Il paradosso apparente: popolare e popolareggiante nella poesia ellenistica

For anyone interested in ancient Greek folklore, apart from the specific problems that the use of this category poses in the Greek context, one obvious fact cannot fail to impress: the amount of information of folkloric interest grows out in the Estratto Il paradosso apparente: popolare e popolareggiante nella poesia ellenistica 57 poetic sources of the Hellenistic age. It is from the highly cultured Alexandrian poets that the scholar of ancient folklore can begin to fill his dossier of information, which is almost empty in relation to the authors and texts of earlier ages. Why, then, in the archaic and classical age, is poetry so reticent about those uses that we would today call folkloric? And why, instead, does a poem usually considered cultured and literate contain so many elements of the culture of social classes so distant from the milieu that produced literature in the Hellenistic age? The general tendency to use popular elements in sophisticated contexts can be explained by the need to create innovative and original literary works. The inclusion of the daily life of the lower classes among the interests of Hellenistic poets seems to be a natural consequence of their choice of poetic realism.