Greek lyric is the body of
lyric poetry written in
dialects of ancient Greek. It is primarily associated with the early 7th to the early 5th centuries BC, sometimes called the "Lyric Age of Greece", but continued to be written into the
Hellenistic and
Imperial periods. Lyric is one of three broad categories of poetry in
classical antiquity, along with
drama and
epic, according to the scheme of the "natural forms of poetry" developed by
Goethe in the early nineteenth century. (Drama is considered a form of poetry here because both
tragedy and
comedy were written in verse in ancient Greece.) Culturally, Greek lyric is the product of the political, social and intellectual milieu of the Greek
polis ("city-state").