STESICHORUS

born 632/629 BC, Mataurus, Italy died 556/553 BC Greek lyric poet credited with originating bucolic poetry in his Daphnis and with being the author of such forerunners of Hellenistic romantic poetry as Calyce and Rhadine. Stesichorus' works were mainly narrative poems dealing with myths, and he wrote in the Doric dialect. The Latin writers Horace and Quintilian spoke of him as a serious poet, but hardly 100 lines of his work have survived, and it is not even certain that he used the triadic stanza (divided into strophe, antistrophe, and epode) supposed to be his invention. Stesichorus was active mainly at Himera in Sicily; Plato recounts in the Phaedrus that he was struck blind after censuring Helen of Troy's conduct in a poem but was cured after composing Palinodia, a recantation.