Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli”. I'm here today with Professor Michael Trapp, who is Emeritus Professor of Greek Literature and Thought at King's College London. Michael's knowledge of the ancient world is extensive, and among other things, he has researched the way in which prominent figures of the antiquity such as Socrates have been reimagined and appropriated since their own days. And therefore he's the perfect guest for this episode as today we will talk about “The Owl”, a poem narrating the death of Socrates as observed by a group of boys on the street of Athens. This is a very interesting rewriting of the story of Socrates’ execution, which, as Michael will tell us, has been the subject of countless retellings and artistic representations. James Ackhurst and I co-translated Poemi Conviviali in 2022 for Italica Press and the translation you hear is our own. The poem is read by James himself. The music is by Giovanni Tardini and played at the Celtic harp by Arianna Mornico.
ELENA
“The Owl “is one of the poems grouped under the title “Poems of Psyche”. In Greek, “psyche” means “soul”, “breath” or “life”, but also “butterfly”, as listeners know from the episodes that we did on the poem “Psyche”. So it's the winged entity leaving the body upon death. We can see this representation of the human soul on many ancient tombs and mosaics in Greece and Rome. So in this poem, the winged entity representing the soul is not a butterfly, but it's an owl. And in ancient Greece, the owl was the sacred bird of the goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom. So the protagonist of this poem is in fact the wise man par excellence, Socrates. And the poem narrates his execution when Socrates is forced to commit suicide by drinking a potion made with hemlock. The inspiration comes obviously from Plato's dialogue Phaedo. The very scene of Socrates death in Plato's dialogue, which is the only ancient source we have describing this event, has been the subject of many works of art and literature in the 18th and 19th century. And Michael, can you tell us a bit about the fortune of this scene in the centuries leading to Pascoli's poem, which was published in 1904 as part of the Conviviali collection.
MICHAEL
The death of Socrates was a great focus of attention in the 18th century, particularly in visual art. It was the subject of prize competitions like the Prix de Rome. And the death of Socrates was therefore one of the great exemplary scenes from antiquity, epitomising the lessons that antiquity could teach us: in this case, Socrates, moral heroism and his firmness of purpose unto death. For illustrations, think just of Jacques Louis David's painting or Antonio Canova's low relief sculpture, but they are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Everybody was doing death of Socrates through the second half of the 18th century and a couple of decades into the 19th century, and then you get a kind of burnout, a kind of disenchantment, romanticism, the abandonment of ancient paradigms as the most powerful people wanted to do things differently. And I think you can get a spectacular illustration of what results from that by comparing Canova or David with a sculpture of the death of Socrates done in 1876 by the Russian sculptor Mark Antokolsky, copies of which are both in St Petersburg and by the lakeside in Lugano. There you see not heroic Socrates, but a completely inert, slumped, dead Socrates, utterly alone, the empty cup of hemlock rolling around his feet on the floor. Complete contrast and a testament to the desire to do the scene differently. And this desire to look differently affected not just depictions of death scene, but creative reactions to the Phaedo as a whole. So, thinking quite close to Pascoli's time, we have some fascinatingly destabilised or decentred uses of the Phaedo and its characters. British literature by the poets Amy Levy and John Addington, Symonds Levy in her poem “Xanthippe”, published in 1881, where you have the resentment of the intelligent woman shut out from masculine intellectual society and rather closer to Pascoli in some ways. Symonds’ poem: an episode which is voiced by Phaedo as an old man looking back on his earlier life. And two great moments of encounters with Socrates. One when Socrates rescues him from a brothel where he was working as a male prostitute. And the other, Socrates stroking his hair on the last day of his life in prison to the end. And I think in particular that spotlighting of Phaedo's hair gives us rather an intriguing link to Pascoli, who doesn't name Phaedo, but clearly has him there in the prison. He is the pupil with the luxuriant long hair.
