style="font-size:15px;"> 90 90 Cf. Depew 2000. Agalma derives from ἀγάλλω, “pay honour to a god”; we may thus gloss the word as “that which pays honour to a god.”91 91 At their best they contain fine lyric narrative (Theseus, 17) in simpler language.
92 92 Aristophanes fr. 235 PCG; Plutarch Sympotic Questions 711d.
CHAPTER 3 Epic and Lyric
Adrian Kelly
Introduction
There are several points of contact between epic and lyric poetry of the archaic period, although all of them, in their capacity to articulate the differences between these modes of composition, require some kind of nuance and offer interesting exceptions.1 First of all, Meter and Language: epic poets composed in a stichic (“line-by-line”) pattern called the dactylic hexameter, and their Kunstsprache (roughly, “poetic language”) combined the Aeolic and Ionic dialects from different periods. The elegists use the same language and basic dactylic rhythm (that is, one heavy followed by two light syllables, represented as ), but the lines are arranged in couplets (a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter), while the other lyric meters are much more varied, ranging from stichic patterns to stanzaic groupings of verses. Their language is just as traditional as that of epic, if drawing more freely on Aeolic and Doric forms (corresponding to the geographical and cultural centers of these traditions), as well as on the epic language itself.2 Secondly, Scale: most lyric compositions were relatively short and tied to an immediate, if not necessarily real, performance setting, but this is not inevitable: many lyric poems lack a specific link with the external audience, and elegies could be very long, even if we leave out of consideration the extensive melic heroic narratives of Stesichorus and his Western Greek forebears. Moreover, standard epic performances weren’t as lengthy, presumably, as the Iliad and Odyssey; Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (roughly 1,000 and 800 lines long, respectively) and the larger Homeric Hymns fit much more neatly into the scale usually imagined, and some of these epic hymns are very short. Thirdly, Self-presentation and Perspective: epic poets—at least those concerned largely with narrative—seem usually to have self-anonymized, standing at a distance from the mythical content of their works, while lyric poets were more inclined to refer to the external audience’s contemporary world and to foreground their own and their audience’s role in it. Again, we have exceptions: Stesichorus doesn’t seem generally to have followed his lyric brethren, while Hesiod (and possibly other epic poets) freely deployed “autobiographical” statements within their songs. Fourthly, Delivery: while both modes were accompanied by a stringed instrument, the kithara, phorminx, or lyra, the epic poet’s style is sometimes held to have been closer to recitative, rather than the singing of the elegist (to the accompaniment of the aulos or reed-pipe) and the rest of the lyric poets, much of whose work, moreover, could be performed either by a soloist or a chorus. Again, however, Homeric language reveals a strong conception of epic poetry as song, and Hesiod’s famous story of the Muses giving him a staff (Theog. 30) probably represents a sign of poetic authority rather than revealing a change in delivery style, viz. from sung to spoken. Fifth, Performance context: lyric poetry is often associated with smaller, more private occasions, such as the symposium (drinking-club), while epic poetry is frequently linked with larger, more public events, such as the festival depicted in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (146–176), or the funeral competition mentioned by Hesiod in the Works and Days (654–669). But this differential has even less value than the others: choral lyric poetry, like Alcman’s Partheneia (“Maiden [songs]”), obviously found a natural home in public performances, and some of the most famous depictions of epic performances in the Odyssey (1.325–327, 8.62–107) render a smaller-scale performance in a patron’s household more than conceivable.
The reader may be relieved to know at this stage that, despite the nuances just suggested, there is no practical difficulty in distinguishing an epic poem from a lyric poem. The relationship between these modes of composition, nonetheless, has long been a matter for discussion. Scholarship once divided early Greek literary history into temporally discrete periods, with epic preceding lyric, so that the latter was seen as solely derivative and reactive. Not only did this tend to reduce our conception of epic to the dominant extant examples (sometimes not even that) in order to make comparisons seem more stark,3 but now we recognize the continuities and evolution of both “types” before and after the archaic period: the poems of the “Epic Cycle,” for instance, were being composed and performed well after the Iliad and the Odyssey, and found a lively reception in visual and poetic discourse,4 while, for example, the elegiac couplet is clearly already of some antiquity before we first encounter it in the poetry of Archilochus in the seventh century. Both genres are thereby freed from a teleological straitjacket: lyric poets need not simply be reacting to an epic model, epic poets other than Homer (and Hesiod) become more visible to the literary historian even as they encapsulate and modify elements within the lyric traditions, and we become alive to a mutually enriching process at the heart of literary history in the Archaic period.
I Epic and Elegy on War 1: Tyrtaeus
So we should not deny a constant interplay between the forms throughout the archaic period, especially but not only in places like Lesbos, which enjoyed strong local traditions of both epic and lyric poetry,5 though this chapter inevitably focuses more on the latter material. Such an interplay is particularly evident when epic and lyric poets treat the same theme, especially with the elegists, whose formal similarities with the epic tradition permit us to see them manipulating common themes, but in a more self-contained, contemporary direction.6 Take the contrast between old age and youth, in the context of violent death in battle, as found in the Iliad and the seventh-century Spartan elegist Tyrtaeus.7 In Homer (Il. 22.71– 76), Priam says that it is a fine thing for the young to die in battle, but shameful for the old to lie dead, so as to exhort Hector not to risk death by fighting Achilles: instead, he is to save himself for the good of the city. The comparison at first sight militates against his point; perhaps Priam is really contrasting the desire (or normative expectation) that the young should die in battle with the need to protect the old from the kind of violent end which the sack of Troy would—indeed will—entail. Nonetheless, a niggling impression of inconsistency remains, especially given that Tyrtaeus uses the same theme in a hortatory elegy (fr. 10.21–30 W): the poet here makes it clear that the death of an old man in battle is a shameful thing, following on from his call to the young specifically not to abandon their elders (15–20), while it is both laudable and beautiful for a youth to die there. The same theme as that in the Iliad is woven more directly into its surroundings, since its message is addressed to the young when exhorting them to fight in such a way that they not “love their lives” (18). Though important, the question of epic or elegiac priority is less crucial here than observing the greater specificity and self-contention of the lyric poem: it cannot rely on a wider narrative context, and must instead fill out its claim on the audience in a more direct, self-sufficient way.8
II Hesiod and Alcaeus on Drinking
Approximation between epic and lyric modalities can proceed even without the aid of shared dialect and meter. Consider the pictures of high summer in Hesiod’s Works and Days (582–596) and the sixth-century Lesbian poet Alcaeus (fr. 347).9 Hesiod sets out a series of seasonal signs (582–588) before suggesting a somewhat restrained drink (mixed three parts of pure water and one of wine: 588–589, 595–596) for the farmer, resting from the cool of the sun after enjoying the best food the season has to offer (590–594). Alcaeus’ much shorter treatment uses a stichic meter (called the “Asclepiad”) like the hexameter, and allows several correspondences with Hesiod’s language
