[In the following essay, Kurke contends that certain “critical ruptures of decorum” found in Alcaeus's poetry may be read as indications of crisis in the aristocracy.]

1. DECORUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS¹

It is a truism that history is written by the winners, but in the case of the late-seventh/early-sixth-century Lesbian poet Alkaios inveighing against his enemy Pittakos, we have an extraordinary instance of history written by the “losers”. For Pittakos, the “winner”, has become a shadowy figure, one of the Seven Sages, to whom we can attribute little more than an aphorism, while Alkaios has left us a substantial number of poetic fragments. Yet Alkaios represents in its purest form the aristocratic power monopoly which was fast disappearing in Mytilene and throughout the archaic Greek world. The poet's anomalous relation to history was noted by D. Page in his dismissive envoi of Alkaios:

We shall not judge that Mytilene lost a statesman of any good promise in one who struggled so long and so vainly against the stream of history. Alcaeus was for ever rushing headlong into battle, fighting for himself and his friends, and often he rushed headlong out again. All through his stormy life he had neither might nor right on his side. There is little to admire in the man except his poetry …².

The fact that Alkaios offers a contemporary eyewitness account for a period of extreme social and political crisis has led scholars to read him in one of two ways. On the one hand, the fragments are mined for evidence of actual historical events; on the other, Alkaios is judged and condemned for his reactionary politics. In contrast to both these approaches, I would like to offer a reading of certain fragments which is literary but also ultimately political. For in these fragments, I believe, we catch the break-up or crisis of a traditional culture and the rupture of its dominant discourse into heteroglossia. And this crucial moment of rupture is inscribed in the once-dominant homogeneous discourse of the ruling aristocracy.

In other words, I would like to consider the issue of literary decorum as a social and political phenomenon. As a recent critic has reminded us, “the concept of decorum is never innocent”³, and it is never more weighted with significance than in a culture where poetry is socially embedded and composed for performance. In the archaic period, all poetry has a social function and an intended audience, and these constraints strictly dictate genre, occasion, and level of style. In composing for the closed aristocratic hetairie, Alkaios, like Sappho, appears generally to have adhered to the strict rules of decorum which informed Greek poetic production from Homer to the fifth century B.C.E.⁴. Within the constraints of genre and occasion, melic poetry (both monodic and choral) maintained a level of style that differentiated it from everyday speech, on the one hand, and from the vulgar and abusive style of iambus, on the other⁵.

It is, then, all the more striking to discover in the political fragments of Alkaios certain small but critical ruptures of decorum. It is these anomalous moments that I would like to account for by placing them within the larger context of the ideological struggle in which they were composed. It should be said at the outset that this interpretation, like all reconstructions of the context of Alkaios' poetry, must remain largely speculative, since the evidence is so fragmentary⁶. Still, given the momentous upheavals within a traditional culture to which Alkaios was witness, it seems worth the risk to speculate on the impact such changes had on the traditional poetic medium he commanded.

In his biography of the archaic sage Pittakos, the third-century C. E. scribbler Diogenes Laertius reports that “Alkaios calls him drag-foot (σαράποδα, σάραπον), because he had flat feet and trailed them behind him; chap-foot (χειροπόδην) because of the cracks in his feet, which they call ‘chaps’; prancer (γαύρηκα), since he was always prancing around; pot-belly (φύσκωνα) and big-belly (γάστρωνα) because he was fat; dusky-diner (ζοφοδορπίδαν) since he did not use a lamp; and well-swept (ἀγάσυρτον), since he was slovenly and dirty”. (Diogenes Laertius I 81; Alkaios, fr. 429, Campbell's translation).

This list offered little more than antiquarian interest to linguists and connoisseurs of abuse, until sizable papyrus fragments of Alkaios were found and deciphered in this century. One such poem is Alkaios fr. 129, which was first published in 1941:

          ].. ρά. α τόδε Λέσβιοι
          ] … εὔδειλον τέμενοs μέγα
ξῦνον κά[τε]σσαν, ἐν δὲ βώμοιs
ἀθανάτων μακάρων ἔθηκαν
κἀπωνύμασσαν ἀντίαον Δία
σὲ δ' Αἰολήιαν [κ]υδαλίμαν θέον
πάντων γενέθλαν, τὸν δὲ τέρτον
τόνδε κεμήλιον ὠνύμασσ[α]ν
Zόννυσσον ὠμήσταν. ἄ[γι]τ' εὔνοον
θῦμον σκέθοντεs ἀμμετέρα[s] ἄραs
ἀκούσατ', ἐκ δὲ τῶν[δ]ε μόχθων
ἀργαλέαs τε φύγαs ρ[ύεσθε·
τὸν '′Uρραον δὲ πα[ῖδ]α πεδελθέτω
κήνων 'Ε[ρίννυ]s Ὤs ποτ' ἀπώμνυμεν
τόμοντεs ἄ.. [                    ′.]ν..
μηδάμα μηδ' ἔνα τoν ἐταίρων
ἀλλ' e θάνοντεs γaν ἐπιέμμενοι
κείσεσθ' ὐπ' ἄνδρων οi τότ' ἐπικ′.. ην
ἤπειτα κακκτάνοντεs αὔτοιs
δaμον ὐπὲξ ἀχέωνρύεσθαι.
κήνων ὀ φύσγων οὐ διελέξατο
πρὸs θῦμον ἀλλὰ βραϊδίωs πόσιν
ἔ]μβαιs ἐπ' ὀρκίοισι δάπτει
τὰν πόλιν ἄμμι δέδ[.].. [.]. ί. αιs
οὐ κὰν νόμον [.]ον.. [].′[]
γλαύκαs ἀ[.].. [.].. [
γεγρά. [
Μύρσιλ[ο

… the Lesbians once founded this great conspicuous precinct as a common one, and in it they established altars of the blessed immortals, and they named Zeus Antiaos, and you, glorious Aiolian Goddess, the mother of all, and third, this one they named Kemelios, Dionysos, eater of raw flesh. Come, hear our prayers, holding your spirit kindly-disposed, and save us from these toils and from grievous exile. But let the Erinys of those men pursue the child of Hyrrhas, since once we swore, cutting … never to [betray or abandon] anyone of his comrades, but either to lie clothed in earth, dead at the hands of the men who then [held power], or, having killed them, to free the people from their griefs. Of these men Fatty did not speak sincerely⁷, but easily mounting upon the oaths with his feet, he devours our city … not according to law …

This lengthy fragment actually contains one of the insults Diogenes Laertius preserves in his list: ὀ φύσγων—“fatty” or “blubber”. But if we were expecting from Diogenes Laertius' list scathing invective in the manner of Archilochus or Hipponax, we should be sorely disappointed by this poem⁸. It begins with the people of Lesbos founding a temenos or sacred precinct and, in the second strophe, naming the three gods to whom the precinct is dedicated with their cult epithets. The poet then solemnly invokes this triad of divinities to heed his prayers, both positive and negative. For himself and his companions he prays “to be freed of these toils and of this grievous exile” (11-12). For Pittakos, the child of Hyrrhas, he prays that “the Erinys or Fury of those men (κήνων in l. 14, which has no explicit antecedent) go after him”. And then the reason in lines 14-15: “since once we swore, cutting …” (and here the text is lost, but it must mean either “cutting the throat of a sacrificial victim” or “cutting oaths”, the Homeric expression which itself must derive from the custom of ratifying oaths with an animal sacrifice). Alkaios then reports the substance of the oath in lines 16-20, and finally, we get the narrative of Pittakos' betrayal (21-25). The poem continued for one more stanza after the fragmentary lines 25-28. Rösler has argued quite convincingly that the poem must have begun with the foundation of the sacred precinct and invocation of the gods (Rösler pp. 194-198), so we have at least three-quarters of the ode fairly well preserved.

