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SUMMARY: While many have written on the fragment of Stesichorus's Palinode presented to us in the Phaedrus, most of this work has focused on attempting to understand the function the palinode may have played within Stesichorus's work or his performance tradition, and on the nature of Stesichorus's offense against Helen, the offense which prompted her blinding of him and his subsequent creation of the Palinode fragment itself. Careful examination shows that the language it uses is carefully chosen to situate Stesichorus's work in opposition to epic and Panhellenic versions of the story of Helen.
A. "THIS IS NOT A TRUE STORY"
FEW BIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES CONCERNING GREEK LYRIC POETS HAVE BEEN AS EVOCATIVE or as memorable as that of Stesichorus's blinding by Helen, and of his recovering sight following the composition of the Palinode. This anecdote has generated considerable scholarly work in the past few decades, but most of this work has focused on its authenticity or otherwise and on attempting to account for the anecdote within the life of Stesichorus himself.1 Insufficient attention has, I believe, been placed on understanding the story of Stesichorus's blinding in the appropriate context, i.e. the fragment of the Palinode that Plato has Socrates quote in the Phaedrus, and the Phaedrus as a dialogue in its own right. I will argue that a closer examination of the text of the fragment itself, especially its first line, will provide the most suitable context in which to interpret the biographical anecdote. This first line, which I provisionally translate, following Louise Pratt, as "This is not a true story," situates the Palinode within a complex network of ideas concerning truth and lies, fictionality and narrative. Beyond that, it also places the poem that it ostensibly introduces firmly on the side of local cultic and lyric tradition, as opposed to the Panhellenic narrative of epic.
The Phaedrus is probably our oldest, and certainly our most important source for the story of the blinding of Stesichorus; it is, moreover, our only source for this fragment of the Palinode (Plato, Phaedrus 243a2-243b3):
So, my friend, I need to be purified. There is an ancient purification for those who have erred in muthologia, one which Homer did not perceive, but Stesichorus did. For when he was...