Sicily’s Place in Greek Poetry

Abstract

A multitude of literary texts dealing with Sicily are presented in four chapters. Starting with a fusion of the Aeneid’s presentation of Sicily and some modern literary associations, the opening chapter proves that in Virgil’s usage the term “Sicilian” became a kind of shibboleth, which turns his works into texts au deuxième degré. His Sicelides Musae come from Theocritus whose poetry is at the centre of the bifold second chapter, offering two retrospective glances upon earlier Greek poetry: a first half is dedicated to Theocritus’ Cyclops-poems and their ‘bucolic archaeology’. Quite similarly, the second half of the second chapter is concerned with Theocritus’ poem on Hieron II and its epinician predecessors, i.e. Simonides and Pindar. This tradition, however, might well have started earlier than Simonides, and it is not unlikely that already Ibykos and Stesichoros, the latter born in Sicily, composed epinician poetry. Pindar and Simonides’ nephew Bakchylides were guests of Hieron I, who also invited innovative Aeschylus, reputed to be a vir utique Siculus, to whom the third chapter is dedicated. Aside from the bucolic and epinician tradition, Sicily has another literary facet of which the fourth chapter catches some glimpses: Sicilian lifestyle attracted attention, and Sicilians were famous in antiquity for some extravagancies, a fact well known to comedy one streak of which is supposed to have its origins in Sicily. Sicilian food and all what comes with it were not altogether above suspicion, as Plato and his translator Cicero remarked, and also Horace thought of Sicilian banquets, Siculae dapes, as most lavish. It turns out not only that in the history of ancient Greek and Latin literature Sicily is a real island as well as an imaginary place, but also that Sicilian regularly denotes something outstandingly valuable; both themes are recurring like a leitmotif. But there is something more: Sicily was a place of modernist poetry. It was in Sicily where two highly unusual tragedies by Aeschylus were performed, and it was for Sicilian rulers that Pindar and Bakchylides created some of the most impressive epinician odes; and aside from Theocritus, whose awareness of the historic dimension of literature forms a leitmotif of this paper, a poet who managed to establish bucolic poetry as a new poetic genre, there is Stesichoros, credited with incessant multifarious inventiveness. * A large part of this text was a lecture which I delivered in Warsaw to the Committee of Ancient Culture, itself belonging to the Polish Academy of Sciences. I should like to thank Krystyna Bartol as president of the Committee for her kind invitation, and Jan Kwapisz, Magdalena Stuligrosz, and Elżbieta Wesołowska for their helpful criticism at various stages. Neil Hopkinson saw an earlier draft and advised me on various matters.