In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext, a team of international scholars consider the afterlife of early Greek lyric poetry (iambic, elegiac, and melic) up to the 12th century CE, from a variety of intersecting perspectives: reperformance, textualization, the direct and indirect tradition, anthologies, poets’ Lives, and the disquisitions of philosophers and scholars. Particular attention is given to the poets Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Pindar, and Timotheus. Consideration is given to their reception in authors such as Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Aelius Aristides, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Statius, as well as their discussion by Peripatetic scholars, the Hellenistic scholia to Pindar, Horace’s commentator Porphyrio, and Eustathius on Pindar.

The Greek lyric, elegiac and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 BCE produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity. This new poetic translation captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry.

Three important literary questions in early Greek lyrics are addressed in this study. First, Fowler attempts to determine the extent that Homer and epic poetry generally influenced the lyric poets, with respect to both the style of compositions and their content. Identifying the certain examples of influence – which are far fewer than often thought – he analyses the technique of imitation, tracing a development from simpler to more complex as the archaic period proceeds. Throughout this and the following chapter, he often finds occasion to take issue with the famous and influential view of the early Greek mind championed by Bruno Snell and Hermann Fränkel. In the second chapter Fowler studies the organization of individual poems, identifying compositional principles that may be used to solve literary and textual problems. Some of these principles, like ring-composition, are old familiars; others are not. All are found to be more pervasive than is often realized, and reflect an attitude to composition rather different from the disorderly and associative techniques traditionally ascribed to the lyrics poets. The last chapter explores the nature of genres in the archaic period, starting from the vexed question of the definition of elegy. In all the genres associated with particular occasions, the author finds that the poets' professional skills and self-consciousness became more important than the purely occasional aspects of their composition. Observations of interest are made on, among others, citharodic songs, epigrams and epinician odes; and elegy in the end turns out, paradoxically, not to be a true genre at all.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

New approach to translating the Greek lyric poets