta. Nothing has been preserved of the productions of these men, but the earliest
work of Spartan poetry that has come down to us was also the work of an immigrant. This was Alcman, who
certainly came to Sparta from abroad, and was possibly a Lydian from Sardis, but more probably an Ionian. He
flourished in the second half of the seventh century B.C.
His poetry belongs to the genre of choral lyric, which from the beginning was bound up with the cult of the gods
and so also became a major component of tragedy (see below). Choral poetry was technically
, that is a
combination of music, poetry and dance. It was developed especially among the Dorians, and for this reason Doric
became the conventional dialect of this genre. There was an Alexandrian edition of Alcman's poetry, but until 1855
all that was preserved were brief quotations. In that year a papyrus, written probably in the first century A.D., was
found which contained about 100 verses of one of his Partheneia, 'Maiden Songs'. The text is evidently a scholarly
edition and is provided with accents and other 'prosodies' and notes.
The dialect is 'abstractly' Doric and lacks local Laconian peculiarities. In common with all poets Alcman owes
much to Homer. It has been argued that he draws to some extent on the language of Lesbian poetry, and he also
shows the influence of the Mainland branch of the Epic school discussed above under Hesiod. The following key
features may be singled out. The accentuation in the papyrus is evidently Doric:
, , etc.
The contraction of a plus an e-sound is h and not
as in Attic-Ionic: ( = ).
The nominative plural of the article is
; among the personal pronouns distinctive are first plural ,
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nominative singular
, the third singular dative , etc. The first plural active ending of the verb is ,
e.g.
, and that of the third plural active is , e.g. , 'they are'. Further points of verbal
morphology are
'he was', the infinitive (or ), and the participle in , the x-aorist
and the Doric future (as against the normal Greek type in , etc.).
Little that is more narrowly Laconian must be added to this general Doric physiognomy. One prominent feature of
our texts must be due to the manuscript tradition. This is the late Laconian q > s, as in
= =
etc., for the early inscriptions still regularly show q, the first example of s being dated to the
beginning of the fourth century B.C. Another Laconian feature is the comparative
< * < <
*
, as opposed to Attic-Ionic / < * . On the other hand, there is no example in Alcman
of the characteristic change -s- > -h-, as in
, while digamma is very rarely written in the texts although this
sound was particularly tenacious in Laconian.
Preservation of digamma is too widespread to serve as a sensitive indicator of dialect except negatively to exclude
Attic-Ionic. Though it seldom appears in our texts, it is clear that Alcman took account of it in an initial position.
Intervocalically the occurrence of contracted forms like
and argues its loss, so that =
will come from an Epic source. On the dual treatment of , and ( : ), see
below.
That the text of Alcman has been modified, in all probability by the Alexandrian editors of his works, is suggested
by another phenomenon pointed out by the Swiss scholar Ernst Risch. Alcman's dialect, though lacking in notable
Laconisms, shows remarkable similarities to the dialect of Cyrene, which was a colony of Theta (p. 82): notable
points of resemblance are the thematic infinitives in
, short-vowel acc. plur. like and , with
the same phonological change as occurs in the nominative singular of participles like
. Add the 'Aeolic'
treatment of
in the participles and , the change of > , in ( < *
< ). But these are not ancient characteristics of Cyrenian, and so the resemblance cannot be explained
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by supposing that Alcman was using a particularly ancient form of Laconian that has been preserved in the dialect
of Cyrene. Risch concludes that our text of Alcman does not yield an authentic picture of his dialect but that it was
modified by Alexandrian scholars, for whom Cyrene was the nearest Doric city. On the other hand certainly
authentic features of his dialect are non-Laconian. Thus the
of is metrically guaranteed. Moreover, though
no such authentication secures the short-vowel infinitives in
(they could all be replaced by ), the fact that
later choral poets like Pindar and Bacchylides also have
infinitives indicates that this was traditional in the genre
and so in all probability goes back to Alcman.
Risch poses the problem of the source and origin of phenomena like
, and is an epic name
and
, as we saw (p. 103), actually occurs in Hesiod. In all likelihood Alcman was here drawing on the
Mainland literary language, his immediate source being perhaps Tyrtaeus (see p. 111).
A Lesbian source is possible for participles like
, but the phonological treatment contrasts with , and
since there is little or nothing else which is indisputably Lesbian, the
forms in the text are presumably due
(see above) to the later editors who held that Alcman was 'constantly Aeolicizing'
. More
important are the Homerisms, which may be either Ionic or Aeolic. Thus the potential particle appears both as
and as k' (which may stand for either or ). Alongside the Doric adverbs like and we also have
, probably though Lesbian is not impossible. Dative plurals end in and (e.g. )
for the third declension and in
/ for a- and o-stems, though the short forms are predominant. In the verb
third plural active forms in
are attested besides those in . There is one example of
the
infinitive: . The familiar Aeolic treatment of -sm-, -sn- occurs solely in the name . The
adjective
is likely to be an intrusive false Aeolicism based on , for the true Aeolic product of *
is . In clusters ending in digamma and must be regarded as Epic forms. As in
Homer, all three versions of the preposition 'towards',
/ / , occur in Alcman.
