Notes on Greek Poetry:

Hellenistic Period to the War of Independence

 

Use this as a guide to the xeroxed selections from the Trypanis anthology. Parts 1 and 2 of this outline deal with background earlier than the poems represented in our xeroxed selection.

 

1.     HELLENISTIC PERIOD

Pastoral tradition:

Theocritus (c. 300-c.260 BCE), a native of Syracuse who lived in Kos and Alexandria. Known for his idylls, bucolic poems with figures like shepherds and goatherds establishing a decorum of shorter narrative and dramatic works.

            Bion of Phlossa (near Smyrna), who lived toward the end of the 2nd century BCE, author of Lament on Adonis. Thought to be the last major pastoral poet of the era.

 

Elegies and epics:

Callimachus (c. 305-c. 240 BCE), elegiac poet at Alexandria. His pupil, Apollonius, also known as Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 270-c. 245 BCE) authored an epic in 4 books called the Argonautica, dealing with legends of Jason, Medea, et al.

 

 

2.     RISE OF ROMAN INFLUENCE

146 BCE: Achaean League collapses and much of Greece becomes a dependency of Rome (Corinth destroyed). Rome also destroys Carthage at the end of the 3rd Punic War.

 

From 89 BCE on, the Mithridatic Wars in Asia Minor trouble the eastern empire.

 

30 BCE: The last of the Ptolemies, Caesarion (son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar) executed at the command of Octavius.

 

While Athens and Rhodes remained important centers of education, other cities such as Alexandria, Pergamum, Antioch and Ephesus had increasing cultural importance.

 

The relative decline of Greek poetry occurs at a golden age of Roman poets:

Virgil (70-19 BCE)

Horace (65 BCE- 8 CE; patronage of Maecenas 37-30 BCE)

Catullus (84-54 BCE)

Propertius  (c. 48 BCE- c. 15 BCE)

Ovid  (43 BCE- 17 CE)

 

Greek poetry persists in various lyric traditions such as the epigram and in imitations of classical forms such as the sapphic and the anacreontic.

 

 

 

3.     CHRISTIAN AND BYZANTINE ERA

Hymns, chants and metrical sermons, sometimes influence by Hebrew liturgical traditions as well as classical pagan prayers, become a dominant form of poetry, though there are still laments for the pagan world like the anonymous epigram in our handout (p. 356). See also the “Evensong” on pp. 360-361 of the handout.

 

One important figure (not in our handout) was Nonnus, an Alexandrian poet of the 4th century CE, who wrote an epic called Dionysiaca in 48 books—as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Nonnus was known for frankness about homosexual love, a subject generally silenced in the Christian era until another Alexandrian poet, Cavafy (1868-1933) brought it back.

 

Musaeus (xerox pp. 356-358) was from the “school of Nonnus,” and was principally known for his poem about Hero and Leander. The story of a lover swimming the Hellespont is one that will recur in literature about Greece, including work by Byron and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

 

Another tradition emerging in the Byzantine era is of folksongs, including hundreds of ballads about the folk hero Basil Digenes Akritas, whose name means a sort of frontiersman born of two races—he was said to be the son of a Saracen father and a Greek mother. In the song we have (pp. 463-465), who would you compare Akritas to in American folk tradition? Notice that these songs, which may be as old as the 11th century in their sources, were not written down until the 19th century.

 

Some other questions about the folksongs in our handout: How is the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) seen in these songs. How are other kinds of narrative notif used in “The Bridge of Arta,” “The Curse of the Deserted Maiden,” “The Red Lips,” “A Lullaby,” “The Ship of Death” and “The Passing of Death”? What do these songs tell you about Greek life in an anthropological sense?

 

Vizentzos Cornaros (1553-1617), a nobleman and poet in Venetian-controlled Crete, which was captured by the Turks during his lifetime. His poem The Erotókritos, written in more then 10,000 rhyming 15-syllable lines, is the single most influential literary artifact of the Byzantine era, a poem that, in its many oral versions, was until recently recited by heart in the mountain villages of Crete. In the story the love of Erotókritos and the princess Aretousa is opposed by her father, King Herakles of Athens. When Aretousa rejects the marriage her father has proposed instead, she and her loyal nurse, Phrosyne, are put in a dungeon. Athens is besieged by Wallachians, and the young hero takes a potion that turns him into a mysterious dark-skinned knight who kills the Wallachian king in single combat. As a reward, he is offered Aretousa’s hand in marriage and regains his natural appearance. The lovers marry and reign over Athens. Cornaros (or Kornaros) may have adapted the story from an Italian translation of a French story. The poem is also known for its didactic aphorisms, and we have examples of these in our selections.

 

Remember, though, that some of the most influential poets upon early Modern Greek literature were as much Italian in their heritage as Greek. This would include Dionysios Solomos, author of what became the national anthem.

 

 

4.     THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

The movement to create an independent Greek state free of Ottoman influence had three important components: 1) the geopolitical machinations of other countries like Russia, France and England; 2) the dawning cultural consciousness of a Greek intelligentsia dwelling on questions of language (demotic versus katharevousa or “purist”); 3) the rise of a militant culture of klephtes or rural guerillas, some of whom controlled small territories like war-lords.

 

Poets getting education abroad brought aspects of the Romantic revolution to Greece—note only the literature of Goethe and Wordsworth, but also the ideas of Rousseau, the news of the French Revolution (1789) and the rise of Napoleon. There are a great many Greek poets of the Romantic era, all of whom were involved in rethinking the Greek language as well as the situation of Greeks as a people. In this era both Greeks and Turks were alternately romanticized and demonized, thought of as primitives and “noble savages,” depending on who was writing about them.

 

Dionysios Solomos (1798-1857), born in Zante, son of a count and a serving girl, educated in Italy. He first wrote poetry in Italian, but on his return to Greece in 1818 found he was especially influenced by the Erotókritos and began writing poems in a mixture of demotic Greek and the purist form of the language.  His “Hymn to Freedom,” part of which was set to music in 1828 by Nicholas Mantzaros, eventually became the national anthem of Greece.

 

Note: As you read ahead in Byron’s poems and the fiction of Papadiamantis, how do you see these issues and themes reflected by Greeks and non-Greeks?