4 - Scope and procedure

Summary

It may be useful at this point to recapitulate and/or clarify the precise scope of the two chief factors in the discussions that follow, the Greek corpus and the concept of interaction. First, the corpus. The poetry in my period extends from Archilochus at one end to Aeschylus, Pindar and Bacchylides at the other. It comprises, that is, the whole of archaic and early classical verse with the exception of the two hexametric traditions: Homer with the later hymns and epic fragments, and the Hesiodic corpus together with its distant Presocratic relatives, notably Parmenides and Empedocles. In the case of Homer, the main reason for exclusion is the peculiar difficulty of establishing standard usage for the period (’ which period?’), and the situation of the other early hexametrists is comparably problematic. Their successors are omitted only for the sake of genre consistency.