What is striking about the poem as a whole is its high style. There is the solemnity of the opening invocation and prayer, the designation of Pittakos as “the child of Hyrrhas”, and the elevated diction of θάνοντεs γaν, ἐπιέμμενοι κείσεσθ(αι) (language almost exactly paralleled in Pindar, Nem. 11,15-16). This general level of style makes ὀ φύσγων in line 21 all the more startling—and critics have indeed been startled. The classic formulation is that of Kirkwood, who seems to think that Alkaios has been momentarily overcome by anger and hostility:

The abuse of Pittacus after the solemn oath is somewhat unfortunate in emotional effect. There is power in the steady movement from the description of the sanctuary to the prayer to the curse; but in the climactic expression Alcaeus gives to his anger there is more violence than power. Violence of statement is not necessarily bad, but here it damages the impression of the passage as a whole. A deeply serious, religious atmosphere has been created; with the abusive and not particularly relevant word φύσγων (“pot-belly”) the tone changes at once. The image created is comic, we are suddently in the realm of satire, and Alcaeus's anger runs the risk of appearing to have more personal animus than political idealism.⁹

The problem of incongruity of style which Kirkwood poses here is a real one, though I do not want to endorse his censure of the poet's taste. As Kirkwood notes, φύσγων is a shocking anomaly in context. And we should not try to ignore the incongruity by pretending that this coarse word makes the poem into conventional invective, for it has neither the formal metrical characteristics nor those of diction to qualify for this category¹⁰. Instead, I believe we must acknowledge what is unconventional here and look for an explanation which is strictly speaking extra-literary: in a changed relation among the poet, the language he utters, and that which his words denominate.

We find the same incongruity of style in some other fragments, especially those concerned with Pittakos. Consider fr. 70:

π. [.]τωι τάδ' εἴπην ὀδ'. υ.. [
ἀθύρει πεδέχων συμποσίω. [
βάρμοs, φιλώνων πεδ' ἀλεμ[άτων
εὐωχήμενοs αὔτοισιν ἐπα[
κῆνοs δὲ παώθειs 'Ατρεῒδα[.]. [
δαπτέτω πόλιν ὠs καὶ πεδὰ Μυρσί[λ]ω[
θas κ' ἄμμε βόλλητ' '′Αρευs ἐπιτ.ύχε.. [
τρόπην· ἐκ δὲ χόλω τῶδε λαθοίμεθ.. [·
χαλάσσομεν δὲ τὰs θυμοβόρω λύαs
ἐμφύλω τε μάχαs, τάν τιs 'Ολυμπίων
ἔνωρσε, δaμον μὲν εἰs ἀυάταν ἄγων
Φιττάκωι δὲ δίδοιs κῦδοs ἐπήρ[ατ]ον.

… to say these following things … the lyre plays having a share of the symposium, … feasting lavishly with vain braggarts … them, but that one, son-in-law to the Atreidai …, let him feed on the city as also once with Myrsilos, until Ares wishes to turn us to arms (?); and may we forget this anger … and let us relax from spirit-devouring strife and internecine battle, which some one of the Olympians has roused, leading the damos into folly and giving lovely kydos to Pittakos.

Alkaios begins by painting a scene of Pittakos at a symposium, describing his companions with the obscure phrase φιλώνων πεδ' ἀλεμάτων. Φίλων occurs nowhere else, but its formation (like φύσγων) suggests a nickname or term of abuse. The low style of φίλων is confirmed by the meaning of ἀλέματοs, “vain” or “foolish”: the whole phrase is usually translated “with vain or empty charlatans”¹¹. In striking contrast to Pittakos' low-class companions of the first strophe are the language and sentiments of lines 10-13. The diction here is very elevated, full of solemn Homeric echoes, and the poem ends with the “lovely kydos” some god has bestowed on Pittakos¹². The dissonance between φιλώνων πεδ' ἀλεμάτων and δίδοιs κῦδοs ἐπήρατον is repeated at the center of the fragment, in the juxtaposition of παώθειs 'Ατρεῒδα[and δαπτέτω πόλιν. The former attaches Pittakos to a heroic genealogy, while the latter transforms him into a ravening animal by the use of the verb δάπτω¹³.

A similar stylistic dissonance appears in the brief fragment preserved by Aristotle (fr. 348):

                                                                                τὸν κακοπατρίδαν
Φίττακον πόλιοs τὰs ἀχόλω καὶ βαρυδαίμονοs
ἐστάσαντο τύραννον, μέγ' ἐπαίνεντεs ἀόλλεεs

They established Pittakos the base-born as tyrant of the gutless and ill-starred city, praising him greatly all together.

Alkaios characterizes the city which chose Pittakos tyrant as ἀχόλω καὶ βαρυδαίμονοs, expressing the double motivation so familiar from Homer and tragedy. But along with such double motivation, the two adjectives represent a striking inconcinnity in style. Βαρυδαίμων is an elevated poetic compound, while ἄχολοs is a medical term otherwise used only in technical contexts¹⁴. Campbell's translation, “that gutless, ill-starred city”, effectively captures the unevenness of tone produced by the conjoined adjectives¹⁵.

Alkaios' contemptuous designation of the city as “gutless and ill-starred” may shed light on one final incongruity. In fr. 130b, 1-8 Voigt Alkaios longs for civic life from exile:

ἀγνοιs.. σβιότοιs.. ιs ὀ τάλαιs ἔγω
ζώω μοῖραν ἔχων ἀγροϊωτίκαν
ἰμέρρων ἀγόραs ἄκουσαι
καρυ[ζο]μέναs ὦ ('Α)γεσιλαῒδα
καὶ β[ό]λλαs· τὰ πάτηρ καὶ πάτεροs πάτηρ
κα‹γ›γ[ε]γήρασ' ἔχοντεs πεδὰ τωνδέων
τoν [ἀ]λλαλοκάκων πολίταν
ἔγ[ω. ἀ]πὺ τούτων ἀπελήλαμαι

… I, wretched, live, having the most rustic lot, longing to hear the assembly heralded, o Agesilaidas, and the boule. The things my father and my father's father grew old having among these citizens who do each other harm-from these I have been driven away …

Here, the poet's nostalgia is ruptured by the bitter word ἀλλαλοκάκων, which designates the citizens in the assembly and boule. We do not know whether this poem comes from Alkaios' first or second exile, but if we may connect ἀλλαλοκάκων with ἀχόλω καὶ βαρυδαίμονοs we may suspect that the poet's resentment explodes at the memory of Pittakos' election. Thus this incongruity too would be associated with Pittakos' rise to power¹⁶.

2. DOXA, ORTHODOXY, AND THE CRISIS OF VOICE

What, then, are we to make of the stylistic dissonance in fragments 129, 70, 348, and 130b? There is a real linguistic violence here, but it is not without a logic of its own. It is, I suggest, Alkaios' response to a twofold crisis of voice—of authoritative utterance. First there is the oath, which forms the center of fr. 129, sworn by the members of the same hetairie or aristocratic political club (notice ἐταίρων at the end of line 16)¹⁷. The oath should be a form of absolute and absolutely binding speech, but one member of the hetairie, Pittakos, betrays the oath and joins forces with the tyrant the hetairie has sworn at all costs to overthrow (notice Myrsilos at line 28). By his betrayal of the oath, Pittakos subverts the possibility of absolute speech and confounds the distinctions of friend and enemy, noble and base.

Second, in combination with this absolute speech whose authority is eroded, there is voice where there should be silence. For Pittakos, as we are told by Alkaios himself, is elected tyrant by a deluded damos (fr. 348; cf. Aristotle, Pol. 1285a). There is much debate about what would have constituted the damos in assembly in seventh/sixth century Mytilene (cf. fr. 130b), but scholars are generally agreed that it had more in common with the quiescent Homeric assembly than with the full-fledged democratic assembly of fifth-century Athens. On the Iliadic model, then, there exists a Boule of elder statesmen, prominent aristocrats who advise the King or, in an oligarchy, set policy, and an agora consisting of the full people assembled to hear the decisions of their few noble leaders¹⁸.

