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 very same poem by Alcmanmentioned above this impish Eros is also an unstoppable force; and—accordingto an interpreter of Apollonius Rhodius, who echoes Alcman'sdescription—he is a "mad Eros" who is capable of communicatingthe full force of that madness to human beings. Similarly, for Anacreon,Eros' knucklebones represent his mad whims and refer us to thechaotic conflicts in which he involves his victims. In a similar violentcontrast, in another of Anacreon's poems, Love invites the narrator toplay an altogether metaphorical game of ball with a young girl who iswearing brightly embroidered slippers. She, however, invokes her aristocraticLesbian origins and turns away from the poet, showering himwith her contempt.

    Once more Eros of the golden hair
    hits me with his purple ball,
    calls me out to play with the girl
    with the flashy slippers.
    But she, since she comes from noble
    Lesbos, scoffs at my hair,
    since it's white, and gapes for another girl.

Paradoxically, the sweetness that Eros inspires is also a burning. Sapphocalls Eros "the bittersweet one," combining the two polar opposites in asingle compound. But, in view of the arrows that Eros lets fly in Euripides,perhaps a more accurate translation would be "the sweet-stingingone" or, to confine ourselves to archaic poetry and, for now, to thatparticular couplet of Sappho's, it might be added that there Eros is comparedto a creeping serpent against which there is no defense. In archaicpoetry, penetration is the distinctive power attributed to arrows, and itcan lead to a death that is itself sometimes described as bitter. Someerotic lines of poetry attributed to Theognis convey the contrast evenmore specifically. For young people, love is both stinging and sweet, forit is both a torment and a delight. But, using an expression that is probablyproverbial and that, with the same contrast, can be applied equallyeither to the relations between kin in a family household or to politicalsituations, these lines also create a new, dynamic image of Eros. Thefulfillment of love confirms its sweetness, but when pursuit ends in frustrationlove is an unwelcome affliction.

Bitter and sweet, kindly also and harsh, Cyrnus, is love unto the young till itbe fulfilled; for if a man achieve it, it becometh sweet, and if he pursue andachieve not, that is of all things the most painful.

Eros is thus characterized by the same dynamism as that conveyed byour own concept of aspiration, aims, desire. Later in this semantic study,I shall try to define what this mobility involves. For now, though, sufficeit to say that archaic poetry always dwells more upon the dissatisfyingside of love. For example, the Theognidean corpus portrays Eros as aburden that is hard to bear: no longer to fell desire is to be freed fromweighty sorrows, to escape the most painful of woes, and to rediscoverthe joys of life. For Eros strikes hard, as one double, interwoven metaphorshows. He strikes his victim as would the mallet of a bronzesmithwho then plunges his material into icy water. In this metaphor, both theblows and the contrast are violent. Elsewhere, Eros, condemning hisvictim to insomnia, swoops in like a Tracian North Wind, with effectsas antithetical as the work of the bronzesmith: at once blazing withlightning yet shrouded in darkness, shamelessly and with the utmostviolence he shakes the lover's "diaphragm" to its very core; his gusts aresudden attacks of madness, winds that burn.

    In Spring Cydonian
    quince trees flower, watered by the sluice
    of streams, where the Maidens'
    untrimmed garden strands, and vineshoots
    rise and bloom beneath the shading branches
    of the vine. But for me desire
    knows no season of rest:
    ablaze with lightning—
    a Thracian north wind—
    swooping from Kypris with
    searing frenzies, black, unabashed
    he brutally wrenches my heart
    at the root.

In this poem by Ibycus, the very action of Eros, who may strike whateverthe season, is set in sharp opposition to the spring blooms of thegarden (into which we shall be venturing a little farther on). For now,let us simply note that Sappho, too, compares Love to a wind that couldwell be the same Boreas, one that shakes the membrane surrounding theheart, like the blast that falls upon the mountain oaks. Eros shakes theorgans of the body with repeated flurries, shattering its very limbs. Themain feature of Eros upon which these poets dwell is his implacablecruelty, all those violent onslaughts of his that successively led to thedestruction of Troy, of Theseus, and of Ajax, son of Oileus. So destructiveis his power that he seems to have thrived upon the attacks ofmadness to which Ibycus also refers. Even later when Pindar, in a morepositive vein, evokes instances of a more noble love, he still considers itan advantage to be able to keep it under control.

Eros prides himself on hitting his target at its emotional center. But assurely as it is through this particular organ that he can permeate theentire person, that person may then appropriate this erotic desire as hisor her own. For example, the narrator of some lines attributed to Theognisproclaims, using the proverbial form of the makarismos: "Happyis he who, loving (erôn) a boy, knows not the sea"; Sappho, juxtaposingher "I" to the "you" that designates the beloved, declares "Once I loved(eraman) you, I, you, Atthis"; and Anacreon too, addressing Dionysus,concludes with a reference to his own situation, claiming as his own thedomineering love that joins in the games played by Dionysus, Aphrodite,and the Nymphs. For the poet can experience erotic desire in itspure state, simultaneously sensitive to both the madness that it inducesand its absence:

    Once again I love and I do not love,
    I am mad and I am not mad.

