Alcman
Encyclopedia
Alcman was an Ancient Greek
choral lyric poet from Sparta
. He is the earliest representative of the Alexandrinian canon of the nine lyric poets
.
wrote that poets have "many mothers" and that the continents of Europe
and Asia
both claimed Alcman as their son. Frequently assumed to have been born in Sardis
, capital of ancient Lydia
, the Suda
claims that Alcman was actually a Laconia
n from Messoa. The compositeness of his dialect may have helped to maintain the uncertainty of his origins, but the many references to Lydian and Asian culture in Alcman's poetry must have played a considerable role in the tradition of Alcman's Lydian origin. Thus, Alcman claims he learned his skills from the "strident partridges" (caccabides), a bird native to Asia Minor
and not naturally found in Greece
. The ancient scholars seemed to have referred to one particular song, in which the chorus says:
Yet, given that there was a discussion, it cannot have been certain who was the third person of this fragment. Some modern scholars defend his Lydian origin on the basis of the language of some fragments or the content. However, Sardis of the seventh century BC was like modern Paris
or New York
, a cosmopolitan city. The implicit and explicit references to Lydian culture may be a means of describing the girls of the choruses
as fashionable.
, holds that Alcman came to Sparta as a slave
to the family of Agesidas (= Hagesidamus?), by whom he was eventually emancipated
because of his great skill.
reported that it was believed Alcman died from a pustulant infestation of lice (phthiriasis), but he may have been mistaken for the philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton
. According to Pausanias
, he is buried in Sparta next to the tomb of Helen of Troy.
at Saqqâra
in Egypt
. The fragment, which is now kept at the Louvre
in Paris
, France, contains approximately 100 verses of a so-called partheneion, i.e. a song performed by a chorus of young unmarried women. In the 1960s, many more fragments were discovered and published in the collection of the Egypt
ian papyri from a dig of an ancient garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus
. Most of these fragments contain poems (partheneia), but there are also other kinds of hymns among them.
dialect, which does not usually sound beautiful, it has not at all spoiled the beauty of his songs.
Alcman's songs were composed in the Greek
Dorian
dialect
of Sparta (the so-called Laconian dialect). This is seen especially in the orthographic peculiarities of the fragments like α = η, ω = ου, η = ει, σ = θ and the use of the Doric accentuation, though it is uncertain whether these features were actually present in Alcman's original compositions or were added either by Laconian performers in the subsequent generations (see Hinge's opinion below) or even by Alexandrian scholars who gave the text a Doric feel using features of the contemporary, and not the ancient, Doric dialect.
Apollonius Dyscolus
describes Alcman as "constantly using the Aeolic
dialect". However, the validity of this judgment is limited by the fact that it is said about the use of the digamma
in the third-person pronoun "his/her"; it is perfectly Doric as well. Yet, many existing fragments display prosodic
, morphological
and phraseological
features common to the Homeric
language of Greek epic poetry
, and even markedly Aeolic and un-Doric features (σδ = ζ, -οισα = -ουσα) which are not present in Homer itself but will pass on to all the subsequent lyric poets. This mixing of features adds complexity to any analysis of his works.
The British philologist
Denys Page
comes to the following conclusion about Alcman's dialect in his influential monograph
(1951):
In his dissertation on the dialect of Alcman (2001), the Danish philologist George Hinge reaches to the opposite conclusion: that Alcman composed in the same poetic language as Homer ("the common poetic language"); however, since the songs were performed by Spartans, they were also transmitted with a Laconian accent and written down with a Laconian orthography
in the 3rd century BC.http://alkman.georgehinge.com
: Different metres
are combined into long stanza
s (9-14 lines), which are repeated several times.
One popular metre is the dactylic
tetrameter
(in contrast to the dactylic hexameter
of Homer
and Hesiod
).
). Much of what little exists consists of scraps and fragments, difficult to categorize.
The most important fragment is the First Partheneion or Louvre-Partheneion, found in the late 19th century in Saqqara
in Egypt by the French scholar Auguste Mariette
. This Partheneion consists of 101 lines, of which more than 30 are severely damaged. It is very hard to say anything about this fragment, and scholars have debated ever since the discovery and publication about its content and the occasion on which this partheneion could have been performed.
