Bacchylides

Bacchylides of Keos was a choral song composer of the first half of the fifth century BCE, one of the nine archaic/classical Greek lyric poets canonized by the Alexandrians. Although he was famous in his lifetime, attracting commissions from across the Hellenic world, 5th-century poetry shows few obvious traces of his influence and no obvious quotations are found in the works of 4th-century writers. His songs gained wider currency from the third century BCE onward thanks to the editorial work of Alexandrian scholars. They were certainly read by Callimachus, Strabo, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Horace, and Plutarch. While the number of books in Bacchylides’ Alexandrian “edition” is unknown, he worked in a variety of choral lyric genres: later sources cite books of epinicians, hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, prosodia, partheneia, hyporchemata, erotika, and encomia (or skolia). (Two epigrams of the Palatine Anthology are also ascribed spuriously to Bacchylides). Of this large body of work only about one hundred verses survived the shipwreck of the third and fourth centuries CE, with a small number of fragments anthologized or preserved by commentators and lexicographers as well as Athenaeus. In 1896 the magnificent London Papyrus (British Library, P. Lond 733) was discovered and published a year later by F. G. Kenyon. Dated to the first–second centuries CE, it preserves the remains of a single book roll containing what transpired to be substantial parts of fourteen epinician odes (probably almost the whole of Bacchylides’ epinician production as it was known in Hellenistic times) as well as six dithyrambs, five of which were also largely complete. Since then, remains of fifteen more papyri have been attributed to Bacchylides: two more papyri contain fragments of commentaries on his dithyrambs and epinicia. The implications of these extraordinary discoveries are by no means yet fully understood. Already in Antiquity, Bacchylides suffered from comparison with Pindar (see, e.g., Ps.-Longinus, On the Sublime 33.5). Only in recent decades has his poetry begun to be appreciated in its own right, with ongoing editorial work having produced a text that is dependable enough to leave scholars free to examine his poetic technique and the relationship of his poems to their historical and performance contexts. The scholarly bibliography is still, however, quite limited. Though little known outside the world of classical scholarship, Bacchylides is well served with commentaries and translations in major languages; still, many aspects of his poetry remain to be explored. Updated by Nathaniel S. Agnew.