The second chapter explores the music behind the poetry of Homer, looking at the melodic part of poetry – that is, the part that makes poetry song – in the Iliad, Odyssey, and two Homeric Hymns. It suggests that the early conceptualization of music borrows from the fields of artisanal objects and animal sounds, using these two different kinds of materiality to enact the presence of melody avant la lettre. These modes of conceptualization both place song within the material world, suggesting a presence that can shift and change, but that it will persist by way of such change.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

The final chapter explores the reception of songs lost and then recovered in papyri finds within their own fraught material context, focusing on Archilochus’ Cologne Epode and Timotheus’ Persae. How does the experience and narrative of loss, discovery, and recovery inform our sense of the bodies in these poems, so concerned themselves with the loss of limb and grasping touch?

Chapter four investigates archaic inscriptions and the interplay of song and stone in the poetry of Simonides. The tradition of Simonides gives us both epitaphic inscription and choral epinician, two poetic genres whose means and methods might be seen as so widely divergent as to be unrelated. However, I will explore how the substance of song and the fixity of objects are both in play on both sides of the song and stone divide, through a situatedness that allows Simonides to make claims that memories of the past will endure into the future.

Chapter five demonstrates how the ambition to preserve the past in song and stone leads to the hope of securing a stable sense of the future in the poetry of Pindar and the tragedies of Aeschylus. Here we see how the mere image of writing becomes a vehicle in epinician and tragic poetry not only for imagining systems of memorialization and justice, but also for questioning the systems thus imagined.

The epilogue charts a return to the earliest Greek poets on record, Homer and Hesiod, and a discussion of how these poets used monumentality to depict matter shaping time.

The introduction argues that ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and ephemerality inherent in mortality. It stresses the fact that these poems have assumed at least two forms of materiality: one in relation to performing bodies and another as inscribed texts. After reviewing prior scholarship in these areas, it looks at definitions of the body and the word ephêmeros in Greek poetry, including Homer, Pindar, and other lyric poets, and in Ps.-Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, before offering summaries of the chapters of the book.

The first chapter looks at one half of song, namely rhythm. It seeks to understand how the idea of rhythm relates to the movements of the body, and particularly the heartbeat, starting with the earliest uses of the word rhythmos in poems of Archilochus of Theognis, moving back again to Homer and then forward to Aristophanes and Plato to understand the shifting ways that rhythm was understood to connect poems and bodies.