ἐπάμεροι· τί δέ τις; τί δ᾽οὔ τις; σκιᾶς ὄναρ
ἄνθρωπος. ἀλλ᾽ὅταν αἴγλα διόσδοτος ἔλθῃ,
λαμπρὸν φέγγος ἔπεστιν ἀνδρῶν καὶ μείλιχος αἰών.
(Pindar P. 8.95-7)
Mortal lives are short. We are creatures of the day. Or, in Pindar’s trenchant phrase, a dream of a shadow. This fundamental understanding of the human condition suffuses Greek poetry, and much of what survives presents different ways of acknowledging, dealing with, fighting against, or trying to ameliorate this painful fact. No genre, no author, no period is exempt, and thus the relevant texts are highly varied. Sarah Nooter undertakes this topic holistically in her latest and ambitious book, Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality. Drawing on approaches from anthropology, new materialism, literary theory, and philology, Nooter offers a rich exploration of this theme from Homer to Timotheus, with particular attention to Archilochus, Sappho, Simonides, Aeschylus, and Pindar. While the book works within these methodological frameworks, much of its value is in the individual observations on the poems and sections of poems it treats.
The title perhaps gives insufficient indication of the book’s breadth, but Nooter states her broad enterprise on the opening page: “In this book, I suggest that poetry offers a way to remain in the world—not only by way of declarations of intent or the promotion of remembrance, but also through the durable physicality of its practice” (1). The book considers various forms of “poetic perseverance” (5) in six chapters, divided into two parts, one on the body, the other on texts. The first part is preceded by a substantial introduction, and the second followed by a brief epilogue. The author is concerned with time, its relationship to ephemerality, of course, but also to how poetry helps to shape time’s rhythms. “The specific problem of embodied time that requires the intervention of poetry can be iconized by the term ephemerality, the Greek coinage that accounts for an important aspect of the mentality that underlines the materiality of poetic practice.” Expanding on Fränkel’s influential discussion of the semantics of ἐφήμερος (1946), Nooter sees the word as connoting not only brevity but a “cocktail of ignorance and hope, awareness and foolishness” (20). The word serves not only as a statement of the human condition but as a call to action—what is the audience going to do about it? The performance (or writing) of poetry itself is a statement against our ephemerality. “Immateriality is proclaimed, but in a traceable, predictable pattern. The sonic makes materiality and engenders memory; performance lends perdurance.” (24)
The first chapter (“Did the Heart Beat? Rhythm and the Body in Ancient Greek Poetry,” 35-68) looks at the relationship between body and rhythm with the underlying argument that “in the ancient Greek world, the meters of song and dance afforded the rhythm, steadiness, and even the measured temporality that was lacking from the internal, embodied experience of emotion, movement, and character” (40). In agreement with other scholars, Nooter asserts the uniqueness of the dance’s fleeting nature (nothing survives a performance). True, but such impermanence is true equally of song and oral recitations. More particularly, she focuses on the appearance of the word θυμός in Archilochus frag. 128 and in two passages in Theognis, including the “octopus poem,” to suggest that while the θυμός, representing one’s inner self, is changeable and inconstant, it is rhythm that provides “a potential source of permanence and stability” (51). From here, Nooter moves on to argue persuasively that the notion of a poem’s “heartbeat” does not exist in archaic Greece, since the heart was not imagined as generating a regular, predictable rhythm. This leads to an insightful discussion of two passages involving Homeric hearts—Odysseus’s when he is frustrated about when to take his revenge on the suitors at the opening of book 20 and Andromache’s when she learns of Hector’s death in Iliad 22.
Music in Homer and the Homeric Hymns is the focus of chapter two (69-96), beginning, appropriately enough, with the invention of the lyre and Apollo’s delight in Hermes’ song in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Nooter’s argument in this chapter is that the “intrinsic quality of ephemerality in music is counterbalanced by an emphasis on material perdurance through association with, or at times analogy to, objects and ecologies that last for generations” (72). She points to the physical description of Achilles’ lyre in book nine of the Iliad and then to his shield in book 18, with its four scenes depicting song and/or dance. She proposes that the reference to Daedalus’s creation of a dancing space for Ariadne, in the context of Hephaestus’s fabrication of the shield, suggests to the audience the perdurance of physical, enduring objects, even while the song itself fades away. “Momentary experience—whether of song, sound, or pain—is anchored by art in the Iliad, even if only metaphorically.” (88) In the Odyssey, however, Nooter finds music associated more with the natural (or nonhuman) world, where the continued or recurring existence of those objects provides the stability to combat ephemerality. This is reminiscent of Glaucus’s famous words to Diomedes in Iliad 6.145-9: mortals’ life is brief, but the recurrence of seasons and patterns in nature endure. The chapter concludes as it began, with a Homeric Hymn, this time the Hymn to Apollo. The maiden singers in this poem are a wonder (θαῦμα), whose fame (κλέος) will never die: across the generations, each iteration of these singers will keep this glory alive; the song is both ephemeral and eternal.
