Greek Lyric Research Articles

FASTI HORATIANI: HORACE'S AUGUSTAN APPROPRIATION OF THE CALENDAR

This article argues that Horace's incorporation of festivals does more than reflect his lived reality and add a Roman veneer to Greek lyric. Horace's festivals weave the poet and his life into publicly shared Roman time. His celebration of private events on public holidays mirrors the kind of penetration of public and private we see in imperial appropriation of the fasti. Just as 28 April, the start of the Floralia, gains new significance with the addition of feriae celebrating the transfer of Vesta's temple to Augustus’ house, so also 1 March comes to signify both the Matronalia as well as the divine rescue of Horace the bachelor. Horace's inclusion of private festivals in his monumentum allows him to create a parallel calendar, one which perhaps competes with the imperial fasti. This exploitation of the fasti plays a key role in Horace's ability to immortalize himself and what he cared most about.

PECULIARITIES OF THE SEMANTICS OF “FRIEND” AND “ENEMY”IN ARCHAIC LYRICS: A GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The article provides a general description of the image of friend and enemy in early Greek lyrics. First of all, the author defines the specificity of the key lexemes of the ancient Greek language for the studied concepts, namely φίλος, and ἐχθρὸς, emphasizing their diversity, ambiguity, “untranslatability” and contextuality. This situation is also connected with the presence of a kind of “dictionary” of both friendship and enmity in the language of the ancient Greeks. It is proved that the source of the designation of a person as a “friend/enemy” for the early Greek lyricists was the work of the archaic epic, namely the works of Homer and Hesiod since both epics and lyricists noted that both gods and humans can be friends. At the same time, it is emphasized that the possibility of friendly relations with the transcendent was widespread in the ancient Near Eastern tradition. By examining the works of such early Greek lyricists as Alcmaeon, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Pindar, Sappho, and Theognis, it is proved that the image of a friend is dual, according to the use of one or another lexeme φίλος or ἑταῖρος. Φίλος denoted a friend with whom a person has a spiritual/emotional affinity, although this did not exclude usefulness, while ἑταῖρος determined the relationship between the mundane and everyday. This distinction between friendship and kinship was also due to the reflections of the pre-Socratics, as they contributed to this clarification by arguing that there are conditions for friendship that do not necessarily exist between family and friends. It has been proved that enemies in the context of the works of the lyricists of the pre-classical period of ancient culture exist not only in the relations between people but also between certain mythological characters. The Greek poets of the pre-classical period did not hate the enemy as such only for some atrocities, but it was a mutual feeling. One was not at odds with a person blindly, thoughtlessly, but because of the corresponding (in)action with which this or that person was associated. The image of the enemy has not only a negative meaning, since negative, sometimes even cruel feelings will be felt towards him, but also positive and friendly ones, if he really deserves it.

Reframing Tragedy

Reframing Tragedy

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

Post-Classical Greek Elegy and Lyric Poetry

Abstract This volume traces the development of Greek elegy and lyric in the hands of Hellenistic and Roman-era poets, from literary superstars such as Callimachus and Theocritus to more obscure, often anonymous authors. Designed as a guide for advanced students and scholars working in adjacent fields, this volume introduces and explores the diverse body of surviving later Greek elegy and lyric, contextualizes it within Hellenistic and Roman culture and politics, and surveys contemporary critical interpretations, methodological approaches, and avenues for future study.

The political invective in the Early Greek Lyric: The case of Alcaeus

The political invective in the Early Greek Lyric: The case of Alcaeus

The Problem of the Absent I

Abstract One of the greatest paradoxes of ancient Greek lyric poetry is its fundamental tension between the vivid evocation of a performance communicative context and the capability of the text to transcend the context itself. A key aspect of this is the way in which language can exploit both poles of this tension: the presentness of the performance and the transcendence of the text. This is a source of crucial interpretative problems, as well as of complex expressive potentialities. The focus of this paper is to examine some of the ways in which the shift of the use of first person indexicals serves the dialogue between text and performance, proceeding through three stages. In the first place I briefly analyze some different genres of discourse (drama, epistle, lyric) that in Archaic and Classical Greek display a complex use of indexicality calling attention to the ‘mediated’ nature of the communication process (§ 2). In the second stage I revise some examples of ‘mediated’ indexicality in Greek lyric in general (§ 3) and in Pindaric poetry in particular (§ 4). In the third stage I locate these cases within a wider comparative approach, exploring a suitable theoretical explanation of this important feature (§ 5).

