Lille Stesichorus

The Lille Stesichorus is a papyrus containing a major fragment of poetry usually attributed to the archaic lyric poet Stesichorus, discovered at Lille University and published in 1976. Some consider it the most important of all the Stesichorus fragments, confirming Stesichorus's role as a historic link between genres as different as Homeric epic and Pindaric lyric. The subject matter and style are viewed as typical of his work, although not all scholars have accepted it as his. The fragment is a narrative treatment of a popular myth involving the family of Oedipus and the tragic history of Thebes. This sheds light on other treatments of the same myth, such as Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos and Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes. The fragment is also significant in the history of colometry, since it includes lyric verses divided into metrical cola, a practice usually associated with the later career of Aristophanes of Byzantium.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a mummy case and its contents were deposited at Lille University by Gustave Lefebvre and Pierre Jouguet, the founder of the university's Institute of Egyptology. The papyrus packing material inside the case was covered with ancient Greek script, including fragments of previously unknown poetry, a discovery that was made much later and published in 1976 by Ancher and Meillier. However, they assembled the fragments for publication in the wrong order, basing it purely on considerations of papyrus texture, alignment of lines and length of columns. The correct order for the text was instead worked out by P. J. Parsons and published the following year.

The assembled fragments consisted of 125 consecutive lines, thirty-three of which were virtually intact, representing a portion of a much larger poem (calculated to have been about 700 lines). The verses were structured in triadic stanzas (strophe, antistrophe, epode), typical of choral lyric. Triads are found, for example, in plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and in odes by Pindar and Bacchylides, and they are known also to have been characteristic of the poetry of Stesichorus. The handwriting indicated that a scribe had written it as early as 250 BC, but the poetic style indicated that the original composition must have been much earlier.^{[citation needed]}

There was no record of a title or author, but the Doric dialect, meter, and overall style suggested that it was probably a work of Stesichorus, written sometime in the first half of the 6th century BC. His authorship was promptly questioned by Bollack et al., and Parsons also was skeptical, noting the Homeric cliches and the "drab, repetitious flaccidity" of the verse. Martin Litchfield West then presented the case in favour of Stesichorus, even turning Parsons' arguments on their head and winning over Parsons himself. Ancient commentators had noted the same characteristics that Parsons had found fault with: Stesichorus could be long-winded and flaccid (redundat et effunditur, Quintilian 10.1.62) and "most Homeric" (Ὁμηρικώτατος, Longinus 13.3). However, West was careful not to endorse Parson's low opinion of the fragment's artistic quality.

The fragment's importance may be understood in terms of the tenuous state of Stesichorean scholarship prior to the discovery. In 1841, the philologist Theodor Bergk could publish only fifty-three small fragments attributed to Stesichorus, the longest only six lines. The situation was hardly different by the time Denys Page published Poetae Melici Graeci in 1962. Five years later it was still possible to comment: "Time has dealt more harshly with Stesichorus than with any other major lyric poet ... no passage longer than six lines is quoted from him, and papyrus finds have been meagre. For an estimate of his poetry we depend almost wholly on hearsay [from ancient commentators]." That same year, 1967, Edgar Lobel published the papyrus remnants of another three poems, which were later included in Page's Supplementum Lyricis Graecis in 1974, the longest, however, was just twelve lines. Thus, the sudden appearance of the Lille Stesichorus in 1976, with over 125 lines, thirty-three virtually intact, was a cause of considerable excitement in scholarly circles.

The contents of the fragment seem not to fit any of the titles attested for Stesichorus, though the first book of Eripyle has been suggested. The context of the original poem is clearly^{[according to whom?]} the Theban myth of the ill-fated Labdakid clan. The first 175 lines are missing, but they probably dealt summarily with the demise of Oedipus, the quarrel between his sons Eteocles and Polynices, and the intervention of the seer Tiresias. The best preserved section (lines 201–34) is a speech by the Theban queen, who is not named but who is probably Jocasta, sometimes known as Epicaste, the mother and wife of Oedipus and thus the grandmother/mother of Eteocles and Polynices (she is probably not Euryganeia, who, in some versions of the Oedipus myth, is his second wife and the mother of his children, yet the fragment does not allow for certainty on this issue).

The artistic merit of the verses has been questioned by Parsons, for example, but it also has admirers. Jocasta may be thought to emerge from her speech as a strong woman who seeks practical solutions to the plight of her sons even while feeling distress and anxiety for them:

"Taken as a whole the passage is remarkable for its combination of great emotional power and the dignity of traditional epic diction. There is an emotional vibrancy that goes beyond epic forms...this text reveals Stesichorus' full mastery of his technique, handling epic situations and characters with the flexibility and poignancy of lyric." – Charles Segal