1 - Greek versions

Summary

This chapter will offer a selective survey of work on Greek authors who wrote before the five Roman poets to be considered in later chapters. It first sweeps from Homer through tragedy, then stops to consider Plato, Aristotle, and (briefly) the history of the concept of “unity,” before finishing with the Alexandrian poets. We shall look both at the poets on whom the Roman poets schooled themselves, and also at the modern aversion to inconsistencies that led scholars to march through the corpus of Greek and Latin authors removing, lamenting, or explaining away inconsistencies. Thus this chapter will demonstrate both the extent to which inconsistency appears in authors to whom Roman poets are indebted, and the scholarly behavior pattern under indictment in this book, in which a work is found wanting because it lacks the simple and organic unity or univocality that came to be identified with value and quality in poetry. Throughout, the stress will be on questions, and in some cases even characters and myths, that recur in later chapters. Discussions throughout the chapter must be brief. Often recent work will be described and put to some critique, but this chapter will present arguments for consideration more than it will analyze them in depth, although there will be a little more detail when we reach the Alexandrians. I leave more extended examination for later chapters.