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Such grammatical abnormalities tend to occur where metre or theme are Heroic (thus D. L. Page). But it is in
matters of diction and phraseology that in Alcman as in other poetry the pervasive influence of Epic is most
apparent, whether by imitation or wholesale borrowing: e.g.
, cf. Hom. | 123-
4 , cf. Hom. w 199 .
Partheneion (23 Bergk, 1 Diehl = 1 Page, col. ii, 2-14):
'There is a vengeance of the gods. Blessed is he who in gladness weaves his day to the end unweeping. I sing of
the radiance of Agido. I see her as the sun which Agido summons to shine as our witness. But the illustrious
chorus-leader utterly forbids me to praise or blame her; for she thinks she herself is pre-eminent as if one set
among the grazing herds a sturdy, thunderhoofed, prize-winning steed, one from wingèd dreams.'
It was Alcman who apparently established the dialect canon for his successors in the genre of choral lyric. First
among these are two poets from the colonial world of Magna GraeciaStesichorus of Himera (632/629-556/553
B.C.) and Ibycus of Rhegium, who was born in the first half of the sixth century B.C. and was active at the court
of the tyrant Polycrates of Samos (538-522 B.C.). Little has survived of their work but the dialect shows much the
same mixture of Doric, Lesbian, Aeolic and
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Epic. That a gradual watering-down of the Doric element with a corresponding increase in epicisms took place in
the development of choral lyric has been made clear by siting Stesichorus and Ibycus in their chronological
position between the Mainland poets Alcman and Pindar. The two island Ionians Simonides and Bacchylides will
be considered separately below.
Pindar
Pindar of Cynocephalae near Thebes in Boeotia (518-438 B.C.) was the greatest of the writers of Greek choral
lyrics. He came of a well-connected family and as a youth was sent to Athens. He became a professional poet of
international reputation with patrons throughout the Greek worldThessaly, Aegina, Athens, Magna Graecia, Rhodes
and Cyrene. He wrote religious poetry, processional songs
, maiden songs, encomia, dirges, and songs
celebrating victories in the games . Only the last have survived complete, but enough has been preserved
of the other works to show that the epinicia may be taken as representative of the whole.
What is characteristic of the language of choral epic has emerged from the study of Alcman. Its essential feature is
what we may call its polymorphism: the poetic repertoire includes a number of alternative dialect forms on which
he may draw at his convenience for particular effects (see below). In view of certain recent theories, to be
discussed at the end of this section, the point must be made that this is an artificial language, modelled on the first
literary language of the Greeks, the Epic language, towards which it gravitated in the course of its development.
This emerges clearly from a study of certain diagnostic alternative forms.
In Homer the conditional particle
occurs over four times more often than , which is confined to the
combinations and . Whereas is never used by Alcman, it is the sole choice of Simonides. In
Pindar and Bacchylides
rarely appears, but Stesichorus and Ibycus remained close to the practice of Alcman. Of
the three Epic alternatives
/ / the last becomes increasingly dominant over the combined figures of the
first two in the progression Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod and Homeric Hymns. After Homer drops out from the
literary language (it is conjectured once in Alcman
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but the weight of the evidence favours
). Stesichorus has a number of examples of including the
compound
(also with Doric > h) but only one certain occurrence of . The figures for Ibycus are too
small to be of significance (
and once each), but in Pindar is two to three times more frequent than
.
The dative plurals / versus / provide another valuable indicator. In Homer the longer forms are
predominant and this is also true of Hesiod, despite a considerable increase (especially in the Works and Days) in
the proportion of shorter forms. In choral lyric, despite the fact that the Doric dialects on the whole have the shorter
forms, the disyllabic endings occur in great abundance. In Alcman and Stesichorus they still outnumber the shorter
forms. Ibycus is exceptional, for with him the shorter (presumably epichoric) forms are now preponderant, the
disyllabic type occurring in prepositional phrases of the pattern
. In Pindar about 56 per cent of
the clear examples are short forms.
A similar progression emerges from the figures relating to the alternative typified by
/ . Alcman and
Stesichorus still remain faithful to Epic in their large preponderance of forms with compensatory lengthening, but
Pindar has some 70 per cent of the short-vowel forms (always
).
It is in the use of the potential particles by the choral lyricism that the strength of the Homeric tradition and the
insulation from the local dialects is most apparent. There is no example in this genre of the characteristic Doric
,
but both and occur. Stesichorus has a 'free Homerism' in that he ventures though in the Epic only
the combination
is found. As in Homer, outnumbers in all representatives with the exception of
Bacchylides. Increasing dilution of the Doric element is shown in the use of the alternative forms of the temporal
adverbs typified by
/ . The Doric forms predominate in Alcman, while Stesichorus and Ibycus use them even
in adaptations of Homeric material. On the other hand only
forms are used by Pindar, Simonides and
Bacchylides.
The next feature to be considered involves the possibility of three dialect alternatives: the type example is the third
plural active endings
(Doric)/ (Ionic)/ (Lesbian). The material from the earlier lyricists is meagre but
both forms are
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attested for Alcman, and he is the first of the choral lyricists to present analogous forms in the aorist participles
and . There is a clear difference between Pindar, who prefers Doric forms, and Bacchylides, with whom
they are extremely rare.
