Vendetta e reciprocità nel Corpus Theognideum (vv. 337-340, 341-350)

In these two elegies, the theme of revenge oscillates between the language of (retaliatory) justice and the well-known principle of reciprocity. Starting from the reconstruction of the historical context in which these and other poems from the Corpus Theognideum (the result of diachronic and diatopic stratification) can be placed, this paper suggests hypotheses for the reconstruction of a communicative code in use among aristocratic groups of the sixth century, inscribed in traditional values that, despite the echoes in Greek tragedy, gradually disappeared in the polis.