GRIEGO PARA ESTUDIOS INGLESES / GREEK FOR ENGLISH STUDIES 1

II. 4. Greece and the erotic legacy. Greek etymologies in the English
language

II. 5. 2. Words in context

As Oliver TAPLIN observes, “There is an abundance of Greek love poetry,

from archaic times through to the end of antiquity, homosexual and heterosexual,
sentimental and realist, passionate and frivolous. (…) Aphrodite and Eros are cruel
gods: they burn people up, they shake them like stormwinds, they send them mad. In
ancient Greece sex is seen as madness and pain as much as, if not more than, sweet
delight.” (Greek Fire, London: Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 120-3). Below there are
some fine examples of the afore-mentioned remarks. What is your opinion?

! Sappho, Fragment 1
«Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with hard pains,
O lady, my heart
but come here if ever before
you caught my voice far off
and listening left your father’s
golden house and came,
yoking your car. And fine birds brought you,
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair–
they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled (μειδιαίσαισ’) in your deathless face

and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why

(now again) I am calling out
and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again)
to lead you back into her love (φιλότατα)? Who, O

Sappho (Ψαπφ’), is wronging you?

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For if she flees, soon she will pursue.

If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them.
If she does not love, soon she will love
even unwilling.
Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs (ἰμέρρει)

to accomplish, accomplish. You

be my ally (σύμμαχος).»
(Trans. Anne Carson)
! Anacreon, Fragments 357-9 Campbell
«Lord, with whom Love (Ἔρως) the subduer

and the blue-eyed Nymphs (Νύμφαι)

and radiant Aphrodite (Ἀφροδίτη)

play, as you haunt

the lofty mountain peaks,
I beseech you: come
to me with kindly heart,
hear my prayer and find it acceptable:
give Cleobulus good counsel,
Dionysus, that he accept my love.»
(Trans. David A. Campbell)

«Once again golden-haired Love

strikes me with his purple ball and
summons me to play with the girl
in the fancy sandals;
but she –she comes from Lesbos (Λέσβου)

with its fine cities– finds fault with my hair

because it is white, and gapes
after another –girl.»
(Trans. David A. Campbell)
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Κλεοβούλου μὲν ἔγωγ’ ἐρέω, «I love Cleobulus,

I am mad about Cleobulus,
Κλεοβούλῳ δ’ ἐπιµαίνοµαι, I gaze at Cleobulus.»
Κλεόβουλον δὲ διοσκέω. (Trans. David A. Campbell)

«I’m in love, I’m not in love!

ἐρέω τε δηὖτε κοὐκ ἐρέω
I’m insane, I’m not insane!»
καὶ μαίνομαι κοὐ μαίνομαι
(Trans. Anne Carson)

! Sappho, Fragment 31
«He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing –oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead –or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to dared, because even a person of poverty…»
(Trans. Anne Carson)
! Sappho, Fragment 130
«Eros (Ἔρος) once again limb-loosener whirls me

sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up»

(Trans. Anne Carson)
! Ibycus, Fragment 286
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«In spring, on the one hand,

the Kydonian apple trees,
being watered by streams of rivers
where the uncut garden of the maidens [is]
and vine blossoms
swelling
beneath shady vine branches
bloom.
On the other hand, for me
Eros lies quiet at no season.
Nay rather,
like a Thracian north wind
ablaze with lightning,
rushing from Aphrodite (Κύπριδος)

accompanied by parching madnesses (μανίαισιν),

black,
unastonishable,
powerfully,
right up from the bottom of my feet
[it] shakes my whole breathing being (φρένας).»
(Trans. Anne Carson)

In short, as Anne Carson aptly put it, the “poets’ standard attitude and
conviction” on eros can be summarized as such: “Desire is a moment with no way
out. Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of
tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and
proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life. Eros comes
out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and
material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal
conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as
an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to
melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce,
wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder. Eros employs nets,
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arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing gloves or bits and bridles in making
his assault. No one can fight Eros off (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 434; Sappho, LP, fr.
130.2; Soph. Ant. 781; Trach. 441; Eur., TGF, fr. 433; cf. Pl. Symp. 196d). Very few
see him coming. He lights on you from somewhere outside yourself and, as soon as
he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resist the change or
control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for worse, at best a mixed
blessing (glukupikron, as Sappho says).” Anne CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet. An
Essay, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 148.

