Alcaeus of Mytilene

Mytilene

Mytilene is a town and a former municipality on the island of Lesbos, North Aegean, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Lesbos, of which it is a municipal unit. It is the capital of the island of Lesbos. Mytilene, whose name is pre-Greek, is built on the...

 (c. 620 BC-6th century BC), Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

 lyric

Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...

 poet who supposedly invented the Alcaic verse

Alcaic verse

The Alcaic stanza is a Greek lyrical meter, an Aeolic verse form traditionally believed to have been invented by Alcaeus, a lyric poet from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, about 600 BC...

. He was included in the canonical

Canon (fiction)

In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...

 list of nine lyric poets

Nine lyric poets

The nine lyric poets were a canon of archaic Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study.They were:*Alcman of Sparta...

 by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria

Alexandria

Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...

. He was an older contemporary and an alleged lover of Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class

Social class

Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

 of Mytilene

Mytilene

Mytilene is a town and a former municipality on the island of Lesbos, North Aegean, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Lesbos, of which it is a municipal unit. It is the capital of the island of Lesbos. Mytilene, whose name is pre-Greek, is built on the...

, the main city of Lesbos

Lesbos Island

Lesbos is a Greek island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea. It has an area of with 320 kilometres of coastline, making it the third largest Greek island. It is separated from Turkey by the narrow Mytilini Strait....

, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.

Biography

The broad outlines of the poet's life are well known. He was born into the aristocratic, warrior class that dominated Mytilene, the strongest city-state on the island of Lesbos and, by the end of the seventh century B.C., the most influential of all the Asiatic Greek cities, with a strong navy and colonies securing its trade-routes in the Hellespont. The city had long been ruled by kings born to the Penthilid clan but, during the poet's life, the Penthilids were a spent force and rival aristocrats and their factions contended with each other for supreme power. Alcaeus and his older brothers were passionately involved in the struggle but experienced little success. Their political adventures can be understood in terms of three tyrants who came and went in succession:

• Melanchrus - he was overthrown sometime between 612BC and 609 BC by a faction that, in addition to the brothers of Alcaeus, included Pittacus (later renowned as one of the Seven Sages of Greece
  Seven Sages of Greece
  The Seven Sages or Seven Wise Men was the title given by ancient Greek tradition to seven early 6th century BC philosophers, statesmen and law-givers who were renowned in the following centuries for their wisdom.-The Seven Sages:Traditionally, each of the seven sages represents an aspect of worldly...
  
  ); Alcaeus at that time was too young to be actively involved;
• Myrsilus - it is not known when he came to power but some verses by Alcaeus (frag. 129) indicate that the poet, his brothers and Pittacus made plans to overthrow him and that Pittacus subsequently betrayed them; Alcaeus and his brothers fled into exile where the poet later wrote a drinking song in celebration of the news of the tyrant's death (frag. 332);
• Pittacus - the dominant political figure of his time, he was voted supreme power by the political assembly of Mytilene and appears to have governed well (590-580 BC), even allowing Alcaeus and his faction to return home in peace.

Sometime before 600 BC, Mytilene fought Athens for control of Sigeion

Sigeion

Sigeion was a Greek city in the north-west of the Troad region of Anatolia located at the mouth of the Scamander . Sigeion commanded a ridge between the Aegean Sea and the Scamander which is now known as Yenişehir and is a part of the Çanakkale district in Çanakkale province, Turkey...

 and Alcaeus was old enough to participate in the fighting. According to the historian Herodotus

Herodotus

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...

, the poet threw away his shield to make good his escape from the victorious Athenians then celebrated the occasion in a poem that he later sent to his friend, Melanippus. It is thought that Alcaeus travelled widely during his years in exile, including at least one visit to Egypt. His older brother, Antimenidas, appears to have served as a mercenary in the army of Nebuchadnezzar II and probably took part in the conquest of Judaea and the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. Alcaeus wrote verses in celebration of Antimenides' return, including mention of his valour in slaying a Goliath-like opponent(frag. 350), and he proudly describes the military hardware that adorned their family home (frag. 357).
Alcaeus was a contemporary and a countryman of Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

