Homeric epics as a reasonably faithful representation of the Late Bronze Age world (for discussion, see Morris 2000: 77–78). But not everybody was convinced that there was any lineal connection between the Mycenaeans and the Greeks of the archaic age and, in any case, the seemingly radical disjuncture between the detached and anonymous authorial voice of the epics and the more subjective individuality of archaic Greek poets rendered the latter the more vivid testimony for historians to mine. As Karl Julius Beloch (1912: 314) put it, Archilochus “is the first Greek who stands before us in his full individuality as a person of flesh and bone.” Furthermore, it was commonly believed that this more “autobiographical” stance might inform us better as to local or regional differences in the politics of the archaic Greek poleis. So, Werner Jaeger, while conceding that the poets “spoke in their own persons, and expressed their own opinions and emotions, while the life of their community was relegated to the background of their thought,” nevertheless argued that “when they mentioned politics—as often—their theme was not a standard with a claim to universal acceptance (as in Hesiod, Callinus, Tyrtaeus, and Solon) but a frank partisanship, as in Alcaeus, or the individual’s pride in his rights, as in Archilochus” (1945: 116).
Today, the picture looks rather different. First, “what we know of the exigencies of performance radically challenges the reading of the lyric “I” as the spontaneous and unmediated expression of a biographical individual” (Kurke 2007a: 143). Since archaic poetry was typically composed for performance—be it at a festival or in the context of the symposium—the recitalist could very well be adopting a persona, distinct from the voice of the author (Lefkowitz 2012: 31). Pertinent here is the oft-cited fragment 19W of Archilochus (“I care nothing for the possessions of Gyges, rich in gold”), which, according to Aristotle (Rh. 1418b28), was uttered by a character named Charon the carpenter.
Second, it is clear that not all the verses ascribed to a named individual can be the work of a single poet. The cautionary example here is the body of work attributed to Theognis of Megara. According to the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (s.v. “Theognis”), Theognis flourished at the time of the 59th Olympiad of 544–541, but the reference in verses 39–40 to “a man who will correct our wicked violence” has often been taken as anticipating the tyrannical rule of Theagenes, whose daughter’s marriage to the failed Athenian tyrant Cylon (Thuc. 1.126.3) would date him about a century earlier. Later, verses 773–6 call upon Apollo to “ward off the violent army of the Medes from this city,” which seems to refer to the Persian invasion of the Megarid in 480–479 BC.1 Worse still, ancient authors disagreed as to which Megara was Theognis’ home city: Stephanus of Byzantium (s.v. “Megara”) and Harpocration (s.v. “Theognis”) identified his homeland as Nisaean Megara, north of the Corinthian isthmus, and this is generally accepted by scholars today, but Plato (Laws 630a) and the Suda (s.v. “Theognis”) derive him from Megara Hyblaea on Sicily (Figueira 1985: 123–124). It is partly for these reasons that “autobiographical” readings of archaic poetry have come under sustained critique in recent decades (Dover 1964: 209; West 1974: 27; Seidensticker 1978). Gregory Nagy (1985: 33), for example, has argued that “the figure of Theognis represents a cumulative synthesis of Megarian poetic traditions.” Indeed, Nagy has made similar claims for both Hesiod and Archilochus. In the case of the latter, he suggests that the verses ascribed to the poet were continuously recreated in the context of rhapsodic performances centered on the “Archilocheion”—a hero shrine established on the island of Paros, perhaps as early as the late sixth century.2 Presumably, the “cumulative tradition” hypothesis could also be extended to many other Archaic poets. As Nagy admits:
The major advantage to this theory is that the poetry of a given poet like Archilochus or Theognis may then be appreciated as a skillful and effective—maybe even beautiful—dramatization of the polis through the ages. The major disadvantage on the other hand is that the notion of a historical figure called, say, Archilochus or Theognis, may have to be abandoned.
