Stesichorus of Himera

Abstract

Stesichorus was a Greek poet from the first half of the 6th century bce. Born probably in Metaurus in South Italy (today’s Gioia Tauro), he subsequently settled in Himera on the north coast of Sicily. His poetry consists of vivid mythological narratives, thousands of lines long, in lyric verse—that is, they are designed to be sung, in contrast to the recited epic poems of Homer, with which Stesichorus’s poetry creatively interacts. Stesichorus’s works were performed by a singing and dancing chorus—his very name means “he who sets up the chorus”—and were intended not merely for local festivals but for audiences across the Greek world. Stesichorus’s works had a considerable influence on later Greek poetry, especially tragedy; collected into twenty-six books in the Hellenistic period, they survived until roughly the 3rd century ce. For more than a millennium the only remains of Stesichorus’s oeuvre were quotations and paraphrases buried in the text of writers whose works did survive antiquity; but since the 1950s several ancient papyri, many of them extensive texts, have been published which furnish us with a clearer picture of one of the great poets of antiquity.