Sympotic Poetry

Al nome di Teognide di Megara è legata l’unica ampia raccolta di poesia monodica arcaica e classica a noi giunta per tradizione diretta: un insieme di elegie per un totale di poco più di 1400 versi, ai quali si devono aggiungere, per tradizione indiretta, almeno altre 4 elegie monodistiche (non considerando altri versi di dubbia attribuzione). Il testimone più antico di questa raccolta è il cod. A (Parisin. Bibl. Nat. Suppl. Graec. 388), del X secolo, pubblicato nel 1815; nella cosiddetta elegia del "sigillo", collocata più o meno all’inizio della raccolta (vv. 19-26), esso presenta l’affermazione: «sono versi di Teognide il Megarese» (v. 22 sg.). Il cod. A appare diviso in due libri A e B, di cui il secondo scompare nei testimoni recenziori della tradizione manoscritta: oggi si ritiene che il libro B sia una selezione delle elegie erotiche, operata in età bizantina (IX-X sec. d. C.). Teognide è noto come autore di elegie, radunate in una raccolta scritta, almeno a partire dal tardo V secolo a. C.: suoi versi vengono citati o imitati da Ferecrate, Crizia il tiranno, Senofonte, e da Platone, che ne parla come di un autore ben conosciuto e stimato. Secondo la Suda (X sec. d. C.), Teognide è vissuto nel VI sec. a. C. e ha scritto elegie per un totale di 2800 versi, come ammaestramenti morali per il suo giovane amante Cirno. È solo a metà del 1500 che si notano dei difetti nella raccolta di Teognide: alcune elegie sono assegnate dalla tradizione indiretta ad altri autori (Tirteo, Mimnermo, Solone), un certo numero di poesie è stranamente ripetuto due volte nella raccolta, e il disordine tematico regna ovunque. Si comincia dunque a dubitare che quanto tramandato sotto il nome di Teognide sia effettivamente tutto suo, e nasce la moderna Questione teognidea. La raccolta viene interpretata come un corpus, dal momento che non tutte le poesie possono essere del poeta Teognide, e il problema cui si cerca a lungo di dare risposta (principalmente nel XIX e nel XX secolo) è quello di come questo corpus si sia costituito: la risposta che generalmente viene data è che il corpus teognideo è un’antologia, formata per aggregazione di due, o tre, o quattro, oppure molteplici fonti, in un’epoca variamente identificata (le proposte vanno dallo scorcio del VI sec. a. C. alla tarda età bizantina). Sono state però individuate anche sequenze di elegie che devono ricondursi alle recitazioni simposiali dell’età greca arcaica: esse mostrano che la costituzione di almeno buona parte del corpus si deve ad un apporto simposiale molto antico, e possono far interpretare l’intero corpus come una raccolta nata dalla registrazione scritta di varie elegie eseguite oralmente nei simposi.
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In The Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet, Wecowski offers a comprehensive account of the origins of the symposion and its close relationship with the rise of the Greek city-state or polis. Broadly defined as a culture-oriented aristocratic banquet, the symposion—which literally means 'drinking together'—was a nocturnal wine party held by Greek aristocrats from Homer to Alexander the Great. Its distinctive feature was the crucial importance of diverse cultural competitions, including improvising convivial poetry, among the guests. Cultural skills and abilities were a prerequisite in order for one to be included in elite drinking circles, and, as such, the symposion served as a forum for the natural selection of Greek aristocracy.

My central research question concerns the role space has in archaic Greek lyric poetry (7th-5th C.B.C.). Therefore, a theoretical framework inspired by narratology, phenomenology and metaphor theory is developed in the first chapter. Generally speaking, I distinguish between a role as setting or frame and a symbolic role (symbolic associations and metaphor, including personification). This theoretical framework is applied in three subsequent chapters on the city (chapter two), the countryside (chapter three) and the sea (chapter four), in which I offer detailed readings of 32 lyric poems. I argue that space predominantly has a symbolic role: the city is a political and an erotic metaphor, the countryside has erotic associations, and the sea has associations with danger. In an epilogue I attempt to bring the symbolic role of space in connection with the performance context of the symposium, in which these poems were performed: city metaphors are connected with sympotic plays of 'guessing', the erotic symbolism of the countryside reveals a projection of the erotic fantasies of the sympotic group, and the symbolism of danger of the sea serves to reinforce the cohesion of the sympotic group.

Abstract: This essay examines  the poetic production connected to the occasion of the symposium (seventh ‒ fifth cent. BCE), a production that underwent different stages of submersion determined by diverse cultural and political factors, and further examines the lullaby as a different type of monodic poetry, composed by and large by women. The author argues that lullabies are a perpetually emergent typology of text on the synchronic level, due to the recursive nature of their compositional occasion, and explores the dynamics which conversely resulted in the total submersion of the individual texts on the diachronic level, partly due to the failure to secure their written transmission.

Abstract: Epigram AP 10. 42, attributed to Lucian in the Palatine Anthology, probably is not by Lucian, nor is it originally even an epigram: the allusion to the oral publication of the verses, which must be protected by a “seal” affixed to the tongue, betrays an archaic (rather than classical) mentality, while the almost total thematic coincidence with the Theognidean elegy of the “seal” (Theogn. 19-26), as well as the similarity between the solutions proposed in the two compositions and the broader stylistic and linguistic similarities, suggest that this epigram should be recognized as a couplet from a lost section of the Theognidean corpus, just like other texts attributed to Theognis by Stobaeus.

The A. supports with new arguments von der Mühll's idea that in Anacreon fr. 356 PMG (=33 Gentili) Athenaeus has joined two distinct short poems. The first (fr. a) is an invitation to drink heavily in order to provoke Dionysiac enthusiasm; the second (fr. b) is an admonition against the degeneration of the symposium and a reminder of the rules of a well-ordered rite. The performance of the two poems must be placed in the same symposium at some distance of time, or, more probably, in different symposia: both could be performed whenever similar circumstances occurred. Some arguments are proposed in defence of Pauw's amendment ἀνυβρίστως in fr. (a).

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 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.

In: Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 161 (2018) 242-274.The present article is a full-length re-examination of Archilochus’ frr. 2 and 4 W. In the first place, it shows that there is no compelling reason for assigning both fragments to a single elegy composed or performed during a night-time watch on a ship, as many scholars assume; in the second place, it offers a metasympotic reading of both fragments. In fr. 4 Archilochus uses marine and military imagery to conjure up a fictional setting that evokes the actual sympotic gathering.

Abstract: This essay examines the poetic production connected to the occasion of the symposium (seventh ‒ fifth cent. BCE), a production that underwent different stages of submersion determined by diverse cultural and political factors, and further examines the lullaby as a different type of monodic poetry, composed by and large by women. The author argues that lullabies are a perpetually emergent typology of text on the synchronic level, due to the recursive nature of their compositional occasion, and explores the dynamics which conversely resulted in the total submersion of the individual texts on the diachronic level, partly due to the failure to secure their written transmission.