Theognis. The elegiac and iambic metrical schemes, were both unsung, and both form more regular metrical patterns than lyric. Achilochus of Paros, active in the late eighth or early seventh century B.C.E., practiced both, and his voice emerges as one of the most distinctive in Greek literature: a tough cynical soldier with a taste for obscenity, he also shows a pride in his poetic gifts. A much less complex character emerges in the seventh century Spartan elegist, Tyrtaeus, whose verse is full of exhortation to bravery on the battlefield and who upholds this as true excellence in a man. However, the largest body of extant elegy from the period under consideration is that composed for the symposium attributed to the poet Theognis, of the seventh or sixth century B.C.E. In fact, the verses clearly range over a wide chronological...