1 - Early Greek views of poets and poetry

Summary

Histories of criticism in early Greece are usually based on surveys of those relatively few passages where the Greek poets speak about themselves and their poetry. Although this chapter will comment on many of these passages, the publication of a new history offers an opportunity to go beyond this fragmentary evidence by considering it in the wider framework of the society or societies for which this poetry existed. In what follows, the primary evidence is not restricted to whatever the poets say about themselves and their world: rather, it embraces the context in which they say what they say. The task will be to describe the social function of early Greek poetry and to present a picture of the traditional thought-patterns that shape the very concept of poet and poetry. It is through these thought-patterns that early Greek poetry defines itself and the poet as well, making it ultimately possible for critics of later times to talk about poetry.

The very notion of ‘critics’ and ‘criticism’ can best be seen in the post-Classical context of a great period of scholarship, in Hellenistic Alexandria. The Alexandrian concept of krisis, in the sense of ‘separating’, ‘discriminating’, ‘judging’ those works and those authors that are to be preserved and those that are not, is crucial to the concept of ‘canon’ in the Classical world. Literally, kanōn means ‘rod’, ‘straight-edge rule’, then by synecdoche a ‘standard’, ‘model’. The Alexandrian scholars who were in charge of this process of separation, discrimination, judgement, were the kritikoi, while the Classical authors who were ‘judged worthy of inclusion’ within the canon were called the enkrithentes, a term that corresponds to the Roman concept of the classici, who are authors of the ‘first class’, primae classis.