But already in the Iliad, we are shown a scene in which a non-noble like Thersites could air his grievances and where, in a volatile situation, the assembled masses could vote, if not with their hands, at least with their feet. An equally surprising turn of events seems to have occurred in Mytilene: according to one reconstruction, “Both Aristotle and Alcaeus use terms which imply that it was the damos of Mytilene which exercised the power of appointing Pittacus to dictatorship. It is probable that in more settled times the damos could do no more than ratify decrees of the Council; but on this occasion, they may well have taken into their own hands the law suspended by faction in the Council and impotence in the royal house” (Page pp. 178-179). This is a revolution of sorts, for whatever the constituency of the damos, it must have represented a broader base than the vying aristocratic factions—a group which was supposed to be silent because spoken for by the more privileged nobility (notice the assumption of delegation and its breakdown in fr. 129—Alkaios and his hetairoi swore to “save the damos”, but are now themselves in need of saving). When the larger group appropriates to itself the power of authoritative discourse, of nomination and delegation, the effect may well have been more alarming than the subversion by a single aristocrat of the absolute discourse of oaths.

To comprehend what is at stake in this twofold crisis of voice, I would like to make use of P. Bourdieu's concept of doxa. By doxa Bourdieu designates all that is taken for granted, all that is self-evident in a culture, the internal structures inculcated in each member by the objective structures, all the practices of living in the culture:

Systems of classification which reproduce, in their own specific logic, the objective classes, i.e. the divisions by sex, age, or position in the relations of production, make their specific contribution to the reproduction of the power relations of which they are the product, by securing the misrecognition … of the arbitrariness on which they are based: in the extreme case, that is to say, where there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs¹⁹.

Elsewhere, Bourdieu defines doxa as “the objective consensus on the sense of the world”: “what is essential goes without saying because it comes without saying” (Bourdieu p. 167, italics in original). And just as doxa is the product of objective structures of inculcation, so too objective crisis is the necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the questioning and breakdown of the doxic order. That is, contact with other cultures or “the political or economic crises correlative with class division” (Bourdieu p. 168) can precipitate the recognition of the arbitrariness of the dominant order. That recognition, in turn, can provide the dominated classes with the symbolic means to reject the construction of reality which is imposed on them from above. Once this happens, what was the realm of doxa becomes the site of contested paradigms of “the real” and the proper—the sphere of orthodoxy and heterodoxy:

Orthodoxy, straight, or rather straightened, opinion, which aims, without ever entirely succeeding, at restoring the primal state of innocence of doxa, exists only in the objective relationship which opposes it to heterodoxy, that is by reference to the choice—hairesis, heresy—made possible by the existence of competing possibles and to the explicit critique of the sum total of the alternatives not chosen that the established order implies

(Bourdieu p. 169, italics in original).

Lesbos of the late seventh and early sixth centuries witnessed precisely the objective conditions of crisis Bourdieu enumerates: cultural contact with the empires of the East (with its attendant economic disruptions) and ultimately the political upheaval of class division²⁰. As a result, the established order is exposed as arbitrary and Alkaios' poetry captures the critical moment of the fall from doxa into the contested field of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The twofold crisis of voice we have identified enacts for Alkaios a double estrangement, both subjective and objective, linguistic and social. Pittakos' betrayal of the oath subverts the possibility of perfect univocality—of binding speech which is an adequate token of a pure aristocratic self—and thereby alienates Alkaios from his own discourse. For, as Burnett notes, part of the bitter edge of fr. 129 comes from the fact that Pittakos has transformed the entire hetairie into unwilling oath-breakers by his betrayal (Burnett p. 160).

In like manner, the voice of the damos, which elects Pittakos its representative, irrevocably estranges Alkaios from a condition of perfect social unanimity. It is a minor historical irony that we have come to know Alkaios' poetry by Strabo's designation στασιωτικά, since this poetry is constituted as factional only by the new order which Alkaios inveighs (unsuccessfully) against. That is, Alkaios and his cronies would never acknowledge themselves the representatives of faction opposed to the proper civic order—instead they believed themselves to be speaking for the damos which could not conceivably speak for itself. This “objective consensus” is suddenly ruptured by the damos' appropriation of voice: by appointing Pittakos as their delegate, the damos constitutes itself as a separate, autonomous group and simultaneously consigns Alkaios' hetairie to the status of faction²¹. This social estrangement accounts for the anomaly of Alkaian monody, which (as Rösler has so amply demonstrated) has as its audience the aristocratic hetairie, and yet seems continually to be striving to speak to (and for) the wider circle of the entire damos²².

It is in the context of this crisis of doxa that we must analyze Alkaios' significant violations of decorum. In a condition of a “quasi-perfect fit between the objective structures and the internalized structures”, poetry and its etiquette contribute to the reproduction of the status quo: decorum works in the service of doxa. But Alkaios is confronted with a situation in which doxic certainty has evaporated—where he must struggle to assert orthodoxy and to define and definitively prevail over its other, heterodoxy. In this struggle for mastery of the field of signification, the poet takes desperate linguistic measures. In fragment after fragment, he brands Pittakos and his party as κακοπάτριδαι, “the base-born” (frr. 67,4; 75,12; 106,3?; 348,1). Scholars are very uncomfortable with Alkaios' use of this term, because, as D. Page points out, for Pittakos ever to have been Alkaios' hetairos or companion, he must have been a nobleman. Also, we know from Alkaios' own poetry that Pittakos married into the family of the Penthilidae, one of the noblest houses of Lesbos (fr. 70). Such a marriage alliance, like his association with Alkaios' hetairie, would have been impossible for a man of base ancestry.

Page's solution is that “Alkaios is referring not to a lowly position in society but to barbarian pedigree—the father of Pittacus was a Thracian. The great families of Mytilene might admit a noble foreigner to their ranks as a peer: but it was always open to his enemies to remind him of the outer darkness from which he had barely emerged” (Page pp. 169-170). Page's claim, I believe, reveals more about the British attitude toward the limits of its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries C.E. than about Lesbos of the seventh and sixth centuries before our era²³. For as Page himself admits in a footnote, the rule in the archaic period is the complete integration of noble foreigners. Indeed, the evidence that we have suggests that it was only the most noble who would intermarry with foreign nobility. Thus Kimon son of Miltiades, the great Athenian general and statesman, was a grandson of Olorus, King of the Thracians. (And notice that Thucydides mentions a Thracian King Pittakos 4,107,3). Pittakos' Thracian connection (if such existed) could surely not have been turned against him in the way Page imagines²⁴.

The answer is much closer to hand: Alkaios must constitute an orthodoxy. But orthodoxy, unlike “all that goes without saying because it comes without saying”, requires its opposite number—heterodoxy. This explains the poet's near-manichean demonization of Pittakos in the rhetoric of base birth. Pittakos' betrayal threatens to confound the distinctions on which Alkaios' life and political program are based. The poet responds with rigorous exclusionary logic: to keep an oath is to be a nobleman; to break an oath is to be, by definition, base. Pittakos is κακοπατρίδαιs, base-born, because he must be.

But Alkaios' neat dualism is repeatedly destabilized by the very thing that generated it—the shifting position of Pittakos. Pittakos was once a hetairos—one of a band of the same—who has become other. In order to align Pittakos unambiguously with the pole of heterodoxy, Alkaios represses that sameness, speaking only of his enemy's difference. But still the distinctions refuse to stay fixed: in fr. 70, for example, in spite of the abuse of Pittakos, a strange kind of assimilation occurs. As Rösler argues, we must imagine Alkaios performing his songs before his hetairie at the symposium, perhaps with lyre accompaniment²⁵. In performance, fr. 70 doubles that context by locating Pittakos at his own symposium. For Pittakos, as for Alkaios at the moment of performance, “the lyre plays having a share of the symposium” (ἀθύρει πεδέχων συμποσίω … βάρμοs, 3-4). Until it is added that he “feasts with vain braggarts”, the distinction between Pittakos and Alkaios' own party wavers eerily. Critics have never acknowledged this doubling of symposia, but they have revealed their discomfort by attempts to draw the lines more clearly. Thus Page, for example, claims that ἀθύρει, “in this context (unlike, for example, Hom. hymn. XIX 15 … Pind. I. IV 37f.) probably signifies childish, undignified, play” (Page p. 235). In like manner, Rösler translates the innocuous participle εὐωχήμενοs as “üppigen Trinken” (Rösler p. 165). These scholarly reactions in fact reenact the poet's own response, for Alkaios himself feels the need to shatter the mirroring effect by the introduction of the harsh colloquial phrase φιλώνων πεδ' ἀλεμάτων.

