This volume offers a collection of papers originally presented at an international colloquium sponsored by the Department of Philology of the University of Crete. They discuss the relationship between Horace's Epodes, Odes, and Epistles, and the poetry of Archilochus, Hipponax, Alcaeus, Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides and Callimachus.
The essays cover a variety of topics: Horace's unwillingness to make comparisons between himself and the poets of archaic Greece (Denis Feeney), the conception of "lyric" in the absence of the lyre (Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi), the development of iambic verse from its origins to Horace's Epodes (Alessandro Barchiesi), the construction of lyric space (Michael Paschalis), and the social function of Horace's poetry vis-a-vis Greek performance poetry (Michele Lowrie). They also offer detailed discussions of individual Horatian odes and their Greek lyric background (Lucia Athanassaki, Richard Martin, John Miller, Jenny Strauss Clay).