A Survey of Lyric Genres in Hellenistic Poetry: the Hymn. Transformation, Adaptation, Experimentation

Abstract

The paper is the first part of S. Barbantani’s contribution Lyric for the Rulers, Lyric for the People: The Transformation of Some Lyric Subgenres in Hellenistic Poetry, in E. Sistakou (ed.), Hellenistic Lyricism: Traditions and Transformations of a Literary Mode (Trends in Classics 9, 2), Berlin - Boston 2017, 339-399 (which discusses encomiastic lyric, epinikion in Callimachus, Posidippus and inscriptional epigram, literary epithalamia, threnoi and epikedeia, poems in stichic lyric meters, Carmina popularia, anthologies for symposiastic use and mimes). This contribution analyses how some of the main lyric genres, developed in archaic and classical Greek poetry, underwent transformation in the Hellenistic period, following social, political and cultural changes. The paper specifically explores lyric poetry produced ‘for the gods’ (hymns, esp. paeans, preserved on stone and on papyrus).