LAUSR

THE NAMING OF POETRY came at the end of its first glory, during the tumult of the fifth century in Athens. It set poetry apart thereafter from the songs of Homer, Archilochus, and Sappho, none of whom would have recognized their verses in the word poiêsis, a word that points toward craft, process, and construction. And yet it is often trotted out with some satisfaction that the word “poetry” derives from the Greek verb poieô, meaning “make” or “do.” Indeed it remains a useful insight that poetry is all making, all the time, inasmuch as it is built from words, sounds, and associations that are all made by the human imagination. But the term itself, when Herodotus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, and Plato slapped it onto song, was always about the work of others, poets and their fabrications, their strivings to influence, affect, effect. And it is true that poets in the Greek and Roman traditions were always striving to do something. They shaped sounds into song and speech, engineered performances, and created texts in order also to do other things. But what? This issue of Classical Philology presents seven articles and six notes that take on a range of poetic acts, events, methods, and meanings with a view toward capturing the purposes of these poems. The issue is constructed from a preponderance of works on shorter poems, many but not all of which could be called “lyric.”Though epic and drama are pertinent—they reside prominently in the poetic consciousness of the poetry that is discussed here—the concerns of this issue are principally the kinds and instances of poetry that are closer to what qualifies as poetry in the practice of themodern era: lyric, elegy, pastoral, and odes. Readers will find essays concerning Alcaeus, Theocritus, Callimachus, Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and, above all, Pindar: Pindar both as poet and as the focus of the thoughts and aspirations of later poets.