I Policrati ibicei. Ibico, Anacreonte, Policrate e la cronografia dei poeti della "corte" di Samo

Abstract

Ancient chronography is a stratified kind of literature: the texts which preserve informations about (archaic or classic) poets and their times are, nearly always, Hellenistic and post Hellenistic and take forms of datation and year-reckoning (or epoch-reckoning) very different from those used in archaic Greece. The Olympic quadriennium, for instance, is fixed as chronographic element only by Eratosthenes; in archaic and classic Greek poleis official kinds of datation were above all eponymic and intervals from events (and people) of the past were determined by synchronizations and connections with other events (and people), well-known. Chronographic sources (Eusebius, Suda etc.) preserve a large amount of informations which join "ancient" and "new" forms of datation. The informations about Ibycus, Anacreon and Polycrates (and his father), in particular, show that the different olympic datations result from the same chronological relationships, applied to different points of synchronization; and distortions could derive from mutual attraction of these unequal chronological grids. The ancient informations about the two poets were, very probably, the synchronization between Ibycus and the father of Polycrates and between Anacreon and the great tyrant.