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1 results

  • 5 - The paradigms of epic: Apollonius Rhodius and the example of the past

  • Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge
  • Foreword by Emma Greensmith, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Poet's Voice
    Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024, pp 284-333

  • Summary

    The avant-garde writers of the Hellenistic period demonstrate an acute sense of literary tradition. In the previous chapter we have already seen some of the ways in which Theocritus develops his distinctive fragmented and polyphonous voice in relation to the past. In the programmatic narrative of Idyll 7, the search for an exemplary voice recedes through a series of lost poets’ songs towards an always already distanced model of excellence. So in Idyll 11, the much-discussed Hellenistic technique of reversing and restructuring the phraseology of earlier writing finds a parallel in the appropriation and manipulation of a Homeric figure: the Cyclops is taken back to a green and loving youth, back to a time before Homer’s writing of him as a paradigm of monstrous brutality. Indeed, in Hellenistic poetry we see again and again a search for an original and originating moment in the past ’before Homer wrote’.