Archaic Poets

This chapter evaluates two renowned poets: one, Archilochus, who lived in the early Archaic age of Greece, and the other, Pindar, who lived at its close and on into the time we call Classical. Their audiences and their modes of performance may have differed, but the two poets spoke the same essential language, and that language included nonverbal communication. Some fragments of Archilochus's poems preserve evocative words or phrases whose articulation seems to need an attendant gesture. In creating a character who expressed himself vividly, Archilochus can hardly have failed to use his head and hands to accentuate words or pictures as he recited his poems. If there is a question as to who exactly performed the odes that Pindar composed, whether it was the poet himself or a chorus-leader or selected members of a chorus, the sort of gesture that was needed to make sense of two “incomplete” conditional sentences was easy to do.

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