Poetry stands as one of humanity’s oldest art forms. It is the art of manipulating words into rhythm and meaning to elicit strong emotional responses, allowing us to experience the world in new ways. As people across the globe celebrate World Poetry Day on March 21, we revisit the immortal world of poetry in ancient Greece—from Homer’s epic poems, the earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, to Sappho’s later lyric poetry, many writers left a mark on ancient Greece’s early poetic tradition.
Homer’s millennia-old Iliad and Odyssey were the two epic poems that brought the ideas of Greek civilization to the world and served as the foundation of Western literature.
Both works were composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC. They contain features preserved from the pre-literate age. Historians estimate they were actually put into writing around the middle of the 6th century. Homer, along with Hesiod, is one of the most celbrated ancient Greek epic poets, with epic poetry being one of the two major poetic genres in ancient Greece.
Epic poems are usually long, narrative poems which most often than not describe heroic deeds and events that are significant to the poet and to people of the same culture. Many famous literary masterpieces all over the world were written in the form of epic poetry aside from the Iliad and Odyssey, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, written between 2100-1200 BC in ancient Mesopotamia and recognized as the world’s oldest epic.
Epic poems were ideal for expressing stories orally, which is why they are common in the ancient world. Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics such as those of Homer were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes in order to memorize the epic as received in tradition and add to it in their performances.
The Iliad was composed as one continuous poem. In its current arrangement (most likely after the establishment of the Alexandrian library in the early 3rd century BC), it is divided into twenty-four books corresponding to the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.
It has a metrical form known as “dactylic hexameter,” a meter also associated with many other epic poems in antiquity (such as The Odyssey and the Aeneid, the Virgil’s Roman epic). In The Odyssey, a bard called Demodocus sings on request in an aristocratic context about the Wooden Horse at Troy, providing a sense of the kind of existence “Homer” might have led.
The Iliad is only one poetic work focused on the war of Troy; many others have not survived. But such is its quality and depth that it had a special place in antiquity and probably survived for that reason.
We know virtually nothing about Homer and whether he also created the other poem attributed to him, The Odyssey, which recounts the return journey of Odysseus from the Trojan War to the island of Ithaca. The Iliad was presumably written by a brilliant poet immersed in the traditional skills of oral composition (i.e., “Homer”). This tradition of oral composition probably reaches back hundreds of years before the Iliad.
These long epic poems are unlike most other poems we are familiar with in that they switch around from scene to scene, and in between some scenes there is dialogue, creating drama for the audience. Plato called epic poetry a mixture of dramatic and narrative literature because long speeches make a big part of both Iliad and Odyssey.
The Greeks regarded the two great epic poems as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them, not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction.
But after the age of epic poetry, when stately poems of extraordinary historic deeds—and length—reigned supreme, Greek tastes changed. Shorter, more personal poems written for feasts and weddings started coming into fashion.
The rise of ancient Greece’s age of lyric poetry
As the Classical Age was waning, after 800 BC, the Greeks were introduced to a larger and more complicated world around them. Epic poetry and nostalgia for the epic heroes started giving way to lyric poetry—the second great poetic genre in ancient Greece.
By the 7th century BC, lyric poetry was rapidly becoming popular across Greece. Lyric poems introduced experimentation with different meters and all were sung by the poets to the accompaniment of a lyre, hence the name lyric poetry.
Ancient lyric poets wrote short, direct poems, expressing personal feelings, mostly focused around love. Sappho, who lived and wrote her poetry and music on the island of Lesvos, is the most well-known lyric poet of ancient Greece and was given names such as “The Tenth Muse” and “The Poetess.”
Sappho was no epic ancient poet; rather, she composed lyrics: short, sweet verses on a variety of topics from hymns to the gods, marriage songs, and mini-tales of myth and legend. She also sung of desire, passion and love—mostly directed towards women—for which she is best known. And it is for such poems that Sappho has come down to us as history’s first lesbian—literally “from Lesvos.”
Sappho, following the poetic traditions of Archaic Greece, tended towards floral and natural imagery to depict feminine beauty and youth. Elsewhere, she evokes images of garlands, scents and even apples to convey feminine sensuality. Hers was largely a world of beauty, caresses, whispers and desires; songs sung in honor of the goddess Aphrodite and tales of mythical love.
In “Fragment 16,” arguably Sappho’s most sublime poem, fortunately well-preserved albeit a little tattered, her definition of beauty anticipates the maxim of the philosopher, Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things:”
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
whatever a person loves.
It is perfectly easy to make this
understood by everyone: for she who far
surpassed mankind in beauty,
Helen, left her most noble husband
and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all
for her child or dear parents,
but [love?] led her astray …
lightly …
[and she]
has reminded me
now of Anactoria
who is not here;
I would rather see her
lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her
face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed
infantry …
Most of Sappho’s poetry is now lost and what is not, has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is complete. Her poetry however, is still considered extraordinary and her works continue to influence modern writers.