Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli.” I’m here with James Ackhurst again, to talk about one of his favourite poems, The Old Men of Kea, which tells the story of two famous Greek athletes, Lachon and Panthis, in their old age. James is a poet and a writer based in New Zealand, and he has a background in Classics. James and I co-translated Poemi Conviviali in 2022 for Italica Press, and the translation you hear is our own. The poem is ready by George Sharpley and Joanna Strafford. The music has been composed by Giovanni Tardini, and played at the Celtic harp by Mark Harmer.

ELENA

The Old Men of Kea is a long poem, made of five shorter poems. It has two protagonists: two old men, as the title indicates. They are called Lachon and Panthis, two former athletes from the Greek island of Kea. If you listened to other episodes in this series, you know that very rarely does Pascoli create his characters from scratch. In fact, even in this poem, Pascoli finds these two characters mentioned in the works of Bacchilides, a Greek lyric poet who lived between the sixth and fifth century before Christ. It is interesting that Pascoli wrote this poem right after the publication, in 1897, of 21 hymns by Bacchilides contained in the collection of Egyptian scrolls in the British Museum of London. It was a man called Frederic George Kenyon who published these hymns, and this publication caused quite a sensation in the circles of classicists and archeologists. We know that Pascoli actively participated in the scholarly debate over these texts.

In this poem, Pascoli slightly tweaks the characters: he makes Lachon much older than he is in Bacchilides’ hymn, so that he can be the same age as Panthis, who was the father of an athlete in Bacchilides’ corpus, called Argeus. It’s very complicated…So here we have Lachon and Panthis, two former athletes at the end of their lives, who are also friends with each other. Before we listen to the first part, I’d like to ask James to tell us a bit about Bacchilides, and why his poetry has to do with athletes.

JAMES

All right, so Bacchilides is from the island of modern Kea, or Keos, as you said, which is ancient Ceos, Ceos like C, E, O, S, not like chaos , like the state of my flat at the moment. So he comes from Ceos. And another famous person from Ceos was Simonides. And some people might know Simonides is the author of the famous epitaph for the Spartans, after Thermopylae, the one that which is very laconic, very brief, and says, “go tell the Spartans you who pass us by that here obedient to their laws, we lie.” So Simonides of Ceos was a big deal poet, and Bacchilides was actually the nephew of Simonides. So we think Bacchilides dates are around 520, to 450, BC. So they straddle the conventional divide between the archaic and the classical periods of Greek history, and the conventional dividing line between the archaic and the classical period is the Persian invasion of 480 so the great Persian War is a 480 and 479 BC. That's when the archaic period becomes the classical and so, like a poet that he's often compared to, Pindar, Bacchilides is both late archaic and early classical.

Now we know that there were nine canonical lyric poets recognised by scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria and collected by them and edited by them. And Bacchilides for almost 2500 years, had the smallest amount of surviving material of all those poets, just a few verses quoted by others, no complete poems by Bacchilides And then, as Elena mentioned, in 1896 you have this papyrus that's discovered containing his book of epinikia or victory odes, which we'll talk about a lot more. That book of epinikia or victory odes in complete form, and also half of his book on dithyrambs or songs to Dionysus, and more later, material was found from papyri from Egypt, no fewer than 15 different papyri.

And so now we know a lot more about Bacchilides than we did, you know, however many years that is, 120 130 years ago or so. Bacchilides, we now know, wrote hymns to the gods called peans. He wrote processional songs. He wrote parthenaia or maiden songs. He wrote dancing songs or hyporchemata, erotica, obviously love songs, and encomia or songs of praise. So he had quite a variety. He was quite versatile, like a lot of these early lyric poets, but the most important genre for our purposes is the victory odes, the epinikion poem, and like Pindar, Bacchilides wrote these for wealthy patrons, and these were generally aristocrats who took part in the Great Panhellenic athletic competitions, and we're actually recording this while the Olympics is going on in Paris. So it's very topical.

So, for example, one of the epinikia poems of Bacchilidesis a celebration of Hieron, Hero, as they sometimes call him, the tyrant of Syracuse and Magna Grecia and Sicily. So the Greek cities in Southern Italy and Sicily had a longer tradition of actual kings, monarchs and tyrants. Greeks often call them tyrants than other city states. So we even into the classical period, we get these figures who are kind of kings or monarchs over their city states. So one of Bacchilides’ poem celebrates this guy, hero and his victory at the horse race at Olympia in 576, that must be 476, this and that's actually the same victory as Pindar celebrates in his first Olympian ode. So I gave that as an example because that's very typical of what these definition poems are like. They usually are in honour of a particular aristocrat who's associated with the ruling class in a particular city state, or at least a high up aristocratic of some city state, and they're in honour of victory in a particular event. So it could be the horse race, it could be the chariot race, it could be the wrestling sprint, whatever, or the running armour. They're all these different ancient athletic events. So anyway, that's what Bacchilides is all about. I mean, not all about he has this versatility. But the main thing we remember him, we remember him for, now, we know him for now, is his epinician poems. So like Pindar. Now he's almost up there with Pindar, the great author of these victory odes.

