Antiquity Studies

Theognis’ Unoriginal Didactic Failure

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Abstract

Section 1 argues that Theognis embodies a robust conception of literary authorship and that his authorial unoriginality is inextricable from his moral authority. Section 2 interprets Theognis’ failure to instruct Cyrnus as integral to his didactic message and as part of a strategy whereby the poet’s relationship to his addressee prefigures his relationship to larger audiences. An appendix provides a statistical analysis of the citation history of the Theognidea and argues that at some point after the classical period an original collection was supplanted by something like the strange text that we read today.


Open access

Submitted: May 17, 2021 | Accepted: June 23, 2021 | Published Dec. 16, 2021 | Language: en

Keywords Textual history • Authorship • Elegy • Didactic poetry • Theognis

Copyright © 2021 Henry Spelman. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-548-3/007


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