Greek lyric

• 1. Introduction

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  Greek lyric poetry was born to be heard, not read. In the early 7th century BC, poets across the Greek-speaking world set words to the strings of a lyre or the breath of a reed pipe, and audiences gathered at drinking parties, religious festivals, and athletic games to hear them. This was poetry that lived in performance, tied to specific occasions and specific bodies in motion.

  What kinds of occasions? A soldier's funeral. A victory at the games. A prayer to a god. A breakup. The range is astonishing, and it raises a question the documentary will try to answer: what made this tradition so central to Greek public and private life, and why do we have so little of it left?

• 2. Song, Meter, and Music

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  The reed pipe called the aulos and the stringed kithara both appear by name in the ancient sources as accompaniments to lyric performance. When a poem was sung with either kind of instrument, the Greeks called it melic poetry, from the Greek word for "song": melos. But not every lyric was actually sung. A form called meter was recited rather than sung, strictly speaking, though it still fell under the broad umbrella of what we now call Greek lyric.

  Greek poetic meters work on a principle unfamiliar to modern English readers. Where English verse rides on stressed and unstressed syllables, Greek poetry is built on patterns of long and short syllables. Lyric meters were especially varied; the lines could differ in length from one to the next, and the feet that composed them could be of different kinds within a single poem.

  The main meter families were the Ionic, the Aeolic, and the Dactylo-epitrite. The Aeolic family was based on a unit called the choriamb, which could generate forms as different as the glyconian and the Sapphic stanza. Doric choral songs were built in a triadic structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, where the first two parts shared the same metrical pattern and the epode followed a different one.

  Beyond the basic long-short opposition, poets also worked with stress and caesuras, the pauses that fall within a line. The interplay among all three elements shaped meaning, letting a poet push certain words forward or hold them back.

• 3. What Lyric Was For

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  Pindar's victory odes belong to a category the Greeks called epinikia: poems celebrating athletic triumphs at the great games. But that was only one of many functions lyric poetry served. Choruses of maidens performed partheneia at festivals. Soldiers heard lyric poetry that exhorted them to courage in battle. The dead were honored in commemorative verse. The gods received hymns, paeans, and dithyrambs.

  The symposium, or drinking party, was another setting where lyric poems were performed. Private gatherings of men would commission or recall poems about love, money, youth, old age, death, and the heroic past. Love poems could praise the beloved or express unfulfilled desire, but they could also slide toward invective, a poetic attack aimed at insulting or shaming a personal enemy.

  Archilochus, the earliest known Greek lyric poet, was celebrated for his skill at invective. His example shows how close the emotional distance was between erotic and combative verse in this tradition. A poem that began as a love complaint could turn into a weapon.

  The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome draws a careful distinction that modern readers often miss: "'melic' is a musical definition, 'elegy' is a metrical definition, whereas 'iambus' refers to a genre and its characteristics subject matter." The Greeks themselves did not put elegies or iambics inside the category of melic poetry, because those forms used different meters and different instruments. Modern surveys of Greek lyric routinely include them anyway, which is why the Companion urges readers to "approach Greek lyric poetry with an open mind, without preconceptions about what 'type' of poetry we are reading."

• 4. The Nine Canonical Poets

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  In the 3rd century BC, scholars at Alexandria undertook what we might now call a curatorial project. The encyclopedic movement there produced a canon of nine melic poets: Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides, and Stesichorus. This list became the standard reference point for anyone studying the form.

  Sappho's case illustrates both the richness of what existed and the scale of what has been lost. In the Library of Alexandria, her poems were said to fill nine papyrus rolls, with the first book alone containing more than 1,300 lines of verse. Today, only one of her poems survives intact. Fragments from other sources, when gathered together, would scarcely fill a chapbook.

  The loss is not unique to Sappho. Only a small sampling of lyric poetry from Archaic Greece, the period when the form first flourished, survives at all. The nine poets the Alexandrians canonized were themselves survivors of a much larger tradition, most of which has vanished.

• 5. The World That Made the Poems

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  Greek lyric poetry is, at its core, the product of the Greek polis, the city-state and the social world it created. The period most associated with the form runs from the early 7th century to the early 5th century BC, a span sometimes called the "Lyric Age of Greece," though the tradition continued into the Hellenistic and Imperial periods.

  Lyric sits alongside drama and epic as one of three broad categories of poetry in classical antiquity, according to a scheme developed by Goethe in the early 19th century. Drama belongs in this company because both tragedy and comedy in ancient Greece were written in verse. Much of Greek lyric is occasional poetry, which means it was composed to mark specific public or private events, whether performed by a soloist or by a chorus.

  The themes that ran through all of it, from Archilochus's invective to Pindar's victory odes, included politics, war, sports, drinking, money, youth, old age, death, the heroic past, and both heterosexual and homosexual love. What held the tradition together was less any single subject than the expectation that poetry would accompany the defining moments of a Greek life, from a boy's first athletic win to a soldier's last rites.