A First-of-a-Kind Collection of Greco-Latin Lyrics
Christopher Childers, Ed., The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (London: Penguin: Random House: Penguin Classic, February 27, 2025). EBook: £16.99. 1008pp. ISBN: 979-0-141-39213-4.
*****
“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. 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 practiced 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… 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…”
The introductory “Note on Lyric” defines it as “a song sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—and a set of meters associated with it.” But this volume includes “material that falls outside the strict definition of lyric” by expanding this definition to the more general “anglophone” usage of this term to refer to a short poem, even expanding it further to also include long or epic verse. Though later in the text there is a note that epics are not included, and thus Homer and other lengthy poets do not appear (5).
The “Translator’s Preface” notes that composing this book took the translator “ten years” because he did it himself, without involving “many hands”. The translation was complicated by needing to apply “meter, stanza and rhyme” to the texts that have not been previously translated (xv).
“Note on Meters” offers the much-needed definitions and explanations for the intricate categories of meter covered. The definitions for basic and complex terms such as “dactylic”, “iambic” and “aeolic” make this a good book for poetry professors to use in classes. The textbook that explains verse is accompanying an anthology of examples. Too often these components are separated into different books. I wish I could permanently save this ebook in my files, as I will probably need it if I teach poetry in my classes in the future. There are few equivalently thorough explanations of the science of measured verse. Sections are needed to note the many examples in this anthology of each meter. For example, the “Minor Ionic” is described with its “scansion” or meter pattern, its “Associations”, manner how it was translated consistently in this collection, and examples of poems where it is used, such as “Corinna” and Horace’s Odes.
Some of these translations have been previously published in different reviews and periodicals.
After these extensive notes and introductions, the book is organized chronologically. This is certainly necessary for a book with over 1,000 pages that spans different historic ages. The first section covers the “Archaic Period”. I just learned that “archaic” can refer to a specific age, as opposed to simply something antique. This “archaic” period began when the “Dark” period ended, and writing first appeared in 800 BCE (1). The introduction offers a good amount of needed details to understand what sort of poetry was written, and what was happening during these centuries.
Each author is also helpfully introduced with a biography and a note on their literary style and formulas.
There are elaborate and specific notes on each of the poems at the back of the book, with explanations for cross-references to other poets’ work, cultural references, history and the like. For example, there is an explanation that one poem “is a fine example of what pre-rhetorical’ Archaic oratory (that is, before the techniques introduced by the fifth-century sophists) could achieve” (596). This is useful to me because I have been thinking about rhetoric in my current research project.
This is a very enjoyable and useful book to review. I am tempted to keep reading more of it to insert additional evidence into my study of genres. These early poetic genres serve as foundations of modern genres, so there is much that they explain about our current fictional and poetic landscape. Anybody similarly interested in these subjects would be delighted to browse, or read through this collection. It would be a great additional to any library.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025