Limb-Loosening and the Care of History: Tracing a Motif in Vergil

Limb-Loosening and the Care of History: Tracing a Motif in Vergil GEORGE SAAD the counter-voice of eros in epic While the Homeric world clearly underlies Vergil’s Aeneid, this Roman appropriation of Greek epic is not without complications. Vergil, taking the whole of history as his theme, develops a world subject to cosmic forces beyond the might and craft of Homeric heroes. To overcome enemies is no mean feat, but how is the world itself overcome? How does the hero move history? Prior to writing the Aeneid, Vergil had already found this world-conquering power in amor and labor improbus,1 which conquer all things. Love and unrelenting toil always step beyond their limits. Unlike Achilles, they rage on after the bodies are buried. Always unsatisfied, they cut deeper than the superficial, personal manipulations of sword and stratagem. These forces reach beyond the satisfaction of any finite objective, encompassing and reshaping the entire world. As Vergil is more than an epic poet, the Aeneid transcends the presuppositions of Homeric epic. Against the wider horizon of world history, the epic form becomes the contingent expression of an outmoded worldview, one now seen from outside itself and suspended in comparison with other possible alternatives. And so, though Vergil sings of arms and the man, it is not at all clear that he means to exult the armed man. The ambiguity of Vergil’s commitments has been expressed in Adam Parry’s reading of Vergil as counterposing “two voices” in the Aeneid, 2 a main voice of Roman triumph and a counter -voice questioning the Roman imperial project. This counter -voice ties Vergil to genres outside of epic, genres with their arion 28.2 fall 2020 44 limb-loosening and the care of history own often opposing views of the human condition. Sappho offers one such critique of epic from the erotic perspective of lyric when she asks if any military pageantry could really be more beautiful than the object of her desire (Sappho LP 16). Though the sentiment comes from Greek lyric, it perfectly applies to the crisis of value-commitments Aeneas faces across his journey, most obviously (but not exclusively) in abandoning Dido for Roman glory. The conflicting voices Parry found within the Aeneid are thus analogous to the contrast between epic and lyric, between a view of the world as violence redeemed by public renown and a view of the world as love contained within personal intimacy. Even in Vergil’s most quintessentially epic moments, the deaths of great heroes, an echo of the lyrical voice is present. A formula repeated at the beginning and end of the epic—solvuntur frigore membra—describes the introductory surrender of Aeneas during the storm (Aen 1.92) as well as the concluding death of Turnus at Aeneas’ own hands (Aen 12.951). The hero and his rival both fall with their “limbs slack in a chill,”3 one in desperate supplication, the other in death. What exactly does this mean? Do the limbs seize up in a kind of terror, stiffening in rigor mortis as frigore would suggest? Or is the stress on the solvuntur, as the limbs loosen with a free sensuality evocative of lyrical eroticism? On the most basic physical level, solvere describes the body as somehow coming apart and losing its unified form, yet in these uses it also suggests the opposite, a rigid stiffening of the body. There is clearly more than a physical account intended in each of these expressions. Some deeper semantic sense unites the physical descriptions. Vergil is not entirely innovating with this expression, as Homer uses a similar phrase to describe the deaths of Patroclus and Hector (Il. 16.856–57; 22.68). I aim to demonstrate how this epic formula draws upon a literary tradition which supplies the wider semantic sense necessary to contextualize these passages in Vergil. The epic poets are relying upon a George Saad 45 long-standing motif to describe the loosening of boundaries between individual and world in a moment of bittersweet release. While this motif arises throughout Greek literature, it is especially characteristic of lyric. The loosening of the limbs becomes especially conspicuous in Vergil because this...

Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods

Abstract What is distinctive about Greek lyric poetry? How should we conceptualize it in relation to broader categories such as literature / song / music / rhetoric / history? What critical tools might we use to analyze it? How do we, should we, can we relate to its intensities of expression, its modes of address, its uses of myth and imagery, its attitudes to materiality, its sense of its own time, and its contextualizations? These are the questions that this discussion seeks to investigate, exploring and analysing a range of influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.

Обозначение единоличных правителей архаической Греции в письменных источниках

In the present paper the author analyses the evidence of the archaic Greek lyrics containing mentions of tyrants and tyranny and presents her version of the answer to the question who and why were called tyrants by the Greeks in the archaic period.

AESCHYLUS’ DIKTYOULKOI: A TYPICALLY ATYPICAL SATYR PLAY?

Abstract The story of Danae and her son Perseus on Seriphos, where they are initially rescued by Dictys only to be his molested by his brother Polydectes, appeared in Greek lyric, tragedy, and comedy. Aeschylus’ satyric handling of the story has been read as a light-hearted, romantic romp with Silenos and the chorus acting as benign foster-parents to the infant hero. But Aeschylus gives Silenos and the chorus of satyrs a more menacing identity than they generally had in other plays of this genre. Silenos can be seen as the comical counterpart of Polydectes, and appears to have the full support of his sons, something he clearly does not enjoy in other satyric dramas. The satyrs of the chorus stand in contrast to the often more sympathetic, if clownish, creatures they can be elsewhere. Diktyoulkoi contains elements typical of satyr drama, but in paradoxical ways not without moments of pathos.

Las fronteras, la muerte y la eternidad. La poesía en el cine de T. Anguelópulos

In this paper the authoress deals with the film “The eternity and a Day”, linking it with modern Greek Lyrics, especially with the character of Dionysios Solomos, cornerstone of National Greek Poetry.
 His presence in the film is used as a symbol of Greek values which, in times of crisis (either individual –illness– or collective –war, immigration–) turn themselves into universal referents such as freedom and human dignity.

НЕКОТОРЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ АРХАИЧЕСКОЙ ГРЕЧЕСКОЙ ЛИРИКИ В НАУЧНОМ НАСЛЕДИИ О.М. ФРЕЙДЕНБЕРГ

The article deals with some passages from several important works by O.M. Freidenderg, an outstanding Russian scholar, that are connected with issues of Archaic Greek lyric. With her views on that subject O.M. Freidenberg was much ahead of her time. Some of them now find parallels in postmodernist humanitarian studies. Being under influence of, on one hand, of N. Marr’s ideas, and, on the other hand, of the “Cambridge ritualistic school” in philology (J. Frazer, F. Cornford and others), O.M. Freidenberg in her works insisted on folklore origins of Ancient Greek lyric and genealogized it eventually to rituals. Accordingly, she was ready to minimize authorial principle in that lyric. Her thoughts on symposial context of Hellenic lyric poetry are of importance (nowadays, such a context is accepted unequivocally by scholars and is often researched). However, some Freidenberg’s theses seem to be wrong, as, for example, her suggestion to date Sappho’s verses almost a century later than is accepted, and her factual negation of the very historicity of the poetess.

Voices of the dead: Underworld narratives in Bacchylides’ Ode 5 and Odyssey 11

Abstract This article identifies the influence of the Homeric ‘Poetics of Hades’ in Greek Lyric and argues for an aetiological relationship between the persistent presentation of the lyric poet’s subjective voice and the freedom of speech introduced in Homer’s Underworld. The article demonstrates this relationship through an examination of Bacchylides’ Ode 5 and argues that the lyric poet consciously innovates upon Homer’s underworld narratives by allowing his Meleager to occupy the stage and takes the audience through his agonising last minutes by describing what dying feels like in his own voice. In doing so, Bacchylides presents his audeience with a Meleager who glosses over his heroic actions and moments of glory in favour for a more emotional and subjective view of his past, filled with regret and self-pity. In this respect the hero is no different from the ghost of Achilles who dismisses honour after death for the simple privilege of seeing the light of the sun, or Agamemnon who is consumed by the memory of his wife’s treachery while having nothing to say about his glorious exploits at Troy. This powerful retelling of the story of a great epic hero of the past looks, I argue, simultaneously backwards and forwards, since on the one hand it is inherited from Homer’s ‘Poetics of Hades’, while on the other, it anticipates the emotional and unmediated voices of the heroes and heroines of the tragic stage.

