In Our Time - Greek and Roman Love Poetry

Episode Date: April 26, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Greek and Roman love poetry, from the Greek poet Sappho and her erotic descriptions of romance on Lesbos, to the love-hate poems of the Roman writer Catullus. The source of many of the images and metaphors of love that have survived in literature through the centuries. We begin with the words of Sappho, known as the Tenth Muse and one of the great love poets of Ancient Greece: “Love, bittersweet and inescapable, creeps up on me and grabs me once again”Such heartfelt imploring by Sappho and other writers led poetry away from the great epics of Homer and towards a very personal expression of emotion. These outpourings would have been sung at intimate gatherings, accompanied by the lyre and plenty of wine. The style fell out of fashion only to be revived first in Alexandria in the third Century BC and again by the Roman poets starting in the 50s BC. Catullus and his peers developed the form, employing powerful metaphors of war and slavery to express their devotion to their Beloved – as well as the ill treatment they invariably received at her hands!So why did Greek poetry move away from heroic narratives and turn to love in the 6th Century BC? How did the Romans transform the genre? And what effect did the sexual politics of the day have on the form? With Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London; Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London; Maria Wyke, Professor of Latin at University College London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, today we'll be discussing Greek and Roman love poetry, the source of many of the images and metaphors of love that have survived in literature through the centuries. We begin with the words of Sappho, known as the Tenth Muse,

and one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. quote, love, bittersweet and inescapable, creeps up on me and grabs me once again, unquote. There's no defence, love is visceral. Such heartfelt imploring by Sappho and other mainly male writers led poetry away from the great epics of Homer and towards a new personal expression of emotion. These outpourings would have been sung at intimate gatherings,

accompanied by the liar, and we gather, plenty of wine. The style fell out of fashion to be revived first in Alexandria in the third century BC, and then by the Roman poets in the, the first century BC. Catullus and his peers developed the form and employed powerful metaphors of war and slavery to express their obsession to their beloved, as well as the ill-treatment to the invariably received at her hands. So why did Greek poetry turn away from heroic narratives and turn to love in the 6th century BC? How did the Romans transform the genre, and what effect did the sexual politics of the day have on the form?

Joining me to discuss Greek and Roman love poetry at Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of Nick Ler, Senior Lecture in Classics, also at Royal Holloway, and Maria Weik, Professor of Latin, at University College of London. Nick, and as love as a subject for poetry, first becomes popular in about the 6th or 7th century BC. What happens at that time? Why does it...

Well, the 7th century is a time of extraordinary changes in the Greek world. It's a time in which the independent city-state is taking shape as the distinctive feature of the Greek community. It's a time of great overseas expansion, of increased trade and contact with the Near East. And within that kind of world, epic poetry is beginning to show its limitations. It's great for singing about the past, but what it can't really do is look at the here and now.

It can't deal with the immediate world of the singer, the audience and the community. We're talking about two or three centuries on from the earlier, the Odyssey. Well, depending on when you date it, probably about one century. But you have to remember, of course, that this is a period in which there are interesting things going on in the social makeup of Greek communities and the old aristocratic grip on power is being loosened up a bit. There's a rise of a kind of mercantile class. And within that kind of context, sorts of performance which bind people together in terms of their common experience, start to acquire a new kind of social influence.

What are the key characteristics to Lyc Percher? We know that it's sung. That can't be emphasised enough, can it really? It is always sung. That's right. Although writing is by this period quite well established, these poems were not being transmitted in writing until really quite a lot later, and for all we know, someone like Sappho may not even have been literate herself. Lyric, as a term, of course, comes from the liar, because as ancient taxonomists worked it out, lyric poetry is poetry that's sung to the lyre. I want to talk to Edith Hall about Sappho in precisely about 25 seconds, but could we hear little Sappho in Greek?

I might ask you to sing it, Nick, but if you could give it a bit of wellie when you read it. I don't know about the wellie, but here it goes. Omen ibeon's throtton, oida pezzedon, oida naun, faise, began, malignan, Manai Caliston, Ego de ken ototis erratai. Some say an army of cavalry, some say of infantry, some of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it's that which you love.

Edius Hall, Sappho is in one way an unlikely key figure, as it were, the founding poet of personal love. in such a male-dominated society? In a way, but also the very passions that love poetry celebrates, the gods that it's celebrated under, Eros, Aphrodite and Dionysus, tend to drift towards the feminine in the ancient imagination. And many of the lovers, when they're taking on the persona of the lover in their poems, actually becomes slightly a feminine or feminized.

