For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: verse that was accompanied by a lyre, cithara, or barbitos. Because such works were typically sung, it was also known as melic poetry. The lyric or melic poet was distinguished from the writer of plays (although Athenian drama included choral odes, in lyric form), the writer of trochaic and iambic verses (which were recited), the writer of elegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epic. The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study. These archaic and classical musician-poets included Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar. Archaic lyric was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance. Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms in odes to a triad, including strophe, antistrophe (metrically identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does "not" match that of the strophe).