(c. 350) but omitted in a later Egyptian prayer; the form as we have it in The Didachē may have passed into Egypt with the authority of tradition which was afterwards weakened. The anti-Jewish tone of the second part suggests the neighbourhood of Jews, from whom the Christians were to be sharply distinguished. Either Egypt or Syria would satisfy this condition, and in favour of Syria is the fact that the presbyterate there was to a late date regarded as a rank rather than an office. If we can connect the injunctions (vi. 3) concerning (abstinence from certain) food and that which is offered to idols with the old trouble that arose at Antioch (Acts xv. 1) and was legislated for by the Jerusalem council, we have additional support for the Syrian claim. But all that we can safely say as to locality is that the community here represented seems to have been isolated, and out of touch with the larger centres of Christian life.
This last consideration helps us in discussing the question of date. For such an isolated community may have preserved primitive customs for some time after they had generally disappeared. Certainly the stage of development is an early one, as is shown, e.g., by the prominence of prophets, and the need that was felt for the vindication of the position of the bishops and deacons (there is no mention at all of presbyters); moreover, there is no reference to a canon of Scripture (though the written Gospel is expressly mentioned) or to a creed. On the other hand the “apostles” of the second part are obviously not “the twelve apostles” of the title; and the prophets seem in some instances to have proved unworthy of their high position. The ministry of enthusiasm which they represent is about to give way to the ministry of office, a transition which is reflected in the New Testament in the 3rd Epistle of John. Three of the Gospels have clearly been for some time in circulation; St Matthew’s is used several times, and there are phrases which occur only in St Luke’s, while St John’s Gospel lies behind the eucharistic prayers which the writer has embodied in his work. There are no indications of any form of doctrinal heresy as needing rebuke; the warnings against false teaching are quite general. While the first part must be dated before the Epistle of Barnabas, i.e. before A.D. 90, it seems wisest not to place the complete work much earlier than A.D. 120, and there are passages which may well be later.
A large literature has sprung up round The Didachē since 1884. Harnack’s edition in Texte u. Unters. vol. ii. (1884) is indispensable to the student; and his discussions in Altchristl. Litteratur and Chronologie give clear summaries of his work. Other editions of the text are those of F. X. Funk, Patres Apostolici, vol. i. (Tübingen, 1901); H. Lietzmann (Bonn, 1903; with Latin version). Dr J. E. Odgers has published an English translation with introduction and notes (London, 1906). Dr C. Taylor in 1886 drew attention to some important parallels in Jewish literature; his edition contains an English translation. Dr Rendel Harris published in 1887 a complete facsimile, and gathered a great store of patristic illustration. Text and translation will also be found in Lightfoot’s Apostolic Fathers (ed. min.) The fullest critical treatment in English is by Dr Vernon Bartlet in the extra volume of Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible; the most complete commentary on the text is by P. Drews in Hennecke’s Handbuch zu den N.T. Apocryphen (1904). Other references to the literature may be found by consulting Harnack’s Altchristl. Litteratur.
DIDACTIC POETRY, that form of verse the aim of which is,
less to excite the hearer by passion or move him by pathos,
than to instruct his mind and improve his morals. The Greek
word διδακτικός signifies a teacher, from the verb διδάσκειν,
and poetry of the class under discussion approaches us with the
arts and graces of a schoolmaster. At no time was it found
convenient to combine lyrical verse with instruction, and therefore
from the beginning of literature the didactic poets have
chosen a form approaching the epical. Modern criticism, which
discourages the epic, and is increasingly anxious to limit the word
“poetry” to lyric, is inclined to exclude the term “didactic
poetry” from our nomenclature, as a phrase absurd in itself.
It is indeed more than probable that didactic verse is hopelessly
obsolete. Definite information is now to be found in a thousand
shapes, directly and boldly presented in clear and technical prose.
No farmer, however elegant, will, any longer choose to study
agriculture in hexameters, or even in Tusser’s shambling metre.
The sciences and the professions will not waste their time on
methods of instruction which must, from their very nature, be
artless, inexact and vague. But in the morning of the world, those
who taught with authority might well believe that verse was the
proper, nay, the only serious vehicle of their instruction. What
they knew was extremely limited, and in its nature it was
simple and straightforward; it had little technical subtlety; it
constantly lapsed into the fabulous and the conjectural. Not
only could what early sages knew, or guessed, about astronomy
and medicine and geography be conveniently put into rolling
verse, but, in the absence of all written books, this was the
easiest way in which information could be made attractive to the
ear and be retained by the memory.
In the prehistoric dawn of Greek civilization there appear to have been three classes of poetry, to which the literature of Europe looks back as to its triple fountain-head. There were romantic epics, dealing with the adventures of gods and heroes; these Homer represents. There were mystic chants and religious odes, purely lyrical in character, of which the best Orphic Hymns must have been the type. And lastly there was a great body of verse occupied entirely with increasing the knowledge of citizens in useful branches of art and observation; these were the beginnings of didactic poetry, and we class them together under the dim name of Hesiod. It is impossible to date these earliest didactic poems, which nevertheless set the fashion of form which has been preserved ever since. The Works and Days, which passes as the direct masterpiece of Hesiod (q.v.), is the type of all the poetry which has had education as its aim. Hesiod is supposed to have been a tiller of the ground in a Boeotian village, who determined to enrich his neighbours’ minds by putting his own ripe stores of useful information into sonorous metre. Historically examined, the legend of Hesiod becomes a shadow, but the substance of the poems attributed to him remains. The genuine parts of the Works and Days, which Professor Gilbert Murray has called “a slow, lowly, simple poem,” deal with rules for agriculture. The Theogony is an annotated catalogue of the gods. Other poems attributed to Hesiod, but now lost, were on astronomy, on auguries by birds, on the character of the physical world; still others seem to have been genealogies of famous women. All this mass of Boeotian verse was composed for educational purposes, in an age when even preposterous information was better than no knowledge at all. In slightly later times, as the Greek nation became better supplied with intellectual appliances, the stream of didactic poetry flowed more and more closely in one, and that a theological, channel. The great poem of Parmenides On Nature and those of Empedocles exist only in fragments, but enough remains to show that these poets carried on the didactic method in mythology. Cleostratus of Tenedos wrote an astronomical poem in the 6th century, and Periander a medical one in the 4th, but didactic poetry did not flourish again in Greece until the 3rd century, when Aratus, in the Alexandrian age, wrote his famous Phenomena, a poem about things seen in the heavens. Other later Greek didactic poets were Nicander, and perhaps Euphorion.
It was from the hands of these Alexandrian writers that the genius of didactic poetry passed over to Rome, since, although it is possible that some of the lost works of the early republic, and in particular those of Ennius, may have possessed an educational character, the first and by far the greatest didactic Latin poet known to us is Lucretius. A highly finished translation by Cicero into Latin hexameters of the principal works of Aratus is believed to have drawn the attention of Lucretius to this school of Greek poetry, and it was not without reference to the Greeks, although in a more archaic and far purer taste, that he composed, in the 1st century before Christ, his magnificent De rerum natura. By universal consent, this is the noblest didactic poem in the literature of the world. It was intended to instruct mankind in the interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed by Epicurus, which at that time was exciting the sympathetic attention of all classes of Roman society. What gave the poem of Lucretius its extraordinary interest, and what has prolonged and even increased its vitality, was the imaginative and illustrative insight of the author, piercing and lighting up the
