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Scholarship on Alcman’s poetry has traditionally been dominated by discussions of his partheneia. These beautiful and relatively well-preserved fragments have provided an unparalleled look into the song culture of ancient Greece and more specifically ancient Sparta.1 While this extensive discussion has greatly enriched our understanding of the complex imagery and performance context of choral women’s songs, it has tended to overshadow Alcman’s shorter extant poems. This article aims to refocus attention on at least one of these smaller fragments, 17 PMGF, a poem that has as its subject matter something far different than the dancing of young women: a gift of a tripod full of soup. Even in this bare description we can see the oddness of this juxtaposition. A tripod, with its heroic overtones, makes an unusual pairing with the humble, everyday soup. And even more surprisingly Alcman goes on to claim solidarity with the Spartan people because of his love for this soup. This extraordinary rhetorical gesture, which combines the political and gastronomical, requires an explanation. As I will argue, this explanation is firmly rooted in the socio-political reality of the archaic Sparta that Alcman performed in. Through Alcman’s self-presentation in fr. 17 we can see traces of the growing influence of the damos within Sparta.
There is another pressing reason to analyze this fragment of Alcman, one found in the general haziness of Spartan history during the archaic period. The notorious problem of the “Spartan Mirage” has distorted our understanding of Sparta throughout antiquity.2 This distortion only grows worse as we go back in time to the archaic period.3 It remains unclear when and how the unique institutions we see in Sparta of the classical period came into being. As a historical Spartan poet from the archaic period (whether native-born or an emigrant), Alcman provides us with a potent weapon to pierce through the Spartan mirage.4 Alcman can provide us with an “emic” view of Spartan society during one of its most transitional periods.5 And this view is certainly not apolitical. As Kurke and Morris have convincingly argued, in the archaic period seemingly apolitical things such as fashion and dining were themselves political statements. Food, drink, and clothing were all aspects of elite self-fashioning...