passage. Bacchylides (5. 176 f.) calls on her to halt ‘the well-made car’ when
he wants to make a transition. Pindar sees himself as travelling in it (Ol. 9. 81,
cf. Isth. 2. 1 f.); it is yoked by his patron (Pyth. 10. 65); it speeds on to celebrate
the athlete’s victory (Isth. 8. 61).^50
A more elaborate picture is developed in the proem of Parmenides’ philo-
sophical apocalypse (fr. 1. 1–25 D.–K.). The poet is borne along on a car
drawn by mares that take him as far as his desire reaches. Sun-maidens show
him the way on the path that leads the enlightened man anywhere. This
perhaps draws on a distinctive strand of mystic tradition that grew out of the
more general theory of poetic charioteering. It finds its closest parallel not in
the Veda but in the Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a (3. 33. 19 f., cf. 6, 10; 46. 6; 49. 14), where it is
explained that those who have conquered higher worlds by asceticism possess
chariots that fly where one desires.
The Greeks had a musical form associated with dactylic rhythm and called
the Chariot Nome, >ρμα ́ τειο νο ́ μο; it is said to have been used by Stesichorus
and invented by the piper Olympus. The term goes back in any case to the
fifth century .^51 It may have been coined to describe the bucketing
rhythm of dactylo-epitrite lyric. But it can hardly be dissociated from the idea
of the poet’s chariot of song. Neither can the term πεζ‘pedestrian’, which
in the fifth century was used as the antithesis of ‘sung, melodic’ and sub-
sequently came to designate prose discourse as opposed to verse.^52 ‘On foot’
must have been meant to contrast with ‘on horseback’ or ‘in a conveyance’.
The song takes offEven apart from the imagery of horses and chariot we find in Graeco-Aryan
poetry the idea that the song is something that moves forward and travels a
course.^53 Hesiod recalls that the Muses of Helicon ‘set me on the path of
song’,$πβησαν α, οιδη
(Op. 659). The Phaeacian bard Demodocus, invited
to perform, ‘set forth and began from the god’, +ρμηθε? θεου
@ρχετο.^54
Both poets and prose writers refer to themselves as ‘going on’ to a new point,
(^50) See also Pind. Ol. 6. 22–5, Nem. 1. 7, Isth. 5. 38, Pae. 7b. 12–14, fr. 124ab. 1, 140b. 8; Bacchyl.
- 51; Ar. Vesp. 1022; Choerilus of Samos fr. 1. 4–5; Call. fr. 1. 25–8; Lucr. 6. 47, 92 f.; Virg. G. 2.
541 f., etc. For the ‘yoking’ image applied more generally to songs and words in Vedic and Greek
cf. Wüst (1969), 57–9.
(^51) See M. L. West, CQ 21 (1971), 309–11.
(^52) A. C. Pearson, The Fragments of Sophocles (Cambridge 1917), i. 14 (on fr. 16); Eduard
Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa (3rd edn., Leipzig–Berlin 1915), i. 32–4.
(^53) See Durante (1958), 3 f. ~ (1976), 123 f.; Nünlist (1998), 228–54.
(^54) Od. 8. 499. In the next line, usually read #νθεν λ.ν‘taking it from there’, Bergk proposed
$λ;ν‘driving’, which would imply the chariot metaphor; cf. Pind. Isth. 5. 38 #λα ν ν μοι πεδ-
θεν; Bacchyl. 10. 51 τ μακρα` ν γλ;σσαν !θ3σα $λα3νω | $κτ: +δο ;
- Poet and Poesy 43