ELENA
Well, thank you very much, Michael. That is absolutely fascinating. And in this poem, Pascoli narrates Socrates’ death, however, he doesn't do it directly, but through a variety of perspectives and a polyphony of voices. And the first scene is in fact dominated by a group of children, Gryllus, Hyllus and Coccalus. Pascoli didn't invent these. He hardly ever invents anything as listeners know from the other episodes in this podcast. These are good classical literary names, mostly from a Greek text called Mimiamboi, mime iambics, written by the Greek poet Herodas during the third century before Christ. These mimes depict scenes from everyday life in ancient Greece, and they're quite vivid, I must say, and at times even sexually explicit, but very enjoyable to read. So Hyllus, Gryllus and Coccalus, they're playing together in Athens, right outside the prison where Socrates awaits death, called the house of the Eleven for the number of magistrates there. So Socrates’ execution had to be postponed, as no death sentences were carried out during the solemnities known as the Lesser Delia. So during this holiday, a sacred ship went to the island of Delos, commemorating Theseus freeing Athens from paying tribute to Crete by killing the Minotaur, if you are familiar with this myth. And Socrates’ execution is to be postponed until the ship returns from Delos. The children are outside the prison and they have captured a bird, an owl. So let us listen to the first two stanzas.
And Michael, this is quite an unusual way, I think, of narrating the death of Socrates, as it provides a unique perspective and we see Socrates through the eyes of those children, which reminds me of some films and books, books of Neorealism, such as, for instance, Bicycle Thieves. And we're jumping forward from the time of Pascoli's poems, of course, but in these books and movies, tragic events are filtered through the eyes of children.
MICHAEL
Yes, I think overall, Pascoli is performing a very interesting kind of inversion with the whole of the Phaedo, because if you think about the Phaedo, it's all happening inside the prison, and you get very, very few glimpses outwards. There are a few people come from the outside, people depart again. But essentially you are locked in there, the prison room with Socrates and his pupils, whereas with Pascoli, it's all from the outside looking in. And one of the amazing things for me about Pascoli's poem is how, even though he has performed this inversion of viewpoints, the number of times he touches on details from the Phaedo in slightly transformed versions is really surprising. But thinking perhaps a little bit more generally about this point about shifted viewpoints, another comparison that comes to my mind, besides the John Addington and Symons poem that I was mentioning a moment ago, is rather more contemporary, though not absolutely up to date, W.H. Auden's poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”, which makes the big point about, as the old masters knew, suffering happening in a corner, when everyday life goes on around it and his example is Bruegel's painting of the fall of Icarus, where the fall of Icarus is a tiny detail in one corner of the canvas. And what you mainly see is a ploughman just getting on with his ploughing. And there's something of the same feeling about the world carrying on around the prison, some people looking in, but a lot of the surroundings are unaffected. Another thing this allows Pascoli to do is to make Socrates death a more obviously Athenian event, because you have those references to the Acropolis, to the gleaming point of the spear, of the statue of Athena on the Acropolis and so on. So it's a really clever rethinking of the material with that shift of viewpoint.
ELENA
Thank you, Michael, thank you very much. In the next stanza we are inside the prison cell and Socrates is there with his disciples, including Phaedo, his favourite disciple, as you have just heard. Let's listen to how Pascoli describes them.
And Michael, perhaps our listeners are not entirely familiar with who Socrates was and why he was sentenced to death. And here we see him trying to convince his disciples that he will not die, but that his soul will survive. And we know that Plato used the character of Socrates as his mouthpiece to illustrate his own philosophical theories, especially concerning the nature and destiny of the soul.
