Bacchylides

[4] However, the differences in their styles do not allow for easy comparison, and translator Robert Fagles has written that "to blame Bacchylides for not being Pindar is as childish a judgement as to condemn ... Marvell for missing the grandeur of Milton".

Lyrics by his uncle, Simonides, and his rival, Pindar, were known in Athens and were sung at parties, they were parodied by Aristophanes and quoted by Plato, but no trace of Bacchylides' work can be found until the Hellenistic age, when Callimachus began writing some commentaries on them.

[11] Like Simonides and Pindar, however, Bacchylides composed lyrics to appeal to the sophisticated tastes of a social elite[12] and his patrons, though relatively few in number, covered a wide geographical area around the Mediterranean, including for example Delos in the Aegean Sea, Thessaly in the north of the Greek mainland, and Sicily or Magna Graecia in the west.

[19] According to one account, Bacchylides was banished for a time from his native Keos and spent this period as an exile in Peloponnesus, where his genius ripened and he did the work which established his fame.

There was a thriving cult of Apollo on Keos too, including a temple at Carthaea, a training ground for choruses where, according to Athenaeus,[24] Bacchylides's uncle, Simonides, had been a teacher in his early years.

Simonides later introduced his nephew to ruling families in Thessaly and to the Sicilian tyrant, Hieron of Syracuse, whose glittering court attracted artists of the calibre of Pindar and Aeschylus.

[26][27] Bacchylides's first notable success came sometime after 500 BC with commissions from Athens for the great Delian festival (Ode 17) and from Macedonia for a song to be sung at a symposium for the young prince, Alexander I (fr.

[31] The poems were collected into critical editions sometime in the late 3rd century BC by the Alexandrian scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who probably restored them to their appropriate metres after finding them written in prose form.

4) observed that the emperor Julian enjoyed reading Bacchylides, and the largest collection of quotations that survived up until the modern era was assembled by Stobaeus (early 5th century).

Other fragments and 'notices' are sprinkled through the surviving works of ancient authors, which they used to illustrate various points they were making, as for example:[41] Fortunately for Bacchylidean scholarship, a papyrus came to light in Egypt at the end of the 19th century with a text of Greek uncials, which a local claimed to have found in a ransacked tomb, between the feet of a mummy.

In an elaborate plan involving a crate of oranges, switched trains and covert embarkations including a midnight rendezvous with a P&O steamship, he eventually sailed from the Suez with the papyrus dismembered and disguised as a packet of photographs.

[37] Some more pieces of the Egyptian fragments were fitted together by Friedrich Blass in Germany and then followed the authoritative edition of Bacchylides' poetry by Richard Claverhouse Jebb[n 1] – a combination of scholars that inspired one academic to comment: "we almost had the Renaissance back again".

[44] As noted by Frederic Kenyon,[45] the papyrus was originally a roll probably about seventeen feet long and about ten inches high, written in the Ptolemaic period, with some Roman characteristics that indicate a transition between styles, somewhere around 50 BC.

It reached England in about two hundred torn fragments, the largest about twenty inches in length and containing four and a half columns of writing, the smallest being scraps with barely enough space for one or two letters.

[35] Bacchylides had become, almost overnight, among the best represented poets of the canonic nine, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar, adding about a hundred new words to Greek lexicons.

[50] The kind of lofty and stately poetry that celebrated the achievements of these archaic aristocrats was within the reach of 'The Cean nightingale',[51][52] yet he seems to have been more at home in verses of a humbler and lighter strain, even venturing on folksiness and humour.

[55] The use of gripping and exciting narrative and the immediacy gained from the frequent use of direct speech are thought to be among Bacchylides's best qualities,[7] influencing later poets such as Horace (who imitated him, according to Pomponius Porphyrion, in Carmen I.

[61] Bacchylides is renowned for his use of picturesque detail, giving life and colour to descriptions with small but skilful touches, often demonstrating a keen sense of beauty or splendour in external nature: a radiance, "as of fire," streams from the forms of the Nereids (XVI.

[65] Whereas however Pindar's ode focuses on the myth of Pelops and Tantalus and demonstrates a stern moral about the need for moderation in personal conduct (a reflection on Hieron's political excesses),[66] Bacchylides's ode focuses on the myths of Meleager and Hercules, demonstrating the moral that nobody is fortunate or happy in all things (possibly a reflection on Hieron's chronic illness).

[68] But irrespective of any scruples about his treatment of myth, Bacchylides is thought to demonstrate in Ode 5 some of his finest work and the description of the eagle's flight, near the beginning of the poem, has been called by one modern scholar "the most impressive passage in his extant poetry.

In fact, in the same year that both poets celebrated Pherenicus's Olympic victory, Pindar also composed an ode for Theron of Acragas (Olympian 2), in which he likens himself to an eagle confronted with chattering ravens – possibly a reference to Bacchylides and his uncle.

[74] According to Kenyon, Pindar's idiosyncratic genius entitles him to the benefit of a doubt in all such cases: "... if there be actual imitation at all, it is fairly safe to conclude that it is on the part of Bacchylides.

A tendency to imitate other poets is not peculiar to Bacchylides, however – it was common in ancient poetry,[76] as for example in a poem by Alcaeus (fragment 347), which virtually quotes a passage from Hesiod (Works and Days 582–8).

Pindar however grasps the contrasts between the extremes of mortality and divinity with greater intensity than Bacchylides and for this reason seems the more philosophical and meditative, more concerned with ultimate questions of life and death, transience and permanence.

"[82] Bacchylides continues this dancer allusion in praise of Aegina, and ends it by listing some famous men who were born on the island, namely Peleus and Telamon.

Bacchylides relates how Achilles’ inaction spurred the Trojans to false hope, and how their swollen pride led them to be destroyed at the hands of the men they thought they had vanquished.