ELENA

Shall we listen to the first poem?

ELENA

So what we see here is that the two athletes are picking herbs but not for cooking: they are picking hemlock, which is the same poisonous plant that was used to kill Socrates. The law quoted there is paraphrased from Menander, a Greek dramatist of the 4th/3rd century BC: “Those who cannot live well, should not live badly”, which means they should rather die. The last lines also suggest the idea that human beings are essentially defined by their mortality: life, after all, is just a long illness that gets worse with time, and there is nothing that can be done to stop its progression. This first part ends with a meditation on human mortality but, the next part is called, conversely, “The Eternal Hymn”. In this part , we are introduced to the Choregeion, the choir school, where a choir of boys used to gather to sing hymns. James, what was the Choregeion, and what kind of poetry was sung there?

JAMES

Well, Coregheion just means sort of the chorus place, the chorus thing, and so it's the kind of the place where choral poetry was practiced. And often this was in the home of the coregos, which literally just means the leader of the chorus in democratic Athens. This became a kind of official job that the wealthy man had to do as a form of taxation called the coregia. And their choruses would be the centerpiece of the tragedies or comedies that were put on during the great festival of Dionysus, which features five days of plays and ceremonies, one day of opening ceremonies and three days of tragedies, and one final day, where they have five comedies and the choruses will often have elaborate costumes. So you might think of Aristophanes plays, which are the only surviving fifth-century tragedies that we have. And they often have these animal choruses. So the frogs, the birds, obviously, they had choruses of frogs and birds also the clouds. And so that's not animals. But you get the idea that these choruses would have been, you know, they would have had amazing costumes, and people would have come, partly to see these costumes, and that was one of the main expenses. But of course, they would not only have these amazing costumes, they would also be able to sing and dance in time, and there'd be singing these lyric odes of Aristophanes and other poets, as well as kind of reciting some of the lines in different meters. So it'd be kind of like modern opera, which is, course based on ancient drama, where people would be singing and also sometimes speaking or reciting, but also with the element of dance. And you know, 12 or 15 people in tragedies and comedies, 24 people in the chorus dancing together. Okay, so let's just back up a bit and talk about choral poetry and choruses in the archaic period, because that's classical Athens, and that actually is something that comes out of the tradition that begins somewhere in the in the midst of Dark Age Greece. So when we start having information and getting information about Greek culture in the Iron Age, end of the Dark Age, early archaic period, whatever you want to call it, around the eighth century BC, into the seventh and sixth centuries BC, we find these choruses. So they're a feature of Greek social life all over archaic Greece, and they usually involve groups of young people, and often single-sex groups. So all boys are all girls. This is when that genre of parthenaia, maiden songs, starts to make a bit more sense. These are songs involving performances by young girls, and as with, as in the choruses of ancient uh, classical Athenian drama, these choruses are usually singing, and we assume dancing as well. And so they've been studied as a kind of rite of passage, actually, by anthropologically-minded classicists. You know, a lot of adolescents seem to move through this period of dancing and singing together. It's a kind of socialization ritual. They become part of the polis, all right, so one traditional distinction is between choral lyric poetry and monodic lyric. So two types of lyric poetry basically in archaic breeze. There's lots of different ways of categorizing this. People argue about this, but basically one distinction that's long been drawn is, yeah, choral poetry and monodic lyric poetry, with the former being sung by choruses and the latter by single individual. That's why it's called monodic, you know, one one singer, one one song. And so the monodic poems usually have a kind of “I” in them, but even that, scholars now think we should take with a pinch of salt. You never really know who's writing the poem and who was performing them back in the day, whether it was one person or many. But anyway, that's the broad distinction. So let's talk about choral poems. So most of the choral poems that we have are essentially religious songs, the songs of praise, either to Apollo, in which case they're called pIans, or to Dionysus, which in which case they're called dithyrambs. They could be processional songs, episodia. They could be maiden songs, parthenaia, they could be wedding songs, himenaia. It could be dirges or requiems called threnoi. And we've seen Bacchilides writes most of these types. So at least we have poems Bacchilides writes, which are examples of each of these genres, or most of these genres. Now, by the end of the archaic period, we get the secularisation of choral songs with aristocrats or kings being praised rather than the gods. And one subset of this genre is the victory, the victory of that we just talked about, of Pindar and Simonides of Ceos and Bacchilides of Ceos. And as we've seen, these are usually praise, in praise of aristocrats who've just been victorious at one of the great Panhellenic athletic competitions. Choral lyric is most closely associated with the Doric areas of Greece. So people.. listeners don't know, in ancient Greece, there were different cultural areas. The Greeks perceived themselves as kind of diverse. There are many groups, but the main, the most important ones, I suppose, the Doric and the Ionic Ionians and Dorians. So the cities which were Dorians are more closely associated with choral lyric, although Simonides and Bacchilides are actually exceptions to this. These are from Ceos. But you think of other poets like Alcman, he's from Sparta. A lot of them come from Doric city states. Uh, despite this, the Greek that's used in these coral homes. They tend not to be pure Doric. They tend to be this weird mixture of Doric, West Greek Ionic, so other Greek dialects, and also Homeric, which is itself a kind of amalgam, sort of Pan Hellenic, a mix of different Greek dialects. So |I don't need to go into the details of that, probably, because I don't think I remember them. But the point is that these poems were written in a language that would have sounded highly stylised, even to contemporary listeners and contemporary readers. It's definitely by the classical period they would have sounded stylised and in Athenian plays when they have these coral loads, they're actually written in this. Weird sort of choral language to sort of give them a heightened feeling. You know, they there's a sense that they're from a long ago time, and they're sort of special the written sort of special language. Choral lyric is also usually strophic in form. So that means that there are these pairs of so called strophes, which which are just stanzas, and the two stanzas with the same meters, so you have one stanza, you know, the same meter, and then there's a sort of break, and then there's another stanza of different words, but and they kind of answer one each other. They answer one another. So each strophe is met by an equivalent anti strophe. And the usual assumption is that this reflected some kind of dance moves or some kind of pattern in the dance as turns or repetitions of certain dance sequences by the horses. And that's another feature that goes into classical Athenian drama. You get this so called responsion, the echo of the strophe by the anti strophe. So it's actually kind of an interesting genre in its own right, choral lyric, and it has this long history. And so Pascoli knows all this, and he's trying to pick up on all these things.

