Performance, transmission and the loss of Hellenistic lyric poetry

This article explores the issue of the production, performance and transmission of Greek Lyric poetry during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. It does so by examining a representative series of case-studies that include poems transmitted on papyrus, on stone, and texts known thanks to the indirect tradition. One of the outcomes of this examination is to show how, while the transmission of ‘classical’ Lyric poetry, produced up to the end of the fifth century BCE, normally involved scholarly editions that circulated on more or less standard ‘books’, meant as a rule for a reading public rather than for performance, the abundant, more recent lyric production followed different avenues of transmission and was only rarely meant for reading circulation (as opposed to sung performance, which was particularly popular throughout these periods). The paper also deals with the issue of the different kinds of reperformance of this later lyric repertoire, focusing on the different implications of cases of ‘diachronic’ continuity in the longue durée and cases of ‘synchronic’ intensive ritual reperformance.