Economy of the Unlost by Carson Anne

Author:Carson, Anne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

EXCHANGE

A salesman of memorial verse has to think very closely about the relation, measurable in cash, between letter shapes cut on a stone and the condition of timeless attention that the Greeks call memory. Simonides was struck by the implications of this task, as various anecdotes from his traditional biography attest. Remember his adventure with a corpse on a beach. This story instantiates the epitaphic contract: a poet is someone who saves and is saved by the dead. And although the anecdote is likely apocryphal, its metaphysic can be felt throughout his poetry (and in graveside rhetoric down to the present day).3 What Simonides contributed to our style of thinking and talking about death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor of exchange. Here is an example of his epitaphic work:

ἡγεμόνεσσι δὲ μισθὸν Ἀθηναῖοι τάδ᾿ ἔδωκαν

ἀντ᾿ εὐεργεσίης καὶ μεγάλων ἀγαθῶν·

μᾶλλόν τις τάδ᾿ ἰδὼν καὶ ἐπεσσομένων ἐθελήσει

ἀμϕὶ περὶ ξυνοῖς πράγμασι δῆριν ἔχειν.4

[And to the leaders as a wage the Athenians gave this

in exchange for service and great goods.

All the more will a man of the future (seeing this) choose

to enter battle for the common benefit.]

This inscription was probably carved on a herm c. 475 B.C. to commemorate an Athenian victory against the Persians in Thrace.5 Notice the figurative language Simonides has chosen here to represent the relation between death on the battlefield and life on a monument, between soldiers whose lives are past and citizens whose lives are still before them. It is a transactional relationship, as the noun μισθός (“wage”) and the preposition ἀντί (“in exchange for”) and the noun εὐεργεσία (“benefaction”) imply. Money is not mentioned but we feel the presence of a metaphysical question of value. It is a question at least as old as Achilles, a question whose contours have been sharpened (I think) for Simonides and for his audience by personal experience of money transactions. “Money can exchange any quality or object for any other, even contradictory qualities and objects,” says Marx.6 Achilles would not have agreed. Achilles’ answer to the question of value was simple: no object or quality in the world (he decided) was worth as much as his own breath of life.7 Achilles put a veto on the heroic exchange of death for glory. But this exchange is absolutely fundamental to the politics of the public epitaph, as Simonides says bluntly in the last couplet of this poem:

All the more will a man of the future (seeing this) choose

to enter battle for the common benefit.

A poet’s task is to carry the transaction forward, from those who can no longer speak to those who may yet read (and must yet die).

The political terms of epitaphic transaction are set out also in Simonides’ epitaph for men fallen in the battle of Euboea:

Δίρϕυος ἐδμήθημεν ὑπὸ πτυχί, σῆμα δ᾿ ἐϕ᾿ ἡμῖν

ἐγγύθεν Εὐρίπου δημοσίαι κέχυται·

οὐκ ἀδίκως, ἐρατὴν γὰρ ἀπωλέσαμεν νεότητα

τρηχεῖαν πολέμου δεξάμενοι νεϕέλην.8

[Underneath the fold of Dirphys we were broken, but a sign on top of us

near Euripos at public expense has been heaped up—

not unjustly: for we lost lovely youth

and took in exchange the jagged cloud of war.

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