II. 5. 3. Greece and the erotic legacy. Tradition and Reception in

the English speaking countries: Men and Women

“Ancient Greece was certainly not a utopia for most women, especially not
in the great ‘enlightened’ age of Athens. An Athenian orator Apollodorus claimed:
‘Tarts we have for pleasure, mistresses [non-citizen] for the daily refreshment of our
bodies, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to look after the house.’ So
women had either the low status of a sex-object or the respectability of a child-bearer
and producer of cloth. The vase-paintings generally reflect this deep division. (…)
The most intriguing complexity is the portrayal of women in Greek tragedy.
(…) Tragedies were made by men for men. Yet many have women as their main
characters, indeed some of the most powerful women ever created by art, the most
memorable, terrible and determined. (…) The audience of Athenian men must have
been well aware, at some level of consciousness, that the women they shut in their
houses had potency and intelligence. (…)

When Jason, in Euripides’ Medea of 431 B.C., deserts Medea, his oriental
conquest, for the younger, richer princess of Corinth, she hurts him in the supreme
way within her grasp, by killing their sons. (…) Yet Medea, at least in the first half
of the play, is presented in a far from unsympathetic light. There can be no light
dismissal of the great speech which includes:

Of all creatures that feel and think,

we women are the unhappiest species.

In the first place we must pay a great dowry

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to a husband who will be the tyrant of our bodies…

When the man tires of the company of his wife,

he goes outside and relieves the burden of his heart…

They say that the women have a safe life at home,

while men must go to war. Nonsense!

I would rather fight in the battle line three times

than go through childbirth once…

It is for sentiments like these that Medea is often just below the surface of
George Eliot’s novels, especially Felix Holt. In 1913 songs and speeches from the
play were chanted at suffragette meetings.” Oliver TAPLIN, Greek Fire, London:
Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 124-7.

II. 5. 4. Greece and the erotic legacy. Tradition and Reception in

the English speaking countries: Boys and Satyrs

“The cliché that ‘Love is the same the world over’ is a way of avoiding the
uncomfortable thought that our deepest emotions may be structured by social
pressures and expectations, and do not just happen. The challenging otherness
of the past makes ‘Who do you think you are?’ an unsettling question.

(…) One figure the Greeks loved to use in order to ponder how a man is a
man is a man was the satyr. Myth may showcase the heroic male, but it also features
these followers of Dionysus who have the hairy tail of a goat, an ugly snub
nose and sometimes hairy legs and goat’s horns too. Satyrs are the most
common of all decorations on pots for symposiums. They are usually distinguished
by their phallic displays, and they do a whole range of things that men might not
quite be up to. They are not violent destroyers of marriage like the
centaurs, who have to be shown being destroyed themselves –as they are in the
Parthenon sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis and other grand civic sculptures.
Satyrs do carry of maenads, or try to, but usually they are outrageous in a more
homely way. (…)
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The satyrs do all the things that proper boys shouldn’t do. (…) Satyrs are
disruptive, and lurk on the dangerous boundary between the human and the
bestial.

Satyrs aren’t simply mythical, however –because men, good citizens, dressed
up as satyrs. In Athens every year after the tragedies, there were satyr plays.
These were short and often uproarious skits with a chorus always made up of satyrs
–men dressed in hairy shorts with a penis and tail attached. The satyrs became
embroiled in tricks, scrapes and escapades that parodied the serious human world of
the tragedies. Furthermore, in many religious processions and festivals of Dionysus
throughout the Greek world, men dressed as satyrs, and processed and cavorted. (…)

Satyrs are like parodic men behaving badly. They step on and over the
boundaries of male propriety. (…) The satyrs are at all the Athenian parties,
provoking a question about the limits of behaviour. How freely can a man act at a
drunken party? When does he become a satyr? Is this what we look like when we
have too much of Dionysus’ wine? The satyr holds up a sly, embarrassing, funny
mirror in which the Greek man must confront his own body and his sexuality.”
Simon GOLDHILL, Love, Sex and Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes our
Lives, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 54-69.

