we find bards reciting epic poetry accompanied by the lyre (Odyssey 8.66) and archaic Greek poets such as Alcaeus and Sappho are supposed to have sung their lyric poetry to live audiences accompanied – just as the name suggests – by the music of a lyre. However, it wasn’t until much later, in the Hellenistic period (the historical period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bce and the birth of the Roman Empire in 31 bce), that lyric poetry came to be defined essentially by its meter. Or rather, by its meters – plural. For, unlike epic (which is defined as poetry written in hexameter verse) and elegy (which is written in couplets made up of paired lines of verse, namely a hexameter line followed by a pentameter line), lyric poetry uses lots of different meters. Some of these are named after the ancient Greek poets who originally composed the first known lyric poetry: Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides, and Stesichorus. In fact, these nine poets came to represent a formal lyric canon, and lyric poetry came to be quite loosely defined as anything written by these poets or in the meters they employed. This means that poetry described as “Greek lyric” verse covers a wide range of topics and embraces a wide variety of different styles. Some Greek lyrics celebrated the great achievements of famous men (for example, Pindar’s victory odes), some were written to be sung by a chorus of young men or women in ceremonial situations (such as Alcman’s Partheneion), and some expressed the intimate thoughts and emotions of the poets, who would sing in the first-person voice – telling of love and loss, and of their hopes and fears (such as the lyrics of Alcaeus and Sappho). Cicero may reportedly have complained that life was too short to read all the works of the Greek lyric poets (Seneca Epistles 49.5), but these Greek lyric styles would have a profound influence upon Roman lyric poetry, and the writings of Catullus and Horace – the only two Roman lyric poets whose work has survived – were decisively shaped by this Greek lyric tradition (see Chapters 2 and 3).
The earliest surviving Roman lyric poetry is found in Latin comedy and a few extant fragments of Latin tragedy – typically in the form of a song (Plautus’ third to second century bce comedies) or a chorus (Ennius’ second century bce tragedies). It is not until the early first century bce that we find the Latin poet Laevius apparently experimenting with a more personal, subjective style of lyric writing (familiar from the Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and Sappho) in his collection of Erotopaegnia (Love Songs). This work is now lost but seems to have included a lyric treatment of love stories from the mythic tradition. It is easy to see how such a collection might have influenced lyric (and, indeed, elegiac) poets in their later re-workings of such mythological stories, but the direct influence of the early dramatic lyric composition upon later lyric poetry is hard to assess. Nevertheless, these early theatrical, performative origins of Latin lyric should not be ignored. For they serve to remind us that Latin poetry was not simply or silently read in the Roman world, it was also performed.
Literary Contexts for Elegy and Lyric: Performance
In addition to expecting their writing to be read by others, the Roman lyric poets (just like the elegists) would typically have given oral performances of their poems. It is important to note that the sort of live musical performances that Alcaeus, Sappho, and the other canonical Greek lyric poets would have known had already disappeared by this time (having died out during the Hellenistic period) but there were plenty of opportunities for the Roman poets to perform their work in person. Horace’s Carmen Saeculare would certainly have been performed before a large public audience. And it is possible that the early public readings of some of Horace’s sympotic “party poems,” in which he refers to scenes of drinking and feasting (Odes 1.4, 1.7, 1.9, 2.7, 3.8, 3.29), may originally have taken place at a dinner party (cena) or some other convivial recitatio or poetry reading event – although these poems are definitely not mere party pieces (see Chapter 3). When Tibullus calls for “More wine” (Adde merum, 1.2.1) in the opening line of his second elegy, we are similarly invited to imagine a banquet or Roman convivium as the background setting for the poem’s reading, where the wine would, indeed, have been flowing freely. Whether such convivial, sociable contexts for lyric and elegy are simply to be imagined or whether some performances actually took place in these communal settings, there is no question that Roman poets wrote their work to be read aloud – to be performed, either in private or in public (see McKeown 1987: 63–73; Gamel 1998, 2012). Ovid, for example, describes hearing his favorite poets (Tristia 4.10.41–50), and to reading his own poetry in public (Tristia 4.10.57). And Augustus’ sister Octavia famously fainted when she heard Vergil read aloud an extract from his Aeneid in which her dead son Marcellus appears as a ghost.
In this light we may recall that a core part of the education of the Roman lyric and elegiac poets involved the study of rhetoric. Ancient handbooks on the art of rhetoric typically emphasize the importance of physical performance – including gesture, posture, voice, as well as costume – to aid the oral delivery of different styles of writing and (crucially) to produce the desired emotional affect upon an audience. Indeed, such rhetorical handbooks and training would have encouraged Roman poets and their readers to treat each poem as if it were a script to be acted out. We can see this clearly in a poem such as Propertius 1.3, in which, as Mary-Kay Gamel points out, Cynthia’s complaint at being woken from her sleep by her drunken poet–lover (Gamel 2012: 352): “can be performed as a fierce attack, a whining complaint, an overly tragic pose, or a moving lament. Each of these choices, valid in itself, affects the performer’s and audience’s interpretation of the poem’s overall meaning. Cynthia’s position, in molli fixa toro cubitum (‘planting her elbow on the soft bed,’ 34), is ambiguous, and the ‘stage directions’ carefully avoid specifying how these lines are to be delivered.” As this example shows, Latin elegy (and, indeed, Latin lyric too) is not only open to very different interpretations – to different, even contradictory readings and performances – it is also a richly dramatic form of poetry which brings its characters and scenes vividly to life.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that elegy in particular should have a great deal in common with another dramatic medium: Roman New Comedy. Balancing out the genre’s traditional focus on sadness and lament, Roman elegy draws upon several of the stereotypes and stock situations familiar from the world of comedy. The Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence provide plenty of such material for the elegists to re-use, but the Greek comic poet Menander (on whose plots Plautus and Terence base most of their own) is also a rich resource for the elegists. In fact, as Ovid makes clear in his Amores, it is Menander who defines the key dramatis personae which populate both Latin elegy and comedy (Amores 1.15.17–18):
dum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena
vivent et meretrix blanda, Menandros erit.
(While slaves are untrustworthy, fathers hard-hearted, bawds immoral,
and while courtesans flatter, Menander will live on.)
These stock comedic characters are certainly all found in Ovid’s Amores, together with the character role that is typically played by the elegiac poet himself – the adulescens amator or unhappy young lover. Ovid even uses this familiar character’s stock catchphrase to declare his unhappiness with life and love: “me miserum!” – “poor me/woe is me!” (Amores 1.1.25, 1.14.51, 2.5.8, 2.11.9, 3.2.69, 3.11.44). The fact that this catchphrase comes from the world of comedy reminds us not to take the poet too seriously when he says this, however. And the fact that this same phrase (and variations thereupon) already appears repeatedly throughout the canon of Latin love lyric and elegy gives us the strong impression that Ovid is well aware that whenever he says “me miserum!” he is effectively speaking to a familiar lover’s “script.” Indeed, the phrase is already well used by Catullus (50.9, 76.19, 99.11) and features prominently in the opening line of Propertius’ programmatic first elegy: Cynthia prima suis miserum