 and, since both poets composed for the entertainment of Mytilenean friends, they had many opportunities to associate with each other on a quite regular basis, such as at the Kallisteia, an annual festival celebrating the island's federation under Mytilene, held at the 'Messon' (referred to as temenos in fr.s 129 and 130), where Sappho performed publicly with female choirs. Alcaeus' reference to Sappho in terms more typical of a divinity, as holy/pure, honey-smiling Sappho (fr. 384), may owe its inspiration to her performances at the festival. The Lesbian or Aeolic school of poetry "reached in the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus that high point of brilliancy to which it never after-wards approached" and it was assumed by later Greek critics and during the early centuries of the Christian era that the two poets were in fact lovers, a theme which became a favourite subject in art (as in the urn pictured above).

Poetry

The poetic works of Alcaeus were collected into ten books, with elaborate commentaries, by the Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium

Aristophanes of Byzantium

Aristophanes of Byzantium was a Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other classical authors such as Pindar and Hesiod. Born in Byzantium about 257 BC, he soon moved to Alexandria and studied under Zenodotus,...

 and Aristarchus of Samothrace

Aristarchus of Samothrace

Aristarchus of Samothrace was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.He established the most historically important critical...

 sometime in the 3rd century BC, and yet his verses today exist only in fragmentary form, varying in size from mere phrases, such as wine, window into a man (fr.333) to entire groups of verses and stanzas, such as those quoted below (fr.346). Alexandrian scholars numbered him in their canonic nine

Nine lyric poets

The nine lyric poets were a canon of archaic Greek composers esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study.They were:*Alcman of Sparta...

 (one lyric poet per Muse). Among these, Pindar

Pindar

Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...

 was held by many ancient critics to be pre-eminent, but some gave precedence to Alcaeus instead. The canonic nine are traditionally divided into two groups, with Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon

Anacreon

Anacreon was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of nine lyric poets.- Life :...

, being 'monodists' or 'solo-singers', with the following characteristics:

• they composed and performed personally for friends and associates on topics of immediate interest to them;
• they wrote in their nativee dialects (Alcaeus and Sappho in Aeolic dialect, Anacreon in Ionic);
• they preferred quite short, metrically simple stanzas or 'strophes' which they re-used in many poems - hence the 'Alcaic' and 'Sapphic' stanzas, named after the two poets who perfected them or possibly invented them.

The other six of the canonic nine composed verses for public occasions, performed by choruses and professional singers and typically featuring complex metrical arrangements that were never reproduced in other verses. However, this division into two groups is considered by some modern scholars to be too simplistic and often it is practically impossible to know whether a lyric composition was sung or recited, or whether or not it was accompanied by musical instruments and dance. Even the private reflections of Alcaeus, ostensibly sung at dinner parties, still retain a public function.

Critics often seek to understand Alcaeus in comparison with Sappho:
The Roman poet, Horace, also compared the two, describing Alcaeus as "more full-throatedly singing" - see Horace's tribute below. Alcaeus himself seems to underscore the difference between his own 'down-to-earth' style and Sappho's more 'celestial' qualities when he describes her almost as a goddess (as cited above), and yet it has been argued that both poets were concerned with a balance between the divine and the profane, each emphasising different elements in that balance.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus. His literary style was Attistic — imitating Classical Attic Greek in its prime.-Life:...

 exhorts us to "Observe in Alcaeus the sublimity, brevity and sweetness coupled with stern power, his splendid figures, and his clearness which was unimpaired by the dialect; and above all mark his manner of expressing his sentiments on public affairs," while Quintilian

Quintilian

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing...

, after commending Alcaeus for his excellence "in that part of his works where he inveighs against tyrants and contributes to good morals; in his language he is concise, exalted, careful and often like an orator;" goes on to add: "but he descended into wantonnness and amours, though better fitted for higher things."

Poetic genres

The works of Alcaeus are conventionally grouped according to five genres.

