Every Reader's Keats

This is the thirteenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In the Every Reader’s Poets I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.

The poems discussed follow the essay.


     I hesitate to write about John Keats, for to me he is like a youthful romance, somewhat embarrassing while inspiring what I still experience late in life as ingenuous heart-felt affection. Keats, more than any other single writer, attracted me to poetry with his dedication to beauty, his clearly cut concrete imagery, and his lovely melodies.

     His appeal may have been enhanced by his biography, an exemplary Romantic life. Born to parents of modest circumstances – his father had tended horses in a stable attached to an inn which he later rose to manage, but he died when the author was eight. His mother sent him to school where he acquired the reputation of being a bit wild, indolent, and prone to fist-fights, but it was there that he attained a love of Classics (though not a scholar’s expertise) and a dedication to literature, winning an academic prize at the age of thirteen. The following year his mother died and he was sent to live with his grandmother who promptly apprenticed him to the family’s medical practitioner. Successfully completing the apprenticeship, Keats went to something like a residency in London well on his way to qualifying for the Royal College of Surgeons. Yet the more he wrote and entered into a literary scene, the more he resented the time he had to devote to medicine; he ultimately abandoned that work for the dubious career of a full-time poet.

     “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is perhaps the best-known sonnet from Keats’ earliest collection, but to me a little-praised piece provides a clearer model of the poet’s sensibility. The sonnet beginning “Give me a golden pen . . .” was an occasional impromptu written in a matter of minutes toward the conclusion of a social visit. It is nothing but a series of images, each if which renders more precise the subjective experience. Keats begins with the pen, as memorializing the pleasant hours in verse fixes their memory and enables their lasting significance. The pen is golden because of the value of such preserved felicity, the adjective suggesting as well the gap between real and ideal which for Keats only art can bridge. With characteristic extravagance Keats then imagines himself leaning “on heaped-up flowers.” The experience, while sublimed by aesthetic distance (“in regions clear, and far”), sounds almost hedonistic in glad sensuality. The poet proposes beginning with “a tablet whiter than a star,” a vision of the absolute immediately succeeded by a series of concrete images, a more palpable version of the beauty Keats experiences as semi-divine. Having asked for a “tablet” on which to write, he moves to a different art, his poetry now figured as the heavenly music of the blessed. For Keats the mention of celestial song is too vague, he renders the idea photographic, specifying the angelic hand at a particular moment, “the silver strings of heavenly harp atween,” and then goes on to add “a pearly car,” and then “pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar.” Just as he is only just trying his artistic abilities, the presumably newly minted angel has “half-discovered wings.”

     He is then able not only to hear the music of the spheres, but to transcribe a part on his page. Amazed at the sublimity he has attained he exclaims, “For what a height my spirit is contending!” just before the final line reminds the reader that this extraordinary afflatus has been attained simply by passing the evening among sympathetic friends. His reliance on his fancy, and his idealistic aspiration toward the sublime are clear and enthusiastic, and his method of reasoning through images already established.

     A similar pattern is discernable in “Sleep and Poetry” in which, after repeating the familiar sentiment “life is but a day,” Keats proceeds also to identify life with “A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way/ From a tree’s summit” and then, even more extravagantly to “a poor Indian’s sleep/ While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep/ Of Montmorenci.” This fatalistic description is then immediately succeeded by more positive images: “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” “the reading of an ever-changing tale,” “the light uplifting of a maiden’s veil,” and “a pigeon tumbling in the summer air.” He then concludes the series with an altogether optimistic figure “a laughing school-boy, without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.” Note however, that the burden of mortality is never denied, the rose, the story, the maiden, the pigeon, even the “laughing school-boy” each must come to an end, and Keats was acutely aware that he, too, shared that fate toward which one may cultivate an enlightened acceptance, but which one cannot escape.


     Keats’ odes are likely his best-known works, and of them surely the popular favorite is his meditation on a Greek vase of the sort that fills many little-visited galleries in the great museums of Athens and Paris and New York. The ode had evolved in English literature into a far more flexible form than it had in antiquity. (Pindar possesses sufficient complexity that a reader might think he is “free-styling,” to use an almost contemporary idiom.) Keats here devised an original form though he used a traditional name which to him signified strong emotion and a certain looseness of structure.

     The poem is an ekphrasis, a literary description of a work of art. He begins writing not about the pictured scene as much as about his lack of knowledge of what is before his eyes. What does the scene represent, he asks, who are represented, what is going on?

     One might be tempted to reduce the poem to the neat concluding apothegm.


"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."


     While this may seem to declare an unconflicted aestheticism, wholly satisfied by the rapt contemplation of an objet d’art, such a reading would ignore the balancing complaint that runs through the poem, a lament about mortality and the transience of things, painful facts that lead the poet to seek solace in the art of antiquity. Ancient Greece, fetishized in Europe since the Renaissance, was particularly valued by the Romantics (many neo-Classical writers having a taste for Rome), and Keats hopes to escape the terms of human existence, what Marvell called “the iron gates of life,” by contemplation of the clay object. The boughs are “happy,” because they exist outside of time. Of course, their happiness is a construction of the human observer as is their beauty.

     The survival of a beautiful work of art promises a sort of immortality, though at the price that it remain a perpetually “unravish’d bride,” a “cold Pastoral,” while those who appreciate it weep and laugh and celebrate and sicken and die. The poem may, in fact, be said to be about the gap between the feeling, desiring, temporally limited subject and the perfect, timeless object. This opposition, present from the start never develops or changes; there can be no honest resolution. The questions of the first stanza return unchanged in the fourth, while stanzas two and three praise the incorruptible perfection of the scene. What Keats appreciates on the vase the love, the “mad pursuit” and “wild ecstasy” are the very things which in human life he seeks to transcend: the “heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,” the burning forehead” and “parching tongue” all of which evidence strong emotion.

     Keats’ ode “To Autumn” represents another attempt to come to terms with the evanescence of beauty. While springtime is a common theme since the earliest poetry, the autumn, he rightly suggests, is comparatively unappreciated. He invokes no eternal work of art, but rather celebrates the fullness, the perfection of the full maturation of the harvest season, followed though it is by the death of annuals and the chill of winter. In a lush elaboration of Shakespeare’s formula from King Lear “Ripeness is all” Keats details the country scene. The first stanza notes the beauty of the season’s fruit and nuts and suggests people’s joy at collecting this bounty, surely a strong emotion since prehistoric times, but the second stanza is decidedly more Romantic, almost decadent.

     Autumn is personified as a languid, dreamy, “careless,” “half asleep,” as though “drows'd with the fume of poppies,” and the theme of soporific intoxication is echoed by the mention of the “cyder-press.” This suggestion of anaesthesia allows the observer, perhaps, to feel satisfaction in the moment like the bees who “think warm days will never cease,” and to ignore the inevitability of approaching death and barrenness.

     Yet the final stanza defines the music of the season first in the “wailful choir the small gnats” mourning and rising among the “sallows,” or willows that grow by the river. Willows are a common gravestone motif, but the next image, the bleating lambs, is less funereal, and the lambs are succeeded by the sound of the crickets, the robins, and the swallows. The poem ends with this chorus asserting the value of life despite the shortening days. In nature, of course, the cycle continues, the new will replace the old, assuring a sort of immortality, while the individual human subject will come to an end.

     Keats developed a passionate attachment to Fanny Brawne to whom he wrote "My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. . .Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you." He reworked a sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” he had composed earlier to express his love.

     Again, his focus is the gap between the temporal and the eternal absolute he identifies with her and likens to a star. The first eight lines, the octave, portray her as “stedfast,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” gazing passively over earth, in fact, not unlike the “Grecian urn.” He can participate in this divinity through his love. “Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,” he can feel himself “awake for ever in a sweet unrest.” In this condition of aroused passion he feels in part at least redeemed. If he must die, it will be in a “swoon” of love at which the lover could hardly complain.

     Keats’ literary career was frustrated by low sales – the four volumes published during the poet’s lifetime sold less than a few hundred copies. Apart from the praise of Leigh Hunt and other friends, the critical attention his work attracted was fierce and scathing, more political and social than literary. Keats and his circle were condemned as the “Cockney school” of poetry. The poet had asked that his epitaph be simply “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” but his friends added a protest against his treatment by critics which they maintained contributed to his death. “This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies.”

     Keats remains a poet to whom I can return repeatedly for his lovely melodies and pregnantly suggestive images. In a certain mood I find Shelley is often airy and abstract, Wordsworth plain in language though sometimes tangled in meaning, Coleridge philosophical, and Byron casual and hasty. While, readers may perceive Keats’ weaknesses, I for one have a prejudice in his favor. In a letter he defined “Negative Capability” as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is in art that meaning may be constructed without revelation or positivism. Keats, whose life was difficult in a number of ways, managed to build an imaginative world true to his experience yet lit with joy.