Reduced to a simple condition for the duration of the present tense, thecontrasts in the nature of Eros become so strong that the poet usescontradictory terms rather than merely contrary or contrasting ones:now Eros is not simply both sweet and stinging, but is both active andabsent, all at once. In similar fashion Sappho, or her enunciative substitute,seems, in one short opening fragment of a poem, to be feeling twodesires at once.

Eros thus delights in contradictions as much as in contrasts. Despitethe frequent claims that the power of love is objectivized into a noun,Eros, when expressed in a verbal form, can equally well be taken overby the subject experiencing desire. But whether objectivized or embodied,Eros as an agent profoundly alters the state of his victim more thanhe impels him or her into action. But we must still investigate the modalitiesof this state of desire. We have already noted some of the organsaffected by the action of Eros; now let us consider the preferred intermediariesthat are employed, and then go on to examine the substanceof that action, along with the various relationships it weaves aroundEros' victim. In the guise of desire, erôs may also be designated by otherterms, which enrich its semantic field, a field that may be extended totake in love's affinities with other intense emotional states, such as themadness or intoxication to which I have already referred.

2. Physiologies of Erotic Desire

While the power of Eros may thus be wholly assumed by a person capableof expressing him- or herself as "I," it first strikes one of the specificorgans that the ancient Greeks considered to be the seat of the emotions:for Alcman this was the heart (kardia); for Sappho and Ibycus itwas the diaphragm (phrenes), and likewise for Pindar, who tells howEros implants his stinging darts in a similarly selective manner. Alcaeus'Helen, for her part, is struck by love in the "soul" (thumos)within her breast (stêthea): from that moment on she is beside herself,in the grip of madness. One of Anacreon's poems uses an equestrianmetaphor (to which we shall return) in which love holds the reins thatcontrol the vital breath called psukhê by the Greeks. And Archilochus'description of the physiology of amorous feeling is even more specific:

    Such desire for love, coiled at my heart,
    Shed a thick mist over my eyes,
    Stealing the tender senses from my breast.

It is certainly not easy to match these organs of feeling to our ownnomenclature of affective physiology. However, Eros seems regularly tobe kept separate from the organs of the intellect that, in the archaicview, constituted the seat of knowledge and will. He is to be found inneither the noos (mind) nor the boulê (will). This is not surprising since,precisely, the power of Eros cancels out all ability to understand or tomake decisions.

To overcome his victim, Eros resorts to his favorite medium: nottouch or caresses, but one that operates from a distance: namely, thegaze that, fixing the desiring subject, now creates another subject, theone who inspires that desire. For it is in the eyes of the man or thewoman who arouses the libido that Eros is most likely to dwell. Sometimes,as in Ibycus, he resorts to the ploy of substitution we have alreadynoted at work in the case of the subject who is in love; and Eros,from beneath his own dark lids, casts the look that dissolves and ravishesits recipient, provoking in the narrator a reaction of anxiousalarm. At other times, as in Alcman, this gaze, whose sweetness is moremelting than even sleep or death, is attributed directly to the young girlwho arouses the desire. In the poetic language of Pindar's Spartanchorus leader, the verb that designates such gazing is marked by theprefix pros-, and the gaze is always cast in a particular direction. Focusedon the desiring subject, it operates as a vector of amorous feeling.

    You must harvest desires at just the right moment, heart, at just the right age.
    But any man who has seen
    the dazzling rays
    of Theoxenos' eyes and does not swell with longing
    has a black heart forged of adamant or iron

    in an icy flame. Disgraced by Aphrodite of the roving gaze,
    either he struggles for money with all his might,
    or, a slave to female arrogance,
    is towed down every path. But me,
    I melt at her urging like wax

    of sacred bees stung by sunlight, whenever I see
    the fresh young limbs of boys. Yes, on Tenedos too
    Persuasion and Charm are at home
    in the son of Hagesilas.

Only a black heart, forged of steel or iron in an icy flame, could failto respond to the shining rays of desire flashing from the eyes of theyoung Theoxenos of Tenedos, whom Pindar praises here and who isassisted by the equally bright-eyed Aphrodite. It is clearly throughsight that the recipient perceives the Eros emanating from the one whois desirable. Similarly, it is at the sight of her young friend banteringwith her betrothed that Sappho is gripped by a feeling that, in all of itsphysical symptoms, certainly corresponds to that inspired by Eros.