• Political songs: Alcaeus often composed on a political theme, covering the power struggles on Lesbos with the passion and vigour of a partisan, cursing his opponents, rejoicing in their deaths, delivering blood-curdling homilies on the consequences of political inaction and exhorting his comrades to heroic defiance, as in one of his 'ship of state' allegories. Commenting on Alcaeus as a political poet, the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus
  Dionysius of Halicarnassus
  Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus. His literary style was Attistic — imitating Classical Attic Greek in its prime.-Life:...
  
   once observed that "...if you removed the meter you would find political rhetoric."

• Drinking songs: According to the grammarian Athenaeus
  Athenaeus
  Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...
  
  , Alcaeus made every occasion an excuse for drinking and he has provided posterity several quotes in proof of it. Alcaeus exhorts his friends to drink in celebration of a tyrant's death, to drink away their sorrows, to drink because life is short and along the lines in vino veritas, to drink through winter storms and to drink through the heat of summer. The latter poem in fact paraphrases verses from Hesiod
  Hesiod
  Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
  
  , re-casting them in Asclepiad meter and Aeolian dialect.

• Hymns: Alcaeus sang about the gods in the spirit of the Homeric hymns
  Homeric Hymns
  The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. The hymns are "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same epic meter—dactylic hexameter—as the Iliad and Odyssey, use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect...
  
  , to entertain his companions rather than to glorify the gods and in the same meters that he used for his 'secular' lyrics. There are for example fragments in 'Sapphic' meter praising the Dioscuri, Hermes
  Hermes
  Hermes is the great messenger of the gods in Greek mythology and a guide to the Underworld. Hermes was born on Mount Kyllini in Arcadia. An Olympian god, he is also the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of the cunning of thieves, of orators and...
  
   and the river Hebrus (a river significant in Lesbian mythology since it was down its waters that the head of Orpheus
  Orpheus
  Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...
  
   was believed to have floated singing, eventually crossing the sea to Lesbos and ending up in a temple of Apollo, as a symbol of Lesbian supremacy in song). According to Porphyrion
  Porphyrion
  In Greek mythology, Porphyrion was a giant, one of the sons of Uranus and Gaia. After the Olympian gods imprisoned the Titans in Tartarus, Porphyrion was one of twenty-four anguipede giants who made war on Olympus....
  
  , the hymn to Hermes was imitated by Horace in one of his own 'sapphic' odes (C.1.10: Mercuri, facunde nepos Atlantis).

• Love songs: Almost all Alcaeus' amorous verses, mentioned with disapproval by Quintilian above, have vanished without trace. There is a brief reference to his love poetry in a passage by Cicero
  Cicero
  Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
  
  . Horace
  Horace
  Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
  
  , who often wrote in imitation of Alcaeus, sketches in verse one of the Lesbian poet's favourite subjects - Lycus of the black hair and eyes (C.1.32.11-12: nigris oculis nigroque/crine decorum). It is possible that Alcaeus wrote amorously about Sappho, as indicated in an earlier quote.

• Miscellaneous: Alcaeus wrote on such a wide variety of subjects and themes that contradictions in his character emerge. The grammarian Athenaeus quoted some verses about perfumed ointments to prove just how unwarlike Alcaeus could be and he quoted his description of the armour adorning the walls of his house as proof that he could be unusually warlike for a lyric poet. Other examples of his readiness for both warlike and unwarlike subjects are lyrics celebrating his brother's heroic exploits as a Babylonian mercenary and lyrics sung in a rare meter (Sapphic Ionic in minore) in the voice of a distressed girl, "Wretched me, who share in all ills!" - possibly imitated by Horace in an ode in the same meter (C.3.12: Miserarum est neque amori dare ludum neque dulci). He also wrote Sapphic stanzas on Homeric themes but in unHomeric style, comparing Helen of Troy unfavourably with Thetis
  Thetis
  Silver-footed Thetis , disposer or "placer" , is encountered in Greek mythology mostly as a sea nymph or known as the goddess of water, one of the fifty Nereids, daughters of the ancient one of the seas with shape-shifting abilities who survives in the historical vestiges of most later Greek myths...
  
  , the mother of Akhilles.

A drinking poem (fr. 346)

The following verses demonstrate some key characteristics of the Alcaic style (square brackets indicate uncertainties in the ancient text):

Let's drink! Why are we waiting for the lamps? Only an inch of daylight left.

