Chapter 12. Aeschylus: Little Ugly One As we turn to the major Athenian dramatists, we find that three of the four fit into our pattern somewhat; Aeschylus suffers an adverse trial against his poetry and bitterly leaves Athens; Euripides is attacked by the Athenians and leaves Athens, only to be torn to pieces by comic poets or women; Aristophanes attacks Cleon, and is subjected to trial and… Read more
Chapter 13. Euripides: Sparagmos of an Iconoclast Euripides was closer than either of the other two major tragedians to a blame poet, so it is not surprising that his vita conforms to the exclusion pattern quite closely. [1] His plays had satirical aspects: he was especially noted for his critique of war (The Trojan Women) and for his attacks on women. Read more
Chapter 14. Aristophanes: Satirist versus Politician Aristophanes and the other comic poets inherited, as part of their comic art, the iambic abuse of Archilochus and Hipponax. [1] Perhaps the hallmark of Old Comedy was political satire; it is not surprising therefore that the poet in conflict with politician is constantly in evidence in the history of Old Comedy. [2]… Read more
Chapter 15. Socrates: The New Aesop In many ways, the Platonic Socrates fits into the pattern of Aesop, the mythical blame poet who is moral, called by god, yet rejected by a corrupt society. Socrates, like Aesop, was seen as the best of men. Thus, in the ending of the Phaedo: “Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of… Read more
Chapter 16. Victim of the Muses: Mythical Poets As has been shown previously, the lives of the poets are often composed of legendary and mythical elements, side by side with historical elements. We will now approach the problem from the other side, looking at selected mythical poets, testing these myths for attestations of the same patterns. A more complete survey of mythical poets can be found in… Read more
Chapter 17. Kissing the Leper: The Excluded Poet in Irish Myth In 1596, Edmund Spenser wrote, There is amongst the Irish a certaine kind of people, called Bardes, which are to them insteed of Poets, whose profession is to set foorth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rymes, the which are had in so high regard and estimation amongst them, that none… Read more
Chapter 18. The Stakes of the Poet: Starkaðr/Suibhne In 1942, the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil published Horace et les Curiaces, in which he treated the battle-fury of the Indo-European warrior. [1] Aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens (1956) was his first book-length examination of the warrior from a comparative Indo-European perspective; in this book he discussed for the first time the… Read more
Chapter 19. The Sacrificed Poet: Germanic Myths As was previously shown, Starkaðr is the Odinic hero par excellence; he is given his poetic consecration by Odin, as well as his martial consecration; he is killed by an Odinic god. Odin, like Starkaðr, is closely associated both with war [1] and with poetry. [2] A number of myths… Read more
Chapter 20. “Wounded by Tooth that Drew Blood”: The Beginnings of Satire in Rome “Satura quidem tota nostra est,” wrote Quintilian. “Satire is entirely ours [Roman].” [1] Thus blame in verse, of a certain type, was a characteristically Roman genre, despite some influence from Hellenistic Greek poetry. [2] Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, tells us that “Cato,… Read more
Chapter 21. Naevius: Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae We find the theme of the exiled Roman poet first in the life of Naevius (ca. 270–199 BC), Rome’s first writer of plays with Roman subjects, and writer of the first Roman epic with Roman subject matter, The Punic War. The scant details of his life, with their story of satirical freedom and political repression, have been thoroughly debated. Read more
