Fifteen Eighty Four

When we think about lyric poetry and song traditions in the Roman Empire, the association is hardly new. Horace’s refined lyric experiments are well known, and Nero’s dramatic (and infamous) performance during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE—singing while the city burned—has become part of popular legend. But what about the Greek East, where lyric poetry was first born? Did lyric still matter under Roman rule?

That’s the question my book, Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture, sets out to explore. For the first time, it looks at how Greek intellectuals and writers living under the Roman Empire engaged with the rich legacy of archaic and classical lyric. What did lyric mean to them? How did they reinterpret those voices from the past in a new imperial context? Through the figure of Aelius Aristides and beyond, the book uncovers a vibrant, often overlooked layer of cultural memory and literary imagination in the imperial Greek world.

When I first began tracing the presence of lyric poetry in the Greek-speaking world under Roman rule, I assumed I knew what I would find. Surely, I thought, the major lyric poets—canonized by the scholars of the Alexandrian Library—must have had a solid place in the reading habits of imperial-era intellectuals. If Homer and the Athenian tragedians were still held up as cultural touchstones, then surely Pindar, Sappho, and others deserved a seat at the same table. I imagined my task would be relatively straightforward: to recover and restore lyric poetry’s rightful place alongside the classical heavyweights in the literary imagination of the Roman-era Greek East. What I would end up finding, however, turned out to be far more complicated — and much more interesting.

Not every Greek writer in the Roman Empire had deep knowledge of archaic and classical lyric poetry. Most, we can safely assume, weren’t spending their days poring over volumes of Sappho or Pindar. Instead, lyric seems to have been the domain of a more select group of readers. Quoting or referencing these poets wasn’t casual—it was a marker of super-elite literary education and a more refined form of classicism.

But lyric wasn’t just prestigious because it was rare. Its content made it uniquely powerful. With its mix of choral songs, victory odes, love poems, and biting political invective, lyric poetry gave voice to ideas about identity, belonging, and power—ideas that mattered deeply to Greek communities living under Roman rule. Even when people didn’t know the texts word-for-word, certain lyric figures and themes remained recognizable and resonant across the cultural landscape.

Mosaic with female portrait labelled ΣΑΠΦΩ; from the House of Kakaris. Mid third century ce. Sparta, Archaeological Museum. © Ephorate of Antiquities of Lakonia, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports/Archaeological Resources Fund.

For those imperial Greek writers who did engage directly with lyric, these models offered more than just a nod to tradition. They opened up distinctive, powerful ways to connect with both their fellow Greeks and the Roman authorities—enriching their writing with layered meanings that spoke to both local and imperial contexts.

That was certainly the case with the protagonist of my book, the orator and writer Publius Aelius Aristides (117–after 180 CE). Despite—or rather, precisely because—he composed and delivered speeches in prose, engaging with the tradition of lyric poetry gave Aristides a powerful strategy to elevate his public image. By weaving in echoes of lyric, he could style himself not just as a skilled rhetorician, but as a figure touched by poetic inspiration—someone whose voice carried the weight of cultural memory and even divine favor.

Even more intriguing is how Aristides used lyric models and musical metaphors as subtle tools to navigate the ever-present reality of Roman power. These weren’t just aesthetic choices—they were deeply political. Take, for instance, his response to political unrest in Rhodes. With tensions threatening to draw Roman intervention, Aristides didn’t just urge peace in generic terms. Instead, he framed his call for concord through the imagery of a well-tuned chorus, drawing on the harmony of collective song to evoke civic unity.

At the same time, he invoked the poet Alcaeus of Lesbos—not as a model to emulate, but as a cautionary figure. Alcaeus, famously opposed to tyranny, had once stirred civil conflict on his own island. By distancing himself from that lyric legacy, Aristides reinforced his message: true leadership, in the Roman imperial context, meant cultivating harmony, not stoking division. Through lyric allusion, Aristides could speak to Greek audiences about local politics while also signalling the loyalty and stability required by the ruling power.

Following the ‘sound’ of the lyric tradition, then, leads us somewhere quite different from Nero’s infamous performance amid the flames of Rome. Instead of the spectacle of a single imperial figure on a burning stage, we find a more complex story unfolding among Greek intellectuals living under Roman rule. Here, lyric is not nostalgia—it’s a rich, adaptable resource. It offers writers and public speakers like Aristides a way to communicate with authority, shape cultural identity, and engage with power on their own terms. By tracing these echoes of lyric in the imperial Greek East, we gain a new perspective on how ancient genres lived on—not frozen in time, but transformed through use. And in doing so, we see how Greek voices under Rome continued to negotiate their place in the world, not just by evoking the past, but by singing with it.