There may well be something missing at the end of this fragment, but even so it is a self-contained and (con)dense(d) vignette, seemingly designed to make itself as quotable and popular as it became.12
Connection between summer and wine drinking is traditional in early poetry,13 and Hesiod’s consumption is in keeping with his poem’s moderation and restraint (592–596), while the Alcaean refraction isolates and puts the drinking first, and in exuberant terms somewhat removed from the well-instructed farmer seasonally resting from his toils. This contrast, between the repeated rhythms of Hesiod and the definitely hic et nunc nature of Alcaeus’ song, recalls the directness we saw in Tyrtaeus.14
But direct comparisons between lyric and epic modalities are most evident in the case of mythical narratives and exempla, since the lyricists were almost as interested as their epic kin in using the past as a paradigm for the present.15 The narration of myth is, of course, the natural province of epic poetry and dominates our record of the form (and so the rest of this chapter): whether we think of the poems themselves, like the Iliad and Odyssey, which set out large-scale heroic narratives, and the Theogony (and its ilk) and Homeric Hymns which tell the stories of the gods; or of the many characters in those poems who deployed these exempla in their own speeches, as e.g., Phoenix recounting the story of Meleager to Achilles (Il. 9.524– 599), or any of Nestor’s several self-narratives (Il. 1.260–273, etc.). Even epic poets who adopted a more involved self-presentational stance may be grouped here, such as Hesiod in his Works and Days with the myths of Pandora’s creation (47–105) and the Ages of Man (106–201) as direct lessons to his contemporary addressee, Perses, about the power of Zeus.16 This is, in other words, a strategy found everywhere in early epic. So it is in lyric, right across genres and the span of the Archaic period, where we can observe the growth of a specifically lyric or—more accurately perhaps—an openly mixed tradition of mythological exemplarity.
III Eos and Tithonos across the Modes
Most of the time, we don’t have directly comparable treatments of the same tale, which makes particularly valuable the widespread story of the goddess Eos and her Trojan husband Tithonos. In this tale, Eos falls in love with the handsome mortal Tithonos and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Known from several early sources (and assumed in Homer’s formular expressions for daybreak, where Eos simply rises from Tithonos’ side: Il. 11.1–2, Od. 5.1–2), here we can compare three lyric treatments (Tyrtaeus fr. 12.5 W, Mimnermus fr. 4 W, Sappho fr. 58) with an epic one (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–240). For Tyrtaeus, Tithonos is a one-line, almost throwaway, paradigm of beauty (“not even if he were more fair than Tithonos”);17 for Mimnermus, in an isolated and lacunose couplet from his longer elegiac poem Nanno (“to Tithonos [Zeus] gave an everlasting evil/old age, which is more dreadful than terrible death”), aging immortality is even worse than death. Similarly brief, but at least with some contextual detail as to its point, Sappho’s fr. 58 adduces Tithonos’ example, as mortal lover of Eos, to parallel her own aged situation and relationship to Music (vv. 2–7), in contrast to an opening exhortation to unspecified “children” to cultivate the Muses (1–2): she cannot escape old age (6–7), illustrating her point by reference to the state which takes him despite his divine consort (8–12). Her selectivity and allusivity is clear (nb. the reference to tradition in the form ἔφαντο “they said” 9),18 as is the deployment of several apparently epic features, such as the expression for Dawn (βροδόπαχυν Αὔων “rosy-armed Dawn” 9) which looks like a Lesbian recreation of the (later attested) epic phrase of the same meaning Ἠῶ τε ῥοδόπηχυν (HH 31.7), but must be a “new” coinage, given that this epithet is never applied in early epic to Dawn (see Hes. Th. 246, 251, fr. 35.14 M–W, etc.).19
Tithonos as a negative example is found once more in the epic hymn, where Aphrodite explains to Anchises why their liaison cannot be permanent:20 as in Sappho, the relationship between Eos and Tithonos has an exemplary purpose, but the story proceeds in a more leisurely way and sequentially, each activity being fully told before the next: from the first snatching (218–219) all the way to Dawn’s final abandonment of him in the closed bedroom (233–238). Aphrodite then goes on to draw lessons from the story as reasons for them not to be together, in somewhat the way Sappho had tried to link the story with her circumstance (though here at the end rather than the start of the myth), but the differences in scale and process between epic and lyric modalities are clear: the epic speaker/narrator proceeds step-by-step and gives the whole story, in this case within a broader, embedding narrative encounter between goddess and heroic mortal, while the lyricist’s smaller composition selects and alludes only to the desired parts of that story—an excellent example of the general lyric approach to the “epic” material in the Archaic period.
IV Elegy and Epic on War 2: Simonides and Archilochus
A more straightforwardly heroic example can be seen in the famous “Plataea elegy” of the late sixth- and early fifth-century author Simonides of Ceos (frr. 10–17 [+18?] W2), which deploys the story of Greek victory in Troy as a direct comparison for the recent triumph over the Persians in the eponymous battle (479 BC).21 The first extant portion seems to be addressed to Achilles (see esp. fr. 10.5), introducing this poem with an elegiac version of the epic proem-hymn which opens the Theogony (1–104) and Works and Days (1–10), here directed at Achilles; this is closed with the standard hymnic transitional farewell to the god and introduction of the current or next poem, viz. the battle of Plataea itself (fr. 11.19–21). Between those points, the poet summarizes Achilles’ involvement in the Trojan War, but the text is insecure and its story selective: Simonides mentions the hero’s death at the hands of Apollo (lines 7–8), the responsibility of Paris (9–11) and the “chariot of justice” which destroyed the city (12), and the journey home of the Greeks from Troy (13–14), before a transition to talking about the “undying … glory” (15) which they earned through Homer’s poetry (15–18).
Simonides naturally uses epic vocabulary, such as ἀοίδιμον (“worthy of song” fr. 11.13) and ἡμ]ιθέων (“demi-gods” 18), but he also sprinkles in some decidedly non-epic words (ἁγέμαχοι “leaders of battle” 11.14) and phrases (θείης ἅρμα … δίκ̣[ης “chariot of swift justice” 11.12). The poet also creates what looks like an epic formula (ἀθά]νατον … κλέος 11.15), using it again in the Persian narrative section (11.28), but it is in fact not evidenced before him nor again until Bacchylides (13.32); when Simonides uses the epic collocation of “trusting in the gods’ signs,” the precise form (θσῶν τεράε]σ̣σ̣ π̣εποιθότε̣ς 11.39) is not found in extant epic (Il. 4.398, 4.408, 6.183); similarly innovative is his call on the Muse to be an “ally” (ἐπίκουρον fr. 11.21), a subordination of the god and foregrounding of human which will be resumed by Ibycus (see below), while Simonides’ epic recreations continue in describing the setting out of the Greek forces in what looks like a reformed catalog style (fr. 11.29–34; cf. fr. 15 of the battle order).
This desire simultaneously to compete with, as well as pay homage to, the tradition, helps the elegist construct the hoped-for parallelism of Homer’s effect on the Trojan War with his own efforts for the Persian War. The epic world—its themes, concepts, and language—is refashioned for a different kind of mode: Simonides is not just advertising an affiliation or passively following epic norms, but actively participating in an ongoing dialogue with a mixed poetic heritage.
Much the same type of aim, though perhaps generically less self-confident, can be seen at the other end of the period in Archilochus’ “Telephus elegy,” in which the poet apparently excuses a recent military defeat suffered by Parian colonists on Thasos by comparing it to the first Argive reverse, at the hands of Heracles’ son Telephus, when they landed by mistake on
