Lyric is one of three broad categories of poetry in
classical antiquity, along with
drama and
epic, according to the scheme of the "natural forms of poetry" developed by
Goethe in the early nineteenth century. (Drama is considered a form of poetry here because both
tragedy and
comedy were written in verse in ancient Greece.) Culturally, Greek lyric is the product of the political, social and intellectual milieu of the Greek
polis ('city-state'). Much of Greek lyric is
occasional poetry, composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions. The
symposium ('drinking party') was one setting in which
lyric poems were performed. 'Lyric' was sometimes sung to the accompaniment of either a string instrument (particularly the
lyre or
kithara) or a wind instrument (most often the
reed pipe called
aulos). Whether the accompaniment was a string or wind instrument, the term for such accompanied lyric was
melic poetry (from the Greek word for 'song'
melos). Lyric could also be sung without any instrumental accompaniment. This latter form is called
meter and it is recited rather than sung, strictly speaking. Modern surveys of "Greek lyric" often include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly "
song lyrics" in the modern sense, such as
elegies and
iambics. The Greeks themselves did not include elegies nor iambus within melic poetry, since they had different metres and different musical instruments. The
Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome offers the following clarification: "'melic' is a musical definition, 'elegy' is a metrical definition, whereas 'iambus' refers to a genre and its characteristics subject matter. (...) The fact that these categories are artificial and potentially misleading should prompt us to approach Greek lyric poetry with an open mind, without preconceptions about what 'type' of poetry we are reading." Greek lyric poems celebrate athletic victories
(epinikia), commemorate the dead, exhort soldiers to valor, and offer religious devotion in the forms of
hymns,
paeans, and
dithyrambs.
Partheneia, "maiden-songs," were sung by choruses of maidens at festivals. Love poems praise the beloved, express unfulfilled desire, proffer seductions, or blame the former lover for a breakup. In this last mood, love poetry might blur into
invective, a poetic attack aimed at insulting or shaming a personal enemy, an art at which
Archilochus, the earliest known Greek lyric poet, excelled. The themes of Greek lyric include "politics, war, sports, drinking, money, youth, old age, death, the heroic past, the gods," and hetero- and
homosexual love. Only a small sampling of lyric poetry from
Archaic Greece, the period when it first flourished, survives. For example, the poems of
Sappho are said to have filled nine
papyrus rolls in the
Library of Alexandria, with the first book alone containing more than 1,300 lines of verse. In modern times, only one of Sappho's poems exists intact, with fragments from other sources that would scarcely fill a
chapbook. ==Meters==