Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Readers who chance upon Nicander's poetic oeuvre of nearly 1,600 lines, devoted almost entirely to snakes, spiders, and poisons and marked by an arcane style and recondite vocabulary, typically do not fall in love with their discovery. Professional classicists also sometimes run from Nicander as if from a venomous creature. Even A. S. F. Gow, who in the mid-twentieth century made a key contribution to Nicandrian studies, had mixed feelings about the texts he was editing, seeing in them “the combination of a repulsive style with considerable metrical accomplishment” ( Gow and Scholfield 1953 : 8; for other unfavorable judgments by modern scholars, see Jacques 2002 : lxvi–vii ). And yet in Nicander, as in other Hellenistic poetry, content, style, and meter are intimately interconnected aspects of the same literary program. Nicander's diction more particularly reflects how linguistic trends noticeable in early Hellenistic poetry developed during the mid-Hellenistic period, just as his poetics offers an invaluable insight into the evolution of Greek didactic poetry after Aratus. Both features of his work merit close consideration. But first we need to confront the issue of Nicander's chronology. Ancient sources ascribe many works to a Colophonian poet named Nicander, and a “Nicander of Colophon” indeed explicitly claims to be the author of two extant hexameter poems, the 958-line ... log in or subscribe to read full text