View source for Alcman

==Text==
[[File:P. Oxy. 8.jpg|thumb|[[Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 8|P. Oxy. 8]] with fragment of Alcman's poem]]

=== Transmission ===

There were six books of Alcman's [[choral poetry]] in antiquity (c. 50–60 hymns), but they were lost at the threshold of the [[Middle Ages]], and Alcman was known only through fragmentary quotations in other Greek authors until the discovery of a papyrus in 1855(?) in a tomb near the second [[pyramid]] at [[Saqqara|Saqqâra]] in [[Egypt]]. The fragment, which is now kept at the [[Louvre]] in [[Paris]], contains approximately 100 verses of a so-called ''partheneion'', i.e. a song performed by a chorus of young unmarried women. In the 1960s, many more fragments were  published in the collection of the [[Egypt]]ian [[papyri]] found in a dig at an ancient garbage dump at [[Oxyrhynchus]]. Most of these fragments contain poems [https://books.google.com/books?id=DhfmgSz1eR4C&pg=PA3 (partheneia)], but there are also other kinds of hymns among them.

===Dialect===

Pausanias says that even though Alcman used the [[Doric Greek|Doric]] dialect, which does not usually [[Phonaesthetics|sound beautiful]], it did not at all spoil the beauty of his songs.<ref>Pausanias 3.15.2 {{lang|grc|Ἀλκμᾶνι ποιήσαντι ἄισματα οὐδὲν ἐς ἡδονὴν αὐτῶν ἐλυμήνατο τῶν Λακῶνων ἡ γλῶσσα ἥκιστα παρεχομένη τὸ εὔφωνον}}.</ref>

Alcman's songs were composed in the Doric [[dialect]] of Sparta (the so-called Laconian dialect). This is seen especially in the orthographic peculiarities of the fragments like α = η, ω = ου, η = ει, σ = θ and the use of the Doric accentuation, though it is uncertain whether these features were actually present in Alcman's original compositions or were added either by Laconian performers in the subsequent generations (see Hinge's opinion below) or even by [[History of Alexandria#Ptolemaic era|Alexandrian]] scholars who gave the text a Doric feel using features of the contemporary, and not the ancient, Doric dialect.

[[Apollonius Dyscolus]] describes Alcman as {{lang|grc|συνεχῶς αἰολίζων}} "constantly using the [[Aeolic Greek|Aeolic]] dialect".<ref>Ap.Dysc., ''Pron''. 1, p. 107.</ref> However, the validity of this judgment is limited by the fact that it is said about the use of the [[digamma]] in the third-person pronoun {{lang|grc|ϝός}} "his/her"; it is perfectly Doric as well. Yet, many existing fragments display [[Prosody (linguistics)|prosodic]], [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] and [[Phraseology|phraseological]] features common to the [[Homeric Greek|Homeric]] language of Greek [[epic poetry]], and even markedly Aeolic and un-Doric features (σδ = ζ, -οισα = -ουσα) which are not present in Homer itself but will pass on to all the subsequent lyric poets. This mixing of features adds complexity to any analysis of his works.

The British [[philology|philologist]] [[Denys Page]] comes to the following conclusion about Alcman's dialect in his influential [[monograph]] (1951):

{{cquote|(i) that the dialect of the extant fragments of Alcman is basically and preponderantly the Laconian vernacular; (ii) that there is no sufficient reason for believing that this vernacular in Alcman was contaminated by features from any alien dialect except the Epic; (iii) that features of the epic dialect are observed (a) sporadically throughout the extant fragments, but especially (b) in passages where metre or theme or both are taken from the Epic, and (c) in phrases which are as a whole borrowed or imitated from the Epic...}}

Witczak (2016) suggests that the term {{lang|grc-x-doric|ἀάνθα}} – the first use of which is attributed to Alcman according to [[Hesychius of Alexandria]] (5th century CE) – may have been an early Doric loanword from [[Proto-Albanian language|Proto-Albanian]].<ref>{{Cite conference |last=Witczak |first=Krzysztof Tomasz |date=2016 |title=The earliest Albanian loanwords in Greek |url=https://www.academia.edu/31212816 |conference=1st International Conference on Language Contact in the Balkans and Asia Minor |publisher=Institute of Modern Greek Studies |pages=40–42 |via=[[Academia.edu]] |access-date=2020-12-19 |archive-date=2024-05-27 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240527123241/https://www.academia.edu/31212816 |url-status=live }}</ref>

===Metrical form===
To judge from his larger fragments, Alcman's poetry was normally [[Strophic form|strophic]]: Different [[Meter (poetry)|metres]] are combined into long [[stanza]]s (lines 9–14), which are repeated several times.

One popular metre is the [[Dactyl (poetry)|dactylic]] [[tetrameter]] (in contrast to the [[dactylic hexameter]] of [[Homer]] and [[Hesiod]]).