Annotations about archaic Greek lyric, preliminaries

Preliminaries for the series “Annotations about archaic Greek lyric”

For English-speakers in the world of higher education, as of this writing, the introductory textbook most often assigned for the study of “archaic Greek lyric” (including elegiac and iambic poetry) has been Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry, edited, with Introduction and Notes, by David A. Campbell (revised edition, Bristol Classical Press, 1982). In a reading course that took place in autumn 2022, administered by the Classics Department of Harvard University, PhD candidate Greta Galeotti and I were working through this textbook, and both of us found many points of interest that are not addressed in the introductions and notes written by Campbell about the Greek texts that he collected for study. So, to supplement Campbell’s introductions and notes—without disparaging the merits of his work—the two of us thought of a plan for a new project, still waiting to be launched. The plan was to edit, online, a new set of annotations on archaic “Greek Lyric” writ large. The authors of these annotations would include not only editors, such as Galeotti and Nagy, but other authors, invited by the editors. Some annotations could  take the form of stand-alone essays while others could be comments written into the margins of Greek texts—or of translations of the Greek texts. The authors of such marginalia could be indicated by way of a preceding name-stamp, together with a date-stamp of authorship. Still other annotations could take the form of new comments written into the margins of the stand-alone essays, again with name-stamp and date-stamp of authorship.

Postscript, written 2024.06.01, to the preceding paragraph

In my original text here, I followed up by tentatively appending, as “Part 1 ” for such a series of annotations as envisioned in the preceding paragraph, a stand-alone essay about Archilochus, who is featured as the very first of the “Greek Lyric” poets in Campbell’s textbook. That essay has now been rewritten and republished in Classical Continuum 2024.06.01.