Poets and playwrights

Each poet, or group of poets, has a page of their own. The poets are grouped below by the kind of poetry they wrote. This guide explains the names of the groups, shows how a poet’s page is built, and suggests where to begin.

How a poet’s page is built

Every page has two sets of tabs. The About tabs describe the poet: life and date, the metres used, the dialect, and how the poems reached us. The Works tabs each hold one poem or passage, scanned line by line.

A works tab opens with a short Synopsis: what the work is about, and where the passage stands in it. Then comes the Text and translation, with the Greek beside the site’s own English. The Scansion follows. It marks every syllable long (—) or short (⏑), with the scheme of the metre beside it. Further down, Prosody line by line explains why each syllable has the length it has.

The groups

Epic is long narrative poetry in dactylic hexameters. The hexameter is the metre of Homer and Hesiod and of all later epic.^[1] The Homeric Hymns are in the same metre.

Elegy and iambus are the poems of the archaic Ionian poets other than epic.^[2] Elegy is written in elegiac couplets: a hexameter followed by a shorter line, the pentameter.^[3] Here is a couplet of Theognis:

Iambus is verse in iambic metres, above all the iambic trimeter, and in the epodes of Archilochus and Hipponax, where a long line alternates with a shorter one.^[4]

Monody is song for one voice.^[5] Lesbian monody is the song of Sappho and Alcaeus, in their own Aeolic dialect and metres.^[2] Ionian monody is the song of Anacreon. He was an Ionian, but he used aeolic and ionic cola too.^[6]

Choral lyric is song for a chorus that danced as it sang.^[7] It belongs to the Dorian tradition, with its longer and more complex strophes.^[8] From Stesichorus on, the strophes were often grouped in triads: strophe, antistrophe, and an epode of a different form.^[9] Pindar and Bacchylides are the chief poets here.

Late classical lyric is the song of the late fifth century. Late Euripides and Timotheus gave up repeating stanzas for freely composed song.^[10] Timotheus’ Persians is the chief example.

Tragedy and Comedy are the drama of Athens. They have spoken parts, in iambic trimeters, and sung parts, mostly in strophes.^[11] In the last plays of Euripides and Sophocles the songs often run through many metres without repeating.^[12]

Hellenistic poetry belongs to the centuries after the classical age. In them most poetry was written in the three main stichic metres: the hexameter, the elegiac couplet and the iambic trimeter.^[13] Imperial and late antique verse carries the story on into the Roman empire.

Women poets gathers women whose verse survives: Erinna, Praxilla, Anyte, Nossis, Moero, Melinno and Julia Balbilla. Sappho stands with the Lesbian poets, and Corinna with the choral poets.

A suggested path

1. Begin with Homer: the hexameter is the commonest Greek metre, and Iliad 1.1–52 has a human recording.
2. Then Sappho, fr. 1: a whole poem in Sapphic stanzas.
3. Then the elegists and Archilochus, for the couplet and the trimeter.
4. Then a play: the opening of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus for spoken verse, and a chorus of Euripides for song.
5. Then Pindar or Bacchylides, for triads.

Before a works tab, read Verse forms for the poem’s metre, and Dialects and styles for its dialect.

Notes

1. ^ West 1987, p. 19.
2. ^ ^{a b} West 1987, pp. 2–3.
3. ^ West 1987, p. 24.
4. ^ West 1987, p. 31.
5. ^ Landels 1999, c. pp. 11–12.
6. ^ West 1987, p. 40.
7. ^ Landels 1999, c. pp. 12–13.
8. ^ West 1987, pp. 2–3, 35.
9. ^ West 1987, p. 36.
10. ^ D’Angour 2022, p. 138.
11. ^ West 1987, p. 48.
12. ^ West 1987, p. 66.
13. ^ West 1987, p. 68.