Poesia e biografia: Archiloco, la colonizzazione e la storia

Abstract

In what sense Archilochean texts can be thought historically reliable? To answer this question, first we have to consider the function of each poem and consequently its possible - or required - assent to historical landscape and factious spirit. If we make a review of Archilochean fragments, we recognize at least three different performance arenas: the symposion (for elegy and iambus: aggressive first person); civic or religious occasions (for cultual songs and dithyrambos: choral first person); public performances - more public than symposion - celebrating collective memory (for narrative poems: storyteller first person). The tetrametric fragments, in particular, seem to have a strong narrative and patriotic inspiration and could have been employed in different performances, public or privat: the two Parian inscriptions of Archilochus (of Mnesiepes and Sosthenes), in fact, use above all this kind of poems to reconstruct the archaic Parian (and Archilochean) history. Each performance - that is each occasion in which Archilochus performed a poem - legitimates different poetic attitude: more respectful of Parian history and tradition in case of public occasion, more available to distortion in presence of a agreeable audience. All these parameters affect the historical significance of each Archilochean fragment, that must be individually judged.