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
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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.