| This dissertation constitutes the first stage of a project to study the educational function of three types of men, the poets, the sophists and the philosophers, in the context of the social history of Greek sophia. Integrating the method of performance poetics and social history, here we investigate the first type of sophos, the poet, and examine the notion of the poet as educator in archaic poetry itself.; The dissertation grew initially out of an attempt to contextualize the famous critique of poetry in Plato's Republic. The Introduction traces this origin through a reading of the Republic as the founding work of philosophia as paideia. The "ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy" is shown to be philosophy's voice of competition to replace the traditional authority of poetry as the best education for the polis. Chapter One then returns to the authority of the poet by means of a detailed reading of Hesiod's Theogony. The poet, as sophos, resembles the authoritative figure of the prophet and the king. It is based on this authority that Hesiod undertakes to educate in the Works and Days, the focus of Chapter Two. The performance of the Works and Days constructs a poetic space for the education of Perses, which amounts to the codification of farming as a way of life. In Chapter Three we turn to Solon the Athenian. As a 'performer of wisdom', poetry and law code constitute two complementary manifestations of his sophia. A close reading of Solon 4W shows how the poem teaches the central message that Eunomia lays a new foundation for Athens. Finally, Chapter Four demonstrates how the master of advice, Theognis codifies the aristocratic education in the symposium as a response to the corrosion of aristocratic rule by social tensions between the agathoi and the kakoi.; The examination of these three archaic poets in their different configurations as educators will serve as a basis for further research on the social history of sophia and the sophos in ancient Greece. |
