It may be the case that more people know Sappho’s poetry now than at any point in the past, even more than in antiquity. It is certainly true that she’s currently the most famous of the canon of Nine Lyric Poets fixed by Hellenistic scholars. (Pindar, the great celebrant of athletic victories, has receded to a distant second in the contemporary popular imagination.) When papyrologist Dirk Obbink announced the recovery of a new fragment of Sappho’s poetry in early 2014, it evoked a level of excitement from the general public that it is hard to imagine the likes of Alcman or Bacchylides inspiring, no matter how remarkable the find. Daniel Mendelsohn recently observed in a New Yorker article on the new Sappho, “It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.”

In no small part, this is simply because Sappho’s poetry is very good. But it’s also because Sappho has had a number of excellent recent translators incarnate her work in contemporary English verse idioms (Anne Carson, Stanley Lombardo, Willis Barnstone, and most recently, Diane Rayor, all of whom were evaluated very recently by Edith Hall), and has been the subject of smart general-audience writing by classicists (like Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Margaret Williamson’s Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, Margaret Reynolds’s The Sappho Companion). Finally, Sappho’s special importance as the first named woman author in the literary tradition that we call “Western” is undeniable — and that pride of place alone gives her a unique claim on our attention.

But Sappho’s popularity makes it even more surprising that one other poet of the Nine hasn’t received more attention alongside her: Alcaeus, who until recently had always been “twinned” with Sappho — like Keats with Shelley, or Elizabeth Bishop with Robert Lowell. Alcaeus, like Sappho, lived on the island of Lesbos in the late 7th and early 6th centuries BCE. He is our only other written source from this place and time, and the only other literary writer who uses the Lesbian Aeolic dialect. They both use unusual stanzas never found in other Archaic poets, which even in antiquity bore their names — “Alcaics” and “Sapphics.” And although there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that they ever met or even knew of each other, centuries of reception history have imagined them as colleagues, competitors, and even lovers.

These alone are sufficient reasons for a dedicated reader of Sappho to care about Alcaeus as well. If you want to make sense of Sappho, Alcaeus is part of the puzzle. But far beyond merely foiling her bright star, he shines with a light of his own: a poet of exceptional range and severely underappreciated influence, Western poetry could not have taken the shape it did without him. Like Sappho, he wrote hymns; like Archilochus, he wrote drinking songs; like both, he wrote about love. But he also wrote unprecedented and highly refined poems about politics and the experience of exile, and so in a sense, through the mediating influence of his devotee Horace, he is the ancestor of all the lyric poetry on political displacement that came after him — of Dante, Yeats, Akhmatova, and Brodsky. To write the history of why we grasp for lyric in an age of anxiety, it is to Alcaeus that we should turn first.

AS IN the case of Sappho and most of the other Archaic Greek poets, our evidence for Alcaeus’ biography is brief and fragmentary, and dates are hard to fix. Two of Alcaeus’ poems (Lobel-Page 48 and 350) refer to his brother’s military service as a mercenary in Babylon — an event that couldn’t have happened later than 582 BCE, so Alcaeus seems to have been composing by then. But although the poet refers to a number of other historically grounded events — wars, revolutions — the condition of our other sources on the period isn’t good enough to allow us to put them on a timeline with confidence. Through more poems (167, 306, 428), we know that Alcaeus fought in a war between Mytilene (his native city on the island of Lesbos) and Athens over the town of Sigeion on the mainland of Asia Minor — we just don’t know exactly when this war happened (though we think it was probably the late 7th century BCE). We know that the general of that war, Pittacus, was part of the same political “club” (or hetaireia) of aristocrats as Alcaeus, and that after several successive revolutions against earlier rulers of Mytilene (named Melanchrus and Myrsilus), Pittacus himself — who would become known as one of the “Seven Sages” of Greece — came to power in a move that Alcaeus interpreted as a personal betrayal (70, 129, 332, 348). But again, we’re unsure of when these events took place.

We would care relatively little about the political intrigues of an island in proto-historic Greece if Alcaeus hadn’t transmuted the events of his lifetime into the stuff of art — remarkably good art. Like the Homeric epics, his poems jump, apparently fully formed, out of the head of a tradition whose beginnings we have lost. In one of the best-preserved fragments (130b), the poet sings about the experience of exile — taking refuge in the wooded interior of the island of Lesbos, daydreaming about the political life that he has given up. (Translations throughout are mine.)

holy with these lives [ . . . ] the wretched I,
having a rustic lot in life,
longing to hear the agora
announced, o Agesilaïdas,

and the council. What my father and my father’s father
grew old possessing (among these
eachotherharming citizens) —
I have been thrust away from these things,

fleeing to the ends of the earth. Like Onymakleēs
the Athenian, I have dwelled in the wolfthickets,
escaping the war. For the unrest
toward [ . . . ] not better.

