and its modality to the needs of the lyric poet.
IX Lyric into Epic, Epic into Lyric: Stesichorus
If we are right to see a creative agonism at the heart of this interaction, then it reaches something of a paradoxical climax in the works of the mid-sixth-century Western Greek lyric poet, Stesichorus of Himera, whose songs almost entirely comprised mythological narratives, composed in a variety of dactylic rhythms.49 Their length was extraordinary, next to those of the other lyric poets, with works ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 verses. These facts make him exceptional enough, but he was also unlike other lyricists in not saying much of himself or his contemporary audiences and performance settings in these compositions, and in digging out the less conventional parts of those stories. For example, his treatment of the conflict between Heracles and the monster Geryon focused much more on humanizing the latter than on heroizing his slayer (as, e.g., Hesiod’s story does: Theogony 287–294, 979–983), a choice perhaps unsurprisingly given the poem’s title: Geryoneis or “song of Geryon.”
That is not to say that he did not treat famous, panhellenic myths: his oeuvre included poems with the titles Sack of Troy, Oresteia, and the Returns (of the heroes from Troy), and his interaction especially with Homer was of an extraordinarily sophisticated sort; he took not only formulaic phrases and epic type-scenes such as those we found throughout the lyric tradition, but even unique expressions become the subject of his recreative poetry, such as the simile of the poppy applied to Geryon’s death (fr. 19.44–7 F) drawn from the same, unique, simile image in the Homeric description of the minor warrior Gorgythion’s death (Il. 8.302–308).50 Nonetheless, we can get the clearest picture of his unique stance vis-à-vis the other lyric poets, by turning to his deployment of the Helen myth—a popular theme, as we have seen. Whether his poem Helen was the same as his Palinode (or Palinodes),51 Stesichorus’ treatment represented a broad-spectrum rehabilitation, a response to the critical coverage Helen received in epic poetry—but also to the denunciations in Alcaeus, and the more qualified picture in Sappho. Stesichorus went much further in his exculpation than any previous author: he denied that she had gone to Troy, her place there being taken by a phantom (this, too, is an epic theme, but taken to an extreme conclusion: see, e.g., Il. 5.449–453), and this version would perhaps unsurprisingly leave its mark on later literature, both in Herodotus (2.112–120) and Euripides’ Helen. But unlike his lyric predecessors when they turned their attention to Helen, Stesichorus doesn’t select or allude or compose on a small scale—he massively retells and revises her entire story (perhaps more than once!), and in doing so he shows himself a true modal hybrid, with the scale, self-presentation, and ambition of an epic poet, the delivery and performance contexts of a lyric poet, and the languages and rhythms of both.
* * *
The lyric poets of the Archaic period interacted with epos as well as their own lyric past, and bequeathed to later ages a rich, inter-modal inheritance, opening the way for future experimentation and cross-fertilization between epic and lyric modes of poetic composition. Without this extraordinary, path-breaking period, the next great efflorescence of Greek poetic creativity, the works of Athenian tragedy, would have been impossible.
FURTHER READING
For general introductions to this material, see Herington 1985; Graziosi and Haubold 2009; Budelmann 2018b: 16–18; Kelly 2015; Rawles 2018 (all with further bibliography). For an excellent overview of the varieties of epic poetry in this period, see Gainsford 2016. Pallantza 2005 and Bowie 2010b discuss the lyric refractions especially of Trojan War material in the poetry after Homer. For recent developments in elegy’s relationship with epic, which tend to see the two forms as both independent and interdependent, see Lulli 2016, and the controversial arguments of Faraone 2006 and 2008 that the elegists used basic ten-verse stanzaic structure (viz. five couplets). The opposite tendency in iambos, i.e., to read it as all parasitic directly on Homer, is visible in recent studies in iambos, e.g., the essays by Alexandrou and Hawkins in Swift and Carey 2016, with very skeptical response in Kelly forthcoming.
Notes
1 1 I am grateful to Laura Swift for her invitation and scrutiny of this chapter, and to Bill Allan and Felix Budelmann for reading drafts and assisting me with its material. For Sappho and Alcaeus, I use the numeration of Campbell; for the elegists, that of West. This chapter uses the term “mode” to describe “epic” and “lyric” as distinct poetic forms, since current terminology (e.g., “genre,” “sub-genre,” even “super-genre”) can be deployed, confusingly, for both these broadest groupings and also their most specific several sub-types. Under the “lyric” mode I include (a) sung poetry (sometimes labeled “melic”) of the sort practiced by Sappho, Alcaeus, Alcman, and Ibycus, and (b) recitative poetry of the elegiac tradition, as practiced by Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus, Theognis, etc. Many poets were productive in more than one group (e.g., Archilochus, Simonides) and even modes (e.g., Sappho frr. 105–109, 142, 143: see Kelly 2021: 56–57), and so the possibility of experimentation beyond and within these boundaries needs always to be remembered. The basic differentiation in this chapter is, therefore, “epic” and “non-epic” (in all their varieties). The current survey is limited to the Archaic period down to Simonides. Iambic poetry receives no mention in this chapter, as its interaction with epic is uncertain: see Kelly forthcoming and, specifically on Hipponax’s so-called “mini-Odyssey” (frr. 74–77 W), Prodi 2017a.
2 2 See esp. Hooker 1977 and Bowie 1981 on the traditionality of the Lesbian poetic language; and de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume.
3 3 For the variety of epic poems, forms, and approaches to be found in early Greek epos, see Gainsford 2016.
4 4 See now Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, with much further bibliography.
5 5 See West 2002: 218 = 2011–2013: i 406–407; for Lesbos in the Homeric epic tradition, see Il. 9.129, 664, 24.544, Od.3.169.
6 6 For the need to see elegy as not simply a reactive offshoot from epic, see Faraone 2006: 19–21; Lulli 2016: esp. 193–195 (though much of her following treatment seems to do precisely this).
7 7 See de Jong 2012: 75–76 for recent summary, and further bibliography.
8 8 For another example of epic/elegiac interaction, see the famous “men as leaves” topos, found in Iliad 6.145–50 (but also 2.467–468, 2.800–801, 21.462–467, Od. 7.105–106, Od. 9.47–50), and in Mimnermus fr. 2.1–5 W, and Simonides frr. 19–20 W; see Griffith 1975; Sider 1996: 273–275; Burgess 2001: 117–126; Kelly 2015: 22–24; Rawles 2018: 106–129. Once more, whatever judgment we make as to priority, the elegiac refraction cannot rely on the narrative context to smooth out its interpretation.
9 9 For readings of Alcaeus’ poem, see e.g., Page 1955: 303–306; Rösler 1980: 256–264; Petropoulos 1994 passim; MacLachlan 1997: 142–143; Hunter 2014: 123–126.
10 10 The pattern is ‒ × ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ‒ ˘ ˘ ‒ ˘ ‒ (“dactylic” portions underlined).
11 11 The poem may have continued; nonetheless, aside from Sirius forming a ring with ἄστρον (1: Budelmann 2018b: on lines 5–6, 113), ἄσδει also reverses the opening verb τέγγει “drench.”
12 12 See Budelmann 2018b: 111.
13 13 See esp. Petropoulos 1994. The image is found also in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, a mid-sixth-century epic tale (393–400) roughly contemporaneous with Alcaeus, but the points of arguably direct contact with Hesiod are fewer.
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