of drama, was first used for occasional poems, such as short invectives and festive
songs. The pattern of the iambic pentameter line is:
u __ | u __ | u __| u __ | u __Both elegiacs and iambics were used by an early practitioner, Archilochus, of the
mid-seventh century, fragments of whose work survive as the earliest post-Homeric
poetry. Rhyme, which is standard in English verse before the twentieth century and
is employed in some of the translations used in this book, was not generally used in
Greek verse.
Early lyric poetry (called by the Greeks melic, whence melody, for it was always
sung in public performance, often at a symposium or drinking party) has two main
branches. The Aeolian, from Aeolia in northern Asia Minor, is monodic, that is
composed for one voice, and monostrophic, that is written in stanzas that repeat the
same metrical form. Its two main representatives, Sappho and Alcaeus of the late
seventh century, both came from Lesbos and wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Greek.
They have given their names to their favoured metrical forms, which they may have
invented. Sappho seems to have been at the centre of some kind of religious
association, dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses, which had young girls for its
members. Much of her poetry is concerned with the lives and loves of these women.
One of the most famous is quoted by the rhetorician Longinus in his treatise On the
Sublime, cited here in the version of the eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips.
Bless’d as the immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee all the while
Softly speak and sweetly smile.‘Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
And raised such tumults in my breast;
For while I gazed, in transport tossed,
Mybreath was gone, my voice was lost.My bosom glowed; the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame;
O’er my dim eyes a darkness hung,
My ears with hollow murmurs rung.In dewy damps my limbs were chilled,
My blood with gentle horrors thrilled;LITERATURE 141