complains of not having received the reward he has been promised, ten mares
with stallion and a camel, and there is a famous Irish quatrain from the ninth
century that goes ‘I have heard he does not give horses for poems: he gives
what is innate to him –– a cow!’^16
In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, when the infant god demonstrates his
newly invented lyre with a song honouring all the gods, Apollo exclaims, ‘this
is worth fifty cows!’ (437). The reference is to his own fifty cows that Hermes
had stolen, which he is now content to let him keep in exchange for the lyre.
But the transaction seems like a reminiscence of the kind of society reflected
in the early Indic and Celtic sources, where a poet might indeed be rewarded
for an outstanding song with a herd of cattle. The epic singers portrayed in
theOdyssey, Phemius and Demodocus, are not shown as receiving boons on
this scale, but each is attached to a nobleman’s house and is provided with a
living, besides getting occasional bonuses from those pleased with his per-
formances. The best professional poets in archaic Greece could earn rich
rewards. The famous citharode Arion is represented by Herodotus (1. 24. 1) as
making himself wealthy by his recitals in Sicily and Italy. Poets such as Simo-
nides and Pindar composed laudatory poems for rich patrons in many parts
of Greece for agreed fees, in money rather than livestock.^17 It pays to increase
your word power.
CONCEPTS OF POETRYIf we cannot identify a universal Indo-European term for ‘poetry’, we can find
a number of words or roots that must have been used in connection with it,
over at least parts of the Indo-European world, from early times. There is
one that has Anatolian attestation and should therefore go back to PIE. The
Hittite verb ish
̆
ama ̄i- ‘sing’ is held to be cognate with Vedic sa ̄ ́man-‘song’
(< sh 2 omen-), and also with Greek μνο‘song’ and ο μη‘poetic theme’. The
details are debated,^18 and for μνο there are alternative etymologies to
be mentioned later. But if the combination is valid, we have here remnants of
the oldest discoverable word relating to singing.
The root wekw‘speak, utter forth’ produces in Greek, besides the com-
monplace verb ε!πει
ν, the noun #πο, which is used in the singular of an
epic verse and in the plural of hexameter poetry or a complete poem. It
(^16) Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford 1956), 90.
(^17) Cf. Campanile (1977), 43 f.
(^18) N. Oettinger in Serta Indogermanica (Innsbruck 1982), 236 n. 18; F. Bader, BSL 85 (1990),
34–8; Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 733 f.; D. Q. Adams in EIEC 520a.
- Poet and Poesy 31