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, a team of international scholars consider the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) up to the 12th century CE, from a variety of intersecting perspectives: reperformance, textualization, the direct and indirect tradition, anthologies, poets’ Lives, and the disquisitions of philosophers and scholars. Particular attention is given to the poets Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Pindar, and Timotheus. Consideration is given to their reception in authors such as Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Aelius Aristides, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, as well as their discussion by Peripatetic scholars, the Hellenistic scholia to Pindar, Horace’s commentator Porphyrio, and Eustathius on Pindar.

The Greek lyric, elegiac and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 BCE produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity. This new poetic translation captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry.

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.

This handbook is a guide to the reading of elegiac, iambic, personal and public poetry of early Greece. Intended as a teaching manual or as an aid for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, it presents the major scholarly debates affecting the reading of these poetic texts, such as the effect of genre, the question of the poetic persona, or the impact of modern literary theory.

Willis Barnstone has augmented his widely used anthology of the Greek lyric poets with eleven newly attributed Sappho poems, making this the most complete offering of Sappho in English. Two new sections -- "Sources and Notes" and "Sappho: Her Life and Poems" -- provide the student with the classical sources and an appraisal of this greatest of Western women poets. Barnstone's lucid, elegant translations include a representative sampling of all the significant Greek lyric poets, from Archilochus, in the seventh century B.C., through Pindar ("prince of choral poets") and the other great singers of the classical age, down to the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. William McCulloh's introduction illuminates the forms and development of the Greek lyric. Barnstone introduces each poet with a brief biographical and literary sketch. The critical apparatus includes a glossary, index, bibliography, and concordance. Willis Barnstone is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Indiana University. He is co-editor of A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, and has translated poetry of Mao Zedong, Antonio Machado, and St. John of the Cross.

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 them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Introduction to this wide-ranging body of poetry, which includes work by such famous poets as Sappho and Pindar.

Three important literary questions in early Greek lyrics are addressed in this study. First, Fowler attempts to determine the extent that Homer and epic poetry generally influenced the lyric poets, with respect to both the style of compositions and their content. Identifying the certain examples of influence – which are far fewer than often thought – he analyses the technique of imitation, tracing a development from simpler to more complex as the archaic period proceeds. Throughout this and the following chapter, he often finds occasion to take issue with the famous and influential view of the early Greek mind championed by Bruno Snell and Hermann Fränkel. In the second chapter Fowler studies the organization of individual poems, identifying compositional principles that may be used to solve literary and textual problems. Some of these principles, like ring-composition, are old familiars; others are not. All are found to be more pervasive than is often realized, and reflect an attitude to composition rather different from the disorderly and associative techniques traditionally ascribed to the lyrics poets. The last chapter explores the nature of genres in the archaic period, starting from the vexed question of the definition of elegy. In all the genres associated with particular occasions, the author finds that the poets' professional skills and self-consciousness became more important than the purely occasional aspects of their composition. Observations of interest are made on, among others, citharodic songs, epigrams and epinician odes; and elegy in the end turns out, paradoxically, not to be a true genre at all.