Translator's Note
This fragment, dated to the sixth century BCE, is the earliest surviving literary description of the preparations and ethics of the Greek συμπόσιον, or symposion, the practice of reclined banqueting that played an important role in ancient Greek culture. One earlier fragment, tentatively dated to the seventh century and attributed to Alcman (Fragment 19), mentions klinai (banquet couches) in combination with tables and food, but its brevity (at just four lines) means it doesn't tell us much about the symposion. Scenes of reclined banqueting first appear in art from mainland Greece at the very end of the seventh century BCE, in a series of three Corinthian column kraters found in Etruria and now in the Louvre. The earliest artistic evidence for the practice among Greek-speakers is a fragment of a North Syrian-style silver bowl from Paphos (today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) with a Cypriot syllabic inscription and depicting a royal woman reclining in front of a laden table, which has been dated to the eighth century BCE. [1] While it has been argued by Wecowski that the symposion should best be understood as a development within Greek elite culture, Nijboer’s conclusion that it is part of a pattern of Greek emulation of Levantine royal lifestyles, motivated by a variety of contact situations, is inescapable. [2] The habit of reclining while feasting or carrying out other royal activities is first attested at the north Mesopotamian/east Syrian city of Mari in the Middle Bronze Age [3], and it is well attested in the Hebrew Bible, such as in the poetry associated with the eighth-century prophet Amos, in Neo-Assyrian wall reliefs of the seventh century (today in the British Museum), and in the Phoenician and North-Syrian-style drinking bowls, which were made, in the first place, for a Levantine elite. Xenophanes in fact lived for part of his life in Zancle on the island of Sicily, which is one of the well-known areas of contact between Greek- and Phoenician-speaking people beginning in the eighth century BCE.
The themes of this text are pleasure, piety, and excellence. Simplicity of poetic diction and an easy pace accompany the enjoyment of luxuries that are charged with divine significance. Those who enjoy this blessed state must sacrifice and sing to the unnamed god found often in sympotic poetry (probably Dionysus). The consideration of piety and what is right introduces a stern tone and coincides with increased syntactic complexity and a swift pace, as if the speaker has raised his voice. This section contains metapoetic criticism of epic and theogony, both genres written in hexameter meter, as well as other lyric or elegiac poetry that deals with civic strife, as unfit for the symposion. Xenophanes may be thinking, in the latter case, of his fellow poets Alcaeus and Theognis; significantly, his critique of hexameter genres leaves out subjects included in the Homeric poems. Excellence is found in avoiding these stories and offering useful ideas to one's fellow symposiasts.
The genre of ancient Greek elegy is defined by a metrical pattern of alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and pentameter known as the elegiac couplet. With this translation I am exploring the poetics of the caesura and diaeresis, metrical junctures created by the meter within the second or third foot of hexameter and elegiac lines. Few contemporary translations graphically represent the rupture of the caesura and thereby exploit its function to organize the sense of the verses. In my own translation, every line break or stanza break is a caesura, a diaeresis, or a break between a hexameter and an elegiac line in the original. I have thus organized the original’s twelve couplets into nine stanzas reflecting the thematic progression of the fragment. The fifth stanza (beginning “Sensible men…”) is the crux of the piece, where the celebration of the pleasures of luxury gives way to admonitions about proper behaviour.
The syntax of the four stanzas that follow from this point is more complex, and their meter more dactylic rather than spondaic. In other words, the poet here favors metrical feet containing short syllables (the dactyl) over the long syllables of the spondee, producing a faster pace that I connect with emotional arousal as the speaker expresses his wishes. Grammatically, this section uses infinitive verbs in almost every main clause, indicating that the entire second half of the poem depends on the word χρὴ (“it is necessary”) in line 13 and marking the turn towards stern admonitions about piety and decency. This section concludes the fragment with alternating exemplars of good behaviour to be emulated and bad behaviour to be avoided.
[1] Matthäus, H. (1999-2000). “Das griechische Symposion und der Orient.” Nürnberger Blätter zur Archäologie 16: 41-64.
[2] See Marek Wecowski, The Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet (Oxford, 2014) and Albert Nijboer, “Banquet, Marzeah, Symposion and Symposium during the Iron Age” in Regionalism and Globalism in Antiquity: Exploring Their Limits, ed. F. De Angelis, pp. 95-125 (Peeters, 2013).
[3] Jean-Marie Dentzer. (1982). Le motif du banquet couché dans le Proche-Orient et le monde grec du VIIe au IVe siècle avant J.-C. Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome.
Kevin Solez