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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

"A Rhetorical Trojan War: Philostratus' Heroicus, the Power of Language and the Construction of the Truth"

Résumé

Although the characters of Philostratos’ Heroikos claim to tell the ‘true’ version of the Trojan War, a close study of the compositional techniques used in the text shows that this alter-native story of the Homeric poems and the Epic Cycle is mostly based on rhetorical categories, such as likelihood (εἰκός), possibility (δυνατόν) and non-contradiction. This article aims to ex-plore this polemical relationship to archaic poetry by comparing the argumentative techniques of the Heroikos with the exercise of contestation (ἀνασκευή), as it is defined in the Progymnasma-ta. Unsurprisingly, Philostratos chose the Trojan War to do so: no ancient writer doubted its historical reality, but it was taken for granted that Homer and the poets of the Epic Cycle distort-ed it for poetic reasons. In this sense, we can identify in the Heroikos a questioning similar to Gorgias’: what can λόγος say about a fact whose reality is unattainable?
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Dates et versions

hal-04338336 , version 1 (12-12-2023)

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Copyright (Tous droits réservés)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04338336 , version 1

Citer

Decloquement Valentin. "A Rhetorical Trojan War: Philostratus' Heroicus, the Power of Language and the Construction of the Truth". Paola Bassino; Nicolò Benzi. Sophistic Views of the Epic Past from the Classical to the Imperial Age, Bloomsbury, pp.187-210, 2021, 978-1-3502-5576-0. ⟨hal-04338336⟩
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