Metacritics. Debate and Polemic as Strategies of Knowledge in Ancient Greek Culture. Editorial of Engramma no. 225

Engramma no. 225 considers conflict not as a disruption of thought, but as its very precondition. The volume unfolds in two interwoven movements. The first, ‘Polemics in Antiquity’, investigates how ancient sources articulate knowledge through confrontation. Mauro Tulli, in Was können die Musen Hesiod lehren? Die Wahrheit und ihre Feinde in der Theogonie, reinterprets Hesiod’s Theogony as a polemical stance against Homeric fiction and poetic excess. Marianna Nardi, in Un dibattito antico sulle strategie argomentative: Platone e la διαίρεσις come Begriffsspaltung, analyses how Plato’s Sophist reframes polemic into classificatory precision through the method of διαίρεσις. Vincenzo Damiani, in Antike Kritik an der sokratischen Pädagogik am Beispiel der Epikureer, explores Epicurean critiques of Socratic irony and parrhesia. Selene I.S. Brumana, in Con o senza akribeia? Su filosofia e scienza nel dibattito ellenistico, examines akribeia as a philosophically contested and rhetorically volatile value. Luigi Trovato, in Ancora sull’οὐδὲν πρὸς τὸν Διόνυσον: l’anomalia olimpiodorea, traces a Dionysian proverb through late antique scholia, revealing how polemic survives in exegetical reactivation. The second movement, ‘Modern and Contemporary Critical Debates’, reconsiders ancient agon through the lens of modern controversies. Monica Centanni, in Critias’s Pirithous: Echoes of the political situation in Athens at the end of the 5th century BCE and metatheatrical references in Aristophanes’ Frogs, reads metatheatre as civic allegory and literary contest. Alessandro Grilli, in Lisistrata contro il Commissario, ovvero: la rivincita dell’identità performativa, analyses gendered polemic in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Paolo Biagio Cipolla, in De “magna muliere” in Callimachi Aetiorum prologo nonnulla disputantur, revisits Callimachean aesthetics and its long critical reception. Roberto Indovina, in Arqueología filológica y filología arqueológica. Interrogantes y controversias epistemológicas persistentes, maps the methodological dispute between Oliver Taplin and Luca Giuliani on tragedy and visual culture, offering a case study in interpretive dissensus. This issue does not aim at synthesis, but exposes the crisis at the core of every act of thought. Here, metacritique is not a posture of neutrality but a practice of risk: a situated discernment under conceptual pressure. Thought begins, as the Greeks understood, not in resolution but in tension – in the poised stillness before the blow, in the lucidity that only confrontation can yield.