Ibycus
Encyclopedia
Floruit
Floruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...
: 2nd half of 6th century BC), was an Ancient Greek
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...
lyric poet
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
, a citizen of Rhegium in Magna Graecia
Magna Graecia
Magna Græcia is the name of the coastal areas of Southern Italy on the Tarentine Gulf that were extensively colonized by Greek settlers; particularly the Achaean colonies of Tarentum, Crotone, and Sybaris, but also, more loosely, the cities of Cumae and Neapolis to the north...
, probably active at Samos
Samoš
Samoš is a village in Serbia. It is situated in the Kovačica municipality, in the South Banat District, Vojvodina province. The village has a Serb ethnic majority and its population numbering 1,247 people .-See also:...
during the reign of the tyrant Polycrates
Polycrates
Polycrates , son of Aeaces, was the tyrant of Samos from c. 538 BC to 522 BC.He took power during a festival of Hera with his brothers Pantagnotus and Syloson, but soon had Pantagnotus killed and exiled Syloson to take full control for himself. He then allied with Amasis II, pharaoh of Egypt, as...
and numbered by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
in the canonical
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
list of 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...
. He was mainly remembered in antiquity for pederastic
Pederasty in ancient Greece
Pederasty in ancient Greece was a socially acknowledged relationship between an adult and a younger male usually in his teens. It was characteristic of the Archaic and Classical periods...
verses but he also composed lyrical narratives on mythological themes in the manner of Stesichorus
Stesichorus
Stesichorus was the first great poet of the Greek West. He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres but he is also famous for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing...
. His work survives today only as quotations by ancient scholars or recorded on fragments of papyrus recovered from archaeological sites in Egypt, yet his extant verses include some of the finest examples of Greek poetry. The following lines, dedicated to a lover, Euryalus, were recorded by Athenaeus
Athenaeus
Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...
as a famous example of amorous praise:
The rich language of these lines, in particular the accumulation of epithets, typical of Ibycus, is shown in the following translation:
-
-
- Euryalus, offshoot of the blue-eyed GracesGrâcesGrâces is a commune in the Côtes-d'Armor department in Bretagne in northwestern France.-Population:Inhabitants of Grâces are called gracieux.-External links:*...
, darling of the lovely-haired SeasonsHoraeIn Greek mythology the Horae or Hours were the goddesses of the seasons and the natural portions of time. They were originally the personifications of nature in its different seasonal aspects, but in later times they were regarded as goddessess of order in general and natural justice...
, the CyprianAphroditeAphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....
and soft-lidded PersuasionPeithoIn Greek mythology, Peitho is the goddess who personifies persuasion and seduction. Her Roman name is Suadela. Pausanias reports that after the unification of Athens, Theseus set up a cult of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho on the south slope of Acropolis at Athens. Peitho, in her role as an...
nursed you among rose-blossoms.
- Euryalus, offshoot of the blue-eyed Graces
-
This mythological account of his lover recalls 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...
's account of Pandora
Pandora
In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman. As Hesiod related it, each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts...
who was decked out by the same goddesses (the Graces, the Seasons and Persuasion) so as to be a bane to mankind an allusion consistent with Ibycus's view of love as unavoidable turmoil.
As is the case with many other major poets of ancient Greece, Ibycus became famous not just for his poetry but also for events in his life, largely the stuff of legend: the testimonia are difficult to interpret and very few biographical facts are actually known.
Life
The ByzantineByzantium under the Macedonians
The Byzantine Empire reached its height under the Macedonian emperors of the late 9th, 10th, and early 11th centuries, when it gained control over the Adriatic Sea, southern Italy, and all of the territory of the tsar Samuel....
encyclopaedia 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...
represents a good example of a problematic biography, here translated by David Campbell:
Suda's chronology has been dismissed as "muddled" since it makes Ibycus about a generation older than Anacreon
Anacreon
Anacreon was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets.- Life :...
