Greek Lyric Poetry And Its Influence

This book deals with Greek lyric composed more than twenty-five centuries ago. These poems sing of everyday events and emotions in human life, from the most festive to the most serious, presenting a living portrait of the ancient Greeks. This multidisciplinary volume begins with a panorama of Greek lyric poetic genres, their main authors and their representative topics. The first part contains philological studies and literary analyses, first of some Greek poets—Anacreon, Sappho and Lycophron, among others—then of their influence on Horace’s Latin poetry, and on contemporary poetry. The second part, illustrated with colour images, studies Greek lyric from socio-political and iconographic perspectives, analysing its coincidences and reflections in images from Greek pottery, sculptures and reliefs. In addition, this section includes two works on musical theory and composition related to ancient Greek lyric. The volume closes with two studies of the image of Sappho in cinema.

In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, twenty-one international scholars discuss the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) from the 5th century BCE to the 12th century CE.

Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as seen in political lyric. By conducting a close reading of six poems and then a broad survey of martial lyric, exile poetry, political lyric, and sympotic lyric as a whole, Jessica Romney demonstrates that sympotic lyric focuses on the same basic behaviors and values to construct social identities regardless of the content or subgenre of the poems in question. The volume also argues that the performance of identity depends on the context as well as the material of performance. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that sympotic lyric overwhelmingly prefers to use identity rhetoric that insists on the inherent sameness of group members. All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes.

The Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 BC - Archilochus and Alcman, Sappho and Mimnermus, Anacreon, Simonides, and the rest - produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity, perfect in form, spontaneous in expression, reflecting all the joys andanxieties of their personal lives and of the societies in which they lived. This new poetic translation by a leading expert captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry as never before. It is not merely a selection but covers all the surviving poems and intelligible fragments, apart from the works of Pindar and Bacchylides, and includes a number ofpieces not previously translated. The Introduction gives a brief account of the poets, and explanatory Notes on the texts will be found at the end.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within in them, but as well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

This handbook for the reading of early Greek poetry is intended to be both a manual for teachers and a guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It covers poetry in the elegiac and iambic genres, as well as melic poetry which is provisionally divided into the personal and the public. The book takes a critical look at scholarly trends applied in interpreting this poetry, exploring, for example, the problems of defining the nature of the elegiac genre, the origins of iambic poetry, the personal voice used by the poets, and the validity of historical criticism. Appearing in the Classical Tradition series, it considers the impact of modern literary theory on the reading of these texts - for instance the new interpretations suggested by feminism - and guides readers to a full bibliography on scholarly debates from the 19th century to the present.