A Sympotic Self: Instruction through Inebriation in Anacreon

As early as the fifth century, Anacreon was the poet of wine, love, and song; even his death—choking on a pip—is attributed to the grape. The fact that the symposion looms large in the extant fragments is, therefore, hardly surprising. In this article, I examine Anacreon’s sympotic verse and its moral quality. While the ethical character of Xenophanes’ and Theognis’ sympotic fragments has been acknowledged, most scholars consider Anacreon as a poet of love, rather than of moral instruction. Recently, Lear and Hobden have begun to address the moral and instructive character of Anacreon’s verse. I build on these analyses by examining the Anacreontic speaker’s presentation of moral value through his own person; there are 46 first-person statements in Anacreon, an important fact considering the narrative and psychological potency of “I” statements in early Greek lyric. In contrast to gnomic statements that purport to be generalized prescriptions, Anacreon’s performative “I” offers an alternative mode of moralizing delivery. These first persons, however, are not the same person: Anacreon gives a multitude of perspectives on appropriate sympotic behaviour. I read the Anacreontic speaker’s diverse and changing persona as a challenging and embodied moral perspective, which destabilizes the idea of a true self, and consequently denies the stereotyping of ancient poetic biography. By enunciating Anacreon’s songs, the speaker puts his own body and individuality into play in the “educative” space of the symposion. In Anacreon’s verse, the self itself becomes the space on which sympotic instructions—moral imperatives—are inscribed and displayed to others.

Ethics and Musical Language: A Gramscian Reading of Dallapiccola’s Liriche greche and Their Influence

Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75)—a pioneering figure as serialist, composer of protest music, and trailblazer for the avant-garde—wrote his Greek Lyrics song cycle (1942–5) as an escape from wartime anxiety. I locate the Lyrics within a nexus of technique, text setting, and ethical engagement. That complex resonated with the younger composers Berio, Nono, and Maderna, each responding in the postwar period with settings from the same collection, Quasimodo’s 1940 free translation of classic Greek lyrics. I examine Quasimodo’s ethics, placing his poetry and Dallapiccola’s settings within Gramsci’s notions of language and politics, which were highly influential on postwar Italian composers.

A Satyriastic Epiphany in Horace’s Eleventh Epode

Epode 11 presents several puzzles. What causes Horace’s embarrassed silence at a symposium? What does his impassioned but opaque speech mean? How does the poem relate to the genres of elegy and iambus? The “symptoms of love” motif does not fully explain Horace’s behavior. This article offers a new reading: Horace is in the presence of his girlfriend, rival, or both; worse still, he suffers an attack of satyriasis, an erection accompanied by uncontrollable desire. The motif is paralleled in the Symposion Relief of Cos, which I trace back to a common source in Greek lyric.

O lógos dos polloí no argumento de Gláucon

In Book II of Plato’s Republic , after the praise of justice as part of the most beautiful class of goods by Socrates, Glaucon responds by saying that this is not the opinion of the majority (δοκeῖ ... πολλοῖς). Our work aims to investigate who are the polloi presented by Glaucon as a counter-argument to Socrates. For this we will use a specific part of his speech: the myth of Gyges’ ring. As a hypothesis for our investigation, we draw a parallel with ancient Greek lyrics, which in its poetry spoke for the fi rst time Gyges of Lydia. Keywords: Plato’s Republic, Glacon’s speech, Gyges, ancient Greek lyrics.

