Brought to you by | New York University Authenticated Download Date | 3/3/18 1:54 AM in Richard Hunter, Antonios Rengakos and Evina Sistakou (eds.), Hellenistic Studies at a Crossroads: Exploring Texts, Contexts and Metatexts, Trends in Classics, Supplementary Volumes, 25 (Berlin 2014) 13-30. David Sider Didactic poetry: The Hellenistic invention of a pre-existing genre For all that it is almost a cliché that Hellenistic poets were acutely aware of genre —who before Callimachus would or could have boasted of his πολυείδεια?—,¹ discussions, let alone definitions, of didactic poetry as a genre are scarce. Why bother, when it seems so obvious? Look at Aratus and Nicander, whose model was Hesiod, and nothing more need be said. Nonetheless, that will be my aim here. There have of course been many useful studies of classical didactic poetry,² some of which offer various classifications (see below); yet I have long felt that insufficient attention has been paid, both by the ancients themselves and by us today, to the development of the poems called didactic, although modern termi- nology and the ancients are not in complete agreement as to what constitutes a Bibliography at end, pdf page 18.  Some earlier poets did in fact write in more than one genre, but could have boasted of it only in particular terms, i. e., by specifying “I write poems of type X and Y ,” as we see at the end of the Symposium 223d ὁμολογεῖναὐτοὺς τοῦ αὐτοῦἀνδρὸςεἶναι κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν ἐπίστασθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνῃ τραγῳδοποιὸν ὄντα <καὶ> κωμῳδοποιὸνεἶναι (“They agreed that the same man can know how to compose both comedy and tragedy, and that the skilled tragic poet is also a skilled writer of comedies”)—to which one can add that Plato has himself done this within this very dialogue, adding satyrography, as Bacon (1959) shows. Furthermore, since lyric is not considered a genre, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Pindar, et al. are seen without fuss to write in several genres. This can be seen in Pl. Laws 700d (after the Persian wars) ἄρχοντες μὲντῆς ἀμούσου παρανομίας ποιηταὶἐγίγνοντο φύσει μὲν ποιητικοί, ἀγνώμονες δὲ περὶ τὸ δίκαιον τῆς Μούσης καὶ τὸ νόμιμον, βακχεύοντες καὶ μᾶλλον τοῦ δέοντος κατεχόμενοι ὑφ’ ἡδονῆς, κεραννύντες δὲ θρήνους τε ὕμνοις καὶ παίωνας διθυράμβοις, καὶ αὐλῳδίας δὴ ταῖς κιθαρῳδίαις μιμούμενοι, καὶ πάντα εἰς πάντα συνάγοντες (“After the Persian wars, there came into existence poets, who, although with some innate talent in the composition of poetry, were yet ignorant as to what was just and right in the realm of the Muse. They began their unmusical lawlessness, acting like Bacchants possessed more than is proper, combining threnodies with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs, imitating songs for the aulos on the lyre, mixing anything with any- thing”), where the last phrase is regularly taken to mean “mixing together all genres”. Plato’s terms, it should be noted, refer to songs characterized in the ancient mind very much by occasion, but he clearly does not mean that (e. g.) some singer sang paeonic praise of Apollo at a funeral, but that an element or elements appropriate to one song were noticeably present in another, which entails the idea of genre. See further Effe 1977, 9 – 26; Rosenmeyer 2006, 428 – 9.  See, for example, Asquith 2005, Atherton 1997, Cusset 2007, Effe 1977, Erren, 1986, Fabre-Serris 2004, Fakas, 2001, Gale 2004, Horster & Reitz 2005, Hutchinson 2008b and 2009, Kroll 1925, Kruschwitz & Schumacher 2005, Prince 2003, Schiesaro et. al. 1993, Toohey 1996, Volk 2002, Wöhrle 1998.