Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation (review)

This study, the author's doctoral thesis, is a well-documented discussion on the relationship between Solon's poetry and the cultural and political situation of its composition. Starting with a survey of previous interpretations of archaic poetry and discussing the danger of misinterpretations, Irwin outlines a new approach to the poems by applying her own methodological devices. She calls the first step of her reading defamiliarising the poems, which means detaching the poems from interpretations given by previous scholars. Then, in a second step, she wants to recontextualise the poems starting from the poems themselves, mainly from their language. The work is divided into three independent chapters: the first chapter is an analysis of a genre, martial exhortation; the second narrows the study to one of Solon's poems (fr. 4 West), and the third chapter focuses on a larger collection of poems from Solon, including his iambic poems.

In the first chapter, Irwin analyzes Solon's poetry as part of the poetical tradition of martial exhortation. She focuses, however, mainly on poems from Callinus and Tyrtaeus, as their poems form the main sources for martial exhortation. She studies the link between these poems and Homer through examples of martial exhortation within the Homeric text. Looking closer at the scenes of martial exhortation in the Iliad, she shows that feasting, a particular honor of heroes, establishes a link to the performance situations of archaic poetry. The combination of both of these features, the presence of martial exhortation in the Iliad and the honors linked to the participation in a formal meal, allows her to give a new interpretation of martial exhortation in archaic poetry. This special context enables a small group to define itself as an elite within a city. This definition works mainly through remembering martial achievements in a group sharing the same values. Irwin strengthens her analysis by opening her study to inscribed epigrams from the archaic period. According to her, the mention of two major elements present in stone epigrams, heroic deeds and the affiliation to a city, depends on the audience. Within a city, the deeds mentioned distinguish the achievements of one member of the city. Outside the city, the connection to the city is emphasized. In martial exhortation the situation is similar. In the context of the symposium, the deeds are focused on, whereas within the poetical tradition, which is not confined to one city, the mention of a city and the links to it are emphasized.

After having used her methodological device for the analysis of a genre, she applies it in chapter 2 to one of Solon's poems in particular. She chooses Solon's Eunomia (fr. 4 W) and places it within several traditions. Starting from the conclusions of her first chapter, she discusses the differences between martial exhortation and the exhortation in Solon's poem 4. Solon's message is now a social exhortation no longer linked to the context of war but to the political situation of a city. Then she links the poem to Homer and the epic tradition, singling out the particular relationship to the Odyssey and especially to the character of Odysseus and his speeches. Finally, she stresses the link to Hesiod and to the theme of divine justice. She also mentions the similarity of the stance of both poets. They both play the role of a divine warner.

In the third chapter, she again widens her point of view and analyzes several poems of Solon, looking at a particular theme treated in all of them. She focuses on the political language and imagery Solon uses in his poems and shows that Solon's use is surprisingly close to the use a tyrant could have made of it. She compares especially the figures of Solon and Peisistratus, since both have been linked, and even sometimes confused, since antiquity. Showing convincingly what she can do with her new approach to archaic poetry, Irwin has...