good deal of scholarly debate, and it cannot be said that the reasons for this acceptance are fully
understood today. This phenomenon, which dates to the period of the development of the polis, seems to
have arisen out of the same tension that we have seen at work in some of the other phenomena that also
date to this period, namely the tension between individuality and uniformity. Public nudity is, in one
sense, the ultimate form of self-expression, but at the same time, by stripping away the external
accouterments of wealth and privilege, it sets everyone on the same level. The naked man is at once
vulnerable and supremely self-assertive, so that nudity is an appropriate symbolic garment for the citizen
of a Greek polis, which arose by both curbing and exploiting the impulses of men who saw themselves as
cast in the same mold as Achilles. (Women were not regarded as citizens of the polis – they are rather
appendages, first of their citizen father and then of their citizen husband – so that the causes that inspired
male nudity did not affect women.)

Lyric Poetry of Archaic Greece

Just as the kouros can be seen as an instance of exhibitionism confined within the safe limits of
standardization, so the developments in literature during the Archaic Period feature the baring of the
poet’s soul, but only in a conventionalized framework. In chapter 3 we discussed the large-scale poetic
works of Hesiod and Homer, works composed in the meter known as the dactylic hexameter and using an
artificial literary dialect that had evolved in the course of several centuries of oral tradition. That meter
and that dialect continued to be used by Greek poets for well over a thousand years, for composing epic
poems in the tradition of the Iliad and the Odyssey and didactic poetry in the tradition of Hesiod. This
poetic idiom was also used for hymns in honor of the gods, a collection of which has survived. These
hymns, some of which are only five or six lines long, while some are a few hundred lines, were attributed
in antiquity to Homer and so are known today as the “Homeric Hymns.” None of them, however, was
composed by the same person who was responsible for the Iliad or the Odyssey, and in fact a number of
them date from long after the sixth century. But the longer hymns, those to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and
Aphrodite, are early and belong to the period between the middle of the seventh and the middle of the fifth
century BC. The reason for the similarity in meter and dialect between these hymns and the poems of
Hesiod and Homer is that hymns to the gods were conventionally used to open a recitation of poems like
those of Homer and Hesiod, and when these hymns are referred to by ancient Greek authors they are
sometimes called “preludes.” Indeed, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days open with brief hymns to,
respectively, the Muses and Zeus.

The Homeric Hymns glorify the deity to whom they are addressed by recounting myths that illustrate the
deity’s power and influence. They open with a conventional “I begin my song with ...” or “Tell me, Muse,
of ...” but they tell us nothing further about the “I” who is responsible for the song. This is characteristic
of the authors of hexameter poetry, whose individuality is submerged under an impersonal tradition. Even
Hesiod, who tells us his name and some further autobiographical details, speaks either as the inspired
mouthpiece of the Muses (in the Theogony) or in the standard persona of the purveyor of wisdom
literature (in the Works and Days). The autobiographical details serve to enhance his authority and his
credibility; he is not interested in providing his audience with revelations concerning the state of his
psyche. There are, however, poetic traditions active in the Archaic Period in which the poet reveals (or,
at least, claims to be revealing) his or her innermost feelings. These traditions are connected with poetry
on a smaller scale than the hexameter poems of Hesiod and Homer. The poetry we are concerned with is
sometimes referred to as “lyric” poetry because “lyric” is a word with an appropriately Greek etymology
(meaning “accompanied by the lyre”; see figures 61 and 88) and because today “lyric poetry” means
poetry characterized by an outpouring of the poet’s own thoughts and feelings. Despite our use of the word