Force-Ranking Choir Directors By Hotness in Alcman's Partheneion
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“The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There's Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There's Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there's Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts.”
In similar news, today is the last day to pick up a paid Chatner subscription for 20% off the next year:
Original Fragment 1 found here. Alternate translation here.
Alcman was one of the Nine Melic Poets (along with Pindar and Sappho) credited with establishing lyric poetry in ancient Greece. The first fragment of his Partheneion, or Maiden Hymns, deals with the praise of a chorus of young women for their two chorus leaders, Hagesichora and Agido.
Listen. There is such a thing as a divine mandate, you know.
And the gods favor those of sound mind, who work while the sun shines,
they suffer little, weep less.
And I am happy to sing about Agido, the assistant choir director.
Lovely! Luminous, even, like a pearl,
like if the moon had a really smart best friend.
I love how she always does her hair.
And what a choir director’s assistant she makes!
Always on time, always hits her cues,
reliable as a clock or a gun.
But I can’t go on. I can’t talk about Agido any longer.
Truth stops me, beauty stops me,
the power of Hagesichora’s face insists —
It’s context, is what it is.
What I mean:
If you had a herd of dairy cattle, set them grazing,
then one morning went out meadow-stepping
to find a darkbody mare browsing amongst them,
with hawser-knit forelegs, apple-eyed,
and deep-chested, with hooves like struck steel,
born for the chase, delivered sleek and perfect to you, like an egg,
would you comment on the cows?
Excellent cows though they may be, and producers of high-quality milk?
Or do you notice first the jennet?
Consider the hair on Hagesichora’s head! Is gold purer? And is beaten silver more shining than her face?
Listen, none of this can hurt Agido. There’s nothing catty here,
only increasing degrees of perfection, like in Heaven.
The beauty who runs second to Agido is like a Kolaxaian courser following hot on the heels of an Ionian warmblood! They’re both good —
They’re both good!
We, each beauties ourselves, carry the slippers of the slightly better-looking,
not in grief but in shared and reflected glory,
thanking the gods that there is not a dud among us!
Do the Pleiades compete with Sirius? Or do they all beam together?
And yet neither is there any question, of what shines brightest in the sky —
The sun puts all lesser lights and questions out!
Scour your robes in purple, yes,
Snake gold and copper into bracelets, soften your eyes into pools,
Crease and re-crease your whitest linen into wimples
in the finest Lydian style,
borrow Areta’s hair to mingle with your own —
go further, take Philylla’s, take Ianthemis’! —
and can I just say that speaking of hair,
yours hangs like coils of cinnamon around your fragrant head,
but Hagesichora is present today,
her whose graceful ankles look better than most faces,
and she stands near Agido, and Agido is content,
so content you. Let’s finish this, shall we?
I’d like to apologize to the choir directors for screaming.
I’m sorry. I got carried away. Aotis is the goddess of the dawn,
rosy-lipped and gracious,
but it is thanks to Hagesichora that we walk on paths of peace, no?
On account of how splendidly she wears us out —
And in a ship, everyone agrees the helmsman is in the best position to steer?
Has she not brought us all — laden, weary, happy, well-traveled — into port?
If other faces have looked scrubbed and healthy,
the cause is hers, for she was lovely first. She cannot outshine the gods,
legally speaking,
I’m not allowed to say that, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
Like a swan’s, that throat — and then those knots of yellow hair —
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