(Gr. panegyrikos ) originally denoted an oration delivered at one of the Gr. festivals; later it came to designate a speech or poem in praise of some person, object, or event. Much oral poetry is p. in nature, consisting of the praises of heroes, armies, victories, and states; and in most cultures particular subgenres developed for specific occasions, such as the Gr. epinikion, a victory ode, or the epithalamium (q.v.), a marriage song. P. is closely related to, and may have developed from, the eulogy, a speech or poem in praise of the dead. In Greece, p. was originally a rhetorical type belonging to the epide-ictic category of oratory. Its rules are given in the rhetorical works of Menander and Hermogenes, and famous examples include the Panegyricus of Isocrates, the p. of Pliny the Younger on Trajan, and the 11 other XII Panegyrici latini (4th c.). Pindar’s odes have sometimes been described as ps. After the 3d c. B.C., when much of rhetorical theory was appropriated for poetics, p. was accepted as a formal poetic type and its rules were given in handbooks of poetry. Significant Western examples of ps. incl. Apollinaris Sidonius’ poems on the Emperors Avitus, Majorian, and An-themius; Claudian’s on the consulships of Honorius, Stilicho, Probinus, and Olybrius; the p. on the death of Celsus by Paulinus of Nola; Ald-helm’s De laudibus virgitate, and innumerable Christian Lat. poems in praise of Mary, the cross, the martyrs, etc. It remained popular through the Middle Ages both as an independent poetic form and as an important topos (q.v.) in longer narrative poems, esp. epic (q.v.); and like other such forms persisted into the Ren., with perhaps more emphasis on the praise of secular figures and institutions. Scaliger ( Poetices libri septem ) distinguishes between p., which tends to deal with present men and deeds, and encomium (q.v.), which deals with those of the past, but in general the two are indistinguishable. The p. underwent a brief revival in 17th-c. encomiastic occasional verse, Edmund Waller’s 1655 “Panegyrick to My Lord Protector.” For further discussion of the Western trad.
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