Poetry as communication

Photo by Dimitrios P

For the Ancient Greeks, poetry was music and a way of knowing. For all cultures, music almost comes before language. It’s the rhythm and melody of something that you share that makes the communication valuable and memorable.

Ancient Greece is made up of a collection of city-states that begin communicating over the sea. Some of these city-states are in what is today the west coast of Turkey or the east coast of south Italy, as well as mainland Greece and the Greek islands. The people in these different city-states begin communicating stories of their own past: they communicate in myth and poetry.

The Nine Muses

For us today, a muse is your inner voice; it’s what compels you to write poetry or to make art. For the Greeks, with their impulse to personify their own inwardness and make it divine, there were the Nine Muses and their mother, Memory.

One of these muses is the muse of history. We don’t normally think of history as a creative art, but it is the way of knowing the past. Another is the muse of astronomy – a way of knowing the heavens in the world outside us. There is also the muse of dance, and the rest are muses of different types of poetry. First, we have epic poetry. Homer and Hesiod write about war, about the origin of human suffering. We all want to know why we suffer. After that, come stories of the gods, like Prometheus.

The story of Prometheus

Prometheus was a kind of demigod. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to human beings, and that is the origin of human civilisation, human creativity. But he suffers for it. The gods send him his sister, Pandora – Pandora, which means “all gifts”. Every god gave her a gift. Pandora is this beautiful woman who has all talents and gifts, which she could give to man. It’s worth noting that this is a misogynist, sexist and patriarchal society. Prometheus’ foolish brother accepts Pandora, who carries with her a jar. Pandora takes off the lid and all the nósoi – the diseases and harm in the world – fly out, leaving ‘hope’ under the edge of the lid.

Prometheus becomes the father of human civilisation, but it comes at a price. Later, Prometheus himself is stretched out by the king of the gods on a rock, where an eagle eats his liver every day. His liver is renewed, and the eagle comes back every day. This is a great myth, which Homer’s great colleague in epic, Hesiod, returns to twice to explain how all the precious things we make and do in our societies are also punished.

Sappho and lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is completely different. It’s not so public; it’s a little intense form. One of the greatest lyric poets was a woman, Sappho. She lived in Lesbos in the 6th century BCE. The philosopher Plato, who lived two centuries later and was himself a poet, called her the Tenth Muse.

There’s a wonderful fragment of a poem by Sappho which says: The moon has set. The Pleiades have set. Time passes. I lie alone. This is something that poetry of all kinds, in all languages, can do: make experience universal through the particular. The “I” in I lie alone – anybody singing that or listening to that could identify with that “I”.

The power of music

Orpheus Charming the Animals by Jacob Hoefnagel, 1613. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Greek poetry is important in cults, all sorts of different cults in their multiplicity of gods. One figure that binds them all together is Orpheus. The figure of Orpheus is a mythic one. He was a great singer and his voice and lyre were magnetic. He drew everybody together towards him. This is important politically, as well as communally and personally.

You are drawn towards the music, you share in it, and it fortifies you. There is a communality of music and poetry which is very important and which continues to this day in dance festivals and football crowds, in people wanting to sing together. Orpheus is behind that.

The myth of Orpheus

Orpheus loses his beloved Eurydice. He goes down into the underworld, taking his art, his lyre, with him. He sings to the gods of the underworld so magnetically, saying he wants his beloved wife back, that they agree. They are so charmed by him, just as the whole world is, including animals. Everybody flocks to hear sweet music, sweet poetry.

Orpheus can only have Eurydice back on one condition: he has to go back without looking behind him, as she follows him up to the light. Right at the end, when he sees the glimmer of daylight at the end of the tunnel, he’s in such doubt about whether she’s really following him that he turns and looks. He sees her look at him and flee back to the underworld again.

Orpheus has lost her. He comes out into the world maddened by his grief, and he sings. The mad women, the followers of Dionysus, jump on him. Nobody knows why, but they tear him limb from limb, rip off his head and throw it into the Hebrus River. His head flows downstream, still singing. That is an extraordinary Greek image for the continuity of song: that, even after you’re dead, your voice can go on singing and still matter to other people.

Poetry and philosophy

In the 6th century BCE, particularly in south Italy and on the coast of Turkey, people who we now call the pre-Socratic philosophers began to study what we were made of; what the heavens were; the ellipses of the movements of the stars and the planets; and how we know things. It was the beginning of philosophy.

Some of these people wrote in prose, of which we only have fragments and sentences; some of the most powerful wrote in poetry. One of them, who is sometimes called the father of philosophy, was Parmenides. He wrote in hexameter verse and he wrote a long poem which was a journey into knowledge: a journey of understanding how we know the world and how we know ourselves. He was followed by a wonderful poet called Empedocles, who wrote about the conflicted nature of the soul and the conflicted nature of the world.

Eris and Eros

Empedocles had these two principles: Eris, strife or conflict, and Eros, love or union. He used these principles to explain both the soul that is ourselves and the world: the nature of the world, the stars, how heaven and Earth came together. He wrote about sexual union, like the sky upon the Earth, but also political union and attunement. He talked about the splitting – Eris, or strife – which is the beginning of discord in a person, in a family or in war between nations. He wrote that he himself was a follower of mad strife – and that strife is not necessarily a bad thing because both union and separation can be good and bad. Good and bad isn’t the point: it’s how things happen that matters.

Poetry and harmony

Sappho and Alcaeus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1881. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain

One of the most fascinating things about Ancient Greek culture, and one of the reasons it has so shaped the Western world ever since, is that all the things which we think of as separate – astronomy, history, politics, drama, learning – are in the domain of poetry, which is also in the domain of music. This could be summed up best in the concept of Harmonia, from which we get the word “harmony”. It comes from a verb meaning to fit together, from the tuning of the lyre.

Greek medical theorists thought of the body and health as a harmony of different impulses, different humours, different elements. When they’re all in balance, that is a harmony. Empedocles thought of the soul as an attunement, as a proper tuning of all the elements in it. This is taken over so profoundly by Plato when he talks about morality and politics: that the body politic is also like the human body. There has to be an attunement, with everything in balance, for it to work well. The same goes for the soul. We have to be harmonised in order to work healthily and function happily in a society, in our family and in ourselves. And that is all the province of poetry.

Discover more about

poetry and Greek culture

Padel, R. (1995). Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton University Press.

Padel, R. (2020). We Are All from Somewhere Else: Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose. Vintage.

Padel, R. (Forthcoming, 2021). Daughters of the Labyrinth. Corsair.

Poetry and harmony in Ancient Greece