Aristotelianism and Grammar

Abstract

Abstract To speak of the “fate of poetry” is, from one point of view, too portentous. Certainly poetry continued to be written and performed, continued to play cultural, social, and political roles, and continued to be understood in rhetorical terms from early to late antiquity. There is, however, a well established agreement among classical scholars that poetry “declined,” from the Second Sophistic onward, as the proliferating varieties of epideictic prose became the predominant and most lively media for significant epideictic discourse and original invention. Such a view may reflect, in part, an inability like that of W. R. Johnson to view a poetry like Solon’s as “poetic.” However, it does seem true that little poetry of consequence was written in late antiquity—that is, after the third or fourth century—or little that can seriously be compared with what remains of Sappho, Solon, Pindar, or the great Hellenistic and Augustan poets. The poets of late antiquity (or those whose writings have survived) are often regarded as well-trained hacks, many of whom are little more than antiquarians or well-bred poetasters indulging in verse as a courtly hobby. The better poets do rise above mediocrity, but not very far: mostly they rework an exhausted body of conventional materials and forms, with laborious if ingenious pedantry. In short, poetry became for the most part a minor and often sec-ond-rate form of epideictic. Such is the standard view.