A Companion to Greek Lyric. Группа авторов
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and narrative convention: the story proceeds in a strictly sequential manner, there is an unparalleled (at least from our examples above) use of character speech with a closing “formula” (4–11; for ὢς εἶπ’ cf. Homeric ὣς φάτο etc.), a catalog of Andromache’s dowry (7–10) and even a refraction of the typical epic departure scene (13–20).
Unsurprisingly, scholars have tried to link this poem with the Iliad, casting it as a foreboding pastiche-prediction of the couple’s future within, and predicted by, the epic.44 Certainly Homer knew the story but other epics, such as the cyclic Cypria and whatever preceded it,45 might have told it, alongside the wedding of Helen and Paris (already encountered in Sa. fr. 16 and Alc. fr. 283). Equally, some scholars have viewed the poem in positive terms, as a joyous celebration of the couple’s limited but still glorious future.46 Yet epic weddings are not generally happy affairs,47 and the marriage inevitably invokes the fall of Troy and the death of their son Astyanax, both popular themes in early epic,48 which sits ill with the apparent purpose of an epithalamium, even one which is something of a generic oddity.
Aside from the question of sources, fr. 44 is typically Sapphic in its emphasis on the experience and perspective of women: Andromache’s praise (8–10) looks forward to the joyful Trojan women participating in the ceremonies (14–16, 23–31), the couple’s “imperishable glory” (4) is equally hers as it is Hector’s, while the promise and value of her person, augmented by the dowry-catalog but also the detailed, itemized description of the whole city’s welcome, contrast powerfully with Troy’s unstated future. As Sappho reframes the epic world, the female presence within it becomes as prominent and visible as the male.
So the lyric experiment and interaction with epic in the Archaic period consisted of several strategies of engagement, and several opportunities for poetic choice: appropriation and alteration of language, form, rhythm and prosody, theme and material, immediate or self-sufficient directionality in orientation, in sum the—at times, deliberately and openly agonistic—subordination of epic poetry and its modality to the needs of the lyric poet.
IX Lyric into Epic, Epic into Lyric: Stesichorus
If we are right to see a creative agonism at the heart of this interaction, then it reaches something of a paradoxical climax in the works of the mid-sixth-century Western Greek lyric poet, Stesichorus of Himera, whose songs almost entirely comprised mythological narratives, composed in a variety of dactylic rhythms.49 Their length was extraordinary, next to those of the other lyric poets, with works ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 verses. These facts make him exceptional enough, but he was also unlike other lyricists in not saying much of himself or his contemporary audiences and performance settings in these compositions, and in digging out the less conventional parts of those stories. For example, his treatment of the conflict between Heracles and the monster Geryon focused much more on humanizing the latter than on heroizing his slayer (as, e.g., Hesiod’s story does: Theogony 287–294, 979–983), a choice perhaps unsurprisingly given the poem’s title: Geryoneis or “song of Geryon.”
That is not to say that he did not treat famous, panhellenic myths: his oeuvre included poems with the titles Sack of Troy, Oresteia, and the Returns (of the heroes from Troy), and his interaction especially with Homer was of an extraordinarily sophisticated sort; he took not only formulaic phrases and epic type-scenes such as those we found throughout the lyric tradition, but even unique expressions become the subject of his recreative poetry, such as the simile of the poppy applied to Geryon’s death (fr. 19.44–7 F) drawn from the same, unique, simile image in the Homeric description of the minor warrior Gorgythion’s death (Il. 8.302–308).50 Nonetheless, we can get the clearest picture of his unique stance vis-à-vis the other lyric poets, by turning to his deployment of the Helen myth—a popular theme, as we have seen. Whether his poem Helen was the same as his Palinode (or Palinodes),51 Stesichorus’ treatment represented a broad-spectrum rehabilitation, a response to the critical coverage Helen received in epic poetry—but also to the denunciations in Alcaeus, and the more qualified picture in Sappho. Stesichorus went much further in his exculpation than any previous author: he denied that she had gone to Troy, her place there being taken by a phantom (this, too, is an epic theme, but taken to an extreme conclusion: see, e.g., Il. 5.449–453), and this version would perhaps unsurprisingly leave its mark on later literature, both in Herodotus (2.112–120) and Euripides’ Helen. But unlike his lyric predecessors when they turned their attention to Helen, Stesichorus doesn’t select or allude or compose on a small scale—he massively retells and revises her entire story (perhaps more than once!), and in doing so he shows himself a true modal hybrid, with the scale, self-presentation, and ambition of an epic poet, the delivery and performance contexts of a lyric poet, and the languages and rhythms of both.
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The lyric poets of the Archaic period interacted with epos as well as their own lyric past, and bequeathed to later ages a rich, inter-modal inheritance, opening the way for future experimentation and cross-fertilization between epic and lyric modes of poetic composition. Without this extraordinary, path-breaking period, the next great efflorescence of Greek poetic creativity, the works of Athenian tragedy, would have been impossible.
FURTHER READING
For general introductions to this material, see Herington 1985; Graziosi and Haubold 2009; Budelmann 2018b: 16–18; Kelly 2015; Rawles 2018 (all with further bibliography). For an excellent overview of the varieties of epic poetry in this period, see Gainsford 2016. Pallantza 2005 and Bowie 2010b discuss the lyric refractions especially of Trojan War material in the poetry after Homer. For recent developments in elegy’s relationship with epic, which tend to see the two forms as both independent and interdependent, see Lulli 2016, and the controversial arguments of Faraone 2006 and 2008 that the elegists used basic ten-verse stanzaic structure (viz. five couplets). The opposite tendency in iambos, i.e., to read it as all parasitic directly on Homer, is visible in recent studies in iambos, e.g., the essays by Alexandrou and Hawkins in Swift and Carey 2016, with very skeptical response in Kelly forthcoming.
Notes
1 1 I am grateful to Laura Swift for her invitation and scrutiny of this chapter, and to Bill Allan and Felix Budelmann for reading drafts and assisting me with its material. For Sappho and Alcaeus, I use the numeration of Campbell; for the elegists, that of West. This chapter uses the term “mode” to describe “epic” and “lyric” as distinct poetic forms, since current terminology (e.g., “genre,” “sub-genre,” even “super-genre”) can be deployed, confusingly, for both these broadest groupings and also their most specific several sub-types. Under the “lyric” mode I include (a) sung poetry (sometimes labeled “melic”) of the sort practiced by Sappho, Alcaeus, Alcman, and Ibycus, and (b) recitative poetry of the elegiac tradition, as practiced by Mimnermus, Tyrtaeus, Theognis, etc. Many poets were productive in more than one group (e.g., Archilochus, Simonides) and even modes (e.g., Sappho frr. 105–109, 142, 143: see Kelly 2021: 56–57), and so the possibility of experimentation beyond and within these boundaries needs always to be remembered. The basic differentiation in this chapter is, therefore, “epic” and “non-epic” (in all their varieties). The current survey is limited to the Archaic period down to Simonides. Iambic poetry receives no mention in this chapter, as its interaction with epic is uncertain: see Kelly forthcoming and, specifically on Hipponax’s so-called “mini-Odyssey” (frr. 74–77 W), Prodi 2017a.
2 2 See esp. Hooker 1977 and Bowie 1981 on the traditionality of the Lesbian poetic language; and de Kreij (Chapter 10) in this volume.
3 3 For the variety of epic poems, forms, and approaches to be found in early Greek epos, see Gainsford 2016.
4 4 See now Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015, with much further bibliography.
5 5 See West 2002: 218 = 2011–2013: i 406–407; for Lesbos in the Homeric epic tradition, see Il. 9.129,