Chambers of the Sun Part 9

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Now Reigns the Rose

Anzac Pension, Kuşadası - September 14th, Afternoon

Just as a footnote to the last two entries, that spectral, shuffling drumbeat was abroad at an ungodly hour in Pergamum as well. I am disappointed to discover that it is no hashish-mazed Sufi, but rather the imsak, the call to signal the beginning of the day's fast in Ramazan - or so the pension manager tells me, adding, "I tell some of my guests that I am paying him to welcome them." He is a queer, moon-led soul who sleeps on his own roof terrace at night. "Under the stars?" asks a wide-eyed Japanese girl. "I have a high ceiling," he smiles back.

Before leaving Pergamum, I took a brief look at the Red Basilica, the notorious seat of the Devil. The approach is down a street lined with carpet shops, who spread their gaudy wares out onto the streets like the embroidered cloths of heaven. Tread softly... The site was originally a Serapeum raised as the fad for the Egyptian cults of Serapis, Isis and Harpocrates spread virulently through the Roman empire in the 2nd century AD. It is so shatteringly vast that, when the next religious craze took hold of Rome, the Christian church-builders did not even attempt to adapt it, instead constructing a basilica inside the walls. Just to round the allegory off nicely, when Pergamum fell into Ottoman hands a mosque was constructed in one of the towers. The result is a horrible architectural hybrid on the most colossal scale imaginable, a little reminiscent of the half-finished Basilica of Constantine standing like a deserted aircraft hangar in the Roman forum.

Wondering where to go next, I remembered that, what with one thing another, I had thitherto almost wholly neglected my avowed intent to search for the great poets of Ionia. It is time to attend to the real strength of the region, its lyric poetry.

Lyric - or, more correctly, Melic - poetry comes in rather more varieties than there are major writers. And yet, although ıt eludes definition on grounds of audience, geography, subject matter and even metre, it has an unmistakable feel and identity. This is because it is all reeling with the same, sudden, heady rush of life which ignited the whole Greek world around the death of Homer. The precipitate confluence of a Greek culture revelling in its newfound universality from the west and, from the east, a steady flow of new faiths, new ideas, new questions, produced a fragmented commonwealth of vigour. The spheres of travel and knowledge extended to the Nile, to the Dnieper, to the Euphrates; cities began to overthrow their hereditary monarchies in favour of tyranny, and, starting in Miletus, a new order of mind began first began systematically to question Man's place in the greater world. Most crucially, the habit of writing became common as never before, endowing a generation of personal poets with a means to immortality. Literary power now lay in the hands of the individual, who had full scope for every species of ingenuity in topic, diction and metre.

Campbell utters a word of caution: "I hope...that the student will approach these poems in a critical spirit, preprared not to lump them together as a small package of the glory that was Greece, but to evaluate them separately and to be cautious in generalising." He is quite right, for even within the range of composition of a single poet - as we shall see - there is a bewildering variety of tone.

It is, therefore, by an appropriate chance that I should have alighted upon Anacreon as the first representative of this class of poets; not because he could be said in any way to be typical, but because the catholic nature of his life and works is a microcosm of the greater movement in which he was singing. He is also an apposite introduction to melic poetry on the grounds of the sheer obscurity of his actual life and thoughts; he has been described as "a poet whose fame and stature come from a collection of poems which he did not write." His reputation from the Renaissance at least to the beginning of the Romantic era was founded upon the sixty or so apocryphal poems of the Anacreontea, which are now generally agreed to have been written several centuries after his death by a motley crew of Alexandrians as verse exercises. These poems have given the world the persona of a proto-metaphysical; full of variously successful conceits, they present the world view of a lecherous old man and a corruptor of youth.

