Chambers of the Sun Part 10

---

The Unseen Legislators of the World

Aspawa Pension, Pamukkale - September 16th, Evening

Roaring down the coastline from Seferihisar on yet another glorious day, we passed a minute sign for a turn-off to a village called Alpaslan. This hamlet, tucked away some ten miles inland, is named after the Selçuk bey who first bore the brunt of the First Crusade, thus earning his title, for - and I am shocked at C.S. Lewis' heathen sensibilities - "aslan" is the Turkish for lion. There is a greater significance to this peaceful village, however: once upon a time, it was the site of one of the most powerful cities of the Ionian decapolis, Colophon. Literally translating as "summit," Colophon commanded a formidable position over a fertile landscape, which even today is rich in vines and corn. This is excellent country for poetry, and in his Vera Historia Lucian cited it as one of the possible birthplaces of Homer. More plausibly, it is said to have produced Mimnermus, a love elegist revered in antiquity for the elegance of his style.

Mimnermus is certainly the first poet to have turned the elegiac couplet to love with stellar success; Callimachus addresses him in the prologue to his Aetia as the master of concision in verse, while Propertius' opinion is more credulous and compelling: "plus in amore valet Mimnermi versus Homero," "in terms of Love, a verse of Mimnermus' is stronger than Homer." (I.9.11) For all the garlands that antiquity laid at his feet, what can we say with certainty about him? His poetry, which, if we are to believe the librarians of Alexandria, once filled an entire book, the Nanno, with an epic on the foundation of Smyrna to boot, has been as ravaged by time as that of his other great contemporaries, and posterity enjoys but five significantly sized fragments of his work. From these five poems, we can mark him out for his cleverness in manipulating other texts, especially Homer, in which art he could be said to exceed any other of the Melic poets. His borrowings from Homer are well adapted to the elegiac - with a grace not entirely his own - and his sentiments are similarly sourced, if well developed. One of his images best illustrates this:

"We are such as the leaves which the flower-strewn time of Spring
Begets, when first they wax under the rays of the sun.
Like these we delight in the blooms of youth for but a slender time,
Knowing - by the grace of the gods - neither wrong nor right." (fr. 2, tr. Moody)

The simile, to which I have already had cause to make reference in this journal, is Homer's and yet made Mimnermus' own, blending the original impression of fragility with a delight in the vigour and beauty of spring. The obscure comment attached - for I have chosen but one interpretation - is either a profound observation of happiness' disregard for morals, or a simple statement of unwavering fortunes. Mimnermus is constantly, obsessively concerned by a sense of "the urgent, insurgent now" and a fear of "grievous" old age. I do not feel that we can conscionably exalt him as his immediate successors did just on the basis of the handful of verses that we now possess; his diction is often taken literally from the Iliad, and the opinions which it expresses swiftly become monotonous, for they are not subtly worked with the focussed skill which we admire in the modern Romantics. When Solon tells Mimnermus to add another twenty years to the ideal length of life - which the latter had supposedly fixed at sixty - we cannot but agree with him.

Mimnermus' spirit - or, perhaps, the way we would like the spirit of such a revered poet to be - is best caught by William Cory Johnson in his poem Mimnermus in Church:

"...forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But O, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die."

If we chose, casting aside the paltry shards of evidence, to believe rather in the myth of Mimnermus, we could call him the first of the Romantics for this instinct to cherish life. However, another concern of the English Romantics which we cannot attribute to Mimnermus - a driven struggle against tyranny in every form, especially wherever it holds sway over human hearts - can be found in another son of Colophon, Xenophanes. Much better suited to my taste, Xenophanes combines - as I hope to demonstrate - the greater virtues of the poet and the philosopher with such sweetness as would remain unequalled throughout the Classical era.

If it is well known that Xenophanes was the first to expose religious relativism - "the Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have blue eyes and red hair" - it is more seldom considered that this is a development of the most tremendous significance in the history of thought. The pantheon in Homer, capricious and vain though it may be, is questioned so little that even the Trojans pray to the same gods. Religion was one of the few collative forces strong enough to bind the squabbling Greek states together, and festivals like the Olympics were a powerful reminder of the light that was confined to the Greek world, the flame of identity. To step outside of Greek religion was to be something other than a Greek, and Xenophanes' seemingly obvious statement does just that. He breaks the golden fetters of thought, and lays the ground for the true objectivity upon which scientific thought is based. That Xenophanes' words seem evident to the point of banality to the modern reader is evidence of the immense importance of their having been said.

I would take this as a product of a mind steeped in critical rationality, as natural as a dewdrop, and yet he goes and blows this with a series of observations that Kirk and Raven find "unutterably bizarre:" that the sun is remade every day from "little pieces of fire," and that the earth is infinitely large and bounded neither by the air nor the heaven. This I would prefer to take as a case of Xenophanes' excellence as a poet, for I am far from certain that he was anything like a scientist in our sense of the word. He has a mind far less constrained than any of his contemporaries, but I doubt that he would have been able to tell the difference between a verifiable observation and a poetical conceit. This would account for the occasional flash of sheer brilliance in his writings - his inference, for a shining example, that the sea had once covered the earth from the fossils he found in Malta - as well as the delightful weirdness of his other thoughts.

If anybody, it is Xenophanes who best embodies the charms and the inspirations of the age that bore him. His personal poetry reveals a man who hates pretension and immoderation with a wicked line in satire, while his philosophy, especially on the subject of epistemology, is that of a clear-sighted thinker who is nonetheless prey to an enchanting eccentricity.

Sadly, the otherwise infallible Turkish bus network has a bit of a blind spot over Colophon, so I have had to move on to Kuşadası, the Bognor Regis of Turkey's Aegean coast. Cruise ships and tour buses daily disgorge thousands of holidaymakers in search of sunburn, love or cheap alcohol, and the wonderfully named "Diamond Sand Beach" looks rather like the strand under the Gadarean cliff. Signs everywhere offer "Big Bottle Beer," Sex Bomb blasts out from half the joints on the Barlar Caddesi (lit. "Street of Bars")and somebody has even threatened me with a three-week holiday tattoo of Atatürk. For this whole resort is a flagship of the republican state; there is a great garden full of busts of "progressive" thinkers, the newly developed boulevards all bear the names of post-war politicians, and a four-times life-size statue of the Father himself presides over the bikini-strewn streets. I wonder, though, if this is what he truly envisaged when he laid the roots of Turkey's new order, as Kuşadası is dolled up for the West like a dancing-bear.

---