Solon’s poetry in light of comparative-historical linguistics

Abstract

The subject of this research is the heritage of Indo-European poetics in works of the Ancient Greek poet Solon. The object of this research is the elegies and fragments of his hexametric oeuvres. The authors examine such aspects of the topic as: 1) retention in Solon’s poetry of the structures similar to exposition of hymns in Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian traditions; 2) preservation of stylistic figures widely represented in the poetry of ancient Indo-European peoples; 3) preservation of poetic expressions and mythological ideas that may date back to Indo-European times. For achieving the set goals, the author employ the methods of text hermeneutics, semantic analysis, and comparative-historical linguistics. The following conclusions are made: in the corpus of Solon’s texts there are fragments very similar to expositions of hymns in the Ancient Greek and Vedic traditions; Solon’s poetry contains stylistic approaches that can be reconstructed to the level of Indo-European poetics; poetic expressions and mythological representations dated back to Indo-European times are retained in Solon’s texts.