Dialects and styles

This section is about the language of Greek poetry. Greek was spoken in many dialects, and the poets wrote in several of them. A poet did not simply write the dialect of home. Each kind of poem had grown up in one region, and it kept that region’s dialect wherever it travelled.^[1]

Dialect matters for metre, because the dialects differ in their vowels and in the length of their syllables. This guide explains the words the menu uses, shows how the pages are arranged, and suggests an order.

Dialect and genre

A dialect is a regional form of a language, with its own sounds and word-forms. Linguists sort the Greek dialects of the archaic and classical periods into four groups: Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, West Greek (including Doric) and Arcado-Cypriot.^[1]

A genre is a kind of poem, defined by its occasion and its form: epic, elegy, iambus, song for one voice, song for a chorus, drama. By the eighth and seventh centuries BC there were at least three traditions of poetry. Each was bound to a dialect, and each had metres of its own:^[2]

• The Ionian tradition: epic, elegy and iambus. Its pages here are Epic Ionic.
• The Aeolian tradition, known only from Sappho and Alcaeus on the island of Lesbos. Its page is Lesbian Aeolic.
• The Dorian tradition of the Peloponnese and the western colonies, with long and complex strophes. Its page is Doric, the dialect of choral lyric.

Athenian drama is written in Attic, the dialect of Athens. It has the fourth page.

One vowel as a signpost

The quickest way to tell the dialects apart is one vowel. Older Greek had a long ᾱ (ā) in many words. Doric and Aeolic kept it. Attic and Ionic turned it into η (ē):^[3]

Both vowels are long, so this change never alters the metre. Other differences do, and the How dialect affects metre tab and each dialect’s Metrical consequences tab show them.

Words the menu uses

Monody is song for a single voice, like the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus. Choral lyric is song for a chorus that danced as it sang, like the odes of Pindar.^[4] Choral song kept Doric as its dialect, whatever the poet’s own birthplace.^[5]

The lyric koinē (κοινή, koinē, “common”) is the mixed literary dialect used by most lyric poets.^[6] It is not the same as the Koinē of the Hellenistic world, the common Greek of later centuries, which the Attic page’s last tab, Koinē and accent, describes.

The proof that genre, not birthplace, chose the dialect comes from poets who wrote in more than one genre. Simonides of Ceos, an Ionic island, wrote his choral lyric mostly in Doric, but his elegy in Ionic.^[7]

The pages

A suggested path

1. Overview: Dialect and genre first, then How dialect affects metre. The Map tab shows where each dialect was spoken.
2. Epic Ionic, with Homer’s page under Poets and playwrights open beside it.
3. Lesbian Aeolic, with Sappho and Alcaeus.
4. Doric, with Pindar and Bacchylides.
5. Attic, with the dramatists.
6. Finally the Overview’s Editions and orthography and Papyri and metrical evidence: how editors decide which spelling to print.

To hear the vowels this section talks about.^[8]

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} D’Alessio 2009, p. 120.
2. ^ West 1987, pp. 2–3.
3. ^ Smyth 1920, p. 14.
4. ^ Landels 1999, c. pp. 11–13.
5. ^ Maehler 2004, p. 11.
6. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 149.
7. ^ de Kreij 2022, p. 143.
8. ^ See Phonology › Sounds.