91 Arion astride a dolphin, holding a lyre: reverse of bronze coin from Methymna, second-first century BC.

92 The 'Mnesiepean Inscrip tion' relating to Archilochus, on Paros: set up c. 250 BC by Mnesiepes in a shrine dedi cated to the poet, and devoted to his life and work. The remaining fragments were dis covered and edited in 1952 by N.M. Kontoléon.

as well as music. We do not know the dance-steps, and the early music
is lost: all we have are the words and their rhythm. This is rather like
trying to reconstruct an opera or oratorio solely from the libretto. We
should also bear in mind that though all these types of lyric expression
acquired literary prominence only during the seventh century, they
had (like epic) existed in oral form since time immemorial, whether as
public ceremony or private folk-song. Homer reveals the existence of
dirges, paeans and wedding-hymns. Archilochus in his beast fables
and scurrilous polemic hints at an age-old folk-tradition which sur
faced in durable form only after the discovery of writing. Literacy, in
general, tends to tidy up art, to organize it in respectable patterns: the
man who can read and write is already half bourgeois. The drunken
impromptu dithyramb in honour of Dionysus was put on a regular
footing by Arion, who - besides riding dolphins - had the essentially
middle-class gift of making poetry pay off in hard cash. Archaic
Greece on the whole, however, tended (the Homeridae apart) to dis
trust literary professionalism, and it took a couple of fifth-century

giants - Simonides and Pindar - to legitimize the idea of a poet, like anyone else, being worthy of his hire.

The first lyric poet known to us, Archilochus (2716-c. 650) is also one of the most memorable. An aggressive individualist, wryly sardonic in his attitude to the world around him, he packed his spare verse with brilliant, disconcertingly realistic imagery and a biting blend of sensuousness and satire. Born on barren Paros, the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a slave-woman, he joined the earliest colonizing expedition to Thasos, off the Thracian coast - and provides us with priceless evidence, in his work, of seventh-century frontier life. Always in danger from Thracian tribesmen or rival prospectors - like the Klondike, Thasos had its gold-rush- the settler enjoyed few consola tions save whoring and drinking. All this Archilochus sets down, without heroics, in phrases as vivid as any Japanese haiku. He spares neither himself (we hear a lot about his impotence), nor his friends (such as the dandified Glaucus, whose gravestone turned up a few years ago), nor the unlucky girl he never quite managed to marry. His

broken engagement to Neobule, indeed, sparked off some of his most vitriolic invective. No less serious a poet than Homer (so they judged him in antiquity), yet the most un-Homeric of old soldiers, he describes the skirmishes of love and war with an equally unromantic eye. In Archilochus, Thersites has come of age.

Other near-contemporary poets - Callinus of Ephesus, Tyrtaeus and Terpander at Sparta could still, without self-consciousness, and inspired by the new polis ideal, hit an almost Kiplingesque note of parish patriotism. If Archilochus is the colonists' poet, these show us the collective hoplite ethic in action. Chariots and individual prowess are out, and war has become (as it was long to remain) a kind of bloodier football match, where you stood in line and shoved until something gave. Yet even at Sparta, in the seventh century, there was still room for a learned, frivolous and frankly eccentric poet such as Alcman, whose famous Partheneion (maiden-song), partly preserved on papyrus, shows us a shows us a complex and luxurious world, as remote as could well be imagined from the later stereotype of crude Spartan militarism. This is not to say that political conditions had no impact on a poet's outlook or imagery. When Gyges of Lydia occupied Colophon - hitherto among the most powerful of Ionian cities - its inhabitants lost their civic self-confidence, retreating into mere private hedonism. Such a mood is perfectly reflected by that nostalgic pessimist Mimnermus himself a Colophonian - whose autumnal imagery of inexorable, melancholy decay, the fading life-cycle, forms one highly characteristic leitmotiv in Greek lyric poetry. Equally typical are those odd tirades against women which (in more than one sense) likewise symbolize man's sense of anxiety, impotence and frustration.

As conditions became more settled, however, and men gained further control over their environment, such imagery gradually faded into the background. In particular, we find less recurrent emphasis on the omnipotence of Zeus as a kind of fatalistic shorthand term for the absolute helplessness of the individual. 'Hope and self-persuasion,' Semonides of Amorgos noted, with wry accuracy, 'keep us all alive in our unprofitable desires.' Of no poets was this truer, in their very different ways, than Alcaeus and Sappho - both aristocrats from the island of Lesbos, and both roughly datable to the period 620-570. Like Theognis a century later (see p. 102), Alcaeus reveals himself as a right-wing diehard, homosexual by temperament and brim ming with political bile. To him we owe (along with various choice insults, mostly directed at his bugbear Pittacus) the first known appearance of the 'Ship of State' metaphor in European poetry. In exile he seems to have derived his main consolation from the wine-jara resentful casualty of the new mercantile world which had so brusquely

by-passed him and his old-fashioned, not to say reactionary, beliefs. A landed squire manqué, he had an equally appreciative eye for longtailed widgeon and pretty boys: the final paradoxical impression he gives is of Hilaire Belloc rewritten by Cavafy.

Yet the fame of Alcaeus (as of Archilochus before him) was ulti mately eclipsed by that of a woman: small, dark, not very good looking, and perhaps in some way crippled. Sappho's life was largely absorbed by her private relationships and the pursuit of beauty. Her poetry reflects, not those political cross-currents in which she so nearly drowned-like Alcaeus she was twice exiled - but, first and foremost, her intense attachments to various girls, who formed a kind of circle (thiasos) round her. The fierce gales of Lesbos, characteristically, she used as a symbol for her own violent passions: no doubt about the order of priorities there. Sappho's poetry tells us rather less about