The Iambistai of Syracuse

David G. Smith (San Francisco State University)

Alongside Panhellenic models of Greek poetic production and consumption existed epichoric preferences for specific types of performance conditions.  For example, a tantalizing notice of Athenaeus (5.181, a problematic quote from Timaeus) states that while the Athenians preferred Dionysiac and circular choruses, the Syracusans preferred “iambic choruses”.  Iambic choruses?  Scholars have hitherto been at a loss to explain either the nature of these iambistas khorous or the Syracusan preference for them.  I argue, however, that it is possible to reconstruct the meaning of Athenaeus’ statement with the following observations:

First, comparative evidence suggests that egalitarian contexts, such as those found in early Greek colonial communities, encourage the performance of various types of invective and obscene joking as a form of social control.   Thus we find that aiskhrologia appears not only in the religiously constituted egalitarian contexts of Eleusinian gephyrismos and the Thesmophoria (as well as other women’s cults), but also as part of the secular practices of Spartiate homoioi gymnastics and communal dining.  Invective and obscenity in a performance context of notional equals appears most famously in the Old Comic tradition of onomasti komodein during the Athenian radical democracy of the late fifth century.  Conversely, however, it can be observed from the remains of the comedies themselves as well as from testimonia (especially the Old Oligarch and Platonius) and proscriptive legislation (the decrees of Morichides and Syracosius) that the freedom to engage in obscene invective was curtailed under ideological or historical circumstances of democratic rejection.  I argue, therefore, that the colonial foundations of Sicily – in which there is good evidence for a strong sense of civic egalitarianism – are likely contexts for the performance of literature in an iambic mode (i.e. containing obscenity and invective).

Second, the interconnection of myth and cult in Sicilian religious and political contexts encouraged a literary preference for iambus.  The worship of Demeter and Kore, in whose Homeric Hymn the genre of iambus is given its aetiology as a form of obscene joking among equals, was the dominant cult among the Greeks of the Sicilian colonies.  Their cult was propelled into the political spotlight through the actions of Telines at Gela, who deftly transformed a personal hierophancy of Demeter and Kore into a state-sanctioned hereditary priesthood.  His descendants, who became the Deinomenid tyrants of Syracuse, were inheritors of this religious office.  Thus, after their victories over Carthage in the early fifth century, Gelon and his brother and successor Hieron not only promoted the worship of Demeter and Kore everywhere from Italy to Africa but also patronized poetry in which we can find traces of their patrons’ cultic connection to the mythical origin of iambus (as well as recognition that the lack of egalitarianism under their tyranny problematizes this very connection).

Finally, we find that this preference for iambic modes of expression was recognized at Athens and can be traced in classical Athenian depictions of Sicilian and Syracusan personalities such as Gorgias of Leontini and Polemarchus of Syracuse.  Therefore, while the exact nature of “iambic choruses” continues to remain obscure, a case can now be made both for why Athenaeus believes that the Syracusans might have preferred them and for why he was not alone in so doing.