Two quite long elegies in ‘Book 1’ of the Theognidea are addressed to a Simonides, as is one in ‘Book 2’, a poem that is shorter, but by comparison with other pieces in ‘Book 2’ also relatively long.1 Modern students of classical Greek poetry have of course been tempted to suppose that this Simonides must have been the late sixth- and early fifth-century poet Simonides of Ceos.2 But the author of these three poems seems almost certainly to be Euenus of Paros, a poet and sophist whose activity is firmly pegged to the last decades of the fifth century.3 Several men named Simonides from the later fifth century could be Euenus’ addressee. One is the Athenian στρατηγός, ‘general’, mentioned by Thucydides (4.7), militarily active in the spring of 425 BC, and presumably active in Athenian symposia for some years on either side of that date: he cannot be ruled out. But a more appropriate literary profile seems to be that of a Simonides from Eretria or Carystus, known only from the Suda: for some reason his disappearance from modern literary histories has been compounded with omission from LGPN, but he deserves at least some attention.

This paper raises, and attempts to answer, some questions about Stobaeus’ citation of excerpts from early Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry. Many of these were raised and answered in an excellent if short article by David Campbell thirty years ago (Campbell 1982) and in order not to unbalance my own treatment I shall occasionally have to repeat rather than ignore some of his points. One important piece of evidence has been added since 1982 by the publication of a papyrus, and another recently published papyrus allows an old guess to be made rather more convincing.

In this paper I explore archaic wandering poets’ representation in their poetry of themselves and of their performances. I confine myself (some comparanda apart) to non-hexameter poetry of the period down to 500 BC and to pieces that I take to be in the first instance for monodic rather than choral performance. That is one of the reasons I have decided to exclude Stesichorus; another is that in his surviving poetry itself there is almost nothing that contributes to the issues I investigate. My cut-off date of 500 BC is partly to legitimise my exclusion of Bacchylides and Pindar. But another, and better, reason for that exclusion is that even their surviving epinicia on their own merit a separate treatment, and I pursue some related issues concerning them elsewhere.1

I first offer a text, translation and some textual and literary comments. The text printed here is that of West 1991. The editio princeps of fr. 188.3–5, preserved on P.Colon. 58.36–40, was by Merkelbach and West 1974, 101 and 111–2, shortly to be superseded by Kramer and Hagedorn 1978. For the numerous editions and discussions since this chapter’s first publication in 1987 see Brown and Gerber 1993, Swift 2019.1

This paper addresses two points in the long, complex and fascinating story of the relation of Latin lyric poetry to the songs of the seventh/sixth century poet of the Mytilenean elite, Alcaeus. The first concerns Catullus, and departs radically from the current communis opinio. The second concerns Horace’s interpretation of Alcaeus’ ship-poems, and may be judged to be less iconoclastic.

Much archaic and classical Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry was initially composed for male audiences, and chiefly for male singers or reciters, to be performed in symposia. To judge from vase paintings and from the erotic ballet at the end of Xenophon’s dialogue Symposium, the sympotic atmosphere could be highly sexualised, no holds barred (as it were), and some surviving poetry shows that sexual relations could be the subjects of more or less explicit talk, song and propositions. The poetry that has come down to us has rather less of such material than one might expect from the vase painting, and I suspect that one reason is the filtering out of raunchier elements at various stages in transmission. This paper will indeed eventually reach twentieth-century expurgation or other modes of cleansing Greek melic, elegiac and iambic poetry, but it will begin with some sondages in earlier stages in transmission because they put the lyric corpus in a quite different category from, say, Attic Old Comedy.

In his Life of the honey-voiced sophist Hadrianus of Tyre (VS 2.10) Philostratus tells his readers about an institution created by Herodes Atticus to give his teaching an edge on that of his rivals – and no doubt to entitle him to charge his pupils higher fees. It is an institution about which Philostratus was silent in his Life of Herodes himself, doubtless because he already had copious material for that Life and much less for that of Hadrianus. The institution was called the Κλεψύδριον, ‘Little Water-clock’:

This volume, the first of three in which my papers published between 1970 and 2020 are being reprinted, brings together (in the order of their publication) articles in periodicals and chapters in collective volumes that investigate Greek poetry down to the late fifth century BC. Neither reviews nor contributions to general histories or encyclopaedias are included in any of the three volumes,1 and, to bring about a more even distribution, papers on Old Comedy have been held over for volume 2. I have corrected some errors of fact, added several bibliographical items, and inserted a few comments where what I wrote in the original publication has been overtaken by more recent discoveries or scholarly argument. Such additions do not aspire to offer an overview of the state of the question, which in some cases would require not lines but pages.

This paper will fall into two parts. In the first part I discuss the political role of some Epodes of Archilochus. The second part of the paper adds some suggestions concerning Archilochus’ use of an iambic trimeter poem and a piece of elegiac poetry in a way that seems more related to his private than his public life. Both parts of the paper advance interpretations which are easier to reconcile with the hypothesis that individuals named in Archilochus’ iambi are real people than with their being stock characters, as has sometimes been suggested.1

This paper is chiefly concerned with the circumstances in which early Greek elegy was performed. Section 2 argues that for our extant shorter poems only performance at symposia is securely attested. Section 3 examines the related questions of the meaning of ἔλεγος (elegos) and the performance of elegies at funerals. Finally (section 4) I try to establish the existence of longer elegiac poems intended for performance at public festivals.*

This paper argues for the creation in Athens at the end of the fifth century BC of a collection of early elegiac poetry, later to form the basis of the greater part of ‘Book 1’ of the Theognidea. It also argues, less confidently, for the creation at the same time of a smaller collection of elegiac pederastic poetry, transmitted as Theognidea ‘Book 2’. A proposal is made concerning the identity of the creator of each of these two collections.1

It is irritating, but hardly surprising, that Herodotus gives us no hints of poems composed to commemorate the battle of Marathon, either performed or inscribed, whether in the vicinity of the soros or elsewhere. His inclusion of three epigrams relating to the battle of Thermopylae (at 7.228) is a happy chance resulting from particular considerations that we have no right to expect to be repeated elsewhere in his work, far less replicated systematically. But these and other epigrams to survive on stone commemorating Greeks who died in the Persian wars1 show what might a priori be expected, i.e. that the by now flourishing tradition of the use of epigrams, preponderantly but not exclusively elegiac, to enhance dedications and grave epitaphs was drawn upon to contribute to commemoration of the war dead, certainly those of 480 and 479 BC.

In this paper I explore the meagre evidence for the archaic performance context or contexts of poems in the metre that modern scholars (following metricians of the Hellenistic and Roman periods) call the trochaic tetrameter catalectic.1 Some features of these trochaic tetrameters might support the view that their performance contexts were different from those of other early verse forms – from those of melic poetry (always sung), of elegiac poetry (either sung or perhaps chanted),2 and of iambic trimeters (usually spoken, not sung) to which they are metrically close.3

In this paper I wish briefly to re-examine the place of monetary gain in the activity of epinician poets. Among the stories that can be told about this subject a commonly accepted one is that of Gentili, first set out by him in an article in 1965,1 and further elaborated in 1985.2 According to this story the rise of the tyrants brings in a new type of relation between patron and poet: for Gentili Ibycus and Anacreon are ‘courtier poets’, and the poet ‘fully conscious by now of the dignity and importance of his role … puts his own sophia at the disposal of the highest bidder’.