The Griphos: A Vindication

Extract

When I read, rather belatedly, Professor Davison's article on Theognis 257–66 in C.R. ix (1959), 1–5, I found myself remembering somewhat uncomfortably that I have an article awaiting publication in Mnemosyne in which I present a new interpretation of Theognis 1209–16 as a griphos. Against Carriere, Davison remarks that it would be easier to accept 261–6 as a griphos ‘if there were any serious evidence for the prevalence of in the Theognidean corpus’ (p. 2); this is an eminently sane attitude and leaves the question open for later consideration. But lower on the same page E. Harrison's dictum that ‘sweeping emendations’ are ‘the last infirmity of exegesis’ (Studies in Theognis, p. 167) has given birth to a pronouncement that ‘recourse to riddles’ is one of two ‘penultimate infirmities of academic minds’. This is really too much. I have not yet acquired a fixation on this subject, but I am sufficiently impenitent to maintain that the griphos appears at least twice in the corpus, at 1209–16 and 261–6. I have no opinion on 257–60, which seems at any rate to be in its proper place.