The choral lyrics of Alcman were meant to be performed within the social, political, and religious context of Sparta
. Most of the existing fragments are lines from partheneia. These hymns are sung by choruses of unmarried women, but it is unclear how the partheneia were performed. The Swiss scholar Claude Calame
(1977) treats them as a type of drama by choruses of girls. He connects them with initiation rites.
The girls express a deep affection for their chorus leader (coryphaeus
):
Earlier research tended to overlook the erotic aspect of the love of the partheneions; thus, instead of the verb translated as "guards", , at the end of the first quotation, the papyrus
has in fact the more explicit , "wears me out (with love)". Calame states that this homoerotic love
, which is similar to the one found in the lyrics of the contemporaneous poetess Sappho
, matches the pederasty of the males and was an integrated part of the initiation rites
. At a much later period, but probably relying on older sources, Plutarch confirms that the Spartan women were engaged in such same sex relationships. It remains open if the relationship also had a physical side and, if so, of what nature.
Other people, among them Hutchinson and Stehle, see the First Partheneion as a song, composed for a harvest ritual and not as a tribal initiation. Stehle argues that the maidens of the Partheneion carry a plough
(or, in the most translations: a robe) for the goddess of Dawn. This goddess of Dawn is honoured because of the qualities she has, especially in harvest time when the Greeks harvest during Dawn (Hesiod
, Works and Days, ll. 575-580: 'Dawn claims as it's portion a third of the work (harvesting)). The heat (embodied by the Sirius
-star) is a threat for the dawn, so the chorus tries to defeat him. In the meanwhile the chorus-members present themselves as women ready for marriage. Stehle doesn't agree with Calame about the initiation-rituals, but cannot ignore the 'erotic' language that the poem expresses.
Some scholars think that the chorus was divided in two halves, who would each have their own leader; at the beginning and close of their performance, the two halves performed as a single group, but during most of the performance, each half would compete with the other, claiming that their leader or favorite was the best of all the girls in Sparta
. There is, however, little evidence that the chorus was in fact divided. The role of the other woman of Alcman's first partheneion, Aenesimbrota, is contested; some consider her indeed a competing chorus-leader, others think that she was some sort of witch, who would supply the girls in love with magic love-elixirs like the pharmakeutria of Theocritus
's Second Idyll, and others again argue that the she was the trainer of the chorus like Andaesistrota of Pindar
's Second Partheneion
festival (according to Athenaeus):
and festivals are described with care, even though the context of some of those details can no longer be understood.
Alcman's language is rich with visual description. He describes the yellow color of a woman's hair and the golden chain she wears about her neck; the purple petals of a Kalchas blossom and the purple depths of the sea; the "bright shining" color of the windflower and the multi-colored feathers of a bird as it chews green buds from the vines.
A lot of attention is focused on nature: ravines, mountains, flowering forests at night, the quiet sound of water lapping over seaweed. Animals and other creatures fill his lines: birds, horses, bees, lions, reptiles, even crawling insects.
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
choral lyric poet from Sparta
Sparta
Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
. He is the earliest representative of the Alexandrinian canon of the nine lyric poets
Nine lyric poets
The nine lyric poets were a canon of archaic Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study.They were:*Alcman of Sparta...
.
Family
The name of Alcman's mother is not known but his father may have been named either Damas or Titarus.Origin
Alcman's nationality was a matter of dispute even in ancient days. Unfortunately, the records of the ancient authors were often deduced from biographic readings of their poetry and the details are often untrustworthy. Antipater of ThessalonicaAntipater of Thessalonica
Antipater of Thessalonica was the author of over a hundred epigrams in the Greek Anthology. He is the most copious and perhaps the most interesting of the Augustan epigrammatists...
wrote that poets have "many mothers" and that the continents of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
both claimed Alcman as their son. Frequently assumed to have been born in Sardis
Sardis
Sardis or Sardes was an ancient city at the location of modern Sart in Turkey's Manisa Province...
