Aeolic verse


Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect. These verse forms were taken up and developed by later Greek and Roman poets and some modern European poets.

General description

Essential features and origin

Sappho and Alcaeus' verses differ from most other Greek lyric poetry in their metrical construction:
  • Verses consist of a fixed number of syllables.
  • Consecutive anceps syllables may occur, especially at the beginning of the verse.
Antoine Meillet and later scholars, by comparison to Vedic meter, have seen in these principles and in other tendencies, – u u – and – u – figure importantly, and groups are sometimes joined by a link anceps. Aeolic poems may be stichic, or composed in more elaborate stanzas or strophes.

Choriambic nucleus and expansion

One analysis of Aeolic verses' various forms identifies a choriambic nucleus, which is sometimes subject to:
  • dactylic expansion ;
  • choriambic expansion.
For example, an Asclepiad may be analyzed as a glyconic with choriambic expansion, and a glyconic with dactylic expansion produces the stichic length in which Sappho composed the poems collected in Book II.
In this analysis, a wide variety of Aeolic verses are analyzed as a choriambic nucleus, usually preceded by anceps syllables and followed by various single-short sequences, with various additional allowances to accommodate the practice of the later poets. By also taking the cretic unit, mentioned above, into account, this analysis can also, for example, understand the third line of the Alcaic stanza—and other stanza lines as in Sappho frr. 96, 98, 99—as Aeolic in nature, and appreciate how the initial three syllables of the Sapphic hendecasyllable were not variable in Sappho's practice.

Names of basic lengths

Ancient metricians such as Hephaestion give us a long list of names for various Aeolic lengths, to which modern scholars have added. For the most part, these names are arbitrary or even misleading, but they are widely used in scholarly writing. The following are the names for units with an unexpanded "choriambic nucleus" :
Comparison, with "choriambic nucleus" emphasized:
x x – u u – u – –
x – u u – u – –
x x – u u – u –
x – u u – u –
x x – u u – –
x – u u – –

Sappho and Alcaeus' verse

The meters of the Sapphic corpus

Because the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's works divided the poems into books mostly based on their meter, an overview of its contents is a convenient starting point for an account of the Lesbian poets' meters.
Book I Sapphic stanza
Book II x x – u u – u u – u u – u –
Book III Greater Asclepiad, marked off in distichs
Book IV x – u u – – u u – – u u – u – –, marked off in distichs; the book may also have contained three-line stanzas.
Book V probably consisting of poems in various three-line stanzas
Book VIcontents unknown
Book VII featuring the verse u – u – u – – u u – u – u – –
Book VIII a short book, the fragmentary evidence for which is "nearly but not quite compatible with" – u u – – u u – – u u – u – –
Book IX epithalamia in other meters, including dactylic hexameter, pher2d, pherd, aristoph2c, and less easily summarized lengths
unclassified fragments various meters

Sappho and Alcaeus' meters

Sappho and Alcaeus' poetic practice had in common, not just the general principles sketched above, but many specific verse forms. For example, the Sapphic stanza, which represents such a large part of Sappho's surviving poetry, is also well represented in Alcaeus' work. Alcaeus frr. 38a and 141 use the same meter as Book II of Sappho, and Alcaeus frr. 340 – 349 the Greater Asclepiad as in Book III. One notable form is the Alcaic stanza, but this too is found in both poets.
Many of the additional meters found in Sappho and Alcaeus are similar to the ones discussed above, and similarly analyzable. For example, Sappho frr. 130 – 131 are composed in a shortened version of the meter used in Book II of her poetry. However, the surviving poetry also abounds in fragments in other meters, both stanzaic and stichic, some of them more complicated or uncertain in their metrical construction. Some fragments use meters from non-Aeolic traditions.

Choral Aeolics

The versification of Pindar and Bacchylides' 5th century BC choral poetry can largely be divided into dactylo-epitrite and "aeolic" types of composition. This later style of "aeolic" verse shows fundamental similarities to, but also several important differences from, the practice of the Aeolic poets. In common with Sappho and Alcaeus, in the aeolic odes of Pindar and Bacchylides:
  • Two or more consecutive anceps syllables may occur at the beginning or middle of a verse.
  • There are many metrical sequences formed by prolongation, including both double-short and single-short units together.
These connections justify the name "Aeolic" and clearly distinguish the mode from dactylo-epitrite. But there are several important innovations in the "aeolic" practice of Pindar and Bacchylides:
  • Verses are no longer isosyllabic.
  • Anceps syllables are mostly realized the same way in a given location.
  • Verse forms and sequences are more varied, so that description with reference to the earlier practice must speak of expansions, shortenings, acephalic verses, cholosis, etc.
The tragic poets of Classical Athens continued the use of Aeolic verse for their choral odes, with additional metrical freedoms and innovations. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides each went his own way in developing Aeolics.

Hellenistic Aeolics

Theocritus provides an example of the Hellenistic adaptation of Aeolic poetry in his Idylls 28 – 31, which also imitate the Archaic Aeolic dialect. Idyll 29, a pederastic love poem, "which is presumably an imitation of Alcaeus and opens with a quotation from him," is in the same meter as Book II of Sappho. The other three poems are composed in the Greater Asclepiad meter. Also in the third century BC, a hymn by Aristonous is composed in glyconic-pherecratean stanzas, and Philodamus' paean to Dionysus is partly analyzable by Aeolic principles.

Latin Aeolics

Aeolic forms were included in the general Roman habit of using Greek forms in Latin poetry. Among the lyric poets, Catullus used glyconic-pherecratean stanzas, the Phalaecian hendecasyllable, the Greater Asclepiad and the Sapphic stanza. Horace extended and standardized the use of Aeolics in Latin, also using the Alcaic stanza, the Lesser Asclepiad, and hipponacteans. In the summing-up poem "Exegi monumentum", Horace makes the somewhat exaggerated claim:

In Imperial Greek poetry

In later Greek poetry, the phalaecian was widely used by poets including writers of epigram. The ode to Rome in Sapphic stanzas by "Melinno" "is an isolated piece of antiquarianism."

In post-Classical poetry

Especially through the influence of Horace, Aeolic forms have sometimes been employed in post-Classical poetry. For example, Asclepiads have been used by Sidney and W.H. Auden. Poets in English such as Isaac Watts, William Cowper, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Allen Ginsberg, and James Wright have used the Sapphic stanza. In German, Friedrich Hölderlin excelled in Alcaic and Asclepiadic odes. Hungarian poets such as Dániel Berzsenyi and Mihály Babits have also written in Alcaics.