Epic Age - When the form “lyric” began.

Lyric Age - Poets of lyric are associated with the archaic period.

Khoros - the Greek term for Chorus, ,which means singing and dancing. This could include the audience.

Essentially “lyric” has two meanings: the lyric writing form, and the Lyric Age. The writing form has been around since the archaic ages, and definitely during the Epic age. THe lyric era is a sort of rise-of-the-poets moment in history.

In the classical period of Greek literature, Homer was the primary representative of what we know as epic. The figure of Homer as a poet of epic was considered to be far older than the oldest known poets of lyric, who stemmed from the archaic period. It was thought that Homer, acknowledged as the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, stemmed from an earlier age. Herodotus (second half of the fifth century BCE) says outright that Homer and Hesiod were the first poets of the Greeks (2.53.1–3). It does not follow, however, that the myths conveyed by the poetry of Homer and Hesiod are consistently older than the myths conveyed by the poetry of lyric. In fact, the traditions of Greek lyric are in many ways older than the traditions of Greek epic, and the myths conveyed by epic are in many ways newer than the myths conveyed by lyric.(52)

In the oral poetics of lyric, we saw that composition interacts with performance, and such interaction is parallel to the interaction of myth with ritual. The same can be said about the epic poetry attributed to Homer: to perform this epic is to activate myth, and such activation is fundamentally a matter of ritual. (53)

So the question is, how can you recall an epic action that you did not personally experience? The answer is to be found in the word kleos ‘glory’, the abbreviated plural form of which is klea ‘glories’, which refers to the story told by Phoenix. This story, which is about the hero Meleager, is intended by its narrator as a model for the story about the hero Achilles, which is a story-in-progress while it is being performed. The klea ‘glories’ of heroic predecessors are being set up as a model for the main hero of the

Iliad:

This is the way [houtōs] that we [= I, Phoenix] learned it, the

glories [klea] of men of an earlier time

who were heroes – whenever one of them was overcome by

tempestuous anger . . .

Iliad 9.524–5 (55)

Unlike Achilles, who must choose between kleos and nostos in the Iliad, the epic hero Odysseus must have both kleos and nostos in the Odyssey. For Odysseus to live out the master myth of his own heroic life, he must have a nostos or ‘homecoming’. For Odysseus to succeed in coming home to Ithaca, however, his nostos must be more than simply a ‘homecoming’: it must be also a ‘song about a homecoming’. The kleos or epic glory of Odysseus depends on his nostos, that is, on the song about his homecoming, which is the Odyssey. By contrast, the kleos of Achilles must be divorced from the very idea of ever achieving a successful nostos: as we have seen, Achilles will win kleos by dying young (69).

This pattern is typical. Greek tragedies do not narrate heroic exploits: instead, they explore the disruptions and dilemmas generated by such heroism, disruptions and dilemmas which almost invariably involve the catastrophic destruction of a household. Now of course tragedy is not the only genre to highlight the problematic aspects of heroism. We need only think of the Iliad, where heroic values are put under enormous strain by the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles; where Achilles' clear-eyed awareness of the brevity of his glory contrasts with the all-too-human, indeed ‘tragically' limited vision which characterizes Hector;4 and where one of the poem's greatest affective climaxes, in which Priam ransoms from Achilles the body of his dead son Hector, precisely exemplifies the kind of emotional intensity later exploited in Attic tragedy.5 Or we may think of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus' slaying of the suitors is by no means morally unambiguous (this is especially clear in Book 24, where the suitors' grieving families step forward to exact vengeance for their murdered brothers and sons). Nevertheless, it is above all in tragedy that the underside of heroism becomes pervasive, not simply as a ‘theme,' but as the predominant perspective from which mythical events are selected and depicted. It will be useful to illustrate this in more detail, by examining one myth, that of Jason and Medea, in three different versions.