The Agōn as Literary Motif in Representations of the Lyric Poets

Beyond factual statements on the competition among choral poets, the literary and biographical tradition reveals that contest-oriented associations between the lyric poets became an essential feature of the poets’ constructed persona in our sources. In this chapter I demonstrate that the literary tradition, especially the biographical tradition, turned agonistic relationships between lyric poets into a literary motif, which gradually gained an evaluative function. As will become clear, the choice of the lyric poets who were presented as participants in these literary agōnes and in pairs of other kinds was never random. It was rather based on criteria that reflected their generic, performative, and thematic associations. I show in this chapter that the arrangement of lyric poets in pairs or groups often reflects common characteristics of both the compositions and the literary personae of the selected poets.