If we shift our focus from the poet's response to Pittakos to his reaction to the newly articulate damos, we find a similar pattern. The violations of decorum we have noted (in frr. 130b and 348) represent both the cure and the disease, for they mark the spot of the poet's attempted construction of heterodoxy, even as they pinpoint the wavering of opposing categories so characteristic of the ambiguous regime of orthodoxy. Thus in fr. 130b, Alkaios' language implies, if it does not actually state, that his father and grandfather were members of the Boule. If this is correct, the broader designation τῶν ἀλλαλοκάκων πολίταν (7) is likely to correspond in a chiastic arrangement with ἀγόραs in line 3. The damos at large is branded with the startling hapax ἀλλαλοκάκοι because of its activity in the agora—the election of Pittakos. Yet, from a perspective which does not take the rule of the nobility for granted, this act of election appears to be just the opposite of “doing each other harm”. As Alkaios himself admits in fr. 348, the acclamation was ἀόλλεεs, the unanimous decision of a newly independent body. From this point of view, just barely suppressed by Alkaios' poetry, it is the aristocratic factions that are ἀλλαλοκάκοι—harming each other and the entire civic order by their incessant in-fighting. And indeed, as Aristotle informs us, the damos appointed Pittakos aisymnetes “against the exiles led by Antimenides and Alkaios” (Pol. 1285a). Similarly, fr. 348 brands the city as “gutless” at the precise moment at which, from another perspective, it could be said finally to have acted on its anger. Thus, these moments of linguistic violence, intended to heal Alkaios' social estrangement by clearly labelling proper and improper behavior, instead produce the uncanny effect of doublespeak. “Legible” both from above and below, their meaning flip-flops with alarming frequency.

In the other adjective that characterizes the polis in fr. 348, βαρυδαίμων, we detect a different strategy which is nonetheless susceptible to the same deconstruction of categories. This one word epithet enacts the same polemic as the last readable lines of fr. 70: “Since some god … has led the damos into ruin and given lovely kydos to Pittakos”. While reviling the citizens for their division and gutlessness, Alkaios simultaneously denies them any authority or responsibility, referring events instead to “some divinity” as the final instance. This invocation of divinity clearly serves the purposes of Alkaios' orthodoxy, since he wants to reconstruct a world in which the damos could not possibly act by and for itself. And yet, paradoxically, the language Alkaios uses to dispossess the damos of any authority endows it with the status of a Homeric hero. It is heroes whom the “god leads into ruin” or whom “an evil daimon pursues”²⁶. In each case, Alkaios' attempt to construct orthodoxy is subverted by the poetic language at his disposal.

3. HOW (NOT) TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS

All of these slippages point to the fundamental inadequacy of orthodoxy—that it always already contains and includes heterodoxy. Once all the “competing possibles” are represented, the illusion of a god-given or “natural” order is shattered. There is no longer a privileged point of view, from whose perspective the categories maintain their fixity. For, once orthodoxy has articulated its other, it becomes possible to “think with” either category²⁷.

Even short of such a radical critique, if we imagine Alkaios holding fast to a fixed point of view, the coexistence of orthodoxy and heterodoxy threatens assimilation and contamination. How can one be certain that it is not heterodoxy which constitutes and sets the terms for orthodoxy, rather than vice versa? We can detect traces of this latter dilemma in the poetry of Alkaios. Perhaps the most important element of Alkaios' aristocratic ideology is essentialism. As the poet repeats with striking frequency within our fragmentary corpus, men are noble because they are born from noble fathers (frr. 6, 67, 72, 130b), and genealogical likeness is invoked as a spur to action (fr. 6). What little we can glean of Pittakos suggests a revisionary tack towards this aristocratic essentialism. His famous quip, preserved for us by Simonides, that it is “hard to be good” (χαλεπὸν φάτ' ἐσθλὸν ἐμμεναι, Simonides 542, 13 PMG) is nonsensical within the confines of strict aristocratic ideology: either you are esthlos or you are not. If you are born noble, you simply are; if you are not, no amount of working at it will make it so. Pittakos thus implicitly replaces aristocratic essentialism with functionalism: handsome is as handsome does²⁸. Authentic or not, a number of the aphorisms attributed to Pittakos in Diogenes Laertius' Life exhibit the same tendency: rather than “Know yourself” (γνῶθι σαυτόν), the Delphic maxim traditionally associated with the Seven Sages, Pittakos endorsed the adage “Know your opportunity” (καιρὸν γνῶθι, D.L. 1,79)²⁹. And rather than Alkaios' valorization of the aristocratic symposium, “Wine is the window into a man” (οἶνοs γὰρ ἀνθρώπω δίοπτρον, fr. 333), Pittakos is said to have quipped “Office reveals the man” (ἀρχὴ ἄνδρα δείκνυσιν, D.L. 1,77)³⁰. But the crisis within Alkaios' own poetry resides precisely here, in the tension between essentialism and functionalism. For in the rigorous exclusionary logic which makes Pittakos κακοπατρίδαιs because of his betrayal of the oath, Alkaios himself accepts the premises of functionalism. Heterodoxy has set the terms for orthodoxy.

That Alkaios was at some level aware of and disturbed by this paradox is suggested by the shift from κακοπατρίδαιs to the string of abusive epithets Diogenes Laertius records. All these abusive terms show what κακοπατρίδαιs tells, and thereby elide their basis in functionalism, focussing instead on essence. If we look at one such term in context in fr. 129, we can see how such elision works. Pittakos is called “child of Hyrrhas” in the context of swearing the oath (when still a member of the hetairie), but φύσγων at the moment of betraying it. It is the act of betrayal that transforms Pittakos into “the baseborn”, but in terms of style and reference, φύσγων insists that it is a matter of essence. The word functions like a verbal firecracker—it is intended to shock and draw attention to its own inappropriateness. In terms of style, φύσγων is a low-class word in a high-class context. Alkaios thereby offers us a perfect mimesis in words of the political situation as he sees it. Pittakos has revealed himself to be base—and yet, he is now ruler of Mytilene, elected by the equally degraded damos. Alkaios exposes him for what he is, brands him as a ridiculous, incongruous pretender.

In terms of reference, φύσγων pointedly calls attention to Pittakos' appearance, to his ugliness, as if inner and outer nobility were a seamless whole, and Pittakos' baseness were immediately revealed by his paunch. Alkaios has a fine Homeric precedent here. The poet of the Iliad describes the physical appearance of only one man in the Greek army—Thersites, who is also the only commoner we ever encounter in the epic. Homer says of him:

                                        αἴσχιστοs δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ '′Ιλιον ἦλθε·
φολκὸs ἔην, χωλὸs δ' ἔτερον πόδα· τo δέ οἱ Ὤμω
κυρτώ, ἐπὶ στῆθοs συνοχωκότε· αὐτὰρ ὕπερθε
φοξὸs ἔην κεφαλήν, ψεδνὴ δ' ἐπενήνοθε λάχνη.

This was the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion. He was bandy-legged and went lame of one foot, with shoulders stooped and drawn together over his chest, and above this his skull went up to a point with the wool grown sparsely upon it.

(Iliad 2, 216-219, Lattimore's translation)³¹

But we still have not exhausted the implications of Alkaios' abuse. We have considered the literal reference of ὀ φύσγων, but the lines that follow compel us to take it also as a symbolic designation. For the two verbs that characterize Pittakos' activity after he is given the name “fatty” are ἔμβαιs, “mounting upon the oaths with his feet”, and δάπτει, “devouring the city” (cf. fr. 70,6-7). These two activities correspond precisely to the two most prevalent spheres of abuse in Diogenes Laertius' list—Pittakos' feet and his belly. We cannot be certain about a connection between πόσιν ἔμβαιs and Pittakos' deformed feet, since we nowhere have these abusive words preserved in context³². But the connection between φύσγων and δάπτει τὰν πόλιν in fr. 129 is quite clear. Anne Pippin Burnett notes the pairing and nicely elucidates its implications:

Alcaeus calls upon the three Lesbian gods to send the Fury who is to devour Pittacus, but meanwhile he does her job himself, destroying the man in his own way with a final image that is grotesque, base and detestable. He makes him a bloated cur; one that gobbles up the city like a stray; a creature who is all distended belly, ugly and perhaps diseased; a man who is dangerous only as a dog might be. All this he does by combining the bestial verb daptei with the inspired denomination of Pittacus as ho Phuskon, the swollen one, the Paunch.

