Early Greek Elegists

by Cecil Maurice Bowra

English, Greek

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

Reviews

[sanguis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of three books by Bowra on early greek non-Homeric poetry, the others being a survey of lyric poetry and a monograph on the Pindar. Bowra is from an earlier generation of scholars who had no interest in being novel or fashionable in his views which more often than not makes him and those like him the best guide to these subjects.

Elegy is first off distinct from lyric in that lyric was recited to the accompaniment of a lyre and elegy was read, usually in convivial settings, to the sounds of a flute. But this book is concern more with the relationship of elegy to the looming presence of Homer than to lyric poetry.

Each poet covered, Mimnermus, Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Xenophanes, Solon, Theognis and Simonides uses elegy from the starting point of Homer's language and molds it into something that conveys the outlook of a society very different from the one Homer sang about. Take Tyrtaeus; whereas Homer described the battle prowess of individual fighters fighting for personal glory in hand to hand combat, Tyrtaeus, writing for a Spartan audience, found the need to recast the virtues of the homeric hero to fit the more corporate elan of the Spartan soldier--where the personal aspect of glory existed only in contributing as a anonymous member of a group and where often the highest regard is reserved fro those who died in battle. Quite a contrast to the Homeric taunt over the dead. To die in battle is no longer shameful by the Spartan outlook.

For Solon, in his attempts to suture together a workable Athenian state, he had likewise to derive the vocabulary of what a good man was and what a good state was from the set of ideals in Homer which would certainly if taken on their own terms have resutled in a state Solon would have found unacceptable; in fact, the Aristocratic enemies of his reforms were probably closer in their outlook to Homer than was Solon who had nevertheless to couch his statements with the language of Homer.

The last chapter, on Simonides (epitaphic poetry), is maybe the weakest since so much attributed to Simonides is spurious and Bowra spends a lot of pages on non-simonidean elegiacs, however, there was still a lot to learn regarding the relation of elegiac to pure hexameter epitaphs and how each was used on tomb markers. The hexameter is less personal and because of superstitions regarding the use and possible malicious misuse of the dead's name are usually anonymous or only mention the one erecting the tomb and not the one actually interred within it. Elegiacs leave behind these superstitions and craft a careful emotional connection between the reader and the departed, neither of whom were expected to have known the other. An excellent exaple is provided in an epitaph for a hunting dog which stood out in its portrait of the dog's excellence and how it's absence is noted by a kind of anthropomorphic fallacy in its previous hunting grounds.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although in a few places outdated this is still a valuable, accessible and highly enjoyable book on the early elegists. Bowras strength lies in conveying the personalities of the poets and connecting them convincingly with the few fragments we have of them. This gives these fragments life.
The translations of the poems I found a bit problematic. Quite often they didn't show the details he stressed in his interpretations. He certainly could have done better translations himself, judging from his later ones of Pindar.