, another poet known to have flourished at the court of Polycrates, and it is inconsistent with what we know of the Samian tyrant from Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
. Eusebius recorded the poet's first experience of fame ("agnoscitur") somewhere between 542 and 537 BC and this better fits the period of Polycrates' reign. Suda's account seems to be corroborated by a papyrus fragment (P.Oxy.1790), usually ascribed to Ibycus, glorifying a youthful Polycrates, but this was unlikely to have been the Polycrates of Samos and might instead have been his son, mentioned in a different context by Himerius
Himerius
Himerius , Greek sophist and rhetorician. 24 of his orations have reached us complete, and fragments of 12 others.- Life and works :...
as Polycrates, governor of Rhodes. Suda's list of fathers of Ibycus also presents problems: there were no historians in the early 6th century and Cerdas looks like an invention of the comic stage (it has low associations). There was a Pythagorean
Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him...
lawgiver of Rhegium known as Phytius, but the early 6th century is too early for this candidate also. Ibycus gives no indication of being a Pythagorean himself, except in one poem he identifies the Morning Star with the Evening Star, an identity first popularized by Pythagoras. Suda's extraordinary account of the poet's death is found in other sources, such as Plutarch
Plutarch
Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
and Antipater of Sidon
Antipater of Sidon
Antipater of Sidon , Antipatros or Antipatros Sidonios in the Anthologies, was a Greek poet in the second half of the 2nd century BC....
and later it inspired Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life , Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...
to write a ballad called "The Cranes of Ibycus" yet the legend might be derived merely from a play upon the poet's name and the Greek word for the bird or ibyxit might even have been told of somebody else originally.However, according to Hesychius
Hesychius of Alexandria
Hesychius of Alexandria , a grammarian who flourished probably in the 5th century CE, compiled the richest lexicon of unusual and obscure Greek words that has survived...
(s.v. iota
Iota
Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 10. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh . Letters that arose from this letter include the Roman I and J and the Cyrillic І , Yi , Je , and iotified letters .Iota represents...
138) is a form of ibis
Ibis
The ibises are a group of long-legged wading birds in the family Threskiornithidae....
, while the common Greek word for "crane
Crane (bird)
Cranes are a family, Gruidae, of large, long-legged and long-necked birds in the order Gruiformes. There are fifteen species of crane in four genera. Unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back...
" is used of the birds associated with the death of Ibycus Another proverb associated with Ibycus was recorded by Diogenianus
Diogenianus
Diogenianus was a Greek grammarian from Heraclea in Pontus who flourished during the reign of Hadrian. He was the author of an alphabetical lexicon, chiefly of poetical words, abridged from the great lexicon of Pamphilus of Alexandria and other similar works. It was also known by the title...
: "more antiquated than Ibycus" or "more silly than Ibycus". The proverb was apparently based on an anecdote about Ibycus stupidly or nobly turning down an opportunity to become tyrant of Rhegium in order to pursue a poetic career instead (one modern scholar however infers from his poetry that Ibycus was in fact wise enough to avoid the lure of supreme power, citing as an example Plato's quotation from one of his lyrics: "I am afraid it may be in exchange for some sin before the gods that I get honour from men") There is no other information about Ibycus' activities in the West, apart from an account by Himerius, that he fell from his chariot while travelling between Catana and Himera
Himera
thumb|250px|Remains of the Temple of Victory.thumb|250px|Ideal reconstruction of the Temple of Victory.Himera , was an important ancient Greek city of Sicily, situated on the north coast of the island, at the mouth of the river of the same name , between Panormus and Cephaloedium...
and injured his hand badly enough to give up playing the lyre "for some considerable time."