, capital of ancient Lydia
Lydia
Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian....
, the Suda
Suda
The Suda or Souda is a massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often...
claims that Alcman was actually a Laconia
Laconia
Laconia , also known as Lacedaemonia, is one of the regional units of Greece. It is part of the region of Peloponnese. It is situated in the southeastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. Its administrative capital is Sparti...
n from Messoa. The compositeness of his dialect may have helped to maintain the uncertainty of his origins, but the many references to Lydian and Asian culture in Alcman's poetry must have played a considerable role in the tradition of Alcman's Lydian origin. Thus, Alcman claims he learned his skills from the "strident partridges" (caccabides), a bird native to Asia Minor
Asia Minor
Asia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
and not naturally found in Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
. The ancient scholars seemed to have referred to one particular song, in which the chorus says:
Yet, given that there was a discussion, it cannot have been certain who was the third person of this fragment. Some modern scholars defend his Lydian origin on the basis of the language of some fragments or the content. However, Sardis of the seventh century BC was like modern Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
or New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, a cosmopolitan city. The implicit and explicit references to Lydian culture may be a means of describing the girls of the choruses
Greek chorus
A Greek chorus is a homogenous, non-individualised group of performers in the plays of classical Greece, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action....
as fashionable.
Career
One tradition, going back to AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, holds that Alcman came to Sparta as a slave
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
to the family of Agesidas (= Hagesidamus?), by whom he was eventually emancipated
Manumission
Manumission is the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. In the United States before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished most slavery, this often happened upon the death of the owner, under conditions in his will.-Motivations:The...
because of his great skill.
Death
AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
reported that it was believed Alcman died from a pustulant infestation of lice (phthiriasis), but he may have been mistaken for the philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton
Alcmaeon of Croton
Alcmaeon of Croton was one of the most eminent natural philosophers and medical theorists of antiquity. His father's name was Peirithus . He is said by some to have been a pupil of Pythagoras, and he may have been born around 510 BC...
. According to Pausanias
Pausanias (geographer)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the 2nd century AD, who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece , a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from firsthand observations, and is a crucial link between classical...
, he is buried in Sparta next to the tomb of Helen of Troy.
Text
Transmission
There were six books of Alcman's choral poetry in antiquity (ca. 50-60 hymns), but they were lost at the threshold of the Medieval Age, and Alcman was known only through fragmentary quotations in other Greek authors until the discovery of a papyrus in 1855(?) in a tomb near the second pyramidPyramid
A pyramid is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge at a single point. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape, meaning that a pyramid has at least three triangular surfaces...
at Saqqâra
Saqqara
Saqqara is a vast, ancient burial ground in Egypt, serving as the necropolis for the Ancient Egyptian capital, Memphis. Saqqara features numerous pyramids, including the world famous Step pyramid of Djoser, sometimes referred to as the Step Tomb due to its rectangular base, as well as a number of...
in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
. The fragment, which is now kept at the Louvre
Louvre
The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, France, contains approximately 100 verses of a so-called partheneion, i.e. a song performed by a chorus of young unmarried women. In the 1960s, many more fragments were discovered and published in the collection of the Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
ian papyri from a dig of an ancient garbage dump at Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus
Oxyrhynchus is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered...
. Most of these fragments contain poems (partheneia), but there are also other kinds of hymns among them.
Dialect
Pausanias says that even though Alcman uses the DoricDoric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...
dialect, which does not usually sound beautiful, it has not at all spoiled the beauty of his songs.
Alcman's songs were composed in the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
Dorian
Doric Greek
Doric or Dorian was a dialect of ancient Greek. Its variants were spoken in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, Crete, Rhodes, some islands in the southern Aegean Sea, some cities on the coasts of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily, Epirus and Macedon. Together with Northwest Greek, it forms the...
dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
of Sparta (the so-called Laconian dialect). This is seen especially in the orthographic peculiarities of the fragments like α = η, ω = ου, η = ει, σ = θ and the use of the Doric accentuation, though it is uncertain whether these features were actually present in Alcman's original compositions or were added either by Laconian performers in the subsequent generations (see Hinge's opinion below) or even by Alexandrian scholars who gave the text a Doric feel using features of the contemporary, and not the ancient, Doric dialect.
