Flutes and Elegiac Couplets

Abstract

My purpose in this article is to call attention to the inconclusive nature of the evidence for the view that the proper accompaniment of early Greek elegiac poetry was the flute. The elegiac couplet has been aptly called ‘a variation upon the heroic hexameter in the direction of lyric poetry’. But how far did it go in this direction? In particular, did early elegiac poetry have a close connexion with music? A distinction is commonly drawn between poetry written κατὰ στίχον, for example the epic hexameter and the iambic trimeter, which was spoken or at most intoned, and poetry in lyric metres which was sung to musical accompaniment: to which group does elegiac poetry belong?Passages in Plutarch and Pausanias and hints in the lexicographers and in the early elegists themselves have suggested to some scholars that there was a connexion between elegiac poetry and the flute.