Some Preliminary Soundings

This chapter presents a series of “soundings” of short hexametrical genres. The aim is to investigate the following: (i) how the Homeric poet, in Hector’s description of the burial mound of his antagonist, plays with his audiences’ expectations of the generic and preexisting form of the hexametrical epitaph and how both he and the Hesiodic poet use the hypothêkê, a traditionally hexametrical form of avuncular advice in the Homeric speeches of elders like Peleus or in the Hesiodic address to Perses; (ii) how a mimetic poem composed by Theocritus helps us to imagine the performance context of some fragments of Sappho’s “wedding poems” as epithalamia in hexameters composed in ten-line stanzas and chanted before the door of newlyweds; and (iii) how the short poems embedded in the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer reflect the rich array of short hexametrical performances.