Anne Pippin Burnett, The Art of Bacchylides

Anne Pippin Burnett, The Art of Bacchylides, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1985.

The origins of this complex and rigorously conventional poetic performance are lost in the unrecorded time when Hellenic society was first organizing itself. The Greeks themselves said that they danced in imitation of the Olympian gods, who danced when Apollo brought them the lyre, but dancing of some sort must have gone back to the times when men first began to collaborate in the hunt. Dance was the most direct and economical route to ecstasy and ecstasy is necessary, as any people with a shaman knows, to courage and strength as well as to truth and the higher forms of cleanliness. What is more, singing dancers do not work just upon themselves, and ecstasy need not be their only end, for their activity may also be directed outward toward the daimonic world that is approached, sometimes even controlled by magical means. In this realm a band of singing dancers has a special efficacy since many voices obviously have more effect than one when calling upon a nonhuman power, while many hands and feet make the rite more binding when the actions of sympathetic magic are performed. Much of magic depends upon repetition, and the plurality of a chorus provides a multiplied simultaneous repetition of puissant patterns of gesture and sound. Their numbers enforced their demands, and even in a postmagical world the communal songs of the choruses were always—especially by contrast to the single-voiced “interior” lyrics of a monadist—the poetry of power. (6)

Choral song could recreate an old event by means of mimicry and then, since the gestures of demonic force of the original moment could be danced into the present ceremony. In this way, while it offered a pleasing and worshipful spectacle to the gods, the archaic chorus also pressed upon the supernatural world by means that were almost magical to obtain what it sought—the immediate presence of an active divine influence. /

Obviously this choral practice of recreating a bit of the past depended upon a special sense of time. We tend to think of time as a series of units arranged in a line (one end of which is clear, the other indiscernible), wherein only the final item is real. The moments along this line are wedged tightly between their predecessors and their successors and though they may survive as causes of present phenomena they cannot break away from their won before and after, or be brought to life again. Choral lyric, on the other hand, saw time as a pool in which past events sank aimlessly but never ceased to be. Any agitation could bring a fragment of yesterday up from below, and what the dancers did was give this pool of time an artful, ritual stir. (7-8)

…the present celebration had to be subtly detached from its own specific hour and locality if it was to receive this extratemporal infusion, and to achieve this the singers used a technique that was as old as sorcery—self-description. The girl singers of Alcman’s Partheneion spent half of their song depicting their own performance, as if the visible present were a story to be told, and, in this way, they made of their own ceremony an even t that had some of the truth and durability of myth. Not all choruses were as full of themselves as this one, but even in the most austere epinecian odes the male chorus, performing in the Dorian mode, would sing about singing in that mode, much as the witch who cut her herbs into the fire chanted, “I cut my herbs into the fire.” Self-description was the witch’s way of liberating her gesture from its bondage to the actual and the quotidian, so that it could operate outside the daily laws of causation, and the choral dancers who imitated her attempted to do much the same thing. Singing themselves, they sacralized their own movement and their own sound, for they were to be the medium through which power that was not human would pass into the present company. (8)

The spectator saw dancers whom he knew, wearing costumes that he had perhaps seen before; they were a part of his life, but he heard them describe themselves and their performance with the same music that described matters from another world and another time, and meanwhile in the dance these neighbors were instantaneously heroes or monsters or even gods. Such a spectator watched while his own familiar and tangible present became indistinguishable from a world that was strange and timeless. His own incidental presence at a festival lost its fleeting and random quality, for it was recorded as it occurred, memorialized and translated into art, and at the same time the past came to his as a freshly felt sensation. (8)

It was the function of choral poetry to introduce a bit of demonic power into a rite or festival, and so the performers would often mime an even that had been touched with supernatural force. The idea was to activate a moment so numinous that some of its electricity could be tapped for the present ceremony—providing of course that the gods were pleased with the song. The thing could be done in twenty lines or two hundred, but the essential trick was always the same since the singers had first to remake the moment so well that its indwelling spirit was aroused, then draw its force off quickly, before it had time to dissipate. (15)

Furthermore, though the chorus obviously means to entertain its present festival audience while it delights the god it would praise, these urbane intentions do not explain the song’s distinctive narrative qualities, all of which can be classified as breaches in the ordinary rules of the story-telling art. The fact that the story of Theseus’ undersea visit, appropriate or inappropriate, is not properly told at all, for the song sets up fictional expectations, then leaves them unsatisfied. The singers begin with a challenge but never let us know whether the challenge was met; they send their hero off to visit his father and never let him find him; they make two men quarrel, then show neither resolution nor victory between them. Early in their tale a girl cries out, engaging all our attention, but she is never mentioned again. And halfway through, a ring is cast into the sea, likewise never to be heard of more. The singers linger over preparatory moments, then race past their crucial scene; they pay more attention to irrelevant water sprites than they do to the queen of the sea, and worst of all, when this choral narrative is broken off, the physical condition of all the principals is exactly what it was at the start. The hero is still alive, but the Athenians are also still at sea, still being carried as victims toward the labyrinth, and in the self-defined world of story-telling for its own sake nothing has occurred, since Minos is still master of the fates of everyone on board. /

The tale has been rich in poetic magic, offering enchantments like the “sea-wet toes” of the Nereids, but its central narrative miracle—the wonder that a Hecataeus or a Herodotus would have dwelt upon—has been almost suppressed. Theseus disappeared into the water, the ship sped on before a following wind, and then Theseus reappeared at a point far to the south of the position of his dive, astonishing Minos who thought him probably drowned and certainly left behind. All this we are expected to understand, just as we are expected to understand the purpose of the voyage and the dangers that wait at its end, for the essential fictional questions of why and how and what happened next are exactly the ones that this chorus does not propose to face. They refuse to treat their episode as a free-standing anecdote with a beginning, an end, and a “point”, and they likewise refuse to treat it as a “chapter” in the continuing saga of Theseus. Instead they detach a single event, emphasizing its discrete nature by locating it in the lost time of a journey at sea, and then they use their voices, hands, feet, and bodies to bring it to life again. (22-23)

No one knows exactly how and when the chorus that danced heavenly power into earthly events became associated with athletic victory. The only thing that is certain is that the victory songs of the early classical age did use the magical unison of choral gesture and voice, in spite of their ostensibly secular occasion, and that an epinician ode in consequence put pressure on the supernatural world, just as a dithyramb or paean did. The strength of a man was hymned with tones and postures associated with the immanence of the divine, and this meant that the composer of such an ode was conscious of great power, but also of a strong tension between the matter and the manner of his song. He had to stretch a single web of praise between heaven and earth—as Pindar put it, between a mortal who is nothing and gods who live forever in the bronze houses of the sky (N. 6.3)—and the tissue sometimes showed the marks of strain. (38)

Because the myths of the victory odes were conveyors of force and links with fame, not mere embellishment, they did not have to be happy or even auspicious. Stories of crime, disaster, grief, or suffering could give a richer and more serious tone to praise, as long as the poet provided some positive ballast, and this both Pindar and Bacchylides knew very well how to do. The negative myth could be made to produce some joyous detail; it could be moralized and used as a warning; it could be paired with a second, happy story, or another sort of compensation might be offered in the form of smiling allegorical figures. (96)