Simonides of Ceos and poetry as téchne

Abstract

The platonic “explanation” concerning poetic creation in the dialogue Ion, which explains poetry as an effect of inspiration, allows us to identify the cultural conditions that underlie this conception; due to a lack of writing the entire Greek wisdom, including the poetics, had been transmitted orally. Poet’s circumstances whilst doing his work founded Plato’s proposition about poet’s impossibility to give reasons about her poetry; mainly due to poetry’s not correspondence to the téchne. This critique reaches the sophists’ realizations in the field of the pedagogical uses of poetry; therefore, it is valid to ask if these criticisms were aimed at the sophist’s conception of poetry as téchne. However, arguing in favor of this conception implies a “forcing” of Plato’s doctrine on poetry according to his arguments on sophistic emerged, since Simonides a of Ceos, within specific cultural circumstances in which Platonic theses lost validity; the sophists’ work is product of a certain time in which alphabetic writing already existed.