Give me a golden pen, and let me lean
On heaped-up flowers, in regions clear, and far;
Bring me a tablet whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween:
And let there glide by many a pearly car
Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,
And half-discovered wings, and glances keen.
The while let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches each delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone,
And full of many wonders of the spheres:
For what a height my spirit is contending!
'Tis not content so soon to be alone.




Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."




To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.




Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

William Morris’s Revolutionary Narratives

Page references are to Three Works by William Morris, a paperback published by International Publishers with an introduction by A. L. Morton. I have included poem and chapter numbers for the convenience of those using different texts.


     A popular poet in his own day, William Morris is now more celebrated for his designs for wallpaper, textiles, and books as well as for his socialist activism. This political commitment shaped his three revolutionary narratives The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), A Dream of John Ball (1888), and News from Nowhere (1890), all of which foreground theme. As these works were meant to be agitprop weapons in service to radical social change, their persuasiveness is a reasonable focus for analysis, though not necessarily the primary criterion for judgement. As it happens, I have just read (or reread) the three in a 1968 edition from International Publishers with a very sympathetic introduction by the British historian A. L. Morton who approvingly quotes Morris’s choice of the word communism to describe his ideology. The political tendency of these books is thus generously overdetermined.
     Incongruous as the combination of his refined aestheticism and the cause of the working class may seem to some, Morris was, of course, far from alone in his day. Ruskin, Walter Crane, and Wilde were among others who sought to combine the love of beauty with that of justice, yet in each case tensions and incongruities lingered. Each naturally developed an idiosyncratic social vision in accordance with his own sensibility. Such variation is properly viewed not as a defect, but as an advantage, with every writer, indeed, in the broader sense, every citizen, adding, not assent to a predetermined party line, but an individual proposal that might, by respecting such differences, form a contribution to the construction of a socialism that approaches most closely to the goal of serving the needs of all.
     William Morris was born, like many radicals [1], into an affluent family, the scion of a wealthy bill broker, comparable perhaps to a Wall Street arbitrageur today. His emphasis on the beautiful as opposed to the practical and his fundamental lifelong distaste for industrialization might make him an unlikely militant; indeed, his own company made luxury goods, necessarily catering to the wealthy. Yet he was earnest and resolute in his writing, propagandizing while also organizing to bring about greater felicity for all. These three works provide views from different angles of his vision of that future and of the values that underlie the social and economic revolution Morris favored.
     The Pilgrims of Hope is transitional, Morris’s last verse narrative and his first major work in praise of socialism. In a modern pilgrimage, an idealized couple go not to Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela, but to Paris to join the short-lived 1871 Commune. To Morris the communards, while “they failed in conquering immediate material freedom for the people” nonetheless “quickened and strengthened the ideas of freedom by their courageous action and made our hope of to-day possible.” Their defeat was to him “the greatest tragedy of modern times.” [2] The French setting is a rare example of internationalism for Morris, for whom as for Blake the New Jerusalem was firmly set in “in England’s green and pleasant land.”
     The poem deals with events of the recent past and concludes with the protagonist and his son looking forward to the struggles of the future. Their devotion to change arises not so much from their own want as from their alienation from the avarice and ugliness of capitalism. While they are déclassé and must work for bread, their need for change arises from suffering that is not material, but rather psychological, or what some might call spiritual.
     Other significant patterns emerge as well that offset, undermine, or interrogate the poem’s forward-looking associations. Most fundamental is Morris’s pastoralism which recalls Blake as well as the entire romance tradition descending from Hellenistic times. The poem begins, repeatedly returns, and ends in an idyllic locus amoenus. One of these Edenic scenes occurs during the calm before the storm, prior to the party’s departure for France. [3] For all the narrator’s languorous delight in “a place of happy rest,” as he lies stretched out on the lawn, watching the haymakers, he is aware that his experience is reserved for those who “need not work.” In fact, as he gazes at the farm laborers, he muses, not on his solidarity with all productive workers, but rather on how “far from them have I drifted,” his radical consciousness severing his tie with the community rather than strengthening it. Similarly, even among the radicals at the meeting, the persona is pointedly said to be the “only one” to respond to the “Communist” speaker. “Bitter to many the message but sweet indeed unto me.” [4] Morris is apparently so strong a collectivist as to find himself isolated.
     While his opposition to industrialism and individualism may seem in tension with his devotion to socialism, he also introduces elements with little direct relation to social justice. This is hardly the place for a general consideration of the association of left-wing factions with such non-political beliefs and practices such as yoga, vegetarianism, and esotericism. Many have been drawn to the cause of socialism whom a ‘thirties Stalinist might condemn as “bourgeois individualists.” [5] While advancing the people’s movement was clearly the primary motive, the plot of The Pilgrims of Hope contains idiosyncratic elements such as the couple’s transformation into a ménage à trois, inevitably reminding the reader of Morris own domestic arrangements.
     The verse form is a long, loose, and mostly anapestic line with some iambs and, in general, six beats per line recalls Homer while retaining the caesurae and some of the alliteration of Old English verse. [6] While many have found the form cumbersome and particularly unfit for prosaic passages, the impression arises in part because we are today unaccustomed to lengthy verse narratives in any meter while such books could be bestsellers in Morris’s day. Morris is one of the last English poets who could write narrative in poetic lines as naturally as in prose, but of course the elder portion of his readership was the last broad audience with a taste for such things as Browning’s The Ring and the Book.
     The poem employs a good many familiar conventions of romance apart from rural idylls. The pattern of thwarted love ending in felicity is one, though here the conclusion is merely peaceful, with a decisive conflict (to be followed by presumably unending peace) projected into the future. The main character’s wise advisors, first the aged Frenchman, then the Communist speaker have seemed to many to be variants on the wizards or seers of legend. The device of making the hero a bastard who is descended from a ruling class father is similar to the many legendary lost princes and princesses, brought up in obscurity.
     Calling the trip to Paris a pilgrimage recalls the Middle Ages, and the goals of the lovers indeed seem more spiritual than political. The poem proceeds with sustained echoes of religious language, such as “tonight I am born again” or “How long, O Lord! how long?” [7] The most significant Christian theme, however, and one with a conflicted relation to revolutionary secularism, is the theme of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice. Many passages indicate that the three comradely pilgrims each expects to find a Christ-like martyr’s end in the Commune. The hero is determined “in Paris to do my utmost, and there in Paris to die.” Though as it happens he survives, he had expected all three “there to die like men.” [8] Morris lauds “the lovers of earth” for having paradoxically exchanged the good things of life for the “bitter pain” of a transfiguring death in combat. “The day of the deeds and the day of deliverance is nigh." Nature itself is voluptuously entangled with this impending love-death. “Earth kindled to spring-tide with the blood that her lovers have shed.” [9]
     Their reward is in the intensity of their feelings, not the advances secured by their actions. It is only in accepting what he regards as his own “foredoomed” end that he can say, “at last of all days I knew what life was worth.” Like a religious convert, he exults, “yea the life had we attained to could never be unlearned.” [10] The revolutionaries in Paris exhibit sublime elation: “Such joy and peace and pleasure!” [11] Acting in solidarity provides a feeling of love that provides a motive markedly stronger than the recovery of a worker’s surplus value.
     The fourteenth century peasants in A Dream of John Ball (1888) are likewise heading into slaughter and betrayal, though here Ball’s status as a priest makes the religious coloration of motive natural. Speaking with the narrator, a visitor from the future, he mirrors Christ’s view, looking beyond crucifixion to resurrection and the second coming, and finds his own approaching end acceptable in view of the eventual victory of his followers’ cause. Ball’s resolute fortitude with full foreknowledge of his own impending doom (the historic Ball was in fact hanged, drawn, and quartered, and his head displayed on a pike) remind the reader of Achilles as well as Christ. Morris assimilates medieval piety to nineteenth century socialism by displacing the Christian emphasis on Christ’s divinity with a concept of all-embracing “fellowship” [12], a word that generally translates the Greek κοινωνία, familiar from the New Testament.
     A more convincingly integrated Christian socialism had, of course existed for many years, arguably since apostolic times. Morris’s rhetoric, however, does not guide his readers to Christ but rather uses Christian language to gild his politics with a numinous glow satisfying to readers, at least to those whose enthusiasms resemble his own. A contemporary reviewer thanked Morris for celebrating a nearly forgotten people’s hero and said with confidence that the poem provided “an earnest of the near triumph of the true cause.” The critic managed to praise even the qualities that might have given some revolutionaries pause, noting that, while most people come to conclusions only after “research and ratiocination,” Morris’s poetic inspiration amounts to a “spiritual insight that guides him straight to a truth.” Readers of many of Morris’s non-political romances might with some justice complain of the fact that a “vague illusive atmosphere of dream-land surrounds us all throughout the story,” but to the reviewer “this is just as it should be when the narrator is a poet telling his dream.” [13]
     News from Nowhere is so tendentious it is scarcely a novel at all. The sensational “news,” that all might live in harmonious plenty, so dominates the description of settings and of characters as to leave little room for surprise or subtlety. Yet Morris’s vision is sufficiently sweet, especially for readers who share his sensibility, to lend his utopia a specific charm. There is such a poignant hope in his insistence that beauty belongs to all people and to every day and that all work might be pleasure and all people brothers and sisters that the reader becomes as indulgent of the book’s vulnerabilities as the citizens of the new England are of the peculiarities of their time-traveling guest.
     Yes, Ellen seems a manufactured love interest, oddly insubstantial and disinterested as though she might be a creature of virtual reality. The book’s thematics can seem something of an apparition as well, particularly to readers less disposed to be friendly to Morris’s vision. Whatever is the mysterious source of power that seems to support industry and transportation with no apparent human effort? The book’s account of the transition to socialism is fairly detailed, yet no satisfactory explanation of the economic or political organization ever appears. How is production governed? Does anyone assign people their tasks? Does a magic Quakerly consensus seize hold once we are all on the same side?
     The role of the story as agitprop is nonetheless clear. It was published in Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, and, in fact Morris’s semi-pastoral ideals bore fruit in the Garden Cities Movement of Ebenezer Howard and others. [14] The year before News from Nowhere appeared, Morris published a story of its origin as “Under an Elm-tree.” [15] In this lyrical piece, none the less moving for its free hand with history, [16] Morris constructs the loveliest idyllic scene as he observes the hay-making that for him represented the glorious collective work of the countryside. The details of flora and fauna are so accurate, the enthusiasm clearly heart-felt, such that the author’s delight in nature convincingly becomes a motive for action, a conviction that he views “a country-side worth fighting for.” From imagining the valor of the Anglo-Saxons he turns to the oppression of the farm laborers before his eyes, dramatically conveyed in a few brief conversational exchanges.
     The germ of News from Nowhere stands out. “Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety . . .” Apart from this positive motive, Morris’s book was a polemic response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) which projects a bureaucratized, technocratic utopia, a sort of state capitalism in which society becomes the alpha monopoly. [17] To the twenty-first century about which he wrote, Bellamy's scheme savors at its best of Walden Two and at worst of paternalistic authoritarianism, but Morris was most of all outraged by Bellamy’s philistinism. Bellamy was an enthusiastic admirer of industrialization and vast, anonymous production. To him just as “the machine is truer than the hand, so the system . . .turns out more accurate results.” [18] The cash nexus that led to alienated labor in Marx’s analysis is invisible, and all are paid alike, but the human element so important to Morris, in the mark of the maker on the finished product and the affectionate linkage of fellow citizens, has no significance for Bellamy. It is hardly a surprise that Morris’s prose is lyrical and, on occasion, grandly rhetorical, and that his work bears a gilded margin of pure fancy, while Bellamy is practical, utilitarian and flat with an excess of common sense. His Dr. Leete in the future may be solicitous and polite, but he sometimes sounds arrogant and self-righteous.
     Morris, on the other hand, who thought beauty should be everywhere, enjoyed his French edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital hand bound by Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson in turquoise goatskin with gilt tooling. And why not? Morris may have idealized his farm laborers, but he listened to their real complaints and based his socialism on the economic realities of his day. If he can detail an aesthetic paradise, and Bellamy a technocratic one, let a hundred others likewise add voices that each may contribute to a more fully human future for all.