Gender, politics of love poetry, very different from those of official public or state poetry. What can you tell us about the work of how does it survive? And about her, what's known about her? Well, we know that she's born in the late 7th century. She crosses the late 7th, early 6th century. She is certainly an aristocrat. She's actually very typical of the poets in that she is an eastern Aegean,

Eastern Mediterranean Greek, from an aristocratic family, living in very sophisticated cities, as Nick said, which are influenced very much by the cultures of the ancient Near Eastern Mesopotamia, very rich cultures like ancient Persia. And she's clearly got an incredible amount of leisure. And the only thing I would really add to Nick's sort of political analysis of how it arose is that you've got leisure, you have got courts, you've got rivalrous Nouveau-reach families, setting themselves up in these new cities who are trying actually to make public statements

about how refined their courts are. And almost all these poets, Sappho and Denecrian, and there are others from other islands around the Aegean, get attracted to very, very rich courts. And it's part of patronage is actually enmeshed with the whole thing right from the very beginning. And how has her both? survived because Nick implied that she might not even be literate. We know they're in songs. We know that songs until very recently didn't have much chance of surviving. How did her work

survived and what survived of it? She got written down just as soon as people could write down poetry in the late 6th, 5th century. Everybody knew how good she was. And she is sung at almost any decent drinking party worth its name for a thousand years. The most famous poem of all, if you'd ask any ancient Greek, for one poem by Saphaphos, it would have been one in which she describes the eight symptoms, physical symptoms of love, one after the other. And we know how this was really famous

because it's quoted by the ancients. And translated by Catullus, of course. Indeed, translated by Catullus. And in this, she watches a man chatting up the woman she loves. It's extraordinary how she does that. And she says, he looks to me to be equal to a God because he's watching you as you laugh so beautifully. And while that goes

on, all these things happen to me. I go dumb, I can't speak. Fire runs under my skin. Cold sweat pours all over my body. My ears are roaring. I'm going blind. I think I'm going to die. Now that is the love poem of the worst.

Male love poetry tends to be much more about power, about the exercise of male power. What is radical about Sapphire, I think, is actually the way she turns it into poetry. Because what she typically does is she constructs these extraordinary kind of inner dramas in which nothing actually happens. You start with an external situation, nearly always triangular,

nearly always a love triangle of which Sappho is one of the vertices. And then the poem will, for the first time in Western literature, really, evoke a kind of stream of consciousness illusion in which you're taken on a tour of the poet's thoughts. And you go, in Sappho's case, off into a kind of world of fantasy, which may be myth or maybe memory. Can you give us an example? Well, the poem I read the opening,

of begins with this proposition that the most beautiful thing in the world is not any of the thing that men admire, it's the object of your desire. It's not great armies on the march, it's not great fleets to see it, yeah. And then she goes on to say, I can prove this, because look at the myth of Helen of Troy, she gave up everything to follow the one she loved. And then as so often with Sappho, a bit of the text is missing in the middle of the poem. But then just as the text resumes, she says, this reminds me of anactoria, who is now far away,

whom I would rather see than any of these armies and Lydian chariots that other people think are so wonderful. And it looks as though what's going on there is what's going on in all her other poems, that she goes off into this kind of imaginative excursus, emulating the kind of... movement of thought as you brood on a situation you can't do anything about. And then when you come back to the situation at the end, it's somehow been emotionally transformed,

even though nothing has happened. Before I move on from that deep pass, as it were, the beginning, just to show that it wasn't just Sappho, there were other poets at the time. Can you just tell us something briefly about anachryon? Anacreon has to be really my favourite of all ancient poets because he's dedicated pleasure-seeker. He's absolutely dedicated party boy. He gets to work for three different Nouveau Rich family is across the Ogen.

He's so good. He's like a prize footballer who's brought off by different courts. He's had a statue beside Pericles, the great general in the Athenian Agarra. And I think he personifies, the great move for me of love poetry, is that epic is love and war. Love poetry is love versus war. And he had a very, very handy knack with the powerful metaphor. Eros is a blacksmith who smashes him with an enormous hammer

before dunking him in the cold torrents of the sea. Love is a boxer who comes along like a pugilist with mighty gloves and all he's got in defence of the garlands of flowers on his head at the drinking party. So there's a sort of gusto about the life of pleasure, which I think can only be related politically to a very decadent set who are trying to prove how little work they've got to do because they're so rich. Well, that's an act. That's an acronym, on.

