beneath the vine's shady shoots:
but my Love rests at no season;
[but like] the Thracian North Wind
blazing -with lightning
it darts from the Cyprian goddess
with wasting frenzies
dark and fearless
and ail-powerfully shakes
my heart from its very roots.(fr. 286)
Anacreon, by contrast, unfolds scenes swiftly, image by image, suddenly imposing a surprising and witty
perspective by twists at the end. Thus fr. 358, probably complete:
Once again his crimson ball
Love, golden-locked, throws my way
challenging me to play
to a gaudy-sandalled lass's call:But she - from an isle with a touch of class,
Lesbos - my hair (now turned
white) has spurned
and makes eyes at another lass.Anacreon's songs also differ from Ibycus' in scale. Several of around eight lines look complete, a length
typical also of his Hellenistic imitators. Ibycus is more problematic: fr. 286 and another about love could
come from short poems, but quotations of mythological details suggest heroic narrative unattested for
Anacreon. It may, of course, have served as illustration. Certainly in one forty-five-line fragment (282)
Ibycus catalogues Trojan-war episodes and figures he will not sing of, using them as a foil to his
concluding praise of Polycrates' renown, boldly linked to his own. Often he recalls Stesichorus in metre
and language, and clearly stands close to that tradition of heroic narrative which Stesichorus alone
represents.
Much about Stesichorus (C. 560 BC) has become clearer from recent discoveries. His treatment was so
expansive that Alexandrian editors gave songs individual papyrus rolls and titles. Thus Geryoneis, telling
of Heracles' fight with three-bodied Geryon, exceeded 1,800 lines. Oresteia in two books must have been
longer still. Other features too explain the ancient assessment of Stesichorus as 'most Homeric'. Many
phrases evoke, without duplicating, Homeric formulae, and Geryoneis shows how Homeric motifs were
transposed. At Iliad 12. 322 ff. Sarpedon urged Glaucus to fight, since even survivors of the battle would
one day die. Geryon adapts this to answer a long speech counseling him not to face Heracles. 'If I am
immortal it would be better to [ ]. But if I must grow old among mortals, far nobler now to face my
destiny' (Suppl. 11). Later, when a poisoned arrow has cleft the last of Geryon's three heads, Stesichorus