SOURCE: Kirkwood, G. M. “Alcaeus.” In Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type, pp. 53-99. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974.

In the following essay, Kirkwood analyzes Alcaeus's poetry and what the fragments reveal of his political thought.

Both Alcaeus and Sappho are the spiritual successors of Archilochus, because both continue his contemporaneity of subject matter and his intensity of self-expression. They may owe specific debts; there is, as we shall see, some evidence of direct imitation by Alcaeus. But it is a long step from Archilochus's asynartetic verses and epodes to the four-line stanzas of Alcaic and Sapphic strophe.¹ The choral poetry of Alcman and Stesichorus,² who wrote contemporaneously or shortly before them, bears no striking similarities to their poetry; any influence, in either direction, can have been only slight. But there were other possible models. Traditional songs associated with work, religion, or social activities...