Anacreon is celebrated today as a master miniaturist, the author of terse, adroitly turned, deceptively simple poems about desire and wine. A renowned participant and performer in the aristocratic symposia of late archaic Samos and Athens, he fashioned poems that were extensively imitated in the ‘Anacreontic’ genre that flourished in later antiquity, and which still strike as deeply as on the day they were first sung. In this edition, consisting of a text and translation of all the major fragments and testimonia (volume I) and a detailed commentary (volume II), Hans Bernsdorff equips readers for their voyage into Anacreon’s worlds with everything required for a philologically informed approach to his texts. The volumes are a major scholarly achievement, and will be consulted with profit by anyone interested in Greek lyric poetry.
The virtues of this work are more easily listed than fully appreciated. The notes abound in discussions that illuminate the minutiae of Anacreon’s diction. Larger interpretative vistas are treated with similar lavishness, each poem and fragment being furnished with a doxographical discussion that catalogues and engages extensively with the main lines of interpretation. The introduction gives helpful overviews of the evidence for Anacreon’s life and his reception (primarily in antiquity, although later periods are briefly mentioned, 31–45), as well as introducing issues such as themes, models, and performance that are addressed in greater detail throughout the commentary (11–22). When discussing the fraught Alexandrian editions, the structure and content of which can only be dimly glimpsed through the vagaries of later evidence, primarily book numbers given in citations and the commentary contained in P.Oxy. 3744, Bernsdorff displays an admirable blend of exhaustiveness and caution (47–52). He is similarly measured on the question of whether the extant fragments can be said to be representative of Anacreon’s original output, or whether matters military and political may have played a greater role than the present state of the evidence suggests. Bernsdorff recognises that the prevalence of erotic and symposiastic themes in the extant corpus may be exaggerated to some degree by the processes of citation and reception, but argues that the character of Anacreon’s oeuvre as presented by the tradition seems to be broadly confirmed by recent discoveries (11–12).
One of the volume’s principal strengths is its detailed treatment of papyri. Particularly notable in this respect is Bernsdorff’s discussion of the (restored and supplemented) mention at P.Oxy. 3722 fr. 15 col. i 17 of ‘Eubuleus [the] swineherd’ (280–1), which appears to be a pherecratean, and hence not part of the commentator’s prose. As he has argued in more detail in previous publications,[1] Bernsdorff sees in this fragment evidence for a poem that dealt with a specifically Athenian subject, the story of Eubuleus’ pigs being swallowed up by the chasm that opened when Persephone was abducted (280–1). In Bernsdorff’s hands, the reference to Eubuleus is tantalizingly suggestive of an Anacreon unfamiliar from the better known fragments, whose poetry responded to and recast epichoric myth (perhaps prefiguring, at least to some extent, the approaches of Pindar and Bacchylides). More can be said about the more extensive remains that make up P.Oxy. 2322 fr. 1 (= PMG 347). Bernsdorff is inclined to identify ‘the famous woman’ of line 12 with Penelope (360–1), and finds in the character’s wish for her mother to throw her into the sea (15–18) engagement both with the Odyssey, and with the tradition that Penelope was thrown into the sea by her mother when a child and was brought to shore by the birds after whom she was named (= S Pi. Ol. 9.79). Two distinct differentiations are at work here: unlike the Penelope of Od. 20.61–5, Anacreon’s ‘does not wish to be thrown into the sea by the winds, but by her mother’, and unlike the young Penelope of the aetiological narrative, ‘hopes that she will not be recovered’ (361).
As this reading richly demonstrates, Bernsdorff continues the recent scholarly trend of seeing Anacreon’s poems in intertextual dialogue with previous authors, particularly Homer and Sappho.[2] The terms in which these readings are elaborated, however, leave some conceptual stones unturned. While acknowledging the importance of the symposium as a performance context and the predominance of oral delivery, Bernsdorff stresses that ‘we can hardly doubt that Anacreon composed his songs in writing’ (18), and puts considerable emphasis on the role of ‘textuality in Anacreon’s time’ (17 n. 79). His understanding of intertextual relationships is underpinned by the assumption that the texts of Homer were ‘fixed’ by the late sixth century. Even if ‘rhapsodic recitations’ rather than books were the main source of audiences’ access to Homer, such recitations, on his account, ‘had to have been based on a fixed text’. It follows that poets ‘would have been able to refer to certain passages [of the Iliad and the Odyssey] which were recognizable to their audience’ (17).
These claims will doubtless be found more and less persuasive by readers, depending on the views they take of the evidence. But because Bernsdorff does not offer a detailed discussion of what he means by ‘intertextuality’, where he sees it anchored (text, author, reader, or a combination of all three), and what the relationship between its formal structures and interpretative implications might be, an opportunity is missed to think about its larger aesthetic and socio-political significance.[3] In his account of the PMG 358, Bernsdorff argues that the connection between Anacreon’s speaker being struck by Eros’ ball and Odysseus being surprised by the ball with which Nausicaa and her friends are playing ‘is confirmed not so much by verbal echoes [here he cites the parallel between Anacreon’s σφαίρῃ … συμπαίζειν and σφαίρῃ ταὶ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔπαιζον at Od. 6.100] … as by an analogous action and grouping of characters’ (460). The former effect is conceivable within the framework of traditional referentiality, and some may doubt whether a ‘fixed’ text of the Odyssey, as opposed to versions of the Nausicaa story, is required to ground the interactions Bernsdorff sees at work here.
