Greek Lyric

Recent work on the performance of archaic Greek lyric poetry often discusses the work of a poet within the context of his or her own circle. Anacreon's poetry is read from the perspective of a hedgy poet-for-hire, entertaining—but not really belonging—at a tyrant's court (Kantzios 2005, 2010); likewise, Theognis and Alcaeus each perform among their own hetaireia in symposia at Megara or Lesbos (Figueira and Nagy 1985; Rösler 1980).

Alcaeus’s sophisticated use of imagery has been somewhat neglected in comparison with that of his Lesbian fellow-poet Sappho – but this neglect is unfair. This paper explores Alcaeus’s skillful use of one particular group of images, namely weather imagery; it shows that the poet is drawing on a nexus of topoi discernible both in sympotic poetry and on sympotic pottery, and it seeks to explain his peculiar manipulation of these topoi.

The conventional definition of skolia has largely hinged upon whether a poem was called a skolion by an ancient author (even Reitzenstein’s extensive and influential survey of skolia does not depart significantly from this conception and, more recently, Campbell follows Page in this classification). However, this is an inadequate approach to skolia.