TONY HARRISON

THE TRACKERS OF OXYRHYNCHUS

T HE N ATIONAL T HEATRE T EXT

(1990)

APOLLO

This mottled tortoise, this creeping thing

joined to my cattle makes dumb nature sing.

Debeeved, bereaved, but now I can rejoice

that was dead and dumb now has a voice.

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I rather think the tortoise population

will be proud to make music for higher creation,

proud to be the sole purveyor/supplier

of the principal part of Apollo’s own lyre.

The gods decreed a fixed scale in creation

from the Olympian, like me, to the crustacean,

and almost at the bottom of the scale,

even below your sort with hoof and tail,

and tail-bearers with no part human, come

creatures like this tortoise, who are dumb.

The scale of creation like a scale with notes

runs the whole gamut from gods to goats,

and distinctly closer to the latter,

low on the scale of being, comes the satyr.

CHORUS OF SATYRS

Group B

It’s very sad, the tortoise had to die,

as part goat or horse, I part identify.

Group C

When Nature gets made use of for Man’s needs

my heart, at least the goat part of it, bleeds.

Group A
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But when I hear the lyre, all the rest

the two-thirds human part, ‘s impressed.

Group B

We’re always in things from the very start,

the creation of fire, the lyre, wine and art.

Group C

We’re envoys of Nature who give their consent

to surrender the substance they use to invent.

Group A

Woodlands for barbecues, crushed grapes for wine,

but where will a satyr start drawing the line?

APOLLO

When Dionysus started giving wine away

the horse part of you satyrs never said neigh.

Soon you’ll be free to drink till you fall,

the freedom, it seems, you want most of all.

But first you satyrs, and you people out there,

listen to my lyre’s world premiere.

Apollo gives the world’s first lyre recital. The Satyrs are enraptured
by the melody, so much so that when Apollo has finished his recital the
Satyrs all rush forward and crowd around Apollo, reaching up towards the
lyre.

CHORUS OF SATYRS

All
GRIEGO PARA ESTUDIOS INGLESES / GREEK FOR ENGLISH STUDIES 10

Oh, it’s wonderful. Let us have a go!

APOLLO

No! No! No! No! No!

My advice is stick to being satyrs

and don’t go meddling in musical matters.

You don’t need lyres. You’re natural celebrators

stuck between animal and human status.

You need no consolations of high art.

Your human pain’s cancelled by your horse/goat part.

What use are lyres to you? Your satyr stamp and strut

has no need of these seven strings of gut.

You’re satyrs, satyrs. Your sort need no lyres

while your goat parts tether you to brute desires.

M ORE ON A NCIENT G REECE L OVE AND E ROS

! Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (1986).

! Peter Jay & Caroline Lewis (eds.), Sappho Through English Poetry
(1996).
! Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion (2001) and The Sappho
History (2003).

Useful Materials

If you are interested in these topics, please go to Virtual Classroom (Aula

Virtual), where you will be able to download and listen to some interesting podcasts
which will help you improve your knowledge. If you wish, you may take part in a
Forum in order to discuss with your classmates some of the contents from those
podcasts. This will help you to improve not only your listening skills but also your
GRIEGO PARA ESTUDIOS INGLESES / GREEK FOR ENGLISH STUDIES 11

writing skills in a friendly and collaborative academic atmosphere. Appart from that,
you will, of course, gain access to a deeper insight of the main ancient Greek ideas on
desire, sex and love as well as their impact on the language, ideas and history of the
English speaking countries.