The Lyric of Ibycus: Introduction, Texts and Commentary by Claire Louise Wilkinson (review)

Reviewed by: The Lyric of Ibycus: Introduction, Texts and Commentary by Claire Louise Wilkinson Laura Swift Claire Louise Wilkinson . The Lyric of Ibycus: Introduction, Texts and Commentary. Sozomena, 13. Berlin : de Gruyter , 2013 . Pp. x, 318 . €154.00 . ISBN 978–3-11–029514–6 . This book, a revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis, offers us a commentary on “those fragments which offer the greatest scope for an analysis of Ibycus as a writer” (preface), along with a text based on Wilkinson’s examination of the papyri, her own translations, and a general introduction dealing with Ibycus as [End Page 559] an author. While the reader may regret the fact that Wilkinson was unable to pursue her original aim of providing a commentary on every fragment of Ibycus, we should not overlook how thorough a resource she has provided us with, for the detail and scope of this book far exceeds any other publication on this author. The introduction is relatively short, but it covers all the main bases, and offers discussion of Ibycus’ life and dates, the major themes of his poetry (myth, love, and praise), his use of imagery, likely performance contexts, dialect, meter, and the transmission of the poetry. For me, the most interesting section was that on myth, which begins with a helpful list of the range of myth categories to which Ibycus refers and uses this to discuss where he is similar to other lyric poets (such as his interest in Trojan myth) and where he differs (in his use of Sicilian themes, which Wilkinson connects to the desires of local patrons). The discussion of Ibycus’ relationship to epinicia, and the question of whether he can be considered an epinician poet, will also be useful, since, as Wilkinson notes (24), this is an issue that has been overlooked in Anglophone scholarship. The table of Ibycus’ use of imagery (28) provides a quick overview of a dense topic and helps the reader to draw out major strands. The commentary itself forms the bulk of the book, and can fairly be described as exhaustive. Each fragment is given its own miniature introduction, dealing with questions such as the content and type of poem, the papyrus, metrical analysis, or further general points about style and imagery (as applicable). In the lemmatic commentary itself, almost every line of Greek included receives detailed discussion, whether for the choice of an adjective, the parallels for a usage in other authors, or papyrological description. Wilkinson is well versed in the scholarship on the relevant questions, and this is a rigorous and thorough piece of work. At times the commentary could have done with a little streamlining: for example, discussions of parallels could sometimes do with trimming, or with the author making it clearer what the payoff of discussing these parallels is for our understanding of Ibycus. Similarly, while Wilkinson’s desire to take account of the full range of views in the scholarship is admirable, we can get a bit bogged down in the detail at times. Nevertheless, the level of commentary offered will certainly be useful for those wishing to pursue matters further. It is particularly valuable for the less famous fragments, which do not feature in anthologies of lyric or articles other than technical and papyrological ones, and Wilkinson’s patient analysis of these fragments will make it much easier for scholars to see what is interesting or important about them in the future. A gripe aimed at the publisher has to do with the ease of navigation within the volume: it is irritating that the page headers list only the broad grouping of fragments (e.g., “Manuscript Fragments,” or the number of the papyrus which preserves this set of fragments), instead of the individual fragment number, which means that readers cannot simply flick through and find the poems they are looking for, but must use the table of contents each time. This is not a book for beginners to Greek lyric, and Wilkinson at times could ease the reader better into the material, or foreground the important issues more clearly. For graduate students and scholars working on Greek lyric, however, this detailed and scholarly discussion of Ibycus’ poetry...

Poets and athletes: Olympic winners and losers in early Greek lyric

Ancient Greek society was extremely competitive; amongst the nobility especially there was the constant need for an ideal of achievement on the battlefield or athletics track and to integrate this into the family history. In the absence of the role the present-day media plays in our society, three poets in particular recorded, propagated and praised the achievements of athletes at the Olympic and other games: Simonides, Pindar and Bacchylides. For a winner they composed a special victory hymn, the epinikion, an elevated ode sung by a chorus with musical accompaniment. In this article extracts of such poems are analysed in order to illustrate the poets’ views regarding winners and losers.