Alcaeus is the premier poet of politics and the symposium, or drinking party. Like Sappho, he wrote poems intended to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of a lyre (see Horace, Odes 2.13, 4.9); and the surviving representations of him, like those of Sappho and Anacreon, show him with the stringed instrument. His songs seem to be intended primarily for the symposium (fragment 70.3-4) and either the political discussion or the frolicking that occurs there (fragments 373, 374) among a closely knit circle of friends (fragment 71). Alcaeus wrote in the Aeolic dialect in simple meters and in stanza form, in contrast to the choral odes by Pindar or Bacchylides, for example, that employ the Doric element of Homer, with complex meters and alternating strophes and antistrophes. Even Alcaeus's hymns, while drawing on Homer's portrayals of the gods, show these simpler lyric characteristics rather than the epic meter and language of...