. ] . [ . . . ]t[ . . ] . to the precinct of the blessed gods
I have dwelled, treading on the black earth
. li . [ . ] . [ . ] . [ . ] . the very meetings
I dwell, keeping my feet outside of evil —

where the women of Lesbos, judged for their beauty,
walk in their trailing dresses. And there peals
the divine echo of the women
the holy ritual cries

] . [ . ] . [ .]n from many once indeed the gods

Alcaeus’ mode of expression is stunningly compressed. From the very first words we have, the poem hammers us with suffering, opening up a space within which Alcaeus creates a sense of absence and lack: o talais ego, I the sufferer, I the wretched, stressed with a definite article, as if it is the speaker’s only identity now (like “William the Conqueror,” “Catherine the Great”). The noun takes two verbs, both participles: echon, having, and imerron, longing — one the opposite of the other, setting the reality of what one has (a life in the wilderness) against the fantasy of what one wants (life in the city). Together, they explain that word talais — why “wretched”? Because of this cleft in the self: he wants one thing, but has another. The speaker says he wants just to listen to the agora and the council, concrete evocations of the abstraction of political life, when they have been called to order. The understatement has poetic effect, intensifying the emotion felt: if only he could just listen, not even participate! Then he would be happy.

We experience exile through the images of the poem, moving from civic order and ancestral home to dispossession and wilderness. And suddenly, among the thickets, it takes a strange and beautiful turn: out here in the middle of nowhere, the speaker comes to a holy space, consecrated to the gods, and sees a kind of ritual beauty contest among the young women of Lesbos — and then hears not song, but the echo of a song filling the space. (That young women of Lesbos regularly participated in sacramental beauty contests and choral singing should fire the imagination of any reader of Sappho.)

What is worth stressing is that this kind of poetry is, to the best of our knowledge, almost entirely new in Alcaeus’ time. Homer’s Iliad had been thought of as a manifestation of political knowledge; Alcaeus’ predecessors Archilochus and Tyrtaeus wrote about war; his near-contemporaries Theognis and Solon talked about the public sphere. But only Alcaeus took his personal experience of political upheavals and treated it — rather than a narrative of past deeds or advisory contemplation — as a subject fit for song. In taking this particular stance on politics, Alcaeus opened up a world of possibilities for poetry.

YET it is primarily through his most devoted student, the Roman poet Horace (who lived at least half a millennium later), that Alcaeus has exerted his influence on poetry as we know it. The vast majority of Alcaeus’ poetry, like Sappho’s, has not survived into modernity. But all the works of Horace that we know of have. And Horace, whose lyric poems may be the most widely read in European history, confessed himself at every turn to be a devotee of the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus — but especially Alcaeus. In one of his odes (2.13), Horace envisions Alcaeus and Sappho side by side in the afterlife, engaged in a kind of “Battle of the Bands”; wonderful though Sappho is, Alcaeus wins.

We can see the influence of Alcaeus all over Horace’s poetry: Horace borrows first lines from Alcaeus, turns of phrase, subjects for poems. (Eduard Fränkel devoted a whole chapter of his book Horace to “Odes Related to Alcaeus.”) “Now we must drink” (nun chre methysthen) says Alcaeus when the tyrant Myrsilus dies; “Now we must drink” (Nunc est bibendum), an exact metrical equivalent, echoes Horace on the occasion of Cleopatra’s death. Alcaeus is our first source for one of the most famous metaphors ever — the “Ship of State,” which started life in several poems by the Greek, including this one (208):

I do not comprehend the lay of the winds:
for one wave rolls in here,
another there, and we are borne along
in the middle of the ship with the black storm …

But it is through Horace’s imitation, ode 1.14 (“O navis!”) that the image comes down to us marked (by Quintilian) as allegory; and thence the metaphor (which was carried onward — into Melville, into Whitman (“O Captain!”), and the remarks of countless politicians, from Cicero to Barack Obama, over the years.