The Aeolic alternative with
< *-ons- recurs in the present participle < * and in the dative plural of -
nt- stems
< *-ont-si. It is a peculiar fact that Alcman's text, Doric in character though it is, constantly offers
the Aeolic participles in
, and the same is true of Stesichorus. Here again we find a sharp contrast between
Pindar with whom
greatly predominates and Bacchylides, who has only one such form. How restricted this
phonological Aeolicism is in the whole of choral lyric is shown by its non-occurrence in dative plurals and in the
word
< * . The different poets vary in their choice of form for the 'Muse'. Alcman keeps to the Doric
whereas Pindar prefers the Aeolic , once again in contrast to Bacchylides for whom Ionic is
overwhelmingly attested.
One point must be made in connection with the 'Ionicisms' of the choral lyricists. There is in fact no Ionic feature
which is not also Epic. In other words, the Ionian features should be ascribed to the influence of Epic. This is
brought out by Bacchylides' use of unaugmented preterites. He is the only poet in the genre with whom such forms
predominate, as they do in Homer (about 6o per cent). They occur in all choral lyrics from Alcman on, but their
proportion increases progressively in the order Stesichorus, Ibycus, Pindar and Simonides. In the observance and
non-observance of initial digamma, too, the example of Epic is unmistakable. Once again Bacchylides represents
the culmination of a general tendency. His practice reveals that he was simply, at his convenience, availing himself
of certain metrical licences founded in the Epic tradition. This is no less true of Pindar who, despite the fact that
digamma was preserved in the Boeotian of his day, freely makes his choice between
/ , / etc.
If the influence of Epic made itself increasingly felt in the minutiae of phonology and morphology, the flesh and
blood of poetry, vocabulary and phraseology remained overwhelmingly Homeric. There remains this limited but
curiously persistent Aeolic, or rather Lesbian, colouring. Pindar strengthens this to
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some extent, for he is the first of the choral lyricists to add aorist participles in
and to those in ,
etc. Was this done haphazardly or was there some hidden effect in the choice between the alternatives? That
Lesbianisms were a conscious poetical device is suggested by Pythian II, which is outstanding in Pindar's work for
its Aeolic colouring. It is an oddity that the best MS presents
although elsewhere we have ,
etc. This points to a source in a psilotic dialect. The spelling
(with an Epic infinitive form) again points
to Lesbian, and this is consistent with the patronymic
'O son of Deinomenes'. This archaism is, of
course, common Aeolic, but Pindar normally uses the genitive of the father's name. The Lesbian connection is
stronger in
/ , 'But Hybris drove him into arrogant delusion '(1. 28). Not
only is
a Lesbian form but the diction is clearly a reminiscence of Alcaeus... /
'(civil strife) which one of the Olympians has sent, leading the folk to blind folly'.
Yet another Aeolic form occurs in
'while the rest of the tackle has labour
in the sea deep down' (ll. 79-80). Yet in general the poem has the same Doric character as the other odes: dative
plural in
(e.g. ), , third plural active in with epicisms like
(contrasting with Lesbian ). Why then these echoes of Lesbian poetry, which were apparently deliberate?
They will have had some point and purpose to which the poet obscurely alludes in the passage (67-71) 'This song
is sent over the grey sea like Phoenician merchandise...
/
/ 'this Castor song on Aeolian strings regard kindly for the sake of
the seven-toned lute when you receive it'. What Pindar may be saying is that as a good Dorian Hieron of Syracuse
(whose victory is being celebrated) will expect a good Spartan martial song (the
is said to be a Spartan
war tune) but that what is sent has been given an Aeolic twist. Pythian IV is outstanding among Pindar's work not
only for its size but also for the great proportion of the whole devoted to myth, for the bulk of the poem treats of
the voyage of the Argonauts. Here Pindar demonstrates the lyric treatment of an Epic theme, and
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in language this is among the most Homeric of his poems. Thus it is no accident that he here used aorist forms in
instead of the Aeolic ( 22, 295 and 149), the first two actually occurring in
Homeric quotations with Ionic h in the second, while is a well-known Epic Aeolicism (= ).
From what is Pindar's outstanding masterpiece (Pythian IV) we choose our illustrative specimen (188-98):
'And when that flower of seafarers had come to Iolcus, Jason reviewed them all and approved them. And the seer
Mopsus, prophesying from birds and holy lots, embarked the host with glad heart. And when they had hung the
anchors above the ram, their leader, taking in his hands a golden cup, at the stern called upon bolt-hurling Zeus,
father of the Ouranidae, and the thrust of the waves and winds that speed voyage and the nights and the paths of
the sea and fair days and sweet portion of safe return. And from the clouds a propitious peal of thunder roared in
reply to him, and bright came the lightning flashes bursting forth.'
Simonides and Bacchylides
Pindar, because of his genius and the sheer bulk of his surviving poetry, is of particular importance in showing
what Doric, Epic and Aeolic colouring was regarded as appropriate for the
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