Melos and Molpe in Hellenistic Poetry

The present study turns the spotlight on lyric terminology as worked into Hellenistic poetry by examining two of the most ancient and recurrent terms in the musical and poetic tradition: melos 'song, music, melody' and molpe 'singing or singing and dancing'. By collecting and analyzing material from the entire corpus of Hellenistic poetry (Theocritus, the epigram, the bucolic collection, Callimachus, Apollonius, Lycophron), it sheds light on the variety of meanings that these terms had acquired in Hellenistic poetics, ranging from the concepts of lyric poetry and its genres to the making of sound effects, the composition of music or the use of musical instruments.