This poem was from a forty-ninepage manuscript edited from a much larger one (it encompasses in 800 double-spaced pages of complete fictions, terrible translations from the Greek of either poems that exist only in fragments (or even just notices) that I wished survived like this one, poems that never existed but I wished did, and abominable translations from the Greek of obscure pieces (like Michel Psellus’ scurrilous denunciation of a of a thoroughly corrupt monk at the monastery he had been exiled to) to accord with the rules of POET magazine “American Chapbook Contest,” H. R. Courson, contributing editor and judge, which limited the text to 50 pages, and was to be published by Cooper House Publishing Inc. I don’t like the poem, but it has happened often what I don’t like, other people take to. Go figure. They stopped the contest after the announcement in the Fall 1995 issue, volume 6, number 3, moved from Oklahoma to Louisiana and never published the manuscript although they repeatedly said they would. However, they did publish this one poem in the above issue on page 39. It is reproduced here as they presented it. If you think this is beating my own drum, it is . . . for what little it is worth.

First Place

Gary C. Moore’s manuscript is a real prize. The historical context is fascinating. Fragments from antiquity communicate clearly to us here at the end of the twentieth century. What makes the communication poignant is that we listen to a society trying to figure out who and what human beings are and can be in that threatening environment from which man had recently distinguished himself. We listen from the stance of a culture that thought it had figured the answers out and finds that it has failed. These fragments raise questions that need to be asked again, like “shining Orestes – punished justly for doing justice.” This is an unusual, a unique collection, eminently worth sharing with a wide variety of readers.

(GCM: You can see philosophically I would not agree with this. Not only would I say a culture could not “fail” because only individuals have goals and can fail. Also, I would say the Hellenic classical culture has been and remains the most influential and domineering culture in the world. However, that is an effect because of real causes, not complementary at all. This anthology was constructed in the form of a novel by a Greek Jew who was a lieutenant fighting in Albania against the Italians when the Nazis came and crushed Greece. Except for Thessalonica, the Greek Jews were the most assimilated Jews in the world. Even the fascist dictator, General Metaxas [the only general to oppose the disastrous war with Turkey in 1922], like Marshall Pilsudski in Poland, suppressed anti-Semitism in Greece which, unlike Poland, amounted to only one newspaper and the people associated with it. The lieutenant went guerilla when the Nazis entered the war but was finally caught at a Nazi roadblock in Albania in 1943, and forcibly inducted into the Waffen SS division Skanderbeg. This was an idea of one of the brothers Welinsky (the other transported the ancient Jewish community at Thessalonica to Auschwitz). Several Waffen SS divisions were not “freewilling” as the Nazis labeled them, and the lieutenant had no problem with his circumcision because Albania both is mostly Muslim and has a number of Greeks in the southern most province. Eventually, after ending up serving in Russia, the Nazis send him to Auschwitz, but as a privileged prisoner with the status of “political” (German, usually Communist) not “Jewish.” One such group of German Communists from the concentration camps, considered ‘reformed’ and Nazified was trained as an army unit [a really stupid idea – together? I guess the high command thought they might be a corrupting influence. They were.] and sent to Greece where, like most of the Waffen SS Skanderbeg, promptly deserted to the Greek ELAS guerillas.

The quote in the above preface is from another of my poems in the chapbook.)

Kratinos, from THE WINE JAR, 519-422 BCE

I understand my wretchedness,

Part self destroying madness,

Part rotting out sickness,

. . . ghost that batters me within.

I puke, see visions, my guts fall out.

. . . . . . wine gave me heat,

Now it only gives me less of cold.

I return to childhood babbling.

Unable to keep my own footsteps,

I fall in the mess I made.

And I’ve become a great pisser,

And pissed away my manliness.

My shaking hand beckons earthquakes,

In everything I hold.

I swear a strong oath on sober Apollo

At noon, I shall never drink but water again.

And then the cruel god of evening crushes me.

To withstand his terrible anger, I drink.

My night becomes witless,

A parody in life of my comedies.

When at midnight a darkness comes,

It is an epiphany from below

The level of human horizon.

But Aristophanes, that swaddling babe of poetry,

Tattles that I’ve lost my talent.

Am I not a better critic of me,

Than a greedy newborn to the comic stage?

Did I not wet nurse the little tyke myself?

Any needle has the prick of a little truth.

That is the whole of what was published by POET magazine. The final line omitted here, maybe by me, goes, “But when sorrow draws a laugh it justifies all,” I would now reinstate, especially after having read Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais. With each poem in the anthology there was a story of its provenance. There would have been a very short one in the chapbook manuscript, but I do not think I have a copy anymore. The one at hand goes more or less like this.

Kratinos’ first known play was produced when he was 71, and THE WINE JAR when he was 95. Two years later he was dead, supposedly from the shock, Aristophanes said in his play PEACE, of seeing a wine cask split open and spill on the ground.

Kratinos was the first great comic poet. When Aristophanes insinuated in THE KNIGHTS that he had lost his talent to drink and senility, Kratinos wrote THE WINE JAR and entered it against Aristophanes’ now famous play THE CLOUDS, and won first place, while Aristophanes won third. But that is not an argument that THE WINE JAR is a better play, for in all the Athenian competitions the now famous play rarely won first place, and the vast majority of first place winners are unknown except for their names.

The plot of Kratinos’ play revolves around a divorce action initiated by the comic muse against Kratinos because of his fondness for wine which the muse accuses him of treating as another mistress.

This is one of several comic monologues found on a roll of papyrus in a jar along with various books of the ILIAD and Plato’s PHAEDO. This roll was the second book of ON COMIC SPEECHES by Julian of Memphis, otherwise unknown. The jar was discovered in the remains of a group of buildings covered over by the Sahara desert outlying the Siwa Oasis. Paleographic analysis dates the roll in the sixth century CE.

From the references within the roll, Julian could not have been writing before Constantine the Great. The revival of interest in Old Comedy began in the second century BCE, called the “Second Sophistic”, and peaked in the century before Justinian’s reign. The intellectual climate of Justinian, with its unsuccessful suppression of pagan intellectual life, may not have been tolerant of the obscenities, and the insults to divinity, even pagan divinity, of the classical playwrights. However the work of Christopher Hill, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paolo Sarpi, Carlo Ginzburg, Francois Rabelais, and Umberto Eco have demonstrated a strong and enduring low class, as “villains,” and even “lumpenproletariat” tradition of materialistic atheism and blasphemy. The same exists today in the same utterly worthless class (this is what they call themselves which should give you pause for thought) of people, but is only indirectly to be found in the media, and usually classified as pornography.

The reason for the Second Sophistic’s revival of interest, especially in Aristophanes which saved so many of his plays, was the rhetorical interest in the pure Attic dialect as opposed to koine. Julian’s intent is clear enough from his castigation of Menander and Appollodorus compared with his praise of Old Comedians like Aristophanes and Eupolis. Julian does not seem to have been a Christian.