(Burnett p. 162)³³

Burnett's reading suggests another level still, for she points to the performative power of fr. 129. She notes that Alkaios “stands in an almost priestly relation” to the gods of the precinct and offers an acute rhetorical analysis of the “sense of supernatural efficacy” conjured up by the poem (Burnett pp. 160-162)³⁴. With the language of conjuration, Burnett points to the other level of voice we have been considering—the voice of the damos and its delegation. For Alkaios is indeed trying to conjure, both in religious and political terms—trying to construct his poem as a performative and transform it into a rite. And, as recent work in political and literary theory has argued, the power of a performative inheres not in its language but in the consensus of the group that certain utterances are efficacious. That is, performatives perform by common consent³⁵.

By constituting the poem as a performative, Alkaios attempts to forge that consensus, to reconstruct the seamless community of doxa, with himself as its appointed delegate. Thus the emphasis on perfect community in the first two strophes: the temenos is set up as “common” (ξῦνον 3) and the Aeolian goddess is called “mother of all” (πάντων γενέθλαν 7)³⁶. These two strophes are also very concerned with assigning the proper names to things, for nomination, like delegation, is an act of authority based on consensus. After the foundation of temenos and altars, an entire strophe is devoted to the naming of the gods, ringed by the verbs ἀπωνύμασσαν … ὠνύμασσαν. It is interesting that Dionysos “raw flesh eater” escapes this enchanted circle of naming, dropping down to the first line of the next strophe (a detail to which we shall return). Still, these first lines evoke a kind of doxic purity—unfallen, unquestioned unanimity in a primordial setting of foundation and naming.

With φύσγων, Alkaios engages in another act of conjuration: he conjures with his culture's shared categories of thought to cast Pittakos into the outer darkness. Ancient Greek thought located human beings between beasts and gods. And the Greeks, like many other cultures, perceived their rulers as marginal figures, poised at the extremes at either end of the scale of humanity—godlike but also bestial. Thus already in Homer, the lawful king is διοτρεφήs and “revered like a god by his people” (Iliad 2,196; 9,155; 12,312), while a bad king feeds on his own citizenry like a wild animal (he is δημοβόροs, as at Iliad 1,231). This same polarity powerfully shapes the archaic imaginary of the tyrant, who, as Gernet argues, taps into much older mythical categories for his self-representation³⁷. In addition, as Vernant has suggested in a reading of the Oedipus Tyrannos, the complementary categories of tyrannos and pharmakos structure Greek political thought, the one at the top of the city, the other at the bottom. Within this dialectic of beast and god, scapegoat and king, Alkaios' startling abuse aims to precipitate his enemy from the highest status to the lowest. We have seen that the collocation of φύσγων and δάπτει τὰν πόλιν transforms Pittakos into a “bloated cur”; I would suggest that the same epithet participates in his metamorphosis into a ritual scapegoat. Thus the substance of Alkaios' ἄρα—both prayer and curse—is that Pittakos be pursued by the Erinys of the men he has betrayed. That pursuit, like the expulsion of the pharmakos, is the condition of the salvation of exiles and damos alike (note ρ[ύεσθε, l. 12; ρύεσθαι, l. 20—each emphatic at the end of its strophe, right before the mention of Pittakos). The designation “fatty” is relevant to this ritual context. Among the scanty evidence preserved by late sources, Tzetzes characterizes the pharmakos as ugly (τὸν πάντων ἀμορφότερον, Chil. V 731), and Dio Chrysostom asserts that “those with big bellies” (τῶν τὰs μεγάλαs κοιλίαs ἐχόντων) are appropriate scapegoats (Dio Chrys. 8,14; cf. Scholia ad Aeschylus, Septem 680; Aristophanes, Knights 1136, and Frogs 718)³⁸. In this context, it is worth noting that, whereas Diogenes Laertius explains ἀγάσυρτοs (another abusive term Alkaios applied to Pittakos) as “slovenly and dirty”, other ancient commentators glossed it as ἀκάθαρτοs, “ritually impure or polluted”³⁹. To conjure Pittakos into a scapegoat is an act of performative power indeed, for the ritual expulsion of a single representative fuses the community into a once-more harmonious and unanimous whole⁴⁰. In the single term φύσγων, then, Alkaios contrives a radical cure for the twofold crisis of voice he confronts, ritually expelling Pittakos for his violation of the oath and thereby forging a unified community for which he is spokesman and priest.

Or such at any rate he aspires to be. Fr. 129 aims to reconstitute the doxic order, but instead it must settle for the equivocal and contested realm of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Yet again a certain drift or ambiguity in the poet's own representation betrays him. It is as if Alkaios wishes definitively to reduce Pittakos from ambiguous doubleness to repulsive essence, but even as he makes this attempt, the poet's abuse assimilates Pittakos not just to the bestial, but to the divine. There is first the repetition of θῦμον in the second line of the third and sixth strophes, used initially of the gods heeding the poet's prayer (l. 10), and then of Pittakos' duplicitous oathtaking (l. 22). Then the adverb βραϊδίωs, which describes the ease with which Pittakos betrayed his oath, evokes Homeric contexts of divine aid or divine power⁴¹. But most disturbing is the link between Pittakos, “all distended belly” feeding on the city, and Dionysos “eater of raw flesh” (notice the close metrical correspondence between ὠμήσταν and φύσγων, each in the first line of its strophe)⁴². We noted that Dionysos, the third god of the triad, seems to slip out of the enchanted circle of naming the poet weaves. Just so, Pittakos is branded with a name and simultaneously eludes the authority that names him. Once language has become an ambiguous medium, it is impossible to disambiguate it. Even as he tries to reduce Pittakos to an animal, the poet unwittingly conjures up a new daimonic interior that shimmers eerily behind the bestial surface.

In like manner, the performative power of fr. 129 does not go unchallenged. Alkaios would make his poem into a ritual, forging a community by scapegoating Pittakos. But, if the ambiguities of fr. 129 suggest that Alkaios remains estranged from his own language, other fragments point to an abiding alienation from his community as well. In fr. 130b, Alkaios, not Pittakos, is cast in the role of the pharmakos—exiled to the limits of the territory (ll. 8-9), skulking with “his feet out of trouble” (ll. 14-16). That it is indeed the category of the scapegoat that shapes Alkaios' imagery here is suggested by a long-standing textual puzzle. The lines which immediately precede what is conventionally designated fr. 130b read as follows:

FR. I, COL. II

          αὖτο. […]ε καππέτων
8 ἐχέπ[..]. [.]α τεῖχοs βασιλήϊον
ἀγνοιs.. οβιότοιs.. ιs ὀ τάλαιs ἔγω
ζώω μοῖραν ἔχων ἀγροϊωτίκαν.

As Lobel noted in the editio princeps, the first two letters of line 9, αγ, are crossed out with λί or λυ written above them⁴³. According to Page, Lobel suggested that this odd correction might be a reference to the agnus castus—called ἄγνοs or λύγοs in Greek. Page considered this suggestion the best of a bad lot and noted that he would read ἄγνοιs δυσβιότοιs if he could imagine a context in which such a reading would make sense (Page p. 202). I suggest that the imagery of scapegoating provides a reasonable context, for we know that a related ritual in Boiotia required a slave to be driven out to the limits of the territory, whipped with branches of the infertile agnus castus. Combining this phrase with the legible words from the lines above, we get “having been cast down … (beyond?) the royal wall, … miserable branches of agnus castus … a wretch, I live having the most rustic lot …”⁴⁴.

