Table Of ContentGreek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods
Classical Poetry
Editor-in-Chief
Scott McGill (Rice University)
Associate Editors
Jackie Murray (University of Kentucky)
Sophia Papaioannou (University of Athens)
Jonathan L. Ready (Indiana University)
Catherine Ware (University College Cork)
volume 1.1
Volumes published in this Brill Research Perspective title are listed at brill.com/rpcp
Greek Lyric of the Archaic
and Classical Periods
From the Past to the Future of the Lyric Subject
By
David Fearn
LEIDEN | BOSTON
This paperback book edition is simultaneously published as issue 1.1 (2020) of Classical Poetry,
DOI:10.1163/25892649-12340001.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019955635
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISBN 978-90-04-42436-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-04-42437-1 (e-book)
Copyright 2020 by David Fearn. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize
dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations,
and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases.
Requests for commercial re-use, use parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to
Koninklijke Brill NV.
This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Contents
Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods: From the Past to the
Future of the Lyric Subject 1
David Fearn
Abstract 1
Keywords 1
1 Introduction 2
2 A Preliminary Case Study: Four Readings of Sappho 4
3 Sappho: Wider Ramifications 12
4 Alcaeus, Ibycus, and Anacreon: Sympotic Poetics, Politics, and Erotics 25
4.1 Alcaeus 25
4.2 Ibycus 28
4.3 Anacreon 35
5 Stesichorus: Myth, Narrative, Ornamentation, Interpretability 39
6 Simonides: Tombs and Pictures 54
7 Bacchylides: Narrativity and Imagistic Depth 62
8 Pindar 67
8.1 Pindar In and Out of Context: Contemporary Methodologies 67
8.2 Voices and Attitudes, Lyric Mystifications, or ‘Enchanted ethicality’ /
‘ghost channel:’ ‘Operationalizing’ Pindar 76
9 Timotheus, the New Music, and Beyond: Sound Affects 84
References 89
Classical Poetry 1 (2020) 1–113
brill.com/brp
Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods
From the Past to the Future of the Lyric Subject
David Fearn
University of Warwick
[email protected]
Abstract
What is distinctive about Greek lyric poetry? How should we conceptualize it in rela-
tion to broader categories such as literature / song / music / rhetoric / history? What
critical tools might we use to analyze it? How do we, should we, can we relate to its
intensities of expression, its modes of address, its uses of myth and imagery, its atti-
tudes to materiality, its sense of its own time, and its contextualizations? These are the
questions that this discussion seeks to investigate, exploring and analysing a range of
influential methodologies that have shaped the recent history of the field.
Keywords
Greek lyric – poetry – Sappho – Pindar – historicism – affect – form – subjectivity –
Greek literature – literary criticism – critical theory
© David Fearn, 2020 | doi:10.1163/25892649-12340001
2 Fearn
1 Introduction
μνάσεσθαί τινα φα⟨ῖ⟩μι καὶ ἕτερον ἀμμέων
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
Sappho fr. 147; translation: Carson 2003
Greek lyric poetry created and continues to create an enthralling encounter.1
But what is it, and what do such encounters amount to? How to conceptual-
ize it, through its abilities, claims, and roles, continues equally to challenge
and puzzle. This discussion seeks to explore these puzzles and to analyze and
characterize how we might critically engage with and theorize lyric’s distinc-
tiveness in and out of contexts – as literary form, as a body of texts, as perfor-
mance, as a set of voices, as emotional content – in ways that invite us to reflect
on our own attitudes and, thus, the status of our classical disciplinarity.
Study of Greek lyric poetry in recent years has been marked by a diverse
range of responses to methodological development and a variety of speeds
of absorption. There is some tension – creative tension – between traditional
philology and a wide (and ever-increasing) range of methodological outlooks,
which include comparativist dimensions. Scholarship has also – at least in the
case of Sappho – reported and absorbed some important new discoveries.
Specifically, scholars in some quarters are beginning now to develop a nu-
anced attitude to questions of contextualization and performance, and a more
nuanced and theoretically informed attitude to questions of voice, which has
significant implications for reception. At stake, in some ways, is the very ap-
plicability of ‘lyric’ as a term.
This broad discussion will assess this dynamic range of interpretations. It
begins with a deep-dive into a chronologically arranged survey of views on a
fragment of Sappho and then moves on to consider poets in sequence, con-
cluding with Pindar and Timotheus. Although the poets are presented and
analyzed separately, the extent of methodological and theoretical reflection
is a thread that connects all the sections together. Discussion circles back to
the opening discussion of Sappho as the most obvious creative space for theo-
rizing and reflecting upon the relation between Greek lyric pasts and futures.
1 Many thanks indeed to the editors and the reader for their numerous thoughtful suggestions
and improvements; thanks also to Victoria Rimell and Alex Purves for their valuable com-
ments and encouragements.
Classical Poetry 1 (2020) 1–113
Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods 3
I move from issues of orientation and definition to much wider questions
about the nature of criticism on this immensely rich, diverse material.2
An opening may be provided by Martin West’s basic definition, offered to
orient readers of the Oxford World’s Classics translation of Greek Lyric (includ-
ing archaic and classical elegiac and iambic poets but not Pindar, Bacchylides,
or Timotheus):
‘Greek lyric poetry’ is a conventional catch-all term covering more or less
all the Greek poetry of the centuries down to 350 BC apart from epic, di-
dactic, and other verse composed in hexameters, and drama.3
West goes on to limit his material to lyric poetry up to around 450 BC. This is a
rather arbitrary periodization not necessitated or informed by any of the mate-
rial. In fact, it becomes evident that prejudice shapes West’s approach:
I have taken 450 BC as the notional limiting date because the poetry
of the succeeding period is somewhat different in character, more self-
conscious, less spontaneous in feeling and expression; there are no very
major figures among its poets.4
For those working today on Greek lyric, these statements will probably seem
both to neglect a number of pertinent interpretative issues and to be deliber-
ately provocative. The question of the subjectivity, spontaneity, and emotional
intensity of earlier Greek lyric poetry has been very much at issue in a range
of important contributions in recent years. In addition, the significance and
complexity of the so-called New Music of the later fifth century, at which West
surreptitiously takes aim here, has been the subject of a range of important
contributions, especially but not exclusively focused on Timotheus.
2 Discussion is necessarily selective, in coverage and in focus. I have not included detailed
discussion of Alcman, though see n. 51. I have not discussed early Greek elegy and iambus
(see most recently the edited collection of Carey and Swift 2016 and the new edition of
Archilochus by Swift 2019), but I have included a final section looking briefly at Timotheus
and the New Music (though with more of a focus on methodological matters arising than a
full treatment). I do not cover textual criticism, prosody and metrics (see Battezzato 2009),
or papyrological discussions except where they have a broader bearing on questions and
methods of literary interpretation, my principal focus throughout. For collected surveys of
scholarship see Gerber 1989 and 1990, and 1993 and 1994; Neumann-Hartmann 2010. For com-
panion volumes, see esp. Budelmann 2009b; Swift forthcoming.
3 West 1994, vii.
4 West 1994, ix.
Classical Poetry 1 (2020) 1–113