Lift down the large cups, my friends, the painted ones;

for wine was given to men by the son of Semele and Zeus

to help them forget their troubles. Mix one part of water to two of wine,

pour it in up to the brim, and let one cup push the other along...

The Greek meter here is relatively simple, comprising the Greater Asclepiad

Asclepiad (poetry)

An Asclepiad is a line of poetry following a particular metrical pattern. The form is attributed to Asclepiades of Samos and is one of the Aeolic metres....

, adroitly used to convey, for example, the rhythm of jostling cups . The language of the poem is typically direct and concise and comprises short sentences - the first line is in fact a model of condensed meaning, comprising an exhortation ("Let's drink!), a rhetorical question ("Why are we waiting for the lamps?") and a justifying statement (Only an inch of daylight left.) The meaning is clear and uncomplicated, the subject is drawn from personal experience, and there is an absence of poetic ornament, such as simile or metaphor. Like many of his poems (e.g. fr.s 38, 326, 338, 347, 350), it begins with a verb (in this case "Let's drink!") and it includes a proverbial expression ("Only an inch of daylight left") though it is possible that he coined it himself.

A hymn (fr. 34)

Alcaeus rarely used metaphor or simile and yet he had a fondness for the allegory of the storm-tossed ship of state. The following fragment of a hymn to Castor and Polydeuces (the Dioscuri) is possibly another example of this though some scholars interpret it instead as a prayer for a safe voyage.

Hither to me now from your isle of Pelops,

You mighty progeny of Zeus

Zeus

In the ancient Greek religion, Zeus was the "Father of Gods and men" who ruled the Olympians of Mount Olympus as a father ruled the family. He was the god of sky and thunder in Greek mythology. His Roman counterpart is Jupiter and his Etruscan counterpart is Tinia.Zeus was the child of Cronus...

 and Leda

Leda (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Leda was daughter of the Aetolian king Thestius, and wife of the king Tyndareus , of Sparta. Her myth gave rise to the popular motif in Renaissance and later art of Leda and the Swan...

!

Show that you are kindly by nature, Castor

And Polydeuces;

You who get about on swift-footed horses,

Over the broad earth, over all the ocean,

Easily bringing men deliverance from

Death's chilling rigor,

Landing on tall ships with a sudden, great bound,

A far-away light up the forestays running:

You convey a glow to a ship in trouble,

Sailed in the darkness.

The poem was written in Sapphic stanza

Sapphic stanza

The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form spanning four lines ....

s, a verse form popularly associated with his compatriot, Sappho, but in which he too excelled, here paraphrased in English to suggest the same rhythms. There were probably another three stanzas in the original poem but only nine letters of them remain. The 'far-away light' is a reference to St Elmo's Fire, an electrical discharge supposed by ancient Greek mariners to be an epiphany of the Dioscuri, but the meaning of the line was obscured by gaps in the papyrus until reconstructed by a modern scholarsuch reconstructions are typical of the extant poetry (see Scholars, fragments and sources

Alcaeus

Alcaeus may refer to:*Alcaeus , a writer of ten plays of the Old Comedy.*Alcaeus , one of several figures of this name in Greek mythology*12607 Alcaeus - a main belt asteroid...

 below). This poem doesn't begin with a verb but with an adverb (Δευτέ) but still communicates a sense of action. He probably performed his verses at drinking parties

Symposium

In ancient Greece, the symposium was a drinking party. Literary works that describe or take place at a symposium include two Socratic dialogues, Plato's Symposium and Xenophon's Symposium, as well as a number of Greek poems such as the elegies of Theognis of Megara...

 for friends and political alliesmen for whom loyalty was essential, particularly in such troubled times.

Horace

The Roman poet Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

 modelled his own lyrical compositions on those of Alcaeus, rendering the Lesbian poet's verse-forms, including 'Alcaic' and 'Sapphic' stanzas, into concise Latin - an achievement he celebrates in his third book of odes. In his second book, in an ode composed in Alcaic stanzas on the subject of an almost fatal accident he had on his farm, he imagines meeting Alcaeus and Sappho in Hades

Hades

Hades , Hadēs, originally , Haidēs or , Aidēs , meaning "the unseen") was the ancient Greek god of the underworld. The genitive , Haidou, was an elision to denote locality: "[the house/dominion] of Hades". Eventually, the nominative came to designate the abode of the dead.In Greek mythology, Hades...

