Vincenzo Di Benedetto e la lirica greca

The present paper offers a close reading of the more important contributions on Greek archaic lyric (and on elegiac poetry) written by V. Di Benedetto in the span of more than fifty years. The papers on Sappho are of seminal importance: They stand out as a major achievement towards a deeper understanding of her poetry, from both a textual-philological and a literary point of view. With Sappho Di Benedetto is at his best in the art of interpretation, by supplementing in the most brilliant way many tattered fragments, and also in providing an overall and sympathetic interpretation of her poetry and the way it came to be composed. He also shows an unmatched familiarity with sources that were little known, such as treatises from the Hippocratic corpus and texts from the Near East which help in contextualizing Sapphos imagery. An assessment of his method in approaching the fragments is also attempted, discussing the constant need to rely on the limited corpus of the extant Greek literature and the risk of identifying it as the only network of texts also accessible to the poets of the past.