Teognide, Eveno e Simonide: una revisione e una nuova ipotesi (con un'appendice)

This paper re-examines ll. 467-496, 667-682 and 1345-1350 of the Theognidea. The analysis of materials confirms the hypothesis that the author of these lines is Evenus, the poet-sophist of Paros, who was known to Socrates in Plato’s dialogues. At the end of the fifth century B.C, now elderly, Evenus was active in Athens (shortly before he had already been in Sicily). The last part of his life can be linked to the historical facts that occurred in Paros in 410 B.C. The Simonides that is mentioned in the second person in the three passages of Theognidea is probably the famous poet Simonides of Ceos. He represents a distinguished predecessor for Evenus, specifically in the genre of elegy for its topics (including the metaphor of the ship?), cultural interests (e.g. the art of memory), expressive attitudes and discursive forms (such as the tendency to use dialogue at a distance with other authors and the use of ·åÓ›ÁÌ·Ù·). Evenus can engage in a poetic dialogue with the same Simonides (as perhaps also in fr. 10 Gent.-Pr. = 9a West), though not in presence of Simonides himself (now long dead), but in the performative reality of the symposium and in a ‘chain’ of poems. In the game of enunciative identity and poetic masking at symposium Evenus could have replicated the performance of Simonides’s elegies: a case of metapoiesis that has a parallel in Sol. fr. 26 Gent.-Pr. (= 20 West).