Page "Alcaeus of Mytilene" Paragraph 20

* Political songs: Alcaeus often composed on a political theme, covering the power struggles on Lesbos with the passion and vigour of a partisan, cursing his opponents, rejoicing in their deaths, delivering blood-curdling homilies on the consequences of political inaction and exhorting his comrades to heroic defiance, as in one of his ' ship of state ' allegories.

Commenting on Alcaeus as a political poet, the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus once observed that "... if you removed the meter you would find political rhetoric.