American Journal of Philology

In this paper I question the validity of the notion of "historical elegy" as a genre of classical Greek elegy. My approach is to view elegy as a whole in order to understand first how the Greeks themselves used the term "elegy" and then what we can learn of the contents of other classical elegies that touched upon historical subjects. I show that the Greeks never attached any descriptive label to "elegy," whether "historical" or otherwise, and that an elegy that included historical matters could also incorporate myth and look forward to the future, while including as well themes now thought of as sympotic.