1. Marx himself was the son of an upper middle class lawyer. The fathers of Trotsky, Mao and Castro were wealthy farmers, members of the class that might in Russia have been called kulaks. Those of us who participated in the movement of the sixties did not need the studies of Kenneth Kenniston to tell us that most of the young radicals, even the “red diaper babies,” enjoyed similarly privileged backgrounds.

2. These quotations from “Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris,” Commonweal III, 62 (March 19, 1887).

3. Page 151, Poem VIII, “The Half of Life Gone.” The rural British variety of Paradise is briefly recalled in Poem XI “A Glimpse of the Coming Day.”

4. Page 138, Poem V “New Birth.” A capitalization in most of the twentieth century would indicate membership in an explicitly “Communist” party. For Morris did it indicate acceptance The Communist Manifesto or of Marx in general?

5. I will mention here only the emergence of the Fabian Society, the moderate socialist organization whose members were typically affluent and well-educated. Many shared such non-economic concerns as spiritualism and vegetarianism. The Theosophist Annie Besant was an early member and the Fabians themselves had evolved out of a group called the Fellowship of the New Life which declared its first principle to be “the subordination of material things to spiritual things.” Its founder Thomas Davidson advocated a philosophy he called apeirotheism, which had, of course, nothing to do with the Second International or any other political organization. Closer to the present, the potent countercultural strains of ‘sixties radicalism were and are obvious to all.

6. Morris was a translator, of course, from Old Norse, Old English, and Ancient Greek.

7. In page 138, Poem V “New Birth” and page 151, Poem VII “In Prison – And at Home.” Compare, among other passages, John 3:3, 1 Peter 1:3, Psalm 13, and Habakkuk 1:2.

8. From page 163 and 165, Poem X “Ready to Depart.”

9. Page 170, Poem XII, “Meeting the War Machine.”

10. Page 172, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

11. Page 170, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

12. Morris’s universal fellowship resembles the I. W. W.’s exalted concept of “One Big Union” (regularly so capitalized).

13. In To-Day No. 55, for June 1888. While this journal called itself the “Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism,” oddly, the very same year of its founding Jerome K. Jerome began publishing a journal with the same name (including the dash and the capital D). Unsurprisingly, Jerome’s proved the longer-lived.

14. When actually built, Howard’s developments encountered an obstacle. His clientele (like that for Morris’s design workshops) was necessarily affluent and jealous of their prerogatives, leading the planner to drop the most progressive aspects of his plans, most significantly cooperative ownership.

15. Commonweal, Vol 5, No. 182, 6 July 1889.

16. As did others of his time, Morris associates the Iron Age White Horse of Uffington with the time of King Alfred and the Viking invasions. He claims of an era that had not only lords and peasants, but masters and slaves as well, that “there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now.”

17. However it may strike us now, Looking Backward struck an American chord, leading to a nationwide organization and newspaper. With the rise of the Populist Party and Bellamy’s failing health, the movement, socialists who eschewed the term socialist, declined. It was a rare example of a radical organization that had little to do with the industrial working class.

18. Looking Backward, Ch 5, p. 43 in the Modern Library edition introduced by Robert L. Shurter.

Notes on Recent Reading 41 (McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim)

The Stones of Florence (McCarthy)

     McCarthy provides a pleasantly idiosyncratic account not only of the art that makes the city such a popular destination and of the city’s history, but also of the Florentine character in the mid-twentieth century. Offsetting the oh-so-aesthetic sensibility Tuscany often inspires, she makes a point of the region’s practicality, business sense, and even plainness in contrast to the sensualism of Venice. She creates a vivid sense of fifties Florence, still under the war’s shadow, bustling with Vespas and equal measures of pride and irony.
     Her freshness and vinegar are physic to the viewer who has ever felt that Botticelli, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi can be a bit sweet. In a certain mood Pater’s enthusiasm can be off-putting. It is then that McCarthy’s acerbic comments are particularly welcome. Florence attracts enthusiasts; it is refreshing to have this account by a cynical and sharp-eyed intellectual.
     The Stones of Florence reads as though it was a weaker sequel to her excellent Venice Observed. Nonetheless, the book deserves a place in the libraries even of those who are not travelers.


