CHAPTER 1

THE EROS OF THE MELIC POETS

Prone as it is to an incoherence fostered by its excessive practiceof criticism, our civilization has fragmented the notion of amorousfeeling into the most contradictory representations of it. Onthe one hand a medical approach has led to isolating an instinct of aphysiological nature, which the behavioral sciences promptly seizedupon: love has thus been reduced to the taxonomy of interactive anddeterminist relations known as "sexuality." On the other hand, psychologyinspired by psychoanalysis refers us to a libido that turns eroticdesire into a series of affective reactions that are responses to an unconsciousmotivating impulse. Yet the desperate search for partners attestedby the "lonely hearts" columns in the newspapers and fostered by thesimplistic plots of televised soap operas and romantic tales told in photographyindicates an aspiration oriented exclusively toward tenderness,sensuality, and affection, if not toward passion of the most romantickind. We are thus presented with a total contrast between, on the onehand, a sexuality centered on "desiring man" and, on the other, anaspiration toward a relational type of love. As we know, in ancientGreece love was essentially erôs, a force that this term tended to objectivize,a power of such an autonomous nature that writing it with acapital E can be enough, in modern usage, to express its divine nature.If Love was seen as an anthropomorphic deity, we should study it as asemiotic agent, with particular symbolic qualities and in consequenceparticular modes of meaning and action of its own, amid the forces thatit brings into play; and we must relate it to the beneficiaries of its actionand the web of social and symbolic relations in which it involves them,as well as to any sexual roles and gender functions that it institutes insituations of contrast and conflict. Our investigation into the social andsemiotic means of action devised by Eros will focus synchronically uponfirst their literary and then their symbolic manifestations. The imagethat emerges will then be resituated in its historical context, at whichpoint we shall turn our attention to the question of the function of thetexts through which that image has been transmitted to us.

But why, some might ask, should we follow the scholarly tradition soclosely as to begin chronologically with the poetry we mistakenly label"lyric"? For a number of reasons. One is the inevitably literary natureof most of the tradition about antiquity and consequently also aboutEros. Another is that, although melic poetry cannot be said to mark theadvent of the modern individual, it does allow a place of importance tothe figure of the narrator or locutor, in that the one who speaks or singsthe poem uses the grammatical forms of the first person; this linguisticor discursive figure tends to be all too readily identified with the realutterer of the poem, if not with its author.

Yet these poems furthermore assume vis-à-vis their addressees a functionthat will offer us a means of understanding the social practice oflove, as the Greeks understood it. It should also be acknowledged that,given the fragmentary form in which these poems have come down tous, they are naturally easier to divide into small units, so as to meet therequirements of the search for a paradigm.

1. The Actions of Bittersweet Eros

In archaic poetry, the power of love is perceived most immediatelythrough its sweetness, which flows through us, enchanting our heartswith a sense of ease. But this sensation of sweetness is certainly notconveyed solely through the faculty of taste. Sometimes, to be sure, it isaroused by a liquid such as water or wine. But it is a sweet pleasure thatcan also be brought on by sleep and, above all, by music in all its forms:a voice, a song, a flute melody, the sound of the phorminx, in short theMuse. On two occasions Pindar uses a crater, or mixing bowl, as ametaphor for a lingering song. The sweet charm of the kind of lovethat is concrete enough to take on a human configuration and potentenough to act as a deity is to be found in the Eros that Theognis describesawaking at the moment when the earth is becoming carpetedwith flowers and then leaving Cyprus to go forth and spread his seedamong men. Alcman has a springtime Eros frolicking among the cyperus(galingale) flowers like a playful child. And Anacreon gives himknucklebones to play with just as, much later, Apollonius Rhodius hasGanymedes play with these in the flower-filled garden of Zeus. Suchscenes are frequently depicted in the pictorial imagery of a later age:Italiot pottery, in particular, was prone to represent a winged Eros hoveringabove a bed of flowers. But in the...