Top of the best seller this, I think. Nicola, two or three hundred years pass. And the form falls away and is revived in Alexandria in about 300 BC. Can we talk about who was revived there and why it was revived there? This is Calimachus, isn't it? Oh, certainly, what, Callimachus is easily the most important figure in the period. He's the author of the catalogue of the Alexandrian Library in his day. job in 120 books. This is not your ordinary library catalogue. This is their first systematic

history of Greek literature. This is a period when the lyric poets are being collected and systematized in additions for the first time. They found nine books of, yes, exactly. Nine books of Sappho, some between six and ten of anachrian, collecting the stuff for the first time from all of the Greek world and writing systematic histories of it. But that's the day job. In their leisure time, at the Ptolemaic court in Alexandria, they were writing poetry of their own, and Colimachus was the great poetic guru of the age, and one of his strongest held principles

was that small is beautiful. There's a great reaction against the big genres of epic and tragedy, and a delight in trying to do complex things in the smallest possible number of lines. And Callimicus has this idea that a six-line epigram can actually be a better poem than a 29-dine. So he revised the idea of love poetry there. Mario, do you want to pick up what's happening in Alexandria as a love poetry?

The innovations that Dickus pointed to do that, that Callimachus did there, of what he took from the past and what he was going to pass on to the future, the future being the first century BC in this case. Sure, well, he sets an agenda that's then followed by the Roman poets in turning away from the poetry of heroism like epic and the poetry of the city like tragedy, turning more inwards to address a differently conceived community, a community that's often described as very bookish and scholarly,

because in Alexandria there is now established a very small elite community. It's very different from democratic Athens. And one of the things that he does in turning away from epic and tragedy is he starts to reflect on the nature of love in terms of how one writes poetry about it. it's quite reflective, quite rational in his analysis. And he does interestingly integrate the ideas of erotics and poetics together. So he suggests that what he's interested in is the refined, the exclusive. And he means not just in love, but also in the way of writing poetry.

He has an epigram in which he says, I hate the recycled poem, I hate the world-true. Trotten Road. I hate the promiscuous boy. I don't drink from the public fountain. I hate everything to do with the people. And there you can see that the promiscuous boy and the poetry that everyone else has written before are all part of the same scheme. And at the end, he says, he then applies that to his own apparent love affair and says, Lissanias, I say that you are beautiful, but you belong to someone else and there's a kind of irony there that the problem with being very fastidious

with poetry and with love is that you may end up with no one to love at all so you're talking here and we're talking here Edith Hall about a poetry that ceased to go straight onto the streets and be written by perhaps illiterate persons and it's become much more well as Sappho you said might have been

illiterate absolutely Shafo was the property of anybody who could speak Greek but you've missed yeah and so we're going to a poetry which is written down it's a You mentioned the word small group. You might have even touched on the terrible elite word. Elite. And it's a different thing is going on here, isn't it?

Can you briefly tell us before we move on to Catellas? Or bring in Catellas to this, Edith, that would be helpful. Well, it's a brand new aesthetic for a brand new political era. Most of the people who lived in Alexandria didn't even speak Greek. They were Egyptians. And preserving a classical repertoire of literature, become a sort of obsession to do with ethnicity as much as anything else that we are the ancient Greeks

who are keeping this stuff alive. But he actually did have dreams and things, Kalimicums on. He was a real poet, a real person, and he dreamt that Apollo came along to him, the god of the music, found him as all poets do as a shepherd, metaphorical shepherd, who's with his flock. And Apollo says to him,

keep your flock fat, but your muse slender. And the slender muse of the new poetry, it becomes a sort of canonical aesthetic. It's got to be light, slender and artistic. And Catullus at Rome picks this up. And he, despite being a provincial from Verona, says, I am the one who does the polished little poem, Expolyto.

My poem is a polished little, clever little item that is highly, highly wrought. And writing becomes, as Maria said, one of the most prominent metaphors for the whole thing. You'll never find a pen or a papyrus in a Sappho poem. So this from Alexandria reaches over, as it were, two and a half centuries to Rome, Nicholas. I always seem to burden you with dates, don't I really.

