Narrative, Authority, and Blame

In a world where song had an embedded social position, poetry had a vital role to play in constructing and confirming or destabilizing and destroying reputation and social standing. Though Pindar, for his own programmatic reasons, chooses to see poetry of praise and blame (reified for him in its most famous exponent, Archilochos) as fundamentally opposed (Pythian 2.54–6), they share certain needs. My interest here is poetry of blame. To express hostility at the most basic level, all that is needed is the terminology of personal abuse, an approach in which Alkaios is particularly inventive. The problem is that abuse is ultimately limited both aesthetically and in terms of impact. It can briefly unite speaker and audience at the expense of the person or group held up to ridicule. But it neither engages the imagination nor reaches out beyond the already committed. To be effective, blame, like praise, needs to speak from a position of authority if it is to achieve its pragmatic goal. This article looks at one means of generating authority, narrative. It looks at the construction of characters and events in straight storytelling and the use of paradigmatic narratives of the physical and animal worlds and examines the way in which archaic blame poetry uses these to construct a social, moral, natural, and religious order as a means of positioning speaker, audience, and target. This construction of authority is important for the vertical as well as the horizontal positioning of poetry of blame, in that it eases the movement of poetry and poetic reputation into the Panhellenic mainstream.