Through Horace, Alcaeus’ voice resounds all the way down to the present day. His descendants are many and unwitting — not consciously imitators of a style or subject so much as the inheritors of a posture. It may be objected that a poet can write personal political verse without direct influence from a predecessor of whom she knows nothing. But Alcaeus is the ancestor nevertheless, just as Sappho is an ancestor of even those poets who write about love and desire knowing nothing about her. There is Whitman, as mentioned; but also Wordsworth’s tone in cataloguing his feelings about the French Revolution in verse epic:

‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated, and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soil of common life was, at that time,
Too hot to tread upon. Oft said I then,
And not then only, “What a mockery this
Of history, the past and that to come!”
(The Prelude, 9.161–69)

The family resemblance comes out in the grafting of personal reflection onto political events — the sense of wanting to bear witness, not just from the impersonal standpoint of an epic narrator, but with one’s full subjectivity thrown into the verbalization. Taking up a different strand of the Alcaic tradition, there is a sympotic tone to Yeats’s “Easter 1916” which catches a flash of Horace and Alcaeus. It comes out most in his momentary apostrophe to a hypothetical audience — the sense that this very public poetry is nevertheless written with a private audience in mind, a kind of hetaireia:

And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

And when Auden begins “September 1, 1939” with the lines “I sit in one of the dives / On Thirty-Second Street, / Uncertain and afraid,” they echo at two thousand years’ distance the o talais ego, the wretched I, of Alcaeus. (Auden might be the most Alcaic English-language poet of the 20th century in his ability to mix the light and the grave, his ranging over both politics and love, his experience of leaving his home country and subsequent feelings of displacement.)

Nor is this just a matter of modern classics. An awareness of Alcaeus’ poetry and how it works has much to offer by way of illumination on our contemporary political verse — that it speaks not just from a moment, but as part of a tradition. The critic and pedagogue Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote that some of Alcaeus’ poems, taken out of meter, could be mistaken for political speeches:

That potbelly [Myrsilus] didn’t speak to their
hearts, but trampling slowly
on his oaths, he devours
our city… (129)

There’s craft at work here: Alcaeus takes a single word, “potbelly” (physgon) and extends it slowly into a swinish metaphor without ever actually describing a pig — all the work is in the verbs, “trampling” (epibais), “devours” (daptei). Wit can make a charge stick. The Alcaic invective tradition can illuminate — and help us evaluate — similar impulses in the poetry of our own times. Take, for instance, this moment in Frederick Seidel’s 2014 poem “Snowing”:

The junior senator from Texas, Mr. Cruz,
Smiling his ghastly Joe McCarthy smarm,
With a broken-open shotgun
Draped over the crook of his arm —
Out with friends shooting pheasant and moderate Republicans.

Why should we consider this the stuff of poetry rather than the op-ed page? We don’t need Alcaeus as predecessor to show us — but it helps to see that such poetry, far from just ventilating one poet’s opinions, goes back to the very beginnings of the art, and that we can admire or deprecate it on the strength of its verbal agility. The same is true of a very different poem, Frank Bidart’s “Curse,” written as an imprecation against the 9/11 hijackers:

… Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you
seek the dead. Each time you enter them

they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.

Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter
the skin of another, what I have made is a curse.

Again, it helps us to think of this poem not just as an individual instance of an expressive urge, but as an object that avails itself of an entire repertory of curses going back to L-P 70:

And let him, wedded to the Atreïdai[ . ] . [
feast on the city as he would with Myrsilus
[until] Ares decides to turn us to arms…

In this case, comparison raises the question: why does language of eating and consumption return, in very different contexts, over the span of two and a half millennia? Is there something in the structure of revenge, of justice, that encourages us to think in terms of food (or not-food, in the case of Bidart)? These are the kinds of aspects of our contemporary poetry that Alcaeus can help us see more clearly.

And as we do so, Alcaeus’ poetic talent comes to the fore. Inventive and ambitious, he crafts with rhetorical and poetic ingenuity a language that can cast the ephemeral raw material of politics in the mold of intense personal feeling, creating a poetry that has outlasted by far the circumstances that gave it rise — and a tradition of other poets doing the same. In addition to the writers already named, the politically engaged lyric personae of Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich, among many others, owe some debt of priority to Alcaeus. So does the poetry of exile: Ovid, Dante, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Brodsky, and others. Only a handful have probably ever been aware that Alcaeus was their predecessor. But his scraps and fragments hover in the background behind them all, and it is hard not to think of him in reading them once you have spent some time with him.

Right now, however, it is hard to appreciate Alcaeus in English. There are few good translations of his poetry, and none that have been done with the poetic verve of some of Sappho’s recent translators. David Campbell’s facing-page prose trots in the Loeb volume give the literal meaning, and the renderings in Martin West’s Greek Lyric Poetry for the Oxford World’s Classics series are serviceable enough. But what we need now in order to see Alcaeus in his rightful place in the history of poetry is a translation sparked by a literary vision — someone who can bring the fire, wit, pain, and delight of this member of the Nine to life, with the faint traces of his reception from Horace until now in mind.

Spencer Lenfield studies classics and philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has written regularly for Harvard Magazine, including most recently a profile of the poet and translator David Ferry.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.