Return now, goddess dance-delighting…
It never happened so, that tale;
you never sailed forth in the well-benched ships,
you never reached towered Troy.
Translation © Carey Jobe. Original:
δεῦρ’ αὖτε θεὰ φιλόμολπε…
οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος,
οὐδ᾽ ἔβας ἐν νηυσὶν ἐῡσσέλμοις
οὐδ᾽ ἵκεο πέργαμα Τροίας,
Notes:
Sadly, the fragments of the Greek lyric poet Stesichorus (6th Century BC) are in a tattered state that there are no identifiable fragments of his Ode “The Sack of Troy,” where he recounted the tale of Helen as told in Homer and blamed Helen’s infidelity as the cause of the war. Legend holds that the deified Helen, in anger at Stesichorus for maligning her, struck the poet blind. However, Stesichorus was able to recover his vision by writing an additional ode recanting his earlier version of the legend.
Of the Palinode (his recantation of that Ode) we have three lines spoken by Socrates that are quoted in Plato’s Phaedrus, along with this commentary:
For those who commit transgressions in their telling of myths there is an ancient purification, which Homer did not know, but Stesichorus did. For when he became blind for uttering falsehoods against Helen, unlike Homer he was well aware of the reason and, being a devotee of the Muses, he immediately composed a poem, and having completed the Palinode, as it is called, his sight was immediately restored.
Interestingly, this passage suggests that Homer, too, was blinded by Helen for telling “falsehoods” about her, but didn’t know the cure.
In addition, a papyrus fragment of ancient commentary indicates Stesichorus wrote two Palinodes, the first blaming Homer for neglecting to tell that Helen’s phantom went not Troy, the second blaming Hesiod for this. The first lines of both Palinodes are quoted. I have made the educated guess that the first quote goes with the first Palinode, the one quoted by Plato. The association seems to fit, as he tells the Muse “Wait, come back!”
Also, the epithet “dance-delighting” suggests the muse that Stesichorus invoked at the beginning of the Palinode was Terpsichore. After the invocation of the Muse, there would have been a direct address to Helen, the “You” of the 3-line quote.