The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry [Paperback]

This book examines Greek songs composed between 440 and 323 BC and argues for the vividness and diversity of lyric culture.The first book-length study of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Combines literary-critical engagement with poems and attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. It provides access to little-known texts and fills a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and Hellenistic periods.The first book-length study of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Combines literary-critical engagement with poems and attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. It provides access to little-known texts and fills a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and Hellenistic periods.This is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied side by side, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices  political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current reevaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.Introduction: definitions, methods, prejudices of reception; 1. A collection of unrecollected authors? The corpus and its problems; 2. New music and its myths: rhetoric, persona, and the theatre stage; 3. Musical lives: readinglS|