Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli”. Today we will talk about the first poem of the book called Solon. With this poem we will take part in a banquet in ancient Greece where we will meet poetess Sappho. I'm here today with James Ackhurst, with whom I co-translated Poemi Conviviali in 2022. James is a poet and a writer based in New Zealand and he has a background in classics and ancient history. The poem you will hear in our English translation is read by David Carter and Joanna Strafford. You can also enjoy Taije Silverman's and Marina de la Putta Johnston's wonderful translation on our website. And the music is by Marianne Gubri.

ELENA

The very first poem is called Solon and the story takes place during a banquet in ancient Athens. Well, the Latin word for banquet is convivium, and in Italian it is convito. So we immediately see why this poem is the first of convivial poems, of poems of the banquet. And since most of Convivial Poems were published in a journal called Il Convito, it makes sense that Pascoli begins his book with this particular poem and setting. It's also a way for Pascoli to pay homage to Adolfo de Bosis, the man who had financially sponsored Il Convito and actually invited Pascoli to be part of the group of artists and writers writing for this journal. “A lively bunch of militant energies”, as Paschal himself described them in a letter to De Bosis and then in the preface to Poemi Conviviali. Well, the metaphor and the image also of the ancient banquet in fact evokes a gathering of intellectual and artists. But James, what were in fact banquets like in ancient Greece?

JAMES

Well, I haven't actually been to any ancient Greek banquets, but the ancient Greek banquet, the word we are looking for really in ancient Greek is symposium or symposion. And that was really a fundamental kind of social institution, I guess, in ancient Greece. So that word symposium or symposium means drinking together. So it’s really is just sort of drinking something jointly. And it's typically an all male gathering. So this is predominantly aristocrats. And they would eat and drink together, laid out on couches in a room called the men's room, but not like a men's room, like a bathroom, like a room where men gather. So that was called the andron. And you can see these archaeologically because they have. ..They're organised so that they have space for the couches and the entrance, the doorway actually has to be to one side of the front wall. So you see them all over Greek archaeological sites. And so there's men in there, men only really, except for really the sort of paid help. And these can take the form of flute girls or waitresses, or also hitairi. And these are really a kind of high class prostitute, similar to maybe the geishas, the geishas in Japan. So one example of this is Aspasia, or Aspasia, to use the pronunciation of the modern Greek name. And Aspasia was Heracles’ favourite concubine, and she was a former hetaira. And actually Pericles fathered a son with her who he called, with great originality, Pericles junior. So scholars disagree on the question about whether ordinary women who weren't prostitutes or flute girls or wine servants could actually go to these banquets. But there was definitely music and there's definitely poetry accompanied by music, so lyric poetry. And we actually don't know that much about what ancient Greek music sounded like. There are some experiments out there where people try and reconstruct it and we have little scraps of musical notation on the inscription in Delphi, for example, but we don't have that much music, so we don't know exactly what these lyric problems would have sounded like with musical accompaniment. Just like we don't know what the tragedies and comedies would have sounded like with their musical accompaniment. There are often players of this instrument called the aulos, and the aulos is often translated flute. I'm not sure if we translated aulos as flute if it came up in Pascal. But anyway, it's not really a flute, it's an oboe. It's got a reed in it, so it's double oboe with reed. So reeded double oboe, I guess so you see depictions of it in vases. There's actually a strap behind the player's head and then there's these two kind of prongs of this instrument that go out and you can kind of separate them. And there's even a special musical and poetic genre of song making called sympodic. And so both Sappho that we're just about to talk about, and Alceus, who's kind of like the other poet of Lesbos, who doesn't really get that much attention nowadays, but he's also very important in terms of ancient Greek poetry. So they're famous representatives of this genre of sympotic song and sympotic poetry. And these songs often address specific historical events or biographical events. Much like what singer songwriters do these days. And they're often accompanied by stringed instruments as well. So the lyre, for example, which features a lot in Pascal, and it's the ancestor of the modern harp.

ELENA

So Solon really is a meta poem. On the one hand, it is an allegory for the journal Il Convito, the journal as a container of poem, just like the ancient banquet used to be an event where poems were sung. But there are quite a few more layers of interpretation. First, Pascoli did not invent the story behind the poem, but as he often does, it takes inspiration from a source. And in this case, the source is Claudius Aelianus, a Greek author who lived in the second century after Christ in Rome. Aelianus is famous for reporting peculiar anecdotes about Greek authors and personalities from earlier centuries. It is he who reports the story that one day the Athenian statesman Solon heard during a banquet a song composed by the poetess Sappho. So Solon supposedly asked the singer to sing that song over and over again so that he could learn it by heart. But why? The singer must have asked, so I can learn it and die. So this is actually what happens in Pascoli's poem. But in this case, Solon invites Sappho herself to his banquet to sing two songs. So before we actually listen to the poem, James, who was Solon?