Some modern scholars have found in the surviving poetry evidence that Ibycus might have spent time at Sicyon
Sicyon
Sikyon was an ancient Greek city situated in the northern Peloponnesus between Corinth and Achaea on the territory of the present-day prefecture of Corinthia...
before journeying to Samosmythological references indicate local knowledge of Sicyon and could even point to the town's alliance with 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...
against Argos
Argos
Argos is a city and a former municipality in Argolis, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Argos-Mykines, of which it is a municipal unit. It is 11 kilometres from Nafplion, which was its historic harbour...
and Athens. His depiction of the women of Sparta as "thigh-showing" (quoted by Plutarch as proof of lax morals among the women there) is vivid enough to suggest that he might have composed some verses in Sparta also. It is possible that he left Samos at the same time as Anacreon, on the death of Polycrates, and there is an anonymous poem in the Palatine Anthology
Palatine Anthology
The Palatine Anthology is the collection of Greek poems and epigrams discovered in 1606 in the Palating Library in Heidelberg. It is based on the lost collection of Constantine Cephalas of the 10th century, which has been composed using older anthologies. It contains material from the 7th century...
celebrating Rhegium as his final resting place, describing a tomb located under an elm, covered in ivy and white reeds.
Poetry
Ibycus' role in the development of Greek lyric poetry was as a mediator between eastern and western styles:Although scholars like Bowra have concluded that his style must have changed with his setting, such a neat distinction is actually hard to prove from the existing verses, which are an intricate blend of
the public, 'choral' style of Stesichorus, and the private, 'soloist' style of the Lesbian poets. It is not certain that he ever in fact composed monody (lyrics for solo performance), but the emotional and erotic quality of his verse, and the fact that his colleague in Samos was Anacreon, who did compose monody, suggest that Ibycus did too. On the other hand, some modern scholars believe that 'choral' lyrics were actually performed by soloists and therefore maybe all Ibycus' work was monody. He modelled his work on the 'choral' lyrics of Stesichorus at least in so far as he wrote narratives on mythical themes (often with original variations from the traditional stories) and structured his verses in triads (units of three stanzas each, called 'strophe', 'antistrophe' and 'epode'), so closely in fact that even the ancients sometimes had difficulty distinguishing between the two poetsCambell elsewhere (Greek Lyric III, Loeb, page 63) cites this comment by Athenaeus (4.172de): "but Stesichorus or Ibycus had previously said in a poem entitled Funeral Games..." Whereas however ancient scholars collected the work of Stesichorus into twenty-six books, each probably a self-contained narrative that gave its title to the whole book, they compiled only seven books for Ibycus, which were numbered rather than titled and whose selection criteria are unknown. Recent papyrus finds suggest also that Ibycus might have been the first to compose 'choral' victory odes
Epinikion
The epinikion or epinicion is a genre of occasional poetry also known in English as a victory ode...
(an innovation usually credited to Simonides
Simonides
* Simonides of Ceos, , a lyric poet* Semonides of Amorgos, an iambic poet* Flavius Simonides Agrippa, son of Roman Jewish Historian Josephus* Constantine Simonides, 19th-century forger of 'ancient' manuscripts...
).Cambell cites P.Oxy.2637 and finds also a 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...
ic/epinikion tone in a quote from Porphyry
Porphyry (philosopher)
Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...
(comment. in Ptolem. harmon. iv):"with the gluttonous mouth of Strife will one day arm for battle against me."; translated by Cambell, Loeb III, page 271
Until the 1920s, all that survived of Ibycus' work were two large-ish fragments (one seven, the other thirteen lines long) and about fifty other lines scraped together from a variety of ancient commentaries. Since then, papyrus finds have greatly added to the store of Ibycean verses - notably, and controversially, forty-eight continuous lines addressed to Polycrates, whose identification with Polycrates of Rhodes (son of Polycrates, the Samian tyrant) requires a careful selection of historical sources. Authorship of the poem is attributed to Ibycus on textual and historical grounds but its quality as verse is open to debate: "insipid", "inept and slovenly" or, more gently, "not an unqualified success" and optimally "the work of a poet realizing a new vision, with a great command of epic material which he could manipulate for encomiastic effect." In the poem, Ibycos parades the names and characteristics of heroes familiar from Homer's Trojan epic, as types of people the poem is not about, until he reaches the final stanza, where he reveals that his real subject is Polycrates, whom he says he will immortalize in verse. An elaborate and not very amusing joke, this "puzzling" poem has been considered historically significant by some scholars as a signal from Ibycus that he is now turning his back on epic themes to concentrate on love poetry instead: a new vision or recusatio.
