This important and ambitious book explores new approaches to early Greek lyric which go beyond the current anthropological paradigm and do greater justice to its literary aspects and the complexity of its relationship with performance contexts. Although individual chapters, inevitably, vary considerably in scope and methodology, the volume as a whole represents a strong, remarkably coherent challenge to the dominance of new historicist, historicising or cultural criticism, proposing a number of promising alternative approaches to Greek lyric.
As the editors note in their introduction, most scholarship since the 1980s has approached Greek lyric through the lens of performance and/or social, political or ritual settings. Although much has been gained from this (as the volume's contributors are at pains to point out), the costs have been substantial. By reading poems functionally, as primarily intended to perform socio-political roles, scholars have neglected aspects that were once considered central to lyric (and which still are, surely, among the main attractions of this poetry for people outside academia): pleasure, subjectivity, experience, imagination (pp. 1–2). The editors do not advocate a return to the scholarship of the past; instead, they aim to offer new perspectives on aspects that ‘cannot be captured in terms of sociocultural functions’ (p. 4).
Most compellingly, they propose to deploy a concept of literature informed by modern criticism, according to which authors, performers and audiences can once more be granted the individual agency that they have largely been denied in (e.g.) new historicist readings. Lyric can be read as literature because it is ‘categorically different from ordinary forms of communication’ and does more than merely ‘communicate meaning from the author and performer(s) to the listeners’ (p. 11). Through its language and form, lyric is able to have a transformative impact on audiences – to change our perspective on the world. The editors are mindful of the anachronism involved in using literature as a conceptual category for early Greek poetry; yet they note, importantly, that, while we clearly cannot understand Greek lyric on the same terms as contemporary audiences, we share a great deal with them in terms of ‘cognitive and interpretative resources’ (p. 13). The book combines this idea of literature with new approaches to performance contexts, exploring, for instance, the imaginary settings constructed by lyric poems or their ability to anticipate their own reception and to invite a variety of subtle responses from active audiences (the ‘phenomenology of context’, p. 19).
The first part explores the relationship between real and imaginary settings. G. D'Alessio cautions against the widespread tendency to associate deictic markers in lyric poems with their ‘original’ performance settings. He notes that reconstructions of Sappho's poems as (say) ritual performances or sympotic poetry, beyond their inevitably speculative nature, fail to do justice to the ambiguity and subtlety of her evocations of context. In fact, D'Alessio's careful analysis shows that Sappho's poems tend not to point to an actual performance context, but situate themselves ‘on the margins’ of, or outside, actual rituals and performances.
A. Uhlig's chapter, one of the best in the book, goes beyond the ‘ship-of-state’ model to offer a new approach to Alcaeus’ maritime poems. She begins by offering a masterful analysis of political readings such as B. Gentili's, revealing their allegorical nature: in the absence of clear indications of a performance context in the poems, readers reconstruct a ‘secret language … to detect the meanings hidden beneath the surfaces of our texts’ (pp. 78–9); the fact that these hidden meanings are usually found to be of socio-political import says more about scholars’ preoccupations than about early Greek lyric itself. Going beyond such allegorising readings, Uhlig suggests that it is in fact worth reading Alcaeus’ maritime poetry as related to the sea, both for historical reasons and, crucially, from an aesthetic perspective. The poems, Uhlig argues, deploy a ‘maritime aesthetics’ (p. 84) that plays on the contrast between the land as a place of fixity and the sea as alien and unpredictable; by setting them at sea, ‘a place that resists historical contextualization’ (p. 89), Alcaeus constructs a more ambiguous relationship between content and performance context.
D. Fearn explores the interaction between the material objects populating Alcaeus’ poetry and his ‘representational poetics’ (p. 98), particularly the ways in which his poems self-consciously exploit their ability to be ‘reframed’ by different audiences. For instance, Fearn argues that the description of a hall decorated with weapons in fr. 140 plays on a tension between immediacy or presence and absence, ‘the lack of clear access to the world being described’ (p. 104), which in turn gestures towards the possibility of reception and reperformance. Although sometimes obscured by excessive use of jargon, the chapter offers another interesting approach to Alcaeus and sheds light on the literary aspects of his poetry. G.O. Hutchinson argues against the idea that lyric poems have single, monolithic settings. Using Greek, Latin and modern examples, Hutchinson shows how settings change in the course of a poem, and attempts to isolate patterns according to which evocations of spatial contexts intersect dynamically with other elements such as time and the passage from conflict to resolution.
In the opening chapter of Part 2, ‘Conceptual Contexts’, T. Whitmarsh shows that Sappho's poetry endows Helen with a capacity for agency and self-determination that goes against other traditions (although the impact of erôs on Helen's autonomy is perhaps oversimplified, p. 142). Sappho's Helen, however, also remains an object, a ‘figurative abstraction’ (p. 143), and Whitmarsh argues that this double status gestures towards the complex interplay, in Sappho's poems, between immediacy and specificity on the one hand and absence and universality on the other. In Whitmarsh's reading, the hybrid figure of Helen emerges as a fundamental agent of Sappho's poetics.
