Greek lyric Alcaeus and Sappho (Brygos Painter, Attic red-figure kalathos, ca. 470 BC) Greek lyric is the body of lyric poetry written in dialects of ancient Greek. It is primarily associated with the early 7th to the early 5th centuries BC, somet imes called the "Lyric Age of Greece",[1] but continued to be written into the H ellenistic and Imperial periods. Lyric is one of three broad categories of poetr y in classical antiquity, along with drama both tragedy and comedy were composed a s verseand epic, according to the scheme of the "natural forms of poetry" develop ed by Goethe in the early nineteenth century.[2] Culturally, Greek lyric is the product of the political, social and intellectual milieu of the Greek polis ("ci ty-state").[3] Much of Greek lyric is occasional poetry, composed for public or private perform ance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions. The symposium ("drinki ng party") was one setting in which lyric poems were performed.[4] "Lyric" indic ates that these poems were conceived of as belonging to the tradition of poetry sung or chanted to the accompaniment of the lyre, also known as melic poetry (fr om melos, "song"; compare English "melody"). Modern surveys of "Greek lyric" oft en include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly "song lyrics" in the modern sense, such as elegies and i ambics.[5] Greek lyric poems celebrate athletic victories (epinikia), commemorate the dead, exhort soldiers to valor, and offer religious devotion in the forms of hymns, p aeans, and dithyrambs. Partheneia, "maiden-songs," were sung by choruses of maid ens at festivals.[6] Love poems praise the beloved, express unfulfilled desire, proffer seductions, or blame the former lover for a breakup. In this last mood, love poetry might blur into invective, a poetic attack aimed at insulting or sha ming a personal enemy, an art at which Archilochus, the earliest known Greek lyr ic poet, excelled. The themes of Greek lyric include "politics, war, sports, dri nking, money, youth, old age, death, the heroic past, the gods," and hetero- and homosexual love.[7] In the 3rd century BC, the encyclopedic movement at Alexandria produced a canon of the nine melic poets: Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides, and Stesichorus.[8] Only a small sampling of lyric poetry fr om Archaic Greece, the period when it first flourished, survives. For example, t he poems of Sappho are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the Library of Alexandria, with the first book alone containing more than 1,300 lines of verse. Today, only one of Sappho's poems exists intact, with fragments from other sour ces that would scarcely fill a chapbook.[9] Contents [hide] 1 Meters 2 Bibliography 2.1 Translations 2.2 Critical editions 2.3 Scholarship 3 References Meters[edit] Greek poetry meters are based on patterns of long and short syllables (in contra st to English verse, which is determined by stress), and lyric poetry is charact erized by a great variety of metrical forms.[10] The nine melic poets composed i n complex triadic forms of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, with the first two p arts of the triad having the same metrical pattern, and the epode a different fo rm.[11] Iambic and trochaic meters, most commonly iambic trimeter and trochaic tetramete
r, alternate long and short syllables. Iambic meters were thought to reflect mos t closely the rhythms of Greek as spoken in everyday life,[12] and was thus the meter used for dialogue in Greek plays of the 5th century BC. Earlier, it was us ually used for invective or satire, as suggested by the word iambos, which meant "lampoon" or "scurrilous abuse",[13] and as found in Archilochus and Hipponax. Semonides of Amorgos uses iambic trimeter for both his "misogynistic satirizing of women" and for his poem on the theme of "the vanity of human wishes."[14] Literary histories usually treat elegies, a category which includes any poetry w ritten in elegiac couplets, as part of the lyric tradition. Since the first line of an elegiac couplet is dactylic hexameter, the verse form used for epic poetr y in both the Greek and Latin literature, the division between elegy and epic is permeable. Military and didactic themes may be treated in elegiac couplets, dra wing on poetic conventions from epic.[15] Bibliography[edit] Translations[edit] Anthologies[edit] Lattimore, R. (1955), Greek Lyrics, Chicago. Miller, A.W. (1996), Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation, Indianapolis, ISB N 978-0872202917. West, M.L. (2008), Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford, ISBN 978-0199540396. Loeb Classical Library[edit] Campbell, D.A. (1982), Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume I. Sappho and Alcaeus, Loeb Cl assical Library, no. 142, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 9780674991576. Campbell, D.A. (1988), Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume II. Anacreon, Anacreontea, Cho ral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman, Loeb Classical Library, no. 143, Cambridge, MA , ISBN 9780674991583. Campbell, D.A. (1991), Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume III. Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simo nides, and Others, Loeb Classical Library, no. 476, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 97806749 95253. Campbell, D.A. (1992), Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume IV. Bacchylides, Corinna, and Others, Loeb Classical Library, no. 461, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 9780674995086. Campbell, D.A. (1993), Greek Lyric Poetry: Volume V. The New School of Poetry an d Anonymous Songs and Hymns, Loeb Classical Library, no. 144, Cambridge, MA, ISB N 9780674995598. Gerber, D.E. (1999a), Greek Elegiac Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centur ies BC, Loeb Classical Library, no. 258, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 9780674995826. Gerber, D.E. (1999b), Greek Iambic Poetry: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuri es BC, Loeb Classical Library, no. 259, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 9780674995819. Critical editions[edit] Lyric[edit] Page, D.L. (1966), Poetae Melici Graeci, Oxford. Page, D.L. (1974), Supplementum lyricis Graecis, Oxford. Davies, M. (1991), Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. I. Alcman Stesic horus Ibycus, Oxford, ISBN 0-19-814046-0. Page, D.L.; Lobel, E. (1955), Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta, Oxford. Voigt, E.-M. (1971), Sappho et Alcaeus: fragmenta, Amsterdam. Elegy and Iambus[edit] West, M.L. (1989 92), Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati (2nd revised e d.), Oxford. Gentilli, B.; Prato, C. (1988 2002), Poetarum elegiacorum testimonia et fragmenta (2nd enlarged ed.), Berlin. Scholarship[edit] Barron, J.P.; Easterling, P.E.; Knox, B.M.W. (1985), "Elegy and Iambus", in East erling & Knox (1985), pp. 117 64. Bowie, E.L. (1986), "Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival", JHS 106: 1335, JSTOR 629640. Budelmann, F. (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric, Cambridge, ISBN 97 8-0-521-84944-9.
Budelmann, F. (2009a), "Introducing Greek Lyric", in Budelmann (2009), pp. 1 18. Bulloch, A.W. (1985), "Hellenistic Poetry", in Easterling & Knox (1985), pp. 541 6 21. Calame, C. (1998), "La poésie lyrique grecque, un genre inexistant?", Littérature 11 1: 87110, doi:10.3406/litt.1998.2492. Calame, C. (2001), Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece, Lanham, Maryland, ISBN 978-0742515253 tranlsated from the French original of 1977 by D. Collins & J. Orion. Campbell, D.A. (1982a), Greek Lyric Poetry (2nd ed.), London, ISBN 0-86292-008-6 . Campbell, D.A. (1985), "Monody", in Easterling & Knox (1985), pp. 202 21. Carey, C. (2009), "Genre, Occasion and Performance", in Budelmann (2009), pp. 21 3 8. Davies, M. (1988), "Monody, Choral Lyric, and the Tyranny of the Hand-Book", Cla ssical Quarterly 38: 52 64, doi:10.1017/s0009838800031268, JSTOR 639205. Easterling, P.E.; Knox, B.M.W. (1985), The Cambridge History of Classical Litera ture: Greek Literature, Cambridge, ISBN 978-0-521-21042-3. Gerber, D.E. (1997), A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets, Leiden, ISBN 978-9-00 4-09944-9. Gerber, D.E. (1997a), "General Introduction", in Gerber (1997), pp. 1 9. Hutchinson, G.O. (2001), Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pie ces, Oxford, ISBN 0-19-924017-5. Kurke, L. (2000), "The Strangeness of "Song Culture": Archaic Greek Poetry", in O. Taplin, Literature in the Greek & Roman Worlds: A New Perspective, Oxford, pp . 5887, ISBN 978-0-192-10020-7. Nagy, G. (2007), "Lyric and Greek Myth", in R.D. Woodward, The Cambridge Compani on to Greek Mythology, Cambridge, pp. 19 51, ISBN 978-0-521-60726-1. Rutherford, I. (2012), Oxford Readings in Greek Lyric Poetry, Oxford, ISBN 97801 99216192. Segal, C. (1985a), "Archaic Choral Lyric", in Easterling & Knox (1985), pp. 165 20 1. Segal, C. (1985b), "Choral Lyric in the Fifth Century", in Easterling & Knox (19 85), pp. 222 44. References[edit] Jump up ^ Andrew W. Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Hackett, 1 996), p. xi. Jump up ^ Budelmann (2009a, p. 3). Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xi. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xii. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, pp. xii xiii. Jump up ^ David E. Gerber, A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets (Brill, 1997), p p. 161, 201, 217, 224, 230. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xii. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xiii. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xv. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xii. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, pp. xiii xiv. Jump up ^ Aristotle, Poetics 4.18 (1459a). Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xiv. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, p. xiv. Jump up ^ Miller, Greek Lyric: An Anthology, pp. xiii xiv.