While Alkaios, by his own representation, hovers like a pharmakos at the limits of the territory, the Lesbian damos, his intended audience and community, appears to have opted for a different performative ritual⁴⁵, or so at least an intriguing notice in Diogenes Laertius suggests:

At that time the Mytileneans honored Pittakos mightily and they entrusted the rule to him. And he held it for ten years and put the polity in order, and then he reliquished the rule and lived another ten years. And the Mytileneans rendered land to him, but he consecrated it as holy, and even to this day it is called Pittakos'

(καὶ χώραν αὐτo ἀπένειμαν οἱ Μυτιληναῖοι· ὁ δ ὲ ἱερὰν ἀνῆκεν, ἥτιs νῦν Πιττάκειοs καλεῖται, D.L. 1,75).

More than anything else, the grant of land, its dedication, and its enduring denomination Πιττάκειοs suggest the practices of hero cult. This notice might lead us to believe that Pittakos was honored as founder of a restored Mytilene—with his own temenos consecrated at the center of the city. It appears that the damos of Mytilene chose to regard Pittakos not as a defilement, but as a savior. In the oscillation of beast and god, pharmakos and tyrant, what is inscribed in Alkaios' text as its other, as heterodoxy, becomes the vote of history.

Notes

1. I owe the title of this section to Ellen Oliensis, who coined it for her own complex and suggestive reading of Horace, The Construction of Horatian Decorum, Diss. Harvard 1991.

2. D. L. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, Oxford 1955, p. 243 (henceforth, I will designate this simply as “Page” in the text). All citations of Alkaios are taken from E. Lobel and D. L. Page, edd., Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, Oxford 1955, and follow their numeration. For the relevant fragments, E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus, Amsterdam 1971, offers no significant variation.

3. E. Oliensis, ‘Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace's Epodes’, Arethusa 24, 1991, p. 107.

4. For the conformity of the Lesbian poetic lexicon to the standards of other Greek poetry, see the discussion of A. M. Bowie, The Poetic Dialect of Sappho and Alcaeus, Salem N. H. 1981, pp. 139-178. On the performance context of Alkaios' poetry, see W. Rösler, Dichter und Gruppe: Eine Untersuchung zu den Bedingungen und zur historischen Funktion früher griechischer Lyrik am Beispiel Alkaios, Munich 1980—henceforth simply “Rösler”. On the strict adherence of archaic and classical Greek poetry to “unwritten laws” of genre and decorum, see L. E. Rossi, ‘I generi letterari e le loro leggi scritte e non scritte nelle letterature classiche’, Bull. Inst. Class. Stud. Univ. London 18, 1971, pp. 69-94.

5. On the stylistic contrast between melic poetry and everyday speech, see H. A. Schmitz, Hypsos und Bios: Stilistische Untersuchungen zum Alltagsrealismus in der archaischen griechischen Chorlyrik, Bern 1970. On the “scurrilous, lubricious or farcial character” of traditional iambus, see M. L. West, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus, Berlin-New York 1974, pp. 22-39.

6. The point that all reconstructions are speculative deserves to be emphasized, for many classicists still behave as if the reconstruction of historical events from ancient texts has greater truth value than the reconstruction of mentalités or ideologies. But there is no justification for this naïve empiricism—in fact, just the opposite: given that all we have in many cases are textual traces, we are in a better position to reconstruct the ideological or symbolic systems at work than the “realities” of events.

7. For the interpretation of lines 21-22, I follow B. Gentili, ‘Alceo, P. Oxy. 2165, Col. I, v. 21’, Studi it. filol. class. 1947, pp. 105-108; ‘Ancora sul nuovo Alceo’, ibid. 1949, pp. 229-233, and especially Polinnia. Poesia greca arcaica, edd. B. Gentili and G. Perrotta, Messina-Florence 1965², pp. 204-205.

8. On the conventional forms of invective, see S. Koster, Die Invektive in der griechischen und römischen Literatur, Meisenheim am Glan 1980; M. Davies, ‘Conventional Topics in Invective in Alcaeus’, Prometheus 11, 1985, pp. 31-39; and R. M. Rosen, Old Comedy and the Iambographic Tradition (American Classical Studies 19), Atlanta 1988. Koster (p. 60) cites fr. 429 as an example of Alkaios' “presumed invective”, though in context, as we have seen, fr. 129 is anything but conventional ψόγοs (cf. H. Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy, trans. M. Hadas and J. Willis, New York 1973, p. 192). Compare Hipponax, fr. 115 West, which, like Alkaios fr. 129, denounces a former hetairos who has betrayed his oath.

9. G. M. Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type, Ithaca N.Y. 1974, pp. 69-70. Cf. C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford 1961, p. 145; D. E. Gerber, Euterpe: An Anthology of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac, and Iambric Poetry, Amsterdam 1970, p. 194 and Fränkel (above, note 8) pp. 190-192. Rösler pp. 203-204 seeks to palliate the incongruity by transforming it from an individual howl of pain and rage to a collective one. For a more sympathetic treatment of the fragment, see A. P. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Cambridge Ma. 1983, pp. 162-163 (henceforth simply “Burnett”).

10. This is the strategy of Davies (above, note 8)—by atomizing the poems and focussing only on the content of the moments of abuse, Davies manages to recuperate these odd fragments as conventional invective. Other critics try to avoid the problem by denying that φύσγων is incongruous in tone—but see P. Chantraine, La formation de noms en grec ancien, Paris 1933, p. 161 and E.-M. Hamm, Grammatik zu Sappho und Alkaios, Berlin 1957, p. 84 on noun-formations in -ων as traditionally nicknames, slang terms, and terms of abuse. A final strategy for recuperating Alkaois' ruptures in decorum might be to label them as “serio-comic” moments, akin to the last triad of Pindar, Pythian 2. For a discussion of the “serio-comic” see J. K. Newman-F. S. Newman, Pindar's Art: Its Traditions and Aims, Hildesheim 1984, esp. pp. 32-50: Newman and Newman identify “the mixture of different stylistic levels and genres” as one characteristic of what they term the “carnivalesque” or “komic” in Pindar (p. 39). For formal reasons, I do not find this an apposite comparison: Alkaios' use of coarse or abusive words is much more abrupt and violent than that found in Pyth. 2, 72-96, where Pindar fills a whole triad with language and imagery apparently drawn from beast fable and invective. Alkaios, in contrast, allows a single low-class word to exploded in a poem which is otherwise consistently high style. In addition, labelling an element as “serio-comic” does not explain it in sociological or formal terms: to my mind, no one has yet provided a satisfactory account of the contextual and literary instigations for the last triad of Pythian 2. Perhaps this analysis of violations of decorum in Alkaios can shed some light on that problem.

11. With φίλων, E. Lobel (ΑΛΚΑΙΟU ΜΕΛΗ: The Fragments of the Lyrical Poems of Alcaeus, Oxford 1927, p. 27) and Page pp. 235-236 compare Theognostos, καν. μα (An. Ox., ed. Cramer, II 12), φέλων· ὁ ἀλαζών. Hamm (above, note 10) p. 84 suggests a different etymology: that φίλων is an -ων formation nickname from φίλοs. On this interpretation, it is the -ων suffix which marks it as a term of abuse. 'Αλέματοs (Doric and Aeolic for ἠλέματοs) occurs otherwise at Sappho fr. 26,5, with very little context preserved, and fairly commonly in the third century (Callimachus, Hymn 6, 91; Apollonius Rhodius 4, 1206; Sotades, fr. 2 Powell; Theocritus, Idyll 15, 4; Timo fr. 34, 3). Theocritus' usage at least suggests that it may be a colloquial expression: see Page p. 236 and Gow's commentary ad loc. For the translation of the whole phrase, see Davies (above, note 8) p. 35 note 23.

12. Kirkwood (above, note 9) p. 74 notes that τιs … ἔνωρσε is an echo of the opening of the Iliad; δίδοιs κῦδοs (of a god) also echoes a common Homeric formula (cf. Iliad 1,279; 8,216; 11,300; 12,437; 13,303; 18,456; 19,204; 19,414).

