
Among these were the Sapphic, the Elegiac, the Alcaic, and the Asclepiadean strophe, all of them prominent in Greek and Latin verse. With the development of Greek prosody, various peculiar strophe-forms came into general acceptance, and were made celebrated by the frequency with which leading poets employed them. The arrangement of an ode in a splendid and consistent artifice of strophe, antistrophe and epode was carried to its height by Pindar.

But it was the Greek ode-writers who introduced the practice of strophe-writing on a large scale, and the art was attributed to Stesichorus, although it is likely that earlier poets were acquainted with it. It is said that Archilochus first created the strophe by binding together systems of two or three lines. In choral poetry, it is common to find the strophe followed by a metrically identical antistrophe, which may – in Pindar and other epinician poets – be followed in turn by a metrically dissimilar epode, creating an AAB form. Like all Greek verse, it is composed of alternating long and short syllables (symbolized by - for long, u for short and x for either long or short) in this case arranged in the following manner: įar more complex forms are found in the odes of Pindar and the choral sections of Greek drama. But the Greeks called a combination of verse-periods a system, giving the name "strophe" to such a system only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form.Ī simple form of Greek strophe is the Sapphic strophe.


In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based, with the strophe usually being identical with the stanza in modern poetry and its arrangement and recurrence of rhymes giving it its character. Strophe (from Greek στροφή, "turn, bend, twist") is a concept in versification which properly means a turn, as from one foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.
