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A Note on Theocritus' Aeolic Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

M. L. West
M. L. West
Affiliation:
University College, Oxford
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Extract

Theocritus' four known Aeolic poems, 28–31, are all in metres used by Sappho and Alcaeus. 28, 30, and apparently 31, are in greater Asclepiads, and 29 is in Sapphic fourteen-syllable lines. Neither of these metres was in common use, and Theocritus is likely to have based his metrical practice, like his dialect, on the Lesbian models.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , May 1967 , pp. 82 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1967

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References

1 Greater Asclepiads were used by Asclepiades (whom Theocritus admired, 7. 40), Callimachus (fr. 400), and Horace (C. 1. 11, 18, 4. 10).

2 In the fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus I have counted 16 examples in 226 lines in Aeolic metres whose beginnings are preserved. I found no fragment of more than ten lines that lacked an instance except Sappho fr. 44 (28 lines)—a significant exception, in view of the known abnormalities of that poem (see Page, D. L., Sappho and Alcaeus, pp. 65 ff.).Google Scholar

3 In C. 1. 15. 36 ignis lliacas domos, the variant Pergameas, whatever its source, is unlikely to be a conjecture designed to meet the metrical point, which was surely too subtle for fifteenth-century scholars; and could Horace have written Iliacas only three lines after Ilio? He varies his words for Greek and Trojan throughout the ode.

4 Gow, ii. 511, notes that the pyrrhich base is admitted in 30 and does not occur in 28, and says that this is ‘probably no more than accident’.

5 Of the many conjectures the most ingenious is perhaps (Pohlenz, , NGG 1949, 231);Google Scholar though while I have heard from Greek poets and some others of ‘babbling water’, I cannot say I have ever heard of babbling rush. Trees ‘whisper’ in 1. 1, and (with an object) in the post-Theocritean 27. 58.

1 Cf. in 7. 44, with Gow's note.

2 So Gow, ii. 208. It must be remembered that poem 28, to all appearance, is later than poem 13; and the balance of probability is that poem 13 is later than the first version of Argonautica i–ii.

3 Gow, i. 257. In IL 3 also, if Gallavotti's reconstruction is correct (Riv. Fil. lviii [1930], 500–3;Google ScholarTheocritus, p. 303), 28 was preceded by 17. Cf. Gow, i. 1, n. 1.Google Scholar

1 Gallavotti, , Theocritus, pp. 288 ff.Google Scholar

2 Hephaestion 63. 17.

3 Gow, ii. 519. If so, there will be no significance in the fact that 29 and 30 could be divided into four-line stanzas. With Horace's greater Asclepiad odes, which have eight or sixteen lines, it is another matter, in view of his regular use of quatrains.