More important, however, are the interpretative and imaginative processes set in train by the poem’s glancing allusiveness. When noting that σφαίρῃ … πορφυρῇ (PMG 358.1) recalls the language used in describing Halius and Laodamus playing ball at Od. 8.372–3 (σφαῖραν καλὴν … πορφυρέην), Bernsdorff argues that this connection ‘support[s] the intertextuality with the Nausicaa episode … where, however, the adjective does not occur’. More disjunctively, the echo of the Odyssey’s σφαῖραν … πορφυρέην might be read as evoking a contrast between Halius and Laodamus, who co-operate playfully, and Eros and the speaker, the latter at odds with a power with whom he cannot form a reciprocal relation. Such connections can be played out in scenarios of reading, but they also have implications for our understanding of the affective and interpretative environment constituted by a sympotic performance. Do they create a communal understanding, shared across the sympotic group, by evoking a common heritage? Or do they bring individual interpretative agency to the fore by adumbrating interpretative possibilities which can be variously construed (and indeed not construed at all)? Pursuing these (and other, related) questions affords the opportunity to think further about the specific kind of intertextual encounters that this poetry opens up.
Bernsdorff devotes a section of his introduction to ‘Performance’ (18–22), and offers some important correctives to the notion that ‘all deictic elements referring to the “here and now” … were understood as pointing to the communication situation outside the text’ (20). What is not discussed here, however, is the psychology, ethics, and politics of the symposium, all of which have been standard fare in recent scholarship.[4] When combined with the methodological constraints of the lemmatic commentary, the result of this stance can be to separate the texts as objects of philological attention from the events of performance, perception, and interpretation through which they were realized. While Bernsdorff’s glosses invariably supply readers with a wealth of linguistic and cultural information, there are occasions on which the commentator’s striving for exegetical clarity can be somewhat at odds with the poems’ workings. Discussing the celebrated question of what πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει at PMG 358.8 refers to, Bernsdorff makes an argument based on syntax: because ‘the last feminine form that refers to the girl’ is in line 5, but ‘all feminine forms of lines 6-7 refer to the hair … it is inevitable that we understand κόμην also with ἄλλην τινά’ (475). But this assumes both that πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινά, which as Bernsdorff notes ‘taken alone would naturally refer to a person not a thing’, does not create a new syntactical possibility (‘at another girl’) that cuts against the expectation Bernsdorff documents, and that such a volte face and its attendant ambiguity are not part of Anacreon’s poetic toolkit. One wonders whether it is ‘inevitable’ that ancient listeners, perhaps especially those in the mood for ludic ambiguities after an evening of drinking and laughter, would have heard the line as Bernsdorff does. With a similar eye to context, we might wonder whether the syntax does not work to create a poem that could be performed variously (the singer pointing at another man, or at a hetaera) and produce correspondingly various kinds of humour.
Attention to another key component of Anacreon’s poetry, namely the deftness with which the poems anticipate and accommodate the likelihood that audience responses will have varied across time and place, is also sometimes forestalled by the mechanics of philological elucidation. In his reading of PMG 348, for instance, Bernsdorff draws on a topographical understanding of the relationship between the sanctuary of Artemis Leucophryena and its environs to argue that when making sense of the reference to Artemis ‘by the eddies of the Lethaeus’ (ἥ κου νῦν ἐπὶ Ληθαίου | δίνῃσι, 4–5), ‘we have to imagine the goddess somewhere close to the sanctuary, either on the hills close by or at the [nearby] confluence, where one is able to look through the gorge’ (388). This is a plausible reconstruction of how listeners or readers with a knowledge of Magnesia and its surroundings might have conceived these lines. But the contemporary reader to whom Bernsdorff appears to appeal (‘we’) could also consider how the lines might have been understood by those without such knowledge, who may have found in ἐπὶ Ληθαίου | δίνῃσι less topographic precision than a sketch of the goddess’ activity that pairs evocative association with rhetorically apposite reticence. More importantly, Anacreon’s κου, which as Bernsdorff points out (396) can mean either ‘somewhere’ or ‘I suppose’, dextrously anticipates and accommodates just such a perspective. Performance by, for instance, an Athenian symposiast who displays his distance from the real-world referents makes good on a relation made possible by the poem’s language.
Each of these readings and alternatives turns on a relationship between two approaches to poetry’s workings. The first, with which Bernsdorff is primarily concerned, addresses itself to the poem conceived as a verbal construction subject to philological description and analysis. The second is concerned with events of meaning opened up by the text’s formal procedures,[5] and realized in performance and reading through the varying intercessions of audiences and readers. The challenges of the former will always shape scholarly engagement with Anacreon, and this edition will be of considerable value in helping future generations of readers navigate them. When responding to the demands of the latter, and considering ramifications touched on but not fully conceptualized in this commentary, readers will find in Bernsdorff’s work ample spurs for their own explorations.
Notes
[1] See e.g. H. Bernsdorff, ‘Anacreon and Athens’, ZPE 198 (2016) 1–13.
[2] See e.g. I. Pfeijffer, ‘Playing Ball with Homer: An Interpretation of Anacreon 358 PMG’, Mnemosyne 53 (2000) 164–84. For Sappho in Bernsdorff’s discussions, see especially 356–63, 619–21.
[3] For his discussion, see esp. p. 17 with n. 79, which engages specifically with ‘intertextuality in textless communication’.
[4] For discussion and extensive bibliography, see D. Fearn, ‘Materialities of Political Commitment? Textual events, material culture, and metaliterarity in Alcaeus’, in F. Budelmann and T. Phillips (eds.) Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece (Oxford, 2018), 93–113.
[5] See in general J. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Chicago, 2015). A. Matlock, ‘Relationality, Fidelity, and the Event in Sappho’, ClAnt 39.1 (2020) 29–56 makes use of Badiou’s notion of the ‘event’ in order to explore how lyric form can reflect and inaugurate distinctive modes of thought.