Alcman

Alcman, one of the earliest Greek lyric poets, was born about the middle of the 7th century B.C. at Sardis, in Lydia, but lived, first as a slave, and afterwards as a freedman, in Sparta. The first to write erotic poetry, he composed in the Doric dialect Parthenia, or songs sung by choruses of virgins, bridal-hymns, and verses in praise of love and wine. Of his scanty fragments, which are given in Bergk's Poetæ Lyrici Græci (4th ed. 1878), the most important is a Parthenion, discovered on an Egyptian papyrus at Paris in 1855.