In his study of didactic poetry in Hellenistic Greece, Leonardo Cazzadori explores the intellectual history of the concept of “didactic” poetry, analyses the cultural background of the poems (fourth to second centuries B.C.), and examines the poems’ rhetorical strategies in popularizing scientific discourse and describing the natural world.
Leonardo Cazzadori presents the first comprehensive and comparative study of Greek didactic poetry from the Hellenistic period (ca. 350–30 B.C.). He traces the intellectual history of didactic poetry, analysing ancient and modern implications of this literary category. The author further investigates the rhetorical and stylistic features of Hellenistic didactic poetry, shedding light on the textual strategies that shape and define its instructional and explanatory function. He argues that Hellenistic didactic poetry played a crucial role in establishing a new poetic domain – one that enabled the popularization of scientific discourse and fostered imaginative and insightful descriptions. By examining this innovative poetic form, Leonardo Cazzadori offers fresh perspectives on ancient Greek literary culture, and, more broadly, the interactions between science, the natural world, and literature.
Table of contents:
1. Introduction
1.1 Criticism of ancient genres
1.2 Approaches to Hellenistic didactic poetry
1.3 Structure of the work
Part A. Theory of the didactic form2. The idea of didactic
2.1 The term didascalicus in antiquity
2.2 Theories of the didactic genre in the eighteenth century
2.3 Ancient didactic poems in the eighteenth century
2.4 Didactic poems in antiquity: The earliest discourses about genre and canon
2.5 Beyond the construct of didacticism
3. Hellenistic didactic poems: Forms and contexts
3.1 How didactic poems teach: the concept of expository rhetoric
3.2 A booming genre: survey of didactic poems from the Hellenistic period
3.3 Performing didactic poems in the Hellenistic period
Part B. The Hellenistic didactic poems4. A lesson in haute cuisine: Archestratus of Gela
4.1 Knowledge, rhetoric and literary culture in the fourth century B.C.
4.2 Facts and rhetoric: displaying knowledge in the Hedypatheia
5. Recounting the stars: Aratus of Soli
5.1 Framing and concealing the exposition in the Phaenomena
5.2 Aratus’ expository rhetoric and the ambivalent addressee
5.3 Conclusions: Aratus and the modes of expository rhetoric
6. Useful verses: Nicander, Apollodorus and Pseudo-Scymnus
6.1 Nicander
6.2 Apollodorus, Pseudo-Scymnus and the epitome of facts
Conclusion