Apollonius Dyscolus
Apollonius Dyscolus
Apollonius Dyscolus is considered one of the greatest of the Greek grammarians. He was born at Alexandria, son of Mnesitheus. The dates for his life are not known...
describes Alcman as "constantly using the Aeolic
Aeolic Greek
Aeolic Greek is a linguistic term used to describe a set of dialects of Ancient Greek spoken mainly in Boeotia , Thessaly, and in the Aegean island of Lesbos and the Greek colonies of Asia Minor ....
dialect". However, the validity of this judgment is limited by the fact that it is said about the use of the digamma
Digamma
Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet which originally stood for the sound /w/ and later remained in use only as a numeral symbol for the number "6"...
in the third-person pronoun "his/her"; it is perfectly Doric as well. Yet, many existing fragments display prosodic
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
, morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and phraseological
Phraseology
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units , in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when...
features common to the Homeric
Homeric Greek
Homeric Greek is the form of the Greek language that was used by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey. It is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects, such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically in...
language of Greek epic poetry
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
, and even markedly Aeolic and un-Doric features (σδ = ζ, -οισα = -ουσα) which are not present in Homer itself but will pass on to all the subsequent lyric poets. This mixing of features adds complexity to any analysis of his works.
The British philologist
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
Denys Page
Denys Page
Sir Denys Lionel Page was a British classical scholar at Oxford and Cambridge.-Early life:Born at Reading, Page was the son of Frederick Harold Dunn Page, a chartered civil engineer of the Great Western Railway, and his wife Elsie Daniels. He was educated at St...
comes to the following conclusion about Alcman's dialect in his influential monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
(1951):
In his dissertation on the dialect of Alcman (2001), the Danish philologist George Hinge reaches to the opposite conclusion: that Alcman composed in the same poetic language as Homer ("the common poetic language"); however, since the songs were performed by Spartans, they were also transmitted with a Laconian accent and written down with a Laconian orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
in the 3rd century BC.http://alkman.georgehinge.com
Metrical form
To judge from his larger fragments, Alcmans poetry was normally strophicStrophic form
Strophic form is the simplest and most durable of musical forms, elaborating a piece of music by repetition of a single formal section. This may be analyzed as "A A A..."...
: Different metres
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
are combined into long stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s (9-14 lines), which are repeated several times.
One popular metre is the dactylic
Dactyl (poetry)
A dactyl is a foot in meter in poetry. In quantitative verse, such as Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight...
tetrameter
Tetrameter
Tetrameter: [ti'tramitə]; te·tram·e·ter; a verse of four measuresOrigin: early 17th century : from late Latin tetrametrus, originally neuter from Greek tetrametros 'having four measures,' from tetra- 'four' + metron 'measure'....
(in contrast to the dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter
Dactylic hexameter is a form of meter in poetry or a rhythmic scheme. It is traditionally associated with the quantitative meter of classical epic poetry in both Greek and Latin, and was consequently considered to be the Grand Style of classical poetry...
of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
and Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
).
The First Partheneion
The type of songs Alcman composed most frequently appear to be hymns, partheneia (maiden-songs Greek "maiden"), and prooimia (preludes to recitations of epic poetryEpic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
). Much of what little exists consists of scraps and fragments, difficult to categorize.
The most important fragment is the First Partheneion or Louvre-Partheneion, found in the late 19th century in Saqqara
Saqqara
Saqqara is a vast, ancient burial ground in Egypt, serving as the necropolis for the Ancient Egyptian capital, Memphis. Saqqara features numerous pyramids, including the world famous Step pyramid of Djoser, sometimes referred to as the Step Tomb due to its rectangular base, as well as a number of...
in Egypt by the French scholar Auguste Mariette
Auguste Mariette
François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette was a French scholar, archaeologist and Egyptologist, the designer of the rebuilt Egyptian Museum under Maximilian of Austria orders when the later had gained control of the artifacts collected to that point.-Early career:Born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Mariette...
