Chapter Two Didymus and lyric

Abstract

Didymus worked extensively on archaic lyric poetry. The greatest amount of surviving material comes from the Pindar scholia and concerns Pindar’s Epinicians, but there are fragments and testimonies of his commentaries to other authors and a treatise On Lyric Poets. This chapter reviews the evidence for Didymus’ lyric scholarship, then discusses the contents of the On Lyric Poets—whose surviving fragments are concerned with the identification of lyric genres and the etymologies of their names—and the threads that run through his Pindaric exegesis: the compilation and evaluation of earlier scholarship, the use of historiographical evidence, textual criticism, a concern for the constitution of the Pindaric corpus and the contextualization of individual poems, and strategies of literary interpretation such as recourse to recurrent Pindaric themes and the train of thought of a passage.