This book examines the formation and development of the biographical traditions about early Greek poets, focusing on the traditions of Hesiod, Stesichorus, Archilochus, Hipponax, Terpander and Sappho. The study provides a detailed overview of the traditions and chronographical material about these poets and seeks to clarify who were the creators of the particular traditions; what were the sources; when the traditions were formed; and to what extent they are shaped by formulaic themes and story-patterns. It challenges several mainstream assumptions on the subject, for example, that the traditions were formed mainly in the Post-Classical period; that the only significant source for the legends is the works of the particular poet; and that the poets were perceived as “new heroes.”

A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life for the general reader the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary and possibly mythical Orpheus and with Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, “the dirty old man of poetry,” to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses–the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.

Mary R. Lefkowitz has extensively revised and rewritten her classic study to introduce a new generation of students to the lives of the Greek poets. Thoroughly updated with references to the most recent scholarship, this second edition includes new material and fresh analysis of the ancient biographies of Greece's most famous poets. With little or no independent historical information to draw on, ancient writers searched for biographical data in the poets' own works and in comic poetry about them. Lefkowitz describes how biographical mythology was created and offers a sympathetic account of how individual biographers reconstructed the poets' lives. She argues that the life stories of Greek poets, even though primarily fictional, still merit close consideration, as they provide modern readers with insight into ancient notions about the creative process and the purpose of poetic composition.

Brilliantly applying insights and methodologies from anthropology, literary theory, and the social sciences to the historical study of archaic lyric, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece, winner of Italy's prestigious Viareggio Prize, develops a new Picture of the literary history of Greece. An essentially practical art, ancient Greek poetry was clocely linked to the realities of social and political life and to the actual behavior of individuals within a community. Its mythological content was didactic and pedagogical. But Greek poetry differs radically from modern forms in its mode of communication: it was designed not for reading but for performance, with musical accompaniment, before an audience. In analyzing the formal and social aspects of this performance context, Gentili illuminates such topics as oral composition and improvisation, oral transmission and memory, the connections betweek poetry and music, the changing socioeconomic situation of the artist, and the relations among poets, patrons, and the public.

Explores the phenomenon of wandering poets, setting them within the wider context of ancient networks of exchange, patronage and affiliation.

This book brings a new approach to the study of the early Greek lyric poets. Instead of concentrating on the poetry as literature, Podlecki has chosen to examine the life and works of the leading poets of the eighth to fifth century B.C. in the context of the military and historical events of the period.