John Tennant (Stanford University) “Speaking Lyrically, Speaking Proverbially”

Talk Description:

Plato’s quotation of excerpts from lyric poetry in the dialogues highlights the status of those excerpts as detachable statements, removed from their original, textual context. This invites the question, what makes a statement detachable? What quality allows for a text’s quotability as a “stand-alone,” a “detachable?” I argue in this paper that an essential element of detachability consists in a statement’s capacity to function proverbially – as a stand-alone aphorism, maxim, proverb. Plato’s quotations from various lyric poets – among them Simonides, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Phocylides – illustrate how lyric poetry seems especially possessed of this capacity to generate detachable, proverbial statements. Readings from Plato’s quotation of lyric poets in Protagoras, Meno, and Republic reveal that within the context of the dialogic exchange, to speak lyrically is to speak proverbially – that is, to marshal lyric quotation as stand-alone proverb in the dialectic. In addition, lyric “proverbs” often seem to contradict one another, even when composed by the same poet and within the very same poem (e.g., Simonides’ ode to Scopas in Protagoras, verses from Theognis in Meno). Aside from noting the connection with the sophistic educational practice of the antilogiae – itself consonant with the antilogical arrangement of ancient gnomic anthologies with their assorted proverbs gathered from different texts – I argue that the positioning of contradictory proverbs in the lyric poetry of Simonides and Theognis (“contradictory” at least, in Plato’s act of citation) enjoys a correspondence with modern counterparts, such as Robert Frost’s dueling proverbs in “Mending Wall.” Moreover, lyric detachables in both Plato and Frost highlight the Janus-faced nature of proverbial expression, revealing that contrary to popular belief, proverbs are hardly univocal but rife with paradox and ambiguity, qualities essential to lyric poetry.

Biography:

John Tennant is a Lecturer in Ancient Greek and Latin and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Stanford University’s Classics Department. His research concerns the transmission of cultural wisdom in Greek prose and poetry and how this transmission was called into question in the late fifth century BCE. John explores how proverbs, aphorisms, and other rhetorical commonplaces become particularly important at times when discourse breaks down and language itself becomes an object of mistrust. His current book project, Plato’s Proverbs: The Reformation of Discourse in Plato’s Republic, offers a new way of reading Plato, based upon the previously unexplored role that proverbs and quotation play in creating a more just state. Related to John’s interest in the breakdown of discourse is a focus on instances of “failure,” particularly with respect to performance in ancient literature, such as Pindar’s numerous false starts and self-corrections. John’s second book project will explore more broadly the dynamic of failure in ancient literary performance. John received his PhD in Classics from the University of California, Los Angeles (2019) and his MA in Classics from Stanford University (2013). Prior to becoming a classicist, John was a union-side labor lawyer, having received his J.D. from Harvard Law School (1989).

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.