The Many-Headed Muse
Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry

This book examines Greek songs composed between 440 and 323 BC and argues for the vividness and diversity of lyric culture.

Pauline A. LeVen (Author)

9781108401661, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 April 2017

387 pages, 4 tables
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.67 kg

'The reader will be impressed by the detailed analysis of the poems as well as by the insightful engagement with other sources … the publication of the first ever monograph to be devoted entirely to … late classical Greek lyric poetry deserves to be celebrated.' Theodora A. Hadjimichael, Greek and Roman Musical Studies

This is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied together, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices – political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current re-evaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.

Introduction: definitions, methods, prejudices of reception
1. A collection of unrecollected authors? The corpus and its problems
2. New music and its myths: rhetoric, persona, and the theatre stage
3. Musical lives: reading through the lives of the poets
4. The language of new music: poetics of compounds and baroque aesthetics
5. From authority to fantasy: narrative, voice, fictionality
6. A canon set in stone? Epigraphy, literacy, musical tourism
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Poetry [DC]