13. As Page p. 167 notes, in Homeric diction, δάπτω is used only for animals and fire; see discussion below.

14. Βαρυδαίμων occurs also in Euripides (Alcestis 865) and in a paratragic passage in Aristophanes (Ecc. 1102). '′Αχολοs appears once in Homer (Odyssey 4,221) to designate Helen's drugs “which allay bile”, and otherwise, in Hippokrates, Prorrh. I 98, Aristotle, H.A. 506b2; P.A. 677a33, and Plotinus 4,4,28 (so nowhere else metaphorically, as here in Alkaios). This may, however, be a case of an early poetic word taken over by technical prose writers (on which see Bowie [above, note 4] pp. 145-146, citing M. Leumann, Homerische Wörter, Basel 1950, pp. 303-315). As Bowie acknowledges, however, this reconstruction is itself speculative and the data are susceptible to just the opposite interpretation, for which Bowie cites Sir K. Dover (Bowie p. 144).

15. D. A. Campbell, ed., Greek Lyric. I: Sappho and Alcaeus, Cambridge Ma. 1982, p. 383. Note also the translation of Burnett p. 115, “their unlucky lily-livered city”.

16. Cf. G. Tarditi, ‘Alceo e la volpe astuta’, in Lirica greca da Archiloco a Elitis: Studi in onore di Filippo Maria Pontani, Padua 1984, p. 83, who dates fr. 130b to Alkaios' second exile (after the election of Pittakos as aisymnetes). This certainly does not exhaust the moments where there appears to be a rupture of decorum in Alkaios' poetry. I will, however, limit my discussion here to fragments where there is enough context preserved to warrant a literary reading. Cf. fr. 167 (on which see Burnett p. 171, but note that W. Barner, Neuere Alkaios-Papyri aus Oxyrhynchos [Spudasmata Band XIV], Hildesheim 1967, pp. 62-73 divides it into two or even three different poems on the basis of meter); fr. 306a-i (on which see B. Gentili, Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece from Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. A. T. Cole, Baltimore 1988, pp. 211-212); and fr. 332.

17. M. Davies, Review of Burnett, Class. Rev. n.s. 34, 1984, p. 170 and (above, note 8) p. 37 calls into question the reality of the oath, observing that oathbreaking is a conventional topos of abuse. I find this a puzzling line of argument, since it hardly accounts for fr. 129 in particular or for the motivation for Alkaios' invective against Pittakos in general.

18. Thus Page p. 177; see also J. C. Kamerbeek, ‘De novis carminibus Alcaei (P. Ox. XVIII 2165)’, Mnemosyne ser. 3, 13, 1947, pp. 170-178; C. Gallavotti, Storia e poesia di Lesbo nel VII-VI secolo a.C., Naples 1948, pp. 27-28; W. Donlan, ‘Changes and Shifts in the Meaning of Demos in the Literature of the Archaic Period’, Parola d. passato 135, 1970, pp. 391-395; V. Steffen, ‘Die politische Krise in Mytilene in der Zeit des Dichters Alkaios’, Scripta Minora Selecta I, Warsaw 1973, pp. 135-138; Rösler pp. 30-31. Burnett, who offers perhaps the most subtle and sophisticated literary reading of the fragments, insists on equating the damos with the ruling nobility of Mytilene, and this equation vitiates some of her interpretations.

19. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge 1977, p. 164 (henceforth simply “Bourdieu”).

20. I hope to consider the economic aspects of the crisis in more detail elsewhere. For a consideration of Alkaios fr. 69 along these lines, see L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, Ithaca N.Y. 1991, pp. 252-254.

21. On the mutual self-constitution of the delegate and the corporate entity delegating, see P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge Ma. 1991, pp. 163-228.

22. Rösler pp. 37-45 insists on the basis of formal criteria that Alkaios' intended audience was only ever the closed aristocratic hetairie, but he does not allow for a metonymic relation between the hetairie and the damos as empowered part to whole. The same analysis could fruitfully be applied to the Theognidea, which likewise conjure up a double audience of hetairie and polis. On this double audience (in which the aristocratic group can be read as a metonymy for the whole city), see G. Nagy, ‘Theognis and Megara: A Poet's Vision of his City’, in Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis, edd. T.J. Figueira-G. Nagy, Baltimore 1985, pp. 22-81.

23. Page follows the lead of S. Mazzarino, ‘Per la storia di Lesbo nel VI secolo a. C.’, Athenaeum n.s. 21, 1943, pp. 47-52, and Page's thesis is taken up in turn and modified by Gentili, Polinnia (above, note 7) p. 207. For a critique of Page along lines similar to those suggested here, cf. the remarks of A. W. Gomme, ‘Interpretations of Some Poems of Alkaios and Sappho’, Journ. Hell. Stud. 77, 1957, p. 255: “It is a favourite occupation of scholars to pass laws and regulations for the conduct of ancient Greeks, in all their activities but especially for society, as for the proper behaviour of young ladies or the nice observance of class distinctions—this latter the especial favourite of Englishmen and Prussians”.

24. Against the historicizing position of Mazzarino and Page, see Gomme (above, note 23) pp. 255-257; Rösler pp. 186-191, who regards Pittakos' base ancestry as a “Scheinproblem”; and Davies (above, note 8) pp. 33-34. Davies addresses the problem by observing that the imputation of base and/or foreign origins is a conventional topos of ancient invective, which we rarely take at face value. Still, to observe that a certain strategy is conventional is not to explain the logic of its use by Alkaios.

25. Rösler pp. 33-36; see also J. Trumpf, ‘Über das Trinken in der Poesie des Alkaios’, Zeitschr. f. Pap. u. Epigr. 12, 1973, pp. 139-160; O. Murray, ‘The Greek Symposion in History’, in Tria Corda: Scritti in onore di Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. E. Gabba, Como 1983, esp. pp. 262-268.

26. Cf. Iliad 2,111; 9,18; for the pairing of ἄτη and κῦδοs, cf. Iliad 8,237. For the guidance of an evil daimon, cf. Odyssey 5,396; 10,64; 19,201, and 24,149.

27. On “thinking with”, see C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York 1973.

28. It is surely not accidental that Pittakos' maxim, “it is hard to be good” is taken up by Simonides, whose own poetry represents (in Gentili's words) the “deconsecration of aristocratic values” (Gentili [above, note 16] pp. 63-71, quote from p. 67); cf. A. Carson, ‘How not to Read a Poem: Unmixing Simonides from Protagoras’, Class. Philol. 87, 1992, pp. 110-130.

29. On γνῶθι σαυτόν, see Plato, Hipparchos 228c-229, Protagoras 343a-c; Diogenes Laertius 1,36 and A. N. Oikonomides, ‘Records of ‘The Commandments of the Seven Wise Men’ in the 3rd c. B.C.’, Class. Bull. 63, 1987, pp. 67-76.

30. For the pairing of these two maxims (with a somewhat different interpretation), cf. Burnett p. 156.

31. I do not mean to deny the polysemy of the Thersites episode, emphasized by P. W. Rose, ‘Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer’, Arethusa 21, 1988, pp. 5-25. In a sense, Rose's subtle reading points to the problem in Bourdieu's theorization of doxa—what we might call the “always already” problem. That is, can a “pure doxic order” ever have existed unchallenged? A careful reading of representations of the dominant order will produce an infinite regress of moments of rupture. Still, in this case, the issue is not one of teleology, but of psychology: even if the Iliad already offers one or more “competing possibles”, that does not mean that every Greek audience of Homer has to accept the offer. Whatever a non-aristocratic audience may have understood in the description of Thersites, I assume that Alkaios could still have occupied a doxic illud tempus, in which Thersites' ugliness was taken as clear proof of his baseness. For an interpretation of Thersites as a scapegoat figure within the Iliad, see W. G. Thalmann, ‘Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats, and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad’, Trans. Am. Philol. Ass. 118, 1988, pp. 21-26; for the later democratic appropriation of an aristocratic ideology of ugliness, see J. J. Winkler, ‘Phallos Politikos: Representing the Body Politic in Athens’, Differences 2/1, 1990, pp. 29-45.

