The nature of genre

The urge to categorise creative art has an excellent pedigree. In the case of lyric, the concept and some of the labels are there already in the Homeric poems, which identify both specific contexts for sung performances and also terminology for certain kinds of song. At Il. 1.473 the Greek emissaries to Chryses sing a paean to Apollo at the sacrifice and feast which follows the reversal of the offence against the god. A paean is again sung by the Greeks after the killing of Hector (Il. 22.391). The wedding depicted on Achilles' shield includes a song explicitly termed a hymenaios (Il. 18.492), the term later used for wedding songs. At Hector's funeral, the verb thrêneô and the noun thrênos (the standard term later for sung lament) are used of the song of mourning sung for him. The depiction of the harvesting on Achilles' shield (Il. 18.570) includes the singing of a Linos-song. The list is not exhaustive even for its own day, for it omits the dithyramb in honour of Dionysus, just as the Homeric poems in general avoid Dionysus, even though his worship goes back to the Bronze Age.