. This Partheneion consists of 101 lines, of which more than 30 are severely damaged. It is very hard to say anything about this fragment, and scholars have debated ever since the discovery and publication about its content and the occasion on which this partheneion could have been performed.
The choral lyrics of Alcman were meant to be performed within the social, political, and religious context of Sparta
Sparta
Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
. Most of the existing fragments are lines from partheneia. These hymns are sung by choruses of unmarried women, but it is unclear how the partheneia were performed. The Swiss scholar Claude Calame
Claude Calame
Claude Calame is a Swiss writer on Greek mythology and the structure of mythic narrative from the perspective of a Hellenist trained in semiotics and ethnology as well as philology...
(1977) treats them as a type of drama by choruses of girls. He connects them with initiation rites.
The girls express a deep affection for their chorus leader (coryphaeus
Coryphaeus
Coryphaeus, or Koryphaios , and often corypheus in English. In Attic drama, the coryphaeus was the leader of the chorus. Hence the term is used for the chief or leader of any company or movement...
):
Earlier research tended to overlook the erotic aspect of the love of the partheneions; thus, instead of the verb translated as "guards", , at the end of the first quotation, the papyrus
Papyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
has in fact the more explicit , "wears me out (with love)". Calame states that this homoerotic love
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
, which is similar to the one found in the lyrics of the contemporaneous poetess Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
, matches the pederasty of the males and was an integrated part of the initiation rites
Initiation
Initiation is a rite of passage ceremony marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components...
. At a much later period, but probably relying on older sources, Plutarch confirms that the Spartan women were engaged in such same sex relationships. It remains open if the relationship also had a physical side and, if so, of what nature.
Other people, among them Hutchinson and Stehle, see the First Partheneion as a song, composed for a harvest ritual and not as a tribal initiation. Stehle argues that the maidens of the Partheneion carry a plough
Plough
The plough or plow is a tool used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowing seed or planting. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history, and represents one of the major advances in agriculture...
(or, in the most translations: a robe) for the goddess of Dawn. This goddess of Dawn is honoured because of the qualities she has, especially in harvest time when the Greeks harvest during Dawn (Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
, Works and Days, ll. 575-580: 'Dawn claims as it's portion a third of the work (harvesting)). The heat (embodied by the Sirius
Sirius
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, it is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. The name "Sirius" is derived from the Ancient Greek: Seirios . The star has the Bayer designation Alpha Canis Majoris...
-star) is a threat for the dawn, so the chorus tries to defeat him. In the meanwhile the chorus-members present themselves as women ready for marriage. Stehle doesn't agree with Calame about the initiation-rituals, but cannot ignore the 'erotic' language that the poem expresses.
Some scholars think that the chorus was divided in two halves, who would each have their own leader; at the beginning and close of their performance, the two halves performed as a single group, but during most of the performance, each half would compete with the other, claiming that their leader or favorite was the best of all the girls in Sparta
Sparta
Sparta or Lacedaemon, was a prominent city-state in ancient Greece, situated on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia, in south-eastern Peloponnese. It emerged as a political entity around the 10th century BC, when the invading Dorians subjugated the local, non-Dorian population. From c...
. There is, however, little evidence that the chorus was in fact divided. The role of the other woman of Alcman's first partheneion, Aenesimbrota, is contested; some consider her indeed a competing chorus-leader, others think that she was some sort of witch, who would supply the girls in love with magic love-elixirs like the pharmakeutria of Theocritus
Theocritus
Theocritus , the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC.-Life:Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poems commonly attributed to him have little claim to...
's Second Idyll, and others again argue that the she was the trainer of the chorus like Andaesistrota of Pindar
Pindar
Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...