32. Aside from the link between the foot abuse of fr. 429 and πόσιν ἔμβαιs, we should note various associations with lameness or deformed feet which may be relevant to Alkaios' abuse of Pittakos: (1) Lameness is associated with illegitimacy or base birth (cf. Plato, Resp. 7,535-536, Xenophon, Hellenica 3,3,1-3, Plutarch, Agesilaus 3,1-9, and see J.-P. Vernant, ‘The Lame Tyrant: From Oedipus to Periander’, in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York 1988, pp. 211-212). (2) As Vernant notes, there is a link between lameness and tyranny (pp. 216-225). (3) According to the physiognomic writers, those with flat feet are πανοῦργοι (cf. Arist. H.A. 1,15,494a; R. Foerster, ed., Scriptores Physiognomonici I, Leipzig 1893, p. 356) and (4) those with “multilated and fat feet” are “of a savage nature” (θηριώδουs φύσεωs, Foerster vol. I, p. 356, and see M. Bettini-A. Borghini, ‘Edipo lo Zoppo’, in Edipo: il teatro greco e la cultura europea, edd. B. Gentili and R. Pretagostini, Rome 1986, pp. 215-225). (5) M. Detienne-J.-P. Vernant (Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. J. Lloyd, Sussex 1978, pp. 269-273) point out the connection between weird oblique locomotion and the sphere of cunning intelligence (e.g. Hephaistos; cf. Foerster, loc. cit.; on the metis of Pittakos, see Detienne and Vernant p. 36). Any or all of these associations may be in play in Alkaios' designation of Pittakos as σαράπουs and χειροπόδηs.

33. Cf. M. G. Fileni, ‘Osservazioni sull'idea di tiranno nella cultura greca arcaica (Alc. frr. 70, 6-9; 129, 21-24 V.; Theogn. vv. 1179-1182)’, Quad. Urb. n.s. 14 (43), 1983, pp. 32-33. Fileni links the topos of the voracious tyrant in Alkaios and Theognis to the Homeric model of the δημοβόροs βασιλεύs.

34. Other scholars as well have felt the incantatory power of the fragment: cf. Gallavotti (above, note 18) pp. 57-58; Kirkwood (above, note 9) pp. 69-70.

35. On performative utterances, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge Ma. 1975² and J. R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge 1969. For a sociological critique of the theory, see P. Bourdieu (above, note 21) pp. 103-126, and for a similar model of the contestation of performative utterances in a revolutionary situation, see S. Petrey, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola and the Performances of History, Ithaca N. Y. 1988, pp. 17-51.

36. I see no evidence for the assumption of A. J. Beattie, ‘A Note on Alcaeus fr. 129’, Class. Rev. n.s. 6, 195, p. 189, that the Lesbian exiles alone built the shrine.

37. On the marginality of the ruler, see J. Bremmer, ‘Scapegoat Rituals in Ancient Greece’, Harv. Stud. Class. Philol. 87, 1983, pp. 299-320; on the bestial traits of the Homeric king and archaic tyrant, see Fileni (above, note 33); on the archaic tyrant's use of a much older system of associations, see L. Gernet, ‘Marriages of Tyrants’, in The Anthropology of Ancient Greece, trans. J. Hamilton and B. Nagy, Baltimore 1981, pp. 289-301; P. Schmitt-Pantel, ‘Histoire de tyran ou comment la cité construit ses marges’, in Les marginaux et les exclus dans l'histoire, Paris 1979, pp. 217-231; and S. Vilatte, ‘Idéologie et action tyranniques à Samos: le territoire, les hommes’, Rev. ét. an. 92, 1990, pp. 3-15.

38. For the evocation of the ritual of scapegoating as a traditional element of iambic invective, cf. Hipponax frs. 5-11 West, and see the discussion of C. Miralles-J. Pòrtulas, Archilochus and the Iambic Poetry, Rome 1983, pp. 11-50. As Pòrtulas observes there, “the outcast able to cause someone else's casting out, the figure that has been excluded but who has the power to exclude … is one of the deep constant features of the iambic genre” (p. 22). This observation suggests that Alkaios is attempting to appropriate the power and traditions of iambic for his own melic poetry. Thus iambic functions as the other of lyric, the discourse of heterodoxy with which Alkaios attempts to conjure. On Greek scapegoat rituals in general, see Bremmer (above, note 37); W. Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan, Cambridge Ma. 1985, pp. 82-84; and J.-P. Vernant, ‘Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex’, in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, cit. pp. 127-133.

39. Zonaras 13 ἀγάσυρτοs· ὁ ἀκάθαρτοs; cf. Gentili (above, note 16) pp. 211-212, who compares ἀγάσυρτοs to the term ἀκαθαρσία, preserved in an ancient commentary on Alkaios (fr. 306i, col. ii, line 10). For elements of scapegoating, cf. also fr. 143, which looks like a list of savage punishments to which Alkaios would like to subject Pittakos (see Barner [above, note 16] pp. 30-41 for the reconstruction).

40. All theories of the scapegoat, from Burkert to Girard, agree on its positive, community-building function: see R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregor, Baltimore 1977; Bremmer (above, note 37) p. 315; Burkert (above, note 38) pp. 82-84.

41. Indeed, the Iliadic uses of ρηϊδίωs suit the ambiguity of this passage very well. The adverb occurs eleven times (always line initial): three times of heroes who accomplish something with divine aid (Iliad 4,390; 5,808; 9,184), four times of the ease with which gods achieve their ends (Iliad 16,690; 16,846; 17,178; 22,19), and three times of animals in similes (Iliad 11,114—lion, 17,283—boar, 22,140—falcon). (In its final occurrence, the adverb is used to characterize Hektor's extraordinary strength—Iliad 12,448).

42. And notice that in two of the three Iliadic occurrences of the verb δάπτω, it appears in close proximity with the epithet ὠμοφάγοs (Iliad 11,479-481; 16,156-159), while in its third occurrence, the idea of eating raw flesh is implicit (Achilles vows to Patroklos that Hektor will not feed the fire, but the dogs—Iliad 23,182-183). Fileni (above, note 33) p. 31 observes the co-occurrence of δάπτει τὰν πόλιν with Dionysus' epithet ὠμηστάs, suggesting that “Il senso della voracità che pertiene al verbo δάπτω è rafforzato … da altri termini che appartengono alla stessa sfera semantica”. Fileni does not note that this semantic convergence combines with others to assimilate Pittakos to the divine.

43. E. Lobel in Lobel, C. H. Roberts, and E. P. Wegener, edd., The Oxyrhynchus Papyri XVIII, London 1941, no. 2165, pp. 33-34.

44. For the ritual, cf. Plutarch, Mor. 693f; for modern discussions of the rite, see V. Rotolo, ‘Il rito della βουλίμου ἐξέλασιs’, in Miscellanea di studi classici in onore di Eugenio Manni VI, Rome 1980, pp. 1947-1961 and Bremmer (above, note 37) with earlier bibliography. It is unclear whether line 9 marks the beginning of a new poem: there may be a change of meter (though it is hard to tell, because the preceding lines are so fragmentary). On the other hand, as Page acknowledges, if l. 9 (= his l. 16) does begin a new poem, it is unusual that no coronis marks the break (Page pp. 200-201). Given the obscure beginning of line 9, I would like to take at least the preceding lines as belonging to the same poem (as Page himself does in his latest edition of the poem: see D. L. Page, Lyrica Graeca Selecta, Oxford 1973, fr. 128). In that case, we may even go a step further and suggest the supplement πάιs (meaning slave) for the troublesome.. ιs of line 9. Page notes: “Between.. σβιότοιs and ὀ τάλαιs ἔγω there remains only one syllable, of which the last two letters are known, to be supplied:.. ιs. Of the few theoretical possibilities, none seems appropriate to any imaginable context” (p. 202). If we assume ὠs vel sim. occurred somewhere in the preceding lines, we get, “(Like one) cast down … (beyond?) the royal wall … a slave … miserable branches of agnus castus, I …”.

45. On the significance of performance to the traditions of the Seven Sages, see R. P. Martin, ‘The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom’, in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, edd. C. Dougherty-L. Kurke, Cambridge 1993, pp. 108-128. On the exploitation by another archaic tyrant of Homeric and heroic associations, see Vilatte (above, note 37).

    For discussion and encouragement on a (very different) earlier draft, I owe thanks to Mark Griffith, David Halperin, and Seth Schwartz; for thoughtful responses to the final version, I am particularly grateful to Maurizio Bettini, Bruno Gentili, Richard Martin, and Ian Morris.