RATIONES RERUM 24: Articolo Federico Favi

Descrizione

Rationes Rerum 24

FEDERICO FAVI
Alcuni casi di (presunto) lessico poetico in Senofonte

The study of Xenophon’s language has attracted renewed interest in recent years, but much remains to be done. This article examines a category of lexemes used by Xenophon, namely what critics have commonly referred to as “poeticisms”. Without questioning the existence of poetic formulas in Xenophon, this article examines a selection of forms for which a classification under the category of “poeticism” is unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, it is necessary to reject the binary opposition between poetic language and a common, unmarked, middle-register language that would be typical of prose writing. Moreover, not all forms of marked language adopted by Xenophon pursue the goal of raising the register, since their use may be an attempt to achieve rhetorical effects. Finally, we must consider the possibility that forms that appear poetic, according to their distribution in literature, were perceived differently, as in the case of terms belonging to specialized languages or terms that are euphemistic in various ways.