According to Aristotle, Diogenes, and others, Epimenides was brought to Athens to allay a plague he diagnosed it as deriving from the murder of Cylon’s associates, who had taken refuge at the altar of Athena. This would be an important aspect of his function as a famous purifier in order to purify a city or a person, one had to look into the past and diagnose the cause of the pollution. However, according to Aristotle, an important part of his seership involved looking into the past. This poet was also a famous seer Plato calls him a “divine man” ( anēr theios) and describes how he foretold events in the Persian wars.

Thus we have a blame poet critical of his native country receiving the patronage of the nymphs he receives wisdom from supernatural sources. As in the case of Hesiod, there is a significant emphasis on the placement of bones after death: “The Thebans assert that Linus was buried among them, and that after the Greek defeat at Chaeronia, Philip the son of Amyntas, in obedience to a vision in a dream, took up the bones of Linus and conveyed them to Macedonia other visions induced him to send the bones of Linus back to Thebes.” Also in the grove of the Muses at Helicon is a rock sculpture of Linus: “To Linus every year they sacrifice as to a hero before they sacrifice to the Muses.” Here the poet is almost assimilated to the dying god of Frazer and the ancient Near East. ” After his death the whole world mourns (which seemingly puts Apollo in an unsympathetic light) even in Egypt there was a Linus lament. Τhe son of a Muse, Urania, he “ won a reputation for music greater than that of any contemporary or predecessor, and … Apollo killed him for equalling him in singing. The Linus who was the forefather of the Linus killed by Heracles (according to Pausanias), fits into this category of poets. Aggression and the Defensive Topos Archilochus, Callimachus, Horace Transformations of Myth: The Poet, Society, and the SacredĪppendix B. Seneca, Petronius, and Lucan: Neronian Victims

Naevius: Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae “Wounded by Tooth that Drew Blood”: The Beginnings of Satire in Rome Kissing the Leper: The Excluded Poet in Irish Myth Shadows of Hesiod: Divine Protection and Lonely Death Archilochus: Sacred Obscenity and Judgment Aesop: Satirist as Pharmakos in Archaic Greece

Finding Identity by Silenus Poetry