An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

     J. B. Priestley practiced a profession virtually obsolete today; he was a man of letters, the author of at least twenty-eight novels, as well as books of short stories, and a good many plays and films and four books of literary criticism aimed not at specialists, but the general reader. He wrote English Journey, a road book worthy of being placed next to Jack London’s The Road, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Responsible in addition for a number of works on history and politics, autobiography, and essays, he was an exemplary hard-working professional writer.
     He is most remembered today for one play of enduring popularity, a favorite of community theater, An Inspector Calls, written rapidly as a bit of agitprop as WWII ended and first performed in Moscow. The play’s success in repeated revivals by companies of all sorts is not due to its tendentious theme, however, but rather to its disguise as a conventional mystery story.
     The genres are not mixed without hazard. The trajectory of the unfolding of the inspector’s indictment is so clear that the viewer has little doubt what will happen by the end of the first scene. Lacking opportunity to surprise expectations in the main line of the story, he resorts to a switcheroo or two at the end instead.
     When Mr. Burling wonders why he put up with the inspector’s accusatory behavior and his independence from any legal forms, the audience is likely to wonder with him. Having been simply enough amused to watch the working out of a pattern clear from the start, they may have neglected to worry about realism. By the end of the play we are to accept the supernatural when it appears the inspector is not a regular police agent at all. Unconcerned with making arrests, he is nonetheless devoted to tending to the moral order. Once the resemblance to Everyman emerges, realism is no longer relevant. When the Burlings realize that it is possible that the various incidents for which they feel culpable may have involved not one woman, but many, this cleverly mirrors the thematic implication that they play is not about a single egregious case of persecution, but about the capitalist system.
     All very well, but why, then, does the final telephone call occur, letting them know that an inspector is on his way. Is what they had just experienced happening again? Is it happening now for real whereas it was before a phantom summoned up by a family full of guilty consciences? Is it all of a sudden about one woman again? What is going on? But before one can think, the curtain has fallen.


Prince of Monkeys (Ehirim)

     Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel provides an overview of Nigerian life during the nineties, and the picture is disturbing, even tragic. The plot concerns the emergence into adulthood of his protagonist Ihechi and his circle of school friends in a profoundly corrupt society. The bleak depiction of Nigeria is intensified by the older characters’ memories of the Nigerian Civil War.
     The middle class Ihechi is anti-colonialist, yearning for a distinctly African form of communalism, leading him and his set to idolize Fela. Yet he is as scornful of the Ifa orisas to which his mother is devoted as he is to the Anglican Jesus. Given the political theme, the horrifying ending is perhaps inevitable, as each individual comes to grief, doomed simply for having independent judgment and conscience.
     The lurid character of the final scene is of a piece with the over-striving of some of the prose. Ornamental alliteration or figures of speech that seem to be for show alone occasionally distract the reader, but it is in a way exhilarating to see style and rhetoric for their own sake. Very likely West African fancy for oratory in the days before literacy influences even this young writer. The ample use of proverbs is without a doubt traditional (and European ones sneak in as well).

Platonic Love

After touching on the history of the concept of Platonic love, I present new translations of a selection of the lyrics traditionally attributed to Plato along with a few unsystematic comments.



     In popular usage we all know that Platonic love means love without sensual indulgence, love conceived as spiritual or intellectual rather than physical. Yet, without venturing on the seas of defining what Plato in fact thought about love, any reader of the Symposium or, indeed, most of Plato’s dialogues will surely notice that their scenes are lit with a warm erotic glow. His circles of Athenian men who congregate to enjoy each other’s mental play in conversation were doubtless at the same time enjoying each other’s bodies in and out of the local gymnasium. According to Diogenes Laertius the philosopher’s birth name was Aristocles, and he was given the sobriquet Plato (“broad”) by his trainer, Ariston the Argive wrestler, in tribute to his physique. [1] As the centuries passed, the notion of sexless, so-called Platonic love is repeatedly presented as an ideal, but also regularly ridiculed as absurd or impossible.
     In Lucian the residents of the Isles of the Blessed enjoy corporeal pleasures in spite of being deceased. They “see nothing indecent in sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and indulge in it quite openly, in full view of everyone. The only exception was Socrates, who was always swearing that his relations with young men were purely Platonic, but nobody believed him for a moment, and Hyacinthus and Narcissus gave first-hand evidence to the contrary.” [2] Here Socrates sounds as though he is playfully coy, a gentleman offering a discreet if inaccurate disclaimer.
     The collocation “platonic love” (albeit in Latin) was first used by Marsilio Ficino in 1469 in his commentary on the Symposium to describe an ideal love of the type he enjoyed the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti whom he regularly addressed as “amico mio perfettisimo.” [3] For centuries scholars assumed that, due to Ficino’s Roman Catholicism, he could not have been a “sodomite,” though the tables have turned and more recent writers often treat his homosexuality as an established fact. In late fifteenth century Florence same sex relationships among men, though illegal, were exceedingly common. [4]
     In the first half of the seventeenth century, Plato was much à la mode in the court of Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I. An observer described the vogue: “The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a love call’d Platonick Love, which much sways there of late; it is a Love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of Mind, not in any carnal Fruition. This love sets the Wits of the Town on work; and they say there will be a Mask shortly of it, whereof her Majesty and her Maids of Honour, will be part.”
     In this intellectual climate, phrase “platonic love” enters English usage in William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers (1636). The play mercilessly satirizes Theander and Eurithea’s wholly spiritualized love as absurd, contrasting it to the natural love of their siblings, Phylomont and Ariola. A medicine eventually cures Theander who awakens then to the physical side of love, replacing his erstwhile courtliness with a conventional male chauvinist marriage, telling his beloved “Your charter's out of date, and mine/ Begins to rule.”
     At the end of the nineteenth century Oscar Wilde made a brave and spirited speech at his first trial defending “the Love that dare not speak its name" as “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.” (His admirers recall that later his pride caused him to give up, as Socrates had done, his chance for exile.) Wilde speaks of a “spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect,” but whether that spiritual purity precluded carnal relations the reader of the testimony at the writer’s trials may judge.
     If one is to believe Aelian’s Varia Historia [6] Plato had written epic and tragic poetry and was about to enter a tetralogy in the competition at the Dionysia when he happened to hear Socrates speak, whereupon he immediately abandoned literature for philosophy (though many would say he continued to write a sort of poetry during his entire career). None of his youthful works has been preserved for certain, but his name has been attached to a group of lyrics in Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus, and in the Greek Anthology. The authorship of these poems was long treated with considerable suspicion by scholars but Plato the lyricist has, in the last fifty years, found more defenders, though most still date the lyrics considerably later than Plato’s time. [7] Whoever may have been the author, the fact that a group of love poems are attributed to Plato indicates that readers in later antiquity were quite willing to accept Plato as a romantic and sensualist, enjoying physical relations with both men and women.
     The simple existence of deep friendships among same-sex heterosexuals is enough to demonstrate the possibility of passionate attachments in which sexuality plays no clear part, and many would see a broadened sort of eroticism in virtually all affectionate relations. Some feel so faint a physical desire as to be almost asexual, while others may experience an actual aversion to physical love. The issue will not be here resolved. For my part it is sufficient to have a new look at these poems, so ardent, so selfish and generous, so direct and yet sophisticated, so very human. Whether Plato had anything whatever to do with them, in my fancy they enhance his reputation.



Poetry attributed to Plato

i.

᾿Αστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς, ᾿Αστὴρ ἐμός· εἴθε γενοίμην
οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

Greek Anthology VII.669, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You see the stars, my star. I wish I were
the sky that you might fill my many eyes.


     What grand sensual greediness! Heavenly bodies possess an extravagant but rather abstract beauty, and this compliment employs a well worked vein of convention, extending it in a novel and dramatic image. I think of the earthier Catullus 13 in which the poet confesses his lack of most resources for hospitality and asks Fabullus to bring supplies for a party, but assures him that it will be worth his while, because Catullus will contribute the scent lent his lover by “the Venuses and Cupids,” so intoxicating that his friend will wish to be “all nose.”


ii.

᾿Αστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζωοῖσιν ῾Εῷος·
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις ῞Εσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

Greek Anthology VII.670, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You shone then like the star of dawn, alive,
among the wasted dead you’re Hesperus.


     This bit is paradigmatic of the Greek lyric pairing of pleasure and pain, circling every joy with a sense of loss. Well before Plato, Sappho had called love sweet-bitter (γλυκύπικρον). The coming-into-being and the passing away of the beloved is here assimilated to the grand procession of the heavens, known to be cyclical and apparently eternal. The poet borrows a bit of that cosmological glow to compliment the deceased. The word I translate “wasted” is derived from φθίω, meaning not so much completely gone as “wasted away,” “decayed,” “dwindling,” “fading,” suggesting the specifically Greek horror at becoming in Hades a weak and spectral shade. Achilles in the most memorable anti-heroic moment of the Odyssey (XI.488) cannot be consoled.  There is, however, a redemptive enthusiasm in the couplet above as well as a reassuring structural dualism. If death is to life as the evening star to the morning (which are in fact identical), where then is its bite? Only in an individual's loss of a dearly beloved.


iii.

τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν εἶχον·
ἦλθε γὰρ ἡ τλήμων ὡς διαβησομένη.