JAMES

Okay, well, that's a big question. So there's basically two Solons. So one Solon is the mythological Solon, the Solon who makes it into lists of the ancient Greek wise men. And we can see the mythological Solon in Herodotus’ Histories. So in Herodotus’ Histories, there's a famous story, I think, in book one of Herodotus’ Histories, where Croesus of Lydia, who is a very rich king. ..In fact, there used to be an expression in English that's not so common nowadays, as rich as Croesus. So that's Croesus. So Croesus is the king of this kingdom, Lydia. Solon comes to visit him, and Solon has this reputation for wisdom. So Croesus says to him, “Solon, who is….You know, you travelled widely, you're a wise man. The reputation for wisdom precedes you. Who is the most successful, the happiest man in the world?” He uses this Greek word, I think it's eudaimon. So it kind of means a combination of both happiest and most successful. And this is after Croesus has shown him all his treasures and his Ferraris and things like that. And Solon says, “It's not you,” he says, “it's this guy who fought for his country in Athens and he died. And, you know, he had grandchildren and he had children, and they grew up and they were healthy, and that's the best life. And that guy was the most successful person ever”. And Croesus says, okay, all right, who's the second most successful person you've ever met? Thinking it's going to be him again. And it's actually not even him. He's not even second. So it's these two guys who…. This is a funny story in its own right. They dragged a cart with their mother on it to go to this festival, Hera, in Argos, because their mother couldn't do it. And when they did this, the mother prayed to the God, the goddess Hera, to give her sons the best thing that can happen to mortals. And so they promptly keeled over and died. It's this very pessimistic ancient Greek idea that the best thing. We found this idea in Sophocles, too, the best thing for mortals is to be dead. And if you go to the Delphi Museum, you'll see statues of these two young men that we think were Cleobis and Byton, the two guys in those stories.

Anyway, so coming back out of that story to where Croesus and Solon are talking, that's the story about them, that's the mythological Solon, because historians have studied the chronology of that, you know, when Croesus was alive, when Solon was probably alive, and they think that basically it couldn't have happened. So someone made up the story at some point, and Herodotus wrote it down in his histories, which, to be fair, he always tells us that you can't necessarily trust the veracity of what he's writing down, but he's going to write down the stories anyway. Okay, so I'll try and do the historical Solon a bit more quickly. But second, Solon is the historical Solon. And we know Solon was a real bloke. He was a person, you know, existed in the world. And he's associated with a really important series of reforms in ancient Athens. And the date that that's associated with is the date of Solon's archonship, the date when he was eponymous archon in Athens. The archon that is officially, that gives his name to the year. And that year is 594,3. So we're really. And the Athenian years go over our years. That's why there's kind of two years there but it's one year, 594, three. And this is, you know, in archaic Athens, it's not classical Athenian democracy yet. And it seems like the problem Solon had to deal with was massive economic inequality, that the rich people had a lot of land and the poor didn't have much. And I'm not going to go into all the details of what happened and how Solon solved it, but to cut a long story short, it seems like what he did was not to kind of completely redistribute the land, but he did make it harder for really poor people to slip into slavery. So he made it illegal for Athenians to sell themselves into slavery. And he also enacted some political reforms. Again, I'm not going to go into great detail, but these political reforms later on in a text written by Aristotle or one of his students, it's described as democratic, or we might say proto democratic. The Athenians aren't yet the full classical democracy, but he basically, Solon strengthens the rights that the absolute poorest citizens in Athens have. And so the way that we know this, and we think we know this, the evidence we have, we have poems written by Solon, and I think the fragments all come from this text I just mentioned. There was a text written in the late 4th century. It's called the Treatise on the Constitution of Athens, and it's produced either by Aristotle or a student of Aristotle, we're not sure which. And that is a history of the development of the Constitution of Athens. And as part of this, the author talks about Solon, as part of the discussion of Solon, they talk, they quote lines of Solon's poetry, and we get quite a vivid impression of Solon from that. He often is at pains to present himself as a moderate. He describes himself, for example, as a dog turning among wolves. So it's a vivid image of all these wolves attacking, and the dog is kind of barking and keeping them off. And so that's it. So Solon's mythological wise man, and in actuality, he seems to have been some kind of politician, but he also wrote poetry, and he wrote poetry about his own career and about other things.

