Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece

8. The Tradition of Harvesting Songs

The Tradition of Harvesting Songs Κυρά των Αμπελιών, πώς να κρατήσουμε στους ώμους μας τόσο ουρανό πώς να κρατήσουμε τόση σιωπή μ’ όλα τα μυστικά των δέντρων; —Yannis Ritsos, Η Κυρά των αμπελιών Lady of the Vineyards, how can we hold so much sky on our shoulders How can we hold so much silence, with all the secrets of the trees? Reaping a Rich Harvest: A Diachronic Perspective on the Lityerses Work-Song Tradition Agricultural work provides an ample forum for song and ritual activity. Prayers and rituals that reveal their performers’ close connection with labor and its product , however brief or fragmented, can give significant information not only as vestiges of what survives but as tokens of a much larger and richer repertoire of songs, rituals, games, possibly even jokes, and narratives. Ancient Greek genres of performance functioned in a real world outside the literary frame in which we study them today.1 Harvesting songs were perceived in antiquity, just as they are today, as strictly occasional, attached to a recurring performance in the harvest season. As such, they are often regarded as a conservative genre in which little change occurs, a genre of simple poetic structures with simplified narratives performed to the rhythms of the work. In fact, traditions around the world show both a comparable scholarly “contempt” for the genre as “lesser” and also sweeping and generalizing views on the poetics of such songs and their function and role as accompaniment to work alone. It is also commonly thought that structural similarities across different cultures of seemingly brief and “unsophisticated ” addresses to tools of work, such as we saw earlier in chapter 5 with the Chapter 8 202 voices at work woman addressing her mill, are the product of song activity accompanying repetitive work, in a type of performance that can be similar to a ritual utterance. Claims of naiveté have often conditioned scholarly approaches too ready to neglect the genre as a whole. I suggested earlier that repertoires of songs at work are much more fluid than is currently thought. As anthropological research suggests, wedding songs, to give just one example, could be performed as agricultural or weaving songs. Arguing against a narrow, static, and rigid view that sees work songs reduced to simple utterances, I will analyze the stylized version of a well-known type of agricultural song, the Lityerses. I say type of song because various sources mention the Lityerses but give little detail about its content. Nor did it necessarily exist without temporal or geographical variations. As with the Linos tradition, Lityerses is both a personal name belonging to a mythic figure and the name of a type of song. Certain references to mythic figures might seem opaque at first glance, hidden in a narrative economy of allusion and cultural cross-references. I approach the Lityerses song tradition through a diachronic nexus of texts, all of them grounded in their own specific literary and cultural contexts. The primary text of my focus will be a literary creation, which includes a reflection on harvesting songs: Theocritus’s Idyll 10, “The Harvesters.” Although our information on the Lityerses tradition is patchy, we can still gain a clear picture of the richness of the tradition it sprang from and the mythology to which it alludes when we view it from a diachronic perspective. Let me first define my use of diachrony. There is the diachrony of a reverse perspective, which asks how a tradition of great storytelling, songs, and myths that fascinated people in many different areas of the world was shaped and placed within later literary composition, erudition, and taste, as was the case with the work song in Theocritus and the other sources that discuss the Lityerses song.2 There is also the diachrony of approach, one that looks forward and puts forth comparative material, common vehicles of expression in other types of folklore or literary expression that shed light on ancient performances associated with daily life and labor. I analyze a “canonical” text, Theocritus’s Idyll 10, to excavate the soil of refined Hellenistic aesthetics to uncover the different types and layers of voice, myth, and performance with which this poem interacts. I examine the song’s stylization with a focus on genre and gender, the mythic material it resonates, and parallel texts, arguing that this poem presents a historiola, an abbreviated mythic narrative, that is a mere vestige of longer and richer possible oral versions of the story. Such historiolas are the forefront of mnemonic techniques The Tr adition of Harv esting Songs 203 for larger...