SOURCE: Hooker, J. T. “Music and Poetry.” In The Ancient Spartans, pp. 71-81. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1980.

In the following essay, Hooker examines the extant writings of the two outstanding Spartan poets of the seventh century, Tyrtaeus and Alcman.

For the development of the visual arts at Sparta we now have a wealth of evidence, enabling us to trace the Spartan achievement in this field from Protogeometric down to the classical age. … By contrast, the remains of Spartan literature would fill only a very few pages. But these relics have a value out of all proportion to their bulk, both because of their intrinsic worth and because of the light they shed on archaic Sparta. Much indirect evidence tells of a number of poets who lived and wrote at Sparta in the seventh century; but the works of only two, Tyrtaeus and Alcman, have survived in such...