Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Turning the Tables on the Audience:Didactic Technique in Solon 13WKate StoddardSolon's great elegiac poem, variously called the "Hymn to the Muses" and the "Elegy Eis Heauton," is an odd work, one that has been the subject of exhaustive and varied study. Owing in part to its considerable length and to its complex paratactic style, the poem's unity continues to be the single most important issue for the scholars who study it. The apparent interruption of the elegy's train of thought at line 33, as well as the puzzling statement about atē in lines 63-70 that seems to contradict the description of divine justice earlier in the poem, has caused many scholars to doubt the poem's integrity altogether.1 The interpretations of the elegy's structure range from those that discover in it little more than a rambling patchwork of philosophically inconsistent reflections to others that seek to demonstrate that the elegy is in fact a closely knit and conceptually coherent unity.2 [End Page 149]The great majority of scholars now accept the premise that Solon 13W is a unified whole that Solon composed more or less in the form that survives to us today. As a consequence of this admission, scholars are faced with the question of how to explain the breaks at lines 33 and 71. Beginning with Wilamowitz, the traditional way of explaining the structure of the elegy is to see it as a paratactic "chain" of observations in which each idea springs from the one that precedes it but is not necessarily connected to the other ideas in the poem.3 Wilamowitz argues that the poem's unity is rooted in the idea of the desire for wealth, which he sees as permeating every aspect of the elegy.4 Subsequent scholarship finds [End Page 150] different unifying themes of the elegy, with several scholars focusing on the last three lines of the poem (74-76) as the key to the poem's unity.5Allen, who argues that lines 74-76 restate the ideas of the first half of the poem and thus unify the poem by ring-composition, believes that the real unity of the poem depends on the content of the opening prayer: olbon moi pros theōn makarōn dote kai pros hapantōn / anthrōpōn aiei doxan echein agathēn (3-4). Allen interprets the prayer as a prayer not for wealth, over which the Muses have no jurisdiction, but for wisdom, specifically the wisdom needed to avoid committing injustice and falling victim to atē. In order, however, to make the content of the prayer harmonize with the last three lines of the poem Allen translates the kerdea of 74 to mean "unjust gains"6 rather than simply "gains," a qualification that is not at all justified by the text:7[End Page 151].8No limitation of wealth is visible for men,For those among us who now have the most abundant meansStrive twice as hard [to gain more]. Who could satisfy them all?The deathless gods grant gains to mortals,But ruin arises from these gains, which, whenever Zeus sends itAs punishment, afflicts now one man, now another.(71-76)It is this striking contradiction between the opening prayer for olbos (1-6) and the closing statement that atē arises from god-given wealth that is the subject of this article.9 In it I hope to demonstrate that the first half of the poem, and most especially the prayer itself, is "ironic" and set forth for the purpose of instructing the audience that the mindset it depicts represents a dangerous trap for mortals.At the beginning of Solon 13W the narrator prays for the traditional blessings of olbos and good repute:105Shining children of Memory and Olympian Zeus,Pierian Muses, hear me as I pray:Grant me to have wealth from the blessed godsAnd from all men always to have good repute;5 To be thus sweet to friends but bitter to enemies;An object of respect to the former, but to the latter an object ofdread to behold.(Solon 13.1-6)Although...