The chapter opens by making the case for a capacious understanding of the psychology of the religious imagination. Psychological capacities and propensities, it is suggested, are enabling as much as they are constraining, and religious actors creatively employ these capacities and propensities as much as they are unknowingly subject to them. The particular phenomenon for which this notion of the religious imagination is then explored in the bulk of the chapter is the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy; the relevant imaginative capacity is the human propensity for make-believe. The chapter argues that both externally, as a form of make-believe, and internally through details of the dialogue between god and characters, deus ex machina scenes pull systematically in two directions: the religious experience they enable is one in which there is room simultaneously for both belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, commitment and distance. A subsidiary strand of the argument aims to contribute to current debates about the notion of ‘belief’ in scholarship on Greek religion. The chapter emphasizes that ‘belief’ is usefully understood as sometimes including an attitudinal dimension. This attitudinal dimension comes to the fore in the deus scenes.

Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris is a tragedy marked by ‘complexities of … mood, tone and design’. It ends happily, comprehensively so, but that very happiness, and above all the way it is brought about, brings with it a nagging question. Should we allow ourselves to be swept along by the wondrous coincidences and benign divine interventions, or is there a disconcerting sense of too-good-to-be-true that should put us on our guard and leave us quizzical more than cheered after the denouement? The play has been read, alternatively, as an escapist fantasy of wish-fulfilment and as a nihilistic exploration of the world’s epistemological opaqueness, both readings supported by forceful arguments, and there are many defensible positions in between.

Alcman was active in Sparta. Ancient scholarship offers two floruits, second and fourth quarter of the seventh century (see testimonia 1, 10 Campbell). The earlier date is rendered very unlikely by Alcm. 5 fr. 2, which seems to have mentioned not just king Leotychidas I (usually dated to the second half of the seventh century) but also a daughter and possibly granddaughter old enough to have a role in the performance; see West 1992a. It is likely therefore that Alcman was a broad contemporary of Sappho and Alcaeus, perhaps slightly older.

Seventh-century Sparta was already a polis with considerable military power and organisation, which had annexed neighbouring Messenia in a protracted struggle, but it was not the militaristic society that we find in Classical sources, and it certainly was not culturally austere. Surviving art, including work in bronze and ivory, suggests wealth and sophistication; see the surveys of Fitzhardinge 1980 and Förtsch 2001. An impressive number of poet-musicians composed and performed in Sparta a generation or two before Alcman. Best preserved is the elegist Tyrtaeus. The Pseudo-Plutarchian De musica (ch. 9) connects several names with the establishment of Spartan musical institutions: Terpander of Lesbos, Thaletas of Gortyn, Xenodamos of Cythera, Xenokritos of Locri, Polymnestos of Colophon, Sacadas of Argos. Despite the dearth of reliable information for each of these figures, it is clear that seventh-century Sparta was a major musical and poetic centre, attracting talent from across Greece.

Much of Alcman's poetry seems to have been tied closely and explicitly to Sparta's religious and social structures. Several polis festivals, cults and deities are named in the texts, as are certain tribes and individual members of aristocratic and indeed royal families (cf. 1.53n.). We do not know whether Alcman was commissioned by the polis or by families, but he certainly composed for major public occasions. A significant portion of these compositions were maiden-songs, for which Alcman was known in antiquity (e.g. [Plut.] De mus. 17 = test. 15 Campbell), and which seem to have filled at least two of the six books of the Alexandrian edition; see Steph. Byz. ε137 (quoting Alcm. 16) and probably Alcm. 5 fr. 49 col. ii.

It is always a good time to be reading Greek lyric. Even so, I would like to think, the case for a volume such as this is particularly evident now. The past two decades have been an unusually busy period, during which new approaches and a steady trickle of new finds have substantively changed the way we think about the corpus.

I have tried to write a commentary that different kinds of readers will wish to use. The emphasis is literary. However, I believe that even first-time readers of Greek lyric should have the opportunity to engage with more technical issues, such as supplementation, transmission, metre or dialect, which play a large role in this field.

In comparison with the standard volume of this kind in English, D. A. Campbell's Greek Lyric Poetry (1967, 19822), the notes are full and the selection is narrow (not just because Campbell includes elegy and iambus). I hope that both designs have their use. Neither is there any attempt to compete with G. O. Hutchinson's Greek Lyric Poetry (2001), which covers some of the same texts but with somewhat different aims. The selection leans towards the well known, but makes space also for some less widely read texts, notably Timotheus and some carmina popularia. Excluded are Pindar and Bacchylides, who have their own volumes in this series (as will in due course elegy and iambus). There are several more texts I should have liked to treat if space had permitted, and readers will have their own wish lists. I nevertheless hope that the poems that are included will make an attractive and diverse, as well as manageable, selection.

Text and apparatus are my own. I rely on the standard critical editions for reporting the papyri and manuscripts, except that I have used photographs to check certain details. In the commentary section, the bulk of the space is given to the discussion of individual poems; introductions to authors are kept brief. Relatively full (though still in many cases highly selective) lists of secondary literature are provided for each text. Individual observations are not usually attributed to their author. My debt to earlier commentaries and discussions will nevertheless be obvious in every paragraph. For reasons of space the long reception history of the poems is not treated.