Iambic Ideas: Essays on a Poetic Tradition from Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire

This text explores the concept of the iambic as a genre. In a set of detailed studies, the contributors examine, across time, the idea of the iambic through a wide variety of cultural settings: Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antiquity. What emerges is that the iambic idea is impossible to define in absolute terms; rather, the form of iambic keeps varying in response to different historical contingencies. The variation is evident in such critical terms as the iambic tendency in Sappho, the re-using of iambi for Roman epodes, and even the instances of iambic absence in comedy and other such related forms. In the end, what is most characteristic about the iambic is its own inherent variability.