In Part III we shall see how rhapsodes performing at a major public festival like the Panathenaia were capable of improvising in the course of reciting memorized verses. Memorized lines of Homeric poetry furnish the basis for modifications in sense or embellishment, in other words improvisation, as each competing rhapsode contributes to the larger performance demand of interweaving passages or episodes of Homer. What is important is that each rhapsode pays careful attention to the performance of his competitor(s) and the audience reactions to it. Only by doing so can he effectively gauge the nature of his challenges both with respect to the mood of his audience and to the skill of his adversary. As we have just seen, all of these features are regularly employed in the context of sympotic verse competition.

These formal similarities between sympotic and rhapsodic performance seem to contradict what is often perceived as a main impetus for the very singing of poetry at symposia, especially in the late archaic period. A variety of poetic testimony establishes that poetic performance and the expression of philosophical idealism at the symposium were conceived in direct opposition to the performance tradition of rhapsodes. This opposition operates on two levels, which we might call formal and philosophical. The first, formal opposition is metrical: the lyric and elegiac meters that we find in sympotic poetry contrast themselves with the epic hexameter, even if they do not altogether reject it. The use of lyric meters makes the most fundamental, yet still only formal, break, especially when we witness poets like Stesichorus (e.g. Geryoneis, frr. S7–87 Davies) and Ibycus (S151 Davies) in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE treating epic and mythological themes in choral lyrics and with triadic—strophic, antistrophic, and epodic—struc- tures. Indeed some critics have argued that the centralized, public performances of rhapsodes were developed specifically in reaction to the types of heroic poetry composed by Stesichorus. [1] However, this is a different line of inquiry from the one that we now need to pursue, which is to outline the perceived tension between rhapsodic and sympotic performance in the sixth century and thereafter.

Let us begin with the hexameter. The hexametric line in elegy is closely related to, but developed independently of the epic hexameter, as the research of Nathan Greenberg has shown. [2] Greek elegists, unlike their Roman counterparts, do not explicitly claim that their pentameter serves to reject the hexameter. Yet at a more subtle level there is some evidence that this metrical contrast was nevertheless meaningfully felt. I have in mind the scrap of evidence concerning Pigres of Halicarnassus, who dates to sometime in the second or first century BCE. [3] According to the Suda, it was Pigres (West):

Despite the clear antagonism between the pentameters and hexameters in these examples, we simply do not have enough evidence to know to what extent Theognis or Pigres, or their symposiastic audiences, thought of this kind of elegiac composition in terms of “subverting” the hexameter, and with it the themes and rhapsodic performance of Homeric poetry.

Still, we are justified in pressing this line of thought because such a standpoint does emerge sparklingly in the Amores of Ovid, whose first elegy of book 1 expresses both the metrical and thematic antithesis only hinted at in Pigres:

Arma graui numero uiolentaque bella parabam
     edere, materia conveniente modis.
par erat inferior uersus; risisse Cupido
     dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem.

I was preparing to sing about arms and violent wars in heroic measure,
     with material suitable to the mode.
The second verse was equal; but Cupid is said to have laughed
     and to have stolen a foot.

(Ovid, Amores 1.1.1–4 Kenney)

Here the point is made directly that the patron god of elegy, Cupid, is himself responsible for modifying the hexameter and thereby upsetting the heroic agenda begun by the first line. The voice of the poet further describes the metrical and thematic lightness that the presence of the pentameter gives to his verses (1.1.17–20):

cum bene surrexit uersu noua pagina primo,
     attenuat neruos proximus ille meos.
nec mihi materia est numeris leuioribus apta,
     aut puer aut longas compta puella comas.

When a new page rose up well with the first verse,
     that second one weakened my strength.
My subject is not suitable for lighter measures,
     neither a boy nor a girl adorned with long hair.

At the end of the poem, the persona of the poet has resigned himself both to a changed meter and to new themes, not to mention a change of costume (1.1.27–30):

sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat;
     ferrea cum uestris bella ualete modis.
cingere litorea flauentia tempora myrto,
     Musa per undenos emodulanda pedes.

Let my work rise up in six feet, and fall in five;
     farewell to cruel wars with your measures.
Surround the golden temples with shore-loving myrtle,
     Muse, who ought to be set to eleven feet.

Warfare and elegy never mix, at least ideally, and Ovid is giving form to a sympotic theme that began centuries earlier with Xenophanes (discussed below). The mention of myrtle of course recalls the myrtle branch typically passed around by guests at symposia, and is now intended to adorn the head of the sympotic Muse. But what draws our attention is whether the metrical, as opposed to the thematic, antithesis between the elegy and hexameter, which is so manifest in Ovid, remained fully implicit among the Greek elegists. Pigres and Theognis suggest that perhaps it did not.

Footnotes