Greek lyric

• 1. Origins And Performance Contexts

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  Greek lyric emerged in the early 7th century BC within the political and social milieu of the Greek polis. This body of poetry was written in dialects of Ancient Greek and served as a product of that specific city-state environment. Much of this work functioned as occasional poetry composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions. The symposium, known as a drinking party, provided one setting where these poems were performed. Lyric could be sung to the accompaniment of either a string instrument like the lyre or kithara or a wind instrument such as the reed pipe called the aulos. Whether the accompaniment was a string or wind instrument, the term for such accompanied lyric was melic poetry from the Greek word for song. Lyric could also be sung without any instrumental accompaniment. This latter form is called meter and it is recited rather than sung strictly speaking.

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• 2. Genres And Thematic Scope

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  Modern surveys often include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly song lyrics in the modern sense. These forms include elegies and iambics which had different metres and different musical instruments compared to melic poetry. The Greeks themselves did not include elegies nor iambus within melic poetry since they possessed distinct characteristics. Greek lyric poems celebrate athletic victories through epinikia and commemorate the dead with religious devotion in the forms of hymns paeans and dithyrambs. Partheneia or maiden-songs were sung by choruses of maidens at festivals. 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 an art at which Archilochus excelled. Archilochus stands as the earliest known Greek lyric poet who mastered the art of poetic attack aimed at insulting or shaming a personal enemy. The themes of Greek lyric encompass politics war sports drinking money youth old age death the heroic past the gods and hetero- and homosexual love.

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• 3. The Nine Canonical Poets

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  In the 3rd century BC the encyclopedic movement at Alexandria anthologized a canon of nine melic poets. This group included Alcaeus Alcman Anacreon Bacchylides Ibycus Pindar Sappho Simonides and Stesichorus. Only a small sampling of lyric poetry from Archaic Greece survives today. For example the poems of Sappho are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the Library of Alexandria. The first book alone contained more than 1,300 lines of verse. In modern times only one of Sappho's poems exists intact with fragments from other sources that would scarcely fill a chapbook. This severe fragmentation defines the survival rate of Archaic texts compared to their original volume. The Alexandrian scholars preserved what they could but the vast majority of these works remain lost to history.

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• 4. Metrical Structures And Rhythm

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  Greek poetry meters are based on patterns of long and short syllables in contrast to English verse which is determined by stress. Lyric poetry is characterized by a great variety of metrical forms apart from the shift between long and short syllables. Stress must be considered when reading Greek poetry as well. The interplay between the metric shifts the stressed syllables and caesuras is an integral part of the poetry. It allows the poet to stress certain words and shape the meaning of the poem. There are two main divisions within the meters of ancient Greek poetry: lyric and non-lyric meters. Lyric meters literally mean meters sung to a lyre and are usually less regular than non-lyric meters. The lines are made up of feet of different kinds and can be of varying lengths. Some lyric meters were used for monody such as some of the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus while others were used for choral dances like the choruses of tragedies and the victory odes of Pindar. The lyric meters families include the Ionic the Aeolic based on the choriamb and the Dactylo-epitrite. The Doric choral songs were composed in complex triadic forms of strophe antistrophe and epode with the first two parts having the same metrical pattern.

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