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 and style, since its rhythm allows dactylic segments.10 Thus, Alcaeus can treat his verses, as epic poets do, as largely contained (sub)units of meaning with considerable degrees of end-stopping: the only—and thus emphatic—noticeable run-over comes in the poem’s final word ἄσδει “dries up.”11 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