:

quam paene furvae regna Proserpina

Proserpina

Proserpina or Proserpine is an ancient Roman goddess whose story is the basis of a myth of Springtime. Her Greek goddess' equivalent is Persephone. The probable origin of her name comes from the Latin, "proserpere" or "to emerge," in respect to the growing of grain...

e

et iudicantem vidimus Aeacum

Aeacus

Aeacus was a mythological king of the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf.He was son of Zeus and Aegina, a daughter of the river-god Asopus. He was born on the island of Oenone or Oenopia, to which Aegina had been carried by Zeus to secure her from the anger of her parents, and whence this...

sedesque descriptas piorum et

Aeoliis fidibus querentem

Sappho puellis de popularibus

et te sonantem plenius aureo,

Alcaee, plectro dura navis,

dura fugae mala, dura belli!

How close the realm of dusky Proserpine

Yawned at that instant! I half glimpsed the dire

Judge of the dead, the blest in their divine

Seclusion, Sappho on the Aeolian lyre,

Mourning the cold girls of her native isle,

And you, Alcaeus, more full-throatedly

Singing with your gold quill of ships, exile

And war, hardship on land, hardship at sea.

Ovid

Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

 compared Alcaeus to Sappho in Letters of the Heroines

Heroides

The Heroides , or Epistulae Heroidum , are a collection of fifteen epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets, and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek and Roman mythology, in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated,...

, where Sappho is imagined to speak as follows:

nec plus Alcaeus consors patriaeque lyraeque

laudis habet, quamvis grandius ille sonet.

Nor does Alcaeus, my fellow-countryman and fellow-poet,

receive more praise, although he resounds more grandly.

Scholars, fragments and sources

The story of Alcaeus is partly the story of the scholars who rescued his work from oblivion. His verses have not come down to us through a manuscript tradition - generations of scribes copying an author's collected works, such as delivered intact into the modern age four entire books of Pindar

Pindar

Pindar , was an Ancient Greek lyric poet. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian described him as "by far the greatest of the nine lyric poets, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich...

's odes - but haphazardly, in quotes from ancient scholars and commentators whose own works have chanced to survive, and in the tattered remnants of papyri uncovered from an ancient rubbish pile at Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered...

 and other locations in Egypt: sources that modern scholars have studied and correlated exhaustively, adding little by little to the world's store of poetic fragments.

Ancient scholars quoted Alcaeus in support of various arguments. Thus for example Heraclitus 'The Allegorist' quoted fr.326 and part of fr.6, about ships in a storm, in his study on Homer's use of allegory. The hymn to Hermes, fr308(b), was quoted by Hephaestion (grammarian)

Hephaestion (grammarian)

Hephaestion was a grammarian of Alexandria who flourished in the age of the Antonines. He was the author of a manual of Greek metres, which is most valuable as the only complete treatise on the subject that has been preserved. The concluding chapter discusses the various kinds of poetical...

 and both he and Libanius

Libanius

Libanius was a Greek-speaking teacher of rhetoric of the Sophist school. During the rise of Christian hegemony in the later Roman Empire, he remained unconverted and regarded himself as a Hellene in religious matters.-Life:...

, the rhetorician, quoted the first two lines of fr.350, celebrating the return from Babylon of Alcaeus' brother. The rest of fr.350 was paraphrased in prose by the historian/geographer Strabo

Strabo

Strabo, also written Strabon was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher.-Life:Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus , a city which he said was situated the approximate equivalent of 75 km from the Black Sea...

. Many fragments were supplied in quotes by Athenaeus

Athenaeus

Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...

, principally on the subject of wine-drinking, but fr.333, "wine, window into a man", was quoted much later by the Byzantine grammarian, John Tzetzes

John Tzetzes

John Tzetzes was a Byzantine poet and grammarian, known to have lived at Constantinople during the 12th century.Tzetzes was Georgian on his mother's side...