It reaches over two and a half centuries to Rome and Catullus and various Roman posts. For a very brief period take up this story, which we can say began in New Zealand, went to Alexandria, and then came to Rome with masses in between, I know, but those are our three staging points. Can you tell us a bit about Catullus

and his great address to his lover who he calls Lesbia? Yes, well, the name Lesbia looks back to Sappho. Sappho, of course, operating on the island of Lesbos. And what may be the first poem of the lesbian group is actually this famous translation of Sappho's most famous poem. And it may be for that poem that he coins the name. But we are told by the novelist Apuleus in the second century AD

that she was a real person, that she and the other mistresses of the Roman. and love poets, were masks for real women. And in the case of Catulles' lesbian, we have a fairly good idea of who she is. And she seems to be this extraordinary widowed aristocrat who gets on the wrong side of Cicero and whose brother is one of the great political troublemakers of the 50s. And Catullus's poetry is mixed up in all this.

Catullus's father was a close friend of Julius Caesar, He used to stop off at his estate when he was on his way to and from Gaul. And he's plugged into these circles in a way that makes him all too aware that he's the poet mixing with big people. But the poetry itself, can I, would you like, as you have said, can you give people an idea of that? Because I've been reading translations of it this last week, and I can't say, I haven't probably read Catullis, probably in my life, maybe glanced at. And it's absolutely wonderful and such a powerful. a powerful address to this woman and I love you and I hate you

and on it goes in this mixture and he's going to give her up and so on and so forth Can you just talk about the... Nick's given us a very good background Can you tell us about the work? Yes, I think one very interesting poem is ironically not about lesbian and not about

even Rome but it's very revealing about how Catullus perceives the nature of love and is very important for how we then see what the later Roman poets do. And that is a poem which tells the story of a young man in Athens called Attis, who is overwhelmed by his passionate devotion to a mother goddess, Sibeli. He leaves Athens, he leaves his family, he leaves his companions,

and he sets sail across the sea to the forests of the east, where he actually castrates himself and devotes himself totally to the goddess and then wakes up to bitterly regret what he has lost in every sense. And what's really curious about that poem, the way that it engages its readers, is the way that it seems to offer you a kind of extraordinary exaggeration of how a Roman like Catullis felt about the nature of love. That what love does is destroy your identity as a Roman citizen. You lose everything.

You lose your family. You lose your home. You lose your city. You're completely overwhelmed by a woman. you're subject to complete despair, and you feel yourself as if you're in another country and completely isolated in this savage, dark world. And you can see that surfacing that idea about love

in some of the Catalan poems, which are also a real development on the first-person narratives of the earlier poetry that's been discussed, because they seem to be much more extensive, internalized narratives. You get a sense that Catullus is almost standing in front, of a mirror saying get a grip and realize that it's all over that if the girl once loved you she loves you no more and be adamant and then in the poem interestingly a little story seems to develop because the the one who wants to stand firm the rational Catullus then collapses back

into the passion of Catullis thinking about who's she going to be with now what are they going to do who's going to kiss her and obviously he's absolutely fixated still who's little she bite Exactly. And at the very end, he says again, Catullus stand firm, turned to stone. When you've been offered the opportunity precisely to see that this Catullus is not standing firm and is collapsing back into the obsession he had before, with all its associations of the loss of masculinity. And as Edith said earlier, when you take on the role of the lover, interestingly, the male starts to become soft and feminized by being a lover. you lose your identity as a man and a citizen

if you're a lover in the ancient world. It's interesting that Catullus made a wonderful... Well, I've told it's wonderful. I haven't read the Greek or... I've read in English, translation of Sappho, and so there's a relationship there, Edith Hall, isn't that?

There is. He's making a very strong statement. His 51, is a Latin translation of her 31. Of course, the sexual politics change because it's a man, watching a man with woman, so everything changes

when you have one man watching another man. And it is farrier. With Sappho, the emphasis is very much on examination of her own inward and physical symptoms. This is much more full of hate and self-torment. You feel he's masochistically setting himself up to watch this, as you so often do. You have this incredibly strong. I have to say it, even though it's anachronistic,

it was sadomasochistic bent that you put yourself in the position of the one being tortured or flog or whipped like a slave. and Cotella sort of introduces this idea. His mistress is domina, which actually means sort of mistress of a slave as well as mistress of his heart, as it were. She's also older than him, of course. I mean, the actual Clodium Mattelli, the real woman, is older than him.

She's tremendously rich and powerful and clearly very charismatic, everything we know about her. And he is obsessed. But there is something going on here politically. I'm sorry to do this to you, but it is the late Republic. and all the elegists at Rome, all of them, are of a very high class who under the old Republic would have been expected to be good stoic heroes and self-controlled.

