Author Description

Like his contemporary Pindar, Baccylides (c. 520-450 BC) composed songs of praise for princes and victorious athletes and songs for choral performances at religious festivals. Although lost in Late Antiquity, many of them have been recovered from papyri found in Egypt. Their clear formal structure and vivid narrative make them more easily accessible than Pindar's verse and they are elegant specimens of the exclusive and sophisticated choral lyric poetry from the first half of fifth-century BC Greece. (This selection contains the first English commentary since 1905).