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Phocylides

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

M. L. West
M. L. West
Affiliation:
Bedford College, London
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Extract

Phocylides was famous as a poet of admonitory or gnomic verse. Isocrates names him together with Hesiod and Theognis, saying that they are praised as the best counsellors for human life, though their advice is seldom followed (ii 43). He is again bracketed with Theognis by Dio of Prusa (ii 5), Athenaeus (632d), and Cyril (c. Iul., Patrol. lxxvi 841d). Theophrastus quoted a line of Theognis (147) in different works as ‘Theognis’ and as ‘Phocylides’: we should not infer that it occurred in both poets, but simply that people tended to muddle them. And when Phocylides is dated as σύγχρονος Θϵόγνιδος, we must suspect that this was a guess based on nothing more than the similar tendency of their work, for certainly neither named the other.

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Notes
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The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 98 , November 1978, pp. 164 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1978

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References

1 Suda, from Hesychius, of Miletus. Cf. my Studies in Greek Elegy and lambus (1974) 65Google Scholar f.

2 They are collected in Bergk, , Poetae Lyrici Graeci, ii 68–72Google Scholar; Diehl, , Anth. Lyr. I, i 57–60Google Scholar. I follow Bergk's numbering. The evidence that Phocylides also wrote elegiacs is unreliable; see my Iambi et Elegi Graeci, ii 93, and Studies 171.

3 Chamaileon fr. 28 Wehrli (Ath. 620c) knows of performers who sang These were presumably citharodes who had lost the art of composing for themselves; see CQ xxi (1971) 307 ff.

4 Ps.-Hdt. vit. Hom. 15–17. Much has been written on the supposed device of the σφραγίς, a pseudo-technical term constructed on a misinterpretation of Thgn. 19 and idle speculation about the meaning of σφραγίς as a part of the citharodic nome (Poll. iv 66). Poets mention their own names for a variety of reasons. To put all such mentions under the single heading σφραγίς is to succumb to that love of formulaic labels that so often serves as a curb to thought. Geffcken, J., Gr. Literaturgeschichte i (Anmerkungen) 96Google Scholar n. 2 diagnoses Phocylides' repetition of his name as a ‘Mangel an Originalität’.

5 I have made a short survey of this literature, with particular emphasis on the ancient Near East, in the introduction to my edition of Hesiod, 's Works and Days (Oxford 1978)Google Scholar.

6 Alster, B., The Instructions of Šuruppak (Copenhagen 1974)Google Scholar; Studies in Sumerian Proverbs (Copenhagen 1975).

7 Shippey, T. A., Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (1976) 48–52Google Scholar.

8 Arngart, O., The Proverbs of Alfred (Skrifter utgivna av kungl. humanistiska Vetenskapssamfundet i Lund, 32/2) 1942Google Scholar.

9 See further my Hesiod, Works and Days 24 f.

10 The phrase is attested only in fr. 2, plausibly supplemented in fr. 1.

11 Theognidean line-references in sloping type indicate that the poem in question is anonymous.

12 Gr. Literaturgeschichte (1967) 79.

13 Bergk appends to his collection of fragments a number of anonymous gnomic hexameters which may come from Phocylides. Their inclusion would not significantly affect the picture I have drawn.