ELENA

Okay, great. So in the first part of the poem, we actually see Solon in his banquet, one of the two, enjoying music and in his old age, appreciating the true pleasures of life. So let's listen.

Well, what's extraordinary about these lines is that Pascoli stitched together a variety of fragments of ancient Greek poetry using a technique called tecnica centonaria in Italian, from the word centone, fragmen,t cento in English. Well, a cento is a sort of patchwork poem based on a particular challenge, which is to use lines or parts of lines from great poets of the past in order to create a new text. Well, in the lines you have just heard, Pascoli weaves in a line from the Odyssey where Solon praises a table full of wine and bread, with musicians playing during dinner. Well, then a fragment from Solon himself, that's Fragment 23, Burke, where Solon lists all the things he's happy to have, dogs, horses and guests. Then a fragment from Theognis, that's fragment 1042, where he talks about music turning sorrow into joy. Well, this one fragment, I think, is interesting because the nexus pain and joy can be found in the very last line of the very last poem of Poemi Conviviali, called The Good Tidings. And the line reads, taking comfort from our sorrows. So we're onto something here, a very important theme, the Pascoli, which runs throughout the book. And it kind of creates a ring composition between the first and the last poem of the collection. Pain and joy are linked to one another in a variety of human experiences. And for Solon, here, pain and joy are woven together in the pleasure and comfort that we sometimes get from listening to mournful music in the next dance, as we will hear, actually Sappho's songs. There's yet another layer of interpretation here. Pascoli encapsulates a mini history of the evolution of Greek poetry and its genre. Apparently, three genres of poetry originated within the context of the banquet. The elegy originated from the plaintive songs sung at banquets following a funeral. Iambic poetry, on the other hand, sprung out of the bawdy songs at a stag do, so to speak, or the banquet for the bridegroom to be, then iambic lines being employed in comedies in ancient Greece. So it makes sense. A melic poetry allegedly came from the hen party, again, so to speak, the banquet for the bride. The topic of Melic poetry is serious love, or what we would call now romantic love. The two topics of the songs Sappho sings in this poem by Pascholi are about love and death. So again, Pascoli did not invent these songs completely, but once again he inserts two fragments from actual poems by Sappho, what we have, what's left of them. In the first song, the fragment 153B by Voigt mentions the moonlight. So Sappho's song starts with. That's our translation. Garden shine in silvery moonlight. And not only. But Pascoli also makes a metric change here and uses a. sapphic stanzas, which we actually kept in the English translation. So you talked about genre in general, but can you tell us a bit about who Sappho was and what actually a Sapphic stanza is?

JAMES

Okay, well, this is. I feel like these are all big questions because Sappho is such a humongous figure in ancient Greek culture and poetry and the way we think about the ancient Greeks. So she was seen as one of the kind of supreme poets, kind of maybe up there with Pindar. We know that in the Hellenistic times, you know, after the death of Alexander the Great, there were nine volumes of Sappho's verse in the library, the great library in Alexandria. And of those we have basically zero. We have fragments. And I think we have one complete poem. We have one complete poem, like one almost complete poem, something like that. So we have very little. It's very sad. And we've lost all the music. So Sappho lived probably between about 630 and 570 BC. So she's squarely in this archaic period. She's from one of the city states on Lesbos, which is quite a big island. So it has several city states called Mytilene. And so she's a lesbian. And so she comes from Lesbos and she's a lesbian. And this is where we get the word in modern languages, like English, for, you know, woman who is interested sexually in other women. Because some of Sappho's poems seem to have or definitely have, you know, female and female eroticism in Them. And this is something that's kind of interesting. You look at the history of how Sappho has been studied and received for a long time. Classical scholars, you know, very conservative scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they didn't really like this fact about Sappho, they didn't really like what the text seemed to be saying, so they tried to kind of cover it up in various ways, but I think now we're sort of more able to talk about this openly. But so having said that, one important thing is that in Pascolu and what we say, there is actually a tradition that Sappho fell in love with men too. This features in some of her fragments, I believe, and there's definitely this tradition, I think, in later sources, that Sappho. The way that Sappho died was that she was pining for this boatman, boat man. I should stress that he's a man, he's called Fa'an, and she's pining for him. And this is unrequited love. And so at the end of the day, I don't know when in the day, but anyway, at the end of this tragic story, she throws herself from a cliff top into the sea. So Sappho and all these milik and lyric poets, one of the confusing and complex things about this period is that they all have complicated metres, different metres, elegiac couplets or various different things. I've forgotten all of them, but one of them is this Sapphic stanza. So this is an eolic form. So another thing to say, final thing to say about Sappho, and we'll bring in Alceus here again. So Alcias and Sappho, Lesbian poets. And because they come from Lesbos, they speak Greek funny. So the Greeks, ancient Greek, came in various different dialects. The main ones were Ionic and Doric and there was also Aeolic. And so this dialect has several features. So, for example, when you can't aspirate those kind of like you want to say, how are you? And you say, ow are you? You know, Lesbians would have sounded a bit like that.

