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Greek and Roman Religions, Fall 1999
October 21, 1999
 
 
WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT DUE TODAY: In Miller's Greek Lyric, read all the selections from: 
Archilochus, Mimnermus, Stesichorus, Sappho, Alcaeus, Corinna. 
Also, read these poems by Pindar:
 
PREPARATION:  What similarities can you see between our selections from Greek, Roman, and Indian lyric?  Come to class with some general ideas, and if possible some textual examples from our readings.
 
SESSION LEADER:  Read  Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon in Indo-European:  Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, Oxford UP 1995, pp. 3-27  (P569 .W38 1995).  Try to apply what you learn from Watkins to our examples from class.
 
LECTURE NOTES:
 
 
 Our basic problem
 
Religious poetry in Greece was written, typically, for a special occasion of performance.  Contrast this with the situation in scriptural religions, where the sacred text reaches a period of 'completion', after which it remains largely unchanged and is used in myriad circumstances.  As a rule, then, this poetry was not preserved, precisely because its nature was that it be ephemeral. 

What does survive was poetry that became viewed as literature at some point; this is all the evidence we have, but it is bad evidence if we are concerned with the relation between religion and literature.  Perhaps these poems were always literature, first and foremost, and the purely ephemeral poems were noticably different in substantive ways.  But it appears that we can get an idea of generic Greek religious poetry by looking at literary examples. 
 
 
Typology of Lyric Poetry
 
Lyric Poetry has two senses:  a broad one, which includes all breeds of monody and choral poetry; and a narrow sense in which it forms a subset of lyric monody, defined in terms of its meter. 

Monody:  performed by a single person, often while playing a musical instrument. 
 

Lyric meters:  accompanied by a lyre; include poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, and Anacreon. 

Elegiac Couplets:  meter is very similar to the dactylic hexameter of epic. 

Iambic and Trochaic Meters:  the closest, allegedly, to the standard prose meter of classical Greek.  Relatively easy to compose in, and suitable to a wide variety of subjects, but particularly used for narration of action and sharp wit or satire. 
 
Choral Poetry:   performed by a chorus.  Typically subdivided according to genres that are defined by content and/or performance context.  In later literature, these became purely literary/formal genres, and poets adopted them for novel contexts. 
 
Hymns:  poems addressed to gods. 

Paeans:  also, mostly for religious purposes (at least in early poetry). 

Dithyrambs:  two types: 

1)  sung at Delphi for the god Dionysus 
2)  sung in Athens at the Dionysia and Thargelia
 
Prosodia:  "processional songs" 

Partheneia:  sung by choruses of girls 

Hypochemata:  "dance songs" 

Enchomia:  "eulogies" 

Threnoi:  "dirges":  used for eulogies of dead, or at funerals 

Epinikia:  "victory odes"; short-lived genre produced by Simonides, his nephew Bacchylides, and Pindar. 
 
 
Individual Poets
 
A map of ancient Greece 

Archilochus:  first half of the seventh century; b. Paros, later settled in Thasos, where he had to fight Naxians and Thracians; prototype of iambic poet. 

Mimnermus:  second half of the seventh century; b. Colophon or Smyrna (Asia Minor). 

Stesichorus:  first half of the sixth century; b. in Himera, on island of Sicily (first major West Greek poet); died in year of Simonides' birth; Longinus called him "most Homeric"; early choral lyricist. 

Sappho:  first half of the sixth century; b. in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos; most famous of Greece's two extant, female lyric poets 

Alcaeus:  first half of the sixth century; b. in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos 

Corinna:  dates unclear (anywhere from fifth to third century); b. in Tanagra (in Boiotia); the other female lyric poet of Greece 

Pindar:  518-438 perhaps; b. in Kynoskephalai, near Thebes; we have the four books of Pindar's epinikia, in addition to fragments from other books, so he is the best preserved (and latest) of the early lyric poets. 
 
 
Poems we looked at in class
 
Sappho:  Miller 1 (frag. 1);   Miller 4 (frag. 16)

Mimnermus:  Miller 5 (frag. 12)

Stesichorus:  Miller 2 (frag. S17)

Corinna:  Miller 4 (frag. 664a + b)

Pindar:  Olympian 2
 

Two genres in outline.  Their relation.
 

Epinikion.  Basic elements:  Name of victor, his father, his city, name of the game.  This is the information that was contained in victory lists (one of these exists on a papyrus fragment from Egypt), and records the basic facts that were important, culturally, from a Greek perspective.  The rest of the ode is poetic expansion of these basic elements. 

Hymn.   Examples of prayers in your reading:  .  Clearly Pindar's epinikion is related to prayer:  prayers occur in epinikia; and the victor is held up to praise in ways appropriate to gods in prayer. Especially notable (and often debated) in Pindar is the use of myths. 
 

Structure of a hymn (see Race, GRBS 23 [1982] 5-14):  1)  Beginning:  this includes at a minimum the naming of the god in first or third person, and often discussion of how the poet will begin.  2)  Greeting:  typically chaire, "hail", lit., "take pleasure". 3)  Request:  in public prayers, often this joins hope that the prayer please the god, and that the community be well 
 
 
Also see Burkert on prayer (pp. 74-75):  "Hear!" + name of god; heaping of epithets; mention of dwelling place(s) of god; precedent set by previous occasions, often stated in conditional form; current request; a vow for future worship. 
 
Prayers can vary considerably in form and content:  they are, after all, intended to have practical results, so prayers will necessarily vary according to context.  But the basic structure, being simple, is fairly well fixed.  Further, certain formal phrases tend to reoccur in many prayer contexts, at junctures in the structure of the prayer:  "but" introducing the request, the so-called priamel structure (introducing a foil before the subject of interest), "always" emphasizing the constant, reciprocal relation of worshipper to god, etc. 
 
Return to the basic problem
 
Claim:  Both religious language and poetic language rely heavily on the ambiguity of reference.  Thus, literary genres are especially well suited to the expression of religious 'truths'. 

If this claim is true, it provides a way to view the problem with which we began:  it lends support to the view that our literary texts are in fact good models of the non-literary, ephemeral poems of cult. They might simply be recorded examples of the latter.  If true, this would give us direct access to a particularly important part of Greek cultic worship. 

This approach assumes that the qualities that make a poem religious are those that make it literary.  Thus, we would tend to expect the two types of qualities to co-occur, and if this is the case, then we can expect a poem with literary styling to express a religious viewpoint, at least in the cases where the context of the poem is related to a social but non-literary context (i.e., the social context of being an Alexandrian poet doesn't count). 
 
 
Roman lyric
 
I have not asked you to prepare any examples of Roman lyric, but I will bring one example in for class reading and discussion. 

History of Roman lyric and problems for the history of Roman religion: 
 

Useful examples (if you want to consider them on your own): 

 
 
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