Alcman

Alcman (flourished 7th century bc, Sparta [Greece]) was a Greek poet who wrote choral lyrics in a type of Doric related to the Laconian vernacular, used in the region that included Sparta.

Alcman’s work was divided by the editors of Hellenistic Alexandria (3rd and 2nd centuries bc) into six books, or papyrus rolls, but the poems survived into modern times only in fragments. The longest is a partheneion (a choral song for girls) discovered on a 1st-century papyrus in Egypt in 1855. This ode was probably written to celebrate a rite of passage, and the poem is characterized by sensuous imagery and erotic implications. The Women Divers, the plot of which is unknown, may have taken up an entire papyrus roll.

The Suda, a Byzantine lexicon (late 10th century ad), describes Alcman as a man “of an extremely amorous disposition and the inventor of love poems.” His learned verse is full of geographic detail. One fragment, telling of the sleeping world at the end of the day, was imitated by Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in his Wanderers Nachtlied, 1776–80). The fragment’s sympathy with nature is unusual in Greek poetry. In two other fragments the poet attributes his poetic creativity to his imitation of nature; he says that he knows how all birds sing and that he composed his song by using human language to reproduce the voice of the partridge.

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Alcman’s lighthearted manner, so different from the later Spartan style, gave rise to the traditional notion that he was not a Spartan but a native of Sardis in Lydia. In fact, contemporary scholars know that Sparta in the 7th century bc had a brilliant cultural life, a context into which Alcman fit perfectly.