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date: 06 February 2025

Theognis (1), elegiac poet from Megaralocked

Theognis (1), elegiac poet from Megaralocked

  • Andrew Ford

Summary

The Theognidea is a collection of archaic Greek elegy amounting to nearly 1400 verses; its content is mainly gnomological advice on issues of politics and ethics, with the symposium as the ostensible occasion for its presentation. A passage near the opening of the work announces that these are the verses of Theognis of Megara, who is widely famed for his songs; and yet some of the verses are attested as having been composed by other Greek elegiac poets and the corpus as a whole has clearly suffered from repeated editing and excerpting. If neither the poetry nor the historical traditions about Theognis yield much reliable information about him, the Theognidea remains a valuable anthology of social and political thought among late archaic and early classical Greek elites.

Subjects

  • Greek Literature

Updated in this version

Article rewritten to reflect current scholarship.

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