| Chapter One sets up the question of archaic Greek didactic poetry. An examination of the idea of "didactic," leads ultimately to an argument for a polyvalent definition of genre which includes consideration of the rhetoric of instruction and forms of address deployed in these poems. In the case of didactic poetry, we must consider the role of the auditores (used throughout to encompass both "hearers" and "readers"). When we combine attention to the auditores with the formal elements of archaic Greek didactic poetry, we see a distinctive literary genre emerging from the (posited) discourse genre of instruction surviving in the rhetorical genre of parainesis.; Chapter Two focuses on cosmogonic poetry, Hesiod's Theogony and Orphic poetry. The opening of Hesiod's Theogony is read as a deliberate instance of hypotyposis, a scene being made vividly present before the eyes of the auditores. This strategy serves to enhance the truth-value of Hesiod's version of the world, a crucial addition when the Muses present themselves as convincing and persuasive liars. Thanks to the rhetoric of this porooimion, we auditores are persuaded to accept Hesiod's cosmogony.; Chapter Three studies Hesiod's Works and Days. The narrator's brother, Perses, is read as a didactic double. He is a substitute, someone who can be chided and upbraided by the Hesiodic narrator and, implicitly, by the auditores. In this way, the narrator instructs the auditores while nominally instructing a wayward brother.; Chapter Four examines the Presocractic poetry of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Each author presents, in dactylic hexameters, a version of the cosmos different from his predecessors. Xenophanes first conjoins poetry and philosophy, exhorting auditores to see the foolishness expressed by Homer and Hesiod. Parmenides includes the auditores on his voyage toward knowledge; Empedocles addresses Pausanias, his didactic double. In truth, all auditores are being addressed, enjoined to partake of the wisdom he, like Hesiod, or Xenophanes, or Parmenides before him, proffers.; An Appendix on the use of the Greek pronoun tu&d12;nh (relevant to the discussion of Hesiod's Theogony) and a list of Works Cited & Consulted conclude this dissertation. |