.

The first 'modern' publication of Alcaeus' verses appeared in a Greek and Latin edition of fragments collected from the canonic nine lyrical poets by Michael Neander, published at Basle in 1556. This was followed by another edition of the nine poets, collected by Henricus Stephanus and published in Paris in 1560. Fulvius Ursinus compiled a fuller collection of Alcaic fragments, including a commentary, which was published at Antwerp in 1568. The first separate edition of Alcaeus was by Christian David Jani and it was published at Halle in 1780. The next separate edition was by August Matthiae, Leipzig 1827.

Some of the fragments quoted by ancient scholars were able to be integrated by scholars in the nineteenth century. Thus for example two separate quotes by Athenaeus were united by Theodor Bergk

Theodor Bergk

Theodor Bergk was a German philologist, an authority on classical Greek poetry.-Biography:He was born in Leipzig. After studying at the University of Leipzig, where he profited by the instruction of G. Hermann, he was appointed in 1835 to the lectureship in Latin at the orphan school at Halle...

 to form fr.362. Three separate sources were combined to form fr.350, as mentioned above, including a prose paraphrase from Strabo that first needed to be restored to its original meter, a synthesis achieved by the united efforts of Otto Hoffmann, Karl Otfried Muller

Karl Otfried Müller

Karl Otfried Müller , was a German scholar and Philodorian, or admirer of ancient Sparta, who introduced the modern study of Greek mythology.-Biography:...

 and Franz Heinrich Ludolf Ahrens

Franz Heinrich Ludolf Ahrens

Franz Heinrich Ludolf Ahrens was a German philologist.He was born at Helmstedt. After studying at the University of Göttingen under Otfried Müller and Georg Ludolf Dissen, and holding several educational appointments, in 1849 he succeeded GF Grotefend, director of the Lyceum at Hanover, a post...

. The discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri towards the end of the nineteenth century dramatically increased the scope of scholarly research. In fact, eight important fragments have now been compiled from papyri - fr.s 9, 38A, 42, 45, 34(a), 129, 130 and most recently S262. These fragments typically feature lacunae or gaps that scholars fill with 'educated guesses', including for example a "brilliant supplement" by Maurice Bowra

Maurice Bowra

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.-Birth and boyhood:...

 in fr.34(a), a hymn to the Dioscuri that includes a description of St Elmo's fire in the ship's rigging. Working with only eight letters (pro...tr...ntes), Bowra conjured up a phrase that brilliantly develops the meaning and the euphony of the poem (proton' ontrechontes), describing luminescence "running along the forestays". Bowra's ability to single out important information is legendary and it is demonstrated in an anecdote about his days at Oxford. He and some colleagues had stripped naked for a swim in the river when they were surprised by a party of ladies out for a stroll. Bowra's colleagues made haste to cover their private parts; Bowra merely covered his head. Asked about this afterwards, the scholar observed: "I don't know about you, gentlemen, but in Oxford I at least am known by my face."

Sources

• Greek Lyric Poetry. D.A. Campbell (ed.) Bristol Classical Press, London, 1982. ISBN 978-0-86292-008-1
• Greek Lyric 1: Sappho and Alcaeus. D. A. Campbell (ed.). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982. ISBN 978-0-674-99157-6
• Alcée. Fragments. Gauthier Liberman (ed.). Collection Budé
  Collection Budé
  The Collection Budé, or the Collection des Universités de France, is a series of books comprising the Greek and Latin classics up to the middle of the 6th century...
  
  , Paris, 1999. ISBN 978-2-251-00476-1
• Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets. Translated by Willis Barnstone. Schoken Books Inc., New York, 1988. ISBN 978-0-8052-0831-3

External links

• Poems by Alcaeus English translations
• A. M. Miller, Greek Lyric: Alcaeus, many fragments.
• Alcaeus Bilingual Anthology (in Greek and English, side by side)
• James S.Easby-Smith The Songs of Alcaeus (1901) W.H.Lowdermilk and Co., Washington - digitalized by Google: biography, history of criticisms, history of editions/publications, translations of fragments, commentary etc.