Artemon and Anacreon: No Text without Context

Abstract

WE KNOW VERY LITTLE about the circumstances surrounding the actual performance and composition of Greek lyric poetry of the classical period. In antiquity too the same could be true, so that we cannot be sure that those ancients who attempt to supply what is now lost and what for them was also lost, are worthy of the credit they seem to deserve. They were especially liable to be deceived by dramatic poetry, since they themselves were scholars of a literary culture, and I offer an example in confirmation of this. The historian Demeas' began his authoritative life of Archilochus with a story which he claims took place in the life of an archon whom he names-the stone is defaced at this point-and he cites a poem of Archilochus as evidence. In this very year a Milesian pentekonter with one Koiranos aboard was wrecked in the Naxian channel, i.e., just off the coast of Paros, and he alone was saved by a dolphin. This is important for us, not because the story is obviously not true, but because it almost certainly belongs to a ritual of some cult as an aitiology, in this case probably of Poseidon. The name Koiranos, and the dolphin rescue show that the story belongs with the other myths that deal with the return of the king from afar after some disaster; we may compare Dionysus and the dolphin at Delos, Arion at Tarentum, Melikertes at the Isthmus and Dionysus at the Anthesteria, as well as the other examples assembled and interpreted most recently by Walter Burkert.2 We can therefore deduce that Archilochus told a dramatic cult story in such a way that later Greeks on reading it could misunderstand it as historically true and put it in a definite year in the poet's lifetime. They seem to have done much the same with the poems about Neobule and Lycambes, as M. L. West has convincingly suggested on other grounds.3 If we speculate on the possible contexts for our fragments of early Greek poetry, we must bear in mind the anthropological parallels adduced