's Second Partheneion
Other songs
Alcman could have composed songs for Spartan boys as well. However, the only statement in support of this idea comes from Sosibius, a Spartan historian from the 2nd. c. BC. He says that songs of Alcman were performed during the GymnopaediaGymnopaedia
The Gymnopaedia, in ancient Sparta, was a yearly celebration during which naked youths displayed their athletic and martial skills through the medium of war dancing...
festival (according to Athenaeus):
Praise for the gods, women, and the natural world
Regardless of the topic, Alcman's poetry has a clear, light, pleasant tone which ancient commentators have remarked upon. Details from ritualsRite
A rite is an established, ceremonious, usually religious act. Rites in this sense fall into three major categories:* rites of passage, generally changing an individual's social status, such as marriage, baptism, or graduation....
and festivals are described with care, even though the context of some of those details can no longer be understood.
Alcman's language is rich with visual description. He describes the yellow color of a woman's hair and the golden chain she wears about her neck; the purple petals of a Kalchas blossom and the purple depths of the sea; the "bright shining" color of the windflower and the multi-colored feathers of a bird as it chews green buds from the vines.
A lot of attention is focused on nature: ravines, mountains, flowering forests at night, the quiet sound of water lapping over seaweed. Animals and other creatures fill his lines: birds, horses, bees, lions, reptiles, even crawling insects.
Texts and translations
- Greek Lyric II: Anacreon, Anacreontea, Choral Lyric from Olympis to Alcman (Loeb Classical Library) translated by David A. Campbell (June 1989) Harvard University Press ISBN 0-674-99158-3 (Original Greek with facing page English translations, an excellent starting point for students with a serious interest in ancient lyric poetry. Nearly one third of the text is devoted to Alcman's work.)
- Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets translated by Willis Barnstone, Schoken Books Inc., New York (paperback 1988) ISBN 0-8052-0831-3 (A collection of modern English translations suitable for a general audience, includes the entireity of Alcman's parthenion and 16 additional poetic fragments by him along with a brief history of the poet.)
- Alcman. Introduction, texte critique, témoignages, traduction et commentaire. Edidit Claudius Calame. Romae in Aedibus Athenaei 1983. (Original Greek with French translations and commentaries; it has the most comprehensive criticalTextual criticismTextual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...
apparatus.) - Poetarum melicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Vol. 1. Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus. Edidit Malcolm Davies. Oxonii: e typographeo Clarendoniano 1991.
- Greek lyric poetry: a commentary on selected larger pieces. G.O. Hutchinson. Oxford University Press 2001.
Secondary literature
- Calame, Claude: Les chœurs des jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque, vol. 1-2 (Filologia e critica 20-21 ). Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1977. Engl. transl. (only vol. 1): Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 1997, rev. ed. 2001. ISBN 0-7425-1524-9 .
- Hinge, George: Die Sprache Alkmans: Textgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte (Serta Graeca 24). Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag 2006. ISBN 3-89500-492-8.
- Page, Denys L.: Alcman. The Partheneion. Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1951.
- Pavese, Carlo Odo: Il grande partenio di Alcmane (Lexis, Supplemento 1). Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert 1992. ISBN 90-256-1033-1.
- Priestley, J.M.: The ϕαρoς of Alcman's Partheneion 1, Mnemosyne 60.2 (2007) 175-195.
- Puelma, Mario: Die Selbstbeschreibung des Chores in Alkmans grossem Partheneion-Fragment, Museum Helveticum 34 (1977) 1-55.
- Risch, Ernst: 'Die Sprache Alkmans'. Museum Helveticum 11 (1954) 20-37 (= Kleine SchriftenKleine Schriftenis a German phrase often used as a title for a collection of articles and essays written by a single scholar over the course of a career. "Collected Papers" is an English equivalent. These shorter works were usually published previously in various periodicals or in collections of papers written...
1981, 314-331). - Stehle, Eva: Performance and gender in Ancient Greece, Princeton 1997.
Further reading
- Easterling, P.E.P. E. EasterlingPatricia Elizabeth Easterling FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles.-Life and career:...
(Series Editor), Bernard M.W. Knox (Editor), Cambridge History of Classical Literature, v.I, Greek Literature, 1985. ISBN 0-521-21042-9, cf. Chapter 6, "Archaic Choral Lyric", pp. 168–185 on Alcman.