Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece by Jessica M. Romney (review)

The interpretation of archaic lyric in light of its communities and audiences is by no means untrodden ground: one thinks especially of Rösler’s Dichter und Gruppe (1980), Gentili’s Poesia e pubblico (1984), and Ferrari’s Una mitra per Kleis (2007). But Romney’s book, which is based on her 2015 Bristol dissertation, is unique for its overarching concern with lyric poetry’s rhetoric of identity and groupness. Although Greek lyric is notoriously diverse in both its poetic forms and subject matter, Romney traces a number of common strategies for constructing, protecting, and negotiating social identity. Few will be surprised to discover how these strategies are grounded ultimately in a symposiastic performance context, but their recurrence across a diverse array of poems, periods, and places is a novel insight.

After a dense introduction outlining the project’s theoretical framework, the first chapter introduces the strategies of archaic lyric at issue. For Romney’s purposes, a fine line separates two basic types. On one hand, poets stand outside of the audience groups they address and must therefore construct their poetic authority. By asserting knowledge of the future (or of the gods’ will), adopting a didactic posture, and projecting a strong first-person point of view, they encourage their audiences to identify with their perspective. On the other hand, however, poets also seek membership within those audience groups, which requires different strategies, such as forging a group identity through sameness (or opposing it to an out-group). The interplay of these strategic agenda—who’s in, who’s out, and why—animates the book’s close readings.

The second chapter (“Constructing Group Identity”) considers Tyrtaeus and martial lyric. Some of its points about hoplite ideology are familiar enough, but Romney’s readings stand out for how they link historical, literary, and performance context. Her sensitivity to the poems’ oscillation between the Homeric model of hypercompetitive, zero-sum combat among elites and the more collective, egalitarian model of hoplites in phalanx formation leads her to argue against rhetorical exclusivity. She instead argues convincingly that Tyrtaeus’ poetry was at home in both the elite symposion and the communal syssition of Sparta because the ideology that animates it is behavioural. Whether one is a promachos in full panoplia or a gumnēs of more modest means, what one does on the battlefield determines one’s status. All can therefore aspire to excellence, even if actually achieving that goal often remains an elite prerogative.

The topic of the third chapter (“Threats to Social Identity”) is the precarity of social status and relationships. Romney identifies the rhetorical goal of Alcaeus 129 as the cohesion of the exiled group’s identity, which the poem depicts as consistently positive and as grounded in and productive for the larger community, in both the present and the distant past. That identity stands in contrast to Pittacus’ appetite and negative individuality, which casts him as always already a destructive outcast and social misfit whose actions warrant revenge. Similar strategies inform Alcaeus 130b, whose first-person persona seeks to preserve both political identity and a connection to community and culture despite a state of isolation and liminality. Romney detects the rhetorical importance of the in-group’s cohesion even here, since each of its members could potentially endure a similar fate in the future. The poems share the attempt to overcome exile and the threat of oblivion.

The final chapter (“The Group and the Individual”) focuses on poetry as political campaign. Its analysis of Solon 4 recalls the arguments of the previous chapter in describing an external threat characterized by a lack of control or appetite. But where Alcaeus attacks a specific figure (Pittacus) whose offences against the in-group hetaireia are a microcosm of his relationship to the community as a whole, Solon instead fixates on the generalized astoi and hēgemones of Athens, whose inability to exercise moderation portends stasis...