ELENA

Let’s listen to Part 2

ELENA

The eternal hymn in this part of the poem is a powerful juxtaposition to the finitude of each individual human life. There’s a great metaphor of the sea waves that dissolve only to be followed by new ones, continuously and endlessly. That image introduces the main concept in the next part of this poem, where Panthis proudly talks about his progeny. Just like the waves in the ocean, each generation follows the first, and is followed by another. Each individual life ends, but life itself continues, which is why the next part is called “ephemerals”, from the word epi emeros: on one day. Each life is but one day but life itself is endless, at least for those, like Panthis who have children. Panthis is the father of Argeus, a famous athlete, and he even has a grandchild, whereas Lachon is childless.

Let’s listen to Part 3

ELENA

In the last two parts, we see the two men part ways and go home. Each of the two parts recounts each man’s return. As they go home, they hear a hymn, and each man listens to a hymn sung by the choir which is devoted to them. In Part 4, the hymn celebrates Lachon, and in Part 5, the hymn celebrate Argeus, Panthis’ son, so both of men go home happy, and ready to die. Now, those hymns are interesting from a poetic perspective. Pascoli wrote that he invented Lachon’s hymn himself but That Argeus’ hymn is a translation, though a free one, of Bacchilides’ Hymn II. Those hymns are epinikia, which is the plural of epinikion. Pascoli kept the metric structure of this poetic genre, and we kept it in our English translation as well. James can you tell us about this particular type of hymn?

