Philodemus’ Terminology and Opponents
This chapter provides a summary of the technical terminology of Hellenistic literary criticism used in the On Poems and then summarizes the views of Philodemus’ opponents in the On Poems. Attention is focused on those thinkers whose views are not widely known. These thinkers held a variety of views: the Kritikoi (Megaclides, Andromenides, Heracleodorus, Pausimachus, and Crates of Mallos) identified verbal composition or the euphony that results from it as the quality that determines whether a poem is good or bad and so disregarded content entirely or at least to a great extent. Other thinkers, such as Heraclides and the Stoics, emphasized content in the evaluation of poetry. Some thinkers do not survive in enough detail (“Critic A” and the anonymous Doxai in Zeno) to evaluate or, like Aristotle, do not easily fall into debates over formalism and educational content.