The Allure of Narrative in Greek Lyric Poetry

Abstract

This chapter concerns itself with Greek lyric’s attention to its own allure, through an exploration of the tension between absorption into the narrativity of lyric’s worlds, on the one hand, and, on the other, attentiveness to lyric’s exposition of the artifice and ornamentation of language, and of the intertextualities that constitute the building blocks of lyric narrative. Building on accounts of lyric, literary allure, and literary narrative in recent work in comparative literature as well as hin Classics, the chapter explores the experience of narrative across a diverse range of Greek lyric texts—Stesichorus, Bacchylides, Anacreon, and Pindar—and assesses the range of effects produced and complexities entailed while also drawing out what seems to be distinctively lyrical about all these examples of Greek lyric’s attitudes towards narrative.