Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Recent scholarship on early Greek elegy suggests that there were two basic types: shorter poems sung at symposia on a variety of martial, political, and erotic themes and much longer historical narratives, such as Mimnermus’ Smyrneis or Simonides’ poem on the battle of Plataea. There is less consensus on the existence of a third type, a formal elegaic lament sung in funerary contexts that was perhaps a specialty of the Doric world. Our understanding of all forms of archaic elegy is, however, continually vexed by our inability to know what was the traditional length of a shorter elegiac poem and what—if any—was the size of a typical compositional unit in the more extended poems. Such ignorance greatly limits our aesthetic appreciation, for example, of the poetry of Archilochus and Mimnermus, which survives antiquity only in small, isolated fragments quoted out of context by much later authors, who were generally more interested in mining these ancient poems for moral maxims than appreciating them as examples of archaic poetry. This ignorance is equally debilitating when we turn our attention to the longer