In chapter three (“The Erotics of Again: Time and Touch in Sappho,” 97-132), Nooter suggests apropos Sappho’s oft-repeated adverb δηὖτε that “Erôs is a serial phenomenon, part of a cyclical, repeating series of individual present moments, as opposed to a linear progression of experiences in and from the past” (121). This observation captures the tension she finds in Sappho’s poems between the intensity of immediate bodily feeling and past experiences and absence. Borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, she sees Sappho’s conception of time as an “eternal recurrence” in which these “intensely embodied experiences . . . might be thought to act as spools that thread the Sapphic lifespan into one ongoing present” (98). She treats four of Sappho’s poems/fragments in depth: frag. 31 and frag. 1, in part with a contrast to Homeric timeframes; frag. 94; and the “Tithonus poem.” Her readings of these poems are subtle and suggestive, even if I don’t agree with all her interpretations. She artfully brings together the strong physicality, temporal intensity, keen awareness of absence, and invocation of memory found in Sappho’s poems. Nooter’s readings here are enriched with parallels she adduces from the work of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. At the conclusion of this chapter (and the first section of the book), she writes, “For both Homer’s similes and Sappho’s embodied instances of desire implicitly suggest that poetry itself, and perhaps poetry alone, can transform the shifting and vanishing temporalities of the past into a recurring and returning present” (132).
Production of song was one way to fight against ephemerality; inscribing words on physical objects was another. In the second half of the book, Nooter takes up the role of texts in transcending time. The fourth chapter (nicely alliterative “Situating Simonides: Stones, Songs, and Sounds,” 135-64) gives an excellent introduction to this shift in focus since it concentrates on Simonides as both epigrammatist and lyricist. The chapter is threaded with a discussion of futurity both in his (physically inscribed) epitaphs and in his lyric poems. The former pointed to the future, were fixed in space, and offered a kind of communal memory and continuity. Nooter also focuses on the poet’s use of deictic pronouns and underlines his emphasis on the “thisness” of things. Her discussion of Simonides’ poem over the Spartan dead at Thermopylae (531 PMG), a “machine in memorability-making” (154), teases out the multiple layers of commemoration built up in these words, while her discussion of his “Danaë song” points to its carefully constructed aural elements.
In chapter five (“Writing the Future: Pindar, Aeschylus, and the Tablet of the Mind, 165-94), Nooter pursues two arguments. First, it is with Pindar that we see for the first time a reshaping of ideas about futurity in his use of τὸ μέλλον and its connections to contracted obligations; and second, the metaphor “writing in the mind,” used by both authors, becomes for Aeschylus tied to his notions of justice. “Aeschylus imagines a path to such a system [of Justice] by using images of writing to chart a course into the future, an axis along which justice might function.” (182)
With chapter six (“Recovering the Bodies of Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and Timotheus’ Persae,” 195-221) Nooter moves in a different direction to the “present’s management of the past” (195), focusing on two poems that were discovered through papyri, and that involve, in diverse ways, bodies—the young woman’s body in Archilochus and the lost bodies at sea in Timotheus. Nooter argues that scholars’ role in and influence on the interpretation of discovered poems are fundamentally different. Perhaps, but the differences, I think, are one of degree not kind. Scholars dealing with a passage of Aeschylus’s Suppliants, the bracing language in a Pindaric ode, or, for that matter, any text construct meanings similarly through their own lenses and biases. Fragmentary texts offer greater opportunities for construction, but the lenses and biases of a given scholar are at work in all cases. This said, Nooter presents acute readings of the poems, arguing that “the bodies portrayed within them lose their coherence and dissolve into the environment around them” (198). The Cologne Epode of Archilochus presents a clear example of the scholar’s role. When published in 1974, this longest surviving fragment of the canonical poet, combined with its subject matter, the apparent sexual assault of a young woman, captivated the scholarly world. Nooter traces some of the almost exclusively male scholarly responses to this new poem and the various theories they concocted and sexist assumptions on display in making them. In Timotheus’s poem, we see bold metaphors blurring nautical objects and human body parts, suggesting a disintegration of the body, a degeneration that ironically is well preserved on a clearly written fourth-century BCE papyrus.
A brief epilogue (“The Shape of Time,” 218-21) returns to epic, looking at the Theogony passage of Zeus establishing the emetic stone at Pytho and Zeus telling Poseidon to turn the Phaeacians’ ship into a stone marker in the Odyssey. These passages, suggests Nooter, demonstrate how gods, unlike mortals, shape time, not vice versa.
Greek lyric poetry has an overwhelmingly large bibliography. Nooter draws on a wide array of authors from several disciplines and her references include items from as recent as 2022 (and forthcoming). In her treatment of Sappho’s engagement with Homer, there is no reference to Leah Rissman’s Love as War: Homeric Allusions in the Poetry of Sappho (1983), and her discussion of Andromache’s losing her veil in Iliad 22 might have referred to Michael Nagler’s treatment (Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer [1974], 44-63).
The book is a pleasure to read. The writing is clear, graceful, and occasionally witty. I have quoted from it frequently in part to give a flavor of Nooter’s lively style. Nooter also helpfully signposts her arguments with frequent indications of what she intends to show and with summaries of conclusions reached. Almost all the translations from the Greek are the author’s own and they are admirably spot-on and valuable for those without (and with) Greek. I noted only two trifling typographical slips: the Aristophanes passage citation on 65 should be “Nu.,” not “V.,” and Theseus’s “sale” (135) should be “sail.”
In conclusion, Greek Poetry in the Age of Ephemerality presents a deep engagement with a fundamental issue in this poetry. Nooter treats her subject with care, nuance, creativity, and elegance. Even in the cases where one does not share her conclusion, her treatment of the poems and fragments opens up possibilities for further thought and interpretation. Nooter explains (30) that the chapters can be read individually as discrete essays. That’s true, but I strongly recommend that anyone interested in ancient Greek poetry read, and enjoy, this entire book.