(.) The fact that these categories are artificial and potentially misleading should prompt us to approach Greek lyric poetry with an open mind, without preconceptions about what 'type' of poetry we are reading.' The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome offers the following clarification: ''melic' is a musical definition, 'elegy' is a metrical definition, whereas 'iambus' refers to a genre and its characteristics subject matter. The Greeks themselves did not include elegies nor iambus within melic poetry, since they had different metres and different musical instruments.

Modern surveys of 'Greek lyric' often include relatively short poems composed for similar purposes or circumstances that were not strictly ' song lyrics' in the modern sense, such as elegies and iambics. This latter form is called meter and it is recited rather than sung, strictly speaking. Lyric could also be sung without any instrumental accompaniment. Whether the accompaniment was a string or wind instrument, the term for such accompanied lyric was melic poetry (from the Greek word for 'song' melos). 'Lyric' was sometimes sung to the accompaniment of either a string instrument (particularly the lyre or kithara) or a wind instrument (most often the reed pipe called aulos). The symposium ('drinking party') was one setting in which lyric poems were performed. Much of Greek lyric is occasional poetry, composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions. (Drama is considered a form of poetry here because both tragedy and comedy were written in verse in ancient Greece.) Culturally, Greek lyric is the product of the political, social and intellectual milieu of the Greek polis ('city-state'). Lyric is one of three broad categories of poetry in classical antiquity, along with drama and epic, according to the scheme of the 'natural forms of poetry' developed by Goethe in the early nineteenth century.

Greek Lyric Poetry by M.L. West