Book Description

This book deals with Greek lyric composed more than twenty-five centuries ago. These poems sing of everyday events and emotions in human life, from the most festive to the most serious, presenting a living portrait of the ancient Greeks. This multidisciplinary volume begins with a panorama of Greek lyric poetic genres, their main authors and their representative topics. The first part contains philological studies and literary analyses, first of some Greek poets—Anacreon, Sappho and Lycophron, among others—then of their influence on Horace’s Latin poetry, and on contemporary poetry. The second part, illustrated with colour images, studies Greek lyric from socio-political and iconographic perspectives, analysing its coincidences and reflections in images from Greek pottery, sculptures and reliefs. In addition, this section includes two works on musical theory and composition related to ancient Greek lyric. The volume closes with two studies of the image of Sappho in cinema.