Greek lyric

[3] Much of Greek lyric is occasional poetry, composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus to mark particular occasions.

"[9] Greek lyric poems celebrate athletic victories (epinikia), commemorate the dead, exhort soldiers to valor, and offer religious devotion in the forms of hymns, paeans, and dithyrambs.

In this last mood, love poetry might blur into invective, a poetic attack aimed at insulting or shaming a personal enemy, an art at which Archilochus, the earliest known Greek lyric poet, excelled.

The themes of Greek lyric include "politics, war, sports, drinking, money, youth, old age, death, the heroic past, the gods," and hetero- and homosexual love.

[4] In the 3rd century BC, the encyclopedic movement at Alexandria produced a canon of the nine melic poets: Alcaeus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Pindar, Sappho, Simonides, and Stesichorus.

Some lyric meters were used for monody (solo songs), such as some of the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus; others were used for choral dances, such as the choruses of tragedies and the victory odes of Pindar."

The lyric meters' families are the Ionic, the Aeolic (based on the choriamb, which can generate varied kinds of verse, such as the glyconian or the Sapphic stanza), and the Dactylo-epitrite.