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Exhortation and Meditation: Alternating Stanzas as a Structural Device in Early Greek Elegy

t is a fairly well-established notion that vigorous exhortation and sober meditation are two of the basic rhetorical functions and linguistic actions of the elegiac genre, especially in its earliest phases.1 It has not been noticed, however, that early elegiac poets do not deploy these two modes randomly, but that in the longer extant fragments, at least, they often show a tendency to organize their thoughts into stanzas of equal length, which alternate back and forth between advice in the imperative and rumination in the indicative. The idea that elegiac poets composed by stanzas is not entirely new. Around the time of the American Civil War, Heinrich Weil floated the hypothesis that many of the early elegists divided their poems into “strophes” that occasionally displayed a kind of responsion similar to that found in ancient Greek choral poetry.2 Weil did not suggest, however, that these elegiac “strophes” lent any special rhetorical pattern to the poems in which they appeared. Although his contemporaries quickly rejected the main argument of his brief study—that Solon 13 was primarily composed of four-couplet “strophes”—they paid scant attention to some of his other, passing observations, most notably that Tyrtaeus seems to use a five-couplet “strophe” to lend structure to all three of his longer fragments (nos. 10–12), and that Xenophanes 1 and 2 both seem to be composed as a pair of six-couplet “strophes.”3 Although Weil’s overall thesis about elegiac strophes was ultimately rejected, Rossi, in a detailed study nearly a century later, confirmed that the