Genre, Μodels and Functions of Xenophon’s Anabasis in Comparison with Isocrates’ λόγοι

Abstract

In archaic and classical Greece, as long as poetic production was tied to specific occasions of delivery, the literary genres remained stable,1 but their stability should not mislead: what is constant is the social context, which is linked to the function that the work fulfilled. The identity and definition of the genre were derived externally, from the context of publication and consumption. On the other hand, internally, within the code of the genre, the authors were able to move with a certain freedom and make use of strategies that properly belonged to different genres. In the case of tragedy, for example, the poet could adopt epic strategies in the messenger speeches, or threnodic ones in some lyric passages. We should also pay particular attention to the overlapping of occasion with oral publication: written publication began to become established in the last quarter of the fifth century BCE, and it was in the decades immediately thereafter that some authors became conscious of the disconnect between works and occasions. I am referring in particular to Thucydides, Isocrates and Plato.2 The processes that I am trying to describe are actually much more varied and complex: it is enough to recall that the relation between works and occasions had been broken in the preceding decades through the introduction of prose. The earliest prose works go back to the second half of the sixth century, that is, around a century previously. We have very little information on the modes of publication of the first prose works (e. g. Pherecydes of Syros, Acousilaus of Argos, Hecataeus of Miletus), but their content itself makes