Himerius, Orations

ToposText · Himerius · 532 sections

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§ 66.5 So what does that fashioner of tales do in his story when the chorus gets disorderly? He makes Apollo retune his lyre and change from a gentle to a harsh melody, and he has the god sound the strings with a plectrum rather than with his fingers. The mountains, glens, rivers, and birds in Aesop get angry along with Apollo when he is wronged by the nymphs. Helicon itself, as a result of its anguish, is now transformed into a human being, begins to speak, and protests against the nymphs. And let us not consider this feature of the story to be audacious. For if Helicon knows how to make poets out of shepherds—and we certainly believe Hesiod in this—then it is not right for us to be annoyed at the Phrygian [ Aesop ] for making a mountain speak.
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§ 66.6 What, then, does Helicon say to the nymphs in the story? “ Nymphs, where are you going? What is this grievous sting that has driven you mad. Why, having turned your backs on Helicon, the Muses’ workplace, do you hasten to Cithaeron? There are misfortunes and troubles on Cithaeron, and the praises of Cithaeron are a source of tragedy. I make poets out of shepherds, but Cithaeron turns those who are sound of mind into crazed beings. There a mother rages against her child, and family wages war on family; but here one finds offspring of the Muses and gardens of Mnemosyne and nourishment for [ Mnemosyne’s] progeny. So they dance and sport with Apollo now, and of course they always accompany him as he sings. But as for your ailment, I fear that it may become part of theatrical repertoire and the preface to a sad tragedy for you.
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§ 66.7 “But why all this talk? The nymphs are quickly anticipating the end of my speech. One of them there is right next to the god, another will soon be so, and yet another will become a devotee of this chorus before long. For the spell of Apollo’s lyre is overwhelming, and in its delightfulness it outdoes every charm of Aphrodite.. This is what Helicon says in Aesop. Whether this story has any bearing on the present situation is for all of you to surmise.
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§ 68.i A Protreptic [Talk] on the Need to Be Favorably Disposed to Variety in One’s Orations [ Himerius ] delivered this [talk] before the oration that has the title “On the Derisive Remark”
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§ 68.1 When I saw the theaters of Attic eloquence so parched, I hastened to relieve the drought with my eloquence, as if with a sudden burst of rain. Each land, you know, produces its distinctive fruits and offspring. Horses point to the Thessalian, long hair to the Celt, a lavish table to the Mede, the laurel to the Delphian, and war to the Spartiate. But the word and man are the fruits of this city [ Athens ].
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§ 68.2 When any of those fruits is in decline, we say that the land that produces it is in bad condition. So when eloquence is thriving, it lifts Athens up to the heavens; but when it ceases to be heard, it casts the city back down. One can see that this is true from past times. The stage once flourished, and so did the city along with [dramatic] eloquence. The speaker’s platform blossomed with its rhetors, and so did the people’s thinking along with them. The Lyceum abounded in wise men at that time, and all majestic houses everywhere were filled with wisdom. But once the public voice became silent, speaking was almost [entirely] removed to [the private world of ] sailors and slaves.
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§ 68.3 Come, then, boys, let us kindle the whole of eloquence, like an inextinguishable fire, and in this fire let us ensure the city’s preservation. This fire would shoot up and illuminate everything, if those who give shape to words would refuse always to be satisfied with the ancient models and instead would keep coming up with new works of art to fashion.
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§ 68.4 For the conception of new works in a sense strengthened the talent of Phidias and the artistry of the other craftsmen whose hands we admire for their skill. Phidias did not always sculpture Zeus. He did not always make bronze statues of Athena armed. He applied his craft to other gods too; and he adorned the maiden [ Athena ] by letting a blush cover her cheeks, so that he might hide the goddess’s beauty under that blush rather than under a helmet.
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§ 68.5 Isn’t art’s purpose the same in the case of Dionysus, whose form the theologians’ sons change into that of a young man? The god lets hair grow on his cheeks, and the golden down of a beard spreads over them. For this, I think, is the way in which the beautiful Dionysus had to be adorned; he had to have a beauty whose flowers would blossom together with the beauty of spring.
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§ 68.6 And, with regard to other things, what has the plan of the great craftsman in heaven been? At one time he conceals the sun with clouds and whitens the whole earth and sea with snow. [By this wintry weather] he frightens the sailor and ships on the sea, he drives the cattleman and his animals from the meadows, he makes peace for the hoplite and hides his sword, and he makes the soldier unwarlike. At another time he gives humans spring, the clouds and sent the golden sun. He crowns the earth with flowers, the sky with choruses of stars, and the sea with calm and stillness. After this come ears and sheaves of grain, after ears of grain come fruits and grapes, the bounding winepresser, and the gleaming kindness of autumn.
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§ 68.7 Look, if you wish, at that beautiful Homeric meadow that has everything in it, the meadow that the poets call “the shield of Achilles.. Examine the endless banquet on that shield, how many things it offers. One person does battle on it, another sails, one person’s thoughts are fixed on marriage, another’s on the tending of his cattle, someone is busy playing the lyre, someone else makes music flow from his pipe, here a person cuts grain with his sickle, and there someone else works the earth with a golden plough, behind which the soil seems to split open and blackens.
