The main edition of Pindar’s cult poetry is the Teubner by Snell and Maehler (see S-M in list of abbreviations). Cf. Pavlou 2011.
74 74 Nagy 1990a.
75 75 Tony Harrison’s play Trackers of Oxyrhynchus contains a portrait of the pair, as they unearth and decipher papyri.
76 76 Cf. Rutherford loc. cit.; Dougherty 1994; also considered by Carey 2017.
77 77 The cult details tie in with local socio-demographic structures in a way inviting analysis according to Kowalzig’s method.
78 78 3–5 σέθ]εν Ἰάονι τόνδε λαῶι / παι]ᾶνα [δι]ώξω / Δηρηνὸν Ἀπόλλωνα πάρ τ, Ἀφρο[δίταν].
79 79 The poem is in Doric dialect!
80 80 Carey 2017 considers the question of the identity of singer and audience more carefully.
81 81 28–30 νεόπολίς εἰμι· ματρὸς / δὲ ματέρ, ἐμᾶς ἔτεκον ἔμπαν / πολεμίωι πυρὶ πλαγεῖσαν.
82 82 I find the metaphor “I have given birth,” ἔτεκον, odd if applied to the young men of the chorus, more natural if applied to personified Abdera. Unfortunately there is no specific indication of gender in the whole run from 24 to 36.
83 83 Known as παιανίζειν.
84 84 Note lines 102–103 ἐμο̣[ὶ δ, ἐπ]έ̣[ω]ν ἐσ[.] / …ε]ὐκλέα [……]ν χά[ρ]ιν, in which Pindar seems to be talking of the “fame of words” which is due him.
85 85 As Käppel 1992 says.
86 86 Ἄβδ]ηρε, καὶ στ[ρατὸν] ἱ̣ππ̣οχάρμαν / σᾷ] β̣ί̣ᾳ πολέ[μ]ωι τελευ‐ / ταί]ωι προβι[β]άζοις, “Abderus, may you advance your cavalry, too, with your force in a final war.”
87 87 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1907 (=1995): 55.
88 88 Cf. Liapis 2017.
89 89 One ancient reference to this common saying in Aristophanes Clouds 566Σ: ἔθος τοῖς ποιηταῖς τὴν ἁρχὴν τῶν ποιμάτων ἀπὸ τοῦ Διὸς ποιεῖν: “It was the custom of poets to make their beginning from Zeus.”
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