Strip them away, however, and a far more human figure emerges. Gilbert Murray, with his characteristically clear-sighted feel for humanity, writes, "Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid ease of rhythm, thought and expression. A child can understand him, and he ripples into music." We see a man who is at a constant, playful remove from his passions with a delicate awareness of irony very reminiscent of the spirit of Horace's vitis me, Chloe... He is the very soul of Milton's L'Allegro. A famous fragment reads:

"Once again from high upon
The Leucadian cliff I dive
Into the foaming wave,
Drunk with love." (fr. 376, tr. Fowler)

The essence of this poem is found in the words "once again;" in the Greek, de aute. They can also be read as "in turn." This ambiguity does not seem to make a great deal of difference until we remember that, as myth had it, it was from none other than the Leucadian rock in Epirus that Sappho cast herself to her death. The suicidal leap becomes a motif for love in repetition and, by extension, love poetry in repetition. The feeling of gentle inevitability and mocking overstatement that the poem carries is very characteristic of Anacreon. He "boxes" and "dices" with Love, he describes a boyish lover as the "charioteer who holds the reins of my heart," and a girl as a Thracian racehorse. Love is a tender game, but at the same time the most serious pursuit of all.

He is most remarkable, however, for the distillation of his language, a little like Tennyson. Conceits are taken no farther than is absolutely necessary and are always used for a pang of piquance, no more. This condensation of expression and conscious distance from his own loves and fears are both features of a court poet, but also of a man for whom the art of poetry was an overriding concern. He is never entirely serious, even in the most pathetic of his pieces:

"I'm grey on the sides and white on top;
Youth that was graceful is gone, my teeth themselves
Ache old and chatter, life's span is shortening, and I
Cry more than sometimes, fearing Tartarus..." (fr. 395, tr. Campbell)

The slight air of self-caricature and the stage-whisper tone of the poem belie the words, and the metre is his own skittering Anacreontic, designed for sophisticated play; polioi men hemin ede. Despite all this, there is a clear core of real intent, and that is Anacreon for you: the first poet really to blur the boundaries of man and narrator, prefiguring all the delicate tropes of Roman elegy. "Shall I tell you what I feel?" he seems to say.

He lived at Teos, an Ionian city on the south side of what is now the Çeşme peninsular. Teos was a city of immense power when he was born, with Dionysus as its smiling patron. However, Herodotus - the best travelling companion a young man could have - tells us that the Persian satrap Harpagus came and laid siege to it, mounding earth against the walls so that his troops could climb over. Just as the Persians took possession of the outer walls, the Teians decided to flee and establish a colony at Abdera, which would later produce the philosophers Democritus and Protagoras. Anacreon wandered from Abdera to the brilliant court of Polycrates of Samos, where he joined his fellow member of the Nine, Ibycus, and thence to Athens. The constant wandering, the void where a geographical identity ought to be, is very symptomatic of the character we read in his poetry.

I walked over the hills to Teos from Sığacık, a little medieval town crumbling away inside its walls. I crested the bronze summit and looked down upon the ruins, and o! the pastel Aegean, the soft air, the sweet sufficiency of being! Teos itself is an anonymous overthrow of a town today; nothing really remains except for a few columns of the Temple of Dionysus, hastily resurrected amid the billy-goats, olive groves and odd picnickers. In a sunset tinted with the gentlest shade of gold, the ruins cast long shadows. The heart of the place seems to survive, in spite of all its age-old torments, first at the hands of the Persians and now at the hands of another race of barbarians. You cannot help but feel that Father Liber still smiles on this city, and on Anacreon with him. Schmidt cites an epitaph from the Planudean Anthology, which somehow feels apt to end on:

"Observe him, old Anacreon, frayed and worn, wobbly
With wine, how he bends his shape into the stone.
He gazes, look at him, with eyes that look
With love, with lust, and see too how his gown
Trails right down to his heel. In a haze of wine
He's lost one sandal, but the other still conceals
A shrivelled clutch of toes...O Dionysus,
Keep him safe, for it would be wrong indeed
Were Bacchus' faithful servant to be felled
By Bacchus' wine."

It is not a true portrait, but the sentiment is true.

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