Didactic Poetry from Homer and Hesiod Onwards: Knowledge, Power, Tradition

Description

Here a team of established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. In previous scholarship, a drive to classify Greek and Latin didactic poetry has engaged with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre. The present volume approaches didactic poetry from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient near-eastern and contemporary African traditions). The issues raised include knowledge in its relation to power; the cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; the interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; the authority of the teacher. Cover Title Page Table of Contents Introduction Part I: Theory 1. Knowledge is Power: Dynamics of (Dis)Empowerment in Didactic Poetry 2. Thinking for Yourself: Hesiod’s “Works and Days” and Cognitive Training Part II: Tracing Tradition 3. Homer Ethicus 4. Elegiac Pharmacology: The Didactic Heirs of Nicander? 5. Name Puns and Acrostics in Didactic Poetry: Reading the Universe 6. Ovid’s “Ars Poetica”: Metapoetic Didactic in the “Ars Amatoria” Part III: Comparisons and Continuations 7. Didactic and Apocalyptic Turns: Clarity and Obscurity, Homer and Hesiod in the “Sibylline Oracles” 8. Embodied Teaching: “Ludlul Bel Nemeqi” and the Babylonian Didactic Tradition 9. Fauna and Erotic Didactics in Archaic Greek and Kalanga Oral Wisdom Literatures 10. Scientia Demands the Latin Muse: The Authority of Didactic Poetry in Early-Modern Scotland Index Index Locorum