Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Performance and genre
- 2 The aetiology of Callimachus' Aitia
- 3 The Argonautica of Apollonius and epic tradition
- 4 Theocritus and the bucolic genre
- 5 Epic in a minor key
- 6 The style of Hellenistic epic
- 7 The epigram
- 8 The languages of praise
- 9 Hellenistic drama
- 10 Roman epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index of passages discussed
- General index
1 - Performance and genre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Performance and genre
- 2 The aetiology of Callimachus' Aitia
- 3 The Argonautica of Apollonius and epic tradition
- 4 Theocritus and the bucolic genre
- 5 Epic in a minor key
- 6 The style of Hellenistic epic
- 7 The epigram
- 8 The languages of praise
- 9 Hellenistic drama
- 10 Roman epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index of passages discussed
- General index
Summary
INVOKING THE MUSES, EVOKING MODELS
For the Greeks, from the age of Homer to the late imperial period, the poet received his inspiration from the Muses or from some other god (e.g. Apollo or Dionysus), to whom he attributed the responsibility for the enthousiasmos which allowed him to sing as he wished to sing; consequently, it was a widespread practice for poets to apostrophise these divine sources of inspiration at the beginning of their works, or even to claim that they had been invested as poets by them (as in the case of Hesiod). Particularly in the Hellenistic age, however, we find that another figure takes his place beside the divine inspirer, or at times substitutes for him in the rôle of ‘guarantor’ of the origin of the work. The conventional rôle of acting as a source of inspiration may well be left to the Muses, but now an illustrious predecessor often steps in to teach the new poet the ropes, and how to proceed to construct the work he has undertaken, or else he verifies and ratifies the correctness of the method that the new poet has followed. In practice, in their combination of these two series of figures – the Muses and the poetic masters or models – it is as if Hellenistic poets turned to their advantage the distinction between inspiration by the poetic divinities, on the one hand, and the primacy of ‘craft’, technē, on the other; the two now formed a powerful unit, no longer a pair of opposed possibilities.
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- Information
- Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry , pp. 1 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005