The central section of Part 2 is taken up by two splendid chapters on the Homeric Hymns, which both show how epic can help us think about lyric and vice versa. H. Spelman demonstrates that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo deals with questions of authorial self-presentation, (re-)performance and reception in a way that is reminiscent of archaic lyric. He argues, convincingly, that the hymn's author was probably influenced by lyric models, and rightly concludes that we need to break down the arbitrary barrier between epic and lyric, and focus on the fact that both belonged to a broader, shared literary culture. O. Thomas's chapter offers fascinating perspectives on lyric poetry from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and particularly those passages in which Apollo and Hermes discuss the lyre and the songs it can accompany. In keeping with the hymn's ‘Hermetic’ character (which Thomas associates with the crossing and blurring of boundaries), the two gods are made to combine very different lyric genres (a theogony and ‘festive banter’ [p. 182]; a hymn and skolia) into a paradoxical, playful ‘companion to Greek lyric’ (p. 185). As Thomas argues, scholarly attempts to fashion a coherent performance context for the hymn out of this bewildering patchwork of generic markers amount to an oversimplification that ‘offends against Hermes’ (p. 187). The chapter offers another excellent illustration of the need, brilliantly met by the volume, for a more textured and inclusive approach to lyric performance.
Phillips discusses the ways in which the invocation of the sun in Pindar's Paean 9 does more than simply recreate the reaction to an eclipse, offering itself to audiences as an elaborate artefact capable of eliciting a wide variety of responses. He focuses notably on the poem's self-positioning vis-à-vis the tradition of ‘eclipse poetry’ and on the interplay of different voices that can be heard by the audience. Phillips's reading is rich and thoughtful, and paints an attractive picture of the various ways in which the poem could have engaged active audiences. I was, however, less convinced by his attempt to relate all this to the poem's religious dimension, which is largely relegated to the background, and primarily understood, as in (neo-)historicist readings, as a cultic or ritual ‘function’ to be fulfilled.
The final part, ‘Lyric Encounters’, contains the richest chapters. P.A. LeVen ingeniously uses the myth of Echo in Daphnis and Chloe as a paradigm for thinking about lyric poetry. From Pan's delight in hearing the repeated sound of the absent Echo's voice emerges a form of listening that is shared by audiences of Greek lyric: we never know exactly whose voice we are hearing, and poems present themselves to us as the delayed ‘echoes’ of something that happened in the past. The adverb δηὖτε (‘once again’) is emblematic of lyric poetry's self-conscious play with this phenomenon: when used by (say) Alcman or Sappho, it activates a ‘temporal kaleidoscope’, creating a fictional, sometimes intimate ‘relationship of listening’ (p. 230) with individual hearers at different stages of a poem's reception. This is a fascinating contribution, which – like Phillips's chapter – offers thought-provoking insights into the phenomenology of lyric performance, a concept that will repay further attention.
Budelmann deploys cognitive psychology to offer new perspectives on the lyric ‘I’. Using the concept of ‘mentalising’ (the ‘human ability to form impressions of other people's mind-states’, p. 235), he traces the encounters between the audience and the ‘I’ projected by lyric poems. Most attractively, he presents the relationship between fictional speaker and listeners as an idealised encounter characterised by unqualified trust, in which the audience ‘have access to some of the other's thoughts in a manner that is uncommon in real life’ (p. 243). Crucially, Budelmann critiques the modern suspicion of the author, arguing – in my view convincingly – that encounters with the author were a fundamental aspect of ancient audiences’ experience of lyric poems, partly because human beings tend naturally to look for intentions and because the poems themselves evoke a palpable sense of the author. Besides showcasing the benefits of a cognitively inflected approach to lyric, Budelmann's contribution has momentous implications for debates on author and persona in ancient literature. In the final chapter M. Payne rightly notes the tension between the occasion of Pindaric epinician and the poems themselves, which demand a far greater and more complex response from the audience than that which one would normally expect of athletic victory. For Payne, the excess emerging from this tension creates conditions in which Pindar's poetry can operate a change in its audience, transforming the poems into ‘events’ that require the listener to enter into their ‘enchanted circle’ (p. 272), thereby pledging ‘fidelity’, and strive to free themselves of their pragmatic occasion (‘farewell’). Payne draws attention to a fundamental problem in understanding epinician and suggests fascinating answers; yet his discussion, which is limited to a handful of passages and barely engages with scholarship on Pindar, remains too theoretical and limited in scope to convince fully.
The chapters are all engaging; many are excellent and offer compelling alternatives to current approaches. The volume will, I hope, encourage further research in this direction. In any case, it will join Budelmann's recent ‘Green and Yellow’ as indispensable reading for anyone interested in early Greek lyric.