Greek Anthology V.78, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

Kissing Agathon, my heart (the wretch)
came to my lips to try to pass to him.


     This was a familiar topos, appearing, for instance, in Rufinus who says that his lover in a kiss “draws out his soul from his very fingernails” (V, 14) and Meleagar (V, 171) whose lover “drinks up his soul” with a draft of wine. The imagery resembles Donne's describes in “The Extasie” in which the lovers’ souls are said to have emerged and “hung twixt her and me,” though here used more strictly as a witty compliment, suggesting that the poet’s disloyal soul would prefer to be housed in the more attractive Agathon. The name of the beloved, of course, signifies simply “the good,” allowing the verse to remain conveniently open to a metaphysical reading. Though I use the word “heart” since the issue is love, the word ψυχή is often translated as spirit or soul.


iv.

νῦν ὅτε μηδέν, Ἄλεξις, ὅσον μόνον εἶφ᾽, ὅτι καλός,
ὦπται, καὶ πάντῃ πᾶσι περιβλέπεται.
θυμέ, τί μηνύεις κυσὶν ὀστέον, εἶτ᾽ ἀνιήσει
ὕστερον; οὐχ οὕτω Φαῖδρον ἀπωλέσαμεν;

Greek Anthology V, 100 and Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

I only just said that Alexis is fair;
now everyone everywhere ogles that youth.
O heart, you toss to the dogs a bone
and then regret. I lost my Phaedrus so.


     This verse provides a glimpse into the competitive homoerotic arena of ancient Greece. In a tradition familiar in the blues in, for instance, “Woman be Wise,” which advises “don’t advertise your man,” the lover finds that his praise for the beloved has only brought him rivals. The implication that the intruders are “dogs” is properly vituperative, perhaps, but it entails the unfortunate suggestion that the lovely Alexis is a “bone.” With the mention of Phaedrus it becomes a four line soap opera.


v.

δάκρυα μὲν Ἑκάβῃ τε καὶ Ἰλιάδεσσι γυναιξὶ
Μοῖραι ἐπέκλωσαν δή ποτε γεινομέναις:
σοὶ δέ, Δίων, ῥέξαντι καλῶν ἐπινίκον ἔργων
δαίμονες εὐρείας ἐλπίδας ἐξέχεαν: [p. 60]
κεῖσαι δ᾽ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν πατρίδι τίμιος ἀστοῖς,
ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων.

Greek Anthology VII. 99 and D. L. (Plato)

Queen Hecabe and Trojan women wept,
The fates had ruled at birth that they should weep.
And after you had done great works and won,
Dion, the gods spilt all your grandest hopes.
You lie now honored in your airy town,
you who drove my heart so mad with love.


     The poet begins with what one might call an aerial view, surveying the legendary era to stress the inexorable workings of fate. Then the perspective moves to his own time in which the inscrutable turning of the wheel of fortune is illustrated by the passing of Dion who had been so victorious in life.


vi.

Ἀρχεάνασσαν ἔχω τὴν ἐκ Κολοφῶνος ἑταίραν,
ἧς καὶ ἐπὶ ῥυτίδων ἕζετο δριμὺς ἔρως.
ἆ δειλοὶ νεότητος ἀπαντήσαντες ἐκείνης
πρωτοπλόου, δι᾿ ὅσης ἤλθετε πυρκαϊῆς.
    

Greek Anthology VII, 217; Diogenes Laertius (Plato 31); and Athenaeus 589e

My love is Kolophon’s Arkheanasse,
O love lurks even in her wrinkled skin!
O fools who sailed her boat when she was young,
what flaming blazes you passed through with her!


     Here Plato appreciates the skills of a mature courtesan. His connoisseurship may be more literary than experiential, though Diogenes Laertius calls Arkheanasse his mistress. The woman’s name had already erotic associations, having earlier appeared in Sappho as well as later being used by Asklepiades to whom is attributed a very similar quatrain. Metaphors for sex using the language of both sailing and fire were commonplace, suggesting passion, intensity, danger, and excitement. [9]


vii.

μῆλον ἐγώ: βάλλει με φιλῶν σέ τις. ἀλλ᾽ ἐπίνευσον,
Ξανθίππη: κἀγὼ καὶ σὺ μαραινόμεθα.
    

Greek Anthology V.80.

An apple me -- and thrown to you for love!
Say yes,
o Xanthippe, both you and I will die.

     As both these lyrics indicate, the Greeks formalized the apple’s erotic significance in social ritual as well as in poetry. As a flirtation, one might toss an apple in the direction of a prospective lover; to accept the apple meant acceptance of its donor.  The current expression “the apple of my eye” preserves the usage.  One knows that apples, while beautiful and tasty, will in the end decay, heightening the urgency of seeking love in youth.

     The coincidence of the name with Socrates’ wife is accidental. Xanthippe was a vaguely aristocratic-sounding name, not uncommon. The theme would fit anyone.

viii.

ἡ σοβαρὸν γελάσασα καθ᾽ Ἑλλάδος, ἥ ποτ᾽ ἐραστῶν
ἑσμὸν ἐπὶ προθύροις Λαῒς ἔχουσα νέων,
τῇ Παφίῃ τὸ κάτοπτρον: ἐπεὶ τοίη μὲν ὁρᾶσθαι
οὐκ ἐθέλω, οἵη δ᾽ ἦν πάρος οὐ δύναμαι.

Greek Anthology VI, 1

I’m Lais the proud who laughed at Greece, when crowds
of young men thronged about my door. I give
my mirror to Love’s goddess. I cannot use it
now nor can it show me yesterday.


     One of the host of Greek lyrics lamenting the passing of youth, of beauty, ultimately of life, a loss that is the greater for lovers. The reader is reminded of Villon’s “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis” or Whitman’s more brutal “A Hand-Mirror.” A good many of the dedicatory epigrams in the Anthology carry similarly elegiac themes.
     Lais, perhaps the most celebrated hetaera of the Classical era is memorialized in a number of Anthology epigrams. [10]







1. III, 1. ἐγυμνάσατο δὲ παρὰ Ἀρίστωνι τῷ Ἀργείῳ παλαιστῇ: ἀφ᾽ οὗ καὶ Πλάτων διὰ τὴν εὐεξίαν μετωνομάσθη, Socrates himself clearly cared about keeping his body fit and criticized those who did not.

2. Chapter 2, A True Story (Ἀληθῶν Διηγημάτων) in Paul Turner’s translation.

3. De Amore. Ficino’s words are “amor platonicus.” His lover is not to be confused with the Troubadour Guido Cavalcanti who lived two centuries earlier.

4. According to Michael Rocke in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence during the late fifteenth century homosexual and bisexual behavior was the norm in Florence though technically forbidden. He claims that the Office of the Night, charged with prosecuting homosexuals, over a period of two generations punished 17,000 Florentines out of a population of 40,000. The Florentines renewed ancient attitudes, endorsing primarily an older/younger couple while frowning on the effeminate and the pathic.

5. James Howell, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Eliana, 255.

6. 2.30.

7. As my topic more nearly concerns Plato’s reputation than Plato himself, I need not trouble myself about this question.

8. XI.488.

9. Dozens of examples from comedy are catalogued in Jeffrey Henderson’s essential The Maculate Muse (161 for nautical images, 177 for fire).

10. See Antipater Sidonius 7.218, Pompeius 7.219, Agathias 7.220, Julian 6.18-20, Paul Silentiarius 6.71, and Secundus 9.260.