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§ 68.8 Let us also, my boys, imitate Apollo’s most clever lyre. How did he tune it? Well, Colophon has his lyre, but his tripods [at Delphi ] resound [with his oracular utterances] as well. Furthermore, you will see the waters of the Branchidae helping him issue his oracle; and you will also see the god prophesying in the midst of the Delians’ trees. At one time we honor Apollo as the sun, when, after bathing himself, he drives his horses up out of the ocean and above the earth with his falling hair and blazing fire; at another time we honor him as Dionysus with beautiful hair, when, having put the [sun’s] flame out, he delights in song and dance.
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§ 68.9 It seems to me that Proteus was also a sophist, one skilled at eloquence. When a Momus with his censure-loving tongue verbally harassed him, he used many qualities of style in his response, so that he could thus prove that that Momus’s derisive remarks about him were false. But when Proteus encountered a more skillful sophist [i.e., Homer ], he found himself being represented in that sophist’s tale as having the same multiformity that he had managed to achieve stylistically in his response to that Momus. Hence the Homeric Proteus [Od. 4.417–18, 456–58] kindles like a fire, flows like water, roars like a lion, grows tall and flourishes like a tree.
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§ 68.10 I want to tell you one of Protagoras’s stories. When nature made human beings and the other animals, almost predisposed as it was to one pattern, it imposed a single shape on the appearance of all creatures. Upon becoming aware of this absence of embellishment, Zeus agreed to send the two heavenly beings—I mean Prometheus and Epimetheus —to help nature. They brought with them, from [the god] who had sent them, mind and perception, also strength and speed. Thus they introduced variety into nature’s pattern, altering it by this diversification of the appearance of what nature had fashioned. Reason received humankind; and the remaining faculties, in a fitting manner, received each of the other kinds of animal, making nature’s beauty motley now by the multiformity of its creatures.
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§ 68.11 So, my boys, you, no less than I, have Protagoras’s story to prepare you through its myth to introduce variety into your orations. Actually, you opt for variety even before Protagoras and I do, for yesterday I saw you acting as workmen for your orator [i.e., Himerius ], when you tossed your books aside and built this makeshift auditorium for the Muses, an auditorium that is much better than the wall erected against the Lacedaemonians by Demosthenes and the Athenians in Pylos. That wall was built because of the winter, but this auditorium was built because of the desire and yearning of your ears, which longed for a new declamation.
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§ 68.12 But turn your gaze away from the walls [of the auditorium] to the tongue, and imitate Amphion, if you will. He applied his hands partly to the wall [of Thebes ] and partly to his lyre and spread his country’s fame abroad because he walled Thebes so harmoniously.
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§ 69.i The Discourse (Διάλεξις) Delivered after His Wound Healed [ Himerius ] delivered these remarks after his wound healed, when studies were [re]commencing and he was about to speak for the first time in the very same auditorium.
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§ 69.1 It is time to open the lecture hall, my boys, since the Muses are giving eloquence its season. We must do what they say Hesiod did when he threw away his little pipe in his desire to attend on the Muses with his lyre. And let me first offer hospitality here to those who have come to my school from other lands, so that I may finally pay an old debt. I have not willingly let my tardiness in paying this debt reach this point in time. It is not a pleasant thing when eloquence takes time off, like those collectors of money who customarily seek to retreat from the crowd so that, when they encounter them [later], they will seem more impressive to those who behold them.
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§ 69.2 But envy is good at abusing lofty tongues as well as lofty fortunes, and envy’s fight against eloquence is much more intense than its fight against material prosperity. For the lesser boon of material prosperity, although it has often incurred envy, does not provoke it very much; but a lofty and great tongue, I think, shoots at the very center of envy’s heart.
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§ 69.3 So no human being in the whole world envied Sardanapalus, even though he ruled over countless people and, because of the way in which he decked himself out, was almost thought to be made of pure gold. But insolent envy did not let Palamedes and Orpheus go until it made them victims of an accuser and of madness respectively.
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§ 69.4 And I know that on Homer’s plains many demigods became the playthings and sport of envy: “the son of Tydeus, strong Diomedes, has been hit; Odysseus, famous for his spear, has been hit, and also Agamemnon ” [cf. Hom. Il. 11.660–61]. Envy chases the whole phalanx of heroes away from battle through the wounds they suffer. Poetry struck down even the gods themselves, as if it sought to console mortal heroes by pointing out that envy shoots its arrows as far as heaven. Thersites is the only one in Homer who is not injured, for he had nothing by which to annoy envy. “But endure, my heart,” said the wise man [ Odysseus ] after the Cyclopes, the Laestrygonians, and the ocean [Hom. Od. 20.18].
