The Palinode of Stesichorus
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Socrates — ἔστιν δὲ τοῖς ἁμαρτάνουσι περὶ μυθολογίαν καθαρμὸς ἀρχαῖος, ὃν Ὅμηρος μὲν οὐκ ᾔσθετο, Στησίχορος δέ. τῶν γὰρ ὀμμάτων στερηθεὶς διὰ τὴν Ἑλένης κακηγορίαν… ποιεῖ εὐθύς— οὐκ ἔστʼ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος, οὐδʼ ἔβας ἐν νηυσὶν εὐσέλμοις, οὐδʼ ἵκεο Πέργαμα Τροίας— καὶ ποιήσας δὴ πᾶσαν τὴν καλουμένην Παλινῳδίαν παραχρῆμα ἀνέβλεψεν
For those who sin in the telling of sacred stories there is an ancient cure — one Homer never discovered, but Stesichorus did. Blinded for defaming Helen, he did not sit in the dark wondering why, as Homer had; being a true servant of the Muses, he knew the cause, and immediately composed: 'That story is not true: you never boarded the well-benched ships; you never came to the towers of Troy.' And when he had finished the whole poem men call the Palinode, his sight returned on the spot.
How do you take back a poem? Socrates knows the precedent: the poet Stesichorus, struck blind for slandering Helen, sang his 'song of taking-back' — and the light came back with it. Socrates will now do the same for Eros, bare-headed this time.
Two of English's words are born in this passage. Stesichorus's poem was the <em>palinōidía</em> — the 'singing-back,' πάλιν + ᾠδή, the ode that unsays an ode — and every 'palinode' since descends from Socrates's use of it here. And the poem's first word of substance is <em>étymos</em>: 'that story is not TRUE' — the adjective whose neuter, <em>tò étymon</em>, 'the true sense,' the grammarians took for the study of words' real meanings: etymology. A recantation and a science of truth, sharing one sentence.<br><br>The theology is the point. Stesichorus's blindness was not bad luck but consequence — a poem is an act, and an act against a divinity (Helen was a daughter of Zeus with a cult of her own) demands not apology but counter-poem: the offense and the cure are the same medium. His corrected version is itself audacious myth — Helen never sailed; Troy burned ten years for her phantom (an <em>eídōlon</em>) — epic unsaid in epic's own formulas ('well-benched ships' is Homer's furniture). Socrates, blinded-in-advance by nothing yet, will be 'wiser than both poets': he pays <em>before</em> the penalty, bare-headed now where he delivered the first speech muffled in shame. What follows — chariot, wings, the plain of Truth — is not an argument that happens to be beautiful. It is liturgy: the purification (<em>katharmós</em>) the voice at the ford demanded.
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