The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse

by Christopher Childers (Editor)

• ISBN13: 9780141392134
• ISBN10: 0141392134
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-08-12
• Publisher: Penguin Random House
• More Book Details

Summary

A window onto the past, full of fire and life: two immortal traditions as the English language has never seen them before

A Penguin Classic

The poets in this book are philosophers and statesmen; priestesses and warriors; teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; drunkards and brawlers; grumpy old men and chic young things. They speak of hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago. The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book-culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practised by the greatest ancient poets - Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus - mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare. Anyone looking for a picture of what ancient poets were up to when they weren't composing national epics, manuals in verse or pieces for the tragic or comic stage - when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times - can find it here. It is a magisterial accomplishment, astonishing in its ambition and thrilling in scope.

Author Biography

Glenn W. Most (afterword, introducer) teaches Classics and related fields in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; until 2020 he was Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Christopher Childers (anthology Editor, translator) studied Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches Latin, coaches squash and tennis, and watches over his pet fish and budgies.

Table of Contents

Note on Lyric
Translator's Preface
Note on Meters
Note on the Text(s)
Acknowledgments

THE ARCHAIC PERIOD
Archilochus
Semonides of Amorgos
Callinus
Tyrtaeus
Mimnermus
Alcman
Sappho
Alcaeus
Solon
Theognis and the Theognidea
Phocylides
Demodocus
Stesichorus
Geryon
Helen
The Theban Saga
The Sack of Troy
Ibycus
Anacreon
Xenophanes
Hipponax
Simonides
Lyrics
Elegies
Epigrams
Pindar
Olympian Odes
Pythian Odes
Fragments from Other Genres
Bacchylides

THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
Timocreon of Rhodes
Ion of Chios
Praxilla
Corinna
Timotheus
Ariphron of Sicyon
Philoxenus
'Plato'
Aristotle
Aristonous of Corinth
Philodamus of Scarphea
Hermolochus
Anonymous Classical Lyric
Folk Songs
Scolia

POST-CLASSICAL GREEK LYRIC
Callimachus
The Aetia
The Iambi
The Hymns
Epigrams
Theocritus
The Greek Anthology
Epigrams from the Garland of Meleager
Philetas of Samos
Erinna
Anyte
Asclepiades
Leonidas of Tarentum
Phalaecus
Nossis
Heraclitus of Halicarnassus
Posidippus of Pella
Hedylus
Rhianus
Dioscorides
Mnasalces
Theodoridas
Alcaeus of Messene
Theaetetus
Diotimus
Tymnes
Pancrates
Phanias
Anipater of Sidon
Anonymous
Meleager
Epigrams from the Garland of Philip
Philodemus
Crinagoras
Erucius
Zonas
Antipater of Thessalonica
Apollonides
Marcus Argentarius
Bianor
Antiphilus of Byzantium
Automedon
Evenus
Maccius
Antiphanes of Macedonia
Philip of Thessalonica
Anacreontea

LATIN LYRIC
Catullus
Polymetric Poems
Longer Poems
Elegies and Epigrams
Virgil
Tibullus
Propertius
Sulpicia
The 'Sulpicia Elegist'
Sulpicia
Horace
Epodes
Odes
Ovid
Amores
Tristia
Letters from Pontus
Statius
Martial

Afterword: What is Lyric?
Abbreviations
Notes
Index of Genres
Index of Poets
Index of First Lines
Thematic Index