And as their republic falls about their ears, they all seem to turn to these very decadent public love affairs. And there is some kind of political statement being made about that. It's about the fall of the old Cato, stoic ideas and the passionate love of woman. The great theme of Godotlus' poetry is the experience of being overpowering. by your lover. Lesbia seems to dump him at a very early date. All the greatest lesbian poems are poems about it all going horribly wrong. And gradually, of course, the poems are not in any kind of chronological order, so you can construct your own narrative out of the collection. But there's a

wonderful kind of descent into a kind of madness, which sometimes erupts in loathing. There's an absolutely magnificent poem where he addresses someone who may be his. successor as lesbias lover. Kailas, he says, our lesbian, the great lesbian, whom Catullus loved more than himself and all his own, now at crossroads in back alleys.

And then there's a word in the Latin, a shock word in the Latin, which we can't translate on... I can't transmit you mean. Let's say, is performing sex acts on... The Mighty Songs of Remus. That's right. Obviously made an impression about you.

I've been swirting up. Globet. Look it up. If we were to think what the next development is to get away from the more salacious material I suppose for a minute

is that if we look at the next generation of love poets, Propercius and Tabalus and Ovid, one of the very striking features about their work that then becomes deeply influential on the later poetry

of the medieval period in the Renaissance. is that they take exactly the same sense of the tortured love, the domination, the being acted upon, the being turned almost into a woman by your desire for this overpowering female. One of the things that they do is they construct this as a kind of story across a range of different poems. We're now entered into a world of writing of poetry books

where you have a first and a last poem to round off your story. they create a narrative of a love affair. Love becomes a way of life now to the exclusion of everything else. It's not just an intermittent poem among poems about other things. Love is everything. So it's taken up by Petrach and then by a lot of Shakespeare's

and so on. So that's the big leap forward, which we're not going to do, but that's where it does go. Yes, precisely. So that you tend with Perprecious to associate him with one particular beloved Cynthia, tabullus with Delia, Ovid with Karina

And Perpersius, for example, starts his first poem saying Cynthia was the first to capture wretched me with her eyes and love trampled on my head and the image is like that in an arena where love is now the gladiator

who has conquered you and is literally tramping on your head until you cry out for mercy and then the last poem in the series of a group of three has Perpersius rejoicing in his return to common sense. Goodbye, Cynthia.

You'll get old and decayed, and I'll be very happy with that. I'm off, you know, to a happier life. One of the many things that's interesting here, I mean, is that this period of great Roman love poetry is quite short, let's say 60 years. Can you give us, Edith, can you tell us why it sort of, as it were,

seems to, why it stops? There seems to be a specific reason. Well, it starts, as the Republic, falters and falls to pieces and it's pretty well killed off by the time that Augustus finally passes his moral legislation which has been in the air all through the

20s BC and is it 1718 he passes all these very strict rules regulating basically the sexual and familial and domestic behaviour of the upper classes so when Ovid comes along in 10 BC he's the last great elegist with his amorees which are a delight I mean they are perhaps in some ways the first thing

that somebody should go and read because they're very accessible, they're very immediate and they're very funny. It's almost as though he's not taking the genre seriously as a love genre. And all that intensity and palpable emotional frustration you feel in Catullus has been diluted into a commentary on the genre, I feel. You looked as if you're putting up to that. Yes, yes. No, I just wanted to add to that really nice description that,

to think of a specific example of how he plays with what's been done before and yet can be very engaging emotional. It's a poem where it's a hot, sunny afternoon in Rome, and he's half-closed the shutters of his room to have exactly the right kind of light for the girl to arrive with whom he's going to have sex. And then the game has to be played, that she has to look as if she's resisting.

He is the pursuer. He pulls her clothes off, and then he describes her body, but he very clearly describes it only from the neck down, down to the thigh, gets to that point and then says to the reader very teasingly, of course you know the rest. we can very much engage with this kind of physical desire. But in a sense it's the antithesis of what the previous perks have done.

They hardly ever describe bodies. They're interested in faces and eyes and looks and hair. And the kind of mystique about the beloved. The beloved is like a goddess. The last thing she is is a body like any other body. And the last experience they have is sex like everybody else. It's always different. We'll have to stop that.

Thank you very much, Edith Hall. I thank you, Nick Lowe. Maria White, thank you for listening next week, next week, Spinoza. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.