A Forgotten Poet

A FORGOTTEN POET GILBERT NoRwooo M ODERN Athens has followed a plan (natural, surely, in that city beyond most others) of naming streets after distinguished citizens who lived in the days of her ancient glory. You may pace the Street of Pericles or of Themistocles: nay, so catholic is their admiration, so remote those days, that I once found myself walking (somewhat nervously) along Brasidas Street. A student of the ancient drama is delighted to discover a theatre at the end of Cratinus Street and Eupolis Street; not far away is Euripides .Street, where y~u may buy vegetables. But despite this alert and roving sense of the past, you will search Athens in vain for the Street of Hermippus. Our histories of literature make little more of him; amid the remains of his contemporaries scarcely any mention of his work surviv. es; his own fragments are few and mostly brief. The only place where he makes much of a figure is the didascalic inscriptions-the battered stone records of prize-winners in the dramatic competitions at the Lenaean festival in late winter and the Great Dionysia, celebrated when spring began. Yet this neglected poet reveals himself to an attentive and sympathetic reader as the most attractive personality among Attic comedians. There can, of course, be no serious doubt that as a playwright Hermippus stood below Cratinus and Eupolis; but he wrote other kinds of poetry besides comedy, knew more of the world than did Aristophanes, and excelled all the others in poetical charm. From Suidas we learn that he was an Athenian, son of Lysis, and brother of Myrtilus, also a comic dramatist; 43 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY his plays numbered forty; he had only one eye. The first prize was adjudged to him at least five times. Titles of ten plays are known to us: Agamemnon, The Birth of Athena, The She-Bakers, The Demesmen, Europa, The Gods, The Cercopes, The Fates, The Soldiers, and The_ BasketBearers . Of these, the earliest was probably The Fates, produced in 430 B.c., a date that shows Hermippus to have been older than Aristophanes, who was born not earlier than 445 B.c. But another piece of evidence puts Hermippus still further back. Plutarch informs us that he prosecuted Pericles.' mistress, Aspasia, for impiety. "He accused her also of receiving on Pericles' behalf free women who used to meet .regularly." This has been taken to imply procuration and adultery; probably all . that Aspasia did was to hold a salon. This attack was delivered before 432 B.c., and Hermippus would not have brought it had he not been a citizen of some standing and authority. We may, therefore_, place the date of his birth tentatively at 470 B.c., about half-way between Cratinus and Aristophanes, the greatest masters of Old Co~edy. Only two other scraps of definite information have come down to us: his chief actor was named Simermo; and Aristophanes mentions Hermippus casually as having joined in attacks upon Hyperbolus, the demagogue who succeeded Cleon. But we shall find from Hermippus' own fragments that he travelled widely and was deeply influenced by his foreign experiences. The date of his death is quite unknown, but he seems to have produced no play after 4i5 B.c. The poetic beauty of Hermippus' style_, his imagination , his eye for loveliness in unlikely places, are apparent even in fragments that have survived for reasons entirely unaesthetic. Athenaeus' desire to tell us the genitive of 44 A FORGOTTEN POET a certain noun has preserved from The Cercopes a line of bewildering loveliness: "Have you ever looked at a pomegranate-seed in snow?" He means, of course, a woman's breast, and this "conceif' is less far-fetched than might appear: snow was as familiar on Athenian dinner-tables as ice on ours. This exquisite glimpse of beauty is not in the Athenian manner: it suggests rather the sensuous charm of a Westerner like Ibycus. In modern love-poetry such "conceits, are far more frequent: Full gently now she takes .him by the hand, A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow. Like Hermippus, Aristophanes (despite his Athenian preoccupation) perceived and mentioned...