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§ 69.5 Yet why do I need Odysseus? Why do I need Homer and the Cyclops? Come, in our fight against reproach let us rather seek consolation from the Muses and lyric poetry. Anacreon tuned his lyre after an illness and once again greeted his dear loves in song. Stesichorus also tuned his lyre after his suffering. There is a widespread story that Ibycus fell off his chariot as he was riding from Catana to Himera. Having broken his hand, he did not sing for quite some time but made his lyre a votive gift to Apollo.
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§ 69.6 But enough of woes! Enough of pain and disease! Perhaps we cannot say “enough of envy,” though, so long as eloquence soars with its golden wings. Let us speak again, let us lead our chorus again in the midst of envy. Surely the Muses will do what they can to blunt envy’s arrows, for it is they who, like shepherds, tend to eloquence. Now the Muses’trumpets are sounding, the calls of sailors have come to an end, cicadas are breaking off their songs and giving way to the eloquence [of sophists], and nightingales are refraining from their melodious sounds and yielding to sophists. The Nile’s flow is abating, and what for a time was a sea is becoming a river [again]; it is the Muses’ rivers and streams whose waters are rising.
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§ 69.7 Come, then, before proceeding to the rites and the shrine, let me tell you what it is right to do and to refrain from doing. Let all initiates and those entering the higher degree of initiation listen. Throw the balls out of your hands. Put all your energy into using your styluses. Put the palaestra’s games behind locked doors, and let the Muses’ workshops be opened. Say good-bye to the streets, and stay at home more and write. Hate the vulgar theater, and give your attention to the better theater [of the school of rhetoric]. Let luxury and the pursuit of pleasure be removed from your labors; show me that you can be austere and can overcome luxury. This is my pronouncement and law—a great deal contained in a few words. Whoever of you listens and obeys will let Iacchus’s song sound to the full; if any of you disobeys and has taken no heed of what I say, I shall conceal from him the [sacred] fire and lock him out of the shrines of eloquence.
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§ 69.8 This pronouncement is for everybody, but it is especially directed, my young men, at those of you who are newly initiated and have recently come to me. Of these new students, [Mt.] Argaeus sent one—a mountain at whose foot sprout golden saplings of my family. The peoples and cities of the Galatians sent another, and this is the first “colony” they have dispatched to learn rhetoric [under me]. Some come to the mysteries who live close to the river Caicus; and when this pair leaves us and returns to that river, I think that it will swell with golden waters.
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§ 69.9 Of course, among the initiates there is also a chorus from the Nile. When I have bedecked them with the Muses’ garlands, I shall send them from the Ilissus [River] to Egypt with a lyre, so that, with Attic frenzy, they may hymn the Nile’s sea. This is my proclamation, and it has been given by way of a preface. Let me now reveal the sacred [rites] to the initiates both in my actions and in my speech.
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§ 74.i The Theme [of This Talk] Is That One Must Always Be in Training [ Himerius ] delivered this [talk] extempore in the summer.
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§ 74.1 “Practice makes an endeavor succeed” [Hes. Op. 412]. These are the words of an emulous poet. But suppose that something other than this poet can urge us on, and that I call your attention to it and divulge it.Well, so that in this matter we do not put our trust just in the poets, I shall tell you a story about the topic under consideration.
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§ 74.2 Once, during the Pythian Games, Timagenidas announced that he would play the pipe. But before he entered into competition with his fellow pipers, he quietly took leave of the crowd to practice solely in the company of his friends. First he practiced a melody on a single pipe, then, blowing more forcefully, on two instruments together. For a while he played a melody, restricting his practice to a prenomic tune; then he played what they call the nome of Athena’s contest [the Panathenaea ].9. For practice, you see, cannot fail to spur on and keep improving people’s skills.
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§ 74.3 Thus, a horse is swift at racing, not when he goes from the manger directly to the racecourse, but when he beholds the racecourse after a period of training. An athlete is quickly proclaimed the victor when he willingly subjects himself to training before going to the table. If a person is a soldier, I urge him not to wait for battles to occur, but to practice using his weapons in peacetime, before war breaks out. We see those devoted to agriculture attending to the plow before the setting of the Pleiades and sharpening the sickle before the rising of those goddesses so that, when summer comes, they will be ready to harvest the crops.
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§ 74.4 As for those who are devoted to the spoken word, is there anything they should do except constantly to practice composing orations. I once heard a wise man—he was wise, that is, in the art that we pursue— expressing the opinion about the matter under discussion that “speech always comes from speech.”99
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§ 74.5 The reason why the Attic myth deprives the nightingale of its tongue is that it does not speak incessantly but spends some of its time in silence and some in song. Myth thus calls its melody a lament, berating it, I think, because, although it is of Attic origin, it does not devote itself to singing incessantly. On the other hand, myth says that swans are sacred to Apollo and marvels at their song because they never stop fashioning a hymn of praise to their god through their singing.

Via ToposText (topostext.org), a project of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation created by Brady Kiesling. Translated by Robert J. Penella (1947 - ). Composed ca. 380 CE. Licence: copyright Robert J. Penella, used by permission. Source.