When the seven funeral pyres before Thebes had burned down, the Argive king Adrastus spoke of the seer Amphiaraus, whom the earth had swallowed with his chariot and horses. He missed, he said, the eye of his army, a man good both as a seer and with the spear. In his sixth Olympian, Pindar offers these words as the model for the praise he owes his patron. He quotes a king, not a poet. Nothing in the tradition makes Adrastus a singer. His celebrated eloquence was the eloquence of prose.
Long before Pindar, the elegist Tyrtaeus had named it. In a catalogue of excellences worth nothing without courage, he passes from the strength of the Cyclopes through the beauty of Tithonus and the wealth of Midas, and places at the climax “the sweet-speaking tongue of Adrastus.” None of these figures is a poet. The last place goes to a speaker, the poet’s chief rival.
A Muse Who Attends Kings
The received history of Greek literature has little room for him. Prose, in that history, emerged haltingly in the sixth century, long after epic and lyric, and came into its own only with Plato and Demosthenes. Poets rarely engaged with it before Callimachus, who names the prose historian Xenomedes as his source in the Aetia and has been called the first to do so.
In the Fall 2026 issue of the American Journal of Philology, Teddy Fassberg proposes that this story is too simple. Recovering no lost texts, he argues that surviving poetry preserves evidence of a culture of oratorical prose, by which he means non-verse language performed in public. It differs from verse in form and from conversation in occasion, and it is literary because it is meant to be kept and reused rather than spent in the moment.
The first witness is Hesiod. In the Theogony, Calliope is the greatest of the Muses because she attends upon kings too. The Muses pour sweet dew on the tongue of a favored king, and his soothing words end great quarrels in the assembly. Eric Havelock supposed the king spoke in meter, M. L. West read the lines as flattery, and most have called them aberrant. Fassberg reads them as ordinary. Homer’s Nestor, an orator and no singer, speaks sweeter than honey. Euripides calls Palamedes, a model orator, “the all-wise nightingale of the Muses” for his wisdom, not his verse.
The difficulty, Fassberg argues, lies not in Hesiod but in a modern habit of mind. Poetry comes from the Muses; Hegel traced prose to the slave. Virginia Woolf pictured prose shouldering the dirty work, answering letters and paying bills. Giambattista Vico held that poetic style arose before prose by a necessity of human nature.
The words themselves keep the hierarchy. Latin prosa is short for prosa oratio, speech that runs straight ahead, from prorsus, “turned forward.” Versus is the turning, by an old etymology the turn of the plough at the end of a furrow. Later Greeks called prose pezos logos, speech that goes on foot, or psilos logos, bare speech. Each name defines prose by a lack. Dictionaries still describe prose as the medium distinguished from poetry, never the reverse.
The Archaic Greeks drew no such line. They sorted speech by occasion rather than by meter, with no concept of prose to set against verse. The names of the Muses say as much. Polymnia is Many Hymning and Calliope is Beautiful Voice, and neither names a formal property of words. A king, too, could have a beautiful voice. Prose and verse belonged to a single category of artful speech, and so they could answer one another.
Speech Set in Hexameter
Homer gives this dialogue its widest room. In the Odyssey, Odysseus rebukes the young Phaeacian Euryalus with lines nearly identical to Hesiod’s portrait of the eloquent king. Richard Martin traced the shared lines to the instruction of princes, a genre the poet set inside his epic. Fassberg adds that some genres epic absorbs were not usually performed in verse, and public speech is chief among them.
Direct speech fills nearly half the Iliad and almost two-thirds of the Odyssey. Everything in Homer is hexameter, but not everything was heard as song. Wedding hymns and laments are said to be sung, and Achilles, seated with his lyre, rises to address the embassy, a change of posture that marks a change of kind. Hexameter was a convention, like the Greek spoken by the Trojans. An audience hearing Odysseus in assembly imagined a man speaking.