Praxilla

     Every artifact made by our species is shaped by our nature, inevitably recording human tastes and beliefs as well as needs and desires in the most subtle and precise detail. Thus not only the economy but much of the religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples has been reconstructed largely through the tracing of the mere ghosts of words in linguistic roots. Poetry is the most densely information-bearing form of code. Every line holds the potential for expanding waves of significance that fade to silence at the margins of the reader’s or listener’s persistence with no clearly defined end.
     The reader wishing to understand the female poets of ancient Greece faces a paucity, though not an absence, of textual data. The twenty-first century knows of the existence, at least, of twenty-nine ancient Greek women who were celebrated in their own era, but of some of them nothing remains beyond the name and, perhaps, a few tatters of legend. The oeuvre of others has diminished to a few indirect mentions or a couple of phrases cited by grammarians to illustrate an unusual dialectical or grammatical usage.
     In antiquity some of these women were among the most highly honored of writers. They appear in vase-paintings and busts as well as in public tributes like statues and coins. Around the time of Christ Antipater of Thessalonika, who was sufficiently a part of the power structure to be appointed a local governor by the Romans, praised nine female poets as earthly Muses providing with their lyrics for “the undying delight of mortals.” They possess, he says, “divine tongues.” [1] The durability of these poets’ reputations is suggested by the fact that Antipater wrote his tribute roughly three hundred years after Nossis, the most recent writer on his list, and roughly six hundred years after Sappho, the earliest.
     Among these nine, Sappho has survived the loss of all but a few pages of her poetry and has today numerous admirers and translators, while the others remain little more than names. While we properly lament the disappearance of so much of the writing of antiquity, the work of women in particular, it is salutary also to make the fullest use of what remains. A close examination of the most fragmentary phrases might reveal unexpected beauty, like the delicate limbs of insects trapped in amber. Even a body of work consisting of only a few words might, like the pinhole lens of a camera obscura, project an entire world-view.
     The first poet Antipater mentions, perhaps because he thought her most eminent, is Praxilla of Sikyon, a poet of the fifth century BCE of whom only five fragments and three brief paraphrases remain from a once substantial body of work. Evidence of her onetime prestige includes the fact that she was honored with a statue by Lysippos, by a portrait and a few words of verse on a pot, and by allusions in Aristophanes. Even in the second century CE, she was popular enough for Tatian to denounce her and for Zenobius to record a proverbial usage making fun of one of her lines. [3]
     The bits and pieces attributed to Praxilla seem to fall into two unlike genres. The dithyramb is a pious public choral song accompanied with dance, sometimes by troupes of fifty, performed on cult or civic occasions. Dithyrambs in their original form were devoted to Dionysos, though they developed from cult usage to literary adaptation, most significantly, according to Aristotle, as the source from which tragic drama grew. Skolia, while also associated with wine, are social songs, sung by individuals at private parties, often passing the lyre around and sometimes “capping” each other’s verses. Though casual and occasional in this original usage, they became a polished genre in the hands of poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Sappho, and Pindar, and their characteristic meter was eventually used for more formal compositions praising gods and heroes. The identification of several of Praxilla’s fragments as skolia has suggested to some critics that she must have been a ἑταίρα or concubine as women were not ordinarily included in symposia. [4]

     A single line is all that remains from a dithyramb on Achilles.

i.
But never could I reach your heart inside.


     One can only speculate on the dramatic context, but the words alone suggest a conflict between Achilles’ subjective truth and what may be a well-intentioned advisor. Though the circumstances are unclear, the single line implies the hero’s brooding and sensitivity, his vulnerability to his own sometimes self-destructive moods. [5] The line, though, is nearly identical to passages in the Odyssey referring to Odysseus’ resistance to the perilous charms of Calypso and Circe creating a doubled-edged meaning poised between obduracy and fidelity. [6] Odysseus’ enduring affection for his mate and Achilles’ egotistical pique are both impressive in their heroic strength. This line suggests the ambiguous role of passion in shaping action and the misunderstanding that all but inevitably exists between one human and another.


ii.
O friend, let Admetus teach you to love
the good -- keep clear of thankless craven men.


     Though skolia are drinking songs performed at private parties, they need not have Dionysian or even convivial themes. Athenaeus cites Praxilla’s comment on Admetus as an example of the form, so it is clear that prudential wisdom of the sort found in maxims also appeared in such songs. (Though such content is unlikely in an American pop song, it is common in, for instance, such West African tunes as Prince Nico Mbarga’s “Aki Special.”)
     Admetus is a deeply ambiguous figure. Known as a just king, his role among the Argonauts and as a hunter of the Calydonian boar is clearly heroic. Euripedes’ chorus praises his piety and generous hospitality [7] and he is favored by both Apollo (in late antiquity called Admetus’ lover) [8] and Heracles. Yet to Praxilla he is despicable, so fearful of death that he was, in effect the killer of his own wife. [9] His name signifies “untamed” which might be taken as a heroic boast equivalent to unvanquished, but might also suggest one who had failed to control his own nature. In Euripedes’ Alcestis his father Pheres calls him hubristic and his wife is repeatedly described as outstanding (άριστος) while the epithet is never used of Admetus, yet the chorus continues to praise him to the end when Alcestis returns to the world thanks to Heracles as deus ex machina.
     The ambivalence is dramatized on the divine level. Though aided by Apollo, he is opposed by Artemis whose boar he had helped to kill. [10] On the occasion of his wedding, Admetus had neglected to sacrifice to Artemis who retaliated by filling his bridal chamber, which could represent the harmonizing of male and female, with hostile snakes. Artemis, Praxilla, and his wife’s partisans join in denunciation of the king of Pherae, though Alcestis herself is too loyal to criticize him.


iii.
Take care, my friend, a scorpion lurks under every stone.


     In this cautionary skolion the proverbial metaphor works as well literally as figuratively. The first impression enjoining caution in the natural and presumably the human realm as well, is complicated in the dialectical dance of mythology by a web of associations. Scorpion deities were well-known in the ancient Near East, nearly all of them goddesses. [11] In Greece Orion the hunter is sometimes said to be Artemis’ companion and a scorpion is the instrument of Artemis’ revenge against him. [12] Thus the scorpion is not only potentially arachnid or human, as a beast it is also associated with the same Artemis who was inimical to Admetus. He and Orion are both mortals pursued by the same virgin goddess.


iv.
You look so fine through window frame,
a girl’s fresh face, below a bride.


     The verb ἐμ-βλέπω, “to look,” “look at,” is often used in erotic contexts, and the words παρθένος (“girl” or “virgin”) and νύμφη (“bride,” “recently married”) are definitely sexual. The modern reader might take this skolion, a drinking song at a men's party, as as unkind satire, characterizing a "girl-next-door" type who already possesses experience "below," that is, "below the best." Though the Anthology contains ample misogyny, I find no parallel for such a poem there. A recent critic has made a good case that the fragment is part of an epithalamium, a rite of passage celebrating the transition from girl to married woman, a likelier reading, particularly given  the female author, all the more probable as Sappho is known to have written an entire book of epithalamia. [13]
     The three paraphrased references to Praxilla’s verse do little to clarify the influence of the sympotic setting. All relate to pederasty, one concerns the story of Zeus carrying of Chrysippus (whose rape is usually attributed to Laius) in Athenaeus [14] in a discussion of the origins of homoerotic love and the other two mentioning Canus (or Carneius), the seer who became Apollo’s eromenos.
     The three lines that remain from Praxilla’s dithyramb on Adonis the dying and reborn god of whom Frazer made so much in The Golden Bough are her best-known fragment. [15] Here, however, Adonis speaks not as a semi-divine legendary hero but rather as any mortal might, reflecting on what he most regretted leaving behind in life. To me it seems that ancient Greek poetry generally inhabits this palpable world and rests on perceptions and physical experience. The love for life, for wine and sex and sunshine, is always tinged with the sensualist’s regretful admission that all experience, even life itself, is transient, for all that it may be lit with pleasure and, perhaps in addition, with the glow of some fine abstraction from above. Praxilla begins with bidding farewell to the sun, a conventional way of speaking of death, but she then introduces a surprising trope.


v.
Most lovely I leave -- the light of the sun,
next, the luminous stars and the face of the moon,
then, too, cucumbers in season, and apples, and pears.


     The light of the heavenly bodies is a conventional sign of numinous glory, a glimpse of the divine available to anyone who gazes upwards, but the last line began to sound strange not long after its composition. In Zenobius’ book of proverbs, he records the phrase “more foolish than Praxilla’s Adonis,” presumably because of bathos of fruit following after semi-divine heavenly bodies, and, in particular the mention of one more often featured in salads than lyrics. [16] I think upon reading it of the many catalogues in the dedicatory book of the Greek Anthology which list specific objects – tools, toys, in one case a single quince [17] – that were significant for an individual. For a mystic, any object if considered deeply might be uplifting, and, for an agricultural people, a deep attachment to produce seems quite natural. At any rate, Praxilla’s Adonis expresses an immense affection for the things of this world and the tragic incongruity of mortal attachments.
     Surveying the scanty remains of Praxilla’s poetry, one would look in vain for a dramatic new vision or stylistic innovation (though there is the one original meter, the praxilleion), still less for an anachronistic feminism (though she did have an affinity with Artemis and took Alcestis’ part against Admetus). She has more in common with the didactic proverbialism of Theognis than with the sensual intensity of Sappho. No high-wire juggler of myth like Pindar, she represents for the most part the norms and received ideas of her time, no mean achievement itself. Skolia were popular at the symposia, thus she composed many, very likely on popular themes, including the prudential monitory lines that have been preserved.
     That marvelous cucumber of Adonis stands out, with every reading providing a delightful frisson of surprise. Just as the expected sun and stars do not vanish into insignificance with the mention of the surprising produce, the detailing of wholly conventional Greek beliefs remains richly meaningful, all the more significant due to accumulated tradition. Celebrating marriage and extramarital affairs alike, while also fussing over the imperfection of marriage and friendship, warning about betrayal with the voice of experience, these are all-too-human and very Greek. The most powerful image of Praxilla, though, on which her reader is likeliest to linger is surely her Adonis who loved both the large and small marvels of life. Neither the necessity of eventual farewells nor the sure sweet pain of clinging to the evanescent can dissuade this Adonis, or, presumably, Praxilla from a passionate love for this world.





