Theognis’ Unoriginal Didactic Failure

Abstract

Section 1 argues that Theognis embodies a robust conception of literary authorship and that his authorial unoriginality is inextricable from his moral authority. Section 2 interprets Theognis’ failure to instruct Cyrnus as integral to his didactic message and as part of a strategy whereby the poet’s relationship to his addressee prefigures his relationship to larger audiences. An appendix provides a statistical analysis of the citation history of the Theognidea and argues that at some point after the classical period an original collection was supplanted by something like the strange text that we read today.