The Poetics and Pragmatics of Hellenistic Aesthetics

The pseudo-Theocritean Idyll 23 is a morbid poem: a perverted paraclausithryon which narrates the deaths of both a spurned exclusus amator and the hard-hearted boy who is the target of his love. The poem has been roundly criticized by modern scholars: in the view of Gow, it is “wretched writing” (1952 II:413) and “the least attractive [poem] in the whole Theocritean corpus” (1952 II:408; cf. Kyriakou 2018:122).

This paper discusses the (in)consistencies between the early Stoic attempts to theorize beauty and the later attempts to theorize arts, especially music and poetry, arguing that this comparison leads to a more nuanced articulation of the functionality condition in both. 

Leonidas of Tarentum wrote many epigrams commemorating dedications by poor laborers. His epigrams also include ecphrases of famous artworks, e.g. Apelles’ Aphprodite Anadyomene and Myron’s Cow, which evoke aristocratic tastes and prestige. How do we reconcile these two seemingly discordant registers? Leonidas himself offers a solution when he presents two epigrams on the dedications of woodworkers (AP 6.204, 205) in ecphrastic terms.

The Ptolemies fostered a literature of exquisite polish and slender proportions, most strikingly embodied in Callimachus, whose aesthetic principles became synonymous with Alexandrian artistry. At the same time, however, they had a penchant for ostentatious display and gigantism, as evidenced e.g. in Ptolemy Philadelphus’ “Grand Procession”.