Tyrtaeus

Tyrtaeus (flourished middle of the 7th century bc, Sparta [Greece]) was a Greek elegiac poet, author of stirring poetry on military themes supposedly composed to help Sparta win the Second Messenian War.

Greek tradition after the 6th century claimed that Tyrtaeus was a schoolmaster from Athens or Miletus, sent to Sparta in reluctant compliance with an oracle to strengthen Spartan morale. Stories of his non-Spartan origin were probably invented after the 6th-century revolution at Sparta, when there was only a distant memory of Sparta’s 7th-century-bc cultural vivacity. By the 5th century, Athenians’ claims to cultural monopoly distorted histories of other cities.

Only fragments survive of Tyrtaeus’s work, which was divided by scholars in Alexandria (3rd and 2nd centuries bc) into five books, or papyrus rolls, that include elegies and war poems. The elegies are the only securely authentic fragments and include the “Elegy to the Muses”; the Eunomia (“Law and Order”), which defends the Spartan constitution; and poems calling young men to arms, which combine exhortations to courage and self-discipline with reminders of past victories and assurances of future success and posthumous glory.

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The historical background to Tyrtaeus’s poetry lies in the rigidly egalitarian ethos of the Spartiates (warrior citizens of Sparta) and in the practice of hoplite warfare (in which the courage and the disciplined resistance of the individual warrior inside the ranks determined the solidarity of the phalanx and thus victory). Tyrtaeus’s language and poetic imagination follow the epic tradition, yet they possess their own expressive intensity and force. Tyrtaeus’s model of heroism privileges the common good of the community and so is quite distinct from the heroic individualism of the Homeric world.