JAMES

Okay, so an epinikion, as we've mentioned before, is a victory ode. So this actually comes from Greek as well, obviously. So you just mentioned ephemerals from epi hemeros. So that word epi in it's the same word here, but this time it's epi nike. So it's on victory: nike. People might know about the Nike Sportswear brand, which was named after Nike Athena, which is a deity of victory. So yeah. So epinikion is a victory ode. It's a song composed in honour of somebody, invariably, an aristocratic, athletic male who has been victorious at one of the great pan Hellenic athletic competitions. And there were four of these in the sort of canon, in the sort of tour, and they took part, you know, year after year, so you could do a sort of circuit. And these were Olympia, obviously the most famous ones. We now have the Olympic Games named after those, also at Nemea, at Isthmia and Delphi. And the games at Delphi are actually called the Pythian Games, in honour of Apollo, the Python Slayer. In Pindar’s case, we actually have poems he composed about victories in all of these sets of games, all of these athletic competitions, so that scholars have been able to refer to Pindar’s poems as the first Olympian ode, the second Pythian ode, et cetera, or just Olympian one, the me and two and so on. The writers of epinician odes do sometimes refer to them as hymns: humnoi, however, and there's a theory that they evolved, these epinician odes evolved from hymns describing the feats of Herakles. So first of all, they're kind of normal hymns to gods. Then they become hymns to sort of demi-gods, like Heracles. And then they get to these aristocratic families who usually claim that they descend ultimately from gods. So it's not too too big of a leap. The earliest epinikia, as we mentioned, are those of Simonides, Simonides of Ceos. And even though Pindar is now considered and really known as the kind of king of the epinikia, we should bear in mind that's partly because we didn't have any complete poems by Bacchilides. Until quite recently. So Pindar has kind of had the field sort of to himself for a long time. But Bacchilides is the nephew of the earliest epinician poet that we have, that we know of Simonides, and he should be considered a really interesting and successful writer of epinikia in his own right. So I think that people who work on or study Bacchilides are always kind of living in the shadow of Pindar, and they're always trying to say, no, no, actually, Bacchilides is a really interesting poet in his own right. I think that's right, right. We shouldn't really, we're doing it now already, but we shouldn't really consider him just like he's he's another Pindar. He's almost as good as Pindar. He's actually very successful epinician poet in his own right. And we only really have, well, possibly we only really have this perception of him as kind of trying to catch up with Pindar because of this accident that we had so much Pindar for so long and very little Bacchilides Anyway, so Pascoli is again showing that he really knows his stuff by setting his poem about epinician poetry and athletics on the island of Keos.

Let’s listen to Part 4

Let’s listen to Part 5

ELENA

I love this poem, because it contains the same message about life and death as the first one, “Solon”: a well-spent life implies a better acceptance of death, like Leonardo famously said in his motto about wanting to sleep after a good day’s work, and being willing to die after a productive life. I am also reminded of Solomon in the Bible, who is said to have died “full of years, riches, and honour.” In The Old Men of Kea, it is not just glory and good deeds that make our life worth living, but also having offspring, someone to continue life after we’ve gone.

JAMES

That’s right, I mean, I think this is an incredibly Greek poem. I mean, obviously Pascoli knows a lot about the Greeks, and he's very learned, and he strives to kind of incorporate them and get the pitch and the spirit of them, and in most of the poems of the poem vividly and in other works as well. But this one kind of really stands out for me, just for the knowledge of epinikia, for the way that he does sort of such a good impersonation, slash adaptation of Bacchilides. And I think it's a bit of a flex, as they say. You know, it'd be too obvious going for Pindar. He's going to give you a little something, a little bit niche. And I think just the sort of the whole atmosphere of this poem is incredibly Greek. I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that it's actually a little bit, it's a bit of a downer, you'd say nowadays, because it's about these guys who are going to die. And that seems that might seem a bit strange to us. I mean, Pascoli be a little bit melancholy, but I think this is also something that comes out of the Greek texts. I mean, there's a famous part of someone in Sophocles play who says, the best thing is never to have been born. Second best thing is to die as quickly as you can. So for the Greeks, there is actually the strange sense that because life is full of tragedy, it can actually be a good thing to have kind of a death well achieved. And there's also this idea that a happy life is never complete until you've actually met your end. So when we did the last episode about Solon, I think we told the story already, right? Of Solon and Croesus of Lydia, the richest man in the world and Croesus of Lydia, said to Solon, who's the happiest man, who's the most eudaimon man, who's the most successful man, expecting Solon was gonna say, “Well, you obviously, you got all these Ferraris and stuff.” But actually he said “You know, there's this guy in Athens who fought for his country and died, and he had grandchildren, and he was an honored man in his community, and he's the happiest.” And Croesus said, “Okay, who's next”, expecting again that it would be him. And then that's when Solon brings in the story of these guys, Theobis and Byton. And I told the story before, but the relevant point here is that they, you know, they drag their mother to the sanctuary of Hera. The mother says “Oh, they are my young sons are so good to me.” And she prays to the goddess to bring them the happiest thing, you know, the best thing possible for mortals. And what happens is, the hero kills them. There's a very strange thing to. Read, if you're someone who's not an ancient Greek, but the whole point of what Solon is trying to tell Croesus, though, is that you never know that your life is complete, that you're sort of, you never really safe in your prosperity until you die. So in some ways, see it from that angle, that it kind of sets the seal on a life well lived. And so these two old guys, it might seem a bit kind of sad that they're reaching the end of their lives, but the point is, they've done what they've done. It's included athletics, and one guy's case, at least, has included children, and now this is going to set the seal on it so and that's the that's the kind of melancholy, but almost sort of complete, and sort of it's an atmosphere of sort of fulfilment, I think is the idea.

ELENA

Thank you James for this conversation, and thank you everyone for listening,