Alkaios 305A.14-27 (P.Oxy. 2306i): Exile, Remembering, and Return at Mytilene, 612/09-597/6 BCE

David Tandy (University of Tennessee)

What can we say about the role of oral political testimony in the archaic Aegean in general and at Mytilene on Lesbos in particular? The success of the “great families” that punctuate our accounts of archaic political history depended to a large extent on a family’s ability to assert the clout of their pedigree.

Among the strategies employed by these families were public testifiers, called istores by Homer (Il. 18. 501; 23.486) and Hesiod (WD 792). The Gortyn Code (about 480) states that a mnamon will report to the kosmos; the “rememberer” here is of high status. A roughly contemporary inscription from Arkades (about 500) assigns Spensithios the two positions of mnamon and poinikastas, which led Jeffery and Morpurgo-Davies to speculate that the older office of mnamon has merged now with the new one (Kadmos 9(1970):150). We might hazard an observation that these figures “remembered” and thus supported local power arrangements.

But Ed Carawan (forthcoming) argues persuasively that we can say two things about the mnemones and the hieromnemones known to us from the seventh century forward. First, that they are recognizers more than they are rememberers. Second, that what they recognize are the rightful owners of property in dispute. His conclusions will serve us well at Mytilene.

Beginning before 612/09, there was at Mytilene exceptionally relentless struggle among powerful families who ruled alone and in alliances: the Penthilidai (descended from Penthilos son of Orestes), the Kleonaktidai, the Arkheanaktidai, the Polyanaktidai, the Agesilaidai, the Epilaidai, and the Damoaktidai are all on parade in the surviving verses of Sappho and Alkaios. These families, extended into political hetaireiai, feuded so continuously that finally, probably in 597/6, the Mytilenians installed Pittakos as aisumnetes for ten years.

Persons came in and out of power during this period and a return to power by the Kleonaktid Myrsilos appears to been the subject of the poem to which Alkaios 305A is commentary. I will argue that Myrsilos’s return has been validated by the local mnamon, until now assumed to be the proper name Mnamon. If it is appropriate to limit the local mnamon’s role to the restoration to Myrsilos of his family property then we may understand better how power restoration worked and thus what Alcaeus’s poem may have been dealing with. This reconstruction of an event at Mytilene may then cast light on what exactly Orestes is referring to when he anticipates his own return to Argos at Eumenides 756-8, “And some one of the Hellenes will say, ‘The man is an Argive once again and will dwell among his father’s possessions’.”