MICHAEL
Yes, Socrates was, perhaps surprisingly, the first native born Athenian philosopher whose native city notoriously turned out not to be able to stomach him. He was put on trial in old age when he was 70. The formal charges were the charge of not acknowledging the gods acknowledged by the rest of the city of Athens and corrupting the young, which if you think about it, constitutes Socrates as a pretty fundamental traitor and public enemy. He's striking at the favour of the gods on which the city depends, and he's striking at the next generation of citizens who are going to bear the weight of citizen duty unless they are corrupted by people like him. However, these particular charges, although they're clearly there in the background, are not the main focus of the Phaedo. The Phaedo is all about Socrates talking to his disciples, his pupils in prison, about the nature of the soul. And on one level, he's of course trying to console them for his impending death by trying to convince them that nothing bad is actually going to happen to him. But even more importantly, he's trying to get across ideas about the soul which are as much to do do with knowledge and understanding and what the soul ought to be doing while it's still in a living body as it is about death. The Phaedo is a very heavily epistemological dialogue. And I think actually this is again, something that Pascoli picks up on, because he has that line about the soul that is most alive when it lives most with itself, quanto vital and away from the physical world, away from the senses, withdrawn into itself. So, again, clever Pascoli.
ELENA
Well, a clever Pascoli indeed. He definitely knew a lot about the ancient world, and he's always able to weave little details in his various poems. And in the final stanzas, we see the scene of Socrates execution through the eyes of the child. Hyllus has climbed on the shoulders of another boy so that he can see inside the prison cell. He witnesses the scene and tells the other boys. And once Socrates is dead, the owl, which had been tied to a string, frees itself from Gryllus’ fingers and lifts itself in the sky. And clearly what we're seeing here is a metaphor for the soul leaving the body. And when he leaves the body, the owl or the soul says kikkabau, which is what owls sound like in Aristophanes’ The Birds. There are a lot of other birds in this poem, as you can then hear in the full track. And someone in the crowd also says, go well, my friend. Which is how we translated the original Italian, con fortuna buona, and in Greek, agathe tykhe. Let us listen to the end of the story.
But, Michael, what do you think of this ending?
MICHAEL
As you say, the image of the departure of Socrates. It's an image of the departure of Socrates soul that is beautiful and evocative, both as metaphor and in its own right. Up goes the owl into the starry night sky, quickly lost to sight, more gradually lost to hearing. But there could perhaps be further layers of allusion here, I think, to do with the status of Socrates as a sage and as the archetypal philosopher. Remember that he is commemorated as the person who actually invented what philosophy is essentially about. He is the one who brought philosophy down from the heavens and set it in the homes and cities of men, and set it to ask questions of moral philosophy. And for me, two things come to mind at this point, which might make a quite surprising couple. An Aesopic fable, a fable of the kind composed by the fabulous Aesop, and a famous declaration by the philosopher Hegel. The Aesopic fable tells of the owl as the wise advisor of the birds, to whom the other birds always came with questions and quandaries. And the owl always gave them good advice, which the rest of the birds then ignored. And eventually the owl got sick of this and retreated into just lamenting. That's why the owl hoots. It's a sort of etiological fable, wisdom not listened to and just dissociating itself. And maybe there's something there. And then, on the other hand, there is Hegel's celebrated declaration that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the onset of twilight. That is to say, decoded in the history of humankind, the history of the unfolding and self realisation of the spirit. Philosophy only comes along at a very late stage, as we might say at the 11th hour. Can we not think, can we prevent ourselves thinking about Hegel's owl as we see Pascoli's owl disappearing up into the night sky? Particularly when we think again, what an alert poet Pascoli was, how interested he was in revisiting and tweaking ancient material in the light of more recent developments. I don't know myself how well he knew his Hegel, but I'd be very tempted to see a connection there. All of which adds another layer, if you want it, to the surface beauty of that final moment of the poem.
Well, this is a fascinating exploration of the sources and inspiration behind Pascoli's second “poem of Psyche”. The other one, “Psyche”, is episode 10 of this series and I'm very grateful to Michael for leading us through the, in this journey through Pascoli's poem and the ancient world.
Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure and for me particularly to make the acquaintance of Pascali's poem, which I hadn't known before.