Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond

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Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond: Knowledge, power, tradition.
Edited by Lilah Grace Canevaro and Donncha O’Rourke

ISBN 978-1-910589-79-3, 280pp, 2019,

Here ten scholars examine poetic texts of wisdom and teaching related to the line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. Previous scholarship has grappled with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre and as a result has often focused on defining and classifying didactic poetry.

The present volume approaches didactic texts 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). Issues include knowledge in its relation to power; cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; authority of the teacher

The Editors

Lilah Grace Canevaro is author of Hesiod’s Works and Days: How to Teach Self-Sufficiency (OUP, 2015) and Women of Substance in Homeric Epic: Objects, Gender, Agency (OUP, 2018). Her research centres on ancient Greek poetry, with a focus on gender.
She pioneers new-materialist approaches to classical study, and has published also on classical reception and comparative literature. Dr Canevaro is Lecturer in Greek at the University of Edinburgh.

Donncha O’Rourke has published extensively on the poetry of the late Roman republic and early empire, especially the elegiac and didactic genres, with a particular focus on their intertextuality with other literary and philosophical texts. Forthcoming work includes a monograph entitled Propertius and the Virgilian Sensibility (CUP) and an edited collection on Approaches to Lucretius (CUP).
Dr O’Rourke is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Edinburgh.

The Contributors

Lilah Grace Canevaro, Monica R. Gale, Elena Giusti, Johannes Haubold, David McOmish, Madhlozi Moyo, Donncha O’Rourke, Floris Overduin, David Sider, Helen Van Noorden

Contents

Introduction by Lilah Grace Canevaro and Donncha O’Rourke

PART I: THEORY

1. Knowledge is power: dynamics of (dis)empowerment in didactic poetry - Donncha O’Rourke

2. Thinking for yourself: Hesiod’s Works and Days and cognitive training - Lilah Grace Canevaro

PART II: TRACING TRADITION

3. Homer Ethicus by David Sider

4. Elegiac pharmacology: the didactic heirs of Nicander? - Floris Overduin

5. Name puns and acrostics in didactic poetry: reading the universe - Monica R. Gale

6. Ovid’s Ars Poetica: metapoetic didactic in the Ars Amatoria - Elena Giusti

PART III: COMPARISONS AND CONTINUATIONS

7. Didactic and apocalyptic turns: clarity and obscurity, Homer and Hesiod in the Sibylline Oracles - Helen Van Noorden

8. Embodied teaching: Ludlul Bel Nemeqi and the Babylonian didactic tradition - Johannes Haubold

9. Fauna and erotic didactics in archaic Greek and Kalanga oral wisdom literatures - Madhlozi Moyo

10. Scientia demands the Latin muse: the authority of didactic poetry in early-modern Scotland - David McOmish

Index

Index locorum

Classical Review 2021, 4-5.

"This valuable volume offers new avenues to an ancient genre that is notoriously hard to define." Katharina Volk, Latomus 2020 813-16. "In conclusion, this volume may be certainly considered a leading guide to the" Giuseppe Solaro

Revue des Etudes Anciennes 2020, 276-80.

"À la fois par la comparaison et par le dialogue entre pensée contemporaine (notamment Foucault et, d’autre part, les sciences de la cognition) et textes anciens, l’ensemble de l’ouvrage vise à montrer que la poésie didactique est « a natural mode of discourse in all times and places » et il y parvient bien tout en montrant l’importance des variations contextuelles. ... Un tel ensemble d’études, sur un corpus parfois mal connu, intéressera de ce fait les spécialistes de ce genre ancien de la poésie didactique au sens restreint (la médecine ou la pharmacopée en vers, par exemple), mais aussi dans un sens élargi (d’Hésiode à Virgile ou Ovide), quand finalement tout poète réfléchissant aux enjeux esthétiques, éthiques et idéologiques de sa pratique se veut aussi maître de savoir, vérités et, du même mouvement, doutes." Michel Briand,