The Praise Singer: A Novel

AUTHOR’S NOTE

IF THE LIVES OF Greek poets in the latter half of the sixth century are to be understood, we must be aware more of contrasts than of parallels with the condition of writers today.

It was only on the very lowest level, that of the marketplace entertainer, that the singer or reciter made his living from a public audience. Circulation of the written word was still unknown, and compositions were committed to writing only for personal reference, if at all. Many surviving fragments of the century’s great lyric poets may have been recorded only after a long circulation by word of mouth. It is certain that the whole of Homer was so transmitted for some two centuries, and may incorporate material centuries older still, over a stretch of time during which the art of writing had entirely perished; Pisistratos’ collation came just in time to rescue him for a literate society. During the Dark Age, and into the dawn of the archaic renaissance, the libraries of the bards were contained entirely within their heads.

Before the passing of the powerful aristocratic oligarchies, private means would assure both the poet’s independence and an audience of his peers: Sappho, Alkaios, Solon, had no need of patronage. This situation was changed by the advent of the “tyrants.”

It is little understood today that nearly all the Greek tyrants were well to the left of the oligarchies they superseded, and, though invariably of aristocratic birth themselves, emerged as champions of underprivileged majorities. The term itself had originally a neutral connotation, like the word “dictator” in Rome. Its later meaning derived from the excesses of some tyrants, once all restraints on their exercise of power had been removed. The blanket generalization that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a historical absurdity (compare, for instance, Nero with Marcus Aurelius); and tyrants came in all shades of personality from benign father-figures to sadistic monsters. What they had in common was that they were all heads of state, in whom resided the poet’s only hope of public performance and recognition, even though he might be a man of property. Thus his situation was quite different from that of writers in other ages of patronage, such as Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson, who could pick up a living in time of need through the theater or the printing press.

Prose composition, dependent wholly on writing, had not yet begun; and neither, therefore, had history or biography. Anyone trying to piece together the lives and characters of the archaic poets must turn to the researches of scholars, among whom the late Sir Maurice Bowra has pride of place, who have collected from all kinds of scattered sources the fragments of their work, and references or quotations by other, often much later, classical authors. Thus the record of their lives is skeletal when it is even that; and their treatment in fiction leaves the novelist with many more lacunae to fill in than when dealing with a much-chronicled figure such as Alexander the Great.

Simonides is known to have been born in Keos (whose severe austerity laws are described by Strabo) and to have been so ugly that when he had composed a satire on the Corinthians, someone asked him how so ill-favored a man dared reproach a beautiful city. Nothing is known of his childhood, and I may have traduced a loving father who fostered his talent; but it seems that, once out of Keos, he felt no disposition to go back. It is not known whether he ever worked in Ionia before the Persian conquest, or in Samos either; but there is some evidence that at one time he lived in Euboia, before being invited to Athens by the Pisistratids.

His father’s name is known; so are the names of his sister and her husband, because they were the parents of Bacchylides, himself a gifted poet, and his uncle’s pupil and companion up to the time of his death in Sicily, at the age of eighty-eight. Theasides son of Leoprepes appears in Herodotos as a man of high repute among both the Spartans and the Aiginetans, who was allowed to arbitrate in a dispute between them, and thus averted a war. Unluckily his native city is not given; but Leoprepes, the name of Simonides’ father, is an unusual one. I have made them brothers by pure guess.

One of the most striking features of Simonides’ career is the respect with which he was welcomed back to Athens after the expulsion of Hippias, despite his long residence at the Pisistratid court. It seems probable that he left it after the murder of Hipparchos; the dates of his sojourn in Thessaly are not exactly known. Anakreon, who also found a refuge there, was also persona grata when he came back. It is probable that the Pisistratids were not so unpopular in Athens before the unforgivable defection of the exiled Hippias to Persia. It is also true that to the Greeks of the great age, good work was good work, and carried its own passport.

In the story of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, I have followed Thukydides’ account in every particular that he gives. The errors he corrects in the received tradition—that the friends were democrats, and that they killed the reigning tyrant—are the first known instance of distortion of history for political ends.

The name of Harmodios’ father is not known; but J. K. Davies, in his indispensable Athenian Propertied Families, 600-300 B.C., gives Proxenos as a family name.

The curious circumstance about Harmodios’ father, as with the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, is that he did nothing. Whether or not he knew of Hipparchos’ attempts upon his son, the public humiliation of his daughter would have insulted him, as head of the family, more than any of its other menfolk. I have therefore inferred that, in an era when life-expectancy was short, he was already dead, and that this place was held by Harmodios himself.

A bronze statue-group of the “liberators,” set up in the Agora, was taken as a trophy by Xerxes during the Persian invasion, and carried back to Susa. The Athenians commissioned another statue-group to take its place. In the fourth century Susa fell to Alexander, who sent the original statues back to Athens. For some centuries the two groups stood in the Agora side by side.