(1990a: 436)
Third, even the notion that archaic poetry preserves local traditions may stand in need of some revision. Nagy (1985: 34), for example, has argued that, through continuous performance, much of it “evolved into a form suitable for pan-Hellenic audiences.” This is revealed not only by shared topoi that are as common to the verses ascribed to Theognis and Solon as they are to Hesiod but also by the dialect in which they are composed. Thus, although the poems attributed to Sappho and Alcaeus are close to the Aeolic dialect spoken on their native island of Lesbos, the verses of the presumably Dorian poets Theognis and Tyrtaeus are in a stylized form of the Ionic dialect (see de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume).3
In light of these sobering reassessments, Ian Morris (2000: 159) has argued that, while the works attributed to archaic poets can be viewed as discourses that convey coherent ideologies, we can only approach the body of texts from ca. 700 to ca. 520 BC synchronically and should refrain from reconstructing specific events from the poems. That verdict would deliver a crushing blow to our understanding of the archaic period because the historical value of lyric poetry resides in its approximate contemporaneity to the world it describes—a stark contrast to the dubious evidence for the period that is presented by authors writing much later, such as Plutarch, Pausanias, or even the Aristotelian school (Hall 2014: 18–19). Fortunately, the outlook may not be quite so bleak.
For one thing, Nagy’s model of recomposition in performance does not necessarily rule out an original poet or an original moment of composition (Forsdyke 2005: 33). In contrast to the Theognidea, datable references in the poetry of Archilochus are confined to a relatively short span of time in the middle decades of the seventh century: (i) in fr. 102, Archilochus describes the Parian settlement of Thasos, for which archaeology suggests a date shortly before the middle of the seventh century; (ii) fr. 19, as we have already seen, refers to the Lydian king Gyges, whose reign is approximately dated by Assyrian documents to the period 665–643 BC; (iii) a reference to a solar eclipse in fr. 122 should be that of either June 27 661 or April 6 648 BC; and (iv) the name of one of the poet’s addressees, Glaucus son of Leptinus, appears on a memorial, set up in the Agora of Thasos and dated by letter-forms to the last quarter of the seventh century, thus providing a terminus ante quem.4 For another, the assertive, individual “I” in Greek lyric betrays what Leslie Kurke (2007a: 145) describes as an “intense ideological contestation”—that is, a form of resistance to rapidly changing circumstances in which the force of specific referents would be bluntened were they merely generic. One of the distinguishing features of the archaic Greek poets is that they “use their own experience to express a truth of general validity” (Carey 1986: 67). It may be possible then, as Sara Forsdyke argues, to read such poetry both historically and generically (2005: 40).
Alcaeus is a case in point. Modern reconstructions of the history of archaic Mytilene (e.g., Jeffery 1976: 238–240; Parker 2007: 31–32) are largely generated from the fragments of Alcaeus’ poetry as well as from later authors, who may have had little else to hand than that same poetry. So, we hear that Mytilene was originally ruled by an aristocratic group of families known as the Penthilidae (fr. 75 Campbell), who were overthrown by a certain Megacles and his associates after they had gone around striking people with clubs (Arist. Pol. 1311b). Another fragment (fr. 331) mentions the tyrant Melanchrus, whom Alcaeus’ brothers are supposed to have assisted Pittacus in deposing (Diogenes Laertius 1.74). A scholiast to fr. 114 tells us that Alcaeus and his associates fled to nearby Pyrrha after a failed plot against another tyrant, Myrsilus, whose death is celebrated in fr. 332. On this occasion, Pittacus had apparently taken Myrsilus’ side (fr. 70), later being established as tyrant of Mytilene (fr. 348), although Aristotle (Pol. 1285a) implies and Diogenes Laertius (1.75) explicitly states that Pittacus assumed power (archē) for a limited term of 10 years before standing down. Alcaeus’ hostility against Pittacus is unreserved: he calls the tyrant, among other things, “splay-footed,” “a braggart,” and “a pot-belly” (fr. 429). And yet Diodorus of Sicily (9.11.1) describes him as a “good lawgiver,” who “liberated his homeland from three of the greatest evils—tyranny, civil strife (stasis), and war” (cf. Strabo 13.2.3) and later tradition numbered him among the