Experiencing Elegy: Materiality and Visuality in the Ambracian Polyandrion

Abstract

To talk about a poem’s genre is not simply to place it in an analytic category or performance context, but to bring to the surface structures that underlie it. The structural nature of genre allows it to intersect with features of a poem’s performance that would have been immediately accessible to audiences in antiquity, but that today can only be discursively reconstructed. Our ability to understand how a poem’s genre relates to the visual and auditory spectacle of its performance is, in most cases, limited by the nature of the evidence at our disposal, which often comes from secondary accounts or literary reimaginations.1 In this respect, poems inscribed on stone monuments offer a unique opportunity to consider how genre relates to the visual and material experience of poetry.2 Even within the large corpus of archaic inscriptions, there is no other poem whose visual impact can rival that of the one discovered chiseled into