Stesichorus - Works

Works

The ancients associated the lyrical qualities of Stesichorus with the voice of the nightingale, as in this quote from the Palatine Anthology: "...at his birth, when he had just reached the light of day, a nightingale, travelling through the air from somewhere or other, perched unnoticed on his lips and struck up her clear song." The account is repeated by Pliny the Elder but it was the epic qualities of his work that most impressed ancient commentators, though with some reservations on the part of Quintillian:

"The greatness of Stesichorus' genius is shown among other things by his subject-matter: he sings of the most important wars and the most famous commanders and sustains on his lyre the weight of epic poetry. In both their actions and their speeches he gives due dignity to his characters, and if only he had shown restraint he could possibly have been regarded as a close rival of Homer; but he is redundant and diffuse, a fault to be sure but explained by the abundance of what he had to say." Quintillian

In a similar vein, Dionysius of Halicarnassus commends Stesichorus for "...the magnificence of the settings of his subject matter; in them he has preserved the traits and reputations of his characters", and Longinus puts him in select company with Herodotus, Archilochus and Plato as the 'most Homeric' of authors.

Modern scholars tend to accept the general thrust of the ancient comments – even the 'fault' noted by Quintillian gets endorsement: 'longwindedness', as one modern scholar calls it, citing, as proof of it, the interval of 400 lines separating Geryon's death from his eloquent anticipation of it. Similarly, "the repetitiveness and slackness of the style" of the recently discovered Lille papyrus has even been interpreted by one modern scholar as proof of Stesichorean authorship – though others originally used it as an argument against. Possibly Stesichorus was even more Homeric than ancient commentators realized – they had assumed that he composed verses for performance by choirs (the triadic structure of the stanzas, comprising strophe, antistrophe and epode, is consistent with choreographed movement) but a poem such as the Geryoneis included some 1500 lines and it probably required about four hours to perform – longer than a chorus might reasonably be expected to dance. Moreover, the versatility of lyric meter is suited to solo performance with self-accompaniment on the lyre – which is how Homer himself delivered poetry. Whether or not it was a choral technique, the triadic structure of Stesichorean lyrics allowed for novel arrangements of dactylic meter – the dominant meter in his poems and also the defining meter of Homeric epic – thus allowing for Homeric phrasing to be adapted to new settings. However, Stesichorus did more than recast the form of epic poetry – works such as the Palinode were also a recasting of epic material: in that version of the Trojan War, the combatants fought over a phantom Helen while the real Helen either stayed home or went to Egypt (see a summarybelow). The 'Lyric Age' of Greece was in part self-discovery and self-expression – as in the works of Alcaeus and Sappho – but a concern for heroic values and epic themes still endured:

"Stesichorus' citharodic narrative points to the simultaneous coexistence of different literary genres and currents in an age of great artistic energy and experimentation. It is one of the exciting qualities of early Greek culture that forms continue to evolve, but the old traditions still remain strong as points of stability and proud community, unifying but not suffocating." – Charles Seagal.