The poem stages a contest between speech and song. Odysseus takes up the story where the bard Demodocus left off and narrates his wanderings across four books. King Alkinoos praises him for telling it as a bard would, a likeness worth remarking only because the two differ. The contest is also a collaboration that joins two performances into one epic. If the hero is likened to a poet, the poet is likened to a performer of prose. As the hero must be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds, the poet must compose speeches as well as narrate action. The performance of prose is not merely a theme of Homeric epic. It is constitutive of it.
The Hawk and the Nightingale
Hesiod’s dialogue with oratory is more uneasy. The small word “too” in Calliope’s couplet implies that she serves singers like her sisters and kings besides, and that the second service makes her greatest. In a song about the kingship of Zeus, the language of kings stands above the song’s own. The word for “venerated,” aidoioisin, echoes aoidoisin, “bards,” and lets the bard stand beside the king without displacing him.
The Works and Days answers. Its kings give crooked judgments, and Hesiod addresses them with a fable. A hawk carries a nightingale into the clouds in his curved talons and tells her that one far stronger holds her, singer though she is. The hawk does not sing. He speaks, in the manner of Agamemnon’s flyting. Fassberg proposes that the nightingale stands to the hawk as song stands to speech.
Bards in the Theogony are men upon the earth, while kings come from Zeus; the hawk accordingly flies high. Yet the Theogony’s kings judged straight, and the hawk’s talons are curved. The nightingale’s “mottled” neck, poikilodeiron, points as Deborah Steiner has observed to her varied voice, and Fassberg notices that the letters of poikil-, but for a missing alpha, rearrange into kalliop-. The singer claims Calliope at the kings’ expense. When justice prevails over the hawk’s hubris, the nightingale stands with Zeus, and royal prose stands apart from justice.
Song Rather Than Speech
Solon wrote laws in prose and poems about his laws. His Salamis opens with a couplet that names the matter outright: “I have come myself, a messenger from lovely Salamis, composing a kosmos of words, song rather than public speech.” The terms are occasions, aoidē and agora, not meters. Athens, at war with Megara over the island, had made it a capital offense to advise renewing the fight. Solon feigned madness, put on a little felt cap, mounted the herald’s stone in the marketplace, and recited his elegy. The law was repealed, and the island was taken.
Ancient readers credited his impunity to the madness, modern ones to a herald’s inviolability. Fassberg looks at the language. Greek law spoke prose, and comedy deferred to it: in Aristophanes’ Birds the verse breaks off while a decree seller reads statutes for Cloudcuckooland. The law Solon faced, in the wording Diogenes Laertius preserves, forbade anyone to advise war, and its verb is the one for addressing an assembly. It outlawed a kind of oratory. By announcing that he sang, Solon declared with some cheek that he was not breaking it.
The couplet’s last word, themenos, “setting,” recalls the Odyssey’s phrase for calling an assembly, but here agora is governed by “rather than.” Solon calls no assembly and lays down no law. He sets a kosmos, a word whose older sense, Fassberg notes, was authoritative declaration, tied to law and used of speech that was not verse. In the Salamis tradition it is song that keeps company with madness and prose that keeps order. A kosmos of words could be song or speech, and Solon tells the crowd which he has chosen. Thersites, who in the Iliad knows words “lacking order,” stands behind the line, and the hawk’s warning to the nightingale echoes Odysseus’ rebuke of him. These poems stage contests over who may address the public, and in what mode.
In the third century, Callimachus tells in his second Iamb of a fox and a swan sent as envoys to Zeus, figures Steiner reads as prose and song. Citing Xenomedes, he never mentions that his source wrote prose, and a poet who usually flags his innovations flags nothing here. For Fassberg, the silence means he saw nothing new. Of Adrastus’ oratory nothing survives but what poets chose to quote. Its loss, Fassberg concludes, does not justify leaving prose out of the history of Archaic Greek literature.
Fassberg, Teddy. “Archaic Greek Poetry in Dialogue with Prose: Homer, Hesiod, Solon’s Salamis.” American Journal of Philology 147, no. 3 (Fall 2026): 383–417. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2026.a1002817.
Leave a Reply