Abstract

Faraone's research in the area of early Greek elegy presented in this book, which is an extension of the approach to elegiac poetry worked out in a series of his earlier articles, revives Henri Weil's proposal, put forward almost a century and a half ago, to treat a "strophic" construction as the original feature of these archaic compositions. A decisive advance over Weil's thesis about the strophic design of elegy is found here not simply in the substitution of the term "stanza" for Weil's "strophe" or in the much greater number of analyzed texts, but first of all in bringing out the early elegists' technique of—let us call it—"five-couplet spans" and arguing that it was the main "intelligibility-granting" factor of the genre, referred to also by erudite imitators in the Hellenistic period.