Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond

Here ten scholars examine poetic texts of wisdom and teaching related to the line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod. Previous scholarship has grappled with the near-total absence in ancient literary criticism of explicit discussion of didactic as a discrete genre and as a result has often focused on defining and classifying didactic poetry. The present volume approaches didactic texts from different perspectives: the diachronic, mapping the development of didactic through changing social and political landscapes (from Homer and Hesiod to Neo-Latin didactic); and the comparative, setting the Graeco-Roman tradition against a wider backdrop (including ancient Near-Eastern and contemporary African traditions). Issues include knowledge in its relation to power; cognitive strategies of the didactic text; ethics and poetics; interplay of obscurity and clarity, playfulness and solemnity; authority of the teacher.