Fragmenta Alcmanis Lyrici Collegit Et Recensuit Fridericus Theophilus Welckerus...

by Alcman (creator)

This book is a collection of fragments of the poetry of the ancient Greek poet Alcman, compiled and edited by Fridericus Theophilus Welckerus. It is an essential resource for scholars of ancient Greek poetry and literary history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 651

About the author

7th century BC Greek poet, citizen of Sparta

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcman

Reviews

[Mac]

After I finished reading the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, I decided to turn next to Greek lyric poetry, on the grounds that it came next chronologically. The first poem that greeted me in the Oxford Classics edition of Lyrica Graeca Selecta was a 100-line poem, partly fragmentary, by Alcman. I had never heard of this poet, the language was strange (I later learned it was in the Laconian dialect of Sparta), the meter was new to me, and I had no idea what the poem was about. After a little searching on Wikipedia, I discovered that Denys Page, whose books on the Iliad and the Odyssey I have enjoyed, had written a monograph on this very poem, known as "The Partheneion" (roughly, the maidens' song). Sadly it was not easy to find a copy of this book, but I eventually procured one from a British bookseller.

By the time I started reading Page's book, I had gotten more comfortable with the language and style of Alcman and the other Greek lyric poets. But I still learned a tremendous amount about the poem, its context, and Alcman's language. The text of the Partheneion comes from a long papyrus roll found in the Egyptian desert. Page's book starts by giving the text as clearly as possible exactly as it stands on the papyrus, meaning without any punctuation, word divisions, or distinction between capital and lower-case letters. He also gives the various "scholia," comments written in the margins by scribes. This was all revelatory to me, as I had never fully considered all the decisions an editor faces in presenting an ancient text like this in a modern edition.

The next part of the book delves into the context of the poem. Page looks into other sources of Spartan myth, especially as recorded in Pausanias, a later travel writer. These help to make some sense of the list of names that begin Alcman's poem. Page also works through different hypotheses to arrive at a convincing argument that this poem was sung by a chorus of young women in competition with another chorus. Some details remain foggy, but I came away with a much better concept of what the Partheneion was "about."

The last section of the book is a thorough discussion of Alcman's language. Page argues that he essentially writes in the Laconian dialect, i.e. not in an artificial poetic language but in the language of his time and place. He goes through the various oddities compared with what later became standard Greek, and then gives a detailed line-by-line commentary on the poem itself.

All in all, this is a perfect companion to reading Alcman's Partheneion.

[Stephen Bruce]

The fragments that remain of Alcman, the seventh-century BCE poet, present a different side of Spartan life than is commonly known: love between women and reverence for the natural world.

Here's the most beautiful passage I found in M. L. West's translation:

Muses of Olympus, my heart is rapt
with desire of hearing a new song
and the unison of girls in lovely melody
. . . will dispel
the sweetness of sleepy eyelids.
. . . draws me along to the piazza,
there where I'll be tossing my flaxen hair
. . . a dance for tender feet . . .

and with crippling longing. Her glance
more melting than sleep or death;
hers is a potent sweetness.

[Giorgos Lyc]

I want to read the Page's scholia.