Much of this paper is speculative, but I begin on relatively firm ground.

I chose to investigate the subject to which I have given the title ‘Epigram as narration’ because I am interested in the extent to which different genres of archaic poetry can be seen to be following different conventions – indeed how far there are conventions, and how far (by contrast) genre is definable by little more than occasion. In the case of epigram, this would presumably mean that the mere fact of a piece of verse being inscribed would be the only generic feature, and within that epigram absolutely anything might be expected. A secondary interest is whether (if we were to agree that certain genres do have discernable conventions) we can see the conventions of one genre influencing those of another.

Our principal witness to Stesichorus’ Geryoneis is still P.Oxy. 2617, published by Edgar Lobel in 1967. In the almost half-century since its publication there has been extensive discussion: some 500 items are registered in the thirty pages of bibliography in Lazzeri 2008, and more accrued when the new edition of Stesichorus by Davies and Finglass was published.1 The papyrus, with its marginal Ṉ marking a line numbered by the scribe as 1300,2 has contributed greatly to our understanding of the scale and manner of Stesichorean poems, and much attention has been paid to the exchanges between Geryon and his friend or herdsman Menoetes and his mother Callirhoe, and to the way these and the actual killing of Geryon by Heracles exploit and develop the schemata of hexameter (and particularly Homeric) epic. But in the context of this volume and for the purposes of my paper the important contributions are made by two quoted fragments, fr. S17 PMGF = 8 Finglass and fr. S7= 184 PMGF = 9 Finglass.

This chapter explores the relative importance of invective and narrative in the earliest surviving fragments of Greek iambic poetry, and argues that narrative may have been just as important as invective in defining the genre. In approaching this question it is important to remember that these surviving fragments are very unlikely to represent the beginnings of Greek iambic poetry.1 Whenever and wherever these beginnings may have been, they were almost certainly some time, perhaps many generations, before our first fragments, which date from around 650 BC. I am very sceptical about the possibility of constructing plausible hypotheses about the development of iambic poetry before the poems from which these fragments come. In them we find no trace that their composers, Archilochus of Paros and Semonides of Amorgos, are at an early stage in the development of the genre or in the handling of its metres – rather they display an assured skill in both respects.

One way in which symposiasts in archaic Greece entertained themselves, especially in Ionian cities, was by singing a form of dactylic poetry that we know as elegiac.1 Such song was often accompanied by the αὐλός, ‘pipe’, and indeed it is my view that only rarely would elegy be sung in a symposium without accompaniment on the αὐλός.

In this paper I propose (section 2) to review briefly the traces of narrative early Greek elegiac and iambic poetry that might be seen as ancestors of historiography; (section 3) to assess how many of these traces might be securely or conjecturally claimed to be composed for sympotic, and how many for other, locations of performance; and (section 4) to ask to what extent any features of our earliest prose historiography might be argued to betray the influence of the techniques or performance conditions of such verse narrative. Section 5 offers a very brief conclusion.

One of the questions with which the emperor Tiberius notoriously plagued his scholarly companions on Capri was Quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae, ‘What did the Sirens usually sing?1 Like the other such questions he asked (Who was Hecuba’s mother? What name did Achilles take when he was draft-dodging on Scyros?) the form and content of the Sirens’ song were clearly things that investigation of extant Greek literature left obscure: the grammatici in Tiberius’ entourage were baffled despite, presumably, access to the libraries of Rome and, through their personal connections, Athens, Pergamum and Alexandria. ‘The song the sirens sang’ is thus an appropriate constituent of the title of an investigation into Alcman’s Louvre Partheneion: for it too has continued to baffle modern grammatici since its discovery in 1855 and its first publication in 1863. I would be combining the foolhardiness of Odysseus with the insensitivity of Tiberius if I pretended to have privileged access to this particular Sirens’ song. But in many years of discussing the poem with pupils and colleagues I have formed some views on the limits within which our interpretations should be confined, and risking these views in print is long overdue. Nor is the title’s reference to the Sirens’ song simply a meretricious attempt to sugar a scholarly pill: its presence there is not merely a symbol, but (as I hope to show) the nature of the song the Sirens sang has a particular relevance to Alcman’s Partheneion.

