Alcuni casi di (presunto) lessico poetico in Senofonte

The study of Xenophon’s language has attracted renewed interest in recent years, but much remains to be done. This paper examines a category of lexemes employed by Xenophon, namely, those that critics have commonly referred to as “poeticisms”. Without questioning the existence of forms of poetic origin in Xenophon, this paper examines a selection of forms for which a classification in the category of “poeticism” is unsatisfactory for various reasons. First, it is necessary to reject the binary opposition between poetic language and an underdefined common, non-marked, medium- register language that is allegedly proper to prose writing. Furthermore, not all the forms of marked language adopted by Xenophon pursue the aim of raising the register, as their use may be motivated by the attempt to achieve rhetorical effect. Finally, one must consider the possibility that those forms which appear poetic based on their distribution in literature were perceived differently, as in the case of terms belonging to specialized languages or of terms which are euphemistic in various ways.