ABSTRACT
We cannot properly understand archaic Greece without the poet. We encounterpoetic activity at all levels of society, some of the most prominent archaic leaders left poetry and poetry forms our main contemporary literary evidence. The image of the archaic poets is, in their own words, one of wisdom and moral authority, deserving of a semi-religious awe: in one modern formulation, the period is the ‘lyric age of Greece’, in another, that of the ‘discovery of the individual’, characterizations which both focus on the lyric poets (in the widest sense of the term ‘lyric’). These poets celebrated individuals. In a famous fragment, the sixth-century poet Ibykos moves through a catalogue of heroes of the Trojan War who have been the subject of song, in order to set them aside, for his real theme is Polykrates, tyrant of Samos:
For you, too, Polykrates, will have undying fame, both through song and my own fame.