He composed like Stesichorus in a literary language, largely Epic with some Doric
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...
flavouring, and with a few Aeolisms
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 ....
that he borrowed from the love poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus. It is possible however that the Doric dialect was added by editors in Hellenistic and Roman times, when the poet's home town, Rhegium, had become more Doric than it had been in the poet's own time. In addition to this "superficial element of Doric dialect", the style of Ibycus features mainly dactylic rhythms (reflecting the Epic traditions he shared with Stesichorus), a love theme and accumulated epithets. His use of imagery can seem chaotic but it is justified as an artistic effect. His style has been described by one modern scholar as "graceful and passionate." The ancients sometimes considered his work with distaste as a lecherous and corrupting influenceD.A.Campbell, Greek Lyric III, Loeb (1991) page 8: "His love poetry was what later generations particularly remembered, sometimes with distaste", citing as proof Philodemus
Philodemus
Philodemus of Gadara was an Epicurean philosopher and poet. He studied under Zeno of Sidon in Athens, before moving to Rome, and then to Herculaneum. He was once known chiefly for his poetry preserved in the Greek anthology, but since the 18th century, many writings of his have been discovered...
and Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
, translated on page 217:
- Philodemus On Music, here commenting on the arguments of the Stoic DiogenesDiogenes of SinopeDiogenes the Cynic was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope , he was born in Sinope , an Ionian colony on the Black Sea , in 412 or 404 BCE and died at Corinth in 323 BCE.Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure...
: "And he did not show that Ibycus, Anacreon and the like corrupted young men by their melodies but rather by their ideas." - CiceroTusc. 4.33: "Finally, what revelations do the greatest scholars and finest poets make about themselves in their poems and songs? Alcaeus was recognised as a valiant hero in his city, but look at what he writes about love for youths! Anacreon's poetry of course is all erotic. More than any of them Ibycus of Rhegium was ablaze with love, as his writings demonstrate. And we see that the love of all these is lustful."
Menelaus
Menelaus may refer to;*Menelaus, one of the two most known Atrides, a king of Sparta and son of Atreus and Aerope*Menelaus on the Moon, named after Menelaus of Alexandria.*Menelaus , brother of Ptolemy I Soter...
's failure to kill Helen of Troy , under the spell of her beauty, was valued by ancient critics above Eurypides's account of the same story in his play Andromache
Andromache (play)
Andromache is an Athenian tragedy by Euripides. It dramatises Andromache's life as a slave, years after the events of the Trojan War, and her conflict with her master's new wife, Hermione. The date of its first performance is unknown, although scholars place it sometime between 428 and 425 BC...
.
Fragment 286
The following poem was quoted by the ancient scholar Athenaeus in his wide-ranging discourses Scholars at DinnerDeipnosophistae
The Deipnosophistae may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers...
and it demonstrates some of the characteristics of Ibycean verse:
-
-
- In spring the Kydonian
- apple trees, watered by flowing
- streams there where the Maidens
- have their unravished garden, and vine buds,
- growing under the shadowy branches
- of the vines, bloom and flourish. For me, however, love
- is at rest in no season
- but like the ThracianThraceThrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe. As a geographical concept, Thrace designates a region bounded by the Balkan Mountains on the north, Rhodope Mountains and the Aegean Sea on the south, and by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara on the east...
north windEtesianThe etesians ', sometimes found in the Latin form etesiae), meltemi μελτέμι , or meltem are the strong, dry north windsof the Aegean Sea, which blow from about mid-May to mid-September...
, - ablaze with lightning,
- rushing from AphroditeAphroditeAphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....
with scorching - fits of madness, dark and unrestrained,
- it forcibly convulses from their very roots
- my mind and heart.
-
The poem establishes a contrast between the tranquility of nature and the ever restless impulses to which the poet's desires subject him, while the images and epithets accumulate almost chaotically, communicating a sense of his inner turmoil. In the original Greek, initial tranquility is communicated by repeated vowel sounds in the first six lines. His love of nature and his ability to describe it in lively images are reminiscent of Sappho's work.
External links
- http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POXY/VExhibition/images/1790.jpg