Ciléa Dourado

Original title: Memória e Rapsódia: o canto divino na Arcádia

Published in Expressing the Divine: Language, Art and Mysticism

Keywords: Poetry, Power., tradition, truth.

The poetic activity of the Greek Golden Age, better known as Archadia, grew inside a pre-literate culture which was characterized, above all, by a mythological symbolism. The Archadian poetry points to the notion of the fantastic, of the sublime and of the divine in its purest form. The archaic Poet was endowed with the power directly by the gods, and such a power was non-negotiable and non-transferable. The lineage and succession of a rhapsodist was often brought out by Arete, the choice of the nobler.