Stesichorus

6th century BC Greek lyric poet

Stesichorus (/s//t//ə/'/s//ɪ//k//ə//r//ə//s/; , Stēsichoros; c. 630 – 555 BC) was a Greek lyric poet native of today's Calabria (Southern Italy). He is best known for telling epic stories in lyric metres, and for some ancient traditions about his life, such as his opposition to the tyrant Phalaris, and the blindness he is said to have incurred and cured by composing verses first insulting and then flattering to Helen of Troy. He was ranked among the nine lyric poets esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria, and yet his work attracted relatively little interest among ancient commentators, so that remarkably few fragments of his poetry now survive. As David Campbell notes: "Time has dealt more harshly with Stesichorus than with any other major lyric poet." Recent discoveries, recorded on Egyptian papyrus (notably and controversially, the Lille Stesichorus), have led to some improvements in our understanding of his work, confirming his role as a link between Homer's epic narrative and the lyric narrative of poets like Pindar. Stesichorus also exercised an important influence on the representation of myth in 6th century art, and on the development of Athenian dramatic poetry.

Stesichorus was born in Metauros (modern Gioia Tauro) in Calabria, Southern Italy c. 630 BC and died in Katane (modern Catania) in Sicily in 555 BC. Some say that he came from Himera in Sicily, but that was due to him moving from Metauros to Himera later in life. When exiled from Pallantium in Arcadia he came to Katane (Catania) and when he died there was buried in front of the gate which is called Stesichorean after him. In date he was later than the lyric poet Alcman, since he was born in the 37th Olympiad (632/28 BC). He died in the 56th Olympiad (556/2 BC). He had a brother Mamertinus who was an expert in geometry and a second brother Helianax, a law giver. He was a lyric poet. His poems are in the Doric dialect and in 26 books. They say that he was blinded for writing abuse of Helen and recovered his sight after writing an encomium of Helen, the Palinode, as the result of a dream. He was called Stesichorus because he was the first to establish (stesai) a chorus of singers to the cithara; his name was originally Tisias.

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,
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 Quintilian 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. 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 summary below). 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:

Some poems were wrongly attributed to Stesichorus by ancient sources, including bucolic poems and some love songs such as Calyce and Rhadine. It is possible that these are the works of another Stesichorus belonging to the fourth century, mentioned in the Marmor Parium.

Bovillae, about twelve miles outside Rome, was the original site of a monument dating from the Augustan period and now located in the Capitoline Museum. The stone monument features scenes from the fall of Troy, depicted in low relief, and an inscription: Ιλίου Πέρσις κατα Στησίχορον ('Sack of Troy according to Stesichorus'). Scholars are divided as to whether or not it accurately depicts incidents described by Stesichorus in his poem Sack of Troy. There is, for example, a scene showing Aeneas and his father Anchises departing 'for Hesperia' with 'sacred objects', which might have more to do with the poetry of Virgil than with that of Stesichorus.