So the Sapphic stanza is a verse form or a type of stanza type, you know, a series of four lines, I think, usually four or five, which we associate with Sappho. And it's used all the way through classical verse. So Horace copies it, because Horace is interested in trying to reproduce some of the effects of these Greek lyric poets. And so the way that the Sapphic stanza works is that you have three or four lines, which kind of go. And in ancient poetry we have an alternation not of stressed and unstressed beats, like in English, we'd say, like to justify the ways of God to man. There's five beats as iambic pentameter. An ancient Greek verse, as in Latin verse. It's more like a long vowel than a short vowel, long vowel than a short vowel. So I won't like, tap out on the table or try and do this alternation of long and short vowels. But what. The important thing is that in the first. Well, one of the important things in the first three or four lines, there are longer lines. And one thing to look out for is you get this thing called the chorion, which is long, short, short, long. So it kind of goes bump, but a bum, like, you know, in the middle. And then as you get three longer lines with that in the middle, and then at the end you got this thing called an adonian. And adonian actually comes from a poem. The name comes from a poem by Sappho, or a fragment of a poem by Sappho, where she says, oh, ton adonin, I think so she's invoking Adonis and that metrical structure. Bump, bada bump, bump, shave and a haircut. That's always what you find at the end. So you get these three longish lines or four longish lines, and then you get bump, bump, bump. But it comes back to that every time. So, yeah, and that's something, I think, that we tried to reproduce in our version of this section in Pascoli’s poem. So you get this chorion in the middle of these longer lines. Silvery ring, blue is the sky, following through song is our strength, etc. At the end of each stanza you get the Adonian in our translation. It's bringing my strength out. Beautiful sunset, Whispering wind blows bumpa da bumpa.

ELENA

We did quite well, I think, with that. So without further ado, let's listen to Sappho's first song and hopefully our listeners will be able to notice these shorter verses that we created.

So, as James said, in the Western tradition, Sappho is typically associated with homoerotic experiences among young women, which were customary in ancient Greece. But here Paschali portrays a love story between Sappho and a man called Phaon. There's a famous painting by Jacques Louis David representing Sappho and Phaon. And also the unrequited love that Sappho felt for this man inspired the 44th sonnet sequence, Sappho and Phaon by 19th century British poet Mary Robinson. In case you want to keep reading about Sappho. Anyway, here with Paschali, there's also an interesting word play. Pascolu takes Sappho to mean light. Words found means the light of the setting sun. There is always a remaining light following the sun setting into the sea. And that image signifies Sappho's suicide. For love she turns into the light trailing the day's end. And then it is no wonder then, that upon hearing the first song, Solon understand this to be the song of death. But it's not, says Sappho. This is the song of love, a type of consuming love, romantic love, we may say, where pain and pleasure are mixed. And the song also hints at the loss of oneself. But it is unclear whether it is through death or through erotic love. Let's now listen to the second song, which is the actual song of death. Pascoli here has inserted another fragment by Sappho, which is B150V, which says, you are in the house of the poet. Apparently it's a fragment from an elegy to mourn the death of someone.

ELENA

And the poem ends with Solon saying, may I learn it and die? The song he wants to learn is, in Pascoli's interpretation, the song of death. Is it the song of death or is it the song of immortality, the kind of immortality one gains by being remembered. Poetry immortalises glory and good deeds, and poetry lives forever. Or so we hope. But it's definitely a good theme to put at the beginning of a book of poetry. It speaks highly of the function of poetry to prolong human life. But also, in my opinion, it also reminds of the fragment by Theognis about sorrow and joy in taking comfort from one's pain. If possible, we can accept death, I think, if we lived a life well spent. Which reminds me of one of my favourite mottos by Leonardo da Vinci, with which I want to finish this episode. And the motto says, as a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death. Well, thank you for listening and now you can enjoy the full track read by David Carter and Joanna Strafford and music by Marianne Gubri. Or you can read Taije Silverman and Marina de la Puta Johnston's alternative translation on the website.