SOURCE: “Origins and Beginnings,” in Early Greek Elegists, Barnes & Noble Inc., 1960, pp. 3-36.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1935, Bowra discusses the flute-song origins of the elegy and the significance of Archilochus's use of Homeric language in his verses concerning war.

Few forms of verse can have had so long a history as the Greek elegiac couplet. It first appears, so far as we know, in the eighth century before Christ, and it was still vital in the tenth century after Christ. It is the aim of these lectures to give a sketch of this form and of its users in its early days and to mention some of its chief characteristics in a period when it was the vehicle not only for passing emotions but for considered ideas. In the centuries from the eighth to the fifth before Christ the elegiac existed by...