Abstract: In an essay of 1971 Luigi Enrico Rossi, studying the laws of the Greek literary genres, recognized the existence of three periods: the Archaic period, in which laws are existing and observed, but have not been still made in...
moreAbstract: In an essay of 1971 Luigi Enrico Rossi, studying the laws of the Greek literary genres, recognized the existence of three periods: the Archaic period, in which laws are existing and observed, but have not been still made in writing in special manuals (that did not exist); the Classical period, in which laws are observed and begin to be writen in descriptive and normative manuals; the Hellenistic period, where laws are studied and then are put in writing, but are not respected, indeed are violated for liter- ary purposes. Also Rossi noted that learning the laws was oral in Archaic period, and took place in a sort of ‘apprenticeship of workshop’ (collaborating with teachers) or ‘direct practice’ (atending poetic performances), and also that the observations on po- etry and art must occur in the poems themselves. Checking the validity of these gene- ral observations in the restricted ield of elegy, we concluded the following. There’s only two periods of elegy: Archaic and Classical period, where the unwriten laws are respected; Hellenistic period, in which writen laws are not respected. In particular, learning in Archaic and Classical period was oral and only with direct practice, but you can also suggest the use of writen collections of elegies to derive the rules; those who learned are the young aristocrats, which serve as bearers in the symposia. It is conirmed in several elegies Rossi’s intuition according to which, in the absence of manuals for the elegy in the Archaic and Classical period, observations on the poetry and art must take place only in the poems themselves. Some violations of the laws (of the metric, the dialect to use, the topics to be treat, the symposion’s practice to observe) are nothing more than the usual exceptions that prove the law.