1. Greek Anthology 9.26. The Greek phrases are “θνατοῖς ἄφθιτον εὐφροσύναν” and “θεογλώσσους . . . γυναῖκας.”

2. See Thesmophorizusae, 528 Wasps, 1238,

3. Against the Greeks, 33 says her “poems contain nothing useful.” In the same passage he calls Sappho “a lewd, love-sick female [who] sings her own wantonness.” He indicts as well a number of other female poets, claiming that Christian women in contrast are “are chaste, and the maidens at their distaffs sing of divine things more nobly than that damsel of yours.” Tatian notes scornfully fourteen women honored by Greek cities with statues. For Zenobius see note 6 below.

4. Wilamowitz was horrified at the idea of a proper lady writing skolia. Some have even suggested the existence of two Praxillas, one more respectable than the other. A somewhat more likely proposal is that Praxilla may have been, not a courtesan, but a sort of professional entertainer, like some of the Troubadours. Other critics have surmised that the skolia were falsely ascribed to Praxilla after her death.

5. Kleist’s Achilles in Penthesilea is dramatically more extreme, almost always in an erotic furor.

6. Speaking of Calypso: ἀλλὰ τοῦ οὔ ποτε θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἔπειθεν: “yet she could never persuade the heart in his breast,” Odyssey XXIII, 337. Similarly, VII, 258 and IX, 33 referring to Circe.

7. ὃσιος 553 (pious or in accord with nature).

8. See Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 934; Tibullis, Elegies 2.3; Callimachus Hymn 2.47-49; and Rhianus fr. 10 P.

9. The semantic range of the word δειλός extends from cowardly to base, worthless and miserable, unhappy, implying that courage is essential for a good character and that good character is a prerequisite for happiness.

10. In fact the story of the hunt includes on the human level the gender opposition of the gods. Atalanta, a virgin huntress like Artemis, was the first to wound the boar, but her prize, though allowed by Melagar, was taken by other men, jealous of her recognition. (Ovid Metamorphoses, VIII, 425-0450).

11. Among them were the Egyptian Serket (also Hedetet and Ta-Bitjet), the Hurrian and Hittite Ishhara (sometimes identified with Ishtar), and, some dikstance further afield, the Hindu Chelamma. A rare exception are the scorpion men Aqrabuamelu attested in reliefs and described in the Akkadian Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish but these are, after all, creatures of the goddess Tiamat.

12. Odyssey 5.121 ff. The same tradition appears in Hesiod (fragment 4 - Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catast. fr. xxxii ). According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 25 Artemis killed him either for challenging her to a discus competition or for conceiving another love interest.

13. Vanessa Cazzato, “Glancing Seductively through Windows: The Look of Praxilla fr. 8 (PMG 754) in The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual: Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 1, edited by Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois. Sappho is known to have written many epithalamia.

14. Athenaeus 13.603a.

15. Among the parallels Frazer cites are Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus, and Jesus. For others see Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature A192 and A193.

16. Zenobius, Proverbs 4.21. Zenobius wrote in the second century CE. Many critics have offered justifications. Smyth in Greek Melic Poets, for example, suggests the poet was characterizing Adonis’ naivete. In addition cucumber (σίκυος) is surely a play on her city’s name Sikyon (Σικυών).

17. Greek Anthology VI, 252.

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).

Pestilential Times

These are drafts of brief talks I was invited to prepare on literary responses to epidemics for an online library program. I venture to point out a few comparisons with our present situation and on this excuse have indexed this with politics. The quotations from Defoe are, scholars will notice, from an edition with modernized capitalization conventions.


I. Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens

     There can be no good time for a pestilence, but the citizens of ancient Athens had reason to feel that the disease which spread in 430 BCE was peculiarly unlucky. The city was well into the Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta when, as Thucydides tells us, its citizens were suddenly struck by a greater plague than any had ever before experienced.
     Physicians of the day had no effective treatment. Thucydides notes that, as they were caring for the stricken, a great many doctors died. Magical recourse such as “supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth” likewise proved of no value. Ultimately the disease (experts dispute the diagnosis) killed a hundred thousand people, a good third of the population of Athens. Thucydides, himself a survivor of the illness, describes the progress of physical symptoms in agonizing detail, but he regards the most horrifying effects to be psychological.


"But the greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick (for they grew presently desperate and gave themselves over without making any resistance), as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation, for the greatest mortality proceeded that way."


     He notes a detail that will not surprise Americans in 2020. The suffering of those on their deathbeds was increased by isolation. “For if men forebore to visit them for fear, then they died forlorn.”
     Even the healthy began behaving irresponsibly. As the number of victims grew, people began to neglect first proper burial rites and then “grew careless both of holy and profane things alike.” Those with money spent it profligately, thinking they might have but few days left. Licentiousness ruled ranging from rudeness to outright crime as social bonds dissolved. Many Athenians reacted to their own fear by descending into semi-savagery. They neglected the bonds of cooperation that joined them to their fellows. The social fabric that had produced Classical Greece was unraveling.
     Thucydides’ memorable depiction of this critical scene in Greek history is considerably heightened in drama and significance due to the fact that it is immediately preceded in his history by the celebrated account of Pericles’ funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Second Peloponnesian War. Every nation commemorates its war dead as martyrs to the national values, and the society Pericles praises has much in it that we might yet admire. The ideals he celebrates are meaningful despite the facts that ancient Athens stood on the shoulders of slaves, that women were excluded from much of public life, that oligarchs and cliques regularly out-muscled majority rule, and that greed often motivated both foreign and domestic policy. The Athenians felt considerable pride in Hellenic superiority to “Asian” despotism.
     The single word in which Pericles sums up what is good about his city is liberty. He says, “our ancestors have handed down to us a free country.” He says the government “favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” When he celebrates their practice of equality under the law and claims that people might there advance through individual merit in spite of low birth, he sounds very like an American.
     Pericles goes on to discuss what we might today call lifestyle issues, recommending a broadly liberal tolerance and consistent civility. “We do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.” In contrast to what he saw as the gloomy rigor of the Spartan garrisons, Athenians, he says, enjoy life. “Our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please.” For a civilized person, Pericles thought, that embraces the pursuit of pleasure. “Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen.”
     He claims that such apparent casualness brings with it no weakness. “This ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens.” “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners” out of fear that they may be spying, trusting in “the native spirit of our citizens” to protect the city when necessary. In sum he says Athenians “are just as ready [as those under tyrannical regimes] to encounter every legitimate danger.”
     Pericles is clear that to him freedom, democracy, liberality, and tolerance make the land stronger than regimentation by encouraging every citizen to live as an individual while fully engaging in community life. The cohesiveness that comes from mutual respect and the joy that arises from the collective pursuit of the good life will, he feels, allow his people to defeat any despot’s challenge. Athens had, after, led the successful resistance to the Persians.
     The glorious ideal, however, was shredded by the plague. Patriotism had always concealed contradictions. Following the victory over Persia, Athens had been high-handedly manipulating the Delian League to allow itself ever greater benefits, establishing a sort of empire over other Greeks. This was, in fact, the cause of the war with Sparta. With the physical and psychological damage of the epidemic weighing against them, Athens lost, and a puppet regime, the Thirty Tyrants, was imposed over them. Socrates refused what he considered an unjust order from the Tyrants to arrest a certain Leon of Salamis. According to Plato’s Apology, he would have been killed for his defiance if the government had not fallen just in time. (It was a few years later, under so-called democracy, that he was, in fact, executed.) The Athenian system never recovered its strength, and not so very long after, Alexander subjugated not only Greece but much of the world to autocratic rule.
     No nation presently threatens the United States as Sparta did Athens, but we would do well to bear other parallels in mind. The fear of the Other in American racism and xenophobia, the appeal of a militarized economy, disrespect for the values of others, and the lure to some of an all-knowing tyrant who will relieve everyone else of the need to make decisions, all of these, I think, weaken America. They are likely to attract more people as fearfulness and anxiety increase in times of crisis.
     American society has long valued openness, freedom, tolerance, and liberality as ideals, however imperfectly they have been realized. The reader of Thucydides will surely conclude that, even under an epidemic, a society that loses these values may never recover them. America had been stressed by terrorism, economic inequality, and bad actors among other nation states, and the addition of a frightening illness only adds another potential catalyst for irrational decisions. The fact is that people who have a stake in their society, who believe in it, who have some control over their own lives, will be better citizens, both in peace and in war, than those who have been coerced into obedience.
     Ancient Athens offers a cautionary example. Frightened by the very real danger of illness and death, they gave up their commitment to each other and fell into fragmented isolation, chasing after individual ends. I have never seen such a danger of fascism as looms over the United States today. For the future of the American experiment to be bright, the right course can only be to redouble our cooperation and reinforce a sense of community that includes everyone. The yahoos holding demonstrations against pandemic precautions resemble the Athenians who panicked and abandoned what they believed in. Those who demonstrate against racism, the medical workers, the teenagers who are stocking grocery shelves, the people delivering our mail, these are the upholders of true American values. There is no easy way out, and people are daily dying, but the United States might still save its soul.



II. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year


     Since the Black Death ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, bubonic plague regularly took English victims, but in the days before antibiotics and antipyretics, many diseases might prove as fatal. The plague had broken out in London in 1592, 1603, 1625 and 1636. However, it returned in 1665 with a severity unseen for centuries. The best eyewitness account of this epidemic was written by Daniel Defoe in spite of the fact that he was only five years old when the disease killed a hundred thousand of his fellow citizens, nearly equaling within the city the staggering mortality rates that had occurred three hundred years earlier throughout Europe. Defoe’s book A Journal of the Plague Year, though it was published fifty years later, provides excellent and detailed reportage, full of both statistics and journalistic anecdotes, that allows the reader today to understand the experience of Londoners and to evaluate the public health measures with which the government sought to cope with the unfolding devastation.
     His book appeared in 1722, over fifty years after the events it describes, but at a time people were talking about the disease which had recently broken out anew in Marseille. Before publishing the Journal Defoe had tested the market with reportage about the disease in southern France and the release of his Due Preparations for Plague as well for Soul as for Body. His new book found plenty of readers. It sold well when first out, it has been consistently reprinted, and in March of 2020 Amazon reported that the popular Penguin edition had sold out. It is considered by many historians the best single account of the time, more useful than such contemporary publications as Hodge’s Loimologia or Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City or even Pepys’s diary.
     Apart from the topicality of the continuing danger of plague, as a professional author, Defoe doubtless saw a potential best-seller in the horrifying and sensational details he collected from a number of sources including the journal of an uncle with whose initials he signed the manuscript. The narrator cannot stay away from the giant corpse pit dug in the churchyard of St. Aldgate. We hear the voices of rumor and gossip. There were reports, Defoe tells us, of the dying sometimes leaping into the pit alive out of despair. A certain piper, he claims, was passed out drunk and mistakenly put on the dead-cart. As they proceeded toward the church, he stirred, causing one of the attendants to exclaim, “Lord, bless us! There’s somebody in the cart not quite dead!” eliciting the response, “I an’t dead though, am I?” which “made them laugh a little, though . . . they were heartily frighted at first.” Defoe records rumors of nurses who killed patients in their care, as well as “mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy, some dying of mere grief as a passion…others frightened into idiotism.” At times the cries of the afflicted seemed to fill the city and could be heard by anyone walking the streets. “ I wish I could repeat the very sound of those groans and of those exclamations that I heard from some poor dying creatures when in the height of their agonies…and that I could make them that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring in my ears.”
     When the plague struck, King Charles II and his notoriously pleasure-loving court along with many aristocrats promptly moved out of town, going first to Hampton Court in Salisbury, but then, when cases emerged there, on to Oxford. So many wealthy commoners (including the better class of physicians) left town in their wake that for days the streets were jammed with moving wagons. Among the affluent who remained, it was possible for Samuel Pepys, at least, to multiply his fortune fourfold and to write “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time.” And Pepys was a man, we know, who fancied his wine and women.
     In contrast to the king and his circle, Lord Mayor John Lawrence, a middle-class businessman, announced that he, the aldermen, and the sheriffs would remain to combat the disease and ensure order. He issued plague regulations that included hiring doctors for the poor at public expense as well as “searchers,” older women in all neighborhoods, to report where deaths had occurred, and watchmen to oversee homes where victims, their families, and servants were sequestered. Some may find parallels between the utter neglect of duty by the crown and the responsible and aggressive action by lower authorities during the seventeenth century and today’s United States in which the would-be American king keeps minimizing the present pandemic, leaving it up to state officials with greater respect for science to take effective action to protect citizens.
     Just as today, simply purchasing food was a risky business. Though homes in which plague had been detected were locked down, depending on the watchman assigned to keep them in to run errands such as buying provisions, the symptomless continued to circulate about the streets. “And here I must observe again,” Defoe notes, “that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another.” He vividly recreates the experience of shoppers. “The butcher refused to hand the cook a cut of meat; she had to take it off the hook herself. And he wouldn’t touch her money; she had to drop her coins into a bucket of vinegar.”
     The mayor’s decisive action was not universally applauded. Defoe says, “The shutting up of houses was a subject of great discontent, and I may say indeed the only subject of discontent among the people at that time.” The poor suffered the most. Living in cramped quarters, with hardly the means of subsistence in normal times, it is little wonder that some refused to confine themselves. “What must I do?” he quotes one man as saying, “I can’t starve. I had as good have the plague as perish for want.” Today the news features armed protestors in Michigan invading the state capitol demanding an end to the state’s pandemic precautions. They have a good deal in common with those of whom Defoe said (with, admittedly, a certain classism), “But it was impossible to beat anything into the heads of the poor. They went on with the usual impetuosity of their tempers, full of outcries and lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well.” Defoe comments that the greater damage occurred when people thought the crest of the threat had passed and they prematurely moved to resume normal life.
     We might certainly echo Defoe’s observation that the illness stimulated extremes of both irresponsibility and duty. While the city government did its best to protect the people and some risked their own lives in tending to loved ones or total strangers, others behaved recklessly, going abroad into the city and out of it while carrying the disease. People evaded those appointed to guard them and keep them in their homes and were rumored even sometimes to have killed the watchmen.
     Then as now, quack nostrums proliferated. Our president has pushed remedies ranging from the semi-plausible (hydroxychloroquine) to the utterly preposterous (injections of bleach), and anxious patients have grasped after every straw. At a time when it seemed everyone was dying and medical science had little effective remedy for infections of any kind, such frauds are not surprising. Defoe has little patience with magic remedies. “But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies.” Charms and amulets such as “Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid” were sold to anxious buyers.
     Many interpreted the plague as a divine judgement and those who could attended services, some featuring Dissenting preachers in pulpits belonging to the Church of England from which the priests had fled. Street ministries flourished as well in what seemed to many apocalyptic times.


"In March, early in the plague, he was out on a warm morning, puffy clouds above in the blue sky, and saw a crowd surrounding a woman who was carrying on about a giant angel in the clouds pointing a sword at London. She gestured upward, calling on all to see. “Yes, I can see it all plainly,” said a member of the crowd. Another “saw (the angel’s) very face and cried out what a glorious creature he was.” The narrator was having none of this; he told the crowd only clouds bathed in sunshine were above. The crowd became agitated, the visionary woman angry. She blasted the narrator, screaming God’s judgment was approaching, “and despisers ... should wander and perish.” The narrator, sensing trouble in this world if not the next, moved on."


     In a passage that has proved finely ironic, Defoe attacks those who considered the disease a “stroke from Heaven,” against which it would be impious to struggle, reminding moderns of the leaders of Southern megachurches who refuse to halt their mass gatherings. Yet he goes on to comment on the “manifest ignorance” of those “who talk of infection being carried on by the air only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures.” And the persona of the Journal decides to remain in the city only after opening his Psalms randomly to a passage he takes as a sign from above.
     To him the epidemic represented an intensification of the general human dispensation rather than an example of special Providence. “A near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life, and our putting these things far from us, that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and so far carry'd on among us, as it is: another plague year would reconcile all these differences, a close conversing with death, or the diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes, than those which we look'd on things with before.”
     We might well wish for such an outcome ourselves, having progressed little toward enlightenment in the last three centuries. America can only hope that our own comparatively bearable privations and the deaths of so many fellow citizens, though proportionally so much less than those of the seventeenth century, might sweeten our temperaments and heighten our realization that cooperation is essential to our survival and, indeed, is what makes us human. Now, as we hear new mortality figures daily, some have taken this point to heart, but it seems that the twenty-first century pandemic has only caused others to cling more obstinately to selfishness and ignorance.