My choice of title, with its ‘1500 days’, may misleadingly have raised hopes of a precision that is of course unattainable for the years from 490 to 485 BC, as Thucydides would have been quick to remind us. It was partly intended to recall the targets and boasts of some modern governments, which have presented their entering upon office as a turning point in their nation’s policies. But that intention was ill-conceived: ancient Greek poleis with anything resembling a democratic system had no ‘government’ in the modern sense of the term, so Athens of the 480s was saved from such dreams. One question, however, that can and should be asked about the immediate aftermath of the battle of Marathon in 490 BC is whether we have evidence that the Athenians felt a that new chapter in their history was opening – in the way, for example, that many British citizens felt was the case in the summer of 1945, and I believe that many Greeks did in 1974. The straight answer, I think, is ‘no!’, but this is partly because we have so little evidence for the politics of Athens in these years. These politics, like the battle of Marathon itself, get a much more cursory treatment from Herodotus and Thucydides than the battles of 480 and 479 and the rapid development of Athens’ μεγάλη ἰδέα, ‘great idea’, a μεγάλη ἰδέα that sailed more or less triumphantly for seventy-five years before foundering in 404 BC. On the basis of what little evidence we have, however, my sense is that in the early 480s the chattering classes of Athens would have seen the battle of Marathon as a less significant landmark than the expulsion of Hippias and some of his friends in 511/510, twenty years before; than the extensive restructuring of the Athenian system of administration by Cleisthenes, perhaps chiefly enacted in 508/7; or than the adventure of aiding Ionians in their attempt to throw off Persian control, initially exhilarating but ultimately disastrous, and the prime cause of Darius’ expedition that sacked Naxos and Eretria and must have seemed to some to have come very near to sacking Athens.

My subject falls on the frontier between acrostichs and the like, whose nature is entirely to do with words, and indeed in most cases, inevitably, with written words, and the performance culture of the symposium, in which verbal entertainment and communication1 is only one part of a much wider range of performances and interactions – music, dancing, gift-giving, seducing. Much of that wider range falls into what is referred to in Greek as παίζειν, ‘to play’, which has emboldened me to look for my subject in this quarter. What I discuss here also falls within the activities that in English are called ‘teasing’, and for which again the Greek term παίζειν can sometimes be used. That is not to say that the range of meaning of παίζειν is co-extensive with that of the English word ‘tease’, and I am very conscious that my presumptions and interpretations are in danger of being language-specific, because different forms of activity that in English are all referred to by the verb or noun ‘tease’ are distinguished in some languages.

This paper explores some of the aspects of the transmission of early Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry and attempts to assess how close an ancient collection of early elegiac poetry came to what according to our modern conceptions would be a collection of fragments. Different definitions of a ‘fragment’ can be offered.

This chapter revisits the question of how far Greek narrative elegy of the archaic and early classical periods can be seen as an early stage in the development of Greek historiography, offering very tentative answers to the sorts of questions addressed by other contributors to the volume edited by David Konstan and Kurt Raaflaub in 2010.1 In particular I shall try to establish, so far as is possible, to what extent there seem to have been unwritten rules (to use the terminology of Rossi 1971) that distinguished the subject matter and treatment thought appropriate for elegy from those thought appropriate for hexameter epic, a genre that stood very close to elegy both in metre and in language. In an appendix to the chapter a very brief comparison is made with what we know of the Hesiodic Catalogue of women and of the epics of the so-called ‘cycle’, and with our first post-Homeric hexameter epic to survive complete, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes.

In Greece from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC the symposium was an important institution both for the social and political life of men from prosperous households and for the creation of songs that constitute a significant portion of our surviving archaic poetry. Between seven and seventeen men, mostly in their early or later teens – παῖδες, ‘boys’, or μειράκια, ‘youths’ – and νέοι, ‘young men’, in their twenties (or sometimes even their thirties) – would recline on couches to engage in the ritualised consumption of wine and to enjoy entertainment. This entertainment provided either by their own conversation, singing and sympotic games like κότταβος, or by the musical, gymnastic and sexual diversions offered by ἑταῖραι, female entertainers.1 Although light food was on offer, drinking was the central and defining mode of communal consumption, and the symposium was clearly distinguishable from a banquet.2 Much light is thrown on sympotic entertainments by painted vases, and their evidence has been brilliantly interpreted by Francois Lissarrague in his book Un flot d’images.3 Only from the fifth and fourth centuries BC do we find texts that set out to report the subjects of sympotic conversation (above all Aristophanes’ Wasps, and the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon) but comparison of these with the texts of poetry that was composed for sympotic performance, chiefly sung performance, suggests that these poetic texts are a fair guide to the topics that figured in archaic conversation too.4

The sixth-century BC poet and αὐλητής, ‘piper’, Sacadas of Argos enjoys little κλέος, ‘renown’, in the modern world.1 He gets a brief entry in West 1992, where only three of the eight or so ancient testimonia are to be found, and an eight-line article in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (repeated in the fourth edition) which is no more informative and denies that any of his work has survived. He was more generously handled by Gentili and Prato in 1985.2

This paper explores some aspects of Stesichorus’ performance of poetry involving the myth of Helen.1 I begin by addressing briefly the debate conducted in the last four decades concerning the probable manner and contexts of performance of Stesichorus’ poems, a problem related to that of their size, and then I concentrate in particular on the poem known already in the fourth century BC, and thereafter throughout antiquity, as the Παλινωιδία, ‘Palinode’.