id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
grbs-16901	van den Berg, Baukje	Twelfth-Century Scholars on the Moral Exemplarity of Ancient Poetry	2023	27	.pdf	application/pdf	9602	314	46	114 THE MORAL EXEMPLARITY OF ANCIENT POETRY ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 63 (2023) 103–129 ton identified in Renaissance readings of ancient texts through the lens of moral exemplarity: while the most ideologically correct and rhetorically powerful exemplar would be morally unambiguous, the veneration of antiquity and the study of ancient texts laid bare the entire narrative of the hero’s life, with all its ambiguities.28 Like their Renaissance counterparts, Byzantine teachers and scholars applied a degree of censorship or filtering to ancient narratives with the aim of countering their inherent ambiguity and moral heterogeneity.29 Both Basilakes and the anonymous epigrammatist(s) offer an un- equivocal interpretation that brings the ὠφέλεια or (moral) usefulness of the old stories into sharp relief for contemporary readers, a usefulness that served to justify the study of ancient literature in the first place.30 Homer as a teacher of moral behavior Byzantine scholars thus continued to subscribe to the age-old notion that drama and poetry in general—not least that of Homer, who was still considered the greatest of all poets—had an inherent moral value.31 In an encomium on the metro- 28 T. Hampton, Writing from History: By focusing on the ethical usefulness of the ancient past and by reading ancient texts through the lens of moral exemplarity, our twelfth-century scholars transform ancient poetry into a site of moral reflection and redefine its cultural authority in terms relevant to their own time.	cache/grbs-16901.pdf	txt/grbs-16901.txt